bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Approches roumaines de l'histoire ottomane
Authors: Lemny Stefan
Published: June 2016

Stefan Lemmy : Rumanian studies of Ottoman History.

This article shows how the dominating political presence of the Sultan in the Rumanian past influenced their historians' approach to Ottoman history. Until the end of the Seventeenth Century, interest in Ottoman history was to be seen only through references to relations between Rumanians and Turks to be found in the scant chronicles of Rumanian countries. A change came about at the beginning of the 18th Century with the Moldavian Prince Dimitri Cantemir's History of the Ottoman Empire, which was read and praised throughout Europe ; it was translated into several languages and used by Voltaire, who admired its author. After Cantemir, interest in Ottoman history died out. The poet and statesman Ianach Vàcàrescu was the last 18th-century Rumanian to write a History of Ottoman Emperors, but it remained unfinished in manuscript form and was inferior to Cantemir's work.
Les Jeunes de langue de Péra-lès-Constantinople
Authors: Hitzel Frédéric
Published: June 2016

Frédéric Hitzel : the 'jeunes de langue' at Pera of Constantinople.

Following Venice, which had created in the 16th century a school of oriental languages in order to form dragomans, the French minister Colbert's edict of 18th November 1669 set up, at the request of the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce, a school of professional interpreters to act as dragomans for French ambassadors and consuls in the East. The school was called the school of "Enfants de langue" or "Jeunes de langue". After studying at the Parisian college of Louis-le-Grand, the pupils were sent at the age of twenty to the Capucin convent at Pera in Constantinople, where they perfected their knowledge of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. The great period of this school was between 1721 and 1762, after which it declined, particulary on the creation in Paris of the School of Oriental Languages. It ceased to exist in Constantinople in 1831 and in Paris in 1873.
Le Traité des trois imposteurs et ses origines arabes
Authors: Gunny Ahmad
Published: June 2016

Ahmad Gunny : The Traité des trois imposteurs and its Arab origins.

In the 18th Century, the personality of Muhammad drew more attention perhaps than sociological, political and economic questions in Islam. The Prophet was often denounced in published works, though the fiercest attack against him is to be found in clandestine texts, particularly the Traité des trois imposteurs. The Traité, as Massignon has shown, had Arab origins and dates back to the 10th Century, the 18th-century version being a reconstruction of the earlier, Arabic text. But the reconstruction was not as fantastical as Massignon thought. This article shows that a major episode, found in the French text only, may have had a later, historical origin.
À propos du Divan de Goethe. La lumière vient de l'Orient
Authors: Brahimi Denise
Published: June 2016

Denise Brahimi : On Goethe s Divan.

The East-West Divan, a late work of Goethe's, prolongs his Enlightenment inspiration while around him there was developing a certain romanticism which exalted the irrational and associated poetry with darkness. Goethe adopts the Enlightenment criticism of Oriental despotism, the denunciation of pilgrimages and the Crusades and praise for travel as a means of gaining knowledge. In a Voltairian manner he contrasts the admirable deism of the Parsees to the deplorable excesses of Hinduism, and his sarcasm concerning Hinduism is often a mask for criticism of Christianity. He adopts the Parsees' natural religion and worship of the sun, source of all Enlightenment.
Trois lettres inédites de Crébillon fils à Mme de Graffigny
Authors: L. Grayson Vera
Published: June 2016

Three unpublished letters from Crébillon fils to Madame de Graffigny, presented by Vera L. Grayson.

Madame de Graffigny met Crébillon fils at the salon of Mlle Quinault in December 1741. In March 1744, she invited him to a dinner at her house ; his letter of acceptance is published here. Attempting to invite him again over the course of the next few weeks, she was annoyed by his constant refusals. Two of his letters of refusal are published in this article. The two continued to see each other at Mlle Quinault' s, and by January 1745 Crébillon was a regular guest at the house of Madame de Graffigny. But by March 1745, the Quinault salon was abandoned and they made no more attempts to see each other, Graffigny complaining of Crébillon' s laziness.
Le Rat du Châtelet
Authors: Nédélec Claudine
Published: June 2016

Claudine Nédélec : Le Rat du Chatelet.

Le Rat du Châtelet, a small duodecimo volume published anonymously in 1790, is a novel, a report and a political statement on prisons ; it shows us how the political and the social are integrated into the literary, and how reality is described and recomposed through textual traditions, in particular the picaresque tale and parodies of noble genres. The work also provides a social portrait of criminality by 'quoting' dialogues in argot, the secret language of thieves and murderers, which here appears for the first time as the language of criminels in prison, in a context which is both realistic and dramatic and very different from the burlesque, 'comic' (in Scarron's sense) writing of the stories of beggars in early 17th-century popular literature, which was still widely sold. This work, half-way between a raw document and a literary reworking, prefigures the great 19th-century works in argot.
Condorcet et les assignats : présentation
Authors: Dorigny Marcel
Published: June 2016

Manuela Albertone, Jean-Nicolas Rieucau, Marcel Dorigny and François Hincker : Condorcet and the assignats.

