VAUVENARGUES, LUC DE CLAPIERS, seigneur de. - French moralist, b. 6 Aug. 1715 at Aix-en-
Provence, d. at Paris on 28 May 1747.

He fought in the Italian, Bohemian (1741-42) and Rhine (1743) campaigns; he resigned from service in 1744, and at Aix he was gravely stricken by smallpox, which left him almost blind. In May 1745 he settled permanently in Paris and there devoted himself to the drafting of his most important work, Introduction à la connaissance de l'esprit humain, published anonymously at the end of 1746 together with some Réflexions sur divers sujets, and of the Traité sur le libre arbitre, already written in the form of a Discours at Besançon in 1737. These are the themes of the moral discourses Sur la gloire, Sur les plaisirs and of the Conseils already addressed to his fellow soldier Hippolyte de Seytres (fallen at Prague in 1742 and commemorated in a moving Eloge), rethought with an unshakable confidence in the value and goodness of the elementary human sentiments. The nobility of soul that emerges in them, even amid the failure of all ambitions and the misery of V.'s life, won him the friendship and admiration of men such as Voltaire and Marmontel, who enshrined his memory in the Mémoires. And in reality his morality, inspired by a sure faith in virtue and in action, in a social development respectful of the human person, detaches him from the bitter pessimism of the seventeenth-century thinkers and brings him close to the movement of ideas of the end of the century and the early nineteenth.

Bibliography4 works

BIBL.: the most complete ed. is that edited by D.-L. Gilbert, Paris 1857, comprising a vol. of Oeuvres posthumes et inédites. Studies: M. Vallas, L. de C., marquis de V., Paris 1930; P. Trahard, Les maîtres de la sensibilité française au XVIIIe siècle, II, ibid. 1932, pp. 29-48; S. Rocheblave, V., ibid. 1934; G. Cavallucci, V. dégagé de la légende, Naples 1939.

Enzo Bottasso

(from II, Van der Mandere, II, V., s. l. III, before the frontispiece)
VAUGHAN, HERBERT - Ritratto.

@incollection{ec12_vauvenargues_luc_de_clapiers_s, author = {Bottasso, Enzo}, title = {Vauvenargues, luc de clapiers, signore di}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {XII}, pages = {1145}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1954}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/vauvenargues-luc-de-clapiers-signore-di} }

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Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Seigneur de

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