y. They
encouraged or repressed the philosophers according to the political
calculations of the moment, sometimes according to the caprices of the
king's mistress, or even a minister's mistress. When the clergy braved
the royal authority, the hardiest productions were received with
indulgence. If the government were reduced to satisfy the clergy, then
even the very commonplaces of the new philosophy became ground for
accusation. The Encyclopaedia was naturally exposed in a special degree
to such alternations of favour and suspicion.[144] The crisis of 1759
furnishes a curious illustration of this. As we have seen, in the spring
of that year the privilege was withdrawn from the four associated
booksellers, and the continuance of the work strictly prohibited. Yet
the printing was not suspended for a week. Fifty compositors were busily
setting up a book which the ordinance of the government had decisively
forbidden under heavy penalties.

The same kind of connivance was practised to the advantage of other
branches of the opposition. Thirty years before this, the organ of the
Jansenist party was peremptorily suppressed. The police instituted a
rigorous search, and seized the very presses on which the Nouvelles
Ecclesiastiques was being printed. But the journal continued to appear,
and was circulated, just as regularly as before.[145]

The history of the policy of authority towards the Encyclopaedia is only
one episode in the great lesson of the reign of Lewis XV. It was long a
common mistake to think of this king's system of government as violent
and tyrannical. In truth, its failure and confusion resulted less from
the arbitrariness of its procedure, than from the hopeless absence of
tenacity, conviction, and consistency in the substance and direction of
its objects. And this, again, was the result partly of the complex and
intractable nature of the opposition with which successive ministers had
to deal, and partly of the overpowering strength of those Asiatic maxims
of government which Richelieu and Lewis XIV. had invested with such
ruinous prestige. The impatience and charlatanry of emotional or
pseudo-scientific admirers of a personal system blind them to the
permanent truth, of which the succession of the decrepitude of Lewis XV.
to the strength of his great-grandfather, and of the decrepitude of
Napoleon III. to the strength of his uncle, are only illustrations.

The true interest of all these details about a mere b