The jubilee is a time of penitence and pardon, when the Pope accords plenary indulgence to all Catholics who submit to certain practices and assist at certain pious ceremonies.  The grand jubilee was formerly celebrated only once in a hundred years; afterwards it took place every fifty, and then every twenty-five years. 1825 was the time of its first celebration in the nineteenth century, and it drew to Rome that year more than ten thousand pilgrims.  The Pope had celebrated the close of it the 24th of December, 1825, but yielding to the prayers of several Catholic powers, he accorded to them, by special bulls, the privilege of celebrating the same solemnity in 1826.

The opening of the French jubilee took place February 15, 1826, at Notre-Dame de Paris.  The papal bull, borne on a rich cushion, was remitted to the Archbishop for public reading.  The nuncio chanted the Veni Creator.  Mass was said by the Cardinal, Prince of Croi, Archbishop of Rouen, Grand Almoner of France.  The relics of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul were borne around the Place du Parvis, in the midst of a cortege, in which were present the marshals of France, the generals, and the four princesses.  The order of the Archbishop of Paris prescribed four general processions.  The first took place with great pomp the 17th of March, 1826.  The King and the royal family, the princes and princesses of the blood, all the court, the marshals, a multitude of high functionaries, peers of France, deputies, officers, assisted at this ceremony in which appeared the Archbishop of Paris and his grand vicars, the metropolitan chapter, the pupils of all the seminaries in surplice, the priests of all the Paris churches with their sacerdotal armaments.  It was a veritable army of ecclesiastics that traversed the capital.  In the midst of the cortdge, the reliquary containing the relics of Saint Peter and Saint Paul was the object of the devotion of the faithful.  Surrounded by the Dauphin, the Duke of Orleans, the young Duke of Chartres, the great officers of the crown, of the Hundred Swiss, and of the body-guard, Charles X., in a costume half religious, half military, walked between a double hedge formed by the royal guard and the troops of the line.  The Place du Parvis-Notre-Dame was hung with draperies in fleur-de-lis, and all the streets to be traversed by the procession had been draped and sanded.  The first stop of the cortege was under the peristyle of the Hotel-Dieu, where an altar had been erected; the second, at the Church of the Sorbonne; the third, at that of Sainte Genevieve.  The two other processions had no less eclat, and their pauses being fixed in the churches of the principal parishes, they passed through the busiest and most populous quarters of Paris.