a Book in his Hand: A Tribute to Edmund Frow (Salord, 1998);Ruth Frow, Edmund Frow (Eddie) 1906-1997: The Making of an Activist (Salford, 1999); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999) Britain, 1951Britain, -68 (2003)); Geoff Andrews, End Games and New Times. The Final Years of British Communism 1964Communism -1991Communism (2004)); Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists in British Society 1920-1991[START_REF] Gillett | The History of Hull (Hull[END_REF]; Geoff Andrews, The Shadow Man. At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle (2015).

KEVIN MORGAN

See also: †Dona TORR; †Frderick John (Jack) TANNER GOULD, Alfred (1856[START_REF] Béliard | Les proto-travaillistes et l'argent des conservateurs: du scandale Hyndman-Champion (1885) à l'affaire Alfred Gould[END_REF] TRADE UNIONIST Alfred Gould was born on 23 May 1856 to Henry and Mary Ann Gould in Paradise Place Hull, where he later served an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner. His father was a warehouse keeper. For a short time Gould worked as a ship's carpenter. However, shore life being more to his liking, he soon returned to Hull. In 1881, at the age of 25, he joined the Hull 6th Branch of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASC&J). The union, founded in 1860 in London, had by then grown to become one of the largest of the Victorian age, with more than 17,000 members-in particular thanks to the action of another Hull-born, Robert Applegarth, its General Secretary from 1862 to 1871. From the start, a vigorous participant in the affairs of the society, 'Brother' Gould was to take on ever-growing responsibilities, at both local and national level.

In the mid-1890s, Gould engaged in the fight for the construction of an Independent Labour Party (ILP), a struggle that was to become his lifetime passion. Joining the ILP shortly after its foundation in 1893, he campaigned in 1895 in favour of docker Tom McCarthy, the first labour candidate ever to challenge Liberal ship-owner Charles Henry Wilson in his West Hull stronghold albeit without official support from the Hull Trades Council. Indeed, since the dissolution of the dockers' union in the aftermath of the 1893 lockout, the Trades Council had embraced a 'Lib-Lab' course, and its figurehead, Fred Maddison, was chosen to represent the Liberal Party in the Central Hull constituency. Neither McCarthy nor Maddison were returned. But Gould was so shocked by the Lib-Lab partnership that the following year, he presented the Executive Committee of the Hull Trades Council with a motion stating that only independent labour candidates should be supported. It was defeated by 67 votes to 25, illustrating the solidity of the Lib-Lab current, as well as the growing credibility of the ILP. That same year (1896), another ILPer, George Belt, was elected Deputy Chairman of the Council, after a campaign stressing the necessity to recruit the casual port workers which group the 1893 defeat had virtually atomised. However, from 1896 to 1900, the cause of labour was almost muted in Hull, the Trades Council even failing to organise any May Day celebrations. Meanwhile, Gould was asserting himself inside the ASC&J. In 1897, at the age of 41, he was elected to its General Council, where he was one of the first leaders to advocate the inclusion of labour representation in the society's objects. Yet in Hull, Gould was still a secondary figure when in 1899 the Hull building workers engaged in a determined and eventually victorious strike. From then on, the Hull Trades Council and its Executive Committee were dominated by a nucleus made of masons, painters, carpenters and joiners. Initially in the shadow of strike leader Watson Boyes, Gould was to become a pillar of the Trades Council.

It was not until the Taff Vale Judgment in 1901 that Gould's advocacy of independent working-class politics started to be heard again. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC), founded on 27 February 1900, soon found in Gould its most obstinate defender on Humberside. On 23 October 1901, his first letter to Ramsay MacDonald, the LRC's secretary, was a plea to receive propaganda material, in order to inform the members of the Trades Council of the organisation's purpose and activities. In the following months, Gould repeatedly spoke out in favour of a 'United Labour Group' in the Commons, to the point of irritating his old friend Frederick W. Booth, the editor of the Trades Council's Monthly Labour Journal. Gould's insistence was rewarded in 1902, when the Council agreed to send two of its leaders (R.W. Lazenby and Gould himself) to the LRC conference in Birmingham. From that moment onwards, the sending of pamphlets and tracts from the LRC headquarters to Hull became regular.

In 1904, on Gould's suggestion, the Council unanimously asked the dockers' leader James Sexton to represent the LRC in Hull in the next general election. Sexton declined the invitation and the LRC was unable to run any candidates in Hull in the 1906 election. But that disappointment was compensated by a near-simultaneous breakthrough in local politics: the formation, in March 1905, of a Labour Group on the City Council. Seven out of the nine city councillors affiliated to the Trades Council signed a text in which they proclaimed their refusal of any links with the Liberal and Conservative Parties, thereby dissolving the 'Progressive Party' that had dominated Hull politics since the mid-1890s. The passing from one era to another was symbolised by the sudden death, on 9 December 1905, of W.G. Millington, one of the two labour councillors who had refused to cross the bridge. The Lib-Lab sentiment however, survived, and former secretaries of the Trades Council such as Watson Boyes and T.G. Hall (vilified by ILPers as 'Renegade Labour') refused to walk in Gould's footsteps.

In the years that followed the Trades Council's takeover by the Gould team, it was once again on the offensive. In June 1905, a massive demonstration was organised in favour of 'the right to work'. Gould explained to the crowd 'how capital exacted toll from the workers, and when the best had been taken out of them, they could take refuge in the workhouse or the gaol'. The 'right to work' campaign, punctuated by visits from national leaders such as MacDonald and Will Thorne, culminated with a mass meeting on 27 September 1908, during which two motions submitted by Gould were adopted by the crowd: one demanding the direct recruitment of unemployed workers by the Corporation, the other imploring the Liberal government to support the Labour Party's Right to Work Bill. The gathering ended with a speech by Ben Tillett, who 'outgoulded Gould' in both form and content-and almost faced prosecution for his wild talk about the crimes of the 'master class'. The campaign, however spectacular, did not stop the rise of joblessness, especially in the building and shipbuilding industries. Gould also inspired a victorious campaign against the closing of several passageways to the public by the Northern Eastern Railway Company (NER), which was trying to privatise the shores of the Humber. The combative mood instilled by Gould played a major role in attracting socialist militants such as Joe Higgins and Gustav Schmidt (Gus Smith) back into the Council's everyday activities. More surprisingly it even led Booth, a Lib-Lab at heart, to embrace the independence turn.

By 1905, Gould's local influence was acknowledged beyond the labour movement milieu, as revealed by a micro-scandal in which he played the central part. In December 1905, Gould was discretely contacted by an agent of the Conservative Party, who promised him substantial financial help should he choose to run for the Labour Party in the upcoming general election. He was hoping that this popular trade union leader could take away votes from the Liberals, thus enabling the Conservatives to conquer East Hull. Gould arranged a meeting with the agent to let him know whether he was interested-this time making sure that a journalist from the Eastern Morning News was present, behind a screen, to record the terms of the deal. The paper immediately published all the details of the attempted bribery. The Conservatives' local reputation was seriously damaged, while Gould's image, on the contrary, became associated with incorruptibility and confidence in labour independence. T.E. Ferens, the Liberal candidate for East Hull (he was also the director of the Reckitt factory), then tried to convince Gould to stand with him on an electoral platform to denounce 'the amazing Tory intrigue ' [Woodworkers' Journal, April 1906]. Gould agreed, on condition he could explain 'the policy and the principles of the Labour Party'-a compromise Ferens refused. The whole affair was thus turned by Gould into an opportunity to declare the Labour Party proudly independent from both of the 'orthodox parties' that served the 'idle class' [Woodworkers' Journal, April 1906].

In the wake of the scandal, Gould declined the Eastern Morning News's offer of one pound a week to write a weekly column on labour affairs in Hull, as he considered he would not be 'allowed a free hand' by the pro-Liberal daily: 'This put an end to my career as an amateur journalist', he recalled with a smile [Monthly report of the Hull Branch of the Woodworkers' Amalgamated Society, February 1906]. In the eyes of the Trades Council, the net result of the failed plot was 'credit and honour to the Labour Party in general, and to Mr. Alf Gould in particular' [Monthly Labour Journal, January 1906], especially as he had recently been in and out of jobs and was financially stressed. Though the Hull supporters of the LRC did not feel confident enough to run candidates of their own in the 1906 general election, they seized the day on the occasion of a by-election in West Hull. On 29 November 1907, their candidate James Holmes, a national official of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), only came third. But, securing 29% of the votes, he was not far behind the Conservative and the Liberal candidates (35 and 36% respectively). Gould's resistance to the manipulations of the two big parties, coinciding with the creation of a Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in the Commons, had played an essential part in that affirmation. Much to Gould's disappointment, the Labour Party's progress in Hull then slowed down, in particular due to the 1909 Osborne, Judgment which squeezed the party's finances to the point that it was not able to run any candidates in Hull in the general elections of 1910.

Still, the Labour Group on the City Council took root, with around five representatives on top of Gould himself. Year in year out, they used their position to promote working-class interests in matters great and small. To the forefront in initiating progressive measures, they campaigned successfully for Hull Corporation to keep control of the telephone system; to open a hygienically suitable public abattoir; to cut the price of tram fares for workers; and to provide schoolchildren with free meals. They also placed the question of wages at the heart of their propaganda, insisting that the Corporation should not sign any contracts with employers that underpaid their workers, and that municipal employees should receive fair pay. In 1909, on Gould's initiative, the Trades Council became affiliated to the National Committee to Promote the Break-Up of the Poor Law, which called for the abolition of the Boards of Guardians. This did not stop the Labour Group from campaigning in the Guardians' elections-with results that showed almost continuous improvement from 1905 to the outbreak of the Great War. For many a worker, Gould came to be seen as a reliable watchdog and an effective spokesman-for example when he voted against the raising of the Chief Constable's salary to £700 per annum and reminded the other councillors that 'thousands of working-men in Hull (lived) on incomes of less than £80 per year' [City Council (Watch Committee) Minutes, 11 February 1914].

