Charles Forbes Montalembert

Artist Info

Charles Forbes MontalembertLondon, 1810 - 1870, Paris

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n83025559

Montalembert, Charles-René-Forbes de, comte de Montalembert in the French nobility (1810–1870), politician, orator, and writer, was born in Upper Brook Street, London, on 15 April 1810 (The Times, 17 April 1810) and baptized at Stanmore, Middlesex, on 29 May 1810. His father, Marc-René de Montalembert (1777–1831), whose family originated in the Poitou region, was an émigré French nobleman, serving as a major in the British army, and his mother, Eliza Rose Forbes (1788–1839), later deemed a suitable companion for the future Queen Victoria, was the daughter of the celebrated orientalist James Forbes (1749–1819). It was Forbes who brought up the young Charles for the first nine years of his life in Fulham and Stanmore. In 1819 he joined his father in France and he was educated at the Collège Sainte-Barbe from 1826.

Montalembert's visit to Ireland in the autumn of 1830 and acquaintance with Daniel O'Connell, the nationalist politician recently at the forefront of the campaign for Catholic emancipation, made a profound impression in the heady days after the July revolution in France, when he reneged on his family's attachment to the senior branch of the Bourbons. From 1830 to 1832 he was under the spell of the liberal Catholic and radical ultramontane cleric Félicité de Lamennais; if this collaboration led to rupture with Lamennais, it also produced the most fruitful friendship of his life, with Henri Lacordaire. He published a life of St Elizabeth of Hungary in 1836. He was prominent in the campaign for protection of historic monuments, inspired by Victor Hugo and Prosper Mérimée. In 1836 he married Anna de Mérode, daughter of Félix de Mérode, one of the founding statesmen of the kingdom of Belgium.

Montalembert took his seat at the chamber of peers in May 1835 (he inherited the right to sit there on the death of his father in December 1831, days before that right was abolished by Louis-Philippe; he was not eligible, however, to take the seat until his twenty-fifth birthday). There, he spoke in favour of limiting children's hours of work and of freeing the Catholic church to teach without government supervision. In foreign affairs, he spoke in favour of Irish and Polish national aspirations and was especially vocal against Lord Palmerston's policies towards the Sonderbund, the federation of Catholic cantons that had seceded from the Helvetic Confederation. Palmerston had his revenge in December 1848 when he vetoed Montalembert's appointment as ambassador to the court of St James.

Montalembert's political career seemed finished for good when the chamber of peers was abolished by the new republic after the revolution of February 1848. Nevertheless, he was elected to the national constituent assembly on 23 April 1848 and was re-elected to the national legislative assembly on 13 May 1849. During this time he supported the French expedition to restore papal sovereignty in Rome in 1849, the law giving the church greater involvement in education (the loi Falloux), and the restriction of universal suffrage in 1850.

Montalembert publicly endorsed President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte after the coup d'état of 2 December 1851, but by January 1852 he had joined the opposition, from which he would only emerge tentatively in January 1870 at the onset of the liberal empire. Elected to the legislative body as an independent deputy in 1852, he lost his seat to an official candidate in June 1857. He was elected to the Académie française in 1851 and was received at the Institut de France on 5 February 1852, an event sarcastically commemorated by Robert Browning's poem ‘Respectability’.

