Jean-Pascal Gay
As recent events have recalled, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, heir to the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition, remains a tribunal, and particularly a tribunal for bishops.1 Yet, since the nineteenth century, observers have regarded the Congregation primarily as a doctrinal censor and a participant in the production of the Catholic magisterium. The story of this transformation is long and conflicted, involving a complex set of relations among episcopal, pontifical, inquisitorial, and political powers. In this history, both France and the seventeenth century play significant roles. Despite the breadth of its theoretical authority, codified in its bull of foundation, the Roman and Universal Inquisition could not exercise jurisdiction over France. Because the Inquisition had been created after the Concordat of Bologna (1516), the French Parlements recognized no legal authority whatsoever emanating from it. By constantly challenging the Inquisition decrees, the Parlements manufested that they regarded themselves as the defenders of the so-called Gallican liberties.2 Therefore, the Inquisition had to favor an essentially doctrinal, rather than judicial, approach to French matters. This fostered its role within the Roman Curia as the doctrinal specialist, at a time [195] when the intensification of theological controversies among French Catholics drew the Inquisition’s attention.3
As Elena Bonora has convincingly shown,4 the dispute over whether the council, the pope, and the Inquisition had the authority to try bishops played a major part in defining the boundaries and nature of their respective powers. In the seventeenth century, particularly in relation to France, the question remained significant, as those powers had not yet stabilized because of the institutional, political, and religious specificities of French Catholicism.
On the question of bringing French bishops to trial, the state of documentation preserved in the Inquisitorial collection at the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (ACDF) is striking. Aside from decrees issued by the Inquisition, almost all documents regarding sixteenth-century France comes from episcopal trials, and particularly from the trial of Calvinist bishops in 1563. Studied extensively by Elena Bonora, this trial was led by Pope Pius IV Medici (r. 1559–65) and the Inquisition around the time the Council of Trent was discussing the question of pontifical reservation of episcopal cases.5 The bull Licet ab initio (21 July 1542), by which Pope Paul III Farnese (r. 1534–49) had created the Roman Inquisition, granted the Inquisitors very wide authority to proceed against any heretic. Yet following the trials against bishops and cardinals under Pope Paul IV Carafa (r. 1555–59), both Pius IV and the council showed some resolve to protect the episcopate from the grasp of the still-young Inquisition.6 In 1563, the council finally decided that the pope should handle cases of episcopal heresy, but that if, for some reason, cases were to be treated outside the Roman Curia, they should proceed by papal commission.7 Such commissions should not go beyond instruction of the cause, whose sentence should be handled directly by the pope. Lesser offences could be handled by provincial councils. Almost at the same time, the Council of Trent granted powers to the episcopate to dispense and absolve in foro conscientiae in cases reserved to the Holy See,8 a concession later suppressed by the bull In [196] Cœna Domini (1568), which restored many prerogatives the Inquisition had lost in the previous years. Indeed the 1563 trial was essential to the institutional memory of the Inquisition. It was headed at the time by the Inquisitor maior Antonio Ghislieri, who, as Pope Pius V (r. 1566–72), restored the very power the Inquisition had lost under his predecessor.
In contrast with earlier material, the seventeenth-century documents regarding France are much more abundant and varied, particularly after 1650 when the rise of Jansenism in France became a major focus of the Roman Inquisition.9 Yet there are also significant documents that center on discussions within the Inquisition as to how suspect French bishops could and ought to be tried. Such discussions never actually came to much, and no French bishop was tried for Jansenism in the seventeenth century. The only actual trial of French bishops by papal commission occurred in 1632 under unusual circumstances. Yet, during the last two-thirds of the century, the Roman Inquisition never ceased to discuss the possibility and the possible forms of such trials. Indeed, these discussions occurred within the latent but always more prevalent and defining conflict between Roman and French styles of Catholicism as both grew more coherent and increasingly opposed. Yet the issue of episcopal trials interfered with other institutional tensions, namely periodic tensions between the episcopate and the monarchy in France, and within the Roman Curia between the Inquisition and other agencies and institutions.
This essay will explore the significance of such discussions for the Catholic understanding of episcopal power and for the relationship of the French episcopate to both the pope and the Roman Curia. Following a brief discussion of the trials that actually took place in the seventeenth century, it will examine how the question of judicial trials of French bishops was handled at the time Innocent X Pamphili (r. 1644–55) published his constitution against Jansenism in 1653 and around the time Alexander VII Chigi (r. 1655–67) issued a bull imposing a formulary of faith. An important focus will be the part played by the Inquisition in the confrontation with French episcopalism. As this essay shows, the Inquisition’s self-narration regarding its role in these trials played a significant part in the reactive evolution of the Roman understanding of episcopacy in the second third of the seventeenth century.
[197] Trials That Were and Trials That Might Have Been
After the 1563 trial, and particularly in the seventeenth century, trials of French bishops were scarce, and in France both the Assemblies of the Clergy and the monarchy tried to avoid them. Trials occurred only when particular bishops, or a group of bishops, entered into a conflict with the monarchy. As far as the position of the Roman Curia, the fact that France did not accept the decrees of the Council of Trent10 and the 1516 concordat’s ambiguity on the question of jurisdiction created both some wiggle room and some potential for conflict between the king, the episcopate, and Rome. The bishop’s experience and the perception of episcopal jurisdiction could change dramatically according to the relative strength of those institutions at any given time.
The few trials that took place in the seventeenth century share some resemblance in their sociopolitical conditions with the 1563 trial of Calvinist bishops. Periodically, the involvement of one or several bishops in the clientèle of aristocrats who were in conflict with the king could result in a trial taking place. In those few cases, papal power appears as an ally of royal power confronted with one aspect of the aristocracy’s autonomous local power. A prime example of this is the trial initiated, but never completed, against the archbishop of Bordeaux, Cardinal François d’Escoubleau de Sourdis (1599–1628), in 1615.11 A few weeks before Sourdis celebrated the royal wedding between Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, he participated in and certainly sponsored an attack on the prison in his episcopal town in order to free a former rebel12 who was tied to his own clientèle. The Parlement of Bordeaux started to act against him, apparently without disapproval from the regent, Marie de Medici. Perhaps to reassert her own authority, she solicited the pope, in the name of her son Louis XIII, for an ecclesiastical trial on the grounds that since the escape had resulted in the murder of one of the jailers, the cardinal also merited severe ecclesiastical penalties. The royal request coincided with the Parlement’s own attack on Sourdis.13
[198] This episode shows the possibility of rapid escalation. The Roman Curia acted to simultaneously defend both ecclesiastical immunity and the papal right to act as the natural judge of the episcopate. Rome pressured the French court to overturn the Parlement’s acts passed against Sourdis condemning him for lèse-majesté while also trying to preserve the Roman Curia’s authority over a possible ecclesiastical trial. The pope even threatened to not create any more French cardinals if the judgment of the Parlement stood.14 Cardinal Ubaldini, the nuncio in France, preempted any commission by declaring Sourdis suspended a divinis (i.e., he could no longer celebrate mass or other sacraments). He could have avoided doing so by using the detailed casuistical and canonical consultations Sourdis had sent to Rome to argue that neither the suspension nor the trial was necessary.15 Indeed Rome was keen on not missing the opportunity to try the bishop and thereby to argue their right to jurisdiction in the case. In the end, the trial did not happen; Sourdis was finally reconciled with the king, who petitioned the pope for his absolution, which was readily granted.16
The question of the judicial trial of bishops resurfaced when the duke de Montmorency’s rebellion (1632) was crushed, an important episode in advancing the absolutist agenda of Richelieu and Louis XIII. Here the exceptional quality of bringing French bishops to trial echoes the extraordinary quality of the death sentence carried out against Henry II de Montmorency.17 In 1632, in the aftermath of the rebellion, the king and the cardinal asked Rome for commissions to try the rebellious bishops of Lodève, Albi, Uzès, and Saint-Pons, all of whom were involved in the rebellion because of their ties to the Montmorency family.18 The pope granted commissions to the archbishop of Arles and to the bishops of Boulogne, Saint-Flour, and Aire. Those commissions were remarkably broad, granting these bishops the right to try “any abbot, bishop, or archbishop” and issue “definitive sentence.” However, the king was not satisfied with the commissions and provided the bishops with patents for execution of the commissions. The bishop of Albi, Alphonse Delbene (1608–34), was finally deposed in 1634, while Jean Plantavit, bishop of Lodève (1625–48), who was less involved in the rebellion, remained in place.
