by Thomas Davitt cm

John Gabriel Perboyre was executed by the authorities in China in 1840. He was thirty-eight years of age and had been in China approximately five years. In the first of those years he was learning the language and making the long journey from the Portuguese colony of Macao to his appointed location in the interior of China. In the final year he was in prison. He had a few months less than three years of active ministry in China.
In view of those facts it is obvious that if we are to get to know and to understand this man who died in China we have to look at what he was doing before he went there. He had spent thirty-three years of his life in France, where he had three years of Vincentian ministry before his ordination, while he waited till he reached the canonical age for ordination to the priesthood. After ordination he had nine years of ministry before he left for China.
We are very fortunate in having one hundred and two of his letters still extant. The earliest of these letters was written when he was fifteen years old and the latest one during his final months in prison. It is principally from these letters that we can learn what sort of a person he was who eventually would be executed in China.
There are also some letters written about him while he was still alive, and in the immediate aftermath of his death, by persons who actually knew him. These are important. Some other letters, particularly later on, tend to be hagiographical and are of not much use in getting to know the real man.
He was born on his father's farm, Le Puech, near the village of Montgesty about one hundred and fifteen kilometres north of Toulouse. He was the eldest child in a family of eight. As he was the eldest it was taken for granted that he would succeed his father in managing the family farm. As that was the case, it was also taken for granted that basic primary education was all that he would need. On the other hand, the parents decided that their second son, Louis, should be given full secondary education, as his future would not be on the farm. Louis was six years younger than John Gabriel. Their father's brother Jacques was a Vincentian priest, who had been ordained at the start of the French Revolution. During the subsequent troubled years he successfully maintained a secret ministry and survived. When things had quietened down he was offered a parish by the bishop of Cahors. A few years later asked to be released from it as he wanted to found a school in Montauban. His main purpose in this was to prepare boys for entry into the major seminary. He received financial help for this from his relations, and eventually eighteen of his nephews were educated there. When Louis' parents decided to give him secondary education they naturally chose this school.
Louis was only nine years old, and Montauban was about sixty kilometres away and he would have to stay there for the entire school year. His parents were worried about these facts and how Louis would react to them, so they decided that John Gabriel, almost fifteen years old, would be sent with Louis for the first year to prevent homesickness. He would be brought back in early summer to help on the farm.
In June 1817 when his father went to collect John Gabriel to bring him back home he received a surprise. The teachers in the school had been impressed with John Gabriel. They had suggested to his uncle that John Gabriel should finish the complete programme of secondary education and then enter the major seminary to prepare for the priesthood. Jacques had the delicate task of breaking this news to his brother and his nephew. Apparently neither the teachers nor his uncle had said anything about this to John Gabriel. They probably thought it prudent to wait for his father's arrival and discuss it with him first. The father made no objection and went home, and John Gabriel took some time to make up his mind. It seems clear that he had not previously thought of being a priest. A few weeks later, on 16 June 1817, he wrote to his father and said that after much praying about it he had decided to follow his uncle's advice and prepare for the seminary and the priesthood.
Having made up his mind, he then had to do a lot of extra study to catch up with boys of his own age, and he received extra teaching to help him with this. One of the subjects he needed to study was Latin, which he had not even begun. He studied all through the summer holidays of 1817 with a priest his uncle had asked to help. Some years after John Gabriel's death this priest recalled those days, and pointed out some facts, as opposed to opinions. In November he had made sufficient progress to move up into the next class. At Easter 1818 he moved up again, and in November 1818 he jumped up two classes and a few weeks later into the final year. In the first term after
the summer of 1817 he was ranked second in the class, a rank which he almost always kept from then on.
In late 1817 a mission had been given in Montauban by the Vincentians, and John Gabriel had indicated to his uncle that he would like to be Vincentian. His uncle did not encourage him, which was probably the correct prudent response at the time. In May of that year Jacques had written to a fellow Vincentian that he had seven boys in his school who wanted to join the Congregation, but his nephew was not mentioned. Later he agreed with John Gabriel, and in a letter to the Superior General in December 1817 he wrote: "I have a nephew of mine here, quite exceptionally gifted, who is going to don our habit soon. There are several others as well but they need some further testing".
Things were still far from normal in Paris and there was no house of formation for new recruits. Jacques suggested to the Superior General that an intern seminary could be set up in Montauban. This idea was accepted, and an elderly Vincentian was sent down from Paris to be the director. On 10 March 1818 John Gabriel was accepted there, his first step towards becoming a Vincentian priest.