This dossier is made up of three studies centred around a single theme, namely Condorcet' s attitude towards the paper money issued by the Constituent Assembly. The three approaches proposed here offer quite different interpretations of this question and open up a debate concerning the nature of assignats and the significance of the divisions between the revolutionaries on this point.

Manuela Albertone recalls the doctrinal elements of Condorcet' s initial opposi¬ tion to the creation of money assignats ; it was above all the formation of his economic thought and his experience as an Inspector of the Mint which prevented him from supporting this type of fiduciary currency. As his thinking was influenced first by the Physiocrats and then by Turgot and Smith, he could not imagine a non-metallic money with no universally accepted intrinsic value.

Jean-Nicolas Rieucau, on the other hand, emphasizes the fact that Condorcet refused assignats not so much from a doctrinal attachment to quantitativist theory or from a superstitious attachment to precious metals, as from certainty concerning the imperfect nature of assignats which were incapable of completely fulfilling the role of 'true money'.

His refusal was based on an awareness that the assignat was unsatisfactory as a complete means of payment. Paradoxically, this analysis led Condorcet to ask for a generalisation of small assignats which could play an almost perfect monetary role, at least for everyday transactions.

Marcel Dorigny and François Hincker note that Condorcet did not stick rigidly to his initial hostility, but became by the end of 1791 one of the most fervent partisans of money assignats ; they describe the different stages of this about-turn and try to explain its causes.
Les manuscrits religieux de Newton et leur occultation
Authors: Baillon Jean-François
Published: June 2016

Jean-François Bâillon : Newton's religious manuscripts and their exclusion from the canon.

This article attempts to assess the impact of Newton's manuscripts on their first readers (heirs, editors, biographers). Instead of seing the fact that they were ignored as the result of positivistic prejudices, the author suggests that it was rather their heterodox contents that frightened readers who were concerned to maintain an ideological solidarity between official science and the national religion. An analysis of the manuscripts themselves in the light of this hypothesis shows that they undermine the authority of the clergy in a way that could at the time seem close to certain deistic theses. Paradoxically, the very existence of a positivistic myth about Newton was made possible by the fact that, for theological reasons, Newton's religious manuscripts were removed from the canon of his writings.
Idoménée de Fénelon à Crébillon père. Du statut ambigu donné à l'expérience tragique
Authors: Soulatges Magali
Published: June 2016

Magali Soulatges : Idomeneo from Fénelon to the elder Crébillon.

At the end of the 17th Century the tragic story of Idomeneo, the infanticide king, excited almost simultaneously the interest of two authors involved in very different types of literary création. Fénelon gave the ruler an important place in his novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) and the elder Crébillon began his career with the tragedy of Idoménée (1705). Although both authors inserted the story into a scenario of initiation, they brought their characters to two different types of knowledge drawn from tragic expérience : Fénelon's hero overcame his mistake by redemption, while Crébillon's Idomeneo was confronted with meaninglessness verging on absurdity. But Fénelon's monarch is a truly tragic character, for his submission to the tyranny of a didactic account prevents him assuming freely the meaning of and responsability for his act. Crébillon's Idome¬ neo, taking full advantage of the freedom of expression provided by the theatre, constructs his tragic identity alone, thus escaping momentarily from the weight of transcendence.
Les vaudevilles, un medium théâtral
Authors: Robinson Philip
Published: June 2016

Philip Robinson : Vaudevilles, an 18th-century theatrical medium.

Early French opéra-comique (or théâtre de la foire) is typified by vaudevilles , which are the theatrical application of the pont-neuf (the singing of satirical lyrics to already known tunes) ; this means not only refrain songs at the ends of acts or whole plays, but the very dialogue itself. Vaudevilles become a theatrical medium in a quite specific musical sense, for even when present in only limited numbers they impose, thanks to the cultural connotations and references of their airs, a light and comical tone which tends to dominate the entire play. The point is demonstrated by following, through a number of plays from the period 1740-70, the use of two airs for which the connotations and references can be reconstructed and the musical effects illustrated.
Rétif de la Bretonne en Suède
Authors: Björkman Margareta
Published: June 2016

Margareta Bjôrkman : Rétif de la Bretonne in Sweden.

This article deals with the reception of the Swedish translations of Rétif de la Bretonne's novels La Famille vertueuse (1767 ; Swedish translation 1780) and Lucile ou le progrès de la vertu (1768 ; translation 1785). Advertisements in the press, catalogues from booksellers and circulating libraries have been used to trace their path to the readers, and even typolographical layout is taken into consideration. The aim is to draw attention to the amazingly universal sphere of popular reading. The translators are seen as representatives of two types : either using their translations to advance within the civil service, or simply needing to make a living. Translations of prose fiction were of great importance for the development of Swedish prose, as there was practically no domestic production of prose fiction at this time.
Communautés vigneronnes en vallée de Montmorency et catholicisme (1750-1800)
Authors: Arzalier Francis
Published: June 2016

Francis Arzalier : Wine-growing communities in the Montmorency valley and catholicism, 1750-1800.

