The Cardinal Virtues and the Common Good: Lessons from France

By
Dr. Cindy
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The four cardinal virtues—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—form the practical foundation of life together. Whether in a household, a workplace, a neighborhood, or a nation, they enable people to pursue genuine goods without destroying the conditions that make those goods possible. St. Thomas Aquinas treated them as habits that perfect reason, will, and the passions. What has unfolded in France illustrates the cost of neglecting them, especially when significant numbers of people no longer share or accept the basic framework of law and mutual obligation that any stable community requires.

Prudence

Aquinas (ca. 1265–1274/1947) defined prudence as “right reason applied to action” (II-II, q. 47, a. 2). A prudent parent weighs a child’s long-term formation against short-term ease; a prudent official weighs the real capacity of schools, housing, and social trust before expanding immigration. Prudence is the habit of seeing reality clearly enough to choose means that actually achieve the intended end. Without it, good intentions produce disorder.

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Justice

Justice, for Aquinas, is “a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will” (II-II, q. 58, a. 1). Commutative justice governs exchanges between individuals, distributive justice the community’s allocation of burdens and benefits, and legal or general justice directs all other virtues toward the common good. Christ’s command to “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” (Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition, 2006, Matthew 22:21) and St. Paul’s teaching on obedience to authority (Romans 13:1–7) capture one elementary demand of this virtue: legitimate authority is owed obedience in its proper sphere. The Catechism holds both duties together: nations should welcome the foreigner as far as they are able, and immigrants must obey the laws of the country that receives them (Catholic Church, 2000, para. 2241). Entering a country illegally rejects that demand, treating the host community’s laws and borders as optional while claiming the benefits those laws make possible.

Fortitude and Temperance

Fortitude is the virtue that strengthens the will to pursue the good despite fear, hardship, or social pressure. A parent exercises fortitude by enforcing reasonable rules when it would be easier to yield; a society exercises it by maintaining the rule of law when doing so is unpopular or costly. Temperance moderates the desire for pleasure, and the virtues Aquinas joins to it—humility, which restrains the desire for status, and meekness, which restrains anger—keep the passions from overriding reason (II-II, q. 157, a. 3; q. 161, a. 4). In public life they appear as restraint: refusing to loot when stores are vulnerable and declining to burn public buildings in the name of protest.

The Common Good

The common good is not the sum of private interests; the Second Vatican Council (1965) describes it as the conditions of social life, such as peace, ordered liberty, education, and economic cooperation, that allow groups and individuals to flourish (para. 26). Natural law, in Aquinas’s account, is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law; its first precept is that good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided (I-II, q. 91, a. 2; q. 94, a. 2). A nation is a community bound by such law, and its members, whether native-born or naturalized, owe one another the duties of justice that sustain it.

Lessons from France

France shows what happens when these habits erode. On October 17, between 550,000 and 800,000 people marched nationwide against the rising cost of living. Most marched peacefully, but fringe elements turned the marches into riots: the historic town hall of Limoges was set ablaze, shops were looted across multiple cities, and nearly 2,400 people were arrested (CNews, 2026; France 24, 2026). The mayor of Limoges said the police lacked the means to hold their ground. The rioters abandoned temperance and justice; the state, for want of will or resources, failed to show fortitude.

The deeper problem of assimilation came into view three years earlier. After a 2023 police shooting near Paris, rioters attacked 99 town halls (Associated Press, 2023). A government inquiry found that most of the adults convicted were French nationals, yet the majority came from immigrant families and few voiced any ideological grievance; opportunism and the pull of the group drove them (Inspection générale de l’administration, 2023). Long-standing patterns of weak integration had left many young citizens less invested in the legal and civic order. Prudence would have required earlier realism about the limits of absorption. Justice requires both that the state enforce its laws impartially and that newcomers and their children accept those laws as binding. Fortitude is needed to uphold those standards against accusations of intolerance, and temperance so that grievances do not license destruction.

Assimilation and the Virtues

Assimilation is the practical expression of these virtues at the national level. It means learning the language, accepting the constitutional framework, and subordinating group claims that conflict with the common good. Aquinas saw this centuries ago: peaceable foreigners must not be molested, yet they should not share fully in the community’s affairs at once, since those who do not yet hold the common good at heart might act against it (I-II, q. 105, a. 3). Legal entry is the first act of justice toward the host community: one asks permission and accepts the terms. When these virtues are widely absent, even legitimate protests become pretexts for disorder, and the shared life that natural law aims to protect begins to unravel. Recovering them is not optional for any free society that wishes to remain free.

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