Brief History
Around the year 1000, a first hermit named Gombaud settled in a cave on the left bank of the Creuse, at the back of which gushed a spring, the “Gombaud fountain,” which gave its name to the abbey and the village.
Over the years, a small colony of hermits formed around him, carving their cells into the rock and then building a chapel dedicated to Saint Julian, the first bishop of Le Mans.
In 1091, the superior of this small community of hermits, Pierre de l’Étoile, decided with some of his companions to cross the Creuse to found a monastery under the Rule of Saint Benedict.
The first abbot of Fontgombault knew Saint Bernard of Tiron, of whom he was the advisor and friend, Blessed Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the Order of Fontevraud, as well as Saint Raoul de la Futaye and Saint Vital of Savigny. Having died in 1114 from ergotism, he did not see the dedication of the abbey church, which probably took place around 1145. His remains were found in 1954 in the old chapter house, then transferred to the nave of the church.
For more than two centuries, the monastery experienced a period of prosperity. In the surroundings of the monastery, such as in Loups, but also in Touraine, Poitou, the Orléanais, and the Vendômois, and as far as Aunis, the monks of Fontgombault created some twenty priories, originally all occupied by a few religious who were to oversee the exploitation of the land, sometimes work with their hands, and ensure the Divine Office in a chapel.
The new abbey was part of the “new monasticism” movement, illustrated notably by the Cistercian Order, which sought to promote a more literal practice of the Rule and restore the place of manual labor.
Material prosperity is not without danger for the purity of monastic life: claustral offices were established as benefices that their holder administered at will, and soon the income from certain priories was attached to these offices, as well as other rents. This arrangement opposed the Benedictine ideal, which reserves the entire government of the monastery to the abbot, in both spiritual and temporal matters, with all being bound to individual poverty.
Furthermore, in addition to the ravages of the Black Death, the Abbey suffered greatly from the Hundred Years’ War between the English and the French. In 1356, the region became a theater of military operations that led to the first devastation of the monastery. After the Treaty of Brétigny (1360), which ceded Poitou to the English, an English garrison settled on the site, with the last bays of the church nave being converted into a fortress. It was the knight Bertrand du Guesclin who liberated the region in 1372: he is known to have fought at the fort of Fontgombault.
There were a few moments of respite, but to meet the demands for subsidies, both royal and ecclesiastical, the community was forced to alienate part of its heritage. The size of the community gradually decreased to twelve monks at the end of the 14th century, and rarely exceeded this number thereafter, as the estates could no longer support a large community.
Starting in 1412, a second phase of the war left the country at the mercy of the exactions of armed troops and bandits. However, from the 1460s onwards, a certain economic rebirth of the region, as well as royal donations, allowed for the development of the estates through the creation of ponds in Brenne, as well as a restoration of the conventual buildings: the warming room and the refectory were fitted with new rib vaults, as was the sacristy, and the original cloister, now gone, was partially rebuilt.
In 1500, a competition for the abbatial seat between the candidate elected by the community and the one favored by the King led to an armed intervention where the religious were severely mistreated. The Parliament of Paris, seized of the matter, ruled in 1501 in favor of the monks’ candidate.
But soon, and until the Revolution, all the abbots of Fontgombault (with one exception) would effectively hold the abbey in commendam: chosen by the King and presented by him to the Pope, these ecclesiastics, who were not monks, were often more concerned with the income they could derive from their benefice than with the spiritual good of the community.
This institution of secular commendatory abbots was a plague for monasteries, as was that of “confidential abbots,” clerics who held the title of the Abbey but were in fact in the pay of unscrupulous local laymen to whom the King had delegated his power of appointment, and who administered the monastery’s assets for their own profit. Thus, Fontgombault Abbey fell under the control of Protestant lords who had no qualms about plundering its temporalities.
In 1569, a Calvinist detachment from Coligny’s great army plundered the monastery and set fire to the church and the conventual buildings. The religious had to lodge in the Abbey’s outbuildings, to the detriment of monastic life. Twenty years later, in 1589, as part of the struggle between Henry IV and the League, the fort of Fontgombault had to maintain a garrison of twenty men on site at the Abbot’s expense.
In 1656, the appointment of Anselme Mornet as commendatory Abbot brought about a renewal. An Augustinian religious, he intended to hold the Abbey “in rule” and not in commendam. Without residing at the Abbey himself, he regrouped the community and imposed a stricter rule of life. Above all, in 1674, he appointed a prior of great merit, Dom Andrieu. The latter abolished the private allowance of the religious and pooled the income. He undertook a general restoration of the monastic buildings: the choir of the abbey church, the dormitory, the infirmary, the refectory, the cloister, the bakery, the wine press, and the Saint-Julien chapel. He wrote a History of the Abbey. By the time of his death in 1705, the community had regained its regular numbers along with its fervor.
