Soldier, Assassin, Artist, Priest

Joseph-Pierre Picot de Limoëlan de Clorivière (1768-1826) came late to the profession of religion. A youthful officer in the army of Louis XVI, he rose quickly in the ranks of the counter-revolutionary forces in Brittany during the 1790s, achieving sufficient distinction to be forced into exile in the Channel Islands. His return to France in 1799 opened the way for his involvement in an attempted assassination of Bonaparte, and only the assistance of his uncle, a priest, kept him from arrest and execution and arranged for his seclusion in hiding in Brittany. In 1803 Clorivière left France for good, taking his personal devotion as a Catholic and his skills as a portraitist in miniature to support him in the United States.

Once arrived in Baltimore, after shorter stays in Savannah and elsewhere, Clorivière entered the Sulpician seminary, and in 1812 he was ordained by Bishop Carroll. He was assigned to Charleston, South Carolina, as an assistant to Father Simon Felix Gallagher whose brilliance and renown as a pulpit orator saved him on numerous occasions from the results of his lapses into intemperance. After an auspicious beginning, Clorivière ran into serious difficulties with Gallagher and the Irish trustees of the Charleston congregation, not least because Clorivière devoted a substantial part of his pastoral efforts to blacks. After a short but bitter pamphlet war in 1818, he retired to Georgetown, where he played an active role in the spiritual life of the Georgetown Visitation Monastery, in the crypt of which he is buried.

At his death, Clorivière left some 175 volumes from his personal library in the care of the Visitandines, where they remained until last fall, when Mother M. Philomena Tisinger, VHM, agreed to their transfer to the Special Collections Division in Lauinger Library. Ranging in date from the 1670s to 1819, the volumes are almost entirely of religious content of one sort or another; virtually all are in French. Apart from some volumes of Scripture, catechetical woks, and a few theological reference works, the collection centers very largely on private devotion and individual prayer. The title of a work by Clorivière's uncle, Considérations sur l'exercice de la prière et de l'oraison (Paris, 1802) suggests reasonably well the tone and content of the whole. Given the difficulties under which the Church struggled during the French Revolution and its aftermath, such an emphasis is perhaps to be expected; for Catholic scholars today the collection as a whole provides a first-hand look at the intellectual and spiritual apparatus which sustained a whole generation of clergy. Bu the same token, those interested in American Catholic history will find in the collection the materials which formed and reflected the mind of one of this country's early pastors and spiritual counselors.