La Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" in the Literary and linguistic context of the Epoch

Litnevskaia Ol'ga PhD student, Departement of French Linguistics, Lomonosov Moscow State University 119192, Russia, Moscow, Lomonosovsky Prospekt str., 27 k. 7 litnolga@mail.ru

"Maxims and Moral Reflections" by Francois IV de La Rochefoucauld — a collection of aphorisms, first published in 1665 — became one of the most significant works of French classical literature of the XVII century and had a great influence on the literature of the "great century" and subsequent generations. The question of the originality of this work, as well as its place in the literary tradition of the era, remains, nevertheless, open, which explains the interest in the writer's work that has not faded to this day.

Many researchers focus on the analysis of individual elements of the collection (for example, considering individual topics-the keywords "Maxim" ^[21]). Those who are looking for sources that influenced the content of the collection traditionally turn to the history of the genre and the historical context ^[5],[9], but quite little remains said about the language design of "Maxim" and their relationship with the requirements for the language design of classical works that developed in the XVII century.

The purpose of this article is an attempt to synthesize existing points of view on the originality of "Maxim" in the literary and linguistic context of the epoch by lexical and stylistic analysis of the work of La Rochefoucauld in general and "Maxim" in particular and their correlation with the traditions of the epoch and the requirements for form and content imposed on classical works.

Although neighboring genres (maxims, apophthegms, aphorisms) date back to Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the genre of maxims took shape only in the XVII century, when the creation of laconic prose statements within the framework of the salon intellectual game became popular in the secular society of that time close to the Jansenist elite (the debate about whether La Rochefoucauld himself could be considered a Jansenist continues until until now. There is a completely opposite opinion: some researchers see La Rochefoucauld as an Epicurean, analyzing, among others, maxim 182; even more researchers take a position between these extremes ^{[25, p. 5]}). It is believed that in its classical form, Maxima was born from the correspondence of the Duke de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), the hostess of the literary salon of the Marquise de Sable (1599-1678) and the prominent Jansenist orator Jacques Esprit (1611-1677).

Although some critics (Emile Man, Louis Lafume, Edmond Dreyfus-Brizac and others) believe that the work of La Rochefoucauld and Madame de Sable is nothing more than a tribute to fashion and blind copying of samples, templates and ideas developed in the 1640s. ^{[20, p. 184],[17, p. 276]} There is also a widespread point of view that the maxim genre owes its existence to the collective creativity of writers and philosophers of the XVII century. ^[8],[19]. Adherents of this point of view point to the similarity of a number of statements by the authors of collections of maxims. So, we can compare maxim 199 at La Rochefoucauld —

"Le d?sir de para?tre habile emp?che souvent de le devenir" (hereafter ^[18], our translation: "the desire to appear skillful often prevents one from becoming so.").

— and maxim 40 at de Sable:

"Souvent le d?sir de para?tre capable emp?che de le devenir [...]" ("Often the desire to appear capable prevents one from becoming so." ^{[23, p.26]})

Along with this, a number of researchers, such as Henri Grubbs, Will Graybenrn Moore, Jean Vigne, etc., declare the originality of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims ^{[16, p. 17]} and their primary role in the design of the maxim genre as we know it ^{[26, p. 373]}. Thus, collections of sayings of La Rochefoucauld correspondents — "Maxims" by de Sable and "Falsity of Human Virtues" by Esprit — will be published only after their death, while La Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" have survived five lifetime editions (1665-1678) (the earlier Dutch edition of 1664 is usually not taken into account in the genetic analysis of "Maxims", so as it was published without the author's permission and underwent substantial editing) and gave rise to many imitations. In addition, the author's publication history allows us to trace how the ideas included in the final collection were born and improved. Already in his Memoirs, La Rochefoucauld makes sketches-portraits that will later become the foundations of individual maxims (90, 129, 162, 215, 251 and others); considerable work has been done in the Maxims themselves to generalize the ideas that can be found in the writer's early work. During the five lifetime publications of Maxim, the author also does not stop working on the form and content of the collection. One can, for example, observe a gradual rejection of practical advice on combating political injustice, as well as religious allusions in favor of typifying the described situations. Let's compare, for example, the final form of maxim 170 —

"Il est difficile de juger si un proc?d? net, sinc?re et honn?te est un effet de probit? ou d'habilet?" ("It is difficult to judge whether an honest, sincere and decent act is committed out of decency or calculation").

