Abstract:

We investigate whether individual politicians can help reduce polarization in parliamentary debates. Focusing on the French Third Republic (1880–1914), we study Members of Parliament educated in Jesuit collèges—institutions combining religious formation with rigorous scientific and rhetorical training. Using newly digitized data on Jesuit school enrollments and over one million parliamentary speeches, we identify Jesuit-educated MPs (JeMPs) and analyze their linguistic and behavioral patterns through text embeddings and large language models. We find that JeMPs systematically employed less emotional and less polarized rhetoric, emphasized reason and science, and moderated subsequent speakers’ tone within the same debate. These effects were particularly pronounced during the contentious 1905 Separation of Church and State Law. Our results provide the first large-scale quantitative evidence that personal formation rooted in both faith and rational inquiry can foster moderation in polarized political environments, highlighting a historical mechanism for “de-polarizing” politics.