With Marc Fumaroli disappears one of the last great scholars of the european civilization. This pope of the university culture, elected in 1986 at the Collège de France to the chair of Rhetoric and society in Europe (Sixteenth-Seventeenth centuries) “, the skimmer of libraries, familiar trans-temporal of The Fountain and Chateaubriand, had a mere dandyism in tweed who put his honour in the pocket. The air of a prince aztec cravaté, a friendship sustained with Jean d’ormesson, this taster of words loved to reconstruct with accuracy a state gone from small talk in the west, ever attentive to the upper crust societies of the verb. A man of culture, that is, someone who pays the price for what has been lost. Marc Fumaroli would it have borrowed a time machine that she had deposited in the middle of a sermon of Bossuet. French eloquence, Italian by the purple, the duke of Mantua was not of his cousin.
Marc Fumaroli, it was first the mystery of a fire. Born in Marseille in 1932, a young student in Fez, professor of classics mobilized in the wilayas of the Algerian war, he confronts soon enough the impetuosity of a land of bravado with the armature of the word ordained, fascinated by the embers in the syntax, worn by the glow réfrénée that upon its investigations. Prisant, without doubt, the beautiful veins of the marble racinien, he preferred to devote one of his first books to the posture inflamed heroes hard. The fervor of the libido sciendi, the desire for knowledge, made him a décrypteur of rhetoric, a litigant sizes, a swarm of case history humming beneath the skin of a carnal chair.
It was a count Zaroff hunting for the uneducated.
His academic reputation was quickly established. There was in him of Norbert Elias to the study of the societies of court, and the Bernard Berenson for the acuity of the gaze in painting. Him who devoted one of his last essays to Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun liked the poses draped, sculptures oratories. The author of When Europe spoke French cultivated the nostalgia of imperium and of the subtleties of marquis. Surveyor of lost time, Fumaroli could be semiologist of the intangible : in the Sites of memory of Pierre Nora, his article on ” The conversation “, the theme inherently volatile, is dazzling. Camped in the face of his contemporaries in the posture of the appalled reactive, this preface sought took in the university the place of an arbitrator ancestries.
It was then that his temperament duelist found to express themselves. Close to aroniens of the review Comment, it book in 1991 a pamphlet assassin, ” The cultural State “, steering wheel in the feathers of Jack Lang, the pursuer of his arrows, up to the injustice, this mandarin-literate that was Jacques Rigaud. The neo-imprecator handled the stick with volts of dancer cruel. He knew how to play it. The signature of Fumaroli then became a antimoderne sharpened, experiencing the luxury of inquisitor to castigate what bothered her frame. I’ve heard hamm Andy Warhol, stroking one by one, such as succulent crab claws, each of its arguments and murderers. Fumaroli would gladly encagé Jeff Koons to Medrano. Delivering pancraces on a bed of feathers, he preferred the time when the city of Paris was surrounded by barriers rather than suburbs. This cardinal acute could darder on you the eye contempteur and haughty monk’s gourmet that was Louis Jouvet in La Kermesse héroïque. It was a count Zaroff hunting for the uneducated.
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Télévangéliste of the past
The recognition does not spare : his censer mental exhaled a scent of consul crowned. Notable it became, adorned with countless titles of doctor honoris causa, delivering oracles and stylish on the planets of the spirit. To the Institute of France, as say the rappers, he did it backwards : received first to the French Academy, the chair Ionesco, Fumaroli was elected three years later to the Academy of inscriptions and belles-lettres, going back as well of cardinal Richelieu in Tacit and Democritus. Man academies in effect, as it existed in the Sixteenth century in the cities of court Italian, when the platonic ideal of a company literate agrémentait the beautiful hours of the prince. Most amazing in this omen latin, the fervor that it triggered on american campuses. We invited him to Harvard and Columbia, Chicago and Princeton, as a télévangéliste of the past, revered as a fragment of old Europe laid down on a cheeseburger. With his friend Allan Bloom, he broke the modern as a convict, exploding stones. Imported as a table of Chick, the man in the Dome was psychically placed in the United States under the protection of a dome of nostalgia.
Enemy of schemes, abstract, friend of the contours to be accurate, the rhétoricien redouble his love for the precise expression by a mimesis of the real : in his free time, Marc Fumaroli diligently practiced photography, a kind of digital mirror capturing the eye of the thing as it is. Expert features-and-thrust, he could wipe those from his friends. A day where, in Corsica, he came out of the water with his snorkel in having scraped the side of the chest on the rocks, Jean d’ormesson, greeted him on the shore, saying : “You are Mazo de la Roche ? “But you have to know the best-sellers of the past in order to grasp the tip, served with crackling to a friend. These time are erased. Marc Fumaroli in the mastaba of words that it has built in purple ink. When the body disappears, the statue comes to life. The crusades will survive in the ether like a king hidden of incunabula. Vixit and scripsit. He lived and he wrote.
writing will advise you
Marc Fumaroli, the prince of the past
