An Account of the Destruction of the Jesuits in France

by Jean Le Rond d' Alembert

It is thus that the Jesuits have acquired in Paraguai a monarchical authority, founded, it is said, on persuasion alone, and, on the lenity of their government: sovereigns in that vast country, they render happy, it is assured, the people there who obey them, and whom they have at last effectually subjected to them without employing violence. The care with which they exclude strangers, prevents our knowing the particulars of this singular administration; but the little which has been discovered of it, speaks its praise, and would render it perhaps to be desired, if the relations be faithful, that many other barbarous countries, where the people are oppressed and unhappy, had had, as well as Paraguai, Jesuits for apostles and masters. If they had found in Europe as few obstacles to their domination, as in that vast country of America, it is to be believed that they would rule there at this day with the same empire: France, and the states into which philosophy has penetrated for the happiness of mankind, would without doubt have lost greatly thereby; but some other nations perhaps would not have been more to be pityed for it. The people know but one thing only, the wants of nature, and the necessity of satisfying them; the moment they are by their situation sheltered from misery and suffering, they are content and happy: liberty is a good which is not made for them, of which they know not the advantage, and which they possess not but to abuse it to their own prejudice; they are children who fall down and hurt themselves the moment they are left to go alone, and who get up again only to beat their nurse; they must be well fed, kept employed without crushing them, and led without suffering them to see too plainly their chains. “This (say they) is what the Jesuits do in Paraguai; this probably is what they would have done every where else, if the world had been disposed to permit them.” But in Europe, where they had already so many masters, they did not think proper to suffer any new ones: this resistance, tho’ so natural, irritated the Jesuits, and rendered them wicked: they made those nations, which refused their yoke, feel all the evils which those nations endeavoured to inflict on them: useful and respectable in Paraguai, where they found only docility and gentleness, they became dangerous and turbulent in Europe, where they met with dispositions a little different; and it is not without reason it has been said of them, that seeing they did so much good in a corner of America, and so much ill elsewhere, it was necessary therefore to send them all to the only place where they were not hurtful, and to purge the rest of the earth of them.

Let us return to France, or rather to the history of the establishment of the society in that kingdom. Already had the Jesuits, supported by the protection of the popes and by that of kings, succeeded, in spite of the opposition of the universities, to obtain very great advantages, to found several houses, to raise at length in Paris itself a college, which was looked upon by the others with envy. The establishment of this college had undergone several assaults at different periods: at first Stephen Pasquier, so well known for his satyrical talents, and several years after Anthony Arnauld, father of the doctor, had successively pronounced against the Jesuits those famous pleadings, in which a few truths are found joined to much declamation. The society, victorious in these pleadings, had obtained by patent the liberty of continuing its lessons; the university of Paris was obliged to put up with it, and thought itself still very happy in not being constrained to admit into its bosom those ambitious and factious men, who would soon have possessed themselves of the power: perhaps also they escaped this yoke, only because the Jesuits disdained to impose it on them: probably they thought themselves sufficiently strong to raise with success altar against altar; and their vanity, flattered with making a party by themselves, nourished from that time the hope which it has since but too well realized, of taking away from the universities the education of the most brilliant of the nobility of the kingdom.

In the midst of this war of the universities and the parliaments against the Jesuits, the assassination of Henry IV. by John Chatel, a scholar of those fathers, was, as it were, the signal of a new storm again them, and made that thunder burst which had long rolled over their heads. The Jesuit Guignard, being convicted of having composed, in the time of the League, writings favourable to regicide, and of having kept them after the amnesty, perished by the last torture; and the parliaments which long since saw with an evil eye those usurpers, and who sought only a favourable occasion to get rid of them, banished them from the kingdom, as a “detestable and diabolical society, the corrupters of youth, and enemies of the king and of the state:” these were the words of the arrêt.

