Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon

The French writer Louis de Rouvroy, Duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), provides in his classic "Memoirs" a major source of information on the court of the "Sun King," Louis XIV.

The Duc de Saint-Simon was born on Jan. 16, 1675, in Paris. As a young aristocrat, he studied horsemanship and fencing as much as letters and entered the elite King's Musketeers at the age of 16. Three years later, apparently inspired by the memoirs of Marshal Bassompierre and others, which he read in the field, he began making notes for memoirs of his own.

Passed over for promotion in 1702, Saint-Simon abandoned his military career and went to live at the court of Versailles. He apparently continued to make notes and read extensively in the works of other memorialists and historians, to the point that his fellow courtiers often consulted him on questions of history, genealogy, and court etiquette. However, both his resignation from the army and his sometimes unwelcome knowledge of court traditions irritated Louis XIV, who excluded him from any official post for the rest of his reign.

After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, Saint-Simon played an important role as public and private counselor to the regent, Philippe II d'Orléans, retiring upon the death of the latter in 1723. After spending several years on such other historical projects as his Notes on the Dukedoms and Peer-ages and his Additions to the Marquis of Dangeau's Journal, he began revising and writing out his Memoirs in 1739.

In the Memoirs, Saint-Simon's observations allowed him to describe vividly both the elegance and the corruption of the court of Versailles. Despite some errors of fact and interpretation, his knowledge of history made him aware of the breakdown of traditional checks and balances that underlay Louis XIV's royal absolutism and which was to lead, in the next century, to the French Revolution. Saint-Simon's intensely written accounts of court intrigues and such events as the deaths of the Grand Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, and Louis XIV himself - as well as his incisive word portraits of his fellow courtiers - make him perhaps the world's greatest writer on the prestige, the ambitions, the uncertainties, and the ironies of public life. He completed his Memoirsin 1752. Saint-Simon died on March 2, 1755, in Paris.

Further Reading

Saint-Simon's Memoirs have never been completely translated into English. The most recent partial translation is by Lucy Norton, Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon (2 vols., 1967-1968). The best study of Saint-Simon in English is Edwin Cannan, The Duke of Saint Simon (1885).

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de (1675-1755). Author of the celebrated Mémoires. His father was one of Louis XIII's favourites, and had been made a duke in 1635: the son was brought up to cherish the old king's memory, and reverence for the values of the early 17th c. afforded him a perspective from which to view critically the political and social developments of his own lifetime. The young duke was physically small (generally known as ‘notre petit duc’) and consumed with the importance of his rank. He served briefly in the army, but resigned because he found talent prized above seniority or birth. Thereafter he divided his time between his country estate at La Ferté and the court, where high rank entitled him to be constantly in attendance though he never secured the positions of importance he felt his due.

Saint-Simon was one of the group including Fénelon, Beauvilliers, and the duc de Chevreuse, whose covert opposition to the regime of Louis XIV's declining years focused on the duc de Bourgogne, and whose hopes for restoring order and prosperity in France were dashed by the young dauphin's death in 1712. Characteristically, Saint-Simon committed these Projets de gouvernement du duc de Bourgogne to paper only after this event, doubtless partly with the ambition of guiding policy under the now inevitable Regency. Indeed, after Louis XIV's death in 1715 the regent was prepared to listen, and his dramatic overturning of the provision made for Louis's illegitimate offspring in his will is applauded in the Mémoires; but the only formal task entrusted to Saint-Simon was a mission to Spain in 1722 to bring back the princess engaged to the young Louis XV. She did not in fact become queen; but the event was profoundly to affect the future publication of the Mémoires, since all Saint-Simon's papers were at his death classified as state documents, and many of them remain to this day in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay.

They show him to have had an obsessive love of documentation, amassing legal and historical evidence bearing on the issues of the day while he waited in vain for political office in the years after the regent's death (1723). Ever since 1694 he had been recording what he had himself seen at court. Late in 1729 he was given a manuscript copy of the journals of court life which Dangeau had dictated from 1684 till his death in 1720. He had them interleaved with blank pages which, over nine years, he annotated from his own range of sources. After this period of immense preparation, he composed the Mémoires in the decade 1740 to 1750. He lost his beloved wife in 1743, his elder son in 1749, his younger son and sole heir in 1754, and he himself died in 1755.

