SOURCE: Clark, Henry C. “La Rochefoucauld and the Social Bases of Aristocratic Ethics.” History of European Ideas 8, no. 1 (1987): 61-76.

[In the following essay, Clark claims that La Rochefoucauld's ideas are universal in nature and do not betray his aristocratic background. The critic goes on to explore the relationship between social participation and moral observation in the Maximes.]

One of the paradoxes in the career of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) consists in the almost complete absence of any overt evidence of social particularity in his literary work. In practice, he was acutely protective of every privilege pertaining to his imagined place in the social hierarchy of seventeenth-century France, even more than most of his fellow peers. But in his classic work, the Maximes, he was scrupulously abstract and universal in scope—rarely alluding even to the three general orders of society, much less to the sorts of minute aristocratic subdivisions that consumed so much of his youthful energy.¹

It might be thought that the maxim form itself encouraged, perhaps even required, such a universal treatment of moral questions. But this is clearly not so. Most of the many people who wrote maxims in France from about 1650 onwards did not scruple to include quite precise social considerations in them. Madame de Sablé, for example, who hosted the salon in which La Rochefoucauld developed his own maxim form, made more references to the particularities of her social hierarchy in eighty-one maxims than La Rochefoucauld did in over five hundred.² It is clear that the classical detachment of La Rochefoucauld's work, aside from its undoubted literary significance, also tells us something about the author's understanding of his own society, and about the way that understanding helps shape his moral judgments. The purpose of the present paper is to clarify the relationship between social participation and moral observation in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld, and to do so in the context of post-Fronde aristocratic ethics in general.

At the outset, it will be useful to make clear the general terms of this discussion. Every moral code—whether based more on habit or reflection, tradition or reason—makes claims that are in some sense general, and relates them to a social order that is identifiably particular. In a controversial recent book, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has made an ambitious analysis of this relationship between the social and the moral, the particular and the general.³ That part of his manifold argument that is of interest in the present context might be summarised as follows.

Most traditional societies have been held together by ethical systems in which the terms of moral evaluation are tantamount to descriptions of social roles, in which the shared good of the community informs each of the latter, and in which there is a variety of virtues to account for the various ways that the role-bearing members of society contribute to the good of their community. Society consists of the good mother or father, the good priest, the good warrior, and moral education consists in learning the skills and virtues necessary to fulfil these firmly embedded sets of expectations.

The moral process that is likely to occur when the bonds and structures of such a society begin to loosen is a general alienation that will manifest itself in one of two ways. On the one hand, the weakening of social roles will throw the individual back on himself, and there will thus be a tendency toward moral individualism of some form or another. On the other hand, the demise of socially located standards of conduct will give way to abstract, universal standards of conduct unrelated to the fulfilment of specific purposes in life; the good priest or warrior will be replaced by the ‘good man’.

MacIntyre discusses at considerable length two historical episodes that seem to conform, roughly at least, to this outline. In the fourth century b.c., the traditional self-containment of polis life began to collapse. A social structure that had been small enough to engage the full participation of its citizenry disintegrated and finally gave way to the broader, more amorphous life of the oikoumene. In MacIntyre's view, this relatively familiar story brought with it some predictable changes in the moral realm. The morality of the polis, which was essentially the traditional morality of social roles, gave way to two general trends which, for all their differences, each lacked a firm sense of social place. On the one hand, there were various forms of what might be seen as individualistic orientations, notably Cynicism and Epicureanism. On the other hand, there was an ethic of duty, of abstract reason, of the ‘good man’, best exemplified in Stoicism.

MacIntyre's other historical example, which forms the core of After Virtue, is the Enlightenment and its aftermath, when, he argues, the traditional social structures of Old Europe began to give way to the individualism and mass society of modern times. Here too, MacIntyre adds an interesting dimension to a familiar story. For here too, he argues that what disappeared along with a social structure was a morality appropriate to it—teleological, socially defined, centred on a variety of virtues necessary for the variety of social roles which help achieve a common good. And this morality was replaced, again, by two different but complementary dispositions. On the one hand, there was the ‘Enlightenment project’, which consisted of a number of attempts to found morality on rules rather than virtues, on abstract reason rather than concrete, socially located formation of character. On the other hand, there have been a variety of forms of individualism—liberal, sometimes libertarian in nature—that have culminated in what MacIntyre calls the ‘emotivism’ of the post-Bloomsbury age in which we live.⁴

Whatever might be thought in general of MacIntyre's account of the relation between morals and society, which I have too crudely summarised here, it seems to me that it does help illuminate the immediate issue at hand. For La Rochefoucauld lived in a changing but still traditional society, one in which morality continued to be defined very closely according to social role. This was especially true of his own aristocratic milieu, where moral education was viewed mainly as the cultivation of a range of virtues necessary for the formation of a character appropriate to one's privileged station. La Rochefoucauld's corrosive observations in the Maximes must be seen, partly at least, as a dissolution of a particular set of bonds between morals and society. What exactly was the nature of his attack on aristocratic ethics? What, if anything, did he substitute for the socially based ethic that he attacked? And what is the larger context in which to view his moral enterprise? These are the questions to which we must now turn.

In what is perhaps the best-known account of French aristocratic ethics in this period, Paul Bénichou depicts a class of adventurers, of ‘noble individualis[ts]’ striving to transcend themselves in order to exalt their own egos. He portrays them as chivalrous heroes of late feudalism in pursuit of Corneille's ‘idea of the sublime’. He writes, ‘the social yoke does not weigh too heavily on the nobles. For them virtue cannot lie in deprivation, in the painful restraint that duty imposes on the ego's desires’.⁵ Love and honour, in this view, cooperate in exalting the individual ego.

