Part 1

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AN ACCOUNT OF THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JESUITS IN FRANCE.

By M. D’ALEMBERT.

Incorruptam fidem professis, nec amore quisquam, & fine odio dicendus est.

Tacit. Hist. ch. 1.

LONDON.

Printed for T. BECKET and P. A. De HONDT, near Surry-street in the Strand.

MDCCLXVI.

To M. • • • COUNSELLOR TO THE PARLIAMENT OF • • •.

Permit, Sir, an unknown, but zealous, citizen, an impartial historian of the Jesuits, to pay public homage to that truely philosophical patriotism which you have displayed in this affair. In exciting against the society the zeal of the magistrates, you have not neglected to fix their enlightened attention on all those men, who may have with this alien society any marks of resemblance, and who, arrayed in black, gray, or white, may acknowledge like it, in the very bosom of France, another country, and another sovereign.

You have shewn no less lights in making known to the sage Depositaries of the laws, all the Men of the party, whoever they be, all the fanaticks, whatever livery they wear, whether they invoke _Francis of Paris_, or _Francis of Borgia_, whether they maintain _predeterminating decrees, or congruous assistances_.

If the author of this writing had been able to ask you your opinions, his work would, without doubt, have gained greatly by it. May you, such as it is, grant it your suffrage, and receive it as a slender mark of the acknowledgement which religion, the state, philosophy, and letters owe to you.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The different pieces which have been published on the affair of the Jesuits (if we except therefrom the requisitories of the magistrates) breathe an animosity or fanaticism in those who have undertaken either to defend or attack the society. We may say of these historians, what Tacitus said of the historians of his time: _Neutris cura posteritatis, inter infensos vel obnoxios_: “None of them were influenced by any regard for posterity, being themselves among the exasperated or the obnoxious.” As the author of the following writing professes a pretty great indifference for quarrels of this sort, he has had no violence to do himself in order to tell the truth (so far at least as he has been able to come at the knowledge of it) with respect to the causes and the circumstances of this singular event: if he has sometimes told it with energy, he flatters himself at least that he has delivered it without bitterness, and he hopes that thus his work will not displease those, who like him are detached from any spirit of party or interest. He has even waited, before he published this writing, till peoples' minds should be no longer heated, in regard to the matter which is the object of it; he will lose thereby, without doubt, some readers, but the truth will gain by it, or at least be no loser.

The facts which are related here, are, for the most part, very well known in France: they are less so to foreigners, for whom we have proposed to write as well as for the French. The reflexions which have been to this historical account, may be useful to both, and perhaps still more to the French than to foreigners.

ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JESUITS IN FRANCE.

The middle of the century, in which we live, appears destined to form an æra, not only in the history of the human mind, by the revolution which seems to be preparing itself in our opinions, but also in the history of states and empires, by the extraordinary events of which we have successively been witnesses. In less than eight years we have seen the earth shaken, swallow up a part of Portugal, Spain, Africa, and Hungary, and terrify by its shocks several other nations; a war kindled from Lisbon to Petersbourg, for some almost uncultivated tracts in North-America; the system of Europe changing suddenly its appearance at the end of two centuries by the strict and unhoped-for union of the houses of France and Austria; the consequences of that union, all contrary to what it was natural to have expected from it; the king of Prussia withstanding alone five formidable powers leagued against him, and issuing from the bosom of the storm victorious and covered with glory; an emperor cast headlong from his throne; the king of Portugal assassinated; France terrifyed at a like attempt, and trembling for a life the most precious; lastly, the Jesuits, those men who were thought so powerful, so firmly established, so redoubtable, driven from the former of these two kingdoms, and destroyed in the second. This last event, which is, for certain, neither the most melancholy, nor the greatest of those which we have just recapitulated, is perhaps neither the least surprising, nor the least susceptible of reflexions. It is for philosophers to see it such as it is, to shew it such as it is to posterity, to make known to the sages of all nations, how passion and hatred have, without knowing it, assisted reason and justice in this unexpected catastrophe.

In order to explain myself with impartiality on the destruction of the Jesuits in France, the object of this treatise, we must begin very far back, and reascend to the very origin of this famous society, place in one point of view the obstacles which had been opposed to it, the progresses which it has made, the blows which it has given and received; lastly, the causes apparent and secret, which brought it to the brink of the precipice, and which have terminated by throwing it from thence.

It is somewhat above two hundred years since the society of Jesuits took birth. Its founder was a Spanish gentleman, who having had his brain heated by romances of chevalry, and afterwards by books of devotion, took it into his head to be the Don Quixote of the Virgin[1], to go and preach to infidels the christian religion which he knew nothing of, and to associate himself for that purpose with those adventurers who should think proper to join him.

