LA BRUYèRE, JEAN DE (1645–1696)

LA BRUYèRE, JEAN DE (1645–1696), French moralist, social commentator, and satirist. Jean de La Bruyère was baptized in Paris. His parents were bourgeois. Other than these facts, little is known about his early years before he obtained a law degree from the University of Orléans in 1665. He did not practice, however, and led a life of leisure, made possible by a modest inheritance from an uncle in 1671. In 1684 he obtained a position as one of the tutors to Louis de Bourbon, grandson of the Grand Condé, Louis II de Bourbon (1621–1686), a royal prince. When the latter died three years later, the young Louis quit his studies, but La Bruyère remained attached to the household. The role of domestic servant did not suit his temperament, although it allowed him to observe closely the court and all of its foibles.

His wounded pride and the injustices he witnessed due to the disparity of social status are often considered crucial to the creation of his only literary work, a collection of sarcastic observations and caricatures entitled Les caractères (1688; The characters). The work was immediately and immensely successful, going through seven editions in four years, with each edition bringing additions to previous texts as well as new passages. He was received into the Académie française (French Academy) in 1693, and can be considered one of the last "Anciens" in the quarrel between ancients and moderns. He wrote a polemical tract, Dialogues sur le Quiétisme (1696; Dialogues on Quietism), against the contemporary vogue for religious mysticism, assailing with vigor François Fénelon (1651–1715). He died suddenly at Versailles in May, 1696.

In Les caractères, ('portraits' or 'caricatures'), La Bruyère established his work within the tradition of classical Greco-Roman literature. He presented first a French translation of the Greek text by Theophrastus (d. 278 B.C.E.) with some of his own caractères and satiric observations drawn from his own time and society. These were divided into sixteen different chapters, covering such diverse topics as literary criticism, life in town and country, the court, women, judgment, and taste. With each successive edition came an increase of entries in all categories, until La Bruyère's text far surpassed that of Theophrastus. The opening passage to his own work, in which he switches from translator to author, begins with the often-cited phrase, "Everything has been said. . . ." a paradoxical beginning perhaps, but one that indicates the contemporary view of imitation. Novelty is to be sought less in substance than in style, in how a work is expressed.

His text is a compendium of brief forms—maxims, observations, thoughts, portraits—that often lack external connections or transitions. The coherence, or organic unity, of the whole is not apparent, although certain themes and perspectives, such as superficiality, vanity, and righteous indignation, reappear. Some critics have argued that the entire work should be read in light of the final chapter—a Christian defense—although others consider him more a pessimist or satirist than a Christian reformer. He does stress the virtues of retreat from society. Within a textual entry, elliptical, paratactical structures make for a rapid and vivid description, as nouns and verbs come shooting forth, separated by punctuation marks, a simple "and" or "but" rather than complex constructions joined by direct causal links ("because"). The age of King Louis XIV (1638–1715) prized an oral, theatrical style, and many of the caractères read like small scenes, presented without authorial comment. To this extent the reader plays a role in supplying the criticism or condemnation implicit within the text, such as that found in the chasm that separates Giton, who is rich, from Phédon, who is poor.

Following his literary model, La Bruyère used Greek pseudonyms for his portraits, and keys soon circulated that claimed to identify the real identities of Ménalque, the scatterbrain, Gnathon, the gourmand, Ornulphre, the religious hypocrite patterned after Molière's Tartuffe, and dozens of other individuals. He was much imitated in the eighteenth century, although without much success. Due to their short form but richly dense material, many passages were anthologized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for general audiences as well as classroom exercises. Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), Marcel Proust (1871–1922), and André Gide (1869–1951) were influenced by his style, and recent literary criticism has found an affinity for the open, "readerly" nature of the texts. As for his content, his comments on women have brought him some approbation, but his indictment is primarily against the way society treats them and how they are obliged to behave. In addition, La Bruyère was one of the few writers of the seventeenth century even to allude to the plight of the poor and the peasants.

LA BRUYèRE, JEAN DE (1645–1696)

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