Social contract

The social contract in Justine is presented not as an abstract agreement among equals but as a contested bargain whose fairness depends on who has resources and power. In a debate with Dubois and Coeur-de-fer, Justine argues that mutual obligations make society possible and that rejecting them invites retaliation. Coeur-de-fer answers that a contract which demands concessions from people with little to give, while failing to protect them in return, cannot claim their allegiance. Their exchange exposes the tension between social cooperation as a condition of peace and social order as a structure that may perpetuate inequality.

The argument for reciprocal obligation

Justine challenges the criminal doctrines advanced by Dubois by asking whether self-interest alone can sustain a community. A person who offers society only crimes, she argues, will be treated as a threat: if strong, that person will be attacked; if weak, the first person offended may bring them down. Even among criminals, she reasons, a refusal of all restraint would endanger everyone. If each member followed private advantage without limit, one might kill the others to seize their shares. In her account, the group’s need for cooperation demonstrates the practical necessity of something resembling virtue, even in a criminal association.

Her argument widens beyond the band. Society, she says, is maintained by an ongoing exchange of consideration and good works, which bind people together. A person who rejects the social contract and contributes only injury cannot expect others to tolerate the danger. The people around that person will unite to protect their peace, making isolated opposition to collective interests unstable. The contract is therefore not merely a moral ideal in Justine’s reasoning: it is a means of securing mutual safety through reciprocal restraint.

Coeur-de-fer’s reply: interest without virtue

Coeur-de-fer rejects Justine’s conclusion while accepting part of her observation. Criminals, he insists, are not kept from attacking one another by virtue. They refrain because acting alone would deprive them of the cooperation and resources they need to pursue their own interests. Their restraint is thus strategic and contingent, not evidence of moral commitment. What Justine identifies as virtue, he redescribes as calculation: each member preserves the others because their continued participation is useful.

He then turns the same analysis against the wider society. The common interest, he argues, is only the combined mass of individual interests, and private interests can be reconciled with it only through concessions. But the capacity to concede is unequal. A poor person who possesses almost nothing cannot give up a meaningful portion without losing what little sustains them; a person with more may discover that they give far more than they receive. For Coeur-de-fer, a bargain so uneven cannot be presumed fair simply because it is called a social agreement. His challenge is directed at the terms of consent: what does the contract offer someone who has no adequate share to exchange?

Unequal power and the state of nature

Coeur-de-fer frames the social contract as a pact imposed between people who occupy different positions of strength. Those who consider themselves stronger, he says, have no reason to surrender advantages; those who are weaker surrender more than the agreement guarantees them in return. Since society contains both groups, he argues that the pact can fail both: it restrains the powerful without satisfying them and takes from the weak without adequately protecting them. He consequently presents the state of conflict that preceded the contract as preferable to an unjust settlement, because it leaves people free to exercise their strength and industry rather than accepting an arrangement that distributes losses and benefits unfairly.

This argument does not offer a peaceful remedy. Coeur-de-fer treats renewed conflict as the condition of nature and regards departure from an unjust society as preferable to remaining bound by its terms. The person who breaks the pact risks death, but, in his reasoning, that risk may seem less terrible than a life of poverty and humiliation. The supposed freedom to refuse the contract is therefore inseparable from vulnerability: for the weak, refusal may mean exposure to violence, while compliance may preserve the deprivation the contract was meant to alleviate.

Poverty as the material test of consent

The debate resonates with the circumstances through which Justine tells her story. After her father’s bankruptcy and death and her mother’s death a month later, Justine and her sister Juliette are left with only a hundred crowns apiece from an inheritance largely consumed by creditors. Their relatives do not take them in, and the convent releases them to make their own way. The contrast between formal liberty and material insecurity is immediate: the sisters are free to choose, but have few resources with which to make that freedom effective.

In her account of seeking work, Justine describes approaching the wealthy tradesman Dubourg while still under fourteen and pleading for help as an impoverished orphan. He tells her that virtue will not sustain her and presents women’s sexual availability as a route to support. Justine refuses his proposal, but the encounter shows how a nominal choice can be narrowed by need and by the assumptions of the powerful. Later, after she leaves Dubourg, she learns that he has received a government trusteeship expected to increase his income by more than five hundred thousand pounds a year. Her misfortune and his prosperity make visible the unequal distribution of security underlying their encounter.

The same mechanism appears on a larger scale in the account of a trafficking operation in Languedoc and Provence. Its operator describes seeking victims in places where the need to live and the lack of alternatives wear down resistance, and claims to use influence over commercial conditions and prices to enlarge the impoverished population from which he recruits. He offers Justine authority over four people and wages of ten thousand crowns to join the enterprise. Her refusal places the recruitment pitch beside the earlier appeal to Dubourg: in both episodes, an exploiter treats deprivation as an instrument for making vulnerable people available to his purposes. The contrast is not simply between virtue and vice, but between nominal consent and choices shaped by unequal access to work, money, and protection.

Narrative and ethical significance

The debate leaves the social contract unresolved as a defense of existing society. Justine’s case makes reciprocity essential to collective life, while Coeur-de-fer’s reply insists that cooperation among criminals can arise from calculated interest rather than virtue. More sharply, his critique asks whether an agreement deserves allegiance when its burdens and protections are unequally distributed. The episodes of poverty and exploitation give that question material force: Justine is repeatedly made to negotiate from a position in which refusal carries serious costs.

The exchange also reveals the danger in converting a diagnosis of injustice into a justification for predation. Coeur-de-fer’s account identifies real disparities in what people can give and receive, but his proposed freedom from the pact makes strength, not fairness, the measure of what is permitted. Justine’s counterargument insists on mutual responsibility, yet her experiences show that a social order may invoke virtue and obligation without furnishing the vulnerable with reliable means of survival. The concept therefore functions both as a philosophical dispute and as a lens on the novel’s recurring conflict between reciprocal duty and a world in which economic power can dictate the terms of apparent choice.