An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert

It was thus that the one and the other defended their cause. We say nothing of the ill language which they added to them, and which on either side were worthy of their reasons.

The magistrates alone (and this observation is not to be neglected) opposed, on this occasion, to the constitutionists, reasons that were unanswerable: they pronounced, that the doctrine, taught or authorised by the bull, was contrary to the laws of the kingdom, and of consequence ought not to be a pretext for vexation. Of this the magistrates were competent judges, and the partisans of the bull had nothing to reply: it belongs to the depositaries of the law to decide what is conformable or contrary to it; and this question is not within the province of the church.

It is certain, besides, that all those refusals of the sacraments, occasioned by the bull, disturbed private families; that they sowed dissension among the people: that in this view, at least, the magistrates ought to take cognizance of it, and to employ, as they did, the authority of the laws, to put an end to the confusion. But the inconvenience which attends contests in theology, of hurting the publick tranquillity, is the fruit of the error which was committed in France, and almost every where else, of connecting civil affairs with religion, of requiring a citizen of Paris to be, not only a faithful subject, but also a good catholic, and as exact in providing holy bread as in paying his taxes. As long as this spirit shall subsist among us, the maxim of which fanaticks make an ill use so often, “That it is better to obey God than man,” will be an invincible obstacle to the most prudent measures of government and of magistrates for stifling religious quarrels; because men like better to obey a master of their own chusing (and who, after all, commands them to do only what they please) than a master whom they have not chosen, and who enjoins them what they dislike. In Holland, where the Jansenists form a church absolutely separate, which the government knows nothing of, and leaves in peace, they are neither the cause nor the object of any disturbance. It is only by a discreet toleration (equally avowed by religion and politicks) that we can prevent those frivolous disputes from being contrary to the repose of the state, and to the union of the subject. But when shall we see that happy time?

However this be, the Jansenists, treated at their death as excommunicated persons, rose up against this new persecution. The parliament, which had registered the bull with a very ill will, undertook their defence; it banished the fathers who refused the communion to dieing Jansenists: the archbishop, on his side, forbad them, and deprived of their places those priests who obeyed the parliament; and the unhappy God-Bearers (so they are called) having before their eyes exile on one side, and famine on the other, found themselves under a melancholy alternative. Reasonable people were surprised that the archbishop, the author of their misfortune, did not go and present himself to the parliament, declare that they had done nothing but by his orders, and give himself up as a victim for so many innocents. They had so much the more reason to expect this, as the virtue of that prelate, and his sincerity in this affair, were by no means suspected. The Jansenists called him persecutor and schismatick; the courtiers, obstinate: his partisans compared him to St. Athanasius, who was also (they said) called obstinate and rebellious by the courtiers of his time.

The dispute grew more and more warm: the court wished ineffectually to put a stop to it; the Jansenists had found means to occasion more trouble in their deaths than they had done during their lives; the parliaments and the arch-bishop were exiled by turns. At last the king, justly tired of these disputes, recalled the magistrates, and in concert with them imposed alike silence on the partisans and on the adversaries of the bull.

This law of silence, it is true, was not too well observed; it was particularly broken by the encomiums which the Jansenists bestowed on it: they printed large volumes to prove that it was necessary to be silent; they resembled the Pedant in Moliere, who after having talked a long time, and said abundance of foolish things, promises at last to keep silence[13], and in order to shew that he maintains his promise, interrupts every moment the conversation, by observing that he opens not his mouth.

The constitutionists on their side had the presumption to say, that the King had no right to ordain mad subjects to be silent on the ridiculous object which heated their imaginations; that the sixth general council had anathematized the type of the emperor Constantius, which was also, as they pretended, nothing more than a law of silence. The Jansenists replyed, that this council had done better still, in anathematizing Pope Honorius.

