The suppression of the Society of Jesus was the removal of all members of the Jesuits from most of Western Europe and their respective colonies beginning in 1759 along with the abolition of the order by the Holy See in 1773; the papacy acceded to anti-Jesuit demands without much resistance. The Jesuits were serially expelled from the Portuguese Empire (1759), France (1764), the Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Sicily, Malta, Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, the Spanish Empire (1767) and Austria and Hungary (1782).
Historians identify multiple factors causing the suppression. The Jesuits, who were not above getting involved in politics, were distrusted for their closeness to the pope and his power in independent nations' religious and political affairs. In France, it was a combination of many influences, from Jansenism to free-thought, to the then-prevailing impatience with the Ancien Régime. Monarchies attempting to centralise and secularise political power viewed the Jesuits as supranational, too strongly allied to the papacy, and too autonomous from the monarchs in whose territory they operated.
With his papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor (21 July 1773), Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society as a fait accompli. However, the order did not disappear. It continued underground operations in China, Russia, Prussia, and the United States. In Russia, Catherine the Great allowed the founding of a new novitiate. In 1814, a subsequent pope, Pius VII, acted to restore the Society of Jesus to its previous provinces, and the Jesuits began to resume their work in those countries.
Background to suppression
Before the eighteenth-century suppression of the Jesuits in many countries, there had been earlier bans, such as in territories of the Venetian Republic between 1606 and 1656–1657, begun and ended as part of disputes between the Republic and the papacy, beginning with the Venetian Interdict.
By the mid-18th century, the Society had acquired a European reputation for political maneuvering and economic success. Monarchs in many European states grew increasingly wary of what they saw as undue interference from a foreign entity. The expulsion of Jesuits from their states had the added benefit of allowing governments to impound the Society's accumulated wealth and possessions. However, historian Charles Gibson (1966) cautions, "[h]ow far this served as a motive for the expulsion we do not know."
Various states took advantage of different events to take action. The series of political struggles between various monarchs, particularly France and Portugal, began with disputes over territory in 1750 and culminated in the suspension of diplomatic relations and the dissolution of the Society by the pope over most of Europe, and even some executions. The Portuguese Empire, France, Naples and Sicily, Parma, and the Spanish Empire were involved to a different extent.
The conflicts began with trade disputes in 1750 in Portugal, 1755 in France, and the late 1750s in Naples and Sicily. In 1758 the government of Joseph I of Portugal took advantage of the waning powers of Pope Benedict XIV and deported Jesuits from South America after relocating them with their native workers and then fighting a brief conflict (Guaraní War), formally suppressing the order in 1759. In 1762 the Parlement of Paris (a court, not a legislature) ruled against the Society in a huge bankruptcy case under pressure from a host of groups – from within the Church but also secular notables such as Madame de Pompadour, the king's mistress. Austria and the Two Sicilies suppressed the order by decree in 1767.
Lead-up to suppression
First national suppression: Portugal and its empire in 1759
There were long-standing tensions between the Portuguese crown and the Jesuits, which increased when the Count of Oeiras (later the Marquis of Pombal) became the monarch's minister of state, culminating in the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759. The Távora affair in 1758 could be considered a pretext for the expulsion and crown confiscation of Jesuit assets. According to historians James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, the Jesuits' "independence, power, wealth, control of education, and ties to Rome made the Jesuits obvious targets for Pombal's brand of extreme regalism."
Portugal's quarrel with the Jesuits began over an exchange of South American colonial territory with Spain. By a secret treaty of 1750, Portugal relinquished to Spain the contested Colonia del Sacramento at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata in exchange for the Seven Reductions of Paraguay. These autonomous Jesuit missions had been nominal Spanish colonial territory. The native Guaraní, who lived in the mission territories, were ordered to quit their country and move to Uruguay. The Guaraní rose in arms against the transfer due to the harsh conditions, and the so-called Guaraní War ensued. It was a disaster for the Guaraní. In Portugal, a battle escalated, with inflammatory pamphlets denouncing or defending the Jesuits, who, for over a century, had protected the Guarani from enslavement by way of the Reductions. The Portuguese colonizers secured the expulsion of the Jesuits.
On 1 April 1758, Pombal persuaded the aged Pope Benedict XIV to appoint the Portuguese cardinal Francisco de Saldanha da Gama to investigate allegations against the Jesuits. Benedict was skeptical about the gravity of the alleged abuses. He ordered a "minute inquiry", but to safeguard the Society's reputation, all serious matters were to be referred back to him. Benedict died the following month, on May 3. On May 15, Saldanha, having received the papal brief only a fortnight before, declared that the Jesuits were guilty of having exercised "illicit, public, and scandalous commerce" in Portugal and its colonies. He had not visited Jesuit houses as ordered and pronounced on the issues the Pope had reserved for himself.
Pombal implicated the Jesuits in the Távora affair, an attempted assassination of the King on 3 September 1758, on the grounds of their friendship with some of the supposed conspirators. On 19 January 1759, he issued a decree sequestering the property of the Society in the Portuguese dominions. The following September, he deported the Portuguese fathers, about one thousand in number, to the Papal States, keeping the foreigners in prison. Among those arrested and executed was the then denounced Gabriel Malagrida, the Jesuit confessor of Leonor of Távora, for "crimes against the faith". After Malagrida's execution in 1759, the Portuguese crown suppressed the Society. The Portuguese ambassador was recalled from Rome, and the papal nuncio was expelled. Diplomatic relations between Portugal and Rome were broken off until 1770.