Fervor was maintained for some time, but recruitment dried up and by 1741, only five religious remained. The Archbishop of Bourges then decided to suppress the community in perpetuity, to install the Lazarists of Bourges in its place, followed by the Sulpicians starting in 1779. The commendatory abbots continued to take their share of the income, and the last of them, François-Régis de Rech de Saint-Amans, even proposed in 1786 to demolish the abbey church; providentially, the operation was deemed unprofitable.
The revolutionary turmoil finally completed the ruin of the monastery. The conventual buildings and all the estates were sold as national property on July 2, 1791. The ruins of the church served as a stone quarry.
The church and the monastic buildings owed their salvation to the initiative of two priests from the diocese of Bourges, Abbots Lenoir and Damourette, who undertook their restoration in 1848.
To repopulate the monastery, the Cistercians of Bellefontaine sent a group on All Saints’ Day 1849, reinforced in 1858 by a group of about twenty monks from Melleray Abbey (which would send another twenty or so in the following years). In 1859, the abbatial title was restored and Dom Dosithée Pellan took the head of the community, which welcomed a penal colony of young delinquents placed by the courts to learn a manual trade and receive elementary religious training. The Abbey thus received up to more than three hundred children.
In 1878, Dom Albéric Baranger succeeded Dom Dosithée. Despite the material difficulties due to the sudden withdrawal of the colony in 1880 by the anticlerical minister Jules Ferry, he was able to continue the development of the monastery, in particular by restoring the Saint-Julien chapel and the guesthouse.
Meanwhile, Abbot Lenoir tirelessly continued his work, and the nave was rebuilt within ten years; but the dedication of the restored building, planned for 1899, was forbidden at the last moment by a sectarian ministry.
Dom Albéric’s successor in 1902, Dom Fortunat Marchand, inherited a difficult financial situation, aggravated by the government’s harassment of the religious. In May 1903, some of the monks went into exile in the United States to found a new monastery, and the others were distributed among other Trappist monasteries in France. The young American foundation, falling victim very early to an accidental fire in its buildings, unfortunately could not be maintained.
In 1905, Louis Bonjean bought the buildings of Fontgombault to install various social works, including a cooperative button factory; this is the origin of the small group of pavilions intended for the housing of workers’ families which is located today near the Abbey farm.
In 1919, the Saint-Martin school opened, a minor seminary coupled with a section for late vocations, in part of the premises rented to the diocese of Bourges, which flourished for some thirty years.
After the war, the diocese of Bourges proceeded to regroup its seminarians and proposed to Solesmes Abbey to revive monastic life at Fontgombault. The Abbot of Solesmes, Dom Germain Cozien, accepted, and the first founding monks arrived from Solesmes in May 1948.
In 1953, the old abbatial title was again restored, and Dom Cozien appointed Dom Édouard Roux to head the new abbey. The latter gradually restored the conventual areas, rearranging the interior of the abbey church and preparing it for the grand ceremony of its dedication which took place on October 5, 1954. He focused above all on transmitting the monastic ideal that he himself had lived at Solesmes, and on firmly securing the foundations of a fervent and hardworking community.
After his death on March 19, 1962, at the age of 66, the community elected Dom Jean Roy to succeed him, under whose abbacy it took a remarkable leap forward, during difficult years when many religious communities were declining. He had to build to cope with the influx of vocations, and soon found himself in a position to found two new monasteries, that of Randol in the diocese of Clermont in 1971, and that of Gricigliano in Italy, in the diocese of Florence in 1976. The latter, having failed to attract enough Italian vocations, had to be closed later, to become the house of formation for the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.
Dom Jean Roy died suddenly in Rome in 1977, and the crozier was entrusted by the monks to Dom Antoine Forgeot, his Prior. The thirty-four years of Dom Forgeot’s abbacy saw the consolidation and independence of the Auvergne foundation of Notre-Dame de Randol, then the undertaking of three other foundations: that of Notre-Dame de Triors in the diocese of Valence in 1984,…
…, that of Gaussan in the diocese of Carcassonne in 1994, a community that later moved to a mountainous part of the diocese to become Notre-Dame de Donezan Abbey,…
… and that of Our Lady of Clear Creek in the United States, in Oklahoma, in 1999.
Feeling the weight of age, Dom Forgeot resigned his abbatial office into the hands of the Father Abbot of Solesmes during the summer of 2011. The community elected Dom Jean Pateau, his Prior, to succeed him, who received the abbatial blessing on the following October 7. In the first years of his government, Fontgombault again saw the departure of a group of monks sent to take over Saint-Paul de Wisques Abbey (2013), whose elderly community had been weakened for many years by the lack of vocations.
In the years that followed, work continued for the maintenance, renovation, and development of monastic activities, or simply to embellish the domain of Notre-Dame, with a view to the flourishing of the monastic ideal received and its faithful transmission.
May the Virgin Mary continue to bless this house,
keeping the monks faithful to their vocation,
so that Fontgombault may always be a garden of Mary’s children,
on the way to eternal life.