Jesuit Secondary Education Revolutionized: the Académie anglaise , Liège, 1773–1794*

Abstract

In September 1773, the educational work of the largest and most powerful teaching body then in existence was brought to an abrupt end. The order, by Pope Clement XIV, for the total and universal suppression of the Society of Jesus resulted in the summary closure of 728 Jesuit establishments responsible for the education of some 250,000 students. The prohibition on the existence of Jesuit schools and colleges, engendered by intense political pressure on the papacy for a variety of reasons, was to endure for more than forty years, until 1814, with massive repercussions for education worldwide. Penal laws prohibiting the existence of Catholic schools were introduced during the reign of Elizabeth (1559–1603) and continued until the passing of the Catholic Relief Act of 1791, which permitted the existence of Catholic (but not, as yet, Jesuit) schools and colleges on British soil. The effects of the suppression on education have been the subject of numerous national studies, with one important exception – the fate of the educational work of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. With members in England, Wales, Maryland and Pennsylvania, as well as in educational outposts in continental Europe, the English Jesuits were to prove a unique body. Unlike their counterparts in every other country, the Russian Empire excepted, they were to retain their corporate identity throughout the suppression period, as a result of quirks both of history and of geography. The English Jesuit college founded in exile at Saint‐Omer in the Spanish Netherlands in 1593, because of the penal laws against Catholics in England and Wales, moved to Bruges in the Austrian Netherlands in 1762 when the Paris Parlement dissolved the Society of Jesus in France. At the time of the universal suppression in 1773, the prince‐bishop of Liège, François‐Charles de Velbruck, invited the English ex‐Jesuits to consolidate all their educational activity in the principality of Liège, where they had operated a house of studies since 1614. The suppressed English Jesuits developed and furthered their educational activity, first at the newly formed Académie anglaise at Liège, from 1773 until 1794, and thereafter in England, at Stonyhurst, in Lancashire, developing their curriculum in important new ways, beyond the confines of the Ratio Studiorum. Despite a series of major calamities, they were able to use their educational successes as a springboard for the further development of Jesuit education, not only in England and Wales but also in the early United States of America, at Georgetown, where they created a secondary‐level academy that led on to the foundation of the present‐day university. The aim of this paper is to indicate how the suppressed English Jesuits succeeded in their educational work, against all the odds. From research undertaken in surviving, hitherto largely unexplored, archival sources in Britain, continental Europe and the United States, the paper aims to throw new light on this significant but neglected period of educational history.