Claude Fauchet (1530-1602)

Claude Fauchet (3 July 1530 – January 1602) was a sixteenth-century French historian, antiquary, and pioneering romance philologist. Fauchet published the earliest printed work of literary history in a vernacular language in Europe, the Recueil de l'origine de la langue et poësie françoise (1581). He was a high-ranking official in the governments of Charles IX, Henri III, and Henri IV, serving as the president of the Cour des monnaies. He was born in Paris, to Nicole Fauchet, procureur au Châtelet, and Geneviève Audrey, granddaughter of Jacques III De Thou. His mother was also connected through her daughter from an earlier marriage to the Godefroy family. Fauchet was thus closely connected by birth to the world of the Paris Parlement. Fauchet studied at the University of Paris before taking his degree in civil law at the University of Orléans in 1550. He subsequently travelled through northern Italy, visiting Rome and also Venice, where he made the acquaintance of the humanist Sperone Speroni. Upon his return to Paris, Fauchet composed a series of short essays based on his wide reading in medieval French literature, much of which had not yet been printed and was only accessible in manuscript. He entitled this collection Les Veilles ou observations de plusieurs choses dinnes de memoire en la lecture d'aucuns autheurs françois par C.F.P., dated to 1555.The Veilles (French for 'vigils') are a literary miscellany in the tradition of Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights. The author's manuscript of this miscellany still exists; it was never printed in full in Fauchet's lifetime, though he would recycle parts of it in his later printed works on the history of French poetry and French magistratures. Fauchet was eventually made second president of the Cour des monnaies (29 March 1569), and subsequently rose to the rank of premier président in 1581. He held this office until 1599. Among his friends and colleagues are to be counted Étienne Pasquier, Antoine Loisel, Henri de Mesmes, Louis Le Caron, Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jacopo Corbinelli, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Filippo Pigafetta, Sperone Speroni, and many other learned and erudite characters of the sixteenth century.