Abstract EN:

La Rochefoucauld is usually known for his famous maxims. The Duke and Moralist was equally versed in other literary genres such as the rhetoric of the pamphlet, Memoirs, satirical or gallant-style portraits, casual essays, commentaries on historical anecdotes, a sketch of the theory of the "honnête homme". This Ph-D in stylistics sets out to be a methodological tool in a dual way : firstly, it is an attempt at justifying the epistemological use of various modern linguistic theories (utterance-centred approaches, pragmatics, Guillaume's linguistics, praxematics, the French school of discourse analysis) and their application to classical texts : secondly, it is an endeavour to grasp the manifold interactions which characterize a multi-generic work (the part and the whole, component and system). Indeed, the works of the Duke generate one another, either overtly through a process of rewriting (such works as The apology and The Memoirs, the Maxims and Miscellanous thoughts can be coupled together) or through the emergence within the tightly-knit structure of the early works of formal components inferred from analysis which prefigure the future fragments or maxims. As a consequence, this Ph-D thesis is concerned with textual genetics, at once in the philological sense of the term ( the study of intra-textual variations) or in the broader sense of psycho-stylistics : the birth and development of a figure of thought that virtually encapsulates "the spiritual etymon" of the whole work : paradox, a seldom studied feature to which a hundred-page chapter is devoted.