A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom

Author:Philipp Blom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, 18th Century, Political Ideologies, Radicalism, Modern, France, Political Science, Social History, History
ISBN: 9780465032587
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-05-08T07:28:03+00:00

The most important among these recent arrivals, a diplomat himself, was the abbé Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787), a man who became one of the fixtures at the salon for some years. Galiani worked as secretary of the Neapolitan embassy in Paris, but he was not well suited to life as a diplomat, partly because he was so tiny that he constantly had to fight for attention, which he often did by being more witty than his opponents. In 1759, during his presentation to the king, he had greeted the sniggering of the courtiers with the words “Your Majesty, what you see before you is merely a sample of the secretary. The real secretary will come later.”

Born in the Italian town of Chieti in the Abruzzi region, Galiani had shown his brilliance early, and when he took the lower orders to become an abbé at the age of twenty-two, he had already published books that made him famous in the two areas that would establish his reputation: an economical treatise, Della moneta (On Money), and a satirical one, Raccolta in morte del boia (Eulogies on the Death of a Hangman). In 1759, at age thirty-one, the abbé took up his diplomatic appointment, and soon he was found regularly at some of the leading salons, including Holbach’s, whose intellectual range and frankness attracted him.

Galiani was a scholar and a scientist as well as a wit, and he was used to winning every debate he engaged in. Soon Holbach and his friends discovered that the abbé was a man who could stand up even to Diderot’s provocative views and rhetorical volleys. Diderot himself noticed it and was delighted; Galiani was “all gaiety, imagination, esprit, folly, and jokes, who makes you forget the drudgery of life,”6 he wrote to Sophie.

If Galiani’s impish humor made the circle laugh, his enjoyment of controversy made him adopt the position of Christian in residence at the baron’s godless table. One evening, when Diderot and his friend Roux had argued the atheist case with particular abandon, “saying things that should have attracted a hundred bolts of lightning to the house,” the diplomat could bear it no longer. “The abbé Galiani . . . had been listening patiently, but finally he said ‘Messieurs, messieurs philosophes, you are going very fast,’” recounted Madame Geoffrin. “‘Let me start by saying that if I were Pope I would deliver you to the inquisition and if I were King of France, to the Bastille, but, as I have the happiness of being neither one nor the other, I will come back to dine next Thursday.’”7

Galiani took up with great alacrity his role as the exact opposite of a devil’s advocate. Every atheist argument earnestly expounded by the radicals would be countered with a facetious defense of faith that could drive even Diderot to despair. Once, the abbé challenged him to a game of dice. After Denis had lost a fair amount of money, he furiously turned on Galiani, saying that the dice were loaded. “What,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.