Divine grace was at the heart of the bitter theological disputes that followed the posthumous publication of Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus in 1640. According to Jansen's interpretation of the writings of St Augustine, human sinfulness was such that salvation could be achieved only through efficacious grace, which was granted by God and could be neither ensured nor resisted through actions emanating from human will. Such an attitude came close to Calvinist notions of predestination in the attainment of salvation and was coupled to an austere inclination to retreat from the world and an attitude to penance that emphasised unfeigned contrition. This put the Jansenists in opposition to others within the Church, notably the Jesuits, who emphasised engagement with the world, an approach to penance based on attrition and a theology of salvation that was centred on sufficient grace, meaning that humans could contribute to their salvation through the exercise of free will. The papacy tried to prevent divisions from emerging over the thorny and difficult questions surrounding grace by imposing silence. In 1642 Urban viii condemned Augustinus in the bull In eminenti for having broken rules prohibiting the publication of works on the subject without papal approval. Such actions had little success, however, in preventing the circulation of Jansen's work or suppressing discussion of grace.Footnote 1
From the wide range of characters who contributed to this fraught debate in the tense atmosphere of the 1640s and ’50s, this article concentrates on one man, the preacher Charles Hersent – an individual who makes cameo appearances in histories of the period but whose life has rarely been tackled directly. He did not have anything notably original to contribute to the theological discussions, but, being prone to involvement in controversy and intrigue, the manner in which he made his interventions was unusually dramatic, and an important event involving his preaching has been hitherto absent from accounts of Jansenism in this period. In 1650 he delivered a panegyric of St Louis in Rome espousing Jansenist ideas of grace that stirred up a brief storm of controversy, particularly after it was published with a direct appeal to the pope to support the followers of Jansen. This was not a success; it aroused Innocent x's anger and turned Hersent into a target of the Inquisition. The extraordinary audacity of the attempt, however, made it significant. Hersent had tried to seize a significant moment in the Roman year, normally reserved for triumphalist celebrations of the Catholic prestige of the French monarchy, to present the Jansenist case before the papacy in a highly public manner. The story of his sermon is one that ties together many themes: the strategies employed by Jansenists to make their case before the church hierarchy; the culture of religious glorification surrounding the French monarchy and the means by which it could be subverted or appropriated; the history of preaching and the storms of debate it could engender at this time; and the nature of Jansenism's relation to the papacy and Gallicanism before the first papal condemnations.
Why did Hersent make this public appeal to the papacy, and what results might he have expected? What was the significance of his failure in terms of the subsequent history of Jansenism? Did it mark a turning point in terms of the possibility of papal support? In many ways Hersent's sermon came at the very last point at which it might have been conceivable that Jansenist ideas could be to some extent accepted and tolerated within the Church, even if official endorsement was extremely improbable. Moreover, the choice of the authority to which he appealed tells us much about the relationship between Jansenism and Gallicanism. Here was a preacher who had already stirred up controversy earlier in his career by producing strongly-worded anti-Gallican polemics making a direct appeal to papal authority. Historians have, understandably, aimed to show the connection between Jansenism and Gallican opposition to papal interference in France, and it is not necessary to wait for the eighteenth-century controversies over Unigenitus to see this link. As Dale Van Kley has noted, however, the original Jansenists were not necessarily Gallican, as seen for example in their criticism of Richelieu's dynastic policies during the Thirty Years’ War.Footnote 2 In fact, Hersent's example shows that, before the papal bulls of the 1650s, a Jansenist could be overtly ultramontane. Historical accounts of the early decades of Jansenism sometimes fail to capture the sense of volatility of the situation that comes across in some of the primary sources and tend to view the movement in light of subsequent developments. For these reasons, a study of this last-ditch appeal to the papacy at a key point in the history of Jansenism is revealing of some of the factors at play at this critical and decisive moment.
