La jalousie dans Les Diversitez de Jean-Pierre Camus

Literary career of Jean-Pierre Camus started with his admiration for Montaigne’s
Essais which became the pattern of his first work, Les Diversitez. The tome IX of this rich collection
of various forms concerns passions of the soul and scholars are unanimous in considering
it as the foundation of his religious teaching, both by word and by writing. Contrary to medical
and moral thought in force at the threshold of modernity, the bishop of Belley believes
passions are neutral, neither good nor bad, and acquire their meaning by the use man makes
of them. This is in particular the case of jealousy which the writer understands as an effect of
love. Yet in his treaty of passions the author describes on just several pages only the jealousy
of God and for more details he refers the reader to two other places of Les Diversitez where, he
says, he has already raised the issue of this feeling. In fact, a chapter of the tome II and a letter
of the tome VIII deal with the problem of human jealousy. This paper first shows different discursive
forms that Camus uses to analyze jealousy. Then it focuses on the author’s definition of
jealousy, ‘desire for exclusive possession of the loved object’, and on its effects – often tragical,
always painful – in the daily life of spouses. Finally, it appears that the author’s taste for dichotomous
presentation of passions leads him to childish images of jealous God and implicitly to
an inacceptable hypothesis of jealousy of the creature in front of a supposedly unfaithful God.