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César Vichard de Saint-Réal (1639 - 1692), was a French polygraph.

He was born in Chambery, Savoy, but educated in Lyon by the Jesuits. He used to work in the royal library with Antoine Varillas. This french historiographer influenced the way Saint-Réal wrote history. He used to be reader and friend of Hortense Mancini, duchesse de Mazarin, who took him with her to England (1675).

Saint-Réal was a polygraph. His works belong to different genres but he had always interest for history.

After some minor works written in order to win the protection of Louis XIV, he wrote De l'usage de l'histoire in 1671. In this essay, he speacks about the good way of writing history and explains that understanding of facts is more important than facts themselves. In 1672, he publishes Dom Carlos undertitled "nouvelle historique". It's a short novel or a long short story which relates the love story between Dom Carlos, the son of Philip II of Spain, and his wife Elisabeth of Valois. Saint-Réal mixes political and love but love appears much more important. This text had a big success in the high society. Nowadays french critical sees it as an important text in the construction of french psychological novel. Il annonces the style of Madame de La Fayette novels.

But Saint-Réal wanted to be a serious writer and needed to write texts wich were no fiction. That's why he published in 1674 la Conjuration des Espagnols contre la République de Venise en l'année M. DC. XVIII. It relates a spanish conjuration against Venice. The historical work is not serious if it's seen with modern criterions. But this work was considered by people of the end of the XVIIth century and the XVIIIth century as a good exemple of classical prosis. In Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire speachs about Saint-Réal as the "french Sallust" because of this work.

The authorship of the duchess's Mémoires has been ascribed to Saint-Real, but no proof exists. He has written a Vie de Jésus Christ in 1678 wich is a summery of the gospels. He took part in the literary arguments of his time with the short treatise De la critique (1691), directed against Andry de Boisregard's Réflexions sur la langue française. There were a lot of editions of hisŒuvres complètes during the XVIIth and the XIXth centuries. Some were longer than anothers due to the inclusion of some works falsely attributed to him.

Bibliography

• Dom Carlos, nouvelle historique, Amsterdam, 1672, In-12.
• Conjuration des Espagnols contre la République de Venise en l'Année M. DC. XVIII, 176 pp., Paris, Claude Barbin, 1674. (Reedition, 1683)
• Dom Carlos et La Conjuration des Espagnols contre la République de Venise, facsimile of original editions, Genève, Droz, 1977, 675 p., 18 cm.

• Gustave Dulong, L'abbé de Saint-Réal, Étude sur les rapports de l'histoire et du roman, thèse, Paris, Honoré Champion, 1921. Slatkine Reprints, 1980.
• Père Lelong, Bibliothèque historique de la France, No. 48, 122;
• Andrée Mansau, Saint-Réal et l'humanisme cosmopolite, Lille, Atelier de reproduction des thèses, 1996.
• Barolo, Memorie spettanti ella vita di Saint-Rial (1780; Saint-Real was an associate of the Academy of Turin).