Saint Peter Fourier (1565-1640)

Mirecourt, a family of drapers in the duke's service

Peter Fourier was born on 30 November 1565 at Mirecourt, a small cloth-making town in the Vosges, in the Duchy of Lorraine — in the immediate aftermath of the closing of the Council of Trent (1563), at the very moment when the spiritual renewal of the Catholic Reformation was dawning in the West.^[7] A note in recent historiography signals, however, that the usually accepted date of 1565 is not absolutely certain: Sister Hélène Derréal, the critical editor of his correspondence, judges a birth in 1564 slightly more probable.^[8] Ignispedia retains the traditional date of 1565, while honestly flagging this minor archival doubt.

He was the son of Demenge Fourier (the Lorraine form of Dominic), a cloth merchant — master of the drapers' guild of Mirecourt from 1579 to 1581 — and of Anne Nacquard, a native of Mattaincourt, the very village where Peter would become parish priest.^[9] The family belonged to the bourgeoisie in the duke's service: a first cousin, Demenge Fourier (1542–1620), would be ennobled in 1591.^[10] The Jesuit Jean Fourier (1560–1636) — professor of theology at Pont-à-Mousson before becoming its rector — was long presented as a relative of Peter, his spiritual director, then that of Saint Francis de Sales, whom he allegedly guided to the episcopate of 1602 and urged to publish the Introduction to the Devout Life: neither this kinship nor these spiritual directions are established by the sources. All that is attested is the role of a Father Jean Fourier, head of the Jesuit college of Chambéry, with Mme de Charmoisy, the first recipient of the letters that became the Introduction to the Devout Life, published in 1609 (not 1608).^[11] In 1582, Peter lost his mother at sixteen; his father remarried Michelle Guérin, former nurse of Princess Christine of Lorraine, and would be ennobled in 1591.^[12]

The Jesuit college of Pont-à-Mousson

In 1578, at twelve, Peter entered the Jesuit college of Pont-à-Mousson, where he pursued six years of studies in grammar and rhetoric.^[13] Founded in 1572 and entrusted to the Jesuits, the University of Pont-à-Mousson was then one of the great intellectual centres of the Catholic Reformation in Lorraine; the Jesuit Jean Fourier taught theology there before becoming its rector (whose kinship with Peter is not established, see above).^[14] Another Jesuit, Louis Richeome — nicknamed the "French Cicero" — deeply marked the young Peter with his optimistic conception of human nature, in the line of the Council of Trent and of the devout humanism that prepared the French spiritual school of the seventeenth century.^[15]

Canon regular at Chaumousey

In 1585, at twenty, Peter Fourier joined the canons regular of Saint Augustine at Chaumousey Abbey, near Épinal — a choice of religious life which, unlike cloistered orders, allows wide apostolic and pastoral action.^[16] He was ordained priest at Trier, on which the diocese of Toul depended, on 25 February 1589, and celebrated his first Mass at Chaumousey Abbey on the following 24 June.^[17][18]

His abbot then sent him back for seven years to the University of Pont-à-Mousson for thorough studies in theology and law, in contact with the jurist Pierre Grégoire, author of the Syntagma juris universi (1582).^[19] There he trained in the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as updated by the commentary of the Dominican Cajetan^[20], and his contemporaries report that he knew the Summa Theologica by heart.^[21] Returning to Chaumousey in 1595, he administered the parish attached to the abbey until 1597.

Perpetual vicar of a poor parish

In 1597, Peter Fourier became parish priest of Mattaincourt, in the Vosges — an office he would exercise until his death in 1640, for forty-three years.^[22] Technically, recent historiography notes, he was not a full parish priest but a perpetual vicar: the benefice belonged to the canons of Haussonville, whose collegiate church remained juridically the "primitive parish priest" of Mattaincourt; Peter Fourier therefore received only the congrua — casual fees and a modest pension — which he devoted entirely to the works of his parish.^[23]

Several older biographies and contemporary websites present Mattaincourt as a "little Geneva" won over to Protestantism that Fourier supposedly had to reconquer.^[24] This image should, however, honestly be nuanced: the expression seems to come from an embellishment by one of the saint's very first biographers (Jean Bedel, 1645/1869), and no local archive confirms the actual presence of Protestant households at Mattaincourt when Fourier became parish priest.^[25] What the sources establish with certainty, on the other hand, is the state of moral and material dilapidation in which he found the parish, and the tenacity with which he raised it up through prayer, instruction and example — to the point that his biographers count it, with the foundation of the Congregation of Notre-Dame and the reform of the canons regular, among his "essential titles of glory".^[26]

