CCHA Historical Studies, 58 (1991), 5-20
Life and Death of
a Community:
The Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Troyes,
1628-1762
by Elizabeth
Rapley
Department of
History
University of
Ottawa
The religious community of the monastery of
the Congrégation
de Notre-Dame of Troyes should hold a special meaning for the Canadian Catholic
historian. It was the institution where Marguerite Bourgeoys first worked as a
teacher. The methods she learned there, we may presume, were the methods that
she applied in Montreal, and taught to the members of her congregation.1 It is not too
far-fetched to imagine a sort of educational family tree, rooted in Troyes and
stretching its branches in Canada. Unfortunately the ancestor was less vital
than its descendants. In 1762 it was suppressed for its Jansenist leanings, and
disappeared, almost without a trace. Anyone wishing to reconstruct its history
must search patiently, and be content with gleanings.
A description dating from 1700, provides
the setting:
In the city of
Troyes there is a large house of religious of the Congregation instituted by
the saintly priest Fourier, curé of Mattaincourt: cloistered nuns who bring
together a large number of secular women ... to follow a life of piety, and
teach school, and give religious instruction in various places, going
everywhere two by two, as is the practice in missions.2
Marguerite Bourgeoys, before she came to
Canada, was a member of this group, working under the direction of one of the
nuns, Louise de Chomedy. This means that she knew of the efforts which were
being made by Louise’s brother, Paul de Chomedy de Maisonneuve, to establish a
colony in Montreal. In 1652 she was introduced to Maisonneuve, and invited to
go to Montreal. And so she parted company with Troyes. There is a great deal
more known about her doings during the next half-century than there is about
the community which she left behind.
The monastic building still stands, though
it is now the local gendarmerie. What it tells us, both by its spaciousness
and by its position within the city, is that this community was once highly
privileged. Seventeenth-century Troyes was not large. Its walls enclosed an
area approximately a mile long and half a mile wide. Its population could not
have been much more than 10,000.3 Yet space was always at a
premium. People jostled against each other in narrow, crowded streets and
alleys. Those who could not find room spread out into the faubourgs beyond the
walls – areas that were more spacious, but less desirable. Yet the monastery of
the Congrégation
stood
in extensive grounds, right at the centre of the walled city.
What strikes the modern eye is the high
proportion of inner city space which in the Old Regime belonged to churches and
religious orders. Historians, even Church historians, agree that this huge
ecclesiastical presence was a serious physical problem for cities. The people
of the time knew it too. Municipal officials were loud in their complaints.
Monasteries, they argued, absorbed private houses and forced out families.
Their cloistered buildings and gardens blocked streets. Their exemption from
most taxes meant that the tax burden was proportionately increased for the
remainder of the population.4
Troyes provides a good example of ecclesiastical
overpopulation. Within the walls there were, at mid-seventeenth century, one
cathedral (with its adjacent bishop’s palace), two collegial churches, ten
parish churches, three abbeys, three priories, one commanderie, three masculine
and four feminine convents.5 In some cases, churches and religious houses
were only a stone’s throw apart. All this in a city where Calvinism had once
been strong, and where Catholicism had been re-established only by the sword
of the Holy League.6
This points to a basic fact about religious
communities: they were part of the Counter Reformation’s response to the threat
of Protestantism. And as such, they came into an atmosphere that can scarcely
be called neutral. In Troyes, the “conventual invasion,” as it has been called,
met with an entrenched opposition. The religious wars might have destroyed the
infrastructure of the reformed church, but they had not stamped out its memory,
especially among the well-to-do and influential families who had been its most
enthusiastic members. This helps to explain a persistent surly opposition to
the new militant Catholicism. The city fathers’ attitude towards proposals for
new religious foundations ranged from reserve to open hostility, and they did
what they could to hinder them.
The most famous, and long-running, of all
battles of wills between the municipality and a religious order was what came
to be known as “The Siege of Troyes by the Jesuits.”7 From 1603 onwards
the Society made repeated efforts to establish a college in the city. It seems
a small enough matter; but we have to understand the strategic importance of
the college, in this as in other towns of seventeenth-century France. In earlier
times the college had been a local affair, run by the municipality. It was now
becoming a central institution of the Counter Reformation, educating the young
men of the region, but also providing a base from which to direct the local
elites and to proselytize the people.8 Everybody knew that the order
that ran the college would have a dominant position in the life of the city.
