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| b. Sept. 15, 1613, Paris, Fr.
d. March 16/17, 1680, Paris |
La
Rochefoucauld was more vulnerable than most of his contemporaries, because
throughout his life he seems to have been susceptible to feminine charm.
In 1635 the Duchess (duchesse) de Chevreuse had lured him into intrigues
against Cardinal de Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII, an adventure
that only procured for La Rochefoucauld a humiliating interview with Richelieu,
eight days of imprisonment in the Bastille, and two years of exile at Verteuil.
Later, his hatred for Mazarin and his devotion to Anne de Bourbon, Duchess
de Longueville, sister of the Great Condé, who was the leader of
the Fronde, led to an even more disastrous outcome. His own account of
the weary alternation of plots and campaigns of the mutinous nobles throughout
the revolts (1648-53) may be read in his Mémoires.
His
loyalty to the House
of Condé did not increase his popularity with the crown and
prevented him from pursuing any single policy for reform of royal or ministerial
government. How far toward treason he allowed himself to be led, when the
intentions of the reforming princes and nobility were superseded by personal
ambitions, is shown by the draft of the so-called Treaty of Madrid
of 1651, which laid down conditions of Spanish help to the French nobility.
La Rochefoucauld not only signed the treaty but is thought by one scholar
to have drafted it. (See Chevreuse,
Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de, Richelieu,
Armand-Jean du Plessis
Two other features of his public career deserve mention, since they explain much of his writing--courage and litigation. The man who was to pen the aphorisms on courage and cowardice had certainly been in the forefront of battle. Within six years he was wounded in no fewer than three engagements. The injuries to his face and throat were such that he retired from the struggle, his health ruined and his peace of mind lost.
His financial difficulties were no doubt intensified by war, his lands were heavily mortgaged, and but for the astute help of his agent he might not have been able to keep his establishment in central Paris, as he did from 1660 onward. He was forced to pay not only for fine living but for endless litigation. There is evidence of no fewer than five lawsuits in the space of three years, chiefly against other noble families, over questions of precedence and court ceremonial.
Yet in 1655 his literary endeavours were still before him. Thanks to the lasting and intellectually stimulating friendships with Mme de Sablé, one of the most remarkable women of her age, and Mme de Lafayette, he seems to have avoided politics for a while and gradually won his way back into royal favour, a feat sealed by his promotion to the knightly order of the Saint-Esprit at the end of 1661. Reading and intellectual conversation occupied his time as well as that of other men and women of a circle who listened to private readings of Pierre Corneille's classical tragedies and Nicolas Boileau's didactic poem on the principles of poetic composition, L'Art poétique. The circle was enlivened by a new game that consisted of discussing epigrams on manners and behaviour, expressed in the briefest, most pungent manner possible. The care with which La Rochefoucauld kept notes and versions of his thoughts on the moral and intellectual subjects of the game is clear from the surviving manuscripts. When the clandestine publication of one of them in Holland forced him to publish under his own name, it was clear that he had satisfied public taste: five editions of the Maximes, each of them revised and enlarged, were to appear within his lifetime.
It may have been hostile reception or the fear of revealing a political attitude that made him abandon this kind of epigram except for the almost unrecognizable No. 185: "Il y a des héros en mal comme en bien" ("Evil as well as good has its heroes"). Modern readers forget that La Rochefoucauld's contemporaries would read recent history into statements that appear cryptic and opaque to posterity.Les crimes deviennent innocents, même glorieux, par leur nombre et par leurs qualités; de là vient que les voleries publiques sont des habiletés, et que prendre des provinces injustement s'appelle faire des conquêtes. Le crime a ses héros, ainsi que la vertu. (Crimes are made innocent, even virtuous, by their number and nature; hence public robbery becomes a skillful achievement and wrongful seizure of a province is called conquest. Crime has its heroes no less than virtue has.)
The Fronde was to La Rochefoucauld one of those moments of history that seemed to reveal men's motives at their worst. His exposure of the self-seeking that lay beneath conventional homage to morality has earned for him the reputation of a cynic, but his keener contemporaries are no less severe. The pungency and absence of explanation make his epigrams seem more scornful than similar statements embedded in memoirs. But La Rochefoucauld was concerned with conveying something more than scorn, and beneath his professions of idealism he pinpointed a restless and unquenchable thirst for self-preservation. Virtue in the pure state was something he did not find:
This image of the sea recurred:Les vertus se perdent dans l'intérêt comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer. (Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.)
La Rochefoucauld has been called an Epicurean but his imaginative insights attached him to no doctrine. Like Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, he was aware of the mystery around man that dwarfs his efforts and mocks his knowledge, of the many things about man of which he knows nothing, of the gap between thinking and being, between what man is and what man does: "La nature fait le mérite et la fortune le met en oeuvre" ("Nature gives us our good qualities and chance sets them to work"). Some epigrams show a respect for the power of indolence, and others reveal an almost Nietzschean respect for strength. All these insights seem common to the French classical school of which he is so brilliant a member--though as an aristocrat he disdained being called a writer. These insights also accounted for his fame and influence on his disciples: in England Lord Chesterfield, the orator and man of letters, and the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy; in Germany the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg; in France the writers and critics Stendhal, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and André Gide.Voilà la peinture de l'amour-propre, dont toute la vie n'est qu'une grande et longue agitation; la mer en est une image sensible; et l'amour-propre trouve dans le flux et reflux de ses vagues continuelles une fidèle expression de la succession turbulente de ses pensées et de ses éternels mouvements. (Such is the picture of self-love, of which all life is one continuous and immense ferment. The sea is its visible counterpart and self-love finds in the ebb and flow of the sea's endless waves a true likeness of the chaotic sequence of its thoughts and of its everlasting motion.)
Yet his chief glory perhaps is not as thinker but as artist. In the variety and subtlety of his arrangement of words he made the maxime into a jewel. It is not always the truth of the maxim that is so striking, but its exaggeration which can surprise one into a new aspect of the truth. He describes and defines--he has no time for more--but of the single metallic image he makes amazing use. He handles paradox to such effect that a final word can reverse the rest:
La Rochefoucauld authorized five editions of the Maximes from 1665 to 1678. Two years after the last publication, he died in Paris.On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils (We give nothing so generously as . . . advice). C'est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul (It is great folly to seek to be wise . . . on one's own).
Though he did a considerable amount of writing over the years La Rochefoucauld
actually published only two works, the Mémoires and the Maximes.
In
addition, about 150 letters have been collected and 19 shorter pieces now
known as Réflexions diverses. These, with the treaties and
conventions that he may have drawn up personally, constitute his entire
work and of these only the Maximes stand out as a work of genius.
Like his younger contemporary, Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld
was a man of one book.
(W.G.Mo.)
To
cite this page:
"La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duke (duc) de"
Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
<http://members.eb.com/bol/topic
[Accessed 30 October 1999].
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