page_title: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet / Biography / Early years
context_page_description: Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet was a French bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist.
  Court preacher to Louis XIV of France, Bossuet was a strong advocate of political absolutism and the divine right of kings. He argued that government was divinely ordained and that kings received sovereign power from God. He was also an important courtier and politician.
  The works best known to English speakers are three great orations delivered at the funerals of Queen Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I of England, her daughter Henriette, Duchess of Orléans, and the outstanding military commander le Grand Condé.
  His work Discours sur l'histoire universelle is regarded by many Catholics as an actualization or new version of the City of God of St. Augustine of Hippo.
context_section_description: Bossuet was born at Dijon. He came from a family of prosperous Burgundian lawyers – on both his paternal and maternal side, his ancestors had held legal posts for at least a century.  He was the fifth son born to Beneigne Bossuet, a judge of the parlement (a provincial high court) at Dijon, and Marguerite Mouchet. His parents decided on a career in the church for their fifth son, so he was tonsured at age eight.
  The boy was sent to school at the Collège des Godrans, a classical school run by the Jesuits of Dijon.  When his father was appointed to the parlement at Metz, Bossuet was left in Dijon under the care of his uncle Claude Bossuet d'Aiseray, a renowned scholar.  At the Collège des Godrans, he gained a reputation for hard work: fellow students nicknamed him Bos suetus aratro, an "ox broken in to the plough".  His father's influence at Metz allowed him to obtain for the young Bossuet a canonicate in the cathedral of Metz when the boy was just 13 years old.
  In 1642, Bossuet enrolled in the Collège de Navarre in Paris to finish his classical studies and to begin the study of philosophy and theology. His mentor at Navarre was the college's president, Nicolas Cornet, the theologian whose denunciation of Antoine Arnauld at the Sorbonne in 1649 was a major episode in the Jansenist controversy.
  For the time being, however, Cornet and Arnaud were still on good terms.  In 1643, Arnaud introduced Bossuet to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, a great centre of aristocratic culture and the original home of the Précieuses. Bossuet was already showing signs of the oratorical brilliance which served him so well throughout his life.  On one celebrated occasion at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, during a dispute about extempore preaching, the 16-year-old Bossuet was called on to deliver an impromptu sermon at 11 pm.  Voiture famously quipped: "I never heard anybody preach so early nor so late".
caption: St. Etienne's Cathedral in Metz, where Bossuet was made a canon at age 13 in 1640
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