Not yet in English
No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1841 · French original
Rome et Lorette
by Louis Veuillot
Veuillot travelled 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 convert behind the argument
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.
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?
- We have not found a public-domain English edition. The French original is freely available at Archive.org.
A note on the text. Rome et Lorette is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Frenchoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.