This year marks the 250th anniversary of Dominus ac redemptor, the breve with which Pope Clement xiv (r.1769–74) ordered the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. On the morning of August 16 of that year, an official delegation flanked by soldiers entered the Jesuit headquarters at the Church of the Gesù in Rome, an edifice whose construction had been initiated over two centuries earlier by the order’s founder Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), to notify Superior General Lorenzo Ricci (1703–75, in office 1758–73) of the pope’s decision. If the reports are to be believed, astonishment befell Ricci as he realized that, despite the solidity of the walls surrounding him and the venerability of the Society’s record in shaping early modern Catholicism, the institution he headed was no more. Yet as shocking as this news might have been, it could hardly qualify as a complete surprise since it represented merely the terminus of a long train of preceding events. Since the 1750s the Society found itself besieged on numerous fronts by diverse opponents making multifarious accusations. Prominent among these accusations was the charge of conspiracy.

For the Jesuits, there was admittedly nothing new about such an allegation, nor more generally about the hostility they faced. In fact, previously the Society had seemed to thrive in the face of opposition; adversity had spurred it on. So why did this change sometime in the mid-eighteenth century? There is presumably no single answer, yet by focusing on the charge of conspiracy we arrive at least a partial appreciation of the sea change that beset the Society of Jesus and betokened its demise. In the late 1750s, this accusation found new traction in two assassination attempts, one targeting King Louis xv of France (r.1715–74) in January 1757 and another directed at King Joseph of Portugal (r.1750–77) in September 1758. Yet in addition to reanimating thoroughly routinized charges of Jesuit complicity in these crimes, some opponents of the order began to frame such allegations within imputations of an even more profound subversion. If the Jesuits had been charged with conspiracy in the past, now they found themselves increasingly confronted with the denunciation that the order itself was a conspiracy. As the historian Dale K. Van Kley writes in the conclusion of a recent essay, the Society of Jesus had come to resemble “a conspiracy reduced to a system” in which “each Jesuit [was] a conspirator by definition.”¹ Such a characterization made it clear that reform was not an option. For an institution rotten in this way to its very core, the only conceivable remedy was the radical one of eradicating it root and branch.

One can, of course, ask to what degree the anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories promoted in the years leading up to the order’s dissolution were actually driving policy or were instead supplying a specious source of its legitimation; yet whatever form the answer might take, the anniversary of Dominus ac redemptor more than justifies the decision of the editors of the Journal of Jesuit Studies to devote a special issue to the complex, multi-layered, pluri-directional relationship between the Society of Jesus and conspiracy theories—a relationship that, as the contributions to this issue will demonstrate, is by no means confined to the years preceding the order’s suppression. Indeed, even after 1773, there were those who believed that the order, now operating as a secret society, continued to sabotage programs of Enlightenment-inspired reform and undermine state sovereignty. Furthermore, when the order was reinstated in 1814, the Jesuits were once again typecast as sinister agents who blindly obeyed the pope and who were willing to stoop to the most devious of means and deceitful of measures in their intransigent opposition to all that was progressive.

In addition to the prompt provided by an anniversary of Dominus ac redemptor, the moment to examine this theme is also auspicious because it resonates unnervingly with the discordant tones of contemporary politics. “Fake news,” “deep state,” “rigged elections,” “QAnon”—the mere mention of these phrases suffices to impart some of the vertiginous quality associated with a new media environment permeated by campaigns of disinformation and misdirection sponsored by powerful lobbies or hostile foreign states and accruing to erode trust in public authority. In one respect, revisiting the voluminous annals of anti-Jesuitism can instruct us that the disorientation is not unprecedented and has arisen in other contexts. Yet history also has a lot more to offer than simply the message “we’ve seen it all before.” Turning to the past reveals both congruence and incongruence and can therefore clarify what is genuinely new and unprecedented about the contemporary moment we are fated to inhabit.

