UNIVERSES. - Newspaper founded in Paris by Abbé Migne, first published on 3 November 1833 under the title L'Univers religieux; it acquired fame and growing circulation under the direction of Louis Veuillot (v.), editor-in-chief from 1845.
Judging political regimes solely in terms of supreme Christian interests, the U. professed itself first of all and above every contingency Catholic. Its faith and the literary prestige of its editors aroused much hostility both within Catholicism and outside it. Incisive and pugnacious, under Louis Philippe it opposed the university monopoly and no less the remnants of Gallicanism, and it fought for the adoption of the Roman liturgy. It adhered to the Second Republic (1848), but in a conservative sense, conducting itself likewise in 1853 and in the early years of the Empire. Suppressed in 1860 for its censures of Napoleon III's Roman policy, it rose again in 1867, expounded the Syllabus and defended, before and after the Vatican Council, papal infallibility. After 1870 it became the interpreter of the legitimist aspirations of the Catholics of France and again supported the Pontiff, deprived of the temporal domain. Eugène Veuillot succeeded his brother Louis in the direction, which the latter left in 1883. In November 1890, the "Algiers toast" caused a dramatic secession within the U.: Eugène declared his intention of following in the newspaper the policy of adherence to the Third Republic (ralliement). His sister Élisa therefore withdrew and founded Vérité Française, which in 1907 was to merge into the sister newspaper. The energetic direction of Pierre and François Veuillot, sons of Eugène, could not avert the slow crisis, prelude to its disappearance.
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Ippolito Vittorio