The Significance of Jansenism in the History of the French Catholic Clergy in the Pre-Revolutionary Era WILLIAM H. WILLIAMS Traditionally, Jansenism has been considered one of the most in teresting of the religious movements since the Protestant Reforma tion, and, to the ablest scholars attracted to its study, one of the most complex,1 As Alexander Sedgwick has recently shown, the historiog raphy ofJansenism provides an example of amazing vitality and inten sity of debate,2 a debate which echoes that over the Reformation itself except for its vastly reduced scale. Many writers—especially in the nineteenth-century—found an ideological touchstone in Jansenism as they traced the origins of their modem world to the Enlightenment, to the demise of the ancien regime, and to the revolutionary upheaval at the close of the eighteenth century. Their interpretations reflect their own widely dispersed positions across the political and religious spec trum, with Jansenism depicted as evil or constructive according to their viewpoint. The variety and complexity of Jansenism explain perhaps why of the more than 15,000 titles devoted to the phenome non there exists no single work which adequately explains its rise, transformation, and dissolution. 289 290 / WILLIAM H. WILLIAMS Despite the current surge of interest in seventeenth* and early eighteenth*century Jansenism, there have been very few studies of Jansenism in France before the Revolution. Yet the profound muta* tion which occurred in the Jansenist phenomenon in the eighteenth century has opened serious problems of interpretation which have still to be fully explored. This essay examines the fundamental difficulties in interpreting the significance of Jansenism in the pre*Revolutionary period and suggests an essential context in which these can be re* solved. A principal part of the problem is the use of the terms Jansenist and Jansenism in the last third of the century, for they provide in them* selves a continuing source of confusion. This confusion was apparent to thoughtful contemporaries observing the political and judicial ac* tivities of determined factions in Paris in the 1750s and 1760s.3 The historian Jean Leflon, although referring to the history of Italian Jan* senism after 1850, has aptly suggested the bankruptcy of this term when employed in a general sense in France in this period. Leflon states: “The word Jansenist contains so many different facets that it loses all meaning. We thus have the Jansenist who is anti*Jesuit, the Jansenist who is an Augustinian, the Jansenist who is a theologian of efficacious grace, the Jansenist who is an anarchist, the Jansenist who is a republican, the Jansenist who is a liberal. The word changes according to the context.”4 In the most competent studies of the last decade historians have begun to confront the problem posed so sue* cinctly by Leflon. They have traced the course of the movement across the national frontiers of Catholicism and have emphasized the inter* national significance of Jansenism. In the process they have provided new dimensions to its place in the intellectual history of the Age of the Enlightenment.5 Modem studies of French Jansenism in the eighteenth century date from the 1930s when Gabriel Le Bras published his earliest articles. In these he pioneered the regional examination of the conditions of Catholicism in France in the context of a quantitative study of the sociology of religious practices.6 His investigations culminated in his seminal work Etudes de sociologie religieuse in 1956, in which he suggested a correlation between the penetration of Jansenism in some Jansenism and the Pre-Revolutionary Clergy I 291 regions, the decline of religious practices, and the subsequent loss of faith in these areas.7 As Le Bras’ scholarship richly suggests, the future of Jansenist historiography lies clearly in comprehensive regional studies. More importantly, the findings of local religious history must be projected into the larger context of collective mentalities in France, for which Le Bras’ important work provides only a partial illumination. The continuing tradition of Le Bras’ scholarship is reflected in the significant article of 1967 by Bernard Plongeron on the Jansenist image of the Catholic Church as seen in their famous publication the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques. This periodical, which appeared, at times sporadically, from 1728 to...