Fenelon's views on politics were not so much fantastic as those of an idealist. He dreamed of a monarchy which should submit to the control of righteousness; he mourned over the pride and extravagance of the court; he constantly pleaded against wars of ambition; he desired that a powerful and Christian nobility should mediate between the crown and the people; he conceived a system of decentralisation which should give the whole nation an interest in public affairs; in his ecclesiastical views he was Ultramontane rather than Gallican. These ideas are put forth in his _Direction pour la Conscience d'un Roi_ and the _Plan de Gouvernement_. Louis XIV. suspected the political tendency of _Telemaque_, and caused the printing of the first edition to be suspended. Fenelon has sometimes been regarded as a forerunner of the Revolutionary movement; but he would rather, by ideas in which, as events proved, there may have been something chimerical, have rendered revolution impossible. Into his controversy with Bossuet he threw himself with a combative energy and a skill in defence and attack that surprise one who knows him only through his _Lettres Spirituelles_, which tend towards the effacement of the will in a union with God through love. Bossuet pleaded against the dangers for morals and for theology of a false mysticism; Fenelon, against confounding true mysticism with what is false. In his _Traite de l'Existence de Dieu_ he shows himself a bold and subtle thinker: the first part, which is of a popular character, attempts to prove the existence of the Deity by the argument from design in nature and from the reason in man; the second part--of a later date--follows Descartes in metaphysical proofs derived from our idea of an infinite and a perfect being. To his other distinctions Fenelon added that of a literary critic, unsurpassed in his time, unless it be by Boileau. His _Dialogues sur l'Eloquence_ seek to replace the elaborate methods of logical address, crowded with divisions and subdivisions, and supported with a multitude of quotations, by a style simple, natural, and delicate in its fervency.