HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE

1870-1900

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BOOK I 1870-1873

BOOK II 1873-1875

BOOK III (1875-1877)

BOOK IV 1877-1890

 

The men of the Third Republic:

BISHOP DUPANLOUP

(1802-1878) .

A PRELATE, with the ascetic features of an anchorite, the manners of an eighteenth century marquis, the piercing eye of a soldier, and the combative eloquence of a crusading monk, Monseigneur Dupanloup—the priest who received Talleyrand's death-bed confession—stands in point of talent at the head of the French episcopacy; and in his diocese of Orleans he is not only bishop, but king. It was thought last year that M. Thiers would raise him to the archbishopric of Paris; but M. Thiers probably mused as to what would be the temperature of the capital when the hottest ecclesiastic in France got commencing hostilities with the Republican municipality about educational or other delicate matters, and he preferred selecting Monseigneur Guibert of Tours, who is not a godlier man, but a quieter. There must have been many not among the devout only whom this choice disappointed, for Monseigneur Dupanloup, an academician, a deputy, the most remarkable French preacher since Bossuet, and a controversialist of world-wide reputation, would have made a right imposing primate, of whom Parisians might have been proud; and every time he delivered a sermon in Notre Dame there would have flocked crowds to hear him such as even Father Ravignan and Father Hyacinthe never attracted. But each of these sermons would assuredly have operated as an explosion, casting up matters for dispute and bitterness over all the quarters of Paris, Monseigneur Dupanloup being a prelate who has never consented, and would never consent at any price, to put a curb upon his tongue. Once enthroned in the capital, it is certain he would have waged upon Belleville, Montmartre, and the favourite newspapers of those localities, a war without truce or pity. As vacancies occurred in the parish churches he would have filled them up with ardent priests of the proselytising sort. The spiritual domination which weighed so lightly on the faithful of Paris during the mundane rule of Quehm and Sibour, and under the bourgeois tolerance of Affre, Morlot, and Darboy, would have made itself implacably felt in all that regarded infidel literature, under which head would have been banished from every metropolitan home laying a claim to religiousness the books of Littré (dictionary included), About, and Taine, and all journals not tending directly to orthodoxy and edification. It would have been a glad time for the Monde, Union, and other kindred prints; the trade in sacred images, wax tapers, and probably also the fish trade, would have received a welcome stimulus; and there would soon have arisen petitions to the Legislature covered by thousands of signatures, and praying for a revival of the Corpus Christi processions, abolished in Paris since 1832.

At election periods, Monseigneur, who has already shown at Orleans what a determined bishop can do with a well-drilled and obedient clergy at his orders, would have converted every one of his vicars, curates, and chaplains into electoral agents; and the struggles of the Imperial era between irreconcilables and official candidates would have been remembered as child's play beside the contests that would have supervened between lists wholly Radical and others wholly Ultramontane. For where prelates like Monseigneur Dupanloup reign, neutral tints fade away. Paris has never yet enjoyed a bishop who marched all his clergy about like a battalion, and commanded them to use the pulpit, the school, and the confessional, as instruments for achieving such and such a purpose. There are even Parisians who might deny that such a thing was possible in their city, and these may be congratulated upon not having been allowed to witness the experiment. Under Monseigneur Dupanloup such Parisians as are Catholic at all would almost all have became rabidly so. As for the others, plunging more furiously than ever into free-thought, they would have torn his lordship's pastoral letters off the church doors, raged exasperatedly against him in their clubs, cafés, and journals, and if he had been caught in an insurrectionary moment by the rougher spirits among the party, he would have had no quarter shown him.

In the last-named contingency, Monseigneur Dupanloup would have been the man to court martyrdom rather than flee it. Fronting his executioners with prelatial contempt, he would have repeated as calmly in his last moment as every morning at mass, "Judica me, Deus, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta." But the powerful Bishop of Orleans is not a prelate of the Wolsey or Richelieu type, nor is he Mazarin. He is Dupanloup; that is, a priest who will leave his individual mark as one of the most perfect embodiments of clerical ambition allied to private sanctity which this century has seen.

It is customary to write of all bishops that they lead saintly lives; in this instance the saying would be no more than strict truth. Frugal as a hermit, an abstainer from wine, sleeping on a bed like a monk's, and rising at four, summer and winter, Monseigneur Dupanloup supports an existence which would seem penal servitude to many a so-called working man. Read all that Victor Hugo says of Bishop Myriel in his "Miserables," and you will get a notion of Monseigneur Dupanloup' s charity, which is so munificent as to have left him occasionally in very straitened circumstances. Recall everything that has been stated of Fenelon's exquisite sweetness of voice and urbanity of demeanour, and you will have no exaggerated conception of what Monseigneur Dupanloup is in his conversations with strangers. But this is the Dupanloup of private life. See him sweep up to his throne in the Cathedral of Orleans, with his head erect, his body clothed in lace and jewelled vestments, and a resplendent procession of thurifers and priests chanting before and behind him, and you will understand why so many have stigmatised him as a proud prelate of the old school, who arrayed himself in violet cashmere and cambric, and would only eat, like Monseigneur de Narbonne, of spendthrift memory, off gold plate. Nothing is too rich or majestic, according to Bishop Dupanloup, for the ceremonies of the Church, nor for his own adornment in taking part in them. He holds that the Church should speak to the eye and the ear as well as the mind; that she should be supreme in the State; that nothing should be done in education or government but through her or by her; and he is quite consistent with himself when, humble and unpretending at home, he shows himself surrounded with all the pomp he can command when officiating as a bishop.

