An in-depth study of European anti-Jesuitism, Dale Van Kley's new book details inimical accounts of the Jesuits and the international plotting against their order from the portrayal of the Society of Jesus as a threat to the Renaissance state in the 1550s to its suppression by Clement xiv in 1773. Extremely erudite and steeped in the details of political, diplomatic and intellectual history from Spain to Poland, Van Kley does not merely narrate what its author deems a series of events equal in religious importance to the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. It also deploys the concept of Reform Catholicism for the first time in order to describe Catholic reformist views that, originally elaborated in France, were exported to the rest of Europe after 1750 to justify at first the Jesuit expulsions from Braganza Portugal and the Bourbon realms, and later the papal suppression of the Jesuit order. Van Kley's final aim is to recount the centuries-long formation of a self-conscious ideology that was ultimately potent enough to persuade Europe's highest powers to destroy the Society even when solid evidence of its misdeeds was lacking.

Systematic anti-Jesuitism, we learn in the book's opening chapters, began with the Gallicanism of Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615) and Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619), which was later complemented by Cornelius Jansen's (1585–1638) famous refutation of Luis de Molina's (1535–1600) theology of grace in Augustinus (1640). The resulting rendering of the Jesuits as morally lax conflated by the mid-seventeenth century with additional portrayals of them as educators who challenged the universities, as regular clergy who combated the secular clergy, as Pelagian pagans who tolerated pagan rites among their Oriental converts, and as immoral missionaries who tore authority away from virtuous colonial bishops. A century would then pass before France – ever the laboratory of Reform Catholicism – experienced a second wave of anti-Jesuit Gallicanism that bore fruit in a legally airtight case against the Society's ability to exist in France, thus forcing a reluctant Louis xv to accept the Society's suppression in his lands.

If, as Van Kley shows, French reform Catholics built a rigorous case against the Jesuits at both the legal and ideological levels, their Portuguese and Spanish counterparts imported the French theoretical framework in order to not only suppress, but also expel the Jesuits for reasons at once hazier and more practical. In Carvalho's Portugal, the motivation was the fact that the Jesuit Paraguay missions competed against Carvalho's Company of Grao Pará and Maranhao in producing tea, wild cocoa and similar products. In Carlos iii's Spain, the trigger was the Esquilache riots that frightened the monarch into finding a scapegoat, and that led him to make the Jesuits’ complete suppression a central item of the Bourbon Family Pact he was negotiating with France, Naples and Parma. Inexorably, the Jesuits were expelled from the smaller Bourbon kingdoms, and Van Kley recounts in detail the plotting that was involved, reconstructing what by the mid-eighteenth century was a reform Catholic international that had its most important policy and information centres in the Archetto – a Roman clerical group that met in the home of Cardinal Andrea Corsini (1735–95); in the Jansenist church of Utrecht – severed from Rome after it elected its own hierarchy following the Netherlands’ conversion to Calvinism; and in the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques – France's clandestine, vitriolic and exceedingly well-informed Jansenist journal. The book closes by recounting the intrigues surrounding the election of Clement xiv, the pressure exercised on the Franciscan friar become pope to suppress the Society, and the ‘unedifying, even ugly’ (p. 238) procedures that Spain employed to finally wrest the suppression from the new pontiff in the bull Dominus ac redemptor (1773).

Richard Evans has demolished historical counterfactuals as fundamentally wishful reactionary exercises, but Van Kley uses counterfactuals to conjure both a ‘right-wing’ scenario – what would have happened if the pope had flatly refused to dissolve the Society – and a ‘left-wing’ one – what would have ensued if he had dissolved the Society immediately upon ascending to the chair of St Peter. In the first case, Van Kley muses, a schism with Spain and Portugal would probably have happened, while in the second, the pope would have been able to attend to the non-Jesuit-related items of the reform Catholic agenda: sovereigns’ temporal independence, a recognition of papal fallibility, canonical limits on papal power, the superiority of ecumenical councils and the right to self-government of each national Catholic Church.

Had the Church been reformed by the pope himself along these conciliar, anti-devotional and anti-regular clergy lines, Van Kley believes, the papacy would have both avoided the indignities it suffered as a result of Spanish bullying, and created a situation in which the French Revolution would have been less violent and anti-Christian, since the National Assembly would have faced a clergy in need of very little if any reform. This, in turn, would have averted the polarisation that happened after the publication of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1791), which drove the majority of the French clergy into the papacy's arms. One cannot but wonder, however, how willing Clement xiv – regardless of how Franciscan – could ever have been to suppress swiftly, and without having to undergo duress, the largest and most cosmopolitan of Catholic orders, a major propagator of the Catholic faith and one of the strongest supports of his own office.

In all, Van Kley's is an impressive scholarly effort and the worthy culmination of a lifetime of erudition and acute analysis, as well as a masterful synthesis poised to become a classic of the historiography of Reform Catholicism and the Jesuit suppression.