The life and controversies of Charles Hersent
Born in Paris, Hersent entered the French Oratory in 1615 and was encouraged to learn to preach by its influential founder, Pierre de Bérulle.Footnote 3 The subsequent success of sermons delivered in Troyes, Dijon, Angers, Langres and Paris seems to have made him over-confident, and he was reprimanded by Bérulle for failing to control his temper.Footnote 4 After returning to France from Rome, which he had visited without permission in 1624, he left the Oratory in 1626 on account of disagreements over policies relating to the assumption of benefices by its members, which would deprive him of a priory granted by the bishop of Angers.Footnote 5 Lashing out against his former colleagues, he launched a career in controversy with two publications criticising the Oratory and attacking Bérulle directly.Footnote 6 The difficulties that this stirred up for Hersent caused him to retract them in another pamphlet of 1626, although it seems he was never readmitted.Footnote 7
As he was immersed in these struggles with the Oratory, Hersent was also engaged in other projects, for example demonstrating his erudition in Latin and Greek with a commentary on writings attributed to St Dionysus the Areopagite (but in fact by ‘Pseudo-Dionysus’), intended as an apology for mystical theology.Footnote 8 In 1627, however, his focus shifted to royal encomium. On 14 April Gabrielle-Angélique de Verneuil de La Vallette (an illegitimate daughter of Henri iv) died at Metz, where her father-in-law the duc d’Épernon was governor. The important task of delivering her funeral orations fell to Hersent, who preached three, focused respectively on her high birth, virtues and pious attitude to death.Footnote 9 In the printed edition he included flattering letters dedicating the sermons to Anne of Austria, Gabrielle's brother Henri de Bourbon (the titular bishop of Metz) and Épernon. This was evidently successful, winning him the chancellorship of Metz cathedral, which he took up in October 1627.Footnote 10
Hersent continued to produce works flattering the government, probably in an effort to secure continued patronage and advancement. The ‘happy success’ of Louis xiii’s victory over the Huguenots at the siege of La Rochelle in 1627–8 provided the opportunity to publish a discourse dedicated to the king and praising him for destroying heresy. Characterising the Huguenots as rebels, Hersent argued that true religion obliges its adherents to be loyal to their prince and that ecclesiastical and royal power are mutually supportive.Footnote 11 Although he would not always prove so loyal himself, he did produce another strongly royalist work in 1632, an emphatic statement of the king's sovereignty over Metz (occupied by France since 1552).Footnote 12 He noted that he had discovered in Metz a sense of alienation from France rather than submission and obedience to the king as sovereign and ascribed this to an ignorance of history, which it was in his remit as chancellor to rectify by proving the antiquity of royal claims over the city.Footnote 13 In 1635 he published a set of paraphrases of the Song of Songs, dedicated to Richelieu and including a letter obsequiously describing the cardinal's presence at the king's side as Louis's greatest glory.Footnote 14
Hersent had apparently worked independently of official directives in his book on Metz, but presumably the publications of 1629–35 were at least in part an attempt to secure further advancement and patronage at court. If so, they seem not to have won him the recognition that he desired, and William Church described him as ‘disgruntled’ and his next publications as ‘retaliation’.Footnote 15 In the late 1630s, he moved dramatically from royal propagandist to acerbic critic of Richelieu in a way that makes this explanation of his change of heart highly plausible.Footnote 16 A French translation of Cornelius Jansen's 1635 Mars Gallicus, a polemic heavily critical of French foreign policy, appeared in 1637 and has often been attributed to Hersent, with the letters ‘C.H.D.P.D.E.T.B.’ on the title page apparently signifying ‘Charles Hersent de Paris, Docteur en Théologie, Beneficier’.Footnote 17 Although Hersent's responsibility has been questioned, he still seems the most likely candidate.Footnote 18 One eighteenth-century source, citing Hersent as the translator, indicates that he was by 1637 a ‘disciple’ of a key figure in the establishment of Jansenism in France, Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, suggesting that he was being drawn to Jansenism at this time.Footnote 19 In any case, if the translation were Hersent's it marked a significant departure from his previous role as royal panegyrist.
