Background
François de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris on September 15, 1613.
(*This Seedbox Classics edition of La Rochefoucauld: The M...)
*This Seedbox Classics edition of La Rochefoucauld: The Maxims includes illustrations. Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld was a 17th century French nobleman who is best known for his maxims and memoirs about the motives of human behavior. La Rochefoucauld believed that every human action was tied in some way to self-interest. His philosophies were important in the French intellectual community along with being influential to thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche. The maxims in this extensive collection range from thoughts on self-love and bravery to tips on holding a conversation and flirting.
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François de La Rochefoucauld was born in Paris on September 15, 1613.
La Rochefoucauld was given the education of a nobleman of his era, which concentrated on military exercises, hunting, court etiquette, elegance of expression and comportment, and a knowledge of the world.
He saw military service in Italy and elsewhere and took part in various court intrigues during the 1630s and 1640s. Learning of the first episodes of the Fronde, or revolutionary opposition to the Regency and its prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, he joined the Frondeurs in December 1648. During the very complex military action and intrigues that followed, he was wounded attempting to break the blockade of Paris and organized the brilliant but unsuccessful defense of Bordeaux against the royal armies. In later phases of the Fronde, La Rochefoucauld was gravely wounded again in the battle of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in 1652.
In ill health, La Rochefoucauld spent the next few years working principally on his Memoirs (first published, without his consent, in 1662). As he gradually regained the tolerance of the Crown, he came to frequent various Parisian literary salons. From the discussions of the précieuses and men of letters in the salons, as well as his own reading and reflections, he distilled his famous Maxims, which he first published in 1665.
A collection of just over 500 sayings and reflections on various topics, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims criticizes extensively such human virtues as bravery, friendship, altruism, and love. All of them, he asserts, are motivated by either self-interest or self-esteem, the famous amourpropre which, according to La Rochefoucauld, underlies all human action and thought. In place of the moral virtues he attacks, La Rochefoucauld seems to value only a single intellectual one, that of lucidity. If man cannot help others without hypocrisy or love others without loving himself more, he may at least hope to understand his motives and those of others for what they are. As he states in one of his best-known maxims, the sovereign talent is to understand the price of things—that is, to see through hypocrisy and self-delusion to the nature of things as they are.
After many years in Paris, during which he may have contributed something to the novels of his great and good friend Madame de La Fayette, La Rochefoucauld died on the night of March 16, 1680, in Paris.
(*This Seedbox Classics edition of La Rochefoucauld: The M...)
Quotations:
"Though the gifts of the mind are infinite, they can, it seems to me, be thus classified. There are some so beautiful that everyone can see and feel their beauty. There are some lovely, it is true, but which are wearisome. There are some which are lovely, which all the world admire, but without knowing why. There are some so refined and delicate that few are capable even of remarking all their beauties. There are others which, though imperfect, yet are produced with such skill, and sustained and managed with such sense and grace, that they even deserve to be admired. "
"Few men, nevertheless, can have unison in many matters without being a copy of each other, if each follow his natural turn of mind. But in general a person will not wholly follow it. He loves to imitate. We often imitate the same person without perceiving it, and we neglect our own good qualities for the good qualities of others, which generally do not suit us. "
La Rochefoucauld had taken his place in the salon of Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé, a member of the Marquise de Rambouillet côterie, and the founder of a kind of successor to it, whose special literary work was the writing of Sentences and Maximes.
He was married at the age of fifteen to Andrée de Vivonne, a sixth cousin of Catherine de Vivonne, the future marquise de Rambouillet.
