Father Menoux - Jesuit man of letters

 Yes, Messieurs, we live in the century of light ("le siècle des Lumières") and good taste; minds are more enlightened, discernment has become finer; a happy harmony characterises all our good books...
Joseph Menoux, Jesuit and famous anti-philosophe, 11th March 1751

He is a man of great talent and nonetheless much wit, who is a good Philosopher,  yet also a good Christian.

Fréron, commenting on Menoux in the Année littéraire in 1758.

Frontispiece to Menoux's Discourse on History

[continued from previous post]

Father Menoux's more direct dealings with the world of letters once again show the delicacy of his situation, this time in his relationship with Stanislas and his courtiers, and in his role in the Academy of Nancy. Far from being simply a heavy-handed opponent of the philosophes, he laboured under great difficulties to find any effective strategy to counter the advocates of Enlightenment irreligion. He seems finally to have given way under the strain and retired, to die largely forgotten and unlamented in 1765.

Father Menoux - Jesuit preacher and missionary

The Jesuit priest Father Joseph Menoux is remembered today, if at all, chiefly as an adversary of Voltaire. He warrants barely a footnote in the great sea of Voltaire studies or, at best, a repetition of Voltaire's own dismissive caricatures.  I decided to try and discover a little more about Menoux's life. It  proved to be an interesting exercise, and one which supplies something of an alternative perspective on the world of the Enlightenment writers. 

Early life

Sadly, there not a single anecdote or petty detail enlivens the perfunctory outline of Menoux's early life supplied in the biographical dictionaries.  We learn only that he was born in Besançon on 14th October 1695 - making him not quite a year younger than Voltaire  -, that he belonged to an "excellent famille de robe", and that he was always destined for an ecclesiastical career.  He began his studies with the Jesuits at the age of fourteen and remained in the order; we can assume that he attended the Jesuit college in Besançon, the imposing buildings of which still survive today.   He entered the Novitiate on 8th September 1711 and, having taught in a number of colleges, was singled out by his eloquence for a career as a preacher. 

The Jesuit college in Besançon  - now College Victor-Hugo
https://structurae.net/en/structures/college-victor-hugo 

The preacher

In 18th-century Catholic France a talented preacher could command a great deal of prestige.  Jesuits like Bourdaloue, and more recently, Charles Porée (d.1741), star of the Parisian house, attracted huge crowds.  They rubbed shoulders with the highest echelons of society, and attracted attention from the  Enlightenment world of culture and letters - to which the Jesuits themselves contributed through their Journal de Trévoux edited from the Maison professe in Paris.