There is something, however, in Monseigneur Dupanloup's tone of voice, in his style of writing, in his conversation, and even in his look when most exalted by the splendours of Church pageantry, which first puzzles, and then strikes one as slightly dwarfing the dignity of the man. Reflect a little, and you will perceive that Monseigneur Dupanloup's life, which has been devoted in a large measure to school teaching, has set upon him the ineffaceable seal of the pedagogue.

Born in 1802, of very lowly parents, in Savoy, Monseigneur Dupanloup was brought up at the expense of an uncle of his, who was a priest; and it was to the habits learned from this good man that he was indebted for his extremely rapid rise. Soon after his ordination, the Duchess of Angouleme, hearing of the Abbé Dupanloup's skill as a catechist, came to watch him instruct the children in the parish church of the Assumption, and she was so much pleased with his gentleness and his eloquence, that she caused him to be appointed confessor to the little Duke of Bordeaux (now Count of Chambord). Shortly afterwards the Abbé Dupanloup became catechist to the Orleans Princes, and then chaplain to the Duchess of Berry.

After the Revolution of 1830 he founded the Academie de St. Hyacinthe, an institute where young men of all classes, but principally workmen, came to hear religious lectures, and in 1834 he was offered, but declined, the head mastership of the Paris Seminary. He accepted, however, the post of chief professor (préfet des études), and his teaching was so lucid, patient, and successful, that in 1837 Archbishop Quelen insisted upon his undertaking the head mastership, and at the same time appointed him Vicar-General of the diocese.

As most people are aware, one of M. Dupanloup's favourite pupils at the seminary was Ernest Renan, who was then being trained to the priesthood, and whom the Bishop has never ceased since to call his "erring but beloved sheep." On the death of Monseigneur de Quelen, M. Dupanloup bestirred himself most actively to prevent the appointment of the King's nominee, Monseigneur Affre, whom he thought too lukewarm; and, failing in his endeavours, resigned his VicarGeneralship. Monseigneur Affre taught him on this occasion a generous lesson in forgiveness by creating the office of Honorary Vicar-General for him, and by entrusting him with a confidential and important mission to the Papal Court. Meanwhile, M. Dupanloup, who, by his Lenten sermons at St. Koch and his Advent lectures at Notre Dame, had acquired the reputation of being the most erudite and impassioned preacher in Paris, was appointed Professor of Sacred Eloquence at the Sorbonne. He delivered but half-a-dozen lectures; for on his sixth appearance, having trampled on the doctrines and memory of Voltaire before an audience composed for the greater part of Latin Quarter students, he excited such a terrific uproar that a breach of the peace was apprehended, and he could never again obtain a hearing.

In 1849, under the Second Republic, and Count de Falloux being Minister of Public Instruction and Worship, M. Dupanloup at length obtained the crowning reward of his career, and was collated to the see he has filled ever since. If Monseigneur Dupanloup had been personally ambitious, his promotion to an Archbishopric and to the Cardinalate would have followed as matters of course. Napoleon III would have been delighted to count so distinguished a prelate among his partisans, and Monseigneur Dupanloup might easily have adopted the plan of some of his astute episcopal brethren, who, giving themselves out for staunch Imperialists, became Archbishops, Cardinals, and Senators, and only turned round on the Empire when it had nothing further to bestow on them.

But the Bishop of Orleans was too honest for trickery of this sort.

Finding that Napoleon III did not intend to govern on the ultramontane principles, he declared himself his foe without delay; and the pamphlets he wrote against the Emperor's policy (notably that reply to an anonymous pamphlet of the Emperor's own, Le Pape et le Congres, 1859) were so scathing, that Monseigneur got identified in many peoples' minds with the Liberal party. Needless to say that on no point was Monseigneur a Liberal; in fact, politics proper were with him quite a secondary consideration. He had served the Restoration and the July Monarchy; and he would have been quite willing to uphold the Empire, or even a Republic which would have let itself be guided by the Church. His weapons of attack were the pen and the pulpit, but he wielded a yet more dangerous one in the schools of his diocese, and this brings one back to the point that both in speech and style Monseigneur Dupanloup is essentially a pedagogue. He showed it in his assaults on M. About (1860), in his public reprimands of M. Veuillot for excess of zeal, in his pastoral letter (1869), which gave a lesson to the Pope, in the fearless rebuke which he administered to the Germans when imprisoned by them in his episcopal palace (1870), and in his recent lecture to the Academy, à propos of M. Littré's election. He has shown it again in his epistles to Dr. Manning and the Archbishop of Malines, in the counter project which he presented against M. Simon's education law, and in the somewhat patronising support he has extended, and is still extending, to M. Thiers, whom he regards as a good substitute for Gambetta, but nothing more; and he will show it so long as he lives, and can see his lessons repeated and propounded by the whole of that doctrinaire party of mixed Orleanists and Constitutional Legitimists who boast that they are his disciples.

