Louis XIV, Religion and dissension

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Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585-1638)	Louis XIV - religion and dissension

Jansenism

	Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585-1638) was educated at the University of Louvain - the local epicentre of bitter arguments over predestination and free will (ended in 1597 by order of Pope Clement VIII). Jansen was deeply influenced by Jacques Janson (a follower of Baius) who attacked a Jesuit priest, Leonardo Lessius, for Semipelagianism. Jansen too became a lifelong enemy of the Society of Jesus. In 1635, Jansen published pseudonymously the satirical tract Mars Gallicus; it fiercely attacked the policies of the French monarchy in general, and Louis XIII's alliances with Protestants against the Hapsburgs in particular. It went through many editions and was translated into French. In 1636, Jansen became Bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands, only to die within two years.
	After his death, Jansen's friends arranged for the publication of his Augustinus (1640). Supposedly merely an explication of Augustine's views on grace and predestination, in fact Jansen returned to the debate silenced thirty years before, taking a firmly predestinarian stance.
	One of Jansen's closest friends was Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, who had been imprisoned by Richelieu for his hostility to Richelieu's foreign policies. He urged Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) to defend the Augustinus from the attacks being made on it - especially by Jesuits. For the next fifty years, even when forced to flee to the Netherlands (1679), Arnauld defended Jansen and attacked the Jesuits.

Port-Royal des Champs

Antoine Arnauld's sister, Angèlique (1591-1661) had become abbess of the convent of Port-Royal at the age of eleven. After a conversion experience in 1608, she imposed rigorous standards of observance on the nunnery. 1n 1633, she chose as the convent's confessor Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran. The nunnery of Port-Royal became a center of Jansenism.

Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) was another of the Port-Royal Jansenists; refused ordination because of his views, he too spent some time in exile in the Spanish Netherlands.

The most famous sympathizer with Jansenism was Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). A mathematical child prodigy, Pascal was one of the founders of the modern theory of probability. In 1654, after a mystical experience, Pascal grew increasingly pious and even more involved in the activities at Port-Royal, which he and his sister had frequented since 1646. (He used to wear a girdle of nails and press it into his skin when he felt wicked urges).

[Pascal is famous for his path-breaking work on probability; he is also known as a religious thinker - the two meet in Pascal's wager, a novel argument for belief in God's existence.]

The opponents of Jansenism lobbied to have its doctrines condemned. In 1649, the theological school of the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) condemned five propositions on grace and predestination which they said were contained in the Augustinus. One of the university's syndics, Nicolas Cornet, applied to Rome for the Pope's support.

Innocent X (Velasquez 1650)

In 1653, Pope Innocent X condemned the Five Propositions in his Bull, Cum occasione.

	Louis XIV was deeply suspicious of Jansenism. Many in the Parlement of Paris at the time of the Fronde had sympathized with Jansenism, and two prominent noble Frondeurs - Anne Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchess of Longueville and Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, Duchess of Chevreuse - were patronesses of Port-Royal.
	Louis and Mazarin tried to expel Jansen's followers by firing or imprisoning those who would not swear agreement with the papal ruling. But the virtual imprisonment of the pious nuns of Pont-Royal was unpopular. Jansenist beliefs were widespread in the French Church - even in its highest ranks - and it was difficult to expel clergy (including four bishops) wholesale without causing schism.
	Many Jansenists just equivocated and procrastinated. Arnauld, for example, distinguished between the law and the facts - he accepted that the five propositions were contrary to the law of the Church, but he denied that in fact the Augustinus asserted them. Arnauld was condemned by the Sorbonne in 1656.
	Blaise Pascal responded with the *Lettres Provinciales* (Provincial Letters). They were published anonymously in 1656 and 1657 with the help of Arnauld and Nicole; (Nicole soon translated and published a Latin edition). Sharply satirical, the Letters defended Arnauld, Jansenism and Port-Royal and attacked the Jesuits for sophistical casuistry and moral laxity. The Jesuits were widely unpopular, and Pascal's ridicule found a ready audience.

After negotiations, in 1668, Pope Clement IX restored some peace to the French Church with the Pax Clementina - an ambiguous formula that allowed the Jansenists to swear obedience without conceding the theological issues.

Clement IX
(Carlo Maratta, 1669)

The "peace of the Church" which lasted from 1668 to 1679 was more of a truce. Jansenism was widespread amongst the Oratorians - an order of priests, who like the Jesuits specialized in religious education. Under their influence, many parish priests became sympathetic to Jansenism. Louis XIV continued to regard Jansenists as a fifth column and was merely waiting for an occasion to root them out altogether.

Mother Catherine Agnes (another of the Arnauld family)
praying for a sick Port Royal nun

In 1679, the Jansenists' patron, the Duchess of Longueville died, and the King immediately resumed his attack. Arnauld was exiled. Port-Royal was closed down (1709) and razed to the ground, after its nuns refused to swear another retraction of Jansenist views.

