LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, François, Prince of Marcillac and Duke of. - Writer and moralist, b. in Paris on 15 Sept. 1613, d. there on 17 March 1680. Admitted to court in 1629, he soon found himself involved there in the intrigues against Card. Richelieu and then in those of the Fronde. A wound received in combat in the Parisian quarter of St. Anthony (1652), which seriously endangered his sight, convinced him to leave politics and devote himself to letters. He then began to frequent the cultured marquise de Sablé, of Jansenist leanings (1598-1678).
After the death of her husband and son (1656), the latter had settled in the same quarter (St-Jacques) as the Parisian monastery of Port-Royal, and in her salon of an old "précieuse" she promoted, almost as a parlor game, the vogue of brief essays illustrating a maxim or a proposed theme. La R. devoted himself there at the same time to the drafting of his Mémoires sur les brigues à la mort de Louis XIII, les guerres de Paris et de Guyenne et la prison des Princes, for the period 1624-52 and printed clandestinely in 1662 at Amsterdam. A first edition, likewise clandestine, of his Sentences et maximes de morale appeared at The Hague in 1664, and was followed the next year by another authentic one, which added the title of Réflexions, afterward retained: both preceded by a good deal the publication of the maxims of the marquise de Sablé (posthumous in 1678) and of her other intimates, the chevalier de Méré (1687) and the former Oratorian Jacques Esprit (1669 and 1678). On the work, the most celebrated of La R., rests an implacable pessimism, proper to the man inept and indecisive in the face of action through an excess of lucidity and through the taste for going to the bottom of every thing, beyond "fair appearance," together with a desperate awareness of the irrepressible egoism that represents the fatal, sad consequence of original sin.
BIBL.: sources
raines : La R., ibid. 1885; M. L. A. Ehrhard, Sources historiques des Maximes de La R., Heidelberg 1891; J. Bourdeau, La R., Paris 1895; F. Hémon, La R., ibid. 1896; E. Dreyfus-Brisac, La clef des Maximes de La R., ibid. 1904; G. Grappe, La R., ibid. 1914; E. Magne, Le vrai visage de La R., ibid. 1923; J. Schmidt, Die Maximen von La R., in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 27 (1933), pp. 129-55. Enzo Bottasso