In the 17th century not all manuscripts were clandestine because there also existed
manuscripts written for public circulation (first and foremost the correspondences that
were semi-public, or certain collections of poems that circulated first in manuscript and
then in printed form), but it is undeniable that most of the resolutely “heterodox” authors
found it useful to entrust their ideas to manuscripts both to protect themselves against the
retaliation of the authorities and to circumvent the censorship to which printed books were
subject. These philosophical manuscripts were messengers of “full heterodoxy” which we
could call “global” and not “local”. The exclusion did not regard one or another context
but all (or almost) of the contexts of the Ancien Régime, as they expressed a radical dissent
in contrast with all of the orthodoxies of modern Europe. Bodin’s Colloquium, like
Theophrastus redivivus and Meslier’s Mémoire , could not have been published either in a
Catholic country or in a Protestant one, either in an absolute monarchy or in a republic.
The clandestine authors were aware that it would be impossible to spread their ideas
outside a circle protected by the manuscript form and most often by anonymity.