When the roll of France's ecclesiastical worthies comes to be called for the last time, Richelieu will step to the front witli an axe, Bossuet with a sword, Monseigneur Dupanloup with a ferule.

The little village of St. Felix, hidden away in the Alpine forests near Chambery, is the birth-place of this illustrious soldier of the Church militant. Seventy years since, under the First Empire, that part of Savoy was annexed to France as the Department of Mont Blanc; but it was not till 1838 that M. Dupanloup obtained his letters of naturalisation as a French subject. It may please scrupulous ritualists to be informed that he was baptised on the day of his birth, though it was the 3rd of January, and received, with the holy water, the three Christian names of Felix-Antoine-Philibert. His mother was a pious woman, who brought him up carefully, at the cost of much pinching and self-sacrifice. When her brother had taught him as much as he could well learn at home, he was sent, at eight years old, to Paris, and placed at an ecclesiastical school in the Rue du Regard, under the direction of the Abbé Tesseyre. Having speedily carried off all the prizes to be won there, he was transferred to the Seminary of St. Nicholas du Chardonnel, and thence, at eighteen, to the College of St. Sulpice, where he made a very pleasant and valuable acquaintance.

It had happened (1820) that the young Princess deRohan, while admiring herself in the looking-glass, when dressed for a ball, had incautiously approached too near the fire and was burnt to death. Her husband, inconsolable for her loss, and unable to bear the desolation of his home, had sought refuge in the priesthood, and became Cardinal Archbishop of Besançon. Every year during the vacation he invited a select few of the students of St. Sulpice to visit him at his Castle of La Roche Guyon, and young Dupanloup was received with especial favour. The Cardinal was deeply imbued with the love of letters; he knew how to make the driest researches of science attractive; and it was from him that his guest learned that exquisite courtesy of speech and manner which distinguished the French nobility half a century ago. Under his guidance the young man became an accomplished gentleman and a skilful instructor. His teaching at the Paris Seminary was so successful that Pope Gregory wrote to him that he was "the apostle of youth."

He had a peculiar dislike for still waters, and thought that boys who have not a little devil in them are commonly hypocrites. This opinion was subsequently borne out by one Verger, whose conduct was so exemplary that Dupanloup said uneasily, "That boy frightens me." He afterwards assassinated the Archbishop of Paris.

But though cheerful in his morality, M. Dupanloup was always as austere as an anchorite towards himself, and while Vicar of St. Roche some rich penitents subscribed to furnish his room, which was uncomfortable enough to excite their commiseration. When the upholsterer came with his goods, and showed his receipted bill, the Vicar smiled and answered, "A few sticks are sufficient for me. I beg, therefore, that you will sell these fine things, and pay the money to the clergyman of your parish. I shall always be too well lodged while the poor are hungry." Indeed, his charities were so large, that he once gave his pastoral staff in pledge to a beggar, having nothing else; and it had to be bought back again for him.

Every week lie invites the workmen of Orleans to his house, where they pass the evening in playing dominoes, chess, or draughts ; but no cards are allowed. On these occasions he gives moderate refreshment and homely advice, not unmixed with shrewdness, to anybody who asks for it, and they generally go away pleased with their visit, though some of them complain of the episcopal tea, which, according to the notions of French country people, should only be offered to the sick.

As soon as he is up the Bishop has several secretaries hard at work upon his correspondence, and employs others in pamphleteering. His conception of an idea is lively, and his dictation rapid; but he returns again and again to the first draft of a book, and corrects every line minutely. Publishers and printers are driven to despair when they find that he wants as many as twenty proofs of a single sheet; and probably nothing but the prodigious sale of his writings when thus laboriously polished would reconcile them to having anything to do with him. From long before dawn, often till deep into the night, he toils unceasingly; and when exhaustion overtakes him at last, he seizes a stout stick for support, and sets off for a walk by tlie banks of the Loire. If his mental fatigue resists this rough treatment, he takes a journey to Switzerland, and seeks health in his native air, wandering about on foot among the Alps, where his reputation has gone before him—fortunately ; for in one of these pedestrian tours he was benighted in a storm, and could not get shelter at a curate's house till he had assured the worthy man that he was "the bishop of the newspapers."

He was asked, some time since, if he thought that the conversion of Talleyrand was sincere. He replied, "Yes, certainly. A man often dies impenitent, but he never tries to dupe his Maker." Then he told how the old diplomatist had resisted the attempts of all the clergy in Paris, till he found a very simple way to that callous heart. A niece of the prince was about to take her first communion, and he caused her to be led in her white frock to the bed where he lay dying. The child knelt down, and her tears rained fast upon the withered hand he stretched out to her. A terrible sigh of anguish and remorse burst from him. "Go, my child" he said; "go and pray for me." He was an altered man after that. "He confessed, and received absolution very humbly," asserts Monseigneur Dupanloup.