But by restricting himself to literature, and especially to tragedy and romance, Bénichou tells at most half the story. He concentrates on what might be called the ‘centrifugal’ forces of aristocratic life—those motives that urge the nobleman to neglect hearth and village, to neglect his role in an ongoing society, in the pursuit of a glory that would be strictly his own. These motives undoubtedly existed in the seventeenth century, but there were also more ‘centripetal’ tendencies that must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the moral life of the nobility, for it is clear that the latter took seriously their place atop a settled, hierarchical order.

Such ‘centripetal’ forces operate generally within the following types of relationship: lineage, household, corps, and the organically conceived society that embraces them all. These determine the functions a typical nobleman will see for himself. In MacIntyre's neo-Aristotelian terms, they shape the telos of the noble life in seventeenth-century France. The virtues necessary for the fulfilment of this telos are not the same as those Benichou found on display in the plays of Corneille. They are more integrative, and are epitomised by the affective, post-feudal bond of fidélité, which, more than anything else, highlights the nobleman's sense of his social obligations.⁶

The importance of the lineage, or maison, in the noble system of values can hardly be exaggerated. Although social constraints on personal morality were often loose, the task of maintaining the maison was always taken seriously.⁷ The king considered it a public necessity to ensure the integrity of his nobility by overseeing their selections of marriage partners, in opposition to the more individualistic tenets of Church law.⁸ And it worked both ways; the nobility sometimes tried to control the marriage decisions of royal ministers, especially during an unstable regency period.⁹ Kings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found it necessary to appeal strongly to family interest in their attempts to forge a sense of national identity among the office-holding nobility; it is thus that offices became patrimonial.¹⁰ When it came time, at the Assembly of the Nobility in 1651, to set down the obligatory expression of group solidarity, the Act of Union did so by affirming the equality of maisons, not of persons.¹¹

Like the family line, the household is also a focal point of noble life. It too is a source of important powers and duties. Its powers arise in a variety of ways. For one thing, a master's domestiques could sometimes also be clients; they could perform any number of essentially political tasks for their powerful patron, including the bearing of arms.¹² They could serve as ambassadors in the outside world.¹³ They could, and usually did, defend the honour and interests of their masters with tenacity.¹⁴ Less tangibly, the domestiques of a great household were a visible manifestation of the status of the noble house.¹⁵ Modelled to a greater or lesser extent on the royal household, the households of the nobility prided themselves on the size, complexity, even the leisure of their domestic staff.¹⁶ An intricate hierarchy often obtained among the domestiques that mirrored, to a certain extent, the hierarchy prevalent in society at large.¹⁷

The ultimate duty in this connection was to make the household conform to the larger plan of the cosmos. Households were, in theory and largely in fact, the elements from which society was composed.¹⁸ Whether from the Christian sense of equality or the post-feudal sense of mutual fidelity, the households were meant to be microcosms of the properly ordered life. To this end, noble masters were supposed to feel at least certain duties to their servants: sometimes a dowry, occasionally an apprenticeship, but almost always moral and religious instruction, in which the masters were likely to take particular pride.¹⁹

Masters tended to view their servants on the model of the poor in general. They often recruited deliberately from among them, and considered the work they gave them as a means of saving them from the perdition that always threatened.²⁰ But at the same time, the master had to treat the servant in such a way as to merit the fidélité that he expected of him. For even when servants had become mere serviteurs rather than domestiques, as tended to occur in the eighteenth century, they were likely to be rewarded more for their fidelity than for a more modern consideration such as achievement.²¹ A revealing example of the importance of this moral bond consists in the piece of tavern legislation, according to which gens sans aveu could not stay in an inn for more than one night. As the jurist Guy Coquille made clear, gens sans aveu meant mainly those who ne sont domestiques ou facteurs d'aucuns Maistres.²²

Broader, but also more sporadic was the nobleman's participation in his corps. Though the nobility did not, like the clergy, have regular meetings at established intervals to press their claims on the Crown, they made frequent attempts to claim the same sort of corporate status as the clergy, and were in general acutely aware of both the rights and duties that attached to their condition in a society of orders. Aside from the various political claims of the organised nobility, which by now are well known, there was an essential moral dynamic at work, again centering on fidélité. Mutual fidelity might be sworn at the formation of a spontaneous act of union such as the one Bussy-Rabutin formed at Dourdinessur-Loing in 1630 to protest the imprisonment of the princes.²³ In the course of a more formal and settled initiative, too, fidelity played a key role. In the Assembly of the Nobility of 1649, for example, it was the mutual loyalty sworn by the members to each other that required the minority to follow the decisions of the majority on any given issue, a procedure that might be suggestive for the understanding of later democratic institutions.²⁴

To understand the spirit of this noble ethos of fidélité, it is necessary to see how unabashedly emotional it is. The bond of loyalty was an affective bond.²⁵ A group of provincial nobles, angry at the depredations of some gens de guerre in their respective locales, organised a protest expedition to Paris during the Fronde. On their way, they stopped at La Roche-Guyon for a meeting with Roger du Plessis, Marquis of Liancourt, who read to them a letter from the King, urging them to maintain their loyalty to him rather than descend to the making of cabals against him. Touched by such an appeal, the nobles hastily proceeded to their destination, in order to make manifest their fidelity to the King. An état nobiliaire à la polonaise, such as appealed to some of the barons and marquises during this critical period, was not for them.²⁶

The bond of fidelity could take a bewildering variety of forms. It could appear as chaleureuses effusions, or as a sentimentalisme pessimiste; it could lead to crusading expeditions against the Turk, or simply to the dogged exercise of mundane duty.²⁷ Moreover, just because it was an affective bond, just because it was attached to persons more than to institutions or abstract ideas, fidelity could contribute to anarchy as easily as to social harmony, and did so during the Fronde as before.

