English Summaries
p. 327-333
Texte intégral
Spaces and intermediaries
1Antony McKenna
Pierre Bayle and the Huguenot Refuge in Brandenburg
The Huguenot Refuges are a choice terrain for investigation of cultural transfers1. In Brandenburg as in London, Amsterdam and Geneva, the exiled Calvinists sought to safeguard their identity but also to continue to play a role in the broad cultural world. This article presents Pierre Bayle’s relations with exiled Huguenots, in particular in Brandenburg, where he maintained a number of contacts : the queen Sophie Charlotte herself, his own former pupil Alexandre de Dohna-Schlobitten, magistrates such as Joseph and Charles Ancillon, the lawyer Jacob Le Duchat, philosophers and scholars such as Leibniz and Veyssière La Croze and Protestant ministers such as Jacques Abbadie, Gabriel d’Artis, Jacques Lenfant and François Gaultier de Saint-Blancard. The reviews of Bayle’s works in the periodical Bibliothèque germanique allow us to grasp the way in which a selective reading of his attack on the claims of reason to establish Christian doctrine allowed the editors to maintain a “moderate” rationalist theology, which was to be that of all Reformed communities throughout the 18th century.
2Florence Catherine
Disseminating knowledge in order to embrace the system of nature : the mechanisms of informative exchange between Haller and the French scholars
Even if the famous Bernese physician Albrecht von Haller maintained close relationships with French erudite circles, the ambivalence of his views on France invites us to distinguish scales and different epistolary circles in order to understand the implementation of trade mechanisms. To this end, coupling the analysis of the flow of material goods and knowledge with the notion of cultural transfer sheds light on the role of the many intermediaries and the variable time-scale of exchanges.
Haller uses a plurality of paper technologies that support a substantial and fertile flow of knowledge enabling him to gain access to the scientific production of other spaces.
Moreover, the fact that he chooses to solicit particular interlocutors is also revealing of the different scholarly identities of Haller, a citizen of the Republic of Letters whose curiosities and skills are part of the fields of knowledge which tend to become more and more independent of each other.
3Lisa Kolb et Martin Stuber
Albrecht von Haller and solar salt. Considerations on knowledge transfers in the Economic Enlightenment
Between 1758 and 1764, Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), physician, botanist and poet, was the director of the salt works of the Republic of Berne. In this position, he tried to improve the process of salt production by introducing methods of solar evaporation common in coastal areas. As a starting point for this knowledge transfer, Haller consulted chemical discussions in learned journals such as the Memoirs of the Academy of Science in Paris. To promote his innovations, he made use of a variety of media – journals, treatises, and reviews as well as correspondences – and sought to maintain contact with both the international scientific community and local authorities. Depending on the target audience, he accentuated either his contribution to chemical knowledge about the production of salt or the advantages of his method of saving wood, thus strengthening the Bernese economy. The example of Haller’s Sonnen-Salz is pertinent to highlight characteristic features of knowledge transfers in the Economic Enlightenment, such as the close relation between practical and theoretical knowledge and the tension between its claims of validity on both a local and a global scale. Moreover, it helps us to understand the pivotal role of agents and media in the process of transferring and embedding knowledge in new contexts.
Languages and intertextualities
4Helmut Zedelmaier
“Learned diligence”. Remarks on a French-German cliché
“Learned diligence” is a label characterising German sciences, arts and literature since the 16th century. This article is based on a compilation of individual statements by French and German scholars (Adrien Baillet, Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Johann Caspar Lavater, Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Nicolai, Christoph Lichtenberg). On this basis we seek to define which specific phenomena were designated with the attribute “learned diligence” in the late 17th and 18th centuries. We also study how statements of this kind were shaped by the institutional and social conditions in France and Germany. Two contexts characterize the judgments and evaluations of both French and German scholars during the investigation period : the depreciation of traditional (historical-philological, humanistic) scholarship, and the concern of German scholars to assert themselves against a superior French culture.
5Flemming Schock
Extracts and commentaries. The reception of French periodicals in the German scholarly press at the beginning of the 18th century
The article discusses a point which has not yet been emphasized in research on the transfer of knowledge during the Enlightenment period : the learned journals of the 18th century were tightly networked in content. Particularly in the German speaking area, it was a widespread practice to generate journals from other journals. The example of the Neue Bibliothec oder Nachricht von neuen Büchern (1709-1721), published at Halle, illustrates the high impact of French journals on German periodicals. This weekly journal exemplifies critical and selective journalism of the period by not simply translating and copying the contents of French journals : instead, the Neue Bibliothec innovated by generating reviews of book-reviews.
