is that Malesherbes or Choiseul was anxious to please the dauphin and the Jesuit party at Versailles.  The most probable explanation is that the authorities were eager to silence one at least of the three elements of opposition, the Jansenists, the lawyers, and the philosophers,—­who were then distracting the realm.  The two former were beyond their direct reach.  They threw themselves upon the foe who happened to be most accessible.

The government, however, had no intention of finally exterminating an enemy who might at some future day happen to be a convenient ally.  They encouraged or repressed the philosophers according to the political calculations of the moment, sometimes according to the caprices of the king’s mistress, or even a minister’s mistress.  When the clergy braved the royal authority, the hardiest productions were received with indulgence.  If the government were reduced to satisfy the clergy, then even the very commonplaces of the new philosophy became ground for accusation.  The Encyclopaedia was naturally exposed in a special degree to such alternations of favour and suspicion.[144] The crisis of 1759 furnishes a curious illustration of this.  As we have seen, in the spring of that year the privilege was withdrawn from the four associated booksellers, and the continuance of the work strictly prohibited.  Yet the printing was not suspended for a week.  Fifty compositors were busily setting up a book which the ordinance of the government had decisively forbidden under heavy penalties.

The same kind of connivance was practised to the advantage of other branches of the opposition.  Thirty years before this, the organ of the Jansenist party was peremptorily suppressed.  The police instituted a rigorous search, and seized the very presses on which the Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques was being printed.  But the journal continued to appear, and was circulated, just as regularly as before.[145]

The history of the policy of authority towards the Encyclopaedia is only one episode in the great lesson of the reign of Lewis XV.  It was long a common mistake to think of this king’s system of government as violent and tyrannical.  In truth, its failure and confusion resulted less from the arbitrariness of its procedure, than from the hopeless absence of tenacity, conviction, and consistency in the substance and direction of its objects.  And this, again, was the result partly of the complex and intractable nature of the opposition with which successive ministers had to deal, and partly of the overpowering strength of those Asiatic maxims of government which Richelieu and Lewis XIV. had invested with such ruinous prestige.  The impatience and charlatanry of emotional or pseudo-scientific admirers of a personal system blind them to the permanent truth, of which the succession of the decrepitude of Lewis XV. to the strength of his great-grandfather, and of the decrepitude of Napoleon III. to the strength of his uncle, are only illustrations.