A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime 9780773569416

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A Social History of the Cloister

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m c gill-queen’s studies in the history of religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. series two In memory of George Rawlyk Donald Harman Akenson, Editor Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk Inifinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston, editors The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

Gentle Eminence A Life of George Bernard Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William Katerberg The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel, 1948–2000 Paul Charles Merkley A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley

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series one G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for an New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Monreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution John Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844– 1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827 to 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanna M. Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

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A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime elizabeth rapley

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2222-0 Legal deposit third quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Rapley, Elizabeth A social history of the cloister: daily life in the teaching monasteries of the Old Regime (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2222-0 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women – France – History. I. Title. II. Series. lc506.f8r36 2001 271′.903044 c2001900081-2

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations

ix

xi

Introduction

3

part one

two hundred years

1 The Nuns and Their World

13

2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy 29 3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

49

4 “Personae non gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus 64 5 The Decline of the Monasteries 6 Aftermath part two

78

96 t h e a n at o m y o f t h e c l o i s t e r

7 Clausura and Community

111

8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience 130 9 Prehistories

148

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viii

Contents

10 Novices

164

11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ”

182

12 Of Death and Dying 198 13 The Institut

219

14 The Pensionnat Conclusion

234

257

Appendix: Demographics of the Cloister 261 Glossary Notes

285

289

Bibliography

349

Index 371 A map of the three teaching congregations appears on page

275

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank her husband, who has encouraged her and researched with her during all the years that she has worked on this book. Most particularly, she thanks him for the many patient hours he has spent bringing order and meaning to her data. She acknowledges the assistance given to her by a number of people in France, notably Chanoine Michel Veissière, Madame Marie-Thérèse Notter, Cécile Amalric, odn, and the municipal librarians in Montargis and Provins. She thanks the editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History for agreeing to the inclusion in the book of material previously published in that journal. Finally, she would like to express her lifelong gratitude to Beatrice Binney, rscj, a wonderful history teacher, to whose memory she dedicates this work.

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P. Helyot, Dictionnaire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires (Paris: N. Gosselin, 1714–1719),vol. 6, opposite p. 355. Courtesy of University of Ottawa, Rare Books Collection.

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xii

Contents

Vol. 2, opposite p. 425.

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xiii

Folio

Vol. 4, opposite p. 185.

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xiv Contents

Vol. 4, opposite p. 166.

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A Social History of The Cloister

The persons whose virtues are proposed for our meditation are not strong men who have crossed the seas to take the Gospel to the infidels; they are simple women like ourselves, whom we have seen sanctifying themselves in our midst, in the practice of the same Rules, in fidelity to the same usages. “Annales des Ursulines de Blois,” 1714

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Introduction

I think I must start by saying that during the years the nuns in my study were bending themselves to their mission of recatholicizing the world, my own ancestors, both English and Scots, were all dyed-in-thewool Protestants, who probably never saw a papist in their lives. My English ancestors lived in Huntingdonshire, one of the most Puritan of counties, and their allegiance was to Oliver Cromwell. Even during my mother’s childhood in the early years of the twentieth century, no family member was allowed to criticize the great man. A sort of residual loyalty, then, gives me my excuse for starting with a story about Cromwell. Having risen to power, he needed to do the right thing and pose for a portrait. But while the portrait was necessary, the flattery that customarily went into it was not. In that respect, Cromwell was not like most other great men. His words to the artist have lived on, even though most of his other words have faded: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”1 Far be it from me to compare French nuns in their convents to a soldier-statesman in Westminster – surely, both nuns and statesman would have been most insulted at the suggestion – but I think that perhaps they too would have appreciated a faithful portrait, warts and all. This would not have been their first choice, which would be no portrait at all; for they wished to live in obscurity. “The name of a religious ought to be as unknown and solitary as her person,” wrote one of them.2 Many of the more eminent among them took care to preserve

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4 Introduction

that obscurity by burning their papers before their death. But the problem is that obscurity has not been kind to them. If you do not see to your own history, someone else will see to it for you. In their case, the absence of evidence has been taken for irrelevance, and self-disparagement has turned into disparagement by others. A true portrayal, warts and all, is one thing, but a concentration on warts to the exclusion of all else is another. The nuns of the Old Regime were the subject of considerable hostile analysis by people who had never been inside their convents’ doors. They were accused of “idleness, childishness, back-biting, hypocrisy, sentimentality in prayer, prudery, preciousness, affectation and vanity.”3 Worse, they were suspected of harbouring “volcanic” passions, which were kept in check only by the locks on their doors and the bars on their windows. Their image did not improve with time. In the nineteenth century, when France was shaken by monumental church-state battles, religious women, loyal troops of the church as they were, caught the edge of the anticlericals’ hostility. The literature abounded in negative images; a nun was “the disappointed lover, the intriguer, the harridan, the person whom one designates … by the intentionally equivocal expression ‘good sister,’ and finally, the pseudo-mystic.”4 What had nuns done to deserve such harsh treatment? In answer to this question there was only silence. No one had entered the public domain to speak for the nuns. If they themselves had spoken, they would probably have said, “I will not dignify this with a response.” That is certainly how they acted. For the most part they swathed themselves in privacy. However warm and kind they may or may not have been among themselves, they treated “the world” with hauteur. They did not owe it an explanation, still less a justification. They cherished their apartness, cultivating the “us against them” mentality. Had they wished to persuade others of their value, they certainly had the means. Over the years they produced, or arranged to have produced, many biographies and historical monographs. But these works were designed strictly for home consumption, and their purpose was hagiographical. Their subjects were the institutions or the founders and other women who might qualify for canonization. Intended to edify, these writings seldom allowed even the mildest criticism, the slightest hint of humanity. Hagiographies, of course, preach only to the converted. This was the problem with this old convent literature. It had no intention of reaching across the great divide, to tell the world what it was really like to live in community under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. So the reader was left with two extremes: the hostile and generally uninformed writings of the outsiders, and the carefully crafted and

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5 Introduction

sanitized tributes of the insiders. The consequence of this extremism was the loss of a sense of balance. Only recently have there been an increasing number of works that seek to portray religious women as they really must have been – warts and all, and far more connected to the human race than we have ever been allowed to believe. Another great problem with the insider literature is that it was fragmented. No one spoke for monasticism or even Catholicism as a whole. This is characteristic of older Catholic historiography. It has been pointed out that in the period when Reformation history was taking shape under the hands of great Protestant scholars, “Catholic historical scholarship, chartless and rudderless … hardly sought to synthesize but was content to record, piecemeal, reforms, resistances, counter-offensives.” As a result, for many years the movement known as the Counter-Reformation was defined by its opposition, and suffered accordingly.5 This failure of Catholic historiography must surely be blamed partly on the religious orders, whose allegiance seemed too often to belong to their own institutions rather than to the universal Church. The infighting to which they were so prone found permanent expression in their writings. In the older literature of any religious order you will find yourself within an intellectual cloister where the brothers are everything and the rest of the world is barely mentioned. Loyalty to the in-group was matched by indifference and sometimes even hostility towards the outsider. The history of monasticism and the religious orders was, for these earlier historians, the history of individual orders and societies. With religious women, this fragmentation was taken to extremes: from individual societies to individual houses. Look at the bibliography at the end of this book, and among the older works you will see a host of monographs, each dedicated to a single community. We can fit them together to form a sort of mosaic of female monasticism, but in doing so we are circumventing their original purpose. In keeping with the dictates of the Church and the prejudices of society, the female monasteries of France were cut off, not only from the world but from each other. The spirit of isolation was built into their communities at the time of foundation, and it endured through the years.6 From within the circle of their own walls, nuns tended to regard outsiders with caution, and other religious orders with outright coolness. A sense of apartness filled their minds, so they would have been most surprised to learn that they were really not as unusual as they thought. It was only in the later twentieth century that historians began to supply the syntheses that treat religious women as members of an identifiable countrywide group, sharing many of the same ideals, objectives, and problems.7

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6 Introduction

I have followed this path, drawing a large picture with material that was originally intended for small pictures. This has required some audacity, because the three congregations with which I am concerned – the Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule, the Compagnie de Marie NotreDame, and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame – are still very much alive and active, teaching children all over the world. They have every right to shake their heads at the liberties I have taken in grouping them together; after all, there were differences between them; they were not the close copies of each other that my broad-brush methodology may suggest. And even if similarities may be found in their rules, organization, and lifestyle, the geographical distribution of their communities always tended to intensify their differences. Each cloister had its own character at a time of great regional diversity in France. So is it legitimate to group together the large and prestigious monasteries of great cities with the small houses buried in towns of two or three thousand souls? Or to group the communities of bustling port cities with those of slumbering provincial backwaters? My only defence can be that while some particularities are lost, many perspectives are gained in the telling, and I hope that the latter will make up for the former. The other great problem has been the passage of time. The period covered in this book extends from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth – the period generally known as the Old Regime. In writing social history, it is tempting to treat blocks of time as though they were a unified whole. Yet during those two centuries French society did not remain static. At its different levels it progressed unevenly, some parts of it leaping ahead while others remained virtually immobile. The cloisters about which I write existed simultaneously on these different levels. They were (for the most part) urban and therefore were not immune to the forces at work in their cities; they were populated largely by daughters of the better off and better educated, and were therefore not entirely closed off from the winds of change. On the other hand, their way of life was inspired by the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, and their rules were designed to keep this way of life as intact as possible. “Edified and encouraged by the example of those who have gone before us,” the nuns of 1790 proclaimed, “we have no other ambition than to model our conduct on the exact discipline and constant regularity which they supported.”8 Was this unchangingness an illusion, or was it genuine? Were the sisters of 1790 really clones of the sisters of 1630? That was a question I asked over and over again as I researched this work. Time did make a difference. Monastery walls were not impervious to the currents that flowed through society at large. Had the cloister

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7 Introduction

existed in a vacuum, it might have remained unchanging. But events battered against its walls, creating circumstances to which the women inside simply had to respond. Whether they knew it or not, they did evolve – if only just enough to survive in a changing environment. Because the forces for change originated outside the walls, it is necessary to explain what was happening there. Part 1 is an introduction to the events which, over nearly two hundred years, dictated what happened to the women’s monasteries. Chapter 1 begins in the broadest terms, touching on the general topic of monasticism, both male and female, tracing the great fluctuations in its fortunes from the extraordinary period of growth in the earlier seventeenth century, through the dark days in the eighteenth century, and to the French Revolution. Chapter 2 turns to the three teaching communities with which we are concerned. They developed in the same context, enjoying the same rapid expansion before falling into the same drastically unstable economic environment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nothing before or after, until the Revolution, provided such a unifying experience for thousands of religious women as the misery they shared during these years. Chapter 3 falls back in time to consider the tensions inherent in the communities’ relationships with their bishops. One of the fictions about religious women is their supposed docility. “Their spirit, being sedentary, calm and patient, banishes the fear that they would ever wish to leave the circle which is traced for them by their duty and their Rule,” wrote a Crown minister at the time of the Restoration.9 This may have been true, both then and in the preceding centuries. But how did the nuns react when outsiders encroached on that circle of duty and Rule? On numerous occasions, the sensitivity of monastic communities to what they themselves called their “rights” led them into serious confrontations with the ecclesiastical authorities to whom they were subject. The degree to which they could be stubborn, combative, and downright disobedient was demonstrated in the eighteenth century in the regions of France that experienced the Jansenist crisis. Chapter 4 considers this crisis and its often tragic results. Chapter 5 takes up the themes of chapter 2. In the history of monasticism, the eighteenth century is remembered mainly for decadence and decline. Religious women have been associated in that decline, albeit with some reservations. This author joins with others in questioning that historiographical tradition. The female monastic population decreased, to be sure. But the convents were the victims not so much of moral decline as of an extremely adverse economy and an unsympathetic government. The Law Crash brought hundreds of communities to their knees. It is remarkable that so few of them actually

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8 Introduction

collapsed and that so many were still alive and in tolerable financial health at the time of the Revolution. Chapter 6, “Aftermath,” offers a brief glance at the women’s experience during the Revolution. While strictly speaking this experience belongs to another historical period, it is important to remember that it had its roots in an earlier time. The nuns who faced the guillotine, sat in the crowded prisons, or simply survived as best they could in rented rooms and garrets had been formed in the orderly and protected environment of the Old Regime cloister. Their negative reaction to the Revolution, unexpected at the time and mildly controversial to this day, was the fruit of that earlier life. Part 2 seeks to describe life within the cloister: the framework provided by the institutions, the spiritual and material problems of every day, the relationship of the women with one another, and their relationship to the world outside. Having paid due respect to time and space in part 1, I now sidestep their restrictions, drawing from sources scattered across the whole period and the whole country to create a composite picture of teaching nuns in the Old Regime. I am emboldened to make these generalizations by the knowledge that the very act of entering a convent and submitting to a Rule involved a certain loss of individuality. When all is said and done, there was much that was invariable about the cloister, whether in 1650 or 1750 and whether in Brittany or the Dauphiné, Burgundy or Poitou. In the early modern period, women’s horizons were limited, and religious women’s even more so. Once the parameters of their life had been set, few serious deviations were open to them. All monastic communities were built on the same foundations: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and clausura (the obligation to remain within the cloister). To these obligations the three congregations in question added another: the holy apostolate of instruction, which they called their institut. The obligations imposed patterns on the lives of the women who undertook them. All their regional, cultural, and personal particularities and all the modifications caused by the passage of time had to fit within these patterns. At the same time, religious women always remained physically connected to the society around them. They shared in many of its customs and practices. They employed the same notaries, doctors, and legal advisers. They drank the same water and patronized the same butchers and grocers. They approached the problems of child rearing, nursed and medicated their sick, and attended their dying in much the same way as “the world” did. In fact, the records they kept about these things, at a time when women as a whole seldom wrote much about daily life, can provide useful information on life not only in the cloister

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9 Introduction

but also in the larger community that swirled around it only a stone wall away. Thus, this “social history of the cloister” is more than a cameo study of a small closed-off section of society; it has a bearing on the general history of women in early modern France. In a field of study where women’s self-expressions are difficult to find, it offers a wealth of material composed by women for women. Part 2 of the book is, for the most part, a collection of anecdotal evidence, drawn from the annales and other writings of religious women. In the appendix another perspective is offered: a look at the demographics of the population, extracted from the thousands of records of individual nuns that survive in various French archives, public and private. They provide sufficient evidence to reconstruct, at least in part, the life courses of the women: the age at which they entered religion, their staying power in the novitiate, and their age at death – and the effects on these life courses of time and geography. The records also reveal the changing shape of communities and the rise and decline in their populations, with all that this has to say about the evolution of the public’s opinion regarding the female monastic life. The importance of religious women in the world of the Old Regime should not be underestimated. As celibates in a society that counted on leaving many of its members celibate, as dutiful children in a system where family strategies were key to economic and social development, as devout practitioners of a faith and a moral code that sought to cover and permeate the whole land, as exponents of the state-building virtues of order and obedience, as pioneers in numerous fields of health care, and as the principal educators of thousands of growing girls – in all these roles, the religious women surely deserve to be recognized as full members of their society, especially its female part. As for the church of the Old Regime, if religious women do not loom large in its history, it is not so much for lack of evidence as for lack of interest. Few other groups have contributed so much to the life of an institution. It is the perception that others have had of their unimportance, added to their own obsession with privacy, that has kept them so long in the shadows. As I have said, this situation is now changing. Mine is only one of a number of studies that have been undertaken in the last decades, as a quick visit to my bibliography will show. I am sure that many more will follow; I certainly hope so. Other orders and congregations of nuns, both in France and in other countries, await their historians. Only when they too are documented will the religious women of the past have the history they deserve.

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part one Two Hundred Years

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1 The Nuns and Their World

Of the millions of women who have become Roman Catholic nuns over the last four centuries, a large proportion have been teachers. Most of these teaching nuns have belonged to religious orders that had their genesis in France. Who were the first professional nunteachers of France? Were they the little group of young women who joined together in 1592 in the Isle-sur-Sorgues, in the Comtat Venaissin, to live under the vow of chastity and to teach Christian doctrine?1 Or were they the five young women of Mattaincourt in Lorraine who, on Christmas Eve 1597, put black veils on their heads and announced that thenceforth they were going to live in community and teach school?2 Or – since none of these actually lived in the France of their day – was it yet another small group of women, established in Bordeaux and led by Jeanne de Lestonnac, baroness of Montferrand, who in 1607 received papal authorization “to offer to God a vow of perpetual chastity and to dedicate to Him their lifelong service in the formation of young girls in good morals and Christian virtues”?3 To borrow a phrase from Lucien Febvre, all this is “une question mal posée.”4 It matters little who was first across the starting line in this race to educate and Christianize, and thus save the female children of France. What is significant is the extraordinary power of the idea and the fact that, within a very few decades, it spread throughout the country. It has been described as a “contagion” and indeed it was, leaping from person to person and from town to town.5

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14

Two Hundred Years

If the contagion was to spread, it required certain conditions: young girls needing to be schooled, teachers to school them, and a heavy infusion of wealth to finance the whole complex of undertakings. None of these conditions could have been taken for granted in the circumstances of 1600. Girls had never before been thought to need schooling. One might well ask why they were thought to need it now. As a historian of primary education has remarked, it is astonishing that so many parents of the seventeenth century strove so hard to ensure that their children, both boys and girls, received instruction.6 There was little of the necessary infrastructure immediately available in the France of 1600 – the country, newly emerged from war, already had a great deal to do just to repair past damage. However, its distress at the devastation in its ancient Church, coupled with its alarm at the superiority of Huguenot teaching and preaching, provided the motive power. Thinking Catholics were convinced that heresy could only be combated by its own weapons – by better preaching and by building and staffing schools and colleges; and the postwar expansion in the agricultural sector that fuelled the economy provided them with the means to accomplish their new purpose.7 There remained the third necessary condition: teachers to do the work. Where girls were concerned these teachers had to be female, since both the Crown and the Church viewed any kind of coeducation with horror. Women had always taught school here and there, but never in great numbers. Now they crowded onto the scene, even before there were children to be taught or money to fund their efforts. The need that drove them was the need to do something about the desolate state of the Catholic faith – and, at the same time, to give vent to their own religious energy. Those early groups of women were inspired not so much by any pedagogical aspirations as by the desire, as one of them put it, “to do all the good that is possible.”8 And the good they sought to do was to be done from the base of a community life. Their decision to live in this way was as fundamental to their plans as was their apostolic purpose. The movement was highly dynamic. Its real growth spurt began after 1610. By the time this was over in 1670, the three small groups of 1592, 1597, and 1607 numbered among them close to five hundred communities – about a one-quarter of the total number of female monasteries of every kind that have been counted for the Old Regime. Virtually every substantial town possessed at least one convent of teaching nuns. The phenomenal growth of the teaching congregations was part of a wider sea change taking place in French female monasticism. The women’s monastery was not, of course, an invention of the Counter-

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15

The Nuns and Their World

Reformation; it was as old as France itself.9 But the passage of years and the ravages of the religious wars had taken their toll, so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century both the population of monastic women and their religious purpose were sadly attenuated. Whereas, at their apogee, the great abbeys – Benedictine, Cistercian, Fontevrist, and others – had housed hundreds of nuns, their numbers were now diminished and their purpose degraded. In the countryside around Paris, for example, seven abbeys and one priory existed in a state of vegetation, with populations of between twelve and sixteen nuns apiece, leading lives largely innocent of any monastic discipline.10 Within the cities, convents of mendicant nuns – Franciscan, Dominican, and others, some richer, some poorer – also struggled to survive. But the life they offered did not seem to meet the needs of contemporary women. As Jeanne de Lestonnac explained, they were either too physically demanding or too relaxed: [Of] the many women who would like to serve God in religion some are constrained, because of the austerity of the Rule and the weakness of their bodies, to remain in the world … Others, seeing that the primitive spirit of charity, devotion and perfection is almost extinguished in the ancient [monastic] families, and [that there is a] lack of spiritual aids therein, do not dare to join them … for fear of finding spiritual death where they looked for life.11

It was not from these ancient institutions that the great surge of religious activism arose. By the time such institutions managed to renew themselves, they were already almost submerged in the flood of new monastic creations. Port-Royal, Montmartre, and other famous houses might have had great influence and respect in French society, but the huge energy of the years of “Spiritual Conquest” came from newly established communities such as the Carmelites, the Visitation, and the three teaching congregations to whom this work is dedicated. The teaching congregations represented a new, hybrid form of religious life. In accordance with the custom at the time of their foundation, they were strictly enclosed,12 and they gave a good part of their day to prayer, spiritual reading, and meditation. Their originality lay in their apostolic intention, their institut* – the saving of souls through the instruction of children. They differed from the contemplative orders in that teaching rather than prayer was their principal objective. “The teaching function is the prime purpose of our institute, for the greater glory of God, for the salvation of souls and for the public good,” stated the Rule of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame;13 the other * Words marked with an asterisk are defined in the glossary.

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Two Hundred Years

two congregations held the same view. “The public good” was an idea to which they readily paid homage. Wherever they went, they drew up contracts with the city authorities whereby they undertook to teach, at no charge, all young girls who came to their door. As soon as they could, they opened their classrooms, and the children always came flooding in. If there is one fact that appears universally in their records, it is the instant popularity of their free schools. These schools became an integral part of the social structure, and they changed the way France felt about female education. The opening pages in the history of convent education are marked by intense enthusiasm and a supernormal degree of dedication. The movement was young, as were the women who joined it; it was given to all the extremes and excesses that accompany a religious revival – which, of course, is what it was. We shall see it grow older and wiser with the passage of time. But the point to remember is that many of the first generation of nuns were zealots, and as zealots they simultaneously aroused both admiration and alienation in the society around them.

th e c o nv e nt ua l i n vas i o n The movement of women into the religious life in the early seventeenth century was part of what has been called a “rush”,14 a levée en masse.15 Again, it has to be emphasized that the great change came from the mushroom growth of new religious congregations, both male and female. It was they who provided the muscle for what has been called “a fantastic conventual invasion.”16 Communities of every stripe and every purpose formed up and then, within a few years, spun off subcommunities and even sub-subcommunities. They became Catholicism’s front-line fighters in the battle to regain the advantage from the Huguenots. In this they were highly successful, and along with their proselytizing, they brought civility and learning to a people badly scarred by war. But in their very success lay a serious social problem. Each of these new communities had to find its own place in the sun: its funding, its circle of supporters, and its living quarters. The older orders were already well endowed with land and feudal revenues, the fruit of centuries of acquisition.17 The new orders had nothing until they could find new sources of wealth. The supply, however, was not equal to the demand. The wealth of the countryside depended on the labour of the peasantry, which – no matter how pushed – was finite. Naturally, the landowning families had their own ideas on how to use any surplus. When some of their more devout members began to divert large

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slices of the family fortune into religious institutions, serious internal divisions developed. These became more intense as the century progressed and as the provincial nobility began to suffer economic and social decline.18 The huge generosity which the gens de bien showed the monasteries at the outset did not last long. The local elites bestowed more than money on the religious congregations; they also gave them their children. “It was not unusual, in Paris and everywhere else, for the sons and daughters of good houses – men and women of quality – to go off and enter these orders,” wrote Pierre de l’Estoile in 1606.19 Many families followed up with support and affection for the same orders. But with the passage of years, as they became more straitened in their circumstances and more sceptical in their thinking, they began to withhold both money and children.20 This put the new religious communities at risk. Since their strength had come from their close identification with the upper classes, their decline began when the same upper classes lost interest. “The solidarity of noble and convent, so complete in the seventeenth century, carried within it problems for the future, when the descendants of the zealous reformers would become more indifferent towards the Church, and begin to oppose the diminishment of their patrimony in favour of the religious orders.” So writes the historian of religious orders in Brittany.21 What he says applied equally across the country. The last of the new communities’ requirements was perhaps the one that caused the most trouble: the need for space. Almost to a man (or woman), they looked for a place inside the cities. But these cities, in the early 1600s, were still cramped tightly within their defensive walls, with houses piled on each other across narrow alleyways, and public space always at a premium. The arrival of a new religious community meant the dislodgement of ordinary households. The establishment of seven, eight, or more new religious communities, complete with cloisters, gardens, cemeteries, and churches, meant in many cases the virtual takeover of the intra-muros. And more than space was involved. Church property enjoyed numerous tax exemptions. Thus, every private house that was absorbed into a monastic space meant a loss for a city’s tax base. So while some people were enthusiastically encouraging the establishment of new religious communities, others (including municipal officials, assemblies of citizens, and local parish clergy) actively opposed them.22 These people feared that whatever limitations on expansion the new communities initially agreed to, they would break the agreements once they were installed. “We all know that the communities settle for an inch of land when they arrive, and then afterwards spread out by degrees,” commented a critic.23 A truer word was never spoken.

