ABSTRACT
There is no necessary relationship between the appearance of a new linguistic phenomenon and an evolution, still less an abrupt shift, in the conceptual domain. Inversely, a word or expression may survive for hundreds of years in the vocabulary of a language, little noticed until the moment when a shift in the conceptual field assigns it a central role. To capture the uncertainties, the discontinuities, the backslidings, the sheer untidiness of this segment of cultural history without retrospectively projecting on to Montaigne, Descartes or Pascal the exotic blossoming of the modern self, which they could not have foreseen even in their worst nightmares, is a difficult and delicate task. This chapter examines a series of texts as a cluster of archaeological fragments showing signs of a family resemblance within the broader horizon of French culture between 1550 and 1650, without any claim to provide a definitive reconstruction of this family's genealogy.
