Everything about Henri Gr Goire totally explained
» For the 20th-century Belgian Byzantinologist, see Henri Grégoire (historian)
Henri Grégoire (often referred to as
Abbé Grégoire;
December 4,
1750 –
May 20,
1831) was a
French Roman Catholic priest,
constitutional bishop of
Blois and a
revolutionary leader.
Early life
He was born at
Vého near
Lunéville, the son of a peasant. Educated at the
Jesuit college at
Nancy, he became
curé (priest) of
Emberménil and a teacher at the Jesuit school at
Pont-à-Mousson. In
1783 he was crowned by the Academy of Nancy for his
Eloge de la poésie, and in
1788 by that of
Metz for an
Essai sur la régénération physique et morale des Juifs.
He was elected in
1789 by the clergy of the
bailliage of Nancy to the
Estates-General, where he soon made his name as one of the group of clerical and lay deputies of
Jansenist or
Gallican sympathies who supported the Revolution. He was one of the first of the clergy to join the
third estate, and contributed notably to the
union of the three orders; he presided at the session which lasted sixty-two hours while
the Bastille was being attacked by the people, and spoke vehemently against the enemies of the nation. He later took a leading role in the
abolition of the privileges of the nobles and the Church.
Constitutional bishop
Under the new
Civil Constitution of the Clergy, to which he was the first priest to take the oath (
December 27,
1790), he was elected bishop by two
départements. He selected that of
Loir-et-Cher, taking the old title of
bishop of Blois, and for ten years (
1791-
1801) ruled his diocese with exemplary zeal. An ardent
republican, it was he who in the first session of the
National Convention (
September 21,
1792) proposed the motion for the abolition of the
kingship, in a speech in which occurred the memorable phrase that
"Kings are in morality what monsters are in the world of nature.". (Source: Herbert A. L. Fisher, The Republican Tradition in Europe, The Harvard University Lowell Lectures, 1910)
On
November 15 he delivered a speech in which he demanded that king
Louis XVI should be brought to trial, and immediately afterwards was elected president of the Convention, over which he presided in his episcopal dress. During the trial, being absent with other three colleagues on a mission for the union of
Savoy to France, he along with them wrote a letter urging the condemnation of the king, but attempted to save the life of the monarch by proposing that the death penalty should be suspended.
When, on
November 7,
1793,
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel,
bishop of Paris, was intimidated into resigning his episcopal office at the bar of the Convention, Grégoire, who was temporarily absent, hearing what had happened, faced the indignation of many deputies, refusing to give up either his religion or his office. This display of courage ultimately saved him from the
guillotine.
Throughout the
Reign of Terror, in spite of attacks in the Convention, in the press, and on placards posted at the street corners, he appeared in the streets in his episcopal dress and daily read
mass in his house. After
Maximilien Robespierre's fall (the
Thermidor), he was the first to advocate the reopening of the churches (speech of
December 21,
1794).
He also tried to get measures put in place for restraining the
vandalism, extended his protection to several artists and writers, and devoted attention to the reorganization of the
public libraries, the establishment of
botanic gardens, and the improvement of technical education. In fact, he coined the term, vandalism, in a series of three monumental reports in 1794, for example,
Report on the Destruction Brought About by Vandalism,... (op. cit., J.L. Sax, p. 1149; "Vandalism",
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.). He is credited by scholars (for example Joseph Sax) with the idea of
preservation of cultural objects.
Advocate of racial equality
In October 1789, Grégoire took a great interest in
abolitionism, after meeting
Julien Raimond, a
free colored planter from
Saint-Domingue who was trying to win admission to the
Constituent Assembly as a representative of his group. He published numerous pamphlets and later, books, on the subject of racial equality, and became an influential member of the
Society of the Friends of the Blacks. It was on Grégoire's motion in May 1791 that the Constituent Assembly passed its first law admitting some wealthy free men of colour in the French colonies to the same rights as whites.
Annihilating the patois of France
Abbé Grégoire is also notorious for writing his
Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language, which he presented on
June 4, 1794 to the
National Convention. In a France where according to his own findings, a vast majority of people spoke one of 33
patois, French had to be imposed on the population and all other so-called dialects eradicated. In his hardly reliable classification, notable mistakes and prejudices included
Corsican and
Alsatian being described as "highly degenerate" (
très-dégénérés) forms of Italian and German while
Occitan was decomposed into a variety of syntactically loose local remnants of the language of
troubadours with no intelligibility between them, and had to be abandoned in favour of the language of the capital. This, coupled with
Jules Ferry's brutal policy less than a century later, led to the weakening of most unofficial languages (not dialects) in France, all of them being subsequently banned from public documents, administration and school. The government of today's France still refuses to ratify (let alone apply) the
1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (see also:
Language policy in France).
