The Life of a Clerical Aristocrat

François René de Chateaubriand: Vie de Rancé. Printed in Monsee, Illinois, 2020.

 

No less than his younger cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Chateaubriand long considered the condition of his fellow aristocrats in France, and in the world generally. In his novella, The Last of the Abencerrajes, he presented a way in which fervently religious aristocrats of different faiths might yet reach a modus vivendi with one another. [1] In Vie de Rancé, he shows how a young aristocratic wastrel might reform himself, enter the Church, and eventually reform a declining monastic order as “the perfect model of penitence,” “the worthy son and faithful imitator of the great St Bernard,” that eloquent and austere adherent of the Benedictine Rule, co-founder of the Cistercian Order and the Knights Templar. 

Born in 1626, Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé’s aristocratic heritage could hardly be questioned. His father, Denis Bouthillier, Lord of Rancé in Brittainy served as a Councilor of State under Louis XIII; Cardinal Richelieu was the son’s godfather. But 1626 was also the year of the Chalais Conspiracy, in which aristocrats plotted against the lives of Louis and Richelieu; later schemes, culminating in France’s civil war, the Fronde, would involve the younger Rancé, two decades later. He received an education in Greek, Latin, and “Moeurs”—the “traditions of education that go back to Montaigne.” Montaigne, that most elegant and understated of Machiavelli’s followers: What moeurs did the boy learn? In reading “the poets of Greece and Rome,” with their “ancient ideas,” he imbibed “a subtle passion hidden beneath the flowers” of Anacreon’s erotic lyrical poetry and drinking songs, some of which he translated and published. Being the second son in an aristocratic household, Armand was destined for a clerical career, becoming the commendatory abbot of the monastery at La Trappe at the age of ten, then ordained as a priest at age twenty-five. [2] For him, understandably and characteristically for a man of his circumstance in the France of his time, he regarded the Church as a ladder of ambition; he had no financial worries, as he inherited substantial wealth from his father, who died in the following year.

As a youth, Rancé “wandered in the midst of the societies which began before the Fronde”—that is, the salons presided over by literary ladies, places of refinement, of amours, and often of aristocratic resistance to the monarchy. Salon life engendered Les Précieuses, who pitted the refined language of the aristocracy against what the ladies regarded as the vulgarity of the royal court. The salons had considerable social influence and eventual political consequence. “There, under the influence of women, the mixture of society began, by the fusion of ranks, this intellectual equality, the inimitable moeurs of our old patrie were formed. The politeness of spirit joined to the politeness of manners: they knew how to live well and to speak well.” That is, the aristocrats themselves, striving for authority in matters of taste, needed to introduce brilliant young non-aristocrats to their homes—an early trace of democratization which had lasting consequences. An Italian lady, Catherine de Vivonne, married to the Marquise de Rambouillet, ruled one of the most influential of these societies; “from the debris of this society was formed a multitude of other societies which preserved the defects of the Hôtel de Rambouillet without its qualities.” Among them, for example, was the salon organized by Anne de L’Enclos, nicknamed ‘Ninon,’ a courtesan and author, patron of Molière and of the child, François-Marie Arouet, later ‘Voltaire.’ She, too, sympathized with the Frondists. [3] Rancé frequented several of these societies; “he could not spoil his mind, but he spoiled his morals.” It was in one of them that he met Marie d’Avaugour, Duchesse de Montbazon, his future mistress.

Politically, then the salons were “friends of the Fronde” and thus enemies of the king. Rancé’s association with them raised the suspicions of Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin. Chateaubriand blames Mazarin for sparking the civil war, which began in 1648; he raised taxes and fines in order to fund the ongoing war with the Hapsburgs, much to the displeasure of the aristocrats. Mazarin and the Queen feared some of the more formidable aristocrats, especially Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, called ‘Le Grand Condé’ in recognition of his brilliant generalship during that war. While the prince suppressed the first manifestation of the Fronde, he switched sides in the second, putting the monarchy at risk. Madame de Montbazon, married to the much older Hercule de Rohan, governor of Paris, was an enemy of Mazarin, pro-Frondist, and reputed to be an avaricious libertine. “It is easy to imagine that Madame de Montbazon would take a new lover, whose treasure would tempt her beautiful and unfaithful hands.” It is equally easy to imagine how the young Rancé might have been dazzled by her; they became partners in political intrigue, with Madame as the decidedly senior partner. Chateaubriand can only shake his head: “When you stir up these memories that are turning to dust what would you get from them but a new proof of the nothingness of man? These are the finished games that ghosts retrace in cemeteries before the first hour of day.” 

