The skull of Bishop Jean Soanen of Senez

I came across an old life of the Jansenist Bishop Soanen of Senez, dated 1902, which piqued my curiosity, since it was subtitled  "his retraction, his death, his skull". The story of the skull appears on pg. 60, and is taken from a Lyon newspaper article of February 1890.  We learn that a skull, said to be that of Soanen, had been inherited by a young man who subsequently sold it for next to nothing to an antiques dealer in the Quartier des Terreaux.  He in turn sold it for 1,000 francs to a "Jansenist lady", who apparently already owned the bishop's jawbone. Sieur B. the agent who had secured the transaction, touting around the skull in a silk lined casket,  now demanded 500 francs in commission and threatened legal action. 

The case was eventually settled out of court.

As the writer notes, the incident proved that Jansenist piety and veneration for the appellant cause was live and well among the anticoncordataires of 19th-century Lyon, who were few in number,  but represented several influential and wealthy families.

I was motivated to find out more about the bishop and his relics.

Port-Royal in 1814

Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck
National Portrait Gallery

The 19th-century writer Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (1778-1856) was the daughter of the Quaker businessman  Samuel John Galton. and wife of Lambert Schimmelpenninck, a member of a noble Dutch family trading living in Bristol. She was introduced to the writings of Port-Royal through Hannah More and wrote several works popularising Jansenist piety. 

 In 1816 she published a history of the destruction of Port-Royal, which included an account of a journey she herself made to the ruins during a tour of the Continent in 1814. 

Here are a few extracts:

Jansenist pilgrimage (cont.)

STATION VII: Church of Saint-Jean-des-Trous, Boullay

The commune of Boullay-les-Troux, with its church of  Saint Jean l'Evangéliste, is about ten kilometres south of Port-Royal des Champs. In the 17th century Boullay was the seigneurial domain of Guillaume du Gué de Bagnols (1616-57), Maître des Requêtes in the Parlement of Paris and one of the principal protectors of Port-Royal -  the château de Boullay (demolished in 1825) once housed some of the Petites Ecoles. Gué de Bagnols had rebuilt the adjacent church in 1652.  On the night of December 4th 1711 his remains, together with those of his wife, daughter and two other family members, were secretly transferred there from the Abbey. They were initially buried behind the altar, then in 1735 moved by his grandson to a specially constructed crypt.  Gué de Bagnols's original tombstone is conserved in Magny-les-Hameaux.

Port-Royal - an 18th-century pilgrimage

https://books.google.co.uk/
books?id=tiKa2Sc3l8kC

Louis XIV had ordered that Port-Royal des Champs should be "razed to the ground".  He desired by this act of destruction to obliterate all physical remains, to leave the Jansenists with no places of memory and pilgrimage.  He didn't quite succeed.....

Here is a Jansenist "Manual for pilgrims" dating from 1767 which sets out a pilgrimage route to the major sites associated with 17th-century Jansenism.  It is one of several similar publications.  The work is prefaced provocatively with letter by Cardinal Bellarmine on the canonisation of saints. There are  various helpful texts - a  necrology and history of Port-Royal, catalogue of major Jansenist writings, plus a full office for the veneration of relics. 

The stopping points are listed as a series of "Stations", each with accompanying prayers, psalms and hymns, in Latin and French. Notes signalled by a pointing hand give details of the tombs, relics and other objects to be found at each location, together with suggested prayers for intercession.


It is interesting - and in the light of the fate Port-Royal, sad - to see the concern lavished in this Catholic world on physical remains.  It was the common practice for hearts, and even entrails, to be removed and interred separately at different locations. Despite the determined tone of the manual, the welcome at former Jansenists strongholds was clearly often frosty and the surviving relics often conspicuously meagre. 

