Les feuillants du duché de Savoie face aux défis du XVIIIe siècle

In the kingdom of Sardinia during the Ancien Régime, two monasteries belonged to the Foglianti in the Duchy of Savoy: Abondance (in Chablais, south-east of Évian and Lake Geneva) and Lémenc (on the suburb of Chambéry). The members of the congregation had taken over these two houses at the beginning of the seventeenth century, relocating Augustinian regular canons to Abondance and Benedictines to the abbey of Ainay (at Lyon) at Lémenc. However, in the eighteenth century, both society and the State started questioning their existence: both monasteries were accused of failing to observe the Benedictine rule and of failing to serve the parishes entrusted to them. The hostility of the Bishops led to the suppression of the abbey of Abondance at the beginning of the 1760’s and the weakening of the abbey of Lémenc in the 1780s, even before the French invasion and the Revolution in 1792.