The Republic of Letters

The Republic of Letters
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The Republic
of Letters
MARC FUMAROLI
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LARA VERGNAUD
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

The Margellos World Republic of Letters Series is dedicated to making literary works from around
the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking
world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe,
Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and
creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2018 by Yale University.

Originally published as La République des lettres. © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2015.
Excerpts from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, by Michel de Montaigne, translated by

Donald M. Frame. Copyright © 1958 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior
University, renewed 1971, 1976. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher,
Stanford University Press, sup.org.
Excerpts from Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility Being the Life of Peiresc,
trans. W. Rand (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2003). Used by permission of Olivier Thill.
All rights reserved.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
PART I: AN IDEAL CITIZENSHIP
1. The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 13

2. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc: Prince of the
Republic of Letters 26
3. Conceptions of Europe in the Seventeenth Century:
John Barclay, a Keyserling Predecessor 50
4. Rhetoric and Society in Europe 65
5. The Emergence of the Academies 82
PART II: CONVERSATION

6. Conversation and Conversation Societies 105
7. Savant Conversation 122
8. Parisian Conversation and Its Expansion across
Europe 133
9. Fortin de La Hoguette’s “Testament” 149
10. The Erudite Origins of Classical “Grand Goût”:
The Optimus Stylus Gallicus According to
Pierre Dupuy 159
P A R T I I I : L E T T E R E D L E I S U R E A N D C O R R E S P O N D E N C E
Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus: Three Allegorical

11.
Settings of Lettered Leisure 169
vi Contents
12. Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita: A Regimen

for the Republic of Letters? 191
13. Venice and the Republic of Letters in the
Sixteenth Century 201
14. The Genesis of Classical Epistolography:
Humanist Letter-Writing Rhetoric from
Petrarch to Justus Lipsius 212
P A R T I V : L I V E S
15. From Lives to Biographies: The Twilight

of Parnassus 229
16. The “Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses:
A Voyage through Italy as an Exercise in
Lettered Leisure 252
17. The Comte de Caylus and the “Return to
Antiquity” in the Eighteenth Century 266
18. Seroux d’Agincourt and “Literary Europe” 293
Afterword: The Secret of the Republic of Letters 317

Notes 335
Index of Names 371
PREFACE
On the outside, I have been living in an era in which the expression “Re-
public of Letters” designates, more or less ironically, the small chessboard that
is Paris and an increasingly frenetic festival circuit, whose chess pieces are the
hundreds of new novels that appear every year, and the reward for winning the
game is dozens of literary prizes. On the inside, however, I have spent over half a
century, privately with a few friends and, for a somewhat shorter period of time,
at the current Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, within a European
Republic of Letters of an entirely different category and era. Such has been my
“engagement.” Extricating myself from my present-day reality, but not ignoring
it, I have sought to understand the vanished reality of a society of literary and
solitary savants in which I reveled, whose evolution was quite strange, buoyed
by a protective freedom of movement and thought within political and reli-
gious regimes that, going by current criteria, could be labeled as despotic. That
strangeness or, if one prefers, paradox continues to fascinate me, even though I
have gradually come to better understand the secret advantage enjoyed, in total
awareness of its source, by my friends (and subjects): the knowledge of how to
live in two planes of time, each reflected in the other. The first, Greco-Roman
antiquity, is timeless precisely because it is the ripe fruit of time; whereas the
second exists in an entirely different historical period, nearing maturation in its
turn, but this time without the reflective mirror of the “humanities” and, as a
consequence, increasingly disoriented.
In order to justify these unfashionable retreats into the world of scholars
of classical centuries, forgotten or scorned for the most part, I felt compelled,
thanks to the freedom provided me by the Collège de France, to finally attempt
to describe the unknown facets of this society of lettered savants and to sketch
portraits of a few of its most modest and often quite prodigious princes of the
mind.
Pierre Nora, whom I consider to be patience incarnated, has desired the
publication of this book for a long time and granted it the honor of inclusion in
his famous Bibliothèque des Histoires collection. Its publication owes much to
our shared friend, Krzysztof Pomian, an author at the forefront of this subject,
who allowed me to read his early university dissertation on the Republic of Let-
vii
viii Preface
ters, which he never wanted to publish. I also dedicate this book to him. The Re-
public of Letters also owes a great deal to the sorely missed Bruno Neveu, who
knew better than anyone the joy felt by the researcher who chooses the literary
republic of two classical centuries as his or her Montaignian arrière-boutique,
or “back room.”
Various summaries of my lectures on the history, customs, and fecundity
of the Republic of Letters of the ancien régime that appeared in the Annuaire
du Collège de France have been assembled in this collection. But they were
not presented successively and as a unit. These summaries are therefore intro-
duced and flanked by other lectures, additional research, and essays published
in diverse journals and collections, which complete or clarify on various points
the broad panorama drawn by my lectures given at the Collège de France. The
chosen order is neither chronological nor narrative, but more akin to a montage
or cubist collage, juxtaposing fragments of different genres and perspectives
(firsthand accounts, portraits, semantic analyses, close readings of key texts,
and so on) adjusted to progressively initiate the reader into this ideal and none-
theless real society, which transcended the political and religious geography
of humanist, classical, baroque, and finally neoclassical Europe up until the
French Revolution, with antiquity as its legacy and uninterrupted focus.
The intellectual prodigies included in this society of friends and equals were
most frequently commoners or members of the noblesse de robe (nobles who
acquired their rank by holding high offices) tacitly elected by their peers. I high-
light a few of these figures from varying eras and nations. This invisible, though
not at all clandestine, Republic had its own capital or capitals, which changed
according to the period. I describe those shifts and hypothesize the concrete
motives behind them.
Indeed, within this montage, the reader will see the capital of the Respublica
litteraria move from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice
to Aix-en-Provence (where the great Peiresc lived the longest) and to Paris. Sa-
vant Europe found itself in business in the king’s library, where it was received
by Pierre Dupuy, the “Pope of Paris.” That privilege endured until the end of
the seventeenth century and the emergence of a rivalry between three capitals,
Amsterdam, London, and a grand Paris in which Louis XIV was trying to mo-
nopolize the letters and arts by creating a Parisian system of prestigious royal
academies around his Versailles sun: a kind of local Republic of Letters and
Arts integrated into the royal state within the Palais du Louvre that hosted its
companies.
Many of the citizens accepted into the Republic of Letters traveled fre-
quently, at least during their youth. In the background of this collection of essays,
Preface ix
the reader will discover great men of letters roaming across Europe, duly bear-
ing or preceded by letters of recommendation, traveling either at their own ex-
pense, as diplomats, or under the pretext of preceptorship undertaken by young
noblemen on their Grand Tours, and welcomed as colleagues in libraries, ar-
chives, collections of Greco-Roman antiquities, gardens and menageries of rare
species, and finally in priceless conversations with local savants. Each took care
before his departure to ask among his peers for the names of notable and influ-
ential figures he would encounter in order to borrow and obtain the appropriate
letters of recommendation.
Then there are figures like the Comte de Caylus, who, at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, having prematurely launched a military career, himself
initiated his education as a future prince of the Republic of Arts with a modified
Grand Tour that took him through Italy to develop a “connoisseurship” in paint-
ing, through Asia Minor to explore Greek antiquities, and through Holland and
England to study sciences, philosophy, and a variety of collections. If I fail to
extensively develop this highly ritualized and studious aspect of the peregrina-
tio academica specific to the Republic of Letters, my portraits of Peiresc, Presi-
dent de Brosses, and Caylus notwithstanding, it is to avoid duplicating Recher-
ches sur le voyage savant au XVIIe siècle, the excellent and exhaustive analysis
published by two experts, Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, to which I refer.1
I would have also liked to learn and share more about the postal systems (mean-
ing both messengers and public transport) that facilitated the rapidity and secu-
rity of increasingly regular communication over the last two centuries of the
ancien régime, favoring in particular the wayfaring curiosity of the citizens of
the savant Republic. If the German corpus on the unrivaled courier system sup-
plied to the Hapsburg Empire by the Thurn und Taxis family (Italian by origin)
is quite extensive, it is less comprehensive when it comes to the French royal
postal system. The Thurn und Taxis family and their European communication
network is incidentally the focus of an excellent recent work by British histo-
rian Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know
About Itself, which I recommend to non-Germanists. If some of my readers are
amateurs of microhistory, they will find an abundance of material in the follow-
ing works: Peter N. Miller’s Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seven-
teenth Century; Daniel Roche’s Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture
et lumières au XVIII e siècle; and Laurence W. B. Brockliss’s Calvet’s Web: En-
lightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France.2 Daniel
Roche’s description of the activities of the Nîmes-born eighteenth-century
Peiresc, Jean-François Séguier, the longtime student and adoptive son of the
Verona-born savant, the marquis Scipione Maffei, as he made his way across
x Preface
Europe, and the even more meticulous account—including statistics!—of the

young Caylus of Avignon, the doctor Esprit Claude Calvet, by Professor Brock-
liss are particularly noteworthy. Each gives a precise sense of the development,
both in terms of expansion and comprehension, that reached as far as the pro-
vincial middle class, of an encyclopedic solidarity of men of letters in which
antiquarianism, numismatics, epigraphy, and archaeology occupied the high-
est ranks, and substantiate the progressive “return to antiquity” across Europe
that triumphed in the 1750s. As for myself, I hope to have, at the least, whetted
your appetite.
Marc Fumaroli
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Diligently researching and frequenting the society of friends and equals

that, within the hierarchical society of Europe’s ancien régime, called itself the
Republic of Letters for over four centuries and in a variety of languages is inevi-
tably a solitary and, even more so, narcissistic activity. This Republic boasts the
surprising virtue of being able to recreate itself on a more or less modest scale
around the researcher dedicated to its rediscovery. The development and com-
pletion of this book enabled me to once again benefit from that gift.
I must first express my gratitude to my friend and editor, Pierre Nora, and to
his primary collaborator in the delicate planning and realization of this work,
the very wise editorial director Olivier Salvatori. Next, my appreciation goes to
three friends and scholars who generously dedicated their time and unrivaled
meticulousness to reading the first draft, already ably edited by Mr. Salvatori,
offering translations and corrections as well as answers to my often thorny
questions: the great Latinist Pierre Laurens, an honorary professor at the Sor-
bonne and my colleague at the Académie des Inscriptions; Krzysztof Pomian,
to whom I have dedicated this book, a leading specialist in connoisseurship and
private and public collecting during the ancien régime and one of the postwar
reinvigorators of the theme of the Republic of Letters, along with Paul Dibon
and Bruno Neveu; and of course Pierre-François Burger, a former collaborator
at the Centre national de la recherché scientifique (CNRS, National Center for
Scientific Research) and an erudite connoisseur of Port-Royal, but also de omni
re scibili, including the correct language desirable for savant works.
I can imagine the pleasure my friend Bruno Neveu, a member of the Acadé-
mie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, whose knowledge and affinities made
him a master of the Republic of Letters himself, would have felt upon seeing
this book, which owes him so much. He left us too soon, shortly after embarking
on a long-planned trip to meet with Christians of the East, already under threat
at the time. I am immensely grateful for the knowledge provided by Jean-Robert
Armogathe, a corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions, and to
our mutual Italian friends, Tullio Gregory and Avvocato Gerardo Marotta and
his Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples; as well as to Carlo Ossola,
a fellow member of the Accademia dei Lincei; Roberto Calasso, my scholarly
xi
xii Acknowledgments
and brilliant Italian editor; and Lina Bolzoni, who, like my late friend from
Turin, Franco Simone, is refining our understanding of the Italian Rinascita,
so different from the French Renaissance that stemmed from it, at the Scuola
Normale Superiore di Pisa. I learned a great deal from conversations with my
English friends, notably Sir John Elliot, the eminent historian of Spain’s Golden
Age, and Michael Screech, who popularized Rabelais and Montaigne in En-
gland through his translations and analyses; and with my American friends,
Irving and Marilyn Lavin, Peter Miller, Anthony Grafton, and Bob Silvers; and
with my Catalan editor Jaume Vallcorba, the late philologist dedicated to the
savant tome; and finally with my dear student who kept all her promises and
then some, Colette Nativel. I dare not forget to thank Jean-Claude Casanova,
Alain Besançon, Bernard de Fallois, to whom I am indebted, and the journal
Commentaire, which published one of the texts included in this book.
Finally, I must express my gratitude to the Collège de France, its succes-
sive administrators, and its assembly of professors, for having allowed me to so
broadly extend the official title of my chair, Rhetoric and Society in the Seven-
teenth Century, notably to the eighteenth century. They greatly facilitated the
success of the tasks linked to that chair by assigning two unparalleled associate
professors to assist me: Francesco Solinas, an eminent art historian educated at
the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Catherine Fabre, the heart and soul,
along with my Dutch friend Professor Hans Bots, of the team behind the publi-
cation of the complete correspondence of Madame de Maintenon.
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Ludivine Vergnaud and Adrien Chipret.

The Republic of Letters
INTRODUCTION
In a landmark book published in Cambridge in 1979, The Printing Press as

an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein wanted to show that the invention
and expansion of the printing press had not yet been adequately recognized for
what they were: a technological revolution that broadened and hastened the
advancement of knowledge at the same time that it increased the individual’s
intellectual autonomy and the breadth of his or her free and public expression.
Inspired by the views of Marshall McLuhan—though not by the renowned
Catholic theorist’s personal reservations regarding new, postwar technologies—
Eisenstein, through this celebration of the revolutionary benefits of the printing
press and the printed work, also laid the foundations for another argument, this
time in defense of the new forms of media then emerging in the United States
and of the internet, still a well-kept secret in the 1980s.
This American argument assumes that, its unceasing acceleration notwith-
standing, human progress is the product of increasingly radical technological
revolutions, which correspondingly free man from the limits imposed on him
by nature, and create for his comfort and even happiness a second, artificial
nature wherein his senses, intelligence, memory, imagination, as well as his
physical health and life span are tremendously increased.
This euphoric, quasi-millenarian utopia of a people chosen for “manifest des-
tiny” has expanded worldwide, more or less modified or in keeping with the
model of the vast North American market. Neither the large-scale massacres
that have multiplied since the twentieth century, nor the successive economic
crises forcing us to live in constant anxiety over the future, nor even apocalyp-
tic predictions of the depletion of raw materials, global warming, and wide-
spread air pollution can rattle this messianic faith in the god of Progress, which
is one of the foundations of the “multicultural” American society. It seems to
go without saying that scientific and technological genius will prevail over the
by-products and accidents of the ferocity, voracity, and recklessness of human
nature on the (“overall positive”) road to progress. The remedy is, as it were, em-
bedded in the disease.
Less of an ardent believer in the benevolence, both retrospective and pro-
spective, of the god of Progress than Elizabeth Eisenstein, I recognize, like her
1
2 Introduction
and thanks to her, the indisputable advantages accorded humanity by the in-
vention of the printing press through the transmission and accumulation of
knowledge and consequently through its capacity to increase at the expense of
both routine and ignorance. That said, I am surprised that Eisenstein glossed
over Europe’s wars of religion, which, though perhaps a necessary evil and no
doubt a ruse of Hegelian reasoning, were also horrific bloodbaths provoked in
large part by the popularization of Bible reading, made possible by the print-
ing press and the proliferation of sects attached to their idiosyncratic interpre-
tations of Holy Writ. When, after lauding the positive impacts of the printing
press, Eisenstein draws the conclusion that all subsequent revolutions in com-
munication technologies will have as exclusively beneficial outcomes, I am in-
clined to adopt a stance of doubt and caution, echoing Plato, who feared that
the invention of writing would atrophy living memory and the spoken word: all
progress has collateral damage. America would not have taken the lead in this
march to universal happiness without the enslavement of blacks in the South
and the genocide of Native Americans in the West.
The printing press had destructive side effects that were quickly noticed by
humanists, though they had initially welcomed its arrival with open arms. So
they did what was needed to preserve the integrity of the mind as much as
was possible. Of course, they had suffered from the Roman Catholic Church’s
establishment of the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum as much
as they did from the fate reserved for authors presumed to be “heretics” by the
new schismatic churches. But European humanists independently, without re-
sorting to the police or the executioner, took what precautionary measures they
could to prevent the harmful consequences of the widespread and cheap cir-
culation of books and ensure that quantity did not outweigh quality. Follow-
ing Erasmus’s example, they allied themselves with Europe’s most prestigious
publishing houses and, like the author of Ciceronianus and Encomium Moriae,
used irony and criticism to disqualify bad books and used praise to elevate good
authors at the expense of bad ones.
Any technological revolution in modes of communication, beginning with
writing, which coincided with the first historical developments of administra-
tion and commerce, is a response to a practical demand. The invention of the
printed book was no exception. It was carried and amplified by the develop-
ment of states and city-states whose intense urban, political, and economic life
required educated actors and could no longer settle for either oral eloquence
or handwritten correspondence. Of course, such practical advances inevitably
provoke new problems, unprecedented dangers, and unexpected threats. When
human affairs are involved, every rose has its thorn, and critical doubt must be
the most attentive companion to even the most justified admiring gaze.
Introduction 3
The invention of the printing press, an unarguably promising advertising and

commercial endeavor, arrived at just the right time. Many city dwellers could
not exercise their professions without knowing how to read. That demand had
to be met on a scale that was larger and cheaper than handwritten manuscripts,
which was impossible without infringing on the power of ecclesiastical and even
political authorities. No one was capable of foreseeing the unrest to come or of
noting, once it erupted, the cause-and-effect link between the production of
printed materials and mass movements of religious views. And yet, one century
before Gutenberg, Petrarch had invented the best vaccine for the collateral
damages of the printing press: he ensured the revival of the Greeks’ paideia,
the Romans’ institutio, the education of a cultured and sophisticated elite that
was capable of offsetting, as was the case in classical antiquity, the passion and
violence of both the mob and the man behind the mob—the tyrant. Petrarch
shared his ardent nostalgia for the classical age of the Greco-Roman Empire
and his desire to recreate the corps of science and wisdom that had nourished
its great men with his disciples and readers, who would later be called “human-
ists.” According to the poet, the tragedy of Christian Europe was the work of
barbarians, who, by destroying that literature, had also destroyed the progeni-
tor of the critical mind and a civilized elite. For a thousand years, European
civilization had in a manner of speaking atrophied, not due to Christianity, as
Machiavelli and Nietzsche would later claim, but because the Christian laity
of its libraries, academies, and cultura animi failed to develop the critical mind
and temper pagan customs. There was a kind of preestablished harmony be-
tween Christianity and classical culture, as well as a complementarity between
the contemplative lifestyle of Christian monasticism and the otium litteratum
(classical lettered leisure, the life of the mind, which was forgotten or damaged
by barbarian vandalism, but which could and should once again ennoble the
active lives of lay Christians, aristocrats, or merchants.)
Hence Petrarch’s contagious passion for unearthing and reconstructing the
scattered and buried treasures of the classical humanitas and its urbanitas. How
could Christian Europe be healed after its amputation? Petrarch and the first
humanists set out to uncover, recopy, publish, and assemble masterpieces of
classical moral literature abandoned and forgotten in monastic libraries, within
their own collections. This recreated corpus was meant to be the new starting
point for civilization. However, these new copies of handwritten copies, which
often dated back to the Carolingian Renaissance, written on either papyrus or
parchment, were obligatorily few and very expensive. So wasn’t the Renaissance
inaugurated by Petrarch (who wanted to educate laypeople, and not in any way
challenge the Roman orthodoxy and ecclesiology) itself vulnerable, sooner or
later, to the same disaster that had abruptly interrupted the progress of the clas-
4 Introduction
sical world? It would have been easy, in the early fifteenth century, for barbarian
invaders to set fire to the first large humanist libraries in Italy, as easy in fact as
it had been in the West in the seventh century.
It was not enough to recreate classical texts. They needed to be safeguarded
from new destruction or mnemonic atrophy. Handwritten copies, despite being
made more practical by the monastic invention of the paginated, softbound,
or hardcover book, which replaced the classical volumen, remained too expen-
sive to be made en masse and, therefore, to defend from attack. One can imag-
ine Petrarch’s disciples, hunters of forgotten manuscripts of classical works, but
also monuments to be restored in spirit and inscriptions to decipher, wonder-
ing: What equivalent could there be in engravings in counterrelief, marble,
and stone for the classical inscriptions that had survived the passage of time,
damaged but still legible, or the dedications in metal letters affixed to ancient
temple pediments, like the one that adorns the architrave of the Pantheon of
Rome or the one on the Maison Carrée of Nîmes? The Ancients had no way to
hand down their legacy other than through tablets and rolls of parchment paper
or papyrus, all too easy to torch. They also invented a primitive form of printing
and engraving in order to consign short messages (brilliant pre–text messaging
shortcuts) to the gods and posterity: inscriptions. Unfortunately, the technique
was cumbersome, stationary, and unsuitable for transmitting long messages. For
Petrarch, and even more so for his enthusiastic spiritual successors, his friends,
and disciples, it was vital that the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity then being
reconstructed be definitively salvaged from oblivion and once again made fer-
tile in an indefinite march of progress in order for Italy and Roman Christianity
to be wrenched from the ignorance and barbarism they owed to their seventh-
century invaders, as well as to avoid the disaster that came next, the rapid ex-
tinction of the Carolingian Renaissance. The humanists’ tasks were many: look
to antiquity to shape and educate civilized and modern laypeople; reassemble
the philosophical, scientific, oratory, literary, and artistic legacy of the Greco-
Roman school so it could become productive again; and foresee any repeat of
the catastrophes of transmission that occurred during the seventh century and,
for different reasons, the ninth century.
Was Gutenberg inspired, in the 1450s, by antiquarian humanists’ attempts to
decipher the metal letters engraved and affixed to stone temple frontons when
imagining the metal, movable, and raised letters of the printing press? Or did
this shrewd technician look farther afield, inspired by and driven to improve the
printing press of the Far East, with its engraved plates of unmovable symbols?
Of course, Gutenberg would have needed to be sure that a market that could
make his ingenious invention profitable was already in place.
Introduction 5
This clientele could not be built around the monks who controlled large
parts of the niche market of copying manuscripts. Instead, Gutenberg’s first
clients came from a lettered bourgeois audience capable of reading Saint
Jerome’s Latin Bible or literate artisans capable of reading the first translations
of Holy Writ into vernacular. We cannot say that the initial impact of the print-
ing press was in the vein of progress, however. The circulation of printed ma-
terials served sectarian hatreds and national ambitions, multiplied sects, and
amplified propaganda. Very quickly, however, Petrarch’s disciples, present in
several regions in Europe, caught on to the merits of the printing press: its in-
vention was a perfect response to their anxieties, as well as to their ambition to
civilize Christian Europe through the study of science, wisdom, and the arts
of antiquity. The multiplication in the thousands of the same edition of an im-
portant classical text published by an accomplished philologist would facilitate
its dispersion across the globe and, thanks to the increase in the number of
libraries throughout Europe, render its quasi-disappearance in the event of an
onslaught of vandalism impossible. At least that was the admirable sales pitch
which was used by the great editor and philologist Aldus Manutius on his clients
across Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which appears in
the manifesto prefaces he included in his irreproachable editions of Greek and
Latin philosophical classics, including works by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, as
well as Tuscan texts by Catherine of Siena, and Francesco Colonna’s Hypnero-
tomachia Poliphili, written, as would be Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in an invented
language: such texts, when written in ancient Greek, were copied at Manutius’s
philhellenic academy and printed in Venice, with his own presses, using charac-
ters specially drawn and melted for him.
It is hard to imagine a more abrupt divide, within a vastly hierarchical social
universe, between the printing press’s dual applications as, respectively, the re-
discovered spiritual legacy of a demanding and cultivated European elite, and
the pamphleteering vehicle of scriptural controversy, theological disputes, or
political propaganda on the scale of the urban masses. That “humanist” elite of
culture, science, and taste did not wait until the invention of the printing press
to gain self-awareness, give itself a collective name, and, when the time came,
assume its role in the printed book or page market. In 1417, Francesco Barbaro,
one of Petrarch’s young, second-generation Venetian disciples, named the inter-
national fraternity of missionary humanists, dedicated to finding and copying
manuscripts of classical works ignored since Petrarch’s day, the Respublica litte-
raria—the “Republic of Letters.” Right on time. Thirty years before the inven-
tion of the printing press.
What did the young Barbaro—at the time concluding his study of the
6 Introduction
humanities in the Florence of Chancellor Coluccio Salutati; his successor,

Leonardo Bruni; and Poggio Bracciolini himself—mean by this expression?
The humanist Renaissance, the renovatio litterarum et atrium launched by
Petrarch, was above all characterized by a change in the dialogic model domi-
nant among men of letters. The dialectical model of the quaestio and the dispu-
tatio that connected the scholastic edifice and the theological intelligence of
clergy and monks gave way to a rhetorical dialogic model, whose key categories
were the epistola according to Petrarch and its oral derivatives (or models),
the “conversation” (sermo) according to Pontano, and the “essay” according to
Montaigne. All these modes were private and very different from the public
modes (the judicial, political, and epidictic discourse of pagan antiquity), which
would serve as models for future magistrates, diplomats, and dignitaries of the
modern forum, the court. Preachers too, stripped (or nearly) of the medieval-
era income that had allowed them to harangue believers in Latin, were now
forced, as well-trained orators, to convince, plead, and move their listeners in
regularized vernaculars. Epistolary or conversational dialogue between two
or more people, distanced from the negotia of the classical political forum or
modern monarchal court, fell under the category of otium operosum, “studious
leisure,” based on its practitioners’ uninterrupted commercium with the dead,
authors of antiquity whose written works and effigies kept them alive, fertile,
and generous. Epistolary exchanges between the living, and literary exchanges
with the dead, two superior and intimate forms of dialogue, created a distinct
social link among humanists in an invisible republic whose shared foundation
was a classical heritage being reread, reinterpreted, and expanded continuously.
Was the Respublica litteraria a social network? Undoubtedly, though it oper-
ated between epistolary peers recruited through co-optation, and not between
internet interlocutors assumed by definition to be arithmetically equal. The citi-
zens of this invisible republic were not the active cives of ancient republics, nor
the passive members of modern monarchies, but the subjects of an unprece-
dented relationship with self, with the other, with knowledge, and with truth.
Among those who held (and not just used) this privilege of literary citizenship,
it was accompanied by the extension of lettered dialogue beyond the university
sphere and also beyond privileged specialists, to men and institutions previously
excluded from access to knowledge. Beginning in Italy’s city-states, an urban
public of lay readers formed a long time before the invention of the printing
press. The use of private, familiar letters—a medium at which Petrarch excelled
and whose tone and form were infinitely less predetermined than official medi-
eval epistles—strengthened and intensified the dialogical relationship between
author and reader. Writing personal letters led to learning to read in a personal
Introduction 7
way. Petrarch would have been the grand master and model for this friendly and
intimate epistolary dialogue. Liberated from exterior decorum, these exchanges
nonetheless had to adapt according to the person, circumstances, and location
and had to respect a level of propriety that was quite variable and that assumed
a subtle discernment of one’s interlocutor in space, time, and circumstances.
Epistolary art (let’s avoid “epistolarity,” that monstrous product of modern-day
scholastic pedantry) had to be able to harmonize the personal expression of the
person writing with an intuitive understanding of the recipient. It served as an
education in urban and polite conversation, departing not only from the logical
formalism of the scholastic disputatio, but even from the rhetoric of the three
types of public discourse (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic) for reasons we
have already glimpsed. If epistolary art was a form of rhetoric, it corresponded to
private discourse, between peers, in leisure. And indeed it was a form of rheto-
ric, for the mastery of decorum in this type of private discourse required eru-
dition and an oral facility that were all the more vast and refined because they
had to remain invisible. The supreme art lay in hiding the artistry at work and
appearing natural, for fear that too much art, misplaced within an urban, private
exchange, would render one’s interlocutor suspicious.
A Roman textbook for future magistrates and lawyers, Quintilian’s Institu-
tio oratoria, rediscovered in 1417, would influence the rules and fluid forms of
dialogue between men of letters more than any other classical text. For a long
(or very long) period of time, the informal epistle remained clandestine and
unpublished. Nonetheless, the Republic of Letters was not entirely immersed
in the obscurity of the otium. It had its theater: the “querelle,” which could last
several decades and involve dozens of scholars and savants across Europe, be-
came a privileged rite of research beginning at the end of the fifteenth century.
It would be absurd to reduce these debates to a purely formal game; it would
be no less excessive to not acknowledge the rhetorical rules that moderated and
nurtured them. The aristocratic Republic of Letters was modeled on the clas-
sical forum, but a forum whose citizens had first been co-opted. This new kind
of senate, tackling the relative chaos and violent confusion caused by the vul-
garization of reading, strove to limit the fallout and to safeguard the chances of
progress and the spread of specialized knowledge.
A rediscovered mode of intimate dialogue between men of letters inevitably
required new institutions. Beginning in the fourteenth century, long before
Gutenberg, groups of friends and students formed around Petrarch, Boccac-
cio, and Salutati; in fifteenth-century Florence, on the margins of the studio,
private academies assembled around the Byzantine Jean Argyropoulos and
later the Hellenist Marsilio Ficino. Partly fictionalized “dialogues,” “correspon-
8 Introduction
dences” set down the forms and content of conversations, the medium of col-
lective research endeavors, in writing. It was this first nebulous Florentine ap-
pearance of savant “companies” that almost immediately adopted the Latin
name of Respublica litteraria.
The term “academy,” which was also applied to the research groups united
by the Republic of Letters very early on, referred to antiquity’s schools of phi-
losophy, notably the most glorious among them—Plato’s, which was closed
in AD 529 by Emperor Justinian after one thousand years of existence. The
school also encompassed the rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. The
humanists’ rediscovery of the art of persuasion was not a literary epiphenome-
non, meaning a hollow and pedantic repetition of classical models, limited to
praising princes or the sterile verbosity of court. Studied by savants, imbued
with philosophy, it provided a discernible framework for a socialized mode of
knowledge and understanding, which Descartes would define in Discours de
la method (Discourse on the Method) in 1637. But Descartes did not invent
this idea of a savant community that believed in knowledge, invisible to the
common man, which persisted beyond the death, distance, and persecution
of its members: it was a reality he encountered along the way, which trans-
ported him, and whose conventions, manners, rites, and norms he accepted.
He even wanted to be its reformer, by proposing a shared method that would
make collaboration between all savants in search of truth, in the service of a
universal, common good for humanity, less tentative and more efficient. The
philosopher had found a homeland and an audience within this community.
And so this enemy of traditions respected at least one—that of the Republic of
Letters, which he perceived in accordance with its Platonic origins and mission
in Marsilio Ficino’s Florence. Though rhetorical by its procedures, the classic
Republic of Letters was philosophical in the sense of its members’ collective
search for truth, a calling to which Descartes was faithful by defining it as what
it should be. By analogy, the literary republic served as a model for a Republic
of Arts conceived of by its theoreticians, from Vasari to Quatremère de Quincy,
as an ideal academy in which the most diverse talents would compete to serve
beauty for its own sake and multiply the testimonials restraining artists and their
public from deviating from probity in questions of taste and creativity. It was by
serving this community of lettered men that the printing press and bookselling
became agents of progress. A deep current of pure water, often suspected by the
censors of the day and filtered by posterity, emerged among other impure and
agitated currents, a considerable proportion of printed materials, untroubled
by various censors, having disseminated works of regurgitation, ignorance, and
poisoned malice.
Introduction 9
Though a self-aware fiction, the Republic of Letters was nonetheless a

democracy of peers, if not equals, that endured over several centuries of monar-
chism and aristocracy. Within a world of courts and intrigues, this ideal republic
was a vast invisible and unshakable society, whose civic links were nourished
by an uncompromising love for the truth, though tempered by friendship, and
a respect for knowledge and talent. The exchange and circulation of books, as
well as books themselves, fostered, much as the postal system did, the transna-
tional expansion and fecundity of the Republic of Letters. But the book was not
the Republic’s sole concern, even if countless notable publishers, from Aldus’s
era to the present day, were often its most zealous senators and diplomats. The
abundance of state and church censorship, commercial interests, political pas-
sions, religious fanaticism, and the tyranny of what was in fashion weighed
upon productions of the mind, in the same way that publicity, pornography,
and all manners of terrorism today weigh so heavily on the internet, the peda-
gogical realm of all dangers.
In spite of that collateral damage, the internal solidarity of the Republic
of Letters, its critical authority, the open debates it sparked between creative
minds, and the respected journals and periodicals that it produced successfully
established hierarchies, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and created a critical
counterbalance to the inert and disproportionate mass of ink and paper.
Unraveling the history of this singular and metamorphic institution means
not only viewing Europe in an unfamiliar light, which is neither economic nor
military, but also convincing ourselves that such a transnational critical au-
thority is even more desirable in the century of Facebook than it was during the
century of the invention of the printing press.
Part I
AN IDEAL CITIZENSHIP
1
THE REDISCOVERED REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Paul Dibon, professor of history and philology at the École Pratique des
Hautes Études in Paris, is responsible for reviving the concept of the Republic
of Letters, which had more or less fallen into obsolescence since the early four-
teenth century. Dibon was the first to show that this forgotten phrase signified
both a program of research and a framework for understanding the European
mind during the ancien régime. Through his personal contributions to that pro-
gram, Dibon established that this idea of the Republic of Letters removed a
number of epistemological, national, and disciplinary obstacles to historical re-
search and illuminated the past in a way that sheds light on our responsibilities
as Europeans today.1
In order to highlight the gentle revolution that Paul Dibon sparked within
the field of European intellectual history, while limiting myself to previous
French works, I will begin by briefly noting what was lacking from studies con-
ducted by Dibon’s two most remarkable predecessors: Paul Hazard and my own
mentor, René Pintard. In The Crisis of the European Mind, published in 1935,
Hazard’s scope is unarguably European.2 But the subtleties and brilliance of
the analysis notwithstanding, the history of ideas as viewed by Hazard is, strictly
speaking, idealistic: he describes a battle of books, employing an allegorical
drama within which the modern critical mind, emboldened since the Renais-
sance or the Reformation, undermined the conceptual edifice of tradition and
faith, thus creating a favorable terrain for the rise of the Enlightenment and
what is referred to as secularization.
A simplification, both as pertains to the dramatis personae and the intrigue
of Hazard’s account, pits the conservative mind in the service of the absolute
state and the church, whose distinguished representative was Jacques Bénigne
Bossuet, author of Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, against
the insidious and combined assaults of critical scholarship and science, symbol-
ized by Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton.
That dramatic backdrop is also apparent in René Pintard’s classic work Le
Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertinism), published in 1942, which in many re-
spects attempted to substantiate Hazard’s theses by showing their earlier validity
13
14 An Ideal Citizenship
in the years preceding the “crisis,” 1617–1651. Thanks to a more archival and fo-
cused method, however, René Pintard does introduce nuance and a sort of new
nominalism into the psychomachy of the principles of intellectual history so
well illustrated by Paul Hazard.3 In his analysis, Pintard weaves individual por-
traits of complex and contradictory men of letters who were not all motivated
by a shared philosophical and political cause against a shared adversary. Thanks
to a kind of Proustian genius, quite different from Paul Hazard’s own theatri-
cal talent, Pintard brings his philosophers and erudite savants to life in a society
that was specific to them, with its own rituals and customs and a vivid aware-
ness of its autonomy, even if profound and subtle doctrinal differences could
at times divide its members. The central meeting place of this society of letters,
which was presided over by the Dupuy brothers, also known as the “Adelphes,”
was in Paris, in Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s library on the rue des Poitevins, and
subsequently in the king’s library, where the Dupuys entertained every day at
the same time, from 4:17 p.m. to 4:53 p.m. This society had European offshoots
as well, maintaining permanent correspondence and continuous cooperation
with Aix-en-Provence, Rome, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. There is just one
word missing from René Pintard’s comprehensive work, as well as from the
countless unpublished texts on which he relied, which encapsulates the extraor-
dinary endeavor of intuitive archaeology that, for the first time in the eyes of the
Moderns, revived a European community of minds. The word (or rather two):
Respublica litteraria.4
This game-changing expression was brought back into scientific circulation
in France thanks to Paul Dibon and his now-classic articles, which were com-
piled in the masterful collection significantly titled Regards sur la Hollande du
Siècle d’or (Reflections on Holland in the Golden Age). Rescued from oblivion
and restored to its original meaning, the expression Respublica litteraria brings
Pintard’s portrait to life, illuminates the drama staged by Hazard, and possibly,
or especially, expands our retrospective gaze by extending its reach to Holland,
England, and Europe. Paul Dibon has since provided inspiration for research
projects, conferences, and studies conducted by his students and followers nec-
essary to understand the European history of the mind in this new light. The
expression Respublica litteraria, used by men of letters among themselves, per-
fectly sums up the keen awareness shared by Pintard’s protagonists, as well as by
those authors cited by Hazard, that they belonged to a society within another
society, a contemplative society within an active society, and a society united
by letters, beyond death and distance, in the same intellectual adventure. In an
article published in 1978, Paul Dibon outlines the general characteristics of this
“literary republic of the seventeenth century.”5 In a way, he provides the key to
The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 15
the phenomenon observed by Pintard, who was unable to name it or determine

its profound structure, and collectively extends it to the seventeenth century,
echoing and expanding an intuition expressed by Annie Barnes, who, in 1938,
entitled her classic work Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des Lettres
(Jean Le Clerc [1657–1736] and the Republic of Letters).6
Paul Dibon did not go so far as to propose a genealogy for either the expres-
sion Respublica litteraria or the phenomenon itself as it could be observed dur-
ing the seventeenth century (Dibon’s favored time period). We can gauge his
academic reserve or caution through, notably, his studies on the epistolary net-
works that united—and, in many respects, constructed—Europe’s community
of international men of letters at the time. Dibon nonetheless illustrated better
than anyone the authority held by Erasmus and his works in Holland during the
Golden Age.7 Implicitly, by examining Erasmus’s reception among the Dutch
“citizens” of the Republic of Letters in the seventeenth century, Paul Dibon not
only provided a glimpse of the Erasmian exemplum that oriented their thinking
and shaped their lifestyle, but also suggested a genealogy and tradition specific
to this lettered elite connected to its French, English, and Italian counterparts.
It was therefore completely natural, in light of those propositions, to question
whether the concept of the Respublica litteraria, documented in Erasmus’s cor-
respondence beginning in the early sixteenth century, did not in fact exist even
earlier.
Without straying from the field of lexicography, and without asking, or at
least only indirectly, all the questions prompted by the “long duration” of this
four-century-old expression, it is clear that several occurrences of the Res-
publica litteraria make the case for more continuity than rupture, despite their
intermittence over time.
The first occurrence of this syntactic unit thus far identified dates back one
century before its first use by Erasmus. We find it, as previously noted, in a July
1417 letter addressed to Poggio Bracciolini, known as Poggio, and sent from
Venice by Francesco Barbaro, a young nobleman and a student of Guarino
Guarini. Poggio was at that time in Constance, where he remained despite the
council’s deposition of Antipope John XXIII, whom he had accompanied with
a delegation of Florentine humanists. In a letter to Guarini, dated January 1417,
Poggio enumerates his sensational discoveries of manuscripts by Latin authors,
which he made during several “campaigns” to various monasteries across north-
ern Europe. He compares himself to Virgil’s Aeneas, saving the Penates from
the destruction of Troy, as instructed by Hector’s ghost, in order to bring them
to a new Troy.
The reconstitution of the Latin West’s dispersed and in large part forgotten
legacy,8 carried out by Petrarch and Salutati’s disciples, therefore took place
against a backdrop of division which was rattling the Respublica christiana and
which the council of theologians gathered in Constance were attempting to
repair via their own methods. At the same time, in pursuit of the same mission
through different channels—the unity of Christian Europe—Poggio was re-
assembling a literary heritage on which “another Troy,” more promising and rec-
onciliatory, could be founded in Italy. And so the last holdover of “barbarism”—
theologians’ abstract sophism, the basis of disputes in Europe at the time—was
erased in the light of rediscovered knowledge and eloquence from antiquity.
Another “spiritual power” emerged in the very wake of the ecclesiastical “spiri-
tual power” weakened by the Great Schism.
Francesco Barbaro belonged to an illustrious Venetian senatorial family.
Thanks to his childhood initiation into the Greek and Latin studia humanitatis,
he joined the same family of men of letters to which his master Guarino Guarini
belonged, as did Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolò Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, and Pier
Paolo Vergerio. Barbaro wrote to Poggio in the name of this community of Ital-
ian men of letters, whose ambitions extended to Christian Europe and whose
shared cultura animi transcended its members’ civic or gentilic loyalties, in
order to, as it were, render it written and public homage:
Ignominia etiam notandi sunt illi Germani, qui clarissimos viros, quo-
rum vita ad omnem memoriam sibi commendata esse debuit, quantum in
se fuit, vivos diuturno tempore sepultos tenuerunt. Quod si impudenter
factum est, quid neglegentius? Si ex sententia, quid crudelius? An quis-
quam ita invidus erit, ut vos nimium exornari a me censeat? Quos autem
orno? Eos, nempe, qui huic litterariae Reipublicae plurima adjumenta
atque ornamenta contulerunt. (We must also condemn those Germans
who have for so long buried alive the exceptional geniuses whose memory
should have been eternally precious to them. If that is the result of short-
sightedness, what negligence is most to blame? If it is deliberate, is cruelty
worse? Could there be anyone so jealous as to judge my praise excessive?
But to whom is my praise directed? To those, is it not, who have contrib-
uted the most to the growth and ornament of the Republic of Letters.)9
Barbaro then defines a European and universal legacy, on a European, uni-

versal scale:
Quid enim magnificentius, aut praeclarius assequi poteras, quam immor-

talia haec tua merita non latere in tenebris, non esse abdita, sed cum
in luce Europae, tum in aulis Germaniae provinciae, atque in auribus
omnium gentium et nationum esse posita? (What more magnificent,
more dazzling reward can you obtain than to see your immortal merits,
instead of languishing, buried in the shadows, shine under Europe’s light
as in all the courts of the German province and reach the ears of all the
peoples and all the nations?)10
I will not elaborate at present on the rhetorical architecture that gives sense
and autonomy to this “society within a society,” which united members of the
Roman curia, the Venetian Senate, and the Florentine Signoria in the same
respublica, around a shared European heritage for which they took responsi-
bility.
All those elements can be found in a work by Angelo Decembrio, written
around 1450 and published in 1540, entitled De politia litteraria. In this literary
dialogue, which stars Leonello d’Este, Guarino Guarini, Pier Paolo Vergerio,
Leonardo Aretino (Leonardo Bruni), and Poggio Bracciolini, Decembrio clari-
fies the categorical difference between politeia in the Aristotelian perspective
(the temporal city) and politia as he viewed it (the republic of minds):
Politiæ litterariæ commentarios [. . .] quam non a poli ciuitate græca

deriuatione, sed a nostris, hoc est poliendo seu polite scribendo appellare
libet. (These commentaries on literary politeness [. . .] which it pleases me
to name as such, by deriving the word, not from the Greek polis, which
designates the city, but from our Latin words, polio, which means to
polish, or polite scribendo, write in a meticulous manner.)11
The politia litteraria—a “society of minds within political society” and a

“pedagogical and erudite province” that transcended political regimes, chang-
ing them from the inside—had its own place within the permanent curriculum
of urbana conversatio, which libraries would expand to include interlocutors
from the farthest past, brought back to life through philology. Its mission lay in
the transformation (cultura), or polishing (expolitio), of the “political” man to a
man of the “mind” (elegantia).
The term Respublica litteraria resurfaced in a more ambitious and less seem-
ingly interior way at the end of the fifteenth century in the prefaces and dedi-
cations that appeared in Greek and Latin texts published by Aldus Manutius,
though still based on the idea of a fertile literary heritage administered by a
corps of philologists in the service of a superior and universal good. The ex-
pansion of that network of philologists and their influence now represented
a tangible European strategy to expand libraries dedicated to learning and
strengthened international solidarity between scholars. For Aldus, the ideal
and essential library that his publishing house hoped to create, summarizing
and perpetuating a century of classical “manuscript chasing” and philological
progress in Italy, was both a heritage shared by all European men of letters and
the “commonplace” of their solidarity and cooperation in service of the mind.
I will limit myself to a few quotations, without foreseeing a deeper analysis
that would even better highlight how this great Venetian editor viewed the Re-
public of Letters. First, it is important to precisely outline the meaning of the
noun litterae or the adjective litteraria within the phrase Aldus borrowed from
Francesco Barbaro. For the Venetian publisher, much more than for Barbaro,
“letters” implied the preeminence of the Greek language (the ultimate vehicle
for the philosophy and sciences invented in Greek) over Latin, the language
of general culture. It is equally important to highlight how the idea of the res-
publica was expanded in Aldus’s writing, which utilized an even more reso-
lutely European backdrop in which England, France, and northern Europe
were linked much more explicitly than in Francesco Barbaro’s letter at the time
of the Council of Constance.
A semantic constellation12 radiates from the term Respublica litteraria
throughout Aldus’s writing and transforms it into the banner of a program and
a strategy: Studiosi bonarum litterarum, amantissimi bonarum litterarum, and
academia universalis are all different definitions for the same community of
philologists and readers, editors, and beneficiaries of texts published by Aldus
thanks to the support of Alberto III Pio, the Prince of Carpi.
In the dedication for Alberto Pio’s Astronomica, published in 1499, Aldus
mentions two Englishmen (Linacre and Grocyn) who came to Italy to study
“good letters,” just as Alcuin once left Ireland for the then-barbarian European
mainland. The two men would collaborate on the academia universalis, of
which Aldus’s philhellenic academy was one single link.13
In a preface dedicated to Marco Musurus in an edition of Statius’s Silvae in
1502, Aldus mentions other collaborators attracted to Italy from various loca-
tions in Europe:
Atque utinam plurimos id genus haberemus reipublicae litterariae bene-

factores! Quanquam plurimos speramus futuros non in Italia, solum,
sed et in Germania atque Galliis et apud toto orbe divisos Britannos. . . .
(If only we had a swarm of this kind of benefactors for the Republic of
Letters! Which is what we hope for, not only in Italy, but in Germany,
France, and as far as the Britons ‘who live at the end of the world.’ . . .)14
In the same year, in his dedication to Marino Sanuto in Ovid’s Metamor-

phoses, Aldus writes:
Sperabam equidem cum academicis nostris viris utriusque linguae perstu-

diosis, ut tecum inde reverso esse die, noctuque possemus atque de re litte-
raria communicare. (As for me, I hoped, with our learned academicians
knowledgeable in two languages, to share, upon your return, your com-
pany day and night to converse about literature.)15
For lack of a direct link between the scholar-senator Sanuto and the philo-
logical community assembled in Aldus’s bottega, the Ovid text published by
Aldus and dedicated to the senator, an enlightened patron of letters, serves to
establishes a dialogue and exchange between the two, through its inclusion in
the splendid library that the Venetian senator assembled at his home. The text
bears witness to the gratitude owed the statesman by philologists for the printing
privileges he obtained for them:
Pro republica litteraria ex hoc amplissimi sapientissimique senatus con-

sulto mihi omnium pene consensu decerneretur . . . (So that it is bestowed
upon me, in the name of the Republic of Letters and with the consent of
all, by a decree by this most august and wise senate . . .)16
In the dedication for Ovid’s Heroides, also dedicated to Marino Sanuto,

again in 1502, Aldus clarifies his views on the polarity, which was not neces-
sarily antithetical, and even less so antagonistic, between the “literary republic”
and “political society,” between the spiritual and worldly:
Vide quanta in te sit suavitas, mi Marine: equidem tecum esse, tecum

vivere semper velim. Quod quia non licet; maximis utriusque nostrum
occupationibus, meis quidem in republica litteraria, tuis vero in inclyta
hac Republica Veneta, in qua ne hora quidem vacare potes a muneribus
publicis. (See the effects of your kindness, dear Marino: I want to always
be and live with you, a joy prevented by our respective occupations,
for me in the Republic of Letters, for you in your glorious Republic of
Venice, where not an hour frees you from your public duties.)17
In a Supplicatio to Leo X, published in the beginning of Omnia Platonis

opera in September 1513, Aldus draws a parallel between, on one hand, the
political and religious vocation of the new pope, who wanted to reestablish
peace in Europe and propagate the Gospel throughout the world, and, on the
other, his zeal for bonae litteraie (good letters).18 In this elegant manifesto, the
sacerdotal power of the pope, head of the Respublica christiana, appears com-
plementary to the similarly spiritual though distinct authority of the prince of
the Respublica litteraria, which Aldus wished to become. The two authorities
were contributing to the same goal: peace and unity in Europe. They could col-
laborate on a shared terrain: bonae litteraie, the Greco-L atin literary heritage, a
terrestrial source of faith, hope, and charity.
As clearly demonstrated by Fritz Schalk, nobody provided more public‑

ity for the expression Respublica litteraria than Erasmus. It is nonetheless
worth noting that the phrase did not appear in his correspondence, or in that of
his interlocutors, until well after his stay in Venice, in 1508, with Aldus Manu-
tius.
Again in 1515, Erasmus sent a famous letter of allegiance to Rome, the com-
munis patria of men of letters around the world, addressed to Cardinal Riario.
Within it appears the Manutian doctrine of a close alliance between the Res-
publica christiana, led by the pope, and the Respublica litteraria, which had
its own structure but nonetheless benefited from pontifical patronage, whose
endeavors mirrored that of the apostolic priesthood, and which participated in
the same Roman universality.19
Beginning in 1517, the Manutian idea of a universal and autonomous com-
munity of men of letters continued to appear in various forms in Erasmus’s cor-
respondence, although an alliance with the papacy and the communion with
Rome were no longer evoked. Erasmus’s correspondents themselves designated
him as the sole leader—the princeps—of a civitas litteraria that not only had its
own structure but also an autonomous spiritual mission. Erasmus appeared to
accept this role of “literary pope,” admonishing secular states, flagellating pon-
tifical Rome, debating with Luther, and reigning at the “ceiling” of a violently
divided European “parliament,” which did not know how to resolve its quarrels
apart from using weapons or theological disputes. He wanted to be the custo-
dian of a spiritual power that was more disarmed, but more authentic because it
could be more unifying than other powers. Consider a few examples:
• (1517) letter to Budé: Erasmus mentions panegyricus eruditorum.20

• (1518) letter from Budé: He writes to Erasmus of a senatus doctorum
invested with the ultimate power to judge and glorify the merits of men.21
These are synonyms for the Respublica litteraria.
• (1523) letter to Budé: Erasmus mentions the familia et natio
litteratorum.22
• (1528) letter from Hubert Balland to Erasmus: The former qualifies his
illustrious correspondent as antistes reipublicae litterariae.23
• (1530) letters following the publication of Ciceronianus: Erasmus
repeatedly expresses his fear that he is not creating as great an uproar
within the Republic of Letters as that provoked by the Reformation within
the Christian Republic. Erasmus believed that while the two “Republics”
were deeply analogous and could be compared to one another, one was
superior to the other and should not allow itself to be divided against itself
as the other had been.24
To reinforce this needed unity among men of letters, the cornerstone of true
European unity, Erasmus tirelessly advocated the cult of friendship, the social
link distinctive to learned society and the counterbalance to the principles of
division and hatred that were ripping other human societies apart. In his corre-
spondence, Erasmus also specifies the conditions for admission to the Republic
of Letters, notably for younger people: each must “unite good letters with good
values, have an erudite culture in Greek and Latin (ultraque lingua doctus),
be a gentle and brilliant conversationalist,” and above all have a “highly devel-
oped and zealous sense of citizenship oriented toward the common good: let-
ters.”25 This same doctrine can be found throughout Adagia. Erasmus begins his
commentary on the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis with the following phrase:
“Neither the relationship of affinity nor of consanguinity binds congenial spirits
with closer or firmer bands, than an union in one common pursuit of liberal
knowledge and intellectual improvement.”26 For him and his correspondents,
the res litteraria was the common ground of the Respublica litteraria.
In a letter Budé sent to Erasmus, the great Hellenist Frenchman uses the
following formula: “that ocean of antiquity which by natural law is common
to all.”27 That was precisely the principle of unity missing from the Europe of
theologians and which allied philologists had to restore amid a fissured world in
order to teach it peace. But the Respublica litteraria, while a crusade for peace
and unity, was also an army, which had to combat formidable and numerous
unrelenting foes and which boasted its own generals and soldiers (militia). Phi-
lology itself was a war against a swarm of perverse enemies who wanted to main-
tain the authors of the res litteraria in silence and shadow in order to ensure they
were not heard. Erasmus refers to his troops as “citizens in arms.”
The legacy of medieval religious orders is also very visible in Erasmus’s vo-
cabulary, as it is in Petrarch’s. Erasmus, whose Civitas sive Respublica litteraria
resembled a chivalrous and monastic religious order, saw himself as the abbot
of lettered men, chief of the devotees to bonae litteraie, which did not prevent
him from imagining himself as the Muses’ grand priest.28 The savants of his Re-
public, like medieval clerks in the not-so-distant past, formed an aristocracy of
the mind in the vanguard of a humanity still immersed in blindness. Borrowing
Cicero’s theory that study constitutes a bond between men—“a kind of natu-
ral fellowship” that “most distances us from the nature of other animals”29—
Erasmus writes: “Men devoid of those letters that, not without reason, we refer
to as the classics scarcely merit the name of men.”30
This aristocracy of the mind recognized its leaders. In 1525, in a letter to Jean
Lallemand, Erasmus evokes Principes reipublicae litterariae, meaning himself,
Guillaume Budé, and Thomas More. Juan Luis Vivès, one of Erasmus’s Spanish
disciples, wrote about vera academia, scilicet conventus et consensus hominum
doctorum, pariter et bonorum. . . .31 Elsewhere, this same author wrote along
similar lines, but while emphasizing the spirit of freedom that characterized
men of letters:
Erigunt enim sese apud nationes omnes clara, excellentia, liberaque

ingenia impatientia servitutis, et jugum hoc stultissimae ac violentissi-
mae tyrannidis ex cervicibus suis animose depellunt, civesque suos ad
libertatem vocant, vindicabuntque totam prorsus litterariam civitatem
in libertatem longe suavissimam, qua tot saeculis caruerunt. . . . (Bright,
outstanding, liberal talents arising among all the nations are spiritedly
throwing off the yoke of this stupid and violent tyranny from their necks,
and exhorting their fellow citizens to freedom. The world of letters will
finally achieve that sweet liberty which has been absent for so many
centuries. . . .)32
That liberty placed men of letters in a critical position—in both meanings

of the term—in relation to the state and the church. It allowed them to be the
impartial conscience of institutions and societies.
Francesco Barbaro was Venetian, Aldus Manutius moved to Venice, and
Erasmus visited Venice. Clearly, the city of the doges played an important role
in the elaboration of the concept of the Respublica litteraria.33 In the beginning
of the eighteenth century, Historia sui temporis, which was written by Jacques-
Auguste de Thou, a Gallican friend of Paolo Sarpi, the complete edition of
which did not appear until 1734, when it was published in sixteen volumes in
London, was the most complete portrait of the European Republic of Letters
during the sixteenth century, as well as the first attempt to write European his-
tory from the critical perspective of the “Republic” of savants for which De
Thou himself served as an authority. But Historia, which was written in Latin,
and therefore whose circulation was long limited, still maintained the esoteric
character of the expression Respublica litteraria within an aristocratic circle of
learned men.34
It fell to Trajano Boccalini to ensure that the expression Respublica litteraria
was widely circulated throughout Europe, starting in Venice, a city that played
a decisive role before and alongside Paris. Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso,
which was published in Venice in 1612 and in Milan beginning in 1614, was an
immense literary success, first in Italy and then, following multiple translations
into various European languages, in France beginning in 1616, England in 1622
and 1626, Spain in 1634, as well as Germany, in numerous and partial transla-
tions.35 Like De Thou’s Historia, Ragguagli (which is difficult to separate from
another essay by Boccalini, Pietra del paragone politico)36 presents a veritable
political and autonomous view on Europe belonging to the Republic of Let-

ters. Boccalini also offers his readers a well-structured allegorical image of the
Republic of Letters centered around its prince, Apollo, who reigns over repub-
lics and kingdoms from Mount Parnassus and takes counsel from a senate com-
posed of classical and modern authors, living and dead, to render his political
and literary judgments. No other work did more to solidify, in the mind of a vast
international and interdenominational public, the concept of a kingdom of the
mind and the transhistoric council of authors from which that kingdom drew
its authority and the freedom of its judgments. Thanks to Boccalini, Mount Par-
nassus became an allegory for the Republic of Letters.
However, Pierre Bayle;37 Vigneul-Marville;38 Adrien Baillet;39 Daniel Georg
Morhof;40 Gottfried Leibniz, who mentions orbis litterata (the lettered world)
in his Acta eruditorum; and Denis de Sallo, who evokes the Republic of Let-
ters in the introduction to the first edition of Journal des savants (Journal of
Savants), published in 1665, brought the phenomenon considerable publicity
and authority during the reign of Louis XIV.41 During this period, Europe could
convince itself that it was harboring a power of the mind (studium)—alongside
its religious (sacerdotium), political, and military (imperium sive regnum) au-
thorities—which was highly organized and united and which assumed all the
authority that the Middle Ages had reserved for its universities. Through his
person and his work, Voltaire succeeded in encapsulating and exercising this
power, which he would retrospectively praise:
There never was a more universal correspondence kept between philoso-

phers than at this period, and Leibnitz contributed not a little to encour-
age it. A republic of letters was insensibly established in Europe, in the
midst of the most obstinate war, and the number of different religions;
the arts and sciences, all of them thus received mutual assistance from
each other, and the academies helped to form this republic. [. . .] The
truly learned of every denomination have strengthened the bonds of this
grand society of geniuses, which is universally diffused, and everywhere
independent.42
In 1790, Nicolas de Bonneville wrote the following statement in Le Tribun

du people (The People’s Tribune, no. IX), the organ of the Cercle social: “It is
from the Republic of Letters that we expect the triumph of patriotism and lib-
erty.” In September 1794, the Abbé Grégoire declared before the National Con-
vention: “Without the efforts of the Republic of Letters, the French Republic
would have yet to be born.”43
To understand Kant’s support of the French Revolution, and the Hegelian
notion of Reason at work throughout history, it is essential to note the grow-

ing influence—beginning in 1684, the date when Bayle’s Nouvelles de le Répu-
blique (News of the Republic) were first distributed, through 1792, when the
new studium made its first attempt to commandeer the French imperium—of
a spiritual power independent from states and churches, which was presented
more and more overtly by men of letters as European genius at work.
Nowhere was this French concept described and analyzed with greater care
and interest than in Germany during the reign of Louis XIV. I will limit my-
self to citing two Latin dissertations: the first by Christian Löber, which was
defended and published in Jena in 1696; the second by George Prit, defended
and published in Leipzig in 1698.44 In the latter, Prit reverses a fact established
by Löber—that the Respublica litteraria is not a political society, but a private
sodality—in its favor. According to Prit, the Republic of Letters was a political
society superior to all others, thanks to its nature, origin, and form. Its nature
reunited
illam virorum doctorum societatem, quae circa bonas artes et scientias

expolien das, promouendas, propagandasque est occupata; quae cum per
universitatem orbis terrarum sit dispersa . . . (this society of savants, fully
occupied with cultivating, promoting, and propagating the sciences and
the arts, which is dispersed across all regions of the universe . . .).
By its origin, which, according to Francis Bacon,45 was different from all the po-
litical city-states, for it was born from the premise that the principle and means
of repairing man’s descent into ignorance can be found in the history of man,
the history of the Republic of Letters is therefore the infinitely more generous
and redemptive other half of the violent, blind, political, and military history
of nations. Finally, its form: the Republic of Letters was not restricted to any
one territory but could exist anywhere that the degree of barbarism had not de-
scended too far beneath animality. The Republic did not have a “head,” in the
sense of an absolute sovereign, nor did it espouse religious or doctrinaire ortho-
doxy. Tolerance reigned supreme: nemo ad religionem cogi possit (no one can
be forced into worship).46
The Respublica litteraria was predicated on equality (paritas) between its
elected citizens and governed by universal suffrage, which determined the value
of works and the merit of men in its ranks. It was a democracy, but one in which
votes eadem non numero sed suo quodque pondere aestimentur (are estimated
not by their number but by their weight).47 According to that definition, the
French Republic could be viewed in Germany as the political triumph of an
inherently literary ideal.
Still according to Prit, the Republic of Letters reveled in a freedom of con-

science, speech, and expression. Human error was allowed, though at times
suppressed and ridiculed with critical irony. This freedom was not the same as
freedom in the civic and political sense; it was freedom circa mentis sense, free-
dom “of thought,” related to freedom of both oral and written expression, and
not the unlimited freedom postulated by Spinoza in chapter XX of Tractatus
theologico-politicus.48
In reality, Prit was picturing a Republic of Letters in the image of the
Lutheran university in Leipzig where he presented his dissertation: an assem-
bly both disciplined and liberal, cautious and open-minded, good and sound,
and frankly very different from the French version of the Republic of Letters,
which since its debut had developed outside of the university system. That dif-
ference clearly escaped the author, who situated the two universes within the
same ideal structure.
To conclude, I propose two angles of research: the first lexicographical in
the broadest meaning of the term, and the second more akin to a historical
sociology that pays particular attention to the very different institutional and
intellectual contexts in which the idea of the Respublica litteraria appeared
over four centuries.
An exhaustive list, as far as is possible, of the occurrences of the Respublica
litteraria and the semantic field surrounding it is in itself highly desirable. It is
equally important, however, to note that the history of this concept is punctu-
ated by its use by leading thinkers, or by the reflections they dedicated to the
“spiritual power” of learned men, who never expressly mentioned the Republic
of Letters. Thus, for example, Samuel Sorbière49 was able to deduce a theory
about the Republic of Letters from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, even
though the concept itself was absent from the philosopher’s vocabulary. The
Republic of Letters is often present in places where it does not visibly appear.
Today, there is a great deal of discussion and writing on the sociology of intel-
lectuals. Unfortunately, this recent discipline appears to ignore the fact that it is
built upon a formidable tradition of learned men themselves reflecting on the
specific society they were forming within Europe’s political and religious soci-
eties. The rediscovery of this tradition, building upon the political philosophies
of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, though remaining clearly distinct from the his-
tory of political ideas, is perhaps the most promising field of research currently
available to us. And for that we owe thanks to Paul Dibon and to what he refers
to as his “discourse on method” in his article on savant correspondences.
2
NICOLAS CLAUDE FABRI DE PEIRESC:
PRINCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
The entry for “Peiresc” in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique

(The Dictionary Historical and Critical) is brief, albeit extraordinarily dense
and unusual in its enthusiasm:
No man rendered more services to the Republic of Letters than this one.
He was in a way its procurator-general: he encouraged Authors, he pro-
vided them lighting and materials, he used his revenues to purchase or
copy the rarest and more useful monuments. His trade of Letters spread
to all parts of the World: philosophical experiences, rarities of Nature,
productions of Art, Antiquities, History, and Languages were all equal
objects of his care and curiosity. The details of all these things can be
found in his Life, wisely and elegantly composed by Pierre Gassendi.
It is not un-useful to note that this man celebrated by all of Europe,
whose death prompted so many Poets to weep, in so many languages,
and caused the Humorists of Rome to go into ceremonial grieving, was
unknown to many Frenchmen, men of merit and learning [Born on
December 1, 1580]. He died on June 24, 1637.1
In his precious notes, Bayle quotes from the correspondence between Jean-
Louis Guez de Balzac and Jean Chapelain to support his conclusions. Indeed,
Balzac writes, “in a mediocre fortune he [Peiresc] had the thoughts of a great
lord, and without the friendship of Augustus, he would not have become Maece-
nas.” Balzac continues, “Do you believe in the rest, that Monsieur de La Roche-
foucauld had never heard of our Mr. de Peiresc, and that just as many other per-
sons who are neither barbaric nor ignorant have no knowledge of him either?”2
While these seventeenth-century accounts may justify my chosen title,
“Peiresc: Prince of the Republic of Letters” (Bayle called him its “procurator-
general,” Balzac referred to him as “Maecenas”), they also raise the question,
Why was Peiresc relatively unknown in his own country, France, beginning in
the seventeenth century? This question prompts two additional ones: Why did
Gassendi, author of the laudable Life of Peiresc, which was published in 1641,3
26
Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 27
write in Latin, thereby limiting the work’s circulation? And why, for that matter,
was that Latin edition of Peiresc’s Life, which was republished several times in
Holland and rapidly translated into English, not translated in France until 1770,
and only then in an abridged form, which omitted a large portion of Peiresc’s
scientific activities? Charles Perrault’s homage to Peiresc, in his Hommes illus-
tres (Illustrious Men, 1697), reveals the detachment already felt by the “Mod-
erns” toward this “Ancient” as strange and distant in their eyes as Varro or Pliny.
Perrault does not mention (and had not read) Gassendi’s Vita. He somewhat
confuses the magic-imbued science of Giovanni Battista Della Porta and the
much more critical science of Peiresc, who knew the polymath in Naples, but
was one generation younger:
It is difficult to find a time when the Person (our present subject) was a
Child; for in the first Years of his Life, the desire of Learning, which was
always very strong in him, made him despite all the Sports and Amuse-
ments of Childhood; and he took no pleasure, but in listening to what
was told him either Useful or Curious. Wisdom came to him so early,
that at the Age of 9 or 10, he tutor’d his younger Brother, who study’d in
the same College, and who look’d upon him and hearken’d to him as his
Father and Preceptor. At his leaving the College, they gave him Matters
to teach him to Ride, to Fence, and to Dance; but as his whole Inclina-
tion was turn’d to Letters, he never did his Exercises but in presence of his
Masters, employing the rest of his time either in Reading or Extracting
Books, or in Composing. He set himself then to the study of Medals, of
Inscriptions, of Tombs, and other Monuments; and in fine, of every thing
which could afford an exact and particular knowledge of antiquity. In a
short time, he surpass’d the most Able in that Science, and made a con-
siderable store of such things as exercise and nourish with pleasure this
laudable Curiosity.
He study’d afterwards the Law under the best Masters of that time.
And because it would be too long to report all the kinds of Study whereto
he apply’d, I shall content my self to say, That there is no sort of Litera-
ture whereto he did not devote himself, and which he hath not in some
manner exhausted; that there is scarce any Library in Europe, which he
did not see and examine; no Men of Learning, whom he did not know,
and to whom was not beneficial, in communicating to them, either his
Knowledge, or his Books, or his Medals, or even his Purse; and if he hath
receiv’d some good Offices from them, he fail’d not to return them with
interest. His House was a kind of Academy, not only because of the great
number of Men of Letters who came to see him; but only to consider it
with regard to his Domestics, who knew all of ’em something with distinc-
tion, even to the Lacquys, whereof the least could serve as a Reader upon
occasion; and had the Ingenuity to Bind Books, and to Bind ’em with a
singular neatness.
He had in the number of his Friends Baptiste de la Porte, most pro-
found in the knowledge of the deepest Secrets of Nature, of whom he
learnt every thing that he knew the most curious in those sort of Sciences.
He convers’d with (in particular) the excellent Painter, Rubens, upon the
knowledge of Medals, and upon his Art of Painting, whereof he knew
all the Beauties, as also of most other Arts. He liv’d a long time with the
excellent Monsieur du Vair, first President of the Parliament of Aix, where
he was Counsellor, and join’d himself to him in so strict a Friendship, that
when the King had given the Seals to Monsieur du Vair, he follow’d him
to Paris, where he never made any other use of his interest with him, but
for the service of his Friends, or to procure himself an easier entrance into
the Libraries and Cabinets, where he hop’d to be able to satisfie his curi-
osity, Monsieur du Vair, who imparted to him his greatest Secrets, and
took his Advice upon the most important Affairs of State, could never get
him to accept of any Favour or Kindness of all those he offer’d him, but
one very small Benefice.
After the death of Monsieur du Vair, who left him Heir of all his
Medals, he return’d to Aix to revisit his ancient Library. There with his
Brother Palamede Fabri Sieur de Valance, he continu’d his Commerce of
Letters and Curiosities, not only with all the old World, (which did not
suffice to satisfie him), but with all the New; from whence was brought
him, without ceasing, the marvelous Productions both of Art and Nature.
He died in June 1637, aged 57 Years. He was of the celebrated Academy
of Humorists of Rome, who render’d him the fame Honours which are
done to the principal Officers of that Academy, altho’ he was but a plain
Academic, his Merit prevailing upon the Custom. The Hall was hung with
Black, and his Buste was set in an eminent place. James Bouchard Pari-
sian, and of that Academy, made his Funeral Oration in Latin, a Piece
of great Eloquence, in the middle of an infinite crowd of Men of Learn-
ing, and in presence of ten Cardinals, among whom were the two Car-
dinals Barberini. The Funeral Elogiums made in his praise are not to be
number’d: There is compos’d a great Volume of ’em, in above 40 different
Tongues. He is interr’d in the Church of the Jacobins at Aix; and these
Words are read on his Tomb, where also his parents are bury’d, Tumulus
Fibricorum.4
Amnesia had already largely taken hold. All Bayle could do with his Dictio-
nary was set limits on how far that forgetting would extend. Although Peiresc’s
immense correspondence had been written in French and Italian, he had none-
theless become the figurehead for the Latin Republic of Letters. He had been
recognized and celebrated across Europe by a community of savants who con-
sidered Latin to be their language, both technical and literary. Even though
Peiresc wrote and spoke in vernaculars, he viewed French and Italian as mere
utilitarian languages to communicate and share information. If he had ever at-
tempted to produce a formal scientific treatise or a literary work, he undoubt-
edly, like his friend Gassendi, would have chosen to write and publish it in a
humanist’s polished Latin. But neither his place in the Republic of Letters nor
his vocation as its modest and tireless servant allowed him to dedicate himself to
the work of an author. He had a vision of his own role that was both too elevated
and too humble. Peiresc, as Bayle accurately wrote, “encouraged his authors,”
but he had no desire to become one himself. His conception of the office of the
“prince of the Republic of Letters” was in this respect different from Erasmus’s,
and even more so from Justus Lipsius’s, who though unquestionably a savant,
and eminent among them, was an “author” above all and in the most literary
meaning of the term, which included an author’s “self-love.”
Even figures like Joseph Justus Scaliger, Salmasius, or Mersenne were, in
this respect, less “princely” than Peiresc, who modeled himself after Gian Vin-
cenzo Pinelli and himself found a disciple in Rome in Cassiano dal Pozzo. He
rigorously adhered to the noble and altruistic order of invention, inspired by an
erudite and polymathic encyclopedia in the Aristotelian, Varronian, and Plinian
vein, which he strove to nourish and which he rendered fruitful by coordinat-
ing European collaboration between specialists. But Peiresc himself was the
opposite of a specialist, though he did specialize in numerous subjects simul-
taneously. He was content with his role as the pilot of a shifting mass of knowl-
edge: he never needed to write either reports or specialized treatises himself.
One of Gassendi’s objectives in the Vita of Peiresc was precisely to show that
this absence of completed and published works was not due to intellectual ste-
rility, and even less so to laziness, but to an excess of invention—a cornucopia
of new and profound ideas, with which Peiresc generously advanced the science
of his time. That altruism extended to a forgetting of the self was a capital trait of
the scientific ethical code as understood by Peiresc. It mattered to him to set the
example for others, in the name of primus inter pares. He was too endowed with
a sense of scientific community, and the collective nature of its work and results,
to allow himself to claim any personal ownership, which would have served his
own fame. However, I reiterate and insist that if he had been guilty of such a sin
of avarice, he would have done so in Latin. In writing his Vita, Gassendi became
Peiresc’s posthumous spokesperson, draping him in a purple Latin robe that this
great thinker had refused to don in his lifetime.
To fulfill his exceptionally noble and humble role as the “procurator-general”
of letters, Peiresc contented himself with developing remarkable conversational
skills with which he nourished his guests and his no-less-remarkable correspon-
dence with savants all across the world, which fed their research and coordi-
nated their efforts. Only one part of this magnum opus, the memory of which
Gassendi’s Vita hoped to save, was ever published. And following Tamizey de
Larroque, it fell to Agnès Bresson to bring what is perhaps the most memorable
chapter of Peiresc’s opus to light, which she did with as much knowledge as
devotion: the savant’s correspondence with Claude Saumaise.5
Peiresc’s best friends (and spiritual successors after his death in 1637) were
the Dupuy brothers, Pierre and Jacques, two Parisians in continuous contact
with Aix and Belgentier, where Peiresc spent most of his time after leaving Paris
in 1623. Like both Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and Peiresc, the Dupuy brothers did
not publish anything apart from their Traitez des droits et des libertez de l’Église
gallicane (Treatise on the Rights and Liberties of the Gallican Church, 1639),
written on Richelieu’s orders, and various “memoirs” about the French mon-
archy that directly reflected Pierre Dupuy’s responsibilities as a royal archivist
before he handed his duties over to Nicolas Rigault. The brothers’ encyclopedic
knowledge was not as extensive as Peiresc’s, however. But they too were situated
at the center of a vast network of erudite correspondence, most often conducted
in French. The library where they entertained everyday (first Jacques-Auguste
de Thou’s, followed by the king’s) was a “theater of memory” where conversa-
tion between Parisian savants or visiting foreigners, themselves “living, breath-
ing libraries,” fostered a permanent council of minds. But when Pierre Dupuy
died, in 1651, Nicolas Rigault, his lifelong friend, published a Vita Petri Puteani,
which was accompanied by a mournful homage in the form of poetry and prose,
most of which was written in Latin6 by regular visitors to the “cabinet Dupuy.”
Even within this Gallican milieu, which included Guez de Balzac and which
viewed the emergence of literature written in French with a highly favorable
gaze, Latin was still the noble language shared by all European men of letters
and the language of literary glory. In 1718, Pierre Daniel Huet was still publish-
ing his Memoirs in Latin in The Hague, as Jacques-Auguste de Thou did in the
beginning of the seventeenth century.
Yet that fidelity to Latin had been a lost cause for some time, especially in
France, where the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” began in 1667
with Louis Le Laboureur’s Avantages de la langue françoise sur la latine (Ad-
vantages of French over Latin). When Gassendi published his Vita Peireskii in
1641, Descartes’s Discours de la method (Discourse on the Method) in Leiden,
which was in French, had been published four years earlier; Mersenne had pub-
lished his Harmonie universelle (Universal Harmony) in 1636 in French (the
Latin translation would not appear until 1648). As steadfast as Francis Bacon
in England, Descartes and Mersenne championed a “new science” in France,
which broke with the neo-Aristotelian encyclopedia emphasized by figures like
Peiresc. This “new science” wanted to dispense with “ancient authorities,” in the
same way that it could dispense with Latin. It found its own language in mathe-
matical symbols. Liberated from the weight of philology and humanist erudi-
tion, the movement quickly attracted the sympathy of the “mondains,” new
“men of letters” who read ancient classics in translations by Amyot or Perrot
d’Ablancourt, and who knew classical philosophy thanks to Montaigne’s Essays.
As Balzac wrote, quoted by Bayle, it was possible even during Peiresc’s lifetime
to encounter “many persons” of letters in Paris, in that new, restrained mean-
ing, who were entirely unaware of Peiresc’s rank and role within the Latin and
international Republic of Letters. That explains why the Vita Peireskii was so
quickly forgotten and ignored in France. Gassendi’s own philosophical and sci-
entific works, written entirely in Latin, would have met a similar fate if one of
his disciples, François Bernier, had not endeavored after his master’s death to
publish Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (Gassendi’s Abridged Philoso-
phy) in 1674, for use by the “new [French] men of letters”: this assured the dis-
semination of Gassendi’s ideas not only in Paris, but in all of eighteenth-century
French Europe. Humanist Latin’s drop in prestige in France during the reign
of Louis XIV would bring about a transformation of the Republic of Letters. A
French Republic of Letters, of the Enlightenment, with many more citizens,
began to replace the Republic of the Renaissance, whose origins traced back to
Petrarch. Bayle, the author of the Dictionary Historical and Critical as well as
the publicist behind Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News of the Re-
public of Letters) understood that context better than anyone. In his Suite des
réflexions sur le prétendu jugement du public (Continuation of the Remarks on
the Pretended Judgment of the Public), he writes:
[W]e live in an age where they read rather for amusement than in order
to grow learned. If I had written my Dictionary according to the taste of
Abbot Renaudot [who had banned the Dictionary . . .], no body would
have printed it, and had any body run the hazard of putting it to the press,
he would not have sold a hundred copies. [. . .] If I had written in Latin,
I should have taken another method; and had the taste of the former age
prevailed, I should have given a place in my book to nothing but litera-
ture [meaning: historical and philological erudition for specialists]. But

the times are altered. Good things alone do not take, but disgust. We must
mingle them with others, if we would have the reader take the patience to
peruse them. Veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes, Cum dare conantur,
prius oras pocula circum etc. [Like those who, healing children with bitter
absinthe, before giving it to them dampen the cup’s rim] [Lucretius, De
rerum natura, book 5, v. 11–12]. [. . .]
[Henry] Valesius and the learned men of his rank deem that to be
superfluous in a book which they know already, or do not hope to turn
some day to their advantage. But they ought to sympathize with the
necessities of the half-learned, and the vulgar of the Republic of Letters.
They ought to know that it is divided into many more classes than the
Roman Republic ever was. Each class has its wants, and it is the part of
compilations to serve them all, some one way, and some another. They
are therefore mistaken notwithstanding their great knowledge, when they
say absolutely, this thing is useful and necessary, that is superfluous. Are
not these terms relative? Say rather, this is useful or useless to me, and to
those that are like me, useful or useless however to a hundred other men
of letters. It is not a just way of reasoning to say, such a book would better
deserve the approbation of the most learned men in Europe, if it was
shorter, therefore it ought to have been shorter. Softly, gentlemen; there
is nothing useless in these volumes which you mention; for what may not
serve you, may serve several others: and I am very sure that if all the citi-
zens of the Republic of Letters were brought together, that each might
give his opinion upon what should be taken away, and what should be
left, in a vast compilation, it would appear that the passages which some
would throw out, would be precisely those which others would retain.
A hundred reflections might be made not only on the true properties of
works of this kind, but likewise on the inseparable union of criticism and
trifles. Many might also be made on the difference which lies between
a good book and a useful one: between an author who only proposes to
himself the approbation of a few scientifics, and an author who prefers
the general benefit to the glory of meriting approbation, which is not less
hard to attain than a crown.7
The decline of Latin as the official and esoteric language of knowledge was
accompanied by that of the presupposed fundamental element of Renaissance-
era humanism—antiquity as a reference for truth and topic of erudite research.
The distrust of the Ancients’ erudition and authority that had aided thinkers
like Francis Bacon and later Descartes gradually spread as the preeminence of
classic Latin diminished and the use of modern languages increased, in par-
ticular French, even within scientific disciplines. Leibniz lamented this evolu-
tion for depriving the Republic of Letters of a truly universal language, which
he himself employed. Fortunately, great minds, conservative and modern alike,
ensured a certain continuity during this slow “crisis of the European mind,”
which was as epistemological as it was linguistic, by preserving the fundamen-
tals of humanism of the previous centuries, as if on Noah’s ark. The most deter-
mined, and also the most precocious, of these “smugglers” was without a doubt
Montaigne. In his Essays, which he began to write at the end of the sixteenth
century, he condensed all the philosophical work of the “return to antiquity”
accomplished since Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, and placed it within reach and
in the maternal language of the “new men of letters,” which the seventeenth
century would name “honnestes gens.” Pierre Daniel Huet was another of these
“smugglers,” during the reign of Louis XIV. But no one was more efficient than
Pierre Bayle: in his Dictionary intended for the public of the new Republic of
Letters, he assembled, in French, the riches accumulated by the old republic,
in the savant Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Bayle had
himself renounced. The “Peiresc” entry in the Dictionary is characteristic in
this respect: by summarizing in fifty lines Gassendi’s Vita of Peiresc, which had
been “unfashionable” for quite some time and for various reasons, the article
safeguards its substance for the centuries to come. But what a drastic abridge-
ment! Requier’s limited version in 1770, which remained largely obscure, did
little to rectify Bayle’s heavy editing.8 How odd and wonderful that today—an
era in which the philosophy of the Enlightenment and even the “new” science
of Descartes, Newton, and Darwin have become historical objects susceptible
to deconstruction, and when French, a universal language not so long ago, is as
menaced as Latin was in the seventeenth century—the Life of Peiresk written
by Gassendi has finally been translated in its entirety, at the very moment when
Agnès Bresson published the correspondence between Peiresc and Saumaise,
itself forgotten for three centuries. The owl of Minerva, wrote Hegel, only flies
at dusk. Let’s say, more prosaically, that the end of the belief in linear and ir-
resistible progress has made us more indulgent toward the states of learning
and forms of wisdom that positivist history had believed to be definitively “sur-
passed” by the irresistible progress of reason.
It is interesting to note that the fate of Pierre Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii was
very different in England, where the vitality of the English language was not
linked, as in France, to the Moderns’ blinding victory over the Latin of the
Ancients. In 1657, William Rand translated the Vita Peireskii into English
under the title The Mirror of True Nobility, and Gentility, Being the Life of
N. C. Fabritius, Lord of Peiresc. This Latin masterpiece of seventeenth-century

academic biography thus became a part of England’s literary heritage. Even
better, in 1681 in London, William Bates published a collection of Latin Lives
of the giants of the Republic of Letters, a veritable Parnassus of Europe’s great
minds. The collection, of course, included biographies of great humanists and
protectors of erudite, English humanism like Henry Chichele, the archbishop
of Canterbury, who founded All Souls College in Oxford with Henry VI, and
Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library. But it also prominently
featured the humanist princes of continental Europe. Thus we can read, for ex-
ample, in their original Latin texts, Beatus Rhenanus’s Life of Erasmus, Louis
Le Roy’s Life of Budé, Paolo Gualdo’s Life of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Leo Alla-
tius’s Life of Julius Caesar Lagalla, with a dedication by Gabriel Naudé to Guy
Patin, Nicolas Rigault’s Life of Pierre Dupuy, and his brother Adrien’s Life of
Henri de Valois. At the same time, the “Modern” Fontenelle, in France, was
inaugurating a tradition of “academic eulogies” for savants, the first collection
of which, published in 1719, was significantly preceded by the Histoire du re-
nouvellement de l’Académie des sciences en 1699 (History of the Reorganiza-
tion of the Academy of Sciences in 1699). This French and “modern” tradition
of academic eulogies, which would be continued by d’Alembert in the eigh-
teenth century, broke radically with the literary genre of the Vitae associated
with the former humanist Republic of Letters. Thus a new funeral rite spread
across Louis XIV’s France within a new, and primarily French, Republic of
Letters, whose central institutions were the royal academies. Little matter that
the Protestant Pierre Desmaizeaux, a friend of Bayle’s and Saint-Évremond’s,
published in French, though in Amsterdam, the Vies of Saint-Évremond (1711),
Boileau (1712), and Bayle (1732) after the model of Latin Vitae established by
the former Republic of Letters; his was a provincial effort. For that matter, Des-
maizeaux never dreamt of translating Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii. In England, on
the contrary, thanks to Rand’s translation as well as to Bates’s collection, the
tradition of the Vitae endured, giving rise in 1792 to that masterpiece of phi-
lologist savant biographies—James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, which
itself energized the genre of Life and Letters within nineteenth- and twentieth-
century England. This quite selective literary genre served as a Mount Parnas-
sus in Great Britain and even, in some respects, as the equivalent of the French
Academy. The first complete translation of the Vita Peireskii into French by
Roger Lassalle is therefore a recent reparation, and a Belgian initiative,9 for the
long French injustice dealt one of the former heroes of the literary civilization
of France and Europe.
But what exactly was the Latin and European Republic of Letters in Peiresc’s
day? And how could this Republic, never mentioned by either political histo-
rians or historians of national literatures, have had plebian “princes”? As previ-
ously noted, the concept of Respublica litterarum or Respublica litteraria (the
public service of letters or the literary state) appeared for the first time in 1417,
in the correspondence between the young, noble, Venetian humanist Fran-
cesco Barbaro and the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini. It was shaped
on the model of the Respublica christiana, which, in the Middle Ages, was the
legal expression designating the Catholic Church as a universal institution that
gathered and governed all Christians according to a constitution that was simul-
taneously monarchist, under the authority of a prince (the pope); aristocratic, as
the pope was assisted by bishops, heads of monastic orders, and cardinals; and
democratic, since all Christians, clergy and nonclergy, entered into the mysti-
cal communion of the church without distinctions of nationality, language, or
rank. As a legal state, albeit based on canonical law, the Respublica christiana
transcended the various temporal and purely human states of civil law. When
the Italian humanists following in Petrarch’s footsteps wanted to give them-
selves, and their program of study (the studia humanitatis, or literary humani-
ties), a quasi-legal identity, it was entirely natural that they modeled their com-
munity and the laws governing it on the Respublica christiana. The Republic
of Letters was perceived to be a studious order within the Christian Republic,
and from its debut, the alliance between Respublica litteraria and Respublica
christiana was very strong. If Petrarch and his successors opposed the scholastic
science of Europe’s northern universities with their studia humanitatis, it was
only to reform and reenergize the church through study of the church fathers of
the first centuries, as well as by a cultivated resurrection of Christian antiquity,
which was inseparable from the Greco-Latin civilization of the Roman Empire.
But once the Italian humanists’ grand aspiration to reconnect to the genius and
faith of antiquity was transplanted to Europe’s Gothic and scholastic north, it
took a turn that was infinitely more dangerous for the unity of the Respublica
christiana and the Roman orthodoxy. Early on, northern humanism, which was
much less attached to Italic tradition, began to lean toward freer thinking and
a literary and scientific theological “modernity” that was difficult for the Ro-
man Church to accept. Even so, an influential northern humanist, Erasmus,
appropriated the originally Italian concept of the Respublica litteraria, which
he made into a principle and symbol of unity for Christian Europe, and gladly
accepted to be named its prince. In effect, he was the first prince of the Res-
publica litteraria of the north to be widely recognized. It is significant not only
that this prince never wanted to break with the Catholic Church communion,
but that he was a hair’s breadth away from receiving the title of cardinal from
Pope Paul III Farnese. Pietro Bembo, prince of the Italian Respublica litteraria,
became a cardinal in 1536. Popes had long understood the symbolic authority
of the Respublica litteraria and had done their best to link it to the unity of the
Roman communion.
The Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist Reformations could have ripped
apart the European fabric of the Respublica litteraria if the Republic had not,
in accordance with Erasmus’s wishes, successfully maintained (in Latin) bonds
of cooperation and mutual personal esteem between humanists of opposing
faiths. Even more than the printed book, an easy target of censorship and re-
pression, it was thanks to the more confidential vehicles of correspondence,
conversation, travel, and private libraries that a program and network of savant
cooperation throughout the sixteenth century could be maintained, in spite of
partisan passions and sectarian persecutions. During the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, the common reference, and the core of a relatively universal
program of research, among Catholics and learned Protestants remained the
great, unifying light of Greco-L atin and Christian antiquity. Latin remained
the language of research. No one did more than Erasmus, in his letters, to foster
this feeling of belonging and cooperation in the savant’s quest for a common
homeland of the mind. He had named the enemy, and it was less theological
heresy than ignorance of antiquity and the “barbarism” that accompanied it.
Erasmus’s militant Respublica litteraria, en route toward the rediscovery of an-
tiquity’s forgotten wisdom, was forced to fight for survival on all fronts. Though
entirely pacifistic, the Republic nonetheless voluntarily resorted to metaphors
of war, as penned by its leader. In a 1525 letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, Eras-
mus writes:
for we see two factions, which are generally at each other’s throats, unit‑
ing in a surprising coalition to destroy all that is elegant and refined in
literature. One side has the impudence to proclaim that the sects are the
children of the humanities, and the other includes among its members
many who detest everything that has been a part of our human existence
in the past. So that nothing may remain unchanged, they want to sup-
press all humane learning. But without this the life of man would be
a poor and shabby thing.10
To prevent that vandalism, Erasmus multiplied his calls for resistance and co-
operation—in Latin—to his peers, both Protestant and Catholic men of letters,
writing as the head of “a studious Senate and people,” as the princips of the let-
tered Republic. In 1526, he writes to Conrad Goclenius, “I thought it would be
useful to the Republic of Letters if fanfare of this kind encouraged you to lead
to the end the battle against both barbarians and non-believers.”11 He never tires
of reminding his interlocutor that that battle depends on an accord between the
hearts, and the unity of views, of men of letters, whom he depicts as a council
reigning in permanence, granting rewards to its best members, celebrating the
dead, and always working in concert. Erasmus himself is qualified by his corre-
spondents as, in turn, princeps scientiae, princeps litterarum sacrarum et profa-
narum, princeps eruditionis universae, heros, and princeps Musarum. Erasmus’s
role as Apollo on Europe’s Mount Parnassus was challenged by Bembo in Italy,
and Guillaume Budé in France, who was already asserting the universality and,
in Budé’s eyes, unrivaled preeminence of the French Republic of Letters. But
Erasmus’s spiritual empire, which was recognized by pope, emperor, and the
English, German, and Flemish nobility, was not tied to one state or one national
language. Peiresc’s seventeenth-century principality was an admirable blend of
the legacies of Budé, Bembo, and Erasmus; it was truly and exceptionally Euro-
pean. After Peiresc’s death in 1637, Europe would learn to rally behind a largely
French Republic of Letters.
The linguistic and national rifts dividing political and religious Europe were
diminished within the Republic of Letters by the solidarity between lettered
men against various barbarian forces. The question of who was the leader of this
invisible state was one of the greatest uncertainties in intellectual politics dur-
ing the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. When a
young Peiresc visited Padua and then Rome in 1599, France’s eclipse during the
Wars of Religion was facilitating the emergence of two main poles of advanced
humanist study, Brabant, in Holland, and Venice. At the time, three figureheads
of the Republic of Letters could be identified: the first two, rivals in the north,
were the Protestant Joseph Justus Scaliger,12 a professor at the University of Lei-
den, whose successor would be Claude Saumaise13 and later Pierre Bayle, and
the Catholic Justus Lipsius, a professor at the University of Louvain; the third
was the Italian Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. He was based in the Republic of Venice,
in Padua, home to one of the most celebrated universities in Europe. In 1599,
the situation was changing, thanks to the peace brought to France by Henri IV,
who had just published the Edict of Nantes. In Paris, a prestigious parliamen-
tary magistrate, Jacques-Auguste de Thou, assembled an encyclopedic library
in his residence on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts, which, upon his death in 1617,
became the headquarters of the “Cabinet Dupuy” and the increasingly uncon-
tested center of the European Republic of Letters until 1651. Beginning in the
1630s, Pierre Dupuy was regarded as the “(Gallican) pope of Paris.” But Paris’s
appropriation of the principality of the humanist Republic of Letters could
never have succeeded so well if Peiresc, in the South of France, had not spirited
Italy’s traditional literary principality away from it, using both shrewdness and
unrelenting diplomacy. (Pinelli, Cardinal Bembo’s successor, had governed that
principality until 1601.) Peiresc was very close to the Dupuy brothers, De Thou’s
successors, and apparently a regular visitor to their “cabinet” during his stay in
Paris between 1617 and 1623. His position was therefore quasi-official. Alongside
the Keeper of the Seals Guillaume du Vair, he supported men of letters, had
their works published, and endeavored to reinforce cooperation among savants.
In a way, this era marks the first French golden age for the Republic of Letters.
After his return to Aix, Peiresc remained the privileged correspondent of the
Dupuy brothers. With his Parisian friends, Peiresc had constructed a role for
France, now politically reconciled on the domestic front, as the geometric cen-
ter of learned Europe through a two-pronged, well-coordinated motion based
in two points in France: Aix, turned to the south, and Paris, turned to the north
and the east. The Republic of Letters would experience both its peak and a radi-
cal metamorphosis in Paris.
Returning to Peiresc’s debut, it is noteworthy (Gassendi’s Vita is extremely
insightful and precise in this respect) that, from his first steps onto Italian soil,
he was able to gain recognition abroad, from Scaliger and Lipsius, and earn
respect in Italy from Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. It is no less significant that Pei-
resc designed his peregrinatio academica along two axes: the first leading to
Italy, where he remained for three years, refining his erudite knowledge of an-
tiquity and forging friendships with all the leading Italian humanists; the other
to northern Europe, to England and Holland, where he had his all-important
meeting with Joseph Justus Scaliger, the philological genius of the sixteenth
century, and finally Flanders, where he became friendly with the Duke of Aar-
schot, to whom Henry IV had granted the title of Duke of Croÿ. By the time
Peiresc completed this voyage, nearly triumphal, in 1606, at the age of twenty-
six, he was already a star in the international savant community, and according
to Gassendi, had earned the title of princeps in Italy. That Italian recognition of
a Frenchman marked the end of an era. It also revealed the extent of Peiresc’s
conservative and traditionalist genius. Like Montaigne, he was much more con-
cerned with synthesis than rupture. For his friends, as Peiresc writes to Du May
on October 8, 1635: “The Muses seem to have abandoned the warm countries
long ago, in search of cooler air in your quarters.”14 Though perhaps that was
mere flattery. In fact, Peiresc did not appear entirely convinced of ultramon-
tane inferiority, at least according to two letters written to Gabriel Naudé.15 His
return to Aix in 1623 merely delayed Paris’s supreme preeminence by ten years.
During that period, Paris, the capital of the Republic of Letters, had a kind of
Mediterranean foothold not far from Avignon, where the great adventure of
humanist letters began. After Peiresc, that link to Italy disappeared.
In Gassendi’s account of the young Peiresc’s time in Italy, each word counts.
Everything is written for an audience of the initiated, in the language of the ini-
tiated: the Latin of savants. This account allows us to confidently reconstruct
the rites of passage and recognition that, in accordance with a tradition that was
already three centuries old, and which had reached its ultimate degree of matu-
rity, could grant access to Europe’s literary principality. For that, and not his
study of law, was the true objective of Peiresc’s long Italian stay. He went there
to study antiquity in its museum, as it were, and to be crowned by the successors
of Petrarch, Valla, and Bembo.
When Peiresc left for Padua, he was carrying a passport duly issued by one
of the great reigning figures of the Republic of Letters in northern Europe:
Justus Lipsius. In his collection Lettres aux Français (Letters to Frenchmen),
published the previous year, Lipsius included those he had addressed to Pei-
resc. In Italy, one of Justus Lipsius’s correspondents in Padua, Thomas Segetus,
confirmed and attested to Lipsius’s distant recommendation: “To the Genius
of Provence in France; to the wit and in unripe yeers ripe vertues of Nicolaus
Fabricius, I consecrate this testimonial.”16 It was the type of endorsement that
opened every door, even that of the most punctilious of savants. Another re-
nowned Lipsius disciple, his spiritual successor Erycius Puteanus (Enrico dal
Pozzo), then teaching in Milan, added his own comments to those of his mas-
ter and Segetus. The doors to the sanctuary were thus opened to young Peiresc,
notably to the home of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, who was at that time leading the
Italian Republic of Letters, which also served as museum, library, and club of
learning. In 1607, after Pinelli’s death, his student and friend Paolo Gualdo pub-
lished his Vita,17 which would serve as a literal model for Gassendi thirty years
later, but more immediately as an example, typus viri probi et eruditi, that Pei-
resc himself religiously imitated. Pinelli, who was on good terms with the popes
and the Society of Jesus, had managed to maintain close links with northern,
largely Catholic, but also Protestant, Europe.
Thanks to his epistolary network and his library, one of the richest and most
current in Europe, Pinelli’s home in Padua represented a principality benefit-
ing from Venetian independence, shielded from the censorship of the Index
and the Holy Office. A universal savant, Pinelli was abreast of most of the re-
search being conducted in Europe and, as Peiresc would on a much larger scale,
provided useful books, manuscripts, and documents to savants, using his per-
sonal treasury, while simultaneously offering his omniscient support.
His conversation reflected both exquisite courtesy and stimulating vivacity.
Thanks to his biographer, Paolo Gualdo, it is clear exactly what Montaigne
meant when, in De l’Art de conférer (Of the Art of Discussion), after having
praised the oral exercises of Athenians and Romans, he adds, “In our time, the
Italians retain some vestiges of it, to their great advantage, as is seen by a com-
parison of our intelligence with theirs.”18 Here is how Gualdo describes the art
of conversing with Pinelli:
He was accustomed to immediately discerning the inclinations and

moods of each of his interlocutors, not by relying on lessons learned from
some physiognomist, but enlightened by his habitual commerce with so
many men of exception. His manner of addressing others was his alone. It
brought forth hidden treasures from the interlocutor, turning and return-
ing them by diversified words, mixing the serious and pleasant. You would
have said Proteus himself by his metamorphoses, and called them as
divinely intuitive. Even for those he knew the least, he habitually forged
names that were characteristic and precisely symbolic, which reflected
with precision the shape of their soul, the conformation of their body,
and other particularities inherent to them. He quickly distinguished the
modesty and discreetness of the talkative and the vain, whom he avoided
like victims of the plague and the contagious diseased. He was horri-
fied by boors and the uncouth, against whom his deep and innate hatred
emerged, or even simply people who were poorly dressed. You would
gladly describe him as the father of elegances, such had the art of doing
everything in harmony and according to just reason become second
nature to him.19
We can compare this with what Gassendi wrote about Peiresc’s merits in
the same art, thirty-four years later. This amplified image of the Italian original
offers more proof of the “Muses’ migration towards the North”:
From what has bin said, we may understand how delightful his conversa-
tion must needs be to those in health; seeing he so well knew, what things
were suitable to every ones Genius and Manners. For knowing so much as
he did, it was easie for him to discourse of such things to every one as were
to him most contentful; and being alwaies intent to learn, he would only
ask such things, as he knew the party to whom he spake, would delight to
relate. Whereupon, being frequently visited by travellers and curious per-
sons, he would in the first place smell out, with what study they were most
delighted; and then he would shew them only such of his Books, Rari-
ties, and other things which they would be delighted to see; nor would
he present any thing to them, which they did not affect to know. Then he
would ask them, what Rarities they had seen, either in their Countrey, or
upon their journey; and he had alwaies some like things either to show
them, or to relate as having seen the same, or read thereof in his Books.
Whence it was, that every one was sorry to part from him, wishing that
the hours and daies had bin longer. Yea, and he was far from making such
as frequently conversed with him to be aweary of his company, or satiated
with his discourse: for he was alwaies pouring forth new floods of Learn-
ing; and his expressions were so lively & ravishing that such as heard him,
were always afraid, lest he should make an end too soon. And sometimes,
he would pertinently interpose a jest, though very seldom; for his cus-
tome being to speak seriously, he poured forth his words with such elo-
quence, as needed not to be seasoned with Jests.
Moreover, though his company was most acceptable to every one; yet
he himself could not endure the company of such as loved only to hear,
and speak, of vulgar and trivial matters. And therefore he was wont to
complain that he was forced to lose such good hours, only in hearing and
assenting that it was cold weather, or very hot; that the Sky was very clear,
or cloudy; the Aire healthy, or unhealthy; and other such like things. And
for this very cause he shunned the society of Women; because he could
hardly get any good thereby; and he must be forced to talk to them only
of toies and trifles.
Nor could he endure with patience clamorous, brawling, conten-
tious, and talkative People; yet could he best bear with the last, because
amongst many vain words, some profitable matter might be intermingled,
which he was wont to say, he picked, as Corn from amongst an heap of
Chaffe. Howbeit, they must be sure to speak truth, which such talkative
folk, are not much used to do; for he hated nothing more, then a man that
he found in a lie. Wherefore, he was wont so to sift such kind of men, by
asking them divers Questions, touching the circumstances of what they
told, that they must needs have a good memory, if they told a lie, and did
not contradict themselve. The like esteem he had of Boasters, and Brag-
gadokies; save that he was sometimes delighted with some witty passage,
which would now and then bolt out, among their Boastings. But never-
theless, he wonderfully hated all vainglorious boasters; for he was endued
with so great modesty, that being more delighted with brave actions,
then glorious speeches, he never was the man that thought, or spake
proudly of himself. So that he might have taught such men better by his
own example, who never heard his own prayse, but against his will, and
rejected all ambitious Titles which were put upon him, and did so extenu-
ate his own vertues, though very rare, that he was ever accusing himself of
infirmity, or ignorance; giving evident demonstration, that nothing could
be more desirable, then so great moderation of mind.20
The parallel between Pinelli and Peiresc—and between Vita Pinelli and Vita
Peireskii—can be expanded even further. Doing do reveals the extent of the
debt the French savant owed to erudite Italian humanism and its forma mentis.
Indeed, one can see the aura of moral prestige surrounding the illustrious and
elderly Pinelli, successor to Bembo, Speroni, and Daniele Barbaro, in the young
Peiresc’s mind. Pinelli, a model, in this respect and others, for Peiresc, preferred
to be a gardener of minds rather than an author. The Paduan transplant, origi-
nally from Genoa, dazzled with an amenability and kindness that Peiresc would
later display, and which was already being praised by Erasmus, even if those
same qualities were harder to find in the Dutch savant, a combative and vindic-
tive man of letters. Like Peiresc after him, Pinelli was a great diplomat rather
than a militant of the mind.
At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth
century, Pinelli’s name had great standing. Gassendi’s account of a scene, in
1601, in which we see a dying Pinelli “pass the torch” to a young Peiresc, like a
knighting or Episcopalian ordination, is one of the most profound and secret
pieces of information within the Vita Peireskii. Gassendi adds, “For he had so
moulded himself according to the manners of Pinellus; he became so animated
with the studie of noble and brave things, and advancing of good Arts, that he
might justly be thought to have inherited his heroicall virtues.”21 Pinelli’s dying
designation was, therefore, according to Gassendi, immediately confirmed by a
consensus that had been growing for some time. Indeed, Gassendi had already
quoted testimonials by Lipsius and Scaliger. He further quotes Paulo Gualdo’s
Vita Pinelli, published in 1607,22 which stated that upon his arrival in Padua,
Peiresc met Pinelli and joined his circle. Gassendi also quotes a testimonial by
Erycius Puteanus, in a letter dated 1602, and finally a statement addressed to
both Peiresc and Marc Welser, Pinelli’s alter ego in Augsburg: “[You] shall be
what Pinellus was.”23
Whether accurate or embellished by memory, this translatio auctoritatis
surely meant a great deal to Peiresc (Gassendi himself was certain of that). Ac-
cording to the biographer, Peiresc behaved like a great Italian humanist, begin-
ning with his first trip to Italy, all while striving for recognition by the northern
strain of reformed humanism, and notably, by the Calvinist Scaliger, whom he
lavished with erudite gifts: Hebrew manuscripts, rare coins, rubbings from the
tombs of his supposed ancestors in Verona. But Peiresc’s services first targeted
and benefited all of Italy’s erudite elite: Pignoria, Aldrovandi, Della Porta, To-
masini. He was able to return to France to complete his law studies and join the
Parliament of Aix. That magistracy, which he performed reliably and conscien-
tiously, would for him only be a small part of the negotium that he conceded to
society, and which would yield to the best part of his life: the otium studiosum
of the lettered man, master of his oeuvre and patron of European erudition.
The private nature of the office of princips of the Republic of Letters was
almost as pronounced with Peiresc as it was with Pinelli. Even in Paris, along-
side his friend and Keeper of the Seals Guillaume du Vair, it was in his per-
sonal name that Peiresc worked to incite and coordinate savant research and
publications. Later, he was on excellent terms with the Cardinal Alphonse de
Richelieu, the archbishop of Lyon and then Aix. It is significant, in my mind,
that Gassendi fails to mention Alphonse’s brother, Cardinal Armand, who be-
came Louis XIII’s prime minister in 1624, except in reference to the official
honors granted Peiresc after his death. That omission, and the absence of a di-
rect relationship between Richelieu and Peiresc, can be viewed as the simple
result of the close and long collaboration that tied the magistrate in Aix to his
former first president, Guillaume du Vair. In his Memoirs, Richelieu does little
to hide the contempt he feels toward the, in his mind, politically incompetent
Du Vair, whose reputation for eloquence and great virtue had long offended
him. Peiresc, who retreated to Aix in 1623 and remained there until his death,
found that in reality his withdrawal was not a disgrace but an emancipation
from state affairs, liberating him to dedicate himself to matters concerning the
Republic of Letters. In the meantime his friends the Dupuys in Paris were di-
rectly serving the cardinal-minister’s plans, notably through the publication of
archives justifying the French church’s “liberties” against Rome. It remains de-
batable whether Peiresc, another Frenchman and a great admirer of Michel de
L’Hôpital, but on the best terms with the family of Pope Barberini, was sympa-
thetic toward the imperious and aggressive character of the raison d’état dictat-
ing Richelieu’s domestic and foreign policy, notably toward Rome. A policy of
governance through fear could hardly reflect the spirit of kindness and harmony
that Peiresc constantly sought to spread around him. That spirit corresponded as
much to Erasmus’s irenicism as to the traditional French notion of a Christian
monarchy built on an edifice of love. For that matter, Peiresc’s kingdom was far
too idealistic to concern Richelieu.
The French statesman did not appear to pay much attention to Descartes,
either, who incidentally is not mentioned any more than Richelieu in the Vita
Peireskii. This can be explained with completely different reasons. Peiresc and
Descartes, two great minds, evolved in incompatible worlds. As shown by Ag-
nès Bresson in the introduction and notes to her edition of correspondence be-
tween Peiresc and Saumaise, Peiresc sought to recognize and share visible con-
stants through his diverse encyclopedic study. That exploration of the harmonic
unity of the universe behind an extreme diversity of appearances was not foreign
to Descartes. But the philosopher’s blunt methods were aimed less at contem-
plation than at action, at more mathematics than general philology. For all that,
Descartes’s science is not any “truer” today than Peiresc’s. One wonders if Pei-
resc’s conclusions went “out of fashion” the moment Discourse on the Method
first appeared in Leiden in 1636, the same year of his death. Peiresc’s science
belongs to the humanists. It was never as alive, inventive, or hopeful as during
the first few decades of the seventeenth century. It would find an eighteenth-
century successor in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (New Science) and a
nineteenth-century one in Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions (Memoirs
of the Academy of Inscriptions). Peiresc’s science had as bright a future as Des-
cartes’s did. A philologist deciphering the language and signs of God in nature,
Peiresc was simultaneously an astronomer, cosmographer, physician, zoologist,
and naturalist—and a philosopher in his study of antiquity. Not only did Peiresc
pursue the discipline distinguished by Valla, Politian, Turnèbe, and Scaliger,
but he enlarged it into a vast historical and comparative quest intended to make
man, the image of God, a true observer of himself and his creator. This philologi-
cal method is apparent in the words Gassendi attributes to Peiresc in his Vita:
Yea, and frequently he brought such as heard him into admiration, when
he shewed, that without the view and consideration of such things as
these, the meaning of Authors could not be understood, seeing they make
so frequent mention of Coines & Weights, as Talents, Sicles, Drachms,
Denaries, Victoriates, Sesterces, also of the As or pound weight and its
parts, and many other things; of which while he reasoned, producing a
vast quantity and variety thereof, I have known many men astonished.
And more especially when upon a time a multitude of Ounces being pro-
duced, differing one from another in weight and fashion, he was asked
what meant those so different marks or tokens, which were upon them.
For he said that a single Globe or little Boule was put, not only to sig-
nifie the number one; but that by the swelling and bunching thereof,
which the Greeks term Oncos, an allusion might be made to the word
Ounce. For the same cause, the most were marked with an Hook, which
being called Uncus or Uncinum, it was intimated, that that was pondus
unicale, or an ounce weight. But in some and especially those of Tusca-
nie, there was a Spear, which the Greeks tearm Lonche, that by leaving
out l the same word once might be intimated: So, for the most part, the
Moon marked on, did signifie an unity; not only because she alone does
enlighten the night, with rare splendor; but, because from the word
Luna, L being taken, there remains una, which signifies one. So upon
some was marked that side of the Astragalus or Cock-all which being cast
uppermost makes one; and upon others that side was only understood,
the opposite being expressed, called Senio, Sice or Six. The like things
he declared in the other parts of the As or pound weight, as when in the
Semissis or half pound, was marked an ear of Corn, because the ancients
alluded to the words Seminis & Semissis; but thus much may suffice
to have hinted, to shew how he by his study & industrious, & sagacious
examination of these things, could interpret matters which no Books
could shew; which therefore did so much the more astonish the hearers.24
“Letters” served as the bridge and unifying principle between critical “read-
ings” of antiquity and of nature. Even Peiresc’s study of physical and astronomi-
cal phenomena, which became the object of collaborative research by a team
of philologist-savants, was governed by the discipline of ars critica applied to na-
ture’s broad canvas. He applied selenography to the study of the Bembine Table
of Isis in Turin, the Iguvine Tables in Gubbio, and the Florentine Pandect. In
1635, he commissioned from the engraver Claude Mellan a bronze engraving of
the different lunar phases observed through the telescope—“superior in reach
and perfection of scope”—sent to him by Galileo. With this map, an inscription
in an unknown language, Peiresc attempted to imagine the optical techniques
that could correct “visual errors” and permit the correct interpretation of this
celestial mirror of the world. Gassendi writes:
Consequent hereunto, he began seriously to think of (which he purposed

long before) assisting Geographers, towards the finding out the difference
of Longitude of several places. For he would have a certain method writ-
ten, of observing Eclipses; and he was wonderfully industrious to procure,
that the Eclipse of the Moon, which was to be in August next follow-
ing, might be observed, both in Europe, and in divers places of Asia, and
Africa. For besides our Countrymen, and those that live more Westerly
be procured, that by the instigation of Cardinal Barberino, those learned
and famous men Andrea Argolus at Padua, and Scipio Claromontius at
Caesenna might observe the same; and by the intercession of the said
Cardinal, he obtained two observations then made at Rome, and two at
Naples, where the most exact was that which Joannes Camillus Gloriosus,
a rare man doubtless, had made. In like manner he procured from Gran-
Caire [Cairo] in Aegypt, an observation made by the foresaid Capucine
Agathangelus, being assiste by Joannes Molinus Dragomannus a Vene-
tian; also from Aleppo in Syria, an observation, made by another excel-
lent Capucine, Michael Angelus, assisted by the foresaid Caelestinus a
Sancta Liduina. All whose observations cannot be set down in this place,
yet I must needs say, that Peireskius was herein satisfied by the Observa-
tions aforesaid, that it was a clear case, that all Geographical Tables and
Maps, do set those places of Aegypt and Syria at too great a distance from
us, seeing they do all set Alepo almost three hours, that is to say, forty five
degrees Eastward of Marseilles; whereas those observations have made it
appear, that almost an whole hour ought to be abated, seeing they have
reckoned no more then thirty degrees between the places aforesaid.
Whereupon the business having succeeded so well, he took a great deal of
pains, and procured Cardinal Barberino and the Generals of the Jesuites
and Dominicans, to command such religious persons as lived in both the
Indies, and all other parts of the world, carefully to observe all Eclipses,
and things of like nature. Nor was there afterwards any Capucine or other
studious person, that passed through Provence, intending to travel into
the East, or any other way, or to settle his abode in any foreign part, whom
he did not oblige by divers kindnesses, and to whom he did not injoyn the
care of making such observations, giving them Books, Prospective-glasses,
and such like things; of the use whereof if any were ignorant, he took care
before their departure, both to have them instructed, and that they might
experiment their skill.25
Note in passing that this “first” in international scientific cooperation was