He was to continue down this new path from laudatory propagandist to bitter critic with his most controversial publication, ‘on the precautions that should be taken against schism’, addressed to the French ecclesiastical hierarchy in January 1640 under the name of the ‘Gallic’ Optatus.Footnote 20 Hersent singled out a recently published work on the liberties of the Gallican Church as part of a diabolical scheme to bring about schism in Catholicism.Footnote 21 His strongly ultramontane argument, which finished with an emphatic statement of papal plenitude of power, was bound to create controversy in Gallican France, particularly at a point of deteriorating relations with Rome.Footnote 22 Even more guaranteed to cause trouble were his accusations against Louis xiii and Richelieu, the latter in particular presented as aiming to establish a French patriarchate that would lead to France breaking away from obedience to the Holy See. Naturally, this was published anonymously, but there seems to be no doubt in seventeenth-century sources that Hersent was the author. According to the Oratorian Richard Simon, Hersent communicated his ideas to certain Oratorian priests with whom he had remained friends despite his earlier controversies as well as to the papal nuncio, to whom he gave twenty copies to send to Rome.Footnote 23 The pamphlet stirred up enormous controversy and was swiftly condemned. The parlement of Paris accused the anonymous author of trying to sow divisions between pope and king, and moreover defaming the king's honour and sovereignty; in March it ordered the burning of the pamphlet.Footnote 24 Richelieu was clearly pleased with this swift response, writing a brief note the next day to congratulate the premier président, Mathieu Molé.Footnote 25 An episcopal condemnation followed a few days later, describing the work as false, scandalous and injurious.Footnote 26 Richelieu no doubt realised, however, that condemning the book was not in itself enough to obliterate its ideas, and therefore arranged for published refutations to be written to emphasise the cooperation of Church and State and to deny that the cardinal was trying to bring about a schism.Footnote 27 The number of these works that appeared in Latin and French in 1640–1 is a testament to the level of controversy generated by Optati Galli. In general they sought to defend the Gallican liberties and disprove Hersent's accusations relating to the patriarchate as nonsensical and imaginary.Footnote 28
Optati Galli clearly marked a complete rupture in Hersent's former attitude to the cardinal. It is worth noting that notarial documents indicate that in the early 1640s he was drawn into the patronage of Louis xiii’s turbulent brother Gaston d'Orléans, whose antagonism to Richelieu is well known.Footnote 29 Following the deaths of Richelieu and Louis xiii in 1643, however, Hersent reverted to the role of royal panegyrist with a set of sermons eulogising the king. Having condemned Louis's wars by translating Mars Gallicus, here he defended them; having accused the king of being part of a devilish plot to divide the Church, here he praised him for his piety and zeal in restoring Catholicism.Footnote 30 Certainly there were some more idiosyncratic elements, such as the statement that the French people were suffering under the burden of an extraordinary authority by the end of the reign. Still, the flattering dedicatory letters to Anne of Austria, Cardinal Mazarin and the bishop of Beauvais suggest that this was another attempt to secure patronage and favour, Hersent perhaps viewing this as more likely now that Richelieu was gone. If so, it does not seem to have worked – although he would start to refer to himself as a ‘predicateur ordinaire du Roy’ on later publications, suggesting he had been given this title at some point.
Instead, Hersent began to involve himself in the other great ecclesiastical controversy in France during these decades, Jansenism, by publishing a treatise on the most controversial subject, the frequency of communion.Footnote 31 Jansenists such as Antoine Arnauld in De la Fréquente Communion (1643) saw communion as requiring vigorous preparation, sometimes for years before the person was worthy, while the Jesuits saw it as spiritual nourishment, to help the sinner on the path to salvation. This sparked numerous polemics in the 1640s, including a treatise on the subject by Hersent, published in 1644 with a dedication to Cardinal Mazarin. Arnauld had sought an approbation for his work from Hersent but was surprised and angered when instead he received a large volume of criticism.Footnote 32 For, despite being now in the Jansenist camp according to Henri-Michel Sauvage, Hersent criticised both sides for carrying their arguments to the extreme and cast himself in the rather unlikely role of an open, tranquil, easy-going and disinterested spirit trying to extend a more moderate opinion to bring about consensus. Arguing against those Jesuits whose laxity led them to administer the sacrament to sinners, but also exhorting Arnauld to relax somewhat the severe rigour of his approach, Hersent seemed to recognise that he alone was unlikely to solve the problem with this book, and so implored Mazarin to convene a national assembly of the French Church.Footnote 33 The Jansenist priest and historian Godefroy Hermant noted in his mémoires that this intervention had almost no effect.Footnote 34
Hersent's conversion to peacemaker was not particularly long-lasting. In Advent 1644 he caused another controversy with a sermon preached at the Parisian church of Saint-Gervais before Paul de Gondi, coadjutor of Paris and future cardinal de Retz. The published version included a letter to Gaston d'Orléans in which Hersent described himself as the victim of shameful profanation by the coadjutor and appealed for the duke's help. The problem was his discussion of the fraught issue of grace, preaching on which had been banned. In the sermon, he claimed that he would not address these questions – but only, in fact, after having already set out a Jansenist opinion on man's inherent corruption and divine grace as the only corrective for human nature. He talked of how Jesus’ life and doctrine had scandalised the world and attacked those who tried to downplay the inconvenience of accommodating devotion with an active life in the world, stating bluntly that piety was incompatible with games, sumptuous clothes, love letters, balls and so on.Footnote 35 According to a four-page apology printed in the middle of the sermon, it had been admired by thousands of people present, except Gondi.Footnote 36 Hersent dismissed the idea of banning discussions of grace as impossible to enforce and downright dangerous at a time when Pelagianism was being revived by the devil. Needless to say, the controversial manner in which he publicised his opposition to accommodation with the world and Jansenist opinions on grace lost him the right to preach in Paris.Footnote 37 It seems to have led, however, to an escalating commitment to Jansenist ideas. According to the pro-Jansenist Benedictine historian Gabriel Gerberon, on Hersent's second trip to Rome in 1645 he had the audacity to write a memorial defending Jansen and attacking the bull of Urban viii, which, despite the accompanying protestations of loyalty, was a provocative document to present in person to Innocent x.Footnote 38
