Homme de lettres

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Homme de lettres (French: about man of writing ; feminine: femme de lettres, plural: gens de lettres) is a cultural-historical term for writers .

In the 16th and 17th centuries, high-ranking personalities kept a homme de lettres who could function as secretary (as La Fontaine to Madame de la Sablière) or document the patron's interest in literature. Furetière shows in Le Roman bourgeois (1666) the dependency, but also the greed for money and the parasitic existence of the little taken seriously gens de lettres. In the 18th century, a certain sense of class gradually developed, which emerged in 1750 with the establishment of the Société des gens de lettres . In 1793, France was the first country to introduce copyright law. Even before this date, some writers (such as Lesage , Marivaux ) were living on the income from their varied publications.

The reluctance to break away from patronage meant that the expectations of the readers were increasingly taken into account, although the still comprehensively educated homme de lettres saw himself as an educator for his fellow men. In the romantic era, the homme de lettres was the specialist in the art of formulation integrated into the beginning of a society based on the division of labor, in contrast to the highly sensitive and lonely poète . Later, homme de lettres (or femme de lettres) was used synonymously with "écrivain" as a job title. In German feature pages , the French expression is used to highlight a writer who handles many genres with confidence.

literature

  • Maurice Pellisson: Les hommes de lettres au XVIIIe siècle . Paris 1911, reprinted by Slatkine, Geneva 1970.
  • Paul Bénichou: Le sacre de l'écrivain, 1750-1830. Essai sur l'avènement d'un pouvoir laïque . Gallimard, Paris 1996, ISBN 2-07-074448-5 .
  • Jürgen von Stackelberg: Topics of the Enlightenment . Fink, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7705-1821-7 , pp. 30-52.
  • Renate Baader : Dames de lettres. Authors of the precious, highly aristocratic and “modern” salon (1649–1698); Mlle de Scudéry , Mlle de Montpensier , Mme d'Aulnoy . Metzler, Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-476-00609-3 .