The Republic of Letters

399 Pages·2018·2.397 MB·English

by  Marc Fumaroli, Lara Vergnaud

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.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963185
ISBN 978- 0- 300- 22160- 2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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
PART III: LETTERED LEISURE AND CORRESPONDENCE
11. Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus: Three Allegorical
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
PART IV: LIVES
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 analy ses, 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-G ermanists. 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 XVIIIe 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