Suppression in France in 1764
The suppression of the Jesuits in France began in the French island colony of Martinique, where the Society of Jesus had a commercial stake in sugar plantations worked by black slaves and free labor. Their large mission plantations included large local populations that worked under the usual conditions of tropical colonial agriculture of the 18th century. The Catholic Encyclopedia in 1908 said that the practice of the missionaries occupying themselves personally in selling off the goods produced (an anomaly for a religious order) "was allowed partly to provide for the current expenses of the mission, partly to protect the simple, childlike natives from the common plague of dishonest intermediaries."
Father Antoine Lavalette, superior of the Martinique missions, became one of the largest land and slave owners on the island. But on the outbreak of war with Great Britain, ships carrying goods of an estimated value of 2,000,000 livres were captured, and Lavalette was unable to pay his very large debts and went bankrupt. His creditors turned to the Jesuit procurator in Paris to demand payment. Still, he refused responsibility for the debts of an independent mission – though he offered to negotiate for a settlement. The creditors went to the courts and received a favorable decision in 1760, obliging the Society to pay and giving leave to distrain in the case of non-payment.
On the advice of their lawyers, the Jesuits appealed to the Parlement of Paris. This turned out to be an imprudent step for their interests. Not only did the Parlement support the lower court on 8 May 1761, but having once gotten the case into its hands, the Jesuits' opponents in that assembly determined to strike a blow at the order. Under fire for currency speculation and accused of torturing and killing four slaves, Lavalette resigned from the Jesuit order in 1762.
The Jesuits had many who opposed them. The Jansenists were numerous among the enemies of the orthodox party. The Sorbonne, an educational rival, joined the Gallicans, the Philosophes, and the Encyclopédistes. Louis XV was weak; his wife and children were in favor of the Jesuits; his able first minister, the Duc de Choiseul, played into the hands of the Parlement and the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour, to whom the Jesuits had refused absolution since she was living in sin with the King of France, was a determined opponent. The determination of the Parlement of Paris in time bore down all opposition.
The attack on the Jesuits was opened on 17 April 1762 by the Jansenist sympathizer Abbé Henri Philippe de Chauvelin, who denounced the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, which was publicly examined and discussed in a hostile press. The Parlement issued its Extraits des assertions, assembled from passages from Jesuit theologians and canonists, alleging then to have taught every sort of immorality and error. On 6 August 1762, the final arrêt was proposed to the Parlement by the Advocate General Joly de Fleury, condemning the Society to extinction. Still, the King's intervention brought eight months delay, and in the meantime, a compromise was suggested by the Court. If the French Jesuits separated from the Society headed by the Jesuit General directly under the pope's authority and came under a French vicar, with French customs, as with the Gallican Church, the Crown would still protect them. The French Jesuits, rejecting Gallicanism, refused to consent. On 1 April 1763, the colleges were closed, and by a further arrêt of March 9, 1764, the Jesuits were required to renounce their vows under pain of banishment.
At the end of November 1764, the King signed an edict dissolving the Society throughout his dominions, though some provincial parlements still protected them, such as Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Artois. In the draft of the edict, he canceled numerous clauses that implied that the Society was guilty, and writing to the Duke of Choiseul, he concluded: "If I adopt the advice of others for the peace of my realm, you must make the changes I propose, or I will do nothing. I say no more, lest I should say too much."
Decline of the Jesuits in New France
Following the British 1759 victory against the French in Quebec, France lost its North American territory of New France, where Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century had been active among indigenous peoples. British rule had implications for Jesuits in New France, but their numbers and sites were already in decline. As early as 1700, the Jesuits had adopted a policy of merely maintaining their existing posts instead of trying to establish new ones beyond Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa.
Once New France was under British control, the British barred the immigration of any further Jesuits. By 1763, only twenty-one Jesuits were still stationed in what was now the British colony of Quebec. By 1773, only eleven Jesuits remained. The British crown claimed Jesuit property in Canada in the same year and declared that the Society of Jesus in New France was dissolved.
Spanish Empire suppression of 1767
Events leading to the Spanish suppression
The Suppression in Spain and the Spanish colonies, and in its dependencies the Kingdom of Naples and Kingdom of Sicily, was the last of the expulsions, with Portugal (1759) and France (1764) having already set the pattern. The Spanish crown had already begun a series of administrative and other changes in their overseas empire, such as reorganizing the viceroyalties, rethinking economic policies, and establishing a military, so the expulsion of the Jesuits is seen as part of this general trend known generally as the Bourbon Reforms. The reforms aimed to curb American-born Spaniards' increasing autonomy and self-confidence, reassert crown control, and increase revenues. Some historians doubt that the Jesuits were guilty of intrigues against the Spanish crown that were used as the immediate cause for the expulsion.
Contemporaries in Spain attributed the suppression of the Jesuits to the Esquilache Riots, named after the Italian minister to Bourbon King Charles III, that erupted after a sumptuary law was enacted. The law, which placed restrictions on men's wearing of voluminous capes and limiting the breadth of sombreros men could wear, was seen as an "insult to Castilian pride."
King Charles fled to the countryside when an angry crowd of those resisters converged on the royal palace. The crowd shouted, "Long Live Spain! Death to Esquilache!" His Flemish palace guard fired warning shots over the people's heads. An account says that a group of Jesuit priests appeared on the scene, soothed the protesters with speeches, and sent them home. Charles decided to rescind the tax hike and hat-trimming edict and fire his finance minister.