The persistency of the Duke of Choiseul carried the day at last; an edict of December, 1764, declared that “the Society no longer existed in France, that it would merely be permitted to those who composed it to live privately in the king’s dominions, under the spiritual authority of the local ordinaries, whilst conforming to the laws of the realm.”  Four thousand Jesuits found themselves affected by this decree; some left France, others remained still in their families, assuming the secular dress.  “It will be great fun to see Father Perusseau turned abbe,” said Louis XV. as he signed the fatal edict.  “The Parliaments fancy they are serving religion by this measure,” wrote D’Alembert to Voltaire, “but they are serving reason without any notion of it; they are the, executioners on behalf of philosophy, whose orders they are executing without knowing it.”  The destruction of the Jesuits served neither religion nor reason, for it was contrary to justice as well as to liberty; it was the wages and the bitter fruit of a long series of wrongs and iniquities committed but lately, in the name of religion, against justice and liberty.

Three years later, in 1767, the King of Spain, Charles III., less moderate than the government of Louis XV., expelled with violence all the members of the Society of Jesus from his territory, thus exciting the Parliament of Paris to fresh severities against the French Jesuits, and, on the 20th of July, 1773, the court of Rome itself, yielding at last to pressure from nearly all the sovereigns of Europe, solemnly pronounced the dissolution of the Order.  “Recognizing that the members of this Society have not a little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that for the welfare of Christendom it were better that the Order should disappear.”  The last houses still offering shelter to the Jesuits were closed; the general, Ricci, was imprisoned at the castle of St. Angelo, and the Society of Jesus, which had been so powerful for nearly three centuries, took refuge in certain distant lands, seeking in oblivion and silence fresh strength for the struggle which it was one day to renew.

The Parliaments were triumphant, but their authority, which seemed never to have risen so high or penetrated so far in the government of the state, was already tottering to its base.  Once more the strife was about to begin between the kingly power and the magistracy, whose last victory was destined to scarcely precede its downfall.  The financial embarrassments of the state were growing more serious every day; to the debts left by the Seven Years’ War were added the new wants developed by the necessities of commerce and by the progress of civilization.  The Board of Works, a useful institution founded by Louis XV., was everywhere seeing to the construction of new roads, at the same time repairing the old ones; the forced labor for these operations fell almost exclusively on the peasantry.  The Parliament of Normandy