Abstract

Notions of a developing public sphere in the eighteenth century have assumed, following Jürgen Habermas, that this is a necessarily secular space in which the better argument alone would prevail. This project examines efforts by French Jansenists to use the new public sphere to argue in public that God had performed miracles through a Jansenist saint, the late deacon François de Pâris, and thus expressed His rejection of the standing order in church and state. These works, culminating in Carré de Montgeron’s 1737 ’Verité des miracles’, sought to base their case on ’facts’ and ’evidence’ for the miracles; they used techniques of virtual witnessing that bore a striking similarity to the literary techniques of early modern science as analyzed by Steven Shapin. Savants responded to Montgeron’s case not with refutation but with a refusal to give any serious consideration to the ’evidence’ presented. The Pâris affair is therefore a revealing moment in the emergence of Enlightenment epistemo