ROUGEMONT, FRANÇOIS. – Jesuit, missionary, born on 2 April 1624 at Maastricht, died at Ciangehou on 4 November 1676.
He departed for China in 1656 and arrived there in 1659; he worked in Cekiang and Kiangnan. From 1665 to 1671 he remained in exile at Canton.
He wrote a series of books on pastoral practice for the use of neophytes, including 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 Jesuit superior general Paolo Oliva in favor of the indigenous Chinese clergy. His principal work is the Historia Tartaro-Sinica nova (1660-66), composed during his exile in Canton and completed on 16 December 1668 at Louvain (1673). The first two parts contain the history from 1659 to 1662, the date of the conquest of China by the Tartars; the third part recounts the persecution under the four regents up to the expulsion of the missionaries. A Portuguese translation, by Sebastiano Magalhaes, was printed by Da Costa in Lisbon in 1672. R., together with his confrères Prospero Intoretta, Cristiano Herdrich, and Filippo Couplet, was the editor of the first biography of Confucius intended for the West, published in China in 1663 together with a treatise on his doctrine (in two columns, the Latin translation alongside the Chinese text of the Dialoghi Lim-Yü) and reprinted in Paris in 1687 without the Chinese text.
The work exerted a powerful influence on the Enlightenment thinkers and Encyclopedists who thereby came to know Confucian ethics.