Note 311 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else, he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising in 1831–32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement (1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never changed: “I have gone on, that is all.” But he had in effect changed from a Catholic to a pantheist;311 and in 1848, as a member of the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by “an affectation of impiety.”312 On his deathbed he refused to receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and with no cross on his grave.