Grégoire

Grégoire, HENRI, the most remarkable among the so-called constitutional bishops of France, was born of poor parents at Vêlo, near Lunnéville, December 4, 1750. Educated by Jesuits at Nancy, he took orders, and lectured for some time at the Jesuit College of Pont-à-Mousson. His Essai sur la Régénération des Juifs (1778) breathed the toleration that was in the air, and became widely popular. Becoming curé of Emberménil, he was sent to the States-general of 1789 as one of the deputies of the clergy. He was an ardent democrat in all his views, and, attaching himself from the first to the Tiers-état party, acted a prominent part throughout the grand drama of the Revolution. One of the secretaries of the National Assembly, he supported enthusiastically the abolition of the privileges of the nobles and clergy alike, and the civil constitution of the clergy. He was the first of his order to take the oaths, and was elected the first 'constitutional bishop' of the department of Loir-et-Cher, which he accepted, although the old and legitimate bishop, Monseigneur de Thémines, was still alive. Grégoire carried into every department the stern democracy to which he was devoted, and which he identified with the Christian brotherhood of the gospel; and upon the fundamental doctrine of the Revolution—the rights of man—he sought to ingraft his own early advocacy of the Jews and of the negroes, and especially the doctrine of the duties of man. At the blasphemous Feast of Reason, the weak Gobel, constitutional Bishop of Paris, publicly renounced Christianity; but Grégoire faced the infuriated rabble with all the courage of the primitive martyrs, and refused to deny his Master. After the 18th Brumaire he became a member of the Corps Législatif. His extreme republicanism was highly distasteful to Bonaparte, and it was only after a third attempt that he was appointed member of the senate. On the conclusion of the concordat between Pius VII. and Bonaparte he ceased to exercise ecclesiastical functions, being unable conscientiously to give the retractions required by the church, and he died without reconciliation at Auteuil, near Paris, 28th May 1831. His Mémoires were edited by H. Carnot, with a life (1831). Of his numerous writings may be named Histoire des Sectes Religieuses (1814); Essai historique sur les Libertés de l'Eglise Gallicane (1818). See the studies by Krüger (Leip. 1838) and Böhringer (Basel, 1878).