Justice & Law Quote by Jean de La Bruyère

Poverty gets indicted so often it starts to feel like a comforting alibi: blame the conditions, absolve the person, and let the rest of society off the hook. La Bruyere, a sharp-eyed moralist of Louis XIV's France, won’t let that story stand unchallenged. His line is built like a courtroom cross-examination: yes, poverty can "mother" crime, but the real paternal force is stupidity - not ignorance, not misfortune, but the everyday failure of judgment. The family metaphor matters. A mother suggests origin, necessity, the pressures of birth; a father suggests authority, direction, the shaping hand. He’s separating circumstance from agency, insisting that deprivation may set the stage, but bad sense writes the script.

The subtext is both elitist and bracing. La Bruyere wrote for a society obsessed with decorum and hierarchy, where the court performed rationality while indulging in vanity. Calling "lack of good sense" the father of crime quietly targets not only the desperate thief but the well-fed schemer: the aristocrat gambling fortunes, the bureaucrat selling favors, the hypocrite preaching virtue while cultivating vice. Poverty may explain certain crimes, but it doesn’t explain the spectacularly avoidable ones committed by people with options.

The wit lies in the rebalancing. He grants the fashionable pity for the poor, then pivots to a harsher, more universally applicable culprit: foolishness. It’s an indictment that travels upward as easily as it travels down, and that’s why it still lands.