Charles Forbes René de Montalembert
Encyclopedia
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
- March 13, 1870 Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
) was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
publicist and historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
.
Family history
He belonged to a family of AngoumoisAngoumois
Angoumois was a county and province of France, nearly corresponding today to the Charente département. Its capital was Angoulême....
, which could trace its descent back to the 13th century. Charters carry the history of the house two centuries further. For some generations before the historian the family had been distinguished, both in the army and in the field of science. Montalembert's father, Marc René, had fought under Condé, and subsequently served in the English army. He married Elise Rosee Forbes, and his eldest son, Charles, was born in London. At the Restoration of 1814, Marc René returned to France, was raised to the peerage in 1810, and became ambassador to Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
(where Charles completed his education) in 1826. He died in 1831, a year after the overthrow of the monarchy.
Career
Charles de Montalembert was under twenty-five at his father's death and therefore too young to take his seat as a peer, but he retained other rights. Combined with his literary and intellectual activity, this made him a person of some importance. He was a Liberal, in the English sense, and disagreed with the new regime on only the religious question. He would have approved of the policy of the golden mean represented by Louis PhilippeLouis-Philippe of France
Louis Philippe I was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the July Monarchy. His father was a duke who supported the French Revolution but was nevertheless guillotined. Louis Philippe fled France as a young man and spent 21 years in exile, including considerable time in the...
. He wished to see the Church free from state control and attacked the monopoly of public instruction by which the monarchy fortified its position. This latter scheme first brought Montalembert to public attention when he was formally charged with unlicensed teaching. He claimed the right of trial by his peers and made a notable defense with a deliberate intention of protest in 1832.
On the other hand, he thought that the Church should not obstinately oppose new ideas. He had eagerly entered into the plans of his friends, Lamennais
Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais
Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais , was a French priest, and philosophical and political writer.-Youth:Félicité de Lamennais was born at Saint-Malo on June 19, 1782, the son of a wealthy merchant...
and Lacordaire
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire , often styled Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, was a French ecclesiastic, preacher, journalist and political activist...
, and he collaborated with them in the newspaper, L'Avenir. The ultramontane party was roused by their boldness, and Montalembert and his two friends then left for Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. They failed to win any mitigation of the measures which the Roman curia
Curia
A curia in early Roman times was a subdivision of the people, i.e. more or less a tribe, and with a metonymy it came to mean also the meeting place where the tribe discussed its affairs...
took against L'Avenir. Its doctrines were condemned in two encyclical
Encyclical
An encyclical was originally a circular letter sent to all the churches of a particular area in the ancient Catholic Church. At that time, the word could be used for a letter sent out by any bishop...
s, Mirari vos
Mirari Vos
Mirari Vos - On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism is the first encyclical of Pope Gregory XVI and was issued in 1832. Addressed "To All Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, and Bishops of the Catholic World", it is general in scope....
in 1832 and Singulari vobis in 1834, and Montalembert submitted. He clung to his early liberalism
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
, and in 1848 saw the end of a government towards which he had always been hostile. He held a seat in the Chamber of Deputies until 1857, but was then obliged to retire to private life. He was still recognized as a formidable opponent of the empire. Meanwhile his Liberal ideas had made him some irreconcilable enemies among the Ultramontanes. Louis Veuillot
Louis Veuillot
Louis Veuillot was a French journalist and author who helped to popularize ultramontanism ....
, in his paper, L'Unitiers, opposed him. Montalembert answered by reviving in 1855 a review which had for some time ceased publication, Le Correspondant, which he used to fight the party of Veuillot and the far-left Liberals of the Revue des deux mondes
Revue des deux mondes
The Revue des deux Mondes is a French language monthly literary and cultural affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829....
.
He took great interest in the débuts of the Liberal empire, while trying to parry the blow which the Ultramontanes were preparing to deal to Liberal ideas by proclaiming in the First Vatican Council
First Vatican Council
The First Vatican Council was convoked by Pope Pius IX on 29 June 1868, after a period of planning and preparation that began on 6 December 1864. This twentieth ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church, held three centuries after the Council of Trent, opened on 8 December 1869 and adjourned...
the dogma of papal infallibility. But once again he would not allow himself to be seduced from obedience to the pope. He severed his connection with Père Hyacinthe Loyson
Hyacinthe Loyson
Hyacinthe Loyson , was a controversial Roman Catholic priest, religious figure and author.-Biography:...
as he had with Lamennais and made the submission expected of him to the council. It was his last fall. Broken down by the trial of these continued fights against people of his own religion, he died prematurely.
In addition to being an eloquent orator, Montalembert wrote in a style at once picturesque, fiery and polished. He was an ardent student of the Middle Ages, but his medieval enthusiasm was strongly tinctured with religious sentiments. His first historical work, La Vie de Ste Elisabeth de Hongrie (1836), is not so much a history as a religious manifesto, which did much to restore the position of hagiography. It met with great success, but Montalembert was not elected a member of the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
until after the fall of the July monarchy in 1851.
From this time he gave much of his attention to a great work on monasticism in the West. He was at first attracted by the figure of St. Bernard and devoted one volume to him. He later withdrew it on the advice of his friend Dupanloup
Félix Dupanloup
Félix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup was a French ecclesiastic.-Biography:He was born at Saint-Félix, in Haute-Savoie. In his earliest years he was confided to the care of his brother, a priest in the diocese of Chambéry. In 1810 he was sent to a pensionnat ecclésiastique at Paris...
, and the entire printing was destroyed. He then enlarged his original plan and published the first volumes of his Moines d'occident (1860), an eloquent work which was received with much admiration in those circles where language was more appreciated than learning. The work, unfinished at the time of the author's death, was completed later from some long fragments found among his papers. Volumes VI and VII appeared in 1877.
Wife and daughter
Montalembert married Mlle de Merode, daughter of Félix de MérodeFélix de Mérode
Philippe Félix Balthasar Otto Ghislain, Count de Merode , known as Félix de Merode, was a Belgian politician....
. His daughter married the vicomte de Meaux, a Roman Catholic statesman and distinguished writer.
Works (selection)
- The Obligation of Catholics in the Matter of Freedom of Teaching (1843)
- Catholic Interests in the Nineteenth Century (1852)
- Pius IX and France in 1849 and 1859 (1860)
- Les moines d'Occident depuis saint Benoît jusqu'à saint Bernard (The Monks of the West from St. Benedict to St. Bernard) (Paris: J. Lecoffre Fils et Cie., 1877)
- Emmanuel Mounier, ed., Montalembert (Paris, 1945), an anthology of his writing
Sources
- Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics and the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (NY: Doubleday, 1998)
- E.E.Y. Hales, Pio Nono: A Study of European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954)
- R.P. Lecanuet, Montalembert d'après son journal et sa correspondance, 3 vols. (Paris, 1895)
- Jean Maurain, La politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire de 1852 à 1869 (Paris, 19930)
- George Weill, Histoire du Catholicisme libéral en France (1828-1908) (Paris, 1909)
- Roger L. Williams, Gaslight and Shadow: The World of Napoleon III (NY: Macmillan, 1957), Ch. 3: "Montalembert and Liberal Catholicism"