made possible by the support provided by a cardinal-secretary of the state, who
had authority over religious missionaries spread throughout the Mediterranean
and the Middle East, to a grand prince of the Republic of Letters. The cir-
cumstances are all the more notable as they relate to a chapter of science dur-
ing which Peiresc and Gassendi worked in strict accordance with views held
by Galileo. For Peiresc and his friend, the Holy Office’s condemnation of the
Florentine physician was a regrettable matter among theologians that in no way
interrupted the historic collaboration between the two major unifying institu-
tions of Europe: the Roman Church and the Republic of Letters. Cardinal Bar-
berini held a similar view, though clearly Rome was, by principle, more favor-
able toward antiquarianism than toward astronomy and physics, subjects largely
ignored by Holy Scripture.
General philology, as understood by Peiresc, was as applicable to nature as it
was to history and language. In terms of natural sciences, the discipline of phi-
lology echoed Gassendi and Galileo, and, though ignoring Descartes, it none-
theless reflected the most recent advances of the era. But it also remained faith-
ful to the spirit of the humanists’ philology; its aims were contemplative and it
in no way sought to make man into a “master and possessor of nature.” This form
of contemplation was rational and methodical and on guard against sensory
illusions, preconceptions, and common or lazy superstitions that came between
the mind and the secret truth of things and texts. It did not delude itself about
the limits of the human mind, even the most methodical and best corrected
by the confrontation of opinions and experiences. This general philology was
above all a quasi-redemptive and perseverant homage paid to the sublime divine
genius that created man and the world, a continuous act of loyal conformity be-
tween the human mind and its creator. Ingenium, in other words, or what Pascal
later called “esprit de finesse.”
The study of philology was inseparable from spirituality and civil wisdom. Ac-
cording to Peiresc, savants, in particular the international community of savants
as he saw it, did not only require civil peace and peace between nations to carry
out their work; they themselves were a “force of peace,” a unifying principle
from the top down in a Europe divided and ravaged by wars, a beehive of friends
who together collected and produced, unbeknownst to the common man, the
honey of wisdom and knowledge. Science according to Peiresc, in his quest for
the divine mysteries of the world, and the elements that man could grasp, was
itself a source of appeasement. Mersenne got it right when he placed Peiresc
in the position of Apollo Citharoedus in his dedication to the French savant in
Traitez des consonances, des dissonances, des genres, des modes, et de la com-
position (Treaty of Consonances, Dissonances, Genres, Modes, and Composi-
tion), book II of Harmonie universelle (Universal Harmony). This minor savant
equates the Republic of Letters, which owed so much to its inexhaustible liber-
ality, with Harmony:
I do not want to speak of the favors and affections that savants receive at
your home, since none can visit you without you obliging them to believe
and confess that it appears that you prepared your cabinet only for him,
and that all your goods are as common to all savants as the water and air
to those who breathe: so that I am assured that they entirely approve the
offering I am making you with this work, so that our century attests to the
posterity that it gives a man who can serve as a model to all those who
want like you to imitate the will of God, who never ceases to do right, and
that the very Harmony that appears to offer you all that it has that is most
excellent strives entirely to recite the praises of the one who gave it light
and being [. . .]. And if these Compositions are not as charming as one
could desire, due to their great simplicity, which it wanted to use to better
bring art and science into the minds and ears of listeners, I am assured
that their subject will be rewarding, as it is capable of delighting men and
angels, to wit Misericordias Domini In Aeternum Cantabo.26
Peiresc was not a monk like Mersenne, or a canon like Gassendi, but the
high-ranking magistrate, like Guillaume du Vair, held an ecclesiastical position
as the abbot of Guîtres. That detail explains many traits of his personality, which
distinguished him from most of the purely secular savants who counted among
his best known correspondents and friends, and who foreshadowed, much more
than Peiresc, the modern intellectual, with his keen attention to what was ap-
propriate when it came to matters of the mind. Indeed, Peiresc had that Salesian
unction that was the fruit of a veritable oblation of the “me” to an order—of
letters, in his case, which was in his mind as consubstantial with the Roman
Church as the Society of Jesus could have been in the mind of a Jesuit. As a
man of the cloth, Gassendi was better equipped than anyone to sense and share
the cultivated spirituality in his friend Peiresc. He did more than make frequent
allusions to Peiresc’s efforts to convert his heretical friends to Catholicism. The
theological virtue of charity is apparent throughout the Vita Peireskii, both in
the descriptions of Peiresc’s conversation as in those of his manners and where
he lived. Imitatio Dei—love of God and his work—was an essential component
of Peiresc’s “curiosity.” There was nothing anxious, bitter, or greedy about that
curiosity, which was inspired by a kind of act of unflagging and contagious love.
Peiresc’s residence in Aix, which served as a library, museum, astronomical ob-
servatory, and laboratory, was a mirror of the universe and antiquity. However,
he transformed his home in the Belgentier countryside into a nature capsule,
a rediscovered heaven on earth, where the abbot of Guîtres went to reinvigo-
rate himself while observing animals, trees, and fruits, inhaling the perfume of
flowers, and listening to birdcalls. Gassendi’s Epicureanism inspired him to in-
corporate accents worthy of the gardener from La Fontaine’s Fables into his de-
scriptions of his friend’s hermitage, a veritable Wunderkammer of God’s master-
pieces. Through contemplation of nature, Peiresc could rest and recover from
his untiring work in the service of the Republic of Letters. These retreats were
indispensably more therapeutic than prayer for this musical and fragile being,
who was afflicted by the cruelest infirmities and literally consumed by his thirst
for knowledge and for sharing knowledge. I want to conclude with the image
of an ailing Peiresc, whose cruel physical burden was lightened by the joy of
contemplation. In this beautiful passage by Gassendi, translated into English
by William Rand, the savant is painted as one and the same with the poet saint,
Francis of Assisi of the Laudi:
Moreover, he preferred the singing of Birds, before the voyces of men,

or any musical Instruments; not but that he was therewith also delighted;
but because after the Musick which men made, there remained in his
mind a continual agitation, drawing his attention, and disturbing his
sleep; the rising, falling, and holding of the Notes, with the change of
sounds and concords, running to and fro in his fancy; whereas no such
thing could remain after the Birds Musick, which because it is not so
apt by us to be imitated, it cannot therefore so much affect, and stir our
internal faculty. He would also for the same cause, continually breed up
Nightingales, and such like small Birds, which he kept also in his own
Chamber; and of which he was so careful, that he knew by divers signes
and tokens, what they wanted or desired, and presently would see them
satisfied: they therefore, as out of gratitude, would sing unto their bene-
factor, Hymnes of prayse; and whereas in his absence, they were for the
most part silent; as soon as ever by his voyce of staffe, they perceived he
was comming, they would presently fall to singing.27
3
CONCEPTIONS OF EUROPE IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: JOHN BARCLAY,
A KEYSERLING PREDECESSOR
From its earliest aspirations for political unity, Europe has asked itself,
What do we do with our nations? In what respect were they actualities that,
in the name of realism, had to be respected and even considered as one of the
surest foundations of the new communitarian edifice? In what respect were they
passions and ideologies to be critiqued, under the threat of seeing the tragedies
that littered European history reproduced? Should Europe have donned the
jester’s cap from Erasmus’s Folie (In Praise of Folly) and said, to one and to all:
Nature has planted, not only in particular men but even in every nation,
and scarce any city is there without it, a kind of common self-love. And
hence is it that the English, besides other things, particularly challenge to
themselves beauty, music, and feasting. [. . .] The Parisians, excluding all
others, arrogate to themselves the only knowledge of divinity. [. . .] And,
not to instance in every particular, you see, I conceive, how much satis-
faction this Self-love, who has a sister also not unlike herself called Flat-
tery, begets everywhere; for self-love is no more than the soothing of a
man’s self, which, done to another, is flattery.1
This irony voiced by the first truly European prince of the Republic of Let-
ters both bemoaned and acknowledged a reality that political history cannot
ignore: though derisory, in the eyes of the mind, the plurality of the peoples
of Europe had already given rise to a veritable characterology of nations by
the early sixteenth century, which would become more specific over the next
two centuries. What Erasmus called “Self-love” and “Flattery,” we now refer to
as “nationalism” and “demagoguery.” Nonetheless, behind this deformation of
self-love, nations were also real entities. So how to make the distinction? Valéry
said, “The very idea of a nation is not easily grasped.”2
The task seems to fall, by privilege, to historians. Europe is an old continent,
whose present day can only be well understood if we acknowledge, in keeping
with the image Fernand Braudel painted of France, that it is “the living result
50
Conceptions of Europe 51
of what the interminable past patiently deposited, layer by layer, just as the im-
perceptible sedimentation of the seabed.”3 The gentes et nationes of Europe
are, like their languages, the products of a slow maturation of which they bear
mere traces. They are, in other words, living, moving fingerprints. To understand
and describe nations, and to disassociate them from their nationalism, would
in theory make a wonderful project of historical analysis. Make that compara-
tive historical analysis. The French school of history known as the “Annales”
became aware of this somewhat belatedly and grudgingly, and only after long
favoring vast transversal, economic, and social phenomena and regional evolu-
tions ranging from the Mediterranean to Languedoc as objects as study. Start-
ing with Alphonse Dupront, who was keenly aware of the symbolic register that
the neopositivism or neo-Marxism espoused by the Annales had long wanted to
ignore, and who published an admirable monograph in 1972, in a volume of the
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade dedicated to “France and the French people,” under
the title “National Sentiment.” Dupront did not have a large following, but he
was respected. Fernand Braudel himself wrote an entire book titled L’identité
de la France (The Identity of France), and Pierre Nora subsequently directed
an impressive collection of essays about France’s “lieux de mémoire,” or “realms
of memory.”4 I have yet to see similar, and similarly ambitious, attempts being
made in other European countries or, for that matter, any beginnings of com-
paratism conducted on the European scale. In terms of what Marxists and neo-
Marxists used to contemptuously categorize as “superstructures” and what I am
no longer alone in calling “the symbolic”—an order of spiritual facts, or actuali-
ties, with its own autonomy, duration, and specific laws—one has to admit that
after half a century of more or less improved or diminished dialectical material-
ism, we were still, in France, very recently stuck in the cave era. In The Identity
of France, Fernand Braudel goes as far as to completely omit literature, arts, and
manners from his final chapter, “Superstructures.” Not even an orthodox Marx-
ist would have made so brutal an omission.
If French historians are nonetheless a little less handicapped than others by
this recent reemergence of the repressed “symbolic,” it is because they have
at their disposal (after several centuries of benefiting from a cultivated state)
a homegrown tradition of research and reflection on the characteristics of
their own nation, as well as on its very definition. Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis
XIV (The Age of Louis XIV), Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
(The Old Regime and the Revolution), Michelet’s Histoire de France (History
of France), Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine (The Origins of
Contemporary France), Renan’s Sorbonne speech “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”
(What Is a Nation?), and even Julien Benda’s Esquisse d’une histoire des Fran-
çais dans leur volonté d’être une nation (Sketch of a History of the French and
Their Desire to Be a Nation) are the modern masterpieces of a historiographi-
cal genre whose brilliance was already visible by the sixteenth century, as dem-
onstrated by Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (Research on France),
and which has since displayed, on multiple occasions, impressive philosophical
vigor and originality in its methods. If we consider that, in parallel, the French
school of human geography, notably the body of work by Vidal de La Blache
being rediscovered today, transformed into science the meticulous and me-
thodical knowledge of the French territory accumulated by French administra-
tions, according to their respective competencies, since the seventeenth cen-
tury, we can easily understand why the study of national identity could very
well experience a resurgence in France, in keeping with deservedly prestigious
models that, deep down, were never truly forgotten. For the moment, these
models are rediscovering their erstwhile authority, though not without threat of
anachronisms. They held such sway in the past that even France’s foreign allies
and adversaries imitated them and turned them against France. In the interwar
period, Ernst Robert Curtius’s The Civilization of France and Friedrich Sie-
burg’s Is God a Frenchman?, and, after 1945, Hubert Lüthy’s essay on France,
Frankreichs Uhren gehen anders (France against Herself, 1955), attest to a genu-
ine, inverted fascination for the science of one’s own nation long conducted
by the French at a high degree of conceptual precision and literary elegance.
To that list we can add the essay on national sociology that Tocqueville dedi-
cated to America or the one Élie Halévy dedicated to England. Both are note-
worthy derivations of experience gained in France through the reflexive study of
national identity. In a way, these lateral productions were invented by Voltaire
himself. His Lettres philosophiques (Letters on the English), which preceded
Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV) by twenty years, and Discours
aux Welches (Discourse Addressed to the Welsh) by more than thirty years, is in
reality an important monograph on the English nation and its distinctive traits.
Unfortunately, when Voltaire tried his hand at comparatism on the global scale,
in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (An Essay on Universal His-
tory, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations) even a notion as nuanced as mœurs,
or “manners,” which drove his analysis, could not forestall what was an obvi-
ous failure. Voltaire compares—or more often, juxtaposes—entities that do not
belong to the same category: large religious zones, civilizations, and nations.
His internationalist ambitions surpassed his capabilities. Focusing on the Euro-
pean scale would have made for a more refined example and one within his
reach. Montesquieu, who similarly claims to adopt an international perspective
in Esprit des lois (Spirit of the Laws), in reality focuses all his attention on the
“liberty of Europe” in opposition to the “slavery of Asia,” creating a near com-

parative genealogy of the “general spirit” of European nations, the broad back-
drop to the parallel between the French and the English that so obsessed him.
Kant’s Anthropology provides another good example of a comparative analysis
of national characteristics in Europe.
The subsequent drought of European comparatism beginning in the eigh-
teenth century gave rise to one exception. Here, I want to focus on a book
that, while unjustly forgotten today, was still enthusiastically read in post-
war France: Das Spektrum Europas (The Spectrum of Europe) by the Baltic
Count Hermann von Keyserling. (The original German edition was published
in 1928.)5 Keyserling, who was neither a historian nor a professional philosopher,
was a deeply erudite man with vast international experience, whose literary tal-
ent was nothing to scoff at. He deserves credit, if belatedly, for producing a com-
parative analysis in the last years of the Weimar Republic of the kind one would
have expected of Voltaire in the eighteenth century and at which Montesquieu
merely hinted. Like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Kant, Keyserling did not claim
to be an economic expert. On the contrary, like Thucydides in Ancient Greece,
and like his Enlightenment predecessors, he believed that the “general spirit”
or “character of manners” particular to each nation was a decisive actor in the
historical European saga. Rather than creating sketches of European nations,
as if for Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas)
or Proust’s Marquis de Norpois, Keyserling used climate, geography, sociology,
and political, military, religious, and literary history to highlight the distinctive
inclinations and contradictions, either dangerous or advantageous, that char-
acterized them. These collective characters were gauged comparatively. After
three-quarters of a century, Keyserling’s diagnosis of France remains arrestingly
original. He noted a deep contradiction between the French people’s general
attachment to their hexagon-shaped “garden,” which led in turn to a fear of see-
ing it invaded and disfigured, and the reckless or provocative vanity that led to
a nationalistic view of France in terms of international “grandeur” and as a uni-
versal model. For Keyserling, the French fait, or “essence,” translated to a nation
that was home to the oldest culture in Europe, a “literary nation” in existence
for seven centuries, and the only nation in which the modern threat of the fight
for gender equality found a powerful counterbalance in an old tradition of love,
gallantry, and friendly sociability.
Keyserling, who was born in Russian Livonia, married Bismarck’s grand-
daughter in 1919. He was therefore well situated to develop an insider and
relatively impartial opinion on Germany. He undoubtedly did not foresee the
crimes of Nazism, and his work does not rival the metaphysical level of Hannah
Arendt’s post hoc analysis of the “banality of evil.” But Keyserling’s sharp criti-
cism of the formidable disproportions between the scientistic “objectivity” and
abstract idealism between which the “German character” oscillated nonethe-
less offered uneasy insight at the time.
Even more so than Keyserling’s results, the methods and research plan of
Das Spektrum Europas now appear more interesting than ever in terms of in-
ternal structure, even if the analysis itself can seem outdated. Keyserling studied
each European nation, as did Renan and Dupront, as a symbolic structure that
was both stable and evolving, which shaped its values, intellectual production,
and general behavior. But while Keyserling compared these various structures,
he did so from the loftier perspective of the harmony they could attain if they
were to complement each other in a symphonic, European ensemble. This ama-
teur’s attempt has lost none of its originality from a historian’s point of view,
in terms of either its intentions or motivations. Indeed, authors like Naipaul,
Enzensberger, and Kapuściński have recently imitated and reinvigorated the
genre, though leaning more toward the impressionist aspects of Stendhal’s Mé-
moires d’un touriste (Memoirs of a Tourist).
The genre embodied by Das Spektrum Europas has successors, but also an-
cestors. Comparative analyses were attempted, pre-Montesquieu, as early as the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Constructed around the topic of “national
character,” these attempts were modeled after the admirable parallel drawn be-
tween the Athenian and Lacedaemonian natures by Thucydides in his History
of the Peloponnesian War. It is important to note that the lieu, or “place,” of
the French nation—its “Frenchness,” if you will—exclusively favored by the
knowledge, talent, and continuity of countless French authors, is an egotistical
derivation of the same theme on a comparative, European scale, which fell into
disuse. The startling and lasting success of the national French lieu should not
overshadow—and here, Keyserling can provide an opportune reminder—the
intrinsic superiority and even chronological anteriority of a comparative and
impartial reflection on all the “places” that made up or broke down Europe.
The most convincing predecessor to Das Spektrum Europas may be Icon
animorum (The Mirror of Minds), a Latin essay published in 1614 in both Lon-
don and Paris by the Scottish publicist John Barclay. It was notably translated on
several occasions in Paris, under the title Examen des Esprits, in 1617 and 1624.
Like Keyserling, John Barclay was well traveled and highly cultured, and while
he was not the first modern author to have collectively depicted the “characters”
of European nations, he was the first to do so with the international experience
and keen wit that would also distinguish Das Spektrum Europas three centuries
later. Icon animorum was the work of a humanist and a diplomat. It sprang from
a literary genre that had already acquired respectability by the early seventeenth
century, and not solely for works by the Ancients, Thucydides and Tacitus. Icon
animorum stands out within this humanist “art of memory,” which we under-
stand much better today thanks to Frances Yates, Paolo Rossi, and Lina Bolzoni.
The art of memory assembled information accumulated through the literary
tradition of de omni re scibili et discibili in “places” organized in the same imagi-
nary theater and in a way that could be easily accessed mentally. This mnemonic
tool, which amassed what was already known and had already been said on
every subject, was not aimed solely at creating an encyclopedic “interior mu-
seum”; it provided the mental resources necessary for creating new discourses
adapted to new situations. When it came to describing “national characters,”
“places” containing already known or stated information did more than serve
as preparation for the creation of eulogies, an obligatory oratory rite for ambas-
sadors being received at foreign courts. They were also used to guide a diplo-
mat’s first steps in an unfamiliar milieu. The diplomat would be able to observe
his new environment all the better by using his own experience, which, from
the start, could be based on any general and accepted foreknowledge already
stored in his mind. This interior museum was therefore both a source of formal
eloquence and a principle of the “art of prudence.” As shown by Louis Van Delft
in Littérature et anthropologie (Literature and Anthropology),6 early collections
of “national characters” were limited to gathering and categorizing designations
used by the writers of antiquity to define the particular nature of every people of
the ancient world. In Specimen epithetorum, published in 1518 but expanded in
later editions in the sixteenth century, Ravisius Textor instructs that the Gauls
had been qualified as feroces, truces, bellicosi and the Romans as invicti, atro-
ces, feroces, bellaces, truces, caerulei. In 1561, in his Poetics, Scaliger proposes a
similar series of designations drawn from classical texts: Itali, cunctatores, irri-
sores, factiosi . . . Dei contemptores. These lists of traits, by no means intended as
portraits, were limited to providing the Ciceronian orator, who hoped to dazzle
with his Latin declamations, with classic argumenta and an eulogistic lexicon:
“nations” and their “manners” (like age, gender, and temperament) were indis-
pensable supports for the construction of an official and flattering ideal-type.
In vernacular accounts more closely based on firsthand experiences, descrip-
tions of a nation’s distinct character (the “lieux des nations”) were filled with less
archaic and less conventional details. In The Book of the Courtier, for example,
published in 1528, Baldassare Castiglione, a prominent diplomat in the Duke of
Urbino’s court, characterizes France by the prejudices of its established nobility:
the French aristocracy, driven by honor, cherishes war and hunting and disdains
letters, which threaten their valor. Far from contradicting the classic descriptors
applied to the Gauls by Julius Caesar, this clever observation offered an updated
variation, more in keeping with the concrete experiences of a circle of initiates
who met and talked in private. In Examen de los ingenious (The Examination
of Men’s Wits, 1575), Spanish doctor Juan Huarte’s accolade to Spain’s “national
character” owes even less to the classical topic of gentes. Huarte relies instead on
an analysis of human geography (climates, types of land) and a Galenic anthro-
pology of temperaments in order to compare the different characters of Euro-
pean nations as they appeared to a contemporary observer. This comparative
analysis concludes that due to Spain’s climate and land, favorable to dry melan-
choly—the temperament, according to Aristotle and Galen, most inclined to
the most brilliant productions of the mind—the Spanish people were predis-
posed to advanced studies of theology and medicine. Spain was destined for
truth and grandeur. Because of Italy’s climate and temperament, its people (to
limit myself to this example) were viewed as less inventive and in particular ex-
cellent at rhetoric. The nation’s mild climate was less virile.
Even in France, or rather especially in France, the “inherited enemy” of
Charles Quint and Philippe II, the book met with lasting success and was trans-
lated on several successive occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Of course, it was not the book’s conclusions that seduced members of the court,
commoners, and true savants alike, but its method, easily altered to favor the
French “national character,” and in particular its use of comparatism, which
was highly useful in a cosmopolitan capital like Paris. The “topic” of national
traits was useful not only for the diplomat, but also for the statesman, in terms
of his strategy toward foreign courts, and the political philosopher who wanted
to explain or evaluate the different types of European people. In Les Six livres
de la République (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576), Jean Bodin creates
a listing of peoples categorized by climate (Nordic, temperate, meridional) and
the temperaments (Galen’s “krâsis”) favored by respective climates. He relies
expressly on contemporary experiences and not obsolete observations made by
the Ancients. Here, Bodin is already borrowing from Huarte. He notes that the
different “ethnotypes” he describes could provoke fundamentally hostile “vexa-
tions,” between the clever and melancholy Spanish, for example, and the bilious
and choleric French. They could also produce favorable combinations, as was
the case for Italy’s character, which had some Spanish and French elements and
was destined to act as mediator between those two opposed “natures.” Mazarin’s
entire public persona is implicitly presaged in this too-often-overlooked text.
Though written in elegant Latin for an international lettered audience, John
Barclay’s Icon animorum nonetheless reflects the vernacular anthropological
and sociological tradition of Castiglione, Huarte, and Bodin. Indeed, Barclay
was well placed to do so. Born in 1582, he was the son of William Barclay, a Scot-
tish noble and Catholic politique who immigrated in 1571 to France, where he
pursued advanced law studies in Paris and Bourges and later became a professor
at the Jesuit university of Lorraine, in Pont-à-Mousson. His treatises on the in-
violability of the prince’s person, even when dealing with tyrannical monarchs,
earned him the sympathy of James I. In 1603, his son John, a child prodigy,
published a poem in Latin celebrating the coronation of James I, as well as
a satirical novel, Satyricon Euphormionis, that recounted his father’s French
misadventures. The younger Barclay traveled to Italy, became a novice with the
Jesuits, left the order, married, and published a new edition of Satyricon in Paris
considerably spiced up by his own quarrels with the Society of Jesus. Nancy,
Rome, Venice, London, Paris: by 1605, John Barclay, an anti-Jesuit Catholic,
had become a supremely cosmopolitan, and already famous, citizen of the
European Republic of Letters. In 1606, despite belonging to the Church of
Rome, he was named a minor official in the court of James I. But it was in
Nancy, during a trip to the court of Lorraine, that he would publish the sec-
ond part of Satyricon, whose literary success had already spread across Europe
and which had been added to the Index in 1609. James I also charged Barclay
with diplomatic missions in Poland and Savoy and visibly appreciated his sup-
port during the heated controversy on the power of the popes, which pitted the
erudite king against Bellarmine. In 1614, Barclay, who was friendly with Nicolas
Fabri de Peiresc, whom he had met nine years earlier in London, dedicated
Icon animorum to Louis XIII, then thirteen years old, a prelude no doubt to an
eventual move to Paris. However, Maffeo Barberini, who was Paul V’s legate in
England and nuncio in Paris, persuaded him to move to Rome instead, where
he was appointed to the chancery and granted a pension. The commentator and
Latin novelist died unhappy in the papal capital in 1621, the same year Peiresc
published Barclay’s Latin novel Argenis in Paris, which was destined to become
another European best seller and was translated into several languages, twice
into French. John Barclay’s international prestige was such that, despite Satyri-
con’s inclusion in the Index, the papacy had coaxed this dangerous Scottish Vol-
taire to settle in Rome, a move he bitterly regretted.
The Icon animorum, quoted here from an English translation entitled The
Mirror of Minds, published in 1633, was inspired by Barclay’s strong preference
for France, a sentiment then shared by the European Republic of Letters. Ever
since Henry IV’s reign and the Edict of Nantes, Anglican, Arminian, Gallican,
and moderate Catholic men of letters had in effect viewed the French mon-
archy as the guarantor of the “philosopher’s freedom” in Europe and the sole
arbiter capable of keeping the hegemonic ambitions of the papacy, Austria, and
above all Spain at bay. This bias toward France, which saw its political expres-
sion in Barclay’s allegorical roman à clef Argenis, was nonetheless tempered in
Icon animorum due to the author’s desire to display a greater impartiality more
appropriate for a leading citizen of the Republic of Letters and a free mind who
avoided flattery and depicted real life.
The Mirror of Minds begins with a solitary, symbolic scene. Standing at an
elevated point, north of London, Barclay is engrossed by the vast landscape un-
folding before him: forests and hills, ships on the river and docked at port, an
immense panorama of the English capital and its neighborhoods. He contem-
plates this prodigious variety of all things, arranged by nature and multiplied
by the industry and commerce of man. Barclay concludes that man himself is
“the greatest instance of this beauty of variety,” for “men have not onely in their
bodies a difference of habits, and proportions; but their minds are fitted for so
many things, that no picture can with more colours, or lineaments delight the
eye of the beholder, then are drawne by the fates, in the minds of men.”7 Even
if he is “born to liberty,” man is no less inclined to adopt “certain affectations
and rules of living” that change according to environment, political system, and
era, and which determine the form, capacity, and style of his mind. Barclay, like
Bodin, omits the great symbolic system of astrology, though it silently persists
in the guise of a “certain force” or “Fate” that governs historic mutations and
sculpts the “molds” that differ according to place and time and imprint their
forms on nations and individuals. “Nothing is more beneficial,” concludes Bar-
clay, than deciphering this diversity, whose imprints pave the road of life with
formidable hostilities or encouraging sympathies, teaching man what “to expect
or fear” when necessary. But amid this troubling diversity also lies a promise of
harmony.8 None of these “national characters” is perfect or complete; none can
claim to be exemplary or to dominate others. The study of national characters
teaches greater humility, whose effects can be beneficial: “A cessation of arms
gave mutual traffic to all these nations, which as they differed in dispositions
and language, so could they not be guided by the same arts.”9 For Barclay, that
study of dispositions, notably in Europe, where the web of exchanges and rival-
ries was particularly fraught, was the discipline best suited to a general and paci-
fying diplomacy over the long term.
This secular leap of faith in a European harmony was undoubtedly sup-
ported by Barclay’s experience with the Republic of Letters—a vast diplomatic
corps of the international and interfaith mind, and an ideal model for political
equilibrium on the European continent. Though it was that very familiarity
with the pax litteraria, which transcended national and religious aversions, that
ensured France’s place of honor in Barclay’s text. He begins his description in
terms of human geography and political systems. France is a garden, whose
generous fertility renders it nearly self-sufficient, though its coastal borders also
open onto every sea. It is also a kingdom, galvanized by the love of its princes.
Barclay then turns to the specific traits of the French character, which he de-
fines based on its most complete and natural representatives: its noblesse d’épée.
Valiant in battle but inherently ill-equipped to follow through on their victo-
ries, the French do not know how to win wars. In contrast, they have beautiful,
grand manners, a luxurious sartorial elegance, civility, inimitable politeness,
and natural grace. “The world can never be sufficiently thankful to the hospi-
tality of France, which seemeth to open a temple of humanity, or sanctuary for
the fortunes of all foreigners to flee unto. They consider not the country, but the
worth of a man. . . .”10
The lieu of the noble French character, whose principal traits are summa-
rized by Barclay, would alone merit its own genealogical monograph. Barclay,
like Castiglione, saw dangerous weaknesses in the French nobility. Whereas
Castiglione deplored its disdain for men of letters (no longer the case under the
reigns of Francis I and the Valois kings), Barclay now notes their lack of perse-
verance in battle and a much more original trait that assumes the comparison
with the English nobility: even in the most pressing circumstances, the French
nobles staked their honor on not “undertak[ing] merchandise.” He writes, “mer-
chandise is basely esteemed of there [in France], than befits a thing of so great
utility, and which first did spread humanity through all the world.” He adds
that in France, “the merchants themselves, as if ashamed of their calling, when
they are grown rich, do bring up their sons in some other discipline. [. . .] But
the high minds of the French nation are in nothing more perfectly discerned
than the eager pursuit of magistracies, where the shameful sale of them doth
exclude the needy, howsoever virtuous.”11 The nobles’ prejudice against com-
merce thus worked against them, as the rich merchants whose common blood
they so distrusted were able to rise within their own ranks by purchasing venal
offices. Young nobles in France gave the impression of vanity, insolence, and
libertinage, or else that of a haughty countenance poorly masking impatience.
But cheerful and capacious minds, which were therefore all the “freer,” could be
found between those two excesses and best represented, among young people,
the nature of the French character. Other regrettable shortcomings in the man-
ners of French nobles included the mutual contempt they showed one another
while traveling and the senseless rage of their duals. These alarming idiosyn-
crasies lay in total opposition to the good qualities found among the French:
their outspokenness contrasting with their “wonderful courtesy, not feigned,
nor treacherous [. . .] free from deceit and secret hatreds [. . .] and respective of
all men according to their degrees and ranks.”12
This harsh portrait of France’s traditional aristocracy was a typical depiction
by a citizen of the Republic of Letters (whose leader was now a Frenchman, Pei-
resc). This republic of minds had the expectation that Louis XIII, whom Barclay
addressed as a preceptor, would impose political discipline on his nobles’ anar-
chic tendencies and the corruption they were introducing into the body politic
and even the administration of the kingdom—an implicit program of “reform,”
in other words, whose stages were outlined in Argenis, Richelieu’s bedside read-
ing, under the cloak of fiction and allegory. The Republic of Letters needed
France, but a France governed by an intelligent and vigorous state, which would
discipline its nobility and find a solution to the venality of its offices, without af-
fecting the nation’s noble and hospitable nature.
Barclay—a Scot, a Gallican Catholic, the son of a jurist converted to Angli-
canism, and a gentleman in the court of James I—supported the Franco-
English alliance sealed in 1625 by the marriage of Charles I and Louis XIII’s
sister, Henrietta. Barclay’s portrait of England, a profitably cultivated island-
garden, further enriched by its maritime commerce, foreshadowed continen-
tal Europe’s discovery, in the eighteenth century, of the insular kingdom that
passed from the Stuarts to the House of Hanover. Barclay looks favorably on
commerce, a vehicle for and complement to the “commerce of the mind.” De-
fended from invasion and relatively peaceful domestically, England was blessed
with near “felicity.” That “felicity” had two adverse consequences: a lazy and
careless people, and its arrogance toward both foreigners and English nobility.
Barclay notes the particularity of English criminal law and describes the tradi-
tional judiciary system and advisory political regime that prevailed in the king-
dom. He further highlights the privileges and maritime interests of the high
nobility, and bases England’s national character on its members: “The English
are for the most part grave, of retired spirits, and fit for counsel.”13 Science, phi-
losophy, and mathematics were highly valued by the aristocracy and univer-
sities, whose highly cultivated milieus were welcoming, as in France, toward
foreigners. But “[the people] run ever into extremes” and were divided into nu-
merous religious sects whose fanaticism disturbed Barclay. Caution was then
mandated for any stranger traveling to this country where such a wide gulf di-
vided the higher, learned classes from the masses. Barclay makes a careful dis-
tinction between England and Ireland and above all Scotland, whose national
character mirrored that of France.
In contrast to France and England, two nations hospitable to letters, Spain—
named the homeland of science by Huarte only half a century before—had
become, in Barclay’s eyes, the country where “the studies of learning shine
not [. . .] when even that spirit of erudition which ought to fill all parts of the
sciences did seem altogether lost and vanished.” He continues: “For in Spain
neither eloquence in the Latin tongue nor the elegance of poetry nor that profit-
able and solid knowledge of history and ancient rites is at all regarded. They keep
their old and almost barbarous manner of attaining learning. Philosophy they
study, they love divinity, and despise not the knowledge of the laws and canons,
but cannot endure that those learnings should be dressed at all in the Greek or
Latin elegancies, as supposing that by those adulterate varnishes (as they think
them) the lineaments of manly learning would languish away.”14 The imperi-
alism of Spain’s weapons and language in Europe was therefore a threat to the
Republic of Letters. According to Barclay, war and corruption by gold from the
Indies, shielded by “pretence of religion” and a supposed “God’s cause,” were
the means to achieve Spain’s ambitions. Here, Barclay turns the “melancholy”
national character attributed to the Spanish people by Huarte against them. He
deems them arrogant, which explains why “they have grave minds and swelling
high, but mixed with a kind of weightiness, which makes them not rashly carried
upon divers things.” But, Barclay adds, this very consistency and tenacity, which
bolsters their conquests formidably, is made “loathsome” when spoken of in the
fables and boasts that intersperse Spanish conversation. By drawing, in Latin,
the first outlines of the Spanish braggart, and by making Spain, isolated from
the “commerce of minds,” an obscurant threat to all of Europe, Barclay laid the
groundwork for Richelieu and the triumphant French propaganda that would
be utilized during the Thirty Years’ War.
Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Hungary, and the Balkans are all fea-
tured in Icon animorum, alongside the Turks and a few others. However, they
are foils, in varying degrees, to the principal actors of the stage on which the
political and moral future of Europe was being decided—France, England,
and Spain. That left Italy, whose legendary status, in Barclay’s eyes, was far re-
moved from its piteous reality. He writes that its territory is often poor and sav-
age, its magnificent cities and palaces impractical, and its sumptuous churches
superstitiously dark. Italy then was the often flea-ridden hostelry for Europe’s
young and rich, “one common and extemporary home” where cosmopolitan
friendships were nourished and which left all young travelers on their Grand
Tour with nostalgic memories. Equitation, riding, fencing, music, and comedic
spectacles, which dazzled in Italy, were all suited to the idle, golden youths who
went there to complete their educations. Italians, politically discarded and par-
tially conquered, were limited to playing the role of entertainers, teachers, and
eventually mediators on the European stage. Barclay does not even mention
the Holy See.
The most noteworthy of these national dramatis personae, according to the
very characters attributed them by Barclay, were personified in a tragic play,
Europe, which Cardinal Richelieu, an avid reader of Icon animorum and Arge-
nis, had staged at the Palais-Cardinal on November 18, 1642, fifteen days before
his death. This was his public legacy. It would therefore be a mistake to under-
estimate the “characters of nations”: even statesmen as powerful as the “Red
Eminence” relied on them to develop their domestic and European strategies.
Barclay’s Icon animorum is not limited to the comparative juxtaposition of
“national characters.” This educational treatise destined for a prince continues
with a “survey” of the types of individual “dispositions.” This analysis of the po-
litical reality of Europe therefore combines two parameters: general and spe-
cific, macroscopic and microscopic. The latter perspective introduces another
theme utilized by the “moralists” (Hall, Gracián, La Rochefoucauld, and La
Bruyère): the “places” of those singular dispositions supplied the memories, in-
ventiveness, and caution of the preconceptions indispensable to making one’s
way through the formidable maze of European political life.
In 1614, Barclay was a trailblazer in this respect. His influence on vernacu-
lar literatures cannot be overestimated, and in fact would be duly recognized
at the end of the seventeenth century by a leading German scholar, Daniel
Georg Morhof, in a chapter from his Polyhistor (1694) dedicated to Mores gen-
tium. In order to know a man, instructs Barclay, you must first study the style
of his conversation. When encountering men who dazzle and seduce through
quips and witty improvisation, Barclay advises, “Take them [. . .] from bandying
of wit to an argument of longer discourse [and] then without doubt thou shalt
contemn the barrenness of their empty minds.” But those who display “longer
eloquence” and enjoy listening to themselves do not even notice that they are
tiring their audience. The Senecan brevitas and Ciceronian copia can, each in
its own way, indicate hollow and trivial minds in conversation. In Barclay’s text,
rhetoric is framed as a hermeneutic of manners. “Tell me how you speak and I
will tell you who you are.” Following this maxim, Barclay paints multiple por-
traits of paradoxical “dispositions” whose “elegance” dupes only the naïve: wan-
dering “minds” useless to anyone besides themselves, but capable of success-
fully parading before listeners to whom they have adapted; “men of a dull and
narrow soul” who are nonetheless capable of ripe contemplation and concep-
tion, better suited to writing than speaking; learned but pedantic men unable
to accept “men famous for public virtues and born to govern people, if they be
unfit (forsooth!) for the subtlety of learning.” These distinctions between tem-
peraments, regardless of the nation in which one is born, were an art of “pru-
dence and subtleties” quite familiar to the Ancients and which experienced a
resurgence in Europe following the Renaissance. That art was not solely the
province of specialists dazed by long study, but implied a gift from nature, a
celestial attraction, as much as an experience meditated upon and illuminated
by the divination of human beings and their circumstances.15
Barclay further explains that the truth about different kinds of intelligence—
that is, that the best equipped and the most eloquent are not the most fortu-
nate—also applies to virtues. One must be able to decipher fear, timidity, or te-
merity in magnanimity, which can take on the most varied and deceptive guises.
One must know how to distinguish all that is excessive and extreme in devotion,
and capable of suddenly reverting to its just-as-extreme opposite, atheism.16
Finally, instructs Barclay, one should not rush to condemn feelings of love,
like certain “severe men” (meaning the clergy of all faiths), even when this pas-
sion torments those who feel its sting: it is the ultimate social passion and the
principle of all humanitas. Barclay considered love to be a pacifying and uniting
force, superior even to the commerce of letters and to commerce itself. Even
Socrates fell in love (Barclay thus absolves James I’s penchants, which were
shared by Louis XIII). He writes:
But the mind of that man whom Nature moulded for a lover is mild,
expressing in the very countenance modesty and simple virtue; of a great
but merciful spirit; not hard to be entreated to spare suppliants and con-
demn revenge; exceeding penitent when he himself offends; a great lover
of offices of humanity; impatient of idleness and all occasions of sloth,
unless forgetting the great benefits which he hath received from Nature,
he corrupt the felicity of his disposition with lascivious wantoning and so
idleness.17
It could appear that Barclay has abandoned politics for a reflection on an

entirely private form of wisdom. Indeed, his lesson on “kinds of dispositions
and affections” is followed by an initiation into the difficult discernment of
physiognomy, gestures, and attitudes (“this great and troublesome knowledge
of minds,” according to Barclay) that Giovanni Battista Della Porta and Gio-
vanni Bonifacio attempted to reduce to a semiotic system during the same
period. But the connecting thread of Icon animorum—the progress of humani-
tas in Europe—is not lost. For Barclay, France is the driver of this progress, and
England is lucky to have a Scottish king, Scotland’s character being similar to
France’s. In France, the monarchy, easily transformed into a ferocious tyranny,
is protected from that fate by a prodigious legitimacy, an ancient mystery, which
earned its kings the genuine, zealous love of their subjects. Love in France can
be both a political bond and a private attraction. It attracts a large court around
the king, which, when it does not degenerate into chaos, can serve as the ideal
terrain on which to practice the art of memory, intuition, and diplomatic cau-
tion instructed by Icon animorum.
Written in Latin, and intended for a French king who was still a child, as
well as the Republic of Letters, Barclay’s book preceded vernacular moralist lit-
erature by several decades. Icon animorum belonged to an additional category
as well, which was destined for a high society audience barred from the world
of politics by absolutism. In a singular stroke and method, the work simulta-
neously introduced the main elements of European politics and the anthro-
pology of individual traits. Barclay addressed an elite with high responsibili-
ties and power in government and its advisors. Writing in Latin, he was able to
show tremendous audacity in his analysis and a freedom of views reserved for
the initiated. Ultimately, the most incontestable common element in the un-
likely comparison I make between Icon animorum and Das Spektrum Europas
is the aristocratic nature (in the truest sense of the word) of these two treatises
on the art of politics and the interpretation of European manners. Barclay was
noble several times over—by birth, by his rank and role in James I’s courts, and
by an education and talent that made him a lord of the Republic of Letters. He
was motivated to contribute to the education of Louis XIII, the reform of the
French monarchy, and the growth of the French crown’s European authority
by the ideal he held of a cultivated and free, as well as a more harmonious and
peaceful, Europe—a political substitute for a religious Christianity that had
collapsed. But this grand plan was interrupted by war, and a French victory,
with the support of Stuart England, over the Spanish Inquisition and all forms
and forces of aggressive encroachment. John Barclay’s name must be rehabili-
tated. He was, after all, one of the major inspiring forces behind the “Euro-
pean Equilibrium” created by the Treaties of Westphalia and the Pyrenees. He
was also one of the keenest interpreters of the political, moral, and diplomatic
“European education” that developed during the seventeenth century; he saw
its golden age in the eighteenth century which, for the most part, remains to be
rediscovered. The search for unity within the multiplicity of Europe, from Bar-
clay to Keyserling, shares another trait: it bypassed religion, at least in appear-
ance, looking instead to nature for the mysterious principle of harmony that
would lead to reciprocal gratitude and goodwill.
4
RHETORIC AND SOCIETY IN EUROPE
The expression “Republic of Letters” is still in use today. It appears in the

majority of recent French-language dictionaries and even at times in everyday
speech or the media as a pompous and ironic circumlocution used to desig-
nate the literary Parisian “milieu.” That pejorative and archaist connotation is
an impediment (as is somewhat the case for the term “rhetoric”) to the current
focus of scientific research on the surviving expression’s former meaning and
the notion of an international commerce of ideas that it represented to men of
letters of the ancien régime. The recent nature of this scientific interest can be
attested to by Paul Hazard’s famous Crise de la conscience européenne (Crisis of
the European Conscience, 1934), which fails to mention the Republic of Let-
ters entirely. In his chapter on Pierre Bayle, Hazard mentions Nouvelles de la
République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters), the scholarly journal
published in Amsterdam by the Calvinist thinker, with no apparent desire to ex-
plain the journal’s seemingly self-explanatory title. Within intellectual history,
the concept of the Republic of Letters was not itself a subject of study. It re-
mained just outside the scope of a field dedicated entirely to a kind of chemistry
of pure ideas, independent of the literary form that disseminated said ideas, not
to mention the institutional circuits and forms of sociability and dialogue that
“invented” and circulated those ideas and, most of all, the awareness that “sa-
vants” may have had of the solidarity unifying them as well as any meaning they
may have attributed to it. Yet innumerable accounts, at least during the eigh-
teenth century, reveal that for savants, also referred to as “men of letters,” the
expression “Republic of Letters” solidified both the society that unified them
beyond national borders and their highly articulated awareness of it. This “blind
spot” in intellectual history is yet another legacy of a more classic literary history.
Amid its descriptions of various fields of research, Gustave Lanson’s Manuel
d’histoire littéraire (Manual of French Literary History), which has the great
virtue of framing itself as a heuristic endeavor, says nothing about a Republic of
Letters whose collective European foundations would erase the national, politi-
cal borders of the literary history of France as perceived by Lanson. That was not
its sole exclusion. The field of literary history was formed within the positivist cli-
65
mate of the late nineteenth century, with a strong, polemical inclination against
“rhetoric,” which was considered to fall within the purview of “grand, vague
things” from which scholarly work needed to disassociate itself. That healthy
reaction against pedantic, clerical, and fixed forms of rhetoric would be trans-
formed into derision by romantic authors. However, that attitude also meant
being doomed to abandon earlier forms of the art of persuasion and dialogue,
in particular those that had supplied fertile theoretical frameworks for the ac-
tivity and sociability of academies and savant societies and, in general, for the
network of correspondences and the style of quarrels that formed the European
tissue of the Republic of Letters of the ancien régime.
In other words, this meant excluding from historical excavation the very
foundations on which, following the Renaissance, a first “scientific commu-
nity” had established itself with its own functions, conventions, public opinion,
and mythology, as well as an epistemology for collective works extending across
boundaries and generations, which shielded it to some extent from the control
of political and religious authorities. Even René Pintard’s masterpiece—I re-
peat this with unceasing amazement—Le Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertin-
ism, 1943), which blends intellectual history and literary history, relies on the
“psychology” of the “libertine” savant and his moral duplicity to describe the
educated aristocracy of France, Italy, and the Netherlands, whose every mem-
ber displayed his own individuality and lived symbiotically with the society and
prejudices of the era, but which as a whole formed a backdrop coherent enough
to facilitate a surprising autonomy of thought and behavior. The actual expres-
sion “Republic of Letters” does not appear in the book’s index verborum. That
absence is all the more remarkable given that Pintard had provided the best
description thus far of the Republic’s style of existence and collaboration that
prevailed among the leading men of letters in the first half of the seventeenth
century. He also gives glimpses, though never explicitly, of the institution that
sheltered, in a very unique and unconventional fashion, the men who at that
time referred to themselves either as “sçavans” (savants) or men of letters, and
who recruited others according to a subtle and rigorous method of co-optation.
The conceptual limits of Pintard’s analysis are counterbalanced by the reach
and precision of his historical inquiry and by its skillful presentation.1
And yet, as early as 1929, Max Kirschstein had revealed the importance (at
least during the eighteenth century) of the phenomenon represented in the lan-
guage of the time by the formula “Republic of Letters” in his thesis “Klopstocks
deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik” (Klopstocks’s German Republic of Letters). In
1938, Anne Barnes’s French-language work Jean Le Clerc et la République des
Lettres (Jean Le Clerc and the Republic of Letters), introduced a perspective
Rhetoric and Society in Europe 67
that Paul Dibon, in articles published in 1976 and 1978, would try to introduce
into French research. In 1965, Krzysztof Pomian, in a thesis in Polish that unfor-
tunately remains unpublished, and in 1977, Hans Bots, during a lecture given
in Dutch, adopted a similar approach. In 1982, Wilhelm Kühlmann published
a major work in Tübingen that stands a good chance of becoming the equiva-
lent of René Pintard’s in the first half of that century. This time the idea of the
Republic of Letters appears in the title (Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat:
Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des
Barockzeitalters), and the problematic of the book revolves around this central
concept.2 The importance paid to Kühlmann’s work by the German Germanis-
tik can be measured by an ambitious project organized by the research center
of the Wolfenbüttel Library and published in August 1987 under the title Res-
publica litteraria: Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (in
two volumes). However, the scope of these two works is limited chronologically
to the “Baroque era” and geographically to Germany. The European dimen-
sion of the Republic of Letters phenomenon takes a back seat, and the genesis
of the concept itself and its varied interpretations depending on location and
era are unaddressed. Nonetheless, it is clear that Germany was experiencing a
genuine resurgence, both reflexive and critical, of the kind of research that was
extremely prevalent in Lutheran universities at the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury and throughout the eighteenth century, and which led to the publication
of numerous legal theses or works of literary history dedicated to the Respublica
litteraria. This collective effort within German academic circles was aimed at
understanding and assimilating a development from which the Thirty Years’
War had temporarily blocked Germany. Incidentally, a good account of this his-
torical aggiornamento can be found in Emilio Bonfatti’s work (La “Civil conver-
sazione” in Germania) on one of the fundamental aspects of the “manners” of
the Republic of Letters: courtesy, affability between men of letters, and the art
of conversation, as invented by Italy and adopted and reinterpreted by France,
which a savant Germany strove to belatedly study, translate, and systematize.3
Visibly, the history of the expression “Republic of Letters” was just as fertile in
eighteenth-century France, where it was used almost to the point of obsession.
Without it, we would be unable to understand the meaning of Condorcet’s
Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch of a His-
torical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit, 1793), and even less so the
odd hopes expressed by the Girondin Nicolas de Bonneville, who in 1790 wrote
in Le Tribun du people (I cannot resist quoting this a second time): “It is from
the Republic of Letters that we expect the triumph of patriotism and liberty.”
A worse prophet would be hard to find.
For a long time, however, in France, which played such a capital role in the
history of the Republic of Letters, works about that network of savants betrayed
enormous gaps, to say the least. There are nonetheless many points of refer-
ence for the seventeenth century, thanks to works and collections of letters be-
tween savants written or assembled by Paul Dibon, Hans Bots, Bruno Neveu,
and François Waquet.4 The eighteenth century and the French Revolution re-
main, in this respect, less studied due perhaps to the fact that the lettered Re-
public grew both demographically and geographically and took on a critical
guise detrimental to its former irenic nature. If we look back even farther to the
sixteenth century, we are forced to make do with a German article about Eras-
mus, written by Fritz Schalk: “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria.”5 It is too
early for research on the exact nature of the institution and the structure of its
concepts, as well as the legal and poetic ideals implied. But curiosity about the
genesis and strictly semantic history of the expression itself is lacking. Indeed
one credible historian of humanism wrote, not so long ago, that the expression
does not predate Erasmus! And yet it is evident that even future studies on the
French or German Republic of Letters in the eighteenth century, for example,
could be greatly distorted by the lack of previous investigations on the origin
and earlier interpretations of the term “Republic of Letters.” The stakes here
are nothing less than the history of the emergence of a European “scientific
community,” the “democracy” of judgment and criticism it implies, the institu-
tional structures it created for itself, and the philosophical reflection put into it.
Why would this line of research interest a historian of humanist rhetoric in
particular? Let’s consider his or her working hypothesis: the humanist Renais-
sance—the renovatio litterarum et atrium launched by Petrarch—is character-
ized principally by a change in the dialogic model dominant among savants.
The dialectical model of quaestio and disputatio that structured the scholastic
system gave way to a model of a rhetorical-t ype dialogue, for which the Petrar-
chan “letter,” and later the Montaignian “essay,” served as the original example.
This was another branch of the subject of knowledge, of its relationship to the
“other” and with truth, which had a much more diverse range of forms. But it
was also an extension of savant dialogue beyond university walls, and beyond
the exclusive privilege of specialists, to largely secular men and institutions that
had been previously excluded from access to knowledge: artisans, merchants
and squires, chancery secretaries and notaries. The rhetorical mode of savant
dialogue was more “open” than the one it was attempting to replace but did
not for all that lack its own brand of discipline, which imposed norms of speech
and sociability on its participants, making collaboration and internal checks
possible. Rhetorical dialogue had more in common with legal debates than it
did with the logical formalism of the scholastic disputatio. This new mode of
dialogue called for new institutions of dialogue: groups (cœtus) of friends as-
sembled around Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati in the fourteenth century,
and “academies” around Argyropoulos and Ficino in Florence in the fifteenth
century. It was this nebula of savant “companies” that took the name Republic
of Letters and which therefore enabled that society to exist within mainstream
society. Such a phenomenon would naturally appear to be a major theme for
the historian of the “art of persuasion.”
He or she would then be primed to make the case that humanist rhetoric was
not a “literary” epiphenomenon or a simple, pedantic repetition of classical and
archaic models whose usage was limited to political and religious propaganda
or verbose academicism. It also, and most importantly, paved the way for a so-
cialized mode of “modern” discovery and understanding for which Descartes,
echoing Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne, provided an accurate definition in
the peroration of his Discours de la method (Discourse on the Method, 1637):
I judged that there was no better provision against these two impediments
[the shortness of life and the difficulty and cost of research] than faith-
fully to communicate to the public the little which I should myself have
discovered, and to beg all well-inclined persons to proceed further by
contributing, each one according to his own inclination and ability, to the
experiments which must be made, and then to communicate to the pub-
lic all the things which they might discover, in order that the last should
commence where the preceding had left off; and thus, by joining together
the lives and labours of many, we should collectively proceed much fur-
ther than any one in particular could succeed in doing.6
In Étienne de Courcelles’s Latin translation of this text, which was published

in 1644 with Descartes’s authorization, the word “public” was replaced by the
Latin expression Respublica litteraria.
At this stage of research, the expression “Republic of Letters,” unknown dur-
ing antiquity and the Middle Ages, looks to have appeared for the first time in
1417 in a Latin letter addressed by the young Venetian humanist Francesco
Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini, to congratulate him on the discovery of various
manuscripts, including Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.7 The idea of a savant
community that transcends borders and generations, and which owes a debt of
gratitude to Poggio and is duty-bound to honor him, appears throughout the
letter, as it does in Barbaro’s later correspondence, in different forms: eruditi
homines, doctissimi homines ubicumque (the erudite men, the savants of the en-
tire world), united by necessitudo litterarum (the alliance of letters) and paying
homage through Barbaro’s pen to Poggio’s pro communi utilitate labores (works
of public utility). Here then are three generations, spanning from Petrarch to
Poggio to Salutati, via a network that included Milan, Padua, Florence, and
Rome, during which the renovatio litterarum created bonds of solidarity and
collaboration between savants who had adopted it as their ideal. Soon enough,
it would choose a name: Respublica litteraria. It is noteworthy that this moniker
appeared in an “incunable” manuscript of academic eulogy nearly one century
before academies governed by actual statues were formed.
Where did this new expression come from? I propose that it is a variation of a
much older formula: Respublica christiana. The two expressions actually appear
together, in later occurrences, and are used interchangeably, or at least differen-
tiated by an imperceptible nuance. Respublica christiana dates back to The City
of God,8 in which Saint Augustine counters Cicero’s definition of the Roman
state (from the dialogue De Republica, which had been entirely lost during the
Renaissance) with his own definition of the state in general, which allowed him
to contrast the earthly city and the city of God, as well as states both divided and
united by the love of false gods and false things and the church (ea respublica,
cujus conditor rectorque Christus est, “that republic whose founder and ruler
is Christ”). During his reflections on the Ciceronian definition, according to
which juris concensus and utilitatis communio establish unity among a people
and the legitimacy of a state, Saint Augustine rejects the notion of law, an en-
tirely human convention, and that of a community of interests, overly subject
to selfish passions, and bases his definition of a political community on “an as-
semblage of reasonable beings bound together by common agreement as to the
objects of their love.” He replaces the order of law and interest with that of grace
and love, with, as its opposite, its demonic caricature, the earthly city.
These texts, widely read throughout the Middle Ages, were all the more om-
nipresent in humanists’ minds because they had Petrarch’s two heroes, Cicero
and Saint Augustine, dialoguing with one another. In Barbaro’s letter, utilitas
communis is an expression of Cicero’s as quoted by Saint Augustine. And the
meaning the Venetian humanist ascribes to Respublica in this context is a blend
of the two definitions discussed in City of God: a society united by love of the
same things, and by law and common interests. The Respublica takes from both
the Augustinian church and the ideal Roman state according to Cicero. The
rational element Saint Augustine made sure to include in his definition is rep-
resented by the adjective litteraria, which simultaneously implies the eruditio
of this republic’s citizens and the nature of the common good uniting them.
Respublica litteraria broke away from the Respublica christiana, not to oppose
it but to imitate it, in a way, on a literary level.
Remember that the letter in which this expression appeared for the first
time was addressed to Poggio while he was in Constance (1414–1418), where he
had followed Antipope John XXIII, who was attending the council gathered by
Emperor Sigismund to put an end to the Great Western Schism. Under those
circumstances, concerns over the unity of the Respublica christiana were par-
ticularly intense, and the restorers of “good letters” (diplomats or chancery sec-
retaries who had followed John XXIII) could very well believe in a perfect con-
currence of their savant civicism and their Christian civicism. After the council
deposed the three antipopes, including John XXIII, Poggio found himself with
some leisure time, leaving him free to explore the libraries of German-speaking
Switzerland at length and to announce his discoveries to his Florentine friends.
Contemporary theories of conciliar theologians, notably the Gallicans, strength-
ened by the tragedy of the Great Schism, insisted precisely on the notion of a
congregatio et universitas fidelium (congregation and collectivity of the faith-
ful): clerics and laymen called upon to establish the authority of a universal
council that would surpass that of incompetent or abusive popes. Francesco
Barbaro was a layman, who would quickly marry within his Venetian, senatorial
milieu and assume a leading role in the affairs of the Serenissima. As shown by
Carlo Dionisotti,9 a notable percentage of the doctissimi homines assembled by
Barbaro in the “literary republic”—from Petrarch to Politian, and from Boccac-
cio to Castiglione and Bembo—enjoyed ecclesiastical benefits, held important
posts within the pontifical curia, and desired or obtained a bishopric or cardinal-
ship. The Republic of Letters would have to extend to northern Europe, incor-
porating Gallicans and reformists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
and masons in the eighteenth, for this lettered aristocracy’s original relationship
with the Roman church to weaken, though the notion of a mystical corps of
savants working together toward a common good with universal meaning never
disappeared entirely.
In fifteenth-century Italy, the separation between Respublica christiana and
Respublica litteraria was not conceivable. The latter was still merely a meta-
phor for the self-awareness of a group of important secular Italian men of let-
ters within the Roman Church, who sought the church’s unity (at that time
threatened by the Great Schism) and shared similar research aims and the same
project of renovatio antiquitatis. However, this metaphor was sufficiently dy-
namic to engender social rituals for the group it was simultaneously construct-
ing and defining: Barbaro’s eulogistic letter is the symbolic equivalent of a uni-
versity laureatio, granted in the presence and name of the laureate’s fictitiously
assembled peers. Its “epideictic” character implies the existence, well attested
to elsewhere, of other forms of judicial or deliberative collaborations, true dia-
logues, like Leonardo Bruni’s I dialogi ad Petrum Histrum, a collection of letters

discussing various points of philology, morals, and so forth.
Nonetheless, it is worth pausing on the adjective litteraria, which, following
Petrarch, became (like the noun litterae)10 a way for Italian reformers of savant
culture to recognize and acknowledge one another—a password, as it were. It
is important to once again note its dual registers: one classic and pagan, the
other Christian and medieval. For ancient grammarians, littera was the written
notation of the smallest segment (elementum) of articulated speech. The man
of letters, the savant, was above all someone who could read, who had a literary
memory, and who was in a position to extract other words or expressions from
his mental repository, which he would dictate, as writing was a task relegated
to specialized slaves. Initiation into the world of letters meant elevation from
the level of the rude; it meant erudiri, accession to humanitas and eventually
urbanitas. There was a “mystery” in the knowledge of letters, and in the uni-
verse of books, that separated the ancient, medieval, humanist from his illiter-
ate contemporaries as surely as, in Mallarmé’s eyes, the “mystery in literature,”
known only to poets, separated the bourgeoisie and journalists in their philis-
tine ignorance from the men of letters they imagined themselves to be. The
divide was even more pronounced in the Middle Ages and left no room for illu-
sions. Hence, the monk Nicolas of Clairvaux could write:
Vetus enim proverbium est, et ore veterum celebrata sententia: quantum a

belluis homines, tantum distant a laicis litterati. (It is an old proverb and
one celebrated by the ancients, that as much as men are removed from
the beasts, so are educated men removed from the illiterate.)11
Access to the world of letters, reserved to the “clergy,” provided a particular

mastery of space and time, and an internal freedom difficult to violate. Freedom
of space, as the man of letters was not confined to a single location and could
communicate, through letters, with those absent and faraway, meaning the
dead. Freedom of time, because the man of letters was alone capable of trans-
forming otium, a misfortune for the common man (intervals between negotia,
disgrace, exile, old age), into a source of productive happiness. For Cicero, the
otium litteratum (lettered leisure) was the ultimate form of otium cum digni-
tate, but was above all, in his mind, a “rejuvenation” for the man of action tem-
porarily absent from the political scene. In Seneca’s writings, on the other hand,
particularly in his final works, the studiosum otium (studious leisure) became,
for the first time in Rome, a superior way of life that was sufficient unto itself.
Here, we are already on the path that led from the withdrawal of the philosophi-
cal man of letters to Christian monasticism. In De otio, Nero’s tutor even fore-
shadowed the Augustinian concept of two cities. Seneca writes:
We should try to comprehend two commonwealths: one great and truly

common to all, by which gods and men are held together and in which
we should not look for this or that out-of-the-way place but the bound-
aries of a city as measured by the course of the sun; and another in which
we are included by accident of birth, which may be that of the Atheni-
ans or of the Carthaginians or any other city which does not reach out to
include all men but only specific ones. Certain individuals give service to
both commonwealths at the same time, to the greater and to the lesser;
some only to the lesser, others only to the greater. We can serve devotedly
this greater commonwealth even in leisure, or indeed probably better in
leisure.12
For the citizens of the invisible Cosmopolis, according to Seneca, that leisure
was fully dedicated to contemplative understanding, with books, of the immu-
table laws governing the divine order of the world. But that understanding was
fixed and solipsistic, which in no way anticipated the collaborations and relays
of the Republic of Letters as would be defined by Descartes, and for that matter
depicted by the utopian cities of the Renaissance by figures like Thomas More
and Campanella, with the aim of a theoretical, but practical, “common good.”
If we know the fate of the otium litteratum in the Middle Ages, it is thanks to
Pierre Courcelle’s works on Saint Augustine and Dom Jean Leclercq’s studies
of monastic life.13 And yet Petrarch, the founder of humanism, directly linked
his chosen way of life to monasticism: he longed to join his brother, a Carthu-
sian monk, and was himself a cleric.14 Few publications were more influential
on his work than two symmetrical treatises: De otio religioso, written for monks,
and De vita solitaria, for men of letters like himself. The connection is evident
in several respects, and it is clear that efforts to imitate the Ancients by the
first humanists, Petrarch’s spiritual successors, were filtered through a thousand
years of monasticism. In this way, the monastic elevation of writing to the level
of a spiritual exercise15 freed it of the servile character attributed it by antiquity.
In Petrarch’s Letters, the calamus, in his own hand, becomes an intelligent mea-
sure of his degree of availability and concentration. For example, he writes to the
Dominican Giovanni Colonna:
Only there [in solitude] and not elsewhere am I myself; there lies my pen
which at present rebels everywhere I go and refuses my orders because I
am preoccupied with burdensome matters. Thus, while it is constantly
busy [negotium], when I have plenty of leisure [otium], it prefers to have
leisure [otium] when I have much to do [negotium], and almost like a
wicked and insolent servant, it seems to convert the fervor of the master
into its own desire for rest. However, as soon as I get back home I shall
compel it to take on its duties and I shall write about what you seek in a
separate book, indicating what has been written by others and what are
my own ideas. Indeed just as I am accustomed to writing these friendly
letters almost as amusement in the very midst of conversations and bustle,
in the same way I have need of solitary quiet and pleasant leisure and
great and uninterrupted silence in order to write books.16
Many humanists were secretaries. Petrarch was himself solicited on mul-

tiple occasions to accept a pontifical appointment as a secretary of briefs. His
method of forming letters, in imitation of Carolingian cursive, and breaking
with the university and Gothic style, primed the development of a “human-
istic” script by Poggio Bracciolini, who would not deign to copy manuscripts.
Thanks to Petrarch, otium scribendi was transported out of the monastic scrip-
toria and became a spiritual exercise for all the lettered, secular clerics for whom
he served as a model. Judging from the development of this new manuscript
culture, one could hazard that it was preparing its agents to become the arbi-
ters of a new world, which was highly polemical and dangerous, inaugurated by
the printing press.
To quote Paul Oskar Kristeller, the humanist of Petrarchist extraction, the
agent of this new culture, appeared like a “transfer of the ideal of monastic
life from the monk to the scholar.” The return to antiquity was first of all a re-
turn to the prescholastic period of Benedictine Europe, to sapientia scribae in
tempore otii (wisdom of the scribe in ancient times [when one knew how to
occupy leisure time]), which supported conventual theorica studia. This was
Saint Bernard’s revenge on Abelard: shared meditatio and gustatio to God tri-
umphing over logic-based school exercises. The eloquent genres essential to
monastic civilization—sermons and lyrical hymns, history, epistolography (the
rotuli that made the rounds of Europe)—once again prevailed over theologians’
quaestiones disputatae. The difference between the monk and the humanist
(and monks from Ambrogio Traversari to Battista Mantuano often enthusias-
tically embraced the “new culture”) was above all one of discipline: the monk
was subject to the rules of his order and the authority of his abbey; the human-
ist, to borrow a Benedictine category, was a “gyrovague” (errare and vagare are
key words of Petrarch’s correspondence). If he were to impose a discipline upon
himself, to accept the rules of savant “civicism,” it would be of his own free
will, for the love of letters, during an independent otium often funded by eccle-
siastical benefices. The metaphor of the Respublica litteraria relates as much
to the idea of order—though nonmonastic, transcending frontiers and genera-
tions, and based on a free implicit contract—as it does to the idea of the church
and “mystical body.” Humanist circles were quick to respond to the biographi-
cal and hagiographical activity of the great medieval orders with the elabora-
tion of Lives, or cycles of Lives, which established a model of what a “savant”
was and how he should behave. This began in 1341 with Boccaccio’s De vita et
moribus Domini Francisci Petrarchi. It became a cycle in the second half of
the fifteenth century in Florence, with Vespasiano dei Bisticci’s Lives, and an
academic genre in the sixteenth century with Paul Jove’s Vitae, the model for
Vasari’s Vite of artists. If dialogi, epistolae, and diverse oratory forms of the “trea-
tise” established collective standards of savant discussion and its epistemology,
then Lives, as I previously noted, provided this developing and expanding com-
munity with moral examples and models of savant discipline.
During the Middle Ages, the litterati were separated from the vulgus, and
the clerici from the laici, not only by their ability or inability to read and write,
or access or lack thereof to savant memory and spiritual and intellectual disci-
pline, but also by use of different languages. The sermo litteratorum, the lingua
litterata, was Latin; the sermo vulgi, the lingua vulgaris, was the multiplicity of
vulgar idioms. As a grammatical language, Latin respected universal rules and
was relatively stable. Vulgar Latin, composed of local, fluctuating dialects and
devoid of grammar, had an inferior ontological standing. The Respublica litte-
raria, which inherited that medieval view, had a universal vocation insofar as its
language was Latin. But which Latin? As soon as this question was raised—and
indeed, this was the Republic’s seminal question given that the humanist man
of letters was first distinguished by his rebellion against the “corrupted” univer-
sity Latin—the fixed hierarchy that governed the interactions of Latin and ver-
nacular, clerics and laymen, was shaken. A historical perspective on language
was introduced. If the studia humanitatis were meant to overcome a “corrup-
tion of eloquence” that originated during the barbarian invasions, why was that
mission not extended to the vulgar tongue, rather than being limited to savant
Latin?
This issue was raised beginning in the early fifteenth century within the
humanist circles of the Florentine chancery and pontifical curia. For a figure
like Leonardo Bruni, a vulgar, corrupted Latin had already existed in ancient
Rome. The savant/vulgar language diglossia preexisted the barbarian invasions;
it was a structural trait of Romania. For scholars like Flavio Biondi and Giovan
Battista Alberti, that diglossia was a “medieval” phenomenon. Since Latin had
been susceptible to “growth,” “corruption,” and “restoration,” as grammatical
as it was, why wouldn’t the same hold for the vulgar tongue? This debate in-
volved both a historical perspective and an inseparable rhetorical one. It was
Latin’s rhetoricity and capacity for eloquence that had grown and that had been
corrupted. In Bruni’s mind, those traits were not transmittable to vulgar Latin,
either then or during antiquity. For proponents of the opposing argument, a

Latin restored to its previous vigor, in thoughts and actions, had the historical
function of serving as a living model and guide for the growth of vulgar Latin
and its accession to savant and literary dignity. Henceforth, each generation
of humanists would have its own debate over the future of that vulgar tongue.
This prevented the emerging Republic of Letters from being a “closed society,”
situating it instead in a perspective of expansion and dynamism, which was not
limited to the good news of the “restoration of Latin eloquence.” That restora-
tion was itself understood to be contagious, and also served as a model: what
had been achieved in the case of scholastic Latin could also be achieved in the
case of vulgar Latin—a corrupted Latin, yes, but a living, moving, and effective
language, like the original Latin. The “question of language”17 quickly became,
and remained, a driving force of the Republic of Letters, ultimately leading it in
the eighteenth century to a conversion, itself controversial, to academic French
as the “Latin of the Moderns.”
Confined to networks of handwritten correspondence, the expression Res-
publica litteraria would not reach a wide audience until the end of the fifteenth
century, via several incunable texts and, in particular, the admirable dedications
(and veritable manifestos) that Aldus Manutius included in his editions of clas-
sical texts. In the meantime, another word, rare in the Middle Ages, entered the
humanists’ vocabulary and became inseparable from the expression Respublica
litteraria: academia. It first appeared in a purely Ciceronian sense in order to
designate, in reference to Poggio Bracciolini’s home and later Marsilio Ficino’s,
a villa in the countryside equipped with a library and, in Poggio’s case, a collec-
tion of antiques, where savant friends joined the master of the house for varied
discussions. Friendship, which the Ancients had made the ultimate social con-
nection, as well as the breadth of feelings and sociable attitudes that could be
summarized by the virtue of humanitas, developed, in a kind of freely chosen
withdrawal, among these groups of lettered men united by their affinities. These
feelings, this politesse, created conditions favorable to dialogue and therefore
themselves became an integral part of the new epistemology.
But from the beginning, the borrowing of the word academia from the An-
cients, Cicero and Pliny, was rich with latent semantic developments. The
memory of the Platonic Academy, the only philosophical school of antiquity
that lasted without interruption for one thousand years—a fact that continu-
ally amazes me—until its closure by Justinian I in 1529, was revived by Byzan-
tine scholars, who first converged on Europe as diplomats and then as refugees
beginning in the late fourteenth century, bringing with them from the Orient
a zeal for Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, alongside the Greek language
and manuscripts. The garden of Akademos, the altar that Plato dedicated to
the Muses, and the role played by dialogue, banquets, and music within the
transmission of Platonic philosophy, formed a savant myth that would confer
the prestige of a “rediscovered era” to gatherings of Italian humanists, from the
meetings held by Marsilio Ficino at the villa of Careggi, which was founded
by Cosimo de’ Medici, to Raphael’s Parnassus in the Signature Room at the
Vatican. Well before academies had acquired legal status and became stable
“guilds” in the sixteenth century, they emerged as the informal and common
model of devout lay brotherhoods, referred to in Venice as scuole. These confra-
ternities had an annual holiday for their patron saints, banquets, and charitable
responsibilities shared by all their members. The members of these brother-
hoods, according to statutes written and approved by civil and religious authori-
ties, incidentally had their own professions, careers, and families. They dedi-
cated only a part of their spare time to the confraternity.
The humanists also lived double lives, in their own way: they had their offi-
cia, their negotia, and could only dedicate the best of their otium to solitary
study and savant sociability. It was the model of the devout brotherhood, rather
than the guild of artisans, that gave meetings between savants their regularity,
festive rites, and a climate of literary zeal that warmed and familiarized those
remnants of antiquity that seemed spectral or affected. At the villa at Careggi,
as at Pomponio Leto’s villa on Quirinal Hill in Rome, they celebrated the birth-
days of “saints” with a banquet. In Florence, the “saint” was Plato; in Rome,
Romulus. In between, confabs, speeches, and concerts in Florence and Rome
(where representation of plays by Plautus and Terence and shared pilgrimages
were staged or held among the ruins or in the catacombs) nourished lettered
piety and sowed the seeds of encyclopedism as well as the antiquarianism of the
academies of the later classical era. Savonarola dissolved Ficino’s academy in
1494 and, by 1468, Pope Paul II had taken umbrage at the activities of the Aca-
demia romana of Pomponius Lætus (Pomponio Leto), notably Leto’s invented,
self-attributed title of Pontifex maximus and the classical pseudonyms the aca-
demicians insisted on choosing, and put an end to these enduring remnants of
paganism under pretext of a plot. In Naples, on the other hand, the academy
grouped around Antonio Beccadelli, which included the great poet and essayist
Pontano (who adopted the pseudonym Jovianus), lived symbiotically with the
court of Alfonso the Magnanimous and would only see its work interrupted in
1495 by the arrival of Charles VIII’s French armies. Five years later, in Milan,
Louis XII disrupted a similar synergy between court and academy by sending
Ludovic le More to France as a prisoner. In just a few years, presaging the sack
of Rome, the fragility of the network of the first Italian academies had become
apparent, as had that of the Republic of Letters that had injected all these com-
panies with the sensation of working together in the same mind-set and for the
same renovatio spiritus of Latin Christianity.
Here is where the advantages of the printing press, previously viewed by men
of letters merely as a technique to supplement the dissemination of piety and
knowledge, became apparent: the output of one century of Greek and Latin
philology and the existing foundational works of Italian humanism found a “de-
finitive” storehouse in the printing press. These works were circulated across
Europe to create a network of libraries and spread the models of savant research
and sociability developed in Italy. The expression “Republic of Letters” crossed
the Alps, and academies appeared in Germany, France, Spain, and England.
Erasmus was the principal beneficiary, and eloquent champion, of this trans-
latio of the Respublica litteraria across the breadth of the Respublica christiana.
But first we must give Erasmus’s predecessor Aldus Manutius his rightful due.
His editions, with their anchor and dolphin emblem, are even today the pin-
nacle of all that remains of Europe’s great libraries and its high bibliophilia.
From the earliest works published by Aldus, beginning in 1494 in Venice, his
epistolary prefaces, addressed to studiosi bonarum litterarum (students of good
letters) and amantissimi bonarum litterarum (devotees of good letters), made
him the true spokesman for a Republic of Letters expanding across all of Europe
and read like the editorials of an international “scientific program.”18
These addresses to a “savant public opinion” were not published in Venice
by chance. Aldus was Roman, not Venetian. And at forty years old, he was
not young by the criteria of his day. He could have, as his noble-born student
Alberto Pio, the Prince of Carpi, desired, established another small academy
in his patron’s castle. He chose to become a printer, and a printer in Venice at
that. The city was without a doubt the most favorable communications hub,
in Italy at least, for circulating books, as it included countless printers. Venice
also served as a refuge for Byzantine exiles; Greek was taught and spoken there,
which made the printing of Hellenic classics less insurmountable. But it was
also an aristocratic republic protected from the military campaigns ravaging the
rest of Italy, thus giving rise to the savant myth of Venice as the land of politi-
cal wisdom and liberty. The University of Padua was its “Latin quarter,” which
attracted students from across Europe, where scholastic theology had a weak
grip, and where Petrarch’s repeated visits a century earlier had planted the seeds
for a conversion to philological and rhetorical humanism. The Roman Inquisi-
tion did not encroach upon this defensive republic. Strategically, the choice of
Venice was the best one. But which strategy? Aldus, a friend of Pic de la Miran-
dole, a correspondent of Politian, and an admirer of Marsilio Ficino, saw what
his lettered friends had not: the printing press could destroy their literary en-
deavor either by circulating texts adulterated by haste and the lure of profit or
by spreading the Gothic heritage on a vast scale. On the other hand, it could
also save it by circulating, and imbuing with prestige, the rediscovered and re-
stored “common good.” In 1497, in the preface to his edition of the Greek text
of Aristotle’s Physics, Aldus mentions the academy he assembled in order to en-
sure the critical exactitude of the texts he published. He lists his collaborators,
all talented philologists, and makes no effort to hide the hopes he places in the
far-reaching dissemination of the fruits of the Italian Renaissance. At the begin-
ning of his edition of Aristophanes, he writes:
I hope that in a near future, when barbarism is destroyed and ignorance

vanquished, good letters and true disciplines will be embraced not, as
they are now, by a tiny minority, but by universal accord.
In 1499, in another preface, this time to a collection of Greek astronomers,

Aldus delights over the fact that the Englishman Thomas Linacre, Chalcon-
dyle’s student in Florence, had uncovered some of the texts he had published.
In 1502, in the beginning of his edition of Statius, dedicated to the Cretan poet
and humanist Marco Musurus, the now successfully established Aldus writes:
I have never failed to mention the name of a savant who contributed to

uncovering the texts I publish, or who helped my enterprise in one way or
another.
He adds:
May Heaven grant us even more benefactors of the Republic of Letters.
In a dedicatory epistle to Senator Marino Sanuto,19 also in 1502, Aldus be-

moans the infrequency with which he sees his friend, overburdened with public
affairs, and that he himself is too busy with affairs of the Republic of Letters. The
underlying opposition is of course between otium, related to private life, and
the negotia of the forum. But by formulating this old Roman antithesis in a new
way, at the beginning of a book that would circulate throughout Europe, Aldus
conferred a public quality on the collective otium litteratum of the Republic
of Letters, which made it a spiritual power comparable to civil power and ele-
vated it to a community of judgment, distantly but directly foreshadowing the
eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. These prefaces themselves offer a hint,
still conflated with the book itself, of the savant press that would emerge during
the reign of Louis XIV. This is clear in the sweeping dedicatory epistle to Pope
Leo X that prefaces the 1513 edition of Plato’s Complete Works. Part assessment,
part forecast, this epistle is a true manifesto of the Republic of Letters. A strictly
political reflection on the disasters that had struck the first Italian academies
twenty years earlier prompted Aldus to seek an alliance between the Republic
of Letters and the absolute sovereign that the pope was in the process of once
again becoming. Thus began a course of action that, until the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, would guide the leaders of the Republic of Letters through a
tactical alliance with strong political powers, which were capable of imposing
that alliance on those opposed to the freedom of research and of endowing the
savant world with lasting institutions. This strategy adopted by men of letters
would benefit Richelieu and Louis XIV in particular.
Conscious of the fragility of his own “academy,” too tightly linked to the fate
of his printing business, Aldus sought to transform it into an official academy
whose longevity would be guaranteed even after his death. He negotiated with
both the pope and the emperor, though neither effort was fruitful. Neverthe-
less, several ephemeral branches of the Aldine Academy subsequently spread
throughout Europe. Aldus’s project and output were given further momen-
tum and another perspective by Erasmus’s visit to the publisher’s home in 1508.
Erasmus would go on to create the northern pole of the Republic of Letters in
Basel, alongside Frobenius and the Amerbachs. The group of young English
humanists with whom Aldus collaborated, Thomas Linacre and William Gro-
cyn, William Latimer and Cuthbert Tunstall, would help make the University
of Oxford into a humanist academy crowning a pedagogical edifice inspired by
the experiences of Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre, fifteenth-century
Italian Quintilians. (Their unique way of doing so made an indelible impression
on the English history of universities.) Aldus foresees this turning point in the
preface to Astronomica (1499):
From the same England where barbarian letters lacking in erudition once
reached as far as us and occupied Italy, where they still have a citadel [the
scholastic “scotism”], we now receive good letters: they speak Latin flu-
ently there, and it is with the aid of the English that we are chasing away
barbarism and taking back possession of the citadel, so much so that the
same spear that wounded us will also heal us.
Note in passing the metaphor of militia litterarum, which would continue to

be used to support the eloquence of the Republic of Letters until Voltaire’s time
and beyond, making it into a savant church that was both militant and mission-
ary. In a note added to his commentary on the adage Herculei lebores, which he
wrote while visiting Aldus, Erasmus pays homage to the publisher while borrow-
ing his language of the propagatio litterarum:
I saw clearly that this was not work for one man, nor one library, nor for
a few years—this work that I finished alone, unaided, in less than eigh-
teen months, with the help of one library—though that was Aldus’s, and
a large one, richer than any other in good books, especially Greek, and
from this library as from a fountain-head all other good libraries all over
the world are coming to birth and increasing.20
And indirectly, thanks to two events—the French Hellenist Guillaume

Budé’s visit to Aldus’s home in 1501, and the 1508 arrival in Paris of Girolamo
Aleandro, one of Aldus’s most brilliant “academicians,” who taught Greek in
the French city to resounding success, using texts printed in Venice—this great
Italian bookseller of the Republic of Letters contributed, with Budé, to cre-
ating favorable conditions for the establishment of classical language chairs at
the Collège Royal. The sixteenth century effectively saw the institutional con-
solidation of the Republic of Letters throughout Europe, whose scientific unity
it would preserve despite religious schisms and international and civil wars. In
large part, the Society of Jesus’s strategy following the Council of Trent con-
sisted of imitating and attempting to adapt to, often successfully, the Republic’s
network. It was the age of academies and, in both Italy and northern Europe,
these seemingly disparate and often ephemeral institutions largely resisted the
passions and violence sweeping the continent and maintained, with the “com-
mon good” of rediscovered antiquity, the criteria of judgment that ultimately
prevailed over political and religious vicissitudes.
5
THE EMERGENCE OF THE ACADEMIES
In the previous chapter, amid a semantic study of the expression Respublica

litteraria, or res litteraria, and its earliest occurrence in the early fifteenth cen-
tury, I touched upon another concept, which was revived from antiquity at
nearly the same time by Italian humanists: academia. I will continue that line
of study here by analyzing the forms of sociability and collaboration between
men of letters during the Renaissance, in Italy and France, to which academia
referred and which it encapsulated. This does not entail, of course, diverging
from our long-term objective, which is to clarify the meaning, role, and history
of the idea of the Republic of Letters in modern Europe. From what has previ-
ously been established, we can already determine that both Respublica litteraria
and academia developed to characterize, from two different angles, the unique
character of the “humanism” founded by Petrarch and spread by Boccaccio, in
relation to traditional institutions of knowledge—universities. The Respublica
litteraria transformed the lettered circles that privately, and beyond the limits of
monastic discipline or a strictly university framework, dialogued—like Petrarch
and Boccaccio—with antiquity into an “ideal corps” with a universal vocation.
This “ideal corps,” which had no conception of itself outside of the church, and
indeed whose very founding concept was a variation of another name for the
universal church, Respublica christiana, had an implicit parallel to the idea of a
“universal council,” which, through its knowledge, stood in for or supported the
Holy See’s doctrinal authority over the Christian world. This analogy (natural in
the early fifteenth century, in the context of the Great Schism and the Councils
of Constance and Basel) should not be taken too far, however. The “society of
lettered men” discussed by figures such as Francesco Barbaro and Aldus Manu-
tius, whose “citizens” included laymen and clergymen, the living and the dead,
did not claim an ecclesiastical status and refrained from infringing on the sacer-
dotal hierarchy’s territory: theology. If we can consider a “council of lettered
men” when discussing the emerging Respublica litteraria, it is in the sense of
an initially modest, and in any case quite indirect, contribution to a general and
orthodox desire to reform the Church. Its program of restitutio bonarum littera-
rum (good letters forgotten or obliterated by time) was clearly aimed at contrib-
82
The Emergence of the Academies 83
uting to creating the epistemological and spiritual conditions of a “reformed”

Christianity: that renewal translated to a return to the authors and models of
the Greco-Latin and Christian antiquity that preceded the “barbarization” of
Europe. However, this endeavor concentrated on the roots and the trunk of the
“tree of sciences” as it was taught in universities, meaning notably the subjects
of the trivium, but also those of the quadrivium. The medieval “queen” of the
sciences—theology, or studia divinitatis—remained beyond the reform’s ini-
tial scope. Focus was therefore placed on the artes sermocinales, the “arts of
language,” specific to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics); with rhetoric
came eloquence, history, and poetry, revived by imitating the models and disci-
pline of the Ancients. Dante entitled his tract on the vulgarization of the sci-
ences, which hinted at the evolution of “humanism” three centuries in advance,
Convivio (we’ll come back to that choice). But the “banquet” (convivium), at
which he invited his readers to sit at his table (mensa) and share the “bread” of
science with him, was in reality a lecture delivered in first person. The audience
would narrow with Petrarch, who was concerned with restoring classic Latin,
but the notion of convivium deepened. Contubernia of lettered men formed
around the first “humanist,” around his disciple Boccaccio, and around their
spiritual heir, the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati. This network was
extended to absent friends through correspondence, and to the dead and living
through the genre of dialogue borrowed from Cicero. These privately initiated
“seminars of advanced studies” existed on the fringes of the studi, the Italian
name for universities. When the word academia reappeared in the beginning
of the fifteenth century, first in Poggio Bracciolini’s correspondence, the let-
tered societies designated by the term were not claiming to rival or substitute
the studi; rather, they offered the cultores humanitatum a milieu and a style
of research and dialogue highly preferable to that of the studi, “modern” insti-
tutions that could not for their part boast of classical precedents or models, or
philosophical banquets and apostolic Suppers; nor could they revive the virtues
of a golden age—gentleness, equality between peers, and timeless, joyful knowl-
edge—the secret to which the humanists sought within “good letters.”
The initiator of this movement to “reform studies,” which was fervently wel-
comed by the lay world of Italian merchants, notaries, jurists, and chancery
secretaries, was Petrarch. From the start, the desire to legitimize “reformed”
studies entailed more than just invoking the Ancients’ distant authority. It also
sought an equivalent to the ranks or honors conferred by universities. Any study
of the development of the academies should take into account an event often
neglected by historians of humanism: the “coronation” Petrarch was intent
on receiving on Rome’s Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341. This “archetypical”
event is in many respects constitutive of the European academic tradition that

was parallel with, but distinct from, the university tradition. It was as a “poet”
that Petrarch claimed his “crown” (“poetry” representing the pinnacle and en-
capsulation of the “reformed” trivium), an honor with few modern precedents:
the “pre-humanist” notary Albertino Mussato (1262–1329), friend and succes-
sor of the judge Lovato Lovati (1241–1309) in the quest for Latin classics, was
“crowned” in Padua for writing the Senecan tragedy Ecerinis (December 3,
1315). On his deathbed, Dante was also crowned with a laurel wreath. But con-
trary to Mussato, whose laureatio was initiated by the University of Padua, and
Dante, a poet of the vernacular, Petrarch earned his public coronation outside
of the university sphere as the author of the Latin epic poem Africa, based on
the Virgilian model and at that time incomplete, and not as the author of Can-
zoniere, which was written in the vernacular. Petrarch had received two simul-
taneous (and undoubtedly sought-after) invitations: one from the president of
the University of Paris, the other from the Roman Senate. Petrarch accepted
the latter. He chose antiquity and its classical precedents over the scholastic
“modernity” of the great northern university. But Petrarch’s choice also meant
asking Rome for the equivalent of a modern licentia docendi, whose modernity
Rome would eliminate by restoring its classical precedents—the laureationes
(laurel coronations) historically bestowed by Roman emperors upon poets and
orators. For want of an emperor, and for want of a pope (whose return to Rome
Petrarch ardently desired), the poet was forced to make do with the authori-
ties that served, in Italy at that time, as the Sacerdotium and the Regnum, and
which were, despite everything, in a position to sanction the activities of the
studium. And in reality, though this exceptional candidate claimed to bypass
university intercession when it came to his “coronation,” the forms of confer-
ring university degrees were respected. The “exam” was conducted in Naples,
and the examiner was King Robert of Anjou. The laureatio took place in Rome,
in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which housed the senate. A Roman senator,
Orso dell’ Anguillara, handed Petrarch both his crown and the diploma (licen-
tia ubique docendi) authorizing him to teach “good letters,” the disciplines of
poetry, eloquence, and history, wherever he saw fit. In return and as thanks, the
poet made the first “acceptance speech” in European academic history. Citing
verses by Virgil,1 Petrarch celebrated the privilegium laureate he had just re-
ceived in three parts: he spoke of the love of glory and the arduous paths on
which it led poets; he exalted the dignity of poetry; and he conducted an exege-
sis of the symbolic meaning of the laurels he had just received. Though Petrarch
may have reproached himself later in life for desiring this coronation, and retro-
spectively deemed himself unworthy of the honor,2 he nonetheless garnered, for
both himself and the long line of disciples to follow, a type of doctoral authority
that the academies would later inherit and whose renewal they would demand
in the form of a charter signed by a prince or a pope. The rites of co-optation,
recognition, and praise practiced by the Italian academies, which were derived
from university rites and imitated various classical models, would expand the
circle of renowned men of letters to all kinds of “savants” who had no place at
the university, for example, musicians, painters, architects, sculptors, poets, and
others whose methods or disciplines did not correspond to established programs
of learning.
Before the full semantic plasticity of the term academia could unfold, and
the reformist fertility of these savant societies could be revealed, the term’s
Ciceronian meaning (the “villa” where lettered friends gathered to collectively
engage in “studious leisure”) had to be revived during the fifteenth century,
followed by its Platonic and more generally Greek sense, that is, the school
around a master who teaches through dialogue. The influence of Byzantine
scholars, particularly visible after the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1437), ap-
pears to have played a role in both the development of these “sodalities” and the
kind of teacher-student relationship that prevailed within them. The academy
gathered by Cardinal Bessarion in his Roman palace (1400–1472), which as-
sembled Greek and Latin manuscripts in one of the most extensive libraries of
the Renaissance, was as evocative of the apostolic “Lord’s Supper” (through its
debates about evangelical texts) as the Platonic “banquet.” This savant “sodality”
coincided with the emergence of Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence, which
originated with the meeting, at the Council of Florence, between Cosimo the
Elder (Ficino’s Medici patron) and the Byzantine Gemistus Plethon, who in
Mistra had initiated Bessarion to Neoplatonism.
This style of cooperation, but also transmission of knowledge-wisdom, simul-
taneously shaped sociability between men of letters and pedagogy itself. In
the last quarter of the fifteenth century, academia was used to refer to both
stable groups of established men of letters and schools where children were also
taught. Take, for example, Vittorino da Feltre’s school in Mantua, in the “La
Gioiosa” villa. A student of Guarino da Verona, who was himself a student of the
Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, Vittorino, surrounded by high-caliber
Greek masters like George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza, taught Latin and
Greek “good letters” to young people, adults, and also children. The presence of
the sons of noble families (Gonzaga, Montefeltro) among his students indicates
that those future princes were treated differently from how future clerics would
have been in traditional schools. They had to be taught the liberal arts in a lib-
eral manner, through persuasion and not violence, as if to adults in the making,
and not as infirm bodies to be punished. In this respect, the idea of the academy
(which, in the long term, allowed the “university” of knowledge to be extended
to speakers of vernacular languages, “mechanical” artisans, and women) first
enabled a kind of “adoption” of children. The humanists contrasted the “gentle-
ness” of the academy with the asperity of the school, the cheerfulness and
benevolence of lettered conversation against the severe despondency (inter-
spersed with Basoche banquets) that reigned behind scholastic and university
walls. Persuasive speech, derived from both the banquets of antiquity and the
evangelical Supper, therefore claimed to have once again triumphed over the
abstract and somber “sterility” of Gothic learning.
Criticism of medieval “modernity” did not consist solely of reforming the
methods and curricula of literary studies. The revival of antiquity also led to a
genuine “conversion” of the man of letters through dialogue with ancient auc-
tores, which in itself could give rise to a “conversation” between men of letters
that awakened the mind’s fertileness without detriment to the convergence of
souls. (In his sublime “Art de conférer” [Of the Art of Discussion], Montaigne
cites his models as the “academies” of Athens and Rome as well as Italians “in
our time.”)3 A savant reminiscence of the Golden Age, the academy, in its vari-
ous forms, was the setting for this victory over a vanquished status quo: the col-
lective enlightenment of letters (mediation toward a forgotten wisdom) restored
a lost harmony.
Two key words, which are a leitmotif throughout the humanists’ Neo-L atin
language, give us a glimpse at the symbolic order underlying and structuring
lettered sociability, which we would be mistaken in calling “new,” as it itself
claimed to be “renewed” or “rediscovered.” The first word is convivium, which
evokes both the archetype of the philosophical banquet of antiquity and the
evangelical and apostolic “Supper” (Wedding at Cana, the Last Supper, Supper
at Emmaus, Pentecost). The second is conversatio, easily linked to the former
through the metaphor (recurrent throughout Dante’s Convivio) of the auctores’
words as panis, cibus, and food, and their diffusion as the privileged object of a
philosophical and spiritual banquet. In a posthumous work, the great philologist
Leo Spitzer indirectly contributed to our understanding of the social ethos of
the studia humanitatis through his study of the semantic history of the family
of Latin words preceded by the prefix cum.4 His analysis, concentrated around
consonantia, the word invented by Cicero to translate the Greek harmonia,
establishes the semantic field in which to situate the terms convivium and con-
versatio, and the channels through which they were able to so fully penetrate
philosophical, musical, and religious harmonics. Both convivium and conversa-
tio echo consonantia (in addition to concordia, concentus, consensus, convenien-
tia), whose meaning operates on two registers: the “contemplative life” and the
cosmic music to which it provides access, and the “active life” and civil peace,
good governance, to which it strives. These two terms express the Greeks’ sum-
pathéïa, or sumpnoïa, the happy convergence of minds, hearts, and voices. The
word conversatio does not belong to Ciceronian vocabulary; when it appeared
in Latin, a little later, it did not solely signify, as is the case today in French fol-
lowing a long erosion, “discussion of many,” but a society in which one has roots,
habits, where one feels “at home,” among his “own.” It implied actions and ges-
tures, an implicit way of “being together,” and excluded neither speech nor the
celebratory convivium. We can therefore speak of conversatio amicorum, the
company of one’s friends, and of conversatio castrorum, camp life. Synonyms
include familiaritas, commercium, consuetudo, ratio agendi et vivendi, mores.
Christian authors’ adoption of the word conversatio did not diminish its conta-
gion by a philosophical vocabulary of harmony. On the contrary, the term grew
semantically closer to the Christian word communio. Spitzer cites a passage by
Saint Augustine (who, like Cicero, heavily influenced Petrarch) in which this
Christian adoption of a vocabulary of harmony is particularly evident:
Haec enim congruentia sive convenientia, vel consonantia vel si quid com-
modius dicitur, quod unum est ad duo, in omni compaginatione, vel si
melius dicitur, coaptatione creaturae, valet plurimum. (For this congruity,
or suitableness, or concord, or consonance, or whatever more appropriate
word there may be, whereby one is [united] to two, is of great weight in
all compacting, or better, perhaps, co-adaptation, of the creature.)5
Augustine adds: “what I mean is precisely that co-adaptation which the

Greeks call αρμονια [“harmony”].
The “harmonic” link between convivium and conversatio can be further ex-
plained by the verbal root of the latter term versari, which refers both to that
familiar gesture of participants of ancient banquets turning toward, or vers, and
the concept of a habitual stay. Conversatio passed from the private sphere to the
public one to translate the Greek politeia or politeuma, and to serve as a syn-
onym for civitas and even respublica. Here we can see the point of departure
for the semantic relationship between conversatio civilis and Respublica litte-
raria that appeared during the Renaissance. Christian authors had also adopted
conversatio in this sense of civitas. The Latin Vulgate had Saint Paul say, Nostra
conversatio in caelis est (Our city, our homeland, is in heaven).6 During the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous painters of the Italian Renaissance
illustrated that phrase in a profound way, breaking with the juxtaposition of
saints against Gothic altarpieces. Gathered in the same space, around the Vir-
gin, and engaged in the same silent mediation, these saintly figures communing
with one another without apparent subject or objective were given, with very
good reason, the collective title of sacra conversazione. The visible, if enigmatic,
“harmony” that united these groups in effect prompted the spectator to engage
in an interior meditation, shared by all, on the same “harmony” that reigns in
the celestial homeland.
During the Middle Ages, a scribal error frequently shortened conversatio to
conversio in a famous passage of The Rule of Saint Benedict, thereby accentu-
ating the antithesis, implicit in the creator’s mind, between the monastic city
and lifestyle, harmonized through observance of rule of law, and the sottish
earthly city, the conversatio mundialis stultitiae, which surrendered to passions
and illusions and lacked discipline. Petrarch’s attraction to the monastic way of
life, and his detachment from “society” life at court, as well as from university
“disputes,” foreshadowed the success of the conversatio civilis between Petrar-
chist men of letters during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Beyond the
monastic mensa and its lectiones spirituals, the sharing of “good letters,” the res-
toration of a lost harmony, brought back Platonic banquets, dialogues suffused
with exquisite urbanity in the way of Cicero’s De oratore, Aulus Gellius’s Attic
Nights, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistes, and Macrobius’s Saturnalia (in which
sermo convivialis is mentioned).
The theory of this conversatio civilis (for which prescriptive treatises would
multiply in the sixteenth century) appeared in 1462 in De politia litteraria,
written by the Milanese humanist Angela Decembrio. The politia of the title
is a Latin transcription of politeia but serves as a synonym of conversatio. It of
course refers to the “society of lettered men,” the Respublica litteraria, though
viewed from the angle of its specific manners and its characteristic and essential
sociability. The dialogue, explicitly modeled after Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights,
stages a group of men of letters “disputing” finer points of grammar and the in-
terpretation of classic texts. But these “disputes” are a mere game to sharpen
the mind; they support rather than break the concordia, the concentus animo-
rum, the amicitia, that creates group harmony through the collective sharing
of letters.
The first printed edition of Decembrio’s treatise did not appear until 1540, in
Augsburg, published by Henri Steyner. Its title page is embellished by a wood
engraving of a literary “supper” around a table on which liturgical objects are
present: an open book, an inkwell, quills. The perfunctory decor is that of a
studio-library, whose shelves are protected by curtains. Seated, in accordance
to the legend portrayed in the engraving, several Italian scholars from the previ-
ous century are engaged in a friendly and animated discussion. (Note that a few
figures depicted in the engraving are not present within Decembrio’s dialogue.)
This iconography, which reappeared on numerous frontispieces of savant works

up until the end of the seventeenth century, was likely modeled after Leonardo
da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan. It represents a private academy in action,
the “banquet” where the bread is the book and which, via the book, expands
the company of the living to that of the dead. All ages are represented, from ex-
treme youth to extreme old age: it is also a banquet of generations. Seventeenth-
century texts further attest to the persistence of this harmonic model. The “eru-
dite libertine” Guy Patin (a professor at the Collège Royal beginning in 1655)
observes, for example, “When I’m in the solitude of my office, I enjoy the com-
pany of the dead, I hear my books.” Patin also wrote the following account:
Having returned home this morning, I found your excellent letter here,
which provided me new satisfaction, and increased the joy I had yester-
day, during my celebration of my deanship. Thirty-six of my colleagues
made good cheer; I have never seen serious men, including even our
elders, laugh and drink so much. It appeared that the appetite of the
young inspired others’ emulation and renewed their thirst. We drank the
best old wine of Bourgogne, for I leave Champagne to those who live
there, as I am greatly convinced that little is available in Paris, and that
the little available is neither pure nor the true merum. I welcomed them
in my chamber, where above the tapestry can curiously be seen paint-
ings of Erasmus, the two Scaligers—father and son—Casaubon, Muret,
Montaigne, Charron, Grotius, Heinsius, Saumaise, Fernel, the late Mr.
de Thou, and our good friend Mr. Naudé, librarian for Cardinal Mazarin.
[. . .] There were three other portraits of excellent men, the late Mr. de
Sales, bishop of Geneva; the lord Bishop of Belley, my good friend, Justus
Lipsius; and finally François Rabelais. [. . .] Were my guests not, then, in
good company? Company that was all the better because, without deni-
grating the prepared celebration, it provided agreeable subjects of con-
versation. All were given accolades, and at times we noted the excellent
qualities of their works. Thus the living spoke with the dead and the dead
brought pleasure to the living.7
Here was a banquet on the margins of university life, though fully permeated
by the model of the humanist academies’ “civil conversation.” It took place at
the home of a good friend to the Dupuy brothers’ academy, amid portraits of
the “princes of the Republic of Letters,” in the presence of which this erudite
scholar usually wrote his correspondence.
Two centuries before Guy Patin penned this description of a secular supper,
Decembrio had dedicated De politia litteraria to the humanist Pope Pius II
Piccolomini. The central character of his dialogue was the marquis Leonello
d’Este, who died in 1450. The marquis’s tutor, the elderly Guarino da Verona,
was equally prominent within this small private academy. The dialogue has no
predefined order: the conversation is sinuous, cheerful, even capricious, al-
though its object remains subtle questions of Latin grammar and literature.
The prince himself does not claim any authority besides his literary arts, which
he shares equally with the other guests. He is happy to set the tone and moder-
ate the discussion: “Such was in his mouth the goodwill of his words, serenity
on his face, good humor in his eyes, modesty in all his gestures, grace in all his
attitude.” His clothing, adds Decembrio, worthy of a prince, was chosen accord-
ing to a carefully premeditated cooptatio colorum, in accordance with the day’s
planetary convergence. He therefore incarnates celestial harmony within the
group. Decembrio also insists on the prince’s piety, tanquam sacer Monachus,
“worthy of a monk.” Using these various facets (moral and oratory decorum,
equilibrium of body and soul, cosmic harmony, Christian piety), the humanist
sketches the portrait of the “academician prince,” which would reappear in Cas-
tiglione’s Cortegiano and be incarnated by those close to the Gonzaga and Este
families and, in France, Catherine de’ Medici and her sons.
Several passages of De politia litteraria are dedicated to reflections on the
ethos of academic conversation, for which the dialogue as a whole hoped to set
the example. Despite the presence of a princely moderator within the group,
that ethos did not differ significantly from that revealed by Florentine dialogues
of the same period, for example those written by Leonardo Bruni and Christo-
foro Landino. The bold separation Hans Baron8 attempted to establish between
Florentine “civic humanism” and the “aulic humanism” of Italian courts in
the north should be situated in regard to a political-military context. The en-
graver of the 1540 edition of De politia litteraria, who introduced two Floren-
tine humanists into the illustration of the Milanese dialogue—Leonardo Bruni
and Poggio Bracciolini—viewed the “common ground” linking academies to
“republics” and academies to “principalities” more naïvely. The inventor of the
expression Respublica litteraria, the Venetian Francesco Barbaro, was a citi-
zen of a republic, but he had the same teacher as the marquis Leonello d’Este:
Guarino da Verona.
What initially stands out about this ethos is what one might be tempted to
call “a lay spirituality of the library,” which, as shown by Guy Patin’s writing,
cited above, was still very present during the seventeenth century. One of the
speakers of De politia litteraria expresses it as follows:
When I examine the shelves where my volumes are kept, when I take
them in my hands (I have written each author’s name on the cover),
I feel that I am in the presence of the saintly tombs of those who wrote
them, where one can contemplate, not the remains of their bodies, but
the repository of a part of their soul. Even if the best of them resides with
the blessed, they also breathe in large part through their books, and that
indeed is the benefit of letters.9
Quite naturally, the sacred emotion Decembrio attributes to Joannes Gua-

lengius culminates in an effuse prayer: “O blessed body! O immortal souls!”
The library-chapel-reliquary, where the voices of “author saints” from an-
tiquity could be invoked and conjured from the other world at will by their
learned devotees in this one, was destined to become the temple of a “supper”
between men of letters that abolished time and transformed their dialogues into
invocations of ancient masters brought to life, plunging its participants into a
joy (voluptus, delectation) superior to all earthly joys. This “banquet” among
books, around books, “portraits” of their authors’ souls, ideally extended to all
men of letters. A communion of nonclerical saints, it embraced and encapsu-
lated all the Respublica litteraria. As late as the early eighteenth century, the
historian and librarian Muratori, a clergyman, described such a gathering as a
universal “banquet”:
The fact that so many academies, universities, and savant societies in Italy,
France, Germany, and England are active, attests in an authentic man-
ner to what point the growth of letters is aided by the union of souls, over
which neither the distance between bodies nor the diversity of nations
prevails.10
The “spirituality of the library,” exercised in solitude or in a group, made

no separation between intellectual discipline (indispensable to the preparation
and interpretation of classical texts) and the health and moral virtues that con-
tact with these texts provided to men of letters, regardless of their social rank, in
“active life.” However, this concordia animorum between men of letters, aware
that it existed outside mainstream society, also had to pay attention to its con-
nections with that society. Another passage of De politia litteraria11 casts a bright
light on an additional aspect of the academies, and therefore the Respublica
litteraria itself, beginning in the fifteenth century. The marquis d’Este himself
notes that, like the classical orator, the modern man of letters often writes letters
or speeches in the service of others, in which he reveals his “science” of good
authors. However, he continues, “clients” exclusively appropriate the glory that
these works should also and primarily bring their authors. What remedy could
there be to this violent injustice (injuria)? It is at this point in Decembrio’s dia-
logue that the concept of the Respublica litteraria appears in the guise of the
Consortium politiae litterariae. Solidary men of letters, grouped in a commu-
nity whose members were publicly recognized, albeit in a private capacity, for
litteratissimi et doctissimi, were in a position to ask their peers to give them their
due and to ensure recognition of the glory some attempted to take from them.
Politia litteraria did not only refer to the politeness, urbanity, friendship, joy of
being together, and mutual respect inherent to lettered society. It was also, in
regard to the “world” in general, the police force of literature, reestablishing its
rights, dignity, and due glory, against patrons who were often quite predatory.
And the concern, preventative as it was, that drove Petrarch to organize his own
“coronation,” and therefore the authority of his name and work, is all the more
visible in De politia litteraria when Decembrio has Guarino da Verona deliver a
long, erudite commentary on the coronations of poets and orators in antiquity.12
The quasi-liturgical script of the conversatio presided over by Leonello d’Este
in the fifteenth century was destined to endure for some time, notably appear-
ing in Erasmus’s Convivium religiosum (1526), whose seemingly entirely non-
clerical setting evokes both the communion of saints and the banquets around
Christ in the Gospels, and in particular the final of those feasts: one, the Last
Supper itself, on the eve of the Passion, the other, said to take place at Emmaus,
following the Resurrection.
Shortly after 1611, building on The Supper at Emmaus, Rubens painted an
almost Eucharistic convivium studiosum, which the painter assembled around
a table-altar. In the painting [The Four Philosophers], books are laid on the table
underneath an overhanging niche in which a bust resembles the pagan and
secular saint Seneca, a master in the art of living and dying. The living and
dead around the table are absorbed in a shared lettered piety far from the reach
of profane time. We see Justus Lipsius, the great spokesman of Neostoicism
and editor of Seneca and Tacitus, who died in 1606, and who initiated Philip
Rubens, the painter’s brother, into that Christianized science, before he him-
self passed into the other world in 1611. Jan van den Wouwer (Woverius in the
Republic of Letters), who was very much alive when Rubens, also very much
alive, painted this tableau, is depicted with another Lipsius disciple, also living
at the time. The late master thus appears to be reunited with his dead disciple,
Philip Rubens, and his two living disciples, Peter Paul and Woverius. The evan-
gelist author of this conversatio in coelis, a young Peter Paul Rubens, depicted
himself as an assistant self-portraitist in the background of this secular scene, in
the same way that Velásquez would later depict himself in the midst of silently
immortalizing the august Spanish royal family in Las Meninas. With the paint-
ing The Four Philosophers, currently at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Rubens
identified the profound structure of the Republic of Letters (nonclerical Chris-
tian or simply Christian) with that of the Republic of Arts, two communions
of saints beyond death. He gave unprecedented meaning to the inexhaustible

motto drawn from Horace: ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry).
Earlier, I highlighted another, entirely “modern,” model for the first Italian
academies: confraternities of “laic” devotion.13 That model should also be taken
into account when examining the consuetudo of fifteenth-century Florentine
academies (for example, those led by Jean Argyropoulos and Marsilio Ficino)
and Pomponius Laetus’s academy in Rome. Their emergence was simultaneous
with the writing of De politia litteraria. Moving forward, I will focus on the pos-
terity of the Pomponian Academy, and then on the network of academies that
developed in Florence during the reign of Cosmos I beginning in the 1540s.
My aim is to interconnect the narrative of events, the portraits of the fig-
ures that shaped them, and the emergence of symbolic constellations that tran-
scended both people and acts, resisted the succession of generations, and estab-
lished a tradition. The family of words related to cum, previously discussed in
relation to Leo Spitzer’s work, falls within that category. Salvaged from classic
Latin or Christian antiquity, this word family supplied an ideal structure for the
vastly varied and temporally and geographically disparate universe of the aca-
demies, to the point that each would reproduce it with their own variations and
nuances. Following the example of the teachers of the Warburg Institute, who
rightly accorded a primary importance to the myths of classic antiquity, which
were reinterpreted by philosophy, linked to astronomy, and transformed, like
classic Latin, into a stable system of symbolic reference, I would like to empha-
size the link established during the Renaissance between the academic ethos
and the myth of Parnassus: Apollo, god of light and music, soul of the world, the
nine Muses, musical keys of the celestial spheres, and the dreamlike mountains
of Parnassus or Helicon, on which occurs the mediation between the harmony
of the universe and men of letters, savants or poets, called on to understand and
relate that myth in earthly time and vicissitudes.
Medieval iconography, loyal to authors of late antiquity (Martianus Capella,
Augustine, Boethius, but also Paulinus of Nola), paid scant attention to the
Muses, preferring to represent the encyclopedia with the allegorical features of
the seven liberal arts, and the sciences they introduced. The revival of the Muses
in fifteenth-century Italy accompanied the “renaissance of the Academy.” And
with the Muses, symbols of cosmic harmony, as well as of an encyclopedia re-
organized around poetry, reappeared the lyre-playing Apollo Musagetes. This
portrayal of Parnassus, already reconstructed in The Divine Comedy, took on
greater consistency in the philosophical and ethnical exegesis of Dante’s text
prepared by Marsilio Ficino.14 It found its visual expression, archetypal for
several centuries, in Raphael’s fresco of Parnassus, painted for Julius II in the
Stanza della Segnatura (Signature Room) of the Vatican from 1508 to 1511. The
theme of the room had been established by men of letters (secular humanists
or theologians, like Cardinal Giles of Viterbo) who participated in the Roman
Academy, the successor to Pomponius Laetus’s academy, and whose “prince”
had been Tommaso Inghirami, Laetus’s student and heir, since 1495. The close
links forged between one painter, Raphael, and the most preeminent members
of the Roman Academy (Pietro Bembo, Castiglione, as well as Inghirami, whose
portrait Raphael also painted) were certainly not out of the ordinary in Italy dur-
ing the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Numerous parallels (starting with that
of Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, in Urbino’s lettered court) preceded that
case. Indeed, it is evident that the “academy” setting was particularly inviting. It
alone was able to foster close collaboration, which was in Raphael’s case one of
almost equal footing, between men of letters and practitioners of the “mechani-
cal arts.” The Sapienza, the University of Rome, where Pomponius Laetus and
Tommaso Inghirami would nonetheless occupy the same chair in turn, was un-
able to create a similar milieu of rapprochement, collaboration, and dialogue.
The rehabilitation of poetry and eloquence, for which the academies served as
setting and safeguard, presupposed, in the more or less long term, the rehabili-
tation of practices excluded from the sphere of liberal arts by university teaching
until that point. The quadrivium taught arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
music, but it ignored the musicians, architects, painters, and sculptors who put
those savant disciplines into practice. The harmonic ethos of the academies re-
paired that cleavage and would go far beyond its classical model, incorporating
the “mechanical” arts into the dignity of knowledge.
Pope Julius II benefited from the collaboration between Raphael’s bottega
and the Roman Academy: the Room of the Signatura (whose fame spread
quickly through Christendom through engravings) opportunely celebrated
the synthesis of sciences (theology, philosophy, and canon law) and humanist
poetry, which was supported by the Holy See; in return, it advocated for the
papacy’s universal authority. The context of the imminent Lateran Council,
however, in no way diminished the enduring exemplary nature of Raphael’s
masterpiece. Instead of allegorizing the sciences with isolated figures (which he
did on the room’s ceiling), the painter represented them on the walls as “savant
conversations,” whose debates evoked a greater harmonic truth. The spirit of the
academic banquet was extended to theology and philosophy. It was epitomized
by the fresco dedicated to poetry, the queen of the artes sermocinales, and ele-
vated, beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to scientia veneranda.
An assembly of crowned poets, a timeless gathering of ancient auctores (Homer,
Virgil) and humanists (Dante, Petrarch) with their successors at the Roman
Academy, is reunited on Parnassus, among the Muses, surrounding the lyre-

