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Liens personnels, réseaux, solidarités en France et dans les îles Britanniques (xie-xxe siècle)

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Bates David
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Gazeau Véronique

Partie 2. Réseaux et solidarités politiques

Louis Veuillot, L’Univers and the Ultramontane network in nineteenth-century France

James F. Mc Millan

Résumé

Ce n’est pas l’idéologie ultramontaine intransigeante de l’époque de Pie IX (1846- 1878) qui est etudiee ici, mais les canaux par lesquels elle se diffuse. L’exemple retenu est sans doute le plus significatif, puisqu’il est celui du réseau constitué autour de la principale figure de l’ultramontanisme en France, Louis Veuillot, et de son grand journal L’Univers.

Avant de 1’aborder, 1’auteur revient sur les réseaux ultramontains du premier xixe siècle frangais: l’école menaisienne, les séminaires, la nonciature. Il évoque le rôle de la presse et, à travers cette dernière, le cas de L’Univers. Il montre la position centrale du journal dans 1’ultramontanisme frangais car il fédère les énergies des éléments du petit clergé, des ordres religieux, des prélats, de la nonciature, de la société lai’que et de la noblesse légitimiste gagnés à la cause pontificale. Le succès du périodique lui permet de rayonner au-delà des frontières, jusqu’à la Curie même.

James F. Mc Millan décrit aussi l’équipe de L’Univers et la façon dont elle fonctionne. Pour elle, l’ultramontanisme est moins une idéologic qu’un sentiment d’appartenance commune à une famille spirituelle. La spiritualite est ici encouragee par l’amitié et, en retour, l’amitié est nourrie par une spiritualité partagee.

Texte intégral

The new Catholicism

  • 1 On this, see the excellent chapter by Chris Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wa (...)
  • 2 On Grégoire, see especially R. Hermon-Belot, L’abbe Gregoire: la politique et la vérité, Paris, Seu (...)

1One of the most profound cultural changes of the nineteenth century was the transformation of European Catholicism into an essentially new religion.1 The intransigent ultramontane Catholicism associated with the papacy of Pius IX (1846-1878) and championed in France by the combative Catholic journalist Louis Veuillot and his collaborators on the newspaper L’Univers may have claimed to be the very incarnation of “tradition”, but it was something very different from the enlightened and gallican variety of Catholic Christianity which had inspired the likes of the abbé Grégoire in the late eighteenth century and which continued to inform the religious and political outlook of the majority of French bishops in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy.2

  • 3 A. Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign 1848- 1853, Oxford, Cla (...)

2What was new about the Catholicism of the age of Pius IX was, in the first instance, its romanità. Rome had long been the spiritual nerve centre of Catholic Christianity but the nineteenth century witnessed the romanisation of the Catholic Church to an unprecedented degree. In France, in a matter of a few years in mid-century, the mainstays of ecclesiastical gallicanism were swept away through the assertion of papal authority over that of the bishops and by the replacement of old Gallican liturgies with the standard Roman liturgy.3 The issuing of the Syllabus of Errors of 1864, followed by the declaration of the dogma of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council of 1870, were only the most striking of the many manifestations of enhanced Roman authority in the Church.

  • 4 B. Horaist, La Dévotion an pape et le catholicisme frangais sous le pontiƒical de Pie IX (1846-1878 (...)
  • 5 Quoted by R. McLuskey, “Tribulation, 1820-1922”, in The Scots College Rome 1600-2000, ed. R. McLusk (...)
  • 6 Horaist, op. cit, p. 47.

3The majority of Europe’s liberal and freethinking intellectuals were repelled by such pronouncements, but to their further astonishment and dismay the new authoritarian Catholicism appeared to have a widespread appeal among the masses. The popularity of the papacy rose steadily throughout the century, expressing itself in a massive devotion of the faithful to the person of the pope to the point where, under Pius IX, one could speak of a virtual personality cult.4 After 1870, when the new Italian state appropriated Rome, the image of “the prisoner of the Vatican” served only to reinforce the sympathy of ordinary Catholics for their persecuted leader. The young Scottish ecclesiastical student who, after a papal audience with Pius IX, wrote about “the poor old man, amidst all his sorrows and affliction”, was articulating a sentimental attachment to the pope that was felt by millions of Catholics throughout Europe.5 A tangible sign of their devotion was their readiness to part with their money in the form of “Peter’s pence” contributions to the papal cause.6

  • 7 On the Catholic revival, see especially M. L. Anderson, “The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Re (...)
  • 8 The best overviews are in G. Cholvy and Y.-M. Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporai (...)
  • 9 On the Sacred Heart, R. Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Tim (...)

4The new militant Roman Catholicism personified by Pius IX was no one-man show, however. It was, rather, only one manifestation of a much vaster movement of Catholic renewal which too many historians of the nineteenth century have managed to overlook.7 In France, the revival was marked by the reconstitution of the Church’s infrastructure, which after the depredations of the Revolutionary period, was little short of astonishing.8 Down to c.1880, there was an impressive rise in the number of recruits to the clergy, a phenomenal growth in the religious orders (especially female orders), widespread missionary activity and the founding of new devotional associations among the laity. The growing popularity of certain forms of piety-pilgrimages, miracles, cults of saints-disgusted the intellectual elites, who thought that they were witnessing a return to the “superstitions” of the Middle Ages, but it was precisely the emotional, demonstrative and antiintellectual aspects of these forms of piety which gave them their mass appeal. Through the promotion of the cult of the Sacred Heart and of miracles such as the appearance of the Virgin to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858, the official Church found itself much more in tune with popular religion than it had been at the end of the Ancien Régime, when an “enlightened” and sometimes Jansenist clergy had sought to return to a purified primitive Christianity that had been stripped of its excess baggage of popular devotions.9

  • 10 See J. F. McMillan, “Priest Hits Girl!: the Front Line of the ‘War of the Two Frances’”, in Culture (...)
  • 11 L. Veuillot, Le Parƒum de Rome, in F. Veuillot. CEuvres completes de Louis Veuillot, Paris, Lethiel (...)

