Lamennais, FÉLICITÉ-ROBERT DE, was born at St Malo, 16th June 1782, the fourth of the six children of a merchant and shipowner, who was ennobled in 1788 by request of the States of Brittany for his patriotic services and for supplying cheapened corn to the poor during a time of scarcity, but who was too modest to use his title or the privileges it bore. His mother was a saintly woman of remarkable ability and of Irish descent, who died when he was but five years old. He grew up slender and small in stature, nervous and weak in health, but lively and restless in temperament, and from a very early age he took to books, and read widely at his will in his uncle's library. He loved music, and became expert in swimming, riding, and fencing, and it is said fought a duel with credit in 1802 or 1803. But the dominant passion of his youth was solitary study, and his earliest companions were doubt and melancholy. It is a fact not without significance that his first communion was deferred till he was twenty-two, at the time when his eldest brother Jean was ordained a priest. The pair retired about the end of 1805 to the solitude of their joint estate of La Chesnaie, two leagues from Dinan, and there, amidst almost savage surroundings, but in an ample library, the real education of Lamennais began. In 1807 he translated the Guide Spirituel of Louis de Blois: Napoleon's police suppressed his Réflexions sur l'Etat de l'Eglise (1808). He received the tonsure in March 1809, and his letters of that period reveal a vein of lofty and somewhat mystical devotion and an inward joy of which he was to taste but little in later years. But study, prayer, and meditation could not satisfy all the cravings of his nature, and this exaltation of mind soon gave place to the malady of genius, that vague unrest and distaste for the present which was the fundamental undertone in the constitution of Lamennais. The years from 1806 till 1814 he spent in a narrow range of studies, shut out from the world, the vultures of vague unrest tearing at his heart, while he remained forging the weapons of controversy. He taught mathematics in his brother's seminary, shared his quarrel with the new university, and wrote together with him the ultramontane and anti-Gallican Tradition de l'Eglise sur l'Institution des Evêques (1814). In 1815, during the Hundred Days, he took refuge in London, where he was befriended and much influenced by the Abbé Carron. In November he returned to Paris, and with sore misgivings both before and after he was ordained priest at Vannes. At Paris in March 1816 he wrote the first volume of his famous Essai sur l'Indifférence en matière de Religion (1818-24), a magnificent, if paradoxical, denunciation of the right of private judgment and the doctrine of toleration—itself but a virtual unbelief, 'a new kind of persecution against the church.' The whole is a polemic against the individual reason on which certitude cannot rest; its conclusion that the unity of society depends ultimately on the unity of truth, and that all systems but the Catholic destroy one another and lead to scepticism. Three different systems of indifference are in turn examined and refuted: (1) that of those who, repudiating religion for themselves, believe that it is necessary for the people—atheism, and the organised religious polity of the empire; (2) that of those who believe religion to be necessary for men, but that God has not given any special revelation of how He would be worshipped—natural religion, and 18th-century deism; (3) that of those who believe in a divine revelation through a book, but hold that God has left men to interpret it for themselves—Protestantism. In the Défense de l'Essai he answered opponents of the most opposite camps, advocates of freedom in thought, Gallican monarchists who refused to admit that the source of all authority was the holy see, and Ultramontanes themselves, who took fright at a bold attempt to find support for the Christian revelation in an analysis of human tradition.
