An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert

While the Jesuits, rather dreaded than supported by the greater part of the clergy, animated against themselves the parliaments, and alienated the persons of the court who had most credit, they also found the secret to indispose greatly a set of men, less powerful in appearance, but more formidable than is imagined, that of the men of letters. Their declamations, at court and in the city, against the Encyclopedie had irritated against them all those who wished well to that work, and who were very numerous: their invectives against the author of the Henriade, their old pupil, and for a long time their friend, had provoked that celebrated writer, who made them sensibly feel the folly which they had been guilty of in attacking him. Whatever be our strength, or whatever we imagine it to be, we ought never to make ourselves enemies of those who, enjoying the advantage of being read from one end of Europe to the other, are able, with one stroke of their pen, to inflict a signal and lasting vengeance. This is a maxim which favour and power itself ought never to make either individuals, or societies, lose sight of, but which the Jesuits of our times seem to have forgot to their great misfortune. The lion pretends to sleep, suffers the wasp to buz around his ears; but grows tired at last of hearing it, rouses himself, and kills it. For six years and upwards, the Journalists de Trevoux, and the light troops which low literature maintained in their pay, abused the celebrated person above mentioned, who seemed not to know it, and suffered them to go on. At length tired of seeing himself harrassed by so many insects, he tucked up the maroders, and silenced their chiefs; and what is of importance in France to the gaining of a cause, exposed both the one and the other to publick laughter. While he rendered the Jesuits ridiculous, they rendered themselves odious to all the sensible men of the nation, by the spirit of persecution which they preached up in the same Journal de Trevoux, and the fanaticism which they published in it. The philosophers, as they are called, whom they sought to maltreat, forgot, on their side, no opportunity of avenging themselves in their works; and this they did in a manner the most mortifying to the Jesuits, without too much engaging and exposing themselves. They did not say to them as the Jansenists did, “You are ambitious, intriguing, and knaves:” this accusation would not have humbled the society: they said to them, “You are blockheads; you have not among you a single man of learning, whose name is famous in Europe, and worthy of being so: you boast of your credit; but that credit exists more in opinion than in reality; it is only a house of cards, which will be overturned the moment one blows upon it.” They said true, and the event has proved it. To complete their misfortune, the Jesuits, overwhelmed with the blows which they had imprudently drawn upon themselves, had not one single defender able to repel them: they had no good writers, nor men of merit in any kind; their new enemies, oppressed by them at Versailles, were too strong for them at the pen; and the value of this advantage is sensibly felt in a nation which loves to read only to amuse itself, and which ends always by declaring for that party which succeeds therein the best. The Jesuits had for them the phantom of their power; their adversaries had France and all Europe.

It must be confessed that the Jansenists, who never piqued themselves on being artful, were much more so in these latter times, than they thought for; and that the Jesuits, who value themselves greatly on their finesse, were not at all cunning. They fell like fools into the snare which their enemies had laid for them, without once suspecting it. The Jansenist Gazetteer, excited only by fanaticism and hatred (for that half-witted satyrist knew no better) reproached the Jesuits with pursuing in the Jansenists the phantom of heresy, and of not falling upon the philosophers, who became daily, according to him, more numerous and more insolent. The Jesuits stupidly quitted their expiring prey, to attack men full of vigour, who never thought of hurting them. What was the consequence? They have not quieted their old enemies, and have drawn upon themselves new ones, whom they had nothing to do with. They perceive it very plainly now, but it is too late.

Such was the situation of these fathers, when the war kindled between England and France brought upon the society that famous law-suit which ended in its destruction: the Jesuits carried on a trade with Martinico; the war having occasioned them some losses, they wanted to break their correspondents at Lyons and Marseilles; a Jesuit in France, to whom these correspondents addressed themselves for justice, talked to them like the rat retired from the world: “My friends,” said the recluse, “things below no longer concern me; and what can a poor hermit assist you in? What can he do but pray God to help you in this affair? I hope that he will take some care of you.[15]”

He offered to say a mass for them to obtain from God, instead of the money which they demanded, the grace to bear in a Christian-like manner their ruin. These merchants, thus robbed and treated like fools by the Jesuits, attacked them in the regular way of justice; they pretended that these fathers, by virtue of their constitutions, were answerable one for the other, and that the Jesuits in France ought to discharge the debts of their missionaries in America. The Jesuits were so persuaded of the goodness of their cause, that as they had a right to be judged before the Great Council, they demanded, in order to render their triumph more brilliant and complete, to have the cause brought before the Great Chamber of the parliament of Paris. They lost it there unanimously, and to the great satisfaction of the publick, which testified its joy at it by universal applause: they were condemned to pay immense sums to the parties, with a prohibition to them to meddle with commerce.