The Jesuits had the backing of the Crown,
the bishop, a sizeable section of the city’s wealthier citizens, and most of
the common people, whose sympathies had always been with the League. But the
city council set its face against them all. Battle followed upon battle in the
council chambers; insults were bandied about, and even threats of excommunication;
messengers were sent post-haste to the court at Fontainebleau, to promote one
or other side of the argument. In the end, after years of wrangling, the city
council won. In 1624 the Jesuits were ordered by the Crown to withdraw from
Troyes.9
The decisive moment in the battle came in
1621, when a prominent citizen, Franyois Pithou, died, leaving a large house
with its adjacent land to the city “to be made into a college for the
instruction of youth,” but only on condition that the Jesuits “not be received
in any way.”10
This was an offer
that nobody could refuse. The city very swiftly moved its college into the new
premises, and entrusted it to the Oratorians.
Since so much turned on this fateful
legacy, it is worth noting that Pithou was a one-time Calvinist who had
suffered persecution and exile before finally converting to Catholicism.11 Whether his
conversion was genuine or not, it certainly did not include any compromise with
the Jesuits. His opinion of them has been preserved for us in a lengthy tract
which he wrote in 1611.12 In trenchant language that obviously predated
the existence of libel laws, he described them as heirs of the Holy League,
overturners of the public order, inciters of violence, instruments of the Pope,
and servants of “the grandeur of Spain.”13 In his testament,
the last public act of his life, we catch all the resonances of past angers, of
the bitterness and bloodshed of the religious wars. In dying he was able to get
even with the old enemy. The college went, not to the Jesuits, but to the Oratorians.
It is reasonable to suspect that the
Oratorians’ greatest virtue, in the minds of the city fathers of Troyes, was
that they were not Jesuits. But there was more to the Oratorians than that.
They were already nurturing the gloomy theology which we call Augustinianism,
which before long would develop into Jansenism. The act which closed the book
on past religious conflict also opened it to future discord. Troyes was to
become a stronghold of Jansenism in France, and at the centre of the stronghold
would stand the Oratorian college.
We shall come back to Jansenism later. What
we note here is simply that by excluding the Jesuits and importing the
Oratorians, the city of Troyes was unwittingly setting the scene for future
religious strife. There is another point to be made. The episode is a good
example of one of the most troubling characteristics of the religious orders
during the Old Regime: the overwhelming passion known as esprit de corps. The
Jesuits in their frustration lashed out at their opponents, calling them
“atheists, libertines, half-Catholics, heretics, schismatics” and so on.14 The name-calling
was not that unusual. The lowest circles of hell might be reserved for
Protestants and such like, but the religious orders had no problems in
consigning each other to deep purgatory, at least.
In the year 1628, the chanoinesses de
Saint-Augustin of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame carried out their plan to establish a house in
Troyes. They belonged to a new congregation based in Lorraine, dedicated to
the instruction of girls.15 They had been in France for only a few years,
but they were expanding at a remarkable rate. This particular colony came from
the north-east, from Châlons-sur-Marne. Some daughters of prominent local
families had entered the Châlons house, in the expectation of returning to
Troyes to found a community.16 Quite clearly they had a body
of local support.
At the same time another colony of nuns was
making its way up from the south-east, also with the intention of founding a
teaching monastery in Troyes. These were Ursulines. They were heading not only
for the same city, but for the same piece of property. Both communities hoped
to acquire the old college, so recently vacated thanks to Pithou’s legacy. They
arrived in the same year.
The modest status of religious women should
not blind us to the fact that they, too, were in fierce competition with each
other. In various cities of eastern France throughout this decade the two
congregations and their respective supporters jockeyed for pride of place.
Bishops, municipal officers, members of the royal court, all worked to promote
their protegées and exclude the other side. In Troyes, the Ursulines seemed to
have the advantage. Since 1611 they had had royal authorization to establish a
community here, and in 1628 Louis XIII renewed the authorization, asking the
citizens of Troyes to facilitate the foundation.17 Upon their arrival
they offered 40,000 livres for the empty college building. But the local
officials dragged their feet, and did everything they could to obstruct them in
their efforts to establish themselves. It was 1629 before the Ursulines managed
to buy a property, and at that it was not the coveted vacant college in the
centre of the city, but an hostelry located at one end, close to the walls. In
a final act of non-cooperation, the city refused to deliver them the keys until
ordered to do so by the king, in 1630.18 In the meantime
the old college was sold to the nuns of the Congrégation, for the handsome
sum of 50,000 livres.19
Did the city act in bad faith towards the
Ursulines? It appears so. In that case, Troyes was not alone in its cavalier
behaviour. There is evidence in other cities of active conspiracies to keep
them out.20 The reason may have been that the Ursulines were perceived as members
of the Jesuit siege train, so to speak. Certainly at this time their order was
being promoted by the Jesuits.21 The nuns of the Congrégation appeared to be
free of such political baggage. Whatever the reason, influential citizens of
the city had opted for the Congrégation, and king and bishop combined
were unable to deflect them.
