ABSTRACT
The legacy of the Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish mendicant orders in Japan in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was strongly felt both in Japan and in the Catholic Church. The Societe des Missions Etrangeres was French and its missionaries were Frenchmen. Following the French Revolution, the onset of the Bourbon Restoration and with increasing French naval activity in the Far East, the Societe's interest in Japan revived. Prior to the departure of the Baron Gros expedition the memoranda had been submitted to the Foreign Ministry arguing that France should not raise the Christian question at all in Gros’s overtures to Japan. No doubt such a course would have been impossible owing to political considerations at home; throughout the Bakumatsu period official support for the missionaries was lukewarm. The relative success of the Protestants was due to their being able to count among their converts a number of influential and distinguished intellectual figures of the Meiji period.
