Joseph-Jean De Smet

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Joseph-Jean De Smet (born December 11, 1794 in Ghent , † February 13, 1877 there ) was a Catholic clergyman, historian and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts of Belgium and the Belgian National Congress .

Life

In 1819 De Smet was ordained a priest and was appointed teacher of rhetoric at the seminary of St. Barbara in his hometown of Ghent. Shortly afterwards he took up a teaching position at the college in Aalst , which was closed in 1825 for political reasons. The Dutch state claimed a monopoly on educational institutions. As a result, De Smet criticized the government more and more often and published articles in the opposition news magazine Le Catholique des Pays-Bas , which was edited by Adolphe Barthels .

De Smet was politically active throughout his life. As early as 1822 he published his work Geschiedenis van België (History of Belgium) in which he publicly criticized the actions of Wilhelm I during the Spanish-Dutch War . After the Belgian Revolution of 1830 he was appointed to the newly elected Belgian National Congress. Here the Catholic clergyman campaigned for a constitutional monarchy in Belgium and for the separation of church and state. He abstained in the election of the Protestant Leopold I as the first Belgian king.

In 1831 De Smet became professor of ecclesiastical history at the Ghent seminary and an honorary canon in St Bavo's Cathedral . In 1835 De Smet joined the Académie royale de Belgique ( Koninklijke Academie van België ), in 1837 he became a member of the Royal Commission for History ( Koninklijke Commissie voor geschiedenis ).

Works

After the Belgian Revolution, De Smet's book on the history of Belgium ( Geschiedenis van België, 1822) became famous. On the basis of the diaries of the Ghent Bishop de Broglie , which he wrote during his imprisonment on the island of Marguerite, De Smet wrote the work Coup d'œil sur l'histoire ecclésiastique dans les premières années du XIXe siècle, et en particulier sur l in 1836 'assemblée des évêques à Paris en 1811, d'après des documents authentiques et en partie inédits .

His main work, however, is the Corpus chronicorum Flandriae , a compendium on the history of Flanders , which was published in Brussels in 1841. Here he processed the church chronicles of St. Bavo and Drongen and, among other previously unknown medieval chronicles, the records of the Benedictine monk Gilles Li Muisis .

literature

personal data
SURNAME De Smet, Joseph-Jean
ALTERNATIVE NAMES De Smet, J.-J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian clergyman and historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 11, 1794
PLACE OF BIRTH Ghent
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 1877
Place of death Ghent