VOLUME X SLICE VIII France to Francis Joseph I. (continued 5)

Another striking feature of Francis’s character was his constant joyousness; it was a precept in his rule, and one that he enforced strictly, that his friars should be always rejoicing in the Lord. He retained through life his early love of song, and during his last illness he passed much of his time in singing. His love of nature, animate and inanimate, was very keen and manifested itself in ways that appear somewhat naïve. His preaching to the birds is a favourite representation of St Francis in art. All creatures he called his “brothers” or “sisters”—the chief example is the poem of the “Praises of the Creatures,” wherein “brother Sun,” “sister Moon,” “brother Wind,” and “sister Water” are called on to praise God. In his last illness he was cauterized, and on seeing the burning iron he addressed “brother Fire,” reminding him how he had always loved him and asking him to deal kindly with him. It would be an anachronism to think of Francis as a philanthropist or a “social worker” or a revivalist preacher, though he fulfilled the best functions of all these. Before everything he was an ascetic and a mystic—an ascetic who, though gentle to others, wore out his body by self-denial, so much so that when he came to die he begged pardon of “brother Ass the body” for having unduly ill treated it: a mystic irradiated with the love of God, endowed in an extraordinary degree with the spirit of prayer, and pouring forth his heart by the hour in the tenderest affections to God and our Lord. St Francis was a deacon but not a priest.

From the return of Francis and his eleven companions from Rome to Assisi in 1209 or 1210, their work prospered in a wonderful manner. The effect of their preaching, and their example and their work among the poor, made itself felt throughout Umbria and brought about a great religious revival. Great numbers came to join the new order which responded so admirably to the needs of the time. In 1212 Francis invested St Clara (q.v.) with the Franciscan habit, and so instituted the “Second Order,” that of the nuns. As the friars became more and more numerous their missionary labours extended wider and wider, spreading first over Italy, and then to other countries. Francis himself set out, probably in 1212, for the Holy Land to preach the Gospel to the Saracens, but he was shipwrecked and had to return. A year or two later he went into Spain to preach to the Moors, but had again to return without accomplishing his object (1215 probably). After another period of preaching in Italy and watching over the development of the order, Francis once again set out for the East (1219). This time he was successful; he made his way to Egypt, where the crusaders were besieging Damietta, got himself taken prisoner and was led before the sultan, to whom he openly preached the Gospel. The sultan sent him back to the Christian camp, and he passed on to the Holy Land. Here he remained until September 1220. During his absence were manifested the beginnings of the troubles in the order that were to attain to such magnitude after his death. The circumstances under which, at an extraordinary general chapter convoked by him shortly after his return, he resigned the office of minister-general (September 1220) are explained in the article Franciscans: here, as illustrating the spirit of the man, it is in place to cite the words in which his abdication was couched: “Lord, I give Thee back this family which Thou didst entrust to me. Thou knowest, most sweet Jesus, that I have no more the power and the qualities to continue to take care of it. I entrust it, therefore, to the ministers. Let them be responsible before Thee at the Day of Judgment, if any brother by their negligence, or their bad example, or by a too severe punishment, shall go astray.” These words seem to contain the mere truth: Francis’s peculiar religious genius was probably not adapted for the government of an enormous society spread over the world, as the Friars Minor had now become.

The chief works of the next years were the revision and final redaction of the Rule and the formation or organization of the “Third Order” or “Brothers and Sisters of Penance,” a vast confraternity of lay men and women who tried to carry out, without withdrawing from the world, the fundamental principles of Franciscan life (see Tertiaries).

If for no other reason than the prominent place they hold in art, it would not be right to pass by the Stigmata without a special mention. The story is well known; two years before his death Francis went up Mount Alverno in the Apennines with some of his disciples, and after forty days of fasting and prayer and contemplation, on the morning of the 14th of September 1224 (to use Sabatier’s words), “he had a vision: in the warm rays of the rising sun he discerned suddenly a strange figure. A seraph with wings extended flew towards him from the horizon and inundated him with pleasure unutterable. At the centre of the vision appeared a cross, and the seraph was nailed to it. When the vision disappeared Francis felt sharp pains mingling with the delights of the first moment. Disturbed to the centre of his being he anxiously sought the meaning of it all, and then he saw on his body the Stigmata of the Crucified.” The early authorities represent the Stigmata not as bleeding wounds, the holes as it were of the nails, but as fleshy excrescences resembling in form and colour the nails, the head on the palm of the hand, and on the back as it were a nail hammered down. In the first edition of the Vie, Sabatier rejected the Stigmata; but he changed his mind, and in the later editions he accepts their objective reality as an historically established fact; in an appendix he collects the evidence: there exists what is according to all probability an autograph of Br. Leo, the saint’s favourite disciple and companion on Mount Alverno at the time, which describes the circumstances of the stigmatization; Elias of Cortona (q.v.), the acting superior, wrote on the day after his death a circular letter wherein he uses language clearly implying that he had himself seen the Stigmata, and there is a considerable amount of contemporary authentic second hand evidence. On the strength of this body of evidence Sabatier rejects all theories of fraud or hallucination, whatever may be the explanation of the phenomena.

Francis was so exhausted by the sojourn on Mount Alverno that he had to be carried back to Assisi. The remaining months of his life were passed in great bodily weakness and suffering, and he became almost blind. However, he worked on with his wonted cheerfulness and joyousness. At last, on the 3rd of October 1226, he died in the Portiuncula at the age of forty-five. Two years later he was canonized by Gregory IX., whom, as Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia, he had chosen to be the protector of his order.

