An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert

With regard to the other monks in general, it belongs to the wisdom of government to judge of the method they ought to take with them; but supposing they should one day want to destroy them, or at least to weaken them enough to prevent their being hurtful, there is an infallible way of succeeding therein, without employing violence, which must be avoided even with them: this would be to revive the ancient laws, which forbid monastick vows before twenty-five years of age. May the government yield in this respect to the unanimous desire of enlightened citizens!

In expectation of this disaster of the monastick communities and the happiness of the state, let us continue and finish the account of the annihilation of the Jesuits. In spite of the war declared against the society by the magistrates, those fathers did not think their destruction unavoidable: the parliament of Paris, which had given them the first blow, had assigned them a year to judge of their institution: the party which desired their ruin, blind with hatred, and knowing neither the laws nor its forms, reproached the parliament with having granted them so long a term: they were afraid, that the friends which they had still left at court, would obtain from the king an evocation to himself alone of the judgement of this affair. These apprehensions appeared so much the better founded, as, in the interval of the time assigned for judgement, they had again received from court pretty striking marks of protection. The parliament, by the arrêt of the 6th of August, 1761, which adjourned them to appear at the end of the year for the judgement of their constitutions, had ordained provisionally the shutting up of their college on the first of October following: the king, notwithstanding the representations of the parliament, prorogued this time till the 1st of April; and this prorogation made it be apprehended, that they might obtain marks of favour still more signal. Nobody moreover could imagine that a society, lately so powerful, could ever be annihilated: their very enemies dared not flatter themselves with it fully; but they wished at least to deprive them, if it were possible, of the two principal branches of their credit, the place of confessor to their kings, and the education of the gentry.

The king, in the midst of all these proceedings, had consulted, on the institutes of the Jesuits, the bishops who were in Paris: about forty among them, either through persuasion or policy, had bestowed the greatest encomiums, both upon the institute and the society: six were of opinion, that their constitutions should be modified in certain respects: one alone, the bishop of Soissons, declared the institute and the order alike detestable. It was pretended that this prelate (so severe, or so honest) had personal and very grievous subjects of complaint against the Jesuits, who, on a delicate occasion, had deceived, exposed, and sacrificed him. Besides resentment, as they said, and that he wanted to avenge himself of them, this bishop was become Jansenist, and declared chief of a party, which had no longer a head, and was soon to have no members. Unhappily for the Jesuits, the prelate, whom they sought to cry down, was of an unblemished reputation in point of religion, probity, and manners: he affirmed, without disguise, that the parliaments were in the right, and that they could not too effectually get rid of a society, equally destructive to religion and to the state.

Nevertheless, a plurality of the bishops being favourable to the preservation of the Jesuits, the king, in order to show deference to their opinion, issued an edict, the object of which was to suffer them to subsist, modifying, in several respects, their constitutions. This edict being carried to the parliament to be registered, met there a general opposition: they made strong remonstrances against it; and these remonstrances had more success than the parliament itself could have expected. The king, without making any reply to them, withdrew his edict.

In this situation, Martinico, which had already been so fatal to these fathers, by occasioning the law-suit which they had lost, hastened, it is said, their ruin, by a singular circumstance. We received, at the end of March, 1762, the melancholy news of the taking of that colony. This capture, so important to the English, occasioned a loss of several millions to our commerce: the wisdom of the government was desirous of preventing the complaints which so great a loss would occasion to the publick. They bethought them, by way of causing a diversion, of furnishing the French with another subject of conversation; as heretofore Alcibiades thought of cutting off his dog’s tail, in order to prevent the Athenians from talking of weightier matters. They declared then to the principal of the college of the Jesuits, that nothing more remained for them but to obey the parliament, and to put a stop to their lectures, by the 1st of April, 1762. From that time the colleges were shut up, and the society began seriously to despair of its fortune: at length the 6th of August, 1762, the day so wished for by the publick, arrived: the institute was unanimously condemned by the parliament, without any opposition on the part of the sovereign: their vows were declared not binding, the Jesuits secularised and dissolved, their effects alienated and sold; the greater part of the parliaments, sooner or later, treated them pretty nearly in the same manner; some mingled still more rigour in their judgements, and drove them away without other form of process.

