1991). The intellectual and organizational leaders of the new philosophy,
Descartes and Mersenne, came from among the students of the first cohort at
the Jesuit center. The list of former pupils of Jesuit schools is impressive,
including Molière, Bossuet, Huet, Simon, and Bayle, down to Voltaire, Diderot,
and Condorcet. Obviously the pupils are united more by their creative energy
than by adherence to a theological line. The Jesuits are nothing if not activists,
intellectual and political; they play realpolitik with their eyes open, perhaps
the main reason why they have a long history of expulsion from so many states.
Descartes, who spent his life moving between the battle lines of the religious
wars and carefully choosing opportunities to publish new ideas, represents an
extension of the Jesuit strategy into the heart of the intellectual turf.
The Oratorians, founded in 1611 by Cardinal Bérulle, were opponents and
rivals of the Jesuits (Heer, [1953] 1968: 189). They were ordinary secular
priests, a group whose status had always suffered in contrast to the monks,
the friars, and now these new missionary and educational orders. Bérulle gave
them the dignity of their own order, with an emphasis on avant-garde educa-
tion. Originally anti-Calvinist, they soon found their niche in intellectual space.
Bérulle, a minister of state under Richelieu, gave Descartes protection and
encouragement to develop his philosophy, whereas the Jesuits eventually aban-
doned him despite his efforts to get their support.^5 The Oratorians and their
college at Juilly, near Paris, produced its own list of famous members and
pupils over the succeeding generations: La Peyrère, Simon, Malebranche, Bou-
lainvilliers, Montesquieu, virtually a lineup of avant-garde thought in France
for over a century.
France was now the center of Catholic cosmopolitanism and the cross-
cutting pressures for secularization. Paris became the center at which the
movements intersected. The Jesuits and Oratorians were there; anti-Jesuit
movements such as the Jansenists sprang up, contesting the leaders of the
attention space.
Mersenne’s circle became eminent by connecting all the movements. He put
together the scientific network; he publicized Descartes and made Hobbes and
Arnauld known for the first time when he solicited their comments to be
published with Descartes’s Meditations on the First Philosophy in 1641; he
initiated the youthful Pascal by giving him mathematics lessons. Gassendi, who
was driven from his position at the University of Aix in 1623 by the Jesuits,
was recruited by Mersenne as collaborator on the strength of his recent
skeptical attack on metaphysicians and occultists. Mersenne’s unifying strategy
was to use science as a weapon against the Protestants and the dissolution of
church authority. Mersenne launched his correspondence circle in 1623; in the
same year he made his first move on the intellectual scene by attacking atheists,
Deists, Cabalists, and astrologers, denouncing the English theosophist Fludd
Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality • 583