bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
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 Starting from these data, we here present his unpublished work with some hypotheses concerning the date and circumstances of its composition.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.
Jean Potocki rentré de Chine trop tôt...
Authors: Beauvois Daniel , Stroev Alexandre , Triaire Dominique 
Published: June 2016

Jean Potocki : Mémoire sur l'ambassade de Chine. Presented by Daniel Beauvois, Alexandre Stroev and Dominique Triaire.
In 1806, Jean Potocki returned from China furious and disappointed. He had been the scientific director of the mission sent to Pékin a year earlier by Alexander I of Russia, which had just failed miserably, having got no further than Ulan-Bator. According to Potocki, it was clearly the fault of the Russian personnel, who were self-important and incompetent. On the way, he wrote a Mémoire addressed to the Foreign Minister, in which he recounted the story of the mission and analysed the reasons for its failure. The incomplete draft he kept was until now the basis for the various editions of the work. We provide here the complete original Memoire sent to the Minister, discovered in the Foreign archives of the Russian Empire. Annexed is a summary written in 1808, from the Paris Archives, showing that there was for a time a more or less official cooperation between Napoleon and Alexander.
Grimm correcteur de Catherine II. Sur un «fonds Grimm» inconnu
Authors: Otto Véronique 
Published: June 2016

Véronique Otto : When Grimm corrected Catherine II. An unknown Grimm archive.
A German trail forgotten by 18th-century scholars, despite its link with the descendents of Mme d'Epinay, has led to the discovery in Austria of a modest archive of copies belonging to F. M. Grimm. A systematic comparison of these copies with the originals reveals that although these texts by Catherine II (including a letter to Voltaire) were not unknown, the complete or partial copies made or commissioned by Grimm are different enough to be interesting from several points of view. This article gives examples of alterations, ranging from the correction of spelling to inexplicable rewriting, while the thematic choice revealed in the extracts is above all related to political questions. Despite the uncertainties surrounding their purpose and precise date, these papers are useful for throwing new light on the familiarity existing between the Empress and her factotum, who felt he could make such sweeping corrections to some of the letters she sent him.
Comment perfectionner l'éducation, ou les propositions de Dominique-François Rivard
Authors: Granderoute Robert 
Published: June 2016

Robert Granderoute : How to improve education, or Dominique-François Rivard's proposals.
Rivard's reflections on pedagogical reform, formulated in the context of the numerous proposals triggered by the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762 and based on his long experience as Professor at Paris University, are particularly interesting. They stand out thanks to their clear modernizing aim, concerning both subjects and teaching methods and the future teachers for whom a theoretical and practical training is to be provided. But these reflections, which are aimed at making study easier and accessible to a greater number, are combined with a traditional conception of humans and a religious belief which is strongly marked by the author's Jansenism.
L'axe masculin/féminin chez Edmund Burke. De l'esthétique à la politique
Authors: Fuchs Michel 
Published: June 2016

Michel Fuchs : Gender in Edmund Burke's esthetics and politics.
This article deals with Burke's aesthetics from the point of view of his surprisingly gendered preconceptions. While he set out to establish an aesthetics based on the human passions in general, these passions are rapidly seen to be heavily gendered, for the sublime is masculine and the beautiful feminine. Equally surprising is the fact that when Burke became a politician, he did not feel the need to redefine his aesthetic categories but indulged in the widespread prejudices which, in Britain in particular, tended to sexualize the social classes. He even maintained these sexual/social prejudices when confronted with the French Revolution, thereby managing to attack the 'philosophers of the shambles' while at the same amplifying their very sarcasms against the nobility. His 'truly republican' defense of the old regime is at times very similar to the attacks on the monarchy made by the advocates of the French republic.