Home > The History > to the expulsion of the community

The city administration was in a deplorable state, its finances unsound. At the time of the last constitutional recasting in 1772, the Prince-Bishop, François Charles de Velbrük, concentrated the power of the city in the hands of a minority.

On 27 June 1790, the Austrians encamped on the estate of Viet, property and refuge of the Leffe Premonstratensians and set up their headquarters there. Next, they invested the estate of Leffe and installed in the Abbey, precipitately abandoned by the community, a battery of cannon pointed at Bouvignes. The patriots returned to the assault, the fighting was desperate, to the point of forcing the Austrians to retreat towards Viet, leaving ten men on the field.

The victory of Jemappes, won on 6 November 1792 by the French general Dumouriez, decided the fate of Dinant, already subjected to the incursions of the French garrison at Givet. At Dinant, people were far from delirious, particularly because on 8 November the Republican troops set up their winter quarters in the city and its environs. On 16 December, the citizens of Dinant who were on the side of the new order, called the population to the church of the Jesuit college, by means of posters and the “sound of cash”. The population was invited to elect a provisional assembly. The city and its suburbs were divided into 6 sections with the Abbey and the “estate of Leffe” forming the first section and the meeting of the new citizen electors took place in the Abbey, as did those of the other sections assembled in the principal religious buildings of the city. Sixty-six electors were chosen and they, in their turn, appointed 27 administrators and 5 jurors for the city. On New Year’s day 1793, after having intoned the Marseillaise instead of the planned Te Deum, they proclaimed the Republic in the collegiate church of Our Lady. This did not yet amount to annexation, but all swore an oath according to the decree of 15 December, abolishing the Ancien Régime and its feudal rights. All property of lay and religious associations was confiscated and churchmen and women were required to make their contribution.

On 7 February, the doors of the Abbey of Leffe were forcibly penetrated. In the presence of three representatives of the municipality, the Justice of the Peace interrogated abbot Gérard about the disappearance of movable property. The abbot remained silent and because the ransacking of the monastic buildings did not reveal anything, Citizen Bosque ordered abbot Gérard to be kept under watch and had the registers and papers of the monastery taken away by his men. For four days, Frédéric Gérard was locked in his room to meditate on the “error of his ways”. On the orders of the municipality, he was then brought in to undergo close interrogation. Nevertheless, the abbot dug in his heels, for the good reason that the coveted objects were hidden at Namur. He was then locked up in a house next to the town hall and his detention was to be long and distressing. His jailers insulted him and called him “the leading tyrant and greatest despot in Dinant”. The other religious of the community were also disturbed. They had to appear more than once before the communal authorities who were rather embarrassed by the whole affair. They demanded a surety of 50,000 florins to set Gérard free, but Bosque opposed it. The detention continued and proved worthwhile. The cache was revealed. Taking the inventory of the movable property began on 13 February and continued on 26 February and 5 March. In all, more than 1,700 ounces of silver valued at 8,554 livres were listed by Henri Nalinne, citizen silversmith of Dinant; from the processional cross, six large chandeliers from the main altar, the abbatial cross, chalices, and censers, to tablecloths and even a stew spoon, nothing escaped control.

Against all expectations, Frédéric Gérard remained under arrest. Although Liège was reoccupied by the imperial troops on 5 March, Bosque and Lehoday felt strong enough to refuse, up to the last possible moment, to release Gérard, who did not rejoin his community until after the departure of the French on 18 March.

On that 28 May 1794, 11 Premonstratensians of Leffe, including abbot Gérard, precipitately boarded barges hired from a Leffe innkeeper who took them, hidden under bales of straw, as far as Maastricht. It should be noted that the prudent innkeeper invoiced these bales when the religious had returned on 8 November! A second group left the Abbey on the following day, 28 May. These departures created a state of anarchy. The property of the émigrés was pillaged: bells, iron and copper, corn, furniture and the contents of the library. On returning from exile, the Premonstratensians found their house gutted.

On 5 May 1795, the Republic rented out, whilst awaiting their final sale, the gardens and vineyards belonging to the Abbey, which the religious had had to abandon. On 1st September 1796, the government suppressed, in Belgium, “regular congregations and orders, monasteries, abbeys, priories, canons and canonesses regular and in general, all religious houses and foundations of either sex”; it confiscated all their property, movable and immovable and gave vouchers for fifteen thousand francs to male religious, five thousand francs to lay brethren, ten thousand francs to female religious and three thousand three hundred and thirty four francs to lay sisters. These vouchers could not be used otherwise than for the acquisition of national property in the Netherlands.

The religious no longer existed in the eyes of the State, he or she was simply a citizen subject to the laws of the land, relieved of the duties of his or her profession and able to marry, trade and acquire possessions. The vow of poverty made these religious unable to have possessions; from an ecclesiastical point of view, they would not even have been able to accept the vouchers which the government was offering them as a subsistence pensions, if Pope Pius VI had not given them the necessary dispensation. When pooled, these vouchers enabled the religious to repurchase some of their property.

[updated on the 15.11.05]

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