5Such, indeed, was the perception of religious recovery among ultramontanes like Louis Veuillot that they began to entertain hopes for the reconstruction of a Catholic social order, at least in the countryside. It was precisely because they felt that the goal of rechristianisation was within their grasp that the exponents of the new Catholicism, like their bitter secular enemies, adopted an intransigent and intolerant stance which rejected all compromise. The new Catholicism was a combative Catholicism which relished conflict and represented itself as a crusade against the forces of darkness. It considered itself engaged in a fight to the finish. Whereas exponents of the idée laïque refused religion a place in civic society and public life, ultramontanes made it the mainspring of their vision of the social order.10 For Veuillot, the “fragrance of Rome” was always preferable to the “odours of Paris.”11

Ultramontane networks: general

  • 12 See the remarkable article by J. Gadille, “L’ultramontanisme au xixe siècle”, in Les Ultramontains (...)

6The purpose of this paper is to explore not so much the ideological content of the new Catholicism in France but the channels by which it was diffused. In this process, the role of the Catholic newspaper L’Univers was fundamental, and our principal focus will therefore be upon Louis Veuillot and his collaborators. It would of course be wrong to attribute the rise of ultramontanism in France to L’Univers alone: other networks were involved, starting with the clandestine networks of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, of which perhaps the most celebrated was the Congrégation of count Ferdinand de Berthier. In alliance with émigré priests and some religious orders, the Congrégation spread the news of Pius VII’s excommunication of Napoleon in 1809 and organised resistance to the Empire. Thanks to the activity of such networks, the popularity of the papacy was on the rise even before the Restoration, as opponents of the Napoleonic regime looked for leadership beyond the mountains-ultra montes-to Rome.12 After 1815, the new trend towards papalism was reinforced by the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, notably in Germany, where the works of the likes of Novalis and Görres rekindled hopes of a re-unified Christendom.

  • 13 On Lamennais and the Avenir movement, J.-R. Derré, Lamennais, ses amis et le mouvement des idees a (...)

7In France, the intellectual foundations of ultramontane theory were laid by Joseph de Maistre and by Félicité de Lamennais, a quintessentially romantic figure who came to exercise an enormous influence over a new generation of young clerics, many of them destined for high preferment in the Church later in life.13 In the decade between the mid-1820s and the mid-1830s, the école menaisienne, the counter-seminary established by Lamennais at La Chenaie, became the powerhouse of the ultramontane movement. If Lamennais’ own extraordinary intellectual and political trajectory ended in his abandonment of the Church, his condemnation by Rome in 1834 by no means killed off the burgeoning ultramontane movement, since none of his disciples was prepared to follow him into the wilderness. Most, in fact, were more convinced than ever of the need to remain loyal to Rome and to develop a new vision of the Church which was very different from the gallican model that was expounded in the French seminaries.

  • 14 A. de Falloux, Le Parti catholique: ce qu’il a ete, ce qu’il est devenu (Paris, 1856): J. Gadille, (...)
  • 15 S. D. Kale, Legitimacy and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852-1883, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (...)
  • 16 J.-R. Palanque, Catholiques libéraux et gallicans en France au Concile du Vatican, Aix-en-Provence. (...)

8Lamennais’ followers can be divided into two groups. One was a network of laymen, for the most part liberals in politics as well as ultramontanes in religion-men such as Montalembert and Falloux who in the 1840s formed a Catholic pressure group, the parti catholique, to campaign for the right of the Church to establish its own educational institutions free from state control.14 The other group consisted of a network of secular and regular clerics most of whom considered ultramontanism’s natural links to be not with liberalism but with legitimism, which was itself undergoing change after the death of Charles X in 1836. The new Pretender, the Comte de Chambord, rejected the old royal gallicanism and embraced the ultramontane idea of the papacy, thus opening up the possibility of a new version of the alliance of throne and altar which inspired all-clerics and laymen alike-who identified with the intransigent outlook of the new militant Catholicism and its repudiation of liberal bourgeois civilisation. The restoration of “Henry V” would guarantee the restoration not only of the legitimate Bourbon monarchy but of a Christian social order.15 Already in the 1840s, therefore, there were tensions in the parti catholique, which would in the 1850s and 1860s develop into a major rift, between ultramontane intransigents like Veuillot and liberal Catholics like Montalembert who, appalled by veuillotisme, which made the pope into “the idol of the Vatican”, sought refuge in a kind of neo-gallicanism.16 Theirs, however, was increasingly a minority voice, while that of the ultramontane militants was very much the dominant one by 1870.

  • 17 On Guéranger, Dom P. Delatte, Dom Guéranger. abbé de Solesmes, par un moine bénédictin, Paris, Plon (...)
  • 18 Gough, op. cit., p. 119-30.

