Reshaping Virtue: The Case of Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Masonic Poetry

My aim is to reconstruct the process through which freemason poets reshaped the concept of virtue in novel and productive ways. In fact, I believe that they contributed to create a new masonic morality, which combined spiritual and secular values. A new model of Great Man stemmed from this renovated ethos: the virtuous freemason. Between the late Eighteenth-Century and the early Nineteenth-century, freemason savants such as Voltaire, Lalande, Dupaty, Filangieri and Mascheroni became the object of a true cult, thanks to the poetic composition of their Brothers, anticipating the revolutionary secular cult of Marat and Napoleon’s personal propaganda.