You are one of the greatest writers in France. Your boss, Louis XIV is an egomaniacal religious bigot and a ruthless tyrant—nothing you can do about that. His grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, heir to the throne, is an uncontrollable ruffian who takes after the king.

But you, François Fénelon, born 6 August 1651, have the opportunity to create a better future for France (and prevent future calamity) if, in your new position as Royal Tutor, you can teach the young Duke of Burgundy what it means to be a good and mild king, one who listens to and respects the rights of his subjects.

Just a reminder of who Louis XIV was: Known as “The Sun King” and “Louis the Great,” Louis XIV of France consolidated power in France in his own person and made the nobility subservient to his will, in part by building for himself the most colossal, awe-inspiring castle in the world—the Palace of Versailles—and demanding the nobles live there instead of on their own lands, paying court to him and his whims.

But beneath the glamor Louis was a capricious bully. A century before, Henry IV had issued the Edict of Nantes, with which the Catholic crown of France declared tolerance for the French Protestants (or Huguenots.) But nearly a century later, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and declared that the Huguenots must convert to Catholicism. He send his soldiers into villages to burn and pillage and terrorize the Huguenots into submission.

Francois Fenelon was considered one of the rising stars of the French priesthood and after force proved ineffective, Catholic prelates like himself were sent to minister to the Huguenots and convince them to convert. But Fenelon encountered resistance from the local population to his mission, and privately began to have second thoughts about the justness of his cause, and whether Louis’ ends justified his means. But Fenelon was so highly regarded that he secured a prestigious post as the Archbishop of Combray. Then, to crown his meteoric rise in government and the priesthood, he was given the posting of Royal Tutor and tasked with being the teacher of Louis XIV’s grandson, Louis, the Duke of Burgundy.

This was viewed, however as an impossible task, for the prince was an extremely troubled boy. To get a sense of just how troubled the young Duc was, we need only read this fable that Fenelon wrote for him about Melanthius, a boy who alternately “weeps like a child” and “roars like a lion” when he doesn’t get his way!

(Edit: This screen-cap is kind of hard to read. Here is the page it’s on in Chambers’s essay.)

Along with his direct instruction, Fenelon composed a number of moral fables for the young prince to help reform his character, and Fenelon’s fables were afterwards printed and used for teaching morals to children throughout Europe.

But Fenelon’s instruction involved much more than composing stories for his royal student. This riveting biographical essay about Fenelon by Robert Chambers (he of Chambers’s Cyclopaedia fame) is full of poignant description of how the wise teacher mended the ways of his unruly student.

(Awww … he was “full of genial and all-subduing love.” Love conquers all! You’re gonna make me cry, Robert Chambers … *sniffle*.)

But two circumstances led Fenelon to fall out of favor with Louis XIV: in response to a book by Bossuet—an arch-Catholic and Fenelon’s greatest rival—attacking the French mystic Madame Jeanne Guyon, who Fenelon admired, Fenelon published his Maxims of the Saints, a lofty and highly provocative theological work.

Fenelon’s enemies pounced (including Bossuet) and accused Fenelon of heresy. They pressed their claims with the king and all his courtiers, and even got the Pope and the Inquisition to denounce the book as heretical. Ultimately Fenelon was forced to disclaim the book and its teachings.

The final straw for the king came with anonymous publication of the work for which Fenelon is most famous—The Adventures of Telemachus. This young adult novel, a sequel to the Odyssey, describes a just and ideal king and kingdom; Louis XIV saw in it a satirical attack on himself.

Louis banished Fenelon from the court (he resumed his duties as Bishop of Combray) and the king ordered The Adventures of Telemachus banned; and in yet another example of attempted censorship backfiring spectacularly, this only succeeded in making the book more popular.

Les Aventures de Telemaque was translated and printed all over Europe, and became the most popular book for boys in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It became a favorite book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson. Read it here: (https://t.co/iAwFtYKBSD)

Robert Chambers, in his fantastic essay on Fenelon (you can tell how I’m riveted by how much I’m tweeting), credits Telemachus with exerting “a very great and lasting influence on the thoughts and destinies of nations during the last century.”

