Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

By

Louis Veuillot (1866)

Translated by
Rt. Rev. Msgr. George Barry O’Toole, Ph. D., S. T. D.
Professor of Philosophy in The Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C.

With Biographical Foreword by
Rev. Ignatius Kelly, S. T. D., Professor of Romance Languages in De Sales College, Toledo, Ohio

Of old time thou hast broken my yoke, 
thou hast burst my bands, and thou
saidst: I will not serve. — Jer. 2:20.

BIOGRAPHICAL FOREWORD

A PALADIN, and not a mere fighter,” says Paul Claudel of Louis Veuillot. “He fought, not for the pleasure of fighting, but in defense of a holy cause, that of the Holy City and the Temple of God.”

It is just one hundred years ago, 1838, that Louis Veuillot first dedicated himself to this holy cause. “I was at Rome,” he wrote as an old man recalling that dedication. “At the parting of a road, I met God. He beckoned to me, and as I hesitated to follow, He took me by the hand and I was saved. There was nothing else; no sermons, no miracles, no learned debates. A few recollections of my unlettered father, of my untutored mother, of my brother and little sisters.” This was Louis Veuillot’s conversion, the beginning of his apostolate of the pen which was to merit him the title of “Lay Father of the Church” from Leo XIII; “Model of them who fight for sacred causes” from Pius X; and from Jules Le Maitre the epithet “le grand catholique.”

In the days of the Revolution, the maternal grandmother of Veuillot, Marianne Adam, a hatchet in her hand, had defended the cross of the church of Boynes in old Gatinais. “I do nothing more,” said Veuillot, fifty years later. He was born in this same village of Boynes, October 13, 1813, of poor, uneducated parents. A meager elementary education, little religious training, a schoolmaster who distributed dirty novels to his young charges, nothing of these early years would seem to point towards his apostolate of the future. He had reached the age of thirteen, when Providence intervened. Thirteen years old! Time to earn his bread! But by what work? The ambitious mother wanted him to be a lawyer. From his almost meaningless elementary education, he had two helpful assets, sufficient spelling skill and a better than average script. With these recommendations, and with a word from a family friend, Veuillot was accepted as a clerk in the office of a lawyer of Paris, Fortune Delavigne, brother of the poet Casimir, then at the height of his literary glory.

His first work was simple, the pay only thirty francs a month, but there was opportunity to educate himself by his reading and his human contacts. Later on, in the memoirs of his youth, he gave thanks to Heaven for three blessings of his life: poverty, love of work, and an incapacity for debauch. His free time was devoted to reading and reading was learning; books took the place of sleep and no other pleasure took the place of books. He thought of the priesthood and wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Paris, Mgr. de Quelin, asking admission to the Petit Seminaire. Perhaps this wasn’t the proper procedure; perhaps the letter never reached its address; at any rate, there was no reply. The Church lost a probable priest, but gained a sure lay apostle.

The year 1831 is a turning point in his life. Eighteen years of age, assistant chief clerk in the same office, one hundred francs a month salary, Veuillot began to write. Some of his efforts appeared in Le Figaro. Casimir Delavigne praised certain of his poetic attempts and he was thus led to decide on a career in journalism. His first work was with an humble-enough paper, but not without circulation, L’Echo de la Seine-Inf erieure. “Without any preparation,” he says, “I became a journalist.” He went on to other papers in the provinces, “feuilles de chou,” as the Parisians call them, at Rouen, at Perigueux; he formed his hand in this provincial journalism, shaped his mind, and fostered his bent for appraising men and their ideas.

His university was the wide school of clash and contact. But, if he was writing “almost before he had begun to study,” as Sainte-Beuve puts it, his study soon caught up with his trade, and at the age of twenty-five Veuillot gave sign of possessing that depth of view and breadth of culture which are almost without exception the fruit of the university mind. Veuillot was the exception and there was not, as too often there is in the university mind, not even the suspicion of the snob in him.

In 1838, the year of his trip to Rome, Veuillot had scarcely anything soundly Christian about him. His conversion was no different than he had described it, but looking back upon it now, after one hundred years, may we not see it as a great divine grace for Catholic France? The apologists of the “eldest daughter of the Church” were choosing to fence with the enemies of the Cross of Christ, whereas the Church needed, as it always does, not a gilt-edge weapon, but a broad-sword. The champions of ecclesiastical France were of the school of “liberal apologists.”

Veuillot returned to France, a soldier, a missionary, a zealot if you will, but of a zeal which resembles that of a Jerome, an Augustine, a Bernard, a Bossuet, a de Maistre. His contemporaries reproached him for his violence, but his reply swept the ground away: “You need make no effort to persuade me that others are more refined than I. I tremble that others do not possess enough of what I have too vigorously ... I am too ignorant not to be violent; but they lack red blood, hate for a society in which they live, a society where velvet and lace cover up its sins and its corruption. They do not know what is happening in the street; they have never set their feet therein; but I come from it, I was born in it, and more than that, I still live in it.” And he added, “We are willing enough to have the blasphemers save their souls, but in the meantime, we don’t intend to have them imperil the souls of others.”

