This volume gathers the miscellaneous prose of Nicolas Chamfort as edited by Pierre René Auguis and printed in Paris in 1824—maxims, anecdotes, character sketches, and historical tableaux rather than a single sustained work. Its centerpiece is the Caractères et Anecdotes, a running gallery of eighteenth-century French court and salon life, followed by the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, a narrative of the Revolution’s outbreak written from a committed republican standpoint. Around these Auguis assembles Chamfort’s literary criticism, his history of Naples, notes on La Fontaine, unpublished tales, opera libretti, and letters from the period when he was denounced to the Jacobins.
“C’est cette équivoque qui a perdu les peuples; et le despotisme finit ou va”
Auguis’s preface sets the tone for the whole enterprise, placing Chamfort between Duclos and La Harpe—more correct than the one, more precise than the other—and describing a mind that saw in the perfection of civilization only the excessive corruption of morals. The portrait that emerges is of a man who wrote daily on small squares of paper whatever his reflections, his observations, and the piquant words he heard or said himself, so that court, city, men, women, and men of letters all figure together in one mobile scene.
The Editor’s Frame and Chamfort’s Double Reputation
The volume opens with Auguis’s preface, which places Chamfort between Duclos and La Harpe: more correct than the one, more precise than the other. His eulogies and academic discourses lack La Harpe’s abundance but sparkle with piquant traits; his tragedy Mustapha et Zéangir shows a poet schooled in Racine; his comedies capture the opinions of the society that produced them. The observational spirit comes through fully in the Maximes et Pensées, where Hérault de Séchelles found Chamfort’s “biting pincers.” Auguis stresses a defining trait: Chamfort saw in the perfection of civilization only excessive corruption of morals, hideous vices, and every kind of failing.
Auguis describes the daily habit behind the work—small squares of paper filled with reflections, anecdotes, facts for the history of morals, and piquant repartees heard or uttered. Court, city, men, women, and men of letters mingle in this mobile scene. Writing for the Mercure de France alongside Marmontel and La Harpe, Chamfort brought a bitter raillery to his analyses, preferring memoirs, voyages, and works on political reform; he often substituted himself for the author, correcting distorted anecdotes and drawing ingenious consequences like a philosopher.
His history of Naples’s revolutions, written with Saint-Réal’s pen, seems to prelude the Tableaux de la Révolution française, a work of forty-eight engravings whose primitive text was Chamfort’s but which editor Auber repeatedly reworked as governments changed. Auguis judges that the Tableaux now seem painted less with history’s colors than with the passions of the time, yet remain precious monuments as a faithful image of one party’s opinions. He explains Chamfort’s republican harshness by his view of the old order as abuses consecrated by abuses and society as an outrage on the majority; popular excesses were for him mere reprisals, vengeance permitted to those long denied their rights. Chamfort reportedly said after the massacre of Foulon and Berthier that the revolution would go round the globe, and he is credited with giving Sieyès the title and idea of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État?—having customarily said: what is the third estate? nothing and everything. The comte de Lauragais told him: “You gave him the people to sell to the third estate.”
Auguis then surveys Chamfort as poet and orator, crowned with double laurels, seated beside Fontenelle as prose writer with more taste and force, reciting his tales to Voltaire. Dramatic literature was his particular study; the principal articles of the Art théâtral published by Lacombe in 1807 are his. This edition, Auguis states, completes earlier ones with the Naples history, notes on La Fontaine’s fables, the first twenty-six Tableaux, Mercure articles, sketches of the Poétique du Théâtre, twenty-two unpublished Contes, the operas Zénis et Almasie and Palmire, light poems, letters written while denounced to the Jacobins, his Défense placarded on Paris walls, and letters from Mirabeau acknowledging what he owed to Chamfort’s eloquent pen.
The Turnspit Dogs and the Saint’s Mistake
The main text begins with Caractères et Anecdotes, declaring the century produced eight great comediennes—four of the theater (d’Angeville, Duménil, Clairon, Saint-Huberti) and four of society (Montesson, Genlis, Necker, d’Angivilliers). A Provençal named M. says that with kings and ministers, once the machine is set up, the choice among them is indifferent: they are dogs in a turnspit, needing only to move their paws; whether the dog is handsome or has no nose at all, the spit turns and supper is about as good. A procession with the shrine of Sainte-Geneviève, held to obtain drought, barely set out when rain began; the bishop of Castres said the saint was mistaken, believing rain was being asked of her. M. observes that the tone in literature for ten years makes literary celebrity a kind of defamation—not yet as harmful as the pillory, but it will come. After traits of several sovereigns’ gluttony were cited, M. de Brequigny says: what do you expect poor kings to do? They must eat.
A duchess of Rohan, asked when she expects to give birth, says she flatters herself to have that honor in two months—the honor being to give birth to a Rohan. A wit, having seen Corneille’s “Qu’il mourût”
A Gallery of Characters and Maxims
The collection turns to a run of portraits and remarks, each pinned to a named or half-named speaker. M. de T. explains his neglect of his own talent by saying his self-love drowned in the shipwreck of his interest in mankind. A modest man is told there are sometimes cracks in the bushel under which virtues hide. Pressed to speak on public abuses, M. replies coldly that each day lengthens his list of things he no longer discusses, and that the most philosophical man keeps the longest list. M. D. proposes a treaty with slanderers and the wicked: he will tolerate being slandered if some indifferent or praiseworthy act of his supplies the ground, so that slander only embroiders the canvas rather than inventing facts; and he finds it natural to be harmed by anyone who gains by it, provided the harm is not gratuitous.
A fencer, witty and gallant but cowardly and impotent, is said to handle the foil and the fleurette well while dreading both the duel and pleasure. M. laments that cuckoldry has been let fall to nothing, whereas it was once a station in the world like that of the gambler. The misanthrope M. de L. says of his taste for solitude that one must love someone devilishly to go and see them. Another likes to be called wicked, much as the Jesuits were not sorry to be thought assassins of kings: it is pride wishing to reign by fear over weakness. A bachelor prays God to preserve him from women as he will preserve himself from marriage. On the respect the public deserves, M. says it is the respect prudence obtains—everyone despises fishwives, yet who would dare offend them by crossing the market hall?
Wit, Weakness, and the World
M. R., full of talent, explains he never appeared in the revolution of 1789 because for thirty years he found men so wicked one by one that he dared not hope for good from them collectively. Madame de — jokes that “the police” must be a terrible thing, since the English prefer thieves and assassins and the Turks prefer the plague. M. de L. says what makes the world unpleasant is scoundrels and then honest people; to make all passable one would have to annihilate the one and correct the other—destroy hell and recompose paradise. D. wonders why M. de L., a man of great credit, fails in everything he attempts for a friend: the weakness of his character annihilates the power of his position, for whoever cannot add his will to his force has no force. Madame de F., having said a well-thought thing prettily, believes she has done everything; M. de — says that when she has said a pretty thing about an emetic she is astonished not to be purged. Versailles is defined as a country where, going down, one must always appear to be going up.
M. says he has always done well by maxims on women: speak well of the sex in general, praise the amiable, be silent about the rest, see them little, never trust them, and never let happiness depend on any woman. A philosopher says that after examining the civil and political order he now studies only savages in travelers’ books and children in ordinary life. Madame de — calls M. B. honest but mediocre and prickly, like the perch—white, wholesome, insipid, full of bones. M. stifles his passions rather than guiding them, like a rider who, unable to govern a runaway horse, shoots it and hurls himself down with it. He asks whether it is not seen that he is nothing but by others’ opinion, that he loses force when he lowers himself, and falls when he descends.
Love, Friendship, and the Three Sorts of Friends
It is extraordinary that Crébillon and Bernard, authors and panegyrists of libertine love, died passionately enamored of two girls; stranger still that sentimental love possessed Madame de Voyer to the last, while M. de Voyer left two caskets of céladoniques letters copied twice in his own hand—recalling cowards who sing to disguise fear. M. de — laughs that a wit may doubt his mistress but about his wife one must be very stupid. M. L.’s character is curious: pleasant and profound mind, proud and calm heart, gentle and lively imagination. M. explains refusing several posts: he wants nothing that puts a role in place of a man. In the world there are three sorts of friends—those who love you, those who don’t care, and those who hate you. M. wonders why Madame de L. so wants his visits, since after an absence he despises her less—applicable to the world in general.
The Guards and Their Colonel
The regiment of French Guards had long been commanded by the maréchal de Biron, a man of middling talent who nonetheless made himself adored by his soldiers. Distinguished at Fontenoy and afterward forgotten by France though not by the court, loaded with favors and possessed of an immense fortune, he spent part of it on the splendor of his troop—already ruinously expensive to the state—because he craved both the court’s favor and the shine of his own magnificence in Paris. That outward brilliance made him the idol of his men. The author recalls their obedience to him in 1788 during a clash with the people of Paris in the rue Saint-Dominique, and doubts that the new opinions stirring France would have reached the guards had Biron lived to command them. Heaven spared them that trial by ending his days. Their devotion to his memory ran so deep that one of their new colonel’s gravest faults was removing his predecessor’s bust from the barracks—a great imprudence, and not the only one. Complaints multiplied daily: the men reproached him at once with excessive harshness and extreme avarice, two defects that place a chief between hatred and contempt.
Soldiers in the Capital
Several soldiers of the regiment practiced trades in the capital, putting them in direct contact with artisans and day-laborers of every kind. Hence conversations on public affairs in a moment when all minds were heated; hence closer ties with the people and, as it were, a community of resentment. They read or heard read the flood of pamphlets denouncing the government’s wrongs and the disastrous projects of ministers, in a coarse, energetic style whose effect had more than once shown itself too rapidly. These writings carried into the barracks the ideas, rumors, and agitations of Paris, and the sometimes fraternal welcome the soldiers received from wealthy citizens contrasted sharply with the rudeness the agents of despotism showed their own supporters. Discontent against the colonel grew more bitter; he was odious to the people by his office alone, and was thought complicit in the measures taken against Paris—a revolting contradiction with his duties as deputy to the national assembly.
The Colonel Saved by His Soldiers
On Sunday 12 July 1789, the day the insurrection began, M. du Châtelet was recognized and pursued by the people. He fled to the very depot of his soldiers on the boulevard de la Chaussée-d’Antin, believing them capable of a generous sentiment, and was not mistaken. Berbet, of the Gaillac company, covered him with his body and implored the grenadiers to save their colonel, saying that if he was guilty the laws should punish him, not the people. Honest feeling is contagious; all forgot their resentments, surrounded him, and conducted him safely to the hôtel de Richelieu. Nor was this the only time: crossing the bac des Invalides, the general was nearly thrown into the Seine by the crowd, and again these soldiers, so cruelly mistreated, saved him. The author wishes their generous sentiments had been joined from the start by the sound ideas that only time and liberty can produce—then one would not have to reproach the guards for the anxieties they later gave to nascent liberty after assuring it by their courage, nor envy their fellow citizens, the conquerors of the Bastille, the modest honor due those who helped overthrow that fortress of despotism.
An Army Around Paris
Paris lay delivered over to tumult, of which the preceding tableaux express only a weak part. Troops spread around the capital seemed to threaten it with siege or blockade—the fruit of measures taken after the royal session of 23 June. Priests and nobles, having made royal authority the instrument of a faction, pushed the king toward rigor; the new ministers, known for contempt of the people, attested this frightening resolution. Alarmed by the insubordination of the French Guards, they called in regiments believed most attached to passive obedience, placing at their head the maréchal de Broglio, with more than thirty thousand men around Paris. It is said the king, on seeing Broglio summoned from Lorraine, threw himself weeping into his arms: “How unhappy I am! I have lost everything, I no longer have the heart of my subjects, and I am without finances and without soldiers.” He was wrong on the first point—his person was loved. The artillery trains, bombs, and mortars meant for sieges made the apparatus more odious still, though the author rejects the then-current belief that Paris was to be bombarded. The assembly multiplied addresses demanding the withdrawal of troops and received refusals or delays; lists of proscription against patriots circulated; the electors, rallying frequently, became a sort of public power in place of the silent civil authorities.
The Deaths of Becar and Asselin
The fall of the Bastille left behind its own accounting of the dead, and the narrative lingers over two of them with a grief that outlasts the day. One death stirred regret among those who had known the man too late; another cut deeper, measured against the gratitude owed a victim of fatal error. A non-commissioned officer named Becar had stood guard at the powder magazine when the governor arrived with lighted matches, bent on blowing it up. Becar shoved him back and threatened to run him through if he persisted—and so saved Paris from the worst calamity. That same evening, inquiry into his conduct revealed a man who had given pacific advice, formed a citizen’s vows, and never fired a shot during the siege. Hours later his head was carried on a pike, and with it the head of one Asselin, innocent like him. A false resemblance in uniforms deceived the crowd, who took both for cannoneers of the Bastille—the deepest crime in the people’s eyes, since for days those instruments of carnage had been turned against them. The people immolated the two unfortunates and wept once the mistake was known; some of the killers later showed signs of despair when, better informed, they recalled having joyfully displayed to passers-by the hand they had cut from an enemy.
The Swiss and the Invalids
The day held other mistakes. Every generous soul rejoices that the Swiss garrisoning the Bastille escaped by happy chance the punishment public vengeance would have exacted, since they alone had shed all the blood around that fortress; but one would wish the French soldiers, the Invalids, far less guilty, had not borne the penalty of that odious error. The passage turns to address foreign stipendiaries whom the French people believed friends because their masters trafficked with the king in their blood: the generous nation reproaches only the soldiers’ ignorance, for their sanguinary conduct is the work of officers who deceive and oppress them. That blindness will cease—struck by the light of the French revolution, they will learn to judge those who command them. From the people’s bosom came the magnanimous Elie and the brave French Guards who, seeing the disarmed soldiers pale and awaiting death like convicted culprits in the Hôtel-de-Ville, felt heroic compassion, interceded for them, asked only the grace of their brothers-in-arms, and at the unanimous cry “grâce, grâce” embraced them with the joy of a second victory.
The Night of 14–15 July and the Court’s Illusions
News of the Bastille’s capture spread universal gladness, countered by the thought of perils the capture itself might make more pressing by pushing ministers and generals to hasten attack. Troops surrounding the city kept their posts; twice the National Assembly sought their removal and twice met refusal followed by equivocal delay. The court remained wrapped in illusions and lies. Berthier, intendant of Paris, questioned by the king on the evening of 14 July about the capital’s state, answered that all was calm—so that Louis XVI at Versailles was as foreign to the truth about his kingdom four leagues away as the king of Spain in Madrid could be about events in Mexico and the Philippines. A hedge of courtiers and flatterers stood between him and his people like an ocean. “And this is what is called reigning!” The same men who imprisoned him to dictate orders in his name later made France and Europe ring with “The king is prisoner in Paris!”—when the truth was that he was held in his capital so as no longer to be prisoner of the nation’s enemies.
The King’s Journey and the Hôtel-de-Ville
Agitation at Versailles and the terrors used to persuade the king of dangers awaiting him postponed his departure a day, and Parisian ferment redoubled; the bourgeois declared that if he delayed further they would march on Versailles and tear the royal family from its “obsesseurs.” Soldiers deserted to Paris from discontent, love of novelty, or sheer hunger—the court found its defenders starved by itself and fed by those it called rebels. For four days the municipal body had deliberated in a hall beneath which lay forty thousand pounds of powder, a danger that made them shudder once the king’s arrival was announced. Preparations were made to receive him with the dignity of free men; yet some municipals proposed deliberating whether the king should be received kneeling, and unanimous indignation rejected it. After a march of more than nine hours through an immense people, Louis XVI reached the hôtel-de-ville, where the new mayor remitted the keys: “Sire, Henri IV avait reconquis son peuple; ici c’est le peuple qui a reconquis son roi.” He heard the language of truth, adorned himself with the French cockade, and saw from universal acclamations that despite his ministers he retained his people’s love.
Frederick II and the Papal Hatred
The narrative turns to the house of Hohenstaufen, opening with Frederick II, who carried papal hatred from the cradle. He bought his coronation twice through a forced crusade vow, was excommunicated for delaying his departure, excommunicated again for sailing while excommunicated, and threatened with a third anathema just as he delivered the holy places. A bull backed by a crusade preached by the pope himself deposed him, and news of the deposition was spread across Europe and even sent to the sultan of Babylon. Sicily watched him seek shelter among a Mahometan guard against superstition’s attacks; after fifty years of misfortunes wrought by the holy see, he died, and died absolved.
Mainfroy’s Regency and the Crown
Innocent IV exploited Frederick’s death while Conrad, the heir, was still in Germany, entering Sicily as church territory and stirring up Pouille and the terre de Labour. But Frederick had named by testament his natural son Mainfroy, prince of Tarente, as governor of Italy. Mainfroy is drawn as ambitious without crime, dissembling without baseness, superior without pride—a man who created obstacles that delayed but assured his march. Conrad arrived to find a tranquil kingdom, then stripped his brother of his seigneuries and expelled his maternal relatives. Mainfroy answered new injustices with new services. When Conrad died leaving only the young Conradin, Mainfroy was accused of poisoning him, though the passage finds no proof—and notes the pope, mortal enemy of the house of Souabe, was equally accused. Mainfroy had an incapable German declared regent, then accepted the regency himself when the alarmed state begged him; he won a signal victory, and Innocent IV died at Naples of rage and despair. Elisabeth, Frederick’s widow, spread the rumor of her son’s death; the barons urged Mainfroy to the throne, and he let himself be crowned. Too late, Elisabeth produced Conradin and reclaimed his heritage. The pope excommunicated Mainfroy and laid the kingdom under interdict.
Champ-fleuri and the Fall of Mainfroy
Clement IV put Naples and Sicily up for auction, offering the kingdom to Europe’s sovereigns, who refused. The passage asks how Saint-Louis, who rejected the bargain, permitted his brother Charles d’Anjou to accept it—an order to refuse would have spared France and Italy two hundred years of war. The kingdom was sold by treaty; Charles received investiture at Rome and entered Italy. Mainfroy, betrayed and abandoned, sought the usurper. On the plain called Champ-fleuri the combat lasted an hour and was bloody; seeing his troops give way, Mainfroy threw himself among the enemy squadrons and died as he had wished to live, as a king—the first, the passage says, whose ambition was not criminal and whose usurpation seemed legitimate. His friend comte Jourdan watered his body with tears; Charles refused him burial, and Clement had him thrown on the banks of the Marino.
Conradin’s Defeat
Charles entered Naples in triumph with Béatrix and demanded executioners, putting to death barons who still held for Mainfroy. Conradin, twice dethroned at fifteen without ever wearing his ancestors’ crown, trusted the discontented peoples; the young duke of Autriche followed his fortune. The pope excommunicated Conradin, and Charles joined him in Pouille. Hidden in a wood by a French knight named de Saint-Vatry, Charles emerged with a reserve corps and snatched victory.
Jeanne I and the Angevin Crisis
Jeanne de Naples entered Messine in triumph, threatening Sicily, until Blaze d’Allagon dispersed her squadron and, though wounded, defeated the besieging general on land—two victories in one day, saving Sicily and its king, and leading to a general peace. Widowed twice more, Jeanne married Othon de Brunswick, a match that seemed to annul her adoption of Charles de Durazzo and exclude Marguerite, heiress of Naples. The pope, eager to give his nephew Capoue, supported Durazzo, excommunicated Jeanne, and granted Charles investiture. Frightened, Jeanne adopted Louis d’Anjou. Durazzo besieged her in the château neuf; Othon was defeated and taken; the queen surrendered, and Louis de Hongrie, convinced she had murdered his brother André, pronounced the death sentence Durazzo executed.
Papal Intrigue and the Schism
Displeased with the new king, the pope called another duc d’Anjou to Italy; Durazzo made a treaty advantageous to Rome, whereupon the pope excommunicated the very duke he had used and preached a crusade against him. Durazzo sought the throne of Hongrie and perished in its troubles.
The Machinery of Deference
The anecdotes collected here are not idle gossip. Taken together they form a sustained argument about how French society actually worked—who held power, who performed, and who paid. Chamfort’s eye is drawn to the machinery of deference: the memoir dictating to the king where his brow should soften and where he should take a severe air; the nobleman who, as the comte d’Artois’s wedding remark suggests, will go on seeking posts where he performs the function of a valet. A whole theory of manners is compressed into single lines—that one must flatter interest or frighten self-love, since men are monkeys who jump only for nuts or from fear of the whip; that obliging without delicacy is nearly wasted, like a general who takes a town but lets the garrison withdraw into the citadel.
What gives the collection its bite is Chamfort’s refusal to exempt anyone. Great ladies, bishops, ministers, philosophers, and the king himself all pass under the same gaze, and the effect is cumulative rather than merely malicious. The famous “biting pincers” Hérault de Séchelles named are visible everywhere, but so is a kind of moral accounting: the peasant who says his sons treat him “like their child,” the abbé who directs a thief to his money without looking up from his work, the English ambassador who burns a thousand guineas in a chafing dish to shame guests who came for the expense rather than the pleasure. These are the counterweights to the vanity, and they show that Chamfort’s misanthropy was not indiscriminate.
The Revolution as the Judgment of History
The Tableaux historiques turn the same sensibility on politics. Chamfort reads 1789 not as a sudden rupture but as the outcome of centuries—the emancipation of the communes, the long abasement of a people before nobles and priests, the sale of privileges that recruited oppressors from the nation’s own bosom, the wars and impositions that kept ignorance alive. His account of the July days is vivid and partisan: the Gardes-Françaises refusing to fire on the people, the abbey prison broken open, the soldiers of the king becoming soldiers of the fatherland. He does not hide his judgments—he laments that these same guards later gave anxiety to nascent liberty—and he writes with the conviction that the Revolution’s excesses were reprisals permitted to those long denied their rights.
Auguis, looking back with cooler passions, concedes that the Tableaux seem painted less with history’s colors than with the passions of the time, yet judges them precious as a faithful image of one party’s opinions. That double verdict is the fairest way to read the whole volume: as a document of how the Revolution looked from inside the convictions that made it, and of how a great wit’s observations of society hardened into a philosophy of liberation.
A Witness Who Refused the Role
What survives most forcefully is the temperament behind the aphorisms. Chamfort declined several posts because, as he put it, he wanted nothing that puts a role in place of a man. He lengthened each day the list of things he no longer discussed. He measured the world’s unpleasantness as scoundrels first and honest people second, and thought one would have to destroy hell and recompose paradise to make it passable. The letters written while he was denounced to the Jacobins and threatened with the scaffold, together with the Défense placarded on the walls of Paris, belong to the same man who gave Sieyès the title and idea of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? and who said, after the massacres of Foulon and Berthier, that the revolution would go round the globe.
This edition’s value lies in that continuity. The same pen that recorded a duchess’s vanity and a bishop’s gluttony also drafted the manifestos Mirabeau published under his own name, and the same clarity that made the maxims quotable made the political prose dangerous. Chamfort’s reputation has always rested on fragments; here the fragments are assembled so that the observer of salons and the architect of a new order appear as one figure, and the reader can see how a merciless anatomy of the old regime became, almost without a seam, an argument for its destruction.
