In 1700, Daguesseau was appointed Procureur-General, in which capacity he was obliged to form decisions on the gravest questions of state. A learned Memoir, drawn up by him in the year 1700, to prove that no ecclesiastics, not even cardinals, had a right to be exempt from royal jurisdiction, shows his mind already imbued with that jealousy of Papal supremacy which afterwards distinguished him. But his occupations were not confined to legal functions, the administration of that day being accustomed to have recourse, in all difficult and momentous questions, to the wisdom and authority of the magistracy. Thus Daguesseau was enabled, by directing his attention to the state of the hospitals, to remedy the enormous abuses practised in them, and to remodel these charitable institutions upon a new and philanthropic system. In the terrible famine of 1709, he was appointed one of the commission to inquire into the distresses of the time. He was the first to foresee the famine ere it arrived, and to recommend the fittest measures for obviating the misery which it menaced. There existed, at that time, few questions on which a French statesman or magistrate found himself in opposition to the sovereign. Constitutional political liberty was unknown; and even freedom of conscience had been violated by the persecuting edicts of Louis XIV. The magistracy had allowed the Protestants to be crushed, awed by the fear of being considered favourers of rebellion. The legal and the lettered class of French, however they had abandoned the great cause of Reform, exaggerated as it had been by Calvin, were nevertheless still unprepared to submit to the spiritual despotism of Rome. They did not presume to question fundamental doctrines of faith; but they rejected the interference of the Pope in matters of ecclesiastical government, and their claim to independence was sanctioned by the ancient privileges of the Gallican Church. And they were resolutely opposed to the faithless and insidious doctrines of the Jesuits, who sought to make the rule of conscience subordinate to the dictation of the priesthood. These two grounds of opposition to Rome and to the Jesuits constituted the better part of Jansenism. Louis XIV., in his later years, commenced a crusade against this species of resistance to his royal will; and, amongst other acts of repression, he procured a Bull from Rome, called _Unigenitus_, from its first word, which condemned the combined opposition of the Gallican clergy and the anti-Jesuit moralist. In order to be binding upon the French, it was necessary that it should be registered in Parliament. The consent of the great legal officers was requisite, and they were accordingly summoned before Louis XIV. The First President and the Advocate-General had already been won over to the court. The independent character of Daguesseau was the only obstacle; and they had hopes that he might be induced to yield, from the known mildness of his disposition.