The document discusses how the Jansenism controversy contributed to the erosion of absolute royal authority in France. Jansenists used print media like the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques to criticize the Jesuits and lack of transparency in government and religious decision making. This called for more accountability and democratic power, threatening the monarchy and Catholic Church. In response, the pope issued a bull condemning Jansenist theology, further inflaming tensions over foreign meddling in French affairs. The controversy challenged absolutism and foreshadowed ideals of the French Revolution.

1. Prof. Mita Choudhury Stephen Cheng
History 332: Dangerous Ideas April 2010
Second five page paper on Jansenism and the assault on absolutism
The controversy involving Jansenism contributed to the erosion of absolute royal
authority in France. The former led to the latter due to growing public concerns about
openness or the lack thereof within the political and religious affairs of the kingdom.
Suspicions grew as to the alleged existence of a cabal established around the French
throne. This cabal, consisting of clergy, used secret means to adversely influence
governmental decision making. The call for openness was therefore a way to expose and
end the activities of the cabal.
The clerical cabal that supposedly existed at the highest levels of the monarchy
implicated the Jesuit order. Since the Jesuits served as confessors, and given the secretive
nature of confessionals, they were as far as public opinion was concerned part and parcel
of the problem that was the lack of transparency within structures of authority.
Jansenism, certainly in its Augustinian variant, became implicated due to its critical
theological position in relation to the power of the Catholic church in Rome, Italy. So far
as Augustinian Jansenists were concerned, the Roman Catholic church was a “New
Babylon.” In light of the politically privileged positions that the Jesuits in France had in
their religious functions as confessors along with the less than flattering appraisal of the
Catholic church, “[c]onciliarist anti-papalism was combined with a call for a more
democratic power-structure within the church.”1
A combination of religious and political
sentiments worked as the driving force behind the public demand for openness. This
demand, in turn, required the existence of media as a means of articulating such
1
Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (Penguin Books, 2002) 99.
1

2. sentiments.
This combination found expression through textual sources. For instance, a “[…]
populist brew of editorial pieces, news, book reviews and eloquent Jansenist obituaries
[…]” helped garner sympathy and support for the Jansenists and likewise sustained
opposition to the Jesuits.2
Furthermore, this growing use of print media points to the
relative level of sophistication of the public in France. The development of media in print
presupposes the existence of literacy, the availability of the physical and technical means
to produce and distribute literature of all sorts, and the presence of some kind of general
public that exists in venues and environments such as salons so as to generate
discussion on public affairs (with knowledge of public issues arising, of course, from
media). These latter conditions provide the context in which media exists and works in
France. Additionally, given the political and legal conditions of France at the time as a
polity with an absolute monarchy, censorship was a reality (yet another sign that
openness and transparency were barely existent, if not nonexistent, within authority
structures) and producers of media had to take steps to avoid the censors. In the case of
the Jansenists, secret measures were necessary in order to publish a newspaper such as
the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques.3
The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, which started publication in 1728, was meant to be
a reaction to the papal bull Unigenitus that appeared fifteen years before and held as its
guiding principle the notion that “the people were, to an extent, the repository of that
truth on which Rome, the Church and the monarchy were forever seeking to trample.”4
Jansenist media was grounded in a populist conception of how society ought to conduct
2
Jones 103.
3
Jones 103.
4
Arlette Farge and Rosemary Morris, trans., Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century
France (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995) 36-37.
2

3. its religious and political affairs, in which “the people” is the ultimate authority. This
working concept behind the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, which reflected the Jansenists’
call for “ecclesiastical affairs to be regulated by a general council of the church” in terms
of shared emphases on basing decisions upon consensus, was a challenge to the authority
of the monarchy and Catholic church alike.5
It was a challenge, quite obviously, in its egalitarian implications. Furthermore,
by vesting such importance in the decision making power of “the people,” the traditional
sources of authority including the crown and the church would have to be accountable to
a public within France. This accountability necessarily entailed transparency and
openness as regards political and religious issues and therefore met the aims of the
Jansenists in their opposition to the Jesuits. Likewise, for people in the emergent
professional social and economic class such as parlementary magistrates and lawyers,
accountability would dispel the power of the ominous cabal revolving around the French
throne.6
Since Jansenism, via means such as the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, represented a
challenge to the existing power structures then, the latter reacted as well so as to defend
themselves too.
Attempts to preserve power included the aforementioned issuance of the
Unigenitus. The acceptance of this papal bull in 1728 by the Parisian archbishop, the
Cardinal de Noailles, who had been an opponent of the Unigenitus, brought much
consternation throughout the public in Paris as the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques kept up
publication as to various, numerous acts of repression by the authorities and in doing so
5
Jones 99.
6
Mita Choudhury, “A Betrayal of Trust: The Jesuits and Quietism in Eighteenth-Century France,”
Common Knowledge 15:2 Spring 2009: 166.
3

