ROUGEMONT, FRANÇOIS. - Jesuit, missionary, b. 2 Apr. 1624 at Maastricht, d. at Ciancheou on 4 Nov. 1676.
He left 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 on pastoral practice for the use of neophytes, such as a catechism, a refutation of paganism, the six things necessary to enter the Church (published in numerous editions), and a collection of hymns. In 1667 he sent a memorandum to the Jesuit General Paolo Oliva in favor of the Chinese indigenous clergy. His principal work is the *Historia Tartaro-Sinica nova* (1660–66), composed during his exile in Canton and completed on 16 Dec. 1668 at Louvain (1673). The first two parts contain the history from 1659 to 1662, ending with the Tartar conquest of China; the third part narrates the persecution of the four regents up to the expulsion of the missionaries. A Portuguese translation by Sebastião Magalhães was printed by Da Costa in Lisbon in 1672. R., together with his confreres Prospero Intorcetta, Cristiano Herdtrich, and Filippo Couplet, edited the first biography of Confucius intended for the West, published in China in 1663 along with a treatise on his doctrine (in two columns, with the Latin translation beside the Chinese text of the *Lun Yü* Dialogues) and reprinted in Paris in 1687 without the Chinese text.
The work exerted a powerful influence on the philosophes and encyclopedists who thereby became acquainted with Confucian ethics.