The Years of Jesuit Suppression, 1773–1814: Survival, Setbacks, and Transformation

1 Prelude to Dissolution

The date 1773, like 476 and 1453, long ago entered history books as a milestone helping define a period in world history. On July 21 of that year, the Holy See issued the breve Dominus ac redemptor, which suppressed the Society of Jesus.¹ This development was hardly unanticipated.² The Jesuits had been under attack, and arguably, in eclipse, for more than half a century, and the general suppression of the Society was preceded by their expulsion from the Portuguese Empire (1759), France (1762), and the Spanish Empire, including Naples and Parma, as well as Malta, still ruled by the Knights of St. John (1767). Anti-Jesuit propaganda, which had existed since the Society’s creation, had grown in ferocity during the preceding decades, and the curriculum articulated in the Ratio studiorum was increasingly perceived as outdated and in particular as lacking materials reflecting recent developments in science, law, and history.

To their detractors, the Jesuits embodied all the worst qualities of the ancien régime coupled with an intolerant view of Protestants and a conniving nature that placed them at the center of many conspiracy theories. Popular writings portrayed Jesuits as secretive, deceptive, manipulative, devious regicides, intent on world domination either for themselves or for the pope. For their part, some Jesuits saw themselves the victims of vast conspiracies designed to destroy the Society.³ Simultaneously, Jesuits became convenient scapegoats for the Holy See, enabling the papacy to deflect antagonism from the papal curia to the order. Even the order’s allies had begun to wonder if the Society, launched in 1540, had a future, although at the middle of the eighteenth century twenty-two thousand Jesuits still operated nearly seven hundred colleges and two hundred seminaries worldwide.⁴ Yet the Jesuits were not merely unfortunate targets of their opponents; they were victims of their own earlier successes, or more accurately, by their misreading of these successes. The baroque piety the Society had promoted for two centuries and the pre-encyclopedic approach to data collection that they had perfected and propagated were well suited to the mood of the seventeenth century. But at least in much of Europe, they no longer adequately addressed the Zeitgeist or needs of the eighteenth. The visual arts were moving away from the baroque and toward the calm of classicism. The floridly Latin genre of Jesuit school drama, a mainstay of the Society’s educational and mission programs and a key tool of Jesuit self-representation, had declined in popularity and was banned in Vienna by 1768.⁵ Other expressions of the baroque aesthetic that the Society had carried to a high level, such as thesis prints, went into decline in the years before the suppression.⁶

2 A Storm in Portugal

Yet it was not merely in the arts or education that the Society seemed, at key points, to be out of step with the times. Jesuit expressions of a sense of the holy or righteous could become flashpoints of controversy and criticism. Portugal had long been a center of Jesuit enterprise, with a collegium established in Lisbon as early as 1565 and the University of Coimbra becoming a key training ground for missionaries. But here too lay the seeds of the Society’s downfall. On All Saints’ Day 1755, a devastating earthquake struck Lisbon, killing thousands. The Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida (1689–1761), a veteran of twenty-eight years of missionary work in Brazil and a renowned preacher, wrote that this disaster was a divine retribution for grievous public sins, and not due merely to natural causes.⁷ This pronouncement deeply angered Portuguese leaders and resulted in Jesuits being banned from the royal court. As the scandal grew, Malagrida was accused of heresy, based on fantastical theological treatises he had allegedly written,⁸ and on his supposed involvement in a plot to kill King José I (1714–77, r.1750–77). On September 20, 1761, the elderly Jesuit was executed in a spectacular auto-da-fé in Lisbon’s Rossio Square. Two other Jesuits implicated in the alleged plot, João Alexandre (dates unknown) and João de Matos (dates unknown), died in the prison of Junqueira.⁹ Farther afield, the Malagrida case provoked ridicule, even from Louis XV (1710–74, r.1715–74), and inspired Voltaire (1694–1778) to write a leaflet in the voice of a Jewish rabbi supposedly outraged by the mistreatment meted out to the Jesuit.¹⁰

By then, the Jesuits had been expelled from Portugal. In 1758, an ailing Benedict XIV (1675–1758, r.1740–58) had issued a breve calling for an investigation of alleged Jesuit abuses: capitalizing on the death of the pontiff five weeks later, the enemies of the Society soon found the Jesuits guilty of scandalous behavior in both Portugal and its colonies. Within a month, the papal visitor, Cardinal Francisco I de Saldanha da Gama (1723–76), ordered the Jesuits to desist from all commerce, preaching, and hearing of confessions.¹¹ The ban on commerce was not gratuitous; as we shall shortly see, Jesuit commercial activities were the root cause of an immense scandal that was just breaking in France as the papal visitor issued his pronouncement.

Later that year, King José I survived the assassination attempt in which Malagrida would be implicated (almost certainly without justification), an event that triggered gruesome public executions and the destruction of the powerful Távora family, for whom a few Jesuits had served as confessors. In 1759, on the first anniversary of the assassination attempt, the Society’s property was seized by the government and many Jesuits were thrown into prison, while others were expelled: a contingent of 133 were ferried to the Papal States, an especially awkward move considering that diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Portugal had now been suspended. It took time for the edict of suppression to be carried out in all Portuguese territories: the Jesuits of Mozambique were exiled in 1759; in September of the same year, royal troops surrounded the Jesuit buildings in Goa, and almost all Jesuits were arrested.¹² The Jesuits of Angola were deported to Italy on July 6, 1760, and by 1762 even Macau had conformed to Lisbon’s wishes.¹³

The orchestrator of the responses to these events was the ambitious, well-traveled, and reform-minded Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, marquis of Pombal (1699–1782), but the anti-Jesuit climate that he stoked was already in place. The Society was seen as the cause of bloody uprisings by indigenous peoples against Portugal that followed the adjustment in 1750 of the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese territory in South America.¹⁴ Closer to home, Jesuits were made scapegoats for the decline of Portuguese power, an accusation with far different implications from those following from contemporaneous anti-Jesuit rhetoric in France, Austria, Poland, or the empire. The reduced status and international prestige of eighteenth-century Portugal as an imperial power had many causes, but a particularly vivid moment of remembered national “misfortune” were the sixty years from 1580 until 1640 during which the crowns of Portugal and Spain had been united. The immediate cause of this union was the death of the Jesuit-educated and advised king Sebastião I (1554–78, r.1557–78) in 1578 while conducting a “holy war” in North Africa.¹⁵ Jesuits were also blamed for moral laxity and tyrannicide,¹⁶ the latter charge easily dovetailing with the accusations swirling around the death of the young king and rumors of Jesuits arming “savages” to fight Europeans.

As was true elsewhere, Jesuit schools were seen by many as increasingly outdated; the vague sense that school reform was needed would later be sharpened by Pombal (a member of London’s Royal Society but an absolvent of no academic institution) and other Portuguese Enlightenment figures into specific indictments. A year before the worldwide suppression, a volume appeared with the sanction of the king detailing how the Jesuits had accomplished the “destruction of religion” at the famed University of Coimbra.¹⁷

Although Jesuit schools had made contributions to Portuguese culture, there was much truth in these criticisms, which had grown more vociferous over time. One Portuguese Benedictine, João Baptista de São Caetano (?–1773), went so far as to say that Jesuit education was full of darkness.¹⁸ Comments such as São Caetano’s lay bare the core of the Society’s problems, not only in Portugal but throughout Catholic Europe. The Benedictine order, one thousand years older than the Jesuits and long the custodian of learning in medieval Europe, was no natural ally of the Society. Yet beyond this great potential animosity between rival orders was the reality that the Jesuits’ dogged commitment to Scholasticism was viewed unfavorably not merely by supporters of the Enlightenment but additionally by high-ranking members of the Catholic “establishment.” Also numbered among the Society’s clerical critics were the Oratorians, who put special emphasis on the natural sciences and on instruction in Portuguese.¹⁹ There was also the problem of what the Scholastic model excluded from the field of theology (e.g., much of the speculative innovations of the most recent three centuries). Many also disliked the formulaic ways in which Jesuit Scholasticism was expressed in catechisms and apologetic works.²⁰ And this Jesuit tendency to retain a conservative and rigid approach to theology did not exist in a vacuum. In many contexts, including Portugal, the Society’s near-monopoly on high-status schooling did nothing to encourage reflective self-assessment or receptivity to outside criticism, skills that might have better prepared it for the coming frontal attack. As would prove to be true elsewhere, Portuguese Jesuits lacked much sensitivity to a literary climate that favored conspiracy theories. In the end, the Jesuits of Portugal were not nearly as wily as their detractors claimed, but instead stumbled into a crisis for which they were stunningly unprepared.

3 A Spanish Quarrel

The downfall of the Society in Spain bore a family resemblance to Jesuit troubles in Portugal. Once again, an imperial power struggling with symptoms of decline and court intrigues played key roles, with a dramatic incident lighting the final fuse. The “Hat and Cloak” riots in March 1766 proved to be this dramatic incident. An unpopular minister of finance had hoped to reduce street crime in financially hard-hit cities by banning hats and capes that could conceal weapons and identities. The plan backfired spectacularly: Madrileños as well as residents of dozens of other towns responded to the edict by taking to the streets (wearing hats and capes) with demands that soon included reductions in the price of basic goods. A few months later, the queen mother, Elisabeth Farnese (1692–1766), a staunch supporter of the Jesuits, died. In the aftermath of the riots, Charles III’s (1716–88, r.1750–88) ministers managed to convince the king that the Jesuits had been behind the unrest. Although evidence for this charge was distinctly lacking, the king, who seems to have felt himself the object of personal affronts from one Jesuit, Francisco de Rávago (1685–1763),²¹ and no doubt seeking a scapegoat for his realm’s many problems, decreed the expulsion of the Jesuits on February 27, 1767.²² Other factors were also at play. Magnus Mörner (1924–2012) sees this dramatic step as an expression of regalismo, the assertion of royal rights at the expense of the Holy See, with the hostility of colonial bishops toward the Society playing a role.²³ As in Portugal, the Society had faced critics of its aging curriculum and philosophy of education, whose deficiencies were perhaps most obvious in secondary education, where the Society had enjoyed a virtual monopoly.²⁴ The prospect of seizing Jesuit assets was no doubt as attractive to the Spanish court as it was elsewhere. The Society’s suppression in Spain extended to Naples and Sicily,²⁵ with dynastic loyalties causing the Duchy of Parma to follow suit.²⁶ The role of the Bourbon courts thus looms large in this story, but it would be a mistake to view events, as some nineteenth-century Jesuits chose to do, as simply the result of a spiteful and well-coordinated Bourbon plot. The concept of a strong ruler capable of using bureaucracies to centralize and coordinate her or his power was an emerging idea across Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. And while the Iberian Peninsula and Italy did not experience the growth in popular book culture that occurred in the empire, anti-Jesuit publications, some completely unconnected to the regimes that sought the Society’s downfall, were plentiful and widely read in the Bourbon monarchies. In Spain, rumors about Jesuit wealth and wild tales about how this wealth was transported and hidden (and enjoyed) were readily accepted as truth. One instance where considerable Jesuit wealth was confiscated occurred in Goa, where nineteen boxes of precious metals and jewels were taken from the chapel of St. Francis Xavier and sent to Portugal. However, the queen regnant Maria I (1734–1816, r.1777–1816) is said to have sent the boxes back.

For many of the devout, the baroque era of warnings of God’s wrath and visionary experiences that had inspired the works that ultimately brought about Malagrida’s execution was by no means over, but the climate of the Catholic Enlightenment, which now had supporters among the church hierarchy, saw little value in such things. Moreover, as Jeffrey Burson notes, for some opponents of the Society “the rhetorical skepticism that had served the apologetical pursuits of the Jesuits so well also suggested that they were conceding far too much to skeptics and heretics by appealing directly to the authority of the church for whatever could not be affirmed by individual critical reason and scholarly investigations.”²⁷

Jesuits were thus in a no-win situation: if they took an open-minded view of worship and theology, either in Europe or abroad, they were denounced for moral laxness and indifference to Christian truth, but if they took the thundering prophetic path of Malagrida, they could be condemned as heretics. If they debated with Enlightenment skeptics, even if they occasionally seemed to win, they were wily casuists, not to be trusted. When Jesuits applied their scholarly skills to confessional polemic, they fostered a kind of skepticism about texts and sources that ultimately worked against the Society’s goal of promoting unity, belief, and fidelity to the church. If they embraced the evidence of new scientific research, they were perhaps not loyal to a church that still denied Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) achievements. And if they appealed to the authority of this same church in their arguments, they were behind the times and defenders of an oppressive institution. Their successes prompted resentment; their failures inspired their opponents. The charge sheet of alleged abuses assembled by their enemies had never been cast aside or forgotten, and the longer the Society endured, the longer the list grew.

While outright religious skepticism²⁸ probably did not play as key a role in the downfall of the Society as has been often supposed, the Catholic Enlightenment, especially in German-speaking lands, gradually undermined the bases of lay support among many urban elites for the type of traditional piety Jesuits had long presented to the masses.²⁹ A handful of Jesuits, perhaps most notably the editors of the Journaux de Trévoux, attempted a dialogue with the Enlightenment, but these were the exception in a Society that only very slowly adopted its school curriculum to the expanding body of knowledge and did not share the Enlightenment’s optimistic view of human potential.³⁰ The ongoing battles between the editors of the Journaux de Trévoux and those of the Encyclopédie reflected competing ideologies but also exposed fundamental differences between Jesuits and the philosophes on matters ranging from how knowledge should be organized to the reasons for presenting knowledge. The shift to the model of knowledge presentation embodied in the Encyclopédie placed new stress on the presentation of individual units of knowledge, and not on the interrelation of all things by means of metaphor and revelation, a classic position of baroque Jesuits. Perhaps even more importantly, the notion of human progress implied in the Encyclopédie was very different from the moral universe set forth by the sons of Ignatius.

This shift had profound consequences and might be compared in significance to the shift in the presentation of knowledge that has accompanied the development of the internet in our own day. In this debate, the Jesuits may have won some arguments on paper, but ultimately were defeated in the public sphere as much by their inability to address the conceptual challenges posed by the new model as by any specific inadequacies in their arguments. Many Jesuits endeavored to have a foot in both the philosophical and theological realms, but this was becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Not surprisingly, the Encyclopédie’s treatment of the Society was scathing, and widely read, including, it has been claimed, by some bishops.³¹ Adding to the mix was the case of Claude-François-Xavier Millot (1726–85), a professor of rhetoric in Lyon, who in 1757 produced an Éloge de Montesquieu (Eulogy on Montesquieu), which was denounced by his Jesuit superiors. Millot left the Society and went on to have a brilliant career as a historian, being elected to the Académie in 1777.³² Anyone inclined to see the Jesuits as enemies of progress need look no further than Millot’s story.

4 Pious and Persistent Rivals

The rivalry between the Society and mendicant orders, most especially Franciscans and Dominicans, was a much older problem for the Society, stretching back to the sixteenth century. The dispute had many facets: Franciscans emphasized their poverty and humility, which was often contrasted with the intellectual pride and fondness for high position attributed to the Jesuits. The competition between these two orders thus framed could degenerate into “turf wars” in settings such as Japan, Moldavia, or Macao,³³ but the conflict was far more than this, reflecting profoundly different understandings of religious life and mission.

That the Jesuits had embraced such mottos as “unus non sufficit orbis” (one world is not enough) and called themselves the Society of Jesus, a claim that could seem presumptuous, only heightened the animosity felt by other orders. The Jesuit emphasis on books and learning stood in contrast to St. Francis’s (1181/82–1226) opinion that readers of books ran the risk of exposure to vice. Yet the adaptive Jesuits could also emulate Franciscan tactics and symbols, which likewise did not endear the Society to the friars. In India, Jesuits sparred with Carmelites and Capuchins as well.³⁴

Tensions between Dominicans and Jesuits often centered on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Although not proclaimed a dogma of the church until 1854, this teaching was vigorously promoted by many Jesuits (and some Franciscans) while Dominicans, who saw themselves as the scholars and theologians of the church, did not support it.³⁵ Differences in the views of each order regarding the role of divine grace and human free will led to ongoing controversies and eventually a papal ban on either side criticizing the position of the other. The Jesuit emphasis on the discernment of spirits in one’s own life was likewise a very different path from that of the Dominicans, whose fundamental role is that of preacher. These theological disputes were further enflamed by struggles over the control of schools, the Society sometimes requiring a public statement of belief in the teaching of the Immaculate Conception from instructors.³⁶ Dominicans and Jesuits had moreover followed different paths in their respective pursuits of knowledge. The Jesuits during their first century and a half had contributed significantly to scientific literature, in part because they relied heavily on mathematics, which permitted them to explore various explanations for physical phenomena in a “hypothetical” way that sought to evade charges of heresy. But this approach earned them the mistrust of others, among them many Dominicans, who wished to restrict investigation to those avenues explicitly following from Aristotelian natural philosophy.³⁷ In a climate inflamed by charges that Jesuit casuists were tricksters employing “mental reservation” to mislead others,³⁸ this use of mathematics further damaged the reputation of the Society in some quarters.

Along with the Augustinians, Dominicans had lost many university chairs to Jesuits, a matter that resurfaced when the heads of both orders began to press Pope Clement XIV (1705–74, r.1769–74) to sign the breve of suppression. Some Dominicans had also accused Jesuits of moral laxity in pastoral matters, a charge echoed by Jansenists. The mood of at least some Dominicans was suggested by the celebratory banquet held in a Dominican house the night after the execution of Malagrida. As the Society’s fortunes in Spain declined, the general of the Augustinians, Francisco Xavier Vázquez (1703–85, in office 1753–85), paid close attention, and played a role in the negotiations that culminated in the expulsion of the Jesuits from that kingdom.³⁹ As soon as the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish Empire, Mexican Dominicans openly accused the Society of heretical errors, a charge that had circulated for years.⁴⁰ The Oratorians, first established in Portugal, were not as powerful as the Dominicans, but they too were rivals of the Society in settings as far off as Vietnam, and were sympathetic to Jansenism.⁴¹

When the opposition of a scattering of diocesan bishops, who had long resented the patterns of loyalty and obedience found in the Society, was added to this mix, the Jesuits found themselves engaged in unceasing defensive and polemical struggles, not against enemies of the church but against powerful elements of the church itself. These conflicts drew resources away from the Society’s major projects, but, more importantly, fostered a siege mentality that further hampered Jesuit efforts to anticipate and deal with threats to their order. Stuck in a reactive posture, by the 1760s the Society had less energy or will to support the most creative of its members—or perhaps to attract the most intellectually ambitious to the order as well.

5 Dénouement in France

Disaster had meanwhile struck the Society in France. As is often the case, a specific and spectacular scandal allowed criticisms that had accumulated in a variety of contexts to be aired once more and focused on a particular target. Antoine de La Valette (1708–67) was the superior of the Society’s Martinique missions.⁴² La Vallette was accused of engaging in commerce, which violated canon law, and was summoned to Paris for trial. It emerged that La Vallette, confronted with losses on the high seas resulting from the hostilities of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), had tried to recoup his losses by engaging in various unsuccessful (and ethically dubious) ventures without the permission of his superiors. He had then borrowed sums to cover losses that eventually reached the figure of 2,400,000 livres, a vast amount of money at the time.⁴³ The Society was held responsible for this debt by the French courts, which effectively bankrupted the Jesuits in France and led directly to the Society’s expulsion a year later.

