Félicité Robert de La Mennais (or Lamennais; 19 June 1782 – 27 February 1854) was a French Catholic priest, philosopher and political theorist.

He initially held rationalistic views, but in part due to the influence of his elder brother, Jean-Marie, came to see religion as an antidote for the anarchy and tyranny unleashed by revolution.

His social ideas embraced an enlarged suffrage, separation of church and state, universal freedom of conscience, instruction, assembly, and the press.

In 1833, he broke with the Church and the following year published Paroles d'un croyant, which Pope Gregory XVI condemned for its philosophical theories.

Louis-François Robert de La Mennais (1717–1804), his paternal grandfather, was the founder of the “Compagnie commerciale et maritime” in Saint-Malo.

Félicité was one of the five children of Pierre-Louis Robert, sieur de La Menais and of Gatienne Lorin, who died in 1787 when he was five years old, so that 'he was brought up by one of his uncles.

[citation needed] Lamennais was born at Saint-Malo in the ancient Province of Brittany on 19 June 1782, the son of a wealthy merchant who had recently received a coat of arms from the king.

He lost his mother at the age of five and as a result, he and his brother, Jean-Marie, were sent for education to an uncle, Robert des Saudrais at La Chênaie, an estate near Saint-Malo.

Resistant to any kind of discipline, his uncle would lock him in the library where he spent long hours reading Rousseau and Pascal, among others, and acquired a vast and varied learning.

[1] Lamennais devoted most of the following year to translating Louis de Blois's Speculum Monachorum into French, which he published in 1809 under the title Le Guide spirituel.

[2] In 1811 Lamennais received the tonsure and became professor of mathematics in an ecclesiastical college at Saint-Malo founded by his brother, who had been ordained a Catholic priest in 1804.

[2] When the school was closed by imperial authority the following year, Félicité withdrew to La Chênaie, while his brother became vicar-general of the diocese of Saint-Brieuc.

He contended that private judgment, introduced by Martin Luther into religion, by Descartes and Leibniz into philosophy and science, and by Rousseau and the Encyclopedists into politics, had resulted in practical atheism and spiritual death.

He asserted that ecclesiastical authority, founded on the absolute revelation delivered to the Jewish people, but supported by the universal tradition of all nations, was the sole hope of regenerating the European communities.

[5] According to Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman before the full consistory he said that Lamennais was " a distinguished writer, whose works had not only rendered eminent services to religion, but rejoiced and astonished Europe."

Various other minor works, together with De la religion considérée dans ses rapports avec l'ordre civil et politique (1825–1826) kept his name before the public.

He espoused ultramontanism and aimed to create an organized body of opinion to campaign against Gallicanism, the control and influence of the state in church matters.

Bury suggests that Lamennais and his associates found inspiration in a Belgian Liberal Catholic movement centered in Malines and led by Archbishop de Méan's vicar-general, Engelbert Sterckx.

Lamennais founded L'Ami de l'ordre (precursor of L'Avenir) the first issue of which appeared on 16 October 1830, with the motto "God and Liberty."

The paper was aggressively democratic, demanding rights of local administration, an enlarged suffrage, separation of church and state, universal freedom of conscience, instruction, assembly, and the press.

[8] A few days later they received a letter from Cardinal Pacca, advising their departure from Rome and suggesting that the Holy See, while admitting the justice of their intentions, would like the matter left open for the present.

[5] Gregory thought the Polish revolutionaries were seeking to undermine Russian Tsar Nicholas I's efforts to support the Catholic royalist cause in France by forcing him to divert his troops to suppress the uprising in Poland.

In May 1834, Lamennais penned Paroles d'un croyant, or Words of a Believer (1834), a collection of aphorisms that denounced the established social order—what he called the conspiracy of kings and priests against the people—and declared his rupture with the Church.

In the encyclical Singulari nos of 25 June 1834, Pope Gregory XVI condemned the book as "small in size, [but] enormous in wickedness"[10] and censured Lamennais' philosophical system.

He died in Paris in 1854 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in a common grave,[14] without funeral rites, mourned by political and literary admirers.