Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle

Nephew of the playwright Pierre Corneille, Fontenelle was educated by Jesuits in Rouen. Possessing peerless conversational charm and intellectual clarity, he served as the crucial intellectual bridge between seventeenth-century Cartesianism and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

In 1686, he published Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, an elegant dialog between a philosopher and a marquise beneath a starry sky that made Copernican heliocentrism and modern physics accessible to society. As Secretary of the Académie des Sciences from 1697 to 1740, his Éloges celebrated experimental science.