Les mouvements de la vanité à l’époque des Lumières
Vanity’s Movements in the Age of Enlightenment

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the progressive secularization of vanity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Once removed from its theocentric origins, vanity will denote less the vacuity and transience of earthly life and will refer increasingly to socially indecorous behavior that is firmly anchored in the temporal. This shift from the sacred to the saeculum will also cause a shift in the way we imagine vanity’s connoted movements. Once the transient and fleeting, vanity in the 18th century will come to designate the unpliable and the rigid.

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