Eighteenth century at the Museum of Port-Royal-des-Champs

Over Easter I was lucky enough to visit the site of the Abbey Port-Royal-des-Champs in Magny-les-Hameaux just south of Versailles - close to the busy N10 and the urban sprawl of modern Paris, but psychologically a million miles away.  It was one of the few sunny days of the year so far and the ruins, though meagre, were beautiful and peaceful.  The 17th-century lodge at Les Granges houses a museum, with iconic works by Philippe de Champaigne.  Upstairs is a marvellous room dedicated to the 18th-century history of Jansenism.  Here is a little "virtual tour".  The lighting was awful for photographs, so I have taken most of the images of the paintings from the RMN Images d'Art website.  (As this site reveals, the current display is only a few highlights of  whole collection.)

Far wall (left):

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743) Portrait of Jean-Baptiste de Santeuil ( 1630-1697)

A canon of Saint-Victor de Paris, Santeuil was known principally as a Latin poet, author of verses to the glory of the Gallican church.  He composed the epitaph of Antoine Arnauld.  M. de Coustard, contrôleur général de la grande Chancellerie, commissioned from Rigaud in 1704, a trio of portraits - La Fontaine, Boileau-Despreau and Santeuil.

Some Jansenist relics

This assortment of "Jansenist" reliquaries has been gathered together on the website of the Diocese of Paris. It is a striking testament to just how readily the ancient cult of relics was extended to the Jansenist "saints" of the 17th and 18th centuries. 

The fragments are mostly tiny and unidentifiable - the most substantial body part is a tooth belonging to the abbé de Pontchâteau, Cardinal Richelieu's nephew and "gardener" of Port-royal; his coffin had been forced open in 1690 after a young girl was supposedly healed during his funeral. 

Voltaire: Jansenist?

Voltaire : was he influenced by Jansenism? 

René Pomeau has argued persuasively that a preoccupation with religion was a key aspect of Voltaire's psyche from an early age. In the years 1719-1722 he was already voicing his opposition to the "Dieu terrible" of the Jansenists and displayed a precocious anti-clericalism "whose origin escapes us"(La Religion de Voltaire, p.34).  It is hard not to see the negative influence of Armand: at the time of their father's death in 1722 both brothers were nominally still living together under the same paternal roof.  Their quarrels were echoed in the 1721 Epître in which Voltaire maintained that his brother would laugh at his funeral; Voltaire's accompanying note reports that he used to enrage Armand, "an extreme Jansenist",  by defending the Jesuits against him.(Epître XXI, A M. le Maréchal de Villars, 1721)

Pomeau concluded that the family background had created two brothers who were both obsessed with religion - Armand, a Jansenist troubled by doubt, and Voltaire, whose passionate hostility to religion was "un fanatisme retourné " (p.36)  A stark dichotomy between unbelief and absolute faith characterises the Jansenist mindset of the 1720s - Montgeron's spectacular conversion is a case in point.  According to the Jansenist manuscript Notes historiques, Voltaire himself maintained that one must be "either a deist like himself, or a secouriste like his brother (Gazier, p.625).  Much later in his life Jacob Vernet made the same point: Voltaire saw no middle ground between libertinism and religious enthusiasm (See Pomeau, p.36-7)

Armand Arouet, Voltaire's Jansenist brother

 "I  have two fools for sons, one in prose and the other in verse"
Attributed to François Arouet, father of Voltaire: 
 (Duvernet, Vie de Voltaire p.35)

"I used to have a Jansenist brother;  his ferocious manner gave me a distaste for 'the party'"
Letter of Voltaire to the marquis d'Argens, August 1752


Armand, brother of Voltaire

It is a fascinating, if little known, fact that Voltaire's elder brother Armand was a fanatical Jansenist.  Frustratingly, we know very little about him; Voltaire's writings amount to several million words but he is almost entirely silent on the subject of his family. Most of the information available derives from the researches of  Auguste Gazier who in 1906 published an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes entitled  "Le frère de Voltaire".

