Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle | |
|---|---|
 A 1723 portrait of Fontenelle byLouis Galloche | |
| Born | (1657-02-11)11 February 1657 Rouen, France |
| Died | 9 January 1757(1757-01-09) (aged 99) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Essayist |
| Relatives | Thomas Corneille andPierre Corneille |
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (/fɒntəˈnɛl/;[1]French:[fɔ̃tənɛl]; 11 February 1657 – 9 January 1757),[2] also calledBernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French writer and a member of three of the academies of theInstitut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of theAge of Enlightenment.
Fontenelle was born inRouen, France (then the capital ofNormandy) and died in Paris at age 99. His mother was the sister of great French dramatistsPierre andThomas Corneille. His father, François le Bovier de Fontenelle, was a lawyer who worked in the provincial court of Rouen and came from a family of lawyers from Alençon.[3]
He trained in the law but gave up after one case, devoting his life to writing aboutphilosophers and scientists, especially defending theCartesian tradition.[4] In spite of the undoubted merit and value of his writings, both to the laity and the scientific community, there is no question of his being a primary contributor to the field. He was a commentator and explicator and occasionally a passionate, though generally good-humoured, controversialist.[5]
He was educated at the college of theJesuits, theLycée Pierre Corneille (although it did not adopt the name of his uncle (Pierre Corneille) until 1873, about 200 years later).[6] At the Lycée he showed a preference for literature and distinguished himself.
According to Bernard de Fontenelle,François Blondel was a disciple of FatherMarin Mersenne at theAcademia Parisiensis in the French capital, until 1649. There he met "MessieursGassendi,Descartes,Hobbes,Roberval, and the two Pascals,father andson".[7]
He began as a poet, writing a poem inLatin at the age of 13 and more than once competed for prizes of theAcadémie française, but he never won anything. He visited Paris from time to time and became friendly with theabbé de Saint-Pierre, the abbéVertot and the mathematicianPierre Varignon. He witnessed, in 1680, the total failure of histragedyAspar. Fontenelle afterwards acknowledged the public verdict by burning his drama. His libretto for Pascal Collasse'sThétis et Pélée ("Thetis andPeleus"), which premiered at the Opéra de Paris in January, 1689, was received with great acclaim.
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HisLettres galantes du chevalier d'Her ..., published anonymously in 1685, was a collection of letters portraying worldly society of the time. It immediately made its mark. In 1686 his famous allegory of Rome andGeneva, slightly disguised as the rival princesses Mreo and Eenegu, in theRelation de l'île de Bornéo, gave proof of his daring in religious matters. Fontenelle'sNouveaux Dialogues des morts (1683) established a genuine claim to high literary rank.
Three years later, he wrote the most influential work to date on theplurality of worlds,Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686).[8] He wrote extensively on the nature of theuniverse: "Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance."
Fontenelle had made his home inRouen. In 1687 he moved to Paris. In 1687 he published hisHistoire des oracles, a book which made a considerable stir in theological and philosophical circles. It consisted of two essays, the first of which was designed to prove that oracles were not given by the supernatural agency of demons, and the second that they did not cease with the birth of Jesus.
It excited the suspicion of the Church, and aJesuit, by nameJean-François Baltus, published a ponderous refutation of it; but the peace-loving disposition of its author impelled him to leave his opponent unanswered. To the following year (1688) belongs hisDigression sur les anciens et les modernes, in which he took the modern side in the controversy then raging; hisDoutes sur le système physique des causes occasionnelles (againstNicolas Malebranche) appeared shortly afterwards.
