Philippe-François d'Albignac de Castelnau

Philippe-François d'Albignac de Castelnau 1789

Philippe-François d'Albignac de Castelnau (born August 20, 1742 in Triadou Castle in Peyreleau , Aveyron Department , † January 3, 1814 in London ) was Bishop of Angoulême and a member of the May 1789 of King Louis XVI. convened General Estates and the resulting constituent national assembly, the Constituent Assembly .

Life

Ascent

He was the second son of Viscount François-Antoine d'Albignac du Triadou (* 1712), from the widely branched family Albignac , and his wife Anne-Elisabeth de Montboissier-Beaufort-Cannillac († 1752). He entered the clergy and became the king's almsman and then vicar general of Bishop Joseph-Dominique de Cheylus of Bayeux . On June 25, 1784, he was appointed Bishop of Angoulême and on July 18, 1784 consecrated .

politics

Opening of the Estates General on May 5, 1789 in Versailles

On March 20, 1789 he was in the administrative and electoral district ( sénéchaussée ) des Angoumois as one of the three representatives of the clergy in the last of Louis XVI. elected General Estates convened . One of the other two was the ambitious pastor of Saint-Martin in Angoulême, Pierre Mathieu Joubert , elected the following day , who took opposing positions on the crucial issues. Albignac was an unconditional supporter of the existing order. When it came to the question of whether voting should be done according to class or head, he was uncompromisingly opposed to voting according to head, even when special envoy from Angoulême informed the Estates-General that the clergy there were in favor of voting according to head. He also firmly rejected the civil constitution of the clergy, which was passed on July 12, 1790 . In both cases, he submitted written protests against the parliamentary majority decisions, while Joubert voted with a majority. He retired to his castle Triadou in protest and sent a letter to the administration of the Charente department on December 24, 1790, in which he refused to obey their orders and to submit to the new civil constitution of the clergy. He was removed from office, and on March 8, 1791, his opponent Joubert was elected Constitutional Bishop of Angoulême and on March 27 in the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral with several other new bishops by Jean Baptiste Joseph Gobel , Constitutional Archbishop of Paris, consecrated.

Albignac did not give in yet, however. On April 8, 1791, he sent a letter to "Mr. Joubert, Pastor of St. Martin d'Angouleme," and on April 12, published an instruction from the bishop on the March 8 election, as well as instructions to the priests and vicars who had not yet taken the new oath.

On the other hand, his opponents had accused him as early as February 1791 of being a rebel and the secret head of a counter-revolutionary band of robbers who were up to mischief in his home region in the Aveyron department , and on July 27, 1791, the authorities from Millau sent a squad of militiamen to his side Château Triadou in Peyreleau, who searched and looted it and found two boxes with gold and silver under one step of the main staircase. The accusations against the bishop were probably baseless and only the pretext for the search of the castle and the confiscation of the treasure of one of his ancestors, Pierre III, which had long been suspected there. d'Albignac.

Exile and death

A law passed on August 26, 1792 forced all priests and bishops who did not take the oath on the civil constitution into exile . After the constitution of September 3, 1791 had been passed, Albignac first named three trustees, the former vicars general Jean Vigneron, Pierre Lambert des Andreaux and Henri Lafaux de Chabrignac, and then went into exile in London on November 28, 1792 via Dieppe .

His successor in Angoulême, Pierre-Matthieu Joubert, only officiated until December 26, 1792, resigned, renounced the Church, married and took on public offices. The diocese of Charente remained vacant until June 1802.

Albignac refused the resignation demanded by the Concordat Pius VII with Napoleon , which was announced on April 18, 1802, and was deposed against his will. However, he refused to accept it. On July 4, 1802 he published a decree from London in which he provisionally delegated his powers to the successor appointed by the Pope, Dominique Lacombe, who had held the bishopric in Angoulême since June 20, 1802. However, when Lacombe said in two letters, to the Bishop of Bayeux and to a canon in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges , that he had never renounced the civil constitution of the clergy, had received no papal absolution from it and did not need one, Albignac stepped up back in action. On September 12, he issued a statement revoking the previous one and reasserting the powers he believed he had delegated. Although they were shocked by Lacombe's writing and behavior in Angoulême, Albignac's attempt to regain the bishopric was ignored. He then resisted all attempts, including the Roman Curia , to bring about a compromise, broke off his relationship with his former diocese completely, and died in London on January 3, 1814, without having seen France again.

literature

• Dictionnaire des parlementaires français, de 1789 à 1889, pp. 31–32
• J.-P.-G. Blanchet: Le clergé charentais pendant la Révolution. Despujols, Angoulême, 1898

predecessor	Office	successor
Joseph-Amédée de Broglie	Bishop of Angoulême 1784–1791	Pierre Mathieu Joubert