BOUHOURS, DOMINIQUE. - French Jesuit and man of letters, b. in Paris on 15 May 1628, entered religious life in 1644, d. there on 27 May 1702.
First a teacher of rhetoric and then a tutor in aristocratic families, he was finally attached to the body of "scriptores" of the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. His reputation as a stylist no less than his urbanity introduced him into the literary circles of the capital and into the friendship of the great authors of the age, such as Racine and Boileau.
The anti-Jansenist polemic inspires the first part of B.'s output, including the works of devotion, which today appear mannered, with the exception of the Paroles tirées de l'Écriture Sainte pour servir de consolation à ceux qui souffrent, published posthumously in 1704. Mannered too, even though they had many editions, are the biographical works, among them the Vie de s. Ignace (Paris 1679) and Vie de s. François Xavier (ibid. 1683).
B.'s specific field, however, was that of literary and linguistic criticism.
Following in the footsteps of Vaugelas, he wrote: Doutes sur la langue française, proposez à MM. de l'Académie française par un gentilhomme de province (Paris 1674), together with the Remarques nouvelles sur la langue française (ibid. 1675), and Suite des remarques nouvelles (1687, against Port-Royal). His rigorous purism helped to purify the language, but had it prevailed, it would have reduced French to a court language.
Two works of B. had European resonance. In a chapter of the Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène (Paris 1671; Italian trans. by Fr. D. Janno, Palermo 1714), B. asked whether the "bel esprit" of the Parisian salons was to be found among the other nations. Germans replied, such as Cramer (Vindiciae nominis germanici contra quodam obtrectatores gallos, Berlin 1694), and Italians in the controversy against the following book, La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit (Paris 1687; 15th ed., translated into Latin, Italian,
English, German). In those dialogues, Eudoxe, that is B., represents the "classical" temperament of the France of Louis XIV, set against the "baroque" represented by Philanthe. The severe and sometimes contemptuous judgments on Italian authors, such as Tasso, and the incomprehension toward elevated poetic forms aroused proud protests in Italy, especially after the echo given to the French book by the Italian Jesuit C. Ettore (Il buon gusto nei componimenti retorici, Bologna 1696). The first defender of Italian classicism was the Marquis G. Orsi (Considerazioni sopra un famoso libro francese intitolato: La manière de bien penser, ibid. 1703). In the controversy, the side of the deceased B. was taken up by the Mémoires de Trévoux (1705) and also by some Italians, such as Count Francesco Montani; on the Italian side, there intervened, among others, Manfred and Baruffaldi; echoes of it are still found in Vico and, outside Italy, in Leibniz. This first great international literary polemic, which brought into play the profound reasons of every literature, has aroused numerous studies in our own day.
Bibliography14 works
Edmondo Lamalle