Our English translation — made by machine translation with editorial review, not by a scholar. The French text is free and linked below.
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Rome et Lorette
1841 · translated from the French · 336 pages
Rome et Lorette
by Louis Veuillot
Why our edition. In the free French scan at least 1 word in 1013 is damaged — a floor, since we can check the characters but not the words in French. The full French text is public domain and free — linked below.
This English translation is ours — a machine translation with editorial review, not a scholarly translation. The free text linked below is the French original.
On this page: a summary of Rome et Lorette, which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Veuillot traveled to Rome as a young journalist with no religion to speak of and was converted there during Holy Week of 1838. Rome et Lorette is the book he wrote about it — part travel narrative, part conversion account, written in the plain, combative style that would make him the most feared Catholic editor in France. Bracing, and not remotely fair-minded.
The changed life
Veuillot was a self-made provincial journalist, the son of a cooper, indifferent to religion, who went to Rome on a friend’s invitation and made his confession there in 1838. He spent the remaining fifty years of his life as editor of L’Univers, attacking the liberalism and unbelief of the age with a directness that made him enemies inside the church as well as outside it.
Summary
The book is cast as an account of a journey to Rome and to the shrine at Loreto, and Veuillot uses the travel frame to carry the more personal matter. In the preface to the later edition he says he considered rewriting it into something more finished and decided against it, on the grounds that a confidence of this kind loses its value if it looks arranged — that a reader would then see a poet composing a part for himself rather than a Christian telling his brothers what God had done for him.
What follows is the record of a conversion happening in a particular place at a particular moment, with the descriptions of Rome and its ceremonies carrying the weight. It was his first book and it established both his subject and his manner.
Veuillot’s later reputation — as the hammer of liberal Catholicism, adored and detested in roughly equal measure — has tended to obscure this early book, which is the gentlest thing he wrote.
Who was Louis Veuillot?
Louis Veuillot (1813–1883) was a French journalist and editor, born poor in Boynes and largely self-taught, who was working as a provincial newspaperman when a friend persuaded him to visit Rome in 1838. He was converted there.
From 1843 he edited L’Univers, which under him became the most combative Catholic paper in France — ultramontane, hostile to liberalism, and written in a polemical style that even his allies found alarming. Rome et Lorette was his first book, published in 1841.
Which translation of Rome et Lorette is this?
We could find no earlier English edition of this book, in or out of copyright, so we made one: a new translation of all sixty chapters of the thirteenth French edition (Tours, 1869), with the Internet Archive's 1858 copy used throughout as a second witness for damaged readings. The translation was produced by a language model and then reviewed; the edition says so on its first page. The French original is free at Archive.org and at Gallica.
Common questions
- What is Rome et Lorette?
- Louis Veuillot’s first book, published in 1841 — an account of the journey to Rome and Loreto during which he was converted in 1838, written as part travelogue and part conversion narrative.
- Is there an English translation?
- There is now: ours. We could find no earlier one, and no public-domain English edition exists, so we translated the book ourselves from the French — by machine and then reviewed, which the edition discloses. The French original is freely available at Archive.org.
A note on the text. The French text of Rome et Lorette is in the public domain. This English translation is not — it is ours. It was made by machine translation with editorial review, not by a human translator working from scratch. We say so because it is the honest description of what it is, and because it is why this edition costs a fraction of a scholarly translation rather than competing with one. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan shows at least 1.3 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
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