JOUBERT, PETRUS JACOBUS (1834-1900), commandant-general of the South African Republic from 1880 to 1900, was born at Cango, in the district of Oudtshoorn, Cape Colony, on the 20th of January 1834, a descendant of a French Huguenot who fled to South Africa soon after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. Left an orphan at an early age, Joubert migrated to the Transvaal, where he settled in the Wakkerstroom district near Laing’s Nek and the north-east angle of Natal. There he not only farmed with great success, but turned his attention to the study of the law. The esteem in which his shrewdness in both farming and legal affairs was held led to his election to the Volksraad as member for Wakkerstroom early in the sixties, Marthinus Pretorius being then in his second term of office as president. In 1870 Joubert was again elected, and the use to which he put his slender stock of legal knowledge secured him the appointment of attorney-general of the republic, while in 1875 he acted as president during the absence of T. F. Burgers in Europe. During the first British annexation of the Transvaal, Joubert earned for himself the reputation of a consistent irreconcilable by refusing to hold office under the government, as Paul Kruger and other prominent Boers were doing. Instead of accepting the lucrative post offered him, he took a leading part in creating and directing the agitation which led to the war of 1880-1881, eventually becoming, as commandant-general of the Boer forces, a member of the triumvirate that administered the provisional Boer government set up in December 1880 at Heidelberg. He was in command of the Boer forces at Laing’s Nek, Ingogo, and Majuba Hill, subsequently conducting the earlier peace negotiations that led to the conclusion of the Pretoria Convention. In 1883 he was a candidate for the presidency of the Transvaal, but received only 1171 votes as against 3431 cast for Kruger. In 1893 he again opposed Kruger in the contest for the presidency, standing as the representative of the comparatively progressive section of the Boers, who wished in some measure to redress the grievances of the Uitlander population which had grown up on the Rand. The poll (though there is good reason for believing that the voting lists had been manipulated by Kruger’s agents) was declared to have resulted in 7911 votes being cast for Kruger and 7246 for Joubert. After a protest Joubert acquiesced in Kruger’s continued presidency. He stood again in 1898, but the Jameson raid had occurred meantime and the voting was 12,858 for Kruger and 2001 for Joubert. Joubert’s position had then become much weakened by accusations of treachery and of sympathy with the Uitlander agitation. He took little part in the negotiations that culminated in the ultimatum sent to Great Britain by Kruger in 1899, and though he immediately assumed nominal command of the operations on the outbreak of hostilities, he gave up to others the chief share in the direction of the war, through his inability or neglect to impose upon them his own will. His cautious nature, which had in early life gained him the sobriquet of “Slim Piet,” joined to a lack of determination and assertiveness that characterized his whole career, led him to act mainly on the defensive; and the strategically offensive movements of the Boer forces, such as Elandslaagte and Willow Grange, appear to have been neither planned nor executed by him. As the war went on, physical weakness led to Joubert’s virtual retirement, and, though two days earlier he was still reported as being in supreme command, he died at Pretoria from peritonitis on the 28th of March 1900. Sir George White, the defender of Ladysmith, summed up Joubert’s character when he called him “a soldier and a gentleman, and a brave and honourable opponent.”
JOUFFROY, JEAN (c. 1412-1473), French prelate and diplomatist, was born at Luxeuil (Haute-Saône). After entering the Benedictine order and teaching at the university of Paris from 1435 to 1438, he became almoner to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, who entrusted him with diplomatic missions in France, Italy, Portugal and Castile. Jouffroy was appointed abbot of Luxeuil (1451?) bishop of Arras (1453), and papal legate (1459). At the French court his diplomatic duties brought him to the notice of the dauphin (afterwards Louis XI.). Jouffroy entered Louis’s service, and obtained a cardinal’s hat (1461), the bishopric of Albi (1462), and the abbacy of St Denis (1464). On several occasions he was sent to Rome to negotiate the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction and to defend the interests of the Angevins at Naples. Attached by King Louis to the sieur de Beaujeu in the expedition against John V., count of Armagnac, Jouffroy was accused of taking the town of Lectoure by treachery, and of being a party to the murder of the count of Armagnac (1473). He died at Reuilly the same year.
See C. Fierrille, Le Cardinal Jean Jouffroy et son temps (1412-1473) (Coutances, Paris, 1874).
