[1] As a young boy, he frequently read The Genius of Christianity, a work written by François-René de Chateaubriand which defended the Catholic faith against the claims of the Enlightenment, and which had been published shortly before his birth.

At this point he demonstrated his interest in the liturgy when he began to use the Roman Missal and texts for the Divine Office, unlike many of his colleagues, who still made use of the diocesan editions commonly in use in pre-Revolutionary France.

In 1831 the derelict Priory of Solesmes, which was about an hour's journey from Sablé, was put up for sale and Guéranger now saw a means of realizing his desire to re-establish, in this monastery, monastic life under the Rule of St. Benedict.

In a brief issued on 1 September 1837, Pope Gregory XVI, himself a Benedictine, raised the rank of the former Priory of Solesmes to that of an abbey, and constituted it the head of the French Congregation of the Order of St. Benedict.

Those members of the little community he had formed who had received the monastic habit on 15 August 1836, made their solemn profession under the direction of the new abbot, who had pronounced his own vows at Rome on 26 July 1837.

Pitra, afterwards Cardinal, renewed the great literary traditions of the Benedictines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Bishops Pie of Poitiers and Berthaud of Tulle, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Charles Forbes René de Montalembert and Louis Veuillot, were all interested in the abbot's projects and even shared his labours.

[2] The controversy occasioned by several of Guéranger's writings had the effect of drawing his attention to secondary questions and turning it away from the great enterprises of ecclesiastical science, in which he always manifested a lively concern.

With a strategic skill which deserves special recognition, Dom Guéranger worked on the principle that to suppress what is wrong, the thing must be replaced, and he laboured hard to supplant everywhere whatever reflected the opinion he was fighting.

On both the occasion of the definition of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and on that of Papal Infallibility (1870), Guéranger contributed written works that served to uphold the Holy See in making these ex cathedra pronouncements.

Accommodating himself to the development of the liturgical periods of the year, the author laboured to familiarize the faithful with the official prayer of the Catholic Church by lavishly introducing fragments of the Eastern and Western liturgies, with interpretations and commentaries.