Les Maximes Reading Order

Les Maximes (1665) by François de La Rochefoucauld are the supreme achievement of the French moralist tradition — 504 brief sentences on the hidden motives of human behavior, each a little detonation of amour-propre (self-love) revealing that virtue, courage, gratitude, and friendship are almost always disguised forms of self-interest. La Rochefoucauld was a soldier who had been gravely wounded in the Fronde (a shotgun blast destroyed his sight for two years), a salonnier intimate of Madame de Sablé and Madame de Lafayette, and a man with no patience for the moral consolations through which people avoid seeing themselves clearly. The maxim form — the aphorism reduced to its sharpest possible point — is the ideal vehicle for this kind of moral unmasking: it admits of no qualification, no narrative escape, no gradual softening. 'La vanité des autres nous blesse parce qu'elle blesse notre vanité' (The vanity of others offends us because it offends our own vanity) — the sentence enacts the very mechanism it describes. The Maximes went through five editions in La Rochefoucauld's lifetime (1665–1678), each one refined, some maxims dropped, new ones added. They were composed in the salon of Madame de Sablé in a process of collective revision that included Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, and Jacques Esprit — the maxim as a social rather than solitary form.