François-Vincent Toussaint

Frontispiece of the work "Les Mœurs" (1748)

François-Vincent Toussaint (* 21st December 1715 in Paris ; † 22. June 1772 in Berlin ) was a French lawyer, writer, translator and encyclopedist , who now only for his work Les M œ urs (1748) is known, a Scandal book, which he published under the pseudonym Panage .

Live and act

F.-V. Toussaint was born the son of a craftsman - son of a shoemaker - in Paris and was baptized in the parish of Saint-Paul . He married in 1744, but lost his wife after a year. This marriage resulted in a daughter who died at the age of fifteen. He later married the daughter of a Swiss Guardsman from the Palais Royal . The couple had ten children, about whose fate little is known.

He initially intended an ecclesiastic training, but then began studying law and passed the necessary exams. In 1741, at the age of twenty-six, he became a lawyer at the Parlement de Paris . For health reasons, he did not continue his work, but got in touch with the bookseller and publisher André Le Breton .

From 1746 to 1748 he worked with Denis Diderot and Marc-Antoine Eidous on the translation of a medical reference work by Robert James (1703–1776) entitled A medicinal dictionary, including physic, surgery, anatomy, chimistry and botany . The completed translation was corrected and edited by Julien Busson (1717–1781). Further translations followed, such as those by Tobias George Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751).

His first and most important independent work were Die Sitten , Les Mœurs (1748). It caused a scandal and was immediately banned, resulting in 16 issues in the year it was first printed. The central reason for the ban was that a portrayal of Queen Maria Leszczyńska was suspected behind a criticized figure . But the book also countered the official primacy of church moral teaching with its natural-philosophical-Enlightenment basic attitude. Because of his acquaintance with Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas , the Secrétaire d'État à la Marine , the publication should have had no major consequences for Toussaint.

In June 1754 he began his journalistic work, so he took over the management of the journal Journal des étrangers founded by Friedrich Melchior Grimm . Due to conflicts with the directors of the journal, he gave up his position in November 1754. In 1756 he entered in contact with Jacques Gautier d'Agoty (1716-1785), a painter and engraver and founder of the Journal de physique , which he entitled Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts continue to lead . The exact date of his emigration from France to Brussels cannot be reliably determined, it was probably the end of 1760 or the beginning of 1761. In 1757 the political situation turned; so tried Robert François Damiens by an assassination attempt by Louis XV. to murder. Claude Adrien Helvétius published his enlightening work De l'esprit . The opponents of the Enlightenment used these incidents to assert their authority and influence.

In 1754 he went to Berlin. There he was made a full member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences by Friedrich II . He published a refutation of his most successful book - Eclaircissement sur les mœurs (1762).

When he died in 1772, he left his widow and seven children impoverished.

Works (selection), translations

• Les Mœurs , s. l., se, 1748.
• German edition: The customs. Frankfurt, Leipzig 1749 and more.
• Histoire des Passions, or Avantures Du Chevalier Shroop. Ouvrage traduit de l'anglois . Part I & II, La Haye, Jacques Neaulme, 1751.
• Eclaircissement sur les mœurs. Par l'auteur des Mœurs , Amsterdam, Marc Michel Rey, 1762.
• German edition: Des Herr Toussaint's explanation of his book: Die Sitten. Breslau, Korn 1763.

Translations

• François Coventry : La vie et les aventures du Petit Pompée. Histoire critique. Traduite par l'Anglois par M. Toussaint , I, Londres, Marc Michel Rey, 1752.
  • Original: The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog , 1751.
• Histoire et aventures de Sir Williams Pickle. Ouvrage traduit de l'Anglois , I, Amsterdam, Marc Michel Rey, 1753.
• Extrait des oeuvres de Mr. Gellert contenant ses apologues, ses fables, et ses histoires, traduit de l'allemand en françois par M. Toussaint , II, Zullichow, Aux Depens de la Maison des Orphelins et de Frommann, 1768.

literature

• Margaret Elinor Adams: François Vincent Toussaint: Life and Works. Dissertation, Boston University Graduate School 1966.
• Toussaint, François-Vincent: Anecdotes curieuses de la cour de France sous la régne de Louis XV. Texts original publié pour la première fois avec une notice et des annotations par Paul Fould. Paris: Plon 1905.

Web links

Wikisource: François-Vincent Toussaint  - Sources and full texts (French)

• Edition of 1748 on Gallica

• Martin Anton Müller: François Vincent Toussaint; biographical data m. Portrait (in English)
• French-language lexicon article with scientific information

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Frank A. Kafker: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie. Année (1990) Volume 8 Numéro 8 p. 117
2. ^ Bisaccia, Carmela, et al .: Nephrology in A Medicinal Dictionary of Robert James (1703–1776). J Nephrol 2011; 24 (Suppl. 17): 37-50
3. ^ University of Trier Biographical Information
4. ↑ Bibliography of the editions [1]
5. ↑ Marie-Rose de Labriolle: François-Vincent Toussaint. Dictionnaire des journalistes (1600–1789)  ( 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.