Les Aventures de Télémaque

Les aventures de Télémaque (The adventures of Telemachus) is a didactic French novel by Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai and tutor to the seven-year-old Duc de Bourgogne (grandson of Louis XIV and second in line to the throne). It was published anonymously in 1699 and reissued in 1717 by his family. The slender plot fills out a gap in Homer's Odyssey, recounting the educational travels of Telemachus, son of Ulysses, accompanied by his tutor, Mentor, who is revealed at the end of the story to be Minerva, goddess of wisdom, in disguise.

Fénelon described his book as a prose "epic": oddly, for such an admirer of the humanism of the ancient world, he was so much a product of the age of reason as to believe that poetry was obsolete. Yet his choice of simple vernacular prose as a means of spreading morality and enlightened ideas to the widest possible audience, including women and children, was very much in the spirit of the 18th-century age of Enlightenment.

The tutor Mentor is arguably the true hero of the book, much of which is given over to his speeches and advice on how to rule. Over and over, Mentor denounces war, luxury, and selfishness and proclaims the brotherhood of man and the necessity of altruism (though that term would only be coined in the 19th century by Auguste Comte). He recommends a complete overhaul of government and the abolition of the mercantile system and cruel taxes on the peasantry and suggests a system of parliamentary government and a Federation of Nations to settle disputes between nations peacefully. As against luxury and imperialism (represented by ancient Rome) Fénelon hold up the ideal of the simplicity and relative equality of ancient Greece, an ideal that would be taken up by in the Romantic era of the 19th century. The form of government he looks to is an aristocratic republic in the form of a constitutional monarchy in which the ruler-prince is advised by a council of patricians.

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