ABSTRACT
The Jansenist movement had a broad base of popular support, but by the middle of the century, educated elites were beginning to turn away from religious concerns altogether. The middle of the eighteenth century was the high point of the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. The Jansenists, Catholics who followed the ideas of the seventeenth-century theologian Cornelius Jansen, sought a sterner, more austere faith than that taught by the official church. To defend their interpretation of Catholicism, they did not hesitate to challenge the authority of the religious hierarchy and of the royal government that defended it. The beliefs of the common people in the eighteenth century reflected a very different world of experience from the culture of France's educated urban elites. Rousseau sided with the philosophers in rejecting the authority of external institutions, but broke with them by downgrading reason and emphasizing sentiment.