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The conventual invasion was rather like a gold rush in that literally hundreds of communities, male and female, appeared at the gates of scores of cities, anxious to stake their claims. At issue was the wealth, patronage, and support of the elites of those cities. The first to come were usually the first served. Others were closed out or had to settle for less affluent locations with less promising prospects – in the faubourgs or in smaller towns. Given the overcrowding of the course, it is easy to see why the competition was so fierce. This brings up a dark side of the conventual invasion – the rough way in which the congregations treated one another in their haste to secure for themselves the best places in the best cities. They slandered each other without hesitation and used all their influence to keep others off what they considered to be their territory. The Jesuits came to have a bad name for their use of defamation and dirty tricks, but in fact the other orders did the same. Cistercian monks, jealous of the influence which the Capuchins were beginning to exercise over PortRoyal, labelled them “sneaks, sanctimonious hypocrites and zealots,” according to Angélique Arnauld.24 The Cordeliers battled against the Capuchins in one town; they kept the Récollets out of another, preaching that they were parasites who took bread from the mouths of the poor.25 The Minims succeeded in persuading the commune of Abbéville to keep a group of nuns out of the city.26 The mendicants of Lille petitioned the authorities to get rid of the Ursulines whose schools, they claimed, were teaching vanity rather than piety.27 The examples could go on and on, some of them involving fisticuffs.28 Even in an age known for its quarrelsomeness, this infighting was damaging to the image of the orders and was grist to the mill of the ever-present anticlericals: “These ambitious men,” wrote one of them, “when they get the ear of powerful people at court or among the Robe, never fail to speak ill of the others, so as to make them despised, and to build themselves up on their ruins.”29 Thus, the religious rebirth of the seventeenth century, though impressive in so many ways, had its negative side. Catholic France made space for the new orders, but it did not wholeheartedly embrace them. As the years passed, its fears about them were confirmed: the economic base of the cities did indeed begin to dwindle away. “It is certain that the [religious] communities, very numerous, occupy the greater part of the city’s terrain,” wrote a royal engineer in Laon in 1701. “The said communities, founded more than a century ago, [have ruined] more than 150 houses, uniting entire streets to their monasteries, so that the number of inhabitants, the only contributors to the expenses of the city, is notably diminished.”30 It was a grievance that could not be redressed and was never forgotten. The superabundance of regular

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clergy contributed greatly to their unpopularity – and, some have said, to their eventual decadence.31

the first confrontations The naysayers had always been there, but in the first exuberant years they may have sounded like frogs croaking in the marsh. With time, however, their chorus began to swell. At the mid-seventeenth century, disenchantment was turned into action. The first sign that the times were changing came from the Crown itself, and it was over the question of money. The difficulty lay in the Church’s tax exemption. According to ageold custom, ecclesiastical property, whether land or buildings, was considered to be the portion given to God and the service of the poor, and on this account to be withdrawn forever from general circulation. It was held “in mortmain.” In this condition it escaped the taille, the Crown’s main tax, and various feudal dues. At the beginning of the Bourbon regime, huge holdings across France – as much as 10 percent of the country’s landed wealth – were already off limits to the royal fisc. The acquisitions of the new religious congregations only enlarged this pool of untaxable wealth. However, the Crown had its own ways of compensating for its losses. To make up for the revenues that it would henceforth forfeit, it was entitled to collect, at the time of purchase, a fixed percentage of the sale price. This was known as the due of amortissement. If paid at the time of purchase, it was not too hard on the purchaser, but the Crown often overlooked the dues until such time as it was in financial straits; it then demanded the arrears in a single payment. This is what happened around the middle of the century. Under the regency of Marie de Médicis and through the earlier part of Louis XIII’s reign, the Crown had been indulgent to the new religious communities. Because they had been founded recently, they had no inherited property, so it was only natural that as soon as possible they would go on a buying spree, acquiring not only their conventual buildings but also investment property, both urban and rural. Legally, all this property was subject to dues of amortissement. But in the climate of benevolence then prevailing, the fees were either waived or – more often – simply ignored. In 1638, however, as the government’s need for money grew more pressing, the king’s first minister, Cardinal Richelieu, turned his eyes in this direction, claiming that the Crown had the right to the payment of dues of amortissement, with or without the consent of the Clergy. He faced stiff resistance from most churchmen, who were exceedingly

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jealous of their privileges. A confrontation followed, which was settled only when the Clergy offered the Crown a “free gift” of 5,500,000 livres, and the Crown agreed to forgive all dues then owing.32 It was the Clergy’s hope that it might, now and forever, escape paying directly to the Treasury. However, the Crown did not surrender the right to tax religious corporations at will. “The law of amortissement is just, because the State renders it necessary,” the Crown argued. The king was free to levy taxes or not, at his pleasure.33 It was only a matter of time before the government would return to the attack. Meanwhile, with the passing years, the Clergy was losing popular support. Its tax privileges, so fiercely defended, cost it dear in the eyes of the public. Furthermore, the proliferation of monks and nuns, at a time when the economy was under stress, seemed to more critical minds to be tantamount to the creation of a new class of expensive idlers – “much like fleshy excrescences, which drain nourishment from a body of which they are an integral part.”34 It was also said that such people, by their celibacy, were depriving the state of much-needed future citizens. These populationist theories lent weight to the outand-out resentment that many felt towards the monasteries, over what was perceived as their unfair share of the country’s wealth. These views found expression through Louis XIV’s omnicompetent minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who came to power determined to cut down to size the various institutions which he considered a burden on the economy. As early as 1664, he was looking for ways to diminish the number of “monks of both sexes, who only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”35 Colbert consulted with several councillors of state and in 1666, when the answers he received confirmed his own opinions, published an edict ordering a countrywide investigation into religious houses, with the intention of reducing their numbers where possible. Communities were visited by commissioners of the Crown and were required to show their letterspatent of authorization and their statements of accounts. Those that could not justify their existence were forced to close. The minister would have gone further, by raising the minimum age of entry to twenty-five for men and twenty for women, and by placing a limit on the value of religious dowries – and also, significantly, on the value of marriage dowries, which, in Colbert’s opinion, were becoming so high that they were forcing parents to put some of their daughters into convents. But in this he was ahead of his time, and he had to abandon the project. Even with all the resources of the Crown at his disposal, Colbert could not overcome the resistance of the Clergy. However, the line of thought he was following remained fixed in the minds of certain influential people. “There are too many monks,”

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claimed a pamphlet in 1669. “It is an abuse that prejudices the realm … and it is time to deal with it seriously and powerfully. Monks live in celibacy and make neither families nor children … Furthermore, the blind dependence by which they are attached to the wishes of the Pope forms an alien monarchy within the heart of France; and they draw the credulous to it, which is a matter of extreme consequence.”36 The respect with which the French elites had once viewed the monasteries was changing to irritation, even hostility; and the twin issues of money and power were, more than anything else, responsible.

the beginnings of decline If the clergy could not yet be brought to heel, they could at least be taxed. Colbert made the effort in 1674; he was blocked in the usual fashion, by another “free gift” of 520,000 livres. But time and the ineluctable logic of the Crown’s wartime financial needs brought the government to the attack once more in 1689. This time it had its way. The royal declaration of 1689 demanded payment of dues of amortissement on all investment property acquired by the gens de mainmorte since 1641.37 The clergy, no longer able to shelter behind a “free gift,” saw themselves subjected to out-and-out impositions. The Crown reaped a fine reward: 18,000,000 livres, as much as Richelieu had secured in twenty years of effort.38 The Crown’s gain was, of course, the clergy’s loss. Try as it could, the Assembly of the Clergy could not fend off the collection of the dues of amortissement. The tax was justified by custom and by law; what made it oppressive was its size and suddenness. If the dues had been paid regularly when property was purchased, they would have been manageable. But now, communities and corporations were required to pay out, in arrears, lump sums that could easily dwarf their total annual incomes. The result was, in the words of a contemporary publication, “a veritable Saint-Bartholomew for the clergy.”39 Since the Crown’s problems were far from over, the financial carnage (to continue the metaphor) was extended, with the invention of other taxes and the forced sale of offices, in the clerical as in the lay sphere. On average, the Clergy was now paying the Crown 6,400,000 livres per year, where in the period 1660–90 it had been paying 1,230,000.40 It still clung to its privileges by calling these tax payments “free gifts.” But one way or another, the king got his money. This all has to be placed in the context of massive overtaxation right across French society. Even with these increases in its burden, the Clergy was paying only a small fraction – about 3 percent – of the country’s annual taxes.41 The Church as a whole remained rich and its

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credit solid. However, its weaker members were seriously affected by the new tax regime.42 Many individuals and communities – especially new communities and especially female ones – found that they were paying more than they could afford. Their carefully tended economies began to fall apart. “In the year that the taxes commenced, commenced also our decadence,” wrote one monastic annalist.43 Surviving financial records of Old Regime monasteries bear her out: 1689 was a watershed year, ending an era of expansion and beginning an era of decline. Taxes do not tell the whole story. The communities, struggling to make ends meet, found that much of their capital, which was placed out in loans, was now forever out of reach. The economic depression that dogged the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, combined with the continuing war and the government’s desperate attempts to raise more revenue, impoverished the whole society. The agricultural crisis, which brought the poor to starvation, also brought many once-prosperous people to bankruptcy. Those who had lent money to these people now found much of their money uncollectable. At the same time, the cost of living rose and the income from land dropped precipitously. Peace brought no relief. Indeed, as one observer remarked, “Those who have had the misfortune to have all their wealth in [financial investments] have already, in the space of six months of peace, faced more damage to their fortune and experienced more hardship than they suffered during twenty years of war.”44 The last years of Louis XIV’s reign were marked by severe instability in the money market. Then, in 1720, came what was to be the final disaster for the rentier class. France went into a giddy spiral of inflation, then collapsed into bankruptcy. This all resulted from the efforts made by John Law, with the regent’s full backing, to re-invigorate the country’s finances and refloat its economy. Law argued that the shortage of specie, which had depressed the country for years, could be corrected by creating a larger money supply through the issue of paper money. Part of the scheme involved forcing the rentier class, which for so many years had locked up a good part of the country’s wealth, to cough up its treasure and in return to receive shares in a new company, the Mississippi Company, and billets de banque. Thus, money that had been sterile would be put to work, and France would claim its rightful part of the rich returns that were pouring into other countries (mainly Britain and Holland). The country, Law predicted, would be lifted off the rocks by a buoyant tide of capital. But the scheme, which had much to commend it, was too ambitious for the society onto which it was foisted. Throughout the summer, inflation ran out of control; fortunes were made and lost with dizzying

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speed. In December came the crash. The billets de banque were declared to be worth little more than the paper they were printed on. The collapse in the value of money was particularly hard on the country’s lenders.45 Both public bodies and private debtors took advantage of the situation to pay off their debts in devalued paper money or to demand a reduction in the interest on their loans. All too often, threatened with bankruptcy themselves, they refused to pay up at all. In other words, as borrowers benefited from the bankruptcy, lenders suffered. Foremost among these lenders were religious corporations and communities. As one observer wrote, “Hospitals, parish vestries, secular and regular communities, above all those of women, and many other people who had no wealth other than their rentes, have been reduced to indigence.”46 This was no exaggeration. Many communities found their revenues reduced by as much as one-third or one-half.47 Recovery from the bankruptcy was, of course, a slow and painful process. Even societies as prestigious as the Jesuits had to conserve and save and scrimp. Women’s monasteries were particularly handicapped by their lack of flexibility. Tied down by their clausura and hampered by the sheer number of mouths they had to feed, they had few ways to help themselves. Their only option was to appeal for government assistance. And this threw them into a new jeopardy, because it made them dependent on an outside and none too friendly force. Starting in the mid-1720s, religious communities across the country began bombarding Versailles with appeals for help. The more audacious suggested that since the Crown had precipitated the crisis, the Crown ought to solve it. But the Crown’s first response was to turn the tables: to accuse the communities of improvidence, of extravagant building programs, of poor management of their property, and of accepting more women, for the sake of their dowries, than they could afford. “It is this excessive number, out of proportion to the monastery’s revenues, that has caused the failure of a great number of women’s communities,” wrote one jurist.48 After some reflection, it was also decided that the problem was systemic. There were too many convents for the good of the country, and it was “absolutely necessary to suppress an infinity of houses.”49 A commission was established by royal decree in 1727 to hand out assistance to communities in need. This “Commission des secours” was assigned a fund, out of which, in the first five years alone, it paid pensions to 558 houses.50 But it was also instructed to reduce “the excessive number of female communities with which the kingdom is burdened.” Poverty had laid the women’s monasteries bare to the censorious gaze of an officialdom, which had never liked them much and now found its opportunity to do something about them. Colbert’s chickens had come home to roost sixty years late.

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The Commission des secours has been overshadowed by its successor, the Commission des réguliers,* to the point where, in many church histories, it is not even mentioned. Indeed, until 1969,51 it never received any serious attention. But it was in fact a major experiment in social engineering and a significant intrusion by the Crown into the business of the Gallican Church.52 Before it closed its doors in 1788, it had mandated the suppression of some 244 female monasteries and the reduction in size of many more. If this achievement fell far short of its initial ambition, it was only for lack of resources and the declining interest of the Crown.53 However, it had fulfilled its purpose. Between 1720 and 1789 the population of nuns in France was reduced by about one-third.54 It was altered, too, in other subtle ways. The reduction had been achieved not by throwing nuns out but by banning entries, thus limiting the intake of young subjects. As a result, female communities found themselves growing older as they grew smaller.55 They found themselves, as well, subjected to a much stricter tutelage than they had hitherto known – for the ostensible reason that they were becoming too independent.56 From now on, if they offended their bishops, tried to act independently, or showed signs of heterodoxy (in effect, Jansenism), the ban on the reception of novices could be continued indefinitely and pensions could be witheld. This fitted well with the prevailing passion for order. “For their own good,” wrote an adviser to the commission, “they need a greater subjection. They ought to be kept under a very close eye, by a power near enough to them to oversee their conduct.”57 The activity of the Commission des secours reached its peak in the years leading up to 1751. In other words, the reconfiguration of the female monastic world – a world that had been shaped during the Catholic Reformation – took place in an atmosphere already steeped in Enlightenment thinking. Not that the women themselves were penetrated by Enlightenment principles – they seem to have been more or less impervious to them – but the men who decided their future, whether laymen or prelates, were decidedly so. “Women’s convents,” they maintained, “ought to subsist only insofar as they are useful to the State, through the edification of prayer, through the instruction and education of children, through the care of the sick and the poor.”58 Utility remained one of their principal criteria. As for the bishops who were called upon to collaborate in the initiatives of the commission, their responses are revealing. Most of the serious opposition to the reengineering came from men with Jansenist leanings. This is not surprising; they had already forfeited the Crown’s good will because of their independence and so had little to lose from speaking their minds. The

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more worldly bishops, those with ambitions, concurred willingly with the commission’s initiatives.59 But we cannot dismiss them as mere sycophants. The free hand they enjoyed for many years suggests that their thinking reflected that of their own elite milieu. The spirit that had built the monasteries in the first place was now buried in the past.

monasticism, the “unloved” institution From mid-century onwards, the prevailing mood was hostile to monasticism. “At present it is fashionable to slander monks,” wrote a learned Benedictine monk in 1783.60 The chief reasons for this hostility were their perceived idleness and excessive wealth. And indeed the records show truly scandalous divides between the “haves” and “have-nots” of the ecclesiastical world. Canons and monks might enjoy revenues in the tens of thousands of livres at a time when parish churches were crumbling and salaried curés earned only 300 livres.61 “This handful of monks … possesses more wealth than all the curés of Cambrai, to the number of 700,” wrote the priests of that diocese, referring to the monks of a local monastery. They went on to berate the monks for their idleness: “We spend night and day in the rain going about the countryside to administer the sacraments, but these gentlemen would refuse to take four steps away from their home without a good carriage or at least a horse to carry them and a well-equipped valet to serve them.”62 The reason for this serious imbalance was the diversion, over a long stretch of time, of the wealth of the Church into the pockets of the rich and powerful. The diversion had proceeded in two stages. First, the tithe, which should properly have been applied directly to the support of worship and the care of the poor, was largely reserved for the gros décimateurs* – rich, old monasteries for the most part. Their only responsibility was to ensure the provision of religious services, which they could do by hiring priests at economical rates. The difference between intake and output was theirs to enjoy, while often the priests had to supplement their income by charging fees for services. In the second stage of diversion, the wealth of the monasteries themselves was shared out between the monks (or nuns) and their so-called abbots or abbesses – men and women appointed by the Crown, who often had only a pro forma connection to their abbeys but were entitled to a part of their revenues. This was known as commende, and it was an important part of the royal patronage system. If the king benefited from his power to bestow or withold such significant riches, the nobility benefited even more; it “confiscated for its own profit a large part

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of the revenues of the Church.”63 The public anger which this aroused was expressed in no uncertain terms in the cahiers de doléances* of 1788. How did this affect the great majority of religious women in France, who were anything but rich? They seem to have suffered from guilt by association. They were not accused of excessive wealth or evil living, but they were dismissed as irrelevant, petty, and superstitious. Their monasteries were seen as gothic prisons, and they as poor silly victims. Their methods of hospital care came under fire from philosophes and physiocrats whose prime target was the hospital system itself. Their schooling, which had drawn so many people to them in the early decades of the seventeenth century, was pronounced outmoded. Many upper-class girls whose predecessors had grown up in monastic pensionnats were now tutored at home, where piety mattered less than social graces. As for the religious life itself, elite opinion was now strongly against it. “The convents have been judged and condemned,” wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier. “Excessive inquisitiveness, bigotry and hypocrisy, monastic nonsense and claustral prudishness reign there. These deplorable monuments of an ancient superstition exist in the middle of a city where Philosophy has spread its light.”64 He would have argued, as others did, that the fact that women could still be found in them was simply proof that parental cruelty existed even in the Age of Enlightenment. It was time to open up these prisons and release the victims who languished within. It is no wonder, then, that the men of the Revolution were decided, from the very start, to do exactly that. In October 1789 they took action. Monasteries across the country were ordered to receive no more candidates to profession until further notice.65 The following February, all monastic vows were abolished. The religious orders were put on notice. In one way or another, the same message was delivered: “Liberty, or rather, life [will be] restored to the mass of victims of both sexes whom the self-interest of families, personal obligation or a passing fervour have cast into the horrors of the cloister and loaded with insupportable chains.”66 Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1790, commissioners went to every religious community in the country, offering the members freedom while at the same time making an inventory of their property. For monks, the options were stark: freedom with a pension or a continuation of religious life in changed circumstances, regrouped with strangers in houses other than their own. For nuns, there was a concession: they would be allowed to stay in their own houses, even though these now passed into state ownership. But they were encouraged to leave. This inquest was the closing ceremony in the history of religious communities in the Old Regime. In 1790, when it was launched, the

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king was still king, and the Church had not yet been reduced to a department of the nation. The nuns appeared in the records for the last time as communities, coming before the commissioners in solemn order, the superior first, the senior nuns next, the juniors bringing up the rear, their names in religion and their dates of profession all registered – as though all this was still important. Their responses to the inquiries of 1790–91 can be taken as a referendum on female religious life as viewed by those who lived it in the last years of the Old Regime. Whatever the reason (and various explanations have been offered), the overwhelming majority did not wish to leave it. From then until September 1792 those nuns who had opted to remain in community lived in limbo: still enclosed in their cloisters even though their vows were no longer legally valid; unable, as often as not, to receive the sacraments from their own priests; surrounded by familiar property and goods that were no longer theirs; and forbidden to receive pensionnaires or teach school, or even bury their dead in the cemeteries that lay within their walls. Some communities showed spirit, defying the constitutional church in every way they could. Others lay low and waited for better times. It made no difference what they did. In late September and early October 1792 they were all evicted. From then on, if the nuns appear in official records at all, it is as solitary individuals, ci-devant religieuses – prisoners on their way to punishment or small entrepreneurs eking out an existence in private teaching or in the production of goods; or petitioners, aging and impoverished, pleading for their pensions. The year 1792 drew a line under their history. Between the death of the monasteries that year and their revitalization in the nineteenth century lay an empty space of a decade and more. Although some nuns eventually returned to religious life, it was to new communities and new surroundings in a new age. This has been a broad-brush outline of the history of religious orders in France under the Bourbon monarchy, from the early 1600s to 1792. The conventual invasion of the seventeenth century was an extraordinary phenomenon, a huge display of human energy. It achieved its aim – the recatholicizing of French society. But the achievement was not without cost. The very size of the movement laid it open to charges of being overbearing and counterproductive. For all its spiritual vigour, the Catholic Reformation had its negative side. In material terms, the conventual invasion led to a reconfiguration of the urban landscape, with the apparatus of reformed Catholicism – the convents, colleges, churches, schools, and hospitals – absorbing more and more of the available space. Financially, it occasioned a drain

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on the country’s wealth, during the very years when the state was seeking to corner more and more of the wealth for itself. The very part of society upon which the religious orders depended for support – the elites – came to see this as an imposition which the country could ill afford. As the general economic climate worsened, the situation of religious communities became precarious. The more vulnerable of them, the female communities, were the first to fall. Stricken by the Law Crash of 1720, they were forced to throw themselves on the charity of the government – a dangerous move, as it turned out, since the government had already decided that there were too many of them. For the religious women of France, the 1720s and 1730s were the bleakest of times as they faced both impoverishment and the mandated reduction in their numbers. Eventually they achieved a financial recovery of sorts, but the damage to their public image was less easily mended. In the mind of the Enlightenment, monasticism, including female monasticism, simply had no raison d’être. The teaching communities were not immune to these changing circumstances. When the conventual invasion began they were there, instructing and proselytizing – and also accumulating property and wealth, thus making friends and enemies at the same time. They shared in the depression of Louis XIV’s later years and in the bankruptcy of 1720. And in the aftermath, as the antimonastic spirit of the prerevolutionary years billowed up, they were caught within it. All these events helped to shape their life within the convent walls. The following chapter will go into the records of these communities to examine the way in which they gained their fortunes and then lost them during their first century of existence (1620–1720). It will, I hope, serve to illustrate how closely the cloistered life was dependent on material conditions. Throughout the rest of the book this dependency should not be forgotten. It formed the foundation on which religious women built their social and spiritual life.

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2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy

t h e w ay s a n d m e a n s o f a c q u i s i t i o n There are two ways of looking at the crucial decades 1620–40, which saw the foundation of most of the teaching communities. One of them is the view from inside: the stories of the heroism of the anciennes mères and their battle against poverty and the inhumanity of man. Stories like that of the little community of Mâcon passing its first winter in a halfruined house, where “the wind came in from every side … and they had at night to hang their robes up to block the windows”; where the rain and snow leaked through the chapel ceiling; where the best they could afford was a pathetic little altar decorated with coloured paper; and where the senior nuns had to post guard at night over the gap in the wall that threatened their enclosure1 … Or stories of the six young women of the Congrégation, refugees from the war in Lorraine, who struggled to set up a community and a school in far-off Châtellerault, working long hours in their school “and eating dinner while warming themselves and diverting themselves a little … not being able to keep a regular order because they had so much work, work that was a joy for them, so great was their fervour”2 … Or stories of the first Ursulines of Blois living on a starvation diet and taking turns to warm themselves at their one small fire; rising early “to do the laundry, bake, chop and stack the wood, and carry in all the water, even for the wash”3 … And of the five young nuns of the Congrégation in Reims, who for several months slept on straw pallets and drank out of a single, shared earthenware pot, all the while facing down the city council, “who were well and

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truly angry, and seldom left us in peace … wishing to force us to leave, and threatening to tear down our grille.”4 Such stories took on the quality of legends, to be repeated by succeeding generations of nuns and shared with their many friends, supporters, and students. The other view of this period is the one from outside, held by people who saw the new congregations as invaders threatening the delicate balance of their cities. The communities were aggressive and tenacious, all for the sake of their sacred cause. They were accused of taking advantage of friendship wherever they found it, of knowing how to manipulate the networks of patronage, and of using their own self-sacrifice to soften or shame the hardest hearts. We see all these accusations in a memorandum drawn up in 1694 by Edmé Leveil, curé of Saint-Valérien in the city of Châteaudun: In the time of the most illustrious … bishop of Chartres, Jacques Lescot, the religious of the Congrégation … came from Lorraine to establish in the parish of Saint-Valérien … They were 3 or 4 from the city of Nancy who began this establishment … They begged M. Coffinier, canon of the château, and myself to take up a collection through the town for them.

The proceeds from this collection provided the nuns with enough to live on while they pursued a longer strategy: “They laid siege to Messire Jacques de la Ferté, dean of Saint-André, through the intermediary of one Barbier, his attendant,” asserted Leveil, and by their flattery persuaded the dean to give them his niece, with a considerable dowry – “upon which they forgot their country and resolved to stay in this city.” Later, they again “mounted a powerful barrage,” this time on another notable who had come into money. After receiving liberal gifts from him, said Leveil, they just as quickly forgot him and looked for patrons elsewhere: I write this to inform posterity of the humble beginnings of these religious and the disrespect that they have shown for those who rendered them all the services that piety could expect of them … Through the exercise of a deplorable poverty deserving of compassion and assistance, in no time at all they will be in a position to concede nothing to the “poor” order of Saint Benedict which has around 300 millions in revenue every year; what is more, this monastery will never be at peace, donec totum impleat orbem.5

This is bitter language coming from a parish priest. It should not be forgotten that the parish clergy were often hostile witnesses because of the inroads that religious communities made into their congregations. But it rings true: the religious of the Counter-Reformation were zealots,

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with the strengths and failings of zealots, and their cause emboldened them to win, even at the expense of others. They did not hesitate to use the patronage of powerful people to force their way in. Bishops were invaluable; so were local seigneurs and prominent ladies. The sisters proved that even the most dogged municipal resistance would crack if they could win over the daughters of important men. Fond papas had to forgo their opposition when they realized that the only way they could keep their children close by was to allow the opening of a convent in their city. When the sisters of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame arrived in 1630 to set up a community in Toulouse, the president of the Parlement sent them six separate orders to leave the city, and when they protested that one of their members was sick, he answered that “whether the sick woman found health or the tomb, it was going to be outside Toulouse.” But then his daughter decided to join the community, and “the magistrate had a sudden change of heart” and began actively to promote the foundation.6 It was blackmail of a sort, and it worked over and over again.7 In other cases, the sisters used their credit at court. In more than one city, municipal officers received a letter from the king or the queen mother, warning them “not to make difficulties over this establishment.”8 For example, in 1634 the Congrégation in Laon had ambitions to open a house in Reims. The sisters knew they had to move fast because the Ursulines were also eyeing the city. But they held a trump card: a young novice, Gabrielle de Beaumont, niece of Cardinal Richelieu’s éminence grise and herself a native of Reims. Her mother badly wanted her closer to home even if it meant opening a local house especially for her, so the matter was forwarded at court, and letters patent were issued. But the royal will met resistance from the city council of Reims, which was already wrestling with a superabundance of religious houses. Order after order was dispatched without effect, until finally the persistent pressure of Gabrielle’s mother at court resulted in a letter to the council, signed by the king and using stern language: “The present is to order you … under pain of disobedience, to receive the said religious … into our city of Reims, and to let them enjoy, fully and peaceably, the effect of our Letters Patent, desisting from all pursuits contrary to our intention.”9 And so it was done. The nuns got their foundation, and Gabrielle came home to Reims. But the affair aroused ill feeling. A bourgeois of the city, no friend of the religious, commented: “Where they have been refused, they have begged the authority of princes and grand seigneurs … And for fear of disobliging his Highness and making him resent us, we have to receive them.”10 The citizens could only watch sourly as the community settled in and started buying up urban properties.