The works of St Francis consist of the Rule (in two redactions), the Testament, spiritual admonitions, canticles and a few letters. They were first edited by Wadding in 1623. Two critical editions were published in 1904, one by the Franciscans of Quaracchi near Florence, the other (in a longer and a shorter form) by Professor H. Boehmer of Bonn. Sabatier and Goetz (see below) have investigated the authenticity of the several works; and the four lists, while exhibiting slight variations, are in substantial accord. Besides the works, properly so called, there is a considerable amount of traditional matter—anecdotes, sayings, sermons—preserved in the biographies and in the Fioretti;1 a great deal of this matter is no doubt substantially authentic, but it is not possible to subject it to any critical sifting.

Note on Sources.—The sources for the life of St Francis and early Franciscan history are very numerous, and an immense literature has grown up around them. Any attempt to indicate even a selection of this literature would here be impossible and also futile; for the discovery of new documents has by no means ceased, and the criticism of the materials is still in full progress, nor can it be said that final results have yet emerged from the discussion. Students will find the chief materials in the following collections: Archiv für Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters (ed. by Ehrle and Denifle, 1885, &c.); publications of the Franciscans of Quaracchi (list to be obtained from Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau); and the two series edited by Paul Sabatier, Collection d’études et de documents sur l’histoire religieuse et littéraire du moyen âge (5 vols. published up to 1906) and Opuscules de critique historique (12 fascicules): the easiest and most consecutive way of following the controversy is by the aid of the “Bulletin Hagiographique” in Analecta Bollandiana. Relatively popular accounts of the most important sources are supplied in the introductory chapters of Sabatier’s Vie de S. François and Speculum perfectionis, and Lempp’s Frère Élie de Cortone.

Concerning the life of St Francis and the beginnings of the order, the chief documents that come under discussion are: the two Lives by Thomas of Celano (1228 and 1248 respectively; Eng. trans. with introduction by A.G. Ferrers Howell, 1908), of which the only critical edition is that of Friar Ed. d’Alençon (1906); the so-called Legenda trium sociorum; the Speculum perfectionis, discovered by Paul Sabatier and edited in 1898 (Eng. trans. by Sebastian Evans, Mirror of Perfection, 1899). Sabatier’s theory as to the nature of these documents was, in brief, that the Speculum perfectionis was the first of all the Lives of the saint, written in 1227 by Br. Leo, his favourite and most intimate disciple, and that the Legenda 3 Soc. is what it claims to be—the handiwork of Leo and the two other most intimate companions of Francis, compiled in 1246; these are the most authentic and the only true accounts, Thomas of Celano’s Lives being written precisely in opposition to them, in the interests of the majority of the order that favoured mitigations of the Rule especially in regard to poverty. For ten years the domain of Franciscan origins was explored and discussed by a number of scholars; and then the whole ground was reviewed by Professor W. Goetz of Munich in a study entitled Die Quellen zur Geschichte des hl. Franz von Assisi (1904). His conclusions are substantially the same as those of Père van Ortroy, the Bollandist, and Friar Lemmens, an Observant Franciscan, and are the direct contrary of Sabatier’s: the Legenda 3 Soc. is a forgery; the Speculum perfectionis is a compilation made in the 14th century, also in large measure a forgery, but containing an element (not to be precisely determined) derived from Br. Leo; on the other hand, Thomas of Celano’s two Lives are free from the “tendencies” ascribed to them by Sabatier, and that of 1248 was written with the collaboration of Leo and the other companions; thus the best sources of information are those portions of the Speculum that can with certainty be carried back to Br. Leo, and the Lives by Thomas of Celano, especially the second Life. Goetz’s criticism of the documents is characterized by exceeding carefulness and sobriety. Of course he does not suppose that his conclusions are in all respects final; but his investigations show that the time has not yet come when a biography of St Francis could be produced answering to the demands of modern historical criticism. The official life of St Francis is St Bonaventura’s Legenda, published in a convenient form by the Franciscans of Quaracchi (1898); Goetz’s estimate of it (op. cit.) is much more favourable than Sabatier’s.

Paul Sabatier’s fascinating and in many ways sympathetic Vie de S. François (1894; 33rd ed., 1906; Eng. trans, by L.S. Houghton, 1901) will probably for a long time to come be accepted by the ordinary reader as a substantially correct portrait of St Francis; and yet Goetz declares that the most competent and independent critics have without any exception pronounced that Sabatier has depicted St Francis a great deal too much from the standpoint of modern religiosity, and has exaggerated his attitude in face of the church (op. cit. p. 5). In articles in the Hist. Vierteljahrsschrift (1902, 1903) Goetz has shown that Sabatier’s presentation of St Francis’s relations with the ecclesiastical authority in general, and with Cardinal Hugolino (Gregory IX.) in particular, is largely based on misconception; that the development of the order was not forced on Francis against his will; and that the differences in the order did not during Francis’s lifetime attain to such a magnitude as to cause him during his last years the suffering depicted by Sabatier. This from a Protestant historian like Goetz is most valuable criticism. In truth Sabatier’s St Francis is an anachronism—a man at heart, a modern pietistic French Protestant of the most liberal type, with a veneer of 13th century Catholicism.

