The rapid retirement of the Rouge leaders, Dorion and Fournier to the bench and Letellier to the lieutenant-governorship of Quebec, opened the way for early promotion, and in 1877 he entered the cabinet of Alex. Mackenzie and assumed at the same time the leadership of the French Liberals. Defeated in Drummond-Arthabaska upon seeking re-election he was taken to its heart by Quebec East and continued to represent that constituency for an unbroken period of forty years. He went out of office with Mackenzie in 1878, and thereafter his career which had begun so promisingly dwindled almost to extinction until the events already noted called him back to the lists and opened for him the doors of opportunity. When Wilfrid Laurier went to Montreal in 1861 he began the study of law in the office of Rodolphe Laflamme, a leading figure in the Rouge political group; and he joined L'Institut Canadien already far advanced in the struggle with the church which was later to result in open warfare. Those two acts revealed his political affiliations and fixed the environment in which he was to move during the plastic twenties. Ten years had passed since a group of ardent young men, infected with the principles and enthusiasm of 1848, of which Papineau returning from exile in Paris was the apostle, had stormed the constituencies of Lower Canada and had appeared in the parliament of Canada as a radical, free-thinking, ultra-Democratic party, bearing proudly the badge of "Rouge"; and the passage of time was beginning to temper their views with a tinge of sobriety. The church, however, had them all in her black books and Bishop Bourget, that incomparable zealot and bigot, was determined to destroy them politically and spiritually, to whip them into submission. The struggle raged chiefly in the sixties about L'Institut Canadien, frowned upon by the church because it had books in its library which were banned by the Index and because it afforded a free forum for discussion. When Confederation cut the legislative connection between Upper and Lower Canada the church felt itself free to proceed to extremes in the Catholic province of Quebec and embarked upon that campaign of political proscription which ultimately reached a point where even the Rome of Pius IX. felt it necessary to intervene.