Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France 9780228007869

Table of contents :
Cover
Berruyer’s Bible
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 French Jesuits and the Enlightenment
2 The Problem of Innovation
3 The Berruyer Affair
4 From Ink to Ashes
5 The Suppression
6 A Bible for a Post-Revolutionary Age
Conclusion: From Enlightenment to Romantic Catholicism
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Berruyer’s Bible

McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of reliGion

Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. series one: G.A. rAwlyk, editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in SeventeenthCentury France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan 10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson

11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw 19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser

21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau 23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen

24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827–1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanne Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

series two in MeMory of GeorGe rAwlyk donAld hArMAn Akenson, editor 1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson 2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 3 Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill 4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk 5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna 6 The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan 7 Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka 8 Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston 9 The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

10 Gentle Eminence A Life of Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt 11 Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan 12 Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William H. Katerberg 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley 17 A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley 18 Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Edited by Nancy Christie

19 Blood Ground Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne 20 A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay 21 The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Edited and translated by John Zucchi 22 The Founding Moment Church, Society, and the Construction of Trinity College William Westfall 23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian Protestant Churches Haim Genizi 24 Governing Charities Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Archdiocese, 1850–1950 Paula Maurutto 25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the Quebec Connection Richard W. Vaudry 26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide The Conservative Protestant Subculture in Canada and the United States Sam Reimer 27 Christians in a Secular World The Canadian Experience Kurt Bowen 28 Anatomy of a Seance A History of Spirit Communication in Central Canada Stan McMullin 29 With Skilful Hand The Story of King David David T. Barnard 30 Faithful Intellect Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Neil Semple 31 W. Stanford Reid An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy Donald MacLeod

32 A Long Eclipse The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Catherine Gidney 33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 1787–1858 Kyla Madden 34 For Canada’s Sake Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, and the Re-making of Canada in the 1960s Gary R. Miedema 35 Revival in the City The Impact of American Evangelists in Canada, 1884–1914 Eric R. Crouse 36 The Lord for the Body Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880–1930 James Opp 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789 J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters Vision and Mission Rosa Bruno-Jofré 39 Religion, Family, and Community in Victorian Canada The Colbys of Carrollcroft Marguerite Van Die 40 Michael Power The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier Mark G. McGowan 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, 1931–1970 Michael Gauvreau 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame, 1665–1700 Patricia Simpson 43 To Heal a Fractured World The Ethics of Responsibility Jonathan Sacks 44 Revivalists Marketing the Gospel in English Canada, 1884–1957 Kevin Kee

45 The Churches and Social Order in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Canada Edited by Michael Gauvreau and Ollivier Hubert 46 Political Ecumenism Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945 Geoffrey Adams 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian Faith and Community among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 Robynne Rogers Healey 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 Colleen Gray 49 Canadian Pentecostalism Transition and Transformation Edited by Michael Wilkinson 50 A War with a Silver Lining Canadian Protestant Churches and the South African War, 1899–1902 Gordon L. Heath 51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 Jacob Neusner 52 Imagining Holiness Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times Justin Jaron Lewis 53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing with Ecstasy The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 Calvin Hollett 54 Into Deep Waters Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 Daniel C. Goodwin 55 Vanguard of the New Age The Toronto Theosophical Society, 1891–1945 Gillian McCann 56 A Commerce of Taste Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Barry Magrill 57 The Big Picture The Antigonish Movement of Eastern Nova Scotia Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta

58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh John P. Comiskey 59 The Covenanters in Canada Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 to 2012 Eldon Hay 60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 Renée N. Lafferty 61 In Defence of the Faith Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Comissário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline James E. Wadsworth 62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Popular Moralists in Mid-TwentiethCentury Britain Paul T. Phillips 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances Varieties of Religion in Early Modern France, 1350–1789 J. Michael Hayden 64 After Evangelicalism The Sixties and the United Church of Canada Kevin N. Flatt 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation Mariya Lesiv 66 Transatlantic Methodists British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec Todd Webb 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation Making and Remaking the United Church of Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 68 Fighting over God A Legal and Political History of Religious Freedom in Canada Janet Epp Buckingham 69 From India to Israel Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle for Religious Equality Joseph Hodes

70 Becoming Holy in Early Canada Timothy Pearson 71 The Cistercian Arts From the 12th to the 21st Century Edited by Terryl N. Kinder and Roberto Cassanelli 72 The Canny Scot Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish Peter Ludlow 73 Religion and Greater Ireland Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 Edited by Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey 74 The Invisible Irish Finding Protestants in the NineteenthCentury Migrations to America Rankin Sherling 75 Beating against the Wind Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and Tractarianism in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1844–1876 Calvin Hollett 76 The Body or the Soul? Religion and Culture in a Quebec Parish, 1736–1901 Frank A. Abbott 77 Saving Germany North American Protestants and Christian Mission to West Germany, 1945–1974 James C. Enns 78 The Imperial Irish Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914–1918 Mark G. McGowan 79 Into Silence and Servitude How American Girls Became Nuns, 1945–1965 Brian Titley

80 Boundless Dominion Providence, Politics, and the Early Canadian Presbyterian Worldview Denis McKim 81 Faithful Encounters Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire Emrah Şahin 82 Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies The Protestant Ethic and the Quest for Social Justice in Canada Richard Allen 83 Not Quite Us Anti-Catholic Thought in English Canada since 1900 Kevin P. Anderson 84 Scandal in the Parish Priests and Parishioners Behaving Badly in Eighteenth-Century France Karen E. Carter 85 Ordinary Saints Women, Work, and Faith in Newfoundland Bonnie Morgan 86 Patriot and Priest Jean-Baptiste Volfius and the Constitutional Church in the Côte-d’Or Annette Chapman-Adisho 87 A.B. Simpson and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism Daryn Henry 88 The Uncomfortable Pew Christianity and the New Left in Toronto Bruce Douville 89 Berruyer’s Bible Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France Daniel J. Watkins

Berruyer’s Bible Public oPinion And the Politics of enliGhtenMent cAtholicisM in frAnce

Daniel J. Watkins

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0629-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0630-5 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0786-9 (ePdf ) isbn 978-0-2280-0787-6 (ePub) Legal deposit second quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Berruyer’s Bible : public opinion and the politics of enlightenment Catholicism in France / Daniel J. Watkins. Names: Watkins, Daniel J., author. Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two ; 89. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series two ; 89 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210113472 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210113561 | isbn 9780228006305 (paper) | isbn 9780228006299 (cloth) | isbn 9780228007869 (ePdf ) | isbn 9780228007876 (ePub) Subjects: lcsh: Berruyer, Isaac-Joseph, 1681-1758. Histoire du peuple de Dieu. | lcsh: Catholic Church – France – Public opinion – History – 18th century. | lcsh: Jesuits – France – History – 18th century. | lcsh: Censorship – France – Religious aspects – History – 18th century. | lcsh: Bible – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – France – History – 18th century. | lcsh: Enlightenment – France. | lcsh: Church and state – France – History – 18th century. | lcsh: France – Church history – 18th century. | lcsh: France – Intellectual life – 18th century. Classification: lcc bX4705.b3849 w38 2021 | ddc 230.092 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11.5/14 Adobe Garamond Pro.

For Meghan

Contents

Figures

xiii

Acknowledgments Introduction

xv 3

1 French Jesuits and the Enlightenment 2 The Problem of Innovation

50

3 The Berruyer Affair

84

4 From Ink to Ashes

117

5 The Suppression

18

149

6 A Bible for a Post-Revolutionary Age

181

Conclusion: From Enlightenment to Romantic Catholicism Notes

231

Bibliography Index

273 309

215

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1 5.1 5.2 6.1 c.1 c.2

Map of the Jesuit provinces of France. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 19 A Lady Reading the Letters of Héloïse and Abélard. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago. 70 The Fall 78 The Affair of Father Berruyer. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris. 115 Father Étienne Gourlin. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal, Paris. 155 Frontispiece of the Extraits des assertions dangereuses. Courtesy of Google Books. 167 Joseph, histoire sainte. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 197 Lot’s Wife Turning into a Pillar of Salt. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 216 Hagar and Ishmael. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. 217

Acknowledgments

When I was a child, I hated reading. Every year, my school distributed a summer reading list that included both required and recommended books for each grade level. I never read the optional books, and only in the final week of the summer, when the impending doom of a new school year weighed unbearably upon my juvenile soul, did I force myself to open up the pieces of literature mandated by my teachers. Then in the summer of 1997, my family took a road trip to look at colleges for my older sister. We drove for nearly two weeks visiting beautiful campuses throughout the southeastern portion of the United States. To pass the time, my mother brought along one of the recommended books on my summer reading list: Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Without much else to occupy my attention in the long hours on the road, she convinced me to read it aloud to the family as we drove. Together, the book brought us to tears laughing, and the long journey flew by. In the back seat of my parents’ green Ford Explorer, I miraculously fell in love with reading, and I discovered for the first time the power of a single book. At the precipice of publishing my own book, I must begin by saying thank you to the person most responsible for inspiring my love of reading: my mother, Cathy Watkins. Without her my fascination with the world of books and my very career as a historian would have been impossible. This project began in 2008 when my doctoral advisor, Dale Van Kley, handed me a copy of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu and said, “Tell me what you think.” Dale has seen this project through to the very end, reading not only drafts of my dissertation but also the final book manuscript. Few academics have enjoyed as supportive and encouraging a mentor as I, and for Dale’s guidance and generosity I am eternally grateful.

xvi

AcknowledGMents

I also appreciate the many other colleagues who have offered their assistance throughout the course of this project. Mita Choudhury has become one of my most trusted academic confidants. Phone conversations with Mita launched my effort to revise the dissertation into a book manuscript, and her careful reading of the manuscript when it was complete helped me clarify what it was I was trying to say and how I should say it. Jeffrey Burson has read nearly every piece that I have published and has helped me shape my conception of the Enlightenment and the intellectual culture of the Society of Jesus. Alice Conklin guided me through the writing of my dissertation and provided thoughtful advice on how to frame the project as it developed. Geoffrey Parker shared his archival wisdom and many a croissant with me while we were both in Paris in 2011–12. Christy Pichichero offered her expertise in navigating the publishing market, and Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk – my mentors at the University of Florida and the people who first suggested that I consider pursuing graduate studies in history – both gave timely advice on the ways to make my work more accessible to a broader audience. Daniel Barish helped me better understand the Chinese context of Jesuit missions and gave important feedback on drafts of my introduction and first chapter. Joe Stubenrauch also contributed to shaping my introduction and provided tips on the publishing process. D. Gillian Thompson, Michelle Molina, Jennifer Popiel, and Kathleen Hardesty Doig all graciously sent me pieces of their own research that helped me better understand Berruyer and his world. Paolo Fontana too shared his invaluable work on Berruyer and shipped a copy of his book to me all the way from Genoa! Finally, Kara Barr, Jim Bartholomew, Daniel Hobbins, Matthew Goldish, Jeffrey Harris, and Daniel Vandersommers all read and provided beneficial comments on portions of my research. To all these wonderful and generous scholars, I simply say: thank you. I must also express my gratitude to the many librarians, archivists, and researchers that I encountered in my trips to France, England, Ireland, and Italy. Valérie Guittienne-Mürger and Fabien Vandermarcq provided a home away from home at the Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal on the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Valérie also shared copies of her own work on the nineteenth-century editions of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. Robert Bonfils opened up the Jesuit archives in Vanves to me and found numerous letters and documents that I

AcknowledGMents

xvii

never would have found on my own. Monique Cottret welcomed me in France and allowed me to sit in on her seminar at the Université de Paris Nanterre. Vincent Petit quickly became a friend and research partner in Besançon. Without him I would have struck out at the diocesan archives and never discovered the pure, unadulterated joy of Comté cheese. Alison Forrestal hosted me at the National University of Ireland in Galway where we had constructive conversations about Jean Hardouin and the early portions of my project. My fellow fellows at the Moore Institute, Ali Baker and Debapriya Basu, provided friendship and feedback on everything from the book’s argument to its title. David Knight and Jan Graffius allowed me to visit the secluded library of Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, and offered many pleasant conversations over tea. Andrea Ottone was an indispensable guide to the Vatican archives, a wonderful host in Rome, and a dynamite pasta chef. I am indebted to all of these wonderful people and to the staffs of the many archives and libraries that I visited throughout the course of this project. My research was made possible by the financial support of a number of institutions. The Ohio State University’s Department of History and College of Humanities launched my project with a series of short-term grants plus a long-term university fellowship. The Newberry Library in Chicago provided a short-term research fellowship to investigate its collections on censorship and the history of print. The University of North Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences provided a research enhancement grant in 2017 that helped me purchase digital copies of materials, and a Gustave Gimon Visiting Scholar Fellowship from Stanford University afforded me the opportunity to work in the Gimon Collection and search for Enlightenment Catholicism’s connections with nineteenth-century French intellectual culture. A fellowship at the Moore Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Ireland in Galway gave me the time and resources to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript. The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Theodore E.D. Braun Travel Fellowship sponsored an incredibly fruitful trip to Besançon in 2018, and two summer sabbaticals from Baylor University’s College of Arts and Sciences provided the resources to finish researching and writing my manuscript. I am grateful for all of these institutions and the interest they showed in my work.

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AcknowledGMents

So too am I grateful for Kyla Madden and everyone at McGillQueen’s University Press. Kyla has been the ideal editor: supportive, enthusiastic, responsive, generous, and constructive. I admire her for her own academic work and for her willingness to dive into the scholarly worlds of others. Many thanks also go to Donald Harman Akenson for including me in the McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion series and for providing beneficial feedback on the manuscript. I appreciate Lisa Aitken, Kathryn Simpson, and the members of MQuP’s marketing department for taking the time to work with me on improving my manuscript and bringing the process of publication to fruition. And I owe a special thanks, finally, to the anonymous reviewers whose suggestions strengthened my manuscript in many important ways. Finally, I must show my appreciation for my family who have tirelessly supported me over the past ten years of working on this project. My mother, father, and sister all witnessed my transformation from a kid who despised school to an adult who willingly submitted himself to thirteen years of higher education. Surprised as they may be about my career choice, they never once questioned why it was that I was so interested in history. Their unceasing encouragement has not gone unnoticed, and I simply would not be who I am without them. The Wright, Lundborg, and Ernst families have shown incomparable patience with me for the many vacations and family trips during which I absconded to nearby coffee shops to do some writing. For all the times that they babysat, provided lunch and dinner, and even read portions of rough drafts, I cannot thank them enough. My two sons, Benjamin and Andrew, have helped me gain perspective about my work. Their love and belief that writing a book is “cool” brought me joy even when I was far away. Finally, my spouse, Meghan, has given more than anyone. I write this on the morning of our fourteenth wedding anniversary, and I can proudly say that I am far the better for having her in my life. For the constant support, incomparable patience, encouragement, comfort, and inspiration I am so immensely grateful. Most importantly, Meghan has taught and continues to teach me that grace is not about loving someone when he deserves it but about loving someone despite the many reasons why he doesn’t. It is for this and many other reasons that I have dedicated this book to her.

Berruyer’s Bible

Introduction In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.1 God was from all eternity; the world wasn’t: because the world could not come to be by itself nor could it be eternal, it had to have been created in time and drawn out of nothingness … At about noon, God says, “Let there be light,” and there was light. This wasn’t yet the light coming out of the center of the sun, which soon would enlighten the world by its equally rapid and regular course. This was the body of lights … destined to form eventually the sun and all the other [stars].2

On 10 April 1756, the public executioner of Paris lacerated and burned a Bible in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice, the home of France’s most important judicial court. The decision was not made lightly. The authorities responsible – which included members of the court (the Parlement of Paris), representatives of the king, and Omer Joly de Fleury, the king’s main legal counsel – had been deliberating over the work since the previous December. The Bible, titled the Histoire du peuple de Dieu (History of the People of God), had created a scandal. People throughout France had been arguing about it for the previous three years. Among the concerns of those who spoke out against the Histoire was the belief that its author, Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, had drastically altered the biblical text. In its decision, the parlement explained that it condemned the Histoire because the book “corrupted” the holy scriptures. The members of the parlement claimed that Berruyer “placed errors in the sanctuary of truth … degraded the majesty of the Supreme Being … [and] changed the gravity of the holy Books into the style of a novel.” “Is there anything that does more to dishonour Religion, to cause infinite damages to the mind and heart,” asked the members of the parlement, “than a work such as this, written in the superficial, amusing style so common to frivolous writers of this age”? The parlement destroyed Berruyer’s Bible because they felt that it wasn’t a Bible

4

Berruyer’s BiBle

at all. It was a novel in disguise. And a novel disguised as a Bible could do considerable harm to the church and the people of France.3 Berruyer’s book had long been the source of controversy. When it first appeared in the 1720s, some Jesuits – members of the Society of Jesus, the religious order to which Berruyer belonged – objected to it in letters to their superiors. In 1732, Charles Joachim Colbert, the bishop of Montpellier, became the first (but not the last) member of the episcopacy to publish a mandement, or an official directive, instructing priests and parishioners in his diocese not to purchase or read the book. Discussion of the Histoire reached the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church. By the end of the 1750s, three different popes had publicly condemned the work, and the Congregation of the Index had placed it on the Index librorum prohibitorum, the church’s list of banned books. The Histoire became famous (or, rather, infamous) because of the attention brought upon it by these many condemnations, placing it in the same company as other notorious books of the eighteenth century, including Denis Diderot’s and Jean-le-rond D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and Claude Adrien Helvetius’s De l’esprit. Berruyer’s name consistently emerged in public debates throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century and beyond. While the Histoire horrified some, it inspired others. In commenting on the parlement’s decision to burn the book, the Parisian barrister Edmond Jean François Barbier confessed that he found the Histoire “perfectly written” and Berruyer himself to be “a wise man with a lot of wit.” “In his Histoire,” wrote Barbier, “he has woven together [the books of the Bible] in a way that fixes the dryness and lack of style” from which the original text suffered.4 Henri Griffet, one of Berruyer’s colleagues in the Society of Jesus and the king’s confessor, reportedly introduced the book to women at the court in Versailles by explaining that Berruyer had “brightened up the Gospel” and thus made the Bible enjoyable to read.5 Indeed, the Parlement of Paris, the Congregation of the Index, and the whole host of bishops, archbishops, and popes who spoke out against the Histoire did so only because it was already popular. The Histoire drew in readers from all over Europe. It received multiple editions, was translated into four different languages, and ended up in libraries all over the globe. Though it is relatively unknown today, the Histoire du peuple de Dieu commanded the attentions of countless members of the eighteenth-century literate public – including prominent figures such as Voltaire, André Morellet, and Jean-Jacques

introduction

5

Rousseau – and contributed to some of the most significant political events of the era. What follows is the tumultuous story of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu and the impact that it had on French political and intellectual life. In his Histoire, Berruyer tried to tell the tales of the Old and New Testaments using the language, ideas, and sensibilities of the Enlightenment.6 He lauded the pursuit of both social and theological progress. He promoted the power of nature to transmit physical and spiritual truths, expanding the realm of “natural theology” in innovative ways. He contributed to the project of Enlightenment humanism – or, in Charly Coleman’s terminology, the “culture of self-ownership” – that fostered the belief that human reality was detached from the realm of the supernatural and divine.7 He utilized the language and logic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, including the notion that human emotions were confirmations of truth and that the pursuit of happiness on earth was a worthy end unto itself. He did all of this in order to repackage the Catholic faith in a way that might be appealing to eighteenthcentury readers. In brief, Berruyer participated in what historians call the Catholic Enlightenment.8 In so doing, however, he unleashed furious public debates and raised questions about the compatibility of Catholic theology with the new sensibilities of the Enlightenment. These debates, in turn, had political consequences for the church and its place in French society. By following the story of the Histoire, we see how Catholics in France wrestled with questions about how and whether the church could profitably adapt to the cultural norms of the modern era. Using the Histoire as its guide, this book advances two main arguments. First, it argues that Jesuit attempts to build bridges between the Enlightenment and the Catholic faith in the early to mid-eighteenth century produced conflict in the Roman Catholic Church and both preserved and exacerbated divisions that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Berruyer’s Histoire sparked quarrels first within the Society of Jesus, then between the Jesuits and other competing groups in the church, and finally between the church and the French state. This argument flips the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment – presented by the likes of Peter Gay, Paul Hazard, and others – on its head by suggesting that the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it did with external assaults by radical, anti-clerical

6

Berruyer’s BiBle

philosophes.9 It builds upon work by Alan Kors, Anton Matytsin, and others who have suggested that debates among Catholic apologists helped create the very intellectual categories that would be turned against the church in later decades.10 Second, this book argues that Jesuit involvement in the Catholic Enlightenment contributed to the creation of an ultramontane Catholicism that became increasingly popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Histoire reveals that the Catholic Enlightenment’s impact on the church did not fade away in the late eighteenth century or even with the French Revolution. Enlightenment Catholicism shaped Catholic identity and politics into the period of the 1830s and beyond.

Isaac-Joseph Berruyer and the Histoire du peuple de Dieu Berruyer’s career as a Jesuit and his talents as a writer explain why he undertook the project of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Born in Rouen on 7 November 1681 to an aristocratic family, Berruyer’s earliest years are largely unknown. As a child he attended a local Jesuit college in his hometown before his parents moved him to Paris where he entered the Collège Louis-le-Grand, the most prestigious Jesuit educational institution in the kingdom.11 He was clearly an exemplary student. Berruyer served for two years as an overseer, charged with making sure that his classmates were not falling behind in their studies. The leaders of the college quickly recognized his academic talents and began grooming him for a scholarly career in the Society of Jesus. Introduced into the Jesuit novitiate just before his sixteenth birthday, he was ordained in 1706, proceeded to his tertianship – a preparatory time before taking solemn vows – in 1710, and then finally became a professed member of the society on 2 February 1715 at the age of thirty-three, the earliest possible age to become a full-fledged Jesuit. Berruyer found himself connected to the world of the Society of Jesus from an early age and hastened down the path of Jesuit formation and professional life.12 Although many who entered the priesthood in eighteenth-century Europe did so for the social and economic benefits, Berruyer’s choice to enter the Society of Jesus reflected deep religious convictions. The Jesuit order demanded much of its members. Training to become

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a Jesuit was a long and arduous process, and while Jesuits often gained access to domains of power and prestige, theirs was a fairly simple life. Throughout his time as a Jesuit, Berruyer maintained an active devotional life. Letters to a variety of lay women and men testify to Berruyer’s commitment to prayer and other devotional practices.13 As the head of the Séminaire Joyeuse, where he served from 1719 to 1724, he encouraged clerical training for students from diverse backgrounds and advocated on their behalf by petitioning the president of the treasury of France for financial support.14 While writing his Histoire at a professed house in Lyon, one of his Jesuit colleagues judged that Berruyer had a sincere and “tender piety” beyond that of most scholars.15 Berruyer was a gifted intellectual, but he also remained a person of faith. His experiments with Enlightenment philosophy had little to do with a self-conscious desire to push back against the faith that he held dear. Rather, those intellectual forays grew out of his commitments to Catholicism. Berruyer’s career was defined by his writing. According to the assessments of his superiors and the assignments that he received, he was considered to be one of the best authors in the French Society of Jesus. As a student at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, he was granted on two separate occasions the opportunity to present his poetry before visiting dignitaries, an honour that, according to historian John McManners, the Jesuits reserved only for their “most able” students.16 His poems were published and included in volumes commemorating members of the French royal family.17 Berruyer received a major preaching assignment in 1714 before he was a professed member of the society.18 Most Jesuits served as preachers only after they were fully professed. His superiors’ choice to place him in such a public role reflected their high opinion of Berruyer’s ability to communicate. Upon concluding his year as a preacher, his superiors described him as capable of performing “all ministries of the Society,” but they reserved their most glowing assessments for his proficiency in the field of “letters.” In his triennial review, they awarded him the distinction of “magnus” – the highest possible rating – in humanistic studies and literature.19 After he was professed, Berruyer’s superiors immediately assigned him to the role of scriptor librorum, or full-time author for the society, one of only a dozen or so in Paris at that time.20 Berruyer spent thirty-six of his forty-three years as a professed Jesuit serving as a scriptor. For much of that time, he lived and worked at the professed house in Paris, the

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pre-eminent Jesuit residence in the kingdom, alongside the provincial superior of France, the financial agents in charge of the various Jesuit provinces and overseas missions, the king’s confessor, preachers at the court at Versailles, and the most famous Jesuit authors in Europe.21 The opportunity to undertake the Histoire came from Berruyer’s superiors’ recognition of his talents and their desire to use those talents to fulfill the mission of the society. Though he worked on numerous projects throughout his career, the Histoire du peuple de Dieu was undoubtedly Berruyer’s magnum opus. It took him thirty years to publish in its entirety. Berruyer organized the work into three separate parts: the first, which paraphrased the books of the Old Testament; the second, which told the story of the Gospels and the Book of Acts; and the third, which presented a more direct translation of the Pauline Epistles. For a variety of reasons that will be expounded upon later, each part received a different publication date. The first appeared in 1728; the second emerged decades later in 1753; and the final went to print in 1757, the year before Berruyer died.22 It was his life’s labour. Though technically a paraphrase, and a very loose one at that, the Histoire was Berruyer’s attempt to translate the Bible into contemporary language and make it relevant for and appealing to contemporary Catholics. Biblical translations in early modern France were by no means unusual even within the context of the Catholic Church. Bettye Thomas Chambers has identified abridged Bibles and New Testaments in the vernacular as early as the 1470s, and new editions only increased as time went on.23 The Louvain Bible, which became the most popular Catholic version of the Bible in France, appeared in the mid-sixteenth century. By the end of the seventeenth century more followed, including the Port-Royal Bible directed by Isaac-Lemaistre de Sacy and even a translation spearheaded by members of Berruyer’s own Society of Jesus.24 There were, in other words, no lack of vernacular Bibles in France when Berruyer began his Histoire. His decision to create a paraphrase of the scriptures was not in itself particularly novel. It was the way that Berruyer produced his Bible that caught the attention of his contemporaries. Berruyer’s Histoire was exceptional because it was an “Enlightenment Bible” composed in Catholic France. Jonathan Sheehan has described the phenomenon of the Enlightenment Bible as the ambitious

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product of translators, philologists, poets, and others who took the skeptical and rational critiques of philosophes and early biblical critics seriously and transformed the scriptures in novel ways. Reacting to the likes of Richard Simon, Baruch Spinoza, and Thomas Hobbes, purveyors of the Enlightenment Bible sought out strategies to preserve the relevance of the Bible for contemporary Europeans by re-making it into a textbook for ancient philology, a guidebook for ethical pedagogy, a piece of inspiring poetry, and an account of the histories of past civilizations. None of the translators that used the new scholarly techniques of the eighteenth century to do this work intended to move the Bible away from its traditional role in transmitting “the word of God.” Nevertheless, as Sheehan argues, the cumulative effect of their work shifted the value of the Bible away from its theological function to the domain of human culture.25 Berruyer did not feature in Sheehan’s study of the inventors of the Enlightenment Bible mainly because he spent his entire career in France. In Sheehan’s view, “Catholic France … had little interest in rehabilitating the biblical text.”26 While the level of scholarly activity that Sheehan documents in England and the German-speaking lands certainly has no parallel in eighteenth-century France, Berruyer was the exception that proved the rule. In much the same way as Protestant poets, pedagogues, and historians elsewhere in Europe, Berruyer used the philosophical and scholarly tools at his disposal to re-invent the biblical text. His Histoire presented the biblical narrative in a completely original way and did so by leaning on the power of sentimental language and emphasizing the human elements of the stories and their authors. The values and ideals that his new Bible espoused – particularly those that foregrounded the autonomy of the human from the realm of the divine – similarly pushed the Bible away from its traditional theological place as a receptacle for the “word of God” and contributed to the larger process of disenchantment associated with the Enlightenment.27

The Enlightenment To suggest that the Jesuit Berruyer and his paraphrase of the Bible had something to do with the Enlightenment is to wade into the turbulent waters of scholarly debate over the nature of the Enlightenment itself.

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While the singular intention of my book is not to add yet another voice to the conversation on how to define the Enlightenment, the story of Berruyer’s Histoire provides some insight into the ways that religious actors attempted to participate in Enlightenment debates and the effects that this participation had on the Catholic Church. The following study contributes to the larger revisionist movement that has reimagined the Enlightenment as far more open to religious ideas and thinkers than previously recognized. It reveals that even members of the French Society of Jesus – despite their reputation among many historians as the chief enemies of the philosophes – found the new intellectual sensibilities of the eighteenth century attractive and integrated them into their articulations of the Catholic faith. The tale of Berruyer’s Histoire shows that Jesuit efforts to accommodate the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment captivated many and impacted the development of the church over the long eighteenth century.28 Since the early decades of the twentieth century, historians have traditionally associated the Enlightenment with the collective departure of mostly Western societies away from the religious and toward the secular. Ernst Cassirer located the core of the Enlightenment in the advent of a modern philosophy that broke away from the worldviews of medieval theologians and replaced them with the study of the “fundamental form of reality” through the scientific interrogation of nature.29 Tying together the work of philosophes throughout the Atlantic world, Peter Gay posited that the Enlightenment was an intellectual program that promoted, most importantly, “secularism.”30 This vision of the Enlightenment continues to undergird opinions today. “It is undeniably true,” Anthony Pagden has recently claimed, “that the Enlightenment was profoundly anti-religious.”31 From the vantage point of Cassirer, Gay, and others, the Enlightenment was a unified intellectual movement whose proponents, the philosophes, advocated for a break from religious worldviews, the promotion of reason over tradition, and an empirical mindset that privileged the natural over the supernatural. While historians like Cassirer and Gay argued for the inherent secularity of the Enlightenment, a counter-current of scholars drew attention to the ways that religious and Enlightenment mentalities were not so far apart. Already in the 1930s, Carl Becker had provocatively claimed that “the philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages [and were] less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought

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than they quite realized.”32 Becker’s student, Robert Palmer, expanded this argument by showing that the writings of Catholic apologists had much in common with the writings of many of the very same philosophes that Cassirer and others held as the harbingers of European secularism.33 Over the past four decades, historians have continued to show how the philosophes were more receptive to religious ideas and mentalities than previously imagined. The admission that religious ideas played a role in shaping the Enlightenment has contributed to the fragmentation of what was once a unified, singular Enlightenment into many, various “enlightenments” each with its own distinct ideological characteristics. By drawing attention to these various styles of Enlightenment, historians have emphasized the place that religious ideas held in the intellectual culture of the eighteenth century.34 Many eighteenth-century Catholics also found faith and reason compatible. In his schema of the “Religious Enlightenment” – a trans-national and trans-confessional movement in which people of faith sought both the affirmation of traditional theological doctrines and the pursuit of “reasonableness,” toleration, and an engagement with the public sphere – David Sorkin included, for example, the French Catholic priest Adrien Lamourette who promoted, in Sorkin’s words, “a theology that combined reasonable religion and Rousseauist sentimentalism on the basis of a moderate fideist skepticism.”35 Jeffrey Burson, Ulrich Lehner, and others have found similarly inclined Catholics all over Europe from Spain to Poland.36 In a recent synthesis, Lehner identified “Catholic Enlighteners” as philosophers, theologians, and authors that were committed to using “the newest achievements of philosophy and science to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining them in a new language.”37 Like the philosophes, Enlightenment Catholics, according to Lehner, sought to reform both church and state. Thanks in large part to this recent scholarship, the “Catholic Enlightenment” has become entrenched as one of the many distinct varieties of the Enlightenment throughout the eighteenthcentury globe.38 In the same way that historians have broken the Enlightenment into many geographical and ideological styles, however, recent work on the Catholic Enlightenment has uncovered variations in the ways that eighteenth-century Catholics sought to integrate new philosophical ideas into their understandings of the Catholic faith. In

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German and Italian-speaking lands, Enlightenment Catholics tended to be connected to Jansenism, a neo-Augustinian theological reform movement that arose in the seventeenth century.39 In other parts of Catholic Europe, the Catholic Enlightenment looked different. In France, those Catholics who seemed to have been most open to the philosophes’ perspectives on the freedom of the individual, the possibility of progress, and the value of empirical and scientific investigation were, in fact, the Jansenists’ principal rivals, the Jesuits.40 Because of the diversity within the Catholic Enlightenment, some have preferred to use more specific terminology. Dale Van Kley has offered up the notion of “Reform Catholicism” to identify Catholics whose chief concerns were to use Enlightenment ideas to reform the church, mainly along Jansenist or Gallican lines. Reform Catholicism, in Van Kley’s description, stood apart from Jesuit styles of Catholic Enlightenment and worked toward different ends.41 In his synthesis of the Catholic Enlightenment, Lehner has affirmed the diversity of approaches and perspectives of those who attempted to reconcile Catholic faith with Enlightenment reason. For Lehner, the Catholic Enlightenment was essentially “an eclectic enterprise” even if certain features – including a commitment to writing in the vernacular and pursuing reform and/ or progress – were shared.42 Through an investigation of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer and his Histoire du peuple de Dieu, I make four important contributions to the scholarship on Enlightenment Catholicism. First, I introduce an important but overlooked figure into the conversation about the Catholic Enlightenment. Few studies of the Catholic Enlightenment have paid much attention to Berruyer.43 What follows is the first book-length study of Berruyer in English. For a Catholic author so conspicuously linked by contemporaries to the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century, Berruyer is long overdue for a thorough investigation that connects him to the intellectual world in which he lived.44 In what follows, I bring his story to life and explain why it is important for understanding the Catholic Enlightenment and its impact on the church in France. Second, I adopt the methodological strategies of the history of the book to reveal the ways that Enlightenment Catholicism permeated the public sphere. Historians of the book have long argued that the only way to study the impact of ideas on past societies is to study the entire “communications circuit,” from the authors themselves to

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publishers, distributers, and consumers.45 In my analysis of Berruyer and his Bible, I consider the Histoire not simply as a receptacle of ideas but as a material object used and abused by a wide range of figures for their own political, economic, and theological purposes. I offer a unique look at the publishers that were responsible for producing Catholic Enlightenment texts, the mechanisms of privilege and censorship through which these texts proceeded, the political authorities charged with monitoring these texts, and even the communities of readers that bought and circulated them. To do so, I had to consult new types of sources. Through analyses of letters, administrative records, court documents, library and bookseller catalogues, and many other archival materials, I shed light on the many eighteenth-century figures that played a role in making the Histoire what it was. In much the same way as Jeffrey Burson, who has recently argued for the “entangled” nature of epistemological systems in the writings of many eighteenthcentury philosophers, I use the Histoire’s communication circuit to reveal that Enlightenment reading habits were entangled and overlapping.46 Religious readers were also readers of works of the Enlightenment, and sometimes their tastes demanded books that combined the two.47 My study of the Histoire offers a unique look at the “reception” side of the Catholic Enlightenment’s communication circuit. Third, in focusing on how the Histoire reached the public sphere, I explore the political impact that Enlightenment Catholicism had on the French Catholic Church. The tumultuous story of the Histoire provides a look at the ways that the church attempted to navigate the domain of public opinion in a moment when a notion of the “public” was rapidly expanding. Eighteenth-century Europe saw a dramatic rise in literacy, the establishment of newspapers, and the growth of institutions for debate such as coffee houses, salons, and Masonic lodges. Together these innovations drew an increasing number of people into shared conversations about politics and culture.48 The conflict over the Histoire reveals how Jesuit intellectual activity fanned the flames of public debate. The Histoire’s proponents and critics attempted to shape public opinion as a way of gaining support for their intellectual and political agendas. Eventually their competition over public opinion influenced such significant political events as the suppression of the Jesuits and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the French Revolution.

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Finally, in tracing the Histoire into the nineteenth century, I reveal how Enlightenment Catholicism shaped the religious culture of the Catholic Church in the decades following the French Revolution. Most studies of the Catholic Enlightenment stop short of the Revolution, arguing that Catholic experiments with Enlightenment philosophy ceased after the Enlightenment entered a more radical phase in the second half of the century. My study of Berruyer’s Histoire highlights how despite the decline in innovative intellectual activity, the works of the Catholic Enlightenment remained valuable to post-revolutionary Catholics looking for ways to articulate and substantiate their faith in a new era. Ultramontane Catholics in the nineteenth century appropriated elements of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism and employed them in new intellectual and political directions. Berruyer’s story illustrates how, despite the incomparably disruptive events of the French Revolution, certain continuities remained in the religious cultures of the pre- and post-revolutionary worlds.

Organization My argument proceeds chronologically beginning with an overview of the scholarly environment that Berruyer entered when he first became a scriptor. Chapter 1 focuses on the Jesuits in France and explains why they were interested in adopting new epistemologies and engaging in the burgeoning public sphere at the turn of the eighteenth century. I argue that the Jesuits were inclined to participate in Enlightenment debates because of their identities as missionary-scholars, the competition they had with their chief ecclesiastical rivals, the Jansenists, in France, and the growing fear of the spread of “unbelief.” Chapter 1 concludes with an introduction to the Histoire and the ways in which Berruyer himself described his Bible as part of this larger Jesuit effort to accommodate the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century. In explaining the reasons for Jesuit engagement with the Enlightenment, the opening chapter provides the larger political and social context for rest of the book. Chapter 2 jumps to the 1720s, ’30s, and ’40s and looks at the production and publication of the first section of the Histoire. I argue that even before the project was complete, the Histoire produced conflict in the church. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the conflict was

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situated mainly within the Society of Jesus itself. Many Jesuits worried that the Histoire represented rampant and reckless theological “innovation” and a willingness to shirk traditional intellectual authorities to advance opinions that were entirely “new.” Berruyer’s connections with a previously controversial Jesuit author, Jean Hardouin, made many within the Society of Jesus worry that the writings of their own scriptores were weakening the theological bulwarks of the church. Their concerns eventually made their way into the public sphere. While many readers throughout France enthusiastically embraced the Histoire, a debate about whether it was indeed fulfilling its apologetic purpose emerged and provided ammunition for the Jesuits’ detractors to use the Histoire for their own polemical purposes. In chapter 3, the story moves to the 1750s, the Enlightenment’s “high noon.”49 The 1750s saw the Histoire both reach new heights in notoriety and unleash unprecedented levels of resistance. In 1753, Berruyer released the second part of his Histoire, inarguably the most controversial section of the work. Applying his enlightened perspectives to the task of interpreting the life and person of Jesus, Berruyer raised the theological stakes of his project and sparked an intense debate, referred to by contemporaries as the “Berruyer Affair.” The debate featured many members of the French Jansenist community who saw in Berruyer a perfect target for unreserved criticism. By the 1750s, French Jansenists were already well-acquainted with the power of public opinion and public controversy to fuel their cause. The Histoire allowed Jansenists the opportunity to voice their concerns about the “dangers” of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism and smear the reputation of the Jesuits before the public eye. Unwilling to endure these attacks silently, Berruyer and his colleagues penned their own responses and thus turned the Berruyer Affair into one of the most notable literary causes célèbres of the mid-century. The affair became one of the first of what would be a series of literary scandals all involving works of the Catholic Enlightenment that drove a wedge between those who supported efforts to accommodate Catholic theology with Enlightenment philosophy and those who did not.50 The Jansenist-inspired Berruyer Affair placed the Histoire and its style of Enlightenment Catholicism before the public tribunal and helped make the debate over the Catholic Enlightenment a fight for control over public opinion.

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Chapter 4 details the role that church and state authorities played in defining the legacy of the Histoire in the 1750s. Because the Berruyer Affair became so contentious and because the French monarchy found any sort of public controversy to be fundamentally destabilizing, agents of the Direction de la librairie, the royal bureaucracy assigned with managing the world of print, quickly moved to censor the Histoire and shut down public discussion. Royal agents seized copies of the Histoire from booksellers and religious establishments. Soon the courts got involved and condemned the Histoire to be burned. Church officials added their own denunciations. By the end of the 1750s, the highest authorities in both the Catholic Church and the French state had condemned the book and prohibited people from reading it. Censorship politicized the Histoire, associating its style of Enlightenment Catholicism with social chaos and political subversion. Jansenists recognized the value of this politicization and utilized it for their own purposes in the following decade. Chapter 5 shows how Jansenists used the Histoire to build up a case against the Jesuits as a whole and persuade the parlements to suppress the society in France. Jansenists wielded the Histoire as a political weapon. They held the society responsible for the production and distribution of Berruyer’s condemned works and used the Histoire to accuse the Jesuits of weakening Catholic morality and destabilizing political society. They displayed the political power of public opinion by using a literary affair to drive out one of the wealthiest and most entrenched religious organizations in the entire kingdom. The suppression provides the climax of the Histoire’s story, but it was not the story’s end. Chapter 6 advances the narrative to the early nineteenth century and shows how Berruyer’s Histoire, condemned by all and sundry at the time of the suppression of the Jesuits, made a comeback in large part because of the French Revolution. Searching for tools to “re-Christianize” a French society that they believed had fallen into moral turpitude during the revolution, post-revolutionary Catholics turned to religious books that had once commanded significant attention. Catholic publishers in Paris and other French cities, most especially the eastern city of Besançon, identified Berruyer’s Histoire as a potentially useful book for this endeavour and began printing new editions initially in the form of small, cheap pamphlets designed to reach working-class families and eventually in full editions aimed

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at a new generation of seminarians. Those most responsible for the reproduction of the Histoire were ultramontane Catholics who saw in the Histoire not only a book that had once commanded the attention of a host of readers but also a book that had the potential to communicate the particular theological and political message that they felt was most important for post-revolutionary Catholics. In the Jesuit Berruyer, they identified a sympathy for the ultramontanist argument for papal supremacy in the church. They also appreciated in the Histoire the value of sentimentalism and the way that it placed questions of religious truth on the foundation of human emotions. When the Histoire began to appear in the public marketplace, however, old tensions reemerged, and the battles that had dominated debates about Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism a half-century before erupted anew. Yet again, the Histoire fomented political divisions in a church that had already suffered the sting of schism during the turbulent years of the Revolution. Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu concisely demonstrates the myriad ways that experiments in Enlightenment Catholicism transformed the French Catholic Church in the eighteenth century and beyond. It is only one story. There are undoubtedly many more that detail different aspects of the Catholic Enlightenment in France. But by focusing on one story and one book, we can trace change over a long period of time. Berruyer’s Histoire connects the religious and political worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It reveals how the Catholic Church in France experienced the rise of the public sphere and the many intellectual and cultural transformations that the Enlightenment ushered in throughout Europe. While a story about how the Enlightenment affected the Catholic Church, Berruyer’s Bible is also a tale of how many members of the church adapted to a world where conflicts became magnified under the public eye. It is a case study in the ways that French Catholics negotiated “modernity” and the impact of their decisions sometimes to embrace and sometimes to reject intellectual and cultural norms for the greater purpose of preserving and protecting the faith. It is a story of how Catholics experienced the beginnings of the modern world and explored new possibilities for relating to it.

1

French Jesuits and the Enlightenment Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”1 “Let us make man in our image and in our likeness,” says the Lord. It’s as if he had said: The preparations have been made: It’s time to draw out from nothing that for which we have undertaken everything over the past six days, in creation and the material world. Let us form man on the earth so that he will take our place … Let’s give him a soul that is spiritual, reasonable, immortal, blessed with supernatural gifts, sanctifying habits, instilled with divine virtues. Let us give him, for his actions and deliberations, a liberty which will render him glorious to us when, with our help which he will never lack, he chooses to conform his resolutions to our orders.2

In March 1701, Jesuits from the Province of France published the first volume of the Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences & des beaux-arts, otherwise known as the Journal de Trévoux. This journal marked a dramatic turn for the scriptores librorum, the professional writers of the Society of Jesus. Prior to the eighteenth century, most Parisian scriptores had served as “controversialists,” writing polemical books designed to attack the Jesuits’ enemies, first Protestants and then French Jansenists. With the Journal de Trévoux, however, things began to change. The Jesuit scriptores shifted their focus from polemic to erudition, from religious quarrels to Enlightenment.3 The shift was made clear, in part, by the personnel assigned to the new project. While some of the “old guard” of Jesuit controversialists were placed on the editorial board of the new journal, most of the staff responsible for its production were scholars with no prior experience in polemical writing. Claude Buffier, François Catrou, and Etienne Souciet were specialists in a variety of academic fields from philosophy to ancient history. Jean Hardouin researched and wrote on numismatics. The most significant appointment, however, was that of René-Joseph Tournemine who became the Journal de Trévoux’s first chief editor. Not yet forty years old when the first issue came to print, Tournemine was

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1.1 Map of the Jesuit provinces of France. In the eighteenth century, the Society of Jesus had five separate jurisdictional provinces within the kingdom of France. The Province of France was merely one of five, but because it was headquartered in Paris and included Versailles, it had more cultural and political influence than any of the others.

already seen as a talented intellectual. He had no history as a polemicist; indeed, he objected to much of the society’s polemical activity, going so far as to denounce the controversialist writings of his own colleagues as “libels suitable only for troubling the state.”4 That the society’s leaders chose Tournemine to head up the Journal de Trévoux, and not one of the older, more experienced writers already residing in Paris, spoke to the intentionality in the journal’s break from the society’s past.5 The preface to the Journal de Trévoux’s first issue clearly announced the scholarly intentions of its editors. The editors proposed to publish in the spirit of “neutrality” and scientific objectivity. Though Jesuits, they claimed to be of no particular “party” and interested only in the

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“simple exposition of what will be written.” “We will put anything in our work,” they wrote, “if we find that it merits it.” Only in matters of religion and politics did they claim to forgo this openness. They were, after all, ordained clergy in the Catholic Church and obedient subjects of the French king. The journal would include reviews of the latest scientific and philosophical works, original essays on subjects from history and literature to physics and mathematics, and news of appointments in academies and universities.6 In brief, the Journal de Trévoux chronicled, in the words of author and critic Denis-François Camusat, “everything that regularly happens in the Republic of Letters.”7 In publishing the Journal de Trévoux, the Jesuits sought to balance their roles as ministers of the Catholic faith with their desire for the advancement of learning.8 The Jesuits had long been engaged in scholarship and education, but the Journal de Trévoux signalled a new direction for this type of ministry. As scholars, the Jesuits had participated actively in the Republic of Letters, communicating and sharing new knowledge with Europe’s intellectual elites. As educators, they taught a great many students in their various colleges and seminaries. According to its editors, however, the Journal de Trévoux was designed for “the public.”9 They saw the journal as a way of connecting the Republic of Letters to a broader audience, taking the latest intellectual discoveries and making them accessible, concise, useful, and affordable. They did so quite successfully. According to Jeffrey Burson, the Journal de Trévoux was “among the most widely read serials in France” during the first half of the eighteenth century.10 Through the efforts of a few generations of Jesuit scholars, it became one of the most broadly recognized scholarly institutions of the early eighteenth century in France. The Journal de Trévoux signalled the French Jesuits’ active participation in the Enlightenment. A scholarly periodical along the lines of the Journal des sçavans – indeed, the Journal de Trévoux and the Journal des sçavans were the only two journals in France to have a long-lasting presence in the first half of the eighteenth century – it participated in the larger effort of connecting the public to important intellectual debates.11 Its editors shared and sometimes even promoted many of the epistemological and scientific ideas of Europe’s philosophes. Buffier and Tournemine were among the first in France to promote John Locke’s pivotal Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and the journal touted the merits of vaccinations before even the notable philosophe Voltaire.12

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The Journal de Trévoux represented the kind of middle ground that many Catholics throughout Europe, and increasingly throughout the globe, sought to find between the burgeoning Enlightenment and Catholic tradition. What motivated the Jesuits of the Province of France to adopt this new form of scholarship and public engagement, and how did this impact Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s decision to write the Histoire du peuple de Dieu? In this chapter, I argue that French Jesuits’ choice to pursue projects like the Journal de Trévoux and the Histoire arose out of the traditions of the Society of Jesus itself and the intellectual, political, and theological contexts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Central to the mission of the Society of Jesus were commitments both to evangelization and education. Jesuits had long seen themselves as missionary-scholars whose methods of advancing the Catholic faith included accommodating different cultural sensibilities. Jesuit theologians, moreover, had promoted ideas that shared distinct similarities with the empirical worldviews of many early eighteenth-century philosophes. These intellectual practices laid the foundation for Jesuit contributions to the Enlightenment in the early eighteenth century. The scriptores of the French Society of Jesus also shifted from polemics to erudition because of the changing nature of the political conflict that they had with Jansenists in France. The early eighteenth century saw a brief détente between the Jesuits and Jansenists. That détente opened up the opportunity for Jesuit writers to try something other than controversialist pieces. At the same time, a growing fear of the spread of atheism, Deism, and radical skepticism – packaged together by many Jesuits under the term “unbelief ” – shifted the crosshairs of the society’s weapons away from their ecclesiastical rivals and toward “free thinkers” whose writings attacked the church as a whole. Finally, the Jesuits identified the expanding public sphere as an opportunity to advance their own ideological perspectives over and against competing visions from both inside and outside of the church. Engagement with the literate public allowed the Jesuits to “missionize” European societies by different means. Moving away from the “vinegar” of polemical attacks, they saw the opportunity to win the religiously apathetic back to the Catholic Church by way of the “honey” of widely accessible and attractive literary works. Like the Journal de Trévoux, Berruyer’s Histoire emerged out of these important conditions and contexts.

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Missionaries, Scholars, Educators Out of the Jesuits’ vocational identity came the impetus for their involvement in the early Enlightenment. As missionaries, their openness to “accommodating” aspects of non-European cultures with their understanding of the Catholic faith provided a tool for them to do the same with the culture of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Europe. Their missionary experiences in Asia, moreover, convinced them of the need to study the “new” science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As scholars, the Jesuits understood the importance of contributing new perspectives through the publication of books. Perhaps their greatest achievements were in the world of theology where Jesuit theologians extended the parameters of Catholic Scholasticism further than it had gone before. Jesuit theologians promoted a vision of the human’s ability to go through life in a morally upstanding way, a vision that put them in line with the Enlightenment’s general rehabilitation of humanity. Finally, as educators, the Jesuits understood and advanced the project of improving society through the dissemination of knowledge. In brief, their very identity as members of the Society of Jesus set up French Jesuits to take part in the Enlightenment. From its inception, the Society of Jesus was committed to the missionary project. According to the papal bull Exposcit debitum – which, along with another papal decree promulgated ten years earlier, officially founded the Society of Jesus – the purpose of the Jesuits was to “strive … for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine.”13 The much-discussed “fourth vow” of the Jesuits affirmed, in addition to the obligation of absolute obedience to the pope, that members must be willing “to go without subterfuge or excuse … to whatsoever provinces [the papacy] may choose to send us.”14 The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus further explicated what this missionary focus meant. The “vocation” of the Jesuit was “to travel through the world and to live in any part of it whatsoever where there is hope of greater service to God and of help of souls.”15 The Jesuit’s call to both defend and spread the Catholic faith appears consistently in the society’s early writings. Francis Xavier was the first Jesuit to heed this call and leave Europe. A few decades after its inception, the society was consistently sending members abroad to locations as diverse as the Americas and Asia.16

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The Jesuits’ experiences as missionaries gave them tools for engaging in the Enlightenment. In their very first missions to China in the sixteenth century, Jesuit missionaries began to develop techniques to effectively reach the populations they were attempting to evangelize. Among the main features of Jesuit missionary activity was the practice of accommodation, an adaptation to local cultures and an appropriation of local ideas into missionaries’ articulations of Christianity. Although not all Jesuits condoned accommodation – individual missionaries in China, Ethiopia, and elsewhere, for example, rejected attempts to tolerate certain elements of local, civic behaviour – on the whole accommodation was widely accepted among Jesuit missionaries. In Madurai, for example, Roberto de Nobili targeted the elite community of Brahmin by taking on the dress of a sannyāsi, becoming a vegetarian, and learning to speak Tamil.17 Matteo Ricci famously dressed as a member of the Confucian literati, and later missionaries to the Ming and Qing Empires advocated for tolerating elements of Confucian culture, including the veneration of ancestors, which, according to these Jesuits, was a part of Chinese “civic” and not religious identity and thus was compatible with Christianity. French Jesuits became some of the most vocal supporters of accommodation and promoted the practice even in the midst of controversies in the church over it. The French Jesuit Louis Le Comte published a defence of his missionary confrères in 1696 in which he maintained that accommodation made sense because it picked up on elements of the Christian religion that made their way to China long ago. Accommodation was simply a strategic means by which missionaries could make sustainable connections with the people that they were trying to reach.18 Eventually, many in the Jesuit Province of France began to promote the usefulness of accommodation within Europe. As Tournemine explained: “it is in making oneself all [things] to all [people] that one finds … that to which grace has attached the salvation of all.”19 In the typically Eurocentric words of Le Comte, it was equally necessary for missionaries to be “austere to excess among the penitents of the Indies, decently dressed in China, and … polite with peoples of intelligence … in Europe.”20 In the eighteenth century, the practice of accommodation led Jesuits to adopt the language of European scholars, participate in their institutions, read and become familiar with the newest works of erudition, and search for ways to produce equally valuable work.

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Accommodation gave the Jesuits a way of having their Enlightenment and their Catholicism too. Jesuit missionary culture also provided French Jesuits with an appreciation for the value of scientific knowledge. Science had proven to be an effective means of winning East Asian converts to Christianity. Ricci first attracted members of the Chinese literati to his home in part by way of the talks he gave on European mathematics and scientific theories. When word spread that Ricci had evangelized “through the door of Mathematics,” more and more Jesuits began to engage in the world of European science. Soon Jesuit scientists were contributing to the continent’s most important debates – everything from algebra to astronomy. This led some European Jesuits to take surprisingly progressive stances on scientific matters, including Jesuits who taught and defended the cosmological models of Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe despite the antagonistic position that the larger institutions of the Roman Catholic Church had taken against them. Eventually, French Jesuit astronomers won sponsorship by the crown for astronomical missions in India and elsewhere. Thanks to the role that science played in the missions, Jesuits became highly acquainted with the world of European science, and some were among the “new” science’s chief promoters.21 The Jesuits’ willingness to engage with European and Asian scientific writings also came from a second major piece of the Jesuits’ vocational identity: their role as scholars. The Jesuits’ commitment to writing and publishing scholarly works was slower to develop than other parts of their ministry. In the earliest years of the society, some saw the prospect of publishing as a waste of time. But the society’s founding documents opened up the possibility for members to become authors. Among the many points of direction in the Constitutions was the permission for those with “talent to write books useful for the common good” to publish those books if they were judged by the Jesuit leadership to be “something which will edify.”22 Yet the main impulse for Jesuit scholarship was the demands of their educational institutions. Jesuit scholarly work emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a result of the need for textbooks in Jesuits colleges. Members of the society took up the task to write new works on mathematics, history, and grammar to better serve the students that they were charged with educating.23

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Jesuit scholars made arguably their biggest impact in the world of theology. Jesuit theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pushed the boundaries of the accepted frameworks of Scholasticism in important ways. In 1588, the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina published his famous Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis in which he attempted to reconcile the doctrines of God’s omniscience and human free will. The work made one of the boldest statements about the agency and autonomy of the human in early modern Catholic thought. Molina argued that humanity had not lost its capacity to will or to enact good as a result of the Fall; humans had simply been deprived of the supernatural powers given to Adam and Eve in creation – for example, eternal life – and retained all of their natural capacities including their ability to reason. Humans existed in what he called a state of “pure nature” – or, the hypothetical reality of existing both without grace and without sin – until such time that they proceeded into the state of fallenness through sinful choices or into the state of grace through righteous choices. Humans were free to exercise their wills as they wished, and God’s participation in the causes and effects of the world was relegated to a complementary or concurrent role. Molinist theology advocated for, in the words of Jonathan Wright, a “belief in mankind’s potentiality, the notion that original sin was a terrible burden but not something that corrupted human nature to such an extent that free will … had disappeared entirely.”24 Molinism carved out a tremendous amount of space for humanity to shape the world around it. It provided an entry point to the optimistic perspectives about human nature that characterized much of the Enlightenment.25 The Jesuits’ promotion of probabilism also built bridges to Enlightenment attitudes about practical knowledge. Probabilism was a system of moral theology first articulated by the Spanish canon law scholar Martín de Azpilcueta and the Dominican theologian Bartolomé de Medina but popularized most effectively by two Jesuit theological scholars, Francisco Suárez and Gabriel Vásquez. The two Jesuits published treatises on probabilism while teaching at the Jesuit college in Rome, the Collegio Romano, in the 1580s and 1590s. Probabilism maintained that when faced with a moral decision wherein the right choice was not obviously clear, it was licit to follow any course of action that could be justified within the bounds of Christian morality even if that action were the less “probable” to be the right one. Suárez

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and Vásquez emphasized that most ethical decisions fell into this sort of scenario. Life was complicated, and navigating it in an ethically confident way was impossible. Probabilism allowed confessors to recognize the difficult choices that their parishioners had to make and acknowledge their efforts to follow an appropriate course of action. Though not all Jesuits were probabilists, by the turn of the seventeenth century probabilism had become a central feature of Jesuit casuistry. Like Molinism, probabilism provided Jesuits with an intermediary step toward Enlightenment mentalities in the eighteenth century. As Jeffrey Burson has explained, “if the early eighteenth century was to be an age of practical reason … as well as an age that valorized utilitarian morality, then arguably it was Jesuit probabilism that helped pave the way by popularizing a species of pragmatism within moral theology.”26 Jesuit scholarship, however, was ultimately an extension of the society’s commitment to education. Jesuit colleges began dotting the European landscape in the 1540s. By 1565, they operated some thirty schools in Italy and numerous others elsewhere with enrollments ranging from sixty in Venice to 900 in Coimbra.27 Eventually the society’s Constitutions included an entire section on education, declaring that its first purpose was to provide training for future members but stipulating that a secondary benefit would be to make young men in general “both virtuous and learned in order to labor in the vineyard of Christ our Lord.”28 According to Juan Alfonso de Polanco, Jesuit education of the laity would benefit towns and municipalities because “those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, administrators of justice, and will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage.”29 Two centuries after the society’s inception, 669 Jesuit schools existed worldwide, and of those, the ninety-two that were in France enrolled nearly 40,000 students. The Jesuits’ calling to education gave them a sense of their responsibility to improve society as a whole through the application and dissemination of knowledge.30 That the Jesuit educational program was geared toward improving society as a whole is further evidenced by the intentions expressed by early Jesuits and the ways that Jesuit colleges operated. Although they did not aspire to universal education, early Jesuits intended to make colleges open to any who met basic qualifications. Ignatius Loyola made this clear when he instructed his colleagues in Perugia that the colleges were “for everybody, poor and rich.”31 The Jesuits’ early

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founders offered education free of charge, much to the chagrin of rival institutions that required fees to support their staffs. Detailed studies of Jesuit educational institutions in France by François de Dainville show how this inclusive vision was not simply a pipe dream. Between 1620 and 1625, the college in Aurillac admitted students from a wide range of social backgrounds. Only 4.8 per cent of its students were sons of nobles; comparatively, 14.2 per cent were sons of lawyers and men of letters, 19.5 per cent were sons of merchants, and a shocking 28.8 per cent were sons of peasants. From 1618 to 1736 at the college at Châlons-sur-Marne, students from the Third Estate comprised no less than 80 per cent of the college’s total enrollment.32 The Jesuits had a reputation for being the teachers of Europe’s elite. But, as Dainville has revealed and as early Jesuits confirmed, their educational mission applied much more broadly. Jesuit education intended to shape all of society by instructing children of all social ranks and preparing them for positions of civic and ecclesiastical leadership.33 Their curriculum also fostered the Jesuits’ eventual engagement with the Enlightenment. In 1599, the society formalized their educational approach in the publication of the Ratio atque institutio studiorum societatis iesu (aka the Ratio studiorum). The Ratio studiorum reflected the society’s early commitments to Renaissance humanism. Students began by studying Latin grammar, the humanities, and rhetoric, and then they proceeded to courses on logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and mathematics – all based on classical Roman and Greek texts. Familiarity with the writings of the ancients formed the starting point for most eighteenth-century philosophes’ explorations of politics, philosophy, and society. As Dan Edelstein has shown, the Encyclopédie, arguably the most important single text of the French Enlightenment, cited ancient authors far more often than authors from any other period.34 Unsurprisingly, a number of France’s most famous philosophes – including Voltaire, Helvétius, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and Denis Diderot – were educated in Jesuit colleges.35 Humanism was, in the words of Jeffrey Burson, “the midwife of eighteenth-century culture, and even of the secular Enlightenment,” and the Jesuits were undoubtedly at the centre of it preservation and propagation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.36 When Enlightenment debates emerged over the ideas and writings of ancient authors, it was thanks largely to the education that Jesuits professors had provided.37

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As missionaries, scholars, and educators, the Jesuits’ very vocational identity prepared them for their involvement in the Enlightenment. Although they differed in tone and message from the anti-clerical philosophes that are more often identified with the Enlightenment, the Jesuits shared many of their basic principles and background. They too had a cosmopolitan attitude that led them to learn about and accommodate non-European communities and cultures. They too participated in the world of European scholarship, producing texts that pushed the boundaries of the church’s understanding of humans and their relationships with each other and nature. They too were committed to spreading this knowledge to as many people as possible and in ways that would lead to social improvement. Where the Jesuits differed from the more anti-clerical philosophes, of course, was in their lack of willingness to criticize the church and the political institutions of Europe en route to these ideological goals. These differences fuelled the eventual clashes between the Jesuits and the philosophes and the decision of many Jesuits to take part in Enlightenment debates. The Enlightenment became yet another mission field. They had confidence in their ability to accommodate the sensibilities of the Enlightenment with the traditions of the church just as they had with the cultural norms of the Chinese literati and Indian sannyāsi. “To keep the philosophes Catholic,” wrote Robert Palmer, the Jesuits “turned to philosophy themselves.”38

Defenders of the Faith The decision to target the world of the philosophes and Enlightenment France as a new mission field came out of the circumstances surrounding the Jesuits of the Province of France at the turn of the eighteenth century. As explained above, most of the Parisian scriptores prior to the eighteenth century had spent their time writing polemical works directed at the Jesuits’ ecclesiastical enemies. Although this culture of polemics never truly ended, there was a distinct shift right around the turn of the century that brought about new scholarly projects including the Journal de Trévoux. The shift was the result of a new phase in the conflict between the Jesuits and their Protestant and Jansenist opponents. As the French state under Louis XIV took on a more active role in attacking these groups, the Jesuits were encouraged to invest their

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efforts elsewhere. In so doing, they grew concerned over the effects of some of the more radical ideas circulating among European scholars. By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits found that the target of their writings had shifted from Protestantism/Jansenism to “unbelief.” French Jesuits began searching for ways to deal with this new threat. The effort to respond to “unbelief ” launched the Enlightenment projects of many in the Society of Jesus including none other than Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. The official introduction of the Jesuits to France had much to do with Protestantism. Henri II introduced the first letters patent recognizing the society in 1554, but the legal status of the Jesuits remained in limbo because the Parlement of Paris refused to register the king’s decree. When Henri II died in 1559, his son, Francis II, attempted to pick up where his father left off. In February 1560, he reaffirmed the decision of his father, but once again the parlement delayed registration of his orders. Fearing that the Jesuits’ presence in the kingdom would lead to unwelcome influence of the papacy in French matters of state, the parlement postponed all attempts to recognize the Society of Jesus until the queen mother and regent of France, Catherine de Medici, brought the issue to the colloquy that she had arranged in Poissy between notable members of the Catholic Church and a collection of prominent Huguenots in 1561. The prospect of a French Protestant Church legitimized by the monarchy raised enough concern that, a few months after the conclusion of the colloquy, the parlement finally agreed to accept the Jesuits’ presence in France. On the eve of what would turn into a decades-long religious war between Catholics and Protestants, the Jesuits represented a bulwark against the Huguenots that even the fiercely Gallican Parlement of Paris saw as worthwhile. The Jesuits owed their official acceptance in France to the monarchy and the value it and other institutions placed on the Society of Jesus to defend the Catholic Church from the expansion of Protestantism.39 It comes as no surprise, then, that much of the early French Jesuits’ literary activity focused on lauding the monarchy and combatting Protestantism. This was particularly true following their brief expulsion from the kingdom in the wake of the failed assassination attempt on Henri IV in December 1594. When the first Bourbon king allowed the Jesuits back into France seven years later, they worked to forge a strong connection with the royal family. Under Henri IV – the progenitor of the Edict of Nantes, which granted a measure of religious toleration for

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Huguenots in France – it meant serving as educators and as the royal confessor. When Henri IV died in 1610, however, the new regime led by Henri’s widow, Marie de Medici, re-introduced Protestant polemics back into the purview of French Jesuit writers. Pierre Coton’s Institution catholique, published in 1610, highlighted the double-edged sword of Jesuit polemics wherein a work that was dedicated to the queen regent took as its primary purpose to respond to the famous Institutes of Jean Calvin. Tasked in their founding documents with the “defense … of the faith,” early French Jesuits understood that part of their mission was to challenge what they deemed to be heresy in ways that their allies in the court could not. For the more zealously Catholic regent, the Jesuits once again became a useful ally in the fight to mitigate the spread of Protestantism in France.40 In the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Jesuit’s primary target shifted from Protestants to a group within the Catholic Church itself, French Jansenists. Jansenism began as a “grassroots” effort for ecclesiastical reform. Not a regular order or even a self-identifying movement – indeed, the very label “Jansenists,” like “Puritans,” was a derogatory one placed on them by their enemies – Jansenists were a collection of both clergy and lay persons whose main agenda was to bring about an Augustinian-inspired reform of Catholic piety and practice. Cornelius Jansen, the one-time bishop of Ypres and namesake of the movement, hailed from the Low Countries, but Jansenism found its broadest base of support in France. At the centre of Jansenist activity in the kingdom was the community of nuns at the abbey of Port-Royal outside of Paris, an abbey led in the first half of the seventeenth century by Angélique Arnauld. Over time, Jansenism’s influence spread to much of the lower clergy particularly in and around Paris, the Parisian bourgeoisie, and even some aristocrats. Though they came in many varieties, Jansenists shared a commitment to a certain theological disposition. The theology of Jansenism began with an exceedingly low opinion of the status and capacity of human beings. So devastating, according to Jansenists, were the effects of the Fall – the tragic outcome of the original sin of Adam and Eve – that humankind lacked any capacity to do good or behave in a godly way. Indeed, the Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole maintained that the Fall left humans completely bereft of free will. Any good work that a human might do depended entirely on the free gift of “efficacious grace” from God. For the largely Molinist Jesuits,

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Jansenism ran counter to nearly ever theological sensibility that they espoused. Jansenism, in their mind, appeared to be nothing more than Calvinism in Catholic clothing.41 The conflict between the Jesuits and Jansenists began as early as the 1630s when the Jesuits led the charge against a small devotional book published by Angélique Arnauld, accusing it of being an improper “form of mysticism” and a “dangerous quietism.”42 Their attacks against Angélique and her brother Antoine only grew more vituperative after Antoine denounced the Jesuits in a series of publications in the 1640s and a friend of the Arnauld’s, Blaise Pascal, defended Antoine in his Provincial Letters in the 1650s. What followed was a wave of polemical strikes against any number of French Jansenists: from the nuns of PortRoyal to the theologian Pasquier Quesnel and the biblical translator Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy. Jesuit scriptores in Paris vilified Jansenism as “heresy” and a “revolt” in the church. Both sides attempted to debase the other by way of print. The polemical battles fought between Jesuits scriptores and Jansenist apologists prefigured the battles over public opinion that Jansenists and Jesuits would have decades later over a variety of matters including Enlightenment Catholicism and the Histoire du peuple de Dieu.43 Seventeenth-century Jesuits prevailed upon their allies in the court to bring the Jansenist movement to an end. They advocated for French authorities to enforce the initial papal condemnation of Jansen, the bull Cum Occasione, in the kingdom. They persuaded Louis XIV and his ministers to force the Parlement of Paris to register a papal follow up to Cum Occasione – the similarly anti-Jansenist bull, Ad Sacram – and require all clergy in France to sign a “formula” of adherence to it. When the nuns of Port-Royal refused the formula, the Jesuits led a propaganda campaign to discredit them and pushed the monarchy into even more drastic action. In the years that followed, the king banned the convent from receiving new members and then ordered troops to forcibly remove the nuns from the convent, destroy its buildings, dig up the remains of its cemetery, and throw them into a common grave. According to reports, the king’s Jesuit confessor, Michel Le Tellier, had convinced the king that “all physical traces of the convent should be obliterated.”44 Though effectively a theological disagreement, the Jesuit-Jansenist struggle had real-world implications, and Jansenist memories of the actions taken by Jesuit polemicists and their episcopal and royal allies

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lasted well past the seventeenth century. In this moment, the Jesuits’ close alignment with the monarchy made the difference. Louis XIV’s shared disdain for Jansenism prompted him to respond to the Jesuits’ attacks with political force. Over the course of the following decades, however, the balance of power shifted in the opposite direction.45 Paradoxically, this show of force by the Sun King pushed the Jesuit scriptores away from polemics. Louis XIV had taken matters into his own hands and assumed the responsibility for eliminating the Jansenist “heresy” in France. He made it clear in both his actions against the nuns of Port-Royal and, eventually, the efforts he took to bring about the most decisive blow to the Jansenist cause, the papal bull Unigenitus promulgated in 1713. The push against Jesuit polemics, however, began with the king’s appointment of Louis-Antoine Le Maire de Noailles as archbishop of Paris in 1695. Noailles had a reputation as a moderate. Although he denied accusations that he was a supporter of the Jansenists, he regarded the nuns of Port-Royal highly, appreciated certain Jansenist devotional texts, and delayed the inevitable destruction of the Port-Royal convent on a number of occasions. Noailles used his authority as the archbishop of Paris and, eventually, president of the Assembly of the Clergy to tamp down Jesuit controversialist writings. Louis XIV himself then worked to silence Jesuit pens. He personally convinced the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Langlois to stop writing against a Jansenist-leaning edition of the writings of Augustine, and he instructed his chancellor, Louis Phélypeux de Pontchartrain, to stop perhaps the most prominent Jesuit polemicist, Gabriel Daniel, from publishing his anti-Jansenist polemical letters. While Louis XIV’s actions did not stop Jesuit polemicism completely – Le Tellier, undeterred in his hatred for Jansenism, later employed impoverished literary hacks to write illegal pamphlets against the Jesuits’ enemies – it shifted the focus of many scriptores away from polemical work. Without the express support of the French monarchy, Jesuit writers invested their time in engaging other intellectual endeavours.46 In turning toward the realm of scholarship, however, the Jesuit scriptores found a new enemy in the threat of “unbelief.” As Jesuit scholars read the latest philosophical and scientific works, they encountered perspectives that they found to be direct challenges to the Catholic faith. Bundled together under the term “unbelief,” these dangerous ideas included everything from the Deism espoused by the freethinker John

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Toland, a revival of Pyrrhonean skepticism by the likes of Pierre Bayle or Pierre Gassendi, and the more radical materialism or categorical naturalism of Baruch Spinoza. The Jesuits worried that all of these systems led to the same basic conclusion: atheism. While atheism itself, as Alan Kors has deftly shown, was an ideology in-process at the end of the seventeenth century, the fear of atheism was very much real. Jesuit scholars began to encounter arguments that they felt led inevitably to atheism. In response, they began to produce their own philosophical, metaphysical, and scientific works that defended Catholicism and the basic tenets of theism upon which it rested. The concern over “unbelief ” pushed Jesuit scholars to entertain new arguments for the existence of God, the connection between God and the natural world, and the authority of the Catholic Church. These arguments often derived from consulting the works of philosophes in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.47 In their vocational identity, the Jesuits already had a certain predisposition toward engaging the world of the Enlightenment, but circumstances at the turn of the eighteenth century pushed members of the French Society of Jesus to direct their full attentions to that endeavour. Once religious polemicists “defending the church” from heresy, the Jesuits eventually found a new threat and a new mode of defence. While Jansenism continued to haunt the Jesuit scriptores and certain members of the society, including most especially Le Tellier, endeavoured to continue the fight, the Jesuit scriptores became far more concerned with the dangers of “unbelief.” As a result, they searched for any means by which they could address this new threat. For Jesuits like Tournemine and Buffier, it meant appropriating new philosophical arguments and deploying them in novel ways, most especially through articles in the Journal de Trévoux. For Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, the fight against “unbelief ” led him to the Bible and the possibility of making it defensible amidst the arguments of a growing generation of unbelievers.

