VEUILLOT, LOUIS. - French journalist and writer, b. at Boynes (Loiret) on 11 Oct. 1813, d. at Paris on 7 Apr. 1883. His father was a poor cooper, who scraped a hard living and could neither read nor write. The boy, firstborn of a numerous brood, received a rudimentary primary education and no religious upbringing.
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. Seized by the desire to read and to educate himself, he began to attend to his own literary formation. It is indeed singular that this prose writer, one of the most genuine and robust of the nineteenth century, should have arrived little by little at familiarity with the classics of his country - his true masters - without a regular discipline of university or ecclesiastical humanistic studies, as if obeying the voice of blood. A journalist at seventeen, in that improvised recruitment that took place immediately after the Revolution of July 1830, first at the Echo de Rouen, then at the Memorial de la Dordogne, and later at the Charte de 1830, he found himself defending the so-called "Résistance", that is, the right wing of constitutional liberalism, against the left wing, the so-called "Mouvement", but, as he himself later had to confess, more because of the occasion that had presented itself to him, and out of a taste for the trade and love of polemic, than out of true moral commitment and firmness of convictions. Devoted to Guizot, no doubt, but at bottom indifferent to the two parties: led rather by a mischievous good sense and an instinctive honesty to note the petty egoisms, the ridiculous vanities, the hypocrisies and cowardices of the various and opposing political clienteles. The V. of those young years lives again in the likeable little figure of a journalist whom he sketched later in a novel, L'honnête femme (1844), a most felicitous satirical portrait of the provincial bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe.
The rediscovery of himself, and his consequent vocation as a writer who has an apostolate to fulfill, date from a journey of his to Rome in 1838. The event is of capital importance in the life of V., but it is also of very great importance in the history of Catholicism in France. It is not a fortuitous coincidence that the most combative and vigorous lay defender of the advancing ultramontanism, in those decades of strenuous struggles, against Gallicanism (slow to die also because protected by political power) should have found in Rome, in Roman Catholicism, the form of religion that he had long been seeking without being fully aware of it. He then felt himself in the full light of truth and consecrated himself to its defense with all the impetuosity of his temperament. Some friends (Gustave Olivier, Adolphe and Elisabeth Féburier) had assisted and guided him in this crisis. An old French Jesuit, who in his youth had been a friend of Joseph de Maistre and had worked effectively with him at Catholic propaganda in Russia under Alexander I, Father Jean-Louis de Leissègues-Rozaven, now assistant of France to the general of the Order, received at the Gesù the first confession of the convert. This encounter too is not to be neglected; the ultramontanism of V. is in fact linked to that of J. de Maistre, and there is between the two writers a similarity of bold polemical humor that one would not expect to recognize in men of such different social and cultural provenance. A most beautiful document of the conversion and of that first stay in Rome and in Italy remains a book that is perhaps the most genuine and candid of V., Rome et Lorette (1841), preceded shortly before by another, Pèlerinages de Suisse, also of warm religious inspiration.
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 the experience of that stay he drew a book: Les Français en Algérie (1845). Having returned to France and re-entered the Ministry, he soon gave up the office to devote himself entirely to journalism (1843). Editor and then editor-in-chief of the Univers religieux, during the July Monarchy he vigorously conducted the campaign for freedom of teaching together with the liberal Catholics, from whom he was later clamorously to separate, and defended the Jesuits from the attacks of the University and of the anticlerical press. In 1848 he hoped much from republican democracy, but after the June insurrection his sympathy turned into distrust. From that time date some of his most combative writings: Les libres penseurs; L'escluse Vindex. Warmly favorable to the policy of the prince president, he adhered without reservations to the Second Empire, whose domestic regime and foreign action he defended in the Univers. The Crimean War had him among its most open supporters. Meanwhile his disagreement with the liberal Catholics was becoming more pronounced: Falloux, Montalembert, Dupanloup, the archbishop of Paris Msgr. Sibour.
Against these adversaries the polemic of V. is perhaps more violent, and certainly more bitter, than against the freethinkers and anticlericals themselves. Strong in the support of Pius IX, who nevertheless urged him to use more moderate language, he could not resist his need to attack and strike. And the defense of the Papacy, both in the spiritual and in the temporal sphere, was to bring him into open conflict with Napoleon III, whose intervention in the Italian question he fiercely opposed. The Emperor then had the Univers suppressed, and it was able to resume publication only after seven years (1867), when Napoleon III attempted a policy of détente (the so-called "Empire libéral"). But the readers of the newspaper, by now innumerable, found their favorite polemicist again in the books and pamphlets that he published one after another: the long series of the Mélanges religieux, historiques et littéraires; Ça et Là (1860); Le Pape et la diplomatie (1861); Le parfum de Rome (1861); Vie de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1863); Molière et Bourdalou (1866); Les odeurs de Paris (1866). A defender of the Roman theses ever more intransigent, the Vatican Council finds him in the front line among the supporters of pontifical 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 does not abandon his combat post in defense of the Church and the Papacy. But his task was by now finished. It is difficult to say what his attitude would have been before the initiatives of Leo XIII to reconcile modern society to the Church. At the beginning of the new pontificate he was exhausted by his enormous labor and in the last years of his life he left the care of the newspaper to his faithful brother Eugène. Perhaps not by chance did the activity of V. cease with the pontificate of Pius IX, the Pope after his own heart.
An intrepid Christian, a man all of a piece, generous even when he is 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 unction or an apologetics of manner. But his polemic and his satire are those of a stylist of race. His pages of literary criticism, often most acute, demonstrate what gifts he would have had if he had turned to this activity. And a poet he reveals himself not so much in his verses (among which, however, there is no lack of some of the best inspiration) as in the pages of prose in which his religious sense pours forth in charity and most genuine tenderness or rises to a sort of mystical intoxication. Italians, several times offended by him in their national feeling, must be grateful to him for having expressed as a true poet the fascination of Christian Rome.
Bibliography14 works
Pietro Paolo Trompeo