VEUILLOT, LOUIS. – French journalist and writer, born at Boynes (Loiret) on 11 October 1813, died in Paris on 7 April 1883. His father was a poor cooper, who struggled to make a living and could neither read nor write. The boy, the eldest of a large family, received 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. Seized by the desire to read and educate himself, he began to cultivate his literary formation on his own. It is indeed remarkable that this prose writer, one of the most genuine and vigorous of the nineteenth century, arrived at familiarity with the classics of his country—his true teachers—little by little, without the regular discipline of university or ecclesiastical humanistic studies, as though obeying the voice of blood. A journalist at seventeen, in that improvised recruitment which 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 confessed, more because of the opportunity that had presented itself, and out of a taste for the profession and a love of controversy, than from genuine moral commitment and firm convictions. Undoubtedly devoted to Guizot, but, at bottom, indifferent to the two parties: rather inclined, by a mischievous common sense and an instinctive honesty, to note the petty selfishnesses, ridiculous vanities, hypocrisies and cowardice of the various opposing political factions. The V. of those youthful years lives again in the appealing figure of a journalist whom he later sketched in a novel, L'honnête femme (1844), an exceptionally felicitous satirical portrait of the provincial bourgeoisie under Louis Philippe.
The discovery of his true self, and his consequent vocation as a writer with an apostolate to fulfil, date from a journey to Rome in 1838. The event is of capital importance in V.’s life, but also of very great importance in the history of Catholicism in France. It is no fortuitous coincidence that the most combative and vigorous lay defender of advancing ultramontanism, during those decades of strenuous struggle against Gallicanism (hard to eradicate also because it was protected by the political power), found in Rome, in Roman Catholicism, the form of religion he had long been seeking without fully realizing II. He then felt himself in the full light of truth and consecrated himself to its defence with all the fervour of his temperament. Some friends (Gustave Olivier, Adolphe and Elisabeth Féburier) had assisted and guided him during this crisis. An old French Jesuit, who in his youth had been a friend of Joseph de Maistre and had worked effectively with him in Catholic propaganda in Russia under Alexander I, Father Jean-Louis de Leissègues-Rozaven, then Assistant for France to the Superior General of the Order, heard the convert’s first confession at the Gesù. This encounter, too, should not be overlooked; V.’s ultramontanism is in fact connected with that of J. de Maistre, and there is between the two writers a similarity in their bold polemical humour that one would not expect to find in men of such different social and cultural backgrounds. A splendid record of the conversion and of that first stay in Rome and Italy remains in a book that is perhaps the most sincere and candid of V.’s works, Rome et Lorette (1841), preceded shortly beforehand by another, Pèlerinages de Suisse, likewise inspired by fervent religious feeling.
Having entered the Ministry of the Interior, in 1840 he accepted, on Guizot’s advice, the position 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). Returning to France and re-entering the Ministry, he soon resigned his post in order to devote himself entirely to journalism (1843). Editor and then editor-in-chief of the Univers religieux, during the July Monarchy he conducted the campaign for freedom of education with vigour, together with the liberal Catholics, from whom he was later to separate spectacularly, and defended the Jesuits against attacks from the University and the anticlerical press. In 1848 he placed great hopes in republican democracy, but after the June insurrection his sympathy changed into distrust. Some of his most combative writings date from that period: Les libres penseurs; L'escluse Vindex. Warmly favourable to the policy of the prince-president, he gave his unreserved support to the Second Empire, whose domestic regime and foreign policy he defended in the Univers. He was among the war’s most outspoken supporters of the Crimean War. Meanwhile, his conflict with the liberal Catholics was becoming more pronounced: Falloux, Montalembert, Dupanloup, and the archbishop of Paris, Archbishop Sibour.
Against these adversaries V.’s polemic is perhaps more violent, and certainly more acrid, than against the freethinkers and anticlericals themselves. Strong in the support of Pius IX, who nevertheless urged him to use more moderate language, he was unable to resist his need to attack and strike. And his defence of the Papacy, both in the spiritual and temporal spheres, would bring him into open conflict with Napoleon III, whose intervention in the Italian question he would fiercely oppose. The Emperor then had the Univers suppressed; 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 newspaper’s readers, by then innumerable, found their favourite polemicist again in the books and pamphlets he continued to publish: the long series of 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). An increasingly uncompromising defender of the Roman theses, he stood in the front rank of supporters of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council (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 fighting post in defence of the Church and the Papacy. But his task was by then finished. It is difficult to say what his attitude would have been towards Leo XIII’s initiatives to reconcile modern society with the Church. At the beginning of the new pontificate he was exhausted by his enormous workload, and during the last years of his life he left the care of the newspaper to his faithful brother Eugène. Perhaps it was not by chance that V.’s activity ceased with the pontificate of Pius IX, the Pope after his own heart.
An intrepid Christian, a man of complete integrity, generous even when unjust, V. is also one of the century’s greatest writers. There is a perishable element in his literary work, that in which he indulges in a conventional unction or apologetics. But his polemic and satire belong to a writer of genuine distinction. His literary-critical pages, often extraordinarily acute, demonstrate what gifts he would have possessed had he turned to this activity. And he reveals himself as a poet not so much in his verse (though there is no shortage among it of poems of excellent inspiration) as in the prose pages where his religious sense pours forth in the purest charity and tenderness or rises to a kind of mystical intoxication. Italians, whom he offended more than once in their national sentiment, should be grateful to him for having expressed, as a true poet, the fascination of Christian Rome.
Pietro Paolo Trompeo