Saint François de Sales: la charité comme forme de résistance

A man of the Grand Siècle, Saint François de Sales (1567- 1662) has been the patron saint of writers and journalists since 1923. Although he came from a noble family, he chose the path of the Christian faith and, by dedicating his life to God, he therefore renounced all his titles of nobility. One of the most esteemed theologians of his time, a man of remarkable writing, François de Sales was one of the first to use contemporary French in his writings to get closer to his readers. He left a vast body of work that testifies to his vision of life and the world, a perspective which he disseminated by resorting for the first time to printed manifestos; his publications were among the very first Catholic newspapers in the world. Published in the aftermath of the Edict of Nantes, which seems to open an era of tolerance and appeasement, Introduction à la vie dévote (1608) is the result of a correspondence with Louise de Châtel. It traces a kind of breviary of resistance against boredom, lato sensu, for Catholic women using a simple and rather journalistic language and style, without Latin or Greek quotations. This study proposes to demonstrate how this treatise – a kind of entre-deux of the pedagogical treatise and the journalistic essay – offers the reader of the twenty-first century a much more accessible vision than the spiritual treatises of the time: by looming as a hymn to resistance for Catholic women, but also for men in general, against the temptations of everyday life, this collection pushes, in fact, certainly, to prayer – a devout life – but above all to charity as a form of resistance to the evil of living of the time but also to the evil of living of all times.