L'Avenir

L'AVENIR. - A famous French Catholic-liberal newspaper that lasted only two years (1830-31).

It began publication in the aftermath of the upheavals of 1830, which marked the end of royal absolutism with the expulsion of Charles X and allowed greater freedom of the press. Its principal founder and driving force was the abbé Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais (v.), who gathered around himself a large following of disciples, among whom shone the finest names of the 19th-century French Catholic revival, such as Gerbert, Guéranger, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Montalembert, Maurice de Guérin, etc., all imbued with the twofold purpose of propagating a social liberalism in favor of the people and the working classes in full opposition to traditional absolutist Caesarism, and of renewing the religious spirit by wresting the Church from Gallican servitudes and from the other shackles that limited its spiritual activity.

Such, precisely, were the guiding principles of the A., whose first issue appeared on 15 Oct. 1830 with the motto "Dieu et la Liberté." Freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom of teaching were the newspaper's fundamental postulates, and for them a phalanx of editors fought with an often excessive vehemence. These widely disseminated aims did not fail to provoke not only the hostility of governmental and Gallican circles but also the distrust of the world of the right-thinking. Lamennais, for example, did not refrain from proclaiming the right of peoples to insurrection, and from defining as traitors to religion the bishops appointed by the civil power, as though the ratification of the Holy See had not subsequently conferred upon them legitimate authority. One of the A.'s most successful campaigns remains that waged in favor of freedom of teaching, promised, it is true, in principle by the Charter of 1830, but thereafter tenaciously ignored by the regime of Louis Philippe. This campaign, initiated and vigorously conducted by the A., and opposed at first even by many of the right-thinking, later led in 1850 to the Falloux law and to the subsequent conquests of French Catholics in the field of education.

But in the A. ideas were not always expressed with lucidity and clarity, and no sufficient distinction was made between what was due to polemic suited to the circumstances of the moment and what was an enunciation of religious and social principles. An echo of the uneasiness that the newspaper provoked was a long memorial with which several French prelates, among them

Cardinal d'Astros, Archbishop of Toulouse, denounced to Rome the errors and dangers of the position taken by the paper. For their part, Lamennais and his collaborators set out their thinking in a declaration sent to Gregory XVI, and then decided, on 15 Nov. 1831, to go to Rome to defend it directly. Gregory XVI, before receiving them, insisted that they clarify and specify their point of view in a new statement, the drafting of which was entrusted to Lacordaire. In it the Church of France was shown as oppressed by the government and thus fallen into discredit among many Catholics, who saw in the clergy nothing but an instrument, indeed almost an accomplice, of the civil power; and the danger was pointed out either of a violent persecution or of a progressive and insidious enslavement. It was advised, therefore, that the complete separation of Church and State be brought about, and consequently that the clergy renounce the endowment for worship.

The Pontiff instructed Cardinal Pacca to reply that he would have the document examined, and that in the meantime it was advisable for them to return to their homeland.

Such treatment already signified an implicit disavowal, but Lamennais had the fault of persisting. And indeed, having received, in the course of a journey to Munich with Montalembert, the text of the encyclical Mirari vos (15 Aug. 1832), which contained—though without saying anything about the paper and its editors—a true and proper censure, he sought a way out by arbitrarily distinguishing in the pontifical document the spiritual aspect, which bound him in conscience, and the temporal aspect, in relation to which he claimed full freedom of interpretation and action. Revolt was already smoldering in his spirit and later drove him to abandon every priestly function in order to set about writing the insulting Paroles d'un croyant, which subsequently fell under the condemnation of the encyclical Singulari vos of 15 July 1834.

Thus the adventure, brilliant and deplorable at once, of the A. concluded with the condemnation of doctrinal liberalism. The first intentions were, certainly, excellent, aimed at realizing new relations between the Church and modern society, at reconciling science and faith, at denouncing the university monopoly on teaching in order to restore its free exercise to the Church, at freeing the religious society from the straits of the civil power, substantially bringing about a great Catholic-social movement. However, the soundness of the movement was undermined, beyond its meager and inopportune polemics, by the lack of doctrinal precision in its language, by the total separation of Church and State presented as a necessity of principle and 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 one putting an end to the adventurous parabola of the A., the other denouncing the doctrines of Lamennais.

Renato Fontenelle