Cornelius de. Pauw

Statut : Author

1739-1799

Notes : Cornelius de Pauw, born in Amsterdam, was the great-nephew of the brothers de Witt and uncle of Anacharsis Clootz. Orphaned early he was sent to Liège where he had relatives. His education was overseen by a canon of the cathedral who provided the means for him to study at the university of Göttingen. In recognition of his protector who intended to bequeath him his benefice, Pauw became a clergyman. He was sent to Berlin by the prince-bishop of Liège as negotiator in defence of the princely interests at the court of Frederick II. Despite tempting offers from the king, who in order to keep him at court, dangled before him the possibility of becoming Bishop of Breslau, Pauw returned after eight months to the town of Xanten (in the duchy of Clèves), where he contented himself with a canonry. It was here that he devoted himself to his “Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains” (1768-1769) a work which was widely read and also criticised. Diderot and d’Alembert engaged his help in the Supplément to the Encyclopédie, for which he wrote several articles. In 1774, he published his “Recherches sur les Égyptiens et les Chinois”, in their turn criticised especially by the Jesuits. There followed his “Recherches sur les Grecs”, published in Berlin in 1787, then in Paris in 1788, and re-edited with his collected works in 1795. De Pauw consecrated several years of study to a book on the ancient Germans which was never completed and all trace of which he destroyed by burning the manuscripts. The “Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs” are imbued with a spirit of animosity against Mably and Rousseau, but also paradoxically with a singular malevolence towards England and the French admirers of the English model. In fact Cornelius de Pauw could at the same time maintain, against Rousseau and Mably, that the Spartans did not deserve « to be dragged from the eternal darkness into which they had themselves chosen to descend », and also rail against all those who believed that commerce was invented by the « speculators of London » – Montesquieu in particular. Hence doubtless his unusual picture of a « pastoral » Athens. If Athens carried alone in Greece the « great burden » of progress in the sciences and the arts, if she possessed already, despite her turbulent « laocratic » regime, all the « subtleties » of commerce which the English boast of today, it remains no less true that the Athenians « conserve, in the midst of their civil life, a most lively appreciation of the rural life ». It is this which led his (anonymous) English translator to declare his distance from the work by explaining to the English public that it is the product of a « foreigner » whose opinions relate above all to the Continent. The German rendering of de Pauw was entitled "Philosophische Untersuchungen über die Griechen" and was published by Heinrich August Rottmann in Berlin in 1789. The translator was Peter Villaume (1746-1806) who was born in Berlin and descended from a French Huguenot refugee family. Villaume studied theology and became a preacher in the French community of Halberstadt, where he founded a school for girls together with his wife. Villaume wrote in German and in French and his "Geschichte des Menschen" (1783) was published in the two languages. In 1787 he became professor of ethics and humanities at the ‘Joachimsthal’sches Gymnasium’ in Berlin.

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