ABSOLUTE MONARCHY 365 suspected were watched; the pastors who were seized were put to death; the people who were present at any service were sent to the galleys. The children were taken from their parents, the daughters were placed in convents, and the sons were put in charge of Catholics whose duty it was to edu- cate them in the true faith. This persecution lasted thirty years (until the end of the reign of Louis XIV.), and it was several times renewed during the eighteenth century. The purpose of Louis XIV. was to extirpate Cal- vinism in France. He succeeded in part; in the North of France, where the government was more perfectly organized, no more Protestants remained. On the other hand many of them remained in the South, in Poitou, and in the Cevennes Mountains. But there were hardly any except peasant families among them. The nobles and the bourgeois were converted, or else they emigrated. The Protestant countries in the North, England, Holland, Prussia especially,- gained through this emigration industrious and intelligent inhabitants. By it French Calvinism lost its most potent force, and has never recovered from the blow. In the seventeenth century the Calvinists formed one- fifteenth of the population of France; the present pro- portion is one in sixty. The Jansenists.—The Jansenists, disciples of Jati- senius, Bishop of Ypres in Belgium, had remained Catholic, but they had found themselves in opposition to the church ever since the Jesuits had obtained from the pope the condemnation of several propositions taken from the works of Jansenius,- The sect was not