BROSSES, CHARLES de. — French writer, b. in Dijon on 7 February 1709 and d. in Paris on 7 May 1777. A counsellor of the Parliament of Dijon, subsequently President and First President, he is generally known by this designation.
A prolific polymath, the work to which he devoted his entire life is the Histoire de la république romaine dans le cours du VIIe siècle (1777), rich in material, though collected with little critical sense; the work, on the other hand, that constitutes his principal and perhaps his only claim upon posterity is the collection of Lettres familières écrites d’Italie en 1739 et 1740, written during a stay of about one year in Italy, in which he reveals himself as a shrewd observer and indefatigable researcher: these letters are highly objective and therefore possess documentary value; written in a simple and spontaneous, light and agreeable manner, they give a precise idea of the society and customs of the period, viewed by one of the most curious minds of the 18th century—open-minded, fond of art, refined in taste, not incapable of subtle irony and at times of irreligious lack of restraint.
Recent editions of the Lettres have been edited by E. Pilon and Y. Bezard (Paris 1929).
President de B. also wrote a Histoire
des navigations aux terres autrales, a Traité de la formation mécanique des langues (1765), etc., but excessive diffuseness, inadequate expertise, disorder in exposition, and vagueness and inaccuracy 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 Nigerie (Paris 1760), de B. wrote one of the earliest pages in the history of comparative religion. The French man of letters found the occasion for his work in the interest shown by scholars in the second half of the 18th century in peoples in a state of nature (who had been the subject of a celebrated work by Lafiau), while its material was supplied by the reports of Portuguese sailors and merchants who had had the opportunity to explore the western coast of Africa. These had observed that the natives used to wear around their necks or waists objects (shells, teeth or tails of animals, feathers, pieces of iron, etc.), evidently as talismans. The Portuguese called these talismans by the same name they used for those (medals, scapulars, etc.) that they themselves wore for the same purpose: fétigo, from the Latin factitus. De B. appropriated the term, extending it to include every kind of object and even the sacred animals to which acts of worship were directed in ancient Egypt, and made fetishism, together with sabeism, or astrolatry, the initial and uniform stage of religious development among all peoples, with the exception of the Hebrew. Fetishism was held to originate in fear; sabeism in admiration.
This doctrine, which subsequently proved untenable, has its historical value, since the evolutionist positivism of the following century, associated with Augusto Comte, drew its inspiration from it, albeit indirectly.