(English: Discourse on the passions of love) was discovered by Victor Cousin in 1843 in a collection held by the . It consists of philosophical maxims mainly about love, with the themes of ambition and the passions mixed in. The phrase " ("It is attributed to Mr. Pascal") accompanying the text immediately aroused the interest of specialists and, at first, Victor Cousin, , and 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".
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 is cited as the first to demonstrate that the is not authentic. Publications by Louis Lafuma, in particular the article with the explicit title " (1949), further convinced a large part of the public that the text was not by Pascal.
The question of the Discourse 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 , the , the and The Correspondant. The 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 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 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.
Text discovery
Presentation The Discourse on the Passions of Love is divided into 242 philosophical maxims focusing on the passions. While love, its birth and its evolution are the main themes, it also discusses ambition and the differences between social classes, as well as the customs to be observed in relations between men and women, and offers advice on how to make a love affair last. Most of the themes are developed using opposing arguments, so that the text takes the form of a discussion.
Love is described both as a function of the mind and as a passion beyond comprehension, but also as an art form.
Morality also has a place in the Discourse. The fact of having several partners, in particular, is discussed from various points of view. The capacity to love, i.e. the quality and power of feeling, is seen as dependent on the "greatness" of the soul. Hedonism, which could be seen as immoral, is seen here as a natural disposition. What's more, love is seen as a human tendency that contributes to our elevation, or even a necessity. The Platonic myth of the androgyne, without being named, is used to explain the search for another partner.
Context
In 1843, Victor Cousin research led him to the , where he discovered what he believed to be the collection of the abbey of , an in-quarto manuscript collection dated from the seventeenth century, the contents of which read " ("Discourse on the passions of love, by M. Pascal"). The text itself is marked ". The library's catalogue of manuscripts also mentions, at entry 74, a ". For Cousin, there was no doubt that the twenty-page text was authentic: "From the first sentence, I felt Pascal, and my conviction grew as I went along. The evidence is abundant for anyone who has been in close contact with the . The hypothesis of the Discourse authorship by Pascal quickly won the support of many well-known critics.
The bookplate of Balthazar-Henri de Fourcy appears in the collection to which this manuscript, known as "copy C", belongs, which leads George Brunet to wonder about its origin. Could de Fourcy himself, or his librarian Pichet, have asked for a copy of the original manuscript of the Discourse? If so, how could they have been aware of a text that no one had mentioned before it was discovered by Cousin? Did they know the author? Brunet also notes that the copyist must have had links with de Fourcy insofar as another piece in the collection to which copy C belongs, a text by Saint-Evremond entitled , the attribution of which is not disputed, as well as seventeen manuscripts in another collection, are also in his hand. It could be the librarian of Fourcy himself: other remarks and annotations in the same hand as the Discourse can be found in other manuscripts in Fourcy's library. The fact that Saint-Evremond's work belongs more to the realm of libertinism leads Victor Giraud to assume that the copyist was a layman: a cleric would have had no interest in copying a text so far removed from his personal convictions.
As the literature on the from the mid-nineteenth century onwards attests, researchers have to be content with making assumptions for want of concrete information. This vagueness about the origin of the text is all the more intriguing given that it is possible that copy C was made directly from the original manuscript, which may already have been attributed to Pascal: the copyist could therefore have had information about the true author and the reason for attributing the work to Pascal. Moreover, if the copyist wanted to conceal the identity of the author, why in that case distribute the manuscript by copying it? Especially as Pascal's manuscripts are far from being concealed, other people would have been able to recognise the if it had been Pascal's and would quickly have revealed the identity of its author.
Whoever he was, the copyist to whom we owe manuscript C is very harshly judged by George Brunet: certain misunderstood words, either deliberately left out or badly copied and exchanged by others, lead him to say that he "made no effort to understand his model".