The wider implications of the La Vallette affair stretched beyond the financial. The French Parlement, which was La Vallette’s last venue of appeal, decreed that the Jesuits were harmful to the Catholic Church and to French society in general.⁴⁴ Such charges would soon be applied to the Society more globally, and it seems likely that the Parlement, which included many Jansenists, saw the La Vallette case as a golden opportunity to strike a mortal blow at the Jesuits. Why the Society chose to appeal La Vallette’s case to this Parlement, when the court in Marseille had ruled in favor of the Jesuits’ creditors, remains a mystery.⁴⁵ The animosity toward the Jesuits in many parts of French society was hardly a secret. The attempted assassination of Louis XV in 1757, although it could not be tied to the Jesuits beyond the fact that the would-be assassin had worked as a domestic servant in a Jesuit house, had stirred up (or uncovered) intense and longstanding hostility toward the Society. The trials following the attempted assassination of the Portuguese king José I in 1758 only reinforced the old notion of Jesuits as regicides.⁴⁶

Perhaps the debacle of the La Vallette case is an instance when the stereotype of the overly arrogant and self-assured Jesuit holds some truth. Perhaps, too, the La Vallette affair was the inevitable slipup in the operations of a vast, worldwide organization for which the Society’s enemies had been waiting so long. If so, the anti-Jesuits were not disappointed, as the scandal and its aftermath was the biggest single disaster to face the beleaguered Society and sealed its fate, not merely in France, but throughout the world. Later scandals into which the Jesuits were drawn, such as the struggle between the Estates of Brittany and the duke of Aiguillon only accelerated the energies set in motion by l’affaire La Vallette.⁴⁷ Other factors not directly involving the Society added to a climate hostile to such articulate and visible members of the Catholic Church. Voltaire’s 1762 campaign for toleration in the wake of the Calas case did not focus on the Jesuits, but his indictment of the church, and by implication, all who defended it, was clear. Today, we might say that an anti-Jesuit mood in France was “trending.”⁴⁸

In 1763, an improbable and impermanent alliance of Jansenists and philosophes promoted by a Capuchin, Pierre Parisot, alias Norbert de Bar-le-Duc or the Abbé Platel (1697–1769), pressed for the destruction of the Society: soon, the collegia of the Jesuits throughout France were closed, and in November of the following year, the Society was dissolved in all French dominions, although some provincial parlements continued for a while to defend it. The transfer of material possessions went somewhat slowly: it was not until 1770 that the University of Paris took possession of Jesuit buildings and collections. The transfer of properties also addressed the claims of creditors: hundreds of thousands of livres from the holdings of several of the colleges were transferred to these creditors.⁴⁹ The dissolution of the Society in France was a sensation discussed throughout Europe and seemed to point toward the inevitable suppression of the entire order, although what all the consequences might be for the traditional allies and patrons of the Society was far from clear.

The ambitions of monarchs and powerful ministers have long been cited as a significant factor in the downfall of the Jesuits, although in at least one instance, that of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (1741–90, r.1765–90), the alleged hostility of a monarch to the Society was not nearly as great as had been supposed.⁵⁰ Among the political figures openly hostile to the Jesuits, the Portuguese marquis of Pombal was arguably the most influential. Pombal saw the Jesuits as the greatest single obstacle to his plans for the drawing of power to the royal court and to himself personally, but the consequences of his anti-Jesuit campaign reached far beyond Lisbon. Through the promotion of books and pamphlets hostile to the Society, Pombal contributed to a burgeoning anti-Jesuit literature that both hastened the Society’s expulsion from the Portuguese Empire and added to the legend of the evil Jesuit that endured long after the Society was restored.⁵¹ In the Spanish court, anti-Jesuit figures such Count Aranda (1718–78)⁵² exercised great influence over the king, Charles III, who in his decree expelling the Jesuits proclaimed that the topic was not to be discussed, on pain of death.⁵³ In Naples, Bernardo Tanucci (1698–1783) was fiercely anti-Jesuit⁵⁴ and supported the reduction in power of all religious orders. Anti-Jesuit sentiment in the Venetian Republic⁵⁵ dated back more than two hundred years, and the Society had been expelled for fifty years in the seventeenth century. Louis XV was no enemy of the Jesuits, but ultimately endorsed their abolition “for the sake of the peace of my kingdom.” Rulers and courtiers throughout Europe watched the rising storm from the sidelines and made their plans accordingly.

The personality and political situation of the pontiff who issued the breve, Clement XIV, likewise played a role in events, although it is doubtful that any pope would have been able to resist indefinitely Bourbon pressure to suppress the Society. The French foreign minister, the duke of Choiseul (1719–85, in office 1758–61 and 1766–70), was even said to have observed that if Clement XIV’s pro-Jesuit predecessor, Clement XIII (1693–1769, r.1758–69), had lived another decade, a schism might have resulted.

The question of the Society’s future had dominated the conclave that elected him, and while there is no evidence that Clement had promised before his election to suppress the Society, John W. O’Malley observes that “he could hardly have been elected without somehow communicating a readiness to do so.”⁵⁶ The marriage of the Habsburg archduchess Marie Antoinette (1755–93) to the Dauphin (1754–93) in 1770 potentially brought Austria into the Bourbon camp, further increasing the pressure on this non-combative pontiff. In his pre-papal career, the Jesuit-trained Clement had not shown himself to be hostile to the Society, but as ruler of an already weakened papacy he was susceptible to both threats and inducements from agents of the Bourbon courts. Yet his fondness for the Society had on occasion also been evident. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) describes the character of the future pope, Lorenzo Ganganelli, as “mildest and most moderate,”⁵⁷ while the Jesuit historian Sydney Smith called him “a weak man and an opportunist.”⁵⁸ Both assessments may be true. Clement’s death a little more than a year after the issuance of Dominus ac redemptor was attributed by some to Jesuit poisoning,⁵⁹ adding more fuel to wild conspiracy theories.⁶⁰

Another contributing factor in the trend toward suppression were accounts circulating of the Society’s activity in Paraguay. Modern writers have sometimes understood the Paraguayan reducciones as an early example of Jesuit “social justice work” that earned the Society the enmity of neighboring colonial powers.⁶¹ However, the negative reaction to the Jesuit “Republic of Paraguay” had more to do with the threat that an independent (and armed) polity that harbored escaped slaves posed to colonial projects than it did with the in fact paternalistic way Jesuits treated the indigenous peoples who resided in the reducciones. Voltaire’s lampoon of the Jesuit “Republic” in Candide (1759) was read by an audience already inclined to believe the worst about the Society’s undertakings. A diary supposedly written by a Tadeo Enis (Henis) Bohemian Jesuit who had traveled to the reducciones was also employed by the Society’s opponents who found evidence of abuses in Enis’s account.⁶² Stories of strange goings-on in South America did not cease with the suppression. In 1782, rumors spread of a “picturesque madman passing himself off as a Jesuit” who was leading an insurgency in Peru.⁶³ Tales of vast Jesuit wealth once more inspired both resentment and avarice among the Society’s foes. Although the Society held extensive properties in Europe and abroad, there were no caches of gold hidden on Jesuit estates and many communities were cash poor.⁶⁴ After the suppression, the Society’s work in Paraguay would receive a much more positive assessment from the Protestant academic Christian Leiste (1738–1815), but this was little comfort to exiled and imprisoned ex-Jesuits.⁶⁵

The catastrophe the Society faced was helped along indirectly by many other events. The victory of the British–Prussian alliance in the Seven Years’ War, despite Frederick the Great’s (1712–86, r.1740–86) later support for ex-Jesuits, did nothing to stabilize the Habsburg court, long a major ally of the Society. The first partition of Poland in 1772 was the beginning of the complete destruction of a polity where the Jesuits had long been respected and influential. A few months later, Victor Amadeus III (1726–96), who was married to a Spanish Bourbon princess, became king of Sardinia (r.1773–96), potentially moving another monarchy into the anti-Jesuit camp. Famines in Central Europe between 1770 and 1773 heightened social tensions⁶⁶ and reduced tax revenues, tempting rulers to look for scapegoats to blame and for new sources of funds.

Interwoven with each of these factors was the reality that for two centuries the Society had been phenomenally successful, particularly in the field of schooling, and as a result was resented by many.⁶⁷ Moreover, the Society had never been inclined to hide its light under a bushel and had long advertised its successes (as well as its failures, when they produced martyrs) in a way that provoked the ire of its rivals. In addition, a complex series of events that became known as the “Chinese Rites Controversy” had reached a climax more than half a century before the breve of suppression dealt a serious blow to the Society and provided its enemies with ammunition to attack Jesuit undertakings worldwide.⁶⁸ Luke Clossey sees a connection between the nationalist sentiments that stoked the rites controversy and the ultimate suppression of the Society.⁶⁹ Clossey’s observation reminds us that on top of all the other accusations directed at the Jesuits, questions of their national allegiance persisted. Ignatius, while not ethnically Spanish, had remained a subject of the Spanish crown, as did many of the first Jesuits, a fact that did not endear them to all Italians or French. In the Austrian province, tensions between German- and Hungarian-speaking Jesuits had long festered, and Polish and Hungarian Jesuit missionaries had sometimes clashed in Eastern Europe. Many, but by no means all eighteenth-century Jesuits had taken an interest in the languages and literatures of their homelands, which often would earn them the respect of nineteenth-century nationalists but could place these Jesuits at odds with neighboring ethnic populations and with monarchs desiring to downplay ethnic identity. Thus an internationalist or ethnically focused orientation could be turned against the Society by its enemies.

6 The Iberian Empires: Expulsion and Imprisonment

The treatment of Jesuits working in the South American Portuguese Empire by the civil authorities following the suppression of the Society there was particularly harsh. Hundreds were imprisoned for decades or sent to Africa, an exile that few survived. The situation was complicated by the presence of Jesuits who were not subjects of the king of Portugal. At least three Jesuits of Hungarian birth were working in Brazil in 1757. One, Fáy Dávid (1721–67), died in prison,⁷⁰ and the others appear to have been able to return eventually to their homeland. Some ex-Jesuits remained in Brazil after the order of expulsion was published: these were harassed, along with former students of the Jesuits and even friends of Jesuits.⁷¹ In 1760, 127 fathers and brothers were deported to Portugal.⁷² Many of these ended up in the Papal States. Tomás da Silva (dates unknown), a former lay brother or coadjutor temporalis, was living in Pesaro, on the Adriatic, in 1780, where he presumably died a few years later.⁷³ Also living in Pesaro was pharmacist Manuel Dinis (1708–after 1780), who had continued to ply his trade.⁷⁴

The fate of ex-Jesuits in the Spanish Empire could be equally grim. Those banished from the Philippines were transported first to Acapulco, then to Veracruz, and on to Cádiz, from whence they boarded a ship to Italy, a process taking up to two years.⁷⁵ Some were too weak to travel beyond Genoa on to the Papal States, while those who ended up in the snowy Apennines struggled with the change in climate.⁷⁶ A primary source for the experiences of Philippine Jesuits in exile is the Arresto y viaje de los jesuitas de Filipinas (The arrest and transport of the Jesuits of the Philippines) of Francisco Javier Puig (1720–82).⁷⁷ Puig retraces the protracted voyages of the sixty-eight expelled Jesuits to Italy, by way of Acapulco, adding to his account the prophecies of disasters that the expulsion of the Jesuits was supposed to trigger.⁷⁸ A few ex-Jesuits managed to emerge from these ordeals, if not unscathed, then at least alive. Gottfried Bernhard von Middendorf (1741–82), who had worked on the Pacific coast of Mexico, smuggled a letter to his family out of the prison of Puerto de Santa María, Spain, with the help of Swiss guards. Eventually, he was freed through the intervention of Maria Theresia (1717–80).⁷⁹ At least one native-born Mexican Jesuit returned to his homeland before the restoration of the Society: Francisco Bernárdez (1740–1813) was ordained priest in Italy in 1770, arrived in Mexico in 1808, and remained there until his death.⁸⁰

The suppression brought forth rejoicing in many quarters and was regarded, in the words of one modern historian, by Enlightenment thinkers as the “inevitable, logical, and just consequence” of a struggle for intellectual freedom.⁸¹ Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) hailed the suppression as “an occurrence worthy to figure among the outstanding events of an age which itself would prove a landmark in the history of the human mind.”⁸²

At the same time, rumors abounded that the Jesuits had in fact not disbanded, but merely realigned themselves with (for example) the Masons and remained committed to their conspiracies. Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), who founded the Illuminati in 1776, is sometimes described as a former Jesuit, a convenient claim given the broader context of continued Jesuit plotting. In fact, he was trained by Jesuits, and a lay professor of canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. Other supposed Jesuit conspiracies involved a plot to destroy the Bourbon dynasties, unearthed just as the Society was about to be suppressed.⁸³ The lingering suspicion that the Jesuits had engendered is reflected in the observation of John Adams (1735–1826), made two years after the restoration of the Society: “Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gypsies can assume […]?”⁸⁴ The story of the Society’s suppression and eventual restoration must be understood in the context of this continuing suspicion and dislike, which did not dissipate in the nineteenth century and became one of the defining characteristics of the environment in which the restored Society had to function.

The suppression ushered in no victory for those of the Society’s opponents whose motivations were strictly theological. The religious positions of anti-Jesuits gained no ground, while some of the practices promoted by Jesuits among the laity, such as devotion to the Sacred Heart, continued or even grew in popularity. Many French bishops during the La Vallette case had expressed their admiration for the Society, and there is little to suggest that these attitudes changed after 1773. Events nevertheless brought confusion and despair for Jesuits who had seen what was coming but all the same had supposed that their traditional secular patrons, in particular, the Habsburg Maria Theresia of Austria, would protect them.⁸⁵ An especially profound shock awaited Jesuits expelled from Spain, who, after a short stay in Corsica,⁸⁶ found the guns of the pope pointed at them as they approached the Papal States from the sea.

In the Western Hemisphere colonies of Spain and Portugal, about five thousand neophytes were left without pastors.⁸⁷ In the Spanish colonies alone, the Society had run two hundred missions and schools, staffed by 2,606 Jesuits, that maintained contact with a quarter of a million Indigenous people.⁸⁸ In Mexico, Jesuit schools had been important training grounds for Creole elites, some of whom had family ties to the Jesuits. The Society’s expulsion triggered pro-Jesuit protests in several Mexican cities that were suppressed with severity.⁸⁹

The vast distances separating territories ruled by Spain resulted in delays in the execution of the decree of expulsion. In Baja California, Jesuits were not forcibly removed from their posts until February 1768. Among those expelled was Johann Jakob Baegert (1717–72), an Alsatian, who returned to the Rhineland where he published (anonymously) an account in German of the Baja mission.⁹⁰ Deported from his post in Sonora to a Spanish prison, Ignaz Pfefferkorn (1726–98) languished there for almost a decade until family connections enabled him to return to his homeland where he completed his study of Sonora.⁹¹ These missions were given to the Franciscans, although the material properties of the Society passed under the control of military commissioners,⁹² a process repeated elsewhere in the Spanish Empire.⁹³ In what is today eastern Bolivia, a system of governance largely unchanged from that maintained by the Society continued after 1768 with the principal differences being that the aboriginal people could now trade and the missions themselves were run by secular clergy. In the Philippines, where the Society had managed numerous haciendas, ex-Jesuits too ill to travel were allowed to stay, but the management of the sale of Jesuit properties was so poorly handled that there was not enough money to care for these men nor to maintain the former Jesuit churches and schools.⁹⁴ Most of the former Jesuit missions in the Spanish colonies declined after the departure of the Society, a trend most pronounced where mission communities were still in the process of consolidation when the Jesuits were expelled.

The Jesuits of the remote Marianas missions were not read the order of expulsion until August 26, 1769. The aftermath of this expulsion was given an additional anti-Jesuit fillip by the investigation launched the following year into the misconduct of the deceased father Francisco Javier (Franz Xaver) Reitenberger (1707–67), who was accused of sexual offenses.⁹⁵ Despite these hardships, a few former Jesuits found roles in the Spanish Empire. Manuel Ventura Figueroa Barreiro (1708–83), who has been described as a “Gallican,” became governor of the Council of Castile immediately after the publication of Dominus ac redemptor.

The announcement of the actual papal breve of suppression was thus no bolt from the blue, and the Society had already been gravely crippled by its expulsion from the majority of major European powers. The exception was of course the Habsburg realms, where despite the events of the previous fifteen years, some Jesuits in remote eastern communities were still surprised to find their order suppressed (and the breve of suppression supported unequivocally by their monarchs). The suppression of a major Catholic order with a worldwide mission was virtually without precedent⁹⁶ that might be consulted as to how to proceed. Not only was the breve ignored in some countries, it was also interpreted differently in specific dioceses. In Liège, the prince-bishop allowed the Jesuits to continue their work, but with the requirement that they abandon their vow of obedience: henceforth, he alone would be their superior. In England, ex-Jesuits remained at their posts and retained their properties, having first submitted to the vicar apostolic.⁹⁷ In Poland, efforts were made to halt the publication of Dominus ac redemptor, but these soon failed.

In these uncharted waters, a few ex-Jesuits began to reinvent themselves. The past-suppression career of Don Raymondo Hormaza (Hormasa) (c.1750?–1789?) forms a curious sidelight to the aftermath of the destruction of the Society’s missions in the Spanish Empire. Hormaza’s early years are obscure; he may have been born in Bilbao. After years of wandering following the Jesuits’ expulsion from Spain, he arrived in Liverpool where he took the somewhat implausible pseudonym the Reverend Raymund Harris and worked in a Catholic church before falling out with the local bishop. There in 1788 Harris published a pamphlet presenting scriptural arguments in favor of the slave trade.⁹⁸ Harris’s efforts, which earned him a gift of £100 from the city of Liverpool, also triggered rebuttals from the pulpit and in the form of pamphlets by leading abolitionists. Harris died in 1789, having produced no other surviving writings.