4. championed the “humble, ordinary individual” while denouncing police actions as
humiliating and oppressive.7
The reaction of the Parisian public and the Nouvelles
ecclesiastique warrants attention as to the contents of the Unigenitus since the bull clearly
had some contentious theological and political effects.
The Unigenitus was essentially a rebuttal to the Moral Reflections (1692) by
Pasquier Quesnel, a Jansenist who was living in exile in the Low Countries, in which the
former document, originally issued in 1713, rejected the one hundred and one statements
in the latter on the grounds of heresy.8
The reaction of many people was that the
statements in the Moral Reflections were anything but heretical; they were in line with
orthodox theological doctrine.9
As far as the critics of the Unigenitus were concerned, the
papal bull was nothing less than a way for the Catholic pope in Rome to exercise his
clerical authority in France without any due respect for the religious sensibilities within
the country. For instance, according to Jones, “[t]he pope seemed to be laying down rules
of orthodoxy in a way which smacked of belief in papal infallibility and which infringed
the French church’s cherished constitutional independence, […] affirmed in the 1682
Gallican Articles.”10
The Unigenitus, then, amounted to meddlesome and tyrannical theological
authority emanating from a source outside of France. In light of the controversy and
conflict which this papal bull raised, Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, writes that “[t]he
public was particularly up in arms against the Jesuit, Le Tellier. Nothing provokes us
more than a member of the clergy who has become powerful.”11
Given the context in
7
Jones 22-23 and Farge 41-44.
8
Jones 22.
9
Jones 22-23.
10
Jones 23.
11
Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Unigenitus, Constitution." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert
Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer. Ann Arbor: Scholarly
4

5. which the Unigenitus became notorious, it no doubt promoted suspicions as to the lack of
transparent authority and the existence of a cabal so far as French religious and political
affairs were concerned. That there was a foreign influence would only enflame these
feelings, thus promoting an uproar.
The controversy which involved Jansenism called into question the notion and
practice of absolutist authority in France. This challenge to authority existed in the form
of print media publications by Jansenists such as Nouvelles ecclesiastique and in public
reactions to the Unigenitus. In a sense, the political implications of the controversy can be
considered a precursor to the French Revolution and its ideals. Yet the rise of principled
opposition to absolutism also introduced its own set of problems, namely the notion (or
delusion) of the omnipotent and secretive cabal. This latter idea would have its own
dangerously regressive and destructive tendencies in the modern post-revolutionary era of
European history.
Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2003. Web. Apr. 2009.
<http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.170>. Trans. of "Unigenitus, constitution," Encyclopédie ou
Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 17. Paris, 1765.
5

6. References
Choudhury, Mita. “A Betrayal of Trust: The Jesuits and Quietism in Eighteenth-Century
France,” Common Knowledge 15:2 Spring 2009: 164-180.
Farge, Arlette and Rosemary Morris, trans. Subversive Words: Public Opinion in
Eighteenth-Century University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995.
Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Unigenitus, Constitution." The Encyclopedia of Diderot &
d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas
Cassirer. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library,
2003. Web. Apr. 2009.
Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon. Penguin Books,
2002.
6

7. References
Choudhury, Mita. “A Betrayal of Trust: The Jesuits and Quietism in Eighteenth-Century
France,” Common Knowledge 15:2 Spring 2009: 164-180.
Farge, Arlette and Rosemary Morris, trans. Subversive Words: Public Opinion in
Eighteenth-Century University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1995.
Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Unigenitus, Constitution." The Encyclopedia of Diderot &
d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas
Cassirer. Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library,
2003. Web. Apr. 2009.
Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon. Penguin Books,
2002.
6