| Summary: | This article explores an ethical tension that was visible from the 1840s on and that was crystallized in the 1842 Constituent Assembly regarding a civil morality put forward by government authorities. Its objective is to explore one instant in the historical process of disconnection between civil morality and religious morality, more discursive than real, based on an analysis of public opinion and the minutes of the Constitutional Congress. In the context of the country’s political mutations, this article presents a horizon of socioethical mutations tending toward secular virtue yet without pretending to constitute a rupture. This moral adjustment was not an abstract question: it had repercussions on rights such as the freedom of the press and educational freedoms, as well as in procedural issues such as the powers of the courts.
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