Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (* February 11, 1657 in Rouen, † January 9, 1757 in Paris) was an influential and versatile French writer and enlightener. Fontenelle ( as he is known in the history of literature exclusively ) one next to Pierre Bayle 's most important early French Enlightenment.

Life and work

He came from a noble family of lawyers office from Rouen and was the nephew of the playwright Pierre Corneille and Thomas. After studies at the Jesuit college of his native city, he went to Paris. Here, he succeeded quickly, introduced by Thomas Corneille, as a gallant poet, comedy writer, opera librettist, author of an epistolary novel, and not least as a sought Salon entertainer.

1683 published his Dialogues de morts ( dead calls), fictional dialogues between famous dead from the ancient and recent past, for example, between Socrates and Michel de Montaigne. Main issue is the after Fontenelle entirely unjustified prejudices of his contemporaries in favor of antiquity, prejudices that he can lead his ancient spokesman ironic or pseudo- naive absurdity.

1686 a fictional dialogue, under which an educated man of the world an interested aristocratic lady and her daughter came his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes ( Conversations on the plurality of worlds) out, ( and with them, a predominantly presented as a female audience) at a night walk in the park lecturing about the astronomical knowledge according to Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, and thereby the possibility does not exclude that there are also stars beyond Earth beings endowed with reason.

From the Catholic Church, the work was expected to be placed on the Index because it contradicted the Ptolemaic worldview. However, the indexing did his success not diminish, but it was repeatedly reprinted. How many Frenchmen of his time remained Fontenelle of the Cartesian physics arrested, even after it was overtaken by the work of Isaac Newton. Still in 1752 he represented in his Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens the vortex theory Descartes ' from 1644.

Also in 1686 appeared the Histoire des oracles (History of prophecies ). Herein illuminated Fontenelle in elegant conversational various prophecies and miracles described in ancient sources critically in a way that should stimulate readers to biblical prophecies and Doubting also wonder what was so understood and reprimanded by the Jesuits quite right.

When in 1687 the French Academy of dispute between supporters of the traditional and modern ( Querelle des Anciens et Modernes ) broke out, was Fontenelle in terms of his Dialogues de morts one of the first partisan of the "modern " and reached 1688 in the armed one with his digression sur les Anciens et font les Modernes.

In the following years he continued working as a poet, tragedy Author, storyteller and literary theorist. In 1691, he was member of the Académie française on the armchair No. 27 selected. Since 1697 he was also a member of the Académie des Sciences, founded in 1666. In the same year he was perpétuel as successor to Jean -Baptiste Hamel You whose Secrétaire what he remained until 1740. He gave the literature now widely and wrote in the exercise of his office several eulogies ( Eloges académiques ) by naturalists and inventors whose services he introduced her to a wider audience with its elegant spring.

From 1699 he was instrumental in reforming its academy. 1701 elected him the Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres a member.

Also in his role as secretary of the Academy, he wrote from 1733 on the Memoires de l' Académie royale des sciences, which he reported past experiments and observations by members over 30 years. Because of this time reliable primary sources mostly missing, the Mémoires apply to historians of science as an important secondary source.

Until about 1725 Fontenelle played an important role in the Parisian intellectual and social life and in moderation in politics, before his fame began to fade.

He embodied the first in France to the characteristic of the era of the Enlightenment type of " philosophe ", ie all sides of an interested, both fiction, as well as philosophical and scientific works engrossing author.

Honors

• Chevalier de l' Ordre de la Mouche à Miel

Reception

1935 was named after him by the IAU, the moon crater Fontenelle.