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 126 LAMENNAIS versal and equal freedom of conscience, free- dom of instruction, and the liberty of the press. Encouraged by a portion of the people and of the lower clergy, it was violently opposed by most of the prelates and Jesuits, who denounced it at Eome. While the contest was going on, the editors decided (Nov. 15, 1831) to suspend it for a time, and three of them, Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert, repaired to Eome to seek the papal approbation. No no- tice was taken of them on their arrival ; La- mennais in vain sought a conference with the pope on the subject of his mission, and after waiting several months decided to return to France. He had gone as far as Munich when he received the encyclical letter, dated Aug. 15, 1832, in which Gregory XVI. formally condemned the doctrines of L'Avenir. His principal collaborators yielded at once to the decision ; he himself announced that the jour- nal would not again appear. A dogmatic sub- mission was demanded from him, which he finally signed, reserving to himself full liberty in regard to whatever he should believe for the interest of his country and oi humanity. He then retired to his patrimonial villa of La Chenaie, and composed, it is said within a week, his Paroles d'un croyant, which was not published till 1834, after a year of meditation. From its appearance dates his final and definite rupture with the Roman Catholic church. It was immediately translated into the different European languages, passed through more than 100 editions in a few years, and received the papal condemnation as a book " small in size, but immense in its perversity." In 1836 he published his Affaires de Home, in which he seems to cast a last melancholy look upon the belief which he had abandoned. In the fol- lowing year he began a journal, Le Monde, in the interest of extreme democracy, which sur- vived but a few months. He subsequently produced various political pamphlets, one of which, Le pays et le gouvernement (1840), caused his imprisonment for a year in Ste. Pelagie, where he was daily visited by numer- ous friends. As one of the chiefs and the ablest writer of the republican party, he took part in the revolution of 1848, and after editing the Peuple Constituant, a daily newspaper, for four months, was elected by an unusually large vote one of the representatives of Paris in the constituent assembly. He projected a consti- tution in accordance with his own theories, which was rejected by the committee as too radical. For three years he protested by his silent vote against the course of events. After the coup tfetat of Dec. 2, 1851, he retired from public life, and -was occupied in his last years with translating Dante. At the news of his dangerous illness, priests, and even ladies of the highest rank, sought admission to his chamber to induce him to be reconciled to the church ; but by his express prohibition no one was received except those connected with his family. His obsequies were performed amid LA METTRIE an immense concourse of people, and in ac- cordance with a direction in his will his body was borne directly to the cemetery without being taken to any church ; and no cross, nor even a stone, marks his grave. He was both one of the ablest defenders and one of the ablest opponents of the papacy in the present century. The constant element in his specu- lations was an ideal of democracy, which he sought to realize in the first part of his career by allying the people and the pope against the civil monarchy, and in the second part by exalting the people to supremacy in defiance alike of the pope and the civil monarchy. He initiated and gave life to the ultramontane movement, which, after being the object of his most ardent devotion, prevailed in the church of France in spite of his efforts and with his maledictions. Besides the works already men- tioned, he published Esquisse d'une philoso- pJiie (4 vols., 1840-'46). Its system is akin to Neoplatonism, and it traces the rise of all the arts to the plan of the Christian temple. His complete works have been twice collected (12 vols., 1836-% and 11 vols., 1844 et seq). Sev- eral volumes of posthumous works, including Correspondance, were published under the care of Emile Forgues (1856 et seq.}. LA METTRIE, Jnlien Offray de, a French phy- sician and philosopher, born in St. Malo, Dec. 25, 1709, died in Berlin, Nov. 11, 1751. He was the son of a rich merchant, received a lib- eral education, and was destined for the church, but preferred to devote himself to medicine. In 1733 he went to Leyden, where he placed himself under the direction of Boerhaave, sev- eral of whose works he translated into French. In 1742 he went to Paris, and was appointed physician to the gardes francaises, followed that regiment into Germany, and witnessed the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy. In 1745 he published his Histoire naturelle de Vdme, in which he denied the immateriality of the human soul. In consequence of this he lost his office, and the following year, having issued his Politique du medecin de Machiavel, ou le Chemin de la fortune ouvert aux mede- cins, a libellous attack upon his medical col- leagues, he was obliged to fly to Holland. There he wrote and printed his noted atheisti- cal work, L* Homme-macTiine (12mo, Leyden, 1748), which was publicly burned by order of the authorities. Expelled from Holland, he was invited to Berlin by Frederick the Great, who made him his reader and a member of his academy. He lived on terms of familiarity with the king, and published several works of a similar tendency to his previous writings; among them were Z 1 " Homme-plante (Potsdam, 1748), Reflexions sur Vorigine des animaux (Berlin, 1750), and Venus metapTiysique, ou Essai sur Vorigine de Vdme Jiumaine (Berlin, 1752). He died of indigestion, caused by high living. Frederick wrote his eulogy. Several editions of his philosophical works have been published; the most complete in Berlin, 1796.