Abstract EN:

As a literary myth and a source of more or less well-considered nostalgiae, the gaiety of the French eighteenth century is looked upon as an exception of history, a golden age of the " civilisation des mœurs ". For Voltaire's contemporaries, " French gaiety " especially fits into the general picture of the " caractère des nations ". Du Bos, then Montesquieu, elaborated the theory, thus renewing the hippocratic tradition of temperament and climate. By doing so, they also gave a new conceptual tool to the political thought of Enlightenment, from which the " nation " was to be considered with the Revolution. The point of this study, far from any patrimonial sympathy, is, on one hand, to analyze the idea of the nation as a representation, in a sense that it is literary as well as juridical; on the other hand, to recount the genesis of the nation as a moral person, whereas it remained considered, according to the climatical scheme, as a " physical " person, submitted to the same natural determinism as the individual. Law and literature meet on this complex and unsteady ground of " mores ", with the French nation inventing itself as an autonomous subject, whilst previously it was confined the absolutist vision within the building of the state.