9The clerical element in the ultramontane network-both religious orders and secular priests-was of huge importance. The role of dom Guéranger, who restored the Benedictine order at Solesmes in the 1830s, was paramount.17 A romantic who was passionately attached to the Christian social order represented by the Middle Ages, he had specialised in the history of the liturgy while studying with Lamennais at La Chenaie. In 1840 he published the first volume of his Institutions liturgiques and thereafter campaigned aggressively for the Romanisation of the liturgy in the face of stubborn resistance from gallican prelates who were not ready to relinquish their local rituals without a fight.18 New orders, such as the Marists, directed by the dynamic Emmanuel d’Alzon, and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, founded by Eugène de Mazenod in 1816, were also leading lights of the ultramontane movement, as were the Holy Ghost Fathers, a missionary order revitalised after their union in 1841 with the newer congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary created by Père Libermann. Crucially, the Holy Ghost Fathers were given charge of the French seminary in Rome which opened in 1853 with the double objective of encouraging more ecclesiastical students from France to prepare for the priesthood in the Eternal City and also to promote Roman forms of piety and devotion.

  • 19 J. Guerber, Le Ralliement du clergé ƒrangais a la morale liguorienne: I ’abbe Gousset et ses précur (...)
  • 20 R. F. Costigan, S. J., Rohrbacher and the Ecclesiology of Ultramontanism, Rome, Università Gregoria (...)

10Seminaries in France were themselves a network within a network, and a vital channel by which ultramontane doctrines were spread among the younger generation of native-educated clergymen. A key figure here was the abbé Gousset (1792-1866), who was a towering influence at the seminary of Besantjon, where he taught moral theology in conformity with the ideas of Saint Alphonsus of Liguori (1696-1787), the founder of the Redemptorist order and the enemy of so-called Jansenist rigorism in the practice of the sacrament of penance. As the author of authoritative textbooks on moral authority and later as a bishop (he became first Bishop of Périgueux and then Archbishop of Rheims) Gousset not only did more than anyone to diffuse Liguorism in France but in the process encouraged French clerics to assimilate the ultramontane model of Catholicism more generally.19 Similarly, the adoption in the seminaries in the 1850s of propapal history textbooks such as the works of R. F. Rohrbacher supplied another powerful stimulus to the development of an ultramontane ecclesiology among the clergy.20

  • 21 J.-O. Boudon, Paris capitale religieuse sous le Second Empire, Paris, Cerf, 2001, p. 446- 51.
  • 22 J. Maurain, La Politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire, de 1852 à 1869, Paris, Alcan, 1930.
  • 23 Palanque, op. cit., R. Aubert, Vatican I, Paris, éditions de l’Orante, 1964.

11The Paris nunciature was yet another key part of the ultramontane network.21 Mgr Fornari, nuncio between 1843 and 1850, took the initiative in upholding the rights of Rome against gallican-minded archbishops of Paris such as Mgr Affre and Mgr Sibour. Fornari’s successor, Mgr Garibaldi, was more sympathetically disposed to the archdiocese, but when he was replaced in 1853 by the hard-line ultramontane Mgr Sacconi, the nunciature became once again a centre of pro-Roman sentiment. In the 1850s, however, relations between Paris and Rome were generally good, and it was only after 1859-60, following Napoleon III’s reversal of his Italian policy, that tensions over the “Roman Question” became acute22. The strained relationship was exacerbated in 1861 by the nomination to the post of Paris nuncio of Mgr Chigi, a member of the Roman aristocracy and an intransigent in both religion and politics. Both his extreme ultramontanism and his support for the Legitimist cause placed him at odds with the liberal and neo-gallican values of Archbishop Darboy, who resented the nuncio’s attempts to reserve high ecclesiastical preferment for well known friends of Rome and who made no secret of his distaste for the Syllabus of Errors and for the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he opposed at the Vatican Council of 1870.23 If the nuncio was often at odds with the Archbishop of Paris, however, he was invariably supported by Louis Veuillot and his staff at L’Univers, who liaised daily with the nunciature in order to keep abreast of the latest directives from Rome and who ensured that they received maximum publicity in the pages of their newspaper.

The role of L’Univers and the Catholic press

  • 24 On Veuillot, now a largely neglected figure, see M. L. Brown, Louis Veuillot: French Ultramontane C (...)
  • 25 On the press generally, Histoire générale de la presse ƒrangaise, ed. by C. Bellanger (Paris, PUF, (...)

12The power of the press was a decisive factor in the ultramontane reshaping of Catholicism in Europe and nowhere was this more evident than in France, where Louis Veuillot transformed an obscure pious organ founded by the abbé Migne in 1833 and originally entitled L’Univers religieux into the mightiest voice in the entire ultramontane movement.24 In the eyes of his liberal and republican enemies, Veuillot and his collaborators were diehard reactionary “clericals” who clung to the vestiges of the ancien régime in a vain attempt to hold back the tide of modernity. The reality was rather different. In the nineteenth century the press functioned as an instrument of modernity and L’Univers represented one of the many faces of modern journalism. Veuillot, as much as his adversaries, needs to be recognised as a member of the monde moderne, an outstanding journalist in a great age of journalism.25 For Veuillot, the journalist was a modern-day warrior at the very core of the conflict between the Church and its enemies. As he explained in one of his fiercest pamphlets, Les Libres Penseurs, resorting to the military imagery he loved to deploy:

  • 26 Les Libres-Penseurs, OC, 5, p. 112.

