The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590-1615) (review)

The revision of generally accepted positions in the historiography of France during and after the period of the Wars of Religion has gained considerable momentum in recent years. Alongside the "spectacular" works of Natalie Davis and Denis Crouzet, we now have a considerable body of scholarship which attacks topics perhaps less vast than religious violence, but whose careful sifting of surviving evidence and challenge to established arguments make it no less valuable and welcome. It has been possible to throw new light on subjects as essential as Henri III's rule, the Catholic League (especially in the provinces), the Guises, the conversion of Henri IV, and the return of political stability during the 1590's. Eric Nelson's book is all the more welcome in that it tackles an even more contentious topic, which has been almost immune to revision up to now—the role of the Jesuits during the Catholic League, their subversive political teachings, their condoning of regicide, their expulsion from and return to France under Henri IV, and the uproar which followed the king's assassination in 1610 by one of their former students. The "black legend" of the Jesuits as dangerous subversives has endured, picking up additional dimensions over the centuries and entering the common discourse of French politics, especially under the Third Republic. Efforts by the Jesuits' own historians did not really make much of an impact on historical judgments, leaving the field open to later historians who did not share the "French passions" of an earlier age. Nelson has benefited from the research of historians like A. Lynn Martin and Pierre Blet, both of whom brought scholarly detachment to their studies of the Jesuits before and after the reign of Henri IV. But Nelson's is the first fully researched and properly documented study of the problem of the Jesuits in France from the latter phases of the religious wars to the Estates General of 1615. Its subtitle is important, since this is not so much a study of the Jesuits themselves as of the evolution of the Society's relationship with the French crown—one that underwent dramatic and unforeseeable transformation in less than a generation. This is a study of the politics of exclusion, banishment, restoration, and return to royal favor in the face of often considerable opposition from within powerful and articulate segments of the French socio-political elite.

The first virtue of Nelson's approach is not to think of the dramatis personae in terms of preconceived "blocs." Martin had already shown how divided the French Jesuits themselves were as the religious wars developed, with Gallicans as prominent among them as ultramontanes, and that Jesuit political supporters of League were quite few. Likewise, their patrons and supporters were not of a single stripe, and they were to be found among magistrates of the parlements as much as among the aristocracy and the urban notables. But the Jesuits' position in France throughout the religious wars was legally and politically weak, and they did not yet enjoy the royal patronage that would be such a feature of their later history. Other religious orders had far cosier and long-standing relations with the crown, while the Jesuits' educational activities made enemies of the University of Paris from the outset, an enmity which was still alive and well into the 1590's and beyond. Yet it took exceptional circumstances for these weaknesses of the Jesuits' position to do them real damage. Until Chastel's attempt on Henri IV's life in 1594, the idea that the Jesuits were the "real" subversive force—because they were of Spanish and papal sympathies—within the Catholic League was confined to a small hardcore of enemies like Antoine Arnauld and Etienne Pasquier. The attempted regicide changed all that, at...