The Church and the Public The Jesuits saw the emerging public sphere as a vehicle that they could use to accomplish their missional goals to defend the church from new attacks and return “lost sheep” back to the flock. At the turn of

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the eighteenth century, France stood at the precipice of a gradual yet monumental cultural transformation. Over the course of the century, the rise of literacy, the proliferation of a culture of writing, the increased production of books and other printed material, a shift in reading behaviours, and the establishment of new institutions for spreading and discussing information collectively contributed to the rise of what scholars have called the literate “public sphere.” Growing awareness of the importance of “the public” was a central feature of the Enlightenment. Increasingly over the course of the eighteenth century, authors sought to engage with and win the approval of a “public” that they felt was rational and the ultimate authority in social, political, and cultural matters. Although the church was largely left out of Jürgen Habermas’s famous description of the public sphere, more recent scholarship has shown how the French Catholic Church played a significant role in its development.48 Like others in the eighteenth century, members of the church attempted to win the approval of the public by publishing works that were attractive and convincing and by participating in the institutions that discussed and debated those works. In so doing, they had to concern themselves with “taste” and what would garner interest among an increasingly literate public. The public sphere and the church’s interest in engaging it led Jesuits such as Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to produce new types of texts that adopted not only the ideas but also the styles of the Enlightenment. The public sphere emerged out of the activity of a century-long discourse between literary elites better known as the “Republic of Letters.” The Republic of Letters was a community of writers whose shared interest in scholarship manifested itself in correspondence and the publication and circulation of printed texts. A trans-national community, the Republic of Letters valued the free expression of ideas, the equality of all of its members, and a communal effort for the advancement of learning. It arose in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time of immense religious and political strife when wars between principalities and within them ravaged much of the European landscape. The Republic of Letters provided its members a safe-haven, free from the tumultuous political world of early modern Europe. Like-minded scholars could transcend ideological conflict in the shared pursuit of knowledge. Though desiring to be free of the constraints of the court, the Republic of Letters nevertheless owed its

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existence at least partially to the rise of the absolutist state. Unified and expansive postal services, over which members of the Republic connected and corresponded, and royal academies, institutions around which the activities of the Republic of Letters eventually revolved, required a strong and expansive state. At first, the Republic of Letters comprised a small group of intellectual elites who discoursed largely in the shared academic language of Latin. As the seventeenth century progressed, more and more people engaged in the pursuit. The language of the Republic of Letters shifted from Latin to French, and scholarly productions began to reach a broader audience.49 Of the early debates that connected the Republic of Letters to a broader public, the most significant was the so-called “Quarrel” between the Ancients and the Moderns. Launched in full force on 22 January 1687 when Charles Perrault recited his provocative poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand in a session of the Academie Française, the quarrel was a literary battle over the value of antiquity for the arts and sciences. It pitted two camps against each other: the Ancients – who promoted the writings of antiquity as the paragon of beauty, culture, and wisdom – and the Moderns, who praised the “progress” of their contemporaries over the accomplishments of Greek and Roman writers. Although in reality the dividing lines between the two camps were never entirely clear – many Ancients, for example, valued the notion of progress but thought that it needed to come by way of studying classical texts, and many Moderns considered the writings of the ancients worthwhile but felt that it was possible to achieve the same level of accomplishment in their day – the impassioned rhetoric that emerged out of subsequent pamphlets and books polarized the debate. In the decade to follow, the quarrel gained increasing attention among not only academicians but also literate members of the populace. Joan DeJean has argued that it was out of this quarrel that “the first public sphere worthy of the designation public emerged.”50 Contributors to the debate began to call on the public to arbitrate the dispute. This rhetorical act birthed a notion of public opinion that saw the public as not simply a passive audience for writings but an active body of independent criticism.51 The connection of an increasing number of people to the Republic of Letters has also to do with the rise in literacy in eighteenth-century Europe. Numerous indicators suggest the growth of a culture of both

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writing and reading over the course of the century. First, an increasing number of people were able to fill out government and ecclesiastical documents. Following the passage of a French law in 1686 that required brides and grooms to register their marriages at local parishes, for example, the percentage of those who could sign their names rose from 29 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women in the years just following the new law to 48 per cent of men and 27 per cent of women at the eve of the French Revolution.52 These numbers reflect the whole of France, but in certain parts of the country the rates exceeded the kingdom-wide mean. According to François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, the highest rates of literacy came from the north and northwest of the kingdom above an imaginary line that extended from St Malo in Brittany to Geneva. Cities, moreover, tended to be more literate than the countryside. Paris in particular soared above the French average. Of those Parisians who drafted wills, 85 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women were able to sign them at the turn of the eighteenth century, and those rates grew to over 90 per cent of men and 80 per cent of women by the revolution. These numbers were not simply reflective of a privileged group of Parisians. As Daniel Roche has argued, the above-average rates of Parisian signees persisted even in parishes with large numbers of what he called the “popular classes,” and nearly all domestic servants signed their names by the end of the century.53 While these numbers do not necessarily suggest an advanced level of literacy – signing one’s name, after all, reflects only one small part of the multi-faceted combination of skills that we call literacy – the clearly discernable changes in signature rates reflect a transformation into a more discursively adept population.54 Perhaps most eye-catching is the rate of increase for women in almost all parts of France. The eighteenth century was a period in which many French women came to be readers and writers. Dena Goodman has argued that more and more women participated, for example, in letter-writing, a practice that fostered a development of autonomy and participation in the emerging consumer culture of the eighteenth century. Women also began participating in essay and poetry competitions hosted by regional French academies. The anonymity of these competitions allowed women not only to participate but even to win significant prizes. Their successes brought them access to public meetings of the academies, domains that previously excluded women. By

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the second half of the eighteenth century, some women, including Anne-Marie du Boccage and Émilie du Châtelet, were even welcomed as members. No domain connected women to the Republic of Letters more, however, than the literary salons. Led by elite salonnières, these institutions placed women at the centre of literary debates and practices of Enlightenment sociability. Salonnières regulated interactions, set the agenda for discussions, and governed proceedings that included some of Europe’s most notable thinkers. The world of writing became the domain of a far greater proportion of the French population throughout the course of the eighteenth century.55 As writing increased so too did reading. Anecdotal evidence from the period suggests that an increasing number of people from diverse backgrounds were participating in a culture of reading. The Parisian chronicler Sébastian Mercier commented in the later years of the eighteenth century that “these days, you see a waiting-maid in her back-room [and] a lackey in an anteroom reading pamphlets. People can read in almost all classes of society.”56 Book production supports this general assessment. Estimates differ, but it is generally assumed that book production tripled or even quadrupled from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the French Revolution. Investigations into production, moreover, reveal a particular spike in the latter decades of the century. An estimated 628 million book copies were produced in the second half of the eighteenth century, 157 million of which came from France (Europe’s largest producer). Production of Francophone books increased steadily especially in the years following 1770, when new titles rose from 1,576 first editions in 1770 to 1,950 in 1786. The steady expansion of book production correlated with a rise in book ownership levels. Death inventories from Paris indicate that at the beginning of the century around 30 per cent of domestic servants and 13 per cent of journeymen artisans owned books; by 1780, those percentages rose to 40 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. The size of private libraries also grew. At the end of the seventeenth century, the average number of books in Catholic clergymen’s libraries moved from a modal range of 20–50 to 100–300 volumes, and the libraries of nobles and men in the legal professions experienced similar rates of growth. France was becoming a country of readers, particularly in Paris and other urban centres.57 The majority of French men and women did not own a book at the end of the eighteenth century, but, thanks to a variety of new

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institutions, many were still active readers. In the 1730s and 1740s, provincial academies in such cities as Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and Nancy opened their libraries up to the public a few times a week. Starting in the 1760s, French booksellers began establishing reading rooms available for an annual fee. A secondary market of bouquinistes – small shops that dealt in mostly inexpensive, secondhand books – lent books by the hour for those who couldn’t afford annual subscriptions. Eighteenthcentury readers also consumed pamphlets, newspapers, broadsheets, and a host of other forms of “cheap” print. The number of periodicals in France grew markedly over the course of the eighteenth century from around forty titles in the 1720s to over 140 by the end of the 1770s, and readers accessed these texts in new public spaces, including coffee houses, salons, and Masonic lodges. In brief, one did not need to be a book owner to participate in the public sphere. The public sphere inhabited many types of institutions, and the steady development of a literate culture in France provided the precondition for their growth.58 The church played a formative role in the construction of this public sphere. First, it was at least partly responsible for the rise in literacy. Following the lead of the Jesuits, many Catholic groups began founding primary schools in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Orders such as Jean-Baptiste de la Salle’s Brothers of the Christian Schools provided free education for children, and parish leaders started to create their own institutions for small fees. According to Daniel Roche, by 1789 Paris was home to almost 500 primary schools most of which “depended on the Church and … were available more or less free to children from modest homes.”59 The Catholic Church also participated in the expansion of the literary market. Despite the fact that religious books were gradually losing their majority share of the market – religious titles’ proportion of total permissions publiques, or publishing approvals from the state, fell from around 50 per cent at the end of the seventeenth century to 25 per cent in the early 1750s and 10 per cent in the 1780s – clergymen remained the group with the highest number of authors in a survey done by La France littéraire in 1784. The aforementioned Jesuit Journal de Trévoux was among the first of the learned periodicals that spiked in number in the eighteenth century and that brought the debates of the Republic of Letters to the broader literate public. In the wake of Unigenitus, French Jansenists founded their own newspaper, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which declared in its

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first issue that it was appealing to “the public.”60 The Jansenist-Jesuit conflict, moreover, inspired a tremendous number of pamphlets, books, and other publications often sparked by a variety of “affairs” involving the conduct of Jesuit priests. The actions taken by the monarchy and the episcopacy against Jansenists in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s became one of the most significant subjects of public political debate in France. Keith Michael Baker has argued that the controversy over the refusal of sacraments to Jansenists who did not take an oath of submission to Unigenitus was indeed the first step in creating public opinion and subverting the political culture of the absolute monarchy.61 The rise in literacy, the influx of new books and periodicals, and the formation of an independent public sphere presented the church with both opportunities and challenges. The increasing number of writers threatened the intellectual monopoly that privileged institutions such as the church had held over much of French culture. Although most authors throughout the course of the eighteenth century remained tied to sources of income other than their writing, the number of “autonomous” authors increased.62 The image of the philosophe, cultivated over the course of the eighteenth century, projected this type of autonomy and buoyed it into a claim for independent authority.63 For many French clergy, authorial independence fostered the spread of “unbelief.” “Freethinkers,” or libertins, questioned established authorities and promoted ideas that drew people away from the teachings of the church. By the 1760s, the church felt itself under siege by the forces of this new, anti-clerical literary culture. In 1762, the Assembly of the Clergy complained to the king about the proliferation of “bad books” that “blaspheme against all that is most holy in heaven and on earth.” “Impious writers,” they claimed, were “becoming day by day more audacious” and attacked “the most respectable Truths to undermine the first foundations of Society.” Because so many more people were readers, these libertins’ ideas were infecting people “of every class, profession, age, and sex” with the “fatal love of independence and free-thinking.”64 The growth of literate culture provoked many clergymen to feel that the burgeoning public sphere could undermine the foundations of the church and society itself. For many French Jesuits, the solution was to turn the public sphere into another mission field. To combat “bad books” written by “unbelievers,” the Jesuits offered “good books” by their society’s

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authors. Increasing literacy and an expanding book market meant that the Jesuits could reach broad swaths of the French populace quickly and efficiently. This was particularly true of women. While French Jesuits often had close personal connections with elite women and nuns, mainly as confessors, the all-male composition of their colleges meant that their access to women was far more limited than their access to men. Publishing and the public sphere provided Jesuits with a new access point to French women and to many segments of the European population. For their efforts to succeed, however, the Jesuits had to produce content that appealed to the public. Jesuit works had to attract readers. The editors of the Journal de Trévoux did so by discussing and distilling the latest and most important scholarly works in Europe. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer pursued another method. As the story of the Histoire reveals, Berruyer found success by adopting the sensibilities and styles of the early Enlightenment into his retelling of the biblical narrative.

The Histoire and the Enlightenment How did Berruyer contribute to the Jesuit effort to evangelize the public sphere? First, Berruyer addressed and responded to what he felt were the prevailing arguments for “unbelief ” among the libertins of his day. Second, Berruyer attempted to tell the story of the Bible in a way that would appeal to an eighteenth-century audience. By writing something interesting and unique, he hoped to win public approval. Finally, Berruyer connected the theological ideas and perspectives of the Society of Jesus to the newer attitudes of the Enlightenment. The explanatory prefaces that he included at the beginnings of each of the Histoire’s three parts provide a glimpse at Berruyer’s style of Catholic Enlightenment. Berruyer presented a vision of the Catholic faith that was open to social and theological progress, that affirmed the explanatory and even salvific power of the natural world, that promoted the innate goodness of humanity, and that encouraged the pursuit of happiness. In espousing this Enlightenment Catholicism, Berruyer felt he was providing the Society of Jesus and the Catholic Church more broadly with a powerful tool with which to fulfill their mission among the women and men of eighteenth-century France.

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Berruyer clearly saw his Histoire as a weapon in the fight against “unbelief ” in France. Berruyer diagnosed the problem most directly in the preface to the second part of the Histoire. Unbelievers “without number,” he claimed, were “too much spread out among us.”65 They came in many forms. There were “freethinkers who fight against [Catholicism] by their appropriation of impiety” and materialists who thought that everything including the “soul of a man could well be material.” There were atheists who declared that there was “no God, Creation, Providence … [or] other life after this one,” skeptics who “doggedly believed nothing,” Deists who “reduced the works of the Omnipotent One to a haphazard mechanism,” and those who simply “philosophize without measure.”66 The church needed a solid defence, but simply rejecting the philosophies of the day and restating traditional arguments for the Catholic faith was not enough. “To combat the unbelievers of our day,” argued Berruyer, the church had to “employ new weapons.”67 This meant accommodating Catholic theology with new philosophical arguments. In his Histoire, Berruyer suggested that the only way to fight the fire of “unbelief ” was with the fire of the Enlightenment itself. For Berruyer, the process of accommodation began with creating a Bible that was attractive to the eighteenth-century public. The brief prospectus sent out in advance of the first part of his Histoire advertised how his paraphrase of the Bible differed from others available at the time. The advertisement claimed that existing biblical translations were insufficient for teaching readers about the scriptures and the faith. In order to make use of the Bible, readers often had to consult commentaries that explained the meaning of biblical passages, histories that defined important people and places, and devotional books that distilled the Bible’s stories into lessons applicable to their lives. “Despite all of these works,” Berruyer concluded, the Bible remained “a treasure that the majority of the faithful possess without being able to enjoy.”68 The Histoire, he proposed, solved this problem by not only translating the Bible into an accessible language but also integrating the contributions of the various resources mentioned above. The Histoire incorporated commentary, lessons in moral theology, and devotional reflections into the scriptural narrative itself. This single, seamless text would make the Bible and its lessons useful and interesting to contemporary readers.

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Berruyer began his reinvention of the Bible first by re-organizing it. Instead of presenting the Bible in its traditional form – as a succession of distinct books – Berruyer told the whole story of the “people of God” chronologically from the creation of the world through the time of the apostles.69 It read as a uniform story, not as a compilation of separate writings. The biblical text itself – specifically the text of the Latin Vulgate, upon which Berruyer relied for his translations – was relegated to the margins, a decision that contrasted the conventional approach to biblical translation of presenting the original and translated texts side-by-side. Gone were the names, chapters, and verses of the biblical books. Berruyer merged together multiple books into one unified piece of prose. Berruyer sensed that an eighteenth-century audience would better understand and enjoy the Bible if it were presented as a linear sequence of events. To make this chronology clear, he included a running timeline in the margins of each page of the Histoire that established the precise dates of the events being described. In effect, Berruyer transformed the Bible into a single history. Further differentiating the Histoire was Berruyer’s literary style. Berruyer felt that literal translations that focused on preserving the syntactic structure of the biblical text obscured rather than clarified its meaning. Instead, he explained, the Bible must “speak the language of the people” in order to contribute to “public edification.”70 The Histoire, he trumpeted, made the characters of the Bible “speak as if they were speaking among us today” and did so by taking considerable liberties with the biblical text itself.71 Berruyer adopted a conspicuously colloquial tone especially for characters that he considered of a modest station. The interaction between the bucolic Esau and his father Isaac after the latter had accidentally given the former’s birthright to his brother, Jacob, reveals Berruyer’s efforts to make characters sound like eighteenth-century peasants: “‘But who are you?’ responded Isaac in the initial moment of his surprise. ‘Who am I?’ said Esau, surprised himself by such an unexpected question. ‘Um what, father, don’t you recognize me? I am Esau your eldest son.’”72 Berruyer’s inclusion of Esau’s puzzled response – Eh quoy, mon père, ne me reconnoissez-vous donce pas ? – appears nowhere in the biblical text.73 It was an addition that made Esau sound simple, peasant-like, and consequently “real.” Contemporaries noticed his efforts. Commenting on Berruyer’s attempt to write the Gospels in the same style, Henri Montignot remarked

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that he made John the Baptist sound like “the fishmongers at the Place Maubert,” a popular market in Paris.74 Although Montignot meant this as an insult, it confirmed Berruyer’s success in transposing the language of the characters of the Bible to the conventions of the eighteenth century. Berruyer located the Histoire’s apologetic power in its ability to stir up emotions in its readers. Berruyer felt that only a Bible that was truly captivating would convince eighteenth-century consumers of the merits of Catholicism and the practice of faith. He explained in the introduction to the Histoire’s first part that his paraphrase adopted an “elegance … in its composition” in order to “edify more surely and instruct with success.”75 The Histoire presented a “picture of which the colors are so lifelike, the representations so strong, the images so luminous, that a view of it leaves in the minds and hearts [of readers] the imprint of Religion, against which even unbelief cannot defend itself.”76 In approaching apologetics in this way, Berruyer adopted the arguments of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Sentimentalism privileged the power of the emotions to communicate truth more effectively than the rational capacities of the mind. Berruyer felt that readers’ emotional reactions to the text would lead them to religious belief. If he could create a Bible that was as entertaining to eighteenth-century readers as any book that they could find, he could win them to the ideas communicated in that Bible. This apologetic logic in many ways anticipated the efforts of romantic Catholics such as François René de Chateaubriand to rest the authority of the Catholic Church on its fundamental beauty. Berruyer also used the Histoire to communicate his belief that the Catholic faith was evidently reasonable because it corresponded with the testimony of nature. The “Religion of Jesus Christ,” for Berruyer, was a “Religion that [one finds] in the world.”77 Humans, he argued, had a “natural instinct for Religion,” and though “unbelievers” denied the reality of anything that was not observable as “contrary to good sense and right reason,” the considerate Catholic must admit that some aspects of reality were beyond what one could perceive in the moment.78 One example was God. God, Berruyer admitted, was “naturally incomprehensible,” but the believer could still come to a knowledge of divinity through the “moral proofs” that existed in the natural world.79 Nature itself testified to an “infinitely wise God, who

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governs his intelligent and free creatures and who guides them toward an end.”80 Unbelievers who denied the reality of a rational God were “without excuse” when presented with the testimony of the order of the natural world.81 Advancements in science only confirmed Berruyer’s arguments. The more mathematicians and scientists quantified the movement of objects through space and other principles of nature, the more they attested, in Berruyer’s opinion, to the existence of a rational Creator. Indeed, the natural world had much to teach the Catholic believer according to Berruyer. Berruyer’s apologetic essays expanded the domain of natural revelation further than perhaps any Catholic theologian to that point. Natural theology, as it was termed, was a long-established field of study in the Catholic Church, dating back to the medieval period. Theologians, however, had always been careful to distinguish those aspects of Catholic belief that nature could not fully articulate. For the finer points of the Trinity, for example, one had to rely upon “revelation” either directly from God, the sacred scriptures, or the living tradition of the church. Knowledge necessary for salvation was another key detail that nearly all Catholic theologians maintained was beyond the capacity for nature to transmit. Berruyer disagreed. In a section of the preface to the second part of the Histoire, Berruyer suggested that nature might be so powerful as to equip all people with the knowledge necessary for salvation: Speaking in general, the Christian and Catholic faith is necessary for salvation; for it is through Jesus Christ that God wishes to be honored: but this faith can be necessary in particular only to those to whom it is possible. On what, therefore, will the involuntarily blind and the ignorant without malice be judged? It will be on the proper use or abuse of what they should do for the assistance of those both near and far [in accordance with] what they have received, either by arriving at the explicit faith of the Christian Religion, if God so willed it to them, or … by an implicit faith … in the exercises of natural religion.82 In this bold statement, Berruyer suggested that salvation could come via the truths communicated by nature. He extended the logic of Louis Le Comte and other Jesuit colleagues in China who claimed that the imprint of God’s original revelation remained even in societies

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that, upon first glance, seemed not to reflect a knowledge of a Christian faith. Catholicism and natural religion were not in fact different bodies of truth, Berruyer argued. God revealed himself in both, so either could suffice to bring humans to salvation. This expansive theology of redemption led Berruyer all the way to the point of declaring all humans as a part of the “people of God.” God, as the creator of the natural world, used nature to impress upon the hearts of everyone divine truths that “even the greatest crimes can never erase entirely.”83 All people “in whatever time and place,” even those “numerous and nearly infinite [people] who chose darkness rather than light,” had “the power to become children of God, if they wanted.”84 If the natural world could lead one who was ignorant of the Christian message to salvation, then what was the value of the Catholic faith? Berruyer provided three reasons that the Catholic faith was still necessary and advantageous. First, it was in the Catholic faith that the fullness of revelation rested. Nature provided only an incomplete picture of God, especially since it depended upon humans’ abilities to search it out and understand it. “Our capacity for understanding,” wrote Berruyer, “has its bounds, just as the sea has its limits.”85 Only the revelation of Christ, handed down to the apostles directly and then transmitted unceasingly until the present day, could bring complete understanding of God. The fullness of revelation proceeded through apostolic succession from the first twelve apostles, who witnessed “the miraculous events that Jesus Christ, son of Mary, performed before their eyes,” to the leaders of the church in his day.86 The argument from apostolic succession was not a new one, but Berruyer’s emphasis on its empirical dimensions placed it in a different context. For Berruyer, the church was necessary because it was the institution whose members had received direct revelation from God. Berruyer felt this was particularly true of the papacy. Berruyer considered the office of the pope to be the unbroken succession of God’s lieutenants on earth. He made this case most clearly when speaking about Peter, the apostle historically affirmed by the Catholic Church as the first pope. According to Berruyer, Peter was “the prince of the apostles, the pastor of the flock, the doctor of [Jesus’] disciples” who had a “destiny far superior to those of his colleagues.”87 Peter was the “leader of the apostolic family” and had been “enlightened by the Holy Spirit” in a more significant way than the others.88 Yet Berruyer saw the papacy as an institution that existed well before Peter. Berruyer

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referred to Hebrew prophets, high priests, and patriarchs as “pontiffs” in order to make the argument that the experiential revelation of God had proceeded from the very first humans all the way to the present. Having seen and heard from God and then passed along that testimony to their successors, the long chain of pontiffs assured that that which could not be understood through the study of nature was available to all those who followed the guidance of the papacy. This fundamentally ultramontanist argument was, in part, a way to promote the benefits of the Catholic Church over rival Protestant churches, but it was also a way of promoting a Catholicism that centred on the complete control of the papacy over the more decentralized vision of Gallicanism. Berruyer rested the weight of living tradition on not just the Catholic Church but one specific person in the Catholic Church. Berruyer’s empiricism led him to the unusual destination of what might be considered an Enlightenment ultramontanism as a way of arguing for the necessity of the church in an age of Enlightenment.89 Second, the Catholic faith functioned as an improvement of natural revelation and other religious faiths that preceded it. Berruyer placed his explanation of this point in the context of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. He asked: why was it necessary for Christ to come to earth and fulfill his role as the mediator between God and man? His answers ranged from the standard explanation of the substitutionary atonement – by which Christ paid, “in his divine blood, the price for all the grace” that God had given to humanity and “suspended the vengeance of heaven” – to the gift of Christ’s miracles as a means of testimony of the reality of God and his revelation in Christ.90 But his main goal was “to establish in his person and in the union of men to him, a new religion, [and] a new alliance which gave to God worshippers worthy of him.”91 Christ’s importance lay in his ability to provide a faith that surpassed those that had gone before. This argument revealed Berruyer’s fundamental belief in the value of progress. The Catholic Church had improved in its understanding of God over time, not just in the age of Jesus but all the way to the present. Berruyer avowed that it was “in the teaching of the Roman [Catholic] Church and in its present teaching” that one found the most reliable and beneficial forms of Christianity.92 Just as participants in the New Science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had discovered new knowledge of the world and its operations, Catholic theologians over time had progressively uncovered a better understanding of God.

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Berruyer stated this most clearly in a posthumously published essay titled Réflexions sur la foi. “Are we, in fact, more knowledgeable than our fathers?” he asked in the Réflexions. “Yes, without a doubt, as it concerns revelation, and our descendants will be more than us. In this kind of doctrine, each age supplies the material for a new level of enlightenment.”93 The church was an institution of theological science, progressively adding new information on the human understanding of God and, as a result, producing “infinitely more perfect worshippers” of God than in ages past.94 Berruyer described the Catholic Church in terms similar to those used to describe European academies or other institutions of the Enlightenment public sphere. It was an institution in which knowledge was shared and new levels of wisdom attained over the course of time. The church assured that that which past researchers had discovered was not lost but became the foundation for new learning and new understandings of the world and the God who made it. Third, Berruyer claimed that the Catholic religion, above all other means of revelation, brought the most happiness to humans. “Unbelievers,” Berruyer argued, denied the Catholic faith mainly because they wished “to be happy,” yet in so doing they undertook “a strange combat against themselves.”95 In trying to find happiness by abjuring Catholic virtues, they found themselves miserable.96 Berruyer assured his readers that God “created [humans] for his glory and wants to render [them] happy.”97 Indeed, Berruyer found the life of the Catholic to be far happier than that of the unbeliever: I will add again … that it’s not at all to the unbeliever but to the believer that belongs the happiness of life … I see the [life of the unbeliever] delivered in the discourses of some of my philosophe friends; however, my friends of this type are forever unhappy with it. Then I consider the other in the arms of Religion, and in the company of a number of the faithful, who have learned the Gospel and the obligation and the method to console their afflictions. In this comparison, I could only congratulate the Christian; for the unbeliever, I can only pity.98 Ultimately, the most convincing argument that Berruyer could bring against “unbelief ” was the argument of bonheur. Like the philosophes of his era, Berruyer agreed that happiness on earth was a “necessity,” but he disagreed with them on the means by which it was attained.

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The greatest possible happiness came through the instructions of the Catholic Church. Although natural religion could save humans, only Catholicism could make them happy. It could do so, finally, only because humans themselves were capable of moral and social improvement. Like many of his Jesuit colleagues, Berruyer was an unabashed Molinist. He maintained that the Fall had not completely corrupted humanity to its core. Rather, humans existed with the capacity to choose right from wrong, good from evil. Berruyer, however, extended Molina’s theology further. Humans did not simply have the ability to do good, they were inclined toward it. “Despite the deprivation to which we are reduced by the sin of our first fathers,” wrote Berruyer, “we do not cease to be men, that is charitable, kind, and compassionate, except when, by art or education, we graft upon the foundation of humanity the vices which dishonor it and which we do not bring with us from our mothers’ wombs.”99 While he did not deny the existence of sin and human error, he made them aberrations in the natural state of humanity. Products of a natural world created by a good and rational God, human beings were nothing other than good and rational themselves. The Bible, in Berruyer’s telling, was less a tragic story of the utter depravity of humankind and more a heroic tale of moral people progressively improving themselves and the world around them. This Enlightenment Catholicism that Berruyer articulated in the preliminary essays of his Histoire infused the rest of his biblical paraphrase. While the stories he told remained the same as those presented in other translations of the Bible, the explanations he gave for them and the moral lessons that he drew from them illustrated how he felt the Bible supported his vision of a Catholicism that went hand-in-hand with the values of the eighteenth century. In an era that emphasized the capacities of humanity and the pursuit of the “natural,” Berruyer chose to highlight the ways that the Catholic faith connected with and expanded upon natural truths and guided humans in the pursuit of improvement. To the Enlightenment’s approbation of the pursuit of happiness, he emphasized the ways that Catholics were far happier than their unbelieving neighbours. In all his efforts, Berruyer drew from the larger ethos of the Society of Jesus. Like his confreres in Asia, Berruyer was a missionary, only his mission field was the burgeoning public sphere of eighteenth-century France. Embracing the method of

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accommodation, Berruyer decided that to win the philosophe he had to become like a philosophe and to win the rapidly expanding literary public, he had to produce something that the public found compelling. As a scholar and educator, Berruyer presented new theological and historical ideas that he felt could compete with the intellectual challenges of the era, benefit those who received them, and improve society as a whole. In addressing “unbelief,” he used the Histoire to defend Catholicism from what he felt were the more radical and destructive elements of the Enlightenment, and by writing the Histoire as a piece of prose that would be attractive and interesting to an eighteenth-century audience, he hoped to take advantage of the new mechanisms of the public sphere in order to reach a broader base of people than ever before. A Jesuit in an age of Enlightenment, Berruyer did the best that he could to fulfill the mission of his society in a rapidly changing world. His approach, however, did not sit well with all of his Jesuit peers. Some saw his new theological ideas as dangerous innovations that threatened the integrity of the Catholic faith and the reputation of the Society of Jesus. While many, such as the aforementioned editors of the Journal de Trévoux, agreed with Berruyer’ general premise that Catholics should seek out productive links with the new intellectual sensibilities of the eighteenth century, even they worried that Berruyer’s overtures toward the Enlightenment were too bold. Tournemine and others feared that, when published, Berruyer’s ideas might backfire and polarize public opinion against the society. Their fears had much to do with the divisions that remained within the Catholic Church in the early eighteenth century. Although most Jesuit scriptores moved away from polemics, their rivals in the French Jansenist community were just getting started. With the inception of their Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, Jansenists seized on any opportunity to ridicule the Jesuits and their allies and shift public opinion against them. The story that follows reveals how Berruyer’s Histoire exacerbated tensions between the Jesuits and Jansenists in France and how it placed the Society of Jesus in a precarious position with the French state upon which it had always depended for its resources and protection. The public sphere could both promote and ridicule, create and destroy. Berruyer’s Histoire and the controversies it sparked illustrate how experiments in Enlightenment Catholicism could divide the church and produce far-reaching effects in the political culture of the eighteenth century and beyond.

2

The Problem of Innovation [Judith] went up to the post at the end of the bed, above Holofernes’ head, and took down his sword that hung there. She came close to his bed and took hold of the hair of his head, and said, “Give me strength this day, O Lord God of Israel!” And she struck his neck twice with all her might and severed his head from his body … after a moment she went out and gave Holofernes’ head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag.1 At last the decisive moment had arrived … Alone with a barbarian … she approached the bed of Holofernes. She looked upon the impious man with horror and … she secretly addressed to the Lord her God this touching prayer: “Lord God of Israel,” she said crying, “you see from the height of heaven the perils to which your servant has exposed herself for the glory of your name. I need in this moment your omnipotence … Make yourself attentive to the action that my hand is preparing; sustain me in my weakness; help me consummate an enterprise that I would never have taken on if I had not completely believed that I could with the help of your arms.” With these words, the generous Israelite sweetly approached the post of the bed. She took down the sword of the general which was attached to his headboard, she took it out of the sheath, and without losing for a moment the cold determination so necessary, but so rare for her in other situations, she took Holofernes by the hair and saying, “Lord, my God, help me!” she unloaded on him with all her might two great strikes with which she knocked his head to her feet … After she took a moment to breathe a bit and to give God these first acts of thanks, she left the tent holding between her hands the head of her enemy.2

Every year the leaders of Jesuit provinces around the world wrote letters to the superior general of the society announcing the accomplishments of their members. These litterae annuae provided news from the various institutions of the province – including the colleges, seminaries, and overseas missions – as well as lists of new appointments. Although they were bureaucratic documents, the litterae annuae also functioned, in the words of Markus Friedrich, as “edifying letters” designed to broadcast Jesuit successes worldwide and inspire others to “emulate” them.3 Superiors touted the many accomplishments of the members

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under their care to market their own achievements as leaders of the society. Partly administrative, litterae annuae became promotional documents that announced the acts of which provincial superiors were particularly proud. In their 1730 letter, the Jesuits of the Province of France boasted, among other things, of recent and soon-to-be publications from their members. They heralded, for example, a history of the Gallican Church by Jacques Longueval that won him a gift of 2000 livres from the crown and an annual pension of 500 livres from the Assembly of Clergy. They also touted the recent appearance of the first part of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu. The choice to mention Berruyer was intriguing. Berruyer hadn’t written much for the society before. In contrast to the more magisterial books of other Jesuit scholars working at the time, his was an intimate work aimed at reaching the public and not scholarly elites. Berruyer had also come under suspicion for his connections with a troublesome member of their province, Jean Hardouin, who, as we shall see, had earlier caused problems for the Jesuits of France. In brief, Berruyer was not a conventional candidate for a spotlight in the province’s annual promotional letter. His inclusion suggested that, in that moment, the leadership in the French Society of Jesus valued the new efforts he was making to engage with the burgeoning public sphere. Whatever their reservations with Berruyer, his work reflected well on the province as a whole.4 Berruyer’s book warranted mention because it had been widely praised when it appeared in 1728. By all accounts, the first part of the Histoire sailed through the process of publication. The manuscript underwent a review by royal censors in 1727 and received a privilège du roi, an official endorsement from the French Librairie’s administrators and, effectively, the king himself.5 One of the book’s reviewers, the vicar-general of Rouen Urbain Robinet, described it as filled with “learned research [and] a concise and elegant style … suitable for instructing and edifying readers.”6 The provincial superior of the Jesuit Province of France, Louis La Guille, and some of its most important theologians – including Charles Merlin and Thomas Dupré – had openly praised the new book.7 The Journal de Trévoux promoted it in its March 1728 issue and dedicated some thirty pages to a laudatory review seven months later. In the editors’ opinion, the Histoire was “elegant, polished, ingenious [and] energetic” and “one of the most

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attractive productions [by the Jesuits] to date.” They concluded that it would benefit “all those who have piety, good taste, and the sound reasoning of this age.”8 Enthusiasm for Berruyer’s Histoire quickly waned, however, in the years following the 1730 littera annua. Some within the French Society of Jesus were skeptical of the book. However “ingenious” and “elegant” the Histoire may have been for the editors of the Journal de Trévoux in 1728, other Jesuits felt it had included ideas that were not consistent with traditional Catholic teachings. Critics began to write to authorities in Rome about their concerns. A few years later, the Congregation of the Index investigated the Histoire and, after some deliberation, judged it to be “dangerous.” The Congregation recommended the book be censored and placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum. Others in the church supported the Congregation in its judgment and began to speak out about how Berruyer’s book threatened the integrity of the faith.9 The split between those who lauded the Histoire and those decried it centred on the role of innovation in the church. Everyone recognized that Berruyer had done something remarkably new. Competing for readers in a growing marketplace, Berruyer had adapted the Bible to the culture of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He redirected religious devotion away from public spectacle to the interior life of the believer. He promoted the pursuit of happiness and celebrated humanity’s freedom from original sin. All this he did by rewriting the Bible as a popular and fashionable novel. Critics found these innovations unsettling. Proponents found them inspiring. The publication of the first part of the Histoire in 1728 initiated a decades-long conflict within the French Catholic Church over the Enlightenment Catholicism that Berruyer espoused. In the 1720s and 1730s, this conflict mainly took place within the Society of Jesus. Fearful that the Histoire would embarrass the society and taint its reputation with the public, Berruyer’s Jesuit critics attempted to deal with Berruyer behind closed doors. Only a few vocal critics, including the Jansenist bishop of Montpellier Charles Joachim Colbert, managed to speak out against the Histoire in public. Nevertheless, the ire that Berruyer’s book produced among some members of the Society of Jesus and the lengths to which Berruyer’s superiors went to address complaints about the Histoire illustrates how Berruyer’s project of Enlightenment Catholicism produced tensions right away.

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The Arch-Innovator: Jean Hardouin Berruyer’s connections with a troublesome older member of his province explains why resistance to the Histoire first emerged in the French Society of Jesus. Concerns about innovation dogged the Society of Jesus almost from its inception. Missionaries had faced pressure over their “new” methods of accommodating non-European cultures. Within the Jesuit Province of France, however, one particular controversy over innovation set the stage for divisions over the Histoire. Forty years before Berruyer’s book appeared, Jean Hardouin, one of the society’s most talented yet tendentious scholars, aroused anxiety over the prospects of theological innovation. His radical ideas about history, textual criticism, and authority in the church divided the province. On the one hand, it compelled many of its members to engage more directly with some of the philosophical tools of the early Enlightenment. It gave licence to a younger generation of Jesuit scholars, including Berruyer, to innovate in their own writings. On the other hand, Jesuit leaders became concerned with the ways that many members of the province undertook this work and the implications their writings would have on the society’s public image. Many French Jesuits identified Berruyer as Hardouin’s chief disciple and thus grew suspicious of the younger Berruyer. The very Jesuits who opposed Hardouin at the turn of the eighteenth century became Berruyer’s most ardent critics in the 1720s and 1730s. Jean Hardouin began his career in the Society of Jesus as the ideal Jesuit scholar. Assigned to be a scriptor in 1681, Hardouin became one of the early French scriptores to dedicate himself entirely to scholarship and not polemics.10 His research focused on numismatics and ancient history. He submitted articles to the Journal des sçavans, engaged in a back-and-forth with Pierre Bayle in his Nouvelles de la république des lettres over the interpretation of Roman coins, corresponded with specialists throughout Europe, and eventually served as one of the contributing editors to the Journal de Trévoux. Hardouin was dedicated and talented. One of his earliest productions, a new edition of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, was considered to be so significant among the European scholarly community that it made him, in the words of Anthony Grafton, “famous overnight.”11 He soon parlayed his success into a coveted position as a professor of sacred scriptures at the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, and though his official positions changed, he

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remained a prolific writer for the rest of his life. An erudite and productive intellectual, Hardouin was among many French Jesuits whose publications were held in high regard within the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters.12 As he pursued his scholarly work, however, Hardouin began to advance some outlandish opinions. In 1693, he published his Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis restitutae, prolusio de nummis Herodiadum, a chronology that posited a fresh interpretation of events in Roman history taken largely from numismatic evidence. Four years later, he finished his Chronologia Veteris Testamenti, a book that applied the same basic approach to the chronology of the Bible.13 While many commended the painstaking work that Hardouin exhibited in these books, some of Hardouin’s interpretations caused concerns. Hardouin challenged, for example, many of the standard interpretations of the Old Testament’s messianic prophecies. He claimed that Jacob’s prophecy in Genesis 49:10 – that the “scepter shall not depart from Judah” – referred not to the figure of Jesus Christ but rather to the House of Judah’s right to the political throne.14 According to critics, this reading of what was seen to be a proof-text for the identification of Jesus as the Hebrew messiah weakened a standard argument for Christianity. Yet no opinion provoked more concern for his colleagues than his questioning of the reliability and authenticity of ancient sources themselves. In comparing ancient histories to the numismatic materials that he had been collecting and reviewing, Hardouin noticed discrepancies. The apparent contradictions between texts and material artifacts led him to the conclusion that not only were many of the texts of ancient authors unreliable, they were fakes. Introducing this theory in his otherwise well-received Chronologiae ex nummis Herodiadum in 1693, he hypothesized that “a certain band of fellows … some centuries ago … had undertaken the task of concocting ancient history as we now have it.”15 Hardouin implied that a conspiracy of forgers had fabricated large swaths of what was then considered to be the totality of the ancient historical record. Hardouin’s conspiracy theory only gained fuller form as time went on. “All writings which are commonly thought to be old,” Hardouin eventually claimed, “are in fact … suppositions and the fabrications of an unprincipled crew of literary men.”16 He included in later discussions not only the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors but also the works of early Christian writers. Among Christian texts only the Vulgate

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stood above reproach.17 Convinced that no text had an unquestionable claim to authenticity, Hardouin was willing to throw out almost the entire corpus of European historical writings and the writings of the church fathers. The only possible explanation for their existence, in his mind, was that a diabolical cabal of imitators had concocted “nearly all the history of past time” in order to propagate their own intellectual agenda which was nothing less than the proliferation of “atheism.”18 Hardouin’s theory shocked his superiors. They reacted first by stripping him of his role as a professor of scripture in 1691 and “demoting” him to the position of librarian.19 Fearing that his conspiracy theory might spread, they barred him from interacting with Jesuit novices. These disciplinary actions, however, did not stop Hardouin from sharing his ideas. Some feared that Hardouin’s opinions were actually gaining support within the Jesuit community in France. In 1706, Michel Le Tellier initiated an investigation into the spread of “Hardouinism” within the province, and the results horrified him and his superiors in Rome. Many testified that they were aware of Hardouin’s theory and had even conversed with him about it. Claude Judde, a one-time student of Hardouin’s and director of the novitiate in Rouen, claimed that on multiple occasions Hardouin had articulated his belief that the writings of the church fathers were forgeries. When Judde pressed Hardouin on how he knew this to be true, Hardouin allegedly responded “in the tone of a prophet”: “God enlightened me, my son, God enlightened me! He has helped me know the truth.”20 Louis Marquer testified that Hardouin had talked to him about the supposed nature of ancient texts too. He claimed that the idea seemed so outrageous that he assumed Hardouin was joking.21 Henri-Charles Forcet, however, realized it was no joke. In a statement to the superior general of the society, he pronounced that the radical Jesuit was intent on destroying “church as well as profane history” and weakening the intellectual foundations of the Catholic faith.22 The real fear was that Hardouin’s ideas would leak to the wider public and exact irreparable damage to the reputation of the Society of Jesus. Perhaps no one was more concerned than René-Joseph Tournemine. Upon hearing about Hardouin’s theory, Tournemine immediately penned an essay titled, Douze impossibilités contre le système du P. Hardouin, in which he denounced the controversial Jesuit.23 According to the commentator Augustin-Simon Irailh, Tournemine

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pleaded with his superiors to snuff out Hardouin’s “doctrine” – a doctrine that he claimed to be even “more dangerous than Jansenism” because it “attacks not only certain [points of ] dogma but the very foundation of religion.”24 If made public, Hardouin’s ideas would undercut Jesuit claims to be “defenders” of the church and sabotage any progress they were making in the public sphere. Early on, the province’s leaders contained the spread of Hardouin’s theory within the society. The Jesuits who responded to Le Tellier’s request for information all reported to Le Tellier or the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Michelangelo Tamburini, directly. So private was the nature of this correspondence that the near dozen Jesuits who wrote to Tamburini were apparently unaware of who else had been tasked with providing testimonies.25 The Chronologia ex nummis Herodiadum was the only one of Hardouin’s published works that had mentioned the conspiracy of forgers, and as it was written in Latin and had not circulated widely – thanks to the quick efforts of some of Hardouin’s colleagues who seized copies of it from bookstores shortly after it was published – Tournemine and the superiors of the province felt his ideas could still be kept under wraps.26 Despite their efforts, however, Hardouin’s ideas reached a broader audience only a few years later. In 1709, Hardouin published a volume of his collected works behind the backs of his superiors. Titled the Opera selecta, the anthology contained Hardouin’s most ambitious pieces including his Chronologiae ex nummis Herodiadum. When Hardouin first proposed rolling out the new anthology, his superiors had quickly denied the request. Any new publication would call attention to Hardouin and potentially leak the details of his outlandish theory. Hardouin, however, was undeterred. Without the approval of his superiors, he smuggled the manuscript to the Dutch printer Johannes De Lorme by way of Georges de Ballonffeaux, a friend and fellow antiquarian living in Luxembourg.27 This was evidently not the only time Hardouin had secretly worked with foreign publishers to distribute his work. Correspondence between Hardouin and the Dutch publishing firm of the Huguetan brothers reveals that Hardouin was not above skirting the rules of his society to advance his scholarship.28 Meanwhile, Hardouin worked diligently to secure a benefactor that would provide some financial assistance and help smooth over issues with his superiors by suggesting that all problems in his works had been ameliorated through revisions.29

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When the Opera selecta appeared, however, it presented Hardouin’s works unaltered and without the approval of the superiors of the Province of France. Hardouin explained that this was the fault of the publisher who had published the unrevised versions of his publications instead of the ones that had corrected potentially problematic passages. Worse still, the Opera selecta included at the end of it an explanatory note in which Hardouin attempted to clear up any misgivings about his theory. In the note, Hardouin attacked a Protestant scholar, Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze, who had previously criticized him for his thoughts on the unreliability of the church fathers. Though he argued his case clearly, Hardouin nevertheless placed a spotlight on the very controversial ideas that his superiors were so intent on not spreading to the public. Making matters worse, the Dutch printer De Lorme attached his own note after Hardouin’s in which he claimed that he had made no errors in assembling the Opera selecta and had published Hardouin’s works “just as they came into my hands, without adding or retracting anything.” De Lorme’s affirmation undercut the attempt that Hardouin made to place blame for the unrevised nature of his writings on the publisher. Both letters introduced readers to Hardouin’s controversial theory and, more importantly, did so in French. Even if many could not read Hardouin’s actual scholarship in the Opera selecta, which was composed almost entirely in Latin, they could pick up the basic elements of his bizarre conspiracy with only a brief glance at the back of the book.30 Hardouin’s superiors were understandably livid, and they immediately forced him into a retraction. Hardouin was made to reject in writing the notion that the works of the church fathers were falsified, that forgeries of ancient texts were made by an impious cabal, and that the church had no reliable historical record save for the Vulgate and the living tradition of apostolic succession.31 Hardouin’s retraction likely saved him expulsion from the society, but it did not convince his colleagues that he no longer espoused these ideas. Some claimed that they had overheard Hardouin talking about how the records of the ecumenical councils were erroneous even after having signed the aforementioned statement.32 Concerned that private measures could not ensure Hardouin’s compliance and that the Opera selecta had broadcast his theories outside the Society of Jesus, the superiors of the Province of France finally decided to make a public statement. Published in the Journal de Trévoux shortly after the appearance of the Opera selecta,

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the declaration of the four superiors of the Province of France officially distanced the society from Hardouin’s views. The Opera selecta, they wrote, included works that had not been approved by their censors and that they wished “had never seen the light of day.” They denounced Hardouin’s theory of forgeries and defended the society as a whole before “the Public” by affirming that their denunciation of Hardouin’s ideas represented “the feelings of the whole Company.” Following their declaration, the superiors appended a retraction by Hardouin in which he professed – albeit with what appeared to be the enthusiasm of one forced to speak against one’s will – to “condemn whatever [the declaration] condemns.”33 Having failed at keeping Hardouin’s theory under wraps, the superiors of France decided that their only available option was to “go public” and try to minimize the effects that the spread of Hardouin’s ideas might have on the rest of the society. The public denunciation of Hardouin masked what was a much more complicated picture within the Province of France. Although the declaration suggested that Hardouin did not speak for the Society of Jesus, in reality many were sympathetic to Hardouin’s “system.” In 1721, the French Jesuit Philippe Jolly reported in a letter to Jean-Joseph Guibert, the Assistant of France, that a local university student, for example, had questioned the authenticity of ancient texts in his thesis. Reports began to name important Jesuit scientists, authors, and teachers whose work reflected a commitment to Hardouin. According to Jolly, the polymath Edouard de Vitry – who taught grammar, astronomy, mathematics, and theology in France – had become one of Hardouin’s “disciples.”34 Even Louis La Guille, the provincial superior of France from 1726 to 1729, allegedly advocated some of Hardouin’s positions and appointed professors who were confirmed proponents of them to colleges in the province. The list went on. Charles Merlin, ClaudeRené Hongnant, Henri-Anne de Gennes, Thomas Dupré, Barthélemi Germon, Jacob Brisson, Philippe Morel, Francis Maumousseau, Claude and Charles de Neuville, Jean-Mathias Mahoudeau – all arose suspicion over their connections with Hardouin.35 No fewer than twenty French Jesuits were implicated as Hardouin’s supporters by the end of the 1720s. While this number is proportionally small considering that in 1730 there were upwards of 361 professed Jesuits in the Province of France, it was the positions of these suspected “Hardouinistes” that concerned superiors in Paris and Rome.36 Vitry spent many years in Rome as

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the reviser of books for the society’s French authors. Morel was the retreat master in Rennes, and Hongnant served briefly as an editor of the Journal de Trévoux.37 Mahoudeau was in charge of the seminary in Rouen for some time, and in 1728, three of the four professors of theology at the Collège Louis-le-Grand were linked to Hardouin.38 The growing network of “Hardouinistes” explains why remarkably little was done to the controversial Jesuit despite the many concerns of superiors in France and abroad. No Jesuit in the Province of France, however, bore the label of “Hardouiniste” as much as Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. Though largely ignored in the investigations of Le Tellier and Tamburini in 1707 – in large part because he was still not yet a fully professed member of the Society of Jesus – Berruyer became the most prominent of Hardouin’s successors by the 1720s. According to Pierre Amys and others, Berruyer was “empoisoned” by Hardouin’s “system” by the elder Mahoudeau while they served together in Rouen.39 He demonstrated his resistance to “the doctrine of the schools, the Fathers, the ancient books” and made known his allegiance to the “fanaticism” of Hardouin clearly, openly, and widely in the opinion of Claude Judde.40 Providing little explanation for the young Jesuit’s obvious connections to Hardouin, Etienne Souciet simply declared in a letter: “On Father Joseph Isaac Berruyer nothing needs to be said.”41 The question remains, however, as to what attracted Jesuits like Berruyer to Hardouin. None of those reported to have adopted Hardouin’s ideas admitted to believing the entirety of Hardouin’s conspiracy. Berruyer himself overtly denied following “the system of Father Hardouin” in a statement presented to La Guille.42 What appealed to most supporters of Hardouin was the intellectual freedom that his critique of the reliability of ancient texts created. In challenging the authenticity of written authorities, Hardouin suggested that scholars need not consult them when undertaking their own work. Unquestioned reliance on past authorities, in Hardouin’s view, hindered intellectual progress. This was precisely what contemporary critics saw as the danger of Hardouin’s criticism. In an analysis of Berruyer’s writings, for example, one scholar explained that because of the influence of Hardouin, Berruyer felt empowered not to “authorize his opinions on the testimony of the councils and [Church] fathers.” Berruyer “dare[d] to maintain as quite certain those things which he offers as completely new.”43

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“Hardouinism” became code for “innovation” among the Jesuits. Even Yves-Marie André, a determined enemy of Hardouin, was accused of “Hardouinism” not because he adopted Hardouin’s theories (he most certainly did not) but because his defence of Cartesianism and associations with Nicholas Malebranche made him suspect of philosophical “innovation.”44 A number of years after Hardouin’s death, one of his supporters feted the controversial Jesuit by explaining that normalizing innovation was Hardouin’s finest achievement. “The characteristic of novelty alone,” wrote the author, “is not always a sufficient reason to condemn a new way of thinking.” Thanks to Hardouin it was now “no longer a crime to abandon ancient opinions.” Hardouin had shown that those who failed to embrace novelty were not defenders of the truth but “dupes and slaves to tradition.”45 To be clear, Hardouin did not feel that he was “inventing” anything when he wrote about the conspiracy of forgers. He felt that he was defending the “true” tradition of the church from corruption. But Hardouin came to represent innovation. In what would become a famous line associated with Hardouin, the controversial Jesuit allegedly replied to the accusation that his work introduced theological novelties by suggesting that it was pointless for scholars not to innovate: “I wouldn’t go through the pain of writing if I had nothing to say other than that which has been said before me.”46 Few bought Hardouin’s suggestion that atheist monks had concocted the entirety of Greek and Roman antiquity, but many saw in his critique of the reliability of ancient sources the potential to break free from the shackles of intellectual tradition. For critics, however, the consequences of “Hardouinism” were dire. Some, such as Claude Linyères, felt that Hardouin’s “dangerous doctrines” destroyed the very foundations upon which the church claimed authority.47 Its spread meant the gradual erosion of the arguments that the church had used to justify itself in historical, philosophical, and religious debates. Pierre Amys suggested that Hardouin’s ideas were dividing the Jesuits of the Province of France. If for no other reason than the preservation of unity, they had to be stopped. “Your Reverence knows even better than me,” Amys wrote to his superiors, “that the time most favorable to heretics for establishing themselves is that of troubles and divisions [among the faithful].”48 Indeed, it was to Amys’s point that Tournemine had led the charge against Hardouin before the publication of his Opera selecta. If allowed to spread, “Hardouinism”

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would pit Jesuit against Jesuit and undermine the society’s efforts to defend Catholicism against the threat of “unbelief.” Hardouin thus introduced two problems for the Jesuit superiors of France. First was the fear that through his intense criticism of ancient authorities Hardouin had opened up a Pandora’s box of intellectual innovation. Hardouin had destroyed the foundation of the church’s history and theology. What would be built upon the wreckage was anyone’s guess. New interpretations could pull the Jesuits away from the bounds of traditional Catholic orthodoxy and thus into the political crosshairs of authorities higher up in the Catholic Church. Second, Hardouin’s conspiracy theory had forced the Jesuits of France to worry about their public image. Scared that news of internal conflict would open the door for attacks from their adversaries, the Jesuits became sensitive to public opinion and the ways that the public perceived the society. In attempting to quiet Hardouin, they demonstrated their belief in the political power of the emerging public sphere. Even as early as the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits were aware that their privileged position in the church could be undermined by negative public perception. These concerns grew more intense a few decades later with the arrival of the first part of Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu.

A Sentimental Journey How did Berruyer choose to innovate in his Histoire du peuple de Dieu? One of the most noticeable ways that Berruyer sought to break from tradition with his paraphrase of the Bible was to break from standard scholarly conventions and undertake a retelling of the biblical narrative that took many, significant liberties. Berruyer often deviated from the biblical text itself to connect what he saw in the text with certain sensibilities of the Enlightenment. First, he emphasized how the Bible told a story of human happiness. God intended for humans to be happy on earth and not just heaven. Second, he showed how human actions proceeded from sense perception and the ways that the senses were processed in “the heart.” Third, he argued that the romantic relationships of the Bible were often “affectionate marriages” based on love and not just opportunity and duty. In brief, Berruyer adopted the language of eighteenth-century sentimentalism and used it to transform the Bible

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into a fashionable novel. The result was a book that eighteenth-century audiences found compelling. Many in early eighteenth-century France claimed that Berruyer had done the impossible: he had made the Bible into something that people would want to read. Berruyer wrote his Histoire during an era in which the pursuit of happiness became a fundamental goal. For baroque Catholics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, human happiness was largely viewed as a gift of the afterlife. Humans suffered through the trials and tribulations of this world and then, thanks to the grace of God, received the reward of eternal life and joy in heaven. In the seventeenth century, however, opinions began to change. A renewed humanism brought the Renaissance’s optimistic perspectives about humanity back to life. A revival of Epicureanism and new attempts by Catholic theologians to make sense of it popularized the belief that pleasure and the avoidance of pain was, in fact, beneficial. By the eighteenth century, most philosophes viewed pleasure as a key component to forming new knowledge. Human senses could be trusted to determine what was right and true, and that which pleased became that which humans should pursue. Happiness, they believed, also served as a social anodyne. The shared pursuit of happiness brought people together and formed the basis for social cohesion. Insofar as the eighteenth century was an optimistic era, it was so because the prospect of happiness in this life was not only considered possible but also laudable. Happiness had travelled from heaven down to earth.49 The pursuit of happiness functioned as one part of the larger intellectual and emotional movement of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. William Reddy has described sentimentalism as a cultural revolution that promoted the free expression of human emotions, an engagement in new institutions of sociability, and an optimism about the possibilities and capacities of human nature. Sentimentalism provided French polite society with emotional refuges from the more austere and regimented spaces of Louis XIV’s court. It had an impact on everything from the social acceptance of crying to a change in attitudes about when and where people should smile. It also promoted a new emphasis on the importance of romantic love. Sentimentalism valorized the “affectionate marriage” – a marriage characterized by love, the sacrifice of one partner for the other, an equality of feeling and emotional reciprocity between partners, and a commitment to exclusivity and fidelity. This cultural

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transformation had deep connections with Enlightenment practices and pursuits. Many of the most notable French philosophes spoke of the importance of affectionate marriages and indeed of their families in their intellectual pursuits; loving families became laboratories for scientific, philosophical, and sociological investigations. “Sentimental empiricism” – what Jessica Riskin has described as the basic belief that knowledge came from the combination of sensory experiences and the processing of those experiences by the organs of human emotion – played a pivotal role in the development of eighteenth-century scientific thought. For many eighteenth-century writers, emotions derived from experiences of the senses became crucial tools for the discovery of new knowledge, the critique and rejection of received authorities, and the exploration of the natural order.50 Catholic clergy were among those who, at the turn of the eighteenth century, began to adopt the language of sentimentalism. Preachers and theologians deemphasized the moribund and condemnatory aspects of baroque Catholicism and focused on more positive aspects of Catholic theology. Claude de Neuville, for example, often avoided descriptions in his sermons that painted God as foreboding and austere and instead emphasized, in his words, a “God of peace and silence … a tender God, offering you his heart.”51 The Oratorian Jean-Baptiste Massillon argued directly that because God was primarily loving, he made it “possible to be happy on earth.”52 In the words of this new generation of preachers and theologians, happiness came through the enjoyment of the good gifts that God provided. One should enjoy the pleasures of life as a way of celebrating the goodness of God. Sentimentalist theologians spoke about the transformation of the heart and emphasized devotional practices that included private reading, prayer, and confession. In this way, Catholic sentimentalism contributed to the “interiorization of religion” that scholars have identified as one of the fundamental transformations of eighteenth-century religious culture.53 Throughout the Histoire, Berruyer included commentary that explained biblical events using the assumptions and language of sentimentalism. For example, Berruyer constantly evoked the power of the “heart” to guide actions and discern truth. In the Garden of Eden, Berruyer explained, Adam chose to eat the forbidden fruit because “the caresses [and] solicitations … of a beloved spouse … makes powerful impressions on the heart of a man.”54 In telling the

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story of Joseph, Berruyer accounted for Joseph’s brothers’ decision to sell their young sibling into slavery by focusing on the ways that Joseph’s dreams “struck the hearts of his brothers” and moved them to their malicious deed.55 Berruyer described the early successes of the young King David as a product of the fact that he was a “beautiful boy, good looking, with a vivacious complexion full of fire, and a friendly face that charmed eyes and won hearts.”56 Sense experience and its emotional impact on the “heart” explained much of the drama of the biblical story. The Histoire also retold stories from the Bible in a way that confirmed the intention of God to make people happy on earth. No story reflected this better than that of Jonah. In the biblical tale, God called Jonah to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. The Ninevites, however, were enemies of the Israelites. So, Jonah resisted God’s call and fled in the opposite direction only to have God prompt the people on the ship which Jonah was travelling upon to hurl him into the sea and, providentially, the belly of a great fish. After much tribulation, Jonah eventually conceded, travelled to Nineveh, and proclaimed doom for Ninevites unless they repented which they dutifully did and were spared. Most commentators reasoned that the story demonstrated the importance of immediate obedience to God and not to one’s own selfish desires. So reasoned, for example, the Quietist mystic Jeanne de la Motte Guyon who began her reflections on the Book of Jonah: “Oh, God what is self-love? You wanted to give to us in this prophet the figure of a spiritual person who reasoned with your will … [but] the simple soul obeys without reasoning with the will of God.”57 By contrast, Berruyer attributed the moral of the story to the Ninevites who, upon hearing the call for repentance, undertook a fast and begged for God’s mercy. As far as Berruyer was concerned, the story of Jonah had very little to do with Jonah himself. Rather, it broadcast “the omnipotence of the God that we serve, and … his mercy on all men of a right heart, without distinction of country or people.”58 With a mind reflective of the missionary Jesuits to which he belonged, Berruyer claimed that the Book of Jonah was about how God’s purpose was to reach all people and bring them to lives of joy: “The men who do not know [God] well enough and who have not probed the profundity of the charity of a God for his creatures whom he wants to make happy sometimes are outraged by his patience. We see them … opposing themselves to the

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warmth of his kindness, [but nevertheless] we can see that the interests of the greatest sinners are far better in the hands of God whom they have offended than even … the most compassionate of their friends.”59 According to Berruyer, God wanted happiness for all humans. To emphasize the point, Berruyer even ended the story of Jonah with the protagonist realizing that he was wrong to question God’s mercy despite the fact that the biblical text includes no such repentance on the part of the reluctant prophet.60 Berruyer wanted to make clear that happiness on earth was the ultimate end of those who turned to God. Berruyer’s embrace of sentimentalism also extended to his treatment of love. He recast many of the relationships in the Old Testament into affectionate marriages of the type that many eighteenth-century sentimentalists espoused. Berruyer made a point, for example, to emphasize that Adam was a “good husband” and Eve an “attentive” and patient wife.61 When describing the marital arrangements between Isaac and Rebecca, Berruyer affirmed that God “turned the hearts” of the young couple toward each other.62 In their first meeting, Rebecca had “kindness” for her new spouse, and Isaac found Rebecca to be “very charming.”63 Berruyer similarly enhanced the romantic relations of other couples in the Bible, including Jacob and Rachel. While the biblical text itself describes how upon their first meeting Jacob “kissed Rachel, and wept aloud,” Berruyer added that Jacob also felt “a joy that he had trouble concealing” and kissed her “with a respect equal to his tenderness.”64 Berruyer deviated from the exact text of the biblical narrative to emphasis elements of the stories that he thought were important. Romance provided Berruyer with a vehicle for amplifying the language of sentimentalism. Sometimes his depictions of the passions of the patriarchs pushed the boundaries of propriety. In Genesis 39, the biblical text describes how Joseph, enslaved in Egypt, became the object of desire for his enslaver Potiphar’s wife, who “cast her eyes upon Joseph and said, ‘Lie with me.’”65 Berruyer, however, provided far more detail. He told of how Potiphar’s wife “was moved by [Joseph],” and how “every day [she] made the occasion to see this lovely stranger.” Soon, she “conceived for him … a violent passion” and determined that she must “satisfy it.”66 In narrating the story of David’s affair with Bathsheba, he similarly indulged in descriptions of how the bathing Bathsheba was “young … perfectly good looking and of a rare beauty” and how “the poor prince

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felt himself struck” by a passionate desire for the woman.67 “Blinded by passion,” David seduced the woman who, again, “satisfied” the king’s desires.68 Berruyer told romantic stories in ways that he thought would captivate and perhaps even titillate readers. The salaciousness of Berruyer’s paraphrase was not lost on contemporary readers. The bishop of Montpellier, Charles Joachim Colbert, wrote that Berruyer included depictions of romance that “one cannot read without blushing.”69 Berruyer’s willingness to discuss the love lives of biblical figures even warranted mention decades later by the revolutionary leader HonoréGabriel de Mirabeau whose irreverent discussion of sexuality in the Bible explicitly recognized Berruyer’s openness on the matter.70 It is no wonder, then, that the first part of the Histoire garnered a following when it first appeared in 1728. Augustin-Simon Irailh remarked that “scholars, beaux-esprits, men & women, clergymen and laymen … devoured it.”71 Although thoroughly disapproving of the book, the Jansenist periodical Nouvelles ecclésiastiques nevertheless affirmed that “libertins, who found it to be in their taste, have made it en vogue.”72 Numerous bookstores throughout Paris sold the work in the summer of 1728, and according to the superior of the community of Capuchins in Orléans, the monks under his charge spent nearly all of their leisure time reading the Histoire, an obsession that one commentator reported was nothing less than “idolatry.”73 The popularity of the Histoire also spread outside of France. London bookshops sold the first edition into the 1730s.74 Members of the Republic of Letters sought out copies from all over Europe. Writing from Copenhagen, Hubert Angliviel de la Beaumelle demanded a set of the multi-volume work “at whatever price it may be.”75 The Histoire even made its way across the Atlantic and into the library of the notable Maryland Catholic family, the Carrolls.76 The Histoire’s commercial success was paired with largely positive reviews in journals throughout Europe. According to the Mercure de France, the Histoire was a “stylish book” with a “genius” that was “naturally beautiful, fertile, and elevated.”77 English literary critic Archibald Bower called Berruyer “one of the ablest Writers in France” whose prose was “not inferior in Politeness to that of any French Writer whatsoever.”78 In its thorough review of the book, the Journal des sçavans included long passages from some of the Histoire’s most interesting stories in order to demonstrate the author’s attractive style.79 What came across most clearly in these reviews was that the Histoire was

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immensely enjoyable. Bower called it “one of the most entertaining Histories that ever was published,” and the Mercure affirmed that for this reason the “Public searches for it and reads it with eagerness.”80 Even the often critical Jean-Frederic Bernard and his associate at the time Henri du Sauzet reflected that whatever its faults, one could not deny the Histoire’s “fineness and clarity of expression” and its ability “to accommodate the word of God to modern sensitivities.”81 They concluded their lengthy review by describing the book as “agreeable in its narration, happy in its reflections, ingenious in its supplements, and amusing.”82 The popularity of the Histoire came from its association with the burgeoning genre of the novel. The novel began to emerge as a genre in the seventeenth century. Originally, its readers were mostly aristocratic, but as time went on, the audience broadened. In the eighteenth century, novels exploded in popularity. In 1701, eight new novels appeared in France; in 1750, that number rose to fifty-two, and in 1789, it skyrocketed to 112.83 Berruyer’s Histoire appeared in the midst of this dramatic rise. Contemporaries immediately identified the Histoire as a manifestation of the genre. Nearly all of the reviews of Berruyer’s book used the word “roman” or “romanesque” to describe it. Voltaire called it a “roman de ruelle” – or, a salon novel, generally read in the most intimate spaces of these female social domains – and compared it specifically to Clélie, a popular seventeenth-century novel written by Madeleine de Scudéry.84 That the Histoire read like a novel accounted at least partly for its popularity. Irailh shared an anecdote of a certain duchess who quipped to the brother of the lieutenant of police that people in France might actually read the Bible now that, thanks to Berruyer, it had “become a novel.”85 The association was intentional. Berruyer incorporated into the Histoire the same dramatic style of eighteenth-century novels. He highlighted the emotional expressions of his characters and indulged in scenes of romance. He took what was becoming an immensely popular new literary genre and used it to transmit the stories of the Bible. This experiment in cultural accommodation resulted, by all accounts, in significant public attention and even a devoted following among certain members of French literate society. Berruyer adapted Catholicism to some of the most significant cultural sensibilities of the early Enlightenment. He presented the Bible in a way that resounded with the language and values of the culture of

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sentimentalism. He breathed new life into a religious text that many knew but, according to him, had left behind. Berruyer’s solution to the problem of reaching the public was to make the Bible sound like books that were popular to the public. Embracing the principle of accommodation that guided Jesuit missionaries throughout the world, he sought to mimic the popular styles of the early eighteenth century so to better reach early eighteenth-century readers. In transforming the Bible into a novel, however, he also drew the ire of many in the French Catholic Church. What to some made the Histoire appealing and useful, to others made it immoral. Objections to Berruyer’s innovative work emerged almost immediately within the Society of Jesus and eventually made their way to other parts of the church.

“The Scriptures Turned into a Romance” Berruyer’s Histoire equipped the Jesuits to reach out to the eighteenthcentury public in new ways. In doing so, however, Berruyer took risks. While its stylistic innovations made the Histoire popular, they opened Berruyer up to criticism. Berruyer’s critics objected to two things: the theological “innovations” of the Histoire and its novelistic style. For his Jesuit colleagues and superiors, the Histoire identified Berruyer as a disciple of the controversial Hardouin. He advanced interpretations of the Bible that had no basis in tradition and rewrote the scriptures in a completely original way. They feared the Histoire would do what Hardouin’s Opera selecta had done decades earlier, namely stir up controversy that would divide French Jesuits and weaken their position in the church. Lay critics and the society’s Jansenist rivals seized upon the Histoire as a way to embarrass the Society of Jesus publicly. They played into negative perceptions about the genre of the novel and used them to label the Histoire as something immoral and profane. The very thing that made the Histoire popular, thus, worked into the hands of those who used the Histoire to attack the Jesuits in France. Although novels were wildly popular in the eighteenth century, many in the Catholic Church saw them as intrinsically immoral. The abbé Bruslé de Montpleinchamp argued that novels “only speak … about trivialities” and lacked engagement with serious ideas.86 At best frivolous, novels at their worst could stoke illicit sexual desires and unleash

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licentiousness. Armand Pierre Jacquin famously declared that novels were “vain and pernicious amusements of idle and superficial minds”; they “attacked doctrine and morality” and “set traps for innocence.”87 Because they were so closely associated with unregulated “passions,” novels also came to be identified as feminine. In contrast to men who were described by eighteenth-century commentators to be rational and self-disciplined, women were seen as subject to emotions, “moved by their physical body rather than their rational capacity,” and thus susceptible to manipulation.88 Bernard d’Agesci’s “A Lady Reading the Letters of Héloïse and Abélard” effectively illustrates this gendering of the novel.89 The object of the painting, according to Martha Wolff, is the “inspiration of the lady’s languorous transport,” namely the novel falling from her fingertips. Mouth agape, head tilted backwards, and breasts exposed, the young woman “abandons herself to the emotions evoked by her reading.”90 Philip Stewart and Mary Sheriff have suggested that some artists even connected reading novels to masturbation, especially by depicting a woman, legs spread, holding the book in one hand and placing the other hand in her lap.91 This is precisely the opinion that many Catholic clergy had of novels. Novels led women, in particular, into sexual sin.92 Concerns over the Histoire motivated some within the French Society of Jesus to speak out against the book. François Bretonneau, the superior in charge of the professed house of Paris, concisely described the issues that some of Berruyer’s colleagues had with the book. First, many were troubled by how Berruyer wove his own interpretations and commentary into the paraphrase of the biblical text. “Father Berruyer in his Histoire,” suggested Bretonneau, “ought to distinguish what is from the scriptures and what is not”; by failing to do so, he left readers wondering which words were “divine” and which were merely “human.” Second, fellow Jesuits complained about Berruyer’s interpretations, particularly his explanations of the prophecies of the Old Testament. His willingness to shirk traditional interpretations and advance his own innovations outed him as a “partisan of Father Hardouin” and posed the danger of reigniting the conflict over Hardouin’s scholarship that had consumed the province decades earlier. Finally, they worried about the Histoire’s “unseemly narrations” and “all too novelistic style little worthy of the majesty of the scriptures.” Berruyer’s writing was “too juvenal, too romantic, and better suited for a novel than for sacred history.”93

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2.1 A Lady Reading the Letters of Héloïse and Abélard. The painting displays the emotional effects that novels were thought to have especially on female readers.

