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Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of
Bourbon France, 1660–1736
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Fealty and Fidelity:
The Lazarists of Bourbon
France, 1660–1736

Seán Alexander Smith

University College Dublin, Ireland
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Seán Alexander Smith 2015

Seán Alexander Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Smith, Seán Alexander.
Fealty and fidelity : the Lazarists of Bourbon France, 1660–1736 / by Seán
Alexander Smith.
pages cm. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–4724–4478–3 (hardcover)
1. Vincentians – France – History – 17th century. 2. Vincentians – France –
History – 18th century. I. Title.
BX3770.Z5F837 2015
271’.77044–dc23

2015015251

ISBN 9781472444783 (hbk)

ISBN 9781315582047 (ebk)
 Contents
Series Editors’s Preface   vii
Acknowledgements   ix
List of Abbreviations   xi

Introduction   1

1 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent: Rhetoric and

Reality in the Congregation of the Mission   19

2 Fidelity and Failure: The Mission in Madagascar, 1648–1674  51

3 The Call of the Poor and the Call of the Prince: The Lazarists
at Court, 1672–1704   81

4 Masters and Servants: The Royal Chaplaincies of the

Galleys, 1683–1703   119

5 Re-establishing Madagascar: Piety and the ‘Prince’s Law’

in the Mascareignes, 1711–1736   153

Conclusion   189

Bibliography   205
Index   221
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Series Editors’s Preface
Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 counter-balances the traditional,
still-influential understanding of medieval (or Catholic) and reformation
(or Protestant) religious history that has long resulted in neglect of
the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. Continuities
between the middle ages and early modern Europe remain overlooked or
underestimated, in contrast to the radical discontinuities, and in studies of
the later period especially, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various
kinds of Protestantism too often leaves evidence of the vitality and creativity
of the Catholic church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, out
of account. The series therefore covers all varieties of religious behavior,
broadly interpreted, not just (or even mainly) traditional institutional
and doctrinal church history, and is to the maximum degree possible
interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional.
The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a
broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to
superhuman realms, even implicitly.
The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw
an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of
Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution,
or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of
Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the
beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever
level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre
Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic.
Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded
the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably
the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most
Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least
nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a
central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral
part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe
was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even
those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally
Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also
in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had
become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy,
viii Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as
losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment.

Thomas F. Mayer
Founding Series Editor
 Acknowledgements
In recognition of her counsels and assistance during the completion of
this book, I wholeheartedly thank Alison Forrestal, who supervised the
PhD thesis from which this volume is distilled. I acknowledge the generous
support of the Republic of Ireland’s Higher Education Authority and its
Strategic Innovation Fund, as well as grants from the Mellon Foundation,
in producing this book. I also thank Dominique Deslandres, Megan
Armstrong, Rev. Edward Udovic CM, Rev. John Rybolt CM and Patrick
Ryan for their help along the pilgrim’s journey. I extend my special thanks
to the archivist of the Congregation of the Mission in Paris, Rev. Claude
Lautissier CM, for his unfailing kindness. I am also grateful to Tom
Gray and the editorial staff at Ashgate Publishing. To Marian, Stephen,
Jacqueline, Cassie and Viola, I express my gratitude and love. I dedicate
this book to my grandparents Alexander, Beryl, Mary and David. Finally,
I thank the editors of French History for permission to reproduce material
from volume 27, issue 3 (2013), 351–70.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 List of Abbreviations
ACM Archives de la Congrégation de la Mission, rue de
Sèvres, Paris.
AM Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission et de la
compagnie des filles de la Charité. 127 vols. Paris: rue de
Sèvres, 1833–1963.
AN Archives nationales, Paris.
AN MAR Archives nationales, Marine.
BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France.
CAOM Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence.
CCE Coste, Pierre. Saint Vincent de Paul: Correspondance,
Conférences, Documents. 13 vols. Paris: Édition Librarie
LeCoffre, 1920–25.
CCD Coste, Pierre. Saint Vincent de Paul: Correspondence,
Conferences, Documents. 13 vols. Newly translated,
edited, and annotated from the 1920 French edition.
MCM Mémoires de la Congrégation de la Mission. Vols. 1
(Poland), 2 (Barbarie) and 9 (Madagascar). Paris: Maison
Mère de la Congrégation, 1863–6.
MG Mercure galant. Paris: au Palais, 1678–1714.
NCM Notices sur les Prêtres, Clercs et Frères défunts de la
Congrégation de la Mission. Première série: Compagnons
de St. Vincent depuis la fondation de la Compagnie
jusqu’à la fin du XVIII siècle. 5 vols. Paris: 1881–1910.
RC Recueil des principales circulaires des supérieurs généraux
de la Congrégation de la Mission. 3 vols. Paris: Georges
Chamerot, 1877–80.
RT Recueil trimestriel de documents et travaus inédits
pour servir à l’histoire des Mascareignes françaises,
1932–1949. 8 vols. Published by Albert Lougnon
under the patronage of the Académie de l’Île de la
Réunion. Saint-Denis (Réunion).
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Introduction
One prominent collection of essays dedicated to the concept of fidelity
stresses that it became an essential link in the organization of European
societies in the early modern era.1 The gradual multiplication and
increasing complexity of fidelity ties from the fifteenth to the eighteenth
centuries linked serfs to lords, clients to their patrons, ecclesiastics to their
bishops, and parliaments to their kings. Yet for those living under France’s
Bourbon Crown, especially its incarnation under Louis XIV, a powerful
rhetoric emerged to promote one type of fidelity – fealty to the sovereign –
above all other duties. In the words of Bossuet, fealty to the Crown was
primordial because ‘a good subject loves his prince … as he loves the
air he breathes, the light of his eyes, his life and more than his life’.2
However, frequent ideological battles during Louis’ rule revealed that
many healthy subjects found keeping loyal far more challenging than the
task of drawing breath. Established interests all across the kingdom, from
rival branches of the royal family, to the Paris and provincial parlements,
and the nobility, felt a compelling duty to defend their ancient and hard-
won dynastic rights, privileges, and traditions – and these often cut
against absolute fealty to the king. Regular controversies demonstrated
that complete fidelity to the Crown was especially testing for religious
actors. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, the protracted
Jansenist and Quietist quarrels laid bare a tortuous rivalry between the
claims of conscience and the Crown’s commands. When Louis revoked
the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the realm’s religious dissidents found that
the faithfulness owed to their religious creed clashed with a slew of
demanding new obligations imposed by the sovereignty.3 And for a small
but increasingly influential group of French missionaries, followers of the
famous seventeenth-century reformer and saint Vincent de Paul, fealty to
the king came to endanger the weighty responsibility of protecting their
founder’s impressive legacy of virtue.

1
Yves Durand, ed., Hommage à Roland Mousnier: Clientèles et fidélités en Europe à
l’époque moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981).
2
Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture sainte, 2
vols. (Paris: P. Cot, 1709), 1:221: ‘un bon sujet aime son prince … comme l’air qu’il respire,
comme la lumiere de ses yeux, comme sa vie et plus que sa vie’.
3
Joseph Bergin, The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2014), chaps. 11 and 12.
2 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

Studies bequeathed by France’s most influential historian of fidélité,

Roland Mousnier, have inspired a large body of scholarship investigating
concepts of fidelity in the polity.4 However, Mousnier’s call for further
examination of the fidelity of religious agents, especially the rapport
between their spiritual fidelity on one hand, and the temporal fealty owed
by all subjects on the other, remains largely unfulfilled.5 This book offers
a compelling answer to Mousnier’s appeal by focusing on the history of
the Congregation of the Mission (or Lazarists6) in the years after Vincent
de Paul’s death. When he died in 1660, de Paul’s forty-five year record
at the centre of the French church’s reform was glowingly acknowledged
by contemporaries, many of whom focused on his virtue of fidelity. One
commentator, de Paul’s first biographer, Bishop Louis Abelly, depicted the
France which greeted de Paul’s birth in 1581 as a realm reeling from the
successive effects of the Protestant Reformation and the tumultuous religious
wars of the century’s closing decades. These were ‘horrible storms’ which
had driven significant numbers of the French population to first break their
fidelity to the pope, and then sent them into ‘open rebellion against their
King’. Against these evils, de Paul had worked tirelessly as God’s ‘faithful
servant’, restoring the French church to what Abelly christened its ‘first
splendour’. To boot, he had been a paragon of fealty who ‘made profession
of constant fidelity towards the King.’7 In theory, these virtues endured in
those who followed him, but de Paul’s fidelity blossomed in a markedly
different political era to that of his heirs. This book investigates whether
the pledges they made in the Bourbon era of Louis XIV were sufficient to
conquer the dangers new earthly allegiances posed to their ideals.

