Jansenist Miracles from the Holy Thorn to the Origins of the Cult to Francois de Paris

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Jansenist Miracles: From the Holy Thorn to the Origins of the Cult to Francois de Paris

By B. Robert Kreiser

This is a chapter taken from Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton University Press, 1978). It contains a Life of François de Pâris.

The appeal to, and ideological exploitation of, miracles in times of political adversity had a long history in the Jansenist controversy, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. Throughout this stormy period there had been a large number of miraculous cures as well as a variety of other ‘‘supernatural” signs and portents associated with Port-Royal, all of which served to sustain the Jansenists’ sense of themselves as a specially chosen religious elite. Recourse to the miraculous and appeal for supernatural aid—whether for cures of specific physical disabilities or out of a need for celestial comfort in the face of official persecution—became an almost daily occurrence in certain Jansenist circles. Increasingly, the miracle, which bore direct and unequivocal witness to the divine presence, came to constitute perhaps the most important vehicle of expression available to the persecuted Jansenist faithful. The miracle was God’s way of giving “voice” to the previously stifled and frustrated partisans of the “Truth,” of enabling them not only to “speak out” but to do so effectively, with a “language” of extraordinary force and conviction. It thus provided the Jansenists with a powerful apologetic weapon and afforded them a means of fending off the suspicions of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.

Of all the miracles claimed by and for Port-Royal none was more cherished than the famous cure of Pascal’s young niece, Marguerite Perrier, on March 24, 1656, just three months after her uncle had published the first of his Lettres provinciales. Mile. Perrier had been suffering for a long time from a serious and disfiguring lachrymal fistula in the corner of one eye. She was suddenly healed when a Holy Thorn recently presented to the sisters of Port-Royal-des-Champs, where she was a pensionary, was simply touched to her ulcerous sore. Despite vehement Jesuit denunciations and attempts to explain it away, the miracle, supported by substantial medical evidence and duly authenticated a short time later by the diocesan authorities, made a profound impression on the public. So great was the impact of this extraordinary event that the queen mother herself accepted the cure as miraculous and allegedly induced Mazarin to hold off the persecution of the Jansenists for another five years because of it. Within a few months the cures and other miracles attributed to the Holy Thorn multiplied to fourteen, and afterwards to eighty.

Deeply impressed by these incidents, various Jansenist apologists were inspired to pious meditations on the nature of miracles, the means of verifying them, and their significance in times of religious controversy. Pascal, in particular, was moved to a series of long and fruitful reflections on the miracles of the Old and New Testaments and a discussion of the relationship between miracles and religious truth. In notes compiled for a pamphlet (never completed) dealing with the miracle worked upon his little niece, he argued, among other things, that the principal purpose of miracles since the time of the Apostles had always been to discern true doctrine from false—an argument that would be taken up again in the eighteenth century. Residents and friends of Port-Royal, following Pascal, confidently looked upon the Perrier miracle and the other Holy Thorn cures not simply as evidence that they possessed an authentic relic but rather as a demonstration that their defense of efficacious grace had the blessing of God. Accused of a revolt against Church and State, they claimed that these miracles were divine justification of the righteousness of their cause.

While the Holy Thorn miracles were undoubtedly the most striking and widely publicized “supernatural” phenomena associated with Port-Royal and the Jansenists in the seventeenth century, they were by no means the only ones. Numberless other miracles were also attributed to the intercession of a host of Jansenist heroes, lay and clerical, beginning with Saint-Cyran and including Mere Angelique Arnauld, the duchess de Longueville, the abbe de Pontchateau, and several “saintly bishops” who had devoted themselves to the cause of Port-Royal (Pavilion, Vialart, and Choart de Buzenval among them). Their mortal remains and a variety of their relics were carefully preserved, usually at the monastery, as objects of profound veneration and sources of continual protection and spiritual sustenance. Most of the miraculous cures the “saints” performed were, like those attributed to the Holy Thorn, confined to the limited circle of the “societe de Port-Royal.” Occasionally, however, as in the cases of Pontchateau and Bishop Vialart of Chalons, the alleged cures were operated in public arenas and gave rise to popular devotions not unlike those which developed around the deacon Paris in the eighteenth century. They also gave rise to an important split within the Jansenist camp.

The expectation of miracles and other supernatural signs had become almost an integral part of the Jansenist worldview by the end of the seventeenth century, a source of profound psychological consolation, and a means of achieving symbolic victory in the teeth of imminent or actual defeat. Some Jansenists had grown accustomed to finding providential meaning even in perfectly normal-seeming events. But there was an important body of opinion among the party’s theologians which denied the significance of the supposed portents and questioned the very reality of some of the alleged cures and their usefulness to the faithful. Though this skeptical position was expressed initially by Saint-Cyran himself, it received its strongest statement in the works of Pierre Nicole. Nicole’s skepticism, directed particularly at the “public, visible” miracles associated with Pontchateau and others, was a reflection of the growing rationalist critique of the supernatural within the post-Tridentine Catholic Church at large, part of a reaction against what one writer has termed “the credulity, the impostures, the lack of critical intelligence” displayed by large numbers of the faithful. Other writers, stressing the need for austerity and discipline in religious practice and for an interior mortification of the senses, were likewise wary of emphasizing in any way the “magical” side of religion, which they saw as a gross deviation from the spirituality of Port-Royal and from the pure message of the Gospel. Though they never rejected the cult of the Virgin or the veneration of saints, they, like Nicole, especially distrusted the proliferation of unauthorized popular devotions and the “superstitious follies” such devotions helped foster and perpetuate.