Significantly, Gould was the only Hull delegate to be present at every Trades Union Congress (TUC) from 1906 to the outbreak of war. More than Booth, who was also regularly delegated by his union, he became 'the voice of Hull' in the trade unions' national arena and was responsible for a number of memorable outbursts. In September 1907 at Bath he presented an unsuccessful motion opposing a pay raise for the TUC's Parliamentary Secretary, W.C. Steadman. In 1908 in Nottingham, he called into question the legitimacy of the TUC, arguing that a comprehensive body, uniting the Labour Party and the trade unions, would be more efficient-a motion which almost secured a majority of votes at the 1910 TUC in Sheffield. Gould was also adamant that the TUC should publicly condemn those of its members who, in general elections, stood as Liberal candidates, even when faced with a Labour or Socialist candidate. Ex-Hull man Fred Maddison was one of the 'vultures and jackals' targeted [TUC Annual Report, 1907]. When the chairman asked him to withdraw his insults, he agreed to withdraw 'vulture'. Though Gould's position was almost unanimously rejected in 1907, it was almost unanimously adopted in 1908, when delegates realised many Lib-Lab MPs had refused to support Labour's Unemployed Workmen's Bill. Once again, Gould had seen the light just a bit too early. Gould's other interventions at the TUC were warnings against collaboration with the capitalist interest. In 1908, he expressed his disapproval at the sight of delegates accepting an invitation to eat at a buffet organised by a local mine owner well known for his hatred of strikers. In 1910, he denounced the presence of David Shackleton, a member of the TUC's Parliamentary Committee, on Blackburn's Chamber of Commerce. Critical of trade union intimacy with employers, Gould sought to convince Hull Trades Council that the TUC was ripe for dissolution inside a wider Labour Party, and persuaded a relative majority of his defiant views. The same logic made him a steadfast advocate of the Clarion scheme of federation.

All in all, Gould was the main driving force in Hull behind the ILP's march forward in the years following the 1905-1906 local and national breakthroughs. The monthly 'ILP notes' published in the Monthly Labour Journal from October 1907 onwards, signed in turn by Arthur Lockwood and James Major, testify to the energy animating Gould and his comrades in those pioneering years. The articles seldom focused on ideological questions. Gould, although the staunchest of ILP partisans, never called himself a socialist but must have found the ILP's conception of socialism vague enough to be tolerated. What Lockwood and Major aptly conveyed was the devotion and enthusiasm that led old crusaders, such as Joe Higgins, and new converts, such as Joe Cavanagh, to hold out the banner of Labour and Socialism on Hull streets, even after work or on Sundays. Gould's disciples shared the conviction that, due to the recent electoral advances, industrial action was becoming superfluous, and that conquering majorities in the institutions was now paramount.

Gould's views on women's votes or on working women's problems can only be guessed, and with little precision. On 18 April 1906, he chaired the founding meeting of the Hull Branch of the Women's Labour League (WLL), which had been set up in London the month before, as a female counterpart of the ILP. His wife, Elizabeth was the branch's first president. In June 1908, she became the branch's secretary, replacing a certain Mrs S.E. Cawthorne. In branch meetings men were welcome, and Gould's presence was often recorded alongside that of his wife. Their relationship was apparently a free collaboration between equals. Their daughter Lizzie was also involved in the activities of the WLL. In October 1913, she set up a concert for their annual conference and, one year later, married Walter Dobson, an active member of the Hull Labour Party. As a husband and a father, Gould evidently encouraged, rather than restrained female activism, and did not seek to erect a wall between his public and private lives. One should not infer from that open-minded attitude that he saw himself as a feminist or supported the radical means used by the suffragettes. Like the mainstream of male labour activists in the Edwardian age, he was probably less a supporter of suffragism as such than a man who believed the malefemale alliance to be beneficial for his class.

In April 1913, Gould was associated with the launch of a new monthly, The Dawn. The title was hardly original-Derby had harboured a socialist paper of the same name from 1902 to 1905, and the sunrise metaphor was typical of labour evocations of a 'New Jerusalem'. The full title, Hull's Labour Monthly A Review of Local Government and Politics, gave it a respectable front, appropriate for a publication that advertised for the Labour Party's new paper, The Daily Citizen (launched in October 1912), rather than for its turbulent rival, George Lansbury's Daily Herald. Sold at a reasonable price (one shilling a year) and with a circulation of 10-20,000 copies, The Dawn complemented the Trades Council's Monthly Labour Journal, with an emphasis on electoral matters and smaller attention paid to workplace news. Its launch coincided with the Guardians' election of 1913, in which Mrs Gould was one of the five female candidates selected by the Hull Labour Party. The Dawn was also Labour's main broadcasting medium in the municipal elections of 1 November 1913. On that occasion Gould contested (and won) the East Central ward, allowing him to return to the City Council after two years of absence-alongside railwayman Robert Mell. The Labour Party presence thus went up from four to six councillors, out of sixty-four. Possibly because Gould felt he could master the ship alone, the Hull branch did not immediately make use of 'the system of a Full-Time Agent' which the party headquarters were ready to finance for Hull [Labour Party Records, Peoples' History Museum, LP/CAM/13/1/86]. It was not until early 1914 that a certain J. Rule, from Stockport, was appointed Parliamentary agent in West Hull.

Though Gould was not the official editor of The Dawn, he was usually granted the whole of page two to express his opinions, in texts that had all the characteristics of editorials. The Dawn therefore constitutes an invaluable source to understand Gould's fundamental ideas in his years of maturity-even though only eleven issues of out of fifty have been kept. Gould's first piece was a classical ILP denunciation of 'rich shirkers' and 'orthodox parties', and a Hardie-like plea for class independence and the Labour Party vote. Its conclusion ('the pace is quickening, for the General Election of 1906 showed it, the present Industrial Unrest proves it') was more original, presenting the political and the industrial tools to change 'our present vicious social system' as complementary rather than contradictory [The Dawn, April 1913]. This was a denial of the fact that the 'Great Labour Unrest ' of 1911-1914 was largely a rebellion against Labour's impotence in Parliament and against trade union 'officialdom' Gould was now part of. Indeed, though in style Gould remained passionate and at times outrageous, his texts are underpinned by a deep-rooted moderation, at odds with the syndicalist mood of the day. Explaining 'Why the workers demonstrate on May Sunday', Gould wrote a whole page without using the words 'socialism' and 'revolution', preferring to define the event as 'a Democratic carnival' and 'the anniversary of the workers' freedom… throughout the civilised world' [The Dawn, May 1913]. A vehement article entitled 'A Call to Arms', in which he quoted Shelley's 'Rise like lions', presented 'the failure of the strike method' as a matter of fact, and electoral battles as the only perspective [The Dawn, June 1913]. In September 1913, Gould expressed his disapproval of the use of 'the forces of the Crown' against the Dublin dockers, but the monarchy as such he never criticised. His occasional attacks on Liberal or Tory clergymen were made in the name of true Christian values, but religion was never a target. His prose could display sympathy for working-class struggles abroad, but its tone was definitely more emotional when evoking 'the nation's greatness' [The Dawn, June 1913] and Britain's 'strong and healthy race' [The Dawn, October 1913]. When Joe Higgins and Alfred Grainger, young members of the British Socialist Party (BSP) acquainted with Cornelius Shearsmith, complained that the TUC's support for Jim Larkin and the Dublin dockers was too timid, it is significant that Gould should have been the one to discourage them from writing to the Parliamentary Committee. Gradualist and patriotic at heart, Gould's discourse was thus typical of a strand of pre-war British labourism.

In 1914, Gould was at the local forefront of two national campaigns. When nine South African trade unionists were deported to Britain for their role in violent railway and mining strikes, they travelled around the country to plead their cause, and Gould chaired two meetings held in Hull on 29 March. He used his column in The Dawn to denounce martial law and give details about the repression. Like most of his trade union contemporaries, he praised the activists for their refusal to see 'the conditions of the white man' reduced to 'the level of that of coloured or Chinese labour', and presented the Boer farmers who had repressed the strikers as 'dirty and disreputable ' [The Dawn, May 1914]. The second campaign in spring 1914 concerned the employment of Chinese sailors on British vessels. Gould introduced a Trades Council debate over the question and also chaired a mass meeting organised by John R. Bell for the Hull branch of the National Seamen and Firemen's Union (NSFU) on 15 April. Adhering to Havelock's Wilson 'yellow peril' leitmotiv, he embraced his call for the exclusion of all coloured workers from British ships. Both examples show that Gould, in spite of his attachment to class unity, conformed to the stereotypes and hierarchies of his time, without imagining that racial barriers could (or should) be overcome.

During the 'great unrest', Gould kept the Hull Trades and Labour Council at a safe distance from the large-scale social conflicts affecting the port and its workforce. Blaming workers for their electoral 'apathy' and the 'slavishness' that led too many of them to vote for the Liberals and Tories, he insisted that nothing could be as efficient as a strong working-class party in Parliament to resist the growing concentration of the employers' forces. A determined fighter for workers' interests in the City Council arena, he believed his everyday harassment of vested interests on the municipal level could be replicated in the Commons, and would eventually be more useful to obtain concrete changes in favour of the labouring majority than extra-institutional agitation-though he did march and agitate on May Days.

When the war broke out, The Dawn stuck to the ILP's national position, opposing conscription, campaigning for a negotiated peace, and portraying the German worker as a friend, not an enemy-a line that Gould felt ill at ease with. Like Booth in his Monthly Labour Journal, he chose to limit his field of intervention to material issues, calling for the provision of work for unemployed adults and of food for needy children in the name of 'true patriotism', without criticising the coalition government's foreign policy [The Dawn, August 1914]. By November 1914, for financial reasons, The Dawn's format was reduced both in size and in pages-and for the same reason Gould withdrew his candidature for West Hull, postponing any decision on that question until the end of the war. In the last known copy of The Dawn (January 1916), the anti-war stance was more vocal than ever: The Dawn now advertised for Lansbury's Daily Herald, supported the Clyde Workers' Committee against Lloyd George, and left-winger Mell had become the Labour councillor whose name was printed the most often-while Gould's words were significantly absent.

