François-Félix Nogaret

François-Félix Nogaret (4 November 1740 – 2 June 1831) was a French writer.

Biography

François-Félix Nogaret was born in Versailles, the son of a first clerk of the Ministry of the King's Household, Nogaret entered in 1761 in the same offices, and remained there until the Consulate, later cumulating his job with that of librarian of the Countess of Artois. After thirty years of service, he obtained, at the time of the Revolution, in 1791, a pension of 1.500 francs.

After having directed saltpetre workshops in the provinces, he was attached by the Minister Bénézech to the Department of the Interior in 1795, and appointed by Lucien Bonaparte as the sole dramatic censor. Fouché dismisses him in 1807, and his pension, reduced to 1,200 francs, becomes his only resource. He consoles himself for being poor, infirm and forgotten, by cultivating letters until his death. He keeps his memory, his spirit and his gaiety, and in his last years the only title he seems to be jealous of is that of "dean of literature".

Born in a way at the court, Nogaret drew this lightness of principles, this libertinism of spirit which characterized the men of his time. He had a varied knowledge, as proved by his relations with Buffon, Adanson and Montucla. He wrote with ease on frivolous subjects; his style was quite natural and sometimes piquant. Palissot praised him in his Memoirs, but the Marquis de Langle accused him of working "only for his friends, who are not very difficult in terms of taste and correctness".

A tale he published in 1790, Le Miroir des événemens actuels ou la Belle au plus offrant (The Mirror of Current Events or The Highest Bidder's Beauty), prefigures, as much by its plot (a fable of scientific invention) as by one of its protagonists, an inventor named Frankésteïn who creates an "artificial man" (an automaton), Mary Shelley's major work, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), in which Victor Frankenstein and his monster appear for the first time.

A freemason, he was Worshipful Master of the lodge Patriotism. He wrote in 1784 the poem The Flood, set to music by the composer François Giroust, for a solemn ceremony of the lodge, in memory of a deceased brother whose identity is not known.

François-Félix Nogaret died in Paris and was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery (7th division)

Works

• Apologie de mon goût, épître en vers sur l’histoire naturelle (1771)
• Le Fond du sac, ou Restant des babioles de M. X.***, membre éveillé de l'Académie des Dormans (1780)
• L'Arétin français, par un membre de l’Académie des dames, suivi des Épices de Vénus (1787; collection of nineteen poems serving as captions to a series of engravings illustrating different love positions by Elluin after drawings by Antoine Borel).
• Le Miroir des événemens actuels, ou La Belle au plus offrant, histoire à deux visages (1790; translated by Brian Stableford as The Mirror of Present Events; or, Beauty to the Highest Bidder, 2016)
• Cange, ou Le commissionnaire , trait historique en vers (1794)
• Hercule triomphant, ou Le despotisme terrassé (1794)
• Contes et historiettes en prose (1795; 6 parts in 3 volumes)
• L'Âme de Timoléon, ou Principes républicains, philosophiques et moraux, auxquels on a joint quelques motifs de chants analogues aux fêtes nationales et décadaires (1797)
• Le Danger des extrêmes, essai critique, à l'ordre du jour (1800)
• Aristénète au Vaudeville, 1er janvier 1806
• L'aristénète français, ou Recueil de folies amoureuses (1807; 3 tomes in 2 volumes)
• Apologues et nouveaux contes en vers (1814)
• Dernier soupir d’un rimeur de 89 ans, ou Versiculet de Nogaret (Félix), sur la métaphysico-néologo-romanticologie (1829)
• Étincelle d’un feu qui s’éteint. L’œuf frais ou Erato gallina puerpera, fiction nouvelle de Nogaret, contre le coryphée des Ostrogoths, ennemis de la langue et du bon sens (1830; polemic against Victor Hugo)
• La Femme créée avant l’homme (1830)

References

• Douthwaite, Julia V. (2007). "La République a-t-elle besoin de savants? Le jugement des romans." In: Isabelle Brouard-Arends & Laurent Loty, eds., Littérature et engagement pendant la Révolution française, essai polyphonique et iconographique. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, pp. 121–39.
• Douthwaite, Julia V.; Daniel Richter (2009). "The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret's Automaton Tale of 1790," European Romantic Review, Vol. XX, No 3, pp. 381–411.
• Douthwaite, Julia V. (2011). "Pour une histoire de la lecture romanesque sous la Révolution." In: Huguette Krief & Jean-Noël Pascal, eds., Débat et écritures sous la Révolution. Louvain: Peeters, pp. 103–18.
• Douthwaite, Julia V. (2012). "The Frankenstein of the French Revolution." In: Julia V. Douthwaite, The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France. Chicago and Londres: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 59–97.
• Eby, Jack (2003). "Hercule triomphant, ou Le Despotisme terrassé (1794). A Mythological - Allegorical - Revolutionary Spectacle for the Commune of Versailles," Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. XXII, pp. 47–66.

External links

• Works by François-Félix Nogaret at Gallica
• French Gothic novel The Mirror of True Events
• François-Félix Nogaret at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database