French classic Catholic hymnal?

Polymath

Hi all,

Does anyone know of a French classic Catholic hymnal I can access online, one in the public domain (something like the St. Gregory Hymnal, but French)? I write classical-style poetry (with rhyme, meter, and everything), and some of what I do is translations of French poetry into English. Since I’m Catholic, I’d like to try my hand at translating a French hymnal (or at least a few really good French hymns). The idea came from seeing that some of the hymns in St. Gregory were translated from a Slovak hymnal.

Thanks!

oldhymns

Polymath:

I have five French Catholic hymnals, containing a variety of hymns in the French language, you may have:

Recueil de Cantiques, Anciens et Nouveaux (published in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec)
300 Cantiques, Anciens et Nouveaux (published in Montreal)
Recueil de Cantiques (published in Ottowa)
Cantiques de la Jeunesse (published in France)
Cantiques et Motets (published in France) (with a letter or recommendation from Cardinal Merry Del Val)

These hymnals are in the same genre as St. Gregory's Hymnal and contain a good number of hymns by Lambillootte, Kunc, Police, and other French composers. There are also a fair amount of melodies by American-English composers such as Melvil and there are even hymns from Richard Terry's Westminster Hymnal--most in French (some in Latin), of course.

Even though these hymnals were not published in the United States, they were distributed by McLaughlin & Reilly of Boston, the largest purveyor of Catholic music in America for three-quarters of the 20th Century. They were used in the many French-Canadian parishes which dotted small, medium, and large cities and towns in New England for most of this time period. Sadly, nearly all of those parishes are now closed.

All of the above-mentioned hymnals are the singers' editions; and since I have extra copies of them, you may have them. I do have the accompaniment books for these but have no extras of the accompaniments.

If you PM your address, I shall be glad to send them to you. Best wishes with much success on your interesting project.

Polymath

That won’t be necessary, but thank you very much for your offer. I’ve found all but the first on Internet Archive and downloaded them in PDF form.

Thank you very much for directing me to those titles.

DavidOLGC

Check out this link for the first book:

http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080044161/1080044161_MA.PDF

MatthewRoth

@oldhymns I am Francophone and would be interested if you are still willing to give the extra copies away (it’s fine that they’re not the accompaniment editions).

oldhymns

Matthew, PM your address, and I shall be glad to send the five hymnals to you.

madorganist

Here's one from the FSSP:
https://boutique.fssp.fr/produit/livret-de-chants/

Jehan_Boutte

I would highly discourage you to purchase any hymnal from the SSPX. Regardless of their current status (which does not alter the quality of their hymns per se), most of their hymns are banal, childish and not really uplifting, whith a few exceptions here and there.

That said, it is a shame there are no modern French Catholic hymnal worthy of that name.

Jehan_Boutte

Also, please note that unlike their English and American brethren, French Catholics seldom incorporated Protestant hymns and translations within their hymnals. That's a shame, because French Protestants have many gems deprived of heresy.

tomjaw

@Jehan_Boutte But the hymnal linked by madorganist is from the FSSP, not SSPX. As for singing English songs at Mass etc., I think this is falling out of favour in England too...

Jehan_Boutte

But the hymnal linked by madorganist is from the FSSP, not SSPX. As for singing English songs at Mass etc., I think this is falling out of favour in England too...

I know, I was not talking about this FSSP hymnal, of which I do not know anything.

tomjaw

@Jehan_Boutte
Comparing European Protestants and their songs to say the Anglicans and their English Hymns, is not particularly fair. It is quite clear that many Anglicans and some other non Roman Catholics in England were not in any way protestant in their belief, or in their practice of Religion. The Protestant 'truth' [sic] society was set up to try to stamp out Catholic tendencies, and is still failing today.

MatthewRoth

or if they were, they nevertheless didn't produce heresy. It's much harder to use a Lutheran hymn than an Anglican one in my experience; later Lutheran and evangelical or Moravian hymns (the line seems to be fuzzy with some of these distinctions) refer to "Jesus Son of Mary," and while yes, that has precedent in perfectly good and Catholic music, using it exclusively sounds off.

I don't actually know if this hymnal is from the FSSP per se. It's sold in a bunch of places and is ubiquitous in TLM apostolates there.

Jehan_Boutte

Comparing European Protestants and their songs to say the Anglicans and their English Hymns, is not particularly fair. It is quite clear that many Anglicans and some other non Roman Catholics in England were not in any way protestant in their belief, or in their practice of Religion. The Protestant 'truth' [sic] society was set up to try to stamp out Catholic tendencies, and is still failing today.

I agree: Anglicans often did not see themselves as Protestants (though many did) and this is why most of their hymnography can be used today in Catholic chapels. As far as I know, an English-speaking Catholic parish could use the English Hymnal without any doctrinal problem.

While this is not exactly true of French Protestants (for there is practically no "High Church" Protestantism in France, apart from some Lutheran churches recently), nevertheless, I cannot but envy such gems as the "Psautier de Genève".

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