Blaise Pascal

Any état présent of Blaise Pascal (1623–62) is bound to start with an acknowledgement of the insuperable editorial difficulties thrown up by the most important text in the Pascalian canon, known, albeit not to him, as the Pensées. The rights and wrongs of how these discontinuous posthumous sections of written material are presented in order to be, as far as possible, both readable and faithful to what we can ascertain of their compilation and purpose have dominated the story of their publication for more than three centuries. The problem might seem to arise uncomplicatedly from the simple fact of Pascal's early death, leaving as it did a vast corpus of preparatory notes for a projected apologia for the Christian religion in a state of disorder and fragmentation. If, then, we begin by turning innocently to their early publication history, we might hope, at least bibliographically, to find some initial points de repère; but these are already fraught with difficulty. The highly selective and theologically tendentious first version of what was to be known to posterity as the Pensées de Monsieur Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (the 'Édition de Port-Royal') was published in 1670, but was marked by the intrusive editorial presence both of his sister Gilberte Périer, and of the Jansenist ethos that characterized the spiritual milieu of Pascal's family and associates. Pascal was linked to the neo-Augustinian theology of the convent of Port-Royal—so much is certain—and clear evidence of that affiliation is present in the editio princeps, which is available as a facsimile in a modern critical presentation.¹ It was also, self-evidently, to this truncated and partisan anthology that writers in the eighteenth century referred when they took issue with or (more rarely) drew inspiration from the arguments which are, or appear to be, the cornerstones of the whole project.

Another no less dogmatically inspired historical document followed in 1776. This is the Éloge et Pensées de Pascal, in which parts of the 1670 text, disingenuously introduced and explicated by Condorcet, were then annotated two years later, with a predictable dose of hostility, by the now-elderly Voltaire.² It was not his first attack, however, since an initial assault on the 'misanthrope sublime' had figured in the twenty-fifth of the Lettres philosophiques of 1734 (known as the 'anti-Pascal').³ No evolution had occurred, however, in his fundamental objections to Pascal's apologetics; only the spitefulness had increased, probably exacerbated by the an-notative format. A third, less polemically motivated edition was then forthcoming in 1779, now as part of a five-volume set of Œuvres, by the abbé Charles Bossut.⁴ The Pensées were again based on the 'Édition de Port-Royal' both in their organization and, relatedly, in their emphases, albeit with the incorporation of some additional, and previously unpublished, manuscript documents. The whole is introduced by a substantial 'Discours sur la vie et sur les ouvrages de Pascal'. It has not been republished since the early nineteenth century.

The origin of most of the difficulties lies in the manuscripts themselves, of which there are three. The first is the so-called 'Recueil original', a document which, although in Pascal's hand in its constituent parts, is apparently based on nothing more rigorous than the organizational principles of a scrapbook: its compiler, Pascal's nephew Louis Périer, attached fragments of text randomly onto its folio sheets according to a (by definition inauthentic) ordering in 1711. Nonetheless, this is the only autograph collation that exists (and is conserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France as f. fr. 9202). We also know that Pascal's brother-in-law, Étienne Périer, oversaw two transcriptions of the material in question in 1662–63, and it is the 'Première Copie' (f. fr. 9203) and 'Seconde Copie' (f. fr. 12449) that complement the evidence of the 'Recueil original'. These three documents, together with a small number of additional discoveries, have informed the whole remaining publication history of the Pensées. The attempt at an objective and accessible transmission of...