L’Affaire clémentine: une fraude pieuse à l’ère des Lumières by Stéphanie Géhanne Gavoty (review)

Historians now acknowledge that no political history of eighteenth-century France is complete without attention to the controversies surrounding Unigenitus and the conflicts between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. As Dale Van Kley has shown (The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975)), the Jansenists were instrumental in bringing about the expulsion of the Jesuit order from France in 1764, a turn of events that D’Alembert credited to the power of philosophy. Stéphanie Géhanne Gavoty examines how the work of Louis-Antoine Caraccioli, a minor Enlightenment luminary, also highlights the intersection between religious politics and the Enlightenment. At the end of 1775 Caraccioli released the multivolume Lettres intéressantes du pape Clément XIV, a pope best known for his willingness to appease Europe’s sovereigns by suppressing the Jesuits in 1773. Caraccioli composed these letters, a subtle blend of fact and fiction, and the compilation quickly became a bestseller, as eager booksellers sought to cash in on the pontiff’s death in 1774. As Gavoty painstakingly demonstrates, Caraccioli adopted a variety of strategies to establish the authenticity of his endeavours and to justify Clement’s actions regarding the Jesuits. First he published a biography that provided a legitimate foundation for the fraudulent letters, seducing his readers by giving them an intimate view of the inner man. The result is a hybrid corpus fusing different literary and spiritual genres: apologetics, spiritual letters and biographies, and epistolary fiction. Gavoty provides fascinating intertextual analysis showing how Caraccioli’s letters echoed the Rousseauian model of inner authenticity: like La Nouvelle Héloïse, the Lettres intéressantes were designed to edify by revealing the simple and modest man — Lorenzo Ganganelli — and not just his official role as pope. But, almost immediately after their appearance, other writers began questioning the letters’ authenticity. What ensued was a series of polemical exchanges — an ‘Affaire clémentine’ — that, Gavoty argues, resembled Voltairean causes célèbres such as Jean Calas or the Chevalier de La Barre. Gavoty discusses how challenges came primarily from journalists, such as Élie Fréron, and individual polemicists, such as the Dominican Charles-Louis Richard (Diatribe clémentine, 1777), and the Jesuit Jacques Bonnard (Tartuffe épistolaire, 1777) who focused on Caraccioli’s impiety. Astoundingly, they found an ally in Voltaire, who likewise inveighed against the apocryphal nature of the letters. Caraccioli aggressively responded by adopting various voices, or ‘masks’, including that of Ganganelli’s cook who verified that the letters were genuine. Gavoty’s efforts to contextualize this literary duel are uneven: she alludes to the Jesuit/Jansenist controversy, suggesting that Caraccioli allied himself with the latter; however, she does not include any sustained discussion or background on the religious and political parameters of this conflict. She also suggests that Caraccioli’s appeal to different audiences, some religious and others more worldly, and his use of hybrid literary techniques, foreshadowed dechristianization by casting Clement XIV as more human than pontifical. Might not ‘desacralization’ be the more appropriate term here? Despite these shortcomings, Gavoty’s study persuasively illustrates how the Affaire clémentine was an important if forgotten chapter in the eighteenth-century history of books.