This was but the beginning of their misfortunes. In the law-suit which they maintained, it had been debated, whether in reality, by their constitutions, they were answerable one for the other: this question furnished the parliament with a very natural opportunity of demanding a sight of those famous constitutions, which had never been either examined or approved of with the requisite forms. The examination of these constitutions, and afterward that of their books, furnished legal means more than sufficient for declaring their institution contrary to the laws of the kingdom, to the obedience due to the sovereign, to the security of his person, and to the tranquillity of the state.

I say legal means; for we ought to distinguish, in this cause, the legal means on which the destruction of the Jesuits was founded, from the other motives, no less equitable, of that destruction. We must not believe, that either the constitutions of these fathers, or the doctrine they are reproached with, were the only cause of their ruin, though they may be the only truly legal cause, and the only one of course which should have been mentioned in the decrees issued against them. It is but too true, that several other orders have nearly for principle the same servile obedience which the Jesuits vow to their superiours, and to the pope; it is but too true, that a thousand other doctors and religious orders have taught the doctrine of the power of the church over the temporalities of kings: it was not merely because they thought the Jesuits worse Frenchmen than other monks, that they destroyed and dispersed them: it was because they looked upon them with reason as more to be dreaded on account of their intrigues and their credit; and this motive, though not legal, is certainly a much better one than was necessary to get rid of them. The national league against the Jesuits resembles that of Cambray against the republick of Venice, which had for its principal cause the riches and insolence of those republicans. The society had furnished the same motives for hatred. The publick were justly displeased at seeing persons of a religious order, devoted by their very profession to humility, to retirement and silence, directing the consciences of kings, educating the gentry, caballing at court, in the city, and in the provinces. Nothing irritates reasonable people more, than men who have renounced the world, and yet seek to govern it. This, in the eyes of the wise, was the least pardonable crime of the society: this crime, of which no mention was made, was of greater weight than all those they were loaded with besides, and which, by their nature, were more proper to cause a decree to be pronounced against them in a court of judicature.

The Jesuits have even had the presumption to pretend, and several bishops their partisans have dared to declare it in print, that the great collection of assertions, extracted from the Jesuit authors by order of the parliament, a collection which served as the principal motive for their destruction, ought not to have had that effect: that it was compiled in haste by Jansenist priests, and ill-attested by magistrates who were unfit for the work: that it was full of false quotations, passages that were mutilated or misunderstood, objections that were taken for answers: in short, of a thousand other unfair things of the like nature. The magistrates took the trouble of replying to these reproaches, and the publick would have excused them: it cannot be denied, that amidst a great number of exact quotations, some errors had escaped: they were acknowledged without difficulty. But could these errors (though they had been much more numerous) prevent the rest from being true? Besides, were the complaint of the Jesuits and their defenders as just as it appears to be otherwise, who will give himself the trouble of examining so many passages? In the mean time, till the truth be cleared up (if truths of this nature be worth the trouble) this collection will have produced the good which the nation desired, the annihilation of the Jesuits; the reproaches with which we have a right to upbraid them will be more or less numerous; but the society will not exist; that was the important point.

This volume of assertions, extracted from the books of the Jesuits, condemned by the magistrates, had been preceded some years before by the condemnation of the work of the Jesuit Busenbaum, in which the doctrine of king-killing is openly maintained: the copy on which this condemnation was pronounced, bore date 1757, the melancholy æra of that attempt which filled France with horrour and consternation. The Jesuits have pretended that this date was a forgery of their enemies, who, to render them odious, had caused a new title-page to be prefixed to an old edition: the Jansenists maintained, that the edition was in reality quite new, and proved in a sensible manner how far, and to what a degree of impudence, the Jesuits dared be bad subjects. These Jansenists, so little dexterous in other matters, but very violent and rancorous, had actually persuaded the greater part of the French nation, that the atrocious crime in question was the work of the Jesuits. However, the answers of the criminal to the interrogatories put to him, as they were made publick, by no means accused those fathers; but he had been a servant to them, as well as to persons of the opposite party: he had declared this to his judges; the Jesuits (for good reasons without doubt, but which we are ignorant of) were not interrogated, as it seemed they should have been; this was enough to a great part of the publick, to charge them with the crime.

The assassination of the king of Portugal, which happened the year following, and in which the society was again involved, served as a new means to its enemies for maintaining, and making it believed, that the attempt, which shocked all France, was their work. The friends of the Jesuits pretended that they were innocent of the crime committed in Portugal; that the storm raised against them on this occasion, and of which also they became the victims in that kingdom, was an effect of the hatred which they had drawn upon them, on the part of the prime minister Carvalho, who was all-powerful with that prince. But why should persons of a religious order inspire a minister of state with hatred against them, unless it be because they have rendered themselves formidable to that minister by their intrigues? Why should Mr. Carvalho, who detested the Jesuits, leave in peace the Cordeliers, the Jacobins, and the Recollects, unless because he found the Jesuits in his way, and that the others vegetated in peace in their convents, without doing the state either good or harm? Every religious and turbulent society merits, on that account alone, that a state should be purged of them; it is a crime for them to be formidable.