Campbell P. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745

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persons present and the diversity of dress’.

The Chancellor made a speech which

was considered ‘fairly harsh on the company’ in which he recalled the extent of the

King’s authority over their posts and their persons. Then the declaration of 18

August was read and declared registered. Notwithstanding the evident

determination of the ministry, the very next day the parlement remained

intransigent, debated the declaration and decided to represent to the King that it

was unable to conform to its provisions.

It was Delpech de Méréville, a grand’chambrier and a Jansenist, who proposed

disobedience towards the lit de justice. ‘This arrêté has been applauded as an heroic

and Roman act by the whole Jansenist public, who demand nothing less than

formal disobedience.’

The motion was passed by a majority of only seven votes,

and several against it had not been counted because of the rule on family

relationships. Thus a bare majority of the magistrates was prepared to disobey the

King and prolong the crisis. The magistrates began the judicial vacation without

having appointed a chambre de vaction to take care of the little business that came up

during the holidays.

The government was not surprised. The response was already drawn up, Chauvelin

told d’Argenson.

The royal reply was not only swift but it was also harsh– 139

magistrates of the enquêtes and requêtes were exiled in groups to small provincial towns,

although six were exiled individually to particularly undesirable spots. Delpech had

been spared in order to avoid antagonising the grand ‘chambre. A heated debate in council

had taken place over whether to punish the grand’chambre also, but by a narrow margin

it was decided to give them time to form a chambre de vacation themselves. By having a

secret meeting with the acting First President beforehand (Le Peletier), Villars ensured

that a royal order to do so would not be disobeyed.

The magistrates’ exile lasted from 7 September until the date on which duty

would normally have been resumed, 12 November 1732, when the magistrates

were recalled by lettres de cachet. It was an exile which inconvenienced the ministry

very little because the courts would not have been in session, but it greatly

inconvenienced the magistrates who could not supervise their estates in that time of

harvest. They were allowed to return to their estates only if they wrote a letter of

complete submission to the ministry, which only about ten were prepared to do.

During the autumn the procureur général, Joly de Fleury, negotiated with the

magistrates, especially Thomé and Dupré, in order to reach a compromise

solution.

A ministerial memoir cogently expressed the reason for the recall of the

magistrates. The only course for the ministry, declared its author, was to issue an

arrêt revoking the letters of exile and declaring that the declaration was annulled. It

could be argued, he continued, that this would compromise royal authority, but in

fact the declaration had already been found useless in the eyes of the public. If this

course were not adopted during the vacation, with the minimum of commotion,

then more problems would arise. With the enquêtes still in exile the lawyers would

not return to duty. If, after their recall, the enquêtes still wanted to remonstrate, they

could be intimidated with a lettre de jussion. In fact, he argued, there was little doubt

that the arrêt would be obeyed, because most counsellors were even then only

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awaiting an opportunity to return to work without loss of honour. A formal order

would serve their purpose admirably.

In practice, the solution was designed to safeguard the honour of the monarch

much more than this author had suggested. The counsellors were recalled on the

tacit undertstanding that the declaration would be suspended. No business in the

courts usually began before 1 December and shortly after that the parlement sent

representatives to Versailles and a scene was enacted. In order to heighten the effect

of royal majesty and clemency, the deputies were kept waiting for a whole day

before they could see the King, but in the meantime they were excellently and

cordially treated to hospitality by Fleury, Chauvelin and Daguesseau. At the royal

audience the next day the First President humbly begged for the withdrawal of the

declaration and promised obedience. After a suitable interval for consideration, the

King let it be known that it would be suspended, provided that the parlement kept

to the promise of good behaviour. It was not to do so, of course, in 1733, 1735 and

1737, but this was nevertheless the end of the present crisis.

The Parisian populace and some of the younger judges regarded this as a victory for

the parlement, and some historians have upheld the same conclusion, claiming that the

solution was damaging to royal prestige: the ministry had been forced to bend. The

crisis might thus be neatly squeezed into the old thesis of a decline of absolute monarchy

after the spendours of Louis XIV. These arguments are of doubtful validity. Although

the declaration was used tactically by the ministry, its promulgation had ensured that in

the struggle over Unigenitus the ministry would cede no ground. The suspension of the

declaration was only a return to the status quo ante and did not represent a victory for the

courts in their fight against evocations or clerical jurisdiction. Barbier noted a variety of

opinions but the one which is rarely quoted is the most accurate: ‘Lastly, those who are

sensible and open-minded look upon this as plastering over the cracks, because the basis

of the quarrel, which is Jansenism, still remains’.