Political career after Thermidor
On the establishment of
the new constitution, Grégoire was elected to the
Council of Five Hundred, and after
18 Brumaire he became a member of the
Corps Législatif, then of the
Senate (1801). He took the lead in the national church councils of 1797 and 1801; but he was strenuously opposed to
Napoleon Bonaparte's policy of reconciliation with the
Holy See, and after the signature of the concordat he resigned his bishopric (
October 8,
1801).
He was one of the minority of five in the Senate who voted against the proclamation of the
French Empire, and he opposed the creation of a new
French nobility and Napoleon's divorce from
Joséphine de Beauharnais; notwithstanding this, he was created a
Count of the Empire and officer of the
Légion d'honneur. During the later years of Napoleon's reign he travelled to
England and
Germany, but in
1814 he returned to France and opposed Napoleon throughout the
Hundred Days.
During the Second Restoration
To the clerical
Ultra-royalist faction which dominated the Lower Chamber and court circles after the
Second Restoration, Grégoire was a revolutionary and a
schismatic bishop, and thus the object of hatred. He was expelled from the
Institut de France, and forced into retirement, but he remained influential.
In
1814 he published,
De la constitution française de l'an 1814, in which be commented on the
Charter from a
Liberal point of view, and this reached its fourth edition in
1819, in which year he was elected to the Lower Chamber by the
département of
Isère. This was considered a potentially harmful episode by the powers of the
Quintuple Alliance, and the question was raised of a fresh armed intervention in France under the terms of the secret
Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. To prevent this,
Louis XVIII decided on a modification of the franchise; the
Marquis Dessolles ministry resigned; and the first act of
Count Decazes, the new premier, was to annul the election of Grégoire.
From this time onward the ex-bishop lived in retirement, occupying himself in literary pursuits and in correspondence with other intellectual figures of Europe; he was compelled to sell his library to obtain means of support.
Religious views
According to his own principles, Grégoire remained a devout
Roman Catholic and a priest, while remaining a revolutionary,
Gallican, and a Liberal. During his last illness, he confessed to his parish
curé, a priest of Jansenist sympathies, expressing his desire for the last sacraments of the Church. These
Hyacinthe-Louis De Quelen, the
Archbishop of Paris, would only concede on condition that he retract his oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which he refused to do.
In defiance of the archbishop, the
abbé Baradère gave him the
viaticum, while the rite of
extreme unction was administered by the
abbé Guillon, an opponent of the Civil Constitution, without consulting the archbishop or the parish
curé. The attitude of the archbishop caused great excitement in Paris, and the government had to take precautions to avoid a repetition of the riots which in the preceding February had led to the sacking of the church of
Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois and the archiepiscopal palace. Grégoire's funeral was celebrated at the church of the Abbaye-aux-Bois; the clergy absented themselves in obedience to the archbishop's orders, but mass was sung by the abbé Grieu assisted by two clergy, the
catafalque being decorated with the episcopal insignia. After the hearse set out from the church the horses were unyoked, and it was dragged by students to the cemetery of
Montparnasse, the cortege being followed by a sympathetic crowd of some 20,000 people.
Grégoire paid effort to assert that Catholic Christianity wasn't irreconcilable with political liberty, while becoming dissatisfied with the revolutionary outcome of an Empire which had reached a compromise with the
Papacy. Grégoire's Gallicanism clashed with the prevalent view of the authority in his times, and appealed to those French Catholics who had sided with the liberties promised by the Revolution; this version of Catholicism was to be included in those rejected by
Pope Pius IX's
Syllabus of Errors (
1864).
Works
Besides several political pamphlets, Grégoire was the author of:
- De la littérature des nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur littérature (1808)
- Histoire des sectes religieuses, depuis le commencement du siècle dernier jusqu'à l'époque actuelle (a vols., 1810)
- Essai historique sur les libertés de l'église gallicane (1818)
- De l'influence du Christianisme sur la condition des femmes (1821)
- Histoire des confesseurs des empereurs, des rois, et d'autres princes (1824)
- Histoire du manage des primes en France (1826).
- Grégoireana, ou résumé général de la conduite, des actions, et des écrits de M. le comte Henri Grégkoire, preceded by a biographical notice by Cousin d'Avalon, was published in 1821; and the Mémoires ... de Grégoire, with a biographical notice by H Carnot, appeared in 1837 (2 vols.).
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