Reading an erased code

by Michel Despland

The end of the eighteenth century, an age of political and cultural crisis particularly in France, saw a shift in the meaning of belief. Simply put, a break in continuity occurred between the old, religious and a new, literary reading of Scripture. Michel Despland selects five writers who were caught up in this new reading of the old religious text and who came to write about religion in innovative ways. The five writers treated by Despland helped shape a broader definition of belief, one that included individual sensibility. The works they produced are, in a sense, new religious texts. They did not just restate or reinterpret the code, but achieved a new kind of narrative, which has become dominant in the modern era and has shaped individual relationships to all codes.