Abbé Jean Bouchard

He did not own Briord. He lived there, he prayed there, he relieved the poor there — and there he died for it. Abbé Jean Bouchard belongs for eternity to the history of the estate as much as those who were its masters.

The chaplain of Briord

Jean Bouchard was chaplain of Briord. He occupied the small chaplaincy of the estate, that modest dwelling facing the chapel, where he lived and from which he exercised his ministry.

The sources recall that he often came to the aid of the destitute of the parish. He was a priest of the field, close to the people, in a Pays de Retz where faith was no abstraction.

The refusal of the oath

In 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy required priests to swear an oath to the new organisation of the Church, now subject to the State. The clergy of France divided: the jurors, who took the oath; the refractories, who refused.

Jean Bouchard swore under threat and, as soon as he could, retracted.

He would be a refractory priest unto martyrdom.

In the Pays de Retz, as throughout the military Vendée, the vast majority of the clergy refused.

This refusal was no mere posture: it exposed one to the hunt, to prison, to death.

The forbidden Mass

In 1792, Jean Bouchard celebrated, with an Irish priest, a forbidden Mass at the chapel of Briord. The refractory priests then said Mass in secret, in barns, woods and private chapels. The faithful came, at the peril of their liberty and their lives.

For Jean Bouchard, it would be God and the King. He would not waver.

The arrest

He was arrested in 1792, at the same time as Joseph Charette de Briord. Joseph, who underwent yet another interrogation, would finally be released, his great age helping. Jean, for his part, would never again leave the jails of a central power become hysterical and bloodthirsty. The Terror set in, and with it a train of massacres.

Jean Bouchard was tried. The judgment was summary. The condemnation, merciless.

16 November 1793

On 16 November 1793, Jean Bouchard was among the first victims of the drownings of Nantes, organised by the representative on mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier. The vile Carrier, directly responsible for the death of several thousand people in a few months, from November 1793 to his own execution in December 1794.

He would be guillotined — a double irony of history — he who, considering that the "cleaver of the Republic" was not "productive" enough, invented "vertical deportation" and the mass drownings in the Loire that he renamed "the National bathtub".

The condemned were loaded onto barges with holed hulls, taken to the middle of the Loire, and the gunports were opened. The river did the rest. Priests, women, the old, children: several thousand people would perish thus during the winter of 1793-1794.

Jean Bouchard never saw his chaplaincy again.

The memory

Two centuries have passed. The small chaplaincy and the chapel of Briord are still there. Their restoration is among the great projects of the estate, not out of nostalgia, but because a place that has seen a man live and die faithful to his faith deserves to be raised up again to bear witness to it in history.

Having no archive allowing the images of the stained-glass windows of the small chapel of Briord to be established, Eric Peters decided as early as 2023 that they would be made in tribute to the life of Father Jean Bouchard.

Eric thus entrusted to an artist specialising in religious art, Vincent Brédoire, and to a Nantes stained-glass craftsman, Olivier Marguet, the task of creating an exceptional work retracing the life of Jean Bouchard. After dozens of hours of exchange and collaboration to express his wishes precisely, the three great nave windows were approved by Eric.

Their execution, which will begin in the autumn of 2026, will require more than 1,000 hours of work, ending with their installation in the chapel of Briord during the year 2027.

The memory of Jean Bouchard, chaplain of Briord, faithful to his oath to the last moment, will thus be honoured for many years to come.