4
Roland Mousnier, Les institutions de la France sous la monarchie absolue, vol. 1,
Société et Etat (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974), 86, 89, 93. Roland Mousnier,
‘Les fidélités et les clientèles en France au XVI, XVII, et XVIII siècles’, Histoire sociale 15
(1982), 35–46. See also Sharon Kettering, Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt: The Parlement
of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Sharon Kettering,
‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France’, French Historical Studies 17, no. 2 (1989),
408–35; Mack Holt, ‘Patterns of Clientele and Economic Opportunity at Court during the
Wars of Religion: The Household of François, Duke of Anjou’, French Historical Studies 13
(1984), 305–22.
5
Roland Mousnier, ‘Enquête internationale sur les fidélités’ in Durand, ed., Hommage
à Roland Mousnier, xxii.
6
This book refers to the followers of Vincent de Paul as Lazarists, as they are commonly
known as such in France. They are often, however, referred to as Vincentians in English-
speaking countries. Here, the epithet Vincentian is occasionally employed to describe de
Paul’s collective ethos or the family of organizations in his tradition.
7
Louis Abelly, La vie du vénérable serviteur de Dieu, Vincent de Paul, instituteur et
premier supérieur général de la Congrégation de la Mission. (Paris: Florentin Lambert, 1664),
1:2–4: ‘rébellion ouverte contre leur Roi’; ‘fait profession d’une constante fidélité envers le Roi’.
 Introduction 3

Historical interest in de Paul’s life and ethos has traditionally

outweighed scrutiny of his legacy. A single bibliography of works on de
Paul lists hundreds of titles, books, magazine articles, scholarly studies,
and devotional manuals, which range from Abelly’s 1664 biography to
twentieth-century monographs.8 In contrast, expositions on the group
of missionaries that was charged with perpetuating his ethos and work
have been surprisingly limited. The main source of information on the
Congregation is still a small pool of internal histories compiled by Lazarists.
The principal purpose of these works has been to provide members of
the Congregation with edifying accounts of their organization.9 The
most recent example, Mezzadri and Román’s study of the Lazarists, is
a lengthy investigation that makes significant use of previously hidden
primary sources, but contains the kind of homiletic language common in
inspirational literature.10 These largely inward-looking studies skim over
the impact of external forces, such as socio-political trends and wider
ecclesiastical movements. As a result, little sense emerges of the dynamic
relationships that existed between members of the Congregation and
outsiders, especially patrons. This theme is central to the arguments of this
book, because the Lazarists’ private corporate efforts to remain faithful
to de Paul were heavily influenced by their Congregation’s development
as a public institution under the Bourbon régime. Specifically, their
Congregation’s relationship with the sovereignty in France is an especially
consequential theme because de Paul’s direct influence as founder ceased
at almost the same time Louis XIV began his personal rule in France.
As we shall see, the king regularly engaged the Lazarists’ services, but he
was driven by his own motives, above all related to domestic and foreign
policy. He therefore often sought results vastly divergent from those of
missionaries he recruited in his service and remained in a unique position
to override their objection. These facts are rarely, if ever, confronted by the
current batch of Lazarist historians.
This oversight has been the cause of the Lazarists’ reduced importance
in the history of early modern France. In his study, Pierre Coste unveils the
prevailing caricature of the Lazarists when he states that the ‘priest of the

8
John E. Rybolt, ‘Saint Vincent de Paul: Bibliography to Present Day’, Vincentian
Heritage Journal 20, no. 1 (1999), 106–60.
9
Claude Joseph Lacour, Histoire générale de la Congrégation de la Mission
commençant depuis la mort de B. Vincent de Paul et finissant vers l’année 1720 (Paris,
1897–1902; digitized 1999–2001); Pierre Coste, La Congrégation de la Mission dite de Saint-
Lazare (Paris: Libraire LeCoffre, 1927); José Herrera, Historia de la Congregación de la
Misión (Madrid: La Milagrosa 1949); Stafford Poole, A History of the Congregation of the
Mission, 1625–1843 (n.p., 1973).
10
Luigi Mezzadri and José Maria Román, The Vincentians, A General History of the
Congregation of the Mission, trans. Robert Cummings (New York: New City Press, 2009), 4–7.
4 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

Mission was and had to remain the priest of the countryside’.11 Of course,
myths like these would be harmless if strong indications did not exist
that they lie at the root of wider neglect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, histories of the Congregation of the Mission were buried in
voluminous biographical studies on Vincent de Paul, as if the activities
of his followers began and ended with his more memorable career.12
Twentieth-century historians of France continue to gloss over the
Congregation’s enduring importance after de Paul’s death. One high-profile
area of the Congregation’s ministry during Louis XIV’s reign serves to prove
the point. Although the Lazarists were parish priests of Versailles from 1672,
in his prize-winning study on Louis XIV François Bluche proceeds without
a single mention of the Lazarists, although he refers to the Eudists, the
Oratorians, and the Jesuits in turn. It is small compensation that he makes
but a single reference to de Paul.13 Similarly, save for some brief allusions to
de Paul, the Congregation is forgotten in Georges Minois’ study of the court
clergy and confessors.14 One notable recent exception is Alexandre Maral’s
work on the chapel at Versailles during Louis XIV’s reign, which makes
some effort to rescue the Congregation’s place at court.15 This generally
poor output when it comes to the Congregation stands in marked contrast
to the production of recent studies of significant aspects of de Paul’s career,
which explore his considerable influence and power.16
Of course, there are forceful grounds for studying the phase of an
ecclesiastical association’s history that coincides with the period of its
founder’s life. By focusing on the early ministry of Ignatius of Loyola
and his small band of disciples, John O’Malley’s study of the first Jesuits
demonstrates how the founding generation of the Society of Jesus gave

11
Coste, La Congrégation, 50: ‘Le prêtre de la Mission était et devait rester le prêtre
de la campagne’.
12
Pierre Collet, La vie de St. Vincent de Paul: instituteur de la Congrégation de la
Mission, & des Filles de la Charité (Nancy: Chez A. Leseure, 1748); Ulysse Maynard, Saint
Vincent De Paul: sa vie, sons temps, ses oeuvres, son influence (Paris: A. Bray, 1860) ; Arthur
Loth, Saint Vincent De Paul et sa mission sociale (Paris: D. Dumoulin, 1880) ; Louis-Emile
Bougaud, Histoire de saint Vincent de Paul, fondateur de la Congrégation des Prêtres de la
Mission et des Filles de la Charité (Paris: Poussielgue, 1898).
13
François Bluche, Louis XIV (Paris: Fayard, 1986), 561–91, 576.
14
Georges Minois, Le confesseur du roi: les directeurs de conscience sous la monarchie
française (Paris: Fayard, 1988).
15
Alexandre Maral, La Chapelle Royale de Versailles sous Louis XIV, cérémonial,
liturgie et musique (Sprimont: Mardaga, 2002).
16
Alison Forrestal, ‘Vincent de Paul: the Making of a Catholic dévot’, in After the
League: Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France, eds. Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 180–200; Alison Forrestal, ‘Venues for Clerical
Formation in Catholic Reformation Paris: Vincent de Paul and the Tuesday Conferences and
Company’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 38 (2010), 44–60.
 Introduction 5

the order its fundamental shape, especially its distinctive spirituality and
governmental structure. His conclusion that the reality of the Jesuits’
early work and identity does not correspond with the standard historical
conceptions of the order is an instructive lesson for those who study a
post-founder epoch.17 Charles E. Williams’ monograph on the French
Oratorians is more evenly weighted between founder and followers,
although Williams devotes half of his work to examining the asceticism
and theology of Pierre de Bérulle. The work underscores a fact about
Bérulle which helpfully explains the disproportionate attention given to the
creators of other religious institutes in seventeenth-century France: as well
as being a founder, Bérulle sharply influenced wider currents in the church,
particular those promoting reform and superior clerical education.18 Thus,
fame is by no means irrelevant to explaining the capacity of founders to
attract historical interest. In her investigation of the foundation of the
Daughters of Charity, Susan E. Dinan demonstrates how the Daughters
became indispensable to the French church, but Dinan’s ability to show this
hangs on examining the ingenuity of the Daughters’ charismatic founders,
Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul, who deliberately misrepresented
the order’s activities in order to creatively deliver services to the poor.19
Founders had the advantage of originating and developing the attention-
grabbing ministries and networks later followed by others.
The founder’s death was, however, a critical moment, triggering a new
era in the development of a religious order. This fact was in evidence
long before the foundation of post-Tridentine reforming apostolates. The
future direction of the Franciscan Order after Francis of Assisi’s death
was riven by the confrontation of rival opinions about how best to
preserve the spirit of Francis’ ministry.20 For the early modern traditions,
the death of Ignatius Loyola in 1556 was the ‘first crisis’ of many it
confronted in the next twenty years.21 Similarly, a new and regularly
tumultuous phase of the French Oratory’s history began with the death of
Cardinal Bérulle in 1629.22 In several cases, death highlighted the urgency

17
John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993).
18
Charles E. Williams, The French Oratorians and Absolutism 1611–1641 (New
York: P. Lang, 1989).
19
 Susan E. Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeen-Century France: The Early
History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006).
20
John R.H. Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order, from its Origins to 1517
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press: 1988), 84–91.
21
James Brodrick, The Progress of the Jesuits 1556–1579 (New York and London:
Longmans, Green and Co. 1947), 1.
22
Adolphe Perraud, L’Oratoire de France au XVIIe et au XIXe siècle, 2nd edn. (Paris:
Charles Douniol, 1866), 227.
6 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

of making promises to retain practices and traditions originating in the

founder’s lifetime. In the wake of Loyola’s death, the Jesuit leaders made
a decree that no future alterations to Loyola’s Constitutions could be
made.23 For their part, the priests of the Oratory were so concerned about
the authenticity of their public ministry after their founder’s death that
they declared Cardinal Bérulle to be the ‘perpetual superior general’ of
the Congregation, thus making the earthly leaders who followed simply
his spiritual lieutenants.24 Founders themselves were acutely aware of
the pressures which their deaths created. In April 1657, Vincent de Paul
addressed a group of priests from Saint-Sulpice after the death of their
founder, Jean-Jacques Olier. He acknowledged that the followers were
‘plunged’ into grief, but reminded them to be faithful to their founder’s
ethos, declaring that ‘[Olier] will have gladly left his body, provided his
spirit dwell in you. That was his greatest desire and wish during his life;
now you can make him happy’.25 However, de Paul’s allocution offered
few clues to Olier’s grief-stricken disciples about what fidelity entailed.
Rooted in the Latin word fidelis, in its common usage fidelity is the
quality of being faithful, loyal, or showing unswerving allegiance, usually
to a person, party, or bond. Fidelity can also mean the degree to which a
description resembles or corresponds with the original.26 The concept of
fidelity is a fundamentally religious one, for the word fides conveys the soul’s
trust in and obedience to God and his word.27 In the history of Christianity,
allusions to fidelity began with the biblical record, and normally signified
belonging to the religious community. In the Old Testament, for instance,
the scribe of Deuteronomy made fidelity to the decrees and statutes given
to Moses on Mount Sinai the gateway to the Israelites’ possession of the
Promised Land. In the apostolic era, fellowship in Christ, and exclusion from
it, were premised on imitation of his life and fidelity to his commandments.28
Later, early modern notions of fidelity rested on key Augustinian ideas such
as the pactum societatis, where all members of the Christian community
were united in bonds of love.29
Fidelity is also closely related to the term ‘fealty’ (from the Old
French feauté), which dates from feudal times, and signified the homage

