Background
Descended from a family of Breton sailors, he was born on 13 September 1843 in Saint-Servan, Roulais place, now part of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, and was orphaned in 1849, after the death of his father Jacques Duchesne.
historian linguist priest university professor
Descended from a family of Breton sailors, he was born on 13 September 1843 in Saint-Servan, Roulais place, now part of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, and was orphaned in 1849, after the death of his father Jacques Duchesne.
Institut Catholique de Paris. École pratique des hautes études.
Louis" brother, Jean-Baptiste Duchesne, settled in Oregon City, Oregon in 1849. Louis Duchesne was ordained to the priesthood in 1867. He taught for many years in Saint-Brieuc, then went to study in Paris.
From 1873 to 1876, he was a student at the École française in Rome.
In 1877, he obtained the chair of ecclesiastical history of the Catholic Institute, but left the theological faculty in 1883. In 1887, he published the results of his thesis, followed by the first complete critical edition of the Liber Pontificalis.
At a difficult time for critical historians applying modern methods to Church history, drawing together archaeology and topography to supplement literature and setting ecclesiastical events with contexts of social history, Abbé Duchesne was in constant correspondence with like-minded historians among the Bollandists, with their long history of critical editions of hagiographies. He also wrote Les Sources du martyrologe hyéronimien, Origines du culte chrétien (translated as Christian Worship: Its Origin and Evolution and often reprinted), Fastes épiscopaux de l"ancienne Gaule, and Les Premiers temps de l"État pontifical.
These works were universally praised, and he was appointed a commander of the Legion of Honor.
However, his Histoire ancienne de l"Église, 1906‑11 (translated as Early History of the Christian Church) was considered too modernist by the Church during the "Modernist crisis" and was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1912. Abbe Duchesne was made an apostolic prothonotary in 1900. He died in 1922, in Rome, and is buried in the cemetery of Saint-Servan.
Académie française; Prussian Academy of Sciences. Göttingen Academy of Sciences. Hellenic Philological Society of Constantinople.
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres]
In 1888, he became a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, and in 1910, he was elected to the Académie française.
