Episode 32: The Congregation

Monsignor Denis Frayssinous was fed up. The silver-tongued bishop had served as France’s minister of ecclesiastical affairs since Charles X took the French throne in 1824. And for much of that time, Frayssinous had been dogged by constant accusations that Charles’s monarchy was actually a theocracy under the secret control of two shadowy organizations: the banned Catholic order of Jesuits, and a sinister Catholic secret society known only as “The Congregation.”

Right: Bishop Denis Frayssinous, France’s minister of ecclesiastical affairs, 1824-7. Artist and date unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Frayssinous knew better. Yes, as a government minister he was expected to defend the regime. But it also meant he had access to public records and intelligence that showed the charges were simply false.

So Frayssinous, a man of conservative ideology but a moderate temperament,¹ mounted the podium of the French Chamber of Deputies in 1826 to set the record straight. Yes, Frayssinous conceded, there was such an organization as “the Congregation” — but it was a harmless charity, not a secret society controlling the government. As for the much-maligned Jesuits, he continued, claims of their ubiquity couldn’t be farther from the truth. Jesuits ran a mere seven religious schools in the entire country, out of hundreds of different French schools.²

Frayssinous’s hope that sharing this information would put an end to conspiratorial attacks couldn’t have been more wrong. Frayssinous’s speech was treated not as exculpatory but as a confession — the Congregation did exist! Jesuits did control French schools! It was a confirmation, as the main opposition newspaper Le Constitutionnel alleged the next month, that “the Congregationists and the Jesuits of all countries were in concert to dominate peoples and kings.”³

Today, we’re going to dive into this web of conspiracy theories, sorting out what’s true, what’s false — and why ultimately it didn’t really matter.

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This is The Siècle, Episode 32: The Congregation.

Welcome back, everyone. I hope you’ve got your cork-boards ready, because it’s time to dive back into the world of 1820s conspiracy theories. The last time I did this was in Episode 23, which focused on a left-wing secret society whose attempts to launch a military coup were put down in 1822. Writing that one nearly cost me my sanity, but I am boldly venturing back into this conspiratorial morass to investigate right-wing secret societies.

As I covered in Episode 23, the 1820s were a pretty conspiratorial time. Everyone believed that secret societies were at work in the shadows. Sometimes these alleged secret societies were totally invented, such as the mythical “comité directeur” that many royalists believed was to blame for revolutions across the continent. Others were real, like the Carbonari organizations that launched revolts in Italy and France, or the Greek Filiki Eteria.

Today we’re focusing on the secret societies that French left-wingers believed were pulling the strings. I’ve mentioned two organizations by name: the Jesuits, and the Congregation. The important thing to keep in mind is that whatever the real or imagined differences between these groups, conspiracies about either ultimately came down to the same idea: a priestly plot to control the government.

Let’s start off with the more durable of these two anticlerical bogeymen: the Jesuits.

The Society of Jesus

Ignatius of Loyola. Anonymous artist, 16th Century. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Society of Jesus was founded in Paris in 1534 by Ignatius of Loyola, today a Catholic saint. The order was controversial from the very beginning, starting with their name — unlike other Catholic orders, which were named after individuals like Saint Francis of Assisi or Saint Dominic, Ignatius’s order named themselves after Jesus Christ. Rivals tended to see that as presumptuous or downright blasphemous.⁴

Swiftly dubbed “Jesuits” for short, the Society of Jesus became famous — or infamous — for several distinguishing factors. Perhaps most notably, its members swore a vow of personal obedience directly to the pope, instead of to local abbots or bishops. But the worldly Jesuits also swiftly made their mark in education, where “the extensive network of Jesuit colleges dominated the educational field” in Early Modern Europe. The Society were also noted for frequently serving as confessors to royalty and high-ranking aristocrats, giving them some combination of real and imagined political influence.⁵

All this success made the Jesuits plenty of enemies, too, including rival Catholic religious orders. In France, the austere faction called “Jansenists” attacked Jesuits for allegedly watering down core Catholic doctrines to appeal to the public, while ordinary parish priests often saw Jesuit teachers as rivals for authority. In the second half of the 18th Century the Jesuit order was expelled from one country after another, including from France in 1764, before Pope Clement XIV dissolved them entirely in 1774.⁶

But in 1814, Pope Pius VII brought the Jesuits back. In doing so, Pius was very explicit about the reason for restoring the Society of Jesus: its members, he said, were “vigorous and experienced rowers” who would “break the waves of a sea which threatens at every moment shipwreck and death.” In this metaphor, the turbulent sea represented the forces of Revolution.⁷

You might be wondering just how this order of teachers and confessors were supposed to defeat the French Revolution. Ultimately, it came down to educating children. People like the counter-revolutionary theorist Joseph de Maistre argued that one key cause of the French Revolution was the 1764 expulsion of the Jesuits. Had the Jesuits not been expelled, then “the proven virtues of their educational system would surely have saved France from the effusion of impious and revolutionary doctrines that engulfed it,” as historian Geoffrey Cubitt summarized their argument. Here reactionaries were in agreement with liberals: both sides saw control of education as a vital front in the war of ideas, and much of French politics in the 19th Century will be dominated by a battle between secular and religious forces for control of the country’s educational system.⁸

Legality

Pope Pius might have restored the Jesuits, but in France, the 1764 edict banning the Jesuits arguably remained in legal force. This wasn’t some revolutionary decree to be rolled back, but an expulsion ordered by King Louis XV, the grandfather of Louis XVIII and Charles X. In fact, in one example of how debates over the Jesuits could be topsy-turvy, liberals approvingly cited the expulsion decree by the absolutist King Louis XV, while supporters of the Jesuits said laws passed by godless revolutionary governments had superseded their 1764 expulsion.⁹

French governments under Louis XVIII and Charles X never formally re-legalized the Jesuits, but in practice were happy to turn a blind eye to their presence — at least, so long as they kept their heads down.¹⁰ Even before Pope Pius re-formed the order, there were Jesuits in France, both aging survivors of the former order, and new recruits to ostensibly different organizations like the “Fathers of the Faith.”¹¹ These crypto-Jesuit groups helped the Society reconstitute itself fairly quickly in 1814, from a single Jesuit priest in all of France at the start of 1814 to 91 members a year later. But government toleration was conditional. When Louis XVIII was asked to legalize the Jesuits in 1820, the king responded with a warning: “Let the Fathers [of the Faith] take up again neither the name nor the dress of the Society [of Jesus], let them work without making a lot of noise about their affairs, and they have nothing to fear.”¹²

There’s one key fact that will make the Jesuits’ precarious legal position make more sense: Restoration France under the Charter of 1814 did not have freedom of association, where anyone could form any organization they wanted to. Under French law at the time, groups of 20 or more people were illegal unless they had official authorization from the government.¹³ Restoration governments were more willing to look the other way for unauthorized Catholic orders than they were for unauthorized liberal groups, but it was still very much a case of looking the other way.

With this tenuous protection, the restored French Jesuits set about pursuing their mission. In this case, I mean this literally — Jesuits were one of several groups who organized the revival missions I covered in Episode 27.¹⁴

They also quietly set up seven religious schools in the years leading up to Frayssinous’ 1826 speech, plus an eighth that same year, all devoted to training young men for future roles in the priesthood. These schools appear to have been popular, both with parents and with religious leaders. Frayssinous had lamented in 1817 that state-run schools had utterly failed to produce candidates for the priesthood, and predicted that if nothing changed, “this is the end of the priesthood in France.” Jesuits were widely seen as offering the best opportunity for a robust Catholic educational system. While the Jesuits ran eight different schools, local communities offered them more than 80 that the order couldn’t accept due to limited staffing. By 1828, there were 364 total Jesuits in France, not counting novices, and around 300 of those were working in schools. The schools they did run educated more than 2,500 students as of the mid-1820s, and that was after turning down some applicants due to that limited staffing.¹⁵

Controversy

Writing in 1827, Frayssinous noted that there seemed to be no moderate views on the question of the Jesuits: “For the past two years above all, the name of Jesuit has reverberated around the whole of France, blessed by some, cursed by the others, presented sometimes as a lantern of salvation, sometimes as a sign of ruin and calamity.”¹⁶ But that intensity was a relatively recent development. While the Jesuits had always been controversial, criticism of them was fairly muted throughout Louis XVIII’s reign. Despite being personally observant and a public supporter of the controversial missions, Louis’s somewhat moderate image seems to have calmed fears of a slippery slope into theocracy. But Charles X had an ultra-royalist image and kicked off his reign with a series of very public and symbolic shows of devotion like his 1825 coronation ceremony. Under Charles, anticlerical sentiment would hit a fever-pitch, and the most feverish pitch was reserved for the Jesuits.¹⁷

The Bonapartist songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger attacked the Jesuits in a song called “The Reverend Fathers,” which became one of Béranger’s most popular works. Here’s a very loose translation of parts of the song, which paints the Jesuits as sinister manipulators with support from the powers-that-be:

Men in black, from where do you walk?

We come from underground

Half wolf, half fox

Our way is mystery-bound

 

We’re sons of Loyola the devout

You know why we were driven out

Now we’re back, so quit your screeching

And send your children to our teaching

…

From the depths of the palace

We plot with great malice

The missionaries are peddlers, selling our cant

Together with them, we’ll take over France¹⁸

Béranger’s line about the Jesuits coming “from underground” wasn’t merely a bit of poetic metaphor, but was actually a reference to a specific conspiracy theory. Allegedly, critics said, Charles X had an underground tunnel letting him travel between the Tuileries Palace in central Paris and a Jesuit novice-house, which would have been quite an impressive feat of engineering considering the novice-house in question was more than 2.5 miles away in the suburb of Montrouge.¹⁹

That rumor that Charles was personally involved with the Jesuits represented a major escalation of anti-Jesuit attacks. Early on in Charles’ reign, conspiracy theories cast the king as merely the victim of a Jesuit plot, but this quickly evolved to portraying Charles as a participant. After 1825, we start to see reports of popular objects that deface the king’s image to make it look like Charles was wearing the black skullcap associated with Jesuit priests. For example, Charles’ face on French coins was often scratched or inked to draw the skullcap on the back of his head. We also have reports of a baker from Metz in northeast France, who was tried for selling gingerbread cookies shaped like Charles with the outline of a skullcap impressed in the dough. The baker managed to get acquitted by claiming, implausibly, that he was merely trying to represent Charles’ hair.²⁰

An anonymous caricature depicting King Charles X in the garb of a Jesuit priest, circa Aug. 1830. Public domain via Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Printed works played a huge role in spreading and amplifying conspiracies about Jesuits in France. A writer named the Comte de Montlosier published a best-selling book alleging Jesuits were part of a multi-pronged plot to undermine France, and he was simply the most popular of a host of anti-Jesuit authors in the mid-1820s.²¹ In the newspapers, I talked in Episode 31 about how Le Constitutionnel spearheaded a vigorous campaign against Jesuits and the so-called “priestly party” — which paid off when the paper was acquitted on libel charges. Le Constitutionnel absolutely saturated its pages with anti-Jesuit content, including finding Jesuit machinations behind apparently unrelated news items like legal proceedings or economic data.²²

The truth

So how much of this anti-Jesuit hysteria was actually based on truth? As we’ve seen, there were Jesuits in France, operating without government authorization. They were teaching students, which prominent thinkers up to and including the Pope hoped would shape French society to be more Catholic and less liberal. At the same time, as we’ve seen, there were only a few hundred Jesuits in all of France, educating a few thousand children in eight schools. The order clearly had potential to expand, as indicated by all the requests they had turned down to take over additional schools. But as of the mid-1820s, the Society of Jesus was hardly the ubiquitous presence in France that critics alleged.

The question of the Jesuits’ political influence is a little harder to pin down. We know that most French bishops tended to be friendly to the Jesuits, and so were some of the ultra-royalist political figures who dominated French politics for much of the 1820s.²³ But plenty of Restoration politicians were skeptical of the Jesuits, including many royalists in good standing. Some echoed the old Jansenist critiques of the Jesuits as heretical; others wanted a more independent French national church — an ideology called “Gallicanism” — and were leery of the Jesuits’ allegiance directly to Rome. In 1820, a Jesuit envoy reported back that while Louis XVIII and the royal family were sympathetic, “the ministers are hostile, and in both Chambers our friends are rare.”²⁴ In the mid-1820s, the ultra-royalist government of Joseph Villèle would take actions against the Jesuits’ critics — only to be stymied by widespread anti-Jesuit sentiment in the judiciary.²⁵

The most important political figure of all, of course, was Charles X, who was widely attacked as a secret Jesuit. I’ve come across absolutely no credible evidence to suggest any possibility that that’s true. But it is undeniable that Charles was sympathetic to the Jesuits, who he would later call “my most faithful servants… whom I esteem and love the most.” In 1833, Charles will appoint two Jesuit tutors for his grandson, against the advice of many of his advisers.²⁶ Charles wasn’t a Jesuit himself, but the king did support them. Public opinion constrained Charles from supporting the Jesuits more directly, and as we saw in Episode 31, attacks on Jesuits helped bring down Charles’ government in the elections of 1827.