So serious were their concerns that a cohort of Berruyer’s colleagues began to speak out against the author of the Histoire in the years following its initial publication. René-Joseph Tournemine led the charge. According to Bretonneau, shortly after the appearance of the first part of the Histoire, Tournemine stormed into the professed house of Paris furious – or in Bretonneau’s words, “d’un air assez

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échauffé” – ranting about how Berruyer’s book was full of “obscurities, falsehoods, errors, and … impiety.” Three weeks later, he presented the superiors of the province with a treatise that exposed all of the supposed problems with the book.94 For Tournemine, a long-time enemy of Hardouin, the Histoire identified Berruyer as a disciple of the controversial Jesuit scholar: its chronology, interpretations, and the liberty by which Berruyer felt empowered to innovate all reeked of “Hardouinism.”95 Other anti-Hardouin Jesuits joined in the fight. Pierre Amys, always the whistle-blower for “Hardouinism” in the Province of France, wrote letters to Joseph Gallifet, the Assistant of France, and Michelangelo Tamburini about how the publication of the Histoire testified to Hardouin’s continued and growing influence in the society. According to Amys, Berruyer’s Histoire included “nearly the entire system of … Hardouin.”96 Berruyer’s supporters, however, met Tournemine’s and Amys’s attacks with dogged resistance. They defended the Histoire as an important effort to respond to the changing culture of eighteenth-century France. When Tournemine produced his essay lambasting the first part of the Histoire, Berruyer asked his friend Thomas Dupré to write on his behalf. In a month’s time, Dupré penned a response in which he refuted Tournemine’s accusations of the Histoire’s supposed impiety. Dupré defended the orthodoxy of Berruyer’s ideas and praised him for his willingness to include explanations and commentary into his paraphrase. Central to Dupré’s argument was a defence of theological innovation. For Dupré, authors should be applauded for using “their imaginations” to communicate points clearly.97 There was nothing wrong with advancing new interpretations of the Bible or utilizing new styles of communication if the effect was to articulate the Catholic faith in a new way and to a new audience. Tournemine, however, was indignant and fired back against Dupré, labelling him a “nark, a great story teller, a terrible critic, and a pitiful theologian.”98 Eventually, Berruyer came to his own defence. In a memorandum presented directly to the provincial superior Louis La Guille, Berruyer distanced himself from Hardouin’s most controversial ideas. At no point in his work, he claimed, did he ever insinuate that the writings of the church fathers were forgeries or products of an atheist cabal. Berruyer similarly argued that contrary to Tournemine’s assessment, his interpretations and commentary included “nothing contrary to the faith.”99 To innovate was

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not to embrace heterodoxy. He and others like him were simply trying to present Catholicism in a new light so that it might remain relevant. Word of the conflict in the Province of France eventually made its way to Rome. Tamburini quickly requested a formal analysis of the book from one of Berruyer’s French colleagues, Etienne Souciet, who obliged with a brief response in April 1729. Souciet felt that whatever the merits of the Histoire, the book ultimately turned the Bible into a “fable.” Its novelistic style and innovative interpretations diminished the sacredness of the scriptures.100 A month later, Tamburini asked professors at the Collegio Romano to give their opinions of the work. Like Souciet, the four professors declared that there were “many reasons” to criticize Berruyer’s book. They lamented first and foremost its novelistic style, agreeing that it was “unworthy of the majesty of the holy scriptures.” They expressed concern over the way that Berruyer strayed from the words of the biblical text, promoted new interpretations, and included a biblical chronology that the Society of Jesus had not formally accepted.101 The professors of the collegio agreed with Berruyer’s critics that these innovations were a cause for concern. In the end, however, they settled on a conciliatory position vis-à-vis the two opposing sides. The best solution to the problems in Berruyer’s book, they reasoned, was not condemnation of the work but a new, revised edition. While disapproving of many of the same things that Berruyer’s fiercest critics decried, the collegio nonetheless chose not to throw the literary baby out with the theological bathwater. They recognized the potential in Berruyer’s project to reach a broad audience. If Berruyer were to correct its errors, they reasoned, the Histoire could still be a useful missionary tool.102 As the members of the Collegio Romano were deliberating on the Histoire, however, critics in other parts of Europe began reacting to Berruyer’s book. Voltaire directed his typically sardonic wit against Berruyer in occasional writings and correspondences. He lamented, for example, the “decadence” that Berruyer’s book exemplified in France and stated that it corrupted “good style.”103 He accused Berruyer of writing “in the style of the lowest populace, with no other intention than that of having [it] read” – a slight that nevertheless affirmed Berruyer’s popularity.104 Others objected to the Histoire because it transformed the scriptures into something profane. Yves-Marie André remarked that people in Paris were jokingly calling the Histoire the “Love Lives of the

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Patriarchs by Father Berruyer.”105 Because the novel was associated with women, moreover, Berruyer’s critics often denigrated him using gendered attacks. Irailh claimed that detractors frequently called Berruyer a “frivolous, effeminate … writer.”106 Archibald Bower summarized what many at the time said: the Histoire was simply “The Scripture turned into a Romance.”107 Berruyer’s most ardent critics, however, came from the French Jansenist community. Unwilling to grant any value to the Histoire, they objected strenuously to Berruyer’s project of cultural accommodation. In their reviews, the authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques denounced “the irreligion with which [Berruyer] speaks about God, the indecent manner in which he makes [God] speak, [and] his audacity in interpreting the Scriptures.”108 The Histoire was constructed not simply from a paraphrase of the Bible but also from “the fanciful imagination” of its author. In the Histoire, readers found “the most holy of books infected by gross errors … the holy scriptures dressed as a novel so burlesque and dangerous that fashionable society is calling this so-called History of the People of God … a novelizAtion of the scriPtures or the love lives of the PAtriArchs.” The Jansenist periodical used the Histoire as a way to attack the Jesuits as a whole. They blamed Berruyer’s superiors for the debauched book. The first part of the Histoire, they noted, had been “approved by the theologians and superiors of the Society of Jesus”; for this reason, it represented the society’s morals and values. French Jansenists recognized as early as the 1730s that the Histoire provided them with a useful weapon for their ongoing campaign against the Society of Jesus.109 Jansenist repudiations of the Histoire and its author reached new heights when the Jansenist bishop of Montpellier, Charles Joachim Colbert, formally condemned the book in a pastoral instruction in 1732. Published in the Jansenist stronghold of Utrecht but disseminated throughout Catholic Europe, the piece accused the Histoire of a multitude of improprieties: [Berruyer is guilty of ] corrupting the divine scriptures; substituting for the word of God the illusions of his human mind; placing error in the sanctuary of truth; debasing the majesty of the Supreme Being; effacing the great features which serve to represent him; changing into a novel the gravity of the style of the [holy

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scriptures]; ‘correcting’ the expressions of the Holy Spirit; rejecting them as little useful to instruct, edify, and reach out; putting into the mouths of the sacred authors a profane language; disguising the fathers as heroes copied after those of fables; making them into comedians in the actions where Scripture makes us aware of the greatest mysteries; adding to the sacred text discourses that modesty cannot bear; weakening and diminishing the idea of the greatest crimes; making even homicide into a heroic action.110 Colbert’s exhaustive list condemned the Histoire for its theology, its style, and its “lax” morality. Like many others, Colbert’s critiques also reflected the gendered assumptions of the day. He remarked that Berruyer’s style was “soft and … effeminate” because it resembled “the style of a novel.”111 And like the authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, he felt that Berruyer’s many transgressions fell back on the Society of Jesus as a whole. The cultural accommodations Berruyer made with the Enlightenment resembled all too closely those of Jesuit missionaries abroad who “believed to be able to unite the cult of Confucius with that of the true God.”112 Colbert provided the clearest and most thorough argument against what he felt was the inappropriate pursuit of cultural accommodation with the Enlightenment. Berruyer ultimately believed in the power of the senses to impress upon the hearts and minds of eighteenth-century readers the religious values that he felt were at once Catholic and of the Enlightenment. In transforming the Bible into a novel, however, he unleashed a wave of criticism. At the heart of all of these critiques was concern over the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Had Berruyer’s book been merely a fictional story, it might have engendered less outrage than it did. Berruyer’s Histoire, however, was the “sacred story.” A paraphrase of the Bible, it took as its subject one of the most unassailable elements of the faith: the scriptures themselves. By writing this sacred narrative à la mode, Berruyer made the scriptures subject to the criticisms of “taste.” While Berruyer’s Jesuit colleagues attempted to keep their complaints private, circulating them through letters to the society’s internal hierarchy, those outside the society took no such precautions. The Jansenist editors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques and Bishop Colbert presented their objections directly to the public. It was in response to these attacks and the concerns of Jesuits such as Tournemine that the hierarchy of the Society of Jesus initiated a transformation of the first

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part of the Histoire and a public defence of the book and its author. By the mid-1730s, both sides of the Jesuit-Jansenist divide were engaging the public sphere over the issue of the Histoire and its innovations.

Revision and Division Could the Histoire be fixed, and if so, how? These questions occupied the minds of Berruyer’s superiors in the early 1730s. They faced two options for dealing with the Histoire. They could denounce the work and try to censor it as they had with Hardouin’s writings decades before. The failure to successfully contain Hardouin, however, convinced them that the chances of an effective censorship of the Histoire were slim. After all, the Histoire had reached a much broader audience than Hardouin’s writings ever had. So, the superiors of the Society of Jesus chose instead to follow the advice of the collegio’s faculty and allow Berruyer to revise the first part of his Histoire. Revision would allow Berruyer to remove those bits that had caused the most consternation while still keeping some of the appealing parts of the work. The decision to permit Berruyer to continue work on the Histoire, however, calcified divisions within the French Society of Jesus. Although Berruyer changed quite a lot, he kept much of what made his book unique and appealing. Far from quieting criticisms, the new edition of the first part of the Histoire only intensified them. Upon receiving orders to revise the first part of his Histoire, Berruyer made the savvy decision to request editorial assistance from outside of the Province of France.113 With such ardent opponents as Tournemine and Amys in Paris, Berruyer felt that his prospects for an amicable relationship with editors lay elsewhere. The recently installed superior general of the Society of Jesus, Franz Retz, agreed to Berruyer’s request and tasked members of the nearby Province of Lyon to oversee the new version of the Histoire. Berruyer spent a considerable amount of time over the following years in that city working on revisions, despite the fact that his official posting continued to be as a scriptor in Paris.114 Jesuits in Rome instructed Berruyer and his revisers on changes they expected him to make.115 Berruyer himself wrote to Retz throughout the process for counsel and to express concerns about the “examination” to which his work was being “subjected” by some of his colleagues.116 He worried particularly about Tournemine and his “chicanery.”117 Indeed,

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Tournemine had sent a damning critique of the Histoire to the revisers in Lyon, an act with which Berruyer was not too pleased.118 Even after Rome’s decision to allow Berruyer to rework his Histoire, there was still considerable resistance to the project within the Society of Jesus. Although Berruyer was confident in his new Lyonnais partners – whom he deemed “able, sensible, catholic, and passionless critics” – there were still many French Jesuits that wanted to see the Histoire project halted indefinitely.119 The Lyonnais revisers stripped the Histoire of many of the passages that, according to previous Jesuit critics, indulged too much in carnal passions and replaced them with more sanitized versions. In the Histoire’s rendition of Jacob’s first encounter with Rebecca, for example, the new edition cut out the section in which Jacob’s “passion [for Rebecca] had only been augmented by the comparison of [Rebecca and Leah]” and replaced it with the simple declaration that Jacob “had determined to ask her to become his spouse.”120 The revised edition similarly toned down the attempted seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife, the love affair of Samson and Delilah, and the description of Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop along with David’s impassioned response.121 The Lyon revisers also pushed back on Berruyer’s interpretation of Old Testament prophecies – interpretations they felt were reminiscent of Hardouin’s – forcing him to favour more traditional explanations of their meanings and requiring him to produce a statement affirming his belief that the messianic prophecies were fundamental proofs of the veracity of the Christian religion.122 In implementing these changes, the Lyonnais revisers clearly displayed their shared concerns with the problems identified by the faculty of the Collegio Romano. What is surprising, however, is how much the Lyonnais revisers allowed to remain in the new edition. The Histoire kept its overall structure with translations and paraphrases of the scriptures periodically interrupted by Berruyer’s own commentary. The Histoire also retained its sentimental language. Berruyer still focused on the emotions of his characters and celebrated the prospect of worldly happiness. No passage better exemplified this than Berruyer’s depictions of Creation and the Fall. Berruyer was allowed to keep the overtly optimistic description of humanity presented in his narrative of Creation. The new version of the Histoire preserved, for example, Berruyer’s elaboration on Genesis 1:26, in which God not only declared, “Let us make mankind in our image

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and resemblance” – as the original biblical text stipulated – but also, “Let us give him a soul that is spiritual, reasonable, immortal … instilled with divine virtue.” Nor did they cut God’s affirmation that humankind would have “a liberty that makes them glorious to us … [and] which they will never lose” and that the intention of God was to give to humans “a clear knowledge and view of God … to make them happy.”123 Even the story of the Fall maintained its sentimental tone. Although, in Berruyer’s account, Adam and Eve were still expelled from the Garden of Eden upon eating the forbidden fruit and condemned to lives of toil and the experience of suffering, the Histoire included a happy ending: “Exiled in such infamy and reduced to cultivate the earth from which he had been formed by the hand of God, the unfortunate Adam lived a long life of 930 years to weep over his sins and to make penitence for them. But through penitence that was so humble, so constant, and so submissive … he recovered the good grace of his Master and died in His love, leaving to posterity a formidable example as much of the severity of God’s judgements, in his punishment, as of [God’s] infinite mercies in his reconciliation.”124 Nowhere did the biblical text mention God’s forgiveness for Adam. Berruyer’s Fall, by contrast, conspicuously ended with an affirmation of the loving heart of a God whose fundamental desire was mercy. To make this point even clearer, Berruyer included an illustration of the Fall that adorned the top of the very first page of the new edition’s first volume. God, positioned in the centre, casts Adam and Eve out of Eden and into their respective penalties for their sins in the Garden. Adam, shovel in hand, is cursed with the burden of working the land, and Eve (positioned on the left) feeds an infant, an indication of women’s eternal responsibility for childbearing. Neither, however, appears altogether dissatisfied with their situation. Eve calmly and tenderly holds the infant, and Adam appears to work the shovel with relative ease. Neither is exerting themself or realizing the gravity of the protoevangelium – that there would be “enmity” between man and woman and their progeny.125 The beautiful Adam, hair flowing in the wind, even appeared to have a smile. The epigram below the illustration, moreover, came not from the condemnatory narrative of Genesis but from the Wisdom of Solomon and delivers what appears to be an Enlightenment dictum that wisdom “delivered him from

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2.2 The Fall. François Boucher’s pastoral representation of the Fall diminishes the tragedy of the event and magnifies the potential for Adam and Eve’s happiness. The image was included in the first volume of the revised edition of the Histoire.

his transgression.”126 Whatever changes the Lyonnais revisers forced Berruyer to make, the core sensibilities of the Histoire remained intact. The illustrations were a new element of the revised edition, and they only further wedded Berruyer’s Histoire to the culture of sentimentalism and the genre of the novel. Some of the new images were simple. Two maps, created by the engraver and publisher Jacques-François Bénard, oriented readers to the geography of the Near East in order to help them understand the people and places mentioned in biblical stories. Of a far higher quality, however, were the images that adorned the book’s title page and the beginnings of its volumes. These depictions of biblical scenes served both pedagogical and emotional purposes: to teach the reader more about the meanings of biblical stories while also transmitting the sentimental sensibilities of the Histoire as a whole. Employed to illustrate the new Histoire was none other than François Boucher – the great rococo painter and eventual favourite of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV. Before he had established himself as one of the most notable rococo artists in France, Boucher made money as an engraver and illustrator for printed books. Boucher was the ideal candidate to provide images for the Histoire. Making his name as an artist of repute in Paris – indeed, he was admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1734, the same year that the revised

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edition of the Histoire’s first part appeared in France – his style was considered by contemporaries to be “seductive, charming, lively, fecund, delicate, voluptuous, imaginative”; in brief, he was an artist identified with the sentimental culture that Berruyer was appropriating. So tied to sentimentalism was Boucher that decades later Jean-Jacques Rousseau requested his services as illustrator for what would become arguably the most famous sentimental novel of the eighteenth century: Julie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse. In having his Histoire decorated with rococo designs, Berruyer only further identified his book as a sentimental novel.127 Publishers in Paris jumped on the opportunity to print the new work. Demand was high enough that Pierre Prault, André Knapen, André Cailleau, and Marc Bordelet all produced versions in duodecimo, making the work more affordable and thus more marketable.128 The price difference between the quarto and duo-decimo editions was dramatic. One Parisian bookseller, for example, sold the former for sixty livres and the latter for twenty-five.129 While not cheap, the new edition’s price of twenty-five livres was comparable to many books at the time – around two livres per bound duo-decimo volume – and placed it within the purchasing power of members of the Parisian and metropolitan bourgeoisie.130 Some who published the new edition had close connections with the Jesuits. The young upstart printer Bordelet, for example, had formerly worked as a domestic servant for the Jesuits in Paris and set up his shop on the rue Saint-Jacques across the street from the Jesuit college.131 But the Jesuits’ agents were not the only publishers interested in the book. Another publisher of the new edition was Cailleau who was presumed to have been connected to the Parisian Jansenist community.132 The revised version of the first part of the Histoire received no less than nine separate editions from 1733 to 1753. The interest of a wide range of printers and the decision to sell the book in both quarto and duo-decimo testified to the continuing popularity of Berruyer’s Histoire and its growing presence in the French literary market. The popularity of the new edition did not, however, bring harmony to the Jesuit Province of France. In March 1734, Berruyer complained to the assistant of France that Tournemine was not allowing him to promote his new work and was animating his “friends … against the book.” Calling Tournemine “full of bitterness,” Berruyer urged the Assistant of France to remember the approval that the Lyon revisers

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had given to the work and help him circulate it without resistance.133 Tournemine, however, remained undeterred in his efforts to combat Berruyer. In a plea to superiors in Rome, he continued to allege that Berruyer’s Histoire “corrupted” the scriptures and “violated” the faith.134 Tournemine also campaigned in France. Thomas Dupré complained that Tournemine was spreading “inexcusable calumnies” about Berruyer throughout the province.135 Another of Berruyer’s allies, Charles Merlin, reported that Tournemine had worked with Jean-François Baltus on a piece that would attack Berruyer’s interpretations of the Old Testament prophecies.136 Exasperated, Merlin lamented that Berruyer’s opponents “will not cease to quarrel with us” no matter the approvals that they receive from their superiors.137 The divisions rendered by Berruyer’s book within the Society of Jesus mirrored what was taking place elsewhere in the church. While Berruyer and his revisers were working on the new edition of the Histoire, the Congregation of the Index in Rome began to deliberate on the Histoire’s first edition. Meeting in the Quirinal Palace in Rome on 27 May 1732, a small group of the Congregation’s censors discussed the Histoire’s potential problems. The censors’ primary concerns were with Berruyer’s commitment to human free will and the ways that he limited God’s omnipotence. They objected, for example, to Berruyer’s explanation that God “took advantage” of Adam’s sleep to remove his rib and create Eve; this, they complained, made it seem as if God was not powerful enough to create Eve without the circumstance of Adam’s slumber.138 One attendant of the meeting accused Berruyer of favouring Pelagianism, a heresy that denied the impact of original sin on humanity. Like many of Berruyer’s Jansenist critics, they saw in his optimistic perspective on humanity the denial of a fundamental tenet of the Church: human fallenness. As a result, the congregation chose to condemn the first edition of the Histoire. In their official register, they explained that the book was to be prohibited not because of its audacious style but because in adding to the “text of the sacred scriptures” Berruyer had included opinions that were reminiscent of “the Pelagian heresy.”139 The members of the congregation judged Berruyer’s promotion of human happiness and the goodness of humanity to be counter to the traditional teachings of the church. Revision had not quelled the tensions that existed within the Society of Jesus and the Catholic Church more broadly. Some, like

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Tournemine, continued to object to the Histoire even as Berruyer was re-writing it. Tournemine claimed that the only possible response to a “disciple” of Hardouin was censorship and suppression. Yet because the Histoire so clearly appealed to many literate members of French society, Berruyer’s superiors entertained the idea that changes could be made to the text to mitigate its problems. But the conflict over the Histoire extended beyond internal discussions within the Society of Jesus. Already in the 1730s, authorities in other parts of the church had picked up on the book and constructed an argument against it. In the end, the members of the Congregation of the Index decided that the safest move would be to denounce the original edition and hope that the revised one would be better. Their act in placing the first edition on the Index, however, gave momentum to opponents of the Jesuits who saw the official denunciation of the Histoire by authorities in Rome as an indication that the church was turning against Berruyer’s experiment with Enlightenment Catholicism.

Conclusion No consensus emerged within the Catholic Church over Berruyer’s attempt to translate the faith into the language of the modern age. Central to the tensions that erupted over the Histoire were concerns over the ways that Berruyer tried to integrate eighteenth-century sensibilities into the story of the church. From re-writing the Bible as a sentimental novel to emphasizing in his own commentary the power of humanity and God’s commitment to promoting human happiness, the Histoire sought to blend Catholicism with the values of the Enlightenment. For some Jesuits, these innovations conjured up the memory of Jean Hardouin and the troubles that his ideas had caused for the society earlier in the century. Concerns over a rebirth of “Hardouinism” in the Province of France affected the ways that Berruyer’s superiors handled the Histoire. When anxieties first emerged about Berruyer’s style and interpretations, they put their hopes in a less controversial revised edition rather than censorship. Yet the process of revision failed the leaders of the Society of Jesus. While Berruyer and his revisers took out many of the most conspicuously audacious parts of the text, they maintained and even magnified in some ways its sentimental sensibilities. The

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decision to revise the first part of the Histoire did not settle the debate about the value of Enlightenment Catholicism; it merely extended it. For the most part, arguments over the first part of Berruyer’s Histoire in the 1720s and 1730s remained within the private confines of the Society of Jesus, but the efforts of French Jansenists began to bring the debate about Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism into the public sphere. The first part of Berruyer’s Histoire appeared at one of the most significant moments in the Jesuit-Jansenist conflict in France. In the late 1720s, Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury renewed efforts to purge the French Catholic Church of Jansenists. Bishops such as Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, bishop of Soissons, and CharlesGaspard-Guillaume de Vintimille, archbishop of Paris, targeted priests who had denounced the papal bull Unigenitus. When Louis XV declared Unigenitus a law of both church and state in 1730, many Jansenist priests were imprisoned or expelled from the kingdom. Under pressure from both church and state, French Jansenists searched for other means of support. This initially motivated many Jansenists’ acceptance of the convulsionary movement that coalesced around the tomb of the Parisian deacon, François de Pâris, as well as their efforts to coopt public opinion. Through the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques and other printed pamphlets and satires, they promoted the cause of persecuted Jansenists and denounced the actions of their enemies, including the Jesuits. In their efforts to win over the public, they looked for any opportunity to expose or embarrass their rivals. Berruyer’s Histoire provided just such an opportunity. Controversial by nature, Jansenists found in it the perfect example of the Jesuits’ immorality and heterodoxy.140 Crucial to French Jansenists’ use of Berruyer in their attacks was the gendered dimension of his work. In the precise moment that Berruyer’s superiors lauded the Histoire’s potential to reach new audiences in the new spaces of eighteenth-century polite society, Jesuits elsewhere in France were embroiled in a controversy over one of their members’ behaviours within the confines of private space. Catherine Cadière, a young woman from Toulon, accused her confessor, the Jesuit JeanBaptiste Girard, of seducing her in the setting of the confessional. A year later, a pamphlet most likely written by an enemy of the Jesuits in Aix-en-Provence accused Girard of not only sleeping with the young penitent but also impregnating her and, ultimately, forcing her to terminate the pregnancy.141 As Mita Choudhury has explained, the

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episode became a cause célèbre and revealed how Jesuit involvement in the private spheres of French women provided opportunities for their enemies to attack their reputation in the forum of the public sphere. Because it was a “novel,” associated with female readers and female cultural domains, Berruyer’s Histoire similarly exposed the Jesuits to accusations of clerical overreach and malfeasance. Just like Girard, Berruyer was thought to have asserted his influence over women in their most vulnerable places. Gendered language and assumptions became important platforms for Jansenist attacks against the Jesuits, and the Histoire perfectly fit the polemical profile that Jansenists wanted to attach to the Society of Jesus.142 The Histoire du peuple de Dieu reflected Berruyer’s belief that Catholicism could adapt to the changing cultural sensibilities of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment Catholicism could provide a satisfying alternative to the growing literature of “unbelief ” that was becoming increasingly available. Yet the more he and his Jesuit colleagues promoted this style of Catholic Enlightenment, the more they opened up fissures within the church. Critics such as Tournemine recognized the controversial nature of Berruyer’s ideas and pleaded with superiors in Paris and Rome not to allow them a public platform. Whatever influence he may have had, however, his protests ultimately were futile. Berruyer was allowed to publish the first edition of his Histoire’s first part with the society’s approbation and an official privilege from the French Librairie. Even when the book underwent an investigation by Jesuit authorities in Rome, Berruyer was given the chance to adapt his project and make it more acceptable. Not even a formal condemnation from the Congregation of the Index would deter Berruyer or his supporters in pushing forward their Enlightenment Catholicism in France. It was this dogged commitment that ultimately put the French Society of Jesus in danger in the decades to come.

3

The Berruyer Affair In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.1 In the beginning of time, that is, more than four thousand years before the temporal generation of Jesus-Christ, God created the heavens and the Earth for the use of men, and he created men for his glory. Man, only just emerging from the hands of his creator … became an ingrate and rebel. … God made up for his insufficiencies and promised him a mediator … He rendered to the whole universe the gift of mercy and the grace of salvation … God, reconciled to men by the satisfactions of a Man-God, proposed to establish between heaven and earth for the following centuries a new commerce of religion infinitely superior to that which existed in the state of first innocence … and a cult far more perfect than the figurative cult of the Law.2

No book is more closely identified with the Enlightenment than Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Robert Darnton has famously called it “the supreme work of the Enlightenment,” and Daniel Mornet labelled the eighteenth century as a whole “an encyclopedic century.”3 In the Encyclopédie, Diderot and D’Alembert tried to present the extent of human knowledge on subjects as varied as physics, economics, and agriculture. The Encyclopédie represented what it meant to participate in the “enlightening” of society – to educate the public by transmitting the best of human understanding in a form that was accessible and easy to understand. It represented the eighteenth century’s trend toward the pursuit of practical knowledge, and its contributors included many of the most notable philosophes in Europe. Among those contributors was the abbé André Morellet, a young and ambitious graduate of the Sorbonne. Diderot and D’Alembert tasked Morellet with writing articles on theology. A fellow proponent of the

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general advancement of knowledge and participant in the Republic of Letters, Morellet chose not to promote his own viewpoints in his essays but rather, in the words of Kathleen Hardesty Doig and Dorothy Medlin, to “achieve a tone of historical and ecumenical objectivity” that treated theology as a field of scientific inquiry.4 Morellet and his editors all felt that the presentation and comparison of theological perspectives could illuminate essential truths about the world and human societies. Far from relegating theology to the realm of myth or fantasy, Morellet took the subject seriously. In his essays, he sought to articulate the variety of perspectives that scholars have had on important theological topics and diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of each.5 Morellet applied this rational, scholarly approach, for example, in an article on the concept of the “son of God.”6 He began by approaching the term etymologically, providing what he felt were the traditional definitions of the “son of God” in both the biblical context and the works of past theologians. Traditionally in Catholic communities, the “son of God” referred to the person of Jesus and the place that he held as a distinct member of the Trinity. Upon reviewing this and other understandings of the term, Morellet quickly turned his attention to what he felt was a more significant and “new” explanation for the “son of God” that had recently been promoted by a member of the French Society of Jesus: Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. According to Morellet, Berruyer’s understanding of the “son of God” was different from those of previous scholars in two important ways. First, he claimed that the “son of God” emanated from the entirety of the Trinity. This contrasted traditional understandings that stressed that Jesus Christ, in the words of the Nicene Creed, was “eternally begotten of the Father,” or the first member of the Trinity alone. Second, Berruyer suggested that the generation of the “son of God” happened within the compendium of time – namely, in the act of the incarnation by which the human Jesus was infused with the divine nature – even though the Trinity existed outside of time. Seemingly minute and technical, these details were significant. In Morellet’s perspective, they made better sense of the actual biblical references to the incarnation which failed to refer to the “Trinity” specifically and suggested both an eternal and temporal generation of the “son of God.” Morellet found Berruyer’s explanation compelling. Berruyer’s via media between the seeming contradictions in the Trinitarian view of the “son of God” and the

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anti-Trinitarian position was, in Morellet’s words, “truly natural” and utterly convincing.7 While he was impressed by the novelty of Berruyer’s conception of the “son of God,” however, Morellet also recognized that it had troubled others in the Catholic Church. Some had charged Berruyer of “favoring on one side Nestorianism and on another Socinianism,” two Christological heresies from the church’s past. Morellet found these accusations untenable and spent much of his article explaining how Berruyer differentiated himself from the Socinians. The criticism of Berruyer that made the most sense, however, was that his ideas on the “son of God” were entirely “new.” “[Critics] haven’t found it employed … by any [Church] father or any [previous] theologian,” Morellet explained.8 For this critique, Morellet had no retort. Berruyer’s Christology was innovative, but like many other participants in the Enlightenment, Morellet saw that as one of its merits.9 Berruyer’s ideas opened up new understandings of both the natural and supernatural worlds. His critics simply failed to understand the value of innovation for theological inquiry. Morellet’s treatment of Berruyer’s Christological ideas in the Enlightenment’s single most famous work reveals much about how Berruyer participated in the Catholic Enlightenment. In the second part of his Histoire, Berruyer attempted to define and describe Jesus Christ using new terms and new intellectual sensibilities. While maintaining a commitment to Trinitarian theology, he pushed the boundaries of that theology by emphasizing certain aspects of the person of Jesus over others and by explaining the incarnation in new ways. He highlighted the role of nature in forming, constraining, and humanizing Jesus, transforming him into the “natural son of God.” He rationalized the incarnation by suggesting that it happened in a particular historical moment. In many ways, Berruyer’s ideas on Christology were the most provocative theological ideas that he espoused. That these ideas warranted considerable attention and indeed acclaim in the Encyclopédie affirms their connection with the Enlightenment and the attempt of many Catholics to find ways to connect traditional theological principles with the new values and assumptions of the eighteenth century. Morellet’s article also confirmed that Berruyer’s Christology produced conflict in the church. Many in the French Catholic Church objected to Berruyer’s ideas about the “son of God.” Within his own

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Society of Jesus, colleagues criticized him and worked to prevent the second section of his Histoire from reaching the press. When it finally did get published in 1753, bishops throughout the kingdom spoke out against the Histoire and its “new” ideas. Berruyer’s most vocal critics, however, were once again French Jansenists. In a deluge of printed pamphlets and theological treatises, they furiously attacked Berruyer, labelling him a heretic and calling for both the church and the state to hold him accountable for spreading dangerous ideas. When Berruyer and his allies defended his ideas in their own pamphlets and treatises, the issue over Berruyer’s Christology became a public “affair” and one of the many notable literary causes célèbres that defined the 1750s and created, in the words of Keith Baker, a “politics of contestation” that shaped French public life in the second half of the century.10 The cumulative effect of the affair was the paradoxical rise in notoriety of Berruyer and his book. Because it was controversial, Berruyer’s Histoire became more popular and found its way to new markets not only in France but also abroad. In the end, the Berruyer Affair contributed to the transformation of the Catholic Enlightenment in France and the polarization of many French Catholics against the Enlightenment as a whole in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Natural Son of God Berruyer’s unique Christology was inarguably the chief reason that the second part of the Histoire created such a clamour in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. While the first section troubled many because of the style that Berruyer used and the ways that he reshaped the narratives of the Old Testament to promote certain Enlightenment sensibilities, Berruyer’s paraphrase of the Gospels struck at an even more central element of the Catholic faith: the nature of Jesus Christ. Consequently, Berruyer had trouble getting the second part of his project into print. For the better part of two decades, he tried to persuade his superiors and royal censors to allow him to publish his continuation of the Histoire. The first sources of resistance came from fellow Jesuits. Once again, the Society of Jesus in France divided over whether or not Berruyer’s innovative theological interpretations were worthwhile. Implicit in the conflict over the second part of Berruyer’s

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Histoire was the concern that adapting Catholic theology to fit the sensibilities of the Enlightenment fundamentally compromised the integrity of Catholic doctrine. The debate over Berruyer’s Histoire remained a debate about the value of Enlightenment Catholicism in eighteenth-century France. Berruyer encountered resistance to the second part of his Histoire as early as the 1730s. As the revised edition of the Histoire’s first part was just reaching the presses, Isaac-Joseph Berruyer was in Lyon working on the second section of his project. On 28 July 1734, the Lyonnais Jesuit Louis Dugad confirmed that Berruyer was nearly finished with the follow up to his paraphrase of the Old Testament.11 Berruyer submitted the manuscript of his new work to the Jesuit reviser of books in Rome before the end of the year, and on 8 January 1735, the reviser assigned censors in the Province of Lyon to review it.12 They were not the only ones, however, to have a say on the new book. Having just fought a battle over the first part of the Histoire, René-Joseph Tournemine decided to insert himself once again into the deliberations over the continuation of the Histoire project. When he found out that Berruyer was submitting his manuscript to Rome, he quickly rushed off a letter to the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Frantz Retz, to warn him of the Histoire’s issues. Reminding the superior general of the trouble that Berruyer had already caused, Tournemine claimed that the author’s latest volumes only “increase[d] the evil” of the first part of the Histoire. He warned of the dangerous ideas included in Berruyer’s paraphrase of the Gospels and declared that Berruyer was nothing more than a troublesome “innovator.”13 According to Dugad, Tournemine campaigned against Berruyer furiously enough to divert much of the latter’s energy into defending himself rather than finishing his project.14 Meanwhile, the completed manuscript made its way to the Collegio Romano where it received an evaluation from four of the college’s professors. On 3 May 1735, they released the results of their evaluation. In their statement, the faculty of the collegio agreed with Tournemine. Berruyer’s Christology simply did not align with the opinions of previous theologians. The ideas that Berruyer promoted about the person of Christ were therefore unacceptable and disqualified the book from consideration for publication.15 The professors at the Collegio Romano were not the only ones in the Society of Jesus to object to Berruyer’s newest writings. In their

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preliminary report on Berruyer’s manuscript, the censors in Lyon also refused to recommend the manuscript for publication. Far gentler than Tournemine, they described Berruyer as an author with “the utmost piety, intelligence, and merit possible” but concluded nevertheless that his book promoted some “extraordinary opinions.” Like the faculty of the collegio, their chief complaint was that Berruyer’s ideas seemed to have no prior basis in the writings of the church fathers. Hoping to align Berruyer more closely to past theologians, they urged Charles Du Bois, the assistant of France, to “implore him sweetly to correct his book” and make it align with the perspectives of previous theologians. Failing to do so, they feared, would provoke “the indignation of the entire Church against us.”16 Claude de Linyères also wrote to the superior general in 1737 claiming that Berruyer’s “singular opinions” reflected the “opinions of Father Hardouin,” particularly the notion that one could innovate without regard to what had been said by previous authorities of the church.17 Consequently, he recommended that Retz halt any progress of the manuscript toward publication. Berruyer’s colleague Edmund Rivière similarly complained that, like Hardouin, Berruyer recklessly blazed his own theological trails.18 In Bordeaux, the Jesuit professor Charles-Xavier Lacouture also acquired Berruyer’s manuscript and penned another condemnation.19 Three years after having completed the first draft of his paraphrase of the Gospels, Berruyer had received nothing but rejections and denunciations from his colleagues in the Society of Jesus. One theme predominated in the numerous critiques levelled against Berruyer: his Christology was simply too “new.” Within the realm of theology, newness was a liability not an asset. In failing to cite the church fathers, Berruyer was thumbing his nose at over a millennium of theological tradition. He was asserting the merits of his own individual intellect over the collected wisdom of the church. As David Garrioch has explained, in the customary culture of the eighteenth century “to call something an ‘innovation’ was to condemn it.”20 The Catholic faith was understood to be semper eadem, or always the same – “an unchanging gospel, handed down by pen and mouth from age to age.”21 For years, Berruyer’s manuscript bounced around the society’s many theologians and censors all of whom came to the same conclusion. Berruyer was describing the Trinity, incarnation, and the person of Christ in ways that previous theologians had not. Whether Berruyer’s arguments had

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merit was inconsequential; they were new, and that is all that mattered. The second part of the Histoire could not be published because it advanced singular opinions on a topic of the utmost importance to the Catholic faith. Berruyer’s colleagues objected most strenuously to the eighth volume of the proposed work. The first seven volumes of the second part of the Histoire mostly told the story of the Gospels and the Book of Acts in much the same way that the volumes of the first section of the Histoire had presented the narrative of the Old Testament.22 The eighth volume, however, comprised of a series of theological “dissertations,” written in Latin, and directed not to the public but to theological scholars. The dissertations presented Berruyer’s ideas on the incarnation and the nature of Christ. They were technical, academic essays, but Berruyer saw them as the “key” to understanding who Christ was and how he functioned in the rest of the Histoire text. In other words, the eighth volume provided the theological superstructure for the rest of his narrative. While the rest of the Histoire spoke “the language of the people” in order to edify the public, the Latin dissertations spoke the language of scholarship.23 His essays intended to reshape Catholic understandings of the second person of the Trinity from the top down. It was thus no surprise that the professional theologians of the Society of Jesus paid close attention to this intervention in their academic field. What they found in Berruyer’s eighth volume was a Christology that began with a completely new articulation of the incarnation. Berruyer was an avowed Trinitarian. He did not deny the doctrine of the Trinity or the notion that God intervened in the natural world.24 In his Christological essays, he affirmed his belief in “one true God subsisting in three divine Persons” all of whom existed for all of eternity.25 Where Berruyer began to deviate from traditional explanations of the Trinity, however, was in the way that he described the Trinity’s connection with the person of Jesus. Although he identified Jesus as the “son of God,” the second member of the Trinity, and “the Word,” he emphasized what he felt were the unique characteristics of this member of the Godhead, namely his human characteristics. Christ was the only member of the Trinity that took human form, and that human form only lasted for a certain length of time, the lifespan of Jesus of Nazareth. While Berruyer consistently emphasized that the second member of the Trinity was eternal, the incarnation of that member of

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the godhead in the person of Jesus happened in a particular historical moment. “Therefore,” declared Berruyer, “the most holy humanity of Jesus Christ … existed in time.”26 In Berruyer’s description the second person of the Trinity had two distinct emanations: the first was the emanation of the “son of God” as the second member of the Trinity, everlasting and one with the Father from the beginning of time, and the second was what he called the “natural son of God,” or the manifestation of the second member of the Trinity within the confines of “nature.” The natural son of God, according to Berruyer, existed within the constraints of time and space. Berruyer made clear that he was not suggesting that there was a time when the son of God did not exist – as the ancient anti-Trinitarian Arius had famously claimed – but that there was a time in which the specific form of the son of God that appeared on earth did not exist. To emphasize this important distinction, Berruyer argued that the incarnation of the natural son of God proceeded from the Trinity as a whole. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” explained Berruyer, “was made and called the Son of God because his most holy humanity was united with the Word in time, by the communal action of God … the three persons together.”27 The distinction that Jesus Christ proceeded from the Trinity as a whole allowed Berruyer to argue for Christ’s generation in time while not compromising the integrity of the doctrine of the Trinity and its infinite existence. The Trinity existed outside of time, but the natural son of God existed within it. It was this neologism and its corresponding explanation that so intrigued Morellet in his article for the Encyclopédie. For Morellet, the distinction between a natural son of God emanating from the whole Trinity and a son of God that was coeval with the other members of the Trinity explained the inherent tensions that existed within scriptural accounts of the incarnation and suggested both the temporality and a-temporality of the “Word made flesh.”28 However minute these distinctions may seem, for Berruyer they had tremendous implications. Most importantly, by identifying Jesus as the natural son of God, he was able to significantly humanize Jesus but still maintain a commitment to his divinity. While composed of the “hypostatic union of his humanity with the Word [the second person of the Trinity],” Jesus was essentially a being in flesh.29 Practically speaking, this meant that Jesus experienced the many emotions and feelings that all humans experienced. Jesus “suffered, thirsted, died,” like all humans,

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and his human nature guided his actions. Jesus was “God and Word, yet nevertheless Man,” according to Berruyer, and his humanity was “the effective and complete master of all of [his] actions.”30 The story of the Gospels, for Berruyer, was thus a “portrait” of a “singular man, a great man, an irreproachable man, ever the Savior, ever the Legislator, ever the Victim, ever the Model, ever a Man, yet more than a man; ever God but only so that he might appear as a God made Man for the salvation of Men.”31 Jesus was, in brief, “a man like us, conversing in our milieu.”32 The concept of the natural son of God provided Berruyer with the opportunity to show how humans, who were by nature good, could make their way through the world in a morally irreproachable way. Jesus as natural son of God lived a sinless, blameless life; this meant that humans constrained by the same limitations of the natural world could do the same. To emphasize how the natural son of God, though a member of the omnipotent Godhead, found himself constrained to follow the rules of the natural world, Berruyer often depicted Jesus as subject to human and natural limitations. In the second part of the Histoire, Jesus often stumbled upon or “found himself ” in certain places not because of divinely ordained plans but as mere matters of chance.33 He had to use his human intelligence and even cunning to elude those who sought to kill him.34 He relied on family connections rather than divine Providence to know whom to choose as his disciples.35 Even when he preached, taught, or prayed, Berruyer explained, Jesus’ actions were not “operations elicited by the Word” but instead “operations of only [his] humanity.”36 Berruyer went so far as to claim that Jesus received the same sufficient grace as all humans and thus faced the same experiences of having to choose between good and evil. “Sinlessness was not therefore natural to Jesus Christ the Man,” according to Berruyer.37 Although he never sinned, Jesus had the capacity to do so. Ever the Molinist, Berruyer felt that all people had the innate capacity to advance themselves toward either good or evil. Jesus was simply the only human to finish with a perfect record. Berruyer’s Jesus was an example of an enlightened human, doing good and bringing about justice and progress in the world. But what of those moments in the Gospels when Jesus was said to have done something that was clearly beyond human abilities? What of Jesus’ supernatural deeds? Berruyer did not deny the miraculous as

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many Enlightenment skeptics did throughout the eighteenth century.38 To preserve the centrality of Jesus’ humanity, however, he explained their operation in the Gospels in a unique way. Berruyer felt that anything that Jesus did that was miraculous or supernatural came not from the natural son of God himself but through the actions of God the Father. On Jesus’ premonitions, for example, Berruyer stated that he periodically received information directly from God the Father. Jesus’ omniscience did not pertain “precisely to his divine nature,” but, rather, this supernatural understanding came to him through an “infused knowledge” sent to him from a different member of the Trinity. Only “in this unique sense,” he concluded, was Jesus “knower of the future, inspector of hearts, and revealer of mysteries.”39 As the natural son of God, Jesus’ knowledge was limited to that which he could ascertain through his human senses. Similarly, Berruyer felt that the miraculous healings that Jesus enacted also came from the work of the Father. Jesus petitioned God the Father, and the Father produced the miraculous deed.40 Berruyer had Jesus explain all of this to his disciplines in a sort of theological soliloquy at one point in the course of his paraphrase. “As a man whose holy humanity is united in a divine person,” spoke Berruyer’s Jesus, “I operate [miracles] … by way of a request …. I pray and … my Father as God operates them by his omnipotence.” He later continued: “My words are the words of a man, but a man who being God is always guided by the mind of God. It is the same with my works; it is the Father living in me who operates the marvels that I do. I am a man, and it is not by my human power that I do miracles … I ask for them, and my Father does them by his omnipotence.”41 Jesus’ divinity amounted less to his ability to enact supernatural deeds and more to his unprecedented access to the Father’s divine will. “I will ask,” the natural son of God confidently declared, “and the Father will give.”42 In every other way, Jesus was as human as those to whom he spoke. Although the work of Maria-Cristina Pitassi and others have shown that there was no single conception of Christ in the Enlightenment, Berruyer’s Histoire participated in the general trend among Enlightenment writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to provide a vision of Christ that centred around his humanity. Berruyer’s explanation of the natural son of God privileged the power of the natural world to both define Jesus and his limitations. Many of the early Enlightenment’s most prominent writers similarly shifted

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conversations about Jesus away from the supernatural to the natural worlds. Edward Gibbon, for example, deemed the question of the incarnation to be unanswerable and thus settled on only contemplating Jesus’ human actions and teachings. Many English writers simply framed Jesus as a “second Moses” or an important purveyor of moral principles that corresponded with natural religion. Isaac Newton spoke of Christ mostly in political terms, and John Locke preferred to keep Jesus well within his historical context. Berruyer was far more explicit about his belief in Jesus’ divinity than any of these writers, but the general sensibility to shift focus to the human parts of Jesus he shared with his Enlightenment confreres. In his willingness to explore new notions of Christology, however, he struck a live wire. Christology touched on foundational concepts for Catholic orthodoxy. To innovate on such central tenets was perilous. However nuanced and moderate he intended to be, Berruyer terrified many of his Jesuit colleagues who thought his writings would open the door to more radical critiques of Catholicism. And the consequences of misconceiving the Trinity and the person of Christ was to open oneself up to accusations of heresy.43

Beginning the Berruyer Affair The second part of the Histoire only caused serious problems for Berruyer and his society once it was published and made available to the public. For twenty years, it remained in manuscript form and circulated only among members of the Society of Jesus. To get the second part of the Histoire into print, Berruyer had to circumvent the standard process of book production for members of the society. It took him the better part of two decades, but in 1753, he finally saw his efforts come to fruition. Once published, the book prompted an immediate and intense reaction by the Society of Jesus. Fearing the worst, the Jesuit superiors of France went into damage control, attempting to remove the book from the public sphere as quickly as possible. When they realized that keeping Berruyer’s ideas under wraps would be impossible, they mobilized and attempted to shape the public narrative about Berruyer and his book. In so doing, they kicked off what would become the “Berruyer Affair.” Despite initial setbacks, Berruyer continued to search for support among his Jesuit colleagues in the years following the completion of his

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manuscript. He wrote to Du Bois in April 1735 informing the assistant of France that he had left Lyon after having come to an impasse with the censors there. Twice he had offered corrections based on their comments, and both times he left “without an approbation … and without the hope of receiving one.” Berruyer requested that Du Bois speak directly to the superior general of the society and convince him to push the manuscript through to publication.44 Others joined in pleading Berruyer’s case. Thomas Dupré wrote to Du Bois defending Berruyer’s works. He called Tournemine’s attacks on Berruyer “slander” and tried to clear Berruyer of the charge that he was simply a new Hardouin.45 Charles Merlin also complained of Tournemine’s overzealousness.46 Merlin became especially concerned when Tournemine’s attacks began to include denunciations of Merlin himself and other associates of Berruyer.47 Despite their efforts, Berruyer, Dupré, and Merlin were fighting a losing battle. No one in Rome or among the superiors of the Province of France seemed willing to assist Berruyer in rolling out his new work. Unconvinced in his ability to get a fair hearing in Lyon, Berruyer eventually requested to have new censors from Toulouse review the manuscript.48 Berruyer felt that he needed to find new allies to bring his work to completion. In 1738, Berruyer’s frustrations were reaching a peak. Years spent petitioning authorities within the Society of Jesus had been fruitless. In an exasperated letter to Du Bois, he bemoaned the accusations brought against him by fellow Jesuits and even his former editors in Lyon. “In Lyon,” exclaimed Berruyer, “my revisers have singularly insisted on what they have called my system on the subject of the denomination of the Son of God.” But what they labelled his “system” was, for Berruyer, simply the “common belief ” of the entire Catholic Church and the “belief necessary for the literal understanding of Holy Scriptures.” Berruyer maintained that he had explained the incarnation simply and accurately, but he also acknowledged that he was writing in a different era than the church fathers. As a result, he had to change the way that he clarified such important topics as the Trinity. “We need a work that explains this matter,” exhorted Berruyer to Du Bois. “Such a work is complete, but I am unable to send it to you. Voilà, the inconvenience of these revisers.” Berruyer pleaded with Du Bois to intercede with the superior general on his behalf and to tell Retz that he was willing “to make any sacrifice” to ensure him that his intentions were good and his work was timely and valuable.49

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In fact, Berruyer had already addressed Retz himself. Months earlier, he wrote to Retz in an effort to defend himself from the accusations that Tournemine and others had brought against him. Berruyer flatly denied the blatant association with Hardouin. He assured Retz that he espoused only those ideas that were truly consistent with the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Though inventive, the new section of the Histoire, according to Berruyer, was not innovative. As in his letter to Du Bois, he claimed that his Christological opinions were consistent with the scriptures and orthodox Catholic belief.50 Retz, however, sided with Berruyer’s opponents and sent copies of the censures written by the Lyonnais censors and the members of the Collegio Romano to the provincial of France, Jean Lavaud, and to Berruyer himself.51 With the superior general’s declaration against the second part of the Histoire, the path to publication within the mechanisms of the Society of Jesus were blocked indefinitely. For this reason, Berruyer sought support outside of the society. This was a step that most Jesuit scholars did not take. All Jesuits were required to submit their prospective publications to their superiors and the reviser of books in Rome, and the institutional support of the society generally garnered enough power to push an approved work through to publication. Indeed, the Jesuits had their own press at the Collegio Romano should the particular Jesuit author not find a suitable one himself. But Berruyer’s notoriety and the wave of opposition that he faced within his own community pushed him in unique directions. Upon hearing the judgment of the Lyonnais censors, Berruyer travelled to Grenoble to try to win the support of the then archbishop of Embrun, Pierre Guérin de Tencin.52 A “worldly prelate living down a seamy past,” in the words of John McManners, Tencin had a good relationship with the Jesuits due largely to his role supporting their campaigns against the Jansenists following the promulgation of Unigenitus in 1713.53 A staunch supporter of the absolute monarchy and a strong papacy – Dale K. Van Kley has written that he maintained “an absolutism more absolute than the king’s, an ultramontanism more papal [than] the pope’s, and a ‘sacred union’ between these two” – Tencin also had a sister, Madame Claudine Guérin de Tencin, who hosted a literary salon that was popular among Parisian Jesuits.54 Worldly, pro-Jesuit, politically powerful, and connected to institutions of the Enlightenment, Tencin seemed the perfect ally for Berruyer.

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But Tencin either ignored Berruyer’s request for help or rejected it, for a year later Berruyer still found himself without someone to shepherd his work into publication. He continued his search with another bishop that he felt would be sympathetic to his plight: Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, the archbishop of Sens. Like Tencin, Languet had a good relationship with the Jesuits in part because of his rabid attacks on French Jansenists following the pronouncement of Unigenitus. Like Berruyer, Languet was the author of a recently published hagiography of Marguerite Alacoque, a nun and mystic from the convent of Parayle-Monial, which was denounced by the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques as “romanesque” and more like a novel than a work of piety. A member of the Academy of France, he had even supported the writings of the sentimentalist playwright Nivelle de la Chaussée.55 In brief, there were many reasons why Berruyer might have felt that Languet would be interested in supporting his work. In 1739, Berruyer presented his manuscript to the archbishop hoping for his approbation, but even Languet de Gergy disapproved of the new section of the Histoire.56 Upon reading the manuscript, Languet immediately brought it to Tournemine who dutifully locked it away and vowed never to let it “see the light of day.”57 By that time, however, the manuscript had also found itself in the hands of another prominent cleric: Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, Louis XV’s chief minister and one of the most powerful people in the entire kingdom.58 Fleury too found Berruyer’s work problematic, so much so that the Jesuit superior general, Retz, had to send instructions to the provincial general Lavaud on ways to assure Fleury that the Society “vehemently abhorred” Berruyer’s ideas.59 Fleury and Tencin eventually shared their mutual disdain of the work with each other. The problem for Fleury was that Berruyer borrowed too much from the philosophes. Berruyer was nothing but an arrogant writer trying “to make a name for himself with le monde” and doing so not by means of intelligence but rather with “self-conceit and vanity.”60 Rejected by even like-minded members of the church, Berruyer seemed out of options by the end of the 1730s. Berruyer’s inability to gain the approval of either the superiors of his society or members of the French episcopacy convinced him to approach agents of the French Librairie himself. A last glimmer of hope for progress within the society came with the death of his main rival, Tournemine, in May 1739. According to Claude de Linyères,

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Tournemine’s death prompted a certain François Oudin to request access to the manuscript formerly under lock and key and to pass it along to new Jesuit censors in Bordeaux. Oudin, it was reported, was “completely imbued with the opinions of Father Berruyer” and thus wanted to see Berruyer’s work come to light.61 Yet like Berruyer’s petitions to Tencin and Languet, these actions amounted to very little. Because of the previous reviews of Lacouture, Bordeaux provided no refuge for Berruyer’s orphaned book. Berruyer thus chose to approach civil authorities on his own. Both Linyères and Edmund Rivière reported in 1740 that Berruyer had taken his manuscript directly to Dominic Le Rouge, one of the royal censors in France. But Le Rouge too refused to support publication without the approval of Berruyer’s superiors. Over the following years, Berruyer sent his manuscript to other royal officials, and none seemed willing to aid him in his efforts to publish. The second part of the Histoire was stuck in publishing purgatory, unable to garner the necessary support from the Society of Jesus, the French episcopacy, or even the royal bureaucracy.62 A few years later, however, Berruyer’s persistence paid off. Early in the 1750s, Berruyer managed to get the ear of a very powerful supporter, Guillaume de Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, the Chancellor of France and leader of the pro-Jesuit “dévot” faction at court.63 Lamoignon was an especially useful sponsor not only because as chancellor he had tremendous political power but also because his son, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, had recently become director of the Librairie. Malesherbes famously organized much of French literary life during the heyday of the Enlightenment and was responsible for approving such works as the Encyclopédie.64 He was widely noted as a bureaucrat open to the new writings of the philosophes. Berruyer accurately assessed that Lamoignon and Malesherbes would be more amenable to his new work than previous civil or clerical authorities. In a letter to the chancellor, Berruyer described his many trials in getting approval for his manuscript and shared that he feared royal censors, at the behest of the Jesuit superiors of France, had purposefully “put all possible obstacles” in the way of his manuscript’s speedy publication. Time was of the essence, however, for the now seventy-one-year-old Berruyer. He saw in any delay the prospect of his life’s work unrealized. In an emotional petition, Berruyer pleaded for the chancellor’s help: “Therefore, I beseech you,

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very humbly and urgently to … make known to [the censors] your intentions for the expedition of this work. I am old and sick, and it is vital that I am able to finish this affair before my death. I am extremely committed to following the regulations [of the Librairie], and you can judge by my conduct if I am of the [nature] to dispense with them. I am not capable of fooling you, in assuring you, as I do, that when I have all the permissions and approbations required … you will always be in control of the timing and that I will make no step outside your orders.”65 Berruyer sincerely believed that his book would be beneficial to French readers. In the prospect that Lamoignon could get it into print, Berruyer promised to abide by any and all directives that he or the director of the Librairie, Malesherbes, might give. Whether the result of Berruyer’s impassioned plea or not, the chancellor paved the way for the publication of the second part of the Histoire. One year later, Berruyer’s paraphrase of the Gospels appeared in bookstores throughout Paris.66 Unlike the first part of the Histoire, however, Berruyer’s second installment did not receive an official “privilege” from the king. Rather, it was published with a “tacit permission” dispensed by Malesherbes.67 Tacit permissions had been introduced by administrators of the Librairie in 1715 as a way for books to be published without the official stamp of approval from the monarchy but still within its control. Malesherbes explained later in life that they were essential for the printing industry because they provided a faster avenue to publication for what was becoming an exponentially increasing number of book manuscripts submitted to royal censors. Indeed, he made more use of the tacit permission than any of his predecessors.68 Berruyer’s was one among many books that won the tepid approval of royal censors without the full confidence of the Librairie. Like other books printed with tacit permissions, the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire received a false imprint – the title page indicated that it was printed in “La Haye” by the printer “Neaulme” even though it was, in fact, produced in Paris by the printers Bordelet, Durand, and Hérissant – to protect its printers and those in the royal administration who might be held accountable for the controversial work.69 The long journey to publication ended in Berruyer’s ability to work with royal officials directly and take advantage of the same loosening restrictions of the Librairie that allowed many of the most notable works of the Enlightenment to come to fruition.70

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Just because Berruyer managed to get a tacit permission from French officials, however, did not mean that the superiors of his society changed their minds about his book. When the second part of the Histoire finally appeared in the summer and early fall of 1753, the superiors of the Province of France panicked and rushed to contain what they felt would be the inevitable damage to their public reputation. First, they tried to stop publishers from printing copies of the new book.71 Second, they reached out to royal authorities to help them prevent distribution. By the beginning of October, the police had reportedly seized 4,000 copies in Paris.72 An inspector in Clermont found sixteen copies of the book among the inventory of a bookseller in the city and immediately delivered it to the superiors of the local Jesuit community.73 Finally, they called in a favour from an important ally, Christophe de Beaumont, the archbishop of Paris. Beaumont agreed to help the Jesuits by giving them the astounding amount of 10,000 livres to reimburse printers and booksellers for unsold copies.74 These were drastic measures from the Jesuits of France, and they illustrated how very seriously they took the potential fallout over the publication of Berruyer’s book. Despite their efforts to stop the progress of the work, the Jesuit superiors realized that they could not contain Berruyer’s ideas. As a result, they decided to address the public directly. On 22 October 1753, they put out a brief statement distancing the society as a whole from Berruyer’s book. Written by the four superiors of the Province of France – Mathurin-Germain Le Forestier, Louis-Alexis Le Houx, Pierre-François de Saint-Jean, and Étienne De La Croix – the pamphlet began by assuring the public that the publication of the newest installment of the Histoire was undertaken “without [the superiors’] knowledge and against [their] will.” They admitted that the Histoire contained “singular and hazardous” ideas but defended themselves by calling attention to the tremendous efforts they had made to stop its production and sale. The superiors were clearly cautious in their public declaration, not elaborating on the details of Berruyer’s ideas nor strongly attacking the Histoire’s author himself, but the pamphlet made no pretenses about their ardent disapproval of the book. Upon printing their denunciation, they had it distributed at the doors of Parisian churches and the entrances of public promenades. The superiors of France knew that the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire would cause controversy and a public relations nightmare for the society. Their

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declaration allowed them to get ahead of the story and attempt to mitigate its potential damage.75 Interestingly, the affair over the second part of the Histoire got its first spark from the actions of one of the Jesuits’ allies: Christophe de Beaumont. Within a few months of the publication of the newest section of the Histoire, Beaumont sent out a call to gather as many bishops and clergymen as possible to determine how to deal with the release of Berruyer’s book. The meeting took place on 3 December 1753 at the archbishop’s estate in Conflans, and participants included the archbishops of Cambray, Rouen, Narbonne, Toulon, and Sens, the bishops of Orange, Mans, Grenoble, Bayeux, Meaux, Chartres, the former bishop of Quebec and a host of other important clergymen.76 Together, the assembled members deliberated over the Histoire’s newest section and made two important decisions. First, they unanimously concluded that the book was indeed dangerous and must be publicly denounced. Second, they resolved that one of their members ought to make a more formal assessment of the book and its problems. Beaumont assured the clergymen that he planned to compose a mandement that would prohibit members of his diocese from reading or owning the Histoire. He also promised a “thorough examination” of the work that would be shared with the group at a later date.77 Ten days later, Beaumont finished his mandement, which he circulated among those attending a second meeting in Paris.78 In criticizing the second part of the Histoire, he was decisive but also careful, choosing to condemn the work using the phrases and rationales already articulated by critics of the first part of Berruyer’s Histoire. Beaumont objected, for example, to the way that Berruyer’s paraphrase failed to imitate the “noble and majestic simplicity which characterizes the divine word” and how he inserted his own voice and opinions without distinguishing them from the text of the scriptures. Like many of Berruyer’s Jesuit critics, Beaumont also noted that the Histoire included ideas that were “singular,” “dangerous,” and stood outside of the “paths emblazed by Tradition.”79 Most susceptible to these threats would be “people that the [style] of novelty seduces and captures.”80 Beaumont certainly disapproved of Berruyer’s book, but by criticizing it the way that he did, he sought to protect Berruyer’s superiors. Beaumont brought no new charges against Berruyer. He avoided calling attention, for example, to the particulars of Berruyer’s statements about the incarnation or

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the nature of Christ. Beaumont shared the Jesuit leaders’ objective of addressing the problem of Berruyer’s book but minimizing the spread of his ideas. Together, the two allies attempted to control the public conversation about the Histoire in order to protect themselves from public reproach. Beaumont also pressed the Jesuits to make another more definitive statement. Their initial declaration helped the Jesuits of the Province of France to quickly go on record as having opposed Berruyer’s new book, but Beaumont felt that something more substantive was necessary. The superiors of France determined that the best way to limit the damage that the book’s release could do would be to make a statement in their most widely circulating public institution: the Journal de Trévoux. At the head of its initial volume of 1754, the Journal included a notice from the superiors of the Jesuit Province of France. It declared that the Jesuits as a whole “wished to give [Beaumont] … a public and authentic testimony of their obedience” to his mandement. They informed readers that they had already denounced the second part of the Histoire publicly in their declaration of October 1753 and reaffirmed their disapproval of Berruyer’s book. The article did not include further discussion of the Histoire or the reasons why they disapproved of it, but it did include a response from Berruyer himself. Having explained that Berruyer had “totally abandoned his book” upon the recommendation of his superiors and the aforementioned bishops, the article included at the bottom a solemn response from the controversial Jesuit. Berruyer professed to “sincerely submit to the mandement of Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris … and promise … to regard as reprehensible and condemnable that which [the bishops] believe ought to be taken back.” Together with the Beaumont’s mandement, the superiors’ statement in the Journal de Trévoux intended to put an end to public scandal before it began and save the society from any further embarrassment.81 The second part of the Histoire prompted a response from the leaders of the French Society of Jesus and members of the episcopacy almost immediately after it appeared in 1753. Though their efforts began in private, through negotiations with publishers and public officials, it eventually turned to the public sphere in part because Beaumont and the Jesuit superiors recognized the inevitability of Berruyer’s ideas reaching a broad audience. They had to find a way to denounce the Histoire publicly and distance themselves from its ideas without

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calling unnecessary attention to those ideas. With a unified message, the superiors and Beaumont must have felt confident that the narrative around Berruyer was under control. They surely believed that in responding as they did they had successfully distanced themselves from Berruyer while not heaping abuse on someone who was, admittedly, one of their own. This was the opinion of the authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques who saw the simplicity of Beaumont’s condemnation as an indication that he was trying to protect the Society of Jesus rather than denounce a dangerous writer.82 Beaumont’s mandement and the follow-up article by the Jesuits and Berruyer himself, however, were not the end of the story. Ironically, their public statements began a conversation that persisted over the course of the next five years. In those five years, new actors got involved and raised the intensity of the debates to new levels. This public showdown was the “Berruyer Affair,” one of the most notable literary causes célèbres of the eighteenth-century French Catholic Church.

The Berruyer Affair The Jesuit superiors of France and their ecclesiastical allies were the first to make public statements about the Histoire’s controversial second part, but French Jansenists turned Berruyer’s book into an “affair.” In choosing to openly denounce Berruyer’s book, Beaumont placed the question of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism before the public tribunal. A censure from such an important figure in the church begged for a response from Berruyer’s allies. Convinced that Beaumont had done Berruyer wrong, they mobilized to defend their colleague by way of the public sphere. Paradoxically, the cautiousness with which Beaumont had structured his mandement also prompted members of the French Jansenist community to respond. They felt that Beaumont had pulled punches on behalf of his friends. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques immediately demanded a more substantial statement. Jansenist bishops and clergymen answered the call. Far from repeating the tropes of previous critics, however, these Jansenist polemicists labelled Berruyer nothing less than a heretic and held the whole of the Society of Jesus responsible for his ideas. In illegally printed pamphlets, books, and issues of their periodical, French Jansenists launched Berruyer into the public spotlight.

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The authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques already had a long list of grievances against Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. In addition to their criticisms of the first installment of the Histoire, the authors had also accused the Jesuit of a host of other misdeeds. They blamed him for helping the archbishop of Paris Charles-Gaspard-Guillaume de Vintimille in his condemnation of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques in 1732.83 They suggested that Berruyer had influenced heterodox publications from other Jesuits in the 1740s.84 They even derided Berruyer for involving himself in a court case on behalf of a group of men accused of plotting an assassination.85 For the authors of the Nouvelles, Berruyer was a Jesuit with a record of foul behaviour, so when they spoke out against him in the opening months of 1754, they were incensed by the lack of action taken in the wake of the bishops’ and superiors’ statements of the year prior. Berruyer had suffered no consequences for publishing the second part of his Histoire. The only explanation, according to the authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, was that Beaumont had been protecting him by refusing to acknowledge Berruyer’s problematic past.86 There were so many possible reasons to criticize Berruyer, they argued, and the archbishop had chosen to highlight none of them in his mandement. For this reason, Beaumont’s statement was nothing more than “the first cry that announces that a fire is in the house and that it’s necessary to hurry up and extinguish it.”87 The Jansenist periodical declared that there was still much work to be done to combat Berruyer’s dangerous ideas. The authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques were not the only ones upset with Beaumont. At around the same time as the reaction in the Nouvelles, one of Berruyer’s Jesuit colleagues penned a series of letters printed together as the Lettres en réponse d’un ecclésiastique de Province which took up the cause of Berruyer’s defence.88 Though he conceded that Berruyer’s book included “novelties” that were not “absolutely necessary,” the anonymous author maintained that these novelties were not fundamentally threatening to the church. The “most honest and the most learned people” of his town had read the new book, the author claimed, and applauded its “profound yet sensitive erudition … tender and solid piety … [and] genius … employed for the profit of Religion.” To the bishops’ denunciation of the Histoire’s profane style, the author of the Lettres en réponse replied, “How does one describe the style of the Scriptures anyway? It is without a doubt … the manner by which

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the Apostles and the Disciples, for the most part poor, ignorant, crude, and chosen by God to rattle strength by their weakness, have expressed the sublime objects of Christianity.” To the criticism that Berruyer inserted his own theological interpretations into the paraphrase of the scriptures themselves, the author wondered what else one could do; theologians were charged with “bringing together their enlightenment in order to clarify those texts for which authority, a certain tradition, or the evidence of the times still [have not fixed] an accurate signification.” Beaumont and his fellow bishops failed to see the “real utility” of the work. Considering the growing number of “Deist authors” in France, Berruyer’s mediated Christology posed little threat. His willingness to apologize for his mistakes, moreover, demonstrated his true “love for peace” and exemplified how the Jesuits as a whole were “respectful … even to bishops to whom they are not favorable.” The author of the Lettres en réponse clearly sought to change the narrative around Berruyer’s latest book. Instead of a work that was offensive to Catholic sensibilities, the Histoire was an ambitious work, seeking to remedy the problem of unbelief in a way that was both innovative and pious.89 Elsewhere, other clergymen were attempting to shift the terms of the public debate about Berruyer’s Histoire in an altogether different direction. On 12 January 1754, roughly a month after Beaumont and company released their response to the second part of the Histoire, Charles-Daniel-Gabriel de Caylus, the bishop of Auxerre, released his own mandement denouncing Berruyer. The episcopal order was a simple document. It prohibited the people of his diocese from reading Berruyer’s controversial book and referenced Beaumont’s similar effort. Besides lamenting Berruyer’s inappropriate writing style and his audacity in “adding” to the scriptures his own interpretations and narratives, Caylus claimed that his denunciation came as a result of a “public outcry” against the book.90 In a letter written two months later, he shared that, though he felt his mandement was well-received by “the public,” a mere interdiction was not enough. Berruyer’s book needed to undergo an “extensive examination” so that the public would know precisely why it was dangerous.91 Caylus himself decided to undertake this examination with the help of the able theological minds that resided with him in his diocese of Auxerre. Auxerre had been a Jansenist stronghold since around the turn of the eighteenth century. Caylus himself was a decided supporter of the

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Jansenist movement. He promoted the miracles around the tomb of the deacon Pâris, served as the spiritual director for the “solidly Jansenist” Filles du Calvaire, supported the call for a general council in the wake of Unigenitus, and fought against the efforts of Cardinal Fleury to persecute Jansenist clergymen. In his time as bishop, he employed many of the Jansenist community’s most influential thinkers, writers, and activists including the important figurist thinker, the abbé JeanBaptiste d’Étemare, and the abbé Augustin Clément who served as an “ambassador” of sorts for the movement in Rome and Spain. His chief theological advisor, however, was Robert Alexandre Duhamel. Together, Caylus and Duhamel decided to write what would become the first thorough investigation of the second part of the Histoire.92 The community of talented associates in Auxerre was important because, in the midst of the effort to pen a longer pastoral letter, Caylus died. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques lamented his untimely departure and confirmed that at the time of his death he was, in fact, in the process of composing a formidable piece against Berruyer.93 They feared that without the notable bishop the prospect of producing something more substantial would fade away. Fortunately for the authors of the Nouvelles, Duhamel, Caylus’s theological advisor, completed the work on his own before the end of the year and published it as the Projet d’instruction pastorale sur les erreurs du livre intitulé, Histoire du peuple de Dieu. The Projet d’instruction pastorale became the most significant attack on the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire to date and went far beyond the simple criticisms of Berruyer’s style and “innovations.” While he certainly objected to Berruyer’s writing – repeating the now well-established accusation that the Histoire failed to reflect the “majestic simplicity” of the Bible and transformed the sacred characters of the scriptures into “Romanesque persons” – Duhamel struck at the core of the work, attacking Berruyer’s Christology and the main elements of his Enlightenment Catholicism.94 He began by criticizing Berruyer’s emphasis on the humanity of Christ. For Duhamel, the notion that Christ could have both a divine will and a human will, as Berruyer argued, contradicted the doctrine that the two natures of Christ were inextricably linked. It was the divinity of Christ that functioned as “the one authority, the one leader, the one commander” of the person of Jesus and thus was responsible for “all the actions of [his] humanity,” according to Duhamel.95 Duhamel

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also rejected Berruyer’s expansion of the capacities of natural religion. Berruyer’s opinion that natural religion could transmit the full revelation sufficient for salvation made the person of Jesus Christ, his death, and resurrection superfluous.96 In a typically Jansenist fashion, Duhamel also condemned Berruyer’s emphasis on human free will and the way that it flew in the face of theological tradition. Berruyer “entirely ignore[d] … Tradition,” according to Duhamel, never “citing the Fathers of the Church” nor even including “any passages taken from the works of the Holy Doctors.”97 Unlike Beaumont and Berruyer’s superiors, Duhamel had no desire to soften his criticisms. He identified Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism as nothing other than a threat to the church. Duhamel’s Projet d’instruction pastorale introduced not only a new line of ideological assault against Berruyer but also a new means of attack. Prior to the publication of his brief work, condemnations of the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire had come mainly through official statements published at the prerogatives of bishops and archbishops throughout the kingdom.98 Members of the episcopacy had the ability to print and distribute pastoral letters without going through the mechanisms of preventative censorship. These works were a part of the legal structures of the Librairie. Duhamel’s Projet d’instruction pastorale, however, was an illegal book. Without the cover of Bishop Caylus, Duhamel had to engage in the illicit market to get his opinions out about Berruyer. An avalanche of anonymously published, illegal texts written by members of the French Jansenist community followed Duhamel’s initial work. A coordinated effort to attack the Histoire and publicize its dangers began in 1755 and continued through the end of the decade. Jansenists carefully and methodically interrogated the Histoire to expose the ideas that he and his allies espoused. Unlike Beaumont and the Jesuit superiors of France, French Jansenists intended to broadcast Berruyer’s controversial ideas as broadly and often as possible in order to use the Histoire as a tool to mobilize public opinion against the Jesuits. In moving to the realm of illegal publications, the attacks against Berruyer grew more aggressive. Jansenist polemicists shifted their criticisms away from well-trod arguments about the novelty of Berruyer’s ideas and his “profane” style to the more damning accusation that Berruyer’s theological ideas amounted to nothing less than heresy. The Oratorian priest and Jansenist theologian, Joseph Auguste de Maille,

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kicked off this new campaign with what would become a fourvolume series titled Le Père Berruyer, jésuite, convaincu d’Arianisme, de Pelagianisme, de Nestorianisme, &c.99 For Maille, Berruyer’s theological “innovations” were in fact not innovations at all. Berruyer had revived “the ancient heresies of the fourth and fifth centuries” in modern terms.100 The authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques applauded Maille’s effort to “go into depth into … [Berruyer’s] system” and even suggested that the Assembly of the Clergy publish Maille’s book under its own name and with the whole clergy’s approval.101 Soon, other Jansenist writers, including Duhamel once again, added their own voices to what became a resounding chorus of critics all singing the same polemical song. Prudent Maran, Pierre Guénard, Jean-Baptiste Cadry, Henri Montignot, Bescherand De La Motte, Jean-Baptiste Gaultier, and many others published works denouncing the Jesuit as a heretic. Many of their books extended into multiple volumes, and the total number of pages dedicated to exposing Berruyer’s “heresies” reached into the thousands. Through sheer volume, Jansenist polemicists sought to seize the narrative about Berruyer’s controversial theology and shape it in a very particular direction. Their strategy revolved around associating those parts of Berruyer’s Christology that were most controversial to the statements made by some of the church’s most famous heretics. Maille began by tying Berruyer’s explanation of the incarnation to the arguments made by the fourth-century Alexandrian priest, Arius, whose most infamous theological slogan about Christology was that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not.” In arguing against Trinitarians, Arius tried to make the point that as the son of God, Jesus was not co-eternal with the Father. Maille found Berruyer’s explanation of the natural son of God and his creation in time to be a modified version of Arianism.102 Maran explained that in proposing his notion of a natural son of God, Berruyer had completely undermined the Trinitarian understanding of the incarnation.103 The problem with the idea of the natural son of God, according to Guenard, was that it actually posited a “quadrinity” or a Godhead that included “the Father, the Word and only Son of the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ, the natural son of the three persons.”104 Whatever he was, argued these Jansenist critics, Berruyer was not a Trinitarian, for his arguments resembled Arianism more than Roman Catholicism.

