Étienne Dolet

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 theological subjects, motivated the French Inquisition to monitor his activities closely. After being imprisoned several times, he was eventually convicted of heresy, hung 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 education

Born in 1509 into a family of parents who are not known to modern historians, Dolet lived in Orléans until the age of twelve. He was able to secure a very solid education because influential "and perhaps wealthy patronage ... made provision for his education, mainly at Padua and Toulouse, with apparently few privations due to lack of means." Accordingly, in 1521, he left for Paris, where he studied Latin for five years of study with Nicolas Bérault, who also taughtGaspard 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. He did this under the direction of his master and friend Simon de Villanova. On the death of Villanova, Étienne Dolet served 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.

Speaking, writings, prison stays and banishment

During his stay in Toulouse, he was elected speaker of the 'French Nation' and was recognised as a gifted orateur. In October 1533, he delivered a violent indictment of the "backwardness and hostility to humanism and classical scholarship" of the city 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.

In August 1534, following the banishment, he moved to Lyon, where he joined the circle of Lyon humanists and began the most fruitful part of his career. 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 his tract, the Dialogus de imitatione Ciceroniana, which revived 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 a highly advantageous privilege that gave 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 this privilege 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 of 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 thought to be earliest printed work on the subject of ambassadorial responsibilities. However, it regarded mainly as an historical marker and is not considered to be influential in advancing thought on the law of international diplomacy.

Printer in Lyon

Commemorative plaque for Étienne Dolet, located at the passage des Imprimeurs in Lyon.

With the financial assistance of Hellouin Dulin, Dolet opened a print shop on the rue Mercière in Lyon. Over the period 1538 to 1544, Dolet published some 84 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 popular 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 John Calvin, a Protestant tract published during the Inquisition. He is not unaware of the dangers to which this sort of publication exposed him. Even works that he viewed as being within Catholic orthodoxy caused trouble with the Catholic authorities. His Cato Christianus is a catechism based on the model of the Disticha Catonis (Cato's Couplets), a popular textbook for teaching Latin in the 16th century. The Cato Christianus was not only banned as soon as it was released, it was also condemned on October 2, 1542 and was burned on the square in front of Notre-Dame de Paris in February 1544.

Inquisition and trial

Dolet's publication of religious works attracted the attention of the inquisitor Matthew Ory in 1542. He was incarcerated in August 1542 in the prisons of Lyon, accused of being the author of pernicious works and of not believing in the immortality of the soul. Convicted of having printed certain of these works, eating meat during Lent and having claimed to prefer the sermon to the mass, he appealed before the parliament of Paris, which had him transferred from the prisons of Roanne at the Conciergerie where he remained for 15 months. He obtained a new pardon thanks to the intervention of the Bishop of Tulle, Pierre Duchâtel and returned to Lyon.

He was imprisoned a second time in 1544, after the discovery of bundles of heretical books bearing his printer's mark. However, he managed to escape and took refuge in Piedmont. He imprudently returned to France because he thought he could print letters in Lyon to appeal to the justice of the King of France, the Queen of Navarre and the Parliament of Paris. It was in these circumstances that he published the 'Second Hell,' a collection of letters addressed to the powerful and intended to be a defense against his accusers. These letters were followed by two translations of Plato, the Axiochus and a translation of the Hipparchus (also apocryphal), subtitled “on lust and affection to gain”.

Bronze statue of Etienne Dolet by Ernest Guilbert, Place Maubert. Inaugurated in 1889, it was melted down by the Nazis in 1942.

His third trial examined the affair of the bundles of books, a plot almost certainly organised by master printers from Lyon. The inquisitors focused on a passage of his translation of the Axochius: “After death, you will be nothing at all”. Dolet embellished his translation by adding the words “du tout” (at all). The theology faculty of the Sorbonne saw this as proof of Dolet's heresy: he does not believe in the immortality of the soul. He was condemned to death as a heretic.

Execution

On August 3, 1546, Dolet made 'amends' at the site of his torture by invoking the Virgin and her patron saint. According to an act of mercy in his judgment, he was offered the possibility of being hanged, before being thrown with his books onto his pyre, on Place Maubert in Paris. This Place was reserved for the printers' pyres during the Inquisition: four were strangled there and then burned in 1546.

On his way to be first hung and then burnt, 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). This supposedly elicited the following response from the priest who accompanied him: Non pie turba dolet sed Dolet ipse dolet (“it will be Dolet who will suffer and no one else”).

Religious views

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

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 in 1889 on the site of his execution on the Place Maubert in Paris. During the religious conflicts of the Third Republic, the statue became "not only the virtual emblem of anticlerical freethinkers, but also served as a rallying point for Parisian militants, who paraded before his monument every year." The statue was removed and melted down in 1942 during the German occupation of Paris.

Principal works

The title page of a book bearing Dolet's imprint

Many of Dolet's books were destroyed as the products of heresy and books bearing his imprint are now extremely rare. His principal works are:

• Orationes duæ in Tholosam. Eiusdem epistolarum libri II. Eiusdem carminum libri II. Ad eundem Epistolarum amicorum liber (1534)
• Dialogus de Imitatione Ciceroniana adversus Desiderium Erasmus Roterdamum pro Christophoro Longolio(1535), where he argues with Erasmus.
• Commentarius Linguæ latinæ, Book I (1536) ; Book II (1538), Lyon, 2 volumes in-folio.
• De Re navali liber ad Lazarum Bayfium (1537)
• Carminum libri quatuor. Collection of 195 selected works. Banned in Lyon for its use of the term, fatum, in its full philosophical sense (1538).
• Cato Christianus Stephano Dole-to Gallo aurelio autore, Lyon, Étienne Dolet, 1538.
• CatoFormulae latinarum locutionum (1539)
• La Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en l’autre (How to Translate Well from One Language to Another); (1540)
• Les Gestes de Françoys de Valoys, roi de France, Lyon, E. Dolet, 1540.
• Le Second Enfer d'Estienne Dolet natif d'Orléans (The Second Hell), Troyes, 1544. The 'Hell' in the title refers to the title of a book by Clément Marot dealing with his imprisonment for heresy in the prison of Châtelet in 1525; Dolet printed this book in 1542. 'Second' could refer either that it is the second book dealing with this subject, after that of Marot, or it could refer to Dolet's second imprisonment.
• Cantique d’Estienne Dolet (1546), on his sorrow and consolation.

References

• This page is largely a translation of the the francophone Wikipedia page, fr:Étienne Dolet.

• 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