biography
| name: |
Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d'
|
pronunciation:
[ah(r)zh&etilde;]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1703–71)
|
| biography:
| Writer and free thinker, born in Aix-en-Provence, SW France. He popularized the ideas of such Enlightenment writers as Pierre Bayle, Bernard de Fontenelle, and Voltaire. After an aristocratic Catholic upbringing and a tempestuous youth, he spent 25 years as chamberlain to Frederick the Great, writing 18 volumes of letters, Correspondance philosophique. His Lettres juives (1738), Lettres cabalistiques (1741), and Lettres chinoises (1739–40) resemble Montesquieu's Lettres persanes. |
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