Gérard Ferreyrolles

Fellowship 2013

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Gérard Ferreyrolles is born in 1949 in Paris. He is a graduate of the “Ecole Normale supérieure” and was successful for the competitive examination for “agregation” in classical literature (1973). Then assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and cultural attaché in Venice, Italy. After his PhD in French literature in the Sorbonne (1982), he was consecutively assistant professor at the University of Rouen, Visiting Professor at Stanford University and assistant professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. After his professorial thesis in 1994, he was elected Professor at the University of Dijon, and, from 1997, at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, where he leads the research team “Port-Royal and literature” in the “Study Centre for the language and literature of the 17th and 18th centuries” (UMR 8599 of the CNRS). He is a member of the National Universities Council and was awarded the Pierre-Gorges Castex Prize from the Political and Moral Sciences Academy in 2012.

Bossuet writer, intellectual and political thinker in the context of his time

USIAS Fellows: Gérard Ferreyrolles, Béatrice Guion and Hans-Christian Günther

The French 17th century, although it is one of the most interesting periods in European history and a peak of European culture, is very much in the background of public attention. Scholarly research concentrates mainly on two towering figures, Descartes and Pascal.

It follows that Bossuet's momentous work has not yet received all the attention it deserves, although he is a thinker of considerable ability and influence, in religious, historical, philosophical and political matters, as well as one of France’s greatest prose stylists.

This project intends to offer a crucial contribution to a more complete and thorough understanding of his work, and therefore of the period as a whole. Bossuet will be studied in regard to sources and precursors, and in the context of his time, not only inside, but also outside France. This study will be led in an interdisciplinary perspective, gathering specialists of literature and rhetoric, but also scholars who specialize in history, philosophy, and theology.