French Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St. Maur, named after St. Maurus (d. 565). Founded in 1621 to represent in France the reform initiated in the abbey of St. Vanne near Verdun, they eventually numbered nearly 200 houses. From 1672 the Maurists devoted themselves to historical and literary works, producing an extraordinary number of large works of erudition. The full Maurist bibliography names some 200 writers and more than 700 works. The congregation was affected by the ecclesiastical controversies that distracted the French Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some members supported Jansenism.* Suppressed by the Revolutionary government (1790), it was finally dissolved by Pius VII in 1818.