The Impact of Utopia on France’s literature

La description de l’isle d’utopie ou est comprins le miroer des republicques du monde, et l’exemplaire de vie heureuse: redige par escript en stille Treselegant de grand’ haultesse et maieste par illustre bon et scavant personnage Thomas Morus citoyen de Londre et chancelier d’Angleterre. Avec l’Espistre liminaire composee par Monsieur Bude maistre des requestres du feu Roy Francoys premier de ce nom.
Thomas More’s Utopia was translated into French in 1550, and the above phrase was written on the title-page

. I chose this topic as my project because I admire Sir Thomas More. Also, the book was published with such determination and still beautifully designed. The first edition of Utopia was written in Latin but it had been translated into many languages.
The word Utopia was originated from Greek ou-topos meaning “no place” or “nowhere”. However, there was the almost identical Greek word eu-topos meaning “good place”. This book was a work of fiction that told about a foundation of an “ideal” state to live in. More wrote Utopia during Protestant Reformation in England with one of the reasons was to spread christianity

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Utopia came in book 1 and book 2. In Book 1, Thomas More fictional character, More, encountered his old friend Peter Giles. Then, Giles introduced More to his friend, Raphael Hythloday, through whose eyes the utopian state described in the book

. Inside the 1518 Basel edition, after page 24, there was a beautiful illustration of a conversation between More, Giles, and Hythloday that was originally engraved by the young Hans Holbein

. In Book 2, Hytholday found the utopian island.
Through this project, I wish to do research on the influences of More’s Utopia on France’s literature that had changed from one century to the next. One of the literary examples would be Germain de Brie’s Antimorus (1519) that was written in response to More’s Epigrammata, which was published with 1518 edition of Utopia. In this example, the success of Utopia combined with publication of the Epigrammata awakened the animosity of Brie.

Brie had never been a fond of English scholars, and More was one of them. Then, an example of French writers who followed More’s footsteps was François de La Mothe-Fénelon with his novel, Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699)

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