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Updated: June 28, 2025
Voltaire, in the days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the lax morality of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne.
And thence those heroic women came forth again, when religious war threatened to take the place of civil: again they put to shame their more timid male companions, and by their labors Jesuit and Jansenist found peace. But not such was to be the career of our Mademoiselle, who, at twenty, had tried the part of devotee for one week and renounced it forever.
The Jansenist movement was in France in some measure what the Puritan movement was in England, and it caught hold of serious minds in much the same way. The Jesuits had undertaken the task of making Christianity easy, of finding a compromise between worldliness and religion, and they flooded the world with a casuistic literature designed for this purpose.
So great a fear of hell had been instilled into the King that he not only thought everybody who did not profess the faith of the Jesuits would be damned, but he even thought he was in some danger himself by speaking to such persons. If any one was to be ruined with the King, it was only necessary to say, "He is a Huguenot or a Jansenist," and his business was immediately settled.
What other course was open to them in such a case than that of saving the truth at the expense of their own credit! and while admitting the name of sufficient grace, denying, after all, that it was sufficient! That was the real history of the business. This pitiful story of the New Thomist awakens a respondent pity in the writer. But his Jansenist companion is roused to indignant remonstrance:—
Some of the best attested miracles in the whole history of the supernatural were wrought at the tomb of the Jansenist deacon, Paris. The works of faith exalted multitudes into convulsive transports; men and women underwent the most cruel tortures, in the hope of securing a descent upon them of the divine grace.
That is where enchantment is rampant, because in the suburb of La Guillotière you can have a person bewitched for a louis. Add that it is likewise, in spite of its swarms of radicals and anarchists, an opulent market for a dour Protestant Catholicism; a Jansenist factory, richly productive of bourgeois bigotry. "Lyons is celebrated for delicatessen, silk, and churches.
His text was "Fallax pulchritudo, mulier timens Deum laudabitur." Assuredly many delicate points must have presented themselves in the life of a princess who had been a politician and a Frondeuse, a gallant woman, and a Jansenist. Yet Father Talon, a Jesuit, who was present at her death, was fond of repeating on fitting occasions: "Jansenist as much as you will, she died the death of a saint."
When M. d'Orleans was about to start for Spain, he named the officers who were to be of his suite. Amongst others was Fontpertius. At that name the King put on a serious look. "What! my nephew," he said. "Fontpertius! the son of a Jansenist of that silly woman who ran everywhere after M. Arnould! I do not wish that man to go with you."
The observances of the cloister inspired him with but little awe; and as a result of once or twice speaking his mind too freely to the monks he was expelled from the school. From that time forth he was the sworn foe of what he called monkism, and declared openly for the cure of the Briantes, who was accused of being a Jansenist.
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