Pierre-Julien de Lanjuinais

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre-Julien de Lanjuinais (born November 8, 1733 in Pleumeleuc , Bretagne , † October 9, 1804 in Moudon , Canton of Vaud ) was a Franco-Swiss author. He escaped from a Benedictine monastery in Le Mans , ran the high school in Moudon and wrote subversive writings. Although he took opposing positions therein, two of his forbidden bestsellers contributed to the spread of revolutionary ideas: a panegyric on Joseph II , the Louis XV. put in a bad light, and a diatribe on the emperor and his sister Marie Antoinette .

Life

Escape from the monastery

Lanjuinais was the son of an official of secular and ecclesiastical authorities. At sixteen he entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Melaine in Rennes . This belonged to the congregation of St. Maurus , one of the strongholds of the strictly moral Jansenists . Lanjuinais became professor of philosophy and theology in the Maurinian abbeys of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil and Saint-Vincent in Le Mans. In the last-mentioned monastery, the monks protested against the fashionable Bishop of Orléans and Minister of Culture of Louis XV, Jarente de La Bruyère, who was put in front of their noses in 1764 as Commendatar Abbot .

This conflict seems to have made Lanjuinais an opponent of monasticism and the king. In 1764 he fled to Lausanne , which forced him to convert to the Reformed faith. There and in Crans-près-Céligny he seems to have frequented bankers' homes. In 1766 he impregnated the widowed Suzanne Descombes née Peguiron (1732-1799) von Cuarny and had to marry her. They had six children together. In the year mentioned Lanjuinais acquired the citizenship of Arnex-sur-Nyon . In 1767 he was a schoolmaster in Payerne , in 1768 he became the director of the high school in Moudon. In 1770 and 1775 he applied in vain for chairs at the Academy of Lausanne ( jurisprudence , eloquence ).

Panegyric with revolutionary tones

Louis-Simon Boizot: Joseph II, Petit Trianon (1777).
Pierre-Julien de Lanjuinaus: Le Monarque accompli (1774).

In order to receive a post in the monarchy of the House of Austria , Lanjuinais wrote a three-volume panegyric on Joseph II. This was published in 1774 under the title Le Monarque accompli (The Complete Ruler) in Lausanne. It is largely a compilation . The authors cited, including deists and atheists , are almost never mentioned. Against the background of the Austro-French alliance of 1753 , Lanjuinais took the historical Joseph II as the starting point to create a counter-image to the decadent Louis XV. to design. He considered the ideal form of government to be what the Antoine-Léonard Thomas quoted by him called Despotisme de la vertu ( Despotism of virtue ). Lanjuinais saw the revolution as an alternative . He wrote, for example, that if the tax burden is not distributed more fairly, one day the monsters will have to be wiped out which are draining the poor people's marrow. Lanjuinais appealed to the Catholic princes to abolish the monasteries, to ban celibacy and to introduce civil marriage, divorce and freedom of worship for Protestants . He hoped that Joseph II would reunite the Christian churches. He also advocated education for the poor and called for judicial reform.

Lanjuinais seems to have been sponsored by the governor of Moudon Karl Philipp Sinner, whose cousin Friedrich Sinner Schultheiss of Bern was. He asked in vain for a reward from Vienna. He was unlucky that in the year of publication of the work the targeted Louis XV. died and his successor Louis XVI. moved away from his grandfather's pro-Austria policy, although his wife Marie Antoinette was Joseph II's favorite sister. On the other hand, the fact that the Monarque accompli was burned by the hangman in Paris in 1776 helped sales . This also resulted in an unauthorized reprint. The underground magazine L'espion anglois (The English Spy) raised the author to heaven.

Settlement with the Catholic Church

To the delight of the Jansenists, Clemens XIV had abolished the Society of Jesus in 1773 . When he died a year later, it was rumored that the Jesuits had poisoned him. In 1775 Lanjuinais published an account with the Catholic Church under the title L'Esprit du pape Clément XIV . As in the Monarque accompli , he foisted his protagonist 's own ideas, in this case his Jansenist image of Christianity and his criticism of the curia , the bishops and the religious orders . France also banned this book, the Vatican put it on the index . The result was partial translations into German and Italian.

In search of a crowned sponsor, Lanjuinais wrote another panegyric in 1776, this time on Catherine II of Russia . He received no more gratitude for this than for the monarque accompli . The book also sold poorly. A later translation into Russian was probably arranged by a son of the author who was in the service of State Chancellor Alexander Vorontsov.

Assassination threat against a former idol

In 1777 Lanjuinais was entrusted with the upbringing of a nephew by the former British Prime Minister Grafton . Since his publisher Jean-Pierre Heubach did not pay him a fee, he organized his own print shop: he hired the book printer Henri Vincent, to whom Schultheiss Sinner personally advanced money. A textbook on rhetoric penned by Lanjuinas and published by the Société typographique de Moudon , however, found little sales. When Joseph II was traveling through Switzerland at that time , he probably suspected that the author of the Monarque accompli wanted to beg him, and passed Moudon at a gallop. Lanjuinais rode after him as far as Payerne , but was not admitted. In the same year he published a fictional text by the royal chaplain William Dodd (1729–1777), who had been hanged in London for forging documents. In it he called for an end to the death penalty and the persecution of Jews and Protestants. Large parts of the book are copied from Jean-Baptiste-Claude Delisle de Sales.

