Founded by Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus won papal recognition in 1540, just a few years before the first meeting of the Council of Trent where Jesuit theologians first came to Catholic attention as champions of papal primacy and the most formidable foes of Protestant ‘heresy’. More than two and a half centuries later, in 1814, the papacy re-established the society as an institutional antidote to the unbelief and republican ideology bequeathed by a revolution that had marked the parting of the paths between Catholicism and modernity in political form. Yet the same papacy that restored the society had dissolved it as a source of ‘troubles and dissension’ only forty years before, in 1773. Indeed, little in the history of Christendom between the first session of the Council of Trent and the French Revolution is more surprising than the international expulsion of the Jesuits in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

While the papacy in the person of Clement XIV hardly acted of its own accord in 1773, the initiative against the Jesuits came from incontestably Catholic quarters. The first state to strike out against the Jesuits was the ultra-Catholic kingdom of Portugal where the ‘most faithful’ Joseph I expelled them from both the metropolitan mainland and the South American and Asian colonies in September 1759. The next scene of action was Bourbon France where the impetus came from the royal law courts or parlements, which manoeuvred the ‘most Christian’ king Louis XV into dissolving the society in November 1764 instead of bodily expelling all the Jesuits as had Portugal in 1759.

An older historiography of the Enlightenment took the defence or rejection of Christian belief as its starting point and, dividing the world into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’, regarded political thought as derivative of these groupings. Unbelief unleashed a ‘liberal’ assault on monarchy and social hierarchy, while belief came to the defence of these institutions, resulting in ‘conservative’ political thought (see, for example, Martin 1962). This model does justice to something that was incontestably new in the eighteenth century: namely, the emergence of emancipated, secular thought. Yet it is not without its limitations, chief among them being its underestimation of the ‘enlightenment’ of, and dissent within, ‘believing’ communities. Accordingly, this chapter explores the political ramifications of the divisions between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ within eighteenth-century Europe’s believing communities. It asks to what extent the religious and theological differences separating Jesuits from Jansenists, orthodox Lutherans or Calvinists from Pietists, and High Church Anglicans from English Dissenters took the form of differing political visions, not only about the church but also about state and society. In so doing, it broaches the relationship between divergent religious sensibilities and differing kinds of political thought. The heart of the most ‘irreligious’ of Europe’s Enlightenments, France, should provide the acid test of any religiously oriented construal of eighteenth-century political thought. France, therefore, must be this European grand tour’s first and longest stop.