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Critics also accused Berruyer of revitalizing the Nestorian heresy. Like Arianism, Nestorianism was an early church heresy that advanced a different understanding of the person of Christ than that of the Trinitarians. The fifth-century bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius maintained that the divine and human natures of Christ remained “unaltered and distinct” and thus the nature of Christ was fundamentally divided and not one.105 The Jansenist abbé Bescherand De La Motte claimed that Berruyer similarly “present[ed] the humanity of Jesus Christ as independent from the Word in all his actions.” “Isn’t this what Nestorius used to express so clearly his impious dogma?” asked the abbé.106 Duhamel added that Berruyer “seperat[ed] the divine and the human” and only depicted Jesus’ “human, finite, created gifts.” By contrast, he explained, Catholics must understand Jesus as “one divine person” in which the Word “directs all [and] acts in everything and everywhere.”107 Berruyer’s conception of Jesus’ reliance on human knowledge and human senses clearly revealed him to be a Nestorian in these Jansenists’ collective opinions.108 Critics also labelled Berruyer a proponent of Pelagianism. The fifth-century laymen Pelagius was the most ardent opponent of none other than the Jansenists’ theological paragon, Augustine. Much to Augustine’s chagrin, Pelagius condemned both the doctrines of original sin and predestination and maintained that human free will was left undamaged by the Fall. That Jansenist writers labelled a Jesuit writer Pelagian was nothing new; this was one of the Jansenists’ favourite accusations against the Molinist members of the Society of Jesus. Berruyer, however, was an egregious case. He placed the onus of human history almost entirely in the hands of humans themselves and even tried to humanize God in the person of Jesus. Berruyer’s idea of natural religion denied the necessity of God’s grace for human salvation and equipped humans themselves with the ability to obtain eternal life – a notion that was nothing less than the “error of Pelagius” according to Henri Montignot.109 Guenard too branded him a “modern Pelagian” and added that Berruyer was even “bolder than his predecessors.”110 A host of other heretical accusations came against the author of the Histoire in a variety of other polemical treatises. Berruyer was found guilty of “Agnoëtism,” declared a follower of the Ebionites, Sabellius, and the Socinians and even linked with the very Deists that he so ardently denounced.111 Berruyer was, in other words, an “arch-heretic” – someone

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who combined the many errors of heretics past into a new, seductive, and dangerous package.112 Berruyer and his allies, however, put the charge of heresy back on the Histoire’s detractors. Like their opponents, Berruyer and his colleagues took to publishing illegally to get their side of the story into the public eye. In their own flurry of pamphlets and books, Berruyer’s allies launched assaults against the Jansenist polemicists. Their primary message was consistent with what many Jesuit polemicists had been arguing for decades – namely, that Jansenists were not trustworthy judges of theological orthodoxy because their own theological ideas had been formally condemned by the papacy. In his first response, Berruyer accused Duhamel of supporting “Predestinarian errors” – a not-so-subtle code for Jansenism – and of including “heresies” in his own writing.113 The anonymous author of another defence claimed that Guénard’s Sommaire de la Doctrine du P. Berruyer was nothing more than an “abridgement and faithful extract of the calumnious writings [of ] the author of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques” and charged Montignot of promoting “the most determined irreligion.”114 Even the most mild of apologies for Berruyer, an anonymous work titled Lettre d’un théologien à un des ses amis, stamped Duhamel as simply one of the “new Augustinians” who espoused a theology that was “Jansenist.”115 The terms of the debate over the second part of the Histoire came to revolve around who was the more “heretical,” Berruyer or the ones who accused him of heresy. Berruyer’s defenders also spent time making the case for the orthodoxy of Berruyer’s ideas. Berruyer reminded those who read his Défense de la seconde partie that he overtly and repeatedly affirmed that God “subsisting in three persons created the world” and that Christ was a part of the eternal Godhead.116 The author of the Nouvelle défense de l’Histoire du Peuple de Dieu similarly rejected Maille’s claim that Berruyer was a Nestorian by explaining that he did not recognize Christ as having two separate persons but rather two wills joined in one person.117 The same defender of Berruyer brushed aside the accusation of Pelagianism by Montignot and others by reminding readers that Jansenists always threw around the label of Pelagian against members of the Society of Jesus; in this author’s opinion, Augustine himself would have been “stunned to see that you [Montignot] seriously tried to prove that Father Berruyer was a Pelagian.”118 Another of Berruyer’s defenders concluded

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that all accusations of heresy were ridiculous. Berruyer promoted “quite clearly the divinity, consubstantiality, and incarnation of the Word.”119 Most of the defences of Berruyer refused to admit fault in even the most controversial of his ideas. In combating some of Montignot’s criticisms about Berruyer’s failure to consult any Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible, the author of the Défense du P. Berruyer went so far as to invoke Hardouin’s notions about the corruption of ecclesiastical documents to claim that Berruyer didn’t have to use the ancient texts.120 Indeed, he suggested that only heretics consult the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts in order to bolster their erroneous doctrines and fight against “the natural expressions of the Council [of Trent].”121 Berruyer refused to budge on some of his particularly controversial positions. He maintained that Christ did not operate solely on the provocation of the Word, but that acting through his human capacities and impulses Christ remained “in his humanity … wise, just, and holy.”122 Indeed, he insisted that the “Person of the Word … does not influence the actions of the humanity of Jesus Christ … any more than does the Father or the Holy Spirit.”123 He also defended his belief that Christ used only his human knowledge during his earthly ministry, since this was the knowledge natural to him as the natural son of God.124 He even fortified his opinion that Christ only performed miracles through petitions to God.125 Berruyer refused to admit that any of the interpretations of the Histoire were problematic. He ceded no ground to the critiques levelled against him and instead fought back to justify himself and his ideas before the public. The Berruyer Affair reached the levels of notoriety and vitriol that it did in large part because it occurred in a moment that was already filled with tension between French Jansenists and Jesuits. Jansenists had been getting progressively more political in the decades following the promulgation of Unigenitus and its eventual incorporation into civil law in France. Waves of persecution directed by André-Hercule de Fleury and others resulted in the Jansenists’ adoption of figurism, an eschatological theology that cast Jansenists as the faithful witnesses of the truth amidst the oppressive forces of the anti-Christ. In their role as witnesses, they took to the public sphere to cry out on behalf of the faithful and denounce the forces of evil. Their public outcries reached a peak right around 1750 when Christophe de Beaumont and his allies began to systematically refuse the sacraments, particularly

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the sacrament of last rites, to those who had not signed a billet de confession, or a written notice that they accepted the bull Unigenitus. The archbishop’s willingness to deny Catholic priests and laypeople remission of sins as they lay on their deathbeds produced outrage among Jansenists and non-Jansenists alike. Jansenists chose to fight the policy within the domain of public opinion by attacking the archbishop and the Jesuits whom they held responsible for the archbishop’s decision. Berruyer published the second part of Histoire at the precise moment that French Jansenists were denouncing the “evils” of Beaumont and the refusal of sacraments. The timing accounts for just how quickly and furiously the affair grew. Already mobilized, Jansenist polemicists simply needed to shift their attention to Berruyer and find a way to use his work as a way to weaken the position of the Jesuits and their allies as a whole.126 Berruyer’s defenders recognized that Jansenist attacks against the Histoire had much to do with politics. Berruyer blamed the initial publication of Duhamel’s Projet d’instruction pastorale on Jansenist “partisans” who sought to impugn the work of a Jesuit for the sheer sake of scoring political points.127 The author of the Lettres d’un Théologien lamented the irrational “passion” of Maille and Duhamel against Berruyer “and against his whole Company” – a passion that transformed what could have been valid critiques, according to the author, into “injustices.”128 In the words of the Nouvelle défense, Berruyer’s detractors were “impassioned men who sacrifice what is right and good faith to the desire to blacken and render suspect or odious an author whom they simply do not like.”129 They were demi-savants, “who … attacked [the Histoire du peuple de Dieu] even before they read the book.”130 In contrast, most of Berruyer’s apologists claimed impartiality. The author of the Défense du P. Berruyer claimed to be “neither a friend nor an enemy to the Jesuits” and simply one who “loves justice and … likes to render it to a Jesuit along with anyone else.”131 The author of the Lettre à un Docteur de Sorbonne similarly claimed to be “neither a partisan of [Berruyer] nor even a defender of his works,” but instead one who was trying to do what was right.132 Berruyer’s supporters identified that the political context surrounding the publication of the second part of the Histoire had played an important role in the Berruyer Affair, and they attempted to use that reality to their benefit by casting themselves as trustworthy and French Jansenist as manipulative and self-aggrandizing.

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For the better part of five years, the war of words between Berruyer’s supporters and Jansenist polemicists broadcast the divisions over Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism to the French public. The very concerns that Berruyer’s superiors shared in the years preceding the publication of the second part of the Histoire eventually found their way to print first in the restrained words of the superiors themselves and then in the statements of their allies in the episcopacy. When members of the French Jansenist community caught wind of Berruyer’s audacious theological ideas, however, they felt no need to moderate their criticisms. First with Caylus and his associates in Auxerre and then through the pens of polemicists around the kingdom, Jansenists sounded the tocsin against the dangers of Berruyer’s experiment in Enlightenment Catholicism. Seeing that the charge of “innovation” had done little to actually stop the progress of his works, they tried to rebrand him not as an innovator but instead as someone who looked like the heretics of long ago. Jansenists sought to take away the novel, fashionable edge that had followed the Jesuit’s writings and make him seem dull, hackneyed, and heterodox. Perhaps most interesting, however, was the reaction of Berruyer and his supporters. They did not sit idly by as Jansenist critics heaped accusations at the Histoire and its author. They too chose to engage in the world of illicit print to counteract Jansenist efforts to shape the public opinion against Berruyer. They too reduced themselves to name-calling and slander. They pointed out that at the centre of the “affair” was the long-standing division between the Jesuits and Jansenists that had reached a peak in the very years that they were writing. Because of the Berruyer Affair, however, Jansenists, Jesuits, members of the episcopacy, and many more were forced to distinguish their positions on Berruyer’s new theological ideas. The affair calcified old hatreds and created new ones in large part through the power of public opinion.

Conclusion The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques first conceptualized the polemical tête-a-tête between Berruyer’s supporters and his critics as an “event” worthy of serious consideration in the autumn of 1755. Before then, they had reported the actions of Berruyer’s superiors, Beaumont,

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the publications of some of the early works of Duhamel and others against the Histoire, and even the appearance of some of the defences but without thinking of all of these things as forming a cause célèbre. In November 1755, however, they began to describe the conflict induced by the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire differently. “The publication of the book of Father Berruyer in 1753,” wrote the authors, “was like a sort of crisis” in the church.133 A year later, they gave it its name: “the affair of Father Berruyer.”134 The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques had very much become the periodical of record for the event, following its twists and turns and the appearance of every new work that came out either for or against the Histoire. By 1757, the Nouvelles would exclaim, with perhaps a measure of tabloid exaggeration, that the Berruyer Affair had become “one of the greatest scandals that has come to the Church.”135 Leaders of the French Jansenist community were thrilled by the prospect of yet another revelatory “affair” involving a member of the Society of Jesus in France. The Jesuits had had their fair share in the preceding decades, not the least of which was the affair of Father Girard and Catherine Cadière.136 Berruyer joined the ranks of Girard and many others whose actions had drawn public attention. That Jansenists saw the “Berruyer Affair” as comparable to the incident that involved Girard can be seen in the ways that they organized their records about Berruyer. Among the papers of the abbé Jean-Baptiste d’Etemare in Troyes is a collection labelled in his hand, “Pièces relatives à l’affaire du P. JosephIsaac Berruyer.” The abbé compiled a list of all those works written for and against Berruyer. The list gave shape to the affair and its various components. For the abbé, it was important to organize his records in this way so that the collected writings could be conceptualized as one single event.137 The lawyer and Jansenist ringleader Louis-Adrien Le Paige felt similarly. Le Paige collected as many of the writings that made up the Berruyer Affair as he could and bound them together in their own volume with the title, “the Affair of Father Berruyer.”138 Eventually, French Jansenists reified the “event” and presented it as such to the public. Midway through the Berruyer Affair, an anonymously edited collection of documents appeared with the title Recueil des critiques qui ont paru contre l’Histoire du Peuple de Dieu. The volume included portions of the most important pieces that had criticized the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire. Its author intended to provide the public with the “high points” of the affair and thus present the affair

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3.1 The Affair of Father Berruyer. The volume included pamphlets, newspapers articles, and other documents all related to the Berruyer Affair in the 1750s. The collection was a part of the Jansenist lawyer Louis-Adrien Le Paige’s library.

as a cohesive whole.139 Of course, the assumption was that there was a market for such a work. It’s difficult to know what kind of audience the many works involved in the Berruyer Affair had, but the steady proliferation of publications over the course of the 1750s suggests that people continued to pay attention. What made the Berruyer Affair of significant interest to most was the involvement of the state, a story that will be presented in more detail in the next chapter. That the publication of the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire unleashed an “affair” is significant because of the political importance of public affairs in eighteenth-century France. As Sarah Maza has explained, causes célèbres of this sort were crucial in shaping the political discourses that were invoked in the tumultuous years of the 1770s and 1780s and that led eventually to the outbreak of the French Revolution.140 In unleashing a cavalcade of polemical attacks against the Histoire and in invoking some of the most powerful accusations that a theologian could muster – namely, the accusation of heresy – French Jansenists created a public debate which, through

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the volume of their publications and the power of their arguments, they tried to control. In turn, they placed Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism before the public tribunal and exhibited the tensions that it had already invoked before the eyes of literate Francophones. Their success in making the publication of the second part of the Histoire into a “crisis” became all the more evident as the decade wore on and Jansenists took the issue of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism to institutions of the French state. Eventually, Berruyer’s ideas and the Berruyer Affair became inseparable. One could not speak of one without mentioning the other. Nothing exemplifies this better than Morellet’s article in the Encyclopédie, which, while doing its best to elucidate what Morellet felt was the ingenuity in Berruyer’s Christology, nevertheless had to mention that critics had labelled him a “Nestorian” and “Socinian.” Whatever public image Berruyer had acquired because of the publication of the first part of his Histoire, it was overcome by the image given to him by Jansenist polemicists in the 1750s. By the end of the decade, Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism had become so tarnished with the labels of “heresy” and “heterodoxy” that the Jesuit became politically toxic. Using the poisonous dart of Berruyer, French Jansenists found ways to weaponize Enlightenment Catholicism in the following decade and use it to slay their greatest adversary, the Society of Jesus.

4

From Ink to Ashes Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.”1 “Peter,” the Savior said to him, “return your sword to its sheath. Remember that whosoever will use the sword against the ordinary power of a magistrate will perish by the sword of that same magistrate authorized to punish the resistance of those who revolt against his orders.”2

Even before Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont called the meeting at his estate in Conflans to deal with the publication of the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire, Inspector Joseph D’Hémery had his eyes on the controversial book. As Robert Darnton has aptly detailed, D’Hémery was a meticulous agent for the Librairie. His work was systematic and thorough, and he compiled large amounts of information on authors, printers, and booksellers in his various journals and dossiers.3 As early as September 1753, he noted that the second installment of the Histoire had already arrived in Parisian bookstores. Upon some digging, he realized that the book had received a tacit permission and thus was approved for publication by royal censors. Like many books that received these tacit permissions, however, the Histoire was not free from suspicion. D’Hémery and many others involved in the Librairie – including its director at the time, Malesherbes – used tacit permissions as trial-runs for questionable works. If a book caused too much trouble, its permission could be revoked, and agents of the state would remove the book from circulation. A month before the meeting at Conflans, D’Hémery foresaw the eventual end of Berruyer’s book. The second part of the Histoire had already caused a “great ruckus,” according to D’Hémery, because it had been accused of teaching “complete atheism.” “Some are saying,” D’Hémery consequently predicted, “that [Berruyer’s] book will be suppressed.”4

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In the following year, D’Hémery’s prediction came true. Malesherbes and his agents began to crack down on printers and search for copies of the book. D’Hémery reported that his agents had found the Histoire at the shop of various booksellers including Jean-Thomas Hérissant, whom the Jesuit superiors of France were attempting to pay to stop him from selling new copies.5 In a letter to an associate written in September 1754, however, the inspector revealed that two other Parisian printers were still selling the book simply because “most [people] are still interested in this work.”6 The Jesuit superiors of France along with members of the Parisian guild for book sellers and printers were fighting against this demand and trying to stop the Histoire from reaching the public.7 They were assisted by Beaumont who gave Malesherbes tips on new editions of the Histoire that he discovered and places where it could be found.8 Indeed, Beaumont was so consumed with stopping the progress of the Histoire – according to Malesherbes in a letter to Voltaire – that he had “no time for other censures,” a subtle gesture of approval for the controversial philosophe to feel confident in his own publication efforts.9 By 1754, authorities of both the church and state came together to remove the book from the public eye. Censorship played an important role in both politicizing and publicizing the Histoire du peuple de Dieu. At the same time that D’Hémery was hunting down copies of the Histoire throughout Paris, the Berruyer Affair was beginning to spiral out of control. Unlike two decades earlier, authorities felt the pressure to do more to deal with the Histoire and its author. In 1755, the book landed on the docket of the Parlement of Paris whose members used their authority to make possession of the second part of the Histoire officially illegal within the jurisdiction of the court. Soon after, the Roman Congregation of the Index and the papacy itself issued their own condemnations. The 1750s saw a shift in the history of Berruyer’s book and the Enlightenment Catholicism that it espoused. With the publication of the second part and the subsequent outbreak of the Berruyer Affair, new efforts to suppress the Histoire arose both in France and outside of it. But the de-centralized nature of the mechanism of censorship and the political realities of the many bodies involved in the process of censorship unintentionally spread awareness of the Histoire and its ideas throughout the continent.

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Censorship and the Church in France The Histoire du peuple de Dieu became an object of significant political importance partly because it was caught in the middle of a political dispute over the mechanisms of censorship in the Kingdom of France. Censorship was a contested enterprise in Old Regime France. While administrators from the Librairie were officially tasked with monitoring and managing the literary market, they were joined in their efforts by others outside of the royal bureaucracy. Regional parlements waded into the waters of censorship in order to establish their authority throughout the kingdom. Various organs of the Catholic Church used their prerogatives as the spiritual leaders of France to insert themselves into the process. In the mid-eighteenth century, a censorial mechanism that had grown organically from its origins in the sixteenth century came to a point of conflict. Institutions that claimed to have the power to censor books began to assert their control through statements to the wider public. Berruyer’s Histoire became a convenient tool for institutions to use to make their cases about why they should be considered an arbiter of ideas in France. The censorial mechanism in France operated on two levels. Preventive censorship determined a potential book’s value and worthiness to be printed before the act of publication. Originally, this process was undertaken by a wide array of institutions including university faculties, members of the Catholic Church, and the various judicial parlements throughout France. Louis Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain, the chancellor of France from 1699 to 1714, began to centralize the process of preventative censorship and house it within the royal Direction de la Librairie. The agents of preventive censorship included censors appointed to review manuscripts and judge – in conjunction with other administrators of the Librairie – whether they were worthy of approval and publication. Preventive censorship functioned not only as a means for condemning errant or dangerous ideas. It was also a constructive process wherein censors and authors worked together to produce texts. Indeed, by the end of the Old Regime the refusal rate of censors remained only between ten and thirty percent, and since most censors were authors themselves, they often felt a responsibility to help fellow members of the Republic of Letters. In 1757, nine of

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the ten editors of the Journal des sçavans were also royal censors, and thirteen royal censors contributed to the Encyclopédie. Books could be approved in three ways: (1) an official privilege, the highest level of approval and normally in conjunction with a royal approbation of the work and a temporary monopoly for the specific printer who submitted the request, (2) a tacit permission, a way for books to be published without the official stamp of approval from the monarchy, or (3) a verbal “tolerance,” which simply amounted to the turning of a blind eye to a work’s illegal publication. The resulting system focused on establishing the set “criteria for the acceptable” both in terms of process (institutionally) and in terms of content (ideologically).10 In theory, preventative censorship should have sufficed to manage royal approval for books, but the realities of the printing press necessitated another mechanism. Reactive censorship entailed the processes through which the monarchy and other entities dealt with a printed object after its publication. In most cases, reactive censorship targeted works printed in or transported to France illegally. The mechanisms of reactive censorship grew over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the rate of illegal publication rose to unprecedented levels. Determining if a work was published illegally was straightforward since the King’s Council of State produced a litany of regulations and procedures for submitting a work for publication. Works printed illegally were automatically fated for censorship by local authorities, and those who owned, produced, or sold these works were prosecuted in courts and often sent to jail. Illegal books smuggled into France from abroad also posed problems. Swiss and Dutch printers supplied much of the literary market in France with outlawed works and pirated editions. Authorities at the gates of cities checked bales of unbound books and boxes of cargo for illegal print, and representatives of the various book guilds of France searched through shipments once they arrived. On rare occasions the mechanisms of reactive censorship even targeted books that had previously been approved by royal censors. The uproar over the privileged publication and subsequent censorship of Helvétius’s De l’esprit in 1758 perfectly illustrates how even a privilege could not guarantee a book its legal existence in France in perpetuity. Censorship of works that had already been approved by the royal apparatus also raised a sensitive and paradoxical question: if royal censors could not be trusted to evaluate the acceptability of a given work, then who could?11

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Traditionally, members of the church attempted to function as arbiters of literary propriety. The church’s long association with literacy and the production of texts positioned it at the centre of debates about publishing as it emerged following the invention of the printing press. While the monarchy had centralized the process of preventive censorship in its own hands by the eighteenth century, reactive censorship still involved other institutions, such as universities and the episcopacy. In many ways this was due to logistics. As the rate and number of published works increased, the royal mechanisms for censorship found that they could not keep up. As a result, reactive censorship tended to function on an ad hoc basis in response to complaints. Unable to effectively control all works that had been published, the directors and administrators of the Librairie focused their attentions on works that prompted reactions from those outside of the administration. The voice of the reading public became a powerful element of the system of censorship.12 The church in particular functioned as a powerful voice that pushed the crown and its administrators to take action against problematic books. The Assembly of the Clergy implored the king on numerous occasions to eliminate “bad books.” In 1760, the assembly, for example, denounced all books that “blaspheme against all that is most holy in heaven and on earth.” Writing in the heyday of the French Enlightenment, they lamented among other things “the crowd of impious writers who are becoming day by day more audacious” and who “attack … the most respectable Truths, to undermine the first foundations of Society.” Books, the clergy claimed, affected social stability. Bad books could seduce people “of every class, profession, age, and sex” and infect them with the “fatal love of independence and free-thinking.” This type of liberty of mind would lead to lawlessness and discord. In a pointed response to their recent marginalization in the process of censorship, the assembly pointed out that mauvais livres could even be works that were “printed, distributed, and even fitted with the seal of [the King’s] approbation.” Particularly in the crucial moment of the 1760s, when the Enlightenment was blossoming to its fullest extent in France, authorities in the church wanted to play a significant role in the judgment and censorship of books.13 The assembly’s declarations were a part of what had become a rather fraught political conflict between church and state institutions over

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access to the mechanisms of censorship. Pushed out of the bureaucracy for preventative censorship, organizations such as the Assembly of the Clergy leaned on the powers they retained to pressure civil authorities and influence their management of the economy of ideas in France. The Assembly of the Clergy, for example, tied their requests for more active censorship of books into their deliberations over the amount of the don gratuit, or the annual gift that the French Catholic Church made to the royal treasury. Individual bishops often tried to censor books in their respective dioceses by ordering priests and deacons to do away with copies that they found. Episcopal mandements condemning dangerous books were printed on episcopal presses, often with their own privileges, and affixed to the doors of churches and public buildings around the diocese. In all these ways, the Catholic Church positioned itself as a major player in the system of censorship.14 Yet in France ecclesiastical bodies lacked the capacity to affect a material suppression of books. Bishops could suspend priests in their dioceses for owning prohibited texts, and papal bulls generally ended with the threat that those found reading or owning the banned books in question would be excommunicated. They could not, however, order the book to be destroyed or the author to be imprisoned. The church’s capacity to control the printed word came through its ability to influence civil authorities. This explains the Assembly of the Clergy’s petitions to the king regarding “bad books” and the abundance of episcopal mandements, theological faculties’ judgements, and printed papal bulls that condemned controversial books. Viewing itself as the protector of true religion and morality in France, the church could only affect control over ideas in cooperation with royal censors and other governmental bodies. Reactive censorship functioned as a dialectic between word and deed, in which those who proposed to be faithful judges of which ideas were licit and illicit produced as much compelling evidence as needed to influence the civil body to take action.15 By the mid-eighteenth century, however, another institution began to assert itself into the political fray of censorship. In the 1730s and 1740s, regional parlements took on a more overt role in the judgement and punishment of authors and books. This came at a time when the parlements were becoming particularly resistant to royal authority. Unprecedented increases in taxes, which parlements were forced to

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register by the crown, and the conflicts over the king’s push to make the papal bull Unigenitus civil law had the effect of distancing the parlements from the monarchy. By way of counter-attack, the parlements began to encroach upon the royal monopoly over censorship by issuing more and more judgements against books. Censorship became an arena for combat between members of the royal bureaucracy and the magistrates of the parlements. In asserting themselves more in the judgment of books, however, the parlements also came into conflict with members of the episcopacy who, at the same moment, were trying to assert themselves as arbiters over the printed word.16 By the 1750s, censorship had become a politically volatile process. What had been a decentralized and informal endeavour became increasingly bureaucratized and organized under the direction of the royal chancellery. Those bodies cut out of the process, however, did not go quietly into that dark night. Instead, they looked for ways to reassert their control over the publishing industry and used the mechanisms at their disposal to do so. Perhaps the most powerful weapon that privileged institutions such as the parlements and members of the episcopacy had was the ability to print and distribute their own declarations and justifications freely. Like the many barristers of the late eighteenth century discussed by Sarah Maza, bishops, parlements, and the Assembly of the Clergy all enjoyed the opportunity to disseminate their own writings to the public. Public opinion became their weapon of choice in the fight over censorial (and, ultimately, intellectual) authority.17 What they needed, however, were targets, and while the works of radical philosophes like Denis Diderot and Julien Offray de La Mettrie afforded them the opportunity to condemn “harmful” ideas and thus “protect” the kingdom, they did not help institutions like the parlements and church seize back power from the ever-expanding royal bureaucracy. Most of these radical works had not obtained permissions to be printed by royal authorities. Parlements and members of the church could not use their publication as a way to chastise the royal bureaucracy and its inability to properly regulate the realm of ideas. What these ousted institutions needed was a book upon which they disagreed, a book that the monarchy had deemed acceptable but that they found to be problematic. What they found, in the mid-1750s, was the Histoire du peuple de Dieu.18

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The Affair in the Parlements In its efforts to assert itself against the expansion of the royal bureaucracy, the Parlement of Paris politicized Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Despite their efforts, D’Hémery, Beaumont, and the superiors of the Jesuit Province of France could not keep the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire from attracting public attention. By the end of 1754, Jansenist theologians had begun to publish their denunciations of the Histoire’s second part and thus launched the Berruyer Affair. The defences written by Berruyer and his allies only magnified attention on the controversial book. With Berruyer’s Bible growing in notoriety, other institutions seized the opportunity to use the Histoire for their own advantages. Chief among these was the Parlement of Paris whose magistrates coopted the Histoire in their offensive against the royal bureaucracy and episcopacy. Their actions politicized the work, transforming it into a text that was not only theologically controversial but also politically subversive. Many Jansenists in France doubted Christophe de Beaumont and the Jesuit superiors’ condemnations of the second part of the Histoire. Jean-Baptiste Gaultier – a librarian and theologian for the Jansenist bishop of Montpellier, Charles Joachim Colbert – did not believe the superiors’ statement that they had no role in the publication of the book. Claiming innocence, Gaultier explained, was the Jesuits’ “usual maneuver to fool the public.”19 The Jesuits’ inability to effectively censor the book in the fall and winter of 1753 convinced him that, in fact, they wanted the book to succeed: Who has believed what the superiors asserted that … they did everything possible to stop the edition and to keep it from being sold? When the Jesuits want to stop the publication or the sale of a book that displeases them, what maneuvers do they not allow themselves to do for the sake of the police and others? They do research, they pay spies, they seize copies, they stop printers, booksellers, they throw them into prison, sometimes in the dungeon; and if they are able to discover the author, they incarcerate him for the rest of his days. Is this what has happened here? […] When, therefore, after all this a Provincial and superiors say to me: “We have done everything possible to stop this edition and the sale of it,” I say to myself: “What comedians!”20

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Others agreed that the continued presence of Berruyer’s book demonstrated a Jesuit conspiracy to spread Berruyer’s ideas. A brief “tell-all” pamphlet, titled Lettre d’une Demoiselle de consideration, devote des Jésuites, à un de ses amis, accused Mathurin-Germain Le Forestier of protecting Berruyer’s book despite knowing that it was harmful.21 The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques implicated Beaumont as a part of the initiative. For these and other Jansenist critics, the actions of the archbishop and the superiors of France were part of a cover up to secretly broadcast Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism while pretending to resist it. The appearance of a new edition of the second part of the Histoire late in 1754 exacerbated these conspiratorial claims. Allegedly printed in Antwerp, this edition differed from the original in two notable ways. First, it displayed the book’s authorship clearly on the title page. As common with many books granted only a tacit permission, the first edition did not include Berruyer’s name; the printers of the Antwerp edition, however, must have seen an opportunity to use Berruyer’s growing notoriety as a means for commercial success. Second, and more importantly, the work corresponded almost entirely to Berruyer’s original manuscript rather than to the versions that had been on the market since autumn 1753. In their initial efforts to try to censor the work – before they had acquired the money to buy back many of the unsold copies – the superiors of the Province of France had rushed to the shops of many of Parisian printers and convinced them to remove what they felt were the most offensive sections of the book.22 The Antwerp edition, however, included those sections omitted from the first run.23 In including these and other sections, the unnamed editors of the Antwerp edition claimed, rightly, that it was the “most exact” version of the Histoire and that they were satisfying the demands of buyers who wanted the ability to see the work as it was originally written. The new Antwerp edition became powerful evidence for those looking to substantiate claims that there was a grand Jesuit conspiracy to spread Berruyer’s corrosive ideas throughout Europe. It led many to call for further action against the book and its author.24 Those calls were answered by the abbé Henri-Phillipe de Chauvelin who brought the Jansenists’ case against Berruyer to the courts. A magistrate in the Parlement of Paris with close ties to the Parisian Jansenist community, Chauvelin presented the Histoire to the assembled chambers of the parlement in the waning days of 1755.25 The subject

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of his speech on 13 December 1755 was the influx of “bad books” that had recently appeared in Paris. Chauvelin mentioned a few specifically. One was a critical edition of the most provocative passages from Pierre Bayle’s skeptical writings entitled, Analyse raisonnée de Bayle, ou abrége méthodique de ses ouvrages.26 Another was a continuation of the narrative of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the form of a romantic poem, titled La Christiade.27 The rest of the works that Chauvelin mentioned all came from the Berruyer Affair, including the Histoire itself, the Lettre en réponse à un ecclésiastique de Province, and the three Défenses by Berruyer and his allies. Chauvelin began his speech by addressing the nature of censorship in the kingdom, promoting the notion that a cooperation between civil and ecclesiastical authorities was needed in order to maintain social order. He acknowledged that the printing, publication, and sale of books “belonged only to royal authority” and concluded that the right to stop the proliferation of printed works should belong to the agents of the king, including the police but also the parlements. Chauvelin then turned his attention to the books in question. While he mentioned the problems in the Analyse raisonnée de Bayle and La Christiade, he spent the vast majority of his speech targeting Berruyer and those who defended him. Chauvelin reminded the members of the parlement that the second part of the Histoire that had caused so much consternation of late was the continuation of an already controversial work (the Histoire’s first part) that had already been condemned for “corrupting the sacred text.” Chauvelin pointed out – in precisely the way that the authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques had a year prior – that Berruyer had a track record of writing harmful books, and that track record made his latest production particularly egregious.28 Chauvelin’s diagnosis of the second part of the Histoire revealed not only his knowledge of the debates within the Berruyer Affair but also his connections with the Jansenist side of those debates. Like many of the polemicists that targeted Berruyer, Chauvelin focused on the issue of Christology. Repeating the arguments made by Duhamel, Maran, and others, he accused Berruyer of promoting Arianism, Nestorianism, and Pelagianism. Clearly a heretic, Berruyer was poisoning the church with the heretical ideas of yesteryear. Because of the lack of an adequate response from the state, he claimed, Berruyer’s ideas had “never been stopped” and were continuing to spread “publicly.” Chauvelin pointed in particular to the new edition published in Antwerp and the many

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“défenses of this book, more scandalous still, if it is possible, than [the Histoire] itself.” For Chauvelin, it was clear that Berruyer’s Histoire and the works that defended it were “bad books,” but the real issue was that despite the fact that they clearly contained dangerous ideas, the state had been unable to suppress them. The Berruyer Affair had only gotten louder and more expansive, and it had spread Berruyer’s ideas to more and more people. To solve the problem and stop Berruyer’s harmful ideas from further affecting the public, Chauvelin recommended that the parlement get involved.29 Chauvelin’s speech was effective, for shortly after he concluded, the impugned books were handed over to the authorities of the Parlement of Paris to undergo a more thorough evaluation. The report of the parlement’s evaluators framed the Histoire in the context of the ongoing fight against “Religion” by the philosophes of the day. Berruyer’s book was one among many that used new philosophical arguments to question traditional articles of faith. It was particularly “stunning,” however, in the opinion of the anonymous author of the report, to see this kind of challenge to religion come from someone who was “supposedly defending [it].” Though Berruyer’s intentions may have been “laudable” – namely, his intention to defend the church – the way in which he presented the faith only provided unbelievers with “a new means to criticize it.” In particular, the reviewer criticized Berruyer’s treatment of Christ and the incarnation. By disregarding the opinions of the church fathers and embracing an innovative Christology, Berruyer had wandered off the path of orthodoxy and thus weakened the church’s definitive stance on the person of Christ. The issue with the Histoire was one of authority. At the end of the report, the author reminded the parlement that Berruyer’s intent was to “instruct the public on the most important truths” of the faith, but because he had the temerity to “slight” the church fathers, his book was simply dangerous.30 Having considered the official report, the members of the Parlement of Paris decided to condemn the Histoire and the works that defended it. Copies of the proscribed books were brought to the courtyard of the Palais de Justice and, in a public ceremony that typified what Barbara de Negroni has called the censures à grand spectacle, “lacerated” and “burned” by the public executioner. The Histoire and its various Défenses were to be suppressed by enjoining all those with copies to bring them to the authorities at the Parlement of Paris and disallowing

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all printers, booksellers, and anyone else from printing, selling, or in any way distributing the works. Chauvelin’s campaign against the Histoire in the Parlement of Paris was an unquestionable success. He had taken a book that had originally been tolerated by the state and transformed it into something illegal. In so doing, he had taken a shot against the royal bureaucracy and made a claim for the parlements’ importance to the process of censorship.31 At some point between the submission of the anonymous report and the official declaration of the parlement on 9 April 1756, however, the logic for condemning the Histoire changed. The barrister Edmond Jean François Barbier suggested that Omer Joly de Fleury was responsible for adding a new item to the list of charges against the book: ultramontanism.32 To be sure, the arrêt published by the parlement listed many of the original reasons for condemning Berruyer’s works. It condemned the first part of the Histoire for having “changed the gravity of style of the holy books into the style of a romance” and denounced the second part of the Histoire for its promotion of a “strange novelty of doctrine” that offended theologians. The tone of the arrêt quickly shifted, however, upon addressing one point that Chauvelin failed to mention in his speech. For the members of the Parlement of Paris, the greatest danger in Berruyer’s books was not their theological errors but their shocking promotion of “the ultramontane doctrine on the infallibility of the Pope.” In complete opposition to the liberties of the Gallican Church, Berruyer, the arrêt argued, promoted an ecclesiology that left all decision-making and power in the hands of the papacy. The magistrates cited problematic passages from the Histoire and charged Berruyer with promoting the same type of “fanaticism” that the Catholic League had two centuries prior. In the perspective of the Parlement of Paris, ultramontanism was the real danger exhibited in Berruyer’s work, because it threatened the sovereignty of the Kingdom of France. Here again, the magistrates of the parlement revealed their savvy political instincts. For in making the problem with the Histoire a fundamentally political problem, they further placed the propriety for judging it in the hands of the courts as opposed to those of the church. If the Histoire were merely a controversial theological work, then members of the church could use it to assert themselves as the primary players in the determination of censorship. If it were viewed as a political treatise,

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however, the Histoire would legitimize the parlements in their efforts to lead the charge against Berruyer and his book.33 Unlike the many theologians and bishops who had previously condemned the Histoire, the Parlement of Paris had the power to move beyond rhetorical denunciations and take legal action. The arrêt concluded with the confirmation that all of the works mentioned in it would be destroyed and that anyone responsible for producing or selling copies would be punished. But the parlement went one step further. As a judicial body, the Parlement of Paris could take punitive measures against those under its jurisdiction, and authors of “bad books” were often the victims of such measures. The parlement was well within its rights to punish all of the authors mentioned in the arrêt. It chose, however, to focus its wrath on only one: Berruyer. At the very end of the arrêt, the members of the Parlement of Paris summoned him to appear before the court at eleven o’clock in the morning on the following Monday to give an account for his dangerous ideas. Upon hearing his defence, they would deliberate over whether to punish the Jesuit himself for his crimes. Berruyer’s notoriety made him the perfect target for a long, drawn-out trial that would once again help the parlement in its efforts to demonstrate its political power.34 Much to the surprise of the parlement’s magistrates, however, on Monday, 12 April 1756 at eleven o’clock in the morning, Berruyer did not show up. After waiting for five hours, the parlement finally sent two representatives – Denis-Louis Pasquier and Louis Dufranc – to Berruyer’s residence at the Jesuit professed house on rue Saint-Antoine to discover the reason for Berruyer’s absence. Climbing the stairs to the second floor of the Jesuit residence, Pasquier and Dufranc reportedly found Berruyer in his room seated in an armchair next to the fireplace. According to the record of this meeting, Berruyer explained to the two representatives that an illness prevented him from travelling to the Palais de Justice that morning. Since Pasquier and Dufranc had come to him, however, Berruyer agreed to provide them with “a sincere explanation of his feelings” on the matter of his book. Whatever skepticism the magistrates might have had about Berruyer’s illness was put to rest when they entered the room. Berruyer, they explained, suffered from “repeated attacks of apoplexy” and was “almost unable to move himself without help, having difficulty breathing, and though his judgment was

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healthy and reasoned, the faculties of his mind and notably his memory appeared … weakened by the effect of the malady.” In their opinion, it was indeed impossible for Berruyer even to leave his room let alone find his way to the parlement. Having confirmed why Berruyer was unable to make the arranged meeting, the two representatives sought a response to the court’s condemnation of his works.35 Berruyer’s response was conciliatory and revealed his desire not to be branded with accusations of immorality and lèse majesté. Berruyer affirmed his “submission to the laws of God and of the Kingdom, and his obedience to our King” and expressed his horror at the thought that someone had associated him with the Catholic League. He responded to the accusation that his style had offended the integrity of the scriptures and that his interpretations were not in accordance with those of the church fathers by claiming that any error was due to his own “human weakness” and that his goal was only “to inspire in the faithful an enjoyment of true piety.” He professed that he was willing to “disavow formally” any passage from his book that was shown to be erroneous. If Berruyer’s intention was to humble himself before the authorities in order to prevent further punishment, it worked. The end of the printed account of this meeting included the decision of the parlement on the following day not to prosecute Berruyer any further. They simply issued a statement to the superiors of the Society of Jesus in Paris requesting that they be “more circumspect in the approbations and permissions that they … give for the books and works composed by the members of their Society.”36 Though his books were burned and prohibited, Berruyer avoided a far harsher penalty. That one year later the king’s council promulgated an edict that punished anyone who wrote or published a work that challenged religious tradition or undermined royal authority with death only illustrates Berruyer’s good fortune in dodging what might have been a far more dire end to the whole affair.37 Unlike the initial treatises that condemned Berruyer for his theological ideas, the parlement’s focus on the political significance of his writings allowed the court to use the book for its own strategic purposes. In making Berruyer’s book about the fight for Gallican liberties, the parlement positioned itself as a defender of those liberties. Condemnations of the Histoire became a part of the parlement’s larger effort to trumpet itself as the protector of the kingdom’s laws and the fundamental rights of its people. For the following decades, this argument placed the

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parlements in a progressively more anti-monarchial position, especially in the 1770s when the so-called “Maupeou Coup” resulted in the banishment of many of France’s parlementary magistrates and the suppression of the parlements in general. While the Histoire only played a small part in this longer political transformation, it did so at an important time. The mid-1750s saw the beginnings of the parlement’s aggressive use of the mechanism of censorship to assert its political rights in the kingdom. The Histoire provided the parlement with an initial push that set it down the path of continuous conflict with the king.38 By bringing Berruyer’s case before the Parlement of Paris, Chauvelin also began the process of politicizing Berruyer’s style of Enlightenment Catholicism. Up until this point, the debates about Berruyer’s ideas had taken place mostly within the church. Although D’Hémery and Malesherbes had quickly taken to removing copies of the second part of the Histoire from bookshops throughout Paris, there had not been an official proclamation against the book from representatives of the state. The actions of the Parlement of Paris proscribed Berruyer’s Histoire by law. As a result, the ideas that it promoted became politically potent. The barrister Barbier alluded to this reality when he described the burning of the Histoire in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice in Paris. Though Berruyer, his allies, and many who advocated for further freedoms of the press may have lamented the book’s condemnation, there was one group heartened by the proceedings on the Isle de Cité: “It was always a satisfaction for the Jansenists to see burned by the hangman a book of a well-renowned Jesuit.”39 Barbier recognized that by condemning the Histoire, the parlement had transformed the book into a weapon that the Jansenists could wield against their nemeses. Now, they could argue that Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism was not simply wrong but also illegal. And with this new rhetorical weapon, they exacted considerable damage in the years to come.

The Histoire beyond France The Berruyer Affair began as a decidedly French phenomenon – one of the many sustained conflicts between Jansenists and Jesuits in the kingdom – but the notoriety of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu transported the debate about his ideas to the rest of the continent. As the Histoire

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made its way through Europe, controversy and resistance followed, placing the burden of censorship on not just French authorities but on officials elsewhere. As in France, the decision to censor Berruyer’s books was political. Different institutions in the church chose to issue statements against the Histoire for what they believed to be their own political benefit. As the wave of censorship travelled throughout Europe, the political value of Berruyer’s Histoire became clearer. The more the Histoire was condemned by international authorities, the more famous (or, rather infamous) it became, and the more famous it was the more powerful it could be in the hands of the Jesuits’ enemies. Despite the fact that many within the Society of Jesus disapproved of the work, the Histoire made its way throughout Europe in the hands of fellow Jesuits. Over the course of the century’s middle decades, the first part of the Histoire underwent a series of translations. By 1753, it had editions in four other European languages: Polish (Historya ludu bożego od poczatku zaczęcia, 1740), Italian (Storia del Popolo di Dio, 1741), Spanish (Historia del Pueblo di Dios, 1746–52), and German (Geschichten des aussererwehlten Volcks Gottes, 1753).40 In most cases, Jesuits and their allies were responsible for the translations. The Polish edition, for example, was translated by the Chancellor of Lithuania, Michał Jeremi Korybut Wiśniowiecki, who was inclined to do so reportedly as a part of a larger effort “to arouse … the enjoyment of the Letters and to facilitate the progress of the Sciences” in Poland-Lithuania in cooperation with such figures as the Jesuit Paul Stryinski.41 The German translation was the work of the Alsatian Jesuits Georges-Jacques and Georges-Antoine Weimer, and the Spanish translation owed its appearance to the efforts of another member of the Society, Antonio Espinosa.42 Sympathetic Jesuits played a crucial role in spreading the Histoire to new communities throughout the continent. At times, these Jesuits had the support of royal administrators even amidst the protestations of members of the church. As reported by the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques – decidedly biased on this issue but nonetheless rarely inaccurate with their facts – work on the Spanish translation of the second part of the Histoire began as early as 1754, at the behest of the King Ferdinand VI of Spain who had read and enjoyed the Spanish version of the Histoire’s first part. Having already promulgated his mandement against the book in late 1753, however, Christophe de Beaumont was reportedly “displeased” when

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he heard that there was to be a new translation in Spain and objected to it in a letter sent to Rome.43 To assuage Beaumont, certain members of the Society of Jesus provided him with a brief note that detailed why the Spanish translation should not be cause for concern.44 Their explanation amounted to a few basic points: (1) the translation had been submitted to Spanish censors, who paid it “scrupulous attention”; (2) as a result the first and eighth volumes of the Histoire’s second part – the most controversial of the volumes, they admitted – were to be redacted, the latter completely and the former of all sections that detailed the perspectives and “sophisms” of unbelievers; (3) both the translator and censors were using Beaumont’s mandement as their guide in cutting out anything from the text that was deemed dangerous.45 The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, naturally, found no comfort in this statement and nor, they reported, did Beaumont. Nevertheless, the whole episode illustrates the seeming care with which the Spanish translation was undertaken by members of the society in conjunction with authorities from the Spanish state. Those responsible for the Italian edition acted far more defiantly. The effort to produce an Italian version of the second part of the Histoire was spearheaded by members of the Remondini family, owners of one of the most powerful printing firms in the region. Based in Bassano, the Remondini firm operated some eighteen printing presses, thirty presses for engravings, and four paper mills by the mid-eighteenth century. They sent agents all over the world to sell their books and employed thousands of workers in and around Venice. According to Francesco Antonio Mantoan, an inquisitor from Padua, a member of the Remondini family acquired the French version of the Histoire and then hired a teacher from the seminary in Padua to translate it into Italian. The firm then attempted to pass the manuscript through Italian censors. Instead of approaching censors in Venice, however, they circumvented the normal process and contacted the chief inquisitor of Padua, with whom they happened to be friends, and got approval from him in July 1754. Not ecclesiastics, the Remondinis did not take the same sorts of precautions as the Jesuits in Spain. They did not follow the lead of the Spanish translator, for example, in removing controversial sections of the Histoire. Instead, they kept the whole work intact. Not content to simply include the controversial Latin theological dissertations that comprised the eighth volume of the Histoire’s second

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part, the Remondinis chose to translate them into the vernacular, something that even Berruyer himself refused to do. They also appended to the volumes an Italian version of the first apology by Berruyer, the Défense contre le Projet d’Instruction Pastorale. Finally, they based their translation of the Histoire on the Antwerp edition, the edition that included the more provocative “original” manifestations of Berruyer’s writings. The Remondinis clearly knew that controversy had done much to popularize the book and make it marketable. According to Mantoan, they made all of these decisions for the sole purpose of profit. Displaying a “disgust for good laws and honor” and a “greed for money,” they printed the Italian version of the Histoire’s second part in spite of the many warnings that had already come from France.46 Spurred on by Beaumont’s letter, church authorities in Rome began to deliberate over the second part of the Histoire before the appearance of the Italian translation. The minutes from a meeting of the Congregation of the Index on 3 December 1754 reveal how an Italian Dominican, Alessandro Preti, reported on the book before the assembled members who quickly decided to place it on the Index prohibitorum. While Pope Benedict XIV confirmed the congregation’s decision, he requested that they not issue an official “announcement” of the decision until a later time.47 The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques speculated that this request was due to the Pope’s awareness of the upcoming publication of the Défense contre le Projet Instruction pastorale and his desire to time the condemnation appropriately so that it covered both works.48 They were partially correct. In a letter to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, Benedict XIV admitted that he postponed publishing the decision of the Congregation of the Index because he wanted to give Berruyer and his allies a chance to defend themselves.49 This act of restraint was consistent with the movement of reform that Benedict XIV was initiating within the Congregation of the Index. Less than two years before, Benedict XIV had promulgated a bull, Sollicita ac provida, that reshaped the process for evaluating and censoring books within the Holy Office. Among the many changes required by the bull were the directives that censors should consider authorial intent and that Catholic authors had the right to defend themselves and their works.50 Although he allowed for due process, Benedict XIV was clearly unimpressed by the defence mounted by Berruyer and his allies. The Défense contre le Projet Instruction pastorale failed to convince him of

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the legitimacy of Berruyer’s ideas, and he was further disheartened by the Roman Jesuits’ lack of willingness to back their French confrere. Upon hearing of the Congregation’s judgement on the second part of the Histoire, Benedict XIV approached the Jesuits of Rome to see if they would be willing to defend the Histoire on Berruyer’s behalf, but the Roman Jesuits refused. Benedict XIV had to appoint someone from the Holy Office itself to function in that role, and the reluctantly selected defender apparently expressed his displeasure with getting the case. Few wanted to publicly come to Berruyer’s aid, it seemed, so the congregation’s decision proceeded without much resistance. In April 1755, the prohibition of the second part of the Histoire was posted on the doors of St Peter’s Basilica and the Palace of the Holy Office. The Congregation of the Index once again spoke out against Berruyer’s project of Enlightenment Catholicism.51 Berruyer finally came to his own defence a few months later when he wrote directly to Benedict XIV. Benedict XIV had attempted to contact Berruyer before the ruling of the congregation was made public but failed to receive a response.52 In his belated letter, Berruyer explained that his delay had to do with his health, and he begged the pope to reconsider the congregation’s ruling. For Berruyer, the issue was simply one of politics. Although he had confidence in the value and orthodoxy of his work, he knew that there were those in France and Rome who were plotting against him. Berruyer argued that by having to make a public apology for his works, he had already suffered at their hands, but he hoped that the support of Benedict XIV might help to protect him going forward.53 Benedict XIV recognized an element of truth in what Berruyer was saying. In a letter sent to Tencin a month prior, Benedict XIV characterized the Berruyer Affair that was raging at that time in France as motivated by “a great esprit de parti.”54 But Berruyer was, in Benedict’s opinion, also oblivious to some of the issues within his book. Writing again to Tencin after he received Berruyer’s letter of defence, Benedict XIV complained that “Father Berruyer, to tell you the truth, is not the most obliging in the world.” He charged Berruyer with flagrantly ignoring the complaints brought by censors and superiors. Nevertheless, he assured Berruyer that he would give the Histoire the just and impartial consideration that it deserved.55 What changed Benedict XIV’s mind was the appearance of the Italian version of the second part of the Histoire. When it appeared,

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Benedict XIV charged the Congregation of the Index to immediately deliberate over the new translation, and on 28 February 1757, they once again condemned Berruyer’s book and the ideas therein.56 But, because the congregation’s previous declaration against the Histoire had done very little to stop the progress of new editions, Benedict XIV felt that a stronger statement was now necessary. Following the congregation’s ruling, he decided to make his own declaration against the Histoire. Distributed in 1757, the statement specifically condemned the Remondini edition but also addressed the Histoire project as a whole. In forceful and definitive words, Benedict XIV condemned the second part of the Histoire “whether in French, or in Italian, or in any other language that it be written, translated, or edited” for deviating from the traditions of the church fathers and containing passages that were “false, reckless, scandalous, favouring heresy, and close to heresy.” The bull prohibited all Catholics from reading, owning, or printing the work – once again repeating “in whatever language” – and mandated that anyone who owned the Histoire remit their copy to a local inquisitor, bishop, or other ecclesiastic upon pain of excommunication. Benedict XIV’s statement brought the campaign against Berruyer’s Histoire and the Enlightenment Catholicism that it espoused to a new level of intensity. Now, the Histoire had received a formal denunciation from the highest figure in the Catholic Church.57 Just as authorities in France had jumped into action quickly after the appearance of the second part of the Histoire in 1753, so too did censorial bodies abroad. Mitigating factors, however, often shaped their responses. In Spain, royal sponsorship of the work and the careful attention paid to the complaints levelled by clerics in France led to a comparatively less intense response by censorial authorities. Even when Benedict XIV himself inquired about the Spanish translation, he made little headway in changing the opinions of the Spanish inquisitors.58 Italy, however, was a different story. Pioneered by an increasingly successful publishing firm, those responsible for the Italian edition threw caution to the wind and sought to produce a version of the Histoire that would sell. The Remondini family took advantage of publicity afforded to the Histoire by the Berruyer Affair in France. The audacity of the Remondinis and the lack of higher political approval for the Italian version opened it up for a quick condemnation by the Congregation of the Index and, ultimately, the pope himself. The Italian version provided

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Benedict XIV with the perfect case to try out his new reforms to the censorship process in the church and, in the end, exert his power over the religious book trade. What he and others would find, however, is that this attempt to extend control over the mechanisms of print communication was not universally accepted. Though the Histoire and its many non-French iterations provided the pope the opportunity to advance his new agenda of reform and in so doing establish an element of control over the world of religious print, it also prompted other competing censorial bodies to resist.

A Third Part and the Collision of Censorial Bodies Far from settling the matter of the Histoire, papal condemnations and the international notoriety that they gave to Berruyer only advanced the increasing politicization of the Histoire and its Enlightenment Catholicism in France. Neither the Parlement of Paris’s nor Benedict XIV’s prohibitions stopped the spread of the Histoire throughout Catholic Europe. The various translations undertaken by European Jesuits and their allies revealed that there were still many who found Berruyer’s ideas worthwhile, and the Berruyer Affair had convinced printers like the Remondinis that the Histoire and its apologetic defences were marketable. Increased censorship only increased the popularity of the work and its author. For unofficial censorial bodies such as bishops and the Faculty of the Theology at the Sorbonne, growing publicity made the Histoire all the more useful. By the end of the 1750s, there was little need for more institutions to weigh in on the matter of Berruyer. Yet, church authorities continued to pronounce judgements against him, often repeating the same arguments pioneered by Jansenist critics and censorial bodies before. Many in the church realized that the fight over the Histoire was turning into a proxy war for other political disputes, and claims to censorial authority provided the weapons to wage just such a war. As deliberations over Rome’s response to the Italian translation of the Histoire’s second part were taking place, a new section of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu emerged. The third and final part of the Histoire, a paraphrase of the Epistles, appeared in 1757, just before Benedict XIV’s condemnation. According to the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, the book was initially the product of the Lyonnais printer Jean-Marie Bryset, but,

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recognizing that it would be instantly controversial, he sent part of it to the Dutch printer Jean Neaulme who produced his own edition with a fake place of publication. The Nouvelles reported that in the summer of 1758 Berruyer’s latest work was already being sold in bookshops in Lyon and Paris. Incensed, the writers of the Nouvelles called for a new round of assaults on Berruyer and his theological “system.”59 The third section of the Histoire continued to promote many of Berruyer’s provocative ideas. As with the first and second parts, the goal of the third was to render the Scriptures – in this case the New Testament Epistles starting from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and going through the three Epistles of John – into texts that were “useful and agreeable” to a modern audience.60 Each new book began with an introduction that explained generally who the author of the book was, when it was written, and what its main points were. In these introductions, Berruyer elaborated upon his previous arguments about innovation and the fundamental goodness of humanity. In the preface of the work, for example, Berruyer defended his right to speculate on theological issues so long as they were not central tenets of the church or matters that were clearly agreed upon by the whole church.61 Commenting on Paul’s command to “not gratify the desires of the flesh” in his letter to the Galatians, Berruyer repeated his belief in the capacity of the human will to overcome sinfulness and improve.62 He also repeated many of his interpretations about the nature of Christ and the ways that Christ’s humanity operated in his person.63 He even continued to promote the notion of theological progress, stating clearly that it was not the writings of the church fathers that contained the best interpretations of the scriptural text but rather the “present teachings of the Church.”64 Despite the years of public arguments over his theological ideas, Berruyer remained resolute in his effort to advance his version of Enlightenment Catholicism through the Histoire. Though Berruyer’s ideas continued to distress many in the church, his detractors found the third part of the Histoire’s overt association with Jean Hardouin most upsetting. Not a paraphrase of the “scriptures alone,” as earlier versions had boasted, the third part of Berruyer’s project was a “literal paraphrase” of the Epistles presented in Hardouin’s Commentarius in Novum Testamentum. Berruyer’s French paraphrase followed Hardouin’s Latin paraphrase of the Vulgate instead of the Vulgate itself. The choice to follow Hardouin instead of the actual

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biblical text was conspicuous as a comparison of the treatment of a simple verse from the book of Hebrews demonstrates: Clementine Vulgate

Hardouin’s Paraphrase

Berruyer’s Paraphrase

Iesus Christus, heri, & hodie: ipse & in sæcula.

Jesus Christus enim idem nunc est qui antea sub patribus vestris fuit; & erit semper idem. Sit ergo constans & eadem in illum fides; & aderit vobis semper idem ab ipso praesidium.

Ce que Jesus-Christ fut pour eux dans les prémiers temps de la prédication il l’est aujourd’hui pour nous, & il le sera pour les fideles jusqu’à la consommation des siecles.65

Both Hardouin and Berruyer fill in the other actors in the statement, making the verse more about the continuity of the perception of Jesus Christ rather than his existential sameness – something that the simplicity of the Vulgate’s statement only connotes. The closeness between the two paraphrases revealed the connections between the two theologians’ ideas, and while this relationship had already been asserted by critics in the past – and while the connections between their theological ideas had long been evident to those within the Society of Jesus – the Histoire’s third part provided the most tangible example of their shared sensibilities. Critics noticed the conspicuous connection between the Histoire’s third part and the biblical commentaries of Hardouin and used their closeness to further denigrate Berruyer. Joseph-Auguste de Maille devoted the fourth and final volume of his polemical project, Le Père Berruyer, jésuite, convaincu d’arianisme, de pélagianisme, de nestorianisme, etc., to attacking the third part of the Histoire by way of its proximity to the infamous Hardouin. Maille was already a seasoned veteran of the Berruyer Affair who had pioneered the argument that Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism amounted to heresy. His fourth volume sought to establish that these heresies were explicit in the works of both Berruyer and Hardouin. He charged the duo of promoting Nestorianism by suggesting that there were two different “second persons” of the Trinity. He labelled them Arians for the way that both emphasized the “making” of Christ in a temporal moment. They both placed too much emphasis on the salvific power of natural law – something that made the Jesuits’ teachings no different than those of the people they encountered in Asia, according to Maille – and thus

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ignored the impact of original sin like the Pelagians. By connecting Hardouin to the ideas that Berruyer promoted in his Histoire, Maille argued that the heretical theology of Berruyer was part of a larger theological “system” that permeated the Society of Jesus.66 Informed of the threat of another Histoire by the Piedmontese cardinal Carlo Vittorio Amedeo Ignazio delle Lanze, the Congregation of the Index began deliberating for a third time over the book in April 1758. One of the few members of the higher clergy that was well-connected to Jansenists in France and Italy, Lanze wrote to Alberico Archinto, the secretary of state for the papal states, calling for action against the Histoire’s third installment. A few days later, on 24 April 1758, the Congregation deliberated over the third part of the Histoire and judged it worthy of proscription. Their denunciation reflected the long history of criticism against Berruyer and his innovative theological ideas. The speed with which they condemned the new work owed much to the precedent already set by the deliberations over the previous two parts of the Histoire. The congregation criticized Berruyer’s connections with Hardouin – and, most especially, Hardouin’s previously condemned commentaries on the New Testament – charged him with advancing new interpretations of the scriptures that had not been approved by the Council of Trent, and decried the Christological ideas that the third part of the Histoire included. In brief, the congregation saw the third part of the Histoire as a simple continuation of the project of Enlightenment Catholicism that Berruyer had espoused since the 1720s.67 While the Congregation of the Index made their official pronouncement against the third part of the Histoire in April 1758, politics once again got in the way of the more forceful response that they desired. The congregation feared that the continued production of new translations and new sections of the Histoire suggested that Berruyer’s system was moving beyond their control. In a note appended to the end of the minutes of their meeting, they requested that Benedict XIV reiterate his position on Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism in an official statement. Unfortunately for the members of the congregation, Benedict XIV died on 3 May 1758, just over a week after the congregation’s deliberations. Attention in Rome turned away from the Histoire to the election of a new pope, and the issue that came to dominate the proceedings over Benedict XIV’s successor was that of the Jesuits. Proand anti-Jesuit factions emerged within the papal conclave and worked

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to nominate their own candidates for the church’s highest position. Eventually, the two sides agreed upon a compromise candidate, Carlo Rezzonico, the bishop of Padua. Confirmed as Pope Clement XIII on 6 July 1758, Rezzonico appeared to be an ally to neither the Jesuits nor their opponents. The abbé Augustin Clément, a decided partisan of the Jansenists and representative of the Parlement of Paris in Rome at the time of the new pope’s election, felt pessimistic, noting in a letter to his brother in Paris that Rezzonico was “devoted to the Society” because he had relatives who were Jesuits.68 The English Jesuit John Thorpe agreed, calling him a “true friend, a tender father, and a munificent benefactor” of the society.69 Yet the new pope had not immediately surrounded himself with proponents of the Jesuits. He refused to take a Jesuit as his confessor and kept the aforementioned Archinto, well known for his Jansenist sympathies, as secretary of state.70 Clement XIII appeared to be attempting the difficult balancing act of maintaining peace between the two sides of this increasingly contentious quarrel. Toward this end, Clement XIII decided to use Berruyer’s Histoire for his own political benefit. Torn between existing sympathies for the Society of Jesus and the growing consensus in Rome over Berruyer’s “innovative” works, the pope faced a decision on whether to make a public statement about the third part of the Histoire or simply allow the Congregation of the Index’s condemnation to stand on its own. Still early in his tenure as pontiff, Clement XIII used Berruyer’s book as an opportunity to establish the papacy’s authority over the marketplace of ideas. In a bull promulgated on 2 December 1758, Clement XIII chose to heed the congregation’s call for a more definitive statement on Berruyer. He too condemned the third part of the Histoire overtly, and just like his predecessor Benedict XIV Clement XIII denounced Berruyer’s ideas as “false, reckless, scandalous, favouring heresy, and close to heresy.” Also like Benedict XIV, Clement XIII made the conscious effort not to add any additional charges or explanations. The new pope placed the emphasis of his attack on the long history of papal denunciations of Berruyer, including the censure of the first part of the Histoire in 1734 and Benedict XIV’s bull against the Italian version of the Histoire’s second part a year prior. Papal tradition stood in marked contrast to the Histoire’s “novelty.” This approach communicated Clement XIII’s perspective on censorship and, in its own way, ecclesiastical authority. The ideas and discussions of contested works were to take place in

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isolated and trustworthy environments; past precedent was to count enormously, arguably even more than present circumstance; and censorial announcements were simply to communicate the ruling made by the central authorities in order to invoke the obedience of all those outside of the Vatican. Clement XIII’s statement against the Histoire indicated that the church handled dangerous ideas by not yielding to public opinion but rather by presenting a unified front of resistance from its highest authorities downward. It also signalled Clement XIII’s belief that the pope’s ruling was the final one on theological matters in the church.71 Clement XIII’s bull provided a blueprint for those who sought to use Berruyer’s Histoire to forge a closer connection with the papacy. Now that the pope had ruled definitively against the Histoire and tied the condemnation of “innovation” to the strength and centrality of the papacy in the Catholic Church, clerics eager to impress the new pontiff joined in the fray. One year after Clement XIII’s bull, Manuel Quintano de Bonifaz, archbishop of Pharsalia and grand inquisitor of Spain, produced his own condemnation of the Histoire that largely repeated the charges levelled by Benedict XIV and Clement XIII.72 This attack against the Jesuit Berruyer from the grand inquisitor of Spain was a marked turn for someone in Bonifaz’s position. Just a few years prior, his predecessor had not only approved of the Spanish translation of the second part of the Histoire but had even rebuffed Benedict XIV’s attempts to stymie progress of the work.73 Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition had had a history of resisting the papacy’s judgements on published works. Earlier in the 1750s, it had placed Enrico Noris’s Historia Pelagiana on its list of prohibited works, and, when Benedict XIV pushed for the work to be removed from the list, its members successfully elicited royal support to resist the pope’s wishes. Bonifaz’s volte face represented a shift for the inquisition away from being a decidedly pro-Jesuit and regalist institution to one that had closer connections to Rome. As Dale K. Van Kley has shown, this shift would play a significant role in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain a decade later.74 It also illustrated how the Histoire had become politically useful for those in the church seeking to curry favour with Rome. Nothing exemplified the way that some used condemnations of the Histoire to get in the good graces of Clement XIII better than the statement of the 1763 provincial council of Utrecht. The council was

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the brainchild of French Jansenists and their allies in Utrecht who had appealed the papal bull Unigenitus earlier in the eighteenth century. As a result of their protest and the decision by a French bishop to consecrate an archbishop of Utrecht in defiance of the papacy, the entire clergy of the diocese was excommunicated by the pope in 1724 and remained so into the 1760s. In part to broker a possible reconciliation with Rome, the council attendees affirmed their obedience to the papacy and condemned the writings of various authors whom the papacy had also recently condemned.75 Among those targeted were the Jesuits Jean Hardouin and Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. Citing the condemnations of Colbert, Beaumont, and others, the council’s promoter, Lodowijk van Zeller, chastised the “innovator” Berruyer for publishing a work that was “full of errors and follies” and for failing to submit to the judgments of not only bishops but more importantly popes.76 Bishop Johannes Bijeveld followed Zeller’s brief attack with a more thorough denunciation of both Jesuits. Arguing that Hardouin and Berruyer had taught “errors … so dangerous, so horrible” that “attack so openly the principle articles of the faith,” Bijeveld produced an exhaustive analysis of the problems in Berruyer’s Christology, ecclesiology, theological anthropology, soteriology, and moral theology, connecting all of them to his predecessor Hardouin. Like so many before him, the bishop of Deventer labelled Berruyer a heretic as well as an “innovator.”77 His goal, and indeed the goal of the entire council, was to use Berruyer as a point by which they could pivot themselves into the centre of orthodoxy so as to make a better claim for reconciliation with the Roman Church. Condemnations and censorship, however, did not always endear one to the papacy. In France, more authorities got involved in the process of denouncing Berruyer in the 1760s. The Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne had been deliberating over Berruyer’s works and the pamphlets that defended them since the time of the papal bulls. The authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques in early September 1759 had encouraged the Sorbonne to publish an official report of their findings and predicted that the arrival of another defence of Berruyer – an anonymous pamphlet titled, the Lettre à un Docteur de Sorbonne sur la dénonciation & l’examen des Ouvrages du Père Berruyer – might finally prompt them to do so.78 Leading up to their decision, the Sorbonne faculty had been in conflict over their responses to some of the most notable intellectual issues of the day. Following its purge of Jansenists

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in 1729, the Sorbonne had gradually accommodated a more Jesuitderived philosophical perspective that was open to many of the new scientific and philosophical developments in Paris. The controversy and affair over the thesis of Jean-Martin de Prades in the early 1750s, however, destabilized the Sorbonne and weakened its position in France. Struggling to reassert its place as a theological and intellectual authority, the Sorbonne began to aggressively attack radical philosophical works in order to make a case for its trustworthiness on intellectual and theological matters.79 Members of the French Society of Jesus – ever working to mitigate the damage that the Berruyer Affair was doing to the reputation of the society – attempted to prevent the Sorbonne from publishing a formal denunciation of the Histoire. Not denying the problems in Berruyer’s book, their argument to the faculty of the Sorbonne consisted simply of the point that there was already a sufficient number of denunciations of the Histoire. According to the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, the superiors of France were trying to convince the faculty to “adhere to the decisions from Rome against P. Berruyer” instead of producing their own.80 Indeed, in addition to the bulls of Benedict XIV and Clement XIII mentioned above, the Roman Inquisition had produced another decision condemning the anonymous defences of the Histoire that had appeared earlier that year.81 The Jesuits in France thought that they could convince the theologians at the Sorbonne that these responses were enough and that any further statements would simply call attention to Berruyer’s ideas rather than suppress them. The authors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, of course, disagreed and saw in a statement from the Sorbonne an opportunity to produce a “detailed censure” that would “develop what is said more generally in the decisions from Rome.”82 The prospect of another publicized condemnation of the Jesuit Berruyer, particularly one from as notable an institution as the Sorbonne, was incredibly attractive to Jansenists hoping to ruin the reputation of the Society of Jesus in the eyes of the public. This was precisely the type of appeal that also interested a theological institution that found itself suffering from a crisis of credibility. It took a few years, but eventually the faculty of the Sorbonne produced a multi-volume treatise that painstakingly assessed the entirety of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu.83 Compared to the papal bulls which together

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did not add up to twenty pages in length, the faculty’s over 540-page (in quarto) critique was the single longest official condemnation of the Histoire. The first volume focused entirely on Berruyer’s theological dissertations in the eighth volume of the Histoire’s second part, methodically denouncing almost all of Berruyer’s Christological ideas. Nary a page in the eighth volume was left untouched. Like many of the Jansenist polemicists who scoured Berruyer’s work with a fine-toothed comb, the Sorbonne’s theologians unceasingly exploited Berruyer’s every turn of phrase, expounding upon their implications and following their logic to their ultimate theological conclusions. The faculty sent its decision to Rome, hoping, like many other Catholic bishops before, to curry the favour of the papacy, but the denunciation was not received as the faculty expected. In a letter back to the Sorbonne, Clement XIII chastised the faculty for deliberating on something that had already been decided upon by the papacy. He wrote that both he and his predecessor had condemned Berruyer’s writings and that their decisions had “achieved enough.”84 Clement XIII reprimanded the faculty for bringing unnecessary attention to a work that he felt had become obscure and harmless: “It seems, in fact, that by your new judgment [you have] reawakened a sort of celebrity or fame for an author who now is defended by no one, deserted by everyone, and forgotten.”85 In recounting the contents of this letter to the French prosecutor general, one member of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology – most likely the abbé Joseph Xaupi – commented on how out of touch the pope was with the importance of Berruyer and his writings in France. He claimed that Clement XIII’s statement that Berruyer’s works had no defenders was patently incorrect and evidenced by the works’ “public notoriety in Paris.” He worried about the “injurious” effect that the Pope’s letter would have on the Sorbonne.86 In their attempt to use the Histoire for their own political benefit, the faculty of the Sorbonne had miscalculated and, instead, provoked the ire of the new pope. Clement XIII’s response to the Sorbonne’s condemnation exhibited the differing perspectives on censorship within the church. In a letter to Jean Clément Gervaise, Cardinal François Joachim de Bernis applauded the Sorbonne’s efforts to “defend religion” from the “spirit of novelty, error, independence, and impiety.” In a typically anti-philosophe mode, he argued that censures such as the Sorbonne’s were the “best remedy

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that one can employ against the poison by which numerous new books are infected.”87 The Cardinal Colone de Sciava likewise lauded the faculty of the Sorbonne for their “refutation of error and impiety” and for “tirelessly combating the spirit of novelty.”88 Clement XIII’s opinion was shared, however, by members of the Society of Jesus in France who saw the continued declarations of institutions like the Sorbonne as mere extensions of the Berruyer Affair. In their opinion, the faculty was simply publicizing ideas that were better left undiscussed. Although seemingly directed towards the same goal and mission, many of the church’s institutions came into conflict over the way to handle the censorship of a book from their own. All of these bodies had been in unison on the issue of the controversial works written by radical philosophes. It was the work of a Jesuit, however, that put them into confrontation with each other and, ultimately, with the French state.