A Convulsionist - Gabrielle Moulère

Gabrielle Moulère (sometimes Moller), and her sister Jeanne were among the best known practitioners of les grands secours, made famous - or notorious - largely through Montgeron's account and the set of anonymous engravings included in Book 3 of La vérité des miracles. Gabrielle was born in Paris on 10th March 1722, rue Saint-Victor, in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet.  Her father was a cobbler. There  were five children in all  - Jeanne (born 1712);  Marie (born 1715); Jean (born 1719); Gabrielle (born 1722) and Louison (born 1728).The whole family were involved in the oeuvre des convulsions,  with Madame Moulère  assisting at the secours of Jeanne and Gabrielle, in their own home or at the houses of their rich adherents.  Gabrielle was scarcely in her teens at the time.  The girls rapidly ran foul of the authorities: Jeanne was arrested at the home of the marquise de Vieuxpont on 22 November 1737 and Gabrielle on October 30th 1738 (according to some sources 1739) at the country house of  M. d'Arginvilliers in Lardi.  After a brief spell in the Bastille, they were incarcerated in La Salpêtrière and, in Jeanne's case, in Sainte-Pélagie.  Gabrielle was to languish in prison for nine years.

Illustration 1 - Gabrielle is beaten with a heavy iron bar

Despite the inevitable accusations of hysteria or deliberately manipulation of her well-to-do patrons, Gabrielle's commanding presence and sincere belief in her mission were widely attested.  Sympathetic eye-witnesses were deeply impressed by the power of her prophetic gifts. She refused steadfastly to abandon her faith in the secours, preferring to remain in the harsh confines of La Salpêtrière where she died at the age of only twenty-six on 29th March 1748.  After her death she was venerated as a Jansenist saint and the miraculous cure of one Mlle Cécile d'Achon, daughter of an advocate of the Présidial in Nantes, attributed to her intercession.

The Convulsionaries - some first-hand accounts

The vast amount of documentation available on the Convulsionnaires, even just on the internet, is daunting.  I was quite pleased, therefore, to find a couple of old books in English which contain summaries and translations of some of the more famous cases, mostly taken from Montgeron.  Both are based largely on the work of the famous psychiatrist Louis-Florentin Calmeil (1798-1895), author of De la folie (1845); Calmeil's basic thesis was the existence of a pathological state he called a théomanie extaso-convulsive.  His selection from the sources includes the Protestants of the Cévenne  is inevitably biased towards the sensational, but the passages are genuine enough.  Most, but not all, the examples involve supposed miraculous cures.

CATHERINE BIGOT

Catherine Bigot, a deaf-mute, was one of the earliest cases to exhibit convulsionary symptoms. 

"On the 27th of August, 1731, Montgeron relates, they conducted to the cemetery of Saint Médard, a young girl, deaf and dumb from her birth. As soon as she was placed on the tomb, she fell into most terrible convulsions, accompanied with a great perspiration, and manifested, by her gestures, that she was suffering principally in her head, in the throat, and the ears. After the attack, she remained as if dead, and they were obliged to remove her from the tomb. Having, in some degree, recovered her senses, she gave them to understand, by signs, that she wished to be placed again on the tomb, which was accordingly done. The convulsions immediately recommenced with more violence than before, and they carried her away a second time, to enable her to breathe. They yielded again to the desire she evinced, to be brought back to the tomb-stone of the deacon; the convulsions returned, and they were forced to carry away the patient to her own home, where she remained until nine o'clock at night, violently agitated with convulsive movements.

The 28th of August, 1731, she made a second visit to the sepulchre of the Deacon Paris, and the result was a return of the convulsions, which were only allayed at the end of the day. The 29th and the 30th of August, after a kind of swooning, the young invalid found she was able to hear and speak, but, it is said, without understanding the sense of the words which struck upon her ear." (See Montgeron, vol. 2, p. 10f) 
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kzgl6Ois5qEC&pg=PA52-IA35#v=onepage&q&f=false

The "Augustinistes"

The so-called Augustinistes were yet another fringe millenarian group spawned by the convulsionist movement of the 1730s.  They were almost invariably coupled by contemporaries with the Vaillantistes, but their conclusions were more extreme; unlike the gentle Pierre Vaillant, the notorious frère Augustin, their founder, was an unhinged and, even allowing for the bias of the sources, a thoroughly unpleasant character.

