Jacques Proust

Jacques Proust (born April 29, 1926 in Saintes , † September 19, 2005 in Montpellier ) was a French Romance studies and literary scholar. He was a specialist in the French philosopher and encyclopaedist Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie .

life and work

Proust, who was of Protestant origin and lived this committed, entered the École normal supérieure in 1947 and passed the Agrégation de lettres in 1950 . Until 1957 he was a high school teacher at the Lycée français in Vienna, Evreux and Paris. As an assistant at the Sorbonne, he completed his habilitation in 1963 with Jean Pommier with the two theses Diderot et l'Encyclopédie (Paris 1962, 5th edition 1995) and (ed.) Diderot, Quatre contes (Geneva 1964) and was professor from 1963 to 1986 for French literature at the University of Montpellier (from 1985 Professeur de classe exceptionnelle). There he founded the Center d'étude du XVIIIe siècle in 1968 (today Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'Age classique et les Lumières, IRCL). From 1973 he was a Fellow of Churchill College , Cambridge. From 1987 to 1989 he headed the House of Lebanon at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris .

Together with Herbert Dieckmann and Jean Varloot, Proust published the authoritative critical edition of Diderot's works , known as DPV - stands for Dieckmann / Varloot / Proust - (Paris 1975 ff). Proust had maintained intensive research relationships with Japan since the late 1970s.

Jacques Proust belonged to the Académie des sciences et lettres de Montpellier from 1978 and was an honorary doctor of the University of Heidelberg (1978).

Other works (selection)

• L '"Encyclopédie", Paris 1965 (Italian: 1978)
• L'encyclopédisme dans le Bas-Languedoc au XVIIIe siècle, Montpellier 1968
• (Ed. With John Lough ) Diderot, L'Encyclopédie, 4 vols., Paris 1976 (DPV V-VIII)
• L'objet et le texte. Pour une poétique de la prose française du XVIIIe siècle, Geneva 1980
• (Ed.) Diderot, Jacques le fataliste, Paris 1981 (DPV XXIII)
• (Ed.) Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, Paris 1982
• L'Europe au prisme du Japon: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. Entre humanisme, Contre-Réforme et Lumières, Paris 1997 (Japanese 1999; English 2002)
• La supercherie dévoilée. Une réfutation du catholicisme au Japon au XVIIe siècle, Paris 1998
• (with Marianne Proust) Le puissant royaume du Japon. La description de François Caron en 1636, Paris 2003

literature

• Ici et ailleurs. Le dix-huitième siècle au présent. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Proust, ed. by Hisayasu Nakagawa et al., Tokyo 1996 (with list of publications)
• Georges Benrekassa, "Jacques Proust, parmi nous" in: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie 40-41, 2006 ( http://rde.revues.org/index4292.html )
• Marie Leca-Tsiomis, [Obituary in:] Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 106, 2006, pp. 485-486
• Hisayasu Nagakawa, [Obituary in:] Dix-huitième siècle 38, 2006, pp. 353-354
• Muriel Bread, “Jacques Proust et le dix-huitième siècle. Une bibliographie », in: Dix-huitième siècle 38, 2006, pp. 379–387 (list of publications)
• Lectures de Jacques Proust. Textes rassemblés by Muriel Brot & Sante A. Viselli, Montpellier 2008
• Diderot, the "Encyclopédie" & autres études. Sillages de Jacques Proust. Textes réunis par Marie Leca-Tsiomis avec la collaboration d'Alain Sandrier, Ferney-Voltaire 2010

Web links

• Literature by and about Jacques Proust in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Portrait of Jacques Proust
• Université Paul-Valéry, UPV, Montpellier III Disparition de Jacques Proust. Professeur honoraire de littérature française (PDF; 465 kB)
• Académie des Sciences et Lettres de Montpellier (PDF; 261 kB)