The publication of a geography work by François Robert cost Lanjuinais the last of his money. In 1780, the Bernese aristocrats , who financed all of the book printers in Vaud, caused the aforementioned Vincent to move to Lausanne. Still hoping for a reward from Vienna, Lanjuinais found a relative of State Chancellor Kaunitz, who had kidnapped his young son to Lake Geneva . But the wanted fled to France , whereby Lanjuinais escaped the offered reward. An attempt to sell the British Admiralty's alleged operational plans to the French ambassador in Solothurn was just as unsuccessful . Finally - still in 1780 - a stranger told the imperial-royal resident in Basel , Joseph von Nagel, that Swiss aristocrats wanted to carry out an assassination attempt on Joseph II in Vienna . For the discovery of the project, he asked for a hundred thousand guilders, which were to be given to Lanjuinais. A comparison of manuscripts convicted him, however, of having written the threat of assassination himself, and the emperor forbade any further correspondence with him.

Inscription on Marie Antoinette

Louis-Simon Boizot: Marie Antoinette, Louvre (1781).

In 1781 Lanjuinais published a superseded supplement to Espion anglois (see above). In it he assumed Joseph II intended to retake Alsace and Lorraine and, in preparation for this, to destabilize Switzerland. He described a supporter of the emperor, the writer Linguet , who was thrown into the Bastille , as "the lawyer for Nero and Caligula ". In order to harm his former idol, Lanjuinais joined the pamphleteers who demonized his sister Marie Antoinette. Not only did he criticize the Queen's lifestyle, but also her alleged influence on her husband's politics. So he wrongly attributed Necker's fall to her. Otherwise the Supplément à l'Espion anglois largely contains polemics against England, including a threat to assassinate George III. It was banned but reprinted in Rouen in 1782 . Like the Monarque accompli, it is among the forbidden bestsellers of pre-revolutionary France.

The supplément was the last writing that Lanjuinais could publish. When resident Nagel died, he presented his successor Emanuel von Tassara with an imaginary bill for the monarque accompli. In 1787 he offered Tassara to convert the Reichenau monastery into a hospital . In 1789 he asked the Duke of Orléans and the National Assembly in Paris for the position of administrator of Versoix . In 1794 he applied again in vain for a professorship in Lausanne (philosophy). His good relationship with the literary bailiff Franz Rudolf von Weiss, who was appointed commander-in-chief of the Bernese troops in Vaud during the Helvetic Revolution, was almost fatal for him : the Jacobins of Moudon wanted to depose him as rector, but French positions prevented him.

Since French was understood by all educated people in Europe at the time, the effect of the Lanjuinais pamphlets - as a look at library catalogs shows - was not limited to the French-speaking area.

Works

literature

References and comments

  1. ↑ The first name Joseph mentioned in the literature is that of a brother, namely the father of the famous revolutionary Jean-Denis Lanjuinais , with whom Pierre-Julien is also often confused.
  2. ↑ How the Jansenists prepared the ground for the French Revolution is shown by Dale K. Van Kley in: The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. New Haven (Connecticut) / London 1996.
  3. ↑ Among others Voltaire , Rousseau , Helvétius , d'Alembert , Antoine-Léonard Thomas , Beccaria and Mercier .
  4. ↑ Le Monarque accompli. Volume 2, p. 101.
  5. ↑ Le Monarque accompli. Volume 1, p. 116.
  6. ↑ Le Monarque accompli. Volume 1, pp. 217, 255, 278, 281.
  7. ↑ Le Monarque accompli. Volume 3, p. 252.
  8. ↑ Arrest de la Cour du Parlement, qui condamne un écrit intitulé Le Monarque accompli. Paris, May 3, 1776. ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fgallica.bnf.fr%2Fark%3A%2F12148%2Fbtv1b86150649~GB%3D~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3D~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D )
  9. ↑ The first volume bears the year 1776. Another reprint appeared in 1780.
  10. ^ L'esprit du pape Clément XIV.
  11. ↑ The Spirit of Clement XIV. London (Ulm) 1775. ( digitized versionhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.ch%2Fbooks%3Fid%3DdKUAAAAAcAAJ%26pg%3DPA77%26lpg%3DPA77%26dqource%3DDer%2BGeistbl%2BKlemens.26s2BX% % 26ots% 3Ddz-Fl8a5Wr% 26sig% 3DUxYVYL-xmfhfBik0ml7R7OHwJBM% 26hl% 3Dde% 26sa% 3DX% 26ved% 3D0ahUKEwi7ouCbuL7NAhXBuhQKHXPZal% MDepage% 26AEQSAF% 3DAepage% 26% 26AEIKSDAC% 3DAepage% 26% 3Depage 26% 26SDAC% 3DAepage% 26% 26AEQSA% 3DAepage% 26% 3Depage% 3D % 3D ~ double-sided% 3D ~ LT% 3D ~ PUR% 3D )
  12. ^ Lo spirito di Clemente XIV. 2 parts, Amsterdam 1777.
  13. ↑ Éloge historique de Catherine II.
  14. ↑ Екатерина Великая. Translated by Mikhail Dmitrievich Kostogorov. Moscow, A. Rechetnikov, 1802.
  15. ↑ Manuel des jeunes orateurs.
  16. ^ Soliloques ou lamentations du docteur Dodd.
  17. ↑ De la philosophy de la nature. Amsterdam 1770.
  18. ^ Rüdiger Joseph Johann Graf von Starhemberg (1742–1789).
  19. ↑ Supplément à l'Espion anglois. P. 27 ff.
  20. ↑ Supplément à l'Espion anglois. P. 205.
  21. ↑ Vivian R. Gruder: The Question of Marie-Antoinette. In: French History, 16/2002, p. 274.
  22. ↑ Supplément à l'Espion anglois. P. 20.
  23. ^ Robert Darnton: The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York 1995, p. 64 f.
  24. ↑ The name of Lanjuinais is omitted from most copies.
personal data
SURNAME Lanjuinais, Pierre-Julien de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-Swiss author of political writings
DATE OF BIRTH November 8, 1733
PLACE OF BIRTH Pleumeleuc
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1804
Place of death Moudon