“Rien ne peut remplacer un journaliste capable et convaincu. C’est lui qui toujours veille sur la brèche et qui frappe à propos, souvent sans conseil, souvent contre la volonté des chefs, non les grands coups, mais les coups sûrs. Il force les traînards à marcher, engage, compromet les timides, retient les téméraires: il panse les blessés, réconforte les vaincus, fait comprendre aux maladroits leurs fausses manœuvres et les répare.”26

13In terms of the politics of knowledge it was essential to the ultramontane triumph that L’Univers succeeded in establishing itself as the authoritative articulator of Catholic discourse (rather than, say, Le Correspondant, asssociated with the minority liberal Catholic group headed by Montalembert).

  • 27 E. Poulat, Liberte, laicite: la guerre des deux Frances et le principe de la modernité, Paris, édit (...)
  • 28 Gough, op. cit., p. 199 ft.

14If Veuillot now seems a remote figure, the personification of a religious sensibility which retains few echoes in contemporary French culture, that was not the case in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when, for almost forty years between 1840 and 1880, he was the best known spokesman for intransigent ultramontane Catholicism in its culture war with the champions of la ƒoi laïque, those who wished to deny religion any place in public life.27 Born in 1813 the son of a humble artisan and an autodidact, Veuillot began his professional career as a provincial journalist writing for pro-government newspapers under the July Monarchy but having converted to Catholicism in the course of a visit to Rome in 1838, he dedicated himself thereafter to the cause of his new religion as a combative journalist with a rare talent for writing polemical prose. Having joined L’Univers in 1839, he rapidly became its editor, entirely with the consent of the man who until that point had been holding the paper together, Melchior du Lac (an interesting figure in his own right and to whom we shall return). In the early days, in the 1840s, Veuillot collaborated willingly with the likes of Montalembert in the campaign to break the state’s monopoly over secondary education while at the same time making common cause with Guéranger in his efforts to have the Roman liturgy imposed on all the dioceses of France. Despite moments of tension, the nascent parti catholique survived internal disagreements until 1848, but from that time the gap between ultramontanes and liberals widened, especially when Veuillot refused to accept that the loi Falloux of 1850 had given Catholics most of what they had been seeking in the campaign for Catholic schools. To the considerable alarm and outrage of many of the bishops, and notably of the archbishop of Paris, Mgr Sibour, L’Univers not only aligned itself with the ultramontane camp but appeared ready to usurp the place of the episcopate in defining and defending the Catholic interest.28

  • 29 J.-O. Boudon, L’Épiscopat ƒrangais à l’époque concordataire (1802-1905), Paris, éditions du Cerf, 1 (...)
  • 30 See E. Gauthier, Le Génie satirique de Louis Veuillot, Lyon and Paris, Vitte, n.d.

15How to account for the success of L’Univers in the face of strong episcopal disapproval is not straightforward (Mgr Dupanloup, bishop of Orleans, was another sworn enemy and most of the bishops of the early 1850s still leant more towards gallicanism rather than ultramontanism).29 Unquestionably, one factor was Veuillot’s sheer talent as a polemicist, skilled above all in the use of irony, which he used relentlessly to provoke, ridicule and confound his opponents. At last, the Church had found someone who could pay back the sons of Voltaire in their own coin (though he would have more difficulties with the sons of Renan). Veuillot had a devastating line in personal abuse and in corruscating attacks he made fun of many of the leading anti-clerical intellectuals of the day-people like Quinet and Havin, editor of Le Siècle, the best known secular liberal newspaper of the Second Empire era.30

  • 31 P. Pierrard, Histoire des curés de campagne de 1789 à nos jours, Paris, Bartillat, 1986, and M. Lau (...)

16It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the appeal of L’Univers was only a matter of style. Its real strength lay in its ideas, which, however rebarbative they might appear to twenty-first century sensibilities, found a hugely appreciative audience among the provincial parish clergy of nineteenth-century rural France. Most were the products of a peasant backround and these humble curés de campagne readily identified both with Veuillot the man–a fellow son of the people-and his message, an uncompromising defence of Catholic doctrine predicated on the assumption that France was still a profoundly Christian country, despite the best efforts of mocking intellectuals and a sceptical and materialistic bourgeoisie.31 Veuillot’s was a manichean universe of right and wrong, black and white. His stance was never in doubt and what his enemies denounced as bigotry his admirers extolled as audacity and integrity. Veuillot made a virtue of his independence, and while he happily accepted the benefits of governmental benevolence in the 1850s he did not shrink from criticising the Emperor and his regime when they abandoned their support for the papacy in favour of the cause of Italian nationalism. As a result, in 1860 L’Univers was closed down for some seven years, until, benefiting from the gradual, if not entirely planned, liberalisation of the Empire, it reappeared in 1867, more intransigent than ever, proud to align itself with the Syllabus issued by Pio Nono in 1864 and ardently in favour of the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility. What Veuillot and L’Univers stood for was never in any doubt, and if they won support it was because large numbers of French men and women agreed with their ideas.

  • 32 Gough, op. cit., p. 96.

