| Administrative History | The son of a noble family, François Fénelon (François de Salignac de Mothe-Fénelon) was born in Périgord, France, in 1651. He was educated in Paris and became a priest, ordained in 1676. He was appointed to direct a college to teach women who taught converts to Catholicism, and did his best to mitigate the worst excesses of the Huguenot persecutions in the 1680s. He published essays on the education of women, and was appointed in 1689 tutor to the grandson and heir apparent of Louis XIV of France. In order to teach the boy, he wrote fables and allegorical tales to illustrate important points, notably the independence of the church. He was made Bishop of Cambrai in 1695. However, from the late 1680s he had been seeking to espouse Quietist doctrines, and in 1699 was condemned by the Pope and exiled to his diocese. He spent his remaining days in defending the mystical theology to which he had attached himself, and died in Cambrai in 1715. |