One Day in a Jesuit College: Jesuit Scientific Education in 17th- and 18th-Century France

Education was one of the focuses of the Society of Jesus since it was founded in 1540. Most of the Jesuit missionaries were well-educated before they went on missions around the globe, and made significant contributions to contemporary scientific developments in the early modern period. Among the Jesuits, the French missionaries stood out for their emphasis on perfecting the knowledge of science and art for the nation, as well as their systematic scientific missions in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth- centuries. However, compared to the scientific works of the French Jesuit missionaries and their impact on European intellectual communities, less has been discovered about their lives in schools before they went abroad.

How the Jesuit scientific education was conducted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France is the question that this paper intends to explore. Based on the book catalogues in the library of the Jesuit college Louis le Grand and other documents from the French Jesuit colleges, I will unfold the daily lives and studies of the French Jesuit missionaries. For example, how were their individual days like? How was time divided? How much time did they spend studying science? I will also investigate what types of science they studied. Did they get to choose, or were they assigned to specific scientific disciplines? In comparison, I will discuss whether these scenarios changed from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. And I will compare the training of the missionaries who were to be going abroad to that of the priests who stayed in France and those non-Jesuit students. From these discussions, I intend to provide a more comprehensive image of the Jesuit scientific education and their balance between the profit of their mission versus the advancement of scientific knowledge.