Henri-Joseph Dulaurens

Henri-Joseph Dulaurens , also Du Laurens , actually Laurens (* 1719 in Douai ; † August 17, 1793 in Mainz ) was a French Abbé , writer and philosopher .

As a border-crosser of the Enlightenment , Dulaurens is one of the most mysterious and scandalous authors in literary history: Because of his radically anti-clerical, often also erotic-pornographic writings, his opponents accused him of deism or atheism as well as immorality and obscenity. His writings were all secretly printed under a variety of pseudonyms. They were persecuted as soon as they appeared. The authorship of some works could only be clarified in recent years.

Life

youth

Dulaurens was born in 1719 as the second son of regimental surgeon Jean-Joseph Dulaurens and Marie-Joseph Menon, a woman from a simple bourgeoisie. While his brother André made a civil career as a naval doctor, mayor and lieutenant general of the Rochefort police , Dulaurens was destined for a spiritual career. The parents gave him in late 1736 to the nearby, from the Jesuit -led College of Anchin. On November 11, 1737, he took the religious vows . Dulaurens studied theology and literature, but had to endure some chastisements due to his insubordinate, stubborn nature.

Ordination and flight

The first trial against Dulaurens is documented for 1743. His pamphlet La vraie origine du Géan de Douay en vers françois targeted a traditional procession in Douai and exposed it to ridicule. A Discours sur la beauté où l'on fait mention des belles de cette ville attached to this pamphlet is not limited to the praise of beauty, but leads to an accusation of monastic life: “From my earliest years I lived in your hellish walls; could I ever taste a pleasure? In a monastery you can't find anything other than intrigues, euphemistic spite and brothers who try to get angry. ”The pamphlet was banned, the printer was penalized and banned from working. Dulaurens received a fine of 50 livres . Nevertheless, he was ordained a priest in 1744 and even stood as prior of the Trinitarian order of the Mathurines in Douai.

By the middle of the 18th century, many religious orders were in decline and a moral dissolution had begun. Neither the Trinitarian Order of Douai nor its Prior Dulaurens were spared. The latter was notorious in the city's chronicles for its debauchery and overly free writing. In 1752 Dulaurens ran away with a nun from the Saint-Julien convent. The gendarmerie tried to pursue the fugitives, but they could no longer be found. The trace of the Abbé Dulaurens is lost. During the following years he must have traveled across France.

Productive years

In 1761 the track can be taken up again in Paris . Emile Henriot ascribes the continuation of Voltaire's Candide to the Abbé Dulaurens this year : Candide, seconde partie . However, his name is mentioned above all in connection with Les Jésuitiques , a general accounting with the Jesuit order. Dulaurens hit the nerve of the time. "Anger against the Jesuit confessors of absolutism , disapproval of the moral theology and the laxism of the Jesuits on the part of the Jansenists , rejection of the Jesuit discipline, their training and their schools, their ultramontane and essentially non-national spirit and their missionary zeal with all its sometimes ridiculous, The sometimes threatening hustle and bustle has been smoldering for a long time. ”(Schnelle) The work is based on the Philippiques of the early Enlightenmentist Joseph de Lagrange-Chancel . In four odes, the Jesuits are accused and exposed to ridicule. The book was banned, the recognition of the literary leading enlightenment was largely denied him. It is a "collection of insults and platitudes that nobody wanted to see, although the author was given the honor of suppressing them," wrote Friedrich Melchior Grimm .

Fearing he would be arrested, Dulaurens left Paris in August 1761 and went to Amsterdam via Brussels , where he found a buyer for his writings in the bookseller Marc-Michel Rey . The poem Le balai , which he wrote together with his friend Marc-Ferdinand Groubentall de Linière , found more recognition than the hearty satire about the Jesuits . Several people are of the opinion that this Poème héroï-comique probably came from the pen of Voltaire , who had just blown a breath of fresh air into the genre with his Pucelle d'Orléans . The Jesuit visit to a women's monastery suspected of Jansenist activities served Dulaurens as a hook for a satire on the conflicts between the two parties and on the monastic life itself. With Le balai , however, Dulaurens also intervened in the philosophical discourse by reviewing the leading intellectual greats of the time in a series. Its position for the Philosophes makes the poem a serious contribution to the Enlightenment .

