Convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard
This practice originated at the tomb of François de Pâris, an ascetic Jansenist deacon who was buried at the cemetery of the parish of Saint-Médard in Paris.
In painting such a stark contrast, Jansenist theology offered a kind of predestination and appeared to its critics as a denial of human free will.
In particular, the bull was provoked by the Jansenist theologian Pasquier Quesnel and his book Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament.
There was also a concern that the bull would increase Papal and Monarchical influence over the French Church, which operated with a good deal of autonomy in this period.
[14] François de Pâris (1690–1727) was a Parisian Jansenist and a popular religious ascetic whose tomb in the parish cemetery at Saint-Médard gave rise to the convulsionnaire phenomenon.
Large numbers of people from across the social spectrum, including the Cardinal Archbishop Noailles, came to attend his funeral in the small chapel at Saint-Médard.
During the funeral and after, people began to collect snippets of hair and fingernails, splinters of wood from his casket or furniture, soil from his gravesite, and other souvenirs which might serve as holy relics.
[18] While the first recorded case of convulsions at the tomb of Pâris occurred in July 1731, one of the best recorded early cases is that of l'abbé de Bescherand, who made two daily pilgrimages to the cemetery: During these visits, Strayer writes, "his body was wracked by convulsions that lifted him into the air, his face was contorted by grimaces, and foaming at the mouth, he yelled and screamed for hours on end."
[19] Rumours spread through Paris that people were speaking in tongues, stomping on Bibles, barking like dogs, swallowing glass or hot coals, or dancing until they collapsed.
Catherine Maire has demonstrated that of 116 people who claimed miraculous healing at Pâris's tomb, 70% were women, and the majority of these were celibate or widowed.
The reports of police spies referred to the female convulsionaries as prostitutes who allowed others to beat and torture their half-naked writhing bodies.
[38] As the historian B. Robert Kreiser has noted, the themes of persecution, martyrdom, apocalypticism and millenarianism, pervaded the "mental universe" of the convulsionnaire movement.
Prophetic and apocalyptic speeches, often preached by illiterate artisans or women, railed against the apostasy of the Church hierarchy and prophesied the destruction of Babylon.
[41] The convulsionnaires left behind thousands of written works, including prayers, visions, parables, dialogues, letters, songs and poems.
Strayer identifies three common themes in their writing: eschatology (their theology of the end-times), word games, and their relationship to the French Monarchy.
[42] The abbé Vaillant, a convulsionnaire leader who called himself 'Elijah' after the prophet who would accompany the Messiah, was deeply concerned with converting the Jews to Christianity and predicted that the end of the world would come in 1733.
Increasingly, people viewed this strange blend of millenarianism, eroticism, torture, and hysteria as a medical problem rather than a religious phenomenon.
[51] However, Noailles died in 1729, and his successor, Archbishop Vintimille, was handpicked by Cardinal Fleury, who also served as Chief Minister of France under the young King Louis XV.
The initiative to create the Jansenist periodical Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques in 1727 owed largely to this interest in inviting ordinary Christians to witness religious truth for themselves.
[63] This debate did not escape the attention of the Cardinal Fleury, who exploited this division by encouraging, even subsidizing the publications of those Jansenists who attacked the convulsionnaire phenomenon.
[68] David Hume, the father of empiricism, wrote, "There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person, than those, which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbé Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity the people were so long deluded.
... many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned integrity, attested by witnesses of credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world.
David Garrioch (2002) argues that the common Parisian kneeling before the tomb of François de Pâris was seeking an expression of faith "that offered the poor full membership of the spiritual community.
"[71] Echoing Dale Van Kley's (1996) thoughts on the broader Jansenist controversy,[72] Brian E. Strayer (2008) suggests that ... the cemetery and parish of St-Médard [were transformed] into a stage - and an urban battleground - where the quarrel between orthodoxy and heresy could be fought to its bloody finale.
In a very real sense, the convulsionnaire phenomenon constituted the last great European affair to combine both politics and religion into a mass movement involving both the common people and the elite.
The prospect of women claiming to serve as intermediaries between God and the people, Wilson writes, was perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the movement for some conservatives.
[77] Strayer 2008 echoing Kreiser and Van Kley 1996 argues that the convulsionnaires' "democratic, congregational polity constituted a serious indictment of the established, hierarchical order in both Church and state.
She argues that women figured prominently in the struggle between the emerging professional medical community and other practitioners of medicine which might be called charlatans.
She points to physicians (Philippe Hecquet) and theologians (Nigon de Berty) alike who attributed the convulsions to female hysteria, sexual frustration and menstrual irregularities, as well as woman's inherent moral inferiority.
"Imagination," Goldstein argues, was the "smear word" of choice among 18th century French writers who considered it antithetical to "enlightened" rationality.
