Post-Revolutionary Uses of Pascal

Abstract

I propose to explore a convergence of influences in the period following the French Revolution, when Christian discourse weakens in some respects and is renewed in others. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, counter-revolutionary and neo-Catholic writers acclaim religious and political authority and decry the Enlightenment, whose contribution to the Revolution and effects on social life (as seen from their viewpoint) they denounce. And so the Enlightenment is blamed for the Terror, the persecution of the clergy and the corrosion of society by an all-pervasive scepticism. This denunciation is fed by a revisiting of the great figures of tradition — Montaigne, Descartes, Bossuet, Rousseau — with a view to finding, in given aspects of their thought, explanations or arguments in the struggle to defend authority from dissolution. The place of Pascal within this historical context is a decisive one, recently highlighted by Antoine Compagnon, who identifies in the movement from Rousseau to Pascal the ‘usual route’ taken by ‘antimodern’ writers.¹ Having been influenced by reading the philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau, to an important extent the counter-Revolutionaries use their own arms against them.