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The papal bull Unigenitus, issued in 1713, was intended to strike a fatal blow against the Jansenists and demonstrate papal infallibility. Its principal targets were the Réflexions morales of Pasquier Quesnel and through it, Louis‐Antoine de Noailles, cardinal‐archbishop of Paris. The complicated diplomatic manoeuvring leading to its promulgation was prompted by the Jesuits and their sympathizers, enemies of Noailles, and by the aged Louis XIV, which wished to destroy the Jansenists as ‘a republican party in Church and State’, while upholding the independence of the Gallican Church.

Unigenitus caused uproar in France, especially in Paris, where it was viewed as the result of Jesuit conspiracy, standing for papal pretensions against the Gallican Church and clerical manoeuvres against the laity, as well as being an obscurantist attack on scriptural piety, unjust to Jansenists in general and Noailles in particular. Louis XIV forced its acceptance by the bishops, the Sorbonne and the parlement of Paris, followed by the other theological faculties and parlements, but his death and the accession to power of Philippe d’Orléans as regent for the infant Louis XV changed everything. The appeal to a General Council of the Church was led by 16 bishops, backed by the Oratorians and the Maurists. Other bishops either enforced Unigenitus or accepted and then ignored it. Support for the appellants was uneven in France as a whole and centred in Paris, but for their supporters the appeal represented a defence of the Gallican Church against the presumptuousness of Rome and of political freedom against Louis XIV's absolutism.

Between 1730, when Unigenitus was declared ‘a law of Church and State’, and his death in 1743, cardinal Fleury broke the power of Jansenism within the French clergy by the use of ecclesiastical patronage and promotion; the issue of lettres de cachet to send troublemakers to prison, monastery, or exile; police interventions, especially against authors and publishers; and the despatch of royal commissioners to overawe the assemblies of monastic orders and theology faculties. But enforcement of Unigenitus inevitably incurred the hostility of the sovereign courts, especially the parlement of Paris, the magistrates of which saw themselves as the guardians of legal process and individual liberty. Conflict with the parlement, itself not so much Jansenist as Gallican, in the 1730s involved a strike by avocats in 1731–32, but ended in defeat for the magistrates.