Ceremonial Splendor

Performing Priesthood in Early Modern France

Joy Palacios

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781512822779
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

By the end of France's long seventeenth century, the seminary-trained, reform-minded Catholic priest had crystalized into a type recognizable by his clothing, gestures, and ceremonial skill. Although critics denounced these priests as hypocrites or models for Molière's Tartuffe, seminaries associated the features of this priestly identity with the idea of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman. Ceremonial Splendor examines the way France's early seminaries promoted the emergence and construction of the true churchman as a mode of embodiment and ecclesiastical ideal between approximately 1630 and 1730. Based on an analysis of sources that regulated priestly training in France, such as seminary rules and manuals, liturgical handbooks, ecclesiastical pamphlets and conferences, and episcopal edicts, the book uses theories of performance to reconstruct the way clergymen learned to conduct liturgical ceremonies, abide by clerical norms, and aspire to perfection.Joy Palacios shows how the process of crafting a priestly identity involved a wide range of performances, including improvisation, role-playing, and the display of skills. In isolation, any one of these performance obligations, if executed in a way that drew attention to the self, could undermine a clergyman's priestly persona and threaten the institution of the priesthood more broadly. Seminaries counteracted the ever-present threat of theatricality by ceremonializing the clergyman's daily life, rendering his body and gestures contiguous with the mass. Through its focus on priestly identity, Ceremonial Splendor reconsiders the relationship between Church and theater in early modern France and uncovers ritual strategies that continue to shape religious authority today.

CHAPTER 1 Clothing

In May 1664, Louis XIV organized eight days of festivities at his sumptuous palace outside Paris, the Château de Versailles. On the second-to-last day, Molière (1622–1673), already well on his way to becoming France’s premier comic dramatist and actor, presented a new play to Louis’s guests, a comedy in three acts called Le Tartuffe, ou l’hypocrite. The play staged the story of a man whose outward expressions of piety gained him entry to a bourgeois home, where he dispensed spiritual advice while proceeding to try to seduce the master’s wife and steal the master’s property. Tartuffe, the title character’s name, almost immediately entered the French language as a synonym for hypocrisy, and ecclesiastical authorities condemned Tartuffe quickly after its début.¹ In a letter to the king, the curate of the parish of Saint-Barthélemy demanded that Molière “suppress and tear up, stamp out and burn” his play, on the grounds that the play threatened to “ruin the Catholic religion” by “blaming and playing [the church’s] most religious and holy practice, which is the direction of souls and of families by wise guides and pious directors.”² Within a week, under pressure from the archbishop of Paris and the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, the king issued a prohibition against the play’s performance in the kingdom’s public theaters.³

When the actor who played the first Tartuffe—Philibert Gassot (1626–1695), known as Du Croisy—stepped onto the stage at Versailles on 12 May 1664, scholars believe he wore a costume that helped provoke the scandal that engulfed the play.⁴ Although none of the extant versions of the dramatic text refers to Tartuffe as a clergyman, as Georges Couton persuasively argues the venom with which pious Catholics in Paris greeted Molière’s play derived in part from the character’s attire, which evoked the clothing worn by men who sought a career in the church.⁵ A description Molière gives of the way he modified the title character’s attire so as to make him more worldly for the 1667 version of the play allows Couton to deduce that the first Tartuffe’s costume entailed the following elements: “large hat, short hair, small collar, no sword, robe without lace.”⁶ This ensemble, and in particular its small collar, in fact conformed to the clothing worn in the mid-seventeenth century by men enrolled in the seminaries that had been founded in the 1640s by France’s leading counter-reformers. Tartuffe’s initial costume and the outrage it elicited highlight that priestly performance was changing and reveals that for seventeenth-century French churchmen the stakes of this transformation were serious enough to compel men of wealth and influence to attack a play that, when the polemic began, had been performed only once, at an event not open to the general public. For the purposes of this book, Tartuffe therefore condenses the processes of priestly transformation the rest of my study unfolds and foregrounds the stakes of priestly performance in seventeenth-century France.

Tartuffe’s clerical-like attire elicited debate because it disrupted a chain of signification leading from a priest’s clothes and body to the Catholic Church’s authority and ultimately to the perceived truthfulness of Christ’s divine presence in the Eucharist.⁷ For Catholics, in other words, questions about clerical robes cut to faith’s heart and to the foundation for the institutional church’s legitimacy. A set of beliefs and practices known as investiture held fast many of the signifying links that connected priestly clothing to core Catholic doctrines. The term “investiture” refers to the idea that rites leading to and including the sacrament of ordination endowed a priest with a new character, expressed by his robes, such that outer clothes reflected an inner reality. In the seventeenth century, investiture belonged to a larger project of professionalizing the secular priesthood, meaning priests who did not belong to religious orders. Molière’s play played with investiture. In doing so, Tartuffe’s original costume threatened to undo twenty years of work France’s counter-reformers had done to elevate the ecclesiastical and social standing of secular priests.

