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.
Accordingly the Portugueze minister availed himself dexterously
of the imputation laid to the charge of some of these fathers, of
having advised, directed, and absolved the assassins, for causing
all the Jesuits to be driven out of the kingdom: they were sent to
their general, who, it is said, not knowing what to do with these
new-comers, left them to perish with hunger and want on board the very
vessels which brought them.
M. de Carvalho, when he expelled the Jesuits, caused three of them to
be arrested, who had been declared guilty; but he was not powerful
enough to procure the Jesuit Malagrida to be put to death, though
he passed for the most criminal. The Portugueze populace, ignorant,
superstitious, and full of Romish maxims, would not have suffered a
religious to be delivered up to the secular arm for a crime deserving
of the greatest punishments, because that crime was committed only
against a layman: they were obliged, in order to convict Malagrida of
a crime against God, which should render him worthy of death, to go
and seek out some silly books of devotion, the productions of weakness
and of madness, written by that unhappy Jesuit: it was solely for
these rhapsodies that he was condemned to the fire of the inquisition,
not as guilty of high treason, but as a heretick. They reproached him
with visions and miracles, of which he had had the folly to boast;
they reproached him particularly with having been able, at the age of
seventy-five years, to divert himself all alone in his confinement as
a young novice would have done; which might also have been looked upon
as a kind of miracle, truely worthy of being counted among the others.
It was upon motives of this sort that he was condemned to a most cruel
death: the arrêt did not even make mention of the parricide of which
he was accused; and as M. de Voltaire most excellently remarks, an
excess of severity was joined to an excess of folly.
It was matter of pleasantry to observe the embarrassment into which
the Jesuits and the Jansenists were thrown, on account of this victim
sacrificed to the inquisition. The Jesuits, devoted till that time
to this bloody tribunal, dared no longer take its part, since it had
burnt one of their society: the Jansenists who abhorred it, began
to think it just, from the moment that it had condemned a Jesuit
to the flames. They assured us, and asserted it in print, that the
inquisition was not what they had thought it till then, and that
justice was done there _with much wisdom and deliberation_. Some
magistrates also, till then sworn enemies of the inquisition, seemed
at this juncture to soften a little towards it. One of the first
tribunals in the kingdom condemned to the fire a writing, in which
the Portugueze inquisition was very ill treated on account of the
punishment of Malagrida: and in the declaration which condemned this
writing to the fire, they bestowed many commendations, not wholly
on the inquisition itself, but on the _scrupulous examination_ in
consequence of which the Jesuit was delivered up to the secular arm.
On account of this charge of regicide, so often renewed against the
Jesuits, we shall relate here a curious anecdote. It is astonishing,
that among so many pieces which have called these fathers _assassins_,
not one has made mention of a circumstance indeed little known, but
which seems to afford a fine light to their enemies. At Rome, in their
church of St. Ignatius, they have caused to be represented in the four
corners of the cupola (painted about a hundred years since by one
of their fathers) subjects drawn from the Old Testament; and these
subjects are so many assassinations, or at least murders, committed
in the name of God by the Jewish people: Jael, who, impelled by the
Divine Spirit, drives a nail into Sisera’s head, to whom she had
offered and given hospitality; Judith, who, conducted by the same
guide, cuts off the head of Holofernes, after having seduced and made
him drunk; Sampson, who massacres the Philistines by order of the
Almighty; lastly, David, who slays Goliah. At the top of the cupola,
St. Ignatius, in a glory, darts out flames on the four quarters of
the world, with these words of the New Testament; “I came to set fire
to the earth; and what would I but that it be kindled?” Methinks, if
any thing could make known the spirit of the society, with respect to
the murderous doctrine that is imputed to them, these pictures would
be a stronger proof of it than all the passages which are related
from their authors, and which are common to them with many others:
but the truth is, that these principles, supported in appearance by
the scriptures ill understood, are the principles of the fanaticks
of all ages; and we may add, of the greater part of any sect, when
they believe it to be their interest to propagate them, and that they
can preach them in safety. To them an heretick and infidel prince
is a tyrant, and of course a man whom religion and reason order us
equally to rid ourselves of. The only thing which the Jesuits ought
to be reproached with, is that of having forsaken these abominable
principles later than others, after having more strongly maintained
them; of making particular profession of obedience to the pope, and
of a stricter obedience than the other orders; of being, on this
account, so much the more to be dreaded in the state, the more they
are in credit there, the more dispersed, the more addicted to the
ecclesiastical function, and above all to the instruction of youth;
of never having expressed themselves frankly and clearly (when they
have not been forced to it) on the maxims of government, touching
the infallibility of the pope, and the independence of kings; and
of having given too much room to understand, that they looked upon
these maxims as mere local opinions, which might be maintained either
pro or con, according to the country in which they found themselves
placed. We may say with truth, and without passion, that this manner
of thinking breaks forth in all their works, and in those even of the
French Jesuits, who have wanted to appear less Romish with respect to
our maxims, than their brethren of Italy or Spain.
We must not believe, however, that this submission to the pope, with
which the society are so often reproached, is with them an irrevocable
doctrine. While the Jesuits preached it in Europe with so much zeal,
we may say with madness, to effect the acceptance of the bull which
they had drawn up, they opposed in China the decrees which the
sovereign pontiffs launched out against them on account of the Chinese
ceremonies: they went even so far, as to call in question the pope’s
authority to decide on subjects of that nature. So far it is true,
that their pretended devotion to the pope was only, as we may say, by
way of _inventorial benefit_, and on the tacit condition of favouring
their pretensions, or at least of not prejudicing their interests.
However this be, the parallel which has just been made of the doctrine
of the Jesuits with the other orders, is, in my opinion, the true
point of view from which we should have set out in their destruction.
Among so many magistrates, who have written long examinations on
the affair of the society, M. de la Chalotais, attorney-general of
the parliament of Bretagne, appears more than any other to have
considered this affair like a statesman, a philosopher, an enlightened
magistrate, and one disengaged of all spirit of hatred and of party.
He has not amused himself with proving laboriously and weakly, that
the other monks were better than the Jesuits: he has penetrated
farther and deeper: his march to the fight has been more frank and
firm. “The monastick spirit,” said he, “is the scourge of states: of
all those whom this spirit animates, the Jesuits are the most hurtful,
because they are the most powerful; it is then with them that we must
begin to shake off the yoke of that pernicious race.” It seems as if
this illustrious magistrate had taken for his device the following
verses of Virgil[16].
Ductoresque ipsos primùm, capita alta ferentes
Cornibus arboreis, sternit; tum vulgus, & omnem
Miscet agens telis nemora inter frondea turbam.
The war which he has made with so much success upon the society, is
only the signal of the examination to which he appears desirous of
having the constitutions of the other orders submitted, with a proviso
of preserving those, which on such examination shall be judged useful.
There are even some particular communities, for example, that of the
fraternity called _Ignorantins_, whom he points out expressly to the
vigilance of the magistrates, as having already gained silently much
ground: however, I know not whether I am mistaken, men who bear a name
so little formed to command respect, ought by no means to flatter
themselves with succeeding one day to the Jesuits, among a people with
whom names are apt to give law: it is necessary, in order to have in
France success and enemies, to begin by calling one’s-self otherwise.
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.