This questioning attitude toward the miraculous, born of a vague mixture of suspicion and skepticism, would remain strong in certain Jansenist circles throughout the eighteenth century and was to play a complicating role in the anticonstitutionnaires’ response to the miracles attributed to Francois de Paris. Nevertheless, despite the reservations expressed by these Jansenists toward the movement’s recourse to the supernatural—reservations which would be reiterated with even greater force in the 1730s—the justificatory miracle, like the symbolic portent, continued to play a significant role in much of the party’s apologetic literature until the very end of the reign of Louis XIV. This special receptivity to, indeed craving for, the miraculous, and the presence within the movement of several uncanonized popular saints, constituted important, though generally overlooked, elements of the cultural baggage bequeathed to the eighteenth-century heirs of the tradition of Port-Royal. By recognizing the reality and significance of this “devotion affective au merveilleux” within seventeenth-century Jansenism, we may discover that the line from Port-Royal to Saint-Medard is not as tenuous or obscure as has usually been thought.

The condition of the appellants in the 1720s, following Cardinal Fleury’s rise to power, was reminiscent of the situation that had obtained in the 1650s—prior to the Holy Thorn miracles—when the initial persecution of the Jansenists was imminent and the fortunes of Port-Royal were similarly bleak. The post-Regency period, like the period of Mazarin’s rule, witnessed a sudden and dramatic proliferation of reputedly miraculous cures—this time associated with and performed by a series of worthy appellant clergy. In May 1725 the first in a long series of such cures took place in the parish of Sainte-Marguerite in Paris and began vaguely and almost imperceptibly to reawaken the flagging hopes of the anticonstitutionnaire party. On May 31, during the procession of the Holy Sacrament through the parish, a certain Madame Lafosse, wife of a cabinetmaker from the faubourg Saint-Antoine, was suddenly cured of a partial paralysis and considerable hemorrhaging which had severely enfeebled her for a long time. The news of the event spread quickly through Paris, and within a short time Cardinal Noailles appointed a commission to investigate the cure and compile an extensive dossier. After carefully reviewing the results of the commission’s inquiry, the archbishop published the details of the findings in a celebrated pastoral letter of August 10, 1725. On the basis of testimony taken from some fifty witnesses to the prodigy, among them Voltaire himself, as well as the depositions of several medical experts, Noailles certified that the cure was a real miracle which “Providence had just accomplished in order to confound the libertines and the Protestants, both enemies of the Real Presence.”

A public celebration of the miracle took place later in August, shortly after Noailles had issued his pastoral letter. Once again the Holy Sacrament of the parish Sainte-Marguerite was carried in a procession through the faubourg Saint-Antoine. Noailles took part, while Madame Lafosse walked behind holding a candle in her hand. The following Sunday, parishioners from Sainte-Marguerite came in a procession to the cathedral of Notre-Dame along with persons from all over the faubourg; as before, Madame Lafosse walked at the rear, candle in hand. Finally, she was even presented to the king.

The matter might have ended there as a brief and simple episode of early modern popular piety. It might have, but it did not. The cure who had originally consecrated the host and borne the Corpus Christi was the pious Jean-Baptiste Goy, a doctor of theology in the Sorbonne and an avowed appellant, as were most of the clergy who served under him at Sainte-Marguerite. Thus the miracle soon assumed a much greater significance for the partisans of the appeal. Indeed, it was to provoke an exchange of theological polemics which might be regarded as a small-scale dress rehearsal for the later debates over Saint-Medard.

The “supernatural” precedents of the seventeenth century, especially the Holy Thorn miracles, and the commentaries of Pascal and others were not lost on an important group of anticonstitutionnaire. Exultant, they seized upon the Lafosse cure as a striking sign not only of the truth and righteousness of their opposition to the Bull but also of the divine protection gracing their cause and justifying their conduct. Noailles had been reluctant to go so far in his decree, but with him such hesitation was not uncommon. In his public pronouncements, the cardinal-archbishop had limited himself to citing the testimony of the miracle in order to enlighten the faithful; according to his mandement, the miracle was neither more nor less than a proof of the Real Presence. Others, however, were prepared to go much further.

Bishop Colbert of Montpellier, one of the four original appellants, was particularly eager to extend Noailles’ analysis in order to exploit the occasion for the anticonstitutionnaire party. In a pastoral letter dated October 1725, which first appeared in 1726, Colbert went beyond his colleague’s attack on the libertines and the Protestants to assail the proponents of the Bull for preaching “revolt, schism, and division.” He argued that the miracle represented both God’s approval of the appellants and His condemnation and repudiation of their opponents. Regarding the specific case of Sainte-Marguerite, Colbert claimed that prior to the miracle the acceptants had successfully turned many of M. Goy’s parishioners against him, to the point where the faithful were even refusing to receive the sacraments from his hands. Divine intercession, according to Colbert, had preserved the cure’s reputation from the discrediting calumnies of his enemies. Following Pascal, Colbert further asserted that miracles had a general application in times of controversy, as the means by which God discerned the true doctrine from the false. In the case of the Bull, God had evidently declared that the supporters of the appeal, though in the minority, were the righteous preservers of the faith.

Predictably, the constitutionnaire were not prepared to let these pretensions to justification go unchallenged for very long. Bishop Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy of Soissons (later archbishop of Sens), one of the most prolific and vitriolic pamphleteer-theologians in his party, responded to Colbert in a pastoral letter of April 1726. The irrefutable evidence collected by Noailles in favor of the Lafosse cure made any challenge to its authenticity appear fruitless. Languet’s approach, therefore, was to attack as unwarranted the inferences which Colbert had drawn from it in the controversy over the bull Unigenitus. Languet argued that miracles are not always an indubitable proof of the purity of faith, but rather a demonstration of the omnipotence and goodness of God, Who performs miracles when He chooses to do so and for reasons known only to Himself. To be sure, Languet conceded, although miracles once were a means of separating truth from error, this had been the case principally in the days of the Apostles. But after the Church had been firmly established, it alone was entrusted with the task of interpreting the faith... Hence, the only guaranteed source of revealed truth was to be found in the teachings of the Church. Furthermore, he argued, it is doctrine which “discerns the miracles” and not the other way around. The body of bishops, united with the pope, has the apostolic authority to judge. The bull Unigenitus had been declared by them to be official doctrine of the Church. Therefore, the cure, allegedly operated on behalf of those who had challenged official doctrine, could not have been a true miracle. Such an argument was, of course, begging the question, since the notion that the Bull was a “judgment of the Church” was precisely the issue upon which neither side could agree.

From a most unexpected quarter there came yet another rebuke to Colbert for his pastoral letter. The Parlement of Paris, despite its sympathy for the bishop’s espousal of the appellant cause, issued an arret on April 15, 1726, ordering the letter suppressed. On the urging of the royal administration, the court reproached Colbert (in the words of the avocat-general) for “turning a true miracle to partisan account.” But the Parlement’s action, aimed at stopping the episcopal quarrel between Colbert and Languet before it went any further, did not prevent the indefatigable bishop of Montpellier from issuing more letters denouncing the “schismatic ardor” of his opponents. Not surprisingly, Languet, joined by Bishop Belsunce of Marseille among others, continued to match Colbert statement for statement, in number if not in audacity or persuasiveness. By 1727, when Francois de Paris died, the parties to the Unigenitus controversy were only just beginning to skirmish on their new battleground. But the polemical broadsides which they exchanged over the Lafosse miracle were already setting the main lines and terms of the theological controversy that was later to surround the Paris miracles at Saint-Medard. Furthermore, Colbert and Languet also established the bitter, uncompromising tone which marked the debate that raged in the ensuing years.

There is no reason to believe, as some of their acceptant enemies alleged, that the appellants had actually staged the Lafosse cure in the interests of their propaganda campaign. Indeed, the miracle had been so well confirmed that even the pope was reported to have approved of Noailles’ findings. Nevertheless, many of the constitutionnaires in France continued to suspect that their opponents were practicing pious frauds, thereby causing the faith incalculable harm. Nor were their suspicions allayed when other allegedly miraculous cures, all supposedly performed through the intercession of critics of the Bull, followed upon the Lafosse miracle.

For all of Colbert’s polemical efforts, one miracle could hardly have vindicated the claims of the appellants to divine justification of their cause. In subsequent months, however, numerous additional cures, unconnected with that of Madame Lafosse, were reportedly taking place throughout Paris and gave heightened significance to the miracle of Sainte-Marguerite. In July 1725, miracles occurred in the church of Sainte-Genevieve, then in the hands of appellant canons. About the same time, relics of the late Father Quesnel were said to be producing still other miracles all over the diocese. Soon the cures were more widespread. In late 1725 several occurred at the tomb of a certain M. Sauvage, an obscure Jansenist priest from Boulogne. In March 1727, in Lyons, the Oratorian Father Celoron, another ardent appellant, worked a miracle on a three-year-old child who had been stricken blind from smallpox. Celoron later attested himself to the restoration of the boy’s sight.

Nor were these phenomena confined to France. In January 1727, Amsterdam was the scene of the sudden cure of a forty-five-year-old woman named Agathe Leenders-Stouthandel, who for twelve years had been afflicted with several maladies deemed incurable by three doctors. The event occurred after she had received the Eucharist from the hands of Archbishop Barchman of Utrecht, kissed his priestly vestments, and obtained his benediction. The archbishop, installed in his episcopal see more than a year earlier, had seen the canonicity of his election and the validity of his consecration—performed by the suspended French missionary bishop of Babylone, Dominique Varlet— called into question at Rome because of his own Jansenist affiliations. The miracle, attested to by 170 witnesses, including several doctors and many non-Catholics, thus stood for his supporters as divine legitimating of the prelate’s elevation.

It was in the diocese of Reims, however, that these miracles first aroused a public stir great enough to involve the authorities. The controversy developed around the Jansenist priest, Gerard Rousse, a pious canon in the royal abbey of Avenay, who died on May 9, 1727. His constitutionnaire cure had refused Rousse the last sacraments because of his adherence to the appeal and also denied him the right of burial in holy ground. Upon hearing of Rousse’s plight, the sympathetic cure of a nearby parish administered the last rites and provided a resting place in his chapel. Shortly afterward, M. Rousse was temporarily raised from obscurity when, in the space of less than a year, two miraculous cures occurred at his tomb.

The first cure took place in early July. The poverty-stricken Anne Augier, paralyzed for twenty-two years, suddenly recovered the full use of her limbs while lying on Rousse’s tomb. In spite of a decree from the grands vicaires which dismissed the event, the miracle, witnessed by dozens of spectators, won the support of thirty-two cures of the diocese, ten of whom were not even appellants. Acting in accordance with prescribed canonical procedure, the priests called upon the diocesan authorities to undertake a full-scale examination of the cure to determine if it were an authentic miracle. But their superiors refused the request.

Once the Augier case was made public, however, a great number of sick persons began to flock to Rousse’s grave to pray for relief from their infirmities. The cure of Avenay had already warned the duke of Rohan, archbishop of Reims, who immediately forbade the faithful to make any pilgrimage to the tomb or even to invoke Rousse’s name in their prayers. These prohibitions, supported by the strictures of constitutionnaire parish confessors, served to force the submission of the more timid and weak. But some refused to be cowed.

During May 1728 a certain Madame Jeanne Stapart, wife of a notary, defied the prohibition and went to Rousse’s tomb. There she was cured of a severe paralysis and also had the sight restored to her left eye after eleven years of blindness originally occasioned by an attack of apoplexy. The cures of Reims once again requested a canonical investigation, this time of both the Augier and the Stapart cures. As before, they were refused. A pastoral letter published by Bishop Colbert of Montpellier on behalf of the Stapart miracle did not change the situation either. Other efforts were similarly unsuccessful, for the authorities, alarmed at the lack of discipline on the part of clergy and laity alike, were already preparing to suppress the newly formed Rousse cult. An order of October 1728 from Chauvelin, Keeper of the Seals, to the intendant in Champagne, directed the latter to take precautions against the followers of M. Rousse and assist the archbishop of Reims in putting a stop to their “superstitious pilgrimages.” The intendant, who believed that the proposal to stifle the cult would only encourage larger crowds to worship at Rousse’s tomb, objected strenuously. After a considerable delay, the government finally ordered archers placed at the entrance to the chapel where the abbe’s tomb was located. Despite the intendant’s misgivings, these repressive measures, combined with earlier ecclesiastical threats of excommunication for those who continued to practice the prohibited devotions, proved quite successful. Indeed, in fairly short order and without too much difficulty, royal officials acting in concert with the vigilant Church authorities in Reims effectively put a halt to the popular observances before they could become too unmanageable. Now proscribed, the nascent cult briefly associated with Gerard Rousse appears to have come to an abrupt and rather undramatic end.

