Étienne Dumont
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Étienne Dumont | |
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Born | Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont 18 January 1759 or 18 July 1759 |
Died | 29 September 1829 |
School | Liberalism |
Signature | |
Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont (18 January[1] or 18 July 1759 – 29 September 1829), sometimes anglicised as Stephen Dumont, was a Swiss French political writer. He is chiefly remembered as the French editor of the writings of the English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham.
Early life
Dumont was born in
Move to England
In 1785 he moved to London,
In 1788 Dumont visited
Editing Bentham
On his return from Paris Dumont made the acquaintance of Jeremy Bentham. Filled with admiration for Bentham's genius, Dumont made it one of the chief objects of his life not merely to translate Bentham into French, but to recast and edit his writings in a form suitable for the ordinary reading public.
Dumont's editing was heavy-handed, but necessarily so. According to his own account, all the fundamental ideas and most of the illustrative material were already in Bentham's manuscripts; but his task was chiefly to abridge by striking out repeated matter, to supply lacunae, to secure uniformity of style, and to improve the French. Bentham's writing (whether in English or in French) was notoriously convoluted and impenetrable, and according to one reviewer, writing in 1817, "[i]t is indeed when he speaks by another’s lips, that he appears to most advantage; and it to the graces of style which Mr Dumont has given him that he owes the reputation which he has acquired, and which is, from that cause, much greater in foreign countries than in his own. ... [I]t is possible that, but for Dumont, Bentham’s reputation might never have emerged from obscurity."[2] In places, Dumont was also prepared to oversimplify Bentham's ideas, and indeed to contradict them, for example where he considered that Bentham had been over-critical of the British constitution, or had expressed religious scepticism.
The following works of Bentham were published under Dumont's editorship:
- Traité de legislation civile et pénale (1802)
- Théorie des peines et des recompenses (1811)
- Tactique des assemblées legislatives (1815)
- Traité des preuves judiciaires (1823)
- De l'organization judiciaire et de la codification (1828)
French Revolution
In the summer of 1789 Dumont went to Paris. The object of the journey was to obtain through
The same cause also led him to renew his acquaintance with Mirabeau, whom he found occupied with his duties as a deputy, and with the composition of his journal, the Courrier de Provence. For a time Dumont took an active and very efficient part in the conduct of this journal, supplying it with reports as well as original articles, and also furnishing Mirabeau with speeches to be delivered or rather read in the assembly, as related in his highly instructive and interesting posthumous work entitled Souvenirs sur Mirabeau (1832). In fact his friend George Wilson used to relate that one day, when they were dining together at a
Later life
In 1801 Dumont travelled over various parts of Europe with Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, and on his return settled down to the editorship of Bentham's works. In 1814 the restoration of Geneva to independence induced him to return there, and he soon became leader of the supreme council. He devoted particular attention to the City's judicial and penal systems, and many improvements on both are due to him.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was an admirer of his, declaring that "Dumont...is a moderate liberal, just as all rational people are and ought to be, and as I myself am."[4]
Dumont died at Milan while on an autumn tour on 29 September 1829.
References
- ^ Dumont, Etienne, in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
- ^ Anon. (1817). "[Review of] Papers relative to Codification". Edinburgh Review. 29: 217–37.
- hdl:11693/12519– via Florida International University.
- ^ Selth, Jefferson P. (1997). Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont. University Press of America. pp. 132–133.
public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Dumont, Pierre Étienne Louis". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 665–666.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in theBibliography
- Blamires, Cyprian (1993). "Bentham et Dumont". In Mulligan, Kevin; Roth, Robert (eds.). Regards sur Bentham et l'utilitarianisme: actes du colloque organisée à Genève les 23 et 24 novembre 1990 sous les auspices des Facultés de droit et des lettres. Geneva: Droz. pp. 11–25.
- Blamires, Cyprian (2008). The French Revolution and the Creation of Benthamism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Blamires, Cyprian (2009). "Dumont, Pierre-Étienne-Louis [Étienne] (1759–1829)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. . (subscription required)
- Selth, Jefferson P. (1997). Firm Heart and Capacious Mind: the life and friends of Etienne Dumont. Lanham (MD): University Press of America.
- Whatmore, Richard (2007). "Etienne Dumont, the British Constitution, and the French Revolution". Historical Journal. 50: 23–47. S2CID 144898580.
- Whatmore, Richard (2012). Against War and Empire: Geneva, Britain, and France in the eighteenth century. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300175578.