Abstract: This essay proposes a short analysis of two polemical comedies by Charles Palissot (1730-1814): Les Philosophes (1760) and L’Homme dangereux (1770). Through his comedies, Palissot presents two competing images of the dramatic author: the philosophe, based on the author’s sworn enemy, Diderot; and the “homme dangereux”: a self-proclaimed ‘autonomous author’ and defender of French Letters, who often finds himself at the margins of the literary world, both in fiction and in reality.
