Lamennais (or De La Mennais), Hugues Félicité Robert (1782–1854)

French priest and philosophical writer. He began as a devout Catholic and wrote passionately in defence of religious observance, especially in his great work Essai sur l'indifference en matière de religion/Essay on Religious Indifference, 1818–24. However, becoming frustrated with the conservatism of the Roman Catholic Church, he embraced republican politics and sat as a representative of the extreme left in the National Assembly.

Lamennais was born in St-Malo, Brittany. From an early age, he was appalled by the anti-religious excesses of the French Revolution, a view he gave voice to in his anonymous Réflexions sur l'état de l'église en France pendant le 18ème siècle/Reflections on the State of the Church in 18th-century France of 1808. When Napoleon returned to power during the ‘Hundred Days’ in 1815, Lamennais fled to London, and took holy orders on his return to Paris. In 1830 he was a co-founder of the paper L'Avenir, which supported democracy and Catholicism, and was condemned by the Pope. In 1834, Lamennais' Paroles d'un croyant/Words of a Believer marked his final break with the Catholic Church. He was active in the revolution of 1848, and was briefly imprisoned before entering parliament, where he sat until Napoleon III's coup d'état of 1851.