Far, then, from being a spontaneous report on events in the last years of Louis XIV and the first of Louis XV, the Mémoires are a retrospective analysis, contemporary with Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, of what went wrong with France during those years. But Saint-Simon was not a philosophe. His perspective is partly religious, and an austerely Augustinian sense of the vanity of human endeavour informs his sombrest reflections. Like a baroque dramatist, he evokes the dream-world of Versailles against an implicit background of unseen realities and divine judgements. His preface returns to the question on which, as a young man, he had sought counsel from no less stern a spiritual authority than Rancé: may a Christian write the history of his own times without offending against charity? The answer, namely that it is permissible if undertaken for the greater good, serves also to explain the political perspective of the Mémoires. The evils he recounts are those of disorder. Usurpation of God-given authority by lowborn adventurers has distorted the primitive ancient constitution of the realm. The venomous critiques of Madame de Maintenon's malign influence, the ambitions of the duc du Maine, the manœuvres of Cardinal Dubois, are ultimately accusations of illegitimacy. Those rightfully entrusted with the governance of France (dukes above all) have been dispossessed by a kind of diabolical subterfuge.

If this ideology militates against scientific historical accuracy, it imbues the Mémoires with powerfully dramatic energy. Saint-Simon has been aptly described as standing half-way between Dante and Balzac. He shares with the novelist a gift for physical depiction by means of details that imply a moral judgement, and also an urgent, persuasive, at times breathless narrative. What may appear to a modern reader the longueurs of his accounts of ceremonies and genealogies are a vital element in creating an almost cosmic context of hierarchy within which disruptive forces are discerned at work. With him the genre of the character-portrait, refined over a century of moraliste writing, reaches its peak. The freshness of these descriptions springs from their combination of formality with the unexpected, the commonplace, even the vulgar. His writing ranges from the stately to the highly idiosyncratic, neologism jostling with archaism in his vocabulary, and the persuasive crescendo with the occasionally baffling ellipsis in his phrasing.

Proust was one of his most fervent readers. It was, indeed, only at the turn of the 20th c. that the complete text of the Mémoires appeared, after more than a century of state sequestration and partial publication. He seems himself to have envisaged publication delayed until well after his death.

[Peter Bayley]

Bibliography

• Y. Coirault, L'Optique de Saint-Simon (1965)
• D. van der Cruysse, Le Portrait dans les ‘Mémoires’ de Saint-Simon (1971) and La Mort dans les ‘Mémoires’ de Saint-Simon (1981)

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy (1675–1755), duke and peer of France, whose memoirs depict courtly life and politics during the reign of Louis XIV and the regency. Saint-Simon was the offspring of a favorite of Louis XIII. Having lost his father at the age of eighteen, he served in the army and tried to gain prominence at the court. Soon, however, disappointed by Louis XIV's perceived neglect of the nobility, he retired from the military and incurred the king's disfavor. Instead of a promising career, he thus embarked upon the path of a clandestine and critical observer of the court.

Although removed from the king's favor, Saint-Simon had powerful allies and informants: his beloved wife, Marie-Gabrielle de Lorges, duchess of Saint-Simon, who remained in Louis XIV's closest circles in spite of her husband's precarious position, and to whom he owed regular invitations to the much coveted royal secondary residence at Marly; Philippe II, the duke of Orléans, the king's nephew and future regent; a state chancellor; several ministers who formed with François Fénelon the circle of Louis, duke of Bourgogne, heir to the crown and its would-be reformer. Thus Saint-Simon gained close knowledge of state politics in which he even participated briefly during the regency. Living at the court from 1691 through Louis XIV's death in 1715 to the regent's in 1723, he saw, listened, and took secret notes at night, in a small dressing cabinet behind his Versailles apartment. He composed numerous genealogies, timely memos to influence decisions of etiquette and rank politics, and even a bitterly critical anonymous letter to Louis XIV that he had the courage to circulate during the monarch's lifetime, in spite of a recognizable personal style of writing.