playing Apollo. A century and a half removed, in Rome itself, Raphael’s fresco
was the culmination of the consecration Petrarch had sought for poetry in 1341.
Erasmus himself, in a letter written in 1517 to Cardinal Riario, summarized the
impression produced in Europe, at least in appearance, by this pontifical recog-
nition of the studia humanitatis: Aliis alia patria est, Roma communis litterario-
rum omnium, et patria et ultrix et auctrix (Others can have another homeland,
for all men of letters, Rome is the shared homeland, their citadel, their security).
The 1341 ceremony had been repeated in 1512: in the gardens of the Vatican,
at the foot of the Apollo Belvedere, Pope Julius II proceeded with the laureatio
of a poet and an orator, with the emperor’s representative at the Lateran Coun-
cil, Matthias Lang (the priesthood and the empire), at his side, and assisted by
the “prince” of the Roman Academy, Tommaso Inghirami. The participation
of Julius II’s successor, Leo X Medici, in academy banquets and discussions,
which at that time assembled the elite of Italian humanism, both nonclerical
and ecclesiastic, further confirmed the legitimization of the studia humanitatis
and their savant societies within Christian studium as a whole. This did not,
however, prevent Renaissance popes from paying particular attention to the
university of the Sapienza and attempting to increase its prestige.
In exchange for this official recognition, the Roman Academy found itself
contributing to the pomp and ostentation of the Roman court. In its early days,
as a private academy assembled by Pomponius Laetus, it was viewed with sus-
picion and even sparked a serious trial of heresy (1468). The academy’s annual
banquet celebrating the foundation of Rome by Romulus and its pilgrimages
amid the ruins and antiquities of Rome led to rumors of a conspiracy to re-
store paganism. Sixtus IV della Rovere, Paul II’s successor, put an end to this
persecution. Henceforth, like the confraternities of “laic” devotion that orga-
nized representations of laudes or sacre rappresentazioni for liturgical feasts,
Pomponius Laetus, his fellow academy members, and his disciples endeavored
to stage comedies by Plautus and Terence, whose texts had been rediscovered
in the beginning of the fifteenth century. In order to implement this revival
of classical theater to perfection, the academy engaged in vast projects of lit-
erary scholarship. In 1486, Johannes Sulpitius (Sulpizio da Verolo), a profes-
sor, like Pomponius Laetus, at the Sapienza, but also a member of the Pom-
ponian Academy, dedicated an edition of Vitruvius to Cardinal Riario, noting
in his dedication that the book was intended to facilitate the reconstitution
of the Ancients’ theatrical stage. Sulpitius also published an edition of Quin-
tilian’s Institutio oratoria and a treatise, De versuum scansione, intended to
guide the correct interpretation, through movement and voice, of texts by clas-
sical dramaturges. These efforts by the Roman Academy were limited to the
private sphere until 1513, even though the performances they produced were
welcomed by cardinals like Riario and attracted a growing public audience.
In 1513, Leo X charged Inghirami and the Roman Academy with organizing
a celebration in honor of the new pope’s kinsmen, Giuliano and Lorenzo de’
Medici, who were being granted Roman citizenship by the Roman Senate.
A large wooden theater (the first since the end of paganism) was erected on
Capitoline Hill in accordance with Vitruvius’s instructions. Inghirami provided
painters with a plan of the artwork that would decorate the external edifice and,
along with the academy, guided the actors, dancers, and musicians performing
in the production. The festival lasted two days. The stage would successively be
transformed into a church choir area, where Mass was celebrated and sung; a
public banquet room, animated by otherworldly interludes; a dance stage; and
then a proper theatrical stage, on which Plautus’s Poenulus was staged. Erudi-
tion and philology, rhetoric and poetry came together, thanks to the coordina-
tion of Inghirami and the academy, with architecture, painting, music, cho-
reography, liturgy, and even gastronomy at this encyclopedic spectacle where
the guests of honor were both actors and observers, at least during the banquet.
Indeed, the common thread was the banquet—the sacred banquet at Mass,
the Ancients’ philosophical banquet, the literary banquet within the animated
dialogue of Plautus’s comedy. Projected within a theatrical space, the voices re-
discovered and heard in the humanist library were once again brought to life,
made visible and present. And the enlarged circle of Muses—the most literary
uniting with the most “mechanical”—contributed to this resurrection, which
ignored all divisions between literary erudition and science, between belles let-
tres and beaux arts. The artistic fertility of academic “conversation,” breaking all
kinds of barriers, received pontifical patronage on this occasion, a lesson that
would never be forgotten by the sixteenth-century Italian academies.
But this lesson was not solely one of success, which would be repeated and
amplified in northern courts, culminating in the invention of dramma per
musica, the profane operatic genre, a combination of letters and the arts. The
extroversion and extraversion of the savant’s library into the public space, for
the greatest glory of the prince, was both accolade and danger. The threat had
already been noted in Angelo Decembrio’s dialogue: the small private academy,
in the presence of the marquis Leonello d’Este, called upon the lettered com-
munity to judge the powerful figures who appropriated the fame and glory due
the men of letters working in their service. Within the public space, the prince
snatched the “fruits” of the studia humanitatis—eloquence, poetry, history,
and erudition—leaving the artisans of his glory menaced by anonymity. The
Italian academies would defend themselves against this threat through the de-
velopment of literary genres—Lives and “eulogies” of men of letters, modeled
after Paul Jove’s Elogia—and the honors they accorded their members. Acade-
mies of painters and musicians did the same, and Vasari’s Lives provided artists
the same benefits Jove’s Elogies did men of letters. However, a subtler danger
loomed: the corruption of the private, curated, and “sacerdotal” character of
the savant library, and the discussions for which it served as the temple. After
all, wasn’t the contemplative essence of the politia litteraria, the rigorous men-
tal discipline and spiritual happiness associated with it, compromised by the
success of the forum, even, or especially, when it was a princely forum, built
around an eloquence, poetry, history, and synthesis of arts intended for pomp
and show? Erasmus, following a stay in Rome from 1506 to 1509, had been the
first to detect and denounce the danger of extroversion, which his very success
ensured for the pietas litterata. His symposiums, and above all his Convivium
religiosum (1522), redirected men of letters toward a sociability specific to them,
characterized by collective meditation and scholarly cooperation. Yet the Italian
academies attempted to tightly hold on to both ends of the stick, so to speak.
If we examine the development of the Florentine Camerata, we can observe
the convergence between the profound philological erudition of Girolamo Mei
and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the great astronomer) and the inventiveness and
talent of musicians, simultaneous composers, instrumentalists, and singers, all
of whom were inspired by the collective myth of Orpheus and a revival of the
“music of the Ancients.” But this balance between the knowledge of some and
the talent of others, and their consumption via fleeting performances in the ser-
vice of the court, its prestige, and its diplomacy nonetheless also compromised
the “spirituality of the library,” which northern humanism was so protectively
attempting to maintain. The decline of philology in Italy during the sixteenth
century was commensurate with its rise in France and Holland. But the brief
history of the Lincean Academy in Rome (1603–1630) reveals that the danger
was not ignored in Italy itself. Under the leadership of the prince Federico Cesi,
a return to private and disinterested research, austere piety, and the discipline
emblemized by the monastic or philosophical cenacle was inseparable from
the early stages of the scientific method, as applied to natural sciences. Both
the Lincean “laboratory” and library were maintained apart from celebrations
and Roman patronage of the arts. Their mentor Galileo opposed the emerging
“baroque,” epitomized by Tasso, preferring the joyful irony of Ariosto. He was
also adopted by a northern Republic of Letters outraged by Rome, its Index
Librorum Prohibitorum, and its Inquisition court.
In Italy, the expansion of the “liberal arts” to the “mechanical arts” through
the intercession of the academies benefited various forms of festivities and cele-
brations. However, it also advantaged—here Galileo and the Linceans were
slightly ahead of Francis Bacon and his Advancement of Learning—the natural
sciences, experimentation, and new techniques. That development, particularly
apparent in the seventeenth century, should not mask another consequence of
the “harmonic” contagion fostered by academic conviviality: a return to the ini-
tial aim of Dante’s Convivio—the extension of the sciences and arts tradition-
ally reserved for Latinists to the vernacular. This was the condition on which
the “mechanicals,” as Vigneul-Marville would write in his Mélanges d’histoire
et de littérature (Medley of History and Literature, 1700), would “maintain their
rank” within the Republic of Letters.15 The academies played a particularly de-
cisive role in Florence, where local pride was linked to the “defense and illus-
tration” of the Tuscan language as the literary language of all of Italy, in shift-
ing the studia humanitatis from Neo-L atin esotericism to “vulgar” exotericism.
Lorenzo the Magnificent and Poliziano had already composed poetry in the
Tuscan vernacular at Ficino’s Platonic Academy. In the following generation,
the Venetian Pietro Bembo, who had been introduced to Ficino’s disciples by
his father Bernardo, an ambassador of the Republic, published his Asolani with
Aldus Manutius with a philological care until then reserved for the Ancients
(Dante and Petrarch). Bembo, a Hellenist, Latinist, and Provençalist, was a
simultaneous master of Ciceronian prose and Tuscan prose and established the
doctrine according to which Tuscan, by yielding to the same rhetorical rules and
the same models as Ciceronian Latin had, could become a “grammatical” and
literary language worthy of its Roman ancestor (Prose della volgar lingua, 1525).
The theoretical foundations were henceforth laid for the extension of academic
“conversation” to eloquence, poetry, and history in the vernacular. Dialogues
like Bembo’s Asolani (1504) and Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) extended a po-
litia litteraria translated into literary Italian, with the same ideal of gentle and
respectful manners in dialogue, to women and gentlemen who, while no doubt
erudite, were far from the doctissimi of the fifteenth-century academies. The
academy was veering in the direction of the lettered salon. But it remained an
academy nonetheless: the salon, despite the Italian origin of the term, would
not find its unique place and style until seventeenth-century Paris and French.
The transformation from savant academy to a vernacular or “vulgar” one in
Italy took on a different meaning in the sixteenth century, as well as an en-
tirely different level of productiveness. It marked a merging of bourgeois and
popular culture, on the one hand, and savant culture, on the other. This cross-
fertilization, which paralleled collaborations between scholars and “mechanical
artisans” within academies of music and painting, was completely absent from
the French salon, which was inspired by the nobiliary ethics of leisure and gal-
lantry. The examples of the Florentine Academy and La Crusca, in Florence,
are quite convincing. At first, the Umidi were a small society of merchants who
cultivated the literary genres of their milieu and parish in their leisure time. It
was the arrival of Benedetto Varchi and his student Ugolino Martelli, return-
ing from Venice in 1543, that introduced this society (which was elevated by
Cosimo I, for want of a better alternative, to a Florentine Academy) to elo-
quence, poetry, and history using classical models. This transplant was possible
because the two humanists had already learned to practice “academic conver-
sation” in the vernacular tongue while in Padua, at the Accademia degli Infiam-
mati inspired by Bembo and guided by Sperone Speroni. That academy would
reveal its raison d’être, in collaboration with the Accademia del Disegno, in the
funeral services for Michelangelo (1564), who was renowned as a painter and
sculptor but perhaps above all as a vernacular poet. Thus his Three Crowns be-
came the glory of Florence—adornment for its young duke, Cosimo I.
Within the Florentine Academy, a certain symbiosis was possible between
the savant studia humanitatis, transposed to and translated into Tuscan, and
the popular and bourgeois traditions of the vernacular’s “grand rhetoricians.”
The same symbiosis would occur in 1582 when a few surviving members of
the Umidi wanted to recreate a traditional confraternity under the name La
Crusca. Inspired by the savant example of dictionaries written in Ciceronian
Latin, these lovers of “indigenous” language and forms launched their own dic-
tionary, this time strictly academic, which was completed in 1606 and was the
first monument of this kind dedicated to a vernacular language. In 1589, Count
Piero de Bardi, son of the founder of the Camerata, became the “arch-consul”
of La Crusca. The academy’s Dictionary project responded precisely, in its way,
to the celebration of Tuscan on which the Camerata itself had embarked. Like
La Crusca, the Camerata had combined savant disciplines with a love for the
vernacular, elevating Italian song—reformed and perfected in order to redis-
cover the “true music of the Ancients”—to the grand art of recitar cantando,
which would be put on triumphant display in 1600 in Peri’s Euridice and Cac-
cini’s Rapimento di Cefalo during the Florentine celebrations in honor of the
marriage of Marie de’ Medici and Henry IV.
A comparison with France brings extensive similarities to light. They are ap-
parent in Rabelais’s writing, in which both the utopia of the Abbey of Thelema
and the recurring banquet theme summarize and celebrate a French renais-
sance of the academy. And study of the frontispiece of Dolet’s Commentarii lin-
guae latinae (1531) and the plans (pictures and engravings) and frescos for the
Palace of Fontainebleau reveals royal France’s adoption of the Parnassus myth,
so frequently alluded to by Ronsard. The academies of the Valois court (whose

origins can be traced to the circles of Jean Dorat, director of a school at the Uni-
versity of Paris) nonetheless illustrate the unique character of French human-
ism, which was far from limited to the importation of Italian “models.” This
uniqueness owed much to the fact that humanism in France was confronted
by the monumental edifice of the University of Paris, as well as by the problem-
atic of the prestige surrounding a noblesse d’épée rebelling against humanist
pedagogy. Academic mediation during the Valois dynasty was compromised
by a desire for encyclopedism that was difficult to reconcile with a fear of vul-
garization among an aristocracy scornful of all forms of clerical pedantry. The
situation would change considerably, however, in seventeenth-century France,
when Jesuits and Oratorians succeeded in attracting and retaining young nobles
at their schools.
It is clear that though the history of academies in Europe may overlap at its
debut, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with that of the Re-
public of Letters, it nonetheless has its own dynamic and significance. For that
matter, neither can be isolated from the history of European universities, which,
during the sixteenth century, began to claim the term academia, especially,
and quite naturally, among authors like Petrus Ramus, who claimed to have ex-
tensively reformed university curriculum and methods in order to ensure they
merited that title. But that title was equally sought after by the universities of
Oxford, reformed beginning in the early sixteenth century, and Leiden, estab-
lished with a humanist curriculum in 1575. The “territory” of the Republic of
Letters included university professors, like Joseph Justus Scaliger and Justus
Lipsius, even as it excluded a number of Italian academies shifting toward vul-
garization, which included artists, musicians, and vernacular poets and orators
among its men of letters. The Republic’s center of gravity had been moving
since Erasmus’s era more and more openly to northern Europe. By the end
of the sixteenth century, it could be defined by both its loyalty to the classical
“golden age,” to savant disciplines and languages, which allowed it to interpret
science and wisdom, and to an ideal of unity and harmony via a “return to good
letters” that banished national rivalries and theological disputes. A network of
personal and private connections between the “most learned” of men, typically
heavily influenced by evangelism and Erasmianism, the Republic cannot be
said to have had specific “politics.” At the least, however, we can ascribe it a keen
political “sense,” which favored solutions of caution and compromise like, for
example, the Edict of Nantes in France, Arminianism in the Netherlands, mod-
erated Anglicanism in Great Britain, and a Catholicism liberated from pontifi-
cal restraints in Paulo Sarpi’s Venice and the Dupuy brothers’ Gallican France.
All of this suggests a certain independence among an international elite of peers

linked by a relay of correspondences and carefully considered publications, with
regard to local political and religious authorities, that neither academies nor
universities (even “reformed” ones), as collective bodies, could claim. This “par-
allel” diplomacy conducted by Europe’s leading men of letters cannot be con-
fused with that operating in various courts, or with the invaluable prestige sup-
plied to said efforts by eloquent, musical, or artistic academies.
Part II
CONVERSATION
6
CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATION SOCIETIES
It was following the end of the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century
that Paris metamorphosed into a literary, philosophical, and scientific capi-
tal. This rise in its intellectual standing accompanied the solidification of the
Bourbon court in Paris and the decisive role it played, following the Catholic
League’s defeat and the Edict of Nantes, in the military, diplomatic, political,
and religious interplay of Europe. Even in Rome and Italy, and even more so in
Protestant states, all those who remained loyal to the Erasmian brand of human-
ism within Europe’s religious schism counted on the French court to contain
or divert the power of the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain. Many believed that
the Hapsburg monarchy wanted to recreate, for its benefit, the medieval unity
of Christianity, thereby threatening the spirit of a dialogue of opinions and prob-
able hypotheses, which, along with the study of antiquity and unhindered com-
merce of books, constituted the very lifeblood of Erasmian humanism. John
Barclay’s allegorical novel Argenis, written in Rome in humanist Latin and pub-
lished in Paris by Peiresc in 1621 (before being translated into several languages)
reveals the hopes pinned by the European Republic of Letters on English and
especially French resistance to the Hapsburgs, the Inquisition, and a theologi-
cal orthodoxy based on scholastic and Aristotelian logic and cosmology. Here,
the philosophical stakes were inseparable from political-military ones. Barclay
also wrote The Mirror of Minds,1 a work in which he illustrates the fecundity, in
terms of both knowledge and the joy of civil life, of the multiplicity of national
characters and the diversity of individual inclinations, once accepted, recog-
nized, and exchanged. Paris was on its way to becoming, under the regime of
the Edict of Nantes, the home of a vast council of minds, in the sense employed
by Jean Bodin, Montaigne, and Barclay. The French Catholic Reformation, de-
spite its thirst for religious unity, which prompted it at times to support an alli-
ance with Spain, had to adapt to its own plurality. The major currents within
the spiritual revival of French Catholicism were nonetheless Gallican “lettered
piety,” which was hostile toward Madrid and Vienna, and Christian human-
ism, whose figurehead was Francis de Sales, a fervent Italianist and propagator
of “Christian civility” among the laity. Humanism prevailed. Figures ranging
105
106 Conversation
from the Calvinist Arminian Hugo Grotius, who escaped from the Loevenstein
prison in Gomarist Holland, and the Dominican and possible heretic Tommaso
Campanella, who escaped from the prisons of the Neapolitan and Roman In-
quisition, could find both refuge and honor in Paris under Richelieu, who was
allied with the Lutheran princes of Sweden and Germany against the Haps-
burgs.
The university was a limited factor in Paris’s growing appeal following the
Edict of Nantes. Dynamic, active, and respected (enhanced and patronized by
Richelieu), it endured via its esprit de corps and assertion of its privileges. Its fac-
ulty of theology (which safeguarded, from the Jesuits, its privilege of conferring
degrees) took a vocal stance against atheism, heresy, and doctrinal, ultramon-
tane, or Jansenist “innovations.” In response, and without attacking the institu-
tion head-on as it had in the early sixteenth century, Parisian humanism orga-
nized itself into erudite, polite, and finally scientific societies, which were at
first entirely private and which collaborated according to principles foreign to
university teaching and the conservative knowledge of the university. Methods
differed, as did adjudications: the “dispute,” based on syllogistic logic and refer-
ence to undisputed authorities, was challenged by humanist practices of con-
versation, conference, and correspondence, which implied critical distance and
empiricism, and reference to a pluralist, dialogical antiquity, which was subject
to self- criticism and whose authority was not above discussion. University arbi-
tration found itself challenged by that practiced by men of learning for whom
truth was in fieri, meaning it could always be corrected and reestablished, and
even that of a “curious” public, which grew all the larger once the privilege of
the scholarly language, Latin, yielded to the “bon usage” of French, shared by
erudite humanists and the “curious.” Disciplines also differed: the university
remained faithful to the traditional “tree of sciences,” whereas informal “col-
lèges” worked within the scope of an encyclopedia that had been expanding
and evolving since the fifteenth century. It featured classic philology, history,
geography, experimental natural philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, but also
poetry and classical and vernacular eloquence, all subjects alien to the univer-
sity, which rejected both the philological and historical methods driving those
disciplines and the reliance on experiments of the “mechanical arts” hence-
forth invoked by the natural sciences. The old trivium and quadrivium of the
faculty of arts, the medical orthodoxy of the faculty of medicine, not to men-
tion the law faculty, unconcerned with the critical history of Roman custom-
ary law, and the faculty of theology, unconcerned with “positivist” theology,
were effectively overtaken by victorious fields of knowledge whose renowned
masters were respected citizens of the Republic of Letters, beyond the reach of
Conversation and Conversation Societies 107
university scholars’ prosecutory reach. This Republic, of Italian origin, though

its pride and glory was the Dutch Erasmus, now had its nerve center in Paris,
in the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet” or Mersenne’s circle. Even more disdainful
of the university, as evidenced by their subjects, style, and audience, the polite
“societies” in which gentlemen and women conversed, in French, with people
of letters, cultivated linguistic arts ignored by the university and schools in gen-
eral: grammar, rhetoric, and even a form of dialectics adapted to French and to
speakers who were neither university scholars nor learned savants. The sophisti-
cated French trivium had its masters: Malherbe for grammar, Guez de Balzac
for rhetoric, and Nicolas Faret for the humanist form of dialectics called “civil
conversation,” which was inseparable from a philosophy of manners. But these
were “liberal” teachers who instructed through spoken influence and leisure
reading and addressed an adult and often high-ranking public.
Beginning in the 1620s–1630s, a university of humanist “higher learning” took
form in Paris, taking the reins without warning from the scholastic university. It
was divided into “societies” that shared members and cooperated with one an-
other of their own initiative, as amateurs, without conferment of diplomas, an in-
stitutional hierarchy, and any rules other than a freely accepted self-discipline—
an université libre. Sciences and literature were invented here, alongside the vast
philological and historical endeavor of sixteenth-century humanist “criticism.”
Even the “reserved” domains of the faculties of medicine, law, and theology
were slowly but surely appropriated by the new methods implemented by those
“amateurs” of vast knowledge. Peiresc, preceding Claude Perrault, conducted
experiments and research related to medicine; Gabriel Harvey’s discoveries on
the circulation of blood, rejected by the university faculty, were verified and ac-
cepted by erudite and scientific circles free of any university allegiance. Blaise
Pascal did more than contribute to the evolution of mathematics and physics
outside of the scope of official education and recognition: through his Provin-
ciales (The Provincial Letters), he enlarged a theological debate (a privilege,
if it indeed was one, reserved for the doctors of the Sorbonne) to an enlight-
ened “lay” public within the “pedagogical” milieu of humanist academies. This
milieu stretched beyond the limits of an elegant or savant aristocracy. Under
Louis XIII, the “Office of Addresses” created by Théophraste Renaudot (founder
of the Gazette, with links to Jacques Dupuy and a close Richelieu collaborator)
interested a large and “curious” public in various philosophical, moral, and sci-
entific controversies (1633–1642). The project would be repeated in 1642 by an
“academy” founded by Abbot Bourdelot, whose public “conferences” attracted
audiences that could number as many as four hundred people.
Paris’s rise to the rank of Europe’s intellectual capital (a position it had filled
108 Conversation
from the thirteenth to fifteenth century thanks to its single university) was due
this time around to the bustling activity of its “salons” and erudite or scientific
private “academies,” which were all concentrated in the same city and linked
to similar circles dispersed in the provinces and across Europe, notably in Italy,
England, and Holland, through correspondence, travel, diplomatic exchanges,
and commerce of books. These diverse centers of Parisian research increasingly
had a common denominator: the bon usage of the French language which,
though established in polite society, was attracting scholars and savants for the
first time thanks to its literary elegance and new “regularity.” The university
was still present and active (it continued to train clergy). But it had to contend
with, even when educating young people, the Jesuits’ Collège de Clermont,
the Oratorians, the Ursuline and Visitandines female convents, and even, for a
few years, the Petites Écoles de Port-Royal. Its former students, and particularly
its rivals’ students, often joined the ranks of “amateurs” contributing to new
fields of knowledge, including the singular and extremely humanist “academy”
formed by the “solitaires” of Port-Royal, whose leader, Antoine Arnauld, was
nonetheless a scholar of the Sorbonne.
This free and spontaneous university would cautiously and progressively
benefit from official recognition by the French court, thanks to the establish-
ment of a series of royal academies granted legal status. But “amateurs” did not
welcome that legitimization without reservations: among the “honnestes gens”
of polite circles, and the “curious” or “virtuous” members of erudite or scien-
tific circles, “honor,” “curiosity,” and “virtue”—in other words the natural and
liberal desire for truth that led them to collaborate—had made them possessive
of their freedom. And even the so-called “rules” of royal academies would have
little in common with university statutes; furthermore, the young age of these
academies shielded them from overly restrictive traditions. They were easily and
widely accepted and in no way infringed on the simultaneous rise of “salons”
and private “academies” that so often served as their recruitment grounds. How-
ever, it is worth emphasizing this thirst for noble “freedom,” shared by gentle-
men, magistrates, and secretaries of princes alike, which was, to them, insepa-
rable from their desire for truth. If some of these figures can be characterized as
“esprits forts” or “libertins” (in the nonvaudevillian sense), it is precisely because
they staked their honor and “virtue” (in the Latin meaning of virtus, the Ital-
ian virtù: “self-energy and will”) on their moral and intellectual autonomy and
their libertine emancipation, in the tradition of Montaigne, from any tutelage
that intimidated or enslaved the mind (libertinus is Latin for “emancipation
from servitude”).
It is surprising that this phenomenon, and its impressive panorama across
Paris during the reign of Louis XIII, has not been granted more attention by
the sociology of knowledge or historical sociology, which have preferred to
focus on its subsequent phase of development in the eighteenth century. Sci-
entific societies were the subject of an excellent book by Harcourt Brown, but
it was published in 1932.2 Since then, the scholarly edition of Correspondance
du P. Marin Mersenne (The Correspondence of P. Marin Mersenne) and works
related to Pascal, Descartes, and Desargues have increased our understand-
ing of facts, individual figures, and specific texts, but this sociability of “new
science” has yet to prompt a new analysis. In contrast, erudite society is much
better known, thanks to René Pintard’s Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertin-
ism, 1942). Books, monographs, and volumes of correspondences have since
multiplied, but a new overview remains desirable. Finally, “salons” and polite
circles benefit from a very large bibliography, albeit one dependent on the pre-
suppositions of literary history. Norbert Elias’s work is much more applicable to
the phenomenon of the court than that of conversations and private academies
far from the monarchical agora. In none of the three distinctive chapters of his
historical study of the seventeenth century are the conclusions integrated into
a framework that would link intellectual history to social history. To an even
greater degree, the coexistence and eventual symbiosis of the three types of
conversation societies in Paris, and the way in which they collectively opposed
the institutional structure of the university, is absent from this analysis, namely
because the seventeenth-century French university has itself been little studied.
Nonetheless, and despite the profound differences distinguishing these three
types of conversation societies (social recruitment, research objects and meth-
ods), they shared a humanistic ethical code and epistemology hostile to the
scholasticism of traditional university learning. The form of collaboration they
adopted—which we can categorize under the generic idea of “conversation”—
harkens back, well before the establishment of royal academies, to the academic
form invented by fifteenth-century Italian humanists, and which, during the six-
teenth century, still in Italy, was extended from Latin and Greek conversation
to the vernacular. It was this form of collaboration between men of letters, out-
side university walls, and often under the personal protection of a prince or pon-
tiff, that ensured the wide-ranging success of the studia humanitatis in Europe.
“Conversation,” a shared method of research, was also the gnoseological vector
of the Republic of Letters and the heart of its debates and evolution. But that
long-dispersed effort would have to converge on Paris, home to the most power-
ful and prestigious university in Europe, which was more impervious than its
counterparts (Oxford, Louvain, Padua, and of course Leiden) to the influence
of the Republic of Letters, in order for a cumulative effect to take place, and a
110 Conversation
threshold to be crossed, in a symphonic movement that marked the end of the

Renaissance. Simultaneously in Paris, the medieval encyclopedia endured, the
humanist encyclopedia, in contact with Leiden, Rome, and Aix, was reaching
maturity, and a new encyclopedia was developing, this time in French, a lan-
guage that would benefit from this swell of intellectual competition for quite
some time. Confronted by a rigid but always high-caliber university orthodoxy,
this vast collective endeavor carried out by “amateurs” invented a new trivium
for the French language, gave philological and historical criticism renewed effi-
cacy, and revived the classical quadrivium and natural philosophy by allying
the experimental method and mathematical language. The humanist project,
which had begun two centuries before in Italy, found its culmination and crisis
point in seventeenth-century Paris.
What motives could have driven these members of high society, scholars,
and savants to all participate in such a quest for knowledge? It is striking to note
the personal disinterestedness of these “academicians” without title, among
whom we must include France’s salonnières. Descartes, who addressed all these
“amateurs” and curious individuals in his Discourse on the Method (preferably
graduated doctors), recognized their “good sense,” which was “of all things
among man, the most equally distributed.”3 In other words: a natural yearning
for truth and the innately correct judgment to obtain it. This was the French for-
mulation of a principle that had guided the humanists from the start: “Gothic”
university science having corrupted “common sense,” it was necessary to find it
once again while freeing oneself from the effects of that distorting training and
reconnect with nature, of which the Ancients had been faithful followers. For
Descartes, however, the detour via the Ancients had itself become an obstacle:
one’s innate “common sense,” which the philosopher wanted to bolster with
method, could be found there where the school, even the humanist school,
had yet to redirect it—in a new public expressing its appetite for truth, and
from which Descartes did not exclude women. Pascal made a similar gamble
in his Provincial Letters. The “natural desire for truth” in itself, the “curiosity”
(a medieval vice and a humanist virtue) to exert oneself, demanded that one be
free—free from the scholastic mold, no doubt, but also free from the “servile”
deformations that one’s trade, profession, business, and affairs imposed on the
mind. For Pascal, the “natural desire for truth” was inseparable from an ethic of
“generosity,” and thus of “noble life,” the only environment favorable to intel-
lectual freedom. Populated by “amateurs,” by the “virtuous,” and even, as pre-
viously noted, by those curious individuals besotted with surprises and won-
ders, the polite, erudite, and scientific societies of the seventeenth century were
societies of noble, and ennobling, leisure. Magistrates or officers of the court,
men of the church or sword, and secretaries, lawyers, and physicians who par-
ticipated in those societies did so outside of their professional lives, or outside
of any professional life, during a time of leisure that, in their eyes, was the only
one suitable to truly liberal and of course intellectual activities. In Latin, the
term for mind (ingenium) is semantically close to ingenuus, “born free and hon-
orable,” which is constructed from the same root as the verb gignere: “engen-
der,” “produce,” “bring into being.” The freedom to “live nobly” was inseparable
from the freedom of the mind. This could take quite diverse forms: the conver-
sation of, respectively, salons, libraries, or scientific cabinets. It could seduce
nobles by birth, healing them of a prejudice condemned by Castiglione and
Guazzo among France’s noblesse d’épée, hostile toward “letters,” which they
viewed as a servile “trade” of clerics and commoners. It also seduced the coun-
try’s newer nobility, the noblesse de robe, clerics and men of letters who sought
the moral ennoblement provided by higher learning and scientific disciplines
born of humanism. During the seventeenth century, the ideal of the noble man
(as defined by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and in general by classical phi-
losophies) merged with the social prestige of the hereditary nobility and with
the monastic and humanist ideal of “lettered piety,” ultimately producing voca-
tions of the mind, of conversation, and therefore of selfless and bold inventive-
ness in the fields of knowledge opened by humanism. The expected reward was
undoubtedly “honor” and “glory,” but also “gentleness,” “eloquence,” and the
eutrapelia (good humor) so dear to Francis de Sales, expected fruits of polite
and savant conversation, both “civil” and contributing through dialogue to the
enlightenment and harmony of the mind. Descartes’s accounts, in his letters to
Princess Elisabeth, mirror Gassendi’s in Vita Peireskii and those found in schol-
arly and social correspondence at the time. The life of the convivial mind, in
noble leisure, was not merely a question of honor, freedom, knowledge: it also
equated to happiness and joy.
In salons (by definition literary), women participated in a life of clever
leisure. Some earned the insulting label of “precious.” The lady of society (Bal-
dassare Castiglione’s donna di palazzo) had a place in the salon not by virtue
of being a wife, mother, or the head of a household, but solely as a woman of
merit (beautiful and pleasant) and intellect, equal to men or even allotted a
gallantly recognized albeit fictional superiority. Beautiful and pleasant, she was
decoration and magnet; spiritual, she stimulated conversation between “good
company.” This freedom in leisure (which rendered enviable the state of widow-
hood) was relatively accessible to women of high-ranking nobility, who retained
in marriage the personal prestige of their birth and family name. It was harder
to obtain for those of the noblesse de robe or the bourgeoisie, within whose ranks
112 Conversation
marital and paternal authority operated within a narrow domestic sphere, and
for whom societal leisure outside of the family remained a masculine privilege.
Erudite and scientific circles, which recruited magistrates and members of the
bourgeoisie and the secular and regular clergy, were closed to women. In con-
trast, French-language literary circles, which attracted the noblesse d’épée, were
organized around one woman, and largely welcomed the fair sex. The nobility,
a leisure class, had historically and naturally developed an erudite sociability
of leisure during times of peace: hunting, tournaments, sports, dances, feasts.
Literary sociability was just another liberal pursuit, though one to which well-
born women were the most closely associated. Preciosity appeared in the gap
between the leisure enjoyed by the noblesse d’épée, which united men and
women, and studious leisure, morally noble and reserved for men. It reflected
the demand by women of the noblesse de robe and the literary bourgeoisie for
access to a sociability of leisure, notably clever leisure. That sociability, which by
necessity took the form of complicity between women, focused on “endoge-
nous” subjects (precious “feminism”) deemed ridiculous by the “mixed” salons
of France’s high nobility and its circles of erudite and “scientific” men. Precious
affectation—which dates back to Christine de Pisan’s Cité des dames (City of
Ladies)—was a feminine rhetoric, prone to metaphor and allegory and special-
izing in what Voltaire, in reference to Marivaux, named the “metaphysics of
the heart.” Precious dialogue was a perpetual and luxuriously metaphorical “dis-
tinction” from the servile and humiliating “realities” of bourgeois marriage.
When comparing this precious (and eminently literary) form of female
leisure and the scholê of scholars and savants, the difference in subjects and
rules should not mask their common denominators: the noble and ennobling
use of leisure, the free choice of a clever vocation, and the social exercise of that
vocation with chosen partners. The foil for all these societies was without excep-
tion the pedant (already evoked by Montaigne): a professional specialist, lack-
ing humor and urbanity, this ancestor of the “philistine” despised by nineteenth-
century artists was as reviled in precious and polite circles as he was in erudite
and savant academies. A product of the university, this specialized doctor (the
professor of Greek eloquence Pierre de Montmaur, ridiculed by Ménage and
Guez de Balzac, served as the model pedant in the 1650s, well before Molière’s
doctors) lacked the liberal grace that was both the source and product of intel-
lectual activities. He was devoid of sociability’s inseparable virtues and charms.
Madame de Staël defined French conversation as an oral exchange “between
nobles and men of letters.” A valid definition, if we include women and mem-
bers of the church as outsiders joining said exchange. Of course, we have to
understand “letters” in an encyclopedic sense, which includes not only the arts
of language, but also erudition and the sciences. It was in reality much more
than a “diversion”: with its embellishments, the pleasure of variety, and the rich-
ness of a range extending from the savant “conference” to cheerful, casual dis-
cussion, conversation was a mode of liberal cooperation and collaboration that
stood in opposition to the formalism of the scholastic dispute and which man-
aged to unite activity of the mind and noble leisure. It was destined to serve as a
milieu that would encompass Europe’s highest ranks of diplomacy.
The new landscape of knowledge taking shape in Paris during the seven-
teenth century, which left the Gothic fortress of the university intact in the
distance, emanated from salons that shaped its linguistic instruments, erudite
libraries, and “cabinets” of scientific curiosities. It was predicated on a socia-
bility of noble and clever leisure, an ethics of generosity and honesty, and an
epistemology based on collaboration between a diversity of minds.
I’ve chosen to explore three of the main private conversation societies dur-
ing this period: the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,”
and Habert de Montmor’s “academy.” These correspond to the three primary
types of circles defined earlier: polite salon, erudite circle, and scientific circle.
Each lies at the origin of one of the three main royal academies: the Académie
Française, the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, and the Académie des
Sciences.
To understand the role played by Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de
Rambouillet and an ambassador’s wife, it is important to examine the model
she was striving to incarnate in France: Castiglione’s donna di palazzo, a model
broadened and fleshed out by multiple works that appeared in the late sixteenth
century and early seventeenth century, notably Dr. Huarte de San Juan’s Ex-
amination of Men’s Wits (1571, translated into French twice as Examen des es-
prits, 1591 and 1643), which we know, thanks to Tallemant des Réaux, was one
of the books on the marquise’s bedside table. The subject of Huarte’s work,
which had already been explored in John Barclay’s The Mirror of Minds, was
an anthropological study of the diversity of “temperaments” and inclinations,
and therefore of the different aptitudes for knowledge. Leading that taxonomic
hierarchy was the man of the mind, the “ingenious” or clever man of a mod-
erately melancholy temperament, apt to invent new links between things and
ideas, and apt to detect and express truth in a succinct and striking manner.
Madame de Rambouillet was also influenced by Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil
Conversation,4 which introduced France to the notion of “polite discussion,”
which would thereafter be applied to the word “conversation” and the ethi-
cal and rhetorical rules of that mode of collective knowledge. She read and
studied Francis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie devote (Introduction to the De-
114 Conversation
vout Life), which viewed conversation, as defined by Guazzo, as one of the lei-
surely arts of society allowed a wife and a Christian mother. Finally, Madame
de Rambouillet belonged to the first generation of readers of Honoré d’Urfé’s
L’Astrée, a long pastoral novel that gathered all the literary myths of aristocratic
leisure: Arcadia and its shepherds and shepherdesses, their poetic games and
clever dialogues, their Platonic-inspired meditative and contemplative “meta-
physics of the heart.” The Forez depicted in L’Astrée is a relatively protected
“island” within a fifth-century Europe ravaged by violent wars and political
ambitions. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, which neighbored the Louvre, wanted
to be an Arcadia in the middle of Paris. According to accounts by her con-
fidant Tallemant des Réaux, Madame de Rambouillet was quick to abandon
the “throngs” of the Louvre and thought Louis XIII, the ill-mannered warrior
king, a brute. Assisted by her friends and her daughters, as well as by poets in-
cluding Malherbe and later Voiture, she carefully selected her guests and made
her reception rooms, designed to this end, into an “academy” for the court’s
most distinguished nobility. Like other aristocratic Parisian residences under
Louis XIII, the Hôtel de Rambouillet dazzled during times of peace and the
season of peace (winter). It was deprived of gentlemen during times of war and
military-campaign seasons (spring–autumn). To be a society of noble leisure,
the “Chambre bleue” had to be nothing less than a “rhetoric chamber” whose
members practiced oral improvisation (the height of eloquence according to
Quintilian), the art of wit and repartee, and other techniques of advanced oral
virtuosity. It was also an incubator of highly fertile literary inventiveness. But
this workshop of the bon usage of the French language—gay and natural con-
versation between nobles and men and women of letters—was also a delib-
erate method to obtain harmony on questions of taste and inherently inven-
tive collaborations: fixed-form poems, jests, engaging fables and stories, and
quips and bon mots, which were often anonymous, found their way, like let-
ters or in letters, into written form. Manuscripts circulated, a large number of
which were assembled by Valentin Conrart in his renowned Recueils preserved
at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal: the first permanent secretary of the Académie
Française thus played that same role for polite society. Similarly, Œuvres, by the
ambassador-poet Voiture, written off the cuff and inspired by oral improvisa-
tions, was only available in manuscript form during his lifetime. It was only after
his death in 1648 that these texts were collected and published by his nephew
Marc Pinchesne. Polite conversation, conducted entirely in French, thus be-
came a kind of amphibious (both oral and written), multilayered, and collective
literary genre, which associated linguistic and literary invention with an entire
milieu, or society, of aristocratic leisure. As was so rightly observed by Sainte-
Beuve, a better sociologist than Proust, or rather born in an era closer to the
ancien régime than the great novelist’s era, French literature and conversation
became inseparable during the reign of Louis XIII, an affiliation that would
only gradually dissolve after the Revolution. Every “conversation society” of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had its own tone, themes, and preferred
genres, and each merits individual study, which should not separate the nuance
of sociability that characterizes each society from the works it engendered, and
which often boast—as was the case for the collections of Maximes in the society
that united La Rochefoucauld, Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Sablé, and
Jacques Esprit—if not a shared author, at least a common, creative foundation.
The uniqueness of the Hôtel de Rambouillet (which became a legendary model
of Parisian sociability by the end of the seventeenth century, prompting imita-
tors like the salons led by Madame de Lambert and Madame de Tencin) lies in
its function as a recruiting ground for the first Académie Française, as well as for
having served as the oral reference, for Vaugelas, for the correct usage of living
language. For Jean Chapelain, the linchpin of the first Académie Française, the
Hôtel de Rambouillet sustained a link, though it was tenuous, with the other
most prestigious society of literary conversation under Louis XIII: the Dupuy
brothers’ “cabinet.” According to accounts by Nicholas Rigault, Pierre Dupuy,
the erudite Gallican, was very attentive and favorable to the blooming of the arts
of the French language and to the contributions made to it by the high nobility,
who were the best placed to “illustrate” the language of the kingdom.5
The “cabinet,” as it was called, if not the “Dupuy brothers’ academy,”
gathered daily in De Thou’s library, and then that of the king, to whose guard
Pierre Dupuy was named in 1640, the elite of Paris’s erudite humanists, as well
as on occasion their counterparts from French provinces or foreigners passing
through the capital.
Neither women nor gens d’épée (except for Fortin de La Hoguette and the
Comte de La Fayette) were included. Unlike female members of the noblesse
d’épée, women belonging to milieus of new nobility or the lettered bourgeoisie
did not have the freedom to escape the domestic sphere. If they were able to
access a form of leisurely sociability, it was at polite salons rather than meetings
between savants. Gens d’épée rarely overlapped with those who frequented sa-
vant libraries. Antiquity, historiography, philology, critical editions of rare texts,
and natural and moral philosophy—all disciplines that required extensive lin-
guistic and technical knowledge—were the main objects of discussion within
the Dupuys’ circle. Extended and nourished by a vast epistolary network across
Europe, theirs was a tireless and collective creative endeavor that became an in-
trinsic part of the memory of the humanist library. Optimal working conditions
116 Conversation
converged to facilitate its methods of exchange. Even a spectator who remained

at the surface of things, like Fortin de La Hoguette, was aware of the joyful har-
mony of these savant voices and of the politesse that governed their meetings.
In his Life of Peiresc, Gassendi describes the behavior and mannerisms of the
learned magistrate, a close friend and diligent correspondent of the Dupuys.6
He does not hesitate to include in his portrait Peiresc’s “art of conversation,”
which was careful to avoid leaving any room for boredom through the variety
of subjects evoked and liveliness of expression. Jests and witticisms were inter-
spersed throughout his conversation. These pleasurable flourishes concealed an
ethic of savant collaboration, whose principles are described by Gassendi:
He was never more eloquent, in his correspondence, than when warning

men of letters against quarrels, sarcasms, and personal attacks, when incit-
ing them to revere antiquity, and to never stray from one’s sentiments
without forms of respect; to prevent them from hastily forming judgments
when confronted by obscure and controversial questions, from embrac-
ing as certain that which is unresolved; and finally to encourage them to
express their opinion without concern of reversing that of another.
This was the definition of a community of research, with shared references

(antiquity) and rules for collaboration and validation that its members had to
respect in order for their dialogue to be fruitful. The Dupuy brothers shared and
fostered the same discipline of conversation and correspondence and the same
balance of sobriety and graciousness.
Contrary to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Dupuy Academy does not appear
to have found its public legitimization in a royal institution. In 1656, Jacques
Dupuy died and the academy shut its doors. In reality, however, according to a
neglected account by Abbot Claude Nicaise, in a deliciously erudite essay pub-
lished in 1691, Les Sirènes, ou Discours sur leur forme et figure (Sirens, or Dis-
course on their Form and Figure), the Dupuy tradition continued under Louis
XIV. Led in turns and without interruption by Abbot Jacques de La Rivière,
guard of De Thou’s library, rue de Poitevins; M. Salmon, garde du rôle of the
Officiers de France, rue Serpente; and finally by his son-in-law, M. de Vil-
vault, advisor to the king and master of requests, rue Hautefeuille, the Dupuy
Academy never had any problems with continuity. It spanned generations and
migrated from private library to private library after leaving the king’s library in
1656. In the interim, the Dupuy “cabinet” found imitators in Gilles Ménage
and his Wednesday gatherings and Abbot Bignon (son of the attorney general
Jérôme Bignon, one of the leading figures of the Dupuy “cabinet” under Louis
XIII) and his Thursday gatherings. The Dupuy tradition would continue in its
purest form, however, with M. de Vilvault. His residence was the setting, fol-
lowing a meeting of the Académie Française, of the dispute between Abbot
Dangeau and Pierre Daniel Huet (regarding a passage by Virgil) on the form of
the Sirens, daughters of the Muses, and the inspiration behind Abbot Nicaise’s
essay. The latter did not hesitate to compare the Dupuy “cabinet” to the liter-
ary coterie of philologists hosted by the Museum of Alexandria and described
by Strabon.7 It is highly likely that Abbot Brignon had both the Dupuys and
Claude Nicaise’s essay in mind in 1701 when he reformed the “Petite Acadé-
mie” to resemble the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles. What had begun
as a simple commission of the Académie Française in service of the personal
glory of Louis XIV thus became the encyclopedic headquarters of French eru-
dition. With a delay of half a century, the Dupuy tradition finally received the
official recognition of the court.
My remit here was not to trace the origins and principles of the “new sci-
ence” (for that I recommend reading Alexandre Koyre and Georges Gusdorf )
that attached itself, so to speak, to the humanists’ encyclopedia in the early
seventeenth century, gradually weakening its unity. That said, my investigation
does include closer study of one of the “scientific” circles that formed in Paris
in the first half of the seventeenth century and was the basis of the royal Acadé-
mie des Sciences. The Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,” which was in constant com-
munication with Peiresc, is characteristic of what we can call “the autumn of
humanism”: it expanded on the encyclopedia of the now complete sixteenth
century, but also enthusiastically welcomed two forms of research that would
ultimately condemn it to specialization: French belles lettres, and natural sci-
ences based on mathematical analysis and experimentation. These two disci-
plines were already the focus of specialized societies, which existed at the same
time as the Dupuys’ “cabinet,” specifically “literary salons” (belles lettres) and
“Mersenne’s circle” (natural sciences), the latter of which was situated at the
Couvent des Minimes in the Place Royale and was a focal point and center of
correspondence for all of scientific Europe, notably Descartes. Mersenne died
in 1648, but his mantle was quickly taken by a high-ranking magistrate, Henri
Louis Habert de Montmor, who was born in 1600. Previously, France’s high
magistracy—the De Thous (to whom the Dupuys were related), De Mesmes,
Bignons, and Séguiers—had preferred to sponsor philological and historical
studies associated with the French school of law, whose originality and stability,
from Guillaume Budé to Jacques Cujas, has been underlined by Donald Kelley
and George Huppert. Habert de Montmor was one of Guillaume Budé’s grand-
nephews and was allied with the most important families of France’s noblesse
de la robe, magistracy, and upper government: the Lamoignons, Béthunes, and
118 Conversation
Phélypeaux. On March 26, 1637, he married Marie Henriette de Buade de Fron-

tenac, whose brother Louis later become governor of La Nouvelle-France in
Quebec. De Montmor was a learned man, who assembled a vast library in his
mansion on the rue Sainte-Avoye (today 79, rue du Temple), constructed by
his father in 1623. He was a member of the Dupuys’ “cabinet” and, like his
peers, did not publish his works: in order to be truly noble, “studious leisure”
could not give rise to any suspicions of professionalism. However, this man of
letters demonstrated his interest for the French language, and the arts of lan-
guage dedicated to it, much more staunchly than the Dupuys did. Master of
requests for the King’s Council in 1632, he was elected to the burgeoning Aca-
démie Française in 1634, where he joined his cousin Germain Habert, war
commissioner and poet, and Philippe Habert, another cousin and the abbot
of Cerisy, who was also a poet. On March 3, 1635, Habert de Montmor gave a
lecture at the academy entitled “De l’utilité des conferences” (The Utility of
Conferences), which opportunely marked the epistemological importance he
accorded to sociability and collaboration between men of letters. It is vital to
understand “conference” in the sense given by Montaigne: the savant version of
conversation, the mode of understanding through dialogue that the humanists
placed in opposition to the scholastic dispute. Since the Académie Française
did not yet have a fixed location, Habert received his colleagues in his home on
the rue Sainte-Avoye, most likely in the library, on April 30, 1635.
But this scholar of the encyclopedic tradition also displayed his “curiosity”
for “new science” and its representatives. According to Baillet, Descartes’s biog-
rapher, Habert offered him “full usage of his country home, at Mesnil-Saint-
Denis, which was worth 3000 to 4000 pounds in rent.” Descartes declined the
offer, and Habert extended it again, this time to Gassendi, who had been named
a royal professor of mathematics. On May 9, 1653, the canon of Digne moved
into Montmor’s mansion and spent the month of August at Mesnil-Saint-Denis.
There, he wrote Vie de Tycho Brahé (Life of Tycho Brahé), at the request of
Habert, to whom he dedicated the work. Gassendi made Habert his executor,
leaving him all his books and manuscripts, and the telescope given to him by
Galileo. He died on October 24, 1655. Habert presided over his funeral services
and, with the immediate assistance of François Henri, Samuel Sorbière, and
Antoine de La Poterie, prepared the six-volume edition of Gassendi’s Œuvres,
which he had printed with his own preface and a copy of Sorbière’s Vie de Gas-
sendi. This monumental edition would see classical epicureanism, which be-
came so dear to Montaigne, earn its Christian legitimacy under the authority
of a learned canon. Its impact would be felt notably in the following century.
Gassendi’s presence at Habert de Montmor’s residence, from 1653 to 1655,
gave momentum to the academy Habert had hoped to assemble around himself
after Mersenne’s death. Its members included the astronomer Samuel Boulliau;
the mathematicians Pascal, Roberval, Desargues, and Carcavy; and the trav-
eler Monconys. After Gassendi’s death, weekly meetings were organized, and
Samuel Sorbière drafted a nine-article set of rules for the budding academy.
He published it in February 1658 in the form of a letter addressed to Thomas
Hobbes. The preamble and first article discuss “conference,” believed to con-
tribute to the “public good” as well as to the participants’ “amusement.” The
objective of that “conference” was “a clearer understanding of God’s works,
the advancement of life’s comforts, in the arts and sciences that serve to in-
crease them.” Their form: two reports per session, followed by prepared objec-
tions and an oral debate. Reports, objections, and responses had to be read. The
oral debate was brief and submitted to the individual presiding over the session.
Academy members were permitted to submit their opinions in writing when
they could not attend in person. At the end of each session, academy mem-
bers were expected to inform the assembly about news of any ongoing research
or recently published publications they had gathered through correspondence
with foreign scholars. Attendance at the assembly was tightly regulated: barring
a vote by two-thirds of those present, no one could be admitted after the session
had begun, and only selected members of the academy, chosen among “indi-
viduals curious about natural science, medicine, mathematics, the liberal and
mechanical arts,” could attend, with noteworthy invited guests duly announced
and introduced.
Scientific collaboration therefore required formalities and a level of discus-
sion that had little to do with the rigor of university disputationes. It demanded
premeditation, including the reading of preplanned texts, breaking from the
oral improvisation and digressions of both erudite and polite literary conversa-
tion. From 1653 to 1663, these rules appear to have governed the weekly gather-
ings hosted and presided over by Habert, with Sorbière acting as secretary. In the
absence of since-lost session notes, numerous letters from Christiaan Huyghens,
as well as his Journal de voyage à Paris et à Londres (Journal of Travel to Paris
and London, 1660–1661),8 allow us to reconstitute the activities of this private
academy. Jean Chapelain, a member, like Habert de Montmor, of the Acadé-
mie Française, and a frequent habitué of the Dupuys’ “cabinet” and the Hôtel
de Rambouillet (both by this point in decline or closed), was a frequent corre-
spondent with Huyghens in Paris. The Cartesians Clerselier and Robault and
the doctor Pecquet were among the academy’s core members. The Englishman
Henry Oldenburg attended sessions regularly between 1657 and 1660; Huy-
ghens came in person to solidify the relationship between Paris and his circle
in Leiden; correspondence and travel (notably by the Italian Lorenzo Maga-
lotti) established links between the academy and the Accademia del Cimento
120 Conversation
(1657–1665) in Florence, presided over by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leo-

pold himself, which hosted collaborations between disciples of Torricelli and
Galileo. Huyghens’s journal reveals that several members of Habert de Mont-
mor’s academy, like Rohault, Thévenot, Petit, and Auzout, also held smaller,
more casual gatherings at their residences, during which they and their peers
conducted experiments of optics and mechanics or engaged in discussions of
mathematical problems. The “new science” was not at all isolated but rather
was part of what was named the Parisian “université libre,” as the presence of
Chapelain, the new uomo universal of the Renaissance, at Habert de Mont-
mor’s residence can attest. Huyghens himself was invited to join a “Cartesian
salon,” led by Madame de Bonneveau, which signaled the expansion of polite
society’s curiosity to scientific innovations: the femmes savantes would not be
long in coming. The young Dutch prodigy frequented the circles of Méré and
Mitton, where he would once again encounter Pascal. “New science” would
find a response—simultaneously literary, moral, and religious—in the Pensées
that Pascal had developed through his conversation with his peers, as well as
with the “esprits forts” of high society and the hermetic Solitaires of Port-Royal.
Huyghens’s voyage (modeled after the peregrinatio academica of the Re-
public of Letters, on the margins of a Dutch diplomatic mission) continued
in London, where his propitious timing enabled him to attend sessions of the
one-year-old Royal Society. Energized by the news out of London, Habert’s
academy wanted to become a serious rival. But Chapelain, who became one
of Colbert’s most trusted advisors, was already envisioning a French establish-
ment superior to the one the English had just placed under the nominal pa-
tronage of Charles II for the benefit of national agriculture, industry, and com-
merce (though with a budget that sustained its own members belonging to the
landed gentry, such as Sir Robert Boyle and Sir Robert Moray). Samuel Sor-
bière himself, in 1663, read a Discours (quickly sent to Colbert) before the as-
sembly gathered at Montmor’s residence, which recommended that the private
academy be transformed into a royal academy. He noted that private resources
(Montmor’s) were insufficient to successfully complete necessary experiments
and procure the tools to carry them out. He emphasized the conflicts that had
arisen between experimentalists and “philosophes” that could only be resolved
by royal authority. That same year, Huyghens wrote to Sir Robert Moray to tell
him that Habert de Montmor’s academy was over. It persisted, though quietly,
until 1669. Beginning in 1664, the diplomat Melchisédech Thévenot assembled
scholars disappointed by the quarrels of the Montmor Academy: the geome-
trician Frenicle, the doctor Steno, the physician Petit, and the mathematician
and astronomer Adrian Auzout. Also in 1664, Auzout, with his book Éphémé-
ride de la comète de 1664 (Almanac of the Comet of 1664), asked Louis XIV to
transform the Compagnie des sciences et des arts into a royal academy supplied
with the resources and instruments necessary for its projects, and therefore of
great utility to France’s national well-being and reputation. When Colbert, as-
sisted by advice from Christiaan Huyghens, Carcavy, and the Perrault brothers,
founded the Académie des Sciences in 1666, few members of Habert de Mont-
mor’s academy were chosen to participate.9
One of the members of the Habert Academy, the abbot and doctor Bourde-
lot, former secretary for Christine de Suède, and secretary for the prince of
Condé, had established his own academy in 1642, which he categorized as
“public” and which gathered every Monday in his house on the rue de Tour-
non. Announcing its sessions through public postings, this academy gave the
floor to undisputed savants, both French and foreign, and published its Actes.
It endured until the death of its founder in 1685. In 1672, one of Bourdelot’s col-
laborators, Le Gallois (nothing to do with Gallois, the editor of the Journal des
savants and secretary of the Académie des Sciences), published Conversations
de l’Académie de M. Bourdelot, contenant diverses recherches, observations, ex-
périences, et raisonnements de physique, chimie, mathématique (Conversations
of M. Bourdelot’s Academy, Containing Diverse Research, Observations, Ex-
periments, and Reasonings of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics).
The term “conversation” is quite fitting. It was intended to distinguish from
“conferences” between peers. This then is an example of haute vulgarisation not
unlike Renaudot’s “Office of Addresses” during Louis XIII’s reign. After an ini-
tial presentation by an invited savant, a debate between “academicians” would
take place before a large public audience. In terms of the semantic field of the
term “conversation” in the seventeenth century, it is particularly noteworthy
that Abbot Bourdelot had each session introduced by a concert of instruments
and voices, even for subjects of “new science,” meant to establish a harmonious
environment desirable for both the subsequent debate and the convergence of
minds. These sessions were followed by an evening meal as delectable as pos-
sible, supplied, in season, by deliveries of venison from the Prince of Condé, an
avid hunter of Chantilly’s forests. Concert, conversation, banquet: Bourdelot’s
academy therefore extended the spirit of classical and humanist convivia to the
“diffusion” of knowledge and did not separate pleasure in leisure from a natural
thirst for knowledge (Bourdelot was himself known for his accommodating and
cheerful demeanor). The same concern for eutrapelia had privileged “gaiety” in
“polite” society and “erudite” society. The Guy Patin text cited earlier10 would
have us believe that university manners were themselves not (or no longer) im-
pervious to humanist conviviality, which would see its final victory at the Con-
gress of Vienna in 1814–1815.11
7
SAVANT CONVERSATION
During the classical period, correspondence and different modes of pub-

licizing works through handwritten or printed texts played a critical role in
communication between savants. But there is another mode of communica-
tion that we tend to overlook, notably because it can appear overly elusive—
conversation.1 Erasmus defined correspondence as an “exchange between
absent friends.” An admirable consolation prize, but a consolation prize none-
theless. That description essentially suggests that in-person conversation be-
tween friends was the most desirable form of communication. By definition,
it left no trace: verba volant, scripta manent (speech flies away, written words
remain). This insurmountable obstacle for those of us who today deal uniquely
with scripta also impeded sixteenth- and seventeenth-century censors. Con-
versations between savants, held in their libraries, offices, and isolated gardens
ideal for shared walks, were much better placed than letters and, to an even
greater degree, printed works or manuscripts to escape surveillance and even-
tual repression by civil and religious authorities. These exchanges were secret, or
in any case private, guarded, and far from public earshot. But while this secrecy
might appear to contradict the publicity and need for communication so pre-
dominant in the unwritten laws of the Republic of Letters, it was in reality one
of the fundamental elements of humanist knowledge. The humanist encyclope-
dia strove no doubt to be a collaborative and collegial exercise and required that
any results or ongoing research be publicized. But it also adhered to the utmost
caution: first, in regard to official orthodoxy, often ill-disposed toward the liber-
tas philosophandi that savants of the Republic of Letters granted themselves
and each other; and secondly, toward mediocre and jealous individuals who at
times revealed themselves to be indiscreet rivals, spies, or plagiarists. Possessive-
ness of intellectual property and fear of prematurely announcing a discovery
to the public were more widespread in the seventeenth century than was the
generosity of figures like Mersenne or Peiresc, who incidentally published little.
Conversation between trusted friends, who were also peers, could maintain the
secret of a discovery or object of research more easily than other, more exposed,
forms of communication. In the Laudio funebris, included by Henri Valois in
122
Savant Conversation 123
Nicolas Rigault’s Vie de Pierre Dupuy (Life of Pierre Dupuy), Valois notes the
level of vigilance with which the older Adelphe excluded intruders and gossips
(that is, potential traitors and nuisances) from the daily gathering held in De
Thou’s library and later the king’s.2 The friendly harmony of conversation be-
tween confirmed and reliable savants relied primarily on a feeling of deep secu-
rity, of being “among your own,” in accordance with the implicit rules of an
ethical code of loyalty and trust.
It is possible to think that those oral exchanges between savants, which we
are unable to reconstitute verbatim, were a marginal aspect of their scientific
lives. The solitary work conducted in their “cabinets” initially looks to have been
more important. From this perspective, we can consider that savants’ corre-
spondence, books, and manuscripts provide us with a sufficient amount of in-
formation about their work, freeing us of the obligation of tackling the false and
unsolvable quandary of knowing what they may have been saying to each other.
I have several reasons to believe that such an attitude is unfounded. Even
assuming that conversation between savants was merely a way to relax, a quasi-
therapeutic form of otium, it and the discursive modes used merit examina-
tion by the historian. Otium alone always has some connection with negotium,
and even more so with otium studiosum, the savant’s professional mode. Lit-
erature on the nature of this oral relaxation, inseparable from otium studio-
sum, exists and should be taken into consideration. I am thinking notably about
the anas [anecdotal or conversational texts], and more precisely the Patiniana,
which demonstrates Guy Patin’s love for Rabelais, whose irony and at times
scabrous wordplay set the tone of the academic banquets he organized with
his friends. I am also thinking, in a more provincial style, of collections like
Democritus ridens sive campus recreationum honestarum cum exorcismo melan-
choliae (Laughing Democritus on the Playground of Honest Men with Pro-
tection against Melancholy), published in Cologne in 1648 with interleaved
white pages, which reflect the presence, right in the midst of the seventeenth
century, of a humanist tradition dating back to Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae.3
Laughing Democritus is filled with racy stories, apt to spark a relaxing conversa-
tion between savants. This was the ironic and even erotic side of the serious sa-
vant or man of letters. And let’s not forget Nugae venales sive Thesaurus ridendi
et jocandi ad gravissimos severissimos viros, patres melancholicorum conscrip-
tos, Anno 1663. Prostant apud Neminem, sed tamen ubique (Trifles to Sell, or
the Treasure of Laughs and Games Intended for Saddened and Severe Minds,
Fathers Conscripted to the Melancholy Race). Using questions modeled after
scholastic exercises, but with often cynical and bawdy responses, this small book
hints at the substance of what could have been said, during meals or leisure
124 Conversation
time, between good-natured German humanist scholars. But it is specific to

scholars, students, and professors of Lutheran universities. Another collection
of coarse humor intended for scholars or apprentices, an antidotum melancho-
liae jocoseriu (very pleasant antidote against melancholy), was published in
Frankfurt in 1668. This literature merits thematic study and an extensive bibli-
ography, which would undoubtedly add nuance to the at-times-rushed general-
izations about “erudite libertinism.” That libertinism was, in part, an oral form
of relaxation in which savants, outside their serious and taxing studies, indulged
when concerned with their health and seeking to restore the balance of their
humors through the conviviality of laughter and satire, starting with mockery
of false science and pedantry. In the correspondence between Mathieu Marais
and President Bouhier in the early eighteenth century,4 news and scholarly re-
marks are interspersed with the salacious accounts and sexual banter of a sermo
discinctus between men who ignored the more civil graces of the gallantry of
“polite” society and its female members.
Of course those exchanges took place on the margins of more conventional
savant conversation or else during moments of leisure. The essence of this schol-
arly discourse was inherent to knowledge itself, to study, to the working hours of
otium studiosum. More than a mode of communication, conversation between
savants was also an instrument of work and of shared work. The satirical pastiche
of the scholastic disputatio found in Nugae venales (1663) is a belated, implicit
hint at the secular ambitions of European humanism: replace the autistic dia-
lectic of the school with an art of conversation used as a method of shared re-
search. Since we are unequipped to recreate the content of this savant conver-
sation between humanists, can we at least capture its spirit? Contrary to what
one might think, texts are available. However, they reflect a variety of styles
and genres and belong to distinct series, which have most often been studied
independently from each other. In order for these diverse vestiges of the same
seemingly elusive oral phenomenon to settle into a coherent order, we must first
establish savant conversation as our object of study. Beginning with a series of
texts that are the most obvious and easiest to consult: the Lives of savants. These
works stretch as far back as the Lives of Petrarch, Budé, and Erasmus and the
biographies of Vespasiano dei Bisticci, in Ficino and Politian’s Florence. But I
will focus on a more recent series: Paolo Gualdo’s Life of Gian Vicenzo Pinelli,
published in 1607, Gassendi’s Life of Peiresc, published in 1642, and Nicholas
Rigault’s Life of Pierre Dupuy, published in 1652. In each of these Lives, it is
worth noting that the biographer, invariably a close friend and peer, dedicates
long passages to his subject’s conversational skill. This was considered to be an
essential attribute of the learned nobility, to the same extent as the composi-
tion of a library and encyclopedic collections, participation in international col-

laborations of philological and scientific research, and the intensity and regu-
larity of diligent correspondence with other savants. Savant conversation was
the social indicator of both a soul gifted with hospitality, kindness, friendship,
and serenity, and a mind supremely equipped to argue and to persuade. In the
conversation of the three savants mentioned above, as described by their biogra-
phers, the ethos and method of a life filled with work and study were projected
in their relationships with others, distinguished by incomparable charm and
fecundity. Thanks to their art of conversation, these three savants became bea-
cons of irresistible sociability, the very nerve centers of the Republic of Letters.
Even an amateur like Fortin de La Hoguette, who was exceptionally admitted
to the “Dupuy cabinet,” marveled at the near Orphic “music” that the Adelphes
ensured reigned within their society.5 Accounts by Gualdo,6 Gassendi,7 and De
Rigault of their heroes confirm Fortin de La Hoguette’s observations. By com-
paring them, we find ourselves already on the path to a phenomenology of sa-
vant conversation in the seventeenth century, the vibrant and oral heart of the
Republic of Letters.
Daniel Georg Morhof’s Polyhistor (the most comprehensive attempt to de-
scribe the Republic of Letters in its twilight) offers us the most articulated ac-
count of the art of erudite conversation in one dedicated chapter. During the
same period, the literature of the anas, a rather unique genre,8 considered, like
Polyhistor, that conversation between savants, the traits of which are described
in the anas, was a kind of esoteric instruction that surpassed what the public
could learn from their printed works. The anas enabled readers to participate,
more or less faithfully, in the intimacy of an erudite circle gathered around a
teacher and to hear his spoken word, rather than his official, public, and writ-
ten voice. Less dialogue than spoken monologue, this discourse incorporated
both the sermo discinctus—naked, ironic, and uninhibited conversation—and
reflection and solidly constructed analysis. These are undoubtedly only partial
and at times unreliable records, but they attest to the importance and interest
accorded during this time to the spoken word as the vehicle of great knowledge.
Savant conversation further appears in these works as an art of living and of
calmly coexisting, as well as a way to convey knowledge.
Not only are the letters Guez de Balzac called “conversations by writing”
undoubtedly the best accounts of savant conversation available, but they also
contain many veiled references to that conversation. Jean-Robert Armogathe
conducted an analysis of Mersenne’s correspondence,9 which can be resumed,
extended, and compared to other similar collections.
But this collection of indirect accounts should not force us to neglect an-
126 Conversation
other more promising, albeit more severe source: theoretical treatises about
conversation. It took me some time to realize their importance and therefore
establish the tradition behind them, which is quite distinct from the rhetorical
tradition of the great oratory genres. This unusual genre dates back to antiquity,
and only true savants, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were in a position
to observe all that separated it from the grand arts of eloquence. Only the most
erudite observers, meaning the most accomplished philologists and men of let-
ters, were capable of capturing the link between Plato’s dialogues, Aulus Gel-
lius’s Attic Nights, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, and
Plutarch’s Banquet of Sages. All these Latin and Greek texts gave a voice to sa-
vants and men of letters, allowing them to speak to one another and to assemble
and express seemingly incompatible qualities: the precision of memory and the
rigor of intelligence at work, with literary charm. A theory of conversation can
be found in the writings of Macrobius, an author popular among humanists: he
distinguishes between two oral genres, sermones conviviales (related to leisure
and rest) and disputationes matutinae et robustiores (which echoes the notion
of “conference” as viewed by Montaigne). These two adjacent genres were des-
tined to “contaminate one another.” The definition of the erudite sermo, ac-
cording to Macrobius, is in fact applicable to both: concentus in dissonis, in
unum conspiratio (agreement in dissonance and reduction to one).10 Yet, it was
that same harmony of minds that the humanists, beginning with Petrarch, re-
proached scholasticism and its logic formalism for ignoring: scholastic science
and its disputationes were abstract and “frozen,” to borrow Rabelais’s famous
term, and relied on an arrogant and dogmatic way of thinking. Classical wis-
dom, notwithstanding that of the pure logician Aristotle and his stoic disciples,
only accorded the exercise of scientific reasoning a very limited and relative
validity: if it valued dialogue, however, it was because, within a dialogue, the
weaknesses of individual reasoning could be compensated and reciprocally cor-
rected in order to get as close as possible to the truth. The optimal conditions of
the classical dialogue—leisure, friendship, the desire for truth and happiness—
favored that exchange and cooperation, the secrets to the sages’ enlightenment.
Rhetoric, the art of persuasion that could so easily transform during its pub-
lic expression into demagoguery or sophistry, could, in this intimate exercise
between friends, foster philosophical and scientific understanding. And so the
history of erudite humanism is marked by great dialogues, which reflect conver-
sations held in savant circles. Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria (1415–
1466?) and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes camaldulenses (1472–1474) are
two justifiably famous examples. Savant conversation thus preceded courtly
conversation, and erudite humanists paved the way for courtiers and diplomats,
who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, borrowed from them the ethos
and conventions suitable to the relaxed speech of the otium, preparation for the
fraught game of negotiation. However, I will not focus on that form of “polite”
conversation, which is better studied and more visible than savant conversa-
tion.11 Treatises by Castiglione (1528), Della Casa (1558), and Stefano Guazzo
(1574) are classic examples. Original-language variations also exist, written in
Spanish, English, and French (Gracián, Shaftesbury, Chesterfield, La Roche-
foucauld, Méré, and Paradis de Moncrif ).
At the end of the seventeenth century, Daniel Georg Morhof, a man be-
fore his time and the best retrospective “sociologist” of the Republic of Letters,
reestablished the honor and historical precedence of savant conversation. He
writes in Polyhistor:
Musea et collegia [. . .] eam ob causam institui solent, ut ex conversatione

eruditorum mutua res litteraria augmentum capiat. Conversandi ergo
ratio quaedam habenda est, quae, ut in omni hominum societate indi-
gentiam, ita in doctrinis ignorantiam nostram solatur. (Museums and
colleges [. . .] are ordinarily formed so that the practice of letters finds a
nourishing milieu in the words exchanged by men of learning. A rule of
conversation is also needed so that, like indigence in civil society, igno-
rance can be eased.)12
An assertive apologia for savant conversation and its institutions can be

found in Polyhistor, in which it is vigorously described as a collective remedy to
the inevitable indigence of individual knowledge that is as a result riddled with
ignorance. This conversation is founded on the principle of “know thyself,” thus
making its interlocutors’ individual wisdom, modesty, and moderation the prin-
ciple behind shared science and its “augmentation.”
Further on, still in Polyhistor, Morhof writes:
Nihil vero ad informationem commodius est, quam frequens cum viris

doctis conversatio, quae est disciplina omnium optima, et in sensus magis
incurrit, quam taediosa illa per lectiones et meditationes via. (Nothing
does more to cultivate us than to confer often with savants: it is of all the
disciplines the happiest and touches our spirit more profoundly than that
dull path that passes by reading and solitary meditation.)13
Savant conversation was therefore the supreme method of sharing infor-

mation and education, a “general discipline” to develop the mind, inseparable
from its agrément.
It is striking to find this man of letters, if ever there was one, making a judg-
128 Conversation
ment that could be easily attributed to a man at court, but which corresponds
closely to Montaigne’s views on the superiority of “experience” and the “art of
conversation” over book learning:
Per conversationem in omni vitae genere plura disci, quam per lectionem
librorum. Lectio tamen librorum non inutilis, si non habemus cum quo
conversemur. Ideoque vel sola illa cum Bibliopolis et Bibliothecariis con-
versatio insignem nobis usum praestabit. (In all stages of life, we learn
much more through conversation than by reading books. The latter is not
without utility, if one has nobody to converse with. Moreover conversa-
tion with amateurs of books and librarians alone yields us exceptional
benefits.)14
Morhof entrusts the reciprocal culture of the mind, the life and raison d’être
of orbis litterarum, almost entirely to a conversatio that he considers more im-
portant than reading or solitary meditation, and in which he sees the connec-
tive tissue of the Republic of Letters. Naturally, he adds, thereby justifying the
editors of savant correspondence: cum absentibus conversamur per epistolas (we
talk to those absent through letters).15 In Morhof’s eyes, this epistolary substitute
was so effective that, he notes, Casaubon and Scaliger never felt the need to
meet in person. Their correspondence served as conversation.
Conversatio erudita, to which Morhof dedicates an entire chapter, was none-
theless the original and essential social connector of the Republic of Letters.
If the author of Polyhistor had been the only one to maintain that opinion, we
could easily reject it. But he himself invokes influential past authorities, notably
the same savant biographies cited above, from Louis Le Roy’s Vita Budaei to
Paolo Gualdo’s Vita Pinelli, which served as the model for Gassendi’s Vita Pei-
reskii. He notes that all these works dedicated long passages to the conversation
of these great figures of the Republic of Letters, which were naturally prolonged
by their diligent correspondence. So what did he, and the authors of these Vitae,
mean by conversatio?
It is important to avoid the semantic error of reducing the meaning of that
word to “discussion” or “oral exchange.” Without entering into overly detailed
analyses, I want to emphasize that the word conversatio, which appeared in
Latin in the first century and had a long success in the Latin used by Chris-
tians, designated every aspect of a “collective existence,” meaning social and
sociable cooperation. In reality, it also encompassed correspondence, which
mirrored and depended on oral dialogue and whose moral protocol and discur-
sive conventions rendered the “collective existence” of savants both fruitful and
successful. Conversatio therefore implies a configuration that is very different
from that of our modern “communication.” This is evident in the organization

of the chapter Morhof dedicates to conversatio erudita. The German philologist
begins by studying the moral standards that made erudite cooperation possible
and productive, and which, in their absence, was merely an illusion.
The first of these standards is the Greek gnôthi seauton (know thyself ):
knowing oneself is the basis for knowing others, without which conversation is
not possible. This supposes a humble evaluation of the reach of the individual
human mind, even when it is superior. But it also implies the variety of minds,
the singular inclinations that are inseparable from one’s limits.16 Physiognomy
(taught by historians, playwrights, and poets) contributed to this science of
men. As soon as more than two speakers are involved in a habitual conversation
(familiaritas), the addition of a third implies agreement between the first two on
the inclinations and qualities that will insure the newcomer neither disrupts nor
bothers the fruitful harmony already achieved. The Republic of savants relied
on an extremely cautious and selective recruitment process, which included
much more than the evaluation of technical competence or specific expertise.
The candidates’ affinities and levels of moral maturity had to be weighed with a
practically semiotic care. (That word is used in Greek in the title of a work cited
by Morhof, De conjectandis cujusque moribus et latitantibus animi affectibus
sêméiotikê moralis, seu de signis [Semiotic of Characters to Discern the Morals
and Hidden Sentiments of Each, or Treatise of Signs], published in Venice in
1625 and written by Gabriel Naudé’s good friend, Scipione Chiaramonti).17 The
worst flaw that could be detected was pride, an insurmountable obstacle not
only to true knowledge but also to any successful cooperation between savants.
This assessment therefore could not be based on abstract or theoretical prin-
ciples. It required experience, intuition, and tact and took into account the
extreme and paradoxical diversity among men, depending on temperament,
age, sex, fortune, nation, social condition, and proportion of virtues and vices.
Great minds are invariably very different, but a great mind is necessary for the
magnetism of erudite conversation to take effect. Thus participants in savant
conversation were assumed to have freedom and independence in relation to
any exterior and “common” interference. Morhof cites an example. According
to him, Saumaise refused to write the history of Cardinal Richelieu requested
by the French minister himself despite the promised remuneration: he did not
want to be forced to equivocate with the truth. The moral requirements of the
Republic of Letters did not separate between the ethical (character) and the
epistemological.18
The second metric was knowledge: eruditio. This was not linked to the vol-
ume or profusion of a savant’s publications, impressive though they may have
130 Conversation
been, but to the wisdom inherent to his singular being (memory and ingenium).
Mohrof writes that a remark made in passing by a true savant can put one more
directly on the path to truth than lengthy works. Other values—modesty, affa-
bility, kindness, deliberation in speaking, moderation in curiosity, and lack of
precipitation when making judgments—collectively formed the savant’s huma-
nitas, which could be understood as the Stimmung, the most favorable to fertile
conversation with one’s peers.
The savant’s rhetoric was therefore, like that of Cicero and Quintilian (which
is freely cited by Morhof ), tightly linked to a philosophy of morals, itself in-
separable from an epistemology. After examining the conditions in which this
rhetoric was exercised, Morhof studies its modes. The meaning of conversatio
becomes that of the Greek suzêtésis, “collective research,” or even the French
conférence, as employed by Montaigne. This is a blend of the Socratic method:
libertas, varied rhythm, and even silences, and the exchange of arguments as
explained by Aristotle in his Analytics, Topics, and Rhetoric.19 There is an art of
asking questions without insulting the speaker and an art of dialogue, notably
during a walk or stroll (peregrinatio),20 models for which can be found in the
writing of Aulus Gellius and Petrarch. Morhof defines it as a Critica socratica,
and he defines its simple and precise style by borrowing from the éidos socrati-
kos proposed by Demetrius de Phalerum’s taxonomy of styles. He notes that
Casaubon had announced a study of this genus orationis in his Animadversio-
nes in Athenaeum. Morhof also refers to Tranquillo Ambrosius’s book Processus
informativus.21 He further emphasizes that this oral exercise of sharing informa-
tion and discovery had its written equivalent in correspondence. But fragments
of that oral activity, the very heart of letters, had begun to be written down.
Morhof cites the Scaligerana, Perroniana, Thuana, and Colomesiana, all pub-
lished in the 1660s, as well as the Recueil de particularités (Collection of Curi-
osities),22 noting that this biography had since expanded considerably. Morhof
reminds his readers of the questionable reliability of the anas and emphasizes
the value of epistolary conversation, which, he writes, is sola ingenii similitudine
homines conjungit (singly capable of uniting men through the unique force of
intellectual affinities) and which often kindles feelings of affection more than
conversation between face-to-face speakers does. Once again, he does not chal-
lenge the central, vital, and archetypal character of direct conversation between
savants within the epistemic tissue of the Republic of Letters.
His stance is surprising. One would not imagine a Cartesian, or at least not
to this degree, placing conversation, even regulated, at the heart of cognition. It
is important to note that, in this chapter of Morhof’s work, knowledge has none
of the traits of Cartesian science. This “sociologist” of the Republic of Letters
was more aligned with Montaigne and Bacon. His criterion was not mathemati-
cal certitude, but the degree of truth that the limited human mind is capable of
attaining. The structure underlying his analysis is not a system of laws logically
following one another, but an “open” and heterogeneous encyclopedic arena
wherein the multiplicity of items of knowledge and their grasping “progress”
triumphs over a truth that is by principle inaccessible. Conversation was admi-
rably suited to this kind of encyclopedia, both as a kind of heuristic, inseparable
from the variety and limits of talents and minds, combining their diverse capa-
bilities, and an art de bien vivre, reuniting in the same relatively harmonious
society (otium studiosum) the two most sociable vocations of weak humanity:
the desire for knowledge and the desire for happiness.
Viewed from Germany, where the Respublica litteraria of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries was anchored in universities (the opposite of
France and Italy), this European society of savants is described by Morhof as a
Platonic notion of the ideal and perfect society, a humanissima et fecundissima
conversatio between civilized men. An abstraction no doubt, but one that was
nonetheless faithfully embodied by several of its earthly representations (and we
have seen several): Petrarch’s Florentine disciples, the members of Aldus Manu-
tius’s philhellenic academy, the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,” Peiresc’s circle of
correspondents. This view was not shared by Pierre Bayle, though he was writing
in a trade-oriented and Latin- and French-speaking Holland then considered to
be one of the oldest and most welcoming homelands of commercium litterarium
and savant conversation. Recall his famous definition of the Republic of Letters
in the article “Catius,” Remark D, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (The
Dictionary Historical and Critical):
This Common-Wealth is a State extremely free. The Empire of Truth

and Reason is only acknowledged in it; and under their Protection an
innocent War is waged against any one whatever. Friends ought to be on
their Guard, there, against their Friends, Fathers against their Children,
Fathers-in-law against their Sons-in-law, as in the Iron Age.23
After Morhof, another German professor, from Leipzig this time, Johannes
Burckhardt Mencke, reader and above all emulator of Bayle (he took over
management of the Acta Eruditorum from his father, Otto Mencke, who had
founded them to great European success), thought it necessary to choose be-
tween Morhof’s highly civilized vision of conversation and the Homeric and
mercilessly critical view held by Pierre Bayle. He published two successive
Declamationes in 1713 and 1715, spoken in the university auditorium before
his colleagues and their students, entitled De charlataneria eruditorum. This
132 Conversation
critical “journalist” and director of the Acta Eruditorium was careful not to use
Bayle’s cold logic to fuel the scientific wars waged in the name of Reason and
Truth. In Mencke’s mind, the true cause of breaches of basic civility and tact
during conversation between scholars and savants was unrestrained pride. In
this sense, Mencke borrowed heavily from writings by French moralists like
La Rochefoucauld and Pierre Nicole. The charlatanry of publicity seekers was
inevitable among false savants, but more often than not it also corrupted true
ones, prompting them to fly off their theoretically stable handles, thereby ex-
posing them to ridicule and even hatred. Both the past and recent history of
the Republic of Letters provide countless examples of serious lapses in taste
and even simple decency, which saw great minds reduced to the level of intel-
lectual street performers. Mencke was the German Palissot, and his two “dec-
lamations,” dripping with a deliciously classical and humanist vein, were, with
a head start of a few decades, the equivalent of the Comédie des Philosophes
(Comedy of Philosophers, 1760), which would target Voltaire and the parti phi-
losophique at their weakest points. It is regrettable that these two, perhaps overly
rich, cultural consommés were never translated into any vernacular European
languages. A lesson of such high quality is not as outdated as its excellent Neo-
Latin might imply.
8
PARISIAN CONVERSATION AND ITS
EXPANSION ACROSS EUROPE
One of the most singular qualities of Italian humanism, the program of “stu-
dious leisure” established for laymen by Petrarch (1304–1374) and adopted by
the first Republic of Letters in the sixteenth century, was its gamble on the “res-
toration” of Latin. In his Convivio, which was not published until 1490, Dante
had tried to make the scientific encyclopedia of his day accessible to laymen
by writing it in Tuscan. Without renouncing Dante’s ambitions for an “illustri-
ous vernacular,” Petrarch focused his own efforts on a “renaissance” of ancient
Latin (this despite having achieved fame thanks notably to his Canznoniere
and Trionfi). He was crowned a poet in Rome for the first verses of Africa (mod-
eled after the Latin Aeneid), which he hoped to associate with a renaissance of
ancient Greek. In Petrarch’s mind, Latin could no longer remain the modern
language of the school, used only by clergymen, theologians, and men of sci-
ence. It had to re-become what it had been during the pagan and Christian Ro-
man Empires: the language of persuasive eloquence and enchanting poetry. For
that, Latin needed to renew its ties to rhetoric, poetry, and imitation of the An-
cients. This rejuvenated Latin (Erasmus was entirely faithful to Petrarch in this
respect) was meant to seduce a lay public, which medieval clergy had deemed
ignorant, with savant “letters.” However, this “return to antiquity” (meaning
both pagan authors and church fathers) harbored a contradiction that would
become characteristic of Italian humanism and, to a large extent, of European
humanism. This paradox was already visible in works by Petrarch and his favor-
ite student, Boccaccio. It lies at the heart of what historians of sixteenth-century
Italian humanism named the Questione della lingua, which is indissociable in
many ways from the Ciceronian quarrel over the best style of “restored” Latin.
Petrarch—a philologist, collector and collator of manuscripts, and author of
treatises and poems in “classic” Latin—also penned literary masterpieces in
the vernacular or “vulgar” language, which would incidentally influence each
of Europe’s “living” linguistic centers until the eighteenth century. Boccaccio,
who became a European author thanks to his Decameron, written in Tuscan,
finished his life as a student of the Latinist Petrarch by writing compilations
133
134 Conversation
in Latin (Famous Women, Genealogy of the Gods). These two kinds of works,
which inspired humanism, led to two parallel but nonetheless strictly hierar-
chized developments: the Latin Republic of Letters, which made philology and
antiquarianism its core subjects, which would foster the “humanities” and lit-
erary disciplines; and the variety of new national literatures, which had been in
the shadows, for a more or less long time, of the Neo-Latin literature endorsed
by the Republic of Letters. Despite the success of Erasmus’s works, the Latin
Republic of Letters could not reach the entire existing audience of national
literatures. It could, however, inspire its respect thanks to this republic’s inter-
national authority, which was based on its mnemonic and linguistic links with
antiquity, the shared treasure of Europe. This relative linguistic, philological,
and scientific esotericism did not, for all that, renounce its aims of conquering
a much larger public, or at least not until the first third of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Following Petrarch’s example, it relied on accessible genres: eclogues, eulo-
gies, utopian and allegorical accounts (More’s Utopia, 1518; Bartolommeo d’El-
bene’s Civitas veri, 1609), and even allegorical novels (Barclay’s Argenis, 1621).
But it was nonetheless the new national literatures (beginning with Italy’s) that
attracted a larger and mostly noble public, of mixed gender and literate, though
ignorant of the Latin used by humanists, and which had inherited, in its own
language, literary traditions that dated back to the Middle Ages rather than to
antiquity. Pleasure was on the side of poets, novelists, and essayists writing in
the vernacular. Knowledge, based in antiquity, was on the side of the Neo-Latin
humanists. Translation bridged the two universes (the most famous example, in
the sixteenth century, being of course the translation of Amyot’s Vies parallèles
[Parallel Lives, 1565–1575]). This diglossia within European humanism had its
roots in Italy, and would long influence northern Europe thanks to the prestige
of the model suggested by Petrarch and successfully perfected by his many Ital-
ian successors. By the sixteenth century, however, signs of a rupture with the
Italian-humanist model had begun to emerge. The Latin Republic of Letters,
which stretched to northern Europe, was applying philological criticism to law,
history, and Holy Writ, and developing an entire range of disciplines (geogra-
phy, cosmography, astronomy, zoology, phytology, and so on) on the basis of the
best-known texts of antiquity. This expanding encyclopedia was not adapted to
“classic” and literary Latin, even if it continued to use it for its major publica-
tions. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, savant conversation and cor-
respondence would resort to Italian or French. At the same time, the influence
of the Latin Republic of Letters, which had managed to endure and grow until
the 1630s, was in rapid decline, at least in France and England.
The role played by France, and notably Paris, in this turning point for Euro-
Parisian Conversation and Its Expansion 135
pean sciences and letters cannot be exaggerated. The “language question,”

which was formulated differently in France than it was in Italy, was a major
factor in this phenomenon. The Italian program of maintaining two literary
languages (one rediscovered by humanist philology: the elegant Latin of the
“Ciceronians”; the other, a literary Italian, written more often than spoken, and
dependent on imitation of the former) was a conservative one. It restored dis-
tant forms of things. It relegated the mind to the margins, as Galileo saw first-
hand, as strictly as inquisitorial censorship did. This loyalty to Cicero’s Rome
slowed the use of Latin as a technical language and perpetuated within Italian
letters an error already made by the French Pléiade: the “mannerist” and schol-
arly imitation of antiquity intended for a restricted public. Under Henry IV,
France liberated itself from these dual constraints. In a few decades not only did
the “King’s French” become a living literary language distinct from scholarly
imitation of the Ancients, but it was adopted more and more willingly by “new
savants” who themselves stopped relying on classical authorities: Mersenne,
Descartes, Desargues, Pascal. But I prefer to avoid the term “rupture” here. In
reality, the variety and complexity of the French landscape were such that it is
easy to observe, for example, the extreme vitality of Neo-L atin poetry in France
during the seventeenth century or a stubborn loyalty to the Pléiade’s poetic pro-
gram as late as Louis XIV’s reign. Neither Mersenne nor Descartes nor Pascal
seized philosophical and scientific power overnight. The reigning discipline of
the sixteenth-century humanist philology would continue to occupy brilliant
minds and produce high-quality works until the eighteenth century. Gassendi
and Huet continued to publish in Latin. But a major obstacle—the Italian myth
of uninterrupted continuity, from the peninsula, of antiquity to the Renais-
sance—had nonetheless been lifted in France. Why there?
That Italian myth had always encountered resistance, even when it fasci-
nated the most. An “arcanum” of the French monarchy challenged its docile
reception. According to that competing national myth—translatio studii ad
Francos (the transfer of studies to France)—the cycle of classical knowledge was
over. Another cycle, fulfilling the first but to a superior degree, had originated in
France. This myth was therefore also an act of prophetic and philosophical faith.
It prompted, for example, the future cardinal of Bérulle to encourage a young
Descartes, who intended to liberate Christian science from Aristotle’s yoke. But
why was this act of faith so deliberately and widely shared? For now, let’s simply
note that Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche indeed unveiled an
entirely new and open horizon of thought, finally giving form to the myth of
translatio studii ad Francos. We can also postulate that the emergence of a “new
public,” educated in excellent schools particularly attentive to their young stu-
136 Conversation
dents and centered in Paris, favored and supported this philosophical and sci-
entific phenomenon. If this “new public” existed, it was undoubtedly because
Paris had, under the Bourbons, truly become the political and military capital
of the kingdom and the center of European affairs. The French nobility moved
to Paris en masse. They constructed magnificent private mansions. They set the
tone. These men and women were the “public” whose attention one needed to
gain. But this French nobility, which was becoming, often unwillingly, a leisure
caste, now prided itself on speaking French with the utmost elegance and wit.
Even if they had pursued humanist studies, its princes and gentlemen has-
tened to play down that common stock. Traditionally, they had strived for valor
(though their warrior vocation did oblige them to acquire some technical skills)
and gallantry (which required an understanding of poetry and music). Now
they wanted to be “esprits forts.” Montaigne had prepared the playing field for
them, free of prejudice, on which Descartes and Pascal were waiting.
Cartesian cosmology, which had already conquered Parisian salons at the
time of Molière’s Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1672), is the subject
of a gallant dialogue in the park in Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des
mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686). “New science” and
the “Moderns” literary party together played off the fear of being taken in or
fooled, which characterized this intelligent and prestigious public of leisure. It
was through that brilliant and idle public that the “universality of the French
language,” which was then establishing itself at the expense of scholarly Latin,
maintained its sway over courtly Europe. When Pierre Bayle wrote his Diction-
naire historique et critique (The Dictionary Historical and Critical), published
in 1697, in which he summarizes in French the essence of three centuries of
humanism, safeguarding it for the Age of Enlightenment, he took into account
the recent expansion of the Republic of Letters in France. To those erudite
humanists who reproached him for having made too many concessions to the
curiosity of the ignorant, he responded with Suite des réflexions sur le prétendu
jugement du public (More Reflections on the Pretended Judgment of the Pub-
lic, September 17, 1697).1 In another essay that he would similarly append to
subsequent editions of his Dictionary, “Dissertation sur le jour” (A Dissertation
upon the Day), Bayle, in the guise of an erudite clash of opinions relating to
the measure of time, dedicates most of his reflection to his own conception of
“journalism” and modern science: knowledge would no longer be esoteric nor
revealed once and for all at an arbitrary moment in time. He writes that truth
had become the “fille du Temps.” Not that it was not dependent on the vagaries
of opinion; revealing itself bit by bit, the object of a critical judgment in time,
truth had to nonetheless work to garner an opinion that was, ultimately, its judge
and jury. The Republic of Letters was no longer a hierarchical state divided be-
tween clergy and laymen, savants and the ignorant. It was a network of more
or less erudite circles, whose center moved around over time, and which, from
day to day, from crisis to crisis, worked to unveil and understand truth. The pride
and independent-mindedness of the Parisian public of leisure precipitated this
metamorphosis. Apart from renouncing science, savants could not ignore this
new configuration. As for Bayle, he had the feeling that by publishing a critical
memoir of Europe in an abbreviated, and seemingly capricious, form, he was
not only forming and feeding the judgment of the public but helping to give it
a taste of critical thinking. He taught it to submit the legacy of humanist erudi-
tion to methodical Cartesian doubt. He preserved the gains of the old Republic
of Letters, while making them intelligible and appetizing for a new public of
amateurs, henceforth an integral part of a new Republic of Letters.
Paris’s aristocratic “class of leisure” thus earned a “right of bourgeoisie” in
the Republic of Letters during the seventeenth century. It became the arbi-
trator of all things related to the mind and, in exchange, provided that realm,
previously reserved for men of the church or commoners, a freedom, authority,
and vivacity that would have its members believe in the return of the Athens of
Pericles and Plato. For the first time since Greek and Latin antiquity, the new
French letters that succeeded the humaniores litterae of the old Respublica litte-
raria in the seventeenth century had the chance to rely on a literary and schol-
arly language that was also a living and spoken language. The gap between a
written, savant language and “vulgar” tongues disappeared in the language of
Vaugelas, Malebranche, and Bayle. The consequences of this French occur-
rence, both imperceptible and considerable, were also far-reaching. The most
obvious one was the changed center of gravity of the intellectual realm. The
origin and object of knowledge were no longer timeless, situated in the fixed
skies of ancient cosmology or in an antiquity offering two kinds of revelations:
the “natural” and the “supernatural.” They now took the form of “innovations”
developing from the critical reflection of the Republic of Letters, whose con-
centric circles encompassed savants, demisavants, and sophisticated “amateurs”
who read and spoke the same language: French. The classical hierarchy of disci-
plines gave way to a liberal convergence, expressed by budding journalism and
the proliferation of quarrels. Every day brought news and debates that sparked
brief, brilliant essays, which allowed the “public” to participate in a current and
evolving state of knowledge. Thanks to the linguistic homogeneity between sa-
vants and the public, between studious leisure and society leisure, the public
not only gained access to scientific innovations and related discussions, it could
also argue and openly choose a side. The Republic of Letters became part of a
138 Conversation
vast oral phenomenon, integrating a kind of public opinion that it would hence-
forth have to take into the utmost account.
This was “French conversation,” whose encyclopedism and cosmopolitan-
ism grew rapidly throughout the eighteenth century and whose authority and
curiosity were concentrated in the Parisian salons dazzling all of Europe. The
“disposition” of private mansions, that is, their decor and plastic and decorative
arts, helped create, along with garden arts, a fluid, shiny, and pliable milieu for
this grand French phenomenon of oral sociability. The importance gained by
“French conversation” during the reign of Louis XIV is undoubtedly due, as
previously mentioned, to the aristocracy’s newfound availability, the conversion
of their leisure activities to the realm of the mind and heart. This noble spirit
of leisure, first foreseen by Montaigne, was linked to the audaciously skeptical
character and facets of modern knowledge. In an impressive essay, preface to
his Nouveaux dialogues des dieux (New Dialogues of the Gods), entitled “Dis-
cours sur la nature du dialogue” (Discourse on the Nature of Dialogue, 1711),
Toussaint Rémond de Saint-Mard, a close friend of the Comte de Caylus and
his charming mother, links this new mode of knowledge to the classical prece-
dents of the Platonic Academy, the Ciceronian New Academy, and the irony of
Lucien. But it would only reach its peak, according to Saint-Mard, with Fon-
tenelle, one of Descartes’s disciples:
I do not know why a decisive air has become so fashionable. Perhaps

people cannot imagine that it demonstrates both vanity and ignorance.
When they consider an object, they are then audacious enough to judge
it. They have turned it in every direction, they like to say, clearly seen its
every facet. But who knows? Is it not possible that something escaped
the mind? Who can know if the object does not have facets that were not
given to be observed? The pleasure of study should suffice for our Reason.
Mysterious and obtuse as it is, it is not suited to deciding.
Enlightenment could thus only emerge when minds confronted one an-
other: through their very limits and individual inclinations they contributed, as
long as they did not claim to know everything, to as comprehensive a perspec-
tive as was possible. The art of conversation was therefore an effort to obtain
generalized and liberal knowledge. While it may have been suited to an aris-
tocratic and lettered leisure, to its noble temptations, like the prevailing “curi-
osity” in “vanity” and “idleness,” it was also in its own way a response to the
prerequisites of modern research, to the methodical and critical doubt inspir-
ing it, and to the dialectic of experience governing its stumbles and advances.
Within the “new science,” journalism, literature, and conversation, to varying
degrees of intensity, a certain cognitive harmony emerged: “new savants” recog-

nized and claimed the generalized dialogism of the “new men and women of
letters” of Parisian high society, replete with its irony and art of submitting all
things to the intuitive and penetrating trap of the mind. Here, women played
an essential and even decisive role in a fortunate reversal of the injustice that
had deprived them of a humanist or scholastic education. In Recueil de ces mes-
sieurs (The Gentlemen’s Collection, attributed to Caylus),2 the author suggests
that, in theory, the lack of interest in educating a young girl allows her every
opportunity to “think on her own,” a chance refused, in contrast, to educated
young men:
She gathers her ideas on impressions of objects, she reflects; soon,

she makes comparisons, then she draws conclusions, and her reason is
formed. Her thoughts, emerging one after the other, are always just. One
might say she of necessity observes objects of little importance; but I
hardly know which ones are more important than others. What matters
is seeing them as they are. For that matter, what is more important than
studying men and knowing their character? To see the difference in edu-
cation, it suffices to see a young man leaving his school in the presence
of a younger sister. He knows neither what he says, nor what he hears,
whereas his sister makes continual conversation, and sometimes is its
very soul. Why? Because she never learned Latin. Why did the Romans,
they say, have brighter minds than us? It is because they did not learn
Latin, but since they learned Greek, the Greeks who had learned noth-
ing had even brighter minds than they. Thus I conclude that one must
love, esteem and respect women. It would even be best to love them all
at once, if only to love the variability.
Marivaux’s Marianne, quickly “adopted” by the habitués of Madame de Ten-

cin’s salons (Madame Dorsin in the novel), echoes this definition of enlight-
ened feminine naïveté, a model for the noble époché, itself spontaneously reso-
nant with common “good sense.” With the linguistic and erudite barrier lifted,
“French conversation,” an awakening to the enlightened “naïveté” of attic dia-
logues, united people of letters and people of “polite” society, the kaloïkagathoï
(handsome and good)—though politically irresponsible—in an intellectual
equality that enlarged the citizenship of the Republic of Letters to anyone who
had received the “grace” imagined by Descartes in the famous hyperbole in his
Discourse: “good sense [is] of all things among man, the most equally distrib-
uted.”3 However, French conversation’s influence over Europe and within the
new Republic of Letters did not take hold in France itself without resistance. It
140 Conversation
was the subject of a fierce debate that lasted throughout the reign of Louis the
Great (who did his best to firmly associate conversation with his court).
This debate brought theologians, moralists, novelists, and playwrights into
the fray. Though a unanimous consensus had been reached on the rules of
civility, which applied uniformly and internationally to active life and leisure
life, civilized conversation (linked in Paris to the idea of “living nobly”) was a
passionate and controversial subject on which most of France’s greatest classi-
cal authors took a stance. Its staunchest defenders were of course Molière (from
Les Précieuses ridicules [The Precious Ridiculous] to Les Femmes savantes [The
Learned Ladies], peaking with Le Misanthrope [The Misanthrope]) and La
Fontaine (Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon [The Loves of Cupid and Psyche]
and Discours à Mme de La Sablière [Address to Madame de la Sablière]). La
Fontaine was linked to a French aristocracy particularly concerned with protect-
ing its leisure time, its sole remaining freedom, from the “enslavement” of the
royal court and army. He was friends with La Fare and De Chaulieu, the duch-
esses of Bouillon and Mazarin, Saint-Évremond, and the Vendômes. He was the
poet of conversation, an art of living and understanding that he associated with
friendship, “idleness,” and dreaming. No one sensed better than he the deep kin-
ship between “lettered leisure,” as reinvented by humanism for modern laymen,
and “noble leisure,” as defined by an entire philosophical tradition reaching back
to Aristotle. La Rochefoucauld’s maxims criticized “self-love” but only to force it
toward an “honesty” that would open the mind to the superior exercise of a dia-
logued and detached reflection on the human condition. This collective oral re-
flection in effect assumed a radical irony toward the isolated “me” and the emer-
gence of an open-minded “I” capable of arguing with others. La Rochefoucauld
was close to Port-Royal. Indeed, that link prompted the most strikingly decisive
insight into nascent French conversation. In 1670, Pascal’s Pensées and the first
series of Pierre Nicole’s Essais de morale (Moral Essays) were published. Pas-
cal’s philosophy of ennui and distraction modernized commonplaces of Chris-
tian moral theology, applying them to a new object: the art of conversation as
a way of understanding and a way of being “worldly.” This mode of being was,
in Pascal’s eyes, an escape from human truth and, by definition, incapable of
truth and therefore rest. Only conversion, which brought one face to face with
human truth, could create the conditions for true conversation, and therefore
for an authentic being and knowledge. Pascal, like Antoine Arnauld, author of
Logique ou l’art de penser (Logic or the Art of Thinking), provided more insight
than anyone else in the seventeenth century on the psychological conditions
and argumentative tools of French conversation. Pierre Nicole, who coauthored
Logic, combated the vanity of “ordinary” conversations in his Essays: “Ordinary
discussion,” he writes, “is accompanied by two things: the forgetting of God

and the application to worldly things, and these two things are the source of all
temptations.” But, like Pascal, he was all the more driven to seek out, for those
minds enlightened by the Christian faith, conditions more favorable to a dia-
logue with one’s self and others on matters of true import.
Augustinian authors would only accept conversation after conversion.
Chevalier de Méré took an opposing stance in 1677, in a collection of essays,
Discours (De la conversation, Des agréments, De l’esprit) (Discourses on Con-
versation, Embellishments, and the Mind), in which he defines conversation as
an art whose fleeting and challenging “perfection” was enough “to occupy an
entire life.” For Pascal, conversation, minus the precondition of Christian con-
version, masked an incurable and restless internal void. Méré viewed it as the
vehicle to achieving a superior mode of being, “to be of good company.” That
conversational being was both the point of departure and arrival for self-mastery
and the discovery of others, both processes endlessly replete with surprises and
developments, a musical fugue continuously restarted, whose variations chal-
lenged and developed a harmonic genius that fulfilled man’s natural calling. In
order to “please those who listen to you,” one needed to adopt a rigorous disci-
pline of leisure. One had to have honed “great precision of taste and sentiment
to discover the correct proportion,” different each time, between one’s own me-
Proteus and others’. Such precision could not be sought out and even less at-
tained except by those naturally blessed and with a “calling” for a higher state.
The worldly art of conversation, like other arts, and indeed more than other arts,
was not within reach of the common man. Méré writes:
It is quite a rare secret to always sense what is most fitting. [. . .] It is a sci-

ence that is learned like a foreign language [emphasis added], of which
one first understands only a little. But when one enjoys and studies it, one
quickly makes progress. This art seems to have some sorcery within it; it
instructs how to divine and that is the way one discovers a great number
of things one would have never clearly seen, and which can be of great
utility.4
The case was closed, so to speak, and even Port-Royal’s severe criticism of so-
ciety life, which the Solitaires judged to be inattentive and indiscreet, did little
but further distance the model of conversation espoused by Méré from utili-
tarian and frivolous conversation, which that master of society life himself had
been the first to scorn. The ideal of French conversation was all the more attrac-
tive because it was rare, difficult, and practically required a rite of initiation. In
1688, La Bruyère dedicated a chapter of his Caractères (Characters) to it. Ac-
142 Conversation
cording to the doctrine expressed by Méré, French conversation distinguished

society in general, separating the vulgar “monde” (which “the sage sometimes
avoids for fear of boredom”) from conversation between friends and between
peers, in which all parties know to respect this maxim: “The most delicate of all
pleasures consists in promoting the pleasures of others.”
The sociology of noble leisure during this period can undoubtedly not be
boiled down to the philosophy of the conversation to which it was striving. But
that ideal defined the sphere of authority which was attributed to it by the con-
temporary Republic of Letters and which was in fact concentrated among the
elegant elite of Parisian society. Fontenelle was its Socrates for nearly a century
(born in 1657, he died in 1757). A member of the Académie Française (1691)
and the Académie des Sciences (1699), he served in turn as the oracle of the
salons run by Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Geof-
frin, all while knowledgeably and skillfully serving as the permanent secretary
of the Académie des Sciences, and writing admirable funeral eulogies for his
deceased colleagues. His student Abbot Trublet (who frequented Madame de
Tencin’s salon) published an essay on conversation, De la conversation (On
Conversation), in 1735 in his Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale
(Essays on Various Subjects of Literature and Morality). Along with Moncrif’s
essay Sur la nécessité et les moyens de plaire (On the Necessity and Means to
Please, 1738), this is the best account of this “classic” period of Parisian conver-
sation: 1730–1750. Abbot Trublet writes:
Despite all the flaws that are attributed to the French people, it is in
France, and unbiased foreigners agree on this, that one should seek out
the talent of conversing. It is more common and more esteemed there
than in any other nation. The same disposition that has them enjoy con-
versation, disposes them to be good at it. They speak easily [this is the faci-
litas according to Quintilian, the art of improvising as needed] as a result
of this same vivacity, which rendering them dependent on themselves,
has them seek out conversation to relieve this burden. This then is the
principal employment of its honest unoccupied people [emphasis added].
Unlike the calmer and more serious Spaniard, the Frenchman cannot
tolerate idle solitude, or be content, as it were, with himself, happy solely
through rest. If he has nothing to do, he will seek out someone who will
engage him in discussion or whom he will engage. He will find him easily
among those people who are the most occupied, who are not always angry
to be diverted from a boring and tiresome task for a few moments.
“Diversion,” described by Pascal to better condemn it, was so successful that

it subsequently became part of the definition of the French national charac-
ter. But it remained the French leisure class, nobles and educated men and
women gathered in Parisian salons, who represented the pinnacle, like an un-
rivaled team or national orchestra, of a French national disposition elevated to
the level of a grand modern art:
The pleasure of conversation among the French people blends with all
other pleasures and sometimes seems to nearly exclude them. They go
to the theater to talk, rather than to see the show itself. Those which they
call parlor or society games are often merely a conversation held while
holding cards. The same is true of their meals: The pleasure of conversing
with agreeable guests is to them the spice added to good food. And the
choice and assortment of guests play an important role in what they call
the art of “donner à manger,” or knowing how to feed others. The pleasure
of conversation mixed with that of good food is itself protection against
intemperance. And indeed the French spend longer, and are nonetheless
the most sober, at their meals than most other peoples.
The Parisian parliament of French conversation gave rise to an oral literary

genre. Abbot Trublet would go so far as to distinguish its “sub-genres” with a
subtlety of observation comparable to that of his friend Marivaux, who said of
his plays and novels that they had to be the mirrors of conversation. Abbot Tru-
blet writes:
We must distinguish two types of conversation: one that is ordered and

develops on one same subject [the successor of the “conference” as
defined by Montaigne]; the other during which one speaks successively of
several different things, as led by chance. The latter is the more common,
and the most in keeping with the French genius.
These oral miscellanea corresponded to the variety of news items published

by journals. They also responded to the kind of publications favored by the
public under the Regency and under Louis XV: Anas, Esprits (by De Fontelle,
Voltaire, and so on), Essais, and Recueils, all “compilations” without apparent
order, which included, on a superior level, Bayle’s Dictionary.
But in order to gain a more precise understanding of the mobility and
rapidity of which eighteenth-century instrumentalists of French conversation
were capable, we must examine—in addition to Watteau’s admirable “drawings
of attitudes”—the oft-forgotten masterpiece, to which I refer above, by Paradis
de Moncrif, reader to King Louise XV: Essai sur la nécessité et sur les moyens
de plaire. It should be studied in comparison with Rémond de Sainte-Albine’s
Le Comédien (The Comedian, new edition, 1749). A “gay knowledge” of “being
together,” in other words the raison d’être of a society, takes shape in both the
144 Conversation
analysis offered by Moncrif of the man of leisure and conversation and the lively
reflection on theater proposed by Sainte-Albine. Moncrif’s text merits inclusion
here in its entirety:
This [the desire to please] gives the soul over to the most fortunate traits
that we have acquired from nature or education, whether they relate to
one’s physique or one’s character. Without it, men blessed with these
advantages can in no way attain their true value. It suffices to consider
them by their cause and effect to understand this is true.
In general, there are, when we move, when we speak, certain bodily
dispositions, certain expressions in the face, gestures, and voice, settled
upon (it appears) for each nation, to render a given sentiment or thought,
and we regard the best choice between these actions as the most natural,
which form what we call an air of learning, a worldly air, in a word, which
is appreciated on our exterior, and applauded independently of the regu-
larity of one’s physique.
In the person speaking, exterior grace depends on a certain balance
between what he is saying and the action that accompanies it. One and
the other must result from the same idea in the mind, and from that of
the person listening and watching.
And in the same way that the art of the best actors in their profession
lies in capturing these happy actions, changing them only slightly, with
nuance, in a way that accords the most precisely to the heart of the char-
acter and the current situation of the person they are playing, it is the
greatest or least finesse of the mind and feeling that makes these actions
more or less agreeable among worldly people.
Moreover, one should observe that, in the same way that these settled-
upon actions, which distinguish each Nation, vary in a perceptible man-
ner in persons of different situations, one’s facial expressions, gestures,
and voice become a second language [this is nearly verbatim Méré]
which has its own style and which marks, as do the choice of words and
their pronunciation, a more or less refined extraction, or at least an honest
or bad education.
It is without a doubt an advantage that an exterior that presents one
favorably also accredits, in advance, those other qualities that may adorn
us. We see people who, even when they are conversing on a subject of
little interest, have the art of exciting, intensifying, capturing your atten-
tion, by the way they set their gaze on you, or by an immense grace in
their actions, that inspires your desire to applaud them, and even to dis-
cover in them more wit and insight than initially appears.
But, when this happy balance of gesture and thought, this eloquence
of gaze, this grace in action, always desirable qualities, are merely a for-
tunate disposition of organs, when that which touches us in them has
no other connection with us than the agreeable impression it offers our
senses, then their effect on us is only discernible the first time we experi-
ence it. Soon habit renders us indifferent, unless a certain soul, which
only sentiment can produce, maintains those qualities.
To discern which is the soul that ensures the success of those qualities
one believes must be successful on their own, let us return to the man I
described with an exterior that plays so powerfully in his favor. If you seek
the cause of the happy impressions he has on you, you will know they are
born of an enthusiasm in him to occupy you, not from the vanity of being
heard, but by a desire to attract your attention and your approval, which
implies that he holds your esteem in high regard. All those who, like you,
surround him will remain persuaded that this distinct enthusiasm, these
obliging glances, though directed successively at all those present, were
addressed to him or her in preference. This idea will be imprinted on each
of them: he dreams only of pleasing me.
It is therefore the disposition of the mind and not of the body that
imports on our exterior. Embellishments of bearing and gesture, which
exist only in the agreed upon regularity of movements, are purely arbi-
trary. What is graceful in this regard in Paris can be different in Madrid or
London. But this air of attention, of enthusiasm, that satisfaction in see-
ing you, produced by the desire to please, is always successful, and distin-
guishes itself everywhere, even in men whose language we do not under-
stand. It signals a will to get close to us, which flatters us, by praising us,
and inclines us to applaud and like these men.
“Savoir-vivre,” extended to a heightened degree of self-awareness and intui-

tiveness toward others, became both a philosophy and a dance of life. Mirror-
ing this Parisian urbanity, the literature of the time (Marivaux, Crébillon fils)
was capable of an analytical subtlety that would only be rediscovered by the
“worldly” novelists of the 1880–1914 period (Bourget, James, and Proust). This
literature happily interpreted the meaning of movements, facial expressions,
attitudes, gestures, and vocal inflections: this implicit, evasive, and oblique “sec-
ond language,” spoken entirely with “finesse,” was linked, according to a widely
held belief at the time, to the language of plastic arts. This was the French ver-
sion of ut pictura poesis. Speech had nothing to lose within this “interaction
with non-verbal signs.” Under Louis XIV, the Jesuit Bouhours5 and his disciples
Montfaucon de Villars6 and Morvan de Bellegarde7 had established the prem-
146 Conversation
ises of a rhetoric specific to French conversation, a liberated successor to the

classical sermo, which was distinct from similar and much more modest at-
tempts begun by Italy8 and Spain.9 The theoretical contribution of Jesuit (or
affiliated) rhetoricians to French conversation is impressive. Their fear of un-
doing the success the Provincial Letters had brought to Port-Royal convinced
them of the need to sacrifice, to a certain degree, their attachment to Latin and
scholarly rhetoric. However, as relates to this theory of modern French dialogue,
Port-Royal’s contribution, despite its strong Augustinian suspicion of society
life, was unrivaled. To Pascal’s deep musings on the art of persuasion can be
added Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic, in 1662, and then L’Art de parler (The Art of
Speaking, 1678) by Bernard Lamy, an Oratorian very close to Port-Royal, whose
text would continue to bear influence until the beginning of the nineteenth
century. The two schools of the philosophy of conversation were very different,
if not in direct conflict. For that matter, they were not the only ones. Bypassing
for the moment educators like René Bary, an epicurean “school,” evoked (after
Gassendi) by Molière, La Fontaine, Méré, and Saint-Évremond, also contrib-
uted to the theoretical Parisian debate on modern knowledge equally reliant on
oral and written dialogue. During this debate, which continued into the eigh-
teenth century, the Parisian “monde” did not lack for masters of strictly French
rhetoric. Michel Foucault and Gérard Genette were the first to draw attention
to Dumarsais’s Traité des tropes (Treatise on Tropes, 1729–1730), since placed
in context by a compilation by Françoise Douay.10 Pragmatic linguists discov-
ered in their turn the canon Gamaches, author in 1718 of Les Agréments du lan-
gage réduits à leurs principes (Embellishments of Language Reduced to Their
Principles), the third part of which was republished by Jean-Paul Sermain.11 In
his excellent preface, Sermain highlights the text’s “modernity,” notably com-
mon concerns with the most current linguistics of enunciation: “presupposi-
tion, communicational interaction, polyphony, integration of the other’s voice.”
We can extract similar value from the previously cited text by Rémond de Saint-
Mard. The great grammarian Dumarsais was a frequent and faithful visitor to
Madame de Lambert’s Malebranchian and Fénelonian salon. And Gamaches,
a member of the Académie des Sciences, like Fontenelle, was cited by Voltaire.
Toussaint Rémond de Saint-Mard was a frequent guest of both Madame de Ten-
cin and Madame de Caylus.
This phenomenon did not occur by accident or chance. Eighteenth-century
salons, far from mere anecdotal history, deserve to be the object of both social
and philosophical history. In the upper circles of French conversation, literary
leisure and aristocratic leisure composed—this must be emphasized—a veri-
table parliament of the new Republic of Letters that displayed a disconcerting
creativity and vitality, and whose field of competence extended to moral phi-
losophy, literature, arts, varied sciences, but also diplomacy. The links between
major Parisian salons (led by Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and
Madame Geoffrin, for example) and royal academies, and not merely the Aca-
démie Française, placed them at the intersection of the most difficult fields
of knowledge in their most modern guises. Even the salon at the Château de
Sceaux, between 1700 and 1715, which may appear to be the most dazzlingly
short-lived, counted academicians of sciences and inscriptions among its regu-
lars. The Duchess du Maine received an excellent literary and scientific edu-
cation from her teacher Malézieu. And at Châtenay, where Malézieu made
astronomical observations using Cassini’s method, which would later become a
discipline at the Académie des Sciences, the duchess was his assistant. While at
Sceaux, she often received Madame du Châtelet, who with Voltaire introduced
Newton to France. Both women were “geometricians.”
The sciences and politeness and gallantry were not the only outlets of noble
leisure. The mediator of Europe since the treaties of Westphalia, eighteenth-
century Paris was the object of increased attention from other capitals. Am-
bassadors and foreign agents aspired to enter Parisian salons. And French con-
versation was a remarkable vector for diplomatic negotiations: information
was exchanged firsthand, and valuable friendships developed. Grimm, the au-
thor of Correspondance littéraire (Literary Correspondence), was such a well-
connected diplomatic agent that European courts fought over him. Parisian
dialogue was also a delicate and effective instrument of European stability,
whose pressure gauge was located in Paris and Versailles.
London had its own Parisian salon under Charles II, led by the Duchess
Mazarin, who was assisted by Saint-Évremond. In 1709, Shaftesbury wrote
an “Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” (immediately translated into
French and published in The Hague in 1710), in which he emphasizes that the
foundations of “reason” are freedom of controversy and noble candor as ex-
pressed through conversation. David Hume, in his 1748 Essay on the Rise and
Progress of the Arts and Sciences, avidly read in Paris, to which he traveled fre-
quently, admits that while the French monarchy may be somewhat arbitrary
in terms of politics, it is “civilized” and “tempered” by the influence of the
conversation which it allows and which spreads the “politeness of manners”
all while favoring the liberal arts. Hume nonetheless defends the English po-
litical freedom deprived the French aristocracy, which he nonetheless recog-
nizes is less favorable to the gentleness of manners and arts. That admiration
for the French “douceur” and feeling of political superiority were shared by
Lord Chesterfield, a Whig who frequented the salons of Madame de Tencin
148 Conversation
and Madame Geoffrin, and whose antiquarianism and reputation as a literary

and artistic “connoisseur” was rewarded by his election to the Académie des In-
scriptions in 1755. After his death in 1773, his Letters from Lord Chesterfield to
his Son, which he had sent to his son during his Grand Tour of Europe, were
published. These letters written during the young man’s sojourn in Paris from
1755 to 1756 are among the best foreign accounts of French conversation dur-
ing the reign of Louis XV, before Rousseau’s encyclicals condemning it in La
Nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloise) and Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles
(Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert on the Theater). The long-distance education
offered by Lord Chesterfield offers the most dramatic contrast there is to that
described by Rousseau in Émile. Trained in sports and military arts at the Aca-
démie de La Guérinière, the young Philip Stanhope was sent to receive the final
polish to his sentimental, diplomatic, and political education in Paris’s salons,
under the guidance of the female heads of households who were friends with
his father. He was to hone his literary judgment and artistic taste with French
conversation, so intrinsic to the Republic of Letters and Arts, before joining the
Parliament of London. At this turning point of the century (remember that Vol-
taire left the court of Versailles in 1750 to accompany Frederick II of Prussia to
Potsdam and Berlin), the French “leisure class,” which had been integrated into
the Republic of Letters and Arts, took on not only a Europe-wide role of choos-
ing talent and critiquing works, but also of educating the royal, political, and
diplomatic international elite. But this class was deprived, barring carefully re-
stricted exceptions at court, of any exercise of political power. It was deprived of
economic power by the abuse of pensions and other forms of royal allowances
and privileges, and by the prevailing prejudice that led to the derogation of any
noble exercising a lucrative profession. Finally, it was deprived of any “mediatic”
power by another insurmountable prejudice that barred its members from writ-
ing for the public or declaring oneself an author.
Stripped by the monarchic state of all “vulgar” powers, all that remained to
France’s leisure class was its badge of superior taste and manners. That would
not be enough, however, for it to shield a discredited monarchy, which had been
the first to condemn its noblesse d’épée to impotence.
9
FORTIN DE LA HOGUETTE’S “TESTAMENT”
The principal work published by Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (1585–