With L'Arretin , also in Amsterdam published, followed in 1763 a hodgepodge, whose range of topics extends from farming and raising children on the celibacy to the usefulness of vice. “I wrote the work in a hurry like all of my products. A person who lacks bread has no time to reread his work, ”says Dulaurens. He gave the work the name of Aretino because this satirical author had spared no one in his century. So here, too, the Abbé doesn't skimp on scorn. Nonetheless, he deals with a plethora of serious questions and discusses concrete problems of the day, trying to put theory at the service of social practice.

La chandelle d'Arras from 1765 is an "irrepressible profanation of the miracles of the Catholic Church" (Schnelle). The work was the Pucelle aped by Voltaire and show no ingenuity, ruled Louis Petit de Bachaumont . It is littered with disrespectful and defamatory comments or at least with satirical ones. All of these qualities made her extraordinarily sought after.

No less sought-after is the novel Imirce ou la Fille de la Nature , published in 1765 , the story of a girl who is raised in a cave with a companion of the same age but without contact with the outside world. At the age of 22, now a mother of three, it entered the world for the first time. The central problem of the novel is the socialization of Imirce, who up until then had grown up in isolation, and the socio-critical potential released by this situation. Ignorant and naive, but also free from prejudice, Imirce reacts with astonishment and indignation to the absurdity and injustice of social reality. The fact that the work is also intended as a sharp demarcation from Rousseau and his Emile is deliberately overlooked by some opponents who are bothered by the frivolous spirit.

Le Compère Mathieu , published in Holland in 1766, is Dulauren's main work . The novel describes the journey of a group of five, led by Compère Mathieu and Père Jean. “Godfather Mathieu is a rascal who teams up with another rogue, and these two are philosophers and justify their pranks on moral considerations taken from the writings of the most famous French philosophers. (...) On his way the godfather Mathieu meets a third crook, Spaniard and devout, who allows himself all sorts of shamefulness without ever missing the practice of religion ”, Grimm sums up the plot briefly. The book is a picaresque panopticon of time. The different, sometimes extremely radical views and opinions of the individual group members are repeatedly measured against reality during the world tour. The story is told from the point of view of Jérôme, who, in contrast to his companions, takes a less radical point of view and always tries to find a balance between the extreme positions. By showing how immorality can theoretically be disguised and justified, Dulaurens shows the danger of any theory that insists on the wording and leads human thinking to its extreme limits - ad absurdum . The fact that he was again accused of libertinage and immorality with the novel cannot be avoided. Over the years, however, Le Compère Mathieu has seen an impressive number of copies and has influenced the free-thinking milieu in France and Germany alike. The novel is also considered an important precursor to Diderot's famous novel Jacques le fataliste .

Trial and imprisonment

A few more writings, including L'Antipapisme révélé , followed, but Dulaurens no longer saw their publication as a free man. He was arrested in Frankfurt in early 1766 . A Frankfurt bookseller who had sold La chandelle d'Arras and Imirce had been summoned for questioning and revealed Dulaurens' whereabouts. He was picked up in a ragged state and his condition was pathetic. Dulaurens refused to testify and demanded to be brought before a church judge, for example before the Archbishop of Mainz , then Emmerich Joseph von Breidbach zu Bürresheim . He should have known that he would have been treated less leniently by a church court . The Mainz team actually tried to usurp the case, which they succeeded despite initial resistance from the Frankfurters. On November 26, 1766, Dulaurens was imprisoned in Mainz, found guilty of blasphemy on August 31, 1767 and sentenced to life imprisonment. During the trial, he not only willingly provided information about the printers and places of publication of his works, he also confessed to leading a sinful life and distanced himself from his writings. He could not justify them, but condemn them and wrote them only to earn a living. After more than twenty years in prison in Mainz, he was transferred to the Marienborn priests' house in 1788 , where he was however kept. In 1793 the prisoner finally died of mental confusion.

