Louis de Jaucourt

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Louis de Jaucourt

Louis de Jaucourt (born September 16, 1704 in Paris , † February 3, 1779 in Compiègne ) was a French doctor, writer and scholar in the Age of Enlightenment . With more than 15,000 articles, this enlightener was instrumental in the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d'Alembert . After d'Alembert resigned, he succeeded him.

life and work

The de Jaucourt family belonged to the old Burgundian landed gentry, professed the Reformed Christianity of the Huguenots and was therefore viewed with suspicion by the authorities in Catholic France. His father was Pierre Antoine I de Jaucourt baron d'Hubans (1658-1736), his mother was Marie de Mouginot, both married since September 14, 1684. He had two siblings, Isabelle de Jaucourt and Pierre Antoine II baron d'Hubans de Jaucourt, Marquis de Chantome (1687-1780).

The young Louis went to school in Geneva under a false name, Louis de Neufville , and then studied medicine in Cambridge for eight years before moving to Leiden . There were his teachers u. a. Théodore Tronchin and Hermann Boerhaave . In Holland he also began his writing activities. The subject of his dissertation, written in 1730 and published in Paris, was: Dissertatio medica inauguralis, De Allantoide humana.

Although he received his medical degree in 1730, he did not practice as a doctor, but from 1733 he again attended courses with Boerhaave, but also wrote some essays on the German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz .

When he returned to France, he documented the knowledge he had acquired in an anatomical-medical lexicon. When, after twenty years of work, his work was completed in 1751, he wanted to have it printed in Amsterdam so that it would not be exposed to state censorship . The manuscript was lost in a shipwreck - there was no copy.

Around 1751 de Jaucourt offered to work on the encyclopédie that had just begun. Denis Diderot agreed, and from the second volume of the Encyclopédie de Jaucourt made many contributions. The Encyclopédie was supposed to spread the knowledge, ideas and worldview of the Enlightenment , which is why it had many opponents among the nobility and clergy and was finally banned in 1757. Many previous employees did not dare to resist the ban, and after the seventh volume (up to the entry Gythium ) the extradition was interrupted for eight years.

The relationship between Denis Diderot and de Jaucourt can be described as ambivalent. The personal relationship remained rather cool, but Diderot appreciated the contributions to the Encyclopédie. De Jaucourt was involved in the project with a large number of articles and also financially. He wrote up to four articles a day. He hired several secretaries to provide support and paid them out of pocket. The group of publishers around André Le Breton , Antoine-Claude Briasson , Michel-Antoine David and Laurent Durand refused to pay him payment for his activities (see Publishing and Economic Aspects of the Encyclopédie ). Their account books show that they at least provided him with the literature he needed to write his articles free of charge, resulting in an amount of 2,749.69 livres in the nine years of his activity . All other expenses, such as the wages for his employees who were busy researching, excerpting and copying the texts, were left to de Jaucourt. Ultimately, de Jaucourt even sold his house to the publisher André Le Breton in order to cover the running costs.

Thanks to de Jaucourt's participation, Diderot was able to turn his energies into other projects. When, after eight years of prohibition, both printing and delivery were resumed, enough contributions were available so that the last ten volumes of text all appeared in the same year, 1765. Almost every second contribution is from de Jaucourt. In the end, Jaucourt had written 17,266 articles in the Encyclopédie.

With so busy production, it was inevitable that not all items achieved the same quality:

"While [...] some definitions are more poorly copied, among de Jaucourt's contributions [...] there are also essays whose eloquence is in no way inferior to the greats of his time (especially on [...] topics such as civil rights, religious persecution and freedom of belief) . "

Diderot publicly praised de Jaucourt, but referred to him privately as a pedantic writer. De Jaucourt's disdain later prevailed. The services of the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt for the Encyclopédie are hardly ever mentioned, although the work would have remained a fragment without him.

He was a member of the Académie de Bordeaux and the Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien from 1755, the Royal Society of London from 1756 and the Prussian Academy of Sciences from 1764.

In 1999 the asteroid (6977) Jaucourt was named after him.

Works (selection)

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Louis de Jaucourt  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank A. Kafker: Notices sur les auteurs of dix-sept volumes de "discours" de l'Encyclopédie. In: Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie Year. Volume 7, Issue 7, 1898, p. 144.
  2. ↑ Biographical data on father and mother (PDF file; 92 kB)
  3. ↑ Family genealogy
  4. ^ John Christian Laursen: New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge. (= Brill's Studies in Intellectual History. Volume 60). Brill Academic Publications, 1997, ISBN 90-04-09986-7 , p. 157.
  5. ↑ Pierre Lepape: Denis Diderot. A biography. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-593-35150-1 , p. 124.
  6. ^ John C. Powers: Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts. University of Chicago Press, Chicago London 2012, ISBN 978-0-226-67760-6 , p. 170.
  7. ↑ Christine THERE: L'image of solidarités familiales dans l'Encyclopédie. Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, Paris, France, pp. 517-533. (PDF file; 3.03 MB)
  8. ↑ Philipp Blom: The reasonable monster. Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-8218-4553-8 , pp. 385-391.
  9. ↑ Philipp Blom: The knight without a face. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. October 14, 2004, p. 48.
  10. ↑ Minor Planet Circ. 27463
  11. ↑ In French in: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Essais de théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal . 1734.
personal data
SURNAME Jaucourt, Louis de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physician, writer and scholar in the Age of Enlightenment
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1704
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1779
Place of death Compiègne