Le Système d'Helvétius by Jean-Louis Longué

Abstract

1146 Reviews translation of the Institutions,which fornationalistic reasons takes sides with Emi lie against Mairan (John Iverson). Robert Adelson makes a good contribution on Emilie as a musician. [A letter ofDevaux, dated 20 November 1748, reports that she sang her part out of tune!] Franchise Douay-Soublin examines her Grammaire raisonnee, which, pace Wade, she finds owes more to theGrammaire of Port-Royal than to Locke. Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, with his customary erudition, dis cusses her Examens de la Bible. The publication history of her translation of the Principia, including the role ofClairaut, is treated byOlivier Courcelle aswell as by Frederic Chambat and Dominique Varry. Among other articles, Jean-Daniel Can daux provides reports on her lifeand death found in a Swiss journal and Franchise Blechet her borrowings from theBibliotheque nationale. Beautifully produced, this is a fine addition to scholarship on all aspects ofMme Du Chatelet. Among the few misprints, my second forename isgiven as Eugene! University of Toronto David Warner Smith Le Systeme d'Helvetius. By Jean-Louis Longue. Paris: Champion. 2008. 538 pp. 95. ISBN 978-2-7453-1656-1. This is the firstcomprehensive non-Marxist treatment of Helvetius's ideas since the ground-breaking work of Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie et son ozuvre (Paris: Alcan, 1907)). As its title indicates, the author's purpose is to show the coherence of Helvetius's ideas. He also claims to be defending and rehabilitating an author whose materialism has been defamed, though he does not dwell on the critics of Helvetius's system.He achieves his purpose with admirable thoroughness, analysing the author's ideas and situating them in relation to their sources and their influence, without benefit of thekey works ofCrocker. The results are uneven: the sections on religion and intolerance are excellent, those on epistemology and politics less good. The aim of defending his author tends tomake him uncritical. For example, the sentence 'C'est done par un detachement absolu de ses interetspersonnels, par une etude profonde de la science de la legislation, qu'un moraliste peut se rendre utile a sa patrie' (quoted pp. 223-24) makes one wonder how, according toHelvetius's own theory,his views could be given credence. Moreover, a few claims cry out for discussion, notably thatHelvetius's notion of'interet' differs from egoism (pp. 16, 163-64, 279; cf. the quotation on page 407). Though aware of R. Koebner's 1951 article demonstrating that some ofHelvetius's letters toMontesquieu and Saurin were thework of his literary heir La Roche ('The Authenticity of the Letters on the Esprit des lois Attributed to Helvetius', Bulletin of the Institute ofHistorical Research, 24 (1951), pp. 19-43), he prend leparti arbitraire de lejs] citer' (p. 440), without refutingKoebner's arguments or reconciling the ideas of these letterswith those expressed inHelvetius's authentic letters to Servan and to his wife. Itwould be useful to know exactly how his ideas were modified between De Vesprit and De Vhomme; his allusion to a glissement d'une conception algebrique vers une conception geometrique' (p. 77) remains unexplained. Even philosophers may have MLR, 104.4, 2009 1147 troublewith some of the terms used: hecceites,metriopathie, Vobvie, oribasie, soteri ologique, theophanie defeated my Petit Larousse. Publication ofwhat was originally a doctoral thesis in philosophy at theUniversity of Provence (1998?) was delayed by the authors untimely death in an accident in 2001. His bibliography contains no works dated later than 1997, not even an article of his own. Though there are aspects of thiswork that the author would probably have corrected, readers must be grateful to those who have ensured itsposthumous publication. University of Toronto David Warner Smith An Introduction toNineteenth-Century French Literature. By Tim Farrant. Lon don: Duckworth. 2007. 216 pp. ?14.99. ISBN 978-0-7156-2907-9. The taskAn Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature sets itself isnot a small one. It seeks not only to survey the great authors, keymoments, and canonical textsof a particularly prolific century, casting new lighton thatwhich is well known, but also to evaluate theworks and authors lying at themargins of this epoch. Like all such compendia, it faces the challenge of balancing breadth of coverage with intricate analysis. The volume meets...