Translator’s note: After drawing on the Frenchman Coyer for his article Patrie , Jaucourt turns almost exclusively to English authors for his related article Patriot. Much of this entry, as Dennis J. Fletcher has shown,1 is drawn from Bolingbroke’s 1736 “Letter on Patriotism,” published in 1749 and translated into French in a 1750 edition. [1] Some is inspired by Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato, which had a wide audience in the eighteenth century, especially but not exclusively in the English-speaking world. Jaucourt’s deep familiarity with English political culture again provides a distinctive inflection to this French treatment of the subject.

Patriot. This is the person who in a free government loves his country and zealously brings his own well-being and glory to its aid, according to his means and faculties. If you would like an even nobler definition:

Serving one’s country is not a chimerical duty but a real obligation. Any man who agrees that there are duties derived from nature’s constitution and from the moral good and evil of things will recognize the duty that obliges us to do good for our country, or else he will be reduced to the most absurd inconsistency. Once he has acknowledged this duty, it is not difficult to prove to him that this duty is proportioned to the means and occasions that he has to fulfill it, and that nothing can exempt us from what we owe to country as far as it needs us and as far as we can serve it.

Ambitious slaves will say that it is very hard to renounce the pleasures of society in order to dedicate one’s days to the service of one’s country. Base souls, you have no idea then of noble and solid pleasures! Believe me, there are truer and more delicious ones in a life occupied with procuring the good of one’s country than Caesar ever knew in destroying the liberty of his own; or Descartes in building new worlds; or Burnet in creating a world before the flood. In discovering the true laws of nature, Newton himself knew no greater intellectual pleasure than is tasted by a true patriot who extends all the force of his understanding and who guides all his thoughts and actions toward the good of his Country. [3]

When a state minister forms a political plan which he knows will bring the most seemingly independent parts together into a good and great design, he dedicates himself to it with as much ardor and pleasure as the geniuses I have just named dedicated themselves to their ingenious research. The satisfaction that a speculative philosopher derives from the importance of the subjects to which he applies himself is very great, I admit. But the satisfactions of a man of state animated by patriotism go even further. In executing the plan he has devised, his work and his pleasures enhance each other and become diversified. It is true that the execution is often impeded by unforeseen circumstances, by the perfidy of his false friends, or by the power of his enemies. But the faithfulness of some men compensates him for the falseness of others. I will be told that, for whoever is involved in them, affairs of state are a type of lottery. Sure, but it’s a lottery the virtuous man can’t lose. If he meets with success, he will enjoy satisfaction proportional to the good he has done. If it’s the opposite and the oppressive parties come to prevail, he will always be consoled by the testimony of his conscience and the enjoyment of the honor he has acquired. [4]

When fortune had prepared the circumstances for bringing down the Roman republic, Cato arrested its collapse for some time with his virtue. [5] If he couldn’t save the liberty of Rome, he at least prolonged its survival. The republic would have been destroyed by Catiline, backed up by Caesar, Crassus, and their ilk, if it had not been defended by Cicero, supported by Cato and some patriots . I do think Cato showed too much severity for the mores of Rome, which for a long time had been abandoned to the greatest corruption. He was perhaps clumsy in his treatment of a worn-out civic body. [6] But if this virtuous and patriotic citizen was mistaken in his remedies, he has earned the glory he has acquired by the firmness of his conduct in consecrating his life to the service of his country. He would have been more worthy of praise had he persisted to the end in defending its liberty. His death would have been nobler in Munda than in Utica. [7]

After all, if this great man balanced the power of fortune by his patriotism almost alone, then a fortiori several good patriots can by their courage and their labors defend the constitution of the state against the encroachments of ill-intentioned men who have neither Crassus’s wealth nor Pompey’s reputation nor Caesar’s conduct nor Antony’s skill, but at most Catiline’s fury and Clodius’s indecency. [8]

As for me, who because of particular events has not had the good fortune to serve my country in any public employment, I have at least dedicated my days to attempting to know the duties of patriots . Perhaps today I am in a position to indicate them and depict them in their essence: Non is solus reipublicae prodest qui tuetur reos, et de pace belloque censet; sed qui juventutem exhortatur, qui in tantâ bonorum praeceptorum inopiâ, virtute instruit animos; qui ad pecuniam, luxuriamque cursu ruentes, prensat ac reprehendit: is in privato publicum negotium agit . [9]

1. Dennis J. Fletcher, “The Chevalier de Jaucourt and the English Sources of the Encyclopedic Article Patriote,” Diderot Studies 16 (1973): 23–34. See Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the spirit of patriotism, on the idea of a patriot king, and on the parties at the accession of King George the First (London, 1752.

2. The quoted passage appears in English in Jaucourt’s text. It is uttered by Cato upon the death of his son Marcus at the end of act IV, sc. 4, of Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713).

3. This paragraph is lightly adapted from Bolingbroke, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism , 27, which also includes Montaigne on the list. René Descartes was the French philosopher (1596–1650) whose theory of vortices proposed a new scheme of the physical world; Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715) was an English theologian whose Telluris Theoria Sacra, or Sacred Theory of the Earth (Latin ed., 1681, English 1684) offered a new theory of the origins of Noah’s flood. Isaac Newton’s Principia mathematica appeared in 1687.

4. See Bolingbroke, “Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism,” 29.

5. This paragraph is adapted from Bolingbroke, “Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism,” 30–31; see the comments in Fletcher, “English Sources,” 30.

6. Bolingbroke’s phrase here is “a crazy constitution.”

7. Utica, the city where Cato was born; Munda, the site in Hispania Baetica of an important victory by Caesar over Pompey’s son in 45 b.c.e.

8. Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 115–53 b.c.e.), Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106–48 b.c.e.), and Caesar (d. 44 b.c.e.) were members of the First Triumvirate in the civil wars; Marcus Antonius (83–30 b.c.e.) was a member of the second. Lucius Sergius Catilina (102–62 b.c.e.) conspired against the senate. Publius Clodius Pulcher (ca. 93–52 b.c.e.) was a populist tribune. Both he and Catiline were enemies of Cicero.

9. This final paragraph, including the passage from Seneca, is adapted from the final paragraph in Bolingbroke’s introduction to “Idea of a Patriot King” (65–66), where the author contrasts his public spirit with his present and future exile in another country. See also Fletcher, “English Sources,” 32, for Jaucourt’s editorial decisions. The full passage, slightly altered by Jaucourt, would read: “For the man that does good service to the state is not merely he who brings forward candidates and defends the accused and votes for peace and war, but he also who admonishes young men, who instils virtue into their minds, supplying the great lack of good teachers, who lays hold upon those that are rushing wildly in pursuit of money and luxury, and draws them back, and, if he accomplishes nothing else, at least retards them—such a man performs a public service even in private life.” See “On Tranquillity of Mind,” in Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935), II.iii.3, 2:225. A translation of this essay is available online as "Of Peace of Mind."