Jacques Esprit

Jacques Esprit (born October 22, 1611 in Béziers , † June 11, 1677 ibid) was a writer and moralist of the French classical period . He was a member of the Académie française .

life and work

Life

Esprit was the son of a doctor from Toulouse . In 1629 he entered Paris as a novice with the oratorians of his older brother, but in 1634 he left the congregation and lived a secular life. Via the Salon of Rambouillet he came to the house of Chancellor Pierre Séguier through the mediation of Germain Habert , who promoted him and in 1639 gave him seat No. 11 in the Académie française .

When he lost Séguier's protection in 1644, he came with the help of Madame de Sablé as secretary to the Duchess of Longueville , where he met her lover François de La Rochefoucauld . In 1653 the Duchess withdrew from salon life. Esprit went into the service of her brother Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti and accompanied him, like his friend, the poet Jean-François Sarrasin , to Pézenas in the Languedoc . After Conti's death in 1666, he lived again in Paris and Chantilly , eventually in his hometown of Béziers, where he died in 1677 at the age of 65.

The moralist

Esprit went down in literary history because, like Madame de Sablé, he was involved in the creation process of La Rochefoucauld's maxims , who consulted him intensively and involved him in the “maxim grinding”, as Nietzsche called it. While Madame de Sablé published her own maxims after her death, Esprit went through prose. For years he worked on his work La Fausseté des vertus humaines (“The falsehood of human virtues”, or: “Virtues? All hypocrisy!”), Which appeared in print the year he died. By elaborately and lengthily explaining on 1000 pages what La Rochefoucauld squeezed into 500 short, powerful formulas, he created a kind of negative slide on the maxims, which, although printed several times, translated into English and Dutch, by Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique a short, biting one Entry and was reissued by Pascal Quignard in 1996 , but is only known to specialists today.

Works

• La Fausseté des vertus humaines . 2 vols. G. Desprez, Paris 1677–1678. Pralard, Paris 1693, 1709. Aubier, Paris 1996.
  • (English) The Falsehood of Human Virtue. A moral essay. London 1691.
  • (English) Discourses on the deceitfulness of humane virtues. London 1706.
  • (Dutch) De bedrieglykheid der Menschelyke deugden. Dordrecht 1746.
  • (Partial print) La tromperie de l'amitié . Distance, Biarritz 1999.

literature

• Susan Read Baker: "La Rochefoucauld et Jacques Esprit". In: Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France 78, 1978, pp. 179-189.
• Henri Berna: Pensées, maximes et sentences de Jacques Esprit. Considérations sur les vertus ordinaires . Ellipse, Geneva 2003.
• Henri Berna: Molière, Sarrasin et Esprit chez Conti. Mémoires de Jacques Esprit . Edilivre Aparis, Paris 2010.
• Christine Renée Liebich: La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Sablé et Jacques Esprit. Les Maximes, de l'inspiration commune à la creation personnelle . Ph. D. McGill University 1982.

Web links

• Information on Jacques Esprit in the database of the Bibliothèque nationale de France .
• Literature by and about Jacques Esprit in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Short biography and list of works of the Académie française (French)