Louis Du Four de Longuerue

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Louis Dufour de Longuerue (1652 — 1733), abbé of Sept-Fontaines and of Saint-Jean-du-Jard, known simply as the abbé de Longuerue, was an antiquarian and historian, a protegé of Fénelon who in his turn encouraged the Abbé Alary and the young cartographer-to-be, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782), perhaps the greatest geographical author of the eighteenth century. As a philologist, he remarked on the astonishing progress the French language had made, in its refinement and conscious purification from 1630 to 1670. The abbé was a free-thinker, for a man ostensibly of the cloth: Helvétius quoted[1] his remark that, if all the good and all the evil done in the name of religion were weighed together, the evil would preponderate.[2]

His great work was his Description de France, one of the secondary sources used by Edward Gibbon for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire..

After his death a volume of Longueruana was published.[3] In 1769 a further selection of fugitive pieces from among his papers was published.[4]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Helvétius, De L'esprit: Or, Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties, ch. xxiv "Of the means of perfecting morality".
  2. ^ Longuerue, Description de France i, 11.
  3. ^ Longueruana, ou recueil de pensées de discours et de conversations de feu M. Louis Du Four de Longuerue, abbé... ("Berlin", i.e. Paris: Desmarets) 1754; it is to be wondered what Longuerue would have made of the title's macaronism.
  4. ^ Rousselot de Surgy, ed., Receuil de pieces intéressantes pour servir à l'histoire de France, et autres morceaux de littérature retrouvés dans les papoiers de M. l'abbé de Longuerue (Paris 1769).

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