Description
Book SynopsisIn a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an ‘emanation of virtue’. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution.
This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of ‘virtue’ in this period – one that is often associated with a ‘crisis of the European mind’. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Staël, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume’s perspective.
Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, ‘the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences’.
Trade Review‘This fascinating book is likely to have a long-standing presence in the reading lists of students of French intellectual history…The
philosophes certainly raised many questions about the possibility of secular virtue, and the contributions to this book reveal just how important such questions were.’
Madeleine Armstrong,
Modern Language Review'This volume avoids the trap of many others of its kind, as the articles are selected and assembled in a coherent manner in a chronological order in such a way as to give a truly comprehensive view of the of the subject matter.'
Rotraud von Kulessa,
18th Century Fiction Translated from English,
'This volume escapes the trap of many others of its kind, because the articles are chosen and put together in a coherent way in a chronological order in such a way as to be able to give a real overview of the subject matter.'
Table of ContentsList of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
James Fowler and Marine Ganofsky, Introduction: virtue and the secular turn, 1680-1794
Michael Moriarty, Virtue before the Enlightenment
Nicholas Treuherz,
Vertu et Lumières: Bayle’s ‘virtuous atheist’ and its afterlives
James Fowler, Secular virtue: echoes of Shaftesbury in Diderot
Alicia C. Montoya, From the religious virtues to Enlightenment virtue
Ioana Galleron, Bernard-Joseph Saurin, the
comédie de moeurs and the civic function of plays
Karen Nehlsen Manna, Acting
honnête: effeminacy, masculinity and the ethos of social virtue in Enlightenment comedy
Jean-Alexandre Perras, The softness of the
petit-maître and the decay of
virtusMathilde Chollet, ‘La vera nobiltà non consiste in altro che nella virtù’: a woman’s view on virtue, or Henriette de Marans’s nobility
Marine Ganofsky, Virtue and invisibility: libertine variations on the myth of Gyges
Lydia Vázquez, Female virtue and bliss in the eighteenth century
Pierre Saint-Amand, The politics of virtue:
Réflexions sur le procès de la reine by Mme de Staël
Patrice Higonnet, Robespierre’s virtue in Marx and Tocqueville
Daniel Brewer, Virtue and the ethics of the virtual
Summaries
List of works cited
Index
