I. INTRODUCTION#

During the Age of Lights, the struggle of the French monarchy to enforce its royal will on two outsider groups:

  • Jansenists (Augustinian Catholics)

  • Huguenots (Reformed Protestants)

frequently dominated the religious-political history of the Kingdom of France. In play was the monarchy’s critically important claim that it alone possessed the right to determine the religion of the French people.

The Kingdom of France was the most populous and wealthy country of Europe. It was also probably the most feared, hated, admired, and imitated realm on the Continent. The kingdom was divided into regions or provinces such as Languedoc and Provence in the south, Bretagne in the west, Picardie in the north, and Franche-Comté in the east. Lorraine became part of France in 1766, as did Corsica in 1769.

At the time of the French Revolution (1789), the population approached a hefty 28 million. An overwhelmingly Catholic realm, France was divided into 36,000 parishes. In 1790 the revolutionary Abbé Henri Grégoire indicated that between 6 and 8 million people could not speak French but used one of the thirty dialects of the country.

II. THE FRENCH KINGS#

From 1680 to 1789 the Court at Versailles, the principal residence of the Bourbon kings, generally constituted the epicenter of French political life. Nonetheless,

  • The formal and informal discussions of the philosophes in the Parisian salons (drawing rooms of homes) of worldly minded hostesses such as Madame Geoffrin, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Necker

  • The power of the Parlement of Paris (a law court) and other Parlements of France

  • The free exchange of ideas at various Masonic lodges

  • The illegal books and broadsides of a clandestine press

All these began to challenge seriously Versailles’s political dominance in the second half of the eighteenth century. A powerful “court of public opinion” was continuing to emerge.

France’s Bourbon kings sought to protect the inheritance rights of members of their own dynastic family and to expand the kingdom’s economic and political power on the Continent and overseas. They were obsessed with burnishing the luster of their own glory and that of France.

France was often the aggressor in Louis XIV’s wars. These wars included

  • The War of Devolution (1667–68)

  • The Dutch War (1672–78)

  • The War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97)

  • The War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)

After initial military successes, Louis XIV later prosecuted wars that failed and nearly bankrupted the royal treasury.

The wars of Louis XV (1715–74), the Bien-Aimé (“Beloved”), included

  • The War of the Polish Succession (1733–35)

  • The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48)

  • The Seven Years War (1756–63) — which was a “world war” of sorts — and military theaters spread from India to North America

In the Seven Years War, England and Prussia eventually defeated France and her allies Austria and Spain. The Treaty of Paris (1763) recognized the stunning loss of French Canada to the English.

After the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga (1778), Louis XVI, in part to spite the English, supported republican American colonists (via the Franco-American Alliance, 1778) in their quest to gain independence from the British during the American Revolution. This aid had an ironic underside:

  • The monarch was abetting the cause of republicans

  • The aid exacerbated France’s ballooning financial debt.

In May–June 1789, Louis XVI was ultimately forced to call for the meetings of the Estates-General to deal with the severe fiscal crisis.

After histrionic debates, delegates of the Third Estate (the people) declared they represented the “nation” and invited members of the First Estate (clergy) and Second Estate (nobles) to join them. In time, a good number did just that. On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate (the Communes) changed its name to the Assemblée Nationale, claiming that it, rather than the monarchy, represented the nation.

A century earlier, during the reign of Louis XIV, the French people would have thought such an action outrageous — an egregious affront to their “monarch appointed by God.”

A. Divine Right Monarchs#

In 1680 the Kingdom of France constituted a divine right monarchy. In his Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, an apologist for divine right monarchy, an advisor and confessor for Louis XIV, and an instructor for the dauphin (heir apparent), justified this form of government by citing principally scriptural warrant.

Bossuet claimed that the king’s royal power was “absolute” because the “prince need render account of his acts to no one.” The king, however, was not to act like a Turkish despot who made arbitrary decrees. Rather, the king had a covenant with his subjects to care for them the way a loving father cares for his children.

According to divine right theory, the French king was a sacred personage who resided at the center of a religious world. Without him there would be chaos. His lineage stretched back to Adam through Pharamond (a mythical figure), Clovis, Pepin, and Charlemagne.