For more than two years the various appellant miracles we have been describing had remained essentially sporadic, isolated phenomena. With the notable exception of the Lafosse cure, they had attracted relatively little attention beyond the localities in which they had taken place and produced no longstanding or far-reaching repercussions. In the one case—Reims—where the incidence of miracles had given rise to an unsanctioned religious cult, fairly prompt and forceful intervention on the part of the authorities had succeeded in bringing the situation completely under control. Within a short time, therefore, the names of Rousse, Goy, Celoron, and the other Jansenist worthies who had “performed” assorted miracles since 1725 had sunk back into historical oblivion. To be sure, the cures which had reportedly been effected through their intercession—for the present of only limited propaganda potential for the appellant party—were not entirely without symbolic importance. In subsequent years, when the opponents of the bull Unigenitus began to elaborate the full doctrinal and political implications of the Saint-Medard miracles for the anticonstitutionnaire cause, they were to interpret these first miracles as a divine anticipation of those which were accomplished through the intercession of the appellant Francois de Paris. But it was around the tomb of this originally obscure Jansenist deacon, the most prolific miracle-worker of the age, that there developed what was ultimately to become the most controversial religious cult to emerge during the ancien regime. It is to the initial formation and early development of this Paris cult that we must turn our attention in the remainder of this chapter.

The special character of his life and the particular nature of his activities, both private and public, determined in large part the emergence of the popular cult associated with Francois de Paris. Resembling many a saintly martyr of the primitive Church, this deacon with an amazingly fortunate name for a folk hero, appears to have been the model of a perfect Christian—a man of consummate piety, humility, penitence, and liberality toward the poor. Regrettably, almost the only detailed sources available to us about him are the three pious biographies published four years after his death in the midst of the controversies raging over the miracles performed at his tomb. As a consequence, it is very difficult to say how much of what we know about his life is the product of partisan or hagiographic mythologizing, and how much is historically factual. In any event, what is recorded in those accounts of Paris’ life and in a handful of other extant documents is the stuff of which popular legends are made, legends from which the Catholic faithful would draw much spiritual sustenance.

Born in Paris on June 30, 1690, Francois was the elder son of Nicolas de Paris, a wealthy counselor in the Parlement of Paris from the second chamber of enquetes, who had nearly two centuries of “robe nobility” behind him, but no particularly strong or notable religious convictions or affiliations. Nor except for an uncle was the rest of young Paris’ family especially committed to or involved in spiritual affairs. Despite this background, or perhaps because of it, Francois demonstrated from an early age a strong predisposition for the religious life. Even as a youth he gave himself over to frequent mortifications, exercises of piety, and solitary prayer. Once he had completed his education at the college Mazarin, however, he had to confront the problem of selecting a vocation. His parents, who had decided long before that he would eventually succeed to his father’s charge as magistrate, were appalled when he announced his firm intention to follow an ecclesiastical career. They adamantly insisted that he begin the study of law, in preparation for an official career. Reluctantly deferring to their wishes, Francois pursued his legal courses with considerable success until 1711. Now twenty-one years of age, and believing that he had sufficiently complied with the demands of his parents, he renewed his intention of entering the clergy. Two years later, in spite of their continued resistance, he entered the celebrated Oratorian seminary of Saint-Magloire. There he came under the influence of some of the leading Jansenist theologians and controversialists of the time and made the acquaintance of numerous other Jansenist worthies, including Bishop Jean Soanen of Senez. There, too, he became increasingly committed to the Jansenist point of view—a personal commitment to the sect’s austere and demanding form of Christianity and to the wide range of spiritual, charitable, pastoral, and educational enterprises with which the school of Port-Royal had come to be associated. In addition to his own daily prayer, work, and religious studies at the seminary, he managed to find time to give catechism instruction to the children from the parish of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, where he attracted some attention both by his impressive eloquence and by his generosity in distributing books of piety. So outraged was Nicolas de Paris by his son’s disobedience that in 1714, just before his death, he partially disinherited him, reducing Francois’ portion substantially and leaving the remainder to a younger son, Jerome-Nicolas, to whom the father also bequeathed his judicial post. Ever humane and charitable, the biographers tell us, Francois converted a great part of his inheritance into alms and personally distributed to the less fortunate some of the cloth and linen that had been left to him.

Thus freed from most of his temporal cares, Francois de Paris gave himself over passionately to his religious studies. Though he demonstrated little talent for original thought or theological subtlety, he devoted long hours to the study of Scripture and the Church Fathers; he learned several ancient languages to facilitate his task of understanding these original sources of the faith and to make himself more thoroughly conversant with sacred and ecclesiastical history. By June 1715 he had received Minor Orders and in 1717 left Saint-Magloire. After much coaxing, he reluctantly agreed to be ordained subdeacon in 1718, but when he was appointed deacon in December 1720, he humbly refused to assume the position on the grounds that he was a sinful creature, unworthy of holding so exalted an office.

