«Le malheur ne m’est venu que de loin; le bonheur est autour de moi»: insularismo e riflessione pedagogica in Paul et Virginie di Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

The article analyses the pedagogical ‘insularism’ expressed in Paul et Virginie, the most famous novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. More specifically, it analyses the relationship between the ideals of harmony in Bernardin’s philosophy and the insular self-sufficiency of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s pedagogy, on which the model of Robinson Crusoe and Telemachus exerts a powerful suggestion. Bernardin’s pedagogical model is based on the idea that the main task of education is to preserve the essence of the human being, sheltering him or her from all the baleful conditioning of society. Only such a method – transposed in Paul et Virginie in the opposition between the luxuriant microcosm of the Île de France (today’s Mauritius) and the corrupt France, symbol of the inequalities of the Ancien Régime – can make it possible to retrace backwards, thanks to virtue, the causal chain that directly links the human being to God.