History of the Jesuits: Their origin, progress, doctrines, and designs

by G. B. Nicolini

As we have already said, France was now the chief seat of their power, and the field where they reaped their laurels. Under Louis XIII., or, to speak more correctly, under Richelieu, they could not pretend to a great share of authority. The despotic cardinal will only have them as his tools. He will protect them; he will go with his royal slave to lay the first stone of a Jesuit edifice in a faubourg of Paris (St Antoine), but he will cause to be condemned and burnt by the hands of the hangman, the books of Keller and Santarelli, that exalt the papal above the royal authority, which Richelieu considered his own. Cardinal Mazzarini was as little disposed as his predecessor to tolerate any rival domineering influence; and during his administration, the Jesuits had no considerable part in the public affairs. If Mazzarini shewed them some kindness, and afforded them his protection, it was because he wanted their support in opposition to the Jansenists, the partisans of the Cardinal of Metz, Archbishop of Paris, and Mazzarini’s rival in power and in gallant intrigues. But when Louis XIV., on reaching his twentieth year, assumed the government of his kingdom, then really began the reign of the Jesuits. Not that the man who entered the Parliament in his hunting apparel, with his whip in his hand, and was accustomed to say, L’état c’est moi, was much disposed to act by the advice and under the influence of other persons; yet the Jesuits had a great share in all the great events of his reign.

Louis had a Jesuit confessor from his childhood,[255] who, by insidious and daily-repeated insinuations, had rendered him a fanatical bigot, and made him believe that the greatest glory he could achieve would be the upholding of the Popish religion. In this point, as indeed in many others, Louis bears a resemblance to Philip II. of Spain. Both gloried in the appellation of champions of Popery, both had its persecuting spirit, both sacrificed the love of their people to the wish to appear most zealous Romanists; yet both, despotic and jealous of their royal prerogative, waged war against their god on earth when he attempted to impugn it. Philip sent Alva, who, having conquered the Papal troops, entered Rome, and obliged the Pope to subscribe his master’s conditions; while Louis took possession of Avignon, threw the Papal nuncio into prison, and obliged every member of the French clergy to subscribe the four articles of the Gallican Church, expressly got up against the pretensions of Rome. With such a man as Louis, the Jesuits could not succeed in gaining their ends but by the most complete subjection to his orders or caprices. So, accommodating themselves at once to the prince’s character, there was no mark of devotion and servility which they did not shew to him. They supported him in his schism against the Pope, subscribed the articles of the Gallican Church, and refused to publish the bull of excommunication the former had fulminated against the first-born of the Church of Rome,[256] persuading him, however, that he would always remain a good Roman Catholic while they confessed and absolved him. They praised him for his military achievements, and encouraged him in his profligacy, taking great care to abandon the former mistress the moment they saw the inclination of the prince directed towards a new one. For these criminal compliances, they obtained, in exchange, full liberty to persecute the Jansenists and Protestants to their hearts’ content.

The Jansenists were the first who experienced the vindictive hatred of the progeny of Loyola; not because they were considered more dangerous heretics than the Huguenots, but because they had dared to attack the Order openly; because the Provincial Letters had covered it with shame and confusion, and because the most considerable among them were related to that Arnauld who first opposed its establishment in France, and declared its members to be the accomplices of the crime of Jacques Clement. We insist upon that point, because it shews one of the most prominent characteristics of Jesuitism, never to forgive an injury, and to persecute the remotest descendants for the offences they may have received from their ancestors.

