MASSILLON, JEAN-BAPTISTE. - Son of a notary, born at Hyères in Provence on 24 June 1663, died at Beauregard on 18 Sept. 1742. He entered the Congregation of the Oratory in 1681 (he was ordained a priest in 1692), devoting himself to teaching in the Colleges of Pézenas and Montbrison and in the Seminaries of Vienne and St-Magloire, in Paris. After his first oratorical successes won in the provinces, his reputation as a preacher was confirmed by the Lenten sermons he gave in 1699 in the Parisian church of the Oratory.
For twenty years his uninterrupted activity as a sacred preacher lasted, in Paris and at court, down to the ten sermons of the Petit carême delivered in 1718; in 1719 the doors of the Academy were also opened to him. Two years earlier, on 6 Nov. 1717, he had been designated bishop of Clermont; consecrated at the end of 1718, he was still detained for a further two years in the capital by the negotiations to restore peace in the French Church, deeply troubled by the promulgation of the bull Unigenitus, and for which his reputation, his eloquence and his moderation were of no small help. After taking part in the episcopal consecration of the minister Dubois, who had largely willed and engineered those negotiations, he withdrew definitively to his diocese, until his death.
His oratorical work, partially collected by a nephew belonging to his own Congregation, differs markedly from that of his great predecessors of the 17th century, not so much for its more elaborate and ingenious style as for a tendency to place the postulates of morality in the foreground, to analyze and pity the melancholies, discouragements and weaknesses of the human heart. His contemporaries and in general the men of the eighteenth century, beginning with Voltaire himself, felt and appreciated M.'s eloquence as closer to their own needs, to their own literary sensibility, less impetuous, more supple and gripping even in its expression. Hence the origin of M.'s great fortune.
Works: the Sermons (edited by his nephew Fr. Joseph Massillon, 9 vols., Paris 1745); Oeuvres (with preliminary notices by L. P. Béranger, 15 vols., Lyons 1810); Oeuvres complètes (14 vols., Paris 1818; new editions 1822-25, in 15 vols., and 1828-29, in 16 vols.); Oeuvres complètes collated against the manuscripts and furnished with notes, variants, notices and documents by E. A. Blampignon (3 vols., Bar-le-Duc 1865-67 and Paris 1886).
Bibliography6 works
Enzo Bottasso