Out of step with the ILP, Gould turned most of his attention to his trade union activity. He served on the General Council of the ASC&J until 19l7, when he resigned to seek election to the new National Executive Council (NEC), of which he became the first chairman. By then, the union claimed 125,000 members across the English-speaking world. Gould's union was one of many which sought to unite the workers employed in the building sector, from the slaters and tilers to the bricklayers and labourers, inside one federation. The organisation created in 1914, the National Building Trades Council, never existed more than on paper. But it did lead to the foundation, in 1918, of the National Federation of Building Trades Operatives (NFBTO), of which Gould was the first chairman, and which soon led a successful campaign for a shorter working week. In 1920, Gould was replaced by Richard Coppock, who presided over the NFBTO until 1961. In 1918, aged 62, Gould contested Hull's North West constituency for Labour-a long-awaited challenge, since his columns in The Dawn had always been signed 'Alf Gould, Prospective Labour Candidate for West Hull'. At his first meeting on Friday 6 December, he complained about the choice of the date for the general election, which meant the working-class men still serving as soldiers on the Western Front, in Mesopotamia or on the seas would not be able to vote. Presenting the Labour Party as 'the only true democrats', he castigated the 'fossilised old Tories', but found little to reproach Prime Minister Lloyd George, except that he was ill-advised [Hull Daily Mail, 7 December 1918]. One of Gould's pro domo arguments was his probity: he explained he was not after the £400 a year received by MPs, having previously refused a £500 per year position offered by the wartime government. In the overpowering khaki atmosphere, Gould's choice was to distinguish himself from his opponents personally rather than politically. He expressed 'no sympathy' [Hull Daily Mail, 6 December 1918] for conscientious objectors-which set him apart from Labour's candidate in South West Hull, Councillor Mell, who defined himself as an enemy of war and capitalism, supported the 'Soldiers' and

  ; Matthew Worley, Class Against Class. The Communist Party in Britain Between the Wars (2002); Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin. A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (2002); John Callaghan, Cold War, Crisis and Conflict. The History of the Communist Party of Great

Sailors' Charter' and spoke favourably of both the Russian and the German revolution [Gould Election Addresses, Working-Class Movement Library, Salford]. During the campaign, Gould admitted there were now 'two Labour Parties in Hull ' [Hull Daily Mail, 6 December 1918], a split that grew stronger in the following years-as demonstrated in the correspondence between the Hull Trades Council and City Labour Party secretary, H.E. Jordan, and the secretary of the Propaganda Committee of its Industrial Section, O. For a couple of years his disappointment on the political front pushed him to focus on the trade union and co-operative fields. In 1921, the ASC&J merged with a smaller rival, the General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, to form the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (ASW), and Gould was one of its first national leaders. An ardent supporter of the National Building Guild, Gould also took part in the Hull Co-operative Builders Ltd., a trade union experiment in house-building. Yet in the 1920s, he had to relinquish some of his responsibilities, in particular because of an alteration of rule inside the ASC&J/ASW, which appointed a full-time executive committee and fixed an age limit of 63 for its members-forcing Gould to retirement in 1925.

Alfred Gould 'was found by his daughter hanging dead at his home (313 Inglemire Lane) in Cottingham' on Monday 30 May 1927[Yorkshire Post, 1 June 1927]. The coroner's diagnosis was 'suicide while of unsound mind'-though a recent breakdown in health makes a conscious suicide just as plausible. A few days before, a local businessman with Liberal sympathies, Arthur B. Reckitt, had taken his life at nearby Elloughton. Gould was buried on the following Thursday in Hull's Northern Cemetery. The ceremony brought together many Labour sympathisers, especially woodworkers, and several framed photographs of Gould were given to the local Labour Club and to the Hull 6th Branch of the ASC&J/ASW he had belonged to for 46 years. Five months later, on 2 November 1927, members of the building trades gathered once again in honour of Gould. After a tribute by Councillor Walter Turner, Mrs Gould was presented with a framed photograph of her late husband, and a cheque from the Trades and Labour Council [Hull Daily Mail, 4 November 1927]. He had married Elizabeth Broadstreet in 1880 and they had five daughters and two sons.

Gould died only shortly before the Hull Labour Party achieved a municipal majority for the first time at the end of 1929. Though he was to miss both Hull's 'greatest May Day ever' [Hull Sentinel, June 1930], on 4 May 1930, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Hull Trades Council on 3 May 1931, homage was paid, on both occasions, to the man who had contributed so vitally to the growth and coming of age of the local labour movement. Gould also died before seeing the NFBTO's efforts to reach out to foreign workers crowned with the foundation, in 1934, of the International Federation of Building and Wood Workers. But those who had known him were


DAVID HOWELL

See also: †William JOWITT; †Robert SMILLIE; †Sidney James WEBB SHEARSMITH, Cornelius Tonge (1884-1914) SOCIALIST AND TRADE UNIONIST Cornelius ('Con') Tonge Shearsmith was born on 19 August 1884, the son of Edwin Shearsmith and Mary Ann Tonge. Edwin, a Hull-born butcher, had married Mary, of Immingham, nine years his junior, in 1873. They settled at 4 Emporium Buildings, on Spring Bank. The arrival of Cornelius completed the family, which already contained two sons and three daughters. Cornelius Shearsmith started work at age fifteen in 1899 as a clerk for J.A. Carhill, a chartered accountant established in one of Hull's small and busy streets, the Land of Green Ginger.

Shearsmith was soon politically involved, joining the local Fabian Society branch, headed, in the years before the First World War, by a medical man, Dr Joseph Nelson. He also became acquainted with Reverend Reeman, a pastor at the Old Salem Congregational Church, probably in spring 1909, when a trio of Nonconformist preachers launched a local 'Socialist Crusade'. As an aspiring journalist, Shearsmith is said to have contributed a couple of articles to the Christian World magazine-but he was remembered less as a religious person than as a staunch socialist. His last and most solid loyalty was to the Hull branch of the British Socialist Party (BSP), the party that succeeded the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1911.

Shearsmith's socialist faith went hand-in-hand with his trade union activism. A member of the National Union of Clerks (NUC), he became vice-chairman of its Hull branch in the early 1910s and was elected as its chair at the beginning of 1914, taking over from a certain A.C. Hall. The local branch was particularly dynamic at this time, having recruited a sizeable number of women members. Consequently, at Whitsuntide 1914, the NUC's annual congress came to Hull. Shearsmith, appreciated for his 'considerable ability as a speaker' and his 'clear way of expounding his views', was amongst those who addressed the clerks' Paragon Square mass meeting on the event's final day [Hull Daily Mail, 2 July 1914]. The 200 delegates at the congress represented 13,000 dues payers nationally, a figure that had increased by 25% in only one year. Just a week before Shearsmith died, the Hull Daily Mail published his response to two clerks who had expressed scepticism about the value of NUC membership [Hull Daily Mail, 29 June 1914]: it is a well-argued and energetic plea, making it easy to understand why he was perceived locally as 'a hard worker and a clear thinker ' [Monthly Labour Journal, July 1914].

As a representative of the NUC branch, Shearsmith also sat on the Executive of the Hull Trades and Labour Council from the end of 1912. According to Fred Booth, the Lib-Lab editor of Hull's Monthly Labour Journal, he acted, with other 'rebel members', as 'a veritable watchdog ' [Hull Times, 4 July 1914]. Indeed, in the turbulent months that followed the seamen and dockers' strike of June 1911, the Trades Council became home to a new generation of activists, often members of the BSP, who defined themselves as revolutionary socialists. They took a sympathetic view of the syndicalism associated with the 'Great Labour Unrest' of the period and supported what they termed 'greater unionism'. 'The real battlefield of Labour', Shearsmith wrote, 'is not at Westminster, but in the workshop and in the factory, in the mine and in the mill' [Monthly Labour Journal, February 1914]. During the Dublin dockers' lock-out of 1913-1914, Shearsmith was in charge of the local support fund and, alongside the Hull branch of the Daily Herald League, welcomed Jim Larkin heartily when he visited the city. When a meeting was organised in Hull on Sunday 29 March 1914 to support nine South African trade-unionists who had just been deported by their government, Shearsmith was one of the few local activists to mention the plight of the black workforce exploited in the British-owned mines [Monthly Labour Journal, June 1914]. Such initiatives did not go down well with the older, more moderate generation inside the Trades Council, which explains why many felt that he could be 'stinging' and even 'waspish ' [Hull Times, 4 July 1914].

All in all, though 'his views for the re-organisation of society… did not find general favour', Shearsmith seems to have run his NUC branch in an open-minded way, making sure that 'all phases of political thought (were) fully and adequately represented, and (managed) to work in harmony ' [Hull Daily Mail, 2 July 1914]. The feeling conveyed in various tributes to his memory was that he wanted, above all, to be 'serviceable to his class': 'What a big heart for mankind this little fellow had ' [Monthly Labour Journal, July 1914], Booth lamented, expressing a grief shared beyond the socialist milieu. On the verge of a war that was to put British labour's internationalism to a test, it should also be noted that his loss considerably weakened the local voice for pacifism.

Shearsmith died at his home, at 8 Milton Street, of acute meningitis, on Wednesday 1 July 1914, at the age of 29. He had just returned from a holiday in a houseboat on the upper reaches of the River Hull when he started developing rheumatic fever. His old comrade, Dr Joseph Nelson, was unable to stop the illness and shop assistant William A. Grainger, a fellow BSPer, took a week's leave to nurse his comrade in his final unconscious days. He was buried on Friday 3 July in the Borough Cemetery on Spring Bank. The funeral was paid for by the NUC. Of the two poems sent by 'friends of our late Comrade C.T. Shearsmith' published on the front page of the October edition of the Monthly Labour Journal, one was signed by 'a Lady Member'. But there is no evidence of him ever being married.

Writings: The articles that Shearsmith wrote for the Monthly Labour Journal (Official Organ of the Hull Trades and Labour Council) were published between January and June 1914.

Sources: (1) MSS: Letter from Steve R. Shearsmith, Cottingham, East Yorkshire, 27 July 2003. (2) Newspapers and Periodicals: Hull Daily Mail; Hull Socialist; Hull Times; Monthly Labour Journal. (3) Books, Articles and Thesis: Kenneth Gillett and Edward MacMahon, The History of Hull (Hull, 1989); Yann Béliard, 'The Origins of the Great Labour Unrest: Class Relations in Hull, 1894-1910' (unpublished PhD diss., Paris 13 University, 2007); Yann Béliard, 'Imperial Internationalism? Hull Labour's Support for South African Trade-Unionism on the Eve of the Great War", Labour History Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (2009) In more ways than one, Gus(tav) Smith/Schmidt was a militant 'in between'. A revolutionary of German origin, he often began his speeches with 'We, the workers of Great Britain'. Gustav Schmidt, son of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friederike Mathilde Schmidt, was born on 26 February 1854 in Delitzsch, a small town situated in the province of Saxony. In his teens, he left his hometown for nearby Leipzig, the industrial capital of the region, to train as a cabinetmaker. For five years (1868-1873), his apprenticeship led him from one German city to another, until he left for Norway, where he spent two years (1874)(1875). Upon returning to Germany, he was forced to do his military service. Eleven months later he deserted, escaping first to Holland, then to Britain. By 1877, he was working as a cabinetmaker in London, but he only stayed there for a short time. In 1878, at the age of twenty-four, his peregrinations led him to Hull, which was to be his terminus. Bismarck passed the first anti-socialist laws in 1878, making it impossible for him to travel back home. In 1881, Schmidt married a local girl, never to move from Humberside again.

