Montalembert, Charles-René, Forbes de

MONTALEMBERT, CHARLES-RENÉ, FORBES de. - Publicist and politician, b. in London on 15 April 1810, d. in Paris on 13 March 1870. He was educated first under the guidance of his maternal grandfather, James Forbes, an austere Protestant who saw in his England the "sanctuary of religion, of virtue and of true liberalism"; then in France, from 1819. As an adolescent, he already visited Germany, read widely and was enthused by Rousseau, by Staël, by Chateaubriand: he already set himself against the "Voltairian spirit" widespread among the educated, both as a Christian and as a romantic. On the other hand, the influence of the liberal masters, from Cousin, to Guizot, to Thierry, to Michelet, detached him from legitimism. In 1830 he passed, in an aura of messianic expectation, to the revolutionary romanticism of La Mennais: he joined the editors of the Avenir (Nov. 1830) alongside Lacordaire and Gerbet, who were older. The Breton polemicist dominated over them, tending to give a supra-national value to his initiative, extolling the exemplary revolution of Belgium, and developing a whole politico-religious doctrine.

M., who had visited O'Connell's Ireland, idealized its experience and was fired with enthusiasm for all oppressed nationalities: above all for Catholic Poland. This romantic-revolutionary policy took shape in the Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse, founded by the editors of the Avenir: they opened the struggle for freedom of teaching, basing themselves on the promise contained in the Charte. The trial of the école libre led M., as defendant, to defend himself before the Chamber of Peers, of which he became a member upon his father's death (22 June 1831). Meanwhile French democracy in 1830 revealed itself as increasingly irreligious: in Nov. 1831, M. could still admire the workers' movement of Lyon, which he witnessed, because it seemed to him apolitical, but he already feared "democratic despotism," while at the same time condemning the "despotism of legality" and "government as tutelage." In 1833 M. translated A. Mickiewicz's Livre des pèlerins polonais, in which a politico-religious mysticism manifests itself, and in the preface he called for a return to Christian solidarity among the peoples struggling against the twofold egoism of kings and materialist liberals.

When the Avenir was suspended (15 Nov. 1831), M. set out with La Mennais and Lacordaire for Rome: the journey was an occasion for contacts with Italian liberal Catholics. Having left Rome, the "pilgrims" received at Munich, on 30 Aug., the encyclical Mirari vos, which condemned their doctrines. A brief of Gregory XVI, of 1833, censured together the insubordination of La Mennais and the book on Poland. Troubled, M. arrived at total submission only in Dec. 1834. In contact with the Catholic group of Munich, between 1832 and 1834, he began the study of medieval historical and religious texts, and prepared a history of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, while defending, with F. A. Rio, the Christian art of the Middle Ages (Contre le vandalisme en France. Lettre à V. Hugo, in Revue des deux Mondes, 1 March 1833, and other writings, in Oeuvres, VI). In 1836, he married a de Mérode, daughter of a hero of Belgian independence: in Italy, with his bride, he was received by the Pope, who steered M. toward a conciliatory position in the face of Louis Philippe. Between 1837 and 1839, M. partly abandoned his political theses: he nevertheless maintained the inspiring principles of his polemic against the alliance between throne and altar, against Gallicanism, against the "materialist" policy of the "July monarchy." Thus he urged the government to protect the Christians of the East, became an advocate of Belgium, defended the religious Orders, from 1838 meditated a Catholic party, and in 1839 supported and directed with Bailly the Univers, which Veuillot later made famous. In 1840, in connection with a bill on child labor, he made it obligatory for public authority to intervene to protect workers: he demanded, however, the autonomy of private charitable associations vis-à-vis the State, just as he demanded the revocation of the state monopoly in the field of education. This central problem of French Catholicism of the Restoration drove M.'s action in Parliament, and determined him to write in 1843 on "the duty of Catholics in the question of freedom of teaching." With this writing, and with all his activity in the crucial years of the struggle, between 1842 and 1846, M. persuaded the clergy and French Catholics to demand freedom comme en Belgique, and by the same method: conquest of public opinion and action by laymen (the bishop Parisis wrote "on the part that laymen must take in questions relating to the freedom of the Church"). But only the political and social crisis of 1848 shook bourgeois anticlerical prejudices: in a climate of social fear, in 1850, the Falloux law crowned M.'s twenty-year effort for free teaching.

As he had defended in 1847 the Catholic cantons of the Sonderbund against the Swiss radicals, so, in 1848 and 1849, M. defended the sovereignty of Pius IX against the Italian radical patriots: he promoted and supported the Roman expedition at the Constituent Assembly, then attacked V. Hugo in the Legislative Assembly. He supported the candidacy of Louis Bonaparte for the presidency of the Republic, insofar as he committed himself to supporting the claims of Catholics. After the coup d'état of 2 Dec. 1851, which he disapproved of, he still sought a path of conciliation. Disillusioned, he drafted the manifesto of the Catholic-liberal opposition to the Empire (Les intérêts catholiques au XIXe siècle, 1852); from 1855 he led the Correspondant group. He still defended Pius IX against English and Cavourian-Napoleonic diplomacy, in 1856. In the famous speeches of 12 Oct. 1860 and 27 March 1861, Cavour ably invoked the authority of M., and borrowed from his reply the formula "free Church in a free state," forcing M. to dissociate himself in the face of the abusive interpretation. At the Catholic Congress of Malines, in 1863, M. took up his liberal thesis again, specifying that "there exists a possible, legitimate alliance ... between State and Church"; but their mutual independence is its condition.

Although he rejected indifferentism along with radical separatism, and declared the theological problem out of the question, analyzing only what pertains to "political conduct," he was attacked by the intransigents. Cardinal Antonelli privately conveyed a reproach to him. The "Syllabus" seemed to strike at his position and that of his friends in 1864: but in 1891 Msgr. d'Hulat would note that his liberal theses always contained "the most explicit reservations in favor of the superior rights of truth." Montalembert, publicist and orator, lacked the logical rigor of the jurist and the theologian: the contingencies of political polemic, the struggle against the authoritarian Empire, and against those French Catholics who seemed to him to accept the ideology of Caesarism, dominate his thought. The predominance of political preoccupations disturbs his vision in the face of the preparations for the Vatican Council: Gallican motives resurface in him, as in Dupanloup. He does not, however, pass from criticism of a feared worldly "degeneration" of theological formulas to open insubordination. A document of his faith, in the last years of his life, remains the great research he undertook on the history of monasticism in the West, from its beginnings to the 12th century, without being able to complete it. Meanwhile the works of Montalembert are collected in 9 vols., between 1860 and 1868: in that same period 5 vols. of Les moines d'Occident depuis st Benoît jusqu'à st Bernard appear: after his death, another 2 vols. appear (1877). Then many valuable collections of correspondence come to light, among which is cited the Correspondance de M. et de L. Cornudet, 1831-72 (Paris 1905); as early as 1873 the Lettres à un ami de collège (from Montalembert to the same) were published; G. Goyau and P. de Lallemand collect several letters of Montalembert to La Mennais (ibid. 1932) and to others. A complete collection of letters is lacking.

Ettore Passerin