Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, was a prominent 18th-century French philosopher and aphorist known for his insightful reflections on human nature and morality. Born into a noble family in 1715, he faced health challenges throughout his life, including a debilitating frostbite injury from military service during the War of the Austrian Succession. After resigning from the military in 1744 due to his health, Vauvenargues turned to literature with encouragement from the famous writer Voltaire, producing works that explored the complexities of human emotion, virtue, and ambition.
His most notable publication, "Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain," established him as a significant figure in the moral commentary tradition, bridging the gap between the pessimistic views of earlier moralists and the more optimistic perspectives of Enlightenment thinkers. Vauvenargues argued for the potential of human virtue, emphasizing the importance of love for others and the pursuit of glory as noble aspirations that transcend mere self-interest. He is often seen as a precursor to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advocating for the essential interplay between reason and emotion as fundamental to human experience. Despite a relatively small body of work, Vauvenargues's ideas laid important groundwork for future philosophical exploration and contributed to evolving thoughts on individuality and moral progress during the Enlightenment. He passed away in 1747, largely unrecognized during his lifetime, but his legacy grew significantly in subsequent centuries.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues
French writer and philosopher
- Born: August 6, 1715
- Birthplace: Aix-en-Provence, France
- Died: May 28, 1747
- Place of death: Paris, France
Vauvenargues was the outstanding French moralist in the first half of the eighteenth century and an important influence on Voltaire, Rousseau, and other leading figures of the French Enlightenment. His reconciliation of the tension between reason and emotion looked ahead to the Romantic philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Early Life
The Marquis de Vauvenargues (voh-vehn-ahrg) was born Luc de Clapiers to a poor but noble family. His father, Joseph, was the town mayor, and in 1722 he was ennobled as Marquis de Vauvenargues in recognition of his services during an outbreak of the plague. Sickly and ill-favored from youth, Vauvenargues nonetheless entered military service in 1733 as a second lieutenant in the king’s regiment, rising to the rank of captain. His first posting was with Marshal Villars in Italy during the War of the Polish Succession (1733-1735). The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 found him garrisoned at Metz. He was attached to the army of Marshal de Belle-Isle that invaded Bohemia in July, 1741, and took part in the daring night capture of Prague. Reinforcements and supply failed, however, and Belle-Isle was obliged to abandon the city on December 16-17, 1742. His nine-day retreat over frozen ground to Egra was a disaster. Much of the army was lost, and Vauvenargues, whose legs suffered frostbite, was left lame. His lungs and eyesight were also affected, and the pulmonary damage hastened his premature death. He served at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, returned to garrison at Arras, and resigned his commission in January, 1744.
Life’s Work
After Vauvenargues’s resignation from the military, poverty obliged him to seek further employment. He attempted to enter the diplomatic service and was on the verge of securing a post thanks to the offices of Voltaire, who had befriended him, when he was stricken with smallpox. Voltaire enabled him to settle in Paris, where he nursed his failing health but also took up the literary career that friends, beginning with the Marquis de Mirabeau, had urged him to pursue.
In 1746, Vauvenargues published Introduction a la connaissance de l’esprit humaine, suivie de reflexions et de maximes (introduction to the knowledge of the human spirit, followed by reflections and maxims). Vauvenargues died in Paris on May 28, 1747, attended by a small circle of friends but still impoverished and obscure. An edition of his works was published later that year. Much of his writing, however, was suppressed by his family, lest it “stain” his reputation, and remained unpublished until the end of the century. A fiftieth anniversary edition appeared in 1797, more substantive but still incomplete. Forty-two additional letters, and seventeen notebooks totaling 708 pages, were discovered in the Aix-en-Provence library in 1825 and sold to the Louvre. This material served as the basis of D. L. Gilbert’s definitive edition of Vauvenargues in 1857, but the archive was lost in the fire of May 23-24, 1871, that followed the fall of the Paris Commune.