The nuns of the Congrégation carried off the prize,
but at a tremendous cost to themselves. The college had cost them 50,000
livres, plus a further 7000 livres which we can only call a “sweetener,” for
the right to enter the city. They did not have nearly enough money to pay for
this. Two years later we find them faced with debts of 25,000 livres, and with
creditors threatening to take them to court.22 Their financial
distress reflected badly on their house: supporters, postulants and students
all deserted them, and they could not even afford to pay a chaplain to say
their masses. All this, as their founder, Pierre Fourier, commented, because of
their furious determination to find a place in the city of Troyes no matter
what the price.23 To crown their distress, plague hit the city,
forcing them to leave their monastery for a time. By late 1632, however, the
situation was improving: they were back in their house, the monastery of
Châlons had guaranteed their debts, and they had eleven novices and twenty
boarders.24
By mid-century the city of Troyes was
endowed with two large feminine teaching monasteries, where most cities of
comparable size only had one. Both communities numbered fifty nuns or more.25 Both ran boarding
schools; both ran day schools, with two to three hundred students in each
school.26 Furthermore, the Congrégation was now training secular
teachers to go where the nuns could not, specifically the group already
referred to, of which Marguerite Bourgeoys was a member. To these two teaching
communities a third was added when, in 1678, the Jansenist Pierre Nicole
encouraged a small group of secular women to open a school for the very poor.27 These women, known
as the soeurs noires, opened two classes, one for younger children, the
other – along the lines of a sheltered workshop – for older girls. Their school
was highly valued by the working women of the city, who, according to an
eighteenth-century author, “had to be at their stalls all day, a good long way
from home, and so sent their daughters there ... to learn the different skills
that were most essential to mothers of family of their social position.”28 So it seems
likely that any young girl in Troyes whose parents wished her to go to school
would have been able to do so, at least for a couple of years. This was the
situation for approximately a century, until the climax of the Jansenist
crisis, in the mid- eighteenth century.
Jansenism is a complex phenomenon, to which
some 15,000 scholarly works have been dedicated.29 First and
foremost, it was a theology – a theology condemned in 1653 by the Papacy, so
that from then on its supporters were heretics in the eyes of the Church.
However, a change in the Holy See’s policy – the so- called “Clementine peace”
which began in 1669 – gave Jansenism a breathing space which lasted until the
end of the century. It was during these years, under the protection of many
influential people, that “the Jansenist spirit really penetrated into French
Catholicism.”30 When, in 1713, under immense pressure from Louis XIV, the Pope finally
and definitively condemned Jansenism with the Bull Unigenitus, the
heresy was already deeply entrenched in the Church of France.
The heresy of Jansenism consisted in its
pessimistic view of the nature of man, and its insistence on the all-importance
of divine grace. But in fact, there was much more to Jansenism than incorrect
theology. It was the extreme expression of a deep-running current of feeling in
French church and society which rejected the Jesuits’ humanism and
inclusiveness as “laxism,” and opted for a much more puritanical view of man’s
relationship with God. Man was stained and wounded by sin; only God’s grace
could save him, and this grace had to be sought through prayer and penance and
denial of self. This is what is called “the French school,” and although it is
principally identified with Bérulle and his Oratorians, it appealed to a broad
sector of the French church. Many were the Catholics who knew no other
spirituality.
As one historian has remarked, there was
not one Jansenism, but several.31 Jansenism could be theological, or political,
or moral. It could be a debate on the mountaintops, so to speak, involving only
bishops, theologians, and religious orders. This was true of early Jansenism.
It could be a vehicle for political ideas, defending the home-grown Church
against foreign influence, or, in later years, demanding more equality for the
lower clergy. Or it could simply be a rigorous and ascetic form of spirituality
– an extreme expression of puritanism inside the Catholic Church. It was this
last Jansenism which found so much favour within women’s communities.
