Author: Douglas Bradford Palmer

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13:

Abstract: At the center of eighteenth-century international Jansenism were a group of émigré French priests living in the Dutch city of Utrecht where they coordinated the efforts of a learned and cosmopolitan group of clerics, university professors, and governmental officials - an international Republic of Grace - that both resembled and competed with the Enlightenment's Republic of Letters. It was a religious and intellectual community that was dedicated to reform within the Catholic Church, consciously pan-European in its outlook, and in the eighteenth century, threatened the political and religious foundations of Europe's Old Regime. Jansenist religious reform, carried out in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, crossed from the religious sphere into the political, so that Jansenists viewed the French Revolution as the opportunity to complete the task of the Counter-Reformation Church. And, because this debate was waged in the eighteenth century, it utilized the century's most powerful tool for manipulating public opinion, the pen and printing press. Modeled on the studies of the eighteenth-century public sphere inspired by Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, this dissertation argues that Habermas' public sphere is far too limited in scope for he claimed that the basis for its growth was bourgeois and secular in nature. The activities of the Jansenists, however, demonstrate a public sphere that was religious in nature - where faith mattered more than reason - well into the eighteenth and even the nineteenth century. Furthermore, this dissertation significantly adds to the intellectual and cultural history of eighteenth-century Europe and the origins of the French Revolution by analyzing the contributions made by the international Jansenist community to the revolutionary discourse of late eighteenth-century Europe.