We can begin by noting that of all the various corporate bodies that orbit the Catholic Church, the Jesuits have a special affinity to this theme. At the same time, the theme by no means exhausts the range of hostile characterizations to which the Jesuits were exposed over the centuries. Since the order’s approbation in 1540, Jesuits have found themselves maligned in numerous ways, some of which were continuous with a more generalized anti-clericalism that took the clergy to task for hypocrisy because its members allegedly lived flagrantly unholy lives. Yet in the course of time a distinct strand of anti-Jesuitism emerged that pilloried the Jesuits for traits allegedly specific to their order. Misgivings about the order’s appeal to the name “Jesus”; unease about the manner in which the Jesuits seemed to cultivate a fanatical cult of obedience; aspersions that they acted as agents for either the Spanish or the papacy or that the Society was in fact subject to none but its own will; objections about its authoritarian and even “tyrannical” power structure; anxieties about its alleged indifference to national loyalties and patriotic sentiment in favor of papal supremacy; indignation at its promotion of a lax or hypocritical morality; criticism at its encouragement of seemingly outmoded and even superstitious forms of devotional piety; consternation because of the solicitude of its missionaries towards the pagan practices of non-European people; jealousy at the order’s dominance in the field of education—the list goes on. The putative propensity to engage in conspiracies was thus only one theme among this miscellany—although a theme that admittedly could complement or subtend the others cited here.

Standing at the intersection of two lines of inquiry, one focusing on anti-Jesuitism and the other on conspiracy theories, the contributions to this special issue build upon the insights that have accumulated in both fields of study. Turning our attention first to anti-Jesuitism, its treatment was, of course, in some sense coterminous with the study of the order itself, given that the history of the Jesuits was very much a story about the resistance they encountered and the conflicts in which they became embroiled. Yet the decisive shift in perspective and emphasis that dignified it with the status of a genuine object of historiographical inquiry in its own right was intimated by the titles of two works published by Jesuits at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jesuiten-Fablen (Jesuit fables, 1899) by Bernhard Duhr (1852–1930) and Les Jésuites de la légende (The legend of the Jesuits, 1906–7) by Alexander Brou (1862–1947). The fact that a fable is not (just) a fib and a legend not (just) a lie suggests that Duhr and Brou were already taking the first steps that led away from polemical engagement and in the direction of cultural interpretation. Indeed, Duhr’s work even bore the subtitle Ein Beitrag zur Culturgeschichte (A contribution to cultural history), which most likely registers the influence of the essay that had been published two years earlier by the historian Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915) and whose title posed the question “What is Cultural History?”²

Nevertheless, one suspects that Duhr’s appeal to the notion of cultural history was more of an afterthought as within his expansive work he touches upon his own understanding of this approach only once in the conclusion in a somewhat elliptical and oblique remark: “The problem which is of interest to cultural history: how it is actually possible that the lie can exert its devastating influence on civilized peoples and in highly educated circles to such extent and with such tenacity, shall not be discussed here.”³ True to his word, Duhr devoted himself to the task of exposing the lies that have defamed the Jesuits, rather than investigating the preconditions for their production and dissemination. As such, his work (like Brou’s) is witness to the intellectual effort it required to exchange partisan apologetics for impartial inquiry and to move beyond “courtroom history” (as it has been denoted in an article co-authored by one of the contributors to this special issue).⁴

Given that anti-Jesuitism is a topic of cultural history par excellence, it is no surprise that its status as an object of historical inquiry tracks the standing of this particular historiographical approach. During the greater part of the twentieth century, when cultural history was largely eclipsed by other perspectives such as those supplied by social or economic history, the topic lay largely dormant. This changed as cultural history stirred into life again in the century’s later decades and historians became sensitized to the role that collective obsessions, shared memories, and stereotyped Feindbilder (images of the enemy) have played in the past. Thus, one finds not coincidentally a stalwart champion of cultural history, namely Peter Burke, surveying the vast tracts of historical material awaiting further exploration with his essay “The Black Legend of the Jesuits: An Essay in the History of Social Stereotypes.”⁵ The essays gathered by Pierre-Antoine, Catherine Maire, and Pierre-Antoine Fabre in their co-edited volume Les Antijésuites: Discours, figures et lieux de l’antijésuitisme à l’époque moderne (2010) drill down into the core of more specific concentrations of anti-Jesuit sentiment and contain contributions from three authors who not only have subsequently participated in the project of this special issue but who had already enriched the field with important monographs, namely: Sabina Pavone with her investigation into the background to the Monita secreta, Le astuzie dei gesuiti (2000, translated in 2005 as The Wily Jesuits and the Monita secreta: The Forged Secret Instructions of the Jesuits), José Eduardo Franco with his two-volume O mito dos jesuítas em Portugal, no Brasil e no Oriente (The myth of the Jesuits in Portugal, in Brazil, and the East 2006–7), and Christine Vogel with her work Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis (1758–1773) (The downfall of the Society of Jesus as a European media event, 2006). These major studies had been preceded by Michel Leroy’s Le mythe jésuite (1992) and Geoffrey Cubitt’s The Jesuit Myth (1993), two works that not only shared a focus on the extravagant fears provoked by the restored order in nineteenth-century France but also, in their common appeal to the notion of myth, betray once more the debt to cultural history.