— with its prototype, which can be found in the 155 maxim of the Liancourt manuscript and the sixth letter of the Truchet edition:

"Il n'y a que Dieu qui sache si un proc?d? net, sinc?re et honn?te est plut?t un effet de probit? que d'habilet?" ("God only knows whether an honest, sincere and decent act is done out of decency rather than calculation").

Among domestic researchers, M. V. Razumovskaya speaks about the originality of the content of the collection. Relying on the historical and philosophical context in which the "Maxims" were created, she shows that, although La Rochefoucauld's work formally corresponds to the canons of classicism (a judgment that usually does not cause controversy ^{[22, p. 34]}), the author came to this in a very peculiar way ^{[2, p. 16]}. La Rochefoucauld's life fell during the collapse of the political independence of the large feudal nobility and the formation of French absolutism. Resistance to the absolutism of the feudal lords, gradually losing their former political and economic privileges, and to a lesser extent the third estate gave rise to a whole political philosophy that inspired the Fronde (1648-1653), whose main task was to fight against the court, the "tyranny" of the absolute monarchy, the growth of royal taxes. La Rochefoucauld himself, an active participant and ideologue of the Fronde (an origin not traditional for classical authors who are supposed to maintain authority through their works), paints a tragic picture of the era in his Memoirs: the arbitrariness of absolutism, but also distrust, unscrupulousness and greed in the ranks of fronders, preventing them from both rallying and thinking about the good of the state. The defeat of the Fronde, to which La Rochefoucauld devoted a significant part of his life, and the awareness of the reasons for this defeat contributed to the formation of a new political philosophy, a pessimistic view of human nature, which the author subsequently tries to explain in Maxims ^{[13, p. 6]}, developing the idea expressed in the epigraph:

"Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices d?guis?s" ("Most often our virtues are only vices in disguise").

While the expression of pessimistic views on society is the norm for visitors to salons in the middle of the XVII century in France, genetic analysis of the collection, tracing the origins and analysis of the expression of the author's own philosophy serves as proof that the "Maxims" are not just a mechanical transcription of popular ideas of the era.

At the same time, if the pessimistic view of humanity was the result of the writer's personal experience in the socio-political field, then the methodology of the study of the human heart was inspired by the works of philosophers of that era. Thanks to the efforts of such personalities as Gessendi (1592-1655) and Descartes (1596-1650) in the XVII century. there was a departure from the mystical and religious knowledge of the world towards its materialistic vision; the existence of matter independent of thought was recognized. The idea of experience and its intelligent study by Gassendi had a special influence on La Rochefoucauld's attempt to explore and describe the patterns of a person's inner life in Maxims. The natural-scientific method and rational thinking have become new standards to be guided by when analyzing both physical and moral phenomena. Thus, the idea of the relationship between the spirit and the "arrangement of the organs of the body", expressed by Descartes in the "Discourse on Method" ^{[12, p. 90]}, is directly reflected in Maxim number 44:

"La force et la faiblesse de l'esprit [...] ne sont en effet que la bonne ou la mauvaise disposition des organes du corps" (literally: "Strength and weakness of the spirit are nothing more than a good or bad arrangement of the organs of the body").

At the same time, the opposition of the mind (spirit) and the heart, which can be observed in maxims 43, 102, 103, 108 —

"L'esprit est toujours la dupe du c?ur" ("The mind is always on the lead of the heart.").

 — similar to the similar opposition that formed the basis of the "art of persuasion" in Pascal's "Geometric Mind" ^{[4, p.453]}.

Amour-propre, selfishness, (the reason, in his opinion, for the defeat of the nobility in the struggle to preserve the old way of life) became for the author the answer to the question of what drives a person, what underlies his every action and thought. According to La Rochefoucauld, man is not driven by God (see maxim 169 above), but by physiology, chance and passions; individual vices and shortcomings are also analyzed as an inevitable consequence of the general laws of human behavior characteristic of the entire human race. Thus, "Maxims" can be considered a philosophical work reflecting the political and philosophical views of its era.

