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Through the study of three pamphleteer authors, Renaud Camus in France, Oriana Fallaci in Italy, and Fernando Vallejo in Colombia, this article explores the impact of recent legislations against hate speech on the literary field. It determines how literature, especially pamphlets, allows the reactionary ideological offensive to attempt to circumvent the law and studies the characterizing trait of this new twenty-first century pamphlet: the rhetoric of reversal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anonymous pamphlet Conseil privé de Louis le Grand (1696) subjects French monarch Louis XIV to scathing ridicule and denunciation. Interestingly, however, the pamphleteer frames his critique of absolutist politics within an entertaining narrative that deploys tropes from contemporary literary genres such as the historical novella and the historico-satirical novel. A poetics of diversion subtends the work, readable at the level of the plot as well as in the satirical mechanism employed in the text: not only does the Conseil privé de Louis le Grand incorporate scenes focusing on courtly diversions, but it also diverts readers in a more literal way by transforming the monarch into a source of amusement. Absolutism becomes grist to the mill of pamphleteering, and the king a product of authorial fantasy. The pamphleteer figures Louis the Great’s privy council as a harem — a world of corruption, weakness, and ineptitude where the monarchy is painted in its imagined and unimaginable excesses. Studying this text through the lens of diversion offers a case study affirming the power of fiction as a weapon in the pamphleteer’s arsenal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sole text in Calvin's name of which just a German translation survives is re-edited here accompanied by an English translation with commentary and notes, as well as other relevant sources including a reproduction of the original. The pamphlet locates Calvin in the Strasbourg publishers, Wendelin Rihel, where he seems to have performed duties to supplement his income and pay off his debts. He also interacted with his colleagues in their dealings with the same printer. The satirical pamphlet tells the story of an itinerant monk trying to reconvert people to Roman Catholicism, and is a sign of Calvin entering the scene of regional and European religious politics, while sharpening his pen. What was originally a French Catholic pamphlet was answered and, incorporating material from Latin correspondence, was recast in German. News thereby straddled linguistic borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the attribution to Jerome Bolsec of a tract lampooning John Calvin, and composed in verse under the pseudonym of 'Pasquin Romain.' The sole surviving copy is in the Bibliothëque nationale de France. Entitled Le double des lettres envoyees à Passevent Parisien, par le Noble et excellent Pasquin Romain, contenant en vérité la vie de Jehan Calvin [Copy of letters sent to Passevent Parisian by the noble and excellent Pasquin Romain, containing the true life of John Calvini, the pamphlet was published in Paris in 1556 by Pierrre Gaultier. External textual evidence, contemporary witnesses and a thorough comparison of the pamphlet with Bolsec's later, famous anti-Calvin bibliography, Histoire de la vie…deJean Calvin (1577), enable the authorship of the 1556 satirical tract to he identified. Its rediscovery allows one to antedate by at least twenty years the beginnings of Bolsec's anti-Geneva polemics. At that time, he had not yet abandoned the Reformed faith, while figuring among the precursors of anti-Calvinist propaganda that was waxing in heterodox French and transalpine circles. Moreover, the pamphlet is a rare example of the religious commitment and behaviour of a nonconformist of genuine faith who can subscribe neither to the Roman Church nor to the growing orthodoxy of the Genevan Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]