CLORIVIÈRE, PIERRE-JOSEPH PICOT de. - French Jesuit, b. at St-Malo on 29 June 1735, d. at Paris on 9 Jan. 1820. He entered the novitiate of Paris in 1756, but the suppression of the Society of Jesus in France at the hands of the Parlements (1762) caused him to pass to the English province; there he held, among other duties, that of chaplain to the English Benedictines of Brussels (1770-75). After the Society was suppressed in 1773, he became parish priest at Paramé, near St-Malo (1779-86), then superior of the college-seminary of Dinan (1786-90). Having retired at the proclamation of the civil constitution of the clergy (1790), he remained hidden in Paris during the revolutionary persecution. To remedy the void created first by the suppression of the Society and then by the destruction of the religious Orders decreed by the Estates General (1790), he founded, amid great difficulties, two societies whose members were to observe the vows and a religious rule, yet without common life, habit or cloistral observances; one was the "Society of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus" (to be distinguished from the Society of the Sacred Heart, with community life, founded in 1794 by the fathers Tournély and Varin to supply for the work of the former Jesuits); the other, erected together with the noblewoman Marie-Adélaïde de Cicé, the "Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary." Begun in 1791, approved by Pius VII in 1801, both are still flourishing and well deserving of the Church. Suspected by the imperial police on account of family connections, C. was confined in the Temple (1804). Freed at the age of 74, after five years of arbitrary detention, he was the soul of the revival in France of the Society of Jesus; after its restoration (1814), he was its first provincial and attended to its first laborious foundations (in the form of the so-called minor seminaries).
Father de C. wrote a great deal, during the long years of forced hidden life: La vie de M. Louis-Marie Grignion de Monfort (Paris 1785); several novenas or little books of piety, such as Exercices de dévotion à s. Louis de Gonzague (ibid. 1785), which went through many reprints; the Considérations sur l'exercice de la prière et de l'oraison, composed in 1778 for the small group of hermits of Mont-Valérien, published in 1802, with several reprints, the best by Father Bainvel (ibid. 1928) and by Monier-Vinard in P. de C. d'après ses notes intimes (II, ibid. 1935, pp. 10-207); simple in tone, the work is to be 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); Explication des Épîtres de s. Pierre (3 vols., Paris 1809); extensive commentaries on the Apocalypse (commentaire moral, commentaire politique et commentaire littéral) on which he worked for more than 20 years, with highly personal views, remained in manuscript, as did other commentaries on the Prophets and on the Song of Songs; some occasional writings have been brought to light 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, published by R. Bazin in: P. de C. contemporain et juge de la Révolution (ibid. 1926); his Lettres circulaires to the members of the societies he founded were printed in the manner of manuscripts (2 vols., ibid. 1935), his intimate notes by Father Monier-Vinard in the collection Maîtres spirituels (2 vols., ibid. 1935).
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Edmond Lamalle