Rhine and in Italy secured the favourable terms of the treaty of Vienna (1735–1738). France had joined with the other powers in guaranteeing the succession of Maria Theresa under the Pragmatic sanction, but on the death of Charles VI. in 1740 Fleury by a diplomatic quibble found an excuse for repudiating his engagements, when he found the party of war supreme in the king’s counsels. After the disasters of the Bohemian campaign he wrote in confidence a humble letter to the Austrian general Königsegg, who immediately published it. Fleury disavowed his own letter, and died a few days after the French evacuation of Prague on the 29th of January 1743. He had enriched the royal library by many valuable oriental MSS., and was a member of the French Academy, of the Academy of Science, and the Academy of Inscriptions.
Bibliography.—F. J. Bataille, Éloge historique de M. le Cardinal A. H. de Fleury (Strassburg, 1737); C. Frey de Neuville, Oraison funèbre de S. E. Mgr. le Cardinal A. H. Fleury (Paris, 1743); P. Vicaire, Oraison funèbre du Cardinal A. H. de Fleury (Caen, 1743); M. van Hoey, Lettres et négotiations pour servir à l’histoire de la vie du Cardinal de Fleury (London, 1743); Leben des Cardinals A. H. Fleury (Freiburg, 1743); F. Morénas, Parallèle du ministère du Cardinal Richelieu et du Cardinal de Fleury (Avignon, 1743); Nachrichten von dem Leben und der Verwaltung des Cardinals Fleury (Hamburg, 1744).
FLEURY, CLAUDE (1640–1723), French ecclesiastical historian,
was born at Paris on the 6th of December 1640. Destined for
the bar, he was educated at the aristocratic college of Clermont
(now that of Louis-le-Grand). In 1658 he was nominated an
advocate to the parlement of Paris, and for nine years followed
the legal profession. But he had long been of a religious disposition,
and in 1667 turned from law to theology. He had been
some time in orders when Louis XIV., in 1672, selected him as
tutor of the princes of Conti, with such success that the king
next entrusted to him the education of the count of Vermandois,
one of his natural sons, on whose death in 1683 Fleury received
for his services the Cistercian abbey of Loc-Dieu, in the diocese
of Rhodez. In 1689 he was appointed sub-preceptor of the dukes
of Burgundy, of Anjou, and of Berry, and thus became intimately
associated with Fénelon, their chief tutor. In 1696 he was
elected to fill the place of La Bruyère in the French Academy;
and on the completion of the education of the young princes
the king bestowed upon him the rich priory of Argenteuil, in the
diocese of Paris (1706). On assuming this benefice he resigned,
with rare disinterestedness, that of the abbey of Loc-Dieu.
About this time he began his great work, the first of the kind in
France, and one for which he had been collecting materials
for thirty years—the Histoire ecclésiastique. Fleury’s evident
intention was to write a history of the church for all classes of
society; but at the time in which his great work appeared it
was less religion than theology that absorbed the attention of
the clergy and the educated public; and his work accordingly
appealed to the student rather than to the popular reader,
dwelling as it does very particularly on questions of doctrine,
of discipline, of supremacy, and of rivalry between the priesthood
and the imperial power. Nevertheless it had a great success.
The first edition, printed at Paris in 20 volumes 4to, 1691, was
followed by many others, among which may be mentioned that
of Brussels, in 32 vols. 8vo, 1692, and that of Nismes, in 25 vols.
8vo, 1778 to 1780. The work of Fleury only comes down to the
year 1414. It was continued by J. Claude Fabre and Goujet
down to 1595, in 16 vols. 4to. In consulting the work of Fleury
and its supplement, the general table of contents, published
by Rondel, Paris, 1758, 1 vol. 4to, will be found very useful.
Translations have been made of the entire work into Latin,
German and Italian. The Latin translation, published at
Augsburg, 1758–1759, 85 vols. 8vo, carries the work down to
1684. Fleury, who had been appointed confessor to the young
king Louis XV. in 1716, because, as the duke of Orleans said,
he was neither Jansenist nor Molinist, nor Ultramontanist, but
Catholic, died on the 14th of July 1723. His great learning was
equalled by the modest simplicity of his life and the uprightness
of his conduct.
