Introduction [in English]

In October 2019 Quebec City hosted the 45^th annual conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS), on the theme “Ethic(s) of/in the Enlightenment.” The valuable discussions that ensued at many paper sessions demonstrate the ongoing interest in questions of moral agency to scholars of our period. Surveying the key concepts of these scholarly conversations is a worthwhile way of introducing the selected papers collected in the present volume. If today the word éthique is omnipresent in French-language public discourse—be it scientific, juridical, or philosophical—to the point where it has even overtaken morale to characterize investigations into the relation between subjects and their actions, this was far from the case in the Enlightenment. In France, certainly, over the course of the eighteenth century éthique essentially referenced the elements of Aristotelian philosophy as taught in Jesuit colleges or in university. The entry for éthique in the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) reflects this classical influence: the three main branches of philosophy are identified as la logique, l’éthique, and la physique. Aristotle’s Ethics are said to constitute his “ouvrages moraux” [“moral works”]. It is in this vein that Scipion Dupleix—philosopher and counsellor to King Henri IV—published the first philosophy course in the French language for his student the Count of Moret. Titled Cours de philosophie contenant la logique, la physique, la métaphysique et l’éthique (1623), the work testifies to the principally pedagogical and scholarly use of the term éthique in the early modern period. Over a century later, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772) defines l’éthique as the “science of morals,” observing that the word “is no longer used” and that it “only serves on rare occasions to designate works such as Spinoza’s Ethics.” As Jean-Pierre Cléro notes in his contribution to this issue of Lumen, “the French-speaking world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remains to all intents and purposes ignorant of the notion of ethics”: French thinkers largely preferred the term morale. A quick bibliographical search in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) certainly does seem to show the century’s preference and corroborates Cléro’s claim. In point of fact, not a single title containing the word éthique comes up between 1700 and 1799 in the BnF catalogue. For the same period, by contrast, the word morale appears in over 1600 titles. A significant spike in use can be observed after 1780, with 229 titles appearing between 1780 and 1789, and 320 between 1790 and 1799, compared to an average of only 161 for each of the century’s other decades. The French Revolution, a major historical event, is a likely cause for this upsurge in printed works advertising an ethical purpose: the nation’s legislators and thinkers were in the midst of laying the groundwork for the young République on the principles of “moral regeneration.” So, the Latinate morale, appearing throughout the early modern period as an exact synonym of éthique, seems to have surpassed its Greek counterpart in the lexicon of eighteenth-century French thinkers. Only a few works drawn from the dix-huitiémiste’s canon need to be cited to illustrate this trend: Maupertuis’s Essai de philosophie morale (1749), d’Holbach’s La Morale universelle, ou les Devoirs de l’homme fondée sur sa nature (1776), or the Abbé Mably’s Principes de morale (1784), not to mention both Diderot’s and Rousseau’s entire corpus, which are endlessly preoccupied with moral questions. This dimension of these thinkers’ work is still very much an object of contemporary research, as last summer’s Cerisy colloquium on Les Morales de Diderot confirms. In fact, in …