Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle - Legacy

Legacy

Fontenelle was a popular figure in the educated French society of his period, holding a position of esteem comparable only to that of Voltaire. Unlike Voltaire however, Fontenelle avoided making important enemies. He balanced his penchant for universal critical thought with liberal doses of flattery and praise to the appropriate individuals in aristocratic society.

Fontenelle forms a link between two very widely different periods of French literature, that of Corneille, Racine and Boileau on the one hand, and that of Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot on the other. It is not in virtue of his great age alone that this can be said of him; he actually had much in common with the beaux esprits of the 17th century, as well as with the philosophes of the 18th. But it is to the latter rather than to the former period that he properly belongs. According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, he deserves a place "dans la classe des esprits infiniment distingués"—distinguished, however, it ought to be added by intelligence rather than by intellect, and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well. There have been several collected editions of Fontenelle's works, the first being printed in 3 vols. at the Hague in 1728-1729. The best is that of Paris, in 8 vols. 8vo, 1790. Some of his separate works have been frequently reprinted and also translated. The Pluralité des mondes was translated into modern Greek in 1794. Sainte-Beuve has an interesting essay on Fontenelle, with several useful references, in the Causeries du lundi, vol. iii. See also Villemain, Tableau de la littérature française au XVIIIe siècle; the abbé Trublet, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle (1759); A Laborde-Milaà, Fontenelle (1905), in the "Grands écrivains français" series; and L. Maigron, Fontenelle, l'homme, l'œuvre, l'influence (Paris, 1906).

His Dialogues of the dead show both his erudition and wit, by presenting invented - but plausible - dialogues between dead ancients, dead moderns and a whole book devoted to dialogues between an ancient and a modern. To Montaigne asking him if some centuries had more wise men than other, Socrates answers sadly that « The general order of natures seems very constant ». In one of the books Roxelane and Anne Boleyn discuss about politics and the way for a woman to decide a man to marry her. The dialog between Montezuma and Cortez allows the former to dismiss some myths about the wisdom in ancient Greece by quoting some counter-examples.