At the coronation, the archbishop of Reims anointed him with sacred oil and blessed his gloves, scepter, and ring, and the new king swore an oath to uphold the Catholic faith. Elements of the ceremony accented both the divine and civil nature of his union with the kingdom.

  • If his subjects should rebel against or attack his sacred person, they deserved the most severe punishment.

  • An assassination attempt warranted a gruesome public execution, an example for any other would-be assassins.

A subversive word written or uttered against His Majesty could earn its author time in the king’s dank and dark prisons.

In 1757, Robert François Damiens, who had made an attempt on the life of Louis XV, was literally pulled apart before a crowd of thousands of raucous Parisian onlookers.

Until the 1750s, the center of French life was wherever the king’s court was. To be outside of Versailles and Paris was to be “provincial.” Many of the nobles spent their days in this hierarchical world scheming how to advance their own interests, trying to escape boredom through amusements and sensuality, engaging in prattling gossip, ridicule, and court intrigue.

They scurried about trying to gain entrance into Louis XIV’s presence so as to win from him a reassuring glance, a word of commendation, and a favor. Prized opportunities included the right to attend the king’s Lever when he arose in the morning or the ceremonial Coucher when he went to bed, or an invitation to a royal audience, a sumptuous diner party, or a robust hunt.

Between the years 1669 and 1688 Louis XIV had expanded the Chateau de Versailles (originally a hunting lodge) with monumental architecture, sweeping gardens, and fountains as a tribute to France and to himself as Apollo, the “Sun King.” Some 10,000 people lived at the chateau and in the surrounding area. They ranged over time from members of the royal family:

  • Maria Theresa of Spain, his cousin and queen (d. 1683)

  • Françoise d’Aubigné Scarron (Madame de Maintenon), whom he married secretly in 1683

  • His council of governmental ministers

  • His mistresses, including Madame Louise de La Vallière and Françoise-Athénaïs (Marquise de Montespan)

  • The great nobles (les grands)

  • His royal chaplains

to soldiers, gardeners, cooks, and stable stewards who attended to his every royal need and whim.

In the 1690s Louis XIV also attempted to turn Paris into a “New Rome.”

B. Louis XIV and the Gallican Catholic Church#

Louis XIV (1638–1715) became king at age five but, given his youth, did not assume full authority until 1661, at age twenty-two. In the intervening time, his mother, Anne of Austria (who was in fact Spanish), and Cardinal Mazarin attempted to govern a realm beset by great civil unrest and armed conflicts associated with the various Frondes. Nobles of France (the Gondi faction and the Condé/Conti faction) revolted against Mazarin, using the Parlements as venues where their opposition was expressed. They attempted to gain power for themselves and thwart the plans of other factions. In 1649 Paris was placed under a state of siege; the next year civil war broke out. Forced to go into hiding, Louis XIV witnessed firsthand the anarchy and bloodshed of the Fronde.

Traumatized by what he experienced, Louis XIV determined to countermand any future revolts by nobles through the establishment of an absolute monarchy.

  • He learned well the trade of a king (métier de roi) under the watchful eye of Cardinal Mazarin (1602–61), a shrewd politician.

  • He sought to oblige the “people of quality” (the princes of the blood, cardinals and bishops, dukes and peers and other nobles) to do his bidding by making them depend on him for advancement in offices and the reception of gratifications from the royal treasury.

  • He tried to gain control of the royal courts (Parlements), the military, and the tax collection system.

The “very Christian” king, Louis XIV, tried to impose a Gallican form of Catholicism upon his people — whether they were Jansenist, Jesuit, Quietist, Protestant, or other — as a basis of the kingdom’s unity.

Since 1516, French kings had exercised the right to select the bishops of the French church. The kings usually filled the positions with nobles who were loyal to them. When Pope Innocent XI rejected Louis XIV’s naming of bishops and his appropriation of monies from vacant bishoprics, the king, with the backing of the Assembly of the Clergy, encouraged Bossuet to draw up the Declaration of Gallican Liberties of 1682.

Thus the bishops of the Gallican church had great authority to rule both in temporal and spiritual matters.

  • Besides their episcopal visits, ordinations, and baptisms, until 1702 they mandated that religious books could be published only with their permission.

