Bourdaloue, Louis (1623-1704). French Jesuit priest whose sermons were the most assiduously followed of all the fashionable Parisian preachers of his day, largely perhaps because he took social and personal morality for his subject-matter at a time when secular writers had generated a taste for the moraliste portrayal of types and characters. He was much sought after as a confessor. He shows a striking capacity for combining methodical examination with a perceptive, though dispassionate, language of psychological analysis. The rigorous divisions and subdivisions of his sermons made his points easy for his congregation to retain: he was sometimes described as ‘the blind preacher’ because of a habit of speaking with his eyes shut, the better to recall the order of his argument. The written versions of his addresses that have survived are somewhat unvaried in tone, though their objective and rational vocabulary may be said to have contributed to the development of character study as a suitable literary subject: he was widely commended as a model in the 18th c. Comparing and contrasting his sermons with those of Bossuet became a scholastic exercise akin to the more famous parallel between Corneille and Racine.
— Peter Bayley
