La Rochefoucauld et la culture mondaine: portraits du cœur de l'homme (review)

This book, which has its origins in a 2004 Bâle University thesis, outlines the socioliterary context (the term 'culture mondaine' of the title) that helped to shape La Rochefoucauld's celebrated Maximes, and is set in the context of the pioneering work of Louis van Delft, to whom Isabelle Chariatte loyally declares her debt. She begins by recalling that it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the term 'moraliste', that handy tag for the genre-hungry literary historian, came to be used to designate writers whose task was to unmask the subterfuge, hypocrisy, and blindness of the human self in society. For La Rochefoucauld, this enterprise meant exposing the reality of passion and self-interest behind the mask of apparent virtue, rationality, or Senecan impassivity. Chariatte illustrates this point at the outset by showing how the frontispiece of the Maximes, which she places in the context of similar examples, derides Stoicism as a mere social mask to be stripped away. Montaigne, Pascal, and others had of course been there before, and Chariatte constantly reminds her readers that the Maximes came from elements that were part of the contemporary honnête homme's cultural baggage: La Rochefoucauld is not the lone and perhaps embittered Jansenist author some might imagine. Chariatte shows that the Maximes came from the ruelle, that well-documented place of exchange, emulation, and creation later called the salon, in which the examination of galanterie was obsessive and forensic. She points out that in the Maximes there are twice as many references to love as to amour-propre, and that most of La Rochefoucauld's library was composed not of religious or philosophical books, but of the fictional romances then in vogue. She seeks to bring us to the sources of his world view, in which the uncovering of seemingly endless layers of false appearances coexists with respect for the heroic ideal, and accordingly she shows the importance of La Rochefoucauld's continuing dialogue with Madeleine de Scudéry and her world: for example, the different strategies of the art of conversation, such as wit, raillery, and irony, are all deployed in the Maximes to guide the reader on the path of honnêteté. Chariatte's book is a serious and methodical synthesis worthy of its doctoral origins, and she is convincing on the importance of context for the interpretation of a work rarely read as such from cover to cover. That said, one sometimes longs for greater emphasis on those original qualities that make for the enduring appeal of La Rochefoucauld's glittering diamond thoughts. In our human weakness we shall doubtless continue to quote from the Maximes outrageously out of context while wrestling with those eternal paradoxes: that to portray the falsity of appearances is to show things as they are, and that to demonstrate that there is neither wisdom nor truth is to be truly wise.