Pierre-Jean Grosley

Pierre-Jean Grosley (Troyes , 18 November 1718 — 4 November 1785) was a French man of letters, local historian, travel writer and observer of social mores in the Age of Enlightenment. Grosley was a magistrate in his native Troyes, where he had plenty of opportunity to hear the local dialect, which he described in a paper (1761). [Grosley, "Vocabulaire troyen ou le parler de la region de Troyes", "Ephemerides" 1761; a reprint was issued (Saint-Julien: Édition de Sancey) 1984 ISBN: B000OW1SG4 .] At the time of his death he was engaged in publishing "Mémoires historiques et critiques pour l'histoire de Troyes" ("Historic and critical notes for the history of Troyes") of which only the first complete volume was printed (Paris 1774). [After his death the work was continued by his friend E.-T. Simon, who brought out a second volume in 1812, reprinting the "Vocabulaire troyen" ( [http://www.antiqbook.fr/boox/pic/169667.shtml on-line bibliographical catalogue entry] ).]

Grosley accumulated some medieval manuscripts in the course of his researches. A manuscript of the chanson de geste "Garin le Loherain" with Garey's inscription was part of the Phillipps collection and is now conserved in the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. [ [http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/events/bancroftiana/115/frenchmanu.html "Bancroftiana" 115] .]

Following his sojourn in Italy as the military administrator of the maréchal de Maillebois, he published his "Observations sur l'Italie et les Italiens."

He came in second in the competition ordered by the Académe de Dijon in 1750, which was won by Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his "Discours sur les sciences et les arts." In 1752 he published his "Recherches pour servir à l'histoire du droit françois"; the essay, maintaining the Gaulish origin of French customary law, is divided in three sections: the first presents arguments to show that Gaul was least Romanised in the north; the second that French customs did not have their origins in the anarchic feudal conditions of the tenth and eleventh centuries; the third, that the Roman law did not prevail north of the Loire. ["Catalogue of books on foreign law" 1849 London (The Charles Purton Cooper collewction at Lincoln's Inn)]

Grosley was elected an associate of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1761.

A year in London in 1765 produced the tart observations on English style of life, with critical attention to the telling details that revealed for him the English character, his "Londres" (Neuchatel 1770), which was translated in 1772 and read with pleasure by the English themselves. Like the London view of Hogarth or the London Diary of that inveterate slummer James Boswell, ["Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-3" Frederick A. Pottle, ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill) 1950. ] Grosley presents a wry and satirical serious of portraits of London street life from the fashionable walkers in a rainy, soot-laden St James's Park to the bizarre holiday capers of buthcer's boys and milkmaids. Among other things it contained the first publish mention of that English invention, the sandwich.

Grosley was a contributor to volumes IV and XIV of the "Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.

His "New Observations on Italy and its Inhabitants" was published in London, 1764.

In Troyes, rue Pierre-Jean-Grosley commemorates his name.

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