Francois de Salignac de Lamothe-Fenelon was born August 6th, 1651, at
the Castle of Fenelon, of a noble and ancient family in the province of
Perigord.
Early proofs of talent and genius induced his uncle, the Marquis de
Fenelon, a man of no ordinary merit, to take him under his immediate
care and superintendence. By him he was placed at the seminary of St.
Sulpice, then lately founded in Paris for the purpose of educating young
men for the church.
The studies of the young Abbé were not encouraged by visions of a stall
and a mitre. It seems that the object of his earliest ambition was, as a
missionary, to carry the blessings of the Gospel to the savages of North
America, or to the Mahometans and heretics of Greece and Anatolia. The
fears, however, or the hopes of his friends detained him at home, and
after his ordination he confined himself for several years to the duties
of the ministry in the parish of St. Sulpice.
At the age of twenty-seven he was appointed superior of a society which
had for its object the instruction and encouragement of female converts
to the Church of Rome; and from this time he took up his abode with his
uncle. In this house he first became known to Bossuet, by whose
recommendation he was intrusted with the conduct of a mission, charged
with the duty of reclaiming the Protestants in the province of Poitou,
in the memorable year 1685, when the Huguenots were writhing under the
infliction of the dragonnade, employed by the government to give full
effect to the revocation of the edict of Nantes. Fenelon had no mind to
have dragoons for his coadjutors, and requested that all show of martial
terror might be removed from the places which he visited. His future
proceedings were in strict conformity with this gentle commencement, and
consequently exposed him to the harassing remonstrances of his
superiors.
His services in Poitou were not acknowledged by any reward from the
government, for Louis XIV. had begun to look coldly upon him; but it was
not his fortune to remain long in obscurity. Amongst the visitors at his
uncle’s house, whose friendship he had the happiness to gain, was the
Duke de Beauvilliers, a man who could live at the court of Louis without
ceasing to live as a Christian. This nobleman was appointed in the year
1689 Governor of the Duke of Burgundy, the grandson of Louis, and heir,
after his father the Dauphin, to the throne of France. His first act was
to appoint Fenelon preceptor to his royal charge, then in his eighth
year, and already distinguished for the frightful violence of his
passions, his insolent demeanour, and tyrannical spirit. The child had,
however, an affectionate heart and a quick sense of shame. Fenelon
gained his love and confidence, and used his power to impress upon him
the Christian’s method of self-government. His headstrong pupil was
subdued, not by the fear of man, but by the fear of God. In the task of
instruction less difficulty awaited him; for the young prince was
remarkably intelligent and industrious. The progress of a royal student
is likely to be rated at his full amount by common fame; but there is
reason to believe that in this case it was rapid and substantial.
In 1694 he was presented to the Abbey of St. Valery, and two years
afterwards promoted to the Archbishopric of Cambray, with a command that
he should retain his office of preceptor, giving personal attendance
only during the three months of absence from his diocese which the
Canons allowed. In resigning his abbey, which from conscientious motives
he refused to keep with his archbishopric, he was careful to assign such
reasons as might not convey an indirect censure of the numerous
pluralists among his clerical brethren. Probably this excess of
delicacy, which it is easy to admire and difficult to justify, was
hardly requisite in the case of many of the offenders. One of them, the
Archbishop of Rheims, when informed of the conscientious conduct of
Fenelon, made the following reply: “M. de Cambray with his sentiments
does right in resigning his benefice, and I with my sentiments do very
right in keeping mine.” This mode of defence is capable of very general
application, and is in fact very generally used, being good for other
cases beside that of pluralities.
This preferment was the last mark of royal favour which he received.
Louis was never cordially his friend, and there were many at court eager
to convert him into an enemy. An opportunity was afforded by Fenelon’s
connexion with Madame Guyon.
It is well known that this lady was the great apostle of the Quietists,
a sect of religionists, so called, because they studied to attain a
state of perfect contemplation, in which the soul is the passive
recipient of divine light. She was especially noted for her doctrine of
pure love; she taught that Christian perfection consisted in a
disinterested love of God, excluding the hope of happiness and fear of
misery, and that this perfection was attainable by man. Fenelon first
became acquainted with her at the house of his friend the Duke de
Beauvilliers, and, convinced of the sincerity of her religion, was
disposed to regard her more favourably from a notion that her religious
opinions, against which a loud clamour had been raised, coincided very
nearly with his own. It has been the fashion to represent him as her
convert and disciple. The truth is, that he was deeply versed in the
writings of the later mystics; men who, with all their extravagance,
were perhaps the best representatives of the Christian character to be
found among the Roman Catholics of their time. He considered the
doctrine of Madame Guyon to be substantially the same with that of his
favourite authors; and whatever appeared exceptionable in her
expositions, he attributed to loose and exaggerated expression natural
to her sex and character.