Meanwhile, support for a restored Society came from an unexpected quarter: the Protestant German poet and mystic Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg [1772–1801]) called for the return of the Jesuits from Russia. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), normally no friend of the baroque, after seeing a play produced in 1786 that retained some of the Society’s baroque touches, conceded that Jesuit churches were “distinguished by a pleasing pomp.”⁹⁹ And real relief came from other and unexpected quarters. Frederick the Great of Prussia refused to publish the breve of suppression, and, after a standoff lasting two years, the king and the Holy See reached an ad hoc agreement whereby Jesuits could continue their activities within Prussia, not as members of a religious order, but only as individual clergy answerable to their bishops. The king claimed to have no investment in the Society’s religious goals, writing in 1774: “I view [the Jesuits] only as men of letters, whose place in the instruction of youth it would be difficult, if not impossible to supply.”¹⁰⁰

Old habits among the former Jesuits died hard: for a short while, the Jesuits in Frederick’s Rhineland territories referred to themselves as members of the “Provincia Prussiae Occidentalis Societatis Jesu” (The western Prussian province of the Society of Jesus).¹⁰¹ Early in 1776, Frederick announced the dissolution of the Society within his realms, implicitly admitting that they had been functioning as more than a collection of “men of letters.”¹⁰² Indeed, up until then the fathers were still known in official documents as “Jesuiten.” In the place of the Society, a “Royal Schools Institute” was established, which endured until 1800.¹⁰³ Under these arrangements, former Jesuits in Silesia (which until 1740 had been a Habsburg territory and part of the Austrian province of the Society) remained highly visible. Anton Michael Zeplichal (1737–1806) became director of Breslau University,¹⁰⁴ and many other fathers continued as teachers and preachers, among them Anton Marcus Liebisch (1737–77), a “Professor der Aesthetik” (professor of aesthetics) in Breslau and author of a German grammar.¹⁰⁵ At Frederick’s death, his successor, Frederick William II (1744–97, r.1786–97), suppressed the ex-Jesuits and transferred their possessions to the universities of Halle and Frankfurt an der Oder.¹⁰⁶ But Johann Nepomuk Köhler (1750–1836), often called the “last German Jesuit,” was not ordained until 1776 and was able to work first as a gymnasium instructor, then a professor at the University of Breslau, dying in 1836.¹⁰⁷

7 Exile, Internal and External

The experiences of former Jesuits varied wildly depending on their geographic and political situation. Contrasting with the pronounced hardships experienced by many Habsburg and Iberian Jesuits, the post-1773 careers of some Italian ex-Jesuits were productive and acknowledged. Francesco Antonio Zaccaria (1714–95), distinguished for his historical studies published in Italian, was appointed professor of church history at the Sapienza in Rome. Zaccaria was a member of more than a dozen learned academies and published a defense of the Council of Rome of 1725. His Raccolta di dissertazioni di storia ecclesiastica (Collection of essays on church history) appeared in twenty-two volumes, the final tomes published posthumously. Zaccaria’s successful sojourn in Rome was the result of his good relations with several popes and especially his criticism of Jansenism while supporting “sound doctrine.” The prolific Zaccaria was also among the relatively few who dared to offer a detailed rebuttal (albeit anonymously) to the charges against the Society set forth by Portugal.¹⁰⁸

Other Italian ex-Jesuits had solid, if not stellar post-1773 careers. A six-volume text linking logic and theology by Alfonso Muzzarelli (1749–1813), who unlike Zaccaria had taught mostly lower-level grammar classes, enjoyed wide distribution, and his ascetical work Il mese di Maria o sia di Maggio (The month of Mary, or May) has gone through more than one hundred printings.¹⁰⁹ Muzzarelli also devoted two books to refutations of the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Giulio Cesare Cordara (1704–85), best known today as a historian of the Society, devoted his post-suppression leisure time to a Latin burlesque work on his friendship with Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–87)¹¹⁰ and to the composition of drama. Known as an “abate” (an honorific for an esteemed clergyman) and the “Principe dell’Accademia” (Prince of the academy) in his home town of Alessandria, to which he had returned after 1773, Cordara also produced memorial poetry, and even an apologia for the ill-fated Malagrida.¹¹¹ Having become a secular priest, the Venetian Matteo Luigi Cannonici (1727–1805) built a library in his home city containing thousands of medieval manuscripts. Many of these found their way to the Bodleian Library.¹¹² Simultaneously, Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810) was establishing a reputation as an authority on coins, gems, and medallions.¹¹³ Lanzi also composed a history of painting in Italy and took on the task of trying to decipher Etruscan, and project that remains incomplete to this day. At the time of the suppression, Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–94) was the librarian of the duke of Modena and had published only one volume of his Istoria della letteratura italiana (History of Italian literature) but was able to produce twelve more in the coming eight years, thereby becoming the first historian of Italian literature and linking the classical and post-classical literature of the Italian peninsula.¹¹⁴ Tiraboschi also popularized a theory propounded two centuries earlier by Giammaria (Giovanni Maria) Barbieri (1519–74) that Provençal rhymed poetry had been influenced by Arabic, an idea that rowed against Orientalizing tendencies that would become so prominent for the next century.¹¹⁵ Several ex-Jesuits reported on the natural sciences, among them Giovanni Domenico Giulio (1747–1831) and Francisco Gustà (1744–1816), who described earthquakes in Calabria and Sicily.¹¹⁶ Carlo Borgo (1731–94) continued a Jesuit tradition of producing works on fortifications with his Analisi ed esame ragionato dell’arte della fortificazione e difesa delle Piazze (An analysis and reasoned examination of the art of fortification and the defense of city squares [Venice: Antonio Zatta, 1777]).¹¹⁷ In such an environment, ex-Jesuits might debate with one another. Shortly after the breve of suppression was promulgated, the Italian Giovanni Battista Roberti (1719–86) sparred with the Chilean-born Diego José Abad (1727–79) over the use of Latin by non-Italians.¹¹⁸ Finally, to conclude a list that might be made much longer, Carlo Francesco Gianella (1740–1810) taught mathematics at the University of Pavia and at the former Jesuit collegium in Brera, France, and wrote textbooks on mathematics.¹¹⁹

This parade of accomplished Italian ex-Jesuits is no grab bag of strays. The community that coalesced after 1773 revealed the degree to which the pre-suppression Society in Italy had continued to attract young men of superior ability right up until the end. The apparent absence of invective directed toward these former Jesuits as ex-Jesuits says much about the cultural climate in Italy, both at court and in the press. Yet without new recruits this community had no future. Still, while they could, many of these men forged alliances with one another supported not merely by their shared status as former Jesuits but also because of common beliefs and worldviews as well as through their commitment to inquiry. It is here that we find some of the most significant links between former Jesuits and currents of Enlightenment thought. This willingness to engage with new ideas had developed during the years before 1773 among Jesuits conducting scholarship (often presented in poetic form) largely untrammeled by confessional and polemical considerations.¹²⁰ With a perhaps slightly anachronistic turn of phrase, Owen Chadwick (1916–2015) is prepared to describe the positions of some of these former Jesuits as on the “radical left.”¹²¹ However labeled, the intellectual freedom exercised by ex-Jesuits in Italy would not be seen again in the history of the Society until the latter half of the twentieth century.

Exiles from the Spanish overseas empire joined these men, sometimes serving in the diocese of the Papal States or in Italian schools.¹²² Of the more than two hundred former Jesuits who lived in Rome in 1803, eleven alone were from Chile.¹²³ Others worked as tutors for aristocratic families or as librarians. One of the most remarkable of these émigrés was Juan Ignacio de Molina (1740?–1829), who arrived in Bologna from Chile in 1767. Molina had completed a manuscript on the natural and civil history of his homeland, but it was confiscated during his journey to Europe. He then reassembled the materials from memory and published the work in 1770.¹²⁴ Forty-five years later, Molina’s Analogías menos observadas de los tres reinos de la naturaleza (Minor observations on the three kingdoms of nature) would anticipate some of Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theories.¹²⁵ In a more backward-looking vein, Roque Menchaca (1743–1810), another exiled ex-Jesuit living in Bologna, in 1804 published the first collection of the letters of Ignatius.¹²⁶ Menchaca also produced Memorias cronológicas y geográficas de los arzobispados de América y Filipinas (Chronological and geographical recollections of the archbishoprics of America and the Philippines), which included references to dioceses in Canada, Missouri, and Texas.¹²⁷ Juan de Velasco (1727–92), a native of Ecuador, took a position against the philosophes and endeavored, like other South American Jesuits who are sometimes called “Creole Jesuits in exile,” to glorify the “New World.”¹²⁸ Velasco’s Historia moderna del reino de Quito y crónica de la provincia de la Compañía (The recent history of the kingdom of Quito and chronical of province of the same name of the Jesuits) was completed in 1789 but a portion of it remained unpublished until 1842. Another distinguished South American historian who migrated to Italy, José Guevara (1719–1806), produced a manuscript history of Paraguay. However, like Velasco’s work, it did not see the light of day for decades.¹²⁹ Lastly, Juan Nuix (1740–83) articulated a defense of the conquista harkening back to the mindset of the Counter-Reformation and that attacked both Enlightenment values and capitalist exploitation of human beings.¹³⁰

Spanish ex-Jesuits were welcomed to the literary debates so common in eighteenth-century Italy, mixing easily with their Italian confrères in what one historian has called “not so much a more or less secret organization as a society of learned men.”¹³¹ Juan Andrés y Morell (1740–1817), who after his exit from Spain made Ferrara his headquarters, composed a history of literature that included discussions of Voltaire and Rousseau.¹³² A few Portuguese Jesuit scientists also settled in Italy. Eusebio da Veiga (1718–98) was a notable astronomer and had taught mathematics in Lisbon. In Rome, Veiga became the rector of the Portuguese Hospital and published eight volumes of astronomical ephemera.¹³³ The discovery of the diary of Manuel Luengo Rodríguez (1735–1816), another Spanish ex-Jesuit exiled to Italy, has shed light not only on the historical events described therein but also serves as a reminder of how great an impact the suppression had on the self-perception of former Jesuits. Members of the old Society had not written diaries (at least not openly): their identities as individuals were subsumed by the membership in the Society. Luengo Rodríguez, buffeted back and forth between his home country and Italy, experienced these events as an individual with a high degree of sensitivity to events.¹³⁴

We have encountered nothing so far of the Jesuit musical tradition, but in Antonio Eximeno y Pujades (1729–1809) we find an ex-Jesuit who wrote on music during the suppression. A professor of mathematics and rhetoric in Spanish universities, a playwright, and possibly the author of two works on military subjects,¹³⁵ Eximemo arrived in Rome in 1767 and undertook the study of music theory. Using the pseudonym “Aristodemo Megareo,” Eximeno gained admission to many literary societies and produced a theory of musical composition based on the rules of prosody.¹³⁶ Eximino’s rather non-musical approach to music, and the scarcity of any notable musicians among the ex-Jesuits active after 1773,¹³⁷ calls attention to the decline in Jesuit musical activity that had begun before the suppression and contrasted with earlier contributions in the baroque period. While one should not read too much into this trend, the frequently rigid and defensive posture of the Society during its years of crisis and exile does not seem to have been conducive to any of the creative arts. The Połosk academy staged concerts, but they were a far cry from the multimedia extravaganzas of a century earlier.

Christopher Storrs argues that attitudes toward the Society and toward religion more generally in the Savoyard state were “transformed”¹³⁸ after 1789, when some Italians, troubled by developments in France, drew closer to the values of the ancien régime. The same might be said about other parts of Italy. But this potentially more positive view of the Society was soon to be overwhelmed by external events: the “period of splendor” was about to end. The arrival in Italy, first of French Republican ideas, and then, after 1796, of the victorious armies of France, put an end to the ex-Jesuit republic of letters. The overthrow of monarchies and elites who had traditionally supported the Society, the devastation brought by war, and especially the attacks on the church turned many former Jesuits who might otherwise have continued their dialogue with the Enlightenment into outspoken opponents of the revolution and all its works.¹³⁹ Insecurity and danger discouraged bold inquiry and expression. Links between the aristocracy and the Society, which had always been part of the latter’s political and educational program, were reinforced, forging a bond that would greatly influence the post-1814 Society.

The paths of ex-Jesuits in France typically led to much less pleasant directions than those in Italy. Immediately after 1773, ex-Jesuits continued to figure prominently in French political and theological debates. In 1775, during a jubilee announced by Clement XIV, sixteen former Jesuits preached in Paris against the ideas of the philosophes, with, it was claimed, considerable success.¹⁴⁰ Two years later, four Portuguese ex-Jesuits were sent to Guyana with the pope’s blessing, because the French crown needed missionaries who could speak the local language.¹⁴¹ In the 1770s and 1780s, many ex-Jesuits worked as secular diocesan priests, providing a cheap labor force for French bishops, who generally regarded these men highly. However, former Jesuits in France, who continued to number in the hundreds, faced a prolonged period of uncertainty. A number pursued completely new careers as jurists, physicians, and diplomats.¹⁴² Not surprisingly, several former Jesuits were present at the opening of the Estates General at Versailles in May of 1789. A few months later, the National Constituent Assembly suppressed all religious orders, and the status of their members remained extremely vulnerable through the period of the Terror (during which at least forty ex-Jesuits were killed).¹⁴³ A few ex-Jesuits were initially amenable to the new Constitutional Church, but they were the exception. Michel-Joseph Dufraisse (1730–1802) accepted the post of bishop of Cher in 1798 but, recalling his vow as a Jesuit not to accept ecclesiastical dignities, resigned three years later.¹⁴⁴

Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769–1821) Concordat with the Holy See in 1801 did nothing to resolve the question of the status of ex-Jesuits, some of whom languished in prisons or were sentenced to transportation for life.¹⁴⁵ Pensions paid by the government to these men had long since dried up. Meanwhile, rumors of Jesuit plots abounded in a climate where “la patrie en danger” (the homeland in danger) was a watchword. What Richard Clay calls “pro-Catholic royalist murder squads”¹⁴⁶ roamed the streams of Lyon in 1797. Their choice of name, “La Compagnie de Jéhu,” was hardly accidental and surely fostered associations with the Jesuits. Meanwhile, the “father of the conspiracy theory,” ex-Jesuit Augustine de Barruel (1741–1820), was about to publish the first volume of his Memoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (Memoirs contributing to the history of Jacobinism), which blamed the French Revolution and its excesses on Enlightenment thinkers, with shadowy Illuminati ultimately manipulating the players.¹⁴⁷ Barruel’s book, although later denounced for its “paranoid fantasies,” was one of the most influential publications by a former Jesuit of the late eighteenth century, a fact not always acknowledged by later Jesuit historians.

To the south, the Jesuit presence in Malta, technically independent, but practically a fief of the Kingdom of Naples, ended on April 22, 1768: all twenty Jesuits were arrested and soon expelled. The Society’s properties became the nucleus of the “Pubblica Università di Studi Generali” established by the grand-master.¹⁴⁸ The Society did not make a permanent return to the island until ninety-nine years later.

Pierre-Joseph Picot de Clorivière (1735–1820) was a relatively rare example of an ex-Jesuit who spent time in a Benedictine monastery following the suppression. Clorivière had also worked incognito in England for some years, and in 1790 established the Société du Cœur de Jésus (Society of the Heart of Jesus),¹⁴⁹ which sought to perpetuate Jesuit spirituality and was also rumored to be a vehicle for the return of “Jesuitism.” At the time, former Jesuits were regarded as “suspect” by the revolutionary governments and their successors. During Napoleon’s reign, Clorivière, a prolific writer of devotional tracts, was imprisoned on charges of involvement in a conspiracy against the emperor’s life but survived to see the restoration.

In the empire, a few ex-Jesuits found roles to play in the continuing Catholic Enlightenment. Lorenz Hübner (1751–1807), who following the suppression took up the study of jurisprudence and then turned to journalism, sheltered under the liberal regime of Count Hieronymus Colloredo (1732–1812), prince-bishop of Salzburg.¹⁵⁰ On the other hand, Hermann Goldhagen (1718–94), a native of Mainz, published the Religions-Journal, which took a hard line against reformist Catholic theology.¹⁵¹ These disagreements among former Jesuits point to less visible but real fault lines within the Society dating from before 1773, as well as to differences in the social origins and working environments of Jesuits in German-speaking lands. Notably, with the exception of Gabriel Gruber (1740–1805), no ex-Jesuits from the empire, despite their numbers, figured prominently in either the recreation of the Society in Russia or its work in the United States.¹⁵² Perhaps this was due to the relative comfort and security in which some German ex-Jesuits found themselves. The literary critic Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) wrote mysteriously that “what the [ex-]Jesuits are allowed in Munich, is well known,” citing with approval a Düsseldorf newspaper that asserted that in “no other land in the world have the Jesuits since their suppression been treated better than in the Palatinate lands, especially the duchies of Jülich and Berg.”¹⁵³

The situation in Poland was in many ways utterly unlike that faced by former Jesuits in other European states. The commonwealth was in the process of being dismembered by its neighbors, and for twenty years after the publication of Dominus ac redemptor this crisis completely absorbed the attention and efforts of the political leadership. Since Jesuits had long championed Polish language and literature, the nationalist sentiments heightened by the prospect of the complete destruction of the republic tended to foster sympathy for rather than resentment toward the Society among many Poles. The continuing prestige of the Society and the ways in which Jesuit identity was valued is hinted at by Stanisław Załęski (1843–1908), who notes that when the suppression was imposed, scholastics, young men at the beginning of their training, and their “professeurs” “found it impossible to be happy”¹⁵⁴ in other religious orders, and so retired to private life. The relationship between the Society and the very numerous szlachta (roughly, the gentry) in Poland was particularly close. Indeed, many Jesuits were members of the szlachta.

The identities of Catholic, Polish-speaker, member of a titled family, and Jesuit remained closely intertwined in the final years of the republic, although these connections were of less practical value in the exiled Jesuit community of Połock. Thus, when a Commission for the National Education of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Polish: Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, abbreviated KEN) was formed in October 1773, its reformist agenda was not so much pitted against Jesuit educational practices as it was promoted by the almost three hundred former Jesuits who initially served on the commission in various capacities.¹⁵⁵ After 1773, the educational system in Volhynia and Right-Bank Ukraine was administered by the KEN, which transferred control of some Jesuit schools to the Basilians. In Lviv, now in Habsburg territory, the Jesuit university was reconstituted as a state academy. Many Polish Jesuits found posts as chaplains to noble families while two eventually became bishops.¹⁵⁶ During the same period, Polish ex-Jesuits were particularly prominent in astronomy. Marcin Poczobut-Odlanicki (1728–1810) had studied in Italy and France and was elected a member of the Royal Society of London before the suppression. Poczobut became rector of the University of Vilnius, where he had conducted astronomical observations, in 1780, a post he held for twenty-seven years.¹⁵⁷

Yet this was not the whole story: the eastern half of the commonwealth was predominantly Lithuanian-speaking, and the Jesuit connection to that language was far less developed than to Polish. More than one thousand Jesuits worked in the Society’s Lithuanian province in 1773, but probably a majority of these spoke only Polish.¹⁵⁸ This region was under mostly Russian control by 1795. By this time, natural attrition had reduced the total number of former Jesuits still active as educators to about fifty for the entire region originally within the republic.¹⁵⁹ The newly minted Jesuits of the Połock community did not replenish these numbers, nor was the re-establishment of a Jesuit presence in a now dismembered Poland the most pressing concern of those in Rome who dreamed of the restoration of the Society. The years of suppression thus saw the irreversible collapse of Jesuit influence in north central Europe, and the disappearance of the “Jesuit teacher” as a feature of those societies. Yet the positive view held by many of the work of the Society endured.

Polish ex-Jesuits were particularly drawn to journalism, which meant communication in the vernacular. Stefan Odrowąż Łuskina (1725–93) published the Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw gazette), which lasted until 1791 and in 1776 offered its readers a summary of the American Declaration of Independence.¹⁶⁰ Łuskina had been an astronomer and professor of mathematics and did a short stint in France as the confessor of the Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–98, r.1764–95) during the latter’s visit to France in 1765.