In 1907, Augustin Gazier came across a second version of the and informed Victor Giraud, another critic and editor of Pascal. Apparently discovered around 1860 and catalogued in 1900, it dates from the eighteenth century. Unlike the manuscript discovered by Cousin, the latter makes no mention of Blaise Pascal, and in view of the differences between manuscripts C and G, copy G cannot have been based on the one discovered by Victor Cousin and comes either from the original manuscript or from another copy. Critics also agree that it is more recent than copy C and that this second copyist was as careless as his predecessor: he also omitted certain words, and even an entire line; however, certain differences with manuscript C could be due to liberties taken with the text. Despite these changes, Victor Giraud believes that the G copy is more faithful to the original text than the C copy. Comparisons between the two versions lead to two conclusions, highlighted by Brunet: the original writer was not very legible, and the maxims he copied are open to interpretation.
Shortly after the discovery of manuscript C, and even more so after the discovery of manuscript G, two camps clearly emerged. On the one hand were those who supported the authenticity of the Discourses, including Victor Cousin, Armand-Prosper Faugère, Ernest Havet, Alexandre Vinet, Auguste Molinier, Félix Ravaisson, Sainte-Beuve, Prévost-Paradol, Sully-Prudhomme, Émile Boutroux, Émile Faguet, Léon Brunschwicg and Gustave Michaut; on the other hand, those who claimed that the text was not by Pascal, i.e. Abbé Flottes, Augustin Gazier, Charles-Henri Boudhors, Fortunat Strowski, Georges Brunet, Maurice Souriau, Manlio Duilio Busnelli and Louis Lafuma. Finally, others were more indecisive, such as Zacharie Tourneur and Gonzague Truc. As for Victor Giraud, although he was sceptical at first, he eventually became convinced that the text was indeed by Pascal; in his review of Lafuma's work attributing the to the Marquis Charles-Paul d'Escoubleau, he nevertheless acknowledged that "the conjecture proposed by M. Lafuma is not without some plausibility" and suggested testing this hypothesis by examining d'Escoubleau archives in search of clues.
A text long unknown Victor Giraud, Charles-Henri Boudhors, George Brunet and Louis Lafuma point out that it is particularly strange that such a controversial text was not discovered until the nineteenth century. Indeed, "no one, not in Pascal's immediate circle, not in the Jansenist milieu, not among his countless readers, admirers or adversaries, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, no one that we know of, absolutely no one, speaks of it, no one makes the slightest allusion to it". Carole Talon-Hugon confirms that "there is nothing in Pascal's work that resembles a treatise on the passions ". The may nevertheless, in certain respects, be unfavourable to Jansenist doctrine, just as it may be favourable to its detractors the Jesuits or to Pascal's own. Apart from the importance it could have had for the various religious parties for the vision it gives of Pascal, in view of the notoriety the scholar enjoyed during his lifetime and at an early age, it seems hard to imagine that no one would have mentioned it apart from the copyist who added the words " ("it is attributed to M. Pascal"). Even Voltaire, who was opposed to Pascal, says nothing on the subject, even though he blithely spread rumours about the marriage of Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet.
Charles Adam, Gustave Michaut and Ernest Jovy put forward the argument of religious censorship to justify the fact that the text remained unknown for so long. Ernest Jovy points out, for example, that all Pascal's papers were subjected to examination and re-reading, and that it is possible that those close to Pascal, both as clerics and as members of his family, wanted to discard what they considered to be unfavourable to his image, or even to eliminate all "embarrassing documents". According to Lafuma, this argument is without value since other statements by Pascal contrary to doctrine have reached the public, and it would be strange if these texts, which were nevertheless recognised as not "morally unworthy of the author of the , had been suppressed even though the originals of other more controversial texts had been preserved even though the texts in question had not been published. Indeed, although certain "intimate writings cf or fragments not deemed to be directly related to the project of the were excluded from publication, "all of Pascal's papers [were] considered by his family to be relics" and in any case, the copies made by Jean and Pierre Guerrier contain all of Pascal's papers found at the time of his death: notes concerning the would necessarily have appeared in these collections.
Moreover, as Lafuma and Michaut point out, in view of the striking resemblance with certain passages in the , a resemblance which has led many critics to recognise Blaise Pascal in the text, it would have to be assumed that, if the was written by Blaise Pascal, some of its elements were taken from the 1670 edition of the . However, if the Jansenists had disapproved of the to the point of concealing its existence, it is unlikely that they would have wanted to take extracts from it and distribute them to the public under Pascal's name.