Forgiveness and the Age of Reason: Fenelon, Voltaire, Rousseau and Stael

This dissertation examines attempts that were made by Voltaire, Rousseau, Stael and others to provide an account of forgiveness that would be consistent with the rational humanism they had embraced and thus wholly divorced from Christian models. In so doing, it provides a more nuanced understanding of a peculiar situation in which a concept proved to be incompatible with a specific communicative system's vocabulary but could not be abandoned as a real human possibility for both ideological and practical reasons. This dissertation thus reads forgiveness as a concept that proved to be beyond the limits of what the rational humanism of the French Enlightenment could explain.