The nuns who opened the Congrégation’s school
in Troyes were already part of this tradition. Their monasteries in Lorraine
were, from the earliest years, part of the current of what has been called
“pre-Jansenism.”32 As the Jansenist movement grew and defined
itself, its privileged field of action was a vast quadrangle east of Paris,
running through France into Lorraine, and north into the Low Countries.33 The houses of the Congrégation in eastern
France, including Troyes, stood full in the path of circulating Jansenist ideas
and literature. All of them, at one time or another, were identified as
Jansenist.
These Jansenist sympathies and traditions
could not have endured, however, if they had been consistently opposed by the
local bishops. Women’s monasteries were all subject to their bishops, in the
sense that it was the bishops who appointed their confessors and canonical
superiors, supervised the election of their superiors and the admission of
their novices, and in general watched over the “regularity” of their communities.
The bishop’s word was law – at least, it was law in everything which did not
conflict with the monastery’s own rule and constitutions. Thus over the long
term, bishops were able to set the tone of the institutions under their jurisdiction.
This was the case in the various dioceses of eastern France which were ruled
for many years by Jansenist-leaning bishops.
Jansenism had come early to Troyes, through
its Oratorian college. By the end of the century a large section of its clergy
was already Jansenist in sympathy, and the Crown did not improve matters by
using the diocese as a place of exile for Jansenist “trouble-makers” from
other parts of France.34 However, as long as the bishop remained
orthodox the Jansenism in his diocese remained fairly muted. Then in 1718 a new
bishop was appointed: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, nephew to the great Bossuet, a
man of integrity and virtue, but also an open Jansenist. The change in the
diocese was instantaneous: sixteen priests, including eight Oratorians, at once
retracted their adhesion to the papal Bull Unigenitus. Within a few
years most of the clergy had moved to the Jansenist camp. By 1738 the Crown was
noting with alarm that “all the diocese is tainted, including the monasteries.”35
Up until this time, the women’s communities
of Troyes appear to have lived in peace, sheltered from controversy by the
protection of their bishop. They must have known what could happen to
intransigent houses. In 1709 Port-Royal-des-Champs, the most famous of
Jansenist monasteries, was suppressed, its nuns dispersed, its dead exhumed,
its walls razed to the ground. But Port-Royal had been in open conflict with
the authorities, whereas their own position, assured by their bishop, appeared
solid and safe. Bossuet, in a pastoral letter addressed directly to them, urged
them to remember that “we are not making innovations; we are conserving, we are
re-establishing, we are reclaiming our ancient usages.”36 The sense of his
instructions was the same as those given by the Jansenist bishop of the
neighbouring diocese of Châons to the nuns under his jurisdiction: “You must
respect in my person the authority of Jesus Christ. It is He whom you will hear
in hearing me ... If anyone announces a gospel different from that which I
preach to you, even if it be an angel from heaven, say to him anathema, and do
not listen to him.”37 Sacred tradition and episcopal authority:
these were the two guarantees of the communities’ good conscience, and there
seemed to be no conflict between them.
But times were changing. The Jansenist
bishops were disappearing. Bossuet was one of only a few left in possession of
their sees. Their replacements were of a very different temper. In 1730 a new
Archbishop of Sens was consecrated: Languet, a well-known anti-Jansenist.
Bossuet and his colleague, the Jansenist Bishop Caylus of Auxerre, were soon in
open conflict with their metropolitan. “An evil has broken out in the
province,” wrote Caylus to his faithful, “And it seems to be coming from the
centre.”38 Languet, at whom this compliment was directed, appealed past both
bishops to the clergy of their dioceses. In Troyes Bossuet had recently
authorized a new diocesan missal which was distinctly Jansenist in its
rubrics. Languet now threatened any priest in Troyes using the new missal with
immediate suspension ipso facto. With the Crown supporting
the Archbishop, Bossuet was forced to withdraw his missal.39
By now Bossuet was an old man, in delicate
health. In 1742 he announced his resignation. After a quarter of a century
during which Jansenism had been protected and encouraged, and a much longer
time during which it had been tolerated, Troyes was now open to reform. The new
bishop, appointed at once, was Mathias Poncet de la Rivière, known already for
his militant anti- Jansenism. His first act was to order the clergy to accept
the Bull Unigenitus. Fifty priests refused, and were placed under
interdict. A few months later the entire Oratorian community was forbidden to
exercise the duties of the priesthood.40 The minor seminary
was closed and the practice of holding diocesan synods brought to an end. The
clergy still resisted. Within a year the religious life of the diocese was in
chaos.
