Evidence, example, and expe'rience in the eighteenth-century French essay

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Despite its increasing prevalence as a literary form in eighteenth-century France, the essay has received relatively little attention compared with other forms of writing. While the essay is widely understood as an experimental mode of writing concerned with personal experience and the spontaneous association of ideas, the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers employ this form to communicate their thought has not been sufficiently explored. What does a writer's use of the essai reveal about their understanding of the form and its implications? What is the value of individual experience compared with other types of evidence? Is there a particular form of evidence that is most suited to the essay and if so, what does this reveal about a writer's claims? This project will examine works by Enlightenment thinkers including Diderot, Montesquieu, and Rousseau to assess how these writers make use of the essay and employ different forms of evidence to construct their arguments, substantiate their assertions, and create an authorial persona. It aims to reveal the ways in which writers in France understood the essay and its epistemological implications and considers what this means for the essay's importance to the proliferation of writing known as the Enlightenment.Diderot's definition of 'Épreuve, Essai, Expérience' in the Encyclopédie demonstrates the interconnectedness - and often the synonymity - of the terminology of experience, experiment and the essai in eighteenth-century France. The essay's relationship to empiricism and experimental science has been traced to the work of Boyle and Locke and the influence of Montaigne and Bacon is well-documented. While there is extensive scholarship on the emergence of the British periodical essay tradition and the development of the essay in its modern form, recent work has tended to focus on nineteenth-century essayists. Although this provides useful context on the essay's characteristics, there remains limited research on the strategies, techniques, and implications of essay-writing in Enlightenment France.This project will investigate the use of evidence in essais by key Enlightenment thinkers, including Diderot's Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, Montesquieu's Essai sur le goût, and Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues. Scholars most often approach these essays in relation to the author's better-known or more influential works, rather than examining them in their own right. As a result, scholarship has not tended to focus on the significance of the essay form or the ways in which these writers use evidence to shape and substantiate their arguments.The project will consider lesser-known works such as Émilie du Châtelet's recently discovered Essai sur l'optique to assess whether women writers use the essay form in distinctive ways, including in response to academic prize contests, and to explore how these writers understood the requirements and potential of the essay form.My research will use individual essays as case studies to develop a thematic analysis that assesses and compares the different forms of evidence that appear in these texts. I will examine historical example, empirical evidence, personal experience or testimony, and anecdote to identify how they are used and to what effect. This project will take an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing together strands of literary, historical, and philosophical scholarship on Enlightenment thinkers in a way that gives due attention to an understudied aspect of their works and considers them alongside lesser-known essays of the period.