After he retired from the court, Saint-Simon came upon a detailed journal kept by the well-known courtier Philippe de Courcillon (the marquis of Dangeau). Shocked by its boundless flatteries and "lies," he reread and annotated it between 1729 and 1739 and, at the age of sixty-four, set out to write his own journal, a truthful "history of his time." His monumental Mémoires, 2,754 manuscript pages narrating court intrigues and crown politics over thirty-two years (1691–1723), encompass over seven thousand characters depicted with inimitable insight and wit, and lament the chaos introduced into the kingdom by absolutism and predict its demise. The narrative was destined by its author to "remain under the safest locks" for at least fifty years after his lifetime. His wish was granted: a first, incomplete, version was published in 1788, and not until 1829–1830 did a first complete edition appear in French. By presenting a unique backstage view of Versailles, in spite of a certain partiality admitted by the author and due to his distinct noble ethos, his memoirs give an exact picture of daily life at court and of its factions and intrigues, and constitute an important source for court sociologists and historians. Testifying to Saint-Simon's unique vision and style, his memoirs have also inspired French novelists including Stendhal and Marcel Proust, and they remain a masterpiece of early modern French literature and of the memoir genre as a whole.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy. Les additions de Saint-Simon au journal de dangeau. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 1965.

——. Ecrits inédits de Saint-Simon. 8 vols. Paris, 1880–1893.

——. Grimoires de Saint-Simon: Nouveaux inédits. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 1975.

——. Hiérarchie et mutations: Écrits sur le kaléidoscope social. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 2002.

——. Historical Memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon: A Shortened Version. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. 3 vols. London, 1999–2000.

——. Mémoires. 8 vol. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 1983.

——. Papiers en marge des Mémoires. Edited by François-Régis Bastide. Paris, 1954.

——. Traités politiques et autres écrits. Edited by Yves Coirault. Paris, 1996.

Secondary Sources

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, 1968.

Coirault, Yves. L'optique de Saint-Simon. Paris, 1965.

De Ley, Herbert. Saint-Simon Memorialist: "Un enchaînement si singulier . . ." Urbana, Ill., 1975.

Elias, Norbert. The Court Society. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, 1983.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, with Jean-François Fitou. Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 2001.

Stefanovska, Malina. Saint-Simon, un historien dans les marges. Paris, 1998.

—MALINA STEFANOVSKA

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon

Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (January 16, 1675 – March 2, 1755), French soldier, diplomatist and writer of memoirs, was born in Paris (Hôtel Selvois, 6 rue Taranne, today at 175 Bd. Saint-Germain). The dukedom-peerage granted to his father, Claude de Saint-Simon (1608-1693), is a central fact in his history.

Contents 1 Peerage 2 Life 3 Fame as a writer 4 Bibliography 4.1 English-language translations of the Memoirs 4.2 Studies of the Memoirs (in English) 5 References 6 External links

Peerage

No one was made a peer who was not a nobleman, but men of the noblest blood might not be, and in most cases were not, peers. Derived at least traditionally and imaginatively from the douze pairs of Charlemagne, the peers were supposed to represent the chosen of the noblesse, and gradually became associated with the parliament of Paris as a quasi-legislative (or at least law-registering) and directly judicial body. The peerage was further complicated by the fact that not persons but the holders of certain fiefs were made peers. Strictly speaking, Saint-Simon was not made a peer, but his estate was raised to the rank of a duché-pairie. The peers were, in a way, representative of the entire body of the Nobility, and it was Saint-Simon's lifelong ideal to convert them into a sort of great council of the nation.

The family's main castle, where the Memoirs were written, was the castle of La Ferté-Vidame, bought by duke Claude shortly after being awarded his dukedom. The castle brought with it the title of vidame de Chartres. It was a rare title ; in the Middle Ages a vidame commanded the military forces of a bishop and performed other feudal duties unsuitable for a man of the Church. Over time, seven of these titles relating to some of the larger dioceses became attached to specific properties and usable as titles by the owner. An earlier Vidame of Chartres (not related) had been a famous intriguer and participant in the Wars of Religion on the Huguenot side, which still cast something of a shadow over the title in Saint-Simon's day. Rather oddly, the title was given to an elderly character in the court novel La Princesse de Clèves published in 1678, three years after Saint-Simon was born. Since he himself went by this title until he was eighteen, it may have been the subject of jokes.

