Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm

Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, was a German-born writer who built his career in Paris as a journalist, art critic and diplomat, writing in French. Born in Regensburg in 1723 and dying in Gotha in 1807, he matters chiefly as a channel through which French Enlightenment ideas reached courts across Europe.

The son of a Lutheran pastor, he studied at Leipzig under Gottsched and Ernesti, and at nineteen wrote the tragedy Banise. In 1748 he arrived in Paris as secretary to Count Friesen. He mastered French so thoroughly that he made it his main language, and he moved in the circles of Rousseau, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists. His pamphlet Le Petit Prophète de Boehmischbroda (1753), defending Italian opera against the French style, established his literary name.

That same year he launched the Correspondance littéraire, handwritten letters summarising Parisian literary and artistic news for a select group of princes, among them Catherine the Great. His friendship with Rousseau collapsed after his affair with Madame d'Épinay, and Rousseau later portrayed him harshly. Grimm went on to serve several courts, received a baronetcy of the Holy Roman Empire, and acted as an agent for Catherine, buying art for the Hermitage. After losing his closest friends in 1783 and 1784 and fleeing the Revolution, he died in Gotha, living with the granddaughter of Madame d'Épinay.

His legacy is above all documentary. His private letters, published after his death, give a frank picture of Parisian society from 1750 to 1790, and his literary judgments have aged rather well.