Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tocqueville in his Time
- 1 Jansenism and Republicanism in Old Regime France
- 2 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and French Political Culture, 1789-1859
- 3 Providence: Jansenist Rhetoric in the Author’s Introduction to Democracy in America
- 4 Sovereignty: Tocqueville’s Modern Republicanism
- 5 Power and Virtue: The Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
- 6 Religion (I): The Freedom of Education and the ‘Twin Tolerations’ in France, 1843-1850
- 7 Religion (II): Tocqueville Antinomies, the Political Utility of Religion, and the American Double Foundation
- Conclusion: Building a Republic for the Moderns
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Jansenism and Republicanism in Old Regime France
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Tocqueville in his Time
- 1 Jansenism and Republicanism in Old Regime France
- 2 Tocqueville, Jansenism, and French Political Culture, 1789-1859
- 3 Providence: Jansenist Rhetoric in the Author’s Introduction to Democracy in America
- 4 Sovereignty: Tocqueville’s Modern Republicanism
- 5 Power and Virtue: The Necessity of the Political in a Democratic Age
- 6 Religion (I): The Freedom of Education and the ‘Twin Tolerations’ in France, 1843-1850
- 7 Religion (II): Tocqueville Antinomies, the Political Utility of Religion, and the American Double Foundation
- Conclusion: Building a Republic for the Moderns
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
By envisioning the early church as a community of austere communicants in an ecclesiastical republic, these histories ran parallel to the idealization of the Roman Republic or the early Frankish constitution in the civic humanist mode such as those of Montesquieu and the abbé Gabriel Bonnont de Mably. They belong with the literature of the Enlightenment, the ecclesiastical counterpart to its civic humanist strain.
Dale Van Kley's epigram is an excellent summation of what distinguishes the French ‘Machiavellian Moment’ from other European contexts. The reception of the Atlantic republican tradition in France was unmistakably shaped by a kind of civic humanism in clerical garb, especially the intertwined religious heritages of Jansenism and Gallicanism. While distinct, these two traditions evolved in similar spaces and through debates over the role of the Catholic Church in French society.
J.G.A. Pocock emphasizes how republican ideology developed in distinction to varying kinds of ‘Court’ ideologies. This is the case with Jansenism as well, whose history needs to be understood in dialogue with the ideology of Absolutism in France. Indeed, the ideology of the court may have been strongest in France where the king cured scrofula and was descended from Christ. In France, however, the religious context of resistance to the pope created a second type of ‘Country’ ideology, one that stimulated the development of republican visions of the early church as the depository of ancient laws. As a result, early modern republicanism in France was strongly inflected by the extension of Catholic consular ideals into the political. This relationship was strongest with those monarchists who used the thèse nobilitaire (thesis of the nobility) to conceive of the monarchy in the terms of the one, the few, and the many.
This chapter is too brief to provide the reader more than introduction to the space Jansenism occupied in French political culture. My goal here is to describe the long history of French Jansenism, give some sociological reasons for why Jansenism contributed so significantly to the development of the ideology of republicanism in France, and provide a theoretical definition of Jansenism. Although the religious ideas of Jansenism do not play a primary role in my interpretation of Tocqueville's political thought, it is necessary to give a substantive introduction to this religious mentality in order to understand why it was so conducive to the development of a particular French kind of republican political ideology.
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- Tocqueville, Jansenism, and the Necessity of the Political in a Democratic AgeBuilding a Republic for the Moderns, pp. 23 - 54Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015