Final Years
Both political controversies and disputes within the Dominican order clouded Lacordaire's later years. Long hostile to the July Monarchy, he supported the Revolution of 1848. With Frédéric Ozanam and the Abbot Maret, he launched a newspaper, L'Ere Nouvelle (The New Era), to campaign for the rights of Catholics under the new regime. Their program mixed traditional Liberal Catholicism's defense of the freedom of conscience and education with and Frédéric Ozanam's Social Catholicism. Lacordaire was elected to the Assemblée Nationale from the Marseille region. Favoring the Republic, he sat on the extreme left of the Assemblée, but resigned on 17 May 1848, following workers' riots and the invasion of the Assemblée Nationale by demonstrators on 15 May. He preferred to retire rather than take sides in he what he expected would be a civil war between extreme partisans. When L'Ere Nouvelle endorsed ever more socialist policies, he left the paper's leadership on 2 September, while continuing to support it.
Lacordaire supported the Revolutions of 1848 in the Italian states and the later French invasion of the Papal States: "We must not at all be too alarmed by the possible fall of Pius IX," he wrote to Montalembert. He found the Falloux Laws a disappointment despite their attempt to establish a degree of freedom for Catholic secondary education. Opposed to the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Lacordaire condemned his coup d’état of 2 December 1851. He retired from public life, and later explained: "My hour had come to disappear with the others. Many Catholics followed another line, and separating themselves from all they had said and done, threw themselves with ardor before absolute power. This schism that I do not want at all to call here an apostasy, has always been a great mystery to me and a great sadness."
In quasi-retirement, he dedicated himself to the education of youth as permitted by the Falloux Laws. In July 1852 he accepted the leadership of a school in Oullins, near Lyon, then a similar role at the school of Sorèze in Tarn in 1854. Finally, on 2 February 1860, he was elected to the Académie Française, filling the seat of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose eulogy he had delivered. Encouraged by opponents of the Imperial Regime, supported by Montalembert and Berryer, received by Guizot, he agreed that he would not criticize Napoléon III's intervention in Italian politics. His reception at the Académie was therefore not controversial.
About this time he uttered his famous epitaph: "J'espère mourir un religieux pénitent et un libéral impénitent." ("I wish to die a penitent religious and unrepenitent liberal.")
Lacordaire only sat once at the Académie. He died at the age of 60 on 21 November 1861 in Sorèze (Tarn) and was buried there.
Read more about this topic: Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
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