At the same time, Francois did not abstain from involvement in the debate over the bull Unigenitus. Quite the contrary, he gloried in the fact that he had adhered to the appeal in 1717 and had been one of the first to sign the renewed appeal in 1720, acts which were to have posthumous repercussions. Nor had he ever hidden his unequivocal disapproval of the Bull, which he regarded as the work of the devil, and which he believed was “as much opposed to the rights of the king as to those of God.” However, in his activities on behalf of the appellant cause, Paris did not become directly involved in the polemical debates. Instead, he proffered charitable assistance to a number of fellow anticonstitutionnaires who had been forced into exile and obliged to relinquish their inheritances or forfeit their benefices. More important, though, were his efforts to do penance for the evils of the Church. According to his biographers, it was M. Paris’ contention that, whereas others had been blessed with talent to defend the Church with their writings, he had been specially called to defend it “with his prayers and his tears, and to win for it God’s benediction and protection through the practices of poverty, mortifications and the rigors of penitence” to which he began submitting himself. His task, as he conceived it, was to offer himself to God as an expiatory victim. This was his personal effort to appease God’s anger, which had allegedly been aroused by the decline of spirituality within the contemporary Church and especially by the acts of persecution which the constitutionnaires had committed against the party of “Truth.” “He would have consented to being martyred,” observed one of his biographers, “asking that God’s wrath be extinguished in and through him.”

Despite M. Paris’ avowedly anticonstitutionnaire affiliations, his name was proposed for the vacant place as cure of Saint-Come in Paris. But Francois declared that he could not in good conscience sign the Formulary against the Five Propositions that had been required of all Gallican clergy since the 1660s. From then on a sacerdotal career was closed to him, which was just as well, for he had already resolved to spend the rest of his days in poverty and virtual seclusion. In 1722, reportedly disillusioned by the turmoil within the Church, he retired to the notoriously squalid faubourg Saint-Marceau—first the rue de l’Arbalete, subsequently the rue des Bourguignons (the present boulevard Port-Royal), not far from Val-de-Grace—to lead a simple life of austere renunciation and exemplary piety, all for the glory of God.

There were at least two principal reasons why Francois de Paris had chosen to settle in this area of the capital. The first, and perhaps most important, reason had to do with the religious associations that area had for the Jansenists. Saint-Marceau was located in the heart of the legendary Montagne Sainte-Genevieve, long a stronghold of Jansenist agitation, and probably the most “priest-infested” and overwhelmingly anticonstitutionnaire district in the city. It was also an area filled with monastic houses and religious congregations as well as numerous educational and printing establishments, many of them of Jansenist inspiration. In addition, it was here that the ongoing effort to preserve the traditions of Port-Royal had continued to receive much of its energetic direction. The organization of pilgrimages to the ruins of the sacred monastery, the collection and preservation of relics, the production and distribution of innumerable estampes and grauvures, the publication of important works of seventeenth-century Jansenists left in manuscript form by their authors, the composition of pious biographies, and the compilation of necrologies—all were part of the large-scale project to recapture the glorious Jansenist past to which many appellants devoted themselves throughout this period. This was the environment in which Francois de Paris (for whom Port-Royal likewise served as a subject of constant meditation) was determined to do his part to sustain the memory of the monastery and to resurrect its spiritual ideals of piety and interior religiosity.

Having committed himself to a life of heroic unworldliness, Paris thus found Saint-Marceau the perfect setting for accomplishing his purpose. Before long he was joined by three or four like-minded ascetics of his acquaintance, and together, in a modest apartment they found on the rue des Bourguignons, they established a small religious “community” consciously patterned on the model of the Solitaries of Port-Royal. They lived there in relatively peaceful seclusion, sharing various domestic tasks. Though they were subject to no religious vows, they adhered voluntarily to a rigorous reglement de vie which Francois de Paris had drawn up for their mutual use, a “rule” which denned the different spiritual exercises to be performed, individually and collectively, as well as the strict order to be followed in their daily lives. They hoped thereby to emulate, albeit on a very small scale, the fraternal and collegial spirit, the austere piety, and the penitential discipline of their seventeenth-century ancestors. Despite a fundamental mepris du monde, however, their flight from worldly distractions and temptations was not intended as a total escape or withdrawal. As with most of the Jansenists at Port-Royal, separation was primarily of an interior sort and did not involve a complete refusal of all contact with the society at large. Nor did it imply an attitude of spiritual passivity or indifference, especially toward the plight of the poor, the unfortunate, or the religiously benighted. On the contrary, for the life of Christian perfection, as the Jansenists had generally conceived it, involved an obligation to perform good works, particularly acts of charity, on behalf of others. It was in this sacred injunction to minister to Christ’s poor—an injunction of course incumbent upon all Christians, but in this period taken perhaps more seriously by the Jansenists than by many of their fellow Catholics—that Francois de Paris found a second compelling reason for moving to Saint-Marceau. There he would have more than ample opportunity to fulfill this Christian duty.

The faubourg Saint-Marceau was an area of considerable poverty and very high population density. An old and notably grubby quarter, Saint-Marceau included some of the poorest, most overcrowded, and most depressed districts in the capital. The faubourg was one of the traditional centers of Parisian artisanal activity, primarily in the brewing and tanning industries. But it also housed a wide range of other wage earners as well as small property owners: shopkeepers, small manufacturers and retail merchants, traders and peddlers, hired laborers and odd-job men and women, and a motley horde of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the lower trades and crafts. Even in the best of times many of these people lived in relatively precarious material circumstances. However, in the wake of the financial debacle of Law’s System, countless hundreds, perhaps thousands, had no doubt suffered especially severe economic and social dislocation, thereby swelling the numbers of laboring poor living on the very brink of destitution. It was to this milieu that the pious and compassionate deacon Paris had determined to move and where he was destined to live out his last years. Francois de Paris was in his element in Saint-Marceau. His neighbors, many of them poverty-stricken like him, though not by choice, knew him only by the name of M. Francois and until his death were to remain unaware of his real identity. During most of this period not even his own brother knew his whereabouts.

Though he loved his solitude and remained for long periods in his chamber without company, M. Francois devoted many hours daily to the performance of some pious or charitable act on behalf of his less fortunate neighbors. Seeking to render himself as useful as possible to his fellow man, he not only bestowed all he had on the poor, thereby providing their material necessities, but frequently purchased religious books to distribute among them, thus attempting to satisfy their spiritual needs as well. He paid frequent visits to his fellow appellants or to poor parishioners to see if there was anything he could do for them. Kind, considerate, and attentive to their various needs, he also shared in an endless variety of menial tasks and services around the faubourg, from cleaning the streets and paths to carrying buckets of water. To avoid becoming financially dependent on others and to enable him better to serve the needs of the poor, Paris purchased a trade and began to make woolen stockings. He gave most of them away and sold the rest to persons who could afford to buy them. He thus earned enough money to sustain his own simple requirements while obtaining additional funds for his charitable benefactions.

