“The greater the crime, the better it serves Nature”

“The greater the crime, the better it serves Nature” condenses Father Clement’s most extreme case against conventional morality: crime, he argues, does not oppose nature but helps restore the balance that virtue supposedly disturbs. His language turns predation into a law of the universe, and the argument’s chilling force comes from its collision with Therese’s experience of a society where the poor are punished for crimes they did not commit while powerful offenders escape accountability.

The Argument of Equilibrium

Father Clement presents nature as a system of perpetual action and reaction, in which virtues and vices together produce an equilibrium essential to the continuance of the stars and vegetation. The strong consume the weak, he says, just as wolves devour lambs; neither the lamb’s inability to understand its fate nor human horror at violence alters the role that predation plays in his account. The analogy makes destruction appear not an exception to nature but one of its ordinary operations.

He extends this reasoning to human conduct. People, in his account, are alone in the universe from their own perspective and tend to care for others only while expecting some benefit. Once they can assert power directly, they discard humanitarian principles, satisfy their appetites, and cease to consider what their pleasures cost other people. Clement calls this selfish figure a person in tune with nature, not a monster. By invoking the wolf and the lamb, he turns self-interest and domination into parts of a general scheme rather than moral failures requiring restraint.

The formulation that greater crimes serve nature better follows from Clement’s claim that nature loses ground whenever virtue advances. A small crime, because it differs little from virtue, cannot restore the balance as effectively as a grave one. The more deadly and shocking the act, he maintains, the more completely it offsets virtue’s influence. His conclusion is not simply that wrongdoing is natural: it is that the magnitude of wrongdoing increases its supposed usefulness to nature.

Habit, Transgression, and Pleasure

Clement also attempts to explain away moral revulsion. He tells Therese that disgust does not demonstrate that an act violates nature; it results from lack of habit, as aversion to a food or medicine may arise from unfamiliarity. If people become accustomed to evil, he claims, they will find it pleasing. Initial resistance, in this argument, is not a reliable ethical warning but an obstacle that can be overcome through repetition.

The theory gives social prohibition a paradoxical role. Customs, beliefs, and laws chill the pleasure associated with crime, Clement argues, while the barriers they impose make transgression more gratifying. The more a deed appalls people, conflicts with their customs, and breaks social restraints, the more useful Clement claims it becomes to nature. In his telling, the very resistance that might seem to confirm a moral boundary instead magnifies the pleasure of crossing it.

This reasoning also lets Clement recast legal punishment as an interference with natural appetite. He imagines a society in which conduct now condemned would cease to be punished, and says that fear of law diminishes the pleasure nature has placed in crime. He does not present this as a neutral account of how law works: it is a polemic designed to discredit shared moral rules and free the individual from their restraint. His appeal to nature supplies the authority his argument otherwise lacks, treating desire as evidence of what nature intends.

Society, Risk, and the Libertine Case

In a related argument, Clement defends a society whose members share criminal proclivities. Such a group, he contends, would escape the competing interests and continual pitfalls of a mixed society, because everyone would move toward the same goal. He acknowledges that a circulation of vice would bring risks, but claims that the pleasure of threatening others offsets the grief of being threatened in turn. He therefore presents reciprocal danger as a kind of equality, and a community organized around vice as more harmonious than one divided between the virtuous and the vicious.

The claim depends on redefining happiness as the balance of inflicted and endured harm, rather than as safety or mutual care. Clement further suggests that people would no longer be unhappy about wrongdoing if they stopped honoring what they call good and instead ceased to condemn what they call evil. Yet the apparent equality he describes leaves intact the force of domination: his own wolf-and-lamb image begins with one creature devouring another, not with a relationship of equal power. The language of common inclinations does not remove the threatened victim from the scheme; it makes that victim’s exposure part of the supposed balance.

The Doctrine Against the Plot

The doctrine is spoken by Father Clement to Therese, whose own history supplies a sustained counterpoint to his abstractions. She has been seized after Monsieur du Harpin planted a diamond in her mattress and accused her of theft. Her attempt to explain that the accusation was revenge is treated as recrimination, while his standing as a man of integrity outweighs her testimony. The law does not distribute danger and punishment equally: poverty makes her appear guilty, and the authority of her accuser converts his false charge into a conviction.

A similar disparity appears in Therese’s account of exploitation. A wealthy offender describes using emissaries to sell girls to matchmakers in Montpellier, Toulouse, Nimes, Aix, and Marseilles, while profiting from their vulnerability. He also claims to encourage economic fluctuations and rising prices, worsening poverty so that more people will be driven into his reach. The doctrine of natural equilibrium can make exploitation sound universal, but these particulars reveal an organized trade that depends on wealth, influence, and the deliberate production of desperation. The harm is not distributed as an abstract balance: the poor bear it, while the powerful profit.

Therese’s later encounter with the law sharpens the contrast. In Grenoble, she is nearly sentenced to hang with the counterfeiters because the brand on her body is taken as evidence of guilt. A magistrate listens to her testimony, and the court finally acquits her as an unwilling participant; the contrast with her earlier conviction shows that justice can change when someone with authority chooses to hear her. Yet her eventual royal rehabilitation does not bring equivalent accountability for her persecutors. Letters from the King void the proceedings against her and award her a thousand crowns a year, but Saint-Florent and Cardoville have already obtained powerful appointments, and their families quiet the scandal.

Rhetorical Force and Moral Consequence

Clement’s account has the shape of a closed system: if nature inspires desire, desire proves natural; if a deed provokes horror, that horror is attributed to habit; if law punishes the deed, law is accused of suppressing pleasure; and if violence seems to upset the balance, more violence is said to restore it. Each objection is absorbed into the theory as further evidence for its premise. Its fluency is part of its danger: it converts the victim’s suffering into an impersonal mechanism and the perpetrator’s appetite into nature’s work.

The narrative does not erase the real force of this argument by pretending that virtue reliably protects Therese. Her story repeatedly demonstrates the reverse: false accusation, imprisonment, and abuse can follow her efforts to remain virtuous, while money and office shield those who exploit others. But that pattern exposes the human arrangement of injustice rather than proving that crime produces universal equilibrium. In the theory’s most revealing irony, nature is invoked to excuse the strong, while the concrete institutions of courts, markets, and political patronage determine whose suffering counts and whose wrongdoing prospers.