CHARRON, PIERRE

CHARRON, PIERRE. - French moralist writer, b. in Paris in 1541 and d. there in 1603; after taking a degree in jurisprudence he became a priest, was a celebrated preacher, secretary of the General Assembly of the clergy in 1595, and a favourite of Enrico IV.
He wrote Les trois vérités (Bordeaux 1594), Le traité de la sagesse (ibid. 1601), Discours chrétiens (ibid. 1600, Paris 1604); the most famous is the second, translated many times and also placed on the Index, which made it more highly esteemed among the “libertines” of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth, who saw in it a proclamation of scepticism and naturalism—something certainly not intended by the author. C. instead sharply polemicized against medieval scholasticism and sought to detach morality from religion, envisaging a type of “honest man,” who was indeed to be religious and also Christian, but who stood in opposition to the traditional model. The book of Saggezza is an encyclopaedia of sixteenth-century knowledge, written with great clarity, although it contains almost nothing truly original; it seeks above all to combat formalism and pedantry, animated by a spirit of optimism regarding human nature, to the point of making one forget that it is wounded by original sin. His moral model is aristocratic and individualistic.