1668?), Testament ou Conseils d’un père à ses enfants sur la manière dont il faut
se conduire dans le monde (Testament, or Advice of a Father to his Children on
the Manner in Which One Should Behave in the World, 1648), has long mis-
led literary critics and historians. Its title can give the impression of a moraliz-
ing, pompous composition, in line with those strewn upon Paris by Puget de
La Serre during the reign of Louis XIII. And a glance at the table of contents
(“Duties towards God, towards oneself, towards man”) indeed does little to en-
courage the modern reader. But though its content can initially appear trivial,
the form and notably the uncommon genre of Testament should at least merit
our attention.
When Fortin published this text, he was sixty-three years old, his military
career was over, and it was time to write his Mémoires. During the seventeenth
century, the aristocratic memoir genre was also a moral “testament”: it often
concluded with “advice” from the author to his descendants and its significance
came primarily from a lineage whose noble titles it established and whose moral
tradition it cultivated.1 This historical, first-person narrative also offered, in the
long term and in a much larger theater, an “authentic” and “first-hand” account
of the political and military affairs in which the author had been involved and
which were important (for both the author and his gens) to make known for his
own honor, and not according to the perspective of official historians, whose
servile pens were invariably quick to flatter kings and their ministers at the
nobility’s expense. Memoirs were therefore destined for publication but only
at the desired time, when the subject’s family deemed it opportune, sometimes
well after his death. Most of these characteristics are absent from Fortin’s Tes-
tament. Self-published twenty years before the author’s death, the work has as
little in common with a first-person, historical account as does Montaigne’s
Essays or Charron’s Wisdom. Fortin, an officer of modest rank, did not play an
important enough role in the military or diplomatic affairs of his day to dream
of taking a starring role in posterity. Any historical debate thus excluded, noth-
ing was stopping the immediate publication of a book that provided an appraisal
149
150 Conversation
of one man’s experience, albeit as related to wisdom and not any political, mili-
tary, or diplomatic “heroism.” That said, like Montaigne’s Essays, Fortin de La
Hoguette’s moral reflections are based on a fragmented autobiography, and his
general advice is often drawn from lived experiences recounted in the first per-
son. Testament is not a self-portrait, however. Fortin has neither Montaigne’s
literary authority nor his flippancy. Neither memoir nor essay nor impersonal
moral treatise in the style of Charron, in reality, Fortin’s work corresponds less
to one genre than to many. It was conceived of by a highly cultivated writer with
sufficient talent to pursue his own aims, befitting his own resources, using vari-
ous freely “imitated” models.
But in order for Testament to escape triviality, and reward the researcher, a
few things had to occur: the progressive elucidation of Fortin de La Hoguette’s
unpublished correspondence (begun in 1888 by Tamizey de Larroque);2 the
patient reconstitution of his bibliography (an effort in which René Pintard
played a decisive role);3 and finally a broad historical and philological endeavor,
brought to fruition by Giuliano Ferretti (including, among others, the surpris-
ing and definitive attribution of the text Remonstrance au Roy [Remonstrance
to the King, 1628] to Fortin).4 The author’s personality permeates the book and
justifies an interpretation of it as less “conformist” than its appearance may sug-
gest. Even (or especially) when he published his works, Fortin, a close friend of
La Mothe Le Vayer and Peiresc and a frequent correspondent of the Dupuy
brothers and other “erudite libertines,” was very prudent and forced his readers
to pay close attention to the text.
At this point, I propose a closer examination of Fortin’s chapter on conversa-
tion (part 2, chapter 32), which has been passed over by historians of ideas and
manners. Now that we have a better understanding of Fortin de La Hoguette’s
“double life” as a military officer in service to the king and a “citizen of the Re-
public of Letters,” this chapter also takes on a new depth and significance. It
follows a list of Fortin’s recommendations on political behavior, also in part 2,
to those who wish to “follow the court.” In 1648, when the Fronde was erupt-
ing, these strictly loyalist recommendations were an invaluable contribution to
Mazarin and the regent’s cause. The success of Testament, which was repub-
lished continuously until the end of the century, proves that these recommen-
dations of sacrosanct loyalty to the king and his favorites had an audience in a
vast public disinclined to civil disorder. Like Naudé, and like many “erudite lib-
ertines” with whom he associated, even if he did not entirely share their daring,
Fortin was on the side of a legitimate monarchic order, which guaranteed the
political order, that opposed dissenters rallying the masses. Nonetheless, he was
not interested in educating a “courtesan” or even a “man of court.” However,
Fortin de La Hoguette’s “Testament” 151
we have to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. . . . In other words, a poor nobleman

could not build a career, arrange a good marriage, establish his “house,” and en-
sure the fortune of his children without a certain degree of success at court. That
method was for that matter morally preferable to the manipulations and black-
mail, so costly to the public good, on which relied France’s most rebellious lords
and their loyal supporters, beneficiaries of the generous “accommodations” at
court. But even along this honest and legitimate path, one must first and fore-
most “give to God what belongs to God.” Fortin adds: “and to oneself what be-
longs to oneself.” The table of contents of Testament is therefore not as didactic
as it may seem at first glance. This “treatise of court” was in fact included in a
book dedicated to duties “toward oneself,” which did much to place ambitious
“engagement” into perspective. And it was preceded by an entire book dedi-
cated to one’s duties to God, which further increased the interior detachment
of the king’s loyal subjects from their own ambitions and the court in which
said ambition claimed to manifest loyally and naturally. According to Fortin,
such moral conditions make success improbable. The piety he recommends—
unscathed by superstition, zealotry, and theological disputes—respectfully ad-
heres to the outlines of the Catholic faith. But this was a religio laici: evangelical
and Erasmian, and imbued with the piety of Socrates and classical philoso-
phers, and all the more jealously protective of one’s interior autonomy, a “back-
room” where freedom of judgment is whole. How would such a sage then allow
himself to be taken in, during the very era in which he “followed the court” and
managed his affairs there, by the illusions, intrigues, and servile passions of the
courtisanerie? Fortin was no Baltasar Gracián, however, and did not offer his
“children” the “solipsistic” tension of the Spanish “hero” or “man of court.” If he
sought freedom, as far as it could go, he also wished it to be shared with his spiri-
tual brothers. Lecture, meditation, and prayer supported, in solitude, those who
participated at court without dedicating their hearts to it. But other recourses
were still indispensable: “The diversion the most ordinary and the most honest
in life is conversation.”
In this instance, “diversion” is not at all used in the sense ascribed it by Pas-
cal. Rather, it should be understood with the valorizing meaning of the Greek
scholê, the Roman otium cum dignitate. Far from “diverting” from salvation, it
was one of the paths that led to it. As for “conversation,” the term retained its
Latin meaning, conversatio, in the seventeenth century, though it was already
becoming specialized. It therefore referred to both “discussions” and, more gen-
erally, the friendly and private society in which they took place, as well as its
manners, fashions, and style.
It was still synonymous with societas and civitas, though limited in the sense
152 Conversation
of a “haven.” For Fortin, the first merit of this “conversation” could be found in
the middle ground it occupied between two evils, one potential and the other
real. Retreat offered a way to escape the “monde” and society in general: this
solution, by condemning man to complete solitude, despite his natural need for
speech and therefore society, thus entailed, in the eyes of our humanist, “some-
thing quite awful.” Monastic and even cenobitic life, scarcely less reviled than
acedia, horrified Fortin, as it did the entire humanistic tradition behind him.
For that matter, the “monde” in its most perilous guise was, to Fortin, the “mob,”
whose “tumultuous” agitation shattered the soul and scattered it far away. Court
caused similar tumult. “Conversation,” on the other hand, involved the selec-
tion of “a few particular persons with whom one communicates to avoid the
boredom of solitude or the despair of the multitude[s].” Gatherings of trusted
friends on the margins of public life were frequent in Paris during the reign of
Louis XIII. But let’s limit ourselves for now to discussion of Marolles’s circle,
which was mentioned in his Mémoires,5 Conrart’s circle, mentioned by Pellis-
son in his Histoire de l’Académie française (History of the French Academy),6
and the circle memorialized in Nicolas and Henri de Campion’s Entretiens sur
plusieurs sujets (Discussions on Several Subjects).7 These were all societies of
men, nonclerical or otherwise, that united friendship and letters according to
a classical ideal embodied by the “islands of the Happy” described by Aristotle
in his Politics,8 villa dialogues during times of otium, as viewed by Cicero, and
Plutarch’s Banquet of Sages. “The art of discussion,” according to Montaigne,
provided another model for these confraternities. But Fortin celebrates them
by placing them in opposition to the crowd or mob, ruinous to the sage’s au-
tonomy:
The faces that meet there make as little impression on us as those who
see themselves in dreams. The sound of their words is often hardly better
articulated than the noise made by a falling torrent. In this tumult the
soul finds nothing to sustain it.
Using a comparably forceful style (reflecting an extensive knowledge of

Latin texts, notably by Seneca), Fortin names the other dizzying destructor of
equanimity as solitude: “The soul stuns itself in its own circuit.”
The strong, independent soul can therefore only truly find relief (which im-
plies it has a veritable social eros) in the “presence of a single friend or several.”
This relief also comes, as we have seen, from diversion. The “conversation of sev-
eral friends” (the classical form of friendship being the link between these self-
less and peaceful gatherings) “desires,” writes Fortin, “a far greater reach of our
soul” and, to the benefit of that “abstraction from us to them,” operates “a much
greater diversion from our unhappiness.” This cure to the melancholy of the
lonely, or those scarred by the vulgar “war of passions,” is also the gentle fulfill-
ment of the natural desire of the human soul: trustingly opening up to someone,
confidences, the exchange of good faith. In other words, one of the forms, along
with domestic affections, of happiness. But what was true for men was also be-
ginning to apply to women. The Hôtel de Rambouillet granted women access to
its “conversation” at nearly the same time (1608–1617) that the Hôtel de Thou
became the refuge for a savant academy. In this century of religion and phi-
losophy, negotia, matters of public life, and in particular of court life, weighed
and cost all the more because they were conducted with a heightened sense of
duty—officia. And what Corneille’s hero would call “politics,” with such dis-
tance, did so little to sustain the soul that only the compensation of an intimate
circle, in the otium, in private life, and in friendship, could make it bearable for
society women and men of letters alike. In a letter written in Saint-Jean-de-Luz
in 1661, Mademoiselle de Montpensier tells Madame de Motteville:
One also needs all sorts of persons to be able to talk of all sorts of things in
conversation, which, to your taste and mine, is the greatest and almost the
sole pleasure in life, where I am concerned.9
This parenthetical is all the more significant as the princess and her corre-
spondent were participating at the time in the Franco-Spanish festivities sur-
rounding the wedding of Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse. Though she may have
been quite concerned, out of honor and stately duty, to appear in her proper
place within this multitude and tumult, La Grande Mademoiselle nonetheless
expresses her conviction that “true life is elsewhere,” in a smaller and selective
circle of high-society women. She even dreamt of a conversation society far
from the “monde,” of retreat, calm, and shared contemplation.10 For that mat-
ter, her correspondent Madame de Motteville constructed her Mémoires pour
servir à l’histoire d’Anne d’Autriche (Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne
of Austria and Her Court) on the opposition between the interior circle created
by the pious queen, which, with her confidante and rare trusted friends, peri-
odically retreated to feminine cloisters dominated by secular conversation, and
the tumultuous court in which the regent exercised his political duties as an
actor of the state who demanded a respite from prayer and intimate discussion.
For our “soldier philosopher” Fortin de La Hoguette, as for those influen-
tial women, the “pleasure of conversation” was not simply an ideal; it was an
experience he knew firsthand. In one of the autobiographical glimpses in Tes-
tament, Fortin describes the charm and harmony he encountered within the
“Dupuy cabinet,” the exclusively male erudite society in which he had partici-
154 Conversation
pated since 1622. It was the oldest and also most exclusive of the secular and lit-
erary “confraternities” that flourished in Paris under Louis XIII. (It was also the
model that inspired them.) Before it was “animated” by the Dupuy brothers,
this private academy11 already boasted a tradition created by Jacques-Auguste
de Thou, himself a leading authority in the Republic of Letters until his death
in 1617. When Fortin described this “club” in 1648, which had marked the inter-
section of French and European higher learning, it was nearing its decline.
Pierre Dupuy, “the Pope of Paris,” as Fortin calls him in his correspondence,12
died three years later, in 1651. Nicolas Rigault, who had time to write a Vita of
his friend, published in 1651, would pass away soon after, in 1654. The second
Dupuy brother, Jacques, passed away in 1656, and the king’s library, which they
guarded, stopped supplying its books to their erudite academy. One would have
preferred that Fortin supply us with a more precise and lively account of those
daily meetings. For want of that detail, the author of Testament goes straight to
the essential: the spiritual exercise the Dupuy society represented to him. He
writes:
God graced me, while I was at Court, with having been received for thirty
years in a society of two brothers, of one name, of famed merit and life,
who are the Messieurs Dupuy.
Each word matters: the religious vocabulary; the implicit opposition be-
tween the “confraternity” and the court, between society prestige and true
greatness; the quasi-holy secrecy surrounding the two Adelphes. The “grace”
mentioned by Fortin is not so different from that discovered, among the Philo-
theas of the seventeenth century, society women on the sidelines of an agitated
world, as recommended by Saint Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the De-
vout Life, by habitués of the salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Mademoi-
selle de Scudéry. But the Dupuys’ Gallican “parlor,” off-limits to women, was to
the Benedictine convent what Artenice’s intimate circle was to the female con-
vent: a secular “conversation,” a product of the Renaissance and the Abbey of
Thelema, imbued with pietas litterata, and untouched by all rules except Rabe-
lais’s “Do what thou wilt.” Jean Chapelain, who was also active at court, evolved
comfortably in these two “friendship societies,” the most intense in Paris at the
time. He was equally at home in the scientific conversation of the Hôtel de
Montmor. Fortin presents the “Dupuy cabinet” quite simply:
Every day, in the evening, there was a certain concert of friends, in which
all things passed between them with such harmony, and with such gentle-
ness and discretion, that I never had a trouble on my mind that was not
dissipated within this company.
To describe this society’s inherent “genius,” Fortin turns to chamber-music

metaphors (“concert,” “harmony”), which connected the voices, gestures, and
good literary company (gathered in President De Thou’s library on the rue de
Poitevins, then, after 1645, in the king’s library on the rue de la Harpe) of those
“meetings of [musician] friends” commemorated in a painting by Le Sueur and
the famous manuscript La Rhétorique des dieux (The Rhetoric of the Gods),
both linked to the lutenist Denis Gaultier.13 Of these great men of letters—
who shared news learned through correspondence with their absent friends,
discussed recently published or received books, or took from the shelves a work
marked with the arms of De Thou or the king—Fortin retained a penetrating
and soothing Stimmung, whose therapeutic and regenerative power made this
temple of knowledge a sanctuary of serious and fertile joy for the mind and
heart alike:
Such conversation not only calms our passions, it also brightens our
understanding. For it is very certain that meditation would vainly fill the
rooms of the mind if not expressed through words. This is why we often
see good reasoning lose its force and grace when clear enunciation is
lacking, and this enunciation depends only on a certain way of shaping
the notions in one’s soul, and placing them in the correct order before
expressing them. Conversation gives them shape through words, and
we can envisage them much better than when they are shapeless in our
imagination. And it is for this reason that we almost always speak aloud
what we read and write: words can be judged much more clearly than can
thoughts.
The historian may have hoped for a “petit fait vrai”: Fortin returns to this
savant company’s principles of music and musicians. According to Fortin, each
member boasted a perfect balance between “interior speech” and “pronounced
speech,” an exact articulation of one or the other. This implied, in the calm of
passions, a method of meditation and reading that organized thoughts into lan-
guage—voces (words and voice)—meaning in the desire to be spoken and ac-
cepted by the other, in the call to dialogue. Conversation, like correspondence,
was therefore the touchstone and the locus for a collaboration of thought, the
closest man could get to his calling to logos and polis, to thought-speech and to
sociability. The gathering of learned friends was after all a concert whose har-
mony banished both the mutilated silence of the solitary and the vain noises of
the crowd. These were the muses that reigned in the otium studiosum and the
Republic of Letters.
This concertante metaphor is not unique to Fortin. In his Histoire de l’Acadé-
156 Conversation
mie française (History of the French Academy), published in 1653, Paul Pellis-
son, a good friend of superintendent Foucquet, does little to hide his nostalgia
for the private meetings held at the home of Valentin Conrart before it was
commandeered by Cardinal Richelieu to be made into the very official Acadé-
mie Française.
Within the relationship established between “meditation” and “enuncia-
tion” by Fortin (who was far from a poet), we can once again spot his debt
to Montaigne’s Essays. In “De l’institution des enfants” (Of the Institution of
Children), Montaigne (relying on the distinction established by Philo of Alex-
andria between logos prophorikos [external, exteriorized logos] and logos endia-
thetos [internal, immanent logos]), speaks of “heads full” of “unfinished matter”
and “shapeless conceptions,” but that a force of the mind that “untangles and
clears up within” must still “set forth,” in a greater effort of “delivery” than of
“conception.”14 Fortin prefers to speak about enunciation, rather than delivery,
emphasizing, much more than Montaigne does, qualities of elocution, word
choice, syntactical and argumentative order, and even vocal articulation. One
can never be demanding enough when it comes to the conditions of this “enun-
ciation,” as the only possible encounter and cooperation between minds de-
pends on it. The Hôtel de Rambouillet was also very punctilious in this respect,
though the object of conversation there was “agreement” in matters of taste,
not truth. Malherbe was in love with Arthenice, just as he had been a friend
of Peiresc. If the Chambre Bleue welcomed poets and lettered men of the ver-
nacular (whose art was inseparable from polite conversation), the “Dupuy cabi-
net,” as evidenced by Rigault’s Vita eximii Petri Puteani15 and the esteem the
Adelphes held for Guez de Balzac, was particularly attentive to the development
of French prose, notably its potential to become the instrument of philosophi-
cal and erudite collaboration. But even more so than to Malherbe, Fortin refers
heavily to Montaigne, borrowing the latter’s philosophy of “discussion.” Indi-
vidually infirm, human reason finds strength, grows, and learns through dia-
logue and collegiality. Fortin tempers that reason with the lesson, which gained
ground both at the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Thou, of moral and
oral “gentleness” (eutrapelia and euphony) taught, inspired by Cicero, by the
Italian trattatisti of urbanity, Castiglione and Guazzo. What was once a duel, a
strong and harsh joust, in Montaigne’s essay on “discussion” became regulated
and civil, collaboration rather than confrontation, and even loyal, within the
Adelphes’ society.
If Fortin remains allusive and general on this point in his evocation of the
“Dupuy cabinet,” it is because he is addressing, in principle, young gentlemen
who would have had limited opportunities to join this scholarly circle or any
other manifestation of the Republic of Letters. In the Testament, an esoteric

work, the homage paid to the Dupuy brothers and their guests, renowned for
their discretion and taste for secrecy, had to be subtle. And the experience of a
“soldier philosopher” admitted into a milieu very difficult to access was what the
Greeks called a “hapax.” The nobility, even educated, was typically attracted to
polite conversation societies, products of the Hôtel De Rambouillet. Fortin did
not frequent such locales. Nonetheless he felt compelled to reduce the distance
between salon conversation and that of the erudite library. Both had shared
roots (Renaissance humanism) and shared traits, which Fortin highlights easily.
These societies of “liberal leisure,” gathered in private homes far from court,
business, and action were all founded—and it is on this critical point that For-
tin chooses to conclude his chapter—on the mutual sympathies of their inter-
locutors and on the harmony established between their individual qualities.
Whether savant or polite, conversation assembled elements that were inher-
ently similar, creating a “concert” out of seeming diversity. The result: a “world”
that escaped the chaos of the world, a victorious circle prevailing over the con-
fused masses of ordinary society and the weight of pride and ego. From a ter-
restrial perspective, this was the ideal society, a return to the golden age, be it
De Thou’s version or Rambouillet’s. In fact, Fortin concludes with the natural
movement of eros that ensures that “eye meets eye, hand meets hand, mouth
meets mouth.” He adds:
There exist nonetheless between minds several similar elements that feel
such affection for one another, that by the mere difference of their assort-
ment, and whatever diversity there may be overall, we can make a cer-
tain judgment of a man according to the conversation he finds pleasing.
The serious seek out the serious, the mad the harebrained, gentle spirits
the calm of a ruelle, but the wisest seek out a society that is innocent, and
pleasing, which shapes the mind, and diverts it. It is only the minds of
a few friends who all exercise an honorable profession that can meet all
these conditions.
There were therefore several groves in Epicurus’s garden (the anthropology

underlying this text is borrowed from Virgil’s Bucolics: Trahit sua quemque vo-
luptas).16 But the most accomplished group was the one that reunited friends,
in the manner of the ancient academy, and following the example of the grand
dialogues of antiquity and the Renaissance: Cicero’s Tusculanae, Macrobius’s
Saturnalia, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistes, Erasmus’s Convivium religiosum.
Each work is reflected in the conversation of the Academia Puteana. So, one
wonders, is Fortin de La Hoguette, in this chapter, a witness to the twilight of
158 Conversation
the politia litteraria of the Renaissance and of the dawn of the polite civiliza-
tion of classic France? The latter, at the least, borrowed its “password” from the
former: “conversation, the greatest and possibly the only pleasure in life” ac-
cording to Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Fortin’s Testament is one of several
bridges that enabled if not the fusion, then at least the encounter between two
traditions of humanist otium: the “polite” and the “savant.” One particularly
clear example comes from Madame de La Sablière’s salon, in which La Fon-
taine played Voiture’s role and Bernier expanded the gospel he learned from
Gassendi, and which saw the spirit of the “Tetrade” and that of the Chambre
Bleu coincide during the reign of Louis XIV. This conversation, which com-
bined “erudite libertinage” and “Marotic jesting,” served as the backdrop for La
Fontaine’s Fables.
In reality, the Adelphe tradition did not disappear with Jacques Dupuy in 1656.
In 1691, when (as I noted previously) Abbot Claude Nicaise highlighted, even
more explicitly than Fortin did thirty years earlier, the “glory” of the Adelphes
in printed form, he did not consider their society to be an extinguished light. In
a deliciously erudite essay entitled Les Sirènes (The Sirens) dedicated to Chan-
cellor Boucherat, Nicaise attributes the origin of his essay to a conversation held
at a “cabinet” that was still very much alive, and still faithful to itself, despite
deaths and changes in location.17 Maintained, as we have seen, by Jacques de
La Rivière, the Salmons, and the Vilvaults, this old alliance of higher learning
and exquisite urbanity endured on the Left Bank. It traversed generations and
overcame various trials and tribulations. In the meantime, the “Dupuy cabinet”
had been imitated by Gilles Ménage and his Wednesday meetings in the clois-
ter of Notre Dame, by Abbot Bignon and his Thursday gatherings on the rue
Saint-Jacques, and by private academies, which were also active at the time of
Nicaise’s writing and assembled by Abbot de Dangeau and Monsieur d’Herbe-
lot. Nicaise cites others in passing, including François Ogier, Valentin Conrart,
Henri Justel, and Abbot Bourdelot. But the spirit of the Adelphes, in its unique
and original tradition, was preserved by Monsieur de Vilvault, successor of an
uninterrupted lineage dating from 1617. Savant conversation, which was sub-
sequently placed under royal protection,18 would brilliantly resist the disdain
shown it by polite and “philosophical” conversation throughout the eighteenth
century. For a long time it would help maintain, during the century of “Enlight-
enment,” a strictly erudite spirit of moderation and joyful harmony that owed
everything to the Renaissance. The ultimate embodiment of this civilization of
leisure through the arts, and notably the arts of shared discourse, was Antoine
Watteau’s Conversations dans un parc (Conversations in a Park).
10
T H E E R U D I T E O R I G I N S O F C L A S S I C A L “G R A N D G O Û T ” :
THE OPTIMUS STYLUS GALLICUS ACCORDING TO
PIERRE DUPUY
Seventeenth-century French literature still contains vast terrae incogni-

tae. Countless unpublished manuscripts (correspondences, memoirs, and trea-
tises) slumbering in deep archives across France and Europe are waiting to be
discovered, categorized, and published. That said, those works that have been
published are far from having revealed all their riches, in spite of efforts by Ro-
méo Arbour1 and others. Research endeavors continue to all too often don the
blinders of an educational model that, quite naturally, only wants to study those
authors likely to fit into its “program.” We can therefore find entire neglected
zones in the gaps between those authors, populated by their closest rivals and
“literary groups,” that could help to better understand and situate them. This is
clearly the case when it comes to Neo-Latin literature, which, due to the limited
interest it has historically aroused, has led researchers to ignore a phenomenon
as important as the Respublica litteraria within the landscape of seventeenth-
century letters, privileging instead the polite and aulic aspects of French litera-
ture during the Grand Siècle. We are few in France, despite the example set by
Jean Lafond, Pierre Laurens, and Roger Zuber, working to direct a specifically
literary focus on this collection of nonetheless printed and accessible texts, a
more systematic study of which would offer new perspectives in understand-
ing this period.
The example of John Barclay is indicative in this respect. Here we have a
prince of the Respublica litteraria who wrote, in the form of an allegorical
novel, one of the most profound political texts about France under Henry III,
Henry IV, and Louis XIII. His Argenis, published by Peiresc in Paris in 1621,
counted among Richelieu’s favorite books. He also wrote Icon animorium, one
of the more obvious points of departure for France’s “moralist” literature. Yet
the bibliography on Barclay and his works is scant. But there are other examples.
Memoirs written in French have become the subject of conferences, articles,
and books, which indicates considerable progress. However, Neo-L atin auto-
biographies and biographies by viri docti, distinguished members of the Res-
159
160 Conversation
publica litteraria, have yet to receive anywhere near the same levels of attention.
Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii (1641) is in every respect the masterpiece of the bio-
graphical genre in the seventeenth century.2 It is rivaled only by Adrien Baillet’s
Vie de Descartes (Life of Descartes, 1691), which has the advantage of being
written in French, but which has primarily been studied by historians of phi-
losophy as a source of information and not as a noteworthy literary work. Vita
Peireskii has been even more excluded from literary history, to the field’s great
detriment: the English translation of this Neo-L atin masterpiece, which was
quickly relegated to obscurity in France, first appeared in 16573 and established
a canon across the Channel of the “life of the great man of letters,” whose in-
fluence can still be seen in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1792).
The seventeenth century saw other high-caliber Vitae as well, which supple-
mented the laudationes funebres of savants renowned in their day. These were
read across Europe, creating a European corpus through which Italian, Dutch,
and English authors erected a veritable Parnassus doctorum illustrium. This was
a genre in itself, with its own rules, history, and more or less impressive suc-
cesses. It also wielded a major influence on the emerging genre of academic eu-
logies and Lives written in French. Nonetheless, this chapter of literary history
has been widely overlooked up to now.
Among the Vitae virorum eruditissimorum ac illustrium written in the seven-
teenth century, which would be assembled by William Bates in a collection
published in London in 1681,4 one of the shortest examples is Nicolas Rigault’s
Vita eximii Petri Puteani,5 published in Paris in 1652, which foreshadowed the
format of the academic eulogy at which Fontenelle excelled. The relative brevity
of Rigault’s Vita, in comparison with Paulo Gualdo’s Vita of Pinelli (1607) or
Gassendi’s Vita of Peiresc (1641), is all the more striking given that it was pub-
lished in the same elegant quarto format as Henri de Valois’s Oratio in obi-
tum,6 and was approximately the same size. However, the ratio genre had much
stricter rules than the Vitae and, by measuring itself, at least theoretically, by
its readers’ attention span, kept to the same limits as a university prolusion or a
lawyer’s oration. The modest dimensions of Rigault’s Vita eximii Petri Puteani,
however, can be explained by entirely external reasons. Namely haste. As we
well know, thanks to René Pintard’s Erudite Libertinage, Pierre Dupuy was the
presiding Parisian authority of the Respublica litteraria and Jacques-Auguste de
Thou’s successor, first carrying on his legacy closely with Peiresc, until his death
in 1636, and then alone, with the assistance of his brother Jacques. This prince,
who left no successor of his own (Jacques’s days were numbered and he died
five years after his older brother), needed, and quickly, a monument worthy of
his name. Rigault wrote his Vita in the span of a few months. Jacques Dupuy,
Erudite Origins, Classical “Grand Goût” 161
assisted by his friends, assembled all the elements of this laudatory volume. In
addition to the Vita and Oratio, it includes Greek and Latin epigrams by Henri
de Valois, an Extemporalis oratio in obitum Petri Puteani by Bernard Médon,7
various poems in French and Latin by Gabary de La Luzerne, letters in French
from Guez de Balzac to Jacques Dupuy accompanied by a Latin poem by the
author of Socrate chrétien (Christian Socrates), a consolation by Pierre Hallé, an
elegia by Nicholas Heinsus (addressed to Jean Chapelain), Carmina by Jacques
Auguste Perrot, an epistola from Gabriel Naudé to Gilles Ménage, an epicedion
by Jacques d’Auvergne (a royal professor), an epigramma by Ismaël Sarrau, and
French sonnets by Jean Chapelain. At the end of the work, to illustrate the ex-
tent of Pierre Dupuy’s greatness, his friends reprinted the Tumulus written by
his father, Claude Dupuy, which was assembled and published by Paul II de
Reneaulme in 1607, and Tumulus by his Jesuit uncle Clément Dupuy, which
was likely a reprint as well. This jumble of “short forms,” combining prose and
poetry, reveals a desire to expand this reverential text without weighing it down:
it justifies and erases the editors’ haste by making brevity the unifying principle
behind these varied eulogies.
But it is just as important to take the element of fatigue into account. Nicolas
Rigault was born in 1577. In 1651, he was seventy-four years old. He died three
years later. During his lifetime and Jacques Dupuy’s, the Respublica litteraria,
for whom Erasmus had served as the first Neo-Latin beacon illuminating north-
ern Europe, was on its way out, and the Republic knew it. At his age, Rigault
was no longer capable of exerting the same effort Gassendi did ten years earlier
when writing his Vita of Peiresc. Instead, he had to settle for writing a short bio-
graphical portrait of his friend. The subject, as it happened, lent itself less to a
long, wide-reaching Vita than Gassendi’s. Indeed, Peiresc justified his biogra-
pher’s expansiveness: the short life of this grand figure of the European Res-
publica litteraria, originally from Aix, was truly remarkable, and distinguished
by the breadth and variety of his activities and their impact across Europe and
even the Middle East and the Far East. Pierre Dupuy preferred to stay home,
though he was an indulgent host at his Parisian residences. He was above all a
great librarian and an incomparable archivist. His research, far less encyclope-
dic than that of Peiresc, concentrated on legal and historical works in the Gal-
lican tradition. This steady, austere lifestyle, though enhanced by a model of
sociability dazzling in its own way, boasted none of the bright colors that the
southern-born Gassendi was able to highlight to such effect in the extraordinary
traveling life of his friend from Provence. The heart of European letters, which
Peiresc had been able to maintain in the Midi region for some time, through
his talent and an alliance with the Barberini family, had definitively moved to
162 Conversation
the north—a region by definition less flamboyant, more reserved, and more
economical.
Here we are hitting upon the most intimate and profound reason for the
brevity adopted by Nicolas Rigault when memorializing the traits of the de-
ceased Adelphe. His succinctness was as much a response to the genius loci as
to a required format, itself mandated by the ethos of his subject, both a scholar
and a strict Christian. We do not need random speculations to determine the
motivations behind Rigault’s adopted style. Like all great texts, this Vita reveals
the reasons behind its own form. They do not appear in parentheticals or di-
gressions; Rigault did not have to stray from his subject in order to express an
ideal of the optimus stylus that he shared unreservedly with Pierre Dupuy. The
form he adopts and its theoretical definition are a double, truthful homage to
his friend’s great soul and a double, essential contribution to his intellectual,
moral, and religious portrait.
Nicolas Rigault analyzes Pierre Dupuy’s literary taste, as well as his own, on
two occasions in this Vita which is dedicated to Mathieu Molé, the first presi-
dent of the Parlement of Paris, and which vibrates with the emotions rampant
during the Fronde. Somewhat paradoxically, in a Life written in Latin, the biog-
rapher initially focuses on Pierre Dupuy’s choice of the French language for his
publications and educated opinions. He writes:
And since he dedicated the best of his work to French matters, and there-
fore to the interests of the nation, he judged it appropriate, in order to be
more easily and rapidly understood by our fellow citizens, to conceive of
and deliver his works in our language, words in the Latin tongue, long
hidden and revived through old monuments, proving to be incapable,
due to their foreignness, of effectively reaching less accustomed ears. And
in this he relied on the common sense of all peoples.8
Applying all his knowledge to the grandeur of France (the Vita contains
a Tacitean portrait of Richelieu, who never ceased to invoke the wisdom of
Pierre Dupuy, the royal archivist), Dupuy was therefore committed to ensur-
ing his writing had an attentive French audience, whose influence had been
diminished by reliance on the savant and artificial language of scholars. That
rhetorical imperative had the same effect as patriotic fervor. Rigault does not
hide that in the short term; this choice (which, as Descartes did in Discourse,
dealt a fatal blow in the long term to the old European Respublica litteraria)
did much to upset the habits of the erudite world, notably wounding savants’
pride in expressing themselves in humanist Latin, not to mention the point of
honor they granted to interspersing French prose with Greek and Latin quotes.
He continues:
I remember, during our conversations on the subject, having unreserv-

edly agreed with my friend’s decision, and having added that they needed
to betray their own minds, referring to those who, by an affection of sci-
ence, persisted in treating modern and French subjects in the style of
antiquity and the language of Rome. They therefore made themselves
uselessly unbearable and tiresome to themselves and others. Moreover a
hateful habit had ingrained itself in both the Church and the Parlement,
among predicators and lawyers alike, which was to pervert their discourse
by interspersing sentences in the Latin or Greek languages. This care
to insert these phrases, which may appear compelling, in reality com-
promises what is natural, forgets the laws of true eloquence, weakens its
power, and ultimately extinguishes the judgment, attention, and docility
of auditors, who, for the vast majority, do not know the savant languages.
And finally the greatest orators of antiquity, both Greek and Latin, and
with whose writings we can never be satiated, never mixed their dis-
course with any quotation taken from a foreign language. The Latins did
so only in their letters, and the Greeks never did so, not even in that lit-
erary genre. When Plutarch mentions the verse of Horace dedicated to
the magnificence of Lucullus, he faithfully translates the thoughts of the
Latin poet into Greek, and carefully avoids citing the Latin text. Per-
haps the only acceptable excuse today, for those of us who belong to the
Roman sphere (Romanensibus) and make use of a language derived from
both Greek and Latin, when we are called upon to evoke the memory of
our authors, and quote them in their own words, is that it is natural that
we hesitate to appear ungrateful. This represents a minuscule portion of
the work that inspires the most powerful regret in us at the loss of Pierre
Dupuy.9
This is the most complete and concise account of the “quarrel of quotations”
that upset the world of savants and pedants in the first quarter of the seventeenth
century.10 Along with Guillaume du Vair, Rigault and Dupuy retrospectively ap-
pear to have made the “right choice” in this quarrel, bringing all the weight of
their authority as mentors in the Latin Republic of Letters in favor of the “seam-
less robe” of exclusively French prose. The presence of Guez de Balzac, and two
of his letters in French, within this homage by men of letters to one of their lead-
ing figures confirms the irreversibility of that choice at that solemn moment.
Three arguments, closely connected to each other, were fundamental. First, the
rhetorical principle of aptum: one speaks and writes in order to be understood
and to persuade. Denying the reality of the French public, and ignoring “lan-
guages,” meant condemning one’s own discourse to remaining a pointless and
164 Conversation
ineffective fiction. Next, the rhetorical principle (the lex) of the harmony of dis-
course, similar to a homogeneous and living body: the half-measure of wanting
to be eloquent in French while riddling one’s discourse with Latin and Greek
quotations merely produces contorted “monsters.” Granted, loyal “recognition”
of the auctores of our antiquity—Rigault introduces this uniquely humanist
nuance, which is ignored by Descartes—authorized recourse to quotations
in the original text, but only in a very limited number. The determining argu-
ment was ultimately love of France, and therefore love of the French language,
which was the best suited to serve its national interests and enlighten the French
people as a whole. Rigault develops this point later in the text, when analyzing
the “best style” on which Pierre Dupuy based his apologist Gallican writings:
Furthermore he relied on a genre of writing that appeared improvised

and seemed to come naturally (promptus et facilis). His primary concern
was in fact to formulate his thoughts in a way that was both striking and
perfectly clear (significanter et dilucide). Indeed this is the trait preferred
by wise men (prudentes) in their opinions and replies: they teach, explain,
and demonstrate, through reasoning and examples. And within this genre
of expertise that touches upon important matters, and even decides them,
they do not allow either tropes or rhetorical figures. He spared none of
the brilliance (nitor) unique to the French language. In his opinion, it
was no small honor of this century that gave birth to exceptional men
who cultivated elegance, wit, and eloquence (elegans, facetum et diser-
tum). And one marveled to see at what point he appreciated the erudite
urbanity of points of humor and wit, given that they avoided impiety and
denigration.11
Reflections on aptum (directed not toward the public, but toward the subject
at hand), invariably presented with concision and asyndeton, are intermingled
with judgments on the genius of France and its national language. Rigault
images a kind of preestablished harmony between the virtues of the true sa-
vant’s style and the inherent principles of the French language. A learned man
and a sage, like Pierre Dupuy, hewed, in the simple style that suited his words,
to the economy and clarity to which the French language was destined. How-
ever he also allowed for, and here Rigault is clearly thinking of Guez de Balzac,
an “epidictic” component of the French style, which highlighted its potential
brilliance, elegance, and wit, in the “average style” of prose, and even via jabs
and parries (salibus et aculeis) in the course of a brilliant conversation between
cultivated men and women and good company. For all that Nicolas Rigault,
a former student of the Jesuits, became a leading authority on Gallicanism,
he had at his disposal specific rhetorical categories with which to interpret the
French taste (le goût), which was both narrow and refined, and highly attentive
to the dangers of “baroque” rhetoric. As underlined by Henri de Valois in the
Oratio in obitum for Pierre Dupuy, the Academia Puteana, which assembled
the cultivated elite of Paris and even Europe around Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s
erudite successor, was a school of vis judicii—“vigor of judgment.” This should
be understood in the sense of strictly critical meticulousness, intellectual vi-
vacity; but it should also be understood in the sense of a practiced, demanding,
and mature taste, which was quick to recognize, in the bending and dips of
form, insecurities about knowledge and flaws of the mind.
To conclude, I will limit myself to two remarks. The first in homage to the
sorely missed Jean Lafond, who so regularly focused our attention on the ele-
ment of “brevity” in the French and classical optimum stylus: that brevity, lim-
ited only by the need for clarity, established a movement of “Atticism” that
aimed to precisely reconcile words and things, the enlightened judgment of
those who know and the yearning of the ignorant. In other words, the Delphic
“rien de trop” (nothing in excess) that became the French motto.
The second remark is directed at a specific tradition of French literary history
that, since Magendie,12 has overly privileged the role of salons, polite coteries,
and court life in the formation of classical France. It is out of the question to
deny that role. But, once again, it must be understood in its due measure. Mal-
herbe, the “grammarian of court,” was above all a “poet on a mission,” whose
mandators, ultimately, were Guillaume du Vair and Peiresc. The Dupuy circle
belatedly acknowledged a similar role for Balzac. In the background of Pas-
cal’s Provincials lie the solitary savants of Port-Royal; in the background of Cor-
neille’s theater, the pedantic humanism of the collège and Jesuit monasteries; in
Racine’s theater, the Petites Écoles, which taught Quintilian and the Greeks; in
Molière’s, Chapelle and Gassendi. And La Fontaine himself, a friend of Mau-
croix, de Huet, and de Ménage, was perhaps, more than we may have thought,
a “poet on a mission” in the world, whose spiritual legacy came from the savants
and masters of the French memoir. We should also be careful to pay greater
attention, in the study of classical literary forms and tastes, to the viri eruditis-
simi who have until now only captured the attention of historians of ideas and
philology. The growing influence of the Dupuy Academy on Parisian literature
from 1617 to 1656, in liaison and discreet disagreement with the Collège de
Clermont, and in association with the Grande Robe du Palais, was perhaps as
important as that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. In 1643, Balzac wrote to Pierre
Dupuy: “It is at Monsieur De Thou’s home that the true and legitimate Senate,
which has the right to judge our matters of books, gathers.”
166 Conversation
Rallied by national pride to the rise of French literature, the viri eruditissimi
of the French Republic of Letters were also, ultimately, the best connoisseurs of
the Greek and Latin auctores on whom the inventiveness of French writers still
largely depended. Writers themselves, in Greek, French, and Latin, authors of
poemata, carmina, elegia, epicedia, and epigrammata, but also Vitae, Commen-
tarii, Praefationes, Epistolae, and Laudationes, these men counted among the
seventeenth century’s artists of the most exquisite literary form. The laboratory
of the most exigent French taste emerged among these scholars and savants,
who have perhaps been too often overlooked as the result of an overwariness
of the satirical attacks they launched against the “pedant”—Balzac’s “Barbon,”
Ménage’s Parasitopaedagogus, Pierre de Montmaur—the first campaign of a
long war waged by Boileau, Molière, and La Fontaine against the Vadiuses and
the Trissotins of the reign of Louis XIV. In Henri de Valois’s Oratio in obitum,
we expect a piercing echo of this battle of the seventeenth-century Aulus Gel-
liuses against the eternal pedant:
And we retain in our memory that this occurred several times to a

famous parasite of our time [to be barred access to the door to the Dupuy
Museum]. Pierre would immediately go to meet him, and he never
allowed this man [Montmaur] to go any further or to join this very selec-
tive gathering.13
Part III
LETTERED LEISURE AND CORRESPONDENCE
11
ACADEMIA, ARCADIA, AND PARNASSUS:
THREE ALLEGORICAL SETTINGS OF LETTERED LEISURE
In his history of the Florentine Platonic Academy,1 Arnaldo Della Torre

refers to Giovan Battista Alberti, author of Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie
publiche e private, published in Genoa in 1639.2 Della Torre’s historical positiv-
ism leads him to seek information in Alberti’s work, without taking into account
its literary genre and oratorical nature. This Discorso is a eulogy for the Italian
Republic of Letters, inseparable from those written for its governing institu-
tions (universities and private academies), and in itself typically academic. Its
intention was not to provide objective and critical knowledge, but to celebrate,
exalt, and therefore further bring to life, through this spoken mirror, an Italian
community whose common denominator and socializing principle was letters.
Historical narration no doubt has its place in Alberti’s Discorso, but only to
supply genealogical proof of the nobility of Italian letters and, of course, of the
literary institution that characterized it and whose model subsequently spread
throughout Europe: the private academy, which was distinct from the university
of medieval origin. Alberti traces academies back to classical Phoenicia, where
writing was invented, making it the first civitas litterarum. He maintains that an
uninterrupted tradition links contemporary Italian literary institutions to that
source. As a result, Alberti creates an Italian myth striking in its difference from
the prevailing French one during the same period, a translatio studii (movement
of knowledge) from the Mediterranean south to the Parisian north,3 which was
already insisting on both the ruptures and continuities with classical antiquity.
This Discorso can therefore teach us nothing about the origins of the use of the
word academia in the Renaissance lexicon. It is even likely that it will mislead us
about the realities of the Florentine Platonic Academy. However, Alberti’s text
does teach us a great deal about the conception held by Italian men of letters
(let’s call them that rather than “intellectuals”) of the seicento of their country
and community within the European landscape of the time. The genealogical
myth constructed by Alberti claims the privilege of studium on behalf of Italy’s
men of letters, which France had long asserted to have wrenched away from
them and which coexisted in Italy with Europe’s other spiritual authority, the
169
170 Lettered Leisure and Correspondence
sacerdotium of the Holy See. Barbarian powers in the north may have been en-
croaching on the imperium, but the best part of the empire remained in Italy,
with its mother church and civitas litterarum—humanist universities and pri-
vate academies that were direct descendants of Phoenicia, Attica, and ancient
Rome. This apologetic, if not the mythical construction Alberti uses to sup-
port it, has deep roots in the Italian humanist tradition. Consider, for example,
Petrarch’s famous letter to Urban V,4 utterly disdainful of France, or the preface
to Valla’s Elegantiœ,5 which claims that Italy is the only nation to excel at Latin,
Europe’s universal language. Alberto’s Discorso developed that traditional topos
and transformed it into a myth that bears all the markers of ultramontane Tri-
dentinism. However, that genealogical and pseudo-historiographical myth was
blended with others. Parnassus, for example:
Le Accademie rassomigliar possono a quella agata preciosissima che nel

suo anello Pirro Re di Epiroti havea, in cui con prodiggioso scherzo garre-
giando con la Natura e l’Arte, si vedeano impresse le Nove Muse e Apollo.
(The Academies can be compared to the very precious agate that Pyrrhus,
king of Epirus, had on his ring, and on which, Nature victoriously com-
peting with Art, that prodigious tour de force, one sees the nine muses
and Apollo engraved.)6
The Italian academies were the Parnassus of Europe, cultivating the encyclo-
pedia of the liberal arts symbolized by the nine Muses.7 In addition, according
to Alberti, the greatest men of letters of other nations came there to improve
themselves in search of Apollo’s laurel wreath, which would publicly and eter-
nally consecrate their knowledge and talent. Transported from Phocis to Italy,
the idealized mountain on which Trajano Boccalini’s Apollo reigned, begin-
ning in 1611, was the center and the summit of the Italian literary universe.8 If
Giovan Battista Alberti’s mythical historiography points the arrow of time at
Italy, his no-less-mythical geography organizes space around the peninsula, the
center and pinnacle of letters. The myth of Parnassus naturally prompted a cor-
responding one: Arcadia. The latter appears implicitly in Discorso when Alberti
maintains that the homeland of all men of letters benefits from an eternally
gentle climate and steady light. In that endless spring, favorable at all times to
the otium litteratum, we can recognize the kingdom of the god Pan, nymphs,
and shepherds, which, beginning with Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen,9 and by
way of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, was in fact, for all of Europe, the continued meta-
phor of literary Italy, both as it wanted to see itself and as it had partially suc-
ceeded in being perceived beyond the Alps: a golden age as much as a temple
of arts and letters.
Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus 171
Alberti thinks and writes using commonplaces and formulas, leaving the
reader hard-pressed to find a factual narrative within this encomium. That said,
it would be equally absurd to reject his Discorso as a work of “literature” of no
interest to the historian and reserved for specialists of “baroque” rhetoric. The
commonplaces and formulas on which our rhetorician constructs his eulogy
long had, and will continue to have, their own basis in “reality,” bolstered by lit-
erary Italian opinion. If the allegories Alberti uses to describe Italian academies
teach the reader nothing about the “facts,” they nonetheless reveal an imaginary
and mnemonic universe that is as critical to an understanding of lettered soci-
eties as myths can be in understanding the rites of religious societies (notably
medieval brotherhoods). These purely literary myths, which I prefer to qualify
as allegories, transcend the texts that bring them to the surface. They had a rela-
tively independent existence that determined not only their use by men of let-
ters in their works, but also by lettered society itself. They had an ancient prehis-
tory, a humanist birth, a maturity that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and a long twilight in the nineteenth century. The continued meta-
phor that, in Alberti’s writing, compares literary Italy to Parnassus and Arca-
dia invites us to reach back to the roots of the Italian Respublica litteraria. By
determining the history and exegesis of these commonplaces and formulas, we
can reconstruct, from the inside, the categories of thought, imagination, and
sensibility through which a lettered society was built, perceived, perpetuated,
and established in relation to other political, legal, or religious institutions. This
reconstruction is not incompatible (on the contrary) with the strictly archival
and prosopographical form of research used to establish the specific history of a
certain academy or academician or to reestablish the context of a given work of
poetry or discourse. But, in its own way, methodical attention to the allegories
and symbolic narratives that structured the imagination of lettered sociability
and established it as tradition is just as legitimate. This endeavor allows us to
make connections between individual biographies, the texts that interspersed
them, the diverse circumstances that shaped them, and the symbolic heritage
that united them, gave them a sense of community resistant to the effects of
time, and endowed them with a lasting spiritual landscape.
This history and exegesis of places and myths specific to literature can be
easily linked to the research program defined by Ernst Robert Curtius in La
Littérature européenne et le Moyen Âge latin (European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages): the transhistorical analysis of literary topoï, or common-
places. This analysis can play upon the double phenomenology of literary works
(eulogies, poems, blends of prose and poetry, like Sannazaro’s and Crescim-
beni’s respective Arcadias, essays, like Boccalini’s “Ragguagli del Parnasso,”
dedicatory epistles, and so on) and visual representations (portraits, allegorical

paintings, heroic or pastoral landscapes). These two modes of expression, one
literary and the other iconic, overlap for that matter in the genres of symbols and
maxims, which had been deliberately cultivated by Italian academies since the
time of Paul Jove.10 While still noting periodic convergences, circumstances,
and singular events that determine the sense of these symbolic forms in a par-
ticular text or visual representation, it is important to take their relative tran-
scendence into account. They had the power to lastingly stabilize institutions
and morals, gain them recognition in the eyes of others, and legitimize and in-
teriorize them for their own members.
The three allegorical systems that emerge in Alberti’s Discorso—Academia,
Parnassus, Arcadia—influenced and strengthened each other. Both poetic and
philosophical, they sprung from the same moral commonplace: the otium lit-
teratum sive studiosum, the bios theoretikos (contemplative life) suited to the
humanist man of letters. Three figurations existed, each situated in a different
locus amœnus (welcoming place)—the wooded mountain, the pastoral land-
scape, the garden—which could be easily superimposed on the library, the
studio, or the gallery. Literary conversation, and its rites of passage, commu-
nion, collaboration, and commemoration, localized their ideal or real sites in
these three types of locations, which communicated with one another. The sym-
bolic traits unique to each traveled from one destination to another: Parnas-
sus had its laurel trees, but the laurel, braided into crowns, reappeared on the
temples of shepherd-poets or conversing men of letters, at their tables or in
their libraries. When speaking of the meeting room of the Tuscan Accademia
della Crusca,11 Giovanni Pozzi was able to show how a game of symbols, clev-
erly deduced from Virgil’s Georgics, and therefore related to the bucolic world,
ensured, via the maxims of the “Cruscanti,” the continuity and identity of that
literary society.12 This allegorical and mnemonic configuration’s force, fecun-
dity, and faculty of adaptation, its universal status in the lettered imagination,
especially in Italy, are particular visible in the seventeenth century, when the
system, without losing its vitality, arrived at maturity. At this point it had reached
its conventional phase. However, its origins stretch back to the dawn of the Re-
naissance of studia humanitatis, three centuries before Alberti’s Discorso, in the
foundational oeuvre and biographic model created by Petrarch and Boccaccio.
In his two treatises, De vita solitaria and De otio religioso, as well as in his
correspondence, Latin and Italian poetry, and the Lives dedicated to him, by
figures ranging from Boccaccio to Tomasini,13 Petrarch sketched, through writ-
ing and example, a moral theater for the man of letters and a life of letters. But
he also established the groundwork for the figurative justification that would
celebrate, symbolize, and extend that theater. The fertility of that theme and
those figures was not solely discursive: it supported and structured the future of
a lettered community, whose outlines had already emerged within the networks
Petrarch knew to assemble around himself everywhere this worried traveler
settled. The Petrarchist trope of lettered life remained linked to the one high-
lighted, for monastic clerks, by Dom Jean Leclercq in his noteworthy L’Amour
des lettres et le désir de Dieu (The Love of Learning and the Desire for God).14
Petrarch had been tempted by that otium religiosum, subject to monastic rules.
He celebrated and recommended it. But his own path was different. Because
secular freedom was not governed by obedience or monastic vows, Petrarch
had to orient it using purely internal markers. These were all the more neces-
sary given that the freedom adopted by Petrarch for a life of letters necessarily
included, in some way, the vita activa, with all the doubts, anxieties, tempta-
tions, and “vicissitudes of fortune” that came with it. According to Petrarch,
the otium litteratum, an adventure of mental freedom “in the world,” had to
construct a hermitage and inner landscape. That ideal hermitage is incarnated
in the poet’s biography by concrete and highly varied representations, ranging
from Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, in the Comtat Venaissin, to Arquà, in Veneto. But
the idea of that hermitage was already present in De vita solitaria, via architec-
tural metaphors: arx, portus (fortress, port). Petrarch also situated his hermitage
in allegorical landscapes closed in on themselves, protected from the masses
but open to infinity: forest, mountain, cave. In these favored places, a mind
dedicated to learning could feel at home. It could withdraw to these locations
at any moment, even if, physically, it was forced to be a part of urban chaos, the
vita activa. The citadel, port, and loci selvatici (forest spaces) had already been
inhabited by an entire line of hermit saints, beginning with the Baptist in the
desert, and including pagan wise men and even lettered statesmen like Caesar
and Antoninus Pius, “shepherds” due to the periods of contemplative life they
allowed themselves. The seeds of Arcadia exist within that hermetic landscape
for reflective laymen, in the same way that this myth is present in the backdrop
of the “spiritual chase” for the elusive Laura in The Canzoniere. It is also pres-
ent, without being named, in the classical decor of the Christian eclogues of
Bucolicum Carmen.
This ideal hermitage constructed by literary memory could also serve as
a “port”; it did not condemn the mind that sought refuge to idle immobility.
According to Petrarch, the man of letters completed an internal and perilous
voyage, which was simultaneously reminiscence and ascension, transported
by images of the mountain and the obstacles it imposed. In his famous letter
from Mont Ventoux, Petrarch qualifies this mountain, through antonomasia,
as Helicon. In letters evoking his poetic coronation on Capitoline Hill in 1341,

the entire symbolic edifice of the humanist Parnassus, an allegory for initia-
tion to the aristocracy of letters, was already clearly visible. Finally, even if the
term academia was not part of Petrarch’s usual vocabulary, his biography, first
reflected in his correspondence, established the philosophical foundations of
future lettered societies. The bios theoretikos, according to Petrarch, was not
solely an inner depth in which the solitary man of letters could meditate and
grow spiritually wherever he found refuge. It also radiated outward through ex-
ample: friendship, quite selective, was based on an ideal shared by men of let-
ters, rendering it contagious and sociable; Petrarch’s wandering internal her-
mitage attracted disciples and friends, whom the spiritual teacher befriended
through conversation, the exchange of officia (good offices), and literary co-
operation. If Petrarch’s various dwellings were already academies (he qualified
his hermitage in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse as such in Trionfo della morte), then
the network created by his European correspondents already possessed the
traits of the future Respublica litteraria that the humanist scholar would in-
spire. Petrarch’s disciples would develop, amplify, and name the budding con-
cepts visible in his biographical example and oeuvre. In De genealogia deorum,
Boccaccio details and organizes representations of Parnassus at which Petrarch
had merely hinted. In De laboribus Herculis, Coluccio Salutati, the Petrarchist
chancellor of the Florentine Republic, develops a comprehensive theory of the
Muses, whom he viewed as the successive degrees of a philosophical and moral
ascension.15 In his Latin correspondence, filled with reflections on the otium,
Poggio Bracciolini uses the word academia for the first time in a letter to Cardi-
nal Prospero Colonna in 1457, thereby designating the circle of men of letters in
the Roman court that had educated him and in which a great debate was raging
over the choice between the Epicurean and Stoic otium.16 In 1417, in a letter to
Poggio, Francesco Barbaro evokes the Respublica litteraria for the first time to
designate the men of letters impacted by Poggio’s manuscript discoveries, men
who regarded him as their great benefactor.17 By the time Sannazaro entitled an
allegorical account of his literary life in the Pontanian Academy in Naples Arca-
dia, the experiences of the lettered coteries that had been expanding for a cen-
tury and a half in the wake of Petrarch’s disciples had led to the development of
their own symbolism. Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504) was nearly simultaneous with
Raphael’s Parnassus in the Signature Room (1510). By this time, the Pontanian
Academy had been a stable institution for several decades,18 in parallel with the
Pomponian Academy of Rome.19
In De vita solitaria, Petrarch recounts the fable of the shepherd who, forced
to go into town, gives a dazzling account of his trip to his companions upon his
return. Petrarch contrasts this blind shepherd with the metaphorical shepherd,
in other words the true man of letters, who, without leaving town, lives, though
internally, in Arcadia, unmoved by the attractions of the world and in the privi-
leged company of his peers.20 This fable provided the chreia, in the sense of Aph-
thonius’s Progymnasmata, that would be expanded by Sannazaro in his Arcadia
a century and a half later. Bucolic poets were not lacking in fifteenth-century
Italy, nor in Florence, Sienna, or Naples, but pastoral allegory was at that time a
disguise for contemporary political events.21 Sannazaro, who grasped the mean-
ing of the semen orationis (seed of discourse) scattered throughout the works
of Petrarch and his literary successors, was the first to deploy the pastoral alle-
gory to its full modern extent. He transposed into Arcadia, using allegorical
language, the literary experience in which he had participated at the Panormite
and Pontano Neapolitan Academy. He had himself hosted the academy in his
villa Mergellina. This pastoral fiction is no substitute for a history of the Ponta-
nian Academy or as a biography of Sannazaro and his friends—far from it. But
it has its own merits, different from that of the information found in Alessandro
d’Alessandro’s Dies geniales or Minturno’s Poetica.22
Like a contagious dream, Sannazaro’s Arcadia circulated, in its readers’
minds, the Petrarchist Stimmung that unified Naples’s men of letters and gov-
erned their literary exercises. Against Arcadia’s ideal landscape, which mirrored
the Bay of Naples and the slopes of Vesuvius, the long and winding group walks,
narrated by Sannazaro, and interludes at court, during which poetic competi-
tions took place, encapsulated and celebrated the kind of altered state of inven-
tion and passionate meditation aroused by the erudite culture of letters among
enthusiastic and gifted young people. That altered state became infectious,
thanks to Arcadia and its poetic evocative power: Sannazaro’s work offered a
model, and it was imitated. In France, that model was even amplified to the
proportions of a sweeping novel by Honoré d’Urf, L’Astrée (Astrea). But it was
also imitated in real life. It sparked what could be called academic momentum
throughout much of Europe, driving men of letters to gather and collaborate
and to construct, on the margins of their “active life,” the milieu and mores of
an otium litteratum. Sannazaro’s fiction, or mythos, therefore did more than
just produce similar mythology; it introduced its imitators to shared rites and
exercises, and to a shared lettered sociability that, on each occasion, in the guise
and allegorical role of the shepherds of Arcadia, constructed a literary academy
in the literal sense.
In the seventeenth century, Nicolas Frénicle published two pastoral collec-
tions in Paris: Les Églogues (The Eclogues, 1629) and L’Entretien des illustres
bergers (Meeting of the Illustrious Shepherds, 1634). As in Arcadia, these poetic
exercises are set within prose narratives, situated in the woods of Boulogne, on
the banks of the Marne, in the surroundings of Saint-Germain-en-L aye, or on
the banks of the Seine: an Arcadia in Île-de-France. Similar works, using coded
language to narrate the “honest exercises” shared by a network of young men
of letters, multiplied in Europe and include Montemayor’s Spanish-language
Diana (1575),23 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by the Englishman Philip
Sidney (1593), L’Astrée by the Savoyard Honoré d’Urfé (1607), and Arcadia by
the Italian Crescimbeni.24 Locations and character ranks vary, as do language,
style, and poetic meter, but these works all share the theme and poetic essence
of the otium litteratum established by Petrarch, in both Canzoniere and De vita
solitaria, and united by the myth of Arcadia, which became the foundation of
both a literary genre and a “way of life” for the man of letters.
One feature shared by these pastoral narratives and the literary acade-
mies that at times borrowed their decors, costumes, and manners is the use of
pseudonyms. This characteristic dates back to Petrarch himself but was firmly
established with Sannazaro’s Arcadia. In the first eclogue of Bucolicum car-
men, Petrarch adopts the classical pseudonym Parthenias; he uses Silvius and
Stupens in other eclogues.25 Coluccio Salutati took the pseudonym Pierius,
meaning both “son of Pierre” and “disciple of the Muses.”26 Pomponio Leto
was so strongly associated with his own Roman pseudonym (Pomponius Lætus)
that we do not know his real name. These fictional names, which were typi-
cally neo-Greek or, more often, Neo-L atin, are the foundation for the “noms
de plume” used by modern writers. They symbolized a true change of identity
and accompanied a kind of rite of passage within a society that was superior to
ordinary, common society. Pseudonyms attested to the abandonment of the
“old man” governed by the passions of the vita activa and the emergence of
another persona, whose meaning was provided by a different kind of society
governed by the freely chosen laws of the philosophical and poetic vita contem-
plative, according to the mode of the otium litteratum defined by Petrarch. The
use of “classical” pseudonyms was also the secular and literary equivalent of
the change in name and personality, during a ceremony of monastic vows, that
accompanied an initiate’s entrance into a new community which he chose by
breaking with the “world.” “Arcadian” or “pastoral” pseudonymity (whose Greek
roots borrowed from Virgil’s Eclogues: Daphnis, Tityre, Damon, and so on) in-
dicated a personal conversion, entrance into a contractual society, and accep-
tance of literary and moral conventions, that is, the rules of behavior implied by
the “Arcadian” and “academic” contract. More prosaically, the -us latinization
of common surnames would become a form of ennoblement, across northern
Europe, through a family’s entrance, even if only to a modest degree, to the let-
tered class.
In Italy, entering “Arcadia” under an “Arcadian” name also meant entering

the “academy.” It implied that one was willing to follow rules of conduct, yield
to literary exercises, and voluntarily participate in a shared studious program.
In Sannazaro’s Arcadia (which excludes all reference to the active “real life” of
the stulti, Naples’s ignorant citizens), Pontano is Meliseo, Barcinio is Cariteo,
Summonzio is Summonte, and Sannazaro himself is either Ergasto or Sincero.
Those names defined them as “shepherds,” meaning academicians, in the Nea-
politan and literary Arcadia invented by these humanists and chosen as the
ideal homeland for their otium, “literary life,” poetic exercises, and contempla-
tive life. It mattered little if this Arcadia was outside of Naples or superimposed
on Naples. It was not a geographical location in either the country or the city,
but a state or degree of the intellectual life shared by fraternal spirits. This re-
quired a true spiritual reversal among these “shepherds,” in relation to urban,
aulic, and active life. Lettered leisure, insulated from any impure combination,
rendered emotions more vibrant, deeper, and more inspired, and predisposed
them to receive the form of song. When Sincero-Sannazaro has to leave Arca-
dia, his departure is emotionally wrenching.27 He wakens literally from a dream,
like the monk who has to leave the contemplative stability of the convent, to
attend to affairs of the “world.” The small community of pastors, which make up
the Arcadian coterie, is linked by a friendship unknown to the common man.
It fights against melancholy (a disease that afflicted men of letters in the same
way that acedia did monks) through conversation, oratory and poetic jousting,
shared walks in the loci amoeni of the Arcadian-Neapolitan countryside, and
pilgrimages to temples decorated with paintings (opportunities for ekphraseis
[descriptions of works of art] according to the principle ut picture poesis). This
journey is not unlike Francesco Colonna’s voyage through the enchanted park
of Hypnerotomachia, interspersed with stops in front of ancient edifices or con-
structions. Sannazaro’s Arcadia was of course equipped with a Parnassus, where
itinerant shepherd-poets found themselves in the company of Apollo and the
Muses, emblems of inspiration and literary glory. His text marks the first ap-
pearance of Parnassus as an edifice erected in a park.28 During their walk, San-
nazaro’s traveling “shepherds” stop short before a tomb, among cypresses and
pine trees: the sepulcher of the shepherd Androgeo.29 The shepherds observe a
funeral ceremony, an Arcadian transposition of the grieving rites practiced by
academies which were followed by funeral orations and chanted poems. This
general theme can be summarized by the motto Et in Arcadia ego, which was
the primary inspiration for the scene illustrated in famous paintings of the same
title by Guerchin and Poussin.30 These paintings were undoubtedly destined for
eminent members of Rome’s or Bologna’s literary academies, the Umoristi or
the Gelati.
But other highlights of academic life are metaphorized in Sannazaro’s Arca-

dia as well: celebrations, anniversaries, literary competitions, and awards. The
pastoral eros is also present and offers, as in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a continuing
metaphor of the unbiased quest for beauty, a quest that was no longer solitary
but communal and that was supported and stimulated by the friendly emu-
lation that reigned within circles of academicians-shepherds. They competed
with, comforted, and encouraged one another, thus forming the first enthusias-
tic and informed public for their own literary compositions.
Within this youthful yet wise united brotherhood, whose secrets were alter-
nately hidden and revealed by the Arcadian allegory, the topos of puer senex
(the child / old man) found one of its most subtle expansions. Two centuries
later, in 1711, in Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni’s Arcadia, it would no longer be
hidden in the backdrop. But the Arcadian allegory itself remained as vibrant and
available as ever to celebrate the rites and ethos of an Italian Academy (on this
occasion, the Roman Academy of Arcadia), which reunited, under unshakably
neo-Greek pseudonyms (Niso, Urania, Telene, and so on), all those whom Italy
counted among its men of letters.31
If most elements of the allegorical syntagma of Arcadia, from Sannazaro’s
time to Crescimbeni’s, can be traced to antiquity, and though its principal lit-
erary source can be found in a veritable gospel of European letters, Virgil’s
Bucolics, the syntagma itself, with its complex structure and use of allegorical
chronicles, is a modern invention, which owes much to medieval allegorism,
the medieval songe genre, and the millennia-long experiment with monasti-
cism. The gradual elaboration of the Arcadian myth, following Petrarch, co-
incided with the ideal of the secular otium litteratum, which defined itself in
the margins of the monastic otium litteratum and in large part to compensate
for the latter’s decline. Thanks to Arcadia, the former was adopted by countless
laymen and provided recognizable markers and a contagious apologetic. The
same is true for Parnassus, whose sweeping and coherent depiction in Raphael’s
fresco, a burlesque letter from Aretino to Monsignor Leonardi, or Boccalini’s
Ragguagli is nowhere to be found within classical texts.
These symbolic concretions, collective works of the humanist community
perfected from generation to generation, were progressively completed during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If Arcadia symbolized a kind of poetic
sociology of lettered societies, Parnassus provided its philosophy and police,
situating the society of humanist men of letters in a Platonic and Augustinian
vertical order. That order was both cosmic (its model can be found in Plato’s
Timaeus and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) and epistemological (modeled after
Plato’s Ion and Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury). Be-
yond Petrarch, the first modern incarnation of Parnassus was, of course, in The
Divine Comedy. In his dream ascension, on the slopes of his cosmic mountain,
Dante encounters the Muses and then Apollo. But in Dante’s writing, Parnas-
sus was merely the first stage of an edifice whose summit was theological: Para-
dise. In Petrarch’s hands, Parnassus had become a mountain leading upward
by a different path than that of studia divinitatis. It was no longer a simple,
intermediary step on the road leading to perfection. Liberated by Petrarch, the
studia humanitatis obtained, thanks to him, relative autonomy from theologia
poetica. From then on, the revived liberal arts offered the humanist men of
letters who chose them a path of sui generis spiritual ascension and immortal-
ization, which boasted its own richness, as untouched by the “world” and vita
activa as monastic spirituality may have been at its best. At Parnassus’s summit
was its own divine judge, Apollo, weighing souls, along with its own angels, the
Muses, welcoming the chosen ones. To speak of “secularization” in this respect
would be violently reductive. Rather, it was a question of the “laicization” of
monastic spirituality.
The liberal arts, as conceived of by Martianus Capella and the medieval uni-
versity, were able to grow by maintaining within one encyclopedia, capable of
including the old “mechanical arts,” painting, sculpture, and art by architects
and instrumentalists, who could also align themselves with the Muses, figures
less rigid and fixed than the university allegories of trivium and quadrivium.
The laurel crowns awarded by Apollo and symbolizing terrestrial glory served as
saints’ halos; they adorned the heads of “geniuses” in both letters and modern
arts, to whom they granted the right to enter into a new “communion of saints”
with the poets, musicians, and immortal painters of pagan antiquity. Parnas-
sus was not trying to rival Golgotha, Tabor, or Mount Carmel. It coexisted with
these holy mountains, at a respectful distance. But it also belonged to another
region of spiritual geography. Slowly but surely, Parnassus, a mountain both an-
cient and new, took on a seemingly familiar character in the interior landscape
of Europe, where it evolved into a cliché and commonplace as ordinary and
frequent as the great ecclesiastical symbols. Beginning in the sixteenth cen-
tury, the Italian Republic of Letters adopted it as its own emblem. Parnassus
also appeared everywhere that people claimed to represent or have depicted
the humanities. In addition to the mountain where Apollo reigned as a har-
monious judge amid a choir of muses, the following figures also appeared: the
horse Pegasus, symbol of the “sublime”; the Hippocrene spring, symbol of the
literary vocation; and a range of flora symbolizing literary inspiration and glory
(oak, laurel, cypress, ivy) and fauna symbolizing literary invention and genius
(bees, cicadas, swans). It was on this difficult-to-access mountain that dead auc-
tores, ancient conquerors of time, encountered the living: entrance into this
glorious dialogue became access to a kind of literary paradise, which coexisted
as peacefully as possible with theological Paradise.
There was therefore neither strait nor frontier between Parnassus’s moun-
tainous kingdom and Arcadia’s gentle hills. Both allegorical places represented
different features of lettered society; the first, Parnassus, situated that society
parallel to the church, offering itself as an ascension mentis per litteras (eleva-
tion of the soul through letters), parallel to the clerical vita militans; the sec-
ond, Arcadia, set lettered society parallel to the royal court, and offered itself
as the otium litteratum, parallel to the courtier’s vita activa. But in Italy neither
would ever forget its Petrarchist and Raphael-esque roots. They did not chal-
lenge the church and its clergy or life at court. They favored a margin of mental
and spiritual freedom from those two authoritative and active bodies. But they
also sought a peaceful and diplomatic compromise in order to be made accept-
able to these two centers of “active life.” Born within the quasi-secret intimacy
of humanist circles, these allegorical places left the enclosure of the academies
in the sixteenth century, offering a public demonstration of the comfort and
glory of lettered leisure. For ecclesiastic powers, this emergence of Parnassus
and Arcadia attested to the loyalty of humanist studies to the church and their
link to exercises of the Christian faith. As for royal courts, these visible symbols
of literary leisure became proof of “good governance,” bearing witness to the
spiritual grandeur of the prince capable of seeking rest in learning and among
the men of letters he protected, as well as of maintaining or reestablishing the
peace suited to those exercises. As a result, both symbols were incorporated into
public celebrations and the decoration of palaces and castles, and had garden
fabriques, or ornamental structures, dedicated to them. They spread the pres-
tige and “mystery” of letters well beyond lettered circles, the decoration of their
libraries, and the engraved frontispieces of their works. The “Christianized” Par-
nassus and Arcadia were adopted by the Jesuits to symbolize the quality educa-
tion in the humanities that they promised to their young students. Parnassus, in
scholarly Jesuit works, became a useful antonomasia to designate an education
in poetic techniques: gradus ad Parnassum. Arcadia, evangelized beginning in
the early sixteenth century by Battista Mantuano and Jacopo Sannazaro in Du
partu Virginis, became the conventional backdrop of the infant and adolescent
pietas litterata within Jesuit colleges.
Yet, we should not rush to the conclusion that Arcadia and Parnassus were
“worn down to the quick” by the pedagogical and devout industry of the Jesuits
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: neither the academies of Jesuit
colleges nor Protestant academies succeeded in dulling the original idea. These
figures of otium litteratum, exalted by masterpieces of poetry and art, found the
inspiration in those works needed to rejuvenate themselves and acquire new
meaning. It is therefore worth insisting on the seminal character of Sannazaro’s
Arcadia and Raphael’s Parnassus, which took the reins from Petrarch’s works,
themselves still very present in the early sixteenth century. In the same way that
Arcadia was the myth of the Pontanian Academy of Naples, the Parnassus of
the Signature Room (in all likelihood originally destined to house the library
of Julius II) was the myth of the Roman Academy, home to lettered leisure in
the Roman court since Sixtus IV. It is therefore not surprising that the first lit-
erary works that deployed the “classic” and Raphael-esque version of Parnassus
appeared in Venice, within the humanist network that, after the sack of Rome
in 1527, had transported the literary preoccupations of Leo X’s court, though
not its theological duties, to northeastern Italy. Well before Vasari erected a
vast Parnassus of painters in Florence in his The Lives of the Most Excellent
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), at the summit of which Michelan-
gelo was crowned, Ludovico Dolce had published his Sogno di Parnaso en terza
rima, a poetic mirror of Raphael’s fresco, in Venice in 1532:
Questo è quel Monte, ove mai State o Verno

Non giunge, ma felice Primavera
Produce fiori e frutti in sempiterno.
Questo è l’albergo de la gente vera
Che fuggendo d’amar le gemme e l’oro
Per cui convien che l’vulgo errando pera
Si chiede a seguitar l’alto Tesoro
Che virtu scopre a chi l’apprezza e ama,
Godendo in terra un più ricco lavoro.
(Such is the mount that knows neither summer nor winter,

But a happy perpetual spring
With its eternal flowers and fruits.
Such is the home of true beings
Who flee the love of precious stones and gold
Who dazzle abused vulgarity and drive it to defeat
While these true beings strive to find the great treasure
That virtue reveals to those who appreciate and love it,
Rejoicing on earth for a more fertile labor.)32
The golden-age climate reigning evenly across Arcadia therefore extended

to Parnassus as well. Like the land of shepherds, the mountain of a chosen, let-
tered elite was reserved solely for those selfless and contemplative souls who had
turned their backs on the world of passions and vulgar desires and dedicated
themselves to the otium litteratum. Unlike medieval monks, the shepherd lovers
of Sannazaro’s Arcadia cannot entirely escape time on earth: their mortality
looms over them, threatening to break up their ephemeral society. In contrast,
the Parnassus depicted by Ludovico Dolce, like Raphael’s, claims to offer poets
a timeless paradise, a trip through immortality during which a conversazione
sacra eternally reunites them with Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Petrarch.
This difference in ontological status between Parnassus and Arcadia did not
escape Aretino, who was heavily influenced by Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly.33 In
a famous letter to Mgr. Jacopo Leonardi (referenced earlier), which was pub-
lished in the same year as Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1537), Aretino tackles
the Parnassus trope, but in a deeply ironic and even burlesque way. He empha-
sizes the pagan allegory’s fictional and formulaic character. In Aretino’s view,
Parnassus is no longer a Mount Tabor or an eternal paradise for men of letters,
but the convenient and amusing setting for a literary chronicle, somewhat akin
to how Arcadia in the fifteenth century was the overtly formulaic setting for a
political one. Current events supersede immortality, as does sophisticated lit-
erary criticism over erudite reminiscing and contemplative manners. Aretino’s
humor, a departure from the grand lyrical style of Parnassus, was even more at
ease when it came to using the metaphorical mountain as propaganda for men
of letters and notably his own work. During the “dream” that takes Aretino to
the outskirts of the mountain in Phocis, he first notices the fall of a group of
“pedants,” who threaten literature with their charlatanry and are hurried off the
mountaintop. This was the new “final judgment” of the literary criticism emerg-
ing at the time. Transported to the mountain’s peak by his heroine Marphise,
Aretino finds himself in the presence of Apollo, an attractive young man of
loose morals, just as they like them, claims the author, in Rome. Mockery of the
ecclesiastical court thus went hand in hand with literary criticism. By now, we
are already in the universe of Boileau’s Satires and Lutrin. But as ridiculous as
Apollo may appear, the ephebic god nonetheless remains a god, and the arbiter
of talent in the Italian Republic of Letters. He is the one chasing the unworthy
“pedants.” This Apollo-Bacchus (the very modern model for the god painted by
Poussin in The Inspiration of the Poet at Hanover and Prado’s Parnassus) gives
the Venetian poet a warm welcome; he presents him to the Muses and signals
the goddess Fame, who sings the poet’s praises as well as those of the poetesses
Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. Minerva then escorts Aretino to pay
his respects to the horse Pegasus, as morally liberated as his master Apollo. The
supposed dreamer then drinks from the waters of Hippocrene. Irony worthy of
Lucien reduces these rites to an amusing farce. The “secularization” is here in-
disputable.
Aretino, armed with this mocking captatio benevolentiae, does not hesitate
to use Parnassus as a means of publicity: he courts the Duke of Urbino, Fran-
cesco Della Rovere, notably through a poem dedicated to him, Marphisa. In
Aretino’s dream-text, this poem—though it was written well before he drank
from the waters of Hippocrene—earns him access to the company of immortals
on Parnassus. This is also his opportunity to emphasize the supremacy Venice
has achieved over Rome: this ideal and contemporary academy is entirely Vene-
tian and Paduan. Titian is here, as are the principal members of the Accademia
degli Infiammati de Padoue: Sperone Speroni, Benedettto Varchi, Trissino, and,
of course, Aretino’s correspondent, Mgr. Leonardi. This entirely modern and
secular academy (it does not include the Ancients) has gathered to hear Pietro
Bembo, the Venetian prince of the Republic of Letters, read excerpts of the
Latin History of Venice he is in the midst of writing, on the official command of
the Serenissima. The dream ends with the coronation of Aretino, who, thanks
to the diversity of his largely libertine and satirical work, receives from Apollo
not one but several crowns, made of nettles, olive-tree branches, oak, and laurel.
The seeming nonchalance with which Aretino treated the allegory of Par-
nassus attests in reality to the solidity of this “universal of the imagination” in
sixteenth-century lettered Italy. This “universal” was in no way sacred; it incor-
porated profane poetry and literature, the “realness” inherent to them, and the
quidlibet audendi potestas (power to dare anything) in the historical time that
conditioned them. A figure of praise among men of letters (but also of the irony
that such men were capable of directing against themselves), the allegory of
Parnassus got its second wind thanks to Aretino. The Venetian writer used the
allegory effectively to affirm the authority of the lettered men of his generation,
which was inseparable from that of Venice, their sanctuary of “freedom.” It is in
this sense that Aretino’s letter to Mgr. Leonardi, despite its satirical appearance,
took the allegory of Parnassus quite seriously. All the while reassuring theolo-
gians by its inoffensive jest, as the Council of Trent approached, the letter none-
theless conserved and protected the order of secular letters. As farcical as it was,
Aretino’s Parnassus remained, under the auspices of irony, a place where men
of letters were chosen and recognized. We can also consider his epistle as the
chreia on which another Venetian, Trajano Boccalini, labored at the end of the
sixteenth century in order to construct a vast expansion of a “satirical” Parnas-
sus in the centuries of the Ragguagli del Parnasso. For Boccalini, Venice was
always, and never more so than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
homeland of men of letters and the capital of the Italian Republic of Letters,
whereas Rome, which had ceased to fill that role after the sack of 1527,34 had to
settle for being the headquarters of the Tridentine Ecclesia militans and theo-
logical orthodoxy.
The Ragguagli (the first journal of ideas and books) reaffirmed at every
chance the superiority of the Venetian political regime, which was the sole
in Italy to truly grant men of letters libertas poetandi et philosophandi (free-
dom to make poetry and philosophize). Fictitiously located in Greece, Boc-
calini’s Parnassus was in reality a Venetian “superstructure,” in the same way
that Sannazaro’s Arcadia was a Neapolitan “superstructure.” It symbolized the
superior and impartial point of view that only Venice could provide Italians on
the entirety of European letters, their internal debates, and the community that
nonetheless united them through travel, correspondence, and the circulation
of manuscripts and printed books, and that weaved between various political
and religious powers. Boccalini wrote the Ragguagli in a Venetian Republic
that had been struck by the interdict of Paul V Borghese, and whose theologi-
cal advisor, in the fight against Rome, was the Servite and near-heretic Paulo
Sarpi. In 1601, the last great master of the Italian Republic of Letters of the
sixteenth century, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Bembo’s successor, passed away. In
1607, his friend Paolo Gualdo published the Vita of Pinelli, in which he de-
scribes the library, museum, considerable correspondence, and conversation
of his subject, an erudite intermediary between men of letters in northern and
southern Europe, and between the forms of humanism practiced by Jesuits and
Protestants. The allegorical fiction of Parnassus introduced Ragguagli readers
to that difficult context without having to explain it in detail. The imaginary
ancient Greece that serves as the backdrop for Boccalini’s Parnassus was, like
Venice, completely independent from seventeenth-century political and reli-
gious Europe; however, through a kind of chronological prolepsis, it also existed
at the same time. From the mountaintop, Apollo, surrounded by his council of
Muses and assisted by leading classical and modern minds (foremost among
them, in a sign of the times, is Tacitus), reigns as the king-judge and pontifi-
cates on European letters. He allegorically represents the authority exercised
by figures like Bembo, Erasmus, and Pinelli. But he represents Boccalini him-
self above all, the new Aretino and the precursor of Pierre Bayle of Nouvelles
de la République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters). From essay to
essay, livened up by allegorical narration, which often takes the guise of a coded
political-literary chronicle, Apollo’s government offers the final word on Euro-
pean events (notably the assassination of Henri IV); newly published works;
quarrels of poetic, moral, and political doctrine between men of letters; and
the prizes to award (or not) to literary celebrities. Boccalini’s text is more than a
“battle of the books.” The author’s brash polemic ventures as far as the frontiers
of religion, and takes a marked interest in political philosophy, not to mention
politics itself. For example, Apollo excludes the Jesuit Francesco Benci from lit-
erary immortality, despite his indisputable titles (among others, the fact that he
was Marc-Antoine Muret’s student): his mistake lay in having “castrated” clas-
sical poets in his editions and commentaries, and, as a result, in the name of
clerical morality, having seriously violated the libertas poetandi, even if it was
retrospectively, of the most revered classical masters. The threat posed to the
Republic of Letters’ freedom by the Society of Jesus was thus denounced, with
humor, but also firmness.
The Ragguagli attest to the huge importance attained by problems of politi-
cal philosophy in Europe in the wake of France’s religious wars. Tacitus, next
to Apollo, arbitrates the “quarrel on the raison d’État.” The god of Parnassus
presides over the trial of Machiavelli, who is found guilty. Other theorists of
the raison d’État are subjected to judgment as well, but always, and evidently,
from the perspective of men of letters, in search of the best regime to harmoni-
ously exist with their otium and freedom. The Republic of Venice is repeatedly
cited as an example of political wisdom and generosity toward men of letters.
The notion of “Italian decadence,” the consequence of pressure from Rome and
the Jesuits, is also visible in Apollo’s judgments. He summons Italian academies
to appear and declares them “corrupt.” The Ragguagli del Parnasso should be
studied in relation to De Thou’s Historia sui temporis or John Barclay’s Argenis
(1621). Boccalini’s Parnassus played a large role in giving to the savant Republic
of Letters of the first half of the seventeenth century, which had been rebuilt in
northern Europe, an awareness that its identity and authority stood no chance,
except in Venice, in Italy. Boccalini thus paved the way for Paris, for Bayle, and
for Voltaire.
The malleability and stability of the Parnassus allegory, carved with classical
tools by modern men of letters, are surprising. Not only did this rhetorical figure
lend itself to a wide variety of visual representations, differing in style and func-
tion, but it was also adapted to literary works in very different genres, multiple
languages, and across several centuries. Even more than Arcadia, though often
in relation to it (a history of this relationship, visible in seventeenth-century
works by Poussin and Claude Gelée, and those by Ingres and Puvis de Chavan-
nes in the nineteenth century, is needed), Parnassus had been the emblem of
letters, their inherent spirituality, and their persistent freedom in relation to the
church and the state. Beginning with Petrarch’s coronation in 1341, this allegory
symbolized the superior order of humanity that could be attained by letters,
the particular authority they dispensed, and the singular immortality they con-
ferred. There is an oxymoronic quality to this allegory, which ultimately contrib-
uted to its longevity and brilliance: it claimed to be “divine” and timeless, while
recognizing itself as undeniably “human” and immerged in time, in a paradox
that enabled its rich irony and self-directed humor, much like the entirety of
pagan mythology, which became, following Boccaccio and his Genealogy, a
repertory of literary figures and an object of the suspension of disbelief inher-
ent to literature.
The Arcadian allegorism was no less lacking in dogmatic and conceptual
pretension. It was a self-conscious literary game and dream. But that game was
more serious and more contagious than may appear to our modern gaze: its
rules and roles, and the dispositions and talents it demanded from its inter-
preters, introduced those it seduced and who accepted it into a contemplative
society superior to all the common “militias.” As a result, the allegorical terrain
of Arcadia was particularly fertile: it created a “second homeland” for the mind,
protected by literature. Arcadia implied readings, a “Petrarchist” art of writing
and composing, as well as collaboration and conversation dedicated to that art,
which demanded a particular set of manners—gentle, meditative, attentive to
others, amiable. Feelings rather than passions. The landscape, climate, and flora
and fauna of the Golden Age of Arcadia existed to favor those manners and
range of sentiments, as well as to reflect and symbolize them. Nonetheless, this
utopia of the secular otium litteratum was most often rooted in one place, in
a small, natural homeland whose uniquely literary genius it manifested. Su-
premely civilized, it rediscovered and accomplished man’s most spiritual desires
at the other extreme of violence and war.
Parnassus and Arcadia were therefore generative allegories. They emerged,
more or less explicitly, everywhere a literary academy appeared. The spaces
opened by the two allegories, both created simultaneously with the invention
of perspective, had no precise limits and were composed of distant places. Con-
trary to the abstract and two-dimensional allegories of “Gothic” liberal arts,
Parnassus and Arcadia, Muses and shepherds created dispositions toward joyful
sociability (that is, the shared walk in the garden). They also, beginning in the
fifteenth century, fostered the relationship between letters and arts. Painters,
sculptors, and musicians could borrow symbols previously evoked by humanist
men of letters, thereby boosting the creation of artist academies, in collabora-
tion with literary academies to create what was not yet called Gesamtkunstwerk.
No episode of art history (at least not until the nineteenth century of Théophile
Gautier, Richard Wagner, La Revue Blanche, and Russian ballets) is more con-
vincing in this respect than the Florentine sequence of 1540–1600.35 During
this period, we can observe the development, in turns, of a literary academy,
where a still-living Michelangelo was the object, as a poet, of two lectures de-
livered by Benedetto Varchi; then of the “Accademia del Disegno,” supported
by Vasari; followed by the musical Camerata Bardi, linked in many ways to the
Florentine Academy; and finally the Accademia degli Alterati and the Accade-
mia della Crusca. The Parnassus allegory, which is evident even in the struc-
ture of Vasari’s Vite and which appears in one of the large canvases painted to
decorate San Lorenzo during Michelangelo’s funeral services in 1564, took on
a musical guise in the epithelia sung, danced, and played by the members of
what was known as the Camerata Bardi. In the sixteenth century, it deployed
all its semantic malleability to facilitate the rapprochement between artists and
men of letters, poetry and visual arts, and poetry and music, and the emergence
of a new symphonic studium. The great public rites of court society (that is,
matrimonial and funerary rites) were the occasion for Florentine academies to
bring the myths of lettered leisure to the stage, familiarizing them to the collec-
tive imagination and associating them with the “good governance” of princes
and with civil peace itself. One of the greatest disappointments experienced by
Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany, was Michelangelo’s refusal to return to
Florence. But the duke’s entire “cultural” policy, which, as shown by Michel
Plaisance, was well advised, succeeded in transforming that failure into a suc-
cess. The cult of the absent Michelangelo fostered the creation of both Vasari’s
Lives and Florentine academies. Veneration of the poet-artist situated that evo-
lution as parallel to the arts, which themselves admirably served the European
outburst of theater and the court festivities of the young duchy. However, it is
important to note that this political interplay only superficially affected mem-
bers of these lettered societies, which provided a social framework for otium stu-
diosum and determined for themselves the rules governing fruitful cooperation
on research projects that were far from the prince’s immediate interests. Eru-
dite veneration of the Tuscan language, which led to the Dictionary of Crusca,
was connected to musicological research that exalted Tuscan popular song and
appropriated it to the mythical “music of the ancient Greeks.” This was how
Count Giovanni Maria dei Bardi, one of the chiefs of the ducal armies, a diplo-
mat and a member of the literary Academy of the Alterati in 1585, began in
1553 to sponsor research by musicologists Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei.
He gathered poets, instrumentalists, composers, and singers of the Camerata
Bardi at his home. The ducal court and its festivities would only benefit much
later from the spectacular results of these scholarly investigations begun in a
climate of selfless research. When the Marquis Giustiniani summarized this
grand intellectual endeavor in Discorso sopra la musica dei suoi tempi in 1628 in
Rome, he did so using an allegorical landscape in which nostalgia for lost Greek
music combines with the subjects of the first drammi per musica proposed to
the Florentine and Italian public by the Camerata Bardi:
I could add the many effects of the music in use in Arcadia mentioned by
classical authors, as well as all kinds of fables, like the Sirens, Amphion,
Marsyas, Arion, Apollo, the Muses, and Orpheus, and others, spoken of as
truths and which demonstrate the ability of classical music to move its lis-
teners’ souls to diverse and contrary actions, in a diversity of manners and
modes, and in particular, with enharmonic music, which has not been
rediscovered by the present century.36
Both a research project for lost music and the emblems of a new form of
music, the allegories of Parnassus and Arcadia structured the development of
the Seconda Pratica, the modern melody. They provided the settings for libret-
tists composing these first masterpieces. The interludes of La Pellegrina in 1589,
written for the wedding of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine,
evoke celestial harmony, the Muses’ victory over the Pierides, and Apollo’s com-
bat against the serpent Python. Later, Orazio Vecchi’s Amfiparnasso borrowed
the allegory of Apollo and the Muses; Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s Rapimento
di Cefalo in 1600, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, in 1607, provided the most convinc-
ing versions of the Arcadian allegory for the lyrical stage. On each occasion,
academies (Count Bardi’s in Florence and the Invaghiti Academy in Mantua)
ensured that these works of art were the encapsulation of their work, research,
and ideal of harmony between the arts.
To conclude, I want to emphasize a final trait shared by the allegories of Par-
nassus and Arcadia, and one that also characterizes the encyclopedic ideal of
the sixteenth century. I have already underlined their fertility as the setting for
praise in lettered life and as a sign of unity and recognition between men of let-
ters. I attempted to demonstrate their function as a model for lettered society
and its specific rites. However, it is equally important to recognize the presence
of a quasi-research program, in other words, the frontispiece of a future collec-
tive work: Arcadia was the land of musician and shepherd-poets; Parnassus was
home to the lute-playing and poetry-inspiring Apollo and the nine Muses, who
expanded the number of the seven traditional liberal arts; the academy, thanks
to its Platonic origins and encyclopedic curiosities, strived to reform the Greeks’
mousikos anêr (cultivated man). From the start (meaning their still-veiled ap-
pearance in the works of Petrarch), these three symbolic registers contained the
basic elements of a synthesis of the arts that would take shape during the six-
teenth century and spread to an encyclopedic genre, opera, thus linking music
and poetry, architecture and painting, and sculpture and dance. It is undeniable
that this project successfully completed by Italian academies is better situated in
the wake of Castiglione’s Cortegiano than it is following Politian’s Miscellanea
or Valla’s Annotationes ad Novum Testamentum. In the Florentine giostra en-
titled The War of Beauty, in honor of the young Duke of Urbino, designed by
Giulio Parigi and etched by Jacques Callot in 1610, one of the chariots repre-
sents Mount Parnassus. We can see, a little above the choir of Muses, the tutti
quei litterati che nomina Il Cortegiano wearing crowns of oak (the emblem of
the Della Rovere). This courtly Parnassus transformed the otium studiosum of
men of letters into both hostage to and ornament of celebrations at court, diplo-
macy, and polite leisure.37
That festival chariot would have been an obvious target of Trajano Boccalini’s
sarcasm. The Italian satirist believed that Parnassus was a myth of the freedom
of men of letters, intended to affirm their relative independence from courtly
corruption, flattery, and servitude. This festive, Florentine Parnassus dating
from 1610 was similar to the version that emerges amid the Medicean gardens
of Pratolino, or the “Apollo’s fountain” imagined by Giambattista Marino in
the gardens of Venus in Adonis (1623), in his kingdom on the island of Cythera.
But this philosophical contrast between Boccalini’s rather stoic and “republi-
can” Parnassus and courtly versions should not be exaggerated. In all their in-
carnations, the Parnassus allegory as the Platonic origin of the academy and the
Arcadia allegory share a philosophical substrate: the ideal, defined by Petrarch
from the start, of the man of letter’s otium studiosum, which could be reori-
ented in various ways at the court of Urbino, according to Castiglione, at the
court of Florence (where it should be noted that Galileo was able to pursue his
research in peace in 1610), and above all in “free Venice,” according to Aretino
and Boccalini. Parnassus, Arcadia, Academia—dreams, figures of thought, ideal
societies—outlined and defended the fundamental frameworks that made the
bios theoretikos (contemplative life) of the man of letters possible, and distin-
guished it from ordinary modes of active life. They legitimized the disinterested
“way of life,” and favored the apparition of small societies suited to a shared
endeavor, in other words a Republic of Letters that united the academies and
allowed them to collaborate with each other. These beautiful fictions devoid of
sacred authority were no doubt insufficient to eliminate the tensions between
the literary otium and the negotia of politicians, warriors, and even administra-
tors of the state and the church. They concealed, much more than they erased,
the conflicts dividing men of letters and eventually splitting them between in-
compatible programs of research, as occurred in the seventeenth century when
the “new science” of Bacon and Descartes challenged the philological and eru-
dite tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, the persistence
of these fictional ideals throughout the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries
attests to their importance in Europe’s intellectual history.38 That importance
was tied notably to the principle of otium studiosum, which these allegories
maintained in the face of all forms of utilitarianism, commercialism, and fanati-
cism, as well as to what was staked on that principle: the studious leisure of the
man of letters could be an exemplary social model, a discipline that demanded

and encouraged friendship, goodwill, and the politeness and gentleness that
letters could extract from human nature so much better than could the im-
perious precepts of revealed morals and religion. Parnassus, Arcadia, and Aca-
demia, which in certain respects inherited elements of eremitism and solitary
meditation, offered in others a model of sociability that was particularly gay,
and whose contagious example and benefits could extent to political bodies,
whether they were monarchies or republics. That explains their presence, well
beyond the Italian courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as major
themes in official and public festivities or celebrations, the performances and
works of art they united, and even the iconography of the French Third Repub-
lic (1874–1940), during which they were celebrated a final time by a poet of the
Republic, Paul Valéry, author of L’Âme et la danse (Dance and the Soul, 1931),
and by its philosopher, Alain, author of Système des beaux-arts (System of the
Fine Arts, 1920) and Dieux (Gods, 1947).
12
MARSILIO FICINO’S DE TRIPLICI VITA:
A REGIMEN FOR THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS?
As I do not claim to be a specialist of Ficino and fifteenth-century Floren-

tine humanism, in this chapter I simply intend to propose a hypothesis for study
and reflection: Is there not a link between the notion of the “renaissance of
good letters” introduced by Petrarch in the fourteenth century, the notion of a
Republic of Letters introduced in the beginning of the fifteenth century within
Poggio Bracciolini’s network, and the guide to health, long life, and spiritual fer-
tility for men and women of letters published in 1489 by the philosopher and
doctor Marsilio Ficino, under the title De triplici vita? If so, the work’s reception
in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries would be intimately
linked to the history of the Republic of Letters and the fate of the Renaissance.
In the first pages of book 1 (On Caring for the Health of Those Who Devote
Themselves to Literary Studies), Ficino suggests that he is the first to address
the specific nosology of the studious.1 As observes A. Tarabochia Canavero in
the notes to her Italian translation, De triplici vita is in reality part of a quasi-
uninterrupted tradition, beginning with Petrarch, which also produced works
by doctors such as Antonio Guainerio da Pavia and Constantino Africano in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 However, the scale and ambition of
the three essays assembled in De vita, acknowledged and celebrated by Ficino
himself, fully justify the author’s claim. Furthermore, the work’s intended audi-
ence—the “priests of Minerva” themselves and the powerful humanist patrons
to whom Ficino dedicated each of his three books (Lorenzo de’ Medici, Philippe
Valori, and the king of Hungary Matthias Corvin)—manifestly formed a unit
to which Ficino himself belonged and to whom he made clear that they were
tasked with a great mission and responsibility. So De vita was not a medical regi-
men applied to the needs of a broad social category, in the vein of—as Aristotle,
Plato, and Galen might have offered—a guide for family men and another for
preceptors. Instead, the poem (prose-poem?3) in book 1, addressed to Lorenzo,
links a renewed and quasi-sacred form of medicine to the Bacchic mysteries.
Its objective was to maintain the “priests of Minerva,” viewed by Ficino as the
humanists of today and tomorrow, in long-lasting vibrant health. This “Ficinian”
191
medicine, though built on tradition, appears to be the response to a precise

historical content, which assigned a fortuitous and essential task to Ficino,
Lorenzo and Cosimo de’ Medici, and the men of letters within their circle.
In the background of De triplici vita, the reader can sense Ficino’s keen
awareness, both astronomical and historical, of his era and the “revolution” (in
the technical connotation this term had in astronomy) to which it bore witness.
That astro-historical awareness of time (if I can call it that) was accompanied
by an intense concern for the men tasked with carrying out said “revolution.”
Here, Ficino was not thinking of the clergy in general, and indiscriminately,
but rather of the “priests of Minerva” and their patrons, the supreme agents of
the recent renaissance of “good letters” and citizens of the new humanist Re-
public of Letters.
I had the opportunity to hear the great humanism historian Hannah Gray
speak in Philadelphia, where she expressed her regret that the concept of Re-
naissance had been replaced, over the last thirty years, by the strictly chrono-
logical category “Early Modern.” This neutral and scientific category reflects a
standardized, mechanized, and linear conception of historical time. At the very
moment when research by figures such as Garin, Walker, and Yates was reveal-
ing humanists’ astrological speculations, the Early Modern category adopted
by historians was erasing the conception of cosmological time that had domi-
nated since antiquity and from which the specificity of the “revolution,” and the
astronomical and historical “Renaissance” consciously initiated by the human-
ists, drew its meaning. By creatively borrowing from Plotinus, the third book of
De triplici vita undoubtedly offers the most explicit account of the profound
legitimacy of the concept of Renaissance: a simultaneous return to the astro-
historical circumstances that gave rise to the genius of antiquity and the fer-
vent beginning of a new cycle of the Christian era. Book 3 also taught the stu-
dious individuals consciously participating in this “revolution” how they could
and should obtain from the sky, and notably from the favorable convergence of
the Sun, Mercury, and Venus,4 the vital spiritual energy and life span that in-
spired and supported the historical task that came to them from the renovatio
temporum.
Incidentally, the past few years have fortunately seen the concept of a Re-
public of Letters, seemingly forgotten or devalued since the eighteenth century,
come back into historiographical favor. Like “Renaissance,” the concept of a
Republic of Letters was borrowed from its contemporaries; it reflects its mem-
bers’ self-awareness. I have therefore endeavored to bring it back into circula-
tion. Make no mistake, however. It is clear that the French expression “Répu-
blique des Lettres,” as used in 1789, for example, by countless revolutionary
Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita 193
publicists, does not have the same philosophical context or semantic content
that it may have had in Erasmus’s letters, which date from the beginning of
the sixteenth century, in its original Latin form: Respublica litteraria. But we
now know that Erasmus himself borrowed this Latin expression from the Ital-
ian humanists. The phrase emerged with the Renaissance, with which it was
intimately tied practically from the start. Respublica litteraria appeared for the
first time, as previously noted, in a letter written by a young Francesco Barbaro,
in Venice in 1417, to Poggio Bracciolini. The two correspondents belonged to
the generation of Florentine and Venetian humanists that immediately pre-
ceded Ficino’s. A student of Guarino Guarini, the Venetian Francesco Barbaro
had been adopted by the circle of humanists assembled in Florence around
Leonardo Bruni. In his 1417 letter, Barbaro congratulates Poggio Bracciolini
on his recent discovery of Latin manuscripts in the libraries of the convent, in
German-speaking Switzerland, which he visited with a Florentine delegation to
the Council of Constance, assembled to bring an end to the Great Schism. In
this elegant letter-eulogy, using highly classical metonymy, Barbaro identifies
the uncovered manuscripts—notably the complete text of Quintilian’s Insti-
tution oratoire—with their authors, clarissimi viri, quorum vita ad omnem me-
moriam sibi commendata esse debuit (the exceptional geniuses whose memory
should have been eternally precious), who were nonetheless relegated to the
sidelines for centuries by Teutonic barbarism. These grand Ancients, like those
who later endeavored to revive their works across Europe (namely Poggio), be-
longed to the same Respublica litteraria.5 Barbaro became the spokesman of
this community, which successfully bridged the Ancients and the humanists to
express its collective joy and gratitude toward Poggio. Thanks to his discoveries,
Poggio proved himself to be an eminent citizen of the respublica, whose dignity
and utility he served so well.6
In his letters, Poggio compares his discovery of forgotten classical master-
pieces to Aeneas’s saving act—reaching into the flames destroying Troy to save
the city’s Lares and Penates, which would allow him to establish a new Rome in
Latium. Both Poggio and Barbaro wrote of a return, a renaissance, a cycle start-
ing anew after a tragic interruption, in another time and another place. Thanks
to this “revolution,” the great and scorned figures from the dead would return
to take their places alongside the living who brought them back, in a single
community bent on pushing back barbarian darkness and ignorance. Barbaro
named this reconstructed community Respublica litteraria. It was the vector of
the European Renaissance and recognized itself as such.
In a slightly different form, in the 1450 dialogue entitled De politia litte-
raria,7 Angelo Decembrio clarifies the difference between the political city-
state, in the Aristotelian sense, and the politia litteraria, a conversatio governed
by urbanitas, whose object was to refine and polish minds. The conversation
takes place in the Estes’ library in Ferrara. Through manuscripts of classical
masterpieces, contemporary interlocutors communicate with great figures of
antiquity, to whom are granted new life, speech, and a generous presence.
Four decades later, only a few years after the publication of Ficino’s De vita
(1489), the formula Respublica litteraria reappeared in Venice in the pref-
aces and dedications published by Aldus Manutius in his editions of Greek
and Latin classics. Summarizing and multiplying, through print, the fruits of
a century of “manuscript chasing” and identifying texts, the ideal library cre-
ated by savants across Europe thanks to Aldus’s publishing house served as a
safeguard against any eventual patrimonial disaster, akin to the barbarian in-
vasions: once dispersed and multiplied, Europe’s intellectual legacy could no
longer disappear. Aldus’s collection thus provided the “literary republic,” which
reunited men of letters from different European nations with the Ancients,
with an unassailable “commonplace.” That “commonplace” was also the link
between the Renaissance and antiquity. It allowed the Renaissance to resume
the Ancients’ interrupted efforts and work with them to “polish” the nations of
barbarian Europe.
We know of Ficino’s close connections with Aldus,8 who published the Neo
platonic treatises by Proclus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Psellus in the Flor
entine philosopher’s Latin translation in 1497. Even though Aldus did not
continue the interrupted publication of Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Opera
Omnia, his edition of the Greek philosopher’s Complete Works (in the original
Greek), which was dedicated to Leo X in 1513,9 represented the peak of Plato’s
resurrection, a goal toward which fifteenth-century Florentine humanism had
been working for several generations, and for which Ficino had been the in-
spired spokesman. Writings by both Aldus and Ficino reveal a shared conviction
that a new era had begun, thanks to the rerooting of Christianity in an classi-
cal philosophy uncovered by philology. Ficino never used the expression Res-
publica litteraria, at least not to my knowledge, but in many respects the new
topicality that he himself conferred on the idea of the academy, adopted much
later by Aldus, provided the literary republic of humanists with an institutional
dimension and model that were then still lacking.
One can also reasonably think that the 1489 De vita may have been a “life
regimen” for this congregation of men of letters, whose established mission was
to revive Christian Europe’s links with the philosophy, science, letters, and arts
of antiquity (in other words with the nine Muses), that rendered them, if I dare
say, operational. The mental effort required by the new “priests of Minerva”
to carry out their herculean task threatened to prematurely physically exhaust
them and jeopardize their shared mission. The “life regimen” Ficino prescribed
for these men was intended primarily to preserve their health; secondly, to pro-
long their lives, as great mental endeavors require long and numerous years to
mature; and finally, to protect these studious men, saturnine by nature, from
the potentially harmful effects of Saturn, and to enable them to fully receive
the beneficial effects of the most favorable astral convergence, described by
Ficino in the beginning of book 1: the alliance of Phoebus-Apollo, Mercury,
and Venus.
The lifestyle Ficino recommended for the new “priests of Minerva” was dic-
tated by an understanding of medicine that incorporated the relationships be-
tween microcosm and macrocosm. The lifestyles of lettered men predisposed
them, according to Ficino, to an excess of phlegm and black bile,10 which made
them worried, sad, and infertile and could violently disrupt the judgment of
the brain, “the fortress of Pallas.” And the meditative concentration and relative
sedentariness of such men drove them toward an overly narrow alliance of Mer-
cury and Saturn,11 causing an excess of cold and dry humors. It was therefore
necessary to compensate for that excess with heat, which restored light to the
brain, but without succumbing to another, no-less-dangerous excess, which was
the violence of fire. One had to recreate and maintain moderation and regular
balance—crase—between these humors.
Ficino therefore recommends a chaste life, or at least one spared sexual ex-
cesses12 that drain the blood and place too much importance on the carnal sense
of touch, an obstacle to intelligence. The beneficial influence of Venus should
emerge through the imagination and the representation of celestial Aphrodite
rather than through the senses of the terrestrial Aphrodite. Ficino also advises
his readers to avoid all satiety in wine and food, which provokes dense humors,
ruining abstract thought and blunting acuity of judgment.
Ficino advises against staying up late13 and for beginning work at sunrise,14
because at nighttime the convergence of the Sun, Mercury, and Venus is neu-
tralized, the air is thicker, and the imagination more troubled. He suggests
living in elevated areas, far from heavy and humid air, and adopting a light and
regular diet, in which cold foods are flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron,
ginger and sandalwood.15 He recommends breaking fasts with pomegranates
and oranges, and inhaling different scents: an excess of warm humor can be cor-
rected by the smell of roses, violets, myrtle, camphor, and sandalwood, and the
reverse by the smell of cinnamon, citron, orange, clove, mint, melissa, saffron,
crocus, aloewood, amber, and musk.16 The symphony of smells composed by
Lorenzo Magalotti in a text of baroque daring famous in the seventeenth cen-
tury was a belated, albeit very faithful, expansion of the doctor Ficino’s orders.
The sound of musical instruments and the human voice17 can clearly have
a tempering effect on a disorder of humors, as Ficino himself knew from ex-

