LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS de. - Cardinal, b. in Paris on 8 Dec. 1558, d. 14 Feb. 1645. Educated by his paternal uncle Jean, Abbot of Marmoutier, he studied at the Jesuit College of Clermont. At the age of 15 he became Abbot of Tournus, and in 1584 was elected Bishop of Clermont by Henry III. He showed great zeal for the conversion of heretics. During his episcopate the Confraternity of Penitents of the Blessed Virgin Annunciate was founded at Mauriac, confirmed in 1624 by Urban VIII, and the Capuchins established themselves in three convents. Henry IV appointed him Commander of the Holy Spirit, and on 10 Sept. 1607 Paul V obtained the cardinal’s hat for him. Transferred to the see of Senlis, he took possession by proxy on 21 Apr. 1610. Sent on a special mission to Rome, where he met Cardinal Bellarmine, he returned to his diocese on 11 Nov. 1613.
He succeeded in having the canons of the Council of Trent accepted in France at the General Assembly of the Clergy in 1615. He exercised great influence at court as Grand Almoner and member of the Royal Council. He resigned his diocese in 1622 and, at the wish of Gregory XV and Louis XIII, devoted himself to the reform of religious orders. This earned him the high recognition of Urban VIII with a brief dated 11 Feb. 1640.
His works include the Synodal Statutes of Clermont (1599) and of Senlis (1621); *De l’autorité de l’Église en ce qui concerne la foi et la religion*, Paris 1603.
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LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS, Prince of MARILLAC and Duke of. - Writer and moralist, b. in Paris on 15 Sept. 1613, d. there on 17 Mar. 1680. Admitted to court in 1629, he soon became involved in intrigues against Cardinal Richelieu and later in those of the Fronde. A wound received in the conflict in the Parisian quarter of St Anthony (1652), which seriously endangered his sight, convinced him to abandon politics and devote himself to letters. He then began to frequent the learned Marquise de Sablé, of Jansenist tendencies (1598-1678).
After the death of her husband and son (1656), she had settled in the same quarter (St Jacques) near the Parisian monastery of Port-Royal, and in her salon of an old ‘precieuse’ she promoted, almost as a social game, the vogue of short essays illustrating a maxim or a given theme. La Rochefoucauld devoted himself to this while also composing his *Mémoires sur les brigues à la mort de Louis XIII, les guerres de Paris et de Guyenne et la prison des Princes*, covering the period 1624-52 and printed clandestinely in Amsterdam in 1662. A first clandestine edition of his *Sentences et maximes de morale* appeared at The Hague in 1664, followed the next year by another authentic edition, which added the title *Réflexions*, later retained: both preceded by a considerable margin the publication of the maxims of the Marquise de Sablé (posthumous in 1678) and those of her relatives, the Chevalier de Méré (1687) and the former Oratorian Jacques Esprit (1669 and 1678). The work, the most famous of La Rochefoucauld’s, is imbued with an implacable pessimism, characteristic of a man incapable and indecisive in action due to an excess of lucidity and a taste for probing everything to the bottom, beyond ‘fair appearances’, together with a desperate awareness of the irreducible egoism that represents the fatal, sad consequence of original sin.