rst to the jealousy with
which corporations of lawyers always regard corporations of
ecclesiastics, and next to their hatred of the bull Unigenitus, which
had been not only an infraction of French liberties, but the occasion
of special humiliation to the parliaments. Then the hostility of the
parliaments to the Jesuits was caused by the harshness with which the
system of confessional tickets was at this time being carried out.
Finally, the once powerful house of Austria, the protector of all
retrograde interests, was now weakened by the Seven Years' War; and
was unable to bring effective influence to bear on Lewis XV. At last
he gave his consent to the destruction of the order. The commercial
bankruptcy of one of their missions was the immediate occasion of
their fall, and nothing could save them. "I only know one man," said
Grimm, "in a position to have composed an apology for the Jesuits in
fine style, if it had been in his way to take the side of that tribe,
and this man is M. Rousseau." The parliaments went to work with
alacrity, but they were quite as hostile to the philosophers as they
were to the Jesuits, and hence their anxiety to show that they were no
allies of the one even when destroying the other.

Contemporaries seldom criticise the shades and variations of
innovating speculation with any marked nicety. Anything with the stamp
of rationality on its phrases or arguments was roughly set down to the
school of the philosophers, and Rousseau was counted one of their
number, like Voltaire or Helvetius. The Emilius appeared in May 1762.
On the 11th of June the parliament of Paris ordered the book to be
burnt by the public executioner, and the writer to be arrested. For
Rousseau always scorned the devices of Voltaire and others; he
courageously insisted on placing his name on the title-page of all his
works,[89] and so there was none of the usual difficulty in
identifying the author. The grounds of the proceedings were alleged
irreligious tendencies to be found in the book.[90]

The indecency of the requisition in which the advocate-general
demanded its proscription, was admitted even by people who were least
likely to defend Rousseau.[91] The author was charged with saying not
only that man may be saved without believing in God, but even that the
Christian religion does not exist--paradox too flagrant even for the
writer of the Discourse on Inequality. No evidence was produced either
that the alleged assertions