perience. For that matter, the doctor-philosopher advises his readers to gaze fre-
quently at flat, shining water,18 as well as the colors green and red, to frequent
gardens and woods, and to take regular, peaceful walks along rivers or in fields of
flowers. Travel by calm trains, by horse, or by boat on fresh water are other bene-
ficial activities. Above all, advises Ficino, one should vary one’s occupations and
affairs, avoiding fatigue and boredom, and while seeking out the company of
civilized people.
The seminal reach of Ficino’s pages cannot be exaggerated. It is surprising
that Montaigne’s exegetes did not look to De triplici vita for one of the most illu-
minating keys available to unlocking and understanding his Essays.19 Ficino’s
work met with enormous success in France beginning in 1494. Guy Le Fèvre de
La Boderie provided a magnificent translation of De triplici vita during Mon-
taigne’s lifetime, in 1582, including book 3, which was strongly suspected of
astrological paganism. For Montaigne, and later Descartes, health was the pre-
requisite for all wisdom. In order to follow a course of treatment meant to cure
his own melancholy,20 and independently shake off a furious period dominated
by the harmful convergence of Mars and Saturn, Montaigne forced himself to
compensate for studious concentration in his library with walks or horseback
rides outside, small trips in good company, a diet built around wine and small
meals, and a veritable science of variety and distraction in his activities and
readings. The chapter “Sur des vers de Virgile” (Upon Some Verse of Virgil), in
book 3 of Essays, is an admirable exercise in “warming” those humors cooled
by age through vibrant images of Venus evoked by classical poets.21 The prin-
cipal tenets of medicine that Ficino recommended to nonclerical men of let-
ters found a quasi-experimental extension in Montaigne. Essays persuaded the
average “honest man” of France’s “Great Century” to adopt the sage lifestyle
proposed in the first two books of De triplici vita. Incidentally, Ficino and Mon-
taigne would be succeeded by stars of the Republic of Letters as different as
Peiresc and Poussin.
In the Life of Peiresc written by Gassendi after his friend’s death, and pub-
lished in 1641, the biographer concludes with a portrait of the lifestyle adopted
by the great Provençal leader of the European Republic of Letters, following
the model set by the Italian Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, his predecessor in the role.
Peiresc’s calling “to Pallas and the Muses” had manifested very early on. In order
to effectively carry out his all-consuming encyclopedic activities (research, cor-
respondence, and international coordination), the frail and sickly Peiresc was
forced to adopt a regime of compensations and distractions seemingly inspired
by Ficino’s principles. He alternated between city and countryside, between
his residence in Aix-en-Provence and his Belgentier country home, following

the rhythm of the seasons. He lived as chastely as a monk, and incidentally, like
Ficino and his friend Gassendi, eventually embraced the priesthood. Although
he often worked and wrote alone in his library and his cabinet of curiosities, Pei-
resc was very hospitable and received many visitors, with whom he enjoyed the
most varied and lively of conversations. He was too busy to be able to follow the
ideal schedule recommended by Ficino and instead worked late into the night.
However, he took great pleasure from painting and painters and found enor-
mous relaxation in the joys of a collector. He went on regular outdoor walks in
friendly company: “He gladly chose small valleys, shaded spots where one could
advance without constraint, and in full enjoyment of the view and sounds.”22
In his garden in Belgentier, near Hyères, he planted robust plants, flowerbeds,
and lemon trees; the grounds included a pretty canal and a large fountain. He
got along well with dogs and then with cats. He preferred birdsong to instru-
mental music and the human voice, as he found the former less troubling and
more enchanting.23
We can just as easily show, using Félibien’s Vie de Poussin (Life of Poussin),
how the exceptionally literary painter, who was well integrated into the Re-
public of Letters, maintained a lifestyle in Rome that was both balanced and
enlivened by outdoor strolls and conversation according to Ficinian guidelines.
We can also reasonably consider the genre of painted landscapes invented by
Poussin, which he painted more and more frequently as he grew older, as exer-
cises in internal temperance.
Thanks to their lifestyles, Montaigne and Poussin died much later than was
average in their day, and one can rather easily, in my opinion, argue that this was
also the case for most leading men of letters. If Peiresc died at a relatively young
age, it was because he was sickly from birth. The fact that he lived until forty-
seven, suggests his biographer, should be viewed as a kind of miracle. Ficino
focused on the long life expectancy desirable for savants in book 2 of De triplici
vita. How can one maintain, he asks, the flame of life that feeds off the oil of
Minerva’s olive tree?24 Nothing is more beneficial, starting in childhood, than
good nutrition and an informed choice in food; in adulthood, a life alternating
between city and countryside; and in old age, reliance on aromas, tonics, and
contact with gold, “the most temperate thing of them all, the least scathed by
corruption, and the closest to the sun.” One must therefore carefully choose
one’s place of residence and diet, and breathe in the appropriate smells.
Again in book 2, Ficino suggests that anything that can expose aging savants
to the beneficial influence of the most vital celestial bodies (Apollo, Mercury,
and Venus) will increase their life expectancy. In book 3, by far the most anno-
tated of the three, and which presents itself as a commentary on a passage from
Plotinus’s Enneads,25 he ponders the ways to obtain health and life from the
stars. By this time, astrology had become a science, though one viewed with sus-
picion as it threatened to cast doubt on the all-powerfulness of God and human
liberty. Ficino therefore tiptoes around the subject, repeating orthodox protests
and hiding behind the authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Nonetheless, he en-
countered serious problems with ecclesiastical authorities. During the sixteenth
century, the church’s suspicions were reinforced by the early successes of the
celestial science practiced by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. It is noteworthy
that neither Montaigne nor Peiresc ever refers directly to astrology. Whereas
all of Ficino’s practical advice in the beginning of De vita is already based, im-
plicitly, on a system of relationships between the sky and the earth, and between
terrestrial traits and characteristics, beneficial or harmful, and their celestial
foundations, book 3, with its astrological white magic, is the true key to under-
standing the first two.
According to Ficino, the art to maintaining a savant’s health depends on an
astrological “know thyself,” which makes each individual his own best doctor
to treat his unique temperamental and astrological profile. One’s horoscope at
birth, an indicator of an individual’s particular talents and the celestial bodies
on which he depends, is the best possible guide to the art of leading a good life
in accordance with nature. There are felicitous births and others that are diffi-
cult to correct, like that of Ficino himself. Here again, and perhaps more than
ever before, we are getting closer to Montaigne, so confident in his own “beau-
tiful birth,” and easily disposed to listen to nature in order to fully benefit from
the favorable orientation which he was granted and which he welcomed as a
blessing. However Montaigne is careful not to reveal the cosmological backdrop
of his thinking in his word choice.
Several passages in book 3 demonstrate Ficino’s familiarity with alchemy,
another suspicious science which he does not name explicitly, but which, until
the seventeenth century, was regarded as a science of metallic transmutations
linked to the revolutions of the celestial universe.26 Nothing could be more
favorable to health and to the clever exercise of the mind than to match the
various aspects of physical life to the corresponding aspects of the celestial life
of the Anima mundi. One can, writes Ficino, become jovial and “solar” if one
knows to imbibe, at the propitious moment of celestial movements, the rays of
Jupiter and the Sun by which the Anima mundi magnanimously shows itself to
us. The three Graces, which govern that which is the happiest and most natu-
ral that earthly life has to offer, are the figures of Jupiter, the Sun, and Venus,
whose convergence creates the most tempered celestial virtue that can benefit
from the natural, vital, and animal virtue that nourishes us on earth. To “cap-
ture the virtue of a star,” nothing is more effective than its corresponding hard
stone or metal on earth, in particular when it is engraved with a mathematical
figure or suitable image, conceived according to astrologists’ rules: stones and
metals thus become powerful talismans. Correctly chosen smells and flowers
can have a similar effect. Walking in elevated places allows us to breathe in
cosmic movement and vigor. In book 3, therapy by smells, savors, colors, and
voices is explicitly linked to its astrological foundation. Works of art themselves,
namely images, draw occult properties from the sky, as if from nature, and can
have a powerful influence on the health and life of the mind. This corresponds
perfectly to the role played by painting and painters in Peiresc’s lifestyle and to
the function served by images in Poussin’s thinking and that of collectors of his
paintings. All these different beneficial mediations between the sky and us have
their place in a well-moderated style of living:
Mutare locum quamvis semper cum delectu praecepi; quoniam bona

coelestium et universae naturae apud nos sunt rebus locisque aliis pas-
sim atque aliis distributa quibus denique omnibus est fruendum. (I have
advised changing your place—though always by your own choice—
because the good things of the heavens and of all nature are distributed
among us widely in this or that thing or place; and all of them indeed
should be enjoyed.27
The object of this therapy of variety was certainly one of the raisons d’être
of the Wunderkammer (rooms of wonders) of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries: it aimed to “render the mind Solar,” meaning luminous, serene, and
long-lasting, through a perfect dose of opposing qualities. That harmony ob-
tained from the sky kept the mind in the body and kept it healthy.
However, Ficino’s thinking does not acknowledge contradiction. Though
one might understand that everything should be done to avoid the influence of
Saturn, and favor the “solarity” of the mind, the doctor-philosopher reminds his
studious audience not to naïvely rush to the assumption that we can do without
Saturn; rather, one should recognize that nothing could be more desirable than
obtaining its favors. It is the highest planet and governs the largest sphere and,
despite its limited convergence with Jupiter, tempers it. The poisonous influ-
ence that this celestial body can deploy can just as easily become highly benefi-
cial, at least for the most authentically contemplative savants who do not refuse
to live dangerously via the mind.
There is a striking convergence in Ficino’s sublime book 3 between therapy
and aesthetics, and science and wisdom, whose modern disappearance haunts a
recent essay by Rémi Brague, entitled La Sagesse du monde.28 The lifestyle that
Ficino recommended to men of letters in 1489 reverberated in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, either by its direct dissemination or the far-flung
influence of literary, artistic, and musical works that spread his lessons well be-
yond the limits of the Republic of Letters.
The impact of De triplici vita remained fully visible in the eighteenth-century
arts and art of living, even though the classic cosmology on which Ficino had
based his therapeutic recommendations had given way to the mechanics and
rationalism of scientific modernity. It is precisely this contradiction that gives a
figure like Voltaire in Ferney or the literary Europe of the ancien régime their
retrospective charm. In France, when the Republic of Letters wanted to bestow
the new sciences with practices of joy inherited from a vision of the world whose
meaning and credibility had been lost, it would be dragged alongside the an-
cien régime as it fell.
13
VENICE AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
If I were to be faithful to this chapter’s title, I would be displaying quite

the excess of ambition. Even if I dealt with the announced subject matter in
hypothetical terms, while narrowing its chronological field to the “autumn of
the Renaissance,” I would still be forced to situate Venice in the center of a Re-
public of Letters that I would be assuming to be defined, known, studied, and
familiar. But, as we know, that is not the case. The very notion of the Republic
of Letters, despite its well-proven usage during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, has yet to attract the favor of either historical research broadly speak-
ing or the historiography of ideas. That said, in the past few years, under the in-
fluence of Paul Dibon and Tullio Gregory, as I have shown, the term has been
used here and there in scholarly literature, though primarily to designate the
European community of learned men in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. But the concept’s semantic history remains to be established, a task that
would necessitate going back to the origins of the Renaissance in the Floren-
tine fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I am venturing onto shaky ground in
two senses when, in my title, I dare to evoke both “sixteenth-century Venice,”
a vast phenomenon whose full extent has only begun to be revealed, thanks to
the impressive research of the past several decades, conducted notably at the
Cini Foundation, and a “Republic of Letters” whose exact meaning and histori-
cal status remain obscured. I will therefore feel my way along, an explorer of a
topic whose future relevance strikes me as inevitable, and try not to stray too far
from all that is well established and incontestable.
Since I cannot explore it at length here, sixteenth-century literary Venice
can, I believe, be characterized by two particularly distinctive individuals. The
first is Daniele Barbaro,1 whose magnificent portrait painted by his friend Vero-
nese dates to 1569, shortly before the model’s death. This figure (who, though
nonreligious, was the “named” Patriarch of Aquileia, a post he never held) ably
symbolizes the Venetian continuity of the sixteenth century and the superior
“serenity” of a republican aristocracy that knew to protect the Venetian terri-
tory from the Italian and European tragedy of that same century. In Venice, the
201
tribulations and disasters that had in turn torn apart the Platonic Academy of
Florence and Leo X’s Roman Academy (the French invasion of 1494 and the
sack of Rome in 1527) were observed from afar, as if from the top of a Lucretian
cliff: Suave mari magno. A half-century later, the same spiritual gentleness that
Raphael had attributed to his friend Castiglione was granted to Daniele Bar-
baro, giving him a youthful appearance in Veronese’s painting, with the follow-
ing difference: the elegant Castiglione, in his portrait at the Louvre, is engaged
in pure contemplation, whereas Veronese depicts Barbaro at work, in his studio,
wearing an ecclesiastical surplice, like Saint Jerome, before the manuscript of
his two most recent works: a translation of Dieci libri di architettura by Vitru-
vius, and his own Practica della prospettiva. But this seeming difference in fact
links Barbaro and Veronese’s universe even more closely to that of Raphael and
Castiglione. The two works depicted in Barbaro’s portrait are an extension of
the readings and preoccupations of the Roman Academy at the beginning of
the century. For that matter, they are also connected to a masterpiece that built
upon the works of Raphael and Sangallo, which was conceived of by Barbaro
in close collaboration with Veronese and Palladio between 1555 and 1569: the
Villa Maser.2 This villa was in reality an academia, in the sense which had been
applied by Cicero to his own countryside homes and revived by Poggio Brac-
ciolini at the beginning of the fifteenth century: an ideal retreat for the otium
litteratum, for scholarly, studious, and encyclopedic contemplation, in dialogue
with the Ancients.
As a young man in Padua, Daniele Barbaro had written a dialogue, Delle
Eloquenza, that would be published in 1557 by Giacomo Ruscelli.3 A reflec-
tion on rhetoric emerges from this debate on art, the soul, and nature, which
is very similar to later musings by Sperone Speroni, a cofounder with Barbaro
of the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua: Paduan Aristotelianism was seek-
ing conciliation with Florentine Platonism. This work was therefore already an
academic-t ype synthesis, in the Ciceronian sense, which simultaneously evoked
the Rome of Julius II and Leo X, the eloquence of Raphael’s Stanze, and in par-
ticular The School of Athens. In Delle Eloquenza, the Soul elevates Nature, in
the Aristotelian sense, to the perfection of Forms, in the sense of Platonic Ideas,
and through this effort of speech raises itself to contemplation of the earthly
and celestial harmony that governs the universe. Eloquence, the vocation of the
artist’s soul, is the soul’s medium and mediator of an asceticism of understand-
ing and moral purification. The continuity between this youthful text and Bar-
baro’s later masterpiece, the Villa Maser, is evident, as is fidelity to the ideals of
the High Renaissance. In the intervening period, Barbaro dedicated himself to
scientific works, once again in the Aristotelian-Platonic sense, and philological
Venice and the Republic of Letters 203
research, for example, uncovering manuscripts by his uncle Ermolao, a friend

of Politian and Pic de la Mirandole. At the Villa Maser, an architectonic, Vit-
ruvian, and Palladian eurhythmy created a Stimmung (in the Spitzerian sense)
that owed much to Plato and Pythagoras: the architecture molded the space
according to pure and perfect forms, the ultimate object of the sage’s contem-
plation. But the plays on illusion, perspective, and color introduced by Vero-
nese’s frescoes fostered indispensable meditations between the contemplated
world and the observed world, between the unique and intelligible order of the
Idea and the multiplicity of the perceptible, between metaphysics and natural
philosophy. These stages, from Nature to Idea, revealed the possible scope of
eloquence (which was a close cousin, in Barbaro’s writing, to Ficino’s “poetic
theology”), in other words, the entire range of philosophical experience. The
allegories and trompe l’oeil portraits painted by Veronese, set at varying eye
levels, associated the life of the mind with its familial roots (an Albertian proj-
ect) and literary friendship (also an academic program). In an oft-cited letter
from Giulia da Ponte to Barbaro dated 1559,4 the latter congratulates her cor-
respondent for having built a nuovo Parnaso complete with a bella e divina
fountain: the Hippocrene where poets must drink before receiving inspiration
from Apollo and the Muses. Faithful to The School of Athens, Villa Maser was
equally loyal to Raphael’s majestic Vatican fresco: Parnassus, the ultimate aca-
demic myth, wherein poetic contemplation is depicted as the offspring of the
encyclopedic and harmonic science of the nine Muses. In the “Crociera” of
Villa Maser, Veronese painted eight musician Muses, and, in the dell’Olimpo
room, the ninth Muse, Thalia, who, identified with Divine Wisdom, reigns over
the cosmic allegories of the seasons, the stages of life, and the gods governing
celestial and earthly cycles. In Venice, Francesco di Giorgio, diligently continu-
ing the research begun by Marsilio Ficino, had published his Harmonia mundi
in 1525, similar in so many ways to the project of harmonious science and wis-
dom undertaken at Villa Maser.
As the spiritual successor to his uncle Ermolao, as well as a former student
of the Padua studio, an “Aristotelian,” Daniele Barbaro was no less invested in
the Platonizing humanism of Florence and the spirit of reason of the High
Roman Renaissance. In his villa-academy, the recurring allegory of Parnassus
simultaneously represented the harmony of the Platonic-Pythagorean world
and the convergence of methods to understand and contemplate it: Aristotle’s
science and Plato’s metaphysics, philosophy and poetry, but also the arts, paint-
ing, music, and architecture. Better than any definitions, this encyclopedic pro-
gram rendered the ambition of sixteenth-century academies visible and tan-
gible, as well as that of the “Republic of Letters,” which united academies even
more than it did individuals: it was within the collaboration between “men of
letters,” in their shared “conversation” beyond time and space, that the “har-
monious” truth of man and the world had to be sought out and studied. Villa
Maser, a product of collaboration, and the result of several generations of “re-
searchers,” should be analyzed as a temple built by a citizen of this savant Re-
public for his ideal homeland.
Before further elaborating on that idea, however, I would like to mention
another figure, from a later generation, who died in 1601, along with the six-
teenth century: Gian Vincenzo Pinelli was a citizen of Genoa born in Naples,
who settled in Padua in 1558. We know of him thanks to the strikingly beautiful
Vita Pinelli published in 1607 by his friend Paolo Gualdo5 and the eulogy dedi-
cated to him by Jacques-Auguste de Thou in his Historia sui temporis.6 Pinelli’s
career as a “savant” in Padua began roughly at the same time that Daniele Bar-
baro’s ended. Barbaro died before he could see the outcome of the Council of
Trent; Pinelli, on the other hand, witnessed victorious Tridentinism firsthand.
In his Historia (whose Gallican and anti-Trent stance is well known), De Thou
praises Vincenzo Pinelli as a second Pomponius Atticus, a friend of Cicero’s who
was epicurean enough to remain on the margins of the political battles of the
Forum. Far from reproaching that impartiality in Pinelli, De Thou considers it
to be the quality that allowed him to exercise a universal literary magistracy (toto
orbe christiana) from the territory of the Serene Republic. As for Paolo Gualdi,
in his Vita, which often necessitates reading between the lines, he emphasizes
Pinelli’s mission, following his encyclopedic studies, in the exclusive service of
the Republic of Letters, and hints at the diplomatic dexterity he no doubt de-
ployed where he was best able to do so, in other words, the Venetian territory,
in order to keep exchanges between Tridentine Italy and Protestant northern
Europe alive and fertile, and to make his Padua home the center of a network
of European correspondence and collaboration: Patavii animorum Prytaneum,
Bibliotheca ingeniorum, Musaeum doctrinæ et eruditionis (Padua, Prytaneion
of minds, library of intelligences, museum of science and erudition).7 Within
this state of complete independence, Pinelli was able to acquire universal in-
fluence (thus transcending the boundaries between Tridentine Europe and
reformed Europe): he was the last Italian prince of the Republic of Letters,
Bembo’s successor in a much more difficult era. His high standing did not come,
writes Gualdo, from his works, but from his person and his home. He became a
master in the art of conversation that was simultaneously brilliant and scholarly,
a result of his continuing practice of extemporalis action (improvised apologia).
It was thanks primarily to this contagious eloquence that Pinelli attracted such
a diverse and at times seemingly incompatible group of friends. This interna-
tional elite of chosen friends, whom he named aurei homines (golden men),
saw in him a vir natus ad Litterariæ Rei publicæ commode (a man born for the
growth of the Republic of Letters).8 They faithfully sent him the best books pub-
lished throughout Europe and regular letters through which he was informed
of everything important happening in politics and literature alike. Pinelli was
himself a diligent and methodical correspondent, meticulously exacting and
always ready to perform the duties demanded of him. In three decades, his
library (which ignored the prohibitions of the Congregation of the Index) be-
came “one of the best in Europe,” due equally to the encyclopedic scope of its
content and the choice of editions and models, and the ecumenism of printing
locations. His scientific study, with its celestial spheres, terrestrial globes, geo-
graphical and hydrographical maps, etchings of ancient monuments, optical
instruments, natural history collections, and medals and currencies, offered his
visitors a veritable theatrum naturæ et humanitatis, which provoked a curiosi-
tas scrutandi within them.9 He had assembled a collection of unpublished nar-
ratives and descriptions, and handwritten texts; these archives were arranged
in chronological order. With its collection of musical instruments and its her-
barium, this museum encapsulated the encyclopedia of the sixteenth century,
prefiguring the one that would be assembled by Pinelli’s spiritual successor,
Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, in his Aix-en-Provence residence. This savant, or man
of letters (the two titles in this case being interchangeable), monitored every de-
bate that shook Europe’s savants, and was chosen by the protagonists as media-
tor. The network Gian Vincenzo Pinelli assembled around him, again according
to Paolo Gualdo, excluded pedants; it was governed by the charm of an urbanity
and humanity that provided insight into other people and was capable of a deli-
cate balance of pleasant and serious. Within this elite society, Pinelli appeared
as a “divine and unpredictable Proteus.” His physiognomic expertise allowed
him to determine the inclinations of unknown persons according to their fea-
tures. He also earned the description of the “father of elegance,” due to the re-
serve he applied to all aspects of life.
Friends with Sperone Speroni, and a correspondent of Justus Lipsius and
Jacques Corbinelli (in other words, the elite of European humanism), Pinelli
was also on excellent terms with the Jesuits, to whom he dreamt of leaving his
library. Like Pinelli, Peiresc in Aix, the Dupuy brothers in Paris, and Cassiano
Dal Pozzo in Rome would transform their own libraries in subsequent decades
into meeting sites of lettered sociability between all savants, whether they were
Jesuits or Calvinists, Gallicans like themselves, or erudite libertines. Equipped
with a consummate sense of diplomacy, Pinelli assumed a “spiritual power”
of letters in Padua, more ecumenical than that of any church after the Refor-
mation or Trent. He died before the eruption of the “quarrel of the Interdict,”
whose true stakes revolved around the relative extraterritoriality that the Vene-
tian Republic had managed to preserve on the margins of the Tridentine order
that governed the rest of the Italian peninsula. It was at Gian Vincenzo Pinelli’s
home that Galileo and Paolo Sarpi would meet. With them would come the
end of the “autumn of the Renaissance” that had persisted for a considerably
long time in both Venice and Padua. Galileo’s “new science,” which Pinelli had
been able to encourage at its beginnings, was condemned in 1633. And the quar-
rel over the Interdict placed by Rome on the Republic of Venice, which forced
Paolo Sarpi to dangerously steer it to the side of the Reformation, ultimately
weakened the quasi-irenicism in which the secular state had been able to exist
and which had enabled, within its borders, the European standing of someone
like Pinelli. After his death, the center of the Republic of Letters moved inexo-
rably toward northern Europe. Nothing is more symbolic in this respect than
the scene described by Gualdo in his Vita, which shows a dying Pinelli desig-
nating a Frenchman from Provence, Peiresc, to be his successor as leader of the
Respublica litteraria.10
The two figures on which I have focused, Daniele Barbaro and Pinelli, one
serene and contemplative, the other active and cautious, strike me as character-
istic of Venice, a refuge of publishing freedom and religious tolerance after the
death of Aldus Manutius, who, through his editions and prefaces, was the first to
recognize and publicize across Europe that city’s role.11 Both were noble-born,
both secular humanists, both “academicians” in the Ciceronian sense, reconcil-
ing Plato and Aristotle, both “citizens of the world” in the Stoic sense, above and
uninvolved with political and theological quarrels. Like Bembo, Aldus’s friend
and collaborator, they saw Venice as the “Switzerland” of a divided Europe,
where it was possible to live “philosophically” in harmony with the Roman
Church but shielded from Roman politics. Earlier I quoted Jacques Auguste
de Thou. Like all the leading French humanists, from Montaigne to Peiresc, he
viewed Barbaro and Pinelli’s Venice as the parcel of Italy that had preserved the
tradition of letters inaugurated by Petrarch, the second homeland of all human-
ists. The Gallican De Thou supported Sarpi as the thinker and man of action
who had attempted to transform Venice’s unique status from de facto to law, by
definitively and officially ripping it from the abusive power of the papacy, even
at the cost of an Anglican-like schism. But it was precisely that de facto situation
and its invaluable ambiguity that had made Venice so strong and attractive up
until then. By issuing the Interdict and forcing Sarpi to theorize Venice’s unique
case, Pope Paul V achieved what he really wanted: forcing Venice to choose.
Ultimately, however, the republic, after much resistance and hesitation, did not
take the plunge. Within this debate, one expression, already employed by Aldus
Manutius, and frequent in Gualdo’s Vita, played an important role: Respublica
litteraria. How should we understand it in this context?
The expression is all the more noteworthy, as it owes its Latin name and
initial conception to a Venetian: Francesco Barbaro. Respublica litteraria12 ap-
pears for the first time in a letter from the young nobleman, a student of Gaspa-
rino Barzizza and Guarino da Verona, addressed in 1417 to Poggio Bracciolini,
at nearly the same time that the Ciceronian word academia reappeared in let-
ters written by Bracciolini himself. But Respublica litteraria is not of Cicero-
nian origin. A variation of the medieval Respublica christiana, it represents the
earliest awareness within the community of humanists that letters also united
Christianity, and that this spiritual power of unification was as brilliant and con-
tagious as university theology and Rome’s universal mission were in their own
way.13 According to Francesco Barbaro, in his letter to Poggio, letters constituted
a “common good” that linked all who served them and who assembled them
into a city-state. Events at the time Barbaro was writing, namely the Council of
Constance, which was striving to bring an end to the Great Western Schism,
give his words a particularly dramatic backdrop. At the same time, the status of
the Respublica christiana was the object of animated ecclesiological quarrels,
pitting “conciliarist” theses against those of pontifical jurists.14 It is unlikely that
Petrarchist Italian humanism had a decisive and unanimous stance on this “con-
stitutional” problem. On the one hand, it is tempting to think that the right to
be involved in the affairs of the church via a universal council, claimed by the
“conciliarists” for the clerical and nonclerical congregatio fidelium, was aligned
with the emancipation of laymen to which the studia humanitas was contrib-
uting. But on the other hand, it is clear that the papal curia, beginning under
Antipope John XXIII (deposed in 1415 by the Council of Constance), exerted a
strong attraction on the humanists, who, under Pius II, Nicholas V, Julius II, and
Leo X, would contribute to the Roman Renaissance, populate the Sacred Col-
lege, and even reach the throne of Saint Peter on multiple occasions. The “uni-
versal council” of letters could therefore ally itself with the papal seat (another
fundamental element of the unity of the Respublica christiana), or even stand
in for it when the papal authority was no longer recognizable or recognized
(as was the case following the Reformation, Trent, and in particular the Great
Schism). This “supplement of the soul” of Christian Europe was already visible
in the Signature Room, painted by Raphael on Julius II’s orders, as a precursor
to the Lateran Council, which he convened in 1511.15 The traditional principles
of unity of the Respublica Christiania are represented on three of the room’s
walls: theology (Disputa), philosophy (The School of Athens), and canon law
(The Delivery of the Decretals to Pope Gregory IX), the major disciplines of
medieval universities and historic sources of papal authority. However, on the
fourth wall, Raphael portrayed Parnassus, the Academy of Poets, and with it, the
new principle of “letters” as it had appeared beginning with Petrarch. Viewed in
the Lateran context, Raphael’s Parnassus is also a metaphor for Julius II, patron
of humanism and owner of the Apollo Belvedere, who in 1512 did not hesitate
to himself play the role of Apollo crowning poets and orators.16 The principle of
“letters” depicted in Raphael’s composition dovetails with the other three per-
fectly, supporting through its “modernity” the theological, philosophical, and
legal edifice of the medieval church. When that edifice was shaken, and its tradi-
tional tenets rejected by a portion of the Respublica christiana, Parnassus, “let-
ters,” and the academy became the last “common good” that could be shared
by the scattered fragments of Christianity. The Respublica litteraria then took
on the guise of a “universal council” for all Christians, which existed beyond
the divisions between churches and nations. In the fifteenth century, the term
Respublica litteraria, invented by a Venetian for use by Italian humanists, had
not yet developed its full potential. It was an idealized city-state that, during the
division of the church and of Italy, rallied men of letters to rise above the rifts of
the time. The Respublica litteraria was merely one more network among those
that formed the ideally intact architecture of the Respublica christiana. Already,
in Erasmus’s day, the Respublica litteraria was beginning to present itself as the
true Respublica christiana, with which the traditional church was invited to
identify. After Luther, and after the Council of Trent, the Respublica litteraria
truly became the last shared motherland of Christians divided between rival
churches and rival nations. It therefore excluded theological disputes and the
ecclesiastical science of canon law from its “conversation.” All while striving to
preserve its blend of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, the Republic adopted
the vast field of letters, philology, history, eloquence, poetry, and natural phi-
losophy as its own; the innovations that posed the greatest threat to the Catho-
lic edifice restored by the Council of Trent would emerge from that collective
domain. It was after having glimpsed a potential rival in the Republic of Let-
ters that the Holy See, beginning with Paul III Farnese, so ardently favored the
emergence of a lettered order, the Society of Jesus, which would create an organ
to rival the Republic of Letters within the Roman Church, a point of reference
and unity for Catholic letters: a lettered order, meaning an order that adopted
the entire domain of “letters” (epitomized by Raphael’s Parnassus) but made
it subordinate to Tridentine theology, canon law, and the Thomist alliance of
Plato and Aristotle, but also a network of clerical academies, linked by a “special
vow” to the Holy See, and primed to reconquer the ground occupied by a Re-
public of Letters shared by Catholic Europe and Protestant Europe.17 In reality,

the Society of Jesus, a Tridentine and ecclesiastical Republic of Letters, could
not escape the temptation to act as tutor and teacher to the Holy See. Its Galli-
can, Baianist, and Jansenist enemies were quick to denounce this church within
the church as contaminated by humanist innovations that bordered on heresy.
In contrast, the interreligious, Erasmian, Gallican, Anglican, Calvinist, and lib-
ertine Republic of Letters viewed the Society of Jesus as a Trojan horse sent by
the Holy See to overturn it within the Tridentine camp. But the fact remains
that, beginning in the sixteenth century, Jesuit colleges and “professed houses”
cultivated the same subjects as humanist academies and fostered the same con-
vergence of arts, all while subordinating them to the theology and Platonic-
Aristotelian philosophy acceptable to Tridentine orthodoxy. The greatest savants
of these Jesuit “academies” frequented the academies of the Republic of Letters,
at least those that prospered in Catholic states, and direct dialogue between the
two types of academies continued in Venice until Pinelli’s death and in Paris
until Jacques Dupuy’s death. The quarrel over the Venetian Interdict, the ap-
parent end of the Dupuy Academy in Paris, and, most radically, the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes gradually erased the remaining meeting grounds be-
tween the Republic of Letters and its primary Tridentine rival over the course
of the seventeenth century. In addition to “savants” willing to dialogue with or
challenge their peers in the Republic of Letters, the Society of Jesus relied on
educators, orators, and predicators from secular brotherhoods, whom it used to
attract and control a large audience. The academies of the Republic of Letters,
however, relied on solidarity and transmission between men of letters, some of
whom employed a controversial tool: the printing press.
The spiritual power of “letters” (attributed precisely because the domain of
letters had become inextricably associated with the universality of the mind)
thus became the object of a heated rivalry dominated, from 1560 to 1700, by
the Society of Jesus and the Republic of Letters. Despite the methods adopted
by the former to conquer Catholic society in Europe and new worlds outside of
Europe, the Republic of Letters was not defenseless. It benefited from the pres-
tige still attached to the notion of the Respublica christiana, to which the Ro-
man Church and the Jesuits could no longer lay claim. It also benefited from its
influential academies, some of the most prestigious of which lay within the Tri-
dentine orbit, in Venice and Paris. For that matter, it was in Venice that the phi-
losophy of harmony (meaning Platonic-Pythagorean harmony) found its great-
est proponents after Ficino: Francesco di Giorgio and Francesco Patrizi. While
that philosophy was not incompatible with the Aristotelian encyclopedia, as
we have seen in the case of Daniele Barbaro, it was difficult to reconcile with
Tridentine dogma. A freedom of exchanges and publications reigned, again in

Venice, a commercial and diplomatic center, in defiance of the Congregation
of the Index. For the lifeblood of the Respublica litteraria depended on an un-
hindered circulation of books and letters, which made its citizens collabora-
tors of the same ideal academy, transcending frontiers and faiths. This regular
“commerce” of books and letters should be linked to the “dialogue” form, a
reflection of “academic conversation” and a substitute, among men of letters,
for the disputes of university scholars, theologians, and canonists. Whether let-
ter or conversation, Republic of Letters or academy, the same epistemological
and sociological framework structured the solidarity, collaboration, and trans-
mission of this “universal council” of “savants,” which at times reinforced and
at other times replaced the traditional fabric of universities and clerics. The
savant voyage became a method of research and medium of collaboration in
itself. This flexible, metamorphic, and expansive mode of organizing knowledge
contrasted with the universities’ institutional rigidity and escaped the hierar-
chical organization of their primary disciplines. That said, the literary republic
did have discipline, but it was self-discipline, which was more influenced by
the code of friendship and urbanity than by institutional norms. The collabora-
tive framework offered by the academies was scarcely more restrictive, and was
often as changeable as that of a meeting of friends. But although the academies
themselves could appear ephemeral, the notion of the academy itself was tena-
cious; it was easily reformed from its “myth” or founding image: Parnassus.18
Given that Parnassus united men of letters “in glory,” it was only natural that
the academies produce eulogies, cycles of “portraits,” and Vitae which memo-
rialized their members, and which fought against the fragility of those links by
referring to an ideal Parnassus and to its tradition. In Venice once again, in a
famous letter written by Aretino,19 the myth of Parnassus passed from poetry
to prose and, in place of the Platonic music of the celestial bodies, was used to
designate the society of lettered men who, ideally, aligned themselves with it.
In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ragguagli des Parnasso, writ-
ten by an admirer of Venice, Trajano Boccalini, was the first “modern journal
of ideas and books.” In it, Apollo and the Muses symbolize the internal order of
the Republic of Letters, the idealized standard that governed concordia discors
between men of letters.20
The Respublica litteraria was first named by a Venetian nobleman, described
allegorically by a Venetian publicist, and given its first international journal by
an unconditional admirer of the Venetian Republic. Venice played a decisive
role, from the early days of Petrarch, in the rise of “letters” and their “Republic.”
It was a Venetian, Cardinal Zabarella, first a professor in Padua, who, through
his moderate conciliarism, did much to ensure the success of the Council of
Constance and the resolution of the Great Schism. It was in Venice that Byzan-
tine scholars, who would give the Italian Renaissance its second wind, were first
welcomed. It was to Venice that Cardinal Bessarion (who had played a central
role in the negotiations of the Council of Florence and in the short-lived reso-
lution of the schism between East and West) left his library: he, along with his
“Platonic Academy,” had been an ally of Marsilio Ficino in Rome, and with him
the “co-prince” of the Republic of Letters in the Italian fifteenth century. That
humanist tradition notwithstanding, several characteristics suggest the presence
of a preestablished harmony between Venice and the “spiritual power” of let-
ters that thrived in fifteenth-century Italy. Its geographical location, its political
regime, which appeared to conform to Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideals, its
independence in regard to Rome and the Empire, and finally its links to the
Greek world, subject or not to the Turk yoke, all made the Republic of Letters a
singular element in the game of Christianity and primed to appear as the most
stable and secure home for the “common good” of letters.
Venice and Padua effectively filled the previously mentioned role of the Re-
public of Letters’ southern capital from 1496—and the debut of the career of
Aldus, publisher and prince of the philhellenic academy soon to be bolstered by
Bembo’s authority—to 1601, the year that marked Pinelli’s death. During this
period, solidarity between Valois France and Venice quite naturally joined the
two “singularities” of Catholic Europe, two centers of “intellectual freedom.”
The Interdict quarrel would be the “swan song” of that Venice, a welcoming
academy in a Europe torn apart.
In conclusion, I posit that study of the concept of the “Republic of Letters,”
in its Italian phase, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, merits more atten-
tion than has been thus far granted. The emergence of this concept was accom-
panied by another: the “spiritual power” of men of letters, initially in harmony
with Rome, whose true mission was to take over from Rome and maintain, even
in its absence, the unity of European culture. This concept was inseparable
from that of the academy, which reappeared at the same time, on the fringes
of universities or in step with them (as was the case for the University of Padua
and the Venetian academies), but which was also in a position to take the reins
of high European culture. By the fifteenth century, the concept of a Republic
of Letters in its Italian (and notably Venetian) phase, which had initially been
linked to ecclesiology, as well as to epistemology and the organization of knowl-
edge, already contained the seeds of all the developments that would emerge in
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with which we are much
more familiar.
14
THE GENESIS OF CLASSICAL EPISTOLOGRAPHY:
H U M A N I S T L E T T E R - W R I T I N G R H E T O R I C F R O M
PETRARCH TO JUSTUS LIPSIUS
For a long time Italian humanism harbored illusions about the possibility
of resuscitating, within a still-Christian Europe, the eloquence of Cicero and
Demosthenes, for which the speakers of [Tacitus’s] A Dialogue on Oratory had
already mourned fourteen centuries earlier. But perhaps in order for modern lit-
erature to emerge, that period of mourning for a form of public speech that had
granted the Athenian and Roman orator a direct, immediate, and quasi-carnal
hold over his audience had to be extended via the humanist myth of eloquence.
The Augustinian-influenced Middle Ages had already come to terms with that
loss by reserving the legacy of the three defunct genres of pagan eloquence
for the sacred orator, the simple stand-in for Holy Writ and written theological
dogma, and making the then-unknown art of letter writing the written succes-
sor to the oral eloquence of the Ancients, much as the sermon was to Aristotle’s
Rhetoric.1
Despite humanism’s veneration of Cicero and Demosthenes, the great
humanist debate on prose—the Ciceronian quarrels—did not focus on the clas-
sical oratio, but on the letter and on epistolary style, the only true secular rivals
of sacred eloquence. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of humanism is that, renova-
tio bonarum litterarum, it attempted to restore the rhetoric of Cicero and Quin-
tilian, intended for use by orator-statesmen, within an institutional context that,
with the exception of the Florentine Republic, which was replaced at the end
of the fifteenth century by the Medici princedom, offered no outlet for oral and
direct political eloquence other than an academic one. Barring times of crisis
(for example, the Fronde and Wars of Religion in France), monarchic regimes
were in principle incompatible with the kind of eloquence that humanist peda-
gogy was nonetheless propagating, among its young disciples, through the works
of Cicero and Demosthenes. This thirst for eloquence, encouraged at school but
repressed by institutions, would not be fully appeased until the French Revolu-
tion and the parliamentary regimes of the nineteenth centuries. In fact, episto-
lography and homiletics, the two literary genres favored by Christianity begin-
212
The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 213
ning in the time of Saint Paul, would be the sole survivors of pagan eloquence,
even after the Renaissance and even under lay monarchies, within which the
prince’s “secretary,” tasked with writing his correspondence, would be the only
true heir, stripped of the “power of the word,” of the magistrate-orator of ancient
republics, whereas the holy orator, the direct successor of apostles and church
fathers, themselves the successors of pagan rhetoricians, had at his disposal the
full “power of the [spoken] word” over the “people.”
Fittingly, this debate on letter writing most often occurred in the form of let-
ters, or on occasion, as with Erasmus’s Ciceronianus, in the form of a dialogue
that, like the letter, was not linked to public speech but to a private discussion,
amicorum mutuus sermo (conversation between friends). This extraordinary
standing of the epistolary genre within humanist literature clearly reflects a di-
rect continuity with the medieval tradition, which made the letter, along with
the sermon, one of two major prose genres. That continuity was overshadowed
by the rupture between new epistolary rhetoric and the forms that had domi-
nated during the so-called barbarian centuries. The latter category, the Formu-
lae dictandi or Artes dictaminis, exhaustively inventoried and analyzed by James
Murphy in Rhetorics in the Middle Ages,2 had frozen the epistolary genre, so
to speak, in administrative use by secretaries, organized according to the five
sections of the classical oratio in close imitation of established models and in
adherence to a decorum imperatively adapted to a limited number of official
situations.
To a certain extent, the humanist stylus ciceronianus honed by the papal
chancery, one of the most prestigious centers of medieval epistolography,3 was
merely an aggiornata version of the Artes dictaminis. It had a modern tint,
borrowing the vocabulary, structure, and syntax of the letter exclusively from
Cicero, custodian of the rediscovered purity of the Latin language. But when
it came to the essentials, in other words the principles of imitatio and decorum,
Ciceronianism remained faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of medieval epis-
tolary rhetoric. In its loyalty to that model, this entirely external imitatio en-
gaged the secretary’s professional competence and nothing else. This was an
official decorum, bringing into contact two individuals whose social ranks and
institutional roles entirely determined the ritual of the exchange. Even when it
was transposed to private exchanges, the stylus ciceronianus of pontifical briefs
remained rigid and affected, incapable of expressing the internal, personal
tremor of the Christian soul that had precisely been the obsession of northern
humanism, in opposition to Roman and scholastic exteriority.
From this perspective, the advent of the stylus ciceronianus can actually
be considered a regression from the progress made one century earlier by the
founder of humanism, Petrarch. In his Letters,4 the author of each missive is the
private and intimate individual, not the official persona, even when address-
ing an important figure. The Petrarchist doctrine of imitation, as expressed in
a famous letter to Boccaccio, strove to move beyond existing models and dis-
cover a personal style, a “painting” of the epistolarian’s intimate person. Though
Petrarch admired Cicero’s Familiar Letters, which he had introduced to Chris-
tian Europe, he was deeply shocked by what he viewed as the impure mix-
ing within the Roman statesman of the public man and the private one, the
persona and the person. For Petrarch, heavily influenced by Seneca and Saint
Augustine, the private, intimate quest for personal salvation could not be put
on hold for the tribulations of public life. In both his collection of Letters and
his Secretum, he invariably begins with the intimate “I,” withdrawing into an
internal, uninterrupted meditation, when writing to his correspondents of love,
friendship, death, and glory or drawing on his travels and memories to describe
Tuscany and the banks of the Rhine or Mont Ventoux and the sources of the
Sorgue. Petrarch’s Letters, halfway between Letters to Lucilius and Confessions,
are the beginnings of a fragmented moral autobiography. At its Italian origins,
the humanist letter was already an “essay” in the Montaignian sense, approach-
ing all subjects with a meditative and central “me,” the sole unifying principle
amid a variable diversity.
It fell to a northern humanist, Erasmus, to decisively revive the Petrarchist
spirit and challenge a disguised return, in the Italian style ciceronianus, to the
social formalism of the medieval Artes dictaminis, beginning notably with the
1522 treatise De conscribendis epistolis, “the art of the letter.”5 (Incidentally, I
cannot thank Jean-Claude Margolin enough for having procured the critical
edition of this text for me in 1971). Within the relative disorder of this work lies
something quite inspired, cheerful, and irresistible—the victorious relish of a
man who not only made his own erudition second nature, but also discovered
within this superior nature a principle of freedom that could strip away all the
strappings of the official persona. In the first few sentences of this treatise, dem-
onstrating an authority rich with irony, Erasmus affirms the fundamental prin-
ciple which governed, in his mind, the epistolary genre, and which reversed each
of the limiting principles that had thus far prevented it from flourishing. The
principle was one of infini: re[s] tam multiple[x] propeque in infinitum varia (a
subject so complex and varied almost to infinity”).6 Infinity shattered the magic
circle, the circulum istum magicum,7 within which barbarian and ignorant ped-
ants wanted to enclose the epistolary genre. Infinity presented an insurmount-
able challenge to the negative finiteness of the dictates, premade formulas, and
rules of medieval rhetoric. But where did this principle of infinity governing the
epistolary genre come from? First, from its potential subjects, “no less innumer-
able,” according to Erasmus, “than the worlds of Democritus,”8 which conse-
quently had an infinity of possible forms, “no less innumerable,” once again
according to Erasmus, “than the grains of sand in the Libyan desert.”9 These
innumerable forms corresponded to just as many possible nuances of style, quae
sunt infinita (which are infinite),10 according to the Quintilian principle of ap-
tum (appropriate). But the dizzying metamorphism of the letter, versipellis ac
polypus (changeable like the octopus),11 was not solely due to the infinity of
things it could address. A much more profound cause lay in the infinite variety
of man himself: the infinity of ingenia, temperaments, conditions, ages, and
moral characters, which determined, as much as an infinitely varied subject
matter, the aptum of the epistolary genre. And finally, beyond the aptum that
Quintilian already knew so well—vel a re, vel a persona scribentis, vel a moribus
fortunaque et aetate ejus cui scribitur (equally adapted to the subject as to the
person writing and to the character, situation, and age of the person to which
one is writing)12—and which alone considerably relaxed the formalism of medi-
eval rhetoric, Erasmus ascribed the supreme principle of this polymorphism of
the epistolary genre to Christian freedom, libertatem illam epistolarem.13
Was an epistolary rhetoric still possible amid this boundless and infinitely
mobile and changing landscape? For Erasmus, it was all the more desirable
given the presence of another adversary in addition to the Artes dictaminis and
their excessive legalism: a kind of spontaneism, which could condemn the art of
the private letter, a genre without literary value, to negligence without diligence.
The infiniteness of the letter should not encourage a lack of form or shape.
Already the principle of aptum, which Erasmus borrowed from Quintilian
and preferred over the rigidity of decorum, was contradicting the hypothesis of
epistolary spontaneity. For the choice of style harmoniously accorded with the
countless variables present in the writing of any letter was too complex and deli-
cate an operation to be left to spontaneity. This deliberate act, this consilium,14
could only achieve precision through long and cautious preparation. Episto-
lary freedom was not license but reward for a perfect mastery of knowledge
and linguistic possibilities. Rhetoric, which Christian freedom and simplicity
seemingly rendered useless, rediscovered its pedagogical function impart-
ing knowledge, taste, and discursive freedom. Thus was resolved the seeming
contradiction between irony, so critical of the rhetorical formalism of Formu-
lae dictandi, and the abundance of rhetorical recommendations dispensed to
students and tutors alike. But the latter were indeed recommendations, often
negative, and not rules that threatened to stifle a child’s personal ingenium. The
classification of diverse kinds of letters proposed by Erasmus was a scholarly
commodity, not a vain attempt to measure the infinite. The letter models used
to illustrate his typology were more like pedagogical examples than formulas
to be reproduced: the gap between these models and the letters actually sent
by Erasmus gives a sense of the distance that separated, in his mind, the virtu-
osity of school exercises and the freedom conquered by an adult ingenium in
full possession of its methods, that is, by a Christian soul that had achieved the
simplicitas of expression.15
Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis thus proposes a two-part method to re-
place medieval epistolary rhetoric: the first, limited to childhood and adoles-
cence, implements an intelligent and sensitive course of instruction to provide
the future epistolarian’s ingenium with a mastery of knowledge and language;
the second opens the doors to Christian freedom and simplicity: the riches of
memoria and the techniques of eloquentia allow the writer to respond rapidly
and precisely, day after day, to the infinite requirements of epistolary speech.
Nature, fulfilled by art, but not dependent on it, became freedom and sim-
plicity. And rhetoric, now a perfectly interiorized habitus, was merely an instru-
ment of impeccable taste able to find the perfect, and invariably new, response
to the constantly varying demands of social, intellectual, and spiritual life.
The lessons of De conscribendis epistolis were applicable to much more than
just the epistolary genre, though Erasmus made this fundamentally immeasur-
able work the cornerstone of a new literature and a new conception of rhetoric.
In Ciceronianus,16 published five years later, Erasmus is no longer content to pit
the epistolary New Testament against the legalistic Old Testament of the medi-
eval Artes dictaminis: he also uses the former to challenge the reappearance,
within humanism itself, of a paganizing rhetorical legalism. De conscribendis
epistolis had rather discreetly evoked Christian “freedom” and “simplicity,” the
ultimate foundation of that infiniteness of speech through which the letter
writer, while reducing the role of chance as much as possible, “threw his dice.”
In contrast, that same intimate freedom of the Christian epistolarian is front
and center in Ciceronianus, where it is used to reverse the new scholasticism of
the imitatio ciceroniana. Cicero, preemptively distancing himself from his imi-
tators, had defined eloquence as wisdom speaking copiously: copiose loquentem
sapientiam.17 This was especially true for the Christian writer who carried the
crucified and redeeming Jesus Christ deep in his heart: the apte dicere of Cicero
and Quintilian was already a lesson in freedom; the Christian apte dicere was
even more liberating. It excluded any servile imitation that would conceal or
erase the epistolarian’s spiritual autonomy in comparison to his pagan scholarly
models. The debate on imitation allowed Erasmus to define, with more ironic
vigor than ever, the difference between a closed rhetoric, which imprisoned
one’s personal ingenium and Christian identity, and an open rhetoric, which
imposed its discipline only to grant the Christian “I” a full and free mastery of
logos. This was the basis of a later, more famous, distinction made by Pascal be-
tween the “spirit of geometry” and the “spirit of finesse.”
The two stages of “open rhetoric” defined by Erasmus would slowly gain in-
fluence over the greatest minds in Europe. In Italy, where the prestige of stylus
ciceronianus was somewhat correlated with national pride, Erasmus’s lessons
took hold obliquely, without mention of the great northern humanist’s name. In
1543, in a letter to Celio Calcagini,18 Jean-Baptiste Giraldi accepted, while main-
taining Cicero in his role as teacher of prose, the notion that an adult in posses-
sion of his faculties had the freedom to imitate other classical writers, allowing
himself greater personal expressivity and greater adaptability to diverse subjects,
circumstances, and recipients. In 1555, Paul Manutius, who had just published
an edition of The Treatise on the Sublime,19 noted, in a Discorso inserted into a
collection of Italian letters,20 the lessons absorbed from his enthralled reading
of Pseudo-Longinus: there are two kinds of rhetoric, one scholarly and servile,
and the other suited to liberating great souls, offering them a path to personal
originality. This affirmation is all the more remarkable coming from an author
known for writing Latin letters in a purely Ciceronian style. In 1580, in an ora-
tio given in Rome,21 Muret proclaimed the triumph of the epistolary genre over
other genres of eloquence handed down from classical antiquity, which were
as out of place in a monarchical and Christian Europe as they were at a collège
or academy. He further noted, like his friend Manutius, the inadequacy of the
stylus ciceronianus when it came to fulfilling the infinite possibilities of the
epistolary genre, the de facto successor of all other genres of eloquence. Finally,
in 1593, in his Bibliotheca selecta, the Jesuit Possevino dedicated the majority
of his chapter on rhetoric, entitled “Cicero,”22 to the art of letter writing. In an
official work intended to serve as a manual for his order’s ratio studiorum, he
endorsed Justus Lipsius’s epistolary doctrine.
At roughly the same time in France and Belgium, two authors, Montaigne
and Justus Lipsius, were acclimating Catholic culture to the Erasmian con-
ception of the letter once and for all. It would be worthwhile to note the many
ways in which Montaigne’s Essays were influenced by De conscribendis episto-
lis and Ciceronianus. Here, however, we will limit ourselves to observing that
Montaigne, who wrote in the vernacular to give himself more freedom, took
additional care to avoid the importunity of having to adapt to the persona of
any given recipient:
On the subject of letter writing, I want to say this: that it is a kind of work
in which my friends think I have some ability. And I would have preferred
to adopt this form to publish my sallies, if I had had some-one to talk to.
I needed what I once had, a certain relationship to lead me on, sustain

me, and raise me up. For to talk to the winds, as others do, is beyond me
except in dreams; nor could I fabricate fictitious names to talk with me on
a serious matter, being a sworn enemy of any falsification.23
For want of an Étienne de La Boétie to whom he could open his heart and
mind, Montaigne based the metamorphic infiniteness of his Essays on the infi-
nite metamorphoses of a “me” that revealed, in the absent eyes of an unknown
reader, the recesses of its singularity and the meanderings of a quest for wisdom.
Montaigne is not hostile toward rhetoric, either in the chapter “Considération
sur Cicéron” (A Consideration upon Cicero) or “Institution des enfants” (Of
the Institution of Children). But he frames the discipline, which he viewed as
elementary, as subordinate to the development of “understanding” and “judg-
ment” and to an apprenticeship in wisdom. Montaigne believed, like Erasmus,
that intellectual and spiritual maturity, the sciences, and mastery of a language,
once achieved, as if through a game, led to an inherently philosophical freedom
and simplicity. With Montaigne emerged an adult literature in French prose,
which would be separated by a mysterious but obvious dividing line from all
written productions that, in one way or another, gave off the smell of scholastic
exercises.
In 1581, the year following the first edition of Montaigne’s Essays, Henri
Estienne published a collection of Epistolae ciceroniano stylo scriptae (Letters
Written in the Style of Cicero) at the invitation of Henri III.24 This unexpected
publication from an opponent of Ciceronianism25 can be explained by two rea-
sons. The first is pedagogical: like similar collections published ad infinitum
by the Jesuits, Estienne’s work offered novices basic models of correct Latin
prose. The second is patriotic: the collection was an assault on Italian pride and
stressed the supremacy of two Frenchmen, Brunel and Longueil, in the perfec-
tion of the stylus ciceronianus. In his preface, Estienne attempts to highlight
the academic style’s flaws: monotonous form, insufficient subject matter, and
lack of personal sincerity. In so doing, he affirms an epistolary Erasmianism that
Justus Lipsius would later revive in his original Centuries and his Epistolica in-
stitutio (Principles of Letter-Writing).
Lipsius’s preface to his first Century of letters, published in 1586,26 is a criti-
cal manifesto in the history of the classical letter. Written in first person, the
preface does not come from a magister rhetoricae but from a private individual
benefiting fully from his spiritual independence and meditating on his epis-
tolary oeuvre. Not without false modesty, Lipsius claims to be apprehensively
sharing his letters with the public, assured there will be no glory in return. Cen-
tury was not a completed work, an opus perfectum, but an ongoing one, im-
perfectum, which assembled daily notes (diales), a handful of trifles (nugas),

games (jocos, lusus), and idle talk between friends (cum amicis garritus). Lip-
sius does not hesitate to emphasize the discontinuous, fragmented, and multi-
faceted character of a genre that lacked the polished and perfected character
of the speeches through which classical orators achieved their glory. His col-
lection does not recommend a specific organization, the choice of a single and
grand subject, or stylistic beauty (cura et lima in stylo): in Lipsius’s mind, these
qualities were foreign to the epistolary genre, which, “spontaneous” by defini-
tion (sub manu nasci debere et sub acumine ipso stili [they must spring from
the hand that runs behind the quill]), looked down upon rewriting and proof-
reading (bis non scribe, bis vix eas lego [I do not rewrite them and I barely re-
read them]). The “figure of humility” that marks the beginning of Lipsius’s re-
flections to the reader subtly transforms into self-affirmation and praise for the
epistolary genre as the best method of expression for the exceptional individual.
The “spontaneity” of letter writing allowed it to faithfully record the writer’s
changing passions and slightest variations in mood (languent enim illae, ex-
citantur, dolent, gaudent, calent, frigent mecum [they languish, excite, suffer,
delight, burn, and shudder with me]). This could result in a scattering of de-
tails from daily life (leviorum multitudo). But at times, by liberating itself from
its humoral holds, the mind could elevate itself to the level of moral philoso-
phy and philology. Style then spontaneously accompanied the momentum of
the ingenium. The letter was therefore the ideal instrument to paint the self-
portrait of a great soul “who encountered a body,” a multifaceted, accentuated
self-portrait that reflected the various levels of self-awareness: Ecce homo. This
self-expression simultaneously implied ingenuity (candor), sincerity (veritas),
natural style (alibi focus et simulation, hic nativus color [elsewhere, everything
is artifice and simulation, here there is nothing but native color]), as well as the
courage to be one’s self in spite of desires and doubts.
Erasmus, freeing the epistolary genre from its “chains,” had nonetheless
adopted the perspective of a humanist teacher subjecting his student to the
only kind of discipline and exercises that could make the freedom of the apte
dicere possible. Lipsius, however, abandoned the pedagogical approach entirely
and, assuming his readers’ rhetorical training, adopted the “adult” perspective of
a great soul who lifts the veil (nec velum ei ducere succurrit [it does not occur to
him to cast a veil]) on his “interior,” within the trusted space opened by friend-
ship. He defined the epistolary genre by a series of oxymora: a discontinuous and
short genre becomes the sorcerer’s mirror of the infiniteness of the human me
and its oscillations between contemplation and suffering; a plain style, consis-
tent with the “comical” and “private” condition of the letter writer, becomes the
sensitive receptacle of all “ideas” of style, fragments of the classical architecture

of three superimposed styles, within which the highs and lows of an interiority,
both spiritual and physiological, are reflected. Lipsius would attempt to create a
rhetoric of letter writing based on these paradoxes with his Epistolica institutio,
published in 1591.27 In this brief treatise, he is unconcerned with analyzing the
progymnasmata needed to train a letter writer, or with offering him models. In-
stead, Lipsius speaks to the adult reader, no longer under the constraints of the
collège. He relies on already acquired knowledge to fuel the copia of his letter,
and on preformed judgment to adapt his epistolary writing to the situation and
the recipient. He avoids, as much is possible, the classification of the epistolary
genre into subgenres: more clearly than Erasmus, Lipsius transforms the famil-
iar letter into an overarching genre, able to welcome and contain all others, and
also able to encompass all possible subjects. He deduces, based on the preemi-
nence of the familiar letter, the importance of the sermo humilis, which, though
a favored hypothetical, was only one of several possible letter-writing styles in
Erasmus’s text.
Lipsius distances himself most clearly from De conscribendis epistolis when
it comes to his conception of the sermo humilis and of the elocutio of the famil-
iar letter. In Erasmus’s treatise, the sermo humilis, compared to friendly con-
versation or comical dialogue,28 is a reflection of the free improvisation of an
eloquent and cultivated speaker. Lipsius, on the other hand, observes a previ-
ously unnoticed dimension of the epistolary aptum: transposed into writing, the
copious, unbound flow of the oral exchange had to yield to a different perspec-
tive—the reader’s. He does not renounce the rapid improvisation that Erasmus
views as essential to the epistolarian’s freedom and ease. But that very rapidity,
which, in Erasmus’s writing, was maintained by trained observation of the ap-
tum, now had to incorporate an awareness of the gap between oral and written
styles into that precision. The Lipsian letter thus became the written metaphor
of an entirely interiorized improvisation in the spiritual presence of an absent
friend. Raised to the rank of prose art, meaning written prose destined for atten-
tive readers, Lipsius’s sermo humilis found itself between two extremes: the con-
spicuous, ample, and external effects of grand oral eloquence, and the loose and
indistinct relaxation of ordinary conversation. Borrowing the notion of idéaï tou
logou ([the notion of ] forms of discourse) from Hermogenes, Lipsius summa-
rizes the forms of sermo humilis adapted to epistolary writing in five categories:
brevitas, which we would translate as condensation; perspicuitas, which is less
clarity than depth; simplicitas, less spontaneity than an effect of spontaneity;
venustas, which encompasses urbanity, elegance, humor, wit, and all stylistic
graces; and finally decentia, a more fluid and interiorized version of decorum.
These qualities guaranteed that written prose, widowed, as it were, by the

voice, benefited from substitutions of vigor, precision, accuracy, and “strokes”
that would imprint the text into a reader’s soul, in spite of silence and absence.
Erasmus’s prose was written to be read as rapidly as one would have listened to
his spoken word, without looking backward. Lipsius discovered that the reader,
in contrast to the listener, was free to look backward, to linger on the page, and
to contemplate and imbibe it as one would a poem. The prose of letter writing
had to not only retain that searching attention but also reward it with joyful
language. In a way, if Erasmus had discovered the “freedom” of the epistolary
genre, then Lipsius discovered, or at least deepened, the spirituality of the act of
writing and receiving letters, two contemplative forms of solitude intersecting
in silence and absence, and exchanging signs of complicity over time. All the at-
tention was therefore focused on the quality of these signs—their quasi-cryptic
density, depth, and candor—which were all markers of a mind that made the
letter writer a kind of engraver chiseling the traits of his me onto the page in
order to imprint them more deeply into the soul of a friend, who viewed them
as objects of meditation and a source of simultaneously spiritual and aesthetic
joy. Through language, the melancholy of the great soul purified itself at the
same time that it manifested and shared itself in that purified form. By thus re-
inforcing the expressivity of a wholly interiorized form of speech, prose was en-
hanced by characteristics of inspired poetry, oratia stricta. Lipsius was echoing
Tacitus’s lesson in his Dialogue on Oratory, which transformed nostalgia for oral
eloquence into the foundation of a new philosophical enthusiasm, that of the
poet-prose writer, withdrawn from public life, free on the inside, within a circle
of chosen friends, despite the darkness of the world. It is hardly a surprise then
that Lipsius, Tacitus’s editor and a contemporary of Gesualdo da Venosa, redis-
covered the musical secret of the “style coupé.”
The favored instrument of this stylistic acuteness was acumen—the pique,
stroke, sally, or “thought,” which was nothing more than a surprising paradox or
metaphor, though disdainful of further developing itself in order to maintain
its maximum force and allusive seduction. Lipsius viewed acumen as a semen
dicendi (a seed of discourse) maintained in its germinal state to combine, in a
written style, the gushing impact of thought, its suggestive density, and its power
to awaken. Montaigne admirably describes the allusive vigor of prose that makes
the reader think, sowing thoughts in his mind, instead of forcing a subject mat-
ter exhausted from overdevelopment on him:
And how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of them-
selves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little
ingenuity will produce numberless essays. Neither these stories nor my
quotations serve always simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do

not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear,
outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and
sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to
express anything more, and for those who get my drift.29
This type of writing, disdainful of striving for the amplification and finite-
ness of oral eloquence or of descending to the chatter of daily conversation, re-
mained, in a way, closest to the sources of inventiveness (fonts inventionis) in
which the thoughts (sententiae) of great antiquity and the germination of the
modern writer’s adult ingenium overlapped (or “met,” according to Montaigne).
This art of the rapid and allusive sketch, rich with “infinite” developments, was
to “completed” discourse what the drawing was to the painting. Balzac’s rival,
Dom Jean Goulu, joyfully expresses this aesthetic of the important sketch:
You should take [my letters] like the drawings of Michelangelo, which
being only sketches still surpass and excel over all the polishing and finish-
ing of the Flemish tableaus and paintings.30
“Incompleteness” was therefore inseparable from a certain degree of coarse-

ness. Indeed, such was the reproach leveled against Lipsius and Montaigne’s
style coupé by the treasured “douceur” of France’s courtiers, to the great dis-
pleasure of Mademoiselle de Gournay. The style coupé implied a “restrained
rhetoric,” though in the opposite sense from that given by Gérard Genette to
the restrictive expression, for the style coupé tended to focus on inventiveness
and dispense with elocution, insofar as the latter was inseparable from periodic
amplification and euphonic finishes. This style that “jumped” (La Mothe Le
Vayer dixit) from acumen to acumen, from semen dicendi to semen dicendi,
preferring the “pit” to the “pulp,” nonetheless continued to delight connois-
seurs, who here seized upon the ingenium at the inventive stage, protected from
weakness by the rapidity of projection on the page: like the archer, wrote Lip-
sius, echoing Quintilian, who at first glance hits the target, neither falling short
nor exceeding it.31
This written expressivity of the ingenium was to be maintained in a precise
balance with social and moral decorum and all the other requirements of the
aptum through judgment, or judicium. But the ingenium and the judicium of
epistolary writing were not innate faculties. In order to reach maturity, they re-
quired an education in rhetoric and a profound knowledge of antiquity. Lipsius
thus distinguishes three stages in an epistolarian’s education: the first, based
on scholarly imitation of Cicero and Ciceronian humanists, would equip one’s
written style with basic precision and clarity; the second, embellishing on that
solid framework, would imitate less academic authors, including comic writers
Plautus and Terence. (Erasmus essentially stopped at this stage.) The third,
qualified as “adult” by Lipsius, introduced the epistolarian’s ingenium to the
whole “lyre” of classical literature, and in particular its tautest cords, the three
Latin “Attic” writers, Sallust, Seneca, and Tacitus. In order to prepare for the
“first draft” of a letter, the epistolarian also had to compile collections of quo-
tations (excerpta), ornaments (ornamentum), turns of phrase (diction), and vo-
cabulary (formulae).
Among the possible ornamentum, Lipsius recommends that the epistolarian
accumulate, in his memory, images, allegories, piques, or sallies (acutiora
dicta), in other words phrases that can add venustas to his style. The rapidity of
epistolary writing therefore relied on the patient acquisition of loci communes
and a flawless possession of diverse resources of philosophical and literary cul-
ture. The Lipsian epistolarian was like an actor of art: his improvisation was a
trompe l’oeil that hid the clockwork of mnemonic techniques and the cunning
of an art exercised on a daily basis.32 We can apply Corneille’s description of his
Alcandre to Lipsius’s epistolarian Latin style:
And yet his bodily strength does not abate,

His limbs are supple and his bearing straight:
Mysterious forces drive this old man’s heart,
And all his steps are miracles of art.33
Can we say as much for Montaigne? According to René Fromilhague,34 the

French writer veered and developed between a purely Erasmian attitude, which
viewed prose style as a cursory version of cultivated conversation, and a Lipsian
attitude, which emphasized the pointedness of the written style in comparison
to the nonchalance of dialogue. Here, implicitly, was the problem that the art
of the French letter had to resolve in the seventeenth century.
The great debate over Guez de Balzac’s Premières Lettres (First Letters) pits
one of Lipsius’s successors, Balzac, against one of Erasmus’s successors, Dom
Jean Goulu.35 Like Lipsius, Balzac considered the letter to be a written work,
which had to gain the reader’s attention through the strength of expression.
That said, Balzac was more painfully nostalgic than Lipsius for the grand elo-
quence of the Forum, and more prone to amplification, complex phrasing, and
“polishing” than the Flemish humanist. For that matter, Balzac, addressing a
courtly audience in French, which was accustomed to the gentle, euphonic
style of novels and romantic poetry, renounced the ridges and abrupt starts of
the “style coupé” to adroitly seek an effect of harmony and musicality. These
two traits of Balzac’s style, which steered his rhetoric toward meticulous elocu-
tion at the expense of the rapidity of invention, further increased the distance
separating it from an Erasmian conception of the letter. Dom Jean Goulu, like
Erasmus, viewed the familiar letter as a simple substitute for dialogue between
friends, whose meditative freedom and disdain for an overly deliberate elegance
it borrowed. This tension between artful prose as understood by Balzac and the
notion of oral improvisation as understood by Goulu gradually dissolved as the
art of conversation and the art of writing, borrowing features from each other,
became asymptotic in sophisticated milieus.
But the role of epistolary art was neither less important nor less central to
French literary culture than it had been to humanists’ Latin culture. As had
occurred in the sixteenth century, the “infinite” genre of the familiar letter,
associated with the infinite freedom of the private, Christian me, eventually
counterbalanced the scholarly edifice of Aristotelian rhetoric, all while borrow-
ing fragments that would serve to express an interiorized rhetoric, which em-
phasizes personal style and taste over dependence on external models, rules,
and laws. The Christ of this New Testament of rhetoric was Erasmus; its apostle
in France was Pascal, author of The Provincial Letters.
Regardless of the precedence long maintained by private correspondence in
exchanges, notably exchanges of political or literary news, a new mode of public
modern communication soon joined this informative epistolography: the “jour-
nal.” I will only mention the major dates of these developments.
When it came to political and cultural news, Richelieu, as we know, encour-
aged the creation of the quasi-official Gazette in 1631 by Théophraste Renaudot
in order to serve his propaganda purposes.36 As for scholarly and scientific news
and exchanges between savants previously limited to conversation or hand-
written letters, the printed journal also became a method of communication
specific to the Republic of Letters. Thus was created Europe’s first high-quality
journal in 1665, Denis de Sallo’s Journal des sçavans (Journal of Savants), which
was published in French in Paris every Monday. Beginning on March 6, 1665,
the English launched the organ of the Royal Society of London, Philosophical
Transactions, whose prestige was also established almost immediately.
The Dutch Refuge rivaled that national press with its circulation of schol-
arly French-language periodicals, the most famous of which, after March 1684,
was Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News from the Re-
public of Letters), which he wrote entirely himself. As a large province of lit-
erary Europe, the Germanic zone, whose scholarly language remained Latin,
was obligated to have its own scientific periodicals as well. The first to appear,
Acta eruditorum, published beginning in 1682 by Otto Mencke, a professor at
Leipzig University, and then by his son Johannes Burckhardt Mencke, enjoyed
widespread authority from its debut. The Italians had their own scholarly jour-
nals as well.
This development of a generalist and scholarly press benefited from long
rhetorical debates on the best epistolographic style. Its periodicals favored
the simple, clear, and succinct style, stripped of an excess of eloquence,
that had slowly permeated, since the time of Erasmus, the writing of private
c orrespondence.
Part IV
LIVES
15
FROM LIVES TO BIOGRAPHIES:
THE TWILIGHT OF PARNASSUS
“Biography” is a simple, precise, and modern word. Like similar terms with
Greek roots, it appears both competent and understandable. It makes dashing
appearances in the tables of contents of journals and on conference stages, be-
tween “biology” and “bibliography,” and “necrology” and “radiography,” amid
that scientific elite of a lexicon that moves from one language to another, travel-
ing in “business” class,” always at ease in different time zones, hotel lobbies,
conference rooms, and lecture halls. Compared to that prosperity, the term
“life” is old hat, a poor relation doomed to nursing homes and convalescence.
It disappeared from store windows and book covers during the interwar period.
The hesitations of André Maurois, the author of Aspects de la biographie (As-
pects of the Biography, 1928), are characteristic of that transition: he wavered
between Vie de Disraeli (Life of Disraeli, 1927), Ariel ou la Vie de Shelley (Ariel
or the Life of Shelley, 1923), Prométhée ou la Vie de Balzac (Prometheus or the
Life of Balzac, 1965) and, beginning in 1930, the succinct Byron. One senses
that the title Vie was fated to disappear or yield to a proper noun or allegorical
figure. And yet it was a respectable term, of noble Latin origin, as distinguished
in its way as were the Massimi or Colonna of Rome, which claimed to have
ancestors named by Titus Livius. The word’s genealogy is even older, if one re-
members that its metonymical and literary meaning, in Latin, is a translation of
the Greek word bios, with which the ancient Greeks, inventors of the genre and
whose use of their language was less pedantic than ours, contented themselves
until the end. According to Liddell and Scott, “biography” only appears in an-
tiquity quite late, in the writings of a Neoplatonic philosopher named Damas-
kios, who introduced the humorless term into the waning Roman Empire, be-
tween the fifth and sixth centuries, on the eve of the Middle Ages. It crept into
modern languages in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when Renais-
sance humanism was reaching its end and the Enlightenment was beginning.
This belated and portentous word then began a slow, long-delayed ascension;
it did not enter common usage, “antiquarian” circles notwithstanding, until
the nineteenth century. The old term “life” proudly persisted until the 1920s
229
230 Lives
within the particularly conservative language of book titles. Its definitive erasure
in favor of “biography” led to that of the terms “memoirs” and “confessions,”
which yielded to “autobiography,” whereas “hagiography,” though less able to
enter common usage, stripped much of the solemnity and credibility from the
“Lives of the Saints.”
The fact remains that Lives flourished during the golden age of letters, and it
was under that general title that they had the most success. Xenophon and Au-
lus Gellius both subscribed to Montaigne’s judgment, in his essay “Books,” in
which he cited Lives and memoirs as among his favorite readings:
The historians are my right ball, for they are pleasant and easy, and where
man, in general, the knowledge of whom I hunt after, appears more
vividly and entire than anywhere else: the variety and truth of his inter-
nal qualities, in gross and piecemeal, the diversity of means by which he
is united and knit, and the accidents that threaten him. Now those that
write lives, by reason they insist more upon counsels than events, more
upon what sallies from within, than upon what happens without, are the
most proper for my reading; and, therefore, above all others, Plutarch is
the man for me. I am very sorry we have not a dozen Laertii—[Diogenes
Laertius, who wrote the Lives of the Philosophers]—or that he was not fur-
ther extended; for I am equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of
these great instructors of the world, as to know the diversities of their doc-
trines and opinions.1
The paradox in ranking Plutarch’s Parallel Lives far above lengthy, Polybian
Histories and favoring Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers even over
works by the “great instructors of the world” is in keeping with the Essays as a
whole and with the lessons of antiquity as understood by Montaigne. The Muse
of all the authors and readers of Lives was the Sphinx, who stopped Oedipus
at the gates of Thebes and asked him to solve a riddle: the answer (“word”) to
that riddle was a man’s life, from birth to death—in other words, the unity of
time, the yardstick of Greek art, be it by Thucydides the historian or Sophocles
the dramaturge. A life is the simplest, most resistant, and most elementary unit
of measurement. But it is posthumous. After solving the riddle of one word,
Oedipus thought himself its master. But he was in the invisible claws (more
dangerous than those of the Sphinx) of time. The riddle asked of him was too
general not to conceal another one, to which time, alone and on two occasions,
would provide the answer: Oedipus’s own life, which was still on hold when,
confronted by the Sphinx, he discovered, though in a general and abstract way,
that man’s greatest measurement was the bios, the more or less short life cycle
From Lives to Biographies 231
granted him. That life, full of surprises, needed no one less than Sophocles to
write it, in no less than two tragedies, to imitate its twists and turns. As simple
and elementary as the genre of Lives may have been, in comparison to Oedipus
the King and Oedipus at Colonus, it was nonetheless a form of tragic genius.
Comedy inevitably reflects a single episode; tragedy—and following its ex-
ample, Lives—encompasses the entire decline of a career and life cycle, adopt-
ing a posthumous perspective that, once the veil of death is lifted, alone allows
us to perceive the organic logic of an individual’s destiny and defining traits.
What is surprising about Oedipus is that he had two lives, one as a seeing man
blinded, the other as a seeing blind man; one linked to the visible world through
death, the other to the invisible world by an awakening. The bios is a measure-
ment, but a multilayered one. A life cycle contains shorter cycles, with their
own organic completeness, and it is linked, through repetition or variation, to
previous cycles, of family members, for example: the “Life of Oedipus” contains
a life of Laius, of Jocasta, of Antigone. The most striking element of Suetonius’s
“Life of Caligula” is the inclusion of a short “Life of Agricola,” his father, the ob-
ject of the Roman people’s admiration and love whose superior humanity and
tragedy had already been described by Tacitus; Caligula, the antithesis of Agri-
cola, is depicted as a caricature of his parents’ killer, Tiberius, and the repetition,
in short and in features vastly exaggerated by haste, of his uncle’s character and
path. The bios thus becomes a “nest” of time, in which several broods come to
live, and the comparison between them a source of inexhaustible reflections for
anyone—meaning any reader—in a nest other than his own, so to speak. Mon-
taigne recognized himself in Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius: outpacing time,
confronting its pressures, he was in the midst of writing his own Parallel Lives,
his own Life of the Philosophers. Using the more cautious register of prose, he
avoided the surprises of Oedipus by prematurely casting himself as Sophocles.
Can this genre be traced back to gravestone etchings? In a way, cemeteries, with
their juxtaposed family “nests,” are massive collections of Lives. The dispersion
and variety of graves conceal the monotony of the rectangle, based on that of
the human body, which is their measurement for everything, their “unity of
place.” There are few genres like the bios whose contours are as natural, and
whose universal “subject,” susceptible to infinite variations and interweavings, is
more central in literature. One of the warning signs of a certain “death of man”
is the substitution of the biography for the Life.
The two authors of Lives cited by Montaigne composed collections. They
have reached us intact. Others, which he did not cite, like Cornelius Nepos’s
The Lives of Illustrious Men, Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and
Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists also survived the shipwreck of classical lit-
232 Lives
erature. But there is no doubt that the Ancients wrote similar collections very
early on, beginning in the fourth century, and prolifically during the Helle-
nistic period, which were categorized by profession: captains and statesmen,
orators and philosophers, painters and poets. Lives were more generous than
“histories,” which were reserved for war heroes or government leaders. They ac-
knowledged the “immortality” of men who excelled at endeavors of the mind.
That feature draws attention to the importance of professions in the classical
bios: the “life cycle” took social form within a “career profile.” Oedipus himself,
once a king, had his own profile. The occupation of living, shared by all men, is
learned or encounters its decisive challenges within a profession. If the life cycle
itself incited an author of Lives to take an interest in the genealogy, family, and
medical records of his subjects, their careers would prompt him to mention
education, rivals, acts and works, and the successes and setbacks of a master in
his particular domain. These milestones served as markers or acknowledgments
for a group of like minds and the type of individual that corresponded to it. The
Lives of these diverse professional groups formed for each of their new aspirants
an elected society, an ideal assembly of examples or witnesses to which one was
invited to join. A passage from the tract On the Sublime draws us, along with
the aspiring writer, into a circle of invisible accomplished writers watching, so
to speak, from above his inkwell:
Accordingly it is well that we ourselves also, when elaborating anything

which requires lofty expression and elevated conception, should shape
some idea in our minds as to how perchance Homer would have said this
very thing, or how it would have been raised to the sublime by Plato or
Demosthenes or by the historian Thucydides. For those personages, pre-
senting themselves to us and inflaming our ardour and as it were illumin-
ing our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high stan-
dards of sublimity which are imaged within us. Still more effectual will it
be to suggest this question to our thoughts, “What sort of hearing would
Homer, had he been present, or Demosthenes have given to this or that
when said by me, or how would they have been affected by the other?”
For the ordeal is indeed a severe one, if we presuppose such a tribunal
and theatre for our own utterances, and imagine that we are undergoing
a scrutiny of our writings before these great heroes, acting as judges and
witnesses.2
The life and work of an “illustrious man” are here perceived by a single dis-
ciple as a living person, the presence of a superior, timeless order, but with whom
dialogue is possible. These exemplary presences are assembled in tribunals or
theaters, as if on the Mount Parnassus painted by Raphael or Poussin, intimi-

dating but ready to welcome those of the living who were able, in their turn, to
vanquish time.
Aristotelian encyclopedism, and its desire for a complete inventory of all that
is real, has been mined for the impulse that drove the Greeks to compose col-
lections of Lives corresponding to the great professions of the city-state. But it
is clear that this appetite for classifying and inventorying was not incompatible
with the more practical desire to create an “informative milieu,” a world of para-
digms and examples that led potential heroes to imitate them. The Lives were
not merely prosopographical documents. Their audience, aside from the phi-
losopher interested in human diversity, was the professional concerned with
shaping his own path while considering the path followed by the most repre-
sentative of his predecessors. This educational objective is even more visible
in a genre related to Lives—the eulogy. The latter abandoned the simple style
used to narrate Lives in favor of a more formal and ornate style; scrupulous
truth gave way to idealization. Here a significant dose of Platonism was used
to exalt an individual life to the level of an admirable model. But the distance
between the two genres did not prevent some overlap. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives
are also “Exemplary Lives,” a guide to achieving the virtues exercised by Plu-
tarchian heroes. Suetonius’s Lives, without negating the superiority of Caesar
or Augustus or liberally indulging in repulsion, nonetheless does not hide the
vices and pathological excesses of its twelve revered monsters. Suetonius as-
sumes his readers are filled with both admiration and indignation and adroitly
cultivates their discernment of their fellow man. His portraits of emperors, the
“guinea pigs” of a new profession, affected by both their early successes and the
aggrandizing and monstrous effect that supreme power had on their inherent
character flaws, implicitly pay homage to the seasoned, adult emperor, master
of his nerves, who will ultimately become “the delight of the human race.” In
short, the portrait of Trajan celebrated by Pliny in his Panegyric, the implicit
ripe fruit of those twelve, still sour lives. Hadrian, the reigning emperor to whom
Suetonius dedicated his Lives, was also his ideal reader, an optimus princeps
who learned from the trials and errors of his earliest predecessors. Lives and
eulogies, though linked here somewhat paradoxically, contributed to teaching
humanitas, that interior harmony desirable in all professions but above all in a
“master of the world.”
Categories of professional Lives were therefore not specialized to the point
of forgetting that the exercise of an occupation first implied the occupation
of being human. If a Life offered an unrivaled measurement of time, though
shared by all men, its central reference remained a norm of humanity whose
234 Lives
transgression or forgetting had a necessary and tragic sanction. That norm,

more or less observed, more or less lacking, transcended the differences in eras,
regimes, and peoples that the authors of “Histories” (like Tacitus) tended to
stress. A Life did not acknowledge “progress” or “decline”; it was a variation on
a single paradigm, a man’s destiny unfolding between birth and death. That
interlude had neither age nor country. The Life format also offered a boundless
and timeless meeting place with no outer limits, where the living were invited
to meet representatives gathered from previous generations. That indifference
to chronology and geography made all the heroes of Lives contemporaries and
guests to the same banquet. As soon as the authors of Lives had their char-
acters speak as they supposedly did during their lifetimes, why couldn’t one
imagine the discussions they could have had in the Elysian Fields, where they
were reunited after death? The genre of “Dialogues of the Dead,” illustrated by
Fénelon and Fontenelle in imitation of Lucien, which Montaigne was already
exploring in his own way in the interweaving of his Essays, was the modern
blooming of Parallel Lives come to maturity.
Lives, memoirs, and “Dialogues of the Dead” thus represented, beyond
historical time and its circumstances, a swathe of humanity who had passed
the test of bios and who were charged with sharing that experience with those
living souls still “engaged” in the passage of their own lives. It is clear that the
Ancients did not make up the history of the Life genre, which would be nar-
rated abstractly, as was already the case for religious Christian history, and as
the philosophical history of the Enlightenment and Hegel would be to an even
greater extent. Classical history rooted its narratives in cyclical time, which cor-
responded to the rhythm of the stages of human life, the seasons, and cosmic
revolutions. Everything is born, dies, and metamorphoses for a new cycle. The
Life genre thus had origins in classical history, of which it provided a reduced
model and canonical measurement.
Though clearly “egalitarian” in terms of time and death, Lives reserved the
privilege of access to immortality to a small elite, which grew very parsimoni-
ously. How did that elite self-recruit? It represented and encapsulated humanity,
but according to what mode of selection? A unanimous “vote” was necessary,
first from one’s contemporaries, but that choice had to be approved by later
generations.
Meriting a Life implied that right had been previously recognized by all men
in a continuous plebiscite that, though implicit, was nonetheless irrefutable.
Which further implied, among an “electoral body” of illustrious men, a sure and
ultimately infallible ability to find others within its ranks who, in one way or an-
other, had been exemplary “humans”: in other words, those who had overcome
the challenges of the bios in exceptionally distinctive conditions. The author

of a Life did not have the power to make his hero “illustrious.” He was merely
executing an implicit though objective decision, which had been unanimously
made before him, without him. It was even more difficult, however grand one
might imagine oneself to be, to proclaim one’s own “illustrious” nature, even
justly, if the individual in question was relying exclusively on testimony from
his “inner self.” According to Aristotle, the “magnanimous” man could only
become so, and furthermore believe himself to be so, if the public recognized
him as a “great soul.” This did not signify his moral superiority, but rather that
his “visibility,” positive for some, negative for others, was uncontested. And if
that notoriety resisted the obstacles of death and oblivion, then said candidate
to a Life had effectively been approved. At that stage, it was inevitable that a Life
would be written sooner or later, setting in written memory an image that had
imposed itself in oral tradition by a unanimous chorus of votes. There is some-
thing profound and rather mysterious, especially from our perspective, about
this kind of direct, spontaneous election and the degree of certitude it long
introduced into the changing flux of human opinion. The number of Greek
villages in antiquity that fought over the distinction as Homer’s birthplace re-
inforced the uncontested nature of his fame and of his titles, which would be
attributed to the most illustrious poets and therefore those men most deserv-
ing of a Life. We would be mistaken to think that Suetonius’s “twelve Caesars”
merited their Lives because their fortune and birth led them to the head of the
empire. The implicit order of Lives is far from a chronological automatism. For
Suetonius to begin his work, those figures had to be recognized and elected a
second time, not as leaders of the empire, but as exceptionally characteristic,
anthological, and truly legendary representatives of humanity, individually sub-
jected to the test of a power unknown in Rome, which was neither royal nor re-
publican and all the more discretionary. This law of unanimous election, which
the authors of written Lives merely reinforced, had not been done away with by
Christianity. In the primitive church, canonization (and therefore inclusion in
the catalog of the “Lives of Saints and Martyrs”) occurred by a vote of the as-
sembly of followers, presaging the unanimous agreement of the church. Later,
official recognition of the heroic nature of virtues would imply an “odor of saint-
liness” unanimously recognized by the subject’s entourage, and miracles pub-
licly attesting, before all, to the titles and honors of the deceased, who was to
earn sainthood and a place on the calendar of liturgical holidays. Vox populi,
vox Dei. The only direct democracy that has functioned from Athens to our day,
without interruption and to general satisfaction, is the one that selected the rep-
resentatives of humanity in the Pantheon, Parnassus, or Paradise. Even Chris-
236 Lives
tian interiority, and its sense of individual salvation, did not break with the ple-
biscitary objectivity of glory and exemplariness, indispensable prerequisites to
entry into the transcendent kingdom of Lives. And though the implicit philoso-
phy of the doxa governing the system of Lives was quite Aristotelian, Plato and
Platonists themselves had, before the Christians, quietly accepted its presuppo-
sitions. True, Socrates, a distinguished mortal among mortals, was condemned
to death by an Athenian court supported by a majority of Athenians. Plato and
Socrates’s disciples were nonetheless able to appeal that judgment through a
more decisive authority—universal public opinion. Unanimity was reached on
Socrates’s greatness, though it had been denied by a short-lived majority. But in
Aristotle’s strict conception, Socrates’s exceptional notoriety in Athens, in his
very lifetime, had already made him one of the great souls destined for a Life.
Far from endangering that notoriety, his conviction pushed it to its extreme, as
if sealing it with a tragic and unanimously discussed and debated event. His re-
habilitation through the Lives dedicated to him by Plato and Xenophon quickly
rejected as abhorrent the judges who had convicted Socrates and the Athenian
majority who had supported them. More importantly, however, those dialogued
Lives confirmed the unanimity of “votes” by friends and enemies alike, even
in Athens, that recognized the titles merited by Socrates, an exceptional man
and philosopher. Even Aristophanes’s The Clouds confirmed that tremendous
notoriety, and the philosopher’s condemnation ruptured the “importance” of
the person. The unanimity that acknowledged and elected a “great soul” was
therefore not necessarily favorable to him, and could be manifested as much by
cries of hatred as by applause. After Socrates, Christian martyrs would first be
“designated” by the harassment of unbelievers and later by the admiration of
the faithful. In contrast, Christ himself escaped this kind of plebiscitary desig-
nation: in a provincial canton of the empire, far from the theater of public opin-
ion, he earned, in his lifetime, few “votes,” favorable or otherwise. He harbored
the seeds of another kind of unanimity, destined to grow across space and time
due to its divine, nonhuman origin. Christ escaped the genre and philosophy
of the Lives. Strauss, Renan, and their imitators picked the wrong figure when
they wanted to add the “Son of man,” first and foremost the “Son of God,” to
the ranks of “illustrious men.”
The biography, supplanting the Life, governs an entirely different landscape
and according to an entirely different system. A direct form of democracy—the
ancient customs relative to “illustrious men,” the unwritten conventions that
regulated their canonization, and the violent or pious dispositions that drove
them, from childhood, to want to enter an elite, elected circle—was replaced
by a modern and egalitarian democracy, whose electoral body was limited to
one’s living contemporaries. Granted, this body is collectively as numerous as

all those that came before, all eras combined. The old form of direct democracy
had given considerable weight to the suffrage of the dead, to a vote repeated and
confirmed from generation to generation. In a way, it made time the leader of
this vote, granting it a preponderant authority over the decisions of the jury. But
egalitarian democracy relegated time, and Lives, to the warehouse of historic
castoffs. It shifted its focus instead to the “daughter” of time: the young, smiling,
active, and rushing news of the day. And, covertly, it stopped being direct. From
then on, a wave of intermediaries, or middlemen, was to intervene between
the mass of contemporary voters and the objects proposed in their favor (that
is, candidates for biographies) who were and are not at all inclined to allow the
old spontaneous symphony of voices to play, or the irresistible and ultimately
unanimous recognition that once ensured fame and glory. The heroes of past
Lives, maintained by a tenacious collective memory, remain attractive and find
“biographers.” But they are now merely a decimated and abused old senate, the
superstitious worship of whom historical study is incidentally attempting to re-
constitute. A swarm of more recent, younger, and “cooler” representatives are
increasingly designated for the admiration of the democratic masses by “Great
Electors” emerging from who knows where but authorizing themselves to can-
onize anyone who has had the fifteen minutes of fame by which we are all
tempted. And if by chance an individual’s reputation swells without, or far from,
these intermediaries, they hasten to reduce him of her to their mold so that not
one idol can be formed out of their control. They have the necessary means to
force admiration and even adoration upon the creatures they select. They stake
their honor on making something out of nothing and are careful to multiply
their “stars” in order to ensure, among these nebulae, that none truly stand out;
rather, each harms and diminishes the other. Their secret despair is of course
time, which, though relegated, marches onward. They banish it by occupying
all the available space with their trumpets of “Reputation.” In lieu of the chis-
eled artisanship of eulogies, Lives, memoirs, and “Dialogues of the Dead,” they
substitute flashbacks and interviews. Printed echoes of athletic, political, and
cultural celebrity mingle on “superstore” shelves with biographies of leading fig-
ures, which haphazardly respond to a thirst for Lives that remains intact despite
this bombardment. But that thirst is overstimulated and unquenched—reduced
by the Great Electors and stripped, by their voting privileges, of its historic right
to choose what would truly satiate it: news of eternal friends. The usurpers of a
vox populi confined to the present day serve their audience an overabundance
of ephemeral and random representatives swinging between the Charybdis of
repetitive hyperbole and the Scylla of abrupt silence.
238 Lives
This biography “factory” churning out ready-made texts does not merely
jumble past and familiar intercessors and celebrities du jour. History has ceased
to be moderated by a Mount Parnassus which was based on the test of experi-
ence and on which humanity’s greatest members were judged and approved
by humanity itself. History has become a conglomeration of news and current
events, all equal, all radically different, a succession of “cultures” that all produced
“types” who have nothing in common, but who also claim their right to be the sub-
ject of a biography. The news, the new Virgin of Mercy, thus welcomes under her
vast jacket of golden nylon the Hopi Indian and the Bronx vagrant, the Siberian
shaman and the headhunter, the rock star and the talk-show host. Within this vast
and overpopulated “who’s who,” everyone can dream of the unpredictable favor
granted by an intermediary’s whim of suddenly gaining access to the noisy box
office and, for a time, donning the dazzling garment of a “standard” biography.
By expanding the classical privilege of Lives so liberally, we have ensured that
that life itself loses some of its charm. Intermediaries have attempted to address
that risk, placing each new face in a phantasmagoric decor meant to represent
the abyss of “Me,” which the psychology of one’s inner depths can render more
or less mysterious, albeit always under the same spotlight and with the same ac-
complices. Lives were less dazzling, but also less predictable. Chance, tempera-
ment, character, caprice, but also blessings and miracles emerged in these texts,
silently revealing the soul’s impatience in the body, the finiteness rapidly fight-
ing against time or measuring itself calmly in relation to it. The reader finds him
or herself transported in those works by seeing so many diverse responses to the
same questions, so many diverse participants in the same game of imperceptible
rules. By switching from the soul to “Me,” monotony menaces. This Proteus of
psychological origin can adjust to any profile. Sartre’s biographical monsters
(Saint Genet, L’Idiot de la famille [Saint Genet, The Family Idiot]) share the
characteristic inability of serial biographies to reveal much about their subjects,
despite their interminable analyses. Flaubert and Genet became doubles, not
of Sartre but of the writer enmeshing his “Me,” with a more or less accepted bad
faith, into the labyrinth of fiction and its deceptive backdrops. The only differ-
ence between these self-centered famous reflections and the starry-eyed girl or
the rock star is the entirely arbitrary one between popular fiction and literature.
Of course Sartre did not resort to the most radical method of leveling the
playing field—the terror of scientific fact. Lives sought the truth, but as defined
by Aristotle, not Sherlock Holmes. They did not rely on either magnifying glass
or microscope. Instead, the human gaze, and its capacity for discernment, was
enough to capture, in detail and in the act, the current of a life and to appeal to
readers’ shared experiences. That “just sonority” has always been the factor link-
ing the historical Life to the novel. In Suetonius’s text, the young Tiberius sur-
reptitiously casts lovesick glances at his wife, Agrippina, whom he was forced to
divorce for the sake of his country. Once an emperor, that same passion bright-
ened the terrible and intricate debaucheries of his voluntary and dangerous
exile in Capri. There is nothing to explain here. It “screams,” as they say, of truth.
But for the scientific biography, this kind of characterization was unacceptable.
Who could have possibly observed the sideways glances attributed to Tiberius?
And had they been observed and correctly interpreted, how could they interest
any historical scholarship relating to the Roman Empire? Suetonius’s art falls
under literary fiction. Our savant curiosity latches on to other hints, resembling
a police investigation. Even the classic biography of yesteryear is no more than
a novel when compared to a rigorous prosopography or measured by a more dis-
cerning method. The “glances” of a young Tiberius, sensual and still capable of
being in love, like Racine’s Nero, nonetheless appeal to a sense of “truth” that
has remained the same for twenty-four centuries and has yet to abandon us even
today. The scholarly biography wants to see even further, and considers that one
man’s singular drama is necessarily a clash of superior or underlying forces, the
aspects of his “character” a facade or consequence. The Prince of Condé is no
longer the Prince of Condé but a product of an old feudal society grappling
with the rise of the administrative monarchy. And, more profoundly still, he is
that soldier who imagines himself crossing the flooded Rhine but who is carried
away by the notion of history, a simple chance for the historian to measure the
river’s lowest watermark and speed. In this way, the biographer hopes to reveal,
beneath the backdrop and actors that amuse the people, the grand apparatus
moving the theater. This keeps the specialists on tenterhooks and leaves others
somewhat underfed, or, in compensation, overfed on serial biographies. But the
word “biography” is not responsible. It made the mistake of triumphing when
the shared sense and thread of implicit wisdom of Lives was lost. When the ex-
change between the initiates of time—between them and with us—was inter-
rupted. Biographies can accumulate. But they no longer attempt to liberate us.
And yet are we meant to believe that we have left the era of Lives for bio-
graphical modernity in one fell swoop, like in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which,
from one day to the next, transports the reader from Shakespeare’s and Field-
ing’s sunny and vibrant Merry England to a rainy and pompous Victorian En-
gland? Between the classical and medieval landscape of Lives and the bio-
graphical tropics of today, a vast interim period saw the superb sunset of Lives
and the first signs of our mediatized age. This was the era of academies in Italy
and France, and the era of English Lives, the masterpiece of which was Bos-
well’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1792).
The academies, institutions characteristic of the Italian Renaissance and
then of classical France, were interlinked with the Lives genre. One of their
240 Lives
main activities was to perpetuate their members’ memories after their deaths
through a eulogy and the publication of collections of eulogies. This panegyric
vocation was voluntarily extended beyond the academies’ own ranks. Begin-
ning in the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio canonized the most renowned men
of humanist Italy, preferably from Florence, in a cycle of eulogies. Vasari was
following his example, or so it would appear, when he began his own Lives of
the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (by preference, Italians).
Unlike Pliny the Elder,3 he does not restrict himself to briefly juxtaposing the
names of unanimously admired artists with definitions of their styles. He care-
fully traces the career and describes the character of each of his subjects as if he
were one of Plutarch’s heroes or a philosopher according to Diogenes Laertius’s
definition. Spontaneous, popular, and royal recognition clearly preceded the
text. But the commentary provided by Vasari’s Lives, in addition to establishing
Italy as the motherland of artists and art as the true glue of the Italian homeland,
also raised the artist in modern Europe to the rank of a model representative of
humanity, to the same level as the statesman and warrior, the thinker, and the
poet. Vasari further grants his subject a place of honor in the assembly of Parnas-
sus. He also introduces an unknown but auspicious hierarchical criterion. His
Lives build gradually, and the most recent come the closest to perfection. This
idea of a “progression of the arts” was entirely foreign to the collective wisdom
that had “elected” Giotto and Raphael, and Leonardo and Michelangelo, and
which was limited to viewing those figures as the “best.” In other words, this eru-
dite “historiographical schema” built on general opinion. Its expanded perspec-
tive originated in the Medici Court, the Florentine Academy, and that literary
aristocracy’s preoccupation with challenging Gothic Europe. The “progressive
breakthrough” of Florentine painters and artists beyond medieval “coarseness”
was another victory for Florence, then the intellectual capital of Europe. That
in no way weakened the classic function served by Lives and the “transhistori-
cal” magnetism of the group of elites they proposed. In his general introduction,
Vasari writes:
The minds of an elite moved in all they do by an ardent desire for glory
do not spare any pain, however burdensome it may be, in bringing their
works to a point of perfection that renders them fit to dazzle and enthrall
the entire world; the humble births of many among them could never
prevent their efforts from reaching superior stages, the honors offered in
this life and then the indestructible renown of their exceptional merits.
There are therefore echoes of Plutarch in Vasari’s writing: the grandeur of

one’s soul, and the response it elicits from man’s latent desire for greatness, are
the basis of all true and lasting glory. And it fell to Vasari to cement, so to speak,
and protect from the accidents of time the memory of that encounter. He was
no less familiar with Suetonius: the grandeur of the soul has its pitfalls, dangers,
and eccentricities, which can become pathological or ridiculous. The “best”
artists are not sages but melancholy figures troubled and sometimes destroyed
by their demons.
It was rare that a “family of minds” would find an enthusiastic tribute that
summarized, in its own way, with its own illustrations, that group’s distinctive
identity, shared traits, and capacity to encapsulate all of humanity, replete with
all its grandeur, weakness, variety, inventiveness, and folly. Yet Vasari’s collec-
tion of Lives did just that.
It was in France that the “historiographical schema” introduced by the Ital-
ian academies would take on the dimensions and hold of a national myth. The
fleur-de-lis kingdom had to not only reproduce the miracles of the Roman Em-
pire but surpass them. The French state strove to intensify, to its benefit, the
same upward movement that the numerous and dispersed Italian academies
had weakly applied to Parnassus’s elected assembly. The Académie Française
became a “glory machine” far more entitled, central, and visible than its Italian
predecessors. It was itself an official Parnassus, albeit a modern and French one,
that implicitly augured a new way of evaluating great men. Though it undoubt-
edly did not claim, like the intermediaries of the twentieth century, to be a sub-
stitute for the spontaneous choices sanctioned by a long tradition, or even those
made by contemporary public opinion. It did however ensure—albeit not with-
out resistance—that its own jury, whose authority was derived from the state,
was called upon to confirm acquired fame and glory and to impose its own
dignity on recent apparitions of both. Quite naturally, the academy—followed
by its younger siblings, the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture and the
Académie Royale des Sciences—attempted to boost its recent authority via the
idea of “progress,” which made it, its protector the king, and modern France
witnesses of “great men,” more accomplished than all those who had preceded
them. That dual-purpose “biographical” vitality (the exaltation of human ex-
cellence in general but also of French and modern “politesse”) appeared no-
where with more perseverance (excepting the Gallican Church) than in the
collections of academic eulogies that Fontenelle, Abbot Gouget, d’Alembert,
and Cordorcet raised to the level of a structured genre. In a biting move, the
“reformer” of the strictly English biography, Lytton Strachey, in the preface to
his Eminent Victorians (1918), chose to pay homage to a tradition fundamen-
tally opposed to British values and to a genre tightly linked to French academic
conventions:
242 Lives
The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We

have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the
French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and
Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shin-
ing pages the manifold existences of men.4
This display of Francophilia is purely strategic of course. Here, France is hos-

tage to a daunting attempt to hijack the tradition of the original Lives to the ad-
vantage of the Bloomsbury group. Through Lytton Strachey’s voice, the entire
group reveals its ambition to become the self-appointed academy of English lit-
erature, liberated from the Tory yoke. Incidentally, there is a large gap between
the Oxbridgian mockery in Strachey’s biography of Cardinal Manning and the
delicate urbanity of the eulogies chiseled by figures like Fontenelle, Valincour,
and even Newton! The only common denominator between the two styles is
their refusal of Suetonius. However, Fontenelle avoided bizarre or pathologi-
cal traits, the petit fait vrai, in the name of the elegance and propriety that
dominated in French royal academies. Whereas Strachey, keen to denigrate,
preferred the insinuation of disturbing underlying psychological aspects to the
direct and calm power of the detail that “paints.” If Fontenelle diverged from
Suetonius, his colleague at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture André Féli-
bien was equally removed from Vasari: in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les
ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (Discussions concern-
ing the Lives and Works of the Most Excellent Painters, Ancient and Modern),
whose publication began in 1666, he composes a Parnassus of artists in which
French figures, with Poussin in the front row, receive the laurels of Apollo in the
form of dialogued Lives, in the “natural” French style, in which conventions of
decency and good taste gently mask the rough edges of the chosen individuals.
From 1696 to 1701, Charles Perrault, of the Académie Française and the Aca-
démie des Inscriptions, published the similar series of Hommes illustres qui ont
paru en France pendant ce siècle (The Illustrious Men Who Have Appeared
in France During This Century), with a supplement published separately, “in
Cologne” in 1697, the Éloges de MM. Arnauld et Nicole (Eulogies of Misters
Arnauld and Nicole). For the leader of the “Moderns,” this meant extending the
academies’ official privilege of declaring someone’s immortality well beyond
the group’s own members, perhaps based on the pontifical model of the Con-
gregation of Rites, established in 1588 to advise on canonizations. Perrault went
as far as to repair the injustice of the court toward the leading figures of Port-
Royal, objects of unanimous respect and admiration in France and in Europe,
despite their Jesuit adversaries who had influence with Louis XIV. He was not
the first to somewhat rectify the aspects of academic eulogies that could be too
cautiously bureaucratic. In 1673, the academician Honorat de Bueil, the Mar-

quis de Racan, published his Mémoires pour la vie de M. de Malherbe (Memoirs
of the Life of Malherbe). As Malherbe, Racan’s teacher of poetry, had died too
early to enter the academy or benefit from an official eulogy, Racan, with his
Memoirs, established his true ranking on Parnassus as the founder of the French
school of poetry, the Nicolas Poussin of modern literature. As a result, a unani-
mous plebiscite in favor of Malherbe was indeed ratified, and this highly unique
individual’s qualities were memorialized. Racan, in order to give himself more
leeway, modestly claimed he was writing Malherbe’s Memoirs and nothing
more. He nonetheless succeeded at definitively granting the poet his place in
the “historiographical schema” protected by the academy, which maintained a
processional character and responded to concerns of precedence. The following
year, Boileau summed up the significance of that canonization by the famous
“Enfin Malherbe vint” (Finally Malherbe Arrived) in Art poétique. La Fontaine
would soon situate Malherbe and Racan among “the choruses of angels.”
This same “corrective” process benefited the author of The Misanthrope,
who, though banned from the academy during his lifetime due to his actor pro-
fession, was memorialized in 1705 by Grimarest in a proper Life, posthumously
making him an academician. Molière’s glory was complete. One wonders if
Adrien Baillet, who in 1691 published the masterpiece of seventeenth-century
Lives, on Descartes, was driven by a similar goal. In his dedication to Chancellor
Boucherat, the librarian of the parliamentary president Lamoignan, writes that
from early childhood, Louis XIV lavished attention and pensions on Descartes,
an exaggerated claim to say the least. His intention is clear: repatriate Descartes
and the reach of this Life without which a renowned man in France could not
be definitively and officially established as such. And yet, Adrien Baillet, an ir-
reproachable scholar, strayed from the literary model of the academic eulogy:
his meticulously chronological Life is the history of both a great personality
and a great thinker, culminating with a portrait of a “Salesian” philosopher who
combined the qualities of a sage of antiquity and an “honest [Christian] man.”
Baillet even adds a “Suetonian” characteristic, softened with a French touch:
Descartes’s irresistible attraction to cross-eyed women, the result, explains the
author, of an unrequited childhood love for a cross-eyed young girl.
This manner of completing official lists even influenced the church. The
Jesuit Bouhours, the author of the elegant Lives of Saint Ignatius and Saint
François-X avier (1679 and 1682), published in 1686 Vie de Mme de Bellefonds
supérieure et fondatrice du monastère des religieuses bénédictines de N.D. des
Anges établi à Rouen (Life of Madame de Bellefonds: Superior and Founder of
the Monastery of Benedictine Nuns of N.D. des Anges established in Rouen):
244 Lives
this exquisitely cultured abbess, who had hosted salons in her Norman parlor,
was not distinguished by any miracle, and the Congregation of Rites had no
plans to beatify or canonize her. Nor would the academy consider a woman,
particularly a cloistered one. With this account, Father Bouhours, himself close
to the academy, though as a Jesuit unfit to enter it, at least elevated Madame de
Bellefonds to the Christian Parnassus.
There is little doubt that the academic genre of the eulogy and its cousin, the
Life, so regulated, rational, and politely spiritual in France, had a decisive influ-
ence on the novel. Valincour, for example, for whom Fontenelle wrote a eulogy,
was himself the author of a Vie de François de Lorraine, duc de Guise (Life of
François de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, 1681), a work typical of an academic histo-
rian, whereas the Abbot of Saint-Réal published a Don Carlos in 1672 with the
subtitle: “Nouvelle historique” (Historical Story). Saint-Réal also wrote the Mé-
moires de la duchesse de Mazarin (Memoirs of the Duchess of Mazarin, 1675).
Thus, by contagion, authentic eulogies, Lives, and memoirs all influenced fic-
tion. The distance between what was fictional and the degree of historical truth
diminished. The description that Fontenelle, in his Éloge de Valincour (Eulogy
of Valincour), provided for the Life of the Duke de Guise could just as easily be
applied to the “historical stories” that became, under Louis XIV, the nec plus
ultra of the novel:
A small piece of history that responds to all that we ask of a good histo-
rian, research that, though undertaken quite carefully, and sometimes
gathered from distant sources, does not surpass the limits of reasonable
curiosity, a well drawn, and animated, narration that naturally guides the
reader and maintains his interest, a noble and simple style, which draws
its ornamentation from the heart of things, or else quite subtly from else-
where, with no bias toward the hero, who can nonetheless inspire passion
from his author.5
One then wonders if, by adopting the academic model of the Life for her
historical novel La Princesse de Clèves (The Princess of Cleves, 1687), Madame
de La Fayette was not trying to pit altar against altar and had not canonized a
woman in the way required, but in a strictly feminine register foreign to the
masculine Lives: that of private life and an entirely secret and profane grandeur
hidden in the depths of one’s heart.
Women were not alone in aspiring to the heights of Parnassus. Men of let-
ters, who were not looked on favorably by the Académie Française, and who
would not obtain their own company (inscriptions) until 1701, could count on
a kind of canonization via the short-lived genre of the anas. The Naudaeana,
Patiniana, and Chevraeana, which were dedicated to erudite luminaries like