[199] The same commissions were used later against René de Rieux de Sourdéac, bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon (1619–35, 1648–51). Rieux was a member of Marie de Medici’s clientèle, as was the rest of his family.19 He had been suspected of being instrumental in the Queen Mother’s flight in 1631 and was deposed in 1635. He tried to appeal to the pope, but the French ambassador successfully pleaded that the text of the commission enacted by the pope’s authority did not allow for appeal.20 The pope had to choose between asserting his royal power to protect the bishop and asserting the validity of his own commission; he chose the latter. In this case, the French royal power’s interest in stifling any political will on the part of the bishops coincided with the papal power’s interest in affirming the pope’s authority over France, possibly because at that time, papal jurisdiction over France was threatened by a revolution in the theological understanding of politics that had occurred in France between 1615 and 1625.21
As far as the documents allow historians to draw a conclusion on this particular question, the Inquisition did not take part in the discussion of those commissions or in their elaboration and wording. If the Holy Office ever examined the commissions, no evidence remains of such examination. Indeed, this is surprising; even if the bishops’ offenses did not fall immediately under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction—as they were not crimes of heresy—one would have expected the Inquisition to at least provide guidance.
Trials from 1632 to 1635 are particularly important in the history of the relations between the French bishops and Rome, as well as in the history of French episcopalism. The brutal and unexpected deposition of René de Rieux occasioned a strong reaction at the General Assembly of the French Clergy of 1645, which was the first held after the deaths of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. The regency of Queen Anne of Austria (1643–51) was, as regencies always were, uncertain politically. Building upon the first developments of Gallican erudition, the assembly proclaimed the right of the French bishops, according to the decrees of the Second Council of Carthage (419), to be judged in the first instance by their provincial peers assembled in synod. Appeal to the Holy See, they claimed, was a privilege of the accused, granted to protect him from potentially ill-minded judges.22
[200] In 1645 and 1646, Rome managed to keep the upper hand by relaxing de Rieux’s sentence while defending its jurisdictional authority. The pope granted new commissions to the archbishop of Sens and the bishops of Laon, Angoulême, Maillezais, and Le Mans to examine de Rieux’s cause. In September 1646 de Rieux was reinstated as bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon very easily.23 This was done without any sort of acknowledgement of Gallican claims, as none of the newly commissioned bishops came from the Breton episcopal bench, in direct and certainly very voluntary contradiction to the demands of the French Assembly of the Clergy, who had asked that bishops be tried by their provincial peers. The papal commissions in practice rejected the idea that bishops had any natural judge other than the pope, and their successes were a victory for both Rome and the episcopate, implicitly asserting their freedom from royal power through their reinstatement of de Rieux.
Nonetheless, the French bishops continued their attack on the 1632 collusion between the Holy See and the French throne. At the assembly of 1650, when conflict between king and aristocracy raged, the French episcopate tried to reassert its prerogatives and its independence from both Rome and the court. Firstly, the internuncio in Turin attempted to summon for trial the bishop of Grasse, who had resorted to French civil tribunals, and then Delbene contested his 1632 deposition by bishops commissioned by the pope.24 During the assembly, the bishop of Viviers lashed out against “the readiness by which the pope, by means of a brief, had established four bishops as sovereign judges to depose one of their own.” He insisted that “this well deserved that one should think of finding some means of defense if it happened again.”25
The assembly wrote to the pope on this matter, sending an encyclical letter to all bishops in France and even issuing a formal protest against the brief of commission. The protest was particularly harsh, arguing that the 1632 commissions, even though they had been accepted, were contrary to canonical due process and therefore could not serve to establish precedent. The protest stated that the bishops could not have judges other than their provincial peers unless the accused, on his own initiative, appealed to the pope.26 Their argument was perfectly in line with the argument advanced in 1645, presenting the same historicist trend and [201] playing on the same ambiguities in the wording of the papal reservation of major causes in the Concordat. All this amounted to the production of a fictitious right that contradicted contemporary practice and negated any validity in the Council of Trent’s dispositions. This was a most difficult issue, as many people considered that the decrees of the council, although not legal in France, could still be regarded as binding in foro conscientiae, particularly for members of the clergy.
This protest was the occasion of some sort of diplomatic vaudeville. As soon as the papal nuncio learned that the protest was to be made, and with no time to consult Rome on the matter, he announced that he would never receive it.27 He threatened that if ever the French clergy wanted to bypass his opposition by posting the protest on the doors of his residence, he would publish a placard establishing his refusal to receive a protest he regarded as null and void. Even so, envoys of the assembly came the morning after and handed the protest to a servant who, later realizing what he had accepted, ran after them to return the document. The procès-verbal of the assembly nonetheless recorded delivery of the protest. Once the events were known in Rome, the papal court discussed whether to react, for example by censuring the procès-verbal through the Inquisition or the Index; the Inquisition, at that particular time, recommended avoiding escalation and acting as if nothing had happened.
The Return of the Heretic Bishops: Bringing the Jansenists to Trial
With the rise of Jansenism, the issue of episcopal trials changed as heresy returned as a cause for trying some French bishops, but institutional relations between France and Rome in the matter of episcopal trials had been set by the commissions and trials of the early seventeenth century. The first bishop that Rome considered bringing to trial as a Jansenist was Louis-Henri de Pardailhan de Gondrin, the sturdy archbishop of Sens (1645–74) who held one of the primatial sees in early modern France. In 1653, following Innocent X’s bull Cum Occasione censuring the five propositions that summed up Jansenism, Gondrin published a lettre pastorale for the promulgation of the censure that contested the bull’s doctrinal meaning. The nuncio perceived the publication as a trick to derail the censure and believed that Gondrin hoped Rome would condemn his lettre pastorale so that Parlement could act against the condemnation by an appel [202] comme d’abus.28 Therefore, the nuncio proposed a commission to a small group of French bishops favorable to Rome who could promote the censure and try those who resisted its promulgation. The Inquisition reacted swiftly, and by early December the qualificators (theologians who deterimine for the Inquisitors the degree to which some assertion is estranged from Catholic doctrine) had already decided that Gondrin’s letter was technically “suspect of heresy” and encouraged the cardinal-inquisitors and the pope to follow the nuncio’s recommendations, i.e., to commission French bishops to try Godrin.29 As Rome learned of similar promulgations of the bull in Beauvais and Comminges, discussion turned rapidly to the possibility of a collective trial. Indeed, the memory of the endeavors of the General Assembly of the French Clergy must have been very fresh, and the support some bishops showed to the Jansenists may have proved a perfect opportunity to play on divisions in the French episcopate that had previously collectively asked Innocent X to provide them with a censure of Jansenius’s Augustinus. However, this attempt at dividing the French episcopate proved somewhat ineffective. Gondrin’s attempt to link his defense of Jansenists with the Gallican interpretation of episcopacy was a far more efficient tactical move, and in 1656 the Assembly of the Clergy renewed its proclamation of the rights of French bishops to be tried in the first instance by their provincial peers.30
The issue lingered for almost ten years, and Alexander VII’s bull Regiminis Apostolici (February 1665) sparked a recreation of the events of 1653/54. The bull imposed a formulary of faith on the entire French clergy and instructed the bishops to supervise the clergy’s subscription to the formulary. The bishops of Alet, Beauvais, Angers, and Pamiers, and for a short time that of Noyon, published mandements for clergy to sign the formulary, endorsing what had become the Jansenists’ main defense against the censure, namely the celebrated distinction of right and fact (le fait et le droit). These bishops asked only that regarding fact (whether the heretical doctrine could be found in Jansenius’s Augustinus), the clergy should show a submission of discipline and respect.31 As the bull had previously been registered in the Parlement by royal command, Louis XIV, whose political position was much more favorable than it had been in 1656, decided to act against the bishops. He asked Rome to appoint commissioners to proceed [203] against the mandements and their authors. He did so with some attention to Gallican claims, asking Rome for a commission of twelve bishops. The Inquisition however, after examining the royal demands, decided to proceed against the bishops directly by establishing their contumacy through a judicial monitory.32
The accused bishops reacted by returning to Gondrin’s tactic of tying their cause to the lot of the episcopate and asked that the 1650 Assembly of the Clergy’s dispositions be implemented.33 With the guidance of the Holy Office, the nuncio tried to obtain the most direct form of trial possible by arguing at the French court that disobedience to pope and king were essentially the same.34 He tried to confront royal power with its own contradiction and recalled the time when Louis tried to obtain from Rome a condemnation of Cardinal de Retz, noting the choices Richelieu made as to how bishops should be tried.35 In November 1665, the Inquisition decided to open the possibility of judicial proceedings against the French bishops by censuring the episcopal mandements and ordering the archbishop of Paris to declare the bishops under interdict and suspension if they did not comply. This would have provided a canonical basis for a full-fledged trial on the grounds of heresy.
Yet the monarchy remained hesitant and stuck with its contradictory claims, trying to obtain a trial that could condemn the Jansenists and respect Gallican claims while not endorsing episcopal demands, and that would have placed the king, as the solicitor of the commissions, in the position of “exterior bishop.”36 Through 1666, the negotiations made little progress because Rome wanted only to commission French bishops to enforce the decision of a trial led from Rome, while the king continued to press for the bishops to be made true judges with authority [204] to rule either way on the issue.37 In early 1667, Rome censured the mandements by means of the Congregation of the Index (a lesser form of condemnation than censure by the Inquisition),38 a decision taken within the Inquisition. At this stage, the Holy Office showed a considerable degree of involvement in the diplomatic negotiations. The assessor of the Holy Office even met with the French ambassador in Rome, a very rare event, to discuss the matter.39 It was finally settled when Cardinal Albizzi, one of the cardinals most favorable to France in the Roman Curia at the time,40 met with the French ambassador as a delegate of the Inquisition.41 First Albizzi argued that, because the Holy See had already evoked the cause, and, more importantly, because it regarded faith, the pope could not commission bishops as judges. The ambassador objected by reducing the issue to one of discipline (bishops refusing to subscribe to the required formulary). The two men finally agreed on a commission that would establish a group of French bishops as judges on the contumacy of the French bishops, which thus avoided appointing them as judges in charge of determining whether the actions of the authors of the mandements were heretical.
Yet this solution was never carried out, as the bishops considered for the commission showed obvious signs of reluctance and even resisted separating themselves from the episcopate’s collective stance. This reluctance continued as other negotiations with the Jansenists brought the accommodation that resulted in the so-called Peace of the Church at the beginning of Pope Clement IX Rospigliosi’s pontificate (r. 1667–69).42 For more than ten years, Rome had discussed trying some French bishops, but effectively it never did.
French episcopal resistance to Roman claims of judicial jurisdiction had indeed been widespread, even among bishops otherwise favorable to Rome. In 1654, for example, after the nuncio had recommended to Rome which bishops to commission to try Gondrin, the first papal briefs were rendered useless when two of those bishops—those of Le Puy and Macon—departed from court,43 a move that was certainly not independent from their being recommended for [205] commissions. Passive opposition to the commissions was clear during the ten years of discussions before the Clementine peace. In September 1658, the nuncio wrote to Rome lamenting that he could not find ways to have the commissioned bishops obey and proceed to trial. He claimed that the entire episcopal body was perfectly united in its will “not to see introduced the use of being tried by commission from Rome.”44
Even French advisers to the Inquisition, such as François Hallier, asked not to take an extreme stance and to consider how the Jansenists could raise canonical difficulties and use them to their advantage.45 He argued that there was no detriment to the authority of the Holy See if the commissions against Gondrin and the other Jansenist bishops were given to bishops from neighboring provinces, as long as a few suspect bishops (whose names he provided) were avoided. Indeed, Hallier promoted a sort of compromise with the Gallican claims of the Assembly of 1650. The solution he favored was the commission of twelve judges (the number required by the Council of Carthage), presided over by the archbishop of Lyons as primate of the Gauls. He insisted that to allow the trials to go forward, the text of the commissions ought to avoid any reference to possible derogations to canon law (which would have therefore contested French claims as to how bishops ought to be tried), or to the Concordat of 1516, or to French customs.
Indeed, the introduction of formal proceedings against the Jansenist bishops caused some radicalization of French episcopalist discourse and development of its arguments, which prompted the 1663 declaration of the Sorbonne and encouraged the French Assembly of the Clergy to commission Jean Gerbais to write a complete canonical treatise about “major [legal] causes.”46 His Dissertatio de causis majoribus was not published until 1679, during another moment of tension between Rome and the Gallican church, but it proves that the French episcopate had elaborated strong canonical and historical arguments to defend its rights. These arguments also aimed at providing the Parlements with the means of defending bishops against Roman encroachments on Gallican liberties.
In the triangle that emerged between the French episcopate, the papacy, and the French Crown, the most embarrassed party, surprisingly, seems to have been the latter. Indeed, Louis XIV was confronted with a major contradiction, in which French episcopal ideology and royal absolutist ideology could very well conflict. All the more so because Rome, mirroring the evolution of the French [206] episcopate’s position and using precedents from the first half of the century, presented its own arguments on how the trials should proceed. A key question in this debate concerned the number of commissioned bishops. While Louis XIV relentlessly asked for twelve commissioned judges, and thereby for some sort of acknowledgement of Gallican claims, Rome consistently refused. In their negotiations, both parties argued on primarily practical grounds, but the question was anything but practical, and at one point in his negotiations with the king’s ministers, the nuncio said that accepting this number would mean the pope accepted being dictated to by a “particular assembly of a few bishops,” such as the French Assembly of the Clergy.47 When Rome finally issued commissions in 1667, their text avoided not only the dreaded number of twelve bishops, but also avoided choosing too many bishops from neighboring provinces. Such refusal to compromise explains why the trials were never carried out, and raises the question of why the Holy See would prefer a strong but utterly ineffective claim of their authority to a negotiated but actual exercise of that authority.
The Roman Inquisition and the Demise of Compromise
The Roman Inquisition was the key decision-making body on the issue of judicial trials of French bishops. Most decisions were discussed in the particular congregations on Jansenism, which were satellites, if not subcommittees, of the Inquisition. Most of the time the pope validated those decisions, and some of his objections could be bypassed by the cardinals-inquisitor in the course of the decision-making process. For instance, during the affair of the episcopal mandements, the pope at one point insisted that the Holy Office needed to give complete and detailed answers to the objections presented by the French ambassador, but the congregation, while they had produced such responses, argued successfully that the pope should not risk having them published, exposing them to public debate and questioning.48
The liberty of Roman diplomacy appears limited by the institutional structure of the Roman government. In the Roman Curia, personal and family ties may have led to a greater amount of interpenetration between different sections of government than was common in other early modern courts.49 Despite this, [207] the papal secretary of state appears to have had little influence when it came to this particular matter of how to try French bishops. Indeed, the Inquisition seems to have gone as far as providing direct arguments for the nuncio to use in diplomatic negotiations.50 When, in November 1666, the French ambassador in Rome passed a memorandum to the pope asking again for the commission of twelve bishops, which used part of the argument repeated by the Gallican clergy since 1650, it was the Holy Office that elaborated the Roman answer,51 maintaining that the question was primarily doctrinal. Moreover, the timing imposed on the negotiations remained that of doctrinal elaboration, which went through the slow inquisitorial process of qualifications and consultations. On several occasions the Inquisition advanced stronger alternatives to the propositions of the nuncios. In 1658 for instance, the Inquisition asked the nuncio in France to explicitly threaten the king with a trial held in Rome, a threat the nuncio was understandably uneasy about presenting to Louis XIV.52
One of the reasons for the Inquisition prevailing over the diplomats was that, under pontifical law, the Inquisition remained the body that constructed judicial cause. If the commissions against Gondrin were granted by motu proprio—the only way for them to have any chance at being legally received in France where decrees of the Congregation of the Inquisition were not accepted—there would still be a properly Roman and inquisitorial side to the process. Not only did the motu proprio explicitly quote the Inquisition’s qualifications53 of the lettre pastorale of the archbishop of Sens as grounds for judicial action against a suspect of heresy, but in Rome the Inquisition tried to formally establish Gondrin’s guilt. Mostly through Jesuits and locals present in Rome, the Inquisition gathered testimonies of Gondrin’s firsthand responsibility for publication of the lettre pastorale, and even had his autograph signature on a document sent from Sens examined by a witness who could testify to its authenticity.54
Yet, even with a strong sense of what it considered its traditional role with regard to heretic bishops, the Holy Office was not necessarily bound to a radical [208] interpretation of how French bishops ought to be tried. Nonetheless, the Inquisition appears as the key source of the hard line prevalent in Rome’s diplomatic negotiations with France. It is from within the Inquisition that an essentially doctrinal approach to this issue led to Rome’s endorsement of such a staunch approach to this primarily judicial problem. Many qualificators and consultors (theological advisors to the Inquisitors) did not satisfy themselves with a canonical treatment of the matter, which was all the more problematic because France did not accept the decrees of the Council of Trent, but they also justified their decisions through a theological interpretation of what the episcopacy and the episcopate were. The most common argument was that a bishop’s jurisdiction over his diocese was not derived directly from the Holy Spirit, but from the appointment by the Holy See.55 Thereby, for example, Rubeis stated in a 1656 votum, that the episcopate was subjected to the pope “as the members were to the head,” and that the entire church was ruled by papal power by the right of a monarchical regime.56
As the Inquisition’s discussions continued, such arguments became more radical. In 1666 Cardinal Pallavicini, who was in charge of producing an argument for the nuncio that would fend off royal demands, also wrote a dissertation “for [his] own satisfaction” and “for the truth.”57 That text, which apparently retained its original private character and differed a great deal from more political arguments, is a strong rebuttal of the French requests regarding the right to try bishops, which Pallavicini deemed opposed to both ancient and modern ecclesiastical customs everywhere, not even required by the “so-called privileges” of the French church, and offensive to both royal and papal authority. Pallavicini argued that the French clergy was bound in conscience by the decrees of Trent and that any derogation of the universal laws regarding the episcopate would be detrimental to the Catholic Church at large. Clearly, the essentially doctrinal approach of a more and more doctrine-focused congregation contributed to the effective radicalization of the Roman position on the matter of the French bishops.
At several key moments, it was the Inquisition’s intervention that stalled the negotiations, either because it advocated some sort of voluntary delay to avoid concessions or because it produced a new argument that was resisted in France. On reception of the 1666 memorandum of the French ambassador, the first reaction [209] of the cardinal inquisitors, which the pope did not approve, was to do nothing.58 However, if something was to be done, the cardinal inquisitors advocated that the pope should promote the solution most remote from French claims, i.e., a commission of only two or three bishops with authority over all those to be tried. It was also the Inquisition that invented the explicit restriction that would have made the commissioners “mere executors” (mere executores).59
Regarding trials of French bishops, the Inquisition’s institutional memory played a fundamental part in their decision-making process and had a key relationship to the development of inquisitorial ideology and self-representation. Diplomatic standoffs activated archival and historical investigation into earlier dealings with France, although in a very selective way. In the early seventeenth-century trials, which advanced satisfactorily for the Roman Curia, no such process of historical investigation seems to have been carried out. Yet in the 1650s and 1660s, the memory of earlier trials and exploration of those trials played a major part. There are many extant copies or summaries of documents from the 1563 trials, from the trials of Sourdis, or from the 1632 commissions, present among the documents regarding the hypothetical trials of Jansenist bishops. The events of those earlier trials also provided examples for the vota of the qualificators and consultors, as well as for arguments produced by the Inquisition for the nuncio.
During the Inquisition’s discussions with French negotiators and during its own internal discussions, all earlier examples of trials were used. Yet, considering that the 1632 commissions offered the most recent precedent, and that they contained examples that had proved most efficient and on which the papacy and the monarchy had been most in agreement, one would expect them to be the essential examples promoted by the Roman Curia. Nonetheless, the Inquisition kept returning to the 1563 trial against Odet de Chatillon. It was clearly the model for the actions of the Inquisition in 1653 when it had to deal with Gondrin.60 The first judicial enquiry led in Sens and Rome clearly paved the way for a formal monitory resembling that of 1563. A letter from December 1653 to the nuncio relied heavily on the legal enquiry carried out by the papal legate Cardinal de Tournon against Chatillon. The possibility of such a monitory was discussed in the case of Sens, as well as in the cases of Beauvais and Comminges.
One might think that this was because the cause of the Jansenist bishops focused on heresy, as did Chatillon’s cause. Yet there is little evidence for this [210] distinction where both the 1563 and 1632 precedents are mentioned. However, it is clear that the Inquisition turned to the 1563 precedent more often because the trial was led by Rome and presided over by the Holy Office. Among the historical memoranda about Chatillon produced in the 1660s, one text insisted particularly on the part played by the Holy Office and on the earlier motu proprio issued by Pius IV. This motu proprio gave power to the Inquisition to try heretic clergy regardless of their dignity.61
One might also think that using the 1563 trial as a pattern for later trials may have been an efficient historical argument, when used as a threat to force the French negotiators into accepting a milder solution. Indeed, when the nuncio mentioned it to Lionne, the French foreign minister in 1653, it was certainly supposed to play out in that manner. Yet, the invocation of this precedent was not merely instrumental, for it played its part in the internal discussions in the Inquisition. In November 1658, when the Inquisition decided to threaten the King with a Roman trial, while actually not considering it expedient due to the situation, certain cardinals had advocated it as more than a threat.62 For example, Cardinal Coraldi had argued that if the King could not carry out the trial, it ought to be held in Rome. Cardinal Albizzi advocated gathering witnesses and testimonies in Rome (as had been the case in the early stages of Chatillon’s trial) and argued that the Concordat bore no authority in such a case. Cardinal Chigi agreed. The most vocal opponent of such a course of action was Nicolò Guidi di Bagno, who was a diplomat and had been nuncio in Paris at the time of the 1650 Assembly and up to 1656.
Also noteworthy is that, at least on this particular matter, the argument produced within the Inquisition was not as primarily theological as it was canonical and historical. Its highly doctrinal character is not incompatible with a type of discourse that mirrors the Gallican argument. For example, one of the first memoranda on the French demand for twelve bishops argued on this very basis. It conceded (something that Pallavicini did not) that the canons put forward by the French existed and at some point had been implemented.63 Yet it also argued that this was due to particular historical and political reasons, namely the barbarian invasions of the fifth century and the political weight of the Arian party in Italy that had rendered such canons necessary in the rest of the Western Church. [211] Once those conditions had changed, the popes had rightly tried to restore their prerogatives as judges of other bishops. If ever, after the papacy had regained its freedom, such canons had still been used, it could only have been as a political concession to worldly princes in particular occurrences. Even Pallavicini’s memorandum, stringent as it may have been, also argued on a largely erudite basis, discussing the value of the authorities alleged by the French and countering them by an accumulation of counter example taken mostly from the medieval canonist Juan de Torquemada.64 To French erudition the memoranda opposed a decidedly Roman ecclesiastical science. On the occasion of those hypothetical trials,the Inquisition, as well as the French episcopate, told their own very different stories in a very similar, and yet performatively distinctive way.
Confronted with the question of whether to try French bishops, the Roman Curia preferred to simply repeat claims to power rather than actually exercising some diluted version of their power. Concessions were made in only exceptional circumstances, and even those were limited. The Inquisition was at the heart of this process, and all the more so as it abided by a formal and doctrinal approach. The paradox here is that the more the Inquisition participated in the decision-making process on this issue, the less likely it became that these trials would take place.
For French bishops, this meant that they were largely free from the threat of an actual trial. Moreover, the progress of Gallicanism and its wider endorsement by the Crown also lessened the possibility of cooperation by the monarchy and the papacy against particular bishops and the episcopate as a whole, as had occurred in 1632. This meant that even the royal threat of a trial, which required support from Rome, could prove partially empty or at least could be fended off as long as one did not mind political disgrace. This provided some bishops with considerable pastoral freedom as the case of Gondrin largely proves. The fate of Gallican episcopalism, although not entirely endorsed by the king, was bound to the king’s defense of his own prerogatives. This situation practically nuanced the distinction that some historians have perceived—if it was ever an actual one—between political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism.65
[212] Finally, this state of impossibility to exercise jurisdiction favored the deepening of alternative and mirrored narratives of two distinct ecclesiologies, if not of two distinct Catholicisms. Both of those narratives also gained institutional strength through the seventeenth century. Thereby, the absence of actual jurisdiction and theological discrepancies seems to have worked together in the confessional dynamic that affected both French and Roman styles of Catholicism somewhat differently. In Rome, this fostered a more radical interpretation of papal authority over the entire Catholic episcopate.
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