author
Charles Bordes
1711–1781
An 18th-century French man of letters from Lyon, he moved in the world of Enlightenment debate and wrote with wit, curiosity, and a taste for satire. His work ranges from poetry to philosophical controversy, including a published response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
1 Audiobook
Parapilla, poëme en cinq chants
by Charles Bordes
About the author
Born in Lyon in 1711 and often listed as Charles Borde or Bordes, he was a French writer associated with the literary and intellectual life of the eighteenth century. French reference sources describe him as an homme de lettres, and his career linked him with learned circles in Lyon as well as the wider world of ideas in Paris.
He is remembered for varied writing rather than a single famous book. Library and reference records connect his name with works such as Parapilla and with a 1753 discourse answering Rousseau in the debate over the arts and sciences, which gives a good sense of his place in Enlightenment-era argument. He also belonged to the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon, a sign of the esteem he held in regional intellectual life.
He died in Lyon in 1781. Though not widely known today, he offers a glimpse of the lively provincial literary culture of pre-Revolutionary France, where poetry, philosophy, and public debate often met in the same career.