Étienne Dolet

Medallion with portrait of Étienne Dolet

Étienne Dolet (French: [etjɛn dɔlɛ]; 3 August 1509 – 3 August 1546) was a French scholar, translator and printer. Dolet was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. His early attacks upon the Inquisition, the city council and other authorities in Toulouse, together with his later publications in Lyon treating of theological subjects, roused the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely. After being imprisoned several times, he was eventually convicted of heresy, strangled and burned with his books due to the combined efforts of the parlement of Paris, the Inquisition, and the theological faculty of the Sorbonne.

Early life and eduction

Born in 1509 into a modest family, Dolet lived in Orléans until the age of twelve. In 1521, he left for Paris, where he studied Latin for five years with Nicolas Bérault, professor of Gaspard II de Coligny. In 1526, following the humanist tradition of the time, he began a tour of European universities. First, he went to Padua to perfect his knowledge of Latin and especially the writings of Cicero, under the direction of his master and friend Simon de Villanova. On the death of the latter, Étienne Dolet attached himself as secretary to Jean de Langeac, bishop of Limoges and French ambassador to the Republic of Venice. There he followed Battista Egnazio's lessons on Cicero, who became for Dolet his “master of writing and often of thought”. He also found time to write Latin love poems to a Venetian woman named Elena.

He returned soon afterwards to Toulouse, where he studied law.

A bust of Étienne Dolet in Orléans, (Val-de-Loire, France) Mairie garden.

Speaking, writings, prison stays and banishment

During his stay in Toulouse, he was elected speaker of the French Nation and was recognised as being a gifted orateur. In October 1533, he delivered a violent indictment of the barbarism of Toulouse and later, in January 1534, a diatribe on religious superstitions and the brutality of the Gascons. He was imprisoned in March 1534 and, despite the protection of Jean de Pins (a prominent humanist and bishop), he was banished by the parliament of Toulouse in 1534.

Following the banishment, he moved to Lyon in August 1534, where he joined the circle of Lyon humanists. Its members included Clément Marot and Rabelais, as well as Guillaume and Maurice Scève, Jean de Tourne père and the printer Sébastien Gryphe, for whom he became a proofreader.

In 1535, thanks to Sébastien Gryphe, Dolet published the Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana, a work reviving the quarrel over Ciceronianism. In this work, he attacks both Erasmus and Luther, accused them both of trying to destroy the Christian religion.

In December 1536, during a brawl, he killed a painter nicknamed Compaing who, he claimed, wanted to assassinate him. He fled Lyon and discreetly reached Paris to beg for mercy from the king, who pardoned him in February 1537. Dolet was nevertheless imprisoned for a few weeks upon his return to Lyon.

On March 6, 1538, Francis I granted him the highly advantageous privilege giving him the exclusive right for ten years to print any work in Latin, Greek, Italian or French, from his pen or under his supervision. He allowed various publishers to benefit from it before setting himself up as a printer in 1539. It was in these years that he published the first two volumes of the Commentariorum linguae Latinae, an ambitious etymological dictionary of Latin. This work, which he conceived during his adolescence, is considered to be the magnum opus of his life.

In 1541, he published De officio legati on the functions of ambassadors. This work is believed to be earliest printed work on the subject of ambassadorial responsibilities.

Printer in Lyon

With the financial assistance of Hellouin Dulin, he opened a print shop on the rue Mercière in Lyon. In the course of four years, he published nearly 90 works, including textbooks for students, classic texts in French or Latin, and the literature of the time, Clément Marot, Rabelais (indeed, Dolet published a counterfeit edition of Gargantua which led to the falling out of the two men ). One of his great publishing successes was his work on 'How to Translate Well.'

A quarter of this production is devoted to religious works. Notably, he published a French version of the New Testament and 'The Institution of the Christian Religion' by Calvin, a Protestant tract published during the Inquisition. He is not unaware of the dangers to which some of his publications exposed him. The publication in 1538 of his Cato Christianus even produced the opposite effect. This catechism is based on the model of the Disticha Catonis (Cato's Couplets), a very fashionable work in the 16th century. The Cato Christianus was banned as soon as it was released, was condemned on October 2, 1542 and was one of the books burned on February 1544, on the square in front of Notre-Dame de Paris.

Further imprisonment and death

After imprisonment for fifteen months, Dolet was released by the advocacy of Pierre Duchatel, Bishop of Tulle. He escaped from a second imprisonment in 1544 by his own ingenuity, but, venturing back from Piedmont, whence he had fled in order to print at Lyon the letters by which he had appealed for justice to the king of France, the queen of Navarre and the parlement of Paris, he was again arrested. He was branded as a relapsed atheist by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. On 3 August 1546 (his 37th birthday), he was executed in Place Maubert in Paris. On his way there he was said to had composed the punning pentameter Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pia turba dolet (Dolet himself does not suffer, but the pious crowd grieves).

portrait of Étienne Dolet

Religious views

Whether Dolet is to be classed with the representatives of Protestantism or with the advocates of anti-Christian rationalism has been frequently disputed; the principal Protestants of his own time did not recognize him, and Calvin formally condemned him, along with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and his master Villanova, as having uttered execrable blasphemies against the Son of God. The religious character of a large number of the books which he translated or published is sometimes noted in opposition to these charges, as is his advocacy of reading the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue.

Dolet has been referred to as an Anti-Trinitarian.

Legacy

The trial of Dolet was published (1836) by A.H. Taillandier from the registers of the parlement of Paris. A bronze statue of Dolet was erected on the Place Maubert in Paris in 1889; it was removed and melted down in 1942 during the German occupation of Paris.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dolet, Étienne". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 387–388.

Further reading

• Picquier, Marcel, Etienne Dolet, 1509-1546: imprimeur humaniste, mort sur le bûcher, martyr de la libre pensée (nouv. ed., 2009)
• Weinberg, Florence Byham (2015). Dolet. Paladin Timeless Books. ISBN 978-1606191286.
• Boulmier, Joseph, E. Dolet, sa vie, ses oeuvres, son martyre (1857)
• Christie, Richard Copley, Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (2nd ed., 1889), containing a full bibliography of works published by him as author or printer;
• Didot, Ambroise Firmin, Essai sur la typographie (1852)
• Galtier, O., Étienne Dolet (Paris, 1908).
• Michel, L., Dolet: sa statue, place Maubert: ses amis, ses ennemis (1889)
• Née de la Rochelle, J.F., Vie d'Éienne Dolet (1779)

External links

• Works by Etienne Dolet at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Étienne Dolet at the Internet Archive