Today, I’d say it’s quite obscure.

The young duc de Burgogne ultimately matured. Married at 15, he was admitted into the high council of advisors to the king at age 20. In his essay on Fenelon in his Causeries du Lundi, Sainte-Beuve quotes the memoirist Saint-Simon and notes his contrasting depictions of the young Duke:

That young prince, whom Saint-Simon shows so haughty, so spirited, so terribly passionate at the beginning, so contemptuous to everybody, of whom he was able to say: ‘From a celestial height he looked down upon men as mere atoms, with whom he had nothing in common, whoever they might be; even his brothers hardly appeared intermediary between himself and the human race’; this same prince, at a certain moment, is modified and transformed, becomes quite another man, pious, humane, charitable as well as enlightened, attentive to his duties, quite awake to his responsibilities as future king, and this heir of Louis XIV dares to utter, in the very drawing-room at Marly, these words which are capable of making the roof fall: ‘that a king is made for his subjects, and not the subjects for him.’

Though he allows that other advisors may have helped influence the Duke in this direction, but after making allowances “to the mysterious and invisible operation of the spirit, even to what they call grace,” and to his subsequent teachers, “to whom can we give a large share [of credit] than to Fenelon?” And so in the early years of the 18th century, the Duke was though of as the head of the so-called Burgundy faction in the French court (which included Fenelon) which wanted a more decentralized monarchy. In 1711, after the Duke’s father died, and he became the first in the line of succession, Fenelon briefly became the most consulted man in France.

But it was not to be. In quick succession, the duke, his wife, his father, and his eldest son all contracted a fever and died. Sainte-Beuve quote’s Fenelon’s reaction in a letter thus:

I suffer, God knows; but I did not fall ill, and that is much for me. Your heart, which sympathizes with mine, comforts it. I should have been keenly painted to see you here; think of your poor health; it seems to me that all I love is dying.

Though France briefly seemed like it might be through with absolute monarchy, when Louis XV came of age in 1718 the absolute monarchy was restored. Fenelon’s dream of a more open and tolerant France was shattered and within a few years he too passed away, in 1715.

The memoirist Saint-Simon has given this description of Fenelon, which Sainte-Beuve gives:

This prelate, he says, was a tall, thin man, a good figure, pale, with a large nose, eyes from which fire and intellect gushed like a torrent, and a physiognomy the like of which I have not seen, and which one could not forget though one had seen it only once. It combined everything, and opposites did not struggle upon it. It had gravity and gallantry, seriousness and gaiety; it suggested equally the man of learning, the bishop and the grand seigneur, and what was uppermost in his face, as in his whole person, was shrewdness, wit, grace, modesty, and above all nobility. It required an effort to cease looking at him.

Sainte-Beuve identifies Fenelon’s biggest weakness as being his at times excessive equanimity and tolerance. He was a man who would rather let things go than engage in a confrontation, a character trait that showed during his conflict with Bossuet (although when you have the pope and the Inquisition ranged against you, not everybody’s so reckless as to go full Martin Luther, come on now!) Another example Sainte-Beuve gives is when La Motte, a man who had translated (“defiled” in Sainte-Beuve’s opinion) Homer, sent a letter seeking Fenelon’s feedback. Sainte-Beuve is fairly outraged by Fenelon’s weak-kneed, mealy-mouthed repl:

The victory undecided between La Motte and Homer! And this is Fenelon, the translator, the continuer of the Odyssey, the father of Telemaque, who speaks thus! Is it possible to carry tolerance so far? Evidently Fenelon had none of that irritability of good sense and reason which makes one replace with a forcible No, that honest and hasty, even a little blunt power, which Despreaux carried into literature, and Bossuet into theology.

Nonetheless, Sainte-Beuve classes Fenelon with La Fontaine as two writers who are impossible not to like.

Take out celebrated authors, you will find in them nobility, power, eloquence, elgance, sublimity in parts; but that indescribable facility which is communicated to all feelings, to all thoughts, and which gains even the reader, that facility mingled with persuasiveness, you will hardly ever find except in Fenelon and La Fontaine.