Exercer l'autorité: l'abbé de Cîteaux et la direction de l'ordre cistercien en Europe (1584–1651) by Bertrand Marceau (review)

A revision of a doctoral dissertation defended at the Sorbonne in 2013, this book is a lengthy, thorough, and at times tedious study of what may be viewed as a rather narrow topic. Directed by Alain Tallon, Marceau's thesis focused on how abbots of the abbey of Cîteaux exercised their authority over two-thirds of a century. The period is in fact a particularly vibrant one in politics, church history, and related matters from the latter stages of the French Wars of Religion to the majority of the young King Louis XIV. In the context of the Cistercian order, 1584 corresponds to the beginning of the twenty years of Edme de la Croix as abbot of Cîteaux, while 1651 was marked by a general chapter of the order.

Marceau's book demonstrates how complex and contested the exercise of abbatial authority could be. The abbot of Cîteaux was both abbot of one abbey only, albeit an exceptionally important one, and, ex officio, also superior general of the Cistercians, not only in France, but wherever houses of the order were. He had to deal with a broad range of overlapping and competing claims to authority. Monastic chapters, in his own monastery, or of the whole order, were a source of alternate authority. In France the monarch used the title Most Christian King and claimed rights over the Church that included appointment of abbots as well as of visitors sent to reform religious houses. Cardinal Richelieu was for a time not only first minister to Louis XIII but abbot of Cîteaux, though he was hardly a monk. State authorities intervening in monastic affairs also included the French parlements, courts that could support or oppose legal claims of the Cistercians. The abbot was a feudal lord and had plenty of secular legal matters to deal with in addition to everything else. Cistercian houses outside France had to contend with claims of their own 'secular' rulers, and these rulers often posed obstacles to any French or other foreign supervision in their territories, thus challenging the very notion of an international religious order. (Jesuits were hardly the only order to face this kind of difficulty.) Popes also claimed authority over the Cistercians, no matter their location or nationality, and local bishops chafed at assertions of exemption of religious from episcopal jurisdiction. Among Cistercians themselves, the seventeenth century was a time of growing tension between those favoring a stricter observance (one that would, for example, forbid consumption of meat) and those wishing to retain a more moderate observance. Abbots of Cîteaux had to manage this source of division, one difficult to heal. The tension would eventually result in a separate Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), though this development came later than in the years studied here.

This volume is well-worth the attention of historians. Maps, an index, and a bibliography enhance its accessibility and usefulness. For those who think that there was some kind of golden age of the Church in the past—when all accepted Church authority—this study offers a case study of just how problematic exercise of such authority could be, in an age often termed one of absolutism. Contestation of authorities, not simplistic submission to them, may have been characteristic of what in France is called le Grand Siècle.