The Prophet Elijah is reincarnated

The prophet Elijah is a certain Vaillant, a curé from the Diocese of Troyes, who is at present imprisoned in Bicêtre.  They say that he is a man who has fasted so much and so pickled his body by his austerities, that his brain has been affected and he thinks in good faith that he is the Prophet Elijah.  He has gone so far as to take the stagecoach to Metz, and present himself to the Jews as the Prophet Elijah; but the Jews regarded him as a madman and kicked him out on his backside.....
(Barbier, Journal, vol.ii, p.527; December 1734)

 As Catherine Maire has shown, a "figurist" reading of Scripture, associated with the abbé Duguet, the abbé Étemare and other theologians at Saint-Magloire permeated Jansenist thought in the 1730s and suffused it with with millenarian expectation.  Analogies and correspondances proliferated.  Among the best known Biblical passages referring to the Last Days was Romans Chapter 11 which foretold the return to earth of the Prophet Elijah and the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity.  It was perhaps inevitable that someone would eventually claim that Elijah had returned or even, more extravagantly, that they themselves were Elijah. That person was the abbé  Pierre Vaillant.

 Ascent of Elijah Plate from Thomas Macklin's Bible, c.1800

Miracle cures - Restout's illustrations (cont)

Here are the cures from the first volume of Montgeron's with their paired illustrations:

Alphonse de Palacio

Montgeron's first case was neither a woman nor a humble working person.  Dom Alphonse de Palacio, was the sixteen-year old son of a Spanish court official,in Paris studying at the Collège de Navarre.  He had been almost blinded in an accident and sought the aid of Europe's leading oculists to no avail.  Having already lost the sight of his left eye, his right one was so inflamed and weakened that on 30th June 1731 Mr Gendron, doctor to the duke of Orléans certified his condition as incurable. He was unable to bear any light. On 2nd July, when he lay his head on the tomb of the Deacon, the sight in his right eye was perfectly restored so that "he could bear with no discomfort the rays of the sun"; he rushed home and stayed up all night to commit his testimony to paper.

Jean Restout and the miracles of Saint-Médard

A full bibliographic study of  history of Montgeron's La vérité des miracles is yet to be written (see Kreiser, p.378 nt.).  The first volume, which contains detailed accounts of the miracles of Saint-Médard, is generally considered the most interesting.  It went to the press in late 1736 or early 1737.  The first edition was printed in Urecht under the supervision of the abbé Nicolas Le Gros, closely followed by one clandestinely published in Paris - it was this edition which was destroyed in Hérault's bonfires.  The book runs to over 900 pages and contains striking full-page engravings after originals by Jean Restout.  The duc de Luynes reckoned that it had cost Montgeron over 1,000 livres to produce.

Louis Carré de Montgeron, defender of Jansenist miracles

In 1731 Louis-Basile Carré de Montgeron (1686-1754), a magistrate of the Parlement of Paris in his mid-forties, experienced a miraculous conversion at the tomb of the diacre Pâris. He henceforth dedicated all his energies and his considerable fortune to the Jansenist cause, preparing a monumental three-volume defence of "the truth of the miracles of M. de Pâris". What, one wonders, could have motivated such a man?