The parlement had not been defeated, nor had it won a victory over royal policy.

It had managed to preserve its legal jurisdiction, but had not been able to re-

establish its sole right to decide on theological disputes. The next decade would,

however, see the ministry turn this ambiguous outcome into a victory. The

following chapter will explore how this was done. But before moving on, it will be

useful to reflect on what can be established about the behaviour of the courts as a

result of the close analysis of this crisis.

* * *

By setting the specific conflicts of 1730–2 between the crown and the parlement in

the wider context of the politics in which it occurred, an extremely complex

situation has been revealed. Concern for jurisdiction and commitment to corporate

honour, stirred up by religious faction and supported by excitable youth, led to

confrontation which became locked into a process of escalation, a ritual of bluff and

counter-bluff, which all combined to produce a crisis in crown-parlement relations

in 1732. Failures of management, particularly by the First President but also by the

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royal council, exacerbated tensions with the result that although divided in opinion

over how far to carry their protests, the magistrates displayed their traditional

corporate solidarity against the royal council. It must be emphasised that the

transition from a formal protest against the declaration of 24 March 1730 to strikes

and insubordination was produced by a variety of factors. This list of elements

differs greatly from those usually referred to in modern historiography, and it is

interesting to dwell upon the implications of this analysis for a wider understanding

of the parlement.

We have seen that the role of the parti janséniste was crucial. This was the

formative period for the parti, and the tactics of the 1730s were the same ones that

were to be used successfully in the 1750s. Recent scholars, although recognising the

existence of a Jansenist clique in the parlement,

have failed to uncover exactly how

the Jansenists were able to succeed in animating their colleagues not only from 1730

to 1732, but also from 1749 to 1762. What were the motives of the majority of the

judges who supported them? How was it that the efforts of the Jansenists were so

successful in fomenting opposition, when the vast majority of the magistrates were

not Jansenists? Were the magistrates willing to follow their lead, and even prepared

to provoke a full-scale political crisis, simply because they sympathised with the

religious struggle; or was it because they were Gallican; or because they were

advocates of a ‘parlementary constitutionalism’? One aim of this study has been to

show that in the complex world of crown-parlement relations, monocausal

explanations do no justice to the evidence. Let us therefore reconsider these other

options.

The idea of religious sympathy put forward by Lucien Goldmann, was based on

the idea that the adoption of the Jansenist theology was a case of sublimated

opposition to the ‘absolutist’ or despotic tendencies in Louis XIV’s monarchy.

This thesis can be regarded as unsatisfactory on several counts: if Jansenism can be

located principally in the judicial milieu, it is because it required a highly literate

culture to be understood; even so, fewer than 10 per cent of the judges were

Jansenists, most had been educated by Jesuits and many were dévots;

and there is

no evidence of non-Jansenist magistral support for either the miracles or the

convulsionary movement. In a wider sense, in the wake of Hamscher’s work,

historians no longer believe that Louis XIV repressed the Parisian parlementaires,

rather he managed them, so they presumably had no need of religious sublimation;

Goldmann’s association of (noble) parlementaire resistance with a rise of bourgeois

opposition now seems a very doubtful proposition. The other two possibilities

deserve lengthier reconsideration.

Clearly, parlementary Gallicanism was an element in the Jansenists’ success—but

the answer is not a simple one, and its role was not nearly as great as has been

suggested. It has often been assumed that the Jansenists were able to appeal to the

Gallicanism of the magistrates who were thus in a permanent state of readiness to

react to an abuse of papal, royal or clerical power.

Gallicanism, in the parlement’s

sense of bolstering up temporal jurisdiction against ecclesiastical rivals, was

undoubtedly a factor in a number of crises; yet there is no evidence to suggest that

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the magistrates always rallied to the Gallican cause in religious disputes where their

jurisdiction was not in question. Even when it was, they were often prepared to

accept compromise and there was no really determined or intransigent

parlementary resistance on an important scale in 1735 or 1737, not until 1749 and

the 1750s, nor had there been any in the 1690s when the issues were the same—so

the question remains of why opposition was united from 1730 to 1732. It is not my

intention to challenge the view that ‘Gallicanism’ was important to the magistrates,

but rather to raise the question of how strong a cause of opposition it was in relation

to other identifiable motives: in other words, to ascertain its place in their ideology

or general outlook, and to ask what precisely was its nature.