"To harm no one, to be useful to all"

Peter Fourier's whole pastoral life is summed up in the motto he adopted, borrowed from Saint Ambrose of Milan: Obesse nemini, omnibus prodesse — "to harm no one, to be useful to all".^[27] His portraits, stained-glass windows and statues bear it almost always as an epigraph. It is not a mere pious slogan: it is the concrete programme of four decades of local reforms — credit, public health, justice, instruction — of which Mattaincourt became the laboratory.

The Saint-Epvre fund and the "little devotionnette"

To keep struggling artisans from resorting to moneylenders, Fourier founded a mutual fund, the Saint-Epvre fund, which lent without pledge and without interest.^[28] He also organized a mutual-aid system which he himself called, in his correspondence, the "little devotionnette" — a team of five or six lay people charged with collecting food and redistributing it to the neediest, comparable in spirit to modern charitable organizations — and set up a soup kitchen.^[29]

"My good sisters, if you knew what it is to be a parish priest — that is, pastor of peoples, father, mother, captain, guard, guide, sentinel, physician, advocate, attorney, mediator, feeder, example, mirror, all things to all — you would take good care not to wish me absent from my parish during this season." — Saint Peter Fourier, reply to religious sisters urging him to flee the plague^[30]

Plague, famine and public health (1626, 1631–1632)

Fourier took an active part in the fight against the Great Plague of 1631–1632, issuing hygiene rules — wholesome food, clean premises, pure water — which helped curb the contagion.^[31] During the famine of 1626, he imposed a rationing of wheat on the principle "to each according to his needs", and not according to wealth — a remarkable social choice for the time.^[32]

A magistrate priest: justice and local administration

Lorraine custom sometimes assigned municipal functions to the parish priest. Each year, on the Sunday before Saint John's Day, Peter Fourier presided over the assembly that elected the schoolmaster, the churchwarden managing church property, an alderman and a lieutenant of justice; by ducal delegation, he himself rendered low and middle justice, depending on whether the fine was below or above ten sols.^[33] Since 1627, an edict of Duke Charles IV had required anyone entering a town of the duchy to carry a certificate attesting the absence of contagious disease. His correspondence preserves one of these certificates, written in his hand on 15 September 1631:

"I the undersigned, parish priest and head of justice at Mattaincourt in Lorraine under the authority of His Highness, attest to all whom it may concern that this fifteenth day of September one thousand six hundred and thirty-one, Jean Mailfer […] left the said Mattaincourt, where he stayed some seventeen weeks, in which place, God be thanked, there is no danger of plague or other contagious diseases." — Saint Peter Fourier, health certificate, Mattaincourt, 15 September 1631^[34]

Alix Le Clerc, a thwarted vocation

Alix Le Clerc (1576–1622), a young lady of the nobility of Remiremont, had for several years been seeking the religious form in which to embody a deep desire to serve God through the education of the poorest.^[35] Under the spiritual and intellectual direction of Peter Fourier, parish priest of Mattaincourt and already committed reformer, she finally found the path of her vocation: not a cloister closed in on itself, but a congregation devoted to instruction.^[36]

Christmas 1597: the first vows at Mattaincourt

At Christmas 1597, Peter Fourier received in the parish church of Mattaincourt the vows of consecration of Alix Le Clerc, aged twenty-one, and of four companions.^[37] This is the spiritual birth certificate of the future Congregation of Notre-Dame. In May 1598, the small group moved to Poussay, where a chapter of noble ladies was held: there they made the "retreat of the billets", a week of individual discernment on life's great choices, at the end of which all unanimously agreed to found a new congregation dedicated to the teaching of girls.^[38]

In July 1598, the first free school of Lorraine for little girls opened at Poussay — poor and rich without distinction.^[39][40] The founding text of 1598 sets out the project's ambition in terms remarkably clear-cut for the time: "to establish public schools and there instruct girls free of charge in reading, writing, needlework and Christian doctrine".^[41] Tolerant, Fourier expressly asked the sisters also to welcome little Protestant girls to the school, and insisted, in one of his letters, that nothing be done that could "disturb their faith".^[42]