Nonetheless, because of the restraining influences of family and inherited privilege, the anarchic impulses of noble fidélité tended to fall short of complete fulfilment. For unlike the mediaeval monk, and despite Bénichou's one-sided depiction of aristocratic aspirations, virtue was in the noble mind an inherently social commodity. It was their virtue that they advanced as justification for their periodic claims to more offices in the seventeenth century.²⁸ It was inner virtue (and its external manifestation, honour) that defined and justified their own and others' places in society during this period.²⁹ In fact, the great jurist Loyseau took pride in the fact that the ranks of the French social hierarchy were acknowledged and respected voluntarily (par honneur), rather than with the coercive help of the law, as in ancient Rome.³⁰ In the last analysis, it was noble virtue that was ultimately deemed most efficacious in ensuring the harmony of the social order by providing examples of proper conduct for others to follow.³¹

Most nobles of the sword would have accepted Fortin de la Hoguette's formulation of the organic world-view that underlay this notion of the social function of noble virtue. An active pamphleteer during the Fronde, Fortin composed a testament for the edification of his son that is significant in the present context.³² He divided his work into three parts: duties to God, to oneself, and to others. His concept of duty was fully located in a teleological conception of society, so that he justified his thematic organisation on the grounds that ‘tout homme qui craindra Dieu, & qui usera de sa volonté selon raison, sera bon mary, bon pere, bon fils, bon frere, bon maistre, bon serviteur, bon voisin, bon citoyen, bon sujet, & bon Prince, qui sont les principalles liaisons de la vie civile’.³³ Fortin believed that society is a coherent whole, that its members are held together by natural sympathies or correspondances,³⁴ and that virtue is the capacity to live up to one's duties by making these correspondances effective. He explicitly rejected the idea that virtue might be private, as in a monastery, instead arguing that one usually goes to a monastery out of weakness rather than virtue.³⁵ As to the nobility, its crucial role in such a society is suggested in his narration of how regular conversations with les personnes les plus avisées, in which one can contracte quelque union avec ceux à qui on se communique, is the best way he knows of calming the passions and enlightening the understanding, because it brings forth a special form of the sympathie on which all society is based.³⁶

One man who certainly would have been inclined to look favourably upon these ideas of Fortin was his contemporary, the Prince of Conti. A brief look at him and his own writing on noble ethics will be useful in the present context, for a number of reasons. Conti was not only a contemporary of La Rochefoucauld, but a fellow peer. Though somewhat younger, he was formed by the same critical experience of the Fronde, and more generally by the same frondeur milieu. The two men knew each other well, and had a number of common friends. Most importantly, both men wrote simultaneously on moral subjects in the wake of the Fronde. Conti's writing is one of the best examples of the still strong tradition of an organic, socially locative account of noble vice and virtue. As such, it does much to put in its proper context the very different approach to the subject by La Rochefoucauld.

Armand of Bourbon, Prince of Conti was born in 1629. As the younger son of le grand Condé, he was in line for a career in the Church, holding a number of benefices in his youth.³⁷ At the outbreak of the Fronde, however, he was in his brother's inner circle, was in fact chosen generalissimo of the rebel forces, and was arrested with him in 1650. On his release, he continued to serve Condé's cause until the desperate days of 1653, when he made a separate peace with Mazarin.³⁸ Whereas Condé was too proud to submit and instead went into exile, his younger brother, for a mixture of personal and familial reasons, abased himself, swearing his loyalty to the Crown in exchange for the hand of Mazarin's niece, Anne-Marie Martinozzi, whom he married in 1654.³⁹ The latter, along with Conti's influential sister, Madame de Longueville, prevailed upon him to ‘convert’ to Jansenism, which he followed devoutly for the rest of his life. His family ties with Mazarin now stood him in good stead, as he was showered with military commands and governorships, being selected a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Saint Esprit in 1661.⁴⁰ He died in 1666.

It is sometimes said that Jansenism offered a refuge for the frustrated rebels among a declining feudal nobility.⁴¹ But it seems to have provided Conti, on the contrary, with a way of reconciling himself to the established order. For his version of Christianity amounted to a reaffirmation of an essentially organic view of society, of the special role of the nobility in that society, and of the socially locative morals necessary to fulfil this role. It is in his brief work Les Devoirs des grands that Conti's post-Fronde vision of the Christian nobleman is described.⁴²

The key motif of Conti's work, in the best Jansenist tradition, is the stark contrast between the grandeur of God and the humility of man. Since les grands hold privileged positions in society, one of Conti's goals is to argue that the nobleman's human grandeur must serve the greater grandeur of God. The organic character of Conti's conception of the social hierarchy is suggested in his assertion that it is not only the nobleman himself, but also his family, his lands, and his Gouvernemens that fulfil this essential task of divine stewardship.⁴³

Furthermore, what follows from this conception is the fundamentally social character of noble ethics. Conti takes pains to emphasise not only that true grandeur is a reflection of the Almighty, but also that the human grandeur vested in the nobility is a bridge between the Almighty and the humble. He calls the nobleman l'homme du prochain,⁴⁴ by which he means both that the nobility must serve their inferiors, and that their example must lead the latter to the respect necessaire. More interestingly, if noble grandeur were not designed for, and exercised on behalf of, others, it could serve no other purpose, man being as weak as he is, than that of a pâture de l'orgueil, & de l'amour propre.⁴⁵

