SOURCE: Westgate, David. “The Concept of Amour-Propre in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld.” Nottingham French Studies 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 67-79.

In the following essay, Westgate explores the concept of self-love as it was understood in the seventeenth century to better grasp La Rochefoucauld's use of this idea in the Maximes.

Critics generally agree that amour-propre is central to the description of man in the Maximes, but not all have seen into the full sense of the term. H. Chamard writes of it as being egoism;¹ W. G. Moore envisages it as self-interest;² for A. Krailsheimer, it is the “permanent and radical reorientation of man's spiritual eye on to himself.”³ All of these ideas hold some truth, as amour-propre certainly embraces each of these aspects. The seventeenth-century concept of amour-propre, however, also has the wider connotation of being the natural condition of Fallen Man. This particular point has not been...