ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of three authors who promulgated modern republican ideas in France from mid-century down to the moment before the beginning of the French Revolution. All three have been understudied, underappreciated, and misunderstood. Because of his reduction of all motives to self-interest, Helvétius has been viewed in the English-speaking world as a forerunner of Jeremy Bentham. Nothing, however, could be more at odds with Bentham than Helvétius’s quest for republican prowess in the modern world. A proper legislator can and should transform subjects into citizens by making it in everyone’s interest to pursue the public good. Helvétius had no use for a repressive civic virtue - nor did Holbach, whose thought was overwhelmingly characterized by the theme of natural rights and social contract along the lines outlined by Locke, not the earlier social contract of Grotius and Pufendorf who spoke of alienable rights. Saige took the theme of natural rights republicanism beyond the 1770s to the 1780s, and where both Helvétius and Holbach, fearful of revolution, appealed to enlightened monarchs to begin the process of converting subjects into citizens, Saige did not rule out revolution.
