The secret thoughts of Church academicians The cases of Louis Racine and François de Bernis

In Fontenelle’s time, the Parisian academies included a number of defenders of the Catholic faith. Two authors of long apologetic poems, written shortly before 1742—Louis Racine, marked by Jansenism, and François de Pierre de Bernis, who was an Epicurean poet before becoming a minister and cardinal—displayed an equal familiarity with clandestine philosophical literature. But their treatment of it reflects their profoundly different conceptions of religion.