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This book examines the beliefs and behaviour of the people of France (and sometimes the regions just outside the kingdom proper) in the early modern period. Shared beliefs were the ultimate legitimation for the institutional role of the Catholic Church, studied in the essay on church and state. The three studies of witchcraft emphasize the crucial role of the village community in regulating the identification and persecution of this very particular class of deviants. Popular revolts involved deviance of a much more public and obvious kind, in the political rather than the religious sphere, but these episodes are particularly revealing of both communal attitudes and divisions. Evolving clerical attitudes towards families and the imposition of moral standards through confession brought confrontations with alternative values which had deep communal roots. Some further aspects of this clash of values are evoked in both the analysis of the puritanical elements in Jansenism and rigorism and in the general essay on idées and mentalités in the Catholic reform movement.

An account is given of reformers of the Catholic Church in Europe in the eighteenth century, following on from The Counter‐Reformation. This starts with the Jansenists in France, and goes on to discuss (Lodovico Antonio) Muratori (1672–1751), Pietro Tamburini (1672–1750), and Pietro Giannone (1676–1748) in Italy, the Enlightenment, Febronianism and Febronius (a pseudonym of the German anti‐Catholic Johann Chrysostomus Nikolaus von Hontheim, 1701–90), Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Pope Pius VI in Vienna, Leopold of Tuscany, Scipione de’ Ricci, the Diocesan Synod of Pistoia and the constitution of the Church (1786), the riot at Prato (1787), toleration, the attack upon celibacy, and the reform of the liturgy.

Traces the decline of political power in the Catholic Church in Europe from the period after the overthrow of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814, and the return of the Pope to Rome. In the new Europe so formed, Protestants were politically far stronger than Catholics. The different sections of the chapter cover the Austrian chancellor Metternich, the Age of the Concordats (agreements between Rome and the governments of different countries), Spain and the reaction to the revolution, the secret articles of Verona (Italy, 1822), revolution in Spanish America, reaction in Italy and the Prince of Canosa, the restored Pope, the Papal States, the Carbonari, Silvio Pellico, Pope Leo XII, the shadow of the Jansenists, the end of the campaign against celibacy, the structure of the restored Church (bishoprics, seminaries, brotherhoods), the jubilee of 1825, collegiate churches, the revival of the monks and monasteries, the revival of the Jesuits and other orders, new religious groups, virtus, and differences in parish life.

The Commission des Réguliers was set up in 1765, after the expulsion of the Jesuits, to inquire into and reform the regular orders. The documentation it produced provides an impressionistic view of the diversity of monastic institutions and topics, including conflicts between monks and their superiors, the influence of Jansenism, and the scholarly endeavours of the Maurists. Some small and moribund Orders were wound up and some decayed houses suppressed, but overall the limited nature of the Commission's achievements illustrates the impossibility of radical reform under the ancien régime, given the wide range of lay and clerical interests at stake.

Outlines the seventeenth‐century origins of the Jansenist controversy and the difficulties faced by the historian in arriving at a viable definition of Jansenism. The grim theology of Cornelius Jansen had given rise obliquely to a movement of great spirituality that posed questions about the nature of truth and the limits of secular and ecclesiastical authority. All the various aspects of Jansenism, including predestinarian theology, the questioning of papal authority, and reform of the Church involving a greater role for the laity in general and women in particular, came together in hostility to the Jesuits. In the eighteenth century it would involve the war of the parlements against the crown, the rising discontent of the lower clergy, and the convulsionist movement.

The papal bull Unigenitus, issued in 1713, was intended to strike a fatal blow against the Jansenists and demonstrate papal infallibility. Its principal targets were the Réflexions morales of Pasquier Quesnel and through it, Louis‐Antoine de Noailles, cardinal‐archbishop of Paris. The complicated diplomatic manoeuvring leading to its promulgation was prompted by the Jesuits and their sympathizers, enemies of Noailles, and by the aged Louis XIV, which wished to destroy the Jansenists as ‘a republican party in Church and State’, while upholding the independence of the Gallican Church.

Unigenitus caused uproar in France, especially in Paris, where it was viewed as the result of Jesuit conspiracy, standing for papal pretensions against the Gallican Church and clerical manoeuvres against the laity, as well as being an obscurantist attack on scriptural piety, unjust to Jansenists in general and Noailles in particular. Louis XIV forced its acceptance by the bishops, the Sorbonne and the parlement of Paris, followed by the other theological faculties and parlements, but his death and the accession to power of Philippe d’Orléans as regent for the infant Louis XV changed everything. The appeal to a General Council of the Church was led by 16 bishops, backed by the Oratorians and the Maurists. Other bishops either enforced Unigenitus or accepted and then ignored it. Support for the appellants was uneven in France as a whole and centred in Paris, but for their supporters the appeal represented a defence of the Gallican Church against the presumptuousness of Rome and of political freedom against Louis XIV's absolutism.