The Congregation

But Jesuits weren’t the only target of anticlerical attacks in the mid-1820s. There was also the enigmatic group known only as “the Congregation.”

What exactly was the “Congregation”? Perhaps the first person to set his sights on the Congregation was the polemicist Alexis Dumesnil, who described it in 1823 as “a menacing league, formed in the shadows, and which, under the pretext of combatting the [Napoleonic] tyranny, lately threw out roots all over the kingdom.”²⁷

A group called the Congregation did exist. It was founded in 1801 by Father Bourdier-Delpuits, a former Jesuit, as a charitable organization. Napoleon banned the group in 1809, but it came back with the Bourbons in 1814. Though it had been founded by a priest and maintained close associations with the clergy, the organization’s leadership appears to have always been Catholic laymen.²⁸

Getting a precise count of how many people were members of the Congregation is difficult, because it wasn’t a single organization. There was a central Paris Congregation, which had more than a thousand members, though many were inactive. But there were also lots of local Congregations spread out around the country. Congregations in turn founded separate charities like the Society for Orphan Apprentices, the Institution for Blind Youths, and Aid for the Uncomplaining Poor. Overall, it seems like there were at a minimum tens of thousands of French people associated with the Congregation in one form or another.²⁹

But was that all the Congregation was? French liberals certainly didn’t think so. They saw this sprawling national network, organized in hierarchical cells much like the Carbonari, and were sure there was a “menacing league.”³⁰

This conclusion had some logic. After all, not all the charities organized by Congregations were engaged in the provision of alms. Others were actively trying to make France a more Catholic country. For example, the Catholic Society for Good Books promoted Catholic literature against too-popular secular drivel like Voltaire. There was also the Society for the Propagation of the Faith — which still exists — devoted to raising funds for Catholic missions. As we saw in Episode 27, mission work could be extremely controversial, and the fact that the Society was focused on funding foreign missions didn’t save it from being the object of liberal suspicion.³¹ It wasn’t an enormous logical leap to think that these Congregation-affiliated groups might be also working behind the scenes to shape the public policy of Charles’ sympathetic regime.

Below: François Dominique de Reynaud, Comte de Montlosier, by Maria Chenu, 1864. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But significantly, liberals weren’t the only ones making this logical leap. There were plenty of upright conservative royalists who didn’t like the idea of the Church having too much influence over their beloved monarchy. The most significant of these was an author I mentioned earlier: the Comte de Montlosier, a “champion of the aristocratic and monarchical order.” In a series of articles and a best-selling book, Montlosier wrote that France was threatened by four related “scourges”: the Jesuits, the Congregation, the “Ultramontane” movement promoting papal primacy over the French national church, and what he called the “spirit of encroachment by priests” on public life. Montlosier described the Congregation as “a wide-ranging but flexible and elusive power” which was “capable of functioning at one moment as a network of intrigue and espionage.” He alleged that the Congregation’s membership included countless benign-seeming fronts, and — most dangerously — 130 to 150 members of the Chamber of Deputies.³²

Montlosier saw his four “scourges” as separate, but as his ideas took off, popular imagination conflated them — especially the Congregation and the Jesuits. “Jesuits, Congregationists, it is the same thing,” wrote the liberal paper Le Constitutionnel; the Chateaubriand-affiliated Journal des débats said the Congregation “is to Jesuitism what pioneers are to an army: it prepares the way.” The idea of the Congregation had particular polemical power precisely because of the group’s lay nature. The Jesuits were ordained priests — but anyone could be a member of the Congregation.³³

But here’s the thing: when it came to the Congregation, Montlosier was both right and wrong. There was a secret Catholic lay society devoted to expanding Church influence behind the scenes. It just wasn’t the Congregation.

The Knights of the Faith

Back in 1810, a French aristocrat named Ferdinand de Bertier was determined to oppose the rule of the usurper Napoleon. This could be a dangerous business under the authoritarian French Empire, so Bertier proceeded carefully. He founded a secret society modeled on the most famous semi-secret society around: the Freemasons, which Bertier actually joined for research purposes.

