François-Vincent Toussaint

He worked with Denis Diderot and Marc-Antoine Eidous on a French translation of Dr. Robert James's A Medicinal Dictionary (the London publication of 1743-1745, fol.

[2] He translated Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, and composed the table of contents for a 1749 edition of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of Law).

The book was a scandal (and a huge success, reprinted 13 times in the first year) for several reasons, including the fact that one of the treatise's characters was assumed to be based on the oversanctimonious queen Marie Leszczynska.

Parisian reader Edmond Jean François Barbier wrote in his diary that Les Mœurs had been banned and he would now have to pay double the normal price for the book.

A short summary is to be found in It is basically an excerpt of a more extended discussion, the unpublished thesis of Adams corrects several flaws and errors in previous research on Toussaint by