Note 15 — Front matter

We refer, of course, to the promulgation of the Bull Unigenitus, procured from Pope Clement XI by the Jesuits; when their opponents, the Jansenists "of all professions and classes, were subjected to imprisonment, confiscation, and every species of oppression" (Jervis, Student's History of France, p. 415).

The manœuvre is characterised by another historian as a "struggle of narrow-minded fanaticism, allied to absolutely unscrupulous political ambition, against all the learning and virtue which the French clergy still possessed" (Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 379).