The Musket Ball and the Maxim
On July 2, 1652, in the narrow streets flanking the Faubourg Saint-Antoine on the eastern edge of Paris, a musket ball struck François de La Rochefoucauld in the face. The shot tore through tissue near his eyes, and for weeks afterward — some accounts say months — he could not see. He was thirty-eight years old, a prince of one of France's most ancient aristocratic bloodlines, a veteran conspirator against two cardinals, a lover of dangerous women, a signer of treasonous treaties, and now, suddenly, a man staring into literal and figurative darkness. The wound was not the first he had sustained in service to the chaotic cause of the Fronde, that tangle of aristocratic revolts against the centralizing monarchy, but it was the one that ended his career as a man of action. Within six years he had been wounded in no fewer than three engagements; the injuries to his face and throat were such that he retired from the struggle, his health ruined and his peace of mind lost. He would never again command a regiment, never again scheme in antechambers, never again ride into battle alongside the princes whose interests he had championed with more loyalty than sense.
What he would do, in the decades of enforced stillness that followed, was something far more destructive than anything he had accomplished with sword or signature. He would write sentences — small, lapidary, devastating sentences — that would strip the veneer from human motivation with the precision of a surgeon and the coldness of an executioner. Five hundred-odd aphorisms, refined over five editions between 1665 and 1678, that would establish him as the most ruthless anatomist of self-interest in the history of Western literature. The man whom Voltaire would credit with having influenced the taste and expressed the genius of an entire nation. The aristocrat who disdained being called a writer. The melancholic who claimed he had scarcely been seen to laugh more than three or four times in three or four years. The author of a single imperishable book.
The trajectory from the musket ball to the maxim is the essential parabola of La Rochefoucauld's life — a fall from action into reflection, from illusion into disenchantment, from the battlefield into the salon, from the noise of politics into the silence of a sentence so compressed it reads like a detonation. Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés. Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise. That epigraph, placed at the threshold of his Maximes, is not a philosophical proposition to be debated. It is a grenade tossed into the drawing room of human self-regard, and it has not stopped exploding in three and a half centuries.
By the Numbers
The La Rochefoucauld Ledger
~504Maxims in the final authorized edition (1678)
5Authorized editions published in his lifetime (1665–1678)
3Serious battle wounds sustained during the Fronde
8Days imprisoned in the Bastille (1637)
~150Surviving letters
1,000+Years of documented La Rochefoucauld family lineage
67Age at death, March 16/17, 1680
The House on the Rock
To understand the force of La Rochefoucauld's disillusionment, you must first understand the altitude from which he fell. The family's lineage could be traced to 1019 — to Foucauld, Lord of the Roche, a close relative of the Viscount of Limoges, who built the first fortification on the rock overlooking the river Tardoire around 980 AD. Only four other families in France, among them the Capetians — the royal house itself — could claim such antiquity. The Château de La Rochefoucauld, still standing in the Charente, is a physical encyclopedia of French power: an eleventh-century donjon built to broadcast dominance over the Count of Angoulême, fourteenth-century châtelet and towers reflecting proximity to the crown, a bewildering Renaissance wing begun in 1519 that inscribes the castle among the greatest achievements of the French Renaissance. Century after century the family produced cardinals, military commanders, political reformers. The name was not merely distinguished; it was constitutive of French aristocratic identity.
François VI was born into this inheritance on September 15, 1613, in the Rue des Petits Champs in Paris. His father, François V, the fifth count (later first duke), served as minister to Louis XIII. The boy's formal education was, by most accounts, neglected — a common aristocratic oversight that valued court etiquette, hunting, fencing, dancing, heraldry, and military training over Latin and letters. He compensated through self-education, a habit that would serve him well when the drawing-room games of the salons became his second career. At barely fifteen he was married to Andrée de Vivonne, a union that would produce eight children — five sons and three daughters — and about which the historical record is curiously silent. She appears as a fact, not a presence. Whatever private warmth existed between them, it left no trace in his writing, which concerned itself exclusively with the machinations of courts and the deceptions of the heart in the abstract.
By seventeen he was at court. By fifteen he had joined the army, commanding a regiment inherited from his uncle Benjamin de La Rochefoucauld, comte d'Estissac. He fought in Italy in 1629, in the Netherlands and Picardy in 1635–36, and in Flanders in 1639. He was severely wounded at the siege of Mardyke in 1646. The trajectory was everything his birth predicted: a life of martial glory in service to the crown, with political influence accruing naturally to a name that had been synonymous with power since before the Norman Conquest of England.