It would require volumes to relate all the persecutions to which the inhabitants of Port-Royal were subjected. Hardly had Louis assumed the reins of government than, at the instigation of the Jesuits, he convened an assembly of bishops, and declared his intention to extirpate the Jansenists. The crafty and unscrupulous De Marca, Archbishop of Toulouse, prepared a formula to the following effect:—

“I sincerely submit to the Constitution of Pope Innocent X., of May 31, 1653, according to its true sense, as defined by the Constitution of our holy Father, Pope Alexander VII., of October 16, 1656.[257] I acknowledge myself bound in conscience to obey this Constitution, and I condemn, from my heart and with my mouth, the doctrine of the five propositions of Cornelius Jansenius, which are contained in the book of Augustinus, which both the popes and the bishops have condemned; and the doctrine of St Augustine is not that which Jansenius has falsely set forth, and contrary to the true sense of the holy doctor.” All the clergy, and all persons who were in any way engaged in the tuition of youth, were required to subscribe this formula, and the most severe persecution awaited those who refused to do so. Neither the pure and uncontaminated life of those nuns of whom Bossuet himself said that they were “as pure as angels,” nor the learning, the piety, the austere and exemplary conduct of De Lacy, Arnauld, Nicole, and a hundred others, were a sufficient protection against the persecuting spirit of the Jesuits. Those noble and magnanimous men were dragged from their peaceable retreat, and sent to pine away their lives either in foreign lands or in the dungeons of the Bastille, of which the very passages were crowded with prisoners. Yet the noble resistance of the nuns could not be overcome, and the persecutors could only have amends of Port-Royal by levelling it to the ground.

Père La Chaise.

Hinchliff.

Fiercer and more sanguinary was the persecution exercised upon the Huguenots, who were very numerous in France at this epoch. Henry IV., after his cowardly apostasy, in order to pacify and calm his Calvinist subjects, had, in 1598, by an edict dated from Nantes, the principal town of Brittany, insured to them the free exercise of their religion; leaving in their hands some strong places as a warranty. This edict had afterwards been disregarded by the French Government on many occasions, and Richelieu almost hazarded the throne in reducing Rochelle, the stronghold of the Calvinists; yet no sanguinary measures were resorted to, from purely religious motives, and the Huguenots lived, we may say, almost unmolested. But after 1660, numberless and incessant petty persecutions, or tracasseries, must have made those Protestants aware of their impending ruin. The Jesuit Lachaise was the principal instrument of all the cruelties exercised afterwards upon them. This Lachaise was a relation of the famous Father Cotton, and confessor to the king. He was the very personification of Jesuitism—handsome, polite, courteous, pleasing in his manners, it seemed as if his whole care were directed to captivate the love of all sorts of persons; he was never heard to utter a word of dissatisfaction against any one. S. Simon says of him, “Il était fort Jesuite—but polite, and without rage;” and Duclos affirms that “he knew how to irritate or calm the conscience of his penitents always with a view to his own interests;” and that, “though he had been a fierce persecutor of every party opposed to his own, he always spoke of them with great moderation.” He became the king’s confessor in 1675, and, by the most skilful and adroit flattery, acquired a great ascendancy over him. But do not imagine that he forgot his Jesuitical cunning. The profligacy and the continual state of adultery in which Louis lived was too great a scandal to be overlooked by such a pious man as Lachaise pretended to be. Sometimes he got angry with his royal penitent, and denied him absolution. “The solemnity of Easter” (the time in which the confession is obligatory), says S. Simon, “gave him the political colic during the king’s passion for Madame de Montespan;” and Crétineau says that “he would not absolve the king, but sent him another Jesuit, who bravely absolved him.” Such was the man who undertook to extirpate the Huguenots.

In 1685 appeared the proclamation which recalled the Edict of Nantes, La révocation de l’édit de Nantes, and from that moment the poor Calvinists were consigned to the tender mercies of the ferocious Jesuits, who, with the help of the dragoons and the lowest of the populace, renewed the horrible scenes of St Bartholomew, carrying the rage of fanaticism and revenge so far as to exhume the buried bodies of the murdered victims, and throw them into the common sewers. How many thousand industrious families were driven naked and penniless into foreign lands! how many children were made orphans! how many decrepid old men were left without a child or descendant to close their eyes! Alas! let us draw a veil over the infernal saturnalia.