Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (; ; 11 February 1657

– 9 January 1757), also called Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, was a French writer and a member of three of the academies of the Institut de France, noted especially for his accessible treatment of scientific topics during the unfolding of the Age of Enlightenment.

Biography

Fontenelle was born in Rouen, France (then the capital of Normandy) and died in Paris at age 99. His mother was the sister of great French dramatists Pierre and Thomas 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.

He trained in the law but gave up after one case, devoting his life to writing about philosophers and scientists, especially defending the Cartesian tradition. 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.

He was educated at the college of the Jesuits, the Lycée Pierre Corneille (although it did not adopt the name of his uncle (Pierre Corneille) until 1873, about 200 years later). At the Lycée he showed a preference for literature and distinguished himself.

According to Bernard de Fontenelle, François Blondel was a disciple of Father Marin Mersenne at the Academia Parisiensis in the French capital, until 1649. There he met "Messieurs Gassendi, Descartes, Hobbes, Roberval, and the two Pascals, father and son".

Early work

He began as a poet, writing a poem in Latin at the age of 13 and more than once competed for prizes of the Académie française, but he never won anything. He visited Paris from time to time and became friendly with the abbé de Saint-Pierre, the abbé Vertot and the mathematician Pierre Varignon. He witnessed, in 1680, the total failure of his tragedy Aspar. Fontenelle afterwards acknowledged the public verdict by burning his drama. His libretto for Pascal Collasse's Thétis et Pélée ("Thetis and Peleus"), which premiered at the Opéra de Paris in January, 1689, was received with great acclaim.

His Lettres 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 and Geneva, slightly disguised as the rival princesses Mreo and Eenegu, in the Relation de l'île de Bornéo, gave proof of his daring in religious matters. Fontenelle's Nouveaux Dialogues des morts (1683) established a genuine claim to high literary rank.

Three years later, he wrote the most influential work to date on the plurality of worlds, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). He wrote extensively on the nature of the universe: "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."

Later work

thumb|Éléments de la géométrie de l'infini, 1727

Fontenelle had made his home in Rouen. In 1687 he moved to Paris. In 1687 he published his Histoire 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 a Jesuit, by name Jean-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 his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, in which he took the modern side in the controversy then raging; his Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionnelles (against Nicolas Malebranche) appeared shortly afterwards.

He remained influential in his older years and when a then unknown Jean-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."

A noted gourmand, he attributed his longevity to eating strawberries. At ninety-two, one observer wrote that he was as lively as a man of twenty-two.

Member of the French Academy

In 1691 he was received into the French Academy in spite of the determined efforts of the partisans of the "ancients", especially Racine and Boileau, who on four previous occasions had ensured his rejection. He was thus a member both of the Academy of Inscriptions and of the Academy of Sciences. and so was the asteroid 10069 Fontenelle, which was discovered in 1989.

Bibliography

  • La Comète (1681)
  • Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683)
  • De l'origine des fables (1684)
  • Lettres galantes du chevalier d’Her*** (1685)
  • Relation de l’île de Bornéo (1686)
  • Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; revised 1724)
  • Histoire des oracles (1687)
  • Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688)
  • Le Comte de Gabalis, comédie en un acte (1689)
  • Énée et Lavinie (1690)
  • Idalie (circa 1710)

References

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  • Works at Internet Archive