Joseph Joubert

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.

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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.