DE SMET, CHARLES. - Belgian Jesuit and historian, born at Ghent on 6 April 1833, entered the novitiate in 1851, and was ordained priest in 1863. Professor of ecclesiastical history at the Jesuit college in Louvain, and for some years a contributor to Les Études, he joined the Bollandists in 1877; he took over their direction in 1882 and retained it, despite a three-year term as rector of the Brussels college (1900–1902), until his death in Brussels on 4 March 1911.
As a scholar, Fr De Smet wrote an *Introduzione ad historiam ecclesiasticam critice tractandam* (Ghent 1876, with a volume of *Dissertationes selectae*). Later he gathered into a single volume, *Principes de la critique historique* (Liège–Paris 1883), articles that had just appeared in *Études* and that brought about a salutary revolution in the field of ecclesiastical history by firmly, judiciously and serenely condemning the erroneous methods—often more apologetic than historical—that then prevailed. His influence on the Bollandist enterprise itself was decisive. Restored somewhat hastily in 1837, the learned society was manifestly in crisis, not only because several of its finest members had died, but also because, despite the work of exceptional figures such as Victor De Buck, it had not yet fully adjusted to advances in historical and philological science. De Smet renewed the methods—both in the selection and philological presentation of the texts published and in the use of every auxiliary discipline. The new method was vindicated in the first three volumes of the November volumes of the *Acta Sanctorum* issued during his tenure and continued in those that followed. In the very year he assumed the leadership, De Smet appended to the weighty tomes of the *Acta*