François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld

François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld (born September 15, 1613, Paris, France—died March 16/17, 1680, Paris) was a French classical author who had been one of the most active rebels of the Fronde before he became the leading exponent of the maxime, a French literary form of epigram that expresses a harsh or paradoxical truth with brevity.

Heritage and political activities

La Rochefoucauld was the son of François, comte de La Rochefoucauld, and his wife, Gabrielle du Plessis-Liancourt. In 1628 he was married to Andrée de Vivonne, with whom he had four sons and three daughters. He served in the army against the Spaniards in Italy in 1629, in the Netherlands and Picardy in 1635–36, and again in Flanders in 1639. The public lives of both father and son were conditioned by the policies of Louis XIV’s government, which by turns threatened and flattered the nobility. Though his father was created duke and made governor of Poitou, he was later deprived of that post when the loyalty of the family was called into question. The younger La Rochefoucauld was allowed by Cardinal Mazarin, the infant king’s chief minister, to resume the governorship in 1646. The fact that his château at Verteuil was demolished by the crown, apparently without notice, in 1650 throws light on a main cause of the series of revolts between 1648 and 1653 known as the Fronde: the distrust and fear felt by the monarchy for the local independence of the nobility.

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 duchesse de Chevreuse had lured him into intrigues against Cardinal 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, duchesse 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.

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 La Fayette, 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.

The Maximes

The first edition of the Maximes, published in 1665, was called Réflexions; ou, sentences et maximes morales and did not contain epigrams exclusively; the most eloquent single item, which appeared only in the first edition and was thereafter removed by the author, is a three-page poetic description of self-interest, a quality he found in all forms of life and in all actions. The manuscripts also contain epigrams embedded in longer reflections; in some cases the various versions show the steps by which a series of connected sentences was filed down to the point of ultimate brevity. Beneath the general single statement, however, can be found a personal reaction to the Fronde, or to politics, often violent in its expression. For example:

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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.)

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.

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:

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.)

This image of the sea recurred:

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.)

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.

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:

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).

La Rochefoucauld authorized five editions of the Maximes from 1665 to 1678. Two years after the last publication, he died in Paris.

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.