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Conclusion
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. See Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution (NewYork:W.W. Norton, ). . In this sense, on the political rather than the economic level, and making allowance for the diversity of options, there may be some truth in the much-criticized thesis of Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché: Étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, ). At the same time, there may be some connection between the erudite Gallicans’ tendency to “privatize” sacramental order and the Jansenist subordination of sacramental efficacy to interior conversion. The best overview of the development of Conclusion I , the Estates General of and the Assembly of the Clergy of marked the high point both of erudite Gallicanism and of the clerical reaction to it. Having failed in their attempt to impose their own vision of a stable monarchy controlling ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and faced with the ever more complete collapse of juristic influence within the corridors of royal power, the erudite Gallicans in fact had nowhere much to go. Their anti-Jesuit polemics continued almost unabated, but those polemics were increasingly cultural rather than political in scope. Jesuit rhetoric, Jesuit aesthetics, and, above all, Jesuit penitential practice were the favored targets of religiously minded French patriots, who could not expect to get much of anywhere by accusing Louis XIII or Louis XIV’s confessors of treason and of undermining the kingdom’s fundamental laws. The abject failure of the parlementaire Fronde a generation later confirmed all this in a most dramatic fashion.1 Gradually, erudite Gallicans retreated from independent political action, looked to their own individual good, and often turned into royalist partisans (like Molé or Dupuy), or into Jansenists (like the Arnauds).2 It was in the latter capacity that they would reenter the 6! Conclusion French Jansenism is now William Doyle, Jansenism: Catholic Resistance to Authority from the Reformation to the French Revolution (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, ). . On the dispute with the Parlement of Rennes (which was seconded by Molé and the Parlement of Paris), see Pierre Blet, Le clergé de France et la monarchie: Étude sur les Assemblées Générales du Clergé de à , vols. (Rome: Librairie éditrice de l’Université Grégorienne, ), :–.The edict granted to the clergy is in M. Isambert and A Jourdan, eds., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, depuis l’an jusqu’à la revolution de , vols. (Paris: BelinLeprieur , –), :–. Isambert points out that, not surprisingly, no court registered this edict. . On this incident, see Michael K. Becker, “Episcopal Unrest: Gallicanism in the Assembly of the Clergy,” Church History (): –; and Blet, Le clergé, :–. . “Supplement ou critique de l’assemblée du clergé de france tenüe en l’année par Mr. de chartres,” AN *G8 , , .The procès-verbal of the Assembly does not give the justi fications for suppressing this document, but according to a marginal note in this archival copy, “une des causes de la suppression de cet avis, est l’infaillibilité du pape. v. l’art. ” (p. ). What that article says about papal infallibility, however, is completely uncontroversial, applying it only to faith, not doctrine; the title of “evêque des evêques” that it gives the pope, however, is one the French clergy had disdained since the thirteenth century, as implying that episcopal jurisdiction was not jure divino. This must have been the excuse for suppressing d’Estampe’s treatise. theater of national politics in the eighteenth century, with an ideology once more transformed and renewed for a new era. This is not to say, though, that the development of erudite Gallicanism and its opponents after was simple or linear.This can be seen as early as , when the Assembly of the Clergy rehashed the issues of – in an even messier fashion than before. Much of what happened there was old hat. After bitter complaints about the enterprises of the Parlement of Rennes, for example, the prelates obtained their most definitive royal declaration to date against the harassment of bishops by the secular courts.3 However, as the Assembly of the Clergy progressed, some cracks began to appear in the prelates’ formerly united anti-Gallican front. This was above all the work of one man, Léonore d’Estampes, bishop of Chartres. In reaction to some jurisdictional excesses by a papal subdelegate, he drew up a statement on bishops’ rights of visitation over regular clergy sufficiently radical in its episcopalism that the nuncio was...
