Sablé has long occupied the background of early modern French
philosophy. She has survived in intellectual history as the patron of
La Rochefoucauld, as the hostess of a theological salon, and as the
correspondent of Blaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld. These ancillary
roles have obscured her original contributions to moral philosophy in
her writings. In her maxims, Sablé develops a distinctive critique of
moral virtue. She claims that virtue is a mask of vice; usually of
pride, and that self-interest is the habitual motor behind altruistic
actions. This critique of virtue is a social critique inasmuch as it
unmasks the mechanism of self-aggrandizement under the cover of virtue
in the court hierarchy of the period. With her characteristic
moderation, Sablé insists that friendship constitutes an exception to
the social charade of masked self-interest. In the intimacies of
mutually sacrificial friendship, authentic virtue can flourish.
Sablé's dismissal of the claims of natural moral virtue, and her
fideistic insistence that true moral order can only be grasped in the
light of faith, reflect her adherence to Jansenism, the
neo-Augustinian movement in Catholicism which she defended in both
civil and ecclesiastical circles.
1. Biography
Madeleine de Souvré was born in 1598 to an ancient aristocratic family
in Le Perche, a region in western France. Prominent in court circles,
her father Gilles de Souvré was a marshal of France and served as the
governor of Louis XIII in his minority. Her mother was Françoise de
Bailleul, dame de Renouard. In the political controversies of the
period, the Souvré family sided with the parti dévot, a faction of
militant Catholics who wanted France's foreign policy to stress an
international Catholic alliance (notably with Spain and Austria)
against the Protestant, Orthodox, and Islamic powers. In 1610
Madeleine de Souvré was named lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie de
Medicis, the mother of Louis XIII and the regent of France. Although
little is known about Mademoiselle de Souvré's education, it is clear
that early in her education she acquired a knowledge of Spanish
literature. Balthasar Gracián's L'oraculo manual would prove
especially influential in Sablé's later reflections on the nature of
virtue.
In 1614, Madeleine de Souvré married Philippe Emmanuel de Laval,
marquis de Sablé. Although Madame de Sablé would bear nine children,
only four survived childhood: Urbain, marquis de Bois-Dauphin; Henri,
Bishop of La Rochelle; Guy, a military officer; and Marie, a
cloistered nun. By all accounts, the marriage was an unhappy one, for
both spouses conducted scarcely concealed romantic affairs as they led
increasingly separate existences.
From the beginning of her marriage, Sablé frequented the literary
salons of Paris. Three in particular developed her philosophical
culture. In the celebrated chambre bleu of Madame de Rambouillet,
Sablé became an ardent reader of the works of Montaigne and was
introduced to the theories of Descartes. At the literary samedis of
Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Sablé studied the gradations of love that
were the central preoccupation of the salon's literary production. At
the salon of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, Sablé practiced the literary
vogue of the portrait moral, in which the author sketched the
characteristic vices and virtues of a prominent courtier presented
under a pseudonym. This predilection for moral psychology and
skepticism concerning the claims of knowledge helped shape the
philosophical themes Sablé would treat in her writings of maturity.
The 1640s inaugurated a more somber period in Sablé's life. In 1640,
the death of her husband left her in a precarious financial situation,
and a family quarrel over the inheritance provoked a lawsuit against
her eldest son, Urbain. In 1646, the death of her son Guy at the
battle of Dunkirk plunged her into prolonged mourning.
The period also marked a religious conversion. Sablé increasingly
frequented the Parisian convent of Port-Royal, the citadel of the
Jansenist movement. Jansenism stressed the depth of human depravity,
complete reliance on grace for salvation, and the need to lead an
austere moral life opposed to the amusements of the world. Sablé's
moral qualms about frequent reception of the sacraments occasioned
Antoine Arnauld's composition of On Frequent Communion (1642), a
treatise attacking the alleged moral laxism of the Jesuits. By the
1650s Sablé would emerge as a partisan of Jansenism and as a prominent
defender of the embattled convent of Port-Royal, but her continued
participation in the salon culture of the capital would raise doubts
as to the depth of her conversion to the cause's moral rigorism.
