Jean Frédéric Bernard
Jean Frédéric Bernard (* 1680 in Velaux , Provence ; † June 27, 1744 in Amsterdam ) was a French bookseller , author , translator , printer and publisher . He worked mainly in the Netherlands , but published mostly in his mother tongue.
The son of a Huguenot refugee family , who was deeply interwoven in the cultural network of that era , became one of the highest-circulation publishers in the Netherlands in Amsterdam thanks to his skill with reprint editions , who with this income and inheritance also authored important works of the European Enlightenment and natural sciences financed. More recent research goes so far that it ascribes two of his editions, Recueil de voyages au nord (1715ff.) And Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses (1723ff.), A significant and lasting effect on the perception of the educational elites of the early 18th century. Both works would have increased the ethical and religious tolerance towards other cultures and ethnic groups in the European Enlightenment.
Life
Youth of a Huguenot refugee
Jean Frédéric Bernard was born in Provence in 1680 as the son of Pastor Barthélmy Bernard (1646–1694). As a Huguenot at the age of five, he and his family fled France for religious reasons, initially to Switzerland , after the Edict of Nantes had been repealed by the Edict of Fontainebleau .
His uncle Jean Bernard (1625–1706), who had served as pastor in Manosque , was considered an important theologian and had to a certain extent taken over the management of the entire Bernard family and the management of the escape to Lausanne . There he was seen as the leader of all Huguenot families in the local diaspora . Therefore, Jean Bernard was chosen to raise funds for Huguenots in Europe, which eventually led him to The Hague . There he asked Maria Stuart , the wife of Wilhelm III. to provide financial resources and a permanent refuge for the Huguenots. Through his mother Catherine Guib, Jean Frédéric Bernard was firmly connected in the network of the Huguenot elite . His maternal grandfather was Jean Frederic Guib, of Scottish descent and a medical degree from the University of Valence . Guib eventually worked as provost and professor of rhetoric at the Collége d'Orange. In addition, Jean Frederic Guib was friends with the personal secretary of the Dutch governor , the poet Constantijn Huygens and his son the astronomer , mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens . These connections should also facilitate the further career of his grandson Jean Frédéric.
But the networks paid off for the entire family: Barthélmy Bernard soon got a pastor's position at the Reformed Church in Amsterdam. This proved to be a special performance out because a total of 360 Huguenot pastors to around a dozen free pastors of the Walloon came Church. Already on May 29, 1686, Barthélmy Bernard received the citizenship of the city of Amsterdam, which normally took more than a year and would have cost him considerable financial resources. However, due to his poor health, died BARTHELMY Bernard already 1694. This made Jean Frédéric Bernard at the age of 14 years and his two surviving sisters, Elizabeth and Henri, after her mother had died to orphans . His two uncles Jean Bernard and Henri Guib, his mother's brother, took care of them. The social background of his family suggested a university or spiritual career - but Jean Frédéric Bernard broke with these traditions.
Beginnings in book trade and publishing
In 1704, thanks to his Swiss connections, Jean Frédéric moved back to Geneva - not as a theology student , but to make his fortune in trade. Already in Amsterdam he had made the acquaintance of a Huguenot publishing dynasty who had family ties to his future friend Pierre Humbert . Thanks to this network, he gained a foothold in the brokerage business in Geneva , with the book trade remaining an important part of his business, which thrived in both areas on mutual trust and the development of a certain clientele . Even Pierre Bayle was one of his customers.
In 1707 Bernard returned to Amsterdam. As a facteur de la société des libraires (member of the bookseller society) of Geneva , Jean Frédéric Bernard traded in Amsterdam from 1705 to 1711. He then emerged as the author of translations, editor of critical editions, as well as various historical and literary works. The short marriage with Jeanne Chartier, who was also Huguenot, died two months after the marriage at the age of 26 in 1714, and marked a double turning point in Bernard's life. Because Jeanne Chartier was extremely wealthy and owned a larger house on the renowned Keizersgracht , so that he was the only heir to receive significant capital. This stimulated his publishing activity.
