Louis-Étienne Arcère

Louis-Étienne Arcère (born April 15, 1698 in Marseille , † February 7, 1782 in La Rochelle ) was a French historian and priest of the Oratorians . He was one of the earliest writers to portray the history of La Rochelle.

Life

Louis-Étienne Arcère taught fine literature and the humanities in various high schools of his order and around 1743 became permanent secretary of the Société royale d'agriculture in La Rochelle, where he resided until his death.

Arcère is best known for its Histoire de la ville de La Rochelle et du pays d'Aulnis (2 vols., La Rochelle 1756–57). Much of the material for this work was collected by Claude-Hubert Jaillot (1690–1749), after whose death in 1749 Arcère continued to work on the history of La Rochelle on his own and brought the work to an end. This book earned the author a provincial pension and his employment as a correspondent for the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres . However, Arcère relied in large parts on the Histoire de La Rochelle by Amos Barbot (1566-1625), created between 1613 and 1625 , which is the oldest available narrative source on the history of this city since the Middle Ages .

Other works by Arcère include:

• Éloge historique du RP Claude-Hubert Jaillot , La Rochelle 1750
• Journal historique au sujet de la tentative de la flotte anglaise sur les côtes du pays d'Aulnis , 1757
• Journal historique de la prize de Mahon , 1760
• Mémoire apologétique de la révolution de Corse en 1760 , Paris 1777
• De l'État de l'agriculture chez les Romains depuis le commencement de la République jusqu'au siècle de Jules-César , Paris 1777

Arcère also wrote two writings dealing with ecclesiastical questions, written in the Jansenist spirit to which the oratorians adhered at the time:

• Mémoire sur la nécessité de diminuer le nombre des fêtes , 1763
• Mémoire sur la nécessité de diminuer le nombre et de changer le système des maisons religieuses , 1765

Many other of his memoranda and some of his poems were included in the Récueil de l'académie de la Rochelle . Arcère also gained a great reputation as a poet and won first prize at the flower games that took place in Toulouse in 1736, 1746 and 1748 , in Marseille in 1741 and in Pau in 1743 .

In the period from 1736 to April 1780, Arcère put together a six-volume handwritten collection of excerpts from various journals on literary and historical topics, theological sentences, etc., which is entitled Arceriana and which he left in the library of the Oratorians in Marseille. He mastered several ancient and living languages ​​and for a time occupied himself with the preparation of an edition of a Turkish-Latin-French dictionary, the material of which his uncle, the orientalist Antoine Arcère , who had died in 1699 , had compiled. However, due to deteriorating eyesight and advanced age, he had to give up this job. He bequeathed the manuscript to the Royal Library of Paris.

literature

• Arcère, Louis-Étienne , in: Louis Gabriel Michaud (Ed.): Biographie universelle , 2nd ed. 1843 ff., Vol. 2, p. 153.