to reform the Church of Rome; they ended by having to fight hard for a doubtful foothold within it. Even that foothold soon gave way. Louis XIV. was a fanatic for uniformity, civil and religious; the last thing he was likely to tolerate was a handful of eccentric recluses, who believed themselves to be in special touch with Heaven, and therefore might at any moment set their conscience up against the law. During the lifetime of his cousin, Madame de Longueville, the great protectress of the Jansenists, Louis stayed his hand; on her death (1679) the reign of severity began. That summer Arnauld, who had spent the greater part of his life in hiding, was forced to leave France for good.
Six years later he was joined in exile by Pasquier Quesnel who succeeded him as leader of the party. Long before his flight from France Quesnel had published a devotional commentary—Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament—which had gone through many editions without exciting official suspicion. But in 1695 Louis Antoine de Noailles, bishop of Châlons, was made archbishop of Paris. He was known to be very hostile to the Jesuits, and at Châlons had more than once expressed official approval of Quesnel’s Réflexions. So the Jesuit party determined to wreck archbishop and book at the same time. The Jansenists played into their hands by suddenly raising (1701) in the Paris divinity school the question whether it was necessary to accept the condemnation of Jansen with interior assent, or whether a “respectful silence” was enough. Very soon ecclesiastical France was in a blaze. In 1703 Louis XIV. wrote to Pope Clement XI., proposing that they should take joint action to make an end of Jansenism for ever. Clement replied in 1705 with a bull condemning respectful silence. This measure only whetted Louis’s appetite. He was growing old and increasingly superstitious; the affairs of his realm were going from bad to worse; he became frenziedly anxious to propitiate the wrath of his maker by making war on the enemies of the Church. In 1711 he asked the pope for a second, and still stronger bull, that would tear up Jansenism by the roots. The pope’s choice of a book to condemn fell on Quesnel’s Réflexions; in 1713 appeared the bull Unigenitus, anathematizing no less than one-hundred-and-one of its propositions. Indeed, in his zeal against the Jansenists the pope condemned various practices in no way peculiar to their party; thus, for instance, many orthodox Catholics were exasperated at the heavy blow he dealt at popular Bible reading. Hence the bull met with much opposition from Archbishop de Noailles and others who did not call themselves Jansenists. In the midst of the conflict Louis XIV. died (September 1715); but the freethinking duke of Orleans, who succeeded him as regent, continued after some wavering to support the bull. Thereupon four bishops appealed against it to a general council; and the country became divided into “appellants” and “acceptants” (1717). The regent’s disreputable minister, Cardinal Dubois, patched up an abortive truce in 1720, but the appellants promptly “re-appealed” against it. During the next ten years, however, they were slowly crushed, and in 1730 the Unigenitus was proclaimed part and parcel of the law of France. This led to a great quarrel with the judges, who were intensely Gallican in spirit (see Gallicanism), and had always regarded the Unigenitus as a triumph of ultramontanism. The quarrel dragged indefinitely on through the 18th century, though the questions at issue were really constitutional and political rather than religious.
Meanwhile the most ardent Jansenists had followed Quesnel to Holland. Here they met with a warm welcome from the Dutch Catholic body, which had always been in close sympathy with Jansenism, although without regarding itself as formally pledged to the Augustinus. But it had broken loose from Rome in 1702, and was now organizing itself into an independent church (see Utrecht). The Jansenists who remained in France had meanwhile fallen on evil days. Persecution usually begets hysteria in its victims; and the more extravagant members of the party were far advanced on the road which leads to apocalyptic prophecy and “speaking with tongues.” About 1728 the “miracles of St Médard” became the talk of Paris. This was the cemetery where was buried François de Pâris, a young Jansenist deacon of singularly holy life, and a perfervid opponent of the Unigenitus. All sorts of miraculous cures were believed to have been worked at his tomb, until the government closed the cemetery in 1732. This gave rise to the famous epigram:
| De par le roi, défense à Dieu |
On the miracles soon followed the rise of the so-called Convulsionaries. These worked themselves up, mainly by the use of frightful self-tortures, into a state of frenzy, in which they prophesied and cured diseases. They were eventually disowned by the more reputable Jansenists, and were severely repressed by the police. But in 1772 they were still important enough for Diderot to enter the field against them. Meanwhile genuine Jansenism survived in many country parsonages and convents, and led to frequent quarrels with the authorities. Only one of its latter-day disciples, however, rose to real eminence; this was the Abbé Henri Grégoire, who played a considerable part in the French Revolution. A few small Jansenist congregations still survive in France; and others have been started in connexion with the Old Catholic Church in Holland.
Literature.—For the 17th century see the Port Royal of Sainte-Beuve (5th ed., Paris, 1888) in six volumes. See also H. Reuchlin, Geschichte von Port Royal (2 vols., Hamburg, 1839–1844), and C. Beard, Port Royal (2 vols., London, 1861). No satisfactory Roman Catholic history of the subject exists, though reference may be made to Count Joseph de Maistre’s De l’église gallicane (last ed., Lyons, 1881). On the Jansenism of the 18th century no single work exists, though much information will be found in the Gallican Church of Canon Jervis (2 vols., London, 1872). For a series of excellent sketches see also Seche, Les Derniers Jansénistes (3 vols., Paris, 1891). A more detailed list of books bearing on the subject will be found in the 5th volume of the Cambridge Modern History; and J. Paquier’s Le Jansénisme (Paris, 1909) may also be consulted. (St C.)
JANSSEN, or Jansen (sometimes Johnson), CORNELIUS (1593–1664), Flemish painter, was apparently born in London, and baptized on the 14th of October 1593. There seems no reason to suppose, as was formerly stated, that he was born at
Amsterdam. He worked in England from 1618 to 1643, and
afterwards retired to Holland, working at Middelburg, Amsterdam,
The Hague and Utrecht, and dying at one of the last two
places about 1664. In England he was patronized by James I.
and the court, and under Charles I. he continued to paint the
numerous portraits which adorn many English mansions and
collections. Janssen’s pictures, chiefly portraits, are distinguished by clear colouring, delicate touch, good taste and
careful finish. He generally painted upon panel, and often
worked on a small scale, sometimes producing replicas of his
larger works. A characteristic of his style is the very dark
background, which throws the carnations of his portraits into
rounded relief. In all probability his earliest portrait (1618)
was that of John Milton as a boy of ten.
JANSSEN, JOHANNES (1820–1891), German historian, was
born at Xanten on the 10th of April 1829, and was educated
as a Roman Catholic at Münster, Louvain, Bonn and Berlin,
afterwards becoming a teacher of history at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
He was ordained priest in 1860; became a member of
the Prussian Chamber of Deputies in 1875; and in 1880 was made
domestic prelate to the pope and apostolic pronotary. He died
at Frankfort on the 24th of December 1891. Janssen was a
stout champion of the Ultramontane party in the Roman
Catholic Church. His great work is his Geschichte des deutschen
Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (8 vols., Freiburg, 1878–1894). In this book he shows himself very hostile to the Reformation, and attempts to prove that the Protestants were responsible for the general unrest in Germany during the 16th and 17th centuries. The author’s partisanship led to some controversy,
and Janssen wrote An meine Kritiker (Freiburg, 1882) and Ein zweites Wort an meine Kritiker (Freiburg, 1883) in reply to the Janssens Geschichte des deutschen Volkes (Munich, 1883) of M. Lenz, and other criticisms.
The Geschichte, which has passed through numerous editions, has been continued and improved by Ludwig Pastor, and the greater part of it has been translated into English by M. A. Mitchell and A. M.