  • Thereafter they regularly called on governmental censors of the Librairie (the institution that assessed books) to condemn “wicked books.”

  • They ruled over a church that owned approximately 10 percent of French land.

  • In exchange for immunities from taxation, they were to give a “free gift” of money to their defender, the monarch, at their Assemblies of the Clergy.

In 1690 Pope Alexander VIII condemned the Declaration of Gallican Liberties. In 1693 Louis XIV had the declaration rescinded. In 1695 he gave his bishops greater authority over priests. He was worried about the spread of Jansenism among them. Nonetheless, the French church continued to exhibit the spirit of “Gallicanism,” a willingness of the king and bishops of France to defy the papacy in temporal and even sometimes spiritual matters.

On occasion, Louis XIV and his royal successors did seek the support of the papacy in dealing with one of their most vexing religious and political problems: the heated rivalry between the Jansenists and the Jesuits.

III. THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE JANSENISTS AND JESUITS#

The bitter controversy between Jansenists and Jesuits and their respective allies in the Parlements and among the nobles often held center stage in the political life of France, not only during the reign of Louis XIV, but during the regency of Phillippe d’Orléans (1715–23) and the reign of Louis XV. Contests between Jansenists and Jesuits also flared up in Spain, Austria, Austrian Netherlands, the city-states of Italy, and Utrecht.

Jansenists#

Jansenists were the followers of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), a professor of theology at the University of Louvain who for a time was a bishop of Ypres. The Jansenists employed a distinctive “Figurist” form of scriptural exegesis in discerning a warrant for “the witness to truth” of a religious minority. They argued for the inviolability of the Christian conscience even to the extent of refusing to accept a church teaching they deemed in error.

Jansen had proposed an interpretation of St. Augustine in his posthumous work Augustinus (1640) that — in extolling God’s majesty, awesome power, justice, and righteousness — challenged any role we humans might have in winning our salvation through free will. Instead, the elect are saved by God’s grace alone. As their lives are transformed, the elect want to do the will of God by performing acts of love for God and their neighbors. The elect, in anxiously seeking assurance of salvation, attempt to overcome temptations of the world, the flesh, and the Devil by following an austere life of sincere contrition, by doing acts of rigorous penance, by celebrating frequent Communion, and by demonstrating true love for God.

Jansenists were especially critical of the Jesuits, whom they believed had succumbed to the teachings of Molinism, an anti-Augustinian theology based on Luis Molina’s A Reconciliation of Free Choice with the Gifts of Grace, Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation (1588).

Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, had argued that “sufficient grace” provides us with the strength to do good using our free will. God elects us according to his foreknowledge of what he knows we will do using our free choice.

Jansenists also did not accept the Jesuits’ defense of papal monarchy. Rather, like Gallicans, they held a conciliarist position: the authority of the church was vested in all the members of the body of Christ, including themselves as a Catholic minority. They pitted their Jansenist Gallican constitutionalism against Jesuit Ultramontane absolutism (loyalty “beyond the mountains” to the papacy).

The Jansenists thought the casuistry of the Jesuits in ethics, their overbearing appreciation of classical pagan culture, and their supposed worldliness were reprehensible.

In the Provincial Letters (1660), Pascal (1623–62), an associate of the Jansenists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, cleverly parodied the Jesuits much to the delight of many Parisians. Louis XIV was not amused; he ordered the book burned.

Jesuits#

For their part, Jesuits accused the Jansenists of being crypto-Protestants and republicans. Having sworn an oath to serve the papacy, Jesuits were particularly suspicious of any proclivities among Jansenists to favor Conciliarism and Gallicanism. Moreover, they proposed that the natural man does have a capacity to live “morally” if he follows reason.

Given this long-standing perspective on moral theology, Jesuit missionaries were thus inclined to make major adaptations of the Christian faith to the beliefs of peoples of other religions. In the so-called Chinese Rites Controversy, for example, the Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), in his The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, made a controversial claim. Ricci allowed new Chinese converts to continue ancestor worship and the making of offerings to the emperor, a practice Pope Innocent X (1644–55) condemned, only to have Pope Alexander VII (1655–67) and Pope Clement X (1670–76) approve it, with the practice once again condemned by Popes Clement XI in 1715 and Benedict XIV in 1742.

