Jean de La Bruyère

Jean de La Bruyère
Painting of Bruyère attributed to Nicolas de Largillière, 1775
Born	16 August 1645 Paris, Kingdom of France
Died	11 May 1696 (aged 50) Versailles, Kingdom of France
Writing career
Language	French
Period	17th-century French literature
Notable awards	Académie française (Seat 36)
Movement	French moralists

Jean de La Bruyère (UK: /ˌlæ bruːˈjɛər/, UK: /ˌlɑː bruːˈjɛər, ˌlɑː briːˈɛər/; French: [ʒɑ̃ d(ə) la bʁɥijɛʁ]; 16 August 1645 – 11 May 1696) was a French philosopher and moralist who was noted for his satire.

Early years

Jean de La Bruyère was born in Paris, in today's Essonne département, in 1645. His family was middle class, and his reference to a certain "Geoffroy de La Bruyère", a crusader, is only a satirical illustration of a method of self-ennoblement then common in France, as in some other countries. As such, he signed his surname as Delabruyère in one word, as evidence of this disdain.

La Bruyère could trace his family back on his father's side at least as far as his great-grandfather, who along with his grandfather had been dedicated members of the Catholic League. His great-grandfather had been exiled from France when Henry IV came to the throne and Catholics fell into disfavor.

La Bruyère's father also had been active in the league under the Duke of Guise in 1584. His father was controller general of finance to the Hôtel de Ville, and despite the turmoil in the country, was able to pay for La Bruyère's education and to leave him a considerable sum as an inheritance.

He was educated by the Oratorians and at the University of Orléans. He was called to the bar, and in 1673 bought a post in the revenue department at Caen, which gave him status and an income. His predecessor in the post was a relation of Jacques Benigne Bossuet, and it is thought that the transaction of the change was the cause of La Bruyère's introduction to the great orator, Bossuet, who, from the date of his own preceptorship of the Dauphin, was a kind of agent-general for tutorships in the royal family, and, in 1684, who introduced La Bruyère to the household of Louis, Grand Condé.

La Bruyère became tutor to the prince's grandson, Louis, as well as to the prince's child-bride, Mlle de Nantes, a natural child of Louis XIV. The rest of his life was passed in the household of the Prince or else at court, and he seems to have profited by the inclination that the entire Condé family had for the society of men of letters.

Very little is known of the events of this part—or, indeed, of any part—of his life. The impression derived from the few notices of him is of a silent, observant, but somewhat awkward man, resembling in manners Joseph Addison.

His critical book, Caractères appeared in 1688. It garnered numerous enemies, but despite that, most notations about him are favorable—notably that of Saint-Simon, an acute judge and one bitterly prejudiced against commoners generally. A curious passage in a letter by Boileau to Racine exists, however, in which the writer regrets that "nature has not made La Bruyère as agreeable as he would like to be."

Literary activity

When La Bruyère's Caractères appeared in 1688, Nicolas de Malézieu predicted at once, that it would bring "bien des lecteurs et bien des ennemis" (many readers and many enemies). That proved to be true.

Foremost among the critics were Thomas Corneille, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Isaac de Benserade, who were clearly critical of the book. They were joined by innumerable others, men and women of letters as well as of society, who are identifiable by manuscript "keys" compiled by the scribblers of the day.

The friendship of Bossuet and protection of the Condés sufficiently defended the author, however, and he continued to insert fresh portraits of his contemporaries in each new edition of his book, especially in the fourth edition (1689). Those whom he had attacked were powerful in the Académie française, however, and numerous defeats awaited La Bruyère before he could make his way into becoming a member among their ranks.

He was defeated three times in 1691, and on one memorable occasion, he had but seven votes, five of which were those of Bossuet, Boileau, Racine, Paul Pellisson, and Bussy-Rabutin.

It was not until 1693 that he was elected, and even then, an epigram, which, considering his admitted insignificance in conversation, was not of the worst, haeret lateri:

"Quand La Bruyère se présente

Pourquoi faut il crier haro?

Pour faire un nombre de quarante

Ne falloit il pas un zéro?"

His unpopularity was, however, chiefly confined to the subjects of his sarcastic portraiture and to the hack writers of the time, of whom he was wont to speak with a disdain only surpassed by that of Alexander Pope. His description of the Mercure galant as "immédiatement au dessous de rien" (immediately below nothing) is the best-remembered specimen of these unwise attacks; and would, of itself, account for the enmity of the editors, Fontenelle and the younger Corneille.

La Bruyère's discourse of admission at the academy, one of the best of its kind, was, like his admission itself, severely criticized, especially by the partisans of the "Moderns" in the "Ancient and Modern" quarrel.

La Bruyère died very suddenly, and not long after his admission to the academy. He is said to have been struck dumb in a gathering of his friends, and, being carried home to the Hôtel de Condé, to have expired of apoplexy a day or two afterward. It is not surprising that, considering contemporary panic about poisoning, the bitter personal enmities that he had excited, and the peculiar circumstances of his death, suspicions of foul play should have been entertained, but there was apparently no foundation for them.