During his intern seminary John Gabriel continued his secondary education, then studied philosophy and even taught some of the junior classes. On 28 December 1820, nine days before his nineteenth birthday, he was sent to Paris to begin theology. His theology course lasted from January 1821 until October 1823. He was still some months short of his twenty-third birthday, and too young for ordination.
He was sent to teach in a boarding school which the Congregation had in Montdidier, between Paris and Amiens. In April 1824 he was ordained sub-deacon by the archbishop of Paris in his private chapel. In May 1825 he was ordained deacon In Saint-Sulpice. On 23 September the following year he was ordained priest in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity in the Rue du Bac. For one of his journeys to Paris he was issued with an internal passport, which has survived. He is described as being 1m65cm in height, with black hair coming down over the forehead, brown eyebrows, grey-black eyes, ordinary nose, small mouth, black beard, round chin, round face, ruddy complexion. The black beard must have meant stubble, rather than a full beard.
His uncle tried to get John Gabriel appointed to Montauban, but without success. He was appointed to Saint-Flour in the Massif Central to teach theology. In a letter dated 2 November he tells his father this, and says he is pleased with the appointment, and that his health could not be better. For the rest of his life his health will always be somewhat of a problem. At the end of his first year there he told his father in a letter dated 14 July 1827 that his health is good but that he is very tired, that he will be home for the summer holidays, and that his father's wine would not be successful in Saint-Flour.
On his return to Saint-Flour in the autumn he found himself with a new job in a different house in the town, a sort of boarding house for students who were attending the state college in the town. He was put in charge in order to bring to an end a period of trouble and problems. He did so very successfully, and held this appointment for five years. Twenty-three letters from this period have survived, mainly to his brother Louis who had followed him into the Congregation and was in Paris. Early in his first year in Saint-Flour John Gabriel had to correspond with an education official about finances. In one of his letters he says to this man: "Apart from the stated fact itself please note the absurdity of your hypothesis". This is quite an extraordinary thing for a twenty-five year old priest to say to an important official. Good relations between them must have been established even as early as that, because this same man later petitioned successfully for the conferring on John Gabriel of the degree of Bachelier-ès-Letters de l'Université de France.
John Gabriel always had an excellent relationship with Louis, as his letters show. As an elder brother he could tease Louis in a friendly way, but could also give an elder brother's good advice to a brother six years younger than himself. Louis hoped to be sent to China, and John Gabriel advised him to study physics at a state college in order to get a qualification, which would be useful in China. He mentions that he himself had previously had the idea of going to China, and that maybe it could still happen. In a letter to his father he says that he will look around Saint-Flour for a suitable horse to send him, but points out that he will not pay for it himself; his father will have to pay!
On 28 November 1829 he writes to Louis:
Don't make so many demands on me. If you knew the state I'm in you wouldn't treat me so pitilessly. Although we still have only a hundred boys I'm overwhelmed with work. I'm extremely tired mentally and physically. I don't know what the outcome will be of a general malaise which I've had for a long time and which is getting progressively worse.
His poor health, in the form of constant tiredness, is mentioned in several letters. At Easter 1830 he wrote to Louis:
The Easter fortnight, which for most priests is a period of much work, is one of rest for me. The boys are on holidays. I needed this break. During the last six months I don't think I've had two days without my head splitting, aches in all my limbs and my blood all on fire. Nothing wears me down like the details of administration; nothing saps my strength like worry.
The man who wrote these two letters was only twenty-eight years old.
He hoped to meet Louis before the latter's departure for China, but that was not to be. Louis was ordained on 3 October 1830 and sailed for China the following month. During the second part of his journey, on a different ship, between the island of Réunion and Java, he developed a fever. He died on 2 May 1831, and was buried at sea. News of this did not reach France until February 1832. John Gabriel wrote very emotional letters to his parents and to his uncle. To the latter he expressed a wish to go to China in place of Louis.
In the summer of 1832 he was recalled from Saint-Flour to Paris to assist the director of seminarists and students, who was a pre-Revolution confrere aged sixty-five. Most of the work seems to have fallen on the new assistant director. The General Assembly of 1829 had expressed a wish that a commission be set up to study pre-Revolution community documents, and John Gabriel was appointed its secretary.
