for it only makes one softhearted, and it should be left to the common people, for they never do anything because of reason and have to be moved to action by their emotions.]31
La Rochefoucauld’s rejection of pity, like that of Descartes, sets out a distinction between greater souls and the vulgar. He indicates his profound civility but also his concomitant desire to keep himself at a distance; he goes on to say that he likes his friends, although he does not show it in “caresses.” This is a Stoic rejection of pity, made all the more compelling for being told in the first person with an account of that person’s struggles; here, the theories of antiquity are turned into a very seventeenth-century self-portrait.
What happens when that moral world of the portrait becomes concentrated in the form of the maxim? La Rochefoucauld’s carefully poised barbs stay familiarly in the territory set out by Descartes, and also turn around the Aristotelian linking of pity with fear, but his characteristic renaming of virtue lends the familiar material a virtuosic rhetorical turn: “Ce qu’on nomme libéralité n’est le plus souvent que la vanité de donner, que nous aimons mieux que ce que nous donnons.”32 [“What is called generosity is most often just the vanity of giving, which we like more than what we give”] (72). This critique of generous emotions and actions participates in the important tradition of paradiastole, in which one redescribes something so that it may be seen in a different light than usual, a trope central to the moralist project. The famous maxim “Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés” [“Our virtues are usually only vices in disguise”] (37), which La Rochefoucauld sets as the epigram of his 1678 edition, is a baseline example of the trope, central to early modern political writing.33 In La Rochefoucauld’s reformulation of the Aristotelian-Cartesian position, the maxim’s pithiness and its presence among other paradiastolic zingers makes it seem as though he is reversing a standard position rather than simply repeating a very old insight. The sense of effort apparent in the self-portrait disappears, and in its place comes a generalized position. In maxim 264, we find an edited reworking of the familiar formula:
La pitié est souvent un sentiment de nos propres maux dans les maux d’autrui; c’est une habile prévoyance des malheurs où nous pouvons tomber; nous donnons du secours aux autres, pour les engager à nous en donner en des semblables occasions, et ces services que nous leur rendons sont, à proprement parler, des biens que nous nous faisons à nous-mêmes par avance.34
[Pity is often feeling our own sufferings in those of others, a shrewd precaution against misfortunes that may befall us. We give help to others so that they have to do the same for us on similar occasions, and these kindnesses we do them are, to put it plainly, gifts we bestow on ourselves in advance.] (72)
The mimetic power of the maxim means that already by Richelet’s dictionary of 1680 La Rochefoucauld’s iteration is given as the first usage under the definition of “pitié”:
Compassion. Douleur qu’on a du mal d’autrui. (La pitié est souvent un sentiment de nos propres maux dans les maux d’autrui. C’est une habile prévoiance des maux où nous pouvons tomber. Mémoires de Monsieur le Duc de la Roche-Foucaut.)35
[Compassion, A pain one has for the suffering of another. (Pity is often feeling our own sufferings in those of others. It is a shrewd precaution against misfortunes that may befall us. Memoirs of Monsieur le Duc de la Roche-Foucaut.)]
Richelet’s speedy recycling of La Rochefoucauld sets the moralist up on the same standing as Aristotle, whose Rhetoric is the first text cited under his definition of “compassion.” If Descartes considers Aristotle within the terms of a seventeenth-century philosophy of the passions, it is La Rochefoucauld’s spin on that conversation which fixes and Frenchifies the pity-fear dyad within the terms of worldly observation. This is not the redemption of pity that Descartes sees in the disinterest of the “généreux”; rather, it is a canny accrual of compassion points. In La Rochefoucauld’s rhetorically deft handling of the question, the economically inflected language of the moralist tradition allows him almost to mock pity as a form of anxious savings policy. This economic language will be taken up not only by the Richelet dictionary but also by other devoted readers.
Christian Emotional Economies: Jacques Esprit
For Jacques Esprit, a Jansenist collaborator of La Rochefoucauld, pity is a force which regulates all social transactions.36 In La fausseté des vertus humaines (1678) Esprit describes a complicated collaboration between Providence and personal intervention that attenuates human suffering:
La vie de l’homme est sujette à tant de sortes de maux, d’infortunes et de traverses, qu’il seroit presque toûjours consumé d’ennuis et de déplaisirs, si personne n’étoit sensible à ses peines et ne prenoit soin de les adoucir: Mais la Providence a pourvû à son soulagement d’une manière admirable par les différentes liaisons qu’elle a établies entre les hommes; car ces liaisons les engagent à s’intéresser à ce qui les touché, et à s’assister mutuellement.37
[The life of men is subject to so many kinds of ills, infortunes and setbacks, that they would be almost always consumed by sorrow or displeasure, if no one were aware of our sufferings and took no care to soften them. But the foresight of Providence has provided relief in an admirable way through establishing various relations between men; for these relations bring them to be interested in what touches them, and to help each other mutually.]
Providence provides not just family but also a larger sense of shared humanity:
Mais comme la proximité du sang ne s’étend qu’à un petit nombre de personnes, et que l’amitié est encore plus limitée, la pluspart des miserables seroient abandonnés, si la même Providence n’eût trouvé le secret de les joindre aux plus heureux par la nature qui leur est commune. (368)
[But since the proximity of blood extends only to a small number of persons, and since friendship is even more limited, most sufferers would be abandoned had not this same Providence found the secret to join them to the happiest through their common nature.]
In this case, pity is a contrivance that brings together divine and human assistance. Those who feel pity provide a sort of social service for those without friends or family; they “tendent les mains aux personnes qui leur sont le plus indifférentes” (368) [“reach out their hands to those with whom they have no connection”]. For Esprit, our self-love certainly underwrites such an emotion; when we see people who help the poor, he notes that
quoy que leurs actions nous persuadent qu’ils ont une veritable compassion des afflictions et des miseres de leur prochain, ce sont des gens qui n’ont pitié que d’eux-mêmes, qui se servent, s’assistent et se soulagent en la personne des autres. (371–72)
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