MASSILLON, JEAN-BAPTISTE. — Son of a notary, born at Hyères in Provence on 24 June 1663, died at Beauregard on 18 September 1742. In 1681 he entered the Congregation of the Oratory (he was ordained 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 early successes as an orator in the provinces, his reputation as a preacher was sealed by the Lenten sermons he delivered in 1699 in the Parisian church of the Oratory.
For two decades his uninterrupted activity as a sacred orator continued in Paris and at court, until the ten sermons of the Petit carême delivered in 1718; in 1719 he was also admitted to the Academy. Two years earlier, on 6 November 1717, he had been appointed Bishop of Clermont; consecrated at the end of 1718, he was still detained in the capital for two years by the negotiations to restore peace in the French Church, deeply disturbed by the promulgation of the bull Unigenitus, in which his reputation, eloquence, and moderation were of no small assistance. After taking part in the episcopal consecration of the minister Dubois, who had largely instigated and directed those negotiations, he retired definitively to his diocese until his death.
His oratorical work, partially collected by a nephew belonging to the same Congregation, differs markedly from that of his great predecessors of the 17th century not so much in its more elaborate and ingenious style as in its tendency to place the postulates of morality in the foreground, to analyze and depict the melancholies, discouragements, and weaknesses of the human heart. His contemporaries and, in general, the men of the 18th century, beginning with Voltaire himself, felt and appreciated Massillon’s eloquence as closer to their own needs, to their own literary sensibility, less impetuous, more flexible and compelling even in its expression. Hence the origin of Massillon’s great fortune.
Works: Sermons (ed. 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 eds. 1822–25, in 15 vols., and 1828–29, in 16 vols.); Oeuvres complètes collated from manuscripts and furnished with notes, variants, notices, and documents by E. A. Blampignon (3 vols., Bar-le-Duc 1865–67 and Paris 1886).