classification

An authentic portrait of Dulaurens does not exist. An unsecured etching on the frontispiece of an edition of Balai from 1791 is the only known portrait. His friend Groubentall de Linière , however, provided one characteristic of his personality : “He is fat, small, stout, has a large and full face, a real monk in fat; no exterior, no physiognomy, no spirit, no face, everything is inside: the heart according to the nature of his country and his class, closed, difficult, suspicious, devious; a friend, if need be, on duty, without obligation, helpful up to his purse, but exclusively in his own interest; no social qualities: inhibitions, harshness, confusing, never finding the right tone, without any quick wit, no engaging nature; quarrelsome, grumbling, dissatisfied, completely hypochondriac to the point of phantasy; Projects after projects, an eternal impermanence, a Diogenes in a woolen robe, he only eats to live, does not seek gallantry or grace, he desires women and then makes them bad; he has a fiery and amazingly grotesque spirit - what else? He only knows God by hearsay. "

Like his friends de Linière and Jean-Henri Maubert de Gouvest, Dulaurens belonged to a group of low-ranking, plebeian authors who, around the middle of the 18th century, fought against the church, intolerance, superstition, abuse of power and arbitrariness of all kinds with rebellious and drastic writings . Those who wanted to be taken seriously and accepted by the bonne compagnie , the literary society that propelled the enlightened reasoning, could not avoid using a moderately subtle expression instead of rumbling, impertinent suaden . After all, the Enlightenment was not only concerned with criticism and accusation, but also with refining human education. Dulaurens, on the other hand, was too indignant and uncomfortable troublemaker to comply with this demand.

To many of his contemporaries, the former monk appeared to be nothing more than an owl with a bit of intellect and docility. As a serious thinker, he was only perceived reluctantly, not least because of his insubordination, a skepticism that continues into the 20th century. "It seems strange to us that the scandalous author of the Arétin modern and the Compère Mathieu should be a true philosopher," wrote Paul Vernière for example in 1954. If one believes that an anonymous writing has a certain quality, the name Dulaurens is used within the framework of the Speculations about the author are often cited only hesitantly. Vernière, for example, did not trust the Abbé to have dealt with Spinoza .

As big as the reservations by the bonne compagnie , as big as the attraction by the young people and the free spirits. "Incidentally, the book market accepted the products from the pen of this lower-ranking party, who belonged to the Philosopher's Party, with great willingness." (Schnell) It was precisely the sometimes shoddy folklore, which is less about stringent thought than about funny chats, that made the success of those circles who got in touch with the Enlightenment . Dulauren's writings not only fostered the Enlightenment due to their considerable widespread effect, but also paved the way for the revolution by rejecting feudalism and the ancien régime .

“One cannot help but notice that the author would not have lacked talent if he had been able to cultivate it in dealings with the bonne compagnie,” note Grimm and Diderot in their correspondance on Dulaurens. He was given a certain respect for his wit even if his works were rejected as too blasphemous, indecent or obscene. He was seen as something of an ally in the service of the Enlightenment.

Even Voltaire , who liked to disguise the authorship of daring writings with ingenious games of hide-and-seek, claimed to avoid persecution that his work L'ingénu came from the pen of Dulaurens. In the course of speculation about the author of Dulaurens' clandestine writings, the name Voltaire was not infrequently brought into play.

