Joseph Omer Joly de Fleury

He is notable for four principal things: his strong opposition to the philosophes and the publication of the Encyclopedie in 1759; his role in the expulsion of the Jesuits; his involvement in the Lally Tollendal Affair; and his ban on inoculation against smallpox in June 1763.

[2][3] On 7 February 1752, after the second volume of the Encyclopédie was published, Joly de Fleury charged in a decree presented to the Grand Conseil that "these two volumes...insert several maxims tending to destroy Royal Authority, to institute the spirit of independence and revolt, and, in obscure and ambiguous words, to erect the foundations of error, of the corruption of morals, of irreligion and unbelief".

[4] The resulting controversy was only settled when the editors agreed that all future volumes were to be reviewed by censors personally appointed by Bishop Boyer, the Dauphin's preceptor.

Humanity shudders, the citizenry is alarmed.’[6] These evils he blamed on ‘a sect of so-called Philosophers (the Philosophes)… who imagined a project… to destroy the basic truths engraved in our hearts by the hand of the Creator, to abolish his cult and his ministers, and to establish instead Materialism and Deism.’ As a result of his speech the Parlement banned the publishers of the Encyclopedie from selling any more copies, and established a commission of enquiry to look in detail at the content of the seven published volumes.

In 1759 the Jesuits were expelled from Portugal [10] and tensions in France escalated around a complex fraud which involved a number of court cases in the 1750s and early 1760s.

Joly de Fleury responded to this emergency by asking the Paris Parlement to vote to refer the question of inoculation to the Faculties of Medicine and Theology at the Sorbonne.

[16] Joly de Fleury was also involved in one of the longest-running and most acrimonious legal disputes in late eighteenth century France, the Lally-Tollendal case.

Throughout the trial, which lasted for two years, Lally Tollendal fought against Joly de Fleury's charges but on 6 May 1766 he was convicted and sentenced to death.