On the Hardness of Virtue, or Fetishizing Disinterest in Beaumarchais' Les Deux amis

An exploration of the self-delusional structures in Beaumarchais's bourgeois drama Les Deux amis, that support the iniquities engendered by commerce in mid-eighteenth-century Lyon. At the dawn of capitalistic enterprise, the protagonist of the drame bourgeois suspends knowledge of his own rapaciousness by emphatically cultivating a stance of selfless virtue as he pursues his commercial interests. It is the paradox of the genre that the very attempt to depict the nascent merchant class in France as a salutary alternative to a lazy and selfish nobility reveals the mechanisms of disavowal upon which the businessman's "disinterested" virtues are predicated, and gestures toward the unseemly economic realities from which its heroes avert their eyes.