Joubert, Joseph - A00109
"A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve."
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Joseph Joubert (born May 6, 1754, Montignac, France—died May 3, 1824, Paris) was a French man of letters who wrote on philosophical, moral, and literary topics.
Joubert went to Paris in 1778; there he came into contact with Denis Diderot and Louis, marquis de Fontanes, the latter of whom would remain a lifelong friend. Joubert married in 1793 and subsequently retired to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, the site of his wife’s family home, although he also spent time in Paris and maintained contact with the era’s significant figures, including François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand. In 1809 he was appointed an inspector general for the newly created lycées.
Joubert published nothing during his lifetime. Throughout his life he wrote in notebooks, on scraps of paper, and on whatever else fell to hand, which he then stored, largely undifferentiated, in a trunk. Chateaubriand was the first to publish selections from this trunk; his Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert (1838) presented Joubert’s writings as relatively tidy pensées, but Chateaubriand heavily reworked his sources. Other landmark editions are Paul de Raynal’s Pensées, essais, et maximes de J. Joubert (2 vol, 1842), which sought to capture the sprawl and messiness of Joubert’s writings but, like Chateaubriand’s edition, shows significant manipulation of the original texts; and André Beaunier’s Les Carnets de Joseph Joubert (2 vol., 1938), which maintains greater fidelity to its sources but falls short of its goal to be a comprehensive chronological record of Joubert’s work.
These editions, combined with other collections and studies, show Joubert to have been a compulsive, wide-ranging writer. His fragments, which are vibrant but not immune to incoherence, express the voice of a conversationalist eager to engage the texts and thought not only of his era, one of the most tumultuous in French history, but of all eras.
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Joseph Joubert (French: [ʒozɛf ʒubɛʁ]; 6 May 1754 in Montignac, Périgord – 4 May 1824 in Paris) was a French moralist and essayist, remembered today largely for his Pensées (Thoughts), which were published posthumously.
Biography
[edit]From the age of fourteen Joubert attended a religious college in Toulouse, where he later taught until 1776. In 1778 he went to Paris where he met D'Alembert and Diderot,[1] amongst others, and later became a friend of a young writer and diplomat, Chateaubriand.
He alternated between living in Paris with his friends and life in the privacy of the countryside in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. He was appointed inspector-general of universities under Napoleon.
Joubert published nothing during his lifetime, but he wrote a copious number of letters and filled sheets of paper and small notebooks with thoughts about the nature of human existence, literature, Christianity and spiritual life, and other topics, in a poignant, often aphoristic style. After his death his widow entrusted Chateaubriand with these notes, and in 1838, he published a selection titled, Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert[1] (Collected Thoughts of Mr. Joubert). More complete editions were to follow, as were collections of Joubert's correspondence.
Somewhat of the Epicurean school of philosophy, Joubert even valued his own frequent suffering of ill health, as he believed sickness gave subtlety to the soul. He belongs to the tradition of the so-called “French moralists.”
Joubert's works have been translated into numerous languages. In 1866 "Some of the 'Thoughts' of Joseph Joubert" were translated by George H. Calvert.[2] A later English translation version was made by Paul Auster. Matthew Arnold in his Critical Essays devotes a section to Joubert.
Principal editions
[edit]- Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert, published by Chateaubriand, Le Normant, Paris, 1838. Text online
- Pensées, essais, maximes et correspondance de J. Joubert, preface by Paul Raynal, Le Normant, Paris, 1850 ; 1861.
- Pensées, introduction and noted by Victor Giraud, Bloud, Paris, 1909
- Carnets, texts collected by André Beaunier, Gallimard, Paris, 1938 ; 1994
- Correspondance de Louis de Fontanes et de Joseph Joubert : (1785-1819), Plon, Paris, 1943
- Pensées et Lettres, organized by Raymond Dumay and Maurice Andrieux, Grasset, 1954
- Pensées, selected texts presented by Raymond Dumay, Club français du livre, 1954
- Essais : 1779-1821, complete critical version by Rémy Tessonneau, A.G. Nizet, Paris, 1983
References
[edit]- ^ a b Delamarre, Louis Narcisse (1910). . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
- ^ "Some of the "Thoughts" of Joseph Joubert". Internet Archive. 1866.
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- "To teach is to learn twice."
- "Never cut what you can untie."
- "Politeness smoothes wrinkles."
- "Tenderness is passion in repose."
- "Imagination is the eye of the soul."
- "The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
- "When you go in search of honey, you must expect to be stung by bees."
- "Children need models rather than critics."
- "Misery is almost always the result of thinking."
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