Antoine Saulnier de Beauregard

Antoine Saulnier de Beauregard , OCR , born as Anne-Nicolas-Charles Saulnier de Beauregard (born August 20, 1764 in Joigny , † January 6, 1839 in La Meilleraye-de-Bretagne ) was a French Trappist , prior, abbot and founder of a monastery.

life and work

Anne-Nicolas-Charles Saulnier de Beauregard, who came from a distinguished nobility, attended the seminary of the Lazarists , then the Collège de Navarre . He was ordained a priest on April 11, 1789 and studied law. Since he refused to take the oath on the civil constitution of the clergy required by the French Revolution in 1791 , he had to leave the country. In Brussels, he was the tutor of a noble émigré family and, before the raging revolution, avoided Duisburg and London with them.

On June 1, 1795, he entered the Trappist monastery in exile in Lulworth , Dorset , and took the religious name Antoine . On June 15, 1796 he made solemn profession (under Prior Jean-Baptiste Desnoyers ) . In 1810 he became prior of the monastery. In 1813 his immediate superior, Abbot Augustin de Lestrange , appointed him ad personam abbot (consecrated in 1814).

When the Restoration began in France, Saulnier bought Melleray Abbey for repopulation, gave up Lulworth in July 1817, which had been a refuge for the community of Lestrange for more than 20 years, and moved into Melleray on August 7, 1817 with 60 monks . In 1829 the community had 192 members, many of them British and Irish. This fact, as well as Saulnier's proximity to the royal family and to Maria Karolina of Naples-Sicily (1798–1870) , Duchesse de Berry, (who visited the monastery in 1828), led to the politically motivated expulsion of the British and Irish after the July Revolution of 1830 , who then founded monasteries in their homeland ( Monastery Mount Melleray and Monastery Mount St Bernard ).

After the death of Lestrange in 1827, Saulnier was appointed by the Pope as immediate superior of all Trappist monasteries.

literature

• Vie du RPD Antoine (Anne-Nicolas-Charles Saulnier de Beauregard), abbé de la Trappe de Melleray , Paris, Pihan de la Forest, 1840, 384 pages.
• Immo Eberl, The Cistercians. History of a European Order , Ostfildern, Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2007.
• Augustin-Hervé Laffay (* 1965), Dom Augustin de Lestrange et l'avenir du monachisme: 1754–1827 , Paris, Cerf, 1998; Diss. Lyon 3, 1994 (passim).