Of lives of St Francis in English may be mentioned those by Mrs Oliphant (2nd ed., 1871) and by Canon Knox Little (1897). For general information and references to the literature of the subject, see Otto Zöckler, Askese und Mönchtum (1897), ii. 470-493, and his article in Herzog’s Realencyklopädie (ed. 3), “Franz von Assisi” (1899); also Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. § 38. The chapter on St Francis in Emile Gebhart’s Italie mystique (ed. 3, 1899) is very remarkable; indeed, though this writer is as little ecclesiastically-minded as Sabatier himself, his general picture of the state of religion in Italy at the time is far truer; here also Sabatier has given way to the usual temptation of biographers to exalt their hero by depreciating everybody else.

(E. C. B.)

1 The Little Flowers of St Francis.

FRANCIS OF MAYRONE [Franciscus de Mayronis] (d. 1325), scholastic philosopher, was born at Mayrone in Provence. He entered the Franciscan order and subsequently went to Paris, where he was a pupil of Duns Scotus. At the Sorbonne he acquired a great reputation for ability in discussion, and was known as the Doctor Illuminatus and Magister Acutus. He became a professor of philosophy, and took part in the discussions on the nature of Universals. Following Duns Scotus, he adopted the Platonic theory of ideas, and denied that Aristotle had made any contribution to metaphysical speculation. It is a curious commentary on the theories of Duns Scotus that one pupil, Francis, should have taken this course, while another pupil, Occam, should have used his arguments in a diametrically opposite direction and ended in extreme Nominalism.

His works were collected and published at Venice in 1520 under the title Praeclarissima ac multum subtilia scripta Illuminati Doctoris Francisci de Mayronis, &c.

FRANCIS OF PAOLA (or Paula), ST, founder of the Minims, a religious order in the Catholic Church, was born of humble parentage at Paola in Calabria in 1416, or according to the Bollandists 1438. As a boy he entered a Franciscan friary, but left it and went to live as a hermit in a cave on the seashore near Paola. Soon disciples joined him, and with the bishop’s approval he built a church and monastery. At first they called themselves “Hermits of St Francis”; but the object they proposed to themselves was to go beyond even the strict Franciscans in fasts and bodily austerities of all kinds, in poverty and in humility; and therefore, as the Franciscans were the Minors (minores, less), the new order took the name of Minims (minimi, least). By 1474 a number of houses had been established in southern Italy and Sicily, and the order was recognized and approved by the pope. In 1482 Louis XI. of France, being on his deathbed and hearing the reports of the holiness of Francis, sent to ask him to come and attend him, and at the pope’s command he travelled to Paris. On this occasion Philip de Comines in his Memoirs says: “I never saw any man living so holily, nor out of whose mouth the Holy Ghost did more manifestly speak.” He remained with Louis till his death, and Louis’ successor, Charles VIII., held him in such high esteem that he kept him in Paris, and enabled him to found various houses of his order in France; in Spain and Germany, too, houses were founded during Francis’s lifetime. He never left France, and died in 1507 in the monastery of his order at Plessis-les-Tours.

The Rule was so strict that the popes long hesitated to confirm it in its entirety; not until 1506 was it finally sanctioned. The most special feature is an additional vow to keep a perpetual Lent of the strictest kind, not only flesh meat but fish and all animal products—eggs, milk, butter, cheese, dripping—being forbidden, so that the diet was confined to bread, vegetables, fruit and oil, and water was the only drink. Thus in matter of diet the Minims surpassed in austerity all orders in the West, and probably all permanently organized orders in the East. The strongly ascetical spirit of the Minims manifested itself in the title borne by the superiors of the houses—not abbot (father), or prior, or guardian, or minister, or rector, but corrector; and the general superior is the corrector general. Notwithstanding its extreme severity the order prospered. At the death of the founder it had five provinces—Italy, France, Tours, Germany, Spain. Later there were as many as 450 monasteries, and some missions in India. There never was a Minim house in England or Ireland. It ranks as one of the Mendicant orders. In 1909 there were some twenty monasteries, mostly in Sicily, but one in Rome (S. Andrea delle Fratte), and one in Naples, in Marseilles and in Cracow. There have been Minim nuns (only one convent has survived, till recently at Marseilles) and Minim Tertiaries, in imitation of the Franciscan Tertiaries. The habit of the Minims is black.

See Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1714), vii. c. 56; Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. § 52; the article “Franz von Paula” in Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexicon (ed. 2), and in Herzog, Realencyklopädie (ed. 3); Catholic Dictionary, art. “Minims.”

(E. C. B.)

FRANCIS (François) OF SALES, ST (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and doctor of the Church (1877), was born at the castle of Sales, near Annecy, Savoy. His father, also François, comte de Sales, but better known as M. de Boisy, a nobleman and soldier, had been employed in various affairs of state, but in 1560, at the age of thirty-eight, settled down on his ancestral estates and married Françoise de Sionnay, a Savoyard like himself, and an heiress. St Francis, the first child of this union, was born in August 1567 when his mother was in her fifteenth year. M. de Boisy was renowned for his experience and sound judgment, and both parents were distinguished by piety, love of peace, charity to the poor, qualities which early showed themselves in their eldest son.

