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Biography of Abbé de Saint-PierreName: Abbé de Saint-PierreBirth Date: 1658 Death Date: 1743 Place of Birth: N/A Nationality: French Gender: Male Occupations: political theorist, economic theorist Abbé de Saint-Pierre The French political and economic theorist Charles Irénée Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743), was an early philosophe of the Enlightenment. His pamphleteering expressed the intellectual upheaval and fascination with affairs of state which marked this era.Of noble lineage, in 1680 Charles Irénée Castel, who is known as the Abbé Saint-Pierre, left his native Normandy and boyhood dreams of a monastic vocation for the ebullient intellectual atmosphere of Parisian university studies. For 5 years he followed every course available in the physical sciences, drifting further and further away from preoccupations with his ecclesiastical state as well as from what remained of his faith. After 1685 he experienced a brief return to the concerns of ethics and moral theology before abandoning the divine again for what would be the area of his real intellectual vocation--political theory. Henceforth his religion and his "consecration" to Holy …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…which jolted its user like a carriage) better than his insightful projects for public assistance to orphans and the aged and infirm, the maintenance of highways in winter (complete with statistical evidence of its economic advantage), and Parisian postal reform. But Saint-Pierre lacked the doctrinaire assurance of the next generation; avoiding grandiose plans for human betterment, he continued to the end refining his practical suggestions, a modest reformer who died in 1743, before the age of prerevolutionary visions. Further Reading In English, a recent treatment of Saint-Pierre is Merle L. Perkins, The Moral and Political Philosophy of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1959), which contains an extensive bibliography. Partial studies of him appear in E. V. Souleyman, The Vision of World Peace in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century France (1941); Carl Joachim Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (1948); and Francis Harry Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (1963). |