In the early 1880s, Schmidt founded the 'Hull Liberty Socialist Club', with the help of half a dozen other German exiles. Though it was officially registered as a cultural association, the authorities were conscious of the political character of the club. Yet, because the club's function was apparently social more than agitational, it seems to have been tolerated. The name was borrowed from Die Freiheit, a weekly paper edited in London by the German anarchist-communist Johann Most (1846Most ( -1906) ) between 1879 and 1882. Freiheit was also the name of circles founded in Germany by a great admirer of Most's, anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958), who was an exile in Britain from 1895 to 1918. Schmidt's scarce writings


Keywords: France, condemnations, Eucharist, Jesuits, Louis

The interdiction of the teaching of Descartes's natural philosophy pronounced by Louis XIV in 1671 was followed by a wave of official condemnations. The first part of this chapter gathers together the facts that led some historians to speak of the persecution of Cartesianism. In the second part, it is argued that various causes explain these condemnations, first by relativizing the importance of the doctrinal question of the Eucharist, second by placing the question in the context of the Jesuit wars, and third by showing that Cartesians appeared as a party threatening the unity of the kingdom.

The Condemnations of Cartesian Natural Philosophy Under

Louis XIV (1661-91)

Sophie Roux

In chapters both titled "De la persécution du cartésianisme", Victor Cousin and his disciple Francisque Bouillier compile the many official condemnations of Descartes's doctrine pronounced by the king, the universities, and the teaching orders in France in the last third of the seventeenth century. 1 These chapters are surrounded by a description of the influence that Descartes's works exerted on early modern thought and by an evocation of the mundane triumph of Cartesianism. 2 Such a juxtaposition is perplexing. Is it possible to go beyond the polarization between institutional censorship and an inescapable diffusion into new circles? Is there a relation between the condemnations of Cartesian philosophy and its success? What were the intellectual and social forces at work?

To answer these questions, I focus on the thirty years between 1661, the year when, immediately after Mazarin's death, Louis XIV declared that he would rule without a chief minister and wield alone an absolute monarchic power, and 1691, the year when the Parisian Faculty of the Arts was forced to reject a list of propositions of Cartesian and Jansenist origins. These thirty years were not a homogeneous period. The interdiction of the teaching of Descartes's philosophy pronounced by the king in 1671, followed by a wave of official 1 Cousin 1866: III.297-332 and Bouillier 1868: I.466-85. 2 Cousin 1866: III.140-296 and Bouillier 1868. I. 437-47. badly" Descartes; 10 in his Commentaire ou Remarques sur la méthode de M. Descartes, Nicolas

Poisson also refers to Plempius, to cast doubt on the publication of the Roman condemnation and to note that there are "a thousand examples of condemnations pronounced rather out of revenge and by stubbornness than out of justice and by reason". 11 That these two condemnations, as formidable as they appear today, were known by hearsay can also be inferred from the fact that the Roman procedure was erroneously attributed to the machinations of the Jesuit Honoré Fabri. 12 In any case, the decrees of the Index could not be implemented in France without being approved by the Parlement, which was quite punctilious about the defense of Gallican liberties and which, on May 8, 1663, actually succeeded in imposing on the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris six articles reasserting these liberties. 13 In view of these elements, it is reasonable to conclude that the censorship of Descartes's philosophy in France was not simply a consequence of the previous condemnations of Louvain and Rome. These latter condemnations 10 Sallo 1666: 61. 11 Poisson 1670: 218-19. Poisson (2000 [1675]), referring again to Plempius, mentions only the condemnation of Louvain.

12 Antoine Vinot to Clerselier, January 27, 1664, in Agostini 2009: II.218; Baillet (1691: II.529), who traced this attribution to Arnauld. Fabri actually intervened, but only after the decree of the king. In order to disentangle himself from the accusations caused by his Apologeticus Doctrinae Moralis Societatis Jesu, he informed the Congregation of the Index that some French Cartesians were introducing a new explanation of transubstantiation, which led to enquiries all over Europe (Armogathe 2005; Donato 2009: 605-8).

were not always known about, and if they were, local circumstances were needed to actualize them.

Descartes, Desgabets, and Other Cartesians

The question of whether the Cartesian thesis according to which the essence of body is extension is compatible with the notion of transubstantiation and with the dogma of the Eucharist, played this actualizing role in the Paris condemnation of 1671. 14 The question was twofold. First, according to the decree of the Council of Trent of October 11, 1551, the species of wine and bread subsist when the host is changed into Jesus Christ; but, in Cartesian physics, all sensible qualities are appearances that necessarily result from certain figures and motions of the corporeal substance. How is it possible, then, to explain that we continue to perceive bread and wine once their substance has been changed into the substance of Jesus Christ? Second, according to the dogma of the Eucharist, the whole body of Jesus Christ is really, and not symbolically, present in every host; but, in Cartesian physics, the essence of the body is its local extension. Considering that something cannot be somewhere without its essence being there as well, how is it possible for the body of Jesus Christ to be really in the host while it is not extended in the host?

These two questions can be referred to as the physical question of the persistence of the accidents of the bread after transubstantiation and as the theological question of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Descartes distinguished them explicitly (AT IV.374-5) and he provided answers to them. In response to Arnauld, he suggested in the Fourth Replies that if the sensible qualities of a body are determined by its surface, then the sensible qualities of the wine 14 On the issue of transubstantiation, see Lewis 1950; Armogathe 1977; Nadler 1988; Ariew 2011: 217-40; Del Prete 2001; Armogathe 2005; Schmaltz 2002: 29-76; Ariew 2011: 217-40. and the bread may very well remain while their internal corpuscles are supernaturally changed into the blood and body of Christ. 15 In his letter to Denis Mesland of February 9, 1645, he moreover suggested, with many precautions and with the injunction that this opinion should not be attributed to him, that the real presence of the Christ in the Eucharist can be accounted for by analogy with what happens when we eat and drink: just as corpuscles of food and drink become parts of my body because my soul is naturally united to my body, corpuscles of bread and wine become parts of the body of Jesus Christ because his soul is supernaturally united to these corpuscles (AT IV.165-70). A few years later, Descartes was more discreet: he refused to communicate anything in writing to Arnauld with the argument that the Council of Trent itself did not want to explain how Jesus Christ's body was in the Host (Descartes to Arnauld, June 4 , 1648, AT V.194).

While the Fourth Replies were entirely published in the second Latin edition of the Meditations (1642), Claude Clerselier did not include the letters to Mesland in the three volumes of Descartes's correspondence that he published in 1657, 1659, and 1667. The still extant manuscript copies of these letters show, however, that they were circulated. 16 In 1654, the very year when he received Descartes's correspondence from his stepfather Pierre Chanut, Clerselier discussed the Cartesian explanation of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist with a lawyer in Tours called Denis and with the Augustinian François Viogué, a doctor of theology who was at the time Chaplain at the French Embassy in Stockholm. 17 Around the same time, he communicated the letters to Mesland to the Benedictine Dom Robert Desgabets, possibly because he needed help answering the objections that a physician from the Auvergne province, Jean-Antoine Pastel, formulated against his answers to Viogué. 18 By the end of the 1650s, having published the first two volumes of Descartes's correspondence, he thought that publishing the letters to Mesland would be his last task to complete the edition of Descartes's works (to Bertet, August 27, 1659, in Agostini 2009: II.21).

He thus communicated Descartes's explanations of the persistence of accidents and of the real presence of Jesus Christ to several theologians, among whom were the Jesuit Jean Bertet (who in turn communicated them to the Jesuits Honoré Fabri and François Malaval, who both censured them privately) and the Benedictine Antoine Vinot (who advised Clerselier to leave things as they were, because the Jesuits "would rather quit their cap and gown than reject the philosophy of Aristotle"). 19 On March 1, 1664, Desgabets sent to Clerselier what he called a "jumble about the blessed Sacrament", actually an extract of his theology where he elaborated on Descartes's interpretation of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Desgabets discussed it with the Cardinal de Retz, who felt that "the thing was marvelously well thought and that it contained nothing contrary to the Faith of the Sacrament"; being however "very knowledgeable about the way in which new things are received in Rome", he advised "to hold back publishing this opinion because without doubt it would be immediately censored". 20 Despite this prudent advice, another circle of theologians was soon consulted about the possibility of accounting for the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist while believing that the essence of matter is extension. But this time these were theologians who favored Descartes's philosophy: Nicolas Poisson was brought up to date in December 1667; Antoine Arnaud and Pierre Nicole were informed by the abbot Guillaume Le Roi at the end of the 1660s; an anonymous religious was prompted by Clerselier to write his objections, which he did in L'incompatibilité de la philosophie de M. Descartes avec le mystère de l'Eucharistie. 21 The upshot was not what was hoped for. In two detailed letters to Clerselier from Decem ber 15 and 22, 1667, Poisson spelled out why these new opinions were contrary to the Scriptures, to the Councils, and to all the Fathers of the Church. 22 Arnauld wrote that they were "contrary to everything that has been taught in the Church for six hundred years, and not only in the Catholic Church, but in all Christian communities". 23 Three years later, Nicole reproached Desgabets for fixing his philosophical principles first, and only then trying to adjust the dogmas of the faith to them, while one should rather learn "what Church and tradition teaches about this 21 Lemaire 1901: 118-24. 22 Agostini 2009: II.145-60. 23 Arnauld 1775-83: I 670. Arnauld's letters are dated from October 18 and November 19, 1669. There is some dispute about this date (Arnauld 1775-83: XXXVIII.xxi-xxii; Rodis-Lewis 1950: 155-6; Schmaltz 1999: 42), but there is other evidence that Arnauld and Nicole expressed their disagreement with Desgabets's views before he wrote the Considerations (Arnauld [1775-83: XXXVIII.xxi] mentions two letters from Desgabets of September 1670 that refer to conversations he had with them; Desgabets, in a letter to Bossuet of September 5, 1671 [in Bossuet 1909-25: I.224-5], says that he was obliged to write to present his opinions against their "complaints and threats".) mystery and adhere to it inviolably without considering philosophical principles": whether we understand it or not, the Eucharist is the very body of Jesus Christ, not any body joined to his soul. 24 These were not ad hoc declarations, but long-standing positions. Already in 1664, Arnauld was consulted by Sébastien Joseph du Cambout de Pontchâteau about the writings of an English author. Having noted that his opinion on the Eucharist could not be received, Arnauld feared that "his condemnation could cause a backlash against principles of philosophy that seem very solid, and that can be allied with faith if one holds on to what was said in Descartes's metaphysics in the answer to the Fourth Objections". He ended by chastising this author for "worrying too much about adjusting our belief in mysteries that depend only on the omnipotence of God to the knowledge that we have of nature . . . while these are things of two wholly distinct orders that should not be mixed together". 25 The distinction between two orders was very much 24 Nicole 1718: I.445-6, 451-2. Moreover, the records we have of the conversations that took place at the Hôtel Liancourt show Nicole presenting the opinions of the Cartesians on the Eucharist as "heretical" (Orcibal 1950: 97, n. 61). in agreement with Augustine's words that Arnauld kept quoting: "What we know, we owe to reason; what we believe, to authority." 26 More specifically, this amounts to making a sharp distinction between the question of the persistence of the accidents and the question of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. While the first question was perfectly admissible and received a correct answer in the Fourth Objections, the second was not to be answered at a philosophical level because it is a mystery that cannot be grasped by reason.

