Remacle Lissoir

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Miniature of Remacle Lissoir by François Jean-Baptiste Topino-Lebrun

Remacle Lissoir O.Praem. (12 February 1730 – 13 May 1806) was a French Roman Catholic priest of the eighteenth century.

Biography

Remacle Lissoir was born in 1730 into a modest family in the Duchy of Bouillon. He followed ordinary studies at the college of Bouillon[1] and embraced religion at the Prémontré institute of the abbey of Laval Dieu.

After two years of novitiate, he took his vows on September 28, 1749. He studied theology and literature. As soon as he became a priest, he was appointed novice master, and successively professor of theology and prior.

On February 12, 1766, at the age of 36, he was elected abbot of Laval-Dieu and installed in this dignity on May 19.

His first concern was to enrich the library of the abbey with good books. The improvement of studies marked the beginnings of his administration; and the example of his studious life was the first spring of literary emulation of his confreres. His abbey was regarded as a flourishing seminary where good and useful pastors were trained. He even had the satisfaction of seeing many of his students called to the first chairs and other honorable positions in his order. Two of his students were elected constitutional bishops: Joseph Monin and his own nephew Jean-Remacle Lissoir.

Around 1773, he founded a music school in Laval-Dieu, thanks to the recruitment of a talented organist, Guillaume Hanser. This school, intended for the religious, also welcomed lay students from the surrounding area, among them Georges Scheyermann (1767–1827) and Étienne-Nicolas Méhul, who became a commensal in the abbey.[2]

He was a strong personality, a man of ideas, interested in Jansenism but more inclined towards Richerism and Febronianism. As such, he questioned the deposit of truth in the Church, infallibility, as well as the origin and nature of the religious hierarchy. Translating the work of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, auxiliary bishop of Trier, written under the pseudonym "Justinus Febronius", he writes in the warning to the reader:

A work in which the true government of the Church is established, in which it is shown that Jesus Christ did not found a monarchical state; that the Church must recognize a head, but that the power of this head has limits; that the universal Council is its sovereign tribunal; that the Episcopate has imprescriptible rights; that the Church has lost its primitive liberty, but that there are still reasons and means to recover it; that it is time to put back into force the discipline that has been enervated by imposture, and to reform the abuses that have been consecrated by ignorance; a work of this nature is undoubtedly very important because of its object. Such is the book given to the public.[3]

The abbots of Prémontré sought to make use of his talents; and from 1779, he rendered them important services, and was part of their council, until February 13, 1790, the time of the suppression of religious corporations in France.

In 1787, when the provincial assemblies were formed, he was called by the government to that of Metz, and appointed president of the assembly of the district of Sedan.[4] He wrote the minutes, and developed, in this double mission, his administrative knowledge.

In 1790, he was appointed to the rank of administrator of the Ardennes department, and the following year, he was elected deputy to the first legislature. The following year, the elections to the National Convention took place in the Ardennes under his presidency.

He refused the secularization that the law would allow him and declared that he wanted to remain a religious. After that, he took the oath of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy without being obliged to do so, because he did not fit into the category of "civil servants of the Catholic religion". His chosen course of action was to be faithful to his faith and respectful of the French nation, which was gradually replacing the authority of the King.[5]

Lissoir felt the revolutionary storm rising and, prudently, he withdrew from politics. He was no less worried: deprived of his abbey, he was incarcerated at the Carthusian Charterhouse of Mont-Dieu;[6] he was released to go to Paris in 1795.

He lived from his pen, and worked at the Journal de Paris for ten years; he enriched this periodical with excellent articles.

At the time of the re-establishment of Catholic worship (by the law of 18 Germinal year X), he asked for a parish priest. He was reproached for having served the parish of Charleville, under the constitutional bishop of Sedan, and for having attended the council of sworn-in priests in 1797,[7] as deputy of the presbytery of the Ardennes; he was able to obtain a place as almoner at the Hôtel des Invalides, and exercised the functions until his death on May 13, 1806.

