Jacques Bernard

Jacques Bernard: Preaching on the Rubble, Editing in Exile

Sometime around 1683 the Protestant temple at Vinsobres in the Dauphiné was pulled down by order of the French crown. Its twenty-five-year-old pastor did not disperse his congregation. He gathered them on the ruins of their own church and stood between them and the soldiers sent to break the meeting up. Then he ran for Geneva. Thirty-five years later Jacques Bernard died a professor at Leiden, having spent the intervening decades doing something stranger than martyrdom: running the most famous review journal in Europe.

Geneva, and a Family Already Committed

He was born on 1 September 1658 at Nyons in the Bas-Dauphiné, the son of Salomon Bernard, a Protestant minister, and Magdelaine Gallatin, of a substantial Genevan family. The Bernards had been Protestant since 1567 — more than a century of it by the time Jacques arrived, which is to say the choice had been made for him long before he was old enough to weigh the cost.

He studied rhetoric and philosophy at the Academy of Geneva, earning honourable testimony in philosophy in June 1674 and in theology in July 1678, and completed his theological training under Mestrezat, Turretin and Tronchin, learning Hebrew from Michel Turretin. A contemporary judgement of the student is telling: what was noted was not originality but his capacity to express clearly and forcefully the ideas he had been taught. That gift — clarity as a transmission mechanism — turned out to be his entire career.

Vinsobres

He returned to France in 1679, was ordained pastor at Venterol, and in 1680 succeeded his own father at Vinsobres. It was the worst possible moment to enter the French Protestant ministry. Worship was prohibited, the temple demolished, and Bernard continued preaching Reformed doctrine in defiance of royal ordinance. The stand on the ruins followed, and then flight to Geneva in 1683 — ahead of the formal Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which would drive the rest of French Protestantism out behind him.

The family's French property was confiscated. In Lausanne he supported his relatives by teaching philosophy and mathematics, the first appearance of a pattern that would define him: no money, so teach; no pulpit, so write.

Refuge in Holland

In 1685 he crossed to Holland, where the Huguenot diaspora was rapidly turning Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague into the publishing capital of Europe. He established himself in Amsterdam on the recommendation of Jean Le Clerc — the most powerful figure in the exile press and the man to whom Bernard's fortunes were tied for the rest of his life. He obtained a pensioned ministry at Gouda while living at The Hague, and taught belles-lettres, philosophy and mathematical principles to well-born students who then became his protectors. In 1705 he was unanimously elected a minister of the Walloon church at Leiden.

Inheriting Bayle's Journal

The journals are the achievement. Bernard began with the *Histoire abrégée de l'Europe*, which he ran from July 1686 to December 1688, then took over volumes XX to XXV of Le Clerc's *Bibliothèque universelle et historique* between 1691 and 1693 while Le Clerc turned to biblical commentary. He wrote roughly eight volumes of the *Lettres historiques*, covering the great European events, and contributed the first three instalments of the *Journal littéraire* in 1715.

But the central act of his life was taking over the *Nouvelles de la République des Lettres*. It was Pierre Bayle's celebrated periodical, the organ through which learned Europe found out what learned Europe was doing, and it had lapsed. Bernard revived it and ran it from 1699 to 1710, then took it up again in 1716 and was still running it when he died. To edit the *Nouvelles* was to sit at the switchboard of the Republic of Letters, deciding month by month which books existed.

The Chair at Leiden

In 1706 Bernard became Reader in Philosophy at the Academy of Leiden. On 12 February 1712, following the death of Burchard de Volder, he received the full professorship in philosophy and mathematics, and held it until his own death six years later. Leiden was among the great universities of Europe, and a French refugee pastor had been given one of its chairs.

His teaching was resolutely a transmission of other men's systems: Rohault's *Physics*, the Port-Royal *Logic*, Euclid's *Elements*. Contemporaries praised him for emphasising order and clarity over erudition, which is praise with a blade in it — the compliment paid to a man who explains well rather than one who knows most.

The Diplomatic Archivist

There was a third career underneath the other two. Bernard edited the Latin letters of the French diplomat Jacques de Bongars in 1695, then assembled the *Actes et mémoires de la négociation de la paix de Ryswick* — the documentary record of a European peace settlement, published while the ink was barely dry — followed by a *Recueil des traités de paix* in 1700. In 1716 he produced a supplement in two folio volumes to Moréri's *Dictionnaire historique*. He also wrote a *Traité de la repentance tardive* (1712) and *De l'excellence de la religion* (1714).

The range is the point. In a single working life he was a pastor, a professor of mathematics, a reviewer of everything published in Europe, and an archivist of international diplomacy. Exile does that to a man: nothing is beneath taking on, because nothing is secure.

Why Jacques Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the case is institutional rather than intellectual, and his own contemporaries said so. What Bernard possessed to a remarkable degree was the editorial faculty: the capacity to read across the entire output of European learning — theology, physics, diplomacy, philology — and render any of it lucid to a general educated reader at monthly speed, for decades, in a second country, while also holding a pulpit and a chair. He was picked out for that gift as a student, and Le Clerc, Bayle's own circle, and the Leiden curators all bet on it. To be handed the *Nouvelles de la République des Lettres* was to be judged the man most capable of standing in for Bayle, and no small number of people wanted that job.

The counter-case is blunt and comes from people who knew him. Contemporaries criticised his limited mathematical depth — awkward in a professor of philosophy and mathematics — and his narrow literary cultivation. He originated no doctrine, and his teaching was other men's books. There is also a question about his candour: while professing outward Calvinist orthodoxy he sympathised with Arminian positions on divine grace, and a contemporary observed his care to hide himself while protesting that he was a good Calvinist. The man who had once stood on the rubble of his own temple spent his later career declining to say plainly what he believed. Bernard is best understood as one of the indispensable conductors of the early Enlightenment rather than one of its sources — a superb secondary intelligence, and the Republic of Letters could not have functioned without a few dozen of him.

Legacy

He died on 27 April 1718, in his sixtieth year, and was buried on 2 May. Le Clerc — the man who had first vouched for him in Amsterdam thirty-three years earlier — wrote the eulogy, publishing it in the May–June 1718 issue of the *Nouvelles de la République des Lettres*, the journal Bernard had been editing until the month he died. It remains the authoritative source for his life.

His monument is the run of periodicals themselves: three decades of European intellectual life recorded as it happened, by a refugee pastor who lost a country and gained a readership.

Achievements

• Held posts at Leiden University, Leiden University and Leiden University