Thus, the humility that is a necessary attribute of the human condition as a whole is far more difficult for a noble to attain than for anyone else. In an elaborate argument along these lines, Conti adduces four obstacles to the proper adherence to the Gospel by a grand. First, the Gospel enjoins humility, but the noble estate porte a l'orgueil. Second, the Gospel requires penitence, but nobility brings de mollesse, de delicatesse & de luxe. Third, the Gospel demands love of one's neighbour, but nobility is a temptation to du mepris, de l'indifference & de l'insensibilité. Finally, the Gospel talks of sin, pain and work, whereas les grands are forever being called by les delices, l'oisiveté & la paresse.⁴⁶ Thus, whereas a commoner (significantly called a particulier) can be saved by the exercise of common virtue, a grand needs to practice une vertu heroique.⁴⁷

In another way, too, Conti related the grandeur of les grands to a larger social and religious perspective. For the heart of his brief work is his adaptation of the seven universal virtues of Christianity (the so-called cardinal and ordinal virtues) to the particular condition of les grands. Here too, the socially locative character of noble ethics becomes clear. In his treatment of charity, for example, after noting the need to love God, he turns to the love of one's neighbour. He concedes that this love must be universal. For the noble, however, charity holds special duties. It means that he belongs to his inferiors, rather than vice versa. It means that his superflu, est le patrimoine de son prochaine, lors qu'il est dans l'indigence. It means that he should define his necessities according to reason, rather than by comparison with the ridiculous luxuries of his peers.⁴⁸

Of temperance, Conti makes the interesting observation that it is only a grand who is even in a position to enjoy the excessive pleasures that would call this virtue forth.⁴⁹ More important than temperance or even charity is justice, which he calls la principale vertu d'un Grand.⁵⁰ Here again, Conti adapts a universal Christian virtue to his particular situation, namely the discharge of the traditional seigneurial obligations. Here too, what concerns him is the special difficulty that a noble faces in practising the virtue in question. He finds five main obstacles to a noble's exercise of justice.

First, there is simple ignorance, which can be remedied by a careful study of the appropriate ordinances. Second, there is what he calls précipitation, by which he seems to be echoing something like Pascal's famous critique of the multiplication of busywork by which frail humans contrive to avoid ennui.⁵¹ Third, there is préoccupation, which seems roughly comparable to our term bias. The fourth obstacle is laziness, which prevents a knowledge both of the laws and of the particular facts of a case, and which is a function of the divertissemens that are so characteristic of noble life. Finally, there is self-interest, le plus grand de tous les crimes; on this subject, Conti says simply that human nature alone is incapable of resisting fully, that only a truly Christian justice can do so.⁵²

What is significant about Conti's work, then, contrary to the argument of Bénichou, is his unwavering belief in the reconcilability of grandeur and self-denial, Christianity and nobility. He based his conception of morality on the assumptions that society exists for a larger purpose, that the nobility has a specific role to play in the fulfilment of this purpose, that in particular the nobility is bound to its social inferiors by a complex combination of duties, and that the fulfilment of their social role is dependent upon the adaptation of universal Christian virtues to the particular conditions facing the nobility. In all of these ways, Conti is far from unrepresentative of seventeenth-century French nobles, whether from before the Fronde or afterwards.

Examining Fortin's organic sense of society, and Conti's adaptation of Christian virtues to noble conditions, helps us to notice the dog that does not bark in the writing of La Rochefoucauld; that is, the almost complete lack of any consideration of the role of the noble order in a functioning society, or of the integrative relationships that sustain aristocratic social life—family, household, corps, or fidélité in general. This lacuna is not to be explained, of course, by any absence of these relationships in La Rochefoucauld's life itself, or of their moral content. On the contrary, the Mémoires and ‘Apologie’ (his two earliest works) make it abundantly clear how strongly he felt about sacrificing himself for the honour and interests of his maison;⁵³ about the trust he invested in his domestiques;⁵⁴ about his noble duty to uphold justice;⁵⁵ about the corporate nature of his society; and in general, about the bonds of trust and fidélité that underlay this hierarchical society as a whole.⁵⁶

Why, then, are these themes so conspicuously absent in his moral writings? The answer, in my view, is that they are absent only on the surface; that instead of treating these relationships in their social particularity, the author has elected to treat with classical detachment the underlying moral-psychological factors that inform and, ultimately, corrode them. In a sense, this answer follows the lines set out by Bénichou. The latter argues that, although La Rochefoucauld fashions his maxims in universal terms, their unmistakable frame of reference is the life of the nobility. This is precisely the present argument, but as with his treatment of the nobility as a whole, Benichou's interpretation of La Rochefoucauld seems one-sided. For he again emphasises only those virtues that enable the nobleman to transcend his contemporaries, not cooperate with them. In his oft-cited enumeration of the ‘chivalric virtues’ that are unmasked in La Rochefoucauld's dissection of amour-propre, he lumps together truly chivalric qualities such as illustrious grandeur, love of glory, and contempt for death, on the one hand, with loyalty, gratitude, and friendship on the other.⁵⁷

To understand accurately La Rochefoucauld's attack on the moral pretentions of his own etat, it is as important to consider the ‘centripetal’ tendencies of noble life as the ‘centrifugal’ ones. To Bénichou's vertical imagery, according to which La Rochefoucauld and the Jansenists levelled off the aristocratic soul, or ‘submerged its highest peaks’ and reduced it to uniform naturalistic dimensions, should be added a horizontal imagery, to take account of how La Rochefoucauld dissolved (or pronounced the dissolution of) those social bonds that held his society of orders together. The cynical detachment of the Maximes consists, among other things, in an analysis of the general consequences of self-love for the particular social relations in noble life.⁵⁸

