François de La Rochefoucauld
François VI de La Rochefoucauld was a prominent French writer and moralist born into an aristocratic family in 1613. Initially pursuing a military and political career, he became involved in the complex intrigues of the French court during the reign of Louis XIV, where his experiences inspired his later literary work. Following a disillusioning political career and a serious injury during the Wars of the Fronde, he retired to his estates, where he began writing.
La Rochefoucauld is best known for his collection of maxims, "Maximes," published in 1665, which articulate profound observations on human nature, self-interest, and morality. His writing style is characterized by a concise and penetrating approach, often using oxymora and parallel structures to challenge conventional thinking. While he critiqued the human condition through a lens of skepticism and determinism, he did not advocate for moral reform, distinguishing him from philosophers and theologians of his time.
His insights have had a lasting impact, influencing various fields such as psychology and sociology, and his work continues to resonate with readers today, prompting reflection on the complexities of human motives and behaviors. La Rochefoucauld passed away in 1680, leaving behind a legacy that extends beyond his era, shaping the understanding of self-love and human nature in subsequent philosophical discourse.
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François de La Rochefoucauld
French moralist and essayist
- Born: September 15, 1613
- Birthplace: Paris, France
- Died: March 16 or 17, 1680
- Place of death: Paris, France
La Rochefoucauld immersed himself in the life of the seventeenth century Parisian salons after a failed political career. His chief literary work, Maximes, best exemplifies the predilection of the salons for the genre of maxims and set the standard of excellence for maxim writers during his century and later.
Early Life
François VI de La Rochefoucauld (frah-swaw deh lah-rawsh-foo-koh) was born into an ancient aristocratic French family. He bore the title of Prince de Marsillac until he inherited the title of duke de La Rochefoucauld at his father’s death in 1650. He grew up in the family château at Verteuil, in Angoumois in western France, and, at the age of fourteen, married thirteen-year-old Andrée de Vivonne, who would bear five sons and three daughters.
Having joined the army when he was fifteen, he entered court life the next year with hopes for a great political career. However, he soon became embroiled in court conspiracies, partly because of the women with whom he was involved, such as Marie de Rohan, duchesse de Chevreuse, and Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon Condé, the duchesse de Longueville (who had a son with him). He sided with Queen Anne of Austria (the regent for her young son, Louis XIV ) against Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu , and later opposed Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Jules Mazarin . After being involved in military campaigns in Italy, the Netherlands, and Flanders, he played an active role in the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1653), the armed uprising of nobles against the French monarchy’s increasing power. In 1652, he was shot in the face during a skirmish in Paris’s Faubourg Saint-Antoine, losing an eye and becoming blind for a few months.
By the end of 1652, disillusioned by years of court intrigue, failed love affairs, and broken promises at court, he abandoned his political career. Accepting Cardinal Mazarin’s offer of amnesty in October to the rebel nobles, La Rochefoucauld retired from the court and withdrew to his country estates in Angoumois.
Life’s Work
Although his political career was laid to rest, La Rochefoucauld was about to enter a new, unexpected career that would make him famous. During his retirement, he wrote his Les Mémoires sur la régence d’Anne d’Autriche, first published anonymously in 1662 (The Memoirs of the Duke de La Rochefoucault , 1683), detailing his experiences of intrigue in the court of Louis XIV. His objective account of then-recent political events and the personalities involved foreshadowed the aloof tone and the close psychological observation of his future masterpiece.
He returned to Paris in 1656 and entered into a new social milieu, the salons. Salons were the meeting places for the aristocratic intelligentsia of France, whose discussions ranged from literature to theology. Although he visited many salons, including that of Madeleine de Scudéry, by 1659, he participated primarily in the salon of Madeleine de Souvré, the marquise de Sablé. Here he became close friends with Marie Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Madame de La Fayette, and Madame de Sévigné, and met such contemporaries as the playwright Molière and the mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal.
In this atmosphere emerged La Rochefoucauld’s most important literary work. One of the salons’ favorite pastimes was formulating maxims—thoughtful, witty, concise statements concerning human nature or behavior. Unlike a proverb or an adage, which expresses an obvious, commonplace truth, a maxim presents a universal truth about a social, psychological, or moral principle, expressed in a profound but elegant way. Salon participants would choose a particular idea and contribute suggestions as to how to best formulate the thought, polishing it and revising it as a group. Although several participants, including the marquise de Sablé, published maxims, the master of this genre was unquestionably La Rochefoucauld.
