Liberty, Rights and Virtue

Abstract

Some Roman republican themes and arguments can be traced in Diderot and d'Alembert, those very philosophes who most emblematically personify the modern Enlightenment which the revivification of Roman republicanism is traditionally said to oppose. This chapter aims at showing that Roman authors considered the detour via Roman republican political thinking as an appropriate route to foster the ‘liberation of the individual in the modern era’. Roman republican references could be sharp weapons turned against the smug champions of enlightened modern monarchies. Assessing the role and function of Roman republican thinking in the revolutionary era is an immensely complex task, if only because most of the political thinkers of the Revolution were at the same time its main protagonists. A clear function of Roman republican ideology in revolutionary but monarchical France was to show how contradictory it would be to claim to be free while living under a monarch.