As historians have recently pointed out, over the eighteenth century the long-standing notion of republican virtue was eroded by the recognition that the pursuit of private interests provided benefits to the state as a whole. After... more
As historians have recently pointed out, over the eighteenth century the long-standing notion of republican virtue was eroded by the recognition that the pursuit of private interests provided benefits to the state as a whole. After Bonaparte republicanized the Italian Peninsula in 1796, the patriots, in spite of being imbued with republican thought, shifted the meaning of virtue in yet another direction. They realized that the traditional notion, which was intrinsically heroic, could not be proposed as a practicable ideal to a wide popular audience. Therefore, they started thinking of virtue in terms of empathy, brotherly love, and charity. In so doing, they did not reject the language of classical republicanism, yet thoroughly redefined it from within, putting a new concept of virtue into the foreground. This concept implied that the citizens were no longer supposed to sacrifice for their country, yet to love and care for their fellow citizens as if they were members of the same family. They were also called to lead a harmonious family life. This redefinition of virtue led the patriots to think of the nation itself in terms of a familial community and fostered the emergence of an autonomous private sphere, that could be properly defined as bourgeois.
