ROUGEMONT, FRANÇOIS. - Jesuit, missionary, b. 2 April 1624 at Maastricht, d. at Ciangehou on 4 November 1676.
He set out for China in 1656 and arrived there in 1659; he worked in Chekiang and Kiangnan. During the period 1665-71 he remained in exile at Canton.
He wrote a series of books of pastoral practice for the use of the neophytes, such as a catechism, a refutation of the pagans, the six things necessary for entering the Church (numerous editions), and a collection of hymns. In 1667 he sent a memorial to the General of the Jesuits, Paolo Oliva, in favor of the indigenous Chinese clergy. His principal work is the Historia Tartaro-Sinica nova (1660-66), composed during the exile at Canton, finished on 16 December 1668 at Louvain (1673). The first two parts contain the history from 1659 to 1662, the end of the Tartar seizure of China; the third part narrates the persecution by the four regents up to the expulsion of the missionaries. A Portuguese translation, the work of Sebastiano Magalhaes, was printed by Da Costa in Lisbon in 1672. R., together with his confreres Prospero Intoretta, Cristiano Herdrich and Filippo Couplet, was the editor of the first biography of Confucius intended for the West, published in 1663 in China together with a treatise on his doctrine (in two columns, the Latin translation beside the Chinese text of the Dialogues Lim-Yü) and reprinted in Paris in 1687 without the Chinese text.
The work exercised a powerful influence on the enlightened and the encyclopedists, who through it came to know Confucian ethics.
Bibliography2 works
Nicola Kowalsky