Desgabets, who previously refused to sign the Formulary in which every member of the French clergy was supposed to condemn the five heretical propositions attributed to Jansenius in the Papal bull Cum occasione (1653), and who judged that Arnauld's and Nicole's Logique ou l'art de penser was "a masterpiece which gives a marvelous perspective on the most beautiful thoughts of M. Descartes", 27 was particularly affected by the low esteem in which they held Descartes's views and his own. In reaction, he wrote a small polemical leaflet of twelve pages, the Considérations sur l'Estat présent de la controverse touchant le Tres-Saint Sacrement de l'Autel. He presented the Considérations as ad hominem, since his intention was to show that Arnauld's and Nicole's disqualification of the new interpretation of the Eucharist was inconsistent with four theses that they defended in their Logique: "1. The idea of matter . . . is the same as that of extension or quantity . . . 2. There are no substantial corporeal forms . . . 3. There are no corporeal forms other than the local disposition of the insensible parts of matter, 4. . . . 26 Armogathe 1977: 105. 27 Lemaire 1901: 125, and Desgabets to Clerselier, March 1, 1664[START_REF] Agostini | Claude Clerselier, editore e traduttore di René Descartes[END_REF]: II.75. Armogathe (1969: 73-9) examines the criticisms that Desgabets formulated when he read Arnauld and Nicole's Logique.

There are no sensible qualities other than this local disposition of the parts of matter." 28 If Arnauld and Nicole were consistent with themselves, they had no choice but to approve of the new explanation of real presence. Although Desgabets did not write this leaflet with the intention of seeing it in print, it was published anonymously in mid-1671 without his consent. 29 It was immediately presented to the king as "heretical and very pernicious" by his new confessor, the Jesuit Jean Ferrier; the king in turn sent it to the Archbishop in Paris, François de Harlay de Champvallon, who meanwhile got hold of a copy of Descartes's letters to Mesland. 30 Around the same time, in April 1671, one of the theologians of the Sorbonne, Guillaume de Lestoc, explained to Jacques Rohault, who was then identified as one of the chief Cartesians and who had just published his Traité de physique, that he admired him very much in mathematics but that he did not share his opinion or his physics. In June, Lestoc had the occasion to clarify that, two years before, a bachelor in theology defended the thesis that the conversion of the bread in the body of Christ is not inconsistent with Descartes's hypothesis; that Poisson pretended that if a rabbit and a wolf carved in wood were put one in front of the other, the wolf would make the rabbit flee; and, finally, that the new philosophy did not admit the accidents of the scholastic 28 Desgabets 1671: 6. For Desgabets's philosophical commitments, see Schmaltz 2002: 47-52, 77-212. philosophy (Rohault to Guyard, June 10, 1671, in Rohault 1978 [1671]: 170-8). This conversation led Rohault to write the Entretiens de philosophie, which, being finished at the beginning of August 1671, were to be submitted to Harlay de Champvallon (Rohault to Poisson, August 5, 1671, in Rohault 1978 [1671]: 169). Like Desgabets's Considerations, Rohault's Entretiens were not intended for publication. Still, they were published by Millet du Pertuis, with more than one guarantee of orthodoxy: a dedication to Louis II de Bourbon-Condé, a Privilege of the King dated from September 30, 1671, and the testimony that Christina, the former queen of Sweden, wrote in 1667 at the occasion of the reburial of Descartes to testify that Descartes was a perfect Catholic and that he contributed to her conversion (Rohault 1978 [1671]: 107, 155-6, 164). Contrary to Desgabets, however, Rohault did not tackle the question of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, but only the question of how the qualities of bread and wine can still be perceived after transubstantiation. Following the Minim Emmanuel Maignan, he argued first that God, being able to dissolve the natural union that exists between the substances and the sensible qualities that they cause in our soul, can make us perceive the qualities of bread and wine while these have been transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Then he referred to Descartes's suggestion in the Fourth Replies that if the qualities of bread and wine are still perceived once transubstantiation has taken place, it is because the surface stays the same (Rohault 1978 [1671]: 117-22, 128-30). Contrary to Desgabets, but like Arnauld before him, Rohault refused to use the letters to Mesland and stuck to the Fourth Replies.

The 1671 Decree and its Aftermath

The moderate line opened by Arnauld and Rohault was not enough to pacify their opponents. On August 4, 1671, Harlay de Champvallon summoned the rector of the University of Paris, the deans of the Faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine, the procurators of the university's nations, and most of the headmasters of the colleges. Considering that some opinions that had formerly been censored by the Faculty of Theology and prohibited by the Parlement were being disseminated, he ordered in the name of the king the representatives of the university "to teach no other doctrine than the one brought forth by the rules and statutes of the university, and to put nothing else in the theses", and to do so to "prevent the diffusion of an opinion that could bring some confusion in our mysteries". 31 In different ways, all the bodies of the university submitted themselves to this order. 32 On August 7 and September 1, 1671, the Faculties of Medicine and Theology issued conclusions against the new opinions. 33 The Dean of the Faculty of Theology, Claude Morel, known for his violent anti-Jansenism, considered requesting the Parlement of Paris to side against the Cartesians by renewing the Arrêt of 1624. 34 Since there is no such request in the archives, 35 this step may never formally have been undertaken, possibly because it was known that the president of the Parlement, Guillaume de Lamoignon, would never follow it 31 Duhamel 1705: 18. There is here an allusion to the condemnations that the Faculty of Theology and the Parlement of Paris pronounced in 1624 against the anti-Aristotelian theses of Jean Bitaud, Étienne de Claves, and Jean Villon. At the beginning of August 1671, Champvallon also met Michele Angelo Vibo, Internuncio to France from July 1671 to June 1672, to report which measures were taken (Armogathe 2005: 143). 32 Jourdain 1862-6: 234-5. More personal measures were also taken. In September, Harlay de Champvallon asked the Procureur général of the Congregation of Benedictines to summon and question Desgabets, who, a few months later, was forbidden to publish anything on theological matters and dismissed from his priory of Verdun. 38 By the end of December 1671 and at the very beginning of January 1672, Harlay de Champvallon himself met Clerselier and asked him and his son-in-law Rohault to refrain from publishing anything. While he authorized discussions of Descartes's opinions in private, he did not want them to be brought forth in public quarrels and disputes. 39 To be done with the matter, Harlay de Champvallon spread the good word throughout the country.

36 De Saint-Marc (1772: 401) mentions a manuscript according to which it was Lamoignon himself who asked Boileau to compose the Arrêt. accused of spreading Descartes's doctrine and of favoring Jansenism and even Protestantism, Cally himself was finally removed from his chair and sent to Montdidier near Amiens in 1687. 44 The persecution of the Oratorians is the most documented. On August 2, 1675, after several months of conflict in Angers between the rector of the university, Claude Voisin, who was supported by the king, and the Oratorian Faculty of Arts, which found an ephemeral and vain ally in the Parlement of Paris, the Conseil d'État explicitly forbade the teaching of Cartesian philosophy in any way or manner whatsoever and ordered the works, lecture notes, and theses of the Oratorians from Angers to be thoroughly examined. 45 Accordingly, an academic commission was tasked with taking a close look at the notebooks of Eugène Fromentier for the years 1672 and 1673, of Bernard Lamy for the years 1674 and 1675, of Cyprien de Villecroze and other professors for the years 1673, 1674, 1675, and 1676, and, later on, of Vincent Pelaud for 1676.

By the end of 1675, the king forbade Lamy to preach and teach throughout his kingdom and sent him away to Saint-Martin de Miséré, near Grenoble; about two years later, Pelaud was also sent in exile to Brive-La-Gaillarde. 46 On March 4, 1675, Abel-Louis de Sainte-Marthe, the General of the Oratorians, sent to the superiors of all the colleges the order to abide by "the order of the king of January 20, 1675, which expressly forbids the teaching of Descartes's doctrine, which hereafter could cause some disorder in His Kingdom, which he wants to prevent for the good of His service and of the public". 47 Meanwhile, on March 29, 1677, it was ordered that "from now on, all our professors of philosophy would be obliged to choose a Thomist author approved and 44 Cally 1674: 53-7, 180-201;[START_REF] Bayle | Recueil de quelques pièces curieuses concernant la philosophie de M. Descartes[END_REF]Bayle -9 (1687)): 96-7. 45 Babin 1679: 30-2. 46 Babin 1679: 58-62.

received in the universities". 48 At the end of 1677 and the beginning of 1678, the Oratorians Bonnet and Giraud were condemned-the first in Marseilles, the second in Toulon-for defending Baianist propositions in morals, while, because of his Cartesianism, Carryer, an Oratorian of Le Mans, was excluded, then reintegrated and exiled to Mâcon. 49 Much more significantly, the Oratorians declared on September 16, 1678, on the occasion of their sixteenth General Assembly, that "they do not embrace any party and do not have any opinion as a body or as a community, but they have always been and want always to stay free to be able to defend any good and sound doctrine, and they prohibit the teaching only of those doctrines which are condemned by the Church, or which could be suspected of Jansenius's and Baïus's views in theology and of Descartes's opinions in philosophy". 50 In physics one should not depart from Aristotle's physics or principles of physics that are usually received in colleges in order to grow attached to the new doctrine of Monsieur Descartes, that the king forbade to teach for good reasons.