The Montmorency Valley, twenty kilometres from Paris, is now simply one huge suburb, but in the 18th Century it was an area of scattered wine-growing villages. The village community, although it was less important from the strictly economic point of view, was very important in mentalities and behaviour, expressed in a religion that represented social rituals rather than dogma. The Valley reacted to the French Revolution firstly as a region of scattered rural communities, with overwhelming support for the disappearance of feudal restraints, but a refusal of the reforms which undermined Catholic practice. Attachment to Catholicism remained very strong, at the same time as the movement of déchristianisation in 1794 was important among the labourers on the neighbouring wheat-growing lands of the Valois, Brie or the Plaine de France.
De dictionnaires en Encyclopédie. Le savoir œnologique et sa diffusion
Authors: Giaufret Colombani Hélène , Mascarello Maria-Teresa
Published: June 2016

Hélène Giauffret-Colombani and Maria Teresa Mascarello : From dictionaries to the Encyclopédie : oenological knowledge and its popularisation.

An analysis of the entries for "wine" in some 18th-century lexicographical works (Dictionnaire de l'Académie, Dictionnaire de Trévoux, Savary de Bruslons's Dictionnaire du commerce and the Encyclopédie) provides a good idea of the impressive body of knowledge concerning wine, initially reserved for the upper classes, but which was later to reach a new reading public through more didactic works. Fermentation (still a mysterious process), vinification, adulteration, commercialisation, and wine-producing regions and countries were all covered. An elaborate framework was used to analyse wine quality (body, strength and acidity, bouquet and taste, colour and age). While focussing mainly on wine consumption, the entries also paid much attention to therapeutic and dietetic uses. Finally, figurative phrases and expressions bear witness to the role of wine in the French language.
Les vignerons et le marché immobilier de l'Ancien Régime à l'Empire, dans la région d'Amboise
Authors: Jollet Anne
Published: June 2016

Anne Jollet : Wine-growers and the property market from the Old Regime to the Empire in the Amboise region.

At the end of the 18th Century wine-growers were numerous in the countryside around Amboise, a small town in the Touraine, in the middle Loire valley. They constituted a third of the 3 900 families living there, corresponding to the majority of the peasants. This article studies how this particular social group fared on the property market throughout the French Revolution. Their activity increased together with that of the whole society, and during the thirty years under study they became more and more buyers rather than sellers, which shows their economic health. Their property increased slowly, as a result of numerous transactions, involving very small plots of land, which became ever smaller, particularly vineyard plots. This facilitated their activity and at the same time their activity helped to increase the number of tiny plots of land, which modified the structure of this property market.
Bordeaux, le vin et les Anglais : commerce ou passion ?
Authors: Larrère Catherine
Published: June 2016

Catherine Larrère : Bordeaux, wine and the English : trade or passion ?

As Melon complained in his Essai politique sur le commerce (1734), "Trade between the two nations in wine and draperies is prohibited. The English are forced to go to Portugal to acquire wines which they do not like". There was agreement on both sides of the Channel, and it was not simply a question of criticising commercial rivalry. From Montesquieu to Adam Smith, there was a developing debate on the quality of wine, for the debate between Bordeaux, wine and the English was less about interest than about passion.
«Le vin, cette liqueur traîtresse»
Authors: Dornier Carole
Published: June 2016

Carole Dornier : "Wine, that treacherous liquor".

In the first half of the century, drunkenness concerned moralists more than doctors. Theologians and philosophers were aware of alcoholic dependence and its consequences, but disagreed when defining appropriate use. For Catholic orthodoxy (Pontas, Dictionnaire des cas de conscience), appropriate use means to drink from necessity only, but this justifies Islamic prohibition and Jansenist rigour rather than Christian toleration (La Médecine théologique ). Lay moralists distinguished reasonable pleasure from destructive behaviour and excessive rigour (Le Maître de Claville, Le Traité du vrai mérite) to find happiness in conformity with natural law (Toussaint, Les Mœurs). But if pleasure is a means to avoid pain, drunkenness and suicide, condemned or justified by the same arguments, are remedies for life's miseries (Maupertuis, Essai de philosophie morale). The effects of wine, alcohol and drugs are compared by philosophers who consider the search for exaltation and relief as a universal phenomenon. The reasonable use of wine seems to be based either on submission to Divine Providence or on respect and self-control as a duty (Kant, Anthropology and Doctrine of Virtue).
L'éloge du vin chez Rousseau. Entre franchise et salubrité
Authors: Crogiez Michèle
Published: June 2016

that sober people may be potential cheats or hypocrites. Drunkenness deprives man of his rational mind, but it erases most of his hypocrisy. As the Ancients said, in vino Veritas. Medicine might agree with this, for neither wine nor water were reliable at the time. The classical dispute over which was the healthiest continued and many authors document the poor quality of water as well as the danger of adulterating wine by additives. In spite of existing rules about selling water, scientists recommended ways of purifying it and demanded laws prohibiting lead vessels or taps and protecting towns from filthy workshops and rivers from pollution. Fear of being poisoned increased, revealing a new awareness of urban ecology. Saint-Preux, praising the "wines from all the universe" made by Julie from her vineyards at Clarens, called for a reexamination of the notions of "nature" and "natural".
De la République des lettres aux réformes de Turgot. Autour de deux lettres inédites de Condorcet
Authors: Macé Laurence
Published: June 2016

Laurence Macé : From the Republic of Letters to Turgot's reforms. Concerning two unpublished letters by Condorcet.