They lived therefore dispersed here and there, and wearing the secular habit; but they remained still about the court, and were even in greater numbers there than ever: they seemed there to brave in silence their enemies, and to wait, in order to recover themselves, a more favourable season. It was said pretty loudly, that these foxes were not destroyed, if they proceeded not at last to shut them up in the hole where they thought themselves secure; and that they were not martyrs so long as they were confessors. “They are very sick;” it was added, “perhaps dieing, but their pulse yet beats.” They were thought to be so little annihilated, notwithstanding their dispersion, that a superior of a seminary, to whom their house for novices was offered, replied, that he would not accept of it, out of fear of spirits.

They were not however very far distant from the moment of their total expulsion; and it was again to the inconsiderate zeal of their friends that they owed this obligation. A frantick partisan of the society published, in their defence, a violent treatise, abusing the magistrates, entitled, It is Time to Speak. Somebody said then, that the magistrates answer should be, It is Time to Depart. Such person was so much the less mistaken, as a new subject of complaint succeeded, to fill up the measure of these proceedings. The arch-bishop, of whom we have already made such frequent mention, thought the rights of the church violated by the arrêts of parliament, against vows contracted before the altars: he issued, in favour of the Jesuits, a mandate, which served completely to set the magistrates against them; some of these fathers were accused of having hawked about the mandate; some of their votaries, of having vended it: this was, as it were, the signal of the last blow given to the whole body. The parliament ordered, that within the space of eight days, every Jesuit, professed or not professed, who was desirous of remaining in the kingdom, should make oath that he renounced the institution. The term was short; they did not choose to give them time to deliberate: it was feared they might hold secret assemblies among themselves; that they might write to their general to beg his leave to give way to the times; that by favour of mental restrictions, they might take the oath which was required; that under the cover of this oath they might remain in France, in order to wait there a more favourable juncture; that they might practise at last the maxim of Acomat in Bajazet:

Promettez; affranchi du péril qui vous presse,

Vous verrez de quel poids sera votre promesse.

It is certain that the Jesuits, in signing the oath which was proposed, would have greatly embarrassed the Jansenists their enemies, who sought only a pretext to get them banished, and to whom that pretext would have been wanting. It is certain moreover, that as Frenchmen and as Christians they might have signed conscientiously what was required of them: this a writer, by no means well affected in other respects to the society, has proved demonstratively, by a writing which has fallen into my hands, and which will be found in the sequel of this history: but whether it was fanaticism or reason, whether a principle of conscience or human respect, whether honour or obstinacy, the Jesuits did not what they might have done, and what it was feared they would do. These men, who were thought so much disposed to trifle with religion, and who had been represented as such in a multitude of writings, refused almost all to take the oath which was required of them: in consequence thereof they had orders to quit the kingdom; and these orders were executed with rigour. In vain several of them represented their age, their infirmities, the services which they had performed; hardly one of their requests was granted. The justice which had been done on the body, was pushed against individuals to an extreme severity, which probably was thought necessary. They wanted to take away from this society, the very shadow of which seemed to terrify even after it no longer existed, all means of springing up again one day; sentiments of compassion were sacrificed to what was deemed reason of state. Nevertheless the implacable Jansenists, irritated by the very recent remembrance of the persecutions which the Jesuits had made them undergo, thought that the parliament had not yet done enough: they resembled the Swiss Captain, who ordered the dead and the dying to be buried together on the field of battle: it was represented to him, that some of the interred still breathed, and begged only to live: “Pho,” said he, “if we were to mind them, there would not be a dead man among them.”