René Auguste Constantin de Renneville

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German edition of Renneville's French Inquisition (1715): arrest of the author.

René Auguste Constantin de Renneville (* 1650 ; † 1723 ) was a French author and well-known prisoner of the Bastille .

Life

Renneville came from Caen , left France as a Reformed Protestant in 1699 as a result of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes and moved to the Netherlands. When he returned to the French court in 1702, he fell victim to a smear campaign and was imprisoned without trial in the Bastille , whose prisoner he remained until 1713. A number of poems from this captivity, which he himself referred to as “Otia bastiliaca” survived on the margins of an edition of the Auteurs déguisés (Paris, 1690), which was rediscovered in 1906 by James Tregaski .

Renneville was released on the intervention of Queen Anne of Britain . He wrote his four-volume French Inquisition , the report of his imprisonment, in French during the following years in exile. It was first published in Amsterdam by Étienne Roger , Volume 1, 1715, the subsequent volumes appeared in 1719. The work was dedicated to George I of Great Britain and appeared almost simultaneously in an abridged English edition in London and in an illustrated edition in Nuremberg. A Dutch translation followed in 1717. The publication is noteworthy from a literary point of view: With it, Renneville continues the current realism of French political journalism in a romantic format. The English edition is supported by William Taylor , among others , who four years later publishes Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , a title that Renneville keeps up with in the daring intensity of descriptions.

At the end of his life, in 1723, Renneville was Major in the Artillery in the service of the Hessian Elector. Renneville also published the ten volumes of the Recueil des voyages qui ont servi a l'établissement de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales aux Provinces Unies .

Remarks

  1. ^ Indication of the place of printing after Renneville's entry in Zedler's Universal Lexicon .

Works

  • Cantiques de l'écriture sainte paraphrasés en sonnets (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1703).
  • L'inquisition Françoise ou l'histoire de la Bastille. Par Mr. Constantin de Renneville [Volume 1] (Amsterdam: E. Roger, 1715).
  • [German:] French Inquisition exposed and shown to everyone, or: History of the Bastille (1715)
  • [English, abbreviated:] The French Inquisition: or, The History of the Bastille in Paris (A. Bell, T. Varnham, J. Osborne, W. Taylor, J. Baker, London 1715).
  • [Dutch:] Historie van de Bastille of inquisite van Staat in Vrannryk (Amsterdam 1717).
  • Psaumes de la Pénitence paraphrasés en sonnets (La Haye 1715).
  • L'inquisition Françoise ou l'histoire de la Bastille. Par Mr. Constantin de Renneville , 4 volumes (E. Roger, Amsterdam 1719).
  • L'inquisition françoise: ou, L'histoire de la Bastille (B. Lakeman, Amsterdam: / J. & H. Verbeek, Leiden; 1724).
  • Supplément à l'histoire de l'inquisition françoise ou de la Bastille (Etienne Roger, Amsterdam 1719).
  • Poème en vers libre pour le jour de l'heureuse naissance de SASM Charles, Landgrave de Hesse (Cassel 1722).
  • Recueil des voiages qui ont servi à l'établissement & aux progrès de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, formée dans les Provinces-Unies des Païs-Bas (JF Bernard, Amsterdam 1725).
  • Œuvres spirituelles contenant diverse poésies chrétiennes (Amsterdam 1725).
  • Anecdotes bas-normandes , 1724, rééd. by Paul Le Cacheux (Impr. de l'Eure, Évreux 1899).

literature

personal data
SURNAME Renneville, René Auguste Constantin de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author and famous prisoner of the Bastille
DATE OF BIRTH 1650
DATE OF DEATH 1723