monastery's income without living there; they were sometimes laymen with no authority over internal discipline, while clerics had very limited authority. However, in 1664, the monastery was aggregated to the Congregation of Saint Maur (the Maurists) and a stricter monastic observance was resumed. Following the French Revolution, the newly formed National Constituent Assembly prohibited all religious vows on 13 February 1790. At Solesmes one of the seven monks (the sub-prior) broke his vows to become a constitutional priest and soldier of the Republic. At the beginning of 1791, the monks began to leave the monastery, and those who resisted were imprisoned or deported to the Island of Jersey. One of them, Dom Pierre Papion, hid in order to celebrate secret masses across the region. After signing the Concordat of 1801, he became chaplain of the hospice de Sablé. Solesmes, whose occupants had been forced out in March 1791, was then commandeered as the country residence of a certain Henri Lenoir Chantelou and its archives were burned in a "civic" bonfire on 14 July 1794. The church was reopened at the time of the Concordat and the Lenoir de Chantelou family were given statues by Napoleon himself so that those at Mans were not removed. In 1825, government property administrators sold the monastic buildings and 145 acres with its farms. Abbey In 1831 the remaining buildings, which had escaped demolition in the Revolution but were threatened with destruction for want of a buyer, came to the attention of a locally born priest, Prosper Guéranger. Inspired by a vision of a restored monastic life in France, he acquired them for the home of a new Benedictine community. In 1832, it was decided to demolish the buildings, starting with the east wing, which has now disappeared. The Benedictines moved in on 11 July 1833. The new community flourished and in 1837 not only received Papal approval but was elevated to the rank of an abbey and was to become the mother house of an extensive French Benedictine Congregation, now the Solesmes Congregation. This later became a founding member of the Benedictine Confederation. In 1866 a convent, St. Cecilia's Abbey, Solesmes, was also founded at Solesmes, by Mother Cécile Bruyère (the first abbess) with the support of Dom Guéranger, which was the first house of the nuns of the Solesmes Congregation. Since its restoration Solesmes has been dissolved by the French Government no fewer