BERRYER
517
BERRYER
bishops of France, by the superiors of the society,
by the Sorbonne, and by the Parliament of Paris.
The first part was put on the Index, 27 May, 1732;
the second part, 3 December, 1754. and by a Brief of
Benedict XIV, 17 February. 1758; the third part
24 April, 1758, and by a Brief of Clement XIII,
2 December. 1758. (See " Index Librorum Pro-
hibitorum", Rome. 1900. 62). A corrected edition
of the first part, approved by the Roman censors,
was pubUshed at Besancjon in 1828.
SoMMEHVOGEL, BM. de la c. de J.. I. 1357; De Backer. BM. ie« ecrivaim de la c. de J., III. 144; HrRTER. Xomendalor Literarius, II, 1350.
Joseph M. Woods.
Berryer, Pierre-Axtoixe, French advocate, orator, and statesman, son of Pierre-Nicolas Berrj'er, an advocate, b. at Paris, 4 January, 1790; d. at Auger- ville. 29 November, 1868. A pupil of the College de Juillv, which the Oratorians had reopened in 1796, Berrj-er, after ha\'ing believed himself favoured with an ecclesiastical vocation, eventually con- secrated himself to the forensic career. "Lea\nng college to the sound of the artillery of Jena", he dis- played his Bonapartist sentiments in certain verses upon Marie Louise which he -nTOte in 1810; but eight- een months' study of the reports of the Constituent Assembly, under the guidance of Bonnemant, a for- mer member of that assembly, made a monarchist of Berrj'er, in 1812, and a monarchist he remained to the end of his days. He always maintained the prin- ciple that "the king is not the head of a party": he took the view that France was not antagonistic to ^he king personally, or to the king's right, but to the monarchist party, and it was always Berrj'er's idio- syncrasy to be independent with respect to that party. He distinguished himself at the beginning of the Restoration by assisting his father and the elder Dupin in the defence of Marshal Ney and by his own defence of two generals, Debelle and Cambronne, compromised in the Hundred Days. Debelle, con- demned to death, had his punishment commuted to ten years' imprisonment, after an application made by Berrv'er to the Due d'Angouleme; Cambronne was acquitted, and Berryer, accused of ha%-ing in his speech for the defence, maintained the right of in- surrection, defended himself victoriously. In 1818 he defended General Canuel, and in 1820 General Donnadievi, both charged with exaggerating the im- portance of the Lyons and Grenoble risings, which they had suppressed. These interventions of Berryer ivere verj' displeasing to the Decazes ministry; but the young advocate, ha\-ing thus combated the spirit of reprisals against the old Napoleonic army, which the Restoration was developing, next directed his energies to opposing a certain shade of liberalism n-hich seemed to him dangerous to monarchical prin- iples. In 1830, in order to supply the property qualification needed to legalize his election as Deputy for the Department of Haute-Loire, his friends pur-
- hased for him the estate of Anger\-ille, in Loiret.
His first parliamentary speech (9 March. 1830) was In defence of the C^ow^l and tie Polignac Ministry igainst the address of the two hundred and tw'enty- ane, which he considered seditious. On hearing this speech Royer-Collard remarked, "There is a Power" (Vnila une puiaxnnce).
Under the July Monarchy Berrj'er was one of the most fortnidable members of the opposition. After vainly endea\-ouring to dissuade the Duchesse de Berri from her insurrectionary enterprise, he was limself arrested as an accomplice, but was acquitted by the jury. He then entered upon a campaign for the liberation of the duchess, and defended Chateau- briand against the charge of complicity. Returned ■jy various constituencies in successive general elections he was the idol of both Legitimists and Republicans. His political life interfered so much II —33
with his law practice that in order to live he v/as
obliged to sell his estate of Angerville; Legitimists
and Republicans united, in 1836, to buy it back
for him. He continued to advocate every measure
calculated to limit the arbitrary power of the central
government — jury trials for press offences, nomina-
tion of mayors by the communes, abolition of the
property qualification. The speech was long famous
with which, in 1834, he defeated the treaty according
to the United States tardy compensation for vessels
confiscated by Napoleon. He was of counsel for the
defence in the case of Louis Bonaparte's Boulogne
attempt, in 1840; defended the Republican Ledru-
Rollin in 1841, in a series of four addresses to the
Chamber; in 1844 gloried in the " Belgrave Square
Pilgrimage" which, with four other Legitimists, he
had made to the Comte de Chambord. Elected by
the Department of Bouches-du-Rhone to the Con-
stituent Assembly of 1848. and to the Legislative of
1849, Berrj'er voted with the Right, but without sup-
porting any of the intrigues of Louis Bonaparte.
After the 2d of December 1851, he returned to his
practice at the Bar. Montalembert, prosecuted in
1858 for an article suspected of advocating for France
the liberties of England, had Berrj'er for his advocate.
Monarchist to the end, he exerted himself as a private
individual to reconcile the Houses of Bourbon and
Orleans. In 1863 he was chosen to represent the
Bouches-du-Rhone, sat with the opposition, and
sharply attacked the Mexican war policy of the Im-
perial Government.
The Academj' received Berryer in 1855; on the 20th of December, 1861, the fiftieth anniversary of his call to the Bar, all the advocates of France imited in honouring him with a splendid banquet. Only a few days before his death, he wTOte to the Comte de Cham- bord a letter which is an admirable testament of the Monarchist faith. Berrj-er was a life-long defender of religious liberty. He was the first to make clear (in his articles on the Galilean Church in the "Quoti- dienne") the changes wTought by the Revolution in the relations between Church and State; he showed that what the State called "Gallican liberties" repre- sented henceforth only a right to oppress the Church. In 1846 and 1847, in two letters to Bishop Faj'et of Orleans, he urged Catholics to take their stand on the common ground of liberty. It was in this spirit that, in 1826, he had pleaded for Lamennais, who had accused the Gallican Church of atheism, and that, in 1828, he wTote against the Martignac ordinances on the episcopal schools (petits seminaires). In 1831 he spoke against the re-establisliment of divorce; in 1833 against the project of Portalis tending to state recognition of marriages bj' priests. His reply to M. Thiers. 3 March, 1845, on the Jesuits, remains, saj's M. Thureau-Dangin, "a sovereign, definitive refuta- tion of all those who, then or since, have pretended to invoke against the religious orders the old laws of proscription". Berrj-er defended the religious asso- ciations with all the more authoritj' because, in that same j'ear, pleading for three carpenters who had combined to secure a suspension of work, he formally asserted the right of labour to combine (droit de coalition ouvribre), which right French law was not to recognize until 1863. He gained great popularitj' among the labouring classes when he compared the restrictions imposed on them with the toleration accorded to "coalitions formed in other spheres of society, with the aim of securing not a wage-increase of 10 centimes, but an enormous advantage for opera- tions involving hundreds of millions"'. Liberty of a.s!sociation for all; respect by the State for the au- tonomy of the Church — such was the principle from which he never wavered, and in the name of which he brought about, in 1850, the defeat of Jules Favre's project which would have compelled the Church to re-establish the non-amovabilitj' of certain membeis