23
Brodrick, Progress of the Jesuits, 27.
24
Williams, The French Oratorians, 261.
25
CCD, 13a:184.
26
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, accessed 22 January 2015.
27
New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Exeter: Paternoster
Press, 1975), 1:588.
28
New American Bible, Deuteronomy 4:1–6; 1 John 2:1–29.
29
Arthur L. Herman, ‘The Language of Fidelity in Early Modern France’, Journal of
Modern History 67, no. 1 (March 1995), 9.
 Introduction 7

and obedience due an overlord by his vassal.30 This last definition has
largely influenced use of the concept of fidelity in historical studies. In his
seminal work on absolutist institutions in early modern France, Roland
Mousnier in 1974 used the term fidélité to describe the mechanism of trust
and devotion which was the engine of social and political relationships
in the ancien régime.31 Twenty-one of Mousnier’s former colleagues and
students explore the notion of fidélité in their 1981 Hommage to him.
In his introductory essay to this volume, Yves Durand stresses that the
sentiment lay at the heart of a society based on orders, honour, dignity, and
esteem. Other essayists emphasize the term’s relevance in understanding
systems of patronage, in particular the affective and moral ligatures which
bound patrons and their clients or créatures in the pre-Louisquatorzian
era.32 However, significant caveats have been added to Mousnier’s theories
since they were first posited, above all that fidelity ties in the ancien régime
were far more complicated, unstable, and pecuniary than Mousnier
originally recognized.33
Of course, the mechanisms which apply in these secular conceptions
of fidelity are not wholly instructive when it comes to examining
the operation of bonds of obedience in a religious context, and this is
especially true for religious orders. If fidelity worked as a ‘language game’,
a means to obtain gifts, benefits, or power in ancien régime France, it was
an end in itself according to the rules of clerical companies.34 Because of
this, and in contrast to the semi-official or unofficial ties connecting actors
in Mousnier’s société des fidèles, members of religious orders (and then
societies of apostolic life) created much stronger enforcement frameworks
to ensure fidelity to their institute’s charismatic leader, code of values,
or traditions. The sacred vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience are
central to religious profession, because they are solemnized promises of
fidelity which hold the association together. Furthermore, their scrupulous
observance is regularly monitored by internal visitations conducted
by senior members of the order, and often sanctioned by high external
authorities such as ecumenical councils. In its decree on the religious life,
the Council of Trent in 1563 enjoined all male and female regulars to
‘order and arrange their lives according to the provision of the rule they

30
 Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed 22 January 2015.
31
Roland Mousnier, ‘Les concepts “d’ordres”, d’états, de fidélité et de “monarchie
absolue” en France de la fin du XVe siècle à la fin du XVIIe’, Revue historique 502 (1972),
289–312.
32
Durand, ed., Hommage à Roland Mousnier.
33
 Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
34
Herman, ‘The Language of Fidelity’, 1–24.
8 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

profess and … faithfully observe what belongs to the perfection of their

profession, such as the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity’.35
The most recent works of scholarship to have considered the fidelity of
religious orders to their founders confirm that this sentiment is present at
all stages of an institute’s development. However, few studies focus on the
period where the pressure of such fidelity is at its most intense. O’Malley’s
study of the Jesuits addresses the early construction of Jesuit fidelity by
charting the evolution of the Society’s schema of values and range of work
over its first twenty-five years. However, despite some analysis of certain
Jesuits’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the Society’s evolution after
Loyola’s death, O’Malley’s study ends soon after this event, and thus offers
only a few insights into the long-term fate of the founder’s projects.36 Mary
Kathryn Robinson, in her recent study of the Benedictine Congregation of
Saint-Maur in eighteenth-century France, demonstrates how the Maurists
evinced fidelity by clinging onto elements of their monastic identity in the
face of secular encroachments during a hostile Revolutionary era, although
she does not explore fidelity in the wake of the founder’s death, a theme
central to this study of the Congregation of the Mission.37 In other works,
the fidelity of followers again emerges only obliquely. In her investigation
of the Observant Franciscans during the French religious wars of the late
sixteenth century, Megan Armstrong demonstrates how the coalition of the
Franciscans’ corporate values and politics galvanized Catholic opposition
to French Protestants.38 In places, she addresses the Franciscans’ fidelity
to the original intention of their founder, such as their adaptation of strict
Franciscan ideals of poverty to the cultural climate of the ancien régime,
but little emerges of the effects this had on the Franciscans’ self-conscious
identity as adherents of Francis of Assisi’s ethos. Of course, the activities
of Armstrong’s group of Franciscans are examined centuries after Assisi’s
death, and the author concedes that certain core traditions had long since
given way to new orthodoxies by dint of circumstance.39 But a study based

35
Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed and
Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2:776, Decree on Regulars and
nuns, session 25 (4 December 1563).
36
 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 308–9, 533–5.
37
Mary Kathryn Robinson, Regulars and the Secular Realm (Scranton and London:
University of Scranton Press, 2009), chap. 4.
38
Megan Armstrong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of
Religion, 1560–1600 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004).
39
Armstrong, Politics of Piety, 88–94. Armstrong’s work no doubts relies on David
Burr’s masterful study The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century
after Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001). While Burr’s
work is exemplary, it mainly focuses on the internal theological differences of post-Francis
Franciscanism rather than notions of fidelity per se.
 Introduction 9

on the immediate post-founder period of an order provides a better vantage

point, because it permits us to chart threats and changes to a founder’s
ideals when his memory was fresh in the minds of followers and observers.

Structure

When he explained why he founded his apostolic society, the Congregation

of the Mission, in 1625, de Paul was specific about the kind of fidelity
he sought to embody. In the 1658 common rules he prepared for it, he
declared that his wish was to place rediscovery of and fidelity to Christ’s
original mission – evangelization of the poor – at the heart of his and his
followers’ ministry in the European countryside.40 Studies on the life of
Vincent de Paul and the early development of his Congregation rightly
acknowledge the central role his ethos of service to the poor played in
orientating his work and that of his followers. However, current studies
do not adequately address the fate of this ethos between his death in
1660 and his canonization. The experience of the Lazarists reveals that
the history of their Congregation after de Paul’s death was dominated by
judgements made concerning their fidelity or lack thereof. In recognition
of this fact, this book does not offer a general history of the Congregation
in the ancien régime, but instead assesses how the evolution of the
Congregation affected the Lazarists’ fidelity to their original mission, as
well as the formative role that key events had in causing shifts in their
core identity in the period from de Paul’s death in 1660 up to 1736, the
year prior to his canonization.
Because the basic foundations of the Lazarists’ fidelity lie in the history
and values which animated their founder’s life, this book commences
long before these dates. Ideological frames are central to the existence of
religious communal groups, whose common vision and actions draw on
them and from which they retain their meaning for individual members.41
In the Congregation of the Mission, these ideological frames were deeply
connected to the major steps of de Paul’s early ministry. Consequently, the
Lazarists’ individual and collective identity became focused on a degree
of faithfulness to this ministry which would allow them to be called
fils de Monsieur Vincent. The first chapter allows the reader to grasp
the Congregation’s core institutional values and rhetoric of fidelity by
rooting them in de Paul’s key accomplishments as a missionary priest.
It begins with a discussion of the inspiration behind his early missions in

40
CCD, 13a: 431, 17 May 1658.
41
Patricia Wittberg, The Rise and Fall of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement
Perspective (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 197.
10 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

the French countryside, and will answer threshold questions. What was de
Paul’s original vision for his small band of followers? What needs did they
initially seek to fulfil in the French church? What institutional structures
did de Paul create to support his Congregation’s mission? Analysis of
this embryonic phase is vital because it reveals that myths about the
Congregation which later became pervasive, especially the notion that
it was a lowly and unimportant organization, in fact originated in the
writings, teachings, and plans of its founder. De Paul cleverly permitted
his ethos to transcend his personal presence by institutionalizing it, and
it thereafter became permanently relevant among succeeding generations
of followers.
As O’Malley argues, values that inspire a religious institute remain ideals
that ‘are never the same thing as the lived reality’.42 Accusations of failed
allegiance, evidence of divided loyalty, and trends leading to drift attach
themselves to any assessment of fidelity. Chapter 1 therefore identifies the
major sources of drift in the Congregation’s early evolution. Alterations
in the Congregation’s size, visibility, or prestige had the potential to derail
the Lazarists’ objectives to remain ‘priests of the poor’ but the confidence
with which de Paul oversaw cumulative changes in the Congregation’s
ministries and public presence illustrates the unique role played by the
founder in handling discrepancies between rhetoric and reality. However,
because de Paul’s power to manage drift flowed solely from his tenure
as superior general, his death left large spaces into which other actors
presumed to enter.
Theoretical discussions on fidelity shed little information on the exact
processes which underpinned its actualization. Chapters 2–5 assess the
external apostolic work designed to give effect to de Paul’s teachings at
the Congregation’s bases. The Lazarists possessed twenty-six houses on de
Paul’s death in 1660; by the end of the century, they controlled over fifty
establishments, and by the Revolution in 1789, this number had trebled.
Of course, any meaningful excursus on activities at 157 establishments is
impossible, so a selection has to be made. By 1660 the Congregation’s remit
was divided into two principal zones of activity: missions to the people
and the operation of seminaries. After de Paul’s death, the Congregation
became an influential player in the provision of seminary education to
generations of French clergy, but this study excludes these establishments
from direct analysis. Instead, a mission in Madagascar, a group of court
appointments, the royal naval chaplaincies at Marseille and Rochefort,
and a mission to the Mascareignes form the basis of this study.
There are persuasive reasons why these missions warrant attention
over others. Firstly, unlike many of the Congregation’s seminaries, they

42
 O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 372.
 Introduction 11

shared the important characteristics of Vincent de Paul’s original exercise

in the French countryside: they were all sponsored by lay patrons, either
individual or commercial, and involved giving traditional missions. As such,
the Congregation was able to place them firmly on a ‘continuum of fidelity’.
At the same time, however, these projects also represented new departures
for the Congregation because they included variations on or additions to de
Paul’s original mission. At three of the sites, the Congregation’s traditional
target – the European poor – were replaced by seemingly functional
equivalents: the ‘poor infidels’ of Madagascar, the Protestant oarsmen of
Marseille, and the ‘poor slaves’ of the Mascareignes. Furthermore, at all
of these locations, the Lazarists tested the boundaries of their traditional
responsibilities by adding other functions to their missionary remit,
most of which were parochial – and therefore permanent – activities.
Most importantly, these houses demanded either close interaction with
delegated royal authority or direct Lazarist participation in the Crown’s
political agendas. All the bases were founded during the reign of Louis XIV
(1643–1715) and the Lazarists’ association with and fealty to his regime’s
policies posed significant challenges to the accomplishment of their core
missionary objective. The powerful combination of all these factors meant
that the sites chosen for this study were the key battlegrounds where the
most consequential and lengthy debates on fidelity to de Paul took place.
After the largely internal discussions at the heart of the opening
chapter, Chapter 2 examines how the Congregation’s principles of fidelity
fared in a missionary venture inextricably tied to the activities of outsiders.
The Congregation’s small mission in the French colony of Fort Dauphin,
Madagascar, in operation from 1648 to 1671, will be its focus. The fact
that this book begins its sharpened analysis of the Lazarists’ apostolic
activity by studying a little-known mission outside the Hexagon reflects the
cross-continental organization of some French missionary institutes in
the early modern period. More pointedly, the era’s religious institutes
swiftly encountered vastly new challenges to their traditions beyond the
frontiers. After all, their ideals and values were first conceived for European
arenas, and then applied far beyond their comfort zones, often with little
preparation or guidance. This reality therefore unveils environments that
are ripe for assessing corporate religious fidelity, because although the
missionaries of France’s expanding empire were often deployed as agents
of the Crown, a far more complex array of objectives underpinned their
daily decisions in the field.
The missionaries in Madagascar began as auxiliaries of a colonial
company, the Compagnie des Indes, and their work there intersected with
its imperial and commercial agendas. However, the focus of Chapter 2 is
the superior weight allotted by the Lazarists to their Congregation’s ethos
and their duty of fidelity to it. The aim of this chapter is to show how
12 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

the Congregation’s mission to the poor was applied in a vastly different

scenario to that in which it originally took shape in France. As we shall
see, fidelity to the Congregation’s ethos was not fulfilled by once-off
verbal courtesies, but was rather a demanding and continual process
exposed to external and internal forces, which either helped or hindered
its accomplishment. The Madagascar mission constitutes an important
barometer for the study as a whole, because it showcased perennial factors
influencing survival of the Congregation’s core identity, such as the powerful
role of patrons and Congregation leaders. Moreover, when it ended in tragedy
the Congregation’s directors made a firm general resolution about the kind
of work it would accept in the future, a ‘strategy for fidelity’ which signalled
the belief of post-de Paul Lazarists that their identity was a settled matter.
The amount of control that the Lazarists possessed over their own
activities on a given mission was critical in determining their ability to pursue
fundamental corporate agendas, the most pressing of which remained fidelity
to de Paul. This book demonstrates that ecclesiastical associations in the
Bourbon era were never free to pursue their own goals unencumbered. The
experience of other clerical bodies revealed that the death of a founder left his
disciples particularly vulnerable to the interference of rulers, some of whom
were eager to impose their own vision of government and practices. In the
aftermath of Loyola’s death, Pope Paul IV had famously attempted to alter
the Society’s constitutions.43 Cardinal Richelieu was equally meddlesome,
unsuccessfully manoeuvring to co-opt the superior generalship of the Oratory
after Bérulle’s demise.44 In the Lazarists’ case, one major power much closer
to the French Lazarists than the pope in Rome and far more assertive than
the cardinal minister sought to increase its sway over them in the decades
after de Paul’s death: the gallican Crown of Louis XIV. Scholars now are
careful to stress the limitations of the absolutist model of government, but
most still produce evidence of the Crown’s widening embrace under the
Sun-King.45 Nevertheless, historical interest in this subject is still weighted
on the side of larger or traditionally powerful corporate bodies which felt
the effects of Louis’ intrusion, such as the French episcopate, the provincial
aristocracy, the magistrates of the parlements, and municipal governments.46

43
Brodrick, The Progress of the Jesuits, 28–31.
44
Williams, The French Oratorians, 253–6.
45
Armstrong, The Politics of Piety, 169. Alison Forrestral, Fathers, Pastors and Kings:
Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth Century France (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004), 146–7; Richard Bonney, The Limits of Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century
France (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995); Robin Briggs, Early Modern France,
1560–1715, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 73–159; Ragnhild Hatton,
ed., Louis XIV and Absolutism (London: Macmillan, 1976).
46
Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors and Kings, chap. 5. William Beik, Absolutism and Society
in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc
 Introduction 13

But the ‘monarchy’s ambition to establish the king’s spatial and temporal
absoluteness’ extended to seemingly less important units.47
Besides significant studies on its relationship with the French Jesuits,
the extent of the Crown’s reliance on other spiritual agents, both at
home and abroad, still remains a black box.48 This is surprising given
the proliferation of powerful new societies of apostolic life home-grown
in the reforming environment of seventeenth-century France. Thus,
alongside de Paul’s Lazarists, Bérulle’s Oratorians, and Olier’s Sulpicians,
Jean Eudes established the Congregation of Jesus and Mary (Eudists) in
1643: all four (and their founders) came to exercise major influence
in French intellectual, political, and religious circles. Still, stronger focus
on the Jesuits might be justified because they were already installed as
the monarchy’s favourites when these novel Congregations emerged and
continued to be pre-eminent for some time. Indeed, the clout of the global
and numerically strong Society of Jesus easily trumps the weight of these
‘French institutes’. Yet the fact that the new institutes were small or did
not share the Jesuits’ lengthy pedigree with the monarchy makes their case
all the more intriguing for greater study. Whatever advantage may lie in
establishing the Jesuit narrative as paradigmatic for the seventeenth century,
this disappears entirely for the eighteenth, when the Society of Jesus was
infamously dissolved by the last Bourbon monarch of the ancien régime
(Louis XVI). Like all the other French-born institutes, the Lazarists did
not share this terrible fate in the eighteenth century, but the secrets of their
survival – indeed, their flourishing – must be located much earlier.
Long before the dissolution of the Jesuits, the Lazarists convinced
outsiders that their fidelity to de Paul’s model of priestliness made them
absolutely distinct from other missionaries, especially the more political
sons of Ignatius. Chapter 3 and 4 explore the monarchy’s increasing
interest in and engagement with this model, as well as decisive tests to
the Lazarists’ resolution to remain faithful to it, a task spotlighted as even
more essential in the wake of Madagascar. Chapter 3 starts with Louis’
appointment of the Lazarists to the realm’s ultimate parish, the royal
parish of Versailles in January 1672. Much more than the Madagascar

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John J. Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements:
The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Ernest
Lavisse, Louis XIV (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1978), 1: 271–92.
47
Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service and the Making of Absolute
Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 8–9.
48
A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit mind: the mentality of an elite in early modern France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic
Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Dale Van
Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
14 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

exercise, the designation to Versailles determined the future direction of

the Congregation in the post-de Paul era, for the Congregation’s leaders
were thereafter instructed to accept a sweep of other royal foundations.
However, as the Lazarists forged an ever-more intimate relationship
with the monarch and his closest kin at court, they quickly discovered
that the increased benefits of association did not come without sacrifice.
Chapter 4 covers another significant area of collaboration between the
Congregation and the Crown, this time at the Congregation’s houses at
Marseille, with comparative analysis of a new house in Rochefort founded
in 1683. These two houses formed the nub of Lazarist operations in the
Crown’s department of the marine, which consisted mainly of supervising
missions and conversions on the royal galleys. They offer a counterpoint
to the bases studied in Chapter 3 because they commanded much closer
allegiance to and execution of Louis XIV’s political agendas, such as
the highly sensitive repression of religious dissidence in the wake of the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Further, both chapters build
on the conclusions of Chapter 2 by comparing the roles exercised by
missionaries at the various locations. The Lazarists’ ability to give potency
to fundamental elements of their corporate ethos, especially charity,
depended on the type and degree of their interaction with the sovereignty
and its delegated officials. This period in the Congregation’s history saw
the priests of the countryside transform into prêtres de Bourbon, and
the chapters weigh the diverse costs and effects of an emerging ‘double
fidelity’ in its missionaries’ lives and ministry. Ultimately, they sought
to ensure that their founder’s spirit endured, and therefore made him
‘happy’ – to use de Paul’s phrase – but close proximity to the king taught
them that his felicity as monarch and patron often had more immediate
consequences for their Congregation’s well-being.
The Congregation achieved unexpected eminence in the last quarter
of the seventeenth century, but as it entered the new century one blemish
still existed on its record: the dismal end of its mission in Madagascar.
Chapter 5 invites the reader to return to the Indian Ocean as the
Congregation aimed to recover the lost hopes of Madagascar. In 1711
and 1721, opportunities arose to return to two islands neighbouring
Madagascar, the Île de Bourbon and the Île de France, on another colonial
enterprise. Just at the Madagascar mission provides a useful lens for
judging the Congregation’s strengths and weaknesses in the immediate
post-de Paul period, the first phase of the missions to the Mascareignes
(1711–36) is helpful in measuring its stature in the period prior to
de Paul’s canonization in 1737. This era was a time of pride and confidence
for the followers of de Paul, but they discovered that increased honour
was not a guarantee of fidelity. By comparing the Madagascar mission
with its successor in the Indian Ocean, the final chapter determines that
 Introduction 15

the Lazarists avoided many of the mistakes which blighted the previous
mission, and even left behind the diffidence of the immediate post-de Paul
period. However, the lessons learnt were not always those most beneficial
to preserving de Paul’s ethos.

Sources

The materials at hand for a study of Lazarist development after de Paul’s

death are wide-ranging. Pierre Coste’s monumental thirteen-volume
collection of de Paul’s letters and conferences, which document the
founder’s thoughts and teachings on myriad subjects, form an essential
corpus, principally because a study of fidelity necessarily involves constant
reference to precedents set in the de Paul era.49 The yearly Annales de
la Congrégation contain rich and diverse information concerning
particularly memorable missions, although they are often anecdotal and
rarely cite original manuscript sources.50 In this respect, the Mémoires de la
Congrégation are more reliable, as they contain printed letters, contracts,
and other rare primary materials.51
The evidence employed for the core of the book is largely different
in character from the regulatory documents central to arguments made in
Chapter 1. Every mission began with standard precatory literature, such as
foundation contracts and their variants, and these are the natural starting
point in assessing how the Lazarist ethos and apostolic programme were
supposed to apply in a new context. They also provide valuable information
regarding the intentions and obligations of various actors when it came
to preserving Lazarist works and ethos, especially the lay patron and the
Congregation’s leadership. However, Lazarist fidelity was not a toprung
issue alone. Conformity to the common rules, faithful allegiance to de
Paul’s values, and avoidance of activities which might lead to drift were
the fundamental objectives of individual missionaries working on a
given mission site. The range of evidence used in this study reflects this
fact. Many of the missionaries wrote letters or kept diaries and personal
memoirs. For the cluster of missions studied here, most of the written
correspondence remains in manuscript form, although the diaries of two
prominent Lazarist court memorialists have been published. Where gaps
emerge in a mission’s history, the circular letters addressed by the superior

49
CCD, 13 vols.
50
Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission et de la compagnie des filles de la Charité
(Paris: Maison Mère de la Congrégation, 1833–1963).
51
Mémoires de la Congrégation de la Mission. Vols. 1 (Poland), 2 (Barbarie), and
9 (Madagascar) (Paris: Maison Mère de la Congrégation, 1863–6).
16 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

general to the Congregation are useful points of reference because several

missions examined here, especially the colonial and court appointments,
were the subject of significant and periodic commentary in them.
Internal documents like the circulars are not only helpful sources of
data. They also shed light on the theme of this book, revealing that fidelity
to de Paul was a negotiated process involving constant communication
and dialogue between the mother house and missionaries on the ground.
Of course, these sources often contain formulaic exhortations designed to
encourage fidelity to de Paul and therefore require careful interpretation.
For instance, the circulars were addressed by the superior general to all
members of the Congregation, most of whom were not participants in the
small number of significant projects mentioned in them. As a result,
the objective was to edify and not to give a thorough, or even completely
truthful, account of a particular mission’s progress. However, through
careful comparison of the information provided and withheld in these
letters with other evidence, it is possible to diagnose the leadership’s
mindset at different periods in a mission’s development, as well as its
capacity for absorbing and resolving frequently expressed concerns about
remaining faithful to the founder.
Rather than attempting a complete census of Lazarist approaches to
fidelity based on correspondence from a potentially unwieldy number of
missionaries, this work extrapolates common themes from a restricted
group who possessed convincing credentials as spokespersons for the
Congregation’s general membership. Many of the missionaries examined
here were well-seasoned Lazarists who had experience of the wide gamut
of functions performed by their institute. Indeed, some were specifically
chosen for experimental assignments because of this, and their knowledge
only enhanced their ability to pass trustworthy judgements on emerging
threats to Lazarist fidelity. The collective weight of their evidence
increases further because it proceeded from all degrees and ranks in the
Congregation’s membership. Most scholarly studies to touch on the subject
of fidelity anchor their analysis in correspondence which more accurately
reflects elite conversations among an institute’s senior leaders. In contrast,
this study relies on testimony from Lazarist priests, brothers, superiors,
and ordinary confreres alike.
To offset the risks of relying on internally generated evidence alone,
this book also incorporates sources from outsiders who offered their
judgements on the extent to which the Lazarists’ nurtured or stained
their founder’s fundamental values. Legal documents written on behalf
of rival clergy, correspondence of courtiers, and the regular reportings of
prominent published circulars, such as the Mercure galant and the Gazette
de France, reveal the level of interest which people of all ranks took in
the Congregation’s development in the decades after de Paul’s demise.
 Introduction 17

At the Congregation’s bases in Marseille and Rochefort, numerous Crown

officials were charged with scrutinizing the Lazarists’ work and general
conduct. Their missives and reports, largely conserved in the archives of the
Marine in Paris, constitute an essential source for Chapter 4, as do
the published letters and memoirs of prominent Huguenots with whom the
Lazarists interacted on the Crown’s galleys. Chapters 4 and 5 also make
extensive use of the ordres and dépêches registers formerly kept by the
Crown’s ministers of the marine. Finally, a wide range of evidence remains
for the Lazarists’ colonial engagements with successive Compagnies des
Indes. The Congregation’s official dealings with the Compagnie des Indes
through treaties and contracts are extant, as are the communications
of the commercial Company’s regional authorities in the Mascareignes,
which have been meticulously gathered by the historian Albert Lougnon.52
Given the depth and breadth of evidence regarding the Congregation,
it may be argued that historians in the past have been too willing to accept
as true the Lazarists’ self-representation as insignificant ‘priests of the
countryside’. As we shall see, de Paul’s death reignited his followers’ sense
of identity and refocused their duty of fidelity to it, but it deprived them of
the one person who was powerful enough to defend it and give it continued
meaning as the Catholic Reform’s original agents in France gradually
passed away. What follows is an investigation of roles and relationships
which challenged their fidelity, competed with it, or made it less relevant.
The study probes the gaps between the Lazarists’ hope-filled ambitions
to be ‘priests of the poor’ and the sometimes terrible pressures of fealty
in Bourbon France and its overseas colonies. Through a rereading of old
sources and recourse to new ones, it goes further by examining how those
entrusted with perpetuating the mission of one of French Catholicism’s
most lauded leaders reacted to their unpredictable and fairly swift rise
to prominence in the kingdom, and then determines if the steps taken by
them led them away from his legacy.

52
Albert Lougnon, Correspondance du conseil supérieur de Bourbon et de la
Compagnie des Indes, 10 March 1732 – 23 January 1736 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1933); Albert
Lougnon, Correspondance du conseil supérieur de Bourbon et de la Compagnie des Indes, 22
janvier 1724 – 30 décembre 1731 (Saint-Denis, G.Daudé; Paris: E. Leroux, 1934).
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 1

In the Footsteps of Monsieur

Vincent: Rhetoric and Reality in the
Congregation of the Mission
Introduction

On 27 September 1660, Vincent de Paul died. The mood of the religious

institute he had led for decades was expressed by his vicar general and
successor, René Alméras, in a circular letter to all superiors in the wake of
this passing. After recounting the events of de Paul’s last hours, Alméras
said that ‘the loss is great for the Church, and incomparable for us, as we
are in a state of affliction that you can well imagine’.1 However, the task of
replacing de Paul, who had been at the forefront of French church reform
since the 1620s, soon displaced this grief. In January 1661, a general
assembly opened at Saint-Lazare, the mother house of the Congregation
of the Mission in Paris, with this weighty duty in mind.
Accounts of the assembly, which took place between 15 and 20 January
1661, are extremely sparse. The evidence remaining consists of some
preparatory documents, the list of attendants, and an announcement of the
result. However, a remarkable eyewitness report came from the superior of
the Congregation’s house in Cahors and visitor of the province of Aquitaine,
Gilbert Cuissot, who made a sworn affidavit on 27 March 1678 concerning
an event that took place on 17 January 1661, at the very moment of
balloting. Explaining that he had been in doubt about giving his vote to the
vicar general Alméras, whose poor health was universally known, Cuissot
recounted the following events:

believing myself obliged to rely on the sentiments of Monsieur Vincent, in

the belief that God had given him some other insight on this matter than
what the infirmity of Monsieur Alméras demonstrated, and balancing before
God all the pros and cons in the best way I could, all of a sudden, a voice
came to me: ‘Quoy! Was the whole Church by the design of heaven not
entrusted to the leadership of St Gregory the Great, and so happily increased
and administered, notwithstanding the fact that he was a man full of bodily

1
RC, 1:31, 29 September 1661: ‘La perte en est grande pour l’Église, et incomparable
pour nous, qui en sommes ici dans l’affliction que vous pouvez penser.’
20 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

ailments? The Congregation [of the Mission] is much less than the universal
Church’. And when it was my turn to write down my choice, asking God once
again for his help, I lifted my mind to the spirit of our very honoured father
Monsieur Vincent, and raising my eyes at the same time to heaven, right up at
the height of the floor he appeared to me, his hat on his head, dressed in his
coat, his face serious and confident. He had the same features and lines that
he had when his health was perfect, and he was not as old as he appears in his
picture. His complexion was, to tell the truth, white, proceeding from a light
that clung to his very face, but no aura around him that I could have noticed
in this space. He was saying to me in a distinct but almost at the same time
an interior voice, ‘If it is a crime, put me in irons; if it is an error, it is mine, so
fear nothing; let this curse be on me, my son.’2

Cuissot claimed that this mystical experience banished his doubts about
Alméras’ suitability, and he voted for him. Of course, Cuissot’s report
has many defects, not least that it was written nearly twenty years after
the event. However, whether or not its contents are reliable, the affidavit
still deserves assessment. The symbolic value of the story, unfolding
in a room where de Paul’s closest companions were gathered, lay in
its similarities to the Pentecostal attendance of Christ’s apostles after
the resurrection. Cuissot echoed the uncertainty which characterized the
scriptural event by admitting his own diffidence in choosing a successor
to the Lazarists’ beloved father. The biblical comparisons were completed
with the appearance of de Paul’s ‘spirit’ and the emboldening effects it
had on Cuissot.3
On the other hand, Cuissot’s ghost consoled nothing more than his
own individual dilemma during the Alméras election. As a result, his
recollection sheds little light on the reaction of the wider group to de Paul’s
death and raises far more questions than it answers. In the years following

2
ACM, Alméras Register, 2, fols. 1726–7, 27 March 1678: ‘croyant m’en devoir
tenir au sentiment de Monsieur Vincent, dans la pensée que Dieu luy avoit donné sur cela
d’autre veue que ce que l’infirmité dudit Monsieur Alméras demonstroit. Et balançant devant
Dieu le pour et le contre le mieux que je pouvois. Tout d’un coup il me fut dit ou (illegible
word) représenté. Quoy ! Toute l’Eglise par l’élection du Ciel ne fut-elle pas mise sous la
conduite du grand St. Grégoire et si heureusement augmentée et conduite nonobstant que ce
fust un homme plein d’infirmitez corporelles. La Congrégation est bien moindre de l’Eglise
universelle. Et lorsqu’il fut à mon tour d’escrire mon suffrage demandant derechef à Dieu son
secours j’elevay mon esprit à l’esprit de nostre très honoré Père Monsieur Vincent et levant en
mesme temps les yeux au Ciel jusqu’au haut du plancher il m’apparut chapeau en Teste avec
son manteau, d’un visage grave et assuré, dans les mesmes traits et linéamens qu’il avoit en sa
santé parfaite, et non si âgé qu’il paroist en son tableau, d’un teint à la vérité blanc procédant
de lumière adhérente au visage mesme mais sans rayon au tour que j’eusse pu apercevoir dans
cet espace, me disant d’une voix distincte et intérieur quasi en mesme temps ‘Si crimen, in me
converte ferrum, si culpa, mea est, noli timere; in me sit ista maledictio, fili mi.’
3
 Acts 1 and 2 (NAM).
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 21

the death of the founder, what concrete resources could the Congregation
draw on to remain close to his intentions? How did Lazarists construct
their corporate identity without the constant guidance of their spiritual
‘father’? In his testimony, Cuissot began by confessing his pressing desire
to remain faithful ‘to the sentiments of Monsieur Vincent’ but he failed to
elucidate what he meant by this. In his lifetime, de Paul had engaged in a
daunting range of works, written thousands of letters and given dozens of
speeches; his ‘sentiments’ about particular questions were therefore open
to selective interpretation. What did the Lazarists select from de Paul’s life
and works that bound them together?
The Lazarists’ fidelity to de Paul was built first and foremost on their
strict adherence to a set of core values: a corporate ethos often referred
to as the ‘spirit of the Mission’. In the decades after de Paul’s death, the
Congregation’s unique vocation as an institute solely for the poor was at
the heart of this corporate schema of values. Immediately upon his election,
Alméras captured this succinctly, saying, ‘Let us give ourselves to God in
charity to consume our lives in his service, and in the salvation and relief
of the poor.’4 In the years that followed, this corporate objective became
embedded in the Congregation’s self-understanding and self-projection, and
acquired the sort of longevity which evaded Cuissot’s ephemeral wraith. It
penetrated shared mental representations of the Congregation, collective
rituals of remembrance, and circular letters of successive superiors general.
Furthermore, the historical image of the Congregation as an institute of the
rural poor drew on several concrete sources to bolster its case. Studying
the impulses of de Paul’s early ministry, it can be judged that the major
prescriptive documents of the Congregation from 1625 to 1660, and also
its internal structures, all guided the Lazarists’ self-presentation after de
Paul’s death.
Reliance on the Congregation’s self-construction in piecing together its
exact identity in the post-de Paul period is, however, inherently dangerous.
The picture both of de Paul and the Congregation which emerged during
this period was at best incomplete, at worst fictional. The inculcation and
constant repetition of the Lazarists’ own image as servants of the poor
was, after all, part of a commemorative, and often hagiographic, process
which ultimately sought church recognition, such as canonization, for
Vincent de Paul. All emphases of internal rhetoric about the Congregation’s
destination were therefore stuck in time and ignored pressing questions
about the continuing evolution of the institute. Even in de Paul’s time,
Lazarist rhetoric did not consistently mirror reality, but the reasons for
this remain unexplored.

4
RC, 1:35, 1 February 1661: ‘Donnons-nous à Dieu en charité pour consommer notre
vie à son service, et au salut et soulagement des pauvres.’
22 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

The realization that Lazarist rhetoric struggled to survive changing

circumstances became more acute in the aftermath of 1660. The
Congregation’s development after this date was not simply restricted to
an inward-looking process of conservation, which emerges so clearly
from the panic in Cuissot’s affidavit. On the contrary, after the death
of their beloved father the Lazarists travelled far as a public institution
and increasingly engaged with powerful outsiders, especially among the
royal family. These changes effected critical shifts in the way Lazarists
saw themselves and were seen by the world, as increased engagement
forced departure from the dearly held vision of the founder. In response,
a rival rhetoric emerged to scrutinize the course of fidelity pursued by de
Paul’s followers, and repeatedly asked a searing question: were the sons of
Monsieur Vincent remaining true?

Vincent de Paul: Father of the Poor

The cornerstone of Vincent de Paul’s legacy lay in the example of his life
and ministry. This was the first component of the Lazarists’ collective
identity and common values, referred to collectively as the ‘spirit of the
Mission’. Born on 24 April 1581 and ordained in 1600, de Paul’s first major
step in creating this schema of values began when he went to Folleville in
late 1616. Folleville was a small village in the diocese of Amiens situated
on one of the estates of his patron at the time, Françoise Marguerite de
Silly, wife of Philippe Emmanuel de Gondi, general of the French galleys.
Besides his duties as spiritual advisor to Madame de Gondi and preceptor
to the children of the Gondi household, de Paul also carried out some
pastoral work on the estate. During his 1616 visit, he was called to hear
the confession of a peasant living in the neighbouring village of Gannes.
According to de Paul, the man had long neglected his conscience before
he visited him and heard his confession. The reported words of Madame
de Gondi when she learnt of the spiritual neglect of rural Catholics like de
Paul’s penitent have since passed into Lazarist lore:

Alas, Monsieur, what is this? What have we just heard? This is the way it must
be with most of the people. Alas, if this man with his good reputation was
really living in danger of damnation, what must we think of others who live
less righteously? Alas, Monsieur, how many souls are lost? What shall we do
about this?5

5
 Abelly, Vie, 1:33: ‘Ha, Monsieur, qu’est-ce que cela? Qu’est-ce que nous venons
d’entendre ? Il en est sans doute ainsi de la plupart de ces pauvres gens. Ha, si cette homme
qui passait pour homme de bien, était en état de damnation, que sera-ce des autres qui vivent
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 23

De Paul’s answer to his patroness was a mission given at Folleville on

25 January 1617, an event which lies at the origin of the Congregation
of the Mission. It bore all the hallmarks of an early modern missionary
enterprise, with preaching, confessions, and catechism. This successful
point of departure gave rise to further missions carried out in other rural
villages belonging to Madame de Gondi in the years following.6
The focus on rural people which lay at the heart of these early
initiatives on the Gondi estates was in some senses unique. Although the
mendicant orders and the Jesuits devoted some of their ministries to the
spiritual and physical relief of rural people, no Catholic missionaries had
adopted this as their central objective.7 De Paul asserted as much in a
conference given on 6 December 1658, declaring that, while the Lazarists
did not claim to be alone in serving the poor, ‘there [was] no Company
in the Church which [had] the poor for its [specific] portion’.8 This gap in
spiritual provision was startling given the enormous challenges presented
by contemporary realities. France in the seventeenth century has been
described as an ‘enormous rural world’ where five-sixths of the population
dwelled in the countryside.9 Despite its numerical importance, however,
the needs of this population were considered acute and neglected. As de
Paul began his ministry, the spiritual welfare of France’s rural people had
long been affected by the poor quality of their ecclesiastical servants,
some of whom were found unable even to pronounce the formulae of the
sacraments.10 To these spiritual disadvantages were added the pressures
of a royal government which routinely loaded its financial burden on
rural populations.11 And in the seventeenth century the yoke of taxes only
became heavier as financial depression and famine brought crises of misery
and starvation to swathes of the rural population.12

plus mal ? Ha, Monsieur Vincent, que d’âmes se perdent ! Quel remède à cela?’ The English
translation is from The Life of the Venerable Servant of God Vincent de Paul, ed. John E.
Rybolt, trans. William Quinn (New York: New City Press, 1993), 1:61.
6
 Abelly, Vie, 47. De Paul’s first mission in the diocese of Paris was at Villepreux, part
of the Gondi domain, in February 1618.
7
Jeanne Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les campagnes parisiennes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1962),
196–8. Ferté argues the religious and mendicant orders only rarely made preaching visits to
country parishes in the Parisien area.
8
CCD, 12:73, 6 December 1658: ‘aucune Compagnie qui ait pour son partage les pauvres’.
9
Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse, Histoire économique et sociale de la France
1660–1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 2: Des derniers temps de l’âge
seigneurial aux préludes de l’âge industriel, 85.
10
Ferté, La vie religieuse, 170–71.
11
Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire économique, 90–91.
12
 Robert Mandrou, Louis XIV en son temps 1661–1715 (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1978), 309–11.
24 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