Piotr Świtkowski (1744?–93), like Łuskina, a mathematician by training, published the monthly Pamiętnik polityczny i historyczny przypadków (Historico-political memoir), which took a more sympathetic view of reform.¹⁶¹ A member of KEN, Świtkowski supported freedom of the press and religion and admired the Josephinian reforms in neighboring Austria. The translator and historian Jan Chrzciciel Albertrandi (1731–1808) was one of several Polish ex-Jesuits who became bishops, and before the suppression he too had edited a publication, which had been launched in Vilnius and bore the memorable name Zabawy przyjemne i pożyteczne (Pleasant and useful delightful amusements). Later, another former Jesuit who became a bishop, Adam Naruszewicz (1733–96), was briefly editor.¹⁶² As time passed, and ex-Jesuits died or retired, the direct influence of the old Society on Polish public life waned, but its immediate impact on the doomed commonwealth was great. Still an overwhelmingly rural society with few urban centers and insufficient resources to establish a new university, Poland–Lithuania turned to its former Jesuits as an ad hoc intellectual community that had no rivals (although Piarist teachers succeeded the Jesuits in many secondary schools). This community had a special interest in national history and language (Naruszewicz was the author of an influential history of Poland). In each of these respects, Poland resembled Hungary, but there were important differences as well. The number and prominence of Polish ex-Jesuits was even greater than in Hungary, virtually all former Jesuits active in Poland were ethnic Poles, whereas ex-Jesuits in Hungary came from various ethnicities, and the tensions created by the Society’s promotion of a Transylvanian Uniate Church were absent. Other ex-Jesuits continued in roles that were more characteristic of the old Society. Tomasz Grodzicki (1718–1802) conducted an urban ministry on Warsaw and wrote a catechism.¹⁶³ Antoni Janiszewski (1728?–after 1781), working in Lviv, which had passed under Habsburg control, published volume after volume of his sermons.¹⁶⁴

8 A Sojourn in White Russia

Jesuits had been visiting Russia for two centuries, and in the time of Peter the Great (1672–1725, r.1682–1725) at least one member of the Moscow aristocracy had joined the Society,¹⁶⁵ but these encounters had not always been positive. The Orthodox hierarchy deeply mistrusted the fathers, and Jesuits returned the compliment, calling them “the most primitive of men.”¹⁶⁶ But Catherine (1729–96, r.1762–96), like Frederick, saw the value in allowing the Jesuits to continue their work in her realm, especially since they could promote loyalty to her among the Polish Catholic nobility.¹⁶⁷ Dominus ac redemptor was therefore not to be published in the Russian Empire. On January 13, 1774, the empress had issued an ukase (decree) commanding the Jesuits residing in her territories to alter nothing of their way of life or work. At the same time, she warned them to obey all of the laws of the empire or lose their privileges. The rise of Catherine’s favorite, Prince Potemkin (1739–91), after 1782, provided the exiled Jesuits with another ally of great influence and power,¹⁶⁸ but as these men would learn, their status within Russia was entirely dependent on the attitude of the sovereign, which could change at any moment.

With the first partition of Poland in 1772, 201 Jesuits of the province of Mazovia came under Russian rule. Some of these traveled eastward to White Russia (modern-day Belarus) when the suppression took effect. The Jesuit collegium in Połock, which had been founded in 1580, was also in Russia after the first partition of Poland. The school remained open with Jesuit instructors still at their work, many of whom continued with the dress, rule, and name of the old Society.¹⁶⁹ Over time, others joined them. Ex-Jesuits who had served in neighboring Lithuania and Mazovia were granted papal permission to rejoin the Russian Society.

Others came from farther away. Antoni Lustig (1752–1815) hailed from Prussia and came to the region in 1776, eventually becoming provincial of White Russia.¹⁷⁰ Gaetano Angiolini (1748–1816), a native of Piacenza, arrived in 1783, painted frescos in the interior of the Catholic church of Vitebsk, served as chancellor of the collegium, and stayed until about 1801 when he migrated to St. Petersburg.¹⁷¹ Jean-Nicolas Beauregard (1733 or 1731–1804) was from Metz and after a career combatting the philosophes had fled to London from the Terror.¹⁷² The presence of these men from distant lands may have been seen by the Russian monarchy as a positive good, since the reduction of Polish national sentiment among the local gentry was one of St. Petersburg’s goals for the region.¹⁷³ But the sudden influx of men of many backgrounds also produced strains for a community that was endeavoring to build a cohesive identity. There were also occasional problems with men who joined the community from Poland, and the canonical irregularity of the entire project.

A larger problem loomed over the entire undertaking, which James T. Flynn describes succinctly: “The Jesuits were in almost constant conflict with the Archbishop of White Russia, Stanisław Siestrzencewicz-Bohusz, the head of the [Catholic] Church in the Russian Empire, who wanted, at bottom, to control every facet of the life of the church in Russia, in close collaboration with the government.”¹⁷⁴

Conflicts between Jesuits and the local ordinary were as old as the Society; what made this collision more dangerous were the position of Catholicism as a tiny minority within Russia, and the Russian tradition of secular control over ecclesiastical policy. Stanisław Siestrzeńcewicz-Bohusz (1731–1826) accepted this tradition without protest and was known for his critical view of the papacy. The tsarina had badgered Pius VI (1717–99, r.1775–99) to accept an ex post facto arrangement by which Siestrzeńcewicz-Bohusz had been made an archbishop, a post he held for the next four decades. It is perhaps noteworthy that the archbishop, while like Catherine not an ethnic Russian, was like his imperial mistress an outspoken Russophile. His coadjutor as bishop (also titular bishop of Gadara in partibus)¹⁷⁵ was the Polish former Jesuit Jan Benisławski (1736–1812), who had been present when the initial oral approbation of the Society had been given by the pope in 1783.

Hostility from the Uniate hierarchy also harried the Russian Society. Bishop Jason Smogorzewski (1715–88), metropolitan of Kiev, fired off letters to Rome detailing alleged Jesuit misdeeds. Woven into these developments was a seldom expressed but very real animosity among ethnic groups. Ethnic Poles (who made up perhaps the majority of Jesuits at any time in White Russia) were historic enemies of Russia. Ukrainians had responded with only moderate enthusiasm to the Society’s efforts to establish a Ukrainian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, and many Orthodox Ukrainians regarded this church as a hostile intrusion from the West (which might mean Habsburg-controlled Hungary). Jesuit missionary work among the Armenians was unlikely to impress Orthodox Russians to whom this restive minority was a potential problem.

Catherine’s ambivalent attitude toward Western Europe cast its shadow over all of the developments. Her new Jesuit subjects were potential tools with which to counter Western European influence, but at the same time they were sworn to obedience to a Western European monarch (the pope). They were also inevitably shaped by the Society’s centuries of engagement with the cultures of Western Europe. The Jesuits’ sometime reputation as untrustworthy “cosmopolites” undoubtedly figured into the equation as well.

Despite these challenges, the Jesuits quickly took steps to establish a community in what is now Belarus, where they became formally known as the “Society of Jesus in White Russia.” One of the first tasks faced by the community was the creation of institutions that both conveyed a sense of permanence and that also had the authority to promote stability and growth. To these ends, Stanisław Czerniewicz (1728–85) was elected the first vicar general “for life” in 1782,¹⁷⁶ and was succeeded by Gabriel Lenkiewicz (1722–98), an instructor of astronomy and mathematics.¹⁷⁷ The existence of the Society within Russia was formally and openly recognized by Rome on March 7, 1801 when Pius VII (1742–1823, r.1800–23) issued the breve Catholicae fidei.¹⁷⁸ In this document, the pope decreed that henceforth the leader of the Society in Russia, where there were now two hundred Jesuits, be known as praepositus generalis (superior general), not vicar general, as had previously been the case. Francis Kareu (1731–1802), a native of Lithuania and the region’s third vicar general,¹⁷⁹ thus became the first Jesuit to hold the title of praepositus generalis since the death of Lorenzo Ricci (1703–75, in office 1758–73) in the Castel Sant’Angelo twenty-six years earlier.¹⁸⁰

The change in terminology found in Catholicae fidei, while having little impact on the day-to-day functioning of the Jesuits in Russia, revealed Rome’s understanding of (and hopes for) the future of the Society: the idea of complete restoration became more openly endorsed. The following year, a general congregation was held that elected Gabriel Gruber (in office 1802–5), a Habsburg Jesuit from Slovenia who during the years after the suppression had gained renown for his engineering skills. Gruber had already spent many years in Russia and had established a connection with the mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), who then resided in St. Petersburg.¹⁸¹ In the tradition of medieval wizards, Gruber is also credited with the creation of a “mechanical head” that could supposedly answer questions put to it in many languages.¹⁸² In a more practical vein, Gruber recruited and trained temporal coadjutors (coadjutores temporales) as architects, painters, and workmen.¹⁸³ Unfortunately for the Russian Jesuits, the energetic and gifted Gruber was killed in a fire two years later. Gruber was succeeded by Tadeusz Brzozowski (1749–1820, in office 1814–20), a Prussian-born scholar with considerable knowledge of the workings of the Russian Empire.¹⁸⁴ Some of the Jesuits who migrated to Połock, hardened no doubt by anti-Catholic persecutions, objected to Brzozowski’s relatively broadminded view of the mission of the Society in Russia, which included the teaching of Orthodox Christianity in Jesuit schools. In 1814, Brzozowski, now the superior general of the restored international Society, found himself in the difficult position of trying to expand the Society’s educational role in Russia while confronting criticism that Jesuits were proselytizing among prominent Greek Catholic families.¹⁸⁵

Joseph Coincé (1764–1833) had been ordained a priest before the French Revolution and entered the Society in 1805 in Riga, then ruled by Russia. Trained as a physician, he was a fervent reformer of what he saw as the degenerate morals of the citizens of Riga and became superior in 1813.¹⁸⁶ With the support of the governor of Riga and several French émigrés, Coincé established a school for noble girls whose curriculum included cooking (not a common undertaking of the old Society), and even managed to initiate construction of a hospital, just weeks before the issuance of Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum.¹⁸⁷

The years of exile in Russia were characterized by a wide variety of undertakings. Jesuit historical writing was greatly diminished during this period, but never entirely extinguished; meanwhile, Russians maintained an interest in the history of the Society. In 1784, Freemason and philanthropist Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) published a series of articles in a Moscow periodical outlining the history of the Society in sometimes critical terms.¹⁸⁸ In a letter of 1820, Prince Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin (1770–1840) also asserted that early in the century Jesuits had aggressively sought to convert Jews, although the prince’s knowledge must have been second-hand since he lived in North America.¹⁸⁹

Jesuit skill at self-promotion had not expired either: a permanent display of Jesuit inventions was installed in the Society’s church in St. Petersburg.¹⁹⁰ The Society also initiated six new missions, which were supposed to be directed only to Catholics, but which very probably included proselytizing among Orthodox.¹⁹¹ Meanwhile, in the capital, St. Petersburg, a pension for aristocratic boys had opened in 1803, but did not endure for long. The educational techniques employed in these schools may not have strictly followed the model of the Ratio. One foreign observer claimed that the Jesuits were first sent to St. Petersburg where they were trained in the methods of Prussian reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724–88), which laid special stress on memorization of terminology and downplayed the classics.¹⁹² While this interpretation of Jesuit teacher training may be somewhat erroneous, it is certain that the Society in Russia was prepared to adapt to the new and challenging circumstances in which it found itself, a trait it had inherited from its pre-1773 ancestor and could be traced back to Antonio Possevino’s (1533–1611) sojourn in Moscow in the sixteenth century.¹⁹³

The secondary impact of Jesuit schooling in the Russian Empire during these years was not insignificant. The Society, while reaching out to a wide spectrum of students, continued, whenever possible, to train elites. In the Decembrist revolt of 1826, eight of the officers involved had been trained in Jesuit schools.¹⁹⁴ Jesuit schools served not only as a vehicle for presenting Western ideas and methods of inquiry but also provided the social context for the gathering of youths, both aristocratic and ambitious. Again, there was nothing new about this function for Jesuit schools, but the particular characteristics of Russian society, with its vast population of serfs and scattered urban centers led by a generally despotic and non-Catholic monarchy, created both risks and exciting possibilities for this Jesuit project.

Połock became the incubator of a key figure of the restored Society: the future superior general Johann (Jan) Phillip Roothaan (1785–1853, in office 1829–53). Born in Amsterdam in 1785, Roothaan arrived in White Russia in 1804 and was ordained priest in Połock in 1812.¹⁹⁵ The same day that Roothaan arrived at the novitiate in Daugavpils, Melchior Malevé, a native of South Brabant, also reached the city.¹⁹⁶ Malevé was soon on his way to the Caspian Sea in the company of Father Jan Woyszwiłło (?–1842) and temporal coadjutor Krzysztof Rodziewicz (dates unknown). Malevé mastered several of the local languages and died in Astrakhan thirteen years later. In a Volga community identified as “Krasnopolis” (but otherwise obscure), the former Sulpician father Fidèle de Grivel (1769–1842) maintained a mission.¹⁹⁷

From 1811 until 1820, when it was expelled once more from Russia,¹⁹⁸ the Society also operated Siberian missions that were directed at the local Catholic population (officially, the Society was banned from making conversions from the Orthodox faith). The fathers were by no means welcomed by Orthodox ecclesiastical authorities.¹⁹⁹ The ambition and scope of these undertakings call to mind the projects of the pre-1773 Society. The initiative for the first mission, launched in 1811, had originated with Polish Catholics exiled to Irkutsk. A second mission was born in Tomsk in 1815. Marek Inglot cites a Catalogus for this second expedition, but little is known about its roots in the pre-restoration community in Połock.²⁰⁰ Meanwhile, there were other rivals to deal with: the Society was hostile to the efforts of the Russian Bible Society, founded in 1812 in St. Petersburg with the objective of distributing Bibles in the vernacular.

A few Polish Jesuits, among them Grzegorz Arakiełowicz (1732–98), migrated eastward to the Society’s new headquarters in White Russia, becoming the core of a community that would endure for four decades.²⁰¹ Others stayed in the diminished remnant of Poland–Lithuania: Andreas Strzecki (1737–97) worked at the Vilnius observatory and became the dean of the physics faculty,²⁰² publishing Ephemerides astronomicae (Daily astronomical records) in 1778.²⁰³ But a striking fact about the Jesuit community surviving in White Russia was its lack of direct connection, on either a personal or philosophical level, with the experiences of former Jesuits in pre-1773 Poland. The Society that persevered within the Romanov autocracy was in some ways new, but in others it looked backward in its techniques and goals, a tendency that its complete dependence on an autocratic monarch did nothing to change.

By 1780, a novitiate had been set up in Połock and novices were being admitted. Twenty-one priests had already been ordained.²⁰⁴ By 1809, Połock had fifty-nine scholastics in training, Dunaburg (Daugavpils) in Latvia had twenty-four,²⁰⁵ and an additional eighteen were being trained at four other sites. All told, 617 Jesuits worked in Połock, and by early 1812, on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the collegium, which counted among its faculties one devoted to the “exact sciences,” had been elevated to the rank of academy.²⁰⁶ Połock soon became the nerve center for an ambitious project: two additional collegia, two residential secondary schools, three missionary houses, and nine missionary stations constituted the Jesuit presence in the region. Połock was moreover a hub of plans for the restoration of the Society. The ways in which the Połock Jesuits engaged with the local population closely resembled the strategies of the pre-1773 Society: confraternities were established, processions and public presentations were staged. Jesuits also conducted rural missions among the Latvians, speaking their language.²⁰⁷ The Jesuit presence in Połock acquired an air of permanence and stability: in 1782, a general congregation was held, electing Stanisław Czerniewicz (1728–85) superior general (in office 1782–85). The following year, Pius VI confirmed the existence of the Society, but only orally and not in writing,²⁰⁸ for there was still much need of caution. Still, word reached White Russia of this positive development, and hopes were further raised. In 1784, Luigi Fortis (1748–1829), who would become the twentieth superior general of the Society (in office 1820–29), established contact with the Russian Jesuits from his residence in Parma. Also during these years the Bohemian ex-Jesuit Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) traveled to Russia in search of documents carried off from Prague during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The library of the Połock collegium was enhanced by donations and eventually held thirty-five thousand (or according to some sources, fifty thousand) volumes, and in 1787, the Połock community acquired a printing press. The Bourbon regimes learned of these developments and fumed but could do nothing.

During the reign of Catherine’s son Paul I (1754–1801, r.1796–1801), the Society’s status remained largely unchanged, and if anything improved, since in 1800 the emperor entrusted education in Lithuania, where Catholics made up the majority, to the Society, and allowed the Jesuits to operate a parish church in St. Petersburg. Paul saw a direct connection between the Society’s work and his own security as ruler, writing to his ambassador at the Porte: “Knowing all the advantages that a good government can derive from the Jesuit Institute, whose end is to elevate youth and inspire love and fidelity for sovereigns, I have resolved to restore this order in my dominions and to grant it great prerogatives.”²⁰⁹ The tsar was apparently not familiar with the propaganda pieces of Pombal or even with the Ratio studiorum, but his linking of the elevation of youth with loyalty to a sovereign anticipated the way the restored Society would be viewed by some absolutist rulers. In 1801, Paul visited Połock and toured the collegium, the only Russian monarch ever to do so.²¹⁰

With the existence of the Society now openly sanctioned in Russia, the language of instruction in the Russian Society’s schools was switched in 1802 from Latin to Russian, which represented a significant advance in engaging the local population and was an indication of how far the Russian Society was prepared to go beyond the program of the Ratio. French was also taught at the St. Petersburg collegium.²¹¹ But things gradually took a turn for the worse once Alexander I (1777–1825, r.1801–25) succeeded his murdered father. At first, the protection of yet another Romanov autocrat seemed assured, but two years after the worldwide restoration of the Society Alexander banished the Jesuits from both Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1820, the Society was banned from the entire Russian Empire.

Jesuits trained in Połock during these years formed a link to the most ambitious undertakings of the restored Society. Francis Dzierozynski (1779–1850) joined the Society in 1806 and after the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Russian Empire sailed to the United States, where he became a teacher and administrator at Georgetown.²¹² No doubt the experience of working where support of the absolute ruler might be withdrawn at any moment encouraged a resilience and flexibility that served these Jesuits well when they migrated to new lands. The negative side of this experience was a wariness and even a sense of persecution that followed veteran members of the restored Society to the New World and endured for decades. As Raymond A. Schroth puts it: “Deep in the American Jesuit consciousness was the realization that the political powers that had almost destroyed them once were always ready to strike again.”²¹³ Anti-Catholic riots and the attack on the Medical College of St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution, both in 1844, seemed to justify this anxiety.

The last Jesuit to remain in the Russian Empire, the Luxembourger Gilles Henry (1772–1856), left in 1827.²¹⁴ Henry, who had arrived in Daugavpils the same day as Roothaan and Malevé, was one of the most gifted Jesuits laboring in Russia during the first decade of the nineteenth century. He became proficient in several of the languages spoken in the Caucasus, including Armenian. Upon reaching the outpost of Mozdok, where many Polish prisoners who had rebelled against the tsar’s rule had gathered, Henry set to work under horrifying conditions to try to alleviate the suffering of the colony. He eventually persuaded the rebels to surrender to the authorities. These missions, in contrast to the modern sophistication of Jesuit schools in the capital, must have had at times a baroque flavor. A letter of Henry, a former Paccanarist, written in Mozdok and dated 1812, is full of references to the presence of the devil and to miraculous cures, while Henry denounces the “lascivious and impious singing” of Muslims, and reports approvingly of Christian converts seeking to baptize sick Muslim children.²¹⁵

Henry’s frequent companion, Fr. Józef Suryn (1773–1832), ministered to the “pagans” in Astrakhan and Georgia, journeying alone in a manner reminiscent of Jesuits of the old Society.²¹⁶ Aloysius Moritz (or Moriz [1738–1805]), who missionized in the Volga port of Saratov, brought an extraordinary background to his work in Russia. Born in the Tyrol, Moritz reached China just a year before word of the suppression reached the missions there. He then returned to the empire and arrived in White Russia about 1776, remaining in the Russian mission the rest of his life.²¹⁷ The freedom of action enjoyed—if that is the word—by these Jesuits reflects the trust that the tsar (who had granted an audience to Henry) had placed in the Society, despite the vehement objections of the Orthodox clergy. Such successful undertakings no doubt made the sudden change in the Society’s fortunes in Russia after 1815 even more disappointing.

