César Chesneau Dumarsais

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais or Du Marsais (July 17, 1676 – June 11, 1756) was a French philosophe, grammarianand contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.^[1] . He was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie.

Born in Marseille, Dumarsais trained in Paris as a lawyer, before abandoning the bar to pursue the life of the mind, subsisting on occasional law students and later on the meager revenue from a pension in the city's Faubourg-Saint Victor. He wrote clandestine tracts in favour of freethought, attacked the French church in books and pamphlets, and proposed, to no avail, a reform of French orthography. He died infirm; in the words of a eulogy penned for the Encyclopédie by D'Alembert, "he lived poor and ignored by the fatherland he had taught".

Principal works include Méthode raisonné pour apprendre la langue latine (1722) and Principes de grammaire (1769). Traité des Tropes (1730) was an influential early attempt to generate a philosophical theory of figurative language. A seven-volume French edition of his complete known works was published in 1797.

References

↑ Frank A. Kafker: Notices sur les auteurs des dix-sept volumes de « discours » de l'Encyclopédie. Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie. 1989, Volume 7, Numéro 7, S. 138

Authority control	WorldCat VIAF: 46760279 LCCN: n85294232 ISNI: 0000 0001 0895 4763 GND: 118520385 SUDOC: 02683863X BNF: cb119007165

Persondata
Name	Dumarsais, César Chesneau
Alternative names
Short description	Early eighteenth century French philosopher and grammarian
Date of birth	July 17, 1676
Place of birth	Marseille, France
Date of death	June 11, 1756
Place of death	France

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.