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In city after city, the creeping invasion took place. In Evreux the Ursuline building program dislodged the residents of twenty-five houses;11 in Châlons-sur-Marne, that of the Congrégation absorbed all the houses between two streets.12 One by one, over seventy years and at a cost of some 40,000 livres, the Ursulines of Avallon absorbed twenty properties adjacent to their monastery.13 An Ursuline convent in Aix pursued a building program that began in 1623 and ended in 1755, and consumed twenty-five private properties.14 From the nuns’ point of view, focused entirely on the completion of their enclosure, there was nothing wrong, and everything right, with their efforts. Indeed, the Ursuline community of Montluçon, confronted by neighbours who refused to sell their property, actually set itself to praying for their conversion – or their death!15 Nuns were also guilty on some occasions of the same disreputable infighting that was so notorious among the regulars.* The Ursulines used their credit with the bishop of Poitiers to keep the Filles de NotreDame out of the city, “hoping to block the progress of those whose happy beginnings they had not been able to prevent in Bordeaux,” wrote the historian of the latter.16 And in Blois they did their best to prevent the Visitandines from entering the city.17 On the other hand, in Troyes, Provins, and Reims it was they who were blocked, while the sisters of the Congrégation made a triumphal entry. The important thing was “to get there first,” while space and good will were still available. Pierre Fourier, founder and mentor of the Congrégation, on observing from afar the frantic efforts of the sisters to reach Troyes before the Ursulines, wrote to them reprovingly: “If other religious get ahead of you … in the name of God, we must thank His providence and infinite bounty for providing, in our time, so many good examples on all sides.”18 But his advice fell on deaf ears. The sisters were too much gripped by the spirit of the race to slacken their efforts.

sources of income: dowries Old Regime France has been described as an aggregate of microcosms.19 This description is entirely appropriate for female monasticism. It must be understood that none of the three congregations in question were “congregations” in the modern sense of the word, with central direction and the freedom to move members from house to house. These practices, though prescribed for reformed male congregations, were still forbidden to women in the early seventeenth century. Constrained by canon law to remain physically isolated even from each other, women’s monasteries were turned in on themselves and their own concerns, and failed to develop the solidarity that might

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have given them strength and – in hard times – comfort. Spiritually, each community surrounded itself with what an Ursuline of our day has called “a rigid, cold barrier.”20 Houses corresponded with each other periodically, and neighbouring communities belonging to different orders even made some mutual gestures of friendship, once the “rush” of the foundation period was over. But one has only to read their various works to suspect that the friendship was more pro forma than heartfelt. They valued their own entities so single-mindedly that they set little store by those of others. Materially, women’s monasteries grew up as small business enterprises, each embedded in its own local “market” of supporters and patrons.21 Each monastery fought its own battle for survival; if it faltered, there was little chance that other houses would help out.22 Success, or lack of it, depended on conditions peculiar to each community: its patrons and protectors; its location and the state of its buildings; the regularity and health of its members; and its business acumen. One superior with good management skills could make a house; one bungler could break it. As a result of all these variables, fortunes could be very different, and some houses thrived while others withered away. From the beginning, these small, independent businesses had to operate in a fairly difficult climate. Unlike older monastic communities, they had inherited nothing from previous generations. The date of their establishment was the date on which they started acquiring wealth, wherever and whenever they could find it. Some of them had temporal founders (or, more often, foundresses) who endowed them with houses, land, and rentes. But the contributions of the founders were generally small in relation to the continuing expenses that communities were forced to incur.23 Nearly always, other important persons – bishops, local seigneurs or merchants, or widows of substance – were called on to help them through their early years. A host of lesser benefactors also chipped in: a table here, a dresser there, a half-dozen stools and a soup ladle from one lady, a tablecloth and napkins from another, two measures of flour and a pair of candlesticks from a third, and so on.24 What really launched the communities, however, was the flood of vocations that burst upon them, usually within months of their arrival. Across the country the conventual invasion was fuelled by hundreds, even thousands, of young women seeking entry at their respective monastery doors. Almost all these young women came with a dowry. Dowries provided the basic wealth upon which communities were built; at a most fundamental level, they made the difference between success and failure.

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The Ursuline house in Blois, so poor at the outset, brought in 280,160 livres in its first forty-five years, from the dowries of some ninety entrants.25 Its mother house in Bordeaux took only thirty-two years to acquire somewhat more, from the one hundred and seventeen women whom it professed.26 The new communities found themselves suddenly blessed with a great deal of disposable wealth – just in time to buy the properties and build the monasteries necessary to house their growing populations. The nuns of the Congrégation in Reims borrowed wildly to acquire property and build a monastery; their debts of 88,000 livres were paid off within seventeen years, thanks to the rapid influx of dowries.27 A great deal of the money went out as fast as it came in. The building at Blois, begun in 1655 and completed ten years later, cost about 120,000 livres – no small achievement for a community that had started forty years earlier with almost nothing.28 Yet it was an achievement frequently matched elsewhere. For instance, the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours – a city that could not have competed with Blois in terms of prestige – built its monastery, worth 100,000 livres, in twenty years.29 Successful building programs put some monasteries ahead of others in the race for acceptance – and more dowries. Although additions and improvements continued to be made to the fabric of the monasteries, the main building boom took place around mid-century.30 Some of the buildings, and especially the attached churches, were perhaps grander than they needed to be. But on the whole they followed the prescriptions of the founders: to be “commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous”; not to “resemble châteaux and palaces, castles and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”31 The “overambitious building projects” for which the Crown was later to blame them were more a fact of men’s monasteries – and some women’s abbeys – and mostly took place in the eighteenth century. But buildings did cost money. It was impossible to erect housing for fifty, sixty, or a hundred persons without a heavy investment of wealth. Monasteries were, by their very nature, expensive establishments. Without sufficient space and decent living conditions, they could not hope to attract entrants. And if they failed to establish clausura, their bishops might close them down.32 In other words, they had to satisfy their market, even if this meant alienating other people. Problems began as the public witnessed more and more of its wealth, in the form of dowries, being absorbed into the black hole of mortmain. To take Blois as an example, between 1625 and 1670 more than 800,000 livres in dowry money made its way into the coffers of the city’s four female convents.33 Since most of the women who entered these

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convents came from the city and its environs, this meant a loss to the patrimony of local families. Wherever the conventual invasion struck, this loss eventually began to be felt. It was for financial reasons more than any other that the country’s elites began to cool towards the monasteries. One of the first signs was a significant increase in lawsuits over disputed dowries.34 In the 1660s Colbert gave voice to the opinion that religious houses were draining the country’s wealth with their demand for dowries. In 1693 the Crown took decisive action, forbidding religious dowries of more than 10,000 livres in Paris and the parlementary cities, and more than 6000 livres elsewhere – which meant that pensions were not to exceed 500 and 350 livres, respectively. The purpose of this legislation was clearly to rein in the avarice of monastic houses. Ironically, whatever the public thought, the difficulty that bedevilled many convents was not that dowries were too large but that they were too small. After all, a dowry was the final settlement that a family made on a daughter before she took vows, became “dead to the world,” and was barred from the succession. The dowries were supposed to meet the women’s needs for the rest of their lives, as well as contributing towards the general upkeep of their monasteries.35 The thinking, even of the critics, was that every nun should be supported by rentes of 300 livres.36 Few teaching nuns ever enjoyed such luxury.37 When visiting bishops spoke out on the subject of dowries, it was usually to scold communities for lowering their requirements to unrealistic levels. This was the gist of Bishop de Rueil’s criticism, in 1628, of the Ursuline community in his city of Angers. The sisters, he ordered, must insist on dowries worth 150 livres per annum in rentes and resist any efforts to lower or circumvent them.38 In the same vein, in 1684, Archbishop de Neufville de Villeroy of Lyon ordered that women’s dowries had to be worth at least 2400 livres in the city and 1200 livres elsewhere in his diocese.39 This translated into 200 and 100 livres, respectively, in rentes – hardly conducive to an extravagant lifestyle, especially since the additional costs of maintaining the monastery and supporting the lay sisters had to be deducted from the same account.

the social significance of dowries If dowries were the foundation of a community’s material success, they were also a statement to the world of its social standing. At a time when one livre was a simple worker’s daily wage and a businessman would be happy to retire on an income of 3000 or 4000 livres per annum,40 the dowries required by cloistered convents presupposed a substantial level of disposable income in the families of their entrants.

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Teaching communities were seldom exclusively noble in their recruitment – their registers of profession bear witness to that – but they certainly drew from the “haves” of French society: the rentiers, the men of the law, the officer class, the rich merchants, and the nous-ferons of cities. The practice of placing children in religion* was all the rage among the elites of the seventeenth century, to the point where in parts of France girls of good family were as likely to become nuns as to be married.41 One of the benefits that women and families gained from the convent of their choice was social status, and postulants were expected to bring in the kind of dowries that befitted that status. In the case of the teaching monasteries, these were usually solid but seldom spectacular. In the mid-seventeenth century, the customary dowry payment in the Ursuline monastery of Montbrison was 2300 livres; in that of Toulouse, 3000 livres, and of Blois, 4120.42 Here and there, in highly soughtafter houses such as that of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, the dowries could rise as high as 10,000 livres.43 What we are seeing, in fact, are market forces at play. Dowries varied widely, according to the drawing power of a house and the ability of its clientele to pay. The Ursulines of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris could command dowries of up to 10,000 livres;44 on the other hand, their sister Ursulines in Tréguier, who probably boasted as many quarterings of nobility, could seldom raise more than 1800 livres, plus 150 livres in life pensions. Nobility, wrote the superior, did not translate into wealth “in a city where there is no commerce and where most of the inhabitants are in no state to dower their daughters.”45 The monasteries’ fortunes were dictated not only by place but by time. At the height of the monastic fashion, communities could weigh the demands for admission against the availability of space and, if things looked favourable, drive a hard bargain. Thus in 1642 the grand couvent accepted one entrant at 6000 livres but demanded that the next candidate pay 8000, on the grounds that the house was almost full, and thereafter raised the dowry requirement to 10,000 livres.46 In the Ursuline house in Périgueux the dowry hovered around 3000 livres for many years and then, in the 1730s, rose to a more or less solid 4000 livres – a tribute, no doubt, to its stable financial situation at a time when other houses were in serious difficulties.47 At about the same time the monastery of the Congrégation in Châteauroux, which had barely survived until it became the protégé of the archbishop of Bourges, was able to raise the dowries of its entrants accordingly – from 2500 to 4000 livres.48 Wherever we see the value of dowries rising, we may be sure that the communities demanding them were also on the rise.

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Conversely, nothing betrayed the weakness of a house so much as its inability to maintain the level of its dowries. The experience of the little community of the Congrégation in Châtellerault shows this clearly. Established in 1640 by refugees from the war in Lorraine, it was slow to gain the favour of the local clergy; this, together with its internal dissensions, may have been the reason for its shaky financial start. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century it was receiving novices with dowries of 2500 to 4000 livres – a respectable level for a house in a minor city. The dowries continued at this level until the mid-eighteenth century, then began to drop. In 1770 and 1771 two women professed with dowries of 1800 livres and 1000 livres respectively. The registrar remarked, “One will no doubt be astonished that these two young nuns gave so modest a dowry, but the great shortage of subjects to sustain our duties, above all our beloved instruction, led the community to obtain … permission to receive them.” But the news was out: this community was not in a position to bargain. From then until the Revolution, most of its dowries were modest indeed. The last entrant, in 1789, brought a dowry of only 900 livres. “It is to be hoped,” wrote the registrar, “that her good qualities will make up for the rest.”49 The advantage of dowries, according to one historian, was that they answered directly to need. More entrants meant more demands on the community’s resources and at the same time provided more money to meet those demands.50 The drawback to dowries, however, was that they were often lowest when they were needed most. Sometimes this was simply a function of a depressed economy. After the Fronde, the novitiate at Montargis was without novices, according to the annalist: “The Chapter, after considering the need that we had of subjects, and also that many of those offering themselves could only afford 1000 écus, consented to receive some at this price, by reason of [our] need, and the miseries of the times, which affected both seculars and religious.”51 In the same way, in 1694, it was “the shortage of money,” together with “the poverty of the house,” that forced the monastery of Saint-Marcellin to lower its dowry requirement from 3000 to 2400 livres, and sometimes even lower.52 However, it appears that the problems that individual monasteries experienced often came from the fact that, as businesses, they failed to impress their clientele. This affected their bargaining power. “Our house is not rich, so we are sometimes forced to receive [novices] for less,” complained the Ursulines of Melun in 1706.53 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, which at the height of its popularity could command dowries of 10,000 livres, was constrained after its near bankruptcy in the 1720s to accept women with dowries that averaged

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2990 livres.54 We may suspect that families were taking advantage of the damage that had been done to the house’s good name to settle their daughters for less.55 In times of weakness, chapters sometimes were tempted to make serious and damaging concessions. The Ursulines of Tonnerre agreed to receive Anne Baillot, to give her a room of her own with hangings, to let her get up late, and to excuse her from saying Office and from fasting. It can only have been the 10,000 livres of dowry that her father offered, and their own financial desperation, that allowed such a bending of the Rule.56 The same must be supposed of the decision of the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Poitiers to allow a sister, who had been in the community only a few months, to request profession at once and to give her the right of seniority that would entitle her to the next room with a fireplace that came vacant – all for a dowry of 8000 livres.57 Arrangements like these do not seem to have been common, but when they occurred they must have been damaging to community life. Certainly they gave credence to the public’s belief that “the monasteries often substitute dowries for vocations and load themselves down with unworthy subjects.”58 The public had a point: money does not make a vocation. The founders would have agreed with them. “It is not gold and silver that makes good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.” So wrote an eminent Ursuline of the early seventeenth century, Anne de Vesvres.59 But the nuns of the early eighteenth century were living with a different reality. “If a dowry in cash arrives, we use it; if it doesn’t, we borrow,” wrote another eminent Ursuline, Jeanne de Bourges.60 Dowries had become the only alternative to debt. The public found this scandalous, considering all the money that had poured into the monasteries through the years. Looking around for cause, people blamed the situation on the women’s mismanagement: “Experience shows that the ruin of monasteries comes all too often from the frivolous and vain expenses that are incurred within them.”61 It was an argument that the government took up with great gusto in the 1730s.

th e bu r de n o f tax at i o n Does the evidence suggest that this accusation was indeed true of the teaching communities? Of all the monastic records that survived the revolutionary period, the financial records are the most complete – for the obvious reason that they were of value to the new proprietor, the Nation. Lists of purchases of land, of money transactions, assets, and debts exist in the archives for houses that in every other respect have

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disappeared altogether. What these lists show is that almost all investments preceded and almost all borrowing took place after the amortissement crisis of 1689. The year 1689 marked a watershed between sufficiency and decline. The costs of Louis XIV’s wars had placed the government in desperate need of money. It had been considering amortissement for a long time, and now it decided to move. A royal declaration ordered that religious bodies must pay dues of amortissement and nouvel acquêt on all property acquired since 1641. Many communities now found themselves facing demands for lump sums that exceeded their total annual revenue. A half-century or more of back taxes would be difficult for anyone to bear. What made this tax worse was that it bypassed the rich and struck the poor. The older ecclesiastical institutions – bishoprics, cathedral chapters, abbeys – were already adequately furnished with land and feudal dues, and therefore had not been active in the real estate market. They escaped the tax almost unscathed.62 But the “new” monasteries, like those of the three teaching orders, had acquired their property recently; and as fast as dowries had come in they had invested them, leaving themselves a bare minimum to live on. For example, in 1690 the Ursulines of Rouen were found to have spent more than 130,000 livres purchasing property over the past seventy years.63 It did not matter that, as a later survey would show, their actual revenues totalled little more than 8000 livres for the support of seventy-five women.64 It was their past purchases, not their present straitened circumstances, that counted with the tax collector. The bill for amortissement dues and arrears combined came to 20,660 livres.65 Similarly, the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers was charged 34,284 livres, and that of the Ursulines of Bourges, 24,320 livres.66 Houses that had acquired less property paid accordingly: the Ursulines of Dieppe, 13,793 livres; those of Montluçon, 8200 livres; those of Chinon, 2568 livres.67 Convent after convent appealed the tax. They pleaded poverty; they pointed to the service they provided, at their own expense, to their cities; they protested that even those of their buildings dedicated to free instruction were being taxed – they felt they deserved the same exemption that hospitals enjoyed.68 A few communities offered to hand over all their goods in return for a pension. The taxmen answered them all in the same way: Pay up or face distraint of your goods; pay up quickly, and we will allow you some moderation in your tax bill. The communities paid, even if it meant borrowing to do so. One strange little feature of the process should be mentioned here. In 1696 the king gave Saint-Cyr, the school set up near Versailles for

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the daughters of impoverished noblemen, the right to receive the amortissement dues still outstanding. Madame de Maintenon, the king’s wife, who was in charge of Saint-Cyr, saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: she had a surplus of young ladies who needed to be “placed,” and the communities had a deficit of funds. So she offered to forgive part or all of the amortissement payment due from any convent that would admit one of her girls as a nun. Numerous religious houses were given the offer; most appear to have accepted it, as did the Ursulines of Dieppe, who received the following letter: “Madame de Maintenon has done me the honour of informing me that you have asked for a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, for whom the 6076 livres 17 sols which you still owe for amortissement will take the place of a dowry.”69 Soon afterwards, the demoiselle arrived.70 We find mention of these women in later records, in communities all across the country. The communities might in time have recovered from the amortissement tax if it had been the only demand on their resources during those last years of Louis XIV’s reign. Unfortunately for them, the declaration of July 1689 opened the floodgates; the government’s initiative raised the consciousness of many seigneurs, who went back to their records and realized that they, too, could demand back payment of amortissement dues.71 The next blow came in 1704, when the Crown decreed that investments in the money market, like investments in real estate, were to be subject to amortissement charges; and at the same time the Clergy began to collect regular taxes for its “free gifts.” In some sixteen years, the taxmen imposed thousands of livres in taxes on even the poorest houses, bringing many of them to their knees. Some communities “were looking to borrow on all sides, beginning to create new rentes on their revenues just to live … and to consume the dowries of the girls that they received,” wrote one annalist.72 Weaker communities were forced to send their younger members home to their families; some closed altogether.

the problems of land ownership Although land ownership had its advantages, many communities had so far failed to extract significant profit from their property. In return for the cost of their initial investment and the running repairs which they were constantly being forced to make, their income was often ridiculously low. Notre-Dame in Poitiers is a case in point: after an investment in land and farms which, according to its historian, amounted to 4000 livres a year for nearly forty years, the monastery received in 1727 only a little more (7134 livres) than it had in 1660 (6000 livres).73 Much of the problem lay in the long-lasting agricultural depression

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that plagued the country. “We are ruined by our sharecroppers,” complained the sisters of the Congrégation in Bourges. “They owe us more than 12,000 livres, because they themselves are all ruined by taxes and their workers, bad crop years, and fires.”74 The accounts of the sisters of Provins tell the same story: years of low yield, years of no yield at all, culminating in the bankruptcy and disappearance of their tenants.75 It was a widespread problem. The very considerable properties of the Ursulines of Beauvais – 160 hectares, for which in 1631 they had paid 26,300 livres – were supposed to bring them 1500 livres a year; but half a century and several tenant bankruptcies intervened before they realized this income.76 Sometimes the monasteries had only themselves to blame. Their original purchases were often imprudent and ill-advised. In Châtellerault, a domaine which the sisters bought for 14,225 livres and hoped to farm out for at least 450 livres, fell far below their expectations. “They were terribly deceived,” wrote their memoirist.77 In Montargis the community accepted a domaine of doubtful quality in lieu of a dowry: “We were in such a hurry to conclude the agreement that we did not give ourselves the time to reflect and to send someone to visit it, as was our custom. The season was not suitable, because it was very cold, and snow covered the ground.” In consequence, “we have since then been very dissatisfied with it.”78 Even where the farms were productive, the nuns often lacked the means to get the produce to market. Cartage could be written into their contracts, but it was expensive. Often, the best that the sisters could hope for was to provide grain, meat, and dairy products for their own needs. For many years, their investments in land, for which they paid heavily in amortissement dues, gave them only meagre returns. Over the whole “long seventeenth century” of agricultural depression, land ownership was a difficult business. The communities had entered into it partly because many dowries and donations involved land, and partly because it seemed the right thing to do. “Having learned of the savings that a monastery could enjoy from the produce of nature, the superior was most anxious that we should buy some métairie according to our small power,” wrote the annalist of Montargis, adding that the convent later came to regret the decision.79 Without the requisite management skills and the right conditions, the nuns were unable to get value for money. Their capital would have been better employed in the money market – at least, until 1720.80 Equally serious was their vulnerability to fraud. Their clausura turned them into absentee landlords. At most, the officers of the house were allowed by the bishop to view their properties before buying. From then on a servant might visit occasionally. Other than that,

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their interests were left in the hands of friends or salaried agents. The annales suggest that friendly help was freely given in the early days but tended to dwindle as communities grew older, more established, and less loved. Thereafter, the nuns depended on agents to know where their money was going, what repairs were really needed, and whether those repairs were faithfully carried out. Of course, these agents could themselves be part of the problem. When the Ursuline monastery of Rouen suffered bankruptcy in 1707, a commission appointed by the archbishop to investigate the matter discovered that the nuns’ agent had been cheating them for twenty years.81 Cloistered nuns were easy targets for dishonesty. At one of the Poitiers monastery’s domaines, the farmer kept seven domestics at the community’s expense; at another, the workers helped themselves freely to the wine; at another, the farmer cut down trees in the woods for his own profit and still fell short on his annual rent.82 The Ursulines in Carcassonne discovered one day that the farmer had simply disappeared, causing a loss to the monastery of 300 livres.83 The only redress, once the damage was done, was to take the matter to court, and this was itself an expensive business. “We couldn’t get anything out of them, no matter how much care and diligence we spent pursuing them. What’s more, we lost the advances that we had been obliged to make,” complained the nuns of Saint-Dizier.84 Legal costs were an ongoing drain on finances. Later, as times grew harder, more and more communities could not even afford them. They were no longer able to protect their interests. These deficiencies were noted and discussed at length by the advisers to the Commission des secours, and it was agreed that cloistered nuns were not in a position to manage their own property: “Because women enclosed in a cloister, incapable of knowing everything, still less of doing everything on their own, are forced to depend for many things on strangers (sometimes lacking in intelligence or attention, and sometimes not too honest), there is danger that the temporal of monasteries will fall, little by little, into great disorder.”85 The solution (since any loosening of the rules of clausura was out of the question) was to subject them more closely to the surveillance of their bishops and directors. From the mid-eighteenth century on, religious women might make no transaction involving more than 1500 livres without the permission of the ordinary. In 1749 their freedom of action was further circumscribed, for they were forbidden by law to acquire land. The Crown made sure that thenceforth they would invest their money in rentes constituted on itself and other public bodies. By then, however, the economic climate had changed, and rural investments, far from being a burden, were beginning to pay off handsomely. As the value of agricultural products rose, so did the wealth of

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the houses that had land and received payments in kind. Thus the Ursulines of Elbeuf, whose ground rents had totalled 1300 livres in 1729, were before the end of the Old Regime enjoying 11,200 livres.86 In the same period their faraway sisters in Saint-Dizier saw the income from their four farms rise from 379 livres to 1,182 livres.87 Such improvement may be attributed in part to the fact that many communities learned to take better care of their farms; this is certainly evidenced by their account books and journals. But their fundamental handicap, their clausura, remained as confining as it had been in the 1730s. What had changed was the conjoncture, now as favourable to them as it had once been unfavourable.

the problems of the money market Investments in rural property were made largely by monasteries that had one foot in the land – monasteries in small towns.88 Urban communities, on the other hand, tended to put their money into urban property or into the money market. The first property they bought was, naturally, that which they needed to establish their monastery and enclosure. Once this was achieved, and with dowries still coming in, they looked for safe places to put their capital so as to ensure a steady income in the years to come. Their preferred choice was property adjoining or close to their own houses – under their eye, so to speak, and therefore easier to manage. These buildings might serve some day to enlarge the monastery; in the meantime, they were renovated as necessary and rented out to householders and shopkeepers. The disadvantage of this rental property was revealed in 1689: like land, it was subject to amortissement dues. The other course open to communities, and the one which they most frequently chose, was to invest their capital in rentes constituées. These were loans, in the thinnest of disguises. In return for a fixed payment per annum, a lump sum was “sold” to the borrower. The transaction was notarized and therefore backed by the law. A rente constituée, like any other property, could be passed from one party to the next, by purchase or gift – or, in a monastery’s case, by dowry. Its chief advantage was its flexibility. Any large influx of capital – a dowry or several dowries – could quickly be put to making money. On the other hand, any large expenditure – a new building project, for instance – could be met by reversing the procedure and constituting a rente on the community itself. It was not difficult, when the occasion required, to turn from lending to borrowing. By moving money about in such ways, religious communities were often important actors in their local economies.89 Initially, most of their rentes were constituted on individuals; in other words, most money was

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lent out privately. But as time went on, more and more of the monasteries’ capital was placed on public bodies such as local municipal corporations, the Clergy, the provincial États, or the Hôtel de Ville of Paris (the Crown by another name). Finally, in 1749, the government barred religious houses from lending to private parties, and from then on all new money was invested in public bodies. However, until the end of the Old Regime, the records of many convents continued to show a welter of private loans made in the distant past and paying (or often, no longer paying) dividends every year. Because the great bulk of their collective wealth was invested in this way, the fortunes of the new religious houses (those established after 1600) were closely dependent on the money market. It was this dependency, rather than their investments in land and buildings, that caused their gravest troubles. Amortissement, argues one historian, would have been supportable had it not been for “the accumulation of public calamities that came upon them, blow by blow: the variations in the value of money, the visa, the Law bankruptcy, the reduction of rentes.”90 The exemption from amortissement dues on money investments ended in 1704. The government, having for many years declared such investments off limits to the taxmen, reversed itself. From then on, investors had to pay dues on their rentes – this in spite of the fact that rentes were already bringing in much less than they used to do. During the foundation period, rentes constituées had usually carried a return of 6.5 percent. It was on the basis of this generous rate, which the first nuns probably imagined to be immutable, that monastic economies were designed and rounded out, and dowries and pensions set. However, in the late seventeenth century the money market became increasingly unstable. In 1679 the rate was lowered to 5.5 percent, and it remained there until 1720. Then, with the Law Crash, it dropped briefly to 2.0 percent before rising to 2.5 percent. Five years later it rose again, to 5 percent.91 The monasteries sank into financial difficulties and climbed out of them in more or less the same cadence. The difficulties arising from the diminished returns were compounded by the fact that, more and more often, returns were not forthcoming at all. As the economic depression deepened towards the end of the seventeenth century, borrowers began to default on their payments. Thus began a build-up of uncollectable debts, which would in time be the undoing of many communities.92 The truth was that no matter how well built their houses and no matter how impressive their holdings on paper, the monasteries had little cash to spare. Rarely was there to be found the frivolity and wastefulness which, the Crown later charged, was the cause of their misfortunes. The injustice of this charge can be seen in the history of the

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grand couvent during these critical years. From the start it had earned its reputation as “a house built on prudence.” Its budget was always balanced, its expenses carefully calibrated. It was able to insist on large dowries. It maintained an agent to watch over its business interests – which included the loans it was able to make to other bodies in the capital.93 But in 1678 the Chapter heard something that it had never heard before: the bursar could not pay for the groceries, “since she cannot get anything out of the debtors.” She was authorized to borrow 8000 livres. She was back again for more in 1689, again in 1690, twice in 1692, twice in 1693, once in 1694, and again in 1695, 1698, and 1701. By now the Chapter was thoroughly alarmed. A community that had been building steadily since 1612 was, for the first time, having to borrow just to live. This was all before the shock of 1706, when the poor woman had to announce that the amortissement dues on the convent’s rentes would take up two years’ revenues. And still in the future, at that time, lay the “system” of John Law, with its terrible consequences for the women’s monasteries. If the grand couvent was feeling pain, other smaller houses were experiencing agony. Even before 1720 many of them were selling their real estate and their church treasures, and sending some of their members home to live. Then came “the Revolution of Law,” as they would later refer to it. As has already been said, John Law’s original scheme was intended to enrich the whole country, even the rentiers. This was the thinking at the top. The nuns in their cloisters, scattered far and wide across the country, were of course not to know any of this. All they knew was that they were ordered to transact no new business in cash beyond a certain level and to constitute no new rentes. Their specie, with the rest of their gold and silver, was to be carried to the Treasury, and their rentes on the government were to be removed from them, with the assurance that they would be reimbursed in billets, which they could immediately place on the Mississippi Company at an advantageous rate of interest.94 This must all have caused them anxiety, in view of their recent experiences and their natural distrust of government which, if their own writings are to be believed, was as great as that of the rest of the population. As it turned out, their distrust was justified. The reimbursement was so slow in coming that in most cases they were too late to buy into the Mississippi Company. The question which then faced them was: What should they do with all this paper money? The right thing to do was to place it immediately by paying off debts, buying in provisions, or purchasing property; this was what some welladvised houses managed to do. An Ursuline community in Aix at once reinvested as many of its billets as possible, as did the grand couvent in

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Paris.95 The Ursulines of Montbrison, quick off the mark, bought a domaine on 9 July 1720 for 9150 livres, of which 8000 livres were in billets.96 But the majority of houses were not so wise or so well served. The traces of one such house’s travails survive in the archives. They begin with a letter, dated 4 September 1720, to the superior of NotreDame in Alençon from a friend in Paris: I wish that my powers equalled my inclinations in the matter of your billets de banque. I would then handle them in a way which would please you; but unfortunately I find myself, like you, in the same difficulty and the same evil predicament … In all good faith I gave up my small bills and my money, but can get nothing back just now except heavy losses, because of the ill usage and the frightful usury that is being practised – and allowed – at present … Imagine, Madame, the bad situation in which people find themselves, here and in the provinces, especially those who are not used to these practices.

There follows an official letter, dated 13 May 1721: M. de Mahault, notary at Paris, charged with placing your billets de banque in a rente on the Hôtel de Ville, told me yesterday that your contract has not yet been expedited by the provost and aldermen, and that you need to make a declaration for your community before the intendant … that on 7 October 1720 you placed in Sieur Mahault’s hands … 45,000 livres in billets de banque, to be placed on the Hôtel de Ville … on behalf of your community, this money coming from a number of reimbursements that were made to you … these rentes having previously constituted the income of the community.97

What happened subsequently is not clear; perhaps, like many others, the nuns simply took the paper money back and put it into their coffers, to wait for a better day that never came. What is known is that the community of Alençon remained drastically poor until the Revolution.98 Mention has been made of reimbursements. The billets de banque continued to be the only legal tender long after their fate was becoming evident. Private debtors, their hands full of paper money that promised soon to be valueless, hastened to use it to pay off their debts. A stampede of reimbursements took place. The result appears in many monastic account books: extraordinary number of receipts, as many as ten times the normal amount, during 1720.99 If the monasteries attempted to refuse the billets, they could be constrained by the law. The reimbursers were every type of debtor: public institutions (in the case of Alençon, the Clergy), nobles, businessmen, friends – even the nuns’ own fathers, who hastened to make up their daughters’ dowries in

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soon-to-be-worthless paper. The convents themselves tried their hands at reimbursing but, on the whole, lost more than they gained. It was a golden opportunity for debtors, but a disaster for lenders. The only way to avoid full repayment was to offer the borrower a reduction in interest rates. Thus, the private lending rate followed the official rate downwards, to 2.5 percent. “The diminution of the regular charges made to debtors can be evaluated in a very general way at 50 percent,” writes the historian of the bankruptcy.100 The loss to the lenders can be pegged at exactly the same level. This was the situation when the bankruptcy finally became official at the end of 1720. One last shock lay in store for the lenders of France: the Visa. The government, faced with some half-million claimants brandishing 2,452.6 million livres’ worth of paper money and shares in the Mississippi Company, in 1721 set up a body to verify the claims and refund those that it acknowledged. By 1724, when the Visa’s work was finished, the government’s debt had been reduced to 1,1936.5 million livres.101 The government’s gain was, of course, its creditors’ loss.102 For communities that depended heavily on rentes, this reduction of their capital and its reinvestment at the now standard 2.5 percent was the hardest blow yet. The Ursuline house at Argenteuil, which had previously received 6419 livres per annum from its rentes, now had to do with 412 livres; the house at l’Ile-Bouchard found its revenues reduced from 4957 livres to 500 livres.103 The list could go on and on. The reversal of fortune could not have been more dramatic. “In less than a year,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “in spite of all our precautions, we lost half our rentes.”104 Some historians have suspected that in their efforts to secure assistance the nuns “outrageously” exaggerated their distress.105 It is true that, in the best tradition of citizens of the Old Regime, they treated the truth somewhat cavalierly when dealing with the fiscal authorities. But they were expected to do that,106 and indeed this is why the authorities, in a second round of inquiries, called upon intendants and bishops to verify their complaints. While these men found many errors and some exaggerations, they did confirm the communities’ situation on the whole; over and over again, they found women “in the greatest need,” living on the charity of families and friends, even begging their bread from door to door.107 In many cases, the free schools had to close because the nuns, in order to put food on the table, were sewing for dear life and could not afford the time and effort to teach. Community solidarity was threatened as private assistance from families allowed some sisters to eat while others starved. Community discipline broke down. Without the bond of the Rule, some monasteries were in

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danger of becoming mere group homes, whose residents shared little more than their anxiety and distress. The internal evidence of serious damage is everywhere in the monastic records. We find registers suddenly neglected, deaths no longer entered, entries simply not being made; bills left unpaid and account books hopelessly confused, the penmanship sloppy and hurried. A document from a Grenoble monastery locates the crisis perfectly. In its register of professions a space was set apart to record the community’s annual renewal of its solemn vows. The practice had been meticulously observed, and every year from 1654 onwards the professed nuns had, one by one, entered their signatures to this effect. Then, in 1727, the practice ceased. In 1732 it was resumed, “to conform to traditional usage,” according to a note in the margin.108 In later decades the sisters wrote feelingly about the experience. In their private correspondence, their death notices, and their annales they frequently alluded to what was, for them, a traumatic event. With no axe to grind, no official to impress, and therefore no reason to exaggerate, they spoke with feeling about “the revolution of 1720.” Years after the event one annalist recalled: “Everyone was emboldened to insult us. In one day we received three summonses, one for fifty livres, the price of a pig; another for ten écus owing to a grocer; another from the butcher for several weeks’ worth of meat … Our impoverishment became public knowledge; families refused to entrust us with their children … The novitiate was empty.”109 The Law Crash and the years immediately following it were arguably the rock-bottom of female monastic fortunes under the Old Regime. For many monasteries, however, another misery was about to fall upon them, for they became involved in “the Jansenist quarrel.”

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3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

My soul finds peace and assurance in obedience and regularity … It is there that I meet God without fear of being deceived. Gabrielle Rubens1

This was a sentiment often repeated in the writings and sayings of religious women. It expressed their longing for security, a security which, they were confident, would come with conformity to the will of God. This conformity would be achieved by (1) obedience, by which was meant submission to authority – an authority invested, first and foremost, in the bishop – and (2) regularity, by which was meant the faithful observance of the Rule. For thousands of nuns there was never a conflict. However, there were moments and situations in which obedience and regularity came into jarring collision for some women. The following two chapters interrupt the discussion of the material fortunes of religious women in order to address the question of their involvement in the Jansenist quarrel. This quarrel came to a head during the years 1730–55 – the same years when convents were feeling the worst pinch of poverty and when the Commission des secours was most actively intervening in their lives. The quarrel affected communities only in some parts of the country, but their defiance of authority, by its stubborn intensity, challenged the conventional wisdom about the natural gentleness and tractability of their kind. Was it something peculiar to Jansenism that fired up their blood? Or was it something in community life that made them obstinate in the pursuit of what they thought was right? To establish a context, we should go back to the beginning and examine the relationship of religious women to their two sources of authority: their bishops and their Rule. “The strengthening of the episcopate in every respect, as the nodal point of every aspect of reform, may be regarded as the corner-stone of

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the counter-reformation Church.” So said Henry Outram Evenett in a famous set of lectures published posthumously in the 1960s.2 He went on to remark that although traditionally the Jesuits are seen as the maids-of-all-work of the Counter-Reformation, it was in fact the bishops who had everything thrust upon them: the total care of their dioceses, spiritual, temporal, and charitable. Included in the massive list of their responsibilities was the supervision of the regulars* who lived within their diocesan boundaries. This, he pointed out, flew in the face of long-established practice; and the regulars, who were used to shouldering much of the responsibility for the care of souls, were loath to accept the new order of things. As a result, one aspect of reform, in France at least, was a long-running battle to establish new lines of authority. The bishops knew that the implementation of reform depended on their ability to take control of a fairly turbulent church and to harness the multitude of competing authorities.3 The religious orders, on the other hand, might be forgiven for pointing to their past devotion to the pastoral care of the faithful throughout the years when the secular clergy had been unable or unwilling to do the work.4 And in any case, they might add, they had exemptions from episcopal control, and these exemptions came straight from Rome. Neither Rome nor the bishops cared to attack the orders’ exemptions head-on. But wherever authority was not specifically delegated elsewhere, it now passed into the hands of local hierarchies. One of the powers which the Council of Trent handed to the bishops was superiority over all non-exempt female monasteries – which, in fact, meant the majority of monasteries founded after 1600. The bishops were commanded to restore and safeguard clausura, to ensure the religious practice of nuns, to examine all candidates for profession as to their age and motives, and to preside over the election of superiors.5 Implicit in these very specific prescriptions was a general understanding that the bishops, though they themselves were in large majority members of the secular clergy, were to become the ultimate arbiters of female religious life. The subjection of the female communities was essential, if only as a stage in the more difficult process of gaining ascendancy over the male religious orders. “What we have to desire is power, not over the nuns, but over the regulars, who, taking advantage of their privileges, often challenge and disrupt hierarchical authority,” wrote Bishop Zamet of Langres in 1627. The problem with nuns, he contended, was that they were under the influence of the men with whom they had contact, their confessors and directors; if these men chose to, they could incite the women to disobedience – even to the point of trying to shut their bishops out altogether, “as has happened here in several places.”6

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Zamet, along with other reforming bishops, felt that it was essential for good order that both men and women be kept in line. Consequently, all new communities of nuns – except those with affiliation to older religious orders – faced the same conditions from the outset: “that they place themselves under the perpetual charge, visit, correction, government and entire obedience” of the ordinaries. They were shaped from the start in postures of submission to and dependence on their bishops. Every religious rule stated this clearly and unequivocally. Most nuns must have been heartily grateful for this, if for no other reason than that their early years in community were fraught with difficulties and often enough the bishops’ protection made the difference between survival and collapse. We can see this protection at work in many different instances. Philibert de Brichanteau of Laon supported his protégées, the sisters of the Congrégation, with both money and political influence during the long struggle to have them accepted into the city: “The bishop lodged the religious in his house of Petit-Vincent 9 years and 3 months. He paid all the expenses of establishment, of securing letters patent and of confirmation by Parlement, and has put out more than 5000 écus, not counting other charities made since.”7 Cardinal de Sourdis, when he learned that certain notables in Bordeaux were criticizing “his” Ursulines, issued a fiery pastoral letter in their defence, threatening sanctions against anyone who spoke against them.8 An archbishop and a bishop accompanied the sisters of the Congrégation into Provins in order to prevent the local opposition from turning them away.9 When plague struck in the 1620s and 1630s, it was often the bishops who offered their country residences as refuges for the nuns. After the destruction of their property during the Fronde, the Filles de NotreDame of Sarlat found a champion in their bishop, who was the uncle of their superior: “He took care to put their funds in security and he gave them one of his châteaux to live in while they were building; so that, with this support, they turned a house ruined by fire and war into one of the finest that their company can boast.”10 There are many such recollections in the surviving literature, and we may take it that these represent many others that have gone into oblivion. The bishops’ help was often needed. In the 1630s and 1640s most nuns and therefore most communities were very young, for the sudden expansion in the female monastic population that took place in the first decades of the seventeenth century was largely fuelled by an influx of girls and young women. In the Ursuline monastery of Rouen, for example, the average age of the community in 1630 was twenty-five, and fifteen of the forty-eight professed choir nuns were still teenagers.11 In

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1632 nineteen of the forty professed choir nuns in Aix were twenty years old or younger.12 At about the same time, the Ursulines in the new house in Blois ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-five.13 How could it have been otherwise, given the newness of the foundations? The monastery that Marie Guyart entered in Tours in 1631 was only nine years old, but it had already professed some thirty nuns and was holding in its novitiate twenty-eight more, all of whom, except Marie, were sixteen years or under.14 This meant that within two years, the majority of the professed members of this community would be under twenty. This was not unusual. All across France the new monasteries were full of young women who had more zeal than experience and were dangerously liable to make mistakes. Consequently, there often developed a paternal-filial relationship between prelates and nuns. Bishop Le Porc of Saint-Brieuc watched over the nascent Ursuline community in his city with fatherly solicitude: “He knew the name and family of all the nuns and took interest in all their relatives … During the building, His Grandeur often came to see the builders … From his palace, he noted if the bell rang exactly on time.”15 When the Ursulines of Montargis – most of them still in their twenties – were faced with the prospect of running their community without help from the mother house in Paris, it was their archbishop who calmed them, promising the new superior that all would go well in spite of her immaturity: “The Lord Archbishop … said to her in front of all the assembly that he gave her from his own years all that lacked in hers.”16 In Mâcon in 1627, when the handful of adolescents who constituted the community lost their superior, the bishop promised “that he would be a faithful father to them – and indeed, even a mother – while they were without,” and he was true to his promise.17 In circumstances like these, affection and dependency tightened the bonds of obedience. In any case, the structure of female monastic life ensured that the women, even after they were mature, would continue to need outside help. Their monasteries were constructed in virtual isolation from each other; there were no normal avenues for interchange of personnel and ideas, few ways in which they could assist each other in times of difficulty. During the formative years, various plans had been set out to avoid this atomization. Both the Compagnie de Notre-Dame in Bordeaux and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Lorraine had begun with plans for a generalate, in which all communities would be subject to a mother house and a superior general, who would have the power to intervene when needed and to move nuns between houses.18 A number of prominent Ursulines tried for years to establish a union between houses. Several bishops tried to construct something of the

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same type on a diocesan scale, with themselves in charge. But all these plans foundered on the rocks of tradition and local particularism. During the very time when male monastic communities were joining together in larger organizations, female monastic communities were left in their own isolation. From their foundation until their end in the French Revolution, they lived very much within the closed circles of their own cloisters.19 This isolation did not necessarily lead to trouble. Many women’s communities maintained a model life of harmony and regularity, and were commended for this by their bishops. But it did make the women more dependent on outside help. Even the larger houses could experience difficulties. In the monastery of Notre-Dame in Bordeaux in 1645, less than thirty years after its foundation, the canonical visitor* was surprised to find that many of the nuns owned personal possessions, that the refectory was the scene of noisy gossip, and that strangers were entering the cloister without permission.20 For smaller or more inaccessible houses, the problems could become malignant. In Libourne in 1642, two factions fought for control of the Ursuline house; peace was restored only when a commissioner from the bishop removed one of the factions by force.21 Some twenty-five years later, in Bourg at the mouth of the Gironde, the little Ursuline community found itself terrorized by one of its members, Jeanne Peychaud. Shortly after her profession, she began “to reveal her evil nature”; when her scheme to get the position of sacristan (and with it the key to the outside church) was thwarted, she became enraged and forced the rightful sacristan to give her the keys. “We realized she was with child in the month of December 1667,” her superior wrote later, naming as father the Mass priest, a certain Sieur de Cosso. After trying unsuccessfully to abort the child, Jeanne changed into secular clothes and went off to Bordeaux for the birth, then bullied her way back into the house! Her bad behaviour continued. She went on writing to Sieur de Cosso; she attacked a pensionnaire and a lay sister, threatened the superior with her fist, and again stole the keys to the sacristy. Only then was the archbishop of Bordeaux informed and the offending woman carried off to prison in a Bordeaux monastery.22 Clearly, given the small size of the community and the weakness of its superior, a case like this required the application of force majeure. An even more bizarre case began to unfold in the Ursuline house of Saint-Remy in 1685. A recently professed nun, Simone Cullevier, who claimed to have the power to deliver souls from purgatory, was elected superior. Then began a reign of terror in the monastery rivalling the abuses that are sometimes seen in twentieth-century cults. “She went for more than twenty-four years without assisting at a single community

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act, or at any offices, saying that the Blessed Virgin took pleasure in seeing her enjoying herself,” and this in the daily company of the provost of the Collegial of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues, her too-close friend and supporter. Under her the nuns were subjected to a harsh new Rule, and those who resisted were beaten and even imprisoned. In the absence of any outside intervention (the foremost families of the town being favourable to Simone) this tyranny lasted until 1708, when the archbishop of Avignon arrived, assessed the situation, and finally took steps to have the woman removed.23 In all such cases, communities simply lacked the ability to right themselves. Once the authority structure of the community broke down or fell into the wrong hands, there was nothing that could be done except call in outside help. Every now and then in the diocesan records we come across a pathetic letter from some distressed nun, alleging dysfunction in her community and appealing for intervention. We find numerous mentions of troublemakers being removed or “foreign” superiors being brought in to re-establish monastic regularity. The problems did not have to be egregious. Sometimes communities were simply divided over interpretations of lifestyle. In Châtellerault in 1649, not long after foundation, the nuns fell to arguing over which version of their Rule was the authentic and legitimate one. The conflict became heated, and the bishop of Poitiers was forced to appoint a referee.24 In all such cases, which in exempt orders would have been handled by a superior general, remedial action depended on the bishops or their delegates. It is difficult to see how women’s monasteries could have survived their internal crises without this outside help. Thus, from the very beginning of the seventeenth-century monastic revival, religious women found themselves engaged in a structure of dependence on their bishops, to which they were expected to contribute “a docility marked by simplicity and childlikeness.”25 Not only did their bishops expect this, but society did as well; and so, it appears, did they. In a time when obedience was the cornerstone of all religious virtue, theirs was meant to be the most perfect obedience of all. However, from the start there was a certain ambiguity in this vocation of obedience. It was not that nuns desired freedom or the right to disobey; it was that they were vowed to two obediences – obedience to their bishop, and obedience to their Rule.26 The bishops’ authority over them was written into their papal bulls.* On the other hand, the Fathers of Trent had reiterated the binding obligation on all religious, men and women alike, to follow their monastic rules: “For if those things which constitute the basis and foundation of all regular discipline are not strictly observed, the whole edifice must necessarily fall.”27 Women who were serious about their profession took this obligation

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literally. Their Rule was sacrosanct and was confirmed by Rome. When they received the papal bulls sanctioning their new religious life, they were given to understand that the regimens thereby established were to be observed on pain of serious fault, that no change was allowable, even in small details. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of its vows, rules and constitutions,” they were told.28 It was customary for new superiors, upon election, to vow never to make any changes whatsoever to the Rule: “Just as the instrument should do nothing of its own initiative but work according to the intention of him who wields it, so ought the superior to watch over the convent according to the ideas and intentions of the Lord, as expressed in the constitutions and regulations – the unique means by which God intends all to arrive at holiness.”29 This belief in the immutability of the Rule was built into the religious mentality. To follow the Rule was to follow it to the letter, for, as the foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, Jeanne de Lestonnac, put it, “there is nothing small in religious life.”30 It was logical for the nuns to believe that this observance was incumbent even on their bishops: “Authority is given in order to make the law respected.”31 This refrain was being voiced by nuns from the earliest days. In fact, we have a black-and-white illustration of it in the first draft of the Rule of the Ursuline community of Présentation NotreDame, in Avignon, which stated that it was up to the bishop to ensure the observation of the rules, “without power to innovate, change or abolish [anything in] the statutes and constitutions.” The manuscript is still held in the departmental archives of Vaucluse, and in it still appears this phrase, struck out – the only correction made to the entire Rule.32 The original phrase suggests an inspiration from a member of one of the masculine religious orders whose influence over the nuns was pervasive. The striking out suggests that it contained implications of what seemed, to the ecclesiastical authorities, an unacceptable independence. For most communities, we may assume, this conflict of obediences was never an issue. Only when the authority of the Rule collided with that of the bishop was the contentiousness of the situation revealed. A flurry of such collisions occurred initially, during the years when the authorities were committing communities to clausura. In some women’s minds this new obligation contravened the spirit of their institut, the apostolic work to which they had dedicated themselves.33 In most cases they simply left their houses quietly. But in others, community structures had to be altered and superiors and officers forcibly removed before the nuns accepted enclosure. There were even some appels comme d’abus,* as in Aix in 1632.34 In these early days, however, Parlement seemed deaf to the complaints of religious women and did nothing to

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support their claims. “Henceforth the cloister was victorious,” writes the historian of the Ursulines of Provence.35 What is true for Provence is true for the rest of France. The cloister closed over the heads of religious women with barely a ripple to mark what had gone. Bishops also intervened in community life when they saw a risk to orthodoxy. In 1660 Archbishop Harlay, concerned over rumours of Jansenism among the Ursulines of Rouen, bypassed established procedure and himself named the officers of the monastery. The nuns were shocked by this attack on their right of election. “We were more dead than alive,” wrote the secretary of the Chapter.36 But they obeyed. With reliable women installed in all the positions of power, the community soon lost its Jansenist tinge. But more often than not, conflicts arose for less weighty reasons, such as incompatibility between the bishops’ interpretation of their powers and the nuns’ interpretation of their rights. In the diocese of Langres, in 1619, the Ursulines of one house (Dijon) received a papal bull elevating their community into a monastery. The terms of the bull were later extended to the other houses of the diocese. This gave Bishop Zamet of Langres the idea of creating a diocesan union of Ursuline houses, all under his immediate control.37 The project had precedents: the union of Ursuline houses of the archdiocese of Bordeaux under Cardinal de Sourdis; and, even more authoritatively, the “congregation” of all the Ursulines in the diocese of Milan under the saintly Archbishop Borromeo. But such a union contradicted the papal bull.38 A General Chapter of the superiors involved rejected the plan as contrary to their Rule, but Zamet overrode their objections and proceeded in 1623 to install a provincial superior at Dijon. To achieve this he had to force the current superior of Dijon not to accept a second term.39 When she refused to step down, he armed himself with letters from Parlement enforcing his authority, then went to the monastery, transferred the keys, and had the protesting woman carried away. When the community resisted this act of force, they were excommunicated and deprived of the sacraments.40 They were not vanquished, however: in the elections of the following year, they chose one of their own, an assistant to the exiled superior. Then, in May 1624, they obtained a papal brief confirming their existing statutes. Zamet accepted the papacy’s decision, but he was only biding his time. In 1637 he called together the superiors of all the houses founded from Dijon and presented them with constitutions designed to create a centralized province. This time the superiors did not argue; they simply allowed the constitutions to remain a dead letter. This kind of respectful noncompliance was a powerful weapon in the nuns’ armory.