By the end of the decade, Sablé emerged as the hostess of her own
salon, first in the fashionable Place Royale (1648-1655) and then in
the apartment she had constructed on the grounds of the Port-Royal
convent (1655-1678). The salon specialized in the production of the
literary genre of the maxime, a concise, epigrammatic phrase that
explored the contradictions of human psychology. A salon member,
François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, quickly emerged as the master of
the genre. Sablé served as a critic and editor for La Rochefoucauld's
maxims, but she also composed her own maxims, which were published
posthumously. Philosophical sessions included papers by Madame de
Brégy on the Stoicism of Epictetus, Clausure on Cartesianism, Sourdis
on the problem of the vacuum, and Arnauld d'Andilly on the limits of
patriotism. As in other salons, the nature and varieties of love were
the primary topic of debate. Leading philosophical members of the
salon included Blaise Pascal, Gilberte Pascal Périer, Antoine Arnauld,
Pierre Nicole, and Madame de Sévigné.
As she reemerged into Parisian high society, Sablé revealed her
diplomatic skills. During the Fronde (1648-1653), the intermittent
civil war that pitted aristocrats and parliamentarians against the
throne, she managed to maintain close friendships with members of both
sides. Despite her allegiance to Jansenism, she included Jesuits and
anti-Jansenist laity among her salon guests. When the persecution of
the Jansenists, especially the nuns of Port-Royal, intensified in the
1660s, she labored to affect the reconciliation of the warring
factions. Pope Clement IX's "Peace of the Church" (1669), which lifted
the censures from the Port-Royal community, reflected in part her
interventions at the papal court.
Madame de Sablé died in her Port-Royal apartment on January 16, 1678.
2. Works
Sablé's extant writings fall into three categories: a collection of
maxims, a treatise on friendship, and her letters.
Published posthumously in 1678 by Abbé Nicolas d'Ailly, Maximes de Mme
la Marquise de Sablé constitutes Sablé's most substantial contribution
to moral philosophy. In this collection of maxims, Sablé analyzes the
vices that mask themselves as virtues in the aristocratic society of
the period. Unlike her colleague La Rochefoucauld, however, she
insists that love constitutes an exception to the domination of vice.
Although her maxims focus primarily on questions of virtue and vice,
Sablé also studies epistemological questions, especially those
surrounding the relationship between power and knowledge. In her
skeptical study of virtue and power, Sablé is clearly influenced by
Montaigne, Graci‡n, and La Rochefoucauld. She differs from her
sources, however, in the characteristic moderation by which she judges
the influence of self-interest in social relations.
The subsequent history of Sablé's maximes constitutes a cautionary
tale on the survival of works by women philosophers. Often published
in anthologies featuring La Rochefoucauld's maxims, Sablé's maxims
were often falsely attributed to her protégé. Sablé's most extensive
maxim, actually a miniature essay condemning attendance at theatrical
performances (maxim no. 80), was attributed for centuries to Blaise
Pascal. A passage in Pascal's Pensées condemning the theater bears a
striking resemblance to the phrases of Sablé. Critics concluded that
it must have been Sablé who copied Pascal, given the literary
preeminence of the latter. The influential Brunschvicg (1904) and
Lafuma (1951) editions of Pascal in the early twentieth century
continued this misattribution. Only at the end of the twentieth
century was this critique of theater reattributed to Sablé herself.
Sellier's recent edition of the Pensées (1991, 2000) notes that it was
clearly Pascal who copied and altered the critique of theater
originally authored by Sablé.
First published by Victor Cousin in the nineteenth-century, Sablé's
brief treatise On Friendship argues that virtue can be experienced
within the confines of intimate friendship. Unlike other social
relationships, where motivations remain masked and vulnerable to
misinterpretation, friendship permits one to discover the internal
motivation behind the external action of one's partner.
