Rochefort martyrs

Priests who had not yet emigrated or were unable or unwilling to hide were arrested and transported in groups to Nantes, Bordeaux, or Rochefort on horse-drawn carts between March and July 1794 under military or police guard, along with other exiles.

At the end of October, due to the harsh weather conditions, the field hospital was closed after many tents were blown away by the wind, and all prisoners had to spend the winter back on the ships.

Due to changes in the political situation in France, treatment by the guards was somewhat milder from late fall 1794, and the priests were allowed to leave the ships in January 1795; the survivors were forced to march in two groups to Saintes, where they were released.

In 1806, survivor Pierre-Grégoire Labiche de Reignefort had a "very detailed account of the things suffered for the sake of religion by the priests detained on board the ships Les Deux Associés and Le Washington in 1794 and 1795 for refusal to take an oath in the harbor of the island of Aix and its surroundings,"[3] which contains an appeal written by his group of prisoners and illustrates the spirit and hope for the future of this part of the victims.

The Martyrology of the French Revolution, published in 1821 during the royalist restoration under Louis XVIII by the former Dominican Aimé Guillon de Montléon,[4] compared the victims of religious persecution in revolutionary France to the early Christian martyrs.

At the same time, Bishop Jean-Auguste-François-Eutrope Eyssautier of La Rochelle launched the preliminary information for a beatification process, for which Pierre Lemonnier (1848-1924) compiled the material published in 1916 and 1917 (including 590 short biographies).

It was not until 1989 that the theologian and historian Yves Blomme (* 1948) took another look at the case and in 1992 presented a new Positio super Martyrio, which limited the trial to those 64 priests whose identity and venerability could be sufficiently determined and secured.