Note 201 — Chapter XI

The persecution to which M. de Chalotais was subjected has been detailed in a work extending to three volumes quarto, entitled “Procès Extraordinaire contre MM. Caradeuc de la Chalotais,” &c., with this singular motto: “Ad perpetuam sceleris memoriam.” He appears to have narrowly escaped with his life. The most important witness against him was a young Maître de Requêtes, M. de Calonne, twenty years later unhappily celebrated as the minister of Louis the Sixteenth. The trial gives a frightful picture of the state of criminal justice in France in those days. M. de Chalotais had pure motives, and was an able man; but his indiscretion, the irascibility of his temper, and the bitterness with which he treated all who differed from him in opinion, no doubt greatly aggravated his difficulties. His first work, “Compte rendu des Constitutions des Jesuites,” appeared in 1762, he being then sixty-one years of age: from that time until his death, in 1785, he maintained a hot and incessant warfare against the Court and religious parties, who regarded him as the representative of principles fraught with ruin to them both. This struggle no doubt materially hastened the Revolution. An interesting account of the proceedings against Chalotais is given in Anquetil (Hist. de France, vol. viii. p. 106–116), one of the best parts of a book of slender merit, and also in Sismondi (Hist. des Français, vol. xxix. p. 321), and in the able article on Chalotais in the Biographie Universelle.—E.