Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 1990"

Subjects and Citizens in the Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: "Everyone parades the name of citizen these days," grumbled the abbe Bouniol de Montegut in 1756.1 Six years later Rousseau complained that the French applied this name to themselves without understanding its real meaning.2 As the self-styled "genuine Catholic patriot" and the self-styled "citizen of Geneva" suggested, their contemporaries used the word "citizen" both loosely and frequently. Loosely, as if synonymous with "subject," inasmuch as the principles of divine-right absolutism excluded them from sovereignty and the structures of the corporate kingdom deprived them of any common juridical identity. Frequently, not because the Encyclopedists interpolated the word into their vocabulary but because it served their polemical purposes during the prolonged disputes about religious, fiscal, and administrative matters spanning the eighteenth century.3 While philosophes repudiated much of the Ancien Regime outright, clergy, Jansenists, Protestants, parlementaires, pamphleteers, and their rulers unwittingly undermined the traditional order they claimed to defend by arguing for decades about the interpretation of the unwritten constitution of the realm.4 Their prolonged and well publicized contestations altered the meaning of words like "citi-

Inventing the French Revolution: Controlling French history: the ideological arsenal of Jacob-Nicolas Moreau

Abstract: In 1760, at the end of a decade of bitter constitutional struggle in France, a confidential memorandum circulated in ministerial circles at Versailles under the title “Principes de conduite avec les parlements.” A powerful blueprint for ideological action in defense of the absolute monarchy, it was drafted by a young lawyer and government propagandist, Jacob- Nicolas Moreau. He was to pursue the campaign outlined in this document for the next thirty years, for the greater part of which period he enjoyed the official title of historiographer-royal. An analysis of his activities and arguments in this regard reveals some interesting dimensions of the process of ideological elaboration that occurred in France during the last decades of the Old Regime. Moreau was born in 1717 at Saint-Florentin in Burgundy, the son of a “hardened Jansenist” obliged by his religious convictions to abandon a prospective ecclesiastical career for the traditional family practice of the law. Brought up a “good little Jansenist,” as he confessed in his Souvenirs , he was sent to Paris in 1734 to be educated at the College de Beauvais, then one of the principal centers of Jansenism. His father's contacts brought him a ready entry into Jansenist and legal circles in the capital, where he was taken under the wing of the devout magistrate Jerome-Nicolas de Pâris (brother of the miracle-working deacon of Saint-Medard) and enjoyed the patronage of the family of Chancellor d'Aguesseau (whose grandchildren he briefly tutored).