Introduction

Those interested in the development of new ideas in seventeenth-century France faced a dilemma. The traditional teaching of science and philosophy took place in the official spaces of orthodoxy located in the Jesuit schools and in the collèges de plein exercice depending on the University of Paris, where, with some modifications, the teaching of Aristotle was maintained and defended into the eighteenth century. In France the universities generally hotly contested any attempt to introduce the new system into any establishment under their aegis. Such institutions were by definition ‘protected’ and tightly controlled spaces. This defensive attitude was present even in the Oratory where one might expect and where one indeed found great sympathy for Cartesianism. The new science and in particular Cartesianism had overall no institutional framework within which to develop. Port-Royal, with its network of connections in seventeenth-century society, played its part in the public debate over Cartesianism. But the Jansenists who participated in promoting the new philosophy had their own sectional interests to look after, and in any case their confrontational stance in relation to certain religious matters made them doubly suspicious. In Holland, by contrast, Cartesianism was disseminated by university professors.

The exclusion suffered by Cartesians meant quite simply that other sorts of spaces had to be created if the new ideas were to reach a larger public. While not all these spaces were unconnected with members of the Church, the vast majority of them were of an overwhelmingly secular character and motivated by predominantly secular concerns.