Charles Hersent has tended to be described negatively by historians, particularly Oratorians with an obvious interest in criticising this enfant terrible. For Louis Batterel, he was impetuous, petulant and disobedient, unable to control his disagreeable temper, and even inclined to lead young priests astray in other ways.Footnote 39 Hersent was clearly an intractable character, prone to taking offence and not afraid to immerse himself in controversy. Despite what Williams called ‘his life of ideological zig-zags’, however, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of certain contours in his thought. By the late 1640s, his list of publications included both strongly anti-Gallican and ultramontane works and sermons espousing Jansenist theology. It was the latter that would get him into yet more trouble when he preached the panegyric of St Louis in Rome in 1650.Footnote 40
The feast of St Louis in Rome
Under the Bourbon kings, the feast day of their ancestor and patron St Louis (Louis ix), celebrated on 25 August, was the principal date on which French diplomats celebrated their kingdom and monarchy. This was particularly the case in Rome, where the memory of the thirteenth-century canonised king of France provided an ideal focus for ceremonies and festivities underlining the Catholic identity of the French monarchy. For most of the years between Louis xiii’s reign and the Revolution, the Gazette contained reports of the celebrations organised in Rome.Footnote 41 The main event was mass at San Luigi dei Francesi (Saint-Louis-des-Français), the ‘French church’ in Rome; each year, its lavish interior received additional decoration and the musical establishment was enlarged to add to the sumptuousness of the occasion.Footnote 42 This mass was normally attended by prelates, nobles, diplomats and, most important, cardinals, the number of whom present was seen as important and often included in the Gazette’s reports. Such information was also conveyed along more private channels. In early September 1651 Henri d’Éstampes-Valençay, the French ambassador in Rome, reported to Henri-Auguste de Loménie, comte de Brienne and secretary of state for foreign affairs, that on St Louis's feast day all the cardinals then in Rome had attended the high mass, excepting those who could not due to ill health or infirmity.Footnote 43
However, the Sacred College was known for its division into factions such as those supporting the Spanish and French monarchies. In 1648 it was those cardinals affectionate towards France who attended the mass on 25 August according to the Gazette, suggesting that this was a celebration of the French party in Rome.Footnote 44 Such celebrations of the feast of St Louis could take place at moments of great tension between France and the papacy, such as 1687, but in happier times, such as Louis xv’s convalescence in 1721, the pope himself was sometimes present.Footnote 45 A grand procession of carriages normally took the French ambassador to the church where he received the cardinals, whom he subsequently treated to dinner and perhaps a concert at his residence (frequently decorated with illuminations). As well as the dignitaries, the Gazette often mentions large crowds of ordinary people, for example in 1665 when they came apparently as much to see the magnificent decorations organised by the cardinal de Retz as to partake of the plenary indulgences on offer.Footnote 46 Retz reported to Hugues de Lionne the presence of most of the cardinals and the Spanish ambassador, to which the foreign minister replied that Louis xiv was pleased with the care that he had taken over the celebrations.Footnote 47
Panegyrics of St Louis were an important part of the proceedings, and it is worth considering a few ‘normal’ examples of the genre from the mid-seventeenth century before moving on to Hersent's controversial contribution of 1650. There are several problems with these sources. We cannot be sure that the printed text corresponded exactly to the sermon delivered, and even if it did, other aspects of the delivery are lost to the historical record. Hersent's manner of preaching, for example, was remembered as being both emotive and violent by Simon and extraordinarily bold by the Jesuit René Rapin.Footnote 48 In the preface to one of his published sermons, Hersent himself told the reader to remember that ‘it is very difficult to transmit to a discourse delivered by the pen, a mute instrument, the force and grace given to it by the mouth, which is an organ or animated instrument’.Footnote 49
Nevertheless, the printed version had an importance of its own in terms of disseminating the content of the sermon, and is a valuable source even if not necessarily a perfect record of what was actually delivered. The panegyrics of St Louis in Rome were delivered in French and were an opportunity to praise not just the virtues and piety of St Louis but also the providential role of France and her monarchs. Jean-Jacques Bouchard's panegyric of 1640 lauded St Louis as the most complete hero in history, uniquely praiseworthy for his piety, charity, religious patronage and devotion to crusading. He also mentioned the respect accorded to St Louis by recent popes such as Paul v, who in 1618 granted Louis xiii’s request to make 25 August a feast of obligation, and Urban viii, who wrote prayers to St Louis. This reminded the cardinals of the papacy's investment in France's saint king. It was, however, the kings of France who drew the most from St Louis's prestige in Bouchard's sermon. That they were uniquely eminent and sovereign in their absolute command and independence from foreign powers (a significant point in Rome) was presented as a recognised truth, with Paris as the modern equivalent of ancient Rome and Athens. Bouchard finished by addressing St Louis directly, asking for his intercession on behalf of France and especially on behalf of the pious, just and victorious monarch following in his footsteps.Footnote 50 This was St Louis as he was supposed to be used from the perspective of the Bourbon monarchy: a model of royal absolutism and Catholic triumphalism, harnessed to the glorification of the current king and the French monarchy.Footnote 51
