Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (born January 16, 1675 in Versailles , † March 2, 1755 in Paris ) was a French politician and writer who is best known for his memoirs , in which he describes life at the court of Louis XIV . and during the Regency describes.

Life

Origin and youth

Saint-Simon (as he is simply called in French historiography) was the only son of Claude de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, Governor of Blaye and Meuland (1606–1693), who had held the post of Grand Hunter since 1628 ( Grand Veneur de France ) at Ludwig XIII. who in 1635 raised him to hereditary ducal status and peer of France . His mother was Charlotte de l ' Aubespine de Châteauneuf d'Hautrive (1640-1725), the Duke's second wife, through whom he was related to the Angoulême family. His godparents were Louis XIV and Queen Marie Therese .

He grew up in Paris and Versailles and had the "enfants de France" as playmates, the children of the royal family, especially the later regent Philip of Orléans , with whom he had a long friendship. He received an excellent education; Among other things, he learned to speak and write German , which was rare in France at the time , but also Latin at a level that was not customary for the time.

Career at the court of Louis XIV.

At 16, Saint-Simon was officially introduced to the court and began his training as an officer. At the age of 17 he was baptized by fire in the War of the Palatinate Succession . At the age of 18 he inherited the title of ducal when his father died and came into contact with latently opposition aristocratic circles at court, where people dreamed of restricting the absolute power of the king and restoring the nobility to their old rights. At the age of 19, Saint-Simon read a volume of memoirs in a camp in the Palatinate and had the idea of writing something like that himself. He did indeed begin by recording reflections and observations, but for decades did not get beyond fragments.

At the age of 20 he began to choose a wife and on the occasion made the acquaintance of Marie-Anne de La Trémoille , known as Madame des Ursins, who wanted to inspire him for one of her nieces. He turned it down because he wanted the support of a well-connected and influential family and in the end chose Marie-Gabrielle de Lorge, Duchess and daughter of the Duke and Marshal of Lorge, the nephew of Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, Marshal of Turenne , and therefore belongs to a noble family. He developed a loving relationship with his wife and had a daughter and two sons with her. He remained friends with Madame des Ursins for the next few years, and in his memoirs he reported in great detail about her unusual fate. He was one of the very few confidants who kept in touch with her even after her deep fall.

At 22 he had a religious crisis and was close to Jansenism , which increased his latent opposition to the king, who in turn supported the Jesuits , i.e. the opponents of the Jansenists. His inclination to this belief was shown again and again in his memoirs, especially in the description of the abolition of the Port-Royal monastery , a Jansenist stronghold that was razed to the ground.

Saint-Simon quit his officer service at the age of 27 after the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession , as his career had progressed more slowly than hoped. During the years he developed a marked aversion to Madame de Maintenon , which he held responsible for every conceivable evil in the state, either directly or at least indirectly. Quite a few suspect that Saint-Simon's exaggerated arrogance of class was the deeper cause of his hatred of Madame de Maintenon, who herself came only from the lower nobility and in his eyes completely unsuitable for the role of maitresse en titre or even the second wife of Louis XIV was. For this reason he was always familiar with Madame de Montespan , who was at least equal in rank to him.

The duke was not particularly popular at the court, as he constantly presented to the king for allegedly resigning in the ceremonial. In his memoirs he reports in great detail about every conceivable disgrace and his reactions to it. In opposition to the king, who, in his opinion, brought too many bourgeoisie into high offices, he sympathized with the political opposition to the nobility. Saint-Simon clashed with the king several times and thereby also lost the chance to be appointed ambassador to the Pope in Rome. His friendship with the Duke of Orléans, to whom he even held in 1709, when the latter became hostile to Madame des Ursins and Madame de Maintenon, who left no stone unturned to harm the Duke of Orléans, was not necessarily beneficial either. Interestingly, the Duke of Saint-Simon appears little over the years in the otherwise extensive correspondence of the mother of the Duke of Orléans, Elisabeth-Charlotte, better known as Liselotte von der Pfalz . In this respect, the friendship was perhaps rather one-sided on Saint-Simon's side.

After the sudden death of the Dauphin Louis of France , whom Saint-Simon despised from the bottom of his heart, he believed that with his son, Louis de Bourgogne , a new, just order, i.e. only open to the nobility, would finally dawn. However, all these plans passed in the following year, when the Dauphins, the Dauphins and their eldest son probably died of rubella within a very short time. For a while, Saint-Simon vacillated in disappointment between retreating into private life and fleeing forward.

