Personnages
Fontenelle, Bernard Bovier of
Rouen, 1657 - Paris, 1757
© Hachette Livre et/ou Hachette Multimédia
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle
French philosopher and writer. Nephew of Corneille by his mother, it exerted some time the lawyer trade, before going to Paris, where Thomas Corneille engaged it, in 1677, with gallant Mercury. He was quickly made a reputation of wit, whose smoothness shows through in works morals and satirists (Dialogs of deaths, 1693) and that he cultivated throughout his life in the living rooms of Mrs. de Tencin, of Lambert or Geoffrin.
After the failure of its first comedies and tragedies, it launched out in a brilliant work of scientific popularization. The Cartesian last in a world becoming Newtonian (Talks on the plurality of the worlds, 1686), it defended the fact against the fable, the Modern ones against the Old ones (Digressions on the Old ones and the Modern ones, 1688), in the name of an infinite progress of knowledge, which it was one of the first to be conceived. The many Praises that it made of his late colleagues in front of the royal Academy of sciences, of which it was named perpetual secretary in 1699, constitute a mine of information for the history of sciences. (French Academy, 1691).