Gabriel Naudé, Guy Patin, and Urbain Chevreau, diverged greatly from the
narratives of academic Lives. Inspired by Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, these
fragmented collections assembled anecdotes, bon mots, and literary judgments
about their heroes. There was no attempt to trace the vast curve of a bios: the
last French Pantagruels of Greco-L atin humanism made do with appearing
at the summit of their scholarly careers, among their peers, amid all the cruel
judgment and biting wit of those who were well read, well traveled, and ex-
perienced. The genre, compromised by the number of mediocre imitations,
declined quickly during the eighteenth century. The bon ton of academic elo-
quence then enveloped the world of men of letters, increasingly looked down
upon as “antiquaries,” and the timid attempt to transform the citizens of the
former Republic of Letters, who wrote in Latin, into heroes collapsed in archa-
isms or ridicule. A standard of French, modern, and polite civility imposed itself
everywhere through the academic eulogy: Parnassus became the policed and
eloquent salon in which the clothed and bewigged dead spoke under the gaze
of the gracious Muses and an Apollo in a coronation cape. Voltaire’s Le Siècle
de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV) offers a clear illustration of this assembly
of Moderns, whom he calls upon to henceforth preside over the progress of the
Enlightenment.
For history itself took very seriously the upward or ascending view of history
held by gens d’esprit after the Moderns’ victory. The Revolution, the work of
orators, ultimately persuaded men of letters that they were indeed the drivers
of a humanity heading toward new heights, and not the custodians of a human
experience that, in its finiteness, always had to be redone, by other means.
Without deigning to directly confront the reigning illusion of his century, the
Chateaubriand who penned Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memories from beyond
the Grave) challenged it, with irony and melancholy, with what he had the
courtesy to present as his individual experience: the succession of human bios,
the rules of a game as old as the world itself, but whose classical rigor, hiding
beneath verbose ideals, had become even more poignant. His less haughty con-
temporary, Sainte-Beuve, was subtler; he has been largely forgotten today. And
yet, in his feline manner, he was even shrewder than Chateaubriand. This histo-
rian awoke quickly from the nightmare of history. Sainte-Beuve wanted to write
Lives. A Benedictine, he singlehandedly constructed a Parnassus of dynamic
portraits capable of intimidating the Moderns. A poet and novelist, he popu-
lated his Port-Royal and his Causeries du lundi (Monday Chats) with figures
even more unscathed by the troubles of his time than the great and eloquent
Chateaubriand: these were not bright “beacons,” but faces that reflected in the
246 Lives
half-light. The ability to distinguish and present those faces indicates an inner
independence and superiority whose masked heroism has not often been recog-
nized. This oeuvre of scattered “criticism”—done justice by Roberto Calasso in
his admirable essay The Ruin of Kasch—is in fact a creation as ambitious and
monumental as Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), Hugo’s
La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), and Michelet’s Histoire de
France (History of France), but with less padding. One finds echoes of both
Boileau and Pascal in Sainte-Beuve’s writing. Sainte-Beuve forced literature to
recreate what it had undone by reflecting and focusing on a collection of par-
allel Lives, not about men of letters, but about men and women who lived and
who wrote. They did not necessarily pen “masterpieces” (a frequent reproach
directed at Sainte-Beuve). But he was suspicious of the modern notion of the
masterpiece, which he viewed as too corrupted by exaggerated genius and illu-
sions of sublimity. His less naïve choices led elsewhere: true fidelity to histori-
cally and unanimously recognized masterpieces (Homer and Virgil, Horace
and La Fontaine, Racine and Saint Augustine). Sainte-Beuve recognized the
loyalty among unknowns and minores whom excitement and bavardage could
no longer discern and whose secret talents were well hidden. A prime example
is Joseph Joubert. Sainte-Beuve loved Leopardi, and he would have appreciated
Emily Dickinson if he had had the chance. So his touchstone, less personal
taste than an infallible intuition for what suited and would always suit honest
men and women throughout time, was a way of being, preferably veiled, and
good use of finitude, in contrast to the Faustian desire to shock one’s era and
knock it a bit further off its hinges. And if the discretion and indirectness of a
written narrative did not suffice, this divinatory critic then restored the singu-
lar plentitude of a life and face through other means. “Life” and “work” and
“character” and “style” worked together to reveal an interior singularity, as well
as human dignity gained over time. These elements were as indissociable for
Sainte-Beuve as physiognomy, clothing, interior decor, and a soul’s trajectory
were for Balzac. Monday Chats was therefore the last Parnassus of the West
and the first to make room for its members’ private lives, for their talent to live
hidden and appreciated by small numbers. At this time, the universal standard
of humanity to which Sainte-Beuve refers had ceased to be immediately and
unanimously recognizable; it was threatened with clandestinity. More than
ever, it needed a representative discreet and invisible enough to allow that stan-
dard to emerge from the shadows and be revealed to distracted contemporaries.
The discontinuity and prodigious diversity of Monday Chats only initially masks
the united and profound coherence of an Elysian landscape to which this criti-
cal genius convoked souls rather than demonstrations of glory, tested and civi-
lized figures rather than masterpieces. Sainte-Beuve, whose claws were so quick
to graze others, carefully recommended these figures to his readers:
The critical mind is by nature easy, insinuating, mobile, and compre-

hensive. It is a large and limpid river that snakes and unwinds around
works and monuments of poetry, as if around rocks, fortresses, carpeted
vineyard slopes and the dense valleys that line its shores. As each object
of this landscape remains fixed in its spot, paying scant attention to the
others, as the feudal tower dismisses the valley and the valley ignores the
hill, the river goes from one to the next, bathes them without damaging
them, embracing them with a living and flowing current of water, under-
stands them, reflects them; and when the traveler is curious to know and
visit these varied sites, the river takes him in a small boat; it smoothly
transports him, and successfully shows him the changing spectacle of its
course.6
Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, Port-Royal, Causeries, Portraits

(Chateaubriand and his Literary Group, Port-Royal, Monday Chats, Portraits):
an entire society selected and gathered, far from the noise and “acceleration”
of history, to accompany the modern homo viator, share experiences with him,
offer him a freely elected family, and liberate him from the flawed belief that
living within one’s limits was the only necessity in life. For Sainte-Beuve, the
literary kingdom of Lives had become the initiatory double of the principalities
of this changing world, and the only fixed reference point from which to liber-
ate oneself.
The French genre had found its “amble” during the seventeenth century,
within the academic sphere. Thus the vast ensemble gathered by Sainte-Beuve
in the nineteenth century was not lacking in affinities with the academic genre
of the eulogy, which the caustic writer in part helped revive. In his Pensées et
Maximes (Thoughts and Maxims), he writes:
Monsieur de Chastellux (the author of La Félicité publique [On Pub-

lic Felicity] and on whom Villemain is in the midst of writing an aca-
demic Notice) was the quintessential admirer at the end of a century
during which illusions distracted everyone and people were like kites.
He applied this to everything. One day, returning from the Comédie
française, where he had seen the debut of an actress named Thénard, and
entering the home of Madame de Staël, he said, “I just saw a new actress
who performed marvelously.” “Oh! That is a bit strong,” said Madame de
Staël. “I was there and I thought she was not a good actress at all.” “But,”
responded Monsieur de Chastellux, “I found that she did quite well in
248 Lives
this or that scene,” which he then tried to specify. Madame de Staël per-
sisted, joined by one or two individuals returning from the theater. Mon-
sieur de Chastellux finally backed down, saying, “What else do you want?
The poor devil did what she could.” Thus his great admiration, further and
further reduced, concluded. I do not know if Villemain will dare describe
this quality in his academic Eulogy. But he should, at risk of not painting
the man.
Paint the man: that phrase paints Sainte-Beuve himself. Suetonius had the
Christian perspective of La Bruyère, Plutarch the French wit of Voltaire, but for
all that Sainte-Beuve may have been our literary “Homer,” his supposed succes-
sors, Taine, Brunetière, and Lanson, cruelly rejected him. And the art of Lives
in France suffered from the contempt that Valéry, and later Proust, would heap
on the pinnacle of the genre: the Life of the writer and the artist. The result:
legend and truth, admiration and the art of knowing oneself lost much. Though
perhaps the age of assembly-line biographies will eventually ease and bring us
back to Lives, portraits, and maybe even “Dialogues of the Dead.”
Nothing can better measure the distance between the French and English
traditions, as well as what links them, than a comparison between Lives in En-
gland and in France. Lytton Strachey feigned astonishment that the English
had nothing comparable to Fontenelle’s academic eulogies. And yet he knew
of the existence of John Aubrey (1626–1697), a friend of Hobbes and a member
of the Royal Society, who wrote Brief Lives, a collection dedicated to his most
noteworthy contemporaries, whom he had known personally or through an inti-
mate oral tradition: Bacon, Hobbes, Henry Wotton.7 But these were master-
pieces of melancholy and erudite wit, composed “tumultuarily,” as he himself
wrote to his friend Anthony A. Wood, an “antiquary” at Oxford. And therefore
nothing that could be read before the Royal Society, a company of savants and
scholars cultivating a plain style and not eloquence. Lytton Strachey’s silence
begs indulgence, however. Bloomsbury was too fixated on the Londonian Aca-
démie Française to see itself in Aubrey; the group was dreaming of the power of
figures like Fontenelle, Voltaire, d’Alembert, and their brilliant friends. Aubrey’s
delicious and profound brusqueness was too much for these somewhat intimi-
dating intellectuals, who could do no more than add a collection of portraits of
original and eccentric figures to England’s rich literary legacy. That did more
than any other literary tradition, when it came to the canonization of England’s
great men, including its writers, to conserve the capricious spontaneity of the
classical and medieval world. The Anglican rupture with Rome shielded En-
gland from being influenced by the Roman Congregation of Rites, as had been
the case for Richelieu. In England, Lives inevitably emerged wherever an indi-
vidual had reaped universal esteem. Another method of posthumous consecra-

tion was the engraved tomb in Westminster Cathedral, another classical ritual
that has no equivalent in France. The Pantheon is not the chapel of a unified
group, like Westminster, but a secular institution. It is natural that, in the ab-
sence of academic eulogies, the genre of Lives in England took on a character
vital for national memory and was held in high esteem. An English Sainte-
Beuve would have been published by Penguin Books. In France, Monday Chats
has not been republished in half a century. The history of Life and Letters, and
reflection on the genre, became a national discipline in England, which spread
throughout the Anglophone world: a journal entitled Biography is published in
Honolulu. And the vitality of the genre, the respect accorded its authors, and
the reviews it garners in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Re-
view of Books are quite surprising to the French, children overly spoiled, without
knowing, by their majestic academic tradition. More generally, the national En-
glish mind-set perceives humanity via the unique individual; it sees no contra-
diction between private and public virtues. In short, it operates with the sense
of bios as viewed by Suetonius and Plutarch. It is not in the land of Shakespeare
that you can, with impunity, announce the “death of man” in terms other than
those of an individual. That said, English loyalty to a common ground of civility
and humanity (extended as far as the animal world) is extremely vibrant. This is
in a way the mystery of the English garden: it appears “tumultuous,” but deep
down every element or essence is treated with a loving attention that places each
in its best light. French Lives, before they devolved into biographies, appeared
to have been governed by Le Nôtre’s hand. Once they strayed, in the works
of Sainte-Beuve—the most “English” and “Tory,” along with Montaigne and
La Fontaine, of all the French—these figures viewed that eccentric with grow-
ing suspicion. The numerous, energetic, dispersed, and varied English Lives
responded to an entirely different conception of man, nature, and the connec-
tions that linked them. Within that landscape looms an enormous oak tree:
James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. It was in a way, amplified to the scale
of a Smollett novel, a brief life of Aubrey himself. His “hero” was a learned man
comparable to Saint-Évremond, Boileau, and Bayle, whose excellent Lives,
written by Pierre Desmaizeaux (1711, 1712, and 1732), the French were so quick
to forget. Boswell grants Dr. Johnson, and for good reason, the honors of a Ro-
man emperor: the reader learns every aspect of his inner self, his quirks, his de-
formities, and the extent of his literary knowledge, taste, and wisdom. However,
Boswell is no less unique than his subject: playing at “good country boys,” he
ultimately reveals the most complete portrait (or “nature”) produced by any
author of Lives in literary history. Though Goethe attempted to reproduce that
250 Lives
miracle by taming Eckermann, he merely emphasizes, by comparison, what we

can call for lack of a better term the “genius” of James Boswell, the Herodotus
of the modern genre of Lives. He manifested the latent gifts of an anonymous
public, in their vibrant and joyful plenitude, which had always been able to
recognize, love, and honor its great men. Moreover, Boswell, like Sainte-Beuve,
had developed the ability to recognize the grandeur of hidden humanity, and
help bring it into a permanent spotlight. Less studied than Goethe, Johnson was
able to sense that calling, which he viewed as a heavenly gift, and made Boswell
his friend and extremely close confidant. He himself published a series of Lives
of the Poets. Johnson knew that literature’s most important role was to take the
measure, and the memory of that measure, of a man’s life. From their relation-
ship emerged the most unsparing and tender Life that has ever been written,
whose hero, without ever ceasing to be one, appears “naïvely” in both his comi-
cal quirks and moments of grandeur. The fact that Johnson was a scholar, a living
library, a philologist, a critic, an unparalleled moralist, known to true connois-
seurs but rarely honored by the masses or the rest of the world, and furthermore
a poor man, a kind of Londonian Socrates who nonetheless dazzled in England,
gives us a sense of both Boswell’s insight and the admirable persistence across
the Channel of these Ancients, in the sense of Boileau and his confidant Bros-
sette, at the very moment (1792) when in France the Moderns were completing
their victory by polishing the guillotine blade.
Starting with Boswell’s masterful work, obligatory bedside reading for the
English (the equivalent of Montaigne’s Essays among the French), Lives in
England ripened with the abundance and regularity of the vines. On mul-
tiple occasions during the nineteenth century, a deputy of the “electoral corps”
would spontaneously come forward, during the lifetime of a “great man,” to
prepare himself, in his private life, for his future task as the author of a Life.
Such was the case, for example, for Forbes as regarded Carlyle, who was him-
self obsessed with the quest for great men and the form of their Lives. The great-
est writers and historians were not above contributing to the genre. The Life of
Charlotte Brontë, by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and The Life of Charles
Dickens, by John Forster, can be counted among the still-popular monuments
of the so-called Victorian Lives of which the Bloomsbury Group was so con-
temptuous. And yet this tradition inspired the most indisputable literary biogra-
phies of our century: Leon Edel’s Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce,
and even Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf!
And since every rule has its exceptions, it is important to note that the twen-
tieth century saw a French masterpiece in the style of the English Life: Jean
Delay’s marvelous Jeunesse d’André Gide (The Youth of André Gide, 1956),
which Sainte-Beuve would have savored. A doctor and a friend of Gide’s, Jean
Delay was in a way his Boswell. His Avant-Mémoires (Before Memory), written
in the manner of Lives, have since confirmed at what point, and with what de-
tached and spiritual humanity, this writer could use the bios to take the genuine
measure of a man’s life. His writing combined the French academic tradition,
minus Strachey’s cant, with the resources of English Lives, which had already
inspired André Maurois. Jean Delay could have easily borrowed, as an epigraph
for his work, the epigram cited in the seventeenth century by John Aubrey: “I re-
member one saying of General Lambert’s: ‘That the best of men are but men
at the best.’”
16
THE “FAMILIAR LETTERS” OF PRESIDENT DE BROSSES:
A VOYAGE THROUGH ITALY AS AN EXERCISE
IN LETTERED LEISURE
Reading Charles de Brosses’s Lettres familières (Familiar Letters), about

his time in Italy from the perspective and imagination of Stendhal, is far from
the worst way to understand and appreciate this gem of travel writing.1 Yet, over
time, the “Stendhalization” of these Letters penned by the president of the Bur-
gundy parlement has become a cliché that dispenses with seeking the inherent
truth and beauty of this masterpiece. That said, this cliché no doubt remains
preferable to the exhausting analyses of which a certain form of modern ped-
antry is capable, bent on detecting “class” mockery, anti-Enlightenment “con-
servatism,” and an affectation of rococo style within de Brosses’s writing. But
coming back to Stendhal: The musical effect of “rapid and gentle leisure” to
which the author of La Chartreuse (The Charterhouse) often referred, from
1799 to his death, as if to the touchstone of the supreme literary gift, none-
theless threatens to conceal the rigorous discipline that supports it, and which
renders taut and tremulous the cords of an instrument with which de Brosses
improvised with such apparent ease. In effect, the traveling president was not a
tourist in the modern sense of the word introduced by Stendhal into the French
language. And not simply because he periodically abandoned his supposed lib-
ertine roaming in order to write long and frequent letters.
If de Brosses the traveler was truly vacationing from his role as parlement
president, he nonetheless remained much more active in his second occupa-
tion as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. His Italian voyage, and the very
Letters through which we know about it, were exercises in the otium studiosum
et litteratum that, since Petrarch (who was hailed in passing at Fontaine-de-
Vaucluse by de Brosses’s traveling companions, the two Sainte-Palayes), had
defined the paradox of contemplative and erudite lettered life. If one notes a de-
gree of ostentation in de Brosses’s Letters, it comes from the traits that elevated
that ideal of lettered citizenship, which were practiced by the Dijon magistrate
throughout his trip to Italy, above the ordinary constraints of professional life or
purely worldly leisure.
252
“Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses 253
Make no mistake: even the refined epicureanism deployed so liberally and

vivaciously in Letters carries the philosophical seal of the Republic of Letters’
most learned tradition, stretching from Lorenzo Valla to Gassendi, and from
Erasmus to Abbot Du Bos. It was a sign of recognition and complicity between
Europe’s greatest savants. For de Brosses, as was already the case for Naudé,
this literary epicureanism had so deeply penetrated Catholicism following the
Renaissance that it served as the common language in Rome, even between
nonclerical “libertines” like our Dijon-born magistrate and the most learned
prelates of the Roman Church, namely Cardinal Passionei and the future pope
Benedict XIV Lambertini. But even that elevated urbanity and attic wit, so
natural in de Brosses’s letters, betrayed him as a citizen of the Republic of Let-
ters to his peers, rather than as a worldly man or salon habitué. De Brosses’s
literary humor, which inserted finesse and laughter into mention of even the
crudest realia touching upon sex and death, reveals the moral habitus of erudite
humanism, which was superior to pedantry, pietism, and prudery, but equally
removed from cynical or fanatical mockery. Traveling through Italy, far from his
professional obligations, de Brosses was another Peiresc at work, but while writ-
ing prose as elegantly as La Fontaine did poetry. But he was also a Peiresc travel-
ing abroad. Beneath the exterior of neglegentia diligens with which de Brosses
was happy to describe his travels, this Italian voyage clearly fell within the scope
of a research endeavor whose solid structure becomes apparent as soon as we
agree to no longer separate otium from studium within his Letters.
De Brosses invented a blended genre: an account of the savant voyage ren-
dered through gallant letters. Chapelle and Bachaumont’s Voyage in the south-
west meets Gronovius’s Letters, written during his peregrinatio academica in
Italy and France,2 the former’s humor and playful charm concealing and ren-
dering seductive the latter’s erudite and classical knowledge. De Brosses could
not have read Montaigne’s Journal de voyage (Travel Journal), which was only
published in 1770, but he was influenced enough by the philosopher’s Essays
that it seems as if he had. A vigorous and lively Montaignian “I,” both enthu-
siastic and ironic, confidently reveals itself “by leaps and gambols” in an inti-
mate nakedness throughout de Brosses’s letters. Thanks to that singular “I,” the
multitude of scholarly or apparently nonchalant curiosities seemingly indulged
by the magistrate during his travels are unified by the same style and intention.
However, this profound “I” does not belong to a novelistic hero “chasing happi-
ness” in Italy. Though mobile and metamorphic, it remains solidly constructed,
knows how it wants to appear and what it wants to be, and is no less organized
and determined in its travels than were the Benedictines Jean Mabillon and
Bernard de Montfaucon, who penned, respectively, an Iter and a Diarium itali-
254 Lives
cum. Like them, even if he was not held to monastic discretion, de Brosses
was on a study trip, in the name of a community of savants, in the company of
savants, and his Letters were first and foremost reports on his mission. Despite
the charm and elegance applied by de Brosses to cleanse this solid and studious
foundation of all pedantry, his Letters remain in the same Republic of Letters
as that of the Maurists.
However distinctive or “Montaignian” it may be, de Brosses’s “I” is insepa-
rable from the erudite society he is addressing and from which he draws his
assurance and freedom, the font of a happy life. Literature was for him akin to a
hive of learned bees among which he could be fully himself before inviting his
readers to share the proverbial honeycomb. From the start (meaning Petrarch),
friendship was the social connector of the Republic of Letters and an activity
neither Erasmus nor Peiresc ever tired of practicing or recommending. The
small group of erudite magistrates who accompanied de Brosses to Italy was
composed of close friends. Alternately confident, tender, gruff, and infectious,
this warm and active friendship permeates the copious missives de Brosses sent
to his beloved Blancey, his gentle Quintin, and his dear Buffon, who, though
faraway, were still “traveling” at his sides. Such robust and stable friendship, re-
gardless of distance, was only conceivable through the example and generous
presence of minds liberated from time, distance, and age: Horace and Ariosto,
and Sallust and La Fontaine were thus observers of these men of learning’s
leisurely pursuits. Often they were granted speaking parts in de Brosses’s cor-
respondence. Citizenship in the ideal Republic of Letters, as it was exercised
by de Brosses and his friends, was also an exquisite victory over the weight and
specter of pride and ego; it was the foundation of gay sociability and shared
knowledge at one table, one banquet, around which the living, even absent,
and the dead happily conversed. This friendship would prove to be the most fer-
tile moral climate for scholarly collaboration and conversation. If de Brosses’s
“I” was able to flourish without self-absorption, it is because he was at home
in the sunny climate of Arcadia, Parnassus, and the academy. The classic light
of Italy extended this ideal climate to a vast landscape and people, both quite
real. It is important, in my opinion, to be quite attentive and receptive to the
differences between this humanist brand of literary friendship, shared with us
for the last time by de Brosses’s Letters, and the seductive alliances into which
Voltaire strategically knew to lead his correspondents. In de Brosses’s writing,
there is always a note of pure love in friendship that a man of letters like Vol-
taire, perennially on guard, carefully avoided. To the trained ear, that note
evokes the old Republic of Letters. From Florence, de Brosses writes to the
Count of Neuilly:
You wanted to come to Italy, my king, but it was for a second voyage,
was it not? For unless one has been here before, one cannot know of all
the things here in the way that you do. But how on Earth! The Borro-
mean Islands, the houses of Brenta, the details of Venice, and one hun-
dred other things you know just as well, and of which you speak to me
as precisely as if you had them before your very eyes. Oh, how I would
love for that view to be at this moment actual and not a dream, especially
now that I find myself within the study of the Grand Duke and amid all
the masterpieces of art and science, curiosities and sweet odds and ends
that truly make this the most surprising place in the world. I am quite
beside myself to not be able to see you when I think how all these kinds of
things are in your style and your taste that I find myself only halfway here
myself.
At this point, a quote from memory comes to mind, from Horace’s book 2, 17:
a, te meae si partem animae rapit

maturior vis, quid moror altera,
nec carus aeque nec superstes
integer?
(Alas, if some untimely blow snatches thee, the half of my own life, away,
why do I, the other half, still linger on, neither so dear as before nor sur-
viving whole?)3
Perhaps de Brosses and the Conte de Neuilly were no Petrarch and Colonna,
Montaigne and La Boétie, or Peiresc and Gassendi, but their devotion was iden-
tical, their transparency and reciprocity almost pastoral. Rousseau would dream
of such friendship his whole life, never finding it among Paris’s philosophes.
The traveling de Brosses cannot be separated from the men of learning who
accompanied him, mentally following him from Dijon, or those whom he en-
countered and incorporated into his group along the way. These men were the
last shepherds of Arcadia. There was not one man of importance in the Ital-
ian Republic of Letters in 1739–1740 that de Brosses did not want to meet and
by whom he was not well received: Cardinal Noris, the famous marquis Sci-
pione Maffei, gifted at both poetry and erudition, the Sinicizing Jesuit Fouc-
quet; Abbot Ludovico Antonio Muratori from Modena, a great historian and
linguist; the collector Niccolò Gaburri, author of a collection of Vite de Pittori;
and finally P. Antonio Maria Gori, a leading antiquary and author of Museum
florentinum and Museum etruscum. Nothing in common then, except the itin-
erary, between this literary voyage, de Brosses’s Iter italicum, and the British
256 Lives
Grand Tour, from which the word “tourist” is derived. The Grand Tour was
the province of very young male members of the British aristocracy, accom-
panied by their preceptors, who in traveling throughout continental Europe
and Italy sought the finishing touches to their educations as future diplomats,
statesmen, and members of the gentry. These young men were not and would
never become citizens of the Republic of Letters. Their travels were part of an
elite curriculum vitae undertaken at the requisite age, during the final years
of adolescence. In 1739, de Brosses was already a high-ranking magistrate, and
neither he nor his companions needed this trip to establish themselves. They left
for Italy because they could, as adults well established in life, who had already
acquired sufficient moral, philosophical, and scholarly maturity. They went to
Italy not to learn, but to verify. In keeping with a French tradition, the trip em-
barked upon by de Brosses and his friends was that of an accomplished and
recognized man of letters. The pilgrimage to Italy, the homeland of letters, was
therefore, for de Brosses, a general remembering of what he already knew and
what he had long read, studied, reflected upon, and seen in the libraries and
collections of Dijon and Paris. At his age (thirty-something), with his vast erudi-
tion, for de Brosses Italy was not a learning ground but a place in which to recall
and deepen existing knowledge. Like the devout pilgrim visiting the tombs and
sites of the holy land, de Brosses put his humanist imagination and memory to
the test of sensory experience in Italy. For him, Italy was a veritable euphoria
of relearning, which revived and incarnated both texts and art. When he found
these works in their original sites, theory became practice, mnemonic prolepsis
replaced by the plentitude of a sensual and tangible presence. He may well have
been irritated or amused by the discrepancy between the beauty of an idealized
Italy and a reality that was often obscured to the traveler. Regardless, he chose
to view it from a different angle.
The following point is important and indeed the very foundation of the hap-
piness abundant throughout Familiar Letters. When he left for Italy, de Brosses
was already, as were the peers of his age group and social class that accompa-
nied him, a recognized citizen of the European Republic of Letters, which,
in 1739, had long been divided between Ancients and Moderns. Members of
the latter group, like Descartes, Malebranche, Fontenelle, and La Motte, were
metaphysicists and geometricians; their analyses largely ignored memory, eru-
dition, or antiquity. Italy, for which they cared little, was no longer the Mne-
mosyne of Europe, in their eyes. Among the Ancients, successors to Boileau,
Racine, Madame Dacier, and de Fénelon, we find President Bouhier, the Soc-
rates of the Dijon Academy. This literary divide occurred in both Paris and Lon-
don. As for Dijon, the city and its parlement remained faithful to the spirit of
a Republic of Letters unified by a shared reverence for antiquity, at least until

1750. Dijon was a citadel of the Ancients, in harmony with and yearning for an
Italy that itself was largely indifferent to the Moderns. De Brosses was to find his
natal Dijon amplified and magnified in Italy.
In fact, in Dijon,4 as in Italy, the regenerative lifeblood of the Republic
of Letters was a Jesuit college, the Collège des Gondrans, where de Brosses’s
teacher of poetry and rhetoric was Father Oudin, a translator of Homer. His
study companions were Buffon and an Italian, the nephew of the Francophile
and pro-Jansenist Cardinal Passionei. But his true teacher of erudite human-
ism was President Bouhier, also a former Gondrans student, who was elected
to the Académie Française in 1727, thanks to the support of the Marquise de
Lambert, when the Moderns were already in power. Editor and preface writer
for Montaigne’s Essays, translator of Herodotus, and commentator and trans-
lator of Cicero, Jean Bouhier perpetuated the savant tradition of the sixteenth
century’s greatest magistrates, the De Thous and the De Mesmes, in Dijon. In
his library of thirty thousand volumes, for which his father had obtained the
privilege of receiving works published by the Imprimerie royale du Louvre, he
assembled a small academy of young magistrates interested in philology and an-
tiquity. He maintained an erudite correspondence with a hundred or so savants
from France and abroad. De Brosses was his most talented student. As soon as
he returned from Italy, in 1741, he purchased the office of président à mortier
from his teacher, who had become first president. He would address his most
technical letter from Italy, Mémoire sur les bâtiments antiques dont il subsiste
quelques restes à Rome (Recollection of Antique Buildings Partially Remain-
ing in Rome), to President Bouhier. The text on the Antiquités d’Herculanum
(Antiquities of Herculaneum), also composed from notes taken on location,
and which de Brosses read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1749, was
another clear example of scientific communication in his Letters.
Other scholarly “memoirs” are included in Familiar Letters: notes on Avi-
gnon, Genoa, Milan, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Naples, and Rome all serve
as monographs on urban and human geography, or materials ready for inclu-
sion in an Italian version of an Essai sur les moeurs (Essay on Manners). There
are also several well-considered painting catalogs: Mémoires sur les principaux
tableaux de Venise, de Bologne, de Florence, avec de courtes remarques; Cata-
logue alphabétique des principales peintures et sculptures de Rome (Memoirs on
the Principal Paintings of Venice, Bologna, and Florence, with Short Remarks;
Alphabetical Catalog of the Principal Paintings and Sculptures of Rome).
Finally, the Letters include notes on geology, for example those de Brosses took
on the activity of Vesuvius and addressed to Buffon. The breadth and vivacity
258 Lives
of de Brosses’s style overshadows this vast scientific dossier, which nonetheless

occupies a large part of his collected letters. Via their recipients in Dijon, these
observations were also directed at the scholarly public of various royal acade-
mies. They fulfilled de Brosses’s duties to the French Republic of Letters.5
To these endeavors of a geographer, geologist, antiquary, and art historian,
we can add de Brosses’s essays on the political, moral, economic, and even mili-
tary realities of the countries in which he was traveling, his precise instruc-
tions on diverse techniques (the art of creating mosaics, relining paintings, or
transporting canvas frescos), and expert remarks on theater and music, all of
which serve to dispel the image of an aesthetic and dilettante de Brosses gone
in “search of happiness” in Italy. Never had a better (and better-prepared) en-
cyclopedic mind more completely fulfilled his studious mission, in a concerted
effort to understand Italy and share that understanding with France’s literary
milieus and political circles. His final letters on the election of his dear Car-
dinal Lambertini, who took the name Benedict XIV, are a model example of
diplomatic relations and political analysis. De Brosses even established a com-
prehensive alphabetic catalog of the cardinals at the papal conclave, includ-
ing their descriptions and political heft.6 Chateaubriand modeled his account
of his experiences during the 1826 conclave in his Memoirs after de Brosses’s
exemplary work as an ambassador in partibus. The “substantific marrow” in
de Brosses’s writing is incomparably more varied and nourishing than that of
any other voyager in the eighteenth century. The pleasures enjoyed by the eru-
dite magistrate are indistinguishable from his duties as a citizen of the Republic
of Letters, and even those of a good subject and servant of an enlightened mon-
archy. De Brosses applied the curiosities and revealed the competencies of an
academician from several different academies. In that sense, his studious leisure
was perfectly adapted to a magistrate of a sovereign court on a mission abroad.
We should see in his Letters the work of a great parliamentarian who believed,
prior to the crises of the end of Louis XV’s reign, that the kingdom’s senates
were essential cogs of the royal state and powerful and informed counterbal-
ances to the court’s potential arbitrariness. De Brosses believed that even the
leisure life of a high-placed French magistrate should contribute to enlighten-
ing one’s peers.
The authority and prestige of the Republic of Letters were in fact indispens-
able to leading magistrates like de Brosses. That tradition dates back to the six-
teenth century. The humanist otium studiosum et litteratum was the corollary
to the senatorial auctoritas. In keeping with that tradition, and upon the advice
of President Bouhier, de Brosses undertook the emendatio of one of the finest
texts of antiquity. He prepared a philological edition of Sallust’s Jugurtha and
Catilina and a reconstituted essay, using a method of conjecture that dates
back to Scaliger, of the scattered and corrupted Roman History, also by Sal-
lust. This ambitious project would ultimately remain unfinished, however, and
de Brosses had to settle for publishing a French translation of Roman History,
which he had haphazardly reassembled, in 1777. However, from 1739 to 1740,
the project still appeared viable. Indeed, de Brosses’s trip to Italy was in part
dedicated to this mission. Throughout his travels, de Brosses invariably sought
out Sallust’s manuscripts in local libraries. His curiosity for monuments, inscrip-
tions, medals, and ancient sites was spurred on by his desire to corroborate or
illuminate a truncated text, a task whose difficulty he knew all too well. From
Milan, he wrote to his friend Louis Quarré de Quintin, general procurer of the
Burgundy parlement:
I had gathered diverse collations of Sallust’s manuscripts at the

Ambrosiana.7
Regarding Naples, he writes to the Comte de Neuilly, speaker at the Bur-

gundy parlement and future plenipotentiary minister in Genoa:
The canton of manuscripts [of the Palais-Royal library] appears quite vast
to me. I placed aside a few written by Sallust and Suetonius for purposes
of which you are aware.8
At the end of his note on Herculaneum to President Bouhier, de Brosses,

overwhelmed by the discovery of papyri in his searches, finds himself dream-
ing of
the discovery of a few ancient authors among our friends, a Diodorus, for
example, a Berosus, a Megasthenes, or a Titus Livius, perhaps even Sal-
lust’s five books of Roman history which we have lost; even if then all the
care that I have already taken to recreate them would itself be lost.9
However it was in Rome that his search for Sallust truly gathered momen-
tum and intensity. The magistrate was a frequent visitor to the Vatican Library,
noting:
I have worked hard for my Sallust, whose excellent manuscripts of pro-

nounced antiquity I have discovered here, particularly one that once
belonged to Fulvius Ursinus and since the Queen of Sweden. I had seven
collated in my presence with great care.10
He also frequented the Biblioteca Casanatense:
I found there some excellent MSS. of Sallust, which are being collated for
me. One is well attended to, and with celerity.11
260 Lives
His visits to the churches and ruins of Rome constantly led him back to his
author. While in the San Pietro church in Montorio, he notes:
The fine balustrade [of the Cardinal of Montepulciano’s chapel] of yellow

antique marble came from the garden of my friend Sallust.12
From San Pietro in Carcere, he writes to Quintin of the “Carcer Tullianum,

built by [the king] Tullius Hostilius”:
You can imagine with what delight I descended into this place to see
the ghost of the Numidian King. The place is still just as it was when
described by Sallust. Here St. Peter was imprisoned, but that is so recent
an event that it is hardly worth while alluding to it.13
We therefore find ourselves dealing with a philologist, epigraphist, and anti-

quary on mission in the field. Here, we are quite far from the Stendhalian tourist
of Rome, Naples and Florence. Though not that far, in reality, wherein lies the
paradox. In his accounts of his promenades through Rome, Sallust’s editor lin-
gers on the remnants of the vast Horti Sallustiani (Gardens of Sallust), as if his
scholarly interest for the ruins of the Latin historian’s work were inseparable
from the enchanting decor of Sallust’s otium. By editing Sallust’s work, and
walking in his footsteps, de Brosses rediscovered one of the most fulfilling mo-
ments—luxurious, calm, exquisite—of the classical otium. In Baia, on the Gulf
of Naples, where the magistrate carefully studied the ruins of Roman villas by
composing detailed notes and lists, his efforts were accompanied and rewarded
by a vision of classical leisures, which superimposed themselves on the reality
of what had become a lamentable and deserted spot:
[. . .] the ancient Romans came here to pass the villeggiatura in the

autumn. All the praises that have been sung of this charming bay do not
seem to me to be an exaggeration. What a lovely sight this half-moon-
shaped hillside must have been when covered with exquisitely built coun-
try places, with gardens and terraces, columns and porticoes, monuments
and marble statues, and the luxurious barges and ships occupied by those
who could find no room on shore. What quotations could I not employ
were it not that Addison has forestalled me! What delightful company
one had here in the days of Cicero, of Pompey, of Horace, of Maecenas,
of Catullus, of Augustus! What exquisite suppers one would have enjoyed
at Lucullus’s villa, near the promontory of Miseno! What a delightful way
of passing the evening, resting in those golden gondolas, richly decorated,
gay with colour, bright with lanterns, floating on a sea covered with roses,
with beautiful women, not over-clothed, upon them! What heavenly
water-concerts all through the night on those waters! A marvelous feast

of life was that, so graphically described by Seneca! Oh, my Neapolitan
friends, why do you not use your money to revive these former delights in
these favoured spots?14
De Brosses happily extended his voyage through Italian Arcadia with a pil-
grimage to Cythera. But this was no Nervalian islet. While in Italy, de Brosses
never felt in exile from the happiness evoked above, for which antiquity served
as both a living source and model. Neither grief nor melancholy for Italy’s
ruins affected him; neither did resentment against the Christian religion inter-
vening between a defeated present and a vanished, luminous past. Thanks to
de Brosses’s Jesuit teachers, he viewed the Roman Church and the Renaissance
of antiquity as closely linked. Contemporary Italy, more so than in any other
European nation, was the theater of that alliance, a natural and spontaneous
continuity. In Lombardy, de Brosses admired the fruits of the administration of
the great cardinal of the Counter-Reformation, the severe Charles Borromeo.
But he knew that this ascetic was also a prince of the Renaissance. Braving a
storm on Lake Maggiore, he visited the cardinal’s family mansion on the Isola
Bella, later writing to the Comte de Neuilly:
In short, these are the rooms we have dreamt of, in which you, Maleteste,
and Neuilly would love to pass an ideal summer.15
The civilized gaiety of ancient Rome was able to re-emerge and blossom
in Christian Europe to the advantage of the Renaissance of letters and, de-
spite Gothic relics of devout, reformist, Jansenist, or popular fanaticism, once
again influence social mores, notably in Italy where it was bubbling underneath
the surface. De Brosses’ scholarly and impassioned study of contemporary Italy
was inseparable from his philological study of Sallust and the ancient monu-
ments to which the latter led him, for in both cases, be it through memory or
experience, a model or a later variant, he found what he was looking for: intel-
ligence in pleasure and the science of happiness. But the epicurean philologist
was an equal match for the epicurean encyclopedist, who had mastered the
most varied disciplines of understanding reintroduced by the Renaissance. Ge-
ographer and geologist, political philosopher, economist, anthropologist, and
moralist, de Brosses applied his informed and keen curiosity to all facets of con-
temporary Italy, in all its delectable diversity. He gladly drew comparisons with
his native Burgundy and Paris. This scholar on a voyage of study was also an
ethnologist conducting research within a territory richer in humanity than any
other, a living palimpsest of antiquity. It is noteworthy that, among so many
learned acquaintances, de Brosses found himself most engaged by the former
262 Lives
Jesuit Foucquet, a missionary to China, a victim of the “Chinese Rites contro-

versy,” and the greatest living Sinologist at the time. In a way, de Brosses in Italy
was like a Jesuit in China, both abroad and at home, decoding a living text of
humanity written in a foreign language and marveling at his discoveries of its
similarities and differences with the original, ancient text. Nihil humani alie-
num puto (I consider nothing that is human alien to me). In this respect, his
Letters contain a scientific discovery of the highest order, of which Stendhal
would duly take note: the natural Italian disposition (compared to the French
affectation) rendered the study of humanity in Italy more direct and more at-
tractive. This was the strongest legacy of antiquity’s “naturalness” in Europe.
Every Italian town offered de Brosses the opportunity to draft a remarkable
Essay on Manners, which should be counted among the classics of historical
sociology. It should come as little surprise that, as a layman less limited than his
Jesuit counterparts, de Brosses placed no limits on his ethnological pursuits, and
studied the relics of ancient customs as well as Italian, notably romantic, ones.
He did not separate the utilitarian from the pleasurable, nor the search from the
experience! One finds some Otaiti in de Brosses’s Italy.
But the traveling encyclopedist was no less at ease when it came to study of
the arts, the delights of classical leisure uncovered by the Renaissance. Hence,
no doubt, his vast “system of knowledge” far surpassed that of the philologists
of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters. Much like the system of royal
academies from the time of Colbert, the French successor to the patronage of
the Medicis and popes, de Brosses’s humanities included painting, sculpture,
architecture, music, and theater, each elevated to intellectual disciplines. The
magistrate found himself within each. His observational range was as vast as it
was precise, his judgment as personal as it was informed. He belonged to a gen-
eration that had read Abbot Du Bos’s Réflexions critiques (Critical Reflections),
first published in 1719.16 Du Bos, a philosopher, philologist, and rhetorician (one
could call him the French Quintilian), had the stroke of genius to align good
taste (goût), the so-called “sixth sense,” with the savant and refined culture of
the Ancients. Following a path paved by Fénelon, he parried the rationalist
criticism of the Moderns with a general aesthetic. He showed that artistic sen-
sibility could also be learned, and that good taste was an intelligent mode of
understanding. Once in Italy, de Brosses was able to get his hands dirty, so to
speak. He was as confortable and engaged at religious services as at the Vatican
Library, with Vivaldi as with Gori, at the Campo Vaccino as in the hospitals of
Venice, where choirs of the most talented women in Europe transported his
trained ear. His architect and urbanist gaze was both professional and sensual.
De Brosses was prepared to understand and experience everything in this uni-
versally artistic country from an expert perspective. It was in Italy that he was
able to blend study and leisure, contemplation and joy. His comparison of Vero-
nese’s The Wedding at Cana and Raphael’s The Battle of Constantine (“One of
these paintings is a living action, and the other is a performance”)17 is a gem of
art criticism, written against the backdrop of the “quarrel over colors and draw-
ing.” His savant’s understanding of the richness of Italian music was less dog-
matic and ultimately more complete than Rousseau’s. Not a single page of the
latter’s Confessions is comparable to the debut of a letter to Blancey, for all that
it was written in haste and seemingly disjointedly, which begins with the follow-
ing allegro vivace:
Not that I am in want of music here, for there is scarcely an evening on

which there is not a concert; but all the world rushes during the Carnival
to the opera with as much ardor as if they had never heard music before.
The passion of the natives for the art is extraordinary. Vivaldi has made
himself one of my intimate friends.18
One could reconstruct the history of art in the eighteenth century, using
Du Bos’s principles and not those of the prevailing German aesthetic, on the
basis of a comparative analysis of the French and Italian goût conducted by
de Brosses, in a letter sent to Quintin from Rome:
The Italians reproach us [in France] with introducing the Gothic style
into our fashions, and accuse us of making our chimneypieces, our snuff-
boxes, our silver in such shapes that we seem—to them—to have lost
sight of the round and square forms. They also say that our ornaments
have become to the last degree baroque in style. Such is undoubtedly the
case, but in small things more excuse is to be made.19
He adds that, in general, the French master the layout, decoration, order,
and amenities of a home’s interior, and the Italians master the magnificence and
grand mode of the exterior: “The two tastes combined make a perfect house.”20
This glimpse at the French Gothic background and the classical Italian one
foreshadows the future victory of neoclassicism in France. But this was no fleet-
ing premonition. De Brosses continues his musings in another letter, in which
he compares the good tastes governing gardens in France and Italy. He focuses
in particular, with a disconcerting freedom and intensity, on a parallel between
the character of the two nations when applied to their respective form of festive
sociability, or what he calls “pomp”:
I often contrast the different styles of living between the French and
Italian nations, and, to be frank with you, the latter appear to me to be
264 Lives
richer, nobler, more agreeable, more useful, and more magnificent, and
appear to feel their dignity more than ours. What we consider living in
a great style is that of a personage who entertains largely. [. . .] An Ital-
ian behaves in quite another manner, and after having become rich by a
frugal life, spends his money in building or adorning some great public
building, which serves either for the use or the adornment of his country,
thus handing his name down in a durable manner, and leaving a last-
ing testimony to his generosity and good taste. Is this not a better kind of
vanity than the other? And does it not answer better in the long run? [. . .]
And must it not be infinitely more satisfactory to see the result of our own
work growing under our eyes in permanent buildings and monuments,
than to spend it in a banquet which disappears so soon? [. . .] A finely
fluted column is worth a dish of larks. One is an enduring pleasure, and
it is a joy for all time.21
De Brosses continues:
But the act of dining itself is an agreeable thing. Indeed. Who knows this
better than I? It is a daily amusement that forms one of the principal links
of society. Yes, when one eats without pomp in a small circle of friends, or
among persons who enjoy each other. Which is what men and women of
good taste and ordinary fortune in France do. I blame the Italians for not
knowing to do the same, but people of ordinary fortunes are not made to
undertake public constructions.22
Apart from the Piranesian predilection evident in the above passage, it is

important to note the writer’s high praise for conversation between friends “of
good taste and ordinary fortune,” which, for de Brosses, was the best trait of the
French character. Regardless of the superiority, in terms of architecture and
urbanism, of the Roman goût resurging from antiquity, the French arts, notably
interior architecture, which, in France, relied on a practical sense of layout, as
well as the arts of decoration and entertaining, had the merit of favoring conver-
sation that “forms one of the principal links of society.” As a result, and despite
or because of its Gothic heritage, France was better able to absorb, as compared
to Italy, the most exquisite gems of the Pax Romana into its national character
and customs: Horace’s Voyage to Brindes, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Macro-
bius’s Saturnalia, and Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists. At the time, de Brosses, like
the Comte de Caylus, considered the monarchy to be at its peak, like a grand
conversation focused and refined to the point of being able to mirror its acade-
mies’ classical models of studious leisure.
The Familiar Letters about Italy—the Attic Nights of the French monar-
chy—were also the swansong of the old Republic of Letters. They were a sermo
convivialis in the purest classical and humanist tradition, a lettered and savant
“banquet” that rewriting and structuring, by de Brosses himself, salvaged from
a fleeting voyage to create “enduring pleasure” and a “joy for all time.” He adds,
speaking of ancient monuments, that “all are invited, and it remains true that
the wider the festivity, the more he who gives it can represent and bring honor
to himself.”23
It is hardly surprising that, though having prepared to do so, de Brosses never
published his Letters. After 1750, amid the general embitterment of the king-
dom and the intense conflict pitting king against parlements and the court
against philosophes, the independent spirit revealed by his letters would not
have been tolerable. De Brosses would have cruelly exposed himself. In his Con-
sidérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (Considerations on Manners of this Age,
1751), Duclos notes the discredit in which literary erudition had fallen. At the
time, the Encylopédie was changing the very nature of the French Republic
of Letters. It alienated it from the court and parlements, transforming it into a
combative opposition party, whose strategist, from Potsdam, was Voltaire. De
Brosses would have also exposed himself to scandal; though deeply conserva-
tive, even in his Lettres de Rome (Letters from Rome), the humor and irony ex-
pressed by the magistrate, who had become président à mortier and was in vio-
lent conflict with the court, would have drawn the wrath of the Jansenists, who
wielded power in his professional milieu. A masterpiece of private life, friend-
ship, and the freedom allowed by shared tastes and feelings, these stripped-
down epistles recounting intimate dinners or scholarly pursuits would not have
been able to withstand criticism and the public’s hostile curiosity. The joyful
plenitude of de Brosses’s “I,” his arte di godere, indicates that he felt, even during
his travels, as if he was at the center of a harmonious conversation of which the
French monarchy was itself the protector and amplifier. But after 1750, did the
president, shaken by the earliest tremors of the ancien régime, somehow sense,
to borrow an expression from Julien Gracq, applied to Chateaubriand, “the new
eruption of history as a suffering, incurable dimension of sensibility”? He was a
good-enough musician to understand that the age of Vivaldi, Corregio, and the
Horti Sallustiani had once again passed. Back in France, he would undoubtedly
also retrospectively decipher Poussin’s melancholic Et in Arcadia ego, which
de Brosses had not seen, while traveling, on a single tombstone in Italy.
17
THE COMTE DE CAYLUS AND THE “RETURN TO
ANTIQUITY” IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
From works considered to be authoritative, we learn that the quarrel be-

tween the Ancients and the Moderns, the dispute that violently disrupted the
Republic of Letters beginning in 1687, was over by 1700. And there was a brief
resurgence (the quarrel over Homer) that came to a clear end in 1716. Two at-
tacks launched between men of letters and learning should not divert attention
from the great “crisis of the European conscience,” whose combatants included
giants like Bossuet and Spinoza, and Malebranche and Locke. In contemporary
French, the expression “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” has lost its
historical anchor, designating instead the eternal recurrence of a generational
conflict that pits old laudatores temporis acti, defeated from the start, against
young Moderns with life, future, and progress on their side. This current and
general meaning retrospectively colors the interpretation of the “quarrel,” in the
strict and historic sense.
Arnaldo Momigliano and Leo Strauss, each in his own way and respective
discipline, share the merit of having challenged, on our behalf, the bias, if not
misleading illusion, according to which the quarrel between the Ancients and
Moderns launched to great fanfare in 1687. Paris ruled, rather quickly and de-
finitively, in favor of the Moderns, as befits “youths” jostling and pushing the
“old” into graves and oblivion. Using different arguments and premises, the
philologist and philosopher each showed that the quarrel, which did indeed
inaugurate the conflict between modernity and its enemies, far from having
been definitively decided by a purported defeat of the Ancients and supreme
victory of the eighteenth-century Encylopédistes, has been ongoing and in dis-
pute up until present day, notably because throughout the eighteenth century
the Ancients of the quarrel succeeded in countering a modernity whose “deca-
dence” they ferociously denounced with a restorative or regenerative “return to
antiquity.”
266
Comte de Caylus, “Return to Antiquity” 267
Decadence and Progress: Contrasting European Views of History

Both the Italian philologist and the German American political philosopher
proved to be Ancients among Moderns, saving the study of classical antiquity
from its relegation to a university specialization and restoring the philosophical,
moral, and civil meaning it had gained during the Renaissance: distance from
“vain scholastic disputes” and “Gothic barbarism” (the decadent modernity of
the time), but also a classical foundation for a “renaissance” or “regeneration” of
the old Christianity ripped apart by the Grand Schism. Facing a similar general
crisis, these two great twentieth-century minds mirrored the fifteenth-century
humanists who returned to “ancient sources” to heal Europe of its melancholic
disease, or the eighteenth-century antiquaries that came three centuries later:
like Rousseau, the philosopher of a “return to nature and antiquity”; Winckel-
mann, the historian of antiquity-era art; and Gibbon, the historian who wrote
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and who also trans-
formed classical antiquity into a foundation on which to escape the quicksand
of the Enlightenment. Since the eighteenth century, terms like “old age,” “twi-
light,” “diseased soul,” “corruption,” and “dissolution”—all metaphors deployed
by Moderns claiming a bounty of virtues over the Ancients (progress, youth, ver-
nal and fertile newness, a healthy mind cleaned of the “rust” of naïve illusions
and old errors)—have been regularly turned against the former camp by the
Ancients, who paint modernity as nothing more than a decrepit and disguised
decadence, a sinister Goya-esque old woman posing as a young and attractive
beauty.
This antagonism did not cease during the French Revolution. Arnaldo Mo-
migliano’s “return to antiquaries” and Leo Strauss’s “return to the Ancients”
both correspond to a reoccurrence (Vivo would call it a ricorso) of the divided
European mind-set, which, in the nineteenth century, oscillated more than
ever before between two collective depressions: one born of a modernity that
believed its rise to be restricted by the persistence of a great blind age; the other
of an antimodernity that looked to an ancient and original state of the mind for
a remedy to its later ills and modern aging. In turns, figures like Auguste Comte
and Ernest Renan highlighted the destructive and negative character of what
Comte called “the critical doctrine” and what Renan called “the critical art” of
the Reformation and the Enlightenment, negators efficient enough to under-
mine the religious and moral foundations of the Roman Church and the politi-
cal ancien régime, but unable to replace the social links they had criticized and
dissolved with other, more unassailable ones.
This shadow cast by the Enlightenment had been described as early by 1802
by Chateaubriand in his novella René, meant to support his Génie du Chris-
268 Lives
tianisme (Genius of Christianity): this allegorical portrait uses the paradoxical

traits of a young man prematurely and morally aged and paralyzed to symbolize
the melancholy or boredom provoked by the critiques of the Enlightenment,
which corroded natural social links as much as they did the religious faith that
sanctified them.
Reinhart Koselleck summed up this philosophical “critique of critique” in
his 1959 Kritik und Krise, published in English as Critique and Crisis.1 Kosel-
leck allows the “philosophes” of the eighteenth century to speak for themselves,
alongside their master, the author of Dictionnaire historique et critique (The
Dictionary Historical and Critical), Pierre Bayle. In their moments of supreme
lucidity, the Enlightenment’s “kings of critique,” tireless liberators and sworn
enemies of dogma, myth, superstition, legend, and tradition, though prudently
conservative in politics, recognized the distress to which they were condemn-
ing a humanity reduced to negations, and the intolerant authority revealed by
their critiques by demanding tolerance between belief systems they had already
emptied of meaning and authority. In his Dictionary, Bayle describes the nega-
tive effects of the extension, beyond the aristocratic “secret” of the Republic of
Letters, of the infighting, and indeed civil war, among “critics,” using terms that
foreshadowed Chateaubriand’s 1802 diagnosis of the modern man, disoriented
from childhood by the generalized criticism of “prejudices.” Bayle writes:
In a word the fate of man is in such a bad situation that the wisdom that
delivers him from one evil precipitates him into another. Drive away
ignorance and barbarity and you eliminate superstitions, and the foolish
credulity of the people so profitable to their progenitors, but who then
abuse their gains to immerse themselves in idleness and debauchery: but
by enlightening men on these disorders, you inspire in them the desire
to examine everything, they dissect and scrutinize so much that they no
longer find anything to content their miserable reason.2
In a supplement to his Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictio-

nary) in 1771, Voltaire also stigmatizes the popularization of the sovereign criti-
cal judgment that he himself had practiced, while believing that it could be
reserved, in all safety, solely for “princes of the mind”: “There is not a single of
these critics who does not believe himself judge of the universe and listened to
by the universe.”3
This state of permanent revolution and civil war sparked by the critical think-
ing of the Enlightenment was on Caylus’s mind when he recommended, for the
“third stage” of intellectual history, the reestablishment of a “spiritual power”
that would support the advances of science while also counterbalancing the col-
lapse of all certitude and shared norms in a world in crisis where the continually
evolving nature of truth condemned all provisional likelihoods to cancel each
other out. Renan came to similar conclusions in his Dialogues and Drames phi-
losophiques (Philosophical Dramas); he believed that the only possible future
for the “Brahmanic” and “aristocratic” character of science lay in the revival
of a “religion of the heart” that would recreate a moral conscience and restore
the sense of sacrifice required by a scientific truth that was unfolding but not
yet complete, in other words, distant and largely hidden. Following Chateau-
briand, who had advocated for a revival of the old Christian faith, Comte and
Renan therefore looked to Rousseau, who had observed better than anyone the
destructive and negative character of the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion,
for a defense of the religious act of faith as the cornerstone of any society, even
and especially a regenerated one.
Rousseau did indeed include an outline of “civic religion” in the utopia of
the reconstructed society of his Contrat social (The Social Contract), sanctify-
ing the rediscovered natural social link among men; in Emile, the “Profession
of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” had looked to sentiments of the heart, more per-
suasive and universal than arguments of theological reasoning or atheistic criti-
cism, for the regeneration of a moral conscience and religious faith in a modern
world stripped of both by the anticlericalism of the Parisian Enlightenment.
A Return to Antiquity and Sources of Faith:

Convergence and Dissociation
This negation of negation and call for the positivity of a “return of the re-
jected,” in terms of religion and morality, are structurally similar to the faith
in antiquity that inspired the work of eighteenth-century antiquaries who were
indifferent to the criticism and disdain imparted on them by Enlightenment
philosophers. At first glance, however, there is no clear link between the “re-
turn to antiquity” and the return to faith encouraged by Vico and Rousseau,
each in his own way, with the former attributing the first awakening of the
true human conscience to fear of the gods and worship of the dead, and the
latter advising the return to the “religion of the heart” natural to all men. After
all, isn’t the “return to antiquity” intrinsically “pagan,” and the act of faith in-
trinsically biblical and Christian? This contradiction, if it did exist, was dormant
among fifteenth-century humanists, as well as Petrarch, for whom the “return
to antiquity” emerged from the same regenerative swell of Christianity as the
“return to the church of the first centuries and its [Greek and Latin] Fathers,”
unscathed by the consecutive “gothicization” of barbarian invasions. That
movement did not separate the return of the Christian faith to its patristic “ori-
270 Lives
gins” from modern Christians’ reappropriation of the Greco-Roman resources

imbued by the Apostolic Fathers with the wisdom of the Revelation. Exasper-
ated by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, this “return to origins”
was able to produce, in French Catholicism, a veritable “archeolatry” of the
early church and fathers,4 which was taken to the extreme by the dogmatic
Augustinism of Port-Royal.5 More faithful to the original and renovating spirit
of the Renaissance, the “critical art” of the Saint-Maur Benedictines strove to
purify the Catholic tradition, in order to invigorate it, of legendary or supersti-
tious accretions accumulated during the “Gothic” centuries, and also under-
stand, through documents and inscriptions, as used by the Maurist Bernard de
Montfaucon’s Antiquité expliquée (Antiquity Explained), the religious back-
drop of pagan antiquity that the Christian Revelation had penetrated, purified,
and illuminated.
Granted, unlike their predecessors of the Italian Renaissance, the secular
antiquaries of the eighteenth century paid little attention to a return to patristic
origins. Even Vico, unique among this group due to his Catholic apologetics, in-
directly constructed his reasoning using anthropological premises: critical mod-
ern reasoning would atrophy the human mind and lead it astray if man were
to cut himself off from the sources of knowledge that awakened his conscious-
ness of himself, that is, religion and poetry. Rousseau, the most ardent of the
eighteenth-century Ancients, was uninvolved with and even hostile toward the
world of antiquaries: that distance was all the greater given that his study of man
did not merely recommend a coordinated return “to nature” and “to antiquity”
but also called for a return to natural religion, notably the form he considered to
be the most transparent, Christianity, provided it was purified of the alienating
“enlightenment” of theological erudition and controversy. In contrast, a full-
fledged antiquary like Edward Gibbon was all the more tempted, like Machia-
velli, to attribute to Christianity a disastrous mission that threatened any solid
and durable political order, given that this religion of slaves had already con-
tributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, a historian of
late antiquity, focused his reverence on the Roman Empire as it had been cele-
brated by the Greeks Polybius and Aelius Aristides, and not on the republican
Rome whose fall was mourned by Lucan and Tacitus and whose civic virtues
had been praised by Rousseau to shame the vices of subjects of the great mod-
ern monarchies. The anatomy of the decomposition of the empire offered by
Gibbon is commensurate with his admiration for the administrative and mili-
tary aristocracy of the Flavians and Antonines, repeatedly left unscathed by
palace revolutions, Eastern religions, Christianity, and cowardly concessions to
the barbarians. Decline and Fall (1776) was an early mirror for and a warning
to the British Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kipling would
rewrite Gibbon in the present.
In general, eighteenth-century antiquaries looked to Greek and Roman an-
tiquity for a noble and altruistic form of historical knowledge. But the most am-
bitious among them went even further: they looked to a now-better-understood
antiquity for the principles of a regeneration of modern art and taste: their
ardent and patient excavations of Roman culture, the successor to Greece, and
their call for man to regain his footing on ancient ground—though they no
longer sought justification through the providential receptivity of the Greco-
Roman world to the Christian revelation, as fifteenth-century humanists had—
nonetheless revealed an act of faith in the vigorous, natural wisdom of classical
genius that had been forgotten, weakened, and diminished by the Moderns.
This act of faith in an antiquity assumed to have fully effected the natural en-
lightenment of man pitted them against the philosophes of the modern Enlight-
enment, and brought them unknowingly closer to Rousseau, the new Dioge-
nes who denigrated the arts and was clearly not one of them. That was because
Rousseau’s resort to the natural wisdom still intact during antiquity implied a
radical regeneration of modern man (see Emile) and society (see The Social
Contract), whereas the most ambitious antiquaries remained as politically con-
servative as the philosophes, and dreamt only of remedying the “corruption of
taste” and of modern arts through the return to nature and antiquity.
The art criticism penned by Diderot, Rousseau’s former friend, is the best
testament to the French convergence of the two conceptions of the “return to
antiquity” held by antiquaries and Rousseau, respectively. This fusion, to which
David’s post-1785 “history paintings” largely contributed, supplied one of the ex-
plosive ingredients of the “revolution” prophesized, desired, and feared, begin-
ning in 1763, by the author of Emile. The fact remains that, whether radical or
conservative, friendly or hostile to Christianity, the point of view of eighteenth-
century Ancients, haunted by the sense of a modern decadence, amputation, or
alienation, challenged that of the Moderns, inspired by a euphoric confidence
in the superiority of the “mind of the time” and its “progress,” with surprising
success.
The Counter-Enlightenment and Rousseau

By redeeming eighteenth-century antiquaries, and siding with Gibbon
over Diderot, Arnaldo Momigliano facilitated a deeper and less naïve re-
interpretation of the century of Enlightenment. In parallel, Leo Strauss, re-
deeming the classical thinking of ancient philosophers and historians within
modern and critical philosophy, also looked to a “return to antiquity” to heal
272 Lives
the modern mind of the general relativism inherited from the Enlightenment
and restore the classical foundations lacking in an adrift political modernity. In
some respects, through their “critique of critique,” these two twentieth-century
thinkers overlapped with the anti-modernity of Nietzsche, and like him, turned
to ancient ground, though not to awaken Dionysus or Zarathustra. But Momig-
liano and Strauss were more aligned with Caylus and Renan when it came to
one fundamental belief: modernity is the errant child of an ultimately harm-
ful critique, which liberated it from faith to better lead it into nihilism and ir-
rationalism. “Progress” that claims to enlighten men by amputating their call
to sacrifice, beauty, and admiration belies the very “enlightenment” it suggests
and condemns humanity to an unprecedented moral withering. Even as he
suggested saving the “future of science” by linking it to a religion that provided
people a sense of sacrifice, Renan could not but doubt the very thing he desired,
since at the edge of science, “the truth is perhaps sad.”
Thus on multiple occasions, modern doubt revolted and turned against the
modernity that had so heedlessly generalized it. The product of a vein of criti-
cism that had long pretended to spare society and the State, the modern crisis
was so successful at attacking every foundation of society and the State that it
provoked, from generation to generation, with reoccurring diagnoses of deca-
dence, new attempts to heal the modern disease by returning to the tenets of
an ancient health.
The talent and propaganda of the French Encylopédistes succeeded in con-
vincing many, well beyond their initial public, that the Moderns were the only
side in the quarrel to have been right and to always be right. The philosophes,
led by Voltaire, succeeded in spreading the axiom that their critical modernity
had an unlimited future and could dispense with history. The critical and skep-
tical “doxa” of the Enlightenment paradoxically adhered to the dogmatism of
an irresistible and irrefutable modernity that adored the progress devouring it,
and rejected any obstacle, impediment, and objection as absurd or perverse
archaisms. In Emile, Rousseau occasionally mocks the Académie des Inscrip-
tions, but his constant quoting of classical events and texts proves the extent
to which antiquity was still alive for the homo naturalis redivius he claimed to
be and which he wanted to encourage in his student. No other Ancient of the
quarrel did a better job at defining how antiquity, a time when man was still
naturally enlightened, was the perennial solution to a decadent era in which
man was alienated from his own nature by the very weight of his contradictory
enlightenment:
Speaking generally Emile will have more taste for the books of the
ancients than for our own, just because they were the first, and therefore
the ancients are nearer to nature and their genius is more distinct. What-
ever La Motte and the Abbé Terrasson may say, there is no real advance
in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another;
for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning
what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for our-
selves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigour of mind. Our
minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do
nothing for themselves.6
Rousseau further viewed the Enlightenment, a phenomenon with which his

century was so pleased, as the ultimate and modern state of alienation from
natural enlightenment, a civil war of the mind waged against itself, which linked
an arrogant and intolerant dogmatism to universal scepticism and criticism:
Shun those who, under the pretence of explaining nature, sow destruc-
tive doctrines in the heart of men, those whose apparent skepticism is a
hundredfold more self-assertive and dogmatic than the firm tone of their
opponents. Under the arrogant claim, that they alone are enlightened,
true, honest, they subject us imperiously to their far-reaching decisions,
and profess to give us, as the true principles of all things, the unintelligible
systems framed by their imagination. Moreover, they overthrow, destroy,
and trample under foot all that men reverence; they rob the afflicted of
their last consolation in their misery; they deprive the rich and powerful
of the sole bridle of their passions; they tear from the very depths of man’s
heart all remorse for crime, and all hope of virtue; and they boast, more-
over, that they are the benefactors of the human race. Truth, they say, can
never do a man harm. I think so too, and to my mind that is strong evi-
dence that what they teach is not true.7
The result of that aplomb of “criticism,” which influenced posterity even

more than it did the audience of the Enlightenment, passionate readers of
Rousseau, was that entire sections of the eighteenth century were draped in
shadow, suppressed like insignificant gnats incapable of stopping the steamrol-
ler of modernity from advancing. It is only in the past few years that we have
started to overcome this retrospective astigmatism. Suddenly, books unthink-
able a mere decade ago have begun to appear, which measure the previously in-
visible extent of the resistance to an Enlightenment believed to have completely
invaded and permeated the eighteenth century.8
In the center of this Counter-Enlightenment looms the formidable figure of
Rousseau, traditionally listed among the intellectuals of the Aufklärung, even
though this Janus bifrons was also, and perhaps above all, the most determined
274 Lives
and prophetic enemy of critical modernity as celebrated and practiced by En-

lightenment thinkers. Beginning with Discours sur les origins de l’inégalité (Dis-
course on the Origins of Inequality), Rousseau contrasts Fabricius, the citizen
from antiquity, and his noble, heroic soul ready to sacrifice for the city, with the
modern bourgeois, liberated from God and idols and protectively diminished
to enjoyment of his private rights and liberties. In Emile, Rousseau does not
merely oppose the “man of nature” in possession of all his gifts with the wither-
ing away of the modern individual, the “man of man” alienated from his own
nature; he invites the man exceptionally restored to his nature, reborn an An-
cient among the Moderns, to free the world of alienated and degenerate men:
Degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses

which make men what they are. Old and base in their vices, their hearts
are shriveled, because their worn-out bodies were corrupted at an early
age; they have scarcely strength to stir. The subtlety of their thoughts
betrays a mind lacking in substance; they are incapable of any great or
noble feeling, they have neither simplicity nor vigour; altogether abject
and meanly wicked, they are merely frivolous, deceitful, and false; they
have not even courage enough to be distinguished criminals. Such are
the despicable men produced by early debauchery; if there were but one
among them who knew how to be sober and temperate, to guard his
heart, his body, his morals from the contagion of bad example, at the age
of thirty he would crush all these insects, and would become their master
with far less trouble than it cost him to become master of himself.9
Confronting the violent and facile anticlericalism of the Enlightenment

head-on, Rousseau exalts the sentiment that makes man believe and doubt, be-
yond reason, and celebrates the fecundity of a “religion of the heart” superior
to the sterile and cynical coldness of the exclusively critical “mind.” He goes so
far as to write the following, presaging both the Terror of 1793 and our contem-
porary ones:
Bayle has proved very satisfactorily that fanaticism is more harmful than
atheism, and that cannot be denied; but what he has not taken the trouble
to say, though it is none the less true, is this: Fanaticism, though cruel and
bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of
man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive
power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest
virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit gen-
erally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the
soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-interest, in the mean-
ness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all
society; for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it
will never outweigh their opposing interests.10
In his Lettre à d’Alembert (Letter to d’Alembert), which foreshadows the cur-

rent rebellions against and aversion to a “globalized” antisociety of spectacle
and consumption, Rousseau launches a merciless assault against the “leisure
societies” of his time, effectively, at least in England and France, anticipating
today’s entertainment society in which distracted, off-centered, bored, and
depoliticized individuals demand that mass-market “culture,” which has swal-
lowed up the arts, occupy the void. An Ancient reappearing among the Mod-
erns, Rousseau saw in the philosophical and moral modernity of eighteenth-
century England and France a well-developed hint of “our modernity,” which
he condemned in advance by adopting the distant, overhanging, and violently
ironic perspective of the “return to antiquity and nature.” Of course, Rousseau
was in no way an antiquary, but his reading of poets, moralists, and classical his-
torians mirrors that of Madame Dacier, who praised the simplicity and grand-
ness of the world of the Iliad, which existed at the same time as that of the Bible,
to an audience encouraged by the Moderns to see nothing but archaism, crude-
ness, and vulgarity in Homer’s poem. Rousseau’s revolt against the sophism of
the Enlightenment in the name of nature and antiquity paralleled the combat
led by the antiquaries in the Ancients’ camp against the modern decadence of
arts and manners, which, in their eyes, could be summed up by the sprinkling of
colors and the languid drawings by alcove painters, flatterers of the “corrupted”
taste of the modern public, in the vein of François Boucher and Carle van Loo.
This was the moment in France when parallel perspectives converged, and
Rousseau’s moral and political revolt coincided with the antiquaries’ battle for
a regeneration of taste. Winckelmann, the brilliant and eloquent successor of
the eighteenth-century antiquaries, was somewhat of a “Rousseauist” when he
constructed his history of classical art using the poignant framework of Longi-
nus’s On the Sublime, contrasting the heroic grandeur and liberty of ancient
republics, the source of grace and sublimity in art, with the physical and moral
decline of the “denatured” world of the eighteenth century.
In England, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which cast a much less
“romantic” judgment on contemporary Europe, looked, on the contrary, to the
Roman Empire at its height for a model to imitate and consider for Europeans
resolved to perpetuate, spread, and defend a civilization awoken by the Renais-
sance, for which they were henceforth responsible before all humankind and in
which they were meant to believe.
If the French Revolution of 1789 had been, according to the Marxist vul-
276 Lives
gate, a “bourgeois” revolution, the Jacobin “bourgeoisie” that pushed it to the

extreme nonetheless claimed to be “ancient” and “sublime” citizens, along the
lines of Rousseau’s Fabricius, and not “bourgeois” ones, in the sense of Voltaire’s
modern Mondain or the philosophe husband and father who served as Dide-
rot’s voice in the Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew). The French Jacobins
had perfectly assimilated the vehement antibourgeoisie sentiment that erupts
in Rousseau’s two Discourses, and in Emile and The Social Contract, and which
made the “virtue” of the citizen of antiquity the plebian foe as unforgiving of
bourgeois hypocrisy as of aristocratic vices. Allan Bloom, one of Leo Strauss’s
students, was the first to note that we should look to Rousseau, who incidentally,
at times proved quite forgiving of the hereditary aristocracy and sympathetic to
its chivalrous virtues, for the basis of the “romantic” horror of the bourgeoisie
and the best definition thus far given of the hypocrisy of the “modern” man:
He who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social life

knows not what he asks. Ever at war with himself, hesitating between his
wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor a citizen. He will be
of no use to himself nor to others. He will be a man of our day, a French-
man, an Englishman, one of the great middle class.11
Vico, Enlightenment Philosophers, and

Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century
The self-taught Rousseau is fundamentally the most consequential and ex-
treme example of the reaction of which a mind that has decided to adopt the
perspective of antiquity and nature to judge the modernity of the bourgeois
Enlightenment is capable. In the years following his death, which preceded the
revolution, it was Rousseau the prophet, speaking on behalf of antiquity and
nature, and no longer Moderns like Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Diderot, who
inflamed a young generation of Bonapartes and Chateaubriands. It was also
Rousseau who inspired the neoclassical and republican heroism of David, the
“painter of history.” It is therefore not surprising that during his lifetime, the
author of Emile was the object of an impressive campaign of denigration and de-
nunciation waged by philosophes and Voltaire.12 Rousseau’s darkly ironic gaze
on the progress of the Enlightenment was the flip side of an enthusiasm for
antiquity and nature whose radicalness greatly bothered a movement of philo-
sophical criticism that refused to see the destructive nature of its modernity.
But even the classic and conservative eighteenth-century antiquary, the suc-
cessor to the humanist tradition of the man of letters examining his own era
in the light of antiquity, was treated with persistent suspicion and denigration
by the Encyclopédistes. Indeed, the Encyclopédie is responsible for introducing
the conflation between antiquarianism and dated pedantry that has since be-
come a commonplace of modernity. In a noteworthy article,13 Arnaldo Momig-
liano had the nonchalant audacity to question that cliché and praise the Italian
Renaissance, which, in contrast, viewed the antiquary and the philologist as
the agents of a regeneration of Christian Europe. Eighteenth-century Italy re-
mained the chosen land of antiquarianism: Venice, Padua, Florence, Cortona,
Parma, Rome, Naples, and their antiquaries (typically amateurs and art collec-
tors), academies, excavations, and monumental publications kept an enthralled
Europe on tenterhooks, much as the first discoveries of painted caves and an-
cient statues in Rome and Latium did during the sixth and seventh centuries.
Enlightenment Italy also had its own philosopher and philologist of modern
decadence, Giambattista Vico, who discovered the first German “philosophers
of history” at the end of the century. Based on the paradigm of the three ages of
the Roman Empire, Vico constructed a cyclical interpretation of the process
of civilization, in which decadence was not regarded as an end but as a return,
in an exacerbated state, gravid with renewal, to fertile original barbarism. This
stage of civilization, which was led astray into decadence, experienced by Rome
in the third century, and which carried the seeds of feudal and medieval Chris-
tendom, reoccurred in the modern Europe of “criticism” and the “Enlighten-
ment.” Vico defined it as a “barbarism of reflection,” a formula Chateaubriand
appropriated in his Memoirs when describing the “barbarians of civilization”
rampant in Paris during the Terror or when predicting the still-to-come moral
repercussions of the social decomposition of postrevolutionary Europe. But
Vico had already spoken of civil wars, past and future:
they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of
men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume
the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into
beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first
men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a
generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight
or be on one’s guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft
words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and inti-
mates.14
As early as 1707, Vico had diagnosed Europe’s return to the “third age” of civ-
ilization—a “barbarism of reflection” that heralded its slide into decadence, a
repetition of third-century Rome—in his speech “Sur la méthode des études de
notre temps” (On the Study Methods of Our Time): the education of the En-
lightenment, which exhausts the feelings, imagination, and faith of adolescents
278 Lives
through their premature exposure to Descartes’s analytical and critical reason-

ing, deprives them of the natural development that would capsulize that of the
three ages of human society (barbarian/poetic, religious/heroic, human/ratio-
nal) and drives them instead toward the “barbarism of reflection.” The alienat-
ing transformation of the “man of nature” to the “man of man,” according to the
author of Emile, is highly similar to that amputation of the modern and exclu-
sively rational man, denounced by Vico as the very essence of decadence, of the
poetic, religious, and courageous capacities plentiful in the man of antiquity.
Momigliano, Gibbon, Caylus, and the Return to Antiquaries

But it was in France, theater of the quarrel between Ancients and Mod-
erns, and not in an Italy still in the throes of the Renaissance and the Catholic
Reformation, that the question of decadence raised during the eighteenth cen-
tury would take its bitterest turn. The philosophes’ criticism replaced that of
the Moderns, and Rousseau’s “critique of critique” then replaced the Ancients’
criticism of the “corruption of modern taste.” At the height of the quarrel be-
tween Ancients and Moderns, the former acquired a citadel with the creation in
1701, initiated by one of their members, Abbot Bignon, of the Académie Royale
des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. This French Academy was at that time, dur-
ing nearly every one of its elections, the battleground on which each side tried
to mark points.
The relentless hatred with which the Encyclopédie’s mastermind, Denis
Diderot, who also became one of Rousseau’s persecutors, harried France’s
most prestigious and influential antiquary, the Comte de Caylus, a member of
the Académie des Inscriptions since 1742, was merely one episode of the fierce
battle waged by French philosophes against antiquaries. The epitaph Diderot
wrote for Caylus’s tomb in 1765 was nonetheless sufficient to compromise his
memory in the long term and to delay, until quite recently, a fair evaluation of
the antiquary’s role and work.
Yet, in his correspondence with Diderot, the great sculptor Falconet, who
represented the world of studios and true connoisseurs, in 1766 jumped vehe-
mently to the count’s defense, and that of his role in the French arts.15 And
beginning in 1761, Edward Gibbon, who had witnessed Diderot’s hateful cam-
paign against Caylus, openly and publicly took the antiquary’s side in his Essai
sur l’étude de la literature (Essay on the Study of Literature). In a note included
with a letter from Mallet addressed to the future historian of Decline and Fall,
Caylus expressed his gratitude:
I speak as if Mr. Gibbon had not praised me, and that too warmly. His
work is that of a real man of letters, who loves them for their own sake,
without exception or prejudice; and who unites with much talent the
more precious gift of good sense, and an impartiality that displays his
candour and justice, in spite of the bias that he must have received from
the innumerable authors whom he has read and studied. I have therefore
perused with the greatest avidity, this little work; and wish that it were
more extensive and read universally.16
Gibbon, equipped with letters of recommendation, saw Caylus on “three or

four occasions” in Paris, and described him in his Memoirs as “a simple, good,
placid man, who demonstrated great kindness.” If the historian did not see him
more, it was due to the count’s lifestyle, which, dedicated to artists during the
day, confined him to his home after six o’clock at night to pursue his individual
projects.17
The posthumous authority of figures like Diderot, Marmontel, and the En-
cylopédistes in France was so great that a relative damnatio memoriae overtook
Caylus despite nineteenth-century attempts to rehabilitate his memory by the
Goncourt brothers and erudite thinkers like Nisard, Rocheblave, and Fontaine.
I developed my own interest in Gibbon’s defense of antiquarianism, and in
particular the antiquary Caylus, thanks to Arnaldo Momigliano, whom I heard
speak at a conference at the Warburg Institute in 1980.18 With the encourage-
ment of Francis Haskell, I dedicated my 1994 lectures at the Collège de France
to this unknown figure of the Age of Enlightenment. I have since been prepar-
ing a book that will be dedicated to his actions and thoughts, which were de-
cisive in the French “return to antiquity” movement. Since that date, a young
generation of art and literary historians has developed a passion for this count
long relegated to the shadows, and several works and publications are currently
in progress.
Following a quite deliberate encounter, Alain Schnapp, indirectly a student
of Momigliano, was responsible for arousing scientific interest in Caylus. In a
book on the origins of archaeology published in 1994, La Conquête du passé
(Conquest of the Past), Schnapp showed that Gibbon was right in defending
Caylus: the French antiquary was well ahead of his time in terms of his me-
thodical and concrete way of viewing archaeological excavations and studying
their results. Schnapp thus challenged another of Diderot’s biases, since em-
braced by Marxists: though an aristocrat, and as such “condemned” by histori-
cal progress, a great lord like Caylus could only have a “reactionary” and ob-
scurantist perspective. I myself was very quickly cured of this bias by another
of my predecessors, Raymond Aron, who was the first to reveal that another
aristocrat, Tocqueville, had viewed the future of modern societies with at least
as much perceptiveness as the commoner Karl Marx. Evidently the so-called
280 Lives
“vanquished of advancing History” could at times see more clearly and distantly
than their temporary vanquishers.
A Magistrate of the Republic of Letters and Arts

In the eighteenth century, the Comte de Caylus, in a way born on the very
steps to the French throne in 1692, son of a niece of Madame de Maintenon and
a descendant of an ancient feudal family from southwest France, and friends
with everyone who mattered in Louis XV’s court, was far from “vanquished”
in the way that Alexis de Tocqueville, born in 1805 to a noble family destroyed
and stripped of its privileges by the Revolution, would be in the following cen-
tury. Nevertheless, even as he remained a member of the royal nobility and
showed himself to be passionately attached to the monarchy, after 1714, the year
in which he ended his brief and brilliant military career, Caylus would no longer
serve either the royal government or administration. Disdainful of power and
ostentation, he combined, within the same ideal vision of life, the leisure of the
“true gentleman” born of nobility who “lives without pretensions” and that of
the magistrate of the Republic of Letters and Arts who, as an altruistic, devoted,
and generous “amateur,” monitors the harmony of the community and the edu-
cation of his fellow artists. One could have, with much subtlety, compared that
ideal life, chosen by a resolutely agnostic layman, liberated in his intellectual
pursuits and manners, but raised by a Fénelonian mother and a resolutely Port-
Royalist paternal uncle, the bishop of Auxerre, to that of a prelate in partibus,
practicing out of “pure love,” without hope of reward, nor even counting on
the consolations of efficacious grace, that enlightened and universal charity
whose moral and social presuppositions were defined by Caylus himself during
a speech on the figure of the amateur given before the Académie de Peinture
et Sculpture in 1748: “the gentle manners, the knowledge, the politesse, the
appreciation for good company, the ornaments and pleasures of the mind.”19
The Comte de Caylus did not transform overnight in 1714, when he left
active service in the royal armies after seven years, during the War of the Span-
ish Succession, into either the influential amateur from 1747–1751 or the anti-
quary respected across Europe from 1751–1765. Unlike the great antiquaries
of previous centuries—Scaliger, Pirro Ligorio, Peiresc, Saumaise, all born to
humanist families and as children gifted at philology—the young noble whose
family name destined him for a military career had received a perfunctory and
prematurely interrupted education. Going against the grain of the modern,
high-society world, this gentleman of the sword chose to pursue a second, strict
education under the greatest masters of the day: Antoine Watteau and Pierre-
Jean Marriette, whom he met at Crozat’s home in 1711, to study the arts of
drawing and engraving; and for the literary disciplines, a friend of his mother’s,
the Venetian abbot Antonio Conti, a polymath who resolutely sided with the
Ancients and Homer in the quarrel. Later, Caylus would benefit from collabo-
ration with the great numismatist and Hellenist Abbot Barthélemy.
Initiated into the world of artist studios and the system of private and public
commands governing their productions, as well as the world of academic theo-
rizing about art and its literary and erudite foundations, Caylus had the means
to act as an active mediator between the two universes. He dedicated every-
thing—his birth, rank, income, friendships and relationships at court, and the
position he now held at two royal academies—to the service of the arts and,
with increasing resolve, to their “return to nature and antiquity,” which he was
counting on to transform the public taste, the craft and talents of artists, and the
fecundity of the monarchy’s literary and artistic institutions.
Beginning in 1714, Caylus embarked on a series of study trips to Italy, the
eastern Mediterranean, Holland, and England. Surrounded by “monuments,”
he studied the arts of ancient Rome and Greece and modern Italy on site. He
befriended Italian amateurs and antiquaries, including Zanetti in Venice,
Gaburri in Florence, as well as Dutch and British princes of the Republic of
Letters, Richard Mead in London, and Basnage de Beauval in The Hague.
In 1731, Caylus was granted the title of “honorary amateur” at the Académie
de Peinture et Sculpture. He would not truly exercise this post until 1747, when
his friend the painter Charles Coypel became director of the academy and First
Painter to the King, and when the two men decided to reestablish “conferences”
in academic life and reform the system to educate young artists. The same year,
outside of academic circles, and in regard to the Salon du Louvre, Lafont de
Saint-Yenne published his Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état présent de la
peinture en France (Reflections on Some Causes of the Present State of Paint-
ing in France), in which he publicly expressed opinions that Caylus, Coypel,
and Marriette quietly held among themselves, albeit using different premises:
the French arts are on the “decline,” and “everything is leading us unavoidably
to the decrial and ruin of all that is strongly and futilely believed.”20 In 1749, the
same author, claiming a “citizen’s” zeal, deepened and expanded his portrait of
the decadence of the French arts in a brochure entitled L’Ombre du Grand Col-
bert, le génie du Louvre et la ville de Paris (The Shadow of the Great Colbert:
The Genius of the Louvre and Paris), a dialogue in which the “decline” of the
academic system of royal arts since the Regency is contrasted with the “grand
goût” in all its possible manifestations, under Louis XIV and Colbert, which
prompted the admiration of all of Europe for the genius of the French nation.
This heated “patriotic” debate, which would have a long reach,21 borrowed and
282 Lives
amplified Charles Perrault’s arguments in favor of Colbert’s administration in

his 1687 poem “Le Siècle de Louis le Grand” (The Century of Louis the Great),
which triggered the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. Designating the
Louvre colonnade designed by Claude Perrault as the emblem of grand goût,
Lafont de Saint-Yenne encouraged, in the abstract and with an entirely “mod-
ern” mind-set, a “return to Louis XIV” under Louis XV.
Caylus, whose mother had dictated to him Souvenirs de la cour de Louis XIV
(Memories of the Court of Louis XIV), published by Voltaire in 1770, and who
had himself penned, in the wake of the success of The Shadow of the Great Col-
bert, a “philosophical” panegyric about the century of Louis XIV, was certainly
not indifferent to this nostalgia for the Grand Siècle and grand goût. But like
Coypel and Mariette, he knew that things were not so simple when it came to
art. The grand goût of the Colbertian Academy had been shaped by the quarrel
over drawing and coloring, pitting “Poussinistes” against “Rubenists,” against the
backdrop of the great sixteenth-century Italian debate between Florence and
Venice. Caylus had been friends with the painter Antoine Watteau, the genius
of “Rubenism.” And he was a friend of Edmé Bouchardon, the sculptor hailed
by Italy as an Ancient reappeared among the Moderns. But the true response to
the oratory “zeal” of Lafont de Saint-Yenne could not be merely a modern and
purely French “return to Louis XIV”; it necessitated a long-term effort within
the academy itself and among its professors, an overhaul of the education of
young artists, and the reappropriation of everything that had shaped the classi-
cal genius of the Italian Renaissance: the study of nature and the Ancients, the
honest and scholarly occupation, the great disciplines. It was not a question of
repeating the “century of Louis XIV,” but of inventing a “century of Louis XV”
that was classical in its own right.
In 1742, Caylus was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions as an “honor-
ary amateur.” He proved so diligent and gave so many lectures that he looked
to be Bernard de Montfaucon’s successor. In 1717–1721, in the illustrated vol-
umes of his Antiquité expliquée, the Benedictine Montfaucon had published a
series of visual documents and writings that supported or complemented knowl-
edge of the Greco-Roman world drawn solely from literary texts. Montfaucon
was immensely cultivated but blind to the intrinsic qualities of the works of
art he was “explaining” and to the visual reliability of their reproductions; he
was not at all concerned with lessons of technique or the formal models that
contemporary artists could potentially find in the relics of a disappeared civili-
zation. An engraver himself and familiar with artist studios, Caylus had col-
laborated, while at Pierre Crozat’s home, on the technically irreproachable
elaboration of a collection of engraved reproductions of tableaus and drawings
by sixteenth-century masters from collections belonging to the king, the Duke

of Orléans, and Crozat himself, who was a great connoisseur. Caylus had en-
graved and published, with the same degree of precision and taste, a collection
of caricatures attributed to Leonardo, then in the possession of Mariette, who
had written the work’s preface. His entrance into the Académie des Inscriptions
had been facilitated by his reputation as a traveler in Greece and Turkey, and by
the 1750 publication of Recueil des pierres gravées de la collection du roi (Col-
lection of Engraved Stones from the King’s Collection), illustrated with engrav-
ings by Caylus, based on line drawings by Bouchardon, which had illustrated
Mariette’s Traité des pierres gravées (Tract of Engraved Stones). This master-
piece was a response to the desire to train artists and amateurs to produce the
most faithful and intact representations of the classical arts of composition and
drawing. Beginning in 1747, Caylus began to share the best of his experiences
with the techniques and impressions of the forms that made the artisans and art-
ists of antiquity, particularly the Greeks, so superior, and which had nourished
the masters of the Italian Renaissance, into his many lectures at the Académie
de Peinture et Sculpture and his publications destined for artists.
This project to revitalize the French school, embraced and pursued with ex-
traordinary tenacity across several categories at once, increasingly replaced the
social life of the “virtuoso” that had long occupied the count while also dividing
his attention. A refined connoisseur of Pascalian ennui and diversion, Madame
du Deffand, one day noted, “Caylus engraves for fear of hanging himself.” In a
eulogy penned for his friend and colleague at his death in 1765, Abbot Le Blanc
offered this more developed description of the count’s moral character:
An enemy of affairs, the count made all the amusements of life into one.
He busied himself with music, drawing, and painting. He wrote, but these
were only games and caprices of society to which he never granted more
care than was merited. Sparkling with fire and gaiety, he never subjugated
himself to the correction of style. He proposed no other perfection of this
genre than the entertainment of his friends. He expected everything of
nature, which served him willingly. To judge works of Art, he possessed
that taste, that instinct superior to study, surer than reasoning, and more
rapid than reflection. His first glance rarely betrayed him, he immediately
noticed beauty and flaws.22
Caylus himself described the kind of conversion to the otium studiosum that
he had experienced in the company of the most erudite antiquaries of France in
the preface to the first volume of his Recueil d’antiquités (Collection of Antiqui-
ties), addressed to his colleagues at the Académie des Inscriptions:
284 Lives
Before you granted me the honor of admission among you, it was from
the sidelines of art that I observed the remnants of savant antiquity saved
from the barbarism of the time. You taught me to attach an infinitely
superior worth to it, by that I mean of containing a thousand unique
traits of the history of religion, custom and manners, of those renowned
peoples who, by the vicissitude of human nature, disappeared from the
earth, which they had filled with the sound of their names.23
Caylus, Bouchardon, and the “Return to Antiquity”

in the French Arts
What drove Caylus, not content to become a “bridge” between the various
worlds in which he felt at home—Parisian “bonnes companies,” where poten-
tial French and foreign clients for the artists under his protection met, the Aca-
démie de Peinture and its artists, and finally the Académie des Inscriptions and
its antiquaries—to personally, and increasingly, side with antiquarianism, thus
lending unprecedented weight and prestige to a vocation in itself modest and
austere? Why did a man with an income of sixty thousand French pounds, and
gifted at a variety of leisure activities, turn away from Watteau and rococo art?
Why did he withdraw from the seductions of Parisian social life? And why, not
content with having accumulated, through his scholarly lectures at two acade-
mies, an enormous body of work, did he dedicate the final years of his life to
the immense undertaking of his Collection of Antiquities, whose seventh vol-
ume was published after his death? The key to understanding this extraordinary
reformative, literary, and scholarly activity can be found in Caylus’s early af-
filiation with the Ancients of the first quarrel and the subsequent quarrel over
Homer. The Ancients and the defenders of Homer viewed “modern” arguments
as a symptom of the decadence that had to be stopped at all costs. Toussaint
Rémond de Saint Mard, the author of Trois essais sur la corruption du goût
(Three Essays on the Corruption of Taste, 1731), and an excellent spokesman of
that collective anxiety, had frequented the circle that gathered around Madame
de Caylus and the Abbot Conti in the small house near Luxembourg where the
countess lived with her son between 1715 and 1728. Nostalgia for the Grand
Siècle within this small gathering, within which the countess conceived of her
Memories of the Court of Louis XIV, was not as singularly patriotic or modern
as Lafont de Saint-Yenne described it. Its members enjoyed Italian music, read
Fénelon and Gravina, and took an interest in the quarrel between Newton and
Leibniz. Abbot Conti and his academician friends from the Académie des In-
scriptions, who all belonged to the Ancients, introduced a young Caylus to the
broad European scope of the Republic of Letters. The count would further es-
cape the Moderns’ insularity and Italophobia at Crozat’s Parisian home, where
Roger de Piles’s work was immortalized, and which attracted academicians from
the Académie des Inscriptions, painter academicians, and erudite actors from
Luigi Riccoboni’s Italian troupe. Again, the perspective was European—Paris
was the capital of the Republic of Arts, but nonetheless knew it had a lot to learn
from the origins of the Renaissance, from ancient Rome and Greece.
Well before the outline for Collection of Antiquities formed in his mind,
Caylus was able to measure the difference between the art produced by his
friend Antoine Watteau, a self-taught genius whose training had evolved before
the Rubenses of Luxembourg and the Venetians in Crozat’s collection, and
that of the masters of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century who had
trained by studying antiquity. He slowly pulled away from the modern “rococo
art” which was welcomed by the Regency and which had broken with the clas-
sic grand goût reclaimed by Charles Le Brun and the sculptors of Versailles.
That shift, which Caylus would indirectly reveal by reading his Vie de Watteau
(Life of Watteau) before the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture in 1748, mani-
fested itself through his friendship and collaboration, beginning in 1733 upon
the artist’s return from Italy, with Bouchardon, a genius who had quite naturally
rediscovered classical forms while in Rome. In the funeral oration for the great
sculptor, read before the academy in 1762, Caylus drew the portrait of a French
artisan of immense talent whose manners and taste for perfection brought the
Greek and Roman authors of engraved stones to life:
Modest in his clothing and household, he always maintained simple man-

ners. The rectitude of his heart rendered him incapable of any ploy or
plot; living apart, he never knew any intrigue. . . . His life was ordered and
moderated, his domestic relaxations never harmed the perfection of the
work to which he was ceaselessly dedicated; on the contrary, while never
losing it from sight, he allowed his work to rest, or rather he distanced
himself from it in order to himself rest and see it with fresh eyes.24
Impressed by Bouchardon’s talent and bearing, Caylus attempted to secure

this antiquity-inspired artist royal orders commensurate with his abilities,
notably for the ornamentation of the Neptune Fountain at Versailles, which
Louis XV and his court had won back after the regent’s death. He successfully
procured Bouchardon the commission for an equestrian statue of Louis XV,
which was completed by Pigalle after the artist’s death and destroyed during
the Revolution. Beginning in 1737, Caylus provided Bouchardon with the sub-
jects, borrowed from the height of antiquity, of large dramatic drawings, which
he would engrave himself and which enjoyed great success. During the period
1755–1758, encouraged by that experience, he published several collections of
286 Lives
descriptions of tableaus depicting important scenes from The Iliad, The Odys-
sey, The Aeneid, and The Legend of Hercules in order to encourage painters
who did not know ancient languages to depict major classical subjects and their
patrons to suggest them.
Once he had perceived the “weaknesses” of rococo art, Caylus used his con-
nections and many talents to transform the academic French system into one
capable of producing great art for the “century of Louis XV” that would rival the
art created during the “century of Louis XIV,” but which would be composed
of original creations directly inspired by the foundations of the Renaissance:
classical arts better known, understood, and studied from the artistic perspec-
tive. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in 1747, he, along with Charles
Coypel, turned to correcting the education of young painters, using his own
money to distribute grants, create prizes, and place commissions, in France
and in Europe, for or to the students who were the most disposed to his teach-
ings. The many disciplines that had given the art academies of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries their strength, and which were all dedicated to the
in-depth study of the heroic body and the expression of the passions of the soul,
were granted places of honor in the atelier for the artists under Caylus’s protec-
tion. From 1747 to 1764, Caylus showed himself to be a tireless educator of his
artist colleagues at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture, reading them fifteen
Lives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French artists, emphasizing their
“beauties” and “flaws,” and twelve essays on concrete aspects of the craft and
poetry of art. In 1761, he created a prize for drawing faces and facial expressions
followed by a prize for perspective in 1763 and a prize for osteology in 1764, in
order to encourage students to master the representation, in historical paint-
ings, of the grace and grandeur of the human experience, in contrast to the far
presto and decorative “affectation” of rococo art, appropriate only for the plea-
sures of private life.
By the 1750s, the studios of his protégés, painters, and sculptors—
Bouchardon, Jean-Marie Vien, Lagrenée, Vassé—had become the centers of a
“return to antiquity” in royal commissions and even in the decoration and fur-
nishing of private homes in the Greek style. Caylus attributed a motto to Bou-
chardon in 1763, in the Life dedicated to his memory, which he had adopted
as his own: “Appropriate the talent of the Ancients and find it again in Nature.”
Antiquarian Caylus and the Technical and

Aesthetic Understanding of Classical Art
Caylus’s involvement in the royal arts, initially via the conduit of the Aca-
démie de Peinture et Sculpture, led him to take an increasingly deep and ex-
clusive interest, now with the support and collaboration of the Académie des
Inscriptions, in the comparative study of texts and monuments of Greek, Etrus-
can, Egyptian, and Roman art. The fact that his research, which rivaled the
works of Venetian, Florentine, Roman, and Neapolitan antiquaries, also in-
cluded archeological explorations of Celtic and Roman Gaul and of Merovin-
gian France indicated that national pride was guiding his efforts as well. Caylus’s
generation had been marked by an important tract about aesthetics by the An-
cients’ camp, Abbot Du Bos’s Réflexions sur la poésie et la peinture (Reflections
on Poetry and Painting), which was published in 1718. Caylus knew Du Bos,
who was a regular visitor to Pierre Crozat’s home. A historian of exceptional
expertise and standing, the abbot established in his Origines de la monarchie
française (Origins of the French Monarchy) that the medieval kingdom had
not been, as argued Boulainvilliers, an ab ovo creation of German invaders but
a local continuation of the Roman administration and army despite the dissolu-
tion of the Western Empire, but with the blessing obtained by Clovis from the
Eastern Empire. For Caylus, a reader of Du Bos and like him a supporter of the
Ancients in the quarrel, the “return to antiquity” in the royal arts was not merely
a revival of the classic grand goût of the academies of Louis XIV; it was a return
to the Roman origins and essence of the Gallican monarchy, the revelation of
the endless bloodline it shared with Italy and civilized Europe.
In 1754, in a move typical of his method of revitalizing modern invention
through the history of antiquity, Caylus used the channels of two academies to
publicize his rediscovery, long developed with the collaboration of chemists and
philologists, of classical encaustic paintings. Over several sessions at the Acadé-
mie de Peinture, he read a text on the “Painting of the Ancients,” and at the Aca-
démie des Inscriptions, he presented and explained a “tableau painted in wax
on wood,” composed by his protégé Vien, and depicting the head of Minerva.
Diderot would swiftly publish a pamphlet to attempt to destroy the impact of
this rediscovery of a forgotten classical technique. Encaustic painting nonethe-
less became an oft-used technique in neoclassical decors.
The 1750 publication of Collection of Engraved Stones from the King’s Col-
lection was similarly representative and topical: in this work of erudite memo-
rialization, Caylus and Bouchardon invented or reinvented the technique of
“line drawing,” which would later be favored by neoclassical artists ranging from
Flaxman to Girodet. As for the Tract of Engraved Stones, Mariette’s text re-
minded its readers that since the Renaissance, figures carved into hard stones,
which were more intact than other more friable materials, had revealed to great
modern artists the Ancients’ sense of contour, art of composition in accor-
dance with one’s subject, and perfect execution. The two friends were working
together toward a second Renaissance.
288 Lives
This Renaissance was conceived in close collaboration with Italy, where

friends like the Venetian Zanetti and in particular the great Florentine anti-
quaries Gaburri and Venuti were keeping lettered Europe on tenterhooks with
their epic publications, Museum Florentinum and Museum Etruscum, which
were available throughout Europe by subscription. By 1715, Caylus had wit-
nessed firsthand the initial excavations attempted at the Herculaneum site by
the ambassador of France. After Charles III reinitiated excavations at the same
site, and following the discovery of classical paintings protectively transported
to and stored at the Royal Villa of Portici, the public’s curiosity was awakened,
which fostered the “return to antiquity” for which Caylus, Mariette, and their
friends were striving. In 1757, to protest the secrecy still surrounding the dis-
coveries of Herculaneum, and to force the Neapolitan authorities to enforce
strict criteria for the publication of rediscovered classical paintings (by the Her-
culaneum Academy created by the king of Naples), Caylus paid for the limited
reproduction, in accordance with the philological requirements of a “Crozat
Collection,” of an ensemble of gouache drawings by Pietro Santi Bartoli, which
were themselves reproductions of classical paintings rediscovered in the seven-
teenth century in Roman “caves” and other Latium sites, but which had been
erased in the meantime. In 1764, again out of his own pocket, he had Winckel-
mann’s Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen, an den Reichs-
graven von Brühl (Report on the Latest Discoveries at Herculaneum) translated
by Michel Huber and published. The young Winckelmann was based at the
time in Dresden, where Caylus had a long-standing correspondent, as he did in
most of Europe’s capital cities. This Parisian publication marked the debut of
the then-unknown historian’s international reputation. Like Caylus, Winckel-
mann protested the attitude of the Neapolitan authorities, which ran counter to
the unspoken duty of communication within the Republic of Letters and Arts.
In December 1749, at the Académie des Inscriptions, Caylus had presented
a book of drawings of ancient vases from Nicolas Peiresc’s library, thereby mark-
ing his filiation with the great polymath from Aix and the French antiquarian
tradition. The many texts he read before the Académie des Inscriptions, which
were published in the academy’s famous Mémoires, were as concerned with in-
terpretations of passages written by Pliny the Elder and the great debate during
the quarrel over Homer on Achilles’ Heel as they were with rubbings of recent
archaeological discoveries made in Gallo-Roman soil, which had been trans-
mitted to him, according to a protocol he carefully devised, by the engineers
working on bridges and roads under Trudaine’s administration. With the help
of his correspondents in Avignon, the Marquis de Clavière and Abbot Esprit
Calvet, Caylus began to reconstruct all the rubbings of Roman monuments in
Provence drawn by Nicolas Mignard on Colbert’s orders and to publish them as

Louis XIV’s minister had intended. This reconstitution of a scattered collection
would prove to be both difficult and incomplete. Mariette resumed the effort
after Caylus’s death, but he died too early to complete the project.
Beginning in 1751, Caylus’s studies and communications, increasingly re-
served for the Académie des Inscriptions, changed somewhat: they were now
destined for inclusion, along with scientific notes on the classical pieces within
his own collection, in his Collection of Antiquities, which would eventually be
published in seven volumes, with the help of several colleagues, including the
great Hellenist Jean-Jacques Barthélemy.
Each of the classical pieces within his collection, beautiful everyday objects
rather than exceptional masterpieces, of which carefully made engravings were
published, was described and explained with utmost precision in his Collec-
tion from a material and technical perspective and also often from an aesthetic
angle, offering a retrospective lesson on the articles and plates of the Encyclo-
pédie, which was limited within the field of visual arts to an inventory of the
practices of the academy and contemporary production. Caylus was therefore
not interested in broadening antiquaries’ iconographic “corpus” but wanted to
provide artists and amateurs with authentic and concrete representations of the
modus operandi of their classical counterparts. Most of the pieces he collected
remained in his possession, allowing him to examine and analyze them himself,
in collaboration with chemists; as soon as they were published, he gave them to
the Bibliothèque du Roi to make room for new ones. In addition to the pieces
discovered at recent excavations in France, many were sent to Caylus from Italy,
as well as the Levant and Marseilles, by his correspondents, as well as by admirers
and persons unknown to him. His most frequent correspondent and shrewdest
supplier was the great Theatin antiquary Paolo Paciaudi. Their correspondence,
published by Charles Nisard in 1850, was the eighteenth-century equivalent
of Peiresc’s exchanges with Cassiano dal Pozzo, and offers us a glimpse into
the elaboration and development of Caylus’s Collection. The influence of that
collaboration on creations by cabinetmakers, bronze workers, ornamentalists,
jewelers, and decorators of various neoclassical styles, up until the empire, must
not be underestimated. The Collection, often cited by Quatremère de Quincy,
alongside Caylus’s lectures at the Académie des Inscriptions, was the reference
for Pierre-Hugues d’Hancarville’s Antiquités étrusques grecques et romaines
(Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities, 1766–1776), Seroux d’Agincourt’s
Histoire de l’art dans les siècles obscurs (History of Art in the Dark Ages, 1821),
and later, works by the societies of antiquaries and archaeologists that would
multiply in France in the nineteenth century.
290 Lives
The Singular Destiny of the French “Return to Antiquity”

When Caylus died in 1765, he was at the height of his fame and influence
in France and Europe. He had the time to observe the beginnings of a reversal
of taste at court and the artistic talent of the city in favor of the antiquity he had
served so well. In 1750, a Greek mode in furnishings, vases, decor, and tableaus
began to emerge, rivaling the rococo style so persistent in Paris. Caylus also wit-
nessed, at the Salons of 1761 and 1763, the success of his protégé, the painter
Jean-Marie Vien, named the “Nestor of the Neoclassical School” by Girodet,
and his preferred sculptor (after Bouchardon), Vassé. He might have taken
great pleasure in reading Correspondance littéraire de Grimm (Grimm’s Liter-
ary Correspondence, 1763), in which Diderot, his enemy and that of the anti-
quaries, gushed over Vien’s La Marchande d’amours (The Merchant of Love),
which was directly inspired, most likely at the count’s urging and unbeknownst
to the critic, by a classical painting reproduced in Pitture antiche d’Ercolano
(volume 1, plate 8), which was finally published in 1759 and parsimoniously dis-
tributed by the Neapolitan authorities. Vien, when composing other graceful
feminine figures in the Greek style—the four Seasons, Glycera, the sacrificing
priestess (Salon de 1762)—had already drawn inspiration from classical-style
gouaches by Pietro Santi Bartoli published at Caylus’s expense in 1757. Begin-
ning in 1755, the tireless count had encouraged painters, in a pamphlet, to favor
Greek grace and charm over the modern and rococo equivalent:
If one desires simply joyful images, tableaus of the daughters of the