Convulsionaries in the 1730s

Despite the consternation of the faithful, the closure of the cemetery of Saint-Médard in January 1731 did not destroy the Jansenist convulsionnaire movement  - far from it, though one of the effects was undoubtedly to de-emphasise miracles of healing in favour of prophetic and charismatic gifts. In an effort to escape police surveillance, adherents dispersed into small gatherings in private homes and religious houses: within a few weeks they had spread into the suburbs of Paris and cells took root in the provinces - in Champagne, Lyon, Eure, Troyes and Auxerre. The groups kept alive the cult of the diacre Pâris  through relics such as earth from his grave or water drawn from a well which had once belonged to him, so that  private homes became "stations of the little cemetery of Saint-Médard". Participants were also mindful of the organisational example of the conventicles of the early Church.

Illustration of a Convulsionary meeting by Bernard Picart,
Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde

The separate cells were sometimes in contact, but do not seem to have evolved into a formal organisation. Membership was open to "friends of the truth" who were "sponsored" by existing members;  most adherents continued to pursue their ordinary daily lives outside the fixed meetings. Most were of humble origins, but noble and bourgeois converts were crucial in providing patronage and protection from the police.   Among them, besides Montgeron himself, were the lawyer Olivier Pinault,  Edward Lord Drummond, the duchesse de Rochechouart,  comte de Tilly;  the marquis d'Arbois, the comtesse de Lampsac, the chevalier de Falord and the retired royal secretary Louis Fontane, who ate his meals on his knees.  In a study based on 384 individuals, the historian Daniel Vidal found that adherents divided roughly 60% female to 40% male and confirmed that they were recruited mainly from the petty bourgeoisie and artisan classes (Stryer, p.254-5 gives various other statistical estimates, generally similar in conclusion; the chronology is a bit vague, especially summary form.  The best guess for total numbers is between 600 and 700 total adherents by 1733.)

Miracles at Saint-Médard

The Church of Saint-Médard

Here are some twilight photos of the church of Saint-Médard, scene in the 1730s of so many supposed miracles and extraordinary frenzied convulsions.  The playground is all that remains of the cemetery which once housed the famous tomb of the diacre Pâris.  Then as now, it was a run-down area.  The fabric of the church dates mainly from the 16th and 17th centuries.  In the 18th century, although the parish fell under the direct jurisdiction of the archbishops of Paris, the curés-prieurs who officiated were provided by the nearby Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève.  Father Pommart the priest at the time of the deacon's death was a Jansenist sympathiser, who was popular with his churchwardens and with his poor parishioners. The cemetery bordered the church to the south and  east,  with the larger southern section running along the rue Censier.  In winter a large communal pit would be dug to receive the bodies of the dead.  The eastern part  where the diacre Pâris was interred, was situated against the outside wall of the chapel in the apse, bounded on three sides by the charnel house.

 Saint-Médard today (Google Maps)

Jérôme-Nicolas Pâris, brother of the diacre

Benoît Audran le Jeune, after a painting by Jean Restout 

This engraving, by Benoît Audran after a portrait by Jean Restout, shows Jérôme-Nicolas, the younger brother of the diacre  Pâris.  He has the same pointed features as his older brother, accentuated by a life of austerity, but  here, as in all his portraits, he appears in splendid magisterial robes with long, carefully curled hair.  His otherworldly aura contrasts with his proud list of titles: 

"Chevalier. vicomte de Machault Romain, seigneur de Muire, Branscourt et autres lieux  Conseiller du Roy en sa Cour de Parlement [et Première Chambre des Enquestes]"

Newly rediscovered portrait of the diacre Pâris

Jean Restout, L’abbé Tournus en compagnie du diacre Pâris sur le chemin de Port Royal
 oil, 104.5cm x 135cm

Last December this painting by Jean Restout was auctioned in Rouen, with an estimate of between €20,000 and €25,000.  It is variously titled "The abbé Tournus in the company of the diacre Pâris on the road to Port-Royal" and "The pilgrimage of piety".  The subject was previously known from a fine engraving by G.F. Schmidt, but the original painting is newly rediscovered.  It had apparently belonged to the same family in Haute-Normandie for several generations and was found hanging on their stairs by a member of the auction house, Delphine Frémaux-Lejeune.  I haven't managed to find out who bought it.