Dulaurens confessed to Voltaire as one of his role models for a secularized way of thinking. However, the rebel he was, he did not shrink from mocking criticism of the Enlightenment, embodied in an almost exemplary manner by the philosopher von Ferney , and of their own orthodoxy. Schnell described the Abbé as “an author whose attempt to emancipate himself not only from religion but also from the philosophical society is absolutely exemplary. The concept of the enlightenment philosopher is moved into a new battlefield. The 'going beyond' Rousseau and the continuation of the Voltairian ethos is of course not very sublime. "

Works

• 1743: La vraie origine du Géan de Douay en vers françois , suivie d'un discours sur la beauté où l'on fait mention des belles de cette ville , without place (Douai).
• undated : La Thérésiade ou le charivari de S. Thomas. poëme héroï-comique , Douai (attributed to Dulaurens).
• 1750: Essai sur la préférence des Cadets aux Aînés , Genève (Douai).
• 1759: Mémoire pour servir à la béatification d'Abraham Chaumeix , Amsterdam (Paris) (attributed to Dulaurens).
• 1761: Candide, seconde partie , Paris (attributed to Dulaurens).
• 1761: Les Jésuitiques (enrichies de notes curieuses pour servir à l'intelligence de cet ouvrage) , Rome (Paris).
• 1761: Le Balai, poème héroï-comique en XVIII chants , Constantinople (Amsterdam).
• 1763: L'observateur des Spectacles ou Anecdotes théâtrales , Amsterdam, (journalistic publication: 13 issues).
• 1763: L'Arretin ou la Débauche de l'esprit en fait de bon sens , Rome (Amsterdam); 1773: published again under the title L'Arretin moderne .
• 1765: La Chandelle d'Arras, poème héroïque en XVIII chants , Berne; 1766: reissued under the title Estrenes aux gens d'Eglise, ou la chandelle d'Arras , Arras.
• 1765: Imirce, ou la Fille de la Nature , Berlin (La Haye).
• 1765: Le Dictionnaire de l'Esprit . (unpublished manuscript).
• 1765: L'évangile de la raison, ouvrage philosophique , without place (ascribed in Gallica Dulaurens).
• 1766: Le Compère Mathieu ou les Bigarrures de l'esprit humain , Londres (Amsterdam). 1988: so far the last German-language edition under the title Mathieu or The debauches of the human spirit . Translated from the French by Johann Zacharias Logan, published by Franz Greno, Nördlingen, series Die Andere Bibliothek .
• 1767: Les Abus dans les cérémonies et les mœurs , Genève, published again (in truth probably first publication) under the title: 1765: La Vérité, Vertu et Vérité, Le cri de Jean-Jacques et le mien , Pékin (probably first edition ).
• 1767: L'Antipapisme révélé ou les Rêves de l'antipapiste , Genève.
• 1767: Je suis pucelle, histoire véritable , La Haye.
• 1770: Le Portefeuille d'un Philosophe, ou mélange de pièces philosophiques, politiques, critiques, satiriques et galantes , Cologne (probably edition by Dulaurens).

literature

• Kurt Schnell: Enlightenment and clerical response. The trial of the Abbé Henri-Joseph Laurens. A contribution to the German and French enlightenment . Rütten & Loening, Berlin / GDR, 1963.

• Clifton Cherpack. "Jacques le fataliste and Le Compère Mathieu". In: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 73, 1970, pp. 165–91
• Jacques Rustin. "Les 'Suites' de Candide au XVIIIe siècle". In: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 90, 1972, pp. 1404-1407.

Web links

• Literature by and about Henri-Joseph Dulaurens in the catalog of the German National Library
• Digitized works by Dulaurens on Gallica2 (French National Library)
• Website on the work of Dulaurens (including precise bibliographical information)

Individual evidence

1. ^ On this Paul Vernière. "L'enfant de la nature d'Imirce à Gaspard Hauser". In: Studi de letteratura francese 7, 1981, pp. 89-99.
2. ↑ For this: Clifton Cherpack. "Jacques le fataliste and Le Compère Mathieu". In: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 73, 1970, pp. 165–91.
3. ↑ [1]