An extensive correspondence of Sablé also survives in the archives of
the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in scattered biographical
publications. Barthélemy's scholarly study of Sablé's salon associates
(1865) provides an ample selection of the letters written by and to
the marquise. Although most of the letters deal with practical affairs
concerning Sablé's person, family, and salon, some of the letters deal
with philosophical issues related to the religious controversies of
the period. Such issues include the relationship between grace and
free will, the limits of civil and ecclesiastical authority in matters
of conscience, and the immortality of the human soul. Philosophical
correspondents include Blaise Pascal, Antoine Arnauld, Mère Angélique
Arnauld, Mère Agnès Arnauld, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld
d'Andilly, Pierre Nicole, Antoine Menjot, and Jean Domat.
3. Philosophical Theses
Sablé's philosophical reflections are limited to the areas of ethics
and epistemology. In moral philosophy, she focuses on the tendency of
the vice of pride to disguise itself as virtue. In epistemology, she
examines the relationship between power and the claims to truth. In
both her moral theory and her theory of knowledge, she mitigates her
skepticism. Despite the presence of vice behind many surface virtues,
some apparently virtuous actions actually reflect authentic virtue in
the agent. Although power has corrupted some claims to truth in court
society, certain claims to truth – notably claims to religious truth
based on obedience to divine revelation – are more than credible.
a. Virtue Theory
In many passages, Sablé condemns apparent exercises of virtue as
expressions of vice. Altruism often masks the will to dominate the
other. Self-aggrandizement is the motor of apparently charitable
action. Her critique of virtue is a political critique, inasmuch as
she examines the depredations of occulted egoism in the culture of the
court.
Sablé analyzes how this masked vice operates within the polite society
of the period. "Virtue is not always where one sees actions that
appear virtuous. Sometimes one only recognizes a favor in order to
establish one's reputation or even to be more firmly ungrateful toward
favors one does not wish to recognize" (Maxim no. 74). Rather than
expressing spontaneous gratitude, public expressions of thanksgiving
are a calculated expression of one's desire to acquire social power or
to elude the moral duty to recognize one's actual debts. The pivot of
salon culture, polite conversation, similarly turns on the self's
desire to remain the center of attention rather than on any concern to
accommodate the needs of others. "Everyone is so busy with her
interests and passions that she always wants to talk about them
without entering into the interests and passions of those with whom
she is speaking, although they have the same need to be heard and
helped" (Maxim no. 29). Under the guise of charitable speech and
action, high society's conventions of politeness permit the individual
to remain enclosed within selfish interests that refuse to recognize,
let alone yield to, the more pressing claims of the neighbor.
Sablé's moral critique of society is especially pronounced in her
treatment of wealth. Genteel society's surface claim to prize the
acquisition of virtue is undercut by its emotional concentration on
the vagaries of material fortune. It is social status, not moral
status, that actually dominates human concern. "Good fortune almost
always makes some change in the procedure, the tone, and the manner of
conversation and action…if we esteemed virtue more than any other
thing, then neither any favor nor any promotion would ever change the
heart or the face of people" (Maxim no.32). Our emotional reaction to
the slightest promotion or demotion in social status, contrasted with
our emotional indifference to the commission of a vice, indicates that
it is social power rather than perfection in virtue that constitutes
our supreme good in the hierarchy of values. In particular, the
acquisition of money focuses our desires. "It is quite a common fault
never to be happy with one's fortune and never unhappy with one's
soul" (Maxim no.67). Despite the insistence on the paramount value of
religious and moral values in the political and educational rhetoric
of the period, it is economic status that actually occupies pride of
place. The hope of enhancement of that status and the fear of its
erosion stubbornly poisons public virtuous action.
b. Ethics of Love
Despite the omnipresence of vice posing as virtue in the public arena,
authentic virtue survives in the arena of interpersonal friendship.
Sablé argues that in the experience of love, one acquires knowledge of
the other's moral motivation that cannot be doubted. It is here that
altruism and self-sacrifice actually operate.