It was precisely this legacy that made the more demanding production of the first edition of Recueil de voyages au nord: contenant divers mémoires très utiles au commerce & à la navigation , 1715, which was to establish its fame. This work was a compilation of several Arctic trips. These included the first publication of Nicole Jérémie's Relation du détroit et de la baie de Hudson , a Québec- born fur trader who accompanied Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville to Hudson Bay . The descriptions of the region, and in particular of the Inuit, were particularly valuable because, unlike the explorers, Jérémie had lived there for 20 years. In a relatively small format and inexpensive presentation, the travel reports combined records from traders, missionaries and fur hunters, which Bernard translated, edited and, in some cases, also contributed his own essays. It was important to him that the reader ultimately put his personal interpretation above everything. This also explains the extremely large number of maps and illustrations, which, in addition to his editorial talent, made the series' long-term success up into the 1730s. However, he himself had included in the collection curious reports such as that of the trip to Iceland ( La Relation d´Islande , 1644) by the French attaché at the Copenhagen court, Isaak de Peyères, which was first published in France in 1663. Because de Peyères himself had never been to Iceland and had completely incorrectly based the report on secondary material for the sake of the narrative effect alone, although experts known to him such as the Danish archaeologist Ole Worm had pointed out the shortcomings to him. In one important point, however, Peyères went into the scientific findings of Worms: He tried to correct the unicorn saga based on the narwhal tusks found in Iceland . Even the republication of this refutation could not stop the legend for the next 150 years.
Breakthrough as a publisher
1718 married Bernard again a rich bride: Marie Sophie Lacoste († 1736), also Huguenot, came from a family of velvet - Manufakteuren from Montauban . Because Bernard was sure to need capital in the low-risk book production business that some aspiring publishers such as B. the converted Jesuit Henri Du Sauzet (1687–1754), despite benevolent discussions and supposed sales successes, drove into bankruptcy . Du Sauzet, who had worked with Bernard in the publication of the scandalous memoirs of Jean-François Paul de Gondi , Cardinal von Retz , in 1719, was always close to bankruptcy . In 1747 you had to declare your bankruptcy to Sauzet, only to die a few years later completely impoverished. Because at that time it often happened that wealthy customers did not pay for valuable books in cash upon delivery, in order to instead order additional, expensive books in advance using the subscription principle . This forced the big booksellers to offer a wide range of products, while the less wealthy publishers were often forced to offer their unsold stocks for sale at auction .
With his friend and colleague Humbert, Bernard shared a liberal and revealing perspective on religious and ideological issues, which did not prevent either of them from writing works like that of the great French liberal of the 17th century, Gabriel Naudé , Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie (1625) or to republish the sermons of the English Archbishop of Canterbury , John Tillotson .
Bernard laid the basis for his business success with the mass production of reprint editions of successful French productions in today's paperback format, which he sold in the whole of Europe. Among other things, Jean de la Fontaine , Anne de la Roche-Guilhen , François Hédelin's studies on French theater or François Fénelon's treatises on rhetoric or poetics were among his offerings. With these profits and the income from the fortunes of his women, he financed the prestigious, but in the short term not very profitable luxury productions. Like many others in his field, he hardly cared about copyrights for reprints , as the book trade of that era was hardly characterized by scruples thanks to an all-round struggle for survival. The reprints alone made up 70 percent of his total literary production.
In the 1720s, Bernard became a member of a consortium of booksellers called Die Gesellschaft der 14 (The Society of 14) , which specialized in throwing pirate reprint editions infringing copyright onto the European book market en masse. This also included Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in French translation, works by Voltaire ( Histoire de Charles XII ), for whom Bernard was therefore a downright hateful figure, and Charles Rollins De la manière d'ètudier les belle lettres . However, this illegal attitude did not prevent the 14 from imposing restrictive measures on their own members themselves. In 1734, Blaise Pascal Lettres provinciales was published with great success . But when Bernard wanted to publish this under his own name, like every other member of the 14, he first had to acquire a license. In order to avoid the increased persecution of the pirated prints by the Dutch authorities, Bernard forged the original factory stamp himself. However, this also helped to protect the production from censorship or political and religious prosecution.