He received his education first at La Roche, in the Arve valley, then at the college of Annecy, founded by Eustace Chappius, ambassador in England of Charles V., in 1549. At the age of thirteen or fourteen he went to the Jesuit College of Clermont at Paris, where he stayed till the summer of 1588, and where he laid the foundations of his profound knowledge, while perfecting himself in the exercises of a young nobleman and practising a life of exemplary virtue. At this time also he developed an ardent love of France, a country which was politically in antagonism with his own, though so closely linked to it geographically, socially and by language. At the end of 1588 he went to Padua, to take his degree in canon and civil law, a necessary prelude in Savoy at that time to distinction in a civil career. His heart, however, especially from the date of his receiving the tonsure (1578), was already turned towards the Church, and he gave his attention even more to theology, under the great masters Antonio Possevino, S.J., and Gesualdo, afterwards general of the Friars Minor, than to his legal course. “At Padua,” he said to a friend, “I studied law to please my father, and theology to please myself.” In that licentious university Francis found the greatest difficulty in resisting attacks on his virtue, and once at least had to draw his sword to defend his personal safety against a band of ruffians. The gentleness for which he was already renowned was not that of a weak, but of a strong character. He returned to Savoy in 1592, and, while seeking the occasion to overcome his father’s resistance to his resolution of embracing the ecclesiastical profession, took the diploma of advocate to the senate. Meantime, without his knowledge, his friends procured for him the post of provost of the chapter of Geneva, an honour which reconciled M. de Boisy to the sacrifice of more ambitious hopes. After a year of zealous work as preacher and director he was sent by the bishop, Claude de Granier, to try and win back the province of Chablais, which had embraced Calvinism when usurped by Bern in 1535, and had retained it even after its restitution to Savoy in 1564. At first the people refused to listen to him, for he was represented to them as an instrument of Satan, and all who had dealings with him were threatened with the vengeance of the consistory. He therefore wrote out his message on sheets which were passed from hand to hand, and these, with the spectacle of his virtues and disinterestedness, soon produced a strong effect. The sheets just spoken of still exist in the Chigi library at Rome, and were published, though with many alterations, in 1672, under the title of Les Controverses. This must be considered the first work of St Francis.

The re-erection of a wayside cross in Annemasse, at the gates of Geneva, amid an enormous concourse of converts, an event which closed the three years of his apostolate, led to the composition of the Défense ... de la Croix, published in 1600. An illness brought on by toil and privation forced him to leave his work to others for nearly a year, but in August 1598 he returned to his field of labour, and in October of that year practically the whole country was Catholic again. Up to that time preaching and conference had been the only weapons employed. The stories of the use of soldiers to produce simulated conversions are incorrect.1 Possibly the lamentable events of the campaigns of 1589 in Gex and Chablais have been applied to the period 1594-1598. In October of this last year, however, the duke of Savoy, who came then to assist in person at the great religious feasts which celebrated the return of the country to unity of faith, expatriated such of the leading men as obstinately refused even to listen to the Catholic arguments. He also forbade Calvinist ministers to reside in the Chablais, and substituted Catholic for Huguenot officials. St Francis concurred in these measures, and, three years later, even requested that those who, as he said, “follow their heresy, rather as a party than a religion,” should be ordered either to conform or to leave their country, with leave to sell their goods. His conduct, judged not by a modern standard, but by the ideas of his age, will be found compatible with the highest Christian charity, as that of the duke with sound political prudence. At this time he was nominated to the pope as coadjutor of Geneva,2 and after a visit to Rome he assisted Bishop de Granier in the administration of the newly converted countries and of the diocese at large.

In 1602 he made his second visit to the French capital, when his transcendent qualities brought him into the closest relations with the court of Henry IV., and made him the spiritual father of that circle of select souls who centred round Madame Acarie. Among the celebrated personages who became his life friends from this time were Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the French Oratorians, Guillaume Duval, the scholar, and the duc de Bellegarde, the latter a special favourite of the king, who begged to be allowed to share the Saint’s friendship. At this time also his gift as a preacher became fully recognized, and de Sanzéa, afterwards bishop of Bethlehem, records that Duval exhorted all his students of the Sorbonne to listen to him and to imitate this, “the true and excellent method of preaching.” His principles are expressed in the admirable letter to André Frémyot of October 1604.

De Granier died in September 1602, and the new bishop entered on the administration of his vast diocese, which, as a contemporary says, “he found brick and left marble.” His first efforts were directed to securing a virtuous and well-instructed clergy, with its consequence of a people worthy of their pastors. All his time was spent in preaching, confessing, visiting the sick, relieving the poor. His zeal was not confined to his diocese. In concert with Jeanne Françoise Frémyot (1572-1641), widow of the baron de Chantal, whose acquaintance he made while preaching through Lent at Dijon in 1604, he founded the order of the Visitation, in favour of “strong souls with weak bodies,” as he said, deterred from entering the orders already existing, by their inability to undertake severe corporal austerities. The institution rapidly spread, counting twenty houses before his death and eighty before that of St Jeanne. The care of his diocese and of his new foundation were not enough for his ardent charity, and in 1609 he published his famous Introduction to a Devout Life, a work which was at once translated into the chief European languages and of which he himself published five editions. In 1616 appeared his Treatise on the Love of God, which teaches that perfection of the spiritual life to which the former work is meant to be the “Introduction.”

The important Lents of 1617 and 1618 at Grenoble were a prelude to a still more important apostolate in Paris, “the theatre of the world,” as St Vincent de Paul calls it. This third visit to the great city lasted from the autumn of 1618 to that of 1619; the direct object of it was to assist in negotiating the marriage of the prince of Piedmont with Chrétienne of France, but nearly all his time was spent in preaching and works of mercy, spiritual or corporal. He was regarded as a living saint. St Vincent scarcely left him, and has given the most extraordinary testimonies (as yet unpublished) of his heroic virtues. Mère Angélique Arnaud, who at this time put herself under his direction and wished to join the Order of the Visitation, attracted by its humility and sweetness, may be named as the most interesting of his innumerable penitents of this period. He returned to Savoy, and after three years more of unwearying labour died at Lyons on the 28th of December 1622. A universal outburst of veneration followed; indeed his cult had already begun, and after an episcopal inquiry the pontifical commission in view of his beatification was instituted by decree of the 21st of July 1626, a celerity unique in the annals of the Congregation of Rites. The depositions of witnesses were returned to Rome in 1632, but meantime the forms of the Roman chancery had been changed by Urban VIII., and the advocates could not at once continue their work. Eventually a new commission was issued in 1656, and on its report, into which were inserted nineteen of the former depositions, the “servant of God” was beatified in 1661. The canonization took place in 1665.

