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- Title
Physiocracy, patriotism and reform Catholicism in Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset’s anti-philosophe Enlightenment.
- Authors
Platon, Mircea
- Abstract
Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset presents us with the double challenge of a Jesuit who abandoned his ‘vocation’ in order to live like a writer, and who afterwards renounced the writing game at the peak of his fame in order to live a pious patriarchal provincial life, far from the Parisian writers who began to ridicule him as a Tartuffe-like character. Exploring the ways in which Gresset’s ‘social practice of writing’ differed from that of the philosophes, this article advances that, measured against Gresset, the philosophes’ Enlightenment does not appear to be a Kantian triumph of individual emancipation. Gresset’s conflict with the philosophes was motivated by what Gresset saw as a decay of reason. Gresset rejected the philosophes not in the name of a counter-Enlightenment, but in the name of Enlightenment. Gresset saw himself as opposing, in the name of reason, the irrationality hidden in the ‘party’s’ egg laid by the philosophes.
- Subjects
FRANCE; GRESSET, Jean Baptiste Louis; FRENCH philosophers; ENLIGHTENMENT; CATHOLIC Church &; literature; MONASTICISM &; religious orders; FRENCH poets; FRENCH dramatists; NATIONALISM &; literature; EIGHTEENTH century; JESUIT history; FRENCH authors
- Publication
French History, 2012, Vol 26, Issue 2, p182
- ISSN
0269-1191
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fh/crr058