Vauvenargues’s corpus is small—one modern edition of his work comes to 525 pages—but sufficient to establish him as the foremost French aphorist of the first half of the eighteenth century and the heir of a tradition of moral commentary that began with Rabelais and Montaigne. Vauvenargues himself was conscious of his place in that tradition, and of an even older heritage of humane skepticism that reached back to Theophrastus, Juvenal, Martial, and, above all, Plutarch. His work is a dialogue with and a commentary on his precursors, as well as a significant extension of it.
Vauvenargues’s concerns are those of his age: the nature of humanity, the relationship of simplicity to virtue and of reason to emotion, and the distinction between vanity and ambition. Much of his work can be read as a reaction against the cynicism of the seventeenth century moralists, particularly La Rouchefoucauld, La Bruyere, and Molière. In contrast to La Rouchefoucauld, who argued that self-interest and self-love were at the heart of all human actions, Vauvenargues insisted on two exceptions: the love of others, and the love of glory. In the beloved, whose welfare we cherish above our own, we rise above mere egotistical calculation; and, similarly, in the quest for glory, which Vauvenargues understood as the pursuit of excellence, we transcend our own interest. These exceptions make nobility, indeed humanity itself, possible, and are the basis of all virtue. Vauvenargues thus rejected the depiction of the human individual not only as a mere bundle of egotistical interests and desires but also as an impenitent sinner, incapable of rising without grace. In this he parted company with Pascal, a thinker sympathetic to him in many ways.
For Vauvenargues, what was crucial in humans was the freedom to aspire. For this, pride and ambition were requisite, but also dangerous, for they could easily terminate in vanity. Only the continual spur of action could overcome the tendency to egotism. The heroic self was realized by seeking what was beyond it, a vision that looked forward to such later thinkers as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The virtuous person, as described by Vauvenargues, was conscious of his or her own insufficiency (insuffisance), and therefore of the continual need of exploration and self-creation. Such a person occupied the mean between the egotist, who admitted the world only as an extension of him- or herself, and the person of convention, who disappeared into it. Authentic selfhood thus required the recognition of self and world as a mutually constituted relation, defined through human action. At the same time, the virtuous individual had to take other selves into account. The common project of all such selves was the common interest (bienfaisance). This interest was the true subject of politics, which might be obscured by private interests, but appeared in moments of crisis. Here Vauvenargues clearly foreshadowed Rousseau’s concept of the General Will.
Significance
Vauvenargues was a critical link between French thought of the seventeenth century and that of the Enlightenment. While acknowledging the frailty of individuals and the corruption of society, he argued that humans were capable of virtue and glory, and therefore of moral progress. His attempt to reconcile reason and emotion, whose incompatibility had been one of the grand themes of seventeenth century thought, led toward Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Romantic successors. Emotion, he believed, was the primary element in human nature, the “first teacher,” as he put it, of the soul. It was also the chief wellspring of action, and therefore indispensable to the projects of reason. In making his claim for the essential interaction of reason and emotion, Vauvenargues both helped to make the Enlightenment possible and provided a check on its excesses.
Bibliography
Fine, Peter Martin. Vauvenargues and La Rouchefoucauld. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974. A comparative study of Vauvenargues and his most celebrated seventeenth century predecessor, the Duke de la Rouchefoucauld.
Gosse, Edmund. Three French Moralists. London: William Heinemann. 1918. Contains a sympathetic and perceptive essay on Vauvenargues by a distinguished turn-of-the-century British novelist and critic.
Read, Herbert. The Sense of Glory: Essays in Criticism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1929. Contains a good overview of Vauvenargues’s life and thought by a major British critic.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers de. Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Editions Alive, 1999. The most recent and comprehensive edition of Vauvenargues’s works. Contains commentary and a bibliography.
Vial, M. Fernand. Une Philosophie et une Morale du Sentiment: Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues. Paris: Droz, 1938. An important French critical commentary.
Walras, Mary. Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1928. One of the few book-length studies in English devoted exclusively to Vauvenargues, and still useful.