Barruel, Augustin de

BARRUEL, AUGUSTIN de. - Jesuit publicist, b. at Villeneuve-de-Berg (Ardèche) on 2 Oct. 1741, d. at Paris on 5 Oct. 1820. Received into the Society on 15 Oct. 1756; he was forced to go into exile in Bohemia and Austria because of the suppression of the Order in France (1762), to which he then returned in 1774. From 1792 to 1802 he lived as a refugee in England; having returned to Paris in 1802 and with the Company 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 trans., Venice 1801) against the aberrations of the Encyclopedists; from 1788 to 1792 he directed the Journal ecclésiastique ou Bibliothèque raisonnée des sciences ecclésiastiques, changing its direction and orienting it toward criticism of the revolutionary and anti-religious public events; this, clashing with the Jacobins in power, forced the journal to cease publication. At the same time he circulated numerous pamphlets, in which he attacked the civil constitution of the clergy, the civil oath, and the sworn priests, and which he later 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 trans. 16 vols., Venice 1791-95), an important mine of documentation of the events. In London he attended to the publication of two other very important historical works: Histoire du clergé pendant la révolution française (London 1793; Italian trans. 3 vols., Rome 1794-95) and Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme (4 vols., London 1797-98; Italian trans. 13 vols., Venice 1799-1800; 2 vols., Rome 1887), in which he strives to prove how the Revolution is the consequence of the joint conspiracy of the unbelievers, the Freemasons, the republicans and the Enlightenment thinkers. A thesis rich in documentation; accurate, if taken as a whole, but in need of revision and correction in its particulars. Having returned to Paris, he defended with the work Du pape et de ses droits religieux (Paris 1802) the new concordat against the attacks of the Gallicans. At the end of his life he was preparing a confutation of Kantian philosophy and the plan of a history of the secret societies in the Middle Ages.

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