Colloquium project in autumn 2022: Turin (September 22) and Annecy (October 6) Françis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, died in Lyon on December 28, 1622. Beatified in 1661, canonized in 1665, he was made a doctor of the Church in 1877.
This colloquium does not wish to return to the rich personality of the who was at the same time bishop, spiritual director, writer, founder of an order: many recent works have been devoted to all or some of these themes. But 400 years after his death, an organized meeting and in Annecy (seat of the bishopric of Geneva from the 16th to the 18th century) and in Turin (François de Sales remained life subject of the Duke of Savoy) would like to question the memory and posterity of the saint.
These two days will say how they were built over a long period of time, in the space that was that of the former states of Savoy, but also in the Catholic world, as in Spain, Portugal, colonial America. While the episodes of his canonization are well documented, how the anniversaries of his death are or will be organized in very different political contexts (the birth of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1722, the Sardinian Restoration after the revolution in 1822, the links with the appeasement of conflicts around the secularism in the Third French Republic, while Italy faced the birth of fascism in 1922, the ‘Exit from the religious’ of the twenty-first century in 2022) certainly deserve collective reflection. Construction of his cult, marked by an evolution towards a rather traditional protection cult as shown Arnold Van Gennep or Roger Devos, the success of his iconography on both sides of the Alps but also in Europe and throughout catholicity, the translations of his relics in Annecy linked to historical vicissitudes (in 1806, 1826, 1911 in the new basilica as recalled by an exhibition at the Haute-Savoie Departmental Archives in 2011), his promotion to the doctorate of the Church by Pius IX in 1877 marked the centuries without necessarily showing any coherence. Thus the eighteenth century seems to be a blind spot in Salesian historiography, despite the beatification of Joan of Chantal in 1751 and her canonization in 1767. Salesian publications then marked time: Roger Devos identifies 54 editions of the Introduction to the Devout Life (first edition in 1609) between 1636 and 1696, or almost one per year.
But there are only 31 left from 1707 to 1793 (that’s one every three years) 29 of which are the text watered down and put into “modern” French by the Jesuit Jean Brignon (1620-1712). The Maison de Savoie did not make Francis de Sales one of its great national saints. Yet his influence extended, in Lombardy for example, in parallel with the expansion of the Visitandine monasteries. In Milan, Archbishop Benedetto Erba Odescalchi obtained indulgences from Rome in 1728 and in 1734 created a association dedicated to François de Sales, bringing together the notables (who later had a certain influence on Friendships of Diessbach). But it was the 19th century that brought about a Salesian revival, marked by numerous creations by congregations, in particular in the former States of Savoy-Piedmont: missionaries of Saint Francis of Sales (by Joseph-Marie Favre and Pierre-Marie Mernier) from Savoy to India; oblates and oblates of François-de-Sales (1873); Daughters of François-de-Sales and Salesian missionaries of Mary Immaculate (1872-1874); Salesians (1859), then Salesians (1872) and Salesian Cooperators (1876) of Don Bosco (1815-1888) in Turin, but also in the Bocage, near Chambéry, where the orphanage founded in 1868 by Camille Costa de Beauregard was taken over by the Salesians of Don Bosco in 1954. Many associations are then created by claiming its spirituality, in particular in Annecy and in its surroundings: Association Florimontane (1851) which later became an academy (1911); Saint- Association François-de-Sales (1859); Salesian Academy (1878). A whole cultural and monumental heritage is thus constitutes in the nineteenth century, still largely living in the twenty-first.
An axis of reflection will also want analyze the constitution of these “Salesian places” on both sides of the Alps: Basilica of Annecy; multiplication of statues of the saint and pilgrimages to Annecy, Viuz-en-Sallaz, Thorens, Chablais, ________________________________________ Page 2 2 Thonon and Les Allinges, in Megève, in Peisey-Nancroix, the small oratory of Sonnaz (near Chambéry), but also in Turin, in Vercelli where Franz Anton Meyer (1710-1782) painted a vast decoration to his glory. The patrimony intangible is also to be revisited (pilgrimage booklets, hymns and cantatas, etc.). What about also of these traces currently in Geneva, Grenoble, Lyon, Milan? The conference will be divided into two days, in the fall of 2022. The first, in Turin on September 22, 2022, will be organized around the me moire and the posterity of the saint from the 17th to the 21st century. The second, at Annecy, October 6, 2022, around the Salesian heritage. The proceedings will be published.