Pie was born in Pontgouin in the diocese of Chartres on 26 September 1815,[1] just after the Napoleonic Wars, between the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) and the Treaty of Paris (20 November 1815).

[2] Abbé Lecomte, who had repeatedly refused episcopal appointment, was an ultramontane defender of papal infallibility, and a great admirer of the thought of Joseph de Maistre.

Another man who played a leading role in the life of Abbé Pie was his bishop, Clausel Montale, who knew him as a seminarian and later as a young priest and vicar of Chartres.

Pope Pius IX appointed Pie to the episcopate on 28 September 1849, and he was consecrated on 25 November by Claude-Hippolyte Clausel Montale.

Pie preached against Liberalism as exemplified by the French Revolution and Louis Philippe I, giving sermons on this topic in 1844 and 1846.

Pie returned to this theme in his Works, writing: "We will not change the essence of things; Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the whole social order.

"[3] Pie's major biographer was Louis Baunard (in his Histoire du cardinal Pie : évêque de Poitiers, H. Oudin, Poitiers, 1886) He would, years after his death, be favourably cited by Pope Pius X, who knew his writings well.

Such is what Bossuet expressed in this way: 'Christ does not reign if his Church is not mistress, if the peoples cease to pay to Jesus Christ, to his doctrine, to his law, a national homage.'

259–60) The main error, the capital crime of this century is the pretension of withdrawing public society from the government and the law of God...

Let it be disguised under the names of abstention, neutrality, incompetence or even equal protection, let us even go to the length of denying it by some legislative dispositions for details or by accidental and secondary acts: the principle of the emancipation of the human society from the religious order remains at the bottom of things; it is the essence of what is called the new era.