Les paradoxes du silence alpin chez Ramond de Carbonnières

Abstract

Ramond de Carbonnières is one of the first writers of Enlightenment to reflect on a high mountain experience. To characterize this environment, still not well known in his time, he explains how silent it is, a paradoxical silence, in a place where « everything draws attention to the idea of motion and sound ». But Ramond precisely draws from this paradox his complex view about mountain, a view which marks his philosophy of nature and will be a landmark in the history of Alpine perception.