As if to clear themselves of the serious charge of sympathy for Protestantism, the leading Jansenists of the mid-seventeenth century, Pierre Nicole (1625–95) and Antoine Arnauld (the “Great Arnauld,” 1612–94), became major protagonists in the eucharistic controversy of the 1660s and 1670s. They attacked the works of Jean Claude, the well-respected Reformed pastor of Charenton (near Paris), who had argued that the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was a doctrinal innovation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In response, Nicole and Arnauld wrote The Perpetuity of the Faith of the Catholic Church concerning the Eucharist in a “small” version (1664) and a multivolume “large” version (1669, 1672, 1674).

  • They defended the thesis that the doctrine had been “perpetually” upheld by the church throughout Christian history.

  • To add weight to their thesis, they added “attestations” gathered from Eastern Orthodox Christians that allegedly indicated that these believers also believed in transubstantiation.

Claude disputed the authenticity of these attestations, gaining covert help from an unexpected quarter, the Catholic biblical critic Richard Simon.

In the Brerewood Additions, Simon, posing as an Anglican priest, scorned the quality of the Jansenists’ linguistic skills and argued that the eucharistic beliefs of Eastern Christians were in fact closer to those of Reformed Christians than to those of the Jansenists.

Despite their best anti-Protestant efforts, the Jansenists Nicole and Arnauld did not ultimately win the favor of Louis XIV. In 1678 they were forced to leave France. Arnauld lived in exile in Brussels.

Under the influence of Madame de Maintenon and Jesuit confessors, Louis XIV’s hostility toward Jansenists only intensified.

In 1704 his grandson, the Bourbon King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746), stoked this animus by calling for the destruction of Jansenism as a “sect so pernicious to the state and church.” Louis XIV apparently associated Jansenism with a spirit of rebellion and with Protestant tendencies.

In 1709 he ordered that twenty Jansenist sisters (religieuses) be removed from Port-Royal-des-Champs southwest of Paris because they would not sign a formulary that indicated certain doctrines of Jansen were heretical. Two years later he commanded the buildings at the site to be destroyed.

In 1712 Louis urged Pope Clement XI to issue Unigenitus Dei Filius. The pope promulgated the bull in 1713. It condemned 101 propositions allegedly found in Pasquier Quesnel’s Moral Reflections on the New Testament (1699). These propositions were supposedly Jansenist, but a number were clearly Augustinian more than Jansenist. After delaying actions by Cardinal Noailles, the archbishop of Paris, the Parlement of Paris only reluctantly and in silence registered the bull on February 15, 1714.

A. Jansenism and Religious and Political Conflicts#

On September 1, 1715, Louis XIV died, leaving a divided French church.

The bull’s reception within French society was very divisive and disruptive. In 1717 four bishops called for a council to reconsider the validity of the bull. They were joined by 3,000 other “appellants” (those calling for a council), who were quickly excommunicated by Pope Clement XI. Between the years 1717 and 1728 the number of “appellants” reached 7,000, or 5 percent of the French clergy.

In 1730 the Parlement of Paris, with the support of influential bishops, delivered a further blow to the Jansenist movement by making the bull Unigenitus a state law. A series of healing miracles, however, took place:

  • First in Paris in 1725

  • In 1727 at the tomb of the Jansenist Gerard Rousse in Reims

  • At the tomb of Deacon François de Pâris, located in the cemetery of St. Médard in Paris.

These happenings accredited the Jansenist cause, as if it were blessed of God, and brought throngs of Parisians to the cemetery in search of healing or moved by curiosity.

In 1732 the government closed the cemetery of St. Médard to curb its propaganda value for Jansenism and to stem the commotions and physical excesses associated with its “convulsionary” miracles.

While the Jansenists lost the support of many bishops, their movement with its “miracles” and egalitarian emphasis (that is, priests could object to bishops’ orders if deemed in error) gained followers in the lower classes of French society. Jansenism’s ecclesiology, with its warrant for the lower clergy to challenge the authority of bishops, also found favor among certain magistrates in various Parlements of France who believed in a somewhat parallel fashion that they could challenge the king’s legislation by failing to register it. Such, they said, was a “fundamental” law of France.