By 1720, the government of the Regency, dominated by abbé Dubois, had adopted a repressive policy towards Jansenism and the appellants, a policy, which would be made even harsher under cardinal Fleury from 1726 onwards. The parlements and the Sorbonne were brought to acceptance of Unigenitus by threats, force, and the imposition of a formulary making it appear compatible with Gallican liberties. However, the deposition of Jean Soanen, bishop of Senez, in 1727 by a council of the archbishopric of Embrun caused a huge outcry among the lower clergy and the bourgeoisie of Paris, supported in particular by the avocats of the Parisian bar. Fleury's ruthless policy succeeded in destroying the ‘old Jansenism’ of predestinarian theology and protest against Rome, but opposition to it laid the seeds for a new, politicized Jansenism.

Faced with repression, the Jansenist opponents of Unigenitus had to appeal to a wider public, notably through the clandestine Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, presenting a running chronicle of friends of the ‘truth’ and scandal about its enemies. Doctrinal divisions were now of little importance, but Jansenism tried to give the laity, including women, a new and leading role in the Church. Paris was the ‘fortress of Jansenism’, and it was here that the cult of the Jansenist ‘saint’, François de Pâris, began with miracles at his tomb in the cemetery of Saint‐Médard, a cult, which developed into the convulsionist movement. Convulsionism, and especially its sado‐masochistic lunatic fringe, divided the Jansenists, allowing Fleury to encourage moderate Jansenist scholars to denounce the cult of deacon Pâris, while police surveillance of the convulsionaries tightened in the 1740s.

Between 1730, when Unigenitus was declared ‘a law of Church and State’, and his death in 1743, cardinal Fleury broke the power of Jansenism within the French clergy by the use of ecclesiastical patronage and promotion; the issue of lettres de cachet to send troublemakers to prison, monastery, or exile; police interventions, especially against authors and publishers; and the despatch of royal commissioners to overawe the assemblies of monastic orders and theology faculties. But enforcement of Unigenitus inevitably incurred the hostility of the sovereign courts, especially the parlement of Paris, the magistrates of which saw themselves as the guardians of legal process and individual liberty. Conflict with the parlement, itself not so much Jansenist as Gallican, in the 1730s involved a strike by avocats in 1731–32, but ended in defeat for the magistrates.

Jansenists were still excluded from the ministry of the Church by the necessity of having to sign the formulary accepting Unigenitus, but many clergy had been formed by a Jansenist‐inspired education, and the attempts by reactionary bishops to act against Jansenists came to be seen as anachronistic. With its triumph over the Jesuits, Jansenism dwindled into insignificance as a political force. In the struggle between the crown and the parlements, culminating in the ‘Maupeou revolution’ and the temporary abolition of the parlements, the ‘Jansenist’ party, the driving force behind parlementaire petitions and remonstrances, was gradually transformed into a ‘patriot’ party. Ideas and modes of thought associated with Jansenism may still be discerned behind the calls for an Estates General in the 1780s, but by the time the Revolution began Jansenism as such was an irrelevance.

Baptism was obligatory and universal by the laws on Church and State and the rules laid down by the Church were universally obeyed. As far as the other sacraments are concerned, the practice of confirmation was haphazard, but in all except the most neglected of parishes, young people preparing for the First Communion were thoroughly drilled in their catechism. A multitude of manuals for catechism were available, many reflecting Jansenist influence, but all affirming the authority of the Church and in the second half of the century adopting an increasingly moralistic tone. There was some tension between church and state over marriage; the secular law stressed the inferior status of the wife, while the Church tried in vain to moderate the folkloric practices surrounding the marriage ceremony. The church ceremonies surrounding death and social observances as much as religious practices were universally followed, despite the scepticism of Enlightenment thinkers.

The reforming clergy made considerable efforts to encourage the intelligent participation of the laity in the liturgical services. They stressed the centrality of the mass and the reverence to be shown in its practice, with the Jansenists being particularly austere in this matter. The vernacular translations of the Bible and other texts were widely available to the laity, despite the attitude of Rome and some conservative clergy. The eighteenth century was a great age of liturgical reform and simplification. New breviaries and missals, produced in considerable numbers, became objects of contention between Jansenists and their adversaries. Paris took the lead in reform, with the Parisian liturgy replacing the Roman, either wholly or in part, in most of France, while Strasbourg and Lyon were particularly strongly influenced by Jansenist ideas.

In France, churches exemplified a much purer Calvinist organization and discipline than that favoured by Anglican episcopalians. The divisions within the French Catholic Church were obscured, in Protestant eyes, behind the one issue which came near to uniting it, the desire for an early abrogation of the Edict of Nantes and the elimination of ‘la religion pretendue réformée’. Puritans and Jansenists could never have understood one another directly in any case, because they belonged to different epochs as well as different faiths. Historians have nevertheless drawn close parallels between the two movements, with their predestinarian, Augustinian theology, their desire to revive the virtues of the primitive church, and their strict moral standards. Puritan hostility to separatists was reflected in the way many Jansenists denounced Protestantism. Jansenism and rigorism shared many characteristics with English puritanism, but their rejection of the world seems to have been more sweeping and more absolute. Jansenism came to incorporate many of the positive elements in the Catholic reform, so that the attempts to eradicate it proved highly damaging to the church.