Six years later he was joined in exile by Pasquier Quesnel who succeeded
him as leader of the party. Long before his flight from France Quesnel
had published a devotional commentary--_Réflexions morales sur le
Nouveau Testament_--which had gone through many editions without
exciting official suspicion. But in 1695 Louis Antoine de Noailles,
bishop of Châlons, was made archbishop of Paris. He was known to be very
hostile to the Jesuits, and at Châlons had more than once expressed
official approval of Quesnel's _Réflexions_. So the Jesuit party
determined to wreck archbishop and book at the same time. The Jansenists
played into their hands by suddenly raising (1701) in the Paris divinity
school the question whether it was necessary to accept the condemnation
of Jansen with interior assent, or whether a "respectful silence" was
enough. Very soon ecclesiastical France was in a blaze. In 1703 Louis
XIV. wrote to Pope Clement XI., proposing that they should take joint
action to make an end of Jansenism for ever. Clement replied in 1705
with a bull condemning respectful silence. This measure only whetted
Louis's appetite. He was growing old and increasingly superstitious; the
affairs of his realm were going from bad to worse; he became frenziedly
anxious to propitiate the wrath of his maker by making war on the
enemies of the Church. In 1711 he asked the pope for a second, and still
stronger bull, that would tear up Jansenism by the roots. The pope's
choice of a book to condemn fell on Quesnel's _Réflexions_; in 1713
appeared the bull _Unigenitus_, anathematizing no less than
one-hundred-and-one of its propositions. Indeed, in his zeal against the
Jansenists the pope condemned various practices in no way peculiar to
their party; thus, for instance, many orthodox Catholics were
exasperated at the heavy blow he dealt at popular Bible reading. Hence
the bull met with much opposition from Archbishop de Noailles and others
who did not call themselves Jansenists. In the midst of the conflict
Louis XIV. died (September 1715); but the freethinking duke of Orleans,
who succeeded him as regent, continued after some wavering to support
the bull. Thereupon four bishops appealed against it to a general
council; and the country became divided into "appellants" and
"acceptants" (1717). The regent's disreputable minister, Cardinal
Dubois, patched up an abortive truce in 1720, but the appellants
promptly "re-appealed" against it. During the next ten years, however,
they were slowly crushed, and in 1730 the _Unigenitus_ was proclaimed
part and parcel of the law of France. This led to a great quarrel with
the judges, who were intensely Gallican in spirit (see GALLICANISM), and
had always regarded the _Unigenitus_ as a triumph of ultramontanism. The
quarrel dragged indefinitely on through the 18th century, though the
questions at issue were really constitutional and political rather than
religious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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