Chamfort: A Man for Our Time
‘Human society must be begun again’, wrote Chamfort, who, after delighting the Court and the fashionable world, became an eloquent prophet of the Revolution. By Alaric Jacob.
No man who could say on his death bed: Je m’en vais enfin de ce monde ou il faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze could ever be wholly forgotten. Yet the degree of neglect which the reputation of Chamfort has suffered in the 180 years since his death is so remarkable that it cries out for analysis.
No biography of Chamfort has ever appeared in France; the best account of his life is still the essay which his faithful friend the historian Pierre-Louis Guinguéné wrote as an introduction to the first edition of Chamfort’s collected works published, just after his death, in 1795.
In England, Matthew Arnold gave Chamfort a couple of paragraphs, while Mr Cyril Connolly, twenty-five years ago, devoted to him a few pages of The Unquiet Grave. Yet Chamfort is, after all, one of the three or four greatest writers of maxims in French literature. La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere may surpass him in universality, and certainly in urbanity.
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