Pascal et la mémoire de la grandeur

Pascal’s famous image of the ‘dispossessed king’ is by no means anodyne. It imposes a specific approach to greatness and misery, one that differs from other approaches to this conceptual pair presented in the Pensées. Above all, to be effective and apologetically valid, this conception of misery as misfortune requires us to assume the presence in man of a memory of lost greatness. This is a difficult point, if not a blind spot, in Pascal’s thinking.