LATIL, JEAN-BAPTISTE-MARIE-ANNE-ANTOINE, comte de. - Cardinal, b. 6 May 1761 on the island of S. Margherita (Var), d. 1 Dec. 1839 at Gemenos (Bouches-du-Rhône). Having entered the Seminary of S. Sulpizio 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 comte d'Artois.
At the Restoration he was a member of the commission for ecclesiastical affairs. First almoner to the prince, he was elected in 1816 by Pio VII titular bishop of Amicles, and the following year bishop of Chartres. Made a peer of France by Luigi XVIII in 1822 and archbishop of Reims two years later, on 29 May 1825 he consecrated his friend the comte d'Artois king of France as Carlo X. Created cardinal by Leone XII in the Consistory of 13 March 1826, he left France in 1830, at the fall of Carlo X, and followed him into exile. Upon the death of the former sovereign he returned to his homeland. He believed that the evils of the century could be eliminated through an adequate influence in civil matters, but this tendency to meddle in the temporal affairs of the Kingdom produced the opposite result, and Lambruschini thought that “if, instead of spending the greater part of the year in Paris and at Court, he had customarily resided in his diocese of Reims, he would have better served the interests of his august benefactor and his own.”