BEAUMONT, CHRISTOPHE DE French ecclesiastic, became bishop of Bayonne in 1 i41, archbishop of Vienne in '743, and in 1746, at the age of 43, archbishop of Paris, To force the Jansenists to accept the bull Unigenitus, he ordered the priests of his diocese to refuse absolution to those who would not recognize the bull, and to deny funeral rites to those who had confessed to a Jansenist priest. While other bishops sent Beau mont their adhesion to his crusade, the parlement of Paris threat ened to confiscate his temporalities. The king forbade the parle ment to interfere in these spiritual questions, and upon its prov ing obdurate it was exiled (Sept. 18, 1753). The "royal chamber," which was substituted, having failed to carry on the administra tion of justice properly, the king was obliged to recall the parle ment, and the archbishop was sent into honourable exile (Aug. 1754)• An effort was made to induce him to resign the active duties of his see to a coadjutor, but in spite of the most tempting offers—including a cardinal's hat—he refused. On the contrary, to his polemic against the Jansenists he added an attack on the philosophes, and issued a formal mandatory letter condemning Rousseau's Emile. Rousseau replied in his masterly Lettre a M. de Beaumont (1762), in which he insists that freedom of discus sion in religious matters is essentially more religious than the attempt to impose belief by force.
De Beaumont's Mandements, lettres et lnstru,ctions pastorales were published in 1 78o, the year before his death.