What, in fact, is virtue? For the bourgeois philosopher of the period it is conformity with nature11 and, in politics, conformity with the law, which expresses the general will. “Morality,” says Saint-Just, “is stronger than tyrants.” It has, in fact, just killed Louis XVI. Every form of disobedience to law therefore comes, not from an imperfection in the law, which is presumed to be impossible, but from a lack of virtue in the refractory citizen.
