Louis Du Four de Longuerue

Louis Dufour de Longuerue (1652 — 1733), abbé of Sept-Fontaines and of Saint-Jean-du-Jard, known simply as the abbé de Longuerue, was an antiquarian and historian, a protegé of Fénelon who in his turn encouraged the Abbé Alary and the young cartographer-to-be, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697-1782), perhaps the greatest geographical author of the eighteenth century. As a philologist, he remarked on the astonishing progress the French language had made, in its refinement and conscious purification from 1630 to 1670. The abbé was a free-thinker, for a man ostensibly of the cloth: Helvétius quoted [Helvétius, "De L'esprit: Or, Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties", ch. xxiv "Of the means of perfecting morality".] his remark that, if all the good and all the evil done in the name of religion were weighed together, the evil would preponderate. [Longuerue, "Description de France" i, 11.]

His great work was his "Description de France", one of the secondary sources used by Edward Gibbon for his "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"..

After his death a volume of "Longueruana" was published. ["Longueruana, ou recueil de pensées de discours et de conversations de feu M. Louis Du Four de Longuerue, abbé..." ("Berlin", i.e. Paris: Desmarets) 1754; it is to be wondered what Longuerue would have made of the title's macaronism.] In 1769 a further selection of fugitive pieces from among his papers was published. [Rousselot de Surgy, ed., "Receuil de pieces intéressantes pour servir à l'histoire de France, et autres morceaux de littérature retrouvés dans les papoiers de M. l'abbé de Longuerue" (Paris 1769).]

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DEFAULTSORT|Longuerue, abbé Louis Dufour de|