Joubert, JOSEPH, was born at Montignac in Périgord, 6th May 1754, and studied and taught till twenty-two at the college of Toulouse, then under the direction of the Fathers of the Christian Doctrine. He then went to Paris, and here made the acquaintance of Diderot, D'Alembert, Marmonel, and La Harpe, and lived through all the fever of the Revolution. He became the bosom friend of Fontanes and Chateaubriand, and he carried both to the famous salon of Madame de Beaumont. In 1790 his native townsmen elected him as justice of the peace, and in 1809 he was nominated by Napoleon on the recommendation of Fontanes to a seat in the council of the new university. At Villeneuve and at Paris he lived henceforward, and his years glided quietly away, while he read, dreamed, walked, wrote letters, and discoursed to friends who thronged even to his bedroom, which he seldom left before three o'clock in the afternoon. Despite weak health, he carried his head high all his life, and never ceased to read and re-read his favourite books, and jot down his meditations. Yet he published nothing in his life, although he was the keenest as well as the kindest critic to the writings of all his friends. He died 4th May 1824. Fourteen years after, his widow acceded to the prayers of her friends to allow a small volume to be printed from his papers. Chateaubriand edited it; Sainte-Beuve praised it without stint in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and Joubert's fame was from the moment of its appearance assured. And his Pensées, alike from their intrinsic value and insight and their faultless form, are worthy of their place in the splendid succession of La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, La Bruyère, and Vauvenargues.
At length in 1842 Joubert's nephew, Paul de Raynal, issued an adequate edition of the Pensées et Maximes from the more than 200 small manuscript books, with the addition of a number of letters, and an admirable biographical sketch. Another and enlarged edition by his brother, Arnaud Joubert, followed in 1850; yet another, better arranged, by Louis de Raynal in two volumes in 1862. There are translations by G. H. Calvert (Boston, 1867) and Henry Attwell (1877). See Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi (vol. i.), Portraits Littéraires (vol. ii.), and almost every page of his Chateaubriand et son Groupe; also Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (1865).