ABSTRACT
How can one picture history as a whole, from which point of view, according to which disposition, which modes of visualization? Is universal history represented as an eventful and turbulent spectacle, as a framed painting (tableau) or as a general map? In an age when painters pay so much attention to the staging and conducting of the viewer’s gaze, where is the “viewer” of universal history supposed to stand—inside or outside the stage/the frame/the map—and what is the trajectory designed for his/her gaze? And finally, what is at stake in such different modes of textualization? What is the epistemological status of such dramas, of such tableaux? Those are some of the questions that the example of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History can help us explore.