Much in the story of the Society’s years in Russia suggests the resolve and growing optimism of the Jesuits working there. But anxiety and risk also characterized their experience. Taking as a vantage point the summer of 1812, the Society could look back on some encouraging developments, but also on the destructive fury of the French Revolution and the impact of its exportation to much of the rest of Catholic Europe and to steady attrition through death of priests and brothers who had belonged to the Society in 1773. This last figure was in no way matched by the number of new recruits coming to Połock. Napoleon himself, while not methodically anti-Jesuit in the mold of Pombal, was a destroyer of the old order and was just beginning his invasion of Russia. The emperor’s seeming indifference to religious matters was different from the attitudes of other absolute rulers with whom the Society had engaged. Unlike Akbar (1542–1605, r.1556–1605) or the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1772, r.1661–1772), Napoleon did not bother to calculate how the Society might fit into his plans; he generally ignored the Jesuits—while forbidding them any role in the state he was creating.²¹⁸ A consequence of the dislocation caused by Napoleon’s retreat from Russia was the death of nine Jesuits in White Russia.²¹⁹ Well might the Jesuits of Połock view their future as one potentially filled with persecutions and uncertainty. Jesuits could nevertheless point to their usefulness to the Russian monarchy. They had served as agents of the Russian imperial government on a mission to dissuade the Qing from entering into trade arrangements with the British and were well regarded in some quarters for their pedagogy. Yet even before the expulsions and controversies of the nineteenth century had gained momentum, the Russian experience of the Society foreshadowed the insecurity that would remain a characteristic of life in the restored Society.

To understand the experience of the Jesuits under the Romanovs we must also remember the state of the Russian Orthodox Church during these years. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) has characterized the period as an “ornate, dreamy and troubled” one for the church.²²⁰ As a spiritual and intellectual community, it had stood on the sidelines during the introduction of Francophile institutions by Catherine and retained a vivid and negative memory of Jesuits from encounters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like many organizations experiencing a period of decline, it was instinctively defensive and sought to resist any advances of the Society, something that men like Gruber understood. Yet the Orthodox Church commanded the devotion and loyalty of millions, its ethos permeating all aspects of peasant life, and was often as much a part of the exiled Society’s experience as the weather.

An outstanding characteristic of the Jesuits active in Russia during these years was the diversity of their backgrounds, perceptions, and foci. Gruber moved easily in the most exalted circles of Petersburg life while Henry reported on the infernal doings of a giant horned hound terrorizing the inhabitants of Mozdok. This diversity on balance was probably more of an asset than a liability since the Russian Society often had to speak with different voices in response to challenges coming from many directions in the years before their expulsion by Alexander I. But Henry’s Jesuit persona, for all of its passion and commitment, looked backward to an earlier time and would have little to offer his brothers laboring in the United States, Britain, or even Italy.

9 Hanging On in China

News of the pope’s suppression of the Society did not reach Beijing until November 1774²²¹ and did not result in the expulsion of Jesuits from China, but the arrival of the breve ushered in a period of uncertainty, danger, decline, and inevitable extinction. Emperor Ch’ien Lung (1711–99, r.1735–96), whose Summer Palace had been embellished with the help of Jesuit missionaries, allowed the fathers to remain in Beijing, but in the provinces the persecution of Catholics reached a climax in 1784–85.²²² In 1791, Jesuits, carrying on much as they had before 1773, tried unsuccessfully to influence Chinese imperial policy toward Lord George Macartney’s (1737–1806) embassy to Beijing and likewise failed to establish a Russian Jesuit collegium in China.²²³ Despite the failure of this mission, Jesuits continued to have a presence in the Qing capital, and one of the Połock fathers sent on a later mission to the Russian east, Giovanni Grassi (1775–1849), went on to play a key role in the development of Georgetown University: indeed, virtually every Jesuit sent to the mission in the United States had some connection to Połock. A year after the issuance of Dominus ac redemptor, forty-one Jesuits remained in China: thirteen French, twelve Chinese, eleven Portuguese, three from Austria and other parts of the empire, and two Italians.²²⁴ Of the Chinese Jesuits, at least four were priests; the names of three Chinese Jesuits have survived, although their positions in the Society are not clear: Louis Ko (?), Étienne Yang (1733–98?), and Jean Yao (1722–96).²²⁵ A few years after the suppression, Yang worked in Guangzhou but was soon arrested. In 1787, after his release from prison in Beijing, Yang traveled to Inner Mongolia where he probably died.²²⁶ Yao evangelized the Jiangsu peninsula and apparently remained there until his death.²²⁷ Luigi Cipolla (Cibolla [1736–after 1805]) arrived in Canton in 1771 with skills as a physician, and also served in the Society’s bureau of astronomy. He is described as a “propagandist in Beijing in 1776,” which probably means he was employed by the imperial government in some capacity as a composer of documents.²²⁸

Among the German-speaking Jesuits of China, Ignatz Sichelpart (1708–80) was perhaps the most renowned. A native of Bohemia, Sichelpart was an artist who worked with court painters to produce a backdrop for a meeting between the emperor and his Mongolian allies.²²⁹ On his seventieth birthday, the former Jesuit received an avalanche of gifts from the court, including a scroll inscribed by the emperor Qianlong himself.

Several Jesuit clockmakers remained active in China after 1773: unlike their counterparts in Europe, these men were always priests, which accorded them a higher status at court. Suggestive of the tales of Gruber’s animated head is the automaton created sometime before 1786 by the French Jesuit Jean-Matthieu Tornu de Ventavon (Wang Dahong; Matou [1733–87]) that could write Manchu at the emperor’s request.²³⁰

Among the few triumphs that the remaining members of the Society’s mission in China could claim was the conversion of Yi Beyok (dates unknown), a Korean who after his baptism by Fr. Jean Joseph de Grammont (1736–1812?)²³¹ returned to his homeland where he died in prison for his proselytizing efforts.²³² Yi’s story has the flavor of martyrdom stories of the pre-suppression Society, but his case was the exception rather than the rule.

One important holdover of the pre-1773 mission to China was the continuing operation of astronomical observatories. The most notable Beijing-based ex-Jesuit astronomer of this period was the director of the Beijing Astronomical Bureau and physician-pharmacist skilled in calendar calculations José Bernardo de Almeida (Suo Dezhao, Yué-Tch‘ang [1728–1805]).²³³ His predecessor, Luís Rodrigues (An Guoning [1729–96]), made numerous observations of lunar and solar eclipses.²³⁴ Jesuits continued to man the observatory in Beijing until 1803. Other former Jesuits, especially those who had labored in the provinces, were less fortunate. Jean-Baptiste de la Roche (1722–85) died while being transported in chains en route to Beijing; others perished on the long sea voyage into exile. Augustin Haller von Hallerstein (Liu Songling [1703–74]) was the last Jesuit astronomer sent to Beijing, having already worked in Goa and Macau. Following his death, eight of his letters to his brother were published by György Pray (1723–1801).²³⁵

During the years of suppression, ex-Jesuits who had served in China, among them Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot (1718–93), contributed to the massive Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, &c. des chinois (Memoirs concerning the history, sciences, arts, mores, and customs, etc. of the Chinese) a work based largely on Chinese primary sources.²³⁶ Louis Antoine de Poirot (He Qingtai) (1735–1818), who died in Beijing more than forty years after the issuance of Dominus ac redemptor, was the last of the Jesuits who used their artistic skills to engage the Chinese court. A gifted linguist, de Poirot produced translations of the Old Testament into Manchu and the New Testament into Chinese.²³⁷ The talents of Pierre-Martial Cibot (Beidu Han Guoying [1727–80]) were in the fields of botany and mechanics: in particular, his work on the Chinese garden was published in the eighth volume of the Mémoires.²³⁸ Far less is known about the French-born Giuseppe Panzi (Pan Tingzhang)(c.1734–after 1794), a Jesuit portraitist (a priest? a brother?) and student of Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), who arrived in Beijing in about 1772 and died there in obscurity forty years later, probably the last Jesuit remaining in China.²³⁹

In 1773, six Portuguese Jesuits lived in Beijing: João Seixas (1710–85), Félix da Rocha (1713–81), José de Espinha (1722–88), Inácio Francisco (1725–92), and astronomers José Bernardo de Almeida and André Rodrigues whom we have already met. Rocha succeeded Hallerstein as director of the Astronomical Observatory in Beijing and in 1774 traveled to eastern Tibet to create a map of the region, and possibly also to assist in the production of artillery pieces for the emperor’s army, returning to the region three years later.²⁴⁰ In addition, Father Manuel da Mota (1720–82) remained in Hunan province, Father Agostinho Avelar (1725–88) remained in Hubei, and José de Araújo (1721–80?) and Inácio Pires (1724–80?) remained in Jianxi.²⁴¹ Little is known about these Jesuits living outside of the metropolis, but their lives were no doubt difficult. Araújo (Gong An-duo-ni) had previously been accused of distributing religious tracts and proselytizing.²⁴² These men attempted to carry on in the modes that had worked for the old Society, but time was running out.

The post-1773 Chinese mission of the Society, despite its very real accomplishments, must have acquired an increasingly melancholy aspect as Jesuits aged and died with no prospect of successors to continue their work. When the embassy of Lord Macartney arrived in China, one of the points it stressed (albeit with only moderate success) was that the English were now the European leaders in the production of mechanical devices.²⁴³ The era of Jesuits bearing fascinating toys from Europe was over, and the few Jesuits remaining in China were in no position to argue the point. Gottfried von Laimbeckhoven (1701–87), an Austrian Jesuit who had arrived in China as a missionary in 1738 and had conducted astronomical and pharmacological studies there, served as bishop of Beijing for five years following the suppression, the last year of which was embittered by a power struggle with a newly appointed coadjutor bishop and by the ongoing persecution of Christians. He spent his last days bowed down by the realization that the China mission would soon vanish.

Gabriel Brotier (1722–89), the last librarian of Louis-le-Grand and noted classicist, never traveled to China but contributed to Sinology through his summary of the letters of three Jesuits who had missionized in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French edition of his Mémoire sur les Juifs établis en Chine (Memoir of the Jews established in China) appeared in 1774 in the Lettres édifiantes and has remained an important source on the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng.²⁴⁴ But Brotier’s work looked backwards, and no Jesuits engaged in ethnological research in China for many decades after the publication of Brotier’s summary.

The gradual extinction of the Jesuit mission to China marked the end of an important intercultural dialogue. Never again would a non-European imperial system be drawn through curiosity to the performances of European Christian clergy: the attitude of the Chinese court was less receptive in the nineteenth century, and even if there had been keen interest, Jesuits were no longer in a position to impress their hosts with unknown technological marvels and new artistic forms from the West. The growing threat of European imperialism also made the offerings of any westerner suspect.

The widely differing experiences of ex-Jesuits in China contain echoes of the Society’s precarious position in Russia, but the Chinese mission had far less access to the network of former Jesuits. As in Russia, the attitude of the monarch toward individual Jesuits might be at odds with government policies toward Catholics more broadly. Qianlong may have esteemed Father Sichelpart’s addition to a diplomatic mission, but the persecution of Jesuits nevertheless continued during his reign. Former Jesuits in China were unlikely to attempt innovation or engagement with broader cultural trends: both their formation and the circumstances in which they found themselves militated against this. Their “way of proceeding” thus died out with them, with few native-born disciples to carry on their studies or other activities.

10 Survival in India

In India, the overwhelming majority of the Jesuits were Portuguese subjects, and with the expulsion of the Society from the empire, scores were rounded up and first housed with other Catholic orders.²⁴⁵ Over half these men were then placed on ships headed for Portugal; at least twenty-four died en route.²⁴⁶ Those who survived faced long years in Portuguese prisons, a fate that at least theoretically they might have escaped had they been willing to leave the Society—but most remained firm.²⁴⁷ Two Jesuit bishops stayed behind, denied support from the Portuguese government but willing to depend on Providence and the loyalty of their flocks for their survival. One of them, Salvador dos Reis, bishop of the Serra (1702–1777), lived into the era of the suppression

Yet many Jesuits escaped the roundup and continued their labors, sometimes joining other religious orders or becoming parish priests, and often living under harsh conditions. A few missionized as wandering swamulus, a term for missionary sannyasis, holy men who had abandoned worldly life, in the remote Deccan interior.²⁴⁸ In the south, French Jesuits, among them the distinguished linguist Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux (1691–1779), stayed on.²⁴⁹ Indeed, not a single French Jesuit opted to return to his homeland. The last surviving member of the Mughal mission, Francis Xavier Wendel (Wendell), who was born in 1726, arrived in India in 1751 and lived until 1812.²⁵⁰ This ex-Jesuit, a skilled linguist and cartographer, has been variously described as German and Belgian, and accused of being “rather shadowy”: indeed, he had contact with a Russian traveler named Czernichef and was even accused of being a British agent. Wendel’s colleague, the Tyrolian-born Fr. Joseph Tieffentaler (Tiefenthaler [1710–85]), published a description of Hindustan, received financial support from the British in Calcutta,²⁵¹ and worked with Wendel to execute a map of the regions northwest of Delhi that was published a decade after the suppression.²⁵² A few of the remaining Jesuits were brothers, although not much is known about their later activities.

The scope and even the strategies of the Society in India differed from those in China: although there were powerful rajahs with splendid courts, Jesuits had not aimed at impressing court culture with their learning and inventions. When the suppression came, the refuges for former Jesuits in India were not buttressed by observatories or diplomatic assignments. Consequently, the relationship between former Jesuits and lower-status Indians was often far closer than what existed between the Chinese peasantry and the remaining fathers, although future research into the missionary work of men such as Yang Dewang (1733–98) may require a revision of this view.

11 The British Isles

At the time of the suppression, as many as 121 Jesuits may have resided in England.²⁵³ Anti-Catholic sentiment was still strong in some quarters, as demonstrated by the Gordon Riots of 1780, in which hundreds died. But the mere fact that these riots had been triggered by a bill granting more rights to Catholics suggested that the official position toward Catholics had mellowed greatly during the previous century. Supporters of the Jesuits could be found among the rural aristocracy and gentry, with the result that a small but significant number of ex-Jesuits were able to live unmolested in the homes of their English Catholic friends. Two such refuges for Jesuits were Linstead Lodge, the residence of Lord Teynham (c.1708–81) in Kent,²⁵⁴ and Wardour Castle, the seat of Barons Arundell. Arriving in England in 1767, Charles Fleury (1739–1825) resided in both homes, fending off attempts by Anglican clergy to prevent him from proselytizing,²⁵⁵ and serving as chaplain to the Arundells for a quarter of a century. Fleury, who also went by the name of Forrester, remained in England after the restoration, where he died.²⁵⁶ Another Jesuit to serve as chaplain at Wardour was John Jenison (1729–92), whose correspondence with other Jesuits conveys some of the gossipy, leisure-dominated culture of upper-class English Catholics among whom many of these English Jesuits moved.²⁵⁷

Thomas Falkner (1707–84), a native of Manchester, returned from the South American missions in 1767 and spent the rest of his life in England. Falkner is probably unique among ex-Jesuits in that he was awarded an MD from the University of St. Andrews in 1774 in recognition of his medical knowledge, although he had never studied the subject in university.²⁵⁸ Another former Jesuit with deeper Scottish connections was John Farquharson (1699–1782). Farquharson had acquired a detailed knowledge of Scottish Gaelic and in 1772 deposited in the Scots College at Douay a manuscript in his own hand of old Scottish poems, which have been cited as a source for the famous poem that was actually written by James Macpherson (1736–96),²⁵⁹ but which was later lost. Farquharson lived in the valley of Braemar after the suppression and produced no further known manuscripts.

Ireland, where seventeen (or according to some sources, nineteen) ex-Jesuits remained after 1773, became an incubator for future Jesuits training there as early as 1801 for life in a “Society now reviving.”²⁶⁰ The last former Jesuit in Ireland died in 1811, but one of his students, Peter Kenney (1779–1841),²⁶¹ purchased Castle Brown in 1814 to be a school for the restored Society.²⁶² Kenney had trained in Palermo before the Society had been expelled from the Kingdom of Naples and was ordained priest in 1808.²⁶³

English Jesuits who had operated a collegium in St. Omers, then in French territory, fled in 1762 to the neighboring Austrian Netherlands, where three years later they were able to open a Grand Collège anglais in Bruges.²⁶⁴ With the promulgation of Dominus ac redemptor, the Jesuits were compelled to move again, this time to Liège, where the prince-bishop allowed them to create an Académie anglaise, which lasted until 1794, when the arrival of French troops in the city caused them to relocate to the Stonyhurst estate of Thomas Weld (1750–1810).²⁶⁵ In the meantime, Habsburg officials had looted the Society’s libraries, throwing away as many as four hundred thousand volumes considered to be theological rubbish.²⁶⁶ These events were the first act in the massive destruction of the book and visual cultures in continental Europe developed by the baroque Society and would culminate in the continent-wide vandalism carried out two decades later during the French Revolution.²⁶⁷ These processes occurred as the Holy Roman Empire came to an end and German monasteries were secularized, which caused the further dispersal and loss of Jesuitica, thereby depriving the restored Society of key resources. Collectively, this destruction counts as one of the most significant events in the Society’s history.

The experiences of the Bollandists, a Jesuit research institute founded in the seventeenth century, were somewhat less catastrophic but still indicative of the hardships faced by the remnant of the Society’s book culture. These scholars first moved from Antwerp to Coudenberg Abbey in Brussels, and then when Josephinian reforms closed the abbey to the Premonstratensian Abbey of Tongerlo in Westerlo,²⁶⁸ where the fathers remained until 1794 when the French revolutionary government seized the property and expelled them. Reassembling the Bollandist project had to wait nearly a quarter of a century after the restoration, since the financially strapped Society could spare few resources. Now reconstituted in Brussels, the small team of Jesuits had to contend with the lack of a library and rivals in their field of endeavor.²⁶⁹ Their work in the nineteenth century was respectable but a mere shadow of their achievements in the seventeenth and eighteenth.

12 Peaceful England, Possible Bohemia

By 1803, the Society had established an English province made up of thirty-three fathers, which affiliated itself to the Jesuits of White Russia (thirty-four ex-Jesuits remained unaffiliated).²⁷⁰ The same year, thirty-five ex-Jesuits renewed their vows at Stonyhurst under Marmaduke Stone (1748–1834) as first provincial of the restored English province. The right to organize community life had been granted to the scattered ex-Jesuits twenty-five years earlier. Despite lingering anti-Catholic sentiment, Jesuit connections to gentry and higher aristocracy endured, though literary and scientific achievements were few. The fates of former Jesuits in the lands of the Bohemian crown, where the Society had held vast tracts of land and dominated higher education, played out differently from in the Bourbon monarchies. These men were also much more productive scholars than their confrères in the British Isles.²⁷¹

In Bohemia, the sympathetic attitude of Maria Theresia toward individual Jesuits fostered a measure of continuity after 1773.²⁷² Distinguished scientists such as Joseph Stepling (1716–78)²⁷³ were permitted to continue their research, and the last group of pre-suppression Jesuit university teachers became the mentors for a generation of intellectuals associated with the Czech National Revival, during which the Czech language again became a vehicle of literary and scientific discourse (c.1780–1850). Stepling’s student, Stanislav Vydra (1741–1804), served as rector of the Prague University and produced a textbook on differential calculus.²⁷⁴ A few former Jesuits even bridged the cultures of late baroque universalism and romantic nationalism. The contributions of Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) to linguistics and history earned him the title “patriarch of Slavonic studies,” while Ignaz Cornova (1740–1822) set forth a patriotic version of Czech history that would form the foundation of an influential nineteenth-century nationalist narrative.²⁷⁵ The prolific Germanophone historian František Pubitschka (1722–1807) became known as the historiographus patriae (historiographer of his homeland). Yet Pubitschka’s reputation as a scholar suffered in a dispute with Dobrovský over the veracity of a pious legend regarding St. Jan Nepomucký (c.1345–93) as the defender of the seal of confession, with Pubitschka defending the more traditional view and the younger Dobrovský taking a more critical position.²⁷⁶ The dispute between the two former Jesuits is a reminder that ex-Jesuit intellectual life was far from monolithic and was frequently riven by generational gaps.