The Consequences of Censorship What began in Conflans and carried itself all the way to Rome was a wave of censorship with the initial objective of suppressing the works and ideas of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. Even as late as 1762 – almost a decade after the initial meeting of the bishops at Conflans – Guillaume-François Louis Joly de Fleury reported the seizure of new copies of Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu in the area around Paris.89 The effort to censor Berruyer’s works became a long and arduous process begun during one of France’s most fertile periods for literary production. Censorship brought a level of significance to Berruyer’s works and placed them at the centre of international debates about the merits and dangers of Enlightenment Catholicism. Censorship also drove a wedge between those Catholics who aspired to make productive connections with the ideas and debates of the Enlightenment and those who saw such attempts as nothing more than irreligion. The Berruyer Affair would take its place as one of a series of intellectual affairs – including the controversies over the thesis of Jean-Martin de Prades and the writings of the abbé Claude Yvon – that scandalized the French Catholic Church and distanced it from the Enlightenment.90 Censorship also proved paradoxically advantageous for Berruyer. The influx of condemnations made readers throughout Europe aware of the Histoire and its importance. In numerous correspondences, Voltaire

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made reference to Berruyer and the burning of his Histoire du peuple de Dieu; he warned that it served as an example for authors of the intensity with which the state now dealt with literature that it feared.91 Yet in the great irony of state censorship, the efforts of the Parlement of Paris, the Congregation of the Index, and the many others who spoke out against the Histoire seemed not to remove Berruyer’s book from the public consciousness but rather to magnify its impact. While the mission of those attempting to censor Berruyer was to eliminate his ideas from the intellectual marketplace, the politics and actual circumstances of censorship instead transformed those ideas and vested them with new meanings and new significance. The political concerns of ecclesiastical bodies also helped determine the manner and effect of censorship. As Jansenist theologians took their own political and theological dispositions and placed them at the forefront of their interpretations of Berruyer’s and his supporters’ texts, so too the various ecclesiastical figures involved in the censorship process allowed their positions and their political concerns to influence how they acted against Berruyer. Beaumont, very much the supporter of the Jesuits in France, worked to help the superiors contain Berruyer’s ideas in an effort to mitigate the potential fallout of the publication of the Histoire’s second part. When he eventually produced a statement against the work, it not only did not directly cite Berruyer’s words, it did not mention his name at all. This tempered response made the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques indignant and prompted them to accuse the archbishop of failing to live up to the promises of his office. While the abbé Chauvelin framed the Histoire as a “bad book” because of its erroneous theological ideas and immoral style, the Parlement of Paris condemned it primarily because it promoted “ultramontanism” and threatened the parlement’s ability to exist independent of the papal see. The pope seemed interested only after the work had shown the potential to threaten other parts of the church and spread throughout Catholic Europe. The papal responses, moreover, provided little by way of analysis, standing instead on the papacy’s supposed authority as arbiter of correct theology and not on its need to “convince” readers of the text’s danger. Conversely, the Sorbonne – having just experienced turmoil at the hands of the Prades Affair – took no chances in its condemnation, producing a two-part document that left little to the imagination regarding the errors and dangers of Berruyer’s texts. These diverse perspectives on censorship collided with each other and

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produced their own points of conflict, evidenced best in Clement XIII’s reprimand of the Sorbonne’s faculty in the 1760s. The decision for each body to act on the matter of Berruyer’s ideas and the conflicts that emerged from these actions transformed the Berruyer Affair from a rather esoteric theological dispute into a cause célèbre known both inside and outside the church. As a result of this complex censorship effort, Berruyer became entangled with larger historical events. The censorial mechanism increased his renown, and Berruyer became far more than simply a wayward theologian, overly ambitious philosopher, or misguided novelist. Berruyer became a focal point for ecclesiastical politics in France. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the Berruyer Affair contributed to the ongoing political melodrama of the Society of Jesus’ expulsion from the kingdom and the rest of Catholic Europe. Berruyer became a stand-in for the whole society despite the fact that members of the society had been divided over his ideas for decades. As the 1760s approached, more and more critiques of Berruyer became indictments of the society as a whole, and the further Berruyer’s ideas spread the more critics of the Jesuits claimed that only a network as organized as the Society of Jesus could be responsible for the dissemination of this “poison” throughout the church. This argument, however, only became possible in the context of a consistent effort to censor the work. For, the society’s “duplicity” was only made manifest in its resistance to both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. By censoring a work that tried to synthesize Jesuit theology with the sensibilities of the Enlightenment, both church and state made illegal the prospect of such a marriage between religious and philosophical ideas. Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism went on trial in the 1750s and was declared guilty by authorities both inside and outside of the church. As a result, Berruyer’s style of Enlightenment Catholicism became politically toxic. No longer supported by members of the church, it came to represent only that which was destabilizing and threatening. Censorship allowed French Jansenists to win the battle over Enlightenment Catholicism in the mid-eighteenth century. Their victory over Berruyer provided them with the momentum to carry out a far greater victory in the decade to follow, a victory over the very ecclesiastical institution that they had most associated with the troubles of the church: the Society of Jesus.

5

The Suppression And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into [Eglon’s] belly; and the hilt also went in after the blade and the fat closed over the blade.1 In the moment that [Eglon] rose, Ehud took into his left hand the dagger hidden on his right thigh; he sunk it into the stomach of the tyrant with such force that the handle followed the blade and the fat curled up over the opening of the wound, and the entire dagger remained in his entrails.2

During a provincial assembly of the clergy in Montpellier on 17 and 18 December 1759, an argument broke out among the nine bishops and thirteen deputies in attendance over the works of Father Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. The fight was not about Berruyer himself, for the controversial Jesuit had died the year before, on 18 February 1758. The debate concerned the legacy of Berruyer’s work and the continued presence of his books in France. Apparently, the tumult was sparked by the bishop of Carcassonne, Armand Bazin de Bezons, who pressed the assembled clergymen for an update on the status of the examination of Berruyer’s works that had been promised in an earlier meeting of the clergy in 1755. Bezons had requested a formal condemnation of Berruyer at the previous meeting, but the request was denied until a more thorough investigation of his works had taken place. Upon realizing that little progress had been made by the two archbishops assigned to the task – the archbishops of Paris and Cambray – he demanded their replacement and delivered an impassioned speech to convince his fellow clergymen to take this matter seriously. As told by the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, Bezons targeted not only Berruyer but the whole Society of Jesus:

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At last the continuation of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu by Father Berruyer, a book which is perhaps the greatest scandal that one has ever seen in the Church, succeeds in presenting the final bit of evidence of the design of these authors. It is no longer the branches that they attack; they are going directly at the root; they are striking the cornerstone on which rests the entire edifice of Religion, and in endeavouring to burn it, they will break apart against it. They contest the Divinity of Jesus Christ; they negate his infinite wisdom, his omnipotence, his merits. They pervert his Doctrine; they debase his Word, which they profane by substituting the indecent reveries of a crazy and wild imagination for it … And now they are borrowing [the ideas] of Nestorius, Socinius, [and] Pelagius; they are even using … the reasonings of prideful and reckless Philosophy, what the debauchery of the heart and mind have unfortunately rendered too common in our day.3 Bezons’s speech summarized what had become of the Histoire in the minds of many critics of the Society of Jesus. Berruyer’s book was both heresy and “philosophy,” of the sort that predominated in Enlightenment France, and Bezons held the entirety of the Society of Jesus accountable for its spread. To this impassioned allocution the clergymen at the meeting gave a rather lackadaisical response. While most recognized the Histoire as a problem, they did not think there was much more that could be done to stop its spread. The work had already been censured formally, not only by a collection of French bishops but also by the Parlement of Paris and the papacy. There was little that a provincial assembly of French clergymen could add to this effort. The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, however, disagreed. They lamented the “complaisance” of these clergymen for what was the bigger issue at stake: the Jesuits and the danger they presented to the church and the kingdom. Some of the clergymen seemed to recognize the connection between the fates of the book and the society at large. The bishop of Narbonne feared that since the society was in a precarious position at that moment in France, a condemnation of Berruyer could be a “fatal blow and a new object of triumph for its enemies.” No doubt the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques enthusiastically agreed, for it seemed that the attacks levelled against Berruyer by the Jansenist weekly and many of its

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partisans had begun to implicate not just Berruyer nor even his “sect.” Instead, attacks against Berruyer took on a more universal character, becoming indictments of the Jesuits as a whole. Though checked by the bishop of Narbonne and others at the provincial meeting in Montpellier, Bezons’s plea pointed in this direction, casting attention on the danger that both Berruyer and the Society of Jesus posed to Catholic Europe.4 Having run afoul of both church and state in the 1750s, the Histoire became a political liability for the Jesuits. In the hands of opponents, the book came to represent the deficiencies of the society as a whole. Although many Jesuits never went along with Berruyer’s ideas, the Enlightenment Catholicism that he espoused illustrated a culture of free-thinking and independence that was socially, morally, and politically destabilizing, according to critics. This case against the Jesuits joined with other rhetorical arguments constructed by the society’s opponents and set up the definitive political moment for the society in France: their suppression in the 1760s. While not responsible for the Jesuits’ demise, the Histoire played a part in creating the conditions for their dissolution. Played out during the continual effort to censor Berruyer’s ideas, the suppression of the Jesuits echoed aspects of the Berruyer Affair. Public opinion featured prominently in the campaign against the Jesuits, and those who fought in it, not coincidentally, were the very ones who had fought the public opinion war of the Berruyer Affair just a few years prior. The controversy that Berruyer sparked grew to have significant political consequences for the society to which he belonged.

A Jesuit Conspiracy The suppression of the Jesuits in France was a complicated matter that involved many actors and necessitated a series of events. IsaacJoseph Berruyer and the Berruyer Affair were undoubtedly among them. Berruyer’s Histoire provided the Jesuits’ enemies with a tangible example of how the Jesuits’ ideas had become threatening and destabilizing. The Berruyer Affair and the censorship campaigns of the French state, Rome, and others identified the Histoire with dissidence and the Enlightenment Catholicism it espoused with heresy and immorality. The Histoire featured regularly in the campaign that the Jesuits’ enemies

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waged to turn public opinion against the society. What made it particularly useful, however, was the fact that Jesuits throughout Europe had continued to smuggle the work abroad and publish new editions and translations of it even after royal and papal condemnations had been announced. The Italian version of the Histoire and others illustrated how the Jesuits who promoted Berruyer’s ideas were willing to flaunt the law of church and state to spread their philosophical system. The continued popularity of the Histoire and the production of a new, posthumously published work by Berruyer convinced many in France that a Jesuit conspiracy was undermining the traditional authorities of the church. Some anticipated the dangers of the Histoire for the Society of Jesus. Decades before their suppression in France, André-Hercule de Fleury wrote in a series of letters to Pierre Guérin de Tencin that he felt many members of the society desired too much to cultivate “a bel esprit” and consequently “discredit[ed] themselves by it.” That the Jesuit superiors seemed either incapable or unwilling to control their members in this matter exacerbated the issue. Part of the problem, in his mind, was the Journal de Trévoux which promoted this bel esprit among French Jesuits. A graver threat, however, was the division that seemed to have emerged within the Society – “a kind of schism” in Fleury’s words – predicated by Jean Hardouin and “confirmed” by Berruyer and his “bold opinions.” Hardouin and Berruyer had made it acceptable to embrace new ideas and shirk the authorities of the past. Fleury thought that this sort of individualistic mentality had “won the youth” in the society and was quickly spreading. It found a home in the Jesuit seminaries where “imprudence and ambition” trumped obedience and proper instruction. The forecast was clear: if this sect of Jesuits was able to disseminate its ideas further, it would do considerable “damage” to the entire society.5 The damage only emerged, however, when the Jesuits’ opponents initiated a campaign to associate the entirety of the French Society of Jesus with Berruyer’s ideas. Bishop Bezons opened this attack in 1759, but it gained significant momentum a year later in the city of Soissons. Once in the firmly and vociferously pro-Unigenitus hands of Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, the diocese of Soissons took a turn when François de Fitz-James became bishop in 1739. The “Jansenistically inclined” Fitz-James had shown his “austere” moral compunctions in various episodes early in his career as well as his support of the Gallican liberties around the time of the Damiens Affair in 1757. Fitz-James hired

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the controversial and unrelenting Jansenist Pierre-Étienne Gourlin as one of his chief theological associates. Disciple of the important figurist thinkers Laurent-François Boursier and the abbé Jean-Baptiste d’Étemare, Gourlin had been removed from his post as the vicar of the parish of Saint-Benoît when he refused to accept the bull Unigenitus. He had already composed a number of pro-Jansenist tracts and contributed to the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques. With Fitz-James he gained a more formal role, assisting the bishop in writing his pastoral instructions and diocesan letters. Working together in this capacity, the two clergymen entered late into the fray of the Berruyer Affair and helped connect the affair of this one Jesuit to the affairs of the entire society.6 Fitz-James’s main contribution to the fight against Berruyer and the Society of Jesus was a two-volume episcopal mandement. Fitz-James had attended Beaumont’s second meeting in Paris in 1753 on the occasion of the publication of the second part of the Histoire and heard the first reading of Beaumont’s mandement against Berruyer’s work.7 Like the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, however, Fitz-James felt that Beaumont’s piece had not said enough. It did not detail the precise problems in the Histoire or discuss why Berruyer’s theological ideas were incorrect. Six years later Fitz-James took matters into his own hands. With the help of Gourlin, he produced a massive pastoral instruction – comprised of over 800 pages in folio – that targeted the collected works of Berruyer, the many apologies written on his behalf, and Hardouin’s Commentarius in Novum Testamentum, the inspiration and model for the third part of the Histoire.8 At last, here was “an in-depth examination of the errors of the Fathers Hardouin and Berruyer,” exclaimed the writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques.9 Fitz-James and Gourlin sought to expand upon the analyses of Beaumont, Benedict XIV, and the like. They endeavoured to trace the genealogy of Berruyer’s ideas and show how his heretical claims had permeated the entire Society of Jesus. The mandement functioned as an exhaustive synthesis of all the many criticisms of Berruyer’s and Hardouin’s works. Fitz-James and Gourlin began with a synopsis of the attacks levelled against Berruyer from the publication of the Histoire’s first part to the intensification of the fight against Berruyer in the early 1750s. They told the whole story of the Berruyer Affair, from the meetings hosted by Beaumont at Conflans and Paris to the appearance of the many Jansenist pamphlets written against Berruyer and the apologies that defended him. They even covered the

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matriculation of the Histoire through new editions and new translations and finally the judgments of Benedict XIV and Clement XIII.10 Having covered the history of the Histoire, the duo proceeded to analyze the various works by Berruyer, Hardouin, and their supporters. The things that Fitz-James and Gourlin identified as problematic in the Histoire were those elements of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism that Jansenists and others had complained about for the previous three decades: his willingness to innovate theologically, his attempt to transform the Bible into something that was pleasurable, his humanization of Jesus and the son of God, his skepticism toward previous modes of explanation for the veracity of the faith, and his optimistic perspective on humanity. Fitz-James and Gourlin placed the entirety of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism on trial. They leaned on many of the arguments invented by Jansenist writers during the Berruyer Affair – including the claims that Berruyer’s innovations were, in fact, simply renewed articulations of the ancient heresies of Arianism, Nestorianism, and Pelagianism – but also added their own unique critiques including the charge that Berruyer’s innovations promoted suicide, lying, and murder.11 Perhaps the most obvious accomplishment of the mandement turned out to be its ability to compile the many arguments brought against Berruyer and his Histoire into one amalgamated text. The thorough analysis of Fitz-James and Gourlin became a talisman inspiring the Jansenist effort against Berruyer, Hardouin, and the society in general. The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques devoted an extended issue of their weekly to summarizing the work and describing its benefits. They saw it as serving to address at once the errors of Berruyer’s ideas as well as the general lack of understanding of the scriptures and their application to the lives of the faithful.12 It was a capital achievement for the anti-Berruyer cause, and it contributed to the growing celebrity of its authors. Among the many engravings housed at the Bibliothèque de la Société des Amis de Port-Royal in Paris is a portrait of Gourlin undertaken after his death in 1775. The image celebrated the deceased Jansenist theologian by showing him seated in clerical garb with a pen in his hand. Behind him lay the crowning achievement of his authorial career: the pastoral instruction against Berruyer’s Histoire. The writers of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques imagined that this pastoral instruction would serve as an “example” for Fitz-James’s “illustrious colleagues” in the episcopacy to push them

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5.1 Father Étienne Gourlin. Gourlin is pictured here with a pen in one hand, signifying his influential role as a writer, and the fruits of his labour in the background including, most importantly, the pastoral instruction written against Berruyer.

to speak out clearly and resolutely against the erroneous theological system promoted by Hardouin and Berruyer and hold the Society of Jesus accountable for its spread.13 Providing further fuel to this fire was the posthumous publication of another of Berruyer’s works, a theological treatise titled Réflexions sur la foi, in 1760. Unlike the various parts of the Histoire before it, the publication of the Réflexions was not the work of Berruyer’s Jesuit

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colleagues. On a manuscript copy of the work among the papers of Mathurin-Germain Le Forestier, the Jesuit superior alleged that “some enemy of the Society had these reflections printed after the death of the Father Berruyer.”14 In their report on the book, the members of the Roman Inquisition also doubted that the Jesuits were responsible for printing the work.15 A 1760 letter addressed to Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes from the members of the Société typographique de Berne provided further evidence that the Réflexions was not what it appeared to be. The société requested the manuscript’s entry into France, hoping to cut off any counterfeit productions undertaken within the kingdom. The request confirmed that the book wasn’t printed in Trévoux, a place associated with the Society of Jesus and their Journal de Trévoux, as stipulated on the Réflexions’ front page.16 Even Gourlin – certainly no friend of the Jesuits – denied that the work was from Trévoux, suggesting instead that it had come to Paris from Rome.17 By all accounts, the Réflexions was the work of someone outside of the Society of Jesus. One of the society’s opponents had gotten ahold of Berruyer’s manuscript and chose to publish it and have it smuggled into France. But why would the Jesuits’ enemies publish a work by Isaac-Joseph Berruyer? Wasn’t the Berruyer Affair largely predicated on Jansenists’ demands that bishops, archbishops, and members of the French state do more to protect French society from the “poison” of Berruyer’s ideas? Le Forestier suggested it was to attach an “insolent” and false preface to the treatise. The preface, not a part of the original manuscript, adopted a ludicrous and satirical tone, painting Berruyer as a martyr, a “great man,” and “in a class with the Jeromes and the Basils” of ancient church history fame.18 It claimed that the Jesuit superiors were responsible for producing the work because they felt it would promote “religion, pious morality, and the propagation of orthodox doctrine.”19 The preface, Le Forestier reasoned, was so absurd that it would result in the work’s condemnation, an act that would bring further embarrassment to the society.20 In fact, the work itself had plenty in it to cause the Society of Jesus problems. The exhaustive report produced by Felice Maria Nerini – the consultant for the case against the Réflexions brought before the Congregation of the Index – shows that the false preface was but a minor concern for those obliged to judge the work.21 Far more

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problematic were the radical ideas that Berruyer himself espoused in the body of the text. The Réflexions sur la foi was Berruyer’s most audacious piece of theological writing. It displayed, among other things, the debts that he owed to Hardouin’s radical skepticism. Berruyer opened the work by declaring that the scriptures failed to provide a reliable source for Catholic teachings. Like Hardouin, he doubted that one could see these monuments as anything but probable evidence of the realities of the faith. He stressed the massive gap between the past and present, questioning how the tenets of the church were “evidently believable … [for] the Christian of the eighteenth century.”22 For Berruyer, the integrity of the church and its teachings rested on two things: authorities from the past and authorities from the present. The evidence of the past – seen in the scriptures, the writings of the church fathers, and the decisions of councils – was to be treated critically with the use of “reason” to render it believable or not.23 The evidence of the present – mainly the teachings and pronouncements of the contemporary church and especially the papacy – was to be preferred completely on the grounds that the papacy was the inheritor of the teachings of Christ and sustained by the revelation of the Holy Spirit. While sources from the past could be questioned and possibly proven false, the testimony of the present was beyond doubt because it came from an authority that was beyond repute: the living tradition of the church. In this way, it was always more reliable, according to Berruyer, to read the past with the help of the present and believe the tenets of the faith not because they are supported by historical evidence but because they make sense in the here and now. His reasoning ran in the same way as that of Hardouin before him, starting from a skepticism and distrust of the written “past” and finishing with a fundamentally ultramontane affirmation of the sole power of the papacy to arbitrate what was true.24 Opponents of the Jesuits knew that the Réflexions contained some of Berruyer’s most scandalous statements, so making the whole of the society responsible for it provided them with an ideal weapon against their nemeses. This explains why those responsible for its appearance listed “Trévoux” as its place of publication and wrote a fake preface that had the Jesuit superiors applaud the work. The publication of the Réflexions projected a notion that Berruyer’s ideas were still alive and

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well in the Society of Jesus and that many were working covertly to spread those ideas. The Jansenist curé Guillaume de Maleville claimed as much in a pamphlet he wrote around this time.25 But no work better articulated this belief than the anonymously published Deux lettres de Monsieur *** à M. *** contenant des Réflexions sur l’affaire du P. Berruyer. The author of the pamphlet crassly described the political opportunity that Fitz-James’s condemnation and the continued publication of Berruyer’s books provided opponents of the Society of Jesus. “The publication of the works of Father Berruyer and the serious reading of the excellent refutations … can give a new face to our general affairs and procure some very real advantages,” the pamphleteer wrote. “All over and particularly in the provinces and isolated places,” the polemicist continued, the Jesuits “scatter this pernicious work by the handful. In the schools of both sexes, in the colleges, seminaries, monasteries, these books are distributed with a revolting ostentation.”26 For the anonymous author, it was “incontestable that the Hardouins and Berruyers speak for the Society, and that the Society has committed to support them whatever the cost.” The Jesuits were purveyors of an “unbelievable conspiracy” to undermine the church.27 If the Jesuits’ enemies could reveal this conspiracy to the public, they could bring down the society once and for all. As Berruyer’s works continued to grow in popularity, and new works, such as the Réflexions, and new translations of the Histoire continued to appear, opponents of the Jesuits began using the Histoire to indict the entire Society of Jesus. Nothing illustrated better the subversive nature of the society, reasoned French Jansenists, than the fact that Jesuits continued to promote a work that had been so resolutely denounced by authorities throughout Europe. The illicit appearance of the Réflexions served as the coup de grâce. Arguably the most outrageous piece written by the controversial Jesuit, its publication at the hands of the society’s enemies allowed those very enemies to build a powerful case for a Jesuit “conspiracy” to destroy the theological foundations of the Catholic Church. The posthumously published Réflexions proved definitively, according to critics of the society, that Berruyer was not the problem. The entire Society of Jesus was responsible for the proliferation of Berruyer’s dangerous Enlightenment Catholicism. The only way to protect the church from the corrosiveness of Berruyer’s ideas, therefore, was to eliminate the society altogether.

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The Histoire and the Suppression of the Jesuits in Paris Berruyer’s Histoire played an important role in the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France. At the precise moment in which Fitz-James, Gourlin, and others were shifting the responsibility for Berruyer’s ideas to the entirety of the Society of Jesus, enemies of the Jesuits received an unexpected gift in the form of the French provincial Mathieu-Jean Joseph Allaric’s decision to appeal a judicial ruling against a Jesuit missionary in Martinique, Antoine Lavalette, to the Parlement of Paris in 1760. Allaric placed the fate of the society into the hands of some of their most ardent critics: the fiercely Gallican magistrates of the parlement. The magistrates turned the case into a deliberation over the legal basis of the society in France by deliberating over the Jesuits’ founding documents, specifically their constitutions. But they depended upon the arguments of those outside its chambers to build a strong ideological case. Those most ready to supply this argument were none other than the Jansenist polemicists and lawyers who had been cutting their rhetorical teeth years earlier during the Berruyer Affair. Once again, Berruyer proved politically useful, this time in what became the most significant political event in the French Catholic Church before the Revolution. Berruyer’s Histoire gave the Jesuits’ opponents a way to argue that the society was immoral and disobedient to its core. It connected the controversial past of the society to its scandalous present. It empowered the magistrates to claim that in eliminating the Jesuits, they were protecting the church and French society.28 Louis Adrien Le Paige, a ringleader of the so-called Jansenist Party in the courts, led the charge to use Berruyer against the Jesuits in their moment of political peril. Le Paige long had an awareness of Berruyer and his potential uses for the anti-Jesuit cause. He collected nearly every polemical work written about Berruyer over the course of the Berruyer Affair. A note written in Le Paige’s hand confirmed that the Jansenist lawyer owned every section of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu as well as “many works for and against Berruyer.”29 Le Paige also kept up with news on Berruyer’s reception in Rome, recording portions of letters that reported the status of the Jesuit’s works among censors and other ecclesiastics.30 His first attempt to use this valuable information came through an influential anti-Jesuit polemical work that he co-authored with fellow Jansenist Christophe Coudrette.

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Among the most significant pieces written against the Jesuits in the years just prior to their suppression, Le Paige and Coudrette’s book argued that the society was “despotic” by nature and sought to place all of Christendom under its control.31 The two Jansenists fit Berruyer into their narrative on numerous occasions. They picked up on the point emphasized by Fitz-James, Gourlin, and others that Berruyer had been condemned by numerous bishops and popes but had evaded formal censure from the Society of Jesus – a reality that illustrated the Jesuits’ penchant for disobedience and their secret approbation of Berruyer’s ideas.32 Le Paige and Coudrette also used their book to remind readers of the reprehensible ideas espoused by both Hardouin and Berruyer. The two Jesuits denigrated the Trinity, profaned the mysteries of the faith, undermined orthodoxy, and promoted a “lax morality” that allowed for all sorts of atrocious behaviour.33 For Le Paige and Coudrette, Hardouin and Berruyer represented the immorality of all Jesuits. That they were allowed to write and publish revealed the dangers of the society and the power that they had amassed in France. On 17 April 1761, a familiar figure brought the case against the Jesuits to the halls of the Parlement of Paris. The abbé Henri-Phillipe de Chauvelin, the irascible barrister who had excoriated Berruyer in front of the parlement six years earlier, shifted his gaze from the exploits of one Jesuit to the dangers of the whole society. Chauvelin’s attacks focused on the Jesuits’ constitutions, or the rules and regulations by which the society operated. Quoting liberally from an edition of the constitutions printed in 1757 in Prague, Chauvelin followed Le Paige and Coudrette’s lead in condemning the society as fundamentally despotic and dangerous to the state. “All Jesuits without distinction,” Chauvelin passionately argued, “are subject and bound to the arbitrary and absolute will of the sole General, by all the bonds that it is possible to imagine.”34 But the Jesuits’ despotic nature extended past their constitutions. Along with Le Paige, Coudrette, and others, Chauvelin made the case that the Jesuits’ writings, particularly their theological writings, also illustrated the despotic nature of the Society of Jesus. Le Paige and Coudrette showed that they had a long history of promoting specious theological ideas, and when these ideas were condemned by bishops, councils, and popes, the Jesuits had refused to change. Chauvelin mentioned specific examples and concluded that the Jesuits’ historical unwillingness to conform to the traditional doctrines and teaching of

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the church confirmed their propensity to disobey.35 Chauvelin’s speech was effective enough to elicit a call for the French Society to submit its constitutions to the parlement for further examination.36 The Jesuits, however, did not go down without a fight. The Jesuits looked to their traditional allies in the French court to protect them from the parlement. The Jesuit superior general, Lorenzo Ricci, wrote letters to both Étienne Franćois de Choiseul and King Louis XV, asking for their intervention. Short and direct, Ricci’s argument was simple: the constitutions of the Society of Jesus were completely trustworthy, had existed for two centuries, and had been approved “by a council and many sovereign pontiffs.”37 The Jesuits resolutely obeyed political authorities in all the places they lived. Ricci’s main concern was not that the case against the society had merit – he clearly felt it did not – but that the political manoeuvres of the society’s enemies might bring about an injudicious verdict. “It is not what they contain,” Ricci wrote about the society’s constitutions then under examination by the parlement, “it is the circumstances in which they are being examined that causes me alarm.”38 Though Ricci had confidence in the society’s traditional allies to help them in their legal cause, he recognized that the politics of the moment made the situation unstable. At the behest of the Jesuits, the king and his agents tried to delay a quick decision against the society in the parlement. The king’s representatives presented their own judgment on the Jesuits’ constitutions before the parlement in July 1761 in which they determined that the French Society of Jesus need only implement a few reforms in order to ensure that their constitutions were acceptable in France.39 By all accounts, it seemed that the French king would once again protect the Jesuits from those in the church who wished them gone. To keep momentum against the Jesuits going and to convince the magistrates of the parlement that the king’s proposed reforms were insufficient, Chauvelin once again spoke to the parlement on 8 July 1761 and this time emphasized the long-standing problems of Jesuit theological writings. In examining these works, Chauvelin argued, one could ascertain the “uniform and consistent doctrine of the Jesuits since the birth of their Society until today,” a doctrine that was fundamentally threatening to the integrity of both church and state and that could not simply be reformed.40 To make his case, Chauvelin immediately consulted Fitz-James’s and Gourlin’s pastoral instruction

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against the Histoire du peuple de Dieu. “It is the entire edifice of Religion that they set out to undermine,” declared Chauvelin, “all the way to its very foundations.”41 The statement came directly from Fitz-James’s famous mandement, but the “they,” in the context of the mandement, referred to Berruyer and Hardouin specifically. Chauvelin applied “they” to the entire Society of Jesus. He took the case that many Jansenists had made against Berruyer – namely, that his dangerous theological innovations reflected a culture of innovation that predominated in the society – and applied it backwards, saying that the Jesuits had always harbored the type of philosophical and theological ideas put on display in the Histoire. Chauvelin used the notoriety of the Histoire as a way to combat the defence of the king and his representatives. The long, scandalous history of the Histoire showed that reform was not possible. The Jesuits were rotten to the core. Chauvelin also showcased Berruyer to highlight how theological errors connected with political disobedience. In his speech, the magistrate told the whole story of the Berruyer Affair and the many efforts to censor the Histoire over the course of the past decade.42 Berruyer’s ideas, he explained, had been condemned at every level of the church and state, but still the Jesuit’s works had continued to grow and spread. For the past seven years, Berruyer’s works were “defended by a number of apologies, showered with praise … multiplied [through new editions], spread throughout the religious houses, and translated into different languages.”43 The progress of the Histoire revealed that Berruyer was not alone in his intransigence. There existed among the Jesuits a conspiracy to spread new and dangerous ideas over and against the wishes of both pope and king. Chauvelin clearly adopted the arguments that Le Paige, Coudrette, and many other Jansenists had supplied in the years just prior. He took Jansenist polemics and brought it to the chambers of the parlement. And the parlement’s decision reflected just how powerful these polemical arguments were. On 6 August 1761, the Parlement of Paris struck a decisive blow against the Society of Jesus. The parlement issued two different arrêts in response to the arguments brought before the court by Chauvelin and others. The first required the Jesuits to remit their founding documents to the court for thorough analysis.44 The second, citing the “pernicious” and dangerous doctrines of the society that were “different from the feelings of the Church,” prohibited the Jesuits from receiving novices,

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allowing foreign members to enter France, and teaching in colleges and seminaries.45 The two decisions reflected the two points of emphasis that Chauvelin had made to the court, and the second in particular reflected the power that arguments about the Histoire could have in this political arena. Thanks in part to Berruyer, the campaign against the Jesuits won its first major victory. The parlement enacted its decisions, however, as appels comme d’abus, which made the declarations provisional and gave the Jesuits a year to present a defence before the decisions were finalized. Though they never appeared before the court themselves, the Jesuits used the time allotted to petition powerful political figures and remedy points of weakness. Just ten days after the promulgation of the parlementary arrêts, Étienne de la Croix, now the provincial of France, wrote to the king to challenge the accusation of disobedience. La Croix assured the king that in their colleges and seminaries the Jesuits did not teach anything “either directly or indirectly against the authority and the person of Sovereign.” He argued that their constitutions charged them with obeying all commands from political authorities. When a Jesuit went astray, he was denounced and “subjected to the full rigor of the law.”46 In his own petitions, the superior general Lorenzo Ricci similarly reassured the king that the society in no way promoted the “horrors” with which the parlement had “impugned” them.47 To make their defence more convincing, however, the Jesuits decided to publicly revisit the case of the Jesuit whose seeming disobedience had featured so prominently in the speeches and writings of Chauvelin. Though they had formally condemned Berruyer’s books years before, the superiors of the Jesuit Province of France chose in this moment to denounce “Hardouinism” and “Berruyerism” once again for the sake of preserving the rest of the society. The task fell to Father Guillaume François Berthier, the chief editor of the Journal de Trévoux. In an article published late in 1761, Berthier reassessed the “systems” of Hardouin and Berruyer. He made it clear that his goal was not to level yet another lengthy condemnation of the two controversial Jesuits. Instead, he wished to articulate their ideas and show that they “have always been disavowed by the Society of Jesus in general and by the [Journal de Trévoux] in particular.”48 Berthier had to walk a fine line in denouncing the two controversial Jesuits’ ideas while still preserving the theological integrity of the society

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to which they both belonged. He claimed, for example, that everyone in the Republic of Letters recognized Hardouin’s “prodigious erudition” while also acknowledging that his books contained ideas that were problematic. He described Berruyer as “a more moderate, more attentive, and more logical mind than [Hardouin]” but conceded that the Histoire was full of “contradictions” and “false idea[s].” Berthier sought mostly to separate Hardouin and Berruyer from the whole of the society. After presenting a quick overview of some of Hardouin’s most controversial claims – and arguing that Berruyer had adopted them wholesale and reproduced them in a more “palatable” way – he pointed out the many efforts by members of the Society of Jesus to denounce and correct them. René-Joseph Touremine had objected to Hardouin’s convoluted biblical chronology; Jean-François Baltus had denounced Berruyer’s interpretations of the Old Testament. Numerous Jesuits had rejected Hardouin’s radical skepticism and his conspiracy about the atheistic forgers of ancient texts. Berthier claimed that the Jesuit superiors had never approved the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire and that the Journal de Trévoux was responsible for publishing the superiors’ denunciation of the work shortly after it was published. Admitting that a very small contingent of “unfaithful friends” had been responsible for publishing the books of the two controversial authors, he nevertheless maintained that the vast majority of the society had “always rejected and even fought against” them. Berthier broadcast this message through the society’s most public instrument, the Journal de Trévoux, so that the Jesuits’ defence against the claims of Chauvelin and others would reach as many as possible.49 The Jesuits’ public defence was met with another round of Jansenist attacks that sought to turn the very public opinion that the Jesuits hoped to win against them. Gourlin penned another denunciation of Berruyer and Hardouin in which he warned that “Berruyerism” was not finished in France. The “monster” of Berruyer’s theological system “still live[d] and subsist[ed] in the heart of the Church” because there were still “Partisans of it and in a great number.”50 Gourlin directly contested Berthier’s claims in the Journal de Trévoux. He argued that though Berthier had maintained the innocence of the society in the matter of Berruyer and his ideas, the very decision to make a statement such as this testified to the larger conspiracy by the Jesuits to privately promote and yet publicly deny the system of Hardouin and

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Berruyer. Gourlin’s evidence came from points previously made by the society’s detractors. He accused Berthier of making the writings of the two Jesuits seem far less menacing than they really were. He claimed that the Jesuit superiors did little to respond to the publication of the Histoire’s second part and rejected Berthier’s admission that the superiors were unaware of the publications of Berruyer’s later works. While Berthier argued that Tournemine halted Hardouinism’s progress in the society, Gourlin would only go so far as to say that he delayed its spread, and he pointed to the publication of the third part of the Histoire as evidence of Hardouin’s continued relevance in the society. All of this built to Gourlin’s larger point that Berruyer and Hardouin showed how the society acted against the interests of the church and the kingdom. The continued publication of Hardouin’s and Berruyer’s works demonstrated how the Jesuits blatantly ignored the condemnations and instructions of the papacy. Their constant disobedience made the Jesuits an “unfailing source of troubles in the Church and in States.”51 The public reputation of the Jesuits took a far worse hit, however, in March 1762 when the Parlement of Paris published their Extraits des assertions dangereuses et pernicieuses. The Extraits des assertions was a compilation of passages from Jesuit writings, both in the past and the present, that demonstrated their immorality and disobedience to the state. Composed by members of the Jansenist Party in the courts, including the abbé Chauvelin and the counselor Robert de SaintVincent, the volumes provided the magistrates with a way to entreat the public to sympathize with its case against the Jesuits.52 Drawing its inspiration from Chauvelin’s speeches, the Extraits des assertions proposed to reveal “the perversity of the doctrine supported constantly and without interruption by the priests, scholars, and others … of the Society of Jesus.”53 The Extraits des assertions was organized into distinct sections, each corresponding to a particular sin promoted by the Jesuits, including “blasphemy,” “sacrilege,” “irreligion,” and “idolatry.” Yet the most audacious claim that the Extraits des assertions made was that the Jesuits endorsed “homicide … lèse-majesté and regicide.” Indeed, murder and regicide were so central to the case that the Extraits des assertions made against the Jesuits that the editors attached a frontispiece to the work that revealed a scene whereby two Jesuits, each with daggers in their hands, were stabbing two helpless victims behind a curtain drawn aside with the help of a pair of angels. Next to the Jesuits lay items

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associated with their victims: a bishop’s mitre and crook and a crown – implying not so subtly that the Jesuits had assassinated members of the episcopacy and monarchy. The angels displayed the scene to an obviously horrified public in the foreground, and the biblical passage included at the bottom reflected the creators’ desire to show how public opinion would hold the Jesuits accountable for such acts.54 The allegory was clear. The Extraits des assertions displayed to the public the evidence that the Jesuits were dangerous for the church and kingdom. The challenge for the editors of the Extraits des assertions was showing that the dangerous beliefs of the Jesuits were, in fact, held by all members of the society including, most importantly, the Jesuits in France. The most damning passages in the Extraits des assertions came from Jesuits who were either not French or who lived some one or two hundred years prior. After going through the hard work of compiling these excerpts, the editors did not want to allow the Jesuits the easy defence of claiming that the statements, while condemnable, did not actually represent the beliefs of the members of the society living in France at that time. They feared this line of defence particularly because they had gotten word that a collection of French bishops was preparing to defend the Jesuits with this very argument before the parlement in the near future. In the words of an anonymous ally to the Jansenist barrister Louis Adrien Le Paige, the Extraits des assertions needed to “to show that the Jesuits of the current century all think just like those of the [Catholic] League.”55 Toward this end, they adopted two approaches. First, they opened the Extraits des assertions with a section on the “unity of sentiments and doctrine” of the Jesuits. Using the writings of Jesuits themselves, the authors made the claim that the Society of Jesus espoused one uniform set of opinions and beliefs.56 Second, the authors tried to include as many examples from recent French Jesuits as they could to illustrate that their dangerous ideas continued all the way to the current place and moment in time. While not the most commonly cited Jesuit in the Extraits des assertions, Berruyer satisfied both proposed goals of the authors. By 1762, the editors had abundant resources to convict Berruyer of some of the charges of promoting pernicious doctrine. Berruyer’s Histoire demonstrated the Jesuits’ promotion of “irreligion,” for example, largely because the book had been deemed heretical by such esteemed authorities as the bishops Colbert and Fitz-James.57 But the editors also

5.2 Frontispiece of the Extraits des assertions dangereuses. The image shows two Jesuits stabbing members of the court and episcopacy behind a curtain that is being drawn back, exposing their deeds to the public.

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used Berruyer in more expansive ways. The Extraits des assertions listed passages from the first part of the Histoire under the most impactful of categories, that of “lèse-majesté and regicide.” By the editors’ account, Berruyer promoted regicide when he told the story of Ehud and the Moabite king Eglon from the book of Judges.58 In the story, Ehud was presenting a tribute to the Moabite king, but while pretending to tell the king a secret he took a dagger that he had attached to his thigh and plunged it into Eglon’s stomach. When telling this story, Berruyer explained that Ehud’s assassination was by the Holy Spirit’s command and that Ehud’s perfidious actions were “legitimate against a violent oppressor that [the Israelites] were not in the state to attack openly.”59 To the editors of the Extraits des assertions, this explanation clearly convicted Berruyer of advocating regicide. Most significantly, however, Berruyer was one of the last French Jesuit authors included in that section and, indeed, in the entire work.60 Berruyer provided them with perhaps the perfect representative of all that they wanted to portray about the Jesuits. As a French Jesuit who lived until 1758, Berruyer dispelled any claim that the dangerous ideas of the society belonged to a different place and time. The Histoire’s inclusion in the Extraits des assertions revealed how important the Histoire had become for the case against the Jesuits in France. In the spring of 1762, the Parlement of Paris took its first concrete actions against the Jesuits. In April 1762, the parlement dispatched soldiers to the Jesuit professed house in Paris to seize its papers and property. Enemies of the Jesuits reacted with glee; members of the society despaired. At the age of fifty-eight, Guillaume François Berthier was forced to give up his position as the director of the Journal de Trévoux, a position he had served in since 1745.61 Despite his efforts, the former editor of the Journal could not prevent the actions against his society, and, looking back, he began to lament the Jesuits’ misfortunes. Writing to a younger member of the society in Lille, he explained that like a piece of theater “all the scenes of [this] tragedy have threaded themselves together one after another.”62 Berthier recognized that the troubles that the French Society of Jesus had just endured were the result of a long chain of events that had supplied their enemies with the ammunition to destroy them. No doubt in his mind as he wrote this sad lament was the Berruyer Affair and the many ways that it had found itself into the politics of the moment. Having composed the society’s last-ditch effort to

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remove the stain of Berruyer from its public reputation, Berthier knew better than most just how dangerous Berruyer’s books had become. While Berruyer was not the only person to which critics pointed when making their case that the society was immoral and disobedient, he played a key role in solidifying their arguments and applying them to the present day. The Histoire revealed that Jesuits continued to defy the orders of both pope and king. With this argument, the magistrates of the parlement and French Jansenist polemicists landed a decisive blow against their longtime enemies in the Society of Jesus.63

The Power of the Public The Histoire also provided French Jansenists with a powerful tool to take the limited suppression issued by the Parlement of Paris and make it universal throughout France. The Parlement of Paris’s decision to expel the Jesuits from colleges, universities, and professed houses only applied to the territory under its jurisdiction. The parlement administrated judicial cases for upwards of a third of the kingdom, but it still left two-thirds of France unaffected. While the Jesuits’ largest and most significant province, the Province of France, fell under the purview of the Parlement of Paris, two of its French provinces – the Province of Lyon and the Province of Toulouse – were left unscathed, and the Province of Guienne was only partly affected. For Jansenist’s plans to suppress the society entirely to come to fruition, they had to convince the other regional parlements to follow suit. To do this, French Jansenists once again turned to the power of public opinion to pressure local bishops and magistrates to act against the Jesuits in their areas. They leaned on previously successful lines of attack including those targeting Hardouin and Berruyer. The successes that Jansenists had in their public campaigns against the Jesuits in the 1760s revealed just how formidable public opinion had become by the mid-eighteenth century. Although the Jesuits mounted their own public defence, they found themselves unable to successfully parry the many attacks directed at them in the final years of their existence in France. Expelled from their institutions, many members of the Jesuit Province of France protested the decision of the Parlement of Paris by seeking the renewed intervention of the king. In letters to Louis XV, Jesuits changed

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their previous approach and, instead of denying the accusations levelled against them, attempted to focus the king’s attention on the great service that the society’s members provided to the kingdom particularly in the realm of education. Jesuits responded to the parlement’s ruling on 6 August 1762, which permanently prohibited them from teaching in universities and preaching in churches, by emphasizing the impact that their dismissals would have on French schools.64 They impressed upon the king his responsibility to preserve and protect “the education of the youth” and claimed that the young people of France would be “entirely troubled by the expulsion of the Jesuits.” The shift in focus to education was a tactical one for the Jesuits. Having seemingly lost the fight over whether their society’s constitutions and scholarly writings were problematic, they attempted to wage the next battle over the issue of the expulsion’s effects. Convicted of contributing to social and political instability, the Jesuits flipped the narrative and claimed that the real instability would come if they were jettisoned from the many educational institutions that they owned and operated in France.65 The Assembly of the Clergy, perhaps the Jesuits’ most ardent supporters, also appropriated this line of defence. The assembly had already thrown their lot in with the Jesuits before the end of 1761. By a large majority – reportedly forty-five to seven – the episcopacy had communicated to the king their support for the society against the Parlement of Paris. Five months later, the assembly once again came to the Jesuits’ aid by composing a formal remontrance sent directly to the king. Approved and presented on 22 June 1762, the remontrance argued for the inherent usefulness of the Jesuits in France. The clergy began their statement with the avowal that they could not possibly countenance “the destruction of a Society of clergymen commendable … by the infinite services that they provide the Church and the State.” In their role as educators, the Jesuits had been “charged with the most precious deposit for the Nation in the education of the youth” and had served them well. The assembly accused the parlements of using “qualifications as odious as they [were] imaginary” to condemn the society, close their colleges and novitiates, and seize their goods. Nevertheless, the society’s members, who were “entirely consecrated to the public utility,” remained faithful and obedient to the king and his people.66 The assembly juxtaposed the Jesuits’ obedience to what they saw as the magistrates’ resistance to the crown. They insinuated that the

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suppression of the society, against the wishes of the monarchy, threatened royal power.67 Finally, they reinforced the argument that the Jesuits’ removal from educational institutions would decimate France and its inhabitants. Education, they claimed, was the “nerve and the force of States” and determined the “events of the following generations.” “We cannot express to you strongly enough, Sire,” the remontrance read, “the inconveniences that must result from the destruction of the colleges of the Jesuits in our cities and countrysides.” Pinned by the magistrates of Paris, the Jesuits and their allies placed their hope in the tried-and-true political method of winning the monarchy to their side. Having lost the first ideological battle over their constitutions, they believed that their best chance was through reminding the king just how beneficial the Jesuits were for the kingdom.68 As the Jesuits attempted to work political back channels to overturn the ruling of the Parlement of Paris, the Jansenists continued to encourage judicial actions against the society. In fact, even before the Parlement of Paris’s decisive ruling in August 1762, other parlements had already gotten involved in the affair of the Jesuits. The Parlement of Normandy, headquartered in Rouen, pronounced the first definitive ruling against the society on 12 February 1762.69 Because of its size and stature, however, the Parlement of Paris’s case against the Jesuits became the template that provincial parlements used to justify and organize their own suppressions of the Jesuits in their regions. Le Paige and his associates in the Jansenist Party were in constant contact with allies in various regional courts. The Jansenist Party hoped that a unanimous and decisive show of force from the collected parlements would overwhelm any rescue attempt of the Jesuits by the crown. To influence the magistrates of the various provincial parlements, French Jansenists once again took to the public sphere. In a wave of publications, they tried to convince decision makers that to delay judgment on the society would be to ignore the will of the people. In this endeavour, they once again found the Histoire du peuple de Dieu to be extremely useful.70 The new attack began with Antoine de Malvin de Montazet, the relatively new archbishop of Lyon. As an archbishop and a Jansenist “in all but name,” Montazet was a rare breed in mid-eighteenth-century France; his acts as archbishop and “primate of the Gaules” contrasted and even directly combated the anti-Jansenist actions of most of his episcopal colleagues.71 On 31 December 1762, Montazet followed in the

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footsteps of Fitz-James by promulgating his own mandement against the works of Hardouin and Berruyer. After so many condemnations by bishops and the papacy, Montazet acknowledged that his mandement might have appeared to be superfluous, but he reasoned that it was necessary at that moment in time because Berruyer’s works continued “to sneak into diverse spots in our diocese” and acquire “a number of partisans [who] speak of it with praise.”72 Berruyer hoped for “nothing less than to destroy … the entire edifice of Religion,” according to Montazet, and for that reason his book needed to be stopped by whatever means necessary.73 The mandement provided little in the way of new analysis. The archbishop echoed Jansenists’ concerns over Berruyer’s articulation of the Trinity and the incarnation, his conception of natural religion, his “trivialization” of the scriptures, and his weakening of grace and the power of original sin. What made Montazet’s mandement significant was its timing. Montazet published his attack on Berruyer and Hardouin less than six months after the Assembly of the Clergy – the assembly of his episcopal peers – had petitioned the king in support of the Jesuits. Montazet did not implicate the whole society in Berruyer’s theological errors. He didn’t have to. By this time, the argument for the connection between Berruyer and the rest of the society was already well established in Jansenist polemics. A public indictment of Berruyer read clearly in the political moment of late 1762 as a public indictment of the Society of Jesus. Arguably the most important member of the French episcopacy outside of the archbishop of Paris, Montazet used his position to proclaim publicly that not all bishops supported the society. Members of the Jansenist Party hoped that Montazet’s declaration would bring other bishops along. Members of the lower clergy throughout France noticed Montazet’s efforts and pressured their respective bishops to make similar decrees. In the area around Rouen, a collection of fifty-six curés petitioned their archbishop, Dominique de la Rochefoucauld, to publicly condemn the two Jesuits. Rochefoucauld was a significant target for Jansenists. Besides being both a cardinal and archbishop, he was among the wealthiest prelates in the kingdom.74 The cardinal’s resources could do much to publicize the anti-Jesuit case widely. In addition, Rochefoucauld had a reputation as a moderate in the context of the Jansenist-Jesuit dispute.75 In their petition, the priests argued that it was especially important that Rochefoucauld take a stand against Berruyer because

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Rouen was the author’s hometown. “Berruyer wasn’t born in Soissons or Lyon; it was not in Lyon or Soissons that he taught, preached, confessed, composed, and distributed his errors,” they wrote. “It is your diocese, Monseigneur, that is his homeland and was the principal theater of his crimes.”76 They assured Rochefoucauld that Berruyer’s works still existed in the diocese and claimed that some had secretly “distributed bundles of them to the religious houses” and placed them “in the hands of a great number of young clerics.”77 Indeed, one letter posited that Berruyer’s Histoire was sold in Rouen “as much if not more than in any other city in the kingdom” and that some of his writings had even been “snuck … into the public prayers of the Church.”78 Unsurprisingly, the priests blamed the distribution of Berruyer’s Histoire in the diocese on “the Jesuits.”79 The protesting clergy explicitly linked the problem of Berruyer to the Jesuits’ continued presence in France and thus connected their petition to the broader campaign against the Jesuits in the 1760s. Most importantly, they published their petitions so that their protests could be read by the public. The clerics felt that by publicizing their requests they would place greater pressure on the Jesuits and on other bishops to act. On this occasion, Rochefoucauld chose the path of moderation, much to the curés’ chagrin. He responded with a pro forma assurance that he would use “wisdom and prudence” to determine the “necessary remedies for evil” in whatever form they took but declined to add another item to the long list of episcopal condemnations of the Histoire.80 But the Rouen curés’ efforts set an example for further activism elsewhere in France. In November 1763, clergymen from Lisieux appealed to their bishop, Jacques-Marie de Caritat de Condorcet – the uncle of the famous philosophe – for a similar denunciation.81 So too the priests and deacons of Auxerre sent a letter to their bishop, Champion de Cisé, asking for a formal statement against the “monstrous doctrine” of Berruyer and Hardouin.82 These letters followed what had become a fairly formulaic script for those seeking redress against the Jesuit duo. They lamented their theological errors, testified that their ideas were not dead and gone but still very much alive, and then linked their continued existence to the Jesuits as a whole. The clerics of Auxerre pleaded with their bishop to “put the axe to the root of the tree that carries such pernicious fruits by banning the Jesuits, condemning the works of Fathers Hardouin and Berruyer … and employing your authority

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to snuff out the fire of schism and discord.”83 The point of publicly pressuring bishops for a formal statement against works that had already been condemned on many occasions was to use the pronouncement in the ongoing case against the Society of Jesus. Their shared strategies demonstrated how the anti-Jesuit effort was being orchestrated by the same Jansenists who had led the fight against Berruyer a decade before. Some eventually took matters into their own hands. Priests from Auxerre published their own Dénonciation des ouvrages des FF. Hardouin et Berruyer in part because their bishop would not. No longer calling for judgments from authorities above them, the collected curés confessed that the scandal over the two Jesuits’ ideas was “still enormous” in Auxerre, and they saw themselves as fighting the same crusade as FitzJames and Montazet.84 The clergymen boldly declared that the problem with Hardouin and Berruyer was a problem of the entire Society of Jesus. Hardouin and Berruyer “hatched” a pernicious doctrine, but now it had “infected all the members [of the Society of Jesus].” Because of the Jesuits, “simple people read [Hardouin’s and Berruyer’s works] with eagerness and thus without realizing [drank] the poison of unbelief.”85 And unbelief, the clergymen concluded, was the “source of all trouble in France.”86 The only solution was to eliminate the Society of Jesus. At the end of their denunciation, the priests and deacons signed their names. Included among the signees was none other than Joseph Robert Alexandre Duhamel, the Jansenist theologian whose writings had kicked off the Berruyer Affair in 1754. Duhamel placed Berruyer in the spotlight of French ecclesiastical politics in the early 1750s and, through his efforts and the efforts of his colleagues, kept him there in the 1760s. The ongoing assault against Berruyer and Hardouin affected the way that the Jesuits defended themselves. In addition to privately petitioning the king and members of the French court for protection, Jesuit authors began publishing books and pamphlets that responded to the charges levelled them. In September 1761, Henri Griffet published a pamphlet in which he refuted point by point the accusations made in the Parlement of Paris’s decision from a month prior and highlighted the society’s usefulness for French society.87 André Christophe Balbani also tried to align the public narrative to what the Jesuits were arguing in private to the court. In his Appel à raison, he promoted the Jesuits’ contributions in “elevating the youth” particularly through education.88 But the consistent flow of Jansenist polemics against Hardouin and

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Berruyer forced Jesuit apologists to break from their largely positive message about the value of the Society of Jesus in France. In his Apologie de l’institut des jésuites, Joseph-Antoine Cerutti endeavoured to show that, despite the ruling of the Parlement of Paris, the Jesuits’ constitutions were perfectly reasonable and did not pose a threat for the French kingdom. When he got to the topic of the Jesuits’ “uniformity of doctrine,” however, he felt obliged to deal with the issue of Berruyer and Hardouin. “It is true that a certain freedom of thought found its way into the Society,” wrote Cerutti. “From that [has emerged] strange paradoxes, condemnable assertions, a Hardouin, a Berruyer among the French Jesuits.”89 The constitutions and the whole of the society, however, were not at fault. The Berruyers and Hardouins of the world were aberrations, according to Cerutti – unfortunate but rare in the Jesuits’ history. Cerruti’s was a logical argument, but the very fact that he and others had to deviate from their plans to emphasize the society’s merits and once again address Berruyer and Hardouin only confirms the success that Jansenist polemicists were having in shaping the public narrative about the Jesuits.90 Berruyer and Hardouin continued to plague the Jesuits as they attempted to defend themselves in the public sphere in 1762 and 1763. In another pamphlet titled Mes doutes sur l’affaire presente des jésuites, Cerutti once again tried to respond to attacks brought against the society and once again found himself having to deal with Berruyer. Mes doutes questioned the many aspersions cast on the society from the Extraits des assertions dangereuses, the powerful polemical work that compiled lists of Jesuit writings in order to show how the Society of Jesus promoted such dangerous ideas as atheism and regicide. Among those authors cited in the Extraits des assertions dangereuses, of course, was Berruyer. For Cerutti, the accusations brought against the author of the Histoire were spurious. He flatly denied that Berruyer’s Histoire promoted regicide and claimed that the editors of the Extraits des assertions were simply manipulating the Jesuits’ writings for their own gain.91 For Balbani the matter of Berruyer was more complex. In making the argument that Jesuit scholars had done much to edify and expand learning in a variety of fields, Balbani deftly avoided mentioning Hardouin or Berruyer. Eventually, however, he had to address the elephants in the room. “And why have we not included Berruyer in this list?” Balbani asked on behalf of his readers. “Too faithful a copyist of the fantasies of Father

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Hardouin, [Berruyer] erred with him, and the Jesuits were the first to openly condemn [them].” Nevertheless, Balbani admitted, the Jesuits had not gotten rid of Berruyer or the stain of his writings on their reputation. So, Balbani chose to simply concede the point against him: “We therefore consider Berruyer an author whose style and colors merit as much praise as his lapses are worthy of blame.”92 Jesuit apologists could not get away from the issue of the Histoire, and their dismissive and/or tepid responses to the charges levelled against it ceded the issue to the Jansenists in the public discourse. By the end of 1764, Jesuit attempts to defend their reputation and preserve their society in France had failed, and many felt it was largely the result of their opponents’ successes in the public sphere. All but a handful of the kingdom’s parlements and sovereign courts ruled against the society in one way or another, and the king eventually abandoned the Jesuits to the whims of the magistrates. In November 1764, he circulated an edict that made the suppression of the Jesuits uniform throughout France. Only one judicial body, the Parlement of Franche-Comté in Besançon, dared speak out against the proclamation of the king.93 Even in the midst of fighting back, many Jesuits felt that they were doomed. “The Jesuits are condemned by everyone,” admitted Cerutti in 1762.94 In another pamphlet published in the same year, he blamed the Jesuits’ bad reputation on the “public execration” that they endured from the “millions of libels” published by printers who “dared to print our satire … [but not] our defense.”95 Mathurin-Germain Le Forestier blamed the entire debacle on the “Jansenist Party” whom he thought to be behind every rumor and insinuation about the Jesuits’ misdeeds. The means by which these Jansenists accomplished their task was clear to Le Forestier. They had taken advantage of the “unbridled license of the press” to circulate false ideas about the society and publish books that “vomited insults against the Society” and displayed “no other merit than their fury.”96 In the opinions of those closest to the event, the Jesuits lost the battle over the public, and it cost them their legal existence in France.97 Though partisan in his retelling, Le Forestier nevertheless identified an important feature in the campaign against the Jesuits. The suppression spread in large part because the ideological case against the Jesuits had spread. Although that case was complex and involved a long process of development, the Histoire proved to be particularly useful

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in its creation and implementation. Berruyer came up time and time again because he and his writings demonstrated just what Jansenists and their allies in the courts wanted to communicate: that the Society of Jesus was dangerous for French society. Although Jesuit apologists attempted to combat this narrative by highlighting how the Jesuits benefitted France, they could not get away from their controversial past. Having been condemned by parlements, bishops, and popes, the Histoire was a constant reminder that Jesuit writers were responsible for spreading ideas deemed threatening to both orthodox belief and social stability. Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism illustrated how the Jesuits as a whole had gone astray. The Histoire’s continued presence throughout the kingdom convinced magistrates and perhaps the public itself that the only way to protect France was to purge it of the Jesuits.

Conclusion One of the first to write a history of the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France was Lorenzo Ricci, the final Jesuit superior general of the eighteenth century. Ricci did not begin his story with La Vallette and the bankruptcy of the Martinique mission, as most histories of the suppression would do in subsequent years and decades. Mentioning La Vallette only briefly, he chose instead “to make a digression” from that narrative and start with the tale of another Jesuit, Isaac-Joseph Berruyer. Ricci argued that the Histoire du peuple de Dieu – the opposition that it faced both within the Society of Jesus and outside of it, its dissemination throughout Europe, and eventually the condemnations that it engendered – initiated the long chain of events that brought the society down. Despite all the efforts that the Jesuits had made to suppress the book and its ideas, the Histoire reached a massive audience, and everywhere it went controversy followed. The spread of “such an odious book,” he argued, set the stage for the condemnation of the Society of Jesus. Berruyer had so tarnished the reputation of the Jesuits for so many in Europe that the case for the Jesuits’ value and trustworthiness withered away. For Ricci, the superior general who witnessed the collapse of the society before his very eyes, the many troubles that he was forced to deal with all began with an ambitious scriptor and his vision of a new expression of the Catholic faith.98

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Though he died before the deliberations of the Jesuits’ constitutions began, Berruyer played a significant role in determining the society’s eventual fate in France. Jansenists and Gallicans resolute in destroying the society were able to attach Berruyer’s name to a long tradition of Jesuit “immorality” and use him as the linchpin for arguing that the doctrinal corruption of the Jesuits persisted up to their very time and place. Because the Histoire continued to be popular throughout the kingdom, it functioned as an effective weapon for opponents of the society to condemn not just one Jesuit but the entire society. The only explanation for the Histoire’s continued presence in France – amidst scores of condemnations and prohibitions – was, according to critics, that a secret cabal of like-minded Jesuits dared to defy the rulings of both church and state in order to spread the poison of Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism. Using Berruyer, these critics charged the entire society with irreligion and disobedience, and because the whole society was at fault, censorship of the Histoire alone would not be enough to protect the kingdom from its dangers. The society as a whole had to go. The continued focus on Berruyer in the 1760s revealed the tension between the public and private within the fight over the Jesuits’ existence in France. As was their custom, Jesuit leaders in France sought to protect themselves and their society mainly through private petitions to the king and his advisors. Their letters assured the king and members of the court that the Jesuits were always and would continue to be faithful subjects. Yet while the Jesuits worked behind closed doors, the Jansenists and their allies in the parlements exploited the new power of the public sphere. Their pamphlets, judicial briefs, episcopal mandements, and theological treatises posited a completely different vision of the Jesuits to the public. These writings packaged the entire society as corrupt and used Hardouin and Berruyer as proof. With every condemnation of the two Jesuits’ works and every inclusion of the two Jesuits on lists of “dangerous assertions,” the opponents of the Jesuits harkened back to over a decade of condemnations and censorial decrees. While some Jesuit apologists attempted to defend their society before the public, they constantly found themselves outflanked and outmanoeuvred by the far more adept polemicists of the French Jansenist community. Berruyer’s role in these public debates illustrates this fact. The Jesuits simply did not have a satisfactory response to the

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continuous accusations that poured in from all over the kingdom. Building on the work of the many polemicists who had gone before them, French Jansenists in the 1760s proved to be far more able than their ecclesiastical nemeses at engaging the public. In so doing, they revealed just how powerful the public sphere had become. In the dispute over the Jesuits in France, public politics triumphed over the private politics of privilege. To suggest that public opinion played an important role in the suppression of the Jesuits in France is not to overlook the many ways that back-room politics contributed to the end of the society. Much can be said, for example, about the actions of the Étienne François de Choiseul, Louis XV’s prime minister, and the connections he had with members of the Jansenist Party. But, as Dale Van Kley and D. Gillian Thompson have shown, the suppression effort in France was exceptional in nature because it came not from a monarch and their reforming ministers – for example, King José I and his powerful chief minister Sebastião José Caravahlo e Melo, the Marqués de Pombal in Portugal – but from institutions, namely the parlements, that used the Jesuits as a way to contest royal authority. The parlements needed to leverage public opinion in order to succeed in checking the monarchy and its representatives. This is why Berruyer proved so very useful. The Histoire already had a public reputation. For the seven years leading up to the beginning of the trial against the Jesuits, Jansenists had cultivated a public identity for the Histoire that state and church censorship only confirmed. Magistrates such as Chauvelin needed only to adopt the arguments already pioneered by Jansenist polemicists to make his case against the Jesuits effective. Jeffrey Burson’s claim that Jesuit experiments with Enlightenment apologetics led them to become “the authors of their own predicament” rings particularly true when viewed through the lens of Berruyer and the Histoire.99 Public opinion also helps explain why King Louis XV did not simply put an end to the prosecutions against the Jesuits by forcing the parlements to cease and desist. When he did pursue such a course of action with the parlements less than a decade later, during the infamous “Maupeou Coup,” it unleashed a deluge of pamphlets against the “despotic” royal ministry and effectively launched the creation of a “patriot party” that helped usher in the French Revolution. Though hindsight is 20/20 and Louis XV could not have known the repercussions that

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his aggressive actions would have in the final years of his reign, he and the royal ministry recognized the formidable power of public opinion already in the 1760s. French Jansenists had shown just how much trouble a mobilized public could cause. Because the power of public opinion was so real, the Histoire proved an effective weapon. In the hands of French Jansenists, it severed the connection of the Society of Jesus to the rest of the French Catholic Church. The Histoire provided parlements and eventually the king with a reason to eradicate one of the wealthiest and most influential organizations in the church. The suppression actualized the divisive potential of Enlightenment Catholicism in eighteenth-century France.100

6

A Bible for a Post-Revolutionary Age [Jesus] said to him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”1 Jesus said to him a third time: “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” … Troubled and confused, he responded for the third time, “Ah! Lord, why do you keep asking me this? Nothing is unknown to you; you know better than I that it’s true that I love you.” “Feed my sheep,” Jesus said to him. […] By these words of Jesus, Peter was established as his vicar in the entire extent of his kingdom, the bishop of bishops, the father of fathers, the bishop of not only a particular seat at the center of catholic unity but the bishop of the church universal …. So it is today, and so it shall be always in the minds of all the faithful ….2

The abbé Charles-Henri Janson, a curé from the diocese of Besançon, spent much of his career searching for ways to effectively teach the Catholic faith.3 From his home of Besançon he wrote catechetical works for the use of ordinary believers. The religious instruction of children was of special significance. According to Janson, there were “few functions as important to the Church of God” than the catechesis of children because proper catechesis created a stable society.4 “The principle of the majority of sins,” argued Janson, was the Christian’s “poor conduct in the accomplishment of the obligations of [their] estate.”5 The propensity toward disobedience drove humans either “to lose sight of or despise” their social obligations. Education was necessary to remedy “this disorder” and to teach right behaviour from the youngest members of society upwards.6 Janson thought that education worked best when undertaken with a direct, casual tone. He privileged “natural, clear, and precise responses” to children’s questions and articulations of the points of faith “not in an abstract and scholastic manner but in a clear and

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easy fashion.”7 The language of religious education must not be that of the university but that of the “pulpit” so that it may better “edify the piety of some and reform the negligence and abuses of others.”8 It was this desire to provide simple, straight-forward religious education that led Janson to call for the revival of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu. In 1788, the native of Besançon published a brief prospectus detailing the proposed production of a new edition of the Histoire. Janson was not ignorant of the tumultuous history of the book. He noted, for example, the work’s theological eccentricities, particularly those having to do with Christology. He referenced the many condemnations of it, including the censure of the faculty of the Sorbonne, Beaumont’s mandement, and the arrêt of the Parlement of Paris. He even shared that he believed Berruyer had unwisely followed the lead of the even more controversial Jean Hardouin on many important matters. Nevertheless, the abbé still believed that the Histoire could be useful for the purposes of catechetical formation. Though as a theologian Berruyer was rightly denounced, as “a man of letters, he merit[ed] a place distinguished in the most estimable class of writers.” The Histoire was a book that told the stories of the scriptures clearly and enjoyably. If one purged it of its “errors,” the Histoire could still inspire “the taste for true piety” and, consequently, prevent people from falling into “unbelief.”9 Unfortunately, Janson picked an inauspicious time to undertake this new project. He began advertising his revised edition of the Histoire in the Journal des sçavans in March 1789.10 Two months later, the Estates General commenced in Versailles for the first time in 175 years and opened up the door to revolution. Janson postponed his publication plans indefinitely. Those who sought to speak of nearly anything other than political events were made mute by the din of revolution. The revolution changed the circumstances under which clergymen like Janson pursued the work of religious formation. Janson already feared the threat of a growing “unbelief ” in France in the early 1780s, but the revolution opened up previously unimagined possibilities for the fight against the Catholic Church. From the schism elicited by the Civil Constitutional of the Clergy to the de-Christianization campaigns of 1793–94, the revolution fundamentally altered the place of the church in France. The abbé himself felt the impact of these changes. Among

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the many priests who refused to take the oath to the Civil Constitution, Janson was forced to flee France. Though he returned home after the revolution, his advanced age and poor health prevented him from realizing his original plans. At the time of his death, on 24 June 1817, the new edition of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu had yet to appear.11 Janson’s vision, however, did not die with him. With the First Empire and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, France saw a revitalization of the religious energy seemingly lost during the most radical years of the revolution. While Janson and many priests like him emigrated from France in the 1790s, the advent of the empire and the return of a Bourbon monarch to the throne brought many back and initiated discussions about how to repair the damage done to the church. Those who set out to revitalize the Catholic Church in post-revolutionary France needed tools with which to achieve their goals. Herein lies the final chapter in the story of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer and his Histoire du peuple de Dieu. The long-deceased Jesuit found new life in the pursuits of missionary-minded Catholics in the early decades of the nineteenth century. As Janson first proposed, these post-revolutionary Catholics used the Histoire to encourage piety and morality among France’s citizens, from children to adults. In so doing, they brought the Histoire back in an entirely different form. Nineteenth-century clergymen and publishers discarded the parts of the Histoire that they felt were superfluous or overly controversial and focused on the portions of the text that they thought best communicated a message of simple piety and obedience. They kept the sentimentalism that had made Berruyer’s Histoire attractive a century before but jettisoned the theology that had brought many in the church to denounce the work. Catholic publishers and clergymen alike felt that this new version of the Histoire could broadcast a new type of Catholicism, an ultramontane Catholicism that looked to the papacy for matters spiritual and political and valued emotional responses over rational arguments in questions of faith. Despite their efforts, however, the return of the Histoire reinvigorated the same conflicts that had engulfed the church in the mid-eighteenth century. Berruyer’s book remained politically charged, and different groups throughout France used it to fight the new political battles of the post-revolutionary era.