The symbolism of the fleur-de-lys, associated inextricably with the French monarchy, was omnipresent in the Capuchin Antoine de Bretagne's panegyric of 1674, where it was connected to the four virtues most important to kings (strength, clemency, liberality and justice). St Louis was, unsurprisingly, the perfect example of a monarch who united these virtues. Moreover, his elevated position was unique in that he was a king among men, a king of France among kings and a saint among kings of France – an explicit statement of the pre-eminence of the French monarchy.Footnote 52 In 1648, the Carmelite Léon de Saint-Jean (Jean Macé) also referred to St Louis with the symbolism of the fleur-de-lys and was unambiguous in his attempt to link the prestige of the saint (particularly his crusading) to the glorification of France above other kingdoms as the defender of Christendom, challenging his listeners to name any people who had crossed the seas to plant the cross in Palestine as many times as the French, spilling their blood to nourish that land blessed by Jesus’ blood.Footnote 53 Such celebration of France and the monarchy within a Catholic triumphalist rhetoric designed to appeal to Rome was a normal feature of these panegyrics for decades to come. In 1703, for example, all the Roman nobility affectionate towards France was present for a panegyric in which Louis xiv’s actions against heretics were lavishly praised in tandem with St Louis's enthusiasm for piercing the tongues of blasphemers.Footnote 54 Thus the Roman panegyrics of St Louis, like the broader context of the celebrations in which they took place, were part of the promotion of the French monarchy and its prestige in the papal capital, where complex relationships with both the papacy and other Catholic powers were constantly being negotiated.
The panegyric of 1650
As might be predicted from his record over the previous decades, Charles Hersent was unlikely to play by the rules when he delivered the panegyric in 1650. It is unclear exactly why he was in Rome and how he got the job. Rapin, hostile to the Jansenists and to the ‘impetuous and scheming’ Hersent, wrote that the Jansenists (referred to in French rather vaguely as ‘on’) recognised Hersent's devotion to the cause and his talent for preaching, thinking he could be useful in helping them rally the ignorant to their cause. However, the wiser among them found his behaviour too headstrong and sent him to Rome to calm down (probably in 1645). According to Rapin, Hersent managed to gain access to the papal palace through his intrigues, with Pope Innocent x enjoying hearing his analysis of French affairs. Hersent apparently acquired such credit with Innocent that the pope dispatched him to Paris as part of a plan, kept secret from Mazarin, to offer a cardinal's hat to Louis Barbier, abbé de la Rivière, in the hope that he would use his influence with Gaston d'Orléans to push the king to make peace with Spain and organise a marriage between Gaston's daughter (the ‘Grande’ Mademoiselle de Montpensier) and Philip iv of Spain. Barbier, however, immediately informed Mazarin of the plan and Hersent was sent to the Bastille. His imprisonment did not last long and he was soon sent back to Rome (presumably by those linked to Port-Royal) in the hope that his access to the pope might be useful there.Footnote 55
Hersent then disappears from the record until 25 August 1650, when, following a magnificent dinner with the French ambassador, numerous dignitaries and prelates including the important cardinals Francesco and Antonio Barberini, Virgino Orsini and Rinaldo d'Este returned to the church of St Louis (where they had heard mass earlier) in order to listen to a panegyric delivered by Hersent.Footnote 56 This was normally an occasion on which a sermon lauding the French monarchy would be expected. Hersent, however, had different ideas. Although he began with the obligatory praise of the current monarch (saying that St Louis's blood was flowing in the veins of Louis xiv), this was followed by the worrying statement that the Holy Spirit was inspiring a design very different to that expected, ‘ordering me to abandon today the praise, feast and triumph prepared to honour the memory of St Louis, to defer and render it entirely to the one whom this cross displays giving his life for all men’.Footnote 57
Hersent did, in fact, praise St Louis, describing him as first among French kings in the eminence of his virtues, and lauding his prudence, justice, charity, humility and crusading. However, he presented a particularly austere account of St Louis's piety that emphasised the ascetic and unworldly in a way that chimed with Jansenist sensibilities. Dead to the world and living only for God, St Louis subjected himself to harsh penitential practices despite being free from sin, which Hersent used to show contemporary sinners that if God expected this from an innocent soul, he needed from them ‘a confession and penitence proportionate to the gravity and number of your sins’.Footnote 58 After expanding on the saint's chastity (he had intimate relations only with his wife Marguerite de Provence, and mostly abstained even from those), Hersent remarked that Louis ix had desired to remove himself entirely from the world and exchange his royal robe for a mendicant's habit, a resolution he would undoubtedly have carried out were it not for Marguerite's ‘prayers and tears’.Footnote 59 This was a St Louis of penitence and retreat (which chimed with Jansenist attitudes as exemplified by the solitaires of Port-Royal), not one who demonstrated the compatibility of piety and active life in the world, which would be the normal theme of his panegyrics under the Bourbons.