This boundless generosity and indefatigable charity he displayed toward the poor residents of the parish and faubourg were no doubt initially responsible for drawing popular attention to Francois de Paris. No less important, however, for the saintly reputation he was later to acquire was the nature of the penitential discipline, physical and spiritual, which he practiced during the last four or five years of his life. Material goods and possessions having already become a matter of little concern to him, Paris had determined to live in extremely austere circumstances and at a level of bare subsistence. But the extraordinary degree of deprivation to which he eagerly subjected himself amazed even some of his fellow penitents and those of his neighbors who occasionally visited him. The deacon’s miserable living quarters were starkly drab, without even the most elementary of creature comforts. There was little or no furniture, an overturned armoire serving as his bed. Nor was there anything else in the little room to distract from an atmosphere of unrelieved, almost morbid, gloom. As for food, Paris’ single daily meal—usually taken early in the evening—generally consisted of a piece of bread, a bit of rice, and some cabbage soup, and only rarely included any meat.

Despite this regimen of extreme self-denial, Francois continued his tireless activities on behalf of his fellow parishioners, all the while seeking ever more severe forms of mortification with which to torture his body. During Lent in 1724 he fasted completely. So incredibly rigorous was his abstention that he was reduced to a state of severe nervous exhaustion, which ultimately reached the point of convulsive agitations notably similar to those that were to occur at his grave some years later. At the same time, the bodily penances and frequent macerations went on unabated—and were even redoubled. To the hairshirt which he had worn all along he added a plate or sheet of bristling iron wires which tore into his flesh and sometimes caused the blood to flow. Nor was that all. When his confessor ordered him to remove the spiked metal belt which until then he had also kept tied around his body, he found yet other macabre torture devices with which to replace it.

Exceedingly scrupulous about his own interior disposition and possessed of an overly sensitive conscience and an exaggerated sense of unworthiness, Paris also felt driven to extremes of spiritual self-denial and self-degradation. Not satisfied with refusing, out of humility, the various clerical charges offered to him, he voluntarily abstained for two years from receiving communion or fulfilling his Easter duties. Only after a formal order had come from his spiritual director and from the cure of Saint-Medard did Francois consent to take communion again. But the attitude of almost obsessive submission to God, the sense of fear and trembling in His awesome presence, persisted as before.

By 1725, despite the care M. Paris had taken to preserve his anonymity, his assiduous devotions, his innumerable benefactions toward the poor, and the public instruction he gave at Saint-Medard attracted the admiring and respectful attention of the parish cure, the appellant Nicolas Pommart. At Pentecost in that year, M. Pommart, with assistance from Paris’ confessor, finally overcame Francois’ resistance to donning the surplice that had rightfully been his since his elevation to the diaconate in 1720. What is more, the cure put him officially in charge of giving catechism lessons to the children of the parish and also made him clerical superior. In this latter capacity he had the task of instructing the young clerics in their duties, and in the process profoundly impressed them and the rest of the parish clergy not only with his wisdom and his piety but with the humility and simplicity which formed his character.

While continuing to carry out these various duties at Saint-Medard and to perform frequent acts of charity for his neighbors throughout the quarter, Paris also continued his intense mortifications and bodily penances. Such physical tortures could not fail to have had a debilitating effect on the deacon’s already weakened constitution. A number of short, but enervating pilgrimages taken in 1726 and early 1727 further exhausted him and sapped his declining strength. In April 1727, after quietly suffering for over a month from a large tumor on the knee, he was finally bedridden with a fever and various gastrointestinal difficulties. As he languished in bed for many days, his condition steadily deteriorated. On May 1, 1727, the abbe Pommart, accompanied by a number of clergy from Saint-Medard, was called to administer the last rites. Legend has it that after writing or dictating his last testament and making arrangements on behalf of those persons, lay and ecclesiastic, whom he had been assisting, Francois de Paris asked for one final time to be given the opportunity to state publicly his unshakable opposition to the Bull. “It is not necessary to explain yourself further,” interrupted Father Pommart, “your views are well known.” Serene and composed, Francois de Paris now received extreme unction. Although he continued for hours to struggle against his impending death and even temporarily regained some strength, the deacon eventually succumbed that evening, a suicide religieux, two months before his thirty-seventh birthday.

As the news of his death quickly circulated throughout the parish, the public reaction was overwhelming. A huge crowd of people, shopkeepers, artisans, and others from the faubourg, flocked to M. Francois’ house to pay their last respects and to view the body, which rested in state in a very simple coffin. Many of them, once they had said their prayers and implored the deacon to intercede with God on their behalf, touched the corpse with rosaries, garments, religious icons, and devotional books, hoping to sanctify the object by direct bodily contact with one whom they already regarded as “Blessed” (bienheureux). Some cut off his nails or bits of his hair, while still others tried to satisfy their desire for some holy relic either by ripping off a tiny piece of the cloth shirt which M. Francois had been wearing when he died or by taking a splinter of wood from the overturned armoire which had served as his deathbed. The first post-humous “supernatural phenomenon” associated with the deacon was reported at this time: those who filed past the bier declared that Paris seemed to be only sleeping, for his face appeared to have retained the rosy color of life.

Two days later Francois de Paris was buried as he had wished, in a very simple grave in one of the little cemeteries, usually reserved for poor parishioners, which at that time flanked the church of Saint-Medard. Though only a modest ceremony, the funeral attracted a large throng of mourners from every station in society and from all over Paris—a situation which thoroughly astonished M. Francois’ poor neighbors, who were overwhelmed to see such distinguished company present at the burial of someone whom they had always believed to be their social equal.