Sacred Isle and the daughters of Sparta provide groups as delightful as
they are interesting. The simple dress of the Greek Daughters, the nobility
of their poses, the elegance of their forms, the beauty of their faces, all
related to the necessary research of Costume, bring infinite value to the
mind and merit of the Painter, in any subject.25
As for grandeur, a category in which “rococo” by definition fell short, the

collections of classical “subjects” (The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The
Legend of Hercules), narrated and annotated for painters, which Caylus pub-
lished in 1755–1757, were prominent in the studios of the young generation
of historical painters, and lent their subjects to several neoclassical “historical
paintings” by Gavin Hamilton, a young David, and other French and foreign
painters.
In the preface that appeared after his death in his Collection of Antiqui-
ties (volume VII), Caylus justifiably congratulates himself, in terms that recall
Virgil’s Georgics, for the serenity and fulfillment he found in his long efforts to
“plow” and “sow” antiquarianism: he believed he had seen the first crop grow.
He contrasted that patient fecundity with the vain, jealous, and withering agi-
tation of the criticism introduced into the Republic of Letters and Arts by phi-
losophes. In Vie de Bouchardon (Life of Bouchardon, 1762), this same ironic
castigation of the “brilliant and sublime metaphysics,” in which the ignorant,
priding themselves for passing judgment on the world of art, adorned them-
selves, appears.
Caylus was thus spared the worst—seeing the French “return to antiquity”
in visual arts, a movement he had desired and prepared with extraordinary per-
severance, change in meaning, and the transformation of taste become if not
the catalyst, then at least the reflection of a political revolution. In many re-
spects, however, the Comte d’Angiviller, the director of the Bâtiments Royaux
under Louis XVI, would turn out to be Caylus’s executor, enthusiastically com-
pleting the overhaul of disciplines related to historical painting in academic
teaching, and commissioning “historical tableaus” with classical themes from
Jacques-Louis David. (David’s training took place in the studio of Caylus’s most
cherished painter, on whom he imprinted his reformist views from the begin-
ning, Joseph-Marie Vien.) The French school, for which the author of tableaus
inspired by The Iliad and The Odyssey had dreamt of a Renaissance entirely in
honor of Louis XV, found in David a master who would place the “return to an-
tiquity” in service of Jacobin Sparta and Napoleonic imperial Rome.
Between 1765, the year Caylus died, and 1785, which marked the salon in
which David’s Oath of the Horatii was exhibited, the “return to antiquity” in
the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture and the Académie de France
in Rome had gradually ceased to be the movement to reform the royal arts so
ardently desired by Caylus. All the count’s works and efforts had aimed to bring
to Louis XV’s France the same academic reform “on antiquity and nature”
that had revived the Bolognaise and Roman schools, at the instigation of Anni-
bal Carrache at the end of the sixteenth century, and the seventeenth-century
French school at the instigation of Le Sueur, Poussin, and Le Brun. David, who
studied under Caylus’s protégé, was, like his peers, a reader of Emile, whose au-
thor, Rousseau, Caylus hated, as well as of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of
Antiquity. (Caylus died too early to be able to hate the historian.) For the two au-
thors, the sublimity for which the Ancients were marvelously gifted—moral for
the former, and moral and artistic for the latter—had only dazzled in manners
and arts during their eras of republican liberty. Subjugated and artificial mod-
ern society prevented rediscovery of the secret of that sublimity except as an ob-
ject of tortured desire and grief, or else as the reward for its radical regeneration,
on a blank slate freed from centuries of servitude and their ruins. The French
rationale behind a “return to antiquity,” in manners or art, could not accept
reform, be it academic or political: it led either to a Terror or to romanticism.
292 Lives
In 1785, with the Oath of the Horatii, commissioned by the director of the
Bâtiments du Roi, painted in papal Rome, and exhibited at the salon of the Aca-
démie Royale, David began to break from the spirit of reform that Caylus had
imparted to his protégé Vien: he created the male icon of the classical republi-
can sublime, as conceived of by Rousseau and Winckelmann, breaking not only
with the style of Boucher and Van Loo, but even with the “ancient” grandeur
Caylus and D’Angiviller had expected from the artists of the reformed Acadé-
mie Royale. David thus established the first cornerstone of his own Jacobin, and
eventually imperial, neoclassicism, whose academy would no longer represent a
king but a France reinvigorated by political revolution, restored to the “liberty
of the Ancients” and heroic civicism, and viewing itself as Spartan or Roman in
the “historical paintings” created in his atelier and by his students.
The quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, whose gaping loophole beneath
the apparent consensus of the Enlightenment salon was revealed thanks to
Arnaldo Momigliano and Leo Strauss, shifted so dramatically toward an An-
cients’ victory during the eighteenth century that it provoked the emergence in
Paris, in both art and life, of the Athens of Abbot Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune
Anacharsis (Voyage of Young Anacharsis, 1788), the Lycurgan Sparta and re-
publican Rome of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité (Discourse on Inequality,
1790–1794), and the Roman Empire of a new Caesar (1804–1815).
18
SEROUX D’AGINCOURT AND “LITERARY EUROPE”
Why would a farmer-general in Louis XV’s France who had everything—

noble birth, wealth, good health, education, wisdom, royal favor—necessary
to comfortably enjoy the diverse pleasures reserved by Paris’s high society for
“amateurs and the curious” like him, choose to move to Rome in 1779, when he
was in his fifties, and dedicate the next thirty-five years of his life, until his death
in 1814 (just in time to learn of the Bourbon Restoration), to an unprecedented
project that would celebrate and amass a thousand years of history of visual arts
for the first time in Europe?
The manuscript of Seroux d’Agincourt’s first volume, ready by 1783 and sent
to Paris in 1789, was returned to Rome as a precaution after the storming of the
Bastille. (The Comte d’Angiviller, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, had feared a
terrible fate for a work whose immense value he sensed.) Its publication was de-
layed until 1805, giving the author fifteen years to refine his text; due to further
delays on the part of his editors, the work was completed and published post-
humously in 1823, in the heyday of the neo-Gothic period of the Restoration.
The rare art historians of our day who have focused our attention on Seroux
d’Agincourt’s masterpiece—from the great Giovanni Previtali1 to Evelina Bo-
rea,2 from Francis Haskell3 to Henri Loyrette4—pondered in passing the Bene-
dictine lifestyle chosen, nel’ mezzo del cammin della sua vita, or “half of his life’s
way,” by the author of Histoire de l’art par les monumens depuis sa décadence au
IV e siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe (History of Art by Its Monuments
from Its Decline in the Fourth Century to Its Restoration in the Sixteenth). The
research project to which this aristocrat fully dedicated himself for a quarter-
century was all the more difficult and selfless given that its subject, practically
unexplored beforehand, was repugnant in principle to his own tastes; what’s
more, in order to pay the draughtsmen (painters, sculptors, architects) and en-
gravers indispensable to his endeavor, he was forced to sell, piece by piece, in
Rome after 1789, the magnificent collection of drawings by Italian and French
masters of the previous three centuries, assembled in France, which had given
him such joy as an amateur of refined art. The Revolution had deprived him of
income that he had amassed from the public funds of the former regime. And
293
294 Lives
yet neither the Revolution nor its dramatic consequences for Italy and Rome
interrupted Seroux’s industrious efforts, which transformed him and his mag-
num opus into a legend of “literary Europe.”
The fame of this project of pure love, in the Fénelonian sense of the term,
long preceded its publication. The trajectory of Seroux’s History echoes that
of the Antichità di Ercolano esposte (Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed),
which was published in Naples between 1757 and 1792, twenty years after the
rumors of excavations began in 1738 and whispers of marvelous discoveries pro-
tectively hidden from prying eyes by the Neapolitan government had stirred
literary Europe into a frenzy, had prompted a myriad of antiquarian publica-
tions, and had sparked a “return to antiquity” movement in the arts that would
erode the popularity of Parisian rococo in only a few years. Seroux’s Roman
atelier and his many collaborators and correspondents slowly inaugurated and
spread another taste revolution, whose effects would emerge by the beginning
of the nineteenth century, even before the long-developed History was pub-
lished in its entirely in 1823. Nothing would have a greater influence on this
shift in favor of medieval and Gothic art than the collective project launched
by Seroux, whose countless collaborators, painters, engravers, and architects be-
came enamored with objects and monuments previously viewed with disdain
or ignored. The subsequent revolution was far-reaching and increasingly went
against the express intentions of its unwitting instigator. During Seroux d’Agin-
court’s lifetime, in anticipation of the delayed publication of his History, Italian
collectors, French amateurs who had visited Seroux in Rome, and illustrators of
his current or future volumes fell in love with parts or all of the “decadence” that
the French aristocrat had endeavored, driven by the pure desire of a documen-
tarian, to reveal to his future readers. A “primitivist” passion, unanticipated by
Seroux, and of which he disapproved, insinuated itself in the very heart of the
“return to antiquity” movement; from that point onward, this radical affirma-
tion of taste would prove a continual thorn in the side of the academic tradition
dating back to the Italian Renaissance and the privileged position in which it
placed Greco-Roman antiquity.
For Seroux, the methodical “remembering” of the long corruption of Euro-
pean art, beginning in the sixth century, was a question of scientific ethics;
he expected no other benefit for European art and taste than proof of the
legitimacy of their first “renewal” in sixteenth-century Italy and their second
prompted by the recent “return to antiquity.” He himself had witnessed in Paris
and Rome this neoclassical contemporary “Renaissance” among artists of the
Académie Royale persuaded by the teachings of the Comte de Caylus and in-
spired by Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity.5 But the establishment
Seroux d’Agincourt and “Literary Europe” 295
of Seroux’s Roman atelier, and the posthumous publication of his work and its
translation into several European languages, unintentionally created a thirst for
“renewal” among certain artists and amateurs that far surpassed a “return to an-
tiquity” and was limited to repeating, so to speak, the revival sparked by the Ital-
ian Renaissance. Henceforth, an uninterrupted series of primitivist, even deca-
dentist, “revolutions” would shake the ground beneath the academies that had
succeeded the Italian academies of the Renaissance, even rattling the academy
that David and Quatremère de Quincy6 hoped to establish in Paris and Rome
on the foundations of the Winckelmannian “return to antiquity.” David’s studio
had its “primitivist” dissidents—the “Barbus” led by Maurice Quaï, who were
celebrated by Charles Nodier and looked down upon by Delécluze.7 Multiple
shifts in public taste—the popularity of, and then obsession with, Gothic ar-
chitecture, pre-Raphaelite painting, pre-Giottesque painting, Roman art, late
Roman art, archaic Greek art, and Cycladic art—successively emerged in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led by scholars and archaeologists and em-
braced by artists in a reversal of the quest undertaken by academies that had
sprung from the Renaissance: the latter had looked to antiquity and its univer-
sal standards of beauty for ways to heal the arts of their long medieval “deca-
dence.” Romantic and modern artists would demand a purity of forms from the
Middle Ages and archaic eras, which they considered to have withered within
the academic tradition.
This increasingly retrospective focus on Europe and humanity’s past was
accompanied by centrifugal movements that projected artists toward novel
forms (Eastern and Far Eastern, American, Polynesian, African), following in
the wake of missionaries, travelers, explorers, colonial forces, and ethnologists.
Seroux had been an unwitting first link in this extraordinary chain of events, but
a decisive one nonetheless.
There is great irony, against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the
Terror, in the slow and meticulous development by a gentle, lettered French
aristocrat emblematic of the ancien régime, protected in Rome, of a master-
piece of memorialization, prepared patiently and serenely, but overlapping,
against the author’s intentions, with a formidable and irresistible revolutionary
groundswell, which since has become permanent, of European taste.8
Before we get to the heart of this singular irony in art history, it is important
to examine, once again, how a figure like Seroux d’Agincourt, the tireless and
sacrificial bee producing the incredibly erudite honey that is History of Art by
Its Monuments, could emerge in the century of Diderot and the Encylopédie,
sworn enemies of erudition, scholars, antiquaries, and indeed all recourse to
the past.9
296 Lives
The French ancien régime reached its height under Louis XV and Louis
XVI, with its administrative monarchy abundant in quasi-sinecures, its church
overflowing with contemplative, erudite clerics, privileged canonships, and
benefits for semisecular men of letters, and its courts of law teeming with
offices, ennobling or otherwise, all of which still left room for leisure, and its
noble aristocracy, now a class of urban leisure exempted from any obligations
apart from war and courtly intrigues, and arbiter of the niceties of the art of
“living nobly.” The result was that France’s two highest-ranking classes and even
their imitators, the Messieurs Jourdain of France’s commercial and artisanal
bourgeoisie, had the privilege of spare time, which most of their servants were
deprived, not to mention, to a greater degree, the majority of the country’s peas-
ant population, whose labors, punctuated by the many festivities of the Chris-
tian year, supported and nourished the edifice of “bonne société” without being
crushed by its weight. The leisure time enjoyed by a French minority shielded
from a life of physical and manual labor was not a privilege of waste, however.
Thorstein Veblen, the American sociologist famous for his study of the leisure
class and its “conspicuous consumption,” is no better a guide than Marx and his
class struggle to understanding what leisure signified in the European ancien
régime, notably in France.10 Both the puritan sociologist and the philosopher of
the industrial proletariat, prophets of twentieth-century society, situated work
in all its forms as the motor of the only economy they perceived to be real—the
material economy.
Manual labor in the European ancien régime provided the foundation for a
leisure economy whose vast aspirational range included the warrior’s chivalrous
leisure-rest, literary and urban leisure, the scholar’s studious leisure, and the
monk’s contemplative leisure. These diverse forms and stages of leisure during
the ancien régime did not abandon their origins in the Greek scholê and Latin
otium. Far from signifying unproductive idleness, these key notions transposed
into the Christian register designated the different, increasingly perfect rungs of
a ladder that liberated the mind from the weight of the body, bringing it closer
to its true end and bestowing it with spiritual possessions and symbolic riches.
The regular clergy and the noblesse de robe were prolific when it came to pro-
ductions of the mind, which continue to fuel us today, and which were con-
ceived during the leisure time specific to these two classes. The noblesse d’épée,
whose leisure time was, in principle, merely an interval of rest in its active life,
the profession of arms, had long steered clear of lettered leisure (otium littera-
tum) and its most elevated and demanding stage, studious leisure (otium studio-
sum), which, in contrast, prompted countless vocations within monastic orders
and courts of law. Men of learning born of the sword, like Seroux d’Agincourt
and his model and teacher, the Comte de Caylus, were rare.
Psychologists of high-society boredom like Pascal and later Schopenhauer

had their own theories on aristocratic leisure. The remedy, though imperfect, to
the ennui that threatened the leisure time of the noblesse d’épée, which paid for
its privileges with military service and was anxious not to lose them, was diver-
sion. The French military aristocracy, by ancestral tradition, ranked hunting and
gallantry at the top of all its diversions. Until the sixteenth century, it consid-
ered intellectual pursuits, relegated to members of the clergy and lesser nobility,
beneath it, and conflated artistic professions with “mechanical,” manual, and
mercenary jobs. It was not until the seventeenth century, under the influence
of Montaigne’s Essays and Jesuit education, that the otium litteratum—the
taste for reading, writing, and reflecting, the art of conversation, the visual arts,
and the practice of music, theater, and dance—entered the sphere of “living
nobly,” offering the urbanized French high aristocracy a range of “liberal” di-
versions suited to filling their leisure time and dispelling their boredom. Gam-
bling, ostracized by the church, and dueling, banned by royal edict, nonetheless
remained violent temptations for young military nobles. Very rare were those,
however, in the seventeenth century, who condescended to dedicate them-
selves to rigorous intellectual disciplines: erudition, study of antiquity, natural
sciences. If some nobles wrote or even published, following Caylus’s example,
they typically did so as “amateurs,” preferably remaining anonymous, and not
as professional authors.
Under the ministerships of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who them-
selves set the example, the creation of a library and collecting became socially
acceptable among the French nobility. François Roger de Gaignières (1642–
1715), an equerry and in many respects a pioneer, further expanded the art of
“living nobly.” Granted, Gaignières was quite a new noble, the grandson of a
merchant from Lyon, the son of a steward granted a title by the Duchess of
Lorraine, and himself a “servant” of the Duchess of Guise.11 But the “noblesse
de l’esprit,” in the sense understood by the Italian humanists, which would be
long in permeating the French mind-set, claimed to prevail over the noblesse du
sang, a saying Gaignières took to heart. During his studious leisure, Gaignières
assembled a large library of manuscripts and books and created an extraordi-
narily sumptuous “cabinet,” which included visual documentation (portraits,
monument rubbings, and drawings of works of art) that retraced the history of
a millennium of the French monarchy and its successive styles. Before Seroux,
Gaignières had undoubtedly already laid the foundations for a “return to the
Gothic” in France. He inspired respect from members of high society “curious”
about genealogy and history and was regarded as an authority by the erudite
Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-Maur; he corresponded both with
noble amateurs like Bussy-Rabutin and Coulanges, friends of the Marquise de
298 Lives
Sévigné, and leading men of letters like Boileau and Fénelon, as well as with
erudite scholars of historical methodology like Mabillon, a Benedictine monk.
In fact, much like Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, the illustrious lawyer from Aix-en-
Provence, three generations earlier, Gaignières was able to earn a rank of high
nobility within the Republic of Letters based on the modest evidence of the pro-
lificacy of his studious leisure.12
During the last three centuries of the ancien régime, the “Republic of Let-
ters” referred to a smaller society that developed within society as a whole and
gathered men of letters and savants, all those working for the common good of
a Europe of the mind, through correspondence and travel, in the same studious
use of leisure, regardless of profession, ecclesiastical and secular status, and even
of borders and religions. The result: a swarm of “bees,” to borrow a metaphor
made famous by the pope-poet Urban VIII, who had three bees engraved onto
his coat of arms, and Jonathan Swift, who made it the Ancients’ emblem dur-
ing the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. These “bees,” of their
own volition and with their own resources, collaborated and conversed with
one another in the same tireless otium studiosum, accumulating and increas-
ing the “honey and wax” of historic rememoration, a living and continuously
reinvigorated source of the enlightenment of knowledge and the gentleness of
civil manners.13 In the eighteenth century, the phrase “Republic of Letters” was
a synonym for “literary Europe,” with the adjective “literary” simultaneously
encompassing literature and erudite and scholarly disciplines (theology, law,
history, natural history, moral and political philosophy, the rhetoric and poetry
of arts and letters, and so on).14
The noblesse de l’esprit that allowed the Italian Renaissance to establish its
moral credentials was indisputably very attractive to the Italian noblesse d’épée
and, by extension, the European noblesse d’épée. One of the fruits of the Repub-
lic of Letters (which sixteenth-century Jesuits sought to penetrate) was a pro-
gram of liberal education and an ideal of “civil conversation” that transported
the high aristocracy from knighthood to the peaceful urbanity implied by the
exercise of lettered leisure. But even if dialogue between “clerics” of the Re-
public of Letters dedicated to studious leisure and the “laymen” of the noblesse
d’épée dedicated to lettered leisure did become possible, it was rare for a noble-
man to voluntarily adopt the self-discipline of studious leisure and take an inter-
est, other than as an “amateur” or “curious” observer, and in the name of one
“noble distraction” among many others, in the rigorous endeavors of the Repub-
lic of Letters. It was even more rare that a noble would aspire to join its ranks.
This was in any case much less common in France than in Italy, where a
strictly military nobility had become rare beginning in the sixteenth century
and countless academies had emerged, participation in which counted among

the obligatory activities of lettered leisure for the Italian noble-born aristocracy.
The eighteenth-century “Arcades” attracted a panoply of leading nobles on the
peninsula, thus uniting in a way its many municipal academies. Yet even in an
Italy abounding with scholars and antiquaries, rare were those who, descended
from old noble families, elevated themselves to the erudite stature of the mar-
quis Scipione Maffei, a prince renowned in literary Europe among his peers in
studious leisure,15 or the marquis Giovan Gioseffo Orsi, the Italian leader of the
quarrel that, publicly within the European Republic of Letters, pitted Italians
and French against one another at the beginning of the eighteenth century as
to the value of their respective languages and literatures.16
An entire world separated the arts and letters as a noble, high-society distrac-
tion among many and as a methodical exercise of studious leisure. Going from
one to the other required a genuine conversion for which the noble ethos was
not prepared, even though it had long accepted, in order to embellish and divert
its lettered leisure, the nobility of the arts and letters. However, switching from a
life of lettered and studious leisure to the contemplative life of sacred orders de-
manded a much more radical conversion. The Benedictines overcame these two
stages and united them in their spiritual life. In the seventeenth century, Pas-
cal, though a layman, abandoned studious leisure to rejoin the quasi-monastic
life of the Messieurs de Port-Royal and dedicated himself to convincing other
laymen of the absolute superiority of the contemplative life inspired by the
Christian faith. In the eighteenth century, France’s cities, including Paris, were
generally still “green” and their surfaces largely taken up by convents of contem-
plative orders, which were built on vast parks. In the countryside, monks lived
on large forested and agricultural properties. The Enlightenment, with Voltaire,
relegated these religious reserves of contemplation, silence, and prayer to the
“dark ages” that opposed progress, though Petrarch, the forefather of Renais-
sance lettered and studious leisure, had nonetheless felt a profound attraction
and reverence for them.
The pious and sophisticated Madame Geoffrin commissioned three deco-
rative panels from Hubert Robert, to be hung between the high mirrors in one
of her receiving rooms.17 In an effort to amuse her guests at her own expense,
Madame Geoffrin had asked that she herself be depicted on the canvas, during
her yearly, well-deserved, monthlong retreat to the Convent of the Visitandines
on rue Saint-Antoine. Robert showed himself painting, en plein air, with the
elderly bourgeois lady dressed in widow’s black, walking or conversing in the
verdant paths of the conventual park, or drinking chocolate in the company of
other nuns, seated around her under ancient bowers. The monastic sanctuary is
300 Lives
represented from the only pleasant angle in the garden; it is annexed to lettered
and sociable leisure, as it were, to which it hastens to offer a psychotherapeutic
respite, rather than demanding the slightest rupture with its comfort and ordi-
nary gentle habits.
Seroux d’Agincourt experienced firsthand the conversion from lettered and
sociable leisure to studious leisure: this occurred relatively late, coinciding with
the death of Louis XV, which freed him from the state duties the late king
had required of the Ferme générale; it began with his Grand Tour in northern
Europe, and then Italy, undertaken by Agincourt so he could be recruited by
the Republic of Letters and to assure its cooperation with the long-term project
he was planning to bring to fruition, in the leisurely outlet of a secular Benedic-
tine exercised at all times.
As I previously mentioned, this conversion had a model: the Comte de Cay-
lus, a great lord unique in his genre, about whom Quatremère de Quincy would
write in 1834, in his essay on Canova et ses ouvrages (Canova and His Works):
He had set the rare example of a grand and rich lord who preferred the
renown of knowledge over the fame of court, using his fortune for acquisi-
tions of all kinds and awakening a taste for research and discoveries of the
arts and ancient monuments within the heart of the Académie Royale des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, through either his writing or his collections,
as can attest his grand and still invaluable Collection of Antiquities.18
The young Caylus had singlehandedly tested all the forms of Parisian aristo-
cratic ennui in the eighteenth century, enthusiastically exercising every form of
lettered leisure that could occupy that time and render it enjoyable. Abbot Le
Beau, the permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions, describes the
count’s younger years in a eulogy he gave for his colleague in 1766:
An enemy of affairs, [the count] made all the amusements of life into one.
He busied himself with music, drawing, and painting. He wrote, but these
were only games and caprices of society to which he never granted more
care than was merited. Sparkling with fire and gaiety, he never subjugated
himself to the correction of style. He proposed no other perfection of this
genre than the entertainment of his friends. He expected everything of
nature, which served him willingly. To judge works of art, he possessed
that taste, an instinct superior to study, surer than reasoning, and more
rapid than reflection. His first glance rarely betrayed him; he immediately
noticed beauty and flaws.19
In the 1740s, Caylus had begun his conversion to studious leisure, which he
would exercise with increasingly ardent and methodical concentration until his
death. After joining the army at the age of fifteen, the great-nephew of Madame
de Maintenon (through his mother) deliberately chose to leave military service
in 1714 and dedicate the best of his time to lettered leisure. This was his first
conversion, undertaken with some nonchalance and inspired by the charming
company he found in Pierre Crozat, a great art connoisseur, a shrewd collec-
tor, and a patron, host, and friend of painters, musicians, and men and women
of letters. To better immerse himself in this existence of an enlightened dilet-
tante, Caylus traveled. Three successive and introductory Grand Tours of the
Republic of Letters had him visit Italy (1714–1715), the eastern Mediterranean
(1716–1717), and finally Holland and England (1722–1723). Upon his return,
even as he continued to frequent joyful “companies” whose members, as ama-
teurs and improvised authors, indulged in playacting or pleasant literary games,
Caylus made his first steps toward being adopted by the Republic of Letters.20
In 1731, he was accepted as an honorary member of the Académie Royale
de Peinture et Sculpture: he had been a friend of Watteau, at that time largely
unknown, and remained friends with the painter academician Charles Coypel;
he befriended the sculptor Bouchardon, who had returned from Rome, and
became the patron of several young artists; as an engraver, he collaborated on
the Recueil Crozat and publications of Watteau’s work coordinated by Jean de
Julienne.21 But this traveler to the Peloponnese and Magna Graecia was also an
amateur antiquary, and in 1742 Caylus, a rare specimen among the great figures
of France’s old noble aristocracy, became an honorary member of the Académie
des Inscriptions.22 He would undergo a second conversion within this scholarly
company, which led him to dedicate himself more and more exclusively to the
composition of the seven volumes of his Collection of Antiquities. In the dedi-
catory epistle of its first volume, Caylus expresses his gratitude to his colleagues
at the academy:
Before you granted me the honor of admission among you, it was from
the sidelines of art that I observed the remnants of savant antiquity saved
from the barbarism of the time. You taught me to attach an infinitely
superior worth to it, by that I mean of containing a thousand unique
traits of the history of religion, custom and manners, of those renowned
peoples who, by the vicissitude of human nature, disappeared from the
earth, which they had filled with the sound of their names.23
Caylus died in 1765, in the harness, as it were, of this grand antiquarian en-
deavor.
Literary Europe celebrated the count upon his death with all the more en-
thusiasm given that his name, birth, rank, and links to the court of Louis XIV
had granted the rare seal of high nobility to the lettered vocation and in par-
302 Lives
ticular the studious vocation. Diderot, who detested antiquaries and envied this
great lord who paid little attention to his dress and devoted himself entirely to
the arts and letters, penned a cruel epigram about Caylus following his death.
From Petersburg, Diderot’s friend and sculptor, Falconet, harshly reproached
him for his meanness and, in contrast, praised Caylus as the kind of enlightened
ally always needed by the arts. However, Diderot’s criticism was not alone in
relegating the antiquarian Caylus, a tireless promoter of a “return to antiquity,”
to the shadows; Winckelmann’s eloquence in his History of the Art of Antiquity
in fact did more in the long run to overshadow the nobleman’s pioneering role
in the French and European arts. At the time, for someone like Seroux d’Agin-
court, as well as Pierre-François Hugues d’Hancarville and Quatremère de
Quincy, the lessons left by Caylus, the reformer of a “corrupted” taste, were in-
dissociable from those of Winckelmann.24
In 1823, Gigault de La Salle, the writer of the preface to Seroux’s History,
clearly and elegantly expressed the natural synergy between the life of arts and
the scholarly research of the Republic of Letters, which nobles like Caylus and
Seroux had proudly served for the common good of French and European art
with as much enthusiasm and competence, not to mention eloquence, as the
commoner Winckelmann:
Art therefore not only needs artists to support itself in all its brilliance,
but also theorists, archaeologists, and historians, and in every era in which
architecture, sculpture, and painting are elevated to their most sublime
conceptions, one finds writers busy noting their history, illuminating
their functioning, illustrating their monuments, and researching their
antiquities.25
It is difficult to determine, given the current extent of our knowledge, when

Seroux d’Agincourt met Caylus and began to follow in his footsteps. Seroux
himself acknowledged Caylus’s decisive influence on him. Like d’Hancarville,
in the second tome of his Antiquités étrusques (Etruscan Antiquities, 1766–
1776),26 Seroux paid Caylus the posthumous homage of a student to his mas-
ter at the end of the former’s Recueil de fragments de sculpture antique en terre
cuite (Collection of Antique Terra-Cotta Sculpture Fragments), which, though
it was not published until 1814, had long been conceived of and illustrated as an
extension of the count’s Collection of Antiquities.27
Born in 1730, Seroux was one generation younger than Caylus, who was
born in 1692, and was thirty-five years old when Caylus died in 1765. However,
the count’s many vocations included that of Fénelon’s Mentor, the preceptor
for his Telemachus: Caylus successively sponsored a number of young artists
from their debuts and helped guide the talents of painters like Vien, Lagrenée,
and Roslin, and of sculptors like Bouchardon and Vassé. It is therefore hardly
surprising that he would have befriended a young farmer-general of noble birth,
in whom he saw a mirror image of himself at the same age, with shared affini-
ties for lettered leisure and studious leisure. Like the famous count, Seroux
had first embraced, class tradition obliging, a military career; under the com-
mand of Charles de Rohan, prince of Soubise, in the cavalry of the Maison du
Roi, he obtained the rank and bought the post of captain. In a Necrology con-
served in Besançon,28 he is described at that age and in that uniform as “daz-
zling by the stature and nobility of his character, the elegance of his manners,
the generosity of his behavior, a beautiful face, a keen and seductive mind”—
a perfect Louis XV gentleman, in other words, who was greatly appreciated
by the king he served. The king himself was the one to overcome Seroux’s re-
morse over and resistance to leaving the army, in order to increase his young
subject’s fortune and reestablish that of his family, and incited him to take on
his duties as the celibate head of a large family of brothers and cousins. Like
Caylus, who after 1714 resumed his until-then limited studies with the learned
abbot Antonio Schinella Conti,29 Seroux took classes at the Collège de Navarre,
studying under the physician Nollet and the renowned professor of rhetoric and
poetry Batteux. While simultaneously taking care of familial affairs, in addition
to his own, Seroux developed a taste for lettered leisure, in which he indulged
more fully after entering the Ferme générale, where he would both excel and
financially profit.
A protégé and guest of the Rohans in a superb Parisian mansion decorated
by the best artists of the period, as Caylus had been in his youth in the no-less-
sumptuous Hôtel de Crozat, Seroux had a free pass to the best social circles,
and, like Caylus in the 1720s–1740s, excelled at improvising poetry and silly
plays in said company; he attended without fail Madame Geoffrin’s infamous
“Mondays,” which debuted in her receiving rooms in 1748, following the Comte
de Caylus’s suggestion, and where artists could converse with art amateurs, men
and women of letters, foreign diplomats, and collectors.30 His close ties to Cay-
lus, Mariette, and the circle of “grand amateurs” intimately associated with
the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture no doubt developed on rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Like Caylus, Seroux learned to draw and engrave as
a semiprofessional. According to Gigault de La Salle, he was friends with Bou-
cher, Van Loo, Pierre, Fragonard, Vien, Robert, Vernet, Pigalle, Bouchardon,
Le Bas, Wille, and Cochin—the elite of the Académie Royale and talented
amateurs who lived symbiotically with it. He attended sales of famous collec-
tions held after their owners’ death, a popular draw of lettered leisure in the
304 Lives
capital, and assembled a noteworthy collection of drawings by Italian, Flemish,

and French masters of which we have only a partial notion today due to their
discreet dispersal in Rome by their desperate owner. Like Caylus, he consid-
ered himself to be a servant of the arts and artists; he gladly lent drawings from
his collection to Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun so she could study and copy them:
in Rome, in 1792, the émigré artist had a joyful reunion with Seroux, as good-
natured as ever despite being forced to separate from his drawings.31
Gigault de La Salle credited Seroux’s Italian voyage for his discovery that
“false brilliance had led our school astray,”32 curing him of any attachment to
rococo and sparking his enthusiasm for a return to antiquity. However, it is far
more probable that he had already been persuaded, while in Paris, by the long-
running campaign led by Caylus, who frequently spoke at the two academies to
which he belonged, engaging with the public as well as with those artists whom
he was protecting, and for whom he had created and granted prizes (for draw-
ing facial expressions and anatomy) in order to gently steer the fragile favor in
which rococo taste was held toward the “bel antique.” Long before his depar-
ture from Paris in 1776, and in the count’s lifetime, Seroux was familiar with
the two published volumes of the renowned Recueil Crozat (Crozat Collec-
tion), a veritable museum of engravings of sixteenth-century Florentine and
Venetian paintings and drawings; he was well aware of the demanding method
applied by Crozat, his friends, and his collaborators to reproduce these works
of art with the utmost precision. Seroux was also familiar with the Recueil de
pierres gravées antiques de la collection du roi (Collection of Antique Engraved
Stones from the Collection of the King), transposed in line drawings by Caylus,
and the Traité des pierres gravées (Tract of Engraved Stones), which included
a long preface by Pierre Jean Mariette and was illustrated using the same plain
technique, with drawings by Bouchardon engraved by Caylus. These scientific
catalogs were also meant to serve as manuals of pure, perfect forms to shape or
reshape artists’ and amateurs’ tastes.33 The pedagogical and rhetorical dictate
that called for “showing” before “saying” or commenting, and which Seroux
applied to his own publications, was the legacy of the great antiquaries and his-
torians of French art during the reign of Louis XV. One of the greatest editorial
endeavors undertaken by Caylus, who was furious with the Neapolitan authori-
ties for delaying publication of the frescos rediscovered at Herculaneum, was
the luxurious publication, in thirty copies (1757–1760), of the hand-colored
reproduction of a collection of gouaches by Pietro Santi Bartoli, copies made
by Bellori’s famous collaborator of classical paintings that reappeared in Rome
and subsequently disappeared.34 This publication was more a technical chal-
lenge directed at the Neapolitans by the French antiquary through the models
he suggested to his protégé, the painter Vien, than an homage to Santi Bartoli,
who was more concerned with elegance than fidelity. Seroux was apprehensive
enough about that shortcoming that he had illustrations of the classical Vati-
can Virgil, already engraved by Santi Bartoli, reproduced at additional cost. He
borrowed only a few plates of well-known monuments from the illustrious en-
graver’s Admiranda Romanorum antiquitatum veteris sculpturae vestigial (The
Remnants of Ancient Sculptures of Roman Antiquities, 1693), which were pre-
sented to the reader for comparison with other later and previously unseen ones.
It was through publications by Caylus, Mariette, and Bouchardon, long be-
fore Seroux laid eyes in Rome on the plates line-drawn by Flaxman and en-
graved by Piroli, that Seroux discovered the documentarian virtues of a “draw-
ing” technique that would come to characterize Europe’s “return to antiquity”;
in his History, that technique became the unifying principle behind engraved
plates faithfully depicting paintings, statutes, and monuments of the “decadent”
ages of art, thus inadvertently equating them with the affinity for “simplicity”
and “truth” that drove his contemporaries to prefer David over Boucher, and
Canova over Clodion.35 In reality, the European “return to antiquity” had been
in the making for a long time, in Paris, by Caylus, Bouchardon, Mariette, and
Vien, well before the dates of the exclusively English and Roman origins re-
cently proposed by Robert Rosenblum, and had already paved the way for a
Europe-wide “return to the primitives,” a movement in which Caylus’s French
disciple, nolens volens, would play the primary role.36
The method used by Seroux for his “rapid sketch” of a millennium of Euro-
pean art history (architecture, painting, sculpture, miniatures) was faithful to
the rigorous principles established by Pierre Crozat, Pierre Jean Mariette, and
the Comte de Caylus for the plates included in their “collections” of Renais-
sance tableaus and drawings and paintings and engravings of classic antiquity.
The meticulously selected collaborators involved in these team efforts received
instructions to use strict and fastidious precision with the “motif,” which was
then verified by masters at either the drawing or engraving stage. As often as was
possible, for paintings and miniatures, Seroux relied (or had his collaborators
rely) on tracings made directly onto oiled vellum. He recruited expert archi-
tects for monuments; when dealing with sculptures, he carefully indicated the
perspective (or perspectives) from which they had to be drawn. No individual
or school mannerisms, nothing remotely embellished, could come between
the original objects represented and their simple visual representation. Seroux’s
“method” brought to Italy the techniques of the “grand [French] amateurs”
trained at the Hôtel Crozat which they had developed in order to remedy the
flaws in the illustrated plates of Montfaucon’s Antiquité expliquée (Antiquity
306 Lives
Explained) and Les Monumens de la Monarchie françoise (Monuments of the

French Monarchy),37 too often carelessly engraved using second-hand or third-
hand drawings or engravings. Seroux, like Caylus, believed that productions
of human art indexed and reproduced by archaeologists and historians should
benefit from the same visual precision as productions of nature, botany, ento-
mology, conchology, and anatomy reproduced in indexes of natural history,
especially as, in the former case, time was pressing, condemning works of art to
ruin, disappearance, and oblivion. Contrary to the widely believed assumption,
the plates in Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie, an inventory of an exclu-
sively contemporary state of the arts entirely lacking any dimension of historical
memory, are a limited representation of the intelligence and, in particular, curi-
osity of the Enlightenment.
Countless drawings and plates created with utmost care, verification, and
correction under Seroux’s direct oversight or according to directives given to
his correspondents (for example, Count Choiseul-Gouffier, ambassador to
Constantinople, who agreed to collect rubbings of Byzantine monuments) re-
mained unpublished, in an attempt to lighten Seroux’s manuscript. These un-
seen items were, alongside the original published plates of History, among the
beautiful detritus of drawings and extensive handwritten notes Seroux left to the
Vatican Library. As demonstrated by Henri Loyrette, using the example of an
altarpiece, many of these line engravings are reflective of the works’ states be-
fore their degradation or dismantling, which now allows us to reconstruct those
original states.38
The example set by Caylus in his final years, increasingly resolute in his stu-
dious antiquarian leisure, composing volume after volume of his masterpiece,
Collection of Antiquities, in collaboration with many of his fellow savants at
the Acadèmie des Inscriptions, undoubtedly fascinated Seroux and prompted
him, as soon as he was able, to similarly detach himself from the world. Cay-
lus’s tenacity, as he himself notes in the preface to volume VII of his Collec-
tion, completed shortly before his death, was partially inspired by the disgust he
felt toward the Parisian art scene, which was overwhelmed by criticisms from
“the gut,” notably those penned by La Font de Saint-Yenne and Diderot, whose
noisy charlatanism would henceforth successfully rival the authority of true en-
lightened amateurs like Mariette and the count himself.39 It is likely that when
Seroux left Paris in 1776, carrying numerous recommendation letters, to begin
his Grand Tour of the European Republic of Letters, much like the one taken
by a young Caylus in 1714–1723, he shared the sentiments that had perturbed
the old count some ten years earlier and was hoping to find a location for his
new studious existence that was more conducive to the serenity of otium than
was an increasingly agitated Paris.
His intuition was on the nose. Rome was good to him, ensuring that he and
his work escaped what would have been unavoidable violence during the Ter-
ror in Paris. The two kinds of nobility incarnated by Seroux—the noblesse de la
naissance and the noblesse de l’esprit—were unfailingly recognized in Rome,
earning the elderly, erudite gentleman universal respect in addition to countless
friendships and collaborations and dedication, even from those French belong-
ing to the opposing party, as well as, at the end, a kind of crepuscular princedom
of the Republic of Letters, to which, in 1804, in his famous Lettre sur la cam-
pagne romaine (Letter on the Roman Campaign),40 the royalist Chateaubriand
paid an homage as lovely as the one the Republican Paul-Louis Courier, travel-
ing in Italy, would soon write in his correspondence with his friends in France.41
Note that Chateaubriand chose one of Seroux’s friends, the French sculptor
Joseph Charles Marin, to carve the tomb for Pauline de Beaumont, which he
had erected in a column of the church of San Luigi dei Francesci.
To justify the dark, bloody nature of his tragedies, Crébillon said, “Corneille
took heaven, Racine the earth. Only hell was left for me.”42 Seroux justified his
decision to offer literary Europe a History of its long “artistic decadence” in a
similar fashion: Winckelmann, after Caylus, had claimed the “heaven” of the
arts, classic Greece and its Roman heritage; Vasari and his many successors
had focused on the “earth” of the arts, Renaissance Italy, the source of their
European “revival”; all that was left was “hell,” the interim millennium during
which the arts were corrupted.43 Seroux was thus allotted the humblest and, be-
cause it lacked precedent, the most ambitious and difficult role of this tripartite
scheme, which led him to unexplored terrain and was dedicated to a thankless
and disparaged subject. He had undoubtedly conceived of his plan well before
leaving the Ferme générale and Paris for a voyage intended to earn him access
to the European Republic of Letters, whose support he needed to successfully
carry out a project destined to fully occupy his own, premeditated future of stu-
dious leisure. It is likely that he was inspired by both the celebrated example of
Roger de Gaignières and works by the Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon—
his Antiquité expliquée, which highlighted works of art dating after the sixth
century, and in particular his Monumens de la Monarchie françoise, a veritable
visual encyclopedia of medieval France—via Caylus’s own Recueil d’Antiquités
(Collection of Antiquities), which boldly juxtaposed Gallo-Roman works of art
with objects of classical craftsmanship. In the France of Ange Gabriel, François
Lemoyne, and Edme Bouchardon, which adhered to the tradition of Italian
academies, the memory of the kingdom’s Middle Ages was honored by a hand-
ful of scholars, including an academician from the Académie des Inscriptions
et Belles-Lettres, La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, who was a compatriot, friend, and
colleague of President de Brosses.44
308 Lives
At this time the kingdom of France was grappling with an unresolved contra-
diction between the myth of the French “Renaissance” (the renovatio studio-
rum et atrium imported from Italy in 1530 by Francis I) and the founding myths
of the French monarchy (Clovis and the Holy Ampulla of Reims), which
stretched back, as did several subsequent and glorious reigns (notably that of
Saint Louis), to the Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres was compelled to dedicate a num-
ber of its “memoirs” to the “medieval” literature and language of the French
kingdom; Caylus, simultaneously pushing for a “return to antiquity,” was among
its authors. In parallel, the Benedictines of Saint-Maur had begun to write a His-
toire littéraire de la France (Literary History of France), which devoted erudite,
dry summaries to the “barbarian” authors of the first centuries of the kingdom.45
Seroux d’Agincourt, a determined enthusiast of the “return to antiquity,”
who dedicated his life to bringing the arts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages
to light, is emblematic of that French schizophrenia. After conducting familial,
genealogical research, he began to believe in a deep past that had been some-
what eclipsed by the prestige of the Renaissance of arts and letters. The “return
to antiquity” movement and criticism of rococo, in which Seroux participated
alongside an older Caylus, took aim at the limp and sensual affectation in which
the French school of arts had “fallen.” Tired of rococo arabesques and rainbows,
the movement’s proponents called for “pure” forms. The austerity or naïveté
of the arts during centuries of “decadence” acquired a secret appeal within the
context of a revolution of taste that would, in its desire to rediscover the bel an-
tique, go so far as to align itself with the Doric Greek Paestum revealed by Pira-
nesi’s engravings.46
For all that the Jacobin revolution created a blank political slate, vandaliz-
ing monuments of the ancient monarchy in the name of an austere return to
Sparta and republican Rome, it was nonetheless one of their own, Alexandre
Lenoir, who, invoking the national legacy and the need to educate citizens on
art from every era, created the Musée des Monuments Français (French Mu-
seum of Monuments), using fragments saved from vandalism, in which Gothic
ogives and sharp angles found themselves abruptly revalorized. For that mat-
ter, not only was studious leisure independent of the trends dictating high so-
ciety’s lettered leisure, it also boasted its own traditions and rhythm, which were
relatively independent from the vicissitudes of taste and political revolutions.
Furthermore, thanks to its European dimension, it was not limited to the spe-
cific context of French national history.
During his Grand Tour of literary Europe, Seroux, already attracted to the
terrae incognitae of past French art, could focus his attention on the many
monuments he saw that dated back to those “dark ages.” He must have also
noted that he was far from the only person outside of France to take an interest
in periods of forgotten art. His arrival in London coincided with the publication
of the first volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire.47 He traveled to Twickenham to visit Horace Walpole, a precursor of
an English Gothic revival that undoubtedly had more to do with an aesthetic
caprice than a scholarly one; after that meeting, Seroux maintained a friendly
correspondence with the British “virtuoso.” He was introduced to collectors in
Holland and Italy who, indifferent to international trends and tastes, had as-
sembled, out of local pride, collections of “primitive” tableaus (Flemish ones
in Holland and pre-Giottesques or pre-Raphaelites in Italy). Reaching Modena
in early 1779, Seroux befriended the former Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi, who
was writing his epic History of Italian Literature, which accorded a generous
and comprehensive role to the centuries and authors predating the “century of
Leo X” and which invited art historians to imitate it.48 This study trip through
Italy, which, in the eighteenth century, was teeming with historians, antiquaries,
and archaeologists, figures whose long memory unabashedly embraced their
own Middle Ages, resulted in comforting Seroux in his plans to methodically
recapitulate the arts of Aetas media, which had been conceived of in France in
the still-timid medievalist wake of Caylus, the Académie des Inscriptions, and
the Benedictines of Saint-Maur. But for Seroux it was out of the question to
effect the aesthetic rehabilitation of the “decadence” he nonetheless aimed to
memorialize.
Yet, at the numerous stops on his long trip leading to Rome, Seroux, leaving
behind the “affectation” of rococo art, occasionally demonstrated an affinity for
works that predated the “revival” of the sixteenth century. As he stood before
Carpaccio’s Legend of Saint Ursula series in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the
“simplicity” and “naturalness” of the attitudes and feelings represented inspired
“a gentle emotion” in the French aristocrat. Along his journey, Seroux’s ambi-
tious project attracted apparently unexpected interest, sympathy, and collabo-
rations, which never would have arisen in France. Even the French citizens he
then befriended—which he did even when Rome was under the protection or
administration of the Directory in France—shared his love of the arts and re-
spected him as a scholar dedicated to the res communis of literary Europe. Dur-
ing his travels, Seroux easily obtained drawings of medieval monuments from
young French architects on study trips. In Venice, he befriended the custodian
of the Marciana library, Abbot Jacopo Morelli, who introduced him to the trea-
sured illuminated manuscripts in his care. In Florence, he was introduced to
the former Jesuit Luigi Lanzi, who was then writing his Storia pittorica della
310 Lives
Italia (The History of Painting in Italy), which [first] appeared in 1792;49 plagia-
rized by Stendhal, this masterly work served as an authority on the art of Italian
drawing and its various “schools” for the first half of the nineteenth century.
Seroux remained in contact with these experts once he had settled in Rome,
where he arrived on November 29, 1779, recommended to the director of the
Académie de France, Joseph Marie Vien, a favored student of Caylus, and
David’s teacher, by the director of the Bâtiments du Roi, the Comte d’Angiviller.
In the same year, the young Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova arrived in
Rome, where he earned the appreciation of the English painter Gavin Hamil-
ton50 and a French amateur, and one of Seroux’s friends, Quatremère de
Quincy, both enthusiasts of the “return to antiquity.” In 1784, David returned
to Rome to paint the Oath of the Horatii amid an atmosphere of intense gen-
eral curiosity.51
Pope Pius VI Braschi’s Rome, where Seroux made his home in the Via Gre-
goriana, became Europe’s leading center for the “return to antiquity” in the
arts. The French nobleman frequented society à la Parisienne at the home of
Cardinal de Bernis, Louis XVI’s ambassador, crossing paths with his peers, Ro-
man scholars and antiquaries, and foreign amateurs passing through, like King
George III of Sweden and Goethe, who was brought to Via Gregoriana in 1787
by the famous painter Angelica Kauffman. The poet was impressed by the medi-
eval collection and illustrated plates of Seroux’s future publication, which in his
mind revealed the endurance of man’s creative spirit, “even in the dark ages.”
Though financially and morally drained by the fall of the French ancien
régime, the royalist Seroux continued his work; the Frenchmen of the new
regime that invaded or administered Rome after 1798 treated him like a “na-
tional treasure” and not as a ci-devant noble. The secretary of the embassy of
the French republic, Artaud de Montor, regularly visited Via Gregoriana be-
tween 1798 and 1803; he preempted Seroux’s History with his own work, first
published in 1808: Considérations sur l’état de la peinture en Italie dans les
quatre siècles qui ont précédé Raphaël (Considerations on the State of Painting
in Italy in the Four Centuries that Preceded Raphael). He would remain a great
defender and collector of Italian primitives.52
Seroux’s Rome was also the backdrop for Paillot de Montabert’s Dissertation
sur les peintures du Moyen Âge et sur celles que l’on a appelées gothiques (Dis-
sertation on the Paintings of the Middle Ages and on Those That were Called
Gothic), published in the Magasin encyclopédique in 1812. This rehabilitation
of primitives is all the more representative of the increasing superposition of
the “return to the primitives” and the “return to antiquity,” given that Monta-
bert, a former student of David, would publish Théorie du geste dans la pein-
ture renfermant plusieurs principes applicables à l’art du théâtre (Theory of the

Gestural in Painting Using Several Principles Applicable to the Art of Theater)
the following year: the strict “principles” outlined in this theory, meaning econ-
omy, naturalness, and decorum, though supported by Greek and Latin authori-
ties and illustrated by classical statuary and glyptics, had been, according to the
author, better observed, all things considered, by the Naïve artists of the Aetas
media than they were by the all-too-skilled corrupters of art in the eighteenth
century.53
François Cacault, negotiator of the Treaty of Tolentino and the Concordat
and plenipotentiary minister of the First Consul in Rome from 1801 to 1803,
was an amateur and collector too familiar with classical and modern Italian art
not to hold Seroux in high esteem.54 Dominique-Vivant Denon, another high-
ranking amateur and the director of the Musée Napoléon, who had spent con-
siderable time with Seroux in the Parisian societies of the ancien régime, en-
countered him again in 1811 in Rome during his mission to Italy. Vivant Denon
had to personally select works from among the tableaus seized from the con-
vents of Tuscany and Genoa to serve as appropriate additions to the collections
of the Louvre, which was lacking in Italian primitives; after consulting Seroux
and rounding out his museum collection with an enlightened eye, he went
on to prepare the European exhibit of “Primitive Schools” in 1814, which in-
cluded the Italian (from Cimabue to Perugino), German, Flemish, and Spanish
schools. As a result, the Louvre seal was affixed to what was becoming, in part
against Seroux’s wishes but also in many respects thanks to him, a clear reorien-
tation of European taste, after having been regarded as a scientific obligation,
and near penitence, during the eighteenth century.55
Among the many collaborators Seroux employed to work on his engraved
plates, not to mention the equally numerous artists and amateurs to whom he
showed and generously explained them in his home over a span of thirty years,
several developed a greater admiration than their host or employer would have
liked for the displayed works and the very “flaws” he pointed out. During its
slow and long evolution in the Via Gregoriana, and well before its publica-
tion, Seroux’s History created “converts” to a primitivism its author had always
wanted to resist.
This reluctant missionary’s “converts,” in addition to the diplomat Artaud de
Montor, a collector and defender of Byzantine and Italian “primitives,” and the
architects and friends Léon Dufourny and Pierre Charles Pâris, two curators
charged with overseeing the publication of Seroux’s History by the publisher
Treuttel and Würtz in Paris, included two collaborators who were involved in
the final phase of the book’s development: the Englishman William Young Ott-
312 Lives
ley and his inseparable travel companion, the Dutchman David Pierre Hum-
bert de Superville, in Umbria and Tuscany in 1792–1793 and 1798. Under
Seroux’s direction, they created numerous drawings and tracings from frescos
predating the Renaissance, notably at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.
Ottley, “converted” by Seroux, nonetheless worked on his own projects as well
and published The Italian School of Design: Being a Series of Facsimiles of
Original Drawings by the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors of Italy: with
Biographical Notices of the Artists and Observations on their Works in 1823 in
London.56 The two friends had originally come to Rome independently, to draw
in the style of antiquity and Michelangelo as “Davidian” members of the Acadé-
mie de France in Rome. According to a hypothesis well supported by Miarelli
Mariani,57 the two men met at the site of a Benedictine monastery in Subiaco
as a result of orders given by Seroux to both of them; their friendship was re-
portedly cemented by the shared passion they felt for Italian primitives. Hum-
bert de Superville (though he harbored Jacobin sentiments) even earned the
nickname “Giottino” due to his efforts as a draughtsman, painter, and engraver,
which were resolutely dedicated to the taste for simplicity and the clarity of lan-
guage of the forms used by the artists of the Trecento.58 The two greatest Italian
artists of neoclassical Rome under Pius VIII, the sculptor Antonio Canova and
the painter Vincenzo Camuccini, both of whom visited Seroux frequently
and occasionally provided him drawings, were also attentive to the sparseness
and solemnity of the works they discovered at the prodding of the French anti-
quary, which, while undoubtedly “decadent” in regard to the bel antique, were
also shielded in their rough fashion from the “corruption of taste” that, accord-
ing to Canova and Camuccini, occurred in Paris in the eighteenth century.
The engraver Thomas Piroli, on whom Seroux relied the most frequently in
Rome, if we exclude his faithful, full-time “employee” Gian Giacomo Macchia-
velli, was the heart and soul of a private “academy” of highly gifted Roman and
foreign artists who existed somewhat symbiotically with the studio, itself quite
popular, of the famous antiquary.
Vivant Denon had zero scruples, in the name of the common good of
Europe, when it came to using new tableaus seized in Italy to supplement the
historic panorama of the development of the arts that the Louvre wanted to
offer literary Europe. At the time of the Treaty of Tolentino, which had stripped
museums and papal libraries of their masterpieces to the benefit of the Musée
Central des Arts, Quatremère de Quincy made an eloquent plea in his Lettres à
Miranda (Letters to Miranda), with the support of David, in favor of maintain-
ing those works in situ; he spoke on behalf of the common good of all the artists
in Europe who needed to continue to find a living and complete museum in
Rome and in Italy.59 In the summer of 1802, the painter François Marius Granet
arrived in Rome, having possibly carried and read during his voyage Chateau-
briand’s Génie du christianisme (Genius of Christianity), published on Easter.
His first effort at open-air painting, in front of the Colosseum, the symbol of
imperial Rome, was a failure; he subsequently confined himself, in July, to the
damp crypt of San Martino al Monte. He writes in his Memoirs: “I was among
the dead who alone made their homes within those immense tableaus.”60 This
time, his painting was successful.
Denis Coutagne described that move from sunny Rome to underground
Rome as a “conversion of perspective” and a quest for the “primitive perspec-
tive.”61 It comes as little surprise that Granet, a good friend of Ingres’s, then a
member of the Académie de France, quickly allied himself with Seroux d’Agin-
court, his neighbor at Via Gregoriana for a time, and with Artaud de Montor,
who would publish Voyage dans les catacombes de Rome (Voyage in the Cata-
combs of Rome) in 1810. These two antiquaries of the “dark ages,” with whom
Chateaubriand spent a great deal of time in 1803–1804, guided Granet in his
search for abandoned sites, notably churches threatened with ruin, which mir-
rored his own meditative melancholy, were viewed contemptuously by a decep-
tively healthy classical and neoclassical world, and would soon be emptied of
their eremites and monks by imperial authorities. While in Rome, Granet (who
was by no means pious and was rather Jacobin in his leanings) was not attracted
to the magnificence of Saint Peter’s Basilica or the monumentality of Santa
Maria Maggiore, but rather by Santa Maria in Via Lata, Saint Frances of Rome,
Santi Quattro Coronati, Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and, far from Rome, the Ba-
silica of Saint Francis (ignored by the majority of eighteenth-century voyagers,
from President de Brosses to Stendhal) and its low chapel. A landscape painter,
he attributed the following prosopopoeia to nature, addressing the painter, in
his Memoirs: “Here I am in all my simplicity. If you want to make something
that resembles me, be naïve and observe me well.”
By 1824, Granet had accumulated over two hundred landscape and architec-
tural paintings on oil on paper, whose severe rusticity emphasized the silence,
space, and light of each view, during his promenades through Rome and the
campagna. Cézanne, who would access these secret spiritual exercises left by
the painter to the museum of his native city Aix-en-Provence a half-century
later, recognized a soul mate in Granet. But Granet could not envisage dis-
playing his improvisations to the public at the Salons de l’Institut: instead he
composed large-format “historical tableaus,” which, while allegories of his con-
templative poeticism, were somewhat more in accordance with the obligatory
academism of the time. The most famous of these, and the archetype of this
314 Lives
official form of production, was Le Chœur des capucins de la place Barberini

(The Choir of the Capuchin Church on the Piazza Barberini), which was exhib-
ited in Rome in 1814, the same year as the exhibit of “Primitive Schools” at the
Louvre, and later at the Louvre itself, at the Salon of 1819. The work’s immedi-
ate success grew during the Restoration, prompting Granet, at the urging of his
friend Auguste de Forbin, Vivant Denon’s successor as the Louvre’s director, to
produce the work in multiple copies and numerous variations. Caroline Murat
bought a version, as did Tsar Alexandar I. Louis XVIII reacted warmly to the
painting, which was featured by Forbin.
Amid the starkness of a timeless apse even more abstract than one of Saen-
redam’s churches, backlit, with vast gulfs of shadows, by the chapel’s only win-
dow, Capuchin friars standing in stalls around an altar table, one seated due to
his advanced age, another in profile kneeling in prayer with his head between
his hands, are attending a mass held by two of the friars, aided by two choir chil-
dren bearing candles. Is the service taking place in the Middle Ages, the eigh-
teenth century, or the era of the primitive church and the catacombs? Like its
brown-robed monks blending into shadow, their faces barely discernible, the
painting is timeless. The painter would never compose biblical altar paintings.
But within this genre of painting he himself invented (like Watteau and his
fêtes galantes!), Granet did translate his own experience as a contemplative art-
ist into a language that could be understood by the laymen attracted to the
Catholic, romantic revival launched in France by Chateaubriand beginning in
1802. Viewers of The Choir of the Capuchin Church and its variations relearned
something they had thought to be lost, which they wanted to find again and,
at least in their better moments, revere: a stripping away of passions and the
world, the pure geometry of a sacred place, the simple and austere grandeur of
a religious rite. Restored to its primitive and severe exercise, the art of painting
as conceived of by Granet was in itself a religion and a way to teach religion.
Moving beyond the lettered leisure that had found its diversions and charm-
ing decor in rococo art, and committed to the severity of the studious leisure
of scholars and antiquaries, Seroux d’Agincourt had led his guests in the Via
Gregoriana, through the study of the architecture and arts of medieval clergy,
to the threshold of rediscovery or nostalgia for the monastic vita contempla-
tiva, which had been forgotten or derisively dismissed by the Enlightenment.
Granet crossed that threshold. He is the true French contemporary of the Ger-
man Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings of interiors and landscapes, often
punctuated with Gothic ruins, also call for a rupture with the world and for rev-
erential contemplation of the divinity flowering in places safe from desecration.
Thus, via an imperceptible transition during the turmoil of the Revolution
and the French Empire, Seroux, a survivor of the noble manners of high Pari-
sian society, who in Rome had become a master of European antiquarianism,
dedicated to revealing a “return to the primitives,” encased within a “return to
antiquity,” was more than the mere protagonist of two revolutions of taste; he
also contributed, intentionally, to a profound change in values. Valorizing stu-
dious leisure by his example, and elevating it above the lettered leisure that had
been made into a supreme ideal of existence during the Enlightenment, he con-
sequently rehabilitated, through his representations of conventual buildings,
polyptichs, and icons, the ideal of the contemplative life of medieval monasti-
cism and notably a Franciscanism that now attracted the admiration of Protes-
tants, agnostics, and Catholics alike. That ideal, revived two centuries earlier by
the Catholic Reformation and by Port-Royal, and reviled and denigrated by the
Enlightenment, would impose itself in the nineteenth century as the counter-
weight to bourgeoisism, commercialism, and industrialization. It found itself at
the forefront of countless purely religious revivals, but would henceforth be so-
licited by (and sooner or later permeate) poetry and art, when those disciplines
sought liberation from servitude to mondaine society.
AFTERWORD:
THE SECRET OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Beacons Lighting the Way

One of the obstacles hindering our understanding of premodern European
arts in context is the rhetoric that frames the invention and reception of Renais-
sance and classical art, and which we have either overlooked or apprehended.
Our focus has instead been on aesthetics, a philosophy of art that dates from
eighteenth-century Germany, which we project, retrospectively and anachro-
nistically, onto premodern art and its reflective and sustaining milieu.
By “rhetoric,” I am referring to the ars bene dicendi invented by the ancient
Greeks, adopted by their conquering students, the Romans, and discovered in
the Western Christian world in the twelfth century and taught to clerics in a
schematic and dogmatic form in the art faculties of pontifical universities in
the late Middle Ages (circa 1101–1300). Thanks to Petrarch and his disciples, that
first Renaissance experienced a second rinascità outside of clerical universities,
which restored the variable and adaptable principle of convenientia (the ancient
Greeks’ prepon) to the heart of the oratorical system.
Petrarch borrowed that principle from Cicero, the author of De Oratore,
who, while working in Rome as a lawyer and statesman, had introduced a pre-
paratory education in legal eloquence, political discourse, and official and pri-
vate epistolary practices. At that time, arts at medieval universities (established
by the papacy) were ancillary to the ecclesiastical functions of the preacher and
the theologian. The oratorical “conversion” prepared by a poet more secular
than clerical such as Petrarch was favorably welcomed by the pontifical Curia,
back in Rome with its high-ranking officials (1347), and by royal courts and secu-
lar city-states that needed political and diplomatic personnel able to negotiate
and correspond with all of Roman Catholicity. The same quickly became true
of the different kingdoms in the Western Empire. In the wake of Italy’s human-
ists, orators, and diplomats, a vast international epistolary network emerged and
spread between European men of letters corresponding in a supple and ele-
gant Ciceronian Neo-L atin, unsullied by the modern “barbarism” of scholastic
Latin. The history of Latin Europe was transformed by the unceasing compari-
317
318 Afterword
son of its current “barbaric” and unfinished state and the finished, superior, and
model state propelling it forward.
Pagan and Christian antiquity, emerging from its relegation to ignorance
and oblivion, became the object of an archaeological and philological program
of study that recalled and sparked a desire for actualized Greco-L atin civili-
zation, and which would prove capable of bringing a still unactualized mod-
ern Europe from potentiality to actuality. That principle comes from Aristotle:
“Only a being in a state of actuality can bring a being from potentiality to actu-
ality” (Metaphysics, book Λ).
Whenever we encounter the somewhat mysterious expression “Republic
of Letters” nowadays, we are immediately dealing with a rhetorical figure of
thought, namely a political, eulogistic, or ironic allegory, which appeared dur-
ing the fifteenth century to designate an informal institution of research and
amicable cooperation that carved out a shared terrain of scholarly Neo-L atin
cooperation for its members, transcending borders and political and religious
contexts, and in spite of linguistic and political differences, bridging “absolute”
monarchies (Rome, Vienna, Madrid, Paris), aristocratic republics (Florence,
Venice), bourgeois republics (Dutch Republic, 1579–1795), and independent
Hanseatic ports.
The Republic of Letters, a state without a state, did not elicit distrust or sus-
picion from the monarchies of the ancien régime, which, following Louis XIV’s
example, had nationalized them in their savant or mondaine academies. The
royal French state willingly selected its personnel from the ranks of local let-
tered societies, all belonging to the European Republic of Letters, whose mem-
bers were recruited, under princely supervision, by co-optation among peers,
and chose the most competent and zealous individuals, including, if necessary,
foreigners. The threat to the state therefore did not come from antiquaries, sa-
vants trained in the rigorous disciplines of philology, numismatics, and collec-
tionism, but rather from the ranks of publicists and “philosophes,” who other-
wise acquired their knowledge (for example, autodidacts like Rousseau) of a
didactic antiquity and its Aristotelian division of political regimes. The master-
piece of that seemingly scholarly literature, which was in fact rich with double
meaning, is Histoire romaine (Roman History, 1738–1740) by the Jansenist pro-
fessor Charles Rollin, who, forbidden to teach, took his revenge by circulating
on a much larger scale, via the printing press, a licit criticism of the French
ecclesial and political regime under the innocent guise of an exemplum histori-
cal account that shamed both modern politics and the Moderns’ manners and
religion. Mably, who penned Entretiens de Phocion et des doutes sur le fonde-
ment naturel des sociétés politiques (Phocion’s Conversations and Doubts on
The Secret of the Republic of Letters 319
the Natural Order of Political Societies), and Rousseau with his two Discourses,
would later embellish on the didactic framework of Roman History.
The thousand-year-old evidence that inspired the French royal state was de-
constructed in the eighteenth century by both Jansenist “archaeolaters” like
Rollin and libertine, deist, or atheist philosophers protected by their unanimous
veneration of beautiful, free, and virtuous antiquity. In his Persecution and the
Art of Writing (1952), Leo Strauss reveals the tricks used by philosophers from
various schools and eras to escape, beneath the mask of antiquity, religious and
political tyrannies. And in 1955, Arnaldo Momigliano, in his article “Ancient
History and the Antiquarians,” rehabilitated the painstaking work of antiquaries
during the ancien régime. Those philologists, numismatists, and archaeologists,
though themselves of relatively little concern to authorities and often acade-
micians, were nonetheless accumulating a mass of critical knowledge about
antiquity from which Enlightenment philosophes would draw an eloquent ar-
gument in favor of the republican regime, the only one, among the regimes de-
fined by Aristotle and Polybius, that guaranteed its citizens the plenitude of a
freedom that stimulated them to generously exercise their civic virtues.
An implicit contract linked Europe’s erudite community to the monarchies
of the seventeenth century. In other words, antiquarian savants respected the
regime that respected them. But that complicity crumbled in the following cen-
tury when the French philosophes of the Enlightenment and their prerevolu-
tionary disciples (Mably, Rousseau, Diderot) popularized a mythical and even
melodramatic version of antiquity. The Fénelonian figure of the royal Good
Shepherd (Telemachus in Salento, in Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures
of Telemachus, 1699), the Rousseauist figure of the Great Lawmaker (Lycurgus
and Solon in Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (The Voyage of Young Ana-
charsis in Greece, 1788), and the sublime figures of republican Rome’s grandest
citizens (the Scipios, Brutuses, and Pompeys of Rollin’s Roman History) spread
and ingrained in the French imagination an exemplary panorama of good and
bad governance, in the tradition of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena, in
which the strict ethics of ancient republics were contrasted with the ingratiating
and perverse aesthetic of modern monarchies, as they had been condemned,
indirectly and implicitly, in Roman History.
In 1865, Edgar Quinet could make the following observation in book 2 of his
Révolution (Revolution):
No tribune in the world had a language less common, more scholarly, and
more studied than Robespierre and Saint-Just. Anyone who tried to speak
the language of the people was promptly and naturally odious to them. It
seemed to them to diminish the Revolution, which they could only view
320 Afterword
with the pomp of Cicero and the majesty of Tacitus. [. . .] It was the Jaco-
bins’ classical and lettered revolution that crushed the uneducated and
proletariat revolution of the Cordeliers. Robespierre followed the designs
of a classical tragedy. Anything that strayed from the accepted order, life,
spontaneity, popular instinct, struck him as a monstrosity: he waged war
against it.
Language, the problematic and the tool of both the Girondin and Jacobin
revolutions, can be found gestating in works by the French figures that popular-
ized ancient history. Fénelon, Rollin, Mably, Rousseau, and Barthélemy all pro-
vided mute but stern mirrors of the most widespread political regime in Europe,
notably in its powerful French variant. For these philosophe writers, Greco-
Roman antiquity served as a critical foil for the French monarchy in the same
way that the Persians did for Louis XV’s France, according to Montesquieu,
and as Louis XIV’s Grand Siècle did for the reign of Louis the Well-Beloved,
according to Voltaire.
That philosophical irony dates back to the Italian roots of the Renaissance,
whose development was inseparable from the virulent satirization of scholas-
tic disciplines and the feudal regime. The Republic of Letters was born in the
context of a long “quarrel of language,” during which scholastic and medieval
Latin—the language of learning, of teaching in Parisian universities, of theo-
logians, and one shared by European universities—found itself deconstructed
and devalued by philologists called “humanists.” They ensured the “rebirth”
of classical Latin, the language of papal bulls and of Cicero, and emboldened
champions of vernacular languages to correct and modify their dialects using
the model of Ciceronian or Senecan Latin. Dante, Petrarch, and Bembo wrote
between the three dueling linguistic centers: dated university Latin, the Cicero-
nian and Virgilian Neo-Latin conserved by the papal Curia, and that same Neo-
Latin adapted by the Tuscan vernacular poet Petrarch. The Tuscan vernacular
reformed by Dante using the Ciceronian model, refined by Petrarch, and en-
nobled by Pietro Bembo, using the grammatical and rhetorical model of Augus-
tan Latin, offered Europe an exemplary filiation that reconciled the unitary but
varied foundations of Rome’s clerical court with the same varied and federat-
ing foundations that enabled the coexistence of a vibrant multitude of Catholic
principalities and kingdoms within the Germanic Holy Roman Empire.
Aesthetics, our current philosophy of visual arts, originates from a Latin
thesis bearing that title and published in 1750 by the professor Alexander Gott-
lieb Baumgarten. Its great success was due to the interest taken in the work, in
German this time, by the antiquarian Johan Joachim Winckelmann (author of
History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764) and the professor Immanuel Kant, author
of “Critique of Judgment” (1790). Kant ultimately extricated aesthetic judg-

ment from the domain of pure or practical reason. For him, it was not the ob-
ject (be it natural or artistic) that imposed its selection and agreeable or dis-
agreeable impressions on the subject, but the subject and his impressions that
decided what was beautiful or not. Like a new Copernicus, the philosopher
from Königsberg attributed to the receiver—to his aesthetic subjectivity, imagi-
nation, and feelings of pleasure and pain—the ability to make both fluctu-
ating and universal judgments without reliance on reason, logic, or any rational
understanding or awareness of the object or its representation. To the ancient
and classical objectivity of beauty and sublimity that independently imposed
themselves on their spectators and receivers, Kant introduced romantic and
centrifugal subjectivism and even, in the long term, expressionism, figurative or
otherwise, liberated from classical reason and substituting instead the poignant
and relativistic game in which the modern individual engaged, in a quest for
ugliness rather than beauty.
By the end of the eighteenth century, even German universities had to sacri-
fice Latin and rely on the vernacular in their curricula. German courts, follow-
ing the treaties of Westphalia, had converted to diplomacy and gallantry en fran-
çais, though not without university resistance to that linguistic colonization.
The centralization of the French royal state enabled its deliberate and long-
lasting expansion, whose impressive continuity was inaugurated by Francis I,
continued by Richelieu, and perfected by Colbert. The royal administration’s
ambitions extended to establishing the French spoken by men of letters and
savants as the universal language of cultivated Europe, destined to replace the
Latin of Cicero, popes, and the Roman Curia. Under the guidance of its great
ministers, Paris was primed to become a major translation hub, multiplying,
throughout all of Europe’s capital cities, publications of political and literary
“news” produced by a French press that would barely survive Napoleon’s Con-
tinental System.
Here, we can observe a vast operation of “actualization” of the art of the van-
quished being applied to the language of the vanquishers, still in its “potenti-
ality.” We have already seen how, in the first century BC, thanks to Cicero, the
Athenian oratory tradition, embodied by Isocrates and by Lysias and Demos-
thenes, absorbed Rome’s coarse language. Antiquity had experimented with
that translation of the ars rhetorica of the prescriptive Greek discipline from
one language to others with the “rhetoricization” of a relatively limited and
impoverished Latin, as described and applied by Cicero. The “modernity” of
the Italian Renaissance would repeat the great linguistic and literary mutation
that had accompanied the transition from Latin republic to Roman Empire.
322 Afterword
The latter’s vast limits (its limes) included Athens, Pergamon, and Alexandria,
late capitals of Hellenism, which were for ancient imperial Rome the equiva-
lent of Florence, Venice, Naples, and papal Rome for the Gothic capitals, and
Paris, London, and Amsterdam for the modern age. The Eternal Return! The
imitation-emulation of “actualized” beings had thus led, on two occasions, to
the emergence of “actualized” capitals of modernity from capitals in “potenti-
ality.”
Invented in Magna Graecia in the fifth century BC, Gorgias and Protagoras
transferable from one language to another, this discipline of language and dis-
course—which we should call by its name: rhetoric—which was legitimized in
Athens despite Socrates and Plato’s quarrel with the Sophists, was rediscovered
in the fourteenth century in imperial and papal courts and in free Italian repub-
lics. It entered into a long conflict with medieval and university Latin, which
held itself to be the legitimate scientific language of scholars, regardless of place
or time, though it was qualified as barbaric by the “humanists” who favored
Ciceronian Latin due to its grammar, word choice, and eloquence capable of
pleasing, moving, and persuading both churchgoing believers and citizens in
state institutions.
Rhetoric provided the free citizens of small republican city-states their uni-
versal frameworks of commercial, political, and legal communication. This ars
rhetorica was more diplomatic than theoretical, the art of arts, rather than a
science, or, even less so, metaphysics. This “art of arts” took hold in Athens and
then Rome, in Greek and Latin (the Greek of Byzantium to the Latin of pagan,
then Christian, Rome). Its centuries-long resilience through antiquity, from
Gorgias to Quintilian, and Hermogenes to Augustine and his Confessions and
De Doctrina Christiana, was followed, after a long eclipse—which was inci-
dentally less intense than the humanists claimed—by a fervent renaissance in
Italy. It peaked in fifteenth-century republican Florence, before being adopted
by the papal Curia returned to Rome from Avignon, where the tone was set
by Petrarch’s Florentine disciples, namely the Neostoic Poggio Bracciolini and
the neo-Epicurean Lorenzo Valla, and also by the princely Aragonese Naples,
whose royal court had the humanist Giovanni Pontano and his “Pontanian”
Academy as its professors.
Pontano is the author of the beautiful nostalgic dialogue De Sermone, writ-
ten during the period in which Naples, the capital of Alfonso of Aragon (also
called the “Magnanimous”), was invaded by feudal troops sent by France’s
Charles VIII (1494). Pontano contrasts the brutal violence of the pillaging, rav-
aging French barbarians with the model of good governance and good manners
set by princes educated by Italian rhetoricians attentive to the great poets of an-
tiquity and appreciative of contemporary artists who mirrored classical styles

and techniques. Charles VIII’s medieval army knew nothing of this humanist
interior, which Francis I, unable to reign in Milan, would decide to transport to
Fontainebleau and the Louvre in 1530.
The circulation and teaching of rhetoric in Italy’s city-states, and later in
its noble courts, occurred in parallel with both the revival of civilized society
and its Greco-Roman models and the material growth of commerce, artisans,
and the wealth of cities. These reawakenings all necessitated dialogue, per-
suasion, conviction, conversion, correspondence, and travel—in short, a vir-
tuosity of discourse capable of influencing an audience through gentle, non-
violent means, through persuasion and conviction and the sole adept power
of the Greek peîthô, rediscovered “persuasive speech.” In the fifth century BC
Athens, the rhetorical system, initially inseparable from the republican system,
had invented an ideal archetype of the orator: a free citizen of the republican
polis, the kalos kagathos, the mousikos anêr (the good and beautiful man, the
musician), trained to cultivate his physical grace and beauty in the palaestra,
and his victorious oral eloquence in schools under the guidance of Sophists,
meaning professors of rhetoric.
That dethroned and forgotten ancestor would reappear suddenly in Cicero’s
Rome, and in that statesman’s long-forgotten manuscripts, as well as those left
by the great educator Quintilian. He was reincarnated in the sixteenth cen-
tury in the Christian and modern guise of Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano
(1528), as depicted in Raphael’s sublime portrait of the author (1514–1515). The
model is warmly dressed in the modern courtly style and not naked in the clas-
sical one; his beauty is entirely interior. The modern courtesan was educated in
private conversation rather than the public eloquence of the rostra and forum.
This new “divine” or “quasi-divine”—read humanus—model of the ideal
citizen of fifth-century Athens found itself celebrated and identified for the
third time (after Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome came sixteenth-century
papal Rome), in this new guise, by poets, sculptors, and painters. But like its
two Greek and Roman predecessors and models, Catholic Rome’s ideal of
humanity, shared by Raphael and Castiglione, an Athenian ideal lost and then
twice rediscovered (the Eternal Return!), did not escape the temptations of
wealth and power to which had ceded, in reality, the young princes of Athens
(Alcibiades) and Rome (Caesar, Anthony, and Pompey in the first century, and
in the sixteenth century, Cesare Borgia, [the inspiration for] Machiavelli’s The
Prince, a harshly critical portrait of the Raphael-esque man of court, published
posthumously in 1532).
On each occasion, new sophists had triumphed over new Socrates in the
324 Afterword
minds of the young men called upon to govern their city-state. Successive ideals
of humanity, and their faithful or deviant incarnations, were nonetheless not all
reproductions of classical models: in The Prince, Machiavelli regretfully notes
that Christianity has rendered the virile virtue of the great statesmen and war-
riors of pagan antiquity impossible. Erasmus, in Institutio principis christiani
(1516), insists on the fortunate, but too often betrayed, difference introduced
by Christian humility between severe pagan magnanimity and gentle Christian
holiness, the wisdom of philosophers and the charity of the apostles.
The “Sublime” According to Longinus: The Long-Hidden

Force of the European Literary Tradition
In Ptolemy’s Alexandria, several centuries after Pericles and Demosthe-
nes, an unknown rhetorician (“Longinus,” or Anonymous) voiced a brilliant
lament for those born in a late, sterile era and recommended the ways in which
they could escape decadence. The impact of his sublime treatise, entitled On
the Sublime, would reverberate throughout the duration of the Roman Em-
pire, influencing Tacitus and his Dialogue on Oratory, and Quintilian and his
Institutio Oratio, before once again gaining prominence, secretly, in fifteenth-
century Italy. It is impossible to trace the original Alexandrine manuscript’s (or
its copy’s) path on the eve of its transfer to Europe, before the fall of Byzantium.
Transported from Byzantium to Venice before 1453, it was saved just in time
from the pillage of libraries in the Turk-invaded Greek capital, just as it had es-
caped the Mamluks’ Alexandria and the fate of that city’s famous Ptolemaic
library by its transfer in due course to Byzantium. Once in Western Europe,
reading the manuscript would long remain a privilege enjoyed by a small circle
of humanists in Venice, Florence, Rome, and possibly Francis I’s Paris. It was
during the twilight of the Italian Renaissance that On the Sublime was finally
published in its original form and in Greek characters (Robortello, Basel, 1554;
Paulus Manutius, Venice, 1555), then in a very partial Latin translation (Leo
Allatius, Rome, 1635), and finally in French translation (Boileau, 1674) in the
waning days of Louis XIV’s reign, when it was used to support the cause of An-
cients humiliated by the Moderns.
Prior to Boileau’s bold initiative, this strange text had been reserved for an
erudite elite within the European Republic of Letters. Beginning in 1572, Mon-
taigne adopted, in vernacular, the essay format, which may well have been in-
spired by the exquisite freedom and elegance of the Longinian chapters dedi-
cated to decadence and the ways to escape it. In an essay in Book III, chapter 5,
“Sur des vers de Virgile” (Upon Some Verses of Virgil), Montaigne borrows
Anonymous’s conception of an enthusiastic auditory reception of sublime cita-
tions, which tear the listener from the corruption of his century and transport
him to a divine milieu in which he can converse with “actualized” masters of
classical sublime poetry and prose. Other hints of the Longinian literary rap-
ture can be seen, preceding Boileau’s candid French translation of the treatise
in 1674, in texts by the novelist Honoré d’Urfé and the playwright Corneille.
After 1674, the mysterious masterpiece would be read and heard in Boileau’s
beautiful French, annotated by the famous Hellenist Dacier, who was invited
to become the permanent secretary of two royal academies (the Académie
Française, dedicated to beautiful language, and the Académie des Inscriptions
et Médailles, dedicated to study of antiquity).
This masterpiece for the happy few would henceforth be heard and read in
French by all of premodern Europe’s successive generations. The baton was
handed, in German, to the great Saxon antiquarian Winckelmann, whose
History of the Art of Antiquity was published in Dresden in 1764 and quickly
translated into the French of the Enlightenment. His historical essays on the
Ancients’ ideal of Beauty clearly incorporate the poignant and “sublime” com-
monplace of political liberty as the mother of the arts, as well as two other
themes articulated by Longinus in a historiographical structure: the modern
servitude and corruption caused by hedonism and avarice, and the recourse of
great souls, in a time of degeneration, to direct contact with the great classics of
antiquity that pull great souls born too late away from the general and contem-
porary current of submission and decline.
Winckelmann writes:
Art, which received its life, as it were, from freedom, must necessarily
decline and fall with the loss of freedom in the place where it had particu-
larly flourished. Athens, under the lenient rule of the Macedonian gov-
ernors [. . .] meanwhile became just as populous as it once was, and from
the 360 bronze statues erected to him within the span of a year [. . .] we
can conclude that most of Athens’s citizens were artists.1
Here the pathos of nostalgia accompanies an awareness of art’s inexorable de-

cline, even if individual heroes can escape that deadly trend by emulating “bea-
cons” from the past that Baudelaire would invoke in turn in a famous “fleur
de mal.”
Foreshadowing the declaration that opens Joyce’s Ulysses (“History is a night-
mare from which I am trying to awake”), Winckelmann declaims in the perora-
tion to his eloquent historical essays:
I have in this history of art already gone beyond its set bounds, and
although contemplating the collapse of art has driven me nearly to
326 Afterword
despair, still, like someone who, in writing the history of his native land,
must touch upon the destruction that he himself has witnessed, I could
not keep myself from gazing after the fate of works of art as far as my eye
could see. Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tear-
ful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, [the
myth that inspired the painting by the bride of Corinth] and believes she
can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover [. . .].2
This typically romantic narrative canvas would reemerge in Chateaubriand’s

Aventures du dernier des Abencérages (The Last of the Abencerrages, 1826), and
in Giuseppe Giocosa’s libretto to Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly
(1904).
At the same time that On the Sublime was written and circulated in Alexan-
dria, Jesus Christ in Palestine was sharing or would soon share his message—“the
way, the truth, and the life”—through speech and martyrdom, which would be
spread by his apostles and the church fathers and borrow philosophical argu-
ments in favor of the Christian faith from Socrates’s pagan disciples, Platonists,
Neoplatonists, and Stoics, to the detriment of the humanism of Greek and Ro-
man rhetoricians. In their dialogues against sophism, Socrates (and his secre-
tary, Plato) repeatedly vilified the corrupted eloquence sold to Athens’s golden
youths by professors of oratory art who called themselves sophists (from sophos,
“wise”) while in reality revealing themselves to be dealers of a false logos that
Socratic criticism intended to unmask. Christianity spread throughout the Ro-
man Mediterranean during an era of decadence that was long predicted and
combated by schools of Greek philosophy. Nothing prevents us from think-
ing that Anonymous may have been a contemporary of that burgeoning Chris-
tianity as it spread beyond Palestine, persuaded by Paul of Tarsus that his voca-
tion was to give new life to both Judaism and Romanized Hellenism. Longinus,
a perceptive admirer of the great Athenian and Roman classics, also looked to
Moses, the “great legislator of the Jews,” who was also capable of sublimity when
it came to having the biblical God speak as was fitting.
Four centuries after Pericles, that glorious reference attests to the degree of
Hellenization achieved by Alexandrine Judaism at the time of Philo, who was
said to be “of Alexandria.” The unknown author of the treatise On the Sublime
was an unrivaled literary critic, capable of sharing with his readers the intelli-
gence of sublime works in a text that itself can be qualified as sublime.
This genius was undoubtedly a Hellenized Jew as, among the quotations
from earlier eras used to illustrate his conception of the “sublime,” he brilliantly
highlights (a unique case in all of Greco-Roman literature) the Greek transla-
tion (reportedly from the Septuagint) of the first verse of the Hebrew Genesis:
Fiat lux et facta est lux. This marks the first appearance of the long list of the
Old Testament’s grandiose theophanies, from the Creation of the world to the
Fall of the Temple. The miracles of the Christian New Testament are not any
less numerous than those of the Jewish Bible. But Christ, and his apostles and
evangelists, achieved their miracles on a scale that was more human, modest,
and ordinary, less spectacular, and almost furtive, than the blinding biblical
acts multiplying God’s sublime interventions on the cosmic scale. The evan-
gelical miracles, the wedding at Cana, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the rest
dispensed with the supernatural cosmos evoked by the grandiose utterances by
the God of Israel, a hidden God, whose presence and voice remained invisible
behind a barrier of fire or clouds that prevented all direct and fatal exposure of
the human to the divine. The cosmic backdrop of the Passion and the Resurrec-
tion, though the most biblical of the evangelical theophanies, did not go so far
as to hide the visibility of the awe-inspiring but not terrifying Jesus, in contrast
to the burning bush of Sinai.
The treatise On the Sublime was conceived of and written by its author to
convince his Greek or Hellenized readers, who shared his sophistication, not
to make the mistake, wrongly taught them by Caecilius in a short, at that time
recently published, treatise, of believing that one of the three styles of formal
rhetoric, the grand style, was another name for the sublime, or sublimity. From
the start, Anonymous asserts what distinguishes the formal oratory grand style,
which persuades its listeners, but not to the point of taking away their freedom
to judge it, from authentic sublimity, which, in contrast,
eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is

usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and
irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no.3
Moses, “the Legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man” (writes Anonymous),

recounted the original performative act (when saying equals doing) through
which divine speech and action blended in the same moment of creation. That
biblical rhetorical device appears as frequently in evangelical speech and its de-
scriptions of miracles as it does in the Hebrew Bible. Except that in Jewish Holy
Writ, the hierophany of the speech-act is grandiose (the Flood, the crossing of
the Red Sea, and so on) and more extraordinary and more dizzying than the
Christian miracles performed by the Son of God or associated with him: the
Annunciation, “Rise and walk,” and “This is my body”—all “performative” acts,
which successfully superimpose “saying” and “doing” without shrouding these
miracles in sacred terror. And isn’t the “sublime poet,” when he transcends the
rules of his art and makes his poem heard, a mirror of biblical or evangelical
divinity when it emerges from silence and acts by speaking?
328 Afterword
The sublime orator’s paradoxical desire to associate the rarest gifts of nature
with the greatest subtleties of the art of discourse led Anonymous to align an
appetizing exordium (the quarrel with the rhetorician Caecilius on the defini-
tion of the sublime) with a peroration that offers the reader the perspectives of
a holy history of literature, alternating fertile earlier periods with sterile, con-
clusive, and recapitulative later periods. The rare great souls to emerge in those
dark times freely subjected themselves to higher learning, whose spiritual liter-
ary exercises protected them from the contagion of mediocrity and vulgarity.
These elevated souls alone knew how to preserve links, transmission, tradition,
which the torrent of their contemporary, and once again fanatical, era sought
to break and scatter. Rediscovered profound heuristic “commonplaces,” inter-
preted by newcomers, revealed their still-hidden resources. [For the anonymous
Alexandrine], it was not a question of applying a formal and dogmatic method
intended to instruct, but of adopting the adult method of investigation and dis-
covery. Two short chapters suffice to negatively contrast the conventional and
cold perfection of beauty and grandeur with the imperfection of a sublimity
that elicits enthusiastic attention and makes the pedant forget his target and the
purist any errors. Longinus writes:
when a passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is hard, nay impossible,

to distract the attention from it, and when it takes a strong and lasting
hold on the memory, then we may be sure that we have lighted on the
true Sublime.4
Another heuristic and fertile “commonplace,” which rejects the didactic

cliché of the good pupil, is the positive view of the mind’s natural elevation as
manifested beginning in childhood, a gift from heaven that should be fostered
and increased continually, to the point of reveling, even through silence or im-
provised remarks, in grand and sound thoughts. Among the many bold essays
written for those great souls reverberating in the sublimity of their discourse,
the most extensive are dedicated to the commonplace of imitation, which is the
most equivocal and most prone to error. Notably because it encompasses both
servile, formal, and regurgitative copying and inventive and bold emulation
that rivals the best examples of antiquity. Longinus warns his readers to guard
against passive copy-imitation of the classics and to avoid confusing that act
with active emulation before the most difficult of judges—past masters.
Behind these penetrating remarks is the broader question guiding the anony-
mous Alexandrian literary critic, and subtly underlying his search for a clear
definition and explanation of sublimity: the “why” of our powerlessness be-
fore the sublime, evident among all modern orators and writers, in other words
Anonymous’s contemporaries. One explanation offered in the treatise is his-

torical and political, similar to the explanation, in the biographical vein, of the
difference between The Iliad, a sublime, entirely actualized poem by the young
inventor Homer in the prime fertility of his visionary genius, and The Odyssey,
a later work filled with imaginative narrations by an older, yet still brilliant, poet
facing death and tempted by diversion and amusement. This compelling analy-
sis prefigures the famous article by the philosopher and musical critic Adorno,
“Late Style in Beethoven,” by two thousand years.5
However, the anonymous Alexandrian does not limit himself to the personal
dimension of an artistic genius confronted with the physical and mental decline
of aging. He emphasizes that the flowering of unparalleled oratory and poetic
genius owes much to the freedom of Greek democracies, lingering in particular
on the tempestuous sublimity of the political speeches given by Demosthenes,
pleading to his compatriots in vain for a mass uprising of the city to defend it
against the menacing maneuvers of Philip of Macedonia, who was attempting
to seize and enslave their free homeland. The monarchic regimes of Alexander’s
lieutenants and the global expansion of the Roman Empire triumphed over the
free democratic city-states of classical Greece. The freedom of the agora was
replaced by the lawful servitude of court, in which reigned an emphasis on the
flattering grand style that prevented all possibility of true sublimity. Was it pos-
sible to leave this restricted and demeaning life? To escape such a confinement
of the mind? How? Longinus answers: by going back to the greatest eras, and
looking to the testimonials of sublimity, freed from the bonds of time, that they
left us; and by relying on those masterpieces that are in part divine, and better
understood, to escape the modern sterility of monarchies that are lazier, more
sensual, and more extravagant than republics. Boileau did not hesitate to faith-
fully translate the arrogant peroration of the Alexandrian treatise, a sublime
touch that, in the seventeenth century, had lost none of its dangerously revolu-
tionary reach. Anonymous writes:
“Can it be [. . .] that we are to accept the trite explanation that democracy

is the kind nursing-mother of genius, and that literary power may be said
to share its rise and fall with democracy and democracy alone?” For free-
dom, it is said, has power to feed the imaginations of the lofty-minded
and inspire hope, and where it prevails there spreads abroad the eagerness
of mutual rivalry and the emulous pursuit of the foremost place. More-
over, owing to the prizes which are open to all under popular govern-
ment, the mental excellences of the orator are continually exercised and
sharpened, and as it were rubbed bright, and shine forth (as it is natural
they should) with all the freedom which inspires the doings of the state.
330 Afterword
Nor did Boileau hesitate to translate the following paragraph:
“We seem in our boyhood to learn the lessons of a righteous servi-

tude, being all but enswathed in its customs and observances, when our
thoughts are yet young and tender, and never tasting the fairest and most
productive source of eloquence (by which,” he added, “I mean freedom),
so that we emerge in no other guise than that of sublime flatterers.” This is
the reason, he maintained, why no slave ever becomes an orator, although
all other faculties may belong to menials. In the slave there immediately
burst out signs of fettered liberty of speech, of the dungeon as it were, of
a man habituated to buffetings. “For the day of slavery,” as Homer has it,
“takes away half our manhood.”6
To escape imprisonment and protect, as much as is possible, the virtue

threatened by the monarchical decadence of later eras, the principal recourse
is combat:
And in truth that struggle for the crown of glory is noble and best deserves
the victory in which even to be worsted by one’s predecessors brings no
discredit.7
Longinus continues:
Accordingly it is well that we ourselves also, when elaborating anything

which requires lofty expression and elevated conception, should shape
some idea in our minds as to how perchance Homer would have said this
very thing, or how it would have been raised to the sublime by Plato or
Demosthenes or by the historian Thucydides. For those personages, pre-
senting themselves to us and inflaming our ardour and as it were illumin-
ing our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high stan-
dards of sublimity which are imaged within us. Still more effectual will it
be to suggest this question to our thoughts, “What sort of hearing would
Homer, had he been present, or Demosthenes have given to this or that
when said by me, or how would they have been affected by the other?”
For the ordeal is indeed a severe one, if we presuppose such a tribunal
and theatre for our own utterances, and imagine that we are undergoing
a scrutiny of our writings before these great heroes, acting as judges and
witnesses. A greater incentive still will be supplied if you add the ques-
tion, “In what spirit will each succeeding age listen to me who have writ-
ten thus?” But if one shrinks from the very thought of uttering aught that
may transcend the term of his own life and time, the conceptions of his
mind must necessarily be incomplete, blind, and as it were untimely
born, since they are by no means brought to the perfection needed to

ensure a futurity of fame.8
By rising, as Anonymous did, to the level of the universally admired master-

pieces produced during great eras of freedom, by imitating them (not in
the sense of passively “copying” them, but rather by bravely “rivaling” grand
models), the treatise may appear inspired by Platonic idealism. In fact, Aristotle
was not far off when he stated that a being in potentiality cannot pass to actuality
without the exemplary influence of an already actualized being.
Of course, genius and sublimity in their original state had disappeared
along with republican political freedom. But great souls, born too late, still
had the possibility of isolating themselves from their own diminished era (de-
prived of “liberty and that freedom from despotic mastery,”9 writes Longinus)
and of living, writing, and working in symbiosis with the unanimously recog-
nized masterpieces of golden eras. “The artifices of rhetoric (in the reprehen-
sible sophistic sense) fade from view,” writes Anonymous, “when bathed in the
pervading splendour of sublimity.”10 He adds, “Sublimity is the echo of a great
soul.”11
The same philosophy of history resurfaced a little later in Latin in A Dialogue
on Oratory, today attributed to Tacitus. To escape the literary and moral corrup-
tion of the imperial court, advises the author, one has to retreat into nature and
abandon oneself, for lack of opportunities for great Demosthenian and Cicero-
nian eloquence, to the tradition of grand poetry introduced by Virgil. In Institu-
tio Oratoria, the great educational treatise written under Domitian (AD 93–95)
by Quintilian (long believed to have penned A Dialogue on Oratory), minds are
trained to escape the corruption of their late eras through the study and imita-
tion of Greek and Latin classics in childhood and adolescence. The artful pro-
ductions of the imperial court were to Roman virtue what Homer’s old age was
to the peak of his genius.
After a very long silence, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the anti-
quarian and Grecianizing milieu of the Roman Academy resolved to emerge
from the medieval “shadows” and use rediscovered antiquity to bring an urban
civilization “back to life,” along with a climate of spiritual freedom favorable to
genius and sublimity.
For that matter, it is difficult not to assume, when viewing Michelangelo’s
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508–1512) and notably his sublime frescoes The
Creation of the World and The Incarnation of Adam, that the painter or one of
his friends had read On the Sublime, which praised the performative Genesis
verse Fiat lux as “sublime.”
This then is the birthplace of antiquarianism, a science that appears so
332 Afterword
strange to us today, but whose vast research and collection network spread
across Europe for three centuries. The objective of this Republic of Letters, at
least among its greatest citizens—Pirro Ligorio, Fulvio Testi, Nicolas Peiresc,
Cassiano dal Pozzo, Scipione Maffei, Anne de Caylus, Quatremère de Quincy,
all unknown today—is the same that Longinus, in his treatise, established for
those great minds isolated and born too late in a withering era: the rediscovery,
reconstitution, and imitation of works, even broken or partial, the most glori-
ous and the most modest alike, that emerged from the genius of Greco-Roman
antiquity.
A community of great minds discreetly proclaimed itself to be the Republic
of Letters within the Europe of the ancien régime monarchies. This vast net-
work of erudite philologists, archaeologists, and coin and medal collectors func-
tioned as a warm incubator that, while reviving the ancient world, and imitating
it in the sense used by Longinus (in other words, by reinventing it), maintained
the temperature of research and the margin of philosophical freedom desir-
able for the birth of the modern world. The secret of the Republic of Letters
can be found in Longinus’s anonymous treatise, which teaches its readers not
to become prisoners of either their late and sterile times or of fertile antiquity,
despite the greatness of its original inventions and productions that need to be
reinvented.
Known almost clandestinely by fifteenth-century savants, the text On the
Sublime (whose original Greek meant it was limited to an antiquarian elite)
was published at close intervals in 1554 and 1555, still in Greek, which did little
to broaden its audience. Its readership would grow, however, once complete
and partial Latin translations of the treatise emerged at the end of the sixteenth
century and throughout the seventeenth century, notably in Rome, thanks to
a translation by the great philologist of Greek origin, Leo Allatius, entitled De
Erroribus magnorum virorum in dicendo (Faults of Great Men in Their Writ-
ings, 1635). There is no doubt that in the library of Cassiano dal Pozza, a good
friend of Allatius, Nicolas Poussin read and contemplated this “critique of
beauty” applied by Longinus to the masterpieces whose renown had survived
intact from eras of genius to eras of decadence. On the Sublime was written for
great thinkers born at the wrong time, whose salvation came from emulating
masterpieces of grand and fertile eras. This pushback against decadence can be
seen in the antiquity-inspired megalographic images Michelangelo painted on
the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as well as in the creation of Catholic master-
pieces by Rubens, an antiquarian savant and Peiresc’s friend and correspondent,
and finally in the historical tableaus and heroic landscapes painted in adulthood
and old age by Poussin, a friend and correspondent of several great antiquaries,
including Cassiano, Cardinal Massii, Fréart de Chambray, and Gian Pietro Bel-
lori. We can see the outlines of a Republic of Arts forming around these great
masters and vanquishers of their decadent times, which, while seeking to re-
invent the splendor of disappeared or ruined classical arts, also invented the
modern arts, from David to Delacroix.
NOTES
Preface
1. Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, Johannes Fredericus Gronovius, pèlerin de
la République des Lettres. Recherches sur le voyage savant au XVII e siècle (Geneva:
Droz, 1984).
2. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About
Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe:
Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000); Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et lumières au
XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Laurence W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlight-
enment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
Chapter 1. The Rediscovered Republic of Letters

This is a modified version of a lecture given on May 17, 1996, at the Instituto Ita-
liano per gli Studi Filosofici of Naples, with the support of the Lessico Intellet-
tuale Europeo, in the context of an international conference held in memory of
Paul Dibon in Naples on May 17–18, 1996. It appeared under the title “La Répu-
blique des Lettres redécouverte, II,” in Marta Fattori (ed.), Il Vocabolario della
“République des Lettres.” Terminologia filosofica e storia della filosofia: Problemi
di metodo (Florence: Olschki, 1997).
1. For Paul Dibon’s publications, see “Bibliographie des écrits de Paul Dibon,”
Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1995): 111–120. Pay particular attention to
Paul Dibon’s Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’or (Naples: Vivarium, 1990), a com-
pilation of many of his various works.
2. Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715, vol. 3 (Paris: Boi-
vin, 1935). Jean Mesnard places this book in perspective in “La crise de la conscience
Européenne: un demi-siècle après Paul Hazard,” in Louise Godard de Donville and
Roger Duchêne (eds.), De la mort de Colbert à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes: Un
monde nouveau?, notes from the 14th CMR 17 conference, January 1984 (Marseille:
Centre méridional de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle, 1985), 185–198.
3. René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit en France dans la première moitié du XVII e
siècle [1943, vol. 2], expanded ed. (Paris: Boivin, 1983); see also issue 127 of the jour-
nal XVIIe siècle (April–June 1980), dedicated to “Aspects et contours du libertinage,”
with articles by Georges Couton, René Pintard, Pierre Rétat, Bernard Tocanne, and
Roger Zuber.
335
336 Notes to Pages 14–19
4. See chapters 4, 5, and 6 on epistolary networks during the seventeenth century;

see also Giuliano Ferretti’s thesis “Fortin de La Hoguette ou le vertige de la politique.
Lettres aux frères dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662)” (Lausanne, 1996).
5. Paul Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica litteraria of the 17th Century,”
Respublica litterarum. Studies in the Classical Tradition 1 (1978): 43–55; also found
in Dibon’s Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’or, 153–190.
6. Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des Lettres (Geneva:
Droz, 1938).
7. See Fritz Schalk’s pioneering study “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria,”
in Actes du Congrès Érasme, Rotterdam, 27–29 octobre 1969 (Amsterdam: North-
Holland, 1971), 14–28.
8. This endeavor was magnificently recounted at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury and in the first third of the twentieth century by Remigio Sabbadini (1850–1934),
throughout his many texts on the history of philology.
9. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV ad
annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743), 1–8. (A letter sent by
Barbaro in Venice to Poggio Bracciolini in Constance dated July 6, 1417.)
10. Ibid., 5.
11. Angeli Decembrii mediolanensis ad summum Pontificem Pium II oratorem cla-
rum de politia litteraria primi libri prologus, Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augsburg], Janu-
ary 12, 1540, folio A 1.
12. See a compilation of relevant texts in Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio edi-
tore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Poli-
filo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI,” (Milan, 1975), as well as Martin Lowry, The
World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1979).
13. Aldus Manutius, Scriptores astronomici veteres [Astronomica], dedication
(Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499), 23: Ut et ex eadem Britannia, unde olim barbariae
et indoctae litterae ad nos profectae italiam occuparunt et adhuc arces tenent, latine
et docte loquentes bonas artes accipiamus, ac Britannis adjutoribus, fugata barbarie,
arces nostras recipiamus, et eadem hasta sanetur, a qua illatum est, vulnus (So that in
this Great-Britain, from whence barbarism and ignorance came to invade Italy, where
they still reign, we the others, who speak scholarly Latin, will borrow true culture and,
chasing away barbarism with the help of these same Bretons, take back our citadels,
healing the wound with the lance that caused it). [Reference: mythologists and poets
claim that Telephus, after being hurt by Achilles, can only heal his wound with a wrap-
ping made of rust from the spear that injured him.]
14. Quoted in Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore, 1, 63.
15. Ibid., 69.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 70.
18. Ibid., 71: Nec minor gloria servata tibi, beatissime pater, instaurandis bonis
Notes to Pages 20–21 337
literis, suppeditando optime quosque libros studiosis, et qui nunc sunt, et qui post aliis
erunt in annis, propagandis bonis artibus et disciplinis. (An equal glory is reserved for
you, oh, Holy Father, for having restored the belles-lettres, obtained all the best books
for the savants of today and those who will be born after, for the defense of the sci-
ences and the arts.)
19. Verum posteaquam Leonis Pontificis modis omnibus maximi laetissimis auspi-
ciis pax tandem est orbi reddita [. . .] jam non solum meae litterae Romam ire gestiunt,
verum ipse quoque mira quadam ardeo cupiditate revisendi veteres illos meos Mae-
cenates. (But since peace was brought back to the world under the auspices of Leo,
the greatest of popes in every respect [. . .], my letters are not alone in burning to visit
Rome: I myself am gripped with a marvelous desire to see my Patrons again.) Note
that at the end of this letter Erasmus bravely intercedes on behalf of Johann Reuchlin,
a scholar of Greek and Hebrew (Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami,
ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols., vol. 2: 1514–1517 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910], 68–73
[May 15, 1515, letter to cardinal Raphael Riario]).
20. Ibid., 466. February 15, 1517 letter to Guillaume Budé. Erasmus thinks that
Budé wants to prove his talent “before the assembly of men of learning.”
21. Ibid., 148. “You run the risk of being condemned [. . .] on the judgment of the
council of savants” (letter dated April 12, 1518).
22. Ibid., 239. Budé told Erasmus that the honors recently awarded him went in
fact to “the family and the nation of humanists”—nationi in universum litterarum bo-
narum studia colentium (letter from early 1523).
23. In a superscription in a letter to Erasmus, Hubert Balland designates his ad-
dressee as summus theologicus et reipublicae litterariae antistes (Erasmus, Opus epi-
stolarum, vol. 7, 1527–1528 [1928], 546 [letter dated December 30, 1528]).
24. For more on this “major diplomatic incident in the Republic of Letters,” see
Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, “Un érasmien français: Germain de brie,” in Col-
loquia Erasmiana Turonensia, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1972), 371.
25. For more on this subject, see Yvonne Charlier, Érasme et l’amitié, d’après sa cor-
respondance (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977).
26. Antipolemus: Or, the Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity, against War.
A fragment, translated from Erasmus (London: C. Dilly, 1794).
27. See The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 842 to 992, 1518–1519, trans.
R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, annot. Peter G. Bietenholz. (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1982), 232 (letter dated February 1, 1519).
28. Countless formulas of this type can be found in Erasmus’s correspondence,
whether his correspondents designate him in this way or he designates his friends as
such. For example, Erasmus calls Guillaume Budé “the marvel of France and the pon-
tiff of letters” at the close of a letter dated July 14, 2015. (La Correspondance d’Érasme
et de Guillaume Budé, ed. M.-M. de La Garanderie [Paris: Vrin, 1967], 71.)
29. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, bk. 1 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991), 21: Eius autem vinculum est ratio et oratio, quae do-
cendo, discendo, communicando, disceptando, judicando conciliat inter se homines

conjungitque naturali quadam societate. Neque ulla re longius absumus a natura
ferarum. . . . (For its bonding consists of reason and speech, which reconcile men
to one another, through teaching, learning, communicating, debating and making
judgements, and unite them in a kind of natural fellowship. It is this that most dis-
tances us from the nature of other animals.)
30. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, vol. 6 (1926), 37.
31. Juan Luis Vivès, De tradendis disciplinis seu de institutione christiana, referred
to in Opera omnia, ed. Mayans y Siscár G., vol. 8 (Valencia: Monfort, 1782–1788),
bk. 6, 1785; repr. (London: Gregg Press, 1964), 279: “The true academy, in other words
the meeting and plebiscite of men both learned and good.”
32. Juan Luis Vivès, In Pseudodialecticos, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1979), 88.
33. See Percy Gothein, Francesco Barbaro. Früh-humanismus und Staatskunst in
venedig (Berlin: Die Runde, 1932).
34. See André Stegmann, “L’europe intellectuelle de J. A. de Thou,” in La Con-
science européenne au XV e et au XVIe siècle, proceedings from the international con-
ference organized at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, Sept. 30–Oct. 3,
1980 (Paris: ENSJF, 1982), 395–422.
35. Trajano Boccalini, De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso (Milan: Giovanni Battista Bidelli,
1614–1615).
36. Trajano Boccalini, Pietra del paragone politico, tratta dal monte Parnaso, dove si
toccano i governi delle maggiori monarchie del universe (Cosmopoli [Venice]: Giorgio
Teler, 1615.)
37. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1st ed., vol. 2, entry “Catius,”
remark D, “the freedom that reigns in the republic of letters” (Rotterdam: Reinier
Leers, 1697).
38. Vigneul-Marville (the literary pseudonym of Noël de Bonaventure d’Argonne),
Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature, vol. 3 (Paris: Besoigne; Rouen: Maurry, 1699–
1701).
39. Adrien Baillet, Jugements des savants sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs,
vol. 3 (Paris: Dezallier, 1685–1686).
40. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor litterarius, philosophicus et practicus, vol. 3
(Lübeck, Germany, 1732). This work was written long before its publication date. The
first edition dates to 1707.
41. For a summary of these texts, see P. Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica
litteraria of the 17th Century.”
42. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biog-
raphy by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming, 21 vols.,
vol. 12 (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901).
43. For use of the expression “Republic of Letters” by intellectuals of the French
Revolution, see Jean-Claude Bonnet (ed.), La Carmagnole des Muses. L’homme de
lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), in particular Marcel
Dorigny, “Le Cercle social ou les écrivains au cirque,” 49–66.
44. Christian Löber, Dissertatio politica de forma regiminis reipublicae litterariae
(Jena, Germany: Literis Wertherianis, 1696); Johann Georg Prit (Pritius), Dissertatio
academica de republica litteraria (Leipzig: Gözianis, 1698).
45. Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, bk. 2, chap. 3 (1623).
46. Prit, Dissertatio academica, chap. 7, “Quid sit respublica litteraria?,” and chap.
12, “Caput non agnoscit.”
47. Ibid., chap. 15, 20–21. Prit is referring to Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, bk. 2,
chap. 5, § 18 (1680).
48. See ibid., chap. 16, “Non tamen illimitata” (But not for all that unlimited), 24,
where Prit reproaches, Tractatus: quo ostendere conatur, in libera republica unicuique
et sentire, quae, velit, et quae sentiat dicere licere, hanc libertatem aequo latius exten-
derit, viderint, quibus spinosiana mens crassis impietatibus immersa, paulo magis est
perspecta. (Did [this treaty] wherein they attempt to show that each is permitted, in a
free republic, to think what he wants and say what he thinks, push this freedom more
than was right? Thus would say those who better know the Spinozian soul contami-
nated by the worst impieties.)
49. Samuel Sorbière, De l’amitié. À M. de vaubrun, comte de Nogent (Paris:
Estienne Loyson, 1660).
Chapter 2. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc

This is a modified version of a text read at the Erasmus House, in Brussels, on
June 3, 1992, which reappeared under this title in Rivista di Letterature moderne
e comparate, vol. 48, no. 1 (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996). The Erasmus House, built
in 1468, expanded in 1515, belonged to the Anderlecht commune. Members of the
community and their guests resided there, the most famous of whom was Erasmus,
who lived there in 1521.
1. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Rotterdam:
M. Bohm, 1720), 2216–2217 (corrected by the author).
2. Ibid., 2217 (remark A, Balzac to Luillier; remark D, Balzac to Chapelain). This
La Rochefoucauld is not the author of Maximes, but the prelate and statesman (1558–
1645). He was named Great Almoner of France in 1618. A very pious man, he dedi-
cated himself, with Richelieu, to reforming the country’s monastic orders.
3. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, Senatoris Aqui-
sextiensis, vita (Paris: Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1641). The first edition of this work was
published in Paris in 1641, by Cramoisy (in quarto, 405 pp.). Two other editions fol-
lowed in The Hague (A. Vlacq., 1651, 2 pts. in one vol., in duodecimo; ibid., 1655, in
quarto). A fourth edition appeared in 1708 in Quedlinburg (3 pts. in 2 vols., in octavo,
Strunzii).
4. Charles Perrault, Characters Historical and Panegyrical of the Greatest Men
That Have Appear’d in France during the Last Century, trans. J. Ozell (London:
Bernard Lintott, 1704), 105–108.
5. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage

(1620–1637), ed. A. Bresson (Florence: Olschki, 1992).
6. In a Latin elegy in the memory of Pierre Dupuy, composed by Gabriel Naudé
and dedicated to Gilles Ménage, the author cites, on two occasions, Pinelli and
Peiresc, with whom he associates and whose merits he compares to those of Pierre
Dupuy. See Gabriel Naudé, In clarissimi viri . . . Petri Puteani obitum Gabrielis Nau-
daei Elegia ad Aegidium Menagium (Paris: Cramoisy, 1651), in quarto, in particular
pp. 4–5. See also chaps. 4 and 5 of this book.
7. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, trans.
P. Desmaizeaux, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (London: Knapton, 1734), 804–806.
8. Jean-Baptiste Requier, Vie de Nicolas Claude Peiresc, conseiller au Parlement de
Provence, où l’on trouve quantité de choses curieuses, concernant la physique, l’histoire
et l’antiquité (Paris: Musier Père, 1770), in duodecimo.
9. The Pro-Peyresq Association, presided over by the dearly departed Mrs. Smets-
Hennekinne, who was behind this translation, deserves deep gratitude for its efforts.
10. Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1535–1657, trans.
Alexander Dalzell, annot. Charles G. Nauert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1994), 74–75.
11. Aloïs Gerlo and Paul Foriers. eds., La Correspondance d’Érasme. Traduction in-
tégrale, vol. 12 (Brussels: Presses académiques européennes, 1967–1984); vol. 6: 1525–
1527 (1977), 520 (Louvain [Leuven, Belgium], December 10, 1526).
12. Gustave Cohen, “Le plus grand philologue du XVIe siècle: Joseph Juste Scaliger
(1593–1609),” in Cohen, Écrivains français en Hollande dans la première moitié du
XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1920; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1921), 187–217.
13. Cohen, “Le plus grand philologue du XVIIe siècle: Claude Saumaise (1632–
1653),” in ibid., 311–333.
14. Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage, 201.
15. Ibid., 201, n. 5.
16. Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility, Being the Life of Pei-
resk, trans. W. Rand (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2003), 28.
17. Paolo Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, patricii genuensis, in qua studiosis
bonarum artium proponitur typus viri probi et eruditi (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augs-
burg]: Mangus, 1607), in quarto.
18. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M.
Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 704.
19. Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 43–44.
20. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 273–274.
21. Ibid., 45.
22. Ibid., 45, and Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 108: Aetas sane nostra si
quem feret eiusmodi, is (ita me Deus amet) non alius erit a Nicolao Fabricio Gallo
Aquis Sextilis clarissimo adolescente, qui Romae et Patavii vixdum plenam pubertatem
egressus, ea ardore Pinellum et Pinelli studia est com- plexus, ut omnibus nobis, et doc-
tis viris quotquot his capiuntur litteris, miraculo sit. (If our era produces someone of
this value, it can only be (God willing) Nicolas Fabri, citizen of Aix-en-Provence, a
brilliant young man who, in Rome and Padua, barely out of puberty, attached himself
to Pinelli and his works with such zeal that he dazzled us all and all those who love
good letters.)
23. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 46.
24. Ibid., 291–292.
25. Ibid., 243.
26. Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, contenant la théorie et la pratique de
la musique où il est traité de la nature des sons, et des mouvemens, des consonances,
des dissonances, des genres, des modes, de la composition, de la voix, des chants, et de
toutes sortes d’instrumens harmoniques (Paris: Cramoisy, 1636), in folio. The second
part has a different publisher and date (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1637). The dedication to
Peiresc appears in the second volume of Traitez des consonances, des dissonances, des
genres, des modes, et de la composition (folios 2–4).
27. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 265.
Chapter 3. Conceptions of Europe in the Seventeenth Century

A modified version of this essay appeared under the title “Penser l’Europe au XVIIe
siècle. John Barclay, un prédécesseur de Keyserling” in Commentaire 72 (Winter
1995–1996).
1. Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson (Mineola, NY: Dover
Thrift Editions, 2003), 35.
2. Cited by Alphonse Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” in Michel François (ed.),
La France et les Français (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 1140.
3. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, Vol. I: History and Environment, trans.
by Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 23.
4. Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
5. Hermann von Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas (Heidelberg: N. Kampmann,
1928).
6. Louis Van Delft, “Le caractère des nations,” in Littérature et anthropologie. Na-
ture humaine et caractère à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1993), 87–104.
7. John Barclay, The Mirror of Minds: Or, Icon Animorum, trans. Thomas May
(London: Print. by I. B. for Thomas Walkley, 1633; Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2013), 31–32.
8. Ibid., 40.
9. Ibid., 43.
10. Ibid., 55.
11. Ibid., 59.
12. Ibid., 69.
13. Ibid., 79.

