Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 2002"

L.-A. Caraccioli et son œuvre : La mesure d'une avancée de la pensée chrétienne vers les Lumières

Abstract: This article, presentating Caraccioli' s life, looks at the influences on him in order to understand how a certain type of Christian thinking could move towards Enlightenment. Caraccioli can be seen as typical inasmuch as he was an honest, sometimes elegant and surprising thinker, sensitive to contemporary developments. His early education led him to oppose most enlightened principles ; but he changed under the influence of 17th-century Christian social thought, the model of the primitive Church, Jansenist political analysis and a reading of Malebranche. Finally, we see how his position changed radically in the early 1780s, following figures like Rousseau or the Physiocrats, who reinjected religious feeling into enlightened discourse. His priorities changed, and the presentation of theological principles was replaced by a more reforming pragmatism ; however, this finally led to a series of difficulties which the Revolution often revealed and which remain at the heart of questions concerning the link between religion and Western modernity.

The Poet and the King : Jean De LA Fontaine and His Century

Abstract: The Poet and the King, described by the New York Review of Books as "the finest and most perceptive of all the innumerable accounts of La Fontaine," is being offered for the first time in an English translation. La Fontaine, whose works are still memorized by French schoolchildren, is regarded by Fumaroli, and countless others, as the greatest French lyric poet of the seventeenth century. La Fontaine is best known, however, for his fables and Contes. Marc Fumaroli's grand study is almost as much about Louis XIV as it is about La Fontaine. He provides a detailed analysis of the absolutist politics and attempts by the king and his ministers to enforce an official cultural style. Fumaroli's work is a meditation on the plight of the artist under such a ruler during the imposition of a tyrannical, centralized political regime. Of particular interest to Fumaroli is Nicolas Foucquet, whose fall from power is the central event of the book. Foucquet, La Fontaine's patron, was arrested and imprisoned by order of Louis XIV on false charges of embezzlement and treason. For La Fontaine, the arrest was a disaster. Foucquet had generously supported and protected La Fontaine, who remained loyal to him for decades, helping in his defense and writing pleas for pardon. Many of Foucquet's associates were arrested. Others, including La Fontaine, prudently left town. During the reign of Louis XIV, the basic role of literature in the eyes of the court was that of an official propaganda machine. The royal cultural policy supported only tragedy and the heroic ode, and demanded works that praised the king. In the years that followed Foucquet's arrest, La Fontaine had to rely on support from groups unconnected with the government, including Jansenists, Protestants, and the libertine, homosexual circle of the Duc de Vendome. The Poet and the King offers not only a captivating history of one of France's greatest poets, but also carries the message that great literature and art can be created in spite of repressive cultural and political regimes.

Modernisme et catholicisme de l'abbé Trublet

Abstract: Abbe Trublet is known to have been an admirer and the historiographer of Fontenelle and Houdar de la Motte. In his Memoires about them, as well as in all his works of criticism, he assumes a radical empiricism, despising any overall plan and accumulating precise details which contribute to a general interpretation. When it came to religion, he was not concerned with abstract proofs or theological systems and was certainly closer to the Jesuits than to the Jansenists, defending an extremely liberal Christianity which absorbed apparently alien philosophies. Thus he re-christianised Fontenelle, Montesquieu and even Voltaire ; only La Mettrie was beyond recuperation.

Les Nouvelles ecclésiastiques et les Lumières (année 1750)

Abstract: This article analyses the importance of Enlightenment themes in the Jansenists' clandestine journal, taking 1750 as a test. The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques only dealt with religion, recounting persecutions or reviewing theological works. On the occasion of the condemnation of Colonia's Bibliotheque janseniste, the paper drew up a list of good books, often from the 17th Century, written by the 'friends of truth'. But despite this fascination with Port-Royal, current events intruded ; the journal reviewed works, all described as irreligious, by Molinists or by Philosophes such as Montesquieu or Buffon, discussed at length. The journalists refused any bridge between good and bad books, and the Philosophes were clearly the authors of the latter ; but the persecuted Appelants described by the journal are readers of forbidden works and examples of resistance to authority, seen as blind and arbitrary. Thus, while the Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques violently opposed the ideas of the Enlightenment in its book reviews, these ideas reappear in the biographies of exemplary Jansenists, seen as champions of individual conscience against oppression.