Bossuet by Emile Baumann is a biographical and critical study written in the early 20th century. It offers a lucid, truth-seeking portrait of the 17th-century Catholic bishop and orator Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, looking past the courtly façade to his inner character, faith, and public action. Blending history, theology, and literary analysis, it examines his ancestry, temperament, spirituality, and the controversies and compromises that shaped his influence.
The opening of this study begins with a candid foreword in which the author addresses Bossuet directly, rejects panegyric, and vows to tell the whole truth, strengths and flaws alike. Chapter I sketches Bossuet’s Burgundian bourgeois roots and early setting in Dijon and Metz, then outlines his robust health, commanding yet genial presence, innate moderation, and charity; it notes temptations mastered, a naive generosity (notably toward Mlle de Mauléon), a conciliatory method with Protestants, a balanced stance between Rome and Gallican privileges, and firmness when needed (as at Jouarre), alongside courtly concessions and deference to royal power. Chapter II presents faith as the axis of his being: steeped in Scripture from youth, ordered by scholastic reason and tradition, honed at the Collège de Navarre under Nicolas Cornet and under Saint Vincent de Paul’s pastoral pragmatism; it shows a dogmatic yet practical spirituality—philosophically clear, pastorally honest, confident in Providence, devoted to the poor, and at times carried to a mystical silence before God. Chapter III then opens by contrasting the ephemerality of most rhetoric with the enduring power of his sermons and funeral orations in the classical French idiom. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
