Obituary

Abstract

Obituary Daniel J. Watkins Click for larger view View full resolution Dale K. Van Kley (July 31, 1941–March 14, 2023) A self-professed "Protestant historian of the Catholic Jansenist controversy," Dale K. Van Kley was a pioneer in the field of eighteenth-century European history. Van Kley studied at Calvin College before pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Yale University. After a brief time as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he returned to Calvin where he taught for twenty-eight years. He spent another fourteen years at The Ohio State University, training and mentoring both undergraduate and graduate students. Van Kley dedicated much of his career to studying the impact of the Jansenist movement on the politics, society, and intellectual culture of Old Regime and revolutionary Europe. His first book, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, uncovered the role that Jansenist barristers and their allies played in the downfall of the Society of Jesus in France. Through meticulous archival research, Van Kley singlehandedly dismantled the narrative, propagated most famously by Jean le Rond d'Alembert himself, that the philosophes were the sole figures responsible for the Jesuits' demise. In the 1980s, Van Kley turned his eyes toward the French Revolution. His first step was to explore, in his words, "the relevance of the Jansenist controversy to the 'social'" by way of a book on the Robert-François Damiens, a domestic servant who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV in 1757. The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime showed that the Jansenist controversy permeated the popular elements of French society and, in so doing, contributed to [End Page 439] the "de-sacralization" of the monarchy and the collapse of the Old Regime. Van Kley's study of the French Revolution reached new heights at the end of the decade when he—along with many of the most notable scholars of the revolution in the United States, England, and France—participated in a series of conferences on "The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture." The conferences commemorated the bicentennial of the event and ushered in a rethinking of the French Revolution and its impact on the modern world. Van Kley's own work on the revolution continued into the 1990s with numerous articles and essays in The Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and other outlets. In 1996, he published his intellectual tour de force, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. The Religious Origins masterfully traced the role that religious disputes played in shaping constitutional and "patriotic" discourses from the sixteenth-century Reformation through the initial years of the revolution. It remains required reading for all those studying the intellectual culture of revolution in the early modern period. By the opening of the new millennium, Van Kley's interests turned to lands beyond France. In an edited volume and a number of essays and articles—including "Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution" and "Religion and the Age of 'Patriot' Reform"—Van Kley investigated the ways that the Jansenist controversy and other neo-Augustinian reform movements took hold in Catholic Europe. His final monograph, Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe, completed his transnational and comparative historical work and brought his career full circle by returning him to his initial research interest in the Jansenists' role in the suppression of the Society of Jesus. As much as Van Kley's work broke new ground, his career is best understood in continuity with his ideological predecessors, Robert Palmer and Carl Becker. Palmer, Van Kley's doctoral advisor at Yale, and Becker, Palmer's advisor, stand as paragons not only of American historians of France but also of historians who valued the role that religion played in the lives of eighteenth-century Europeans. Van Kley remained committed throughout his career to understanding what he called "the fundamentally religious character of human nature." Perhaps no work exemplifies this better than the thoughtful article that he co-wrote with Susan Rosa and published in French Historical Studies in 1998. Together, Rosa and Van Kley made a powerful plea...