It is unhappily too certain (and the history of those dreadful times furnishes melancholy proofs of it) that the maxims which they reproached Guignard and the Jesuits with, respecting the murder of kings, were at that time those of all the other religious orders, and of almost all the ecclesiastics. Henry III. had been assassinated by a fanatic of the order of Jacobins; their prior Bourgoin had just been broke upon the wheel for that doctrine; a Carthusian, named Ouin, had attempted the life of Henry IV. This abominable doctrine was that of the chiefs of the League, among whom were reckoned priests and bishops; it was also, if we may venture to say it, that of a great part of the nation, whom fanaticism had rendered weak and furious. The crime of the society was then that of many others. But the rancour of the court of Rome against Henry IV. the particular profession which the Jesuits made of devotion to that ambitious court; lastly, the confidence which the king had shewn towards them, in permitting them to instruct youth; all these motives, strengthened by the just hatred which their ambition had excited, made them deemed with reason so much the more dangerous and more criminal. Never have the Jacobins been reproached with a Bourgoin and Clement, assassins of their fraternity, as the Jesuits have been reproached with their scholar Chatel, and Guignard their fellow: the reason is, that the Jacobins are little dreaded, and that the Jesuits were both feared and odious.

In this their almost general disaster, two parliaments had spared them, those of Bourdeaux and Toulouse: moreover, in banishing them the rest of the kingdom, they had neither alienated nor confiscated their effects; the magistrates who had proscribed them, had committed that great mistake; those fathers, who had still a corner in France to take shelter in, made use of the little breath which remained to them, in preparing for their resurrection; they joined to their intrigues, within the kingdom, the support of several sovereigns, and especially of the court of Rome, which Henry IV. feared to displease; and in spite of the just remonstrances of the parliaments, they obtained their return a few years after they had been banished. Henry IV. did much more for them; whether it was that they had found means to render themselves agreeable to that prince, or that he hoped to find in them more facility in reconciling with his amours the new religion which he professed; or whether, lastly, which is most probable, that great and unfortunate king, having been so often assassinated, and being still in danger of it, feared and wanted to shew respect for these foxes who were accused of having tigers at their command, he gave them in France considerable establishments; among others the magnificent college of la Flêche, whither he was desirous that his heart should be carried after his death; lastly, as if to interest them more particularly in his preservation, notwithstanding the reports which prevailed against them, he took a Jesuit for confessor. It is pretended that he acted thus, in order to have, in his very court and about his person, an hostage who should be answerable to him for that suspected and dangerous society: it is added, that the Jesuits had been recalled on the very condition of giving this hostage: if the thing be true, it must be confessed that they were able, like dexterous men, to make subservient to their grandeur a law humiliating in itself, and to avail themselves skilfully, for the augmentation of their credit, of the distrust and dread which they had inspired.

Louis XIII., who reigned after Henry IV. or rather cardinal Richelieu, who reigned under his name, continued to favour the Jesuits: he thought their zeal and their regular conduct would serve at once as an example and curb to the clergy; and that the permission of teaching, which had been granted them, and of which they acquitted themselves with success, would be to the universities an object of emulation.

This great minister was not deceived. It cannot be denied that the Jesuits, and especially those of France, have produced a great number of useful works for facilitating to young people the study of letters; works, by which the universities themselves have profited, so as to produce, in their turn, similar works, and perhaps better still: the one and the other are known; and the impartial public has given them the favourable reception they merited.

Let us add (for we must be just) that no religious society, without exception, can boast so great a number of men famous in the sciences and in letters. The Mendicants, even at the time of their greatest lustre, were but schoolmen, the Benedictines only compilers, the other monks mere blockheads[3]. The Jesuits exercised themselves with success in every kind, eloquence, history, antiquities, geometry, literature both profound and agreeable: there is hardly any class of writers in which they count not men of the first merit: they have even had good French writers; an advantage of which no other order can boast; for this reason, that in order to write well in one’s own language, it is necessary to keep company with people of fashion, and that the Jesuits, by the nature of their functions, have been more dispersed throughout the world than others.