In his introduction to the Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peuples représésentés par figures dessinées par Bernard Picart , 1723–1743, Bernard developed a surprising theory of religion: “For him, religion is primarily a social phenomenon. In their essential core, all religions agree, they are only different in their forms of expression. In the various customs and forms, people's own religious ideas find their expression; Behind this, however, lies the general need for ceremonies in the very nature of man. Also anthropologically constant is the desire to interpret certain times and aspects of human existence such as birth and death through religious rituals, but also the attempt to create access to the divine through prayer. "
The seven-volume folio edition on the ceremonies and cultic forms of expression of all known religions was a bestseller of the Enlightenment despite its high price and unwieldy format . The 1,200 copies of the first edition were sold soon, there appeared translations into German, English and Dutch, in 1741 even a competition issue in France itself. The contemporary reviewers widely discussed the work extremely sympathetically and in the holdings of prominent collectors of that time is the work has been proven. The work achieved particular importance through the numerous illustrations by the engraver Bernard Picart , which were so popular with the public that the work was associated with Picart . More recent research claims to have discovered clear roots of Gallicanism and Jansenism in Bernard and Picart . In addition, the illustrations show ethnic groups that were mostly depicted as “bloodthirsty savages” in the tenor of the time. B. the Indians of Florida , as caring individuals in mourning for their loved ones. Thus, the religious and cultural tolerance in the European Enlightenment of the first half of the 18th century would have been increased. On the other hand, a monocausal study approved of Picart's illustrations of high artistic quality, but on the other hand saw the diverse illustrations of a “new” type of Jew , the Ashkenazi , as a kind of social criticism of their growing influence in Amsterdam. Other Jewish studies saw this influence in a much more nuanced way, despite all the clichés , especially since the representation of Picart still has an iconographic influence on Jewish culture.
With the Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses , Bernard was no longer just an intellectual entrepreneur, but an expanding capitalist . He ambitiously tackled the project of a new journal , the Mémoires historiques et critiques , in 1722 with the respected journalist François-Denis Camusat and the well-known historian and geographer Antoine Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière . While Camusat took over the content management, Bruzen took care of the summaries and discussions. Like an older project that Bernard had tried with du Sauzet years earlier, the Mémoires historiques et critiques were not a success with the public. The collaboration between Camusat and Bruzen had, however, paid off. Camusat was also the lead journalist on Bernard's next project, the Bibliothèque Françoise , which after a long start-up period was ultimately to be successful. In this journal, souls of a kindred nature denounced the practice of journalism at the time of suppressing unpleasant tendencies and, for example, B. Wetstein deliberately ignored articles from competing companies. When the Bibliothèque Françoise was finally successful, Bernard - in contrast to Camusat, who wrote for the journal until his death in 1732 - seemed to have lost his interest in it and sold the rights to du Sauzet, who continued the series until 1746. After Camusat's death, Bernard collected his literary legacy in the Histoire critique des journaux , 1734, which had been singular for a long time .
After Maria Sibylla Merian died in Amsterdam, Bernard bought her printing plates and had her works published again in 1730. His other geographic and scientific series, the Recueil de voyages au nord , had a completely second edition in the 1730s, whereby it is worth noting that he himself invested considerable sums in the North American colonies of France, such as B. Louisiana , operating trading companies and also invested in the Dutch East India Company . He also encouraged other Huguenots and Dutch people to do so, and unlike some other investors , he was lucky.
Bernard never made a secret of his publishing activities, but actually kept silent about his services as an author and deliberately left no portrait of his own. In addition to concerns about the censorship at the time, this may have been due to the fact that although he had great respect for the knowledge of his surroundings, he was hostile to pure university scholarship. In contrast to some of his colleagues, he never disappointed the expectations of his subscribers by, for example, not having published works that had been announced. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he always preferred the company of contract companies who could jointly support a risky book project. So he did not tackle the Dutch translation of the Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses until five other publishing houses joined him, although he already had several hundred subscribers.