The 16th of June, 1839, Louis Veuillot made his first contribution to the Univers. It was just a short article, “La Chapelle des Oiseaux,” yet it was the beginning of an association which was to continue through forty-five years, to influence thought and action long after his time. On February 2, 1840, he became a regular contributor and, in 1842, Editor- in-Chief. His first editorial declaration is an exposition of his Catholic program: “In the midst of factions of every sort, we belong only to the Church and to our country. With justice towards all, submissive to the laws of the Church, we reserve our homage and our love to an authority of genuine worth, an authority which will issue from the present anarchy and will make evident that it is of God, marching towards the new destinies of France, with Cross in hand.”

He thought of his journalism as a “metier” to be studied, analyzed, appraised. He knew its deficiencies, but he sensed too its genius. “The talent of the journalist,” he wrote, “is arrow-like swiftness and, above all, clarity. He has only a sheet of white paper and an hour to explain the issue, defeat the adversary, state his opinion; if he says a word which doesn’t move straight to the end, if he pens a phrase which his reader does not understand immediately, he doesn’t appreciate his trade. He must hurry; he must be exact; he must be simple. The pen of the journalist has all the privileges of a racy conversation; he must use them. But no ornaments; above all, no striving after eloquence.”

His journalism was also a mission, a vocation. He thought about it as he knelt before the Blessed Sacrament and he determined early that he must place his tasks above parties, above systems. “A party,” he declared, “is a hatred; a system is a barrier; we want nothing to do with either. We are going to take society as the apostles took it. We are neither of Paul, nor of Cephas; we are of Jesus Christ.” The history of his career bears out the fact that this was his invariable program. Journalist, yes! But a crusader, an apostle as well.

His pen flashed out in defense of the freedom of Christian education. “You will permit us to open our schools, or you will open your prisons for us,” he wrote from the cloisters of Solesmes in a vein that transported Montalembert into enthusiasm. In 1844, he rose to a magnificent defense of the Abbe Combalot, condemned to prison for the crime of lese-Universite. And he in turn, for his hardy defense, was thrown behind the locks of the Conciergerie for three months. In 1850, the Social Question was agitating all of France. “Veuillot shed light upon it from on high,” said Mgr. Roess of Strassbourg, not many years ago. Albert de Mun could write of his social philosophy: “All of Catholic social Action is contained in his words of fire.”

But his social Catholicism was more than a doctrine. It was his very life. “To think that men are my brothers!” he used to ponder. There is beautiful Christian counsel in the letter he addressed to his wife, who was just hiring a new servant: “Make it easy for her to obey, in forcing yourself to possess the virtue of command, which is a virtue of justice, of meekness and of patience. . . . And when you find yourself poorly served, try, before you complain, to realize how you yourself serve God. Then surely your reproaches will be milder and will not wound. It would be a grand thing for us, and for all who are in authority over others, if in our relations with our charges, we should simply be good Christians, if we should simply rid ourselves of the sentiment of our own importance, which makes us proud, imperious, bitter and dissatisfied, as soon as people fail to render us what we think they should.” And he himself practiced this virtue, meekness without weakness, patience without weariness. Those who were close to him, who were associated with him, could not but love him. Son, brother, husband, father, friend, his affections were diversified and enduring. There was in him, says Fortunat Strowski, “le fremissement de la tendresse humaine.”

He was the champion in France of the declaration of the Dogma of Papal Infallibility. His ardor and enthusiasm brought him into conflict with certain members of the hierarchy. Mgr. Dupanloup denounced him vigorously, but the wound was assuaged by Pius IX in a special audience, when the venerable Pontiff assured him that “le cher Univers” had been splendid in this affair, as in every other.

After the war of 1870, Veuillot resumed his apostolate for Church and country. It was under an un-Christian, an un-French leadership that France was marching, and Veuillot was indignant: “I, a Christian,” he cried out, “a Catholic Christian of France, as old in France as its oaks and venerable as they; I, the son of perspiration moistening vine and grain, son of a race which has never ceased giving to France tillers of the soil, soldiers and priests, asking nothing in return but work, the Eucharist and rest in the shadow of the Cross; ... I am made, unmade, governed, ruled, slashed at by vagabonds of mind and morals, men who are neither Christian nor Catholics, and by that very fact, who are not French and who can have no love of France.” “Happy are the dead,” his pen trembled as he wrote the words in 1872, but his faith and courage did not falter long, and the last years of his life found him still the ardent champion of sacred causes. For nearly half a century, he had been fighting for the holy city and the temple. He was worn out by the unceasing combat; his pen moved slowly and finally not at all. His hand could hold only the rosary which had been his companion of the years, he told its beads constantly until the end, which came quietly, calmly April 7, 1883. “Since then,” said M. Barthou a few years ago, “his reputation has not ceased to grow. Rather, we may say of him with his biographer, Frangois Veuillot: “He continues to radiate,” for Louis Veuillot is a flame of truth and devotion, unquenchable because kindled by the divine spark of faith and love for God and country.

Ignatius Kelly, S. T. D.

De Sales College
Feast of the Nativity
December 25, 1938.