François Solier

The crowd of spectators was considerable; the hall, the courtyard, the garden, the walls of the neighboring rampart, and even the roofs of the surrounding houses were black with people.

As Pierre Delage reports, the Jesuits had recently settled in Limoges in the years 1600–1610, and they were keen to revive the Catholic faith in the city.

The theological faculty of Paris condemned propositions contained in these texts as "impious, execrable, detestable, false and manifestly heretical".

The Jesuits, through François Solier, responded in 1611 with a letter in which he accused the College of Sorbonne of being more severe than the Inquisition of Spain and of being in touch with the Protestants.

A remarkable work by François Solier is a book of a historical nature that deals with the life of the Catholic Church in Japan at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this work, "Ecclesiastical History of the Islands and Kingdom of Japan, collected by Father François Solier", François Solier reports the events which saw Catholics, clerics, or laity, undergo religious persecution, and, for some, such as the Italian Jesuit Charles Spinola, to be put to death in Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century for having practiced Catholic worship.

Here is how François Solier relates events of religious persecutions in Japan in 1622, in a style that accurately reflects these very dark facts which were reported to the author by witnesses present in Japan during these years of religious persecution, Twenty-six (Christians) left the jail of Omura, in which they had languished for a long time, some more, some less, and all so cramped, that in a single lower room, equipped only with twelve small rooms.