Anthony D. Wright. The Divisions of French Catholicism, 1629–1645: “The Parting of the Ways.”

Abstract

According to the editor, the goal of Ashgate's “Catholic Christendom” series is to draw attention to how developments in the Catholic Church in the early modern period went on to shape modern Catholicism. Anthony D. Wright's book reflects this goal by beginning with the question of the “alleged dechristianization of France” (p. 3). This question became urgent when church attendance dropped after World War II, and French intellectuals began seeking historical, political, and sociological explanations for the decline. Among the historical explanations to surface was the problem of Jansenism, a Catholic reform movement that had distinguished absolutist France from other countries by dividing Catholics and spawning opposition to the French crown in the eighteenth century. Wright weighs in on this explanation by suggesting that the ultra-rigorism espoused by French Jansenists was a source of dechristianization in France: “Amid [Jansenism's] protean manifestations it had, arguably, a core of moral ultra-rigorism, not least in the confessional, and this could well have contributed to a cumulative alienation of many, though obviously not all, laity by the time of the French Revolution” (p. 4). After positing this hypothesis, Wright notes that the problem of Jansenism has always been a divisive one in French history. To get to the bottom of this schism, he sets out to examine its origins: “To understand [Jansenism's] genesis and original identity thus remains imperative, despite the vast literature which it has engendered, from its own earliest years to the present” (p. 5).