Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (born April 6, 1671 in Paris , † March 16, 1741 in La Genette near Brussels ) was a French author.

Life and work

J.-B. Rousseau (who was not related to his younger and better known contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau ) was considered the best French poet of his generation around 1710. He has been compared to the great François de Malherbe for the formal art of his verses and for the accuracy of his satirical texts with Nicolas Boileau , who regarded and guided him as a worthy successor. During his lifetime, however, he managed to not only anger but vilify much of his recognition through a growing mania, colleagues and patrons with epigrams (mocking verses). We know about him not least thanks to an anonymously printed biography penned by Voltaire informed.

Rousseau grew up as the only child of a middle-class, but relatively wealthy shoemaker who enabled him to attend a Jesuit college . According to reports from contemporary witnesses, he later thanked his father for this by saying that he was ashamed of him and that he did not wish to be known by him in public.

After initially working as an employee of a lawyer, he became the private secretary of the Comte (Count) de Tallart, whom he was allowed to accompany on a longer mission as ambassador to London in 1697. Other doors of Paris society opened to him, too. a. that of Baron de Breteuil , father of Émilie du Châtelet .

His poetic production seems to be determined primarily by ambition. He began with a psalm adaptation, which he managed to launch about a pious courtier at the pious court of the late Louis XIV , which earned him the commission to write religious poetry for the edification of the king's grandson. At the same time, because he also had access to the free-thinking circle around Philippe de Vendôme, the head of the Order of Malta in France, he wrote erotically suggestive and religiously disrespectful poems here.

However, his greatest ambition was a success as a playwright. Between 1694 and 1702 he wrote two opera librettos and four comedies, but only one of them, Le Flatteur (1698, Eng . The Flatterer), reached the audience halfway. Four later comedies went unpublished and unperformed.

He finally earned his fame as "Prince des poètes" (poet prince) with sacred and profane cantatas and odes . In them (similar to the baroque painters of the time) he mainly processes materials and situations from biblical and ancient history and even more from Greco-Roman mythology , which he uses in elaborately chiseled verses and stanzas, a highly rhetorical style and a language and Metaphors full of literary, especially classical and ancient reminiscences.

In 1701 he was accepted into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . When a prominent patron offered him a position in the financial administration, Rousseau proudly rejected this: it was incompatible with his role as a poet.

In the following years he became more and more a victim of his difficult character. So he suspected the cause of his failure as a playwright in a conspiracy of colleagues who, like him, frequented the widow Laurent's coffee house. When he vented his anger with anonymous epigrams on them, which he secretly laid out there, he was banned from the house and eventually even got into trouble with the police when he continued to harass his colleagues by mail.

In 1710 he failed miserably with his candidacy for the Académie française , which animated him to new hateful epigrams on colleagues, in particular Antoine Houdar de la Motte , who had been preferred to him, but also on high-ranking people.

After getting into trouble because of some particularly malicious epigrams, he tried to deny authorship and ascribed it to a colleague ( Joseph Saurin ). When the latter denied his responsibility, Rousseau offered a purchased testimony against him and even put him in prison for a long time. In 1712, however, he was sentenced to pay 4,000 francs in pain and suffering and exiled from France for life for denigrating people and religion.

After living in Solothurn / Switzerland (as a guest at the local French ambassador!), In Vienna (where he was for three years Prinz Eugen alimentierte), and in Holland, he settled in 1717 in Brussels down (where he in the house of the Count of Aremberg recording found). Here in the same year he received the offer of a pardon which the Baron de Breteuil had obtained for him. However, Rousseau demanded his official rehabilitation, for which nobody was ready to campaign.

Voltaire visited him in Brussels in 1722, who had been introduced to him in Paris in 1710 as a hopeful young poet. The two men parted in anger. Other initially benevolent people, whom he found as patrons again and again thanks to his fame, almost regularly offended Rousseau.

As early as 1712 he had published an edition of his work in Solothurn. In 1723 he had a two-volume edition of his lyrical work published in London under the title Odes, cantates, épigrammes et poésies diverses , which was reprinted more than ten times by 1734. After that, his position as an author began to falter. The literary taste had changed in the direction of Rococo , that is to say to more lightness and simplicity, so that his texts, which were bound up with baroque classicism , now appeared pompous and overloaded.

In 1737 , after a stroke, Rousseau tried to get permission to return to Paris and in 1738 stayed there for several months under an assumed name. However, the demarches of some of the last patrons remained unsuccessful. Even the piety to which he had been converted was evidently of no use. Those writers who still knew him no longer took him seriously. The authors close to the Enlightenment even regarded him as a non-person. Voltaire's derisively condescending Rousseau vita dates from this period.

Rousseau had to return to Brussels in 1739 , where he spent his final years.

After all, around 1745 he was still differentiated as "le grand Rousseau" from the younger Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he entered the Parisian literary scene. The romantics , who knew him from their school books as a once authoritative poet, finally branded him as a cold-hearted poet. Only recently has this or that honor been attempted and, above all, his talent as a satirist has been recognized.

Works

• Le Café , comedy in 1 act, in prose (1694)
• Jason , opera in 5 acts, in verse (1696)
• Le Flatteur , comedy in 5 acts, in prose (1698)
• Vénus et Adonis , opera in 5 acts, in verse (1697)
• Le Capricieux (the capricious), comedy in 5 acts, in verse (1700)
• La Noce de village (the village wedding), mask play (1700)
• La Ceinture magique (the magic belt), comedy in 1 act, in prose (1702)
• Œuvres (works), (1712)
• Odes, cantates, épigrammes et poésies diverse , 2 vols. (1723)
• L'Hypocondre (the hypochondriac), comedy, never performed
• La Dupe de lui-même (betrayed by oneself), comedy, never performed
• La Mandragore (the mandrake root), comedy, never performed
• Les Aïeux chimériques (the fairytale ancestors), comedy, never performed
• Lettres sur différents sujets de littérature (letters on various literary issues) (posthumous 1750)

Web links

Commons : Jean-Baptiste Rousseau  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Rousseau's dramas and performances at CESAR
• Voltaire, Vie de MJB Rousseau , 1738: pamphlet against Rousseau published anonymously by Voltaire
• Article in "Name, title and dates of the French. Literature ", Part I (main source for" Life and Creation ")