French moralists

Under the French moralists are expected publishing in French philosophical writers of the late 16th, 17th and 18th century, the texts of which are attributable to European mores. Form and content, this flow or text type, among other things characterizable by essayistic style and tendency to want to analyze human behavior. The word ' morality ' refers not according to aspects of normative ethics.

Conceptual history

The term French moralists coined Amaury Duval (1760-1838), which began in 1820 with the publication of a number of different works under the title Collection Moralistes de Français.

Representative

Among the French moralists are, inter alia, expected: Montaigne, Charron, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, Duclos, Rivarol, Nicolas Chamfort, Montesquieu, Galiani, Prince de Ligne, Joubert, Jouffroy.

In the Paris salons of the wit and the irony of the moralists were well received. They influenced later writers such as, inter alia, Voltaire, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde.