Beware of the self-delusion which so often represents a vengeful act as done in self-defence! How usual is it for him who would gratify a feeling of vengeance to say, "I am attacked and must protect myself,"—for him who would profit at his neighbour's expense to say, "I have been injured by another, and must bring myself home,"—for him who would gratify hatred to say, "He has wronged me, and I have cause to dislike him;"—for him who would fly in the face of the public opinion and insult the general feeling to say, "All men scorn me, and I must be at war with the world!" Be assured of this, that it is easier by such sophistries to disarm conscience of her terrors beforehand, than to quiet her after guilt has been incurred from a neglect of her warning voice; and the same power will be found swift and stern to punish in proportion as it has been impotent to deter.
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A far more important defect is that the Americans seem to me deficient in the sense of honour and even of common honesty. They so exclusively direct all their faculties, all their industry, to the bettering of their condition, that they regard all means of succeeding lawful, or at least consider success as covering over the means used, and constituting a set-off to their baseness.
I first encountered a reference to this work in Sixty Years Hence [1847]:
"Even the versatile Lord Brougham (when having purchased at third hand Lord George's stud, he aspired to the sovereignty Lord George had abdicated,) did not succeed in making up a more successful book than his novel of the 'Chateau Lunel, or the Castle of Languedoc' turned out to be.
Earlier in that novel, the author Charles Frederick Henningsen portrays Henry Brougham as converting to Catholicism and becoming a cardinal, an evident jab at the eponymous character of Albert Lunel, who flees monastic life and converts to Protestantism.
The setting is in southern France near Nîmes (spelled "Nismes" in the novel) in the months leading up to the Estates General of 1789, and culminating in the French Revolution. Overall, it is an interesting exercise not only in prose style, but also in repartée, such that I could readily imagine the participation of Oscar Wilde.
Aside from that, the novel is rich in religious and political philosophy, presented from various viewpoints. As Colin D. Pearce states in his essay published in the Journal of the History of Ideas:
Regarding Albert Lunel, I dissent from Robert Stewart's suggestion that Brougham's "subdued version of the anti-Catholic literature" constitutes only "a minor point of (historical) interest" (Henry Brougham 1778-1868: His Public Career [London, 1985], 352). Rather I see it as a valuable source for understanding the political thought of the period. Brougham's "pedagogical" novel was a more "humanistic" supplement to his "lecture-style" treatise entitled Political Philosophy (3 vols.; London, 1842), and it could teach more directly "the sacred doctrines most connected with human happiness—peace and freedom—religion rational as well as pure—morality uncompromising though charitable—benevolence, universal but discriminating" (Albert Lunel, 1:vi).
According to the publishers of the posthumous 1872 edition, as well as the Dictionary of National Biography, the original 1844 edition was not published, and after a "few copies" had been distributed, was suppressed by the author. Nonetheless, scanned copies are available from several libraries, leading me to believe that more than a few made it into circulation (according to one source, 1000 copies had been printed; see Appendix below).
The text is from these scans of volumes I, II, and III of the 1844 edition, backed up by these scans. While nearly all of the original spelling and punctuation are retained, some obsolete and/or inconsistent instances are modernized or standardized. In addition, some contractions such as "I 'll," "you 'll," and " 'T is" are joined. Footnotes are converted to endnotes and numbered accordingly.
So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
January 6, 2025
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When Albert Lunel was posthumously published in 1872, there was some controversy over the authorship. Here is my transcription of an extensive advertisement by the publisher, as well as of a letter written by Brougham to William Forsyth.