BROSSES, CHARLES de. - French writer, b. in Dijon on 7 Feb. 1709 and d. in Paris on 7 May 1777. Councillor in the Parliament of Dijon, then President and First President, he is generally known by this title.
A prolific polygraph; the work to which he devoted himself throughout his life is the Histoire de la république romaine dans le cours du VIIe siècle (1777), rich in material, but collected with scant critical sense; the work, on the other hand, that constitutes his principal and perhaps his only claim on posterity is the collection of the Lettres familières écrites d'Italie en 1739 et 1740, during a stay of about a year in Italy, in which he reveals himself as a sagacious observer and tireless researcher: highly objective letters, which therefore have documentary value, written in a simple and spontaneous manner, light and pleasant, they give a precise idea of the society and customs of the time, seen by one of the most curious minds of the 18th century, open, a lover of art, of fine taste, not incapable of subtle irony and at times of irreligious unscrupulousness.
Recent editions of the Lettres have been edited by E. Pilon and by Y. Bezard (Paris 1929).
President de B. also wrote a Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, a Traité de la formation mécanique des langues (1765), etc., but their excessive diffuseness, scant competence, disorder in treatment, and vagueness and impropriety of expression deprive them today of all value.
With the memoir Du culte des dieux fétiches ou parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Égypte avec la religion actuelle de la Nigérie (Paris 1760), de B. writes one of the first pages of the comparative history of religions. The occasion for his work the French man of letters drew from the interest of scholars of the second half of the 18th century in the peoples of nature (who had been the subject of a celebrated work by Lafitau), and his material was furnished to him by the accounts of Portuguese sailors and merchants, who had had occasion to carry out explorations on the western coast of Africa. These had noticed how the natives used to wear hung about the neck or waist objects (shells, teeth or tails of animals, feathers, iron, etc.), evidently as lucky charms. These lucky charms the Portuguese called by the same name they used for those (medals, scapulars, etc.) that they themselves wore upon their persons for the same purpose: fétigo, from the Latin factitius. De B. seized upon the term, broadened it to include every sort of object and even the sacred animals, to which acts of worship were directed in ancient Egypt, and made of fetishism, in union with sabeism, or astrolatry, the initial stage of the religious development - uniform - of all peoples, with the exception of the Hebrew. Fetishism would find its origin in fear; sabeism in admiration.
This doctrine, which later proved inconsistent, has, historically, its value, in that the evolutionist positivism of the following century, which had its head in Auguste Comte, drew inspiration from it, albeit indirectly.
Bibliography5 works
Jole Scudieri Ruggieri.