Priests, Women, and Families. Jules Michelet

Table of Contents

      LONELINESS OF WOMAN.—EASY DEVOTION.—WORLDLY THEOLOGY OF THE JESUITS AND HOME.—WOMEN AND CHILDREN ADVANTAGEOUSLY MADE USE OF.—WAR OF THIRTY YEARS, 1618–1648.—GALLANT DEVOTION.—DEVOUT NOVELS.—CASUISTS.

      Hitherto we have spoken of a rare exception—the life of a woman full of action, and doubly employed; as a saint and foundress, but especially as a wife, the mother of a family, and prudent housewife. The biographers of Madame de Chantal remark, as a singular thing, that in both conditions, as wife and as widow, she conducted her own household herself, directed her dependents, and administered the property of her husband, her father, and her children.

      This indeed was becoming rare. The taste for household and domestic cares which we find everywhere in the sixteenth century, but especially among citizens and the families of the Bar, grows much weaker in the seventeenth, when every one desires to live in great style.

      The absence of occupation is a taste of the period, proceeding also from the state of things. All society is ever idle on the morrow of religious wars, each local action has ceased, and central life, that is to say, court life, has hardly begun. The nobility have finished their adventures, and hung up their swords; the citizens have nothing further to do, being no longer engaged in plots, seditions, or armed processions. The ennui of this want of occupation falls particularly heavy upon woman; she is about to become at once unoccupied and lonely. In the sixteenth century she was kept in communication with man by the vital questions that were debated, even in her family, by common dangers, fears, and hopes. But there was nothing of the sort in the seventeenth century.

      Add to this a more serious circumstance which is likely to increase in the following ages; namely, that in every profession the spirit of speciality and detail, which gradually absorbs man, has the effect of insulating him in his family, and of making him, as it were, a mute being for his wife and kindred. He no longer communicates to them his daily thoughts; and they can understand nothing of the minute intricacies and petty technical problems which occupy his mind.

      But, at least, woman has still her children to console her? No; at the time we are now speaking of, the mansion, silent and empty, is no longer kept alive by the noise of children; instruction at home is now an exception, and gives way daily to the fashion of collective education. The son is brought up among the Jesuits, the daughter by the Ursulines, or other nuns; the mother is left alone.

      The mother and the son are henceforth separated! An immense evil, the bud of a thousand misfortunes for families and society! I shall return to this subject later.

      Not only separated, but, by the effect of a totally opposite life, they will be more and more opposed in mind, and less and less able to understand each other. The son a little pedant in us, i.e. Latin, the mother ignorant and worldly, have no longer a common language between them.

      A family thus disunited will be much more open to influence from without. The mother and the child, once separated, are more easily caught; though different means are employed. The child is tamed, and broken in by an overwhelming mass of studies; he must write and write, copy and copy again, at best translate and imitate. But the mother is entrapped by means of her excessive loneliness and ennui. The lady of the mansion is alone in her residence; her husband is hunting, or at the court. The president's lady is alone in her hotel; the gentleman starts every morning for the palace, and returns in the evening: a sad abode is this hotel in the Marais or City, some overgrown grey house in a dismal little street.

      The lady in the sixteenth century beguiled her leisure hours by singing, and often by poetry. In the seventeenth they forbad her all worldly songs; as to religious songs, she abstains from them much more easily. Sing a psalm! It would be to declare herself a Protestant! What then remains for her? Gallant devotion—the conversation of the director or the lover.

      The sixteenth century, with its strong morality and fluctuation of ideas, took, as it were, by fits and starts, flying leaps from gallantry to devotion, then from God to the devil: it made sudden and alternate changes from pleasure to penitence. But in the seventeenth century people were more ingenious. Thanks to the progress of equivocation, they are enabled to do both at once, and, by mingling the language of love with that of devotion, speak of both at the same time. If, without being seen, you could listen to the conversation in a coquettish neighbourhood, you would not always be able to say whether it is the lover or the director who is speaking.

      To explain to one's self the singular success of the latter, we must not forget the moral situation of the time, the uneasy and bewildered state of every one's conscience on the morrow of a period of religious wars, harassed by passions. In the dull tranquillity that succeeded, in the nullity of the present, the past would rise up in glowing colours, and the remembrance of it become the more importunate. Then was awakened in many minds, especially among weak and impassioned women, the terrible question of eternal bliss or woe.

      The whole fortune of the Jesuits, and the confidence placed in them by the nobles and fine ladies, arose from the clever answer they gave to this question. It is, therefore, indispensable to say a few words about it.

      Who can save us? The theologian on the one hand, and the jurist or philosopher on the other, give diametrically opposite answers.

The theologian, if he be really such, attributes the greatest share to Christianity, and answers, "It is the grace of Christ, which serves us as a substitute for justice[1], and saves whomsoever it will. A few are predestined to be saved, the greater number to be damned."

      The jurist answers, on the contrary, that we are punished or rewarded according to the good or bad use that we freely make of our will; that we are paid according to our works, according to justice. This is the eternal debate between the jurist and the theologian, between justice and predestination.[1]

      In order to have a clearer idea of the opposition of these two principles, let us imagine a mountain with two declivities, its summit terminating in a very narrow ridge, with the edge as sharp as a razor. On one side is predestination that damns, on the other, justice that strikes—two terrible monsters. Man is on the top, with one foot on one slope and one on the other, ever on the point of slipping.

      And when was the fear of sliding stronger than after those great crimes of the sixteenth century, when Man was top-heavy, and lost his balance? We know the religious horror of Charles IX. after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew: he died for want of a Jesuit confessor. John III., King of Sweden, who killed his brother, did not die of remorse: his wife took care to send for the good Father Possevino, who purified him and made him a Catholic.

      The means employed by the Jesuits to calm consciences fill us, at first sight, with surprise. They adopted both skilfully and carefully; still they did adopt the principle of the jurists, namely, that man is saved or lost by his works, by the use he makes of his free will.

      A liberal doctrine, yet severe, it would seem: you are free, consequently responsible, and punishable. You sin, and you expiate.

      The jurisconsult, who is in earnest, requires here a serious expiation—the personal chastisement of the guilty party. "He must forfeit his head," says he: "the law will cure him of his malady of iniquity by the sword."

      We should fare better by going to the Jesuit, and get off much cheaper. The expiation he requires is not so terrible. He will often prove that there is no necessity for any expiation. The fault, properly interpreted, will turn out, perhaps, to be a merit. At the worst, if found to be a fault, it may be washed out by good works; now, the very best work of all is to devote one's self to the Jesuits, and espouse the Ultramontane interest.

      Do you perceive all the skill of the Jesuits in this manoeuvre of theirs? On the one hand, the doctrine of liberty and justice, with which the middle ages had reproached the jurisconsults as pagan and irreconcilable with Christianity, is now adopted by the Jesuits, who show themselves to the world as the friends and champions of free will. On the