In Slovenia, the post-1773 career of Jurij Japelj (1744–1807) in some ways paralleled the experiences of the more successful Habsburg ex-Jesuits. Japelj served in many ecclesiastical posts and was eventually appointed bishop of Trieste. His longstanding interest in the Slovene language and in comparative Slavic philology led him to begin translating, with Blas Kumerdey (1738–1805), the Bible from the Vulgate.²⁷⁷ Japelj left an unfinished Slovene grammar at the time of his death. Another Sl0venian, Theodor Kravina Cronstain (Cronstein [c.1726–89]), belongs to the intellectual history of both Slovenia and of the Habsburg monarchy more generally. Born near Maribor in about 1726, Cronstein eventually became the director of the Theresianum, a school for young nobles in Vienna, producing in 1773 a survey of the training in economics offered at this institution. Following the suppression, Cronstein relocated to Zwettl in Lower Austria where he assisted in the translation of a textbook on the physics of immovable bodies. Cronstein died in Zwettl in 1789.²⁷⁸ The parallels in Cronstein’s career with that of Gruber, also a Slovenian, are notable. Both were experts in mechanics and both served in important administrative roles. On the other side of the Alps, the ex-Jesuit Ignaz von Weinhart (1705–87) became rector of the University of Innsbruck and lectured in German on mechanics.²⁷⁹ Along with Peter Anich (1723–66), Weinhart also helped produce one of the first examples of modern cartography, the Atlas Tirolensis (Atlas of the Tyrol [1774]).²⁸⁰

Several Croatian former Jesuits continued their historiographic publications and research after 1773. Josip Mikoczy-Blumenthal (1734–1800), who served as librarian in the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, promulgated a theory that the Croatians were descended from the Medes of ancient Iran in his Hrvati rodom Slaveni, potekli od Sarmata potomaka Medijaca (Croats of Slavic origin, descended from Sarmatian descendants of the Medes [1797]).²⁸¹ Andrija Blašković (1726–96) published Historia universalis Illyrici (The universal history of Illyria) in 1794,²⁸² and Franjo Ksaver Pejačević (1707–81), a native of Osijek of Bulgarian descent, wrote on both Bulgarian and Serbian history.²⁸³ Like their confrères elsewhere in the Habsburg lands, these scholars were concerned with questions of the origins and early histories of the populations from which they themselves originated, and in the case of Mikoczy-Blumenthal, his theory has continued to have its adherents until today. Ignacije Szentmartony (Szent-Mártony Ignácz [1718–93]), a Jesuit claimed by both Hungarian and Croatian historians, spent seventeen years in a Portuguese prison following his expulsion from Brazil and was finally freed in 1777 through the intervention of Maria Theresia. Returning to Croatia, Szentmartony composed a Croatian textbook for German speakers, the first of its kind.²⁸⁴ Another Hungarian Jesuit missionary who had worked in Brazil, Joannes Nepomuk Szluha (1723–1803), returned to Hungary where he became the rector of the collegium in Győr until the suppression. His activities for the next thirty years are not known; he died in Graz in 1803.²⁸⁵ A German Jesuit missionary in Brazil, Anselm Eckart (1721–1809), also spent years in a Portuguese prison until the fall of Pombal. Eckart’s description of Brazilian fauna was published eight years later,²⁸⁶ and the ex-Jesuit eventually made his way to Połosk, where he spent the rest of his life. The career of Ignaz von Born (1742–91) suggests both how deeply engaged the community of Jesuits and former Jesuits was in the intellectual life in the Habsburg lands and simultaneously how ambiguous the position of some of these men might be in the post-suppression landscape. Von Born, a native of Transylvania, left the Society before undertaking his final vows and may have been the model for Sarastro in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756–91) Zauberflöte (Magic flute).²⁸⁷ His interests ranged from metallurgy to literary satire. Von Born’s Masonic connections point to another direction toward which products of Jesuit culture might gravitate in the 1780s.²⁸⁸ While a significant number of Habsburg ex-Jesuits retained a sense of baroque piety, others set out toward new frontiers. Alois Blumauer (1755–98), who became a Jesuit a year before the suppression, went on to write verse set to music by Mozart (“Lied der Freiheit” [The song of freedom]), to compose attacks on the Society, and to construct an epic poem praising the reforms of Joseph II. Blumauer’s works, seen as a challenge to the absolutist spirit of Francis II (1768–1835, r. as holy Roman emperor 1792–1806; as emperor of Austria 1804–35), were banned for a decade after his death.²⁸⁹

Habsburg Hungary likewise provided some career paths for former Jesuits, although the religious composition of the kingdom included far more non-Catholics so that the educational influence of the Society in 1773 was far less dominant than in the Czech lands. The most influential former Jesuit in the region during the first years of the suppression had in fact left the Society years earlier: Adam František Kollár de Keresztén (1718–83), a polymath whose accomplishments included the coining of the term ethnologia and the construction of an argument for the legal bases of Habsburg rule in Hungary, was also court librarian in Vienna and the author of a pioneering work on the history of the Rusyn. Kollár saw himself as a subject of the Hungarian crown, but not an ethnic Hungarian, calling himself instead “Pannonius.” His contribution to the Ratio educationis,²⁹⁰ a rationalized curriculum promoting dynastic loyalty and civic virtue, suggests how far he had come from the values of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum of 1599, yet Kollár was an important part of the Viennese intellectual milieu that sustained ex-Jesuits after 1773. Kollár’s contemporary and colleague, Joseph Hilarius Eckhel (1737–98), was professor of antiquities and numismatics at the University of Vienna, a post he held for twenty-four years. Styled an abbé following the suppression, Eckhel published a study of the numismatic collections of the grand duke of Tuscany and produced a textbook on numismatics for Habsburg schools.²⁹¹

A trio of ex-Jesuit Hungarian historians exercised an immense influence on Hungarian historiography at the turn of the nineteenth century. György Pray is renowned for having discovered the Codex Pray, which contains the Halotti beszéd és könyörgés (Funeral oration and prayer), dated to about 1199 and the oldest surviving continuous Hungarian (and Uraltic) text.²⁹² Pray, who in 1777 was appointed “historiographus Hungariae” (historiographer of Hungary), was a meticulous compiler of documents and served as the librarian of the University of Buda. His catalog of the rare books housed in this collection was a major advance in the curating of libraries in Central Europe.

István Kaprinai (Kaprinay [1714–85 or 1786) shared with Pray a desire to preserve the monuments of Hungarian history. Although Kaprinai was more active before 1773, he remained a mentor for younger ex-Jesuit historians and continued a correspondence with the leading lights of the Hungarian Enlightenment during his final years. The career of István Katona (1732–1811) extended the furthest into the years of the suppression. Katona produced a forty-two-volume work, Historia critica Regum Hungariae (Critical history of the kings of Hungary), that emphasized source criticism and remains an important collection of documents from the Middle Ages. In the 1790s, Katona, now the chief librarian of the archbishop of Kalocsa, taught at the local seminary and produced a steady stream of historical and devotional works.²⁹³ All three of these scholars used scholarly techniques reflecting the universalist approaches of the old Society, but each contributed to national consciousness in a region that was never overwhelmingly Catholic or oriented toward Rome.

Maximillian (Miksa) Hell (Höll [1720–92]) is probably best described as a Habsburg Jesuit. Born in Habsburg Hungary in what is now Slovakia, Hell’s native language was German. In 1773, Hell was a distinguished astronomer and the director of the Imperial Observatory in Vienna, a post he was able to retain after the suppression. Hell soon made the acquaintance of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), to whom he introduced the idea that magnets might cure illnesses.²⁹⁴ Soon Hell was claiming credit for Mesmer’s sensational but dubious “successes,” and a very public feud followed. Meanwhile, Hell continued his work as an astronomer, publishing his findings in annual Ephemerides.²⁹⁵ Hell’s relations with non-Catholic colleagues were particularly cordial, and even if his involvement with Mesmer in retrospect seems ill-advised, his role as mentor to a new generation of Habsburg scientists places him at the forefront of ex-Jesuits who continued to have productive and influential careers after 1773. Among Hell’s students was Antonius (Antal) Martonfi (1747–99), who established an observatory in Alba Iulia (now Romania) in 1794.²⁹⁶ Hell’s successor as observatory director, Franz de Paula Triesnecker (1745–1817), was also an ex-Jesuit and a prolific producer of astronomical treatises,²⁹⁷ as was Hell’s distinguished rival, the Moravian-born Christian Mayer (1719–83).²⁹⁸

Habsburg Jesuit astronomers seem to have been well on the way to establishing a dynasty when the disaster of 1773 struck. The success of these scientists and their ability to continue their work was certainly fostered by the political climate, but we should also give thought to the Society’s still effective recruitment processes and to the educational opportunities found within the Austrian province. The lack of other avenues for budding scientists in the region, the newness and relative unimportance of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, and Joseph II’s interest in practical mechanics are additional factors that sustained the work of these ex-Jesuits.

A few Hungarian Jesuits had “sought the Indies” of the Western Hemisphere, and among those Ferenc Xavér Éder (1727–72/73) was one of the handful who returned to Hungary after expulsion from the Spanish Empire. Éder had worked among the Moxos people of Peru, and his manuscript describing them was published some years after his death.²⁹⁹ Although Éder lacked access to libraries, his work shares with that of his contemporary Kollár an interest in the “patriae” of specific populations, and in their languages.

For two centuries, the Society’s impact on Hungarian secondary education had been immense, but traces of its legacy faded quickly after the issuance of the papal breve. The last classes of the Jesuit academia in Buda completed their studies in 1777, taught by two instructors who had begun their careers as Jesuit novices.³⁰⁰ The program of the Ratio soon vanished from the educational landscape of Hungary.

The relatively successful transition to a post-suppression existence that many ex-Jesuits in the Habsburg realms experienced was due to several factors. First and foremost, Maria Theresia and Joseph II continued to value these men as educators and as producers of scientific and mechanical literature of practical use to the monarchy. The absence of a large and organized Jansenist party anywhere in the region also worked in the favor of ex-Jesuits.³⁰¹ While the Jesuits had many individual enemies among the elites of the various Habsburg territories, there was no personality comparable to Pombal in power and persistence plotting against the Society. Even Prince Anton Wenzel von Kaunitz (1711–94), the vastly influential and reform-minded chancellor, for a long time remained skeptical about some of the most shocking charges leveled at the Jesuits.³⁰² The relative weakness of the Catholic Church in the multi-confessional Habsburg patchwork of territories likewise worked in the ex-Jesuits’ favor. Despite its efforts to hold back toleration, the Catholic hierarchy simply did not possess the capacity to oppress and control to the same degree as in Spain, Portugal, or the Papal States, thereby sparing Jesuits some degree of guilt by association. Finally, the ethnic and linguistic diversity of Habsburg Jesuits prevented them from being exclusively associated with one group to the disadvantage of other populations. The one great exception to this generalization was Transylvania, where the overwhelming majority of Jesuits were ethnic Hungarians, which did not endear them to Orthodox Romanians, or to local German-speaking Lutherans and Anabaptists.

Although the breve Dominus ac redemptor was not promulgated in the Ottoman Empire, the practical reality of the suppression of the Society throughout Western Europe meant that activities by former Jesuits in the Ottoman capital, already crippled by the expulsion of the Society from France, became much more difficult. The French ambassador to the Porte, François Emmanuel Guignard de Saint-Priest (1735–1821), encouraged the fathers to carry on their work while using ambiguous titles such as “temporary agents.”³⁰³ Under these daunting circumstances, a few former Jesuits managed to continue their work for a decade after the suppression, at which point their missions were taken over by the Lazarists.³⁰⁴ A mission in Salonika, led by Robert-François Guérin du Rocher (1736–92), was apparently liquidated by command of the sultan in 1773 or 1774.³⁰⁵ There is also a report of two Jesuits, Dominque Venturi (dates uncertain) and Ferdinand Motté (dates uncertain), traveling to the Greek Isles in 1805, but little is known of the outcome of their efforts.³⁰⁶

The Society’s heritage survived in Greece in another, surprising way. In 1800, a monk of Mt. Athos, Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain (1748–1809), published a Greek-language Spiritual Exercises based on a popularization of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises made by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632–1703) in 1698.³⁰⁷ Nicodemos’s text is much longer than Ignatius’s but shares with the older text exercises of self-examination and an emphasis on the seeking of spiritual perfection.

Jesuits working in Egypt in 1773 were not exiled, but they were reduced to dire poverty. Three, all French, remained after the issuance of Dominus ac redemptor. One was a brother, Pierre Thonisson (1712–after 1773), who had taken his final vows in Damascus. Emmanuel Buman (1712–79), a veteran of decades of missionary work in Egypt, remained superior, and Charles Grimod, the last surviving Jesuit of the Cairo community, died in 1788.³⁰⁸

A few years later, one former Jesuit working in Constantinople made an outstanding contribution to Middle Eastern scholarship. Giambattista Toderini (1728–99) was born in Venice and after entering the Society taught at the Universities of Verona and Forli. A man of broad intellectual interests, Toderini wrote about topics as wide ranging as Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–90) theory of lightning, the aurora borealis, and fossils.³⁰⁹ Like Boscovich, Toderini traveled with an ambassador of Venice to Constantinople in 1781, where he served as preceptor to the ambassador’s son and remained until 1786. The following year, he published an account of Turkish literature and music, including descriptions of libraries in Constantinople, the first work of its kind produced by a Western, Christian scholar.³¹⁰ Toderini’s achievements invite comparison with those of another ex-Jesuit with a Venetian connection, the Croatian Josip (Giuseppe) Marinovich (1741–1801), who published a detailed and sympathetic account of Armenian history, geography, and religious traditions a year before Toderini’s work appeared.³¹¹ Thus despite the suppression, the 1780s were one of the high points of Jesuit engagement with the cultures of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Boscovich, arguably the most famous Jesuit scientist in 1773, relocated repeatedly, his career illustrating the declining prestige and vulnerability of Jesuit science and the insecurities of former Jesuit scientists. He was first enticed by the king of France to migrate to Paris, where he served as director of optics for the navy, receiving a handsome pension of eight thousand livres. After ten years, Boscovich migrated to Bassano in Vicenza and continued his research on optics and astronomy, dying in Milan in 1787, a frustrated and almost forgotten figure.³¹²

Despite this often-gloomy climate, a few ex-Jesuit mathematicians and scientists remained productive and visible. In 1782, Juan Francisco Blasco (dates unknown) devised a project—never realized—whereby Spanish forces could make use of electric telegraphy to besiege Gibraltar.³¹³ Joannes Baptista Horváth (1732–99) retained his university chair in Hungary and published textbooks on general physics, mathematics, and philosophy, the latter reflecting the ideas of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).³¹⁴ And Boscovich’s atomic theory was advanced during the suppression years by the Scottish physicist John Robison (1735–1805), who praised the former Jesuit in an early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.³¹⁵

Not enough is yet known about how ex-Jesuits understood and lived through their fates. A former Jesuit living in Russia, Nikodemus Musnicki (1765–1805), produced a Latin epic poem, De Christi ab inferis reditu (On Christ’s return from hell [1805]), which was an allegory for the suppression and exile of the Society.³¹⁶ The assiduous efforts of ex-Jesuit Mihály Paintner (1753–1826) to collate the records of the pre-suppression society in Hungary betoken far more than antiquarianism and show a desire to preserve a heritage in danger of being lost.³¹⁷ Some ex-Jesuits may have suffered from depression following the loss of their Society—records mention a few men stricken with “melancholia.” Not all Jesuits went quietly; a few attacked the pope who had suppressed the Society.³¹⁸

Yasmin Haskell has highlighted the endurance of Latin as a medium of communication among ex-Jesuits, even in a period when the use of this language as an international medium of communication was in steep decline.³¹⁹ The motives for this use of a declining language include a conservatism brought forth under duress and a rejection of the rising sentiments of nationalism, as well as the shared experience of the curriculum articulated in the Ratio. Nostalgia for the period when Latin had been the vehicle by which the Society’s triumphs had been publicized is likely another reason, and indeed nostalgia proved a palpable element of the culture of the restored Society.

The Jesuit influence on literate culture lingered in sometimes unobtrusive ways. In the Habsburg lands, Jesuit libraries were incorporated into collections that became the cores of cultural centers that became key resources for nationalist movements that would emerge in the nineteenth century. A Serbian-language version of a classic Jesuit emblem text appeared as late as 1774,³²⁰ and Jesuit-trained Romanian Uniate scholars pursued classical studies into the nineteenth century with the tools they had acquired in Jesuit schools.³²¹

In the decades following Dominus ac redemptor, the fate of the Jesuit legacy on the Italian peninsula varied greatly. The arrival of the French in the Eternal City in 1798 resulted in an act of plunder with considerable symbolic significance: the colossal silver statue of Ignatius in the Gesù in Roma was carried off. And, as we have seen, many former Jesuits remained highly visible in many fields. However, the saga of the restoration of the Society in Italy is to a significant degree the story of one ex-Jesuit working there. St. José (Joseph-Marie) Pignatelli (1737–1811) is the only former Jesuit of this period to have been canonized.³²² Pignatelli’s life is suggestive of some of the tensions and possibilities affecting Jesuit culture in the years before 1773, and of the ways former Jesuits attempted to move forward after Dominus ac redemptor. Born of the Spanish high nobility and initially a teacher in a collegium, Pignatelli had initially received praise from King Carlos III (1716–88, r.1759–88) for helping avert an attack on the governor of Zaragoza. Because of his noble status, Pignatelli was offered the chance to remain in Spain (if he left the Society) when his Jesuit brethren were expelled, an offer he declined. The next decades saw Pignatelli moving from Corsica to Genoa to Ferrara and Bologna.³²³ Unsuccessful in his attempts to reunite with the Jesuits of White Russia, Pignatelli finally settled in Abruzzi in 1797, where he became rector in 1799.³²⁴ Thanks to Pignatelli’s efforts, the Jesuits were re-established in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies on July 30, 1804 by the papal breve Per alias,³²⁵ although this gain was short-lived: in July 1806, Joseph Bonaparte (1768–1844 r.1806–8), who had become king of Naples earlier that year, expelled the Jesuits.³²⁶ The community then moved north to Rome where they were allowed to establish a house. Pignatelli did not live to see the worldwide restoration of the Jesuits, but his constant efforts to secure and expand the Society’s presence (typified by his success in restoring the Society in Sardinia in 1807) laid the foundations of a support network that would well serve the nineteenth-century Society and is the key figure in what has been called the “rallying” of the suppressed Jesuits. Pignatelli’s friendship with Charles IV of Savoy (1751–1819, r.1796–1802) influenced the latter’s decision, after his forced abdication, to take simple vows as a Jesuit, thus becoming in 1815 the only former monarch ever to enter the Society.

The Duchy of Parma and Piacenza had already begun to welcome ex-Jesuits as early as 1793.³²⁷ Parma was also the scene of a very modest revival of Jesuit cartography, in the form of decks of playing cards featuring maps of various countries and continents and probably executed by Bartolomeo Luigi Desprotti (1741–1819).³²⁸ By 1799, a Jesuit novitiate had been established in the duchy, the only one in Western Europe.³²⁹ By contrast, Mantua, where the Society had run a university, was in Lombardy and thus under the control of Maria Theresia, who obtained permission from the papacy to use Jesuit properties and the proceeds from the sale of Jesuit lands to create a state school system.³³⁰ In this city, the former Jesuit school was taken over by the Augustinians and the church was deconsecrated and eventually became a barn.

