Du bonheur de publier sous la crosse

• Main Author: Jochen Krenz
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (LARHRA UMR 5190) 2020-03-01
• Series: Chrétiens et Sociétés
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/chretienssocietes/5415

Nineteenth-century German ecclesiastical historiography imposed the idea that Catholic Enlightenment sympathizers, in favour of a reform of Church and State to meet the challenges of secularization, were dissidents, heretics, even "enemies of Religion", while their opponents, defenders of a necessary intolerance towards "philosophers" and Protestants, appeared as the only true defenders of Orthodoxy. The work devoted since the 1960s to the Catholic Aufklärung has made it possible to move away from this caricatured vision and to reassess the intellectual contributions and influence of this theological-political current. The Catholic press of the Empire, the privileged theatre of the confrontation between supporters and opponents of the Enlightenment, presents a contrasting face, which requires both taking into account the chronological evolution of local power relations and taking the measure of editorial interactions on the scale of the entire Germanic space. Taking advantage of the fear caused by the political violence and military expansion of the French Revolution, the uncompromising camp gradually succeeded in imposing its retrospective vision of the Enlightenment debate, demonizing its opponents, presented as the precursors of the French "Jacobins".