In July of 1731, as the controversy over the growing cult at Saint-Médard grew, a woman named Aimée Pivert came to François de Pâris’s tomb seeking a cure for some neurological disorder. This illness may have been epilepsy, for upon touching the tomb, she was sent into spasmic contortions, causing some to think her possessed. Almost every day for a month, she experienced these convulsions at Saint-Médard, until finally she went away claiming she’d been cured. Two weeks later, some other women appeared to convulse at the tomb and then claimed to have been healed, one of them asserting that she had regained the powers of speech and hearing after the experience. At the end of August, an anticonstitutionnaire abbot by the name of Bescherand, whose leg had been withered since he was a boy, went to the cemetery to pray for a cure in hopes of further bolstering the Jansenist cause. This abbot also began screaming and experiencing dramatic contortions and convulsions every day when he visited, with some reports claiming that his writhing body lifted into the air in a way they could not explain. He would shout that different parts of his body were in pain, and the cult’s adherents would rub dirt from de Pâris’s grave onto those places, which somehow relieved his suffering. This went on for weeks, with the police that were present to keep the peace describing his displays as scandalous and terrifying in their reports. Jansenist doctors, who had been present for some time to record any miracles at the cemetery, examined him regularly and claimed his atrophied leg was much improved, while critics of the cult pointed out that he still couldn’t walk on it, suggesting he was faking the entire thing. Soon, though, these convulsions began to spread, as though contagious, whether through the power of suggestion or for reasons we have previously seen suggested to explain the Dancing Plague, like the consumption of tainted bread, or as suggested at the time, because of “hysteria” or even “erotic vapors.” As the ecclesiastical and political controversy continued to swirl around the cult, the occurrences at François de Pâris’s tomb began to change, and certainly in a metaphorical sense, these convulsions truly were contagious, for from them originated great tremors that would shake up not only the cult members and their Jansenist supporters, but the Gallican church, the sovereign court, and the entire ancien régime of pre-Revolutionary France.

The doctrinal controversy associated with the cult at Saint-Médard—that of Jansenist resistance to the papal bull Unigenitus—had already caused a further schism, this one not in the church, but in the government, between the Parliament, or sovereign court, of Paris and the royal authority of King Louis XV. Within the Parliament were certain factions who were strongly allied with or sympathetic toward the Jansenists, and these magistrates and barristers pushed against royal authority in such matters as the Formulary controversy, when Jansenists were compelled to sign a formula of submission, as well as in the king’s subsequent efforts to make the Unigenitus bull a state law rather than just a church doctrine. But among the Jansenist-friendly members of the sovereign court, there were also those directly supportive of the cult of François de Pâris at Saint-Médard. One was François de Pâris’s own brother, who unlike François had followed his family’s path into the law but had come to hold his late brother in great esteem. Another was a magistrate named Montgeron, who had visited François de Pâris’s tomb at Saint-Médard and become a believer after lapsing into a lengthy trance there. These figures helped to rally the Parliament of Paris not only to the cause of the Jansenists, but to the aid of the cult at Saint-Médard as well, which they did by asserting the court’s right to hear appeals on disputed ecclesiastical cases, such as the suspension of Jansenist priests and the findings of investigations into miracles, should an appeal be made. Thus when the Archbishop of Paris, Vintimille, issued a decree forbidding the observances at Saint-Médard and Cardinal Fleury arranged for police to be stationed around the cemetery, the sovereign court took up the cause of the cult in earnest. Their power was a check to episcopal power, they argued, and therefore a bulwark to protect royal authority from the growing power of the Gallican Church. The king, however, whose chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, oversaw ecclesiastical matters, saw it more as a challenge to his own power. Add to this further pressure from Rome, where Pope Clement XII had expressed dissatisfaction with the king’s inability to crush this schismatic cult, ordered a certain biography of François de Pâris to be burned in the streets, and declared all the miracles attributed to him false. King Louis XV chose to bend to pressure from the church rather than pressure from the court, and he wielded his royal prerogative to annul certain of Parliament’s decisions on these matters. In protest, the Parliament of Paris went on strike, disrupting the administration of justice in the city for three months, and turning the so-called “affair of the Bull” which had become tied to the “affair of the miracles” into the “affair of the Parlement.”

