Abstract

The issue of happiness is the core of the self-narration of the French Revolution. The promise and the hope of happiness are fundamental elements of its capacity of activating millenarian hopes, and of being conceived as the «Good news». The essay focuses on Robespierre's conception of happiness. The Author questions the mainstream positions on the Jacobin conception of happiness, and particularly the way they attribute to Robespierre only a concern with «public happiness». Through a philological, lexicological and lexicometrical reading, it is reconstructed the dialectic between individual, private and public happiness in Robespierre's political thought and political initiative.