Jean Bouhier (16 March 1673, in Dijon – 17 March 1746, in Dijon) was a French magistrate, jurisconsultus, historian, translator, bibliophile and scholar. He served as the first president a mortier to the parlement de Bourgogne from 1704 to 1728, when he resigned to devote himself to his historic and literary work following his 1727 election to the Academie francaise.
From the rich Bouhier family (his brother Claude Bouhier de Lantenay became the second bishop of Dijon in 1744), Jean Bouhier had a vast network of correspondents right across Europe. The Eltons write of him:
He was renowned as much for his erudition as for the splendid library he had inherited from his ancestors, which he expanded and put at the disposal of the poets and writers he welcomed to his hotel on rue Vauban in Dijon. At the end of his life the library held 35,000 works and 2,000 manuscripts, but all his collections were dispersed after his death and were mostly sold to Clairvaux Abbey.
Besides his treatise on Burgundian customs (considered his masterpiece), Jean Bouhier was the author of several works on jurisprudence as well as many dissertations. He also translated Latin classical texts, some in collaboration with the abbe d’Olivet, though Bouhier's translations were more appreciated by his contemporaries for their closeness to the original than for their style – his wife said to him "You take care of thinking, and leave me with the writing"
D’Alembert said of him :
History and jurisprudence
Traite de la succession des meres en vertu de l’edit de Saint-Maur, avec une dissertation sur les droits de la mere en la succession de ses enfans, au cas de la substitution pupillaire, principalement par rapport a l’usage du Parlement de Dijon (1726)
Dissertation sur la representation en succession, suivant la coutume du duche de Bourgogne, avec une explication de l’article XXV de la meme coutume (1734)
Traite de la dissolution du mariage pour cause d’impuissance, avec quelques pieces curieuses sur le meme sujet (1735)
Supplement au Journal du regne d’Henri IV, depuis le 2 aout 1589 jusques au 1er avril 1594 ; depuis le 1er de l’an 1598 jusques en 1602 et depuis le 1er de janvier 1607 jusques au mois de juin 1610 (1737)
Les Coutumes du duche de Bourgogne, avec les anciennes coutumes tant generales que locales de la meme province (2 volumes 1742–46)
Œuvres de jurisprudence (2 volumes, 1787–88)
Tusculanes de Ciceron (The Tusculanae Quaestiones of Cicero, 1737)
Poeme de Petrone sur la guerre civile entre Cesar et Pompee, avec deux epitres d’Ovide, en vers francais, avec des remarques et des conjonctures sur le poeme intitule "Pervigilium Veneris" (Poem by Petronius on the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, with two letters by Ovid, in French verse, with remarks and conjectures on the poem entitled Pervigilium Veneris'', 1737)
Les Amours d’Enee et de Didon, poeme traduit de Virgile, avec diverses autres imitations d’anciens poetes grecs et latins (The Loves of Aeneas and Dido, poem translated from Virgil, with several imitations of ancient Greek and Latin poets, 1742)
Remarques sur Ciceron (Remarks on Cicero, 1746)
Recherches et dissertations sur Herodote (Researches and dissertations on Herodotus, 1746)
Memoirs and correspondence
Souvenirs de Jean Bouhier, president au Parlement de Dijon, extraits d’un manuscrit autographe inedit et contenant des details curieux sur divers personnages des XVIIe et XVIIIe siecle (1866)
Correspondance litteraire (1974)
