ABSTRACT
On the outskirts of Paris, at the end of the rue Saint-Jacques, stood the new, spacious convent of Port Royal. Jacqueline Arnauld, Mère Angélique, had brought her Cistercian nuns there from the original abbey outside Paris, 1 and established an influential model of pious observance, infused by that intense, prayerful spirit that is so strongly conveyed by the nuns’ portraits by Philippe de Champaigne. 2 The bold red cross on the nuns’ white scapular speaks of a commitment that was overt, eccentric perhaps in the tendency towards self-mortification, but ostensibly orthodox. That could not be said of the abbé de Saint-Cyran who brought to his role as spiritual adviser to these nuns his concern with recovering the purity of the early church – and the taint of heresy. He had been in prison for two years when there appeared, in 1640, the massive tome that contained the thinking of his collaborator in plans of reform, Cornelius Jansen, the author of pamphlets denouncing Richelieu’s foreign policy. From the start, Jansenism was to be more than an episode in the history of enthusiasm, more than a puritan sect within the Church: it was profoundly, inescapably political. Its importance for Mazarin, as later for Louis XIV, cannot be measured by the numbers involved, relatively few; or by the significance of disputes over doctrine. Jansenism induced nervous ministerial reactions because it touched sensitive areas of policy.