Besides the works which we have named, there were published posthumously his Entretiens, i.e. a selection of the lectures given to the Visitation, reported by the sisters who heard them, some of his sermons, a large number of his letters, various short treatises of devotion. The first edition of his united or so-called “Complete” works was published at Toulouse in 1637. Others followed in 1641, 1647, 1652, 1663, 1669, 1685. The Lettres and Opuscules were republished in 1768.

The only modern editions of the complete works which it is worth while to name are those of Blaise (1821), Virès (1856-1858), Migne (1861), and the critical edition published by the Visitation of Annecy, of which the 14th volume appeared in 1905.

The biography of St Francis de Sales was written immediately after his death by the celebrated P. de La Rivière and Dom John de St François (Goulu), as well as by two other authors of less importance. The saint’s nephew and successor, Charles Auguste de Sales, brought out a more extended life, Latin and French, in 1635. The lives of Giarda (1650), Maupas du Tour (1657) and Cotolendi (1687) add little to Charles Auguste. Marsollier’s longer life, in two volumes (1700), is quite untrustworthy; still more so that by Loyau d’Amboise (1833), which is rather a romance than a biography. The lives by Hamon (1856) and Pérennès (1860), without adding much to preceding biographies, are serious and edifying. A complete life, founded on the lately discovered process of 1626 and the new letters, was being prepared by the author of the present article at the time of his death. With the Lives must be mentioned the Esprit du B.F. de Sales by Camus, bishop of Belley, who, amid innumerable errors, gives various interesting traits and sayings of his saintly friend. Among the very numerous modern studies may be named an essay by Leigh Hunt entitled “The Gentleman Saint” (The Seer, pt. ii. No. 41); a remarkable causerie by Sainte-Beuve (Lundis, 3rd Jan. 1853); Le Réveil du sentiment religieux en France au XVIIe siècle, by Strowski (Paris, 1898); Four Essays on S. F. de S. and Three Essays on S. F. de S. as Preacher, by Canon H.B. Mackey.

(H. B. M.)

1 This, at least, is the account given by Catholic authorities. Less favourable is the view taken by non-Catholic historians, which seems in some measure to be confirmed by St Francis himself. According to this, Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, who succeeded his more tolerant father in 1580, was determined to reduce the Chablais to the Catholic religion, by peaceful means if possible, by force if necessary. After two years of preaching Francis wrote to the duke (Œuvres compl. ii. p. 551): “During 27 months I have scattered the seed of the Word of God in this miserable land; shall I say among thorns or on stony ground? Certainly, save for the conversion of the seigneur d’Avully and the advocate Poncet, I have little to boast of.” In the winter of 1596-1597 Francis was at Turin, and at his suggestion the duke decided on a regular plan for the coercion of the refractory Protestants. This plan anticipated that employed later by Louis XIV. against the Huguenots in France. The Calvinist ministers were expelled; Protestant books were confiscated and destroyed; the acts of Protestant lawyers and officials were declared invalid. The country was flooded with Jesuits and friars, whose arguments were reinforced by quartering troops, veterans of the Indian wars in Mexico, on the refractory inhabitants. Those whose stubborn persistence in error survived all these inducements to repent were sent into exile. See the article “Franz von Sales” by J. Ehni in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopädie (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1899).

(W. A. P.)

2 With the title of Nicopolis in partibus.—Ed.

FRANCIS, SIR PHILIP (1740-1818), English politician and pamphleteer, the supposed author of the Letters of Junius, and the chief antagonist of Warren Hastings, was born in Dublin on the 22nd of October 1740. He was the only son of Dr Philip Francis (c. 1708-1773), a man of some literary celebrity in his time, known by his translations of Horace, Aeschines and Demosthenes. He received the rudiments of an excellent education at a free school in Dublin, and afterwards spent a year or two (1751-1752) under his father’s roof at Skeyton rectory, Norfolk, and elsewhere, and for a short time he had Gibbon as a fellow-pupil. In March 1753 he entered St Paul’s school, London, where he remained for three years and a half, becoming a proficient classical scholar. In 1756, immediately on his leaving school, he was appointed to a junior clerkship in the secretary of state’s office by Henry Fox (afterwards Lord Holland), with whose family Dr Francis was at that time on intimate terms; and this post he retained under the succeeding administration. In 1758 he was employed as secretary to General Bligh in the expedition against Cherbourg; and in the same capacity he accompanied the earl of Kinnoul on his special embassy to the court of Portugal in 1760.