It was not, however, so much the austere depiction of Louis's morality and this emphasis on retreat as the notions of grace emphasised which situated this panegyric on the Jansenist side in the bitter theological disputes of this period. The first half of the panegyric was devoted to showing the ‘empire’ of God's grace over the saints. Hersent argued that ‘the saints as saints do not have true being and substance except for that which they receive from Jesus Christ by the gift of a purely free grace’.Footnote 60 Therefore the task was to praise the sanctifier rather than the sanctified. Quoting from St Augustine in his argument that God alone is the author of the soul and the sole cause of its inclination, and that a person's will is essentially subordinated to the overwhelming power of grace, Hersent's St Louis became a channel of grace rather than someone who chose to live piously through his own free will. The time-honoured rhetorical technique of prosopopoeia, in which the speaker imagines what an absent or dead person would say if they were present, was used to make this point; Hersent had St Louis speak directly to the listeners ‘who regard me today as an object worthy of your admiration’, telling them instead to render glory ‘to the great king by whose grace I am who I am’.Footnote 61 The preacher compared free will to a machine whose action was so delicate and subtle that only the maker could give it movement, ‘so that there is no action of our free will which can be subtracted or separated from the order and operation of providence’.Footnote 62 He concluded by imploring his listeners to ‘recognise the empire of grace’. By implicitly denying St Louis's agency and going straight to the controversial issues of grace and predestination, Hersent had ensured that this sermon would create controversy.
According to Rapin, however, the sermon was delivered with so little gravity that it would not have made much impact had it not been printed – moreover, printed with an extraordinary letter addressed to Innocent x and included in both Italian and French.Footnote 63 Hersent stated in the letter that he was showing Louis's sanctity not in his person, but in its source – the grace given to the children of Adam by a crucified God, which had ‘empire’ over the heart of this great king. Railing against contrary opinions that he compared to the impiety of the Pelagian heresy, he boldly proceeded fully to appropriate the preeminent symbol of the Catholicity of the French monarchy to the service of the Jansenist cause by evoking the image of a revived St Louis on bended knee before the pope imploring him
to take up the protection and defence of this medicinal grace which cost the Saviour all his blood … [and] which he defended powerfully by the most learned pen of Saint Augustine…; and in particular to ensure by your authority that, under the name of the greatly learned, modest and religious bishop of Ypres [Jansen], the doctrine concerning free grace and predestination, that the great light of the church Saint Augustine taught with the order, approbation and admiration of a number of popes your predecessors … of which the Roman church must never be deprived, is never disparaged or slandered.Footnote 64
According to this appeal, Innocent x could neither perform a greater service to the Church nor acquire more personal honour than by protecting Augustinian notions of grace as defined by Jansen from their powerful and numerous enemies; Hersent generously offered to be the first to praise an action so worthy of the head of the Church.Footnote 65 Such a petition could not have come at a tenser moment, for in May 1650 the French Assembly of the Clergy had decided to submit the controversy over Augustinus to the pope, requesting a condemnation of Jansenist ideas; Vincent de Paul organised signatures to this petition over the coming months.Footnote 66 Anti-Jansenist forces were mobilising in Rome; in June 1650 the general chapter of the Capuchins had issued a decree banning their preachers from teaching Jansenist doctrine.Footnote 67 Hersent's sermon was, therefore, an attempt to use the annual celebration of St Louis in Rome to put the opposite, Jansenist side of the argument before the papacy in a highly public manner.
