Louis Duchesne

Who was Louis Duchesne?

Louis Marie Olivier Duchesne was a French priest, philologist, teacher and a critical historian of Christianity and Roman Catholic liturgy and institutions.

Descended from a family of Breton sailors, he was born in 1843 in Saint-Servan, Roulais place, now part of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, and was orphaned at a young age, in 1849, after the death of his father Jacques Duchesne. Marc Tanguy, a relative, was one of the survivors of 74-gun ship Redoutable at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Louis' brother, Jean-Baptiste Duchesne, settled in Oregon, and arrived at Oregon City in 1849.

Louis Duchesne was ordained to the priesthood in 1867. He taught for many years in Saint-Brieuc, then went to study in Paris, where he influenced the reformist Alfred Firmin Loisy, a founder of the movement of Modernism, which was formally condemned under Pope Pius X. In 1876, he became a member of the École française in Rome; he eventually became its director. He was an amateur archaeologist and organized expeditions from Rome to Mount Athos, to Syria, and Asia Minor, from which he gained an interest in the early history of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1887, he published the results of his thesis, followed by the first complete critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis. At a difficult time for critical historians applying modern methods to Church history, drawing together archaeology and topography to supplement literature and setting ecclesiastical events with contexts of social history, Abbé Duchesne was in constant correspondence with like-minded historians among the Bollandists, with their long history of critical editions of hagiographies.