Fernand Nicolaÿ

Jules-Fernand Nicolaÿ (12 February 1848 – 23 November 1922), was a French lawyer, essayist and lecturer.

Biography

Jules-Fernand Nicolaÿ, the son of a professor of literature from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pierre-Louis-Émile Nicolaÿ (1812-1890), was born in Paris. Descendant of artesian and boulonnaisian coopers, the latter is probably not related to the marquises and counts of the Nicolay family. Fernand Nicolaÿ inherited from his father a property corresponding to a large part of the former Camp of Boulogne, to which he will devote a historical study.

After having followed the courses of the faculty of law while attending those of the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, Fernand Nicolaÿ became a lawyer at the Court of Appeal of Paris in 1872. Defender, among others, of the interests of Albert de Mun, the Archbishop of Paris and Le Pèlerin, he was regularly requested by the ecclesiastical authorities, whom he gave legal advice during their fight against the anticlerical measures taken by the Republicans from 1880. He thus challenged the legality of the decrees of March 29, 1880 on congregations, that of the Goblet law excluding congregants from public schools, that of the prosecution of the Assumptionists, or that of the suspension of the salaries of ecclesiastics.

Nicolaÿ was a member of the Corporation of Christian Publicists and, for ten years, of the office of the National League Against Atheism. He was one of the speakers of the movement "for the defense of religious liberties and the rights of fathers" in the month of May, 1880, and one of the speakers of the Catholic Congress of 1888. Pope Pius X himself appreciated "his deeply Catholic works" and appointed him commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great. Nicolaÿ opposed in particular the legalization of divorce, which he considered the "sacrament of adultery", and advocateed for the reintegration of sisters into civilian hospitals. He also developed his ideas at numerous conferences, wrote in several conservative newspapers, and wrote many pamphlets. In one of them, published in 1875, he advocated a plural voting system that would give additional votes to educated voters, fathers, and taxpayers.

On May 28, 1881, he married Alice-Marie-Rose-Albertine Gripon (1861-1923), daughter of the notary Maxime Gripon. The Nicolaÿs, faithful to the Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin church, had five children, including: Marie-Joseph-Émilie (1883-1960), who married René Le Fur; Christian-Marie-Maxime-Fernand (born in 1884), who took orders; Jean-Louis-Marie-François (1890-1959), lawyer at the Council of State and at the Court of Cassation, father of Pierre Nicolaÿ; and Germaine-Marie (1892-1976), who in 1918 married the military engineer Louis-Henri Bosquillon de Frescheville (1887-1970).

Awarded several times by the French Academy and by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Nicolaÿ applied for the seat left vacant by the death of Charles Waddington, but it was Ernest Seillière who was elected in the second round of the ballot.

Works

• Les Enfants mal élevés: étude psychologique, anecdotique et pratique (1890)
• Histoire des croyances, superstitions, mœurs, usages et coutumes, selon le plan du Décalogue (1901; 3 volumes)
• Questions brûlantes (1905)
• Napoléon Ier au camp de Boulogne (1907)
• Ce que les pauvres pensent des riches (1909)
• Histoire sanglante de l'humanité (1909)
• La Vie compliquée: étude d'actualité (1912)
• L'Âme et l'instinct, l'homme, l'animal, d'après les dernières découvertes de la science (1922)

External links

• Works by Fernand Nicolaÿ at Gallica