He was one of seven Trappist monks from the Our Lady of the Atlas Abbey of Tibhirine near Médéa, Algeria who were kidnapped and killed during the Algerian Civil War.
In 1974, he abandoned his legal studies in Tours to enter the Trappist Tamié Abbey, Savoy, and made his religious profession in 1980.
After a period of monastic formation, desiring a simpler life and responding to a call for reinforcement, he changed his stability to the Algerian monastery of Our Lady of the Atlas.
[1] His journal was translated by Mette Louise Nygård and Edith Scholl and published under the title Born from the Gaze of God.
After the kidnappers left, the remaining monks tried to contact the police, but the phone lines were cut due to a curfew.