Emmanuel d'Alzon

Emmanuel d'Alzon was born on 30 August 1810 in Le Vigan, in the Gard department of southern France, into a family of the old Languedoc nobility. His father was viscount Henri Daudé d'Alzon and his mother Jeanne-Marie de Fayn de Rochefort. Raised in a Catholic household in the Cévennes, a region with a strong Protestant presence, he received his early education locally and later in Paris, including at the Collège Saint-Louis. After considering a career in law, he turned toward the priesthood and studied theology at Montpellier and then in Rome. He was ordained a priest in Rome on 26 December 1834.

He returned to the Diocese of Nîmes, where he was appointed vicar general while still a young priest and served in that office for much of his life under Bishops Cart and Plantier. He devoted himself to the restoration of Catholic institutions after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, to the education of youth, and to the defense of the Church in an increasingly secular French society. A convinced ultramontane, he was a strong supporter of the papacy and of the definition of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870.

In 1845 at Nîmes he founded the Congregation of the Augustinians of the Assumption, known as the Assumptionists, a community of priests and brothers living under a rule inspired by Saint Augustine and dedicated to teaching, the Catholic press, pilgrimages, and missionary work. The congregation obtained a decree of praise from the Holy See in the 1850s and further approval in subsequent years. D'Alzon established the Collège de l'Assomption in Nîmes and promoted Catholic journalism and the Association of Notre-Dame de Salut. He was closely associated with the Religious of the Assumption, founded by Marie-Eugénie Milleret, and in 1865 he founded the Oblates of the Assumption with Marie Correnson to share in similar apostolic work. Assumptionist missionaries were later sent to several countries, including missions in the Near East aimed in part at work among Eastern Christians.

D'Alzon spent his remaining years governing his foundations, corresponding widely, and enduring poor health. He died in Nîmes on 21 November 1880. The cause for his beatification was introduced in the twentieth century, and Pope John Paul II proclaimed him Venerable on 21 December 1991. He has not been beatified or canonized.