POTTER United Families

Not only did his childhood experiences give him an independent
nature, they made him fearless of authority.
It is interesting that one biographer of his close friend, Lamennais,
publisher of L'Avenir, insinuated that had he not been raised in the
tumultuous years of the French revolution, he might have been a
more "brave Belgian boy", in the cool sense of it. By 1796, it was safe
to come back in Bruges.
Rather than going to the “Small Seminar of Roulers” (image) where
his friends - like Rodenbach - studied, the ten -year old Louis was
sent to the Simoneau school where he saw Jacobin scenes in an old
Jesuit church. He said: “I forged a critical view for always, when
looking at religious protocol.”
At Age fifteen, he attended a Latin school in Brussels run by M.
Baudewyns. Jottrand wrote that the school was well rated, while
stronger in the study of antiquity and ancient languages. To avoid the
army, he stayed at school where he read philosopher Pierre Bayle,
Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau.
He learned Greek, English and German but, curiously, never learned
Flemish, although he spoke it naturally well in his West-Flanders.
Thereafter, he moved to Leibniz, Fichte and Schelling, and was taken
with the spiritualism of Kant. He composed his first letters to combat
materialism with the spiritualism. These letters were censured by
Napoleonic partisans. He then met the librarian of the Count
d'Arconati, and his twenty-five thousand books.
There were theological works in this library, and he became interested
in it. He remembered a book by Picart entitled "Ceremonials and
religious Customs of the World". But in 1809, the French decided to
form a new national guard in Belgium, and he fled to France to avoid
induction.
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