Hngues Felicite Robert De Lamennais, a French author, born in St. Malo, June 19, 1782, died in Paris, Feb. 27, 1854. His father, a wealthy ship owner engaged in commerce, had been ennobled by Louis XVI. He was early abandoned to himself in consequence of the death of his mother and the pecuniary difficulties of his father. He lived almost in solitude, sometimes obtaining assistance in his studies from his elder brother Jean, till about his 12th year, when he was intrusted to the care of his uncle, who confined him day after day in his library. He read Plutarch and Livy, admired Rousseau, and disputed with the parish priest about religion. In his 16th year he retired with his brother to La Chenaie, a residence two leagues from Dinan, where he reduced his studies and various reading to order, mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and several modern languages, and acquainted himself with the church fathers, doctors, historians, and controversialists. He was 22 years old before he made his first communion, and he adopted the ecclesiastical profession only after long hesitation.

He made a translation of an ascetic work by Louis de Blois (published in 1809), and published in 1808 Reflexions sur l'etat de l'Eglise, his first protest against the reigning philosophical materialism, which was immediately seized and destroyed by the imperial police. He engaged with his brother on the Tradition de l'Eglise sur l'institution des eveques (3 vols., Paris, 1814), in which he confuted the Gallican tenet that the election of bishops is valid without the sanction of the holy see. After being teacher of mathematics in the seminary of St. Malo, founded by his brother, he went in 1814 to Paris, where he lived modestly and unknown. On the return of the Bourbons he published a violent attack upon Napoleon. Judging it prudent to leave France during the hundred days, he took refuge in the island of Guernsey, where he passed several months under the name of Patrick Robertson. He engaged in teaching in London, and for several years after 1815 in Paris. In 1816, at the age of 34, he received sacerdotal ordination, having received the tonsure in 1811; and in 1817 he published the first volume of his Essai sur l'indifference en matiere de religion.

This was the fruit of constant labor during many years of trial and obscurity, and had an immediate effect throughout Europe. It aimed to oppose to Protestantism and philosophy the principle of ecclesiastical authority and the absolutism of faith. It was received by Catholics with admiration and enthusiasm, and the author became a principal collaborator in the Conservateur, a journal founded by Chateaubriand, Villele, De Bo-nald, Frayssinous, and others, which was chiefly directed against the ministry of Decazes. Though thus ranged among the defenders of the monarchy, he was more earnestly a Catholic than a royalist, and sought in the maintenance of the throne to secure guarantees for the stability of the church. The political hopes cherished concerning him were thus disappointed, and in 1820 he separated from his party with a portion of his colleagues called the "incorruptibles," and vehemently assailed the ministry of Villele in the Drapeau Blanc, and afterward in the monthly Memorial Catho-lique. The first volume of his Essai was suspected of innovating tendencies before the appearance of the second (1820), in which he rejected the Cartesian system, which gives authority to the individual reason, and developed a new theory of intellectual authority founded on the universal agreement of mankind.

He maintained that there is a preestablished harmony between the doctrines of the church and the ideas of the race, that truth is attainable not only from revelation but from universal tradition, and thus sought to make the general consent of men the basis of an alliance between reason and faith. In the last two volumes (1824) he traced the transmission of truth through the ages, collected the scattered traditions of various peoples, and sought to demonstrate that Christianity alone possesses the double character of universality and perpetuity. This work was unanimously and strongly opposed by the Sorbonne and the prelates, and was applauded only by a small body of disciples. He wrote a short defence, and in 1824 went to Rome to present it to the pope. He was coldly received by the cardinals, and Leo XII., who had at one time thought of creating him a cardinal, after conversing with him, declared to his assistants that Lamennais would cause much trouble in the church. On his return, after publishing a translation of the "Imitation of Christ," he produced De la religion consideree dans ses rapports avec l'ordre civil et catholique (2 vols., Paris, 1825-'6), in which he strove to establish the absolute spiritual supremacy of the holy see as the solution of the social problem.

