René Auguste Constantin de Renneville
Encyclopedia
René Auguste Constantin de Renneville (October 9, 1650 – March 13, 1723), was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 writer.

He was born at Caen
Caen
Caen is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the Calvados department and the capital of the Basse-Normandie region. It is located inland from the English Channel....

. Because of his Protestant principles, Renneville left France for the Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 in 1699. On his return three years later he was denounced as a spy and imprisoned in the Bastille
Bastille
The Bastille was a fortress in Paris, known formally as the Bastille Saint-Antoine. It played an important role in the internal conflicts of France and for most of its history was used as a state prison by the kings of France. The Bastille was built in response to the English threat to the city of...

, where he remained until 1713. During his imprisonment he wrote a series of poems on the margins of a copy of Auteurs déguisés (Paris, 1690), which he called Otia bastiliaca. These were rediscovered by James Tregaski in 1906.

Renneville was freed through the intercession of Queen Anne
Anne of Great Britain
Anne ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Act of Union, two of her realms, England and Scotland, were united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain.Anne's Catholic father, James II and VII, was deposed during the...

, and made his way to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. There he wrote his Histoire de la Bastille published in 1715 (volume 1) and 1719 (volumes 1-4 with a new preface) in Amsterdam with Étienne Roger, a publisher who addressed the European market. The publication was dedicated to George I and appeared simultaneously in an abridged English and an illustrated German edition. A Dutch edition followed in 1717. At the time of his death in 1723 he was a major of artillery
Artillery
Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...

 in the service of the elector of Hesse
Hesse
Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...

. His other important work is a Recueil des voyages qui ont servi a l'établissement de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales aux Provinces Unies (10 vols, new ed., Rouen, 1725).

The English version of L'inquisition Françoise is of greater interest as it was published with William Taylor, the publisher Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe , born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, and pamphleteer, who gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain and along with others such as Richardson,...

 chose for his Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...

in 1719. Both titles eventually shared aspects of realism and romanticization, an interest in the hardly credible "romantic" story of a survivor.

Works

  • Cantiques de l’écriture sainte paraphrasés en sonnets (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1703).
  • L'inquisition Françoise ou l'histoire de la Bastille. Par Mr. Constantin de Renneville [Vol. 1] (Amsterdam: E. Roger, 1715).
  • [German:] Entlarvte und jedermann zur Schau dargestellte französische Inquisition, oder: Geschicht der Bastille ([Nürnberg,] 1715).
  • [English, abridged:] The French Inquisition: or, The History of the Bastille in Paris (London: A. Bell/ T. Varnham/ J. Osborne/ W. Taylor/ J. Baker, 1715).
  • [Dutch:] Historie van de Bastille of inquisite van Staat in Vrannryk (Amsterdam, 1717).
  • Psaumes de la Pénitence paraphrasés en sonnets (La Haye, 1715).
  • L'inquisition Françoise ou l'histoire de la Bastille. Par Mr. Constantin de Renneville, 4 Vols. (Amsterdam: E. Roger, 1719).
  • L'inquisition françoise : ou, L’histoire de la Bastille (Amsterdam: B. Lakeman/ Leiden: J. & H. Verbeek, 1724).
  • Supplément à l’histoire de l’inquisition françoise ou de la Bastille (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1719).
  • Poème en vers libre pour le jour de l’heureuse naissance de S.A.S.M. Charles, Landgrave de Hesse (Cassel, 1722).
  • Recueil des voiages qui ont servi à l'établissement & aux progrès de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, formée dans les Provinces-Unies des Païs-Bas (Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1725).
  • Œuvres spirituelles contenant diverses poésies chrétiennes (Amsterdam: 1725).
  • Anecdotes bas-normandes, 1724, rééd. par Paul Le Cacheux (Évreux: Impr. de l’Eure, 1899).

Literature

  • Olaf Simons, Marteaus Europa oder Der Roman, bevor er Literatur wurde (Amsterdam, 2001), p.647-661.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK