In 1826, an old royalist priest in the French countryside wrote his spiritual testament. “I, the undersigned François Jacquemont…declare that I wish to live and die in the bosom of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church.” While insisting on his total fidelity to Catholic doctrine, Jacquemont lamented certain “woes” afflicting the Church of his day: “Almost all the new clergy of the kingdom are imbued with ultramontane maxims, Semi-Pelagian errors, and the corrupt morals of the Jesuits.” Jacquemont believed he lived in evil times, when Catholic “Truth” was “covered with the opprobrium that deceit and error deserve.” Although he would never accept the label—and wrote a defense of his opinions on this score—Jacquemont was one of the last true Jansenists.
Jacquemont was hardly the first to object to being called a Jansenist, a pejorative term coined in the seventeenth century by opponents of the rigorist Catholic reformers dedicated to the theology of St. Augustine. Nor would he be the last. Even after the Jansenist movement went extinct in the nineteenth century, the memory of the dissident sect continued to haunt and inspire, particularly in France. Under the entry for “Jansenism” in his Dictionary of Received Ideas (compiled in the 1870s), the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote, “People don’t know what it is, but it’s chic to talk about.”
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