17The point which needs to be emphasised in the present essay, however, is the pivotal place which L’Univers occupied in the entire ultramontane network. Veuillot and his newspaper provided a vital link between all the different elements in the network-the parish clergy, the religious orders, the ultramontane faction in the hierarchy, the seminaries, the Paris nunciature and groups of devout laymen, many of them members of the provincial legitimist nobility who hoped to see a restoration of the monarchy under the comte de Chambord but who also pined for a return to a Christian social order as defined by Rome. L’Univers also maintained important contacts throughout the Catholic world, and gave France a unique position outside of Rome as a nerve centre of a truly international movement. In short, L’Univers brought together all the diverse strands in the ultramontane network and gave them a single, powerful voice which spoke with an authority frequently confirmed by the Pope himself (Veuillot was a regular and welcome visitor to Rome, especially in the years of the journals suppression). As Austin Gough has observed, L’Univers became the “continuous seminar” of the ultramontane movement, publishing the pastoral letters of the ultramontane bishops and re-educating the parish clergy with daily lessons on church history, ecclesiology and political theory distilled from the writings of the likes of de Maistre and (the younger) Lamennais.32

  • 33 The correspondence is published in OC, vols. 15-26.

18The indefatigable Veuillot, of course, was himself the prime mover in the network. In addition to his prodigious output as a writer-apart from his daily journalism, for nearly forty years he churned out polemical pamphlets, works of pious edification, novels with a Christian message, historical studies and poetry-Veuillot kept up a vast correspondence which, in the forty volumes of his complete works, runs to some twelve volumes, each of four hundred pages and more.33 Veuillot regularly dashed off ten letters a day, always wishing to keep in close touch with other members of his editorial team when either he or they were out of town and keen to cultivate contacts with priests, religious and lay people sympathetic to the ultramontane movement. In his public life, Louis Veuillot made many enemies, but in his private correspondence one finds another Veuillot-a man with a remarkable gift for friendship, modest and selfdeprecating, erudite and witty, expansive and sympathetic, and above all sincere in his religious convictions. A friend and ally of Guéranger, he loved to escape to the silence and tranquillity of Solesmes, where he first stayed as a guest of the abbot in 1843. Writing to another close friend, the comte d’Esgrigny from the abbey in June 1861, he described his day:

  • 34 Louis Veuillot to Comte d’Esgrigny, 19 Jan. 1861, OC 20, p. 371.

“Je suis les offices avec délices, je ne puis m’assouvir de grand’messes, de matines, de vêpres et de complies, si bien qu’après m’être levé à quatre heures du matin, et quelquefois plus tôt, j’arrive à la fin de la journée sans avoir fait autre chose que louer le bon Dieu.”34

  • 35 Historiettes etfantaisies is in OC 7. On Segrétain, see also OC 18, p. 243, n. 2 as well as É. Ance (...)

19Among Veuillot’s special friendships, mention should be made of that with Adolphe-Émile Segrétain, mayor and deputy of Laval, and the recipient of a papal knighthood for his assistance in the creation of the new diocese of Laval, a project which Veuillot strongly supported. The two men got to know each other in 1852 and immediately became firm friends. One token of Segrétain’s affection for Veuillot was the steady supply of game, pates and the like which Segretain-a keen sportsman and hunter-dispatched to the Veuillot family. Another was their playful correspondence, full of badinage, some of which Veuillot published after Segrétain’s death in Histoirettes et fantaisies.35

  • 36 On Dumast, OC 15, p. 99, n. 2.
  • 37 Veuillot’s first letter to abbé Morisseau is in OC 15, p. 94-5.
  • 38 The correspondence was initiated in 1851. See OC 17, p. 326.
  • 39 Louis Veuillot to Esgrigny, 13 July 1862, OC 21, p. 222-3.
  • 40 Louis Veuillot to Comte de la Tour, 9 March 1848, OC 19, p. 353.

20Veuillot’s friendships were not uncommonly triggered by a letter from an admirer of one of his works, to which Veuillot would respond warmly. A case in point was Baron Prosper Guerrier de Dumas, man of letters and animator of a Catholic circle at Nancy.36 Another was the abbé Morisseau, a canon of Tours, whose letter to Veuillot congratulating him on the publication of his early work Pèlerinages de Suisse swifly led to a visit by Veuillot to Tours in July 1840 and the furthering of contacts with other priests and supporters of L’Univers among the local nobility.37 The provincial aristocracy, in fact, furnished Veuillot not only with subscribers to L’Univers but also with some of his closest friends. Such, for example, were the Count and Countess de Montsaulnon, to whose Château at Bernay, in the Cher, he and his family regularly repaired.38 They were equally welcome at Poulignen, at the villa of the Comte d’Esgrigny (“Esgrigny-surmer”)39, and at the home of Count Gustave de la Tour in Tréguier, where the latter was mayor and a legitimist deputy for the Côtes-du-Nord.40

  • 41 OC15, p. 338, n. 2.
  • 42 OC 21, p. 142-5, n. 1.
  • 43 OC 16, p. 307, n. 2.
  • 44 On the relationship between Auguste Roussel and Élise Veuillot, see Pierrard, Louis Veuillot, p. 11 (...)