The rational approach to the creation of the collection also, in our opinion, influenced the style of the author and led to such a clear and consistent (albeit paradoxically, and nonlinear due to the peculiarities of the genre) presentation of ideas by the author that it allowed Y. S. Martemyanov to "coherently" comprehend and describe the world of a vain man according to La Rochefoucauld with the help of a single a set of initial assumptions (axioms) and previously proven statements (lemmas), using logical (bundles, linking or matching variables) and, to a lesser extent, linguistic (topic-rhematic division, semantics analysis) means ^{[1, pp. 38-41]}.

The influence of the natural-scientific method on the philosophical works of the epoch influenced the language in which both the "Maxims" in particular and the classical works of the "great century" in general were written: during the XVII century. both writers and linguists formulate requirements for clarity, conciseness, clarity and universality of the form and content of classical works.

In 1660, five years before the first official publication of Maxim in 1665, the outdated descriptive grammars of the XVI century were replaced by the "Universal and Rational Grammar of Port Royal" by Antoine Arnaud and Claude Lanslo - a fundamental universal rational grammar containing elements of the philosophy of language, as well as formulating and fixing norms "acceptable" French. According to the author, the basis of grammar is "the way of searching for reasonable explanations of many phenomena, either common to all languages, or inherent only in some of them" (foreword by Arnaud, translated by N. Y. Bokardova). In 1630, Jean Chaplin, advisor to Cardinal Richelieu, publishes "Lettre sur l'art dramatique", letter-a treatise on dramatic art, in which, following Abbe D'Aubignac and Julius Scaliger, he defends the rule of three unities; in 1674, the rules of classical theater, as well as the rules of good, correct literature in general, are immortalized in Baulo's poem-treatise "Poetic Art", which prescribes writers and playwrights to "write with precision, elegance, inspiration" (translated by E. L. Linetskaya). The desire of writers and theorists for the rational use of language leads to the demand for technical perfection ^{[14, p. 66]}: "the decisions of <the writer> are devoid of pre-rational or anti-rational intuition" ^{[15, p. 156]}, Goye writes about the requirements put forward by Boileau.

Researchers note that the work of La Rochefoucauld, who is close to the Jansenist circles of Port Royal, mainly meets the requirements for classical literature in general ^{[24, p. 281]}. "Maxims" as exemplary representatives of their genre express common truths (genetic analysis of the collection indicates a desire to typify the situations described: for example, in maxim 261, "education that princes receive" of the first edition was subsequently replaced by "education that young people receive", etc.), are concise, do not contain colloquialisms, have a strict and rational composition, which is easy to analyze and compare with the norms formulated by the grammar of the Piano due to the brevity of the collection's sayings.

The theorists of the XVII century base their theories of "ordo naturalis", the natural order, on logical presuppositions ^{[6, pp. 157-164]} (the predicate must be used with a logical subject, which determines the rules for matching the subject and predicate associated with them, etc.). The absence of cases in the French language makes following strict rules necessary not only for management syntax, but also the direction of thought, interpretation of the recipient. "Maxims" overwhelmingly correspond to all syntactic rules, which was statistically proved by Jean-Maurice Martin and Jean Molineau, who reduced the structure of Maxime La Rochefoucauld to a set of clear schemes. So, they divided all the maxims into 3 families (simple, complex, with parallelisms), within which there is a division into types (comparisons, definitions, etc.) according to logical and semantic features, and then schemes and microtypes according to morpho-syntactic features). They proved the correctness and logic of the language of the collection by analyzing complex and long maxims into simpler schemes, which are used in abundance in shorter sayings. So, for example, maxim 68 can be disassembled into a number of segments, each of which in other sayings is the basis of a full-fledged maxim: a simple definition using a scheme with an impersonal verb ("Il est difficile de d?finir l'amour", "It is difficult to define love"), a number of definitions ("dans les esprits c'est une sympathie", "dans le corps c'<...>est une envie <...> de poss?der", "In the mind it is sympathy, in the body it is the desire to possess"), etc. Such an analysis demonstrates syntactic clarity and "stylistic simplicitas", simplicity ^{[10, p. 212]}, so valued in classical literature. As Arno and Lanslo demand, "all parts of speech are simply expressed <...>, not a single word is superfluous or insufficient" ^{[6, p. 160]}.