On 10 March 1834 he wrote to Jean-Baptiste Torrette, who had been ordained with him and had been sent to China. He said that he had hoped to be able to go to China but his health had always been a problem. He said, though, that he would encourage his students to want to go. He sent his uncle the Superior General's letter of January 1835, and the first issue of the Annales de la Mission; both contained a lot about China. John Gabriel kept asking, but the Superior General always refused his requests because of his health. Eventually the matter was referred to the doctor for a definitive answer, and the doctor gave his permission. In February 1835 he wrote to his uncle to tell him that he had achieved his ambition and was going to China. In a later letter from China, dated 18 August 1836, to Jean Grappin, one of the assistants in Paris, he wrote that as far back as his schooldays he had had some vague idea that China was the destination God had for him.
He sailed from Le Havre in March 1835 and arrived in Macao on 29 August. On 9 September he wrote to a confrere in Paris, and said he had begun to study Chinese:
I think it will take me a long time to learn the language… It's said that Fr Clet spoke it only with difficulty. May I, right to the end, be like that venerable confrere whose long apostolic life was crowned with the glorious palm of martyrdom…
At the end of the letter he says that his health has improved. The Portuguese confreres in Macao taught him Chinese while he taught them French. On 21 December he started the long journey to his ultimate destination in the interior of China, but before he left he wrote a short letter to his brother Jacou, who had followed his two older brothers into the Congregation. He said that the journey was going to be about two hundred leagues, and that it would take maybe more than two months. Two hundred leagues would be about nine hundred kilometres. The journey took longer than he had anticipated and he did not arrive in Ho-nan until 15 June.
He continued his study of the language, but against a background of health problems. On 18 August he wrote to a confrere in Paris asking for two or three trusses to relieve an inguinal hernia on the right side, as he could not get on without one. When they eventually arrived they were for the left side!
There are no surviving letters between the end of August and 28 December 1836. In a letter on the latter date, to a confrere in Macao, he mentions that his health had been giving him more trouble; he had contracted some sort of fever and had received the last sacraments, and could not resume his language study until mid-November. In December he preached for the first time in Chinese.
From the end of December 1836 to late August 1837 no letters have survived. During the remaining months of that year he wrote to confreres in Macao and Paris mentioning various practical matters. He said that if a person has not himself been in China he cannot possibly understand what confreres in China are writing about. In Macao there should always be a confrere who had personally experienced missionary life in the interior of China, who could deal in a realistic and practical way with missionary confreres' problems. In September 1838 he advises a confrere in Paris that a projected biography of St Vincent in Latin, for Chinese confreres, should not be published until a draft copy had been sent to Macao. Confreres there, who had experience of life in China, could decide whether it would meet the needs of Chinese confreres. He said that many Chinese confreres had difficulty in understanding The Imitation of Christ in Latin. Some French confreres in Macao criticised him for making too much of trivial matters, and he agreed that this might be true, but he would not change his mind on the question of the need to have in Macao a confrere who had personally experienced missionary life in China.
In a letter to Paris on 10 August 1839 he says that from September 1838 until Pentecost 1839 he gave seventeen missions, and even since then was extremely busy. He was then supposed to set off on another missionary journey, but another confrere decided to take his place "out of pity for his poor legs". This meant that in August and September John Gabriel was resident in the community house in Kou-tchen. On 15 September John Gabriel, Jean-Henri Baldus CM and Giuseppe Rizzolati OFM (Giuseppe da Clauzeto) were at breakfast together when they were warned that a band of soldiers was approaching, and that they should get away from the expected danger. A fierce anti-Christian persecution was getting under way just about this time. John Gabriel went in the opposite direction to the other two, who then separated. The soldiers ransacked the house and set it on fire.
Within a day or two John Gabriel was found, after the soldiers had beaten up a catechumen and forced him to reveal where the priest was. He was arrested on the two charges of entering China illegally, and preaching a prohibited foreign religion, each of which carried the death penalty. He was, of course, guilty of both charges and was sentenced to death. The death penalty needed to be confirmed by the emperor, so he was in prison until this confirmation came through in September 1840 and he was executed on the 11th of that month, by being strangled with a cord while tied to a gibbet.
During his year in various prisons he was well treated except for one period when he was very severely tortured and ill-treated both in prison and in the court-room.

A Chinese confrere, André Yang, was able to visit him in prison many times, by passing himself off as a man interested in studying the Chinese prison system. Shortly after John Gabriel's death Yang gave some details in a letter to a confrere in Macao, and he later gave evidence at the beatification process.
For the beatification of a martyr, all that needs to be proved is that the person in question was put to death for a specifically anti-religious reason. In John Gabriel's case one of the charges against him was that he had preached Christianity.