Works

  • Observations sur le Dictionnaire ecclésiastique et canonique, portatif (1765; 2 volumes)
  • In 1782, at the request of General Jean-Baptiste L'Écuy, he was entrusted with the revision of the Livres liturgiques ("Liturgical Books") for the use of his order; he recast them and supervised their printing. He composed for the breviary the Office of Saint Norbert and that of the translation of his body. He made the hymn of the first, and the prose of the second. These liturgical books, printed by Haener (Nancy, 1786–87), contain the Missal, the Gradual, the Antiphonary (3 vols.); the Breviary (2 vols. in-4° and 4 vols. in-12); the Processional, and the Manual for the administration of the sacraments.
  • De l'état de l’Église et de la puissance légitime du Pontife romain (1766–68; anonymous translation of Febronius' On the State of the Church and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff; 2 volumes)[8]

Notes

  1. ↑ The Nouvelle biographie des contemporains (Paris, 1823, Vol. XII, p. 52) indicates that he "owed his education to the care of the president of the sovereign court of this duchy, named Thibault, who had such a paternal affection for this child that he himself directed his studies. At the age of 15, Lissoir lost his protector, who intended him to take the bar, and he was obliged to present himself to enter the Premonstratensian order. The professor in charge of examining him, as well as another student of Bouillon, gave the most favorable account of him. "There are," he said, "two students from Bouillon, one of whom offers money to be received into the novitiate, and the other has none. If it depended on me, I would send the first one away, and I would give money to the second to induce him to enter." It is probable, however, that the young Lissoir would not have been admitted without the generosity of a Dutch officer who paid the sum requested by the order."
  2. ↑ Clément, Félix (1968). Les Musiciens Célèbres depuis le Seizième Siècle jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Hachette, p. 268.
  3. ↑ Lissoir, Remacle (1768). "Avertissement". In: De l'État de l'Église et de la Puissance Légitime du Pontife Romain: Ouvrage dans Lequel on Établit les Limites de sa Puissance., Vol. 1. Wurtzbourg: Jean Müller, p. ii.
  4. ↑ On the assembly of the district of Sedan, see: Leroy, Stéphen (1893). "L'Assemblée du District de Sedan et Son Bureau Intermédiaire (1787-1799)," Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, Vol. XXIV, pp. 527–58.
  5. ↑ Leflon, Jean (1954). Nicolas Philbert, Évêque Constitutionnel des Ardennes. Mézières: Archives Départementales.
  6. ↑ Poirier, Jules (1903). Les Prisonniers de la Chartreuse du Mont-Dieu pendant la Terreur: Documents pour Servir a l'Histoire de la Terreur. Paris: G. Kleiner, p. 77.
  7. ↑ The Council of the Constitutional Church, was gathered in Notre-Dame de Paris from 28 thermidor year V to 25 brumaire year VI (from August 15th to November 15th 1797).
  8. ↑ Bouillot, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph, (1830). Biographie ardennaise ou Histoire des Ardennais qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs vertus et leurs erreurs, Vol. 2. Paris, pp. 110–11: "It is an abridged version of Febronius, published in Bouillon in 1763, in-4°, a reprobated book, whose author himself (of Hontheim, bishop of Miriophite) recognized the danger and retracted the errors. Lissoir appropriated it, as he says in his preface; he assures that he softened the expressions too hard, and that he omitted entirely of the too sharp expletives against the court of Rome; but he did not carry far enough the corrections and the removals. The work made a noise, which engaged the author to submit it to the Sorbonne to be examined there. The answer was long in coming, and when it arrived most of the edition was out of print. The cartons that were printed could only be added to the small number of copies that remained in the hands of the bookseller."

References

  • Ardura, Bernard (1995). Prémontrés, Histoire et Spiritualité. Saint-Étienne: Université Jean Monnet Saint-Étienne.
  • Dide, Auguste (1884). "Tableau des Évêques Constitutionnels de 1791 à 1801", La Révolution Française, no 7,‎ juillet-décembre 1884, p. 165 (Dide confuses the nephew with the uncle).
  • Lavagne D'Ortigue, Xavier (1988). "Remacle Lissoir (1730-1806). Documents peu connus ou inédits," Analecta Praemonstratensia, Vol. LXIV (1/2), pp. 118–42.
  • Robert, Gaston (1929). "L'Élection Abbatiale de Laval-Dieu en 1766", Nouvelle Revue de Champagne et de Brie, Année 7, pp. 223–27.

External links

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