Although the history of relations between French and Italian scholars has been admirably studied by Françoise Waquet for the period 1680-1750, nothing has been done on the years leading up to the French Revolution. We publish two letters from the University library in Pisa, from Condorcet to the Tuscan ecclesiastic and man of letters Angelo Fabroi, who probably met Condorcet during his first visit to Paris in late 1772 or early 1773. While the first letter illustrates, through Cordorcet's aspirations, the continuing influence of the practices and institutions of the Republic of Letters in groups close to the Encyclopédie, the second, from February 1776, bears a rare witness to the great hopes aroused by the imminent registration of Turgot's reforms, as well as to the change in the role of the scholar, whose political struggle already includes, in 1776, the vision of a historical progress of science and Enlightenment.
La fidélité de Volney. De la première à la dixième édition des Ruines
Authors: Deneys Henry
Published: June 2016

Henry Deneys : Volney's consistency, from the first to the tenth edition of the Ruins.

In the absence of manuscripts of the Ruins or of accounts of its composition, a comparison of the text of the first and tenth editions reveals how the author's theses and references developed from (at least) 1791 to 1820. The comparison of firstly the notes and then the major chapters brings out the way the discussion of fundamental philosophico-political issues in chapters 15, 16 and 17 has been toned down or changed, and what has been removed (which had not hitherto been noticed by commentators). This new reading confirms, for example, the author's concern in 1789 with the historical basis for the Rights of Man, and his tendency to complicate his initial theory of the link between Justice and Equality. While a biographical study emphasizes the way the man changed, the study of the changes to the text of the Ruins brings out the hidden consistency of the author and his faithfulness to the popular dramaturgy of La Sentinelle du peuple, and above all to the "natural" philosophy of Helvétius and d'Holbach.
L'Orient vu par Prévost dans l'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne : l'ambassadeur et l'eunuque
Authors: Leborgne Erik
Published: June 2016

Erik Leborgne : Ortf.ntai, fantasies in Prévost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne : the ambassador and the Eunuch.

The Orient depicted in both the Lettres persanes and the Histoire d'une Grecque moderne is based on a paradox, for it represents the frustration of desire in a despotic world that is nevertheless fantasized by the West as a sexual paradise. Political and erotic fantasies come together in Prévost's treatment of his hero, who appears at the end of the novel as a sort of "ambassador-eunuch" and as the emblem of the impossible conjunction of domination and pleasure. This study of significant episodes in the work (the entry into the seraglio, the night in Oru, the "fête du roi" in the Embassy) brings out the psychological conflicts within this character and the problematc status of his "enlightened libertinism".
L'Irlande et les Lumières
Authors: Davies Simon
Published: June 2016

Simon Davies : Ireland and the Enlightenment.

Ireland has never been envisaged as a significant contributor to the Enlightenment. However, recent years have seen important reassessments of Irish writers and thinkers as well as revisionist studies of Ireland as a colonised nation. Thinkers such as John Toland and Francis Hutcheson and movements such as the United Irishmen have been reconsidered in a wider, often European, context. This article draws attention to these re-evaluations, ongoing subjects of debate and controversy, and implicitly broaches the question of Irish identity in both 18th-century and 20th-century terms.
Pour une histoire littéraire du livre
Authors: Séité Yannick
Published: June 2016

Yannick Séité : Towards a literary history of the book.

During the last thirty years, book history and the history of reading have seen a spectacular development. Nevertheless, as practice lags behind statements, the persistance of certain frontiers between disciplines has meant that the editorial practices of Enlightenment authors have tended to be ignored. The present article particularly looks at the way these authors used their typographical knowledge to ensure the transformation of their texts into books, sometimes running counter to workshop practices. Summing up the last thirty years' research on the book, in a critical dialogue with the writing of G. Genette, R. Chartier or D. F. McKenzie, we lay the foundations of a literary history of the book in the 18th century. This is a history of the way in which writers thought about and treated the book-object in a close relationship with their writing and with enlightened thinking.
Casanova en 1998
Authors: Lahouati Gérard , Luna Marie-Françoise
Published: June 2016

Gérard Lahouati and Marie-Françoise Luna : Casanova in 1998.

