Malesherbes

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani mentions Malesherbes almost always in connection with Rousseau, who addressed his letters to him. He presents him as a cultivated Enlightenment aristocrat, an "honnête homme" and a senior official in charge of censorship, favourable to new ideas and a friend of the philosophes12. What he mainly retains is his role as a mediator: linked to the Encyclopedists and well-intentioned, Malesherbes tries to reconcile Rousseau with them and to act as an interface between him and the Enlightenment345. He recalls that Malesherbes asks Rousseau to explain his walks and what he finds in the forest67, and that he believes Rousseau to be the unhappiest of men. The four letters Rousseau wrote in reply are the text Dominique Pagani quotes and comments on: he counts them among Rousseau's texts richest in sounds, and points to the passage on the modern "tintamarre" (din) and the admission of a willed sadness8. He draws on them in varied contexts: music, nature and landscape, anthropology, worldliness.

1. 1Assemblée nationale24 Oct 2018 · 30:50
2. 2Argent, travail, liberté3 Aug 2019 · 49:57
3. 3W comme Wolmar6 Jan 2015 · 7:09
4. 4Que faire ? 3/329 Jan 2016 · 22:29
5. 5#15 Nietzsche : Pertinence philosophique ou musicale ? Réponses aux questions23 Jun 2022 · 14:39
6. 6#3 Le mythe du bon sauvage chez Rousseau !23 Sept 2014 · 2:16
7. 7Chateaubriand26 Mar 2019 · 1:26:20
8. 8Musicosophie 13. Mozart restitué2 Feb 2021 · 39:26

Summary produced automatically from 21 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.