The King, employed like a good father, according to the expression of a celebrated author, in parting his children who were fighting, was desirous of supporting himself by an authority respectable to both parties, and especially to the most numerous: he thought proper to consult on this question, by which all France was agitated, the late pope Benedict XIV. a man of understanding, who loved not the Jesuits, and who at the bottom despised this controversy. The pope replied like a crafty Italian; on one side he ordained the acceptance of the bull, the work of one of his infallible predecessors, which he could not decently condemn; on the other, he declared at the same time, that the Jansenists who rejected it, ought nevertheless to have the sacraments administered to them at their deaths, “but at their own risque and hazard,” and after having been thoroughly advertized of the danger which they ran with respect to their eternal salvation. From this period the refusals of the sacraments became less frequent; the Jansenists and their adversaries thought they had alike the pope for them, and tranquillity seemed almost re-established.

It was not even lessened by the step which the parliament thought itself obliged to take some time after, of protesting anew against this bull Unigenitus; the acceptance of which it had registered with reluctance. It called not in question indeed the doctrine of the bull; that would have been to encroach on the authority of the church, and it knew too well the limits of its own rights: it protested only against the execution of this bull, declaring it contrary to what is termed in France “the liberties of the Gallican Church.” This protest had not the glory it merited; it was the sequel of a number of writings, of which the French levity began to be tired. Nay, the partisans of the bull even made a jest, with an indecency that deserved punishment, of the “pretended liberties of the Gallican Church,” by virtue of which, the parliament, according to the terms of its decrees, enjoined the priests, under ignominious penalties, to administer the sacraments: they saw not, said they jeeringly, how such decrees supported and favoured the liberty of the church of France, by forcing its ministers to do what they did not think they ought to do. This way of talking, these contests, the pieces without number, which resulted from them, served to feed the frivolous disposition and gaiety of the nation: people laughed at the reciprocal animosity of the theologists of both parties, for questions which deserved it so little: for that animosity, though very usual, and of all ages, always astonishes and amuses reasonable people. Every body laughed no less at seeing, that notwithstanding the reiterated orders issued by the Sorbonne, to mention no more of the bull Unigenitus, either in their writings or their theses, the college displayed an attachment the most obstinate to this bull, which it had rejected so long. Nothing more was wanting, it was said, to all the strange things that had happened on this subject, than to forbid without success the faculty of divinity from teaching a doctrine which it cost so much trouble to make them receive. Philosophy, above all, laughed in silence at all these extravagancies, and amused herself with this new change of the scene, waiting with patience for an opportunity of profiting by it. Those among the philosophers who hoped for no good from these quarrels, took the still wiser part, of laughing at the whole. They observed the mutual rancour of the Jansenists and their adversaries, with that disinterested curiosity with which they observe the combats of animals, well assured, let what would happen, of ending cause to laugh at the expence of some of them. So many blows reciprocally struck on both sides with violence, did not yet reach the Jesuits; employed on one hand in arming the bishops against the expiring remains of the Jansenists their enemies; and on the other, in animating, underhand, the court of France against the parliaments, they were the secret soul of all this war, without appearing to intermeddle in it. But the Jansenists, who, in the quarrel concerning the sacraments, had, or at least thought they had, gained ground, grew bolder by degrees, seemed to prepare for a more decisive stroke; and the arch-bishop, their enemy, whetted, without knowing it, by his zeal, the sword with which the society was soon to be pierced.

Two capital errors which the Jesuits committed about that time at Versailles, began to shake their credit, and to prepare from afar their disaster. They refused, as we are assured, through motives of human respect, to take under their direction some powerful personages[14], who had no reason to expect from them a severity so singular in many respects. This indiscreet refusal, it is said, contributed to hasten their ruin by the very hands which they might have made their support: thus these men, who had been so often accused of loose morals, and who had maintained themselves at court by such morals alone, were undone the moment that they wanted (even to their own great regret) to profess severity; an abundant subject for reflexions, and an evident proof that the Jesuits, from the very first till that time, had taken the right way to support themselves, seeing they ceased to be, the moment that they deviated from it. It is added, that at the same time that they displeased the court by their scruples, they displeased it also by their intrigues. They laid, it was said, snares for some men in place, whose crime in their eyes was that of being wanting in devotion to the society, the only country which they know: the usual effect of these sorts of attacks is, to strengthen the credit which they do not overthrow; those who were the objects of the Jesuitical plots obtained but the more favour by that means.