Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France

By using a correspondence network, this study assembles a picture of the French Republic of Letters in an era of rapid change. It shows how the world of scholarship relates to the movement historians call the Enlightenment and how it is torn apart, then reconstructed, in the social and political turmoil of the French Revolution.
This is a study of the correspondence network of an Avignon physician in the period 1750-1810. Esprit Calvet was an antiquarian, natural historian, and bibliophile, and was at the centre of a circle of like-minded intellectuals from various backgrounds, chiefly based in the Rhone valley. Laurence Brockliss explores in detail the intellectual interests and relationships of a representative sample of the French Republic of Letters. He traces the destruction of the Republic during the Revolution, and its reconstruction, in different guise, under Napoleon. "Calvet's Web" is an important contribution to our understanding of the social construction of knowledge, the history of collecting, and the history of the book. In addition, by examining the circle's attitude to the philosophes and their programme of material and moral progress, it offers a new picture of the relationship between the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment.