Part One: Jesuit Apologetics versus Anti-Jesuitism (1820–1920)

This period witnessed the confrontation between two irreconcilable historiographies that, grounded in the conflictual aftermath of the French Revolution, mirrored each other. The Jesuits embodied the will to re-establish an earlier regime, complete with its philosophy and politics. They retained a quasi-monopoly on the writing of their recent history, which, when delegated, remained firmly under their close supervision. Among historiographers favorable to them, two authors, Louis de Bonald (1754–1840)⁵ and Jacques Crétineau-Joly (1803–75), stand out for being secular. Indeed the latter, “soldier in the intellectual realm,”⁶ was originally commissioned by the leadership of the Society of Jesus to address only the period of the early Society,⁷ but he ventured to touch on recent events. The sixth volume of his history “built, as per its title, on unpublished and authentic documents,” opens with the expulsion of the Jesuits from Russia, and goes on to address the congregation—that much maligned group of devout followers—the missions, the schools, and more specifically their methods in “public education.” The opposite camp included Gallican Catholics, such as Abbé Marcet de la Roche-Arnaud (1801–60),⁸ and such advocates of constitutional liberalism as Alexis Dumesnil (1783–1858)⁹ who saw in the—as yet not officially authorized—New Society’s extensive activities the harbingers of a recapture of France.

The apologetic drive expressed itself in certain chronological choices and in the strength of its focus on the re-foundation period. In connection with the New Society, the development of two societies of priests inspired by the Jesuits after their suppression was the subject of several papers. The Belgian born Abbé Louis-Marie-Joseph comte de Robiano (1793–1858), a prolific author, wrote approvingly: “So many people speak of the Jesuits without knowing them that it is worth showing by what means and in what spirit they re-established themselves.”¹⁰ Indeed, the very priests of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Society of the Faith of Jesus, the former having merged with the latter, did re-join the Jesuits when they were reinstated in Naples by Pius VII in 1804. It is alongside the same Count Robiano that Jean-Louis de Leissegues de Rozaven (1772–1851) defended the Jesuit order to which he belonged so as to enable his readers to “arrive at a justified and sound judgment.”¹¹

As the debate around freedom of education heated up, the Jesuits sought to answer their detractors, at whose forefront could be found Edgar Quinet (1803–75) and Jules Michelet (1798–1874), two professors at the Collège de France. Their lectures had been collected in a single book, which claimed: “one thousand men have accomplished in twelve years a prodigious feat […]. Destroyed in 1830, smitten and thrashed, they rose again without anybody noticing. They did not merely rise: while the question of whether there were Jesuits hung, they effortlessly won over our thirty or forty thousand priests, bamboozled them and are leading them Heaven knows where!”¹² Arsène Cahour (1806–71) rejected a way of writing history, which, far from seeking to pinpoint “personal or general crimes” owned that “vice” lies in “religious or literary school books.” In response, the Jesuit composed a “Full Apologia of the Society of Jesus” whose case rested upon “the scrutiny of the incriminated texts in its code” and “the scrutiny of facts pertaining to its nature, to the body’s temperament rather than to the fortuitous disposition of one or other of its organs.”¹³ The following year, Adolphe Boucher composed his hefty history taking his text from Jules Michelet’s course, even though he dedicated only one chapter to the order’s “modern history,” enlarging on the activity of the Fathers of the Faith and the relations of the Jesuits with the university. In his view, King Charles X (r.1824–30), entirely in thrall to the “black congregation,” emboldened the new Jesuits who indulged in wholesale “Protestant baiting,” “pious spying and priggish activity,” answering to the “general in Rome” to the detriment of their “submission to the bishops.”¹⁴

Some revolutionary fraternization in the spring of 1848 broke off the hostilities but the truce was short lived. The questions of freedom of the press on the one hand and of faith-based schooling on the other led to a fresh anti-Jesuit outcry, as from Victor Hugo (1802–85) at the Assemblée nationale:

And I am not confusing you, the clerical party, with the Church, anymore than I would confuse the mistletoe with the oak. You are the parasites of the Church, the disease of the Church [laughter]. Ignatius is Jesus’s enemy [hearty approbation from the Left]. You are not the believers but the sectarians of a faith you do not understand. You are sainthood’s impresarios. Don’t involve the Church in your business, your manipulations, your strategies, your doctrines, your ambitions. Don’t call it your mother so as to turn it into your servant [deep stir].¹⁵

Under the Second Empire nothing significant was published about the Society of Jesus. However when, upon defeat at the hands of a coalition of soon-to-be unified German States, the Republic was proclaimed anew, polemics concerning the Jesuits’ patriotism fed into the debate on the secularization of education. In his address to the Chambre (lower house) in July, Paul Bert (1833–86) castigated various aspects of “Jesuit morality”¹⁶—they were expelled by decree the following year. Despite being officially banned, the Society continued to be hounded. Edmond de Pressensé (1824–91), a Protestant churchman and member of the Sénat (upper house) has them as the very incarnation of a “theocratic ultramontanism” that taught “the young generation to hate the date of 1789 as if it were the Beast of Revelation”: “The Jesuits are past masters at such persecution [the oppression of souls] that no rack exposes since it operates by stealth.”¹⁷ Stanislas du Lac (1835–1909) published an essay intended as an endorsement.¹⁸Joseph Burnichon (1847–68),¹⁹ a member of the editorial team of the French Jesuits’ periodical Études, countered academia’s anti-Jesuitism with a thesis on Louis Lallemant (1578–1635) focusing on the order of the Oratory’s education: “It was to be expected that the high figures of the University would seize the opportunity to malign the Jesuit and the Society of Jesus—in which they did not disappoint.”²⁰ He also authored articles deploring the state’s monopoly on education in France²¹ or criticizing its programs for “classical studies.”²² The history of education is weighed down by “potent polemical burden”;²³ dispensed by the Jesuits it became a prime target, equated by its opponents with clericalism, ignorance, and political conservatism:

The Society of Jesus maintains with our society no social, familial, proprietary or patriotic bonds since the world is its home and the world is its exile. It is encamped on our land much as might an occupation army […] and it would even sometimes treat us as a dependency, for it has subdivided France into Provinces for its own purpose. To sum up, the Jesuit is neither our contemporary nor our compatriot. He is not our contemporary because he thinks three hundred years backwards! Or our compatriot because he rejects the very essence of fatherland.²⁴

To counter these accusations, Antoine Sengler (1835–87) pieced together what amounted in his view to the proof of Jesuit teachers’ attachment to French patriotic values.²⁵  After discussing the July Monarchy’s education struggles and establishing the biography of the “martyrs” of the Paris Commune,²⁶ Charles Daniel (1818–93) parried the accusations listed by Gabriel Compayré (1843–1913) in his Histoire critique des doctrines de l'éducation.²⁷ Another refutation can be found in a paper by Camille de Rochemonteix (1834–1923) about the Collège at La Flèche, near Le Mans, set forth as an original study about a Jesuit college in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁸ The next monograph on a Jesuit institution, dedicated to the College of Clermont—renamed in Paris Lycée Louis le Grand—²⁹ would not appear before the interwar period. With a view to making the document that structures Jesuit education and teaching practices accessible to his contemporaries, Henri Ferté (1821–1903) published in 1892 his—sometimes inaccurate—translation of the Ratio studiorum.³⁰ It would remain for a century the non-Latinists’ reference.

Against the background of the Dreyfus Affair, the laws of July 1901 on associations and of July 1904 against congregations forced 30,000 members of religious congregations out of the country. In 1910, there appeared the translation of a German synoptic essay authored by Heinrich Boehmer (1869–1927), with an introduction and notes by Protestant-raised historian Gabriel Monod (1844–1912).³¹ In response to “Jesuit phobia,” Alexandre Brou (1862–1947) published two books: one proposed a gallery of portraits featuring the Society’s saints and exceptional destinies; the other, a collection of papers by anti-Jesuit authors,³² reaped from a major research initiative begun some years earlier. After the twenty-fourth general congregation of 1892, the Society of Jesus had created in Madrid an historical institute tasked with editing and publishing original documents from the order’s first century.³³ The bibliographies by Auguste Carayon (1813–74), Augustin de Backer (1809–73), Aloïs de Backer, (1823–83) and Carlos Sommervogel (1834–1902), amounted to twelve volumes published in the last decade of the century.³⁴ They subscribe to a more scholarly approach but remain apologetic. As the centenary of the restoration of the order in France approached, a specific study was undertaken: Joseph Burnichon brought forth his Histoire d’un siècle: La Compagnie de Jésus en France with the support of Edouard Fine (1847–1927) in Rome.³⁵ The publication of a fifth and ultimate tome considered over-controversial was postponed at the onset of the First World War. Although it remains unpublished, its typescript can be consulted at the Society’s archives in Vanves.

The Society of Jesus’s external missions were singled out for special treatment. Voltaire (1694–1778) had, in his time, praised the missionaries’ action in Latin America even as he did them no favors in Europe.³⁶ One century later, in a context of nationalist tensions, their accounts remained beyond the reach of the Society of Jesus’s opponents. Indeed, its missionary work was respected, if not admired, as complementary to the colonial order insofar as more than a quarter of French Jesuits were missionaries in 1880, a percentage that would remain static until 1960.³⁷ Except for one scholarly work that would not be emulated in a long time,³⁸ Jesuit treatments of the missions of the time rarely eschewed apologetics, as attested by Joseph Bertrand (1801–84) writings about the Maduré (India).³⁹ A compendium of missionary work was produced under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Piolet (1855–1930),⁴⁰ a missionary in Madagascar. A laureate of the silver medal of the Société de Géographie for the bulk of his geographical and ethnological work, he was entrusted with drafting a report on the missions for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Together with its general introduction signed by the Republican Catholic Étienne Lamy (1845–1919), it celebrated France’s civilizing genius and the discipline and zeal of the priests of the Society of Jesus. In 1904, the same Piolet pointed out that seventy-five percent of the 6,106 missionaries in the world were French.⁴¹ At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese mission was treated in monographs, the first by a Jesuit who had taught at the seminary of Zi-ka-wei from 1909 to 1917 and specialized on Charles Porée (1676–1741).⁴² In this exercise compounded by the fascination exercised by Chinese culture, objectivity sometimes yielded to admiration.⁴³ And Georges Soulié de Morant (1878–1955), a French consul in China from 1903 to 1909, erudite Sinologist and acupuncturist, promised in his title an epic saga sweeping down the centuries.⁴⁴ Alongside such broad surveys, the biographies of missionaries dying from their labors yielded edifying stories. The man of God—not necessarily a Jesuit—recognizes grace in the spiritual consolation visited upon him in his travails.⁴⁵ Cathary’s biographer declares without any further ado that, for all that he relied on authentic documents, he has “foregone his historian’s role.”⁴⁶ Each and every high figure exemplified the same idea: a mission even one interrupted by the missionary’s death is an irreversible move forward.⁴⁷

On August 2, 1914, a notification from the French Home Office lifted the bans imposed on religious orders and the Jesuits joined in the “Union sacrée” effort. During and after the war, cracks soon materialized though the framing of internal criticism represented a novelty.⁴⁸ Superior General Włodzimierz Ledóchowski (1866–1942) expressed concerns about the “intellectual independence” evinced by some members of the order. His letter to provincial superiors On the Formation of Scholastics, summarizes his apprehensions and recommendations: “The Society needs men dead to themselves, completely detached, ready for any collaboration, radiating, so to speak, a supernatural spirit, in one word: men of God.”⁴⁹ An essay by Jesuit Joseph de Brucker (1845–1926), who taught church history and scripture, and also edited Études as well as directing it from 1895 to 1898, was a timely reminder of the order’s fundamentals. Its publication was delayed as the manuscript was confiscated by the German police occupying Enghien during the war.⁵⁰ His colleague Henri Fouqueray (1860–1927) pursued the publication of L’histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus en France: Des origines à la suppression.⁵¹

The last utterance of anti-Jesuit Gallicanism came from Roger Duguet (1875–1933)⁵² and the journalist Henri Merlier (1869–1952); the pair signed the polemical pamphlets Vérités they published from 1927 to 1939, by the name of Luc Vérus. These authors saw in military chaplain Paul Doncoeur (1880–1961) the very incarnation of “Jesuitism,” namely, the determined pursuit of one’s ends by covert and disloyal means combined with demonstrations of false candor:

For the Order is ruled by so monstrous an esprit de corps that its members, for the most part decent and disinterested individuals, deliberately disregard even the most elementary feelings of common morality and faith when it comes to the “good of the Society.” […] Over the centuries, they have sophisticated morality, rationalized theology and bastardized mysticism. Ultramontane in Rome, Gallican in Versailles, they authorize in China highly superstitious practices […]. Because of the affection and veneration they inspire, good Jesuits stop most Catholics from seeing what the others are up to. They serve to shroud their dubious maneuvers and thus work equally for the good of the Society […]. Father Doncœur, for instance, lavishes his eloquent encouragements both on the last flickers of post-war patriotism and the early efforts of international pacifism […]. The Society wants to rule the rulers of the day, whoever they may be, ready to prostitute itself to their whims if needs be.⁵³

Having fought off the Cartel des gauches’ policy and its failed attempt to force the Religious orders out of France again, the same Doncœur completed that very year his small volume on the “Society’s secret” where he showcased spiritual masters such as his mentor Léonce de Grandmaison (1868–1927), alongside one hundred and sixty young Jesuits who died for their country:

There we have our brothers of yesteryear, religious who were no Saints, and here the cohort of martyrs, on whose countenance I wish to close for being those whom Saint Ignatius recognizes the most authentic Jesuits. We may well see a sign in the fact that the catalogue of 907 Jesuits who, in one way or another, suffered a violent death had been compiled by a young Jesuit, Father Henri Dugout, who concluded his preface on these words: “Such is the list of our martyrs, which will undoubtedly get longer in a future made beautiful with dedication, beautiful with suffering, fulfilling the wishes of our Blessed Father and the promises of Him for whom every Jesuit wishes to die.” For this same Jesuit, become a missionary, achieved, during the 1926 massacres in China the fulfillment of his novitiate dream, whether it was by chance or by God’s choice to fulfill a man’s heart’s desire.⁵⁴

The centuries-long conflict ended on this ultimate bout. Thereafter, Jesuits would only exceptionally be suspected of enmity towards the French nation or the democratic republican institutions. In academia, the anticlerical block had lost interest in the “Society of Jesus” topic.

Part Two: A Strictly Catholic Concern (1930–70)

Time had come for the Society of Jesus to spread its wings with some of its members devoting themselves to scientific and academic research.⁵⁵ Moved from Madrid to Rome, on the site of the Curia Generalis, the Historical Institute includes the archive proper, a library and a publishing house, which, from 1932 onwards, brought out the biannual journal Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu (AHSI) as well as monographs about the Society in the Bibliotheca Instituti Historici Societatis Iesu. That same year, the first volume of the Dictionnaire de spiritualité was published.⁵⁶ Part and parcel of Jesuit historiography, it extends the Revue d’ascétique et de mystique, founded and directed between 1920 and 1928 by Joseph de Guibert (1877–1942), whose key work came out in 1953, prefaced with an introduction highlighting the sensitive nature of mysticism.⁵⁷

The pro-Jesuit editorial effort was extensive but its quality uneven. In a mighty essay on the Jesuits published in 1933, René Fulöp-Miller (1891–1963) proposed to uncover the “secret of their power,”⁵⁸ comparing Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) to Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). Some months later, Gaëtan Bernoville (1889–1960), a writer active in Catholic intellectual circles, offered a systematic exposition in ten chapters spread over four topics: the Society’s founder, the Constitutions, apostolic action and “the secret of action.”⁵⁹ Its appendices presented an outline of the Exercises in one section and, in another, the “Society’s missions to the heathen” on the basis of the 1932 statutes. An admirer of the order, the author acknowledged his full sympathy with Ignatian spirituality, confessing that the book was “written with  one of the best loved and revered masters of Catholic thought, Father de Grandmaison S.J., in mind”⁶⁰ The impending four-hundredth anniversary of the order (1540–1940) prompted special preparations. Pierre Delattre (1876–1961) directed the compendium on Les établissements des jésuites en France, which called on a great many collaborators.⁶¹ Each “residence,” “college” or “station” had its own history chronicled up to 1900, and not beyond in order to avoid the vexed subject of the laws against congregations. Brimming with data, the project still evinced an apologetic intent even though by then nothing suggested that an on-going Jesuit presence in France needed any justification.

Works on the history of education lay bare the diverging concepts of two Jesuits. François Charmot (1880–1965) defended a Jesuit pedagogy arising directly from the Spiritual Exercises whilst still borrowing from the “New Education” movement.⁶² The following generation would yield, with François de Dainville (1909–71), the first major academically approved historical study of Jesuit pedagogy. The author of a treatise on La géographie des humanistes, he addressed, in a second, La naissance de l’humanisme moderne. In the spirit of Jesuit apostolate’s renewal, he had considered titling its second tome Le collège et la cité but gave this up.⁶³ After the Second World War he pursued his research, delving into the staffing of Ancient Régime schools and the social origins of their pupils. With the support of unpublished archives, he made available the contents of the formation on offer, providing details on the modalities of drama work and on the teaching of science, or itemizing the students’ reading materials.⁶⁴ In 1969, the American Jesuit John W. Padberg (b.1926) turned his attention to French colleges during the period 1814–80 after which the Jesuits’ methodology proper rapidly faded away.⁶⁵ With these institutions’ strong influence on the children from Legitimist families in mind, he discussed the curricular content in Falloux Laws colleges after the minor seminaries experiment and the updating of the Ratio studiorum in 1832.

In the field of missionary historiography, the previous era’s standard outlook prevailed well into the 1950s with lay writers⁶⁶ and Jesuits⁶⁷ alike promoting the coupling of Catholic “mission” with French “colonization” in a face-off with Anglo-Saxon Protestant missions. Riding the wave of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Alexandre Brou published a history of Jesuit missionaries in the edifying narrative tradition,⁶⁸ and lay author Paul Lesourd (1897–1981) set forth an overview of the history of missions.⁶⁹ In connection with the centenary of the Lyon province, several monographs were published, some for internal consumption,⁷⁰ others for the public at large.⁷¹ While Joseph Hajjar showed himself to be more attuned to issues of relationships between Latin Catholicism and Eastern Christianity,⁷² Jesuit Adrien Boudou (1876–1945) reported on the Madagascar mission.⁷³ Twenty years later Bishop Simon Delacroix would direct in the same spirit the project of an illustrated edition.⁷⁴

The military defeat of June 1940, the occupation of the country, and the instauration of the Vichy regime rocked French society to its foundations and, within it, a Society of Jesus in full process of normalization. Along with an almost unanimous ecclesiastical hierarchy, the provincials adopted a stance inspired by the principle of guarantee of unity allied to loyalty towards the government in place. The majority of Jesuits followed suit in order to better partake in a re-Christianization drive. However, while carrying out their pastoral duties, a minority opted for clandestine activities of spiritual, intellectual, and political resistance, most notably in the Lyon region. A third group was held captive. The resulting awkwardness manifest at the liberation was never articulated and the leadership roles were passed on under the guise of a generational handover. The “Theology” collection, created in 1944 by Aubier publishers, promptly accrued considerable esteem. However, in the wake of the encyclical Humani generis (1950) and of the extended stay, at the superior general’s request, of Belgian Visitor Clément Plaquet, some rising stars got sidelined. The visitor had the power of control, decisions, and appointment of superiors and rectors in whichever province he was visiting.

Such an atmosphere was not conducive to recording the internal history of the recent past. In 1950, with the two tomes entitled Origines et expansion des jésuites, the public was offered nothing but a translation of a monograph published ten years earlier by an Irish Jesuit.⁷⁵ A specialist of contemporary history and the “Galileo Affair,” James Brodrick (1891–1973) proposed to correct the mawkish image offered of Ignatius Loyola and the Society’s founding fathers. The book, which does not cover the New Society in France, boasted a foreword by Michel Riquet S.J. (1898–1993), who, having joined the French Resistance from the outset, formed firm friendships with Communists and Freemasons in the concentration camps where he was put  after his arrest; he was also famous for the Lenten lectures he had delivered in the cathedral of Notre Dame since 1946. During that decade, the only attempt at a grand history for the benefit of the lay public was written by Pierre Dominique Lucchini (1889–1973), a journalist who had flirted with the Action Française, been a contributor to the Nouvelles litteraires and run the Vichy government’s news agency between 1941 and 1943. An essayist and a pamphleteer, he intended to show up the Jesuits’ ubiquity in the Catholic Church and within political institutions. He highlighted the sea change World War I had represented for the Society, the supranational nature of which had been denounced throughout the nineteenth century: it numbered 8,400 members on the Allied Powers’ side, 4,000 on the Central Powers’ side and another 4,000 in the neutral states.⁷⁶ The fourth centenary of Ignatius of Loyola’s death would coincide with the periodical Études’s first centenary, at a time when its director had to resign his position at the request of the Roman authorities. Historiography would be restricted to the re-edition of Bernoville’s treatise published two decades earlier.

More recent events were reported in roundabout ways bypassing ecclesiastical censorship. After Auguste Valensin (1879–1953) had died, his brother Albert edited his spiritual diary,⁷⁷ and Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) his correspondence with philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949); the book—whose author was at the time prohibited from publishing theology—got reviewed.⁷⁸ After treating the Jesuit’s papers and conference proceedings, the same de Lubac went on to sketch out a biography of this son of a Jewish father who had converted to the Catholic faith.⁷⁹ The handling of the case of paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was even thornier. A public figure⁸⁰ with an acknowledged scientific track record, he was marginalized by the Society while his writings circulated in secret. He had, before his death, entrusted his works to a lay friend to publish. The order’s hierarchy sought in vain to pressure Le Seuil publishers. The publication of Teilhard de Chardin’s works began in 1955, along with testimonies published in the press or in book form, shortly to be followed by a first biography.⁸¹ Unobtrusively, magisterial pressures faded away and in the early summer of 1961, de Lubac was tasked by the Society’s hierarchy with the defense of Teilhard de Chardin’s orthodoxy. Although a 1962 monitum from the Holy Office demanded that Catholics be protected from “the dangers presented by Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and his acolytes’ works,” the Jesuit was not censured. De Lubac published La pensée religieuse du Père Teilhard de Chardin,⁸²  La prière de Teilhard de Chardin,⁸³ and a book of correspondence between Blondel and Teilhard.⁸⁴ He accounted for the randomness of his forerunner’s thought system by pointing to the countless humiliations he suffered while also acknowledging the unwieldy passage from a scientific philosophy based in evidence to a spiritually oriented theology. The paleontologist’s appeal spread far beyond France’s borders. Undertaking A History of the Jesuits, Christopher Hollis, proposed to “make known the order that formed Teilhard de Chardin” with a view to showing that the Jesuits never were conservative.⁸⁵ In his wake, René d’Ouince published two volumes in homage to Teilhard de Chardin, his colleague and friend, in whom he saw a “prophet.”⁸⁶

The council era offered a generation of Jesuits specialized in the humanities the opportunity to advance a historiographical overhaul. At the review Christus, François Roustang (b.1923) and Michel de Certeau initiated the turnaround in February 1964. No longer should the object be, they asserted, an interpretation of Ignatius of Loyola’s fundamental intuitions: beginning instead with the problems as confronted by their contemporaries they should drive their analysis toward the spiritual meaning that may be found therein. Two years later a further step was taken: since religion was called into question in anthropological terms, they proposed to face up to the problematics with the tools of history, linguistics, psychology, and ethnology: “If no one can be found to replace us at Christus, we suggest that the review be concluded so that we may focus our effort on the foundation of a center for reflexion and action in the field of humanities.”⁸⁷ The so-called “Third Man” paper led to Roustang’s leaving the Society. De Certeau stayed put but his insertion in academia in the late 60s early 70s placed him in a unique position.⁸⁸

On the Action Populaire, the Society’s pivotal endeavor in the first half of the twentieth century, Paul Droulers (1903–93) published a vast monograph.⁸⁹ The Jesuit, a history professor at the Gregorian University, describes the development of this organization inspired by social Catholicism in the face of what he calls an “integrist” opposition and its influence within the Catholic Church until 1942. His first volume drew a twofold criticism from Émile Poulat: as a specialist of the modernist crisis, he deplored a representation of social Catholicism conducted by its own actors. He further disputed their version of a history founded in the full harmony with modernity; he discerned enduring forms of intransigence in its midst.⁹⁰ In his own defense, the Jesuit pointed out that he had only sought to offer “a first hand documentation on Reims’s Action Populaire and its organizers”;⁹¹ twelve years later, he would publish a second volume in which, there again, historian Jean-Marie Mayeur should have wished for “some critical distance, and a less benign presentation of the tensions and conflicts.”⁹²

 As tongues and pens loosened within the Society, publications of highly variable quality came out during the 1970s. Translated from the German, Joseph Stierli’s essay Les jésuites⁹³ is of spiritual rather than historical import. Research by Alain Guillermou (1913–98), a professor of Romanian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, was enhanced by his preferential access to documentation preserved in Jesuit libraries.⁹⁴ In 1974, he would sign the introduction to the book version of the “Jésuites” article taken from tome VIII of the Dictionnaire de spiritualité,⁹⁵ jointly published by Beauchesne Publisher and the Centrum Ignatianum Spiritualitatis of the Roman Curia. That same year, surveying over a century and a half of history, the Jesuit André Ravier (1905–99) asked “is there not in the very nature of the Council a call for religious orders—Society of Jesus and others alike—to implement an aggiornamento of their own? An era of research, perplexity, and, let us face it, confrontation has started which is not over by a long shot.” ⁹⁶ Alain Guichard, a journalist at Le Monde produced an essay on the Freemasons and another on the Jews and then turned his attention to the Jesuits. Under its bland title, Les jésuites spans a four-century history. Yet, the author proves aware of the turning point marked by the 1901 exile while still taking more interest in, on the one hand, Vatican II followed by the post-council crisis, which raises issues of “obedience” and, on the other hand, the challenge of “atheism.” The problematics of the relation to authorities lies at the heart of Jean Roche’s work, which presents Franz-Xavier Wernz (1842–1914), the general of the Society during the Modernist Crisis as a “shining example of courage and of obedience too” in his defense of “his subordinates” against the Roman congregations and Pope Pius X (r.1903–14) himself:

At a time of bitter Franco-German rivalry, he unfailingly stood up for the French Jesuits of Études, the likes of Fathers Lebreton and Grandmaison, and the founders of the Action Populaire, Fathers Leroy and Desbuquois, against the calumnies hurled at them from the integrist camp, whether at La Sapinière or elsewhere. He further defended the right to think, research and teach freely in the Society. Notably, he steadfastly refused to make compulsory in philosophy houses the adoption of the twenty-four Thomist theses, even as some Jesuit or other, then very influential in Rome, pushed for this step to be taken.⁹⁷

That very question of the relation to magisterial authority in a context of crisis was revisited in 1977 in a book by historian Renée Bédarida (1919–2015) on the occasion of the Cahiers and Courrier du témoignage chrétien published by the Éditions ouvrières.⁹⁸  This monograph, which provided an annex over a hundred pages with maps of the clandestine publications’ outreach, figures for the print runs, extracts from the articles deemed most significant at a time when historians began to turn their attention to the French Catholics during the Second World War, came about in a context of tension between the Roman Magisterium and a number of French theologians, including some Jesuits. At the end of the 70s and in the early 80s, the Society was in turmoil manifesting behaviors to which Superior General Pedro Arrupe (1907–1991)⁹⁹ did not take kindly:

An anti-institutional attitude seems to be spreading these days in our societies, which affects the Church as well as the Society. In the latter’s case, some of its members, fortunately in small number, have come to set themselves up as “detached” from the Body. They do not feel a shared identity with the others; they speak of the Society as of something that is external to them, nay: foreign. They declare themselves sometimes Jesuits sometimes detached from the Body at their own convenience […]. How irresponsible! In this, I see one aspect of secularization, a danger recent pontiffs had warned us against.¹⁰⁰

In this context, John-Paul II made public his predecessor’s address taking the Society to task over disciplinary and doctrinal issues. While rejecting Superior General Pedro Arrupe’s resignation, he suspended the Constitutions, to appoint two representatives in preparation for a general congregation. Comparing the Society’s structure to that of the Dominican order, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach (1928–2016, in office 1983–2008), is quoted as describing the former as an “absolute monarchy tempered by generalized disobedience.”¹⁰¹

Part Three: A Still Debated but No Longer Contentious Object (1970–2010)

In France the number of entering novices has significantly dropped since the end of the 1950s while the number departing peaked during the 70s: 3100 Jesuits in 1940, close on 1100 in 1982 down to 580 in 2004. The Society has regrouped its four provinces into one, which formed close links with the French-speaking Jesuit province of Southern Belgium and Luxembourg in 2012. It has entrusted lay staff with the management of most of its schools and colleges. Closing the Chantilly center, it has transferred its fonds to La Part-Dieu, in Lyon. In 2002 it vacated the Centre for Slavic Studies in Meudon, which had been opened in 1945 and had grown to include 80000 volumes, including Prince Ivan Gagarine’s collection. Known after his conversion to Catholicism as Jean-Xavier Gagarine (1814–82),¹⁰² he became a Jesuit and was the founding editor of the periodical Études.¹⁰³ As the millennium dawned, the situation seemed to improve, sustained by the Centre Sèvres and the Belgian publishers Lessius. In that latter period, when anti-Jesuitism switched sides, now embraced by the censors of a post Vatican II cum May 68 Jesuit “errancy,” the Society of Jesus’s role in education has been assigned to the field of cultural history. Meanwhile, religious historiography, enriched by major academic research, individual testimonies and commemorative accounts, is the theater of a debate around the alleged advent of a “third Society” born in the aftermath of the Council.

Do we still have Jesuit historians? Undoubtedly. The scientific quality of the “Jesuits” entry of the Dictionnaire de spiritualité, notably in the sections drafted by Michel de Certeau for the eighteenth century,¹⁰⁴ and Pierre Vallin (b.1928) for the nineteenth, provides for further scholarship.¹⁰⁵ A professor at Centre Sèvres, Vallin has specialized in the history of “intransigent Catholicism,” a current to which the Jesuits were attached a century earlier; he has authored countless dictionary entries and articles in the Society’s collective works or publications such as Études, Projet, Recherches de science religieuse. His colleague Paul Duclos (1917–93) has drafted a history of the Society in France in the nineteenth and twentieth century though this nomenclature work has remained in manuscript form (150 pages long). Nevertheless, he has used it for the introduction to the first volume of the Dictionnaire du monde religieux de la France contemporaine, the publication of which he directed and which is, to a large extent, devoted to the Jesuits. It is chronologically broken down into 20 to 25 year periods from 1814 to 1960, with the Society’s zenith set during the interwar period during which its priests contributed so much to the renewal of French Catholicism: “[…] there can be no doubt that if French people’s religious fervor up to 1940 became more personal, more emotional, it is partly under the influence of Jesuit spiritual directors, chaplains, preachers.”¹⁰⁶ The portrayal of the “spiritual Resistance” takes up the best part of the Occupation and Vichy section. The following period denotes on the one hand a social orientation aimed at reaching out to unchurched French strata and, on the other, exegetical and theological research, underscored by the 1950 Roman warnings and sanctions. In 1979 the order decided to equip itself with a reference tool: produced under the direction of Jesuits Charles E. O'Neill (1927–2009) and Joaquín Maria Domínguez, the Society’s historical dictionary proposes “national” entries and the biographies of Jesuits from France, Belgium and Canada.¹⁰⁷ In this field of research the most important work is owed to a Pole, Robert Danieluk. Having completed in France his Master of Advanced Studies on the Jesuits under the second Empire, then a thesis on Sommervogel and the nineteenth-century Jesuits bibliographers,¹⁰⁸ he took up a post at the Society’s archive offices in Vanves.

The initiative—tentative at the end of the 1950s—of publishing some Jesuit biographies expanded remarkably at the turn of the millennium in the shape of autobiographies or book-length interviews. Among these testimonies, the first, posthumous, came from Cardinal Jean Daniélou (1905–74).¹⁰⁹ The Mémoire sur l’occasion de mes écrits, by Henri de Lubac was completed in 1975, then revised and increased by one chapter in 1981.¹¹⁰ François Varillon (1905–78), noted for his conferences, followed suit,¹¹¹ along with Emile Rideau (1899–1981), who worked into a broader canvas his training then his ministry as a worker priest and later as a university chaplain and collaborator to Études.¹¹² Jacques Sommet (1912–2012) related his concentration camps experience,¹¹³ as did Michel Riquet who also outlined his intellectual outreach in Parisian circles and his commitment to interreligious dialogue.¹¹⁴ Jacques Guillet (1910–2001), who escaped from his POW camp in Germany before joining the Free French Forces, recalled his pastoral responsibilities as prefect of the scholasticate at Fourvière and director of the “Théologie” collection after the 1950 Vatican censure,¹¹⁵ Xavier Léon-Dufour (1912–2007) enlarged on the aid he and his colleagues afforded the Jews during the Occupation as well as the controversy raised by the publication of his book Résurrection de Jésus et Message pascal.¹¹⁶ André Manaranche (b.1927) discussed his opposition to the orientations adopted by the Society since th1970s.¹¹⁷ Theologians Joseph Moingt (b.1915)¹¹⁸ and Bernard Sesboüé (b.1929)¹¹⁹ reviewed their activity within Recherches de science religieuse. A specialist of Marxism and social issues, Jean-Yves Calvez (1927–2010) evinced some reservations as to certain orientations taken by his order.¹²⁰ For all that he was a moving force behind it, Paul Valadier (b.1933) has little to say about matters concerning the order’s formation.¹²¹ His elder, Xavier Tilliette (b.1921), also a philosopher, is not so reticent when criticizing the evolutions of the last three decades of the twentieth century:

I did not take kindly to the change or to its grievous consequences, the results of a secularization the effects of which Father de Lubac decried. I had grown convinced that the Jesuits, strengthened by their formation and experience, had the backbone to resist dismantlement. I was wrong and we followed, nay, anticipated the behavior of diocesan clergy and other orders: declericalization, declergification. Though the spirit was mostly rescued, the letter has all but disappeared.¹²²

The publishing phenomenon of the “Grandes voix jésuites” overlaps with that of high circulation non-specialist books.¹²³ Alain Woodrow’s 1984 essay, focuses on the defining moment that was Pedro Arrupe’s election in 1965, and his French-backed policy of a preferential option for the poor sets the tone. The high circulation monthly Lire leaped at the opportunity to quote pages the truncations of which court anachronism. For instance, before the Second World War, French “trail-blazing Jesuits” (Woodrow mentions Teilhard and  Calvez—who does not remotely belong to that generation—or Chaillet) are painted in a conflictual relationship with Rome and the “German Jesuits” in Pope Pius XII’s entourage.¹²⁴ The book was reprinted in 1990 to mark four hundred and fifty years of the Society jointly with Ignatius of Loyola’s five hundredth birthday. In the French translation of an essay by Malachi Martin (1921–1999), formerly an Irish Jesuit who served in Rome until his rejection of some Council developments, the focus is kept on the struggle twentieth century French Jesuits led against “capitalism” and “Roman centralism.”¹²⁵ The Jesuit Jean-Claude Dhôtel’s book grants little more than a passing nod to the Society’s history concentrating instead on its current relevance.¹²⁶ The Founder’s Écrits¹²⁷ were published. The translation from the Italian of a book-form interview with Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, was prefaced with an introduction by Jean-Yves Calvez.¹²⁸ In the same commemorative spirit, Dante Vacchi and Anne Vuylsteke published Les jésuites en liberté, a coffee table book illustrated with numerous photographs and published by Filipacchi. The dedication alludes to the “Arrupe affair” and the book obeys a geographic breakdown: the Americas, Asia, Madagascar, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, where France only gets a mention in the context of the late eighteenth-century condemnation. The French edition is prefaced by André Ravier’s article published fifteen years earlier and printed unchanged. A journalist and a historian teamed up for another photo-rich hardback, titled Les jésuites ou la gloire de Dieu.¹²⁹ On a broad canvas sketched out with the help of students, the journalist Jean Lacouture (1921–2015) complemented the Old Society’s epic history, given pride of place in John W. O’Malley’s (b.1927)  simultaneously appearing work,¹³⁰ with a nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jesuit history.¹³¹ His admission to being a “bricoleur,”¹³² a dabbler, has not precluded his insertion in a good few bibliographies. High circulation weeklies joined in the celebrations,¹³³ while the audio-visual media crafted documentaries around the figure of Teilhard for some, and Jesuit Resistance figures for the rest.¹³⁴ Come the twenty-first century, the “Jesuit myth” becomes the object of historical scrutiny in the academic works of Michel Leroy (b.1948)¹³⁵, Geoffrey T. Cubitt¹³⁶ in the UK, and a paper by Philippe Boutry (b.1954).¹³⁷

The next commemorative wave would address more specifically the history of the Society in France: the centenary of the Action populaire in 2003;¹³⁸ the fiftieth anniversary of Christus en 2004;¹³⁹ in 2006, Études’ 150 years¹⁴⁰ celebrated with atheist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva at UNESCO House; Recherches de science Religieuse’s one hundred years in 2010. In the Society’s journals, articles of a historiographical nature written by experts or scholars not involved in academia. On the occasion of the RSR’s centenary, the Carmelite theologian, Jean-Baptiste Lecuit (b.1965) offers a review of the collective publication Théologies et vérité au défi de l’histoire.¹⁴¹ He shows that, mutatis mutandis, the tension between observing the Church’s teachings and complying with scientific methodological requirements as intended by its founder Léonce de Grandmaison, endures. It has lost none of its relevance, even if

the context is no longer the modernist crisis faced then, and if the antagonism between faith and science has lost some of its intensity [….]  [the] requisite integration of historicity is today more pressing than the need to overcome the opposition between faith and reason, or between observance of the Magisterium and epistemological pertinence.¹⁴²

Academic research throughout these years attests to both a dynamic environment and an extensive freedom. Access to archival material was readily available even for the most recent periods as well as for sensitive dossiers. In the summer of 1999, Robert Bonfils drafted a Guide des archives des jésuites de France à Vanves, located just outside Paris.¹⁴³ Up until 1987–89, these archives were split between four depositories corresponding to the provinces: the Province of France, aka Paris, the archives of which had been kept in Jersey, then in Chantilly; the Province of Lyon, the archives of which had been kept in Paray-le-Monial then Francheville; the Province of Toulouse, city where they had been kept and the Province of Champagne the archives of which had been moved from Enghien to Lille and finally to a Reims suburb. The breakdown of provinces introduced from 1961 to 1976 added to the complexity of the archiving process. As a rule, distinctions were drawn between matters of government and administration, matters of ministry and missionary formation and “personal files.” Unless destroyed by the persons concerned or intentionally passed on to lay people, these files are systematically classified:

The documents of houses that were allocated to another province in 1961 remain in their original province. For instance, the documents relating to Rouen, in France-Nord from 1961 to 1976, or to Nantes, in the province of France-Atlantique during that 15-year period are to be found in the Paris Province archival collections. However the fathers’ personal files are, barring specified exceptions, to be found in the province to which they belonged when they died. Out of four sub-collections, two, Toulouse and Champagne, came with an inventory, sound in the case of Toulouse, dubious for Champagne. The inventory and classifying for Paris and Lyon has gradually improved since 1991. This explains the disparity between the classification and inventory of the four sub-collections.¹⁴⁴

Dominique Julia (b.1940) et Marie-Madeleine Compère (1946–2007), two academics specializing in the history of education in the early modern period continued in the footsteps of François de Dainville.¹⁴⁵ In 1985 a symposium¹⁴⁶ created the opportunity to arrive at an overview. The speakers included Marc Fumaroli, known for publishing a study on rhetoric where the Jesuits took center stage.¹⁴⁷ With Les jésuites à la Renaissance and Les jésuites à l’âge baroque¹⁴⁸ Luce Giard, close to Certeau, helped “désenclave”¹⁴⁹ Jesuit history, after the formula used by the authors of an evaluation of this contribution to historiography in the special issue of the Revue de synthèse.¹⁵⁰ Free from the animus still rampant one century earlier, these scholars, investigating Jesuit insertion in the “intellectual,” learned, and scientific spheres as well as in education and in literary and artistic culture, show how the men from the Old Society were party to the advent of modernity.