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From De-Christianization to Re-Christianization The Histoire made its comeback because of the post-revolutionary campaign of “re-Christianization” that many in the church undertook in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Over the course of the decade following 1789, the Catholic Church lost its place of religious primacy in France. In an effort to restore the church to its prior authority, Catholic missionaries and clergymen undertook several different efforts, one of which was the publication and promotion of “good books” that they felt would present the Catholic faith in a compelling way. Catholic publishers saw in the Histoire a book that could attract a broad audience of readers as it had decades earlier. With clerical editors, they sought to realize Janson’s vision by reproducing the Histoire in a way that avoided the problems of the past and served the mission of the present. The revolution fundamentally changed the organization of the Catholic Church and its place in French politics and society. On 4 August 1789, the National Assembly famously stripped clergymen of the tithe and various other financial privileges and ceased the church’s practice of providing the papacy with its annual annates. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen granted the freedom of religion and the freedom of expression, permanently ending the official monopoly of religious practice and speech in the kingdom. In 1790, the revolutionary government closed all monasteries and convents that did not fulfill a public and charitable function, remapped French dioceses to correspond with the new French departments, and initiated an overhaul of the administration of the church finalized in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Priests and bishops were now subject to election by their parishioners and required to take an oath affirming their allegiance to the nation and the new law. The new Civil Constitution produced a schism in the French Catholic Church, pitting those who went along with the new reforms against “refractory” priests who resisted. Antirevolutionary critics like the ex-Jesuit Augustin Barruel denounced the reforms as against God’s will. The debate over the church quickly became a battleground that separated out radicals from moderates and revolutionaries from counter-revolutionaries.12 When the revolution turned more radical, the divide between the church and the state grew deeper. Already in 1791, refractory clergy in France were viewed as traitors to the revolution and faced retribution

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from revolutionary clubs and municipal governments. The directory of the Finistère decreed that refractory priests were to live at least five miles from their former parishes. Deportation laws made it increasingly easy to exile refractory priests, and the September Massacres of 1792 saw the murder of three bishops and some 220 other clergymen as conspirators. Yet nothing alienated the church from the revolution more than the campaign of de-Christianization undertaken in 1793 and 1794. Revolutionary de-Christianization sought not only to expel the church from the new regime but to erase its imprint on French history. Even the Constitutional Church suffered under this new level of radicalism. Led by “representatives on mission” such as Georges Couthon and Joseph Fouché, these campaigns shut down parishes, prohibited Catholic masses, facilitated the removal and destruction of public crosses, bells, and other instruments of worship, and forced the abdication of priests. Clergy at all levels of the church fled the waves of de-Christianization that swept across the country. Forty-seven of the eighty-five constitutional bishops either left their bishoprics or renounced their allegiance to the church entirely. In Paris, over 400 priests abandoned their parishes, and in the small district of Provins, to the southeast of the capital, a shocking eighty-one of a total 116 members of the clergy relinquished their posts. Although it affected different parts of France in different ways, de-Christianization stripped the Catholic Church of much of its clerical leadership, destroyed much of its property, and undercut the cultural authority that it had in many parts of the country. Among the many legacies that de-Christianization left in France was the notion that, in the words of Frank Tallett, for Catholics “the Revolution was directed against them and their faith.”13 Many French Catholics blamed “philosophie” for de-Christianization and the revolution more generally. “It is the philosophie of the day,” wrote François Xavier de Feller, an ex-Jesuit and counter-revolutionary, “the principles of libertinage and irreligion, that have prepared men’s minds for the total, destructive anarchy that is laying waste to this beautiful realm.”14 Feller wrote this after only the first few months of the revolution. Commenting after the de-Christianizing campaigns of 1793 and 1794, the royalist lawyer and politician Jean-Baptiste Dauchez lamented: “Too long, alas! Atheism has ravaged France! It is to it and to all those who have professed its pernicious maxims that one must attribute all the misfortunes of which we have been witnesses [and]

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victims; for it’s the atheists who have knocked over our altars, destroyed our temples, proscribed our ministers.”15 Counter-revolutionaries linked the revolution’s destructiveness – especially as it affected the church – with the Enlightenment and, in so doing, constructed a sense of “The Enlightenment” as a unified and fundamentally anti-religious intellectual movement.16 They also began to formulate a new, conservative political ideology that depicted the revolution as a historical event more destructive than any before it and Enlightenment philosophy as a “silent and perfidious enemy” that undermined social stability. “It is unbelief; it is philosophical atheism,” wrote the one-time revolutionary and member of the Convention Jean-Baptiste Mennesson, “that still menaces the French people … that contemplates the ruin of our government, that prepares for a future of new revolutions, that secretly poisons all sources of public happiness.”17 Whether due to the excesses of philosophie or not, it was clear to counter-revolutionaries that the demolition of religious spaces, the suppression of Catholic masses, and the persecution of the clergy were the indicators of the destructive nature of revolution. At the behest of conservative thinkers, a campaign to restore the prominence and influence of the Catholic Church emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. Conservatives called for a restoration of the faith in order to piece back together what they felt was a shattered French society. For François René de Chateaubriand, it meant re-igniting devotion to the Catholic faith in the hearts of French citizens by convincing them that faith offered more than just an alternative to unbelief. The “Christian religion,” Chateaubriand wrote, “is the most poetic, the most humane, the most favourable to liberty, to the arts and letters of all the religions that have ever existed” and indeed of all ideologies in “the modern world.”18 Louis de Bonald proposed that only the reunion of religious and political authority – a fusion of the “constitution of political society” and the “constitution of religious society” – could bring about the regeneration and stabilization of France.19 Throne and altar, in his opinion, must be reunited in the fight to overturn the revolution and its effects.20 In the early years of the new century, conservatives had begun to see some success in this effort to “re-Christianize” France. In 1799, First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte began to return properties back to the church and allow for worship to take place openly once again. He

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also released priestly prisoners from their incarceration on the islands of Ré and Oléron. Exiled refractory priests increasingly returned to the country. In signing the Concordat with Pope Pius VII on 15 July 1801, Napoleon also reconnected the French Catholic Church with Rome and acknowledged Catholicism as the “religion of the majority of the French.” The Concordat erected a new episcopacy comprised of both constitutional and refractory bishops and carved out new diocesan borders. Yet even with these initial successes, the project of revitalizing the Catholic faith in France still faced formidable obstacles. Anticlericalism persisted. The wealth and material stability of the church was a far cry from its Old Regime past. The priesthood was drastically diminished in number. The religious marketplace was far more crowded with competing systems of belief, unbelief, and new, unsanctioned lay organizations. For conservatives, the reforms of the Napoleonic regime were only the beginning of the long process of revitalizing the Catholic Church in France.21 The restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 brought hope that the church might return to its former place of privilege and prominence. State funding for the church increased dramatically, and the Chamber of Deputies, the representative body elected by voters from France’s various departments, became, in the words of Caroline Ford, “one of the most conservative and pro-Catholic bodies imaginable.” “After twenty-five years of revolution,” pronounced the conservative journal L’Ami de la religion et du roi in its inaugural issue, France had finally “abjured the maxims of the innovators in order to return to our old institutions.”22 Some even read the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in prophetic terms as the advent of a post-apocalyptic age in which love of religion would overtake the hearts and minds of all French people. For many nineteenth-century Catholics, the restored monarchy would inevitably lead to a restored church, one with the same power and influence as before the revolution.23 The Restoration, in fact, fostered a more complex relationship between throne and altar than many expected. In the wake of the White Terror of 1815, Louis XVIII determined to follow a more moderate political course than many conservatives had hoped. In September 1816, he dissolved the ultra-royalist Chamber of Deputies – a body he named the “chambre introuvable” on account of their uncompromising persecution of all things and people related to the revolution.24 Some

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began to talk of the “ungrateful Bourbons” who had benefitted from the fall of the revolution but failed to live up to the promises of this new conservative age.25 While Catholic missionaries initiated weekslong revivals reminding the faithful of the horrors of the revolution and urging Catholics to repent of the nation’s sins, the monarchy pursued a policy of oubli or “forgetting,” actively preventing talk of the revolution’s darkest moments.26 The Restoration served as a period of both promise and frustration for those who sought to resurrect the authority and cultural centrality of the Catholic Church in France. They experienced difficulties not only from republicans, who wanted to extend the gains of the revolution into the nineteenth century, but also from the Bourbon monarchy itself.27 Re-Christianization therefore became an endeavour undertaken by Catholics sometimes with and sometimes without the help of the state. The task was a difficult one. Joseph Byrnes has estimated that the total percentage of French churchgoers at the dawn of the Restoration amounted to only one-eighth of the population. Although allegiance to the church had been in decline over the course of the eighteenth century, the revolution proved to be a watershed moment for its cultural authority in France. Both belief in the tenets of Catholicism and, in the words of Raymond Jonas, the “habit of Christian practice” appeared to be waning. Additionally, churches throughout the country stood in disrepair and parishes lacked the types of objects that featured prominently in Catholic worship. Post-revolutionary Catholics felt that the church needed a thorough campaign to re-teach the faith to those who were ignorant of or resistant to it, rebuild parishes that had languished during the revolution, and re-acclimate the French people to Catholic ethics and rituals.28 Some of the first acts of re-Christianization engaged the physical landscape of France. Catholics recovered crosses, statues, and bells and placed them back in the public eye. They reopened church buildings and renovated them. They also built new parishes, often from the collective funds of priests, parishioners, and the state. Over the course of the nineteenth century, for example, 168 new parishes were constructed in the diocese of Rennes and 300 in the diocese of Strasbourg. Clergymen also sought to reclaim urban spaces through ritual. Catholic services inserted Catholic liturgy back into human experiences that had been co-opted by the state at various stages of the revolution, including

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funeral services and marriages. Clergy also undertook public processions on feast days and other occasions. One of the most conspicuous forms of re-Christianization, public ceremonies reshaped the urban experience so that the structures, symbols, and practices of the church were once again part of daily, public life.29 The church also sponsored missions to the interior of France to “re-convert” the French population. From 1815 through 1830, over 1,500 missions took place throughout France. These revivals could last for weeks at a time, and priests laboured exhaustively, sometimes from 4 am until 8 pm, celebrating the mass, hearing confessions, and preaching. In the mode of conservative writers, missionaries often publicly denounced the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophes, blaming them for the instability of the revolution. At times, they hosted book burnings where locals brought copies of philosophical works and set them ablaze. Missionaries erected giant crosses – so large, according to one report from Marseille in 1820, that some three thousand people were needed to carry it – and led processions around infamous spaces including locations of guillotines or sites of revolutionary iconoclasm. Missions provided an explanation and expiation for the trials that the Catholic Church had endured. The burning of books, planting of crosses, and penitential processions set the “sins” of the revolution before the local populace and led them through a process by which they repented of the past and looked to a way forward.30 Missions also served the practical purpose of providing pastoral care for areas that lacked substantial clerical support. At the beginning of the Restoration, there were only 36,000 active priests in France, a number half that of the total priesthood in 1789. Some 7,000 of the estimated 50,000 ecclesiastical posts in France were bereft of clerics, and in some dioceses the percentage of absent church positions escalated to 50 per cent. Bishops often invited missionaries to come to their dioceses simply to help with celebrating the mass and hearing confessions. Many missionaries aimed at re-catechizing a French populace that had not received instruction in the faith for some years. “The missions,” explained L’Ami de la religion et du roi, “are public exercises where, by simple instruction, one endeavours to reanimate in men the knowledge and love of religion, to excite in them grief for their faults, and to get them to lead more regulated and more Christian lives.”31 Education

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and catechism, missionaries believed, would lead the French people back to the Catholic faith.32 Members of the church also instituted new organizations to assist in the effort of re-Christianization. Many of the missions undertaken during the Restoration were planned and produced by the Society of Missionaries of France, an organization founded by the abbé Jean-Baptiste Rauzan and given legal status in 1816. The Society of Missionaries spawned other organizations including the “patronesses of the missions,” a committee of women given the charge to fundraise for missionary efforts. Other societies also emerged and set about promoting the Catholic faith in different ways. A secret society of aristocratic Catholics named the Knights of the Faith championed the cause of uniting the throne and altar in the new post-revolutionary governments. The Daughters of Charity became one of the largest female Catholic groups in the nineteenth century, ballooning to a membership of over 1,600 in the First Empire and over 9,000 by 1878. Other women’s organizations included the Daughters of the Charity of the Sacred Heart, the Congregation of Saint Clotilde, and the Little Sisters of the Poor. Re-Christianization inspired the exponential rise of Catholic women’s organizations with over 200,000 women entering religious life by the end of the nineteenth century.33 Among those organizations created to facilitate the re-Christianization effort was the “new” Society of Jesus. The French Revolution did much to change the society’s fate. Already in the mid-1790s, some Catholics began to link the revolution to the absence of the Jesuits. One anonymous pamphleteer reflected this perspective when they provided an explanation for the revolution’s origins. “For a long time,” the pamphleteer asserted, “France has carried the fatal germ [of revolution]”; it was incubated earlier in the century, according to the anonymous pamphleteer, by “fickle and superficial men, youths, freethinkers, [and] all those against Christian morality.” The pamphleteer continued that the philosophes had tried to spread the “poison” of revolution by attacking both the church and the monarchy, yet for most of the eighteenth century their efforts had been rebuffed by a special group that had “harassed [the philosophes], attacked them with vigor, made known to the faithful their insidious ruses, ventilated the poison spread out in their works, [and] victoriously refuted all their errors.” These valiant defenders of the church were none other than the

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Jesuits. The Jesuits, in the mind of this anonymous author, heroically kept the lid of the Pandora’s box of philosophie shut. When the king suppressed the Society in France, however, the defence collapsed. The suppression, argued the anonymous author, “had the greatest influence on the Revolution” and functioned as “one of the principal means to prepare it.”34 Many shared in this general assessment. The Jesuits prevented philosophie from hatching the egg of revolution. If post-revolutionary Catholics wanted to prevent revolution from returning, then the Jesuits needed to come back. The Jesuits were seen as key figures in the re-Christianization effort of the post-revolutionary era. The formal restitution of the Society of Jesus by Pope Pius VII on 7 August 1814 followed the restitution of the Bourbon monarchy by only months. Groups in France petitioned the new Bourbon king for his support with the fledgling society, arguing that the Jesuits would bolster the effort of re-Christianization. One request, allegedly from a former Jesuit, made the case that the king’s work for the stability and “well-being of his people” were one and the same with the work of the Jesuits. He claimed that the pope, in deciding to re-establish the society, had reasoned that it was “more necessary than ever” to bring back this group in order to “oppose the enterprises of impiety.” “It is an unanimous feeling of all the faithful subjects of the king,” he emphasized, “of all the nobility, [and] of all friends of Religion and the State, that there is no better way to fix past evils, to recall everyone to order, to give a Christian education to the youth, in a word, to restrain the unbridled licentiousness that is slipping into all classes of civil society, than the reestablishment of the Society of Jesus.”35 Similar statements came from groups in Provence, Avignon, Marseille, Toulon, Toulouse, and elsewhere.36 France had become a mission field, and nineteenth-century Catholics believed that those best able to operate within this new environment were the clerics that had made their names as the most successful missionaries in the church. The final piece of the re-Christianization puzzle entailed the proliferation of reading materials that might take the place of the “bad books” that many conservatives believed had sparked the revolution in the first place. The fear of “bad books” inspired the book-burnings of Restoration missions and the desire by some clerics to advocate against the spread of literacy in France. Yet there was a far more significant movement within the church to combat “bad books” with the

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publication and distribution of “good books.” “Good books,” many believed, would inoculate the faithful from the “poison” of unbelief. Devotional texts and catechisms were handed out and sold at low prices at missions. New societies emerged for the purpose of subsidizing the production of “good books” and fostering their dissemination. The abbé Julien Barault established a lending library in Bordeaux to facilitate the process of getting parishioners to read edifying books; later on, he published a guide on collecting and managing “good books” for Catholic libraries.37 Members of the Knights of the Faith founded the Catholic Society for Good Books, a Paris-based organization whose purpose was to lend, give away, and sell “good books.” In its first three years of existence, the Society for Good Books counted over 6,000 subscribers and distributed some 900,000 books to French readers. Ralph Gibson has estimated that Restoration presses produced over 1,000 new “good books” each year.38 The rapid pace of the “good books” campaign meant that Catholic printers and book societies had to look far and wide for materials to print. Much of the campaign aimed at distributing books at as low a cost as possible. According to Darrin McMahon, directors of book societies and printers were “constrained by time and circumstances to reproduce titles immediately,” and, consequently, many of the “good books” printed during the First Empire and the Restoration were pieces written before the revolution. These included not only works of the early church fathers, medieval theologians, and saints’ lives but also the writings of authors from the Old Regime, including Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Jean-Baptiste Massillon.39 The Napoleonic Regulation of 1810 gave an institutional incentive to re-print old, religious texts. The regulation re-organized the state apparatus to oversee book publishing, placing it once again under the centralized control of the Ministry of the Interior, and re-instituted censorship. Books that challenged obedience to “the sovereign or the interest of the state” were strictly prohibited, and printers were required to provide proof of their “clean living and good morals” in order to be licensed. At the same time, the regulation expanded copyright laws to authors, providing them with intellectual property rights over their books for the entirety of their lives and the lives of their wives and children for twenty years after their deaths. Together, all of these measures made publishing old, religious books worthwhile. Not only did they pass censorship easily, they provided

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printers with evidence of their “good morals” and came from authors whose claims to intellectual property had long since passed. “Good books” appealed not only to post-revolutionary Catholics searching for ways to re-Christianize French society but also to publishers looking for ways to easily navigate the new mechanisms of publishing and make a healthy profit.40 Among the many works that reemerged within the post-revolutionary “good books” campaign was Isaac-Joseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Re-Christianization meant not only restoring the public practice of Catholicism in cities and towns throughout France but also cultivating the Catholic faith in the hearts of the French people. Books were central to this effort. They provided missionaries and priests with tools to re-convert the French populace. But re-Christianization also demanded political re-stabilization. For many post-revolutionary Catholics, religious renewal was fundamentally linked to the conservative political project. The church depended upon a strong, stable monarchy for the restoration and preservation of its status and privileges. When Berruyer’s Histoire reemerged, it came to promote these cultural and political ideologies. This Histoire was a far cry from the book that had implicated the Jesuits in “immorality” and “regicide” in the moment of their suppression in the 1760s. The revolution brought about a dramatic transformation. The changing circumstances of the church and the volatile political and social contexts of the post-revolutionary era gave the Histoire a new life.

A “Good Book”? Catholic publishers and priests brought the Histoire du peuple de Dieu back as an instrument of re-Christianization. Most of the editions of the Histoire that emerged in the post-revolutionary era, however, were not full editions of the work. Editors and printers spliced Berruyer’s text into smaller pieces that could be printed as cheap paperbacks. By printing pieces of the Histoire separately, publishers and “good book” societies were able to keep production costs low and market the books to what they felt were important audiences: namely, women, children, and the “working class.” Yet this vision of the Histoire as a “good book,” was only shared by some in the Catholic Church. Once

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again, the Histoire was dragged into political disputes that continued to divide the church in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The Jesuits’ enemies used Berruyer’s book to attack the restored Society of Jesus. The theological and political baggage of the Histoire again rendered the book divisive and toxic for an as-yet revitalized French Catholic Church. Though it largely faded out of public conversations in the latter decades of the eighteenth century, the Histoire du peuple de Dieu never really went away. Even after the suppression of the Jesuits, copies of the Histoire remained in public and private libraries and in the homes of many French readers. According to David Garrioch’s work on the inventories of deceased administrators of Parisian confraternities, Berruyer’s Histoire was among the most popularly owned books by these lay Catholics in the second half of the eighteenth century.41 In the wake of the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the book showed up among Jesuit establishments all over France and as far away as colonial Mexico.42 After revolutionary authorities dissolved monastic communities in France and seized the contents of their libraries, they found that the Histoire had permeated most religious orders. Indeed, the only monastic communities that seemed uninterested in the Histoire were the Augustinians whose theological commitments were far closer to those of French Jansenists than those of the Jesuits.43 The revolutionary state also kept track of the books taken from émigrés, or those who fled the country, and those deported or executed on account of being convicted as “enemies” of the nation. Time and time again, the Histoire showed up in library collections both big and small.44 By the end of the century, the revolutionary state had impounded hundreds of copies of the Histoire. Its campaign against the revolution’s “enemies” illustrated just how far Berruyer’s book had made it among those associated with the church and those who eventually found themselves in opposition to the course of the revolution. The Histoire du peuple de Dieu’s renaissance began with a children’s book. A thick volume bound in octavo, the Histoires saintes les plus remarquables et les plus intéressantes de l’ancien testament, propres à commencer l’instruction de la jeunesse was a collection of some of the most notable stories of Berruyer’s paraphrase of the Old Testament published in 1811. Most of the stories were heavily redacted from their original forms in order to make the work shorter, more affordable, and more

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entertaining. Indeed, entertainment was a foremost concern for the publishers responsible for producing the Histoires saintes. In the preface, the work’s editors explained that their motivation for publishing the book was to find an “abridgment of the Bible that had none of the dryness of all those that [had been published] up until the present.” Their audience, they specified, was “the youth who, in instructing themselves in the first foundations of the Christian religion, will find particular details to pique their curiosity and naturally attach them to a reading as edifying as it is pleasing.” Although they felt the Histoires saintes would be “pleasurable reading for all ages,” the main market for the book was intended to be “lycées, boarding schools, and secondary schools” throughout France. Like so many of the producers of “good books” in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the editors of the Histoires saintes felt that the re-Christianization of France should begin with the kingdom’s youngest inhabitants. The Histoire’s novelistic style provided the editors of the Histoires saintes with a compelling read, useful for gaining the attentions of young people and directing them to the church.45 Although the editors of the Histoires saintes mostly cut and pasted sections directly from the first part of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu, they did make some changes. The editors omitted those sections of Berruyer’s Histoire that were overly explanatory, speculative, theological, or simply too provocative. In the story of the Fall, for example, they cut Berruyer’s estimation of the location of the Garden of Eden and much of his background information on the land of Mesopotamia.46 They left out the section in the first part of the Histoire in which Berruyer described the doctrine of concupiscence as he narrated the story of the Fall.47 They avoided any discussion of the scandalous conversation that Rachel had with Lea, allowing the latter to sleep with Jacob in exchange for some food, and they conspicuously simplified the narrative of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, cutting any mention of how the latter was intent to “satisfy” her “passion” with the young Israelite.48 When the editors of the Histoires saintes made changes to Berruyer’s text, they generally did so in order to simplify the story and avoid the theological eccentricities and scandalous elements of the original. The point of the Histoires saintes was not to revive the polemical debates of the past but merely to use an interesting re-telling of the biblical story to draw people back to the Catholic faith.

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By publishing only portions of the Histoire and doing so in small, inexpensive formats, editors and booksellers believed they could reach the French working class. Out of the Histoires saintes came a number of even shorter works during the 1820s. These works were produced in decimo-octavo – an even smaller format than the octavo editions of the Histoires saintes – and distributed through a Catholic subscription service named the Little Catholic Library. According to an advertisement, subscribers to the Little Catholic Library received annually forty books, each in decimo-octavo, for only twelve francs. Each book, therefore, cost thirty centimes, or roughly the price of a bottle of beer.49 This low price point expanded the potential audience of the Histoire. In the mid-eighteenth century, the first part of the Histoire sold for sixty livres in its quarto edition and twenty-five livres in duo-decimo. While members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy could certainly afford a first edition of the Histoire, it was well beyond the purchasing power of a mason, for example, whose wages generally hovered around two to three livres per day.50 By contrast, the books of the Little Catholic Library, according to an advertisement, were intended for “the laboring class and the least comfortable of society.”51 The Little Catholic Library’s mission was not to make a profit but to distribute as many pious books to as many people as possible.52 The organizers of the Little Catholic Library saw in the Histoire an opportunity to target constituencies that they felt most needed the influence of “good books.” Like the Histoires saintes, other versions of the Histoire included in the Little Catholic Library series were intended for “the instruction of the youth.”53 Joseph, histoire sainte, extraite du Père Berruyer – a small, 100-page volume that included the story of the biblical figure Joseph taken from the first part of the Histoire – was designed for young boys. Like the Histoires saintes that preceded it, Joseph omitted large portions of the original text that introduced readers to speculative or complex theological debates. The simplified narrative made the text more accessible for kids. Joseph, moreover, was a young man for much of the story, and the trials that he endured – sibling rivalries, wrestling with God’s calling, and resisting sexual temptations – all resonated, in the minds of the editors, with the experiences of the young men of their day. The story of Joseph was to serve as a model of morality for boys growing up in post-revolutionary France.54

6.1 Joseph, histoire sainte. This small, inexpensive book was one of the many extracts of the Histoire to appear as a part of the Little Catholic Library series in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

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The two-volume Histoires abrégées de plusieurs Saints Personnages de l’ancienne loi was designed for “fathers of families” and painted a picture of Catholic masculinity by way of examples from biblical stories.55 It included a compilation of biblical stories that all focused on heroic men: Moses, Joshua, Jephthah, Samson, David, Solomon, and Tobit. In these stories, working-class French men were supposed to see their exemplars. Self-sacrifice, an undisrupted trust in God, a willingness to lead, and a dedication to passing on the faith to the rest of the family featured as the dominant themes of these tales. In Moses, the editors saw a person who defended his community of faith and represented the God of Israel in the midst of an antagonistic surrounding culture – an analogy for the situation that they felt many Catholics were presented with in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France. Moses willingly led his people and passed along the tenets of the faith to the community at large. To emphasize Moses’s role as the good “father” of the nation of Israel, the editors made explicit choices on what they did and did not cut from Berruyer’s original text. While they pruned most of Berruyer’s commentary about the Exodus story, for example, they kept the portion in which Berruyer speculated that Moses not only continued to see his birth mother and father even after being adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter but also that his birth parents shared with him the knowledge of his true identity as a member of the Hebrew people.56 As Moses’s parents did for him, so Moses did for the rest of the Hebrew community, the editors reasoned, and so they hoped French fathers would do for the members of their own families. By contrast, the Little Catholic Library’s Histoire abrégées de plusieurs saintes femmes de l’ancienne loi focused on women. Women were seen as particularly important to the cause of re-Christianization in France. In the wake of the French Revolution, women came to outnumber men in most parishes, and women’s organizations grew exponentially as newly restored male orders faltered. For many priests and missionaries, women were the key to converting the people of France back to Catholicism. “Christian wives,” wrote the abbé Gaspard Jauffret as early as 1801, “you are responsible for the conversion of your husbands.”57 The Histoire du peuple de Dieu, in part because of its association with the genre of the novel, already had a reputation as being a book that was attractive to women. The Histoire de plusieurs saintes femmes leaned into this association by compiling the Histoire’s most significant stories of female

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biblical characters: specifically, the stories of Ruth, Judith, Esther, and Susanna. Together these stories illustrated a vision of Catholic femininity that saw women too as capable of protecting and leading the people of faith. In telling the story of Judith, for example, the editors of the Histoire de plusieurs saintes femmes preserved Berruyer’s explanation of how Judith had a “happy” and affectionate marriage for three and a half years before becoming a widow, “renounce[ing] forever union with men,” and winning the freedom of the Israelites from the Assyrians literally by her own hands.58 Judith provided a model for French Catholic women in both a domestic role and a monastic one – the roles that proponents of re-Christianization saw as the most important for women in post-revolutionary France.59 Unfortunately for the organizers of the Little Catholic Library, their work came at a moment when the French Catholic Church was once again being pulled apart by political arguments over the Society of Jesus. Not long after the first nineteenth-century portion of the Histoire appeared, the Jesuits were welcomed back to France. Some celebrated their return. The editors of L’Ami de la religion et du roi confidently announced that the “restoration of the Jesuits would be a benefit for which we have great need,” and the society received some eighty-seven requests to run petits séminaires and thirty to run colleges by 1825.60 However, the Jesuits’ return also drew the ire of others, not only anti-clerical liberals but also many in the church. Gallican Catholics saw the reintroduction of the Jesuits as a sign that the restored Bourbon monarchy was giving away its control of the church and allowing it to fall completely into the hands of the papacy. This fear only got worse when Louis XVIII put into a place a number of religious reforms in the summer of 1814 and initiated negotiations with the papacy to roll back the Gallican provisions of the Concordat.61 Among the first to sound the tocsin over the Jesuits’ return were French Jansenists, particularly those whose careers had begun before the advent of the revolution. The ex-Oratorian, one-time constitutional priest, and decided Jansenist Jean-Louis Rondeau warned that the Jesuits’ return resurrected an “association of fanatics … who wish to declare open war on those who do not think like them … [and] to make the clergy entirely independent from the government.”62 MathieuMathurin Tabaraud, another ex-Oratorian Jansenist, lambasted Pope Pius VII for his decision to re-establish the Society of Jesus. Their

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restoration revealed that the papacy was intent on extending its power into France and reviving the papal-monarchial rivalries of early eras.63 The image of the Jesuits awoke in many Gallican Catholics memories of bitter conflict. Re-Christianization, they felt, demanded a united church. The Jesuits would, at best, complicate matters and, at worst, sabotage them completely. Because of the early nineteenth-century editions of the Histoire, Berruyer’s name was once again dragged into the realm of public discourse and the growing debate over the Jesuits in France. Even before the Jesuits’ restitution, some ex-Jesuits and their allies had attempted to repair Berruyer’s reputation. One-time member of the Society of Jesus François Xavier de Feller’s Dictionnaire historique included an entry on Berruyer in which the controversial author was celebrated for the ways in which he “decorated” the scriptures with “all the colors of the modern novels.” Although Feller was quick to point out that the Histoire had “made a lot of noise” when it first came out, he maintained that it nevertheless included “traits that were singular and brilliant” and a stylistic “charm and elegance.”64 Although Feller wrote his Dictionnaire before the revolution, it received a number of new editions during the Restoration in part to try to prop up the reputations of Jesuit authors like Berruyer. For French Jansenists and liberal critics of the society, however, Berruyer was the exact reason why the Jesuits’ presence in Restoration France was a problem. Tabaraud claimed that it was Berruyer and Hardouin whose “system had corrupted many members of the Society.” Those who followed Berruyer fell into apostacy, according to Tabaraud, because they tried to make themselves into “philosophe[s] à la moderne.”65 The problem was all the worse because the Jesuits were attempting to reintroduce the Histoire to the public sphere. The Journal des débats reported in early 1816 that Jesuits in Rome were attempting to reprint the Histoire in its original format but that their efforts were stymied by members of the Holy Office.66 A destabilizing work, the Histoire’s real danger was that it was attractive and easily garnered an audience. The former Jansenist curé François Jacquemont undoubtedly had the Histoire in his mind when he wrote to fellow Jansenist Louis Silvy in 1817: “Today, the people of the world only busy themselves with novels and comedies; and the dévots only read the works of Jesuits … and if the king and the chambers do not finally take effective measures to ban

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ultramontanism and loose morals, that is the end: France is lost and religion is flipped on its head.”67 For nineteenth-century Jansenists, Berruyer was what he always had been: a dangerous author whose “modern” ideas drove people away from the Catholic faith. Like their Old Regime compatriots, post-revolutionary Jansenists took to the pen and used the forum of public opinion as a way to attack the Jesuits and those who sought to place the church under the absolute auspices of the papacy. No author did this quite as fiercely as Silvy. In the first few years of the Restoration, Silvy published three different works condemning the Jesuits and using Berruyer as a crucial point on why the society was dangerous. In his works, he constantly reminded readers of the many condemnations that the Histoire had elicited. He brought up the charges of heresy levelled against Berruyer in the 1750s as well as the accusations that Berruyer was an innovator and corruptor of the scriptures, or, in Silvy’s words, the infamous “inventor of the sacred novel.”68 Yet what truly made Berruyer and the Jesuits reprehensible was the way that they inspired disobedience to civil authorities. According to Silvy, the Jesuits had a long history of obstinance, and Berruyer’s Histoire only proved the point. The continued production of the various parts of the Histoire even after condemnations and censorial decrees revealed the Jesuits’ willingness to shirk the constraints of the law in service of their own nefarious designs.69 Berruyer was “proof of the perversity of the Jesuits and of their rebellion,” according to Silvy.70 As Berruyer’s Histoire reappeared in front of the public eye, it reminded nineteenth-century Jansenists why they ought to renew the fight against their longtime ecclesiastical rivals. During the First Empire and the Restoration, Berruyer’s Histoire was transformed into a “good book” that would assist in the French Catholic Church’s re-Christianization campaign. Catholic editors and printers broke apart this once voluminous text into short, cheap volumes sold at low prices and included in Catholic book subscription services. Berruyer’s Histoire was particularly useful for these editors and printers because it told biblical stories in an entertaining and straightforward manner. Anyone could read his paraphrase and understand the simple tales of the Bible and the guidance they provided for contemporary Catholics. The lessons conveyed by these editions of the Histoire corresponded to a larger conservative worldview, which sought social

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stability through the propagation of Catholicism. Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu remained relevant in the nineteenth century because it provided Catholics with a useful tool for fighting against the perceived impiety and religious apathy of the post-revolutionary age. But not all members of the church thought alike. When Berruyer’s Histoire reappeared, Jansenists like Jacquemont, Tabaraud, and Silvy found it to be a useful weapon for a very different fight: the first against their ecclesiastical rivals in the now-restored Society of Jesus. Despite the best efforts of its post-revolutionary editors, the Histoire could not escape its controversial past. It needed a more thorough overhaul, and for this it demanded the expertise of a special group of clergymen and theologians based in the city of Besançon.

The Ultramontane Histoire In post-revolutionary Besançon, the Histoire found perhaps the best possible location for a revival. Besançon was the home of the abbé Janson, the catechistically minded priest who saw the possibility of a new edition of the Histoire in the 1780s. Besançon had a long history as an intensely Catholic town, and its piety was, since the Catholic Reformation, pointed in the direction of Rome. When the revolution polarized the church in Franche-Comté, it awoke in the largely anti-constitutional clergy a desire to not only re-Christianize society but also to “re-Catholicize” a church that had been co-opted and corrupted by the Gallican state. They attempted this by way of clerical education, and the scion upon which they looked for inspiration in their efforts was none other than the famous ultramontane writer and priest HuguesFelicité Robert de Lamennais. Adopting Lamennais’s theological and political perspectives, the anti-constitutional clergy of Besançon used Berruyer’s Histoire, among other things, as a mechanism for pushing the church in an ultramontane direction. Franche-Comté, the traditional region of which Besançon was the principal city, had long retained a certain independence from the culture and authority of Paris and the rest of France. It was a late addition to the kingdom. Permanently added to France by the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678, it was a spoil of war for Louis XIV’s conquering armies. Joined forcibly to the Sun King’s ever-expanding domains, Franche-Comté lacked

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a close connection with French royal culture. The Catholic Church in Franche-Comté illustrated this best. The church was decidedly ultramontane – its priests and bishops all saw in the pope the ultimate authority in the church and refused to recognize the claims of secular authorities over those of the papacy. Antoine-Pierre de Grammont, the archbishop of Besançon in the late seventeenth century, for example, was one of the few members of the French episcopacy who refused to accept the four Gallican Articles of 1682. In contrast to Paris, there were virtually no Jansenist priests serving in the parishes of FrancheComté. Indeed, the parlement famously refused to register the edicts of suppression against the Society of Jesus in the 1760s and protested the king’s acquiescence to the anti-Jesuit demands of their fellow courts. The Catholic Church of Franche-Comté had long preferred to take its cues from abroad rather than from the bureaucracy of the Gallican establishment.71 Besançon proved to be a fertile ground for Catholic intellectual culture in the eighteenth century. The Jesuits had deep roots in the region, and their schools were among the most highly regarded before the suppression. Besançon had its own university, seminary, and academy. Robert Darnton has argued that in the decades preceding the revolution, the city was among the best markets for learned books including legal treatises and works of the Enlightenment. The Catholic Enlightenment too had gained momentum in the city. Jean-Baptiste Bullet, Claude François Nonnotte, and, most notably, Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier all resided in Besançon in the mid-eighteenth century and undertook the work of Catholic apologetics in an Enlightenment mode. Bergier himself presided over the local college for a time. During the Old Regime, Besançon was a unique city with both a vibrant intellectual and religious culture.72 The revolution, in particular the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, polarized the Catholic Church in Franche-Comté. Thanks largely to its anti-Gallican roots, the church in Franche-Comté – or, rather, in the newly formed department of the Doubs – had some of the lowest rates of clerical oath-taking in France. Only 29 per cent of clergy in the Doubs signed on to become priests in the new Constitutional Church. In Besançon specifically, the rate was only slightly higher at 36 per cent. Because Besançon was so close to the Swiss border, many of the city’s refractory priests fled and joined the ranks of the émigrés.

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Indeed, an emigré group even set up a new seminary in the town of Fribourg to support efforts to send missionaries back to revolutionary France. The Civil Constitution isolated a small portion of the clergy and set it against the vast majority of the church in the region. In the early days under the Civil Constitution, many in Besançon failed to recognize the newly elected constitutional priests, and refractory clergy were allowed to continue in their positions. Unlike other regions where pragmatism and a lack of other options forced many Catholics to go along with the revolution’s reorganization of the Catholic Church, Franche-Comté mostly saw resistance. When the revolution came to a close, the memories of many Comtois Catholics focused not on how de-Christianization had destroyed the church but on the fact that a minority of clergymen had placed allegiance to the state over allegiance to their church.73 This crisis continued to shape the church in Franche-Comté in the post-revolutionary era. In the wake of the Brumaire coup that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power, the church began reconstituting itself. Clergy were welcomed back; the seminary re-opened; and the archdiocese got a new leader, Claude Le Coz, in 1802. His appointment, however, exacerbated tensions between oath-taking and refractory priests. Le Coz had once served as the constitutional bishop of Ille-et-Vilaine and had even participated as a deputy in the revolutionary Legislative Assembly. After he was commissioned, he brought to Franche-Comté a number of former constitutional priests to take up positions throughout the archdiocese. Le Coz’s very presence as archbishop angered many Bisontin priests who were either forced to flee France during the revolution or who had dangerously flaunted the anti-refractory laws of the revolutionary state. They looked to oppose their new archbishop by whatever means that they could. The headquarters of opposition became Besançon’s seminary where anti-Gallicans of all varieties came together in common cause. Opposition came also from women’s organizations such as the Sisters of Saint Jacques who resisted oversight from the new archbishop. Some Catholics began covertly publishing papal pronouncements against the recommendations of Le Coz and other Gallican authorities. Battles between the two sides exacerbated tensions between formerly constitutional and refractory factions of the church and made political division an ever-present reality in the archdiocese.74

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With the death of Le Coz and the birth of the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, the anti-constitutional movement gained momentum in Besançon. The archdiocese saw the arrival of four different archbishops over the course of the next twenty years; all of them had been émigrés during the revolution, and all supported the refractory clergy in their efforts to purge the church of former constitutionals. Cortois de Pressigny, the successor to Le Coz, dictated in his very first mandement as archbishop that oath-taking priests had to publicly retract their oaths within a year of the announcement. The constitutional priest and friend of the abbé Henri Grégoire, Pierre-Philippe Grappin exclaimed in 1821 that “every day sees new retractions, soon there will be no more than a few dozen tied to the maxims of the Church of France.”75 Besançon and its environs also became an important centre of the Restoration’s missionary movement. One of its chief organizers, the abbé Jean-Étienne Bardenet, sponsored sixty-one separate missions in Franche-Comté from 1816 to 1826. The diocese also welcomed back the Jesuits and placed them in charge of one of the local petit séminaires. All of these measures sought to strike back against those in the church who maintained connections with the revolutionary past and expiate the church itself from its revolutionary legacy.76 But the forces of restoration in Franche-Comté also faced a significant challenge. As in many other parts of France, the revolution produced a shortage of clergy in the archdiocese of Franche-Comté. Just before his death, Le Coz reported that sixty-four parishes still lacked priests. Following the purges of former constitutionals that came after Le Coz’s death, the vacancies only grew. By 1821, the number had risen to 215. Making matters worse, half of the diocese’s clergy in 1820 were above the age of sixty. Leaders of the church in the Doubs recognized that re-Christianization had to include a decided effort to recruit and train new priests. Much of the diocese’s money and energy turned to education and the institutions that played a role in clerical formation. In resurrecting these institutions and pushing more young men into them, however, the church leadership wanted to make sure that the education that these men got would point them in an anti-constitutional and ultramontane direction. There was no point in creating priests if those priests had sympathies for the revolution.77 The task of creating ultramontane priests fell to the staff of the seminary in Besançon. In addition to teaching students directly, the seminary’s

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faculty took a leading role in producing Catholic instructional materials. The primary intention of this effort was to give seminaries the tools to shape prospective priests into solid, ultramontane Catholics. A secondary value of the enterprise, however, was its financial benefits. Administrators at the seminary sent around calls advertising the various books that they were producing and received, in response, letters of subscriptions from seminary directors around France. With letters requesting subscriptions came promises of payment. The seminary’s textbook service had a double value for re-Christianization: it not only supplied materials that could be used to train priests effectively but also brought in money that could further the work of re-Christianization in Franche-Comté.78 The only challenge was in producing the books themselves. As the seminary’s faculty was already busy teaching students and serving local parishes and the archdiocese more broadly, they lacked the time and energy to write new devotional and instructional texts themselves. So, for the most part, they contented themselves with reproducing older works instead of writing new ones. The question, however, became which texts to reproduce. In the 1820s, the directors of the seminary decided that the Histoire du peuple de Dieu ought to be one such text. The seminary itself had long been connected to Berruyer and the Jesuits who supported him. At the nearby university in Besançon, Jean-Baptiste Bullet had been a pupil of Jean Hardouin. Upon moving to Besançon, Bullet was responsible for training many of the faculty that served at the seminary before the revolution, including Bergier.79 When the seminary was reconstituted after the revolution, the books donated to its library by the mayor of Besançon included the first and second parts of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu.80 In other words, the directors of the seminary were already quite familiar with Berruyer and the intellectual lineage from which he came. This was particularly true of one of the seminary’s faculty members, Xavier Brocard. Brocard was the director of catechism at the seminary, and he knew Berruyer’s work well. A collection of his sermons cited Berruyer on numerous occasions particularly on topics including “the son of man” and the “love of God” – topics that, as discussed above, were of particular importance for Berruyer.81 In the mid-1820s, he partnered with Antoine Courtois, the executive director of the seminary, to reproduce the first two parts of Berruyer’s most famous work almost in their entirety.82 The object was not to sell the

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book to a broad public but to fashion it into a theological textbook to be used in educational settings and particularly to train future priests. To produce the book, Brocard and Courtois had to find partners in the publishing industry, and it just so happened that there were two publishers ready and willing for the opportunity to produce a new version of Berruyer’s famous text. Jean-Baptiste and Léandre Gauthier were brothers who together formed the “Gauthier Frères” publishing operation in 1823. Their company was one of ten different printing operations in the Department of the Doubs in the final years of the Bourbon regime.83 To compete in the crowded publishing industry of Franche-Comté, the Gauthier brothers chose to specialize in printing religious books. Specialization gave them a few advantages. First, Besançon was a lively market for religious books stretching back to before the revolution.84 Second, it allowed the Gauthier brothers the opportunity to play into narratives of morality and social order in order to convince church and state authorities for support. In a letter requesting financial support from Archbishop Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, for example, the Gauthier brothers foregrounded their close connections with the directors of the seminary and highlighted their press’s role in promoting “religious and monarchial sentiments” among the populace.85 These religious arguments also featured in the brothers’ efforts to get approval from state authorities to become only the second publisher in Besançon with a new lithograph press in 1828. The brothers frequently played up their connections with “good books,” described themselves specifically as “ecclesiastical printers and book-sellers,” and assured authorities that their business only produced materials that benefitted society.86 A letter from the prefect to the French Minister of the Interior confirmed that their strategy worked. The prefect commended the brothers for publishing “books of piety and great copies of ecclesiastical works” and endorsed the request for expansion.87 So, when Brocard and Courtois approached the two Gauthier brothers with the prospect of a new edition of Berruyer’s Histoire, the publishers likely saw the project as a perfect opportunity to market their religious bona fides once again and improve their advantage against their competitors. What the directors of the seminary and the Gauthier brothers produced was a version of the Histoire acclimated to the religious and political context of Restoration France. This Histoire stayed largely true to the form and organization of the eighteenth-century editions

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and used as its base the revised edition of the Histoire’s first part and the original edition of the Histoire’s second part. The only section omitted was the third part which seemed never to be in the plans of the seminary directors. The Besançon Histoire comprised ten total volumes, printed in octavo, and presented Berruyer’s biblical paraphrase from the creation of the world through the story of the early church in the book of Acts. Along with Berruyer’s text, the Besançon edition added explanatory footnotes and a few new essays that expounded upon important historical and theological topics.88 And unlike the original eighteenth-century editions, the Besançon Histoire both received an approbation from an archbishop, Rohan-Chabot, and successfully passed an examination by church censors in Rome.89 Completed in 1828, the Besançon Histoire presented the most complete and, arguably, most widely approved version of Berruyer’s biblical paraphrase.90 Brocard and Courtois explained why they aspired to produce a new version of Berruyer’s once maligned text in their preface. They were not ignorant of the Histoire’s long and turbulent history, admitting that the work had its overly exaggerative supporters and its unreasonable critics in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, they felt that the Histoire was a book “that one will read always with pleasure and with fruit” because it carried within it certain truths. The Histoire properly communicated the story of the Bible and thus carried with it all of the lessons and anecdotes that the scriptures contained. Though they promised to alter “neither the plan nor the style of the author,” they did admit, however, the necessity of changing “a very small number of passages and expressions that seem[ed] paradoxical or that set off the imagination.”91 Among the things that Brocard and Courtois cut were substantial portions of the introductory essays of the second part of the Histoire and the entirety of its controversial eighth volume. They spoke specifically of Berruyer’s Christology when addressing the biggest changes that they made to the text. They voiced their agreement with the condemnations of Berruyer’s Christology by the papacy and even by Berruyer’s colleague Berthier and adopted a far more traditional perspective on the incarnation and nature of Christ. They removed any instance in which Berruyer made reference to his theories on the “temporal filiation of Jesus Christ” and only allowed explanations that affirmed “the eternal generation of the Word.”92 In brief, Brocard and Courtois separated the Histoire from Berruyer’s most innovative, and consequently most controversial, ideas.

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What they kept, however, was a biblical paraphrase that they used to communicate their own particular ideas about the church and its place in society. Brocard and Courtois added to Berruyer’s text copious footnotes which they used to insert their own theological ideas. The purpose of the notes, in their words, was to clarify “doubts, [clear up] difficulties, and [guide readers] to other works.”93 More specifically, Brocard and Courtois used the notes to introduce young seminaries to the apologetic writings of their favourite ultramontane writers. The notes included frequent references to François René de Chateaubriand, Joseph de Maistre, and Bergier.94 But the most important influence on Brocard and Courtois and the person they cited more than any other was Hugues-Felicité Robert de Lamennais. Lamennais was a Catholic priest and, at least during his early career, a decided ultramontane. He published extraordinarily popular works including the Réflexions sur l’état de l’église – a work that condemned Gallicanism, promoted the independence of the Catholic Church from state authorities, lauded the absolute authority of the pope, and called for a revival amongst Catholic clergy. Lamennais was an extremely popular writer in the first decades of the nineteenth century and a bridge between the ideas of Enlightenment Catholicism and the ideas of nineteenth-century ultramontanism.95 He had a substantial following in the ultramontane city of Besançon and particularly at the seminary.96 Brocard and Courtois were strong proponents of Lamennais’s ultramontanism and saw in the Histoire the opportunity to communicate an ultramontane message to seminary students throughout France. Brocard and Courtois also used the footnotes and other added sections to transform the Histoire into a textbook for conservatism. In a note on Samuel’s denunciation of the Hebrew people’s call for a king, the editors explained that Samuel’s unhappiness was due solely to the fact that he was comparing monarchism to a political state directly operated by the commands of God. As far as human governments were concerned, they explained, “the monarchial state is the most ancient, the most common, and the most perfect of all human governments.” It “gives to the supreme chief of a state the necessary means to undertake rapid and unfettered action in all spaces of administration.”97 They promoted public expressions of religion and argued that it was useful for nations to “form themselves” around it.98 “Religion is loved by order and legitimacy,” wrote Brocard and Courtois. “It attaches subjects to the

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sovereign; it fosters obedience and an obligation to consciences, and if it reigns in the hearts [of subjects] it makes revolutions impossible.”99 One of their appended essays belittled the explanatory power of philosophie and unbelief, and in one footnote on Acts 23, when Paul went before the Sanhedrin, they labelled the Sadducees – who refused to believe in the “resurrection, or angel, or spirit” – the “philosophes and free thinkers of their day.”100 Brocard and Coutrois used the Histoire to communicate the apologetics of the Restoration. Against skepticism and individualism, they promoted an obedience to authority. Brocard and Courtois saw in the Histoire a tool to equip future priests with conservative responses to the ideological challenges of the day. In this way, they hoped to create the type of clergy that the seminary directors and many in the Bisontin church most wanted to undertake the task of re-Christianizing France. Yet the circumstances of the post-revolutionary world were not altogether different from those of the eighteenth century. As the Besançon edition of the Histoire advanced to publication, the furor over the place of the Society of Jesus in Restoration France grew in magnitude. The tenor of these complaints reached a fevered pitch in the mid-1820s when Charles X ascended to the throne. Charles X displayed his thoroughly conservative mentality early on by resurrecting much of the Old Regime’s rituals and ceremonies for his coronation, including the king’s ceremonial curing of scrofula patients. The Sacrilege Law in 1825 further broadcasted his desire to bring together throne and altar closer than ever before. It was no wonder, then, that the king would quickly get identified with the Jesuits, the long-time image in France of monarchial despotism under the guises of religion. Radical critics defaced busts of the king, disfigured his face on coins, created caricatures and placards, and even baked gingerbread cookies all of which made him appear as a Jesuit. Attacks on the Jesuits and the “Jesuit-king” became more and more frequent as his reign progressed.101 François Dominique de Montlosier, an aristocrat from the Auvergne, set off the debate at the national level with the publication of his Mémoire à consulter sur un système religieux et politique. The Mémoire was an invective against what Montlosier felt were four existential threats to the Bourbon monarchy: the Congrégation (a charitable organization run by a Jesuit), ultramontanism, the Jesuits, and the domination of priests. Montlosier’s book was a best-seller with over 10,000 copies sold in the first three months of its print run. The book sparked a public conversation about the Jesuits in part because all of the categories that

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Montolosier identified as threats had something to do rhetorically with the Jesuits. In essence, he argued that the Jesuits had infiltrated French politics and society and sowed into them seeds of disorder and dissension.102 Other pamphlets and books soon followed levelling similar accusations. An ex-Jesuit named Duchateau denounced the society as inherently threatening to the liberties of the Gallican Church and the health of a constitutional monarchy.103 Henri Lemaire penned a polemical pamphlet that charged the Jesuits with being a “secretive” organization and arguing that such organizations subverted an open political culture.104 Others attacked Jesuit educational institutions, arguing that they cultivated in the minds of young students “the spirit of ultramontanism and anti-Constitutionalism.”105 Through their politics and their role as educators, the Jesuits were described by opponents like Marcel de la Roche-Arnauld as “disruptors of kingdoms.”106 Once at the centre of anti-Jesuit discourse in the eighteenth century, Berruyer unsurprisingly entered the conversation about the Jesuits’ place in the kingdom at the end of the Restoration. After the first wave of attacks by Montlosier and others, anti-Jesuit arguments began targeting the Jesuits’ history and, particularly, their history of publishing. New editions of the various arrêts that had condemned and expelled the Jesuits from France in the eighteenth century appeared throughout the country and presented the arguments of the Old Regime parlements against Jesuit politics and morality.107 These documents invoked old names, including Berruyer’s, that re-gained political currency. Charles Liskenne began his anti-Jesuit pamphlet, La France et les Ultramontains, invoking the much maligned Berruyer’s name in order to set up his case that ultramontanism subverted the French Church.108 The anonymous pamphlet, Derniers efforts du Jésuitisme expirant presented a long list of Jesuits who had harmed France and included among them Berruyer whose Histoire had “made the patriarchs speak the language of gallantry and free-thinking.”109 Berruyer was a particular threat because his works continued to be relevant in France. Les Jésuites ennemis de l’ordre social de la morale et de la religion, another anonymous pamphlet, recalled the Berruyer Affair as an example of the Jesuits’ resistance to authority. Not only was Berruyer’s Histoire “impious” but the actions of his fellow Jesuits to reproduce the work in France and in Italy, despite three condemnations from the papacy, displayed how the Jesuits remained threats to social stability. Worst of all, however, was that the Jesuits and their allies were continuing to publish his works. Polemicists used the

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appearance of new versions of the Histoire as a means of attacking the restored Society of Jesus and, by way of the Jesuits, the Bourbon monarchy itself.110 The Jesuits featured in nearly every major political controversy of the reign of Charles X, the last Bourbon king of France. By 1825, “Jesuitism” had become code for a wide array of accusations from despotism to the unfettered and oppressive control of France by priests. Jesuits were denounced in debates over the administration of monastic orders, the restitution of laws of primogeniture, renewed measures to regulate the press, and even the insubordination of the Paris National Guard. According to the minister of ecclesiastical affairs, Denis-Luc de Frayssinous, “the name of Jesuit has reverberated around the whole of France, blessed by some, cursed by the others, presented sometimes as a lantern of salvation, sometimes as a sign of ruin and calamity.”111 Attacks on the Jesuits placed so much pressure on the monarchy that, in June 1828, it bent to public demands and ordered the Jesuits to be barred from teaching in France. In many ways, the downfall of the Jesuits once again provided liberals with a foreshadowing of things to come. For, the Jesuits had come to stand for the entirety of the Bourbon regime. “The word Jesuit today,” wrote the future president of France Adolphe Thiers, “characterizes the whole system of the government.”112 The political campaign against the Jesuits split the conservative coalition that propped up the Bourbon state and set the stage for considerable political change. The stakes for a seemingly small matter about the relatively limited presence of the Society of Jesus in France grew larger and larger until finally the kingdom reached a revolutionary breaking point.113 It was the belief that Berruyer’s Histoire could make a compelling case for conservatism and ultramontanism that both attracted some to the work and pushed others away. The directors of the seminary in Besançon believed that it would be a useful tool in the effort to re-Christianize France and train future priests to be Catholics whose allegiances remained with Rome and not the Gallican authorities that they felt had led the church astray in the period of the revolution. But just as it had in the 1750s and 1760s, the Histoire managed to produce conflict in the post-revolutionary era. The political context was different, but the arguments remained the same. Berruyer’s book stood for the Jesuits as a whole. It illustrated how the Jesuits were subversive and dangerous. It showed that their allegiances lay beyond the realm of the nation and that their ideology conflicted with any notion of

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liberty, be it liberty for the Gallican Church or liberty for the French state and its people. Even those who approved of the Histoire played into these assumptions; for, it was the Histoire’s seeming consanguinity with Lamennais’s ultramontanism – his critique of the Gallican Church, his argument for an allegiance to the papacy above all, and a distrust in individual reason – that made Brocard and Courtois revive it in 1828. It is, thus, little surprise that increased attention drawn to the name Berruyer correlated in some way with increased pressure and criticism of the Society of Jesus in France. In many ways the fates of the two were inextricably linked.

Conclusion After the French Revolution, the period from the signing of the Concordat through the end of the Bourbon Restoration was arguably the moment for the Catholic Church to regain its status in French society. Bereft of clergy and facing strident anti-clericalism, the church undertook a campaign of re-Christianization that sought to bring the French people back to the Catholic faith. Through missions, education, and publishing, Catholics attempted to instill in the French people a reverence for the morals and precepts of the church. They used whatever means available, including one of the most controversial books written by a French Catholic priest in the eighteenth century, the Histoire du peuple de dieu. While shattering the institution of the Catholic Church in France, the revolution revived a book that had largely fallen out of public view in the latter three decades of the eighteenth century. But even in a political and intellectual context decidedly different from the one out of which it first emerged, the Histoire found its way into controversy. The initial fragments of the Histoire published by “good book” purveyors in the early nineteenth century did little to reinvoke the complex theological debates that animated the Berruyer Affair. Seasoned Jansenists like Tabaraud and Silvy, however, remembered what the Histoire could mean. They reminded the French public of just how outrageous the seemingly whimsical stories of Berruyer’s Old Testament could be. Although the early anti-Jesuit writings of Tabaraud and Silvy did not reach an exceptionally larger audience – indeed, they got nowhere near the readership that later anti-Jesuit polemics such as Montlosier’s Mémoire received – the more aggressively political and

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widely read pamphlets of the mid-1820s continually featured their arguments. Anti-Jesuitism had a long history, and Jansenists like Tabaraud and Silvy played an important role in keeping it alive during the Restoration. Their actions illustrated how Jansenism remained a force, albeit a less conspicuous one, in the politics of France and the French Catholic Church well into the nineteenth century.114 The revival of the Histoire in the nineteenth century also illustrates how Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism, or at least elements of it, remained attractive in some Catholic circles in post-revolutionary France. In many ways, the Besançon edition of the Histoire was the culmination of a number of seemingly unrelated factors that came together to make the new edition of the work a reality. FrancheComté’s long history of regional independence and ultramontanism made a Jesuit paraphrase of the Bible appealing even after the society’s formal suppression. The Besançon seminary’s connections with the Catholic Enlightenment through Bergier and others – including even particularly that quixotic progenitor of Enlightenment Catholicism, Jean Hardouin – allowed the Histoire to not seem overly “new” or particularly offensive. The Gauthier brothers’ timely entrance into the publishing world of the department of the Doubs and their decision to specialize in religious texts opened a door to make the realization of the project possible. The warm reception that Lamennais’s ideas received in Besançon, particularly at the seminary, paved the way for Brocard and Courtois to see in the Histoire a way to fight against Gallicanism and re-shape the church into an ultramontane institution. Finally, the Histoire’s sentimental style – its ability to reach readers through invoking emotional responses – remained a valuable tool for those seeking to re-Christianize France. Together, these factors illustrate how the production and reception of works of Enlightenment Catholicism had much to do with factors outside the control of individual authors. The Histoire became a tool of a new generation of Catholics whose ideas and concerns were altogether different from those in the previous century. The many editors and consumers of the nineteenth-century versions of the Histoire acclimated Berruyer’s text to a new environment. In so doing, they helped Berruyer achieve what he had strived to achieve a century before: to make the Catholic faith attractive and adaptive to an ever-changing world.

conclusion

From Enlightenment to Romantic Catholicism When the water in the skin was gone, [Hagar] cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went, and sat down over against him a good way off … for she said, “Let me not look upon the death of the child.” And as she sat over against him, the child lifted up his voice and wept.1 For Ishmael, nourished delicately in the house of Abraham, he succumbed first to fatigue, and … he was ready to die of thirst. Languishing and without strength, he lay down under a tree and left his mother devastated, without hope or the power to relieve him. In this cruel despondency, she abandoned her son so that she did not have to endure the pain of seeing him die before her eyes … She wept bitterly and complained to God about her abandonment.2

Brocard and Courtois’s Histoire was not the last edition of Berruyer’s influential book. In August 1836, L’Ami de la religion et du roi announced that the abbé Jean-Baptiste Glaire, a professor of Hebrew at the Sorbonne, was in the process of completing another version of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu.3 Glaire was an accomplished theologian working at one of the premier theological schools in Europe. He had published books on the grammatical structures of ancient near-Eastern languages, the origins of the Hebrew scriptures, and commentaries of the scriptures themselves.4 What attracted this renowned scholar to a novelistic paraphrase of the Bible was what attracted so many before him to Berruyer’s work. Glaire was impressed with the eighteenthcentury Jesuit’s ability to tell the stories of the Bible in an accessible and entertaining way. Glaire believed that the Bible was “not suitable for all ages, all intelligences, or all conditions.” It was a difficult text to pick up and understand on its own. But through careful study and artful style the text could come alive for readers both young and old. Glaire felt that Berruyer had done just that in his Histoire. The Histoire du peuple

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c.1 Lot’s Wife Turning into a Pillar of Salt. Lot and his two daughters flee Sodom leaving behind their wife/mother who has turned into salt. This was one of the many simple illustrations interspersed throughout Glaire’s edition of the Histoire.

de Dieu was a Bible fit for the “libraries of all Christian families … [and even] for public readings in educational houses.”5 To the beautiful prose, Glaire added beautiful illustrations, over 400 of them, in order to make his edition of the Histoire even more attractive than those that had come before. The illustrations displayed Glaire’s intention to produce a Bible for the whole family. Simple images depicting biblical scenes appeared frequently. They made Glaire’s Histoire read like a children’s book, full of explanatory pictures and ornate decorations. Indeed, illustrations were central to the genre of children’s literature at the time. Children’s authors like Sophie de Ségur ensured that words and images worked together to entertain and communicate stories clearly.6 Inserted directly into the middle of the pages, many of the illustrations in Glaire’s Histoire served the same function. But those weren’t the only types of illustrations in the book. Periodically, Glaire provided full-length inserts with drawings of a much higher artistic quality. These images were directed not at children but, presumably, their parents. They depicted scenes meant to invoke an emotional response. Perhaps the most moving example was the

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c.2 Hagar and Ishmael. Hagar stares directly into the reader’s eyes while clutching her dying son. This image, by contrast, was of a higher level of detail and intended to connect the reader emotionally to the story.

illustration of Hagar and her son Ishmael who had been cast off from the family of Abraham and Sarah and abandoned in the desert. The illustrator caught the mother and son at their moment of greatest despair. With head falling backward and legs lifeless, the boy neared

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death. The empty water vase revealed their lack of provisions. Yet the most powerful part of the drawing was undoubtedly Hagar. Holding her dying child in her arms, ready to abandon him to the elements, she gazed directly into the eyes of the reader. This was not simply a pedagogical image designed to help the reader understand the story. It was an emotive image intended to help the reader feel the intensity of the situation. It was directed at Catholic mothers and fathers who might empathize with Hagar’s plight. It intended to inspire an awe and reverence for the God who saved Hagar and her child from an impossibly dire situation. Like the first editions of the nineteenth century, Glaire’s Histoire was effectively a tool for re-Christianization though at a somewhat different moment in France’s history. It had been three decades since the last French republic, and the country was on its third king. The initial expectation of a Catholic Church restored to its Old Regime glory was lost, but a certain revitalization in Catholic piety was underway. The dynamic preaching of Henri Lacordaire was attracting large crowds to the famed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Women’s organizations were continuing to grow in number and size. The cult of Sainte Philomène had reached France, gained a large number of followers, and won official approval from the papacy in 1837. Glaire’s Histoire participated in this revitalization. Sold through a subscription service from a newly formed Bible society based in Paris’s left bank on the Rue du Dragon, Glaire’s Histoire adopted the apologetic tone of the mid-nineteenth century. By presenting something beautiful, Glaire sought to win unbelievers back to the church and strengthen those already there. The price point reflected Glaire’s belief that the book could reach a broad audience. According to the Répertoire bibliographique de la librairie française moderne of 1838, Glaire’s Histoire was being sold for fifty centimes per volume, about half of a day’s wages for a schoolteacher or agricultural labourer at that time.7 The revitalization of the church was to include people from all walks of life, and the church hoped to win people back by marketing its beauty.8 Glaire’s Histoire seemed an innocuous work of piety printed during a devotional renaissance in the French Catholic Church, and yet its publication sparked outcries reminiscent of those that had haunted the Histoire in the eighteenth century. A family Bible produced by a well-respected member of the most reputable theological faculty

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in France and advertised in arguably the most influential Catholic newspaper in the country, it was a far cry from the anticlerical books that Catholics continued to lament in the 1830s. Nevertheless, it elicited an impassioned response from at least one member of the church. In the year that Glaire’s Histoire came out, an anonymous pamphleteer published an angry response. Titled Le cri de la foi – a title that clearly invoked the figurist language of eighteenth-century Jansenism – the pamphlet attacked the professor for reintroducing to mid-nineteenthcentury France “the most grave errors and heresies of different centuries.”9 In a typically Jansenist mode, Le cri de la foi recalled the entire saga of the Berruyer Affair and the many condemnations that the original editions of the Histoire had received. The anonymous author added to their accusations the typical denunciations of the Histoire’s unacceptable novelty – as a book that promoted a “new body of doctrine” and a “new religion that [Berruyer] would like to acclimate to the times” – and its inappropriate style, which turned the holy scriptures into a mere “roman.”10 Le cri de la foi framed the Histoire not as a work of re-Christianization but as a holdover of the Enlightenment. It espoused the “Deism” of the philosophes and “apostacy.”11 Although a contemporary claimed that most Parisians “absolutely ignored” the polemical pamphlet when it first came out, the message that it promoted was already well known.12 It was the same message that critics of the Histoire du peuple de Dieu had been using against the unique Bible since the ink on the first edition’s pages had just dried. The episode of Glaire’s Histoire and Le cri de la foi reveals one final time how Berruyer’s inventive Enlightenment Catholicism divided the French Catholic Church in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Berruyer’s story is simply one among many about the proponents of Enlightenment Catholicism and the trials they faced in trying to adapt Catholic ideas and practices to new cultural and intellectual settings. Along with the scandals of the abbé Jean-Martin de Prades, the abbé Claude Yvon, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and others, Berruyer’s case paints a larger picture about the ways that debates about the Enlightenment de-stabilized the church.13 Enlightenment Catholicism created new antagonisms within institutions – for example, the Society of Jesus – and exacerbated animosities between rival groups, including Jansenists and Jesuits and Gallicans and promoters of ultramontanism. Berruyer’s story differed in many ways from those

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of other Enlightenment Catholics. But along with other tales of the Catholic Enlightenment in France, it illustrated just how difficult it was for eighteenth-century Catholics to “reconcile Catholicism with modern culture.”14 Efforts to adapt continued throughout the nineteenth century even as resistance to those efforts from within the church persisted and, in many ways, emerged victorious. In the area of biblical studies, Antoine Garnier, professor of sacred scriptures at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, exposed his students to the latest biblical criticism coming from Germany and suggested that one read the Old Testament scriptures in light of contemporary scientific understandings of the world. The editors of the Catholic newspaper, Le Correspondant, supported Garnier’s general stance on interpreting the Bible. Like Garnier, they called into question, for example, the strictly literal timeline of Genesis – the story of the world’s creation in six days – and adopted the notion of days as figurative “eras” that coincided with theories of biologists and geologists. At the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred Loisy, professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris, took perhaps the boldest steps of any French Catholic biblical critic in advancing the explanation that the human authorship of the scriptures meant that the books of the Bible were fallible and spoke to the sensibilities of those in a particular historical era. Arguing against the notion of an ahistorical, inerrant Bible, Loisy claimed, “A book that is absolutely true, for all time and in all orders of truth, is no more possible than a square triangle.”15 The Catholic effort to reinterpret and refashion the Bible in order to fit it more comfortably to new intellectual and cultural environments continued well past Berruyer.16 But undoubtedly the biblical critic whose work drew the most attention in nineteenth-century France was not a Catholic theologian but, rather, the ex-seminarian turned author of the immensely popular Vie de Jésus, Ernest Renan. Trained initially by the disciples of Garnier at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, Renan was familiar with German biblical criticism and employed it to construct a story of Jesus devoid of the divine. Renan completely humanized Jesus – depicting him as the influential leader of an extremely successful new religious movement – and eliminated all supernatural acts from the stories of the Gospels, including, most importantly, Jesus’ miracles. The book caused a sensation. It went through thirteen editions within a year

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of its first publication and drew even more attention when Renan published a popular edition, without the scholarly apparatus, for the low price of just over one franc. At first glance, Berruyer’s and Renan’s stories have much in common. Both were interested in humanizing the figure of Jesus more than the Catholic Church traditionally permitted. They both sought to make their story of Jesus available to as wide an audience as possible. Renan even adopted much of the sentimental language that characterized Berruyer’s Histoire, describing Jesus, for example, as a person whose “tenderness of heart was transformed into an infinite sweetness, a vague poetry, a universal charm.”17 And both drew heated responses from traditionalists in the Catholic Church. But Renan clearly went further than Berruyer was ever willing to go. Renan’s project came from the perspective of a secular academic, someone who had a great deal of admiration for the figure of Jesus but who lost faith in his divinity. Where Berruyer humanized Jesus in order to encourage piety, Renan humanized Jesus as a way of providing an alternative to it. Renan illustrates how Berruyer’s project, despite accusations of its radical and heretical nature, was born out of an effort to synthesize Catholicism and the Enlightenment and not a desire to subordinate one to the other.18 Berruyer’s story is perhaps more helpful for understanding the turbulent career of Hugues-Felicité de Lamennais. Both controversial Catholic authors became famous because of their publications, and they shared many theological perspectives. Lamennais’s doctrine of the “common sense” – a notion that rested the veracity of the Catholic religion on the foundation of popular consent – emerged out of a Jesuit argument for the universality of religion, an argument that Berruyer clearly espoused in his Histoire. Indeed, it was Lamennais’s loyalty to the Jesuits, particularly at the moment of their expulsion from educational institutions in 1828, that led to his shift toward a promotion of democratic politics over and against the French monarchy. Like Berruyer, Lamennais championed progress within the bounds of Catholic belief. Through his popular newspaper, L’Avenir (The Future), and other publications, Lamennais affirmed that God’s providence was working through the people to improve the world and usher in liberty. Lamennais even included his notion of progress into his readings of the scriptures. In his commentary on the account of the transfiguration in the Gospel of Matthew, he proclaimed that “the entirety of

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humanity must transfigure itself to pass from an inferior state to a more elevated state … Progress comes about through unity.”19 Lamennais’s writings, in the words of Carolina Armenteros, took “the principles of the French Catholic Enlightenment to their final consequences.”20 Like Berruyer, moreover, Lamennais faced challenges in actively promoting a Catholicism that he felt was better adapted to the social and political climate of his time. In his encyclical, Mirari Vos, Pope Gregory XVI condemned Catholic attempts to accommodate notions of “liberty,” forcing Lamennais’s followers to shut down L’Avenir and pushing Lamennais himself to a far more radical critique of the institution of the church. Berruyer’s story foreshadowed the eventual trials of Lamennais. Having rejected Berruyer’s attempt to push Catholicism to new intellectual ground, the institution of the church – in its path toward an anti-modernism solidified in the Syllabus of Errors and eventually the encyclical Pascendi gregis – appeared no more willing to allow this kind of intellectual accommodation of the Enlightenment in the era of Lamennais.21 A central factor in the conflict that Lamennais’s liberal Catholicism and Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism produced was public opinion. Berruyer’s initial impulse in writing the Histoire was to reach an increasingly literate reading public. He stylized his paraphrase of the Bible in a way to attract readers and to imitate the popular genre of the novel. When Jansenists first set out to attack Berruyer, they did so with the only political weapon that they had: the press. In the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques and illegal pamphlets, they sought to win public opinion to their side and used Berruyer’s Histoire to do so. Jansenists were not the only ones pulled into public debates because of the Histoire. Berruyer’s fellow Jesuits had to parry attacks by way of their own engagement with the public. Even though fellow Jesuits like Tournemine who disapproved of the Histoire project felt it best to voice their concerns within the private communication networks internal to the Society of Jesus, Jansenists brought the conflict over the Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism to the public sphere. Once integrated into public debate, the Histoire and the Enlightenment Catholicism that it espoused proceeded down the path of politicization. When Joseph d’Hémery and the officers of the Librairie turned against the second part of the Histoire, they did so because of the public “uproar” that Jansenists helped create. Although the revolution changed the nature

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of the public sphere in France, it did not prevent members of the church from using it for their own political purposes. For anti-constitutional Catholics, the public sphere became an avenue for re-Christianization. They had to put their message out through newspapers and public events and sell “good books” that would rival the “bad” ones popular among revolutionary and post-revolutionary readers. Even in the comparatively conservative political climate of the Restoration, however, the public sphere became a forum for continuing the internecine disputes of the Jansenists and Jesuits. The public sphere provided the means by which Enlightenment Catholicism divided Catholics in France over the long eighteenth century. The conflict provoked by Enlightenment Catholicism had significant effects on the church. The fight over the Histoire empowered Jansenists in the 1750s and supplied them with the means of taking on the Jesuits in the 1760s and eventually the crown itself in the decades that followed. It emboldened the Parlement of Paris to assert itself more aggressively against the royal ministry in matters of conscience, declaring itself a better arbiter of legitimate ideas than the crown itself.22 In so doing, it contributed to increasing parlementary tensions with the crown – tensions that resulted, in the short term, in the crisis over the “Mauepou coup” in the 1770s and, in the long term, the political crises of the 1780s and the revolution.23 Although the theological disputes at the heart of the Jansenist-Jesuit conflict pre-existed the Catholic Enlightenment, Dale Van Kley has made clear that Enlightenment Catholicism exacerbated it: “On the one hand, religious conflict helped politicize and to some degree even Catholicize the French Enlightenment; on the other hand, contact with an Enlightenment context conceptually radicalized and secularized both sides of the religious conflict.”24 Insofar as it played a role in this process of radicalization, the Histoire and the Enlightenment Catholicism that it promoted, in its own way, pushed French society closer to a revolutionary breaking point. The story of the Histoire further illustrates how conflicts over Enlightenment Catholicism exacted damage on the post-revolutionary church as well. In a church intent on “re-Christianizing” the French population, disputes over the Histoire continued to divide. It provided ammunition to post-revolutionary Jansenists enraged that the Jesuits were given a place in the re-Christianization mission. It allowed Gallicans to paint ultramontane Catholics as subversive and a threat to

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the social order. Continued religious quarrels sabotaged the church’s efforts to rebuild. Deputy Auguste Louis Philippe de Saint-Chamans sensed as much in 1826. Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies amidst the affair over the Jesuits initiated by the Comte de Montlosier, he warned that arguments over the Jesuits and ultramontanism had “revived with great success” the dangerous internal conflict that had so harmed the church before the revolution. “We have resuscitated the fear of the power of the popes … and of the power of the Jesuits on the nation,” he spoke. As a result, Saint-Chamans claimed, “we have seen … the remnant of the Jesuits once again pursued by the remnant of the Jansenists to the joyful cries of the sad remnant of our so-called philosophes.”25 Fighting the same battles that had been fought a century before, post-revolutionary Catholics recognized the lasting damage that it was doing for the social and political place of the church in nineteenth-century France. Enlightenment Catholicism also contributed to a transformation in Catholic piety. In the early nineteenth century, “ultramontane piety” became increasingly popular among France’s Catholics. Ultramontane piety shifted the discourse of Catholic preaching away from the pains of death and horrors of hell toward a focus on death as something “no longer to be feared” but a means of future happiness. It saw the expansion of Marian and Eucharistic devotions that emphasized the loving and compassionate characteristics of God and the closeness that believers could experience through individual worship. It ushered in a change in moral theology with the promotion of Liguorism – named after the eighteenth-century theologian and bishop Alphonsus Liguori – which shifted the focus of confession from penance to forgiveness. It presented a Catholicism that “appealed to the heart rather than the head” and emphasized the importance of religious ceremonies designed to “achieve maximum emotional impact” and art, perhaps best represented by the famous Sulpician style, “used to evoke a religion aimable.”26 Berruyer’s Histoire clearly presented a form of ultramontane piety avant la lettre. The sentimental language and arguments that he employed easily mapped onto ultramontane cultural sensibilities after the revolution and, perhaps, contributed to their development. Indeed, with the advent of ultramontane piety in the early nineteenth century, it is no surprise that Catholic editors and publishers found the prospect of new editions of the Histoire so very appealing.27

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Simultaneously, a movement of “romantic Catholics” emerged who saw in Catholicism and its emphasis on communities and social bonds an antithesis to the overly rational, unfettered individualism of the revolution. Romantic Catholicism drew from the inspiration of Lamennais in the 1820s and 1830s. Like ultramontane Catholics, romantic Catholics, according to Carol Harrison, saw the papacy as “the solid foundation of their faith” and criticized Gallicanism as a feature of the instability of the revolution and a fetter to religious freedom. “Ultramontanism,” Harrison has explained, “allowed young romantics to square the circle of an ancient church drawing on tradition to produce a modern, forward-looking faith.” It was “a chance to leave behind the mistakes that had set the church at odds with progress.”28 Romantic Catholicism saw its most notable adherents in the community of lay writers and intellectuals connected with Lamennais, including Pauline Craven, Victorine Monniot, Charles de Montalembert, Frédéric Ozanam, Henri Lacordaire, and Léopoldine Hugo. They were “determined to set aside the battles of their parents’ generation with philosophes, de-Christianizers, and revolutionaries on one side and Jesuits, Jansenists, and royal censors on the other” and position their Catholic faith into their contemporary world and the challenges that it wrought.29 Romantic Catholics saw in Catholicism a religion that helped them navigate the modern world.30 There are many instances of the Histoire being appropriated by romantic Catholics and transformed to suit their ends. “Romantic Catholics,” Carol Harrison has explained, “continued to believe that marriage and family remained not only relevant [in the postrevolutionary world] but the most significant relationship possible and the model for any subsequent social tie.”31 Editions of the Histoire were often fashioned in ways to drive this point home. Not only did Glaire incorporate images reminiscent of the burgeoning romantic style of the early decades of the nineteenth century, for example, but, by designing his edition of the Histoire specifically as a Bible for families, he also highlighted the very commitments to family that romantic Catholics held dear. Other publishers followed Glaire in refashioning the Histoire as a romantic text. In 1838, the printer and bookseller Charles Raybois produced two small editions of the stories of Ruth and Tobit taken from the first part of the Histoire. In both of the books, the editor explained that the value of the stories was to model pious

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domestic life. The story of Ruth demonstrated how “filial piety” was “rewarded,” and Tobit provided the model of the “virtuous family.”32 Raybois highlighted Berruyer’s sentimentalism by focusing on “the action, feelings, and morals” of the heroine and suggested that one could not read the story “without being touched.”33 Tobit painted a picture of an affectionate marriage and the model of a perfect Catholic man: “a virtuous patriarch … [and] an attentive father forming his son in all virtue, a spouse full of tenderness and kindness, a citizen always busy giving aid to his afflicted brothers.”34 Raybois’s volumes demonstrated how the Histoire continued to have a place within romantic Catholic culture long after the Bourbon Restoration. Both ultramontane piety and romantic Catholicism contained elements of the Enlightenment Catholicism that Berruyer famously espoused. As early as the 1720s, Berruyer had begun promoting a Catholicism that reacted to the baroque sensibilities of seventeenthcentury preachers and theologians by advancing the notion that the Catholic faith fostered human happiness. Berruyer valued emotional appeals as entry points for authentic devotion. Like the romantic François René de Chateaubriand, Berruyer placed the “truthfulness” of Catholicism in its beauty and its capacity to please.35 The Histoire both connected the sensibilities of eighteenth-century sentimentalism to Catholicism and helped to transport that sentimentalized Catholicism to the nineteenth century. Though the Histoire was certainly not the only eighteenth-century text to promote ultramontanism, Berruyer contributed to the effort to cast doubt on Gallicanism and rationalize the vision of a church whose sole authority resided in Rome. In some ways, Berruyer’s skeptical position toward all authorities other than the living tradition of the papacy fit better in the more critical climate of biblical studies in the nineteenth century than in Berruyer’s own age. Berruyer’s pro-papal ecclesiology and criticism of Gallicanism provided the same sorts of critiques of the dangers of the church’s subservience to the state that ultramontanes and romantic Catholics picked up and developed.36 Finally, the “progress” that Lamennais in particular and those romantic Catholics influenced by him saw in Catholicism – the ability for Catholics to find new ways to reconcile their faith with social and political change – invoked memories of Berruyer’s embrace of “innovation.” Berruyer helped popularize an idea that Catholics could profitably adapt both their arguments for and

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presentation of the Catholic faith to the shifting styles of politics and culture. The story of the Histoire also helps us understand how ultramontane Catholicism became the target of gendered attacks in the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, many French republicans came to associate the entirety of the Catholic Church with women. The growth of women’s organizations in the church, the beginning of new female-centred devotions, and the increasing number of women – and the decreasing number of men – who attended church regularly led nineteenth-century commentators to depict Catholicism as feminine and in contrast to the masculine, bourgeois secularism that reached its apogee in the Third Republic. Jules Michelet’s Du prêtre, de la femme, de la famille was only one famous example of a wide anti-clerical literature that criticized the church for its femininity. This narrative of a feminized Catholicism had important roots in the revolution. As the political public sphere became increasingly reserved for male participation, women took up leadership roles in private institutions such as the church. French republican institutions continually pushed women out of the public sphere, so they started to label the institutions to which women were allowed access feminized spaces. Yet the narrative of a feminized Catholicism also drew from longer continuities within Catholic devotional culture. As illustrated in the post-revolutionary editions of the Histoire, nineteenth-century Catholics often preserved elements of eighteenth-century sentimentalism in the “good books” that they published even while purging those same books of other Enlightenment aspects. In so doing, they transported the very gendered attacks brought against the Histoire in the eighteenth century – namely, that it was an “effeminate” novel – to a new century. The narrative of a feminized Catholicism came about not solely as a result of the revolution but also as a result of the choices that post-revolutionary Catholics made in recovering and revitalizing certain aspects of Catholic culture within efforts to re-Christianize France.37 How did a book condemned by eighteenth-century authorities, ridiculed by philosophes and devout Catholics alike, and implicated in the destruction of one of the church’s most powerful organizations continue to find a home in the devotional culture of French Catholics? This is one of the main questions that this book has attempted to answer, but one final example may suffice to demonstrate the ways

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that the Histoire remained relevant in one of the most tumultuous periods in French history. The priest Henri Lacordaire is perhaps best known for his role in reviving the Dominican order in France after the revolution, but he also played a pivotal role in supporting and magnifying the ideas of Lamennais in the 1830s. Along with his good friend Montalembert, Lacordaire became a journalist and one of the chief contributors and editors of the newspaper L’Avenir. In a last testament dictated to Montalembert on his deathbed, Lacordaire shared what had brought him to the romantic faith that he espoused for much of his life. He explained that he had been instructed in the faith by his mother whom he described as a “courageous and strong” woman who fed her son with a faith like “a milk … without bitterness.”38 Yet, even with his mother’s instruction, there were things missing in his spiritual development. On one occasion when visiting his uncle, Lacordaire made his way into his uncle’s library. There he found “the Histoire du peuple de Dieu by P. Berruyer.” Whether in successive trips to his uncle’s home or in that one initial incident, Lacordaire read through Berruyer’s famous book.39 Lacordaire confessed that prior to this incident he had not read the gospels, a confession that he believed was a common one among French people at that time. While not the same as a translation of the Bible, the Histoire proved useful for Lacordaire. The Histoire gave him an opportunity to taste the “sacred milk” of the Catholic faith himself. Accessible even for a curious young boy, the Histoire piqued his interest in the stories and lessons of the Bible – stories and lessons that he would continue to use in his professional ministry throughout the rest of his life. Berruyer had produced a book worth reading. In so doing, he brought a compelling presentation of the Catholic faith to readers in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries alike.40 The Histoire’s story is also a reminder that books have lives beyond their authors. Berruyer surely could not have imagined the impact that his book would have on the French Catholic Church. The Histoire inspired and angered readers for well over a hundred years. Throughout its long history, it changed and adapted to suit the different needs of its many editors, distributers, and readers. Whatever an author’s intent, the impact of a book has to do with the people who produce it, sell it, talk about it, and read it. Their stories are as central to understanding a book as the book itself. Soon after Lacordaire published his testimony about his interactions with the Histoire, Berruyer’s book disappeared from the

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historical records. No new editions emerged. No great controversies erupted. But Berruyer’s Bible had already shown just how malleable a book could be. Berruyer had written something as relevant to discussions about Enlightenment Catholicism as to projects of Catholic renewal in the post-revolutionary age. With the help of Catholic bishops and priests, seminary directors, publishers, booksellers, lawyers, and even government officials, Berruyer’s Bible weathered decades of intense social, cultural, and political change. And, in its own small way, it actually helped to facilitate those very changes.

