Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France: 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.

The Carmélites in the 17th and 18th centuries

The Carmel of Compiègne was founded in 1641 and, until the construction of the convent in 1648, accommodated by Anne of Austria in a wing of the royal château. Until the Revolution the sisters led a peaceful existence under the protection of the royal family. Louis XIV was brought up in close proximity to the convent, whilst Madame de Maintenon and later Marie Leszczyńska were frequent visitors - the latter had a room set aside for her. This royal connection later did them few favours.

Sister Charlotte of the Resurrection
(collection of the Carmel of Compiègne)

In 1790 the house comprised thirteen professed nuns, a novice and three extern sisters, aged between 26 and 75. The majority came from outside Compiègne, mostly from the Paris region, and were of good family. This was especially true of the nuns of the choir. Sister Marie of the Incarnation (Mme Françoise-Geneviève Philippe), author of the manuscript which forms the basis of the hagiography, was the natural daughter of the Prince de Conti, whilst the congregation's prioress, Mother Teresa of Saint-Augustine (Mme Madeleine-Claudine Lidoine) had been provided with a dowry in 1773 by Marie-Antoinette on the recommendation of Louis XV's youngest daughter Madame Louise, prioress of the Carmel of Saint-Denis.

The Carmelites were an enclosed and austere order, faithful to traditions. The house in Compiègne had a high reputation for devotion, discipline and charity. According to a formal declaration made in March 1791, it enjoyed an annual revenue of 5,000 livres in 1790, a middling figure among the religious establishments of the town.

The beginning of the Revolution

From the first the Revolution directed its hostility towards the religious orders. The initial religious reforms - the nationalisation of church property in November 1789 and the suppression of monastic vows in February 1790 - targeted the regular clergy. On 5th August 1790 the administration in Compiègne drew up an inventory of the convent's property. The nuns were individually interrogated as to their intentions; unlike their masculine counterparts, but in line with their fellow sisters in the town, they declared unanimously that they "wished to live and die in their Holy House". This included the young novice Constance who had not yet taken her vows (and was destined never to do so).

As a result, the Carmelites of Compiègne were given permission to remain peacefully in their convent. They lived on the pensions that the law allowed them and which, in August 1791, they duly claimed: 478 livres annually for each of the professed nuns and 239 livres for the three lay sisters. This was a total of 7,423 livres, a sum significantly larger than the 5,000 livres revenue that they had declared for 1790. Moreover, on 11th February 1791 the authorities of the district presided over the regular election of a superior for the house (Mme Lidoine, the prioress since 1787, was re-elected) and of a bursar (Mme de Croissy).

Signatures of the Carmelites on the occasion of the election of a prioress , 11th January 1791.
Compiègne Municipal Archives. Sorel (1878) pl.1; and Appendix II.

The first serious conflict between the Revolutionary authorities and the Catholic hierarchy, over the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, had little direct impact on the nuns, since it involved only the secular clergy. There was little resistance locally and the parish clergy of Compiègne took the civic oath collectively on 9th January 1791.

The sisters, however, were doubtless confirmed in their hostility towards the religious policies of the Constituent by their Director of Conscience, the former Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Courouble (1730-1803). The latter was exiled to Liège on 23rd November 1792, together with the abbé Carlet, chaplain to the Visitandines; both were considered "refractory agitators", even though they had taken the oath of loyalty to the regime - the so-called "serment Liberté-Égalité" - on 19th September 1792 along with their congregations.

Following the fall of the monarchy, the Legislative Assembly, by its decree of 18th August 1792, suppressed all remaining convents. The nuns of Compiègne were now obliged to leave their houses. On 12th September the Carmelites duly complied. On 19th September they took the oath "Liberté-Égalité" which was required of all functionaries and pensioners of the State. (According to Marie of the Incarnation they later retracted, but her testimony is unreliable.)

Even in September 1792 the local authorities continued to show their goodwill. On 4th September the administrators of the district warned the nuns that "prudence dictated" that they leave their house, abandon their habits and assemble together as little as possible. The sum of £18.50 livres was awarded to each of them for new clothes, since "their habits of the cloister can be of no use in the world". With official approval, they moved to three adjoining houses, near the church of Saint-Antoine. In these "refuges" they were able discreetly to continue their communal life without harassment. Until his exile in November the abbé Courouble was allowed by the sympathetic Constitutional priest Jean Thibaux to say mass in the church.