One should teach: 1. That actual and external extension is not the essence of matter. 2. That in every natural body there is a substantial form really distinct from matter. 3. That there are real and absolute accidents that inhere in their 48 Lallemand 1888: 122. 49 Babin 1679: 72-6; Lallemand 1888: 129. 50 Babin 1679: 82-3; Duhamel 1705: 30-1. Such a freedom had been granted to them in their Fifth Assembly (1644).

subjects, that these accidents are really distinct from any substance, and that they can supernaturally exist without any subject. 4. That the soul is really present and united to the whole body and to all the parts of the body. 5. That thinking and knowing are not the essence of the rational soul. 6. That there is no contradiction that God can produce several worlds at the same time. 7. That the void is not impossible. 51 The Genofevins followed suit immediately. The same year, they condemned Jansenism in theology and Cartesianism in philosophy. 52 On August 14, 1685, the Faculty of Arts, which, contrary to the superior faculties, had not taken sides in 1671, prohibited the teaching of "the new philosophy of the moderns, that is of Gassendi and Descartes". 53 While Gassendi was often associated with the new philosophers in the polemical works in the 1680s, this is, to my knowledge, the only mention of Gassendi in an official condemnation in this period. In 1691, Harlay de Champvallon, and soon after the king himself, were notified that eleven dangerous propositions were being taught in Parisian colleges. 54 Among these propositions, the first five were of Cartesian origin and the last six were taken from Jansenius. This was not without some tension, the former affirming the power of reason and the latter emphasizing the infirmity of sinful human nature. 55 On October 28, 1691, at the demand of the king, all the professors of the Faculty of Arts were summoned by their rector Renault Gentilhomme. After these eleven 51 Babin 1679: 85; Bayle 1684: 11-12; Duhamel 1705: 31. 52 Babin 1679: 93-4. 53 Jourdain 1862-6: 269. 54 Duhamel 1705: 33-4.

passions are not vital acts but only motions of the spirits, that the soul can acquire an absolute empire on passions, and that there is no demonstration, no mathematics, and no philosophy for atheists. 64 Though they are not condemnations strictly speaking, two theses defended in June 1665 at the Collège de Clermont are worth mentioning here. 65 Indeed, they reveal which principles in Descartes's natural philosophy were difficult to accept for a Jesuit teacher: some arise from the identification of matter and extension, others from Descartes's definition of motion, and others still from the reduction of sensible qualities or of life to matter and motion.

But it is only at the very end of the second thesis, and only in passing, that it is noted that a follower of Descartes cannot explain the conversion of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. 66 What was revolting for the Jesuit professor who wrote these theses was not the incompatibility of Descartes's philosophy with the dogma of the Eucharist, but rather the paradoxes that it implies, a paradox being, true to etymology, what goes against received opinions. 67 The most remarkable example of the variety of condemned theses is to be found in the Angers affair. The problems associated with the Eucharist are indeed important in that case, but, among the condemned propositions, there were many that had no relation or a very tenuous relation to that: one should once in a life put everything in doubt; sensation has to be denied to beasts; the mind cannot be better defined than as a thinking substance; there is no force to act in the bodies themselves; pain is in the soul; we perceive things through their ideas; one should not trust the senses; we have innate ideas and images (species) of God and the angels; we do not 64 Armogathe and Carraud 2001: 110-20. 65 See Ragayne de la Picottière 1665a, 1665b.

66 Ragayne de la Picottière 1665b: 16. need a Master to learn the sciences but only a Monitor who excites in us the ideas of all things that are innate in us; those who are outside a prince's territory are not bound by his law; virtue is nothing other than charity and love. 68 One cannot read such condemnations without having the feeling that all that an author-here Malebranche rather than Descartes-wrote was suspected and condemned in principle.

Last but not least, it is significant that Descartes's philosophy was also condemned in Protestant universities. In a Protestant university, the question of the compatibility of Cartesian philosophy with the dogma of the Eucharist was irrelevant. And yet Cartesian philosophy was condemned in Utrecht. 69 This shows that the problem that Cartesian philosophy posed to institutions was not limited to this question. Rather, an equally important reason for its condemnation was that it challenged authorities by introducing new doctrines. This dimension appears well in Babin's Journal, in which we see a professor deploring the dramatic degradation of education when the Angers affair began:

The old and true doctrine was absolutely banished from the schools and the novelty and falsehood were with impunity established in their place. Young people were no longer taught anything else than to get rid of their childhood prejudices and to doubt all things, even if they are in the world . . . They were taught . . . that children think in the bellies of their mothers, that when they grow up they have less need of teachers . . . than of monitors . . . It was no longer fashionable to believe that fire is hot, that marble is hard, that animate bodies are 68 Babin 1679: 35-45, 67-71. sensible to pain: these truths were too ancient for those who loved novelty. (Babin 1679: 2) If one wants to understand why the 1671 decree was locally implemented, one must take such testimonies into consideration. It was not only that there were more and more Cartesian teachers who were abandoning Aristotle's doctrine. It was also that Cartesians were teaching outside traditional institutions, calling into question the professional status of teachers. This was the case in Paris at Rohault's "Wednesdays", while in Toulouse, meetings of the Lanternistes took place under the leadership of M. de Nolet, in which François Bayle and Pierre-Sylvain Régis participated. 70 Cartesians and anti-Cartesians gave the same account of the audiences of these conferences, but had opposite judgments about their value. Clerselier praised Rohault for giving his lectures before "people of all stations and conditions, prelates, abbots, courtesans, doctors, physicians, philosophers, surveyors, regents, schoolboys, provincials, foreigners, artisans, in a word, people of all ages, sex and profession", while Jean Vincent, a doctrinaire from Toulouse, was horrified that the Cartesians "divulge this doctrine that in the schools is extended only to a few men, to all kind of people, young people and adults, men and women". 71 It was not only what Cartesians taught, but also how they taught it and to whom they taught it, that was threatening for the professors of the schools. Verdun when Desgabets was professor of philosophy there, he warned that Cartesians took philosophy too seriously:

The Political Question: Jesuits and their Enemies

The most solid Philosophy is only a human science . . . However much we praise the philosophy of Monsieur Descartes, we must nevertheless recognize that what is most real about it is that it makes us understand that all the people who spent their lives philosophizing about nature, talked to the world and to themselves only about dreams and chimeras . . . Descartes is undoubtedly more reasonable than the others: but this quality should not induce us to make an open profession of it . . . In fact Cartesians are not better than the others, and are often more proud and more self-important. (Nicole 1718: I.430, 444) Similarly, Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Saci explained that "with regards to Aristotle, M. Descartes was like a thief who came to kill another thief and to take away his remains . . . Aristotle having usurped such an authority in the Church, was it not just that he was overthrown and dispossessed by another tyrant, to whom the same will perhaps happen?" De Saci reproached Descartes for having destroyed the admiration of God derived from the contemplation of nature by pretending to give reason for everything. 76 In a word, except for Arnauld, the high-profile Jansenists were ready to concede that Descartes was better than Aristotle, but still, he was nothing compared to the word of God. Does this mean that the condemnations of Cartesianism had nothing to do with the all-out war that the Jesuits declared on Jansenists? Certainly not. But we should not focus so much on doctrinal issues rather than on the power games that the Jesuits were playing. Many testimonies suggest that the determination of the Jesuits to destroy everything that was contrary to them, or in any case everything that was independent from them, played an important role in the condemnations of Cartesianism. Not surprisingly, this was insinuated by Arnauld in the memorandum he wrote against the intervention of the Parlement in 1671 (Arnauld 1866 [1671]: 303-4). The condemnation of the Oratorians in 1678 was particularly impressive. Madame de Sévigné commented to Bussy Rabutin that "the Jesuits are more powerful and more enraged than ever. They prohibit the fathers of the Oratory from teaching Descartes's philosophy, and consequently that the blood circulates. They again rekindled the five propositions; it was compulsory to promise and disavow what they wanted; the threat of letters of cachet is a powerful argument for making a doctrine persuasive" (October 12, 1678, in Sévigné 1853: III.433). The Oratorian Pasquier Quesnel suggested that the Jesuits focused on Angers because the nearby Jesuit Collège de La Flèche was losing its pupils. 77 Similarly, Bayle claimed that the Jesuits were furious "either because they feared that the colleges of philosophy where the Oratorians were regents could attract all the youth, who find the new philosophy much more tasty than the old, or because they feared that Descartes's principles would cause a breach in religion". In case his opinion was not clear, Bayle immediately added: "There were apparently both of these elements in their fear, but much more the first than the second" (Bayle 1684: Avis au lecteur, n.p.).

According to such testimonies, when the Oratorians had to submit in 1678, it was neither Descartes's philosophy nor Jansenius's theology that was at stake, but the fact that the Jesuits saw Oratorians as rivals in the education market. Certainly, we should not take these testimonies at face value. Arnauld and Quesnel were avowed Jansenists, while Madame de Sévigné and Bayle were sympathizers of Port-Royal; after several years of Jansenist persecutions, they were ready to see signs of Jesuit malice everywhere. But these testimonies certainly capture something of the rivalry between religious orders. Still, they are not sufficient to explain the decision of the king, who, even if he had Jesuit confessors, had reasons of his own when he issued the 1671 decree. To understand these reasons, one should come back to the manner in which, on Christmas Eve, Harlay de Champvallon exposed the motivations of the king: His Majesty, having appeased the last troubles which arose between theologians on difficult and thorny questions, and having thereby brought peace and tranquility to his state, desired to preserve it and to prevent such a debate from taking place again among the learned, which . . . could later cause divisions and disorders in his kingdom . . . As the philosophy of M. Descartes seemed to alarm the learned and to throw the seeds of a division which could in the end catch fire, if it were not provided early . . . he [Harlay de Champvallon] . . . had orders to tell me [Clerselier] that we [Clerselier and Rohault] had from now on to restrain ourselves from doing anything that could break out and incite against us those of the opposite party . . .

The following clarification was added a week later:

Since he [the king] does not condemn in substance this way of philosophizing, which he sees to be approved by so many clever people, the only thing he apprehends . . . is the altercation between the learned, whom he has ordered to be prevented with all his power. So that, provided that no quarrel or dispute arises in the public, he accepts that a private individual may try to discover the truth by this way, if it is possible, and that the Cartesians make every effort in that direction.

