Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought by Claeys Gregory;

Author:Claeys, Gregory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Further Reading

Lamartine, A. (1963) Oeuvres poétiques complètes, Paris: Gallimard.

Lombard, C. (1973) Lamartine, New York: Twayne Publishers.

Lucas Dubreton, J. (1951) Lamartine, Paris: Flammarion.

See Also: Chateaubriand, François; democracy, populism and rights; Hugo, Victor; Lamennais, Felicite De; liberalism; novels, poetry and drama; Thiers, Louis-Adolphe; Tocqueville, Alexis de

Kathryn Oliver Mills

Lamennais, Félicité de (1782–1854)

Félicité De Lamennais (or La Mennais) was a priest (from 1816) and the foremost Catholic thinker of Restoration France. From the mid-1820s onwards he moved to liberal Catholicism; when the Church rejected his liberal overtures, he abandoned Catholicism altogether and moved towards his final vocation as a political and social reformer.

Born in Saint-Malo in 1782, Lamennais spent much of his early life as a priest who had gathered around himself a group of young men in his land in Brittany. His first work, Essai sur l’indifférence en matiére de réligion (1817), was a vigorous onslaught on the reliance on individual reason propagated by the eighteenth-century philosophes, which would usher in social instability and destroy the social fabric, as had happened during the French Revolution. His solution was the acceptance of Catholicism. However, from the mid-1820s onwards Lamennais, conscious of the inevitability of the final overthrow of the Bourbons, started advocating an alliance between the Church and the liberals. He argued that liberalism needed religion in order to achieve order and stability. Following the July Revolution of 1830, Lamennais and some of his associates established the journal L’Avenir. L’Avenir advocated measures as radical as separation of Church and state, and freedom of education (leaving the choice of kind of education for children to parents). The conservative establishment of the Church was vehemently opposed to these proposals and the journal ceased publication in November 1831. Then Lamennais and his associates shifted their attention to trying to convince the Pope in Rome to endorse their ideas. Pope Gregory XVI instead formally condemned liberal Catholicism. In that context, Lamennais, who had by then become completely disillusioned with the new rulers of July Monarchy France, came to see himself in the role of a champion of the exploited working classes. In 1834 he published what turned out to be his most successful work, the Paroles d’un croyant. In apocalyptic style, the book castigated the exploitation of the working classes and prophesied its end. In the next 20 years Lamennais, besides contributing writings explaining his abandonment of the Catholic Church, went on to write works directly aimed at the working classes themselves, and castigating the established social order, such as Livre du peuple (1837) or Esclavage moderne (1839). His recipes against the exploitation of the workers included universal suffrage, generalized education and workers’ co-operatives. His 1840 pamphlet Le Pays et le gouvernement was so critical of the government that it earned him a year in prison. After the Revolution of 1848 he was twice elected to the National Assembly in 1848–9, sitting on the extreme left. Overall, Lamennais was a rather lonely figure, who, nevertheless, had many admirers thanks to his personal example of courage and conviction.

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