Antoine Furetière
born Dec. 28, 1619, Paris
died March 14, 1688, Paris
French novelist, satirist, and
lexicographer, remarkable for the
variety of his writing.
The son of a lawyer’s clerk,
Furetière entered the legal profession
but soon resigned his office and took
holy orders to qualify himself for
benefices, which provided an income that
enabled him to pursue his literary
vocation. After publishing three books
of comic and satirical verse, he wrote
Nouvelle Allégorique ou Histoire des
derniers troubles arrivés au royaume
d’Eloquence (1658), a facetious survey
of the contemporary Parisian world of
letters, in which he wrote so favourably
of the members of the Académie Française
that he was, in 1662, himself elected.
He soon forfeited the good will of
his colleagues, however. His Le Roman
bourgeois (1666) was a pioneer work in
the history of the French novel because
it dealt realistically with the Parisian
middle classes instead of “heroic”
personages or picaresque vagrants. But
it gave offense to the academy, not so
much by the formlessness of its
construction as by its fidelity to a
subject matter deemed unworthy of an
academician.
Furetière incurred worse displeasure
when, late in 1684, he revealed his
intention of publishing his own
universal dictionary of the French
language, on which he had been working
for some 40 years. This enterprise
infuriated some of his fellow
academicians, whose own long-projected
dictionary was still incomplete. They
expelled him from the academy, and,
though King Louis XIV did his best to
protect him, the rest of Furetière’s
life was spent in controversy with his
former colleagues. His great
Dictionnaire, soon to be recognized as
more comprehensive and much more useful
than the academy’s, was first printed in
Holland in three volumes in 1690.
