This is the first study to focus on the idea of virtue and its place in political thought in eighteenth-century France. Virtue could be used to impart moral authority to arguments about political power. The development of this strategic idea is traced through the works of key Enlightenment thinkers. There is also consideration of the ways in which numerous popular writers of the day, including clerics, eulogists, journalists, novelists and lawyers, employed the idea of virtue in polemical discussions in their writings.