Pierre-Alexandre Levesque de La Ravalière

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Pierre-Alexandre Levesque de La Ravalière (born January 6, 1697 in Troyes , † February 4, 1762 ) was a French historian, Romanist and Medievalist .

life and work

Levesque de la Ravalière studied law in Orléans . In 1742 he published the poems of Theobald I (Navarra) (also known as Count Thibaut IV of Champagne) and was elected to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . There he was at the center of a famous controversy about the origin of the French language . Against Jean Liron , Charles Pinot Duclos , Antoine Rivet de La Grange , Pierre-Nicolas Bonamy and Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye , he persistently denied the development of French from Latin because, for nationalistic reasons, he thought of his origins Language from the gutter ( Vulgar Latin ) was unbearable. He represented the descent of French from the Celtic (Keltenthese).

The (paradoxical) merit of Levesque de la Ravalière is formulated by Jens Lüdtke as follows: “An individual then forced all his opponents to improve the methods and to interpret the facts more precisely through his unreasonable persistence. The positive result of La Ravalière's polemic was that the scholars convinced of the Latin origin of French were now forced to prove their thesis in detail. We owe this proof with the knowledge reached around the middle of the 18th century only to him ”. (Lüdtke 1987, p. 172)

Works

  • (Ed.) Les Poésies du Roy de Navarre avec des notes et un glossaire françois, précédées de l'Histoire des révolutions de la langue françoise depuis Charlemagne jusqu'à saint Louis, et d'un discours sur l'ancienneté des chansons françoises et de quelques autres pièces, Paris 1742 (modern critical edition: Les Chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, roi de Navarre , edited by Axel Wallensköld , Paris 1925)
  • (Ed.) Robert Martin Lepelletier, Histoire des comtes de Champagne et de Brie , Paris 1753

literature

  • Des Essarts, Les siècles littéraires de la France ou nouveau dictionnaire historique critique et bibliographique de tous les écrivains français, morts et vivans jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe siècle [...], Volume 4, Paris 1801 sv
  • Collection des meilleures dissertations, notices et traités particuliers relatifs à l'histoire de France , ed. von Constant Leber, Vol. 14, Paris 1838 (contains the writings of the controversy)
  • Ursula Brauße, The dispute about the Celtic part of the French language development up to the end of the 18th century , Diss. Berlin 1975 (Academy of Sciences of the GDR)
  • Jens Lüdtke, The Debate About the Origin of French 1733–1757, in: The early history of Romance philology: from Dante to Diez , ed. by Hans-Josef Niederehe and Brigitte Schlieben-Lange , Tübingen 1987, pp. 151–176
  • Jens Lüdtke, Diachronic Romance Linguistics and Linguistic Historiography, in: Lexicon of Romance Linguistics I, 1, Tübingen 2001, pp. 1–35

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Levesque de La Ravalière, Pierre-Alexandre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French historian, Romanist and Medievalist
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1697
PLACE OF BIRTH Troyes
DATE OF DEATH February 4, 1762