The bicentenary of the death of Casanova is an invitation, in addition to celebrations, to look at present developments in Casanova studies. First of all there is, in addition to the republication of many of his French or Italian works, the systematic publication of his extensive manuscripts (unpublished texts and letters). Above all, the republication (for only the second time) of his Memoirs in the original French (Laffont, 1993) has given a boost to works on Casanova. While biographical and historical studies continue to fascinate the critics, there is growing interest in the writer, of the memoirs and other works, and in the literary, philosophical, or political aspects of his work. The myth of Casanova continues to stimulate, as it has always done, the dreams or the agressivity of many novellists, playwrights, cineasts and artists.
Les tendances historiographiques d'après la Bibliographie annuelle de l'histoire de France (1975-1995)
Authors: Sonnet Martine
Published: June 2016

Martine Sonnet : Trends in historiography according to the annual bibliography of french history (1975-1995).

The Bibliographie annuelle de l'Histoire de France published by the C.N.R.S. since 1955 lists French and foreign works on French history (articles, monographs, collective works, theses, etc.) and is thus a good basis for studying developments in French historiography. In the volumes for 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990 and 1995 we can see the place occupied by the 18th Century, both quantitatively and from the point of view of the type of questions studied. A count reveals that the 18th Century comes in third place, after the Third Republic and the Middle Ages, but is declining. The study of society and institutions is preferred, before art, religion and the economy ; political history comes sixth and is in steady decline, while interest in social history has progressed regularly. The most obvious traits to emerge are : the preponderance (increasing from 1975 to 1995) of questions of society and civilisation, the importance of commemorations (in particular the bicentenary of 1789) and the number of foreign studies.
Une redécouverte restreinte : la rhétorique française du 18e siècle
Authors: Léoni Sylviane
Published: June 2016

Sylviane Léoni : French Rhetoric.

Classical rhetoric, embodying a system of learning which is no longer accepted, is a true discipline which drew its meaning and coherence from its close relationship with philosophy, Aristotelian dialectics, topics, poetics and so on. These relationships, thanks to which rhetoric became an art in the classical sense, gradually dissolved in the 17th and 18th Centuries under the influence of Cartesianism and English empiricism. Nevertheless, the prestige of the classical tradition, force of habit and the institutional power backing up the teaching of the art of persuasion slowed down the decline of this discipline which, contrary to what is often said, was not limited in the 18th Century to the production of stylistic effects and the study of figures and tropes.
Traduire le roman du 18e siècle
Authors: Stewart Philip
Published: June 2016

Philip Stewart : Translating the 18th-century Novel.

This article draws on the author's experience in translating Rousseau's Julie (in collaboration with Jean Vaché) for reflections on the options confronting the translator of a text from an earlier period. A canonical text requires a more conservative and scholarly approach than a new one, where creative re-invention of the language may be preferred. But one cannot either translate 'word for word', nor re-create authentically an 18th-century English equivalent to Rousseau's French ; moreover, it is more important to use a broad panoply of the 'target' language's vocabulary than to transliterate only. Many discriminations that would be desirable, like the French tu, are unavoidably lost, and the available paradigms of nouns, adjectives or verbs are never the same in the two languages. Above all, the original's stylistic qualities must be respected insofar as possible, and for Rousseau, this has as much to do with sentence structure as with vocabulary.
État de la recherche canadienne sur la littérature française du 18e siècle
Authors: Melançon Benoît
Published: June 2016

uncharted areas, the circuits for sharing knowledge, research finance and research groups. Then he reflects on the intellectual situation in Canada compared to Europe and the U.S.A., for it is perhaps here that the specifity of its 18th-century activity can be seen most clearly, In both cases, the aim is to ask questions about the nature of Canadian 18th-century research and its critical identity.
Un débat franco-américain autour de la Révolution française
Authors: Guilhaumou Jacques
Published: June 2016

Jacques Guilhaumou : A Franco-American debate around the French Revolution.

A critical view of the French school of history has become the major issue in the debate between French and foreign historians. This article highlights a significant example through a study of the relations between the 'critical historiography' of the French Revolution, around François Furet and Mona Ozouf, and American historians. Ten years after the bicentenary of 1789, the history of the French Revolution is becoming professionalised, leading to an unprecedented accumulation of new knowledge. The almost permanent debate between critical historiography and American historians allows for the maintenance of a critical pole in relation to political invention.
Crise des Lumières, crise de la modernité ?
Authors: Denby David J.
Published: June 2016

David J. Denby : Crisis of the Enlightenment, crisis of modernity ?

The 1973 diagnosis of a crisis in 18th-century study and the present debate about the Enlightenment as a set of cultural and political orientations within modernity are here set in tension. Key themes of the contemporary debate are the critique of universalism as a façade of power and of Enlightenment visions of rationality and subjectivity as dominatory. Parts of this critique rely on 19th-century aesthetic modernism, which is influential today and threatens, in the name of the particular, any possibility of universalisation. This aesthetic dimension should be rehistoricised through a reflection on the autonomisation of the aesthetic as a social function. Thus the constitution of cultural objects and practices, raised in DHS 5, remains central. It is also argued that cancelling the boundary between literature and ideas, while crucial, is potentially a form of aestheticisation and should be treated with caution, and that there is still an Enlightenment legacy to defend.
Roland de La Platière et la langue universelle
Authors: Mandich Anna
Published: June 2016

J.-M. Roland de La Platière : Discours sur la langue universelle (1784). Presented by Anna Mandich.