The fall-out was dramatic. According to letters of October 1650 from the papal nuncio, Niccolò Guido del Bagni, to two French bishops both keen to receive news of the incident (Nicolas Sanguin of Senlis and François Fouquet of Agde), soon published alongside a recent papal condemnation of Jansen, it was fortunate that Hersent had preached in French and was therefore understood by few people, otherwise he would have been attacked before descending from the pulpit. Hersent's former friend the pope was gravely offended at the insolence of the printed sermon and letter and furious with those who had given permission to publish it. He ordered that Hersent be brought before the Inquisition to respond to questions about his faith, failing which procedures against him would be initiated.Footnote 68 A reading of the event hostile to the Jansenists was therefore publicised very quickly. Another letter from a Rome that was full of this news soon appeared in print, attributed to François Davenne.Footnote 69 Although the Grand Dictionnaire describes it as a defence of Hersent, the actual text is quite negative. The letter noted that Hersent had not become any wiser since going to Rome, and described him as a partisan of the new opinions (Jansenism) that respect for the Holy See obliged all Catholics to renounce. According to Davenne, Hersent's intention to defend Jansenism was intelligible to all who heard the panegyric even though it was somewhat equivocal; however, the preacher had regretted not declaring himself openly and so published the sermon with its extraordinary letter, therefore arousing the understandable anger of the pope. Hersent is presented as somewhat cowardly, subsequent events showing that he was not prepared to suffer for his beliefs, instead choosing to hide from the Inquisition rather than defend himself.Footnote 70
A far more positive account can be found in the sources written by Jansenists, among whom Hersent's actions had made him something of a hero.Footnote 71 One of these is the journal of the Jansenist theologian Louis de Saint-Amour, who was in Venice when he first heard news of the incident and the efforts of the Inquisition to arrest Hersent in September 1650. Francesco Albizzi, assessor of the Holy Office, went to the Palazzo Borghese where he heard that Hersent was with the ambassador of Malta, and apparently ordered his men to take him to the prison of the Inquisition, with permission to enter the palace if Hersent delayed.Footnote 72 The preacher, however, managed to throw himself into the coach of the French ambassador (Valençay), which was fortunately passing nearby.Footnote 73 This version of events, which sounds a little unlikely, conflicts with Davenne's letter, which stated that Hersent escaped through the back door; Rapin attacked Saint-Amour directly for trying to deny the French ambassador's complicity in organising Hersent's escape. In any case, Hersent found protection with the French ambassador, who, according to Rapin, enjoyed his lively conversation – a stroke of good fortune not shared by Pierre Dufour, the Dominican who had approved the publication of the panegyric and who was soon imprisoned by the Holy Office.Footnote 74 It is worth noting, however, that no reference to Hersent or to this incident can be found in the diplomatic correspondence from Rome.Footnote 75
Saint-Amour's account of subsequent developments is sympathetic to Hersent, as might be expected from someone undertaking the difficult and delicate job of defending the Jansenist cause in Rome. He saw the whole affair as indicative of the volatile and tense atmosphere that surrounded this issue in the papal city. According to Gerberon and Saint-Amour, Hersent requested from the pope several times through Valençay the opportunity to justify himself before the pontiff and the Sacred College – if only his safety were guaranteed – and show that he had said nothing contrary to the faith in the sermon, to which Innocent gave a non-committal ‘vedremo’ (‘we will see’). Saint-Amour also noted that it was strange that the papacy was treating so harshly someone who had exposed himself to danger in arguing an ultramontane case in Optati Galli. In any case, there was no guarantee of safety. Following the public appearance on 17 October (at the same point as a condemnation of two Jansenist catechisms of grace) of a summons from the Inquisition ordering Hersent to appear before them ‘to respond on matters of faith and purge himself of the crimes imputed to him’, the preacher seems to have supposed reasonably that he would be forced either to abjure ideas which seemed orthodox to him or remain in the chains of the Holy Office, and therefore decided to return to France.Footnote 76 He had presumably left Rome by the time that Saint-Amour arrived in November 1650, as there is no mention of any meeting between the two in the latter's writings.Footnote 77
