L'AVENIR. - A celebrated French Catholic-liberal newspaper that existed for only two years (1830-31).
It began publication immediately after the 1830 uprisings, which marked the end of royal absolutism with the expulsion of Charles X and allowed greater press freedom. Its principal founder and driving force was Abbé Hugo Félicité Robert de Lamennais (v.), who gathered around him a large following of disciples, including some of the most prominent figures in the French Catholic revival of the 19th century, such as Gerbert, Guéranger, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Montalembert, Maurice de Guérin, and others. All were united by a dual purpose: to promote a social liberalism in favor of the people and working classes—contrasting sharply with traditional absolutist Caesarism—and to renew religious spirit by freeing the Church from Gallican servitudes and other constraints that limited its spiritual activity.
These were precisely the guiding principles of L'Avenir, 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 contributors fought vigorously—often excessively—for them. These widely disseminated aims not only provoked hostility from governmental and Gallican circles but also distrust from the world of the well-thinking. Lamennais, for example, did not hesitate to proclaim the right of peoples to insurrection or to denounce as traitors to religion those bishops appointed by civil authority, as if the Holy See’s ratification had not subsequently conferred legitimate authority upon them.
One of the newspaper’s most successful campaigns was waged in favor of educational freedom, which had been promised in principle by the Charter of 1830 but was then systematically ignored under the regime of Louis-Philippe. This campaign, initiated and vigorously pursued by L'Avenir—initially opposed even by many of the well-thinking—ultimately led in 1850 to the Falloux Law and subsequent Catholic gains in the field of education.
Yet within L'Avenir, ideas were not always expressed with clarity or precision, and it failed sufficiently to distinguish between what was appropriate polemic for the moment and what constituted the enunciation of religious and social principles. The unease provoked by the newspaper culminated in 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 taken by the paper. In response, Lamennais and his collaborators submitted a declaration to Gregory XVI and then decided, on 15 November 1831, to defend their views in person in Rome.
Before receiving them, the Pope asked them to clarify and refine their position in a new statement, the drafting of which was entrusted to Lacordaire. In it, they portrayed the Church in France as oppressed by the government and thus fallen into disrepute among many Catholics, who saw the clergy as mere instruments—or even accomplices—of civil power. They warned of the danger either of violent persecution or of a gradual, insidious enslavement. They therefore advocated complete separation of Church and State and, consequently, the renunciation by the clergy of state funding for worship.
The Pope instructed Cardinal Pacca to reply that the document would be examined and that, in the meantime, it would be advisable for them to return home.
This response already implied a form of disavowal, but Lamennais persisted in his obstinacy. Indeed, upon receiving, during a trip to Munich with Montalembert, the text of the encyclical *Mirari vos* (15 August 1832)—which, though it did not mention the newspaper or its editors, amounted to a virtual censure—he sought an escape by arbitrarily distinguishing in the papal document between its spiritual aspect, which he claimed bound his conscience, and its temporal aspect, in relation to which he claimed full freedom of interpretation and action. Rebellion was already brewing in his spirit and later drove him to abandon all priestly functions in order to write the inflammatory *Paroles d’un croyant*, which was subsequently condemned by the encyclical *Singulari vos* of 15 July 1834.
Thus, the brilliant yet deplorable adventure of L'Avenir ended in the condemnation of doctrinal liberalism. Its initial intentions were certainly noble: to forge new relations between Church and modern society, to reconcile science and faith, to denounce the monopolistic control of education in order to restore to the Church its free exercise, and to free religious society from the grip of civil power—thereby realizing, in substance, a great Catholic-social movement. Yet the movement’s integrity was undermined by acrimonious and untimely polemics, a lack of doctrinal precision in its language, the advocacy of complete separation of Church and State as a matter of principle, and the consequent suppression of state subsidies for worship already established by the Concordat, as well as certain theological errors that formed part of Lamennais’s personal conceptions. These deviations were condemned by the encyclicals *Mirari vos* and *Singulari vos*, the former bringing to an end the adventurous trajectory of L'Avenir and the latter denouncing Lamennais’s doctrines.