Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/300

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284 L A N L A N from Rome in 107G and the consecration of the new buildings at Bee in which he took part in 1077, he does not appear to have again left England. As regards his administration of his own diocese, Larifranc s principal achievements were the rapid rebuilding of the metropolitan church (1072-79), the reforms he introduced among the monks of Christ Church, and his successful recovery of the estates of the see, which had been encroached on by the king s brother bishop Odo, earl of Kent. Lanfranc died at Canterbury in May 1089. The extant works of Lanfranc are not voluminous. The Epis- tolarum Liber contains fifty-five of his own letters, many of them of considerable interest and importance, as well as some of those of his distinguished correspondents, Berengarius, William, Popes Alexander II. and Gregory VII. The short Oratio in concilia habita represents his argument before the synod of Winchester in 1072 in support of his claims to the primacy. Statuta jiro ordinc Benedidi are an adaptation and expansion of the ordinary Benedictine rules, written, when he was primate, especially for his own monks ; Sermo sive Scntentise also relates to the duties of monks. Libcllus de celanda confessione has no special interest. Commentarius in B. Pauli cpistolas seems rather to be a collection of some student s notes than to have been prepared for publication by himself. Elucidarium sire dialog us de summa totius Christianas theologies, the most voluminous of all the works assigned to him, is of more than doubtful genuineness, but it certainly is an adequate sketch of the scholastic theology in its infantile stage. Most important is the Tractatus de Corpora ct Sanguine Domini, a vigorous and even violent defence of the dogma of transubstantiation, for which it helped to secure currency and permanency, but it adds little to what had already been said by Paschasius Kadbertus. The Benedictine edition of the. works of Lanfranc by D Achery, in one folio volume (Paris, 1G4S), was reprinted at Lyons in 1677. A new edition by Giles appeared at Oxford in two octavo volumes in 1841. The authorities for the life