A depiction of the Grand Chamber of the Parlement of Paris in the early 18th century, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, the miracles at Saint-Médard had begun to be overshadowed by the strange convulsionism occurring at the cemetery, and Cardinal Fleury, perhaps thinking it best to act while the sovereign court was on strike, ordered the lieutenant of police in Paris, one Monsieur Hérault, to investigate. Hérault had already undertaken an investigation of the miraculous cures for Fleury, finding most of them to have been only a temporary remission of symptoms followed by a relapse, and declaring others to be outright Jansenist frauds. Embarking on a similar mission to debunk this new development in the miracles, he started by arresting several of the growing group of people who were experiencing convulsions at Saint-Médard, those who had come to be called convulsionnaires, and locking them up at the Bastille. There, Hérault interrogated them in long, grueling sessions and had them examined by respected physicians over the course of two weeks. Among those examined were one Pierre-Martin Gontier, who under duress confessed that he consciously made himself have these convulsions and demonstrated them on command, making his limbs stiff and then shaking them and contorting himself into a variety of postures. Gontier, upon his release, recanted this confession, but others Hérault likewise grilled intensely and had examined by doctors made similar admissions. They always denied any fraudulent intent, though, claiming instead a desire to fit in among the others experiencing such convulsions. Then again, some refused, even after numerous interrogations, to admit that their convulsions were anything but genuine and divinely inspired. These he left out of his report. Armed with the results of his investigation, Cardinal Fleury succeeded in getting the king to declare the convulsions a threat to public order and issue an ordinance shutting down the cemetery at Saint-Médard once and for all. Early one morning in January 1732, armed guards marched through the streets of the Paris suburb of Saint-Marcaeu, stationing copies of the ordinance high enough that it would be difficult to tear them down, posting guards on horseback at the church and cemetery, and locking the gates of Saint-Médard. Thereafter, Hérault’s police force arrested any convulsionnaires who publicly displayed their spasms and contortions.

By this time, the Parliament had come to an understanding with the king and convened once again, but they were not about to stand by and watch what they viewed as a gross abuse of ecclesiastical authority. Especially outraged at the closing of the cemetery was Jérome-Nicolas Pâris, François de Pâris’s brother, who called the Archbishop’s denunciations of his brother’s biography calumny, and who insisted that the police and the church officials either had already or soon would desecrate his brother’s grave by exhuming him. Eventually, though, when these rumors were proven untrue by an inspection of the tomb, the Parliament’s opposition to the closing of the cemetery faded, as it seemed there was little they could do about it. However, if the goal of the Cardinal and Archbishop had been to crush the cult of François de Pâris and the convulsionnaires entirely, they soon realized that they had failed to accomplish it. Unable to perform their observances and experience their convulsions in the cemetery or in public, the cult of François de Pâris moved underground, meeting in whatever chapels would host them or in private residences. To avoid arrest, they were forced to become something of a secret society, addressing each other using codenames, and gaining entrance to their secret sessions with passwords. At these sessions, which often lacked any kind of clergy to lead them, a spirit of egalitarianism developed, with lay people delivering extemporaneous sermons to the rich and the poor alike, among men and women, none of whom held any position of power over any other. As before, they carried relics of François de Pâris, and dirt from his grave at Saint-Médard, in an effort to bring the presence of their unofficial saint into their sessions, and also before, through appeals for his intercession, miraculous cures were reported, often accompanied by convulsions. Indeed, it was only the ability to experience convulsions that seems to have afforded any status among the group. This convulsionism became more and more the focal point of these sessions, developing stranger, even supernatural qualities that drew even disbelievers to seek out these secret sessions as entertainment and to judge for themselves whether to believe the strange, seemingly paranormal events occurring there. In this way, the convulsionnaires were forerunners of the spiritualists of the 19th century. In fact, the French word used for a convulsionnaire session, was séance.

Depiction of convulsionnaires in the Bastille, via Wikimedia Commons

As the séances of the convulsionnaires gradually changed in character, the convulsions became more important in themselves, not as a medium through which miracles were performed, but as a kind of divine communication to the sect. More and more, those experiencing the convulsions appeared to or claimed to experience great pain from them, and then to indicate through gestures that they required some physical relief from others present in the form of some kind of bodily contact. This could be seen as an evolution from the earliest convulsions of Bescherand who asked that dirt from François de Pâris’s grave be rubbed on parts of his body, but among the convulsionnaires, this was taken to extremes. It was declared that they required injury to be done to them in order to achieve this secour, or relief. So convulsionnaires, many of them young women contorting themselves into indiscreet and even lewd positions, would be struck violently upon their bodies and appeared to gain physical pleasure from it. These blows eventually became known as petits secours, or small relief, for soon they graduated to grands secours, or even secours meurtriers, murderous relief. These convulsing women would be mercilessly beaten with blunt weapons, trampled upon, stuck with pins, and even stabbed with knives and swords! At the utmost extreme, it became rather common for convulsionnaires to be actually crucified before astonished audiences at their séances. And what is more astonishing, it was said that, not only did they derive relief or even ecstasy from these acts of violence, but they were said to have come through them unscathed, unbloodied and without a bruise or any other mark. It was said that, while convulsing, their bodies became invulnerable to harm, their skin impenetrable to blades.

Understandably, the evolution of the cult of François de Pâris to this bizarre convulsionism was decried, not only by Jesuits and constitutionnaires but by many Jansenists as well as a kind of fanaticism, or even as showing the influence of the Devil. First, these séances had a definite element of eroticism with the contorting young females moaning in pleasure upon being slapped and struck. But the crucifixions made it even harder to justify, and sometimes, during séances, convulsionnaires would feel compelled to commit blasphemies, like trampling on the Bible. However, many Jansenists were not ready to give up on the convulsonnaires, arguing that these acts represented a kind of tableau vivant, or living picture, that just needed interpretation to understand its symbolism. In this way, the crucifixions were said to be reenactments of Christ’s sacrifice, or more metaphorically, it was asserted that the painful convulsions represented the evil and the corruption in the church—specifically related to the papal bull Unigenitus, of course—and the secours, their violent relief, stood for the suffering that those faithful to true religion—the Jansensists—had to endure for the church to be redeemed. In this way, even trampling on the bible during convulsions could easily be explained as a representation of constitutionnaire apostasy or Jesuit heresy, and indecent exposure of female convulsionnaires could signify the licentiousness of the church. Still other Jansenists, unable to accept all that went on at these séances, argued that some discernment was required, and that, oddly, some of the acts of convulsionnaires were of divine origin while others were not, and it was up to leveler heads to distinguish which were which.

Depiction of a secouriste at work, via Wikimedia Commons — Depiction of a *secouriste* at work, via Wikimedia Commons

So what exactly is a modern, rational mind to think of the convulsionnaires? Really any view we might take of them was already entertained by some Englishtenment thinker of the day. What they may have called “hysteria,” we would otherwise consider a mass delusion, or a mania, encouraged by the power of suggestion and the desire to be part of a crowd and a shared experience. There is also the idea that some of these people suffered from genuine convulsions because of epilepsy, or even that many of them did. It is conceivable that, as experiencing convulsions became more and more associated with miracles and the divine, and as those who experience them were afforded some measure of respect in these circles, that people with epilepsy were drawn to these groups, or even recruited for their “gift.” As for their supposed invulnerability, this may have been a kind of parlor trick. The grands secours were administered by other members of the cult, so-called secouristes, who may have been careful not to hurt the convulsionnaires when they struck them and not to break the skin when they thrust the points of blades against them. It may have been more of a show after all, like televised wrestling, or more similar, like the séances of 19th century spiritualists. Other supernatural claims that were made about the convulsionnaires, such as that they exhibited clairvoyance or spoke in tongues or delivered elaborate sermons beyond their intellectual capability, could be as easily explained as many spiritualist tricks. We’re all well aware of the vague pronouncements that mediums and psychics use to fool people into thinking they have some preternatural knowledge. And glossolalia, or spontaneously speaking in an unknown tongue, by its very nature cannot be proven or disproven as genuine. As for the sermons, there were conflicting reports about this coming out of convulsionnaire séances. Some said they delivered elaborate sermons, while others described them as the rote repetition of statements obviously memorized beforehand. Likewise, reports from the séances contradict claims about convulsionnaire invulnerability. For every description of their being immune to harm, there are others describing young convulsionnaire women covered in blood and crawling on the floor as if in a trance. In the end, a sensible mind must dismiss the claims of supernatural acts as exaggerations amplified by Jansenist propagandists.

Among those Jansenists bent on legitimizing the convulsionnaires in order not to lose the cult of François de Pâris as their principal claim to legitimacy and doctrinal truth in the schism, there were some who tended toward Millenarianism, the end-times philosophy that the current state of things would soon pass away, ushering in a thousand-year golden age for the church. From this view, the convulsionism in the cult of François de Pâris was but the last sputtering before rebirth, an apocalyptic sign of revolutionary change to come. As with most Millenarian thought, this meant the return of the prophet Elijah, who departed from our world in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire and was prophesied to return as a harbinger of the Messiah. Now in Christianity, some see John the Baptist as Elijah returned, though John denied it, and others look to Christ’s transfiguration, when Elijah appeared in the sky with Moses, like a force ghost out of Star Wars, and say that was Elijah’s return. Millenarians, however, believe Elijah will return at the beginning of the end to herald the Second Coming of Christ. Among Millenarian Jansenist apologists of the convulsionnaires, it was claimed that, surely, Elijah would appear from among these pious vessels of God’s miraculous work. In fact, an anonymous convulsionnaire author took it even further than this in a document called The Mysterious Calendar for the Year 1733 Exactly Calculated on the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist and on the Prophecy of Isaiah, which saw in the Book of Revelations references to the persecution of Jansenists by the Gallican Church. This work asserted that Louis XV was actually the Antichrist himself, for his name in Latin, Ludovicus, when translated into Roman numerals, added up to the number of the beast, 666, and through a couple similarly dubious proofs, settled on 1733 as the beginning of the end of the world. From this milieu, unsurprisingly, there emerged more than one figure willing to make claims that they were prophets of the end times. One was a convulsionnaire whose codename, or nom de convulsion, was Augustin. Frere Augustin, or Brother Augustin, declared himself to be the forerunner of the returned prophet Elijah, and he and his followers were said to consider themselves beyond good and evil, engaging in all kinds of blasphemous and licentious activities at their séances, though whether this is accurate or just the propaganda of constitutionnaires is hard to discern. Then there was Pierre Vaillant, a mild-mannered anticonstitutionnaire abbot and participant in convulsionnaire séances who actually declared himself to be Elijah returned, on a mission to convert the Jews. But Augustin did not confirm Vaillant as the Elijah he had foretold, so the movement just became more and more splintered.

