Jacques Retouret

Jacques Retouret was born in 1746 in Limoges, in the Limousin region of central France. He entered the Carmelite Order, the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel of the Ancient Observance, and was ordained a priest. In the years before the French Revolution he was known in his region as a preacher.

When the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was imposed in 1790, requiring an oath that many Catholics judged incompatible with communion with Rome, Retouret refused to swear. Non-juring priests were progressively outlawed. He was arrested and, under revolutionary legislation against refractory clergy, condemned to deportation.

In 1794 he was taken to Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, where hundreds of priests and religious were confined on two prison hulks, the Deux-Associés and the Washington, former slave ships anchored in the Charente estuary. Intended deportation to Guiana was blocked by war at sea. The prisoners endured overcrowding, hunger, filth, and epidemic disease. Jacques Retouret died of illness on 26 August 1794 aboard the Deux-Associés. The dead from the hulks were buried on nearby Île Madame.

Of the clergy held on the Rochefort pontons, more than two hundred died. On 1 October 1995 Pope John Paul II beatified sixty-four of them as martyrs who had died in hatred of the faith. Jacques Retouret is numbered among these Blessed Martyrs of Rochefort, also called Blessed Jean-Baptiste Souzy and Companions. He is venerated as a blessed of the Carmelite Order and has not been canonized.