He remained influential in his older years and when a then unknownJean-Jacques Rousseau met him in 1742, when Fontenelle was 85, he passed on the advice he gave all young writers that came to him: "You must courageously offer your brow to laurel wreaths and your nose to blows."[9]
A notedgourmand, he attributed his longevity to eatingstrawberries[citation needed]. At ninety-two, one observer wrote that he was as lively as a man of twenty-two.[4] When, in his late nineties, he met the then-beautifulMadame Helvétius, he reportedly told her, "Ah Madame, if only I were eighty again!"[10]
In 1691 he was received into theFrench Academy in spite of the determined efforts of the partisans of the "ancients", especiallyRacine andBoileau, who on four previous occasions had ensured his rejection. He was thus a member both of theAcademy of Inscriptions and of theAcademy of Sciences.[5] In 1697 he became perpetual secretary to the Academy of Sciences, an office he held for forty-two years. It was in this official capacity that he wrote theHistoire du renouvellement de l'Académie des Sciences (Paris, 3 vols., 1708, 1717, 1722) containing extracts and analyses of the proceedings, and also theéloges of the members, written with great simplicity and delicacy.[5]
Perhaps the best known of hiséloges, of which there are sixty-nine in all, is that of his unclePierre Corneille. This was first printed in theNouvelles de la republique des lettres (January 1685) and, asVie de Corneille, was included in all the editions of Fontenelle'sŒuvres. The other important works of Fontenelle are hisÉléments de la géometrie de l'infini (1727) and hisThéorie des tourbillons (1752). In the latter he supported the views ofRené Descartes concerning gravitation, material that by that time had effectively been superseded by the work ofIsaac Newton.[5]
He is noted for the accessibility of his work – particularly its novelistic style. This allowed non-scientists to appreciate scientific development in a time where this was unusual, and scientists to benefit from the thoughts of the greater society. If his writing is often seen as trying to popularize the astronomical theories of Descartes, whose greatest exponent he is sometimes considered, it also appealed to the literate society of the day to become more involved in "natural philosophy," thus enriching the work ofearly-Enlightenment scientists. In spite of the inarguable value and quality of his writings, he had no serious pretensions to original scientific or mathematical work, but did not let that stop him from outspoken support for Descartes' proposed conceptions of the roles of vortices in physics.[5]
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Fontenelle was a popular figure in the educated French society of his period, by holding a position of esteem comparable only to that ofVoltaire. Unlike Voltaire, however, Fontenelle avoided making important enemies. He balanced his penchant for universal critical thought with liberal doses of flattery and praise to the appropriate individuals in aristocratic society.
Fontenelle forms a link between two very widely different periods of French literature, that ofCorneille,Racine andBoileau on the one hand, and that of Voltaire,D'Alembert andDiderot on the other. It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him; he actually had much in common with thebeaux esprits of the 17th century, as well as with thephilosophes of the 18th. But it is to the latter rather than to the former period that he properly belongs.
According toCharles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, he deserves a placedans la classe des esprits infiniment distingués but is distinguished by being ought to be added by intelligence rather than by intellect and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well.There have been several collected editions of Fontenelle's works, the first being printed in 3 vols. atthe Hague in 1728–1729. The best is that of Paris, in 8 vols., 1790. Some of his separate works have been frequently reprinted and also translated.
ThePluralité des mondes was translated intomodern Greek in 1794.Sainte-Beuve has an interesting essay on Fontenelle, with several useful references, in theCauseries du lundi, vol. iii. See alsoVillemain,Tableau de la littérature française au XVIIIe siècle; the abbé Trublet,Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle (1759); A Laborde-Milaà,Fontenelle (1905), in the "Grands écrivains français" series; and L. Maigron,Fontenelle, l'homme, l'œuvre, l'influence (Paris, 1906).
HisDialogues of the dead show both his erudition and wit by presenting invented but plausible dialogues between dead ancients, dead moderns and a whole book devoted to dialogues between an ancient and a modern. ToMontaigne asking him if some centuries had more wise men than other,Socrates answers sadly, "The general order of natures seems very constant". In one of the booksRoxelane andAnne Boleyn discuss about politics and the way for a woman to decide a man to marry her. The dialogue betweenMontezuma andCortez allows the former to dismiss some myths about the wisdom in ancient Greece by quoting some counter-examples.
In 1935, thelunar craterFontenelle was named after him.[11]
Fontenelle Madame Helvetius.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 608–609.
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