La Bruyere's Les Caracteres

Notes on La Bruyère, Les Caractères
8 août 2005

Biography

Born in Paris, 1639; died in Versailles, 1696. Father was controller general of finance to the Hôtel de Ville. Jean was educated at Université d’Orléans, after which he was called to the bar. In 1684, he joined the household of Henri II, Prince de Condé, where he became the tutor for Henri’s grandson, the duc de Bourbon, and his new bride, Mlle. de Nantes, a ‘natural’ child of Louis XIV. The first edition of Les Caractères (along with a translation of Theophrastus’ Characters) appeared in 1688, and was followed by eight revised editions, including one published after La Bruyère’s death in 1696. La Bruyère was elected to the Académie Française in 1693, and in his reception speech, took the side of the anciens in the Querelle des anciens et des modernes.

Literary/Historical Context

“By some accounts, every classical French author is a moralist. Since the aesthetics of French classicism prescribed the conjoining of the useful with the pleasant, this generalization is valid to the extent that the literature of the mid-17th century accordingly legitimated aesthetic pleasure by a didactic focus on ‘moral’ issues such as hypocrisy, misanthropy, or the conflict between duty and passion.” (Van Den Abbeele, p. 327) So these moralists were more philosophes than what we might think of as ‘moralists’ today. They studied and interpreted the customs and manners (moeurs) of the time. “...the French moralists of the 17th century undertook a critique of humankind that drew upon Montaigne’s brand of humanism, the Jansenist revival of St. Augustine, and more paradoxically, the legacy of Descartes.” (ibid.)

Blaise Pascal protested the “semiotic manipulation of truth” (Alter, p. 307) during Louis XIV’s reign. In addition, “The divergence between ideology and reality increased under Louis XIV. A stronger central authority hardened traditional concepts and signs. But social reality moved further away from the ideological model.” (ibid.) La Bruyère’s Les Caractères was not immune from this divergence with “the...inability to distinguish between ‘real things’ and signs. His portraits, stories, group tableaux, essays...thus evoke personalities defined by the absence of a true personality, fashions and games as role models, discrete idioms and meaningless formulas, and all manner of deceit by which real power corrupts the social system without disturbing its surface order. ... Yet La Bruyère does not question the ideology of his time.” (ibid.)

Les Caractères

The most widely accepted models for Les Caractères are the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld and Pascal’s Pensées. “La Bruyères Caractères, written slightly after the other great 17th-century moralists’ texts, already displayed the intertextual process: alongside the satirical portraits that gave the collection its name and fame, the book offered a compendium of short bits of prose, reflections, maxims, and so forth, many of which were obvious adaptations, amplifications, or retranscriptions of fragments from Descartes, Pascal, and La Rochefoucauld.” (van den Abbeele, p. 330)
Just a glance at any section of Les Caractères will confirm this jumble of writing styles and rhetoric. This is a layered text, meaning that La Bruyère added layers with each edition. The portraits (his version of fables, I suppose) also increase in number and significance. We’ll talk more about specific rhetorical techniques in our in-person discussion.

Les Caractères begins with a translation of Theophraste’s Characters, but this comprises a minor portion of the work. La Bruyère has classified his remarks (some would say in a Cartesian mode) under several general rubrics: “Des ouvrages de l’esprit”, “Du mérite personnel”, “Des femmes”, “Du coeur”, “De la société et de la conversation”, “Des biens de fortune”, “De la ville”, “De la cour”, “Des grands”, “Du souverain ou de la République”, “De l’homme”, “Des jugements”, “De la mode”, “De quelques usages”, “De la chaire”, et “Des esprits forts”. In each section, La Bruyère offers a variety of maxims, réflexions, and portraits to promote his views on what’s right and what’s wrong with society, and how to fix it. It’s sort of a 17th-century ‘do’s and don’t’s’ or ‘how-to manual’. Mais on en parlera plus.

La Bruyère’s legacy

Though La Bruyère was known to have been on the side of the anciens, there is much in this work that belies that affiliation. He refined and revised and rewrote, and often based his portraits on contemporary individuals. Some of his remarks presage such philosophers as Rousseau, for example. And, according to Georges van den Abbeele,

...La Bruyère’s portraits often empty or hollow out the characters described, marking them with a progressively disturbing vacuity and insubstantiality. Cartesian optimism, founded upon the indubitable bedrock of human subjectivity and carried over into the tentative composite of honnêteté, thus gives way to the pessimism of one’s preinscription within a cultural and economic system, a pessimism whose inaugural insight is the negative one that tout est dit...La Bruyère’s belatedness is also the sign of his modernity. (op.cit., p. 330)

Today’s discussion

I propose a two-part discussion today:

1) Look at some of the maxims, portraits etc. from each section
2) Talk about Barthes’ article on La Bruyère. One thing that Barthes brings out in La Bruyère is the binary nature of his rhetoric, discourse, whatever you want to call it.

Sources:

Alter, Jean, 1657: Figures of Social and Semiotic Dissent”, in Hollier, Denis, ed., A New History of French Literature.
Barthes, Roland, "La Bruyère", in Essais critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964)
van den Abbeele, Georges, “1668: Moralists and the Legacy of Cartesianism”,
in Hollier, Denis, ed., A New History of French Literature.