André Morellet
Oxford Companion to French Literature:
Top
André Morellet
Morellet, André, abbé (1727-1819). Publicist and economist. The son of a Lyon paper merchant, he studied theology at the Sorbonne with Turgot before being admitted to philosophe circles, in particular the salons of Madame Geoffrin, Holbach, and Helvétius. He was a vigorous polemicist (Voltaire wrote his name: Mords-les) and was imprisoned in the Bastille for two months in 1760. A partisan of free-trade, he attacked the Compagnie des Indes and wrote against Necker and against Galiani's Dialogue sur les blés; he also planned, but never completed, a large-scale dictionary of commerce and made an unpublished translation of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Among his published translations, the most important was Beccaria's Traité des délits et des peines (1765). Elected to the Académie Française in 1785, he saved its archives and the manuscript of the dictionary when it was closed down in 1793; on its reopening as part of the Institut in 1803, he was one of its most faithful members. His Mémoires (1822) and his correspondence paint a nostalgic picture of the lost world of the salons, and contain fascinating, if subjective, portraits of Rousseau, Diderot, and other famous acquaintances.
[Peter France]
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Top
André Morellet
André Morellet (7 March 1727 – 12 January 1819) was a French economist and writer. He was one of the last of the philosophes, and in this character he figures in many memoirs, such as those of Madame de Rémusat.
He was born at Lyon, and educated by the Jesuits there, and later at the Sorbonne. He took holy orders, but without much conviction. Voltaire called him "L'Abbé Mords-les" ("Father Bite-them"), because of his ready and biting wit. His most notable works were a smart pamphlet in answer to Charles Palissot's scurrilous play Les Philosophes (which procured him a short stay in the Bastille for an alleged libel on Palissot's patroness, the princesse de Robecq), and a reply to Ferdinando Galiani's Commerce des blés (1770).
Later, he made himself useful in quasi-diplomatic communications with English statesmen, and was pensioned and also elected a member of the Académie française in 1785. A year before his death in Paris, he brought out four volumes of Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie du XVIIIe siècle, composed chiefly of selections from his former publications, and after his death appeared his valuable Mémoires sur le XVIIIe siècle et la Révolution (2 vols., 1821).
His semi-satirical translation of Nicolau Aymerich's Directorium Inquisitorum was an influencing factor in the cessation of some of the Roman Catholic Church's more inquisitorial practices.
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
The Britannica in turn cites:
-
- A bibliography of his numerous works is given in Quérard's La France littéraire, vol. vi.; see also Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, vol. i.
|
|||||
|
|||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Post a question - any question - to the WikiAnswers community:
Copyrights:
Oxford Companion to French Literature
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Read more
Mentioned in
Cesare Bonesana, Marquis of Beccaria
(history 1450-1789)
Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin
(history 1450-1789)
» More