Les paradoxes de l’« idiot » : liberté, « particularité », scandale chez Érasme et dans le Tiers Livre

Rabelais’s Tiers Livre raises only indirectly the problem of dissidence, by means of Panurge’s defiance. Yet, as far as it illustrates the problem of an expression which comes up against the public opinion, it echoes the contemporary debates on the legitimacy of paradoxes and scandals stemming from the Reformation. By using Erasmus’s and Luther’s writings, this article attempts to show how this mode of expression is questioned through the articulation of the notions of freedom and respect. It also shows how this behaviour leads to think, in the light of the contemporary debates, about an arising freedom which develops between both stumbling blocks of an excessive “peculiarity” (characterising in particular the monastic life), and scandal, so that the notion of “dissidence” moves from a camp to the other. The article finally focuses on a poetics of dissidence as exemplified by the debate of Luther and Erasmus on paradox and hyperbolic processes and by Rabelais’s narrative choice