21Among the editorial staff at L’Univers, Veuillot fostered an easy sociability and a kind of family atmosphere, no doubt helped by the fact that his closest collaborator was family-namely his younger brother and future biographer Eugène, who would continue to edit the paper after Veuillot’s death in 1883. He also had indispensable secretarial support from his sister Élise, a strong-minded woman who did not shrink from offering him advice and who took charge of the Veuillot household and the upbringing of his daughters after the tragically early death of his wife. Gustave de la Tour, the newspaper’s expert on foreign affairs, was an intimate friend and as already mentioned delighted in extending hospitality to the Veuillot family at Tréguier. A graduate of the École des Chartes, Leon Aubineau, (“Frere Léon”) occupied a special place in Veuillot’s affections even before he joined the editorial staff, having furnished Veuillot with local information from Tours while working there in the 1840s.41 Also of the “family” were Pierre Roux-Lavergne, professor at the Faculty of Rennes and a deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1848, who maintained close links with L’Univers after he left the paper to become a priest and to start a new career as a professor of theology at the senior seminary of Nîmes42, and J-B Coquille, a former barrister and the paper’s legal expert.43 A later addition to the team, Auguste Roussel, who joined after the paper’s reappearance in 1867, was especially close to Élise Veuillot and would eventually help her found her own newspaper La Vérité to oppose the Ralliement in the 1890s.44

22At the Univers family, however, there was one other person particularly dear to Veuillot, namely Melchior du Lac de Montvert, whom towards the end of his own life and after du Lac’s death Veuillot remembered as a faithful, lifelong friend who had been the very soul of the ultramontane network. In a moving letter to his brother in 1879, Veuillot recalled:

  • 45 Louis Veuillot to Eugène Veuillot, end of 1879, OC 26, p. 224.

“J’ai trouvé à L’Univers Du Lac, un ami fidèle, et j’ai eu l’honneur d’etre son ami jusqu’à la mort. Il est mort dans mes bras, et j’ai toujours aimé son grand esprit et son grand cœur. Il était savant, ferme, dévoué. J’ai vu de grands esprits. Jamais de plus large, de plus éclairé, de plus tranquillement chrétien. Fidèle à tous les grands attachements, à tous les grands devoirs, il avait pour amis Gerbet, Salinis, Guéranger. Tous le bénissaient. Il me les a donnés et ils m’ont reçu à cause de lui. J’ai les souvenirs, ils sont ma lumière, mes amis ont été ses frères.“45

  • 46 The main source for the life of du Lac is in the Veuillot papers at the Bibliothéque Nationale. BNF (...)

23As Veuillot himself here acknowledged, in his own life and friendships du Lac epitomised everything that ultramontanism stood for46. Born at Castres in 1806, he came from a noble and ancient family of the Languedoc and was therefore a member of that provincial nobility which would provide Veuillot with his most devoted followers among the laity. An émigré grandfather early instilled in him a horror of the Revolution, a horror which only deepened in later life after he had read the works of Joseph de Maistre and other exponents of counter-Revolutionary theory. His enthusiasm for ultramontanism was first stirred at the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, where he had gone to complete his secondary education and where he came under the influence of two of Lamennais’s leading disciples, Salinis and Gerbet, who were chaplains at the school. Reluctantly, at the behest of his family, du Lac agreed to study for a law degree with a view to obtaining a safe career in the government bureaucracy, but he spent as much time as possible reading books on theology, church history and ultramontane theory and in 1834 abandoned the law in order to embark on a journalistic career with the abbé Migne’s newspaper L’Univers religieux. Du Lac’s real desire was to become a priest, but a first spell in a seminary ended when he was obliged to rejoin L’Univers to earn money to send back to his family after the financial ruin of his father. Du Lac’s first service to the cause of ultramontanism, therefore, was, virtually singlehandedly, to keep L’Univers afloat until Louis Veuillot arrived on the scene and began to put the newspaper on an altogether different footing.

24Without du Lac, therefore, there would have been no Univers for Veuillot to inherit, and Veuillot was always ready to recognise him as his master and tutor, responsible for giving him the grounding in theology and church history which he himself lacked from the deficiencies of his own upbringing and education. Du Lac was also the principal link with Guéranger and Solesmes, where he spent the four years between 1844 and 1848 in a second attempt to take holy orders, finally giving up once again on account of the need to support his family financially by means of his journalism. Like Veuillot, and despite his odd aspect (in the office, du Lac cut a bizarre figure, dressed in a soutane so that people frequently mistook him for a priest) du Lac also had a profound gift for friendship. As a bachelor, he was free to accept the many invitations he received to dine at the households of both Louis and Eugène Veuillot, and because of his upper-class background he had many friends among the provincial nobility, the closest of whom was the Comte d’Esgrigny, a friend from his youth to whom he introduced Veuillot and his family. Du Lac too kept up a vast correspondence and regarded the office of L’Univers as the meeting place of a circle of friends. Describing his day to his mother in 1852, he wrote:

  • 47 BNF, NAF 24635, fol. 233: Du Lac to his mother, 12 April 1852.

“Mon temps je passe au bureau du journal où nous sommes sept à huit, comme des frères. Si je n’étais pas loin de vous, ma vie serait la plus douce qu’on puisse imaginer. Le travail que je fais me plaît et je crois qu’il a quelque utilité. Le souverain pontife daigne de temps à autre nous bénir et nous encourager. Les Cardinaux de France et nos évêques les plus éminents nous comblent aussi des témoignages de leur attachement. Ce sont là de grandes consolations.”47

  • 48 Ibid., fol. 314-5: Du Lac to his mother, 22 July 1860.

25His routine changed little down the years and was one of complete devotion to the newspaper and the ultramontane cause. Again apologising to his mother for his failure to write more regularly, in 1860 he described for her his crowded schedule: up at 7 a.m., arrive at the office by 8 a.m., read all the Parisian and all the provincial newspapers, taking notes of issues which needed to be addressed and flagged to his colleague Chantrel before breaking for lunch at 11a.m. After lunch, he would proceed to the Paris nunciature and meet with bishops and others who might have information to pass on for publication in the paper. By 1 p.m. he would be back in the office, where he would start correcting proofs. Next he turned to foreign news, reading the foreign press and translating anything of note, after which he liaised with the printers in order to put the paper to bed. But no sooner would he have finished producing one issue, than he had to think of the following day’s edition. There would be more visitors, and before long he would have reached 5 p.m., when it was time to leave to go to the barber for a shave before dining with Veuillot, d’Esgrigny or some other friend. He would return to the office at 10.30 p.m. in order to read all the evening papers, gutting them for material for the following day’s Univers. Finally, he would go home to try to be in bed by midnight, and, if he was lucky, to read a little48.