The declaration of Unigenitus as a law of state was itself enough to generate

Gallican hostility to Article Ninety-one, and so problems at least were inevitable

in 1730, it could be argued. But this argument does not explain the scale of the

crisis, because many judges only wanted to remonstrate, not mount a sustained

challenge to royal legislative authority. If Gallicanism alone could explain the

opposition, we should have to infer that if the Jansenist magistrates had not led

the opposition, others, equally as intense but simply Gallican, would have. The

evidence from the secret registers indicates that this is by no means certain, for not

a single ardent Gallican who was not also a Jansenist is identifiable. Furthermore,

the thesis of Gallican motivation assumes that the root cause of the crisis was the

1730 declaration, when it has been shown that several other factors were equally

important—especially evocations from 1729, the constant denunciation of pastoral

writings and theses, and the subsequent judicial politics of 1731–2. During these

events non-Jansenist Gallicans were not an identifiable group in the parlement,

and if all the other judges were Gallican they were certainly not vocal. The only

people who seemed to discover abuses of clerical authority in theses, pastoral

letters and mandements, were the Jansenists. It was always a Jansenist magistrate

who denounced a new thesis in the Sorbonne or requested than an appeal comme

d’abus be accepted by the courts. Without this perpetual harrying the other

magistrates might not have reacted so vigorously. Is there any reason to regard

their ‘Gallicanism’ as a sufficient cause?

Perhaps the concept of Gallicanism itself should be re-examined. Gallicanism is

a term which is difficult to define but it is usually regarded as ‘sentiment’, as if it

were akin to a nationalist or religious attitude. The question of how far the

magistrates were motivated by principles or theories, and how far their actions were

simply the product of a magistrate’s duty to make judgements in accordance with

previously registered royal legislation, is of some importance. Its precise meaning is

subject to a number of different definitions.

There was an episcopal, a royal and a

parlementary Gallicanism, and although all of these had views on the extent of

papal power in France, the precise attitudes were the product of, and were

conditioned by, different considerations. Royal Gallicanism was determined to

defend ecclesiastical patronage from papal interference, but it also had a strong

tactical element, which was lacking in the parlementary view. One of the strongest

elements in parlementary Gallicanism was the secular courts’ quarrel with the

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ecclesiastical courts. It is possible that parlementary gallicanism was merely a series

of judgements, some of which were motivated by a certain attitude to Rome and

others not, which has been rationalised by historians into a more coherent doctrine

than it actually was. For the 1730s it is best regarded as adherence to a set of rulings

which had been accepted by the courts and which, partly as a result of frequent

quarrels of jurisdiction with the church, they insisted on enforcing. Thus, for the

magistrates, Gallicanism was not so much a reflection of a sense of nationalism

about the French church, nor an exaggerated royalism (being ‘plus royaliste que le

roi’) as of legal particularism. To say as much is to put the magistrates back into their

true context in a corporate and particularist society. But it is also to use Gallicanism

in a very different sense, stressing jurisdictional not political concerns.

In the historiography of the parlement the thesis of Gallican motivation is

intimately connected to the idea that the parlement had a political role in France,

and that its political militancy was increasing in response to arbitrary government.

Basing his position on Mousnier’s premise that France had an unwritten

constitution, Shennan argues that the magistrates ‘were not interested in the

religious issues involved, but they were concerned with the constitutional ones’. In

this view, the magistrates’ opposition was rooted in their image of themselves as ‘the

upholder of the established law, the enemy of arbitrary government’ and their

primary concern was the defence of the sovereignty of the law.

The parlement

was, it has been suggested, attempting to defend a certain concept of the

monarchical state based upon a long political tradition of free speech and the right

to draw attention to the laws when they had been forgotten.

A significant nuance

can be added to this picture, however. Although the courts used this argument on

many occasions, it was usually in the context of its own interests.

The primary source that seems to confirm the idea of the magistrates’ political

motivation is more ambiguous than might be thought. The Flammermont edition

of the remonstrances, on which historians have usually drawn to the exclusion of

other evidence, lends itself easily to misinterpretation on two grounds. First, the

editorial summaries of the circumstances which led to their drafting omit so much

of the immediate historical context as to be somewhat misleading. The judicial

discourse is not set in its political and institutional context.

