Vol. 06 — Fortitude

Fortitude is the name behind the vital energy that makes it possible to create and to build. Everything, however small, requires courage. This energy, when it is deliberate and conscious, is called fortitude. It allows a person to rise through intentional effort, to persevere along a path through constant effort. There is no fortitude without effort. The taste for effort is probably the genesis of great things and great men. Sustained by the desire never again to endure a past one wishes left behind, it becomes the fuel of a future. This is true for the individual, and it is equally true for a society, so that it may share a common desire to improve, to evolve, or simply to preserve what deserves to be preserved. But the taste for effort takes on its fullest meaning when it is mixed with the taste for risk. Together, these two things are the source of my definition of fortitude.

This choice of word is dedicated to those for whom small things require great efforts and who make them for others.

There is a common mistake made by those who speak of courage: they confuse it with the absence of fear. The truly courageous person trembles and acts anyway. This distinction separates superficial bravery, spectacular and short-lived, from the deep, quiet, and lasting virtue the Latins called fortitude.

Fortitude consists of two distinct acts: to leap forward, to undertake, to attack the obstacle and to hold, to endure, to remain standing under pressure. And it is the second that is superior. Not because the initial momentum is without merit, but because it is infinitely harder to resist over time than to launch oneself in the intoxication of beginnings.

Every founder will recognise this landscape. They know the momentum of early days, when everything still seems possible. But true fortitude reveals itself elsewhere: in the third winter, when teams begin to doubt, when the market resists, when the certainties of the start have been swept away one by one by reality.

Augustine of Hippo offers the most accurate definition: fortitude is the love that endures everything for the sake of what it loves. It thus raises the question every entrepreneur must eventually ask themselves honestly: what are they holding on for? If the answer amounts to profit alone, fortitude will always be fragile. No one stays standing for a spreadsheet.

What the history of companies that truly last teaches us is that their collective fortitude is rooted in a mission that transcends them. But the particular difficulty for those who practice fortitude is fighting against their own humility. Its value only comes when it becomes a culture, a shared narrative, a collective conviction. And for it to become culture, it must be legible, lived out in daily decisions, in the moments when the easy path was available and not taken.

Fortitude is the virtue of those who have found something worth being afraid for and who know how to pass it on.

Fortitude carries no appeal of achievement. It belongs to identity itself, to the survival instinct that keeps a human being alive. It looks like normality, and normality never attracts attention, never asks to be photographed as a final gesture. It’s still being there when everything around collapses, turns hostile.

As documentary photographers, we have met fortitude many times without ever needing to name it.

The fortitude we found had nothing to do with choice. It was what remained when choice had already been removed.

Photography demands what fortitude demands: believing in human beings enough to stay, and long enough for trust to replace novelty, for the story to stop being about its own beginning.