Page - 311 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

311Disruption of Old Structures [1734–85], the Benedictine abbot of Braunau) and the reformist canon Johann Peter Simen (1715–75), respectively. The censorship commission, formerly fully controlled by Jesuits, had not a single Jesuit member by the eve of the suppres- sion: what is more, Jesuit works now became indexed because of the condon- ing of regicide in Jesuit political thought.9 From 1760, Jesuit confessors of members of the dynasty were dismissed one after the other, and in 1767 the empress—whose growing uneasiness with excessive forms of baroque piety and emphasis on private devotion drew her closer to the increasingly influen- tial Jansenists—herself decided to replace in this position the Jesuit Ignaz Kampmiller with the Augustinian and Jansenist (and staunchly anti-Jesuit) Ignaz Müller (1713–82).10 At the turn of the 1760s and 1770s, the situation was still ambiguous. On the one hand, the Catholic powers of Western Europe that had recently expelled the Jesuits from their lands—including, importantly, the Habsburgs’ new ally: France—were pursuing a strong campaign for the wholesale suppression of the Society of Jesus with the newly elected pope, Clement xiv (1705–74, r.1769–74), known to be amenable to listening to them. Influential voices in Vienna, including Van Swieten and von Sonnenfels as well as jurist Karl Anton von Martini (1726–1800), also spoke out in favor of following the example of the Bourbon monarchies. Yet, in 1769–71, when the establishment of a state educa- tion system was intensely discussed in the highest government circles, the con- sensus of the chief decision-makers was that—contrary to a proposal by Count Johann Anton von Pergen (1725–1814) as minister of state to completely ex- clude all regular clergy from education—it was impossible to dispense with the contribution of ecclesiastical orders in the field. Given their still central role in education, this was essentially a debate about Jesuits, whom Maria The- resa, Joseph ii, and Kaunitz continued to hold in respect, and claimed to be largely innocent of the abuses that led to their expulsion from the other Catho- lic realms. Even Kaunitz, who by this time seems to have been the most ac- tively hostile of the trio vis-à-vis the monastic orders, thought that Jesuits were not as bad as others, and keenly emphasized that it was the institution that 9 Norbert Bachleitner, Die literarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2017), 50–51. Chapter 2 (41–92) of this book is fully dedicated to censorship “in the service of the Enlightenment.” 10 On these developments, particularly in censorship, the most comprehensive, contextual- ized account is Grete Klingenstein, Staatsverwaltung und kirchliche Autorität im 18. Jahr- hundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970). See also Hersche, Spätjansenismus, esp. Chapter 2, 103–62; Winfried Müller, “Der Jesuitenorden und die Aufklärung im süddeutsch- österreichischen Raum,” in Klueting, with Hinske and Hengst, Katholische Aufklärung, 225–45.