LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS de. – Cardinal, born in Paris on 8 December 1558, died on 14 February 1645. Educated by his paternal uncle Jean, abbot of Marmoutier, he studied at the Jesuit College of Clermont. Abbot of Tournus at the age of fifteen, in 1584 he 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 B. V. Annunziata was founded at Mauriac, confirmed in 1624 by Urban VIII, and the Capuchins established themselves in three convents. Henry IV appointed him commendatory prelate of the Order of the Holy Spirit and on 10 September 1607 obtained the cardinal’s hat for him from Paul V. Senlis, he took
possession of it by proxy on 21 April 1610. Sent on a special mission to Rome, where he met Cardinal Bellarmine, he returned to his diocese on 11 November 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 chaplain and member of the royal council. He resigned the diocese in 1622 and devoted himself, at the behest of Gregory XV and Louis XIII, to the reform of the religious Orders. This earned him Urban VIII’s high recognition in a brief
of 11 February 1640. He devoted his final years to works of charity and piety, living in the abbey of S. Genoveffa, where he was buried. His heart, however, was taken to the College of Clermont.
His surviving works include the Statuti sinodali di Clermont (1599) and di Senlis (1621); De l'autorité de l'Eglise en ce qui concerne la foi et la religion, Paris 1603.
Biographie du card. F. de La R., therein 1926.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANÇOIS, principe di MARILLAC e duca de. – Writer and moralist, born in Paris on 15 September 1613, where he died on 17 March 1680. Admitted to court in 1629, he soon found himself involved in intrigues against Cardinal Richelieu and later in those of the Fronde. A wound suffered in a conflict in the Parisian quarter of S. Antonio (1652), which seriously endangered his sight, persuaded him to abandon politics and devote himself to literature. He then began frequenting the cultured Marquise de Sablé, who had Jansenist tendencies (1598-1678).
After the death of her husband and son (1656), she had settled in the same quarter (St-Jacques) as the Parisian monastery of Port-Royal, and in her salon, a former «précieuse», promoted, almost as a social game, the vogue for brief essays illustrating a proposed maxim or theme. La R. devoted himself there, at the same time, to the composition of 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 clandestinely printed in Amsterdam in 1662. A first, likewise 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, thereafter retained: both considerably preceded the publication of the maxims of the Marquise de Sablé (posthumously in 1678) and of her other associates, the chevalier de Méré (1687) and the former Oratorian Jacques Esprit (1669 and 1678). The work, La R.’s most celebrated, is marked by an implacable pessimism, characteristic of the man incapable of and indecisive before action because of an excess of lucidity and a taste for probing to the bottom of everything, beyond the «beautiful appearance», together with a desperate awareness of the ineradicable egoism that represents the fatal, sad consequence of original sin.