{"id":93,"date":"2013-02-10T19:08:39","date_gmt":"2013-02-10T19:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=93"},"modified":"2015-03-31T14:14:51","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T13:14:51","slug":"getting-to-know-macintoshs-french-readers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=93","title":{"rendered":"Getting to know Macintosh’s French readers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The lure of Macintosh’s archival trail is sometimes\u00a0irresistible. Although my research energies have been focused largely on completing a co-authored monograph on the history of Macintosh’s publisher, John Murray,\u00a0the urge to pick up Macintosh’s trail (if only briefly) is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n

A translation of Macintosh’s book by\u00a0Jacques Pierre Brissot was published in Paris in 1786 under the title\u00a0Voyages en Europe, en Asie et en Afrique<\/em>.\u00a0Reconstructing the audience for Macintosh’s book in its French-language\u00a0guise (heavily edited by Brissot and supplemented by two\u00a0contemporary\u00a0travel accounts) is among my aims. The\u00a0Biblioth\u00e8que nationale de France’s digital library, Gallica, is helping in this respect, not least by pointing to the library catalogues of various French philosophers, travellers, and statesmen who possessed a copy of the text. Among their number are:<\/p>\n

\"Paul-Henri<\/a>

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723\u20131789).<\/p><\/div>\n

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723\u20131789) who, it might be assumed, read\u00a0Macintosh’s\u00a0reflections on the government of British India in light of his views on ethics and the state: ethocracy.<\/p>\n

\"Louis-Antoine,<\/a>

Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (1729\u20131811)<\/p><\/div>\n

Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville (1729\u20131811), naval commander, circumnavigator, and\u00a0veteran of the American War of Independence may well have seen parallels between his own travels\u2014described in Voyage autour du monde<\/i>\u00a0(1771)\u2014and those of Macintosh (although each dealt with the concept of the “noble savage” in different ways).<\/p>\n

\"Guillaume-Chr\u00e9tien<\/a>

Guillaume-Chr\u00e9tien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721\u20131794)<\/p><\/div>\n

Guillaume-Chr\u00e9tien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721\u20131794), statesman, botanist, and victim of the\u00a0guillotine\u00a0read Macintosh, we might suppose, for his reflections on\u00a0judicial and governmental matters as much as for his relation of geographical\u00a0curiosities.<\/p>\n

Proving ownership of a text is not, of course, straightforwardly proof of its reading, not is it alone any indication of\u00a0how<\/em> the text was read. Such information, should it exist, is likely to be hidden from easy view among letters and diaries. At times like this, I wish my French were better than it is!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The lure of Macintosh’s archival trail is sometimes\u00a0irresistible. Although my research energies have been focused largely on completing a co-authored monograph on the history of Macintosh’s publisher, John Murray,\u00a0the urge to pick up Macintosh’s trail (if only briefly) is hard to ignore. A translation of Macintosh’s book by\u00a0Jacques Pierre Brissot was published in Paris in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}