An unprecedented fourth vow: instruction

The new congregation's exclusive attachment to the teaching of girls took the form of a rare canonical choice: the addition of a fourth vow, that of instruction, to the three traditional religious vows — poverty, chastity, obedience.^[43] This provision, set out in the posthumous collection Les vrayes constitutions de la congrégation Notre-Dame (published in 1649, nine years after the founder's death), marks a date in the history of Western education: never before had a women's religious congregation devoted itself, by formal vow, to the schooling of girls of the people.^[44]

"To win a single soul in your schools […] is more than to create a world." — Saint Peter Fourier, letter to the sisters of Mirecourt, 1619^[45]

The "simultaneous" method and the birth of the classroom

The Vrayes constitutions detail a teaching organization revolutionary for the time: instruction is given to groups of pupils of the same level, the school is divided into "classes", each subdivided into several "orders" of fifteen to twenty schoolgirls entrusted to a mistress, all using the same textbook and learning to read simultaneously.^[46] This rational and effective method would find its full application only with the spread of the cheap book, at the end of the century.^[47] Tradition also attributes to Peter Fourier the invention of the blackboard and its introduction into classrooms; the attestation for this is later and less solidly documented than the preceding facts, and Ignispedia therefore reports it with the customary caution due to a school tradition repeated without first-hand archival proof.^[48]

Founding a new congregation, devoted to active teaching outside strict enclosure, ran headlong into the post-Tridentine canons on women's religious life. It would take Peter Fourier and Alix Le Clerc more than thirty years — from the first diocesan approval to the definitive Roman bull — to have their intuition recognized by the Church.^[49]

1616: the disappointment of an incomplete approval

The bull of February 1615 erected only the Nancy monastery under the rule of Saint Augustine — a recognition judged so narrow that it satisfied neither Peter Fourier nor the sisters, unanimous in refusing it as it stood.^[51] A second bull, in 1616, authorized external teaching but only provisionally. More than ten additional years of representations, memoranda and journeys to Rome would be needed to obtain satisfaction.

1628: the single bull of Urban VIII

After long and difficult proceedings, on 8 August 1628, Pope Urban VIII finally signed a single bull valid for all the monasteries of the Congregation.^[52] The sisters then took the name of Canonesses of Saint Augustine of the Congregation of Notre-Dame. This is the culmination of thirty-one years of institutional patience — and the definitive recognition of a model of apostolic women's religious life which prefigures, well ahead of its time, the great teaching congregations of the following centuries.

The Soissons crisis and the fidelity of Alix

The history of the young Congregation was not without internal trials: in 1623, the Soissons house rebelled against the authority of Peter Fourier, a crisis that would require several years (1624–1627) before its complete resolution.^[53] Alix Le Clerc died in 1622, even before the definitive bull of 1628, without having seen the canonical fulfilment of her work; by that date, thirteen monasteries already existed, and more than one hundred and twenty religious professions had been made between 1618 and 1625.^[54] She would be beatified in 1947.

Beyond the work carried out with Alix Le Clerc, Peter Fourier received a second mission of great scope: the reform of his own order, the canons regular of Saint Augustine, fallen according to his contemporaries into a certain laxity.^[55] The sources diverge slightly on the exact date of this mandate — 1621 according to some syntheses, 1623 according to French Wikipedia — which simply reflects a process spread over several years rather than a single decree.^[56][57] Between August 1625 and January 1626, Fourier stayed on many occasions at Domèvre-sur-Vezouze Abbey, one of the centres of this reform.^[58]

He thus instituted the Congregation of Our Saviour, of which he became, in 1632, the superior for the Duchy of Lorraine — a charge which some sources describe as a generalate.^[59][60] This dual role of founder and reformer — one of the rare examples, at the time, of the same man heading both a men's reform and a women's foundation — gives Peter Fourier an exceptional stature among the Lorraine artisans of the Catholic Reformation.

