LAVIGERIE, CHARLES MARTIAL ALLEMAND (1823-1892), French divine, cardinal archbishop of Carthage and Algiers and primate of Africa, was born at Bayonne on Oct. 31, 1825, and was educated at St. Sulpice, Paris. He was ordained priest in 1849, and was professor of ecclesiastical history at the Sorbonne from 1854 to 1856. In 1856 he accepted the direction of the schools of the East, and was thus for the first time brought into contact with the Mohammedan world. Shortly after his return to Europe, was appointed French auditor at Rome. Two years later he was raised to the see of Nancy, where he remained for four years. While bishop of Nancy he met Marshal Mac Mahon, then governor-general of Algeria, who in 1866 offered him the see of Algiers, just raised to an archbishopric. Lavigerie landed in Africa on May 11, 1868, when the great famine was already making itself felt, and he began in November to collect the orphans into villages. MacMahon feared that the Arabs would resent this action as an infraction of the religious peace, and thought that the Mohammedan church, being a state institution in Algeria, ought to be protected from proselytism ; it was inti mated to the prelate that his sole duty was to minister to the colonists. Lavigerie, however, continued his self-imposed task, refused the archbishopric of Lyons, which was offered to him by the emperor, and won his point. Lavigerie now offered to resign
his archbishopric in order to devote himself entirely to the mis sions. Pius IX. refused this, but granted him a coadjutor, and placed the whole of equatorial Africa under his charge. In Lavigerie founded the Sahara and Sudan mission, and sent mis sionaries to Tunis, Tripoli, East Africa and the Congo.
The order of African missionaries thus founded, for which Lavigerie himself drew up the rule, has since become famous as the Peres Blancs. From 1881 to 1884 his activity in Tunisia so raised the prestige of France that it drew from Gambetta the cele brated declaration, L'Anticlericalisme n'est as un article d'ex portation, and led to the exemption of Algeria from the applica tion of the decrees concerning the religious orders. On March 27, 1882, the dignity of cardinal was conferred upon Lavigerie, but the great object of his ambition was to restore the see of St.
Cyprian; by a bull of Nov. 1o, 1884, the metropolitan see of Carthage was re-erected, and Lavigerie received the pallium on Jan. 25, 1885. The later years of his life were spent in ardent anti-slavery propaganda. Lavigerie died at Algiers on Nov. 26, 1892.