THE DAMIENS AFFAIR AND THE UNRAVELING OF THE ANCIEN REGIME 1750-177° THE DAMIENS AFFAIR AND THE UNRAVELING OF THE ANCIEN REGIME, 1750-1770 DALE K.VAN KLEY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book ISBN 0-69/-05402-9 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Harold W. McGraw Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Garamond Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Frontispiece: Damiens strapped to his mattress in the Tour de Montgomery Inset left: Damiens being dismembered by four horses in the place de Grive Inset right: Damiens' dismembered body being burned in the place de Greve To my parents, John and Stella, for Christmas, 1983 Contents PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix PART I THE DAMIENS AFFAIR INTRODUCTION 3 1 DAMIENS 13 The Domestic Servant 1 3 Damiens' Religion 3 6 2 DAMIENS' MASTERS AS JUDGES 56 Les Affaires du Temps 5 6 Plots and Conspiracies 6 5 Jansenists and Jesuits 80 An Abortive Trial 90 PART II THE UNRAVELING OF THE ANCIEN REGIME 3 DAMIENS' MASTERS AS MAGISTRATES: The Refusal of Sacraments Controversy and the Political Crisis of 1756-1757 99 Christus and Fiscus 99 Parlement against King and Bishops 104 Bishops against Parlement and King 127 The Political Crisis of 1756-1757 149 Christianization and Secularization 163 4 DAMIENS' MASTERS AS THEORISTS: Constitutional Thought from 1750 to 1770 166 The Classical Synthesis 166 The Participatory Church 173 National Sovereignty and Integral Absolutism 184 Sacerdoce and Empire 202 A Literary Damiens 220 vii CONTENTS 5 DAMIENS' PEERS 226 The Mauvais Discours Janseniste 226 The Mauvais Discours Divot 234 Political Folly 242 The Desacralization of the Monarchy 246 Lese-Majeste Verbale 255 CONCLUSION 266 NOTES 271 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 352 INDEX 357 Preface and Acknowledgments IT HAS LONG BEEN my conviction that the mixed religious, ecclesiastical, and political disputes related to the papal bull Unigenitus in eighteenth-century France should occupy a central place in the ongoing discussions concerning the breakdown of the Old Regime and the ideological origins of the French Revolution. The present book represents another in a succes­ sion of attempts to trace the contours of that place. This task, difficult enough for the "century of lights," is not made the easier by the tendency of most "secular" historians to relegate ecclesiastical or "church" history to a wholly separate and irrelevant category of endeavor and of most ecclesiastical his­ torians to rest content with their ghettolike existence as long as their dogmatic slumbers are not unduly disturbed. Hence the title's scrupulous avoidance of anything that might smack of religious or ecclesiastical history. It is a book first and foremost about eighteenth-century France and only secondarily about the French Catholic church. Of those predisposed against such a view who have nonetheless taken the bother to read this preface, I beg whatever indulgence they can muster and at least the patience to hear me out. But why Damiens ? Why remain entrenched in the century's middle decades rather than storm the 1770s and 1780s to demonstrate, say, the continuity between Jansenist-Gallican modes of political discourse and those more immediately pre­ ceding the French Revolution. A hundred times in the be­ ginning stages of the present project I was tempted to abandon Damiens to his fate and attempt—or more modestly begin to attempt—something on the model of Bernard Bailyn's book on the ideological origins of the American Revolution. But aside from the facts that such a project is far vaster than the one for which I had been originally funded and is probably beyond my abilities in any event, I was for better or worse