Abbe Jean-Paul Bignon "Moderator of the Academies" and Royal Librarian

Abstract

The fortunes and relative status of scholarship as a profession depend almost inevitably upon its social utility. During the reign of Louis XIV a succession of great officers of the crown sought to coordinate scholarly activity in France by organizing a group of royal academies and a national library devoted to the advancement of the arts and sciences. The stated goal of these new centers of learning was to perfect and embellish French culture, then in the springtime of its vigor, and to establish its hegemony in Europe. Prominent among the royal officials who used their wealth and influence to marshal scholarly support for the Sun King were Louis Phelypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, who served as chancellor from 1699 to 1714, and his nephew, Abbe Jean-Paul Bignon. In appointing his nephew to a series of key posts in the administration of intellectual affairs Pontchartrain performed as great a service to the sciences, wrote the philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, as any previous minister of state.l Bignon was a consummate bureaucrat who labored tirelessly to preserve the elaborate administrative machinery devised by Jean-Baptiste Colbert for the supervision and control of French intellectual life.