Jean Bouhier (jurist)

Jean Bouhier (16 March 1673, Dijon - 17 March 1746, Dijon) was a French magistrate, jurisconsultus, historian, translator, bibliophile and scholar. He served as the first président à mortier to the parlement de Bourgogne from 1704 to 1728, when he resigned to devote himself to his historic and literary work following his 1727 election to the Académie française.

Contents

Life

From the rich Bouhier family (his brother Claude Bouhier de Lantenay became the second bishop of Dijon in 1744), Jean Bouhier had a vast network of correspondents right across Europe. The Eltons write of him:

Bouhier used to read his books and make notes upon them; and it is said that he carried the practice to such excess as to deface with marginal scribblings the finest work of Henri Estienne and Antoine Vérard. A visitor to his library described the sober magnificence of the rosewood shelves with silken hangings in which the rare editions and long rows of manuscripts were ranged.[1]

He was renowned as much for his erudition as for the splendid library he had inherited from his ancestors, which he expanded and put at the disposal of the poets and writers he welcomed to his hôtel on rue Vauban in Dijon. At the end of his life the library held 35,000 works and 2,000 manuscripts, but all his collections were dispersed after his death and were mostly sold to Clairvaux Abbey.

Main works

Besides his treatise on Burgundian costume (considered his masterpiece), Jean Bouhier was the author of several works on jurisprudence as well as many dissertations. He also translated Latin classical texts, some in collaboration with the abbé d’Olivet, though Bouhier's translations were more appreciated by his contemporaries for their closeness to the original than for their style - his wife said to him "You take care of thinking, and leave me with the writing[2]"

D’Alembert said of him :

Jurisprudence, philology, criticism, ancient and modern history, literary history, translations, eloquence and poetry, he shook everything, he embraced everything, and, for the most part, he gave distinguished and worthy proofs of himself.[3]

History and jurisprudence

Translations

Memoirs and correspondence

References and notes

  1. ^ Charles Isaac Elton & Mary Augusta Elton, The Great Book-Collectors, chapter XV, 1893.
  2. ^ Tyrtée Tastet, Histoire des quarante fauteuils de l’Académie française depuis la fondation jusqu’à nos jours, 1635-1855, volume IV, p. 288, 1855.
  3. ^ Cited by Tyrtée Tastet, Op. cit., p. 287.
  4. ^ Referring to the Pharsalia but misattributing it to Petronius
  5. ^ Book 4 of the Aeneid.
Cultural offices
Preceded by
Nicolas de Malézieu
Seat 33
Académie française

1727–1746
Succeeded by
Voltaire