BAILLET, ADRIEN. – French historian and hagiographer, born at Neuville-en-Hez near Beauvais on 13 June 1649, died in Paris on 21 January 1706. He studied at the college of Beauvais, where he later taught (1672–76). Ordained a priest (1676), he was briefly engaged in pastoral work until he was appointed librarian to the advocate general de Lamoignon in Paris (1680), a position he held until his death and in which he was able to satisfy his insatiable taste for study.
His best-known bibliographical work, Jugements des savants, sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (Paris 1685–1686), which in the author’s original plan was to comprise six parts, stopped at the first. For his Vie de M. Descartes (Paris 1691), he was able to obtain information from the philosopher’s friends and family. Of his numerous other publications, some of them posthumous, we mention only: De la dévotion à la sainte Vierge et du culte qui lui est dû, (Paris 1693, 1696; Tournay 1712), in which the author, instead of merely opposing real or alleged abuses, also denied the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption into heaven; the work was placed on the Index in 1694 and 1701 «donec corrigatur»; and Les vies des Saints... avec l'histoire des autres fêtes de l'année (3 vols. in-fol., Paris 1701, and an ed. in 12° there in 1701 and 1704). In 1739 an ed. in 10 vols. appeared in Paris, the last of which contains Chronologie et topographie des Saints, a work first published together with others in Paris in 1703 in-fol., and in 5 vols. in 12°. Le Vie dei Santi for the months of January–August were placed on the Index in 1709 and 1714 because of the author’s many errors and rationalist hypercriticism; although not a Jansenist, he showed a certain sympathy for the sect.
BIBL: L. Moreri, Grand Dict. hist., II, Basel 1732, p. 26; Hurter, IV, cols. 917–21; J. Carreyre, s. V. in DHC, VI, cols. 253–55 (with an extensive bibliography). Livario Oliger