Montalembert had always kept in contact with English and Irish high society: acquaintances and correspondents included Disraeli, Gladstone, and Macaulay. But his close friendships in Britain, like those in France, were with Catholic notabilities: Frederick Faber, Charles Lucas, William Monsell, Ambrose de Lisle Phillipps, Augustus Pugin, and the duke and duchess of Norfolk. The 1850s were the period of his greatest engagement with the land of his birth, in which he produced two works on England. The first, De l'avenir politique de l'Angleterre, appeared in 1856. Much of the book was a hymn to aristocratic liberty, as Montalembert believed England was the last bastion of a system that had once been universal in Europe. Indeed, he thought that the newly built Palace of Westminster was a thousand times more sacred than the Pnyx or the Roman forum (De l'avenir, 122). The book was also the origin of the myth that Wellington had won the battle of Waterloo on the playing fields of Eton (ibid., 159). Among his readers was Queen Victoria, who thought the book ‘admirable, & so true—judging our defects & weakness, while, at the same time appreciating our immense internal strength & stability’ (Journal, 21 Jan 1856). The English edition was published by John Murray, with John Wilson Croker overseeing the translation of the work (a task done by one Miss Boileau, rumoured to be Croker's mistress). Croker's edition, with its hostile introduction and notes, led to controversy: Fraser's Magazine accused him of ‘tampering, garbling, perversion, and suppression of the author's meaning’ (May 1856). Montalembert distanced himself from the translation (The Times, 2 Apr 1856). In private, Croker concluded that Montalembert was ‘crazy, or else a base knave, or perhaps a mixture of both’ (to Lord Brougham, UCL, Special Collections, 11 Aug 1856, letter 31813). Montalembert's next work on England, Un débat sur l'Inde au parlement anglais (1858), led to prosecution by Napoleon III's government for its unfavourable comparisons of Britain with France. Montalembert's refusal of a subscription offered him by students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (The Times, 1 Dec 1858) was wholly in character.

The last decade of Montalembert's life was overcast by constant illness, which was diagnosed as pyelitis in 1866. Much time was taken in the composition of his massive history of the monks of the west (Les Moines d'Occident, 6 vols., Paris, 1863–77), of which the three central volumes covered the conversion of England. His speech at the Congress of Malines in 1863 defending the marriage of liberalism and Catholicism found little favour in Rome. The First Vatican Council and the projected declaration of papal infallibility appalled him. He died on 13 March 1870 at his Paris house, 40 rue du Bac. The story that there was a letter to John Henry Newman on his desk at the moment of his death is most probably a myth. He was buried at the cemetery of Picpus: his tombstone was designed by Viollet-le-Duc.

According to Margaret Oliphant, Montalembert spoke English ‘without the trace of an accent’; this may be hyperbole, but the critic Sainte-Beuve thought there was a trace of English intonation in Montalembert's delivery of speeches (‘M. de Montalembert: orateur’). His ‘obstreperous zeal’ and ‘bullying effrontery’ (Circourt to Reeve, 9 Nov 1850; 26 May 1851) alienated him from some Parisian salons. Nevertheless, the range and tenderness of his friendships could be surprising, notably with the austerely protestant Guizot in the 1850s and 1860s. As an orator he stands in the first rank for his century; as a politician he was hampered by his uncompromising attachment to the church as well as by his fierce independence of spirit; when he did compromise, as he did in the second republic, it was not to his credit. An aristocrat in an age of modernity, a Catholic who loved Gothic but disdained the new ultramontanism of Pius IX, Montalembert has been heralded as one of the forerunners of the Second Vatican Council: the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII can trace its ancestry at least in part to Montalembert. The full publication of his Journal intime (1990–2009) and the conferences that occurred in 2010 for the bicentenary of his birth are testament to enduring interest in his complex and, at times, tempestuous character.

Christopher Guyver

Sources

Journal intime inédit, ed. L. Le Guillou and N. Roger-Taillade, 8 vols. (1990–2009) · M. Oliphant, Memoir of Count de Montalembert: a chapter of recent French history, 2 vols. (1872) · C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, ‘M. de Montalembert: orateur’, 5 Nov 1849, Causeries du lundi, 16 vols. (1926–49), 1.79–91 · R. P. Lecanuet, Montalembert, d'après son journal et sa correspondance, 3 vols. (1895–1902) · Queen Victoria's journals, www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, accessed on 15 July 2014 · E. S. Purcell, Life and letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, 2 vols. (1900) · A. de Meaux and E. de Montalembert, eds., Charles de Montalembert: l'Église, la politique, la liberté (2012) · Adolphe de Circourt to Henry Reeve, BL, Add MSS 37422–37423