Recommendations
Books Like Oraisons funèbres by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
Works that meditate on greatness through its end
Bossuet's method is the sudden reversal — the long portrait of royal grandeur followed by 'Mais voici le moment redoutable,' the sudden confrontation with the grave. These works share that same reversal: they build up the human construction in order to reveal what undoes it.
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Buy on AmazonDiscours sur l'histoire universelle
by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
The theological framework — Bossuet's providential history of the world from creation to Charlemagne; the philosophy of history that underlies the orations; the best single-volume entry into Bossuet's thought
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Buy on AmazonSermons
by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
The court sermons — preached before Louis XIV at Versailles; the complete picture of Bossuet as preacher; the funeral orations are the high points of a sustained oratorical career spanning forty years
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Buy on AmazonLes Pensées
by Blaise Pascal
The theological parallel — Pascal and Bossuet are the two supreme French writers on the human condition before God; Pascal's fragmentary meditation and Bossuet's sustained oratory are the two forms through which Jansenism and Gallican Catholicism confronted mortality
- 4Buy on Amazon
Confessions
by Saint Augustine
The theological ancestor — Bossuet's oratory is steeped in Augustine's rhetoric and theology; the analysis of human pride and the necessity of divine grace that Augustine develops is what Bossuet performs at every royal funeral
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Les Aventures de Télémaque
by François de Fénelon
The great counter-text — Fénelon and Bossuet are the two dominant churchmen of the late reign of Louis XIV; their theological and political quarrel (Quietism, the education of the Dauphin) is the central drama of the French church under Louis XIV
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Éloge funèbre de Mirabeau
by Honoré de Mirabeau
The revolutionary adaptation — the revolutionary funeral oration after Mirabeau's death (1791) is the genre Bossuet created applied to a new political context; the rhetoric of royal death becomes the rhetoric of republican heroism
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Buy on AmazonDe Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
The modern parallel — Wilde's letter from prison is the secular equivalent of the Bossuetian meditation on fallen greatness; the distance from glory to imprisonment as the occasion for a sustained meditation on art, suffering, and self-knowledge
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Buy on AmazonMémoires d'outre-tombe
by François-René de Chateaubriand
The romantic descendant — Chateaubriand's memoirs are written 'from beyond the tomb' in explicit dialogue with Bossuet's funeral oratory; the romantic meditation on historical vanity that inherits and transforms the Bossuetian genre
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