How would the nuns of the diocese react to
these developments? Tragically, all the women’s monasteries of Troyes –-
Carmelite, Visitandine, Ursuline, Benedictine, Congrégation – became the ground
for a power-struggle between the new bishop and the Jansenists. They were soon
being showered with Jansenist literature, advice on how to defy their bishop,
how to answer his questions, how to resist his ordinances – and also, how to
conceal the names of their secret advisers. The bishop thundered that this was
cowardly advice from people who took care to remain hidden while preparing the
women for martyrdom. And that martyrdom, he warned, would not be long in
coming.41
The nuns were being ordered to choose
between the present episcopal authority and what they believed to be sacred
tradition, consecrated by past episcopal authority. They did not hesitate. The
priests that Poncet appointed to take the place of their old confessors came up
against stubborn resistance. The Carmelites went for a year without confession,
the Congrégation
continued
to confess to the priest whom they had received from Bossuet, the Ursulines
refused to accept their new confessor, arguing that to do so would be to
commit “a mortal sin, in acting against our own conscience.”42 The bishop
rejected their argument. “The Church expects from you a submission so complete
that it leaves you no liberty to examine her judgments, still less to read or
listen to anything which can attack them or contradict them.”43
Gradually, the pressure was increased. The soeurs
noires were disbanded. Then the Benedictines were suppressed, then the
Carmelites. In 1743 the superior and the assistant of the Ursulines were
suspended, and the community was forbidden to receive novices.44 In 1744 the nuns
of the Congrégation
were
forbidden to teach school.45 The subdelegué, in an effort to isolate
the ringleaders, moved five of their sisters to the Ursulines, and brought back
nine recalcitrant Ursulines to their house. All were forbidden to communicate
with their families.46
Still the nuns resisted. The bishop visited
them personally, and was treated with scant respect. The sisters were
forthright to the point of rudeness. Yet there was an important point made in
their argument. Thus, from a religious of the Visitation: “You are very
different, Monseigneur, from our former bishops ... who were always satisfied
with the purity of our faith. Our faith is still the same, our sentiments have
not changed. They themselves put into our hands the books which you now forbid
us.”47 From an Ursuline: “"Our constitutions were not made yesterday,
and they forbid us to obey where there will be a manifest sin.” “What, I am
asking you to commit sin?” asked the bishop. “We do not say that that is your
intention, but in our present disposition, we would be doing so in submitting.”48 The women were
appealing from present episcopal authority to past episcopal authority, to the
authority of their rule and customs, and to the long-time practice of their
community. There is no better way to illustrate this than to quote the words of
another Jansenist nun, spoken at the time of the Bull Unigenitus: "[These
are the truths] with which we have been nourished since our childhood, and
which have become familiar to us through the use of them which we have made,
and still make every day, in the exercise of our profession.”49
Fidelity to the past was one of the most
striking characteristics of the nuns of the eighteenth century. They were
trained to it; they idealized it. The concept of aggiornamento had no place in
their mindset. In this case the fidelity was to a system of belief and
behaviour which was no longer sanctioned by the Church. They were, as the
bishop himself remarked, ‘disposed by a long seduction” to support the tenets
of Jansenism.50 He considered their behaviour inexcusable: “They make themselves into
doctors, and claim all knowledge because they know enough to criticize whatever
contradicts their much-prized independence.”51 A twentieth-century
historian goes one better, and labels their behaviour as bizarre:
“Psychiatrists know what nonsense can be engendered by a fixed idea in a brain
which is no longer ... submitted to wise direction.”52
But in another crisis, not far removed in
time, the nuns – the same nuns, in some cases – were again faced with the
demand that they deny their past. In 1790 every religious woman in France was
invited individually by the government to accept a pension and to leave
community life. In almost every case she replied in the negative, often with
the same sort of hauteur which the bishop of Troyes found so shocking.
The first stubbornness is seen as ridiculous, the second as glorious. Yet they
both arose from the same deep instinct not to break faith with the life that
had been undertaken.
The nuns of the Congrégation did not survive
to see the Revolution. Forbidden to receive novices, they watched their numbers
dwindle, from forty-seven in 1727 to fifteen in 1750. At this stage the bishop
decided to deliver the coup de grâce.
