Paris West University Nanterre La Défense
From 1988 to 2002, Bernard Cottret was a member of the steering committee of the "Bibliothèque nationale de France". In 1988 he defended at the Paris West University Nanterre La Défense a thesis in English literature dedicated to Bolingbroke who became for eighteenth-century Frenchmen the typical "philosophe anglois" and greatly influenced Voltaire and Montesquieu. It led, at the request of Jonathan Clark, to a book in English devoted to the political work of Bolingbroke, and the Conservative Enlightenment.