The picture provides further confirmation of the close ties between François de Pâris and other members of the Jansenist "resistance".  The abbé Louis-Firmin Tournus (1672-1733) was his close associate. The biographies at first referred to him only as "Monsieur Louis" but the 1743 edition of Doyen identifies him by name and reproduces an obituary from the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques for 1734. The abbé's life of penitence, prayer and fasting closely paralleled the deacon's own.  In 1715 he had renounced his parish in the diocese of Agde and come to Paris to live among the Jansenists at the seminary of St. Magloire and the community of St-Hilaire.  According to his obituary, in 1721 Pâris sought him out, knocking on his door, and inviting him to join with him in a life of penitence. The Testament names Tournus as a close friend who has "edified him by his instruction and his example"; Tournus inherited Pâris's library of 200 books.

In 1729, after the deacon's death, Tournus set up a new community with the abbé Gaspard Terrasson and Charles Lajus (aka M. Sylva)  The three lived for some time in retreat at   Notre-Dame de la Gorge in Savoy in the foothills of the Alps. Both these men were involved in the publishing enteprises sponsored by the Jansenist magistrate Carré de Montgeron in the 1730s.  On his return to Paris, Tournus himself was spiritual adviser to the Montgeron family. He died in the Jansenist community of St. Josse in 1733. 

See:

Abregé de la vie de M. Tournus Compagnon de M. de Paris, ou Extrait des Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques du 10 Janvier 1734

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cOM1L512-WwC&pg=PR29#v=onepage&q&f=false

Abbé Tournus in prayer

Musée Carnavalet

The artist Jean Restout was a well-known painter of religious subjects.   He came from a family of painters from Rouen and was one of eleven children, at least three of whom were professed monks. He was received into the Royal Academy of Painting in 1720, and worked mainly for the regular orders.  He had come into contact with Jansenist circles through the intermediary of his uncle and mentor  the history painter Jean-Baptiste Jouvenet (1692-1768) There are other existent studies of the abbé Tournus  in various collections, including the Carnavalet and the Musée de Port-Royal. He also painted a deathbed scene of the diacre Pâris with his brother Jérôme-Nicolas - who in all probability commissioned these various portraits. 

References

Notice for the sale: Normandy Auction, 13th December 2015, Lot 43.

http://www.invaluable.co.uk/auction-lot/jean-restout-rouen-1692-paris-1768-l-abbe-tour-24-c-b5147d19c0

Anthony Quindroit, "À Rouen, un tableau oublié de Restout aux enchères"ParisNormandie.fr 11/12/2015
http://www.paris-normandie.fr/detail_communes/articles/4668958/a-rouen-un-tableau-oublie-de-restout-aux-encheres#.Vt34tvmLSM8

Abbé  Tournus with a view of Port-Royal (Musée Port-Royal des Granges)
http://art.rmngp.fr/fr/library/artworks/jean-restout_l-abbe-firmin-tournus-1672-1733-devant-l-abbaye-de-port-royal-des-champs_huile-sur-toile

The foremost expert on Restout is Christine Gouzi. She has compiled the catalogue raisonné of his works: Jean Restout, 1692-1768, peintre d’histoire à Paris, Paris, Arthena, 2000, 511p.  See the list on Wikipedia:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_peintures_de_Jean_II_Restout

See also:  John Goodman, "Jansenism, "Parlementaire" politics, and dissidence in the art world of eighteenth-century Paris:  the case of the Restout family"  Oxford Art Journal 18(1) 1995 p.74-95 [available on JStor]

The diacre Pâris (cont.)

A little more on the diacre Pâris:  The following is summarised and (loosely) translated from the first of the "lives" to be written, Pierre Boyer's , Vie de Monsieur de Paris, Diacre, which was published 1731, but probably composed in 1728. 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=or5FNa6bXGQC