Dale K. Van Kley (1941-2023)

Born in South Holland, Illinois on 31 July 1941, Dale Van Kley began his academic journey studying History, English, and Philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He moved to Yale University in the early 1960s to pursue a Ph.D. in the history of the German Reformation and soon found himself pulled instead to the history of France, partly, he admitted, because of less-than-desired marks on a German language proficiency exam. This was no straw in the wind; Dale would later master not only French and German, but also Latin, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese sufficiently to conduct research in all these languages. His initial advisor, Stanley Mellon, coaxed him to study the nineteenth century. Yet by the time he took his candidacy exams in 1965, he instead chose to focus on the eighteenth century, a “betrayal,” Dale once wrote, that was nevertheless endorsed by Mellon because Mellon himself had “betrayed” his advisor, Robert Palmer, by jettisoning the eighteenth century for the nineteenth. That he himself ended up the advisee of Palmer, after Mellon departed for the University of Illinois at Chicago, seemed only fitting. Indeed, as his career went on, Dale would show himself to be very much the disciple of Palmer and Palmer’s advisor, Carl Becker ¾ idealist historians who contributed to the French historical community in the United States and whose perspectives always recognized the lingering effects of religious ideas and actors in the eighteenth century. 

Dale spent the majority of his career exploring the mystery of why France, with its deep religious traditions, pursued the most radical de-Christianization agenda of any European nation during the age of the French Revolution. Although standard explanations focused on the role of the philosophes, Dale focused on the French religious tradition itself, in particular, on the idiosyncratic role that Jansenism in its French form played in the destabilization of the Old Regime. His initial foray into this history was The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France, a book that he published with Yale University Press in 1975. The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France challenged the then normative explanation for the suppression of the Jesuits, namely that it was the result of a political campaign orchestrated by the French philosophes. Through meticulous archival research, however, he found another group culpable: French Jansenist clergy and barristers who had long been fighting the Jesuits in an internecine war dating all the way back to the seventeenth century. 

When Dale published The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France, he had already returned to his alma mater, Calvin College, as an assistant professor. His twenty-eight years teaching at Calvin alongside such notable scholars as George Marsden and Nicholas Wolterstorff amounted to an intellectual heyday for the college, especially within the realm of the humanities. All the while he mentored not only undergraduates at his own institution — some of whom would go on to become impressive historians of the eighteenth century themselves — but also graduate students and early-career scholars throughout the United States and abroad. As an outside reader and advisor, Dale shaped the work of numerous luminaries in the field of eighteenth-century French history. He also collaborated with historians in the United States and abroad on numerous research projects including The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, Religion and Politics in Enlightenment Europe, and From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution — edited volumes that included the work of dozens of contributors — and coauthored pieces with James Bradley, Tom Kaiser, Jeremy Popkin, and Susan Rosa. These projects all revealed Dale’s strength in building bridges, highlighting the work of others toward the end of a more complex and nuanced vision of the past. Indeed, Dale once mentioned to his co-editor of From Deficit to Deluge, Tom Kaiser, that working on that project was one of the most rewarding pursuits of his career. After his retirement from The Ohio State University, many of these scholars came together in a colloquium held in his honor in Chicago in 2015. Together, they reflected on the impact that Dale’s work had on their careers and perspectives on history. For Dale, getting the story straight was not an individual undertaking but a collective one.

Indeed, it was at least partially toward the end of supporting the work of graduate students that Dale made his move from Calvin College to Ohio State University in the late 1990s. By that time, he had already published two more monographs: The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime and The Religious Origins of the French Revolution. These books continued Dale’s work of revealing the consequences of the Jansenist controversy in both the process of “desacralization” in the late Old Regime and the generation of the revolution and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Dale became one of the most notable scholars of religion and politics in eighteenth-century France, and his inclusion in the series of conferences on “The French Revolution and the Creation of Political Culture,” held in conjunction with the event’s bicentennial, contributed to a new wave of French revolutionary scholarship. In the last decade of his career, he pushed beyond France, tracking the Jansenist controversy throughout Catholic Europe. The culmination of this effort was perhaps a return to the subject of the Jesuit suppression, this time in international perspective. Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe provided a powerful case for the role that Jansenist and reform-minded Catholics played in bringing down the Society of Jesus in France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy too. While at Ohio State, he oversaw no less than a half-dozen dissertations in European history. As a doctoral mentor, he was kind, generous, and unceasingly supportive. He involved students in his own work and thinking, presenting them with rough drafts of his articles and book manuscripts and genuinely seeking and incorporating feedback. Graduate students were always partners in the pursuit of intellectual growth, and when he sent them off to new opportunities and ventures, he continued to support them through regular correspondence. Even in retirement, Dale gave his time and energy to those whose lives and careers he helped shape. 

All this Dale did because he saw his work as more than simply academic. Like his predecessor, Becker, Dale recognized the moral and ethical dimensions of historical work. He was keen to use his position and training to enact reform and change. Whether through his involvement in political campaigns or his work in the community, Dale engaged with the world outside of the academy. He took seriously the call to love one’s neighbor both in the academic realm and beyond. In return, Dale was loved and respected by a generation of scholars.

Upon retiring, Dale returned to the city of Grand Rapids where his career first began and where he eventually was laid to rest. In mourning his passing, we miss his advice, encouragement, and friendship. But remembrances are also about moving on and taking what we have been given by those whom we have valued and cherished and “paying it forward.” It is our hope that we can be as kind-hearted and gracious as Dale was with us and, in one small way, remake what we were so fortunate to have gained from him.

Daniel J. Watkins, Baylor University, and Thomas Kaiser, University of Arkansas at Little Rock