In 1761 he became personally known to Pitt, who, recognizing his ability and discretion, once and again made use of his services as private amanuensis. In 1762 he was appointed to a principal clerkship in the war office, where he formed an intimate friendship with Christopher D’Oyly, the secretary of state’s deputy, whose dismissal from office in 1772 was hotly resented by “Junius”; and in the same year he married Miss Macrabie, the daughter of a retired London merchant. His official duties brought him into direct relations with many who were well versed in the politics of the time. In 1763 the great constitutional questions arising out of the arrest of Wilkes began to be sharply canvassed. It was natural that Francis, who from a very early age had been in the habit of writing occasionally to the newspapers, should be eager to take an active part in the discussion, though his position as a government official made it necessary that his intervention should be carefully disguised. He is known to have written to the Public Ledger and Public Advertiser, as an advocate of the popular cause, on many occasions about and after the year 1763; he frequently attended debates in both Houses of Parliament, especially when American questions were being discussed; and between 1769 and 1771 he is also known to have been favourable to the scheme for the overthrow of the Grafton government and afterwards of that of Lord North, and for persuading or forcing Lord Chatham into power. In January 1769 the first of the Letters of Junius appeared, and the series was continued till January 21, 1772. They had been preceded by others under various signatures such as, “Candor,” “Father of Candor,” “Anti-Sejanus,” “Lucius,” “Nemesis,” which have all been attributed, some of them certainly in error, to one and the same hand. The authorship of the Letters of Junius has been assigned to Francis on a variety of grounds (see Junius).

In March 1772 Francis finally left the war office, and in July of the same year he left England for a tour through France, Germany and Italy, which lasted until the following December. On his return he was contemplating emigration to New England, when in June 1773 Lord North, on the recommendation of Lord Barrington, appointed him a member of the newly constituted supreme council of Bengal at a salary of £10,000 per annum. Along with his colleagues Monson and Clavering he reached Calcutta in October 1774, and a long struggle with Warren Hastings, the governor-general, immediately began. These three, actuated probably by petty personal motives, combined to form a majority of the council in harassing opposition to the governor-general’s policy; and they even accused him of corruption, mainly on the evidence of Nuncomar. The death of Monson in 1776, and of Clavering in the following year, made Hastings again supreme in the council. But a dispute with Francis, more than usually embittered, led in August 1780 to a minute being delivered to the council board by Hastings, in which he stated that “he judged of the public conduct of Mr Francis by his experience of his private, which he had found to be void of truth and honour.” A duel was the consequence, in which Francis received a dangerous wound (see Hastings, Warren). Though his recovery was rapid and complete, he did not choose to prolong his stay abroad. He arrived in England in October 1781, and was received with little favour.

Little is known of the nature of his occupations during the next two years, except that he was untiring in his efforts to procure first the recall, and afterwards the impeachment of his hitherto triumphant adversary. In 1783 Fox produced his India Bill, which led to the overthrow of the coalition government. In 1784 Francis was returned by the borough of Yarmouth, Isle of Wight; and although he took an opportunity to disclaim every feeling of personal animosity towards Hastings, this did not prevent him, on the return of the latter in 1785, from doing all in his power to bring forward and support the charges which ultimately led to the impeachment resolutions of 1787. Although excluded by a majority of the House from the list of the managers of that impeachment, Francis was none the less its most energetic promoter, supplying his friends Burke and Sheridan with all the materials for their eloquent orations and burning invectives. At the general election of 1790 he was returned member for Bletchingley. He sympathized warmly and actively with the French revolutionary doctrines, expostulating with Burke on his vehement denunciation of the same. In 1793 he supported Grey’s motion for a return to the old constitutional system of representation, and so earned the title to be regarded as one of the earliest promoters of the cause of parliamentary reform; and he was one of the founders of the “Society of the Friends of the People.” The acquittal of Hastings in April 1795 disappointed Francis of the governor-generalship, and in 1798 he had to submit to the additional mortification of a defeat in the general election. He was once more successful, however, in 1802, when he sat for Appleby, and it seemed as if the great ambitions of his life were about to be realized when the Whig party came into power in 1806. His disappointment was great when the governor-generalship was, owing to party exigencies, conferred on Sir Gilbert Elliot (Lord Minto); he declined, it is said, soon afterwards the government of the Cape, but accepted a K.C.B. Though re-elected for Appleby in 1806, he failed to secure a seat in the following year; and the remainder of his life was spent in comparative privacy.

Among the later productions of his pen were, besides the Plan of a Reform in the Election of the House of Commons, pamphlets entitled Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade (1796), Reflections on the Abundance of Paper in Circulation and the Scarcity of Specie (1810), Historical Questions Exhibited (1818), and a Letter to Earl Grey on the Policy of Great Britain and the Allies towards Norway (1814). His first wife, by whom he had six children, died in 1806, and in 1814 he married his second wife, Emma Watkins, who long survived him, and who left voluminous manuscripts relating to his biography. Francis died on the 23rd of December 1818. In his domestic relations he was exemplary, and he lived on terms of mutual affection with a wide circle of friends. He was, however, full of vindictiveness, dissimulation and treachery, and there can be little doubt that in his historic conflict with Warren Hastings unworthy personal motives played a leading part.

Bibliography.—For the evidence identifying Francis with Junius see the article Junius, and the authorities there cited. See also Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, with Correspondence and Journals, by Joseph Parkes and Herman Merivale (2 vols., London, 1867); The Francis Letters, edited by Beata Francis and Eliza Keary (2 vols., London, 1901); Sir J.F. Stephen, The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir E. Impey (2 vols., London, 1885); Lord Macaulay’s Essay on “Warren Hastings”; G.B. Malleson, Life of Warren Hastings (London, 1894); G.W. Forrest, The Administration of Warren Hastings, 1772-1785 (Calcutta, 1892); Sir Leslie Stephen’s article on Francis in Dict. of Nat. Biog. vol. xx.

