Ambroise Chevreux

Ambroise Chevreux was a French Benedictine of the Congregation of Saint-Maur and the last superior general of that congregation. He was born in 1728 at Orléans, in the Kingdom of France. He entered the Maurists, a reform congregation of French Benedictines founded in the early seventeenth century and celebrated across Europe for historical, liturgical, and patristic scholarship, associated with figures such as Jean Mabillon. Chevreux made his monastic profession at the abbey of Saint-Florent at Saumur and later served in the congregation’s houses. In 1783 he was elected superior general, an office whose holder customarily resided at the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the intellectual centre of the Maurists.

The French Revolution brought the rapid destruction of the old monastic order. In 1790 the National Assembly suppressed religious vows and confiscated monastic property; the Civil Constitution of the Clergy the same year required an oath that subordinated the Church in France to the civil power. Chevreux, like a great many regulars and secular priests, refused the oath and was classed among the non-juring clergy. The Congregation of Saint-Maur ceased to exist as a legal body. After the insurrection of 10 August 1792 and the fall of the monarchy, non-juring ecclesiastics in Paris were arrested as suspected counter-revolutionaries.

Chevreux was confined in the former Carmelite convent on the rue de Vaugirard, known as the Prison des Carmes. On 2 September 1792, as Prussian armies advanced and rumours spread of a plot among the prisoners, crowds and volunteer fighters massacred inmates in several Paris prisons. At the Carmes, bishops, priests, and religious were summoned before an improvised tribunal in the convent garden and put to death if they would not swear the civic oath. Chevreux was killed there that day, one of more than a hundred clergy murdered at that site during the September Massacres. The victims were buried in common pits in the convent grounds; no separate, securely identified tomb for Chevreux is recorded.

On 17 October 1926 Pope Pius XI beatified 191 victims of those massacres, including Chevreux, as the Blessed Martyrs of September 1792 (the Martyrs of the Carmes). Their collective liturgical commemoration is kept on 2 September. Chevreux is thus honoured in the Catholic Church as a blessed martyr of the Revolution; he was not separately canonized. His death coincided with the end of the Maurist congregation, which was not restored after the revolutionary years.