Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
French writer
Louis Petit de Bachaumont in a fauteuil, by Carmontelle, ca 1748; in the background the Hôtel de Rouillé is being demolished, to free the classic facade of the Louvre Colonnade
Petit de Bachaumont was of noble family and was brought up at the court of Versailles. He passed his whole life in Paris, however, as the centre of the salon of Marie Anne Doublet (1677–1771), where criticism of art and literature took the form of malicious gossip. A sort of register of news was kept in a journal of the salon, starting in 1762, which dealt largely in scandals and contained accounts of books suppressed by the censor. Bachaumont's name is commonly connected with the first volumes of this register, which was published anonymously, long after Petit de Bachaumont's death,[2] under the title Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des Lettres, but his exact share in the authorship of those years before his death in 1771 is a matter of controversy. The register was continued by Pidansat de Mairobert (1707–1779), who may have had a greater hand in it from the start, and by others, until it reached 36 volumes (covering the years 1774-1779). It is of some value as a historical source, especially for prohibited literature, and full of anecdotes, for which it was sieved by the brothers Goncourt, who revived interest in this obscure figure,[3] whom they presented as the anecdotier parfait, the reputation, as the "perfect recounter of anecdote" to the present time.
Petit de Bachaumont's studied "indolence", remarked upon in his obituary,[4] was a stylish pose. His major published writings are Essai sur la peinture, la sculpture et l'architecture (1751) and his surveys of the Paris salons of 1767 and 1769,[5] in which aesthetics and cultural politics were inseparably entwined. Less noted is his published call in 1749[6] for the roofing-over of the classical colonnaded east front of the Palais du Louvre and the clearing away of the ramshackle structures, both those that had been built against it, in order to form a proper Palais du Louvre, and those in the centre of the Cour Carrée itself[7] Sections of the palace were in danger of collapse, scarcely touched by royal indifference after 1678;[8] work did begin in 1755 to clear the facade of the Louvre, overseen by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Marigny, supervisor of the Bâtiments du Roi.
As a critic of art, his recommendation of a young artist named François Boucher appeared in a design memorandum Bachaumont presented the duc de Bouillon, who was occupied with renovating interiors at the Château de Navarre in Normandy, in 1730: "he is very quick, works fast and is not expensive".[9]
See, in addition to the memoirs of the time, especially the Correspondance littéraire of Grimm, Diderot, d'Alembert and others (new ed-, Paris, 1878); Ch. Aubertin, L'Esprit public au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1872).
↑ Robert S. Tate Jr., Petit de Bachaumont: His Circle and the Mémoires Secrets (Geneva: Institut Voltaire, 1968); extended reviews by Basil Guy (The French Review44.2 [December 1970], pp. 460-461) and Louis A. Olivier (Modern Language Notes86.4 [May 1971], pp. 587-589.
↑ It was first published in London as a multi-volume set from 1783 to 1789.
↑ An incomplete edition of the Mémoires secrets (4 vols.) had been undertaken in 1830 by Ravenal and a volume of extracts was published by P. Lacroix in 1859.
↑ Premier mémoire sur le Louvre; revised and republished 1749.
↑ See Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2007), p.68-72. The temporary structures in the center of the Cour Carrée are clearly visible in Turgot's map of Paris, 1739.
↑ "For lack of funds", remarks Marianne Roland Michel, "The Clearance of the Colonnade of the Louvre: A Study Arising from a Painting by de Machy", The Burlington Magazine120 No. 906 (September 1978, pp. i-vi). p. 1 and passim, detailing the clearance of the Hôtel de Rouillé and other structures.
↑ Claire Hornsby, "Boucher and Servandoni: the Château de Navarre in Normandy", Apollo145 (1997) pp 19-24.
Charles Théveneau de Morande was a gutter journalist, blackmailer and French spy who lived in London in the 18th century.
Jacques Sarazin or Sarrazin was a French sculptor in the classical tradition of Baroque art. He was instrumental in the development of the Style Louis XIV through his own work as well as through his many pupils. Nearly all his work as a painter was destroyed and is only known through engravings.
The Louvre Palace, often referred to simply as the Louvre, is an iconic French palace located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, occupying a vast expanse of land between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Originally a defensive castle, it has served numerous government-related functions in the past, including intermittently as a royal residence between the 14th and 18th centuries. It is now mostly used by the Louvre Museum, which first opened there in 1793.
The Mémoires secrets pour servir à l'histoire de la République des Lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu'à nos jours is an anonymous chronicle of events that occurred between 1762 and 1787. Historian Dena Goodman thinks it started as a manuscript newsletter emanating from Paris. It was first published in London as a multi-volume set from 1781 to 1789. Thus, although the entries bear exact dates, they were not published until long after the events they describe.