Amongst the manuscripts of Jean-Marie Roland conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there is a curious document entitled 'The causes which can make a language universal, and observations on the modern language which is most likely to become universal'. Roland is here discussing a relatively fashionable question, but in this work there is no allusion to the Berlin Academy's contemporaneous competition or to Rivarol's famous Discours. Roland develops an original theory for the time, namely that the only language likely to become universal was the English language, not the language of the English, but of the Americans which unites its own inherent qualities to those of the free, generous and tolerant people speaking it. Starting from these data, we here present his unpublished work with some hypotheses concerning the date and circumstances of its composition.
La famille de Nicolas-Antoine Boullanger et les milieux jansénistes
Authors: Inguenaud Marie-Thérèse
Published: June 2016

Marie-Thérèse Inguenaud : the family of Nicolas-Antoine Boullanger and jansenist circles.

All that was known about the family of the philosopher N. A. Boullanger was that his parents were religious and that his father was a paper merchant. The discovery of certain documents, in particular his burial certificate and his parents' marriage contract, reveal the identity of his father Antoine (not Nicolas as Hampton and Sadrin thought) and mother, Geneviève Ledreux, and their address, rue Saint-Jacques, beside the Saint Yves chapel. This wealthy middle-class family was mainly composed of paper merchants, but was also allied to famous printers and booksellers like the Hérissants and Lottins. They were all influenced by Jansenism and Boullanger' s parents are quoted in Carré de Montge-ron's La vérité des miracles opérés par l'intercession de M. de Pâris (1745-47) as witnesses of a miracle. His work retains the mark of his Jansenist education.
Les Lumières contre le progrès ? La naissance de l'idée de perfectibilité
Authors: Lotterie Florence
Published: June 2016

Florence Lotterie : Enlightenment against progress ? The birth of the idea of perfectibility.

With his Discourse on the origins of inequality, Rousseau coined a neologism that was to become one of the great concepts of Enlightenment thinking, namely perfectibility. But he defined it as a simple potentiality, only activated when man enters history and society. The 'paradox of perfectibility' thus measures, in human evolution, the portion of corruption and loss associated with the successive forms of progress of the species. Despite the ideal of civilisation and natural sociability which apparently dominates the thought of the Philosophes, this historical anxiety is profoundly rooted ; it is also present in the empiricists, who considered human perfection as a fact of nature which did not imply a dramatic break in the order of culture. Thus the idea of progress is always, willy-nilly, limited by the normative reference to an origin.
La philosophie naturelle comme enjeu institutionnel : l'opposition de l'Église catholique à la Franc-Maçonnerie
Authors: Boutin Pierre
Published: June 2016

Pierre Boutin : Natural philosophy as an institutional lever. The Roman Catholic church's opposition to Freemasonry.

Research on Catholic opposition to Freemasonry, declared in 1738, has elucidated its relation to political events, but its doctrinal sources are unknown. One must take into account its context, in particular the exclusion of the churches from the elaboration and legitimation of natural philosophy. The condemnations by Clement XII and Benedict XIV, aimed at the political conceptions contained in the Anderson Constitutions (1723), prolonged the controversy around the intrusion of Newtonian physics and experimentation into the social field. Thus the Church's hostility is not surprising, for the Masonic legislator elaborated a liberal political model, inspired by natural law, using the new relationship between natural and moral philosophy and Newton's gravitational model. This includes the idea of the individual as subject to law, of liberty given by the law, and the autonomy of politics from religious institutions and of philosophy from theology.
La recherche du beau idéal dans l'Essai sur l'architecture de l'abbé Laugier
Authors: de Hillerin Alexis
Published: June 2016

Alexis de Hillerin : The search for ideal beauty in Marc-Antoine Laugier's Essai sur l'architecture.

Many art historians refer to abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier's work, but it seems to have been little studied in literary history, despite the fact that this erudite Jesuit was a man of letters in an age when the search for the universal still concerned literature. Laugier was not an architect and his aim was not the planning of works but their conception and integration into a clearly defined philosophical and poetic space. He sought in architecture the norm for an eternally valid ideal beauty. Thus his Essai is more than a work representing fashionable ideas in 1753. This pedagogical book, based on Paris urbanism, contains an aesthetic programme corresponding in part to a renewal of classicism in both architecture and literature. Thus, at a time when the cultivated reading public was proud of understanding the secrets of architecture, it claims to provide a true poetic art transposed to the builder's art.
Les figures de la nuit chez Crébillon, ou la fascination du clair-obscur
Authors: Costa Véronique
Published: June 2016

Véronique Costa : Figures of night in Crébillon, or the fascination of chiaroscuro.