The houses of the nuns from old photographs in the municipal archives (reproduced in Bush, To quell the Terror)

By this time an atmosphere of religious exaltation had begun to pervade the community. In her account, which first appeared in 1836, Mme Philippe, Sister Marie of the Incarnation, the only one to escape the drama of 1794, refers to a premonitory dream of martyrdom which had come to one of the sisters. This "mystical dream" (which had taken place in 1693) was alluded to by Mme Lidoine for the first time at Easter 1792. On their prioress's initiative, the entire community now began to offer themselves up daily "as a holocaust to appease the anger of God and to bring divine peace to the Church and the State". This act of consecration, dramatised by Bernanos, strongly echoes the original spiritual vocation of the reformed Carmelite order as articulated by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross.

The drama of Spring 1794

Catholicism, then, continued to survive in Compiègne within the framework of the official Constitutional Church without a great deal of difficulty. It was only in the Autumn of 1793 that the situation really deteriorated, due almost entirely to external influences. As dechristianisation gained momentum at national level, the Popular Society of Compiègne and local radicals launched a brutal offensive. Churches were closed or converted to the cult of Reason, and priests forced to abdicate their functions. A systematic anti-religious iconoclasm associated Catholicism with the absolutist and feudal Ancien Régime.

The Revolutionary Committee of Compiègne nonetheless limited its repressive measures to the internment of a few suspect priests; it made no moves against former ecclesiastics or their congregations on account of private religious views. Nor did it take action when a few isolated voices in the Paris Jacobin Club denounced "the fanatical and aristocratic agitation" of former nuns who remained illegally in their communities, mentioning by name the Bernardines de Monchy-Humières and the Carmelites of Compiègne. Whether sincere or forced, the sisters offered pledges in support of the war effort; the Popular Society recorded a civic mention for a package of bandages from "the citizenesses, former Carmelites" - a donation destined for the military hospitals of the town.

According to Jacques Brunet, the subsequent fate of the Carmelites was the result of "a tragic combination of local and national circumstances", the unfolding of which can only be fully understood by detailed study of the archives. The affair was not the result of a systematic will to persecute ecclesiastics, which did not represent the reality of Year II. Rather, it was the outcome of a "distressing mixture of fear, cowardice and political manipulation", born of the exceptional circumstances of Spring 1794, with its climate of psychosis, paranoia, circulating rumours and plots.

.We follow the train of events which led to the perquisition of 2 Messidor Year II (21st June 1794), to the arrest of the nuns, their trial in Paris and finally to their condemnation and execution on 29 Messidor (17 July 1794).

As a foretaste of what was to come, on 16 Ventôse Year II (6th March 1794), the dechristianising Representative-on-Mission André Dumont, on his way through Compiègne, had warned a public session of the Popular Society, that a "nest of Counter-Revolution" existed in the very interior of their commune.

The leading radical of the district in the Year II, was the national agent and printer Bertrand-Quinquet, the "Mirabeau of Compiègne". Bertrand had his troubles. He noted with concern the return of Catholicism and the limitation, if not check, of the dechristianisation of Autumn 1793, above all in the countryside. The local Jacobins struggled to modify the cult of Reason, to which they had given atheist interpretation, into the civic cult of the Supreme Being laid down in the Decree of 18 Floréal.

At the end of April 1794 Bertrand attempted to demonstrate his zeal by writing to the Committee of Public Safety in order to blame the local "flickering of the flame of Reason" on evil-doers who wished to mislead the people. The only reply he received was a stinging rebuke for the vagueness of his denunciation.

The former Carmelites, meanwhile, were conducting an extremely imprudent correspondence, both among themselves and with the outside world, in which they did not trouble to hide their hatred of the Revolution. These exchanges did not escape the vigilance of the maître de poste, Claude-René Chambon, another militant Jacobin and member of the Revolutionary Committee, who took to denouncing the nuns' "fanatical agitation" - it is not hard to see his hand behind the perquisition of 21st June. A few suggestive fragments seized during the search sufficed to credit the totally disproportionate thesis of a "royalist and fanatical plot". The arrest of the Carmelites on 22nd June followed.