Death and aftermath
When Jean Frédéric Bernard died in 1744, he was considered a relatively wealthy man. With an annual income of 2000 guilders , which was probably much higher in reality, because like all Amsterdammers at the time he left the tax collector in the dark, few booksellers in the Dutch metropolis could consider themselves as lucky. His second daughter Elisabeth married Marc-Michel Rey in 1747 , who also had a skilled hand in the book trade and eventually became the most important publisher of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Dutch Enlightenment.
After Bernard's death in 1742, many reprinted editions over the next few decades were issued with the forged signature “Jean Frédéric Bernard” in order to increase their value. His successors thus fell into the same mechanisms of piracy as he himself did during his lifetime.
Even at today's auctions, some of his works achieve reasonable sales. An incomplete but well-preserved edition of the Recueil de Voyages au Nord sold for £ 1,320 at Christie's in 2005 . Amazingly, fragments, that is a total of a map and 13 plates from the identical work, even brought the sum of 5000 US dollars at Christie's two years later . This time, however, in the Christie's branch in New York , Rockefeller Plaza.
Work (selection)
- Recueil de voyages au nord: contenant divers mémoires très utiles au commerce & à la navigation. 1st edition 1715, 10 volumes up to 1731, NA Amsterdam 1731.
- Various traitez sur l'éloquence et sur la poésie. Amsterdam, 1715-1738.
- Réflexions morales, satiriques & comiques sur les moeurs de nôtre siècle , 1711.
- Réponse au Traité du pouvoir des rois de la Grande-Bretagne: où l'on fait voir que ce traité autorise la révolte & la trahison, & rend odieux le pouvoir du souverain; trad. de l'anglois. Amsterdam, 1714.
- together with Henri de Sauzet: Mémoires du Cardinal de Retz. 1719.
- Mémoires historiques et critiques. 1722.
- Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peuples représésentés par des figures dessinées par Bernard Picart. 1723-1743.
- Bibliothèque Françoise. 1723-1730.
- Maria Sibylla Merian : De Europische Insecten, Naauwkeurig onderzogt, na 't leven portrayed, en in print asked by Maria Sibilla Merian. Amsterdam 1730
- Superstitions anciennes et modern, préjugés vulgaires qui ont induit les peuples à des usages et à des pratiques contraires à la religion. 1733-1736. The work was reprinted with various modifications by Bannier, Paris, 1741; Edited as a reprint by Claude Prudhomme in 13 volumes, 1807–1810.
- Denis Camusat: Histoire critique des journaux. 1734.
- Dialogues critiques et philosophiques: by M. l'Abbé de Charte-Livry, nouvelle edition augmentée de plusieurs dialogues. 1734.
- Louis Hennepin and Garcilaso de la Vega : Histoire des Yncas - Rois du Perou with L'Histoire de la Conquete de la Floride with Nouvelle Découverte d'un Très Grand Pays, situé dans l'Amerique. Amsterdam 1737.
- Dissertations Melees Sur Divers Sujets Importans Et Curieux. V1-2, 1740.
literature
- Johannes Franciscus Geradus Boex: De 'Bibliothèque Françoise' van Henri Du Sauzet. 1730-1746 . Proefschrift ter Verkriejgin van de graad van doctor aan de Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen 2002, ISBN 90-9016252-6
- Lynn Hunt / Margaret C. Jacob / Wijnand Mijnhardt: The book that changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious ceremonies of the world . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2010 (1st edition 2001), ISBN 9780674049284
- Lynn Hunt / Margaret C. Jacob / Wijnand Mijnhardt: Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion . Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2010.
- Jonathan I. Israel: Radical enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650-1750 . Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2001, ISBN 978-019820608-8 .
- Paola von Wyss-Giacosa : Et plus ultra: Thoughts of the Amsterdam bookseller Jean Frédéric Bernard about traveling. In: W. Marschall / P. from Wyss-Giacosa / A. Isler: Accuracy: beautiful science. Bern 2008, pp. 111–119.
