Jean Hardouin, a French Jesuit, born in Quimper, Brittany, in 1646, died in Paris, Sept. 3, 1729. He entered the order of Jesuits, and after teaching rhetoric for some time, went to Paris to finish his classical studies. He prepared Pliny's "Natural History" for the Del-phin series of classics (5 vols. 4to, 1685); and in his Chronologia ex Nummis Antiquis restitu-ta (2 parts, 1693 and 1697) he maintained that of all the ancient classics none are genuine but Homer, Herodotus, Cicero, Pliny the Elder, the Georgies of Virgil, and the satires and epistles of Horace; and that with the aid of these the monks of the 13th century had fabricated all the others, and reconstructed ancient history. The AEneid he regarded as an allegory of the progress of Christianity. His work was suppressed by order of parliament, but was surreptitiously reprinted. In 1708 he was compelled to recant his opinions, but he reproduced them in subsequent works. In 1715 he published his great Conciliorum Collectio (12 vols, fob), embracing the councils held from the year 34 to 1714, including more than 20 whose acts had not before been published; but Pere Har-douin is accused of having suppressed some important pieces and replaced them by apocryphal passages.

At the request of six doctors of the Sorbonne the parliament arrested the sale of the work, and caused a number of leaves to be cancelled. Among his other works are Nummi Antiqui Populorum et Urbium (1684); De Nummis Antiquis Coloniarum et Munici-piorum (1689); De Nummis Samaritanis, and De Nummis Herodianum (1001); Chronologia Veteris Testamenti(1697); Opera Selecta(1709); and his posthumous Opera Varia (1733).