Vater – Land – Liebe

Abstract The article discusses in which ways Catherine Bernard reflects in her tragedy Brutus the aporias of the Roman-Republican usus as well as its habitus by staging the famous episode of the roman history in which Brutus sacrifices his two sons – Titus and Tibérinus – for the sake of the Roman Republic. Bernard introduces in her play the character of Valérie, the sister of the consul Valérius, in order to present a moral counterpart to the masculine Roman ethics. By doing this, Bernard’s tragedy constitutes a turning part in the history of the French classicist theatre: her Brutus sets an end to a specific classicist poetics that focusses on state affairs and introduces at the same time a new poetical concept: a civil classicism.