Frederic Ozanam was placed in a lawyer’s office at Lyons, where he remained one year, employing all his leisure time in linguistic and literary studies. Before completing his nineteenth year he was sent to study at the great Law-School of Paris, where he remained six years, after which, at the age of twenty-five, he was admitted to the bar and to the degree of Doctor in Letters, taking the next year his degree of Doctor of Laws. Ozanam had studied well his jurisprudence, and was perfectly competent to practise his profession, or even to hold a chair as professor in a law-school. This was not, however, his vocation, and he had little taste or inclination for such a life. His legal career was, therefore, very brief and only an episode in his life. In respect to his true vocation he had many doubts and anxieties. He was extremely averse to the thought of marriage, and, being so fervently religious, he naturally felt certain predispositions toward the sacerdotal or monastic state. He visited the Grande Chartreuse, corresponded with his friend Lacordaire, and held many consultations with his director. The final result was that he chose the profession of literature, and married, with the full and hearty approbation of his friend and counsellor, the Abbé Noirot. His chief end in choosing his profession was the advancement of the cause of religion and the church; and the generous aspirations, directed by the most elevated and enlightened views, which developed into so glorious and successful, albeit in time so brief a fulfilment, already preoccupied his mind and heart from the time that he was seventeen years old.
In point of fact, he had really found his vocation at that time, and,
notwithstanding his apparent divergence to the legal profession and his various waverings of purpose, he actually began to prosecute it steadily by his studies and by such active efforts as his age and condition permitted, from that early but prematurely ripe period of his life. The programme of his studies and literary labors is laid down in a letter to a friend, written when he was seventeen years old. Without neglecting his professional studies, he was able, thanks to his wonderful mental gifts, his retentive memory, and his habits of intense, continuous application, as well as to the definiteness and unity of the scope and plan which he followed, to acquire that solid and accurate erudition which furnished the material fused and moulded into such beautiful forms by the fire of his eloquence and the constructive art of his imagination.
The state of things among men of science and letters, and the youth studying at the great schools, when Frederic Ozanam went to Paris, was, in a religious aspect, most dreary. His father had feared to send him there on account of the infidelity and immorality with which the whole atmosphere was poisoned, but had at last resolved to trust to the firmness of his principles and the purity of his character. His trust was fully justified. During his student-life Ozanam began, in concert with a few other young men like-minded with himself, that counter-revolution or crusade for the restoration of the old religion of France, among the young students and also among the working-men of Paris, which we devoutly trust will end in the fulfilment of De Maistre’s prophecy that within this present century France will be once again completely Christianized.
There is nothing more melancholy in all history, after the apostasy of Juda from the standard of her Lion, than the lapse of France from her fidelity to the cross and to the vows of that national baptism in the deepest, purest waters of Catholicity, from which she derived her life, her strength, and her unparalleled glory in Christendom. It is like the fall of Solomon, so beautiful, so wise, so royal in magnanimity and splendor, so favored of God, so renowned as the builder of the Temple and the palaces of Sion, degrading those later years which ought to have been crowned with a venerable majesty by turning his heart to strange women and to the abominations of the heathen. It is a grief almost without consolation, and accompanied by surprise and indignation, that a people like that of France, and especially its intelligent and educated portion, living amid the monumental glories of their Catholic history, could be insensible to their own honor, mock at all which makes their nation venerable, destroy the noble work of their ancestors, and, like the Israelites defiling themselves with the base heathen of Chanaan, turn away to the worship of the fetich of the Revolution. How much more deeply must the bosoms of those Frenchmen who are not degenerate be stirred by such emotions! There were always among the sons of Israel of old elect souls, the true children of the promise, such as Joseph, Gideon, Samuel, David, Isaias, Daniel, Judas Machabeus, who burned with zeal and holy enthusiasm for the cause of the God of their fathers; and they never ceased to rise up when they were most needed until the final apostasy of the nation. The people of France have never apostatized from Christ
as a body, although a great multitude of apostates have deserted the faith and loyalty of their ancestors, and the revolution which they stirred up under the traitorous banner of Voltaire, “the wickedest, the meanest, and the most unpatriotic Frenchman of the last century,”[149] has swayed to a great extent the politics and education of France for a hundred years. Paris has gone far beyond France in this road of apostasy, but even there impiety has never gained a complete and lasting conquest. On the contrary, martyrdom, heroic charity, and intellectual valor in the sacred cause have made it their most illustrious palestra, and, we trust, have expiated the guilt of that peerless city, and averted the doom which would seem to await it if the divine justice should exact the due meed of retribution.
