Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld

Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, often distinguished as Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, was a French Roman Catholic bishop of the later Ancien Régime who was killed in the September Massacres of 1792. He was born in 1744 into the house of La Rochefoucauld, a leading noble family of France whose members had long occupied high places in Church and State. As was common for younger sons of that rank, he entered the secular clergy rather than a religious order and rose through the Gallican hierarchy. In the early 1780s he was named Bishop of Saintes, an ancient diocese in Saintonge in southwestern France. In 1789 he sat as a deputy of the clergy at the Estates-General, where he belonged to the conservative minority that opposed the rapid recasting of monarchy and Church.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, enacted by the National Assembly in 1790, reorganized the French Church as a body under civil authority, redrew dioceses, and required bishops and priests to swear a civic oath. La Rochefoucauld refused the oath and was thereafter counted among the refractory or non-juring clergy, who remained in communion with Rome and were increasingly treated as enemies of the Revolution. After the insurrection of 10 August 1792 and the fall of the monarchy, non-juring ecclesiastics still in the capital were arrested. He was confined in the former Carmelite convent (the Carmes) on the rue de Vaugirard in Paris, in the same prison as his brother François-Joseph de La Rochefoucauld, Bishop of Beauvais, together with a large number of other bishops, priests, and religious.

On 2 September 1792, amid panic over the Prussian invasion and rumours of prison conspiracies, armed crowds attacked the prisons of Paris. At the Carmes the detainees were brought before a makeshift tribunal and asked whether they would take the civic oath. Those who refused were killed in the convent church and garden. Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld was among the dead, as was his brother; the two prelates are consistently reported to have been slain together. The massacre at the Carmes was one of the principal episodes of the September Massacres. The number of clergy murdered there is generally given as more than one hundred. The bodies were thrown into a well in the convent garden.

On 17 October 1926 Pope Pius XI beatified a group of one hundred and ninety-one victims of the September Massacres, including Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, as martyrs who had died for refusing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and for fidelity to the Holy See. They are honoured as the Martyrs of September, or Martyrs of the Carmes, and are commemorated on 2 September. Devotion has been centred on the restored Carmelite church and the site of the well in Paris. La Rochefoucauld is remembered in standard accounts less for distinctive writings or a long pastoral administration than as one of this group of clerical martyrs of the first great wave of revolutionary violence against the non-juring Church.