SAINT-PIERRE, JACQUES-HENRI-BERNARDIN de. - French writer, b. at Le Havre on 19 Jan. 1737, d. at Eragny on 21 Jan. 1814.

He pursued mathematical studies and travelled, while still an adolescent, to Martinique, then to Russia, Poland, Austria and Germany, as an officer of engineers or living by his wits; the protection of the baron de Breteuil won him a post on the island of Mauritius, which he had to give up very soon and of which he gave an account in the Voyage à l'île-de-France (1773). In Paris he obtained a far wider success with the Etudes de la nature (1784), followed by the Voeux d'un solitaire (1789), La Chaumière indienne (1790), and above all the pathetic novel Paul et Virginie (1798), the fruit of his exotic experience, relived with extraordinary vividness and freshness.

Director of the botanical garden and, after the Revolution, professor of morals at the Ecole normale and member of the Institut, he published the treatises De la nature and De la morale (1798), setting out in them the humanitarian and natural conception of ethics that he had learned from Rousseau, in the service of an undisguised anticlerical polemic.

Bibliography6 works

BIBL.: L. Aimé Martin, Mémoire sur la vie et les ouvrages de J.-H.-B. de S., Paris 1820 (reprinted with a supplement in 1926); A. Barine, B. de St-P., ibid. 1891 (4th ed., 1922); M. Spurieu, B. de St-P. d'après ses manuscrits, ibid. 1905; A. Monglond, Histoire intérieure du prénomatisme français de l'abbé Prévost à Joubert, II, Grenoble 1929, pp. 428-43; L. Roule, B. de S. P. et l'Harmonie de la Nature, Paris 1930; P. Trahard, Les maîtres de la sensibilité française au XVIIIe siècle, IV, ibid. 1933, pp. 71-146.

Enzo Bottasso

@incollection{ec10_saint_pierre_jacques_henri_ber, author = {Bottasso, Enzo}, title = {Saint-Pierre, jacques-henri-bernardin de}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {X}, pages = {1636}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1953}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/saint-pierre-jacques-henri-bernardin-de} }

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Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri-Bernardin de

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