Fleury left many works besides his Histoire ecclésiastique. The following deserve special mention:—Histoire du droit françois (1674, 12mo); Mœurs des Israélites (1681, 12mo); Mœurs des Chrétiens (1682, 12mo); Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (1686, 2 vols. 12mo); Les Devoirs des maîtres et des domestiques (1688, 12mo). A number of the smaller works were published in one volume at Paris in 1807. The Roman Congregation of the Index condemned his Catéchisme historique (1679) and the Institution du droit ecclésiastique (1687).
See C. Ernst Simonetti, Der Character eines Geschichtsschreibers in dem Leben und aus den Schriften des Abts C. Fleury (Göttingen, 1746, 4to); C. F. P. Jaeger, Notice sur C. Fleury, considéré comme historien de l’église (Strassburg, 1847, 8vo); Reichlin-Meldegg, Geschichte des Christentums, i.
FLIEDNER, THEODOR (1800–1864), German Protestant divine, was born on the 21st of January 1800 at Epstein (near Wiesbaden), the small village in which his father was pastor. He studied theology at the universities of Giessen and Göttingen, and at the theological seminary of Herborn, and at the age of twenty he passed his final examination. After a year spent in teaching and preaching, in 1821 he accepted a call from the Protestant church at Kaiserswerth, a little town on the Rhine, a few miles below Düsseldorf. To help his people and to provide an endowment for his church, he undertook journeys in 1822 through part of Germany, and then in 1823 to Holland and England. He met with considerable success, and had opportunities of observing what was being done towards prison reform; in England he made the acquaintance of the philanthropist Elizabeth Fry. The German prisons were then in a very bad state. The prisoners were huddled together in dirty rooms, badly fed, and left in complete idleness. No one dreamed of instructing them, or of collecting statistics to form the basis of useful legislation on the subject. Fliedner, at first singly, undertook the work. He applied for permission to be imprisoned for some time, in order that he might look at prison life from the inside. This petition was refused, but he was allowed to hold fortnightly services in the Düsseldorf prison, and to visit the inmates individually. Those interested in the subject banded themselves together, and on the 18th of June 1826 the first Prison Society of Germany (Rheinisch-Westfälischer Gefängnisverein) was founded. In 1833 Fliedner opened in his own parsonage garden at Kaiserswerth a refuge for discharged female convicts. His circle of practical philanthropy rapidly increased. The state of the sick poor had for some time excited his interest, and it seemed to him that hospitals might be best served by an organized body of specially trained women. Accordingly in 1836 he began the first deaconess house, and the hospital at Kaiserswerth. By their ordination vows the deaconesses devoted themselves to the care of the poor, the sick and the young; but their engagements were not final—they might leave their work and return to ordinary life if they chose. In addition to these institutions Fliedner founded in 1835 an infant school, then a normal school for infant school mistresses (1836), an orphanage for orphan girls of the middle class (1842), and an asylum for female lunatics (1847). Moreover, he assisted at the foundation and in the management of similar institutions, not only in Germany, but in various parts of Europe.
In 1849 he resigned his pastoral charge, and from 1849 to 1851 he travelled over a large part of Europe, America and the East—the object of his journeys being to found “mother houses,” which were to be not merely training schools for deaconesses, but also centres whence other training establishments might arise. He established a deaconess house in Jerusalem, and after his return assisted by counsel and money in the erection of establishments at Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria and Bucharest. Among his later efforts may be mentioned the Christian house of refuge for female servants in Berlin (connected with which other institutions soon arose) and the “house of evening rest” for retired deaconesses at Kaiserswerth. In 1855 Fliedner received the degree of doctor in theology from the university of Bonn, in recognition rather of his practical activity than of his theological attainments. He died on the 4th of October 1864, leaving behind him over 100 stations attended by 430 deaconesses; and these by 1876 had increased to 150 with an attendance of 600.
Fliedner’s son Fritz Fliedner (1845–1901), after studying in Halle and Tübingen, became in 1870 chaplain to the embassy in