Catherine Costentin, continuing the syntactic analysis of "Maxims" in diachrony, also demonstrates that the "natural" word order is observed in La Rochefoucauld as in maxims, which have not changed in various editions —

"Peu de gens connaissent la mort" ("Few people know death". The beginning of maxim 23 with the subject–predicate – direct complement structure).

— and as a result of simplifying maxims in order to increase their syntactic clarity during the editing of the collection, as, for example, in maxim 218 in the Gilber manuscript, and then the second edition of 1666.:

"L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vicese croit forc? de rendre ? la vertu" ("Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice considers itself obliged to pay to virtue").

"L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend ? la vertu" ("Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue").

At the same time, it is worth adding that such transformations are motivated not only by syntax: the new version is prosodically and rhythmically symmetrical. La Rochefoucauld, being a writer, not a grammarian, strives to accompany the required syntactic purity with stylistic figures, consonances, paradoxes. Following the 218th maxim, maxims 19, 38, 40, 248, 385 also become more rhythmic between editions. Nevertheless, there are also counterexamples, such as maxim 86:

«Notre d?fiance justifie (8) // la tromperie (4) // d’autrui (2)».

"Notre d?fiance justifie la tromperie des autres" (in both cases: "Our distrust justifies someone else's deception").

Catherine Kostenten theorizes that this was done, on the one hand, out of a conscious desire for semantic unification, and on the other because of the desire to diversify the rhythm of maxims in order to keep the reader's attention and play on his aesthetic expectations ^{[10, p. 221]}.

Analysis of such examples indicates the existence of a point of view that denies the decisive influence of the requirements for classical literature on the work of La Rochefoucauld. M. V. Razumovskaya notes that moralistic experiments are less regulated by strict norms compared to more "monumental" genres like tragedy ^{[2, p. 16]}. Louis Van Delft agrees that maxims "developed empirically, without the supervision of dogmas" ^{[11, p. 288]}. Eric Tourette argues that under the classical form of the maxim, one can discern "the dynamism of verbs, the elasticity of the dimensions of referents, or the instability of their very existence, obsession with the movement of a constantly changing world" ^{[24, p. 35]} — all signs of the influence of the Baroque.

Claire Badiou-Montferrand speaks out against the dependence of La Rochefoucauld's work on prescriptive grammar: following Pierre le Goffic, she expresses a theory about "enargeia", the direct persuasiveness and saturation of the stylistic texture of "Maxim", bypassing the grammatical requirements of classical theorists ^[7] (so, she believes that figures can be a natural continuation and expression of thoughts and the author's ideas, and not necessarily the result of a long rational understanding and improvement of the text). Defending La Rochefoucauld's right to aesthetic and stylistic independence and freedom, she questions the role of the requirements of the grammar and logic of Port Royal in his creative process and protects him from reproaches of imitation and imitation of the model formulated by theorists.

At the level of the collection's content, Eric Turka directly contrasts the Jansenist tradition of teaching and guiding with La Rochefoucauld's more restrained descriptive approach, stating, following Laurence Plasene, the small proportions of the verbs devoir and falloir in the collection: "in contrast to the great tradition of Jansenist moralists, who, following Pascal, are trying to teach a lesson to their readers [...], La Rochefoucauld is content with a simple description humanity is in decline, however, without claiming to correct their shortcomings" ^{[25, p. 2]}.

Summing up, the lexical and stylistic analysis of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, as well as a critical examination of opinions for and against the idea of the originality of La Rochefoucauld's work, testifies to one thing: although the Duke's works have entered the canon of classical literature, it is also undeniable that they are inspired not only by the normative works of the era. La Rochefoucauld was greatly influenced by the historical context of the era, the beliefs and habits of the French secular elite, the literary tradition of the previous era and the philosophical works of contemporaries, the complex synthesis of which led to the formation of a unique and specific vision of the world, in some aspects (La Rochefoucauld's pessimism, departure from religious dogmas) that did not coincide with the widespread worldview of the era. Thanks to this, the semantic and linguistic richness contained in clear and concise maxims continues to attract the attention of researchers of various disciplines to this day.