In 1713, under pressure from Louis XIV, Pope Clement XI issued the Bull, Unigenitus. The Bull condemned the views expressed by the Oratorian, Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719); his views included not only a Jansenist Augustinianism on questions of grace and predestination, but a quasi-democratic stress on the rights of the laity and lesser clergy against the Pope and higher clergy. (Expelled from the Oratorians, Quesnel fled to Brussels and joined Antoine Arnauld).
Jansenism had ceased being a movement solely about soteriology and moral austerity; it had fused with the lesser parish clergy's discontents with the Church's hierarchy and with the educated bourgeoisie's desire for more involvement in the shaping of doctrine.

Despite these tensions, the religious orders dominated education in France throughout the period.

Huguenots and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

	Louis XIV saw the Huguenot minority as potentially seditious. Initially, he thought that it would be easy to convert Huguenot aristocrats and so weaken their cause, but the conversion of Henry de la Tour d'Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne proved an isolated case.
	Louis XIV began to put more pressure on Huguenots by strictly enforcing the terms of the Edict of Nantes. Many Protestant places of worship were closed 1659-1664 and they were prevented from holding a national synod. In 1680, an edict was issued forbidding conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism. From 1681 harsher measures were used, in particular billeting troops in Protestant homes; these dragonnades were so disruptive and expensive that many gave in and converted. The remaining, roughly one million, Huguenots were subject to official harassment in dozens of other ways, from Protestant women not being allowed to be midwives to Protestants being forbidden to employ Catholic servants.
	Colbert had done his best to limit measures against Huguenots, because he knew that economically they were a highly-productive section of the population. But in 1683 Colbert died and Louis XIV's marriage to Madame de Maintenon marked a period of increasing piety.
	18 October 1685 - In the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The result was a mass emigration of Huguenots - at least 200,000 left the country.
	The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes not only deprived France of some of its most industrious and inventive workers, it also alienated foreign powers - especially Brandenburg-Prussia.
	Not all the Huguenots left France: those remaining faced increased persecution. Brutal force was initially used against the revolt of the Protestant Camisards in Cévennes (a region of Languedoc) from 1702. The Camisards were inspired with millenarian fervor and led by poor zealots; (one leader gelded sheep, for example). They were named for the camisards (white shirts or chemises) that they wore at night to recognize one another while attacking Catholic priests, churches and local government officials. In 1705, Louis XIV's government was forced to grant a de facto amnesty to restore order.

Gallicanism

	France had a long tradition of Gallicanism. This was a movement with two distinct strands: 1. Episcopal Gallicanism, which stressed the rights of French bishops (as opposed to the pope) in church government; 2. Judicial or Royal Gallicanism, which emphasized the powers of the secular authorities (especially the crown). The two strands merged during disputes of the 1680s.
	Louis XIV believed that the crown should control appointments in the French Church - these "regalian rights" had been granted in the Concordat of Bologna. In 1682, Louis announced that he would exercise the régale - the right to collect the revenues from vacant bishoprics throughout France.
	When Innocent XI protested, Louis XIV assembled the clergy of France and had them pass Four Articles (19 March 1682). These insisted that the French Crown's temporal powers were independent of the pope, and that the pope's authority over the French church and clergy was limited even in spiritual matters. Innocent XI responded immediately (11 April 1682) proclaiming the Four Articles null and void, and his successor, Alexander VIII, issued a still more comprehensive condemnation (August 1690).

Bossuet (1627-1704)
Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

One of Louis XIV's most eloquent supporters was Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), a popular preacher, who in 1681 became Bishop of Meaux.
In his extensive writings on political theory, Bossuet insisted that the king's power came from God alone.

	The popes refused to confirm any bishop nominated by Louis unless he would disavow the Four Articles; Louis nominated to bishoprics only priests who acknowledged the Four Articles. By 1688, thirty-five bishops were nominated but unconfirmed.
	Eventually, Louis gave way. In 1693, the bishops-elect disavowed the Four Articles and were confirmed.

The 1690s

	Louis XIV spent much of his reign waging expensive wars, and by the 1690's the economic cost of this was being felt all over France. From 1688, a highly unpopular militia system placed an unprecedented number of Frenchmen at risk of service.
	From 1689, the Minister of Finance was Louis Phélypeaux comte de Pontchartrain who resorted to such desperate means as the sale of offices to obtain money.
	18 January 1695 a new capitation tax was introduced. This was (unusually) levied on nobles as well as commoners, despite the well-established principal that the nobility were exempt from all taxation.
	In 1693-94 famine and disease struck much of France, killing perhaps about one in ten of the population.
	The combination of these factors strained loyalty to the crown. Earlier, there had already been popular tax revolts in Bordeaux and Brittany in 1674-75. At court in the 1690s, discontented nobles grouped themselves around Louis's grandson, the Duke of Burgundy. In Les aventures de Télémaque (1699), François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715) gave tacit but subversive expression to intellectual distaste for the war, greed, and hypocrisy of the regime, and was banished for his pains.
	A magistrate in Normandy, Pierre de Boisguilbert, and a leading military engineer and general, Sébastian Le Prestre de Vauban, gave voice to the desire for reforms including tax relief and economic renewal, but Louis XIV continued to believe that war was necessary, despite the heavy costs.