Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (Rouen, 1657 – Paris, 1757) was a French writer and philosopher who lived almost a hundred years and moved from the age of Louis XIV into the Enlightenment. A member of several academies of the Institut de France, he is remembered above all for bringing science to readers who were not specialists, at a time when that was far from common. His thought belongs to the Cartesian tradition, though he worked more as an explainer and popularizer than as an author of original doctrines.

The son of a lawyer at the Rouen parliament and nephew of the dramatists Pierre and Thomas Corneille, he was schooled by the Jesuits in his native city. He trained in law as was expected of him, but abandoned it after a single case and spent the rest of his life writing and studying. His first efforts were literary: he wrote poetry and plays, and his tragedy Aspar failed badly in 1681, a setback he acknowledged by burning the script. He had more success with opera libretti such as Psyché and Thétis et Pelée.

His decisive work was the Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), a dialogue in which a marquise and a philosopher survey Descartes's astronomical ideas in a light and lively way. Often regarded as the most influential book of its time on the subject, it showed that science could be discussed in polite society without losing its rigour. In the same period he published the Lettres galantes du chevalier d'Her and the Nouveaux dialogues des morts, which secured his place among the great French prose writers. In the History of Oracles (1687) he argued that ancient oracles were not the work of demons and did not end with the birth of Jesus, a position that drew the suspicion of the Church. In his Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns (1688) he sided with the moderns in a quarrel that divided literary circles across Europe.

In 1691 he entered the Académie française after several failed attempts. From 1697 he served as perpetual secretary of the Académie des sciences, a post he held for forty-two years. From it he wrote the institution's history and the eulogies of its members, which became a model for the genre. His mathematical work, such as the Elements of the Geometry of the Infinite (1727), had less lasting weight, and his defence of Cartesian vortices was overtaken by Newtonian physics.

His influence is twofold. He paved the way for the scientific popularization of the eighteenth century, with writers such as Voltaire, D'Alembert and Condorcet; and his academic eulogies shaped the form of later scientific obituaries. He stands as a figure of transition between the classicism of the Grand Siècle and the spirit of the philosophes.