"Disputes over Words" and Constitutional Conflict in France, 1730-1732

Abstract

When the Parisian lawyer Matthieu Marais complained in 1729 that he was very tired of the Constitution,1 he referred not to the unwritten constitution of the realm but to the papal Constitution, Unigenitus (1713), which condemned one hundred one allegedly erroneous propositions extracted from Pasquier Quesnel's Jansenist commentary on the New Testament. Designed by Rome and Versailles to seal doctrinal orthodoxy in France after half a century of dissension over the workings of divine grace, this notorious bull instead provoked decades of disruptive debate about the religious and political traditions of the kingdom. The interminable disputes generated by the Constitution may have bored Marais, but they had momentous constitutional consequences. The prolonged conflicts of the crown, the clergy, and the parlements over the relationship between spiritual and temporal power and the fundamental laws of the realm contributed as much as, if not more than, the Enlightenment to the undermining of the traditional order before the Revolution. The controversies of 1730-32, witnessed by Marais, set the pattern for these conflicts, which lasted long after his death. The following account and analysis, which uses previously unconsulted archival materials, rereads the confrontations of these years as a revealing episode in the ideological disintegration of the Old Regime.2