Thus Jansenism, originally very much a theological movement, took on political dimensions in its diverse permutations as an oppositional force. Its partisans were found in various walks of life. They very effectively used the printed page, especially the underground journal Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques (1728–1803), to keep a large public current regarding Jansenists’ struggles flowing throughout Europe.

From 1749 to 1754 Paris once again became the site of another dramatic dispute related to the bull Unigenitus, the Refusal of Sacraments Controversy. In 1749 Christophe de Beaumont, the archbishop of Paris, required that before Catholics could receive the last rites, they had to produce an attestation of confession (billet de confession) indicating they accepted the bull Unigenitus. A number of Jansenists refused to sign such an attestation and died without receiving last rites. News of priests refusing to offer the last rites provoked an enormous scandal, greatly agitating large numbers of Parisians.

On April 18, 1754, the Parlement of Paris delivered an order placarded throughout Paris: “The Court forbids all ecclesiastics to perform acts which lead to schism, notably to make any public refusal of the sacraments, under the pretext of failure to present a billet de confession, or to give the name of the confessor, or to accept the bull Unigenitus.”

Louis XV, whose views vacillated on the bull’s merits, supported the Parlement and ordered that silence should be maintained regarding the validity of the bull. When Christophe de Beaumont broke the silence, he was promptly exiled.

B. The Damiens Affair#

Rumors of revolt swirled through Paris in December 1756 and January 1757 after Louis XV promulgated a lit de justice quashing the Parlement of Paris’s failure to register his “compromise” edict to resolve the religious crisis. Perhaps three-fourths of the people of Paris backed the Jansenists against the Jesuits, or so said one contemporary. One rumor suggested that Jesuits would soon be slaughtered.

In the late afternoon of January 5, 1757, a bitterly cold day, a servant named Robert-François Damiens broke through the ranks of the king’s guards and drove a knife into the side of Louis XV. Damiens was immediately arrested. The king initially thought he was going to die, but the wound proved only superficial. His thick coat and the assassin’s choice of a small knife saved the king’s life. Many Parisians were shocked and saddened and feared what might happen next.

On January 22 Frederick II (“the Great”) of Prussia discounted the truth of news coming from Paris as “having to do with an alleged insurrection by the people led by the Prince de Conti.”

Through his Jansenist lawyer, Adrien Le Paige, the Prince de Conti had been an advisor of sorts to the magistrates in the Parlement of Paris who were partisan to the Jansenist cause, and he had engaged in secret negotiations with outlawed Protestants regarding how they might gain toleration. He also knew the assassin Damiens.

Despite torture, Damiens remained resolute in denying the existence of coconspirators. After a trial in which judges assumed his guilt, Damiens’s body was literally pulled apart at a public execution witnessed by a large, boisterous Parisian crowd, simultaneously fascinated and horrified.

Louis XV was badly shaken by these events and his unnerving suspicions that his rebellious first cousin and former confidant, the Prince de Conti, was plotting against him. In an unconfirmed report, a spy indicated to the British government that the French king, so overwhelmed by melancholy, was contemplating resigning from the throne of France. By September, Louis XV had apparently lost the will to enforce strictly the religious restrictions against Jansenists (as well as against Protestants).

A major crack appeared in the monarchy’s ideology that the sacraments of the Catholic Church bound all French subjects into a unified people. Now religious outsiders, such as the Jansenists and Protestants, could worship God in their own ways, generally without fear of being sought out and arrested.

The Jansenists also gained a sense of revenge against the Jesuits (some 3,300 members) when the Parlements of France, reluctantly seconded by Louis XV on November 26, 1764, expelled the Society of Jesus from the kingdom and the French colonies.

The Jesuits’ reputation had been badly tarnished in the Chinese Rites Controversy, the “Paraguay Reductions” case, and a lawsuit (1761) in which Jansenist lawyers Adrien Le Paige and Charlemagne Lalource furnished damaging evidence against the order.

In 1767 Charles III of Spain, the King of Naples and Duke of Parma, expelled the Jesuits from their lands. Eventually, in 1773, the papacy dissolved the order with its 26,000 members worldwide and its nearly 1,000 colleges and seminaries. Only in 1814 was the Society of Jesus reestablished.

