“We Are No Longer in the Time of Elijah”: François de Sales’s Dismantling of Parisian Dévots’s Theology

Abstract

Scholars have credited the Counter-Reformation fervor of Parisian dévots for renewing Catholic devotion and culture in early modern France. Historians have also deemed François de Sales largely sympathetic to these Parisians’s anti-Protestant vision of Catholic renewal, while acknowledging the distinctiveness of Salesian douceur. Challenging these assertions, this article argues that, in the final chapters of his life, de Sales broke definitively from the militant vision common among dévots as he developed a compelling theology of nonviolence. Drawing on Franciscan intellectual tradition, he defined Christian love as unity, trust, and embrace, dismantling the dévots’s theology of purity, distrust, and violence.