Antoine-Léonard Thomas

File:Antoine-Léonard Thomas.jpg

DUPLESSIS Joseph Siffred: Portrait d'Antoine-Léonard Thomas

Antoine Léonard Thomas (1 October 1732 – 17 September 1785) was a French poet and literary critic, best known in his time for his eloquence especially for éloges in praise of past luminaries. It was in recognition of this that he was elected to Académie Française.

In an award-winning 1765 essay in praise of René Descartes, he penned a fuller form of the cogito in French as "Puisque je doute, je pense; puisque je pense, j'existe" ('Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist'. With rearrangement and compaction, the passage translates to "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am," or in Latin, "dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum."

Biography

Antoine-Léonard Thomas was born in Clermont-Ferrand, the son of a very distinguished woman with a strong character, the mother of seventeen children, who kept her faculties until the age of eighty-four, and by directing herself the first education of her children, she prepared the success of those who survived. Brought to Paris at the age of ten, the young Léonard made solid studies at the Collège du Plessis, and had a brilliant successes there. Despite the wishes of his family, who intended him to become a lawyer, he accepted a position as a teacher in a small class at the Collège de Beauvais; it was a way for him to give himself more freely to the inclination which led him to literature. He began, in 1753, with a thesis for the master of arts, entitled: Quantum in societatibus hominum litteratorum ad mutuam utilitatem mutua prosit amicitia.

Thomas had a very noble and not too proud idea of the literary man and his moral role in society, for he demanded a lot from the literary men and did not stipulate anything for them, which was meritorious in a young man. In 1756, he published, without putting his name to it, Philosophical and literary reflections on the poem of the Natural Religion of Voltaire, judging with a pedantic heaviness the verses of the poet that he tried to refute, and comparing his genius to "a volcano which throws only weak sparks obscured by many ashes". Later he disavowed this early production, sang the palinody, and Voltaire counted him, if not among his accomplices, at least among his most declared admirers. In the same year, he composed a most emphatic Ode (1756), dedicated to the comptroller-general of finances Moreau de Séchelles, and which increased the income of the university of Paris by a sum of 20 000 francs.

In 1757, his Mémoire sur la cause des tremblements de terre was judged worthy of an accessit by the Academy of Rouen. Written in a very religious spirit, this motive was enough for him to reject it, thereafter, from the collection of his books. When Watelet offered him a pension of 1,200 francs to allow him to devote himself more freely to his literary vocation, the young professor refused, preferring to rely on himself and his pen, which he was not wrong to do, for the new spirit had penetrated as far as the French Academy. Under Duclos's secretariat, the Academy had, in fact, considerably innovated in the choice of subjects it proposed for the eloquence prizes, by deciding to replace the commonplaces of rhetoric or morals with the praise of famous men of the nation. Thomas was, with La Harpe, the writer of the 18th century who best entered into the true spirit of these competitions. Thus, "according to whether one has little regard for liberty or loves it, one sees in Thomas only a pompous declaimer, a false and chimerical spirit, or under the somewhat sumptuous and stilted form of his eloquence, through the candid exaggerations of an inexperienced enthusiasm, one feels in him an honest, generous soul, a sincere talent".

Thomas' oratorical successes at the Academy began in 1759 with the Éloge du maréchal de Sax (1759), a weak piece, where Grimm found, not without reason, verbiage. The same year Jumonville appeared, a historical poem in four songs, an ode in honor of Captain de Jumonville relating the controversial episode of the death of this French officer assassinated in America by the English, where patriotic feelings abound, but also brilliant but cold verses; the subject is not happy, since in Thomas's version, it is about an assassination for which the young colonel George Washington bears the responsibility. Élie Fréron nevertheless complacently delivered him a certificate of poetic talent.

His Éloge du chancelier d'Aguesseau, on the other hand, was crowned in 1760 and the Epitre au Peuple, presented to the poetry contest, obtained the accessit. In 1761, the Éloge de Duguay-Trouin; in 1762, the Ode sur le Temps, even more inflated than elevated and which won the prize, completed his reputation. In 1762, the Duke of Praslin, Minister of Foreign Affairs, appointed Thomas as his secretary. Thomas did not lose his independence in this delicate position, since it was in the Duke's office that he composed, in 1763, his Éloge de Sully, which had a prodigious impact. The farmers general complained, the courtiers murmured: the philosophical party adopted Thomas, and Grimm wrote: "this eulogy alone deserves more crowns than the three others together", while mixing to his praise some criticisms against "the puerile and pedantic pomp" of this laborious diction. The best part, now that one no longer looks for allusions in the Eloge de Sully, is the eloquent complaints against the lowering of souls in the eighteenth century, against the softness of public morals, and finally the wishes in which the writer wished for constitutions "that would no longer keep orators away from everything that has to do with government and business."

The Éloge de Descartes, in 1765, aroused great animosity at the Academy; the abbés Batteux and d'Olivet, who were at the head of the latter, obtained that Thomas shared the prize with Gaillard, who understood neither the philosopher nor the writer in Descartes.

Thomas's conduct was consistent with his words. A quarrel had arisen between the Duke of Praslin and Marmontel about a joke attributed to the latter, and which affected the minister and his society. As Marmontel was running for the Academy, the Duke, in order to make his candidacy fail, ordered Thomas to join the ranks while getting him, through the Duke of Choiseul, a patent of secretary interpreter of the Swiss, with 1 000 ecus of appointements so that his place of private secretary of a minister would not be an obstacle to his election. Thomas was to keep this position until his death but, intimately linked with Marmontel, sacrificed his position to friendship as well as to his dignity, in August 1763. In 1766, the Éloge du dauphin, who had died the year before, inspired him less happily, for this speech, composed at the request of the Comte d'Angivilliers, who had appointed him, in 1765, historiographer of the king's buildings, if not without merit, appeared inferior to the previous ones.

