Two loyalties dominated Frédéric Ozanam's life. Declaring himself both ‘for the University and for the Church’ he built his life around service to the state and service to God. Ozanam is best known for founding the St Vincent de Paul Society in 1833, but this collection of essays explores his career and personality from a variety of angles, dealing with his roles as husband, friend, traveller, jurist, professor of literature and philanthropist. In this respect it has something in common with the genre of ‘new biography’ that historians have developed in writing about prominent upper middle-class women in nineteenth-century France. A major theme of ‘new biography’ is the way in which individuals create multiple ‘public’ and ‘private’ selves. Ozanam was not immune to the difficulties of managing competing demands upon his public and private selves, and his strong sense of vocation appears occasionally to have exacerbated those difficulties. For instance, Ozanam was at one stage not in favour of married life, because he saw it as distracting young men from Christian activity, but this view was gradually tempered following his marriage to Amélie Soulacroix in 1841. The couple had one daughter and Ozanam came to see his responsibility to care and provide for his family as a divine calling. Ozanam's faith had a degree of singularity about it. On a trip to Italy in 1846 he became an enthusiastic supporter of Pope Pius ix, which left him isolated from Catholic liberal circles on his return to France. Thirty-one years later, on 22 August 1977, Pope John Paul ii beatified Ozanam, who thus became one of the very few married lay men elevated to sainthood. With a helpful chronology at the back, this book performs an important service for researchers by revealing the scope and interest of Ozanam's papers deposited with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France one hundred and fifty years after his death.