The Convulsionnaires, Palissot, and the Philosophical Battles of 1760

The year 1760 was exceptionally difficult for the intellectuals affiliated with the French philosophic movement. Coming right after such ugly events as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noisy defection from the circle of philosophes, the condemnation and burning of Claude Adrien Helvétius's De l'Esprit (1758), and the revocation of the privilège of the Encyclopédie, this was when Charles Palissot de Montenoy's satirical comedy Les Philosophes skewered Rousseau, Helvétius and Denis Diderot on stage by painting them as Tartuffe-like scoundrels.¹ It was also a year when spectacles of a more violent sort captured the attention of Parisian witnesses and readers around Europe: scenes of ritualized self-mortification that were being staged by convulsionaries tied to the religious movement known as Jansenism.

Jansenism was a strand of Catholicism that emerged in the seventeenth century among disciples of Cornelius Jansenius (bishop of Ypres), whose major work Augustinus (1640) preached a return to the austere, predestinarian doctrine of Saint Augustine.² Styling themselves as the defenders of the essential truths of the Christian faith, its adherents insisted on the sinfulness and corruption of man and society. They opposed both the optimistic conception of the human condition that had come out of the Renaissance and the theology of the Society of Jesus, which they considered lax and excessively accommodating to worldly mores. On top of their battle with the Jesuits, Jansenists endured decades of persecution from the royal government, which suspected them of being hostile to France's absolute monarchy and thus a potential source of political subversion. This persecution culminated with a series of acts by Louis XIV toward the end of his reign: the closing and demolition of the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs, the symbolic center of Jansenism, in 1709–11; and the repressive Unigenitus bull, which Pope Clement XI promulgated in 1713 at the French King's request. This papal bull condemned the book Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament (1692), where the Oratorian Father Pasquier Quenel had tried to present "the spirit and message of Jansenism in terms more easily accessible to the laity … while advocating increased lay participation with the clergy in public worship" (MCEP, 8). It denounced many of Quesnel's propositions as heretical and pointed out Jansenism's similarities to Calvinism.³ Although Louis XIV's aim in promoting and enforcing Unigenitus was to crush Jansenism, the results were quite different: the bull and the king's actions reinvigorated the movement (JL, 13).

One reaction to Unigenitus was convulsionism, a fringe branch of Jansenism that began in the late 1720s in the Parisian cemetery of Saint-Médard. Its adepts performed miracle cures brought about, they claimed, by contact with the tomb or relics of the Deacon François de Pâris, a self-sacrificing ascetic who denounced Unigenitus and became the focus of a cultish following after he died in 1727. These assemblies, which drew large crowds until the authorities closed the cemetery in 1732, involved highly kinetic expressions of religious experience like spasms, contortions, and feats of strength, accompanied by trance-like states and apparent imperviousness to pain. One convulsionary, the 22-year-old Marie Sonet, was called "La Salamandre" because she exposed herself to fiery treatments but appeared incombustible.⁴ Another famous participant was the abbé Bescherand de la Motte. Afflicted with an atrophied left leg, he went twice a day to Saint-Médard in the fall of 1731 "to pray for a cure, whereby he might demonstrate both the reality of the miracles and the injustice of Vintimille's recent decree [to ban the Pâris cult]" (MCEP, 174–75).⁵ Although less public by 1760, convulsionaries were still active in conventicles in Paris and other French cities, most notably Lyon.⁶ During this period, their demonstrations of faith sometimes entailed literal martyrdom in the form of what they called grands secours, a term that roughly translates as great succor or great relief.

Adepts of convulsionism regarded these practices as proof of the Oeuvre de la vérité, the force of God actively speaking through the...