Crown, Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV

WITH this book, which covers the years 1661 to 1715, Joseph Bergin completes the project which he began with The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661 (1996) (rev. ante, cxiii (1998), 728–9). To the main text he adds two appendices, one of which, as before, is a biographical dictionary of every bishop and archbishop. The historical context surrounding the study contrasts with the earlier period in two essential respects: first, from 1661 the king ruled personally, there being no equivalent of Richelieu or Mazarin who might exercise ecclesiastical patronage or seek to influence that of the king; secondly, by the Peace of the Pyrenees and other treaties, France annexed territory on its frontiers, and Bergin begins by explaining the steps taken by the crown to reconcile dioceses in Flanders, Franche Comté and Roussillon-Catalonia to the new political realities. He begins with the social and geographical origins of bishops, their training and routes to promotion. ‘Origins’, Bergin stresses, is an imprecise concept, but he nevertheless shows that over half the bishops were born north of the Loire, with a heavy concentration on Paris, and that most were of noble birth. He identifies several trends after 1661. There developed a growing ‘dynasticism’ within the prelacy. Once established in the hierarchy, families acquired other benefices, so that eventually some two-thirds of post-1661 bishops were related to each other or to their pre-1661 predecessors. The key to the crucial first step of securing a see increasingly depended on a family's service to the crown. Bergin examines the fathers of bishops and discovers that the majority were military men or senior officiers, the crown deploying the ecclesiastical promotion of sons as a reward for service in the secular sphere by fathers (with ‘military’ families being especially favoured from the 1690s when warfare was conducted on a huge scale). Those appointed to the episcopate were generally skilled theologians, for the educational strategies of the Counter Reformation were now bearing fruit and producing priests with an excellent intellectual formation. A high proportion of those who were chosen had undergone ‘apprenticeships’ as chaplains at the royal court, or had made names for themselves at the General Assembly of the Clergy; they were usually of mature years and experience, ‘boy’ bishops becoming a thing of the past

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