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The Ursulines in Zamet’s own episcopal city of Langres were equally unresponsive to his plans for union. To overcome their objections, he procured a ruling in his favour from a group of doctors from the Sorbonne. When the sisters continued to resist, he showed what mutinous nuns might expect. He put them in spiritual quarantine, forbidding his clergy to have any further dealings with them until he gave permission. To their pleas that they be allowed to keep their confessor, he answered sarcastically that “they were so good that when they died without the sacraments, they would still be in a state of grace.” The sudden illness of a novice while he was out of town created a crisis, because no priest dared give her the last sacraments. The community’s request for a confessor fell on deaf ears. With the bishop away, the grand vicar refused even to hear the case. The girl was removed to her relatives’ home, where she was able to die fortified by the sacraments. In June the Chapter remonstrated against the grand vicar’s “overly stern refusal.” He retorted that the novice’s sickness had only been a pretext for the community’s disobedience, that the nuns’ open defiance was causing scandal, that until the Holy See ruled otherwise they were bound by the opinion of the doctors of the Sorbonne (to which, he pointed out, those persons advising them ought also to submit), and that he wanted nothing further to do with them.41 The quarrel was resolved two months later when a bull arrived from Rome confirming the women in their existing Rule. The papal confirmation solidified certain important rights for the nuns. In future, all professions were to be made “between the hands of the superior, while observing the form laid down by the Council of Trent” (no mention being made of the bishop). The administration of the monastery’s property was to be the responsibility of the superior, with the advice of her Chapter, an accounting being made annually to the bishop or his appointee. The director, or canonical superior, of the convent was to be chosen by the superior and Chapter, and could be dismissed by them, with the approval of the bishop.42 Zamet accepted the ruling, though with as little publicity as possible. The sisters of the Congrégation faced the same dilemma of obedience. Their founder, Pierre Fourier, had originally hoped that they would have a central direction to manage their affairs, much like that of the masculine congregations. When this project was quashed by Rome, he had to accept the fact that their houses would remain autonomous and under diocesan control.43 But he alerted them early to the difficulties that awaited them: “The Lord Bishops are powerful, and learned, and prudent and holy in their lives, and in possession of your persons where spiritual jurisdiction is concerned, and of your

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monasteries.”44 He foresaw, quite correctly, that these bishops would interfere with the constitutions that he had drawn up. And over the years, he faulted the bishops, one by one – Sens, Laon, Châlons, Metz, Troyes – and counselled the sisters to resist such interference, even at the risk of excommunication.45 The earliest interferences concerned the form that religious vows should take. Fourier had developed, and Rome had approved, a formula by which the professing nun vowed obedience to her superior. A number of bishops changed this so that the obedience would be directed to themselves. This incensed Fourier: “It is the superior of the woman’s monastery who should admit [candidates] to profession … without the bishop having a hand in it.”46 He threatened to cut off nuns from the congregation if they gave in.47 The problem continued to surface, here and there, for a long time, and it was settled in different ways, according to the determination of the bishop and the situation of the community. Thus, in 1686 we see a new bishop of Poitiers visiting the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault and promptly changing the order of profession: “He wanted the novice to make her profession between his hands and to him, and not to the superior as others had done since the start of the monastery.” But since Châtellerault was some distance from Poitiers and the bishop visited rarely, the nuns waited a while and then returned to their old ways.48 In many other houses, however, the order of profession that made the bishop the recipient of the nuns’ vows, and even excluded the superior altogether, became fixed and remained so throughout the Old Regime. Another right which communities guarded jealously was the right to choose their own members. They did this through their Chapter, which was a sort of senate made up of the senior nuns, or vocales. The process of admitting new members was governed by precise rules. After discussion of the applicant’s case, each member of the Chapter was given a white and a black bean, and she cast into the box whichever she felt appropriate. Applicants who did not receive a plurality of white beans were asked to leave. Every now and then, a bishop would attempt to force some protégée on a community. It was not unheard-of for the Chapter to resist his efforts. In Châtellerault in 1660, when the bishop came personally to promote a young postulant’s candidacy, the nuns turned him down flat.49 In Le Mans a century later, a similar response led the Ursulines into a fierce wrangle with the grand vicar, which cost them the sacraments for several months.50 The most important right that religious women were given by the Council of Trent was the right to elect their own superiors. The prescriptions for free and secret elections, conducted at regular intervals, was spelled out: “That all things may be done properly and without

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fraud in the election of superiors … the holy council above all things strictly commands that all the aforesaid must be chosen by secret ballot.”51 But there was a loophole: the council had also made provision for the appointment of a superior in circumstances where no qualified person could be found.52 Thus, a right which initially appeared inviolable became capable of modification, and it was not long before modifications were taking place. We can see it in the procès verbal of the assembly of notables of Alençon granting the Filles de Notre-Dame admittance to their city, in which it was stipulated that the superior was to be elected every three years, “or at such time as it pleases Monseigneur the Bishop of Sées to order.”53 Archbishop de Sourdis of Bordeaux, after approving a rule drawn up for his Ursulines which stipulated triennial elections, straightway allowed it to be contravened by keeping the same superior in place for more than twenty years. When finally, in 1645, half the community protested against what they saw as “prejudice to their rules and to the law,” their mutiny was punished severely.54 The France of Richelieu had no time for rebellious behaviour in religious women. The same disregard for the Rule was shown in Reims in 1650, when an uncanonical election was allowed to stand, despite the upset it caused to the community; and in 1659 in Angoulême, when a superior named by the bishop but rejected by the community was finally installed.55 In 1663 the Ursulines of Carcassonne were equally unsuccessful in challenging episcopal authority. According to their complaint, Bishop Nogaret de La Vallette had presided over an uncanonical election. The appel comme d’abus which the nuns then made to the Parlement of Toulouse brought down on them the wrath of both episcopal and civil authorities. Their community was pronounced to be “a school of disobedience” that was trying to throw off the submission it owed to the bishop. It is interesting to note that their opponents challenged them to bring out their original titles, which, they argued, “subjected them formally to the authority of the bishop,” and that the nuns refused because they knew this to be true.56 After two years of legal battle, the election was confirmed.57 On the other hand, the Ursulines of Nantes were successful with their appel comme d’abus, which they brought in 1656 against their bishop’s effort to install his own candidate as superior. “We wish to live and die in obedience to our rules, bull and apostolic constitutions,” they wrote, and the bishop’s candidate never took office.58 The Ursulines of Sens in 1666 and the sisters of the Congrégation of Provins several years later spoke much the same language when they criticized Archbishop Gondrin’s effort to manage their elections, “because of the right which the constitutions give us to elect our superiors.”59

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Gondrin’s plans for the monasteries of the Congrégation in his diocese led to other confrontations. In or around 1672 he authorized Alexandre Varet, his grand vicar and a prominent Jansenist, to redesign their constitutions. “There are a great number of deletions and changes to make to these constitutions in order to maintain the bishops in the rights and jurisdiction which they ought to have over these religious,” wrote Varet.60 But this was more easily said than done. The nuns put up a fight. While the superior of Nemours approved the changes, her Chapter rejected them. So did the community of Provins. “The prelate, when he was informed of this, wrote a thunderous letter to the superior … Despite all his efforts and his threats, he did not succeed in putting this famous Rule into force,” commented the annalist of the Provins house.61 The contest of wills ended only with the death of Gondrin, and Varet. These combats have attracted little attention from historians, probably because the scale on which they were conducted was so small and the women who conducted them were so uninfluential. Indeed, it is argued that the concept of “rights” did not even take hold inside women’s monasteries until Parlement put it there, somewhat mischievously, in the eighteenth century. But in fact religious women had always had an independent streak. If seventeenth-century nuns were tamer than their medieval predecessors (who sometimes resorted to physical force), it was partly because they had learned to appeal to the law. Not for nothing, as one of their historians has observed, were so many of them the daughters and sisters of men in the legal profession.62 Thanks to their knowledge of legal procedure – and, almost certainly, to the advice of their families and friends – they knew when to call in notaries and when and how to appeal to the courts or to higher authorities. The confiscation of their archives during the Revolution, which put their private dealings into the public record, has allowed us a glimpse of their habits of litigation. Collectively, these make a bulging dossier in which there appear a certain number of remonstrances and appeals against ordinaries and directors. An epic battle broke out in 1643 between the Ursulines of Périgueux and their bishop, François de La Béraudière.63 It seems that the founder of the new community, the baron de la Tour, had not lived up to the financial terms of foundation. The bishop turned on the nuns, demanding that they pay 5000 livres within three months. When the deadline expired without payment, he deprived them of the sacraments, then threatened to go himself to throw them out of their house. At this, their agent protested: “Monseigneur, your power is great, but it does not extend that far. The Ursulines are in their own home, and you will perhaps encounter some difficulties in throwing them out.” To this

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La Béraudière responded: “Well! that is to be seen. We shall find out who is the master.” When the nuns could make no headway with the bishop, they appealed past him to his metropolitan, Archbishop Henri de Sourdis of Bordeaux. The archbishop took their part and ordered an end to the excommunication. But since relations were bad between him and La Béraudière, this only made the bishop angrier. “All we had were words of thunder and lightning pronounced against us,” wrote one of the nuns. “He swore to exterminate us, to crush us … He would surely make us pay sooner or later.” Given the reality of the situation – that he was nearby and the archbishop far off – the nuns had gained nothing. His clergy, though privately sympathetic, feared him enough to stay away. The Ursulines prevailed in the end, but only because the bishop died. This was probably an exceptional case. For the most part, it seems, the newly founded convents behaved as their bishops wanted them to, and the bishops did not intrude too far into the charmed circle of the Rule. We see this mutual forbearance at work in Quebec, after Bishop Laval decided quite suddenly to modify the constitutions of the Ursuline monastery to the point where, in the sisters’ opinion, they became “more suitable for Carmelites … than for Ursulines.” The nuns were most unhappy, as their superior, Marie Guyart, wrote: The matter has already been thrashed out and our minds made up. We shall not accept unless commanded by virtue of holy obedience. Nevertheless, we do not mention it so as not to aggravate the situation … I attribute it all to the zeal of this worthy bishop, but as you know, dearest Mother, in matters of rule, experience should prevail over theory. When things are going smoothly, we should leave well enough alone, because we are sure all is well; but if we change, we cannot be certain whether things will turn out well or not.64

As it turned out, Laval did not pursue his project, and the nuns’ vow of obedience was not put to the test. Each party remained, so to speak, on its own side of a fine line, and no damage was done. A similar standoff with an equally happy ending occurred in Reims in 1684. According to the annalist of Notre-Dame, the community was faced with a newly appointed director who greatly exceeded his authority. “He [gave out] a number of rulings, which by their novelty alarmed the community, all the more so because he promised that there were more to come; and he wanted us to sign the first. But we refused steadfastly to do so, on the grounds that this was not our usage, and that we absolutely did not wish to agree to observe them.” The community’s distress was so profound and so vocal that it reached the archbishop’s ears, and he appointed another, more congenial director.

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“The pleasant surprise that we felt was so great that for a moment we forgot the respect that we owed him, clapping our hands and making a thousand joyful acclamations.”65 But in cases where the fine line was crossed and positions hardened, two principles were generally applicable: first, that an overt breach of obedience by religious women, however justified, was construed as an intolerable affront to the order of things; second, that when such a breach occurred, even in small matters, the practice of excommunicating an entire community was not considered too extreme. This remained true throughout the Old Regime, as the following examples show. In 1730 the bishop of Tréguier ordered the Ursulines of Guincamp not to admit pensionnaires over the age of sixteen. This was consistent with the earliest practice of the community, which kept most older women out of the cloister for most of the time.66 But since these older pensionnaires now provided the house with a large part of its revenue, the nuns were understandably upset and made the mistake of appealing past the bishop to Cardinal de Fleury. The penalty for their action was suspension of all the sacraments for three months.67 In 1739 the archbishop of Aix issued an ordinance laying down certain general rules for all women’s houses in his diocese. One article in the ordinance concerned the design of the grilles in monastic parlours: the archbishop wanted them narrower, to prevent the passing of notes. An Ursuline community in Aix, pointing to its unbroken record of good behaviour, protested that the change would suggest past deficiency “through the malicious interpretations of which it appeared to us to be susceptible.” The nuns made a further argument: for “our right not to be subjected to laws that we had not embraced.” The archbishop responded by forbidding his priests to confess them until the new grilles were installed. The women dug in: “We refused to confess under these conditions … [But] the storm was too strong and our consciences too alarmed by the loss of the sacraments. We finally gave in, without obligation for the future. The bars were installed on the 17 of March 1740.”68 To twentieth-century minds this whole affair seems extraordinarily petty. The community’s reaction to the ordinance seems out of proportion, the archbishop’s response even more so. But we have to consider, on the one hand, the nuns’ ingrained adherence to the letter of their Rule and their suspicion of anything new; and on the other, the sensitivity of the archbishop to anything that was seen to diminish his authority. Neither side believed that obedience could be compromised; their difference lay in how they defined that obedience.

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These incidents must be placed in context. The three congregations with which we are concerned counted close to five hundred monasteries in Old Regime France, and there is no evidence that conflicts such as those described above occurred frequently. After the early spate of problems triggered by the vexed question of enclosure and the efforts of the authorities to impose it, the religious women of France and their bishops seem to have entered a period of harmony. Crises arose here and there as Jansenist thinking began to infiltrate the convents and the authorities sought to enforce orthodoxy, but these cases appear to have been limited. More widely troublesome to the women was the desire of many episcopal authorities to redesign the communities’ rules. At the very least, this meant “novelties,” which the nuns instinctively distrusted; at the worst, there was the danger that communities could be placed in permanent tutelage, without the right to organize their own lives or choose their own superiors. This would have been consistent with Gallican thinking, and it would have given bishops or founders a neat little source of patronage. Here and there in smaller houses, the office of “perpetual superior” did replace the elective office.69 However, in general the situation remained stable. Religious women were deferential to the authorities, and the authorities maintained a benevolent distance, intervening only when outward appearances or inward community difficulties required it. But the ambiguity, the pull of loyalties, remained. In the eighteenth century it surfaced with painful effect as the Jansenist crisis pitted many communities against their lawful superiors.

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4 “Personae Non Gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus

Without the word grace, there is no Christianity. It designates the gift of God, His love offered to men, His presence in their lives and their destiny, and, finally, salvation itself. Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme1

Out of the Christian theology of grace there arises a whole understanding of the relationship of man to God. The word, from the Latin gratia, signifies something freely given, in no way earned or deserved. There is no question of worthiness in the recipient, only of goodness in the giver. Man does not earn merit, still less salvation; he is given these things by the all-powerful God. What, then, is the nature of man? How does he relate to this gift? Is he capable of doing anything to further his own salvation? Has he any free choice in the matter? If the answer is yes, then it follows that human nature has been endowed by God with power enough to will to do good and to work towards its own salvation. This was the conclusion of Pelagius in the fifth century. If the answer is no, then it follows that human nature is so weak that it is incapable in itself of doing the slightest good. It is also incapable of choosing its destiny; this is left to the preordination of God, through the giving or witholding of grace. This was the argument of Augustine, the great antagonist of Pelagius. Although Augustine’s teaching triumphed, Pelagianism never really died. It was brought to new life during the Renaissance, with the elevation of the human spirit and the human will to heights never before known in the Christian centuries. But with the coming of the Reformation, Augustinian theology in turn prevailed, and in an extreme form. In the mind of the reformers, all the efforts of man to save himself were but “works”, good for nothing; the inherent evil in his nature made him fit only for damnation. If he found salvation, it was through no virtue of his own. God saved him or damned him, according to His own inscrutable purpose.

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At the Council of Trent the Catholic Church adopted a middle ground, which affirmed the centrality of grace but insisted on the existence of free will. “The Christian could progress on the way of justification by the constant co-operation of his own will with divine grace.”2 But through the following years, as Catholics lived out their own reformation, this central doctrine came to be shaded in different ways: on the one hand, with a more optimistic vision, in the humanist tradition, of the freedom and dignity of man under God’s grace; on the other, with a new theocentrism, a new sense of the transcendance of God, which brought man and all his pretensions crashing down to the earth and lower than the earth. The Catholic Reformation in early-seventeenth-century France embraced both visions. It saw the apogee of Augustinianism. The great men and women of this “Age of Saints” practised the most rigorous austerity, both in behaviour and in prayer. For them, true religion required denial of the things of this world and a total attachment to those of the next – a self-abnegation without parallel. “May God be magnified, and may His grandeur be nurtured from all that is in me, from the substance of my being! I want no freedom in relation to God, I want to reserve nothing for myself!”3 It was a magnificent prayer, resonant with the aristocratic values of generosity and self-sacrifice. It was a prayer of the elite. The problem was that it was well above the reach of most people. At the same time but in another arena, reformed Catholicism was out to save the world. The great preaching orders, led by the Jesuits and Capuchins, were hammering out an apostolate that aimed at nothing less than the conversion of the total society. The religion these orders preached was inclusive and therefore by necessity not too rigorous: frequent confessions, frequent communions, a certain tolerance of human weakness. Their method involved huge public demonstrations: processions, plays, and theatrical rituals – religion practised by group, which ran counter to the severe individualism of the dévots.4 Whereas, for the Augustinians, the crucified Christ hung with arms only partially extended, as though to save only part of the world, the Christ whom they preached to their mass audiences hung with arms stretched wide. There was contradiction here, and it surfaced before long. The Augustinian tendency in the French Church found its extreme expression in Cornelius Jansen’s work, the Augustinus, published in 1640. This book became the lightning rod for a fatal quarrel. The Jesuits fell on it immediately, and Rome was persuaded to condemn it – or rather, parts of it – in the bull Cum occasione, in 1653. But the effect of the condemnation was uncertain, since the supporters of Jansen insisted that what was being condemned was not what he had taught. The fight

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continued, with both Rome and Paris swinging between tolerance and severity. The equivocation, according to Jean Delumeau, “was heavy with conflict.”5 A hundred years later the Jansenist quarrel was still unresolved, and French men and women on both sides of the fight still believed with all their hearts in the justice and orthodoxy of their own cause. The damage would not have been so great if the quarrel had been contained in the theological arena. But the seventeenth century was a time when religion and politics were intermixed to the point of total fusion, when vicious power struggles were conducted under the cloak of theology, but also when true theological differences led to vicious power struggles. The eighteenth century took its religion more calmly, yet it raised the Jansenist quarrel to unprecedented levels. This was because politics sustained and reinvigorated the old debate. The extreme Augustinians, those who were given the name of Jansenists, were always the minority party, and over the long run they were no match for their opponents. They were generally the sentimental favourites in regions where anti-Jesuit feeling tended to run high: Paris and the Paris basin, the Vexin, Champagne, Lorraine and Normandy, and part of Provence.6 In regions of France where Jesuit influence was strong, Jansenists never gained a foothold. Like the Huguenots of the sixteenth century, they were powerful enough to make an impact but never powerful enough to gain the upper hand. However, they had their own strengths. They enjoyed huge support among certain religious orders. They had friends in high places, including a number of bishops, and they also benefited from the forbearance of many other bishops who preferred a peaceful existence to struggling with such difficult subjects. As time went on, they could count more and more on the sympathy of parlementarians who, as Gallicans, sympathized with anyone who defied the ultramontanism of the Jesuits. And there were numerous other Frenchmen who felt that any enemy of the Jesuits was a friend of theirs. So much did Jansenism identify with anti-Jesuitism that some people thought there was nothing to it beyond that. “Jansenists are [simply] fervent Catholics who don’t like the Jesuits,” wrote Cardinal Bona. But they were much more than that. Jansenism harmonized with the spirituality that had been born of the Catholic Reformation. It was indeed “simply an extreme expression” of this Reformation,7 and as such it struck a deep chord among pious French men and women. Thus, looking at the wrangle as it spilled into the early eighteenth century, we can see a number of features. It was theological; questions of divine grace and human response were still hotly debated. It had powerful moral implications; true Jansenists were not prepared to

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compromise with the world, to sanction dancing, theatre going, and other forms of “laxity.” It was internal, in that both sides claimed communion with the Catholic Church. It was political, in that at a time when church and state were intimately connected, various political institutions had a stake in its outcome. It was uneven, but not sufficiently for it to be finished off easily. In the early 1700s Jansenism seemed to be alive and well and deeply embedded, at least among the religious elites in many major centres. And then in 1713 came Unigenitus. This papal bull, or constitution, has been described as “a political and religious earthquake.”8 It caused upheaval in the religious landscape of France by cutting the ground from under the Augustinians. At the same time it threw the debate into the public domain. It introduced a sort of violence into the French Church which greatly sapped its strength and morale at a time when both were badly needed. It was wrung from the pope by an aging king who had decided that the Jansenist “party” was a threat to the stability of his kingdom. The immediate occasion was the capture of the correspondence of the Jansenist theologian Pasquier Quesnel, which revealed a network of Jansenist sympathizers in Paris and Rome. Louis XIV saw conspiracy, and he imagined that by targeting the individual he could bring down the entire movement. Hence the drive to condemn Quesnel’s work, Moral Reflections on the New Testament. This very limited intervention was seen as a way of “lancing the boil” of heresy.9 However, once underway, the papal bull grew prodigiously. Instead of the anticipated thirty-three propositions, the Roman commission to whom it was entrusted was persuaded by Versailles to condemn a hundred and one, including a number that appeared even to nonJansenists to be perfectly orthodox.10 “The Bull effectively condemned a whole conception of Christianity which was widespread in France,”11 and it did so in the most virulent language. Doctrines that were held by respectable French clergymen to have come straight from Saint Augustine were now declared to be blasphemous and heretical, and the faithful were adjured to stamp them out, by force if necessary.12 In other words, the bull expanded the definition of Jansenism and then called for its ruthless extirpation. Furthermore, Gallicans viewed it as “a pontifical coup d’état.”13 The papacy’s claim to jurisdiction over the French Church was asserted in a way that was bound to offend their sensibilities. Louis had promised Rome that the bull would be received without contest by the French Church, but this did not happen. Religious orders, faculties of theology, the parlements, officers of the Crown – all sorts of people protested, only to draw upon themselves the king’s

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wrath.14 The bishops were profoundly disturbed. A falling-out occurred among them that foreshadowed the serious divisions to come. Some bishops refused to publish the bull as it stood. Later, after Louis’ death, they became the leaders of the appellant movement, which sought to appeal against the bull to a general council of the Church. Others demanded total and immediate submission to the bull in all its particulars. They became known as constitutionnaires – the hawks, if you will, of the eighteenth-century Church. Another group decided that although the bull was bad, disobedience to it would be worse. The future Cardinal de Fleury was one of these; another was the future archbishop of Paris, Charles Gaspard de Vintimille, who called the quarrel over the bull “a stupid, sad affair”15 but was ready to prosecute rebels nonetheless. These three groups spent the next few years struggling to control the agenda, variously assisted by shifts in power in both Paris and Rome. However, with Fleury’s rise to power in 1726 and the submission and death in 1729 of the leader of the appellants, Archbishop de Noailles of Paris, the situation stabilized. “Jansenism became the object of an unremitting repression which fell upon all the strongholds of the party: the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the colleges, the lower clergy, the orders and religious congregations.”16 After Fleury had neutralized the focal points of Jansenism – institutions such as the Sorbonne, and the central councils of the principal religious orders of men – he embarked on a careful stalking operation, “a long campaign of kidnappings, exiles, and imprisonments,”17 to mop up individual Jansenists. His favoured weapon was the lettre de cachet.* It is reckoned that 40,000 lettres de cachet were issued during his seventeen years in power.18 Of these, a sizable share went to Jansenists. But in every case the person targeted – most often a member of the clergy – was first given the choice of accepting the bull and avoiding punishment; if he or she refused, the sentence might still be reversed if he or she later recanted. It was a very personalized form of persecution. Thousands of individual consciences were wrenched from their places of rest as the choice between obedience and conviction fell upon them. Yet even with all the power of the Crown engaged, it took more than forty years to eliminate Jansenism as a force in the Gallican Church. The main reason for this was that France was divided into 130 dioceses, and in each diocese the bishop presided as a virtual autocrat where matters of faith and morals were concerned. Over the years, successions of bishops had fashioned their dioceses according in their own particular image, so that by 1700 some dioceses were solidly proJansenist and others solidly anti-Jansenist.19 In the years after Unigenitus, each bishop acted as the gatekeeper of his own diocese; so intro-

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duction of the bull depended on his cooperation. The division of opinion among bishops now became critical. Some accepted the bull with enthusiasm, some prevaricated and asked for further explanations, while others rejected it outright.20 There was little that anybody could do about this. When a bishop remained defiant, the Crown had learned by experience to wait patiently until death removed the obstacle. Thus, the pro-Jansenist dioceses crumbled only as old Jansenist bishops died and constitutionnaires were named to succeed them. With every such changing of the guard, there was a flight of Jansenist clergy to other, safer places until finally, with the death of Bishop de Caylus of Auxerre in 1754, the last bastion of Jansenism lay open to the action of the Crown.

ja ns én is me au fé m i n i n It was in these circumstances that a number of nuns of Old Regime France had to make painful choices. These women were Jansenist by the new definition, but their Jansenism often had ancient roots. They, their families, and their religious communities were natives of dioceses that had been Augustinian for generations. What other people called Jansenism was, for them, the true Catholicism. With others of the same persuasion, they were ready to cry, “We combat those who would take from us the heritage of our fathers.”21 Many historians of Jansenism have remarked on the loyal support it enjoyed in convents even after it faded from the wider scene.22 This should be no surprise, given the character of life in a religious community. The austere message of Jansenism must have appealed to many religious women. “Salvation has to cost, it has to cost everything,” wrote Quesnel.23 How consoling a thought to women who felt that they had given so much, compared with most other people! It challenged them to stay the course, no matter what or who stood in their way. In the cloister’s lexicon of virtues, fidelity to the past took a high place. “Novelty” was always a bad word, smacking of heresy. One has only to know what one community of nuns or another considered a novelty to know what they considered heretical. They were convinced that their rules and customs were right and that as long as they adhered to them, they could not go wrong. Cardinal de Fleury himself understood this well. “Religious women are a special breed,” he wrote. “They will submit to the powers that be only in matters that do not offend their consciences; and one of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form. They are inexorable in this respect.”24 The community and its history provided the standards by which they lived. How could they betray what

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their predecessors had professed? Jansenist or non-Jansenist, they stood by the teachings and practices of their anciennes mères. One Jansenist nun, defending her beliefs, put it thus: “[These are the truths] with which we have been nourished since our childhood, and which have become familiar to us through the use we have made of them, and still make every day, in the exercise of our profession.”25 Such loyalty to the past was like a rock, upon which Unigenitus came crashing down with devastating effect. The bull had cast the issues in absolute terms. The question now became one of obedience. The pope had spoken, and the Crown had thrown its full authority behind the bull. But where did true obedience lie for women whose bishops persisted in opposing Rome and Versailles? In a letter to the religious women of his diocese, the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, Gaston de Noailles – soon to be an appellant – made it quite clear: I cannot dispense myself from addressing my two instructions to you, so that you may learn from the mouth of your pastor, how far you must carry your respect for Our Lord the Pope, and for his decrees, and so that you may know to whom you should turn. It is in my person that you must respect the authority of Jesus Christ; when you hear me you are hearing Him. I hope that with the help of His grace, I shall never teach you any doctrine contrary to that which He has taught His Church, and which has come to us through the channels of Holy Scripture and Tradition. It is in this confidence that I say to you, with Saint Paul: If anyone offers you with a gospel different from that which I preach, even though it be an angel from Heaven, say to him anathema, and do not listen to him.26

But this instruction did not really solve the nuns’ basic difficulty. Only too soon, this appellant bishop was going to disappear, and a new bishop would preach a radically different gospel. He would demand of his flock not just a change in discipline but a change in belief. In imposing his own authority on them, he would require them to say anathema to that of his predecessor. How, then, were the nuns to respond? Many communities were split along both doctrinal and temperamental lines, the conscientious objectors against the true believers, together with their allies, the more pragmatic souls whose priority was survival – for themselves and their communities. Where the former had their way and their defiance of authority became too blatant, authority had to act, and in many of its punitive measures it ignored or bypassed community rules. Often at this stage nuns who had hitherto not been involved would flail out in all directions, appealing to Parlement and other authorities against the violation of their constitutions. The response was predictable: more

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draconian punishments, sometimes targeting individuals, sometimes whole communities. Monasteries that were dragged into these escalations faced the danger of a further misery: internal breakdown, as the more politic nuns were forced to pay the price for the indiscretions of the more intrepid; “frightful division,” in which the poor women became “like harpies, one group against the other.”27 This was the fate that awaited many religious houses as Cardinal de Fleury’s repression heated up. Their obscurity initially gave them protection. But in the 1730s, as new bishops were installed, they were visited and their sympathies were laid bare. They were told that they must submit to the bull at once, in writing. If they chose to disobey, they knew they must accept the consequences. Unlike the male clergy, they could not run or hide; their obligation of stability made them easy targets for anti-Jansenist discipline. No diocese provides a better illustration of this dilemma than the Archdiocese of Sens. It had been a Jansenist stronghold since the 1640s, when its archbishop, Gondrin, had entered into a power struggle with the local Jesuits.28 By the time of his death in 1674, Jansenism was solidly implanted in the archdiocese. None of his successors had the will to confront it until, in 1731, Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy was installed. Languet had made his name as the most ardent of constitutionnaires, and it was for this reason that Fleury gave him the assignment of “cleaning up” Sens. Languet knew that his task would not be easy. “In general I cannot count on a quarter of the priests and the houses of nuns in my diocese,” he wrote to Fleury. “That’s the result of my predecessor’s forbearance, while the grand vicars filled all the posts with persons of their persuasion … If I were not supported by confidence in God and in the goodness of your Excellency, I should despair of succeeding in this diocese.”29 Fleury did not let him down. A steady rain of lettres de cachet descended, and Jansenist priests and educators began to disappear – into exile or prison. Within a few months of entering his diocese, Languet started visiting the women’s convents. He had a mixed reception. While some of them were docile, others were in a state of mutiny. Two issues were causing them distress. First, they were required, like the rest of the clergy, to sign a formulary submitting to Unigenitus in all its particulars; this involved renouncing beliefs in which they had been raised. Second, nuns who taught school were ordered to put away their old catechisms, which dated from Gondrin’s time, and teach their students only from the new catechism that Languet had drawn up. A recent study of this catechism tells us that while it introduced some doctrinal “innovations,” its most striking break with tradition

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came in its ecclesiology. Languet himself admitted that he was not a dedicated theologian.30 Like many other bishops in the eighteenth century, he was more interested in discipline. He had a vision of the Church as an institution in which all authority resided in the pope and the bishops, and in which the lower clergy had no voice at all.31 This was bound to offend the many priests who mixed their Jansenism with a good dose of what is known as Richerism: the theory that, as successors of the seventy-two disciples, the ordinary priesthood had an important voice in the running of the Church. The catechism raised a storm of protest. A brochure was circulated widely in the diocese, warning schoolteachers to reject it, even at the risk of punishment: “There is no other course to take but to walk straight to the truth of the Gospel and to be prepared to suffer persecution.”32 For many nuns this was a call to action, to martyrdom if need be, for the purity of the faith. For Languet it was a provocation that could not be ignored. Wherever he went, the issue of the catechism came up. He gave away copies of it, he pressured the superiors to enforce its use, and he questioned individual nuns about it. He took careful notes of his interviews – for future use if he should be forced to separate the sheep from the goats. The women’s responses were often audacious in the extreme, considering the power he exercised over them. In one house, “Sister SaintAugustine and several others told him that the new catechism went against their conscience and that they would never accept it; Sister Misericorde judged impertinently that the catechism is obscure and confused.”33 In another house, a sister argued that “she could not in conscience teach the new catechism; that she would keep to the old one, which had been in use for eighty years and had been approved by four archbishops.”34 In another house, a sister remonstrated that “the old catechism, that of Monseigneur de Gondrin, was orthodox, and she did not wish to change it.”35 She had a point. How could a catechism be orthodox for eighty years and then, suddenly, unorthodox? But it was a point that Languet refused to accept. For him, it was a question of discipline. The sisters must be reduced to obedience. But where was obedience to be found? For Languet the answer was simple: in submission to the authority of the Church – in the form of himself. He had written that “the faithful ought to be more docile to what the holy ministry teaches them, than to an angel from heaven.”36 This was exactly what other bishops were saying at the same time. Each in his own diocese claimed to be speaking with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.37 But the problem was that they were saying different things. This did not escape the attention of the sisters – especially those who were reading Jansenist books and journals.

