CLORIVIÈRE, Pierre-Joseph Picot de. — French Jesuit, b. at St-Malo on 29 June 1735, d. in Paris on 9 January 1820. He entered the novitiate in Paris in 1756, but the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France by the Parliaments (1762) led him to transfer to the English province; there, among other duties, he served as chaplain to the English Benedictine nuns in Brussels (1770–75). When the Society was suppressed again in 1773, he became parish priest at Paramé, near St-Malo (1779–86), and later superior of the college-seminary at Dinan (1786–90). Upon the proclamation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), he withdrew and lived in hiding in Paris during the revolutionary persecution.
To remedy the void created first by the suppression of the Society and then by the destruction of religious orders decreed by the National Assembly (1790), he founded, amid great difficulties, two societies whose members would take vows and follow a religious rule without, however, common life, distinctive habit, or claustral observances. One was the “Society of Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus” (to be distinguished from the Society of the Sacred Heart, a communal institute founded in 1794 by Fathers Tournély and Varin to carry on the work of the former Jesuits); the other, established with the noblewoman Marie-Adélaïde de Cicé, was the “Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary.” Begun in 1791 and approved by Pius VII in 1801, both institutes continue to flourish and render valuable service to the Church.
Suspected by the imperial police because of family connections, he was imprisoned in the Temple (1804). Released at the age of seventy-four after five years of arbitrary detention, he became the driving force behind the revival of the Society of Jesus in France. After its restoration (1814), he served as its first provincial and oversaw its early, laborious foundations (in the form of the so-called “petits séminaires”).
During his long years in hiding, Father de Clorivière wrote extensively. Among his works are: La vie de M. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (Paris 1785); several novenas and devotional booklets such as Exercices de dévotion à s. Louis de Gonzague (ibid. 1785), which went through many editions; Considérations sur l'exercice de la prière et de l'oraison, composed in 1778 for a small group of hermits at Mont-Valérien and published in 1802 (with several later editions, the best being that of P. Bainvel, ibid. 1928, and of Monier-Vinard in P. de C. d'après ses notes intimes, II, ibid. 1935, pp. 102–07). Simple in tone, this work is valued for its authoritative exposition of mystical prayer. A Pratique de l'oraison mentale rendue facile à tous les fidèles printed under his name at Avignon in 1821 is not by him. He also wrote Explication des Épîtres de s. Pierre (3 vols., Paris 1809) and extensive commentaries on the Apocalypse (moral, political, and literal), on which he labored for more than twenty years with highly personal insights; these remained in manuscript, as did other commentaries on the Prophets and the Song of Songs. Occasional writings have come to light more recently: Le serment de la liberté et de l'égalité, published by Canon Uzureau (Paris 1924); Les doctrines de la Déclaration des droits de l'homme, with some fragments, edited by R. Bazin in: P. de C. contemporain et juge de la Révolution (ibid. 1926). His circular letters to members of the societies he founded were printed in manuscript form (2 vols., ibid. 1935), and his private notes were edited by P. Monier-Vinard in the collection Maîtres spirituels (2 vols., ibid. 1935).