The royal confessor and his rivals in seventeenth-century France

The most memorable portraits of the French royal confessors of any period are in Saint-Simon's memoirs, and his judgements of them have survived relatively unscathed compared to those he delivered on Louis XIV's ministers generally. His account assumes that royal confessors normally wielded huge influence, but in fact the situation that he describes applies only to Louis XIV's confessors. This essay attempts to put the rise of the confessor into its historical context from Henri IV's reign onwards, primarily by attempting to analyse the rivals and alternatives to the confessor - grand almoners, archbishops of Paris, cardinal ministers. The solutions that emerged under Louis XIV were in no way inevitable, which may explain why they did not survive him. The longevity of his confessors in office contrasts sharply with the fragility of earlier generations of confessors and reflects the shifts in the roles they played within court and ecclesiastical politics.