LABRIOLLE, PIERRE-HENRI-MARIE CHAMPAGNE de. - Eminent Latinist and historian of Christian literature, born at Asnières (Seine) on 18 June 1874, died at Nantes on 28 December 1940. He taught at Laval University in Montreal, then at the Collège Stanislas in Paris, and subsequently at the Lycée of Rennes. From 1904 to 1919 he held chairs at the Catholic University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and from 1926 to 1940 at the University of Poitiers and the Sorbonne. He founded and directed, from 1911 to 1914, the Bulletin d’ancienne littérature et d’archéologie chrétienne; and from 1916 he was a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres.
He began his scholarly work with Saint Vincent de Lérins (Paris 1906), Saint Jérôme (ibid. 1907) and Saint Ambroise (ibid. 1908); followed by the important dissertation Les sources de l’histoire du romantisme (Fribourg 1910) and the synthetic work La crise montaniste (Paris 1913). Then, after more than twelve years of teaching, came the lively and readable Histoire de la littérature chrétienne (ibid. 1920; 3rd ed. ed. G. Bardy, 2 vols., ibid. 1947), remarkable for the completeness of its treatment, the breadth of its learning, and the clarity of its arrangement of so many facts. Even earlier he had completely recast the Histoire de la littérature française by Tivier (ibid. 1904). On the vigorous and insidious literary reaction of paganism against nascent Christianity he wrote La réaction païenne (ibid. 1934), always grounded in full knowledge of the subject and marked by clarity and stylistic elegance. He collaborated on the Histoire de l’Église by Fliche-Martin (vols. III, IV; ibid. 1936, 1937). His edition and translation of St Augustine’s Confessions (2 vols., ibid. 1925–26) gives a rendering that captures the movement and colour of the Saint’s style. The same may be said of his editions of the Soliloquia (ibid. 1927) and De cura pro mortuis gerenda (ibid. 1932), prepared for the same Budé series.