Part 5

Two capital errors which the Jesuits committed about that time at Versailles, began to shake their credit, and to prepare from afar their disaster. They refused, as we are assured, through motives of human respect, to take under their direction some powerful personages[14], who had no reason to expect from them a severity so singular in many respects. This indiscreet refusal, it is said, contributed to hasten their ruin by the very hands which they might have made their support: thus these men, who had been so often accused of loose morals, and who had maintained themselves at court by such morals alone, were undone the moment that they wanted (even to their own great regret) to profess severity; an abundant subject for reflexions, and an evident proof that the Jesuits, from the very first till that time, had taken the right way to support themselves, seeing they ceased to be, the moment that they deviated from it. It is added, that at the same time that they displeased the court by their scruples, they displeased it also by their intrigues. They laid, it was said, snares for some men in place, whose crime in their eyes was that of being wanting in devotion to the society, the only country which they know: the usual effect of these sorts of attacks is, to strengthen the credit which they do not overthrow; those who were the objects of the Jesuitical plots obtained but the more favour by that means.

While the Jesuits, rather dreaded than supported by the greater part 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!