Henri Grégoire

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For another person, see Henri Grégoire (historian).
The Reverend
Henri Grégoire
Member of the Estates-General
for the First Estate
In office
13 June 1789 – 9 July 1789
ConstituencyNancy
Personal details
Born
Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire

(1750-12-04)4 December 1750
Legion of Honor[1]
Signature

Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire (French:

Bureau des longitudes, the Institut de France, and the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers
.

Early life and education

Grégoire was born in

Jesuit college at Nancy, he became curé (parish priest) of Emberménil in 1782. 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

abolition of the privileges
of the nobility and the Church.

Career and contributions

Constitutional bishop

Under the new

republican, he strongly supported Collot d'Herbois' motion for the abolition of the monarchy in the first session of the National Convention (21 September 1792) with the memorable phrase "Kings are in morality what monsters are in the world of nature."[3]

On 15 November 1792, he delivered a speech in which he demanded that King

Louis XVI be brought to trial, and immediately afterwards was elected president of the Convention, over which he presided in his episcopal street 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 7 November 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, Grégroire appeared in the streets in his episcopal dress and celebrated daily Mass in his house. He was then the first to advocate the reopening of the churches (speech of 21 December 1794).

Grégoire also coined the term

preservation of cultural objects
.

Annihilating the dialects of France

Further information: Language policy in France

The Abbé Grégoire is also known for advocating a unified French national language, and for writing the Rapport sur la Nécessité et les Moyens d'anéantir les Patois et d'universaliser l'Usage de la Langue française (Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language),[5] which he presented on 4 June 1794 to the National Convention.[6]

According to his own research, the vast majority of people in France spoke one of 33 dialects or patois, and he argued that French had to be imposed on the population and all other dialects eradicated. Although he was natively raised with knowledge of the Lorrain "patois", his conclusion came from a common view at the time within Jacobin circles that the linguistic diversity of France had been purposely used by the nobility of France to keep the various linguistic groups of France separated from one another and from the political institutions in which French was primarily spoken. That made Grégoire see the various patois as limiting to the ability of French citizens to practice their individual rights.[7]

However, his work was still influenced by the rising sense of French linguistic superiority that had been started by

troubadours that were mutually unintelligible and should be abandoned in favor of the language of Paris. Thus began a process that was expanded dramatically by the policies of Jules Ferry
a century later and led to the declining use of the regional languages in France.

Advocate of equality

Title page of Grégoire's 1808 book on Negro literature

Racial equality

In October 1789, Grégoire took a great interest in abolitionism after he had met Julien Raimond, a free colored planter from Saint-Domingue who was trying to win admission to the Constituent Assembly as the representative of his group. Grégoire published numerous pamphlets and later books on the subject of racial equality.

Grégoire also became an influential member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks although the group and many others like it were seen as radical at the time. As a member of the National Assembly, Grégoire supported seemingly opposing views, such as the eradication of slavery in France, but also maintained his position as a member of the clergy, which was known for mostly wanting to keep slavery within France and its colonies. It was on Grégoire's motion in May 1791 that the Constituent Assembly passed its first law admitting some wealthy free men of color in the French colonies to the same rights as whites.

Later, he was recognized for his work De la littérature des Nègres on the literature of black writers as it showed readers that blacks are equal in every way to whites, including intellectually.[9] In 1810, the encyclopedia was published in New York City in an English translation by the Irish republican exile in Paris, David Bailie Warden.[10]

Jewish equality

Grégoire was considered a friend of the Jews. He argued that in the French society, the supposed degeneracy of Jews was not inherent, but rather a result of their circumstances. He blamed the condition of the Jews on the way they had been treated, their persecution by Christians, and the "ridiculous" teachings of their rabbis, and believed they could be brought into mainstream society and made citizens.[11]

Political career after 1795

After the establishment of the

18 Brumaire in which Napoleon seized power.[9] The day after the coup, the Council issued a proclamation warning the coup would cause France to revert to the times before the Revolution.[12]

Under Napoleon Bonaparte's rule, Grégoire became a member of the

Légion d'honneur.[13]

During the later years of Napoleon's reign he traveled to England and Germany, but in 1814 he returned to France.

