Une redécouverte restreinte : la rhétorique française du 18e siècle

Sylviane Léoni : French Rhetoric. Classical rhetoric, embodying a system of learning which is no longer accepted, is a true discipline which drew its meaning and coherence from its close relationship with philosophy, Aristotelian dialectics, topics, poetics and so on. These relationships, thanks to which rhetoric became an art in the classical sense, gradually dissolved in the 17th and 18th Centuries under the influence of Cartesianism and English empiricism. Nevertheless, the prestige of the classical tradition, force of habit and the institutional power backing up the teaching of the art of persuasion slowed down the decline of this discipline which, contrary to what is often said, was not limited in the 18th Century to the production of stylistic effects and the study of figures and tropes.Léoni Sylviane. Une redécouverte restreinte : la rhétorique française du 18e siècle. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°30, 1998. La recherche aujourd'hui, sous la direction de Michel Delon. pp. 179-193