uid times of Lanfranc are the Chronicon Jicccense, and Vita Abbatttm Ilecccnsium

(which are printed in both editions of the Opera), and the Ilistoria Ecclesiastiea of Ordericus Vitalis. See Hook, Lices of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. ii., .and Freeman s Xorman Conquest, vols. ii.-v. (J. S. I5L.) LANF11EY, PIERRE (1828-1877), the historian who has done the most to destroy the Napoleonic legend of M. Thiers, was born at Chambc ry, the capital of Savoy, on the 26th October 1828. His father came of a warlike race, which had been noble for four centuries, and had himself served in the army of Napoleon as a captain of hussars. On the fall of Napoleon he had left the French army, and retired to Chimbe ry, where he married a milliner. When young Pierre was but six years old, his father died, cursing the priest who came to bring him consolation, and his educxtion was left to his mother. She sent him first to the Jesuit college of Chambery, from which he was ex pelled for writing an attack on the Jesuits, then to another ecclesiastical seminary, which equally disgusted him, and at last to the Lyce"e Bourbon at Paris. After completing his studies at Paris he went to Grenoble in 1847 to study law, and while there took the keenest interest in the Revolution of 1848 at Paris. Even at that age he shows in his letters the hatred of democracy which was always to characterize his sincere love of liberty, and above all his intense feeling that Paris should not always dominate the provinces. His law studies finished at Grenoble, he went to Turin, and qualified himself to act as avocat in his native country ; but, on the news of the coup d e tat, his passion to go to Paris and take his part in the inevitable struggle which he saw must arise between the second empire and the spirit of liberty was not tr> be restrained, and in 1853 he once more took up his abode in Paris. He at first tried in vain to get work on various newspapers, and then to get his first book, which had been sketched out for some years, published. No publisher was to be found, and L Br/lise et les Philo- sophes au XVIIIieme Siccle was printed eventually at his own expense. It appeared in 1855, and at once achieved a great success, and introduced its author to some of the best literary society in Paris. It was followed in 1857 by an Essai sur la Revolution fran^aise, and in 18GO by the Histoire politique des Papes, and the Lettres d&verard. The latter are a revelation of what Lanfrey thought and felt at this time, of his despair that France would ever get free from the enervating rule of the second empire, of his disgust at the literary sterility of the time in confin ing itself to vague philosophy and vaguer criticism ; and through them he first became known outside the literary world. He had hitherto been intimate with such choice spirits as Ary Scheffer, Gleyre, and the Comtesse d Agoult, better known as Daniel Stern, but the Lettres d JSverard introduced him to the most fashionable Parisian society of the time, and the position he held in it is best to be found in the description of him contained in the souvenirs of his friend, Madame Clara Jaubert. In 1860 also he was appointed by M. Charpentier editor of the new Ifevue National, in which he wrote the fortnightly chronicle of affairs for four years, besides various articles and reviews, collected in 1864 under the title of Etudes et Portraits politiques. After resigning his editorship in 1864 he set to work on his great Histoire Je Napoleon /., in which he intended to overthrow the monument M. Thiers had erected to Napoleon in his Histoire du Consulat et de I Empire, and to show the demigod uncle of Napoleon III. to have been but an immoral man and bad politician. The fourth volume of his history had not been published three months when the war of 1870 broke out. At first Lanfrey knew not what view to take, but on the defeats of the French, and the declaration of the republic, he enlisted as a simple volunteer, and marched to Lyons with his bat talion. While there lie heard first that his vigorous opposition in the press to the powerful influence of M. Gambetta had lost him his election to the Constituent Assembly in his native province, and next that he had been elected by the department of the Bouches du Rhone, in which he had never set foot. In the Assembly he warmly supported the Government of M. Thiers, and op posed the radical party as vehemently as he had opposed the empire, saying that both savoured of tyranny. In 1871 M. Thiers appointed him French minister in Switzerland, where he remained till 1874, when he insisted on his resig nation being accepted by the Due de Broglie, and once more took his seat as a moderate republican. In 1875 he published the fifth volume of his Histoire de Napoleon, and in 1876 was elected a life senator; but his strength was fast failing, and, before he could give his sixth volume the careful revision he considered indispensable, he died at Pau on the 16th November 1877. The first predominant idea of Lanfrey, both as a politician and an historian, was a love of liberty which was perpetually putting him in opposition to all parties in turn. In his first book he attacked the church, not because of its doctrines so much as because of its attempts to stiile liberty of thought. In his Essai sur la lievolu- tion, on the other hand, he assailed Robespierre and the democrats because they defended attempts on individual liberty with th? assertion that they were necessary for liberty in general. His second leading idea was a belief in strictest morality in politics ; by this standard in his Etudes he condemns M. Thiers for slurring over the political immorality of Napoleon, Baunou for giving up his old Girondin standpoint to defend the concordat, andCarnot for putting his name to measures of the committee of public safety which he abhorred, in order to maintain himself in power. These two ideas, love of liberty, involving a hatred alike of despotism and democracy, and a stern standard of political morality, are to be seen throughout Lanfrey s great work on Napoleon. No military success ever to him seems to compensate for immoral means to gain an end; no glamour is for him cast over evil actions by glory or tine words; no sarcasm is too severe for the man who cared not for truth but only for effect. Before such a judge Napoleon appears but a small man; and, if at times the judgment seems nlmost too severe, it must be remembered that the author lived through a time when an emperor ruled entirely owing to the influence that the great deeds of his uncle had thrown over the minds of the French people, and that he wrote with the intention of for ever breaking down that influence by exhibiting the naked truth, and destroying for ever the Napoleonic: legend. F,,r Lanfrey s life consult three articles by the Comte d Haussonville in the Revue, des Dtnx ifondes for September, October, and November 1880; the bio- KI aphid]] notice of M. de Pressense, prefixed to ihe last edition of his works; and the numerous letters from him contained in the Souvenirs of Madame Jaubert.