All of this ended in 1657 with her death at the age of forty-seven, which Rancé learned of in a grotesque scene. Not having heard of her sudden passing, he came to the Duchess’s home, “where he was allowed to enter at any hour.” “Instead of the sweets he thought he was going to enjoy, he saw a coffin which he judged to be that of his mistress, noticing her bloody head, which had by chance fallen from under the sheet with which she had been covered with great negligence, and which had been detached from the rest of the body” in order “to avoid making a new coffin longer than the one they had been using.” [4] The shock brought him to his knees; Rancé later testified that he “was astonished that his soul was not separated from his body.” He experienced a “Christian vision”: a “lake of fire in which a woman was devoured by the flames.” Repenting, he converted to serious Christianity and set out to reform the Trappist Order, exchanging “the lightness of his first life” for “the severity of his second life.” One story has it that Rancé had Madame’s head preserved, keeping it in his cell at the abbey as a memento mori for himself and for future generations of monks. Chateaubriand graciously doubts the tale. “The annals of mankind are composed of many fables mixed with some truths” in “the mirage of history.” He does not, however, doubt that Rancé wrote, “I have miscalculated, I will do penance for it all my life.” [5]

“Under Louis XIV, liberty was nothing more than the despotism of the laws, above which the inviolable arbitrariness rose as regulator. This slave liberty had some advantages: what was lost to Frenchmen at home was gained abroad in domination: the Frenchman was chained, France free,” free from foreign domination thanks to its hegemony on the European continent. At the abbey, Rancé sought to establish “the Christian Sparta.” Penitence and austerity freed the monks from sin, insofar as human beings can be freed from it. He also imported a Christian version of the egalitarianism seen in the salons, inasmuch as in the abbey “Man was esteemed whatever his condition: the poor man was weighed with the rich by the weight of the sanctuary,” by his conformity to the regime of the Christian Sparta, a regime of Christian liberty. Chateaubriand lauds him as “the immortal compatriot of whom I would weep in bitter tears at anything that could separate us on the last shore.”

“Here begins the new life of Rancé: we enter into the region of profound silence.” And not only for himself and the monks under his tutelage: “Through Rancé, the century of Louis XIV entered into solitude, and solitude was established in the bosom of the world.” Not only political France but religious France was torn by factions: the Jansenists, for whom divine grace negates free will; the Jesuits, evangelical soldiers of God; the Ultramontanists, advocates of papal power over the monarchic regime of the centralized state. Among all these, the Cistercians at La Trappe, guided by Rancé, lived in peace.

Not without controversy, however, outside the bounds of the abbey: “The calumnies published against the monastery of La Trappe by the libertines, who laughed at austerities, and by the jealous, who felt that another immortality was emerging for Rancé, began to increase; the first errors of the solitary man were constantly brought before their eyes, and they persisted in seeing in his conversion only motives of vanity.” As another abbot told him, “You have many admirers, but few imitators.” Rancé replied to such objections, “God has not commanded all men to leave the world, but there is none whom he has not forbidden to love the world.” The Church had become too worldly, owing to her very success in fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission. “Like a mother who is too fecund, [the Church] began to weaken herself by the new number of her children. The persecutions having ceased, fervor and faith diminished in repose. However, God, who wished to maintain His Church, preserved some people who separated themselves from their possessions and from their families by a voluntary death, which was no less real, no less holy, no less miraculous than that of the first martyrs.” With these words, Rancé addressed the challenge modernity (and especially, by Chateaubriand’s time, modern liberalism) posed to the Church, the challenge of religious toleration. Toleration can kill Christian fidelity not with kindness but with indifference. While the Jacobins burned churches and abbeys, while Napoleonic Wars drove the Trappists drove the Trappists to America (“it was a great spectacle that the world and solitude fled as one before Bonaparte”), the blood of the martyrs remained the seed of the Church. But when the most faithful Christians are met with benign neglect, when they are simply ignored, they may rest in complacency, become lax not only in their efforts at evangelism but in their own spiritual lives. The abbey of La Trappe preserved Christian witness in what would come to be called an increasingly ‘secularized’ world.

