Their crime: being priests and refusing to take an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which disconnected them from the Pope.
Newsroom (21/01/2025 22:09, Gaudium Press) On January 21, 1794, just one year after the beheading of King Louis XVI, Father Jean-Baptiste Curpin du Cormier, and thirteen other priests were guillotined in Laval and then thrown into a mass grave in “La Croix Bataille” in France.
In October 1792, fourteen refractory priests from Laval (who refused to take an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) were imprisoned in the convent of nuns called Pacience, where they could only receive visitors for two hours a month. The only people allowed to see them were their brothers and sisters, watched over by the doorkeeper.
On December 13, 1793, the guillotine was installed in Laval, on Place du Blé (now Place de la Trémoille), near the Revolutionary Court.
Between January 5 and November 2, 1794, in 150 hearings, the Commission pronounced 328 death sentences.
From January 9, 1794, all religious denominations were banned in France. The army transformed Laval’s Trinity church into a “stable and fodder barn” and later into the Temple of Reason.
At 8:30 a.m. on January 21, 1794, the fourteen priests crossed the threshold of the courthouse, where they would be tried by the Revolutionary Commission. Ten were walking with difficulty, four were riding in a cart, and five were over 70 years old.
The public prosecutor Volcler, a former priest and apostate, asked them for the last time to take the oath. “Father Philippot, 78, replied: ‘With the help of God’s grace, I will not defile my old age.
“What? You, Volcler, who are asking for my death? You, whom I welcomed into my home, whom I admitted to my table, whom I loved very much…”, added Father Migoret.
They were executed after being prevented by the guards from singing one last “Salve Regina” together. They were killed after 5 Vandeans (from the French region called La Vendée), who were also tried as enemies of the Republic.
The 4 judges, including 2 sworn priests (one of whom died falling out of a window because he was drunk), who were watching the execution from the window of a neighboring building, drank a glass of red wine with each head that fell, encouraging the crowd to shout with them: “Long live the Republic, down with the heads of the calotins.
The bodies of the 14 priests, as well as those of the others executed, were thrown into a mass grave in Avesnières, in a marsh called “La Croix Bataille”.
From the day of their execution, the priests were venerated as martyrs. Children were asked to dip handkerchiefs in their blood to keep as relics.
In 1803, a gendarmerie report recorded pilgrimages of 50 and 600 people to “La Croix Bataille”, near the mass grave where they had been buried.
On August 6, 1816, at the request of the parish priest of Avesnières, the bodies of the 14 martyrs were exhumed and placed in the chapel of Saint Roch in the parish cemetery of Avesnières. On August 9, they were transferred to the church in Avesnières.
On June 19, 1955, Venerable Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli, 1939-1958) beatified the 14 priests, as well as a parish priest and four nuns who had also been guillotined in 1794.
The fourteen priests guillotined on January 21, 1794, are:
– Jean-Baptiste Turpin du Cormier, 64, parish priest of La Trinité was executed last at the request of Volcler, the procurator.
– Six parish priests: Jacques André, 50, André Dulion, 66, Louis Gastineau, 66, François Migoret-Lamberdière, 65, Julien Moulé, 77 and Augustin-Emmanuel Philippot, 77.
– Four chaplains: Pierre Thomas, 75, of the Augustinians of Château-Gontier, Jean-Marie Gallot, 46, of the Benedictines, Joseph Pelé, 74, of the Poor Clares, and Jean-Baptiste Triquerie, 57, of various Franciscan houses.
– three priests René-Louis Ambroise, 74, Julien-François Morin de la Girardière, 64, and François Duchesne, 58.
With information from Évangile au Quotidien
Compiled by Dominic Joseph
