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Superb and rare pair of brown patina bronze sculptures depicting the bust of two great French philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment: * Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau **, vintage late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
These busts are in good condition. They are not signed.
A note: solder traces on the back busts, that of Voltaire seems a little leaning back, wear and scratches time, see pictures.
François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694 -1778) is a writer and philosopher who marked the eighteenth century and has a special place in the French collective memory. It outlines in fact the figure of the committed intellectual in the service of truth, justice and freedom of thought. An emblematic figure of the Enlightenment France, leader of the philosophical party, his name remains attached to his fight against the "infamous", the name he gives to religious fanaticism, and progress and tolerance. However, it is deist and his ideal is that of a moderate and liberal monarchy, enlightened by the "philosophers". It is also among the enlightened elites of the European Enlightenment, using his immense fame and is alone defending victims of religious intolerance and arbitrariness in cases that he made famous .
writer, philosopher and French Genevan musician. The life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a life of independence and instability. He first left Geneva at sixteen for Savoy before reaching Paris in 1742 thinking a career in music. He leads a hard life, seeking various protective and living with Thérèse Levasseur will give him five enfants.Dans the same time he met Diderot and writes about music for the Encyclopedia. Rousseau enters the history of ideas with brief essays. Having taken the opposite of the philosophy of Hobbes, he knoweth not a return to the original and is pursuing a reflection on the functioning of a democratic society based on the Social Contract (1762) in which the sovereign people organizing collective life . In the literary field, the contribution of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is also decisive with Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), a novel by letters on the English model of Pamela or Virtue rewarded Samuel Richardson, who will be one of the biggest draws of the century. Thus, the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is it most as well in the field of political philosophy nourishing reflection on democracy in the field of literature.
