ministerialists as the least unreasonable of his party, and by the “ultras” as the safest of their leaders. Under the electoral law of 1817 the Abbé Grégoire, who was popularly supposed to have voted for the death of Louis XVI. in the Convention, was admitted to the Chamber of Deputies. The Conservative party gained strength from the alarm raised by this incident and still more from the shock caused by the assassination of the duc de Berri. The duc de Richelieu was compelled to admit to the cabinet two of the chiefs of the Left, Villèle and Corbière. Villèle resigned within a year, but on the fall of Richelieu at the end of 1821 he became the real chief of the new cabinet, in which he was minister of finance. Although not himself a courtier, he was backed at court by Sosthènes de la Rochefoucauld and Madame du Cayla, and in 1822 Louis XVIII. gave him the title of count and made him formally prime minister. He immediately proceeded to muzzle opposition by stringent press laws, and the discovery of minor liberal conspiracies afforded an excuse for further repression. Forced against his will into interference in Spain by Mathieu de Montmorency and Chateaubriand, he contrived to reap some credit for the monarchy from the successful campaign of 1823. Meanwhile he had consolidated the royal power by persuading Louis XVIII. to swamp the liberal majority in the upper house by the nomination of twenty-seven new peers; he availed himself of the temporary popularity of the monarchy after the Spanish campaign to summon a new Chamber of Deputies. This new and obedient legislature, to which only nineteen liberals were returned, made itself into a septennial parliament, thus providing time, it was thought, to restore some part of the ancien régime. Villèle’s plans were assisted by the death of Louis XVIII. and the accession of his bigoted brother. Prudent financial administration since 1815 had made possible the conversion of the state bonds from 5 to 4%. It was proposed to utilize the money set free by this operation to indemnify by a milliard francs the emigrés for the loss of their lands at the Revolution; it was also proposed to restore their former privileges to the religious congregations. Both these propositions were, with some restrictions, secured. Sacrilege was made a crime punishable by death, and the ministry were preparing a law to alter the law of equal inheritance, and thus create anew the great estates. These measures roused violent opposition in the country, which a new and stringent press law, nicknamed the “law of justice and love,” failed to put down. The peers rejected the law of inheritance and the press law; it was found necessary to disband the National Guard; and in November 1827 seventy-six new peers were created, and recourse was had to a general election. The new Chamber proved hostile to Villèle, who resigned to make way for the short-lived moderate ministry of Martignac.
The new ministry made Villèle’s removal to the upper house a condition of taking office, and he took no further part in public affairs. At the time of his death, on the 13th of March 1854, he had advanced as far as 1816 with his memoirs, which were completed from his correspondence by his family as Mémoires et correspondance du comte de Villèle (Paris, 5 vols., 1887–90).
See also C. de Mazade, L’Opposition royaliste (Paris, 1894); J. G. Hyde de Neuville. Notice sur le comte de Villèle (Paris, 1899); and M. Chotard, “L’Œuvre financière de M. de Villèle,” in Annales des sciences politiques (vol. v., 1890).
VILLEMAIN, ABEL FRANÇOIS (1790–1867), French politician and man of letters, was born in Paris on the 9th of June 1790. He was educated at the lycée Louis-le-Grand, and became assistant master at the lycée Charlemagne, and subsequently at the École Normale. In 1812 he gained a prize from the Academy with an éloge on Montaigne. Under the restoration he was appointed, first, assistant professor of modern history, and then professor of French eloquence at the Sorbonne. Here he delivered a series of literary lectures which had an extraordinary effect on his younger contemporaries. Villemain had the great advantage of coming just before the Romantic movement, of having a wide and catholic love of literature without being an extremist. All, or almost all, the clever young men of the brilliant generation of 1830 passed under his influence; and, while he pleased the Romanticists by his frank appreciation of the beauties of English, German, Italian and Spanish poetry, he had not the least inclination to decry the classics—either the classics proper of Greece and Rome or the so-called classics of France. In 1819 he published a book on Cromwell, and two years later he was elected to the Academy. Villemain was appointed by the restoration government “chef de l’imprimerie et de la librairie,” a post involving a kind of irregular censorship of the press, and afterwards to the office of master of requests. Before the revolution of July he had been deprived of his office for his liberal tendencies, and had been elected deputy for Évreux. Under Louis Philippe he received a peerage in 1832. He was a member of the council of public instruction, and was twice minister of that department, and he also became secretary of the Academy. During the whole of the July monarchy he was thus one of the chief dispensers of literary patronage in France, but in his later years his reputation declined. He died in Paris on the 8th of May 1867.
Villemain's chief work is his Cours de la littérature française (5 vols., 1828-29). Among his other works are: Tableau de la littérature du moyen âge (2 vols., 1846); Tableau de la littérature au XVIIIe siècle (4 vols., 1864); Souvenirs contemporains (2 vols., 1856); Histoire de Grégoire VII. (2 vols., 1873; Eng. trans., 1874).
Among notices on Villemain may be cited that of Louis de Loménie (1841), E. Mirecourt (1858), J. L. Dubut (1875). See also Sainte-Beuve, Portraits (1841, vol. iii.), and Causeries du lundi (vol. xi. “Notes et pensées”).
VILLENA, ENRIQUE DE (1384–1434), Spanish author, was born in 1384. Through his grandfather, Alphonso de Aragon, count de Denia y Ribagorza, he traced his descent from Jaime II. of Aragon and Blanche of Naples. He is commonly known as the marquess de Viilena; but, although a marquessate was at one time in the family, the title was revoked and annulled by Henry III. Villena’s father, Don Pedro de Villena, was killed at Aljubarrota; the boy was educated by his grandfather, showed great capacity for learning and was reputed to be a wizard. About 1402 he married Maria de Albornoz, señora del Infantado, who speedily became the recognized mistress of Henry III.; the complaisant husband was rewarded by being appointed master of the military order of Calatrava in 1404, but on the death of Henry at the end of 1406 the knights of the order refused to accept the nomination, which, after a long contest, was rescinded in 1415. He was present at the coronation of Ferdinand of Aragon at Saragossa in 1414, retired to Valencia till 1417, when he moved to Castile to claim compensation for the loss of his mastership. He obtained in return the lordship (señorio) of Miesta, and, conscious of his unsuitability for warfare or political life, dedicated himself to literature. He died of fever at Madrid on the 15th of December 1434. He is represented by a fragment of his Arte de trobar (1414), an indigestible treatise composed for the Barcelona Consistory of Gay Science; by Los Trabajos de Hércules (1417), a pedantic and unreadable allegory; by his Tratado de la Consolación and his handbook to the pleasures and fashions of the table, the Arte cisoria, both written in 1423; by a commentary on Psalm viii. ver. 4, which dates from 1424; by the Libro de Aojamiento (1425), a ponderous dissertation on the evil eye and its effects; and by a translation of the Aeneid, the first ever made, which was finished on the 10th of October 1428. His treatise on leprosy exists but has not been published. Villena's writings do not justify his extraordinary fame; his subjects are devoid of charm, and his style is so uncouth as to be almost unintelligible. Yet he has an assured place in the history of Spanish literature; he was a generous patron of letters, his translation of Virgil marks him out as a pioneer of the Renaissance, and he set a splendid example of intellectual curiosity. Moreover, there is an abiding dramatic interest in the baffling personality of the solitary high-born student whom Lope de Vega introduces in Porfiar hasta morir, whom Ruiz de Alarcón presents in La Cueva de Salamanca, and who reappears in the
