BARRUEL, AUGUSTIN de. – Jesuit publicist, born at Villeneuve-de-Berg (Ardèche) on 2 October 1741, died in Paris on 5 October 1820. He was received into the Society on 15 October 1756; because of the suppression of the Order in France (1762), he was forced to go into exile in Bohemia and Austria, where he subsequently returned in 1774. From 1792 to 1802 he lived as a refugee in England; having returned to Paris in 1802 and the Society having been restored, he hastened to join it again (1815).
He began his literary activity with Les Helviennes ou Lettres provinciales philosophiques (3 vols., Amsterdam–Paris 1781; Italian version, Venice 1801), directed against the aberrations of the Encyclopedists; from 1788 to 1792 he directed the Journal ecclésiastique ou Bibliothèque raisonnée des sciences ecclésiastiques, changing its orientation and directing it toward criticism of the revolutionary and antireligious public events; this, by antagonizing the Jacobins in power, forced the journal to cease publication. At the same time he disseminated numerous pamphlets in which he attacked the civil constitution of the clergy, the civil oath, and the sworn priests, and which he subsequently collected in the Collection ecclésiastique ou recueil complet des ouvrages faits depuis l'ouverture des Etats généraux, relativement au clergé, à la constitution civile, décrétée par l'Assemblée nationale, sanctionnée par le roi (14 vols., Paris 1791–93; Italian version, 16 vols., Venice 1791–95), an important mine of documentation on the events. In London he undertook the publication of two other very important historical works: Histoire du clergé pendant la révolution française (London 1793; Italian version, 3 vols., Rome 1794–95) and Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme (4 vols., London 1797–98; Italian version, 13 vols., Venice 1799–1800; 2 vols., Rome 1887), in which he seeks to prove that the Revolution was the consequence of the joint conspiracy of the unbelievers, Freemasons, republicans, and Illuminists. A thesis rich in documentation; accurate if taken as a whole, but requiring revision and correction in its particulars. Having returned to Paris, he defended the new concordat against the attacks of the Gallicans in the work Du pape et de ses droits religieux (Paris 1802). At the end of his life he was preparing a refutation of Kantian philosophy and the outline of a history of secret societies in the Middle Ages.