FONTANES, LOUIS, Marquis de (1757-1821), French poet and politician, was born at Niort (Deux Sèvres) on the 6th of March 1757. He belonged to a noble Protestant family of Languedoc which had been reduced to poverty by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. His father and grandfather remained Protestant, but he was himself brought up as a Catholic. His parents died in 1774-1775, and in 1777 Fontanes went to Paris, where he found a friend in the dramatist J.F. Ducis. His first published poems, some of which were inspired by English models, appeared in the Almanack des Muses; “Le Cri de mon cœur,” describing his own sad childhood, in 1778; and “La Forêt de Navarre” in 1780. His translation from Alexander Pope, L’Essai sur l’homme, was published with an elaborate preface in 1783, and La Chartreuse and Le Jour des morts in the same year, Le Verger in 1788 and his Épître sur l’édit en faveur des non-catholiques, and the Essai sur l’astronomie in 1789. Fontanes was a moderate reformer, and in 1790 he became joint-editor of the Modérateur. He married at Lyons in 1792, and his wife’s first child was born during their flight from the siege of that town. Fontanes was in hiding in Paris when the four citizens of Lyons were sent to the Convention to protest against the cruelties of Collot d’Herbois. The petition was drawn up by Fontanes, and the authorship being discovered, he fled from Paris and found shelter at Sevran, near Livry, and afterwards at Andelys. On the fall of Robespierre he was made professor of literature in the École Centrale des Quatre-Nations, and he was one of the original members of the Institute. In the Mémorial, a journal edited by La Harpe, he discreetly advocated reaction to the monarchical principle. He was exiled by the Directory and made his way to London, where he was closely associated with Chateaubriand. He soon returned to France, and his admiration for Napoleon, who commissioned him to write an éloge on Washington, secured his return to the Institute and his political promotion. In 1802 he was elected to the legislative chamber, of which he was president from 1804 to 1810. Other honours and titles followed. He has been accused of servility to Napoleon, but he had the courage to remonstrate with him on the judicial murder of the due d’Enghien, and as grand master of the university of Paris (1808-1815) he consistently supported religious and monarchical principles. He acquiesced in the Bourbon restoration, and was made a marquis in 1817. He died on the 17th of March 1821 in Paris, leaving eight cantos of an unfinished epic poem entitled La Grèce sauvée.
The verse of Fontanes is polished and musical in the style of the 18th century. It was not collected until 1839, when Sainte-Beuve edited the Œuvres (2 vols.) of Fontanes, with a sympathetic critical study of the author and his career. But by that time the Romantic movement was in the ascendant and Fontanes met with small appreciation.
FONTENAY-LE-COMTE, a town of western France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Vendée 30 m. N.E. of La Rochelle on the State railway between that town and Saumur. Pop. (1906) town, 7639; commune, 10,326. Fontenay, an ancient and straggling town, is situated a few miles south of the forest of Vouvant and on both banks of the Vendée, at the point where it becomes navigable. The church of Notre-Dame (15th to 18th centuries), which has a fine spire and a richly sculptured western entrance, and the church of St Jean (16th and 17th centuries) are the chief religious buildings. The town has several houses of the 16th and 17th centuries. The most remarkable of these is the Hôtel de Terre Neuve (1595-1600), which contains much rich decoration together with collections of furniture and tapestry. Fontenay was the birthplace of many prominent men during the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Fontaine des Quatre-Tias, a fountain in the Renaissance style, given to the town by King Francis I., commemorates the fact. The chief square is named after François Viète, the great mathematician, who was born at Fontenay in 1540. The public institutions of the town include a tribunal of first instance and a communal college. Among its industries are the manufacture of felt hats, oil and soap and timber-sawing, flour-milling and tanning. There is trade in horses, mules, timber, grain, fruit, &c.
Fontenay was in existence as early as the time of the Gauls. The affix of “comte” is said to have been applied to it when it was taken by King Louis IX. from the family of Lusignan and given to his brother Alphonse, count of Poitou, under whom it became capital of Bas-Poitou. Ceded to the English by the treaty of Brétigny in 1360 it was retaken in 1372 by Duguesclin. It suffered repeated capture during the Religious Wars of the 16th century, was dismantled in 1621 and was occupied both by the republicans and the Vendeans in the war of 1793. From 1790 to 1806 it was capital of the department of Vendée.
FONTENELLE, BERNARD LE BOVIER DE (1657-1757), French author, was born at Rouen, on the 11th of February 1657. He died in Paris, on the 9th of January 1757, having thus very nearly attained the age of 100 years. His father was an advocate settled in Rouen, his mother a sister of the two Corneille. He was educated at the college of the Jesuits in his native city, and distinguished himself by the extraordinary precocity and versatility of his talents. His teachers, who readily appreciated these, were anxious for him to join their order, but his father had designed him for the bar, and an advocate accordingly he became; but, having lost the first cause which was entrusted to him, he soon abandoned law and gave himself wholly to literary pursuits. His attention was first directed to poetry; and more than once he competed for prizes of the French Academy, but never with success. He visited Paris from time to time and established intimate relations with the abbé de Saint Pierre, the abbé Vertot and the mathematician Pierre Varignon. He witnessed, in 1680, the total failure of his tragedy Aspar. Fontenelle afterwards acknowledged the justice of the public verdict by burning his unfortunate drama. His opera of Thétis et Pélée, 1689, though highly praised by Voltaire, cannot be said to rise much above the others; and it may be regarded as significant that of all his dramatic works not one has kept the stage. His Poésies pastorales (1688) have no greater claim to permanent repute, being characterized by stiffness and affectation; and the utmost that can be said for his poetry in general is that it displays much of the limae labor, great purity of diction and occasional felicity of expression.
His Lettres galantes du chevalier d’Her ..., published anonymously in 1685, was an amusing collection of stories that immediately made its mark. In 1686 his famous allegory of Rome and Geneva, slightly disguised as the rival princesses Mreo and Eenegu, in the Relation de l’île de Bornéo, gave proof of his daring in religious matters. But it was by his Nouveaux Dialogues des morts (1683) that Fontenelle established a genuine claim to high literary rank; and that claim was enhanced three years later by the appearance of the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), a work which was among the very first to illustrate the possibility of being scientific without being either uninteresting or unintelligible to the ordinary reader. His object was to popularize among his countrymen the astronomical theories of Descartes; and it may well be doubted if that philosopher ever ranked a more ingenious or successful expositor among his disciples.
Hitherto Fontenelle had made his home in Rouen, but in 1687 he removed to Paris; and in the same year he published his Histoire des oracles, a book which made a considerable stir in theological and philosophical circles. It consisted of two essays, the first of which was designed to prove that oracles were not given by the supernatural agency of demons, and the second that they did not cease with the birth of Christ. It excited the suspicion of the Church, and a Jesuit, by name Baltus, published a ponderous refutation of it; but the peace-loving disposition of its author impelled him to leave his opponent unanswered. To the following year (1688) belongs his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, in which he took the modern side in the controversy then raging; his Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionnelles (against Malebranche) appeared shortly afterwards.