He does not intervene so that peace might prejudice truth, but he does not want it to happen that, under the pretext of defending or seeking the truth, which one is not certain of finding, one disturbs the peace . . . 78 Two aspects of Clerselier's account are worth commenting on. First, the king did not fear Descartes's philosophy as such, and not even Cartesian philosophy in so far as it was seen to be incompatible with the dogma of the Eucharist, but rather its public defense. Working privately on transubstantiation in the framework of Descartes's philosophy was allowed, but it was not permitted to make such work public. This distinction was to re-emerge just after the sixteenth General Assembly of the Oratorians. In September 1678, their general Sainte-Marthe sent François-Ignace de Baglion de Saillant, who besides his function as General Prosecutor was close to Harlay de Champvallon, to report to the king what happened. Louis XIV read the declaration that the Oratorians issued and commented that he prohibited Descartes's philosophy "for very good reasons. Not that I want to prevent it to be taught as it is taught to Monseigneur, but I do not want us to make it the foundation of doctrine" (Lallemand 1888: 408). Indeed, the teachers of the Dauphin that were appointed under the guidance of Bossuet included Géraud de Cordemoy and Jean-Baptiste Denis, who were acknowledged Cartesians.79 What exactly Louis XIV was prohibiting depends on the meaning of the expression 'foundation of doctrine': if 78 Clerselier to Desgabets, January 6, 1672, in Agostini 2009: II.104, 107. Similarly, at the beginning of August 1671, Champvallon told the Internuncio Vibo that he took steps "because he saw that a school of philosophers, calling themselves Cartesians, had begun to form, and that they were making public 'doctrine' refers specifically to the Catholic doctrine, he is asserting that Descartes's philosophy is not appropriate for grounding Catholic doctrine, probably with the issue of transubstantiation in mind; however, if 'doctrine' means 'established knowledge' in general, he is saying that he does not want this philosophy to be taught in colleges and universities. In either case, the problem with Cartesian philosophy is its eventual publicity.

Second, if Descartes's philosophy was to be kept private, it was because its public defense could create disorders and divisions in France. More precisely, it was feared that it could contribute to disturbing the recent Clementine Peace that put an end to the persecution of Jansenism for ten years (1668-79). The Peace stipulated in practice that the members of the French clergy, when signing the Formulary that listed the five propositions condemned as heretical in 1653, could add the precision that they were de facto not in Jansenius's Augustinus; and it seems that the Jesuits received from their General the order to keep an "inviolable silence" on Jansenius's followers. A symbolic event in this regard was the appointment, in September 1671, of Simon Arnauld de Pomponne as Minister of State; the king went as far as to give an audience to his father Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, marking in the eyes of all the goodwill of the king toward the Jansenists. 80 If we consider the Jesuits' desire to bring down all that could diminish their power, and the desire of Louis XIV to preserve peace, we begin to have a fairly clear idea of the situation.

Publicly defending theories on transubstantiation inspired by Descartes amounted to provoking the Jesuits and thus calling into question the fragile peace that had just been established. However, we still need an explanation as to why the Cartesians seemed powerful enough to threaten the peace of the Kingdom. the thesis of animal-machines was to be published in Saumur in 1671. 1668 is the year of publication of a volume containing the Explication des Machines and of a French translation of the Compendium Musicae with ample elucidations written by Poisson, but also of Cordemoy's Discours physique de la parole and of a letter in which he defends the idea that Descartes's explanations of the action of animals and of the formation of the world were not dangerous for religion. In 1670, Poisson issued his Commentaire ou Remarques sur la méthode de René Descartes, which, he thought, would be the first of a long series-except that he was then forbidden to publish anything of the sort by his superiors. 83 Finally, as we have mentioned, Rohault published both his Traité de physique and his Entretiens sur la philosophie in 1671.

Just like the Jansenists, the Cartesians thus appeared as a closely-knit group of people who were able to deploy an enormous intellectual activity, particularly in terms of publications, and to set the tone in cultivated circles. An illuminating comparison with Gassendists has often been proposed in this regard: Gassendi's atomism was as difficult to reconcile with the dogma of the Eucharist as Descartes's doctrine of extension was, and, more generally, his natural philosophy was as damaging to Aristotle's natural philosophy. Still, Gassendi was not put on the Index, and his works, even if they were criticized, were not officially condemned in France in this period.

This is yet another proof that the issue of transubstantiation is not sufficient to explain the condemnations of Descartes's natural philosophy; as has been noted, "the success of the Gassendists in avoiding harassment is a sign of their failure to package and promote Gassendi's system". 84 For a better understanding of what packaging and promoting Cartesianism meant in 83 Lallemand 1888: 120-1. 84 Schmaltz 1999: 48. Before Schmaltz, see Lennon 1993: ch. 1;[START_REF] Brockliss | Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy at the French Collèges de Plein Exercice, 1640-1730[END_REF]and Ariew 2011: 267-94. terms of the social organization of intellectual life, we can consider how some anti-Cartesians-Samuel Sorbière and Jean Chapelain, the two main Gassendists in France, but also Pierre Petit and Edmé Mariotte, who embodied what I have elsewhere called a "radical experimentalism" 85 -regarded Cartesian natural philosophy.

At first, Descartes was for Sorbière and Chapelain an author to be promoted, both for the renewal of philosophy to which he contributed and for the beauty of his style. But, by the end of the 1650s and the early 1660s, they reproached Descartes for behaving like the head of a party and Cartesians for bowing submissively to his views. Although "sect" may refer neutrally to a philosophical school, there is no doubt that it was used in a negative fashion in this case. Thus, Chapelain wrote that Descartes was "happy to have disciples [sectateurs] who swore on his dogma and believed things that he did not himself believe". 86 Similarly, Sorbière noted that Descartes was "very affirmative, as every Doctor has to be if he pretends to become a head of a sect", and that he required from his disciples "docility and patience to mull over [his] doctrine in their mind until it was strongly imprinted on their memory". 87 In the parallels he establishes between Gassendi and Descartes, Sorbière notes that, while the former did not hesitate to present his thoughts in a familiar fashion to those with whom he conversed, the latter refused all dialogue and referred those he spoke with to his writings (Sorbière to Petit, November 10 and 85 Roux 2014. 86 Chapelain to Carrel de Sainte-Garde, May 27, 1662, in Chapelain 1880-3: II.235-6. See also Chapelain to Heinsius, February 6, 1659, to Carrel de Sainte-Garde, December 15, 1663, and to Bernier, February 16 and April 26, 1669, in Chapelain 1880-3: II.17, 341, 622, 640. 87 Sorbière to Saumaise, March 10, 1650, and to Petit, November 10, 1657, in Sorbière 1660: 535 and 679-80. February 10, 1657, in Sorbière 1660: 679, 691). Or, still, that Gassendi tended to suspend his judgment and to note that we can reach only conjectural knowledge, while Descartes pretended to "become the head of a party, or the founder of a sect, and to impose on the half-learned by the bold efforts of a fertile and strong imagination" (Sorbière 1665: 18). If Descartes succeeded in seducing so many disciples, it was because his works were brilliant-though not very solid.

Chapelain wrote to Carrel de Sainte-Garde, who published his Lettres contre la philosophie de Descartes in 1663, that in Descartes's system, he found "great brilliance, great novelty, and a happy use of the ancient doctrine of Democritus for the multiplication of worlds and the modern experiments with magnets for the constitution of his machine, as well as beautiful applications of the nature of motion that could only arise from a greatly inventive mind clever at using everything to his ends". 88 As for Sorbière, he compared Descartes to an acrobat jumping and pirouetting on a wooden horse to impress passing onlookers. 89 According to other anti-Cartesians, the problem of the Cartesian party was not only that Descartes imposed his views on his disciples. Another important aspect of Cartesian dogmatism, underlined that subtle matter was only invented as an ad hoc explanation of Torricelli's 88 Chapelain to Carrel de Sainte-Garde, February 16, 1662, in Chapelain 1880-3: II.203-4. Descartes is said to have "great brilliance (brillant)" and to be "more glistening (luisant) than solid" (Chapelain to Carrel de Sainte-Garde, February 16, May 16 and 27, 1662, in Chapelain 1880-3: II.203, 236).

The point is not that Sorbière and Chapelain, or Petit and Mariotte, were better physicists or philosophers than Descartes. But these testimonies can help us to understand the characteristics of the Cartesian party in the 1660s and 1670s that played a role in the condemnations of Cartesian philosophy. The question of the proper method of physics had nothing to do with the theology of transubstantiation. Through the testimonies mentioned above, we see that the Cartesian party appeared as a sect to which the dogmas of a master were preferred to the exercise of judgment and to the lessons of experiments. This meant the establishment of a new authority, and this was certainly threatening to the old authorities.

25

  Pontchâteau to Neercassel, July 12/22, 1664, in Neveu 1968: 368. Contrary to Arnauld's editors (Arnauld 1775-83: XXXVIII.xx-xxi) and to Neveu, I think that Arnauld was here commenting on Thomas Bonart's Concordia scientiae cum fide, first published in 1659, put on the Index in 1662, finally re-edited in 1664. Thomas Bonart was a pseudonym for Thomas Barton, alias Thomas Anderton, an English Jesuit who, being condemned and ordered to go to Rome, fled through Europe, left the Jesuits, and finally sought refuge in Ireland where he apostatized. Not only does Concordia scientia cum fide agree perfectly with what Arnauld says, but he was well known to Jansenists, as Du Vaucel (1681: 116) makes clear.

29

  Desgabets to Clerselier, July 20, September 24, October 19, November 19, and December 10, 1671, in Agostini 2009: II.90-1, 86, 95, 96, 85; Desgabets to Bossuet, September 5, 1671, in Bossuet 1909-25: I.226. 30 Lemaire 1901: 123-7. Desgabets to Clerselier, September 24, 1671 and Clerselier to Desgabets, January 6, 1672, in Agostini 2009: II.86 and 105. Ferrier replaced his protector the Jesuit François Annat in 1670; in 1664, he had published two anti-Jansenist libels, L'idée véritable du jansénisme and the Relation fidelle et véritable de ce qui s'est fait depuis un an dans l'affaire des jansénistes.

33

  Babin 1679: 5-6; Duhamel 1705: 15-17.34 Arnauld 1866 [1671]: 182; De Saint-Marc 1772: 403-4.

up. 36

 36 Still, it gave Arnauld the occasion to write a serious memorandum where he exposed at length the danger and vanity of condemning any philosophy in the name of religion, while Nicolas Bernier and François Boileau circulated a satire of what a request to the Court of Parnassus against the introduction of new ideas in physics could have been, followed by the Arrêt in which this divine court prohibited blood from circulating in the human body, sent to the heart the injunction to be the principle of the nerves, and re-established into their rights entities, identities, petreities, and polycarpeities.37

37

  Arnauld 1866 [1671], commented on in Nadler 1988: 240-1 and in Ariew 2011: 270-5. Bernier and Boileau 1671.

