The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1640-1710 · France
Port-Royal Jansenism
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About This Movement
Port-Royal was a Cistercian convent outside Paris, reformed into severity by a young abbess, Angélique Arnauld, and it became the centre of a movement that read Augustine on grace harder than the Jesuits or the French crown could tolerate. Around it gathered the solitaires — men of rank who gave up their careers to live plainly near the abbey, teach in its small schools and write. And in its orbit stood Blaise Pascal, whose Provincial Letters mocked Jesuit moral reasoning so effectively that the mockery outlived the quarrel. Rome condemned five propositions said to be contained in Jansen's Augustinus, and the nuns were required to sign a formulary declaring both that the propositions were heretical and that they were in the book. A core of them refused, on the ground that no one could compel them to swear to a matter of fact they had no way of knowing. Louis XIV lost patience: the nuns were dispersed in 1709 and the buildings pulled down, down to digging up the cemetery.
Sources
- The nuns' own records: Mere Angelique Arnauld's letters and Relations; Angelique de Saint-Jean's Relation de captivite (1664-65); the Constitutions and the nuns' collective Relations on the signature crises (primary) — The community's own voice: women's conscience under institutional siege, in their own words.
- Pascal from its orbit: The Provincial Letters (1656-57) and Pensees (1670) (primary) — The Provinciales are themselves a polemic, worth reading as one.
- The theological controversy and the destruction record: Jansen's Augustinus (1640), Arnauld's De la frequente communion (1643), Quesnel's Reflexions morales; Cum occasione (1653), the Formulary, Unigenitus (1713); the destruction of 1709-11 (primary) — A hostile, institutional source: the church's own condemnation and destruction paperwork, which also documents this community's actual end.
- The memoir tradition: Racine's Abrege de l'histoire de Port-Royal, Fontaine's and du Fosse's memoirs, the Memoires pour servir a l'histoire de Port-Royal (primary) — This community's own habit of documenting itself — an insider-advocate genre, worth reading as such.
- Daniella Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns (CUP, 2011), with Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France (1977) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Jansenism and the international suppression of the Jesuits' (Van Kley) (reference) — Aston's 'Continental Catholic Europe' sits beside it.