correspondance Leibniz/Basnage de Beauval

Un échange de services typique entre deux citoyens de la République des Lettres ?

Sara Graveleau

Abstract

This article has three ambitions. First of all, this corpus of letters gives us the opportunity to make a case study of what is a correspondence between two citizens of unequal status in the Republic of Letters. One of them, Henri Basnage de Beauval, is relatively unknown so the second goal here is to show is commitment in the scholar community, above all as a journalist and redactor of the Histoire des ouvrages des savants (1687-1709). Indeed, this correspondence is for him a way to be furnished in literary news. What is interested is that Basnage de Beauval has to face a tension or contradiction between his two identities: as a journalist of the Republic of Letters, he has to be impartial, but as a Huguenot refugee, he needs to express his identity and to defend “the cause”. Last but not least, this article illustrates how much reciprocity is a central value between scholars, because Basnage de Beauval is not the only one to take advantage of this epistolary exchange. There is also some benefits for Leibniz: a better visibility for his ideas because they are diffused by Basnage’s newspaper, and a way to be in relationship with the famous Pierre Bayle and the dutch printers.