# Is "Pensées" by Blaise Pascal a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Pensées by Blaise Pascal (Guillaume Desprez, Paris, 1670) is identified by: Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers." Paris, Guillaume Desprez, 1670; in-12, roughly 159 x 97 mm, collating (41) ff., 365 pp., (10) ff. The census claim needs a material correction on precedence.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- "Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers." Paris, Guillaume Desprez, 1670; in-12, roughly 159 x 97 mm, collating
- ff., 365 pp.,
- The decisive point is in the privilege: it is dated 7 January 1667, and on the verso of the thirty-ninth preliminary leaf the achevé d'imprimer reads "Achevé d'imprimer pour la première fois le 2 Janvier 1670" — the phrase "pour la première fois" is what separates the January first edition from the March second edition of the same year and the same publisher
- The errata are printed on the verso of the privilege
- Guillaume Desprez's monogram or cipher appears on the title page, with engraved initials and tailpieces; a copper-engraved vignette at the head of the text shows the chapel of the Collège des Quatre-Nations under construction with the motto "Pendent opera interrupta" taken from the Aeneid
- That vignette is also the discriminator against the Lyon counterfeits, which lack it
- Publisher imprint reads Guillaume Desprez, Paris

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Blaise Pascal |
| Publisher | Guillaume Desprez, Paris |
| Year | 1670 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | "Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers." Paris… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
"Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers." Paris, Guillaume Desprez, 1670; in-12, roughly 159 x 97 mm, collating (41) ff., 365 pp., (10) ff. The decisive point is in the privilege: it is dated 7 January 1667, and on the verso of the thirty-ninth preliminary leaf the achevé d'imprimer reads "Achevé d'imprimer pour la première fois le 2 Janvier 1670" — the phrase "pour la première fois" is what separates the January first edition from the March second edition of the same year and the same publisher. The errata are printed on the verso of the privilege. Guillaume Desprez's monogram or cipher appears on the title page, with engraved initials and tailpieces; a copper-engraved vignette at the head of the text shows the chapel of the Collège des Quatre-Nations under construction with the motto "Pendent opera interrupta" taken from the Aeneid. That vignette is also the discriminator against the Lyon counterfeits, which lack it. As a seventeenth-century book there is no dust jacket. References: Albert Maire IV, no. 3; Tchemerzine V, 70; Le Petit 207-213; Rahir 573.

## Is this the true first?
The census claim needs a material correction on precedence. The Pensées were first printed in the summer of 1669 with a title page bearing that date, lacking the ecclesiastical approbation and the final table of contents, and were distributed to only a handful of readers — chiefly the bishops whose approval was being sought. That 1669 pre-original is the true first printing, but only TWO copies survive, both institutional and both unobtainable: the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Rés. D 21374, state A) and the Médiathèque of Troyes agglomeration (Des Guerrois 1874, state B, a more advanced state of revision carrying twelve correction cartons against ten in the BnF copy). The 1670 Paris edition is state C, differing from those by the printed date on the title page and by the presence of the cartons required by ecclesiastical censorship. The January 1670 Port-Royal edition is therefore the first PUBLISHED edition and the first obtainable in commerce, and it is what "first edition of the Pensées" means in practice. Pascal wrote in French and published in Paris; English translations follow decades later and are separate works, not issues. Les Provinciales is an earlier and separately collected Pascal high spot: the eighteen letters appeared individually and anonymously between January 1656 and May 1657, and the first collected edition is "Les Provinciales, ou les lettres escrites par Louis de Montalte à un provincial de ses amis, et aux RR. PP. Jésuites", 1657, under the false imprint "Cologne, Pierre de la Vallée" — a fictitious address covering Daniel Elzevier of Amsterdam; the pseudonym Louis de Montalte is Pascal's. Sources differ on the format of the 1657 collection (in-12 and in-4 are both described), so the format should not be relied on as a point.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club question arises for a 1670 book, but the reprint trap here is unusually sharp because the impostor carries the same year and the same publisher. A SECOND edition appeared in March 1670 from Guillaume Desprez: some copies are styled "Seconde édition" on the title and others carry no such statement at all, the unmarked ones probably preceding the marked, so the absence of a "seconde édition" line does NOT establish a first. Identify the March issue by collation and by the achevé: it has 40 preliminary leaves and 358 pages with famously irregular pagination (1-312, 307-330, 312-334), caused by the late insertion of a gathering for chapter XXXI that had been omitted, and it carries corrections and punctuation revisions plus the suppression of a passage on justice made at Arnauld's request. Typographic tells reported in the March issue include p. 9 reading "c'est ce que je doit", p. 89 lacking "du", and the signature on p. 305 marked "Dd" instead of "Cc". Against this, the January first edition collates (41) ff., 365 pp., (10) ff. and its privilege verso reads "pour la première fois". Later Port-Royal editions run to 1678, and Lyon counterfeits are identified by the absence of the Collège des Quatre-Nations vignette.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Pensées* by Blaise Pascal a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/pens-es
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.