Guillaume du Vair

Guillaume du Vair (born March 7, 1556, Paris, Fr.—died Aug. 31, 1621, Tonneins) was a highly influential French thinker and writer of the troubled period at the end of the 16th century.

A lawyer by training, du Vair occupied high offices of state under Henry IV, having made his reputation with his eloquent and cogently argued orations. He first came to the fore with a brilliant oration on the death of Mary, Queen of Scots. The elaborate style of his speeches, with all their erudition and ingenuity, was appreciated in an age that had a highly developed taste for rhetoric. As a thinker, du Vair is famed for such treatises as De la constance et consolation ès calamités publiques (1593; “On Constancy and Consolation in Public Calamities,” Eng. trans. A Buckler, Against Adversitie, 1622). In this work he put forward an amalgam of Stoicism and Christianity that was well calculated to appeal to readers in a France torn apart by civil war. Philosophers such as Justus Lipsius had already attempted to fuse Christian and Stoic ethics, but du Vair’s importance in the dissemination of ideas of this sort is undeniable. François de Malherbe was the first of the French poets to take up du Vair’s doctrines, and the French moraliste tradition of the 17th century owed much to him. A number of his philosophical works were translated into English in the 17th century.