A ten-percent tax (le Dixième) had been levied on everyone except the clergy to help finance the War of the Austrian Succession. But with France hugely in debt at the end of the war, the government proposed to replace it with a new five-percent tax (le Vingtième) to be paid by everyone. The clergy owned a third of France but refused to pay it, so a lawyer for the government wrote a brochure to prove that they should. The common people were already overburdened with taxes, which they also paid to the clergy, and the “free donation” (don gratuit) that the clergy contributed every five years was usually used to reward the king for some concession: the suppression of Diderot's Encyclopedia, for example. This brochure is the work of the “Antichrist” Voltaire refers to, facetiously pretending to speak for the Holy Inquisitor of Rome. Amusingly, he beat the Vatican's own condemnation of the brochure by just a few months.1

How clear it is that the world is about to end and that the Antichrist has already come, said Antichrist having already sent several circular letters to the bishops of France in which he had the audacity to call them Frenchmen and subjects of the king. Satan has joined this man of iniquity to finish off the desolation of holy places with an abomination, since said Satan has composed and sold a rash, offensive, heretical book that smells of heresy, worthy of him. He endeavors to prove that the ecclesiastics are a part of the state instead of admitting they are its masters, as they had formerly taught. He advances that those who own a third of the revenues of the State should at least contribute a third of that, completely forgetting that our brothers were made to have everything and to contribute nothing. In addition, the above-mentioned book is full of impious maxims drawn from natural law, the rights of men, the fundamental laws of the kingdom, and other pernicious prejudices, cruelly tending to strengthen royal authority, to put more money into circulation in the kingdom of France, and to relieve the impoverished parish priests, who have been righteously oppressed by the rich ones until now.

For these reasons, it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us, to burn said book while awaiting the opportunity to do so to its publisher who has been, in this debate, the secretary of Satan. Let us also declare and instruct that our annuities be paid to us with particular care, that Satan be condemned to drink holy water for supper every Friday, and let us enjoin him to enter the bodies of all those who read his book.

Decreed in Rome at St. Mary's without Minerva2 in the twenty-fifth hour on the 20th of May in the year 1750. Signed: Coglione-Coglionaccio, Chief Cardinal, and below this:

Cazzo-Culo, Secretary of the Holy Office.³