Fénélon, FRANÇOIS DE SALIGNAC DE LA MOTHE, was born August 6, 1651, in the château de Fénélon, province of Périgord, now included in the department of the Dordogne, of a family which has given many celebrities both to the church and to the state in France. His education was conducted at home up to his twelfth year, when he was transferred to Cahors, and afterwards to the Plessis College in Paris. In his twentieth year he entered the newly-founded seminary of St Sulpice, where he received holy orders in 1675. Unlike too many ecclesiastics of his own rank at that period, he gave his whole heart to his sacred calling, being for some time employed in the parochial duties of the parish of St Sulpice; and in the year 1678 he was named director of an institution recently founded in Paris for the reception of female converts to the Roman Catholic faith. During his tenure of this office he wrote his first work, De l'Education des Filles; and the success with which he discharged his duties towards the young converts led to his appointment as head of a mission, which, on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, was sent to preach among the Protestant population of Saintonge and Poitou. In 1689 he was named by Louis XIV. to the highly confidential post of preceptor of his grandson, the young Duke of Burgundy. In the discharge of this delicate trust he sought to impress on his pupil's mind the great principles of truth and justice upon which the prince's responsibilities are founded, and to show the hollowness and futility of all earthly glory, power, and happiness which do not rest upon this foundation. To this wise design of the preceptor we are indebted for many works still popular in educational use; for the Fables, for the Dialogues of the Dead, for the History of the Ancient Philosophers, and for the gem at least of the Telemachus. As an acknowledgment of these great merits, he was presented by the king in 1694 to the abbey of St Valery, and in the following year to the archbishopric of Cambrai.
It is to this period of Fénélon's life that the history of the unhappy controversy about Quietism (q.v.) belongs. Two separate schools of Quietism are to be distinguished. In one of these the common mystic principle of the absorption of the soul in the love and contemplation of God led to the conclusion that the soul, in this state of absorption, suffered no contamination from the material actions of the outer man, and that no acts of virtue, not even of prayer, were any longer required (see MOLINOS). The other school, while it maintained the theory of passive contemplation and love, yet repudiated the dangerous and immoral consequences which were deduced therefrom. It was exclusively the latter and less objectionable form of Quietism the professors of which for a time claimed, although not the patronage, yet at least the indulgent consideration of Fénélon. He formed in the year 1687 the acquaintance of the celebrated Madame Guyon (q.v.). Fully convinced of the unfairness of much of the outcry which was raised against her, and which made her responsible for all the principles of the grosser Quietism of Molinos, his generous mind was perhaps attracted to her cause by the very injustice of her opponents. He advised her to submit her works to the judgment of Bossuet, who was then in the zenith of his fame, and with whom Fénélon was in the most friendly relations. In the condemnation of the book of Madame Guyon by this prelate Fénélon acquiesced; but, as she made a formal submission to the church, he refused to join in any condemnation of herself personally. Nevertheless, when a commission was appointed to examine the whole affair, he signed their report. It was not thought enough to publish a condemnation of her several works, but Bossuet prepared a special exposition of the true doctrine of the church on these questions. To this work Fénélon refused to give his approval, and even composed his own Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie intérieure in explanation and defence of certain at least of Madame
Guyon's doctrines; he cheerfully agreeing to the stipulation of the Archbishop of Paris that the Maximes should be kept back from publication until the completion of the rival treatise of Bossuet, Instruction sur les États d'Oraison. An unfortunate violation of this engagement, committed without the knowledge, and in the absence of Fénélon, was the last of a long train of causes which led to the painful and unedifying rupture between these two great prelates. Fénélon's book was received with much clamour, that of Bossuet was universally approved; and in the controversy that ensued all the displeasure of the court, which Fénélon had provoked by covert strictures in his works of fiction, was brought to bear against him. He was ordered to submit his book to the judgment of an ecclesiastical tribunal, of which Bossuet was a member. He refused to accept Bossuet as judge; and in the end he appealed to the judgment of the holy see. Bossuet published a succession of pamphlets; several of the bishops who had espoused the side of Bossuet issued pastorals in the same sense; and Fénélon defended himself vigorously against them all.
The last blow against the ancient friendship of the great rivals was struck by Bossuet in his celebrated Relation sur le Quietisme. Fénélon was wounded to the heart; but his most masterly defence was written, printed, and published within little more than a fortnight from the appearance of Bossuet's Relation. From this point the controversy assumed a more personal and therefore a more acrimonious character; and it was maintained on both sides till the long-delayed decision of the pope brought it to a close, March 12, 1699, by a brief, in the usual form, condemning the Maximes des Saints, and marking with especial censure twenty-three propositions extracted from it. The conduct of Fénélon under this blow constitutes, in the eyes of his fellow-churchmen, one of his highest titles to glory. He not only accepted, without hesitation, the decision of Rome, but he took the very earliest occasion to publish from his own pulpit the brief of his condemnation. The jealousy with which the political principles of Fénélon were already regarded was heightened about this time into open hostility by the appearance of his Télémaque (see TELEMACHUS), printed from a copy surreptitiously obtained by his servant, which the king regarded as but a masked satire upon his own court. Louis's anger knew no bounds. Fénélon was strictly restrained within his diocese; and measures were taken to give the condemnation of his book every character of publicity. From this date Fénélon lived exclusively for his flock. He founded at Cambrai a seminary for his archdiocese, which he made his own especial charge. He was assiduous in preaching and in the discharge of the other duties of his office; and the fame of his benevolence, charity, and enlightened liberality is attested by the order issued by the Allies in the campaign of 1709 to spare the palace and the stores of the Archbishop of Cambrai. The only later controversy in which he appears is the revival of the Jansenistic dispute, in which Fénélon engaged earnestly on the side of orthodoxy. He died January 7, 1715, and was buried in his cathedral of Cambrai (q.v.).
The works of Fénélon are very voluminous, and embrace every variety of subjects—theology, philosophy, history, literature ancient and modern, and oratory, especially the eloquence of the pulpit. His correspondence is very extensive and most interesting. Of his mature discourses two only have reached us in a finished state. They are of the very highest order of sacred eloquence. His work on the temporal power of the medieval popes presents that doctrine in its most amiable form; and even his spiritual writings in general are not unfrequently read by Christians of all denominations.
See Bausset's edition of the Works (22 vols. 1821-24), his Histoire de Fénélon (1808; new ed. 1862), the Correspondance (1727-29), and Marten's edition of the Works (3 vols. Paris, 1874); German Lives by Hunnius (1873) and Wunderlich (1873); the somewhat one-sided English Life, by Mrs H. L. Lear (1876); and Fénélon à Cambrai, by E. de Broglie (1884). It should be added that Douen, in L'Intolérance de Fénélon (Paris, 1872), has endeavoured to establish by documents that both in his management of the institute for the converts and in his measures in Poitou, Fénélon frankly accepted the policy of persecution, and was guilty of inexcusable severity and even cruelty. See an article in the Quarterly Review for 1885.