This article is an attempt to understand the meaning of Crébillon' s fascination with night, which occupies an important place in his work. Darkness of course plays a decisive role in the constitution of those 'moments' which are at the centre of his sentimental doctrine, but his interest in night-time seems to go beyond libertine convention. Night is a fevered regulator obsessed by love's torments or enchanted by fairies with the power to enter one's imagination, and it seems to enhance the infinite refractions of literature ; it is the secret nexus of the romantic. It leads to the confusion of ideas and feelings and encourages psychological experiment and verification, thus emphasizing the ambiguity of affections and the painful conflict between nature and morality. Crebillon's true night symbolizes a confused and obscure relationship to truth.
L'inexistence du pirate Misson de Daniel Defoë
Authors: Camus Michel-Christian
Published: June 2016

Michel-Christian Camus : The non-existence of Defoe's pirate Misson.

The French pirate Misson, mentioned in Defoe's General History [...] of the most Notorious Pyrates, never existed. Following on from the studies by S.C.Hill (1826), M.E.Novak (1961), M. Schonhorn (1872) and above all A. Molet-Sauvaget (1989), this article confirms, through a detailed systematic study of the episode as recounted by Defoe, that he completely invented the character of Misson, whose name he borrowed from a French Protestant refugee in London called Maximilien Misson.
Le compositeur en tant qu'intellectuel : l'homme et la musique dans la société du 18e siècle
Authors: Kirillina Larissa
Published: June 2016

Larissa Kirillina : The composer as intellectual : men and music in 18th-century society.

The greatest composers of the Enlightenment period — Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven — are often not regarded as intellectual because they did not discuss the problems of their art. Their silence poses the problem of the self-identification and self-appreciation of music and musicians in Enlightenment society. In the second half of the 18th Century, music became only a 'fine art' and tried to become independent of science and poetry in order to find its own place among the highest spiritual values. Writings by Haydn and Beethoven show that they avoided using the technical term 'composer' to refer to esteemed colleagues or to themselves, preferring words such as 'master' or 'artist'. Towards the end of the classical era, music became not only a 'language of feeling' but also a 'language of ideas' and regained its honourable position.
État des recherches
Authors: Azouvi François , Baridon Michel , Rolland Christine
Published: June 2016

François Azouvi, Michel Baridon and Christine Rolland : The present state of research.

Modern cristicism has often dealt with the interrelation between science, art and literature in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Strangely enough, the 18th Century has not received the same treatment, despite the fact that all the great figures of the Enlightenment had an interest in the world of science. This special issue shows the connection which exists between scientific research, literature and visual arts, at a time when the word 'aesthetics' was being used for the first time. It also tries to clarify the problem raised by the variety of criteria which came into existence when the Chinese taste coexisted with the Gothic revival and Palladianism and the neo-classical were also in vogue.
La musique entre physique et mathématique
Authors: Charrak André
Published: June 2016

André Charrak : Music between physics and mathematics.

Jean-Philippe Rameau' s treatises, which propose the first systematic formulation of harmonic tonality, are also based on certain traditional procedures rooted in arithmetical manipulations of the monochord. But they also, for the first time, call on the phenomenon of resonance of sonorous bodies, which is at the heart of the development of experimental accoustics. Music thus appears as both a physical and a mathematical science. But the reception of these works by Enlightenment philosophers tested this pretension, for Rameau' s experiments were sometimes non-existent, and the manipulation of proportions does not have the rigorous character of a geometrical demonstration. The present study shows, however, that these criticisms, far from remaining purely negative, bring out the gnoseological implications which Rameau did not bother to explain and which are best expressed by Diderot in the principle of the perception of relationships. D'Alembert' s criticisms of Rameau thus correspond to a more serious opposition, between D'Alembert and Euler, whose work provided one of the sources for Diderot's ideas.
Peinture et science au siècle des Lumières. L'invention d'un clivage
Authors: Démoris René
Published: June 2016

René Démoris : Painting and science in the Enlightenment, the birth of an opposition.

In France, the creation of the Académie royale de peinture in 1648 recognized painting's claims to nobility, founded on its connection with theory, thus allowing it to be counted among the liberal arts. But from the 1660s, artists grew suspicious of rational learning in an art which appeals largely to the imagination. This gap between the subject of art and that of science became more obvious in the 18th Century, when art became the preserve of sensibility. An aesthetics founded on identification gave painting a social mission and soon expected it to have a message. Art criticism, taken over by literature from 1747, tended to stay aloof from the specifically scientific spirit produced by the sensualist revolution. But there remained among a minority a slightly shameful fascination for the despised field of technique , which Diderot recognized on one occasion, in Chardin, as capable of achieving the sublime. This article tries to analyse some of the ways in which a religion of art was constructed.
Sensualisme, esthétique sentimentale et démocratie
Authors: Denby David J.
Published: June 2016

David J. Denby : Sensualism, sentimental esthetics and democracy.