It may safely be deduced that the radical Revolutionaries of Compiègne had seized upon the idea of a plot with opportunistic relish in order to bolster their own credentials and prove their patriotic vigilance in the eyes of the authorities in Paris.

The evidence against Mulot de la Ménardière:
Fragment of verse and letter to Sister Euphrasia
Sorel (1878), Pl II.

The documents discovered were indiscreet but for the most part harmless. The archives of the Revolutionary Tribunal conserve an essay of 59 pages against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, together with several private letters which express hopes for a Coalition victory. The sisters were also found to be in possession of a portrait of Louis XVI and an image of the Sacred Heart (the symbol of the Vendéan rebels!)

In addition, there were some anti-Jacobin verses penned by a certain Claude Louis-Denis Mulot de la Ménardière, a bourgeois of the town whose political ambitions had been thwarted. Little is known about Mulot de la Ménardière, who was a relative of one of the nuns. According to Jacques Brunet, he was a correspondent to Bertrand's journal Affiches de Compiègne et du Beauvaisis in 1786-87.

Other local congregations - the sisters of Charity in Compiègne and the Bernardines of Monchy - were also searched but, perhaps because they were forewarned, no compromising material was found.

Unfortunately for the Carmelites, their arrest coincided with a critical moment in the Revolution's history and they were destined to become collateral damage in the tortuous manoeuvrings of the Revolutionary Government in Paris. After the fall of the "factions", whilst Robespierre sought to rally the people to the cult of the Supreme Being, his opponents, spearheaded by Vadier of the Committee of General Security, attempted to discredit him through his association with the mystic Catherine Théot. It seems that the members of the Revolutionary Committee of Compiègne were well appraised of this affair; they noted that there had been greater activity among the Carmelites and their female followers since "the arrest of the woman Théos, the so-called Mother of God", and voiced the suspicion that the nuns were involved in a criminal correspondence with "the fanatics of Paris".

The sisters, together with the hapless Mulot, were immediately imprisoned in the former house of the Visitandines, which now served as a gaol. With them were the English Benedictines of Cambrai who had been interned in Compiègne. (The latter were released in 1795; indeed they embarked from Calais in the lay clothes left behind by the Carmelites) The dossier for the case was sent to the Committee of General Security which, on 22 Messidor (10th July), ordered the transfer of the Carmelites to Paris, to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 17th July.

Trial and execution

One of very the few images that is not an execution scene - posted on the Tribune Chrétienne website, no further information but modern, I think.

The trial of the sixteen former Carmelite nuns and Mulot de la Ménardière took place at the height of Revolutionary repression in June-July 1794, when the Revolutionary Tribunal despatched nearly 1,400 victims in 46 days. The arrivals from Compiègne were part of a heterogenous group of thirty-four persons, judged hastily and without witnesses. The nuns appeared in their religious habits, their civilian clothes having been left behind in the laundry. The act of accusation, drawn up by Fouquier-Tinville, and read by his deputy Lindon, charged them with "having formed counter-revolutionary conventicles and of having in their hearts the desire to see the people returned to the chains of tyrants and the slavery of sanguinary priests; to have continued to live under their rule and their superior". A condemnation of religious fanaticism was strongly implied. According to Mme Philippe, the accuser attacked the nuns' "attachment to puerile beliefs and stupid religious practices" at which Sister Marie-Henriette Pelras turned to her companions and cried out, "We are going to die for God!" Mother Teresa, speaking in the name of the group, tried in vain to take the blame upon herself and save the sisters.

The unfortunate Mulot was accused of complicity and qualified as a "refractory priest", despite the fact that he had been married for fifteen years - as could easily have been attested by the President of the Tribunal, Toussaint-Gabriel Scellier, whose brother was the mayor of Compiègne. It seems that the Parisian jurists assumed that Mulot was the Carmelites' Jesuit confessor in disguise : that they had allowed this confusion was the only reproach to be made against the Revolutionary Committee of Compiègne after Thermidor.

The judgment against the sisters.
Reproduced in William Bush, To Quell the Terror (1999).

