Charlest, count de Montalember

Charlest, count de Montalember (born April 15, 1810, London, Eng.—died March 13, 1870, Paris, France) was an orator, politician, and historian who was a leader in the struggle against absolutism in church and state in France during the 19th century.

Born in London during the exile of his father, Marc-René, Count de Montalembert (the son of Marc-René de Montalembert), he later accompanied him on ambassadorial tours to Sweden and Germany. He began his political career with the newspaper L’Avenir (“The Future”), founded by the priest Félicité Lamennais in 1830, and the associated General Agency for the Defense of Religious Liberty. He helped found a Roman Catholic school in 1831, opposing the state monopoly that excluded the religious orders from teaching. The school was closed by the police and proceedings were brought against the teachers. Montalembert, who had inherited his father’s title, was able to claim the right of trial by peers. His defense was eloquent and only the minimum penalty was imposed. This affair helped make him leader of the liberal Roman Catholics during the July Monarchy (1830–48). He was a member of the House of Peers from 1835 to 1848.

The Catholics were not united, however, and bishops with strong Gallican leanings caused Lamennais and his group to suspend publication of L’Avenir in 1831. They decided to go to Pope Gregory XVI in Rome to plead their case, but the pope’s decision went against them (Encyclical Mirari vos, 1832). Montalembert then began to write for L’Univers Religieux, founded by the abbé Jacques-Paul Migne in 1833, and assumed a commanding position in French Catholic journalism.

Acting as deputy for the Doubs after the 1848 Revolution, Montalembert swung the Catholic party strongly behind Louis-Napoléon, an act which he later called “the great mistake in my life.” He voted for restriction of freedom of the press during the Paris riots of June 1849 because he feared that the riots heralded socialism and mob rule. He was alienated from the regime of Louis-Napoléon by the stern and dictatorial measures used after the coup d’état in 1851. He then tried to use the French Academy, to which he was elected in 1851, and the review Le Correspondant (revived to oppose L’Univers, which had turned against him) as rallying points for liberal views against the Second Empire. His insistence that the Catholic church should encourage religious and civil liberties brought him into conflict with Rome, particularly after his proclamation of “a free church in a free state” at the congress of Belgian Catholics at Malines in 1863. Yet he was disappointed by the church whose cause he had championed and felt it was being given over, like his own country, to the absolutists.

He then wrote Les Moines d’Occident (1863–77; “Monks of the West”), a study of the growth of Western monasticism; Des Intérêts Catholiques au XIX^e siècle (1852; “The Catholic Interest in the Nineteenth Century”); and De L’Avenir politique de l’Angleterre (1856; “The Political Future of England”).