JOUBERT, Joseph. - French moralist, b. at Montignac-le-Compte (Périgord) on 7 May 1754, d. at 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, then as a lay brother and teacher. He spent the years from 1778 until the Revolution in Paris, where he associated with the most representative figures of late 18th-century France: Laharpe, Marmontel, d’Alembert, and especially the elderly Diderot. There he formed a close brotherly friendship with F. R. de Chateaubriand, N. Restif de la Bretonne, and Louis de Fontanes, who later, in 1808, when he became Grand Master of Higher Education, took Joubert as his advisor and general inspector.
Joubert’s fame rests not on the journalistic ventures of his early Parisian years, but on 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 emotional reaction to encyclopedic irreligion; and on the *Correspondance* (ed. P. Raynal, ibid. 1842).