JOUBERT, JOSEPH. — French moralist, born in Montignac-le-Compte (Périgord) on 7 May 1754, died in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne on 4 May 1824.
From 1768 he was educated at the Collège de l’Esquille in Toulouse, run by the Fathers of Christian Doctrine, with whom he remained until 1776, first as a novice and then as a layman and teacher. He spent the years from 1778 until the Revolution in Paris, where he frequented the most representative figures of the late eighteenth-century France: Laharpe, Marmontel, d’Alembert, and especially the elderly Diderot. There he formed a fraternal friendship with F. R. de Chateaubriand, N. Restif de la Bretonne, and Louis de Fontanes, who wanted him at his side as an adviser and inspector general when, in 1808, he assumed the office of Grand Master of Higher Education.
J.’s fame is linked not to the journalistic endeavors of his youthful stay in Paris, but to the Pensées (ed. F. R. de Chateaubriand, Paris 1838), in which he arranged for his own use the reflections that in those years had led him back to the divine through a kind of artistic and sentimental reaction against encyclopedist irreligion; and to the Correspondance (ed. P. Raynal, there 1842).