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Bombarded by instructions from both sides, the nuns began to exercise their own judgment. One woman, on being asked what she thought of the famous Jansenist deacon François de Pâris, on whose grave miracles were allegedly taking place, answered that she thought him a saint. To Languet’s objection that Pâris had died without submitting to the bull and therefore outside the Church, she responded, “The [bull] is not a rule of faith; people who do not accept it are not cut off from the Church.” The archbishop is said to have replied in anger, “Rule of faith or rule of the Church or rule of discipline, you have to submit to it!”38 To another argumentative woman he exclaimed, “You are damning yourself, my child! there is no salvation without obedience; it is so essential that even if I gave an unjust order, you would not be dispensed from obeying me; the responsibility would be mine; that is the certitude of the faithful!” To which she replied, “Monseigneur, with your permission, what you have said goes against the gospel, which tells us that whoever follows a blind leader will also fall into the ditch.”39 Over and over again, Languet found himself disputing with women. He came away complaining “that they thought themselves to be more learned than he, and that they wished, apparently, to teach him his catechism and reform his theology!”40 This accusation was fraught with menace. Women, especially nuns, had no business being learned. This was not just Languet’s opinion; it was part of the religious culture, and rare indeed was the churchman who would contradict it. However, the doctrinal disarray in the Church left an opening for individual judgment – even that of women. Bishops on both sides of the quarrel had no hesitation in striking down such mutiny. Communities of nuns who argued too much ran the risk of being suppressed, for the simple reason that “they thought themselves to be learned.”41 This harshness was not unusual for the times. Languet, a careful, painstaking man, was as ready to use persuasion as punishment to gain his ascendancy. Submissive houses experienced his favour and protection, and those that began by kicking against the goad but later complied found him forgiving. He was no more ruthless than his contemporary Caylus, the Jansenist bishop of Auxerre, who also punished communities that did not conform to his doctrinal demands;42 or Jacques-Marie de Condorcet, Caylus’s successor, who reversed everything and “put the diocese to fire and blood.”43 Given the temper of the times and the ferment developing amongst both clergy and laity, no one in authority could countenance insubordination in the rank and file. But though control was neat and tidy in principle, its practice was sometimes messy, as Languet found in his dealings with the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours.

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On visiting the convent in 1732, the archbishop found fifty-one women, of whom, according to his notes, “barely a dozen are truly submissive.”44 In his opinion, one of the chief troublemakers was the mistress of novices; he deposed her outright, and when certain nuns protested, he warned that he had the right “to make a stick of wood into the mistress of novices” if he so wished.45 To eliminate the contamination that came from other sources, “the parlours and the communications with Paris,” he forbade the community to read any literature coming in from outside. But on his return a year later, he discovered that his orders had been ignored. “They read books in defiance of obedience … they receive letters from outside,” he wrote.46 Worse, twenty-five nuns were refusing to confess to the new confessors and had therefore failed to perform their Easter duties. So he now took sterner action. “He spared those who had given him some hope that they would return to their duty, but as for the fifteen who had gone to excess, he did not feel that he could let their stubbornness and insolence go unpunished … He deprived them of all voice … in the Chapters.”47 There was more than the discipline of individuals on Languet’s mind now. The election for superior was approaching, and he wanted a docile Chapter in order to ensure the re-election of the right superior. But when he arrived to preside over the election, eleven more nuns refused to take part, protesting what they claimed was the uncanonical exclusion of their sisters. This reduced the Chapter to less than the required quorum. Languet proceeded with the election anyway, but since only a minority of the Chapter took part, the rebels had cause to call the proceedings null and void. They appealed to Parlement, to the great scandal and titillation of the people of Nemours.48 Only the intervention of Fleury to remove the case from Parlement’s competence saved the archbishop from embarrassment. In 1734, lettres de cachet exiled the eight most intransigent nuns to Melun.49 Gradually the rebellion at Nemours subsided, though a hardy remnant continued to regard the new superior as an intruder and to hail their absent companions as true heroines. Similar discipline was exercised elsewhere. In both Étampes and Joigny, hand-picked superiors were forced on the communities; when some nuns protested to Cardinal de Fleury that their constitutions were being flouted, they were exiled.50 The Ursulines of Sens were deprived of the sacraments and also of the pension recently promised them by the Commission des secours. To their protests that “you would not wish to deprive your children of their bread,” Languet answered, “Since you have refused to receive the bread of the Word from my hands, I cannot undertake to furnish you with material bread.”51 The Ursulines of Melun received a lettre de cachet forbidding them to

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receive pensionnaires, their chief source of income. Stripped of their financial security, both these houses would later disappear. The confrontations that took place in Sens had their counterparts in other parts of the country. The armory of punishments available to Languet and other constitutionnaire bishops was large and versatile. The government, by its lettres de cachet, enabled these bishops to isolate communities from the outside world, forbidding visits, even by families. It allowed them to banish as many nuns as they wished to confinement in other convents at the king’s pleasure. It allowed them to send away novices and pensionnaires, thus removing the communities’ main sources of income. As well, the bishops in their own right had the power to condemn women to loss of all status within the community, to subject them to a diet of bread and water, and to confine them in their cells without books or the conversation of others. They could deprive individuals or whole communities of the mass and the sacraments, even the sacrament of the dying.52 It is difficult to imagine what these punishments meant to them, but the women had to accept them or submit. Cases were reported in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques of whole communities begging on bended knee not to be deprived of the sacraments while at the same time refusing to sign the formulary. But in taking action the bishops were within their rights, and the women knew it. There was more resistance when the bishops intervened in the communities’ procedures, especially in the election of superiors and the choice of confessors. Here the nuns were able to appeal to civil authority on the grounds that their rules were being violated.53 For many years the Crown continued to support the constitutionnaires and to reject such appeals, but eventually, as Parlement became more involved in the Jansenist quarrel, the dissident women began to be heard. A parlementary remonstrance of 1753 marked a turning point: Numberless clergymen have been snatched from their benefices and their families, and dispersed in the far corners of the realm … Others have been led into prisons, where they languish still … What a distressing sight for religion! the dispersal of an infinite number of religious women, snatched from those sanctuaries which they had vowed to God never to leave … We entreat you, Sire, not to allow yourself to be distracted as to the true source of so many ills: their origin lies in the infinite number of orders extracted by stealth from your piety. The only way to stop this in its tracks is no longer to abandon your authority to the hands of the ecclesiastics who abuse it.54

The constitutionnaires were facing heavy artillery now. Many of the more extreme bishops endured exile and humiliation at the hands of a

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Parlement riding high.55 Because it furthered their own strategies, the men of the law espoused the cause of the Jansenist nuns. Where as their seventeenth-century predecessors had upheld the authority of the bishops, they were now only too glad to support the rights of the women. In 1774 the King’s Council heard an appeal from the Ursulines of Le Mans, against what they alleged was an uncanonical election. “The rules of election have never been disobeyed in the house before,” they claimed.56 But on election day the grand vicar had arrived with a royal order, stating that no election was to take place and that the previous superior was to continue and to choose her own councillors. This order, the nuns argued, was “a reversal of the rights, the rules and the constitutions of the community.” The step was taken, according to them, in revenge for the Chapter’s refusal to admit the grand vicar’s niece to the novitiate. But the fundamental reason for his action was the community’s Jansenist bent, which the grand vicar was determined to reverse. When the nuns refused to accept the superior, he placed them under anathema for three years. Their protest to the bishop of Le Mans elicited the answer that, as their superior, he had every right to change their Rule.57 The King’s Council thought otherwise. It considered the conduct of the grand vicar to be “so revolting, that the Ursulines may with confidence lay their complaints at the feet of the Throne.” Previous kings, it argued, had invited the Ursulines to establish in France and had undertaken to protect their Rule, which included the right of electing their superiors. Anyone who interfered with this right should be subject to serious penalties, including excommunication and loss of benefices. As for the nuns, they were to be reinstated in their rights – in the defence of which, according to the council, they were “also defending the rights of their fellow citizens.” In their own small way, and certainly without intending it, the Ursulines of Le Mans had become champions of the Rights of Man! But the Jansenist cause was sinking fast as a result of the death and defection of its members and the exhaustion of the public. Equally, the strong anti-Jansenist movement was fading. The constitutionnaires were followed by more conciliatory men. Their passing allowed the turmoil in the French Church to subside. However, the nuns who had been involved had suffered serious damage. Some communities had simply disappeared, ordered out of existence by their bishops, starved of revenues and new recruits by lettres de cachet, or destroyed by internal dissension. Others survived, but only barely – like the Ursuline house in Beauvais, which had numbered eighty nuns when it appealed against the bull in 1718 but had

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only three or four when it emerged in 1773 from a thirty-year interdiction;58 or the Ursuline house in Auxerre, punished for twenty-two years for the opposite reason (because it was anti-Jansenist), and saved just in time by the death of Bishop de Caylus.59 Other communities patched up their internal differences as best they could. But sometimes, within their walls, there remained for years to come the lonely prisoners of conscience, the women who refused to submit. By their very presence they must have thrown a shadow over the lives of their companions. Their deaths without the sacraments were sad and scandalous, as we can see in the case of a nun in Dax, the only persevering member of a once-Jansenist community: “Around midnight, barely six hours after the woman had died, four men arrived at the convent. Only two nuns appeared to open the door for them. They entered the dead woman’s cell, picked her up and went to bury her at the end of the church. Two masons closed the grave, swept the place with care, and covered the tomb with a great paving stone, so that there would be no trace of her.”60 The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques reporting this story ended by remarking that with her death (in 1743, after six years of resistance), the bishop achieved a community totally subject to his wishes. The whole tragic Jansenist quarrel provides the historian of religious women with a valuable insight into the dogged and ferocious fight which these women were prepared to put up when their beliefs and practices were threatened. It was Languet who said of them: “These women are so opinionated, that one could burn them alive without changing their minds.”61 Obviously no compliment was intended; authority could see no virtue in such behaviour among those who were born to obey. But sixty years later it was a different story, as the generation of 1789 put up an equally stubborn, equally hopeless resistance to the new regime. “These beguines covet the martyr’s crown,” one revolutionary wrote in disgust.62 Across the country, religious communities, whether they had once been pro-Jansenist or not, rallied to their bishops and followed their commands. The same conservatism and adherence to “the old ways” that had put so many of them at odds with their Church in the 1730s now gave them entitlement to its highest praise.

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5 The Decline of the Monasteries

th e h i s tor ic al d e bat e The history of the Catholic Church in France has its highs and lows, and the eighteenth century has long been considered one of the lows. Bracketed between the “sacred” seventeenth and the more spiritually fraught nineteenth, it is remembered for its Jansenism, its Josephism, the expulsion of the Jesuits, Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme, and a goodhearted king’s protest that the archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God. It has traditionally been described as a time of religious mediocrity. “Christian life in the eighteenth century does not give an impression of heroism, or even of fervour,” writes L.J. Rogier. “By its well-groomed appearance, the devout life of the eighteenth century makes us think of the gardens of Le Nôtre, emanating order, correction, bourgeois sufficiency … a devotion made up of the juste milieu and of little obligations. It is hardly surprising that ardent souls were anxious to flee from it.”1 Many historians have observed that religion no longer had a hold on the government, the ruling classes, or the court aristocracy. “Belief in God became a source of ridicule, from which one took care to protect oneself.”2 Catholicism had no brilliant defenders to match wits with its detractors. “It was in the enemy camp that the freshness of novelty, the intellectual activity, the creative power, shone out.”3 “The faith of the philosophers was new and burning … The faith of Catholicism … was more casually held, as though an inherited possession.”4 Even within the Church, among its leaders, a mutant version of the faith, laced with

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utilitarianism and rationalism, was beginning to make itself felt. God Himself was the first to change. “He was, more and more, the supreme Sovereign, useful to all the ideologies of order.”5 This change was conveyed to the faithful by way of newly minted catechisms: “Evangelical ferment was transformed into accountability; fear of damnation was dissolved into a hierarchy of submissions to the family, the king, the Church, and God.”6 This is a picture of a faith drying up. It is made all the more poignant by the comparisons that are often drawn with what had gone before: the Age of Saints, the heroic age of the Catholic Reformation. However, in recent years counterarguments have begun to appear. The light of the first period was not altogether light, the dark of the second not altogether dark: “Today we no longer oppose a seventeenth-century bloc, organic and Christian, to an eighteenth century, critical and libertine.”7 It is pointed out that past historians have been so taken up with the study of elite spiritualities that they failed to consider their actual diffusion.8 The great men and women of the seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation lived in a world where the general practice of religion was miserably deficient and there was deep-rooted resistance to their message. The fervour of their own faith did not soon penetrate this resistance. Only after their time was Tridentine Christianity really taken to the people: “It was at the moment of the decline of the mystics that France was converted.”9 So the Catholicism of eighteenth-century France has been revised by some historians to be much more than just “the autumn of the Catholic Reformation.” Jean de Viguerie writes: “To the heritage of the preceding century it added much of its own; and above all, it excelled in distributing its goods, so as to make them accessible to the greatest number.”10 Observance was up, the liturgy was better performed and better understood, and religious books were being read in huge numbers. The eighteenth century was the age of the bon curé, respected for his decorum and his devotion to his parish. However, the same historian points out that it was characteristic of the age that this “distribution of goods” found little favour among the elites: “Literature, philosophy, the theatre, the gazettes, the salons, the academies – all that constituted the world of high intellect or public opinion either was unaware of it or kept quiet on the subject.”11 Absorbed and entranced by their brave new world, and elitist to the core, they saw little that was admirable in the strengthening of religious observance among ordinary people. And to a large extent, by their very brilliance they dazzled generations of historians to come and held them in their thrall. Even historians who disliked the Enlightenment felt constrained to fight it on its own high ground.

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Given this focus, earlier generations of church historians had good reason to feel defensive. Whether it was in the political field, the spiritual, the intellectual, or the institutional, the Gallican Church of the eighteenth century seemed always to be fighting a rearguard action. If there was progress at the grassroots, what did it matter? As long as the attention of historians remained fixed on the upper echelons of society, the picture remained bleak. Only recently has the lowlier dimension been explored. “Both more modest in their chosen terrain and more ambitious in their goals, recent works, growing in numbers year by year, seek to reach into the effective religious life of [ordinary people].”12 As their conclusions become known, the dark picture begins to brighten. The same question of focus can be posed with respect to the history of Old Regime monasticism. One of the truisms of Catholic history is that the health of the Church can be measured by the health of its monasteries. “The life of religious communities,” writes Evenett, “has always been so intimately bound up with the bene esse of Catholicism that their condition at any given historical moment is an almost infallible guide to the condition of the Church as a whole.”13 If this is true, it matters a great deal which monasteries we choose to examine. Always in the forefront of historical memory are the 750 male abbeys of France and the 250 female, many of them with large revenues and idle populations, “too rich to be faithful to their Rule,” as one cahier de doléances put it.14 This image stuck like a bone in the throats of contemporaries – and has stuck in historians’ throats ever since. In the intellectual sphere, the verdict on monasticism is mixed but generally negative: the more erudite among the regulars are seen to have thrown themselves into the new thinking, to the point of becoming éclairés themselves,15 while others forsook both learning and observance to become, in words taken from the report of the General Chapter of one order, “altogether incapable and without talent, without [good] dispositions and sometimes without morals.”16 Institutionally, there is no doubt about it: “The century of Enlightenment appears as a period of continuous and irremediable decline.”17 The figures are there to prove it: in 1768 there were some 25,000 regulars living in 2966 communities.18 Their numbers – ten or eleven men to a house on average – were already low, even before the Commission des réguliers moved in and roughed them up. In the following twenty years their numbers dropped even further, to 17,000. “Among the regulars,” says one historian, “it was not just a decline, it was a collapse.”19 Wealth had little to do with it: the rich institutions were as stricken as the poor.20

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If the problem was not one of poverty, it had to be one of morale. The great days of monastic observance were long gone.21 Eighteenthcentury monks are seen to have been the heirs to a number of longstanding moral disabilities: too much wealth and not enough to do; a loss of regularity and consequently a serious questioning of their profession. Hence their low numbers, which in the 1770s dropped even more precipitously. After years of compromise, we are told, “the existing institutions produced relatively few men or women of value.”22 “Men or women” – with this remark we stumble into a question of historical method. Suddenly, in a discussion about men and their problems, women are included. What this reminds us is that general church histories have been overwhelmingly male histories. Until recently, historians have been ready to subsume religious women under the general heading of “monastics,” with only a brief acknowledgment of their differences.23 Women, it is known, experienced a decline in numbers of about one-third between 1730 and 1790 – a decline, it is said, “quite as flagrant as, and parallel to, that of the regulars.”24 In what way was the decline parallel? And does this mean that their problems also paralleled those of regulars? Given a certain similarity of effect, must we assume a similarity of cause? No serious historian accuses eighteenth-century nuns, en masse, of irregular behaviour. But some suggest that there was a loss of purpose, a smothering of vocations in a soft and meaningless lifestyle: “Within their cloister, most nuns lived a decorous and pleasant life. With their servants, their pets, their pastimes and their visitors, they partook easily of that sweetness of life that the nostalgic Maurice de Talleyrand remembered as reserved to the generation fortunate enough to have matured before 1789.”25 For the nuns and, better still, the noble canonesses of the high aristocracy, there was indeed a good life amid splendid surroundings. “Their state was so agreeable and so fine that they were little disposed to change it for another,” wrote a woman who had known it.26 For the less noble but still very much upper-class clientele, there were other convents that were little more than “wellfurnished hotels and respectable retreats.”27 But to focus on these is to go back into that elitist concentration that so distorts church history. “Most nuns” did not live like that. Most nuns of the eighteenth century were lucky if they could maintain a standard of life suitable to their station. They were bedevilled by poverty, as the Abbé Montesquiou was to point out to the National Assembly in 1790. And it was these poor nuns – respectably poor, but poor nonetheless, and not the rich nuns in their abbeys – who by their numbers and distribution had the closest connection to French society.

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Nor was it just their wealth, or lack of it, that differentiated religious women from religious men. There was a significant difference in mindset. Most female communities (with the exception of some of the more prestigious houses) operated on a relatively nonpolitical, nonintellectual level. They laid no claim to erudition or even to breadth of interest.28 Girded by their walls, regulated by their usages, and closed away from the intellectual currents that swirled around their male counterparts, they largely escaped the angst that afflicted so many monks. They remained firmly anchored in that great troop of dévotes who were such a distinctive part of the late-eighteenth-century Church.29 If they had problems of morale, these were unlikely to be caused by the action of the Enlightenment. Another difference lay in their numbers. High to the point of being “plethoric” at the beginning of the century, their numbers remained, even after the decline, two or three times higher per community than those of their male counterparts.30 This helps to explain the great difference in wealth. As rentiers they had experienced an unparalleled financial collapse at the time of the Law Crash – not necessarily because they lost more revenue than the men but because they had many more mouths to feed. The Commission des secours was established not to restore regularity to the female communities but to save them from destitution. Finally, the timing of their numerical decline is important. Whereas the great plunge in the male religious population took place in the 1770s and early 1780s, the most serious drop in the female religious population took place earlier – and, it can be argued, for different reasons.

the teaching nuns To illustrate all these arguments, I offer the experience of my own subjects, the cloistered teaching nuns. They were, by intention at least, typical eighteenth-century dévotes. Following the direction laid out by their rules, they avoided the high ground of heroic religious practice and specialized in the unglamorous profession of teaching. From the beginning, their congregations frowned upon mysticism, extreme austerities, and voies extraordinaires – a practical view of life that accorded well with the eighteenth-century mentality. These nuns had adopted for themselves the great virtue of “littleness.” In the face of the intellectual challenges presented to them by their religion, they had become, if anything, more demure than before. This lowering of their sights kept them safe from the intellectual temptations that assailed their male counterparts.

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They were more in tune with the eighteenth-century ethos than the purely contemplative nuns were, because they served a useful social purpose. It has been noted that one of the most striking signs of Catholicism’s success was “the remarkable progress, throughout the whole century, in the alphabetization of girls.”31 A good part of the credit for this must go to the cloistered nuns. Even as other institutions opened their classroom doors, the teaching monasteries continued to offer, in general, the best education available to girls32 – and in many smaller towns the only education for them. Their social usefulness did not, however, preserve them from the financial disasters of 1720. In the records of the Commission des secours there are as many cases of desperate teaching convents as of others. We have to visualize their situation. Their communities were among the largest in the country,33 but their financial losses were as drastic as any.34 While the commission gave them credit for their “utility” and put many of them on the dole, it did not hesitate to close others. The Ursulines alone lost about one-tenth of their houses.35 Even for the communities that it decided to sustain, the relief the commission meted out was both cautious and conditional. The commissioners were driven by two considerations: first, that there was no fund in existence sufficient to restore the women to their previous financial standing; second, that there were too many convents anyway, “to the point where they destroy each other,”36 so this was an opportunity to rectify the situation. Communities desperate enough to lay their problems bare to the commission found themselves forced to take its medicine: a reduction in their numbers until these fitted their straitened financial circumstances. The reduction was achieved by the dispatch of lettres de cachet banning the reception of novices until further notice. No one has yet counted the number of houses actually placed under the ban. But one example may set the scene. For the archdiocese of Bourges, the commission’s records show six teaching houses (holding in the 1720s about 55 nuns each!) all recommended for reduction, from a total of 334 women to 229, while a further two small houses were directed to unite.37 These recommendations conformed to the commission’s usual practice. Across the board, the reduction it ordered came to about one-third. Once a community’s numbers had fallen to the desired level, a second lettre de cachet would arrive, lifting the ban. Or in the case of doomed houses, it would not arrive at all. There was no way for an individual house to predict what its end would be. The prescription was painful and debilitating. But it worked. At the end of the Old Regime the female religious population

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was more or less the size that had been ordered in the 1730s; and the female communities had, more or less, balanced their books. This makes for a different scenario, in which the decline in the number of religious women was mandated, rather than being spontaneous. In other words, inadequacies within communities and the public’s dissatisfaction with the female monastic institution as a whole were not major factors, at least not to begin with. More important were the reductions and closures which the government forced on the congregations. These made their problems different in nature from those of the male religious orders. If this scenario is to stand, it is by reason of the timing of the decline. According to an authoritative general history of the Church, the decade 1730–40 was the time during which religious congregations – male and female – were at their apogee.38 One historian of religious women adheres to this timing, drawing the obvious conclusion that “the financial turbulences of the Regency did not constitute a sharp turning point in the history of [religious] houses.” He argues that the decline in their populations was a phenomenon of the later years of the century – in other words, a time when they were reasonably free of financial problems. This would point to some other malaise: a dryingup of the religious life within or a loss of support from the society without. The problem with his argument is that while his figures confirm the decline, they do not establish when in the century it took place.39 Another historian argues the opposite: that it was between 1725 and 1740 that the feminine religious vocation faced its severest hindrances. He adds that for the nuns in his study, the years 1770–74 were among the best in the century.40 If his chronology is correct, it would seem difficult to discuss decline in feminine monasteries without implicating the financial crisis and the policy of suppression launched by the Commission des secours in 1727. My own research indicates that decline in the number of entries did, in fact, set in around 1730.41 Despite the jolts to their finances between 1689 and 1720, women’s communities had continued to recruit members. Indeed, a bumper crop of entries in 1696–1700 suggests that they had done what the Commission des secours later accused them of doing – accepting more entrants than usual as a way of acquiring dowry money. But the Law Crash was beyond anything that their economies could withstand. They endured several years of poverty severe enough to drive many entrants away from their doors. Then a regimen imposed from above led to the winnowing out of some communities and the slimming down of others. The years 1731–45 mark the time when the number of entrants first fell away significantly. Just when monastic numbers as a whole are seen

