Jean-Paul Bignon

Biography

Grandson of Jerome Bignon and nephew of the count de Pontchartrain, it makes his studies with the Collège of Harcourt and the seminar Saint-Magloire, attache with the Oratoire, where it is ordered priest in 1691. In 1693, it is named abbot of Saint-Quentin-in-the Isle and preacher of Louis XIV.

The same year, he is elected member of the French Academy. He becomes in 1699 honorary member of the Academy of Science, which he has as a responsibility of reform and of which he is several times chair. He becomes in 1701 member of the royal Académie of the inscriptions and medals, of which he is the secretary of 1706 with 1742. Of 1705 with 1714, it sits at the editorial board of the Journal of the scientists , of which it takes the direction with Pierre Desfontaines in 1724.

It will contribute to launching the long drafting of the books of the Description of Arts and Métiers .

In 1718, it is named Master of the Bookstore and guard of the Library of the king. Future the National library of France is at that time the largest library of Europe. The width of its collections having become such as the librarians cannot count any more on their only memory to find there a title, Bignon classifies the 23 categories established in 1670 by its predecessor, Nicolas Clément, in five departments: Printed, Handwritten. Titles and genealogies, Prints, Medals. It creates a body of “guards” or conservatives and organizes the Registration of copyright, acquisitions, the catalogs and the loans. Thanks to its important network of correspondents and foreign visitors, it gets busy to enrich the funds by the library by ordering books and periodicals in all Europe. Under its direction also, the Library of the king becomes for the first time accessible to the public, one day per week, during three hours. Jean-Paul Bignon is in addition the author of a novel, the Adventures of Abdulla, wire of Hanif , which it signs of a name of loan by making it pass for the translation of an Arab manuscript. This history of one world to back is at the same time a parody of the Romance invaluable and an Eastern tale in the air of time: in its publication in 1712, Antoine Galland already published its Thousand and One Nights and Montesquieu is on the point of writing its Lettres Persians . The novel is a sharp success and it is translated into English as of 1729. He tells the tour and the adventures of piles Moslem, Abdalla, sent by his Master, the sultan of the Indies, in the search of a water which gets eternal youth.

According to measurements which it had taken, the load of librarian, after him, was occupied by its nephew and his great nephew. Jean-Paul Bignon had an immense instruction; he composed up to four panegyrics of Saint Louis, all different, and he pronounced two of them the same day, one with the French Academy and the other with the academy of the inscriptions. Its panegyrics and its sermons are not printed.

The chancellor of Pontchartrain, his maternal uncle, entrusted to him the department of the academies of the inscriptions and sciences; they were almost still only of simple literary associations, and their establishment was not taken on yet a form which only could make them durable. The Bignon abbot got in 1699 a very wide payment with the Academy of Science, and, in 1701, it appeared with the academy of the inscriptions and the humanities. In 1715, it still obtained, for one and the other, of the letters patent which confirmed their establishment. II also gave, in 1701, with the Journal of the Scientists , the form which it always preserved until the 19th century; This newspaper had been for a long time the work of only one person, Bignon judged more suitable that it was the work of a company of scientists, working under the direction of the chief of the magistrature.

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, its protected, dedicated to Jean-Paul Bignon, in 1694, the kind Bignonia (jasmine of Virginia), a climbing plant tropical.

Publications

Life of François Lêvesque, priest of the Oratory , 1684, in-12;
Adventures of Abdulla, wire of Hanif , Paris, 1712 - 1714; $the Hague, 1715; Paris, 1725; ibid, 1743; $the Hague and Paris, 1775, 2 vol. in-12. The author, who had published this work under the name of Sandisson, left it imperfect. Colson, one of the authors of Hisloire of China , which gave of it a new edition in vol. in-12, completed it. The second volume of this edition is almost entirely new. One finds another outcome, and which appears to be of Mr. de Pauliny, in the Bibliothèque of the Novels , January 1778.

Bignon also cooperated with the Médailles of the reign of Louis Large the , with the Sacre of Louis XV , and with the Newspaper of the Scientists .

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