Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de (1657–1757)

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FONTENELLE, BERNARD LE BOVIER DE
(1657–1757)

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, the French author, forerunner of the Enlightenment, was born in Rouen and died in Paris, having lived one month short of a century. Schooled by the Jesuits, he also studied law, but soon abandoned the career of advocate to follow in the literary footsteps of his uncles, Pierre and Thomas Corneille. Neither then nor later was he to distinguish himself as a poet or dramatist but, in 1683, with the appearance of the Dialogues des morts (Dialogues of the Dead ), he achieved immediate success as a man of letters. The witty paradoxes and sparkling conversations in these imaginary dialogues of illustrious and notorious figures of the past confirmed the reputation of their twenty-six-year-old author as a seventeenth-century belesprit ; more important, they revealed him as a singularly independent thinker, skeptical of traditional values and, as such, a potential enemy of seventeenth-century orthodoxy. Judging his literary fame firmly established, Fontenelle turned to the study of mathematics, physics, and astronomy and published Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686), a brilliantly successful popularization of the Copernican system which, until that time, had achieved very limited acceptance.

The following year his Histoire des Oracles, ingeniously adapted from the ponderous Latin of A. van Dale, appeared anonymously. Ostensibly an exposure of imposture and charlatanism in religious practices of pagan antiquity, the work was soon recognized for what it really was: a bold attack on credulity and superstition in all ages. Equally daring was De l'origine des fables (The Origin of Fables), composed by Fontenelle before 1680, but fear of persecution invited prudence, and it was not published until 1724. One of the first modern studies in the field of comparative religion, it based early man's belief in the supernatural on his ignorance of natural phenomena. But it was obvious that the criticism was intended to apply equally as well to Christianity and other revealed religions.

The quarrel over the relative literary merits of the Ancients and Moderns had been raging for some years when, in 1688, Fontenelle entered the fray with his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, His thesis was that since the question also included the problem of man's progress, the recent accumulation, organization, and dissemination of scientific knowledge proved the superiority of the Moderns. Because of his position in the dispute, entry into the French Academy was denied him on four occasions; and he was not elected a member until 1691.

In 1697 Fontenelle was elected to the Academy of Science, and two years later he became its secretary. His clarity and intelligence, the cool impartiality of his judgment, his wide range of scientific knowledge, and his gift for expression made Fontenelle ideally suited for the post, and he came to be considered as spokesman for his fellow academicians. He contributed a great deal to the widespread popularization of the scientific spirit at home and abroad with his remarkable series of Éloges for departed academy members, written over a period of forty years. These essays provided an impressive, constantly renewed picture of accomplishments in science on various fronts, written with the same lucidity and ease of expression that marked all of Fontenelle's serious writing. They were admirably complemented by the Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences that alone, with its masterful preface and original views, would have assured Fontenelle's reputation throughout eighteenth-century Europe as one of the great historians of the philosophy of science.

In the field of mathematics, Fontenelle was particularly interested in the differential calculus of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the analytical geometry of René Descartes. One of his own mathematical treatises is the Préface des éléments de la géométrie de l'infini (Elements of Infinitesimal Calculus; 1727). The last book he wrote was also scientific in nature. Titled Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens (The Theory of Cartesian Vortices; 1752), it showed him to be a disciple of Descartes in physics, if not in metaphysics.

Concerning Descartes, Fontenelle said that he should be held in esteem at all times but followed only now and then. Nevertheless, Fontenelle can be considered a Cartesian in two respects. First, his own skepticism was closely bound up with Descartes's principle of methodical doubt. Second, as a stout believer in the purely mechanical philosophy of nature, he found the Cartesian theory of vortices far closer to reality than Newton's laws of attraction, according to which it was necessary to hold that some invisible, seemingly supernatural force operated across vast stretches of space.

Among a number of audaciously conceived, anonymous works on religion and metaphysics ascribed to Fontenelle is the Traité de la liberté, which appeared in 1745 together with four other pamphlets under the title of Nouvelles Libertés de penser, The work, a few copies of which escaped police seizure, purports to reconcile divine foreknowledge with human free will, but, in fact, casts doubt on the existence of either.

Immediately following Fontenelle's death in January 1757, the general opinion of his accomplishments was summed up by Frédéric-Melchior Grimm: "The philosophic spirit, today so much in evidence, owes its beginnings to M. de Fontenelle" (Correspondance littéraire, February 1, 1757).

Although there were serious lapses in Fontenelle's knowledge and, hence, in his scientific judgment, his works nevertheless served as the single most important bond between the philosophico-scientific revolution in progress during his life and the philosophe movement just getting under way. He was one of the great forerunners of the French Enlightenment, and no small part of his success in this role lay in the fact that he exploited, as had never been done before, a technique for the popularization of science that was still to have its effects some two centuries later.

Bibliography

principal works by fontenelle

Oeuvres. 3 vols, edited by G.-B. Depping. Paris, 1818.

Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes; Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, edited by Robert Shackleton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955.

works on fontenelle

Adkins, Gregory M. "When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle." Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (3) (2000): 433–452.

Carré, J.-R. La philosophie de Fontenelle ou le sourire de la raison, Paris: Alcan, 1932.

Cohen, Bernard I. "The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution." Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 257–288.

Cosentini, John W. Fontenelle's Art of Dialogue, New York: King's Crown Press, 1952.

Kearns, Edward J. Ideas in Seventeenth Century France, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979.

Maigron, Louis. Fontenelle, l'homme, l'oeuvre, l'influence, Paris: Librairie Plon, Plon-Nourrit, 1906.

Marsak, Leonard M. "Bernard de Fontenelle, the Idea of Science in the French Enlightenment." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 49 (7) (1959): 64.

Riley, Patrick. "The General Will before Rousseau." Political Theory 6 (1978): 485–516.

Vartanian, Aram. Science and Humanism in the French Enlightenment, Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 1999.

White, Reginald J. The Anti-Philosophers: A Study of the Philosophes in Eighteenth-Century France, London: Macmillan, 1970.

Otis Fellows (1967)

Bibliography updated by Tamra Frei (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy