More an intellectual history than a biography, this sweeping study
explores the life and times of the serf-invented and self-destroyed
wit, philosopher, and playwright Chamfort (1740-94), whose
aphoristic style and enigmatic personality influenced, among
others, Nietzsche and Camus. Born the illegitimate son of an
aristocrat and a canon, Chamfort was raised by a grocer, his
beauty, wit, and charm ingratiating him with an aristocracy
insatiable for the sexual and verbal prowess he exhibited. At age
25, this lover who had been called a "Herculean Adonis" suffered a
disfiguring disease and, in a period famous for its furniture,
fashion, and conversation, became a writer, entering the petty
intellectual wars among the now forgotten wits and scribblers
competing for a place in the French Academy. Although supported by
noble patronage, Chamfort was allied with no one, and embodied the
contradictions of the age - reason and passion, irony and
sentiment, elitism and egalitarianism, a love of both civilization
and of solitude. In 1789, he began to negotiate the conflicting and
changing ideologies of the Revolution, in which he believed
intensely. By 1791, he renounced his comforts, titles, and
prerogatives for an austere life as a "citizen," and in 1792 he
became director of the Bibliotheque nationale, which he turned into
a repository of national treasures. The following year, caught in
the vagaries of revolutionary leadership and ideology, he attempted
suicide rather than be imprisoned for his defense of Charlotte
Corday (assassin of Jean Paul Marat) - an act that left him alive
but hideously mutilated. Chamfort died several months later, a
"cultural double agent" as Arnaud (Art and History/Centre Pompidou,
Paris) calls him: both participant and spectator, aristocrat and
populist - but, above all, an enigma, a stranger, an "exemplary
case of illegitimacy." In his foreword, Joseph Epstein describes
the peculiar conditions - sociological, psychological,
philosophical, political - that create the aphorist. In his careful
analysis of every stage in Chamfort's metamorphosis and the worlds
in which he lived, Arnaud re-creates those conditions and gives
them credibility. (Kirkus Reviews)
Sebastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1740-1794), whom Nietzsche called
the "wittiest of all moralists," is now known for little more than
brillian aphorisms that captivated a long line of thinkers, from
Stendhal to Cioran, Schopenhauer to Camus. Yet the fascination of
Chamfort's life is barely suggested by the fragments of writing
that have survived him. In Claude Arnaud's captivating biography,
Chamfort the libertine, playwright, journalist, and revolutionary
stands revealed as the most telling emblem of his times.
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