But La Rochefoucauld had a fatal susceptibility. Not to ambition — that was standard equipment for a man of his station — but to feminine charm, which time and again led him into conspiracies whose consequences he never quite foresaw.
The Education of a Conspirator
The duchesse de Chevreuse was the first to exploit this vulnerability. Marie de Rohan, a woman of extraordinary beauty and even more extraordinary political cunning — confidante of queens, schemer against cardinals, a figure who moved through the intrigues of the French court like a pike through a pond — drew the young prince de Marcillac (La Rochefoucauld bore this lesser title until his father's death in 1650) into plots against Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII. Richelieu, that implacable architect of centralized power, a man who demolished feudal independence with the same methodical efficiency with which he fortified the monarchy — Richelieu was not a forgiving enemy. The adventure procured for La Rochefoucauld a humiliating interview with the cardinal, eight days of imprisonment in the Bastille in 1637, and two years of exile at the family estate in Verteuil. It was a gentle punishment by the standards of the era, when conspirators frequently lost their heads. But it was a lesson. The wrong lesson, as it turned out.
After Richelieu's death in 1642 and Louis XIII's the following year, the infant Louis XIV ascended the throne under the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria, with Cardinal Mazarin as chief minister. Mazarin, Richelieu's chosen successor — Italian-born, shrewd, acquisitive, detested by the French nobility with a passion that was part xenophobia, part class resentment, and part genuine grievance at his treatment of aristocratic prerogatives — became the new target. La Rochefoucauld, permitted by Mazarin to resume the governorship of Poitou in 1646, might have settled into comfortable provincial authority. But there was a new woman.
Anne de Bourbon, duchesse de Longueville, was the sister of the Great Condé, the most brilliant military commander of his generation and the leader of the aristocratic faction that would become the Fronde. She was also, by the accounts that survive, a woman of exceptional charisma and dangerous political ambition. La Rochefoucauld's devotion to her — a devotion that was at once romantic, political, and perhaps pathological — drew him into the very center of the revolts that would consume France between 1648 and 1653. He had a son by her, born out of wedlock. The affair was public. The commitment was total. And the outcome was catastrophic.
The Fronde, or the Education of a Moralist
The Fronde — the word means "sling," after the weapon Parisian street urchins used to hurl stones — was not one revolt but several, overlapping, contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating. The first phase, the Fronde parlementaire (1648–49), was a judicial uprising against royal fiscal policy. The second, the Fronde des princes (1650–53), was an aristocratic rebellion driven by personal ambition, resentment of Mazarin, and a nostalgic attachment to feudal independence that the centralizing monarchy was systematically dismantling. La Rochefoucauld threw himself into the second with the peculiar combination of bravery and political naïveté that would become, in retrospect, the raw material of his philosophy.
He organized the brilliant but unsuccessful defense of Bordeaux against the royal armies. He attempted to break the blockade of Paris and was wounded. He signed — and may have drafted — the so-called Treaty of Madrid of 1651, which laid down conditions for Spanish military assistance to the French nobility. This was treason by any definition. The treaty proposed inviting a foreign power to intervene in French internal affairs, and La Rochefoucauld's involvement in it reveals how far toward the abyss his loyalty to the house of Condé, and to the duchesse de Longueville, had led him.
The Fronde collapsed. It collapsed because the reforming princes' intentions were superseded by personal ambitions, because no single policy for reform emerged from the chaos, because the nobility proved incapable of sustained collective action — because, in short, the very self-interest that La Rochefoucauld would later anatomize with such surgical precision was the engine of the revolt's destruction. His own Mémoires, written in the years after his retirement, record the weary alternation of plots and campaigns with a disenchantment that bleeds through every page. The Fronde was to La Rochefoucauld one of those moments of history that seemed to reveal men's motives at their worst.
And then the musket ball. And then the darkness.
Evil as well as good has its heroes.
That maxim — No. 185 in the published editions — is the compressed residue of everything the Fronde taught him. In the first edition of the Maximes, published in 1665, a longer, more explicit version had appeared: Les crimes deviennent innocents, même glorieux, par leur nombre et par leurs qualités — crimes are made innocent, even glorious, by their number and nature; hence public robbery becomes a skillful achievement and wrongful seizure of a province is called conquest. His contemporaries would have read recent history into these words. He knew it, and after the first edition he filed the passage down to its most cryptic, most deniable form. The six words that survived carry the full weight of a decade of disillusionment.
