Barthes makes a constant effort, in his works, to criticize “common sense”. To understand this criticism, this article proposes not only to contextualize it, in relation to the philosophical debates of the 1960s (Althusser, Deleuze, Foucault), but also to highlight its ambiguity. Indeed, the rejection of common sense can be made in the name of a rigorous demystification, for example in the Mythologies, or because of a taste for paradox. In the first case, the criticism of petty-bourgeois ideology requires the construction of a history of common sense, thanks to indications scattered throughout the complete works; in the second case, the taste for paradox is only based on a hatred of the evidences of the doxa, which betrays, by aristocratic means, the scientific and political intentions of the critical discourse.