14. Barclay, The Mirror of Minds, 173.
15. Ibid., 219–229.
16. Ibid., 237–251.
17. Ibid., 259.
Chapter 4. Rhetoric and Society in Europe

This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhetoric and Society in
Europe (Sixteenth–Seventeenth Centuries),” lecture 1, 1987–1988, published
under the title “Rhétorique et société en Europe” in L’Annuaire du Collège de
France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 88.
1. For a more detailed look at the approaches adopted by Paul Hazard and René
Pintard, see chap. 1.
2. Wilhelm Kühlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat: Entwicklung und Kri-
tik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1982).
3. Emilio Bonfatti, La “civil conversazione” in Germania. Letteratura del compor-
tamento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Knigge, 1574–1788 (Udine, Italy: Del Bianco,
1979).
4. Following the conference for which this essay was originally written, Françoise
Waquet and Hans Bots published a useful guide: La République des Lettres, “Europe
& Histoire” (Paris: Belin; Brussels: De Boek, 1997).
5. Fritz Schalk, “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria,” in Actes du Congrès
Érasme, Rotterdam, 27–29 octobre 1969 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971), 14–28.
6. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Elizabeth S. Hal-
dane and G. R. T. Ross (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 42.
7. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV
ad annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743), 39; Phyllis Walter
Goodhart Gordan, ed., Two Renaissance Book Hunters. The Letters of Poggio Brac-
ciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 199. The
philologist Claudio Griggio has since published Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario, ii, La
raccolta canonica delle “Epistole” (Florence: Olschki, 1999).
8. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrick-
son Publishers, 2009), vol. 2, 21, and vol. 19, 21–26.
9. Carlo Dionisotti, “Chierici e laici,” in Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della lettera-
tura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 63–67.
10. Coluccio Salutati uses the expressions studia litterarum, studia humanitatis
(studies of letters, studies of humanities) in his correspondence to refer to what we call
“humanism.” A bland humanitarian doctrine was therefore constructed out of what
was, in its essence, an educational program, for lack of the slightest idea or desire of
what a Bildung could be.
11. Translation cited from James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in
the Middle Ages (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 143.
12. Seneca, On Leisure, trans. Timothy Chandler, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique
23 (2012): 218 (Monash University).
13. L’Amour des lettres et le Désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du
Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Édition du Cerf, 1957). See also Dom Jean Leclercq, Otia
monastica. Études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au Moyen Âge (Rome:
Herder, 1963; 3rd ed. Paris, 1990).
14. Ernest H. Wilkins, “The Ecclesiastical Career of Petrarch,” Speculum, 28, no. 4
(1953): 754–775.
15. Rabanus Maurus was able to speak of otium legendi et scribendi, “leisure dedi-
cated to reading and writing.”
16. Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, I–VIII, trans. Aldo S. Ber-
nardo (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 295.
17. Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence:
Le Monnier, 1968); Cecil Grayson, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Beginnings of Ital-
ian Grammar,” Proceedings of the British Academy 49 (1963): 291–311; Mirko Tavoni,
Latino, grammatica, volgare. Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua: Antenore,
1984).
18. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Re-
naissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio edi-
tore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo,
“Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI” (Milan, 1975).
19. See chap. 1.
20. Margaret Mann Philips, Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the
‘Adages’ of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 28.
Chapter 5. The Emergence of the Academies

This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “The Republic of Letters,”
lecture 2, 1988–1989, published under the title “L’émergence des Académies” in
L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 89.
1. Virgil, Géorgiques, bk. 3, 291–292.
2. Petrarch, Lettres de la vieillesse (Rerum senilium) (April 28, 1373, letter to Boc-
caccio), ed. E. Nota, trans. J.-Y. Briand and P. Laurens, in Classiques de l’humanisme,
series, 17, 2, 27 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013), 154–155.
Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), bk. 3, chap. 8.
4. Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to
an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1963).
5. Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Arthur West Had-
dan, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Lit-
erature Publishing, 1887), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www
.newadvent.org/fathers/1301.htm.
6. Saint Paul, Letter to the Philippiens, 3:20–21.
7. Guy Patin, L’Esprit de Guy Patin, tiré de ses conversations, de son cabinet, de ses
lettres et de ses autres ouvrages, avec son portrait historique (Amsterdam: Schelten,
1709), 35, 69.
8. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1966.)
9. See folios 23 and following of the 1540 edition (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augs-
burg], Henricus Steinerus).
10. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno alle Scienze
e le Arti (Venice: Pavino, 1708), 106.
11. See folio 130 verso ff.
12. See folios 103–107.
13. See laici in chap. 4.
14. See André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’Art (Geneva: Droz, 1954).
15. Vigneul-Marville, Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature, vol. 2, 60.
Chapter 6. Conversation and Conversation Societies

This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhétorique et société en
Europe (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” lecture 3, 1989–1990, published under that title in
L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 90.
1. John Barclay, The Mirror of Minds: Or, Icon Animorum, trans. Thomas May
(London: Print. by I. B. for Thomas Walkley, 1633; Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2013).
2. Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth- Century France
(1620–1680) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932). See also Roger Hahn,
The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution. The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971).
3. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Richard Kennington (n.p.:
SMK Books, 2009), 2.
4. Stefano Guazzo, La Civile Conversazione (Brescia, Italy, 1574).
5. Nicolas Rigault, Vita Petri Puteani (Paris: Cramoisy, 1652).
6. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc (Paris, 1641).
7. Strabon, Geographica, bk. 67, chap. 1.
8. Henri L. Brugmans, “Le Séjour de Christian Huygens à Paris et ses relations avec
les milieux scientifiques français, suivi de son Journal de voyage à Paris et à Londres,”
doctoral thesis presented to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris (Paris:
Droz, 1935).
9. See Hahn’s important study, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution.
10. See chap. 5, n. 7.
11. See Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
Chapter 7. Savant Conversation

This text was used for a series of lectures given during conferences held in Paris
in 1992 and Nimègue in 1993 and was published under the title “La conversa-
tion savante” in Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet (eds.), Commercium litterarium,
1600–1750. La communication dans la République des lettres (Amsterdam: APA-
Holland University Press, 1994).
1. In addition to my lectures given at the Collège de France (see chaps. 4, 5, 6,
and 8), see my articles “La conversation,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire,
vol. 3: Les France, bk. 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (1993), 679–743; and “De l’âge de
l’éloquence à l’âge de la conversation: La conversion de la rhétorique humaniste dans
la France du XVIIe siècle,” in Bernard Bray and Christoph Strosetzki (eds.), Art de la
lettre, art de la conversation, à l’époque classique en France, Wolfenbüttel conference
proceedings, October 1991 (Paris: Klincksieck: 1995).
2. See Henri de Valois’s Oratio published with Viri eximii Petri Puteani, regi chris-
tianissimo a consiliis et bibliothecis, vita . . . (Paris, 1652), work of Nicolas Rigault.
Note on p, 95: “And we retain in our memory that this occurred several times to a
famous parasite of our time [to be barred access to the door to the Dupuy Museum].
Pierre would immediately go to meet him, and he never allowed this man [the “eternal
pedant” Pierre de Montmaur] to go any further or to join this very selective gathering.”
3. For more on Poggio Bracciolini, also referred to as Pogge, see the Dizionario
biografico degli Italiani, entry “Bracciolini” (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia ita-
liana, 1960). There were some forty editions of the Facetiae produced in the fifteenth
century (Ferrare, 1470; Nuremberg, 1471; Milan and Paris, 1477, etc.); several partial
publications in manuscript form emerged between 1438 and 1452. We can, in this re-
spect, view these manuscripts as an intermediary between a savant oral version and
a printed work, a function that would endure until nearly the eighteenth century, as
evidenced by the work of François Moureau.
4. See, for example, amid savants’ reflections on jurisprudence, remarks by these
two correspondents on the “debauched nuns of Auxerre” or the “corporal gallantry”
of Madame de Tencin, after La Fresnaye’s suicide in his own home, in 1726, in Cor-
respondance littéraire du président Bouhier, 14 vols. (Saint-Étienne, France: H. Du-
ranton, 1974–1988), bk. 9: Lettres de Mathieu Marais, vol. 2: 1726–1728 (1981), 12 ff.
5. See my study “La ‘conversation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La
Hoguette” in Louis Van Delft (ed.), L’Esprit et la Lettre. Mélanges offerts à Jules Brody
(Tübingen: Narr, 1991), 93–105, and in particular p. 100, on which I analyze Fortin de
La Hoguette’s famous reference to the “Dupuy cabinet.”
6. To see Gualdo’s writing on the art of conference with Pinelli, see my article
Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, prince de la République des Lettres (Brussels: Pro
Peyresq, 1993).
7. See the excerpt of Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii in chap. 2.
8. For more on this subject, see Bernard Beugnot, “Forme et histoire, le statut des
ana,” in Mélanges offerts à Georges Couton (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon,
1981), 85–101, and Francine Wild, “Les protestants et les ana,” Bulletin de la Société
de l’histoire du protestantisme français 138 (1992): 49–75.
9. See Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Le groupe de Mersenne et la vie académique
parisienne,” XVIIe siècle, no. 175 (April–June 1992): 131–139.
10. See my study “Otium, convivium, sermo. La conversation comme ‘lieu com-
mun’ des lettrés,” Bulletin des amis du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance,
supp. to no. 4, Xe anniversaire de la Société (1991): 16–38.
11. See Carlo Ossola, Dal “Cortegiano” all’ “Uomo di mondo.” Storia di un libro e
di un modello sociale (Turin: Einaudi, 1987).
12. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor, sive de notitia auctorum et rerum commentarii
(Lübeck, Germany: Böckmann, 1688) chap. 15, “De conversatione erudite,” 153 ff.
13. Ibid., 168.
14. Ibid., 169.
15. Ibid., 171.
16. Fortin de La Hoguette emphasizes the fact that the diversity of minds consti-
tutes the very basis on which the principle of conversational fertility relies. See my
study “La ‘conversation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La Hoguette,”
(1991). This view is similar to that voiced by John Barclay in Mirror of Minds.
17. See Morhof, Polyhistor, 170. The title of the work is: De conjectandis cujusque
moribus et latitantibus animi affectibus sêméiotikê moralis, seu de signis (Venice:
M. Ginammi, 1625); for more on the author, see Dizionario biografico degli Italiani,
entry “Chiaramonti (Scipione).”
18. Morhof, Polyhistor, 157: Quis non laudat illam in Salmasio generositatem, qui
vel amplissimi stipendii spe adduci non potuit, ut Richelii historiam scriberet, quod ipsi
multa essent adversus animi sen- tentiam et in veritatis praejudicium scribenda. . . .
(Who cannot praise the nobility of soul of Saumaise, who despite hope of the most
generous recompense could not be driven to write the history of Richelieu, because he
would have had to record too many things that shocked his honor and caused injury to
truth. . . .) For more on this subject, see Pierre E. Leroy, Le Dernier voyage à Paris et
en Bourgogne (1640–1643) du réformé Claude Saumaise. Libre érudition et contrainte
politique sous Richelieu (Amsterdam: Maarssen, 1983), notably pp. 86–87.
19. See Marie-Luce Demonet-L aunay, “Art de conférer, art de raisonner, Mon-
taigne, Essais, III, 8,” Cahiers Textuel, no. 2 (1986): 19–29, and Demonet-L aunay,
Les Voix du signe. Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris:
Champion, 1992).
20. Morhof, Polyhistor, 170. For the way in which contact with nature can assist
in conversation and reflection, see the idea expressed by Justus Lipsius in the begin-
ning of bk. 2 of De constantia in Jean Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique. L’essor
de l’humanisme érudit de 1560 à 1614 (Saint-Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-
Étienne, 1976), 254 ff. and 304. Claude Saumaise also had the habit of walking while
conversing with his friends, in Dijon or Leiden. See Leroy, Le Dernier voyage à Paris
et en Bourgogne, 56.
21. See Morhof, Polyhistor, 170, when he mentions the work by Tranquillo Ambro-
sini, Processus informativus, sive De modo formandi processum informativum brevis

tractatus (Milan: Burdonius et Locarnus, 1598; repr. Rome: Martinellus, 1604).
22. Morhof, Polyhistor, 171. The Recueil de particularités, fait l’an 1665 was as-
sembled by Paul Colomiès primarily using accounts from Vossières. It was published
in the Opuscula (n.p.: Mabre-Cramoisy, 1668).
23. P. Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 2, 2nd
ed. (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, 1734–1738), 388.
Chapter 8. Parisian Conversation and Its Expansion across Europe

This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhétorique et société en
Europe (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” lesson 5, 1991–1992, which appeared under that
title in L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 92.
1. See chap. 2.
2. Caylus (attributed to), Recueil de ces messieurs (Amsterdam: Crébillon fils et
Duclos, 1745), 367–368.
3. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Richard Kennington (n.p.:
SMK Books, 2009), 2.
4. Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré, Discours de l’esprit; De la conversation;
Des agrements; De la justesse, or, Critique de Voiture, “Discours de la conversation”
(Amsterdam: 1687), 60.
5. Dominique Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (n.p.: Mabre-Cramoisy,
1671); La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit. Dialogues (n.p.: Mabre-
Cramoisy, 1687); Pensées ingénieuses des Anciens et des Modernes (n.p.: Mabre-
Cramoisy, 1689).
6. Nicolas Montfaucon de Villars, De la délicatesse (Paris: Barbin, 1671).
7. Jean-Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde, Réflexions sur ce qui peut plaire ou déplaire
dans le commerce du monde (Paris: Seneuze, 1688); Réflexions sur le ridicule et les
moyens de l’éviter (Paris: Guignard, 1696).
8. Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano (Venice: 1528).
9. Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Huesca, Spain, 1648); in French
La Pointe ou l’Art du génie, trans. M. Gendreau-Massaloux and P. Laurens, pref. by
M. Fumaroli (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Âge d’homme, 1983).
10. César Chesneau Dumarsais, Des tropes, ou Des différents sens, ed. F. Douay-
Soublin (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).
11. Étienne de Gamaches, Les Agréments du langage réduits à leurs principes
[1718], ed. J.-P. Sermain (Paris: Cendres, 1992).
Chapter 9. Fortin de La Hoguette’s “Testament”

This is a modified version of a text published in 1991 under the title “La ‘conver
sation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La Hoguette” in Louis Van
Delft (ed.), L’Esprit et la Lettre. Mélanges offerts à Jules Brody (Tübingen: Narr,
1991).
1. See my studies on the memoir genre, “Les Mémoires au XVIIe siècle au carre-
four des genres en prose,” XVIIe siècle, nos. 94–95 (1971): 7–37; “Mémoires et His-
toire: Le dilemme de l’historiographie humaniste,” in Jacques Hennequin and Noémi
Hepp (eds.), Les Valeurs chez les mémorialistes français du XVII e siècle avant la
Fronde, conference proceedings, Strasbourg-Metz, May 18–20, 1978, Société d’étude
du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck: 1979), 21–45; “Apprends, ma confidente, apprends
à me connaître: Les Mémoires de Retz et le traité Du sublime,” Versants 1 (Autumn
1981): 27–56; and my edition of Mémoires de Henri de Campion, suivis de Trois entre-
tiens sur divers sujets d’histoire, de politique et de morale (Paris: Mercure de France,
1967, repr. 1990).
2. Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres inédites de Philippe Fortin de La Ho-
guette, ed. P. Tamizey de Larroque (La Rochelle: Texier, 1888). See notably p. 69: “J’ai
recouvert icy les dialogues d’Érasme” (January 10, 1627, letter to Pierre Dupuy). This
familiarity with the Colloquia clearly reveals the deep assimilation of erudite conver-
sation, as practiced by Fortin himself, within the Erasmian tradition so pronounced
in the Dupuy milieu.
3. Apart from R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit en France dans la première moitié
du XVIIe siècle, which situates Fortin within the Dupuy milieu on several occasions,
René Pintard dedicated one article to a letter written by Fortin, “Un témoignage sur
le Cid en 1637,” in Mélanges d’histoire littéraire de la Renaissance offerts à Henri Cha-
mard (Paris: Nizet, 1951), 293–301.
4. Giuliano Ferretti, Un “soldat philosophe,” Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (1585–
1668?) (Genoa: Edizioni culturali internazionali, 1988). This excellent monograph an-
nounced the publication of a complete edition of correspondence written by Fortin
(Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage [1623–1662], ed. G. Ferretti, pref. M. Fu-
maroli, 2 vols. [Florence: Olschki, 1997]), whose essential elements had been outlined
by the author in “La corrispondenza di Fortin de La Hoguette,” Nouvelles de la répu-
blique des lettres 1 (1986): 7–14.
5. For more on this academy (1619), see Mémoires of Michel de Marolles (Paris:
Sommaville, 1656), 30–50.
6. Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, Histoire de l’Académie française [1653], ed. Ch. L. Livet,
the rest by Abbot Olivet (Paris: Didier, 1858). Pellison’s account of the transformation
of the private academy assembled around Conrart into an academy made official by
the king, then by Parlement, remains the best starting point for any study of literary
sociability during the reign of Louis XIII.
7. See Entretiens . . . by Nicolas and Henri de Campion (Fumaroli, Mémoires).
These Entretiens attest to the regular meetings of a private (and clandestine) academy
in Paris in the last years of Richelieu’s ministry, in which gentlemen in the service
of princes, magistrates, and clergymen debated “history, politics, and manners” in a
spirit of freedom and equanimity unaffected by the political “engagement” of many
in attendance. For more on current historical research related to these social forms
(intermediaries between the family on one hand, and the state and the church on the
other), see Françoise Thélamon, ed., “Sociabilité, pouvoirs et société” (conference
proceedings, Rouen, France, November 24–26, 1983); Publications de l’université de
Rouen 110 (1987); and, for a different perspective, Laetitia Boehm and Ezio Raimondi
(eds.), Università, accademie e società scientifiche in Italia e in Germania dal Cinque-
cento al Settecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981).
8. Aristotle, Politique, ed. and trans. J. Aubonnet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986),
bk. 7, chap. 14, § 3, p. 101: this quotation of “poets” illustrates the situation of sages
within leisure. See Cicero, De finibus, bk. 5, chap. 19, § 53, which mentions “sages
liberated from all worry [. . .] who dedicate themselves to studies on the understand-
ing of nature,” and more generally the philosophy of the classic otium in the work of
Jean-Marie André.
9. Lettres de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, de Mesdames de Motteville et de Mont-
morency . . . (Paris: Léopold Collin, 1806), 5. The letter, prolonging a conversation in
which Madame de Motteville had suggested the idea of a “happy life”—“if one can
unite Christian piety with the wisdom of philosophers and the politeness of the fabu-
lous shepherds of Lignon”—sketches the outlines of a female Thelema Abbey, albeit
one similar to a convent of Carmeline nuns, though far from the “commerce of court.”
10. See my study “La confidente et la reine: Mme de Motteville et Anne d’Au-
triche,” Revue des sciences humaines 115 (July–September 1964): 265–278, repr. in
“Bibliothèque des idées,” Exercices de lecture (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).
11. See chap. 1.
12. This expression is cited by G. Ferretti, Un “soldat philosophe,” 125, n. 325.
13. For more on Le Sueur’s painting, see Alain Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur (1616–
1655) (n.p.: Arthéna, 1987), 27–28. Commissioned by Anne de Chambré, it depicts
this private academy of conversation and music assembled at the home of this gentle-
man, Monsieur le Prince, during the Fronde (1645–1658). This same group of friends
also prompted the famous manuscript La Rhétorique des dieux (The Rhetoric of the
Gods), lute compositions (according to the twelve Greek modes) by Denis Gaultier,
dedicated to Anne de Chambré and decorated with engravings by Robert Nanteuil
and Abraham Bosse, mirroring drawings by Le Sueur (Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur,
295–296). The manuscript, currently in Berlin, was published by A. Tessier (Publica-
tions de la société française de musicologie, 6–7, 1932). It dates from 1652.
15. See chap. 10.
16. Virgil, Les Bucoliques, 2.65.
17. Claude Nicaise, Les Sirènes, ou Discours sur leur forme et figure (Paris: Anisson,
1691). See Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France.
18. For a more detailed look at this succession, see chap. 6.
Chapter 10. The Erudite Origins of Classical “Grand Goût”

This text appeared for the first time in the collective work L’Intelligence du passé:
Les faits, l’écriture et le sens. Mélanges offerts à Jean Lafond par ses amis, studies
assembled by Pierre Aquilon, Jacques Chupeau, and François Weil (Tours: Uni-
versité de Tours, 1988), 185–195.
1. Roméo Arbour, L’Ère baroque en France. Répertoire chronologique des éditions

de textes littéraires, vol. 4 (Geneva: Droz, 1977–1985).
2. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc . . . Vita, authore
Petro Gassendo diniensi . . . (Paris, 1641; repr., Paris, 1647, The Hague, 1655).
3. Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of
N. C. Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, trans. by William Rand (London, 1657).
4. William Bates, Vitae selectorum aliquot virorum qui doctrina, dignitate, aut
pietate inclaruere (London, 1681). The great Vitae of French savants represent a con-
siderable portion of this work (out of thirty-five, eleven are French Vies). Henri de
Valois appears three times for his Orationes in memory of Denys Petau, Jacques Sir-
mond, and for his own Vie, written by his brother Adrien.
5. Nicolas Rigault, Viri eximii Petri Puteani regi christianissimo a consiliis et biblio-
thecis vita, cura Nicolai Rigaltii (Paris, 1652).
6. The Oratio in obitum by Henri de Valois, which appears in the pamphlet cited
earlier (Henri de Valois, Oratio, published with Viri eximii Petri Puteani, regi christia-
nissimo a consiliis et bibliothecis, vita . . . [Paris, 1652], work of Nicolas Rigault), is just
one example of the biographical output of this great scholar. It is in that capacity that
he occupies a significant role in the collection of William Bates, whom we can regard
as an initiator of the great English tradition of Lives (see chap. 15).
7. Bernard Médon, author of a Carmen funebris in memory of Jérôme Bignon and
two Vitae (n.p.: Cazeneuve, 1656, and n.p.: Maran, 1671), was a magistrate from Tou-
louse.
8. Rigault, Vita, 42.
9. Ibid., 42–43.
10. See my Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et “res litteraria” de la Renaissance au
seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Champion, 1980), 463–466 and
603–608.
11. Rigault, Vita, 44.
12. Maurice Magendi, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en
France au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1926).
13. Henri de Valois, Oratio, 95.
Chapter 11. Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus

This is a modified version of a text published under the title “‘Academia,’ ‘Arca-
dia,’ ‘Parnassus’: Trois lieux allégoriques de l’éloge du loisir lettré,” in David S.
Chambers and François Quiviger (eds.), Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Cen-
tury (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1995).
1. Arnaldo Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia platonica di Firenze (Florence:
Carnesecchi, 1902). Della Torre cites a work by Scipione Bargagli, Delle lodi delle
Accademie (Venice: Franceschi, 1589), 11–12, qualifying it as noiosamente retorica,
though still considering it to be an authority on the existence of Bessarion’s academy
in fifteenth-century Rome.
2. Giovan Battista Alberti, Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie publiche e private

e sopra l’impresa degli Affidati di Pavia (Genoa: Farroni, 1639), 22.
3. To support this assertion, it suffices to cite Peiresc, though he was one of the most
Italianizing French scholars of the seventeenth century: “The Muses seem to have
abandoned the warm countries, some time ago, in search of cool weather in our neigh-
borhood,” Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), Département des Manuscrits (MS),
Nouvelles acquisitions françaises (NAF) 517, folio 162 verso (October 8, 1635, letter to
Du May). For more on the myth of the translatio studii ad Francos, one of the deep-
est foundations of the “French exception,” refer to Colette Beaune, Naissance de la
nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
4. See Ugo Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1987), 395–398; and in
French, Pétrarque, trans. J. Nicolas (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 308–310; new enhanced ed.
(Turin: Aragno, 2014), 547–550.
5. Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiarum latinae linguae libri sex, 1st ed. (Venice: Jenson,
1471), pref., ed. M. Regoliosi (Padua: Antenore, 1981).
6. G. B. Alberti, Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie publiche e private, 110.
7. The seminal study on the Parnassus allegory in fifteenth- and seventeenth-
century Rome is a work written by Elisabeth Schröter, Die Ikonographie des Themas
Parnass vor Raffael. Die Schrift und Bildtraditionen von der Spätantike bis zum 15.
Jahrhundert (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1977). For the Roman seventeenth
century, consult my essay “L’Inspiration du poète” de Poussin. Essai sur l’allégorie du
Parnasse (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1989).
8. Trajano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso e Pietra del Paragone politico, ed.
G. Rua, vol. 3 (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1910). The first edition dates to 1612, Venice. See
Luigi Firpo, “Allegoria e satira in Parnaso,” Belfagor 1 (1946): 673–699.
9. See Antonio Avena, Il bucolicum carmen e i suoi commenti inediti (Padua:
Società cooperativa tipografica, 1906), and Petrarch, Opere latine, ed. A. Bufano,
vol. 2 (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1975).
10. See, in addition to Eugène Müntz, “Le Musée des portraits de Paul Jove,” Mé-
moires de l’Institut national de France 36, no. 2 (1901): 249–253; Paul Ortwin Rave,
“Das Museo Giovio zu Como,” Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 16
(1961): 275–284; and especially, Il Rinascimento e la memoria, vol. 17, Paolo Giovio
conference proceedings (Como, Italy: Raccolta della Società Storica Comense, 1985).
Paul Jove was not content to merely assemble portraits of lettered men in his “mu-
seum” (simultaneously a “Parnassus,” a collection of exemplary Images, and a gather-
ing of absent speakers invited to its own academic meetings). He gave new energy to
the collection of Lives, critical to Vasari’s endeavors, and was the first to define and
reconstruct the lives of Italian academicians. He was one of the great architects of the
Italian Republic of Letters’ “theater of memory.”
11. A metaphor for Tuscan, which was compared to the fine flour obtained by siev-
ing bran.
12. See Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Le pale della Crusca: Cul-
tura e simbologia (Florence, Accademia della Crusca, 1983); the collection The Fairest
Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe
(Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1985); and especially Giovanni Pozzi, “Imprese
di Crusca,” in La Crusca nella tradizione linguistica e letteraria italiana, proceedings
from the international conference held for the quadricentary of the Accademia della
Crusca (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1985), 41–63.
13. For more on the first Life of Petrarch (Boccacio’s De vita et moribus domini
Francisci Petrarchi de Florentia) see Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato (Rome:
Storia e letteratura, 1947), 74–75. Jacopo Filippo Tomasini published a Petrarcha re-
divivus, Laura Comite in 1635 in Padua (Frambotti). The Lives of Petrach played an
essential role, particularly in Italy, in creating both the ideal type and the biographic
model of the humanist man of letters. These Lives were themselves modeled, in part,
on the Epistola posteritati in which Petrarch emphasizes the principle of libertas
(notably in regard to secular and ecclesiastical sovereigns) that governed his life as a
man of letters, and which was not included by his Renaissance biographers.
14. J. Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monas-
tiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Édition du Cerf, 1957). For more on lasting contami-
natio between the humanist otium studiosum and the monastic otium studiosum, see
Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Sant’Andrea degli Olivetani, un “monastero barocco” a Volterra
(Volterra, Italy: Gruppo fotografico, 1982).
15. Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ulmann (Zurich: Thesaurus
Mundi, 1951), 1, 9, 11–20.
16. Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. H. Harth, vol. 3 (Florence: Olschki, 1987), bk. 3,
Epistolarum familiarium libri secundum volumen, 467–469 (November–December
1457, letter 19, to Prospero Colonna).
annum MCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743).
18. For more on the Neapolitan Academy founded by the Panormite and subse-
quently led by Pontano, see, in addition to Camillo Minieri-Riccio, Biografie degli ac-
cademici alfonsini detti poi pontaniani dal 1442 al 1453 (Naples, 1881; repr. Bologna:
Forni, 1969), Vittorio Gleijeses, ed., La storia di Napoli. Dalle origini ai nostri giorni,
vol. 10 (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1974–1981), bk. 4, vol. 2, Napoli Arago-
nese (1974): Michele Santoro, “La cultura umanistica,” 4, “L’Accademia Pontaniana,”
361 ff.; Pietro Prini, “Umanesimo e accademie,” Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, vol.
46 (1978), 32–36.
19. For more on the Roman Academy, founded by Pomponius Laetus, see, in addi-
tion to Pastor (Pius II, Sixtus IV, Julius II) and classical works by Arnaldo Della Torre,
Paolo Marsi da Pescina. Contributo alla storia dell’Accademia Pomponiana (Cas-
ciano: Capelli, 1903); and Emmanuel Rodocanachi, Histoire de Rome (Paris: Picard,
1922–1933); recent studies by Fabrizio Cruciani, “Il Teatro dei Ciceroniani: Tommaso
Fedra Inghirammi,” Forum italicum 14, no. 3 (1980), 356–377; “Lo spettacolo classico
dei pomponiani,” in Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento: Roma 1450–1550 (Rome: Bul-
zoni, 1983), 220–226; and Cruciani, Il Teatro del Campidoglio e le feste romane del
1513 (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1968). A global study of the history of the Roman Academy, its
relationship with the pontifical Curia, and its research program is still needed.
20. Petrarch, De vita solitaria, in Opere latine, vol. 1, 262–565. The principle of
libertas, essential to a life of letters, and ensured by solitude, reappears here.
21. See Enrico Carrara, La poesia pastorale (Milan: Vallardi, 1908), and Dome-
nico de Robertis, “Aspects de la formation du genre pastoral en Italie au XVe siècle,”
in Le Genre pastoral en Europe du XV e au XVIII e siècle (Saint-Étienne: Presses uni-
versitaires de Saint-Étienne, 1980), 7–14, as well as the subsequent texts. For more on
the pastoral landscape in painting, see John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Pastoral Landscape
(Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), which notably includes the study
by David Rosand, “Pastoral topoï in the Construction of Meaning in Landscape,”
161–174.
22. See Alessandro d’alessandro, Dies geniales (Rome, 1522).
23. For more on Nicolas Frénicle and his Illustres bergers, see Maurice Cauchie,
“Les Églogues de Nicolas Frénicle et le groupe littéraire des Illustres bergers,” Revue
d’histoire de la philosophie, new series, no. 10 (1942), 115–133. Jorge de Montemayor’s
Diana, published in Anvers in 1575, was translated into French by N. Colin and pub-
lished in Reims beginning in 1578 (J. de Foigny).
24. For more on Crescimbeni’s Arcadia, see Françoise Waquet, Rhétorique et
poétique chrétiennes. Bernardino Perfetti et la poésie improvisée dans l’Italie du XVIII e
siècle (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 173–209, and Waquet, “La conversation en Arcadie,”
in Alain Montandon (ed.), Traités de savoir-vivre en Italie / I trattati di saper vivere in
Italia (Clermont-Ferrand, France: Association des publications de la faculté des let-
tres et sciences humaines, 1993), 71–89. For more on the place held by the Arcadias
depicted by Sannazaro and Crescimbeni in the history of the European imagina-
tion, see Petra Maisak, Arkadien: Genese und Typologie einer idyllischen Wunschwelt
(Frankfurt and Bern: Lang, 1981).
25. Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen (see note 9).
26. Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario, ed. F. Novati, vol. 4 (Rome: Forzani, 1891–1911),
bk. 4 (1905), 149 ff. (July 9, 1406, letter to Leonardo Bruni).
27. Iacopo Sannazaro, L’Arcadie (Arcadia) [1990], critical edition by F. Erspamer,
trans. G. Marino, pref. by Y. Bonnefoy (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004), 244–245.
28. Ibid., vol. 10, 31–33, pp. 174–175.
29. Ibid., vol. 5, 19–20, pp. 74–75.
30. See the famous study by Erwin Panofsky “Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the
Elegiac Tradition,” in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on Art His-
tory (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).
31. See works by Amedeo Quondam, “L’istituzione Arcadia, sociologia e ideologia
di un Accademia,” Quaderni storici 23 (May–August 1973): 389–483; Quondam, “Le
Arcadie e l’Arcadia: La degradazione del razionalismo,” in Cultura regionale et let-
terature, proceedings from the 7th meeting of the Associazione internazionale per gli
studi di lingua e letteratura italiana, March 31–April 4, 1970, Bari, Italy, 1974, 375–
385; and “L’Arcadia e la Repubblica delle lettere,” in Immagini del Settecento in Italia
(Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1980), 198–211. See also F. Waquet, “La conversation en Arcadie”
(see note 24).
32. Ludovico Dolce, Sogno di Parnaso en terza rima, cited in Christopher Cairns,
Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and His Circle in
Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 233–234.
33. Ibid., 123–124.
34. See André Chastel, Le Sac de Rome, 1527. Du premier maniérisme à la Contre-
Réforme (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 224–225.
35. For more on the beginnings of this sequence, see studies by Michel Plaisance,
notably “Une première affirmation de la politique culturelle de Côme Ier: La transfor-
mation de l’Académie des “Humidi” en Académie florentine (1540–1542),” in André
Rochon (ed.), Les Écrivains et le pouvoir en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance, series 1
(Paris: Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 1973), 361–438. Elsewhere, I have contested the notion
of “cultural policy,” at least as the causal explanation of phenomena of the life of the
mind by the prince. For a less Machiavellian view, see Eric Cochrane and Martin
Lowry, in The Fairest Flower, 21–51.
36. Cited in Angelo Solerti, Le origini del Melodramma (Turin: Bocca, 1903), 117.
See my catalog L’inspiration du poète, 49–53.
37. See the catalog Jacques Callot, 1592–1635, compiled by Paulette Choné (Paris
and Nancy: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1992), 192.
38. For more on the survival and “modernization” of the Parnassus allegory in
eighteenth-century Paris, see Judith Colton’s excellent work, The Parnasse françois.
Titon du Tillet and the Origins of the Monument to Genius (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1979).
Chapter 12. Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita

This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Le ‘De triplici vita’ de
Marsile Ficin: Un régime de vie pour la République des Lettres?” in Les Cahiers
de l’humanisme, vol. 2, Marsile Ficin ou les Mystères platoniciens, proceedings
from the 42nd International Conference of Humanist Studies, held at the Centre
d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, France, July 7–10, 1999 (Les Belles
Lettres, 2002).
1. Ego igitur sortem eorum laboriosissimam miseratus, qui difficile Minervae
minuentis nervos iter agunt, primus tanquam medicus debilibus et valetudinariis ad-
sum. (Since I pity the burdensome lot of those who make the difficult journey of
Minerva who shrinks the sinews, I am the first to attend as a physician sick and invalid
scholars.): Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. C. V. Kaske, and J. R. Clark (Bing-
hamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, in collaboration with the
Renaissance Society of America, 1989), 108, lines 26–28 (this bilingual critical refer-
ence edition is henceforth cited as Three Books on Life).
2. Marsilio Ficino, Sulla vita, trad. A. Tarabochia Canavero (Milan, Rusconi,
1996), 99, n. 9.
3. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 103–104.

4. Ibid., 292.
5. Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario, ed. C. Griggio, vol. 2: La raccolta canonica delle
“Epistole” (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 75, lines 99–106.
6. See chap. 1.
7. See chap. 1.
8. Ficino’s famous letter to Aldus was edited by P. O. Kristeller, Supplementum
ficinianum, vol. 2 (Florence: Olschki, 1937), bk. 2, 95. For more on the relationship be-
tween Ficino and the Venetian publisher, see Carlo Dionisotti, Aldo Manuzio. Uma-
nista e editore (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1995), 96, 101.
9. The dedicatory letter to Léon X was published in Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manu-
zio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il
Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI” (Milan, 1975), 120–123 (Ficino is cited
on page 122).
10. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 112.
11. Ibid., 113.
12. Ibid., 124.
13. Ibid., 126.
14. Ibid., 128.
15. Ibid., 132.
16. Ibid., 134.
17. Ibid., 354–358.
18. Ibid., 290.
19. For more on Montaigne as a reader of Ficino (as a translator of Plato and author
of De amore), see the article by Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron, “Montaigne, lecteur de
Platon,” in Ada Neschke-Hentschke (ed.), in collaboration with A. Étienne, Images
de Platon et lectures de ses œuvres. Les interprétations de Platon à travers les siècles
(Louvain [Leuven, Belgium]: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie; Peeters,
1997), 222–223, 234; and Françoise Joukovsky, Le Regard intérieur. Thèmes plotiniens
chez quelques écrivains de la Renaissance française (Paris: Nizet, 1982), 113 ff.
20. See the famous essay by M. A. Screech, Montaigne et la mélancolie. La sagesse
des “Essais,” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France [PUF], 1992); in addition to
Françoise Charpentier, “La passion de la tristesse,” Montaigne Studies 9, nos. 1–2
(1997), 47.
21. “Plato orders men to attend the exercises, dances, and games of youth. . . .”
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 60.
22. Gassendi, Viri illustris.
23. See chap. 3.
24. Minerva [. . .] olivifera, olei vitalis origo (Minerva [. . .] creator of the olive tree,
the origin of the oil so necessary to life), in Ficino, Three Books on Life, 168.
25. See Sebastiano Gentile’s recent analysis in Sebastiano Gentile and Carlos
Gilly, Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto, exhibit catalog, October 1,

1999–June 1, 2000, Biblioteca medicea laurenziana, Bibliotheca philosophica her-
metica (Florence: Centro Di, 1999), 105–107.
26. See Alfredo Perifano, L’Alchimie à la cour de Côme I er de Médicis. Savoirs,
culture et politique (Paris: Champion, 1997), 228; Sylvain Matton, “Marsile Ficin et
l’alchimie. Sa position, son influence,” in Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton
(ed.), Alchimie et philosophie à la Renaissance, proceedings from an international
conference in Tours, December 4–7, 1991 (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 123–192.
27. Ficinio, Three Books on Life, 291.
28. Rémi Brague, La Sagesse du monde. Histoire de l’expérience humaine de l’uni-
vers (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
Chapter 13. Venice and the Republic of Letters in the Sixteenth Century
This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Venise et la Ré‑
publique des Lettres aux XVIe siècle,” in Vittore Branca and Carlo Ossola (ed.),
Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del rinascimento a Venezia (Florence: Olschki,
1991).
1. For more on Daniele Barbaro, see the article in Dizionario biografico degli Ita-
liani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960).
2. For more on Villa Maser, see Terisio Pignatti, Veronese. L’opera completa, 2 vols.
(Venice: Alfieri, 1976), vol. 1, 56–68.
3. For more on this dialogue, see my Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et “res litte-
raria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Cham-
pion, 1980), 85.
4. Cited by Pignatti, Veronese. L’opera completa, vol. 1, 56 (the letter was published
in 1559).
5. Paolo Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, patricii genuensis, in qua studiosis
bonarum artium proponitur typus viri probi et eruditi (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augs-
burg]: Mangus, 1607), in quarto.
6. Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Historia sui temporis, 1593–1614.
7. Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 20 ff., which also includes a portrait of
J. F. Mussato, a friend of Pinelli’s (who accompanied him to Trent), and, like him, a
student of Greek rhetoricians.
8. Ibid., 19.
9. Ibid., 42, 49. Curiositas is one of the primary virtues of the man of letters in the
“model” drawn by Gualdo.
10. Ibid., 10. The model of Pinelli, including his love of music, influenced both
Peiresc’s life and his biography (Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and
Gentility, Being the Life of N. C. Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, trans. by William Rand
[London: 1657]).
11. See Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi,
vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI”
(Milan, 1975), as well as Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and
Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).
annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743). (See chap. 1.)
13. See chap. 5.
14. See Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, entry “Conciles,” by J. Forget, bk. 3,
coll. 636–676.
15. See John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602), vol. 2 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
16. See by Elisabeth Schröter, Die Ikonographie des Themas Parnass vor Raffael.
Die Schrift und Bildtraditionen von der Spätantike bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (Hildes
heim and New York: Olms, 1977).
17. See the substantial collection assembled by Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Sci-
ence and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
18. See my study “L’Inspiration du poète” de Poussin. Essai sur l’allégorie du Par-
nasse (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1989).
19. See André Chastel, ed., Pierre Arétin. Lettres (n.p.: Scala, 1988), 263–271, and
the quoted article, Luigi Firpo, “Allegoria e satira in Parnaso,” Belfagor 1 (1946), as
well as Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on
Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 231–249.
20. See William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of the Republican Liberty
[1968] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Chapter 14. The Genesis of Classical Epistolography

This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Genèse de l’épisto-
lographie classique: Rhétorique humaniste de la lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse”
in Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 112, April 2012.
1. For more on the quarrel over Cicero’s style, see Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del
ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’etI della Rinascenza (Turin: Loe-
scher, 1885), and Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1910). See also Hermann Gmelin, “Das Prinzip der Imi-
tatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance,” Romanische Forschungen,
1932, 85–360, and Eugenio Garin, L’Éducation de l’homme modern (Paris: Fayard,
1968), 105–107.
2. James J. Murphy, Rhetorics in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory
from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University
of California Press, 1974). In addition to noting the difference in “usage” between
northern Europe and the Roman Curia (pp. 234–235), Murphy highlights the rela-
tionship between the medieval art of the letter and the art of the sermon.
3. For more on the history of the pontifical chancery and its epistolary style, see
Reginald L. Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1915). For more on Bembo, secretary of briefs for Leo X, see
Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei Papi dalla fine del Medioevo (Rome: Trente, Desclée,
Artigianelli, 1890–1934), bk. 4, 402 ff., and Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan:
Garzanti, 1971), bk. 4, chap. 1: “Il classicismo dal Bembo al Guarini,” by Ettore Bo-
nora, 151–153.
4. The first printed edition of Petrarch’s Letters appeared in Venice in 1492. The
entirety of Familiar Letters and Letters of Old Age, in French, are available in the thir-
teen volumes published under the direction of P. Laurens in the series Classiques de
l’humanisme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002–2014): the former in the text by V. Rossi,
trans. A. Longpré; the latter in the text by E. Nota, trans. various authors; with com-
mentary by U. Dotti.
5. Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Amsterdam: North-
Holland Publishing, 1971), 152–579. The first edition of this treatise was published by
Froben in Basel in 1522.
6. Ibid., 209, line 7. See also 210, line 9, Qui quaeso potest tam infinitae rerum
varietati simplex sermonis character accommodari? (How can a single and unique type
of discourse adapt itself to this infinite variety of material?); 309, line 19; and 310,
line 6.
7. Ibid., 211, lines 12–13.
8. Ibid., 210, lines 6–7.
9. Ibid., 309, line 14.
10. Ibid., 223, line 4.
11. Ibid., 223, lines 4–5.
12. Ibid., 223, lines 25–26. See also 222, lines 13–15.
13. Ibid., 301, line 7. See also 221, lines 21–22, Non damnabitur libertas, si non des-
tituat nos consilium, cui decet artem ubique cedere.
14. Ibid., 301, lines 2–3: a consilio [. . .], non praeceptis (through judgment [. . .]
not through rules), and line 10: consilium [. . .], non praeceptiunculae (judgment, not
the minutiae of rules).
15. This idea is crucial. See ibid., 215, line 7: simplicitas [. . .], sed elegans (a sim-
plicity [. . .] but elegant); 221, line 10: erudit[a] simplicit[as] (the simplicity of a savant);
225, line 10.
16. The first edition of Ciceronianus appeared in Basel, published by Froben, in
March 1528. In addition to Pierre Mesnard’s translation of Erasmus, La Philosophie
chrétienne (Paris: Vrin, 1970), I consulted the critical edition by Angiolo Gambaro, Il
Ciceroniano o dello stile migliore (Brescia, Italy: La Scuola, 1965), and the Mesnard
edition in Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, 580–710.
17. See Ciceronianus, ed. Mesnard, in Erasmus, La Philosophie chrétienne, 618–
619, and Cicero’s De oratore, 3, 62–89.
18. See Jean-Baptiste Giraldi, Joannis Baptistae Gyraldi Ferrariensis Poemata
(Basel: Winter, 1543), 200–228. Cicero, according to Giraldi, must remain master of
the best style. But velim unius auctoris angustiis omnia ingenia metiri? (would I want
to measure all minds by the restrictive rules of one sole author?) (203). If exposure is
necessary beginning in childhood, one cannot later refuse exposure to the influence
of other authors. Even when quaecumque excerpta fuerunt, ad unius Ciceronis imita-
tionem convertenda censeo (but everything that one takes away must be converted to
the model set by Cicero, conforming to a norm, to a canon). One must avoid the two
excesses of bad style, the excessive severity of Atticists and the flowery languidity of
Asianists, and find a just milieu, for which Cicero is the judicious touchstone (205).
19. Dionysii Longini de sublimi genere dicendi, in quo cum alia multa praeclara
sunt emendata, tum veterum poetarum versus, qui confusi commixtique cum oratione
soluta minus intelligentem lectorem fallere poterant notati atque distincti (Longi-
nus’s On the Sublime, in which well-known passages have been corrected, and in
which verse quotations from classical poems, mixed with and confused with prose,
are notably indicated and highlighted, risks abusing the unwarned readers) (Venice:
Aldus, 1555). Paul Manutius’s edition presents itself as a slight improvement on the
one procured the previous year in Basel, published by Oporin (dedicated on August 5,
1554) by Robortello, the first printed edition of the text.
20. Tre libri di lettere volgari di Paolo Manuzio (Venice: Aldus, 1555), folios 13 ff.
21. Marc-Antoine Muret, Opera omnia, ed. Ch. Froescher (Leipzig, 1848), vol. 1,
384, Oratio 14, November 1580. For more on Muret as a theoretician of the “best
style” of prose, see Morris W. Croll, “Muret and the History of Attic Prose” and “Mu-
ret’s Progress,” 254–309, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1966).
22. Antonii Possevini . . . Bibliotheca selecta qua agitur de ratione studiorum (Rome:
Typographica Apostolica Vaticana, 1593).
Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 185–186. The chapter “A Con-
sideration upon Cicero,” should be read as a freethinking reflection alongside Vivès’s
De conscribendis epistolis and Erasmus’s Ciceronianus. The rhetoric of the Essays
is entirely Erasmian—“I have naturally a humorous and familiar style” (Montaigne,
Essays), and their insistence on candidness (candor, simplicitas), variety, and “mer-
curial” metamorphosis echoes De conscribendis epistolis, in Opera Omnia Desideri
Erasmi Roterodami, 310). Vivès’s De conscribendis epistolis offers a similar lesson, and
runs counter to the “ceremonial” letters that, in imitation of Cicero and Pliny, masked
the private I and human truth behind an official persona.
24. Henri Estienne, Petri Bunelli, Galli praeceptoris, et Pauli Manutii, Itali disci-
puli, epistolae ciceroniano stylo scriptae, aliorum Gallorum pariter et Italorum episto-
lae eodem stylo scriptae (Geneva, 1581).
25. In his dedication to Henri III, Estienne reminds the king of the discussion
(probably held at the Académie du Palais) which prompted his request that Estienne
avenge the French honor (gloria) by reminding the Italians that the French people
had nothing to envy them in regard to the Ciceronian style: Bruno Longueil, Paul
Manutius’s teacher, had written “Ciceronian” letters that were as good as Bembo’s.
This is therefore a polemical publication, inspired by anti-Italian nationalism, in
keeping with Dialogues du français italianisé. For more on Estienne’s fundamental
anti-Ciceronianism, see, in addition to Louis Clément, Henri Estienne et son œuvre
française (Paris: Picard, 1898), Jean Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique. L’essor

de l’humanisme érudit de 1560 à 1614 (Saint-Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-
Étienne, 1976), 235–236.
26. See Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique, 269–273.
27. Justi Lipsi Epistolica institutio excepta e dictantis ejus ore anno 1587 mense
Junio, adjunctum est Demetrii Phalerei ejusdem argumenti scriptum (The Tract of
the letter of Justus Lipsius, text received from his mouth in June of the year 1587,
with writing by Demetrius Phalereus on the same subject), Lugduni Batavorum, ex
officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1591. J. Jehasse rightly observed
Demetrius Phalereus’s influence on the evolution of rhetoric in the sixteenth cen-
tury (Jehasse [ed.], Apologie pour M. de Balzac [Saint-Étienne: Université de Saint-
Étienne, 1977] intro. 15) and Hermogenes (Guez de Balzac et le génie romain [Saint-
Étienne: Université de Saint-Étienne, 1976] 113, 433, 482, 489). One of the essential
points of the treatise translated by Lipsius and published in appendix to his Institutio
is the distinction between dialogue and letters: notably, dialogue reflects oral speech,
extempore dicentem (improvised), whereas the letter is a written, and therefore more
literary and more ornate genre (oportet epistolam paulo magis adornari et quasi ex-
strui quam Dialogum [it suffices to adorn and better position, so to speak, the letter
than the dialogue]).
28. Erasmus, De conscribendis, in Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, 225,
lines 7–8 (quote from comedian Turpilius): Est enim [. . .] epistola absentium amico-
rum quasi mutuus sermo (the letter [. . .] is a discourse between absent friends). The
style most often accorded to the letter was humilior, comœdiæ propior quam tragœ-
diæ, aut si quid etiam humilius phrasi comica (a lower register, closer to comedy than
tragedy, meaning a tone more banal than that of comedic discourse). Epistolary art,
unreservedly compared to a dialogue between friends, is here viewed as speech and
not silent writing.
29. Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 185.
30. Jean Goulu, Lettres de Phyllarque à Ariste, 3rd ed. (Paris: Buon, 1628), 10.
31. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.4: An non eam, quae emissa optime est, hastam
speciosissime contortam ferri videmus? Et arcu dirigentium tela, quo certior manus, hoc
est habitus ipse formosior (Can we not see that the javelin that is thrown with skill is
also brandished with elegance? Like the archer, the surer the hand, the more elegant
the gesture). This metaphor is echoed in that of the “stroke” or parry, designating a
well-timed and appropriate sententia, or that of the “pointed” style, which played on
an outpouring of “strokes.”
32. See Roberto Tessari, La Commedia dell’arte nel Seicento. “Industria” et “Arte
giocoso” della civiltà barocca (Florence: Olschki, 1969).
33. Pierre Corneille, The Theatre of Illusion, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York:
Harcourt, 2007), 6.
34. See René Fromilhague, “Montaigne et la nouvelle rhétorique,” in Critique et
création littéraire en France au XVII e siècle, international conference proceedings
(Paris: Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique [CNRS], 1977), 55–67.
35. See Zobeidah Youssef, Polémique et littérature chez Guez de Balzac (Paris:
Nizet, 1972); J. Jehasse, Guez de Balzac et le génie romain and Apologie pour M. de
Balzac.
36. Eugène Hatin, Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique
française . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866), noted that the word “gazette” had already
appeared in a pamphlet entitled La Flandre conservée . . . (n.p.: Arras, 1600): “L’in-
fanterie souffrait mille incommodités, combien que les faiseurs de gazettes assurent
qu’il y a eu parmi cela quelque terreur panique” (Bibliographie . . . , p. 48, column b).
Chapter 15. From Lives to Biographies

This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Des ‘Vies’ à la biogra-
phie: Le crépuscule du Parnasse” in Diogène 139 (1987).
2. Longinus, On the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris Manuscript,
trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 83.
3. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 35.
4. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale,
Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918), vi.
5. Emphasis added.
6. Sainte-Beuve, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (Paris: Delangle, 1829).
7. During his Grand Tour in Italy, John Milton carried letters of recommendation
written by Henry Wotton, a British diplomat and a friend of the poet George Herbert.
Chapter 16. The “Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses

This is a modified version of a text published as “Les ‘Lettres familières’ du prési-
dent de Brosses: Le voyage en Italie comme exercice du loisir lettré,” in Jean-Marie
André, Jacqueline Dangel, et Paul Demont (eds.), Les Loisirs et l’héritage de la
culture classique, proceedings from the XIIIe Congrès de l’association Guillaume
Budé, Dijon, August 27–31, 1993 (Brussels: Latomus, 1996).
1. The French edition referred to here belongs to the Centre Jean Bérard: Charles
de Brosses, Lettres familières, text gathered by G. Cafasso, annotated by L. Norci de
Azevedo, in Mémoires et documents sur Rome et l’Italie méridionale, 3 vols., includ-
ing a biography (Naples: Centre Jean Bérard; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991). When
available and when noted, the following English translation has been used: Charles
de Brosses, Selections from the Letters of de Brosses, trans. Lord Ronald Sutherland
Gower (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897). The following work was of par-
ticular value when studying this correspondence: Hermann Harder, Le Président
de Brosses et le voyage en Italie au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981).
2. See Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, Johannes Fredericus Gronovius, pèlerin
de la République des Lettres. Recherches sur le voyage savant au XVII e siècle (Geneva:
Droz, 1984).
3. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 1, 443 (October 18, 1739, letter 24, from
Florence, to M. de Neuilly). Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (Lon-
don: William Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914), 152, 153.
4. For more on Dijon’s literary milieu, notably in the eighteenth century, see
Marcel Bouchard, De l’humanisme à l’Encyclopédie. L’esprit public en Bourgogne
sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 1930).
5. See the bibliography of Charles de Brosses related to letters in Lettres familières,
vol. 3, 1249, and his detailed bibliography on Joseph Théophile Foisset, Le Président de
Brosses. Histoire des lettres et des parlements au XVIII e siècle (Paris: Olivier-Fulgence,
1842).
6. See de Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 2, 1131–1170 (letters 54 and 55, to Abbé
Courtois).
7. Ibid., 1209 (March 23, 1740, letter 57, from Milan).
8. Ibid., vol. 1, 512 (November 24, 1739, letter 31, from Rome).
9. Ibid., vol. 1, 576 (November 28, 1739, letter 33, from Rome).
10. Ibid., vol. 2, 902 (letter 47, to M. de Neuilly).
11. De Brosses, Selections, 196.
12. Ibid., 226.
13. Ibid., 239.
14. Ibid., 128.
15. Ibid., 10.
16. The essential resource on Jean-Marie Du Bos remains Alfred Lombard, L’Abbé
Du Bos, un initiateur de la pensée moderne (Paris: Hachette, 1913). See also Abbot Du
Bos’s helpful edition of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Paris: École
nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 1993).
17. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 1, 330 (letter 17, to M. de Quintin).
19. Ibid., 193.
20. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 2, 742–743 (letter 41, to M. de Quintin).
22. De Brosses, Lettres familières, 644–646 (letter 37, to M. de Blancey and M. de
Neuilly).
23. Ibid.
Chapter 17. The Comte de Caylus and the

“Return to Antiquity” in the Eighteenth Century
This text was originally published as “Arnaldo Momigliano et la réhabilitation des
‘antiquaires’: Le comte de Caylus et le ‘retour à l’antique’ aux XVIIIe siècle” in Mo-
migliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed.
Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
1. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of
Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
2. Cited by Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 110.
3. Ibid., 118.
4. See Jean-Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Église, un re-
tour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1999).
5. See Bruno Neveu, “Archéolatrie et modernité dans le savoir ecclésiastique du
XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle, no. 131 (1981), 169–223; and “L’érudition ecclésiastique du
XVIIe siècle et la nostalgie de l’Antiquité chrétienne,” in Keith Robbins (ed.), Religion
and Humanism (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981), 195–223.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London and Toronto: J. M.
Dent and Sons, 1921; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921).
7. Ibid., 234.
8. See Lionello Sozzi, ed., Ragioni dell-anti-illuminismo (Alessandria, Italy: Edi-
zioni dell’orso, 1992); Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: l’antiphiloso-
phie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Darrin M. MacMahon, The
French Counter Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
9. Rouseau, Emile, 253. This and the following page offer a premonitory composite
image of the revolutionary Jacobin “leader,” or its military version, which Bonaparte
would incarnate.
10. Ibid., 234.
11. Ibid., 7.
12. See Henri Gouhier, Rousseau et Voltaire: Portraits dans deux miroirs (Paris:
Vrin, 1983).
13. A. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Contributo alla storia
degli studi classici (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1955).
14. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 381.
15. See the excellent article by Jean-Louis Jam, “Caylus, l’amateur crépusculaire,”
in Jam (ed.), Les divertissements utiles des amateurs au XVIII e siècle (Clermont-
Ferrand, France: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2000), 36–37.
16. Cited in Edward Gibbon, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Edward
Gibbon (London: Alex. Murray & Son, 1869), 200.
17. See Edward Gibbon, The Life of Edward Gibbon, Esq. (London: John Murray,
1839), 190.
18. The proceedings from this conference were published in the journal XVII e
siècle, no. 131 (1981), which includes the text of this exchange with A. Momigliano:
“Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: Les deux Antiquités dans l’érudition
jésuite française du XVIIe siècle,” 149–168.
19. Cited by Jam, “Caylus,” 30.
20. See Lafont de Saint-Yenne, Œuvre critique, ed. Étienne Jollet (Paris: École
nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, 2001).
21. We can indeed use the the pamphleting campaign led by Lafont de Saint-Yenne
to date the trend among several eminent Parisian collectors during the reign of Louis
XV studied by Colin B. Bailey in his book Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in
Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
22. See Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, depuis son
établissement jusqu’à présent, avec les mémoires de littérature tirez des registres de cette
Académie, vol. 34 (Paris, 1770), 221–232; see also Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 7 (Paris,
1767).
23. This dedicatory epistle, which is included in the beginning of volume 1 of Re-
cueil d’antiquités, was reprinted by Louis-Joseph Jay, Recueil de lettres sur la peinture,
la sculpture et l’architecture, publiées à Rome par Bottari en 1754, traduites et augmen-
tées (Paris: Galerie des tableaux, 1817), 591–593.
24. See André Fontaine, Comte de Caylus, Vies d’artistes du XVIII e siècle, Dis-
cours sur la Peinture et la Sculpture, Salons de 1751 et de 1753, Lettre à Lagrenée (Paris,
H. Laurens, 1910), 25.
25. Cited by Thomas Gaethgens and Jacques Lugand, Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–
1809): Peintre du roi (Paris: Arthéna, 1988), 79.
Chapter 18. Seroux d’Agincourt and “Literary Europe”

This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Seroux d’Agincourt et
‘l’Europe littéraire,’” in Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet (eds.), Papes,
princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne. Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu,
École pratique des hautes études, Sciences historiques et philologiques (Geneva:
Droz, 2007).
1. Giovanni Previtali, La Fortuna dei primitivi. Dal Vasari ai neoclassici (Turin:
Einaudi, 1964), 164–191.
2. Evelina Borea, “Le stampe dei primitivi e l’avvento della storiografia artistica
illustrata,” Prospettiva 70 (1993): 50–74.
3. Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collect-
ing in England and France (London: Phaidon, 1976), 37–45.
4. Henri Loyrette, “Seroux d’Agincourt et les origines de l’histoire de l’art médié
val,” Revue de l’art 48 (1980): 40–58. See also Maria Elisa Micheli, “‘Il “Recueil”’ di
Seroux d’Agincourt,” Bollettino d’arte 80–81 (1993): 83–92.
5. The first French translation of Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden,
1764) was published in Amsterdam in 1766. See Édouard Pommier, Winckelmann,
inventeur de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 199–244.
6. Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of
Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
7. See Jean-Étienne Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps (Paris: Macula,
1983), as well as George Levitine and Melinda Curtis, Search for Innocence. Primi-
tive and Primitivistic Art of the 19th Century, exhibition catalog, Department of Art,
University of Maryland Art Gallery, October 29–December 10, 1975 (College Park,
MD, 1975).
8. Édouard Pommier, “Moyen Âge et Révolution,” in L’Art et les Révolutions, con-
ference proceedings from Strasbourg, 1989 (Strasbourg: Société alsacienne pour le

développement de l’histoire de l’art, 1992), 15–49.
9. My study of this point was facilitated by the essay, as yet unpaginated and in
manuscript form, procured and presented by Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, which was in-
cluded in the reprint of Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’Art (Turin: Nino Aragno
Editore, 2005).
10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Insti-
tutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934).
11. Antoine Schnapper, Le Géant, la Licorne et la Tulipe. Collections et collection-
neurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 291–296.
12. Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, “Une initiative mal récompensée. Roger de Gaig-
nières (1642–1715),” Revue de l’art 49 (1980): 33–34.
13. Marc Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” in La Querelle des Anciens et
des Modernes: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles, assembled and annotated by A.-M. Lecoq (Paris:
Gallimard, 2001).
14. See chap. 4 and chap. 8.
15. Scipione Maffei nell’Europa del Settecento, proceedings from a conference
held in Verona on September 23–25, 1996 (Verona: Consorzio editori veneti, 1998).
16. Viola Corrado, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto. Italia e Francia nella polemica
Orsi-Bouhours (Verona: Fiorini, 2001).
17. Individual collection.
18. Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère De Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages, ou Mé-
moires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste (Paris: Le Clere, 1834),
18.
19. See Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, depuis son
établissement jusqu’à présent, avec les mémoires de littérature tirez des registres de cette
Académie (Paris, 1770), vol. 34, 221–232; see also Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 7 (Paris,
1767).
20. Marc Fumaroli, “Une amitié paradoxale, Antoine Watteau et le comte de Cay-
lus, 1712–1719,” Revue de l’art 114 (1996): 37–47; and “Un gentilhomme universel:
Anne-Claude de Tubières, comte de Caylus (1694–1765),” in Annuaire du Collège de
France. Résumé des cours et travaux, lesson 6 (1992–1993), 563–581. See also Irène
Aghion, ed., Caylus, mécène du roi. Collectionner les antiquités au XVIIIe siècle, exhi-
bition catalog, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cabinet des médailles (Paris: Institut
national d’histoire de l’art [INHA], 2002).
21. Pierre Crozat, Recueil d’estampes d’après les plus beaux tableaux et d’après les
plus beaux dessins qui sont en France . . . , vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1729–1742);
Jean de Julienne, L’Œuvre d’Antoine Watteau, peintre du Roy . . . gravé d’après ses
tableaux et desseins originaux . . . , vol. 2 (n.p., n.d).
22. Marc Fumaroli, “Le comte de Caylus et l’Académie des inscriptions,” Comptes
rendus des séances. Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (1995), 225–250.
23. This dedicatory epistle, which is included in the beginning of vol. 1 of Recueil
d’antiquités, was reprinted by Louis-Joseph Jay, Recueil de lettres sur la peinture, la

sculpture et l’architecture, publiées à Rome par Bottari en 1754, traduites et augmentées
(Galerie des tableaux, 1817), 591–593.
24. Francis Haskell, “The Baron d’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in
Eighteenth-Century Europe,” in Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste. Selected
Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 30–45.
25. Achille Étienne Gigault de La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de J. L. G.
Seroux d’Agincourt,” in Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d’Agincourt, Histoire de
l’Art par les Monumens, depuis sa décadence au IV e siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement
au XVIe, vol. 6 (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1810–1823), bk. 1, p. 7.
26. Pierre Hugues d’Hancarville, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines tirées
du cabinet de M. Hamilton, vol. 4 (Naples and Florence: Morelli, 1766–1776). For
more information on volumes by D’Hancarville, see Pascal Griener, Le Antichità
etrusche greche romane (1766–1776) di Pierre Hugues d’Hancarville. La pubblicazione
delle ceramiche antiche della prima collezione Hamilton (Rome: Ed. dell’Elefante,
1992); Alain Schnapp, “La pratique de la collection et ses conséquences sur l’histoire
de l’Antiquité. Le chevalier d’Hancarville,” in Annie-France Laurens and Krzysztof
Pomian, L’Anticomanie. La collection d’antiquités aux XVIIIe et XIX e siècles (Paris:
Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS], 1992), 209–
218.
27. “This collection followed on from works by Caylus, Stosch, Winckelmann . . . ,”
according to the introduction to Recueil de fragments de sculpture antique en terre
cuite (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1814). Plate 37 of the collection depicts the Comte
de Caylus’s funerary monument in the Église de Saint-Germain- l’Auxerrois in
Paris.
28. This text is excerpted from Mariani’s essay in d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art.
29. Antonio Conti, Lettere da Venezia a madame la comtesse de Caylus 1727–
1729: con l’aggiunta di un Discorso sullo stato della Francia, ed. S. Mamy (Florence:
Olschki, 2003).
30. De La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux . . . ,” 7.
31. Viaggio in Italia di una donna artista, I. “Souvenirs” di Élisabeth Vigée-L e
Brun, 1789–1792, critical edition presented by F. Mazzocca (Milan: Electa, 2004), 93.
32. De La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux . . . ,” 4.
33. Pierre Jean Mariette, Traité des pierres gravées [1750], anastatic repr., vol. 2
(Florence: Studio per Ed. Scelte, 1987).
34. Marie-Noëlle Pinot De Villechenon, “Fortune des fresques de Rome au XVIIIe
siècle; Pietro Sante Bartoli et le comte de Caylus,” Gazette des beaux-arts 116, no. 1461
(1990): 105–115.
35. For more on Flaxman, see David Bindman, John Flaxman, 1755–1826: Master
of the Purest Line, exhibition catalog, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 2003. For
more on Piroli, see Fulvia Spesso, “Tommaso Piroli, incisore romano, 1750–1824: Pro-
poste per un catalogo,” Nuovi annali della Scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari
9 (1995): 79–94. For more on neoclassical engravings, see Marco Fragonara, “Inci-
sione a contorno e l’idea del bello: Appunti sull’incisione neoclassica,” Rassegna di
studi e notizie 26 (2002): 71–96.
36. Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Prince-
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
37. Bernard De Montfaucon, Les Monumens de la Monarchie françoise, qui com-
prennent l’histoire de France avec les figures de chaque règne que l’injure des tems a
épargnées, vol. 5 (Paris: Julien-Michel Gandouin and Pierre François Giffart, 1729–
1733). See Claudine Poulain, “L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719–
1724) par Bernard de Montfaucon,” Dix-huitième siècle 27 (1995): 43–60.
38. Henri Loyrette, “Une source pour la reconstruction du polyptyque d’Ugolino
da Siena à Santa Croce,” Paragone 343 (1978): 15–23.
39. Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, Œuvre critique, edition created and pre-
sented by É. Jollet (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts [ENSBA], 2001);
and Else Marie Bukdahl, Diderot, critique d’art, trans. from Danish by J.-P. Faucher
(Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1980).
40. François René de Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale, vol. 1, 1789–1807,
texts chosen and annotated by B. d’Andlau, P. Christophorov, and P. Riberette, “Biblio-
thèque de la Pléiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 298–314.
41. Paul-Louis Courier, “Lettres écrites de France et d’Italie,” in Œuvres complètes,
text chosen and annotated by M. Allem, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1941), 645–927.
42. Frederick Hawkins, The French State in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Chapman and Hall, 1888), vol. 1, 41.
43. Seroux d’Agincourt, “Discours préliminaire. Objet et Plan de l’ouvrage,” in His-
toire de l’Art par les Monumens, vol. 1, 2–7.
44. See Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment.
The Work and World of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
45. Bruno Neveu, “L’histoire littéraire de la France et l’érudition bénédictine au
siècle des Lumières,” Journal des savants 2 (April–June 1979): 73–113. See also Neveu,
“Communication de synthèse,” in Daniel-Odon Hurel and Raymond Rogé (eds.),
Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, Carcassonne conference proceedings, October 1996
(Saint-Wandrille, France: Éd. de Fontenelle, 1998), 127–135.
46. Mario Praz, Gusto neoclassico (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1956),
97–110.
47. Francis Haskell, “Gibbon and the History of Art,” in Haskell, Past and Present
in Art and Taste, 16–29.
48. Ezio Raimondi, “Letteratura e scienza nella ‘Storia’ del Tiraboschi,” in Rai-
mondi, I lumi dell’erudizione. Saggi sul settecento italiano (Milan: Vita e Pensiero,
1989), 125–141. The first edition of Storia della letteratura italiana was published in
Modena in 13 vols. from 1772 to 1782.
49. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia, in 2 vols. (Bassano, Italy: Remondini
di Venezia, 1795–1796).
50. See Brendan Cassidy, The Life & Letters of Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798): Artist
& Art Dealer in Eighteenth-Century Rome (London: Harvey Miller; Turnhout, Bel-
gium: Brepols, 2011).
51. David Irwin, “Gavin Hamilton: Archaeologist, Painter, and Dealer,” Art Bulle-
tin 44, no. 2 (June 1962): 87–102.
52. Peintres primitifs. Collection de tableaux apportée de l’Italie et publiée par M.
le chevalier Artaud de Montor (Paris: Challamel, 1843).
53. Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, Théorie du geste dans l’art de la peinture,
renfermant plusieurs préceptes applicables à l’art du théâtre, suivie des principes du
beau optique . . . (Paris: Magimel, 1813).
54. Arthur Bourdeaut, “François et Pierre Cacault. Les origines du Concordat et
le musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie
de Bretagne 8, no. 2 (June 1927).
55. Dominique-Vivant Denon: l’œil de Napoléon, exhibition catalog, Louvre Mu-
seum (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1999).
56. Three years later, William Y. Ottley published the volume A Series of Plates En-
graved After the Paintings and Sculptures of the Most Eminent Masters of the Early
Florentine School, Intended to Illustrate the History of the Restoration of the Arts of
Design in Italy (London: Colnaghi, 1826).
57. See Mariani, in D’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art.
58. For more on Superville, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Symbol and Myth: Hum-
bert de Superville’s Essay on Absolute Signs in Art (Cranbury, NJ: University of Dela-
ware, 1979).
59. Édouard Pommier, “Le goût de la République,” in Ideologie e patrimonio sto-
rico culturale nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica. A proposito del trattato di Tolen-
tino, Tolentino conference proceedings, 1997 (Rome: Ministero per I beni e le attività
culturali, 2000), 7–38. For more on Lettres à Miranda [1796], see the critical edition
established by Édouard Pommier, Antoine C. Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres sur le
préjudice qu’occasionneraient aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monuments
de l’art de l’Italie, le démembrement de ses écoles et la spoliation de ses collections,
galeries, musées . . . , referred to as Lettres à Miranda (Paris: Macula, 1996).
60. Marc Fumaroli, “Granet in Rome,” in Paesaggi perduti. Granet a Roma, 1802–
1824, exhibition catalog (Rome and Milan: Electa, 1996), 17–22. The Institut national
d’histoire de l’art [INHA] library (Jacques Doucet collection) has a copy of Mémoires
de Granet, écrits par lui même (ms. 1005). Other copies exist at the Arbaud Museum
in Aix-en-Provence and at the Institut de France. The Mémoires de Granet were pub-
lished in installments by the newspaper Le Temps between September and October
1872 and, with numerous breaks, also in the Revue de Marseille et de Provence 8, 136–
150. Isabelle Néto presented a critical edition of Mémoires de Granet in her doctoral
thesis, “Correspondance de François Marius Granet,” under the direction of B. Fou-
cart (Université Paris-Sorbonne [Paris IV], 1991), vol. 6, 1642–1755.
61. Denis Coutagne, Granet, peintre de Rome (Aix-en-Provence: Association des

amis du musée Granet, 1992), and, by the same author, François Marius Granet, une
vie pour la peinture, 1775–1849 (Aix-en-Provence: Éditions Ville d’Aix-en-Provence:
2005).
Afterword
1. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry
Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 317.
2. Ibid., 351.
3. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H. L. Havell (London: Macmillan, 1890), 2.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Theodore Adorno, Spätstil Beethovens, in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte
Aufsätze 1928–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964); Adorno, “Late
Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2002), 564–657.
6. Longinus, On the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris Manuscript,
trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 155–
157.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. Ibid., 83.
9. Ibid., 121.
10. Ibid., 97.
11. Ibid., 61.
INDEX OF NAMES
Adelphes. See Dupuy brothers Augustine (saint), 70, 73, 87, 93, 214
Adorno, Theodor, 329 Aulus Gellius, 88, 126, 130, 166, 230, 245,
Africano, Canstantino, 191 264
Alain (philosopher), 190 Auzout, Adrian, 120–21
Alberti, Giovan Battista, 75, 169–72
Alberto III Pio (prince of Carpi), 18 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24, 31, 32, 98, 131,
Alcuin, 18 189, 248
Aldrovandi, 42 Baillet, Adrien, 23, 118, 160, 243
Aldus Manutius. See Manutius, Aldus Balland, Hubert, 20
Aleandro, Girolamo, 81 Balzac, Honoré de, 246
Alexandar I (tsar of Russia), 314 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de. See Guez
Alfonso the Magnanimous, 77 de Balzac, Jean-Louis
Allatius, Leo, 34, 332 Barbaro, Daniele, 42, 201–4, 206
Ambrogini, Angelo. See Politian (Angelo Barbaro, Ermolao, 203
Ambrogini) Barbaro, Francesco, 5–6, 16–17, 34, 69–
Ambrosius, Tranquillo, 130 72, 193, 207; mentioned, 15, 18, 82,
Amerbachs, 80 90, 174
Anguillara, Orso dell’, 84 Barberini (cardinal), 46
Aphthonius, 175 Barberini, Maffeo, 57
Aquinas, Thomas (saint), 198 Barberini family, 28, 43, 161
Arbour, Romeo, 159 Barcinio, 177
Arendt, Hannah, 53–54 Barclay, John, 54–64, 105, 113, 134, 159,
Aretino, Leonardo. See Bruni, Leonardo 185
(Leonardo Aretino) Barclay, William, 57
Aretino, Pietro, 178, 182–83, 184, 189, Bardi, Giovanni Maria dei, 187
210 Barnes, Anne, 15, 66–67
Argyropoulos, Jean, 7, 69, 93 Baron, Hans, 90
Ariosto, 97 Barthélémey, Jean-Jacques, 281, 289,
Aristides, Aelius, 270 292, 320
Aristophanes, 79, 235 Bartoli, Pietro Santi, 288, 290
Aristotle, 235, 238; mentioned, 5, 8, 25, Bary, René, 146
56, 111, 126, 130, 152, 191 Barzizza, Gasparino, 207
Armogathe, Jean-Robert, 125 Bates, William, 34, 160, 350n6
Arnauld, Antoine, 108, 146 Baudelaire, Charles, 325
Aron, Raymond, 279 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 320
Athenaeus of Naucratis, 88, 126, 157, Bayle, Pierre, 24, 26, 29, 31–32, 65, 131,
264 136–37, 184, 224, 268, 274; men-
Aubrey, John, 248, 251 tioned, 13, 23, 34, 37, 143, 249
371
372 Index of Names
Beaumont, Pauline de, 307 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 13, 266

Beauval, Basnage de, 281 Boswell, James, 34, 160, 239, 249–50
Beccadelli, Antonio, 77 Bots, Hans, 67, 68
Bell, Quentin, 250 Bouchardon, Edme, 282, 283, 285, 286,
Bellefonds, Madame de, 243–44 287, 301, 303, 305, 307
Bellegarde, Morvan de, 145–46 Boucher, François, 275, 292, 303, 305
Bellori, Gian Pietro, 333 Boucherat, Chancellor, 243
Bembo, Pietro, 98, 183, 320; mentioned, Bouhier, Jean, 124, 256, 257, 258, 259
36, 37, 39, 42, 71, 184, 204, 206, 211 Bouhours, Dominique, 145–46, 243–
Benci, Francesco, 184–85 44
Benda, Julien, 51–52 Boulainvilliers, 287
Benedict XIV Lambertini (pope), 253, Boulliau, Samuel, 119
258 Bourdelot, Abbot, 107, 121, 158
Bernard (saint), 74 Bourget, 145
Bernier, François, 31, 33 Boyle, Sir Robert, 120
Bernis, Cardinal de, 310 Bracciolini, Poggio, 15–16, 34, 69–70, 71,
Bessarion (cardinal), 85 74, 174, 193, 202, 207; mentioned, 6,
Béthune family, 117 76, 83, 90, 123, 191, 207, 322
Beyle, Marie-Henri. See Stendhal Brague, Rémi, 200
(Marie-Henri Beyle) Braudel, Fernand, 50, 51
Bignon, Abbot, 116, 278 Bresson, Agnès, 30, 33, 44
Bignon, Jérôme (attorney general), 116 Brignon, Abbot, 117
Bignon family, 117 Brossette, 250
Biondi, Flavio, 75 Brunel, 218
Bismarck, Otto von, 53 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 248
Bisticci, Vespasiano dei, 75 Bruni, Leonardo (Leonardo Aretino), 6,
Blancey, 263 16, 17, 72, 75, 90, 193
Bloom, Allan, 276 Budé, Guillaume, 20, 21, 37, 81, 117, 124,
Boccaccio, 75, 133; mentioned, 7, 69, 82, 337n28
83, 94, 172, 186, 214 Buffon, 257
Boccalini, Trajano, 22–23, 170, 183–85, Bussy-Rabutin, 297
189, 210; mentioned, 171–72, 178
Bodin, Jean, 56, 58, 105 Cacault, François, 311
Bodley, Thomas, 34 Caccini, Guilio, 99, 188
Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Calasso, Roberto, 246
Boëthius), 93 Callot, Jacques, 188
Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux), Calvet, Esprit (abbot), 288
166, 182, 246, 249, 250, 256, 298, 324, Campanella, Tommaso, 73, 106
325, 329–30 Campion, Henri de, 152
Bolzoni, Lina, 55 Camuccini, Vincenzo, 312
Bonfatti, Emilio, 67 Canavero, A. Tarabochia, 191
Bonifacio, Giovanni, 63 Canova, Antonia, 305, 310, 312
Bonneveau, Madame de, 120 Capella, Martianus, 93, 178, 179
Bonneville, Nicolas de, 23, 67 Carcavy, Pierre de, 119, 121
Borea, Evelina, 293 Carlyle, Thomas, 250
Borromeo, Charles, 261 Carpaccio, 309
Index of Names 373
Carrache, Annibal, 291 Clovis, 287, 308

Casaubon, Isaac, 128, 130 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 120, 121, 262,
Cassiano, 333 281–82, 289, 321
Cassini, Giovanni, 147 Colonna, Francesco, 5, 177
Castiglione, Baldassare, 55, 59, 111, 202, Colonna, Giovanni, 73
323; mentioned, 56, 71, 90, 98, 113, Colonna, Prospero (cardinal), 174
127, 156, 188, 189 Colonna, Vittoria, 182
Catherine of Siena, 5 Comte, August, 267, 269
Caylus, Anne Claude, Comte de, 268– Condé, Prince of. See Louis I, Prince of
69, 278–92, 300–306; mentioned, Condé
139, 264, 272, 294, 296, 297, 303, 305, Conrart, Valentin, 114, 152, 156, 158
308, 332 Conti, Antonio Schinella (abbot), 281,
Caylus, Madame de, 146, 284 284, 303
Cesi, Federico, 97 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 198, 321
Cézanne, Paul, 313 Corbinelli, Jacques, 205
Chalcondyle, 79 Cordorcet, 241
Chambray, Fréart de, 333 Corneille, Pierre, 223, 307, 325
Chambré, Anne de, 349n13 Corvin, Matthias (king of Hungary),
Chapelain, Jean, 26, 115, 119, 120, 154, 191
161 Cosimo the Elder. See Medici,
Chapelle, 165, 253 Cosimo de’
Charles I (king of England), 60 Coulanges, 297
Charles II (king of England), 120, 147 Courcelle, Pierre, 73
Charles III (king of Spain), 288 Courcelles, Étienne de, 69
Charles VIII (king of France), 77, 323 Courier, Paul-Louis, 307
Charron, Pierre, 149, 150 Coutagne, Denis, 313
Chastellux, François-Jean de, 247–48 Coypel, Charles, 281, 282, 286, 301
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 245, Crébillon, Prosper, 307
247, 258, 267–68, 277, 307; men- Crébillon family, 145
tioned, 326 Crescimbeni, Giovanni Mario, 171, 176,
Châtelet, Madame du, 147 178
Chavannes, Puvis de, 185 Crozat, Pierre, 301, 304, 305; men-
Chesterfield, Lord, 147–48 tioned, 280, 282–83, 285, 287, 288
Chevreau, Urbain, 245 Cujas, Jacques, 117
Chiaramonti, Scipione, 129 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 52, 171
Chichele, Henry (archbishop of Canter-
bury), 34 Dacier, 325
Choiseul-Gouffier, Count, 306 Dacier, Madame, 275
Chrysolara, Manuel, 85 d’Agincourt, Seroux, 289, 293–315
Cicero, 70, 72, 178, 212, 213, 216, 217, d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 275; men-
320; mentioned, 5, 8, 21, 25, 76, 83, tioned, 34, 148, 241, 248, 275, 276,
88, 130, 135, 152, 156, 157, 222, 317, 306
321 d’Alessandro, Alessandro, 175
Clavière, Marquis de, 288 Damaskios (philosopher), 229
Clerserlier, Claude, 119 Dangeau, Abbot, 117, 158
Clodion, 305 d’Angiviller, Comte, 291, 292, 293, 310
374 Index of Names
Dante Alighieri, 83, 84, 93, 133, 179, 320; De Thou family, 117, 257
mentioned, 86, 94, 98, 182 d’Hancarville, Pierre-François Hugues,
Darwin, Charles, 33 289, 302
d’Auvergne, Jacques, 161 d’Herbelot, Monsieur, 158
David, Jacques-Louis, 271, 276, 291–92, Dibon, Paul, 13, 14–15, 25, 67, 68, 201
295, 305, 310, 312 Dickinson, Emily, 246
De Brosses, Charles, 252–65, 307, 313 Diderot, Denis, 271, 278–79, 287, 290,
de Bueil, Honorat. See Racan, Honorat 302, 305, 306; mentioned, 276, 295,
de Bueil, marquis de 319
Decembrio, Angelo, 17, 88–92, 96, 126, Dionisotti, Carlo, 71
193–94 Dolce, Ludovico, 181, 182
De Chaulieu, 140 Dolet, Etienne, 99
De Fénelon, 256 Dorat, Jean, 100
Deffand, Madame du, 283 Douay, Françoise, 146
De Fontelle, 143 Du Bos, Abbot, 253, 262, 263, 287
de Huet, 165 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 265
Delacroix, Eugène, 333 Dufourny, Léon, 311
Delay, Jean, 250–51 du Maine, Duchess, 147
d’Elbene, Bartolommeo, 134 Dumarsias, 146
Della Casa, Giovanni, 127 Du May, 38
Della Porta, Giovanni Battista, 27, 42, 63 Dupront, Alphonse, 51, 54
Della Rovere, Francesco (duke of Dupuy, Claude, 161
Urbino). See Sixtus IV della Rovere Dupuy, Clément, 161
(pope) Dupuy, Jacques, 30, 116, 160–61; men-
Della Torre, Arnaldo, 169 tioned, 107, 161, 209
de Ménage, 165 Dupuy, Pierre, 30, 37, 115, 160, 161–
De Mesmes family, 117, 257 65
Democritus, 215 Dupuy brothers (aka “Adelphes”), 30,
Demosthenes, 212, 232, 329, 330 113, 115–17, 124–25, 154, 157, 158;
Denon, Dominique-Vivant, 311, 312 mentioned, 14, 38, 43, 89, 100, 107,
de Piles, Roger, 285 118, 123, 131, 156, 205
de Sales, Francis (saint), 105, 111, 113–14, d’Urfe, Honoré, 114, 175, 176, 325
154 Du Vair, Guillaume (abbot of Guîtres),
Desargues, Girard, 109, 119, 135 38, 43, 47–48, 163, 165
Descartes, René, 8, 31, 43–44, 69, 110–
11, 135–36, 139, 196, 243; mentioned, Edel, Leon, 250
32, 33, 46, 73, 109, 118, 164, 189, 256, Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1–2
278 Elias, Norbert, 109
Desmaizeaux, Pierre, 34, 249 Ellmann, Richard, 250
de Staël, Madame, 112, 247 Enzensberger, 54
d’Este, Leonello (marquis), 17, 89–92, Erasmus, 15, 20, 35–36, 50, 80–81, 95,
96 97, 122, 133–34, 193, 213, 214–17,
de Suède, Christine, 121 219–20, 221, 224–25, 324; men‑
De Thou, Jacques-Auguste, 22, 37, 154, tioned, 29, 33, 42, 43, 69, 107, 124,
165, 204; mentioned, 14, 30, 38, 160, 157, 161, 182, 184, 208, 218, 223, 253,
185, 206 254
Index of Names 375
Erycius Puteanus. See Pozzo, Enrico dal Gaultier, Denis, 155

(Erycius Puteanus) Gaultier, Théophile, 186
Esprit, Jacques, 115 Gaza, Theodore, 85
Gelée, Claude, 185
Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 278, 302 Genet, Jean, 238
Faret, Nicolas, 107 Genette, Gérard, 146, 222
Félibien, André, 197, 242 Geoffrin, Madame, 142, 147, 299–300,
Feltre, Vittorino da, 80, 85–86 303
Fénelon, 234, 262, 284, 298, 302, 320 George III (king of Sweden and
Ferretti, Guiliano, 150 Goethe), 310
Ficino, Marsilio, 191–200, 211; men- George of Trebizond, 85
tioned, 7, 8, 69, 76, 77, 78, 85, 93, Gibbon, Edward, 267, 270–71, 275, 278–
203 80, 309
Flaubert, Gustave, 53, 238 Gide, André, 250–51
Flaxman, John, 287, 305 Giles of Viterbo (cardinal), 94
Fontaine, 279 Giocosa, Giuseppe, 326
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 138, Giorgio, Francesco di, 203, 209
142, 242, 244; mentioned, 34, 136, Giovio, Paolo, 240
146, 160, 234, 241, 248, 256 Girodet, 287, 290
Forbes, 250 Giustiniani, Vincenzo, 187–88
Forbin, Auguste de, 313 Goclenius, Conrad, 36
Forster, John, 250 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 249–50
Foucault, Michel, 146 Gombaud, Antoine. See Méré, Cheva-
Foucquet, 255, 262 lier de (Antoine Gombaud)
Frances I (king of France), 321, 323 Goncourt brothers, 279
Frederick II of Prussia, 148 Gori, P. Antonio Maria, 255, 262
Frénicle, Nicolas, 175–76 Gouget, Abbot, 241
Friedrich, Caspar David, 314 Goulu, Jean, 222, 223–24
Frobenius, 80 Gournay, Mademoiselle de, 222
Fromilhague, René, 223 Gracián, Baltasar, 62, 151
Gracq, Julien, 265
Gabriel, Ange, 307 Granet, François Marius, 313
Gaburri, Niccolò, 255, 281, 288 Gravina, 284
Gaignières, François Roger de, 297, 307 Gray, Hannah, 192
Galen of Pergamon, 56, 191 Grégoire, Abbé, 23
Galilei, Vincenzo, 97, 187 Gregory, Tullio, 201
Galileo Galilei, 206; mentioned, 45, 46, Grimarest, 243
97, 98, 120, 135, 189, 198 Grimm, Baron von (Friedreich Mel-
Gamaches, 146 chior), 147
Gambara, Veronica, 182 Grocyn, William, 18, 80
Garin, Eugenio, 192 Gronovius, 253
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 250 Grotius, Hugo, 106
Gassendi, Pierre, 26–27, 29–30, 31, 33, Guade de Frontenac, Marie Henriette
38–39, 40–41, 42, 44–46, 48–49, 116, de, 118
118, 124, 160, 196–97; mentioned, 34, Gualdo, Paolo, 39–40, 124, 184, 204–6;
111, 128, 135, 146, 161, 165, 253 mentioned, 34, 128, 160, 207
376 Index of Names
Gualengius, Joannes, 91 Inghirami, Tommaso, 94, 96

Guarini, Guarino, 16, 17, 193 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 185,
Guazzo, Stefano, 111, 113, 114, 127, 156 313
Guerchin (painter), 177
Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis, 26, 30, 125, James, Henry, 145
163–64, 165, 223–24; mentioned, 107, James I (king of England), 57, 60, 63,
112, 156, 161, 166 64
Guise, Duchess of, 297 Jerome (saint), 5
Guise, Duke of (François de Lorraine), Jesus Christ, 326, 327
244 John XXIII (antipope), 71, 207
Gusdorf, Georges, 117 Johnson, Samuel, 249–50
Gutenberg, 4–5 Joubert, Joseph, 246
Jove, Paul, 75, 97, 172, 351n10
Habert, Germain, 118 Jovianus. See Pontano, Giovanni (Jovia-
Habert, Philippe (abbot of Cerisy), nus Pontanus)
118 Joyce, James, 5
Habert de Montmore, Henri Louis, Julienne, Jean de, 301
113, 117, 118 Julius II (pope), 93, 94, 95, 181, 202, 207,
Hadrian, 233 208
Halévy, Élie, 52 Julius Caesar, 55
Hall (moralist), 62 Justel, Henri, 158
Hallé, Pierre, 161 Justinian (Emperor), 8, 76
Hamilton, Gavin, 290, 310
Harvey, Gabriel, 107 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 53, 320–21
Haskell, Francis, 279, 293 Kapuściński, 54
Hazard, Paul, 13, 14, 65 Kauffman, Angelica, 310
Hegel, Georg, 23, 33 Kelley, Donald, 117
Heinsus, Nicholas, 161 Kepler, Johannes, 198
Henri, François, 118 Keyserling, Hermann von, 53–54, 64
Henri III (king of France), 218 Kipling, Rudyard, 271
Henri IV (king of France), 37, 57, 99, Kirschstein, Max, 66
135 Koselleck, Reinhart, 268
Hermogenes, 220, 322 Koyre, Alexandre, 117
Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 119, 248 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 74
Homer, 94, 182, 232, 248, 266, 275, 284, Kühlmann, Wilhelm, 67
288, 330
Horace, 255, 264 La Blache, Vidal de, 52
Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 56, 113 La Boderie, Guy Le Fèvre de, 196
Huber, Michel, 288 La Boétie, Étienne de, 218
Huet, Pierre Daniel, 30, 33, 117, 135 Laboureur, Louis Le, 30–31
Hugo, Victor, 246 La Bruyère, 62, 141, 248
Humbert de Superville, David Pierre, Laertius, Diogenes, 230, 240
312 La Fare, 140
Hume, David, 147 La Fayette, Comte de, 115
Huppert, George, 117 La Fayette, Madame de, 115, 244
Huyghens, Christiaan, 119–20, 121 Lafond, Jean, 159, 165
Index of Names 377
La Fontaine, Jean de, 140, 146, 165, 166, Le Sueur, 291

249 Leto, Pomponio. See Pomponius Laetus
Lagrenée, 286, 303 (Pomponio Leto)
La Hoguette, Fortin de, 115, 116, 125, L’Hopital, Michel de, 43
149–58, 346n16, 348n2 Liddell, H. G., 229
Lallermand, Jean, 21 Ligorio, Pirro, 280, 332
La Luzerne, Gabary de, 161 Linacre, Thomas, 18, 79, 80
Lambartini (cardinal). See Benedict XIV Lipsius, Justus, 29, 37, 39, 92, 217, 218–
Lambertini (pope) 23; mentioned, 38, 42, 100, 205
Lambert, Madame de, 115, 142, 146, 147, Löber, Christian, 24
257 Locke, John, 266
Lamoignon family, 117 Longinus, Cassius, 275, 324–33
La Mothe Le Vayer, François, 150 Longueil, Bruno, 218
La Motte, 256 Lorenzo the Magnificent, 98
Lamy, Bernard, 146 Lorraine, Christine de, 188
Landino, Christoforo, 90, 126 Lorraine, Duchess of, 297
Lang, Matthias, 95 Lorraine, François de (duke of Guise),
Lanson, Gustave, 65–66, 248 244
Lanzi, Luigi, 309–10 Louis I, Prince of Condé, 121, 239
La Poterie, Antoine de, 118 Louis XII (king of France), 77
La Rivière, Jacques de, 116, 158 Louis XIII (king of France): mentioned,
La Rochefoucauld, François de (moral- 43, 57, 60, 63, 64, 109, 114, 115, 121,
ist), 62, 115, 132, 140 152, 154
La Rochefoucauld, Monsieur de (states- Louis XIV (king of France), 23, 24, 31,
man), 26, 339n2 34, 79, 80, 116–17, 135, 138, 140, 153,
Larroque, Tamizey de, 30, 150 242, 243, 281–82, 289, 301, 318, 320,
La Sablière, Madame de, 158 324
La Salle, Gigault de, 302, 303–4 Louis XV (king of France), 143, 258, 282,
La Serre, Puget de, 149 285, 291, 296, 300, 303, 320
Lassalle, Roger, 34 Louis XVI (king of France), 296, 310
Latimer, William, 80 Louis XVIII (king of France), 314
Laurens, Pierre, 159 Lovati, Lovato, 84
Le Beau, Abbot, 300 Loyrette, Henri, 293, 306
Le Blanc, Abbot, 283 Lucan, 270
Le Brun, Charles, 285, 291 Lucien, 138, 182, 234
Leclercq, Jean (monk), 73, 173 Luther, Martin, 20, 208
Le Gallois, 121 Lüthy, Hubert, 52
Leibniz, Gottfried, 23, 33, 284
le More, Ludovic, 77 Mabillon, Jean, 253–54, 298
Lemoyne, François, 307 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet, abbé de, 318–19,
Leo X Medici (pope): mentioned, 19, 320
79, 95, 181, 194, 202, 207 Macchiavelli, Gian Giacomo, 312
Leonardi, Monsignor, 178, 182–83 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 3, 185, 270, 323–24
Leonardo da Vinci, 89, 283 Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodo-
Leopold (grand duke of Tuscany), 120 sius, 88, 126, 157, 264
Le Roy, Louis, 34, 128 Maffei, Scipione, 255, 299, 332
378 Index of Names
Magalotti, Lorenzo, 119, 195 Mellan, Claude, 45

Magendie, 165 Ménage, Gilles, 112, 116, 158, 161, 166
Maintenon, Madame de, 280, 301 Mencke, Johannes Burckhardt, 131–32,
Malebranche, Nicolas, 135, 137, 256, 266 224–25
Malézieu, Nicolas de, 147 Mencke, Otto, 131, 224–25
Malherbe, François de, 107, 114, 156, Méré, Chevalier de (Antoine Gom-
165, 243 baud), 120, 141–42, 146
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 72 Mersenne, Marin, 31, 47, 117, 122; men-
Mallet, 278 tioned, 29, 107, 109, 125, 135
Manning, Henry Edward (cardinal), 242 Michelangelo, 99, 186, 187, 312, 331, 332
Mantuano, Battista, 74 Michelet, Jules, 51, 246
Manutius, Aldus, 5, 17–20, 76, 78–81, Mignard, Nicolas, 289
194, 206, 207; mentioned, 9, 82, 98, Mirandole, Pic de la, 78, 203
131, 211 Mitton, 120
Manutius, Paul, 217 Molé, Mathieu, 162
Manutuano, Battista, 180 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 140;
Marais, Mathieu, 124 mentioned, 112, 136, 146, 165, 166,
Margolin, Jean-Claude, 214 243
Mariani, Miarelli, 312, 365n9 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 266, 267, 271, 272,
Mariette, Pierre Jean, 282, 283, 288, 303, 277, 279, 292, 319
304, 305, 306 Monconys, 119
Marin, Joseph Charles, 307 Moncrif, Paradis de, 142, 143–45
Marino, Giambattista, 189 Montabert, Paillot de, 310–11
Marivaux, Pierre de, 112, 139, 143, 145 Montaigne, 33, 86, 152, 156, 196, 197,
Marmontel, 279 198, 217–18, 221–22, 223, 230–31, 234,
Marolles, Michel de, 152 253, 297, 324–25; mentioned, 6, 38,
Marriette, Pierre-Jean, 280–81, 281 68, 105, 108, 112, 118, 126, 128, 130,
Martelli, Ugolino, 99 131, 136, 138, 149, 150, 206, 249, 250
Marx, Karl, 279, 296 Montemayor, Jorge de, 176
Massii (cardinal), 333 Montesquieu, Charles, 52–53, 53, 320
Maucroix, 165 Monteverdi, Claudio, 188
Maurois, André, 229, 251 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 253–54, 270,
Mazarin (cardinal), 56, 89, 140, 150, 297 282, 305, 307
Mazarin, Duchess, 147, 244 Montmaur, Pierre de, 112, 166
McLuhan, Marshall, 1 Montmore, Henri Louis Habert de. See
Mead, Richard, 281 Habert de Montmore, Henri Louis
Medici, Catherine de’, 90 Montor, Artaud de, 310, 311, 313
Medici, Cosimo de’, 77, 85, 99, 187, 192 Montpensier, Mademoiselle de, 153, 158
Medici, Ferdinand de’, 188 Moray, Robert, 120
Medici, Giovanni de’. See Leo X Medici More, Thomas, 21, 73, 134
(pope) Morelli, Jacopo (abbot), 309
Medici, Giuliano de’, 96 Morhof, Daniel Georg, 23, 62, 125, 127–
Medici, Lorenzo de’, 96, 191, 192 31
Medici, Marie de’, 99 Motteville, Madame de, 153
Médon, Bernard, 161 Murat, Caroline, 313
Mei, Girolamo, 97, 187 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 91, 255
Index of Names 379
Muret, Marc-Antoine, 185, 217 Paulinus of Nola, 93

Murphy, James, 213 Pavai, Antonio Guainerio da, 191
Mussato, Albertino, 84 Pecquet (doctor), 119
Musurus, Marco, 18, 79 Peiresc, Nicolas Claude Fabri de, 26–49,
107, 116, 122, 124, 196–97, 198, 199,
Naipaul, V. S., 54 205; mentioned, 57, 60, 131, 150, 159,
Naudé, Gabriel, 34, 38, 129, 150, 161, 245 161, 165, 206, 253, 254, 280, 288
Nepo, Cornelius, 231 Pellison-Fontanier, Paul, 152, 156, 348n6
Neuilly, Comte de, 254–55, 259, 261 Peri (artist), 99
Neveu, Bruno, 68 Peri, Jacopo, 188
Newton, Sir Isaac, 13, 33, 242, 284 Pericles, 137
Nicaise, Claude (abbot), 116, 117, 158 Perrault, Charles, 27, 242, 282
Niccoli, Niccolo, 16 Perrault, Claude, 107
Nicholas V (pope), 207 Perrault brothers, 121
Nicolas of Clairvaux (monk), 72 Perrot, Jacques Auguste, 161
Nicole, Pierre, 132, 141–42, 146 Petit, 120
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 272 Petrarch, 3–4, 6, 7, 70, 72, 73–74, 83–
Nisard, Charles, 279, 289 85, 88, 130, 133–34, 172–75, 176,
Nodier, Charles, 295 178, 179, 214, 252, 299, 320, 352n13,
Nora, Pierre, 51 358n4; mentioned, 21, 35, 39, 68, 69,
Noris (cardinal), 255 82, 94, 95, 124, 131, 170, 182, 185, 188,
206, 254, 269, 317
Oedipus, 230–31, 232 Phalerum, Demetrius de, 130
Ogier, François, 158 Phélypeaux family, 118
Oldenburg, Henry, 119 Philippe II, 56
Orsi, Giovan Gioseffo, 299 Philostratus, 231
Ottley, William Young, 311–12 Pierius. See Salutati, Coluccio (Pierius)
Oudin, Father, 257 Pigalle, 285, 303
Ovid, 18, 19 Pignoria, 42
Pinchesne, Marc, 114
Paciaudi, Paolo, 289 Pinelli, Gian Vincenzo, 37, 39–40, 42,
Palissot, Charles, 132 124, 184, 203–6; mentioned, 29, 30,
Parigi, Giulio, 188 38, 43, 196, 209, 211
Pâris, Pierre Charles, 311 Pintard, René, 13–15, 66, 109, 150, 160
Pascal, Blaise, 107, 110–11, 120, 135, 136, Pirckheimer, Willibald, 36
140, 141, 224–25, 299; mentioned, Piroli, Thomas, 305, 312
109, 119, 142, 146, 165, 246, 297 Pisan, Christine de, 112
Pasquier, Etienne, 52 Pius II Piccolomini (pope), 89, 207
Passionei, Domenico Silvio (cardinal), Pius VI Braschi (pope), 310
253, 257 Plaisance, Michel, 187
Patin, Guy, 34, 89, 121, 123, 245 Plato, 194, 235, 322; mentioned, 2, 5, 8,
Patrizi, Francesco, 209 25, 76, 77, 79, 126, 137, 178, 191, 232,
Paul of Tarsus (saint), 87, 213, 326 326
Paul II (pope), 77, 95 Plautus, 77, 95, 96, 223
Paul III Farnese (pope), 36, 208–9 Plethon, Gemistus, 85
Paul V Borghese (pope), 184, 206 Pliny the Elder, 76, 233, 240, 288
380 Index of Names
Plotinus, 192, 198 Raphael (painter), 93–95, 181, 202, 203,

Plutarch, 233; mentioned, 126, 152, 163, 208, 263; mentioned, 77, 174, 178,
231, 240, 248, 249 202, 207, 233, 323
Poggio. See Bracciolini, Poggio Renan, Ernest, 51, 54, 236, 267, 269, 272
Politian (Angelo Ambrogini), 98; men- Renaudot, Théophraste, 107, 121, 224
tioned, 44, 71, 78, 188, 203 Requier, 33
Poliziano, Angelo. See Politian (Angelo Rhenanus, Beatus, 34
Ambrogini) Riario (cardinal), 20, 95, 96
Polybius, 270 Riccoboni, Luigi, 285
Pomian, Krzysztof, 67 Richelieu, Alphonse-Louis du Plessis de
Pomponius Laetus (Pomponio Leto), 77, (cardinal), 43
93, 94, 95 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis (car-
Pontano, Giovanni (Jovianus Pontanus), dinal and statesman), 43, 61–62, 129,
77, 177, 322–23 224; mentioned, 60, 80, 106, 107, 156,
Ponte, Giulia da, 203 159, 321
Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste (Molière). See Rigault, Adrien, 34, 160
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) Rigault, Nicolas, 30, 34, 123, 124, 154,
Possevino (monk), 217 161–65
Poussin, Nicolas, 197, 199, 332–33; men- Robault, 119
tioned, 177, 185, 196, 233, 242, 243, Robert, Hubert, 299–300, 303
265, 291, 332–33 Robert of Anjou (king of Naples), 84
Pozzi, Giovanni, 172 Roberval (mathematician), 119
Pozzo, Cassiano dal, 29, 205, 289, 332 Rocheblave, 279
Pozzo, Enrico dal (Erycius Puteanus), Rohan, Charles de, 303
39, 42 Rohault, 120
Previtali, Giovanni, 293 Rollin, Charles, 318, 320
Prit, George, 24–25 Ronsard, Pierre de, 100
Proust, Marcel, 53, 114, 145, 248 Rosenblum, Robert, 305
Puccini, Giacomo, 326 Roslin, 303
Rossi, Paolo, 55
Quaï, Maurice, 295 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 269, 270, 271–
Quincy, Quatremère de, 8, 289, 295, 76; mentioned, 148, 278, 291, 292,
300, 302, 310, 312–13, 332 318, 319, 320
Quinet, Edgar, 319–20 Rubens, Peter Paul, 92, 332
Quint, Charles, 56 Rubens, Philip, 92
Quintilian, 7, 331; mentioned, 8, 95, 130, Ruscelli, Giacomo, 202
165, 193, 212, 215, 222, 323, 324
Quintin, Louis Quarré de, 259, 260, 263 Sablé, Madame de, 115
Sainte-Albine, Remond de, 143–44
Rabelais, François, 99, 123, 126 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 114–15,
Racan, Honorat de Bueil, marquis de, 245–48, 249, 250
243 Sainte-Palaye, La Curne de, 307
Racine, Jean, 165, 239, 256 Saint-Évremond, Charles de, 146, 147,
Rambouillet, Marquise de, 113–15, 154 249
Ramus, Petrus, 100 Saint-Mard, Toussaint Rémond de, 138–
Rand, William, 33–34, 48–49 39, 146, 284
Index of Names 381
Saint-Réal, Abbot of, 244 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 54, 252,

Saint-Yenne, Lafont de, 281–82, 284, 306 262, 310, 313
Sallo, Denis de, 23, 224 Strachey, Lytton, 241–42, 248, 251
Sallust, 223, 258, 259–61 Strauss, Leo, 235, 266, 267, 271–72, 276,
Salmasius, 29 292, 319
Salmon, M., 116 Suetonius, 233, 235, 238–39, 242, 248,
Salmon family, 158 249
Salutati, Coluccio (Pierius), 174, 176; Sulpitius, Johannes (Sulpizio da Verolo),
mentioned, 6, 7, 69, 70, 83 95–96
Sangallo, Giuliano da, 202 Summonzio, 177
Sannazaro, Jacopo, 174, 175, 176, 177– Swift, Jonathan, 298
78, 181–82; mentioned, 170, 171, 180,
184 Tacitus, 55, 92, 184, 212, 221, 223, 234,
Santi Bartoli, Pietro, 303–4 270
Sanuto, Marino, 18, 19, 79 Taine, Hippolyte, 51, 248
Sarpi, Paolo, 22, 100, 184, 206 Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon, 113, 114
Sarrau, Ismaël, 161 Tasso, 97
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 238 Tencin, Madame de, 139, 345n4; men-
Saumaise, Claude, 30, 37, 44, 129, tioned, 115, 142, 146, 147
246n18, 280 Terence, 77, 95, 223
Savonarola, 77 Testi, Fulvio, 332
Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 37, 38, 55; men- Textor, Ravisius, 55
tioned, 29, 42, 44, 100, 128, 259, 280 Thévenot, Melchisédech, 120
Schalk, Fritz, 20, 68 Thucydides, 54, 55, 230, 232
Schnapp, Alain, 279 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 309
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 297 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 51, 52, 279, 280
Scott, R., 229 Tomasini, Jacopo Filippo, 42, 172
Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, 154 Torricelli, 120
Séguier family, 117 Traversari, Ambrogio, 74
Seneca, 72–73, 92, 214, 223 Trissino, 183
Sermain, Jean-Paul, 146 Trublet, Abbot, 142–43
Sévigné, Marquise de, 297–98 Tunstal, Cuthbert, 80
Shaftsbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Turnèbe, 44
Cooper), 147
Sidney, Philip, 176 Urban V (pope), 170
Sieburg, Friedrich, 52 Urban VIII (poet-pope), 298
Sixtus IV della Rovere (pope), 95, 181,
183 Valéry, Paul, 190, 248
Socrates, 63, 235, 321, 322, 326 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste-Henri de, 242,
Sophocles, 230 244
Sorbière, Samuel, 25, 118–20 Valla, Lorenzo: mentioned, 33, 39, 44,
Speroni, Sperone, 42, 99, 183, 202, 205 170, 188, 252, 322
Spinoza, Baruch, 25, 266 Valois, Henri de, 122–23, 160, 161, 165,
Spitzer, Leo, 86–87, 93 166
Stanhope, Philip, 148 Valori, Philippe, 191
Statius, 18 Van Delft, Louis, 55
382 Index of Names
van Loo, Carle, 275, 292, 303 Rambouillet). See Rambouillet,

Varchi, Benedetto, 99, 183, 186 arquise de
M
Vasari, Giorgio, 186, 187, 240–41; men- Voiture, 114, 158
tioned, 8, 75, 97, 181, 242, 307 Voltaire, 23, 52, 112, 245, 268, 282; men-
Vassé, 286, 290, 303 tioned, 51, 53, 80, 132, 143, 146, 147,
Vaugelas, 115, 137 200, 248, 272, 276, 299, 320
Veblen, Thorstein, 296
Vecchi, Orazio, 188 Wagner, Richard, 186
Venosa, Gesualdo da, 221 Walker, 192
Venuti, 288 Walpole, Horace, 309
Vergerio, Pier Paulo, 16, 17 Waquet, François, 68
Veroli, Giovanni Sulpizio da. See Sulpi- Watteau, Antoine, 143, 158, 280–81, 282,
tius, Johannes (Sulpizio da Verolo) 284, 285, 301, 314
Verona, Guarino da, 80, 90, 92, 207 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 267,
Veronese, Paolo, 203, 263 275, 288, 302, 307, 325–26; men-
Vico, Gianbattista, 44, 269, 270, 277–78 tioned, 291, 292, 294, 295, 320
Vien, Jean-Marie, 286, 287, 290, 291–92, Wood, Anthony A., 248
305; mentioned, 286, 287, 290, 303 Woolf, Virginia, 239
Vigée-Le Brun, Élizabeth, 304, 305 Wotton, Henry, 248
Vigneul-Marville, 23, 98 Wouwer, Jan van den (Woverius), 92
Villars, Montfaucon de, 145–46 Woverius. See Wouwer, Jan van den
Vilvault, M. de, 116–17 (Woverius)
Vilvault family, 158
Virgil, 176, 305; mentioned, 84, 94, 157, Xenophon, 230, 235
172, 178, 182, 290
Vitruvius, 95 Yates, 192
Vivaldi, Antonio, 262 Yates, Frances, 55
Vivant Denon, Dominique. See Denon,
Dominique-Vivant Zabarella, Francesco (cardinal), 210–11
Vivès, Juan Luis, 21–22 Zanetti, 281, 288
Vivonne, Catherine de (marquise de Zuber, Roger, 159
Marc Fumaroli is a leading scholar of French classical rhetoric and art and a
professor emeritus at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. He is a member
of the Académie française, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and the Société d’histoire littéraire de la France, and is president
of the Société des Amis du Louvre.
Lara Vergnaud is an editor and translator. Her translations from the French
include works by Ahmed Bouanani, Zahia Rahmani, Joy Sorman, Marie-
Monique Robin, Geoffroy Lagasnerie, and Scholastique Mukasonga, among
others. She lives in Washington, DC.

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TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LARA VERGNAUD

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

English translation copyright © 2018 by Yale University.

Excerpts from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, by Michel de Montaigne, translated by

All rights reserved.

Set in Electra and Nobel type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963185

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

PART I: AN IDEAL CITIZENSHIP

1. The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 13

PART II: CONVERSATION

Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus: Three Allegorical

12. Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita: A Regimen

15. From Lives to Biographies: The Twilight

Afterword: The Secret of the Republic of Letters 317

Europe, and the even more meticulous account—­including statistics!—of the

Diligently researching and frequenting the society of friends and equals

Special thanks to Ludivine Vergnaud and Adrien Chipret.

In a landmark book published in Cambridge in 1979, The Printing Press as

The invention of the printing press, an unarguably promising advertising and

humanities in the Florence of Chancellor Coluccio Salutati; his successor,

Though a self-­aware fiction, the Republic of Letters was nonetheless a

the phenomenon observed by Pintard, who was unable to name it or determine

Barbaro then defines a European and universal legacy, on a European, uni-

Quid enim magnificentius, aut praeclarius assequi poteras, quam immor-

Politiæ litterariæ commentarios [. . .] quam non a poli ciuitate græca

The politia litteraria—a “society of minds within political society” and a

Atque utinam plurimos id genus haberemus reipublicae litterariae bene-

In the same year, in his dedication to Marino Sanuto in Ovid’s Metamor-

Sperabam equidem cum academicis nostris viris utriusque linguae perstu-

Pro republica litteraria ex hoc amplissimi sapientissimique senatus con-

In the dedication for Ovid’s Heroides, also dedicated to Marino Sanuto,

Vide quanta in te sit suavitas, mi Marine: equidem tecum esse, tecum

In a Supplicatio to Leo X, published in the beginning of Omnia Platonis

As clearly demonstrated by Fritz Schalk, nobody provided more public‑

• (1517) letter to Budé: Erasmus mentions panegyricus eruditorum.20

Erigunt enim sese apud nationes omnes clara, excellentia, liberaque

That liberty placed men of letters in a critical position—in both meanings

political and autonomous view on Europe belonging to the Republic of Let-

There never was a more universal correspondence kept between philoso-

In 1790, Nicolas de Bonneville wrote the following statement in Le Tribun

notion of Reason at work throughout history, it is essential to note the grow-

illam virorum doctorum societatem, quae circa bonas artes et scientias

Still according to Prit, the Republic of Letters reveled in a freedom of con-

The entry for “Peiresc” in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique

ture [meaning: historical and philological erudition for specialists]. But

N. C. Fabritius, Lord of Peiresc. This Latin masterpiece of seventeenth-­century

He was accustomed to immediately discerning the inclinations and

Consequent hereunto, he began seriously to think of (which he purposed

Note in passing that this “first” in international scientific cooperation was

Moreover, he preferred the singing of Birds, before the voyces of men,

“liberty of Europe” in opposition to the “slavery of Asia,” creating a near com-

It could appear that Barclay has abandoned politics for a reflection on an

The expression “Republic of Letters” is still in use today. It appears in the

In Étienne de Courcelles’s Latin translation of this text, which was published

logues, like Leonardo Bruni’s I dialogi ad Petrum Histrum, a collection of letters

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Europe, and the even more meticulous account—including statistics!—of the

Though a self-aware fiction, the Republic of Letters was nonetheless a

N. C. Fabritius, Lord of Peiresc. This Latin masterpiece of seventeenth-century

Augustine adds: “what I mean is precisely that co-adaptation which the

Academy, is reunited on Parnassus, among the Muses, surrounding the lyre-

time, between good-natured German humanist scholars. But it is specific to

This Common-Wealth is a State extremely free. The Empire of Truth

“Savoir-vivre,” extended to a heightened degree of self-awareness and intui-

To describe this society’s inherent “genius,” Fortin turns to chamber-music

Seventeenth-century French literature still contains vast terrae incogni-