1820 - François Clet

February 18, 1820

Wuchang, Hubei

François Clet,

Jean François Regis Clet was born at Grenoble, France, in 1748. He was the tenth child of 15 in the devoutly Catholic family. In 1769, at the age of 21, Clet entered the Congregation of the Mission of Saint Vincent at Lyon and was ordained a priest there after four years of study.

Clet’s first assignment was to teach moral theology at the Annecy Seminary. During 14 years of faithful service he rose through the ranks until he was named superior of the seminary. Because of his great knowledge the students endowed Clet with the nickname, ‘the walking encyclopedia.’ Clet relocated to Paris, where at the age of 40 he became director of the seminary at St. Lazare. The following year the seminary was destroyed at the beginning of the French Revolution in July 1789.

Because of the chaos enveloping France at the time, Clet volunteered for missionary work in China. He departed in April 1791 and reached Macau after six arduous months of travel. The following year he was sent to Jiangxi Province, and a year later transferred to the mission in Hubei Province. For the next 28 years the Frenchman ministered to the needs of the Chinese Catholics in the central Chinese province, “at the cost of much stress and great danger to himself since it was illegal to do missionary work at the time.”[1] A persecution in 1812 almost resulted in Clet’s arrest but he managed to escape, even though his church and school were burned to the ground.

François Clet was betrayed by a false believer and was imprisoned at Wuchang, Hubei Province, in October 1819. One account listed some of the horrors the elderly French priest was subjected to:

“Wasted by disease and weak from hunger, he was finally brought before the judge. Asked if he would renounce Jesus Christ, he answered firmly, ‘No.’ The soldiers beat him until his body was one big bruise. They stuck slivers of wood under his fingernails, and burnt his flesh with live charcoal. They pulled the hair from his head, and hung him up by the thumbs for hours. Every possible torture they could think of, they used. It was of no avail. Blessed François was firm. For Christ he had lived, and, if necessary, for Christ he would die.”[2]

Clet was sentenced to death by strangulation, a punishment that was carried out on February 18, 1820, by tying the 71-year-old Frenchman to a cross and choking him.[3]

A sketch showing François Clet’s death on a cross.

At the same time as Clet’s martyrdom 23 Chinese Christians were sentenced to life-long banishment to regions outside the Great Wall. One of them, François Cheng, had been a cellmate of Clet. He died in 1825 after five years in exile. Paul Ru Guisen was another of the laymen who perished.

1. CRBC, The Newly Canonized Martyr-Saints of China, 81.
2. Bruno Hagspiel, Along the Mission Trail. Vol. 4: In China (Techny, Illinois: Mission Press, S. V. D., 1927), 355.
3. For an excellent overview of Clet’s life, see G. de Montgesty (adapted from the French by Florence Gilmore), Two Vincentian Martyrs: Blessed Francis Regis Clet, C. M., Blessed John Gabriel Perboyre, C. M. (New York: Maryknoll, 1925).