In a fundamental sense, the very enterprise that La Rochefoucauld undertakes is inimical to these social bonds. For he does not simply unmask appearances of virtue; he presumes to penetrate to the hidden motives of those whose actions he observes. As he puts it, the task of a moral observer is to faire l'anatomie de tous les replis du coeur.⁵⁹ This involves not only a denial of the claims to virtue made on behalf of heroic figures (which was the immediate occasion for his remark), but also a presumptive denial of the mutual trust on which noble life was supposedly based. Furthermore, the cool detachment with which he analyses the workings of human motivation might be seen, in part, as a stark rejection of the warm, emotional bond of fidélité, such as he had known it when he was himself proud to be the special serviteur of the Queen.⁶⁰

Mutual trust is maintained by a complex variety of capacities that are presumed to be generally operative in social life. These include counsel, praise, gratitude, obligation and faithfulness itself, and it is in La Rochefoucauld's treatment of these social virtues that he launches what amounts to a coherent attack on the teleological pretentions of his aristocracy. In the case of each, he does at least two things. First, he shows how the virtue in question merely appears to exist, and how the universal depravity of human nature prevents it from existing in reality. More interestingly, he describes the consequences of this state of affairs for actual social relations, thereby highlighting the way that self-love disturbs the fabric of mutual trust on which his society is based.

Let us look first at counsel (conseil). Rendering advice and counsel to the king had, of course, been a principal raison d'être of the high nobility during the Middle Ages, and later dukes and peers, in particular, were acutely aware of this part of their heritage. The numerous seventeenth-century assemblies of the nobility invariably placed the right and duty of noble counsel very high on their lists of demands. At a more mundane level, the ripe wisdom of good advice, of being among the plus avisées, as Fortin had put it, was clearly an important part of the self-image of the nobility as a whole. For La Rochefoucauld, however, conseil was fruitless in the first instance because of the ineradicable self-love and vanity of the one receiving it, as he suggests in M. [maxime] 378: On donne des conseils mais on n'inspire point de conduite.

In M. 116, the author makes the subtler point that both parties to the exchange of counsel are likely to vitiate the traditional bonds between man and man:

Rien n'est moins sincere que la maniere de demander et de donner des conseils. Celui qui en demand paraît avoir une déférence respectueuse pour les sentiments de son ami, bien qu'il ne pense qu'à lui faire approuver les siens, et à le rendre garant de sa conduite. Et celui qui conseille paye la confiance qu'on lui témoigne d'un zèle ardent et désintéressé, quoiqu'il ne cherche le plus souvent dans les conseils qu'il donne que son propre intérêt ou sa gloire.

Here, it is the social consequences rather than the individual causes of self-love that are highlighted. The artistic payoff is a paradox, consisting in the stark contrast between the apparent integrity of the event as a social exchange, and the real incommensurability of the two parties' hidden motives in the exchange. The clear inference is that one of the nobility's most hallowed prerogatives is in fact meaningless.

A second type of relationship that La Rochefoucauld treats in this way is that of obligation—not in the abstract sense of duty, but in the concrete sense of being beholden to someone who has done an important favour. In the world of noble générosité, the giving of gifts, although its purpose was to forge a sense of community, also had the effect of creating personal bonds that could be burdensome. What sustained these bonds, what gave men the strength to live up to their felt obligations, was the deep feeling of honour thought to be specific to the nobility.

La Rochefoucauld made it clear that, in his judgment, the moral strength necessary to discharge these obligations does not exist. He echoed the Machiavellian observation that men cannot be depended upon to respond properly to gestures of generosity on their behalf. In M's I91 and MS [maxime supprimée] 45, for example, he suggests that fear and not affection, power and not trust, prevail in human relations. I91: L'amour de la justice n'est que la crainte de souffrir l'injustice. MS45: Pour pouvoir être toujours bon, il faut que les autres croient qu'ils ne peuvent jamais nous être impunément méchants.

The author's subtlest representation of the erosion of aristocratic honour, and especially that aspect of honour necessary to uphold a complex system of mutual obligations, is M. 14:

Les hommes ne sont pas seulement sujets à perdre le souvenir des bienfaits et des injures; ils haissent même ceux qui les ont obligés, et cessent de hair ceux qui leur ont fait des outrages. L'application à recompenser le bien, et à se venger du mal, leur paraît une servitude à laquelle ils ont peine de se soumettre.

Here, the moral and psychological roots of the dissolution of mutual trust are merely implied; what is stated is the social consequence of the dissolution. In this case, the consequence is a lassitude, a kind of moral laziness that prevents one from doing one's social duty. That this laziness saps the energy out of the normal impulses of both vengeance and recompense is a characteristic paradox that only underscores the magnitude of the collapse.