La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions: Ou, Sentences et maximes morales (1665; Epictetus Junior: Or, Maximes of Modern Morality, 1670), better known as Maximes , demonstrates the high point of the maxim writing of seventeenth century salons. La Rochefoucauld oversaw four more editions of this work, augmenting, polishing, and sometimes revising maxims more than thirty times for phrasing and succinctness. The fifth edition, published in 1678, contains 504 maxims—each almost always expressed as a single sentence—grouped together by general categories (love, marriage, self-love, vices and virtues, and so forth). The reflections, which make up a short portion of the book, are very brief essays on a variety of topics related to the maxims.
La Rochefoucauld’s maxims probe the source of people’s actions. His overriding theme is that social and moral behavior often is based on self-interest or self-love. All noble virtues, sentiments, and actions are mixed, consciously or unconsciously, with pride, envy, or other ulterior motives. In addition, habit, fashion, temperament, heredity, and circumstances also contribute to people’s motives, thus making virtues and vices often the predetermined products of unconscious motives. Like his seventeenth century contemporaries, La Rochefoucauld did not believe in the goodness of human nature, and his maxims seek to expose lies disguised as truth, vice disguised as virtue, and the selfishness underlying good deeds. However, he went further than his contemporaries by questioning the validity of free will and the existence of uncontaminated virtue and good works. His pessimism, cynicism, and determinism were considered subversive by some but approved by others.
In addition to his perceptive insights, La Rochefoucauld’s style also makes him the prime example of a seventeenth century French moralist. As the omniscient, detached observer who penetrates below the surface, he almost always uses the words “we” or “people” rather than “I” to emphasize the shared commonality of all human beings in whatever truth is being expressed. Through his masterful use of oxymora and parallelisms, he startles the reader out of conventional thinking patterns, illuminating in a sudden flash something that lies hidden. Because each maxim is a self-contained unit on a single, in-depth aspect of people’s behavior or motivation, the work can appear contradictory and fragmentary, but this in fact mirrors the contradictory and complex nature of human beings.
When he died of gout in 1680 in the arms of the French orator Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet , La Rochefoucauld was already famous. His Maximes continued to be appreciated not only by the French but also by English writers such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, and they would go on to influence many thinkers in the centuries that followed.
Significance
Although he fulfilled the moralist’s task of exposing human weaknesses, La Rochefoucauld cannot be categorized as a philosopher, a theologian, or a moral reformer: He presented no coherent system, had no specific methodology, and expressed no interest in religion or desire to change people’s behavior. As a perceptive observer of facts concerning people’s behavior, however, he was a forerunner of modern psychology, sociology, and behavior theory. He laid the groundwork for basic concepts about the unconscious that were later developed by Sigmund Freud and others, and his insights on the multifaceted and contradictory nature of the self contributed to the history of social ethics and to modern studies on human behavior and motivation.
La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes remains one of the most penetrating works on the hidden life of the human heart because it offers an accurate, impartial assessment of the human condition that transcends his century. His insights—on self-interest in particular—were expanded by various European thinkers, including the Scottish economistAdam Smith and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and led to a reevaluation of the concept of self-love as an attitude that can be appropriate and acceptable, rather than a vice.
Bibliography
Clark, Henry C. La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 1994. A helpful discussion of the context of French politics and of Jansenism, and arguments against religious content in the maxims. Includes a brief biography and analysis of La Rochefoucauld’s main themes and philosophy. Translations for French quotations are simultaneous in the text. Includes a bibliography of French and English sources and an index.
Conley, John J., S. J. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Interesting reevaluation of the role and influence of intellectual women and salons in seventeenth century France. Includes detailed arguments in chapter 2 on the marquise de Sablé’s underestimated contribution to La Rochefoucauld’s maxims. Extensive notes, bibliography, and index.
Epstein, Joseph. Life Sentences: Literary Essays. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. A positive overview in this book on nineteen famous writers of La Rochefoucauld’s life and works in the chapter “La Rochefoucauld: Maximum Moralist.”
Hodgson, Richard G. Falsehood Disguised: Unmasking the Truth in La Rochefoucauld. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1995. Focuses on the theme and style of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, with acceptable arguments for their baroque elements. Multilingual bibliography, index. Translation of maxims often only in appendices.
La Rochefoucauld, François de. Moral Maxims. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. A dual language edition of La Rochefoucauld’s classic work. Includes an introduction and further notes by Irwin Primer. Based on the 1749 English translation.
Levi, Anthony. Louis XIV. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004. Very readable description of the political and social atmosphere of the seventeenth century, including La Rochefoucauld’s role in court intrigues and the salons he later visited. Chronology, genealogy, maps, substantial notes, and index.
Thweatt, Vivien. La Rochefoucauld and the Seventeenth-Century Concept of Self. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 1980. A good discussion of the function and worldview of salons. Includes analysis of La Rochefoucauld’s philosophy and style, as well as his manuscript changes and revisions. French quotations and phrases not translated. Bibliography of primary, secondary, and critical sources, and an index.