The Catholic Church of the Ancien Régime

This was the Catholic Church at the height of its establishment and on the edge of its worst crisis: enormously wealthy, woven into the monarchies of Europe, and increasingly unable to control them. Rome's condemnation of Jansenism in the bull Unigenitus (1713) turned into a fifty-year political crisis in France, with parlements and bishops fighting over it. Then the Catholic monarchies turned on the church's most effective order, expelling the Jesuits from Portugal, France, Spain and Naples and forcing the pope to suppress the Society altogether in 1773. Then came the Revolution: church property nationalized, clergy required to swear to a Civil Constitution that split them into jurors and refractories, thousands killed or driven abroad, and Pope Pius VI carried off to die a French prisoner in 1799. His successor signed a concordat with Napoleon in 1801, was imprisoned by him in turn, outlived him, and restored the Jesuits in 1814.