Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought par Michael Moriarty

Abstract

dimension of her letters, their sobriety and simplicity, which Yolanda Viñas del Palacio links to Maintenon’s ethos of contrariété, the need for self-sacrifice as a form of expiation for the king’s favor and of self-protection against ever-present calumny. Indeed, the two central notions underlying Maintenon’s epistolary lexicon are those of droiture of mind, soul, and body, and verticalité expressed through absolute obedience and submission to earthly authorities (Stéphanie Miech). Further contributions on Maintenon’s epistolary rhetoric explore her tense relations with church figures such as Fénélon (Hans Bots, Pauline Chaduc) and the Cardinal de Noailles (André Blanc); Maintenon walked a tightrope in trying to assert her influence and protect her reputation , playing with these powerful figures a‘game of cat and mouse’(André Blanc). The second part examines the reception and provenance of Maintenon’s letters, beginning with how her letters came into the possession of La Beaumelle who published three editions in the 1750s (Claudette Fortuny and Claude Lauriol).While some eighteenthand nineteenth-century anthologies and academic textbooks containing a selection of Maintenon’s letters privilege her ‘style simple’ and moralizing nature (Jean-Noël Pascal),others repeat the acerbic criticisms of La Beaumelle and the Duc de Saint-Simon concerning Maintenon’s ‘negative’ influence on Louis XIV and his court (Béatrice Bomel-Rainelli). So does the edition of Maintenon’s sayings, the Maintenoniana (1773), published by Bosselman, a little-known writer from Lille, who sided with the Encyclopedists in presenting her as contradictory and fanatical (Huguette Krief). Finally, the last six articles explore her reception in Romania in the nineteenth century (Ileana Mihaila), in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century (Madeleine van StrienChardonneau , Suzan van Dijk), among the English Bluestockings and Ladies of Llangollen (Gillian Dow), and for writers such as Mme de Genlis, a great admirer of Maintenon (Lesley H. Walker), and the Vicomte de Ségur, Amélie Suard, and Genlis again (Francesco Schiariti). This rich collection opens new paths for further exploration of this complex literary figure. Hope College (MI) Anne R. Larsen Moriarty, Michael. Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-958937-1. Pp. x + 409. $125. This painstaking and illuminating study complements the work carried out in two previous books by Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (2003) and Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (2006). The focus in this third volume derives from La Rochefoucauld’s insight that virtue is frequently disguised vice.Moriarty provides extensive background in moral philosophy, starting with Aristotle, for better understanding La Rochefoucauld’s thinking on vice and virtue. The book’s initial chapters examine theories of virtue in antiquity: for 228 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 229 Aristotle, virtue must be sustained consistently in practice as the moral life unfolds; Cicero’s civic ideals combine moral good with sociopolitical efficacy; Seneca and the Stoics involve the self in its own problematic diagnoses. All three see virtue grounded in the wisdom of an enlightened few. With the analysis of Saint Augustine, much of Moriarty’s discussion centers on the Christian ethics that would set the terms of debate on vice and virtue from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.Augustine’s view of humanity, tainted by original sin and in need of divine grace to achieve the transcendent ends definitive of virtuous action, provides the theological battleground on which debates would eventually rage in the seventeenth century. In the meantime, Augustine is filtered through Aquinas, who provides for the possibility of relative virtue even if absolute virtue remains unattainable. Chapters on Reformation and CounterReformation theologians reveal how Augustine continued to be cited by opposing camps. Doctrinal disputes would culminate in the controversy over Jansenius; a chapter is devoted to the Augustinus and its discontents. Moriarty places these debates in historical context: “Early modern Europe [...] was shaken up by [a] loss of confidence not just in particular doctrines, institutions or authorities, but in what we might call the naturalness of the way things are” (118). The loss of unquestioned objectivity led to the valorization of the kind...