Of far greater interest is Benedict's attitude toward what we may call foreign affairs, and in this we discover again the more genial side of his character. Those who had known the different aspects of the Pope's personality--the punctilious learning of the ecclesiastic and the _bonhomie_ of the man--must have wondered how he would confront the hereditary problems of the Papacy. Benedict at once made it plain that his policy would be one of deliberate and judicious compromise. Anxious though he was, especially in view of the Italian ambitions of Maria Theresa, about his temporal possessions, he placed his spiritual power and responsibility in the foreground, and on temporal matters he made more concessions than any Pope of equal wit and will had ever made. He was, he told Tencin, "the mortal enemy of secrets and useless mysticism." For disguised Jesuits and intriguing Nuncii he had no employment. He took court after court, with which his predecessor had embroiled the Papacy, and came to an agreement which almost invariably satisfied them; and in the war of the Spanish succession, when Spanish and Austrian troops in turn violated his territory, he remained strictly neutral. The chief problem in France was the conflict of the Jesuits and the Jansenists, which was complicated by a revival of the Gallican spirit that put difficulties in the way of Papal interference. The Bull _Unigenitus_, with which Clement XI. had sought to extinguish the controversy, had increased the disorder, and the zealots pressed the Pope to intervene. Parlement would have resented his interference, and it was not until 1755, when the Assembly of the Clergy failed to find a solution, that Louis XV. asked the Pope to make a further declaration. The credit of his moderate Encyclical[331] is not wholly due to him. The French asked him to refrain from pressing the _Unigenitus_ as a standard of faith and merely to demand external respect for it. This agreed with the Pope's moderate disposition, but the Jesuits and other zealots at Rome were enraged, and Choiseul--without Benedict's knowledge, of course--made extensive use of bribery to win the College of Cardinals. Benedict's letters reflect his weariness between the antagonistic parties and frequently express that he is willing to respect Gallican susceptibilities to any extent short of a surrender of the faith. A draft of the Encyclical was submitted to the French court before it was published. Both the Jesuits and the lawyers attacked it, but the Parlement was won to the King by an attempt on his life and the Jesuits soon found all their energy needed to defend their existence.