In 1623, the Calvinist Count Philip Otto of Salm was compelled to abjure and convert to Catholicism in order to obtain from Emperor Ferdinand II the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.^[61] By an edict of 12 March 1625, he forbade the exercise of Calvinism on his lands, banished Protestant pastors and ordered the Catholic instruction of his subjects within one year, under pain of exile.^[62] It is in this politico-religious context that the catechetical mission entrusted to Peter Fourier to the principality of Salm, near Nancy, belongs: according to the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, in six months, "all the Protestants, whom he called his 'poor strangers,' had returned to the Faith".^[63] This phrase, imbued with Fourier's characteristic pastoral charity — he never speaks of the vanquished but of "strangers" to be brought home — must be set in its context: the prince's political conversion had already led to the departure or forced conversion of part of the Protestant population even before the pastoral intervention of the parish priest of Mattaincourt.^[64]

A war overflowing into Lorraine

In 1630, Gaston d'Orléans, younger brother of King Louis XIII and declared opponent of Cardinal Richelieu, found refuge in Lorraine, where Duke Charles IV welcomed him with pomp. In 1632, the duke married his sister to Gaston without the king's agreement — an affront Louis XIII regarded as a casus belli: his troops invaded the Duchy of Lorraine, already ravaged by the Thirty Years' War and Swedish troops.^[65] The ducal family scattered across Europe. While the painter Georges de La Tour rallied to the French, the engraver Jacques Callot remained faithful to his sovereign — and Peter Fourier with him.^[66]

The 1636 expulsion and the "tour Saint-Pierre-Fourier"

His fidelity to Duke Charles IV earned him expulsion in 1636 by Richelieu. He was then seventy years old. Taking refuge at Gray, in Franche-Comté, then a Spanish possession, he found for all lodging only a closet less than three metres by three, in an old square building dating from 1338, lit by three windows and heated by an ancient fireplace.^[67] Access was by a turret with a turning wooden staircase, allowing the entrance door to be concealed — it is from this device, and not from the building itself, that the name of the place comes, still called today the "tour Saint-Pierre-Fourier".^[68]

"It is the heart of the Lorrainers"

Even in adversity, Peter Fourier remained, according to his biographers, the archetype of the Lorraine patriot.^[69] Three years after his arrival at Gray, in a letter addressed to Duchess Nicole of Lorraine, he renewed to her the assurance of his fidelity:

"As most humble and most faithful and most obedient subjects bear at all times to their good princes, and still to their good princesses. It is the heart of the Lorrainers." — Saint Peter Fourier, letter to Duchess Nicole of Lorraine, from his exile at Gray^[70]

Death, on 9 December 1640

Until his final days, the exile continued working on the revision of the "Great Constitutions" of the Congregation of Notre-Dame.^[71] He died at Gray on 9 December 1640, aged seventy-five.^[72] His body rests today in the parish church of Mattaincourt; a chapel of the Basilica of Notre-Dame of Gray is said to keep, according to the pilgrimage leaflet published for the centenary of his canonization in 1998, a reliquary containing his heart.^[73]

This humility surfaces even in a discreet ministry: called to assist at the exorcism of Mme de Ranfaing, a possessed woman under the care of the Bishop of Toul, Peter Fourier endures the accusation hurled at him — "since you thus deceive people", as if he were feigning holiness to dupe those around him — and simply replies: "Yes, truly, I deserve it!" According to the author, the voice then retreats and Mme de Ranfaing immediately feels better: an example of a deliverance brought about by the mere presence of the saint.^[74]

A Thomist theology at the service of the concrete

Peter Fourier's spirituality was not primarily speculative: trained in the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas and in the optimistic humanism of Louis Richeome, he translated his lofty theological culture into concrete gestures — interest-free credit, free schooling, health certificates, equitable rationing.^[75] The Council of Trent supplied him the doctrinal framework: the central role of catechesis, but also of secular culture, in the Christian's spiritual formation.^[76] From this conviction was born his saying to his sisters of Mirecourt on the price of a soul won at school, quoted above.^[77]

Affection, realism and evangelical joy

The Congregation of Notre-Dame still sums up today its founder's educational spirit in a few words: to see the child with affection, respect, understanding, realism and breadth of mind, in an "evangelical climate of joy, simplicity and charity".^[78] This pedagogy of kindness, applied as early as the seventeenth century to poor little girls whom no one else thought of instructing, is one of the most enduring legacies of the saint of Mattaincourt.

A wholly pastoral temperament

The quotation to the sisters worried by the plague — "pastor of peoples, father, mother, captain, guard, guide, sentinel, physician, advocate, attorney, mediator, feeder, example, mirror, all things to all"^[79] — sketches a rare portrait of what the parochial priesthood could concretely mean in the seventeenth century: not an isolated sacramental function, but a total charge, social as much as spiritual, embraced without reserve even at the risk of one's own life.

