La réforme catholique vue d’en bas: le cas des trinitaires de Provence

Abstract

Historians studying the Catholic reformation in France hardly speak of a ‘generation of saints’ any more. But the history of this period is still written of as the product of men, and sometimes women, whose spiritual and administrative talents led to the establishment of new religious orders and the reform of the old ones. The aim of this article is to explore the case of the Trinitarians of Provence, a congregation which was not reformed by well-known ecclesiastics but rather by its own ordinary members, who invented their own version of reform during a period of forty years and with quite a few failures along the way. The surviving documents enable us to examine the process of Catholic reform from the bottom to the top, and show that the Provence Trinitarians sought to arrest a long decline and to reflect the new spiritual climate of the seventeenth century. Two fundamental questions are asked here: what does Catholic reform consist of and how should one judge its success? Die Historiker, die über die katholische Reform in Frankreich arbeiten, sprechen kaum noch von einer «Generation von Heiligen».