The earliest was held in Amiens, France, in January 1806. Its purpose was to elect a superior general and to work on rules of life for the new Society. The only participants present were members of the local council of the house of Amiens, but professed religious from Grenoble and Belley, the other two houses, sent their votes in writing. Madeleine Sophie Barat was elected superior general for life.

The second general council was held in Paris in November and December of 1815. At this significant meeting the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart, which had been in preparation for almost ten years, were ratified and adopted. It was decided to locate the motherhouse in Paris. The council was composed of the superior general and her assistants, the superiors of the houses and one professed religious from each house, named by Mother Barat. Their names are known, and it is clear that Mother Barat chose the eldest professed from each house.

The need for further work on the school rule and the Plan of Studies for the boarding schools occasioned the calling of the third general council in August 1820. In addition to work on school matters, this council approved the Summary of the Constitutions written by Father Varin. This document for the guidance of individual religious emphasized the attitudes and qualities of the religious, especially humility, poverty and unworldliness. This advice was considered necessary in the face of the Society’s increasing identification with the aristocracy, symbolized by the establishment of the Paris school and convent in the Hotel Biron.
The fourth general council was convened in September 1826, following Roman approval of the Constitutions; it met to bring about conformity to some directives of the Roman authorities, as conditions for papal approbation. This approbation of the rules by the Pope was important as the Society spread to many dioceses; it meant that a local bishops could not insist on changes in the rules, nor could he require RSCJ to undertake works in the diocese that were not sanctioned by the Constitutions.

These Constitutions provided for the conseil général, the general council, to meet every six years; members were twelve in number; superiors and local council members of each house submitted topics for discussion and decision.

At the fifth general council in 1833, for the first time the American houses were represented by Eugénie Audé from St. Michael’s in Louisiana; this meeting again issued a revised version of the Plan of Studies.
Six years later in 1839 the sixth general council met at the Trinità in Rome, for the first time outside of France. It was one of the more controversial ones in the history of the Society; it enacted a series of changes in the Constitutions to bring the Society’s way of life and government more into line with that of the Society of Jesus, some of whose members were advisors to the council. One decision, to move the motherhouse to Rome, caused a storm of opposition in Paris, not only within the Society, but on the part of the Archbishop of Paris. The decisions were to have been implemented on an experimental basis for three years, and then there was to have been an evaluation.

Madeleine Sophie Barat called the next council three years later for the purpose of evaluation; she planned to hold it in Lyon, but the Archbishop of Paris asserted that, as her superior, he had the right to forbid her to hold a council outside his diocese. The council was suspended until the controversy could be resolved, and subsequently, because of internal and external political conditions, there were no more councils until 1851, when the seventh general council convened, again in Lyon.

Madeleine Sophie proposed three changes in the Constitutions to this gathering: she wanted the division of the Society into provinces; she wanted the superior general to name a vicar general, that is someone to act for her in case of need or death; and she wanted the general council of the future to be composed of the assistants general and the provincial superiors. These changes were all accepted and, with some modification, approved by the Pope. Henceforth, the Society was to be divided into fifteen vicariates. With later growth, this number increased. The council of 1851 also revised the ceremonial, the custom book and, again, the Plan of Studies. Except for a few minor adaptations to the requirements of church law enacted in 1922, there were no further changes to the Constitutions until the version composed in 1982.

By the time of the death of Madeleine Sophie in 1865 the Society had taken shape: the “way of organizing” itself – to use a recent expression – was firm; it remained to consolidate, to foster growth, to ensure uniformity and observance of the Rule and, when necessary, to elect subsequent superiors general. For about one hundred years, until 1967, general councils composed of vicars operated along these lines. In the wake of the changes in the church brought about by the Second Vatican Council, the Society undertook a complete revision of its way of life and government. These developments will be considered in Part II of this study.