Louis XVI style, also called Louis Seize, is a style of architecture, furniture, decoration and art which developed in France during the 19-year reign of Louis XVI (1774–1792), just before the French Revolution. It saw the final phase of the Baroque style as well as the birth of French Neoclassicism. The style was a reaction against the elaborate ornament of the preceding Baroque period. It was inspired in part by the discoveries of Ancient Roman paintings, sculpture and architecture in Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its features included the straight column, the simplicity of the post-and-lintel, the architrave of the Greek temple. It also expressed the Rousseau-inspired values of returning to nature and the view of nature as an idealized and wild but still orderly and inherently worthy model for the arts to follow.
The Louvre Colonnade is the easternmost façade of the Palais du Louvre in Paris. It has been celebrated as the foremost masterpiece of French Architectural Classicism since its construction, mostly between 1667 and 1674. The design, dominated by two loggias with trabeated colonnades of coupled giant columns, was created by a committee of three, the Petit Conseil, consisting of Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault. Louis Le Vau's brother, François Le Vau, also contributed. Cast in a restrained classicizing baroque manner, it interprets rules laid down by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, whose works Perrault translated into French (1673). Its flat-roofline design, previously associated with Italy and unprecedented in France, was immensely influential.
Marie Anne Doublet, known as Doublet de Persan, Legendre, was a French scholar, writer and salonnière. She was born and died in Paris.
Nicolas-Philippe Ledru, known as Comus, was a noted European physicist, prestidigitator and illusionist of the late 18th century. He had two sons, Jacques Philippe Ledru (1754–1832), a member of the French National Academy of Medicine and a mayor of Fontenay-aux-Roses, and Jacques Auguste Ledru, an inspector of pawn-shops. The latter was the father of Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, a lawyer and a French politician.
Jean-Marie-Bernard Clément was a French writer and translator.
The Petite Galerie is a wing of the Louvre Palace, which connects the buildings surrounding the Cour Carrée with the Grande Galerie bordering the River Seine. Begun in 1566, its current structures date mainly from the 17th and 19th centuries. Most of its main floor is now the Galerie d'Apollon, one of the Louvre's most iconic spaces.
Hellé (Helle) is an opera by the French composer Étienne-Joseph Floquet, first performed at the Académie Royale de Musique on 5 January 1779. It takes the form of a tragédie lyrique in three acts. The libretto, by Pierre Lemonnier, is based on the Greek myth of Helle. At this time, there was little demand for operas by native French composers and Floquet struggled to have Hellé staged. When it eventually appeared in 1779, it was booed, despite Floquet's attempt to imitate the style of Piccinni, and ran for only three performances.
Jean-François Géorgel was a French clergyman, abbot and member of the Society of Jesus.
Nicolas Boindin was an 18th-century French writer and playwright.
Mathieu-François Pidansat Mairobert was a French writer.
The Cour Carrée is one of the main courtyards of the Louvre Palace in Paris. The wings surrounding it were built gradually, as the walls of the medieval Louvre were progressively demolished in favour of a Renaissance palace.
The Great Sphinx of Tanis is a granite sculpture of a sphinx, whose date may be as early as the 26th century BC. It was discovered in the ruins of the Temple of Amun-Ra in Tanis, Egypt's capital during the 21st Dynasty and the 23rd Dynasty. It was created much earlier, but when exactly remains debated with hypotheses of the 4th Dynasty or the 12th Dynasty. All that is left of its original inscription are the parts alluding to pharaohs Amenemhat II, Merneptah and Shoshenq I.
François Théodore Devaulx, or Théodore-François Devaulx, was a French sculptor.
The expansion of the Louvre under Napoleon III in the 1850s, known at the time and until the 1980s as the Nouveau Louvre or Louvre de Napoléon III, was an iconic project of the Second French Empire and a centerpiece of its ambitious transformation of Paris. Its design was initially produced by Louis Visconti and, after Visconti's death in late 1853, modified and executed by Hector-Martin Lefuel. It represented the completion of a centuries-long project, sometimes referred to as the grand dessein, to connect the old Louvre Palace around the Cour Carrée with the Tuileries Palace to the west. Following the Tuileries' arson at the end of the Paris Commune in 1871 and demolition a decade later, Napoleon III's nouveau Louvre became the eastern end of Paris's axe historique centered on the Champs-Élysées.
Geneviève-Charlotte-Agnès Savalette (1735–1795), mainly known as the Marquise de Gléon, was an amateur playwright and actress active in 18th-century society theatre. In her youth, she was part of the court of the Prince of Conti.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
