Coming home: Edward Gibbon's Essai sur l'étude de la littérature and the “Quality of Foreignness”

Gibbon's first publication, the Essai sur l'étude de la littérature , betrayed a certain “quality of foreignness,” as Gibbon noted himself. The Essai was written in the context of the controversy, in France, between philosophes and erudits , a controversy Gibbon was familiar with because of the formative years he had spent in frenchified Lausanne. In England, where the Essai was published, the satirical climate was quite different. In order to succeed, Gibbon's Essai would need a sympathetic introduction, but Matthieu Maty's A l'Auteur fails to provide one. If anything, it brings Gibbon's foreignness into sharper focus, and could be of no help to Gibbon in shaking off his cultural melancholy. Gibbon's sense of cultural homelessness has disappeared by the time he writes the Memoirs of my Life. Resettled in Lausanne, Gibbon remembers much of his life against the background of his “quality of foreignness,” and the memories of his Essai particularly give us a good view of his struggles with a reluctant Englishness. Ultimately, however, it would appear that the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could choose neither Paris nor London for his cultural centre.