Despite complaints that Protestants were brazenly touting their new toleration, the Assembly of the Clergy continued to affirm the standard premise that Catholicism was the only legitimate religion in France. In 1765, the assembly called upon the king to uphold his anti-Protestant legislation. Louis XV indicated he would do this, but in fact he apparently did not have the will to enforce his sacramental policy toward the Jansenists and Protestants with rigor.

In 1774 Louis XV, the Bien-Aimé, died in a gruesome manner from smallpox. Louis XVI was crowned king in the cathedral of Reims. During a magnificent coronation service, Louis XVI affirmed his desire to uphold the Catholic religion and tried to reinvigorate the sacred character of his union with the people of France.

  • In 1776 a resurgence of Roman Catholic devotion did take place in Paris.

  • But in 1787 Louis XVI yielded to a well-orchestrated campaign by “Magistrate Philosophes,” Jansenists, and the Protestant Pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne, and he issued the Edict of Toleration for Protestants.

The king’s sacramental ideology of “one religion” now was shredded.

Other ideologies including social contract theories with a Rousseauist orientation, already much discussed in ongoing pamphlet wars and in other courts of public opinion, rushed to fill the widening political void by providing warrants for other types of government to replace a divine right monarchy.

IV. GALLICAN CATHOLICISM AND THE SIÈCLE DES LUMIÈRES#

The Gallican church constituted a significant institutional presence in the life of the French people during the Siècle des lumières.

Many church bishops were very wealthy nobles, well connected with the monarchy. Its Assemblies of Clergy attempted to influence governmental policy and public morality. Debates between its clerics — such as between Jansenists and “devout Catholics” associated with the Jesuits — stirred popular unrest. The church’s teachers had access to the kingdom’s young in the classrooms of the Sorbonne and other universities and in city and village schools. Its missionary-minded clerics attempted to catechize the young and “evangelize” rural France.

The church’s writers — ranging from Bossuet, François Fénelon, and the Quietest Madame Guyon (Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon, 1648–1717), to Jesuit directors of conscience — provided various guidelines for Catholic spirituality.

Between 1694 and 1699, a major theological contest ensued between Bossuet and Fénelon over Madame Guyon’s contention (later seconded by Fénelon in his Maxims of the Saints [1697]) that Christians should aspire to “pure love.” This is a state of perfection in which “the desire of recompense and the fear of punishments do not occur.” In 1699 Pope Innocent XII condemned twenty-three propositions ostensibly found in Fénelon’s book.

The church’s great cathedrals and smaller churches, schools, hospitals, convents, and monasteries were dispersed throughout the land. Its clerics often engaged in sacrificial efforts to care for the physical and spiritual needs of the Catholic faithful. The bon curé (good priest) of the countryside, often poorly paid and overworked, became a model of the good Catholic cleric when resentments arose sharply against wealthy bishops who controlled what were perceived to be excessive landholdings on the eve of the French Revolution.

Catholic mothers instructed daughters about feminine virtues and motherhood.

  • Catholics were expected to confess and take Communion each Easter.

The penalties for not doing so could be severe, including excommunication and refusal for Christian burial.

  • Catholics were also expected to attend mass on one out of every three Sundays.

Compliance with these rules and others was great in the countryside but less prevalent in the large cities like Paris, especially in the decades preceding the French Revolution. Going to church was generally viewed as an activity that wedded community, spiritual, and social functions.

Especially after 1760, the Gallicans’ piety and loyalty to the Catholic Church may have flagged somewhat. The phenomenon of a potential nascent “secularism” (a noticeable attachment to the things of this world at the expense of a concern for the things of God) was also apparent in Paris and in larger urban areas.

Be that as it may, as late as 1787 one visitor to Paris pointed out that the chief tourist attraction in the capital was to watch the huge religious processions that coursed through the streets on a regular basis. The most celebrated parade was the Fête Dieu, Corpus Christi, in which the Eucharist was carried on high in such a way that it could be easily venerated and adored by the crowds of onlookers. On occasion the faithful could earn plenary indulgences if they became a participant in the parades.

The faithful also “honored” the relics of St. Geneviève and other revered saints. They did not “worship” them, as Gallican Catholic apologists were quick to point out in an effort to head off potential Protestant criticisms.