Because of its bizarre and scandalous aspects, the career of Niccolò Paccanari (also spelled Baccanari [1773?–1811?]) is a well-known episode from the years of suppression, but it also tells us something about the complex political and diplomatic situation former Jesuits and their allies faced. Paccanari, a native of the Trentino and onetime papal soldier, founded the Society of the Faith of Jesus in 1797 while still a layperson.³³¹ The fortunes of the papacy were then at a low ebb: within the year, the pope would be taken prisoner by Napoleonic forces, and such desperate circumstances may have made powerful Catholic clerics and laypersons more sympathetic to Paccanari’s vision of the resurrection of the Society in spirit, if not in name. In 1800, Paccanari, who welcomed former Jesuits into his Society, was ordained priest, but seven years later, having been accused of various crimes, he was condemned by the Holy Office for immorality and sentenced to ten years in prison, only to be freed by the French authorities in 1809. He was then rearrested by papal authorities on another charge. His subsequent activities are obscure. In 1811, a decapitated body, which may have been Paccanari’s, was fished out of the Tiber, although this identification is not certain.

Paccanari’s creation, the Society of the Faith of Jesus, placed no emphasis on astronomy, poetry, ethnology, or the composition of edifying school dramas: instead, it favored spectacle and miracles, both of which had figured prominently in the mission work of a good many seventeenth-century baroque Jesuits but had not been a major part of the intellectual or spiritual life of the eighteenth-century Society. Ecstatic visions, never central to the Society’s culture, were also part of Paccanari’s repertoire. These elements, and Paccanari’s often autocratic leadership style, made many former Jesuits hesitate. Some of the latter, such as Luigi Mozzi de’ Capitani (1746–1813) were openly hostile, calling Paccanari’s creation a “schismatic branch” of the true Society, now reconstituted in Russia.³³² Later joining with the Society of the Sacred Heart, Paccanari’s followers would prove to be neither numerous nor influential among the ranks of the restored Society, but for a time they played a highly visible role in plans to restore the Jesuits. The last known house of the Society of the Faith of Jesus, located in Rome, rejoined the restored Society in 1814.

Switzerland, never a major object of Jesuit attention, now became part of the Paccanarist story. In the canton of Fribourg, the authorities had obtained permission for several local ex-Jesuits to continue to teach, which they did until the arrival of revolutionary armies in 1798.³³³ In 1805, eight Paccanarists arrived in the French-ruled Republic of Valais in southwest Switzerland to reorganize a local grammar school.³³⁴ By 1810, these men were linked to the Society in Russia. Simultaneously, ex-Jesuit Nikolaus Joseph Albert von Diessbach (Diesbach [1732–98])³³⁵ founded groups of laypersons in Turin called Amicizia Cristiana (Christian friendship) and Amicizie Sacerdotale (Priestly friendship), which soon attracted Pius Brunone Lanteri (1759–1830), who in turn founded the Congregation of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary in 1816.³³⁶

Paccanari’s efforts to create an order on the model of the Jesuits initially gained some powerful supporters, among them Pius VI and Maria Anna of Habsburg-Lorraine (1770–1809), sister of the emperor Francis II,³³⁷ but the Society of the Faith of Jesus was regarded by others as an unnecessary rival to the “real” Society now based in Russia. Moreover, Paccanari envisioned a female order also based upon Jesuit spirituality, for which he wrote a rule.³³⁸ For these and other reasons, intense conflict soon developed between Paccanarists and some former Jesuits. Nevertheless, the Paccanarists made overtures to John Carroll (1735–1815), a former Jesuit working in Maryland who in 1789 had helped found Georgetown College (later university).³³⁹ Carroll was less than enthusiastic regarding the new order’s inclusion of a community of nuns, and the Paccanarist proposal produced little, although Peter Epinette (1760–1832) of the Society of the Faith of Jesus did travel to Georgetown and spent the rest of his life in North America.³⁴⁰ While Paccanari had little direct impact on the organization and mission of the post-1814 Society, the scandals connected with him provided fresh material for nineteenth-century anti-Jesuit propaganda and thus contributed to the enduring image of the scheming, amoral Jesuit.³⁴¹ The Paccanarian episode also sheds light on the spiritual uncertainty some ex-Jesuit confronted, It also sheds light on the origins of the alliance between reactionary elements of Biedermeier Europe, a period of bourgeois sensibility that lasted from the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) until 1848, and some Jesuits—a relationship that in the long run did the latter little good.

Quebec (Nouvelle France) passed under British rule in 1763, a year before the dissolution of the Society in France. Under the new regime, a few Jesuits remained at their missions, although by 1773 there were only eleven left, at which point the British crown announced that the Society was dissolved and laid claim to all Jesuit properties, although it did not enforce the breve of suppression.³⁴² Significantly, Quebec Jesuits do not appear to have been the objects of attacks, unlike their confrères in France—Jansenism had never been a force in North America, and few there had read the writings of the philosophes. In 1774, Lieutenant Governor Hector Cramahé (1720–88) and Bishop Jean-Olivier Briand (1715–94) likewise refused to enforce Dominus ac redemptor. Despite—or perhaps because of—British control of the region, the Jesuits were permitted to keep their name and religious habit and even retained their property; however, they were forbidden to recruit new members and thus their number continued to dwindle.³⁴³ The French-born Jean-Baptiste de la Brosse (1724–82) continued missionary and educational work after the Society’s abolition in France, having thousands of spellers and prayer books in Montagnais printed in 1767. De la Brosse’s outstanding literary achievements were the compilation of a census of Montagnais Christians and the completion of a detailed Montagnais grammar that followed the Society’s tradition of analyzing languages along Latin models.³⁴⁴ One Quebec Jesuit even managed to play a minor role in the American Revolution—on the rebels’ side. Father Pierre-René Floquet (1716–82) ministered to American forces during the Easter Week of 1776 when they were in Montreal.³⁴⁵ For this act, he was placed under interdict by his bishop. By 1789, only four ex-Jesuits remained, one of whom penned a letter committing their dwelling to “citoyens [a notable choice of words] canadiens” when the fathers were all deceased.³⁴⁶ The last of the Jesuits in Canada, the Belgian³⁴⁷ father Jean-Joseph Casot (1728–1800), preserved many of the records of the old Society and presented them to the Hospital Sisters of the Hôtel-Dieu before his death.

As a footnote to this saga, the career of Pierre-Joseph-Antoine Roubaud (1724–after 1789) deserves mention if only because he came reasonably close to living up to the caricature of the scheming, amoral Jesuit—although he may never actually have been a member of the Society. A veteran of the Seven Years’ War and acquainted with the inside of a debtor’s prison, Roubaud was forty-nine and apparently an Anglican priest at the time of the suppression, working as a spy for the British. A few years later, he was in the employ of the Spanish ambassador in London, reporting on debates in the House of Commons. Claiming to have been a Jesuit, he unsuccessfully sought to receive a share of the seized properties of the Canadian Society and “disappeared into the slums of Paris sometime after 1789.”³⁴⁸ Decades later, a landmark court case resulted in a cash settlement returned to the Society to compensate for its losses.³⁴⁹

To the south, Jesuits working in the vast Mississippi territory were all expelled, except for the aged father Michel Baudouin (1691–1768), who was allowed to remain behind as the guest of a sympathetic Catholic resident of St. Louis,³⁵⁰ and Father Sébastien-Louis Meurin (1707–77), who migrated westward across the Mississippi to St. Geneviève, then in Spanish territory. This arrangement did not last, however, and Meurin ended up swearing allegiance to the British crown and returning to the east bank of the Mississippi and British territory.³⁵¹ Farther upstream, in Illinois country, a few ex-Jesuits carried on as secular priests, with the last survivor, missionary and linguist Pierre-Philippe Potier (Pottier, Pottié, Pothier), dying near Detroit in 1781.³⁵²

13 A Legacy Not Easily Discerned

The suppression severed Jesuits from the life of many regions of the globe, in some cases permanently, but the lingering effects of the old Society’s undertakings still appear in surprising places. In Paraguay, where the Jesuits did not return definitively until 1927, educational attainment remains ten to fifteen percent higher in regions of former Jesuit presence.³⁵³ Persisting traces of the baroque aesthetic promoted by the Society, spread across the world and exemplified by the theatrical performance witnessed by Goethe and in votive offerings, suggest how the cultural impact of the Society after more than two centuries of prominence was not quickly or easily extinguished.

By contrast, establishing even an indirect causal relationship between the ideas and ethos promoted by former Jesuits and later educational and political developments is not always easy, but the case of Juan Benito Díaz de Gamarra y Dávalos (1745–83) demonstrates a strong connection between these two.³⁵⁴ Born in Mexico and trained in Jesuit schools in Mexico and the Philippines, Gamarra journeyed to Italy where he visited former Jesuits and received a doctorate from the University of Pisa. Returning to Mexico, he established a chair of modern philosophy, which at that time still encompassed natural science. Gamarra seems to have been deeply impressed by his encounters with ex-Jesuits even as the scientific models and curricula he developed bore little resemblance to those set forth in the Ratio studiorum.

One Peruvian ex-Jesuit became directly involved in the building storm in colonial South America. Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán (1748–98) wrote to the British consul in Leghorn in 1781, urging his government to support the rebellion led by Túpac Amaru II (1738–81).³⁵⁵ Wandering in exile and eventually arriving in England, Visgardo wrote an open letter to the Creoles of his homeland in 1792 in which he denounced the Spanish king as a despot. His posthumously and anonymously published letter, sometimes compared to Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) Common Sense,³⁵⁶ influenced many of the leaders of the approaching wars of independence. Viscardo died in London, leaving his papers to Rufus King (1755–1827), the American minister to the Court of St. James.³⁵⁷ Remembered as a “precursor of independence” in Latin America, Visgardo’s actions were highly individualistic and are difficult to correlate with ether his Jesuit foundation or the activities of his fellow ex-Jesuits. Perhaps the strongest links to the old Society are found in his willingness to take risks and flare for sustained polemic.

A few former Jesuits kept alive the polemical and rhetorical traditions of the Society even while events took unanticipated turns. Juan José Tolrá (1739–1830), perhaps emboldened by the fluid situation in Spain brought on by the departure of Joseph Bonaparte (r.1808–13), published an attack on the Pragmática de expulsión that had suppressed the Society there in 1767.³⁵⁸ Citing the upheavals brought to Italy by revolutionary French troops, Tolrá argued for the restoration of throne and altar, an ideology that the nineteenth-century Society would often support, but his rhetorical style, although expressed in the vernacular, betrays a connection to the older Latin models taught in the schools of the Society. Taking a very different position from Dobrovský, who sought to debunk the Jesuit-promoted legend of St. Jan Nepomucký, in a massive tome Tolrá defended the doubtful tradition that St. James had journeyed to Spain and was buried there.³⁵⁹

Ex-Jesuits thus presented many faces in the debates and conflicts arising in the decades after 1773. Not only is it impossible to generalize about an ex-Jesuit “way of proceeding,” but the unified impact of Jesuit formation on some of the most original thinkers among these men is doubtful. Far from being soldiers in a vast conspiracy driven by a determined and crafty leadership, former Jesuits exhibited a variety of motives and capabilities. From Wendel to Carroll to Blumauer to Dobrovský to Visgardo, ex-Jesuits can come across as individuals inhabiting at times very different moral and intellectual universes.

14 Conclusion: Rebirth, but at a Distance

On August 7, 1814, only two months after his return to Rome from exile, Pius VII signed the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum that restored the Society.³⁶⁰ The title of the bull was taken from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians: “I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches,”³⁶¹ therein articulating the argument for the restoration of the Society in terms of its service to existing Catholic communities rather than in feats of exploration, achievements of scholarship, or even evangelization. Indeed, missionary work is not even mentioned in the pope’s bull. The distance from the earlier Jesuit ethos is striking: one world, and that a smaller one than before, was now more than enough. If the breve suppressing the Society had illustrated the weakness of the papacy, the bull restoring the Jesuits said much about the increasing confidence of at least this particular pope leading the post-Napoleonic church. Pius VII established new dioceses in the United States and enjoyed the (at least temporary) support of European monarchs, something Clement XIV had never gained. Yet the continuing vulnerability of the nineteenth-century papacy and the growing indifference with which much of the world viewed its pronouncements were both significant features of the environment in which the restored Society would have to work. The number of actual Jesuits ready in 1814 to resume some portion of the role the Society had previously played was very small: probably no more than six hundred, based mostly in Europe. These factors have shaped the way historians working during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries have dealt with the years of suppression.

Our understanding of the Jesuit experience between 1773 and 1814 has gained subtlety in recent years in part because of the flurry of scholarship accompanying the bicentennial of the Society’s restoration. Increased interest in missionary studies and in cross-cultural contacts has also contributed greatly to our understanding of this period, as has the “decentering” of a previously Eurocentric narrative. Instead of merely being labeled a “period of suppression,” the decades following Dominus ac redemptor now appear as a time of restricted, yet, in some ways, real continuity, of regeneration, and even of growth and innovation. Intertwined with these processes were the careers of individual former Jesuits who in some cases did not follow the same professional or spiritual paths that had characterized their identities as Jesuits. For example, Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823), cut loose from the Society at the age of sixteen, became a Barnabite monk and then converted to Protestantism (with an interlude as an illuminist), going on to contribute to the literature of post-Kantian idealism. His relations with the Masons and his contributions to the theory that Moses was an Egyptian mark Reinhold as one of the most adventurous of former Jesuits.³⁶²

The verdict is still out on whether the Jesuit tendency at times to accommodate new political arrangements was ultimately more of a help or hindrance to the Society during these years. In Russia, this adaptability made survival possible until the expulsion of 1820. In Manila, when the British fleet arrived in 1762 (during the Seven Years’ War) and looting of the city followed, Jesuits took down the Spanish flag and replaced it with the British, which surely did not help their case when Carlos III began to contemplate their expulsion a few years later.³⁶³ Yet Jesuit adaptation to conditions in the United States helped make the decades after 1814 generally successful ones for the Society.³⁶⁴

Long focused on the political process of suppression and restoration, scholars are now attending to the human consequences of the Society’s suppression. Many, perhaps most ex-Jesuits, whatever their new roles, experienced bewilderment and uncertainty, sometimes tinged with anger, which could lead them to act in concert as a “new Jesuit International.”³⁶⁵ The surrendering (sometimes to rival religious orders, other times to oblivion) of missions and other undertakings to which they had devoted their lives was deeply painful for many ex-Jesuits. Others such as Dobrovský, traveling in new directions that built upon the scholarly or technical aspects of their Jesuit training, do not seem to have looked back. And not a few disappeared from the record, never to be heard from again. The suppression’s impact on laypeople was significant, and not merely because Jesuit schools ceased to exist. Not only was a career path for young men of many social origins now blocked but sodalities and other organizations that had provided meaning and contexts for socialization disappeared or were now run by clergy with much different backgrounds and objectives. Most importantly, the surviving sodalities no longer had the unique and powerful Spiritual Exercises as a source of spirituality.³⁶⁶

Thanks to scholars such as Dale Van Kley, the cultural and intellectual climate both within and beyond the Society in the years before the suppression is also receiving a fresh look. The anachronistic tendency to view the issuance of Dominus ac redemptor as a precursor to a secular, anti-clerical French Revolution that may now seem inevitable has been counterbalanced by a better understanding of the motives of those within the Catholic Church who wanted to restore and purify, rather than destroy the Society. Far from being merely the result of efforts of those seeking a more secularized path toward modernity, the papal breve was also driven by deeply conservative forces as well, eager to preserve a gradually evolving status quo where monarchy and privilege were secure. In this scenario, personalities within the Society could be seen as a destabilizing force (Malagrida comes to mind), rather than as natural allies of the ancien régime. The declining power and influence of the Society’s historic rivals, from Jansenists to Dominicans, must likewise be kept in mind. The end of the old Society was less the result of a coordinated conspiracy than of a perfect storm.

The forty-one years between the promulgation of Dominus ac redemptor and that of Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum were extraordinarily eventful ones for world history. The American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic era, the advance of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of Russian power, and the beginning of the end of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires in the Western Hemisphere and the advance of French and British Empires in the Eastern were all realities confronting the restored Society. The papacy had also passed through the nadir of its influence and, perhaps more importantly, its credibility as a spiritual force, and this experience would shape its dealings with the restored Society. An equally significant trend was the continued rise in the West of an empirical and theoretical science generally inimical to the goals and approaches of the pre-suppression Society. A far less confident Society would concentrate more on institution-building and internal affairs than on scholarship or data collection as it tried to adjust itself to this new world.³⁶⁷ The expulsion of the Society from St. Petersburg by Alexander I only sixteen months after Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum presaged the challenges that lay ahead.

As Niccolò Guasti points out, a major project of the pre-1773 Society in Europe had involved reconciling Thomism with the onslaught of new ideas flooding into philosophy and the sciences, a program he calls “Ignatian syncretism.”³⁶⁸ By 1814, very few intellectuals outside of strictly Ultramontane circles had any interest in such an undertaking. Books such Muzzarelli’s that criticized Rousseau and Romantic ideas had a considerable lay audience, but typically not one consisting of influential thinkers and educators. The centers of gravity of discourse in both the sciences and the humanities had shifted and continued to shift, and no amount of effort by the restored Society could make a project focusing so much on Thomism important again. The suppression itself contributed little to this shift, but the restored Society, in addition to its many other challenges, found itself distanced from new debates regarding, for example, utilitarianism, which dominated philosophy in the nineteenth century.

After 1814, not merely the material resources of the Society were restricted but likewise the vision with which many Jesuits understood the work before them had also grown narrower. Had the years of suppression not seen the excesses of the French Revolution, this narrowing of vision might have been less extreme, but the origins of this process may be found many years before Dominus ac redemptor. What John W. O’Malley calls the “tired and defensive formalism”³⁶⁹ of the restored Society had its genesis in the bruising years following the Chinese Rites Controversy, gained gravity during the suppression through the alliance of former Jesuits with ultra-conservative political and religious figures, and was strengthened during the reactionary pontificates of Gregory XVI (1765–1846, r.1831–46) and Pius IX (1792–1878, r.1846–78). Significantly, the restored Society, still largely made up of Europeans, did not try to re-establish universities in Europe and instead sought to restart its mission in higher education on other continents.³⁷⁰ Thus did the origins of the increasingly internationalist Society of the twenty-first century take root.

The suppression thus caused a break in not merely the geographical (and thus, indirectly the cultural) focus of Jesuit higher education but also in the goals of Jesuit universities and of Jesuit education more generally. Schools located in the United States or Brazil needed to adapt to vastly different political and social arrangements from those found in pre-1773 Europe, among them competition from other universities and opponents or competitors who were much better organized than they had been in the previous century. Aggressive proselytizing was out of the question in many of these venues. Some of the battles the restored Society had to fight had familiar contours, but in the broader cultural context, Jesuits often found themselves on the opposite side from innovative scholarship, modern science, applied technology, and creative theology. Surveying this shift, the historian is tempted to wonder whether the restored Society now received a significantly different group of self-selected men as its members, their choices driven by frustration and anger with the blows suffered by the Catholic Church, by doubts about the new political and economic order, or by other motives not yet identified. Yet the restored Society also produced such inspired characters as Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–73), whose energy and initiative rivaled that of the most remarkable Jesuits of earlier times. The mystique of the Jesuits, it seems, could not be completely extinguished by the restored Society’s hardships and failures.