The women’s monasteries of France were at
this time undergoing review by a royal commission. Their problem was mainly one
of poverty: too many houses had fallen on hard times, largely because of the
national bankruptcy of 1720, which had deprived them of most of their savings.
The commission was empowered to suppress insolvent houses and to unite their
goods and their personnel to other communities.
Poncet used this pretext of poverty and
shortage of personnel to get rid of the Congrégation. In May 1750 he
obtained a royal order to proceed with the closing of the house.53 Since this met
with disgruntlement on the part of the citizens of Troyes, who looked upon the
monastery’s schools as part of their patrimony, he undertook to open a public
school at his own expense, hiring two secular teachers and renting a small
unheated house for the purpose.54 At this point the people of
Troyes dealt him a painful blow. Four hundred little girls showed up at the
school. Whether this overload was an innocent accident, or an exercise of the
malicious sense of humour for which, according to their historian, the people
of the region are well known,55 it certainly created a
problem for Poncet. He decided to commandeer the empty classrooms of the Congrégation.
The trouble was that the nuns refused to give up the keys. “The ill humour
of these women is giving me trouble,” he wrote.56
If the nuns were ill-humoured, they had
good cause. It was clear now that they were in danger of losing their
monastery. In July the bishop appointed an outside bursar, a man named Leclerc,
to take the first steps towards closing it down. Leclerc began by taking an
inventory of the community’s goods and revenues – an inventory which, he
claimed, proved that the house was insolvent. To his horror, on the very same
day the nuns called in notaries and proceeded with their own inventory, which
(they claimed) proved that the house was solvent.57 Eleven days later
he went again to the monastery, this time to demand that the nuns surrender
their registers and their keys, that they dismiss all their servants and send
away their boarders, and that, whether they like it or not, they accept the
chaplain appointed by the bishop. He received a furious refusal.
In authorizing these demands the bishop had
gone too far. He had given a layman permission to enter a female monastery and
to lay down the law to its members, in contravention of all the rights which
they enjoyed by canon law and by the law of the land. The nuns promptly called
in notaries again, this time to register an appeal to Parlement. The bishop’s
ordinance, according to their complaint, “is a piece so null, so irregular, so
monstrous, that it seems incredible that it should come from the Bishop of
Troyes.” The enemies of the community, they claimed, were deceiving His Majesty
into believing that it could not support itself. The bishop was depriving it of
its “incontestable right” to choose its own chaplain; he was abandoning it to
the discretion of a layman, “although it has not been accused of the slightest
wrongdoing.”58
The commission in Paris was becoming
uncomfortable. On the one hand it was anxious to support the authority of the
bishop; on the other, it recognized that he was now acting beyond his powers.
Furthermore, it now had before it two sets of notarized documents, each
contradicting the other on the question of the house’s financial condition. “I
shall be glad to know ... which of the two to believe,” remarked the official
reporter.59 The nuns were now marshalling an impressive array of support from the
officials of the city and the bailliage; on the other hand, the Bishop was serving
notice that this was a fight he could not afford to lose. “This affair is too
important, for the Church, and for my see,” he wrote. In the background, barely
mentioned, was the real threat that the nuns represented: Jansenism, the heresy
that he had been chosen to destroy, and which was coming dangerously close to
destroying him.
On August 17-18 the matter came to a rowdy
climax. Poncet, following the commission’s advice, was moving ahead resolutely
to close down the house. To make this procedure legal, public notice had to be
given, after which his representatives were to go to the monastery, there to
draw up a report of commodo et incommodo, giving reasons why the house
should be closed. On arrival they found not just the nuns, but a crowd of a
hundred people headed by city councillors, representatives from the bailliage, and two canons from
the cathedral. These men insisted that the report should also contain their
statements of support for the nuns. In the end the bishop’s commissioners
withdrew, hoping that by the following day the crowd would have dispersed. On
the contrary, it grew to three hundred, now breathing threats against the
commissioners and even against the bishop.
Poncet decided that the most prudent course
was to call off the action, and wait until the situation calmed down.60 He left for Paris,
to plead his case in person. The nuns continued to shower the authorities with
petitions, but all in vain. Failing to get redress from the Crown, forbidden
to receive novices or to teach school, subject still to the bursar who disliked
them as much as they disliked him, they realized that the demise of the
community was only a matter of time. Twelve years later – in 1762 – the nuns
were gone.61 They were, however, preceded in their departure by their bishop.