Notes

Abbreviations Absi Acdf Add Afsi Ahdb AMb AMr An Arsi bA BCJ bn bPr HPD1

HPD2

HPD3

Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede Archives Départementales du Doubs Archives Françaises de la Compagnie de Jésus Archives Historiques du Diocèse de Besançon Archives Municipales de Besançon Archives Municipales et Communautaires de Reims Archives Nationales de France Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Carlos Sommervogel et al., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, nouvelle édition, 12 vols. (Brussels: Oscar Schepens, 1890) Bibliothèque Nationale de France Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu depuis son origine jusqu’à la Venue du Messie tirée des seuls livres Saints ou le texte sacré des Livres de l’Ancien Testament réduit en un corps d’histoire (Paris: Knapen, 1728). 7 tomes (8 volumes) in-4° Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu depuis la Naissance du Messie jusqu’à la fin de la Synagogue, tirée des seuls Livres Saints ou le Texte sacré du Nouveau Testament réduit en un corps d’histoire (La Haye: Neaulme, 1753). 8 tomes in-12° Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, troisième partie ou Paraphrase des Epîtres des Apôtres d’après le commentaire latin du P. Hardouin (La Haye: Neaulme, 1757). 2 tomes in-4°

232

notes to PAGes 3–5

HPD(B1)

Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, depuis son origine jusqu’à la naissance du messie, par le P. Berruyer, de la Compagnie de Jésus, seconde édition corrigée et enrichie de notes par des Directeurs du Séminaire de Besançon (Besançon: Gauthier, 1830). 7 tomes in-8° HPD(B2) Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, depuis la naissance du Messie jusqu’à la fin de la Synagogue par le P. Berruyer, de la Compagnie de Jésus, seconde édition corrigée et enrichie de notes par des Directeurs du Séminaire de Besançon (Besançon: Gauthier, 1830). 3 tomes in-8° HPD(G) Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du Peuple de Dieu depuis la création du monde jusqu’à la ruine de Jérusalem par Titus (an 70 de J.-C.), 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Desmé, 1838) HPD1(rev) Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, Histoire du peuple de Dieu, depuis son origine jusqu’à la naissance du Messie, tirée des seuls Livres Saints, nouvelle édition, corrigée et augmentée (Paris: Cailleau, 1738). JT Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts (a.k.a. Journal de Trévoux) MGt Médiathèque du Grand Troyes NE Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire de la Constitution Unigenitus (a.k.a. Nouvelles ecclésiastiques) nl Newberry Library sc Stonyhurst College Archives

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

Genesis 1:1, 3 (rsv). HPD1(rev), 1:1, 4. Arrest du 9 Avril 1756, 1, 4–6, 9, 16–17. Barbier, Chronique, 6:292. NE, 20 March 1754, 46. The complexity of the term “Enlightenment” and the ways that historians have interpreted it will be discussed below. For the sake of this study, the Enlightenment will refer not to a singular intellectual program but rather to the wide spectrum of ideas and debates about the ordering and improvement of society, the individual, and the political state that arose in the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries and was popularized

notes to PAGes 5–7

7

8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17

233

and disseminated through the burgeoning world of print culture and the institutions of the public sphere. On Enlightenment humanism, see: Ferrone, Enlightenment, 95–119. On the culture of self-ownership and how it opposed the equally important promotion of “anti-individualism,” see: Coleman, Virtues of Abandon, 3–4. On the “disenchantment of the world,” see: Gauchet, Disenchantment, 3–4. I will be using the terms “Catholic Enlightenment” and “Enlightenment Catholicism” interchangeably in this book. Recognizing that different uses of these terms have, at times, reflected different opinions about the nature and form of the Catholic Enlightenment, I am nevertheless following the lead of Jeffrey Burson whose combination of the terms in the introduction to his co-edited volume with Ulrich Lehner provides an opportunity to speak broadly about “the work of any author (lay or cleric) … from within Catholic Europe who participated in the burgeoning networks of publication and eighteenth-century sociability with a view toward integrating eighteenth-century science, philosophy, philology, or political thought into their understand of Catholic teaching.” See: Burson, “Introduction: Catholicism and Enlightenment,” 14. Gay, Enlightenment; Hazard, Crisis; Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Kors, Atheism in France; Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief; Kors, Epicureans and Atheists; Matytsin, Specter of Skepticism; Edelstein and Matytsin, Let There Be Enlightenment; Burson, Rise and Fall. André, Le Père André, 2:145 “Catalogi breves provinciae Franciae,” Arsi, Franciae 25 – I, fols. 1v, 12v, 31r, 37v, 54v, 58v, 72r, 126r, 143r; Franciae 25 – II, fol. 358v. I am indebted to D. Gillian Thompson who introduced me to these administrative documents and helped me use them to put together this brief propopography of Berruyer. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Marquis de la Charce, 9 April 1745, Afsi, ib 1, no. 7; Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Mademoiselle de la Condraye, 29 October 1729, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. “Catalogi breves,” Arsi, Franciae 25 – II, fols. 518r, 583v; Franciae 26, fols. 14r, 61v, 145v, 182r; Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to M. de Lessart, 1 August 1723, AMr, Collection Tarbé carton 16, no. 59. P. Dugas to [unknown], 13 February 1735, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. McManners, Church and Society, 2:511–2. Berruyer, Europa ad summum pontificem; Plausus parnassi.

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notes to PAGes 7–12

18 “Catalogi breves,” Arsi, Franciae 25 – II, fol. 306v. 19 “Catalogi triennales Franciae 1714, 1717, 1720,” Arsi, Franciae 18, fol. 128v. 20 Dupont-Ferrier, Du Collège de Clermont, 1:60. On the scriptores librorum in Paris, see: Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 3–23. 21 “Catalogi breves,” Arsi, Franciae 25 – II, 26–8c. 22 HPD1; HPD2; HPD3 respectively. 23 Chambers, Bibliography of French Bibles I, 1–8. 24 Ibid. II, vi–x. 25 Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, ix–xiv, 27–30. 26 Ibid., xii. 27 Watkins, “An Enlightenment Bible,” 273–96. 28 For the role that biblical scholars more generally played in Enlightenment debates, see: Lifschitz, “The Book of Job and the Sex Life of Elephants.” 29 Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment, vii. 30 Gay, Enlightenment, 3. 31 Pagden, Enlightenment, xiv. 32 Becker, Heavenly City, 29. 33 Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers. 34 Porter and Teich, Enlightenment in National Context; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 1:50–71; Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn; Feiner, Jewish Enlightenment. For a recent survey of the religious roots of the Enlightenment, see: Matytsin and Edelstein, Let There Be Enlightenment; Burson, Culture of Enlightening. 35 Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 266. 36 Burson and Lehner, Enlightenment and Catholicism; Lehner and Printy, Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment. 37 Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment, 7. 38 On the longer history of the term “Catholic Enlightenment,” see the following: Merkle, Die katholische Beurteilung; Plongeron, “Recherches sur l’Aufklärung catholique,” 555–605; Plongeron, “Was ist katholische Aufklärung?,” 39–45; Burson, “Introduction: Catholicism and Enlightenment,” 1–9; Lehner, “Introduction: The Many Faces of the Catholic Enlightenment,” 2–8. 39 Blanchard, The Synod of Pistoia; Printy, Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism; Klueting, “The Catholic Enlightenment in Austria.” Kleuting has gone so far as to say that “Jansenism was identical with the Catholic Enlightenment” in the Habsburg lands (131).

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235

40 Burson has written much on the topic: Burson, “Towards a New Comparative History of European Enlightenments,” 173–87; Burson, “The Catholic Enlightenment in France”; Burson, Rise and Fall; Burson, “Claude G. Buffier,” 449–72; Burson, “Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier,” 63–88; Burson, “Introduction: The Culture of Jesuit Erudition,” 387–415. 41 Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 14–19. For reactions to Van Kley’s use of the term “Reform Catholicism,” see the forum on Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Catholic Historical Review 105 (2020): 738–45. 42 Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment, 8–10. 43 The best studies on Berruyer in English are Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers and Northeast, Parisian Jesuits. Other works that reference Berruyer include: Monod, Pascal à Chateaubriand, 254n, 305, 345n, 364, 390–2; Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 70, 87, 212, 219; Everdell, Christian Apologetics, 164; Masseau, Les Ennemis, 113; Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment, 25. 44 The only other book-length study of Berruyer is the recently published work of Paolo Fontana: Fontana, Un gesuita. Fontana’s book is an important study particularly of the ways that Berruyer sparked theological crises in Rome. Using mostly archival materials from Italy, Fontana tells the story very much from the perspective of Roman authorities. My study considers the French political and cultural context and looks at the ways that Berruyer’s legacy lasted in the country for a century after his first publication. 45 On the concept of the “communications circuit,” see: Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” 65–83; Darnton, “What Is the History of Books? Revisited,” 495–508. 46 Burson, Culture of Enlightening. 47 Geneviève Bollème has advanced a similar argument about the ways that the popular bibliothèque bleue came to represent some of the changing attitudes associated with the Enlightenment; see: Bollème, La Bibliothèque bleue. 48 On the concept of the public sphere and its rise in the eighteenth century, see: Habermas, Structural Transformation; Melton, Rise of the Public. On salons and their importance to the public sphere, see: Goodman, The Republic of Letters; Craveri, Age of Conversation; Kale, French Salons, 17–45. For a more critical take on the connection between salons and the public sphere, see: Lilti, World of the Salons. On coffee houses and the Enlightenment, see: Outram, Enlightenment, 17, 20; Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 626–30; Munck, Enlightenment, 65–6; Houston, Literacy in

236

notes to PAGes 15–23

Early Modern Europe, 211, 214; Cowan, Social Life of Coffee. On Masonic lodges and the Enlightenment, see: Jacob, Radical Enlightenment; Halévi, Les loges maçonniques; Jacob, Living the Enlightenment; Loiselle, Brotherly Love. 49 Van Kley, Religious Origins, 136. 50 Other scandals include the Prades Affair and the controversy over the writings of the abbé Yvon. See: Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment; Burson, Culture of Enlightening.

Chapter One 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

Genesis 1:26 (rsv). HPD1(rev), 1:13–14. Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 3–5. Dorsanne, Journal, 1:419. Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 4–7, 10–11; O’Keefe, Contemporary Reactions, 6–7; Pappas, Berthier’s Journal, 13–14. JT, January-February 1701, preface. Camusat, Histoire critique, cited in Dumas, Histoire du Journal, 13. Rubiés, “The Jesuits and the Enlightenment,” 858; Pappas, Berthier’s Journal, 13–4; O’Keefe, Contemporary Reactions, 6–7; Dumas, Histoire du Journal, 13. JT, January–February 1701, preface. Burson, Rise and Fall, 43. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 145. On the role of scholarly periodicals in establishing the Enlightenment and spreading Enlightenment ideas more generally, see: Goodman, Republic of Letters, 165–75; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 142–51. Burson, Rise and Fall, 43–6; Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 50–1; Kors, Atheism in France, 218, 302; McManners, Death and Enlightenment, 46. Ganss, Constitutions, 66. Ganss, Constitutions, 68. Ganss, Constitutions, 170. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 9; Bangert, History of the Society of Jesus, 149. According to Bangert, fourteen Jesuits headed overseas in 1581, another thirteen in 1583, twelve more in 1585, and steadily upward through the beginning of the seventeenth century. Županov, Disputed Mission, 4–5; Wright, God’s Soldiers, 117–18. Standaert, “Jesuit Corporate Culture,” 352–3; Wright, God’s Soldiers, 122;

notes to PAGes 23–31

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

237

Thanh, “The Jesuits in Asia,” 400–16; Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, Book That Changed Europe, 235; Brockey, Journey to the East, 156–8; Minamiki, Chinese Rites Controversy, 39n; Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment, 113–24. Burson, “The Culture of Jesuit Erudition,” 397. Hsia, Sojourners, 1. Brockey, Journey to the East, 15, 46, 52; Gatto, “Jesuit Mathematicians,” 640–1, 649–50; Carolino, “Astonomy, Cosmology, and Jesuit Discipline,” 679, 682, 686–9. Ganss, Constitutions, 284. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 114–15. Wright, God’s Soldiers, 166–7. Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, 97, 166–8, 184; Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 30–2, Van Kley, Jansenists, 7. On the Enlightenment’s optimism toward human nature, see: Ferrone, Enlightenment, 95–119. Burson, “The Culture of Jesuit Erudition,” 396. On the Enlightenment as an age of practical reason, see: Matytsin, Specter of Skepticism, 268–74. On probabilism, see: Tutino, Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism, ix–xiv, 26–88; Gay, Jesuit Civil Wars, 1–11, Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 47–8; Van Kley, Jansenists, 16; Maryks, Saint Cicero, 107–26. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 207. Ganss, Constitutions, 172–3. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 213. Farrell, “Introduction,” iii. O’Malley, First Jesuits, 211. Dainville, L’Éducation des jésuites, 70, 107–9. Casalini, “Rise, Character, and Development,” 153–62. Edelstein, Enlightenment, 48–51. Ibid., 65, 155 n21. Burson, “The Culture of Jesuit Erudition,” 394. Ganss, Constitutions, 188; Ratio Studiorum; O’Malley, First Jesuits, 208–10; Casalini, “Rise, Character, and Development,” 153–62. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 22. Bangert, History of the Society of Jesus, 64–9; Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 61–7. Ganss, Constitutions, 66; Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, 97–145, 241–4; Worcester, “Jesuit Dependence,” 106–10. McManners, Church and Society, 2:345–7, 349; Cottret, Histoire du jansénisme, 15–28, 31–43, 55–63; Garrioch, Formation of the Parisian

238

42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

notes to PAGes 31–8

Bourgeoisie, 3–9, 13; Lyon-Caen, La Boîte à Perette; Strayer, Suffering Saints, 1–3, 7–8, 12–19, 22–9, 30–6, 42–5, 47–53; Van Kley, Jansenists, 8–11; Doyle, Jansenism, 5–11, 21–2; Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 13–4; Annat, La Conduitte de l’eglise, 268–350. Strayer, Suffering Saints, 85. Strayer, Suffering Saints, 44–5, 58–61; Cottret, Histoire du jansénisme, 28–31, 49–70. Strayer, Suffering Saints, 153. McManners, Church and Society, 2:345–53; Bergin, Politics of Religion, 187–204; Bergin, Church, Society, and Religious Change, 403–13; Cottret, Histoire du jansénisme, 53–6, 67–70, 83–98, 125–8, 135–44; Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism, 100–3, 106–12, 226–38. Strayer, Suffering Saints, 143–53; Van Kley, Religious Origins, 73–4; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 4–9. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 6–8; Matytsin, Specter of Skepticism, 25–51; Kors, Atheism in France, 17–43; Kors, Naturalism and Unbelief, 69–101; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 159–74. Habermas, Structural Transformation. Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres,” 473–502; Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 15–23; Edelstein, Enlightenment, 82–5; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 12–23. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, x. DeJean, Ancients against Moderns, 8–9, 36–8, 42–51; Edelstein, Enlightenment, 37–45; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 1:145–8. For more on the Quarrel, see also: Bullard, and Tadié, Ancients and Moderns in Europe. Melton, Rise of the Public, 81–2. Roche, People of Paris, 199–200. Furet and Ozouf, Lire et écrire, 36–9; Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe, 129–39. Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 1–13; Caradonna, Enlightenment in Practice, 6, 35–7, 68, 107–17; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 90–182. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, 9:334. Cited in Roche, People of Paris, 201. Chartier, Cultural Origins, 69, 90; Burrows, French Book Trade II, 19. Melton, Rise of the Public, 63, 105; Chartier, Cultural Origins, 70; Habermas, Structural Transformation, 31–43; Jacob, Living the Enlightenment, 73–142; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 53–89. Roche, People of Paris, 206; Melton, Rise of the Public, 84.

notes to PAGes 39–45

239

60 Van Kley, “In Search of Public Opinion,” 219; Melton, Rise of the Public, 52; Cottret, “Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques,” 11–42. 61 Chartier, Cultural Origins, 70–1, 56–7; Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe, 208–9; Choudhury, Wanton Jesuit, 8, 127–51; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 168–72. 62 Chartier, Cultural Origins, 56–61. 63 Turnovsky, Literary Market, 63–102. 64 An, G8 693*, fols. 119r, 132v. 65 HPD2, 1:4–5. 66 HPD2, 1:1, 16, 21, 15, 42, 46. 67 HPD2, 1:5. 68 Prospectus: Histoire du peuple de Dieu, 1. 69 The exception was the HPD3 which reverted to paraphrasing each of Paul’s epistles on its own. 70 HPD1, 1:xxx. 71 HPD1, 1:lx. 72 HPD1, 1:213. 73 Cf. Genesis 27:32 (Latin Vulgate): Dixitique illi Isaac: Quis enim es tu? Qui respondit: ego sum primogenitus filius tuus Esau. [Bold added] Cf. Genesis 27:32 (Revised Standard Version): “His father Isaac said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He answered, ‘I am your son, your first-born, Esau.’” [Bold added] 74 Montignot, Remarques théologiques, 361. 75 HPD1, 1:xxvii, xliii. 76 HPD1, 1:xxvii. 77 HPD2, 1:9. 78 HPD2, 1:18–9. 79 HPD2, 1:25, 139. 80 HPD2, 1:25–6. 81 HPD2, 1:27. 82 bn, h-7207, 193–4 (original version). Berruyer’s Jesuit superiors deemed this passage so controversial that upon first publication of the book they rushed to the responsible printers and had it cut out of extant copies. See: Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 104. 83 HPD2, 7:307. 84 HPD2, 8:217–8. 85 HPD2, 1:252. 86 HPD2, 1:74–5.

240

notes to PAGes 45–52

87 HPD2, 2:212–3. 88 HPD2, 3:308. 89 Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 70–2. For more on Enlightenment ultramontanism, see: Vanysacker, Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi. 90 HPD2, 1:126–7. 91 HPD2, 1:127 (italics mine). 92 HPD2, 1:263; HPD3, 1:xxv (italics mine). 93 Berruyer, Réflexions sur la foi, 41–2. 94 HPD1, 1:xiii. 95 HPD2, 1:9. 96 HPD2, 1:10. 97 bn, h-7207, p. 198 (original version). 98 HPD2, 1:296–7. 99 HPD2, 7:305–6. Translated by Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 74.

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4

5

6

7 8 9

Judith 13:6–10a. (rsv) HPD1, 5.2:282–3. Friedrich, “Circulating the Litterae Annuae,” 5, 10. “Annuae litterae provinciae Franciae, anni 1730–1734,” Arsi, Franciae 35-I, no. 51, fol. 130r; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 8, 11. On Longueval’s publications, see: BCJ, 4:1934–7. “Répetoire alphabétique d’ouvrages présentés et de privilèges obtenus ou refusés de 1728 à 1739,” bn, Fonds français 21975, fol. 57v. According to Robert Darnton, a privilège signalled that the king “did not merely allow a book to come into being: he put his stamp of approval on it; he recommended it to his subjects.” Darnton, Business of Enlightenment, 27. HPD1, 1:415. Robinet’s approval of the work is further confirmed by notes included among the papers of Louis-Adrien Le Paige: “Extrait du livre du peuple de Dieu par le P. Isaac Joseph Berruyer de la Compagnie de Jésus, approuvé par M. Robinet, aujourd’hui official de Paris,” bPr, Collection Le Paige 472, no. 19. HPD1, 1:415; “Mémoire par P. Amys touchant le livre du P. Berruyer,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 129–130n. JT, March 1728, 561–2; October 1728, 1831, 1834. “Acta Sacrae Indicis Congregationis, 1721–1734,” Acdf, Archivum Indicis I-15, fol. 128v; Wolf, Systematisches Repertorium, 1003.

notes to PAGes 53–7 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

241

O’Neill and Domínguez, Diccionario histórico, 2:1880. Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, 185. BCJ, 4:84–111. Hardouin, Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis restitutae; Hardouin, Chronologia Veteris Testamenti. Hardouin, Opera selecta, 523–4; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 127n. Compare this with the more traditional reading of the prophecy in Baltus, La Religion chrétienne, 147–8. Hardouin, Chronologiae ex nummis Herodiadum, 60. Cited in Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, 187. Hardouin, Ad censuram scriptorum, 1. Translated by Edwin Johnson in Hardouin, Prolegomena of Jean Hardouin, 1. Bernard Chédozeau has argued that Hardouin composed the work as early as 1710. Chédozeau, “Le P. Hardouin,” 266. Hardouin, Ad censuram scriptorum, 73, 77; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 117; Chédozeau, “Le P. Hardouin,” 257–9. Hardouin, Prolegomena, 121, 124. For more on the context around “atheism,” see: Kors, Atheism in France. Paschoud, “L’érudition,” 202; “Mémoire par P. Amys touchant le livre du P. Berruyer, 7 novembre 1728,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17. “Deposition du P. Judde,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 21. Louis Marquer to Michel-Angelo Tamburini, 1 September 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 8. Henri-Charles Forcet to Michel-Angelo Tamburini, 29 August 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 6. Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 87. Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:36–7. “Mémoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17; Marquer to Tamburini, 21 July 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 8; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 82n. Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, 188; Neveu, Erudition et religion, 58; Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:36–7. “Mémoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 127n; Grafton, Bring Out Your Dead, 188. Some of Hardouin’s correspondence with Ballonffeaux made its way into the Opera selecta. Jean Hardouin to Huguetan, 30 May [n.d.], Library of the University of Leiden, Collection Papebrouck 15. Jean Hardouin to [unknown], “This Tuesday Morning” [n.d.], Afsi, Collection Vivier, vol. 2, no. 166. See the letters at the end of Hardouin, Opera selecta.

242

notes to PAGes 57–9

31 “Projet de Protestation,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 16; “Protestation du P. Hardouin,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 11. 32 “Doutes sur la sincérité de la protestation,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 12. 33 JT, February 1709, 367–71. The four superiors who composed the statement were Michel Le Tellier (provincial of France), Gabriel Daniel (superior of the Maison Professe), Henry-Charles Forcet (rector of the Collège Louis-le-Grand), and Paul Bodin (rector of the novitiate). 34 Philippe Jolly to Jean-Joseph Guibert, 1 January 1721, Arsi, Galliae 65, fols. 108r–9v; Afsi, Dossier Berruyer, no. 17; “Epistolae, 1671–1765,” Arsi, Francia 49, fols. 249r–54r; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 116; Hillenaar, Fénelon et les jésuites, 313–6. 35 Etienne Souciet to [Michelangelo Tamburini], 17 October 1729, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 26; “Mémoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17; André, Le Père André, 1:473–4; Henri-Charles Forcet to Michelangelo Tamburini, 29 August 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 6; “Deposition du P. Desconseils item ce qui regarde La Piloniere,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 5; Charles Dauchez to Michelangelo Tamburini, 22 August 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 7. 36 The total number of Jesuits in the Province of France can be confirmed in Arsi, Franciae 26, fols. 325–62. D. Gillian Thompson calculated this number in her research project, “The Eighteenth-Century French Jesuits Project of the University of New Brunswick, Findings Based on Research on the Annual and Triennial Catalogs of the Province of France in Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu” and delivered in a conference paper entitled “The Condition of the Province of France on the Eve of the Eighteenth-Century Suppression” presented at the Jesuit suppressions conference at the Institute of Historical Research, London, January 1991. My thanks to Dr Thompson for sharing this work with me. 37 Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 116, 143; “Mémoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17. 38 “Catalogi Breves Provinciae Franciae,” Arsi, Franciae 25–6; Dauchez to Tamburini, 22 August 1707, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 7. 39 “Mémoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17; “Deposition du P. Judde,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 21; Claude de Linyeres to the Assistant of Germany, 8 June 1734, Arsi, Franciae 49, fols. 250r–1v. 40 “Deposition du P. Judde,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 21. 41 Souciet to [Tamburini], 17 October 1729, sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 26. 42 “Mémoire presenté au R.P. de la Guille, visiteur de la Province de France, 12 April 1729,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 3.

notes to PAGes 59–65

243

43 “Mélanges historiques. Receuil de pièces, manuscript et imprimées … Pièces sur le clergé,” bn, Fonds français 15757, fol. 177r. 44 Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 118n. 45 “Lettre de M*** à M***,” 1ff. A manuscript copy of this work resides among Le Forestier’s papers; see: sc, A II 27, vol. 1 no. 24. 46 Prézel, Dictionnaire des portraits, 2:157. The translation is by Edwin Johnson; see: Hardouin, Prolegomena, xxiv. It was originally published in Desfontaintes, Le Nouvelliste du Parnasse, 1:155–6. Jean-Baptiste L’Advocat later repeated the anecdote – with Hardouin’s alleged admission that he awoke at “four in the morning” to pursue his scholarly innovations – in L’Advocat, Dictionnaire, 2:134. 47 Claude Linyeres, “Copia episteles P. de Linyeres Confess. Regis christianisimi ad P. Asistentem Germania, 8 June 1734,” Arsi, Franciae 49, fol. 250r. 48 sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17. 49 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 9–34; McMahon, Happiness, 148–88, 208–45; Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures, 2–9; Palmer, Reading Lucretius, xi–xiv; Kors, Epicureans and Atheists, 5–63. 50 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 145–7, 153; Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears; Jones, Smile Revolution, 1–10; Roberts, Sentimental Savants, 1–12; Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 1–10. 51 Schieder, “Between Grâce and Volupté,” 77. 52 Bailey, Spiritual Rococo, 33. 53 Bell, Cult of the Nation, 37; Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 172, 192–8; Bailey, Spiritual Rococo, 1–30. 54 HPD1, 1:36. 55 HPD1, 1:310. 56 HPD1, 4:80. 57 Guyon, Les livres de l’ancien testament, 12:422. 58 HPD1, 5.1:345. The fifth volume of the HPD1 was originally divided into two separately bound books. The story of Jonah was included in the first of the two (hence 5.1). 59 HPD1, 5.1:355. 60 Cf. Jonah 4:1–11. 61 HPD1, 1:33. 62 HPD1, 1:179. 63 HPD1, 1:182. 64 Genesis 29:9–12 (rsv); HPD1, 1:227.

244 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

notes to PAGes 65–7

Genesis 39:6–7 (rsv). HPD1, 1:321. HPD1, 4:375. HPD1, 4:376; Cf.: 2 Samuel 11:4a (rsv) which simply reads: “So David sent messengers, and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.” Colbert, Ordonnance et instruction, 176. Mirabeau, Erotika Biblion, 193. Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:24. NE, 4 April 1729, 60. Journal des sçavans, August 1728, 484. The Journal listed Huart on the rue Saint-Jacques, Knapen (père) on the rue de la Huchette, Knapen (fils) on the rue Saint-André, Cailleau at the place de Sorbonne, Saugrain at the Palais Royale, Prault on the quay de Gesvres, and the widow Pissot on the quay de Conti among others. On the report of the Capuchins of Orléans, see: [Unknown] to Guillaume-François-Louis Joly de Fleury, n.d., bn, Collection Joly de Fleury 316, no. 40. Evidence of this can be seen in the listings of London newspapers: “Books, To be had at the Shop of J. Groenwege near Katherine-Street, and Nicolas Prevost over against Southampton-Street in the Strand,” Daily Post (London, England), 20 March 1728, Issue 2650; “Just publish’d at Paris, And are to be had at Woodman and Lyon’s Shop, in Russel-Street, CoventGarden,” Daily Post, 17 April 1731, Issue 3208; “Just publish’d at Paris, And are to be had at Woodman and Lyon’s Shop, in Russel-Street, CoventGarden,” Daily Post, 22 April 1731, Issue 3212. Hubert Angliviel de la Beaumelle to Jean Angliviel, 27 April 1751, letter lb81, in Correspondance générale de La Beaumelle, 4:62. Hoffman and Mason, Princes of Ireland, 281. Mercure de France, July 1728, 1542. Bower, Historia Litteraria, 2:307, 319. Journal des sçavans, August 1728, 484–93. Bower, Historia Litteraria, 2:308; Mercure de France, July 1728, 1539. Bernard and Sauzet, Bibliotheque françoise, 8:86. On their partnership, see: Hunt, Jacobs, and Mijnhardt, Book That Changed Europe, 96, 104–5. Bernard and Sauzet, Bibliotheque françoise, 8:114. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 40. On the rise and transformation of the French novel, see: Showalter, Evolution; Rustin, Le Vice à la mode; DeJean, Tender Geographies; DiPiero, Dangerous Truths.

notes to PAGes 67–71

245

84 Voltaire, “Relation de la maladie, de la confession, de la mort, et de l’apparation du Jésuite Berthier,” in Complete Works of Voltaire, 49b:385. On the ruelle and Clélie, see: Bailey, The Spiritual Rococo, 58–9; DeJean, Tender Geographies, 21, 55–7. 85 Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:33n. 86 Montpleinchamp, Le Diable bossu, xiii–xiv. Cited in Showalter, Evolution, 15. 87 Jacquin, Entretiens, iv, viii. 88 Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 296; Merrick, “Gender in PreRevolutionary Political Culture,” 198–219. 89 The painting was originally thought to be a production of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, but Pierre Rosenberg and Colin B. Bailey have identified it as the work of the French painter Jean-Charles-Auguste Bernard, better known as Bernard d’Agesci of Niort. See: Rosenberg and Bailey, “Not Greuze, but Bernard d’Agesci,” 204–11. 90 Wolff, “An Early Painting by Greuze,” 580–4. 91 Stewart, Engraven Desire, 94–101; Sheriff, Fragonard, 108. 92 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 41, 58–69; DiPiero, Dangerous Truths, 10; DeJean, Tender Geographies, 5; McManners, Church and Society, 2:277–81. 93 François Bretonneau, “Mémoire de ce qui est venu à ma connoissance touchant le livre du P. Berruyer,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 1. 94 Bretonneau, “Mémoire … touchant le livre du P. Berruyer,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 1. The mémoire, referenced by others as Tournemine’s Observations sur l’Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, seems never to have been published. Although it was widely read within the Society of Jesus, no copies of the work remain. 95 Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:27. 96 Pierre Amys to Joseph Gallifet, 7 November 1729, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 4; Pierre Amys to Michelangelo Tamburini, 9 October 1729, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 5; Pierre Amys to Joseph Gallifet, 5 January 1730, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 6. 97 Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:26–7, 3:31; Bretonneau, “Mémoire … touchant le livre du P. Berruyer,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 1. Dupré gave similar justifications to the Assistant of France in letters composed years later: Thomas Dupré to Charles Du Bois, 20 January 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 15; Thomas Dupré to Charles Du Bois, 25 February 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 16. Others defended Berruyer in a similar manner; see: Charles Merlin to Charles Du Bois, 30 December 1737, sc, A II 27, vol. 2,

246

98 99

100

101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114

115

notes to PAGes 71–5

no. 13; Charles Merlin to Charles Du Bois, 20 January 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 14; Alexandre Millon to [unknown], 10 August 1734, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 9. Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:26–7, 34; Bretonneau, “Mémoire … touchant le livre du P. Berruyer,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 1. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, “Mémoire presenté au R.P. de la Guille, visiteur de la Province de France, 12 avril 1729,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 3; “Défenses du Père Berruyer par lui-même,” sc, A II 27, vol. 2, nos 21–5. Etienne Souciet, “Judicium P. Stephanus Souciet … de opere P. Isaaci Josephi Berruyer, cui titulus est Histoire du peuple de Dieu, &c.,” Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 163r. “Exemplum judicii revisorum de libro Gallico cui titulus Histoire du Peuple de Dieu,” nl, Case Wing z144.A1, vol. 4, no. 87. They also complained about Berruyer’s interpretations of the prophets: “Judicium P.P. Revisorum de sequentibus propositionibus P.a. Peccarum Angelorum,” 1 August 1729, Arsi, Galliae 65, fols. 168r–173v. Fontana, Un gesuita, 39–45. Voltaire to Louisa Dorothea of Meiningen, 16 March 1754, letter d5732, in Complete Works of Voltaire, 99:35. Voltaire, “History,” in Philosophical Dictionary, 10:96. André, Le Père André, 2:145. Irailh, Querelles littéraires, 3:33. Bower, “Article XXXI: Histoire du Peuple de Dieu,” 319. NE, 26 October 1731, 202. NE, 4 April 1729, 60–1. Mita Choudhury has pointed out that the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques denounced Jacques-Joseph Languet de Gergy’s biography of Marguerite Alacoque in much the same way: “less a devotional work than a novel.” See: Choudhury, “Masculinity and Faith,” 128. Colbert, Ordonnance et instruction pastorale, 4. Colbert, Ordonnance et instruction pastorale, 176, 178. Colbert, Ordonnance et instruction pastorale, 169. Dugas to unknown, 27 October 1731, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. “Catalogi breves provinciae franciae, 1682–1760,” Arsi, Franciae 26, fol. 326r; Franciae 27, fols. 1v, 31r, 49r, 64r. Letters by Dugas confirm Berruyer’s periodic presence in Lyon from 1731 through February 1735. See: Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. Dugas to unknown, 29 October 1731, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer.

notes to PAGes 75–80

247

116 Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Frantz Retz, 3 February 1733, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 138r. 117 Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Du Bois, 9 March 1734, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 7. 118 René-Joseph Tournemine, “Annotata in novam editionem historia populi dei,” Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fols. 535r–40r; Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to unknown, 5 August 1734, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 8. 119 Berruyer to unknown, 5 August 1734, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 8. 120 HPD1, 1:229; Cf. HPD1(rev), 1:216–7. Many of the changes made in the text of the Histoire were compiled in a manuscript volume in Vesoul. See: “Changemens remarquables,” Bibliothèque Louis-Garret, cGM 170. 121 HPD1, 1:321–2, 3:375–85, 4:374–6; HPD1(rev), 1:304–7, 3:392–400, 4:375–6. 122 Berruyer’s required statement on the messianic prophecies can be found in a supplementary volume published by the Parisian publisher Prault for readers who already owned the first edition of the HPD1 but wanted the additional materials included in the revised edition. See: Berruyer, Supplement à la premier edition. 123 HPD1(rev), 1:13–14, 16. 124 HPD1(rev), 1:32. 125 Genesis 3:15–16, 19 (rsv). 126 Wisdom of Solomon 10:1–2. “Wisdom protected the first-formed father of the world, when he alone had been created; she delivered him from his transgression and gave him strength to rule all things” (rsv). 127 Hyde, Making Up the Rococo, 1–8. 128 BCJ, 1:1358. 129 nl, Case Wing z45.18, ser. 4, no. 7b, 9. On the bookseller in question, Jean-Baptiste Claude Bauche (pére), see: Barbier, Juratic, and Mellerio, Dictionnaire, 175–82. Other bookseller catalogues listed similar prices. 130 For a more thorough discussion relative to the city of Troyes, see: Darnton, Literary Underground, 136. 131 Barbier, Juratic, and Mellerio, Dictionnaire, 265–6. 132 Barbier, Juratic, and Mellerio, Dictionnaire, 368. 133 Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Du Bois, 9 March 1734, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 7. 134 “Annotata in novam editionem historia populi dei,” Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fol. 535r. 135 Thomas Dupré to Du Bois, 25 February 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 16. 136 Charles Merlin to Du Bois, 30 December 1737, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 13. Baltus published his piece earlier that year: Baltus, Défense des prophéties.

248

notes to PAGes 80–8

137 Charles Merlin to Du Bois, 20 January 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 14. 138 “Protocollum Congregationis Indicis, 1731–1734,” Acdf, Archivum Indicis II – 78, fol. 233v. 139 “Acta Sacrae Indicis Congregationis, 1721–1734,” Acdf, Archivum Indicis I – 15, fol. 128v. 140 Van Kley, Religious Origins, 85–100; Maire, De la cause de Dieu, 241–86, 388–96; Choudhury, “An Unlikely Pair,” 543–70. 141 Choudhury, Wanton Jesuit, 58–61. 142 On the gendered dimensions of the conflict, see: Choudhury, “Masculinity and Faith,” 109–36.

Chapter Three 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13

John 1:1–5. (rsv) HPD2, 1:1–2, 7. Darnton, Business of Enlightenment, 4; Mornet, “Les enseignements,” 455. Doig and Medlin, “André Morellet’s Theological Articles,” 89; Goodman, Republic of Letters, 108–9. A similar approach to religion can be found in Jean-Frederic Bernard’s and Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde. See: Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe. Although “fils de dieu” was not attributed to Morellet directly, he confirmed his authorship in his mémoires; see: Morellet, Mémoires, 69. I appreciate Dr Kathleen Doig for drawing my attention to this reference. André Morellet, “Fils de Dieu,” in Encyclopédie, 6:804–6; Doig and Medlin, “André Morellet’s Theological Articles,” 94–5. Morellet, “Fils de Dieu,” in Encyclopédie, 6:807. Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 208–9. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 168–9. Dugad to unknown, 28 July 1734, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. In the transcription of the letter, Dugad’s name is spelled “Dugas,” but I am using the spelling provided by Sommervogel. See: BCJ, 3:270. Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fol. 528r. The three censors assigned to review the manuscript were Paul-Louis de Sabbatier, Pierre-Joseph Cortasse, and Pierre Bimet. René-Joseph Tournemine to [Frantz Retz], 28 June 1734, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 121r.

notes to PAGes 88–92

249

14 Dugad to unknown, 28 July 1734, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. 15 “Judicium PP. Revisorum de Sequenti propositione Theologica,” Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fol. 545r–6v. The four censors were Giacomo Ghezzi, Emannuel de la Reguera, Ignace Pien, and Franciscus Montegro. For a breakdown of their condemnation, see: Fontana, Un gesuita, 67–9. 16 Pierre Bimet to Charles Du Bois, 13 January 1735, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 10. 17 Claude de Linyeres to Frantz Retz, 19 February 1737, Arsi, Galliae 65, fols. 125r–v. 18 Edmund Rivière to Frantz Retz, 2 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 132v, 133r. 19 Charles-Xavier Lacouture, “Judicium P. Caroli Xav. Lacouture Societ. Jesu. De Libro Manuscripto P. Josephi Isaaci Berruyer eiusdem Societ.,” Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fols. 586r–95v; Domenico Maria Turano to unknown, 26 April 1738, Arsi, Fondo Gesuitico 673, vol. 2, fols. 585r–v. For an in-depth analysis of Lacouture’s critique, see: Fontana, Un gesuita, 71–82. 20 Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 41. 21 Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 1. 22 The exception was the first volume of the Histoire’s second part which functioned as a preface to the work. For more on the first volume, see chapter 1. 23 HPD1, 1:xxx. 24 On the growing popularity of Socinianism and Deism, see: Hazard, Crisis of the European Mind, 94–6, 252–8; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 115–34; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 599–627. 25 HPD2, 8:77. 26 HPD2, 8:3. 27 HPD2, 8:39. 28 Morellet, “Fils de Dieu,” in Encyclopédie, 6:804–6. 29 HPD2, 8:24. 30 HPD2, 8:95. 31 HPD2, 1:93–4. 32 HPD2, 2:247. 33 HPD2, 3:112. 34 For example, see the way that Berruyer emphasizes the “constraints of the economy of wisdom” that Jesus had to rely on when covertly attending the Feast of the Tabernacles as described in John 7:1–52; HPD2, 4:19.

250 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52

notes to PAGes 92–6

HPD2, 3:38–40. HPD2, 8:53. Berruyer, Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 48. On skepticism toward the miraculous, see: Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 218–29; Matytsin, Specter, 147–8; Jacobs, Secular Enlightenment, 2, 111, 184. HPD2, 8:11–2. On the places in the Gospels where Jesus seemingly displayed this type of miraculous omniscience, see: Matthew 11:27, 24:36; John 8:54, 11:41, 14:28. HPD2, 8:14. HPD2, 5:180–1. HPD2, 8:16. Pitassi, Le Christ entre orthodoxie et lumières; Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 115–34; Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries, 184–6; Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 1:78–80; Cottret, Le Christ des lumières, 13, 30–3, 48–9. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Charles Du Bois, 5 April 1735, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 11. Thomas Dupré to Charles Du Bois, 14 January 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 15. Dupré wrote to Du Bois again a month later to reiterate his support of Berruyer: Thomas Dupré to Charles Du Bois, 25 February 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 16 Charles Merlin to Charles Du Bois, 30 December 1737, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 13. Charles Merlin to Charles Du Bois, 20 January 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 14. Claude de Linyeres to Frantz Retz, 19 February 1737, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 125v. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Charles Du Bois, 10 June 1738, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 18. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Frantz Retz, 11 February 1738, Arsi, Galliae 65, fols. 155r–6r; Berruyer to Retz, 25 March 1738, Arsi, Galliae 65, fols. 157r–8v. Frantz Retz to Jean Lavaud, 20 June 1738, Afsi, Collection Prat 10, no. 73, 534. Bimet to Du Bois, 13 January 1735, sc, A II 27, vol. 2, no. 10. Tencin eventually became a cardinal and archbishop of Lyon, the most powerful episcopal position in the French Catholic Church besides that of Paris.

notes to PAGes 96–100

251

53 McManners, Church and Society, 1:51. Tencin was largely responsible for stripping the episcopal functions of the Jansenist bishop of Senez during the provincial Council of Embrun in 1727. See: Van Kley, Jansenists, 72. 54 Van Kley, Religious Origins, 118; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 21. 55 Choudhury, Wanton Jesuit, 44; Choudhury, “Masculinity and Faith,” 110, 116–17, 128; McManners, Church and Society, 2:327. 56 Claude de Linyères to Frantz Retz, 24 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 159r. 57 Linyères to Retz, 24 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 159r; Claude de Linyères to Frantz Retz, 8 November 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 161r; Manuel, L’année Françoise, 2:319. 58 Edmund Rivière to Frantz Retz, 2 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 132r. 59 Frantz Retz to Jean Lavaud, 2 December 1740, Afsi, Collection Prat 10, no. 73, fol. 537. 60 André-Hercule de Fleury to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 5 January 1740; 16 May 1741, Afsi, C-Pa 80, no. 6. 61 Linyeres to Retz, 24 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 159v. 62 Claude de Linyères to Frantz Retz, 24 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 159r; Edmund Rivière to Frantz Retz, 2 May 1740, Arsi, Galliae 65, fol. 132r. For more on the correspondence between Jesuits in France and Rome over Berruyer’s attempts to publish the second part of his book, see: Fontana, Un gesuita, 82–8. 63 On Lamoignon de Blancmesnil’s connections to the parti dévot, see: Van Kley, Damiens Affair, 60–1, 107, 116, 125. 64 Darnton, Business of Enlightenment, 9–10. 65 Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Guillaume de Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, 24 July 1752, Afsi, Collection Vivier 1, no. 29. 66 Joseph D’Hémery, “Journal de l’inspecteur D’Hémery, 1753–4,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fol. 70v. 67 bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fol. 84r. 68 Darnton, Censors at Work, 32. 69 bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fol. 84r. The authors of the NE confirmed that the book came from Paris; see: NE, 6 February 1754, 21. 70 For this reason, it is not exactly accurate to claim, as Catherine Northeast does, that the second part of Berruyer’s Histoire was “published illegally.” See: Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 103. 71 bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fol. 180v. 72 Argenson, Mémoires, 4:152–3; Régnault, Christophe de Beaumont, 1:360–1.

252

notes to PAGes 100–4

73 “Extrait d’une lettre de Clermont du 15 janvier 1754,” bPr, lP 554, no. 1. 74 Régnault, Christophe de Beaumont, 1:306; Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 68. Police inspector Joseph D’Hémery believed the amount of money that Beaumont gave to the Jesuits might have been as high as 12,000 livres. To put this number into perspective, 12,000 livres amounted to eight times D’Hémery’s annual salary. See: bn, Collection AnissonDuperron 22158, fol. 180v; Bachman, Censorship in France, 87. 75 Le Forestier et al., Déclaration du P. Provincial des Jésuites, nl, Case Wing z144.A1 v. 6, no. 26; Régnault, Christophe de Beaumont, 1:361. 76 Lettres des agens du Clergé, in Cadry, Observations théologiques, 1:547. The writers of the NE theorized that it was the “King himself … [who] determined the 25 or 26 bishops” that attended Beaumont’s meeting. See: NE, 27 November 1755, 189. 77 “Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée de Nosseigneurs les Prélats qui se sont trouvé à Paris, tenue à Conflans, Lundi trois Décembre mil sept cinquante-trois,” An, G8 713*, fol. 107bis. 78 “Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée de Nosseigneurs les Prélats qui se sont trouvés à Paris, tenue à Paris le Jeudi treize Décembre 1753,” An, G8 713*, fol. 107bis. 79 Beaumont, Mandement, 4–5. 80 Ibid., 5. 81 JT, January 1754, 166–8. A copy of Berruyer’s submission is also included among the records of the meetings held at Conflans. See: An, G8 713*, fol. 107bis. 82 NE, 6 March 1754, 37; 20 March 1754, 46. 83 NE, 18 June 1732, 117; Vintimille du Luc, Mandement. The article argues that Berruyer and his colleague Lallement composed the condemnation at the country home of a Madame Galbin in Auteil, a place “famous for its frequent gatherings of the most illustrious Molinists.” The article also suggests that the archbishop of Sens, Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, and Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury were indirectly involved in the project. 84 See their attacks on a Jesuit pamphlet entitled the Supplément: NE, 27 February 1744, 33–4; NE, 26 November 1744, 189–91. 85 NE, 4 September 1745, 143. 86 NE, 2 January 1754, 4; 5 February 1754, 22. 87 NE, 20 March 1754, 46. 88 Both Sommervogel and Cioranescu think Berruyer himself wrote the letters. The moderate tone taken by the author, however, suggests another.

notes to PAGes 105–9

89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98

99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106

253

Most plausible is the theory of the authors of the NE who claimed the letters were written by a “Jesuit in disguise,” likely one of Berruyer’s provincial allies. See: BCJ, 1:1362; Cioranescu, Bibliographie, 1:332; NE, 16 October 1754, 165. Lettres en réponse d’un ecclésiastique de Province, 3–5, 10, 14, 18, 30, 34–5. Montillet, Mandement d’Auxerre, 17–21. Charles-Daniel-Gabriel de Caylus to Mademoiselle du Puis, 1 March 1754, bPr, let 368, no. 3. McManners, Church and Society, 2:406, 445, 459, 462–3; Maire, De la cause de Dieu, 126; Van Kley, Jansenists, 75; Rogister, “A Quest for Peace,” 103–34; Van Kley, “Piety and Politics,” 122; Michaud et al, Bibliographie universelle, 11:466. NE, 30 October 1754, 173–4. Duhamel, Projet d’instruction pastorale, 65–6. Duhamel, Projet d’instruction pastorale, 14. Duhamel, Projet d’instruction pastorale, 32. Duhamel, Projet d’instruction pastorale, 73. In addition to the statement made by Beaumont and the assembled bishops and Caylus, the archbishop of Auch, Jean-Franc Montillet, put out his own mandement prohibiting members of his diocese from reading Berruyer’s newest book. See: Montillet, Mandement du l’archevêque d’Auch, bPr, lP 1449, no. 4. Maille, Le Père Berruyer convaincu. Maille published the volumes anonymously, but his authorship is confirmed by not only historians including Sommervogel and Cioranescu but also contemporaries including the Jansenist abbé d’Étemare. Inspector of the Book Trade, Joseph d’Hémery, simply noted that the first volume was printed “without permission” by “the Jansenists.” See: BCJ, 1:1363; Cioranescu, Bibliographie, 333; “Pièces relatives à l’affaire du P. Joseph-Isaac Berruyer,” MGt, cGM 2554, fol. 2v; “Journal de l’inspecteur d’Hémery, 1754–1755,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22159, fol. 121r. Maille, Le Père Berruyer convaincu, 1:5. NE, 17 July 1755, 115–6. Maille, Le Père Berruyer convaincu, 1:9–10. Maran, Les grandeurs de Jésus-Christ, 256–7. Guénard, Sommaire, 9–10. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 312. Motte, Exposition, 6, 43.

254 107 108 109 110 111

112 113

114

115

116 117 118 119 120

notes to PAGes 109–11

Duhamel, La vérité catholique, 15–16, 26. Duhamel, La vérité catholique, 28; Guénard, Sommaire, 3–9. Montignot, Remarques théologiques, 102; Motte, Exposition, 117. Guénard, Sommaire, 15–6. Duhamel, Projet d’instruction pastorale, 25; Maille, Le Père Berruyer convaincu, 1:107, 2:304, 4:viii, 316; Cadry, Observations théologiques, 2:334–5; Motte, Exposition, 1:117–8; Gaultier, Lettres théologiques, 3:350. Guénard, Sommaire, 1–2. Berruyer, Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 2–3. Like all of the pamphlets published in support of Berruyer in these years, this pamphlet was technically anonymous. Sommervogel and Cioranescu both attribute the work to Berruyer himself, and they’re joined by the authors of the NE. Perhaps most convincingly, however, D’Hémery wrote in his notebook that the apologetic work was specifically “by the Jesuit Berruyer.” See: BCJ, 1:1362–3; Cioranescu, Bibliographie, 332; NE, 21 August 1755, 133; “Journal de l’inspecteur d’Hémery, 1754–5,” bn, Collection AnissonDuperron 22159, fol. 121r. Nouvelle défense de l’Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, 80, 95. Although Sommervogel claims this pamphlet was also the work of Berruyer, the NE, ever-cognoscente of these sorts of details, surmised that it and another defence, the Défense contre Remarques théologiques & critiques, were actually the work of the “apologists among his brothers [in the Society of Jesus].” D’Hémery similarly noted that they were printed “without permission” by “the Jesuits.” See: BCJ, 1:1362–3; NE, 27 November 1755, 189; “Journal de l’inspecteur d’Hémery, 1754–55,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22159, fol. 129v. Lettre d’un théologien, 131, 136. Again, the authorship of this pamphlet is uncertain, but it is likely not by Berruyer despite the claims of Sommervogel and Cioranescu. The Lettre d’un théologien criticized Berruyer and the Histoire quite directly; indeed, Catherine Northeast agrees that because of the critical tone of the work, it was likely “by another hand.” BCJ, 1:1362–3; Cioranescu, Bibliographie, 332; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 134. Berruyer, Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 28–9. Nouvelle défense, 53. Ibid., 73–4. Lettre à un Docteur de Sorbonne, 8. Défense contre Remarques théologiques & critiques, 12–13.

notes to PAGes 111–17

255

121 Défense contre Remarques théologiques & critiques, 17. This comment suggests that the pamphlet was likely written by one of the other “disciples” of Hardouin. 122 Berruyer, Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 14–5. 123 Ibid., 18. 124 Ibid., 55–8. 125 Ibid., 61. 126 Van Kley, Religious Origins, 87–9, 92–7, 122–5, 144–6; Van Kley, Damiens, 43–4. 127 Berruyer, Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 2. 128 Lettres d’un Théologien, 162–3. 129 Nouvelle défense, 7. 130 Nouvelle défense, 10. 131 Défense contre Remarques théologiques & critiques, 4–5. 132 Lettre à un Docteur de Sorbonne, 3. 133 NE, 27 November 1755, 189. 134 NE, 11 June 1756, 98. This was the first mention of the “Berruyer Affair” as such that I have found. 135 NE, 20 November 1757, 189. 136 On the Girard-Cadière Affair, see: Choudhury, Wanton Jesuit. 137 “Pièces relatives à l’affaire du P. Joseph-Isaac Berruyer,” MGt, cGM 2554, fols. 1r–6r. 138 bPr, lP 473. 139 Recueil des critiques, bMl, Collection Des Fontaines, sJ e 640/102. Included in this collection were the mandement of Beaumont, the Jesuit superiors’ disavowal of the second part of the Histoire, Berruyer’s retraction, Duhamel’s Projet d’instruction, Montignot’s Remarques théologiques, Berruyer’s Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, the Défense contre Remarques théologiques & critiques, the Nouvelle défense, the Lettres en réponse, and Guénard’s Sommaire. 140 Maza, Private Lives.

Chapter Four 1 Matthew 26:52 (rsv). 2 HPD2, 5:271. 3 Darnton, Great Cat Massacre, 145–89.

256

notes to PAGes 117–25

4 Joseph d’Hémery, “Journal de l’inspecteur D’Hémery,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fols. 70v, 84r, 189v. 5 D’Hémery, “Journal,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158, fol. 97r. 6 Joseph D’Hémery to M. Duccat, 20 September 1754, bA, Archives de la Bastille 10303, fol. 146r. 7 Included in the records of the printers and book sellers guild is an item on the Jesuits’ Déclaration stating their disapproval of the work. See: “Table chronologique des archives de la Chambre syndicale des libraires et imprimeurs de Paris,” nl, Case Wing z144.A1 c477 1777, p. 160. 8 Christophe de Beaumont to Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, 7 September 1754, bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22144, fol. 104. 9 Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes to Voltaire, 13 January 1754, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, letter d5624, 14:362–3. 10 Shackelton, “Censure and Censorship,” 26–7; Roche, “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” 3–5, 14; Darnton, Censors at Work, 30–7, 47–9, 54–6; Birn, Royal Censorship, 9–15, 22–5, 116; Cerf, “La censure royale,” 4, 7–8; Herrmann-Mascard, La censure des livres, 112–21. 11 Barber, “French Royal Decrees,” 321–9; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 97–104; Birn, Royal Censorship, 28–32; Darnton, Literary Tour of France, 20–7. 12 Soman, “Press, Pulpit, and Censorship,” 453–5; Roche, “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” 5–6; Darnton, Censors at Work, 55–6. 13 “Proces verbal de l’Assemblée Générale du Clergé de 1760,” An, G8 692*, fols. 437–8; “Registres de l’Assemblée de Paris, 1762,” An, G8 693*, fols. 119r, 132v. 14 Bachman, Censorship in France, 22–3. 15 Shackelton, “Censure and Censorship,” 33–4. For an example of a papal bull that included just such a statement, see: “Libelles diffamatoires et livres prohibités: années 1759–1762,” bn, Collection Anisson-Duperron 22094, fol. 94r. 16 Birn, Royal Censorship, 25–7; Van Kley, Religious Origins, 143–54. 17 Maza, Private Lives. 18 Birn, Royal Censorship, 26. 19 Gaultier, Lettres théologiques, 3:305. 20 Ibid., 3:306–9. 21 Lettre d’une Demoiselle, 3. 22 bn, h-7207, p. 387. Evidence of the superiors’ efforts can be found in a handwritten note included in the bn’s copy of the first edition. The only

notes to PAGes 125–30

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

32 33 34 35

257

section of the original manuscript that the Antwerp edition did not include was at the very end of the first volume. In this section, Berruyer discusses how it is uncertain if Jesus actually communed with Judas during the Last Supper and how this uncertainty provides some support for the idea that it was right to deny the sacraments to those who did not abide by the papal bull Unigenitus. The owner of the original copy of the HPD2 housed at the bn notes that this section was almost completely suppressed, and it seems that it remained inaccessible for printers in Antwerp. See the original carton in bn, h-7207, 197–8; cf., HPD2(A) 1:197–8. For more on this, see: Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 104–5. NE, 17 July 1755, 115. Campbell, “The Language of Patriotism,” 39; Van Kley, Jansenists, 50–1. Marsy, Analyse raisonnée de Bayle. Baume, La Christiade. Chauvelin, Discours du Magistrat, 1–5. Ibid. The writers of the NE unsurprisingly lauded Chauvelin’s speech, reporting that upon finishing the magistrates gave him a “general applause” and complimented him on his “edifying” and “authentic” profession of the faith. See: NE, 2 April 1756, 59. “Remarques sur l’histoire du peuple de Dieu … par le R.P. Berruyer de la Compagnie de Jésus,” An, l 10, no. 8, 3–6, 8–11, 55–9, 61–6, 78–81, 84–5, 105. bn, Collection Joly de Fleury 316, fols. 4r–5r; Negroni, Lectures interdites. For more on the symbolic significance of book burning, see: Hillerbrand, “On Book Burnings,” 601. Barbier, Chronique, 6:292 Arrest du 9 Avril 1756, 4–11. On Berruyer’s ultramontanism, see: Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 196n. Arrest du 9 April 1756, 16–17. Procès-verbal du 12 avril 1756, 1–3. Berruyer had a long history of illness, but it seems that his health deteriorated around this time. The triennial catalogues of the Jesuit Province of France included brief descriptions of their members’ physical states. Beginning in 1714, Berruyer’s was described consistently as being “mediocre.” Pierre Amys confirmed in 1729 that though his mind was sharp, Berruyer “never had the health” to be in leadership within the society. At some point between 1754 and 1757 he took a turn for the worse. The catalogue of 1757 described him as “infirmed” and later explained that his body – or, a part of it – was paralyzed. See: Arsi, Francia 18–21 (for the latter description, see: Arsi,

258

36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

notes to PAGes 130–6

Francia 21, fols. 285r and 349r); “Memoire par P. Amys,” sc, A II 27, vol. 1, no. 17. Procès-verbal du 12 avril 1756, 2–4. The writers of the NE, of course, saw only deception in Berruyer’s response. They questioned whether he truly was so ill that he could not properly give account for his writings. See: NE, 11 June 1756, 99–100. Birn, Royal Censorship, 27. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 228–35. Barbier, Chronique, 6:293. BCJ, 1:1358–9. Nouvelle bibliothèque Germanique, 4:218–19. Sitzmann, Dictionnaire, 2:958–9; BCJ, 1:1358. NE, 16 October 1754, 167. The writers of the NE obtained a copy of this mémoire and printed it in their periodical on 21 August 1757. They alleged later that the author was the editor of the JT, Guillaume Berthier. See: NE, 20 November 1757, 189. NE, 21 August 1757, 138–9. Acdf, Archivum Santi Officii Romani, Stanza Storica o-4-A, fols. 3r–7r (cited in Fontana, Un gesuita, 95–6); BCJ, 1:1361. On the Remondini family and their printing firm, see: Fuhring, “The Remondini Family,” 441–6; Boschloo, The Prints of the Remondinis, 1–3; Milano, “Selling Prints,” 75–96. Acdf, Archivum Indicis I-17, fols. 53v–4r. NE, 17 July 1755, 116. Benedict XIV to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 11 June 1755, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:418. Donato, “Reorder and Restore,” 230; Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment, 239–43, 267–8. NE, 9 April 1756, 62; Wolf, Systematisches Repertorium, 1192. Benedict XIV to Tencin, 11 June 1755, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:418. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer to Benedict XIV, 12 October 1755, Archivum Indicis II-85, fols. 113r–4r. Benedict XIV to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 24 September 1755, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:442. Benedict XIV to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 12 November 1755, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:454. Acdf, Archivum Indicis I-17, fols. 64r–v; Acdf, Archivum Indicis II-85, fols. 272r–4v.

notes to PAGes 136–44

259

57 Benedict XIV, Damnatio & prohibitio, 3–6. Benedict XIV stopped short of accusing the Histoire of heresy by qualifying the term with “favoring” and “close to.” According to Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, a number of Roman cardinals convinced him out of the more forceful language in order to protect the Jesuits from further reproach. See: Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 316n5. 58 Benedict XIV to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 21 August 1754, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:355. 59 NE, 5 June 1758, 96. 60 HPD3, 1:xxvi. 61 HPD3, 1:x. 62 HPD3, 2:54–5. 63 HPD3, 2:139–41, 299–301, 314. 64 HPD3, 1:xxv. 65 Hardouin, Commentarius in Novum Testamentum, 675–6; HPD3, 2:409. In the rsv, Hebrews 13:8 reads: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.” 66 Maille, Le Pere Berruyer convaincu, 4:xi–xii, 136–46, 148, 161, 336–7, 345–6, 348–9. 67 Fontana, Un gesuita, 97–8; Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 268; Acdf, Archivum Indicis I-17, fols. 69r–v. 68 Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 110–13. 69 McCoog, “Lost in the Title,” 167. 70 Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 113–14. 71 Clement XIII, Damnatio & prohibitio, 2–10. 72 Bonifaz, Damnatio et prohibitio. 73 Benedict XIV to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 21 August 1754, in Correspondance de Benoit XIV, 2:355. 74 Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 166–75. 75 Van Kley, “Catholic Conciliar Reform,” 50–7. 76 Actes et décrets du II concile provincial d’Utrecht, 238–9. 77 Actes et décrets du II concile provincial d’Utrecht, 247–92. Dale K. Van Kley has argued that Bijeveld’s statement was likely the work of Duhamel, Gourlin, or both. 78 NE, 4 September 1759, 145; Lettre à un Docteur de Sorbonne, 3. The beginning of the letter announced that Berruyer’s works had been discussed in the last meeting of the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Theology. 79 Burson, Rise and Fall, 101–35, 239–74.

260

notes to PAGes 144–50

80 NE, 23 October 1759, 173. 81 The two works in question were the aforementioned Lettre à un docteur de Sorbonne and another titled Le P. Berruyer justifié contre Le P. Berruyer convaincu. The condemnation was printed and translated into French; see: Décret de la congrégation de l’Inquisition. 82 NE, 23 October 1759, 173. 83 Determinatio sacrae facultatis Pars prima, spectans tomum octavum Patris secundae; Determinatio sacrae facultatis Parisiensis Pars secunda. 84 Clement XIII, Bref contre l’Emile de Rousseau & l’Histoire du peuple de Dieu, 5. An original copy of this letter can also be found at bn, Collection Joly de Fleury 316, fols. 27–8. The printed version, consulted here, was published later and included an additional “comment” on the letter and its translation into French. The copy of the printed letter at the bPr – part of the collected papers of Louis Adrien Le Paige – included notes by Le Paige himself that confirmed the printed work’s accuracy and revealed the work’s translator and commentator: a priest of the Oratory by the name of Laurent. See: bPr, lP 473, no. 31, 3–4. 85 Clement XIII, Bref à la faculté de théologie de Paris, 5. 86 bn, Collection Joly de Fleury 316, fols. 18r–v. 87 Cardinal Joachim de Pierres de Bernis to Jean Clément Gervaise, 31 October 1762, letter A287, in Correspondance de Rousseau, 14:248–9. 88 Colone de Sciava to the Faculty of Theology [Sorbonne], 14 March 1764, bPr, lP 473, no. 30. 89 bn, Collection Joly de Fleury 316, fol. 31. 90 Burson, Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment, 262–300; Burson, Culture of Enlightening, 92–127. 91 Voltaire to Nicolas Claude Thieriot, 8 May 1756, letter d6858, in Complete Works of Voltaire, 17:179–80; Voltaire to Anne Marie Fiquet Du Boccage, 27 December 1758, letter D8003, in Complete Works of Voltaire, 19:305–6.

