"Gender, rumor, and religious polemic in Louis XIV's France : Paule Payen de Lionne's intervention in the Chinese rites controversy" / Heath, Sean

This article belongs to French Historical Studies 47 (2024)

Available online at https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-11284403

Abstract: 

The Chinese Rites Controversy was one of the most contentious issues in the French church at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nourished with rumors from China, it was predominantly a debate among men, with the exception of an extraordinary intervention by a woman, Paule Payen de Lionne, in 1701. In a public letter to the Jesuits, she used a dispute concerning her missionary son Artus de Lionne to launch a fierce critique of what she saw as the Society of Jesus's toleration of Chinese idolatry. Conscious that many would see it as inappropriate for a woman to discuss a matter of ecclesiastical controversy, Payen nonetheless filled the letter with references to her sex. This article proposes that she strategically invoked tropes of feminine weakness and intellectual inadequacy as rhetorical tools to contrast the simple purity (and thus truth) of her perspective with the verbose artifice of the Jesuits. At the same time, the register of aggression in her letter forces historians to reconsider the view that women engaging in querelles were obliged to adopt a less confrontational tone than men. This episode shows how women could use femininity to carve out a unique voice in an otherwise male‐dominated public sphere.

Louis XIV’s attitude to the Chinese Rites Controversy / Sean Heath

Published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2026), First view 1–22

Abstract:
Although Louis XIV’s sponsorship of a French Jesuit presence in China is well known, his attitude to the major dispute over the Chinese rites which engulfed the mission has been barely explored. This article shows that, as the Chinese Rites Controversy reached its peak in Paris and Rome in the years around 1700, Louis XIV’s response was surprisingly inconsistent, reflecting the fact that the two groups of missionaries whose work in east Asia he had supported – the Missions étrangères de Paris (MEP) and the French Jesuits – were pitted against one another. Furthermore, the king’s somewhat contradictory interventions were due to the opposing directions in which his chief advisers on ecclesiastical matters pushed him: his confessor La Chaise towards support of the Jesuits, and his wife Madame de Maintenon and Archbishop Noailles of Paris towards helping the MEP. In the end, Louis decided not to wield his influence in Rome in favour of one side or the other, but to leave the decision to the Holy See while prohibiting publication on the ‘Chinese affair’ in France. In doing so, the article offers an exploration of ecclesiastical policy in the making under the Sun King.

"The Jesuit and the 'false princess of China': a contested exile narrative in 1690s Paris" / Heath, Sean

Published in Renaissance Studies, v.39, issue 1 (2024)

Also available through Boston College Libraries

Abstract:
This article examines the fabrication and contestation of a false exile narrative in early modern France. At its centre was Ina, a young woman found on the streets of Paris in the winter of 1692. Claiming to be a Chinese princess who had ended up penniless in France after a long sequence of misfortunes, she gained the attention of members of the Parisian elite but was subsequently shown to be a fraud by Louis Le Comte, a Jesuit and former missionary in China. Ina had refashioned herself as an exile, pretending to be abandoned in a foreign land, far from her home, family and culture. This was not normally a desirable situation, but in her case, ‘faking’ the status of a lonely royal exile was an innovative strategy through which certain tendencies of the late seventeenth-century French elites – including religious impulses to charity and fascination with China – were leveraged to improve (temporarily) her standing in French society. However, the concurrence of her imposture with the intensification of the Chinese Rites controversy turned the debate over her authenticity into a proxy for a broader struggle over Jesuit expertise.