The 18th Century is empiricist in that it seeks to coordinate uncoordinated individuals. The social is imagined as a product of the experience of individuals. Sense-experience is central to aesthetic thought. So, if sensationalism and the esthetic are bound up with the democratic project, what forms might that linkage take ? The birth of post-conventional polity is originally aesthetic, individual subjects creating social bonds through observation and imagination. The valorisation of the eye as a privileged and impartial organ of perception is common to aesthetic, scientific and politico-moral discourse. A model of representativity and substitutability is also shared by science, the sentimental aesthetic and democracy. The links between sensationalism, aesthetics and democracy are thus predominantly formal in nature.
Winckelmann naturaliste. L'histoire naturelle et la naissance de l'histoire de l'art
Authors: Décultot Elisabeth
Published: June 2016

Élisabeth Décultot : Winckelmann the naturalist. Natural history and the birth of art history.

J. J. Winckelman's notebooks of extracts, constituting a huge manuscript library in which the writer took notes throughout his life on his reading, include an unexpected notebook devoted entirely to natural history. This indicates that the art historian was also something of a naturalist. This article studies the relationship between his historical and aesthetic preoccupations and his scientific reading. Three questions are studied here : 1. What was the 18th-century epistemological context which made possible a link between art history and natural history in Winckelmann's reading and in the contemporary classification of knowledge ? 2. What was the writer's scientific culture (the balance between classical and modern references, the choice of disciplines, the preference for certain authors, such as Buffon, etc.) ? 3. What effect did this scientific reading have on the genealogy of his aesthetic and historical work ? This manuscript library, at the intersection between science and aesthetics, throws new light on Winckelmann's work.
Les rapports entre les sciences et les beaux-arts dans les écrits de C.-H. Watelet : pour une représentation de l'ordre de la nature
Authors: Jollet Étienne
Published: June 2016

Étienne Jollet : The relationship between science and art in the writings of C.-H. Watelet. Towards a representation of the order of nature.

C. H. Watelet's didactic poem L'Art de peindre (1760) was part of the movement which aimed at giving legitimacy to painting, but this first French poem on the subject was characterised by the importance given to the relationship between science and the arts. Watelet's aim was to present Newtonianism to artists, as can be seen in several of the articles he wrote for the Dictionnaire des beaux-arts (published after his death by P. C. Lévesque in 1788-92). The link with Newtonian physics can be seen far more in the emphasis placed on empathy for a work of art than in the reference to a coherent body of physical notions, in particular the equilibrium of bodies. The relationship to science, mainly physics, can be seen above all in the desire to integrate humans into the natural world order, which leads to an interest in gardens (Essais sur les jardins, 1774). Thus the reference to Newtonian physics becomes the expression of a desire to merge with the dynamic totality of nature, and nostalgia for the observable world, now outdated due to the growing mathematization of science.
Diderot, l'esthétique et le naturalisme. L'autre science de l'interprétation de la nature
Authors: Quintili Paolo
Published: June 2016

Paolo Quintili : Diderot, aesthetics and naturalism. The other science of the interpretation of nature.

This article studies the genealogy of Diderot's poetics of the natural and the naive in art (theatre, painting, the novel), in his interest in a purely descriptive science of nature. Diderot's art mirrors his epistemological intention : nature only presents individual differences, and the way these natural characteristics are developed in art is controlled by a methodical structure of interpretation of man's 'second nature' based on that of his first nature, namely : 1. observation of an ideal model ; 2. reflection and linguistic formalisation of details ; 3. reproduction of this model in given conditions (playing a role). This is the work of the 'great actor', who invents modes of representation and appropriate transforma¬ tion of the poet's suprasensible ideal. Diderot's aesthetic paradox is only apparent and hides an intention which Kant's philosophy alone adopted. Art is a typical, ideal and meaningful form of human experience which is realised in a process of rationalisation and legitimation of the perceivable. The difficulties involved in this project led to Diderot's mature masterpiece, Le Neveu de Rameau.
Une lettre inédite de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1769)
Authors: Davies Simon
Published: June 2016

Jean-Jacques Rousseau : Unpublished letter. Presented by Simon Davies.

In 1769 Rousseau was planning an expedition to Mont Pilat in the company of the abbé Baurin. In the 19th Century it was noted that there were eight unpublished letters from Rousseau to Baurin ; five of these were printed in the Leigh edition of the Correspondence, but the other three had been lost. It is highly likely that the letter produced here is one of these missing communications.
Deux lettres de la princesse de Tarente à la comtesse Golovina
Authors: Gretchanaïa Elena
Published: June 2016

Princess L.-E. de Tarente : Two letters to Countess Golovina. Presented by Elena Gretchanaïa.

A large number of letters written by Princess Louise-Emmanuelle de Tarente (1763-1814) — who emigrated in 1797 to Russia, where she died — to Countess Varvara Golovina (1766-1821) are conserved in the Russian State Archives in Moscow ; two of them, dating from 1798 and 1799, are published here. They illustrate different aspects of the influence of French culture in Russian life at the end of the 18th Century, and show both the generally underestimated degree to which French émigrés were drawn to Russian culture and the crucial role of personal contacts in the early rapprochement of the two countries. The Princess's presentation of her existential shipwreck takes the form of an almost diary-like account of everyday life, in a style in which failure and loneliness are transformed by ironic distanciation into a sort of epistolary game.