The summaries make

little or no use of the kind of informal evidence on the context that was actually

printed in an appendix on the confrontation of 1750–1, and which shows, for

example, that a motion passed as one proposed by an independent voice had

actually been drawn up by four Jansenists.

Second, the mere fact that so many

legal statements made over a long period are juxtaposed encourages a more

theoretical interpretation of motives. Thus it has been tempting to interpret the

broad arguments contained in them as the prime cause of opposition, to focus on

the language rather than the context, and to forget that most of the remonstrances

(excluding those on financial issues) were concerned to defend a jurisdiction which

the mass of magistrates were anxious to preserve. The fact that the rhetoric of the

courts was increasingly outspoken should not obscure the fact that in practice its

concerns were more traditional.

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273

A very careful reading of the remonstrances up to the 1770s confirms this view.

Many of them are rather moderate, and the least moderate, such as those of 1753

and 1765, were heavily influenced if not actually written by Jansenists.

The main

argument of the remonstrances of 9 January 1731 was the conservation of appeals

comme d’abus.

On 25 July 1731, after a lengthy résumé of the affair, the

remonstrances came to their main point, which was that even the edict of 1695 did

not envisage depriving the parlement of appeals comme d’abus. They then argue that

in defending its own jurisdiction the parlement was defending the King’s own

rights.

On 3 September 1731, their argument was that if the proper legal forms

had not been observed in an ecclesiastical case it was only right that the parlement

should use an appeal comme d’abus.

On 4 August 1732, the remonstrances written

by Portail trot out all the usual reasons for not depriving the courts of appeals comme

d’abus and for allowing the magistrates to deliberate ecclesiastical matters again, and

even assert that ‘it is not the rights that are its own that your parlement is claiming,

it is your very authority that it is trying to maintain’, only to say a few lines further

on that ‘it is the most ancient and most august privileges of your parlement that we

dare to reclaim today’.

For these years it is as easy to find a defence of jurisdiction

in the remonstrances, buttressed sometimes but not always by theoretical

arguments on the observance of laws and the historic role of the parlement, as it is

to find a theory of the defence of the constitution. When constitutional claims were

made in the remonstrances, it was on occasions when thejansenist, or later

thepatriote, minority was able to gain the support of colleagues on jurisdictional

issues.

It was not by exploiting jurisdictional issues that the parlement took the

opportunity to involve itself in the defence of the constitution, it was by

constitutional arguments that the parlement chose to defend its jurisdiction.

It is nevertheless possible to find one other wide explanatory factor which does

accord with the evidence. The foremost concern of the majority of the magistrates

was the defence of their corporate and legal privileges. In this, the detailed study of

the confrontation from 1730 to 1732 has revealed a pattern of motivation that seems

to fit with reassessment of the earlier conflicts in the seventeenth century.

In the

crisis of 1730–2, the debates in the general assemblies of the parlement turned not

upon ‘political’ issues but were concerned primarily with the defence of the

jurisdiction of the parlement in the matter of appeals comme d’abus and evocations.

This interpretation, which therefore emphasises continuities, may even help to

explain the situation from the 1650s until the 1770s.

It has been shown above that the potential of the parlement for bringing about a

political result, that is to say a modification of royal policy, depended upon the

exploitation of the procedure of appeals comme d’abus by a small clique in such a way

that the mass of counsellors would be more or less forced to follow their lead in

protest against evocations. Recent research on the parlement in the 1650s, 1750s

and 1760s provides new evidence that such a sequence of events was repeated on

other occasions.

Many of the conflicts with the ministry during this lengthy period

were the result of one jurisdictional attribute of the courts, namely the procedure of

appeals comme d’abus. Furthermore, Jansenists were involved in all of them. On the

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occasion of the first Bull against the Jansenists the sect resorted to appeals to the

parlement to defend itself, from 1653 until 1659.

These appeals by curés in the

diocese of Beauvais formed a precedent which had not been forgotten in 1730. The

series of conflicts in 1730–2, 1733, 1735, 1737, 1749, the bitter struggle of 1751–4,

1756 and 1757, culminating finally in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1762, all saw the

exploitation of the same procedure in much the same way.

