Pamphlets and Patrons: How courtiers shaped the public sphere in Ancien Régime France

Project Information

PAPA

Grant agreement ID: 101001197

DOI

10.3030/101001197

Project closed

EC signature date 24 February 2021

Start date 1 April 2021

End date 31 March 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 948 683,00

EU contribution

€ 1 948 683,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT TRIER
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - PAPA (Pamphlets and Patrons: How courtiers shaped the public sphere in Ancien Régime France)

Reporting period: 2024-04-01 to 2025-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

PAPA aims at exploring the origins of modernity by bringing together intellectual, political and social history. Historians of ideas have studied Enlightenment thought but they have not given any convincing explanation of why specific ideas have spread in some contexts and not in others. Why was the French Enlightenment more radical than its counterpart in other countries? Why did heterodox religious movements like Jansenism or Deism gain real strength in France? Why were the Catholic Church or the privileges of the aristocratic caste put into question? Why did such a radical revolution break out in France?

PAPA’s core hypothesis is that the special stability of the court society in France played a major role in enabling radical thought and oppositional activities. We turn the common image of Ancien Regime France (“absolutist monarchy”) on its head: It was precisely because the king and his ministers had limited power to act against the high aristocracy that politics became radicalized in France.

The project also develops a way to write a social history of ideas. Whereas twentieth-century social history was interested in social class – for example in the Enlightenment as a “bourgeois ideology” – we are exploring structures of asymmetrical interdependencies between courtiers and people of lower rank. We argue that the patronage (protection) by courtiers had a major impact on the content of political polemical writings (pamphlets). PAPA is thus interested in relationships between unequal actors who have different kinds of “capital” (economic, social, cultural, symbolic capital) and thus a mutual interest in working together. It explores how radical ideas were instrumental for courtiers in claiming political leadership, and how political authors were integrated into the networks of aristocrats and were impacted by this integration.

PAPA has implications for any person interested in politics. It helps to better understand why some rebellious movements are successful while other are not. It explores the roots and mechanisms of sweeping cultural and political changes. Lastly, the project studies the role that the Christian worldview played in the Western political culture and in modernity.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

PAPA consists of six different work packages that present thematic overlaps. We examine:

1) The birth and development of the Augustinian reform movement (often labelled “Jansenism”), a wide movement of religious reform that soon became a counter-power in France: How was it possible that, in France, a powerful religious movement developed that was considered subversive and became increasingly political? By examining the networks, the institutions and the patronage of courtiers, PhD student Nele Döring presents some answers to this crucial question of European history. In the long run, this movement had sweeping consequences: it led to the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, to the Josephin reforms in Habsburg lands and to the reforms of the Gallican Church in the French Revolution.

2) The factional game and the fate of pamphleteers during the Regency (1715-1723) and beyond: Who were pamphleteers? What were the factors for social advancement, stagnation, or decline? Why did Voltaire rise when some of his contemporaries failed? PhD student Miranda Kam retrieves forgotten figures and reinterprets the career of famous ones.

3) The birth of the first big oppositional party in France, the so-called first “Patriotic Party”: How could an opposition emerge towards the end of the reign of Louis XV? Postdoc Simon Dagenais explores the political impact of a prince of royal blood, the prince of Conti. In this way, he reinterprets political and intellectual history from the 1750s to the 1770s.

4) The patronage given to French Enlightenment philosophes: Principal Investigator (PI) Damien Tricoire shows how different kinds of protection by courtiers (both ministers and aristocrats) impacted intellectual history. He especially reconstructs the social conditions for the emergence of radical thought. Radical philosophy was not the product of frustrated outsiders, but of writers well integrated in powerful circles. Tricoire explains why aristocrats were interested in protecting radical philosophes and journalists.

5) The origins and beginnings of the French Revolution: PI Damien Tricoire and postdoc Benoît Carré provide the first in-depth study of oppositional movements before and at the beginning of the French Revolution. They write a new history of the “patriotic party” that introduced sweeping political changes in France, of the networks of actors, of their ideas, goals and motivations.

6) Exploring anonymous texts: Thanks to new methods of statistical analysis of text features (stylometry), PAPA also endeavours to uncover the authorship of a range of anonymous political texts. PI Damien Tricoire collaborates with postgraduate student Julian Csapó and PhD student Antonina Martynenko (Tartu) on this ambitious and risky venture.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Thanks to PAPA, a new picture of the Enlightenment, of opposition and of revolution in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France is emerging. In order to obtain social distinction and to claim leadership within their own caste, aristocrats turned to radical religious and political thought in France. Contrary to ministers, who were dependent on royal power, they were able to do so because, since Louis XIV, French kings had largely renounced their power of distributing favours freely. Due to the relative weakness of the French state, radical thought and oppositional movements could spread thanks to aristocratic protections. The most important role in this respect was played by princes and princesses of royal blood. They were instrumental in initiating and supporting oppositional movements, and, without them, there would have been no revolution in France.

The radical ideas that these oppositional movements used were hardly new, but rather adaptations of Christian medieval political thought. The fact that they were already well-established and had only to be adapted facilitated their spread. These religious-political ideas had been developed by clerics and had helped the clergy to assert its moral superiority. They were now used by radical writers and their patrons to claim moral and political leadership. In 1789 and in the following years, radical writers and politicians were thus successful in imposing an agenda that originally was not at all that of broad parts of the French population. Thanks to the support of elites, the most radical revolution of this age was born, and with it important features of modernity.

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