Abstract

Summary The career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793) featured two phases, separated dramatically by the Revolution of 1789. Before the revolutionary crisis and the subsequent political struggle that was to cost him his life, Brissot was an avocet who never practised but sought instead a career as a writer—and indeed as a philosophe, seeing himself as an ally of Diderot. The improbability of such an alliance was not lessened by his early and continuing alliance with Linguet. Before embarking in1778 on what would be a prolific career as a published author, Brissot had written the manuscript on which attention is focused here. This is an uncompleted ‘Plan Raisoné’ for a comprehensive sceptical critique of all systematic claims to certainty in knowledge. There is an evident though problematic relationship here with Brissot's 1782 De la vérité, but it is also clear that the influence of Rousseau and Brissot's increasingly radical political outlook must have entailed a widening divergence from the scepticism he had previously extolled—the ‘Pyrrhonism’ that would protect sensible readers against dogmatic absurdity. Death on the scaffold proclaimed certainty, not doubt.