Abstract EN:

The aim of this thesis is to combine general philosophical research (on moral and politics virtue of prudence) and research in the history of philosophy (on the status of libertinage in the seventeenth century). Thus, our study deals with the function of the concept of prudence in the works of three seventeenth-century French libertines : François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, and Samuel Sorbière. Starting with a preliminary question that challenges the dominant historiographic thesis (why should the critical thinking of the libertines stop where the politic begin ?), our purpose is to demonstrate how these authors put forward a form of politically subversive thought, and hence libertine, in so far as they divert the explicit meaning of the "raison d'Etat" discourse, though a theorizing and a use of prudence. Indeed, from their perspective, prudence is both an object of thought (as the political art of deception and ethical art of deceit) and a writing process which subverts the opponent's discourse. The successive analysis of the multiple aspects of prudence, with its political implications (inherited from Machiavel), ethical implications (inherited from classical philosophy and from Montaigne), and aesthetic implications (inherited from the persecution libertinage), will lead to a clearer understanding of these authors' complex political thought, and, from a more general point of view, allow to reflect on the very polemic category called "libertinage" (what is its coherence in the seventeenth century and what is its relation with philosophy?)