Life

His father, a tall and taciturn man, was keen on hunting and completely unlike Saint-Simon, who was garrulous, exceptionally short, and preferred to live indoors. His father had become a minor favourite of Louis XIII, who was addicted to hunting, and made him his Master of Wolfhounds before giving him his Dukedom when relatively young; he was 68 when Saint-Simon was born. Saint-Simon was high up the order of precedence among the Dukes, but much less grand than most of them in terms of ancestry and wealth.

His mother, Charlotte de L'Aubespine, belonged to a family which had been distinguished in the public service at least since the time of Francis I. Her son Louis was well educated, to a great extent by herself, and he had for godfather and godmother Louis XIV and Queen Marie Thérèse. After some tuition by the Jesuits, he joined the mousquetaires gris in 1692. He was present at the 1692 siege of Namur, and the battle of Neerwinden. Then he began the crusade of his life by instigating an action on the part of the peers of France against François-Henri de Montmorency, duc de Luxembourg, his victorious general, on a point of precedence.

He fought another campaign or two (not under Luxembourg), and in 1695 married Gabrielle de Durfort, daughter of Guy Aldonce de Durfort de Lorges, a marshal who had commanded him. He seems to have regarded her with a respect and affection unusual between husband and wife at the time; and she sometimes succeeded in modifying his aristocratic ideas. But as he did not receive the promotion he desired, he flung up his commission in 1702. Thus Louis XIV took a dislike to him, and he kept his place at court only with difficulty. He was, however, intensely interested in all the transactions of Versailles, and kept a collection of informers ranging from dukes to servants, who gave him the extraordinary secret information which he has handed down.

Saint-Simon's own part appears to have been entirely subordinate. He was appointed ambassador to Rome in 1705, but the appointment was cancelled before he started. At last he attached himself to Philippe II of Orléans, Louis XIV's nephew and the future Regent. Though this was hardly likely to conciliate Louis, it gave him at least the status of belonging to a definite party and it eventually placed him in the position of friend to the acting Chief of State. He also was attached to Louis, duke of Burgundy, the Dauphin's son and next heir to the throne.

Saint-Simon hated "the bastards," the illegitimate children of Louis XIV. It does not appear that this hatred was founded on moral reasons or fear that these bastards would be intruded into the succession. The true cause of his wrath was that, by Royal fiat, they had ceremonial precedence over the peers. The Saint-Simon as seen through the Mémoires has many enemies, and a deep hatred against so many courtiers, but it should be mentioned that the Mémoires were written 30 years after the facts, by a disappointed man, and that Saint-Simon as a courtier had lived on very polite and friendly terms with most.

The death of Louis XIV seemed to give Saint-Simon a chance of realizing his hopes. The duke of Orléans was at once acknowledged Regent and Saint-Simon placed on the council of regency. But no steps were taken to carry out his favourite vision of a France ruled by the nobility, and he had little real influence with the Regent. He was gratified by the degradation of "the bastards," and, in 1721, he was appointed special ambassador to Spain to arrange for the marriage (which never took place) of Louis XV and Infanta Mariana Victoria of Spain. There he and his second son received the grandeeship, and, though he also caught smallpox, he was quite satisfied with the business: he could now hope for two lineages of dukes (a grandee was recognised in France as duke). Saint-Simon was not eager, as most other nobility, to acquire profitable functions, and he did not use his influence to repair his finances, even further ruined by the magnificence of his embassy.

After his return he had little to do with public affairs. His own account of the cessation of his intimacy with Orléans and Guillaume Dubois, the latter of whom had never been his friend, is, like his account of some other events of his own life, rather vague and obscure. But there can be little doubt that he was eclipsed, and even expelled from the Meudon castle by Dubois. He survived for more than thirty years; but little is known of his life. His wife died in 1743, his eldest son a little later; he had other family troubles, and he was loaded with debt. When he died, at Paris on 2 March 1755, he had almost entirely outlived his own generation and the prosperity of his house, though not its notoriety. This last was in strange fashion revived by a distant relative born five years after his own death, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon – the founder of Socialism. All his possessions, including his writings, were seized by the State on his death, and a large part of his Memoirs is missing.