Those who had known and admired him, including his archbishop and fellow appellant, Cardinal Noailles, and others who had merely heard stories of this saintly man, came to offer their prayers for his soul. Francois de Paris had already begun to obtain posthumously the very notoriety and renown that he had rather successfully shunned most of his life. But it was only the beginning.

A dramatic incident occurred on the day of interment, an event which first established Francois de Paris’ reputation for thaumaturgic powers. An elderly and illiterate woolworker, the widow Louise-Madeleine Reigney (or Beigney), who had met M. Francois several times in the parish and had watched him admiringly at the church of Saint-Medard as he stood in solitary meditation and prayer, went to the services to pay her respects to the deacon for having been such a great friend of the poor and the unfortunate. But she also had another reason for attending. Despite frequent and sincere invocation of divine power, she had until then been unable to obtain a cure for her arm, paralyzed for nearly twenty years. She hoped God might heal the arm this time if she prayed for M. Francois’ intercession. Approaching the bier, full of trust, she fell down on her knees, recited some prayers, embraced and kissed the deacon’s feet—and went away cured! This supposedly miraculous cure was but a foretaste of many others to come, most of them far more remarkable, and a prelude to the almost unimaginable drama that was to be played at Saint-Medard.

During his lifetime, Francois de Paris had won the love and veneration of his fellow parishioners, for whom he had been a truly heroic, indeed charismatic, figure. Long before the deacon’s death, his neighbors—those who had benefited directly from his kindness and charity and others who knew of him and his works only by reputation— had proudly exchanged stories about the extraordinary devotions and acts of piety that he had been performing daily in their very midst. In an age lacking in religious heroes, here was an inspirational figure whose ascetic life seemed beyond ordinary human capability and equivalent to martyrdom, whose qualities of saintliness appeared to match those of other celebrated exemplars of humanity, including Paris’ own great medieval namesake. Like Saint Francis, he had renounced all wealth, property, privileges, and status and had identified himself with the meek and the humble, in whose well-being he had taken a special interest. Having led a life that no doubt conformed to popular expectations of how a holy man should live, this generous “victime de la penitence” thus left a vivid impression upon the people of Saint-Medard, who were already much moved by his death. But the dramatic cure of Mme. Reigney immediately captured their imagination, serving to confirm them in their exalted view of M. Francois and demonstrating that he was endowed with extraordinary intercessionary powers. When news of the miracle spread beyond the parish and throughout the city, a virtual army of sick people, pious believers, and devout pilgrims was drawn to Saint-Medard from all corners of Paris, some to pray for the cure of diseases which had baffled the doctors, others to obtain a relic from among the various effects left by or associated with M. Paris. As his reputation grew, these people, possessed of sufficient and conclusive proof of his sanctity and too impatient to await an official judgment from the Church, were quick to canonize their deacon, “dead in the odor of sanctity.” The largely popular cult which developed in the ensuing years bore witness to this extraordinary reverence for and confidence in Francois de Paris and, especially among the most miserable and distressed, may have satisfied a craving for some new spiritual outlet, some otherworldly consolation or compensation for material afflictions suffered in this life.

Within a year of the burial, Jerome-Nicolas de Paris erected a tomb in his brother’s memory. The modest monument consisted of a large rectangular slab of black marble, raised slightly above the ground by four stone supports. There was just enough space left for a person, crawling on his stomach, to fit between the marble and the grave—an exercise which many were to perform in subsequent years. Jerome-Nicolas also commissioned a certain Jaudin, doctor of theology at the Sorbonne, to engrave on the tombstone a long Latin epitaph summarizing the life and merits of M. Francois. The epitaph received the express approval of Cardinal Noailles, who had been among the admirers present when the deacon was buried.

Noailles, who had apparently looked favorably upon the nascent Paris cult from the outset, played a crucial role in its early development and in the establishment of its legitimacy and respectability. The cardinal-archbishop did not hesitate to acknowledge and extol the saintly character of the deacon’s life or to grant M. Francois the appellation of bienheureux which the menu peuple had already bestowed upon him. More significantly, as a consequence of his exalted ecclesiastical position and in accordance with the Tridentine legislation governing the veneration of saints, Noailles was soon called upon to deal with the subject of the Paris cures. In the spring of 1728, aware of Paris’ reputation for thaumaturgic powers and impressed by the number and notoriety of the cures the deacon was said to have performed at Saint-Medard, Cardinal Noailles initiated plans for an official examination of these allegedly miraculous phenomena. Following the formal juridical procedures prescribed by the Church, he appointed the abbe Achille Thomassin, his vicegerent (administrative deputy) in the ecclesiastical court of the archdiocese, to undertake a careful preliminary study of these cures, in order to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to warrant a full-scale episcopal investigation. After an intensive, three-month probe, Thomassin concluded that a substantial number of seemingly authentic miracles was involved and that the entire affair was clearly worthy of the archbishop’s immediate and direct attention. Once apprised of these preliminary findings, Noailles issued an episcopal order, published on June 15, 1728, naming Father Thomassin to head an official commission of inquiry. He empowered the vicegerent to review with deliberate and painstaking thoroughness all the previous testimony given by the miracules and their assorted witnesses (relatives, friends, neighbors, employers or employees, colleagues, priests, doctors); to evaluate the notarized depositions of medical experts; to examine the character and evaluate the credibility of all persons called to testify; to take further testimony from additional witnesses wherever such supplementary evidence was believed necessary; and, finally, to continue to gather together all relevant information on any other cures reported or discovered in the interim.