Chapter Five 1 Judges 3:21–2 (rsv). 2 HPD1(rev), 3:237. 3 NE, 27 February 1760, 37–8.

notes to PAGes 151–8

261

4 NE, 27 February 1760, 38. 5 André Hercule de Fleury to Pierre Guérin de Tencin, 24 November 1739, 5 January 1740, 3 July 1741 8 August 1741, Afsi, C-Pa 80, no. 6. 6 McManners, Church and Society, 1:40, 2:468; Van Kley, Damiens Affair, 168–9, 238; Michaud et al., Biographie universelle, 17:256; Maire, De la cause de Dieu, 118, 145, 263, 294, 333–4, 339. 7 An, G8 713*, fol. 107bis. 8 NE, 19 March 1760, 49; Fitz-James, Mandement et instruction pastorale. 9 NE, 27 February 1760, 40. 10 Fitz-James, Mandement et instruction pastorale, 1:6–13. 11 For just a few examples, see: Fitz-James, Mandement et instruction pastorale (Arianism) 1:103, 121–6, 268–9, 319–22, 344–54, 413, 421, 434–6, 476–80; (Nestorianism) 201–10, 219–21, 283–8, 310–12, 350, 481–6; (Socinianism) 92, 133, 140, 153, 270–2, 302–30, 333–44, 367–9, 387, 406–7, 417–9, 423–5, 441–6, 451–5, 486–9. On the fairly novel charges of lying, suicide, and murder, see 2:495. 12 NE, 19 March 1760, 50. 13 Ibid., 49. 14 sc, b II 9, vol. 3, no. 3 (table of contents). 15 Acdf, Archivum Sancti Officii Romani, Censurae librorum 1762–1764, fols. 320r–v. 16 Société typographique de Berne to Malesherbes, 20 August 1760, bn, Fonds français 22150, fol. 101r–v; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 148n. 17 Gourlin, Examen d’un nouvel ouvrage, 1–2. 18 Berruyer, Réflexions sur la foi, 4–5. 19 Berruyer, Réflexions sur la foi, 3. 20 sc, b II 9, vol. 3, no. 3 (table of contents). 21 “Analisi e Censura del Libro intitolate Reflexions sur la Foi &c,” Acdf, Archivum Sancti Officii Romani, Censurae librorum 1762–1764, fols 323r–47v. 22 Berruyer, Réflexions sur la foi, 18. 23 Ibid., 27–9. 24 Berruyer, Réflexions sur la foi, 19, 27–9; Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 70–6; Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 71–3; Northeast, Parisian Jesuits, 152–5. 25 Maleville, Mémoire; Dissertation sur quelques sentiments, 1. Alain Mothu noted that the authorship of the Mémoire is debatable though it was

262

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

notes to PAGes 158–64

identified as Maleville in the Dictionnaire de bibliographie catholique. See: Mothu, “Un curé janéniste,” 25. Deux lettres de Monsieur, 2. Ibid., 3–4, 6, 9. Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 122–7; Thompson, “The Lavalette Affair,” 206–18; Thompson, “The French Jesuit Leaders,” 237–63. bPr, lP 554, no. 1. “Extrait d’une lettre de Rome du 10 janvier 1759,” bPr, lP 554, no. 1. Van Kley, Jansenists, 35–6. Le Paige and Coudrette, Histoire général, 3:18. Ibid., 2:515, 3:175–6. Chauvelin, Discours d’un de messieurs des enquestes du dix-sept avril mil sept cents soixante-un, 18–19. Ibid., 22, 30, 35–9. Van Kley, Jansenists, 109–12. Lorenzo Ricci to Étienne-François (duc de) Choiseul, 13 May 1761, Afsi, C-Pa 80, no. 5. Lorenzo Ricci to Louis XV, 13 May 1761, Afsi, C-Pa 80, no. 5. Van Kley, Jansenists, 113–20; Comptes rendus par un magistrat les 17 avril, 3, 4, 6, 7 et 8 juillet 1761. Chauvelin, Discours d’un de messieurs des enquestes du huit juillet, 1–5. Chauvelin, Discours d’un de messieurs des enquestes du huit juillet, 5; cf. Fitz-James, Mandement et instruction pastorale, 1:4. Chauvelin, Discours d’un de messieurs des enquestes du huit juillet, 5–6. It is very likely that Le Paige and other members of the Jansenist Party helped Chauvelin write his 8 July speech. See: Van Kley, Jansenists, 123–4n. Chauvelin, Discours d’un de messieurs des enquestes du huit juillet, 8. Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1761, no. 3. Arrest du 6 Août 1761, 4–10. Etienne de la Croix to Louis XV, 16 August 1761, Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1761, no. 16. Lorenzo Ricci to Louis XV, 28 October 1761, Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1761, no. 38. JT, December 1761, 3012; Van Kley, Jansenists, 132–7. Berthier’s argument convinced some. Upon reading the article in the Journal de Trévoux, Edward Gibbon agreed that “the Jesuits were innocent in this respect.” See: Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works, 2:59. JT, December 1761, 3013, 3017–18, 3023–5, 3029, 3032–3.

notes to PAGes 164–171 50 51 52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67

263

Gourlin, Examen d’un nouvel ouvrage, 345–9. Ibid., 385–7, 390, 402–4. Van Kley, Jansenists, 181; Kuznicki, “Scandal and Disclosure,” 208. Extraits des assertions dangereuses, 2–3. The passage is from Nahum 3:5–7: “Behold, I am against you, says the Lord of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a gazingstock … Who will bemoan [you]?” In the final rhetorical question, the rsv actually reads: “who will bemoan her?” referring to Nineveh in the third person, but the passage underneath the engraving – following the Vulgate and a literal translation from the Latin – targets the subject of this invective more personally, using the second person. [Unknown] to Louis Adrien Le Paige, ca. December 1761, bPr, lP 582, no. 138. Cited in Kuznicki, “Scandal and Disclosure,” 236. The translation is Kuznicki’s. Extraits des assertions dangereuses, 5–8. Ibid., 198, 208. See: Judges 3:12–30. HPD1, 3:230. Extraits des assertions dangereuses, 522. BCJ, 1:1377. Guillaume-François Berthier to P. Wastelin, 4 May 1762, Absi, A II 21, no. 10, fol. 57r. Van Kley, Jansenists, 173–4; McManners, Church and Society, 2:553–4; Thompson, “General Ricci,” 434; Clay, “The Expulsion of the Jesuits,” 691. Voisins, Procédure, 253–82. “Projet de 7 août 1762,” Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1762, no. 5; “Mémoire sur le projet donné au Roy le 7 août 1762,” Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1762, no. 5; “Mémoire donné au Roy,” Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1762, no. 6; “Projet donné au Roy, 12 octobre 1762,” Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1762, no. 10; “Projet presenté au Roy le 12 octobre 1762,” Afsi, C-Pa 61, 1762, no. 11. Registres de l’Assemblée de Paris, 1762, An, G 8 693*, fols 40r–v, 136r–7r. An, G 8 693*, fols 138r–40r. Writing a few months later, the bishop of Saint-Pons, Paul-Alexandre Guénet, argued that the unity of the many parlements against the Jesuits was the novelty that should cause the crown “great fear.” See: Guénet, Lettre de Mr L’Évêque de St Pons, 64–5.

264

notes to PAGes 171–6

68 An, G 8 693*, fol. 140r–2r. 69 Arrest du Parlement de Rouen du 12 février 1762; Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 141. 70 Van Kley, Jansenists, 174–207. 71 McManners, Church and Society, 1:187. The archbishop of Lyon was traditionally granted the honorific title, “primate of the Gauls.” As one of the only archbishops who could make a claim to equality – or even superiority – to the archbishop of Paris, Montazet actively contested the decisions and actions of Christophe de Beaumont, defending the interests of French Jansenists. On Montazet’s connection to Louis-Adrien Le Paige, see: Van Kley, Jansenists, 73–4. 72 Montazet, Mandement et instruction pastorale, 4. 73 Ibid., 6. 74 McManners, Church and Society, 1:217. 75 Ibid., 2:497, 502–3. 76 Requête de cinquante six curés du diocese de Rouen, 69. 77 Ibid., 35–6. 78 Ibid., 84. 79 Ibid., 35–6. 80 Ibid., 52. 81 Ibid., 126–35. 82 Requêtes de cent un curés chanoines du Diocèse d’Auxerre, 27. 83 Ibid., 29. 84 Dénonciation des ouvrages des FF. Hardouin et Berruyer, 1–2, 17. 85 Ibid., 26–8. 86 Ibid., 28. 87 Griffet, Coup d’œil. 88 Balbani, Appel à raison, 3. 89 Cerutti, Apologie de l’institut, 2:155–6. 90 Van Kley, Jansenists, 138–40, 146–58. 91 Cerutti, Mes doutes, 25, 36. 92 Balbani, Appel à raison, 176. 93 Très-humbles et très-respectueuses remonstrances tenue le 12 janvier 1765. 94 Cerutti, Mes doutes, 40. 95 Cerutti, Réponse d’un jeune jésuite, 7, 11. 96 “Anecdotes sur la destruction des Jésuites en France,” Absi, A III 16, no. 9, fols 1–11.

notes to PAGes 176–86

265

97 Van Kley, Jansenists, 175–207; Thompson, Modern Persecution, 50; Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 145. 98 Lorenzo Ricci, “Istoria dell’accaduto in Francia ai PP. della Compagnia di Gesu nel 1761 e 1762 scritte di proprio pugno dal R.P. Lorenzo Ricci Generale et fedelmente copiate dall’originale medesimo,” Arsi, Historia Societatis 273, fols 3–10. 99 Van Kley, Reform Catholicism, 123–50; Thompson, “French Jesuits,” 182–5; Burson, “Between Power and Enlightenment,” 41. 100 Kaiser, “From Fiscal Crisis to Revolution,” 145–6; Van Kley, Religious Origins, 250–81; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 180–1.

Chapter Six 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

John 21:17 (rsv). HPD2, 6:86–7. For a brief biography of Janson, see: Michaud et al., Biographie, 20:554–5. Janson, Instructions familières, 1:v Janson, Explication succinte, v. Ibid., ix–x. Janson, Instructions familières, 1:xxxviii. Janson, L’eucharistie, 1:xiv–xv. Janson, Les œuvres de P. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, 1–5. Journal des sçavans, March 1789, 187–8. Michaud et al., Biographie universelle, 20:554. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 136–44; Van Kley, Religious Origins, 351–67; Birn, “Religious Toleration and Freedom of Expression,” 296–8; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 13–17, 34–9. McManners, French Revolution, 61–2, 64–7, 87–8, 93–6; Aston, Religion and Revolution, 171, 214–15; Tallett, “Dechristianizing France,” 1–2, 27; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 28, 62–3; Ozouf, “Déchristianisation,” 57–8; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 1–13; Vovelle, Revolution against the Church; Ford, Divided Houses, 23–30. Journal historique et littéraire, 15 September 1789, 3:116. Cited in McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 66. Dauchez, Opinion de Dauchez sur la liberté des cultes, 4. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment.

266 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30

31 32 33

34 35 36

notes to PAGes 186–91

Mennesson, Le conservateur, 1:xix–xx. Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme, 1:12. Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique, 1:iii. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 12–13; Armenteros, French Idea of History, 74–5; McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 128–33. Aston, Religion and Revolution, 316–25; Sepinwall, Abbé Grégoire, 160–1; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 217–24; Jean-Pierre Baverel, “Faits mémorables arrivés à Besançon : ans XII, XIII, XIV, et 1806,” AMb, Collection Baverel 72, fols 2–3. L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 1814, 1:289. Fortescue, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 5–6; Ford, Divided Houses, 66–7; Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, 68–83. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 156–7. Jonas, France and the Sacred Heart, 119–20. Kroen, Politics and Theater, 39–108. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 156–7; Jonas, France and the Sacred Heart, 119–20; Kroen, Politics and Theater, 39–108; Gibson, “Why Republicans and Catholics,” 107–20. Byrnes, Catholic and French, 86–7; Vovelle, Piété baroque; Jonas, France and the Sacred Heart, 125; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 220–2. Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, 220–2; Gibson, Social History of Catholicism, 248; Kroen, Politics and Theater, 63–75; Hufton, “The Reconstruction,” 38–52; Jean-Pierre Baverel, “Faits mémorables arrivés à Besançon en 1815,” AMb, Collection Baverel 80, fols 11r–v. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 176; Kroen, Politics and Theater, 76–8; Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 250; Lyons, “Fires of Expiation,” 240–66. L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 1819, 22:49. Kroen, Politics and Theater, 83–4, 89–91; Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, 75–6. Ibid., 84–5; Jonas, France and the Sacred Heart, 142; Byrnes, Catholic and French, 86; Ford, Divided Houses, 33; Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 105–7. Coup d’œil d’un vieux observateur, 4, 7–9. “Projet et supplique au roi Louis XVIII pour le rétablissement de la Compagnie par un ancien jésuite,” Afsi, C-Pa 510, no. 3.4. Afsi, C-Pa 510, nos 3.8–14.

notes to PAGes 192–9

267

37 Barault, Manuel de l’oeuvre des bons livres. 38 Lyon, “Fires of Expiation”; Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 97, 234; Davidson, “Bonnes lectures,” 155–71; McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 176–81. 39 McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 180. 40 Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics, 230–1, 238. 41 Garrioch, “Varieties of Religious Behavior,” 182–3, 188. 42 nl, Ayer 1128, fol. 51r. Special thanks go to Dr Michelle Molina who brought this document to my attention. 43 See the materials collected in An, f/17/1168–79. 44 See the materials collected in An, f/17/1193–1200. 45 Berruyer, Histoires saintes, i–ii. The volume included the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah (the Flood), Sacrifice of Isaac, Marriage of Isaac to Rebecca, Jacob and Laban, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Jephthah, Samson, Ruth and Boaz, David, the Judgment of Solomon, Tobit, Judith, Esther, and the “young” Daniel. Its popularity was such that it received a second edition in 1823. 46 Berruyer, Histoires saintes, 5; cf. HPD1(rev), 1:17–20. 47 Berruyer, Histoires saintes, 4; cf. HPD1(rev), 1:17. 48 Berruyer, Histoires saintes, 38, 91–92; cf. HPD1(rev), 1:245–53, 1:341–3. 49 Jean-Pierre Baverel, “Annales de Besançon pour l’année 1820,” AMb, Collection Baverel 85, fol. 2r. 50 Garrioch, Making of Revolutionary Paris, 52–3. 51 Berruyer, Joseph, avis. 52 The degree to which “good books” subscription services actually reached working-class populations is debatable. Eugen Weber doubts that the nineteenth-century working class actually read “good books” of this sort. See: Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 452–3. 53 Berruyer, Joseph, avis. 54 Berruyer, Joseph. 55 Berruyer, Histoires de plusieurs saints personnages, 1:avis. 56 Berruyer, Histoires de plusieurs saints personnages, 1:14; cf. HPD1(rev), 2:19. 57 Burton, Holy Tears, xxii. 58 Berruyer, Histoire de plusieurs saintes femmes, 23–4, 27, 38–9. 59 Ford, Divided Houses, 2–6, 33–6; Burton, Holy Tears, xx–xxv. 60 L’Ami de a religion et du roi, 1814, 2:7; Bangert, History of the Society of Jesus, 453.

268

notes to PAGes 199–206

61 Bertier de Sauvigny, Bourbon Restoration, 302–3. 62 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques pour le XIXe siècle, 1814, 7:44. Cited in GuittienneMürger, “Ides of August 1814,” 260. 63 Tabaraud, Réflexions d’un élève, 8–14. On Tabaraud’s Jansenism, see: Gazier, Histoire générale, 2:190. 64 Feller, Dictionnaire historique, 2:174. 65 Tabaraud, Du pape et des jésuites, 66–7. 66 Journal des débats, 3 February 1816, 3. Rondeau mentioned the same event in his periodical. See: Nouvelles ecclésiastiques pour le XIXe siècle, 1816, 8:70; Guittiene-Mürger, “Jansénisme et libéralisme,” 3:185. 67 François Jacquemont to Louis Silvy, 18 December 1817, bPr, Gr 5510. Guittienne-Mürger, “Ides of August 1814,” 264. 68 Silvy, Du rétablissement des jésuites, 52. 69 Silvy, Du rétablissement des jésuites, 34, 82–3; Silvy, Les Jésuites dans l’ordre politique, 334; Silvy, Réponse à l’Ami de la religion, 15–16. 70 Silvy, Les Jésuites dans l’ordre politique, 314. 71 Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 106; Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 19–25. 72 Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 19–25; Darnton, Literary Tour, 242–51; Burson, “Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier,” 63–4; Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes, 165. 73 Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, 273, 323, 364; Brelot, Besançon révolutionnaire, 63–5, 95, 121–3; Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 27–34. 74 Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 43–54. 75 Ibid., 78. 76 Ibid., 61–4. 77 Ibid., 62–9, 77. 78 See the many subscription letters and their responses included in the following: “Correspondance du Grand Séminaire (concerne en partie des livres commandés pour les séminaristes,” Ahdb, Archives du Grand Séminaire, fonds ancienne 156; M. [Bresard?] to Jean-Maurice Breuillot, 14 August 1819, Ahdb, Archives du Grand Séminaire, fonds ancienne 36. 79 Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 21; Burson, “Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier,” 64. 80 “Catalog des livres dont la remise a été par M. le Maire de Besançon à Mgr L’Archevêque pour former la Bibliothèque du séminaire,” Ahdb, Archives du Grand Séminaire, fonds ancienne 248.

notes to PAGes 206–11

269

81 “Sermons de l’abbé Brocard,” Ahdb, Archives du Grand Séminaire, fonds ancienne 218, nos 1–2. 82 On Brocard and Courtois’s responsibility for the new Histoire, see the entry on its publication in the registry of printed works in the Department of the Doubs: “Dépôts légal,” Add, 1/t/418 (item #1388). 83 “Etat des imprimeurs & libraires du département du Doubs (1827),” Add, 1/t/399. 84 Burrows, French Book Trade II, 147–52. 85 Gauthier brothers to the archbishop of Besançon [Louis-François RohanChabot], n.d., Ahdb, Archives du Grand Séminaire, fonds ancienne 20. 86 Gauthier brothers to Comte [Joseph Balthazard Siméon (prefect of the Doubs)], 26 June 1828, Add, 1/t/396. 87 Comte Joseph Balthazard Siméon to Minister of the Interior [Jean-Baptiste de Martignac], 27 June 1828, Add, 1/t/396. 88 HPD(B1), 1:311–32, 3:349–58; 7:415–19. 89 Afsi, Dossier Berruyer, no. 18. 90 HPD(B1); HPD(B2). For this reason, the Besançon version of the Histoire went through three separate editions: the first in 1828–29, a second in 1830 (and reprinted in 1835 and 1842), and a third in 1851. 91 HPD(B1), 1:v. 92 HPD(B2), 1:ii–iii. 93 HPD(B1), 1:v–vi. 94 For examples, see: HPD(B1), 2:64, 2:87–8; 2:168–9; HPD(B2), 1:36–7. 95 Armenteros, “Lamennais,” 145–50. 96 Petit, Catholiques et Comtois, 89–111. 97 HPD(B1), 4:8; 1 Samuel 8:10–22. 98 HPD(B1), 4:271. 99 HPD(B1), 5:22–3. 100 HPD(B1), 1:311–32; HPD(B2), 3:289. 101 Kroen, Politics and Theater, 116–20, 194–5, 222–5; Van Kley, Jansenists, 34–6. 102 Cubitt, Jesuit Myth, 73–5. 103 Duchateau, Dénonciation contre la Société. 104 Lemaire, Le jésuitisme dévoilé, 24–5. 105 L’Intérieur de Saint-Acheul, 14. 106 Roche-Arnauld, Les Jésuites modernes, vii. 107 Expulsions des jésuites: Arrets rendus par divers parlemens.

270

notes to PAGes 211–21

108 109 110 111 112

Liskenne, La France et les ultramontains, 1. Derniers efforts du jésuitisme expirant, 5. Les Jésuites ennemis de l’ordre social, 15–16. Cubitt, Jesuit Myth, 67–8. Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 January 1827, 118. Translated by Cubitt, Jesuit Myth, 85. 113 Bertier de Sauvigny, Bourbon Restoration, 374–93; Mellon, Politics Uses of History, 128–49; Watkins, “A Suppression Revisited,” 275–94; Cubitt, Jesuit Myth, 66–104. 114 Guittienne-Mürger, “The ‘Ides of August 1814,” 259–74; Taveneaux, “Permanences Jansénistes,” 397–414.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Genesis 21:15–6 (rsv). HPD1(rev) 1:141. L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 23 August 1836, 90:366–8. Glaire, Principes de grammaire; Atlas de la sainte Bible; La sainte Bible en latin et en français. HPD(Glaire), 1:1–2 (prospectus). Heywood, Catholicism and Children’s Literature, 56, 103–9. Répertoire bibliographique de la librairie française moderne, 14. For an idea of wage rates in the July Monarchy, see: Pinkney, Decisive Years in France, 83–4. Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 234–5 ; Ford, Divided Houses, 98–9 ; L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 23 August 1836, 90:366–8. Le cri de la foi, 3. On eighteenth-century Jansenist works with the same title, see: Maire, De la cause de Dieu, 104. Le cri de la foi, 3–4. Ibid., 10–11. Maire to P. de Gillefort, 11 January 1837, Afsi, Dossier Berruyer. Burson, Rise and Fall; Burson, Culture of Enlightening; Barr, “Crucible in Which to Put the Soul.” Lehner, Catholic Enlightenment, 7. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 195. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 129, 131–6, 171–5, 190, 194–5; McManners, Church and State in France, 104–7. Priest, Gospel According to Renan, 98. Priest, Gospel According to Renan, 20–7, 69–107, 110; Laplanche, La Bible

notes to PAGes 222–8

19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40

271

en France, 156–7; Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 85–6; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 234–66; Goldstein, Post-Revolutionary Self, 233–68. Lamennais, Les Evangiles, 70. Armenteros, “Lamennais,” 146. Armenteros, “Lamennais,” 145–63; Laplanche, La Bible en France, 116–17, 121–2; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 165–91; Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 111–12, 122, 125–6, 194–5; Bowman, Le Christ romantique, 267; O’Malley, Vatican I, 52–3, 66–9, 105; McManners, Church and State in France, 107. Birn, Royal Censorship, 26. Van Kley, “Religious Origins,” 133–5. Van Kley, Religious Origins, 8. Mavidal and Laurent, Archives parlementaires 47:42–3. Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 265. Ibid., 251–67. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 13. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 1–13. Ibid., 6. Ruth; Tobie. Ruth, 5. Tobie, 5–6. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 24. Berruyer, “Examen du quatrième article,” sc, b II 9, vol. 3, no. 7. The treatise was later translated into Italian and published by the Italian cardinal Césare Brancadoro; see: Brancadoro, L’Infallibilità del Papa provata. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 13–27; Popiel, Heroic Hearts, introduction (many thanks to Dr Jennifer Popiel for providing me with the manuscript for her book before it reached the press); Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 265–7; Langlois, Catholicisme au féminin; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred. On the revolution’s role in gendering public space and pushing women to private domains, see: Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace. Lacordaire, Le Testament du P. Lacordaire, 34–5. L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 16 January 1855, 167:137–8. Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 104; Kselman, Conscience and Conversion, 166–7; Lear, Henri Dominique Lacordaire, 7.

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Franciae 49: Episolae, 1671–1765 Galliae 65: Censurae librorum et propositiones Galliae 78: De declaratione cleri Gallicani et De Bulla Unigenitus et Iansenismo, 1682–1794 Gesuitico 673 II: Censurae librorum, 1700–39 Historia Societatis 273: Istoria dell’accaduto in Francia … dal R.P. Lorenzo Ricci Bibliotheek van de Universiteit Leiden Collection Paperbrouck 15: Lettre de Jean Hardouin à Huguetan, 30 mai [n.d.] Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris Archives de la Bastille 10181: Communautés religieuses, Jésuites Archives de la Bastille 10303: Surveillance de la librairie et de la presse, années 1753–89 Bibliothèque Louis-Garret, Vesoul cGM 170: Changements remarquables qui ont été faits dans l’Histoire du peuple de Dieu Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon Collection Jésuites Des Fontaines, sJ e 640/102: Recueil des critiques qui ont paru contre L’histoire du peuple de Dieu, depuis la naissance du Messie Fonds ancien 371128: Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque des cidevant soi-disans jésuites du collège de Clermont, 1764 Fonds ancien 400065: Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de la maison professe des ci-devant soi-disans jésuites, 1764 Bibliothèque Nationale de France (bn), Paris Collection Anisson-Duperron 22092–4: Libelles diffamatoires et livres prohibités, 1742–62 Collection Anisson-Duperron 22138: Jugements des censeurs sous … Malesherbes Collection Anisson-Duperron 22144, 22150: Lettres et Mémoires relatifs à la Librairie Collection Anisson-Duperron 22158–63: Journal de l’inspecteur D’Hémery, 1753–65 Collection Joly de Fleury 316: Damnatio et prohibitio operis … Histoire du Peuple de Dieu Collection Joly de Fleury 1611: Suppression de l’ordre, 1765–77 Collection Joly de Fleury 1629: Affaires des Jésuites de Paris, 1761–77

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Collection Joly de Fleury 2103: Affaires religieuses, 1753–57 Fonds français 14705–6: Critique des ouvrages du R.P. Malebranche Fonds français 15795–6: Pièces relatives aux Jésuites et aux Jansénistes Fonds français 19698: Mémoire adressé au Révérend Pere Berruyer au sujet de son system Fonds français 21982: Registre des déclarations … par les imprimeurs des ouvrages nouveaux mis sous presse, 1732–1764, avec les permissions tacites de 1750 à 1783, et l’indication des livres entrées par la Chambre et des livres refusés depuis 1771 Fonds français 22020: État des livres que messieurs les libraires n’ont pas fournis à la Bibliothèque du Roy, 1752–70 Fonds français 22023: Registres des livres … retirés … pour la Bibliothèque du Roy Fonds nouvelles acquisitions françaises 10781: Notes de police sur divers écrivains français Bibliothèque de la Société de Port-Royal (bPr), Paris let 368, no. 3: Lettre de Charles-Daniel-Gabriel de Caylus, 1754 lP 322: Chemise cartonnée concernant des documents sur les Jésuites, 1815–28 lP 322bis: Chemise cartonnée concernant des documents sur les Jésuites, 1824–61 lP 472, no. 19: Extrait du livre du peuple de Dieu par le P. Isaac-Joseph Berruyer, 1729 lP 473: Affaire du P. Berruyer lP 554: Instruction pastorale de M. de Soissons et autres documents Médiathèque du Grand Troyes (MGt), Troyes cGM 2153: Pensées diverses, extraites des conférences de l’abbé d’Etemare cGM 2154: Recueil de pièces diverses : Sur Port Royal … Reflexions sur la publication des œuvres du père Berruyer … par MM. d’Etemare, Becherand, et autres cGM 2175, no. 4: Extrait d’une lettre de l’abbé F. à M. d’Etemare cGM 2554: Pièces relatives à l’affaire du P. Joseph-Isaac Berruyer Newberry Library (nl), Chicago Ayer 1128: [Documents concerning the expulsion of the Jesuits from Mexico, 1767–81] Case Wing z45 18: [Collection of publishers’ prospectuses, catalogs, and other materials]

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Index

Academy of France, 97 accommodation, 23–4, 4, 49, 67–8, 73–4, 222 Adam (biblical figure). See Bible Agesci, Bernard d’, 69, 245n89 Alacoque, Marguerite, 97, 246n109 Allaric, Mathieu-Jean Joseph, 159 Amys, Pierre, 59–60, 71, 75 ancient history, 18, 27, 35, 156; and Hardouin, 53–5, 57–61, 111, 164. See also Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns André, Yves-Marie, 60, 72 Archinto, Alberico, 140–1 Arianism, 91, 108–9, 126, 154 Arius, 91, 108. See also Arianism Arnauld, Angélique, 30–1 Assembly of the Clergy, 51, 108, 123; and “bad books,” 39, 121–2; and the Jesuits, 32, 170, 172 atheism, 21, 33, 55, 117, 175, 185–6. See also unbelief Augustine (Bishop of Hippo), 32, 109–10. See also Augustinianism Augustinianism, 12, 30, 110, 194. Augustinians, 194 Auxerre, 105–6, 113, 173–4

“bad books” (mauvais livres), 39, 121–2, 126–9, 191–2 Baker, Keith Michael, 39, 87 Balbani, André Christophe, 174–6 Ballonffeaux, Georges de, 56 Baltus, Jean-François, 80, 164 Barault, Julien, 192 Barbier, Edmond Jean François, 4, 128, 131 Bardenet, Jean-Étienne, 205 Barruel, Augustin, 184 Bathsheba (biblical figure). See Bible Bayle, Pierre, 33, 53, 126; Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 53 Beaumelle, Hubert Angliviel de la, 66 Beaumont, Christophe de, 107, 111–13, 125; attempts to stop the Histoire, 100–5, 117–18, 124, 132–4, 147, 153, 252n74; mandement of, 101–5, 132–3, 143, 153, 182 Becker, Carl, 10–11 Bénard, Jacques-François, 78 Benedict XIV (pope), 134–7, 140–2, 144, 153–4; bull against the Histoire, 136–7, 141–2, 144

310

Index

Bergier, Nicolas Sylvestre, 203, 206, 209, 214 Bernard, Jean-Frederic, 67 Bernis, François Joachim de, 145 Berruyer, Isaac-Joseph: accused of being an innovator, 88, 113, 143, 201; accused of being effeminate, 73–4, 82–3; accused of defending assassinations and regicide, 104, 168, 175; accused of heresy, 107–10, 116, 126, 139–41, 150, 154, 201; and apostolic succession, 45–7, 157; and Benedict XIV, 135; Berruyer Affair, 15–16, 87, 94, 100–16, 118, 124, 126–7, 131, 135–7, 139, 144, 146, 148, 151, 153–4, 156, 159, 162, 168, 174, 211, 213, 219, 255n134; Christology of, 15, 85–94, 96, 110–11, 138, 208, 221; connections to seminary in Besançon, 206; death, 8, 149, 156; Défense contre Projet d’instruction pastorale, 110, 126–7, 134–5, 254n113; devotional life, 6–7; early life and career, 6–8, 51; and Enlightenment Catholicism, 5, 14–17, 34, 40–9, 52, 67–8, 81–3, 86–8, 116, 118, 131, 138, 148, 154, 177–8, 214, 219, 222, 226, 229; and Fleury, 97; health of, 8, 129–30; Jesuit allies of, 71–2, 80, 95, 98, 103–5, 110–12, 134; Jesuit rivals of, 49, 69–72, 75–6, 79–80, 88–9, 95–8, 100–1, 175–6; and Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, 98–9; and Languet de Gergy, 97; in Lyon, 7, 75–6, 88, 95; and Molinism, 48; positive

assessments of, 4, 6–7, 164, 182; and progress, 5, 40, 46–8, 92, 138, 221–2, 226; public apology for the second part of the Histoire, 102, 130; relationship with Hardouin, 15, 51, 53, 59, 68–9, 71, 81, 89, 96, 138–40, 152, 182; Réflexions sur la foi, 47, 155–8; and Retz, 75, 95–6; in Ricci’s perspective, 177; as superior of the Séminaire Joyeuse, 7, 59; and sentimentalism, 5, 9, 17, 43, 61–8, 76–9, 81–2, 183, 214, 225–7; as student at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, 7; and Tencin, 96–7; trial against his Histoire in the Parlement of Paris, 3–4, 125–31, 146–7, 160, 163; and unbelief, 29, 33, 40–1, 43, 47–9; and Vintimille, 104. See also Histoire du peuple de Dieu Berthier, Guillaume François, 163–5, 168–9, 208; and the Journal de Trévoux, 163–5, 168 Besançon, 176, 181–2, 202–10, publishers in, 16, 207; revolution in, 202–4; seminary in, 203–6, 209, 212, 214 Bezons, Armand Bazin de, 149–52 Bible: Adam, 25, 30, 63, 65, 77–8, 80, 267n45; Bathsheba, 65–6, 76; Berruyer’s conception of the Bible as a story of progress, 48, 64, 221–2; Bible societies, 218; biblical criticism, 9, 95, 111, 157, 220; and children, 195, 215–16, 218, 225, 228; David, 64–6, 76, 198; Delilah, 76; destruction of, 3–4; Eglon, 149, 168; Ehud, 149, 168;

Index Enlightenment Bibles, 8–9, 14, 33, 48, 52; Esau, 42; Esther, 199, 267n45; the Fall, 25, 30, 48, 76–8, 80, 109, 195; French translations of, 8, 31, 48; the Histoire as a corruption of the sacredness of, 3, 72–4, 80, 101, 105–6, 130, 154, 172, 201; the Histoire as a novelized version of, 4, 40, 52, 61–2, 67–9, 72–4, 81, 104–6, 154, 182, 200, 215, 208, 219, 222; the Histoire as a reconstruction of, 41–3, 61, 68, 138; Isaac, 42, 65; Israelites, 50, 64, 168, 195, 198–9; Jesus, 15, 43–6, 54, 84–7, 90–4, 106–11, 117, 139, 150, 154, 181, 208, 220–1; Joseph, 64–5, 76, 195–7; Judith, 50, 199; Leah, 76; miracles in, 46, 92–3, 111, 220; Moses, 94, 198; Peter, 45, 117, 181; Potiphar (and his wife), 65, 76, 195; Rachel, 65, 195; Rebecca, 65, 76, 267n45; and revelation of, 44; 69; romance in, 65–6, 76; Ruth, 199, 225–6, 267n45; Samson, 76, 198, 267n45; Solomon, 198, 267n45; Susanna, 199; Tobit, 198, 225–6, 267n45; Vulgate, 42, 54–5, 57, 138–9, 263n54 Bijeveld, Johannes, 143, 259n77 Boccage, Anne-Marie du, 37 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 186, 204 Bonifaz, Manuel Quintano de, 142 Bordelet, Marc, 79, 99 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 192 Boucher, François, 78–9 Bourbon Restoration, 13, 183; Catholic Church during, 187–91, 193, 205, 213; debate about

311

Jesuits in, 199–201, 211, 214, 223; memories of the revolution in, 205; printing during, 191–2, 200–1, 207, 210 Boursier, Laurent-François, 153 Bower, Archibald, 66–7, 73 Brahe, Tycho, 24 Bretonneau, François, 69–70 Brisson, Jacob, 58 Bryset, Jean-Marie, 137 Buffier, Claude, 18, 20, 33 Bullet, Jean-Baptiste, 203, 206 Burson, Jeffrey, xvi, 11, 13, 20, 26–7, 179, 233n8 Byrnes, Joseph, 188 Cadière, Catherine, 82, 114 Cadry, Jean-Baptiste, 108 Cailleau, André, 79 Calvin, Jean, 30–1 Camusat, Denis-François, 20 Capuchins, 66 Cartesianism, 60 Cassirer, Ernst, 10–11 Catholic Enlightenment. See Enlightenment Catholicism Catrou, François, 18 Caylus, Charles-Daniel-Gabriel de, 105–7, 113; plans for a mandement against the Histoire, 105–6 censorship: activities of French royal censors, 51, 58, 87, 99, 117, 119–20; activities of Jesuit censors, 88–9, 95–6, 98–9; and Benedict XIV, 134–7, 141–2; and Clement XIII, 141–3, 145; and the Congregation of the Index, 52, 80, 134; French mechanisms

312

Index

of, 107, 119–23, 131; in Italy, 133, 136–7, 159, 208; in nineteenthcentury France, 192; in Spain, 133, 136; and politicization of the Histoire, 16, 118, 132, 137, 146–8, 151, 162, 178–9, 201; and the superiors of the Province of France, 75, 81, 124–5 Cerutti, Joseph-Antoine, 175–6; Apologie de l’institut des jésuites, 175; Mes doutes sur l’affaire presente des jésuites, 175 Chambers, Bettye Thomas, 8 Charles X (king), 210, 212 Chateaubriand, François René de, 43, 186, 209, 226 Châtelet, Émilie du, 37 Chaussée, Neville de la, 97 Chauvelin, Henri-Phillipe de: efforts to censor the Histoire, 125–8, 131, 147; and the suppression of the Jesuits, 160–5, 179 children, 192; and education, 27, 38, 170, 174–5; and the Histoire, 193–7, 215–16, 228; and religious formation, 181–3, 191 China, 23–4, 44 Choiseul, Étienne François (Duc de), 161, 179 Choudhury, Mita, xvi, 82–3 Christology: in the Berruyer Affair, 105–11, 126–7, 139–40, 143, 145, 182; in the Encyclopédie, 85–7, 116; in the Histoire, 87–94, 96, 138, 208. See also Arianism; Nestorianism Cisé, Champion de, 173 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 182–5, 187, 202–5, 223

Clement XIII (pope), 141–2, 144–6, 148; bull against the Histoire, 141–2, 144, 154 Clément, Augustin, 106 coffee houses, 13, 38 Colbert, Charles Joachim, 4, 52, 66, 124, 166; mandement against the Histoire, 4, 73–4, 143 Coleman, Charly, 5 Collège Louis-le-Grand, 6–7, 53, 59, 242n33 Collegio Romano, 25, 96; judgments of professors against the Histoire, 72, 75–6, 88–9, 96 Concordat, 187, 199, 213 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 219 Condorcet, Jacques-Marie de Caritat de, 173 Conflans, 101, 117, 146, 153 conservatism, 209–10, 212–13 Congregation of the Index: judgments against the first part of the Histoire, 4, 52, 80–1, 83, 147; judgments against the Réflexions sur la foi, 156; judgments against the second part of the Histoire, 4, 118, 134–6, 147; judgments against the third part of the Histoire, 4, 140–1, 147 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 24 Coudrette, Christophe, 159–60, 162 Council of Trent, 111, 140 Couthon, Georges, 185 Craven, Pauline, 225 D’Alembert, Jean-le-Rond, 4, 84. See also Encyclopédie D’Étemare, Jean-Baptiste, 106, 114, 153, 253n99

Index D’Hémery, Joseph, 117–18, 124, 131, 222, 252n74 Dainville, François de, 27 Damiens Affair, 152 Daniel, Gabriel, 32, 242n33 Darnton, Robert, 84, 117, 203 Dauchez, Jean-Baptiste, 185 David (biblical figure). See Bible de-Christianization, 182, 185–6, 204 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 184 Défense du P. Berruyer, 111–12, 126–7, 254n114 Deism, 21, 32–3, 219. See also unbelief Delilah (biblical figure). See Bible Derniers efforts du Jésuitisme expirant, 211 Deux lettres de Monsieur, 158 Diderot, Denis, 4, 27, 84, 123. See also Encyclopédie Doig, Kathleen Hardesty, xvi, 85, 248n6 don gratuit, 122 Du Bois, Charles, 89, 95–6 Duchateau (ex-Jesuit), 211 Dufranc, Louis, 129–30 Dugad, Louis, 88, 248n11 Duhamel, Robert Alexandre, 106–10, 112–14, 126, 174 Dupré, Thomas: as defender of Berruyer, 51, 71, 80, 95; as disciple of Hardouin, 58 Eglon. See Bible Ehud. See Bible Encyclopédie, 4, 27, 98, 120; Morellet’s article on the “Son of God,” 84–6, 91, 116

313

Enlightenment, 232–3n6; and Berruyer, 5, 7–9, 12–14, 17, 29, 40–9, 52, 67–8, 74, 77–8, 81, 87–8, 148, 219, 223; and empiricism, 10, 12, 21, 45–6, 53, 63; and the Encyclopédie, 84; the Enlightenment Bible, 8–9; historiography of, 5, 9–14; and humanism, 5, 22, 27, 86, 93–4, 221; and Jesuit missions, 22–4, 28, 74; and the Journal de Trévoux, 18–21, 28, 33, 38, 40, 49, 152; and Lamennais, 221–2; and literacy, 13, 37–9; and Molinism, 25–6; and probabilism, 25–6; and the public sphere, 17, 34–7, 49, 47, 96; and publishing, 98–9, 121, 146, 203, 227; radical Enlightenment, 14, 93, 150; and the revolution, 186; and secularization, 10; and sentimentalism, 48, 52, 61–3, 67–8. See also Enlightenment Catholicism Enlightenment Catholicism, 5–6, 220, 223–4, 226, 233n8; and the Berruyer Affair, 103, 106–7, 113, 116; Berruyer’s style of, 15–17, 40–9, 52, 81–3, 86–8, 118, 138, 154, 214, 219, 229; in Besançon, 203, 214; and censorship, 131, 135–40, 146–8, 151; historiography of, 11–14; and the Jansenist-Jesuit dispute, 31, 125, 151, 158, 177–8, 180, 223; and Lamennais, 209, 222; and Reform Catholicism, 12. See also Enlightenment Espinosa, Antonio, 132 Esther (biblical figure). See Bible Extraits des assertions, 165–8, 175

314

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Feller, François Xavier de, 185, 200; Dictionnaire historique, 200 Ferdinand VI (king), 132 figurism, 111 Fitz-James, François de, 152–3, 159, 172, 174; mandement against the Histoire, 153–4, 158, 160–2, 166 Fleury, André-Hercule de, 82, 97, 106, 111, 152, 252n83 Forcet, Henri-Charles, 55, 242n33 Ford, Caroline, 187 Fouché, Joseph, 185 Francis II (king), 29 Frayssinous, Denis-Luc (Comte de), 212 freemasonry, 13, 38 “free thinking,” 21, 39, 121, 151, 210–11. See also unbelief free will, 25, 30–1, 43–4, 80, 107, 109 French Revolution (of 1789–99), 13, 36–7, 159, 199–200, 224–5, 228; and the Catholic Enlightenment, 6, 14; impact on the Catholic Church, 182–6, 188, 194, 202–5, 213; Jesuit suppression’s role in, 190–1; leaders of, 66, 204; origins of, 115, 179, 182, 223; and the post-revolutionary “good books” campaign, 16–17, 191–3, 206–7, 210, 222–3; reactions against, 187–90, 205, 212, 225; and women, 198, 227. See also Civil Constitution of the Clergy Friedrich, Markus, 50 Furet, François, 36 Gallicanism, 46, 51; Gallican liberties, 128, 130, 152, 203, 211,

213; and Jansenism, 152, 178; and the Parlement of Paris, 29, 159; and Reform Catholicism, 12; in the Restoration, 199–200, 202–4, 209, 211–14, 219, 223, 225–6; and the Revolution, 202–4, 212 Gallifet, Joseph, 71 Garnier, Antoine, 220 Garrioch, David, 89, 194 Gaultier, Jean-Baptiste, 108, 124 Gauthier brothers (Jean-Baptiste and Léandre), 207, 214 Gay, Peter, 5, 10 Gennes, Henri-Anne de, 58 Germon, Barthélemi, 58 Gervaise, Jean Clément, 145 Gibbon, Edward, 94, 262n48 Gibson, Ralph, 192 Girard, Jean-Baptiste, 82–3, 114 Glaire, Jean-Baptiste, 215–19, 225 “good books”: “good book” societies, 192, 196–9, 201, 213; the Histoire as, 184, 193–202, 213, 227; Jesuit commitment to publishing, 39–40; and printers, 192–3, 201, 207; and re-Christianization, 184, 191–3, 195–6, 201, 223 Goodman, Dena, 36 Gospels. See Bible Gourlin, Pierre-Étienne, 152–3, 156, 159–61, 164–5, 259n77; role in writing the mandement of FitzJames, 153–5, 161 grace, 25, 62; Berruyer’s ideas about, 46, 77, 84, 92, 109, 172; efficacious grace, 30–1; sufficient grace, 92. See also free will Grappin, Pierre-Philippe, 205

Index Grégoire, Henri, 205 Gregory XVI (pope), 222 Grenoble, 96, 101 Griffet, Henri, 4, 174 Guénard, Pierre, 108–9; Sommaire de la Doctrine du P. Berruyer, 110 Guibert, Jean-Joseph, 58 Guyon, Jeanne de la Motte, 64 Habermas, Jürgen, 34 happiness, Catholicism’s role in, 47–8, 52, 80–1; in the Bible, 61, 64–5, 76, 78, 81; pursuit of, 5, 40, 48, 52, 62–3; in postrevolutionary politics and piety, 186, 224, 226; and sentimentalist theologians, 63–5, 76, 78. See also sentimentalism Hardouin, Jean: attacked by Jansenists in the eighteenth century, 139–40, 143, 153–5, 158, 160, 162, 164–5, 169, 172–4, 178; attacked by Jansenists in the nineteenth century, 200; Chronologiae ex nummis antiquis Herodiadum, 54, 56; Chronologia Veteris Testamenti, 54; Commentarius in Novum Testamentum, 138–9, 153; connections to Berruyer, 15, 51, 53, 59, 68–9, 71, 81, 89, 96, 138–40, 182; and his conspiracy theory, 54–61, 71, 111; “disciples” of in the Society of Jesus, 58–9, 71, 206, 214, 255n121; early scholarly career of, 53–4; and innovation, 59–61, 68–9, 71, 81, 143, 152, 243n46; Jesuit attempts to apologize for

315

during the suppression, 174–6; and the Journal de Trévoux, 18, 53, 57–8, 163–4; and Old Testament prophecies, 54, 76, 164; Opera selecta, 56–8, 60, 68, 75; rivalry with Tournemine, 55–6, 60–1, 71, 81, 95, 164; and skepticism of ancient sources, 54–7, 59, 111, 157, 164; and the third part of the Histoire, 138–40 Harrison, Carol, 225 Hazard, Paul, 5 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 27; De l’esprit, 4, 120 Henri II (king), 29 Henri IV (king), 29–30 Hérissant, Jean-Thomas, 99, 118 Histoire du peuple de Dieu: Berruyer’s inability to publish the second part, 87–8, 94–8; as Berruyer’s magnum opus, 8; burned in Paris, 3–4, 127–8, 147; calls for a new edition by Janson, 182–3; censorship of by royal authorities, 16, 118, 127–31, 146; Christology within, 89–94; cited in the Extraits des assertions, 166, 168; criticism from the Sorbonne, 144–5; critics of within the Society of Jesus, 52, 69–72, 79–81, 88–9, 87, 94–6, 100–3, 163–5, 177; defenders of within the Society of Jesus, 71–2, 95, 104–5, 110–12, 175–6; as an Enlightenment Bible, 5, 8–10; as evidence in the trial against the Jesuits in France, 161–2; as evidence of a Jesuit conspiracy,

316

Index

151–2, 158, 162; in German, 132; in Italian, 132–7, 152, 158; Jansenist critiques in the nineteenth century, 200–2, 213, 219; Jansenist critiques of the first part, 73–4, 153–5, 171–4; Jansenist critiques of the second part, 104–10, 113, 125–7, 147, 149–50, 153–5, 171–4; Jansenist critiques of the third part, 139–40, 153–5, 171–4; as a novelization of the Bible, 4, 40, 52, 61–2, 67–9, 72–4, 81, 104–6, 154, 182, 200, 215, 208, 219, 222; and other biblical translations, 8, 41–2, 139; papal condemnations of, 135–7, 141–2, 145; placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum, 4, 80, 134–6, 140, 144; in Polish, 132; positive reception of, 4, 15, 51–2, 66–7, 228; prices of, 79, 196; and privilège du roi, 51, 83, 99; publication of cheap print versions in the nineteenth century, 16, 193–200, 213–14; publication of Glaire’s edition, 215–19; publication of the Antwerp edition of the second part, 125, 134; publication of the Besançon version, 16–17, 206–10, 214–15; publication of the first part, 14–15, 21, 51–2; publication of the revised version of the first part, 75–81; publication of the second part, 15, 99–100, 115–17; publication of the third part, 137–9, 200; and the revolution, 223; sentimentalism within, 5, 9, 17, 43, 61–8, 76–9, 81–2, 183, 214, 224–7; in Spanish, 132–3, 136,

142, 158; and tacit permissions, 99, 117; as a vehicle for Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism, 40–9 Hobbes, Thomas, 9 Holy Office, 134–5, 200 Hongnant, Claude-René, 58–9 Hugo, Léopoldine, 225 Huguenots, 18, 28–30, 46, 57. See also Protestants Index librorum prohibitorum, 4, 52, 80–1, 83, 118, 134–6, 140–1, 147, 156 India, 24, 28 Irailh, Augustin-Simon, 55, 66–7, 73 Isaac (biblical figure). See Bible Israelites. See Bible Italy: Enlightenment Catholicism in, 12; Jansenists in, 106, 140–1; Jesuits in, 25–6, 55, 58–9, 72, 75–6, 83, 88–9, 96, 134–5, 211; production of the Histoire in, 133–7. See also Rome Jacquemont, François, 200–2 Jacquin, Armand Pierre, 69 Jansen, Cornelius, 30–1 Jansenists: activities in the nineteenth century, 199–202, 213– 14, 219, 223–4; and Archinto, 141; and Augustinians, 194; bishops, 52, 73–4, 103, 105–6, 124, 149–50, 152–4, 158, 171–2, 251n53; and the convulsionary movement, 82, 106; and Cum Occasione, 31; détente with the Jesuits, 21; and the Enlightenment, 12, 148, 234n39; as instigators of the Berruyer Affair, 15, 103–15, 124,

Index 153–6, 159, 174, 222; Jansenism, 30–1, 56; Jansenist Party, 159, 165, 171–2, 176; lack thereof in Franche-Comté, 203; and Lanze, 140; and Louis XIV, 32; objections to the Histoire as heretical, 80, 87, 103, 107–10, 113, 116, 137, 154; objections to the Histoire’s novelistic elements, 73–4, 219; origins of conflict with the Jesuits, 31–3; and the Parlement of Paris, 31, 125–6, 141, 159, 162, 178; and printers, 79; as proponents of conspiracy theories about the Jesuits, 158, 166–7, 177–8; and public opinion, 15, 38–9, 49, 68, 74–5, 82–3, 107, 113, 115, 144, 164, 169, 175–6, 178–80, 201, 222–3; and refusal of sacraments controversy, 39, 82, 111–12; role in the suppression of the Jesuits, 16, 160–2, 165–6, 169, 174; and Unigenitus, 32, 38–9, 82, 96–7, 106, 111, 143, 153 Janson, Charles-Henri, 181–4, 202 Jephthah (biblical figure). See Bible Jesuits, 4; apologists during the suppression, 169–71, 174–6; attacks against in the nineteenth century, 194, 199–201, 210–14, 223–4; campaign against unbelief, 21, 29, 32–3, 39, 60–1, 190–1; and conspiracies, 125, 151–8, 165–7; domestic missions, 21; and education, 6–7, 20, 22, 24–8, 38, 53, 169–71, 205, 211–12; and the Enlightenment, 5–6, 9–10, 12–13, 18–23, 27, 33–4, 38, 40, 148, 152; expulsion from Spain, 142; foreign

317 missions, 8, 22–4, 28, 44–5, 53, 64, 68, 74, 139; founding documents of, 22, 24, 26–7; in FrancheComté, 203, 205–6; Jansenist attacks against, 15–16, 73, 82–3, 97, 107, 112, 149–55, 159–61, 164–5, 169, 171–4, 176, 178, 199–201, 213–14, 223; and Lamennais, 221; and litterae annuae, 50–1; origins of conflict with Jansenists, 30–2; and the papal conclave of 1758, 140–1; as polemicists, 18, 21, 28–32, 49, 110; Province of France, 18–19, 21, 23, 28, 51, 53, 55–61, 69, 71–2, 75, 79–81, 95, 100, 102, 124–5, 163, 169, 242n36; Province of Guienne, 19, 169; Province of Lyon, 19, 75, 88, 169; Province of Toulouse, 19, 169; provincial superiors of France, 4, 7–8, 51–2, 55–61, 68–9, 71, 73, 75, 81–3, 87, 94–5, 97–8, 100–4, 107, 113, 118, 124–5, 130, 135, 144, 147, 152, 156–7, 164–5, 178, 239n82, 242n33, 256–7n22; public reputation of, 52–3, 94, 100–1, 163–4, 179–80; and re-Christianization, 191, 223; relationship with the French monarchy, 29–32, 161, 163, 170, 178; resistance to the Histoire among, 4–5, 15, 49, 68–9, 71, 79–81, 87–90, 94–6, 100–2, 222; restitution of, 199; and the revolution, 184–5, 190–1; and science, 24; scriptores librorum, 7–8, 14–15, 18, 21, 28, 31–3, 49, 51, 53–4, 75, 177; in sixteenth-century France, 29–30; and the Sorbonne, 143–4; superiors general, 50, 55–6,

318

Index

75, 88–9, 95–7, 161, 163, 177; suppression of in France, 13, 16, 159–71, 176–9, 193–4, 203, 223; and translations of the Histoire, 132–3, 137; and women, 40, 82–3, 114 Jesus. See Bible Jolly, Philippe, 58 Joly de Fleury, Guillaume-François Louis, 146 Joly de Fleury, Omer, 3, 128 Jonas, Raymond, 188 José I (king), 179 Joseph (biblical figure). See Bible Joshua (biblical figure). See Bible Journal des sçavans, 20, 53, 66, 120, 182 Journal de Trévoux, 156, 168; denunciations of Berruyer in, 102, 163–4; and the Enlightenment, 20–1, 28, 33, 38, 40, 49, 152; and Hardouin, 53, 57–9, 163–4; origins of 18–20; promotion of the Histoire, 51–2 Judde, Claude, 55, 59 Judith (biblical figure). See Bible Knapen, André, 79 Knights of the Faith (Chevaliers du foi), 190, 192 Kors, Alan, 6, 33 Lacordaire, Henri, 218, 225, 228 Lacouture, Charles-Xavier, 89, 98 La Croix, Étienne de, 100, 163 La Croze, Mathurin Veyssière, 57 La Guille, Louis, 51, 58–9, 71 Lallemant, Jacques-Philippe, 252n83 Lamennais, Hugues-Felicité Robert de, 209, 213–14, 221–2,

225–6, 228; L’Avenir, 221–2, 228; Réflexions sur l’état de l’église, 209 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 123 L’Ami de la religion et du roi, 187, 189, 199, 215 Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, Guillaume de, 98–9, 156 Lamourette, Adrien, 11 Languet de Gergy, Jean-Joseph, 82, 97–8, 152, 246n109, 252n83 Lanze, Carlo Vittorio Amedeo Ignazio delle, 140 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 38 Lavalette, Antoine, 159 Lavaud, Jean, 96–7 Leah (biblical figure). See Bible Le Comte, Louis, 23, 44 Le Coz, Claude, 204–5 Le cri de la foi, 219 Le Forestier, Mathurin-Germain, 100, 125, 156, 176 Lehner, Ulrich, 11–12, 233n8 Le Houx, Louis-Alexis, 100 Les Jésuites ennemis de l’ordre social de la morale et de la religion, 211 Lemaire, Henri, 211 Le Paige, Louis-Adrien, 114–15, 159–60, 162, 166, 171, 262n42 Le Rouge, Dominic, 98 Le Tellier, Michel, 31–3, 55–6, 59, 242n33 Lettre à un docteur de Sorbonne, 112, 143, 259n78, 260n81 Lettre d’un Théologien, 112 Lettre d’une Demoiselle de consideration, devote des Jésuites, 125 Lettres en réponse d’un ecclésiastique de Province, 104–5

Index Librairie (Direction de la), 16; approval of the Histoire, 51, 83, 99–100; Berruyer’s efforts to get support from, 97–9; efforts to suppress the Histoire, 117–18, 222; mechanisms of, 107, 119–21. See also censorship Liguori, Alphonsus, 224 Linyères, Claude, 60, 89, 97–8 literacy, 13, 34–40, 121, 191. See also public sphere Little Catholic Library (Petit Bibliothèque du Catholique), 196–9 Locke, John, 94; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 20 Loisy, Alfred, 220 Longueval, Jacques, 51 Lorme, Johannes de, 56–7 Louis XIV (king), 28, 31–2, 62, 202 Louis XV (king), 78, 82, 97, 161, 169, 179–80 Louis XVIII (king), 187, 199 Loyola, Ignatius, 26 Lyon: activities of Jesuits revisers in, 76–80, 88–9, 95–6; archbishop of, 171–2; Berruyer’s time in, 7, 75–6, 88, 95; Jesuit Province of, 169; and the third part of the Histoire, 137–8 Mahoudeau, Mathias, 58–9 Maille, Joseph Auguste de, 107–8, 110, 112, 139–40, 253n99; Le Père Berruyer, jésuite, convaincu d’Arianisme, de Pelagianisme, de Nestorianisme, &c., 108, 139, 253n99 Maistre, Joseph de, 209 Malebranche, Nicholas, 60

319

Malesherbes, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de, 98–9, 117–18, 131, 156 Maleville, Guillaume de, 158 Mantoan, Francesco Antonio, 133–4 Maran, Prudent, 108, 126 Marquer, Louis, 55 Massillon, Jean-Baptiste, 63, 192 materialism, 33, 41. See also unbelief Matytsin, Anton, 6 Maumousseau, Francis, 58 Maupeou Coup, 131, 179 Maza, Sarah, 115, 123 McMahon, Darrin, 192 McManners, John, 7, 96 Medici, Catherine de, 29 Medici, Marie de, 30 Medlin, Dorothy, 85 Mennesson, Jean-Baptiste, 186 Mercier, Sébastian, 37 Mercure de France, 66–7 Merlin, Charles, 51, 58, 80, 95 Michelet, Jules, 227 Mirabeau, Honoré-Gabriel de, 66 miracles. See Bible Mirari vos, 222 missions. See Jesuits Molina, Luis de, 25, 48; Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, 25. See also Molinism Molina, Michelle, xvi, 267n42 Molinism, 25–6, 30–1, 48, 92, 109, 252n83 Monniot, Victorine, 225 Montalembert, Charles de, 225, 228 Montazet, Antoine Malvin de, 171–2, 174, 264n71; mandement against the Histoire, 171–2 Montignot, Henri, 42–3, 108–11

320

Index

Montlosier, François Dominique (Comte de), 210–11, 224; Mémoire à consulter sur un système religieux et politique, 210–11, 213 Montpellier, 4, 52, 66, 73, 124, 149, 151 Montpleinchamp, Bruslé de, 68 Morel, Philippe, 58–9 Morellet, André, 4, 84–6, 91, 116; “Son of God,” 85–6, 91, 116, 248n61 Mornet, Daniel, 84 Moses (biblical figure). See Bible Motte, Berscherand de la (abbé), 108–9 naturalism: Berruyer’s belief in salvation through nature, 40, 43–5, 47–8, 94, 107, 109, 139, 172; Berruyer’s conceptions of the “Natural Son of God,” 86–94, 108, 111; categorical naturalism, 33; Enlightenment promotion of, 10, 48, 63, 86; humans as naturally good, 48; natural philosophy, 27, 63; the natural versus the supernatural, 5, 10, 25, 86, 92–4, 220. See also nature nature, 28; in Berruyer’s thought, 5, 43–6, 86, 91–4; and the Enlightenment, 10; human nature, 25, 62. See also naturalism Neaulme, Jean, 99, 138 Negroni, Barbara de, 127 Nerini, Felice Maria, 156 Nestorianism, 86, 109–10, 116, 126, 139, 150, 154. See also Christology Nestorius, 109, 150. See also Nestorianism

Neuville, Claude de, 58, 63 Newton, Isaac, 94 Nicole, Pierre, 30 Noailles, Louis-Antoine Le Maire de, 32 Nobili, Roberto de, 23 Nonnotte, Claude François, 203 Noris, Enrico, 142 Nouvelle Défense de l’Histoire du Peuple de Dieu, 110, 112, 126–7, 254n114 Nouvelles de la république des lettres, 53. See also Bayle, Pierre Nouvelles ecclésiastiques: attacked by enemies of the Jansenists, 104, 110; attacks on the Society of Jesus, 74, 82, 104, 150–1; and the Berruyer Affair, 103–4, 106, 108, 113–14, 143–4; celebration of Jansenist bishops and theologians, 106, 108, 149–50, 153–5; condemnations of Beaumont, 103–4, 125, 147, 153; condemnations of Languet de Gergy, 97; denunciations of the first part of the Histoire, 66, 73, 104; denunciations of the second part of the Histoire, 103, 106, 108, 126; denunciations of the third part of the Histoire, 137–8; denunciations of translations of the Histoire, 132–4; and the public sphere, 38–9, 49, 74, 222 novels: association with unregulated passions and sex, 68–70, 101, 200; Berruyer purposefully fashioning the Histoire as, 52, 61–2, 67–8, 78–9, 81, 200, 222; critics denouncing the Histoire as,

Index 3–4, 68–9, 72–4, 83, 97, 101, 148, 201, 227; growth in popularity of, 67, 79; the value of the Histoire’s novelistic style for nineteenthcentury publishers, 195, 198, 215; and women, 69–70, 73–4, 83, 198, 227 Oratorians, 63, 107, 199 Orléans, 66 Oudin, François, 98 Ozanam, Frédéric, 225 Ozouf, Jacques, 36 Pagden, Anthony, 10 Palmer, Robert, 11, 28 Papacy: approval of the cult of Sainte Philomène, 218; Berruyer’s perspectives on, 45–6, 128, 157, 213, 226, 256–7n22; condemnations of the Histoire, 4, 118, 135–7, 141–3, 147, 150, 160, 165, 172, 177, 208, 211; denunciations of Jansenism, 32, 110, 123, 143; efforts to curry favor with, 142–5; fear of influence from, 29, 128, 201, 224; and Lamennais, 209, 222; popularity of in Franche-Comté, 203, 209; relationship with the restored Bourbon monarchy, 199–200; Revolution’s effects on, 184, 187; romantic Catholics’ attachment to, 209, 225; and the Society of Jesus, 22, 162, 169, 177, 191, 199–200; transition from Benedict XIV to Clement XIII, 140–1; and Tencin, 96. See also ultramontanism

321

Paris: appearance of the Réflexions sur la foi in, 156; artistic community in, 78–9; Berruyer’s time in, 6–8; burning of Histoire in, 3, 127–8; de-Christianization in, 185; “good books” organizations in, 192, 218; Jansenism in, 30–1, 79, 82, 125, 141, 203; Jesuits in, 6–8, 18–19, 28, 31, 53–4, 58, 69–70, 75, 83, 96, 100, 118, 130, 168–70; literacy in, 36–8; markets in, 43; meeting of Beaumont and other bishops in, 101–2, 153; modern biblical criticism in, 220; National Guard in, 212; popular reception of the Histoire in, 72–3, 145, 194; printers and booksellers in, 16, 66, 79, 99, 117–18, 125–6, 131, 138; reception of Le cri de la foi in, 219; re-Christianization in, 192, 218; seizure of the Histoire by the police in, 100, 117–18, 131, 146–7; suppression of the Jesuits in, 159–69; versus the provinces, 202–3. See also Parlement of Paris Pâris, François de, 82, 106 Parlement of Franche-Comté, 176 Parlement of Normandy, 171 Parlement of Paris: campaign against the Histoire, 3–4, 16, 118, 124–31, 137, 147, 150, 160–3, 166– 8, 180, 182, 223; and Jansenism, 31, 125–6, 141, 162, 178; and the Jesuit suppression, 159–63, 165–71, 174–5, 179; resistance to the monarchy, 29, 130–1, 223 parti dévot, 98, 200 parti janséniste. See Jansenists Pascal, Blaise, 31

322

Index

Pascendi gregis, 222 Pasquier, Denis-Louis, 129–30 patriot party, 179 Pelagianism, 80, 109–10, 126, 140, 142, 150, 154 Pelagius, 109, 150. See also Pelagianism Peter (biblical figure). See Bible Philomène (Sainte), 218 Philosophes: and Berruyer, 47–9, 97, 127, 148, 200, 210, 219, 227; and censorship, 98, 118, 123, 127, 145–6, 148; in Enlightenment historiography, 5–6, 9–13, 84; and the Jesuits, 20–1, 27–8, 33, 224; and Malesherbes, 98, 118; and the revolution, 189–90, 210, 225; and sentimentalism, 47–8, 62–3; and “unbelief,” 10, 33, 39, 49, 127, 145–6, 190, 210, 219; Pitassi, Maria-Cristina, 93 Pius VII (pope), 187, 191, 199–200 Pliny the Elder, 53 Polanco, Juan Alfonso de, 26 Pombal, Sebastião José Caravahlo e Melo (Marqués de), 179 Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson de, 78 Pontchartrain, Louis Phélypeux (Comte de), 32, 119 Port-Royal (abbey of ), 30–2. See also Jansenists Port-Royal Bible, 8. See also Sacy, Isaac-Lemaistre de Potiphar and his wife (biblical figures). See Bible Prades, Jean-Martin de, 144, 146–7, 219 Prault, Pierre, 79, 244n73

Pressigny, Cortois de, 205 Preti, Alessandro, 134 Probabilism, 25–6 Protestants, 9, 18, 28–30, 46, 57. See also Huguenots public opinion: battle over during the Berruyer Affair, 13, 15–16, 31, 87, 94, 101–16, 126–7, 138, 151; battle over in the nineteenth century, 17, 200–1, 210–13, 222–3; and the Catholic Enlightenment, 5; and censorship, 119, 121, 123, 127, 147; Clement XIII’s perspectives on, 142; and Jansenists, 15, 38–9, 49, 52, 68, 74–5, 82–3, 103–16, 144, 151–2, 158, 164–9, 171–4, 178, 200–1, 213, 222; Jesuit fears of, 49, 52–3, 55–7, 61, 74, 94, 100, 118, 124, 163–4; political power of, 16, 39, 49, 61, 151, 158, 169–80, 222–3; and the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, 35. See also public sphere public sphere, in Enlightenment historiography, 11–13, 34; the Catholic Church’s contributions to creating, 17, 33–40, 47; the Histoire as intended to influence, 13, 21, 40–3, 47–9, 51, 67–8, 90, 222; institutions of, 13, 36, 38, 47, 194, 216; Jesuit attempts to engage, 14–15, 20–1, 33–4, 39–40, 51, 56–8, 68, 74–5, 100, 102–3, 110–13, 124, 163–4, 174–6, 178, 200, 222; and re-Christianization, 188–9, 223; and the Republic of Letters, 20, 34–5, 37–8, 84–5; rise in literacy, 13, 35–40; and

Index women, 36–7, 40, 83, 227. See also public opinion Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, 35 Quesnel, Pasquier, 31 Rachel (biblical figure). See Bible rationalism. See reason Rauzan, Jean-Baptiste, 190 reason: in Berruyer’s thought, 18, 43–4, 48, 52, 76–7, 86, 157; and Christology, 85–6; critiques of following the revolution, 183, 225–6; within Enlightenment historiography, 9–12, 26; and masculinity, 69; and Molinism, 25, 48; and the public, 34, 112; versus sentimentalism, 43; versus tradition or obedience, 10, 64, 150, 213 Rebecca (biblical figure). See Bible re-Christianization: in FrancheComté, 202, 204–6, 210, 212; and gender, 227; and “good books,” 191–3, 195–9, 201, 206, 213–14; and the Histoire, 16–17, 184, 193– 9, 201, 206, 212–14, 218–19; and the Jesuits, 190–1, 223, 200; and missions, 189–90, 193, 213; during the Napoleonic era, 186–7, 204; and new Catholic organizations, 190; and the public, 188–9, 223 Reformation, 202. See also Protestants Reform Catholicism, 12 refractory clergy, 184–5, 187, 203–5 Remondini family, 133–4, 136–7 Renan, Ernest, 220–1

323

Republic of Letters: connections to the public sphere, 34–8, 85, 119–20; and Hardouin, 53–4, 164; and the Journal de Trévoux, 20; 164; members’ interest in the Histoire, 66. See also public sphere Retz, Franz, 75, 88–9, 95–7 Ricci, Lorenzo, 161, 163, 177 Ricci, Mateo, 23–4 Riskin, Jessica, 63 Rivière, Edmund, 89, 98 Robinet, Urbain, 51, 240n6 Roche, Daniel, 36, 38 Rochefoucauld, Dominique de la, 172–3 Rohan-Chabot, Auguste de, 207–8 romantic Catholicism, 43, 225–6, 228 Rome: deliberations over the Histoire in, 52, 72, 75, 80–1, 88, 134–7, 141–2, 144, 146, 151, 159, 200, 208; Jansenism in, 106, 140–1, 159; Jesuit college in, 25, 72, 76, 88, 96; Jesuit superiors in, 55, 58–9, 83, 88, 96, 135; and the Réflexions sur la foi, 156. See also papacy Rondeau, Jean-Louis, 199, 268n66 Rouen, Berruyer’s time in, 6–7, 59; as a home for Hardouin’s disciples, 55, 59; Jesuit institutions in, 7, 55, 59; opposition to Berruyer in, 101, 172–3; parlement in, 171; support for Berruyer in, 51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4–5, 11, 189; Julie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse, 79 Ruth (biblical figure). See Bible Sacy, Isaac-Lemaistre de, 8, 31

324

Index

Saint-Chamans, Auguste Louis Philippe de, 224 Saint-Jean, Pierre-François de, 100 Saint-Vincent, Robert de, 165 salons, 13, 37–8, 67, 96 Samson (biblical figure). See Bible Sauzet, Henri du, 67 Scholasticism, 22, 25 Sciava, Colone de, 146 scriptores librorum. See Jesuits Scudéry, Madeleine de, 67 Ségur, Sophie (Comtesse de), 216 Séminaire Joyeuse (Rouen), 7, 59 sentimentalism, 43, 62–3; and affectionate marriages, 62–3, 65, 225–6; Berruyer’s appropriation of, 5, 9, 17, 43, 61–8, 76–9, 81–2, 183, 214, 225–7; and empiricism, 63; and the Enlightenment, 11, 81–2; in the nineteenth century, 183, 214, 221, 224–7; and Nivelle de la Chaussée, 97; and the pursuit of happiness, 62–5; and rococo art, 78–9; and Rousseau, 11, 79; sentimentalist theologians, 63 Sheehan, Jonathan, 8–9 Silvy, Louis, 200–2, 213–14 Simon, Richard, 9 skepticism, 11; and Hardouin, 54–5, 157, 164; and “unbelief,” 21, 33, 210 Society for Good Books, 192 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Society of Missionaries of France, 190 Soissons, 82, 152–3, 173 Solomon (biblical figure). See Bible Sorbonne, 84, 137, 148, 215;

condemnation of the Histoire, 143–7, 182 Sorkin, David, 11 Souciet, Etienne, 18, 59, 72 Spain, Catholic Enlightenment in, 11; the Histoire in, 132–3, 136, 142; Jansenism in, 106 Spinoza, Baruch, 9, 33 Stryinski, Paul, 132 Suárez, Francisco, 25–6 Susanna (biblical figure). See Bible Syllabus of Errors, 222 Tabaraud, Mathieu-Mathurin, 199–202, 213–14 tacit permissions, 99–100, 117, 120, 125. See also censorship Tallett, Frank, 185 Tamburini, Michelangelo, 56, 59, 71–2 Tencin, Claudine Guérin de, 96 Tencin, Pierre Guérin de, 96–8, 134–5, 152, 250n52 Thompson, D. Gillian, xvi, 179, 233n12, 242n36 Thorpe, John, 141 Tobit (biblical figure). See Bible Toland, John, 32–3 Toulouse, 95, 169, 191 Tournemine, René-Joseph: and accommodation, 23; criticisms of Hardouin, 55–6, 60–1, 95, 165; Douze impossibilités contre le système du P. Hardouin, 55; resistance to the first part of the Histoire, 49, 70–1, 74–6, 79–81, 83, 222, 245n94; resistance to the second part of the Histoire, 88–9,

Index 95–8, 222; role in the Journal de Trévoux, 18–20, 33 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 27 ultramontanism: Catholic Enlightenment’s connections with, 6, 46, 224; critics of in the nineteenth century, 200–1, 210– 12, 219, 223–4; in Franche-Comté, 203–6, 214; the Histoire accused of in the eighteenth century, 128–9, 147; and the Histoire in the nineteenth century, 14, 17, 183, 202–14, 223, 226; and Lamennais, 202, 209, 225; in the Refléxions sur la foi, 157; and romantic Catholics, 225–6; and Tencin, 96; ultramontane piety, 224, 226–7; and women, 225, 227. See also papacy unbelief, 14, 21; criticisms of the Histoire as a manifestation of, 174; “good books” as an antidote for, 191–2; the Histoire as a weapon against, 40–1, 43, 47–9, 83, 105, 182, 210; Jesuit scriptores’s concern with, 21, 29, 32–3, 39, 60–1, 190–1; and the public sphere, 39, 83, 187; and the revolution, 182, 185–7, 191. See also atheism Unigenitus, 32; Berruyer’s promotion of, 256–7n22; declared law in France, 82, 111, 123; Jansenist resistance to, 38–9, 106, 111–12, 143, 153; parlements’ resistance to, 123; pro-Unigenitus bishops, 82, 96–7, 111–12, 152. See also Jansenists

325

Utrecht, 73, 142–3 Van Kley, Dale, xv, 12, 96, 142, 179, 223 Vásquez, Gabriel, 25–6 Vintimille, Charles-GaspardGuillaume de, 82, 104 Vitry, Edouard, 58 Voltaire, 4, 20, 27, 118, 189; reactions to the Histoire, 67, 72, 146–7 Vulgate. See Bible Weimer, Georges-Antoine, 132 Weimer, Georges-Jacques, 132 Wiśniowiecki, Michał Jeremi Korybut, 132 Wolff, Martha, 69 women: Berruyer’s correspondence with, 7; in the Bible, 50, 65–6, 76–8, 195, 198–9, 225–6; and the Cadière Affair, 82–3; and the Histoire, 4, 66–7, 73, 193, 198–9, 225–6; and literacy, 36–8; and novels, 69, 73, 83; and the public sphere, 36–8, 40, 96, 227; and re-Christianization, 190, 198–9, 218, 227; and the revolution, 204 Wright, Jonathan, 25 Xaupi, Joseph, 145 Xavier, Francis, 22 Yvon, Claude, 146, 219 Zeller, Lodowijk van, 143