13 Facts About Louis Veuillot

Louis Veuillot was a French journalist and author who helped to popularize ultramontanism.

Louis Veuillot returned to Paris in 1837, and a year later visited Rome during Holy Week.

Louis Veuillot 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.

Louis Veuillot viewed all issues through the prism of their relationship to the Church and thought any disruption of the faith was a catastrophe.

In 1840, Louis Veuillot joined the staff of the newspaper Univers Religieux, a journal created in 1833 by Abbe Migne, and soon helped make it the leading organ of ultramontane propaganda as L'Univers.

In 1848, he became editor of the newspaper, which was suppressed in 1860, but revived in 1867, when Louis Veuillot resumed his ultramontane propaganda, causing a second suppression of his journal in 1874.

Louis Veuillot then occupied himself by writing polemical pamphlets against liberal Catholics, the Second French Empire and the Italian government.

Louis Veuillot is a polemic worthy of the golden age of polemics.

Louis Veuillot is singly devoted to ultramontanism; he lives on a small fixed salary from the proprietors of the Univers; he is a man of the purest and simplest domestic life; he is poor, and has a large family, but he has refused all offers of place and salary from the government, and maintains his entire independence.

Louis Veuillot's mind is too narrow and one-sided for that, and his leadership, with the best intentions on his part, is fitted only to bring about the very results he most deprecates.

Louis Veuillot contemptuously dismissed Jews who criticized him as "the deicide people", claiming they were a foreign element which plotted to control all of French society.

Louis Veuillot's hatred intensified during the Mortara case to the point where it put him at odds with Napoleon III whom he had previously supported, causing the latter to temporarily suppress the journal.

Louis Veuillot's two-pronged assault on the Jews and liberalism would influence the anti-Semitism of Edouard Drumont, who worked for L'Univers in his youth.