Construire la totalité. L’« esprit de corps » dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius)

Starting from the first occurrences in French of ‘esprit de corps’ (Saint-Simon, Voltaire), this article investigates this phrase’s philosophical and metaphorical presuppositions of eighteenth-century uses. After analysing Voltaire’s attempt to define the concept of esprit de corps in the ‘ESPRIT’ article of the Encyclopédie, I will examine a passage from Diderot’s Rêve de D’Alembert, in which esprit de corps is traced back to its metaphorical origin: esprit de corps here appears as esprit du corps, which shows how the political use of this category implies a certain preunderstanding of what the physiological body is and how it forms. As a background to his enquiry into the esprit de corps, Diderot puts forward a model of the organism marked by the rhythms and dynamics of epigenesis: the human body, like the political body, is permanently on the verge of completion, engaged in redefining its boundaries with the world and the relationships between its constituent organs at every moment, according to the principle of pleasure. From this perspective, between d’Holbach’s La morale universelle and Helvétius’s De l’esprit, esprit de corps becomes the expression of the eighteenth-century attempt to question the relationships between individuals, groups, and societies, outlining a stratified political reality crossed by non-univocal rhythms of functioning, recognising passions – particularly esteem – and interest as the constitutive and dissolutive forces of societies.