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Chapter 4 “Virtue in the extreme is worth nothing”: Mortification and Mission in Madagascar, 1648–1674

Seán Alexander Smith

Work on an early modern missionary frontier often challenged settled expecta- tions regarding the holding and application of ancient spiritual values. The experiences of Lazarist missionaries who laboured from 1648 to 1674 in the dis- tant French colony of Fort Dauphin, a narrow peninsula on the extreme southeastern coast of Madagascar, perfectly illustrate this problem. One of the most crucial values to them lay in the practice of mortification, a popular form of Christian asceticism. Although mortification has frequently been adopted by many laypeople, particularly lay women, over the centuries since Christ’s crucifixion, in the Christian tradition it is most often connected to forms of cloistered religious life.1 Discussion of ascetical practices on missionary sites is thus much rarer, a surprising fact given that the apogee of mortification coin- cided with the époque missionnaire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Missionary institutes flourished in this very same period, buoyed as they were by the forces of the Catholic Reform. France was especially invested in the cre- ation of embryonic missionary Churches and thousands of its missionaries left the metropole to work in far-off lands.2 This essay explores if a spiritual value

1 The literature on physical asceticism is expansive. General presentations of the subject can be found in L. Cognet, Introduction à la vie chrétienne, especially vol. 2, L’ascèse chrétienne (: Editions du Cerf, 1967). For specific treatments see Claudie Vanasse, Les saintes cruau- tés. La Mortification corporelle dans le catholicisme français moderne (PhD diss., University of , 2005); Patrick Vandermeersch, La Chair de la passion: une histoire de foi, la flagella- tion (Paris: , 2002); N.Hausman, ‘‘Mort et mortification dans la vie religieuse apostolique,’’ Vie Consacré, 3 (1984) : 153–164. Mortification and corporal asceticism is also discussed as part of French doctrinal movements such as Jansenism. For a magisterial study see Brian E. Strayer, Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640–1799 (Eastborne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). For colourful studies of food and food deprivation in a religious context see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 2 Stephen Neil, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 180; Guillaume de Vaumas, L’Eveil missionnaire de la France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1959).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004325173_005 Mortification and Mission in Madagascar 69 like mortification, which encouraged its practitioner in suffering and self- abandonment, was compatible with the pastoral impulses of the burgeoning missionary movement.

I Missionaries ... Must be Mortified

The Congregation of the Mission, whose members are commonly called Lazarists, was founded in Paris in 1625 by the famous churchman and saint Vincent de Paul, along with three companions, as a charitable association with the specific pastoral goal of evangelising ignorant Catholics of the French countryside. Vincent de Paul, of course, had few designs on far-off islands when he began his ministry, but his Congregation soon radiated beyond the French frontier, later sending missionaries to Tunis (1645), Algeria (1646) and (1646). However, when pressed by the nuncio to France to accept a mis- sion to the miniscule French colony in Fort Dauphin, de Paul agreed to dispatch two missionaries, Charles Nacquart and Nicolas Gondrée, who arrived at the settlement in 1648.3 The Lazarists were late arrivals to this global mission work. At a time when the Jesuits, Dominicans, and already enjoyed a virtual monopoly on missions in France’s other colonies – especially those in Nouvelle France and the Caribbean – Madagascar was one of the few remain- ing missionary stations unassigned to a religious institute in the imperial zones.4

3 Pierre Coste, Le Grand Saint du grand siècle. Monsieur Vincent, 3 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1934), vol. 2, 229. The first authorisation for this mission from the French apostolic Nuncio, given 30 March 1648, can be found in Vincent de Paul: Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, ed. Jacqueline Kilar et al., 14 vols (New York: New City Press, 2003) vol. 13a, 358 [hereafter CCD]. The decree from Propaganda Fide, which was issued on 20 July 1648, is contained in ibid., 361. 4 By the time the Lazarists reached Madagascar the Capuchins had already travelled signifi- cantly. See Luca Codignola, ‘‘A world yet to be conquered. Pacifique de Provins and the Atlantic World, 1629–1648,’’ in ieri e oggi. Atti del 6° Convegno Internazionale di Studi Canadesi. Selva di Fasano, 27–31 marzo 1985, III: Sezione Storica, ed. Codignola Luca and Raimondo Luraghi (Fasano: Schena, 1986), 59–84. All three orders had already sent missionaries to the Antilles by the end of the 1630s. See Dominique Deslandres, “Les Missions françaises intérieurs et lointaines, 1600–1650. Esquisse geo-historique,” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, 109, no.2 (1997) : 505–538. The Jesuits, Recollects, and Capuchins had been in since 1612, 1620 and 1632 respectively: Luca Codignola ‘‘Competing Network. Roman Catholic Ecclesiastics in French North America, 1610–1658,’’ The Canadian Historical Review, LXXX, no. 4 (December, 1999): 541–542, and Matteo Binasco, ‘‘Les activités des missionnaires catholiques romains en Acadie/Nouvelle-Ecosse (1610–1755), Les Cahiers de La Société historique acadienne, 37, no. 1 (March 2006) : 4–29.