Pascal’s Useful Friends

Abstract Although the biographical Blaise Pascal seems progressively to have shunned friendships, the two major personae which he adopts in the course of his writing are not only more accepting of the relationship, but indeed depend significantly on it both as a structuring device and as a source of exemplary material for their persuasive strategies. The Lettres provinciales are predicated on a correspondence, first between friends, and then between enemies. In the first phase of the campaign, Montalte’s exchanges with the ami provincial and dialogues with the ami Janséniste initiate a fictive device which was to become a landmark in polemical writing, even if friends in the remaining letters are both more restricted and more consistent in their functions. Turning to the Pensées, we find that, although the term ‘ami’ occurs relatively rarely, this infrequency is countered by the fact that it is found in three of the most centrally important fragments: S 39, an organizational fragment, devoted to an epistolary friend; S 681, which invites the reader’s evaluation of a putative non-friend, who serves as one of Pascal’s most striking counter-examples; and the second exemplary friend, who appears in the wager argument (S 680), showing how certain of the less irretrievable values of the unbeliever are espoused in an active campaign of persuasion. In these ways the strategic efficacy of friendship remains indispensable as one of the most convincing of Pascal’s arts de persuader.