Transforming the ad hoc missions at Folleville into a canonical

missionary institute was a decades-long task. Between 1625 and the
publication of the 1633 papal bull recognizing the Congregation’s
establishment, the question of identifying the Congregation’s function
both within the realm and the French church became the subject of
lengthy negotiations. The documents from this period obviously differ
depending on their source, but their language converges on the core of
de Paul’s early projects: responsibility to the poor. The Congregation
was formally instituted by a foundation contract drawn up on 17 April
1625 between de Paul and the Gondis, and approved one year later by
the archbishop of Paris. The Gondis identified the focus of the mission in
this contract, which recognized that in France ‘only the poor people of
the rural areas remain, as it were, abandoned’. The Congregation would
therefore be established as a company of secular priests devoted to address
this abandonment, both on the Gondi estates and among the ‘poor galley
convicts’ of Marseille. Two years later, when this contract was revised,
the Congregation’s double duties toward both the poor country people
and poor galley convicts were described as the ‘fundamental clauses of
the foundation’. Subsequent to the founding contract, de Paul and his
first companions made their first pledge of association to the institute,
in which they promised to obey these fundamental clauses. These
provisions swiftly entered the minds of public agents who intervened
on the Congregation’s behalf over the next decade. In 1628, Louis XIII
wrote to Pope Urban VIII urging the latter to recognize the association,
repeating the Congregation’s core function to ‘go from village to
village … and catechize the poor common people’.13 At this gestational
stage, the original source of de Paul’s personal mission – the work among
the forgotten Catholics on the Gondi lands – was therefore ingrained in
the legal and official literature of his Congregation, and became the key
feature of the Lazarists’ self-defining rhetoric.
The emphasis placed on the Congregation’s destiny to serve the
poor common people went hand-in-hand with its canonical exclusion
from major towns.14 In his 1633 bull of recognition, Pope Urban
reminded the Congregation that ‘those who live in the principal cities
and towns have access to preachers, counsellors and directors’, and that
the Congregation’s fundamental clause destined it to the people of the
estates, farms, hamlets, and ‘more humble places’. This characteristic
already marked the Lazarists out as distinct from the Jesuits, who

13
CCD, 13a:213, 216, 225, 222, 243.
14
CCD, 13a:215–16. The foundation contract specified by saying that the Lazarists
‘will bind themselves neither to preach nor to administer any sacrament in towns in which
there is an archbishopric, bishopric or presidial court’.
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 25

concentrated their efforts in towns and cities.15 However, despite the

bull’s strict injunction, anxiety still emerged over the Congregation’s
exact destiny in the realm and the French church. In particular, the
status of its members as secular missionary priests thrust it into potential
conflict with diocesan structures, particularly the parishes. In 1627,
Propaganda Fide foresaw some ‘objections and obstacles the local
Ordinaries or others may present against this kind of mission’, because
of its exemption from normal jurisdictional frameworks within dioceses.
Even at this early stage, the commands of the Congregation’s foundation
contract were seen as potentially difficult to realize in reality. Prior to
ratification of the Congregation’s establishment by the Paris parlement on
4 April 1631, the pastors of the diocese demanded that the Congregation
‘renounce any ministry in the parishes and churches of all the cities of the
kingdom’. Alluding to the fidelity owed to de Paul’s original inspiration
for the Folleville mission, the pastors of Paris feared that the ‘source
of [the Congregation’s] first institution’ would be altered by avarice
and ambition.16
The Congregation’s foundation can be attributed in part to its founder’s
participation in a wider movement aimed at combating the very clerical
ambitions to which the pastors of Paris referred. The emergence of the
Lazarists took place along a trajectory of improvements initiated by the
leading lights of the école française de spiritualité, which aimed to restore
the French church at a time when it was seen as a source of scandal. These
reformers forged close personal ties and shared complementary ideas
on the priesthood and the episcopate.17 Like his collaborators, de Paul
focused heavily on abuses within the presbyterate, saying in 1655 that
the church was ‘heading for ruin in many places because of the bad life
of priests’.18 He blamed what he called the ignorance of the poor people
on the negligence of the clergy.19 His solicitude for the poor people of
the countryside therefore intersected with concerns that their priests
also required pastoral attention. In this context, the Congregation of the
Mission constituted, at least in the mind of the founder, part of a new and
holistic approach to ecclesiastical reform. Indeed, the concerns behind the
Folleville exercise later led de Paul to more practical involvement through
the operation of seminaries.

15
 A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind: The Mentality of an Elite in Early Modern France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 18.
16
For these documents, see CCD, 13a:96, 229–30 and 254–5.
17
Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors and Kings, 51.
18
CCD, 11:279, September 1655.
19
CCD, 12:85–6.
26 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

But de Paul went further. He believed in the uniqueness of his

Congregation, a courageous assertion from one living in the époque
missionnaire. He was jealous of both the name and the nature of his
Congregation›s work, as well as wary of any potential encroachment.
He confidently asserted the precedence of his own group in a letter to
the vicar general of Lyon on 5 October 1657 when another body in this
diocese attempted to call itself ‘Priests of the Mission’. De Paul believed
that forty years of precedence existed on the side of his Congregation and
suggested that the rival group change its name.20 He had good reason
to be protective over an institution which had developed an impressive
range of associated partnerships. For de Paul it was not enough for
missionaries to revivify the spiritual life of the rural poor if communities
could not simultaneously address their bodily deprivations through
charity. In order to palliate the needs of the rural people in a durable
way, de Paul advocated the creation of localized charity organizations.
These structures were the confraternities of charity in parishes where
his missionaries worked, the first of which sprung from de Paul’s early
work at the parish of Châtillon.21 One of the most famous examples of
these confraternities was the bureau of the Ladies of Charity set up at the
Hôtel-Dieu in 1634, consisting of well-born women who catechized and
tended to the sick.22 De Paul’s emphasis on service to the poor spawned
another group, the Daughters of Charity, who were officially approved
by the king in 1657 and later became France’s dominant female provider
of poor relief.23 The focus of de Paul’s ministry therefore inspired other
groups and organizations, and in the case of the Daughters, it created a
long-lasting tie because the superior general of the Lazarists doubled as
the Daughters’ director.
Towards the end of his life, de Paul bequeathed one of the most
important documents in the evolution of his ethos with the promulgation
of the Congregation’s common rules in 1658. Published after a deliberately
unhurried compilation process, the rules drew on both de Paul’s vision
and the Congregation’s foundation documents and forever sealed the
core components of its internal rhetoric of key values.24 In his preamble

20
CCD, 6:516.
21
 Abelly, Vie, chap.10. See also CCD, 13a:423.
22
Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic
Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 7; René Taveneaux, Le
catholicisme dans la France classique 1610–1715 (Paris: SEDES, 1980), 2:222.
23
CCD, 13b:230–235; Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing
in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).
24
CCD, 13a:430. Introducing the rules thirty-three years after he founded the Mission,
de Paul explained that he delayed publication in order to ensure they were practicable in reality.
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 27

to the rules, de Paul declared that the Lazarists were called to ‘continue
Christ’s mission, which [was] mainly preaching good news to the poor’.
This crucial objective was united to de Paul’s two equally important goals
of searching for personal holiness and reforming the ecclesiastical state,
but the substantive clauses of the rules still put particular emphasis on the
original inspiration of the mission at Folleville, pronouncing that ‘the little
Congregation of the Mission came into existence in the church to work for
the salvation of people, especially the rural poor’.25
When de Paul died in 1660, rhetoric underscoring his service to the
poor lived on in those who passed initial judgements on his achievements.
On 23 November, the bishop of Le Puy, Henri Cauchon de Maupas Du
Tour, preached the eulogy at a solemn memorial service held in honour
of de Paul at the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris. Drawing
attention to the major themes of de Paul’s life, Du Tour credited him with
changing the face of the church and re-establishing the glory of the clergy
through his conferences and seminaries.26 However, it was de Paul’s charity
to the poor of France that was singled out as the crowning achievement of
his ministry. Declaring him ‘father of the poor’, Maupas du Tour recalled
de Paul’s renowned programmes of assistance in Lorraine, Champagne,
and Picardie.27 De Paul’s record and the Congregation’s prescriptive
literature confirm Du Tour’s judgement. De Paul had created an institute
which continually sought to assert its primary vocation to the poor of
France. Such was de Paul’s iconic association with the poor and charity
that the history of his Congregation up to 1660 inevitably has become
consubstantial with his personal achievements and virtues in this domain.
However, de Paul’s work was fundamentally a group effort involving
many other men in the Congregation. In his panegyric, the bishop of
Le Puy spoke of a ‘living image’ of the founder. This living image – the
institutional legacy of de Paul – was the priests and brothers, commonly
called the sons of Monsieur Vincent, who were charged with reproducing
his work and dispensing the ‘spirit of the Mission’.

25
CCD, 13a:431–2, 439.
26
 Henry de Maupas du Tour, Oraison funèbre à la mémoire de feu messire Vincent
de Paul, instituteur, fondateur et supérieur général des Prêtres de la Mission, prononcée le
23 novembre 1660 dans l’Eglise de Saint Germain l’Auxerrois (Paris: G. Méturas, 1661), 9.
27
 Du Tour, Oraison funèbre, 42. The Lazarists distributed relief to a famine-stricken
Lorraine from 1635, operating from their house in Toul. They collaborated with the
Ladies of Charity and with patrons such as Louis XIII. Throughout the 1650s, de Paul sent
missionaries to Picardie and Champagne to alleviate suffering caused by war and famine, see
Pierre Coste, Monsieur Vincent, Le grand saint du grand siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1934),
2, chaps. 40 and 41.
28 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

Inculcating Service: the Internal Seminary

After de Paul died, the Lazarists did not solely look to the major steps
of his life to meet their central goal. Service of the poor was embedded
in the group’s common values and practices so that it transcended his
personal presence. The first and most important structure in perpetuating
this ethos was their Congregation’s internal seminary, designed to create
a unique type of Catholic missionary. In the early years of his institute’s
existence, de Paul did not implement formal guidelines for training his
followers, relying instead on the good disposition of applicants and the
effects of spiritual retreats. It was only in 1637 that he created the internal
seminary at Saint-Lazare, whose directorship he entrusted to one of his
first companions in the Congregation, Jean de la Salle.28 Further internal
seminaries were opened in Richelieu (1653), Lyon (1672), Saint-Méen
(1674), Cahors (1689), Toul (1692), and Angers (1693).29
During his generalate de Paul came to regard the internal seminary as
essential to cultivating the Congregation’s bedrock virtues. In 1657, he
wrote a letter to one of his confreres saying that ‘those who do not go
through the seminary exercises rarely acquire the spirit of the Company’.30
Moreover, the holiness found in the seminary was regarded as the motor of
the Congregation’s spiritual life in general. The rules for the director of the
internal seminary stated that ‘the greatest share of progress in saintliness
by the Company comes from the good institution of the seminarians’.31
One of de Paul’s seminary directors, his eventual successor René
Alméras, buttressed this when he claimed that ‘the whole perfection of
the Mission depends on the seminary’.32 The role of the internal seminary
in safeguarding the Congregation’s fundamental ethos as it was in de
Paul’s time is evident in the sheer durability of its governing documents.

28
 Abelly, Vie, 1:158.
29
 ACM, Contassot Dossier, ‘L’Etablissement des Lazaristes à Richelieu avant la
Révolution, 1638–1792’, 161; AM, 64:167, 515 (Saint-Méen and Cahors respectively); RC,
1:121–2 (Lyon), 196–7 (Toul and Angers); Mezzadri and Román, The Vincentians, 318–19.
30
CCD, 6:321, de Paul to Firmin Get, 18 May 1657.
31
 ACM, ‘Règles du directeur du séminaire’, fol. 1: ‘la plus grande partie des progrès à
la sainteté de vie de la Compagnie, vient de la bonne institution des séminaristes’. The text
of the ‘Règles du directeur’ (RDS) accompanies the ‘Règles du séminaire interne’ (RS), which
occur in manuscript copy. While only the RS are specifically dated (1652), it is probable that
the two were compiled and approved together.
32
ACM, Alméras Register 2, fol. 1880, ‘Conférences de Monsieur René Alméras sur
différents sujets’, n.d.: ‘toute la perfection de la Mission dépend du séminaire’.
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 29

The Règles du séminaire, which date from 1652, were unfailingly observed
by de Paul’s successors and remained virtually unchanged until 1819.33
The emphasis de Paul placed on the internal seminary found institutional
pedigree in the teachings of the Council of Trent which had given necessary
attention to the question of clerical formation. Improving the standards of
clergy demanded a decree of the council in part because of the critical link
between it and spiritual improvement among the lay Christians of Europe.34
The Congregation’s internal seminary expressed this link with a training
programme that can properly be called a ‘cumulative building process’,
each stage of which remained orientated to the Congregation’s corporate
objectives.35 After an exacting interview process, the candidate began a
two-year probation period at Saint-Lazare, similar to the novitiate spent
in most religious congregations.36 This period was an exclusively spiritual
exercise during which the new entrants concentrated on the cultivation of
virtue.37 In particular, the seminarians were invited to study the common
rules and the 1633 bull of erection. Candidates proceeding to ordination
were required to make a sustained period of reflection on these documents
and every six months spent in the seminary ended with meditation on them.38
The rules summoned the seminary candidate to acquire what Vincent
de Paul called the ‘faculties of the soul’, the values that would guide each
Lazarist in his work and set him apart from other missionaries:

We should follow, as far as possible, all the Gospel teaching … since it is so

holy and very practical. But some of it, in fact, has more application to us,
particularly when it emphasizes simplicity, humility, gentleness, mortification
and zeal for souls. The Congregation should pay special attention to developing
and living up to these five virtues .39

One of the main ways de Paul differentiated the Lazarists from other
missionary institutes was by repeatedly calling their body the ‘little

33
 ACM, ‘Recueil des maximes, règles, pratiques, usages et coutumes qui composent le
Règlement du séminaire interne de la Congrégation de la Mission’, 1819.
34
 Antoine Dégert, Histoire des séminaires français jusqu’à la Révolution, 2nd edn
(Paris: Beauchesne, 1912), 40.
35
 Roger Finke and Kevin D. Dougherty, ‘The Effects of Professional Training: The
Social and Religious Capital Acquired in Seminaries’, Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion 41, no. 1 (March 2002), 105.
36
CCD, 1:555, de Paul to Jeanne de Chantal, 14 July 1639.
37
CCD, 8:478, de Paul to Jacques Pesnelle, 4 April 1659.
38
 ACM, RDS, fols. 2, 13.
39
CCD, 13a:438.
30 Fealty and Fidelity: The Lazarists of Bourbon France

Company’.40 Promoting the five virtues in seminary was instrumental in

helping the Lazarists become as ‘little’ as the poor they served: the first
step in serving the poor was to become assimilated to them. When de
Paul spoke of simplicity, for example, he lauded the quality because he
felt ‘true religion’ was to be found among the poor and simple.41 Further,
the quality was elemental to the Congregation’s unique style of preaching
among the rural people. This style, often called the ‘little method’, involved
a system of preaching that was simple in presentation and unaffected in
language.42 Alméras adeptly explained the principle behind the method
when he taught that ‘it is necessary that there be some relation between
the person who acts and the person for whom we work: the missionary
must operate for the people of the countryside with whom simplicity is
absolutely necessary’.43 Use of the little method meant that the Lazarist
missionary was not a ‘Demosthenes of the people’ – a characterization
that has been made of some Capuchin preachers of the era.44 It also ruled
out employing songs, mnemonic devices, or costume processions often
favoured by Jesuit missionaries, such as the famous Julien Maunoir.45
Indeed, the common rules instructed the Lazarist to reject an ostentatious
rhetoric because ‘God … conceals the secrets of heaven from the wise
and prudent, and reveals them to the little ones’.46 Application of the
little method began as soon as possible, with seminarians being sent to
catechize the poor, either at the seminary gates or another location. After
these exercises, the seminarians were sent on mission.47
The other core virtues were linked in a similar fashion to the ultimate
purpose of Lazarist ministry. De Paul taught that ‘humility bespeaks
the love of being despised and not putting ourselves forward, with each
of us considering himself a poor wretch’. For its part, mortification
would keep the Lazarists in conditions as close to those of poor men

40
See CCD, 11:57, 258, 432, 439. The rules also refer to the little Company or little
Congregation several times, see ibid., 13a:439, 454.
41
Ibid., 11:169–71, 20 February 1656.
42
José Maria Román, St Vincent de Paul: A Biography, trans. Sr Joyce Howard
(London: Melisende, 1999), 348–51. See also CCD, 11:258.
43
 ACM, Alméras Register 2, ‘Conference’, fol. 1903: ‘il faut qu’il y ait quelque
relation entre celui qui agit et celui pour lequel on opère: le missionnaire doit opérer pour les
personnes de la campagne avec lesquelles la simplicité est tout à fait nécessaire’.
44
Bernard Dompnier, ‘Les missions des capucins et leur empreinte sur la Réforme
catholique’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France 70, no. 184 (1984), 127.
45
John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), 2:84; Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire, les missions
françaises au XVII siècle, 1600–1650 (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 159–71.
46
CCD, 13a:434.
47
 ACM, RDS, fol. 4.
 In the Footsteps of Monsieur Vincent 31

as possible. Rooms at Saint-Lazare were therefore sparsely furnished if

not bare and temperatures were very low, except for the kitchen and a
warming room to which entry was restricted.48 The only three items of
necessity specified for entry into the seminary were a soutane, a cloak,
and a bedrobe.49 According to de Paul, the third virtue – gentleness – was
essential to missionaries because, without it, they would not be able to
‘put up with’ what he called the rural poor’s ‘boorishness’. Finally, zeal
would prompt the missionaries to practice the other virtues and spread
God’s kingdom.50
Once the seminarian completed his two years in the seminary, the
next major event in his formation was the pronouncement of vows. The
adoption of vows in the Congregation’s life was unusual and initially
had proved a contentious issue. Members of the institutes baptized by
Bremond as filiales oratoriennes, which included the French Oratory,
the Sulpicians, and the Eudists, all eschewed corporate vows, although
individual adoption of vows remained possible for members of the
Oratory.51 Aversion to vows by these institutes was ostensibly based on
their canonical status as societies of apostolic life and not regular orders.
However, in another instance of his unique vision, de Paul championed the
vows and, after some disputes, they were finally approved in 1653.52 In
pleading for the vows, de Paul sought to combine two distinct approaches
to priestly life. Firstly, he aimed to unite the search for virtue common
in regular orders to the kind of ecclesiastical state he favoured.53 In this
he revealed the influence of figures like Pierre Bérulle, who had insisted
on a maximum of virtue in the priesthood.54 The missionaries therefore
took traditional vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. However, de
Paul’s thinking was not simply a distillation of previous formulae. To the
traditional insistence on sanctification he joined the separate apostolic
programme of the little Company, adding a fourth vow of stability, which
bound its members to service of the poor.

48
Mezzadri and Román, The Vincentians, 342.
49
 ACM, RDS, fol. 3.
50
CCD, 12:243–53.
51
 Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France: depuis la fin des
guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, rev. edn, 5 vols. (Grenoble: J. Millon, 2006), 1: 1008.
52
Mezzadri and Román, The Vincentians, 38–40.
53
In a letter to one of his priests, Claude Dufour, who toyed with the idea of joining the
Carthusian order, de Paul spelt out his veneration for the religious life, but claimed that such
a life was not enough. According to de Paul, an apostolic life, as opposed to a life of solitary
contemplation, was ‘more helpful to our neighbour’: CCD, 2:344.
54
Bremond, Histoire littéraire, 1: 1009.
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