Veuillot, Louis. — French journalist and writer, b. at Boynes (Loiret) on 11 Oct. 1813, d. in Paris on 7 Apr. 1883. His father was a poor cooper who earned a hard living and could neither read nor write. The boy, the eldest of a large family, received only a rudimentary primary education and no religious instruction.
When the family moved to Paris, at the age of thirteen he was placed as a clerk with a solicitor, Fortuné Delavigne, brother of the poet Casimir Delavigne. Driven by a desire to read and educate himself, he began to cultivate his literary formation independently. It is indeed remarkable that this man, one of the most genuine and robust of the 19th century, should have gradually acquired familiarity with the classics of his country—his true masters—without the guidance or discipline of a university or ecclesiastical humanism, as if obeying an inner call. At seventeen he became a journalist in the improvised recruitment that followed the July Revolution of 1830, first at the *Echo de Rouen*, then at the *Mémorial de la Dordogne*, and later at the *Charte de 1830*. He found himself defending the so-called “Résistance,” i.e., the right wing of constitutional liberalism, against the left wing, the so-called “Mouvement.” But, as he himself later confessed, more out of the opportunity that presented itself and for the taste of the aforementioned “mouvement” than out of genuine moral commitment or firm convictions. Devoted to Guizot, no doubt, but fundamentally indifferent to both parties: rather, driven by a shrewd common sense and an instinctive honesty, he exposed the petty selfishness, ridiculous vanities, hypocrisies, and cowardices of the various and opposing political factions. The V. of those early years lives on in the sympathetic figure of a journalist he later portrayed in a novel, *L’honnête femme* (1844), a most felicitous satirical portrait of provincial bourgeois society under Louis-Philippe.
The discovery of himself and his consequent vocation as a writer with an apostolate to fulfill date from a journey to Rome in 1838. This event was of capital importance in V.’s life, but it was also of great significance in the history of Catholicism in France. It was no mere coincidence that the most combative and vigorous lay defender of advanced ultramontanism in those decades of strange lights, against Gallicanism (which was slow to die precisely because it was protected by political power), should have found in Roman Catholicism, in Roman Catholicism itself, the form of religion he had long sought without fully realizing II. He then felt himself in the light of truth and dedicated himself to its defense with all the ardor of his temperament. Some friends (Gustave Olivier, Adolphe and Élisabeth Fubrier) had assisted and guided him through this crisis. An old French Jesuit, who in his youth had been a friend of Joseph de Maistre and had worked energetically with him in Catholic propaganda in Russia under Alexander I, Father Jean-Louis de Leissèges-Rozaven, then assistant for France to the General of the Order, received the convert’s first confession at the Gesù. Nor should this encounter be overlooked; V.’s ultramontanism is indeed linked to that of J. de Maistre, and there is between the two writers a similarity of boldness and polemical spirit that one would not expect to find in men of such different social and cultural backgrounds. A most beautiful document of his conversion and of that first sojourn in Rome and Italy remains a book that is perhaps the most sincere and candid of V.’s works, *Rome et Lorette* (1841), preceded shortly by another, *Pèlerinages de Suisse*, also inspired by warm religious feeling.
Having entered the Ministry of the Interior, in 1840 he accepted, on Guizot’s advice, the post of secretary to General Bugeaud, governor of the French possessions in North Africa, and from that experience he drew a book: *Les Français en Algérie* (1845). Returning to France and re-entering the Ministry, he soon resigned his office to devote himself entirely to journalism (1843). As editor, and later chief editor, of *L’Univers religieux*, during the July Monarchy he vigorously campaigned for the freedom of education alongside liberal Catholics, from whom he was later to separate dramatically, and defended the Jesuits from the attacks of the university and anticlerical press. In 1848 he placed great hopes in republican democracy, but after the June insurrection his sympathy turned to mistrust. Some of his most combative writings date from this period: *Les libres penseurs*; *L’esclave Vindex*. Warmly favorable to the policy of the Prince-President, he unreservedly adhered to the Second Empire, whose domestic regime and foreign policy he defended in *L’Univers*. He was among the most open supporters of the Crimean War. Meanwhile, his estrangement from liberal Catholics—Falloux, Montalembert, Dupanloup, the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Sibour—grew deeper.
Against these adversaries V.’s polemic was perhaps more violent, and certainly more bitter, than against freethinkers and anticlericals. Strong in the support of Pius IX, who nevertheless urged him to a more moderate tone, he could not resist the urge to attack and strike. And his defense of the Papacy, both in the spiritual and temporal spheres, led him into open conflict with Napoleon III, whose intervention in the Italian question he fiercely opposed. The Emperor then suppressed *L’Univers*, which was able to resume publication only after seven years (1867), when Napoleon III attempted a policy of détente (the so-called “liberal Empire”). But the readers of the newspaper, now countless, found their favorite polemicist again in the books and pamphlets he continued to publish: the long series of *Mélanges religieux, historiques et littéraires*; *Çà et Là* (1860); *Le Pape et la diplomatie* (1861); *Le parfum de Rome* (1861); *Vie de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ* (1863); *Molière et Bourdaloue* (1866); *Les odeurs de Paris* (1866). An increasingly intransigent defender of Roman theses, the First Vatican Council found him in the front line among the supporters of papal infallibility (*La liberté du Concile*, 1870, and *Rome pendant le Concile*, 1871), and in the years following the occupation of Rome and the establishment of the Third Republic he did not abandon his post in the struggle in defense of the Church and the Papacy. But his task was now finished. It is difficult to say what his attitude would have been toward the initiatives of Leo XIII to reconcile modern society with the Church. At the beginning of the new pontificate he was exhausted by his enormous work, and in his last years he left the care of the newspaper to his faithful brother Eugène. Perhaps not by chance, V.’s activity ceased with the pontificate of Pius IX, the Pope according to his own heart.
A fearless Christian, a man of uncompromising integrity, generous even when unjust, V. is also one of the greatest writers of the century. There is in his literary work a perishable part, that in which he indulges in a mannered piety or apologetics. But his polemic and his satire are those of a born stylist. His pages of literary criticism, often extremely acute, show what gifts he might have displayed had he devoted himself to that activity. And poet
It is revealed not so much in his verse (among which there are not lacking others of excellent vein) as in the pages of prose in which his religious sense pours itself out in the purest charity and tenderness or rises to a kind of mystical rapture. Italians, whom he had often offended in their national sentiment, must be grateful to him for having expressed, as a true poet, the charm of Christian Rome.
PIETRO PAOLO TROMPEO