Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History

Chapter 4: Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794)

4 R Adrien Lamourette ( 17 4 2 –17 9 4 ) The Unconventional Revolutionary and Reformer CARoLINE CHoPELIN-BLANC today, the name of Adrien Lamourette arouses little reaction. An almost forgotten figure of the past, Lamourette is, at best, known for his revolutionary commitment. this misappreciation partly explains the peremptory judgments issued against him. In his biography of Bishop Marbeuf, archbishop of Lyons before the revolution, Father Charles Monternot describes Lamourette’s political line as “wavering, tortuous , and flexible.” Pierre de la Gorce, in his famous religious history of the French Revolution written in the 1920s, calls him “the most lachrymose” and “the most cruel” of men. yet he deserves better. Lamourette was a brilliant intellectual of his time, and the negative memory of him that has remained is due to the failure of the Constitutional Church and to the violent political context surrounding the time in which he served as a member of the Legislative Assembly. Since the 1960s, the revival of eighteenthcentury religious history and the history of the French Revolution has 107 108 Caroline Chopelin-Blanc made it possible to rediscover some ecclesiastical figures whose commitment to the Constitutional Church was hitherto considered to have tarnished their image: this is true, of course, of Abbé Gregoire. But Lamourette also deserves a new critical biography in the light of available sources. the main advantage of such biographical approaches is to clarify the initially surprising link between the apologetic activity to which he dedicated himself in the 1780s and his revolutionary commitment as citizen bishop. How did Lamourette become a revolutionary, or more precisely, how did he do so when he began as an apologist, that is, a defender of Christian religion against the attacks of the philosophers of the Lumières (Enlightenment)? In short, how did he come to support the revolution actively, whose partisans drew their inspiration from the very ideas of the Lumières? Such questions demand that we ask just what Lamourette’s conception of the revolution was, and how this conception shaped his participation in it. 1742–1789: the origin of the Revolutionary Commitment, a Deep Spiritual Malaise Lamourette did not become revolutionary on sudden impulse. Skimming through the first stage of his religious journey helps one understand the way in which the genesis of a deep spiritual malaise led him to an Enlightened Catholicism capable of coping with revolutionary ideas. Adrien Lamourette was born on 31 May 1742 in Frévent, a small town in Artois, located in the present département (county) of Pas-deCalais . He came from the rural middle class; his father was a peignerant (a maker of combs for the wool industry). In 1759, like many young people in the area, he entered the Congregation of the Mission (also known as Vincentians or Lazarists), and he made his vows two years later in May 1761. Lamourette pursued his training at the congregation ’s house located within the Saint-Lazare Quarter in Paris until 1765, when he became a deacon. From there, he was sent to Lorraine , first to the seminary of Metz, where he taught mathematics and Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794) 109 physics until his ordination to the priesthood in 1769. From his ordination until 1772 or 1773, he served as a lecturer in theology before being transferred to another prestigious Lorraine seminary, the seminary of toul, where he continued to teach theology. In early 1776, at the age of only thirty-four, Lamourette was appointed superior of the seminary. yet he resigned a mere two years later, presumably because of strong disagreements with his older colleagues about the education of the younger generations. Against the advice of more experienced teachers, Lamourette would have liked to modernize the courses at the seminary, with respect both to teaching methods and to the subjects taught, in order to train priests to be more prepared for the changes they would face in the society of the Lumières. Lamourette was allowed to leave by the superior-general of the Congregation, and, under the protection of the Bishop of toul, he was appointed priest of outremécourt, a rural parish in the diocese of toul. Arriving in early 1778, Lamourette then gave up his parish in the summer of 1783. However, it was in the calm of this rural community that he would begin to write his first apologetic works. Because of a gap in historical records, the years 1783–1786 remain...