Nicolas Chamfort

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, known in adult life as Nicolas Chamfort and as Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort, was a French writer of the late eighteenth century, best known for epigrams and aphorisms. He was born in 1741, though even the record of his birth is uncertain. One certificate from Saint-Genès parish in Clermont-Ferrand gives 6 April and names him the son of a grocer called Nicolas; another gives 22 June, “unknown parents,” and has led some scholars to argue that this was a baptismal date. Local tradition made him the child of an aristocratic woman, Jacqueline de Montrodeix, and a clergyman, Pierre Nicolas, later given in adoption to the grocer.

At nine, Chamfort was sent to Paris as a scholarship student at the Collège des Grassins. He was brilliant, dreamy, and proud. When the principal promised him a stipend, he answered that he preferred honour to honours. Later he summed up his schooling with the cutting line, “What I learned I no longer know; the little I still know, I guessed.” After graduation he took the name Chamfort and made his way by teaching, hack writing, and the conversation for which he became famous.

His first success came with the comedy La Jeune Indienne in 1764. He followed it with verse epistles, essays, and odes, but his literary standing was secured in 1769 when the Académie française awarded him a prize for his Eloge on Molière. Another comedy, Le Marchand de Smyrne, brought further notice in 1770. Illness interrupted his rise, and a pension charged on the Mercure de France allowed him to take the waters at Contrexéville and spend time in the country. There he wrote an Eloge on La Fontaine, which won the prize of the Academy of Marseilles in 1774.

Chamfort’s life repeatedly brought him close to power, though he never seemed easy inside it. In 1775 he met the duchesse de Grammont, whose influence introduced him at court. In 1776 his tragedy Mustapha et Zeangir was played at Fontainebleau before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The king gave him a pension, and the Prince de Condé made him his secretary, but Chamfort disliked the constraints of court life and resigned after a year. He was elected to the Académie française in 1781, belonged to the Masonic lodge Les Neuf Sœurs, and in 1784 became secretary to Madame Élisabeth, the king’s sister. In 1786 he received a pension from the royal treasury.

The French Revolution changed the course of his life. Chamfort threw himself into the republican movement, gave his small fortune to revolutionary propaganda, spoke in the streets, and was among the first to enter the Bastille when it was stormed. Until 3 August 1791 he served as secretary of the Jacobin club. He worked for the Mercure de France, collaborated in the Feuille villageoise, and drew up Talleyrand’s Addresse au peuple français. Yet under Marat and Robespierre he became critical of uncompromising Jacobinism, and after the fall of the Girondins his political life ended.

Chamfort’s sharp tongue had spared neither court nor Convention. After imprisonment in the prison des Madelonnettes and a threat of arrest again, he chose death rather than return to confinement. In September 1793 he attempted suicide and declared that he wished to die a free man rather than be brought back “as a slave” to a prison. He died on 13 April 1794. His words still matter because they came from a man who knew dependence, favor, illness, fame, revolution, and fear, and turned them into sentences hard enough to survive the noise of his age.