The verbal equivalent of obligation was praise. The function of this important social lubricant, which was especially conspicuous among a class that prided itself on its noteworthy deeds, was in principle to acknowledge merit while simultaneously fostering a sense of community between honourable individuals. Courtiers of the period had at least two ways of treating it. Some followed Castiglione in regarding praise as a means whereby the courtier might coax his superior along the elusive path to justice. Others saw it as another way to oblige one to oneself, and thereby help to further one's own advancement.⁶¹

In a series of eight maxims (143-150), La Rochefoucauld provides a variety of reasons why, whatever good it might sometimes do (as in M. 149), praise does not foster community. In M. 143, for example, he suggests that vanity and not generosity is what leads one to praise another: ‘C'est plutôt par l'estime de nos propres sentiments que nous exagérons les bonnes qualités des autres, que par l'estime de leur mérite; et nous voulons nous attirer des louanges, lorsqu'il semble que nous leur en donnons.’ The identical point is further chiseled in M. 146: On ne loue d'ordinaire que pour être loué. In M. 145, he points to one of the many ways praise can be enlisted in the ongoing war of mutual deception that is social life: ‘Nous choisissons souvent des louanges empoisonnées qui font voir par contrecoup en ceux que nous louons des défauts que nous n'osons découvrir d'une autre sorte.’ And again, M. 148 puts a similar point in a more concise form: Il y a des reproches qui louent, et des louanges qui médisent.

But as with counsel and obligation, La Rochefoucauld does not confine himself to moral critique; he also engages in social analysis. M. 144 is the riches in this regard:

On n'aime point à louer, et on ne loue jamais personne sans intérêt. La louange est une flatterie habile, cachée, et délicate, qui satisfait différemment celui qui la donne, et celui qui la reçoit. L'un la prend comme une récompense de son mérite; l'autre la donne pour faire remarquer son équité et son discernement.

Here again, at least two points show the disintegration of the traditional noble ethos in La Rochefoucauld's world-view. First, universal human vanity stifles the particular noble magnanimity that would otherwise lead one spontaneously to praise another. Second, however, La Rochefoucauld quickly shifts perspective away from the one giving the praise, and instead assumes, a more Olympian posture toward both of the participants in the exchange, a posture that enables him to treat the exchange as a strictly social phenomenon. The giving of praise, like the giving of gifts, is a means of forming a sense of community between people. La Rochefoucauld dissolves, or announces the dissolution of, this community by showing both the different consequences of self-love for the two parties to the encounter, and the paradox that inevitably results.

The most frequently treated of the socially integrative virtues in the Maximes is gratitude (reconnaissance). The importance of this habit, and of its open manifestation, for the smooth functioning of daily social relations especially in a society of orders, hardly needs to be emphasised. Since, moreover, the giving of gifts or the doing of favours is likely to place one under a settled obligation, expressions of gratitude often take their place within the context of an ongoing relationship, rather than being merely momentary gestures of courtesy. This is what accounts for the substance that one perceives in La Rochefoucauld's many pronouncements on the subject. A good example is M. 298: La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n'est qu'une secrète envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits. And the benefactor is simultaneously playing the same game, as in M. 246: Ce qui paraît générosité n'est souvent qu'une ambition déguisée qui méprise de petits intérêts, pour aller à de plus grands.

The structure of these maxims is that of a simple unmasking; self-love and self-interest, which are implied rather than stated, prevent the sort of genuine gratitude that forges meaningful social bonds. But in the subtle M. 438, the author again transcends this simple moral analysis with a depiction of the personal dynamics that can operate in connection with the duties of gratitude: ‘Il y a une certaine reconnaissance vive qui ne nous acquitte pas seulement des bienfaits que nous avons reçus, mais qui fait même que nos amis nous doivent en leur payant ce que nous leur devons.’ Here, the duties of gratitude are actually turned into an opportunity to oblige the one who has dispensed the bienfaits.

And in M. 225, finally, La Rochefoucauld again shows, as he had done with counsel, praise and obligation, how self-love simultaneously prevents both parties to the exchange (this time of gratitude) from entering sincerely into it: ‘Ce qui fait le mécompte dans la reconnaissance qu'on attend des graces que l'on a faites, c'est que l'orgueil de celui qui donne, et l'orgueil de celui qui reçoit, ne peuvent convenir du prix du bienfait.’ His use of the language of the marketplace here underscores his observation that it is the exchange itself, not merely the moral condition of one or even both of the parties to it, that is vitiated by human pride. The whole of any human interaction was greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, we must briefly consider fidélité itself. In the domestic sphere, of course, fidélité referred merely to sexual or marital relations, and La Rochefoucauld uses the term in this sense on occasion (see M's 331 and MS63, for example). But as indicated above, fidélité was also a concept with considerable public resonance. It denoted that deepseated disposition that was regarded as giving shape to social relations as a whole, especially in aristocratic circles. Indeed, all of the socially integrative habits discussed so far can be viewed as aspects of this overarching disposition.

In general, the demise of fidelity is implied rather than stated in the Maximes. But in a long maxim strikingly reminiscent of his own unpleasant dealings with Cardinal Mazarin, La Rochefoucauld defines fidelity as, in effect, the most efficient ruse employed by self-love in a world devoid of mutual trust. I269:

La fidélité est une invention rare de l'amour-propre, par laquelle l'homme, s'érigeant en dépositaire des choses précieuses, se rend lui-même infiniment précieux; de tous les trafics de l'amour-propre, c'est celui où il fait le moins il engage les hommes par leurs biens, par leur honneur, par leur liberté, et par leur vie, qu'ils sont forcés de confier en quelques occasions, à élever l'homme fidèle auvie, qu'ils sont forcés de confier en quelques occasions, a élever l'homme fidele audessus de tout le monde.

When fidelity has become a mere ‘refinement of policy’, it is no mystery that praise or gratitude should have done so as well.

As might be imagined, the aftermath of the upheaval known as the Fronde witnessed a variety of responses by the nobility to the new conditions of French state and society. Some found meaning in their lives by abasing themselves at the court at Versailles. Others turned on the heroic ethos in dramatic fashion by embracing an austere, humbling version of Christianity—usually Jansenism. Still others tried, to the extent possible, to resume the aristocratic life as if nothing had happened. In a way, the prince of Conti combined elements of all these approaches—reconciling himself to the Crown, converting to Jansenism, but at the same time preserving his sense of the dignity and purpose of the nobility of which he was a member. What is distinctive about La Rochefoucauld, in this context, is that his moral writing amounts to an obituary for his own noble état. The profoundly anti-teleological thrust of his moral criticism, which I have written about elsewhere in more general terms,⁶² is aimed first and foremost at his own social milieu.

That this obituary turned out to be historically premature scarcely needs belabouring. In a variety of ways, the nobility enjoyed quite a robust revival in the eighteenth century,⁶³ and had it not been for the French Revolution, there is no telling how long it would have held onto its prominence in French society. It is true, of course, that some of the chivalric virtues on which La Rochefoucauld had been nourished in his youth were of diminishing relevance in the bureaucratic state then emerging.⁶⁴ But other aspects of noble existence were easier to adapt to these new conditions, and the general aristocratic sense of social purposefulness continued to be strong, even at Versailles. In fact, La Rochefoucauld's own debunking of the values of his class can itself be seen as a symptom of how viable those values still were in his own time. For not only had he seen himself as the Queen's faithful servant before the Fronde, but afterwards he continued both to dream of glorious expeditions and to pursue the values and interests of his caste in the more mundane spheres of family, household and social relations. The cynicism in his literary writings, therefore, derives precisely from the depth of his original commitment to the virtues being unmasked, and reflects as much disillusionment as renunciation on his part.⁶⁵

Thus, La Rochefoucauld was indefeasibly aristocratic. And the paradox with which we began this paper seems closer to resolution: the classical detachment that La Rochefoucauld employed in the Maximes, and that precluded any blatant references to the social hierarchy, was a means of giving universal moral-psychological expression to his particular social experience. For whether or not we agree in general with Alasdair MacIntyre's assertion that ‘all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular’,⁶⁶ this is emphatically the case for La Rochefoucauld. Without his noble status, he was nothing, and to the extent that he diminished his moral commitment to that status, his sense of morals tended to gravitate toward the two poles suggested by MacIntyre's inchoate historical theory cited at the outset. On the one hand, there is a skeptical, subjectivistic sort of individualism that is implicit throughout the Maximes (it is made explicit in M. 48, for example). On the other hand, the moral ‘ideal’ to which he was partially attracted in his later years, namely that of the so-called honnête homme, he defined in terms that were abstract and deliberately unconnected to the traditional functions of his noble caste (see M. 399, for example).

It has sometimes been suggested that La Rochefoucauld helped pave the way for the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is certainly the case that, in his Réflexions diverses if not in his Maximes, he showed how self-love might be accommodated and attenuated for the sake of the sociability and refined taste that his honnête homme required.⁶⁷ But to the extent that liberalism presupposes the adaptation by the non-noble classes of the traditional noble ethos of mutual trust, La Rochefoucauld cannot be seen to have contributed much to its advancement. His M. 223 is, in fact, quite suggestive on just this score: ‘Il est de la reconnaissance comme de la bonne foi des marchands: elle entretient le commerce; et nous ne payons pas parce qu'il est juste de nous acquitter, mais pour trouver plus facilement des gens qui nous prêtent.’ Here, the assimilation of (noble) reconnaissance and (bourgeois) bonne foi is less important than the fact that each is, in the author's eyes, entirely devoid of honour.⁶⁸ Thus, La Rochefoucauld is more properly seen as contributing to a very different tradition of modern thought: that of psychological unmasking, of the debunking of protestations of sincerity in human motives; the tradition that finds its chief embodiments in Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, and that Paul Ricoeur has aptly dubbed the ‘school of suspicion’.⁶⁹

Notes

1. For an example of the latter, see the controversy over préséance between the families of Retz and St. Simon, on the one hand, and La Rochefoucauld, on the other, described in Bibliothèque Nationale, MSS fr., 16245, pp. 334-44.

2. ‘Maximes de Madame de Sablé’, in La Rochefoucauld, Maximes et Réflexions diverses, ed. Jean Lafond (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), M's 2, 30, 60, 71, 72, 75.

3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). To my knowledge, the present essay is the first serious attempt by an historian to explore the implications of MacIntyre's recent work for historical understanding. See also, however, Quentin Skinner, ‘The idea of negative liberty: philosophical and historical perspectives’, in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 193-221.

4. MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 157-8, 217, chaps. 4-6.

5. Paul Bénichou, Man and Ethics, trans. Elizabeth Hughes (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 4-5.

6. Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598-1789, trans. Brian Pearce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), chap. 3. See also Hommage à Roland Mousnier: clientèles et fidélités en Europe à l'epoque moderne, ed. Yves Durand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).

7. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Basil Blackwell, 1983), pp. 50-1.

8. Jean-Pierre Labatut, Les Noblesses européennes de la fin du XV siècle à la fin du XVIII siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), p. 80.

9. For one example, see Richard Bonney, ‘Cardinal Mazarin and the great nobility during the Fronde’, English Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1981), 823.

10. Ralph Giesey, ‘State-building in early modern France: the role of royal officialdom’, Journal of Modern History 55 (June 1983), 191-207, esp. 206-7.

11. Jean-Dominique Lassaigne, Les Assemblées de la noblesse de France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Cujas, 1965), p. 35.

12. Jean-Pierre Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs dans la France de l'Ancien Régime (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1981), pp. 20, 25, 34, 42.

13. Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 110-11.

