action, however, did not meet with the approval of Marshal MacMahon, governor-general of Algeria, who feared that the natives would resent it as an infraction of the religious peace, and he thought that the Muslim faith, being a state institution in Algeria, ought to be protected from proselytism; so it was intimated to the prelate that his sole duty was to minister to the colonists. Lavigerie made it clear that he had come to serve the whole population of Algeria. Contact with the natives during the famine caused Lavigerie to entertain exaggerated hopes for their general conversion, and his enthusiasm was such that he offered to resign his archbishopric in order to devote himself entirely to the missions. Pope Pius IX refused this, but granted him a coadjutor, and placed the whole of equatorial Africa under his charge. In 1870 at Vatican I, Lavigerie warmly supported papal infallibility. In 1868 he founded the Société des missionnaires d'Afrique, commonly known as the Pères Blancs or White Fathers, after the white magrebian dress they wore. Lavigerie himself drew up the rule. In 1871, he was twice a candidate for the National Assembly of France, but was defeated. He founded the Notre Dame d'Afrique in 1872. In 1874, he founded the Sahara and Sudan mission, and sent missionaries to Tunis, Tripoli, East Africa and the Congo. From 1881 to 1884, his activity in Tunisia so raised the prestige of France that it drew from Léon Gambetta the celebrated declaration, L'Anticléricalisme n'est pas un article d'exportation ("Anticlericalism is not an article for export") and led to the exemption of Algeria from the application of the decrees concerning the religious orders. On 27 March 1882, the dignity of cardinal was conferred upon Lavigerie, given the titulus of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, but the great object of his ambition was to restore the see of St Cyprian; and in that also he was successful, for by a bull of 10 November 1884 the metropolitan see of Carthage was re-erected, and Lavigerie received the pallium on 25 January 1885. The later years of his life were spent in ardent anti-slavery propaganda and his eloquence moved large audiences in London, as well as in Paris, Brussels and other parts of the continent. He sponsored the education of Adrien Atiman, a medical student who had been ransomed from slavery by the White Fathers, at the University of Malta. He