Addison and France

Born in 1672 in a climate of strong anti-Catholicism and Francophobia in England, yet aware that France was a great source of intellectual and cultural inspiration, Joseph Addison had a complex relationship with the French nation. His works reflect the tensions between his admiration for the rival country and his hatred of the French political regime. This chapter argues that French influence on Addison’s writings and Addison’s ambivalent attitude to France are nowhere more perceptible than in his way of handling the French ‘battle of the books’, the famous ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’. It also contends that Addison’s ambivalent attitude to the French was not lost on the eighteenth-century French intellectuals who, though they celebrated him as ‘a friend of mankind’, often borrowed his ideas without acknowledging them.