FRANCIS JOSEPH I. (1830- ), emperor of Austria, king of Bohemia, and apostolic king of Hungary, was the eldest son of the archduke Francis Charles, second son of the reigning emperor Francis I., being born on the 18th of August 1830. His mother, the archduchess Sophia, was daughter of Maximilian I., king of Bavaria. She was a woman of great ability and strong character, and during the years which followed the death of the emperor Francis was probably the most influential personage at the Austrian court; for the emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded in 1835, was physically and mentally incapable of performing the duties of his office; as he was childless, Francis Joseph was in the direct line of succession. During the disturbances of 1848, Francis Joseph spent some time in Italy, where, under Radetzky, at the battle of St Lucia, he had his first experience of warfare. At the end of that year, after the rising of Vienna and capture of the city by Windischgrätz, it was clearly desirable that there should be a more vigorous ruler at the head of the empire, and Ferdinand, now that the young archduke was of age, was able to carry out the abdication which he and his wife had long desired. All the preparations were made with the utmost secrecy; on the 2nd of December 1848, in the archiepiscopal palace at Olmütz, whither the court had fled from Vienna, the emperor abdicated. His brother resigned his rights of succession to his son, and Francis Joseph was proclaimed emperor. Ferdinand retired to Prague, where he died in 1875.

The history of the Dual Monarchy during his reign is told under the heading of Austria-Hungary, and here it is only necessary to deal with its personal aspects. The young emperor was during the first years of his reign completely in the hands of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, to whom, with Windischgrätz and Radetzky, he owed it that Austria had emerged from the revolution apparently stronger than it had been before. The first task was to reduce Hungary to obedience, for the Magyars refused to acknowledge the validity of the abdication in so far as it concerned Hungary, on the ground that such an act would only be valid with the consent of the Hungarian parliament. A further motive for their attitude was that Francis Joseph, unlike his predecessor, had not taken the oath to observe the Hungarian constitution, which it was the avowed object of Schwarzenberg to overthrow. In the war which followed the emperor himself took part, but it was not brought to a successful conclusion till the help of the Russians had been called in. Hungary, deprived of her ancient constitution, became an integral part of the Austrian empire. The new reign began, therefore, under sinister omens, with the suppression of liberty in Italy, Hungary and Germany. In 1853 a Hungarian named Lebenyi attempted to assassinate the emperor, and succeeded in inflicting a serious wound with a knife. With the death of Schwarzenberg in 1852 the personal government of the emperor really began, and with it that long series of experiments of which Austria has been the subject. Generally it may be said that throughout his long reign Francis Joseph remained the real ruler of his dominions; he not only kept in his hands the appointment and dismissal of his ministers, but himself directed their policy, and owing to the great knowledge of affairs, the unremitting diligence and clearness of apprehension, to which all who transacted business with him have borne testimony, he was able to keep a very real control even of the details of government.

The recognition of the separate status of Hungary, and the restoration of the Magyar constitution in 1866, necessarily made some change in his position, and so far as concerns Hungary he fully accepted the doctrine that ministers are responsible to parliament. In the other half of the monarchy (the so-called Cisleithan) this was not possible, and the authority and influence of the emperor were even increased by the contrast with the weaknesses and failures of the parliamentary system. The most noticeable features in his reign were the repeated and sudden changes of policy, which, while they arose from the extreme difficulty of finding any system by which the Habsburg monarchy could be governed, were due also to the personal idiosyncrasies of the emperor. First we have the attempt at the autocratic centralization of the whole monarchy under Bach; the personal influence of the emperor is seen in the conclusion of the Concordat with Rome, by which in 1855 the work of Joseph II. was undone and the power of the papacy for a while restored. The foreign policy of this period brought about the complete isolation of Austria, and the “ingratitude” towards Russia, as shown during the period of the Crimean War, which has become proverbial, caused a permanent estrangement between the two great Eastern empires and the imperial families. The system led inevitably to bankruptcy and ruin; the war of 1859, by bringing it to an end, saved the monarchy. After the first defeat Francis Joseph hastened to Italy; he commanded in person at Solferino, and by a meeting with Napoleon arranged the terms of the peace of Villafranca. The next six years, both in home and foreign policy, were marked by great vacillation. In order to meet the universal discontent and the financial difficulties constitutional government was introduced; a parliament was established in which all races of the empire were represented, and in place of centralized despotism was established Liberal centralization under Schmerling and the German Liberals. But the Magyars refused to send representatives to the central parliament; the Slavs, resenting the Germanizing policy of the government, withdrew; and the emperor had really withdrawn his confidence from Schmerling long before the constitution was suspended in 1865 as a first step to a reconciliation with Hungary. In the complicated German affairs the emperor in vain sought for a minister on whose knowledge and advice he could depend. He was guided in turn by the inconsistent advice of Schmerling, Rechberg, Mensdorff, not to mention more obscure counsellors, and it is not surprising that Austria was repeatedly outmatched and outwitted by Prussia. In 1863, at the Fürstentag in Frankfort, the emperor made an attempt by his personal influence to solve the German question. He invited all the German sovereigns to meet him in conference, and laid before them a plan for the reconstruction of the confederation. The momentary effect was immense; for some of the halo of the Holy Empire still clung round the head of the house of Habsburg, and Francis Joseph was welcomed to the ancient free city with enthusiasm. In spite of this, however, and of the skill with which he presided over the debates, the conference came to nothing owing to the refusal of the king of Prussia to attend.

