SABRAN, LOUIS DE

Jesuit preacher, chaplain to James II; b. Paris, 1652;d. Rome, 1732. He was the son of the Marquis de Sabran, French Ambassador in London in 1644, and he entered the Society of Jesus in 1670. In 1685 he was appointed royal chaplain to James II, during whose reign he was active as a preacher and controversialist. At the revolution of 1688 he was seized at Rochester while trying to escape, but was released by the intervention of James II himself. In 1693 he was appointed procurator of the Jesuit College at Watten and in 1694 he tried to obtain support from German colleagues in Rome against the "probabiliorist" views of the Jesuit General Tirso González. In 1699 Sabran was installed by force of Protestant troops as president of the Episcopal Seminary at Liège, where certain professors had been accused of Jansenism. The archbishop of Malines was at this time conducting an anti-Jansenist campaign and urged the prince-bishop of Cologne (aged 24) to exercise his powers under the Tridentine decrees. As a result a group of English Jesuits from their nearby college, headed by Sabran, was forcibly installed as the staff of this secular clergy seminary. This episode, and Sabran's part in it, was attacked in print by Pasquier Quesnel. Sabran was an active anti-Jansenist, and in 1703 it was he who was responsible for taking some of Quesnel's voluminous archives, which had been seized at Malines, to Louis XIV. It was doubtless his activities in this field that disturbed the English secular clergy and that led to the accusation by Charles Dodd, the historian, that Sabran was guilty of stirring up trouble at the English secular seminary at Douai and that the Jesuits were planning to take it over. Sabran was vice provincial and visitor of the English province (1708–12), and rector of Saint Omer's (1712–15). He continued at Saint-Omer's for two years more as director of the sodality, and from 1717 till his death he was spiritual father at Rome.

Bibliography: h. foley, ed., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 v. in 15 (London 1877–82). A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present Time 5:460–63. h. chadwick, St.-Omer's to Stonyhurst (London 1962). Annuaire d'histoire liégeoise 3 (1947) 663–672. Bulletin de l'institut historique beige de Rome 29 (1955) 5–27. l. willaert, Bibliotheca Janseniana Belgica, 3 v. (Brussels 1950).

[t. a. birrell]