The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint. A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France by Mita Choudhury (review)

The "Wanton Jesuit" was Fr. Jean-Baptiste Girard, the "Wayward Saint" his penitent, Catherine Cadière. These were potent labels that were not easily removed from either party when their confidential relationship broke down, escaped from the confessional, blew into the law courts, and became anything but private. As Mita Choudhury shows in this compelling study of a cause célèbre of 1730s France, it was a case of quot homines, tot sententiae, with views on guilt and innocence having far more to do with what one thought of the clergy—and the Jesuits in particular—than such facts as emerged. Indeed, Professor Choudhury admits that, forensically speaking, the charges of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment cannot be decisively determined. Her objective is rather to reconsider the trial and its importance in the questioning of traditional authority in the kingdom and the extent to which the sacred and divine in French society was being openly challenged. "At bottom," she contends, "it was a political affair" (4).

The affair erupted at an inopportune time for the Jesuits. Just at the moment when Cardinal Fleury had committed himself to an anti-Jansenist stance, a year after the royal declaration of March 1730 that the bull Unigenitus was "the law of church and state" in France, Jansenist devotees received an opportunity for a counter-offensive against the Jesuits that offset the limited appeal of the convulsionnaires currently writhing and screaming in the cemetery of Saint-Médard. Not that the vessel through whom they might mount a challenge to the establishment, Mlle Cadière, could be defined as overtly pro-Jansenist. She was a devout Toulonnaise, from a bourgeois background (her father had married an olive oil heiress) where piety was ingrained. Despite smallpox, she grew into an attractive young woman who gravitated without pressure into an urban social circle composed of dévotes. Fr. Girard was an outsider in Toulon, from the Franche-Comté, and, like other members of the Society, he encountered resentment from the well-established Oratorians in the town, an order that was not unsympathetic to Unigenitus. Girard's fame as a confessor and spiritual director came before him, and when he assumed those roles with Catherine in 1728, it might be presumed that the convergence was most apt.

Not so. At first all was well: Catherine established herself as the star penitent within his coterie of dévotes at a time when she began to experience ecstatic visions that validated themselves without any necessary clerical mediation and risked charges of Quietism. This fraught development precipitated the collapse of the relationship and her transfer to a new, sympathetic confessor, Fr. Nicolas Girieux, a Barefoot Carmelite, no friend of the Jesuits. A few months later, in spring 1731, pamphlet wars erupted as the enemies of the Jesuits accused Girard of abusing her faith and innocence to gratify his passions, while he and his followers portrayed her as a fantasist and false mystic. The Cadière family had found an able lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Chaudon, and he took the case to court determined to clear Catherine's name.

It is these complicated and fascinating legal proceedings (and the bitter war of words waged around them) that take-up the last two-thirds of Choudhury's book. The Crown remitted the case to the Parlement of Provence at Aix, where the judges might be expected to pronounce in favor of Fr. Girard; Chaudon countered by placing judicial mémoires sympathetic to his client before the public. Lobbying took place at the highest levels in Paris as the case became enmeshed in the reignited conflicts around Jansenism. The trial proceedings and the arguments and counter-arguments of the lawyers were widely reported, part of what Choudhury calls a "national obsession" (127) with the case. Given that the anti-Cadi...