Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/La Chalotais

LA CHALOTAIS, Louis René de Caradeuc de (1701–1785), representative of the French provincial parliaments in their struggles with Louis XV., was born at Rennes in Brittany, March 6, 1701. He entered with keen vigour into the question of the suppression of the Jesuits, which began to be most openly mooted after the affair of Martinique; and as procureur général of the parliament of Brittany he submitted to the parliament in 1761 and 1762—the very heat of the conflict—two Comptes Rendus des Constitutions des Jésuites, which dealt the society some of the most powerful blows it had received since Pascal, and undoubtedly contributed largely to secure the edict of suppression in 1764. In the friends of the Jesuits La Chalotais had thus prepared for himself bitter enemies, and he was to feel their power in the events of the quarrel between the court and the parliaments. The breach between the estates of Brittany and the king, in which La Chalotais was more immediately concerned, originated in an order passed by Government that the voices of two of the three estates should bind the other, that is, that the clergy and citizens should control the landed proprietors. To this order, designed to secure the registration of certain fiscal edicts in spite of the proprietors, who formed a majority in the estates, and upon whom the taxes would fall most heavily, the opposition was marked by all the obstinacy of the Breton character. La Chalotais endeavoured to carry through a compromise, but at the same time animadverted somewhat acrimoniously upon the coercive efforts of the Duc d'Aiguillon, governor of Brittany, who already, as a supporter of the Jesuits, regarded the procureur with animosity. When the estates, therefore, absolutely refused to register the edicts, the court chose to regard La Chalotais as the moving spirit in the opposition; and in November 1765 he was arrested on a charge of having written certain anonymous and seditious letters to the king. No attention was paid to his protestations of innocence; and, when the parliament of Rennes tried to force matters to a crisis by resigning in a body, Louis merely appointed commissioners to sit as a new parliament and to try La Chalotais, with his son and some other magistrates who had been arrested at the same time. But the question had spread beyond Brittany; other provincial parliaments, and even the parliament of Paris, took it up; and the strife began to assume the ominous significance of one between the people and the crown. No lower tribunal ventured to pass sentence upon La Chalotais, and in 1769 the king, calling the case before himself in council, attempted to settle it in his own autocratic way: silence was imposed as to the future, oblivion as to the past; the innocence of the accused was acknowledged, but they were exiled from their province. Such a decision was no settlement. The parliament, now restored, accused the Duc d'Aiguillon of having suborned witnesses against La Chalotais, and, when he published memoirs retorting the charge, caused them to be burned by the hand of the common hangman. Maupeou, minister of the king, after vainly endeavouring to enforce the royal edict of silence, summoned the case before the parliament of Paris in 1770. That body, however, gave such unequivocal signs of favour to La Chalotais, that the king interfered and quashed the whole proceedings by a "bed of justice." The entire matter thus lay over so far as it affected the procureur, till the death of the king in 1774 allowed him to return to his official duties. La Chalotais died at Rennes, July 12, 1785.

Besides the Comptes Rendus and the Exposé Justificatif (three parts, 1766–67), written in prison, La Chalotais was the author of an Essai d'Education Nationale (1763), a work extravagantly praised by Voltaire. It was written in view of the disorganization in matters educational that would follow the expected expulsion of the Jesuits from France.