Which former Inquisition secretary published a critical history from French exile in 1817?

Which former Inquisition secretary published a critical history from French exile in 1817? Juan Antonio Llorente did.

Llorente served as secretary of the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid from 1789 and gained access to important institutional records. During Napoleon’s occupation, he supported Joseph Bonaparte and helped examine the Inquisition’s archives. When Ferdinand VII returned in 1814 and restored absolutist rule, Llorente went into exile in France.

In Paris, he published Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne in four volumes between 1817 and 1818. The work drew heavily on documents he had encountered while serving the tribunal and became one of the earliest widely circulated critical histories of the Spanish Inquisition.

His estimates and interpretations were later criticized as exaggerated or partisan, but the book remains historically important. Llorente is sometimes confused with inquisitors such as Tomás de Torquemada; unlike them, he became a prominent critic of the institution he had served.