By the end of August the commission had heard numerous persons who claimed to have been miraculously cured, taken depositions from scores of witnesses to these cures, and compiled a series of voluminous dossiers. The initial results of this intensive, probing inquest were striking. A report submitted to Noailles at this time singled out for particular consideration four of the dozen or so cures that had been under investigation, most of them on persons from outside the parish of Saint-Medard. Pierre Lero, thirty-five-year-old marchand fripier from the parish of Saint-Eustache, had been cured in September 1727 of an ulcerated leg that had incapacitated him for more than a year and a half. Marie-Jeanne Orget, fifty-seven-year-old maitresse couturiers from Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, had been cured in March 1728 of acute erysipelas on the leg which had plagued her intermittently for over thirty years. Elisabeth de la Loe, twenty-five-year-old woman from the parish of Bonnes Nouvelles and a recent convert from Protestantism, had been cured in July 1728 of a severe swelling of the breast first experienced some eighteen months earlier. Finally, Marie-Madeleine Mossaron, twenty-seven-year-old daughter of the agent des affaires of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, residing in the parish of Saint-Eustache, had been cured in late July 1728 of convulsions, apoplexy, and a virtual paralysis of the left side of her body suffered since January 1727. Though none of these four cures had been effected instantaneously, each appeared to be so well substantiated that only the authorization of the archbishop was needed to publish the commission’s findings and to declare that the phenomena in question were indeed “true and miraculous.” Just as Noailles seemed on the point of doing so, however, Versailles intervened.

Alarmed by what the Saint-Medard affair might portend in the debate over the Bull, and concerned that Noailles’ public approbation would immediately increase the credibility and the fame of these miracles and endow the tales of Paris’ thaumaturgic powers with the requisite prestige, the government sought to squelch the proceedings. As early as June, Chauvelin had written a rather patronizing letter to Noailles, recommending that the archbishop terminate the inquest because it was displeasing to Cardinal Fleury. Later that same month, after apparently obtaining Noailles’ assurance of compliance, Chauvelin sent another, much more forceful letter to Father Thomassin, urging him not to carry out his charge. “In times like these,” Chauvelin insisted, “it is important to do nothing which might give rise to new controversies and new pamphlets.”

Refusing to be intimidated by the government’s coercive tactics, Thomassin had resolved to fulfill his assignment and to make a full report to Noailles. But by this time, the aged archbishop was failing in health and apparently losing touch with reality. Vacillating more and more in his stand on the Bull and related issues of theology and ecclesiastical politics, he had come increasingly under the influence of his family, who were working in concert with Fleury to convert him to the constitutionnaire side. Despite the positive findings of Thomassin’s commission, despite the growing crowds of the faithful throughout his diocese who were flocking to Saint-Medard, and despite his own express support for the Paris cult, Noailles no longer had either the strength or the courage to stand up publicly to the mounting resistance from Versailles. When in October 1728 Fleury’s allies in Paris managed to force the resignation of Thomassin and other appellants who had long held positions of authority in the diocese and replaced them all with constitutionnaire officials loyal to the government, the cardinal-archbishop found himself virtually alone. Hoping to effect a reconciliation of all parties, and on the verge of an apparent capitulation to Fleury and the pope over the Bull, Noailles was prevailed upon not to publish the Thomassin proces-verbaux. But though he may have acquiesced in Fleury’s demand that he remain silent on the matter and not make any public statement regarding the miracles, the enfeebled archbishop seems to have still had enough presence of mind to take certain steps to ensure that the results of his former vicegerent’s investigation would not be lost. In order that the proces-verbaux might be preserved for possible future use under the appropriate circumstances, Noailles, within a month before his death, had the dossiers secretly conveyed to the Oratorian Father Charles-Armand Fouquet, former superior in the seminary of Saint-Magloire and a friend of the late deacon Paris. Events were later to prove how shrewd and foresighted a precaution this was.

Although the miracles of Saint-Medard had thus been denied formal episcopal consecration, the secret maneuverings over the proces-ver-baux did not materially affect the public observances of the cult. The tomb of Francois de Paris had become a hallowed sanctuary to which the pious and the sick in ever greater numbers—most of them oblivious to the turbulent debates of ecclesiastical politics swirling about the diocese and unaware of or little concerned about M. Francois’ appellant affiliations—continued to make their pilgrimages. For at least two more years the government would make no serious attempt to oppose or even to disturb these religious devotions, concentrating its attention for the time being on more pressing matters. Perhaps Fleury was satisfied at having successfully squelched Noailles’ attempt to give official recognition to the nascent cult. Or perhaps he was not sure that these developments at Saint-Medard posed a very serious problem. Whatever the reasons, by the time of Noailles’ death in May 1729 neither civil nor ecclesiastical intervention seems to have been under consideration.

Government and church indifference or inaction would not last indefinitely, however. At Saint-Medard the unofficial, unauthorized popular religious cult associated with Francois de Paris had already succeeded in attracting many adherents. Though deprived of ecclesiastical legitimation, the cult had obtained at least the tacit approval of Cardinal Noailles before his death. What is more, it had acquired the explicit support of the cure of Saint-Medard himself, who was one of its earliest and most ardent promoters. Indeed, in the parish of Saint-Medard local enthusiasm for the cult—lay and clerical—was considerable, as the presence of a saintly hero in the very midst of this poor, generally obscure, and frequently overlooked quarter no doubt evoked a strong sense of communal pride and excitement. When the constitutionnaire Vintimille succeeded to the archbishopric of Paris, he was bent on restoring order and discipline throughout the diocese. Saint-Medard, which had by then become a place of pilgrimage for many of the Paris faithful, was shortly to become a source of deep disquiet for Vintimille. But, as we shall see, once the new archbishop found it necessary to intervene against the Paris cult, there was a sudden recrudescence of miracles at the cemetery. This new development came at a time of increasingly militant and vocal challenges to his episcopal authority from magistrates, avocats, and parish clergy alike. Pursued relentlessly by a formidable political and ecclesiastical opposition, declining in strength and needful of allies, the Jansenist party was once more to find its most eloquent and forceful apology in a direct intervention of God. Utilizing their extensive and well-functioning propaganda apparatus, the clerical opponents of the Bull were ultimately to seize on the Paris cult as an incontrovertible justification of the anticonstitutionnaire cause and as a live, exploitable political issue. The result of the ensuing confrontation was to transform the Saint-Medard observances from a local phenomenon to a diocesan and eventually a national cause celebre and to draw the popular cult into the turbulent sphere of ecclesiastical politics.

The deacon Francois de Paris

austerely performing his duties