ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the importance of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History (1681) as a threshold text, torn between old and new ways of conveying the pedagogical relevance of history for the prince. It explores the conflicting aims and outlooks undergirding Bossuet’s text with special focus, first, on the enunciative scene through which the text presents itself to the reader, purporting to hold together the past in one unified, enabling vision, and, second, on the universality it promises its reader. This approach will bring to the fore an uneasy tension between a theologically informed divine providence and a rationally inflected profane foresight. More precisely, the articulation of this tension can be studied through the way Bossuet’s text is structured around an impossible promise of discursive immediacy, most cogently formulated by Bossuet elsewhere through the figure of anamorphosis.
