Diderot, ou le rire du mystificateur

The hoaxer's laughter. Following persiflage (to denote scoffing banter, a word which appeared ca 1730), the almost synonimous mystification or hoaxing (ca 1760), caused a particular enlightened amusement. A friend is the victim of a more or less friendly hoax by a small group of intimates, for having stood out unwittingly from the group, which punishes him by means of this insider joke. In the early 19th Century, mystification changed meaning to apply to a direct manipulation of the public itself. Diderot made this social practice a literary manner, with La Religieuse, a hallucinatory self-mystifiction, then L'Histoire des portraits, a diary of a dubiously humoristic joke on a dancer at the opera, and finally Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, a hoax on the gullible Naigeon. This last moving tale was so well done that the outside reader can no longer understand or appreciate the original private joke, as the "historical" story, theorized in the Afterword, creates a true illusion and effaces the irony. Diderot, aware of the powers of "realism", preferred to cultivate the liberating (because critical) laughter of philosophical persiflage.