Cornelius de Pauw

Cornelis de Pauw ( Cornelius de Pauw or Corneille de Pauw, born August 18, 1739 Amsterdam, † July 5, 1799 in Xanten ) was a Dutch historian, philosopher and philologist.

Because of his service to France as an employee of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, he was honored by the Emperor Napoleon with the awarding of honorary citizenship posthumously and through the establishment of an obelisk.

Life

Cornelis de Pauw was a staff member at the Encyclopédie of Diderot and got this as the first foreign honorary citizenship of France. Since 1761 the canons of Xanten Victor pin, he was ordained sub-deacon in 1765 and librarian of the abbey library. Sent in 1767 from the pen chapter in a special mission to Frederick the Great, made him this to his readers. There was a second stay at Schloss Sanssouci in 1775. Though Frederick the Great de Pauw offered a place in the Academy of Sciences as well as a canon at Breslau, he returned to Xanten.

Work

1768 published his treatise Recherches de Pauw philosophiques sur les Américaines, ou Mémoires pour servir à l' Histoire intéressants de l' Espèce Humaine, which was translated into German in the same year ( Philosophical Investigations about the Americans ). There he described the Indians as degenerate, impotent, weak, mentally limited, and therefore inferior to the Europeans and the colonization of America as unnatural and reprehensible: Due to a lower life expectancy and lower fertility imagine this continent, the existence of civilized man in question, with inflationstreibendem Gold and the drug he had introduced only disadvantages tobacco and a half million German were useless disappeared in the local forests.

That he put a violent scientists dispute about the "nature of Americans " in transition. Thus replied in 1769, the royal librarian Abbé Antoine Joseph Pernety ( 1716-1801 ) with his dissertation sur l' Amérique et les contre les Recherches Américaines philosophiques de Mr. de P *** with a passionate indictment of de Pauw three months later with Defense of his Recherches philosophiques was answered. Now mingled with the pseudonym " Le Philosophe la Douceur " (presumably Zacharie de Pazzi de Bonneville ), a further counterparty is a that entered ironic pamphlets on the arguments of both brawlers. Was accompanied years of dispute and the appearance of more and more new additions to the treatises of many other word messages of scientists and lively sympathy of the press.

Although de Pauw was violently attacked because he had never been in America, and no Indian people also just seen, he was the winner of the debate. His public preferred his summarizing critical Überblück on the state of research in relation Pernety lengthy " counter- evidence". De Pauw was asked by Diderot to write an article on the Americans for the Supplément the Encyclopédie. , His image of America has even been adopted by famous authors such as Kant, Raynal, and William Robertson.

Honor

Napoleon Bonaparte was in 1811 the " Obelisk de Pauw ," among others, with the inscription " author of the research on the Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Americans " in French, built in France belonging to this time, Xanten, where he was also the " Cornelius de Pauw street was south of the city center devoted ".

Works

• Recherches sur les philosophiques Américaines, ou Mémoires pour servir à l' Histoire intéressants de l' Espèce Humaine. Avec une dissertation sur l' Amérique & les Américaines. London 1771 ( full text available )
• Recherches sur les philosophiques égyptiens et les Chinois. London, Lausanne and Geneva, 1774
• Recherches sur les philosophiques Grecs. Paris 1788, Berlin 1787-1788