  • 49 Ibid., fol. 189.
  • 50 BNF, NAF 24633, fol. 374.

26In the daily routines of du Lac, one obtains an illuminating insight into how the French ultramontane network actually worked. His colleague, friend and biographer Arthur Loth was right to note that, although this life was one passed between a hotel room and a newspaper office, ‘cette simple vie a eu l’importance qu’on attache à l’histoire des controverses religieuses et philosophiques du siècle’49. Friendship occupied a central place in this life, as in the life of Veuillot, and du Lac was constantly in touch with his circle of friends by letter in the way people today use the telephone, email or text messages, sharing all their hopes, their joys, their disappointments and their sorrows, as in 1856 when he stayed with the d’Esgrigny family to help them cope with the illness and then the death of their son50.

27At L’Univers nothing gave greater pleasure than to be able to have a meal with kindred spirits. Two examples, out of many instances, should suffice to make the point. One is the short note Veuillot sent Esgrigny at the end of April 1858:

  • 51 Louis Veuillot to Esgrigny, end of April 1858, OC 19, p. 283.

“Les circonstances nous ont fait improviser un dîner pour l’évêque de Strasbourg et l’évêque d’Arras, qui vont à Rome. C’est demain. Si par hasard vous étiez libre et qu’il ne vous déplût pas d’être pris de si court, vous seriez bien aimable de vous joindre à nous. Il y aura Du Lac, Ségretain, et quelque abbé...”51

28The other is a similar missive, dating from October 1863 and also fired off by Veuillot, to the combative abbé Jules Morel, an outspoken ultramontane of long standing who, like Veuillot, entertained a visceral loathing for liberal Catholicism and had just written a polemical work against it (Somme contre le catholicisme libéral):

  • 52 Louis Veuillot to abbé Jules Morel, 21 Oct. 1863, OC 22, p. 23.

“Mon Dieu, mon ami que vous parlez bien! Venez donc manger la soupe dimanche. Donnez-moi la consolation de nourrir un si brave ouvrier de la vraie vigne, tout rempli de son bon vin.”52

29Such letters suggest that in any account of the rise of ultramontanism in nineteenth-century France the networks of personal relations which radiated from the offices of L’Univers played a decisive part in the creation of ultramontane solidarities and of an ultramontane community. For du Lac, as for Louis Veuillot, ultramontanism was less an ideology than a sense of belonging to a wider spiritual family. Spirituality was fostered by friendship and friendship in turn was nourished by a shared spirituality.

Notes

1 On this, see the excellent chapter by Chris Clark, “The New Catholicism and the European Culture Wars”, in C. M. Clark and W. Kaiser ed., Culture Wars: Religious-Secular Conƒlict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

2 On Grégoire, see especially R. Hermon-Belot, L’abbe Gregoire: la politique et la vérité, Paris, Seuil, 2000.

3 A. Gough, Paris and Rome: The Gallican Church and the Ultramontane Campaign 1848- 1853, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986; a superb study.

4 B. Horaist, La Dévotion an pape et le catholicisme frangais sous le pontiƒical de Pie IX (1846-1878). D’après les archives de la Bibliothèque Apostolique Vaticane, Rome, École Française de Rome, 1995.

5 Quoted by R. McLuskey, “Tribulation, 1820-1922”, in The Scots College Rome 1600-2000, ed. R. McLuskey, Edinburgh, John Donald, 2000, p. 86.

6 Horaist, op. cit, p. 47.

7 On the Catholic revival, see especially M. L. Anderson, “The Divisions of the Pope: The Catholic Revival and Europe’s Transition to Democracy”, in The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival, ed. A. Ivereigh, London, Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000.

8 The best overviews are in G. Cholvy and Y.-M. Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, vol. l, 1800-1888, Toulouse, Privat, 1985, and R. Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism 1789-1914, London, Routledge, 1989.

9 On the Sacred Heart, R. Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 2000, and for Lourdes, R. Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age, London, Allen Lane, 1999. Also T. A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1983.

10 See J. F. McMillan, “Priest Hits Girl!: the Front Line of the ‘War of the Two Frances’”, in Culture Wars, ed. Clark and Kaiser.

11 L. Veuillot, Le Parƒum de Rome, in F. Veuillot. CEuvres completes de Louis Veuillot, Paris, Lethielleux, 1929-40, 40 volumes (hereafter OC), 9: Les Odeurs de Paris, OC, 11.

12 See the remarkable article by J. Gadille, “L’ultramontanisme au xixe siècle”, in Les Ultramontains canadiens ƒranfais: études d’histoire religieuse presentées en hommage au professeur Philippe Sylvain, Montréal, Les éditions du Boréal Express, 1985, p. 27-66.

13 On Lamennais and the Avenir movement, J.-R. Derré, Lamennais, ses amis et le mouvement des idees a l’époque romantique 1824-1834, Paris, Klincksieck, 1962. L. Le Guillou, L’Évolution de la pensée religieuse de Félicité Lamennais, Paris, A. Colin, 1966.

