Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de

(1657-1757)

   writer, philosopher, poet, scientist

   Born in Rouen, the son of an attorney and nephew of pierre corneille, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle was a man of letters who frequented the salons and took the side of the Moderns in his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes (1687). He also tried, without success, to compose dramatic works. His originality is apparent in his 24 Dialogues des mort (1683), in the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, as brilliant literary or philosophical paradoxes, and is clearly manifest in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), an elegant work on popular science, and in the Histoire des oracles (1687), where he analyzes with ingenious irreverence Christian theology and miracles (La Dent d'or). Elected to the Académie Française (1691), then the Academy of Sciences (1697), he continues in his Éloges on academicians and his Préfaces, which are edited in a precise and clear form, this alliance between science and literature. "The ignoramus heard it, the scholar admired it." (voltaire). Thus, by offering to his readers a synthesis of the scientific achievements of his time (Nicholas Copernicus, rené descartes), and professing a complete faith in science, Fontenelle can well be considered a precursor of the enquiring spirit of the thinkers of the 18th century and the Enlightenment.