In 1824 Lamennais received a flattering reception at Rome, and it is said that Leo XII. was anxious to give the new Bossnet a cardinal's hat. But soon after this other dreams than those of a pure theocracy enthroned in the Vatican began to fill his mind, and already notions of popular liberty appear in the Progrès de la Révolution (1829). The revolution of July (1830) quickened his pulse, and in the famous journal L'Avenir, founded in September, with his young friends Lacordaire, Montalembert, and the Abbé Gerbet, ideas strange to Ultramontanism were eagerly advocated. But the old chimæra refused to be rejuvenised, the Jesuits and bishops took fright at the new doctrines of liberty of the press, of instruction, and of discussion, and the journal was suspended by spiritual authority in 1831. Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert set out for Rome to lay bare their hearts to the Holy Father. The disastrous story is told in Les Affaires de Rome (1836), one of the most interesting of all the writings of Lamennais. His Holiness Gregory XVI. gave the ardent tribune but a quarter of an hour's audience, talked to him of art, pointed out the claw in a lion of Michael Angelo's, and, according to the Abbé Ricard, offered him a pinch of snuff. After waiting in vain for an opportunity of conference, they returned doubtful and disheartened at the cowardly chicanery and worldliness of Rome. A severe condemnation reached them at Munich, 30th August 1832, the date of the beginning of the second life of Lamennais. He signed obedience, but the iron had entered his soul. He retired to La Chesnaie, and there watched with sinking heart a more shameful betrayal still of his Master by the Vicegerent of Christ in the final extinction of Polish nationality, crushed to death by Russia with the sympathy of Austria and before the approving eyes of Rome. Here, in one week of restless walking under the oaks, he poured out the prophetic inspirations of his whole heart in the Paroles d'un Croyant (1834), a glowing poem rather than a treatise, expressed in rhythmical prose arranged in short verses like those of the Bible, under forms now parabolic, now direct, at one moment recalling the gloom of the Inferno, at another the tenderness of the Imitation. The apocalyptic empyrean is a region far above the rules of logic, and it is impossible to set forth precisely the doctrine of this strange book further than to describe it as an illusion of a perfect society, ideal, Paradisaic, governed by love, hindered awhile by the wickedness of despots, but ultimately to be effectuated by perfect liberty. The book made an extraordinary sensation; Sainte-Beuve tells us how he found the compositors gathered round while one of their number read the MS. aloud, his voice trembling with emotion. To churchmen it was 'the apocalypse of Satan,' 'the bonnet rouge planted upon a cross.' It brought about the complete rupture of the apostle with his old associates; repulsed by the pope, he had made his appeal to the people against Rome, itself become faithless to its mission, and henceforth he belonged to the people alone. His further books, Le Livre du Peuple, Une Voix de Prison, Du Passé et de l'Avenir du Peuple, were but weaker echoes of his masterpiece. For one he got a year's imprisonment in Sainte-Pélagie. In the revolution of 1848 he started paper after paper, and poured forth a succession of pamphlets while struggling on bravely against broken friendships, ill-health, and poverty. His piety survived the shipwreck of his faith; he had the gift of attaching friends who still loved the man whatever his opinions, and to these he poured forth his thoughts in impetuous swiftness as he paced up and down, his limbs trembling with emotion. George Sand describes his austere and majestic face, the brow an unbroken wall, furrowed between the eyebrows with those perpendicular wrinkles which, Lavater says, belong exclusively to those of high capacity who think justly and nobly—its rigid austerity ever lightened and humanised by the sudden smile of tenderness. To the last he remained a Breton even to his accent. His ideas and emotions alike ever tended towards excess and to absoluteness of conviction; his temperament was framed for suffering, and his passionate devotion to truth, the foundations of which yet slipped from under him, made his intellectual life a very martyrdom. Lamennais sat in the Constituent Assembly till the coup d'état ended his dreams of popular liberty. At his death, which occurred February 27, 1854, he refused to make his peace with the church, and was buried, by his own desire, without religious rites, in an unmarked grave among the poor at Père-la-Chaise.
In his Correspondance, edited by M. Émile Forgues (2 vols. 1858; 3d vol., ed. by his son, M. Eugène Forgues, 1886), we see the ebb and flow of his stormy emotions for twenty years. His brother and sister kept back from publication many of his papers, but five posthumous volumes appeared under the care of Forgues (1855-58), of which at least one volume, that entitled Mélanges philosophiques et littéraires, was quite worthy of his name. M. Blaise, the nephew of Lamennais, edited his Œuvres Inédites (2 vols. 1866), mainly composed of additional letters. Amid the storms of his later life he found consolation in writing his serene and large-minded Esquisse d'une Philosophie (4 vols. 1840-46), perhaps the most really remarkable of all his works.
See Blaise's Essai Biographique (1858); Sainte-Beuve, in Portraits Contemporains, vol. i., and Nouveaux Lundis, vols. i. and xi.; Guizot, in vol. iii. of his Mémoires; E. Scherer, in vol. iv. of his Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine; Renan, in Essais de Morale et de Critique (1859); E. Dowden, in Studies in Literature, 1789-1877 (1878); and Paul Janet, La Philosophie de Lamennais (1890).