The Jesuits in France

The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

August 24, 1572, was the date of the infamous Jesuit engineered St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. On that day, over 400 years ago, began one of the most horrifying holocausts in history. The glorious Reformation, begun in Germany on October 31, 1517, had spread to France—and was joyfully received. A great change had come over the people as industry and learning began to flourish, and so rapidly did the Truth spread that over a third of the French population embraced the Reformed Christian Faith.

In order to escape persecution in France, the Christians were intent on planting colonies in the New World but this was strictly forbidden by the Bull of Pope Alexander VI.

The gracious Queen Elizabeth encouraged French emigration to the New World and she gave financial aid to the persecuted French Protestants.

The Massacre happened at a time of great friendship and ecumenical goodwill between the French Protestants and the Vatican.

Catherine de' Medici was the mother in law of Mary Queen of Scots and the éminence grise behind the French throne for most of her life.

The Edict of Nantes

As a Huguenot, Henry was involved in the Wars of Religion before ascending to the throne in 1589. In 1598 he enacted the Edict of Nantes which guaranteed religious liberties to the Protestants and thereby effectively ended the civil war.

Henry was one of the most popular French kings; he showed great care for the welfare of his subjects and displayed an unusual religious tolerance for the time. In 1610, he was murdered by a Jesuit fanatic named Francis Travail.

The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

King Henry VI granted religious tolerance to his French Protestant subjects in 1589. That edict was revoked by Louis XIV—the Sun King—in 1685.

Only 4 years after the Glorious Revolution in England, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots were forced to flee France leading to the ruin of the country.

The king's wife—Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon—had a Jesuit confessor who urged her to pressure her husband to revoke the Edict of Nantes. This led to further persecution of the Protestants, and since they were the best workers and craftsmen in the country, French industry was totally destroyed.

The Jesuits Seven Years' War (1756-1763) or the First World War!!

The Jesuits were determined to fulfill the Bull of Pope Alexander VI and eliminate both the English . . . and French . . . from the New World. Jesuits in disguise in the English and French governments actually started a war between England and France called the Seven Years' War or the French and Indian Wars. The French call it the War of Conquest because they lost control of Canada.

The first shots of this worldwide conflict in the New World were fired by a youthful George Washington, who was sent on an expedition against the French in the Ohio country, a region claimed by Virginia. Great Britain declared war on France in May, 1756, and eventually the conflict spread to the whole world. Almost a million people died before a peace treaty was signed in 1763.

Incredible as it may seem, the Spanish ended up supplanting the French in the Louisiana Territory. This came to pass even though Spain fought with France against England!!

By 1762, France knew that she had lost the war. On Nov. 3, 1762, French King Louis XV signed a secret treaty with King Carlos III of Spain, giving him control of the Louisiana Territory. It was called the Treaty of Fountainebleau.

Protestant England was victorious in the Seven Years' War and had a golden opportunity to evict Spain from the New World for good. The charter for Virginia issued to Sir Walter Raleigh by Queen Elizabeth stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean.

Instead, she gave Spain control of the vast Louisiana Territory. Here is a brief quote from the Treaty of Paris signed in 1763:

George the Third, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick and Lunenbourg, Arch Treasurer and Elector of the Holy Roman Empire; the Most Serene and Most Potent Prince, Lewis the Fifteenth, by the grace of God, Most Christian King; and the Most Serene and Most Potent Prince, Charles the Third, by the grace of God, King of Spain and of the Indies, after having laid the foundations of peace in the preliminaries signed at Fontainebleau the third of November last; and the Most Serene and Most Potent Prince, Don Joseph the First, by the grace of God, King of Portugal and of the Algarves, after having acceded thereto, determined to compleat, without delay, this great and important work.

The war was a disaster for France and King Louis XV knew that the Jesuits were the ringleaders in that conflict. The king was eager to ban the firebrands from his kingdom . . . but fearful because of a Jesuit assassination attempt on his life in 1757.

King Louis had a beautiful and brilliant mistress named Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson Marquise (later Duchesse) de Pompadour, also known as Madame de Pompadour.

Madame de Pompadour supported the king's able minister for foreign affairs named Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, and together they engineered the downfall of the Jesuits in France and the other Bourbon kingdoms of Spain, Portugal, the Two Sicilies, Parma, Naples etc., etc.

The first attack on the Jesuits was made by the abbé Chauvelin on April 27, 1761, who demanded that Parlement suppress them:

On April 27, 1761, the abbé Chauvelin, one of the most radical members of parlement, denounced the Jesuits as the opponents of good order, ecclesiastical discipline, and the maxims of the kingdom. 'As a Christian, a citizen, a Frenchman, a subject of the King and a magistrate,' the abbé cried, 'is it not necessary to examine the institution and the régime of the Jesuits? That is what I ask you, Messieurs, to consider.' The Jesuits were already unpopular, unjustly suspected of complicity with the would-be assassin Damiens, of foreign intrigue, a fifth column, out of the state's control. When parlement, in its verdict on May 8, demanded that the society pay one-and-a-half million livres to their creditors, there was wild enthusiasm in the streets of Paris. Next, parlement appointed a commission to review the whole question of the Jesuits position in French society. (Algrant, Madame de Pompadour, p, 267).

This was followed by further edicts until the king finally banished them from France entirely at the end of November 1764.

Pope Clement XIV banned the Jesuit Order by a perpetual decree!!

The French king, through his minister for foreign affairs Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, FORCED the Pope to dissolve the Jesuits order entirely in the dominions of the Bourbon kings.

