Moraliste writing of the seventeenth century deserves the name not because it is moralising in intention but in so far as it examines mœurs (‘morals’) in the sense of human manners or behaviour. It typically makes that behaviour the object of disenchanted reflections delivered in short, fragmented forms. The period's most prominent examples of writing in this vein – the Pensées (Thoughts) (first published in 1670) of Blaise Pascal (1623–62), the Maximes (Maxims) (1665–78) of François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80), the Fables (1668–94) of Jean de La Fontaine (1622–95), and the Caractères (Characters) (1688–96) of Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96) – all combine moral dissection with pithiness. Influenced by the Augustinian pessimism of the so-called Jansenist movement, but generally secular in perspective, they reveal something of the shifting frontier between religion and literature in the period. Like their most important precursor, the Essais (Essays) (1580–95) of Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), they reflect on important questions by experimenting with literary form. Each of the texts has come, as a result of its success, to lend the short title by which it is commonly known – pensées, maxims, and so on – to a distinct form of moraliste writing.

The term moraliste needs, however, to be handled with caution when applied to writing of the seventeenth century. A later invention, one that becomes an established feature of critical discourse only in the first half of the nineteenth century, it risks imposing a false coherence on the texts of the period and masking the differences between them.