Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 1975"

The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791

Abstract: Although the French Revolution is associated with efforts to dechristianize the French state and citizens, it actually had long-term religious-even Christian-origins, claims Dale Van Kley in this controversial new book. Looking back at the two and a half centuries that preceded the revolution, Van Kley explores the diverse, often warring religious strands that influenced political events up to the revolution. Van Kley draws on a wealth of primary sources to show that French royal absolutism was first a product and then a casualty of religious conflict. On the one hand, the religious civil wars of the sixteenth century between the Calvinist and Catholic internationals gave rise to Bourbon divine-right absolutism in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Jansenist-related religious conflicts in the eighteenth century helped to "desacralize" the monarchy and along with it the French Catholic clergy, which was closely identified with Bourbon absolutism. The religious conflicts of the eighteenth century also made a more direct contribution to the revolution, for they left a legacy of protopolitical and ideological parties (such as the Patriot party, a successor to the Jansenist party), whose rhetoric affected the content of revolutionary as well as counterrevolutionary political culture. Even in its dechristianizing phase, says Van Kley, revolutionary political culture was considerably more indebted to varieties of French Catholicism than it realized.

Jansenism and politics in the eighteenth century

Abstract: ‘All the gold in the world and all the promises of heaven’ could not persuade Sainte-Beuve to carry on his study of jansenism into the eighteenth century. The spirit of Port-Royal was not there, ‘or at least it was only found in traces, dried up like a branch of a river that has turned aside into the sands and lost itself among the rocks...It is found even less in the entirely political Jansenism which was, or which appeared so considerable for a moment in the eighteenth century, and which allowed many to be of the party, without being of the dogma, or indeed, of religion at all’. The story of Jansenism after the death of Louis XIV is indeed a story of the war of the parlements against the crown – remonstrances, exiles. writs, denunciations, pamphlets; of the rising discontent of the lower clergy, demanding economic justice and a share in the government of the church; of the convulsionist movement, a strange spiritual underworld of masochism and miracles. Upon this barbarous scene of political and social strife and crude illiterate spirituality Sainte-Beuve turned his back, and those who have walked with him through the magic world of Port-Royal will understand his bitterness. The journee du guichet when Angelique Arnauld renounced human affections, the night of fire of 23 November when Pascal wept tears of joy, the cold ethereal beauty of the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, the intellectual adventure of the alliance with cartesianism, the grammar, the logic, the translation of the new testament, the plays of Racine and the Pensees of Pascal – the eighteenth century can offer nothing like this.