Classical French Moralists

This course will be dedicated to the study of three authors whom Nietzsche called masters of Seelenprüfung(examination of the soul) and whose heritage he explicitly embraced both stylistically and philosophically: Pascal, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. In French literary history these writers are traditionally known as “moralists of the seventeenth century” or “classical French moralists.” The term moralist was not used in the seventeenth century and did not appear until the nineteenth century, when these three writers were grouped in anthologies. Yet their affinities were clear even at the time of the production of these works: when La Bruyère published his Caractères (1696) he explicitly referenced La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1678) and Pascal’s Pensées (1670) to outline the similarities and differences between his work and theirs. These three prose writers were called moralistes because of their focus on moeurs (human behavior). Their perspective is not at all moralizing in the trivial sense of the term (denouncing behavior that falls short of a stated norm). The moralistes are relentless analysts of the complexities and inconsistencies of human behavior and they present their observations in the form of pithy statements with varying degrees of generalization. In La Rochefoucauld, the embrace of the short form is explicit and systematic. In Pascal, it is due in part to the unfinished and fragmentary nature of the work. In La Bruyère, the use of the short form coexists with its opposite. Part of the attraction of these writers for modern readers is their mistrust of appearances and their exacting search for hidden motives, making them forerunners of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”.