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to have been high and healthy, a closer view shows that the number of female monastics was beginning to shrink. This raises a question. If male regulars were still feeling their oats, why were female regulars starting to stagger? No one has yet suggested that women were ahead of men in moral and spiritual deterioration. The sources need to be much more closely examined, with special reference to women, before any firm conclusion can be reached. But I argue that if the female religious population declined before the male, it was because external action made the earlier period peculiarly difficult for women, with the ban on reception of novices. Of course, what started from outside could eventually be internalized. The ban on novices drained communities of their youth, year by year. Already crushed by their debts and facing an uncertain future, their community spirit might well begin to erode. But it must be emphasized that this happened only after the Law Crash opened them up to the commission’s restructuring. The historian of the Provençal Ursulines makes this point, emphasizing that the Law Crash caused a far-reaching trauma among religious communities: “Its direct consequences were serious. Above all, it provoked profound troubles in them, which were not only of a financial order. To repeat a sometimes overused formula, ‘nothing would be the same as before.›42 The women whose monasteries were suppressed outright suffered the most. The commission’s correspondence discussing their fate makes sad reading. The nuns could not believe that they would be targeted without serious moral or material cause. The Ursulines of Avallon wrote a petition in which they listed “the reasons that would be grounds for the extinction, transfer, or destruction of a community.” These were: “Firstly, the lack of observance of the Rule … Secondly, the indigence and poverty of a monastery which, being useful for nothing, becomes a charge on the King and the State … And finally … when this community is so low in numbers that it is not in a state to subsist of itself, that is to say, to fulfil and acquit the charges to which it is bound.”43 Since none of these conditions applied to them, they proclaimed their confidence that the Crown would not wish to close them down. But the commission had already decided that the number of female convents must be reduced at all costs. If it deemed a region to have too many, it was ready to assign a quota of houses for suppression, regardless of merit. The Ursuline monastery in Saint-Gengoux was a victim of this policy. It had been under the dreaded ban for some years when in 1747 the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône wrote to the commission asking that the house be given a reprieve because of its value to the town. The commission at first turned him down flat. Then, in 1748, it wrote to him to

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say that it had information that the nuns were in misery and to ask that a “trustworthy, sensible man” be sent to take an inventory. The report from a local archpriest came back, almost by return of mail. The house, he wrote, was spacious, clean, and in good order, with a wellkept church that could hold four hundred people, a pensionnat, and public classrooms for sixty children. All the buildings were of stone and tile, with a large enclosure producing fruit and vegetables and enough hay to feed four cows. The community had no debts (indeed, it was owed over 7000 livres) and its twenty-one members all had pensions. It sounded idyllic, and it weakened the commission’s resolve. But now came the rub. The commission announced that it was ready to spare the house, but only if the bishop would suggest another to suppress in its place. This the bishop would not do, so Saint-Gengoux went to the block. It was closed in 1752 and its nuns sent off to Chalon where, they later complained, they were left with pensions of 80 livres each instead of the promised 115 livres. The house was sold. When all expenses were paid and a fund set up to support the filles dévotes who were brought in as replacement schoolteachers, there was nothing left over.44 Scenes like this took place across the country. When the suffragan bishop of Lyon protested to the commission against an order, sent him in 1734, to close eight convents, he was told: “This suppression of several religious communities and this diminution in the number of nuns in several [other] religious communities have been among the principal objectives proposed by His Majesty in granting them assistance.”45 In the event, all eight houses were suppressed and 191 nuns dispersed with pensions.46 Once it became public knowledge, the commission’s policy of culling houses gave rise to a fierce and unseemly scramble among communities. If a monastery could convince the authorities to target someone else, it not only saved its own life but had a good chance of receiving some of the spoils from the victim. Epic wars of words broke out between neighbouring convents. Two Ursuline communities in the Provençal town of Saint-Remy fought it out, each in turn gaining favour with the commission. Finally, the house that had initially been targeted for suppression won the battle, with help from two archbishops, a duchess, and Madame la Dauphine herself. The nuns of the losing house were dispersed among other houses, “according to the availability of empty and suitable rooms.”47 In Moulins, the Ursulines and another teaching community engaged in a long and unedifying slanging match in which, it seems, everybody in the town became involved.48 In Annonay, the Filles de Notre-Dame were the underdogs in a bitter struggle with the local royal abbey, during which each side sent

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the commission reams of testimonials for itself and reams of slurs about the other.49 In all such contests, the nuns had to find champions to speak for them. Everything depended on whom they knew and how much influence that person had in Versailles. It went hard for those who had no patrons and no visibility, like the Ursuline monastery in Montcenis, which was consigned to oblivion because it was “tucked away in a small town without support and without protection.”50 Next to losing their houses altogether, the nuns’ worst pain came from the temporary ban on novices. This deprived them of the dowries they would otherwise have enjoyed and also of the young members whom they needed to replenish the community. A further grief came from the fact that the ban by lettre de cachet was increasingly used as a disciplinary tool to bring them to heel if they were too independent. This was particularly hard on communities with Jansenist leanings. We see the Ursuline house in Beauvais placed under the ban for thirty years – not for reasons of poverty, as the bishop explained in 1763, but for “particular circumstances.”51 The Jansenist connection was stated more explicitly in 1786 when the bishop of Montpellier reported on a local Ursuline convent: This community was dear to the inhabitants of Montpellier; the newly converted brought their children there with as much confidence as did the old Catholics; but the errors of the times penetrated the house, and the religious were almost all seduced to the point where they challenged all authority. It was necessary to deprive them of the permission to receive pensionnaires and novices; they remained for eighteen years without a director or superior, and almost without a Rule.

When the original forty nuns had been reduced to eighteen, twelve of whom were then sent away, the remaining six, whose orthodoxy was satisfactory, were allowed to function once more.52 Goings-on like this were bound to have an impact on community support. When families placed their daughters in religion, they expected them to have a stable and predictable future. Now, in the sequence of misfortunes that struck the convents, they saw their daughters impoverished or dispersed; or perhaps worse still, if the community collapsed, deposited back on their families’ doorsteps! Furthermore, town officials and ordinary citizens looked unfavourably on the closing-down and selling-up of “their” institutions, to the benefit of others, elsewhere. The commission’s records are full of their angry protests and its own efforts to pacify them. In such an atmosphere, parents were understandably nervous about putting their daughters into convents.

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From now on, individual houses were more than ever on their own, their fortunes depending on their own good luck and good management, and the favour of the commission. As their freedom to buy land or to lend to private individuals was curtailed by the Crown, and as the influx of dowries slowed down, they found it increasingly difficult to administer what they already had. For some houses, “sufficiency” was almost impossible to achieve. This had a dampening effect on recruitment, a problem the Ursulines of Loches experienced as late as 1783: “Their situation, about which the public is informed (no matter what precautions they take to keep their trouble secret) discourages aspirants who would be forthcoming if they were known to enjoy a modest but decent living.”53 Once a house was on the downward slope, it was difficult to reverse the trend. Fewer novices meant an aging and diminishing population, and hence more difficulty in running good schools and attracting pensionnaires. Less money meant that repairs to the buildings might have to be postponed, that the hiring of lawyers and property agents had to be forgone, and sometimes even that the number of religious services in the community had to be cut back. The appearance of deterioration might in turn lead, to a further flight of prospective candidates. It was a vicious circle. For many, poverty remained a pervasive problem. The national bankruptcy of 1720 had caused damage to a great part of the rentier class. The religious communities found that they could not hope for much in the way of generosity from the people who had traditionally been their friends. Moreover, the difficulty they had always experienced in recovering moneys owing to them was now a major problem. Every convent’s book of accounts held records of debts no longer recoverable because of the insolvency of the debtors: 1800 livres in one case, 2676 livres in another, 8600 livres in another.54 Sometimes it was impossible even to collect the sisters’ dowry payments. A historian of the Ursulines of Périgueux who traced their dowry contracts discovered that throughout the eighteenth century families were as likely as not to delay payment for decades or to default altogether.55 The Ursulines of Montbrison experienced the same problem and for the same reason – “the poverty of the noble families of our province.”56 The Filles de Notre-Dame of Annonay, totally without funds in 1786, claimed that their indebtedness was caused mainly by that of others: “They are owed almost 39,000 livres from dowries or pensions [of which] they cannot secure payment. That is the principal cause of their situation.”57 Where there was impoverishment there was also loss of social esteem. By the late eighteenth century, most teaching monasteries were

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less able than before to attract the upper-class candidates who had once been their boast.58 They had to settle for women of less elevated station. Houses that refused to bend the knee and admit commoners found themselves in trouble. As one observer remarked of the Ursuline community in Sommières: “These religious, since they belong to the principal nobility of the region, have never wished to admit subjects of more modest origins; if their numbers have diminished, it is because of that.”59 But houses that moved with the times and admitted commoners in large numbers found that their upper-class novices (who were fewer to begin with anyway) fled to more exalted institutions – and a certain social cachet departed with them. The teaching monasteries, once largely populated by daughters of officers and the minor nobility, now became the natural home for the middling sort. “We no longer find ‘rich and powerful seigneurs,’ as in the contracts of the seventeenth century, but simple squires,” writes one historian; “to the rich merchants capable of giving 4000 livres … succeeds a minor bourgeoisie of the robe.”60 In the perception of many of its erstwhile supporters, this led to a deterioration in the quality of the monasteries. An interesting subtheme appears here: social déclassement was somehow equated with spiritual decline. The monasticism of the Counter-Reformation had been profoundly aristocratic in its prejudices, equating virtue with birth and social rank.61 The opinion had long been held in influential circles that monasteries were really intended to be the preserve of the aristocracy and that their invasion by the lesser breeds was a betrayal of their purpose. Now, in the years of the “aristocratic reaction,” the belief took on new force. The fear was all the more potent because it was founded on fact: the social derogation so greatly deplored was indeed taking place. This “democratization” during the eighteenth century was the saving grace of many a monastery. But it alienated the upper classes even more. In other ways the ethos of the convents changed. With less support coming in from outside, the sisters had to orient themselves to the business of making money. The success of their early years in attracting dowries had allowed them to be careless about the management of their affairs. In the late eighteenth century their records show them more knowledgeable, more canny in their dealings, more accurate in their accounting, and more astute in the exploitation of their farms.62 Their pensionnats were expanded to become major sources of income. All this material improvement was achieved without much help from outside. Whatever they now had, they enjoyed as a result of their own efforts, not the charity of others. This was a point they made when, in the early days of the Revolution, the National Assembly decided to lay

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hands on the goods of the Church, including theirs. “The dowries of the religious, their handwork and their economies, have sufficed for the acquisition of their house, its reconstruction and its maintenance to this day,” wrote the Ursulines of Lille. “By means of these economies, they have acquired almost all their revenues.”63 They, and many other communities, argued (in vain, as it turned out) that the law protecting private property should protect their private property as well. Was this increase in the communities’ efficiency achieved at the expense of their spirituality? There seems to be a consensus in the affirmative. The historian of the Ursulines points to the reduction of their time spent in prayer, reflection, and reading, to the benefit of their “productive” work, and regrets the change of spirit which this brought about. Another historian concurs. “Women’s convents came to live only by their social function,” he claims, adding that in the eighteenth century nuns became less mystical and more practical.64 Whether the first assertion is true or not, the second almost certainly is. In various subtle ways, the communities’ records do suggest that by the eighteenth century the high exaltation of the early days had given way to more practical expressions. Nuns, too, were affected by the general trend towards “enlightened” Catholicism, as described by Jean de Viguerie.65 The change is reflected in their language. In their death notices the sense of other-worldliness fades; allusions to miracles disappear altogether; and more restrained forms of expression make their appearance. In the late eighteenth century we even see God referred to from time to time as “the Supreme Being,” and we read that another citoyenne has been added to the heavenly host! A change has also been discerned in their choice of names in religion. It was age-old practice for monastics to adopt new names as a sign of their break with their old lives “in the world.” These names were chosen to honour a member of the Trinity, one of the great saints, or one of the lesser saints or angels. A study of Ursuline nuns in the southeast shows that from 1592 to 1649, the great age of Christocentrism, one-third of the nuns in the sample adopted names that honoured Jesus Christ in his different “states” (Incarnation, Passion, Holy Childhood, etc.).66 By the late eighteenth century such titles had fallen to a mere 8.5 percent, and even the Virgin had become less popular, while the percentage of names of lesser saints – unchallenging saints such as Rosalie and Felicité – had swollen to 63.2 percent. “A more reassuring, more human proximity,” the historian suggests, “permitting an easier identification than with God”;67 or put differently, a retreat from the high spirituality of the anciennes mères into a less demanding approach to life in religion.

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The first generations were still revered for their heroism and bounding mystical spirit. No sister of the Congrégation could ever forget Alix Lecler, whose life was shot through and through with dreams and visions, or Gante André, of whom it was said that “she was brave enough to swallow down difficulties without even chewing them.”68 But that was then, and this was now. In the late eighteenth century Madame Roland, looking back on her days in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris, recalled a time of calm and happiness: “The house was respectable, the order not too austere; as a result, the nuns dispensed altogether with those excesses and nonsenses which are characteristic of most [monasteries]”69 – a favourable verdict, given the times, but one that would have sounded strange to Alix and Gante and their sisters. It can be argued, too, that the heroic obedience and humility of the founding generations had suffered with the passage of time.70 It is easy to see why. Religious women had learned to ask questions. This female “curiosity” was seen by some as a baneful characteristic of the new age. The great Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue had only harsh words for “the pernicious effect, in women’s monasteries, of this itch to learn and to appear learned.” He complained: “They want to know everything, discuss everything, judge everything. If disputes arise in the Church on highly subtle, highly abstract questions, they have to find out about them; and scarcely have they acquired the feeblest and most superficial veneer of knowledge than they think themselves as enlightened as the ablest theologians.”71 It can be conjectured that the “itch to learn” was the logical outcome of a long exposure to the divisions within the Church. Nuns had spent years disputing among themselves the importance of contrition to the sacrament of penance, and the rightness or wrongness of frequent communion. Many of them had been introduced to Bible reading, and they were promoting it in their schools. In all of this there was, in germ at least, a kind of “spiritual feminism.”72 Jansenism was at the root of a great deal of it; disillusionment with authority had opened the door to ideas and attitudes that would have been unthinkable in the early seventeenth century. But it is equally possible that in non-Jansenist houses, away from the sort of confrontations that have surfaced in the historical record, other religious women were also acquiring a certain independence of mind. Furthermore, the late eighteenth century saw a few of the world’s new comforts filtering through the monastery walls. Once nuns had recovered from the great bankruptcy, they became more comfortable than their predecessors – better heated, and with more varied food, such as dried fruit and conserves. Coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco

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were not unknown within their walls.73 None of this should surprise. Nuns belonged to their times; if the milieu from which they came enjoyed more consumer goods, it was natural that they should do so too. More controversial was the challenge which, as teaching communities, they faced when asked to update their curriculum. Parents wanted different things for their girls, so in some convent pensionnats, dancing and music lessons were offered, small dramas were produced, and new subjects such as geography were taught.74 However, the tension between tradition and novelty continued. Every innovation had to run the gauntlet of community conservatism. Furthermore, on the occasions when the nuns did attempt to cater to a more worldly clientele, they were likely to find themselves reprimanded by the more conservative elements of the local clergy. So their efforts to update their syllabus – never exactly strenuous – were always subject to the drag of the past. Once the last word in the education of girls, by the late eighteenth century their pensionnats were in danger of being considered “passé.” And once the support of the elites was eroded, what was left to them? Where were “the people,” for whose benefit they had originally been instituted? The public’s verdict on the teaching nuns seems always to have been mixed, and there were various reasons for this. For one thing, their record on free schooling was irregular. The reputation of many houses rested on the size and seriousness of their day schools: 400 children in Nancy, 400 in Rouen, 500 in Valenciennes, 300 in Rennes, to give a few examples. Many others, though their day schools were smaller, nevertheless continued to satisfy all the demands for girls’ education in their little towns. But serious questions could arise where the monastery grew and the day school remained the same size – or sometimes shrank. In Angers in the eighteenth century, the large and well-endowed Ursuline monastery offered spaces to sixty non-paying students – hardly a return on the expenditure of money and space that a community of thirty-three women required.75 In Lorgues, forty Ursuline nuns occupied themselves otherwise while the city paid a schoolmistress to manage the free school.76 This was a breach of their original trust and it carried a danger: wherever the authorities saw cause to suppress a teaching monastery, they were able to do so by bringing in alternative schoolmistresses without much public outcry.77 The rapid growth in the number of secular congregations dedicated to teaching – congregations such as the Dames de Saint-Maur and the Filles de la Croix – had by the eighteenth century made a significant inroad into the cloistered orders’ near monopoly of female education.78 These schoolmistresses, since they were not cloistered, were

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able to live much more cheaply than their monastic counterparts. Once value for money became the main criterion, the expensive monastic option was in danger of losing its charm, at least where public education was concerned. The cloistered nuns suffered from another disadvantage. Even where they continued to offer their services, the common people who furnished many of their day students remained on the other side of a social divide. From the very beginning, the nuns had taken their place among the privilégiés.79 Nothing they could do could eradicate the resentment caused by that fact. Although they taught without charge, gave alms, and handed out soup and bread to the poor at their doors, and although they scrimped to provide small gifts and prizes to the children in the free classrooms and made many friends and clients, they seem never to have gained the hearts of the people. It is possible that the very nature of their service was irksome to their clients. The nuns taught decorum, control, piety, respect for authority; they urged their students to give up the ways of the street and the slum. In outlying regions of the country, they decried the local dialects and acted as missionaries of the French language. Even as the people benefited by their schooling, they may have resented its tone. As the eighteenth century wore on, the pride of the poor became more “ticklish,”80 and they accepted the condescension of their betters with less and less grace. “Forget about those biddies in the Congrégation,” declaimed a pamphlet-writer in 1789. “The service they say they render to the public does us more harm than good. They feed young girls – and turn their heads – with pruderies, affectations, and nonsenses which are of no use in the world … They raise them … to be haughty, proud, contemptuous, curious, and backbiting.”81 It seems that this kind of diatribe did not lack a sympathetic audience. One is struck by the flickering hostility which the public showed to the convents over the years. One could overlook the pranks of young men – the “libertines who entered the convent by night … [and] made various attempts to enter the pensionnaires’ room by force”; the boys who insisted on bathing in the river within view of the nuns, “pronouncing indecent words and even stealing their vegetables and breaking their washboard”; or the two students of the college of La Flèche who scaled the walls of the local monastery during the night and later received “a sharp lesson”82 – but there is also evidence of harassment of a darker sort: stones and refuse thrown against convent doors, windows broken, and obscenities uttered.83 Occasionally, there were incidents that carried a threat of worse to come. In 1776, when the city of Carcassonne ordered that all burials must take place in public cemeteries, the Ursulines complied by sending out a deceased nun to be

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buried, whereupon the body was accompanied to the grave by a hostile crowd, “pouring out a thousand invectives against us.”84 Less than twenty years later, a similarly hostile crowd surrounded the sisters when they were forced to leave their house. The incident reveals the ambiguity that always existed in the nuns’ relationship with “the people,” and it helps explain the harshness with which many of them were treated during the revolutionary years, once the authorities were no longer on their side.

the problem of evidence Where does this leave us in passing judgment on the spirit of eighteenth-century communities? Is it reasonable to assume that because they were more modern, more inquiring, more businesslike, more middle class – and, it appears, less loved – the nuns had suffered a loss of authentic religious vocation? What accounts for the aura that hangs over these nuns, the aura of stagnation and mediocrity? Since we have little to go by in the way of their own testimony, it is difficult to tell whence this opinion arises. Perhaps it is from the visible decline in their numbers and the collective aging that went with it; or from the deteriorating quality of their written records, which has been attributed to dropping standards of literacy and dedication; or from the pathetic inadequacy of their libraries, brought to light when they were inventoried at the time of the Revolution. Other than these physical signs, there is not much that supports such a very sweeping verdict – except that it was the firmly held opinion of nineteenth-century monographers, the first in this field of women’s history. “Piety still reigned there,” wrote the Abbé Richaudeau, historian of the Ursulines of Blois, “and the Rule was still observed … but we no longer see characters as well-formed, or at least, there were only a few.”85 Having read the same records as Richaudeau, I am mystified to know how he came to this conclusion. Because the entries in the annales are briefer, it is difficult to pass any judgment, positive or negative, on the question of character formation. Perhaps the answer is in his next sentence: “This was because society itself was enfeebled, and it could not give what it did not have.” We are back with the piety-birth equation. He went on to say: “From the Regency onward, noble families ceased almost entirely to furnish subjects to monasteries, and, as the bourgeoisie did not, so to speak, know the way, the number of subjects decreased notably in communities.”86 While few of his compeers were as forthright as Richaudeau, they worked from the same prejudice. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century churchmen, highly class-

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conscious and elitist, did not value “democratization” any more than their eighteenth-century forbears had done. As for the material indicators mentioned above – the diminution of their population, the sketchiness of their records, the abysmal state of their libraries – these can all be attributed to one cause: poverty. The questions surrounding the first have already been discussed. As to the second, it is surely arguable that a smaller community struggling with an unchanged workload might not have had the time to compose flowery eulogies or extensive annales – even though it did, often, keep better accounts. As to the third, the number of books a person or a community owns does not tell us how many books she/it reads. There is ample evidence scattered through the records to prove that nuns borrowed books – from family, friends, and spiritual advisers – and also that many of them owned their own New Testaments and other works of piety. During the years that communities could not pay their debts, it is highly unlikely that they would build up their houses’ libraries.87 Symptoms such as these scarcely merit a diagnosis of “mediocrity.” Indeed, there is little in their records that informs us about the morale and inner spirit of religious women on the eve of their disappearance. The wisest course is to admit that we do not know. “The essential often escapes us and will continue to escape us, by the very force of things,” writes a religious historian.88 As long as their lives remained cloaked in anonymity, we cannot in fairness pass judgment on them. The most convincing measure of their private state of mind is to be found in the very public behaviour they exhibited at the beginning of the Revolution. And this, whatever we choose to make of it, was not mediocre.

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6 Aftermath

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, promulgated in July 1790, is considered to have been one of the great turning points of the Revolution. By attempting to include the clergy in its administrative reforms, the government moved unequivocally into the jurisdiction of the Church. It abolished the concordat of 1516 and eliminated the papacy’s influence in national religious affairs. It turned bishops and priests into salaried, elected officials of the state. And it redrew the ecclesiastical map, eliminating dioceses and reapportioning parishes. This was an unprecedented challenge to the Church, and opposition to the constitution grew swiftly. In order to enforce compliance, the National Assembly instituted an oath of allegiance to both the Nation and the constitution, “and especially the Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and demanded that it be taken by the entire serving clergy. The oath ceremony, which was scheduled in the winter of 1790–91, broke the clergy in two. On one hand were the “constitutionals,” who by taking the oath acknowledged the power of the Nation to legislate changes in church matters; on the other side were the “refractories,” or nonjurors, who persisted in their allegiance to the pope and the old hierarchy. All but 4 of the 135 bishops refused the oath, as did some 45 percent of the priests. From this time on, the division between Church and Nation became increasingly serious. “The oath of 1791 marked a major crisis in the political life of the nation,” writes Timothy Tackett.1 A very minor crisis occurred in the town of Saint-Sever, in the extreme southwest of France, as the Civil Constitution was being put in

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place.2 On 9 April 1791 the town prepared to receive its new constitutional bishop, Jean-Pierre Saurine, with full honours. At four in the afternoon the cannon sounded and the bells rang out as planned – all except those of the Ursuline convent. Immediately several armed men went to the convent and demanded that the bells be rung. When the nuns replied that they could not do so in good conscience, the soldiers began to chop down the door. Thereupon Reverend Mother capitulated – after a fashion: “We are not going to ring them, but since you want it done, come in and ring them yourselves.” By this time the troop had swollen in numbers, and the community waited anxiously as the men tramped through the building and rang the bell. They left peaceably enough, but war had been joined, and the nuns knew it. Next morning the new bishop – “the intruder,” as the nuns persisted in calling him – departed, leaving orders for the convent to conform to the new laws. Several hours later the bishop’s delegate, accompanied by the mayor, the syndic, another notable, and “an ex-Capuchin” arrived at the grille. The syndic read out an official order installing the ex-Capuchin as the monastery’s director and forbidding the nuns to hear Mass from anyone else. Then the delegate began to speak with charm and benevolence, only to be cut short by Reverend Mother: “Permit me to speak from my heart and that of my community. We will not recognize any other bishop than the one to whom we have vowed obedience. We cannot accept Mr Saurine; we will not obey any order from him, and we will never communicate with a priest sent by him. These are the sentiments of the Ursulines of Saint-Sever. They cannot be false to the promises they made at the foot of the altar on the day of their profession; to be faithful to those promises, they will bear everything and joyfully suffer even death itself.” The delegate asked if he could have this in writing. The nuns assented, the whole community signing the statement. Still the delegate tried to persuade them “with seducing and artful words.” Then he presented Reverend Mother with a pastoral letter from the new bishop, but she refused even to touch it. On this promising note the group retired, “very confused,” as the nuns heard later from their friends in the town. The following day some city officials tried to deliver the letter at the door, but the portress rejected it “with indignation and scorn.” When a departmental official arrived some days later and summoned the superior to accept the letter, she again refused. “Just take it,” he urged. “If you don’t want to read it, burn it!” But he, too, had to leave without success, all the more chagrined because he had said publicly that he would win the community over. Two days later the ex-Capuchin arrived to demand the keys to the sacristy and the tabernacle, and to warn the nuns that he would be

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arriving to say Mass and that they must ring the bells for him. “The superior told him that he would have to ring them himself and that she would arrange to have the bell-ropes passed out of the cloister and into the church.” Needless to say, the nuns did not present themselves for his Mass. Every attempt he made to regularize his situation – to have the palms ready for the blessing on Palm Sunday, to secure the Easter candle and the various church ornaments used during the season – was met with stubborn resistance. It should be pointed out that most convents maintained a church for the public, into which the nuns could not even step because of their vow of clausura. Their choir was situated to one side, facing the altar but angled so as to be invisible to the public and fronted by a grille, in which was a small aperture that was opened only at Communion time. The standoff between the nuns and their unwanted chaplain took place at this grille. He had the church, they had the altar furnishings. It took a visit from the municipal officers to force them to hand over the sacred vessels. The men’s move to enter the inner sacristy (which was inside the cloister) was met with furious resistance from within. In the end, to prevent a forcible entry, the nuns handed the vestments and sacred vessels through the sacristy turntable; they also sent through a large cupboard, which was dismantled on one side and reassembled on the other so as to avoid the capitulation implied in opening the door. After that, the officials made sure that the nuns could no longer receive Communion – they locked the opening in their grille. The convent church, previously a space shared by the town and the community, was now in the hands of “the intruders.” During the night, however, the nuns arranged to have a lock put on the inner side of the church door that connected with the street. Thus they took the church back. “Immediately a complaint was taken to the mayor,” and he arrived post-haste with a locksmith to remove the lock – and, for good measure, to put bars on all the convent’s accesses to the church. By this time the Ursulines had become the centre of public attention. “The church was like a marketplace all day long. The rabble who had invaded it made jokes at our expense, and the lackeys of the town watched from the tower to make sure the work was not interrupted from inside. One would have thought that they were locking up criminals. We recited our office and said our prayers in the common room, because the abomination of desolation was truly in the holy place.” During this time, rumours were circulating that the nuns would soon be forced out or, at the very least, made to attend Mass in the parish church. “We then felt so troubled that we were more dead than alive,” wrote the memoirist. However, this did not stop them on Easter

