Luigi Cardinal Lambruschini

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Luigi Cardinal Lambruschini (6 March 1776 – 12 May 1854) was a prominent Italian cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church in the mid nineteenth century.

Luigi Lambruschini was born in Genoa, then an independent republic, in 1776. He joined a religious order called the Order of the Barnabites in his youth. He attended the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as secretary to Ercole Cardinal Consalvi.

Lambruschini was appointed Archbishop of Genoa in 1819. He was later named as Apostolic Nuncio to the Kingdom of France in 1827 by Pope Pius VII, but was forced to flee following the 1830 revolution that toppled the Bourbon monarchy and brought King Louis-Phillippe to the French throne.

Archbishop Lambruschini was made a cardinal in 1831. He served as a controversial Secretary of State under the reactionary Pope Gregory XVI. He was the leading conservative reactionary candidate in the 1846 papal conclave. Though he received a majority of the votes initially it was clear that he could not achieve the required two-thirds majority. He was eventually defeated by the liberal candidate, Giovanni Maria Mastai Cardinal Ferretti, the Archbishop of Imola, who became Pope Pius IX.

Lambruschini was a particularly hated figure among the Roman populace during the 1848 revolution that temporarily deposed Pius IX. His house was ransacked and he was forced to flee for his life, disguised as a stablehand. He returned following the Pope's restoration. He died in Rome in 1854.