Saint-Amour thought the issue closed until he heard in February 1651 that the Holy Office was examining the sermon. The key problems seemed to be Hersent's insistence that free will was inherently sinful without grace and that saints were remarkable more for the free manner in which they let themselves be directed by grace rather than the voluntary actions of their free will. It seems that the sermon was well-defended, however, and its accusers had to fall back on Hersent's defence of Jansen in the letter. Saint-Amour presented the whole affair as a sign of the corruption, secrecy and irreligious nature of the Holy Office, which, despite not managing to censure Hersent's ideas other than his defence of Jansen, could not absolve someone who had not recognised their tribunal. On 1 March an order appeared signed by ten cardinals (including Barberini, who apparently admitted to Saint-Amour that he had not read it) ordering Hersent to appear within three months.Footnote 78 This term elapsed and the Holy Office published and publicised its excommunication of Hersent on 24 August 1651, the evening before the next feast of St Louis, despite apparently not being able to find any proposition to condemn within the sermon. In November 1652 Albizzi still maintained that Hersent needed to come to Rome to retract his ideas publicly, or at least go to the nuncio in France to profess his obedience to the Holy See and renounce the ideas of Jansenism, after which it might be possible to see what could be done to withdraw his excommunication.Footnote 79 There seems to be no record of whether or not he did this, but it seems unlikely that such an event would have left no trace. Instead, Hersent appears to have lived out the final years of his life in Brittany, where he became the confidant of Jean-Emmanuel de Rieux, marquis d'Assérac, and died in around 1660 at the château de Cargové.Footnote 80
If Hersent really thought that his sermon could persuade the church hierarchy in Rome to sympathise with, or even support, the Jansenist theology of grace, he was obviously unsuccessful. In October 1650 Innocent x once again repeated the papal ban on publishing new works on grace and in March 1653 issued the bull Cum occasione, whose condemnation of five propositions said to be in Augustinus sparked the ‘right-fact’ debate, leading to another more explicitly anti-Jansenist bull, Alexander vii’s Ad sacram (1656).Footnote 81 The papacy's commitment to suppressing Jansen's ideas was probably inevitable given previous decisions on the matter of grace – not least by the Council of Trent – as well as the pressure exerted by the French monarchy, which increasingly viewed the Jansenists as politically as well as theologically suspect.Footnote 82 But before summer 1650 the papacy had tried to impose silence rather than commit itself to an explicit verdict on the orthodoxy of Jansen's theology, and at that precise point the French monarchy was in a weak position, preoccupied by the challenge of the Frondes. At this moment, Charles Hersent thought that a direct appeal to Innocent x, with whom he had previously enjoyed friendly relations, might secure the pope's support or protection for Jansenism, or at least prevent an outright condemnation. Very soon, such an idea would become far less credible after the French government regained control and Innocent committed the papacy more directly to the suppression of Jansenist ideas of grace. In 1650, however, it was still possible for a Jansenist to be ultramontane and to conceive of the authority of the pope as the best way to resolve the dispute. Hersent's history as the author of Optati Galli and his very public appeal to Innocent x show this combination of ultramontane views and Jansenist theology, which must at the very least complicate our understanding of the links between Jansenism and Gallicanism, particularly before the mid-1650s.
That Hersent used the feast of St Louis to launch this bid was significant and audacious. This was a cult associated strongly with the prestige of the sworn enemies of the Jansenists, the French monarchy and the Society of Jesus. Some historians have noted the connections between Port-Royal and devotion to St Louis, particularly in efforts to write histories of the saint from a Jansenist perspective.Footnote 83 Hersent's panegyric has been missed entirely from these accounts, however, even though it was a very public attempt to channel the prestige of the French royal saint into a defence of Jansenist ideas on grace. In some respects, the whole affair gives the impression of being the work of an independent troublemaker with a knack for causing controversy. He seems to have acted alone and there is nothing in the letters of Mère Angélique of Port-Royal, Antoine Arnauld or other leading Jansenists to suggest that this sermon was part of a wider strategy. This incident therefore shows the passions that firmly-held views on these controversial topics could rouse in the febrile atmosphere of the mid-century, providing motivations for apparently reckless behaviour on an individual level.
Although Jansenism was sometimes tolerated in France in uneasy compromises such as the ‘Peace of the Church’ from the late 1660s, it was obvious from 1653 that the papacy was committed to supporting the French crown's obsession with eradicating it, even if Gallicanism provided opportunities for controversy over how anti-Jansenist measures should be enforced.Footnote 84 The theological controversies continued, but there seems to be no subsequent occasion on which quite so direct an appeal was made to the pope to protect supporters of Jansen's interpretation of Augustine's theology of grace, even during periods when the atmosphere in Rome appeared more sympathetic (such as during the pontificate of Innocent xi). Charles Hersent's appeal, coming at a tense moment when Jansenist ideas needed all the support they could get in Rome, was significant as a highly direct and public attempt to secure papal support and, ultimately, as an unusual but revealing example of ultramontane Jansenism. Its failure, almost inevitable in retrospect, should not obscure the importance of the moment and of what was at stake, and accounts of the early decades of Jansenism should convey something of the volatile and unpredictable atmosphere of the early 1650s.