Yet the Gallican church did not lack critics. Pornographic books allegedly recounting the sexual life of monks and nuns behind monastic walls often sold well.

French Catholic apologists stepped forward to write defenses of their faith against all comers, whether Protestant, deist, or atheist. Some 950 apologetic pieces appeared between the years 1670 and 1802. One of the best-known authors was Nicolas-Sylvester Bergier (1718–90), who penned Deism Refuted by Itself (1765), in which he attacked the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau expressed in the Vicar Savoyard.

Catholic contemporaries believed Bergier’s work Examination of Materialism (1771) constituted a most persuasive refutation of Baron d’Holbach’s materialistic Systême de la nature (System of Nature).

Bergier also pulled no punches in criticizing fellow Catholics, the Jansenists, for claiming that the miracles of St. Médard accredited their cause. He also warned about the dangers of superstition and the veneration of fraudulent relics. Likewise, the Benedictine Louis-Mayeul Chaudon, a notable physicist, penned a penetrating critique of materialism in his Anti-dictionnaire philosophique (1775).

Other Catholic writers such as Antoine Guénée, who in a Pascalian fashion cleverly spoofed Voltaire’s arguments, participated in a potent anti-philosophe campaign. They disseminated their views through books and conservative journals such as the Année littéraire, Journal historique et littéraire, and Affiches. Anti-Enlightenment clerics in the Austrian Netherlands, Spain, and Italy translated these writings into their own languages.

V. PROTESTANTS#

In the 1560s, evangelistically inclined French Huguenots (Calvinists) representing 10 percent of the French population envisioned the day that France might become Reformed. Instead, their hopes were dashed, owing to their resounding defeat in a series of nine politico-religious wars during which they were relegated definitively into a minority status of a suffering church (“under the Cross”).

Henri IV, who had formerly been a Protestant, did afford the Huguenots some rights in the Edict of Nantes (1598). In 1629 the Peace of Alais took away a number of the Protestants’ civil and military rights after they had engaged in failed rebellions in the 1620s. The siege and capitulation of La Rochelle, a Protestant stronghold (1627–28), represented the end of any realistic hope Protestants had of retaining areas of the kingdom as a fortified “state within a state.”

Between 1661 and 1685 Louis XIV launched a serious anti-Protestant campaign.

  • Between 650 and 700 Reformed churches were demolished.

  • The government promulgated more than 400 pieces of legislation curtailing the Protestants’ remaining rights.

Finally, in 1685 Louis XIV, encouraged by Madame de Maintenon (ironically, the granddaughter of the Protestant poet Agrippa d’Aubigné), revoked Henri IV’s Edict of Nantes. Louis XIV propagated the fiction that all of his subjects were Catholics bound together by the sacraments of the Catholic Church.

Many Protestants had “converted” to Catholicism. In 1681, dragonnades made up of “booted missionaries”) moved into Poitou, Béarn, Languedoc, and Dauphiné, where Huguenots sometimes constituted the majority of the population. Feared dragoons forcibly lodged in the houses of Huguenots. The soldiers terrorized the Protestants until they abjured their faith — what the government called “Religion Prétendue Réformée” (self-styled Reformed religion). The dragoons were allowed to use any means possible (except murder and rape) in their “converting” campaign.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes (via the Edict of Fontainebleau) denied to French Protestants their very right to exist in France. The king attempted to fulfill his goal of realizing the “one religion” component of the “one king, one law, one religion” dictum.

About 200,000 Huguenots fled the kingdom before and after the revocation. They undertook their sometimes perilous escapes as they sought refuge in the United Provinces, Geneva, Prussia, England, North America, and elsewhere. The refugees contributed greatly to the intellectual and economic life of their newly adopted countries.

Thousands of Huguenots remained in FranceL

  • Many of whom converted to Roman Catholicism, some in name only. The government called them “Nouveaux convertis” (“newly converted”).

  • A smaller number of Protestants formed an underground church, the “Church of the Desert”, consisting of those Huguenots who refused to yield to pressures to convert to Gallican Catholicism.

Between the years 1684 and 1698 twenty outlawed pastors who tried to minister to the Huguenots were hunted down and executed.

