Collection: Les Caractères

Context and Form
Published in 1688 under the title Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle, La Bruyère’s collection stands at the crossroads of classical moral philosophy and sharp social satire. Drawing authority from a French rendering of Theophrastus’s ancient Characters, which he placed alongside his own, La Bruyère adapts the antique art of typology to the France of Louis XIV. The book is not a continuous narrative but a constellation of maxims, reflections, and vivid portraits that dissect both universal human motives and the particular habits of his century.

Structure and Voice
The work unfolds in a series of thematic chapters that move from the life of the mind to the marketplace, from the town to the court, from private sentiment to the stage of public reputation. Within each chapter, terse aphorisms alternate with miniature scenes and character sketches in which figures move under thin classical masks. Names such as Arrias or Gnathon serve as emblematic labels rather than realist identities, allowing La Bruyère to capture types: the ostentatiously learned, the egoist who makes everything about himself, the grandee insulated by privilege, the devout hardened into bigotry, the author hungry for applause. The prose is crystalline and epigrammatic, using antithesis, hyperbole, and sudden turns to unmask pretension in a single stroke.

Society Under the Lens
La Bruyère reads society as a theater where self-love pursues esteem through costume changes. At court, he observes the choreography of access, favor, and flattery, a world in which speech is calculation and silence an art. In the city he catches the rhythms of commerce and fashion, the rise of fortunes and the scramble for titles. Conversation becomes a moral test: some dominate, some feign wit, some listen only to speak, few actually exchange ideas. He scrutinizes writers and critics, tracing the economy of praise, imitation, and envy that shapes reputations. The clergy and pulpit receive both respect and satire, depending on whether zeal is joined to charity or to vanity. His sections on women register the roles and constraints of the salon and the household while exposing gallantry’s hypocrisies and the temptations of coquetry and slander. Everywhere the spectacle of fashion reveals its law: novelty parades as taste, and opinion rules more imperiously than truth.

View of Human Nature
Beneath the specificities of rank, office, and dress, La Bruyère seeks the constants of character. Self-love distorts judgment; the pursuit of distinction produces folly; envy divides those who most resemble one another. Much of what passes for reason is habit, much of what passes for virtue is reputation. Yet the book is not nihilistic. It sketches a demanding ideal of merit that prizes sincerity, modesty, and justice, and it suggests that clear self-knowledge, however painful, opens a path to decency. The brevity of the aphorism serves this ethic: a sudden flash reveals what long discourse conceals.

Art of the Portrait
The portraits are built from concrete details, gestures at a levee, a phrase in a salon, the cut of a coat, a borrowed opinion, which, when assembled, make a moral physiognomy. La Bruyère rarely names contemporaries openly, but his types are vivid enough to sting; the success of the book lay partly in readers’ eagerness to recognize acquaintances and partly in the chilly pleasure of recognizing themselves.

Legacy
Revised and expanded in later editions, Les Caractères became a touchstone of French classicism, allied with Pascal and La Rochefoucauld yet distinct in its social breadth. It preserves an anatomy of the Grand Siècle while claiming universality: fashions change, the springs of conduct remain. Its sentences travel well because they compress observation into form, turning a century’s manners into portraits of humankind.