If the category of culture was responsible for inculcating in historians an awareness of anti-Jesuitism as a phenomenon demanding serious study, it can lay claim to a similar distinction in jump-starting the sustained investigation of conspiracy theories. By the mid-twentieth century, conspiracy theory had already been conceptualized, in part as a result of “boundary work” underwritten by social science and social philosophy (one thinks of Karl Popper’s discussion of the “conspiracy theory of society” in his The Open Society and Its Enemies) and in part as a result of an agenda of inquiry formulated by social psychologists and historians drawing on social science (one thinks of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”).⁶ However, the academic engagement with conspiracy theories did not really begin until the present millennium. It was then that the new field of cultural studies engendered the realization that the “low culture” to which liberal democracies and social science had consigned conspiracy theories was just as much culture as “high culture.” As such, it demanded the investigation that has since then accumulated at such an accelerated rate that one feels compelled to direct the reader to the recently published Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020) as the most effective way of obtaining an overview of the manifold contributions made by psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, and historians.

Two aspects of this phenomenon deserve attention here because they are powerfully illustrated by many episodes in the relationship between Jesuits and conspiracy theories. First, this special issue of the Journal for Jesuit Studies attempts to acknowledge the complexity of this relationship by triangulating it through the recognition of conspiracies themselves as an additional and distinct phenomenon (thus yielding the special issue’s title: “Jesuits, Conspiracies, and Conspiracy Theories”). This move is deemed necessary because the relationship between conspiracies and conspiracy theories is far from self-evident. Thus, there is a distinction between real conspiracies and the more fictive or invented nature of the ones posited by conspiracy theories—one can think of the seventeenth-century English anti-Jesuitism that tied Jesuit confessors to the real conspiracy of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and then decades later implicated the order in the Popish Plot, the whirlwind of deceit and delusion that between 1678 and 1681 whipped up a frenzy of anti-Catholic, anti-Jesuit sentiment and whose relationship to reality was far more tenuous.

There are also often questions of scale, with the real conspiracy corresponding to a narrowly circumscribed affair in comparison to the grand subversions posited by conspiracy theories. The political scientist Michael Barkun has drawn upon his experience in studying religious extremism by positing the categories of “event conspiracy,” “systemic conspiracy,” and “superconspiracy” to cover the range of possibilities.⁷ If an assassination almost inevitably gives rise to speculation about an “event conspiracy,” an indication of how such a limited operation could be subsumed under a far grander subversion is provided by Jean-Antoine Gazaignes (1717–1802), a French canon who between 1764 and 1771 published a five-volume compilation of anti-Jesuit documents, and who declared in the preface of the first volume “that a plan had been formed in this Society, from its birth onwards, to annihilate the doctrine and the morality of Jesus Christ, to destroy Christ’s religion and the worship of him, and to upturn the thrones and the empires in order to erect on the sacred debris an absolute, independent, universal sovereignty in accordance with its ambitions and desires.”⁸

