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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
During the reign of Louis XIV, few courtiers led careers as full and consequential as that of François Fénelon. Born in 1651 to a nobleman from an ancient line but with little wealth, Fénelon was well schooled through scholarships, rising as a young priest, scholar, teacher, and administrator through the Church hierarchy. The 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes gave Fénelon the opportunity to distinguish himself as an educator at a school for girls who had recently converted from Calvinism to Catholicism. A rising star in King Louis XIV's court, he was mentored by the Crown's leading theologian and political theorist, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, and rubbed shoulders with notables like the Duc de Saint-Simon. These associations led to his appointment as special tutor for Louis XIV's three grandsons, one of whom eventually became Philip V, king of Spain. Fénelon's own ambitions were rewarded in 1695, when he was appointed Archbishop of Cambrai. Over the course of his decorated career, Fénelon wrote theology, mysticism, and pedagogy, as well as more lighthearted fictional literature. He died in 1715, a few months before Louis XIV's own death.
1 Hanley, Ryan Patrick, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hereafter PPF, 1.
2 Hanley builds on the scholarship of Riley, Partick, “Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” in Riley, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau (Cambridge, 2001), 78–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and his introduction to Fénelon, François, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 PPF, 268 n. 1, where Hanley lists scholars associated with this viewpoint.
5 François Fénelon, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings, trans. Ryan Patrick Hanley (Oxford, 2020), hereafter FMPW, 1; PPF, 25.
6 PPF, 118.
7 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London, 1911), 367, 431.
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14 “Memorandum on the Deplorable Situation in France,” FMPW, 173–81, at 175.
15 FMPW, 79; PPF 125.
16 PPF, 135.
17 François Fénelon, “Mandement pour le Carême” for 1711, in Oeuvres de Fénelon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1852), 2: 463–5, at 464.
18 François Fénelon, Discourse Delivered at the Consecration of the Elector of Cologne, in FMPW, 120–40, at 121; PPF, 163.
19 PPF, 148.
20 Fénelon to Guyon, 11 Aug. 1689, quoted in Coleman, Charly, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, 2014), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Lennon, Thomas M., Sacrifice and Self-Interest in Seventeenth-Century France: Quietism, Jansenism, and Cartesianism (Leiden, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Brun, Jacques Le, “Les avantures de Télémaque: destins d'un best-seller,” Littératures classiques 70/3 (2009), 133–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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23 Ramsay, Andrew Michael, The Life of François de Salignac de la Motte Fenelon, Archbishop and Duke of Cambray (London, 1723), 148Google Scholar; Riley, “Rousseau, Fénelon,” 82: “This proto-Rousseauian, demilitarized ‘Spartanism’ led Louis XIV, of course, to read Telemachus as a satire on his luxuriousness and bellicosity, and Fenelon fell permanently from official favor.” Riley repeats the same point in “Fénelon's ‘Republican’ Monarchism in Telemachus,” in Hans Blom, Luisa Simonutti, and John Christian Laursen, eds., Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism, and the Common Good (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 81–2.
24 Hillinaar, Henk, “François-Armand de Salignac de la Mothe,” in Kors, Alan Charles, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York, 2002)Google Scholar, available at www-oxfordreference-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/view/10.1093/acref/9780195104301.001.0001/acref-9780195104301-e-223, accessed 28 Dec. 2020. For Hillinaar's view of Telemachus see his “Le projet didactique de Fénelon auteur de Télémaque: Enjeux et perspectives,” Documents pour l'histoire du Français langue étrangère ou seconde 30 (2003), 11–23.
25 Fénelon to Tellier, 1710, in Oeuvres de Fénelon, ed. Louis-Aimé Martin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1835), 3: 653–4, at 654.
26 FMPW, 7.
27 Like Hanley, I am largely following the commentary of Jacques Le Brun in Oeuvres de Fénelon, ed. Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols. (Paris, 1983–97), esp. 2: 1245.
28 [Fénelon], Les Avantures de Télémaque (La Haye, 1701), vi, vii, xiv.
29 FMPW, 182–210.
30 Mansfield, Andrew, “The Burgundy Circle's Plans to Undermine Louis XIV's ‘Absolute’ State through Polysynody and the High Nobility,” Intellectual History Review 27/2 (2016), 1–20Google Scholar.
31 PPF, 134.
32 Mansfield, “The Burgundy Circle's Plans to Undermine Louis XIV's ‘Absolute’ State.”
33 [Andrew Michael Ramsay], “Discourse Upon Epick Poetry and the Excellence of the Poem of Telemachus,” in Fénelon, The Adventures of Telemachus, trans. Littlebury and Boyer (London, 1719), 18–19.
34 [Andrew Michael Ramsay], An Essay Upon Civil Government: Wherein Is Set Forth, the Necessity, Origins, Rights, Boundaries, and Different Forms of Sovereignty. with Observations on the Ancient Government of Rome and England. According to the Principles of the Late Archbishop of Cambray (London, 1722).
35 Ramsay, The Life of Fenelon, 148,
36 PPF, 198. See also Mansfield, Andrew, Ideas of Monarchical Reform: Fénelon, Jacobitism and the Political Works of the Chevalier Ramsay (Manchester, 2015)Google Scholar.
37 FMPW, 108–14.
38 FMPW, 111.
39 FMPW, 111–12.
40 Voltaire to Condorcet, 24 Nov. 1777, 12 Jan. 1778, Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence, ed. Robert McNamee et al., Vers. 3.0, University of Oxford, 2018, https://doi-org.ccl.idm.oclc.org/10.13051/ee:doc/voltfrVF1290157b1c, accessed 3 Jan. 2021.
41 It was first published in Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Histoire de membres de l'Académie française, 6 vols. (Paris, 1785), 3: 351–70.
42 Fénelon à une convention française ou préliminaires à la constitution du philosophe (Paris, 1793), 4.
43 Archives parlementaire, 18 April 1793, 636; Pierre Vincent Chalvet, Des Qualités et des devoirs des instituteurs publique (Paris, 1793), 13.
44 Mercier, Louis Sebastien, Fénelon à son diocese, pièce dramatique en trois actes en prose (Paris, 1794)Google Scholar; Télémaque dans l'isle de Calypso (Paris, 1790); Chénier, Marie Joseph, Fénelon, ou Les Religieuses de Cambrai (Paris, 1793)Google Scholar.
45 Alphonse de Lamartine, Fénelon, new edn (Paris, 1876), 72–3.
46 Fénelon, François de, Télémaque polyglotte: contenant les six langues européennes les plus usitées, le français, l'anglais, l'allemand, l'italien, l'espagnol et le portugais (Paris, 1837)Google Scholar; Selections from the Writings of Fénelon (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1829). See also Le Télémaque des écoles, ou, Les aventures de Télémaque (New York, 1818).
47 For example, Oeuvres spirituelles de Fénelon: Contenant son Traité de l'existence de Dieu (Paris, 1842).
48 van Horn Melton, James, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, relying on Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1989; first published 1962)Google Scholar.