38

  Agostini 2009: I.86-7; Lemaire 1901: 51. Armogathe (1977: 133-4) gives a partial transcript of Desgabets's interrogation, which was transmitted to Champvallon by Clerselier(Agostini 2009: II.106).

  Moreover, they issued a decree explaining what this declaration implied for the teaching of theology, of logic, of morals, and of physics. It was only in physics that they spelled out in some detail what should be taught and what not:

70

  About the Cartesian companies in Paris, see Roux 2014. For Toulouse, see Fermat toOldenburg, September 21, 1668, June 5 and 25, 1669, in Oldenburg 1965-73: V.53 and VI.95, 445.

  their theses" (Vibo to the Secretary of the State, August 14, 1671, quoted in Armogathe 2005: 143; my emphasis).

  which was not developed by Sorbière and Chapelain but by those who wished to establish a new physics based only on experimentation, was that Descartes and the Cartesians neglected experiments. They preferred to say what they thought, and more precisely what Descartes had thought, than to say what they saw. So Pierre Petit, in his Discours sur les comètes (1665),

 This development was omitted in the first edition of the Meditations to try to obtain the approbation of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris(AT III. 416, 772, and 785).

This list is given in Armogathe 1977: 70-1. The mss 366 of the Bibliothèque municipale de Chartres is partially published in Agostini 2009, II.

Desgabets to Bossuet, September 5, 1671 (in Bossuet 1909-25: I.227-8), rejoiced that the general principles of Descartes's philosophy were to be taught to the Dauphin.

According to a report from the Abbot of Vibo dated December 25, 1671, the order of the king was transmitted to all provincial parlements and all bishops were told that they should not let Descartes's views be taught in their dioceses. 40 In a country as centralized as Louis XIV's France, a decree issued by the king and a condemnation delivered by the University of Paris were the occasion for local institutions to take revenge on the multiplying Cartesians. On October 10, 1673, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Reims forbade the defense of Pierre Le Pescheur's bachelor thesis entitled Do the eyes signify the whole man?, which described the structure of the eye and explained how passions and diseases modify it, because "it swarmed with the doctrines of the moderns, especially with Descartes's doctrine". 41 On June 11, 1675, the General Assembly of the Benedictines of St. Maur prohibited the teaching of "the new opinions of this time touching the essence and nature of bodies, that they identified with actual extension; the opinion of the accidents, that are not really distinguished from matter; and the others that might be connected to the dogmas of Faith". 42 On May 3, 1677, the Faculty of Theology of the University of Caen prohibited the teaching, orally or in writing, of the principles of Descartes's philosophy "because they seem to us contradictory with the sounder doctrine of the theologians", on pain of being refused access to any academic grade. 43 Those who studied in Caen under Pierre Cally, who in his Institutio philosophia (1674) defended the claim that the body is a thing extended in all three directions and that there are no absolute accidents, were indeed denied ordination; after being 40 Armogathe 2005: 145. 41 Duhamel 1705: 19-21. 42 Duhamel 1705: 28-9.

propositions were solemnly read, they had to sign a document certifying that they had never taught these propositions and would never teach them. In the case of the Cartesian propositions, the main issue was no longer natural philosophy, but the metaphysical doubt of the Meditations.

There had already been some concerns about the Cartesian practice of doubting, 56 but it was the first time that it figured so prominently in a condemnation. This marked the end of the period when Descartes's natural philosophy was at the center of censorship in France.

The Networks of Causes

The collections of condemnations on which the historians rely were compiled by people who, themselves involved in condemning the Cartesians of their time, gathered as many authorities as they could to establish that the Cartesian doctrine had been unanimously condemned. 57 In such collections, the condemnations are separated from their original context, so that they seem to engender one another: latter condemnations appear as applications of the 1671 royal decree, which itself appears as the consequence of the condemnations of Louvain and Rome almost ten the French condemnations cannot be understood in isolation from a variety of causes and circumstances that intervened at different levels.

The Doctrinal Question: The Eucharist-and Other Questions

As we have seen, the question of the compatibility of Descartes's views of extension with propositions central to the Catholic faith is what sparked things off. Moreover, this question took up many pages in many books published in the period under consideration. 58 Still, there are several reasons for thinking that the reference to the doctrine of the Eucharist is not sufficient to explain the condemnations that took place in France.

First, orthodoxy, far from being fixed once and for all, is always subject to negotiation. A first possible compromise was rooted in the difference between the question of the permanence of the sensible qualities and the question of the presence of Jesus Christ in the Host. Considering that only the latter involved Catholic dogma as such, Arnauld, Rohault, and later Bossuet suggested that only the answer to the first question should be considered as "Cartesian". 59 59 See above in the case of Arnauld and Rohault; Bossuet 1900 [1674-5]; Bossuet to François de Nesmond, February 9, 1701 (censoring Cally), and to Jean Antoine Pastel, March 24, 1701 (censoring Descartes himself), in Bossuet 1909-25: XIII.34-6, 45-46. sufficiently that it is only because of some secret desire for quarrel that now one wants to find in it things contrary to Faith, since there was none to be found for so long". 60 In this sense, a first compromise could have amounted to renouncing the letters to Mesland; as we have seen, this compromise was rejected, with Descartes's philosophy being taken en bloc. A second compromise could have consisted in a separation of the respective domains of faith and reason.

In this compromise, reason should not be used to judge the mysteries of the faith, but, reciprocally, faith should not be used to decide matters of reason, so that one can, as a mere physicist, talk about things as they are in their natural state. 61 This compromise was refused as well, the adversaries of Descartes claiming that faith is the rule of truth. 62 Rather than taking orthodoxy as established once and for all, we need an explanation as to why these two compromises were not accepted.

Second, the question of the Eucharist, as important as it was, was not the only charge against Cartesian philosophy. Taking the Louvain condemnation as paradigmatic, one scholar has shown that the five propositions that were at stake were criticized and condemned again and again in France until the end of the century; but three of these propositions (that substance is what does not need anything else to exist, that the world extends indefinitely, and that there is only one world) have nothing to do with the Eucharist. 63 Similarly, the censures written by Tartaglia and Spinula that led to Descartes's works being put on the Index involved a variety of considerations, among which are the propositions that the Earth moves circularly and is one of the planets, that 60 Arnauld 1866 [1671]: 308-9. See also Rohault 1978 [1671]

The Social Question: Cartesians as a Party

A passage in the Memoirs of Louis XIV provides an interesting clue: in the year 1661, the king notes that "I applied myself to destroying Jansenism, and to dispelling the communities where this spirit of novelty was fomented, well-intentioned perhaps, but which ignored or wished to ignore the dangerous consequences it could have." Commenting on this passage, François Bluche remarks that not only were some Jansenists linked to the Fronde of the princes and to that of the parliamentarians, but that Jansenism appeared as "a sect, a Chapel, a semi-secret semivisible society"-in short, as a particular body in the state, thereby threatening absolute monarchy. 81 The hypothesis about this remark that I would like to defend is that, regardless of the doctrinal affinities that would have brought together the Jansenists and the Cartesianswhich, as we have seen, were finally quite weak-they both appeared as a party, a sect, and a particular body susceptible to creating divisions in the kingdom.

It should first be remarked that only those who have gained reputation enough to threaten the established order are condemned. In 1675, Jean-Baptiste La Grange asked with surprise why no one cared to condemn Descartes some twenty years earlier (La Grange 1675: 40). Vincent answered this question by noting that, at the time of publication of his own Cursus philosophicus (1658), Descartes "laid almost anonymous; if he had some reputation among the peoples of the North, he had none in France, or almost none" (Vincent 1677, Dédicace to Gérauld du Bourg: n.p.). But, from the late 1650s on, an intense Cartesian propaganda campaign emerged in France, which involved ostentatious manifestations such as the reburial of Descartes at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in 1667, but also some family and patronage networks. 82 Just like Jansenism, Cartesianism was a family matter, actually organized around Clerselier. Chanut, who inherited the papers that Descartes left when he died in Stockholm, was (since 1626) the brother-in-law of Clerselier, who in turn became the father-in-law of Rohault in 1664. Patronage intervened as well, among others with Pierre d'Alibert, Henri-Louis Habert de Montmor, Jean-François Paul de Gondi known as cardinal de Retz, and Prince Louis II de Bourbon-Condé.

Jansenists were famous for their publications, especially in the domain of pedagogy; similarly, Descartes's followers not only published his unedited works, but they established an editorial continuity between their master's work and their own by commenting on these works.

Even if there was sometimes disagreement between them, they expressly identified themselves as supporters of Descartes. They did not seek to found a new system of philosophy, but rather to make Descartes's ideas accessible and to apply them to new domains. The year 1664 saw the publication of Le Monde along with two pieces presented at the Académie Montmort: the Ambroise Victor the first five volumes of his Philosophia cartesiana; a sixth volume defending quicksilver experiment; that "sense and experiments" refute the "nice words and arguments drawn from the obscure, arrogant and presumptuous principles" through which Descartes pretended to explain how fire comes from flintstone; and that Nicolas Steno proved that most of Cartesian anatomy is a fantasy. 90 Moreover, these false explanations derived from the sophism that a hypothesis is proven if it accounts for an effect (Petit 1665: 230-1, 251-2). Similarly, three of the reasons given in Mariotte's Essai de logique (1678) for the lack of progress made by physics came from the neglect of experimentation that characterized Cartesians. First, notes Mariotte, philosophers stubbornly search for the causes of the principles of experience; examples of this fault are the Cartesian explanations of elasticity and magnetism. 91 A second reason for the lack of progress is that Cartesians want to explain everything with a few hypotheses that are insufficiently established from an experimental perspective. From the Essais de physique, we see that a typical example of this fault is the Cartesian subtle matter (Mariotte 1992: 98 and Mariotte 1717: I.170-1; II.341). The case is even clearer for the third cause of the lack of progress in physics, which amounts to explaining a natural effect by a single cause, while experience shows that several causes actually contribute to producing it. Mariotte follows this diagnosis by propositions of his Traité de la percussion that establish that one cannot explain the communication of motion between bodies solely by the conservation of motion, the fundamental Cartesian law of nature. 92 90 Petit 1665: 222-3, 252-4. Interestingly, some Jesuits also developed this criticism of Cartesianism (Roux 2013: 83-7). 91 Mariotte 1992: 97, 103.