LATIL, Jean-Baptiste-Marie-Anne-Antoine, Count of. – Cardinal, b. 1 May 1761 on the island of St Margaret (Var), d. 1 December 1839 at Gemenos (Bouches-du-Rhône). Having entered the Seminary of St Sulpice in Paris, he was ordained priest in 1784. Vicar to the Bishop of Vence, he refused to take the civil oath and went to England, where he became confessor to the Count of Artois.
At the Restoration he served on the commission for ecclesiastical affairs. First almoner to the Prince, he was elected in 1816 by Pius VII titular Bishop of Amicela and the following year Bishop of Chartres. Made a Peer of France by Louis XVIII in 1822 and Archbishop of Reims two years later, he consecrated the Count of Artois as King of France under the name Charles X on 20 May 1825. Created cardinal by Leo XII in the Consistory of 13 March 1826, he left France in 1830 with the fall of Charles X and followed him into exile. On the death of the former sovereign he returned to his homeland. He believed that the evils of the age could be remedied by adequate influence in civil matters, but this tendency to meddle in the temporal affairs of the Kingdom achieved the opposite effect; Lambruschini thought that had he spent more of the year in his diocese of Reims rather than in Paris and at Court, he would have better served the interests of his august benefactor and his own.