Preface to the translation of M. Turgot's life.
Contributions
- Benjamin Vaughan
- author
Related resources
- is paratext of
- The Life of M. Turgot, Comptroller General of the Finances of France, in the Years 1774, 1775, and 1776; Written by the Marquis of Condorcet, of the French Academy of Sciences; and Translated from the French with an Appendix. translation has paratext
Summary (extracted citations)
On pages xiii-xiv of the translator's preface: "In England, where we have a liberal and comparatively tolerant religious establishment, there are happily multitudes of sincere Christians among all ranks and descriptions of people; while in France, the absurdity of the Roman Catholic form of the Christian religion, and the suppression of every other form of it, has led aside a prodigious number of the most respectable persons of that enlightened nation from the belief of any religion whatever".
Notes
Contains an anonymous translator's preface (probably Vaughan; see main text). The preface activates the original text for this different context, namely, as being helpful to the English reformists, while at the same time (in this dissenting context) distancing itself from Condorcet's materialist and anti-religious beliefs. See Leech, 'Cosmopolitanism, dissent, and translation' (Bologna: Bononia UP, 2020), 133-35.
The translator also stresses that it was the extreme religious intolerance of the Catholic church in France to other confessions that led in the end to widespread atheism. In England, on the contrary, many religious denominations were tolerated and thus overall more people believed in God of one kind or another.