René Auber Vertot d'Auboeuf

Statut : Author / Contributor

1655-1735

Notes : René Auber de Vertot d’Auboeuf began his studies at the Jesuit college in Rouen and at the diocesan seminary before spending four years at the Capuchin monastery of Argentan. Reasons of health led him subsequently to follow the less severe regime of the Prémontrés. The abbé Colbert, general of the order at that time, appointed him as his secretary, before making him head of the priory of Joyenval. Vertot left Joyenval for the parish of Croissy-la-Garenne, where he devoted himself to the study of history and literature, and made the acquaintance of Fontenelle and of the abbé de Saint-Pierre. In 1689, he published the “Histoire de la Conjuration de Portugal”, which was republished several times under the new title of “Histoire des Révolutions de Portugal”. His “Histoire des révolutions de Suède” (1696), was also republished several times and translated into several languages. In 1701 with the reorganisation of the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, Vertot was designated associate academician at the request of the chancellor Pontchartrain and enjoyed the protection of the Maison de Noailles, for which he composed a number of memoirs. In 1704, he retired as academician and took part in the production of the “Journal des Sçavants”. He was involved in a long polemic for more than ten years against the Père Lobineau, Benedictine of Saint-Maur, over the subject of the relations between Brittany and the French crown. In his “Histoire critique de l’établissement des Bretons dans les Gaules” (1720) Vertot made Lobineau effectively responsible for the troubles which broke out in Brittany in 1719. Another quarrel, equally political, was that with Père Daniel and Claude du Moulinet, abbot of the Thuileries, on the hereditary or elective character of the kingdom of France. Finally in 1714, Vertot embarked on a polemic against Nicolas Fréret on the subject of the origin of the French nation. The “Histoire des Révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement romain” was dedicated to the «trés haut et trés puissant seigneur Adrien Maurice, Duc de Noailles, Pair de France, Grand d’Espagne, chevalier de l’Ordre de la Toison d’Or», whom Vertot compared in his dedicatory epistle to Scipio Aemilianus, for his « love of the sciences» and his «expertise in warfare». From its publication in 1719 the work had a great success, since Vertot approached the « revolutions that occurred in the government of Rome » from the viewpoint of a central question of the eighteenth century, the relation between the principles of sovereignty and the balance of powers. It was not by chance that Lord Stanhope, minister of George I, approached him for his opinion on the method of recruitment of senators in the Roman republic. The reply of Vertot caused animated debates in England (the “Mémoire envoyé d’Angleterre par Mylord Stanhope”, secrétaire d’état à l’abbé Vertot and the extracts from his reply). The numerous editions of the “Histoire des Révolutions arrivées dans le gouvernement romain” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – seventeen in the former and a dozen in the latter – are evidence of his continuing influence. Historiographer of the Order of Malta from 1715, Vertot also published the “Histoire des chevaliers hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem” (1726).

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