Arthur Mugnier (November 27, 1853 - March 1, 1944) was a French Catholic priest, vicar in various parishes of Paris and then canon.Queer Places:
Cimetière du Montparnasse, 3 Bd Edgar Quinet, 75014 Paris, France
Arthur Mugnier (November 27, 1853 - March 1, 1944) was a French Catholic priest, vicar in various parishes of Paris and then canon.
After an unsuccessful trial with the Society of Jesus, Arthur Mugnier began his studies at the age of 18 at the minor seminary of Nogent-le-Rotrou. He continued his formation in Paris at the Saint-Sulpice seminary while developing a taste for literature, which he would later reveal was his true vocation. He would often criticize the ecclesiastical environment and the training provided there, which banished all creativity. He showed himself to be equally critical of an ecclesiastical hierarchy incapable of understanding the spirit of its time. Nevertheless, he remained a sincere priest who carried out his duties with zeal. He struck people with his very small stature and worn cassocks.
Serving as a curate at Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, a working-class parish in the Halles district, and then from 1881 onward at the very elegant Church of Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin, he was appointed curate at the upscale Sainte-Clotilde parish in 1896. His clear-sightedness regarding the internal workings of the Church, his open-mindedness, but also his naivety—not to say his candor—led him to awkwardly compromise himself through his relations with Abbé Loyson, a modernist priest later excommunicated.
After being sidelined from all parish activity for a year due to his alleged closeness with Hyacinthe Loyson and his son, he had to give up his position as curate in 1910 in exchange for that of chaplain to the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, a post from which he resigned a few years before his death, by which time he had become almost blind. In 1924, he was promoted to the distinction of honorary canon.
An avid reader of Chateaubriand and a self-declared nostalgic for the Ancien Régime—while favoring Mass in French once ordained priest and appointed curate at the Sainte-Clotilde parish in the Faubourg Saint-Germain—Abbé Mugnier became the spiritual director of intellectual and high-society Paris for several decades.
Introduced into literary circles by Joris-Karl Huysmans, he was appreciated by the Countess de Noailles, the Countess Greffulhe, and the Countess de Chevigné, and esteemed or admired by Marcel Proust, Barrès, Morand, and Valéry. He was a confidant of a young Jean Cocteau. Among others, he brought Huysmans and Princess Bibesco back to the Catholic faith.
Abbé Mugnier possessed a lively and sometimes scathing humor. Some of his sharp retorts became famous: at a dinner at the Duchess of Rohan's, his female neighbor pointed out an aging beauty wearing a very pretty antique diamond-set cross on a wasted chest where large bones protruded: "Have you seen the cross?" the lady asked. "No," the abbé replied, "I only saw Calvary..."
Conversely, Abbé Mugnier was very critical of Charles Maurras's L'Action française and clashed with the virulent contempt of Léon Bloy.
The horrors of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune had made him a convinced pacifist. In his diary, he frequently criticized the absence of Christian sentiment in the exacerbated patriotism of his era and, rising above nationalist passions, proved to be an admirer of Goethe's Germany and Richard Wagner's music.
Known for his country-priest appearance, with his frayed cassock and square-toed shoes, he kept a Journal of his clerical and social life from June 16, 1879, to November 27, 1939. This diary also serves as a document of French literary history and was republished on January 19, 2017, by Mercure de France. He died in Paris in 1944 at the age of 91.
Princess Bibesco, after the abbé's death, published their correspondence under the title Vie d'une amitié (Life of a Friendship).
He was portrayed by the Countess Greffulhe, according to the columnist Jean Delage who saw the work at the Château de Bois-Boudran, as well as by Jean de Gaigneron, according to Ghislain de Diesbach, who considers the latter painting to be the best portrait ever made of him.
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