Port-Royal et le jansénisme

About this book

Generally presented as a significant episode in the history of Jansenism and often confused with it, the history of Port Royal fascinates and questions today. The seventeenth century, writing with Jean Racine a militant history of the monastery, built a great myth of which we are still dependent. Installed between Paris and the Chevreuse Valley, Port-Royal was one of the major places of French Catholic reform as a society of thinkers and pedagogues. At the heart of this unique adventure, a community of nuns, caught between the mystique of the century of saints and the emergence of philosophy at the dawn of the Enlightenment. From the mythical story of the "Journée du guichet" to the black legend of the destruction of the Abbeye de Port-Royal des Champs a century later, we must cross the fence to understand the daily life and heroic community of women who resisted until the end to political power.--Translation of page 4 of cover by Belin.