Unlike political exercises of altruism, love by its nature possesses
an internal transparency that does not permit it to be mistaken for
another disposition. "Love has a character so particular that one can
neither hide it where it is nor pretend it exists where it is not"
(Maxim no.80). Other virtues may be feigned if the agent has ulterior
motives for dominating the other. In love, however, the external acts
and the internal dispositions of the agent become one. "Love is to the
soul of the one who loves what the soul is to the body of the one it
animates" (Maxim no. 79).
Sablé insists that it is friendship rather than romance that
constitutes the proper locus for the emergence of this virtuous love.
Freed from passion, the mature experience of friendship permits one to
appreciate the other moral virtues of one's partner disclosed in the
transparency of mutual love. "Friendship is a species of virtue which
can only be founded upon the esteem of the person loved, that is, upon
qualities of the soul, such as fidelity, generosity and discretion,
and on good qualities of mind" (Of Friendship). This disclosure of the
other person's moral constitution through the experience of friendship
requires a basic equality between the partners. "It is also necessary
that friendship be reciprocal, because in friendship one cannot, as in
romantic love, love without being loved" (On Friendship). Whereas
romantic love can veil the moral motivations of the moral agent due to
passion and the inequality of the partners, the sober, egalitarian
relation of friendship permits a veridical disclosure of moral
character through mutual respect and sacrifice.
Sablé's praise of the virtue present in friendship contrasts sharply
with the critique of love developed by her colleague La Rochefoucauld.
In his own maxims, La Rochefoucald condemns friendship as only another
outcropping of vicious self-centeredness. "What humanity has named
friendship is only a business, a reciprocal arrangement of interests,
only an exchange of services. At bottom, it is only a type of commerce
where self-love is always designing to win something" (Maxim. No 83).
For La Rochefoucauld, the egotism disguised as virtue permeates both
the public and private spheres of human interaction. For Sablé,
however, the empire of vice is more limited. In the intimate sphere of
interpersonal love, authentic virtue can manifest itself and be
properly interpreted by the beloved other. It is only in egalitarian
friendship, however, that virtue can make such a rare and transparent
manifestation, and not in the passion of romance nor in the hierarchy
of marriage.
c. Moral Rigorism
In critiquing the predominant vices of her society, Sablé devotes
particular attention to the theater. Her most famous maxim is an
extended paragraph-long meditation on the dangers of attendance at
theatrical performances. Her condemnation of the theater is
categorical. "All the great diversions are dangerous for the Christian
life, but among all those which the world has invented, there is none
greater to fear than the theater" (Maxim no. 80). This censure of the
theater is typical of the moral rigorism of the Jansenist movement.
Pierre Nicole, a close friend and correspondent of Sablé, presented
the most sustained Jansenist brief against theatrical performances in
his Traité de la Comédie (1667).
Sablé's argument against attendance at theatrical performances differs
sensibly from the standard arguments used by Christian moralists of
the period. The moral argument against Christian involvement in the
theater usually appeared for two reasons. First, many of the pieces
played upon the stage of the period were licentious in nature. As
such, they could only constitute occasions of sin, which the upright
Christian should scrupulously avoid. Second, the theaters themselves
were venues for moral licentiousness. Several Parisian theaters were
notorious for the prostitution openly practiced in their corridors.
Such moral considerations had led both the Catholic and Protestant
churches to ban actors from the sacraments and to deny church burial
to them.
For Sablé, however, it is not the licentiousness of the theater that
constitutes its greatest moral danger. The actual moral danger lies in
the attractiveness with which the theater can present counterfeits of
reasonable love among the characters on the stage. Imitating the
romantic plays they watch, audience members can easily develop
sentiments of affection that have been ripped out of their proper
place in the sober cultivation of friendship in actual life. ""It [the
theater] is so natural and so delicate a representation of the
passions that it makes them come alive and makes them arise in our
hearts. This is especially true of love when one presents a chaste and
honest love, because the more it seems innocent to innocent souls, the
more are those souls susceptible to theater's effects" (Maxim no. 81).