Lagging slightly behind, the New Society has elicited almost equal interest. In their sweeping surveys on The Histoire religieuse de la France, Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire stress the part played by the Jesuits notably in Catholic youth movements;¹⁵¹ their analysis is more reticent when dealing with the thinking of some intellectuals they engaged in the 1970s.¹⁵² The place of the Society is also significant in the collective historiographical project for a Histoire du christianisme in several volumes. Bernard Plongeron (b.1933) declares the 1773 suppression a “watershed in eighteenth century civilization.”¹⁵³ Claude Langlois (b.1937), stresses, in tome IV of the Histoire de la France religieuse, how much the New Society was possessed with the mood of the Restoration of the monarchy and the church.¹⁵⁴ René Rémond (1918–2007) who directed this project, writing the preface for the reprint of the Journal de la conscience française by Gaston Fessard (1897–1978), shows some reservations towards the author’s analysis.¹⁵⁵ A symposium dedicated to Yves de Montcheuil (1900–44)¹⁵⁶ draws Jesuit Resistance to public attention. A biography of Pierre Chaillet (1900–72), the founder of the clandestine newssheet Témoignage Chrétien, the mouthpiece of the so-called Spiritual Resistance, is authored by Renée Bédarida (1919–2015)¹⁵⁷. In 2001, the 60^th anniversary of the title is the occasion for François Bédarida (1926–2001) and Renée Bédarida to publish a collection of extracts from the Cahiers and from the Courriers du Témoignage Chrétien, complete with introductions and notes and an exhaustive list of the headlines of the Cahiers and Courriers between the autumn of 1941 and the summer of 1944.¹⁵⁸ Michel Cool chief editor of the restyled Témoignage Chrétien, celebrated “a squadron of young Jesuits […] who were for a whole generation, the honor and the hope of a France who did not want to lose her soul.”¹⁵⁹ The journalist and Academician Henri Amouroux (1920–2007), specialist of French everyday life under the Occupation, saluted the “courage” of that handful of Jesuits, at “a time when anti-Semitism was near enough the ‘official religion’.”¹⁶⁰ For his part, Bernard Comte (b.1930) proposes a distinction between three types of Resistance: aid and life-saving humanitarian action, the spiritual resistance’s educational effort and moral entreaties, and collaboration with armed resistance organizations.¹⁶¹

What all the above-quoted contemporaneous historians have in common is their personal proximity with Jesuits, notably in the context of the Second World War. Etienne Fouilloux (b.1941) who did not share this experience marks a historiographical milestone. His interest in the Society of Jesus starts in the late sixties, and focuses on the Jesuits who were involved in a range of approaches towards Christian unity.¹⁶² This leads him to follow itineraries as diverse as those of Michel d’Herbigny (1880–1957)¹⁶³ and the Groupe des Dombes¹⁶⁴ at both ends of an era that goes from the condemnation of an emerging ecumenical movement to its official recognition by Rome. In a second phase, his interest in Ignatius’s sons turns to their intellectual heft, notably throughout the period preceding Vatican II. His Église en quête de liberté, which builds on L’audace et le soupçon by Pierre Colin (1923–2009), arises from this ongoing research that aims to pinpoint the place of those French theologians—Jesuits and Dominicans foremost among them—who contributed to “the change in intellectual outlook in a Church haunted by the specter of Modernism.”¹⁶⁵ A third phase yields monographic research on the collection “Sources chrétiennes”¹⁶⁶ or the origins of the review Christus,¹⁶⁷ biographical studies,¹⁶⁸ and more synoptic analyses in the spirit of symposia. On the strength of his colleagues’ recent research, the historian analyses the shift that, in less than a century, took historiography “from virulent anti-Jesuitism to a measure of philo-Jesuitism” as a result of the four determining experiences represented by “exile,”¹⁶⁹ “progressivism,”¹⁷⁰ “the war,” and “youth movements”:¹⁷¹

We should of course seek its broader causes in the evolution of outlooks on the Catholic Church, on religious orders or congregations and on the Society of Jesus itself, especially since the 1905 Séparation. We shall be content here to suggest some of the reasons inherent to Ignatius of Loyola’s French descent. The most far-reaching, which are also the least perceptible, probably result from a slow impregnation via education, retreats and preaching through which members of the order less well known than the “great” Jesuits demonstrated to their charges the absurdity of the black legend.¹⁷²

Under the aegis of Etienne Fouilloux and Bernard Hours (b.1959) a first symposium organized by the Conseil scientifique du “Fonds des Fontaines » is held in Lyon’s municipal library and attended by specialists of modern and contemporary history.¹⁷³  This encounter marks the beginning of regular meetings addressing questions specific to the history of the Society of Jesus.¹⁷⁴ The very latest, in 2014, answered the question “Is there a Jesuit spirituality?” Meanwhile a new generation of historians has cut its teeth approaching the Society of Jesus through the encounter with its high figures, generational groups,¹⁷⁵ or intellectual debate.¹⁷⁶Les jésuites dans la société française,¹⁷⁷ by Dominique Avon (b.1968)¹⁷⁸ and Philippe Rocher (b.1966)¹⁷⁹ represent a first stab at an overview that challenges the historiographical proposal of a “third Society,” placing the time of a major shift in the inter-war period; this is confirmed by other studies, not least those concerned with issues of anti and philo-Semitism.¹⁸⁰ Michel de Certeau’s biography by François Dosse (b.1950), who has had no formation in the field of religious history,¹⁸¹ heralds the de-confessionalization of this field of studies. The Jesuits duly figure in the history of psychoanalysis after Louis Beirnaert (1906–85)¹⁸² paved the way thereafter trodden by Michel de Certeau¹⁸³ and even more so by Denis Vasse (b.1933).¹⁸⁴ Among the projects including many researchers from this latest generation see the Dictionnaire des jésuites, by Benoist Pierre (b.1968) for Robert Laffont, in the collection Bouquins.