Fame as a writer

It will have been observed that the actual events of Saint-Simon's life, long as it was and high as was his position, are neither numerous nor noteworthy. Yet he posthumously acquired great literary fame. He was an indefatigable writer, and he began very early to write down all the gossip he collected, all his interminable legal disputes of precedence, and a vast mass of unclassified matter. Most of his manuscripts came into the possession of the government, and it was long before their contents were fully published. Partly in the form of notes on Marquis de Dangeau's Journal, partly in that of original and independent memoirs, partly in scattered and multifarious tracts, he had committed to paper an immense amount of matter.

Saint-Simon's memoirs display a striking voice. On the one hand, he is petty, unjust to private enemies and to those who espoused public parties with which he did not agree, and an omnivorous gossip. Yet he shows a great skill for narrative and for character-drawing. He has been compared to Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, and to historians such as Livy. He is at the same time not a writer who can be "sampled" easily, inasmuch as his most characteristic passages sometimes occur in the midst of long stretches of quite uninteresting matter. His vocabulary was extreme and inventive; among other words he is supposed to provide the first use of "intellectual" as a noun.

A few critical studies of him, especially those of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, are the basis of much that has been written about him. His most famous passages, such as the account of the death of the dauphin, or of the Bed of Justice where his enemy, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc du Maine, was degraded, do not give a fair idea of his talent. These are his gallery pieces, his great "engines," as French art slang calls them. Much more noteworthy as well as more frequent are the sudden touches which he gives. The bishops are "cuistres violets" (purple pedants); M. de Caumartin "porte sous son manteau toute la faculté que M. de Villeroy étale sur son baudrier" (holds under his cloak all the power that M. de Villeroy displays on his sheath); another politician has a "mine de chat fâché" (appearance of a disgruntled cat). In short, the interest of the Memoirs is in the novel and adroit use of word and phrase.

He had a decisive influence on writers like Tolstoy, Barbey d' Aurevilly, Flaubert, Valle-Inclán, Proust, Mujica Láinez, and many others.

Bibliography

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon

Extensive publication of Saint-Simon's Memoirs did not proceed until the 1820s. The first and greatest critical edition was in the Grands écrivains de la France series. The most accessible modern edition consists of nine volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléïade.

English-language translations of the Memoirs

There are a number of English-language translations of selections of the Memoirs:

• Memoirs on the Reign of Louis XIV, and the Regency. Abridged by Bayle St. John. London: Chapman, 1857.
• The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the reign of Louis XIV, and the Regency. 2nd edition. 3 volumes. Translated by Bayle St. John. London: Swan, Sonnenschein, Lowrey, 1888.
• Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon on the Times of Louis XIV and the Regency. Translated and abridged by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Boston: Hardy, Pratt, 1902.
• Louis XIV at Versailles: A Selection from the Memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon. Translated and edited by Desmond Flower. London: Cassell, 1954.
• The Age of Magnificence: The Memoirs of the Duke de Saint-Simon. Edited and translated by Sanche de Gramont. New York: Putnam, 1963.
• Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Edited by W.H. Lewis. Translated by Bayle St. John. London: B.T. Batsford, 1964.
• Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 1 1691-1709. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967.
• Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 2 1710-1715. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968.
• Historical Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon, volume 3 1715-1723. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972.
• Saint-Simon at Versailles. Edited and translated by Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980. Includes selections which are omitted from the three longer volumes, which together include about 40% of the whole work.

Studies of the Memoirs (in English)

• Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Chapter 16 "The Interrupted Supper"
• Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 0226473201
• De Ley, Herbert. Saint-Simon Memorialist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
•  "Louis_de_Rouvroy,_Duc_de_Saint-Simon". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Louis_de_Rouvroy,_Duc_de_Saint-Simon. 

External links

• The complete Memoirs Online (in French)
• Works by Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon at Project Gutenberg
  • Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency at Project Gutenberg

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