LA BRUYÈRE, JEAN. - French writer, b. in Paris on 16 Aug. 1645, d. at Versailles on 11 May 1696. Of petty bourgeois family, in 1673 he purchased a financial office in Caen, which allowed him to remain in the scholarly leisure he cherished. He then entered, through Bossuet’s introduction, the household of the Grand Condé, first as tutor and later as gentleman-in-waiting to the duke.
His *Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle*, published in 1688, brought him sudden and widespread fame and opened the doors of the Academy to him (1693).
The worldly genre of the portrait was already flourishing in the cultured society gathered around the Grande Mademoiselle, Duchess of Montpensier (1627–93), alongside the genre of the maxim, cultivated by the habitués of the Marquise de Sablé, LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS DE (v.). Under La B.’s pen, both genres appear renewed and expanded; they complement and illuminate each other in a superior balance between the overly bitter and almost abstract concision of the maxim as forged by the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and the prolixity of the portraits popularized by preciosity. A more concrete and human taste for satire, for everyday life, and for plain truths (and the first great success of the *Caractères* was as a scandalous, keyed work) brought his worldview to a less tragic pessimism, though equally aware of human pettiness and worldly bustle; it suggested to him wisdom, withdrawal into oneself, and the taste for meditation of the Christian and the cultured man open to the new currents and demands of his time. Already in him one senses both the authentic man of letters and the lively spirit of the eighteenth century.
To the *Caractères*, which he expanded from 418 to about 1,120 pieces across eight editions between 1688 and 1693, La B. did not add other works. Nine *Dialogues sur le judéisme*, reworked and published posthumously by Ellies du Pin (1698), attest not only to his role in the anti-Quietist controversy of his friend Bossuet between 1695 and 1696 but also to his polemical gifts.