De l'apologétique à l'Eglise constitutionnelle: Adrien Lamourette (1742-1794)

Extract

Long marginal to the major oceanic currents of eighteenth-century scholarship, the work of Catholic apologetics during the siècle de lumières has seen increasingly sustained and serious attention by Anglo-American as well as Francophone scholars. Central to scholarly debates about Catholic apologetics in the late eighteenth-century are three issues. The first concerns the extent to which Catholic apologists in France bear witness to the contingent breakdown of the Church's ability to assimilate, rather than strictly reject the Enlightenment or the Revolution. The second concerns the extent to which apologetics ought to be considered as part of the Counter-Enlightenment and adapted in a very different way into the narrative of recent syntheses. The third concerns the renewed interest in various species Catholic Enlightenment or religious forms of Enlightenment in Europe more generally. Directly or indirectly, Caroline Chopelin-Blanc's extensive intellectual biography of Adrien Lamourette speaks to all of the above historiographical concerns, and by focusing upon both continuity and change throughout Lamourette's career, she lends insight into the many curiosities and paradoxes about Lamourette. Indeed, scholars have been at a loss to fully explain how Lamourette could have been a progenitor of Counter-Enlightenment conspiracy theories that blamed the excesses of the French Revolution after 1793 on the predatory materialism and atheism of the philosophes, but also a scion of a ‘Religious Enlightenment’ that, at least in France, was capable of investing millenarian hopes for the imminent coming of the kingdom of God ushered in the unfolding of the Revolution from 1789–92.