The approbation of Fenelon gave currency to the fair Quietist amongst
orthodox members of the church. At last the bishops began to take alarm:
the clamour was renewed, and the examination of her doctrines solemnly
intrusted to Bossuet and two other learned divines. Fenelon was avowedly
her friend; yet no one hitherto had breathed a suspicion of any flaw in
his orthodoxy. It was even during the examination, and towards the close
of it, that he was promoted to the Archbishopric of Cambray. The blow
came at length from the hand of his most valued friend. He had been
altogether passive in the proceedings respecting Madame Guyon. Bossuet,
who had been provoked into vehement wrath, and had resolved to crush
her, was sufficiently irritated by this temperate neutrality. But when
Fenelon found himself obliged to publish his ‘Maxims of the Saints,’ in
which, without attacking others, he defends his own views of some of the
controverted points, Bossuet, in a tumult of zeal, threw himself at the
feet of Louis, denounced his friend as a dangerous fanatic, and besought
the King to interpose the royal arm between the Church and pollution.
Fenelon offered to submit his book to the judgment of the Pope.
Permission was granted in very ungracious terms, and presently followed
by a sentence of banishment to his diocese. This sudden reverse of
fortune, which he received without even whispering a complaint, served
to show the forbearance and meekness of his spirit, but it deprived him
of none of his powers. An animated controversy arose between him and
Bossuet, and all Europe beheld with admiration the boldness and success
with which he maintained his ground against the renowned and veteran
disputant; and that, too, in the face of fearful discouragement. The
whole power of the court was arrayed against him, and he stood alone;
for his powerful friends had left his side. The Cardinal de Noailles and
others, who had in private expressed unqualified approbation of his
book, meanly withheld a public acknowledgment of their opinions. Whilst
his enemy enjoyed every facility, and had Louis and his courtiers and
courtly bishops to cheer him on, it was with difficulty that Fenelon
could find a printer who would venture to put to the press a work which
bore his name. Under these disadvantages, harassed in mind, and with
infirm health, he replied to the deliberate and artful attacks of his
adversary with a rapidity which, under any circumstances, would have
been astonishing. He was now gaining ground daily in public opinion. The
Pope also, who knew his merit, was very unwilling to condemn. His
persecutors were excited to additional efforts. He had already been
banished from court; now he was deprived of the name of preceptor, and
of his salary,—of that very salary which some time before he had eagerly
offered to resign, in consideration of the embarrassed state of the
royal treasury. The flagging zeal of the Pope was stimulated by threats
conveyed in letters from Louis penned by Bossuet. At length the sentence
of condemnation was obtained; but in too mild a form to satisfy
altogether the courtly party. No bull was issued. A simple brief
pronounced certain propositions to be erroneous and dangerous, and
condemned the book which contained them, without sentencing it in the
usual manner to the flames.
It is needless to say that Fenelon submitted. He published without delay
the sentence of condemnation, noting the selected propositions, and
expressing his entire acquiescence in the judgment pronounced; and
prohibited the faithful in his diocese from reading or having in their
possession his own work, which up to that moment he had defended so
manfully. Protestants, who are too apt in judging the conduct of Roman
Catholics, to forget every thing but their zeal, have raised an outcry
against his meanness and dissimulation. Fenelon was a sincere member of
a Church which claimed infallibility. We may regret the thraldom in
which such a mind was held by an authority from which the Protestant
happily is free; but the censure which falls on him personally for this
act is certainly misplaced.
The faint hopes which his friends might have cherished, that when the
storm had passed he would be restored to favour, were soon extinguished
by an event, which, whilst it closed against him for ever the doors of
the palace, secured him a place in history, and without which it is
probable that he would never have become the subject even of a short
memoir.
A manuscript which he had intrusted to a servant to copy, was
treacherously sold by this man to a printer in Paris, who immediately
put it to the press, under the title of Continuation of the Fourth Book
of the Odyssey, or Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, with the
royal privilege, dated April 6, 1699. It was told at court that the
forthcoming work was from the pen of the obnoxious archbishop; and
before the impression of the first volume was completed, orders were
given to suppress it, to punish the printers, and seize the copies
already printed. A few however escaped the hands of the police, and were
rapidly circulated. One of them, together with a copy of the remaining
part of the manuscript, soon after came into the possession of a printer
at the Hague, who could publish it without danger.
So eager was the curiosity which the violent proceedings of the French
court had excited, that the press could hardly be made, with the utmost
exertion, to keep pace with the demand. Such is the history of the first
appearance of Telemachus.