He decided in favor of the latter and, for example, anonymously wrote a brilliant open letter to the old king (which was certainly not known to the addressee) accusing him of having ruined France and the monarchy through wars and despotism. In 1714 he put in the text Projets de gouvernement (German government projects ) considerations for a government led by councils of ministers instead of ministers. At the same time he tried to create mood for his childhood friend Philip of Orléans, who was one of the contenders for the post of regent, who after the death of the king for his still underage great-grandson Louis XV. would rule.

After the death of Louis XIV.

After Louis XIV died in 1715 at the age of 77 and his nephew Philip had indeed taken over the reign, Saint-Simon was finally able to play an active political role as an influential member of the newly created Privy Council according to his ideas. He was instrumental in the overthrow of Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, Duke of Maine and the legitimate son of Louis XIV, and was responsible for ensuring that he was forever excluded from the line of succession. On behalf of the regent, Saint-Simon traveled to Spain to arrange a diplomatically advantageous marriage between the two houses. However, Saint-Simon was soon marginalized by more politically skilled people, especially Philip's ex-educator, Cardinal Dubois , and practically ousted when the regent died in 1723.

He withdrew to his lands and considered once again whether he should continue to be politically active or rather be a writer, especially as a historian. In 1729 he was loaned the diary that a Versailles courtier, the Marquis de Dangeau, had kept from 1684 to 1720, and he began to comment on it from his point of view. In addition, he wrote a number of historical treatises on very special topics, for example the marriage of legitimate illegitimate daughters of French kings into French aristocratic families.

It was not until 1739, at the age of 64 and in the spiritual ambience of the prevailing Enlightenment , that Saint-Simon returned to his idea of 1694 and began his most important work, the Mémoires , which is still known today . These cover the period from 1691 to 1723, i.e. from the beginning to the end of Saint-Simon's courtier career in Versailles. The very extensive work contains not only the author's personal memories, but also numerous documentary information about the king and his court. It was not completed until around 1750, after ten years of work, and, apart from a few excerpts, was not even printed until 1829/30. Afterwards it quickly gained recognition as a masterpiece of the genre memoir, gave its author the status of a classic and found considerable circulation, not least as a reading by numerous writers from Stendhal to Marcel Proust .

meaning

For historians, Saint-Simons Mémoires are also an important, if naturally colored, source on everyday life and the power struggles in Versailles under the late Louis XIV and early Louis XV. Many aspects of the memoir, especially as far as Madame de Maintenon is concerned, find their correspondence in the letters of the mother of the regent Elisabeth Charlotte, to whom the duke dedicated one of the most famous accounts. His portrait shows Liselotte von der Pfalz as a somewhat eccentric, idiosyncratic, unworldly and yet extremely class-conscious German who loves her children beyond measure and spends her entire life writing letters.

Honors

In 1975, on the occasion of Saint-Simon's 300th birthday, the Prix Saint-Simon was created in his honor .

literature

Editions and translations

Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon: The memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon . Edited by Sigrid von Massenbach. Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1977 (German translation).
Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon: memories. The court of Louis XIV after the memorials of the Duke of Saint-Simon . Edited by Norbert Schweigert. Reclam, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-15-007954-3 (selection from the complete works with German translation).

Secondary literature

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie , Jean-François Fitou: Saint-Simon ou le système de la Cour. Arthème Fayard, Paris 1997, ISBN 2-213-59994-7 .
Hermann Schreiber : In the shadow of the Sun King. The memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon . In: From the archive , vol. 2003 (2003), No. 5, pp. 353–357.
Christophe Blanquie: Saint-Simon ou la politique des Mémoires (= Correspondances et mémoires. Series Le Grand Siècle. Volume 6). Classiques Garnier, Paris 2014, ISBN 978-2-8124-3258-3 .

Web links

Wikisource: Louis de Rouvroy - Sources and full texts

Commons : Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon - Collection of images, videos and audio files

personal data
SURNAME	Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy duc de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Rouvroy de Saint-Simon, Louis de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	French politician and writer
DATE OF BIRTH	January 16, 1675
PLACE OF BIRTH	Versailles
DATE OF DEATH	March 2, 1755
Place of death	Paris