Right: Ferdinand de Bertier, comte de Sauvigny, by Jacques Augustin, 1805. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Unlike the generally liberal Masons, Bertier’s secret society was Catholic and ultraroyalist. He called it the Chevaliers de la Foi, or the Knights of the Faith. (This is a different group from the crypto-Jesuit “Fathers of the Faith” I mentioned earlier.) From the Masons he took the idea of hierarchical ranks, with only higher ranks initiated into all the order’s secrets. Entry-level members were told their order was a simple “pious association for good works and the propagation of Christian and monarchical ideas”; the most senior members formed a high council of nine members who debated political strategy and passed orders down to the entire organization.³⁴

Under Napoleon, the Chevaliers gathered news and spread messages. They were involved in stirring up pro-Bourbon demonstrations in 1814 that convinced the invading Allies that there was genuine popular support for a Restoration.³⁵ After the Hundred Days, the Knights of the Faith organized a so-called “banner” in the Chamber of Deputies, the ultraroyalist-dominated Chambre introuvable. There leaders of the Chevaliers secretly coordinated parliamentary tactics for like-minded deputies, creating a discipline that was remarkable for the time. They were “seen to rise, sit, speak and remain silent as one man,” marveled one outsider. Joseph Villèle was a Chevalier, while the blue-blooded future foreign minister Matthieu de Montmorency was the order’s Grand Master.³⁶

This was exactly what critics like Montlosier alleged was happening in France. They just got the name wrong. This is a testament to the Knights’ organization: As far as secret societies go, the Chevaliers de la Foi were the rare exception that actually stayed secret. Indeed, no published work appears to have mentioned the group until 1930 — more than a century after it dissolved.³⁷

But there’s one more ironic twist here. As public attention began to focus on the “scourge” of the Congregation in 1825 and 1826, this real secret society behind the myth was dying. The cause of death was an internal power struggle between Bertier and Montmorency, on the one hand, and Villèle on the other. As prime minister, Villèle wanted to use the Chevaliers to support his parliamentary agenda. Bertier and Montmorency didn’t want to lose control of the group, and didn’t always agree with Villèle. So rather than give Villèle a chance of taking over, they dissolved the order in early 1826.³⁸ This is a vital part of the slow deterioration of Villèle’s majority that I talked about in Episode 31 — a key pillar of Ultra organization had disappeared, and many of its members were now attacking Villèle as members of the far-right “counter-opposition.”

So that’s the twisted, contradictory reality behind the “Congregation.” The sinister secret society of reactionary lay Catholics that Montlosier and company attacked had existed, but it wasn’t the group they thought and had already dissolved by the time it became a bogeyman.

I should pause here to note the groundbreaking research underlying this section, published in 1948 by Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny — a descendant of Ferdinand de Bertier. Bertier de Sauvigny used family papers to unravel what he called “the enigma of the Congregation,” and all subsequent scholarship into this topic builds on his work. The key work here has unfortunately never been translated into English, but Bertier de Sauvigny summarized many of his findings in his 1966 history, The Bourbon Restoration, which does have an English edition. Likewise, while many authors have covered the role of Jesuits and anti-Jesuit attacks in the Restoration, Geoffrey Cubitt’s book The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France was particularly helpful. You can find links to buy both at thesiecle.com/episode32, along with a full annotated transcript of this episode.

Above: Historian Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, date unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Conclusion

We started this episode with Denis Frayssinous’s ill-advised attempt to deal with conspiracy theories by sharing some facts about the limited role Jesuits and the Congregation played in France. As we’ve seen, Frayssinous was largely correct: the Congregation was a relatively benign nonprofit and the Jesuits ran a mere handful of schools.

But one reason Frayssinous’s remarks backfired was because there was some truth behind the theories, too. There was a Catholic secret society that was involved in politics. The Jesuits were small in number but they really were trying to use their schools to shift French culture and politics against revolutionary ideas, and they really did have the sympathy of the king.

It’s a complex web, as befits any good conspiracy theory. Hopefully this episode has done more to inform you than confuse you. But you can’t understand the events of Charles X’s reign without understanding these Catholic organizations, and especially without understanding the torrid, often unhinged popular backlash they received.

There’s an irony here that I appreciate: in one sense, Episode 32: The Congregation wasn’t about the Congregation at all. But in a deeper sense, it was — not the actual Congregation, or the secretive Knights of the Faith, or the small revived order of Jesuits, but the idea of “the Congregation.” Ultimately it didn’t matter how much was true and how much was made up. The mere belief in the idea of a secretive priestly plot was enough to change the direction of France.

Next week, we’re going to see these tensions come to a head. With Villèle defeated, France is going to get a new government, an unsteady creation trapped between resurgent liberals and a determinedly ultra-royalist king. The Jesuits are going to be just one issue confounding France’s newest prime minister. So join me next time for Episode 33: Martignac.