Poncet’s zeal in the pursuit of Jansenists ended up by exceeding the bounds set
by both the pope and the king. His enemies in Parlement and in the local
government now banded together and in 1758 forced him into exile. With his
disappearance the general agitation died down. Only a few incidents marred the
remaining years before the Revolution.
Poncet has been acclaimed as one of the
great bishops of Troyes.62 It is a little difficult to support this view.
Certainly he showed great determination in the face of what was virtually a
general mutiny in his diocese. Furthermore, his disciplinary methods were not
unusual for the times: other bishops, Jansenist and orthodox, were equally
ruthless in dealing with non-conforming clergy and communities. But he was
intemperate beyond the line of duty, and he certainly contributed to the ugly
bitterness which the crisis left behind. Jansenism, it is generally agreed, did
great damage to the Church of France, not only because of the heresy, but
because of the bitter political in-fighting which it occasioned. “It is
inaccurate to attribute the crisis only to a rebellion of intellect and conscience,”
writes a church historian. “Believers themselves were in part responsible.”63 Non-believers and philosophes, as well as the
general Catholic public, watched from the sidelines as the Church tore itself
apart.
The memory of the Congrégation of Troyes – such as it is – is overshadowed by imputations of heresy. These, however, demand a thoughtful examination. The community had been heir, from the earliest days of the Counter Reformation, to a certain rigorous approach to religion – Jansenism even before Jansenius. Its practice of this type of spirituality, tolerated and often actively nurtured by its immediate superiors, had most probably evolved and sharpened in form. But never in a hundred years and more was there – for those nuns, in that monastery, in that particular diocese – a serious question of disobedience to the Church. Now, suddenly, all their protections were stripped away, and they were faced with a stark choice: obedience to the present, or obedience to the past. The choice that they made put them on the wrong side of orthodoxy, and earned them a bad reputation which has lasted until modern times. Perhaps in this more tolerant age they, will be viewed with a little more understanding.
1Soeur
Sainte-Gertrude-de-la-Croix, CND “L’oeuvre pédagogique de Marguerite
Bourgeoys.” Université Laval, 1951: unpublished thesis.
2Charles de
Glandelet, Le Vray Esprit de l’Institut des Soeur seculieres de la Congrégation de
Notre-Dame (Montreal: CND, 1976), pp. 18-19.
3By the early
eighteenth century it was thought to have about 3500 households. This would
translate into approximately 14,100 people. Paroisses et communes de France
(Aube) (1977): Troyes.
4A.Babeau, La
ville sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1880), pp.464-65.
5 To this must be
added several sizeable communities in the faubourgs. See Alphonse Roserot, Dictionnaire historique
de la Champagne méridionale des origines à 1790 (Angers, 1948), vol.IV,
article Troyes (institutions ecclésiastiques).
6 Gustave Carré, Histoire
populaire de Troyes (Troyes: Editions du Bastion,
1983),
part V, chapter 3.
7Pierre Jean
Grosley, Les sieges de Troyes par les Jésuites (Paris, 1826).
8 L. Châtellier, L’Europe des divots (Paris:
Flammarion, 1987).
9For a full account
of the “sieges” see Gustave Carré, L’enseignement secondaire à
Troyes du moyen age à la Révolution (Paris, 1888), pp.53-85.
10Pithou’s testament
is printed in ibid., pp. 318-20.
11Ibid., p. 57.
12 Printed in Grosley,
Les
Sieges de Troyes, pp. 1-62.
13Ibid., p.29.
14Ibid., p.28.
15 For more on the
congregation, see Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in
Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1990), chap. 3.
16L.Carrez, Histoire du premier
monastère de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame établi à Châlons-sur-Marne (Châlons, 1906),
p.253.
17Marie de Chantal
Gueudré, Histoire de l’Ordre des Ursulines en France (Paris: Editions Saint-Paul,
1957), vol.1, p.131; Roserot, Dictionnaire historique, p.1561.
18Archives
Départementales (hereafter AD) Aube G 1297, fol. 125 (April 17 and 19, 1638);
AD Aube D 131, 132. Also see Roserot, Dictionnaire historique, pp. 1561-62.
19AD Aube G 1297,
fol. 137, 17 June 1628.
20 See for instance
the determination of the Archbishop of Sens to keep the Ursulines, for whom he
confessed “an absolute repugnance,” out of Provins, Étampes and Joigny
(Bibliothèque municipal de Provins ms. 251, fol.2, Saint Pierre Fourier, Correspondance
1598-1640 [Presses Universitaries de Nancy, 1986] vol.3, p.195).