While we have noted the significant number of scholarly and scientific works that were composed by Jesuits in the Western Hemisphere before their expulsion, there remain a number of unpublished manuscripts the study of which will undoubtedly add to our understanding of the period immediately before the suppression. Representative of this literature is the Historia natural del Orinoco (Natural history of the Orinoco) of Antonio Salillas (1717–90), which remains in a Madrid archive.³⁷¹ In India, Fr. Joseph Tieffenthaler (1710–85) had composed more than forty short works, none of which has ever been located. Also unaccounted for are manuscripts of the English-born Jesuit surgeon Thomas Falkner, who spent thirty-eight years in South America and published a description of Patagonia.³⁷² The manuscripts of Pierre-Phillipe Potier, whom we have already met, dealing with the Huron language have been identified but have yet to be edited or published. Likewise, Historiae domus (History of the [Jesuit] house), Diaria (Diaries), and other “internal documents” of communities of the pre-1773 Society have yet to be analyzed for clues they could provide about the years of suppression, as are as of yet undiscovered letters by former Jesuits.

When considered individually, the careers of ex-Jesuits show the importance of networks and relationships established long before 1773, but also the capacity of some of these men to function effectively with seemingly very little support. The origins of both these traits can be found in the old Society, where lines of communication and authority were firm but where individual initiative, flexibility, and persistence were likewise essential for survival. The remarkable endurance of ex-Jesuits in India and China is due in part to the self-selection process by which men who had “sought the Indies” eventually arrived at these distant and challenging assignments. Indeed, research into the post-suppression Society has revealed both patterns and continuities among individuals and groups, but also strikingly diverse paths in the cases of some of these men. And had Jesuits not been expelled from South America, this survey might have included accounts of equally exceptional post-1773 careers of former Jesuits on that continent as well.

Surveying the lives of Jesuits still in their prime at the moment of expulsion or suppression, one is struck by the number of priests, including those who had held important posts, who simply vanished from sight, although they lived on for many years. Joseph Ernst Mayer (1752–1814), who became the director of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna in 1786, disappears from the record during the turbulent period following the defeat of the Austrians by Napoleon in 1809.³⁷³ Iberian Jesuits tended to fare worse than their Habsburg or Polish counterparts, with those who labored in the Western Hemisphere facing the worst fates. José Sánchez Labrador (1717–98), expelled from Paraguay in 1767 after a distinguished career as a naturalist and explorer, lived in Ravenna for the next quarter century but almost nothing is known of these years.³⁷⁴

The role and prominence of temporal coadjutors in the restored Society also reflected changing times. While devout men continued after 1814 to choose the vocation of lay brother, the function of these Jesuits as intermediaries between Jesuit priests and the communities in which they worked was reduced in importance. The Society now owned far fewer large tracts of land and less frequently supervised the running of large metropolitan churches, two settings in which temporal coadjutors had served as bookkeepers, pharmacists, musicians, and furniture-makers, among other functions. Jesuit brothers had also provided much of spiritual bedrock of the old Society, but it is less clear whether this was also their role in the nineteenth century. The emergence of the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Europe meant that the late feudal social arrangements that had obtained when the first Jesuit brothers had joined the Society were no longer universally dominant, a change that surely affected vocations. Much work remains to be done on the lives of these men after 1773.³⁷⁵ In a similar vein, the experiences of spiritual coadjutors (coadjutores spirituales), Jesuit priests whose responsibility had been the “care of souls” rather than scholarly or scientific achievement, have been underreported in accounts of the suppression that have been dominated by published sources focusing on the achievements of Jesuits “of the fourth vow.”

While the expulsions and suppression of the Society were acts initiated in Europe, the worldwide context in which events played out is now being explored from a perspective less consciously Euro-centric, a trend that reflects a worldwide tendency in our understanding of ecclesiastical history. The suppression of a religious order that has been called the “world’s first multinational corporation”³⁷⁶ triggered a series of events that could not have been foreseen by any of the players. The case of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809), as a chronicler of the fortunes of ex-Jesuits, is a case in point.³⁷⁷ Born in Spain, Hervás y Panduro arrived in Italy with his exiled brethren in 1767 and remained there for thirty-eight of the remaining forty-two years of his life. Among the works he completed during this sojourn was a monumental study of the languages of the world from which he intended to construct an overarching theory of ethnology. The conclusions that Hervás y Panduro drew concerning, for example, Romany are not regarded as correct today. However, his undertaking represents a carefully documented attempt to draw together data on languages as diverse as Kurdish and Vietnamese and as such is an example of how Jesuit baroque universalist ideology persisted as well as an instance of painstaking data collection, collation, and comparison for which the pre-suppression Society was so renowned. But Hervás y Panduro’s project was in some ways a throwback and one of the last of its kind ever attempted by a Jesuit.

The significance of the suppression and the years that followed is highlighted in some readily identified differences between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Societies. The restored Society was made up almost entirely by a new generation of Jesuits, many of whom had grown up in the difficult years of Napoleonic domination of Europe. Added to this, the restored Society found itself in a political setting unlike the one it had previously known. The emerging nation states of Germany and Italy—and the nationalistic passions that accompanied their emergence—the expansion of a new wave of European colonialism, the reconstitution of the Habsburg monarchy on a non-sacramental basis, and the firm and final rejection by the Orthodox world of any further unions with Rome all placed Jesuit educational and missionary efforts in a far less certain position than before. During the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, Europe had endured a prolonged period of uncertainty that raised expectations among some for even greater change while producing fear and anxiety for others. One of the first acts of liberal nineteenth-century revolutions was the expulsion of the Society.

The colonial powers Spain and Portugal, always centers of Jesuit activity, were now greatly diminished. Moreover, the arguments that had sustained Jansenism for several centuries in its attacks on the Society were now retooled for the quarrel between Ultramontane and Gallican views of the church, a battle fought in a very different context.³⁷⁸ Each of these factors drew some ex-Jesuits in new directions from those of Jesuits of the previous centuries.

Perhaps most importantly, the reactionary and at times fearful posture of a beleaguered Holy See to which the Society continued to offer its obedience put the Jesuits, in the view of many Catholics and non-Catholics, on the side of forces holding back progress. Yet through all this Jesuit institutional memory preserved a sense (at times mythologized) of the pre-suppression Society and provided a sense of continuity through a difficult period that has been called the time of the “second Society of Jesus.” While it may be easy to draw a distinction between the “new” and “old” Societies, the experiences of individual ex-Jesuits varied greatly and included those who never lost hope in the restoration of the Society and understood the suppression as a time of trial that would be successfully endured.

One outcome of the years of suppression was the almost complete extinction of the baroque aesthetic (including its manifestations in homiletics), and its predilections for the eclectic, emotional, and exotic that had lingered in many corners of the Jesuit world until a little past 1773.³⁷⁹ While this aesthetic had passed out of fashion in Western and Central Europe many years earlier and its demise may be regarded as inevitable, the suppression, and the destruction and dispersion of libraries and art collections that followed, produced a clear break with the baroque, and the years that followed imposed a distance that made any return unlikely.³⁸⁰ In Brazil, the tropical climate triggered the accelerated physical decay of books from Jesuit libraries, which became another factor hastening the loss of examples of this baroque aesthetic, and perhaps with it a baroque spirituality.³⁸¹ Nineteenth-century opinion at first saw these developments as no loss at all, as it regarded the baroque as debased, and often blamed the Jesuits for this debasement, an assessment that was only challenged effectively in the twentieth.

Unlike its predecessor, the restored Society proved to be champion of no readily discernible artistic or dramatic style nor of an identifiable approach to library science, poetry, music, or historical methodology, facts that remain true today. Likewise, the restored Society was less daring and innovative in its exploration of the spiritual. The relative poverty of the nineteenth-century Society may have contributed to these deficits, but a much greater factor was the gap in institutional memory brought on by the Suppression. Many of the day-to-day records of the old Society had been either destroyed or scattered, and thus were inaccessible to the men trying to reconstruct the order after 1814. The loss of these records contributed to the formalism we have already mentioned, since the lived experience of earlier Jesuits was not always visible in the formulaic published hagiographies and “annual letters” to which the restored Society had to turn for models. Yet in the former Spanish colonies of the Western Hemisphere, Jesuit baroque historiography proved adaptable, transforming itself into “the critical idiom of enlightened natural philosophy,”³⁸² which was employed to defend the South American continent and its peoples from the unflattering portrayal given them by some European authors.³⁸³

Among the ex-Jesuits who remained active after 1773 were hydraulic engineers,³⁸⁴ architects, horticulturists,³⁸⁵ fortification designers, and even educators in maritime studies.³⁸⁶ The post-1814 Society was not entirely without such talent, but there was no emphasis in Jesuit schools on applied mechanical training, nor did Jesuits parley their skills in these areas into positions of influence in government or education. While this shift was not much remarked upon at the time, it now appears as a significant development in the history of the Society, not least because it illustrated yet another retreat from an earlier engagement with quantitative studies and practical application of knowledge. Although earlier Jesuits such as Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) had speculated about the inner structure of the earth,³⁸⁷ Jesuits and ex-Jesuits played no role in the revolution in geology that commenced in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps most significantly, given the old Society’s long engagement with drama, the golden age of German Romantic drama could claim no successors to Anton von Klein (1746–1810), who spent decades after the suppression producing plays in the vernacular.³⁸⁸ Taken together with the rearguard actions some Jesuits would fight on behalf a papacy resisting social change, this withdrawal from the natural and applied sciences marks an important break between the cultures of the pre-1773 and the restored Societies.

Some commentators have suggested that the years of suppression liberated Jesuits from the structures of approval and promotion that had characterized the Society in its heyday. Such claims are not easily tested, but viewed through the prism of Christian theology, this notion can shed light on the subsequent evolution of Jesuit spirituality and even on the Society that emerged in the mid-twentieth century, with its “preferential option for the poor” and its engagement with liberation theology. Pope Francis (1936–, r.2013–), himself a Jesuit, has gone further, suggesting that Lorenzo Ricci’s attitude toward the suppression, as emulated by other Jesuits, “led the Jesuits to experience the death and resurrection of the Lord.”³⁸⁹ Certainly the four decades of suppression added to the lore of a religious order that has always celebrated stories of its trials and martyrs.

The suppression compelled Jesuits to reflect on their mission and identity, both collective and individual. For some, obedience to the papacy to the point of accepting the destruction of their corporate (and in many cases, personal) identity was evidence of their own piety³⁹⁰ while others privately—or not so privately—criticized³⁹¹ Clement XIV. The loss of a centralized and universally recognized hierarchy for the Society outside of the White Russian communities meant that expressions of “Jesuit spirituality” might take various and even competing forms. A few ex-Jesuits turned to prophecies of, for example, the return of the Society to Spain.

Geography, ethnicity, great power politics, and occasionally chance resulted in vastly different experiences for various communities of ex-Jesuits. Those of the Portuguese Empire probably fared worst of all, lacking champions and subject to an especially repressive and vindictive regime. The experience of Jesuits in Russia was colored by the fact that virtually all were non-Russians and remained representatives of a religion not associated with a dominant or even sizeable ethnic group or language. By contrast, the native-born ex-Jesuits of Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, and Poland became journalists, curriculum reformers, and parish priests. Jesuits in India seem to have endured through their faith, their wits, and their frequently highly homed linguistic skills. In addition to the spiritual aspects of the divisive Paccanari episode, former Jesuits sought to perpetuate a distinctly Jesuit spiritual life in other ways, although in a few instances, the paths they followed were far from those that had been set out by Ignatius.³⁹² The pre-suppression Society had always included men who tested the limits of obedience and who could be largely solitary and even contrarian figures. The suppression years accentuated these tendencies as ex-Jesuits searched for paths to follow in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment. Even allowing for their advanced age, that so few former Jesuits from the European continent joined the restored order after 1814, or engaged with it in any way, is a notable fact that merits more investigation.³⁹³

The restored Society was not compelled to start over completely from scratch, but its growth was slow and cautious, and after half a century it had only reached a third of the size it had been in 1773, with far fewer resources and political connections at its disposal. Thus, although the suppression ended in 1814, its impact continued, with the students of Jesuits who taught during these first “lean years” carrying the sensibilities of the immediately post-suppression Society far into the nineteenth century—and in some quarters, even further. Two hundred years later, the institutional memory of the Society retains a recollection of the hardships, and in the view of many Jesuits, injustices experienced in the years after 1773.

William Clark observes that Jesuits of the pre-1773 Society (perhaps including Father Luengo Rodríguez, whom we have already met) had no private life, in the modern bourgeois sense of the word, as they gave themselves entirely to the Society.³⁹⁴ It is less clear that the men of the restored Society always constructed their identities in the same fashion. Obedient to a papacy frequently on the defensive and facing an environment where they could be frequently expelled from countries on short notice, some of the survivors of the suppression turned to their corporate identity at a point when that identity was being reconfigured or in doubt. Simultaneously, they could be drawn into polemics and politics in which their identities, both as Jesuits and as individuals, might be the object of public ridicule or contempt.³⁹⁵ In the nineteenth century, no immensely powerful Society stood at their back to defend and protect these men. The tensions set loose by this process moved some Jesuits toward a reactionary view of post-1814 (or even post-1789) politics and society, a trend that can be called a secondary effect of the suppression. With such facts in view, the question of essential continuity between the pre- and post-suppression Societies can be raised.

Without wading too far into the shoals of alternative history, we can see the impact that the suppression had on world history more generally. Dominus ac redemptor eliminated the most conspicuous target of those seeking to replace the Catholic theological ideologies as articulated in the struggles of the seventeenth century with a rationalist, mechanical, and materialist worldview. But the suppression of the Society did not destroy the desire in many quarters to turn to the miraculous and transcendent symbols and experiences of baroque Catholicism to cope with change and modernity. The nineteenth-century fusions of national and ethnic passions with traditional Catholic belief, from the movement of Andreas Hofer (1767–1810) in the Tyrol to the rebellion of Louis Riel (1844–85) on the Canadian prairies, are evidence of this persisting desire. The factors that shaped world Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were in fact transformed by neither the Society’s suppression nor by its restoration. It should also be recalled that the downfall and suppression of the Jesuits took place as other Catholic orders, including their rivals the Dominicans, were also in significant decline, a process that the Napoleonic era would accelerate.³⁹⁶ Thus in many of its most dramatic aspects the suppression was more a part of than at odds with broader developments in Catholicism.

The break between advancing empirical science and the activities of the Society likewise was probably inevitable, even if the suppression had not taken place. The resources required for scientific research were increasingly beyond the means of a Society simultaneously committed to recovery and to missionary and educational projects. The growing antipathy of some Western scientists toward a theistic worldview was increasingly a feature of nineteenth-century intellectual life, whether or not Jesuits were part of the conversation. Jesuit obedience to a papacy that had not yet acknowledged Galileo’s contributions, let alone subsequent scientific advances, remained a huge stumbling block. The parting of the ways between the Society and the major universities of Europe and the Jesuits’ initial lack of strong connection to emerging research universities in the United States sealed the deal. All the same, seen from a distance of two centuries, it is clear that the interruption in the lives and careers of many Jesuit scientists deprived many fields of study of needed talent.

The story is different in the field of pre-university schooling. The re-establishment of Stonyhurst College in 1794, by ex-Jesuits fleeing from Liège, is representative of the most successful secondary programs developed by the restored Society.³⁹⁷ The removal of Jesuits from many universities, a process that began before 1773, occurred simultaneously with the reform of many European universities, a process not limited to Catholic ones.³⁹⁸ The Society had always been concerned with what would later be known as secondary education, but in the years after 1814 the distinction between secondary and higher education became much greater in many Western countries, and Jesuits responded to these circumstances by focusing their energies on the training of adolescent boys. The result was the development of an outstanding network of secondary schools that helped secure the Society’s reputation at a point when its presence in European and American universities and research centers was at a low ebb. Since the Society’s first school had educated young boys in Renaissance Messina,³⁹⁹ a significant element of Jesuit education had now come full circle.

For many years after 1773, hostile commentators saw the suppression as part of an inevitable and salutary process of decline for the Catholic Church, and perhaps for all organized religion. Many of those sympathetic to the Society saw its restoration as a reaffirmation of the superior values of the ancien régime: order, deference, and tradition. While both interpretations are too simplistic, the relationship between the travails of the Jesuits from the 1760s into the 1810s and the rise in the West of non-religious, or even anti-religious views of the world must still be addressed in any assessment of the suppression. This relationship is not straightforward. The data collection achieved by the old Society undoubtedly if unintentionally provided ammunition to those developing models of the universe that left no room for the supernatural or that at least assumed a deist position. And the varied post-1773 careers of ex-Jesuits suggest how diverse, secularized (or, depending on one’s view, spiritually weakened), and individualistic the Jesuit experience had already become for some before the suppression had even arrived, and how the old Society was already engaged with and contributing to a secularized world it would later seem often to oppose. Jesuits both inadvertently added to and were carried along by the rejection of a theocentric worldview that characterized late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European, and increasingly, North American thought. The restored Society’s growth outside Europe is thus no accident.

The years of suppression and restoration, although they have received extensive attention during the past decade, continue to intrigue historians, and many questions remain unanswered. What, for instance, motivated young men to join the Society in the years immediately before its suppression, given the rapidly dimming prospects of the order? How might these motivations differ from those of men who had chosen similar paths a century earlier? What were the fates of the thousands of temporal coadjutors after 1773? How extensive and coordinated was the network of communication among former Jesuits? How was the next generation of Jesuits who led the Society after 1814 shaped by the experience of growing up without an institutional framework of Jesuit schools and mentors to shape them? How did former Jesuits fare in places such as Greece, where some stayed on but were isolated within the Ottoman realms? The experiences of Jesuits of non-European backgrounds, such as native-born Vietnamese and Chinese Jesuits, after 1773 likewise merits more study.

The old Society for more than two centuries provided a clear avenue of advancement for young men whose interests were literary, artistic, or scientific yet compatible with a religious commitment—the restored Society, less obviously so. To cite one example of this shift, although missionary work continued to have some importance in the post-1814 Society, it seldom resulted in ethnographical works such as those by Éder or Baegert. Nor did the zoological reports of men like Eckart find many echoes after 1814. Likewise, Jesuit scholar-poets in the mold of Cordara and brothers who designed and decorated buildings are rare among the ranks of the nineteenth-century Jesuits. Jesuit astronomers persisted in a few locations, but their significance was a fraction of those of the old Society and waned further as the costs of producing state-of-the-art telescopes grew beyond the Society’s means. Broader cultural forces drove some of these changes, but the modified goals, resources, and vision of the restored Society were also decisive, as were the personalities and talents of men who were now choosing to enter this new Society.

A reader of the literature dealing with the period of Jesuit history just covered will also be struck by the passionate hatred the Society inspired in some quarters. The history of Christianity has from its earliest days been marked by faction and bitter conflict, but the quality and quantity of the eighteenth-century enemies of the Jesuits and the delight the Society’s downfall produced are nonetheless striking.⁴⁰⁰ More than any other Catholic religious order, the Jesuits have been identified with a cluster of negative stereotypes that at times were as influential in shaping policy during the years of suppression as were any of the deeds of actual Jesuits. Strong emotions and vivid imaginations were moreover not the sole preserve of anti-Jesuits: more research needs to be done on the emotions the Jesuits themselves experienced and how these emotions shaped their perceptions and actions.

The exploration of these and other questions will further refine our picture of these key years, as well as help us to understand better the Society of Jesus as it exists today.