The Demolished Château and the Art of Survival
While La Rochefoucauld was bleeding and scheming on behalf of the princes, the crown demolished his château at Verteuil — apparently without notice. The act was both practical (denying a rebel his stronghold) and symbolic (reminding the nobility who held ultimate power over their property and their lives). His lands were heavily mortgaged. His financial difficulties, intensified by war, were compounded by the costs of fine living and what the records reveal as no fewer than five lawsuits in the space of three years, chiefly against other noble families over questions of precedence and court ceremonial. The paradox is exquisite: a man ruined by rebellion, suing his peers over who sits where at court.
But for the astute help of his agent, he might not have been able to maintain his establishment in central Paris, which he managed to do from 1660 onward. The years of exile — first enforced, then gradually softened — were years of reconstitution. He wrote the Mémoires, which were published without his consent in a grossly inaccurate pirated Dutch edition in 1662, causing a great scandal and offending old friends whose behavior he had described with uncomfortable candor. The authentic text would not appear until the nineteenth century.
And gradually, through the lasting and intellectually stimulating friendships that became the consolation of his later years, he won his way back into royal favour. The feat was sealed by his promotion to the knightly order of the Saint-Esprit at the end of 1661 — a rehabilitation that required the very arts of courtly dissimulation his maxims would soon expose.
The Salon as Laboratory
The woman who made La Rochefoucauld's second career possible was Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de Sablé — one of the most remarkable women of her age, a figure at the intersection of literary culture, religious seriousness (she was connected to the Port-Royal circle, that crucible of Jansenist thought), and social brilliance. Born in 1599 to a family of distinguished courtiers, she had survived widowhood, financial reversal, and the vicissitudes of court politics to establish herself as the hostess of one of Paris's most intellectually fertile salons. Mme de Sablé was not merely a patron; she was a collaborator. The Maximes were begun as a joint enterprise with her and Jacques Esprit, a member of the Port-Royal circle who incarnated the strictest strain of Christian moral criticism. The salon game from which the book emerged — les sentences — was a competitive sport of the mind: someone tossed out an idea, the group discussed it, refined it, expanded it, and the best formulations were recorded.
La Rochefoucauld found this exercise very stimulating. Back in his apartments, he would spend hours polishing the ideas — his own and others put forth by members of the salon — into maxims: concise, elegantly phrased statements that most perfectly captured the observation. These were not meant as mere opinions. They represented, for La Rochefoucauld, la loi dans la nature — the laws of human nature, counterparts to the laws that governed inanimate objects in physics and chemistry. The ambition was scientific, even if the method was literary.
The other great friendship of these years was with Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, comtesse de La Fayette — the future author of La Princesse de Clèves (1678), widely regarded as the first French novel. Mme de La Fayette was nearly twenty years his junior, a woman of immense literary intelligence and emotional subtlety, and their relationship — whether it was romantic, intellectual, or some category the seventeenth century recognized but we have lost the name for — produced one of the most productive creative partnerships in French letters. He may have contributed something to her novels; she certainly sharpened the prose style that made his maxims immortal. Around them circled the marquise de Sévigné, whose letters constitute the brightest chronicle of the age, and the circle listened to private readings of Pierre Corneille's tragedies and Nicolas Boileau's L'Art poétique.
Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.
The irony is structural. The man who would become the supreme expositor of human self-deception found his creative method in polite conversation — in the very social rituals whose superficiality his work relentlessly exposes. The salon was both his laboratory and his subject.
The Pirated Edition and the Birth of a Masterpiece
In 1664, a Dutch printer published a pirated version of La Rochefoucauld's maxims without his consent. This was the second time a Dutch pirate had forced his hand — the Mémoires had suffered the same fate two years earlier. The clandestine publication compelled him to issue an authorized edition under his own name in 1665, titled Réflexions; ou, sentences et maximes morales. It was clear that he had satisfied public taste: five editions, each revised and enlarged, would appear within his lifetime, the last in 1678.
