70 Chapter IV
wave of anticlerical, antireligious, and general philosophe literature. It also, as often
in the past, took action against Jansenism. The importance of Jansenism in France
and Italy at this time has perhaps never been properly understood in the English-
speaking world. Jansenists, as they were called by their orthodox enemies, were
Catholics who inclined to a severe theology, and critized the opulence and worldli-
ness of the upper clergy. They had come into conflict with Rome, and been de-
clared heretics; hence they became critical of the centralization in Rome of power
in the Catholic church. The French parlements for centuries had also opposed the
growth of Roman jurisdiction in France; they were hence Jansenist in a popular or
sloganizing sense. They were certainly anti- Jesuit, and in 1762 had won a great
victory with the expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
The Assembly of the Clergy, in 1765, in its continuing attempt to suppress Jan-
senism, renewed its rule that no one might receive the sacraments unless he pre-
sented a certificate—the famous billet de confession—stating that he had been con-
fessed by a priest in good standing with the church. The Parlement of Paris
thereupon declared all the acts of the assembly null and void. The clergy ran to the
King, and the King quashed the action of the parlement. Few incidents better il-
lustrate the role of royal absolutism as arbiter between irreconcilables—or explain
the continuing popularity of absolutism in many quarters. As Voltaire put it:
“There were 50,000 madmen in Paris who did not know what country the Danube
or Elbe was in, who believed the universe to be shaken at its foundations by certifi-
cates of confession.” For the King, he went on, to command his subjects to stop
calling each other “innovators, Jansenists and semi- Pelagians was to command
fools to be wise.”^8 The matter is important, for Jansenism driven underground was
to have an influence during the Revolution, and because the church, by the mea-
sures it used to repress it, lost the sympathy of many people who cared nothing for
Jansenism.
In any case, the provincial parlements, which had been irked by the high-
handedness of the Parlement of Paris in taking the Fitz- James case away from
Toulouse, now all rallied to its support. All disliked clerical influence, and all ob-
jected to the abrupt annulment of an act of the Paris Parlement by the King.
Then came the affaire de Bretagne. Here as elsewhere the royal governor, the duc
d’Aiguillon, had run afoul of the local constituted bodies. An active administrator,
he had launched a great program to develop this still wild and backward province.
He projected a great system of roads to join Brest and the interior of the peninsula
to the main body of France. He therefore sought to conscript the peasants, who
were more dependent on their local seigneurs in Brittany than in other parts of
France, for labor in construction of roads and bridges. He wished to introduce the
corvée royale, by which, in other parts of France, peasants were required to spend a
certain number of days a year on the building or maintenance of highways. The
Estates of Brittany considered road- building to be under their own jurisdiction,
and were in any case dominated, as has been seen, by a swarm of ancient gentry
with little interest in internal improvements. The Estates resisted d’Aiguillon, and
8 Volt a i re , Oeuvres (1826), X XIX, 3, 6, Siècle de Louis XV, chap. 36; this chapter was first pub-
lished in 1768.