Jacques Cazotte (; 17 October 1719 – 25 September 1792) was a French writer and a monarchist. He predicted the Reign of Terror and was guillotined shortly after.
Life
Born in Dijon, he was educated by the Jesuits. Cazotte then worked for the French Ministry of
the Marine. From 1747 to 1759, he was a colonial administrator on Martinique, working for the Department of the Marine. Due to ill health, he returned to France in 1759. The value of the story lies in the picturesque setting, and the skill with which its details are carried out.
Cazotte copy-edited, adapted, and expanded French translations of tales actually and supposedly belonging to the Thousand and One Nights provided to him by the Syrian priest Dom Denis Chavis. These stories were published in Geneva in 1788–89, independently as Continuation des Mille et Une Nuits and, in the Cabinet des Fées anthology, as Suites des Mille et Une Nuits (1788–1789).
Cazotte possessed such extreme facility that he is said to have dashed off a seventh canto of Voltaire's Guerre civile de Genève in a single night. Circa 1775, Cazotte embraced the creed of the Illuminati and declared himself possessed of the power of prophecy. It was upon this event that Jean-François de la Harpe based his famous jeu d'esprit, in which he represents Cazotte as prophesying the most minute events of the French Revolution. Near the end of his life, Cazotte became a follower of the Martinist mysticism of Martinez de Pasqually, and became a "mystical monarchist".
- Prophetie de Cazotte (Reputed)
- Ollivier, 1762.
- Le Diable amoureux (The Devil in Love), 1772.
- A Thousand and One Follies, and His Most Unlooked-for Lordship. Translated by Eric Sutton, with an introduction by Storm Jameson, 1927.
Notes
References
Further reading
- Francis Amery (Brian Stableford), "Cazotte, Jacques" in St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers, ed. David Pringle. Detroit: St. James Press/Gale, 1998, .