The evolution of the text across these editions is itself a masterclass in the art of compression. The first edition did not contain epigrams exclusively; the most eloquent single item was a three-page poetic description of self-interest — amour-propre — a quality La Rochefoucauld found in all forms of life and in all actions. This extended meditation, removed by the author after the first edition, contains the passage that reveals his method at its most expansive:
Voilà la peinture de l'amour-propre, dont toute la vie n'est qu'une grande et longue agitation; la mer en est une image sensible; et l'amour-propre trouve dans le flux et reflux de ses vagues continuelles une fidèle expression de la succession turbulente de ses pensées et de ses éternels mouvements.
Such is the picture of self-love, of which all life is one continuous and immense ferment. The sea is its visible counterpart and self-love finds in the ebb and flow of the sea's endless waves a true likeness of the chaotic sequence of its thoughts and of its everlasting motion.
But this was too much. Too literary, too discursive, too generous to the reader. The manuscripts show the steps by which a series of connected sentences was filed down to the point of ultimate brevity. The contributions of Mme de Sablé and Esprit were deleted, as were maxims too closely resembling models like Seneca and Montaigne. All references to God and religion were systematically removed. What remained was a collection of just over five hundred sayings that deal with human nature from a strictly human standpoint — lucid, penetrating, stripped of consolation.
The method of successive reduction is significant. La Rochefoucauld did not discover his style; he manufactured it through fifteen years of relentless compression, filing and polishing each sentence the way a jeweler cuts a stone. Paul Morand would later describe the result: maxims of un froid éclat de diamant — a cold diamond brilliance. The style had taken fifteen years to appear to flow from a natural source.
The Anatomy of Self-Love
The central insight of the Maximes can be stated simply, though La Rochefoucauld would have distrusted the simplification: self-interest is the fundamental motive behind human behavior, and what commonly passes for virtue, when it is not pure accident, is really disguised — or unrecognized — vice.
Les vertus se perdent dans l'intérêt comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer. Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
The image of the sea recurs throughout the work — a vast, turbulent, consuming force into which all the supposed streams of virtue eventually disappear. But the exposure of self-interest, or amour-propre, is not a simple cynicism. La Rochefoucauld's psychology constantly implies the hypothesis of an unconscious life of desires: Il s'en faut bien que nous ne connaissions toutes nos volontés — we are far from knowing all our wishes. This is 1665, not 1900. Two and a half centuries before Freud, a wounded French aristocrat is mapping the terrain of unconscious motivation with an accuracy that made Louis Kronenberger observe, in his 1959 translation, that "La Rochefoucauld, in his way, has peered quite as sharply as modern specialists in theirs, into a dark realm of tangled and unsightly motives."
The amour-propre of the Maximes is not simple selfishness. It is a shape-shifting force that speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness. It lives in all states of life and in all conditions; it accommodates itself to things and to their absence. The self-love that La Rochefoucauld identifies is not a conscious strategy of egoism but an involuntary, structural feature of the human organism — closer to a tropism than a choice. This is what gives the maxims their peculiar chill. It is not that people choose to be selfish; it is that the architecture of the self makes disinterested virtue impossible, or at best accidental.
And yet. The predominantly pessimistic outlook is partly relieved — the word is generous — by various qualified admissions that true friendship and genuine integrity, though rare, may occasionally be encountered. The growing pressure of conformism in a highly artificial society, the author's own experience of pointless heroism and shabby motives in the Fronde, and above all his proud and melancholy temperament explain the harsh verdict. But they do not exhaust its meaning.
The Art of the Final Word
La Rochefoucauld has been called an Epicurean, but his imaginative insights attached him to no doctrine. Like Montaigne before him and Pascal beside him, he was aware of the mystery around man that dwarfs his efforts and mocks his knowledge — of the many things about man of which he knows nothing, of the gap between thinking and being, between what man is and what man does. La nature fait le mérite et la fortune le met en oeuvre — Nature gives us our good qualities and chance sets them to work.
His chief glory, perhaps, is not as a thinker but as an artist. In the variety and subtlety of his arrangement of words, he made the maxime into a jewel. It is not always the truth of the maxim that is so striking but its exaggeration, which can surprise one into a new aspect of the truth. He describes and defines — he has no time for more — but of the single metallic image he makes amazing use.
He handles paradox to such effect that a final word can reverse everything that precedes it:
On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils. We give nothing so generously as… advice.
C'est une grande folie de vouloir être sage tout seul. It is great folly to seek to be wise… on one's own.
