War & Peace Quote by Luc de Clapiers

A tidy little aphorism, sharpened to a blade: “Vice stirs up war, virtue fights” turns the usual moral vanity inside out. Luc de Clapiers, the Marquis de Vauvenargues, isn’t praising war; he’s isolating its psychological engine. “Stirs up” implies agitation, intrigue, appetite - the kind of restless self-interest that manufactures conflict before the first shot. Vice doesn’t merely participate; it produces the conditions, the rhetoric, the pretexts. War, in this framing, is less a tragic accident than a predictable byproduct of vanity and ambition.

Then comes the uncomfortable twist: virtue “fights.” Not “wins,” not “conquers,” not even “prevents.” Virtue is reactive, grounded, burdened with necessity. It enters the frame after vice has already set events in motion, forced choices, narrowed exits. That’s the subtextual indictment: ethical action in politics is often condemned to the role of damage control. Virtue doesn’t get the luxury of clean hands; it gets the duty of resistance.

Vauvenargues wrote in an 18th-century France where court politics, imperial competition, and reputational theater routinely laundered aggression as honor. His line reads like an early anatomy of spin: the people most eager to speak of glory are frequently those most invested in lighting the fuse. It’s also a warning to moralists who imagine purity as passivity. If vice is entrepreneurial, virtue has to be muscular - not because it loves conflict, but because it refuses surrender to the forces that profit from it.