Another aspect of conspiracy theories is alluded to in the quotation extracted from Duhr’s conclusion—and might suggest one of the blind spots that afflict contemporary historiography as a result of its determination to substitute a passion for polemic with a curiosity about culture. Given that polemicists feel no qualms about calling out lies, at least insofar as they detect them in the words and works of their opponents, the shift from polemical history to cultural history induces a tendency to ignore precisely the “interesting problem” that Duhr identified as one of the inquiries which cultural historians should pursue. Yet ignoring the problem does not make it go away, for the lie does have a presence in history and moreover a proximity to conspiracy theories. This is not to suggest that conspiracy theories are always equivalent to lies, yet they are often launched on the back of those deceptions we know as forgeries—one thinks of the Monita privata [secreta] (Private [hidden] instructions, 1614) in the case of anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories and, even more influential, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) in the case of anti-Semitic ones. Deception, in turn, is closely tied to the notion of conspiracy.

The result is that there is often something deeply conspiratorial about the production and propagation of conspiracy theories, and once more Jesuit history offers manifold opportunities to study this aspect of the phenomenon. When after a long career spent reconstructing the conflicts pitting Jesuits against their Jansenist and Gallican opponents in eighteenth-century France, the American historian Dale K. Van Kley turned his attention to the fate of the Jesuits in his most recent book Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe (2018), he discerned something deeply conspiratorial in the forces pushing forward the train of events. His contention is that, in addition to the vicious conspiracy theories defaming the Jesuits, the order also fell victim—at least in part—to an actual conspiracy. Of course, parsing the events in such a way that does justice to the agency of the actors while acknowledging those aspects of the frame within which they acted that possibly constrained their action or, in this case, enhanced its efficacy is a difficult task that leads Van Kley to hedge his interpretation by speaking of the “conspiratorial.” One suspects that he would find transferable (at least in part) to his own field of investigation the characterization of an earlier, fourteen-century episode of persecution by a famed cultural historian, namely Carlo Ginzburg, whose reconstruction “reveals the presence of deliberate and coordinated action, intended to guide a series of pre-existing tensions in a predetermined direction.”⁹ Yet given that Ginzburg goes on to write that “conspiracy means this, and this alone,” one might discern in Ginzburg’s highly generalized understanding an elision of exactly the distinction between a definite conspiracy and the fuzzier “conspiratorial” that Van Kley is at pains to tease out in his examination of the circumstances behind the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773.

The contributions to this special issue offer resources for thinking through these issues and their relationship to the wider phenomenon of anti-Jesuitism. The first article, authored by this journal’s editor-in-chief Robert Maryks, surveys a body of material that certainly in the English-language scholarship has until now received scant attention. The Polish-Lithuanian context is primarily known for originating the Monita, yet as Maryks’s excavations demonstrate, this forgery emerged from an environment already thoroughly preconditioned by the polemical clash of pro-Jesuit and anti-Jesuit viewpoints. These debates and conflicts drew upon the similar material generated in other such clashes throughout Europe yet also inflected them with peculiarities of the Polish-Lithuanian religious situation such as the presence, for example, of anti-Trinitarian Socinians.

With Sabina Pavone’s contribution, we also see that the deception perpetrated by the Monita was not as unique as one might suppose and that in other contexts enemies of the Jesuits had set traps devised to compromise the order and reinforce prejudices already established within the first century of its existence. This was the case when the rector of the Jesuit college at Ferrara, Antonio Barisone (1557/8–1623) found himself advising a Venetian noblewoman at a time when Jesuits had been banished from the city. Realizing only too late that his correspondent was not who “she” claimed to be, Barisone found himself a hapless victim not only of a specific anti-Jesuit stratagem but more generally of the trickery so characteristic of the murky trade of information and disinformation in Venice at this time.

My own contribution zeroes on a mainstay of the anti-Jesuit imaginary, namely their supposed use of assassination to remove princes who represented obstacles to the advancement of the Society’s goals. Although it became so deeply integrated into this imaginary that any assault on a prince almost automatically provoked speculation of Jesuit complicity, the article seeks to reconstruct the formation of this topos, aided by the realization that this reputation for regicide assumed a specific “shape” because it was seen to be ultimately rooted in a political theory that legitimized violence against tyrants—with the spine-chilling implication that it was then left to the discretion of the Jesuits to decide whether it was open season on a particular prince because his rule had degenerated into this abject and corrupt state.

