Conservatoire
du Patrimoine
des Abbayes

The Conservatoire

The institution

A learned society established in a Maurist abbey.

The Conservatoire du Patrimoine des Abbayes is a non-profit association under the French law of 1 July 1901, founded on 15 March 2015 at Saint-Pierre Abbey in Mas-Grenier, Tarn-et-Garonne. Its statutes give it as its object the knowledge, preservation, restoration and animation of the architectural, archaeological, historical, artistic, natural, spiritual and human heritage of abbeys and monasteries, through research, training, publication, rescue worksites and cultural events. It acts without seeking profit.

An inheritance received

Saint-Pierre Abbey belonged to the Congregation of Saint-Maur from 1645 until the Revolution, and its eighteenth-century buildings are the work of the Maurists. The Conservatoire does not claim to restore a religious congregation in canon law: the Revolution dispersed it, and the Church alone could re-establish it. It seeks, within its means, to take up the Maurists’ programme of work: what dom Grégoire Tarrisse and dom Luc d’Achery organised at Saint-Germain-des-Prés — a house where one studies, where one teaches and where one makes things, and whose work is put at everyone’s disposal.

The Maurist method

  1. Go back to the sources. Nothing is asserted that does not rest on a document, and every document is first subjected to criticism: that is the lesson of the De re diplomatica.
  2. Work in common. The great Maurist enterprises were collective and passed from one generation to the next; the Histoire littéraire de la France, begun in 1733, is still being continued at the Institut de France.
  3. Hold study and the hand together. The same houses trained philologists, architects, painters and organ builders. Manual work was a rule from which no one was exempt.
  4. Publish. Maurist scholarship served others because it was printed, circulated and discussed urbi et orbi, to the city and to the world.

A lay house, in the service of a sacred inheritance

The Conservatoire is not a religious association and takes the place of no religious community. It studies, teaches, documents and restores; its work is open to all, believers or not. It holds it a duty to respect what, in these places, belongs to the sacred, and to hand on the Benedictine inheritance without emptying it of its meaning.

Recognitions