After the restoration of the Bourbons, Grégoire remained influential, though as a revolutionary and a

schismatic bishop he was also the object of hatred by royalists. He was expelled from the Institut de France. From this time onward, he 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. [citation needed
]

In 1814 he published De la constitution française de l'an 1814, in which he commented on the

Count Decazes, the new premier, was to annul the election of Grégoire.[citation needed
]

Death, funeral, and transfer

Despite his revolutionary

Archbishop of Paris, would only concede on condition that he retract his oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which Grégoire refused to do. [citation needed
]

In defiance of the archbishop, the Abbé Baradère gave Grégoire the

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 uproar in Paris, and the government deployed troops to avoid a repetition of the riots in February of that year which had led to the sacking of the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois and the archbishop's palace. Grégoire's funeral was held at the church of the Abbaye-aux-Bois. Its clergy absented in obedience to the archbishop's orders, and Mass was sung by the Abbé Louis-Charles de Grieu (1755–1836), assisted by two clerics, the catafalque being decorated with the episcopal insignia. The horses were unyoked from the hearse after it set out from the church, and it was pulled by students to the cemetery of Montparnasse, the cortege being followed by a crowd of some 20,000 people.[citation needed
]

On 12 December 1989, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon, the resting place of French notables, in a ceremony at which President François Mitterrand presided. The apostolic nuncio to France, Archbishop Lorenzo Antonetti, and the outspoken Bishop Jacques Gaillot of Évreux attended. The Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, offered a requiem Mass in Grégoire's memory the previous day.[14]

Bibliography

Besides several political pamphlets, Grégoire was the author of:

References

  1. ^ Paris, Louis (1869). Dictionnaire des anoblissements (in French). Vol. 1. Paris: Bachelin-Deflorenne.
  2. ^ Paul Pisani (1907). Répertoire biographique de l'épiscopat constitutionnel (1791-1802) (in French). Paris: A. Picard et fils. pp. 110–117.
  3. ^ Fisher, Herbert A. L. (1910). The Republican Tradition in Europe. The Harvard University Lowell Lectures. [page needed]
  4. ISBN 0-394-55948-7
    .
  5. ^ "Rapport Grégoire an II". Languefrancaise.net (in French). 18 November 2003. Archived from the original on 23 November 2006. Retrieved 11 June 2007.
  6. Tim Blanning; Hagen Schulze (eds.). The Invention of National Languages: Unity and Diversity in European Culture C. 1800. New York: Oxford University Press
    . p. 126.
  7. ^ Grégoire, Henri (1794), Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d'anéantir les patois et d'universaliser l'usage de la langue française, Paris: Convention nationale, pp. 1–19, retrieved 2021-02-26
  8. ^ "Barère: Rapport du comité de salut public". www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca. Retrieved 2021-02-26.
  9. ^
    Encyclopedia Britannica
    . June 6, 2007. Retrieved February 26, 2017.
  10. ^ Grégoire, Henri (1810). An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes (Translated by D. B. Warden ed.). Brooklyn: Thomas Kirk. Retrieved 15 January 2021.
  11. ISBN 9780520241800
    .
  12. ^ Stewart, John Hall (1951). A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution. New York: Macmillan. pp. 765–767.
  13. ^ "Certificate of the Legion of Honor - LEONORE". Culture.gouv.fr (in French). Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  14. ^ "Au Panthéon M. François Mitterrand préside un hommage à l'abbé Grégoire, à Monge et à Condorcet". Le Monde (in French). 13 December 1989. Retrieved 29 April 2023.

Sources

  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Grégoire, Henri". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.; This in turn gives the following references:
    • A. Debidour, L'Abbé Grégoire (1881).
    • A. Gazier, Etudes sur l'histoire religieuse de la Révolution Française (1883).
    • L. Maggiolo, La Vie et les œuvres de l'abbé Grégoire (Nancy, 1884).
    • Numerous articles in La Révolution Française; E. Meaume, Étude hist. et biog. sur les Lorrains révolutionnaires (Nancy, 1882).
    • Numerous articles in A. Gazier, Études sur l'histoire religieuse de la Révolution Française (1887).

Further reading

External links

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