AVENIR (L'). – A celebrated French Catholic-liberal newspaper that existed for only two years (1830–31).
It began publication immediately after the uprisings of 1830, which marked the end of royal absolutism with the expulsion of Carlo X and permitted greater freedom of the press. Its principal founder and driving force was Abbé Hugo Félicité Robert de Lamennais (v.), who gathered around him a large following of disciples, among whom shone the finest names of the French Catholic revival of the nineteenth century, such as Gerbert, Guéranger, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Montalembert, Maurice de Guérin, etc. All were animated by the twofold purpose of propagating a social liberalism in favor of the people and the working classes, in direct opposition to traditional absolutist Caesarism, and of renewing the religious spirit by freeing the Church from Gallican servitudes and from the other impediments that restricted its spiritual activity.
These, precisely, were the guiding principles of A., whose first issue appeared on 15 October 1830 with the motto “Dieu et la Liberté.” Freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and freedom of education were the newspaper’s fundamental demands, and a phalanx of editors fought for them, often with excessive vehemence. These widely disseminated aims aroused not only the hostility of governmental and Gallican circles but also the distrust of the respectable world. Lamennais did not, for example, refrain from proclaiming the right of peoples to insurrection, or from defining as traitors to religion the bishops appointed by the civil power, as though the subsequent ratification of the Holy See had not conferred legitimate authority upon them. One of A.’s most successful campaigns was that fought in favor of freedom of education, promised, it is true, in principle by the Charter of 1830, but subsequently tenaciously ignored by the regime of Louis-Philippe. This campaign, initiated and vigorously conducted by A. and initially opposed even by many of the respectable, subsequently led, in 1850, to the Falloux Law and to the later achievements of French Catholics in the field of education.
But in A. ideas were not always expressed with lucidity and clarity, and no sufficient distinction was made between what was polemics suited to the circumstances of the moment and what was the enunciation of religious and social principles. An echo of the unrest provoked by the newspaper was a lengthy memorandum in which several French prelates, among them Cardinal d’Astros, archbishop of Toulouse, denounced to Rome the errors and dangers of the position assumed by the paper. Lamennais and his collaborators, for their part, set forth their views in a declaration sent to Gregory XVI and then decided, on 15 November 1831, to go to Rome to defend them directly. Before receiving them, Gregory XVI wished to invite them to clarify and specify their point of view in a new statement, the drafting of which was entrusted to Lacordaire. It presented the Church of France as oppressed by the government and consequently fallen into disrepute among many Catholics, who saw in the clergy nothing but an instrument, indeed almost an accomplice, of the civil power; and it pointed to the danger either of violent persecution or of progressive and insidious enslavement. It therefore advised the complete separation of Church and State, and hence the clergy’s renunciation of the state subsidy for worship.
The Pontiff charged Cardinal Pacca with replying that he would have the document examined and that, in the meantime, it would be advisable for them to return to their homeland.
This treatment already signified an implicit repudiation, but Lamennais was at fault in persisting. Indeed, having received, during a journey to Munich with Montalembert, the text of the encyclical Mirari vos (15 August 1832), which, without saying anything about the paper or its editors, contained a veritable censure, he sought a way out by arbitrarily distinguishing in the papal document between its spiritual aspect, which bound him in conscience, and its temporal aspect, with regard to which he claimed full freedom of interpretation and action. Rebellion was already smoldering in his spirit, and it subsequently drove him to abandon every priestly function in order to write the insulting Paroles d'un croyant, which later fell under the condemnation of the encyclical Singulari vos of 15 July 1834.
Thus the brilliant yet deplorable adventure of A. came to an end with the condemnation of doctrinal liberalism. Its initial intentions were certainly excellent: they sought to establish new relations between the Church and modern society, to reconcile science and faith, to denounce the university monopoly over education in order to restore its free exercise to the Church, to remove religious society from the constraints of civil power, and thereby to bring about, in substance, a great Catholic-social movement. The movement’s soundness was nevertheless undermined, in addition to ill-judged and inappropriate polemics, by a lack of doctrinal precision in its language, by the complete separation of Church and State presented as a matter of principle, and by the consequent abolition of the state contributions for worship already established in the concordat, as well as by certain theological errors that formed part of Lamennais’s personal conceptions. The encyclicals Mirari vos and Singulari vos stigmatized these deviations, the former bringing the adventurous parabola of A. to an end, the latter denouncing Lamennais’s doctrines.