The German question was settled definitively by the battle of Königgrätz in 1866; and the emperor Francis Joseph, with characteristic Habsburg opportunism, was quick to accommodate himself to the new circumstances. Above all, he recognized the necessity for reconciling the Magyars to the monarchy; for it was their discontent that had mainly contributed to the collapse of the Austrian power. He had already, in 1859, as the result of a visit to Budapest, made certain modifications in the Bach system by way of concession to Magyar sentiment, and in 1861 he had had an interview with Deák, during which, though unconvinced by that statesman’s arguments, he had at least assured himself of his loyalty. He now made Beust, Bismarck’s Saxon antagonist, the head of his government, as the result of whose negotiations with Deák the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was agreed upon. A law was passed by the Hungarian diet regularizing the abdication of Ferdinand; at the beginning of June Francis Joseph signed the inaugural diploma and took the oath in Magyar to observe the constitution; on the 8th he was solemnly crowned king of Hungary. The traditional coronation gift of 100,000 florins he assigned to the widows and orphans of those who had fallen in the war against Austria in 1849.

Once having accepted the principle of constitutional government, the emperor-king adhered to it loyally, in spite of the discouragement caused by party struggles embittered by racial antagonisms. If in the Cisleithan half of the monarchy parliamentary government broke down, this was through no fault of the emperor, who worked hard to find a modus vivendi between the factions, and did not shrink from introducing manhood suffrage in the attempt to establish a stable parliamentary system. This expedient, indeed, probably also conveyed a veiled threat to the Magyar chauvinists, who, discontented with the restrictions placed upon Hungarian independence under the Compromise, were agitating for the complete separation of Austria and Hungary under a personal union only; for universal suffrage in Hungary would mean the subordination of the Magyar minority to the hitherto subject races. For nearly forty years after the acceptance of the Compromise the attitude of the emperor-king towards the Magyar constitution had been scrupulously correct. The agitation for the completely separate organization of the Hungarian army, and for the substitution of Magyar for German in words of command in Hungarian regiments, broke down the patience of the emperor, tenacious of his prerogative as supreme “war lord” of the common army. A Hungarian deputation which came to Vienna in September 1905 to urge the Magyar claims was received ungraciously by the emperor, who did not offer his hand to the members, addressed them in German, and referred them brusquely to the chancellor, Count Goluchowski. This incident caused a considerable sensation, and was the prelude to a long crisis in Hungarian affairs, during which the emperor-king, while quick to repair the unfortunate impression produced by his momentary pique, held inflexibly to his resolve in the matter of the common army.

In his relations with the Slavs the emperor displayed the same conciliatory disposition as in the case of the Magyars; but though he more than once held out hopes that he would be crowned at Prague as king of Bohemia, the project was always abandoned. In this, indeed, as in other cases, it may be said that the emperor was guided less by any abstract principles than by a common-sense appreciation of the needs and possibilities of the moment. Whatever his natural prejudices or natural resentments, he never allowed these to influence his policy. The German empire and the Italian kingdom had been built up out of the ruins of immemorial Habsburg ambitions; yet he refused to be drawn into an alliance with France in 1869 and 1870, and became the mainstay of the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy. His reputation as a consistent moderating influence in European policy and one of the chief guarantors of European peace was indeed rudely shaken in October 1908, the year in which he celebrated his sixty years’ jubilee as emperor, by the issue of the imperial recript annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Habsburg dominions, in violation of the terms of the treaty of Berlin. But his opportunism was again justified by the result. Europe lost an ideal; but Austria gained two provinces.

In his private life the emperor was the victim of terrible catastrophes—his wife, his brother and his only son having been destroyed by sudden and violent deaths. He married in 1854 Elizabeth, daughter of Maximilian Joseph, duke of Bavaria, who belonged to the younger and non-royal branch of the house of Wittelsbach. The empress, who shared the remarkable beauty common to all her family, took little part in the public life of Austria. After the first years of married life she was seldom seen in Vienna, and spent much of her time in travelling. She built a castle of great beauty and magnificence, called the Achilleion, in the island of Corfu, where she often o resided. In 1867 she accompanied the emperor to Budapest, and took much interest in the reconciliation with the Magyars. She became a good Hungarian scholar, and spent much time in Hungary. An admirable horsewoman, in later years she repeatedly visited England and Irland for the hunting season. In 1897 she was assassinated at Geneva by an Italian anarchist; previous attempts had been made on her and on her husband during a visit to Trieste.

There was one son of the marriage, the crown prince Rudolph (1857-1889). A man of much ability and promise, he was a good linguist, and showed great interest in natural history. He published two works, Fifteen Days on the Danube and A Journey in the East, and also promoted illustrated work giving a full description of the whole Austro-Hungarian monarchy; he personally shared the labours of the editorial work. In 1881 he merried Stéphanie, daughter of the king of the Belgians. On 30th January 1889 he commited suicide at Mayerling, a country house near Vienna. He left one daughter, Elizabeth, who was betrothed to Count Alfred Windischgrätz in 1901. In 1900 his widow, the crown princess Stéphanie, married Count Lonyay; by this she sacrificed her rank and position within the Austrian monarchy. Besides the crown prince the empress gave birth to three daughters, of whom two survive: Gisela (born 1857), who married a son of the prince regent of Bavaria; and Marie Valerie (born 1868), who married the archduke Franz Salvator of Tuscany.

See J. Emmer. Kaisser Franz Joseph (2 vols., Vienna, 1898); J. Schnitzer, Franz Joseph I. und seine Zeit (2 vols., ib., 1899); Viribis unitis. Das Buch vom Kaiser, with introduction by J.A. v. Halfert, ed. M. Herzig (ib., 1898); R. Rostok, Die Regierungszeit des K. u. K. Franz Joseph I. (3rd ed. ib., 1903).