21Gueudré, Histoire des Ursulines, vol.2, p.435.
22Fourier, Correspondance vol.3, pp.249-56.
23Ibid., pp.381-86.
24Ibid., pp.530-32.
25 AD Aube D 133;
Roseray, Dictionnaire historique, p. 1561.
26 Ibid., p. 1561 (Congrégation); Bibliothèque de la
Sorbonne ms. 769, fol. 124 (Ursulines).
27For more on the soeurs
noires, see Bernard Chedozeau, ‘Les petites écoles de Pierre Nicole,” in Colloque de Marseille: Le
XVIIe siècle et l’éducation, lre trim., no.88. (1971), pp.15-22.
28Pierre Jean
Grosley, Ephémérides (1762), p. 75.
29 William H.
Williams, “Jansenism Revisted,” Catholic History Review 63, 4 (1977): 575.
30H.Daniel-Rops, The
Church in the Seventeenth Century, trans. J.J.Buckingham (London: J.M.Dent,
1963), p.366.
31René Taveneaux, La vie
quotidienne des Jansénistes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Hachette,
1973), p.13.
32 René Taveneaux, Le Jansénisme
en Lorraine (Paris: Vrin, 1960), p.111.
33Taveneaux, La
vie quotidienne des Jansénistes, p. 243.
34Joseph Roserot de
Melin, Le
diocèse de Troyes des origines à nos jours (Troyes, 1957), p.165.
35Carré, Histoire
populaire, pp.373-74. After the death of Louis XIV there had been a lull in the
persecution of Jansenism. It was under Cardinal Fleury, Chief Minister of
France from 1726 to 1743, that the Crown returned to the attack.
36AD Aube G 32: Instruction
pastorale de Mgr l’Evesque de Troyes, pour servir de reponse au Second
Mandement de M.1’Archevesque de Sens, au sujet du nouveau Missel de Troyes (1738), p.61.
37AD Marne
Chp.15.588: Lettre de Monseigneur l’illustrissime et réverendissime Evesque comte de
Chaalons Pair de France aux religieuses de son Diocese, au sujet de la
Constitution de N.S.P. le Pape, Unigenitus Dei Filius, p.2.
38H.Bouvier, Histoire de l’Eglise de
Sens (Amiens,
1911), vol.2, p.318.
39A.Prévost, Saint
Vincent de Paul et ses institutions en Champagne méridionale (Bar-sur-Seine, 1928),
pp.132-3.
40 Carré, L’enseignement
sécondaire d Troyes, p.109.
41AD Aube G 32:
Mathias Poncet de la Rivière, Lettre pastorale aux communautés religieuses de son
Diocèse (1749), pp. 5-6, 25, 27.
42A.Prévost, Le diocèse de Troyes (Dijon, 1923-26),
vol.3, pp.148-49.
43Poncet de la
Rivière, Lettre pastorale (1949), p.12.
44Prévost, Le diocèse de Troyes, pp. 147, 149.
45AD Aube G 54
p.122.
46Prévost, Le diocèse de Troyes, pp. 150, 161.
47 Roserot de Melin, Le diocèse de Troyes, p.170.
48Prévost, Le diocèse de Troyes, p.156.
49Mère Hélène Arlon
de Sainte-Colombe, superior of the Ursuline monastery of Beauvais, 1715, quoted
in Gueudré, Histoire des Ursulines, vol. 2, p.494.
50Poncet de La
Rivière, Lettre pastorale (1749), p.5.
51AD Aube G 32. Poncet de la
Rivière, Lettre pastorale (1755).
52Riverot de Melin,
Le
diocèse de Troyes, p.168.
53 Archives
Nationales (hereafter AN) G9 168: Extrait de Registre du Conseil
d'État, 30 mai 1750.
54AN G9 168:
Mandement de Msr l’Evesque de Troyes pour l’Etablissement d’une
Ecole publique de filles.
55Carré, Histoire
populaire, pp. 3-4.
56 AN G9 168:
Poncet de la Rivière –- Commission des Secours, 5 août 1750.
57AN G9 168-11.
58AN G9 168:
13 juillet 1650.
59AN G9 168-11.
60Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62Roserot, Dictionnaire Historique, vol.4, p.1561.
63 Riverot de Melin, Le diocese de Troyes, p.172.