LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, FRANgOIS DE (1613 168o), the greatest maxim writer of France, was born in Paris in the Rue des Petits Champs on Sept. 15, 1613. The author of the Maxims, who bore during the lifetime of his father (see above) the title of prince de Marcillac, joined the army before he was sixteen, and almost immediately began to make a figure in public life. He had been nominally married a year before to Andree de Vivonne, who seems to have been an affectionate wife. For some years Marcillac continued to take part in the annual campaigns. Then he passed under the spell of Madame de Chevreuse, the first of three celebrated women who successively influenced his life. Through Madame de Chevreuse he became attached to the queen, Anne of Austria, and in one of her quarrels with Richelieu and her husband a scheme seems to have been formed, according to which Marcillac was to carry her off to Brussels on a pillion. These intrigues provided Marcillac an eight days' experience of the Bastille and occasional periods of exile to his father's estates. After the death of Richelieu (1642), Marcillac became one of the so-called importants, and took an active part in reconciling the queen and Conde in a league against Gaston of Orleans. But the growing credit of Mazarin came in his way, and the liaison in which about this time (1645) he became entangled with the beautiful duchess of Longueville made him irrevocably a Frondeur. He was a conspicuous figure in the siege of Paris, fought desper ately in the desultory engagements which were constantly taking place, and was severely wounded at the siege of Mardyke. In the second Fronde Marcillac followed the fortunes of Conde. In the later Fronde La Rochefoucauld was always brave and generally unlucky. In the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine (1652), he was shot through the head, and it was thought that he would lose the sight of both eyes. It was nearly a year before he recovered, and then he found himself at his country seat of Verteuil. He did not return to court life much before Mazarin's death, when Louis XIV. was on the eve of assuming absolute power.
Somewhat earlier, La Rochefoucauld had taken his place in the salon of Madame de Sable, a member of the old Rambouillet coterie. He, like almost all his more prominent contemporaries, had spent his solitude in writing memoirs, while the special literary employment of the Sable salon was the fabrication of Sentences and Maximes. In 1662 a surreptitious publication of his memoirs, or what purported to be his memoirs, by the Elzevirs, called forth from him a flat denial of their authenticity. Three years later (1665) he published, anonymously, the Maxims, which at once established him high among the men of letters of the time. He might have entered the Academy for the asking; and in the altered measure of the times his son, the prince de Marcillac, to whom some time before his death he resigned his titles and honours, enjoyed a considerable position at court. Above all, La Rochefoucauld was generally recognized as a type of the older noblesse of the age of Louis XIV. He died in Paris on March 17,
168o, of the gout which had so long tormented him.
His literary work consists of three parts—letters, Memoirs and the Maxims. His letters exceed one hundred in number, and are biographically valuable, besides displaying not a few of his literary characteristics; but they need not further detain us. The Memoirs, when they are read in their proper form, yield in literary merit, in interest, and in value to no memoirs of the time, not even to those of Retz, between whom and La Rochefoucauld there was a strange mixture of enmity and esteem which resulted in a couple of most characteristic "portraits." Only in 1817 did anything like a genuine edition of the Memoirs (even then by no means perfect) appear.
The Maxims the author re-edited frequently during his life, with alterations and additions ; they amount to about seven hundred in number, in hardly any case exceeding half a page in length, and more frequently confined to two or three lines. The view of conduct which they illustrate is usually summed up in the words "everything is reducible to the motive of self-interest." But the phrase is misleading. The Maxims are in no respect mere deductions from or applications of any such general theory. They are on the contrary independent judgments on different relations of life, different affections of the human mind, and so forth, from which, taken together, the general view may be deduced or rather composed. With a few exceptions La Rochefoucauld's maxims represent the matured result of the reflection of a man deeply versed in the business and pleasures of the world, and possessed of an extraordinarily fine and acute intellect. The excellence of the literary medium in which they are conveyed is even more remarkable than the soundness of their ethical import.
In uniting the four qualities of brevity, clearness, fulness of meaning and point, La Rochefoucauld has no rival. His Maxims are never mere epigrams; they are never platitudes; they are never dark sayings. He has packed them so full of meaning that it would be impossible to pack them closer, yet there is no undue compression.
The editions of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims (as the full title runs, Refiexions ou sentences et maximes morales) published in his lifetime bear the dates 1665 (editio princeps), i666, 1671, 1675, 1678. An important edition which appeared after his death in 1693 may rank almost with these. Of the many modern editions may be mentioned the edition des bibliophiles (1870). The previous more or less complete editions of the Afemoires are all superseded by that of MM. Gilbert and Gourdault (1868-83), in the series of Grands Ecrivains de la France, 3 vols. See an English version of the Maximes by G. H. Powell (1903). See also J. Bourdeau in the Grands icrivains fratKais (1893) ; E. Gosse, Three French Moralistes (1918) ; E. Magne, Le vrai visage de la Rochefoucauld (1923).