L'Inquisition romaine et la France: Juridiction, doctrine et pluralité des catholicismes européens à l'"âge tridentin" (XVe-XIXe siècle) ed. by Albrecht Burkardt and Jean-Pascal Gay (review)
2024; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.2024.a928013
ISSN1534-0708
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoReviewed by: L'Inquisition romaine et la France: Juridiction, doctrine et pluralité des catholicismes européens à l'"âge tridentin" (XVe-XIXe siècle) ed. by Albrecht Burkardt and Jean-Pascal Gay William Monter L'Inquisition romaine et la France: Juridiction, doctrine et pluralité des catholicismes européens à l'"âge tridentin" (XVe-XIXe siècle). Edited by Albrecht Burkardt and Jean-Pascal Gay. [ Collection de l'École française de Rome, 611]. (Rome: École française de Rome, 2024. Pp. 468. €34,00. ISBN 978-2-728-31595-6.) The fruit of a French conference in 2018, this book's title offers an unusual chronology that erases the conventional 1789 divide between Old-Regime and modern France. It is also imprecise; the 1400s are invisible and the 1800s end far too soon. More precisely, its "Tridentine age" begins in the early 1540s with the founding of the modern Roman Inquisition and the first Sorbonne lists of prohibited books and ends with the Vatican Council of 1870. From François I to Napoleon III (with two brief republics), France remained a "Gallican" monarchy, where Rome's Inquisitorial decrees were unenforceable. The 2018 conference marked thirty years since the archives of the modern Roman Inquisition (primarily, as the late John Tedeschi predicted in 1971, from the Congregation of the Index) were opened and subsequently provided with a five-volume reference work edited by Hubert Wolf. These sixteen contributions are divided into three parts. The first two cover Roman opposition to such previously explored topics of Ancien régime France as French Protestantism, Jansenism, and Enlightened philosophes. They include instructive micro-histories from its two co-authors: Albrecht Burkardt investigates a crypto-Huguenot and a "complete" (verbal and physical) Libertine priest, while Jean-Pascal Gay studies its huge paper trail concerning the Jansenist bishop of France's most insignificant diocese. The first part features Hervé Boudry's wide-ranging and multi-confessional survey of published Tridentine Indices across Latin Europe, with its author's helpful map (48). Boudry shows that that most of Europe's Latin editions of the Tridentine Index (39 of 73) were printed in France, mainly (23) at Lyon (47). Its second part includes Paolo Fontana's account of the Roman Inquisition's rapid reduction of Paris's Jansenist "convulsionnaires" from schismatics to pseudo-devout frauds in the early 1730s (225–41) and Laurence Macé's survey of the role of papal nuncios in censoring the French Enlightenment, in which Voltaire's works required thirty-two separate dossiers from 1748 to 1808, including an edition in the papal enclave of Avignon (266–73). [End Page 413] However, the book's less familiar final section covering the restoration of the Papal Inquisition and Index after 1817 required an introductory overview from David Armando describing their condemnations of both French writings and French people. From 1817 to 1840, the Index censored over five French books per year (322n30), and two of the eight people in Rome's Inquisitorial prisons in 1836 were French (319–20). The "liberal" Catholic response to the legacy of the Revolution represented by Lamennais was also censored early and as often as necessary. From 1840 to 1880, the Index censored more French than Italian books (322), and a French initiative produced the first papal condemnation of condoms in 1853 (329–30). This section includes Philippe Boutry's masterful account of a wide-ranging "dialogue of the deaf" between a Fourierist work, Parole de Providence, by the well-named Clarisse Vigoureux. and the votum of its Italian Jesuit expert (reproduced as an appendix) proposing its prohibition in 1836 (345–94). The Roman expert, who described Fourier's Phalansteries as "upside-down monasteries" (371), suspected he had composed this work himself and completely ignored Mme. Vigoureux's longest chapter about the rights of women. Her last recorded comments about the papacy, made in Texas in 1864, express "both the intellectual generosity of a disciple of Fourier and the remorseless indifference of Pontius Pilate" (372). This "dialogue of the deaf" between Rome and French intellectuals intensified after Vatican I, when an increasingly "secularist" French republic began simultaneously with the proclamation of papal infallibility. William Monter Northwestern University Copyright © 2024 The Catholic...
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