6Ulrich Johannes Schneider
Knowledge transfer in encyclopedias. The Dictionnaire Historique (1674-1759)
In the eighteenth century, knowledge transfer includes the genre of encyclopedias : all information goes through several stages of editing and translation. A case in question is the Dictionnaire historique, one of the biggest encyclopedias of historical knowledge. First published in one volume Lyon 1674 by its author Louis Moréri, it appeared – 24 editions and 128 volumes later – for the last time 1759 in ten volumes. Selected articles show different degrees of editing. They also throw light on conflicting Catholic and Protestant versions, producing occasionally parallel articles within the same volume. Besides the French editions of the Dictionnaire (printed in Lyon, Paris, Amsterdam and Basel), some German translations are also taken into account in so far as they copy from the Dictionnaire. Examination of this almost altogether unresearched but massive corpus of writings from the Enlightenment era elucidates the transformation of the encyclopedia from a scholarly product to a publication competing with periodicals.
7Vincent Robadey
The Economic Society of Berne and the Encyclopédie économique (1770-1771), from compilation to transfer of agronomic knowledge ?
European agronomic development in the second half of the eighteenth century stemmed from the new interest that cultivated elites took in agronomic sciences. The progress and agrarian reforms began in England and Holland gradually spread to France and the Holy Roman Empire due to the structural model and bilingual publications of the Economic Society of Bern founded in 1759. The strong demand for agronomic information in print induced the alliance of the famous bookseller Fortunato Bartolomeo de Felice with the Economic Society of Bern, which offered its expertise in an atypical encyclopedia, the Encyclopédie économique, often overshadowed by the Encyclopédie d’Yverdon. This article aims to identify methods of compilation and valorization of Bernese and Swiss agronomic knowledge. Does the encyclopedic enterprise extend and intensify the circulation of knowledge and promote agronomic transfers usually confined to a local scale ?
8Élisabeth Décultot
“More harmful than useful” ? The French debate on German philosophical aesthetics, 1750-1810
Despite criticism and resistance, the linguistic creation “Ästhetik” was quite quickly accepted in Germany after the publication of Baumgartens Æsthetica (1750) and Meier’s Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften (1748-1750). In France, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the term “esthétique”, which was imported as a direct translation of this new German creation, met with tenacious resistance, as the rarity of the word “esthétique” before the years 1820-1830 demonstrates. The reception of the philosophical discourse known in Germany under the name of “Ästhetik” confronts the French public with a series of problems, among which the following was particularly prominent : Can philosophical concepts be useful to describe and understand literary productions ? From the middle of the eighteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a lively debate in France on the question as to whether philosophy can legitimately claim to produce a specific discourse on litterature.
Politics and institutions
9Kirill Abrosimov
The cultural policy of Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria (1679-1726), and the “French model” : a project outline
Due to his exile at the French court from 1709 to 1715, Maximilian-Emmanuel, Elector of Bavaria, had solid knowledge of French art as well as of the structures of the French monarchic state. When he returned to Munich, he brought with him an entire staff of qualified French personnel. Nonetheless, his adoption of Colbert’s system was very selective, in terms of artistic forms as well as in terms of discourses used to promote them and state structures.
10Anne Saada
The making of Göttingen at the crossroads of Europe : choices, issues and implementation
This essay examines the role played by circulation of documents and cultural transfer in the construction of the academic network which developed in the 18th century in Göttingen, in the Electorate of Hanover. While this city was little-known at the beginning of the century, the foundation of a university and a library both in 1734, of a scholarly periodical in 1739 and of a Royal Society of Sciences in 1751, gave it a more visible position within the Republic of Letters. Göttingen did not become a scientific capital as the result of a long, progressive evolution, as was the case for Paris, London, Amsterdam, etc. On the contrary, it was the outcome of a deliberate strategy : a great number of tactics, among which the circulation of documents dealt with in this essay, were applied in order to make the town famous.
This documentary circulation mainly concerned the way books were selected and acquired by the library. With 12,000 books in 1734, it boasted over 133,000 at the turn of the century and therefore featured among the first five European libraries. This analysis focuses on the different ways in which the library acquired its collections, the strategies implemented to promote them and to turn the city into an attractive center for European scholars, and finally how the library itself came to be the heart of a network of book distribution in the Empire.
11Avi Lifschitz
Prize contests at the Berlin Academy as vehicles of Franco-German intellectual transfer, 1745-1786
In the second half of the 18th century, the Berlin Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres was a pivotal centre of intellectual exchange and transfer within French-and German-speaking Europe. Not only was it the only major royal institution to incorporate the natural sciences, mathematics, speculative philosophy, and literature ; due to Frederick II’S cultural preferences and the presence of a large Huguenot community in Berlin, the Academy conducted its business mostly in French. However, despite the king’s linguistic predilection, the Berlin Academy was n° French stronghold within Brandenburg-Prussia. It fostered multilateral and reciprocal transfer, as demonstrated in an overview of the prize contests sponsored by the institution during the reign of Frederick II. While sometimes bestowing its annual prize on major French authors, the Academy frequently acknowledged the originality of German intellectuals – thereby broadcasting their works and significance to francophone readership across Europe.
