Lettres Provinciales
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~120,000 words · 575 passages
Cite this work
- APAPascal. (n.d.). Lettres Provinciales. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/lettres-provinciales
- MLAPascal. Lettres Provinciales. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/lettres-provinciales.
- ChicagoPascal. Lettres Provinciales. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/lettres-provinciales.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The French original of the 'Provincial Letters', of 1656-57: the text to cite, and the one that created modern French prose.
Context and history
The catalogue also holds an English translation with a historical introduction; this is the work as Pascal wrote it, and that matters here because in this case the language is the argument. What made these eighteen anonymous letters succeed was not only what they said against Jesuit casuistry but how they said it: in ordinary French, in dialogue, with irony and short sentences, at a time when a theological dispute was written in Latin and for specialists. Voltaire called it the first book of genius written in French prose. They were burnt by royal order and placed on the Index in 1660.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The question here was, if he could, without presumption, entertain a doubt that these propositions were in Jansenius, after the bishops had declared that they were. The matter having been brought before the Sorbonne, seventy-one doctors undertook his defence, maintaining that the only reply he could possibly give to the demands made upon him in so many publications, calling on him to say if he held that these propositions were in that book, was that he had not been able to find them, but that if they were in the book, he condemned them in the book. Some even went a step farther and protested that, after all the search they had made into the book, they had never stumbled upon these propositions, and that they had, on the contrary, found sentiments entirely at variance with them. They then earnestly begged that, if any doctor present had discovered them, he would have the goodness to point them out; adding that what was so easy could not reasonably be refused, as this would be the surest way to silence the whole of them, M. Arnauld included; but this proposal has been uniformly declined. So much for the one side. On the other side are eighty secular doctors and some forty mendicant friars, who have condemned M. Arnauld's proposition, without choosing to examine whether he has spoken truly or falsely- who, in fact, have declared that they have nothing to do with the veracity of his proposition, but simply with its temerity. Besides these, there were fifteen who were not in favor of the censure, and who are called Neutrals. Such was the issue of the question of fact, regarding which, I must say, I give myself very little concern. It does not affect my conscience in the least whether M.…