Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (born February 11, 1657 in Rouen , † January 9, 1757 in Paris ) was an influential and versatile French writer and educator . Fontenelle (as he is exclusively called in the history of literature) is one of the most important French early enlightenmentists alongside Pierre Bayle .
Life and work
He came from a noble family of lawyers from Rouen and was the nephew of the playwrights Pierre and Thomas Corneille . After studying at the Jesuit college in his hometown, he went to Paris. Here he quickly achieved success, introduced by Thomas Corneille, as a gallant lyric poet, comedy writer, opera librettist , writer of a letter novel and not least as a sought-after salon animator .
In 1683 his Dialogues des morts (Talks about the dead) appeared, fictional dialogues between famous dead from antiquity and the more recent past, e.g. B. between Socrates and Michel de Montaigne . The main theme is the completely unjustified prejudices of his contemporaries in favor of antiquity, according to Fontenelle, prejudices that he lets his ancient speakers ironically or pseudo-naively ad absurdum.
In 1686 his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (conversations about the multitude of worlds) came out, a fictional dialogue in which an educated man from the world joined an interested noble lady and her daughter (and with them an audience that was mainly presented as female) a night walk in the park gives lectures on the astronomical knowledge according to Nikolaus Kopernikus , Galileo Galilei , Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, not excluding the possibility that there are also rational beings on stars outside the earth.
As expected, the work was put on the index by the Catholic Church because it contradicted the Ptolemaic worldview . However, the indexing did not detract from its success, rather it was reissued several times. Like many French of his day, Fontenelle remained stuck with Cartesian physics , even after it was overtaken by the work of Isaac Newton . Yet in 1752 he represented in his Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens the vertebral theory of Descartes from the year 1644th
The Histoire des Oracles (History of Prophecies) was also published in 1686 . In this, Fontenelle critically illuminates various prophecies and miracles described in ancient sources in an elegant conversational tone in a way that should encourage the reader to doubt also biblical prophecies and miracles, which was correctly understood and criticized by the Jesuits.
When the dispute between the followers of the traditional and the modern ( Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ) broke out in the Académie française in 1687 , Fontenelle became one of the first supporters of the "moderns" in the sense of his Dialogues de morts and intervened in the dispute with his in 1688 Font Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes .
In the following years he continued to work as a poet, tragedy writer, narrator and literary theorist. In 1691 he was admitted to the Académie française on the armchair No. 27 elected. From 1697 he was also a member of the Académie des Sciences, founded in 1666 . In the same year he succeeded Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel whose Secrétaire perpétuel, which he remained until 1740. He now largely gave up literature and, while exercising his office, wrote numerous laudations (éloges académiques) by naturalists and inventors, whose achievements he presented to a larger audience with his elegant pen.
From 1699 he was instrumental in reforming his academy. In 1701 he was also elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . In 1733 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society . In 1749 he was accepted as a foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .
Also in his role as academy secretary, he wrote the Memoires de l'Académie royale des sciences from 1733 , in which he reported on experiments and observations made by members more than 30 years ago. Because there are usually no reliable primary sources from this period, the mémoires are considered an important secondary source by science historians.
Fontenelle played an important role in Paris' intellectual and social life and, to a certain extent, in politics until about 1725, before his fame began to fade.
He was the first in France to embody the type of “philosopher” characteristic of the Enlightenment , that is, an author who was interested in all sides and who wrote both fiction and philosophical and scientific works.
Honors
- Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Mouche à Miel
- In 1935 the IAU named the Fontenelle moon crater after him.
- In 1989 the asteroid (10069) Fontenelle , later named after him, was discovered.
Works (selection)
- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Œuvres complètes , Paris: Fayard, 1990–
- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Dialogues on the Majority of Worlds (German 1789, reprint 1984)
- Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Philosophical News for People of the World and for Scholars: Selected Writings , Leipzig: Reclam 1989
- Bernard de Fontenelle: Talks of the dead , translated from the French, commented and provided with a dossier and an afterword by Hans-Horst Henschen , Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn 1991, series Die Other Bibliothek , ISBN 978-3-8218-4066-6 .
See also
literature
- Werner Krauss , Fontenelle and the Enlightenment, Munich (Fink) 1969.
- Jörn Steigerwald: Gallant Conversations: Fontenelles Dialogues des morts , in: Dialogue and Dialogicity in the Age of Enlightenment , ed. v. Gabriele Ribémont-Vickermann / Dietmar Rieger. Tübingen: Narr 2003, pp. 13-30.
Web links
- Publications by and about Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in VD 17 .
- Literature by and about Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in the German Digital Library
- Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)
- Gert Pinkernell : Article Fontenelle in the name, title and dates of the French Literature (main source for the section "Life and Creation")
- Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
- Radio report on Deutschlandfunk: "Chatting about the secrets of life"
Footnotes and individual references
- ^ Entry on Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657 - 1757) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
- ^ Members of the previous academies. Bernard le Bouyer (le Bovier) de Fontenelle. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 23, 2015 (with short biography).
- ↑ At 99 he made headlines again and made a comparison with German scholars. Cf. New attempts at useful collections on the history of nature and art, especially from Ober-Sachßen , Schneeberg 1755, p. 1003 (accessed November 20, 2013)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 11, 1657 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rouen |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 9, 1757 |
| Place of death | Paris |