Finally, on November 6, 1766, he was elected, in replacement of Jacques Hardion, to the Academy where, according to his expression, he was so anxious to enter "by the beautiful door". In his speech of reception, pronounced on January 22, 1767, he painted the man of letters citizen, perhaps by raising him a little too high; because he divides exactly the care of the world between the statesman who governs it, and the man of letters who enlightens it. He then compromised the effect of his speech with the reading of a song from his Pétréide, which put the connoisseurs, Grimm among others, to sleep.

Some important works were still finished by this laborious writer, since his entry to the Academy. In 1770, he read at the public session of the Saint-Louis his Éloge de Marc-Aurèle. This work glorifying philosophy, which lacks only a little variety, is, with the Praise of Descartes, his masterpiece. The public having applauded a great number of allusions against the power and the ministers, the men designated by the public opinion were wounded, and the speaker was forbidden to print his Praise, which could not appear until 1775.

At the reception of Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, which took place a few days later, September 6, 1770, Thomas, who, as director, welcomed the new member, began again his panegyric, a little long and awkward, in favor of the literati. Advocate General Séguier saw in it hurtful allusions to an indictment he had just pronounced against the impious books burned by order of the parliament. He became angry; Thomas was summoned before the chancellor: he was threatened with exclusion from the Academy, and it took the intervention of the archbishop of Toulouse to stop the persecution. The Essai sur le caractère, les mœurs et l'esprit des femmes of 1772, was not appreciated by women, and the work, where one would have wished more warmth and pleasure, gave place to many criticisms and jokes, particularly from Galiani, Diderot and Marie du Deffand, and obtained only a weak success. Of the works of Thomas that one continued to read the most, the Essay on the Eloges, published in 1773, showed that the talent of the author was relaxed, is a model of criticism, if not deep, at least honest and measured.

In 1777, Thomas lost in Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin one of his dearest friends; in a Tribute to her memory, he wrote about this benefactress, who had forced him to accept a life annuity of 1,200 livres, a few moving pages, to which he did not put his name. From then on, he was only concerned with the poem of the Pétréide, which he was not to finish, and with his health, which was declining day by day and condemned him to trips to the south of France, during which all work was forbidden to him. Numerous letters that he wrote then, either to Suzanne Necker, or to Mme Monnet, a continuous correspondence with Ducis, his close friend, with Alexandre Deleyre, the only distractions, that his bad health allowed him, form the most curious part of Thomas' works, because he almost doesn't show himself as a man of letters anymore, to become again the delicate, fine, and a little saddened spirit that nature had made him, before he succumbed to the seduction of the pomp of the oratorical genre. There are charming traits that one is quite surprised to find in this solemn writer. Voltaire said, speaking of his writings: "Voilà du gallithomas", but Marmontel praises in many places the "sensitive and virtuous Thomas, this great talent that inhuman critics had frozen", in his Mémoires.

In May 1785, being in Oullins, in the castle of the archbishop of Lyon, Antoine de Montazet, at whose house he had stopped for a few days on his way back from Nice, he suddenly learned that his friend Barthe had died and that a great accident had endangered the life of Ducis at the passage of Les Échelles. He ran to look for the latter, but he himself died a few months later, almost while caring for his friend, with whom he had returned to Oullins. Antoine de Montazet dedicated an epitaph to him in the church of Oullins, a few lines of which summarize well what one should think of Thomas: "He had exemplary morals, an elevated genius; good, modest, simple and gentle, severe to himself, he knew no passions other than those of goodness, study and friendship. A man of rare talents, excellent in virtue, he crowned his laborious and pure life with an edifying and Christian death." In a word Thomas was the type, already rare, of the man of letters who respects himself, who respects the public, and who, according to the remark of Villemain, never wrote a sentence of which a severe and delicate conscience could be alarmed. It is with Ducis the most honourable, the most truly stoic of the literati of a dying society.

The praises of Thomas, some of which are part of particular collections, have been gathered together and the same honor has been given to his poetic productions. As for his Complete Works, they were the object of six editions during half a century; the first one, that of Paris, was reproduced in Amsterdam, in 1774, and in Paris, in 1792; the edition of Paris, is increased by the posthumous works, which include fragments of La Pétreide, a Treaty on the poetic language, the correspondence with Suzanne Necker, Ducis, etc., and also some apocryphal pieces. The best edition of Thomas was given by Pierre Tiffon Saint-Surin. During the lifetime of this writer, Dutch booksellers collected several times his Œuvres diverses. Finally, we have extracts of his writings under the title of Esprit de Thomas.

References

• Deleyre, Alexandre (1791). Essai sur la vie de M. Thomas, de l’Académie françoise. Paris: Moutard.
• Joran, Théodore (1926). "Un Illustre Oublié: Antoine-Léonard Thomas," Revue bleue, Vol. LXIV, No. 1, pp. 174–80.
• Mesnard, Paul (1857). Histoire de l’Académie française depuis sa fondation jusqu’en 1830. Paris: Charpentier.
• Micard, Étienne (1924). Antoine Léonard Thomas (1732-1785): Un écrivain académique au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: É. Champion.
• Tiffon Saint-Surin, Pierre (1825). Notice sur Thomas. Paris: Verdière.

External links

• Works by Antoine-Léonard Thomas at Gallica
• Antoine-Léonard Thomas at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database