Didier Robert de Vaugondy

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Map Environs de Paris (Eng. "Paris area"), from the first edition of the Atlas Universel , Paris 1757.
Prussia Map La Prusse , 1751

Didier Robert de Vaugondy (* 1723 in Paris ; † 1786 ) was the geographer of the French King Louis XV. and of the Duke of Lorraine , contributor to the Encyclopédie and royal censor.

life and work

Robert was born in Paris in 1723 and studied with his father, the royal geographer Gilles Robert de Vaugondy (1688–1766). At the age of nineteen he was already publishing a new edition of the tables méthodiques of his famous great-grandfather, the "father of French geography" Nicolas Sanson (1600–1667). Together with his father Gilles and other editors, he worked on the Géographie sacrée et histoire de l'Ancien et du Nouveau-Testament , which appeared in Paris in 1747. In 1752 he created on behalf of Louis XV. a terrestrial and a celestial globe. Among the cartographic works created in the following years, the atlas universel , published in 1757 and edited together with his father, stands out.

Robert contributed a total of three articles to the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie , published in the same year , of which the article Globe ( Eng . " Globus ") is particularly noteworthy for its detailed and exact description of the manufacture of the globe. After the scandal surrounding d'Alembert's article Geneve and the withdrawal of his royal privilege, Robert - like a number of other authors - withdrew from working on the Encyclopédie .

In the remaining twenty-seven years of his life, Robert created other works on geography and numerous maps that he sold in his shop on quai de l'Horloge in Paris. He created maps for Montesquieu's Esprit des lois , for Buffon's Histoire naturelle and for Brosses Histoire des navigations aux termes australes . James Cook , who took the maps made for Brosses with him on his travels, said he was satisfied with them.

From 1772 Robert served the French crown as royal censor. In this role he came under great pressure due to his assessment of Joseph-André Brun de la Combes Triomphe du nouveau monde . In the work published in 1785, Brun had praised the achievements of the American Revolution , advocated the abolition of the death penalty even in the case of regicide, and argued in favor of the introduction of the native-language liturgy and the abolition of celibacy . In his permission to publish in November 1784, Robert had not only praised the “clarity of language” of the work, but also emphasized that it deserves a prominent place among the few books that are worth passing on to posterity. While Brun was severely punished, Roberts is not known to have been convicted.

Although some contemporaries defended Robert with the argument that the assessment of the work had overwhelmed him as a geographer, his contributions to the three volumes of the Encyclopédie méthodique entitled Géographie modern paint a different picture. In Articles Konigsberg ou Kœnigsburg and Mâcon Robert favor of religious tolerance and in articles Langres he praises Diderot as "writers of the first rank." The third and final volume of Géographie moderne was published two years after Robert's death and one year before the outbreak of the French Revolution .

The island of Vaugondy Island in Antarctica has been named after him since 2013 .

literature

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Representations

  • Jean-François Gauvin: Traditions of globe building around 1750: the Valks, Didier Robert de Vaugondy and Åkerman in comparison , in: the Globusfreund: scientific journal for globes and instruments 51–52 (2003–2004), ISSN  0436-0664 , p 47-48.
  • Mary Sponberg Pedley: Bel et utile: the work of Robert de Vaugondy family of mapmakers , Tring, Herts, England 1992, ISBN 0-906430-12-7 .
  • Robert de Vaugondy, Didier , in: Frank Arthur Kafker, The encyclopedists as individuals: a biographical dictionary of the authors of the Encyclopédie, Oxford 1988, ISBN 0-7294-0368-8 , pp. 330–333.
  • Mary Sponberg Pedley: The Map Trade in Paris, 1650-1825 , in: Imago Mundi: the international journal for the history of cartography 33 (1981), ISSN  1479-7801 , pp. 33-45.

Remarks

  1. ↑ “Sublimité d'idées, noblesse des sentiments, pureté de langage, clarté, energy de style, justesse de raisonnemens, sagesse des principes, objets majestueux, vues profondes; tout m'a paru concourir à lui assurer non-seulement un accueil favorable, mais même une place distinguée parmi le petit nombre d'Ouvrages dignes de passer à la postérité. “Approbation, ii; quoted here from Kafker, The encyclopedists as individuals , p. 332.
  2. ↑ "du premier ordre littérateur, & l'un des plus proFonds métaphysiciens qui existe aient chez aucune nation", cited here by Kafker, The encyclopedists as worth individuals , S. 332nd

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Robert de Vaugondy, Didier
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French geographer and contributor to the Encyclopédie
DATE OF BIRTH 1723
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH 1786