La bure et le sceptre: La congrégation des Feuillants dans l'affirmation des États et des pouvoirs princiers (vers 1560-vers 1660) (review)

This book began as Benoist Pierre's thèse d'état, which means that it is a highly detailed work based on a vast number of manuscript sources. In this case the subject so thoroughly examined is an obscure religious order (defunct since 1790) known as the Feuillants, which was an austere branch of the Cistericians. It received its name from the Cistercian monastery of Notre-Dame de La Charité de Feuillant (from Latin for "leaf") near Toulouse.

As of 1563 discipline in the monastery had slipped badly, and the abbot had become a Protestant. When Charles IX named Jean de La Barrière, the scion of a local noble family, as commendatory abbot, no one had reason to expect better things for the monastery. When he returned from his studies at Paris in 1573, however, the young abbot was determined to reform his abbey. Most of its monks quickly departed for other Cistercian houses, and only four stayed on with him to implement an extraordinarily rigorous rule, which, for example, required that their diet consist of barley bread, greens, and porridge made of flour and water that they ate while kneeling. Despite such extreme asceticism, the Feuillants attracted many eager postulants. They also attracted patronage from the high and mighty. Pierre shows how they caught the attention of Henry III as part of his effort to appease God's wrath against his realm by supporting the "penitential ideal." He built a monastery for them in Paris in 1587, the same year Sixtus V gave them one in Rome.

Once ensconced in Paris, the Feuillants split into supporters of the king and the Catholic League after the Leaguers drove Henry III out of Paris in May 1588. A royalist, La Barrière was also forced to flee, while Bernard de Montgaillard, known as Petit-Feuillant, became one of the most outspoken Leaguer preachers. The Leaguer Feuillants were part of what Pierre calls "the Monastic League," which was vehement in its defiance of both Henry III and Henry IV until the latter's victory in 1594. Petit-Feuillant was one of the Leaguers whom Henry IV exiled, but the Feuillants quickly overcame the embarrassment of their support for the League and became, as the author puts it, "a congregation under high protection." He enumerates the range of patrons and the size of their gifts to the order, which was composed of thirty male and two female houses by 1630; those numbers demonstrated the attraction of the ascetic ideal to the seventeenth-century French.

In the second half of his book, Pierre deals largely with the major issues affecting religious life in early seventeenth-century France and how the Feuillants responded to them. They advocated a moderate Gallicanism, accepted "catholicisme d'Etat" and the king's place as head of religion, opposed Jansenism, and mostly remained loyal to the monarchy during the Fronde, while they took little notice of the Huguenots. Their close ties to the French monarchy created tensions with the Italian Feuillants, and in 1630 two distinct congregations were sanctioned. After 1630, however, the French branch began to lose its solid footing. Donations from the grands and the order's influence on them declined, as did its membership, partly because a new rule of 1634 reduced the original rigor.

In his conclusion the author argues that the example of the Feuillants provides strong support for the concept of "confessionalisation" of the French religious orders. Most of the orders put themselves at the service of the absolute monarchy and manifested a royal religion in their cloisters. Pierre suggests that this left the Feuillants less capable of attracting zealous new members and doomed them to be permanently disbanded during the French Revolution.

This is a work that requires a great deal...