Now far removed from nineteenth-century controversy, Jesuit education in the late modern period is fully an object of historical scrutiny. The notion of the end of authentic Jesuit colleges, illustrated by John W. Padberg, alludes to the failure to keep alive in letter and spirit the Society of Jesus’s educational ideal. With  the spiritual dimension of the educational apostolate in mind,¹⁸⁵ Pierre Vallin discerns the essence of two modes of presence to the world in these institutions: one extolling both the humility of the tasks falling to the “régent” or class assistant and the mutual emulation between educators and teachers, and the other emphasizing the trusting relationship between the fathers and their pupils.¹⁸⁶ In his sweeping historical survey,¹⁸⁷ Philippe Rocher¹⁸⁸ closely observes the college as a unit for life and for Jesuit formation. Further academic research focuses on the “Conférences” the Jesuits facilitated in Paris for the benefit of students,¹⁸⁹ whether around marking figures,¹⁹⁰ viz. Pierre Lyonnet (1906–49),¹⁹¹ or specialist subjects.¹⁹² The singular figure of Marcel Jousse (1886–1961) stands out in this, the field of education; his collaborator’s publications¹⁹³ have been followed by numerous studies on the educational applications of the Jesuit anthropologist’s findings, not least in the field of religion.¹⁹⁴

The history of French Jesuit external missions is examined through a fresh lens. Forty years after the missiology developed by Pierre Charles (1883–1954), Pedro Arrupe officially endorsed the concept of “inculturation” to designate an evangelization adapted to a foreign society or a different culture.¹⁹⁵ For a long time the interest in China was limited to the early modern period, the years prior to the missionaries’ expulsions in the wake of the Chinese Rites Controversy,¹⁹⁶ years richly documented by the Jesuits themselves.¹⁹⁷ While much research has dwelt on early modern China, its late modern period now also attracts academic attention.¹⁹⁸ The field is dominated by specialists unimpeded by the language barrier, as with the  Jesuit Benoît Vermander,¹⁹⁹ both a historian and a witness. Published testimonies such as that of Jesuit Pierre Leroy (1900–92), one of Teilhard de Chardin’s associates, director of the Institut Géobiologique in Peking (1940–46) and CNRS researcher (1946–70)²⁰⁰ are tantamount to source material. For his part, Jean Lefeuvre (1922–2010), worked with Claude Larre (1919–2001),²⁰¹ towards the Grand Dictionnaire Ricci de la Langue chinoise published in 2001.²⁰² Yves Raguin (1912–98), a champion of inter-cultural spiritual convergence is the object of a biographical study.²⁰³ Meanwhile Pierre Ceyrac (1914–2012), brought to public notice by his interview on Jacques Chancel’s radio talk show in 1981, volunteered answers on his missionary activity in India from 1937, and his life is recorded in a biography.²⁰⁴ Africa has always played host to Jesuit missionaries as Roland Pichon (1937–2002) illustrates for Debi Yomtou:²⁰⁵ his apostolate took him from Chad, to Zambia, to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), to the Seychelles and, beyond, to Martinique. Some of his colleagues, e.g., Éric de Rosny (1930–2012)²⁰⁶ or Claude Pairault (1923–2002),²⁰⁷ would in the meantime become anthropologists.

More broadly, the history of a culture clash outside Europe benefits from “the recognition of mission as a formal academic pursuit” over the past 50 years.²⁰⁸ In the wake of Jacques Gadille (1927–2013), professor at Lyon University and founder in 1979 of the CREDIC (Centre de Recherches et d’Échanges sur la Diffusion et l’Inculturation du Christianisme), a vast amount of research is being carried out under the direction of Claude Prud’homme.²⁰⁹ Oissila Saaïdia counts some Jesuits in his study of Catholic and Muslim religious actors’ cross-perspectives.²¹⁰ The nineteenth-century Syrian mission, which embraced Lebanon and Egypt, is at the core of Chantal Verdeil’s²¹¹ doctoral thesis while Dominique Avon surveys more broadly the forms and stakes of Jesuit missionary work in the first half of the twentieth century.²¹² The analysis of the encounter of cultures in the Jesuit mission in Madagascar, conducted first by the anthropologist Françoise Raison-Jourde, was further surveyed by Jesuit Stéphane Nicaise,²¹³ also an anthropologist. As for the Jesuit missions in North America, essentially Canada,²¹⁴ studies undertaken from the 1990s onwards are the preserve of academics. Following on Sylvie Dussault’s study of the Jesuit mission to the Ojibwa,²¹⁵ the Belgian Olivier Servais explores four so-called “Indian” missions: Walpole, a Catholic French mission to the Anishinaabek, Wikwemikong on Anglican turf, where the Jesuits set up a method close to the one adopted once in Paraguay’s “reductions,” a mixed mission at Sault and Garden River, peripatetic as well as attending to the “natives” settled around the missionaries’ residence, and Fort-William an originally peripatetic mission. That study concludes that though the Jesuits adapted the better for receiving no instructions, the “natives” were on the whole unreceptive while seeking to make the best of their contact with the fathers.²¹⁶

Conclusion

After a historiography in two diverging voices, apologetic for one and anti-Jesuit for the other, the writing of the history of the Society of Jesus has benefitted in France from scholarly critical methodology. However, while the “black legend” has almost completely vanished, a part of the “golden legend” has yet to be fully dismissed. Two historiographical schools took shape at the end of the twentieth century: the first places the advent of a “third Society” during the inter-wars period while the other, essentially driven by late modern period historians, including Jesuit Patrick Goujon (b.1969), favors the Second Vatican Council as the time of the birth of a new Society. Stressing “the need to set the 1814 reinstatement in the long term,” “the history of the order,” can, according to Patrick Goujon be split into “three broad periods: from the foundations to the seventeenth century, a long phase stretching from Acquaviva’s generalship to the build up to Vatican II in the 1950s and finally the phase running from the Council to present days.” Framed on the occasion of a symposium²¹⁷ and in a forceful book,²¹⁸ this conception is disputed by nineteenth and twentieth century specialists. Claude Langlois among others, refutes this interpretation, also developed by Jesuit John O’Malley,²¹⁹ on the basis that “placed in such a long timeframe, the 1814 event becomes so diluted as to make one wonder whether it is anything worth remembering.” That historian insists that “the date of re-establishment places the Jesuits in a singular position. The Concordat signed in 1801 between Napoleon and the Holy See had reinstated the Lazarists, Sulpicians and Trappist orders. Meanwhile, the Dominicans and Benedictines would only be reinstated much later, circa 1840, and would thus be much less affected by the political context of their return to France: it is not by chance that Lacordaire, a Dominican, was able to develop a liberal position which finds no echoes in the other orders.”²²⁰

For more bibliographical information, consult Boston College Jesuit Bibliography: The New Sommervogel Online (NSO).