Discours sur les passions de l'amour
Discours sur les passions de l'amour discovered by Victor Cousin / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Discours sur les passions de l'amour (English: Discourse on the passions of love) was discovered by Victor Cousin in 1843 in a collection held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It consists of philosophical maxims mainly about love, with the themes of ambition and the passions mixed in. The phrase "On l'attribue à M. Pascal" ("It is attributed to M. Pascal") accompanying the text immediately aroused the interest of specialists and, at first, Victor Cousin, Prosper Faugère and Adolphe de Lescure affirmed its authenticity and recognized in it the writing and philosophy of the scholar. Faugère in particular assumed that Charlotte de Roannez, sister of Artus Gouffier and a close friend of Pascal, was the inspiration for the Discourse, a theory that did not win the support of all critics and quickly became known as "Pascal's novel".
Author | Blaise Pascal |
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Country | France |
Language | French |
Publication date | After 1670 |
A second copy, discovered by Augustin Gazier in 1907, reignited the debate all the more because it contained no reference to Blaise Pascal. Ferdinando Neri's 1921 work Un ritratto immaginario di Pascal is cited as the first to demonstrate that the Discours is not authentic. Publications by Louis Lafuma, in particular the article with the explicit title "Le Discours sur les passions de l'amour n'est pas de Pascal" (1949), further convinced a large part of the public that the text was not by Pascal.
The question of the Discourse's authenticity quickly divided the community of Blaise Pascal specialists, with some, such as Victor Giraud, changing their opinion as publications progressed. Both camps argued their case in the press: the Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, the Revue des deux mondes, the Mercure de France and the Correspondant. The Discours itself was the subject of separate editions. Different ways of approaching the text lead to different conclusions, whether subjective literary appreciation or scientific method aimed at comparing Pascal's writings with the Discours and literary productions of the seventeenth century. Thus, Georges Brunet, Charles-Henri Boudhors, Émile Henriot and Louis Lafuma distinguish in the text the influences of Descartes, Malebranche, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère in addition to those of Pascal.
In the end, the hypothesis that the Discours is a forgery seems to be the most widely accepted, although no other author can really be identified. Brunet, Boudhors and Henriot, for example, even imagine that the text could be the transcription of a discussion galante, a fashionable activity in the salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are a number of factors that call into question the authenticity of the text, including the fact that it was written and influenced after Pascal's death, and the fact that there was no documentary evidence of the text before Victor Cousin discovered the first copy.