The temptation of obvious vice in licentious plays can be easily
combated, but the seduction of a more innocent, sentimental love in
decent plays is more difficult to resist. By a mimetic effect, such
romantic idylls encourage the audience to cultivate loving
relationships rooted in sentiment for phantom partners rather than in
virtuous sacrifice for actual partners. The one social venue where
authentic virtue has the greatest place to emerge, egalitarian
friendship, has been distorted by the theater into a realm of fantasy
untethered from moral endeavor. The primness of the sentiments
celebrated by decent theatrical pieces does not diminish the moral
dangers fostered by such an illusion of love.
d. Epistemology and Skepticism
Echoing Montaigne, whom she had studied during her early career as a
salonnière, Sablé often confesses skepticism concerning the claims of
human knowledge. Authentic science ultimately affirms the incertitude
of its own propositions and the depth of human ignorance. To this
Renaissance vein of skepticism, Sablé adds her own distinctive
emphases. Human error is not due to the generic infirmity of the human
mind alone; it is often induced by the manipulations of power
practiced in cultivated society. Faithful to her Jansenist creed,
Sablé insists that religious and moral knowledge grounded upon divine
self-revelation is exempt from the dangers of self-deception.
In several passages, Sablé develops her own version of Socratic
ignorance. The truly wise person acknowledges his or her lack of
knowledge. "The greatest wisdom of humanity is to know its folly"
(Maxim no. 8). Authentic pursuit of knowledge permits the seeker to
affirm the utter lack of certain knowledge that is the lot of the
human mind. "The study of and search for truth only make us see, by
experience, the ignorance that is naturally ours" (Maxim no. 38).
If error is endemic to human noetic experience, due to the finitude
and the fallibility of the human intellect, then contemporary society
has increased the risk of error by the emphasis it places upon
external rhetorical devices. The polite conversation of the salon is
exemplary of the ease with which an inquiring subject can be seduced
into error by the power of a seductive rhetoric that masks
insubstantial or fallacious truth-claims. "The exterior and the
circumstances often elicit greater respect than the interior and the
reality. A poor manner spoils everything, even justice and reason. The
how is the most important of things. The appearance we give gilds,
trims, and sweetens even the most troubling things" (Maxim no. 48). In
a society that prizes external ornament, persuasive rhetoric can
easily make the false credible; conversely, threadbare rhetoric can
easily make the truth appear implausible. The development of knowledge
is not a serene adjudication of the conflicting evidence concerning a
controverted issue; it is embedded in a network of power where the
most attractive, rather than the most truthful, proposition wins
adherence.
In this universe of human incertitude and error, there is one
exception. While one must suspend judgment as much as possible
concerning claims to truth by other human beings, one must surrender
one's judgments to what God himself has revealed for one's salvation.
Only in the realm of salvific truth, revealed by an omniscient God,
can the human person discover a truth perfectly safeguarded from
error. "As nothing is weaker and less reasonable than to submit one's
judgment to that of someone else, rather than using one's own, nothing
is greater and more intelligent than to blindly submit one's judgment
to God, by believing on His word everything that He says" (Maxim no.
1). This affirmation of the necessity of blind submission to God's
self-revelation bears the imprint of Jansenist fideism. Skeptical of
the philosophical arguments for God's existence proposed by
neo-scholastic theologians as preambles to the act of faith, many
Jansenist theologians argued that authentic knowledge of God's
existence and attributes can only be found through attentive reception
of the scriptural portrait of God revealed by God himself. For Sablé,
it is this revealed truth alone that bears the stamp of infallibility
and that stands exempt from her skeptical scrutiny of claims to
knowledge.