Louis was persuaded to think that the whole book was intended to be a
satire on him, his court, and government; and the world was persuaded
for a time to think the same. So, whilst the wrath of the King was
roused to the uttermost, all Europe was sounding forth the praises of
Fenelon. The numerous enemies of Louis exulted at the supposed
exhibition of his tyranny and profligate life. The philosophers were
charmed with the liberal and enlightened views of civil government which
they seemed to discover. It is now well known that the anger and the
praise were alike undeserved. The book was probably written for the use
of the Duke of Burgundy, certainly at a time when Fenelon enjoyed the
favour of his sovereign, and was desirous to retain it. He may have
forgotten that it was impossible to describe a good and a bad king, a
virtuous and a profligate court, without saying much that would bear
hard upon Louis and his friends. As for his political enlightenment, it
is certain that he had his full share of the monarchical principles of
his time and nation. He wished to have good kings, but he made no
provision for bad ones. It is difficult to believe that Louis was
seriously alarmed at his notions of political economy. That science was
not in a very advanced state; but no one could fear that a prince could
be induced by the lessons of his tutor to collect all the artificers of
luxury in his capital, and drive them in a body into the fields to
cultivate potatoes and cabbages, with a belief that he would thus make
the country a garden, and the town a seat of the Muses.
Nothing was now left to Fenelon but to devote himself to his episcopal
duties, which he seems to have discharged with equal zeal and ability.
The course of his domestic life, as described by an eyewitness, was
retired, and, to a remarkable degree, uniform. Strangers were
courteously and hospitably received; but his society was confined for
the most part to the ecclesiastics who resided in his house. Amongst
them were some of his own relations, to whom he was tenderly attached,
but for whose preferment, it should be noticed, he never manifested an
unbecoming eagerness. His only recreation was a solitary walk in the
fields, where it was his employment, as he observes to a friend, to
converse with his God. If in his rambles he fell in with any of the
poorer part of his flock, he would sit with them on the grass, and
discourse about their temporal as well as their spiritual concerns; and
sometimes he would visit them in their humble sheds, and partake of such
refreshment as they offered him.
In the beginning of the 18th century we find him engaged at once in
controversy and politics. The revival of the old dispute with the
Jansenists, to whom he was strongly opposed, obliged him to take up his
pen; but in using it he never forgot his own maxim, that “rigour and
severity are not of the spirit of the Gospel.” For a knowledge of his
political labours we are indebted to his biographer, the Cardinal de
Bausset, who first published his letters to the Duke de Beauvilliers on
the subject of the war which followed the grand alliance in the year
1701. In them he not only considers the general questions of the
succession to the Spanish monarchy, the objects of the confederated
powers, and the measures best calculated to avert or soften their
hostility, but even enters into details of military operations,
discusses the merits of the various generals, stations the different
armies, and sketches a plan of the campaign. Towards the close of the
war he communicated to the Duke de Chevreuse heads of a very extensive
reform in all the departments of government. This reform did not suppose
any fundamental change of the old despotism. It was intended, doubtless,
for the consideration of the Duke of Burgundy, to whose succession all
France was looking forward with sanguine hopes, founded on the
acknowledged excellence of his character, which Fenelon himself had so
happily contributed to form. But amongst the other trials which visited
his latter days, he was destined to mourn the death of his pupil.
Fenelon did not long survive the general pacification. After a short
illness and intense bodily suffering, which he seems to have supported
by calling to mind the sufferings of his Saviour, he died February 7th,
1715, in the sixty-fourth year of his age. No money was found in his
coffers. The produce of the sale of his furniture, together with the
arrears of rent due to him, were appropriated, by his direction, to
pious and charitable purposes.
The calumnies with which he was assailed during the affair of Quietism
were remembered only to the disadvantage of their authors. The public
seem eventually to have regarded him as a man who was persecuted because
he refused to be a persecutor; who had maintained, at all hazards, what
he believed to be the cause of truth and justice; and had resigned his
opinion only at that moment when conscience required the sacrifice.
Universal homage was paid by his contemporaries to his talents and
genius. In the grasp and power of his intellect, and in the extent and
completeness of his knowledge, none probably would have ventured to
compare him with Bossuet; but in fertility and brilliancy of
imagination, in a ready and dexterous use of his materials, and in that
quality which his countrymen call esprit, he was supposed to have no
superior. Bossuet himself said of him “Il brille d’esprit, il est tout
esprit, il en a bien plus que moi.”
It is obvious that his great work, the Adventures of Telemachus, was, in
the first instance, indebted for some portion of its popularity to
circumstances which had no connexion with its merits; but we cannot
attribute to the same cause the continued hold which it has maintained
on the public favour. Those who are ignorant of the interest which
attended its first appearance still feel the charm of that beautiful
language which is made the vehicle of the purest morality and the most
ennobling sentiments. In the many editions through which it passed,
between its first publication and the death of the author, Fenelon took
no concern. Publicly he neither avowed nor disavowed the work, though he
prepared corrections and additions for future editors. All obstacles to
its open circulation were removed by the death of Louis; and in the year
1717, the Marquis de Fenelon, his great-nephew, presented to Louis XV. a
new and correct edition, superintended by himself, from which the text
of all subsequent editions has been taken.
The best authority for the life of Fenelon accessible to the public is
the laborious work of his biographer, the Cardinal de Bausset, which is
rendered particularly valuable by the great number of original documents
which appear at the end of each volume. Its value would be increased if
much of the theological discussion were omitted, and the four volumes
compressed into three.
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