JOUFFROY, THÉODORE SIMON (1706-1842), French philosopher, was born at Pontets, near Mouthe, department of Doubs. In his tenth year, his father, a tax-gatherer, sent him to an uncle at Pontarlier, under whom he commenced his classical studies. At Dijon his compositions attracted the attention of an inspector, who had him placed (1814) in the normal school, Paris. He there came under the influence of Victor Cousin, and in 1817 he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the normal and Bourbon schools. Three years later, being thrown upon his own resources, he began a course of lectures in his own house, and formed literary connexions with Le Courrier français, Le Globe, L’Encyclopédie moderne, and La Revue européenne. The variety of his pursuits at this time carried him over the whole field of ancient and modern literature. But he was chiefly attracted to the philosophical system represented by Reid and Stewart. The application of “common sense” to the problem of substance supplied a more satisfactory analytic for him than the scepticism of Hume which reached him through a study of Kant. He thus threw in his lot with the Scottish philosophy, and his first dissertations are, in their leading position, adaptations from Reid’s Inquiry. In 1826 he wrote a preface to a translation of the Moral Philosophy of Stewart, demonstrating the possibility of a scientific statement of the laws of consciousness; in 1828 he began a translation of the works of Reid, and in his preface estimated the influence of Scottish criticism upon philosophy, giving a biographical account of the movement from Hutcheson onwards. Next year he was returned to parlement by the arrondissement of Pontarlier; but the work of legislation was ill-suited to him. Yet he attended to his duties conscientiously, and ultimately broke his health in their discharge. In 1833 he was appointed professor of Greek and Roman philosophy at the college of France and a member of the Academy of Sciences; he then published the Mélanges philosophiques (4th ed. 1866; Eng. trans. G. Ripley, Boston, 1835 and 1838), a collection of fugitive papers in criticism and philosophy and history. In them is foreshadowed all that he afterwards worked out in metaphysics, psychology, ethics and aesthetics. He had already demonstrated in his prefaces the possibility of a psychology apart from physiology, of the science of the phenomena of consciousness distinct from the perceptions of sense. He now classified the mental faculties, premising that they must not be confounded with capacities or properties of mind. They were, according to his analysis, personal will, primitive instincts, voluntary movement, natural and artificial signs, sensibility and the faculties of intellect; on this analytic he founded his scheme of the universe. In 1835 he published a Cours de droit naturel (4th ed. 1866), which, for precision of statement and logical coherence, is the most important of his works. From the conception of a universal order in the universe he reasons to a Supreme Being, who has created it and who has conferred upon every man in harmony with it the aim of his existence, leading to his highest good. Good, he says, is the fulfilment of man’s destiny, evil the thwarting of it. Every man being organized in a particular way has, of necessity, an aim, the fulfilment of which is good; and he has faculties for accomplishing it, directed by reason. The aim is good, however, only when reason guides it for the benefit of the majority, but that is not absolute good. When reason rises to the conception of universal order, when actions are submitted, by the exercise of a sympathy working necessarily and intuitively to the idea of the universal order, the good has been reached, the true good, good in itself, absolute good. But he does not follow his idea into the details of human duty, though he passes in review fatalism, mysticism, pantheism, scepticism, egotism, sentimentalism and rationalism. In 1835 Jouffroy’s health failed and he went to Italy, where he continued to translate the Scottish philosophers. On his return he became librarian to the university, and took the chair of recent philosophy at the faculty of letters. He died in Paris on the 4th of February 1842. After his death were published Nouveaux mélanges philosophiques (3rd ed. 1872) and Cours d’esthétique (3rd ed. 1875). The former contributed nothing new to the system except a more emphatic statement of the distinction between psychology and physiology. The latter formulated his theory of beauty.
Jouffroy’s claim to distinction rests upon his ability as an expositor of other men’s ideas. He founded no system; he contributed nothing of importance to philosophical science; he initiated nothing which has survived him. But his enthusiasm for mental science, and his command over the language of popular exposition, made him a great international medium for the transfusion of ideas. He stood between Scotland and France and Germany and France; and, though his expositions are vitiated by loose reading of the philosophers he interpreted, he did serviceable, even memorable work.
See L. Lévy Bruhl, History of Modern Philos. in France (1899), pp. 349-357; C. J. Tissot, Th. Jouffroy: sa vie et ses écrits (1876); J. P. Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philos. en France au xixe siècle (1846).