Dale Van Kley's epigram is an excellent summation of what distinguishes the French ‘Machiavellian Moment’ from other European contexts. The reception of the Atlantic republican tradition in France was unmistakably shaped by a kind of civic humanism in clerical garb, especially the intertwined religious heritages of Jansenism and Gallicanism. While distinct, these two traditions evolved in similar spaces and through debates over the role of the Catholic Church in French society.

J.G.A. Pocock emphasizes how republican ideology developed in distinction to varying kinds of ‘Court’ ideologies. This is the case with Jansenism as well, whose history needs to be understood in dialogue with the ideology of Absolutism in France. Indeed, the ideology of the court may have been strongest in France where the king cured scrofula and was descended from Christ. In France, however, the religious context of resistance to the pope created a second type of ‘Country’ ideology, one that stimulated the development of republican visions of the early church as the depository of ancient laws. As a result, early modern republicanism in France was strongly inflected by the extension of Catholic consular ideals into the political. This relationship was strongest with those monarchists who used the thèse nobilitaire (thesis of the nobility) to conceive of the monarchy in the terms of the one, the few, and the many.

This chapter is too brief to provide the reader more than introduction to the space Jansenism occupied in French political culture. My goal here is to describe the long history of French Jansenism, give some sociological reasons for why Jansenism contributed so significantly to the development of the ideology of republicanism in France, and provide a theoretical definition of Jansenism. Although the religious ideas of Jansenism do not play a primary role in my interpretation of Tocqueville's political thought, it is necessary to give a substantive introduction to this religious mentality in order to understand why it was so conducive to the development of a particular French kind of republican political ideology.