Antoine Eugène Genoud

Antoine Eugène Genoud
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Born	Antoine Eugène Genoud 9 February 1792 Montélimar, Drôme, Rhône-Alpes, France
Died	19 April 1849 (1849-04-20) (aged 57) Hyères, Var, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
Other names	Abbot Genoude
Occupation	Theologian, politician

Antoine Eugène Genoud (1792 – 1849) was a French Roman Catholic priest, theologian and politician.

Biography

Under the First Empire

Antoine Eugène Genoud was born on 9 February 1792 in Montélimar, France. He was educated in Grenoble then came to Paris where he studied law and was, thanks to the support of Fontanes, exempted from conscription and appointed regent of sixth grade at the Lycée Bonaparte (1811).

Having begun by reading Voltaire and Helvetius and acquired, under their influence, a fund of skepticism which was dissipated by the study of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he entered the seminary of Saint-Sulpice where he remained for a short time but met Lamennais. Around the same time (1812), he frequented Chateaubriand in his house in Auteuil. He was working on a translation of Isaiah which attracted the harassment of the imperial censors because a note about Nebuchadnezzar II being changed into a beast was interpreted as an allusion to Napoleon. He also translated The Imitation of Christ.

Restoration

As early as 1814, in a work entitled Réflexions sur quelques questions politiques, he criticized the principle of a granted charter, calling on the monarchy to rely on a "freely consented pact": "From the people, he said, derives the law, since their interest must form it. Freedom can only ever be the effect of just laws. The king himself is subject to this supreme order. The law alone commands and reigns. The rights of kings are the holiest of their duties".

During the Hundred Days, faithful to the King, he left France through Switzerland and had an interview in Chambéry with the Prince of Polignac, who appointed him his aide-de-camp. When Louis XVIII was restored on his throne, he gave up military life to resume his literary and political works.

He applauded Lamennais' theories in the Essay on Indifference and was, with Chateaubriand, one of the founders of the newspaper Le Conservateur (1818). The articles he published in this paper, as well as in Le Défenseur, which succeeded it and to which Lamennais also collaborated, were imbued with the same character of royalism and "nationality".

Genoud took advantage of a few months of leisure to travel to the Vendée with Auguste de La Rochejaquelein. There he met Léontine Le Caron de Fleury (1795-1834), a relative of Racine and La Fontaine, who was educated by the Countess of Chastenet-Puységur, whom he married.

From 1821 to 1824, his translation of the Bible was a notable success, and allowed him to build up a solid fortune, which was reinforced by his activities in the press. In 1821, he became the owner of the newspaper L'Étoile, which supported Villèle's policy, and quickly became the unofficial organ of the ministry.

On June 28, 1822, he received from Louis XVIII a pension and letters of nobility and was appointed Master of Requests by Count de Peyronnet. Nevertheless, he was dismissed by the Viscount de Martignac because he had taken, from 1827, the direction of the Gazette de France, in which he had melted L'Etoile and constantly supported the cause of the monarchy and religion, while attacking strongly the politics of the new ministry, to the point of contributing mightily to its fall.

Directly involved in the negotiations to which the composition of the next cabinet gave rise, he broke with Peyronnet and Polignac after useless efforts to bring Villèle into its fold, and remained on opposition ground where he demonstrated, on several occasions, an incontestable logic and a real energy.

Eight days before the Four Ordinances of Saint-Cloud, on July 17, 1830, he wrote in the Gazette: "Public liberties are a primitive fact among us, and a primitive fact is a right. The tactics of the faction that wants to overthrow the dynasty is to push the royalists into the false path of exaggerations and coups d'état; ours must be to rally frankly to the representative monarchy. It must be known that the Charter only translated the old constitutions of the monarchy into the language of the day. Now, in the old constitutions of the monarchy, it was a right of the people to be consulted. The misfortunes of the kingdom originated in the disuse of this right. It weakened the throne by diminishing its popularity."

One finds in this passage an echo of the rhetoric of the parliaments of the Old Regime in their fight against the royal power in the eighteenth century.

July Monarchy

Under the July Monarchy, to which he was opposed, he clarified his political ideas and his conception of "national royalism": his political program was based on the alliance of royal heredity and universal suffrage. His motto, "National royalty, liberty, political equality, Catholicism or fraternity", reflects the will to reconcile counter-revolutionary thought and the aspirations of 1789.

