From Reactionary to Revolutionary: Joseph-Antoine Cerutti, Jesuit Priest Turned French Patriot

In the 1750s, Joseph-Antoine Cerutti was on the traditional path of formation for a member of the Society of Jesus (a.k.a. the Jesuits). He was taking classes in rhetoric and theology and preparing to take his final vows to the order. When the Jesuits went on trial in France, Cerutti became one of their most vocal defenders. He published numerous pamphlets arguing for the Jesuits’ integral role in the formation and preservation of a Catholic French kingdom. Yet strangely, this experience placed him on an unusual path. Unlike most of his confreres who opposed the revolutionary momentum that eventually seized France in the 1780s and 1790s, Cerutti embraced calls for change. He started La Feuille Villageoise, a pro-revolutionary newspaper, and eventually served as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. Once a Jesuit and now a revolutionary, Cerutti was the exception to the rule that ex-Jesuits were prone to reactionary politics.

This paper asks the simple question: why? Why did Cerutti not follow the course of so many of his colleagues in the Society of Jesus? Why did Cerutti support the revolution and not denounce it? In investigating the political career of Joseph-Antoine Cerutti, we will discover that there were many roads to revolution in late-eighteenth-century France. Accepting the National Assembly, embracing calls for reform, and undertaking revolutionary action did not simply emerge from positions of social and economic deprivation or an ideological commitment to the writings of radical philosophes. As Dale Van Kley has argued, there were religious origins to the revolution as well. Through a case study of Cerutti, we will see how Jesuit intellectual formation also prepared French citizens for careers in revolutionary politics.