Villemain fancied that he had silenced the bishops by leaving them full authority over the little seminaries. He was quickly disillusioned. From the entire hierarchy individually and collectively came indignant repudiations of the measure and none was fiercer than the protest of Mgr. Affre, Archbishop of Paris. He denounced the university as "a centre of irreligion" and as perverting in the most flagrant manner the youth of France. "You reproach us," he said, "with disturbing the country by our protests. Yes, we have raised our voices, but the university has committed the crime. We may embarrass the throne for the present, but in the university are to be found all the perils of the future." The excitement was so intense that the government actually put the Abbé Combalot in jail for an article he wrote against the bill, and the whole hierarchy was threatened with being summoned before the council of state if they persisted in their opposition.
Montalembert was more than usually eloquent in the course of the parliamentary war. To Dupin who exhorted the peers to be "implacable" he replied: "In the midst of a free people, we, Catholics, refuse to be slaves; we are the successors of the martyrs and we shall not quail before the successors of Julian the Apostate; we are the sons of the Crusaders and we shall not recoil before the sons of Voltaire."
There were thirty-five or forty discourses and twelve or fifteen of the speakers described the Society as "the detested congregation," while the members who admitted the injustice and the odious tyranny of the proposed legislation made haste to assure their constituents that they had no use for the Jesuits. Cousin consumed three hours in assailing them; another member of the Dupin family saw "an appalling danger to the State in the fact that Montalembert could speak of them without cursing them, and that the peers could listen to him in silence, while he extolled the poisoners of the pious Ganganelli." Others insisted that the Jesuits had dragged the episcopate into the fight; even Guizot declared that "public sentiment inexorably repudiated the Jesuits and the other congregations, who are the champions of authority and the enemies of private judgment." The great man was not aware that the same reproach might be and is addressed to the Church.
The measure was finally carried by 85 against 51, but the heavy minority disconcerted the government and better hopes were entertained in the lower house to which Villemain presented his bill on June 10th. There it was left in the hands of Thiers, and it did not reach the Assembly, as a body, for an entire month. As the summer vacations were at hand, the projet de loi was dropped. Guizot then conceived the plan of appealing directly to the Pope to suppress the French Jesuits. He chose as his envoy an Italian named Rossi, who had been banished from Bologna, Naples and Florence as a revolutionist. After a short stay at Geneva, he made his way to France where, by Protestant influence, chiefly that of Guizot, he advanced rapidly to very distinguished and lucrative positions. The country was shocked to hear that an Italian and a Protestant should represent the nation at the court of the Pope from whose dominions he had been expelled, but Guizot intended by so doing, to express the sentiments of his government. It was an open threat. Rossi arrived in Rome and presented his credentials on April 11.
The French Jesuits who had been expelled from Portugal did not return to their native country; for Charles X, discovering at last that the Liberals, as they called themselves, had played him false, resolved to have a thoroughgoing monarchical government; and, to carry out his purpose, made the inept Polignac prime minister. On July 25 he signed four ordinances, the first of which restricted the liberty of the press; the second dissolved parliament; the third diminished the electorate to 25,000. The next day, the press was in rebellion; Charles abdicated and sailed for England. Of course the Revolution was anti-religious and the Jesuits were the first sufferers. House after house was wrecked and the scholastics were gathered together and hurried off to different countries in Europe. Thus ended the first sixteen years of the Society's existence in France, after the promulgation of the Bull of Pius VII "Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum."
The first successor of Father de Clorivière as vice-provincial was Father Simpson. France was made a province in 1820, and on the death of Father Simpson, the new General, Father Fortis, appointed Father Richardot, who at the end of his three years' term asked to be relieved. In 1814 Godinot was appointed, because none of those who had been proposed for the office had been more than ten years in the Society. Godinot himself had been admitted only in 1810. He had been vice-provincial of the Fathers of the Faith, and eleven years after his admission, was directing the scattered Jesuit establishments in Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Germany. In Switzerland, he had given the impulse to the college of Fribourg, which afterwards became so famous. It is worth noting that when he was a Father of the Faith he was a member of the community of Sion in Valais which enjoyed the exceptional privilege of being united as a body to the Society. Everywhere else each individual had to be admitted separately.
On April 14, the peers met to discuss a very exciting subject. A protest had come from Marseilles signed by 89 electors, against the books of Michelet and Quinet. Immediately Cousin was on his feet and ascribed it to the Jesuits. A few days later, another topic engrossed their attention. Dupin's "Manual of Ecclesiastical Law" had been condemned by Cardinal de Bonald, and more than sixty bishops concurred with him in prohibiting the book. At Rome, it was put on the Index, along with Cousin's "History of Philosophy." The anti-Catholics were in a fury, and on April 24, Cousin addressed the House. At the end of a three hour discourse which he began, unbeliever though he was, by protesting his respect for "the august religion of his country," he concluded by saying that "probably the action of the bishops was due to the Jesuits" and therefore he called for the enforcement of the law for their suppression. The question now arose, whether they could proceed to the suppression by force of law while the government actually had an envoy at Rome to dispose of the affair in a different fashion. It was decided that the non-authorized congregations would be suppressed, no matter what might be the outcome of Rossi's mission. Such a resolution was a gross diplomatic insult, but they cared little for that.
Meanwhile no news had come from Rossi. He had been left in the ante-chamber of the Pope until the Abbé de Bonnechose had succeeded in getting him an audience, a service which de Bonnechose had some difficulty in explaining when he was subsequently made a cardinal. A congregation of cardinals was named to discuss Guizot's proposition, and it was unanimously decided to reject it; and when Rossi asked what he had to do, he was told he might address himself to the General of the Society. To make it easy for him, Lambruschini, the papal secretary of state, proposed to Father Roothaan to diminish the personnel of some of the houses which were too much in evidence or remove them elsewhere. As for dissolution of the communities or banishment from France, not a word was said.
Immediately Rossi despatched a messenger to Paris with the account of what had been done, and twelve days afterwards the "Moniteur" stated: "The Government has received news from Rome that the negotiations with which M. Rossi was entrusted have attained their object. The congregation of the Jesuits will cease to exist in France and will, of its own accord, disperse. Its houses will be closed and its novitiates dissolved." On July 15, Guizot was asked by the peers to show the alleged documents. He answered that "they were too precious to give to the public." They have been unearthed since, and it turns out that Guizot's notice in the "Moniteur" does not correspond with the despatch of Rossi who merely said, "the Congregation is going to disperse;" and instead of saying "the houses will be closed," he wrote: "only a small number of people will remain in each house." In brief, the famous Guizot, so renowned for his integrity, prevaricated in this instance, and one of the worst enemies of everything Jesuitical, Dibidous, who wrote a "History of the Church and State in France from 1789 to 1870" declares bluntly that Guizot's note in the "Moniteur" was not only a lie but "an impudent lie."
A great many militant Catholics in France were indignant that Father Roothaan had not defied the government on this occasion. Yet probably those same perfervid souls would have denounced him, had he acted as they wished. He knew perfectly well that the government was only too anxious to get out of the mess in which it found itself, and the little by-play which was resorted to harmed nobody and secured at least a temporary respite.