Dissimulation and diffusion
12Martin Mulsow
Clandestine knowledge transfer and criticism of the biblical canon – from Firmin Abauzit to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Between the beginning of the historical-critical reflection on the origins of the biblical canon in Richard Simon’s work (around 1680) and the effective foundation of historical biblical scholarship by Johann Salomo Semler (around 1770), there is a historiographical gap of almost one hundred years. How can this be explained ? Did nothing happen over that period ? It is only when one considers the history of theology both transnationally and together with its clandestine undercurrents, according to the thesis of this chapter, that one is able to see that the discussion was further developed in the latency period. The example of the clandestine impact of Firmin Abauzit’s long unpublished Discours historique sur l’Apocalypse from the period before 1720 shows this quite plainly : after decades of circulation, it is not only exploited by Voltaire, but also translated by Lessing, at least in its early passages. Later, this translation was thought to be an original work of Lessing’s ; only the radical Enlightenment thinker Christian Ludwig Paalzow recognized the error and anonymously completed Lessing’s translation.
13Cécile Lambert
From the scholarly press to the novel of the Late Enlightenment. The contrasting receptions of La Mettrie
This chapter analyzes the mechanisms that are at work in reception phenomena marked by scandal and constructed via the channel of controversy. Through an analysis of an example, the varied reception of the scandalous work of the French physician-philosopher La Mettrie by different circles of learned people in Germany, the article shows how and why controversy could constitute a particularly interesting strategy for the scholarly press and historia literaria (or rather Litterär-Geschichte) which intended to control or stifle a disturbing reference. It shows also how and why this strategy was subsequently in part subverted by the Spätaufklärung. In so doing, the article also proposes a critical approach to the categories commonly used by reception studies, in particular by considering the relevance of the three notions of “transfer”, “circulation” and “networks” in these specific cases. The notion of “circulation” is the most likely to characterize the processes here at work, because of its flexibility, which well accounts for the ambivalence structurally attached to any phenomenon of reception which has a polemical dimension.
14Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire
Booksellers, freemasons and Huguenots. Writing, printing and diffusing the Masonic book in the Early Eighteenth-century
The production of books on freemasonry in French language was intense in the eighteenth century, particularly in the 1740s, and was essential for the European expansion of masonry. Anti-masonic writings, apologies or exposures were very popular among the general public but also with the freemasons themselves. These writings forged their identity and culture across the continent. This article focuses on the European circulation of masonic books around two major metropolises of the book, sometimes called bibliopolises : Frankfurt-am-Main and Leipzig. In connection with Dutch and Swiss booksellers, but also with English correspondents, some freemasons of the Huguenot Refuge, who were authors, journalists, or themselves printers, published, diffused and translated best-sellers. Their masonic lodges and brethren supported their projects through their correspondence networks and their financial resources. They sought protectors and defended the values of the masonic order, without forgetting the issues of a highly competitive market, where publishers were seeking a dominant position.
15Claire Gantet
Between secret, private and public information : some paradoxes of the circulation of magnetic somnambulism in the 1780s
The physician Franz Anton Mesmer developed his “theory” of animal magnetism in Vienna and re-interpreted it in Parisian aristocratic circles. A break occurred with the condemnation by the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1784. The therapeutic practice was once more given new meaning in France when marquis Amand Chastenet de Puységur unexpectedly discovered magnetic somnambulism. As of then, it circulated toward Germany. At each stage, a scientific practice and a field of knowledge were transformed through border-crossing. Moreover, as a result of the controversial debate, they progressively acquired specific identity on both sides of the border. Nevertheless, the transfer did not operate directly from one country to another, but through unstable networks, diffuse institutions and individual movements, which triggered circulations over French-German political boundaries. The communication devices in the circles that supported magnetic somnambulism, between secret, private and public information, had a significant influence on the anchor points and rhythms of its reception. This chapter examines the depth of this transfer in order to identify the intermediaries, the media and (secret) circles of circulation and reception of magnetic magnetism, a “non-hegemonic” innovation external to scientific institutions.
16Markus Meumann
The order of the Illuminati and France
The records of the Illuminati order, founded in 1776/78 by the young professor of ecclesiastical law at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt (1748- 1830), contain a large number of documents in French, which bear witness to the broad reception and circulation of French culture and knowledge within the order. During the final period of the order’s short history, that is from 1783/84 to its end in 1787, when its stronghold was n° longer Bavaria but Thuringia, the pivotal figure in brokering French culture and knowledge (both practical as well as probably secret or “higher” knowledge) was Johann Joachim Christoph Bode (1731-1793). As an eminent Freemason before joining the Illuminati in 1782, Bode was presumably in permanent contact with French Masons. In May 1787, he undertook a journey to Paris in order to take part in a masonic convention organized by the Philalètes, a French masonic system correlated with the Illuminati, to which some of the members were affiliated. Despite this contact, there is n° evidence that the Illuminati were responsible for the French Revolution as was insinuated by conspiracy theories spread by renegades and conservative opponents of the order as early as 1791.
Notes de bas de page
1 Nous remercions Antony McKenna pour sa relecture.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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