Louis XIV feared that Huguenots harbored antimonarchical republican sentiments and thus could act as agents of political subversion. Moreover, Louis XIV was competing with the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, for political hegemony in Europe. He was suspect in some quarters for having failed in 1683 to send French troops to defend Christian Europe when 200,000 Turks approached Vienna. By contrast, his competitor, Leopold I, dispatched forces. After all, Louis XIV was a warrior king who set Europe on edge with his acquisitive foreign policy and penchant for unfettered warfare against England, the United Provinces, Germany, and the Hapsburg territories.

The king’s suspicions about the seditious proclivities of Huguenots appeared justified. A number of them known as Camisards engaged in the Cévenol or Camisard Wars (1702–4) against his government. They called for “freedom of conscience” and “no taxes.” Cévenol prophets, ranging from boys and girls to men and women, predicted a future liberation of the Protestants from their oppressors. The troops of Louis XIV put down the revolt. Abraham Mazal, a major Camisard prophet, however, was not killed until 1710, when he was still attempting to stir a revolt in the Vivarais. In 1711 a number of “Inspired” prophets went to England, the United Provinces, and Germany.

In 1715 Antoine Court held the first synodal meeting of pastors whose purpose was to restore an organizational framework for the outlawed Church of the Desert.

  • Court described the “spirit of the Desert” as “a spirit of reflection, of great wisdom and especially of a martyr that prepares us and disposes us to forsake our lives courageously, if Providence calls us to this.”

  • Court urged his colleagues to profess sincere loyalty to the monarchy and shun the “infection” of fanaticism that had led the Camisards to pick up arms, a plan of action culminating in disastrous results.

About 1726, Court and others founded a clandestine seminary for young French men in Lausanne, Switzerland. It secretly received financial support from Protestants in Switzerland, England, and the United Provinces. After their studies from six months to three years in Lausanne, the young pastors returned to face the rigors and risks of ministering to outlawed churches in France. If captured, they were executed.

The pastors preached in services held in the secluded ravines of the Cévennes Mountains or on windswept beaches along the Atlantic Ocean or anywhere else that might escape the attention of governmental spies and soldiers.

In the second half of the century, Paul Rabaut of Nîmes gave leadership to the Reformed churches of France, assisting Court, who died in 1760. Rabaut, too, called on the Huguenots to submit to the monarchy’s laws, except for those forbidding Protestant worship.

During the Seven Years War (1756–63), the Protestants became the beneficiaries of a de facto toleration (1758), much to the dismay of some Roman Catholic clergy.

Between 1762 and 1765, Voltaire also abetted the cause of Huguenot toleration by successfully gaining the exculpation of the name of Jean Calas. Voltaire defended other Huguenots and wrote a book defending toleration for Protestants.

Finally, in the Edict of Toleration (1787), Louis XVI granted Huguenots the right to worship but did not accord them full civil rights.

Between 1685 and 1787, the French government’s persecution of Huguenots extracted a heavy human toll:

  • 219 men and 32 women were executed

  • 635 killed by gunfire or other means

  • 3,484 men and 3,493 women incarcerated

  • 1,940 forced to serve on the king’s galleys

  • Approximately 40 pastors were executed

This out of a population growing to 593,000 in 1760. Some Huguenot woman such as Marie Durand spent years imprisoned in the infamous Tower of Aiguesmorte. Durand resisted efforts to persuade her to renounce the Reformed faith.

After 1760 a number of Reformed pastors were greatly influenced by the thought of the philosophe Voltaire, who had defended the Protestant cause. Court de Gébelin, Antoine Court’s son, and Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Paul Rabaut’s son, abandoned distinctive Reformed convictions and advocated beliefs quite compatible with those of certain philosophes. A number of other Protestant pastors from provinces such as Languedoc did the same.

VI. CONCLUSION#

The Christian churches — whether Gallican Catholic, Ultramontane, Jansenist, or Protestant — generally weathered the philosophes’ attacks during the Age of Lights. Likewise, in other continental European countries and city-states the Christian churches sometimes proved less receptive to diverse teachings of the Age of Lights than the philosophes had apparently anticipated.

Moreover, by the time the Bastille fell on July 14, 1789, the Gallican monarchy’s claim that it alone could determine the religion of the French people no longer possessed much persuasive force in the court of public opinion.