Antoine Furetière
Antoine Furetière | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 28 December 1619 Paris, France |
| Died | 14 May 1688 (aged 68) |
| Occupation | Scholar, writer, Catholic clergyman |
| Nationality | France |
| French and Francophone literature |
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Antoine Furetière (28 December 1619 – 14 May 1688), was a French scholar, writer, and lexicographer.
Biography
He was born in Paris, the son of an employee of the royal household. He studied law and worked for a time as an attorney and tax assessor. Later he became a Catholic clergyman and, after various promotions, the abbot of Chalivoy in the diocese of Bourges in 1662. Thanks to the leisure he enjoyed as a clergyman, he was able to devote himself to letters. He was admitted to the Académie française in 1662 in virtue of his satire Nouvelle allégorique, ou histoire des derniers troubles arrivés au royaume d'éloquence (1658) among other works.[1]
One of Furetière's most important literary works was Le Roman bourgeois (1666). This satirical novel described the everyday life of his times, especially within the legal profession, and it cast ridicule on the fashionable romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and of Gauthier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède. Because of its similarity to Paul Scarron's Le Roman comique (1651, 1657), it was translated into English as Scarron's City Romance in 1671. With a self-conscious narrator who comments on his techniques and disregards the conventions of the novel, it anticipates Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67).[2]
At the time of its founding, the Académie française had been entrusted with the task of producing a complete dictionary of the French language. At first, Furetière participated in the collaborative project with enthusiasm, but he eventually grew frustrated with his colleagues' approach and slow progress and began work on his own dictionary, probably around 1676-78.[3] When members of the academy heard that Furetière was about to publish his dictionary, they interfered, alleging that he had stolen their material and violated the monopoly they had held on French dictionaries since 1672. In 1685, after fierce recrimination on both sides, Furetière was expelled from the academy, and the French government revoked his permission to publish the dictionary. In 1690, the Dictionaire universel was published posthumously in the Netherlands with a Preface prepared by his friend Pierre Bayle.
The second edition (1701) and the third edition (1708) were revised and improved by the Protestant jurist Henri Basnage de Beauval (1656–1710); they were published with the title Dictionnaire universel. A fourth edition of the Dictionnaire universel, edited by Brutel de la Rivière, appeared in 1727. In each edition, the spelling of the French word for dictionary in the title matches the spelling of the corresponding headword within the work.
Publication History of the Dictionnaire Universel
- 1684 : Essais d'un Dictionnaire universel. [Amsterdam]: [Henri Desbordes].
- 1685 : Essais d'un Dictionaire universel. Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes.
- 1690 : Dictionaire universel. Den Haag & Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers. First edition. 3 volumes. Preface by Pierre Bayle. Posthumous publication.
- 1691 : Dictionaire universel. Den Haag & Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers. Reprint of first edition in 2 volumes.
- 1701 : Dictionnaire universel. Den Haag & Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers. Second edition. 3 volumes. Edited by Henri Basnage de Beauval.
- 1702 : Dictionnaire universel. Den Haag & Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers. Reprint of second edition in 2 volumes.
- 1708 : Dictionnaire universel. Rotterdam: Reinier Leers. Third edition. 3 volumes. Edited by Henri Basnage de Beauval.
- 1727 : Dictionnaire universel. Den Haag: Pierre Husson, Thomas Johnson, Jean Swart, and others. Fourth edition. 4 volumes. Edited by Jean-Baptiste Brutel de la Rivière.
At the behest of Louis Auguste, Prince of Dombes, the Jesuits of the Collège of Louis le Grand in Paris literally copied the 1701 edition of Furetière's Dictionnaire universel before editing the work to suppress deviant Protestant notions. The Jesuit version was printed in 1704 outside Lyon at Trévoux, then the capital of Dombes; the same press at Trévoux also published the Jesuit periodical Journal de Trévoux, which appeared monthly from 1701 until 1782. The Jesuits even plagiarized the name of Furetière's work: the title given on the title page of the Jesuit editions was Dictionnaire universel françois & latin; the words "françois & latin" were appended to the title because the Jesuits appended a brief Latin-French dictionary to the last volume of their editions. Although almost immediately known as the Dictionnaire de Trévoux to distinguish it from the dictionary of Furetière, these words did not appear on the title page until the last edition in 1771, which followed the suppression of the Jesuits in France. Further work on the Dictionnaire de Trévoux came to an end after the removal of the Jesuits from Paris.[4][5][6][7][8]
The 1721 edition of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux significantly expanded Basnage de Beauval's edition of Furetière's work; however, quite remarkably, while material was added to articles, very little existing material was removed or even reworked: additional material was simply bolted on to the text of the 1704 edition of the Trévoux dictionary. The first most visible difference between the 1701 edition of Basnage de Beauval and the 1721 edition of Trévoux is a tweaking of the abbreviations of the names of the authors cited in the articles of the dictionary.
Subsequently, Brutel de la Rivière updated his 1727 edition of Furetière's dictionary largely by copying material added by the 1721 edition of the Trévoux dictionary.
References
- ^ Walter W. Ross, "Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel," in Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopédie (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1981), 53-54.
- ^ Steven Moore, The Novel, An Alternative History: 1600-1800 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 800 n.253.
- ^ Alain Rey, "Antoine Furetière, imagier de la culture classique," vol. 1 of Le Dictionnaire universel d'Antoine Furetière, facsimile edition (Paris: SNL - Le Robert, 1978), 54.
- ^ Robert Collison. Encyclopaedias: Their History throughout the Ages. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1964.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 357.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 257.
- ^ Richard Yeo. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- ^ Dorotea Behnke. Furetière und Trévoux: Eine Untersuchung zum Verhältnis der beiden Wörterbuchserien. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996.
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