Georges Darboy

Georges Darboy (; 16 January 181324 May 1871) was a French Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Nancy and later Archbishop of Paris. He was among a group of prominent hostages executed as the Paris Commune of 1871 was about to be overthrown.

Biography Darboy was born in Fayl-Billot, Haute-Marne in north-east France. He studied with distinction at the seminary at Langres, and was ordained priest in 1836. Transferred to Paris as almoner of the college of Henry IV, and honorary canon of Notre Dame, he became the close friend of Archbishop Affre and of his successor Archbishop Sibour. He was appointed bishop of Nancy in 1859, and in January 1863 was raised to the archbishopric of Paris.

Darboy was a strenuous upholder of episcopal independence in the Gallican sense, and involved himself in a controversy with Rome by his endeavours to suppress the jurisdiction of the Jesuits and other religious orders within his diocese. Pope Pius IX refused him the cardinal's hat, and rebuked him for his liberalism in a letter which was probably not intended for publication. He is also known for his opposition in 1868 to Jacques-Paul Migne, forbidding him to continue his low-cost books business after the burning of his printing establishment, and suspending him from his priestly functions. At the First Vatican Council he vigorously maintained the rights of the bishops, and strongly opposed the dogma of papal infallibility, against which he voted as inopportune. When the dogma had been finally adopted, however, he was one of the first to set the example of submission. He was transferred to La Roquette Prisons on the advance of the Versailles army, and on 24 May he was shot within the prison along with several other prominent hostages.

Legacy Darboy died in the attitude of blessing and uttering words of forgiveness. His body was recovered with difficulty, and, having been embalmed, was buried with imposing ceremony at public expense on 7 June. He was the third archbishop of Paris to die violently between 1848 and 1871 after Denis Auguste Affre (killed 1848) and Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour (assassinated in 1857).

Works Œuvres de Saint Denys l'Aréopagite (1845). Les Femmes de la Bible (1846–1849). Les Saintes Femmes (1850). Lettres à Combalot (1851). Jérusalem et la Terre Sainte (1852). L'Imitation de Jésus-Christ (1852). Statistique Religieuse du Diocèse de Paris (1856). Saint Thomas Becket (1858). Du Gouvernement de Soi-même (1867).