This is the first study to focus on the idea of virtue and its place in political thought in eighteenth-century France. Virtue could be used to impart moral authority to arguments about political power. The development of this strategic idea is traced through the works of key Enlightenment thinkers. There is also consideration of the ways in which numerous popular writers of the day, including clerics, eulogists, journalists, novelists and lawyers, employed the idea of virtue in polemical discussions in their writings.

'...the indispensable introduction to the subject.' - Johnson Kent Wright, H-France

'...an instructive analysis of the evoloution of one flexible and influential concept but also illustrated larger themes...' - Jeffrey Merrick, American Historical Review

Autorentext

MARISA LINTON is a Senior Lecturer in History at Kingston University, London. She has published numerous articles, including work on the political ideas of Robespierre, on religious toleration in Enlightenment France, on the origins of the French Revolution, and on women in the Paris Commune of 1871.

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Acknowledgements Introduction Concepts of Virtue before 1745 Sociable Virtue and the Rose of Secular Morality, 1745-1754 Virtue and Radical Political Theory: Rousseau and Mably Making the Man of Virtue, 1755-1770 The Virtuous King: A Rhetoric Transformed The Maupeou Crisis and the Rose of Patriotic Virtue, 1770-1775 The Triumph of Virtue, 1774-1788 Conclusion: Virtue and the Creation of Revolutionary Politics Index