FENELON, FRANCOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE (1651-1715), French writer and archbishop of Cam brai, was born at the chateau of Fenelon in Perigord on Aug. 6, 1651. His father, Pons, Comte de Fenelon, was a country gentle man of ancient lineage, large family and small estate. He was educated at home and at the neighbouring University of Cahors. In 1666 he came to Paris, under charge of his father's brother, Antoine, marquis de Fenelon, and in 1669 he entered the college of Saint Sulpice. He contemplated a missionary journey to the Levant, but the plan was vetoed, and he remained at Saint Sulpice till 1679, when he was made "superior" of a "New Catholic" sisterhood in Paris—an institution devoted to the conversion of Huguenot ladies. In the winter of 1685, just of ter the revocation of the edict of Nantes, Fenelon was put at the head of a mission to the Protestants of Saintonge. To Fenelon such employment was clearly uncongenial; but if he employed bribery and espionage among his proselytes, his general conduct was kindly and states manlike. But neither in his actions nor in his writings is there the least trace of that belief in liberty of conscience ascribed to him by 18th-century philosophers.
Meanwhile the marquis de Fenelon had introduced his nephew into the devout section of the court, dominated by Mme. de Maintenon. He became a favourite disciple of Bossuet, and at the bishop's instance undertook to refute certain metaphysical errors of Father Malebranche. In the philosophical Treatise on the Existence of God, which he wrote for the purpose, Fenelon re wrote Descartes in the spirit of St. Augustine. More important were his Dialogues on Eloquence, pleading for greater simplicity and naturalness in the pulpit, and urging preachers to take the scriptural, natural style of Bossuet as their model, rather than the coldly analytic eloquence of his great rival, Bourdaloue. His Treatise on the Education of Girls was probably the most influ ential of all Fenelon's books, and guided French ideas on the question all through the i8th century. It holds a most judicious balance between the precieuses, enthusiasts for the "higher" edu cation of their sex, and the heavy Philistines, who thought that the Iess girls knew the better they were likely to be. Fenelon sums up in favour of the cultivated housewife; his first object was to persuade the mothers to take charge of their girls themselves, and bring them up to be suitable wives and mothers in their own generation.
Even Saint-Simon allows that his episcopal duties at Cambrai were perfectly performed. His diocese was administered with great strictness, and yet on broad and liberal lines. Saint-Simon bears the same witness to his government of his palace. There he lived with all the piety of a true pastor, yet with all the dignity of a great nobleman. With all its luxuries, his house remained a true bishop's palace, breathing the strictest discipline and re straint. And of all this chastened dignity the archbishop was himself the ever-present, ever-inimitable model—in all that he did the perfect churchman, in all the highbred noble, in all things, also, the author of Telemaque.
The blot on this ideal existence was his persecution of the Jansenists (see JANsENlsM). Fenelon's theories of life were differ ent from theirs; and they had attacked his Maxims of the Saints, holding that visionary theories of perfection were ill-fitted for a world where even the holiest could scarce be saved. To suppress the Jansenists he was even ready to strike up an alliance with the Jesuits, and force on a reluctant France the doctrine of papal infallibility. His time was much better employed in fitting his old pupil, Burgundy, for a kingship that never came. Louis XIV. seldom allowed them to meet, but for years they corresponded; this exchange of letters became still more frequent in 1711, when the wretched dauphin died and left Burgundy heir-apparent to the throne. Fenelon now wrote a series of memorable criti cisms on the government of Louis XIV. Much more clearly than most men, he saw that the Bourbons were tottering to their fall.
In 1712 Burgundy died, and with him died all his tutor's hopes of reform. From this moment his health began to fail, though he mustered strength enough to write the Letter to the French Acad emy (1714), a series of general reflections on the literary move ment of his time. As in his political theories, the critical element is much stronger than the constructive. Fenelon was feeling his way away from the rigid standards of Boileau to "a Sublime so simple and familiar that all may understand it." But some of his methods were remarkably erratic ; he was anxious, for instance, to abolish verse, as unsuited to the genius of the French. In other respects, however, he was far before his age. The 17 th cen tury had treated literature as it treated politics and religion; each of the three was cooped up in a water-tight compartment by itself. Fenelon was one of the first to break down these partition-walls, and insist on viewing all three as products of a single spirit, seen at different angles.
A few weeks after the Letter was written, Fenelon met with a carriage-accident. On Jan. 7, 1715, he died at the age of 63. Fenelon has been made by turns into a sentimentalist, a mystical saint, an i8th century philosophe, an ultramontane churchman and a hysterical hypocrite. And each of these views, except the last, contains an element of truth. More than most men, Fenelon "wanders between two worlds—one dead, the other powerless to be born." He came at a time when the characteristic ideas of the 17th century—the ideas of Louis XIV., of Bossuet and Boileau—had lost their savour, and before another creed could arise to take their place. Hence, like most of those who break away from an established order, he seems by turns a revolutionist and a reactionary. Such a man expresses his ideas much better by word of mouth than in the cold formality of print ; and Fene lon's contemporaries thought far more highly of his conversation than his books. Saint-Simon has left a portrait of Fenelon as he appeared about the time of his appointment to Cambrai—tall, thin, well-built, exceedingly pale, with a great nose, eyes from which fire and genius poured in torrents, a face curious and unlike any other, yet so striking and attractive that, once seen, it could not be forgotten. There were to be found the most contradictory qualities in perfect agreement with each other—gravity and court liness, earnestness and gaiety, the man of learning, the noble and the bishop. But all centred in an air of high-bred dignity, of graceful, polished seemliness and wit—it cost an effort to turn away one's eyes.