The clerical robes evoked by Tartuffe’s costume and promoted by seminaries tell the story of how Catholic reformers reworked and recombined practices from a range of cultural domains, both religious and secular, to craft a new priestly identity, that of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman. As Tartuffe’s first costume and the polemic to which it contributed illustrate, the Counter-Reformation priest’s identity intersected practices from three performance cultures, that of regular priests, of royal courtiers, and of stage actors. When blended together, these disparate practices produced a priest whom his peers and superiors would consider divinely called to his office, and whose presentation of self would invest the priestly role, rather than the individual man, with authority. As the next chapter shows, the task of integrating practices from disparate cultural domains required performance techniques and skills, such as role-playing and rehearsal, to which not all clergymen had access, that took time and discipline to master, and that seminaries helped clergymen incorporate. Since the Counter-Reformation ideal of the vray ecclésiastique required a delicate balance of behaviors derived from relatively restricted communities, its embodiment posed a challenge at the individual level by requiring clergymen to learn patterns of behavior that might be foreign to their previous cultural experiences. Furthermore, the failure to properly integrate any of the composite practices threatened to delegitimize not just a particular person but rather an entire institution. Molière’s play represented an incompletely integrated priestly identity. In doing so, it rattled something much larger than any individual priest’s personal reputation. By staging the incomplete mixing of the monastic, courtly, and theatrical practices a vray ecclésiastique needed to incorporate into a seamless whole, Tartuffe inverted investiture, turning it into a disguise. Tartuffe thus provides a broken mirror through which to examine the Counter-Reformation’s ideal clergyman.

The Costume

When Tartuffe appeared on stage in 1664, the physical appearance of what seminary manuals referred to as the vray ecclésiastique had acquired a precise form, even if seminary directors felt that many secular clergymen failed to live up to it. The portraits of Adrien Bourdoise (Figure 1) and Jean-Jacques Olier (Figure 2)—founders of the Seminaries of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet and of Saint-Sulpice, respectively—clearly depict two of the exterior features that by the mid-seventeenth century had become essential to the secular clergy’s public appearance: small collars and short hair. In Bourdoise’s portrait a third key feature, the soutane, or dark clerical robe, is also discernible near his hands and neck, although covered by a white surplice—or short, liturgical robe worn when performing the sacraments. By evoking a small collar, short hair, and a plain robe in Tartuffe’s first costume, Molière’s play cited vestiary norms that seminaries in Paris had spent two decades promoting as signs of the authenticity of a clergyman’s vocation.

Of the three elements, the small collar carried the strongest connotation of seminary-trained, reform-minded secular clergymen. Seminary rules, like those of the Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, required seminarians to wear just such a collar. “The use of collars in the Community of Saint Nicolas,” reads the seminary’s coutumier, or rule book, “has been since the beginning of its establishment to wear them modest and very simple as to their style.”⁸ Not only does Bourdoise’s portrait display this small collar, the seminary’s rules even included a pattern titled “Le veritable models des rabats du seminaire” (The true model of seminary collars), according to which all seminarian collars had to be made.⁹ By the end of the seventeenth century, conformity among clerics trained in or influenced by seminaries had turned the small collar into a trope for involvement in the Counter-Reformation. According to Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel, “One calls ‘Little Collar’ a man who has joined himself to the reform, to devotion, because out of modesty people of the Church wear small collars, whereas people of the world wear big ones adorned with points and lace.”¹⁰ At the same time, by the end of the century the phrase “little collar” also doubled as slang for hypocrisy. Furetière notes that “sometimes it is said in a bad way of hypocrites who assume modest manners, especially by wearing a small collar.”¹¹ Tartuffe’s first costume seems to have played upon the small collar’s simultaneous reference to reform-minded clergymen and artifice.

Figure 1. Adrien Bourdoise (1584–1655), founder of the Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, engraving, late 1650s (Archives nationales de France MM 472, fol. 11).

Figure 2. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608–1657), founder of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, engraving, late seventeenth century, from Charles Hamel, Histoire de l’Église de Saint-Sulpice, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre, J. Gabalda, 1909), 118–19, courtesy of the Archives of Saint-Sulpice (Paris).

Tartuffe’s short hair and plain robe, too, evoked seminary garb. As the manuscript minutes of an episcopal conference on the subject of priestly dress held in approximately 1656 or 1657 confirm, by the mid-seventeenth century ecclesiastical ideals called for clergymen to keep their hair cut short, and they were to wear the soutane, which was an ankle-length, long-sleeved black robe.¹² Documentary evidence does not indicate that the first Tartuffe wore the tonsure, the shaved circle at the crown of the head worn by clergymen. His short hair, however, would have been enough to signify intention to join the clerical state. The path to priesthood began with a tonsure ceremony in which the bishop symbolically clipped the candidate’s hair.¹³ Among other signs of readiness for clerical status, to participate in the ceremony candidates were supposed to present themselves before the bishop “with their hair short and even.”¹⁴ For secular clergymen who did not belong to religious orders, short hair represented what Victor Turner would call their liminal status in between the full renunciation of a monk and a layperson’s complete engagement “dans le siècle” (in the century), as seminary directors put it.¹⁵ In a handbook written for tonsure candidates by Bourdoise, an excerpt from the Italian Catholic reformer Cardinal Bellarmin (1542–1621) explains that the tonsure candidate’s short hair signified “that one must leave behind all superfluous thoughts and desires, like those for worldly things, riches, honors, pleasures, and other similar things.”¹⁶ Short hair thus denoted withdrawal from the world. At the same time, short hair did not represent full renunciation. The rules for the Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet included an entry entitled “Cheveux” (Hair), which explained that the requirement to wear short hair reminded clergymen to care neither too much nor too little for the physical world: “It is recommended to priests to not shave their hair, nor to nourish their hair, but only to clip it to a certain length to teach them that they must not totally apply themselves to the care of external things, nor entirely abandon them, but apply themselves with moderation … to the degree required by pure necessity, charity, or obedience.”¹⁷ A secular clergyman’s short hair announced to the world that he was in it but not of it. With or without a tonsure, Tartuffe’s short hair would have triggered ecclesiastical associations for the audience.

Tartuffe’s plain garments would have further augmented the clerical...