4. Interpretation and Relevance
The vagaries of the publication history of Madame de Sablé's works
indicate how easily the philosophical reflection developed by women in
the early modern period can disappear. Frequently reprinted in the
eighteenth century as part of anthologies, the maxims of Sablé were
often ascribed to an anonymous author or to her two prestigious male
colleagues, La Rochefoucauld and Pascal. Only in 1870 would Jouaust's
scholarly edition of the entirety of Sablé's maxims correct the
history of misattribution and properly restore the work to Sablé's
authorship. Victor Cousin, the preeminent French philosopher during
the July Monarchy, championed a revival of interest in the marquise by
the publication of his biography of Sablé (1859). This erudite work,
based on archival research, featured the publication of previously
unpublished Sablé writings, notably her treatise On Friendship and
extracts from her correspondence. Cousin's work, however, tends to
dismiss the value of Sablé's thought as it celebrates the personality
of the paradigmatic salonnière. Cousin declined to publish the
entirety of Sablé's maxims on the grounds of their general mediocrity
and their inferiority to the maxims produced by her protégé, La
Rochefoucauld. A similar apologetic tone emerges in Jean Lafond's
commentary on the integral edition of Sablé's maxims he presents in
his popular edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes et Réflexions
diverses (1976). "If we present the maxims of Madame de Sablé here, it
is not to suggest a comparison [with La Rochefoucauld] that would turn
too often to the disadvantage of the marquise" (303).
The barbed remarks of Cousin and Lafond indicate a persistent problem
in the interpretation of Sablé: the tendency to treat her as a La
Rochefoucauld manqué. In this interpretation, Sablé's piety,
sentimental defense of love, and moderation in her critique of masked
vice make her a pale version of the more radical critique of virtue
and knowledge developed by La Rochefoucauld. This interpretation
occults the originality of Sablé's philosophical argument, however. It
is disagreement, not timidity, that leads her to argue that mature
friendship can be a locus for the exercise of authentic virtue and
that La Rochefoucauld's dismissal of all public virtues as hidden
vices is wrong. Her claim that certain moral and religious knowledge
can be obtained from divine self-revelation does not derive from a
certain religious conventionality in the face of La Rochefoucauld's
skeptical dismissal of all claims to noetic certitude. Rather, it
springs from her conviction, well honed through her Jansenist
associations, that only such revelation-based propositions concerning
God and the moral order can claim the unreserved assent of the noetic
subject.
Only recently has Sablé emerged as a subject of philosophical, rather
than literary, interest. Like other moralistes of early French
modernity, the study of her works has been confined to literature
rather than philosophy departments. But as with her fellow moralistes
Montaigne and Pascal, the epigrammatic writings of Sablé treat issues
of enduring philosophical interest. Her maxims develop concise
arguments on the illusion of virtue, the nature of love, the sources
of authentic religious knowledge, the relationship between power and
knowledge, and the vices typical of a status-centered society. Her
correspondence pursues philosophical questions central to a theology
of grace in the company of preeminent philosophers of the period, such
as Pascal and Arnauld. In her writings, the salon (the era's central
venue for the philosophical formation of women) becomes the subject of
ethical analysis. It is the salon's rituals of power, codes of
politeness, and quest for scientific knowledge that provide the
principal data for Madame de Sablé's critique of the human pretension
to virtue and to certitude.
5. References and Futher Reading
All French to English translations above are by the author.
a. Primary Sources
* Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de. Maximes de Madame de
Sablé in La Rochefoucauld. Maximes et Réflexions diverses, ed. Jean
Lafond. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Pp 227-247.
* Sablé, Madeleine de Souvré, marquise de. Maximes de Mme de Sablé
1678, ed. Damase Jouaust. Paris: Librairie des bibliophiles, 1870.
(Available online at the Projet Gallica on the webpage of the
Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
b. Secondary Sources
* Barthélemy, Édouard de. Les amis de la marquise de Sablé:
recueil de lettres des principaux habitués de son salon. Paris: E.
Dentu, 1865.
* Conley, John J. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in
Neoclassical France Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp 20-44.
* Conley, John J. "Madame de Sablé's Moral Philosophy: A Jansenist
Salon" in Presenting Women Philosophers, ed. Cecile T. Tougas.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Pp 201-211.
* Cousin, Victor. Madame de Sablé: études sur les femmes illustres
et la société du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Didier, 1859.
* Ivanoff, Nicolas. La Marquise de Sablé et son salon. Paris: Les
Presses Modernes, 1927.
* Van Delft, Louis. "Madame de Sablé et Gracián," Saggi e Ricerche
di Letteratura Francese, 1983. 22: 265-285.
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