Claude Fleury

There he caught the attention of preacher at the royal court, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who persuaded him to study theology and receive holy orders.

In 1696 he was elected to fill the place of La Bruyère in the Académie française; and on the completion of the education of the young princes the king reassigned to him the priory of Argenteuil, in the diocese of Paris (1706), a more lucrative benefice than Loc-Dieu.

Fleury's evident intention was to write a history of the church for all classes of society; but at the time in which his great work appeared it was less religion than theology that absorbed the attention of the clergy and the educated public; and his work accordingly appealed to the student rather than to the popular reader, dwelling as it does very particularly on questions of doctrine, of discipline, of supremacy, and of rivalry between the priesthood and the imperial power.

[1] Fleury was appointed confessor to the young King Louis XV in 1716, because, as the duke of Orleans said, he was neither Jansenist nor Molinist, nor Ultramontanist, but Catholic.

[1] See C Ernst Simonetti, Der Character eines Geschichtsschreibers in dem Leben und aus den Schriften des Abbé C. Fleury (Göttingen 1746, 4to); CFP Jaeger, Notice sur C. Fleury, considéré comme historien de l'eglise (Strassburg, 1847, 8vo); Reichlin-Meldegg, Geschichte des Christentums, I.