UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Preaching for the Eyes: Priests, Actors, and Ceremonial Splendor in Early Modern France Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/42m4676v Author Palacios, Joy Kathleen Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Preaching for the Eyes: Priests, Actors, and Ceremonial Splendor in Early Modern France By Joy Kathleen Palacios A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Shannon Steen, Chair Professor Shannon Jackson Professor Nicholas Paige Professor Michael Wintroub Fall 2012 i Abstract Preaching for the Eyes: Priests, Actors, and Ceremonial Splendor in Early Modern France by Joy Kathleen Palacios Doctor of Philosophy in Performance Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Steen, Chair In 1656, Jean-Jacques Olier, founder of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, urged his students and readers to think of the ceremonies of the mass as “preaching for the eyes.” His emphasis on the liturgy as something that should be not just heard but also seen signaled a shift in Catholic worship away from the auditory toward the visual, as well as a call for priests to acquire what we would now call performance skills so as to “preach” with their bodies. This dissertation argues that ecclesiastical action against actors flared in France between the 1660s and 1730s because the foundation of seminaries two decades earlier had turned parish priests into liturgical performers as part of a larger effort to professionalize the secular clergy. This professionalization helps solve a puzzle presented by the cultural history of the theater in early modern France. Although virulent, religiously informed anti-theatrical discourses punctuated France’s golden age of theater, France’s parish priests appear to have applied anti-actor policies inconsistently. A third of French bishops declared actors “public sinners” during the second half of the seventeenth century, thereby requiring clergymen to exclude performers of all kinds (bateleurs , baladins , farceurs , comédiens ) from the sacraments, an exclusion that diminished a person’s civil identity, social standing, and legal rights. And yet in most cases parish priests administered the sacraments as soon as an actor renounced the stage even if the renunciation was thereafter reversed. Sacramental reabsorption rather than exclusion was therefore the norm. Why this game? By analyzing the interactions between priests and actors in the parish of Saint-Sulpice, where a seminary, a fair ground, and the Comédie-Française existed side by side, I propose that France’s secular clergymen expressed their stance against the theater ceremonially instead of textually. The logic of their ceremonial negotiations has nonetheless remained inscrutable to historians without an excavation of priestly performance practices. Seminary documents – liturgical handbooks, seminary rules, ecclesiastical conferences, instructional pamphlets, parish records, and seminary correspondence – make such an excavation possible. Based on twelve months of archival research at the Archives de la Compagnie des prêtres de Saint-Sulpice, the Archives nationales de France, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, among others, I show how parish priests in France used ceremonial splendor, or éclat , to differentiate masses from plays, to assert their local authority when actors encroached on parish turf, to distinguish priestly self-presentation from role playing, and to influence ecclesiastical authorities who had the power to issue edicts against actors. Ceremonial splendor enabled a nuanced – although ultimately failed – response to the theater, a response that incorporated theatrical elements while rejecting the theater’s way of organizing bodies and objects in space and time. ii For my father, who bravely fused church and theater iii Contents List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. iv List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION : Preaching for the Eyes .................................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE : Ceremonial Splendor and Theatrical Competition ...................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER TWO : Sacramental Exclusions in the Parish of Saint Sulpice ............................................................................... 74 CHAPTER THREE : Public Persons and Public Sinners ............................................................................................................ 112 CHAPTER FOUR : Ceremonial Improvisation and Anti-Actor Action ................................................................................... 158 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 195 iv List of Figures Figure 1. An emblem of Louis XIV titled “The King Represented by a Sun,” from “Devises a la Gloire du Roy sur ses conquestes dans la Holland,” engraving, 1672 (BN, Salles des estampes, M92731). ................................................................................................................ 68 Figure 2. La messe , artist and date of creation unknown. According to Sulpician tradition Jean-Jacques Olier commissioned the painting shortly before his death in 1657. It now hangs at La Solitude, the retirement home for priests of the Society of Saint-Sulpice. .............................. 69 Figure 3. The Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance, from the title page of Missel romain selon le reglement du Concile de Trent, traduit en françois , engraving (Paris: Chez Jean de la Pierre, 1692). ........................................................................................................................ 70 Figure 4. A devotional image in which a priest performs the elevation while Jesus’ crucifixion recurs above and heaven watches, engraving in Le tableau de la croix representé dans les ceremonies de la Ste. messe (Paris: Chez F. Mazot, 1651)............................................. 71 Figure 5. Tabernacle, Church of Saint-Louis in Paris, engraving, 1643 (BN, Salle des estampes, H30323). ....................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 6. Retable framing a tabernacle, Church of Saint-Eustache in Paris, engraving, 1643 (BN, Salles des estampes, A23066). .................................................................................... 73 Figure 7. Detail from the Turgot map of Paris (1739), showing the Church of Saint- Sulpice in the upper right corner and the Foire Saint-Germain on the opposite side of the Rue des Aveugles. .................................................................................................................................... 111 Figure 8. Adrien Bourdoise (1584-1655), founder of the Seminary of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet in Paris, engraving, late 1650s (AN MM 472, fol. 11.) .......................................... 150 Figure 9. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-1657), founder of the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, engraving, late seventeenth century (from Charles Hamel, Histoire de l’Église Saint-Sulpice , 2 nd ed. [Paris: Librairie Victor Lecoffre, J. Gabalda & Compagnie, 1909], between pp. 118-119.) 151 Figure 10. Louis Tronson (1622-1700), third Superior General of the Seminary and Society of Saint-Sulpice, engraving, early eighteenth century. (Private collection.) ................. 152 Figure 11. The jubé at the parish church of Sainte-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, 2008. (Picture by Anne Whinfrey.)....................................................................................................... 153 Figure 12. Frontispiece of Pierre Le Brun’s Explication litérale, historique et dogmatique des prières et des cérémonies de la messe (Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1716), depicting the celebration of a high mass........................................................................................................... 154 Figure 13. Plans for the pulpit at the parish church of Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet, attributed to Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), 1660s. (BN, Salle des estampes, R12531.) ........... 155 Figure 14. A pulpit by Jean Le Pautre (1618-1682), in which an individual peaks from behind a curtain while the priest preaches, engraving, 1659. (BN, Salles des estampes, E004720.) ..................................................................................................................................................... 156 Figure 15. A pulpit by Jean Le Pautre (1618-1682), in which spectators gather in the nave below the preacher and lean over the balustrades above him while they listen to his sermon, engraving, 1659. (BN, Salles des estampes, E004718.) ............................................................