GORCE, PIERRE de la. - French historian, b. at Vannes on 29 June 1846, d. on 2 January 1934. He studied at the St-Jean Institute in Douai and at the University of Paris, where he graduated in law in 1870. He then embarked upon a career in the judiciary, but after the enactment of the decrees suppressing religious congregations in 1880, he resigned because, as a convinced Catholic, he did not wish to participate either directly or indirectly in the execution of decrees that profoundly repelled his conscience.
He therefore devoted himself to historical studies and investigated with particular diligence the history of France from the Revolution onwards. His first work was a history of the Second Republic (*Histoire de la seconde République française*, 2 vols., Paris 1887), followed by an exhaustive account of the Second Empire (*Histoire du second Empire*, 7 vols., ibid. 1894-1905). The history of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was analysed by him in three biographies devoted to the sovereigns of the period (*Louis XVIII*, ibid. 1926; *Charles X*, ibid. 1929; *Louis-Philippe*, ibid. 1931). On the relations between Church and State during the Revolution and, in general, on the Catholic religion in France during this period, he published the still fundamental *Histoire religieuse de la Révolution Française* (5 vols., ibid. 1905-23), the fruit of patient research in the national and departmental archives.