The Caractères, a translation of Theophrastus, and a few letters mostly addressed to the prince de Condé, complete the list of his literary work, with the addition of one curious, and much-disputed, posthumous treatise.

Two years after his death, a certain Dialogues sur le Quiétisme appeared, alleged to have been found among his papers, incomplete, and to have been completed by its editor. As these dialogues are far inferior in literary merit to La Bruyère's other works, their genuineness has been denied. A straightforward and circumstantial account of their appearance was given by the editor, the Abbé du Pin, however. He was a man of acknowledged probity and he knew of the intimacy of La Bruyère with Bossuet, whose views in his contest with Fénelon these dialogues are designed to further, at so short a time after the alleged author's death, and without a single protest on the part of his friends and representatives, all of which seems to have been decisive in the acceptance of authorship.

The Caractères

Although it is permissible to doubt whether the value of the Caractères has not been somewhat exaggerated by traditional French criticism, they deserve a high place.

The plan of the book is thoroughly original, if that term may be accorded to a novel, and skillful combination of elements exists in it. The treatise of Theophrastus may have furnished the concept, but it gave little more. With the ethical generalizations and social Dutch paintings accompanying his original, La Bruyère combined the peculiarities of the Montaigne Essais, of the Pensées, and Maximes of which Pascal and La Rochefoucauld are the masters respectively, and lastly of that peculiar seventeenth-century product, the "portrait" or elaborate literary picture of the personal and mental characteristics of an individual. The result was quite unlike anything that had been seen previously, and, it has not been exactly reproduced since, although the essay of Addison and Steele resembles it very closely, especially in the introduction of fancy portraits.

La Bruyère's privileged position at Chantilly provided him with a unique vantage point from which he could witness the hypocrisy and corruption of the court of Louis XIV. As a Christian moralist, he aimed at reforming people's manners and ways by publishing records of his observations of aristocratic foibles and follies, which earned him many enemies at the court.

In the titles of his work, and in its extreme desultoriness, La Bruyère reminds the reader of Montaigne, but he aimed too much at sententiousness to attempt even the apparent continuity of the great essayist. The short paragraphs of which his chapters consist are made up of maxims proper, of criticisms literary and ethical, and above all, of the celebrated sketches of individuals baptized with names taken from the plays and romances of the time.

These last are the feature of the work which gave it its immediate popularity. They are considered to be piquant, extraordinarily lifelike, and to have conferred pleasure or exquisite pain to the apparent subjects.

See also

• French moralists

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Jean de La Bruyère — Born at Paris in 1645; died at Chantilly in 1696. He was the son of a comptroller general of municipal revenue. An advocate in the Parlement of Paris, he soon gave up the bar and purchased a post from the Treasurer of Finances at Caen (1673), continuing to reside at Paris. He was leading a studious life there "in the solitude of his study" according to his own expression, when Bossuet's friendship secured his admission into the house of Condé to teach history to the Duc de Bourbon, grandson of the victor of Rocroi. This boy was then six years old, and for two years received lessons from his new tutor. The latter only half succeeded in his task, but he secured the friendship of the great Condé, and remained at Chantilly attached to the duke's person, with a pension of 3000 livres, until he died of an attack of apoplexy in 1696, having been for three years a member of the French Academy. Favourably placed for seeing the world, and led to judge it without indulgence, both because of the rebuffs which he must have experienced in his subordinate position and because of his upright but proud and morose nature, he published anonymously in 1688 "Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du Grec, avec les caractères et les moeurs de ce siècle." The book met with great success. Though his means were modest, the author freely gave his manuscript to the bookseller Michallet as a contribution towards the dowry of his daughter, and it is claimed that it brought in nearly 300,000 francs. The first part of the book was a not very remarkable translation of a faulty text. The second part assumed larger proportions, especially as regards the "portraits." La Bruyère continued to add to it from the first edition (1689) to the ninth (1696). The first fifteen chapters, he said with some complacency in his rather loosely-drawn plan, "are preparations for the sixteenth and last, 'Des esprits forts,' in which Atheism is attacked and perhaps overthrown."

La Bruyère must not be regarded as a profound and powerful moralist like Pascal. He is a keen, honest, Christian observer and, above all, an admirable writer. But the stylist and the artist are too much in evidence; he lacks the large simplicity of the authors of the preceding generation. His art is, however, inimitable. Particularly striking is the variety, the finish of detail, the profusion of wit, the skill in securing an effect, the inexhaustible resources of his diction; his works are an inventory of the powers of the French language. By his ideas as well as his life he belongs to the seventeenth century, but his brief and sententious phrases foreshadow the eighteenth.

FOURNIER, La comedie de La Bruyère (1867); ALLAIRE, La Bruyère dans la maison de Condé (1886).

External links

• Biography (in French)
• Works by Jean de La Bruyère at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Jean de La Bruyère at the Internet Archive
• Works by Jean de La Bruyère at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Quotations from de La Bruyère at Frenchphilosophes.weebly.com