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Jansenism and politics in the eighteenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
‘All the gold in the world and all the promises of heaven’ could not persuade Sainte-Beuve to carry on his study of jansenism into the eighteenth century. The spirit of Port-Royal was not there, ‘or at least it was only found in traces, dried up like a branch of a river that has turned aside into the sands and lost itself among the rocks...It is found even less in the entirely political Jansenism which was, or which appeared so considerable for a moment in the eighteenth century, and which allowed many to be of the party, without being of the dogma, or indeed, of religion at all’. The story of Jansenism after the death of Louis XIV is indeed a story of the war of the parlements against the crown – remonstrances, exiles. writs, denunciations, pamphlets; of the rising discontent of the lower clergy, demanding economic justice and a share in the government of the church; of the convulsionist movement, a strange spiritual underworld of masochism and miracles. Upon this barbarous scene of political and social strife and crude illiterate spirituality Sainte-Beuve turned his back, and those who have walked with him through the magic world of Port-Royal will understand his bitterness. The journée du guichet when Angélique Arnauld renounced human affections, the night of fire of 23 November when Pascal wept tears of joy, the cold ethereal beauty of the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne, the intellectual adventure of the alliance with cartesianism, the grammar, the logic, the translation of the new testament, the plays of Racine and the Pensées of Pascal – the eighteenth century can offer nothing like this.
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References
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