FONTENELLE, BERNARD. — Writer and philosopher, born in Rouen on 11 February 1657, died in Paris on 9 January 1757. More than to his frigid poetry, his fame is entrusted to various dialogues and brief treatises, marked by extreme stylistic clarity and refined but arid intelligence; in his long life, the transition from Cartesianism to the more self-conscious Enlightenment is almost embodied.
In his works (among the most celebrated: Dialogues des morts [1683], Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes [1686], Histoire des oracles [1687], Digression sur les anciens et sur les modernes [1688], De l'origine des fables [1724]) there is an attempt to reduce ethics, logic, and theology itself to an essentially human plane, in the clear denial of any positive essence of the idea of infinity and in the acceptance of a naturalistic mechanism. F. is not, however, averse to accepting a teleological explanation wherever mechanistic explanation comes to a halt: the animal world itself was not formed through the chance encounter of atoms, but required the work of an intelligent being; the preordination of the mechanism of the universe postulates the existence of God, but of the typical God of the deists, who is not immanent, moment by moment, in the life of the cosmos. F. rejects the idea of immortality and opposes every revealed religion, affirming, among other things, that miracles are impostures. He seems to believe in skepticism, elevating it almost to the status of a creed; certainly, he believes with great conviction in the myth of progress and in the superiority of the moderns over the ancients. The Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes were placed on the Index on 22 September 1687. But, like F.’s other works, they enjoyed enormous circulation in the salon circles of his age, also because they relied on the author’s facile gift for popularization.