1730: beatification by Benedict XIII

Nearly a century after his death, Peter Fourier was beatified on 29 January 1730 by Pope Benedict XIII.^[80][81] Devotion then developed in Lorraine and the neighbouring dioceses, carried by the living memory of the Congregation of Notre-Dame and of the canons regular of Our Saviour.

1897: canonization by Leo XIII

Peter Fourier was canonized on 27 May 1897 by Pope Leo XIII.^[82][83] The apostolic letter of canonization, Hoc mandatum, dated 27 June 1897, opens with a quotation from the first epistle of Saint John on the commandment of charity — "Hoc mandatum habemus a Deo, ut qui diligit Deum, diligat et fratrem suum" ("We hold this commandment from God: that he who loves God love his brother also", 1 Jn 4:21) — before recalling the new saint's work: he "conceived the plan of instituting a great and lasting society of consecrated virgins" for the education of girls in virtue and the arts.^[84]

For the canonization, Leo XIII retained two instantaneous healings attributed to the intercession of Peter Fourier: that of a religious sister, Sister Marie-Alexandra, from severe arthritis of the knee in 1868, and that of another sister, Sister Marie-Françoise, from a severe gastric ulcer in 1881.^[85] The canonization ceremony was held at Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome on 27 May 1897; a statue by the sculptor Louis Noël, representing the new saint, today adorns one of the pillars surrounding the altar above the tomb of the apostle Peter.^[86]

Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal

The educational intuition of Peter Fourier and Alix Le Clerc crossed the Atlantic as early as the mid-seventeenth century. Trained in the external congregation of Notre-Dame attached to the convent of the canonesses of Troyes — an association of unenclosed lay women directly descended from the work of Mattaincourt — Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700) left Troyes in February 1653 for Ville-Marie: landing at Quebec on 22 September 1653, she opened her first school there in 1658, the first nucleus of the future Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal, the principal North-American centre of expansion of Peter Fourier's founding spirit.^[87]

Karoline Gerhardinger and the School Sisters of Notre Dame

In Bavaria, the same spiritual filiation inspired, on 24 October 1833, the foundation by Karoline Gerhardinger of the "Poor Sisters of Notre-Dame", which became in 1847 the School Sisters of Notre Dame, today present on several continents in direct continuation of the educational charism of Mattaincourt.^[88]

The Congregation of Notre-Dame today

At the end of the seventeenth century, the Congregation of Notre-Dame numbered some sixty-three monasteries and two thousand sisters, spread across France, Lorraine, Alsace, the Spanish Netherlands and German territories.^[89] After several splits and regroupings (Jupille union in Belgium from 1878, Roman union recognized in 1932), the two great branches merged in April 1963, following Vatican II and the beatification of Alix Le Clerc in 1947, forming the unified congregation which continues its educational mission today on several continents.^[90]

Several schools still bear the saint's name — at Mirecourt, in Paris (12th arrondissement), at Lunéville and at Gray — and several religious buildings are dedicated to him, notably the Basilica of Saint-Pierre-Fourier at Mattaincourt, built in 1853 on the site of his old church.^[91][92] The Pierre Fourier–Alix Le Clerc Foundation, recognized as being of public utility in France, perpetuates today their double educational and spiritual heritage.^[93]

At bottom, Peter Fourier's life delivers a message of remarkable timeliness: holiness does not necessarily require the splendour of great urban foundations nor the renown of princely courts — it can also lie, for forty-three years, in the obstinate fidelity of a village priest to his motto: to harm no one, to be useful to all.

• Saint Francis de Sales (1567–1622) — Bishop of Geneva (1602–1622) and author of the Introduction to the Devout Life (1609).
• Saint John Eudes (1601–1680) — another great reformer of the clergy and founder of the seventeenth-century French Church, in the same Catholic Reformation generation.
• Saint Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) — a contemporary of Peter Fourier, another great artisan of organized charity and clergy reform.
• Saint Jane Frances de Chantal (1572–1641) — co-foundress of the Visitation, a major women's figure of the same Lorraine and Savoyard spiritual generation.
• Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700) — direct heiress, in Canada, of the educational work of Peter Fourier and Alix Le Clerc.
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1517–1648) — the great movement of regeneration of the Church of which the work of Mattaincourt is one of the most original fruits.
• The Council of Trent (1545–1563) — whose theology and catechetical emphasis directly nourish all of Peter Fourier's pastoral and educational work.