During this parody of a trial the Carmelites showed a courage and dignity which left a lasting impression. The same was also true of their conduct at the moment of execution. An employee of the prison recounted to Mme Philippe: "One could not believe the respect commanded by the devotion of these generous victims; all of them longed for the moment of their sacrifice; they exhorted one another to remain firm and forgiving in the final combat...they gave the impression of going to their weddings.". Such are the words given to them in their last moments, as the sinister cart carried them to the place du Trône-Renversé, dressed in their white religious robes and singing canticles. It was reported that the crowd was so impressed that they watched in silence as the nuns mounted the scaffold one by one. Mother Teresa was allowed to die last; she had hidden in her palm a tiny terracotta Madonna which each of the sisters kissed in turn, singing the Laudate, before they went to the guillotine. Their bodies were buried in the great communal pit near the cemetery of the convent of Picpus.

The Madonna held by Mother Teresa (collection of the Carmel of Compiègne)

The fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor came only ten days later. According to Catholic mythology, this was the "miracle" accomplished by the nuns, whose courage had turned popular opinion against the tyrant.

From legend to beatification

More than a century passed between the execution the Carmelites in 1794 and their beatification in May 1906 - a long intellectual journey. The point of departure was the "relation" of Mme Philippe, the sole survivor of the community. The latter returned briefly to Compiègne in March 1795 to collect the sisters' effects and to gather testimony; she also retracted her oath of September 1792 on the municipal register.

"Wash-tub" clothes returned from Stanford in 1895.

The town remained silent on the affair until well after the Revolutionary era. The only allusion was the rehabilitation of Mulot de la Ménardière recorded in the proceedings of the local Jacobin club. It was not until the Restoration and the July Monarchy that the first hagiographies appeared, by the abbés Guillon de Montléon (1821) and Auger de Compiègne (1835). In 1836 Mme Philippe's account was published at the request of her superior, the abbé, later Cardinal, de Villecourt, who extensively guided and rewrote the text. The remodelled narrative, which reflected the preoccupations of the post-Revolutionary Church, laid down the foundations for the pious legend of the Carmelites. It was reinforced by the testimony of the seventeen surviving English Benedictine nuns who had briefly shared their incarceration. (The Benedictine Abbey of Stanbrook in Worcestershire was to serve as headquarters for the beatification by Rome in 1906).

The reestablishment of the Carmel of Compiègne in 1867 revitalised local memory. Commemorative services were held and there was a renewed editorial effort on the part of the clergy and of notable

Catholics in the Historical Society of Compiègne. This production increased under the Third Republic as the conflict between Church and secular state intensified. The study of the Carmelites' trial by Alexandre Sorel which appeared in the Historical Society's Bulletin for 1878 provided the historical starting point for the beatification.

The process of beatification was initiated by the French bishops and the cause introduced by Pope Leo XIII in December 1902. A decree of Pius X on 11th June 1905 proclaimed the Carmelites to be authentic martyrs. This was followed, on 27th May 1906 by a series of pompous ceremonies, which may be construed as a riposte to the formal separation of Church and State by the Third Republic in December 1905. The complex drama of 1794 was reduced to a confrontation between the pure faith of the Carmelites and the enemies of religion, that is the Revolution and its inheritors.

Towards canonisation?

Jacques Bernet comments that it is in this same spirit that the memory of the Carmelites has been kept alive in 20th-century art and literature. Both the novel by Gertrud von Lefort and Francis Poulenc's opera are incontestably chefs-d'oeuvre, but they "reinforce the myth to the detriment of historical truth". The same tendency showed itself during the bicentenary of the Revolution, when certain Catholics raised the possibility of canonisation. In 2009 Jacques Brunet was pleased to observe that the Church had showed itself hesitant, perhaps advisedly so. The tragic history of the Carmelites ought not to become embroiled in new partisan quarrels but be allowed to stand as an example for the cause of peace and reconciliation.

References

Jacques Bernet, Les Carmélites de Compiègne, victimes de la Révolution légende et histoire", Annales historiques Compiégnoises, No. 113-114, 2009 [available online from the website of the Société Historique de Compiègne]

https://histoire-compiegne.com/wp-content/uploads/ANNALES/AN113-1.pdf

Rodama: a blog of 18th-century & Revolutionary France

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