It will be thought astonishing, without doubt, that an order, become so powerful and so celebrated, should have for its founder such a man. This founder was however wise enough to decline entering into the order of Theatins, which a cardinal, who some years after became pope, had just established a little before the Jesuits began to appear. Ignatius, in spite of all the opposition which his society experienced at its birth, chose rather to be the legislator of an institution than to subject himself to laws which were not of his making. It seems as if he foresaw, from that very time, the future grandeur of his order, and the small figure the other would make, though destined to be in our times the cradle of a pious prelate, raised from the bosom of that order (by an impenetrable Providence) to the first dignities of the state and of the church[2].

Ignatius had also the wit to perceive, that a society which made particular profession of devotion to the holy see, would find infallible support from the head of the Roman church, and by these means from the catholic princes, its dear and faithful sons; and that thus this society would triumph at length over the transitory obstacles which it might meet with at its origin. It was in this view that he gave to it those famous constitutions, since perfected, and always on the same plan, by two successors very superior to Ignatius, the two generals Lainez and Aquiviva, so celebrated in the annals of the Jesuits: the latter especially, intriguing, adroit, and full of great views, was on all these accounts very proper for the government of an ambitious society: to him it is indebted, more than to any other, for those regulations so well contrived and so wise, that we may style them the master-piece of the industry of human nature in point of policy, and which have contributed, during two hundred years, to the aggrandizement and glory of this order. These regulations, it is true, have ended in being the cause or the motive of the destruction of the Jesuits in France; but such is the fate of all human grandeur and power, it is in their very nature to grow worse and become extinct when they have arrived at a certain degree of greatness and lustre. The empire of the Assyrians, that of the Persians, the Roman empire itself, have disappeared, precisely for this very reason, because they were become too large and too powerful. These examples ought to console the Jesuits, if it be possible for Jesuitical pride to be consoled.

We cannot better compare this society, every where surrounded with enemies, and every where triumphant for the space of two centuries, than to the marshes of Holland, cultivated by obstinate labour, besieged by the sea, which threatens every instant to swallow them up, and perpetually opposing their dikes to that destructive element. Let these dikes be pierced but in one single place, Holland will be laid under water after so many ages of labour and of vigilance. This is what has happened to the society; its enemies have at last found out the weak part, and pierced its dike; yet those who had raised it with so much care and patience, those who had afterwards watched so long over its preservation, those who have cultivated, with so much success, the soil which was protected by this dike, merit nevertheless commendation on that account.

Scarce had the company of Jesus (for that is the name which it had taken), begun to shew itself in France, when it met with numberless difficulties in establishing itself there. The universities especially made the greatest efforts to expel these new comers; it is difficult to decide, whether this opposition does honour or discredit to the Jesuits who experienced it. They gave themselves out for the instructors of youth gratis; they counted already amongst them some learned and famous men, superior perhaps to those of whom the universities could boast: interest and vanity might therefore be sufficient motives to their adversaries, at least in these first moments, to seek to exclude them. We may recollect the like opposition which the Mendicant orders underwent from these very universities when they wanted to introduce themselves there; opposition founded on pretty nearly the same motives, and which ceased not but by the state into which these orders are fallen, now become incapable of exciting envy.

On the other side, it is very probable that the society, proud of that support which it found amidst so many storms, furnished arms to its adversaries by braving them; it seemed to shew itself, from this time, with that spirit of invasion which it has but too much displayed since, but which it has carefully covered at all times with the mask of religion, and of zeal for the salvation of souls. This desire of extending itself, and of domineering, appeared already on all sides: the society insinuated itself into the confidence of several sovereigns; it caballed at the courts of some others; it rendered itself formidable to the bishops, by the dependance which it affected on the court of Rome alone; in short, the more it aggrandized itself, the more it seemed to justify, by its credit and its intrigues, the rancour of its enemies against it. To govern the universe, not by force, but by religion, such appeared to have been the device of this society from its origin; a device which it has made appear further to proportion as its existence and its authority gained strength.

Never did it lose sight, either of this object, or of the means (as smooth as efficacious) which it was to employ in order to succeed in it. It is perhaps the only one of all the societies, as the house of Austria is the only one of all the powers of Europe, which has observed an uniform and constant policy; an inestimable advantage to societies and sovereign houses. Individuals only pass away, and are subject in that short space to a small circle of events, which by no means permit them to have any immutable system. Bodies and great houses subsist for a long time; and if they pursue always the same projects, the scene of the world, which, changes perpetually, brings on at last, soon or late, circumstances favourable to their views. We must, when once we have declared ourselves their enemy, either annihilate them entirely, or end in being their victim; so long as they have one gasp remaining, they cease not to be formidable. “You have drawn the sword against the Jesuits,” said a man of wit to a philosopher; “well, throw the scabbard into the fire.” But individuals, how numerous and animated soever they be, have very little force against a body: accordingly the Jesuits so decryed, so attacked, so detested, would subsist perhaps still with more lustre than ever, if they had not had for irreconcileable enemies other bodies still subsisting as well as them, and as constantly taken up with the project of exterminating them, as they have been with that of aggrandizing themselves.

The manner in which this society established itself in those places where it found the least resistance, discovers very plainly the project which we have attributed to them, _of governing mankind_, and of making religion subservient to that design.

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.