Among the élite of the youth of France, the class most immediately and universally exposed to the deadly influence of impious literature and education and withdrawn from the control of the clergy, gifted and pure souls have arisen, filled with the inspiration of genius and religion, like Daniel and his companions in the captivity, who have escaped the violence of fire and stopped the mouths of lions. First among these is Chateaubriand, who in his old age honored Frederic Ozanam with his special friendship and was loved reverently by him in return. Notwithstanding a short period of defection from the faith, and considerable faults in his character and writings, Chateaubriand deserves to be called the father of the new generation of Catholic youth in France. There is no similar autobiography of more exquisite
charm than the history of that childhood and youth in which this great man shows us how he was trained and formed to that peculiar type of genius which so captivated, and to a great extent re-formed in a Catholic mould, the intellectual and imaginative youth of France. Lamartine deserves a considerable meed of recognition, also, for services of the same general nature, though he was far less true and constant to his first loyalty. Victor Hugo promised in the beginning to devote a genius of a much higher order than either of these two eminent men possessed to the true welfare of his country and mankind, but unhappily was seduced by the fell spirit of the Revolution. Even he shows a reaction from the unmitigated, fanatical hatred of the Catholic past of France and Christendom which animates the worst section of the anti-Catholic sect. The moderates or liberals, the men of compromise between the revolutionary section and some kind of vague natural religion or philosophy under a spiritual or semi-Christian semblance, who have had the predominance at Paris in government, education, and the general leadership of the public affairs of France, since the time of the First Empire, have also belonged to a half-way party, in which the effect of resurging Catholicity is visible. They have been allied with the outside row of Catholics, who were either only nominally such, or, if really, inconsistent and weak in their allegiance to the church. Their position presented, therefore, a much weaker and more easily assailable front to Catholic aggression than one more extreme and openly revolutionary would have done. Nevertheless, the young world of Paris students were as effectually, and more quietly
and irresistibly, alienated from real faith in the religion of their baptism, and every principle or duty of practical Christian morals and piety, by their utterly secular and free-thinking education in the public schools, so long as no counter-influence was brought to bear upon them, as if the Catholic religion had been proscribed by penal laws. It was possible, however, to bring this influence to bear upon them. The liberty granted to indifferentism, infidelity, and atheism might be made use of to the advantage of Catholicity. In the schools where free thought and free expression were a law, the possessors might be invaded and overthrown by intellectual and moral weapons, if there were found aggressors able to wield them and bold enough to enter the arena. On such a battle-ground, where the field is in the domain of history and philosophy, where reason is umpire, and where facts and arguments, eloquence and logic, appeals to the intellect and the heart, the lessons of the past and the examples of those men to whom the verdict of time—the most impartial of judges—has decreed an apotheosis, are the arsenal of the combatants, the Catholic cause must win, if its champions are worthy of their cause.
When Frederic Ozanam came to Paris the other side had the field to themselves, like the challengers of Ashby-de-la-Zouche on the morning of the tournament, before the young Ivanhoe rode into the lists. The venerable Sorbonne, that ancient shrine of sacred learning, had become a theatre, where shallow, rationalistic philosophers like Jouffroy declaimed against revelation and the Catholic Church. Ozanam soon found a small number of resolute, high-spirited young men like himself, who had been well trained