LAMENNAIS, HUGUES FEMME ROBERT DE (1782-1854), French priest, and philosophical and political writer, was born at Saint Malo, in Brittany, on June 19, 1782. He was the son of a shipowner of Saint Malo ennobled by Louis XVI. for public services. Of a sickly and sensitive nature, and impressed by the horrors of the French Revolution, his mind was early seized with a morbid view of life, and this temper characterized him throughout all his changes of opinion and circumstance. He was at first inclined towards rationalistic views, but his philo sophical and historical studies convinced him that belief was in dispensable to action and religion the most powerful leaven of the community. His Re flexions sur l'etat de l'eglise en France pendant le I8ilme siecle et sur sa situation actuelle (1808) was seized by Napoleon's police as dangerously ideological, with its eager recommendation of religious revival and active clerical or ganization. It awoke the ultramontane spirit which was to play so great a part in politics.
Lamennais devoted most of 1809 to a translation, in exquisite French, of the Speculum Monachorum of Ludovicus Blosius (Louis de Blois) which he entitled Le Guide spirituel (1809). In 1811 he received the tonsure and became professor of mathe matics in an ecclesiastical college founded by his brother at Saint Malo. After the conclusion of the Concordat he published, with his brother, De la tradition de l'eglise sur l'institution des eveques (1814). The book was occasioned by the emperor's nomination of Cardinal Maury to the archbishopric of Paris. During the Hundred Days he escaped to London, where he taught French in a school founded by the abbe Jules Carron for French emigres; he also became tutor at the house of Lady Jerningham. In 1815 he returned to Paris, and in 1816 he was ordained priest by the bishop of Rennes.
The first volume of his great work, Essai sur l'indifference en matiere de religion ( I817; Eng. trans. by Lord Stanley of Alderley, 1898), made him a power in Catholic Europe. Lamennais de nounced toleration, and advocated a Catholic restoration to belief. The right of private judgment, introduced by Descartes and Leibnitz into philosophy and science, by Luther into religion and by Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists into politics and society, had, he contended, terminated in practical atheism and spiritual death. The sole hope of regenerating the European communities lay in the acceptance of ecclesiastical authority. Three more volumes (1818-24) followed, and met with a mixed reception from the Gallican bishops and monarchists, but with the en thusiastic adhesion of the younger clergy. The work received the
formal approval of Leo XII. Lamennais visited Rome at the pope's request, and was offered a place in the Sacred College, which he refused. On his return to France he took part in political work, and in ultramontane journalism.
He retired to La Chenaie and gathered round him a group of brilliant disciples, including C. de Montalembert, Lacordaire and Maurice de Guerin, his object being to form an organized body of opinion to persuade the French clergy and laity to throw off the yoke of the State connection. He denounced the liberties of the Gallican church. His health broke down and he went to the Pyrenees to recruit. After his recovery from a second dangerous illness, he believed that he had only been dragged back to life to be the instrument of Providence. Les Progres de la revolution et de la guerre contre l'eglise (1828) marked Lamennais's com plete renunciation of royalist principles, and henceforward he dreamt of the advent of a theocratic democracy. He now founded L'Avenir, the first number of which appeared on Oct. 16, 1830, with the motto "God and Liberty." The paper combined extreme democratic views on civil questions with a demand for complete liberty for the church from civil domination. With the help of Montalembert, he founded the Agence generate pour la defense de la liberte religieuse, which noted any violations of religious freedom and reported them to headquarters. The opposition of the Conservative bishops checked the success of L'Avenir, and Lamennais, Montalembert and Lacordaire resolved to suspend it for a while. They set out to Rome in Nov. 1831 to obtain the approval of Gregory XVI. The "pilgrims of liberty" were re ceived in audience by the pope on condition that the object of their visit was not mentioned. A few days after the audience, Cardinal Pacca advised their departure from Rome and suggested that the Holy See, whilst admitting the justice of their intentions, would like the matter left open. Lacordaire and Montalembert obeyed; Lamennais remained in Rome, but after the issue of Gregory's letter to the Polish bishops, in which the Polish patriots were reproved and the tsar was affirmed to be their lawful sovereign, he "shook the dust of Rome from off his feet." At Munich, in 1832, he received the encyclical Mirari vos, condemn ing his policy; as a result L'Avenir ceased and the Agence was dissolved.