For this publication he was arraigned before the civil tribunal, and condemned. From this time war was waged between Lamennais and the bishops of France. In his treatise Des progres de la revolution et de la guerre contre l'Eglise (1829) he first indicated his tendency toward political liberty while laying stress on theocratic absolutism. To combine democracy with the papal supremacy, liberal with Catholic ideas, became his avowed aim immediately after the revolution of 1830. He. founded the journal l'Ave-nir, having the motto Dieu et liberte - le pape et le peuple, and was assisted by a corps of young and ardent disciples, among whom were Gerbet, De Salinis, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, De Coux, and Montalembert. It demanded administrative decentralization, extension of the electoral right, freedom of worship, universal and equal freedom of conscience, freedom of instruction, and the liberty of the press. Encouraged by a portion of the people and of the lower clergy, it was violently opposed by most of the prelates and Jesuits, who denounced it at Rome. While the contest was going on, the editors decided (Nov. 15, 1831) to suspend it for a time, and three of them, Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert, repaired to Rome to seek the papal approbation.

No notice was taken of them on their arrival; Lamennais in vain sought a conference with the pope on the subject of his mission, and after waiting several months decided to return to France. He had gone as far as Munich when he received the encyclical letter, dated Aug.. 15, 1832, in which Gregory XVI. formally condemned the doctrines of L'Avenir. His principal collaborators yielded at once to the decision; he himself announced that the journal would not again appear. A dogmatic submission was demanded from him, which he finally signed, reserving to himself full liberty in regard to whatever he should believe for the interest of his country and of humanity. He then retired to his patrimonial villa of La Chenaie, and composed, it is said within a week, his Paroles d'un croyant, which was not published till 1834, after a year of meditation. From its appearance dates his final and definite rupture with the Roman Catholic church. It was immediately translated into the different European languages, passed through more than 100 editions in a few years, and received the papal condemnation as a book "small in size, but immense in its perversity." In 1836 he published his Affaires de Rome, in which he seems to cast a last melancholy look upon the belief which he had abandoned.

In the following year he began a journal, Le Monde, in the interest of extreme democracy, which survived but a few months. He subsequently produced various political pamphlets, one of which, Le pays et le gouvernement (1840), caused his imprisonment for a year in Ste. Pelagie, where he was daily visited by numerous friends. As one of the chiefs and the ablest writer of the republican party, he took part in the revolution of 1848, and after editing the Peuple Constituant, a daily newspaper, for four months, was elected by an unusually large vote one of the representatives of Paris in the constituent assembly. He projected a constitution in accordance with his own theories, which was rejected by the committee as too radical. For three years he protested by his silent vote against the course of events. After the coup d'etat of Dec. 2, 1851, he retired from public life, and was occupied in his last years with translating Dante. At the news of his dangerous illness, priests, and even ladies of the highest rank, sought admission to his chamber to induce him to be reconciled to the church; but by his express prohibition no one was received except those connected with his family.

His obsequies were performed amid an immense concourse of people, and in accordance with a direction in his will his body was borne directly to the cemetery without being taken to any church; and no cross, nor even a stone, marks his grave. He was both one of the ablest defenders and one of the ablest opponents of the papacy in the present century. The constant element in his speculations was an ideal of democracy, which he sought to realize in the first part of his career by allying the people and the pope against the civil monarchy, and in the second part by exalting the people to supremacy in defiance alike of the pope and the civil monarchy. He initiated and gave life to the ultramontane movement, which, after being the object of his most ardent devotion, prevailed in the church of France in spite of his efforts and with his maledictions. Besides the works already mentioned, he published Esquisse d'une philoso-phie (4 vols., 1840-'4G). Its system is akin to Neoplatonism, and it traces the rise of all the arts to the plan of the Christian temple.

His complete works have been twice collected (12 vols., 1836-'7, and 11 vols., 1844 et seq.). Several volumes of posthumous works, including Correspondance, were published under the care of Emile Forgues (1856 et seq.).