How the Jansenist convulsionnaires Passed into Nineteenth-Century French Fiction: The Case of Léon Hennique's Elisabeth Couronneau

Abstract: Few religious groups made as distinctive a mark on nineteenth-century French culture as the eighteenth-century convulsionnaires , a fringe group of the dissident reform movement within Catholicism known as Jansenism. The epicenter of their movement was the tomb of deacon François de Pâris, whom adepts viewed as a saint capable of carrying out miraculous cures and divine justice against the repressive Unigenitus Bull. The Convulsionaries both captivated and alarmed their contemporaries through their spectacular faith demonstrations, which sometimes involved crucifixions and other brutal mortifications. They also inspired literary adaptations like Léon Hennique's Elisabeth Couronneau (1879). Although often described as a "hysteria" novel, Elisabeth Couronneau is more properly understood as a historical novel that drew on a long tradition of satires of Parisian life. Hennique's fictionalization of the Convulsionaries and their context illustrates the role which eighteenth-century accounts of this peculiar religious movement played in shaping perceptions of it in the nineteenth century. It also shows the place of literature in the process by which later theorists created an imagined relationship between the Convulsionaries and phenomena they sought to explain—which included not simply hysteria, but also credulity, delusions of grandeur, and the dangerous powers of social imitation.