The Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancien Regime.

Alexander Sedgwick. The Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancien R[acute{e}]gime.

Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. xiii + 297 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-674-90567-9.

Basing this study on family papers, notarial records, manuscript collections at the Biblioth[acute{e}que Nationale and the Bib1ioth[acute{e}que de la Soci[acute{e}]t[acute{e}] de Port-Royal, and published correspondence, memoirs, and journals, Alexander Sedgwick enlarges on his earlier work, Jansenism in Seventeenth-Century France by chronicling the history of the Arnauld family from the religious wars to the Enlightenment. The changes that occurred within the family speak to larger changes in French society during those two hundred years, with a shift from an essentially religious to a secular culture.

The Arnauld family, originally bourgeois gentilhommes, achieved noble status like so many of their sixteenth-century contemporaries, through the acquisition of wealth and service to the crown. In the century of religious war, the family counted several Huguenots among its members, and Sedgwick postulates that it was these Calvinist influences that informed the attitudes of many of their seventeenth-century successors. Sedgwick identifies several traits that can be seen in the family across the divide from the era of religious conflict to the years before the Revolution. These characteristics included a profound m[acute{e}]pris du monk, especially prominent among the female members of the family, yet the tension between worldly strivings and contempt for the world was even to be found in the most ambitious of the courtiers. Family loyalty was equally important.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book focus on individual members of the family, especially Ang[acute{e}]lique (chapter 3) and Le Grand Arnauld, Antoine (chapter 7), and on women's role in the conversion of a family (chapter 4). The story of Ang[acute{e}]lique illustrates in microcosm what many members of the family experienced. Made abbess of Port-Royal at eleven years of age, Ang[acute{e}]lique initially rebelled, considering the monastic life an "unbearable yoke" (41). Why could she not marry, and her more devout older sister become abbess, rather than the reverse? But Ang[acute{e}]lique's personal conversion soon followed, and the break with the secular life was symbolized by what has become known as the journ[acute{e}]e du guichet, a day when she turned away her visiting family. After that, she concentrated her considerable energies on the reform movement, but her life was always characterized by a tension between her need for inner spirituality and the external work she was called on to perfor m.

Similarly, the story of le Grand Arnauld is quite compelling. If Ang[acute{e}]lique symbolizes the intense devotion of the female members of the family, Antoine manifests the tensions experienced by its male members. If Ang[acute{e}]lique had to struggle against her family to proceed with reform, Antoine and the other male Arnaulds had to come to terms with their own ambition and desire for public acclaim. Antoine, one of the spiritual fathers of Jansenism, found this less of a problem than others. For Ang[acute{e}]lique, Antoine, and others, "[c]onflict was a test of their religious commitment and a demonstration of their hostile attitude toward the world" (161), a position that invited persecution. Some of the men were involved in the Fronde, and others, such as Pomponne, became important ministers of state.

Sedgwick's story illustrates the major changes taking place in French society during this period. The attack and destruction of Port-Royal was the external manifestation of what was already happening within some of the members of the Arnauld family, as they began to turn away from the intense piety and commitment to religious reform that characterized members of the family from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Jansenism and its adherents in the eighteenth century were less committed to religious ideals than to a political agenda that attacked absolutism.

It must be said that this is not an easy book to read because of the wealth of details about even minor members of the family, who often shared similar names. Less detail and more contextual analysis would have been desirable. Still, The Travails of Conscience is an important book that will be of great use to students of Jansenism and the political and religious culture of seventeenth-century France.