BUDÉ, GUILLAUME. – French scholar, born in Paris on 26 January 1468 and died there on 22 August 1540, considered the first humanist of France. After pursuing legal studies in Paris and Orléans, with little success, his contacts with the Greek scholar Hermonymos and with Lascaris opened up a broader sphere of cultural interests to him, and he devoted himself passionately to classical antiquity, especially Greek antiquity. He held various positions at court (secretary to Louis XII, ambassador to Rome for the coronation of Pope Julius II and to Pope Leo X, travelling companion of Francis I, etc.) and was in contact with the most illustrious scholars of his time (besides Lascaris, T. More, Erasmus of Rotterdam, P. Bembo, N. Berauld, G. Sadoleto, Rabelais, etc.). In 1530 he obtained from Francis I the foundation of the « Collegium trilingue » (Hebrew, Greek and Latin), which later became the Collège de France; he also founded the Library of Fontainebleau, which, subsequently transferred to Paris, later constituted the first nucleus of the National Library. The Association G. B. is named after him today; under its auspices, among other things, one of the richest and most valuable collections of Greek and Latin texts is published, known, after the name of the publishing house, as the « collana Les Belles Lettres ».
Between 1502 and 1505 he published the Latin translation of several treatises by Plutarch, an author especially favored by the humanists. His Adnotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum, published in Paris in 1508 in a large folio volume, date from that year; by introducing historical and philological considerations for the first time into the study of Roman law, they opened new paths for this kind of investigation and in a certain sense anticipated Cuiacius. Six years later B. inaugurated the study of metrology with the fundamental Libri V de Asse et partibus eius (folio, Paris 1514; republished, in a much improved form, in Venice in 1522; Italian translation by Gualandi, Florence 1562; a summary, prepared by B. himself at the request of Francis I, was published in Paris in 1522 under the title Summaire ou Epitome du livre de Asse). After a philosophical and moral treatise, in which the author reveals a religious spirit based more on feeling than on theological speculation (De contemptu rerum fortuitarum libri tres, Paris 1521–26), B. once again revealed himself as one of the finest humanists and Hellenists with De studio litterarum recte et commode instituendo (there 1527); with the Commentarii linguae grecae (folio, there 1529; 2nd improved edition, published posthumously, there 1548), an extraordinarily rich collection of lexicography, from which all the authors of Greek lexicons who came after him drew extensively; and with De philologia (there 1530), an interesting treatise in dialogue form (one chapter was translated into French by L. Le Roy, commissioned by Charles IX, in 1572, and published in Paris in 1861 under the title Traité de la vénerie). The philologist’s passion and the Christian’s ardor dictated the pages of De transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum libri tres (Paris 1534), in which B. expounds the principle that pagan culture neither excludes nor stifles faith, but rather that man reaches faith by rising from that culture. We also possess a collection of his Epistolae (there 1520–31), which nevertheless comprises only a small portion (160 letters) of his extensive correspondence, and a posthumous work, De l'institution du prince (folio, there 1547), which is a patchwork version of his Recueil d'apophthegnes, offered to Francis I and preserved in manuscript in the library of the Arsenal in Paris (ms. 5103). The Opera omnia was published in four large folio volumes in Basel in 1557.
The conciliatory attitude he displayed toward the Reformation, the fact that he refused any funeral honors in his will, and the conversion of his widow, Roberta Le Lyeur, to the Lutheran creed nine years after his death have led some to suppose that B. adhered to Protestantism during the final years of his life (E. Haag devotes an entry to him in the dictionary of French Protestants, La France protestante, III, Paris 1852, p. 74 ff.). But, apart from his condemnation of the corrupt morals of the clergy, there are no other elements with which to support this hypothesis, which is moreover refuted in the biography written by one of his descendants (E. de
Budé, Vie de G. B., fondateur du Collège de France, Paris 1884).