Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice

Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice

Pocket watch by Fortunato de Felice, with an enamel portrait of the owner

Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice , also known as Fortuné-Barthélemy De Félice and Francesco Placido Bartolomeo De Felice , (born August 24, 1723 in Rome , † February 13, 1789 in Yverdon-les-Bains , Canton of Vaud , Switzerland ), second count of Panzutti, was an Italian-Swiss philosopher , scientist, author and editor of the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon . He is considered a pioneer of the Enlightenment in Switzerland.

Life

De Felice grew up in Rome as the eldest son of six children in a family from Naples . At twelve he studied at the Roman College of the Jesuits, at seventeen he went to Brescia , where the Franciscan Fortunato von Brescia (1723–1789) taught philosophy and mathematics. In 1743 he was accepted into the order of the Franciscans in Rome and ordained a priest in 1746. From 1746 he taught philosophy in Rome, from 1753 ancient and modern geography, experimental physics and mathematics at the University of Naples .

After the liberation of Countess Panzutti, who was imprisoned by her husband in a monastery, and a joint escape that was broken off for lack of money, he fled - also for religious reasons - in the summer of 1757 to Albrecht von Haller in Bern . In 1758 he converted from the Catholic to the Reformed faith .

In 1758 he founded the Typographische Gesellschaft Bern with Vincenz Bernhard Tscharner and published an Italian-language ( l'Estratto de la letterature europea , until 1762) and a Latin ( l'Excerptum totius Italicae nec non Helveticae literaturae, until 1766) literary and scientific journal. In 1762 he moved to Yverdon, where he founded an educational institute for young people from all over Europe and a printing company. The latter quickly developed into one of the most important in Switzerland and remained so until his death. In 1769 he became a citizen of Yverdon and thus Swiss.

He was married four times and had 13 children: 1756 with Countess Agnese Arcuato di Panzutti (1720-1759) (where he received her title suo jure , which her husband had previously held as the first Count Panzutti, who had died in the same year), 1759 with Susanne Wavre von Neuchâtel (1737–1769), 1769 with Louise Marie Perrelet († 1774), 1774 with Jeanne Salomé Sinet.

plant

Felice's work is an important contribution to the Enlightenment in Switzerland. As editor and translator of Burlamaqui’s Principes du Droit Naturel , his name has become synonymous with natural law throughout Europe. His most important work is the Encyclopédie dYverdon , which he directed as editor and for which he wrote over 800 articles. From 1770 to 1780 58 volumes were published as the successor to the Encyclopédie of Paris in a new version from a Protestant perspective.

The rest of his work consists of half a dozen educational, philosophical and scientific books. He translated the works of René Descartes , d'Alembert , Maupertuis and Newton into Italian.

In addition to the encyclopedia, works by Elie Bertrand , Charles Bonnet , Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Albrecht von Haller, Gabriel Seigneux de Correvon, Simon-Auguste Tissot , Johann Joachim Winckelmann and other authors of the Enlightenment appeared in Felice's famous print shop .

The two magazine projects of the Typographische Gesellschaft Bern aimed at an international exchange of knowledge. Their uniqueness allowed Tscharner and de Felice to create a correspondence network across Europe.

Fonts

• Etrennes aux désœuvrés ou Lettre d'in Quaker à ses frères et à un grand docteur. 1766. (In this work Felice polemicized against the so-called philosophers and Voltaire )
• Mémoires de la Société oeconomique de Berne (24 volumes, 1763–72)
• Essai sur la manière la plus sûre d'établir un système de police des grains. Yverdon 1772.
• Dictionnaire geographique, historique et politique de la Suisse. 2 volumes. Neuchâtel 1775.
• Dictionnaire de justice naturelle et civile. 1778. 13 volumes
• Tableau philosophique de la religion chrétienne, considérée dans son ensemble dans sa morale et dans ses consolations. Yverdon 1779.
• Eléments de la police générale d'un Etat. Yverdon 1781.
• Le développement de la raison . Oeuvres posthumous. Yverdon 1789.
• Encyclopédie, or Dictionnaire universel raisonné des connaissances humaines. 42 volumes and 6 supplement volumes. Yverdon 1770-1776. New edition: Fischer Verlag, Erlangen 1993, ISBN 3-89131-069-2 . (38,000 pages on 257 microfiches.)

literature

• Jean-Daniel Candaux, Alain Cernuschi, Clorinda Donato and Jens Haesler (editors): Une Encyclopédie à vocation européene: L'Encyclopédie d'Yverdon et sa résonance européenne: contextes contenus prolongements (1770–1780). Slatkine, 2005; the same: Inventaire de la correspondance active et passive de Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice. In: Ici et ailleurs: le dix-huitième siècle au présent, Mélange Jacques Proust. Tokyo 1996, pp. 181-210.
• Jean-Daniel Candaux: Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . April 20, 2011 , accessed March 10, 2020 .
• Clorinda Donato: Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice e l'edizione di Yverdon dell'Encyclopédie. In: Studi settecenteschi , 16, 1996, pp. 373-396: same: Inventory of De Felice's' Encyclopédie d'Yverdon: A Comparative Study with Diderot's “Encyclopédie”. Dissertation. Center international pour l'étude du dix-huitième siècle, 2004.
• Karl J. Lüthi-Tschanz: Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice. A life full of effort and work from the time of the typographical societies. In: Leaves for Bernese history, art and antiquity. Gustav Grunau, Bern 1914.
• Eugène Maccabez: Fortuné-Barthélemy de Félice, 1723–1789 et son Encyclopédie. Verlag Birkhäuser , Basel 1903. (Dissertation Lausanne)
• Jean-Pierre Perret: Les imprimeries d'Yverdon au XVIIe et XVIIIe. Reprint. Librairie de droit, Lausanne 1945, ISBN 2-05-100359-9 .
• Eugen Teucher: Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice and his Encyclopedia of Yverdon. Publishing house of the Swiss Gutenberg Museum, Bern 1960.
• Jean-Daniel Candaux:

Web links

• Editing project of the Encyclopedia of Yverdon (French)
• Clorinda Donato: Inventory of the Encyclopedia of Yverdon. (Allows an online comparison of 70,000 articles with the Diderot encyclopedia)
• University of Lausanne, Faculté des lettres: Correspondence from F.-B. De Felice
• Stephan Bösiger: Education as a business. The Typographical Society Bern (PDF; 974 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Agnese Arcuato on thepeerage.com , accessed September 15, 2016.
2. ↑ Family de Felice: Fortunato de Félice - Citizenship & Departure (1759) ( Memento of the original from October 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Donato Clorinda: An intellectual exile in the 18th century: Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice in Switzerland. (English)  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.