[2][4] Most of the Benedictine monasteries of France, except those belonging to Cluny, gradually joined the new congregation, which eventually embraced nearly two hundred houses.
[2] The primary idea of the movement was not the undertaking of literary and historical work, but the return to a strict monastic régime and the faithful carrying out of Benedictine life; and throughout the most glorious period of Maurist history the literary work was not allowed to interfere with the due performance of the choral office and the other duties of the monastic life.
The last superior general of the order (Ambroise Chevreux) and forty monks died on the scaffold in Paris[2] in 1792, during the September Massacres.
The foundations of this school were laid by Dom Tarisse, the first superior-general, who in 1632 issued instructions to the superiors of the monasteries to train the young monks in the habits of research and of organized work.
[2] Some of their most important contributions are: The French Revolution cut short many undertakings, the collected materials for which fill hundreds of manuscript volumes in the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris and other libraries of France.
Of the Histories of the Provinces of France barely half a dozen were printed, but all were in hand, and the collections for the others fill 800 volumes of manuscripts.
The two works of de Broglie, Mabillon (2 vols., 1888) and Montfaucon (2 vols., 1891), give a picture of the life of the great Maurists of the earlier generation.
Useful information about their literary undertakings will be found in Léopold Delisle's Le Cabinet des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque impériale; Fond's Saint-Germain-des-Prés.