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Jaime Pasquier
Author Philosopher Historian
Two questions have driven everything
I've written
How should we live? And how do we actually live — when the stakes are high, the choices are hard, and the consequences follow us across years and continents?
Those questions take different forms depending on the book. Sometimes they become philosophy — a rigorous argument for why character matters more than achievement, and why the ancients understood something we've forgotten. Sometimes they become history — a buried scandal, an escape, lives rebuilt under new names. Sometimes they'll take forms I haven't written yet.
Whatever the form, the obsession is the same: what it means to be human, and whether we are capable of becoming more than we are.
This blog is where that thinking happens in public — essays, research, reflections, and the ideas that don't fit neatly between any book's covers. Browse the books below, then stay for the conversation.
Why I Wrote The Virtuous Life
The Ancient Thinkers Lit the Torch: The Architects of Progress By Jaime Pasquier I didn’t write The Virtuous Life because I had all the answers. I wrote it because I couldn’t shake a feeling — one I suspect many of you share — that something is quietly going wrong. Not wrong in the obvious, headline-grabbing way. Wrong in a deeper, slower sense. The kind of wrong you sense when you look around at a society that has more wealth, more technology, and more comfort than any civ
Jaime Pasquier
Mar 213 min read
Why I'm Giving Away 100 Copies of My Book The Virtuous Life
A message from the author This month, I’m giving away 100 Kindle copies of The Virtuous Life: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living through a Goodreads Giveaway — completely free. I’m doing it for a simple reason: ideas only matter when they reach the people who need them. Philosophy has always lived in conversation, not isolation. Socrates walked into the marketplace. The Stoics gathered students in public squares. The great traditions were meant to be practiced, not merely admi
Jaime Pasquier
Mar 12 min read
You Can't Become a Good Person Alone
Here's a sentence that should trouble us: America is the most connected society in human history, and one of the loneliest. We have more ways to communicate than any people who have ever lived. We can reach anyone, anywhere, instantly. And yet loneliness has become a public health crisis — with effects on physical health comparable, according to researchers, to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Something has gone badly wrong. And it's not a technology problem. It's a communit
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 282 min read
More Choices Than Ever. Less Free Than We've Ever Felt.
ANCIENT WISDOM FOR MODERN LIFE The strange tyranny of unlimited options Imagine standing in a supermarket aisle with four hundred varieties of breakfast cereal, unable to choose any of them. Psychologists call this "the paradox of choice." More options don't lead to better decisions — they lead to paralysis, anxiety, and a nagging sense that whatever you picked, something better was probably on the shelf next to it. Now scale that up to your entire life. Career options are ne
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 262 min read
We Don't Have a Politics Problem. We Have a Values Problem.
Why Moral Vertigo is Making Everything Harder By Jaime Pasquier · Author of The Virtuous Life: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living The Silence on Values Here's something worth noticing: people will argue passionately about politics. Yet, they go completely quiet the moment anyone raises a question about values. How should I live? What actually matters? Is there a difference between a good life and a successful one? These are the oldest and most important questions human beings h
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 202 min read
You've Won the Game.
The paradox at the heart of modern success — and the ancient idea that explains it. By Jaime Pasquier · Author of The Virtuous Life: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living Imagine the life you were told to want. Good income. Career traction. A home, a partner, maybe kids. Vacations you actually take. By any reasonable measure, you have arrived. And yet — quietly, persistently — something feels off. Not crisis-level off. Just… hollow. Like you’ve been running a race and crossed
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 194 min read
When the Archive Speaks Your Name
The Family History Behind the Novel What makes this research particularly compelling is that it does not rest on a single family’s claim. The Pasquier family in Nicaragua traces its lineage to Fermín Pasquier, who arrived in the months after the murder. The Praslin family—still present in Nicaragua today—traces its origins to the same period. These families developed independently, in different regions of the country, with no coordinated mythology. Yet both maintained oral tr
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 144 min read
The Story My Family Carried: A Journey Through Archives, Memory, and Mystery
When I began tracing my family tree fifteen years ago, I expected the usual mix of farmers and merchants, perhaps a minor scandal or two buried in parish records. I did not expect to find a murderer—or the conspiracy that helped him disappear. The story begins in Paris on the morning of August 18, 1847. The Duchess of Choiseul-Praslin was found dead in her bedroom at the family’s mansion on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Forty-seven stab wounds marked her body. Her husband
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 146 min read
How One Scandal Brought Down a King
In an opulent setting, a regal couple stands poised, epitomizing French royalty in 1820, reflecting a marriage of convenience through their elaborate attire and formal demeanor. The summer of 1847 in Paris was oppressively hot, but the heat that truly suffocated came from within—from drawing rooms thick with secrets, from palace corridors where whispers echoed louder than proclamations, from a monarchy that had confused longevity with legitimacy. King Louis-Philippe's July Mo
Jaime Pasquier
Feb 78 min read
The Sentence No One Could Escape
Murder, Privilege, and the Impossibility of Redemption in the Praslin Affair By Jaime Pasquier On the morning of August 18, 1847, servants discovered the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin dead in her locked bedroom at the family’s Parisian mansion. Forty-seven stab wounds. Her throat slashed. Blood on every surface. Her husband—a duke whose lineage reached back to the Crusades—was the only suspect, his robe soaked in her blood, her hair clenched in her dead hands. Six days later,
Jaime Pasquier
Jan 245 min read
Two Stories, One Murder: The Praslin Affair Through Opposing Lenses
Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Bette Davis) serves as the governess to the children of the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer) and his wife, the duchess (Barbara O'Neil). While both the Duc de Praslin and his children adore Henriette, the duchess despises her, and is suspicious of the bond she has formed with her family. As the duchess's behavior toward Henriette grows more and more irrational, it puts into play tragic events that will change all their lives forever. In 1938, Rachel
Jaime Pasquier
Jan 245 min read
The Praslin Murder and the Fall of a Kingdom
How a Bedroom Murder Became a Revolution’s Spark By Jaime Pasquier At half past four on the morning of August 18, 1847, a bell rang desperately through the Hôtel Sebastiani on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. When servants finally broke through the locked bedroom door of the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin, they found a scene that would sear itself into France’s collective memory: forty-seven stab wounds, a throat slashed to the bone, blood on every wall, overturned furniture m
Jaime Pasquier
Jan 146 min read
Discovering the Depths of History: The Themes and Value of Jaime Pasquier's Historical Fiction
Understanding Jaime's Literary Vision Jaime Pasquier is a published historical fiction author whose works, CUARENTA Y SIETE PUÑALADAS (Forty-Seven Stab Wounds) and its English counterpart The Scandal That Shook the Throne, offer readers an extraordinary journey into one of 19th-century France's most explosive moments. These aren't simply historical novels—they are deeply researched narratives drawn from family archives, where private tragedy and public scandal collide with de
Jaime Pasquier
Jan 145 min read
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