It has recently been

shown that the involvement of the Paris parlement in the Brittany affair also owed

a great deal to its concern to defend its jurisdiction.

Thus the picture of the motivation of the magistrates, which explains both the

genesis and the possibilities for resolution of the crises, is a complex one. The will

to defend corporate jurisdiction was shared by all judges, but it is hard to imagine

the scale of the crises without accepting the importance of the other elements: a

determined and well organised parti janséniste, or later a parti patriote, able to couch

its more political or particular concerns in the legal language of jurisdiction and

corporate identity, was crucial. Even then, other factors were vital, such as a sense

of afflicted honour and the irresponsibility of youth. A momentum was created

which was increasingly hard to restrain. Yet the very variety of motives and the

complexity of the situation meant that political management of the parlement by

the ministry was always a possibility. If the ministry could employ all its resources

to prevent any group or faction from manipulating the judges, and if it could

avoid giving unnecessary cause for opposition, then it was quite possible to

maintain good relations. The study of 1730–2 has already brought many of these

techniques of management to our attention. It is the task of the following chapter

to examine the repertoire of methods and resources at the disposal of the ministry

that could be employed to ensure the success of its policies and the avoidance of

parlementary crises.

275

MANAGING THE PARLEMENT

1733–43 and beyond

Conflict and management; continuing tensions; the dixième; Jansenist agitation 1733–6; the

barristers’ pretensions defeated; the Douai affair and interpretations of politics; a crisis averted; the

affair of Saint—Vincent de Paul; the Grand Conseil, ajurisdictional threat; the courts successfully

managed; failures of management in the 1750s; contrast with the 1730s.

The preceding chapters on the crisis of 1730–2 have explored the nature of

confrontation between the ministry and the parlement of Paris, and have enabled

us to come to some new conclusions on the nature of crown-parlement conflict. In

the case of that crisis at least, parlementaire militancy appears to be more

accurately described as the defence of jurisdiction than the result of

‘constitutional’ claims by the magistrates. Opposition was the product of the

pressure of parti and faction skilfully combining to manipulate the mass of

counsellors with an appeal to the traditional defence of their jurisdiction and

corporate honour—even if the consequences might not be so traditional. The

form that disputes took was ‘coded’, and obeyed certain unspoken rules; it was

easy for disputes to develop but harder to put an end to them once they had

broken out. But a complete royal victory was not desirable. As Doyle has pointed

out, a measure of opposition from the parlement was not only normal but also

desirable.

It proved that the monarchy was not a despotism. In the absence of any

representative institution, at least in the pays d’élection, the parlement could and

sometimes did speak for the people. Although royal power could not safely

countenance outright and prolonged disobedience to its will, neither could it

allow itself to trample over a traditional and legitimate institution—which also it

needed in so many administrative ways. So the problematic dialogue between the

ministry and the courts was above all a relationship, a reciprocal process that

could be influenced in many ways, provided that dialogue was allowed to

continue. The rules of the game suggested that conflicts would quickly escalate to

a point at which each side would seek a negotiated compromise behind the

scenes, unless honour became so involved that compromise was made either

extremely difficult or impossible (as in 1770–1).

Apparent confrontation was a part of the system, given its corporate structures

and the fact that open negotiations were impossible; equally, deadlock or impasse

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276

was therefore not the normal state of affairs. Through the good offices of the gens du

roi, most differences between the courts and the ministry over the registration of

laws could be settled by a few compromises. Although both sides wanted to appear

to stick to their positions, neither crown nor parlement had a desire for genuine

constitutional debate. Yet once a conflict of jurisdiction had been embarked upon,

the venal and corporate officers felt they needed to defend their institution and their

office which represented their wealth and status; the consequences of faction or

youthful impetuosity could push matters almost to an impasse. Even then, there

was always a real feeling among most magistrates that this was all a game, a show of

strength in a coded system: their universe remained an ordered one in which

rebellion was impossible. Determined posturing was not perceived as rebellion, it

was a part of the corporate socio-political system.

