Jean de La Bruyère

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Jean de La Bruyère

Jean de La Bruyère (born August 16, 1645 in Paris , † May 10, 1696 in Versailles ) was a French writer .

The author, counted among the great French classics as a moralist , came from a bourgeois family who had probably only recently settled in Paris and, after studying law in Orléans, was admitted to the bar at the highest court in Paris, the Parlement, in 1665 . In 1671 he inherited a rich uncle with his three younger siblings and in 1673 bought an office in the financial administration in Caen , which ennobled him pro forma, but did not require him to be present on site. Rather, he lived on as a reindeer in Paris and dabbled as a private scholar.

Here he came across the character studies of the ancient polygraph and Aristotle pupil Theophrastus (3rd century BC), which he began to translate from the Greek.

In 1684, on the recommendation of the bishop, prince educator and great preacher Bossuet , he was appointed tutor (précepteur) of his grandson, the Duc (= Duke) de Bourbon , by the Prince de Condé , the head of a side line of the royal family. After he had been married in 1687, La Bruyère remained in his service as a “gentilhomme” (a kind of noble domestics) and secretary and lived in his tow mostly in Paris, Chantilly and Versailles.

As a marginal figure in the aristocratic milieu, he became a keen observer and subsequently enriched the Theophrastian "characters" with the representation of social types of his own time, whereby he preferred certain aristocratic and pseudo-aristocratic behaviors, but also general human-all-too-human weaknesses, manias and Targeted ticks. In 1688 he had a small volume appear with the title Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle ("The characters of Th., Translated from the Greek, with the characters or customs of our century").

Thanks to its subject matter, its division into short, easy-to-read sections and its pointed, often ironic formulations, the work was an immediate success, and La Bruyère expanded it from one to the next of the nine editions that quickly followed one another; the last shortly after his death. Keys were soon circulating in Paris that attempted to identify individual figures as portraits of well-known contemporaries.

After a first unsuccessful attempt in 1691, La Bruyère's dream came true in 1693: he was elected to the Académie française with the help of the king - in the dispute between traditionalists and progressives as a candidate for the traditionalist "Anciens" and against the resistance of the progressive "Modernes", who were now setting the tone there and which he deliberately provoked with his inaugural speech.

Shortly before his sudden death from a stroke, he wrote Dialogues sur le quiétisme , with which he supported his former patron Bossuet in his fight against Madame Guyon and Fénelon .

literature

notes

  1. ↑ also about Jean de La Fontaine , Molière , Alain-René Lesage , Diderot , Madame de Staël , Pierre-Jean de Béranger , Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac . The text about La Br. Follows the revised. 1862 edition, volume 1, lower third of the site , French

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME La Bruyère, Jean de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH August 16, 1645
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1696
Place of death Versailles