Louis Du Four de Longuerue

Louis Dufour de Longuerue (1652, Charleville-Mézières, Ardennes) – 22 November 1733), abbé of Sept-Fontaines (from 1674) and of Saint-Jean-du-Jard near Melun (from 1684), known simply as the abbé de Longuerue, was an antiquarian, a linguist and historian, a child prodigy who became the protégé of Fénelon; in his turn Longuerue encouraged the Abbé Alary and the young cartographer-to-be, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697–1782), perhaps the greatest geographical author of the eighteenth century. As a philologist, he remarked on the astonishing progress the French language had made, in its refinement and conscious purification from 1630 to 1670. The abbé was a free-thinker, for a man ostensibly of the cloth: Helvétius quoted[1] his remark that, if all the good and all the evil done in the name of religion were weighed together, the evil would preponderate.[2]

His great work was his Description de France,[3] one of the secondary sources used by Edward Gibbon for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Louis was born in Charleville-Mézières, the son of Pierre Dufour, seigneur de Longuevue et Goisel, a Gentilhomme de Normandie and governor of Charleville.[4] His elder brother, who had been expected to succeed to the title and was already a field marshal awarded the Order of St. Louis, was killed at the battle of Ramillies, 1706.

After his death in Paris a volume of Longueruana was published,[5] based on the recollections of a devoted amanuensis who had transcribed Longuerue's savant conversations.[6] In 1769 a further selection of fugitive pieces from among his papers was published.[7]

Notes

  1. ↑ Helvétius, De L'esprit: Or, Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties, ch. xxiv "Of the means of perfecting morality".
  2. ↑ Longuerue, Description de France i, 11.
  3. ↑ In full, Description historique et géographique de la France ancienne et moderne.
  4. ↑ Biographical details are from the Avertissement to Longueruana (Berlin, 1754).
  5. ↑ Longueruana, ou recueil de pensées de discours et de conversations de feu M. Louis du Four de Longuerue, abbé... ("Berlin", i.e. Paris: Desmarets) 1754; it is to be wondered what Longuerue would have made of the title's macaronism. A catalogue of Longuerue's letters and dissertations follows the Avertissement.
  6. ↑ "...le résultat de ce qui se disoit dans une conversation libre & animée, où l'on passe d'un sujet à un autre, sans suite et sans liaison... L'Auteur a écrit de suite ce qu'il avoit entendu dire, sans s'embarrasser si ce qu'il écrivoit avoit du rapport avec ce qui précédoit, ou avec ce qui suivoit." ( Avertissement, 1754: xii-
  7. ↑ Rousselot de Surgy, ed., Receuil de pieces intéressantes pour servir à l'histoire de France, et autres morceaux de littérature retrouvés dans les papiers de M. l'abbé de Longuerue (Paris 1769).
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