Félicité Robert de Lamennais

Born at Saint-Malo, 29 June, 1782; died at Paris, 27 February, 1854. His father, Pierre Robert de Lamennais (or La Mennais), was a respectable merchant of Saint-Malo, ennobled by Louis XVI at the request of the Estates of Brittany in acknowledgment of his patriotic devotion. Of the six children born of his marriage with Gratienne Lorin, the best-known are Jean-Marie and Félicité. The latter, though delicate and frail in physique, early exhibited an exuberant nature, a lively but indocile intelligence, a brilliant but highly impressionable imagination, and a will resolute to obstinacy and vehement to excess.

Education

At the age of five Lamennais lost his mother: his father, absorbed in business, was thus obliged to confide the education of Jean-Marie and Félicité to Robert des Saudrais, the brother-in-law of his wife, who had no children of his own. Jean-Marie and Félicité — or Féli, as he was called in the family — were taken to live with their uncle at La Chênaie, an estate not far from Saint-Malo, which Félicité was afterwards to make famous. At La Chênaie there was a well filled library in which works of piety and theological books were mingled with the ancient classics and the works of the eighteenth-century philosophers. Félicité was not very docile at his lessons, and, to punish him, M. des Saudrais would sometimes shut him up in the library. The child acquired a taste for the books he found around him, and read voraciously and indiscriminately all that came to his hands, good and bad. He even multiplied reasons for being shut up in the library, abandoned himself there to his favorite reading, and made such rapid progress that he was soon able to read the classical authors without difficulty. The Revolution was then at its height; the proscribed priests had been obliged to leave France, or to continue from hiding-places their sacred ministrations at the peril of their lives. The Lamennais household afforded an asylum to one such priest, Abbé Vielle, who sometimes said Mass at La Chênaie in the middle of the night. Félicité, who used to assist at the Divine services, derived from these early impressions a lasting and lively hatred of the Revolution. At the same time, his unwise reading, especially of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, seduced his ardent mind and prejudiced him against religion. These prejudices found vent in objections which moved his confessor to postpone indefinitely his First Communion.

His father at first intended Lamennais to join him in his business, but the youth obeyed without enthusiasm. Always ill-at-ease in the office, he visited it as little as possible, and gave to reading all the time he could steal from his regular occupation. While he thus succeeded in completing his literary education and acquiring foreign languages, these studies undertaken without teachers or guidance necessarily left gaps in his training, and made him liable to contract dangerous habits of intellectual intolerance. The passions, too, gained a certain mastery over him, drawing him into lapses which he says, not without some exaggeration, in a letter written in 1809 to his friend Brute de Rémur, the future Bishop of Vincennes in Indiana, "the most rigorous austerities, the severest penance would not suffice to expiate". The happy influence of his brother Jean-Marie, who had recently (1804) been ordained a priest, rescued him from this condition. Restored to Christian sentiments, he made his First Communion, and resolved to consecrate himself to the service of the Church. He withdrew to La Chênaie and there gave himself up under his brother's direction to ecclesiastical studies, briefly interrupted (January to July, 1806) to reestablish his threatened health by a sojourn at Paris.

The Church of France was then in a struggling and precarious condition, being deprived of material resources and served but poorly by a clergy either enfeebled by age or inadequately prepared to meet the intellectual demands of the time. The two brothers set themselves to labor as best they could for the relief of the Church. In the common task which they imposed on themselves with this aim, the part that fell to Félicité, as being the better suited to his tastes, was chiefly intellectual and literary. In fact the story of his life is almost entirely contained in his books and articles. The first result of the joint labors soon appeared in a book published in 1808 under the title "Réflexions sur l'état de l'Église en France pendant le dix-huitieme siecle et sur sa situation actuelle". The first idea of this work and the materials were due to Jean-Marie, but the actual writing was done almost exclusively by Félicité. After describing the evils under which the Church labored in France, the authors point out the causes and propose remedies, among others provincial councils, diocesan synods, retreats, ecclesiastical conferences, community life, and proper methods in recruiting the clergy. Many of these views were calculated to offend the imperial government; the book was suppressed by the police, and was not republished until after the fall of the Empire. Meanwhile, the two brothers had left La Chênaie for the College of St-Malo, in which they had been appointed professors. Félicité was to teach mathematics; for he had to earn a living now that his father, already financially injured by the wars of the Convention, saw his business ruined by the Continental Blockade, and was obliged to surrender all his property to his creditors. This ecclesiastical college having been closed by imperial authority, Félicité withdrew to La Chênaie, while his brother was called, as vicar-general, to Saint-Brieuc. There Félicité completed another work, in which also he had his brother's collaboration, and which was to have been printed and published at Paris in 1814. In opposition to Napoleon, who wished to transfer the right to the metropolitans, the two brothers vindicated the pope's exclusive claim to the canonical institution of bishops. This work marked the beginning of Lamennais' long struggle against Gallicanism. However, the fall of Napoleon, coming some months before the book appeared, made it no longer appropriate, and it thus obtained only a succès d' estime. Lamennais next published a violent article against the imperial university; indeed, when Napoleon returned from Elba, the young writer, thinking himself insecure in France, went over to England, where he found a temporary asylum with M. Carron, a French priest who had established in London a school for the children of émigrés. On his return to France after the Hundred Days, Lamennais made M. Carron his confidant and took up his residence near him in Paris. Under the influence of this worthy priest and on the advice of M. Beysserre, a