It had to be kept in check by the King’s council, lest there be a descent into chaos,

or lest a subordinate institution gain a small victory that created precedents for

further enterprises. Magistrates did not see the royal council as the pure expression

of Louis XV’s will, they saw it as a rival institution with a defined jurisdiction whose

encroachments must be resisted. From the monarchy’s point of view, the best way

to control the potential friction created by corporate rivalries was to manage affairs

in such a way that tensions, ever present to some degree within the constitutional

order of things, did not lead to serious problems. The key to good relations

therefore lay in good political management. In the later 1730s, just as under Louis

XIV from 1653 to 1713, it would be possible, if hard, to control the parlement and

prevent protest from escalating to crisis. The very variety of parlementaire motives

involved in creating crisis, meant that careful management could often prevent the

disparate interests from combining into a threatening force. The following pages

will examine more closely exactly how the courts were controlled in these years and

how further confrontations on the scale of 1730–2 were avoided.

The compromise reached at the end of 1732 only came to be viewed as a royal

victory later in the decade, as its full implications became apparent. At the time,

after the show of strength by the courts, the price of the office of counsellor went up

50 per cent because the prestige of the institution rose.

However, experienced

observers realised that the royal declaration of 18 August had been no more than a

bluff designed to intimidate the judges, and that by keeping it suspended over them

the ministry had protected royal authority. As the cardinal de Bernis observed, ‘in

spite of the annihilation of the declaration of 1732 registered in a lit de justice, the

King appeared to be more than ever master of his parlement’.

The negotiated

compromise of late 1732 encouraged more careful reflection by the majority of the

judges before supporting precipitate action. Once a brief period of euphoria was

over, in early 1733, it was to be more difficult for the parti janséniste to get a majority

for its more vigorous proposals. At the same time the ministry too had learnt

something, for it hoped to avoid confrontation by making its policy more even-

handed. Silence was to be imposed on the religious disputes by evocations to the

royal council and the suppression of inflammatory writings.

In so doing, the

ministry faced difficulties from the extreme constitutionnaires like La Fare the

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archbishop of Laon, but confronted them more readily. When trying to control

their excesses, the example of the disruption to the state’s business during the

parlementary crisis enabled Fleury to tell the zealots that it was his duty to preserve

the state from such chaos, and that he would therefore have to take action against

their reckless or unduly militant publications.

If in 1730 Fleury had hoped for a quick solution to the Jansenist problem, by

1733 he was resigned to the idea that a slow but sure two-pronged policy would

eventually eradicate the sect. As we have seen, first, he would prevent the Jansenists

from taking action against Unigenitus through the parlement; second, he would deny

them any patronage or preferment while encouraging acceptance by those appellant

institutions that remained recalcitrant. Preventing the courts from acting against

Unigenitus was bound to lead to further tensions with the parti janséniste. A closer

examination of events will reveal Fleury’s methods with the parlement more clearly.

The difficulty of his task should not be underestimated, because corporate society

was extremely unresponsive to ministerial interference. Historians of the ancien

régime have perhaps been too ready to assume that, even when a ministry had a

sound policy and was as united as any ministry could be, the actions of its agents

would accurately reflect its political will. Much can be learned about the enormous

difficulties ministries could have when dealing with the courts when working

through men who were sometimes incompetent, or pursuing their own familial or

factional interests, or even of doubtful loyalty.

* * *

On 31 December 1732 the parlement had suppressed a thesis in the Sorbonne as

being liable to arouse a dispute, and reprimanded the Faculty. To the surprise of the

Syndic and Faculty of the university, an arrêt from the royal council also suppressed

the thesis on the grounds that it was likely to upset the tranquillity the King wished

to preserve in his realm. This was surely a warning that the council would not

tolerate any discussion of the respective limits of the two powers, namely church

and state—a matter the council was anxious to keep from the parlement. On 12

January 1733, just before the procureur general was to condemn it, a letter from Fleury

to the Sorbonne prevented the acceptance of a thesis that argued that the agreement

of the majority of the bishops was enough to give unshakeable authority to a papal

constitution. When the Sorbonne complained, the Cardinal stopped all

examinations for a couple of weeks, allowing them to continue only if they refused

to pass any that were too controversial.

Fleury also complained to the First President about the enquêtes, saying that what

annoyed him most was that their ardour seemed unquenched, they were ready to

flare up again at the slightest opportunity. He hoped he could rely on Portail and

wiser heads to control them.

Portail appears to have replied weakly that there were

real issues of theology involved, at which Fleury then gave proof of his high level of

theology by appraising these issues, and arguing that they were debatable, and that

the students could reply as they wished as long as they respected ‘our liberties’. ‘I