Louis Veuillot

Louis Veuillot (11 October 1813 – 7 March 1883) was a French journalist and writer who helped to popularize ultramontanism (a philosophy favoring Papal supremacy).

Career overview

Veuillot was born of humble parents in Boynes (Loiret). When he was five years of age, his parents relocated to Paris. With little education, he gained employment in a lawyer's office, and was sent in 1830 to serve with a newspaper of Rouen, and afterwards to Périgueux. Initially, Veuillot supported the July Monarchy of Louis Phillippe criticizing both Republicans and supporters of the deposed Bourbon Dynasty.

He returned to Paris in 1837, and a year later visited Rome during Holy Week. There he embraced ultramontane sentiments, and became an ardent champion of Catholicism. The results of his conversion were published in Pélerinages en Suisse (1839), Rome et Lorette (1841) and other publications. Veuillot's embrace of Ultramontanism led to his violent rejection of Bourgeois society and norms. He had little regard for theological nuance and held fast to the overall philosophies of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, the original Catholic counter-revolutionary thinkers. Veuillot viewed all issues through the prism of their relationship to the Church and thought any disruption of the faith was a catastrophe. For this reason, he expressed surprise when he learned that his friend Joseph-Théophile Foisset was working on a new edition of Blaise Pascal since he was a Jansenist.

In 1840, Veuillot joined the staff of the newspaper Univers Religieux, a journal created in 1833 by Abbé Migne, and soon helped make it the leading organ of ultramontane propaganda as L'Univers. His methods of journalism, which made great use of irony and ad hominem criticism, had already provoked more than one duel, and he was imprisoned for a brief time for his polemics against the University of Paris. In 1848, he became editor of the newspaper, which was suppressed in 1860, but revived in 1867, when Veuillot resumed his ultramontane propaganda, causing a second suppression of his journal in 1874. Veuillot then occupied himself by writing polemical pamphlets against liberal Catholics, the Second French Empire and the Italian government.