(b Bort, 11 July 1723; d Abloville, 31 Dec 1799). French man of letters. A prominent literary figure in Paris, he wrote opera librettos for Rameau, Grétry, Piccinni and others. He supported Italian music; some of his texts for Piccinni are italianate adaptations of Quinault's.

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Marmontel, Jean-François (1723-99). ‘L'enfant gâté de l'Ancien Régime’ (F. Aulard), Marmontel enjoyed a highly successful, sociologically interesting career: a poor tailor's son, called to Paris by Voltaire in 1745, he was one of the first to make of literature a profession, ultimately becoming Historiographe de France (1772) and Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Académie Française (1783). By his own admission, his lifelong passion was literary theory. His first articles, published in the Encyclopédie, underwent successive rehandlings (e.g. Poétique française, 1763), and when finally they appeared as Éléments de littérature (1787) they confirmed Marmontel's contribution to the discipline as both distinguished and sometimes prophetic (the work contains developments that Baudelaire and Valéry could have called their own; others, without acknowledgement, quite shamelessly did).

Besides being a theorist, Marmontel also participated actively in the Enlightenment. His internationally successful Contes moraux (1755-65) had made ‘la philosophie’ and the practice of virtue reassuringly attractive. But it was Bélisaire (1767)—a retelling of the story of the Roman general Belisarius, designed to persuade Louis XV to become the badly needed Philosopher-King—which proved to be his most useful contribution. Chapter 15, containing a plea for the civil toleration of Protestants, caused a furore involving the philosophes and the religious establishment which left the government pensive. Provoked by the same affaire de Bélisaire, Les Incas (1767-77), which was to enchant both Chateaubriand and Mickiewicz with its prose poetry, was in turn another powerful plea for toleration. Though these works, engines of war in the service of suffering humanity, may not suit modern tastes, they helped the cause of Huguenot emancipation. For this reason ‘they remain important works’ (Jean Fabre).

Recent criticism has re-evaluated Marmontel's career and work, and has recognized the importance of both. Notwithstanding, it is still true that the public will spontaneously read only his Mémoires (1792-4), that charming and revealing historical record that he left of his own century which he knew so well: the world of the salons, the attributes of the honnête homme, the numerous personalities of the literary and political establishment. More recently, however, critics have perceived that the Mémoires also have a profoundly human value and hence doubly deserve to be read, for they not only reproduce the complexity of the man and of his world, but also mirror the contrasts of the age and of the ‘human condition’.

— John Renwick

Bibliography

• S. Lenel, Marmontel (1902)
• J. Renwick, Marmontel, Voltaire and the ‘Bélisaire’ Affair, (1974)
• M. Cardy, The Literary Doctrines of Marmontel (1982)

(zhäN fräNswä' märmôNtĕl') , 1723–99, French critic, dramatist, and story writer, contributor to Diderot's Encyclopédie. Educated by the Jesuits, he taught in Jesuit schools until 1745, when, encouraged by Voltaire, he went to Paris. His works, popular in his day, include Denys le tyran (1748), a tragedy; Contes moraux, which appeared in the Mercure between 1761 and 1786; Bélisaire (1767), a plea for tolerance; and his Mémoires (4 vol., 1804), written for his children. He was a member of the French Academy.