| Summary: | For several decades, critics have discussed the baroque aesthetics in Pascal’s Pensées. Although Pascal’s style is sometimes regarded as classical, his writing abounds in extravagant figures – which he radically condemns in Jesuit writings – and his mental world is marked by typically baroque motifs. In order to disentangle those apparent contradictions and to go beyond the opposition between classical and baroque poetics, it is necessary to use the notion of mannerism. Of course, Pascal and the Solitaires of Port-Royal would not accept a mannerist conception of poetry and rhetoric because it implied virtuosity, sensuality and courtliness. They regarded such a mode of writing as the glorification of self-love, as well as the source of all evils. Yet, as they denounced mannerist excessiveness that was characteristic of the mid-seventeenth-century Précieux movement, the “Messieurs de Port Royal” claimed a right use of extravagant tropes, as long as they were subordinated to the humble service of God. Similarly, Pascal’s hostility to all ornate forms of writing does not mean he should be regarded as a champion of classicism: on the other hand, he should be more appropriately described as an anti-mannerist baroque writer.
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