- Paola von Wyss-Giacosa: Religious images of the early enlightenment. Bernard Picart's panels for the “Cérémonies et Coutumes religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde” . Benteli, Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-7165-1421-4 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Jean Frédéric Bernard in the catalog of the German National Library
- Dialogues critiques et philosophiques: par M. l'Abbé de Charte-Livry, nouvelle edition augmentée de plusieurs dialogues , 1734 ( full text )
- Digital project by UCLA, the Getty Research Institute, the University of Utrecht and the Huntington Library: The Origins of Comparative Religion: Bernard and Picart's Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1723-1743) (multilingual user guidance, German, English, French, Dutch)
- Recueil de voyages au north . Flyers. ve.torontopubliclibrary.ca
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stadsarchief Amsterdam ( Memento of the original dated December 29, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Lynn Hunt / Margaret C. Jacob / Wijnand W. Mijnhardt: The book that changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious ceremonies of the world . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2010 (1st edition 2001), ISBN 9780674049284 ; Paola von Wyss-Giacosa: Religious images of the early enlightenment. Bernard Picart's panels for the Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde . Benteli, Zurich 2006, ISBN 978-3-7165-1421-4 .; The Early Enlightenment, Religious Toleration, and the Origins of Comparative Religion: Bernard and Picart's Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World
- ^ Lynn Hunt / Margaret C. Jacob / Wijnand W. Mijnhardt: The book that changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious ceremonies of the world . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2010, p. 89.
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 90.
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 93.
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 96.
- ↑ Full text Recueil de voyages au nord , microfilm, on www.archive.org for download as * .pdf (approx. 30 MB) and other formats
- ^ Adina Ruiu: Les récits de voyage aux pays froids au XVIIe siècle. De l'expérience du voyageur à l'expérimentation scientifique. Montréal 2007, ISBN 978-2-923385-08-2 .
- ^ Hans-Joachim Schoeps : Philosemitism in the Baroque. Religious and intellectual history studies. , JCB Mohr, Tübingen 1952, p. 81ff.
- ^ John Tillotson: A Sermon Concerning the Unity of the Divine Nature and the Blessed Trinity , London, 1693
- ↑ Alexandre Calame: Anne de La Roche-Guilhen, romancière huguenote (1644-1707) . Librairie Droz 2010.
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 98.
- ^ Paola von Wyss-Giacosa: Religious images of the early enlightenment . In: Sehepunkte , 7/2007, No. 9
- ↑ Example picture, Fig. 6.10 ( 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.
- ^ Lynn Hunt / Margaret Jacob / Wijnand Mijnhardt: Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion . Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 2010.
- ↑ http://www.college.ucla.edu/news/07/digital-project.html ( Memento from December 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Samantha Baskind: Bernard Picart's Etchings of Amsterdam's Jews . In: Jewish Social Studies, Volume 13, No. 2, 2007, pp. 40–64.
- ↑ Jenna Weissman Joselit: Enlightened Views. A new book shows how a set of 18th-century etchings helped change the way Europe thought about religion, 2010
- ^ Mémoires historiques et critiques
- ↑ Histoire critique des journaux
- ↑ http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/bildzeug/qtvr/DHM/n/BuZKopie/raum_15.07.htm
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 105.
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 101 f.
- ^ Door Lynn Avery Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, WW Mijnhardt: The book that changed Europe: Picart & Bernard's Religious ceremonies of the World. Harvard University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-067404928-4 . P. 133. [1]
- ↑ Hunt / Jakob / Wijnand, 2010, p. 110.
- ↑ Example of a forged signature
- ↑ http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4563607
- ↑ http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5014118
- ↑ Recueil De Voyages Au Nord, in ChetRossRareBooks ( 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.
- ↑ http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/bildzeug/qtvr/DHM/n/BuZKopie/raum_15.07.htm
- ↑ presentation of the project (Engl.)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bernard, Jean Frédéric |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bernard, Jean-Frédéric |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French author, translator, printer, publisher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1680 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Velaux , Provence |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 27, 1744 |
| Place of death | Amsterdam |