FURETILRE, ANTOINE (1619-1688)

This article appears in Volume V11, Page 357 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: FRA-GAE

FURETILRE, ANTOINE (1619-1688) , French scholar and miscellaneous writer, was born in Paris on the 28th of December 1619. He first studied law, and practised for a time as an advocate, but eventually took orders and after various preferments became abbe of Chalivoy in the diocese of Bourges in 1662. In his leisure moments he devoted himself to letters, and in virtue of his satiresNouvelle Allegorique, ou histoire des derniers troubles arrives au royaume d'eloquence (1658); Voyage de Mercure (1653)he was admitted a member of the French

Academy

ACADEMY, GREEK
ACADEMY, ROYAL

in 1662. That learned

body

BODY

had long promised a complete dictionary of the French tongue; and when they heard that Furetiere was on the point of issuing a

work

WORK

of a similar nature, they interfered, alleging that he had purloined from their stores, and that they possessed the exclusive privilege of publishing such a book. After much bitter recrimination on both sides the offender was expelled in 1685; but for this act of injustice he took a severe revenge in his satire, Couches de l'academie (Amsterdam, 1687). His Dictionnaire universel was posthumously published in 1690 (Rotterdam, 2 vols.). It was afterwards revised and improved by the

Protestant

PROTESTANT

jurist, Henri Basnage de Beauval (1656-1710), who published his edition (3 vols.) in 17o1; and it was only superseded by the compilation known as the Dictionnaire de Trevoux (Paris, 3 vols., 1704; 7th ed., 8 vols., 1771), which was in fact little more than a reimpression of Basnage's edition. Furetiere is perhaps even better known as the author of Le Roman bourgeois (1666). It cast ridicule on the fashionable romances of Mlle de Scudery and of La Calprenede, and is of

interest

INTEREST

as descriptive of theeveryday life of his times. There is no

element

ELEMENT (Lat. elementum)

burlesque

BURLESQUE (Ital. burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful
trick
- TRICK
)

, as in

Scarron

SCARRON, PAUL (1610-166o)

's Roman comique, but the author contents himself with stringing together a number of episodes ,and portraits, obviously

drawn

DRAWN

from life, without much attempt at sequence. The book was edited in 18J4 by Edward Fournier and Charles
Asselineau and by P. Jannet.
The Fureteriana, which appeared in Paris eight years after Furetiere's death, which took place on the 14th of May 1688, is a collection of but little value.

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