On July 21, 1773, this "infallible" Pope banned the Jesuit order by a perpetual decree never to be rescinded. It cost him his life as he was given the cup of Borgia shortly thereafter and died a horrible lingering death:

And to this end a member of the regular clergy, recommendable for his prudence and sound morals, shall be chosen to preside over and govern the said houses; so that the name of the Company shall be, and is, for ever extinguished and suppressed. (Bull of Suppression of Pope Clement XIV).

The banished Spanish Jesuits ended up on the island of Corsica!!

Even before the Bull of Clement was issued, the Jesuits were suppressed by King Charles III of Spain. That enlightened monarch was a foe of the Jesuits and the Spanish Inquisition.

The king of Spain used great secrecy and ordered that nobody was to divulge the planned expulsion of the Jesuits under pain of death:

When all measures were ready, despatches were sent from Madrid to all the governors of all the Spanish possessions of Africa, Asia, America, and throughout all the peninsula. These despatches, signed by the king, and counter-signed by D'Aranda, were sealed with three seals. On the second envelope was written, 'Under pain of death, you shall not open this despatch but on the 2d April 1767, towards the closing of the day.' The orders to be executed in the different places, on the 2d of April, were all of the same tenor. The alcaldes were enjoined, on the severest penalties (Crétineau says on pain of death) immediately to enter the establishments of the Jesuits armed, to take possession of them, to expel the Jesuits from their convents, and to transport them within twenty-four hours as prisoners to such ports as were designated. The fathers were to embark instantly, leaving their papers under seal, and carrying away with them only a breviary, a purse, and some apparel. The orders were executed everywhere with the utmost rigour, and six thousand Jesuits were very soon floating at the same time on the waste ocean on their way to the coast of Italy. (Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, pp. 355-356).

The Papal States refused to allow those sons of LIEola to land and they finally found a refuge on the island of Corsica:

Torrigiani obeyed Ricci's injunction to the letter. When after some days sailing the first vessels arrived before Civita Vecchia, they were received by cannon shot. The poor Jesuits, who thought they were near the end of their sufferings, and had smiled at the sight of the promised land, were furious when they saw themselves rejected from a country in which they knew that their General had the utmost influence, and loudly accused him of being the author of all their miseries. The Spanish commander, not wishing to employ violence, and to land by force of arm, coasted away towards Leghorn and Genoa, but there too they were refused a landing. A similar fate was reserved for them on their first approach to Corsica; and only after having been for six long months at the mercy of the winds and waves, were those unfortunate monks, decimated by illness, fatigue, and old age, permitted to disembark in Corsica, lately ceded by Genoa to France, and where Paoli at that same moment had begun to fight for independence. (Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, p. 358).

The Jesuits—who had taken a vow of poverty—were fabulously rich but the Spanish government found nothing in their monasteries; they must have seen the handwriting on the wall and hidden the money beforehand.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the island of Corsica!!

It so happens that the man who shook the world for 20 years was born on Corsica in the year 1769. His name: Napoleon Bonaparte.

The world was told that Carlo Maria Bonaparte was the father of Napoleon. He could not possible be the REAL father. The Jesuits were famous or rather infamous for seducing the wives of kings and rulers in the confessional. The offspring of such unions were often passed of as legitimate children.

This was plainly the case in the birth of Napoleon as his subsequent career plainly reveals. The war loving Napoleon declared war on all the Bourbon kings that had banished the Jesuits. He tried to bring England to her knees and invaded Russia in 1812. He finally restored the Jesuits in 1814.

Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French in 1804

In the short interval of 40 year since the banning of the Jesuits, there was a total of 4 Popes. Finally in 1800, a Pope was "elected" that would be favorable to Napoleon and his Jesuits. Pius VII traveled to Paris for Napoleon's coronation in 1804.

Nothing seemed to stand in Napoleon's way and his ambition knew no bounds. He wanted to make himself master of all of Europe, so in 1812, he launched his disastrous invasion of Russia.

On June 18, 1815, the Battle of Waterloo was fought in which Napoleon was defeated and forced into permanent exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. He died there on May 5, 1821.

Pope Pius VII removed the perpetual ban of his predecessor!!

In 1801, Pope Pius VII signed a Concordat with Napoleon Bonaparte and crowned him Emperor of France in 1804.

"On Sunday, the 7th of August 1814, Pius VII, went in state to the church of the Gesù, celebrating himself the mass before the altar consecrated to Loyola; heard a second mass, immediately after which he caused to be read and promulgated the bull by which the Society of Jesus was re-established according to the ancient rules" (Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, p. 439).

In a Papal brief issued on August 7, 1814, this "infallible" Pope contradicted a previous "infallible" Pope:

"By the same brief, we received the congregation of the Company of Jesus under our immediate protection and dependence, reserving to ourselves and our successors the prescription of everything that might appear to us proper to consolidate, to defend it, and to purge it from the abuses and corruptions that might be therein introduced; and for this purpose we expressly abrogated such apostolical constitutions, statutes, privileges, and indulgences, granted in contradiction to these concessions, especially the apostolic letters of Clement XIV., our predecessor, which begun with the words Dominus ac Redemptor Noster, only in so far as they are contrary to our brief, beginning Catholicae and which was given only for the Russian empire." (Bull of Restoration of Pope Pius VII).

The Napoleonic dynasty

Even after the demise of Bonaparte, his dynasty continued to rule many of the countries of Europe. Here are just 2 of the Bonapartes who played a major role in world events.

Charles Joseph Bonaparte was a grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte (the youngest brother of the French emperor Napoleon I), and attorney general in the Roosevelt administration from 1906 to 1909.

He founded the Bureau of Inquisition which later became know as the "Federal" Bureau of Islam or the FBI. He also founded an organization called the American Protective League which spied on patriotic people who exposed Rome's activities. People confused it with the patriotic U.S. Protective Association or the APA.

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Copyright © 2008 by Niall Kilkenny

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