Arria’s dagger Female education and virtue in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

With its reading of the Discours sur l’éducation des femmes (1777), a text by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre still neglected by critics, the aim of this article is to show how the author of Paul et Virginie reformulates Rousseau’s doctrine of the complementarity of the sexes as illustrated in the fifth book of Émile, assigning a specific moral and political role to women.