D'Alembert, Jean le Rond (1717-1783)

c.1745-1782

1 file (5 items)

Purchased from Charavay, Paris, October 1928 / April 1929 (acc.63700); Desgranges, Paris, September 1932 (acc.65659) and January 1934 (acc.66597). Provenance details of no.4 not known (acc.12377).

Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) was a French mathematician, mechanician, physicist and philosopher, and with Denis Diderot was co-editor of the Encyclopédie, the central text of the French Enlightenment. He was the illegitimate child of the writer Claudine Guérin de Tencin and the chevalier Louis-Camus Destouches, a military officer. His father was abroad when he was born and his mother left him on the steps of the Saint-Jean-le-Rond de Paris church: he was placed in an orphanage before being adopted, taking as was customary the name of the patron saint of the church where he had been left. Destouches paid for the education of Jean le Rond secretly and did not acknowledge his parentage officially. He studied from the age of twelve at the Jansenist Collège des Quatre-Nations (the institution was also known under the name "Collège Mazarin"), graduating as bachelier in 1735: he abandoned, however, the theological bent of his educators. He participated in various salons and published on science, mathematics and Latin scholarship. He entered the Académie des sciences at the age of 23 and the Académie de Berlin at 28; in 1754, d'Alembert was elected a member of the Académie française, of which he became Permanent Secretary in 1772.When the Encyclopédie was organized in the late 1740s, he and Diderot were engaged as co-editors (for mathematics and science); he wrote over a thousand articles for it. He died in 1783 of a bladder illness.