14. Sarah C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 213-14.

15. Maza, Servants and Masters, pp. 199-201.

16. Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, p. 35.

17. Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, p. 66.

18. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 3rd edn. (New York: Scribner's, 1984), chap. 1, is a standard expression of this view.

19. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, p. 104 and passim.

20. Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, pp. 50, 65.

21. Maza, Servants and Masters, p. 170.

22. Roland Mousnier, Jean-Pierre Labatut and Yves Durand, Problèmes de stratification sociale: deux cahiers de la noblesse (1649-1651) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), pp. 168-9.

23. Lassaigne, Les Assemblées, p. 32.

24. Ibid., p. 42.

25. Orest A. Ranum, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 29.

26. Jean-Marie Constant, ‘La troisième Fronde: les gentilshommes et les libertés nobiliaires’, XVII Siècle 145 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), 347-50.

27. Jean-Pierre Labatut, ‘La fidélité du duc de Navailles’, in Hommage, p. 196.

28. Mousnier, Labatut and Durand, Problèmes de stratification sociale, p. 141.

29. Roland Mousnier, La Plume, la faucille, et le marteau: institutions et société en France du Moyen Age à la Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), p. 16.

30. Charles Loyseau, Traité des Ordres et simples dignitez (Paris: Anthoine de Sommeville, 1620), pp. 12-13.

31. ‘Remonstrances de la noblesse du bailliage de Troyes’ (July 1651), in Problèmes de stratification sociale, pp. 148-9.

32. P. Fortin, Sieur de la Hoguette, Testament ou conseils fidelles d'un bon pere à ses enfants, 3rd edn (Paris: A. Vitré, 1649).

33. Ibid., pp. 12, 368.

34. Ibid., p. 282.

35. Ibid., pp. 369-70.

36. Ibid., pp. 326-8.

37. M. le Duc d'Aumale, Histoire des Princes de Condé, Vol. V (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1889), p. 125.

38. For Conti's role in Bordeaux, see Sal Alexander Westrich, The Ormée of Bordeaux (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).

39. Bonney, ‘Cardinal Mazarin’, p. 832. For Conti's familial considerations in this important decision, see d'Aumale, Histoire des Princes de Condé, Vol. VI, pp. 312-13.

40. Mémoires de Saint-Simon, ed. Gonzague Truc, Vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), p. 314, for the latter.

41. Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 115-16, is a notable exponent of this view.

42. Armand de Bourbon, le Prince de Conty, Les Devoirs des grands (Paris: Thierry, 1666).

43. Ibid., p. 16. (I use the modern spelling of his name.)

44. Ibid., p. 27.

45. Ibid., pp. 11, 28.

46. Ibid., pp. 14-15.

47. Ibid., p. 17.

48. Ibid., pp. 28-30.

49. Ibid., pp. 57ff.

50. Ibid., p. 42.

51. Pascal's Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter, with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), P. 131.

52. Conti, Les Devoirs pp. 45-51.

53. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, ed. L. Martin-Chauffier, rev. Jean Marchand, intro. Robert Kanters, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 25, 29, 50, 53. See also Emile Magne, Le Vrai visage de La Rochefoucauld (Paris: Ollendorff, 1923), pp. 158-67.

54. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, p. 84.

55. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, pp. 32, 81.

56. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, pp. 80, 20-2, 46, 67, 73. Corporate solidarity, in the form of assemblies of the nobility, were less important to peers such as La Rochefoucauld than to lesser nobles, as the Fronde was to show.

57. Bénichou, pp. 112-13.

58. For a different approach to the social implications of self-love, see Liane Ansmann, Die ‘Maximen’ von La Rochefoucauld (Munich: W. Fink, 1972).

59. La Rochefoucauld, Oeuvres complètes, p. 631.

60. La Rochefoucauld, ‘Apologie de M. le Prince de Marcillac’, in Oeuvres complètes, pp. 20-1. In the pages that follow, I use the system of enumeration in La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1967).

61. For an example of the latter, see Eustache Du Refuge, Traicté de la cour, ou instructions des courtisans (Leiden: Elsevier, 1649), p. 17.

62. Henry C. Clark, ‘La Rochefoucauld and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion’, dissertation, Stanford University, 1983, chap. 6.

63. For the evidence in France, one can consult Robert Forster, The Nobility of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960): Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Noblesse au XVIIIe siècle: de la féodalité aux lumières (Paris: Hachette, 1976). Labatut, Les Noblesses européennes, p. 161, argues that this was a European, not just a French, phenomenon.

64. A point made in a different context by J. H. Hexter, ‘The myth of the middle class in Tudor England’, in Reappraisals in History, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 116.

65. Morris Bishop, The Life and Adventures of La Rochefoucauld (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1951), pp. 262-7. See also Madame de Sévigné: correspondance, ed. Roger Duchene, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, Vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp. 701, 707.

66. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 119.

67. For La Rochefoucauld's connection with the vogue of the honnête homme, see Oskar Roth, Die Gesellschaft der Honnêtes Gens: zur socialethischen Grundelegung des honnêteté-Ideals bei La Rochefoucauld (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), and Henning Scheffers, Höfische Konvention und die Aufklärung: Wandlungen des “Honnête-homme-Ideals im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980). See also my as yet unpublished paper, ‘La Rochefoucauld and the Salon Culture of Honnetete’, available upon request.

68. For one example, see J. E. Parsons, Jr., ‘On La Rochefoucauld: preliminary reflections’, Interpretation 2 (Winter 1971), 126-42, esp. 130-1, 137, 139, 141-2.

69. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 33 and passim.