With the next two articles, we shift our focus to the drumroll of events and accusations culminating in the suppression of the Society in 1773. In their contribution focusing on one of the undisputed powerhouses of eighteenth-century anti-Jesuitism, namely Portugal under the direction of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo (1699–1782), later honored by the king as the marquis of Pombal, José Eduardo Franco and Paula Carreira first offer valuable insights into what the implementation of his anti-Jesuit policy looked like up-close and on the ground. In the second part of their article, they then consider how attempts at educational reform channeled a specific strain of anti-Jesuitism in justifying a devaluation of Aristotelian philosophy.

In her complementary contribution that expands the scope outward from local anti-Jesuit policy to the supralocal, pan-European impact of the anti-Jesuit narratives fabricated by Pombal’s propaganda machine, Christine Vogel considers how printed images were used to embed news of these events into conspiracy narratives. She develops thereby the argument that the intermediality of these images (i.e., their integration of textual and visual elements) endowed them with their own distinctive hermeneutic logic whose effect was to exert a subtle pressure upon interpretations, augmenting the conspiracy posited by the conspiracy theory and elevating it from the level of an “event conspiracy” to a “superconspiracy.”

The final contribution from Claus Oberhauser directs our attention geographically to the region of Tyrol within the Austrian empire and historically to the period after the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814. In its new guise, the Society became the nemesis of a nascent liberal movement whose “common touch” was evident in the transmission of its aspirations and animosities in the form of songs and poems sung and recited in taverns. In drawing attention to this unfamiliar medium for the transmission of anti-Jesuitism, Oberhauser’s article reminds us that this phenomenon shares with conspiracy theory a feature that he and I have denoted as genre promiscuity in a previously published, co-authored article devoted to how conspiracy theories were both transported and generated by developments in the eighteenth-century media environment.¹⁰ In other words, neither conspiracy theories nor anti-Jesuitism are tied to any one genre but instead, as ways of seeing the world and acting in it, possess the ability to transmigrate across diverse genres. Thus, in addition to the political pamphlet and theological polemics that served as vehicles for anti-Jesuitism, this special issue considers how this hostility could also manifest itself in forged correspondence and printed images. It is furthermore not difficult to point to other genres not touched upon in these pages (for example, the nineteenth-century serialized novel à la Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew [1844]) as conduits for the propagation of anti-Jesuit sentiment. In the same manner, the articles gathered here focus on different scenes and regions extending from Portugal to Poland, though given the global dimensions of the Society’s presence it would be interesting to consider how Jesuit action in locales beyond Europe might have generated conspiracy theories.

It remains to acknowledge one desideratum that, because it is at most only obliquely referenced in some of the contributions, I wish to flag here in this introduction. It pertains to an area where conspiracy theory no longer aligns with anti-Jesuitism. Although the contributions to this special issue treat episodes and experiences in which the Jesuits tend to assume the role of innocent victims maligned by conspiracy theories concocted by their enemies, it is important to remember that the order’s history evinces no shortage of conspiracy theorizing among its own members. To focus merely on the French context, one could cite Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), who toiled away for many years on his eccentric belief that most of the classical and patristic works were forgeries concocted by medieval monks; or on the legend of Bourgfontaine cultivated by a succession of Jesuits who from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century elaborated upon the idea that Jansenism was a cunning plan to replace Christianity with deism; or an ex-Jesuit such as Augustin Barruel (1741–1820) who from British exile fleshed out into the four volumes of his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (Memoirs illustrating the history of Jacobinism) the thesis that the ancien régime had been toppled by a series of assaults launched successively by philosophes, Freemasons, and German Illuminati.¹¹ A complete cultural history of Jesuits and conspiracies will need to take into account how conspiracy theories often emerge out of dynamics of accusation and counteraccusation—and indeed, how those charged in this manner with conspiracy will often treat this charge as not only erroneous but as a manifestation of the genuine conspiracy in which they figure not as perpetrators but rather as victims. Even if the anniversary of the unfortunate fate that befell the Society 250 years ago has in part inspired this special issue, it should not induce us to forget that in the polemical exchanges of the past the Jesuits were hardly ever at a loss for words and almost always able to give as good as they got.