François-Vincent Toussaint

François -Vincent Toussaint ( born December 21, 1715 in Paris, † June 22, 1772 in Berlin) was a French lawyer, writer, translator and encyclopedist. His pseudonym was Panage.

Life and work

F.-V. Toussaint was born artisans son, a shoemaker in Paris and received his baptism in the parish of Saint -Paul. He married in 1744, but lost his wife after a year. From this marriage a daughter emerged, who died at the age of fifteen. Later he married the daughter of a Swiss from the Palais Royal. The couple had ten children, whose fate is poorly understood.

He first proposed an ecclesiastical education, but then began to study law and completed his required tests. At the age of twenty-six years he was in 1741 lawyer at the Parlement de Paris. For health reasons, he continued his activities of discontinued, but came with the bookseller and publisher André Le Breton in conjunction.

He worked from 1746 to 1748 with Denis Diderot and Marc- Antoine Eidous on the translation of a medical reference book by Robert James ( 1703-1776 ), entitled A medicinal dictionary, including physic, surgery, anatomy, and botany chimistry. The completed translation was revised and edited by Julien Busson ( 1717-1781 ). More translations followed, such as the The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751 ) by Tobias George Smollett.

His first independent work were the customs, Les Moeurs (1748 ) caused a scandal, the similarities with the Queen Mary Leszczyńska were still striking. Also, because of his acquaintance to Jean -Frédéric Phelypeaux, comte de Maurepas, the Secrétaire d' État à la marine, Touissant came out unscathed from the matter out again.

In June 1754 he began his journalistic work, he took over the leadership of Friedrich Melchior Grimm founded by the Journal of étrangers. Due to conflicts with the directors of the journal, he gave up his position in November, 1754. In 1756 he came into contact with Jacques Gautier d' Agoty ( 1716-1785 ) a painter and engraver and founder of the Journal de physique involved, which he then sur l' histoire naturelle et sur ​​les arts further led under the title Observations sur la physique. The exact date of his emigration from France to Brussels is not set dependable, it was probably the end of 1760 or early in 1761. In 1757, the political situation applied, so Robert François Damiens attempted assassination by a Louis XV. to murder. Claude Adrien Helvetius published his enlightening work, De l'esprit. The opponents of the Enlightenment took advantage of these incidents to make their authority and influence law.

In 1754 he went to Berlin. There he became a full member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences.

When he died in 1772, he left behind his widow and seven children impoverished.

Works (selection), translations

• Les Moeurs, S. L., S. E., 1748.
• Histoire des Passions, ou avantures Du Chevalier Shroop. Ouvrage traduit de l' anglois. I. & II game, La Haye, Jacques Neaulme, 1751st
• Eclaircissement sur ​​les mœurs. Par l' auteur of Moeurs, Amsterdam, Marc Michel Rey, 1762nd

Translations

• François Coventry: La vie et les aventures du Petit Pompée. Histoire critique. Traduite par l' Anglois par M. Toussaint, I, Londres, Marc Michel Rey, 1752. Original: The History of Pompey the Little; or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap -Dog, 1751st