The structure is architectural. The first clause builds an expectation; the final word demolishes it. The reader is set up, then ambushed. The shock of the reversal is the maxim's entire point — it mimics, at the level of syntax, the unmasking of self-deception that is the book's philosophical project. You think you know where the sentence is going. You are wrong. You think you know your own motives. You are wrong about that too.
The influence cascaded through centuries and across borders. In England: Lord Chesterfield, the orator and man of letters, and Thomas Hardy, the novelist who absorbed La Rochefoucauld's pessimism about human nature into the Wessex landscape. In Germany:
Friedrich Nietzsche, who found in the
Maximes a predecessor for his own psychology of ressentiment, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the aphorist who carried the form into the Enlightenment. In France: Stendhal, who learned from La Rochefoucauld how to embed psychological analysis in a single sentence; Sainte-Beuve, who made him a subject of criticism; André Gide, who recognized a fellow anatomist of self-deception. Adam Smith, in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), devoted careful pages to refuting La Rochefoucauld's doctrine — while conceding that the maxims, "first slightly sketched out with the elegance and delicate precision of the duke of Rochefoucault," had thrown upon their doctrines "an air of truth and probability which is very apt to impose upon the unskilful."
Even the refutation was a tribute. You do not spend a chapter of your masterwork arguing with a man whose ideas you can dismiss.
The Melancholic's Self-Portrait
"To speak first about my temperament," La Rochefoucauld wrote in his brief Portrait de La Rochefoucauld par lui-même of 1659, "I am melancholic — so much so that I have scarcely been seen to laugh more than three or four times in the last three or four years."
The self-portrait, composed for a salon exercise in which members wrote descriptions of themselves and each other, is the closest thing La Rochefoucauld left to a personal confession. It is characteristically guarded — revealing just enough to create the impression of transparency while withholding everything that matters. He describes his face (regular, his complexion dark), his bearing (dignified but natural), his habits of mind (more inclined to dreaming silence than to brilliant conversation). The man who could compress the entire mechanism of human vanity into a single sentence claimed that his melancholy so filled his imagination that most of the time he either sat daydreaming without speaking a word or had almost no connection to what he said.
This is not false modesty. It is something more interesting — a demonstration, within the confines of an autobiographical sketch, of the very phenomenon his maxims expose. The self-portrait is itself a kind of performance, a carefully managed disclosure designed to create a particular impression. La Rochefoucauld knows this. He knows you know it. And he writes it anyway, because to refuse to describe oneself would be its own form of vanity. Le refus des louanges est un désir d'être loué deux fois. The refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice.
The Last Years and the Gout
The final decade was not kind. His wife, Andrée de Vivonne, died in 1670. His mother followed in 1672. In the same year, two of his sons died — one in battle, one by illness — joining a litany of losses that accumulated with the grim regularity of the gout that was slowly crippling his body. The illness that had begun in his years of military service intensified, confining him increasingly to his Parisian apartments, where the conversations with Mme de La Fayette and the remnants of the salon world continued to sustain him.
He authorized the fifth and final edition of the Maximes in 1678. Two years later, on the night of March 16–17, 1680, he died in Paris. He received the last rites from the hands of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet himself — the greatest preacher of the age, the voice of the church triumphant, come to administer the sacraments to the man who had written that hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
Though he did a considerable amount of writing over the years, La Rochefoucauld actually published only two works in his lifetime: the
Mémoires and the
Maximes. About 150 letters survive, along with 19 shorter pieces now known as
Réflexions diverses. Like his younger contemporary Jean de La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld was a man of one book. But the book was inexhaustible.
Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
The Sea and the Rivers
In the Château de La Rochefoucauld, still standing on the rock above the Tardoire in the Charente, the family archives occupy 240 boxes. Twenty thousand volumes fill the libraries. The castle itself — its eleventh-century donjon, its Renaissance wing, its eighteenth-century extensions — is a physical record of a thousand years of power, ambition, renovation, and persistence. The family that has owned it without interruption since Fucaldus laid the first fortification around 980 continues to live there.
François VI's portrait hangs in the Château de Versailles — the palace of the king whose centralized monarchy crushed the feudal independence La Rochefoucauld fought for and then spent the rest of his life observing the ruins of. The man who could not laugh. The man who saw self-love in every gesture of apparent generosity, who found in the ebb and flow of the sea a true likeness of the chaotic sequence of the human mind's thoughts and its everlasting motion.
The rivers run to the sea, and the sea is not full.