14 A. de Falloux, Le Parti catholique: ce qu’il a ete, ce qu’il est devenu (Paris, 1856): J. Gadille, ed., Les catholiques liberaux an xixe siecle Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1974.

15 S. D. Kale, Legitimacy and the Reconstruction of French Society, 1852-1883, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

16 J.-R. Palanque, Catholiques libéraux et gallicans en France au Concile du Vatican, Aix-en-Provence. Ophrys, 1962.

17 On Guéranger, Dom P. Delatte, Dom Guéranger. abbé de Solesmes, par un moine bénédictin, Paris, Plon-Oudin, 1909-910). A different perspective is offered by A. Ledru, Dom Guéranger, abbe de Solesmes et Mgr Bouvier, évêque de Mans, Paris, Champion, 1911.

18 Gough, op. cit., p. 119-30.

19 J. Guerber, Le Ralliement du clergé ƒrangais a la morale liguorienne: I ’abbe Gousset et ses précurseurs (1785-1832), Rome, Università Gregoriana, 1973.

20 R. F. Costigan, S. J., Rohrbacher and the Ecclesiology of Ultramontanism, Rome, Università Gregoriana, 1980.

21 J.-O. Boudon, Paris capitale religieuse sous le Second Empire, Paris, Cerf, 2001, p. 446- 51.

22 J. Maurain, La Politique ecclésiastique du Second Empire, de 1852 à 1869, Paris, Alcan, 1930.

23 Palanque, op. cit., R. Aubert, Vatican I, Paris, éditions de l’Orante, 1964.

24 On Veuillot, now a largely neglected figure, see M. L. Brown, Louis Veuillot: French Ultramontane Catholic Journalist and Layman, 1815-1883, Durham, NC, Moore, 1977) and the more recent study by P. Pierrard, Louis Veuillot, Paris, Beauchesne, 1998. The principal biography, which is at the same time a history of L’Univers, is that of his brother Eugène, completed by Eugène’s son, Francois, in four volumes, E. Veuillot, Louis Veuillot, Paris, Rétaux, 1899-1914.

25 On the press generally, Histoire générale de la presse ƒrangaise, ed. by C. Bellanger (Paris, PUF, 1969-76, 5 vols. On the modernity of the press, D. de la Motte and J. Przblyski eds., Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France, Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

26 Les Libres-Penseurs, OC, 5, p. 112.

27 E. Poulat, Liberte, laicite: la guerre des deux Frances et le principe de la modernité, Paris, éditions du Cerf, 1987; C. Langlois, “Catholiques et laïques”, in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. P. Nora, Paris, Gallitnard, Quarto, 1997, vol. 2, p. 2327-358.

28 Gough, op. cit., p. 199 ft.

29 J.-O. Boudon, L’Épiscopat ƒrangais à l’époque concordataire (1802-1905), Paris, éditions du Cerf, 1996.

30 See E. Gauthier, Le Génie satirique de Louis Veuillot, Lyon and Paris, Vitte, n.d.

31 P. Pierrard, Histoire des curés de campagne de 1789 à nos jours, Paris, Bartillat, 1986, and M. Launay, Le Bon Prêtre: le clergé rural au dix-neuvième siècle, Paris, Aubier, 1986.

32 Gough, op. cit., p. 96.

33 The correspondence is published in OC, vols. 15-26.

34 Louis Veuillot to Comte d’Esgrigny, 19 Jan. 1861, OC 20, p. 371.

35 Historiettes etfantaisies is in OC 7. On Segrétain, see also OC 18, p. 243, n. 2 as well as É. Anceau, Les Députés du Second Empire. Prosopographie d’une élite du xixe siècle, Paris, Champion, 2000, p. 112 and p. 353 and M. Denis, “Un ami mayennais de Louis Veuillot, Esprit-Adolphe Segrétain. Lettres inédites (1855-1861)”, Bulletin de la Commission historique de la Mayenne, 1965.

36 On Dumast, OC 15, p. 99, n. 2.

37 Veuillot’s first letter to abbé Morisseau is in OC 15, p. 94-5.

38 The correspondence was initiated in 1851. See OC 17, p. 326.

39 Louis Veuillot to Esgrigny, 13 July 1862, OC 21, p. 222-3.

40 Louis Veuillot to Comte de la Tour, 9 March 1848, OC 19, p. 353.

41 OC15, p. 338, n. 2.

42 OC 21, p. 142-5, n. 1.

43 OC 16, p. 307, n. 2.

44 On the relationship between Auguste Roussel and Élise Veuillot, see Pierrard, Louis Veuillot, p. 11-12.

45 Louis Veuillot to Eugène Veuillot, end of 1879, OC 26, p. 224.

46 The main source for the life of du Lac is in the Veuillot papers at the Bibliothéque Nationale. BNF NAF 24635 contains a dossier du Lac, which includes a manuscript biography written by his Univers colleague Arthur Loth.

47 BNF, NAF 24635, fol. 233: Du Lac to his mother, 12 April 1852.

48 Ibid., fol. 314-5: Du Lac to his mother, 22 July 1860.

49 Ibid., fol. 189.

50 BNF, NAF 24633, fol. 374.

51 Louis Veuillot to Esgrigny, end of April 1858, OC 19, p. 283.

52 Louis Veuillot to abbé Jules Morel, 21 Oct. 1863, OC 22, p. 23.

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Professor of History, University of Edinburgh.

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