After 1830, he strongly attacked the July monarchy: "Philippe d'Orléans," he wrote, "is proclaimed king. It is not by the right of his birth that he arrives at the throne. It is not either by the suffrage noticed by the people. Deputies, elected in virtue of a principle of legitimacy, without mandate to remove or to award the crown, greeted him with a title that they could just as validly grant to any other. Here hereditary legitimacy is discarded, the legitimacy of the nation is counted for nothing."

These attacks earned the Gazette de France more than forty trials in the cour d'assises and its director was frequently sentenced to prison. Because of the singularity of his program, he found himself very isolated within the press. "He stood out," wrote Gustave Vapereau, "by his activity of mind, by his constant preoccupation with staging his personality, by a pompous and oratorical manner, more made for preaching than for the newspaper."

Asked by the Courrier français to formulate his aspirations clearly, Genoud declared himself a supporter of the periodicity of the Estates General, of freedom of association, of free administration, of the emancipation of the communes, of freedom of education, of the creation of a non-hereditary Upper House, the formation of which would not be left to the discretion of the government, and of the distribution of taxes by provincial, departmental, and municipal assemblies. For him, the communal and cantonal assemblies should be able to elect the provincial assemblies which in turn elect the national assembly.

In foreign policy, the theoretician of national royalism was in favor of the principle of nationalities in which he perceived the application of the Christian and civilizing principle applied to international law: he rejected the treaties of 1815 and wished for the accession of France to its natural borders, that is to say up to the line of the Rhine.

This declaration was immediately followed by the seizure of the Gazette de France, which was also banned in Austria, Prussia, Russia, the Sardinian States and Italy. However, it did not give up and during the reign of Louis Philippe I, it made a relentless campaign in favor of parliamentary reform and universal suffrage. It was vigorously opposed by La Quotidienne, the organ of the ultra-royalists, but Genoud held firm on this issue. The tendency embodied by Genoud and La Gazette de France was quite distinct from other legitimist factions. Calling himself a "national royalist," Genoud represented a nationalist, Gallican royalism that was open to democracy.

By his activism and his intransigence, he became one of the leaders of the legitimism, in particular in the popular circles of the South. His hostility to the July monarchy led him to approve parliamentary alliances with the Republicans against the Orleanist majority.

In 1834, having become a widower, Genoud was ordained a priest and called himself Abbot de Genoude. He created the Société des Réformistes and in January 1846 convened a congress of the legitimist reformist press, which demanded a massive enlargement of the electorate. He was the first to take part in the congress.

He was elected on January 24, 1840 to the Academy of Sciences, Belles-lettres and Arts of Savoy, with the academic title Correspondant.

On August 1, 1846, he was elected deputy by the 2nd electoral college of the Haute-Garonne, he took his place on the right but found himself very isolated within the Chamber. In 1847, the speech he made on electoral reform was approved neither by the Legitimists nor by the government majority. In 1848, he did not sign the proposal of impeachment of the Guizot ministry.

Second Republic

After the revolution of 1848, he made many vain attempts to enter the Constituent Assembly. They failed by a small margin in the Hérault region: the establishment of universal suffrage, for which he had fought so hard, was not favorable to him in 1848.

Death

Genoud died on 19 April 1849 in Hyères, France.

See also

• Jacques Honoré Lelarge de Lourdoueix

Bibliography

• Réflexions sur quelques questions politiques (1814)
• Voyage dans la Vendée et dans le midi de la France, suivi d'un Voyage pittoresque en Suisse (1821)
• Considérations sur les Grecs et les Turcs (1821)
• La Raison du christianisme ou preuves de la religion, tirées des écrits des plus grands hommes (1834–1835).
• La Vie de Jésus-Christ et des Apôtres, tirée des saints Évangiles (1836)
• Leçons et modèles de littérature sacrée (1837; with Jacques Honoré Lelarge de Lourdoueix)
• La Raison monarchique (1838)
• Exposition du dogme catholique (1840)
• Défense du christianisme par les Pères (1842)
• La divinité de Jésus-Christ annoncée par les prophètes (1842)
• Lettres sur l'Angleterre (1842)
• Histoire d'une âme (1844)
• Histoire de France (1844–1848)
• Sermons et conférences (1846)

References

• Crétineau-Joly, Jacques (1842). Histoire Contemporaine des Hommes et des Journaux Politiques, I. M. de Genoude et la Gazette de France. Paris: Colomb de Batines.

External links

• Works by Antoine Eugène Genoud at Gallica