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Young Franklin’s rebellious emancipation from tyrannical rule, as narrated in the Autobiography, will only lead to success if accompanied by the rigorous discipline exemplified in the famous « Art of Virtue » supposed to help the subject keep his anarchical impulses in check. This blueprint for Republican ethics, though meant for personal improvement, might also aim at controlling the indocile masses the Revolution has unleashed. However, the handbook of discipline and its ivory tablets from which any trace of unruliness can be erased could rather be regarded as a democratic art for the typographical as well as theatrical invention of the self.