Claude Fleury was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 ecclesiastical historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

.

Destined for the bar, he was educated at the aristocratic College of Clermont (now that of Louis-le-Grand). In 1658 he was nominated an advocate to the parlement

Parlement

Parlements were regional legislative bodies in Ancien Régime France.The political institutions of the Parlement in Ancien Régime France developed out of the previous council of the king, the Conseil du roi or curia regis, and consequently had ancient and customary rights of consultation and...

of Paris, and for nine years followed the legal profession. But he had long been of a religious disposition, and in 1667 turned from law

Law

Law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behavior, wherever possible. It shapes politics, economics and society in numerous ways and serves as a social mediator of relations between people. Contract law regulates everything from buying a bus...

 to theology

Theology

Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...

. He had been some time in orders when Louis XIV

Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

, in 1672, selected him as tutor of the princes of Conti

Conti

-People:* Bill Conti, film music director* Bruno Conti, former football player and member of the Italian national football team in 1982* Carlos Conti , Spanish comic writer* Francesco Bartolomeo Conti , Florentine composer...

, with such success that the king next entrusted to him the education of the count of Vermandois, one of his natural sons, on whose death in 1683 Fleury received for his services the Cistercian abbey of Loc-Dieu, in the diocese of Rodez.

In 1689 he was appointed sub-preceptor of the dukes of Burgundy, of Anjou

Anjou

Anjou is a former county , duchy and province centred on the city of Angers in the lower Loire Valley of western France. It corresponds largely to the present-day département of Maine-et-Loire...

, and of Berry

Berry (province)

Berry is a region located in the center of France. It was a province of France until the provinces were replaced by départements on 4 March 1790....

, and thus became intimately associated with Fénelon

François Fénelon

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, more commonly known as François Fénelon , was a French Roman Catholic archbishop, theologian, poet and writer...

, their chief tutor. In 1696 he was elected to fill the place of La Bruyère

Jean de La Bruyère

Jean de La Bruyère was a French essayist and moralist.-Ancestry:He was born in Paris, not, as was once thought, at Dourdan in 1645...

 in the French Academy

Académie française

L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...

; and on the completion of the education of the young princes the king bestowed upon him the rich priory

Priory

A priory is a house of men or women under religious vows that is headed by a prior or prioress. Priories may be houses of mendicant friars or religious sisters , or monasteries of monks or nuns .The Benedictines and their offshoots , the Premonstratensians, and the...

 of Argenteuil

Argenteuil

Argenteuil is a commune in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris. Argenteuil is a sub-prefecture of the Val-d'Oise department, the seat of the arrondissement of Argenteuil....

, in the diocese of Paris (1706). On assuming this benefice

Benefice

A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...

 he resigned, with rare disinterestedness, that of the abbey of Loc-Dieu.

About this time he began his great work, the first of the kind in France, and one for which he had been collecting materials for thirty years—the Histoire ecclésiastique. 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.

Nevertheless it had a great success. The first edition, printed at Paris in 20 volumes (4to), 1691, was followed by many others, among which may be mentioned that of Brussels, in 32 vols (8vo), 1692, and that of Nîmes, in 25 vols (8vo), 1778 to 1780. The work of Fleury only comes down to the year 1414. It was continued by Jean Claude Fabre and Goujet

Claude Pierre Goujet

Claude Pierre Goujet , French abbé and littérateur, was born in Paris.He studied at the College of the Jesuits, and at the Collège Mazarin, but he nevertheless became a strong Jansenist. In 1705 he assumed the ecclesiastical habit, in 1719 entered the order of Oratorians, and soon afterwards was...

 down to 1595, in 16 vols. (4to). In consulting the work of Fleury and its supplement, the general table of contents, published by Rondel, Paris, 1758, 1 vol. (4to) will be found very useful. Translations have been made of the entire work into Latin, German and Italian. The Latin translation, published at Augsburg, 1758–1759, 85 vols. (8vo), carries the work down to 1684.

Fleury was appointed confessor to the young King Louis XV

Louis XV of France

Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...

 in 1716, because, as the duke of Orleans said, he was neither Jansenist nor Molinist, nor Ultramontanist, but Catholic

Catholic

The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...

. His great learning was equalled by the modest simplicity of his life and the uprightness of his conduct.

Fleury left many works besides his Histoire ecclésiastique. The following deserve special mention:

• Histoire du droit français (1674, 12mo)
• Mœurs des Israelites (1681, 12mo)
• Mœurs des Chrétiens (1682, 12mo)
• Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (1686, 2 vols 12mo)
• Les Devoirs des maîtres et des domestiques (1688, 12mo)

A number of the smaller works were published in one volume at Paris in 1807. The Roman Congregation of the Index

Index Librorum Prohibitorum

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a list of publications prohibited by the Catholic Church. A first version was promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559, and a revised and somewhat relaxed form was authorized at the Council of Trent...

 condemned his Catéchisme historique (1679) and the Institution du droit ecclésiastique (1687).

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.