In search of the Martyrs of Compiègne

Even for assiduous relic hunters, there are pathetically few material reminders today of the martyred sisters of Compiègne.  However, the website of the French Carmelites offers a short "pilgrimage", which I have tried to follow (not in real life, just on Google Maps!).  We start off with a "promenade in Compiègne"

Le Carmel de France, "Les Carmélites martyres de Compiègne - Faire le pélerinage"
https://www.carmel.asso.fr/Faire-un-pelerinage.html

In Compiègne

The site of the 18th-century Carmel

The dominant feature of 18th-century Compiègne, as today, was the great royal château.  The Carmel was close by; the substantial site stretched as far as the Oise, covering the approximate area bounded by the modern roads rue d’Ulm, rue Othenin, cours Guynemer and rue du Fours (formerly rue des Carmélites). 

Quite literally, not a stone remains.

Where the nuns once had their chapel, there now stands the splendid Théâtre Impérial: a memorial plaque was erected in the entrance in 1994.  The area that accommodated the sisters' living quarters, until recently occupied by the  École d’État-major, is now the subject of a major urban regeneration project. 

On 7th August 1792 the National Assembly ordered the municipalities to verify the official inventory made two years previously.  The verification, seizure and removal of the convent's entire furnishings was only actually carried out on 12th September.  All items were seized and transported to the former St. Corneille Abbey, the general depot for Compiègne’s confiscated church goods... Madame Philippe mentions, in particular, the disappearance at this time of the large collection of fine, life-size wax figures composing the monastery’s celebrated “crèche.” Its numerous spectacular tableaux of richly dressed images were set up not only at Christmas, but also at other times by royal request. With an indignation rare for her, Madame Philippe opines that those magnificent wax figures had all been melted down to make the candles illumining the works of darkness fomented by revolutionary committees during their sinister nocturnal meetings.  It was  on September 14, with their housing assured and their civilian clothing acquired, that the community finally emerged from their stripped monastery... (William Bush, To Quell the Terror, p.91-92)

The contents of the Carmel were definitively sold off in November 1794, by which time the buildings had already been transformed into a military hospital.

The Martyrs of Compiègne

On 18th December the Pope announced the canonisation of  the "martyrs of  Compiègne",  sixteen Discalced Carmelite nuns executed by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal on 17th July 1794.  A procedure known as "equipollent" or "equivalent" canonisation dispensed with the need for intercessory miracles and instead recognised the long-standing veneration enjoyed by the nuns, who are held to have met their deaths with inspirational courage and unwavering faith.  At the time of their beatification in 1906 they had been declared as martyred "in odium fidei" ("in hatred of the faith"). The nuns' story is well-known through art and literature.  It was the subject of a  novella written in 1931 by the German Catholic Gertrud von Lefort and also of Georges Bernanos's Dialogues des carmélites, which provided the libretto for the highly successful opera by Francis Poulenc, first performed in 1957.

G. Molinari (1906), The Carmelite martyrs mount the scaffold, 1906. Carmel de Compiègne

 

What were the circumstances surrounding the condemnation of the nuns of Compiègne and what do they tell us about the religious policies of the Revolution?

The following is translated from an essay published in 2009 in the Annales of the Historical Society of Compiègne, by Jacques Bernet, a historian who has researched and written extensively on Revolutionary dechristianisation in the local area.  In his preface, he emphasises the need to move beyond hagiography to uncover the historical context.  In his view, the Carmelites were victims of a tragic conjunction of personalities and political circumstances rather than a generalised ideology of anti-religious violence.