LA BRUYÈRE, JEAN. — French writer, born in Paris on 16 August 1645, died at Versailles on 11 May 1696. Of lower-middle-class origin, in 1673 he purchased a financial office in Caen, which enabled him to remain in the scholarly leisure he valued. He then entered, introduced by Bossuet, the household of the Grand Condé, first as tutor and subsequently as the duke’s gentleman.
Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, published by him in 1688, brought him a fame that was as broad as it was sudden, opening to him the doors of the Académie (1693).
The worldly genre of the portrait had already flourished widely in the cultivated society that gathered around the Grande Mademoiselle, the duchess of Montpensier (1627–93), just as the genre of the maxime had been cultivated by those who frequented the marquise de Sablé, LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS DE (v.). Under La B.’s pen, both genres seem to be renewed and enlarged; they complement and illuminate one another in a higher equilibrium between the excessively bitter and almost abstract concision of the maxim as it had been shaped by the duke of La Rochefoucauld and the prolixity of the portraits popularized by preciosity. A more concrete and human taste for satire, for daily life, for practical truths (and the first great success of the Caractères was scandal, as of a book with a key) leads his vision of the world back to a less tragic pessimism, although equally conscious of man’s pettiness and of his worldly agitation; it suggests to him wisdom, withdrawal into himself, and a taste for the meditation of the Christian and the cultivated man open to the new currents and demands of his age. In him one already senses both the authentic man of letters and eighteenth-century vivacity.
To the Caractères, revised and expanded from 418 to approximately 1,120 entries through eight editions between 1688 and 1693, La B. added no other works. Nave Dialogues sur le quiétisme, reworked and published posthumously by d’Elles du Pin (1698), attest not only to the part he played in his friend Bossuet’s anti-Quietist controversy between 1695 and 1696, but also to his gifts as a polemicist.