Depiction of a convulsionnaire seance, from the book ‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ , by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright. — Depiction of a *convulsionnaire seance,* from the book *‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ ,* by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright.

In the end, this is a story of schism upon schism, with one sect rising, only to have another sect born from its midst: the Jansenists, the anticonstituionnaires, the cult of François de Pâris, the convulsionnaires, the Millenarians, the so-called Augustinistes and the Vaillantistes. And these are just to name a few. I have actually simplified matter in this series, choosing not to define certain groups or movements like the appellants, the figurists, and the discernants just to try to make it more accessible. As this became more and more complicated, each group came to represent or contain some element that its predecessor could not stomach. So the Jansenists turned on the cult of François de Pâris when the convulsionism took over, and many of the followers of François de Pâris, who retained some sense of propriety and decorum, turned on the fanaticism and excesses of the convulsionnaires when they evolved to include the secours, and the convulsionnaires, many of whom still stuck to their conservative Jansenist theology, rejected the Augustinistes and Vaillantistes for their blasphemy and heresy. In the end, the outrageous doctrines of these sects actually did much to heal the divisions between the sovereign court, the Gallican Church, and the king, for none could stand behind a sect that called the king of France the Antichrist. So eventually, the Parliament of Paris abandoned the convulsionnaires as a cause celebre and worked with Cardinal Fleury to indict Frere Augustin and the worst of the Augustiniste fanatics. With the Parliament no longer countering their every move, ecclesiastical authorities moved to erase this modern age of miracles by officially denying all the cures attributed to François de Pâris, even the early ones that the Archbishop before Vintimille had previously confirmed to be genuine. A final story should serve to illustrate how entirely the power of the cult of François de Pâris and its convulsionnaires had waned. In 1737, after years of working on it in exile, the parliamentarian named Montgeron, whose conversion to convulsionism I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, completed a huge book compiling all the evidence in favor of the miracles attributed to François de Pâris, called The Truth of the Miracles Operated at the Intercession of Monsieur Pâris. Despite having previously been exiled, he dressed up in his finest clothes and strolled into the palace at Versaille, where he handed Louis XV his volume and urged him to read it. In response, King Louis had him tossed in prison for the rest of his life and ordered all copies of the book to be publicly burned.

Now this is not to say that the convulsionism of the followers of François de Pâris disappeared overnight. Their séances and sect persisted in ever dwindling numbers even long after Archbishop Vintimille and Cardinal Fleury and King Louis XV were gone. And it is completely reasonable to consider this entire affair as having made a definite contribution to not only the eventual French Revolution, but also to the emergence of Enlightenment thought and the modern world. While for the most part, the cult at Saint-Médard never expressed any revolutionary sentiment, the ecclesiastical and political struggles they exacerbated certainly seem to have weakened royal authority over the parliament, and likewise, parliamentary resistance to ecclesiastical authority created concrete rifts in the marriage of church and state. Additionally, the fact that the church and the sovereign court and the power of the throne all were forced to struggle with a group of pious commoners, and that even despite the exercise of power to destroy them, they persisted in secret, creating their own egalitarian religious organizations, speaks to the tendency in France at the time toward democratic ideals. Furthermore, and ironically, though this was a modern age of miracles, in the long run it had the counterintuitive effect of reducing the importance of miracles in the church. The lengths to which the church went to explain away the purported miracles, or to suggest they represented something diabolical, resulted in skepticism being the standard reaction to such claims. More than this, the fanaticism that appeared during this affair encouraged the philosophes of the French High Enlightenment in their attacks on religion and claims of the supernatural, helping to usher in the modern age of rationalism and materialism. Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out this irony best when he suggested that the miracles at Saint-Medard were better attested to than those of Jesus Christ himself, and so in working so hard to undermine and disprove those miracles, the church had unwittingly provided skeptics with the arguments needed to refute even the wonders performed by Jesus.

The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, Part Two: The Convulsionnaires

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