LESTRANGE (LOUIS-HENRI), AUGUSTIN de. - Trappist, b. at Colombier-le-Vieux (Ardèche) on 19 February 1754, d. on 16 July 1827 at Lyon. Having left his military career, he studied at St. Sulpice and was ordained a priest in 1778. Vicar general of the archbishop of Vienne (1780), he withdrew to the monastic life at La Trappe (Soligny).
When the religious Orders were suppressed on 10 February 1790 by the National Assembly, L., with twenty-four confreres, moved to the former Carthusian monastery of Val-Sainte (Switzerland) on 1 June 1791, and made it the seat of a branch of his Order, which soon spread to England, Piedmont, Spain, Canada and Germany. On 30 September 1794 Pius VI erected Val-Sainte into an abbey, appointing L. abbot and head of all the foundations, and among other things of the new Third Order of La Trappe for both sexes, intended for the education of youth. In 1796 L. also founded a women's monastery in the canton of Valais. Forced in 1798 by the French armies to leave Val-Sainte, L. took refuge with many confreres and sisters in Bavaria and then in Russia, where the emperor Paul I assigned him monasteries in White Russia and in Lithuania; but shortly afterwards the Trappists, again expelled, migrated to Danzig (1800). Having finally returned to Val-Sainte, L. in 1811 incurred the wrath of Napoleon for having publicly deplored his attitude toward the Pontiff. He then went to England, and from there to America, then, once the restoration had taken place, he returned to France, where he re-established the Trappe of Soligny and founded other monasteries. In 1825 dissensions arose over the reform he had introduced; he was summoned to Rome to justify himself and remained there until almost on the eve of his death. Besides various works of piety, he published the Règlements de la Maison-Dieu de Notre Dame de la Trappe (2 vols., Fribourg 1794), and a Traité abrégé de la sainte volonté de Dieu (3rd ed., Lyon 1827).