In reacting against his own previous way of life, in his rigorous reforms of the Order, did he merely rush from one extreme to another? Chateaubriand denies it. “Rancé would be a man to be driven out of the human race if he had not shared and overshadowed the rigors he imposed on others: but what can one say to a man who responds with forty years of desert, who shows you his ulcerated limbs, who, far from complaining, increases in resignation in proportion as he increases in pain,” a man who, “in the midst of all these tribulations had taken no refuge other than Christian patience”? Far from the spirit of its grim ancient model, “the family of religion around Rancé,” the citizens of the Christian Sparta, “had the tenderness of the natural family and something more; the child she was going to lose was the child she was going to find again: she was ignorant of that despair which is finally extinguished before the irreparability of the loss. Faith prevents friendship from dying; each one weeping aspires to the happiness of the Christian, called by God; we see a pious jealousy burst forth around the righteous, which has the ardor of envy, without having the torment of it.” On his deathbed, Rancé could say to a weeping religieuse, “I do not leave you, I precede you.” “His heart was at rest, and the divine Spirit had filled his soul with splendor.” Saint-Simon recalls, “The Church wept for him and even the world rendered him justice.” [6]

Chateaubriand ends by contrasting the Christian Sparta with the original one. One important element of the Spartan regime was the crypteia, a legal requirement that young aristocrats be formed into bands, the cryptai, charged with killing and terrorizing the helots in the countryside. This institution not only subordinated slaves not under the immediate rule of masters in the urban center of the polis, it hardened the cryptai, forcing them to endure harsh weather and putting them into constant, arduous action as hunters of men. Having endured this, they could then enter into full Spartan citizenship. Clemenceau writes, “The cryptia of Sparta was the pursuit and death of slaves; the cryptia of La Trappe is the pursuit and death of the passions. This phenomenon s in our midst, and we do not notice it.” Owing perhaps to the enduring spirit of Montaigne, “the institutions of Rancé seem to us only an object of curiosity which we will see in passing.” His Life of Rancé stands as his own attempt to engage modern Christians, if not to join the Christian Sparta, then to undertake the stern, loving, rewarding task of making war against the worst elements of the human soul.

 

Notes

1. See “Religious Toleration Among the Aristocrats? Chateaubriand’s Thought Experiment” on this website under the category “Manners and Morals.”
2. A commendatory abbot holds an abbey in commendam, that is, he derives revenues from the abbey but exercises only limited authority over the life of the monks and is often a placeholder until a more suitable officeholder is designated. As a result, a layman (such as the child, Rancé) may become a commendatory abbot.
3. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), chronicler of the French court, laments “the disorder she caused among the highest and most brilliant youth.” “Ninon never had but one lover at a time,” although she retained a coterie of numerous “admirers.” As she aged, the lovers dropped away, but she remained influential, prized for her great wit. (Duke of Saint-Simon: Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency. Bayle St. John translation. Washington: M. Water Dunne, Publisher, 1901, Volume I, 343-344.) Saint-Simon himself spares no affection for Mazarin: “What I considered the most important thing to be done, was to overthrow the system of government in which Cardinal Mazarin had imprisoned the King and the realm. A foreigner [Mazarin was an Italian], risen from the dregs of the people, who thinks of nothing but his own power and his own greatness, cares nothing for the State, except in its relations to himself. He despises its laws, its genius, its advantages: he is ignorant of its rules and its forms; he thinks only of subjugating all, of confounding all, of bringing all down to one level. Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin, succeeded so well in this policy that the nobility, be degrees, became annihilated, as we now see them.” That is, in Saint-Simon’s estimation, France’s apparently ‘absolutist’ monarchy in fact became an oligarchy of ‘intellectuals’ and clergymen, many of them of low birth. “Now things have reached such a pretty pass that the greatest lord is without power, and in a thousand different manners is dependent upon the meanest plebeian. It is in this manner that things hasten from one extreme to the other.” (II.341). Accordingly, had Saint-Simon reached the impossibly long age of 110, he might well have ascribed the French Revolution to the effects of the Richelieu-Mazarin regime.
4. Unlike Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon regards this story as fiction.
5. The term “miscalculated” evidently reminds Chateaubriand of the “wager” made by the most eminent mathematicians of Rancé’s time: “The terrible Pascal, haunted by his esprit géometrique, doubted incessantly; he could not escape his misfortune unless he rushed into faith.”
6. Saint-Simon, op. cit., I.191. He also remarks that Rancé’s chosen successor at the abbey, D. François Gervaise, who “acted as if he were already master” before the elderly Rancé died, “brought disorder and ill-feeling to the monastery,” and was eventually caught in an illicit love affair, after which he resigned and departed (I.149).