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Monday, when Bishop Saurine returned to Saint-Sever, from again refusing to sound their bells and again receiving a violent visit from the soldiers. Saurine decided against visiting them, as he was being urged to do, and left them to the discretion of the municipality. Two days later the mayor arrived with a letter from a member of the National Assembly warning the community that if they did not accept the Civil Constitution they would be cut off from their pensions. Again the community refused unanimously. For six months the standoff lasted – the ex-Capuchin in the church, the nuns in the convent, neither having anything to do with the other. For the women, this meant no Mass, no Communion, no confession – nothing but the services they organized for themselves. On the Feast of the Federation, 14 July 1791, they again refused to ring their bells and again were visited by soldiers. Then came a surcease as the local authorities were forced to acknowledge the law passed by the National Assembly that “freedom of worship is implicit in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Despite the reluctance of the commune and the fierce opposition of the local Jacobin Club, the sisters regained the key to their own church and, better still, their own nonjuring chaplain. However, their contacts with the outside world were cut off; the outer door of their church was closed to the public (turning it, in effect, into a private chapel), and they were forbidden to teach day students. At the end of 1791 their bells were removed – a relief, they agreed among themselves, because they would no longer be summoned to salute “the intruder” or celebrate the Feast of the Federation. “In February the persecutions resumed … From that time on it was constantly being said that we were to be chased from our monastery … They [the Jacobin Club] went to Saurine and urged him to come to our convent and force us to receive him and to take the [civic] oath or, if we refused, to turn us out.” By now, much of the town had turned against them, including old friends. Only the bishop’s pacifism protected them; he argued, with considerable wisdom, “that harassments would never make us abandon our errors.” And so passed the spring, summer, and autumn of 1792. When the sisters were expelled that October, it was the end of a siege that had lasted eighteen months. The experience of this one monastery cannot be treated as typical. Many communities lived through the years 1790–92 with less difficulty; many others lived through it with more. But in several ways the episode throws light on the minds of the nuns and their relations with authority and the world around them. First of all, it is obvious that this community enjoyed both a strong superior and a strong esprit de corps. Reverend Mother was firm to the point of stubbornness in her dealings with the various officials who came to browbeat or cajole her. But on

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every occasion the community backed her, sometimes after discussion, sometimes spontaneously. Not every community was capable of such solidarity, which was the sine qua non of resistance. Furthermore, at the very beginning of the confrontation, the nuns had framed the issue as a choice between betrayal of their vows and martyrdom. Once declared, neither threats nor blandishments could rob them of their high sense of mission. We frequently find the language of martyrdom on the lips of religious women. “We are resolved to die rather than leave our house,” wrote the Ursulines of Carpentras in 1790. “We will all suffer a thousand deaths before renouncing our holy religion,” proclaimed the Ursulines of Lille in 1791.3 Both communities were anticipating by some considerable time the reality of the guillotine, and reasonable folk may well have thought them overdramatic. Yet how small and insignificant were the issues over which this battle raged! – The ringing of bells, the control of vestments and church plate, the acceptance or nonacceptance of a letter. One can imagine the frustration of the revolutionary officials at being foiled at such a level – and the fury of the clubmen on seeing this happen. The law was being flouted, and by mere women. Moreover, the public was watching with keen awareness and, no doubt, some amusement. It became imperative for the sake of law and order that something be done, that the nuns not be allowed to win. On the other side, the women were in their own element, where black was black and white was white, and small things mattered intensely. It was difficult to make deals with people who were talking martyrdom. “Religious women are a special breed,” Cardinal de Fleury had written fifty years earlier. “They will submit to outside power only in matters that do not offend their consciences.”4 Had the revolutionaries known of the earlier behaviour of Jansenist nuns – the last holdouts in that bitter and protracted struggle – they might have been more prepared for the contradictions they now faced.

the larger view Between the outbreak of the Revolution and the evacuation of the religious houses in the autumn of 1792, the relationship of the nuns of France with their new masters went through several different phases. First came a few months of peace, then a series of laws that threw them into adversity: the suspension of solemn vows on 28 October 1789, followed by their outright abolition on 13 February 1790; the nationalization of the Church’s property on 2 November 1789, followed on 20 March 1790 by a decree ordering an inquest into the properties and a census of the personnel of the monasteries. As early as January

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1790 communities were sending away their novices, often amid scenes of great distress. “It was like a bolt of lightning for us … our poor novices were inconsolable,” wrote a monastic annalist years later.5 They knew well what it portended. “They are respectfully bowing to your intentions,” wrote the bishop of Marseille to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “but they are very much alarmed by the fate that seems to be being prepared for them.”6 So they were already filled with suspicious anxiety as they were forced to open their houses up to the commissioners who came to inventory their possessions. And of course their fears were realized. “After the inventory all our goods were seized; our domaines were farmed out by the district, and our invested money was also taken from us,” wrote the annalist quoted above. Even though they were promised a pension, the loss of autonomy was clear to them. It is little wonder that when the mayor came and preached to them on the advantages of the Civil Constitution (“inestimable, according to him; we were citizens of liberty and equality!”), they reacted negatively, “many of us finding it difficult to contain our indignation.”7 Thus the great inquest of 1790, for all the decorum of the procèsverbaux, took place in an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. The commissioners thought they were offering the women their freedom; the nuns perceived that they were being denied their rights: “Is it possible,” wrote one of them to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “at a time when we hear the word ‘liberty’ sounding from every side, that we should be excluded from this privilege, in finding ourselves forced to quit a sanctuary that we chose in all freedom?”8 When they were asked, one by one, if they wished to renounce the religious life, many of them must already have been feeling furious. This certainly is the impression we get from one deponent, Marie-Jeanne Coqteaulx of the monastery of the Congrégation in Châlons-sur-Marne: She declares that at a time when oaths are being taken everywhere to be faithful to the Nation, the law and the king, she finds it very strange that religious are given permission to be unfaithful to God, and to forget the engagements which they contracted with Him; this permission is an injury to the Divinity and a dishonour to those who give it when they certainly do not have the right. She says: “Our duties are inviolable, no authority on earth can dispense us from them. Does anyone believe that we could in conscience go against a solemn oath made to God before the altars? How much weight could henceforth be put on oaths, even those made in public places? Whatever the consequences, I declare that I will hold to my vows … Such are my intentions, and you will please make them public, to disabuse those who might think me in a different disposition.”9

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The near unanimity of the nuns’ initial refusal to leave their convents may be attributed in good part to a spirit of anger.10 They believed in themselves and in their place in society; they had as yet no reason for physical fear; and they had every right to take umbrage over their treatment. Not every community or every nun resisted this invitation to freedom, but the number of women who accepted it was tiny. Four out of 515 nuns in the Côtes du Nord chose to leave; 2 out of 195 in Aude; 1 out of 466 in Douai; 1 out of 304 in the diocese of Arras.11 These numbers are typical of the breakdown across the country. Even in Paris, hotbed of revolution, the number of departures was “infinitely small.”12 The thirty defections in Rouen were almost entirely attributable to one community, the Dominicaines emmurées; the rest of the 600 nuns held firm to their communities. “The history of religious communities in Rouen during the Revolution is in large part a feminine history,” writes their historian.13 There was no clear pattern to the defections. Lack of discipline was a factor (though some unedifying houses, such as the abbey of Longchamp, chose to continue).14 Division in the community was another; once solidarity was lost, morale was weakened, and it became easier for the sisters to walk away. Thus in the Ursuline convent of Digne, the original nineteen nuns of the 1790 census were only seventeen a year later, at which time six of them, including the superior and three of the officers, decided to leave.15 Life in the cloister, once the common property was confiscated and each nun had her own pension, was difficult. “They wanted to see if by making us into proprietors, discord would come to divide us,” wrote the annalist of Bourg-Argental.16 Clearly, the strategem sometimes worked. Furthermore, the idea of freedom was unsettling enough to make some communities mutinous and quarrelsome. A strong esprit de corps and a superior with leadership qualities were necessary to prevent this from happening. On the other hand, esprit de corps and a strong superior could sometimes go too far, and some of the unanimity which the commissioners recorded in 1790 was grounded in timidity in the face of community pressure. Nuns who expressed a desire to leave were subjected to intense argument and even persecution. “They were in hell, so much were they being tormented,” ran one memoir.17 A later recollection, totally unsympathetic of course, allows us to imagine their feelings: Two of our sisters, seduced by the charm of a false liberty … deserted the cloister and re-entered the world. The superiors had spared no pains to prevent these unhappy sheep from leaving the fold. Mère Besnard, respectable for her age and her virtues, seeing one of them before the Blessed Sacrament, went

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and knelt beside her and, in friendly tones, said: “Remember, Sister, the commitments you made to the Lord in front of this altar.” She replied: “Don’t say anything more; I am tormented enough.”18

There were some even more extreme cases, where nuns were detained under duress and had to be liberated by the municipal authorities.19 Some thought has been given to the type of women who opted to leave. Dominique Dinet suggests that they tended to be middle-aged, isolated from their families, and often from out of town.20 Geneviève Reynes thinks the opposite: “Only women who were still young, and who had kept up their ties with their families, could be tempted by this adventure.”21 In fact, I have seen nothing that supports her view. The women who left were overwhelmingly middle-aged – most in their fifties, but some even older. Their reasons were not often given, but they probably ranged from a genuine desire for freedom to a real foreboding about the future of their communities. Some of them openly admitted that they could not face the hardships that seemed to be awaiting them in the convent. “I am 73 years old,” wrote a nun of Valence. “If our sisters continue to live in community, I shall continue the common life. If this hope is a vain one, I shall go where I can. I put my confidence and my resignation into the hands of Jesus Christ; He will give me the strength and consolation that I need.”22 Young nuns seldom deserted the religious life. Lay sisters were the most tenacious of all. Throughout these months, as monasticism was being dismantled, the Gallican hierarchy remained silent. Its situation was somewhat awkward. Over the past sixty years it had tolerated the state’s growing interference in its business, with the Commission des secours, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the Commission des réguliers. So when in 1790 the Ecclesiastical Committee claimed that the state had the right to decide on the existence of religious orders, it was able to point to precedents in the Old Regime. “To judge by past events, we have to admit that all of this flowed normally from the worldly spirit of the Enlightenment,” writes Rogier, and he surmises that the bishops were not upset to see an end to the monks.23 At any rate, the church authorities gave no intimation that the inventory or confiscation were illegal, and they made no major issue of the invitation to monks and nuns to leave their convents.24 No matter how distressed the religious communities felt, they had to comply. On the surface, things were still peaceful; there was as yet no open confrontation between the Revolution and the Church. Everything changed with the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath that followed. The offering of the oath and its public acceptance or rejection by parish priests throughout the

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country “thrust the Revolution clearly and unambiguously into the lives of common men and women everywhere.”25 France was forced to choose sides. For the great body of religious women still living in community, there was no contest. Now that they had the clear direction of their bishops, they rallied to the support of the nonjurors. Their chapels became the centres for refractory worship and their convents the hiding places for refractory priests. And as we have seen, their resistance to the constitutional clergy was often overt and, in the minds of the revolutionaries, not to be tolerated. In early April, in Paris and some other locations, nuns were seized and subjected to public whippings.26 For the most part the women who were thus maltreated were secular sisters, the cloistered nuns being perhaps protected by their higher social status and the fact that they were relatives of local notables. But the writing was on the wall. The Nation was growing more radical, and it was turning its angry eyes upon them. “[The] convents are usually the receptacle where the refractory priests and their dévotes unite,” wrote the journalist AntoineJoseph Gorsas, calling the nuns “furies under their veils and wimples,” “old witches,” and “hideous fanatics.”27 The teaching nuns faced a further challenge. In their capacity as public school teachers, they were, legally speaking, as much servants of the nation as the parish clergy were. “Are not catechists – black sisters, grey sisters, sisters of all colours – responsible for education, are they not public servants? Was it not the purpose of the decree of 27 November to submit them, too, to the taking of the oath?” wrote Gorsas.28 In late 1791, they too were ordered to take the oath on pain of losing their pensions and seeing their public schools closed. Again, there was massive refusal. This put the authorities in a quandary, because the closings would cause serious inconvenience to the public. “Where will you find schoolmasters as zealous and as disinterested as these virtuous teachers?” asked a petition drawn up by the citizens of Lille in early 1792,29 and moderates across the country agreed with them. Some administrations simply allowed the nuns to go on teaching. The municipal council of Bordeaux, for instance, while deploring the fact that “the religious of Sainte-Ursule and Notre-Dame … have declared that they will close their schools if we attempt to force this on them,” argued that “these schools are most useful to the less fortunate of our citizens, and their suppression would occasion discontent,” and decided to leave them open for the time being.30 The minister of the interior concurred: “It would be extremely unfortunate if the instruction of children was interrupted.”31 He ordered that schools across the country remain open.

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But if the nuns had won a battle, they were losing the war. By their defiance they had drawn upon themselves the full attention of the more radical revolutionaries. They were now being identified as tools of the refractories and therefore of the Counter-Revolution. “The nuns … are teaching their pupils principles contrary to the Constitution,” protested the Jacobin clubs, with justification.32 They argued that “it would be better for the children to receive no instruction at all than to receive a bad one.”33 The day came when the Nation agreed with them: “No part of public education will from now on be entrusted to … any houses of the çi-devant congregations of men and women.”34 The congregational schools were closed down. With that, the fate of the teaching congregations, along with that of the rest of the monastic world, was sealed. On 4 August 1792 the National Assembly ordered that all convents be evacuated. The sisters’ plight was made worse by the fact that through the drama of the oath they had incurred the public’s wrath. By causing the closing of schools, they had done something that directly affected ordinary people, and now the ordinary people turned against them. In a petition to the government, the sisters of the Congrégation in Vézelise wrote that since they had refused to take the oath, they were daily the target of new outrages: “Their cloister has been violated with impunity by crowds of madmen who have created much disorder.”35 They protested that anyone would have thought that their longtime service as free schoolteachers would have earned them the gratitude of the town. Their bewilderment and bitterness are understandable; in their own minds, they had done nothing but good to their neighbours. But the incident reveals the fragility of their relationship with “the people.” Once the rulers of the nation turned against them, the religious congregations found themselves exposed, as the following story shows. In Reims, at the same time that the September massacres were taking place in Paris, a mob seized and lynched several nonjuring priests, then roamed the city looking for more. The first the sisters in their monastery knew of it was when they heard the clamour outside their walls: “The crowd, pressing in front of our monastery gate continued to grow. They stayed there all the day … They demanded with great cries that our door be opened so that they could take the priests who (they believed) were hidden among us.”36 One can imagine the women’s fear and confusion. Magistrates arrived, but only to warn them that the crowd was out of control and that they should leave as soon as they could. They fled under cover of night, with a few trusted men to protect them.

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Up and down the country similar scenes were played out. Sometimes amid jeering or indifferent crowds, sometimes at night and in secret, the religious population took flight. Dressed awkwardly in secular clothes, carting the few possessions they were allowed to keep, they left on foot or in rented coaches and wagons. Some of the very old and very sick had to be carried out on chairs.

epilogue This is intended to be a study of cloistered life under the Old Regime, a regime that ended with the establishment of the First Republic on 22 September 1792. Its monastic institutions vanished almost completely within the next fortnight. However, there is an aftermath, a life after death so to speak, which deserves to be noted. During the revolutionary years, the nonjuring church owed its survival partly to the support of women. And active among these women were çi-devant religieuses. We have to recognize that the history of women in the revolutionary years is almost inaccessible. It is heavily dependent on the impressions of men, because women had hardly any means of speaking for themselves. Seen through the eyes of officialdom and journalists, they were either virtuous citoyennes and patriotic wives and mothers or irrational femmelettes doing the bidding of traitorous priests. Their own motivations – whether for actions in favour of or against the Revolution, or for simple indifference to it – were not considered and therefore have to remain a matter of conjecture. What is clear is that the decision that many of them made to defy the Revolution’s ecclesiastical reform was a factor in that reform’s ultimate failure. Timothy Tackett has written that although historians have given pride of place to the sans-jupons and tricoteuses of revolutionary Paris, “it was perhaps the humble women of provincial and rural France, protesting with their whole beings this ‘change in religion’ thrust upon them by the men in Paris, who delivered the single most influential political statement by any women of the revolutionary decade.”37 It should be remarked that while the majority of such protesters were simple peasant women (a fact that officials loved to dwell on at the time), not all counter-revolutionary women were of humble origin. They came from every social milieu.38 Their defiance was multiform – sometimes violent and open, sometimes clandestine. They harassed constitutional priests, sheltered nonjuring priests, and organized underground masses and distributions of sacraments. Children were secretly taught from old catechisms, “fanatical” pamphlets were circulated, and religious services were devised when the Mass could no longer be said. When all

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else failed, the faithful gathered in groups to say the rosary. When finally the Thermidoreans again allowed freedom of worship, it was often women who arranged for the repurchase and reoccupation of disaffected churches.39 In all this female counter-revolutionary activity, François Lebrun sees the hand of “the great mass of religious women, dispersed in 1792, living, for the most part, in France, and not too much interfered with during the Terror.”40 Certainly, nuns took an active role in the mischief that was done to the Constitutional Church; that much can be deduced by the number of them who, at one time or another, went to prison.41 But their importance as leaders in the female version of the Counter-Revolution can only be left to conjecture. For however much civic officals and constitutional priests in their exasperation wanted to make nuns scapegoats for the incivisme of women in general, there were plenty of other reasons why so many of the female sex disliked and opposed the Revolution.42 Arguably, the greatest contribution of the teaching nuns, both cloistered and secular, to the survival of the Catholic Church in France was made long before that church was in any danger – during the long, uneventful stretch of years when they met their students day after day and taught them to read, write, and pray.43 Attendance at a school operated by regulars did not of itself ensure lifelong fidelity to the Church (as the men of the Revolution, alumni of Jesuit- and Oratorian-run colleges, were to prove). So, again, we have to admit that we cannot quantify the influence of religious schoolmistresses on the women they taught. But we do know that well before 1789 there were more dévotes than dévots in France. As the century progressed and men forsook the Church, women became its chief mainstay. “In their detachment or their distancing [from the Church] many men were not followed by their wives,” remarks Jean Quéniart;44 and Michel Vovelle, reaching the same conclusion, maintains that even as the churches emptied of men, religious practice thrived among women: “The theme of the feminization of devotion recurs as a leitmotiv in our analyses.”45 Historians are now agreed that there was a long history behind the dechristianization movement of the Revolution; by the same token, there was a long history behind the attachment, manifested during the Revolution, of many people – and more women than men – to the old religion. “If women had been enlightened,” complained a representative to the Convention in 1793, “priestly fanaticism would not have written the Revolution in characters of blood in so many unfortunate cities.”46 How proud the teaching sisters would have been to hear those words! The gender divide was of utmost importance to the future of France and the church in France. As a result of the loyalty of women to the

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old religion, even as their menfolk were adhering to the Revolution, “a model homme/patriot, femme/fidèle aux prêtres” was allowed to emerge, which coloured the thinking of Frenchmen for over a century to come.47 Women were seen by republicans as the tools of the clergy, the fifth column in society, undermining the rule of Reason. Apologists for the Church sought to counteract this image by consistently downplaying the “feminization” aspect. But the fact remains that without women, the pews would have been empty. As for the women themselves, they simply continued their march, as can be seen from the extraordinary burgeoning of their religious population (from 13,000 in 1808 to 130,000 in 1880).48 One of the casualties of this struggle for male validation was the nuns’ reputation for courage in the face of danger. The men of the Revolution had always decried them as the poor silly victims of scheming nonjurors. Women’s convents, they had maintained, were “monastic bastilles, with refractory priests for jailers.”49 It was natural for republican historians to adopt the same line. But it is disappointing that church historians – most of them clergymen – often did the same thing. While granting that many women went to their death for their principles, they still loved to depict the gender in outlines of soft and fragile femininity: “doves … all trembling with fear,”50 made strong (temporarily) through a miracle of grace. The nuns themselves retained memories of a different sort, of resilient no-nonsense women who faced danger and disruption with an obstinate and often outspoken courage. But their memories remained locked within their communities and did not often impinge on the public historiographical sphere. I should like to conclude with one of these in-house memories – of an encounter between a republican official and an old nun in Brittany. Like the little confrontation with which this chapter started, it was of no consequence in the greater scheme of things. But the fact that it was treasured for most of a century shows that religious women did not see themselves as “trembling doves” and that they valued courage and outspokenness as much as any man. The official’s interrogation of the old lady, an ex-Ursuline, who had been discovered running a small clandestine school, occurred in the Year V. Here is a part of the interview as it survived in local tradition: (q) “What doctrine are you teaching your pupils?” (a) “The faith of our fathers.” (q) “And if our fathers were mad, would we have to follow them?” (a) “Citizen, I knew your father; he was a good Catholic and a man of sense and character. He would not have spoken to me as you are doing.”51 The official’s reply is not recorded. He did not have spiritual descendants to commemorate his words and deeds. The old nun did.

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part two The Anatomy of the Cloister

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7 Clausura and Community

The female monastic community was an organism with two skeletons, so to speak: the exoskeleton of clausura, which kept the women close to each other and apart from the world outside; and the endoskeleton of the Rule and constitutions, which defined all the functions of the community and spelled out the way in which they should be performed. Without these two skeletons, female monasticism could not have operated as it did.

cl au s u r a In 1640 Marie Guyart was visited in her Québec monastery by a group of Abenakis: “They asked me why we had our heads all covered up, and why we were only seen through holes (that is what they called our grille). I told them that this was the custom for virgins in our country, and that they were not seen otherwise.”1 If the Abenakis went away mystified, it is not altogether surprising. This must have been, for them, an extraordinary sight. Clausura, the physical enclosing of female religious, cannot have made any sense to their society. It is arguable that in the strict form to which it had been restored by the Council of Trent, clausura was already at odds with the currents of life in Marie’s own country. Yet it was to stand, rock solid or almost so, until the end of the Old Regime. At the beginning of Catholic renewal in France, several influential reformers had argued for the mitigation of clausura.2 They had insisted that a less trammelled life would allow women to do more good

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in a world that badly needed it. They had also maintained that clausura was a recent phenomenon in the Church’s life and was therefore dispensable. Their argument received some support in Rome, since Cardinal Bellarmine himself, in a letter to François de Sales, approved the latter’s plan for an uncloistered community, adding that what the Church had done the Church could now undo: “Before Boniface VIII, there were religious who were not confined to their monasteries in the sense that they could not go out when necessary … Solemn vows and strict clausura only became church law under Boniface VIII.”3 The event to which Bellarmine referred was Pope Boniface’s promulgation of the bull Periculoso in 1298. Until then, enclosure of nuns had been a counsel of perfection. Now it was on its way to becoming universal law.4 Over the following centuries the pope’s directives, which were fairly general in their wording, received the attention of glossators – with powerful consequences. On the one hand their focus was narrowed, while on the other, their stringency was increased. The tradition that perfection was best achieved within monastic enclosure was very old. “A monk outside his monastery is like a fish out of water,” ran the saying. But it had originally applied to both monks and nuns. Now Periculoso initiated a process by which, at the very time that male monastics were relieved of the need for enclosure, it became for female monastics the keystone of the religious life.5 “Clausura, which to start with was only a means and a precaution for men and women engaging themselves in ‘celibacy for the kingdom,’ became little by little, and exclusively for women, an end in itself to which all feminine religious life had to be subordinated.”6 Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commentators elaborated on the requirements of clausura and the punishments for infractions. With developing laws came a developing rationale. Each generation of glossators added strength to the principle that as far as nuns were concerned, chastity was virtually their raison d’être. “There is hardly a hint in the literature that religious women might encounter any other moral dangers, or that the cultivation of other virtues might be in order.”7 It was a peculiarly limited vision of female sanctity that Periculoso and its glosses developed. The immense burden of remaining chaste required high walls, barred windows, and double-locked gates. But once those gates were locked and those windows barred, there was little left for nuns to achieve. Furthermore, this definition, this downsizing so to speak, of the female calling to sanctity was made during an era of spiritual effervescence when many women were experimenting with new forms of religious life. At a time when female devotion was becoming somewhat ebullient in the wider world, Periculoso tried to confine the devotion of nuns within safe though uninspiring channels. It had

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only limited success among monastic women, while a flood of semireligious women – beguines and tertiaries – simply overflowed the banks and went their own way. The Council of Trent came down firmly on the side of Periculoso. In its final session it renewed the decree, adding stiff sanctions for violators. All religious women were to be enclosed. Clausura was to be enforced by the church authorities on pain of excommunication.8 This meant that the walls of women’s monasteries were to be high enough to close off any view, either from within or from without. The entrances were to be locked and double-locked, their keys remaining in the possession of senior officers of the monastery. Spaces where the nuns came close to the outside world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed grilles. No men, not even priests, might enter the enclosure except for the most pressing reasons. Where female pensionnaires were allowed, strict limitions were imposed: only girls from five to eighteen years of age were eligible, and they were to leave the convent rarely and then under the most rigorous supervision. Mature women had no place within the cloisters, since their worldliness constituted an unacceptable temptation for the nuns. In other words, religious women were to be shielded from all disturbing influences. Trent left a lasting image of nuns as frail, susceptible beings whose virtue required heroic protection. Some reformers of the seventeenth century wanted more for religious women. They wanted them to be free to go where they were needed (though always with modesty and under obedience); but beyond that, they wanted to foster a much more spiritual life within the cloister. François de Sales once said that he wished to fill his monastery not with inmates but with religious; he did not want prisoners, he wanted true lovers of Jesus Christ. It was not enough to build high walls; a new energy had to infuse the cloister. “If the spirit of true devotion reigns in a congregation, a moderate enclosure will suffice to make good servants of Christ; if it does not reign there, the strictest enclosure will not be sufficient.”9 His words found an echo among the new congregations. “The enclosure of walls without an interior retreat of the spirit would be a prison rather than a religious haven.”10 However, to reformers of a more conservative stripe, François de Sales seemed to be asking for less, not more: for relaxation of the established rules. The conservatives held firm, and the new religious orders for women – not only the one in question (the Visitation) but all three teaching congregations being studied here – were constrained to submit to strict clausura. However, serious contradictions remained. For one thing, the classroom teaching of externe students to which the three congregations

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were committed was incompatible with old-fashioned clausura, an obvious fact that gave the Holy See cause for anxiety for several years.11 Physical enclosure could be maintained by a complicated system of locking and unlocking doors, but exposure to outside influences could not be avoided as long as children went in and out of the monastery school. For another thing, the new orders were essentially urban, as they had to be if they were to serve their teaching purpose. They had inched their way into the crowded cities of Old Regime France, buying up property as the market and their own financial situation allowed. The monastic solitude that could be achieved in wooded valleys and remote countryside was beyond their grasp. Their space was limited and forever threatened; neighbours might punch holes through their walls or raise tall buildings that overlooked their grounds; passersby could singe the ears of both nuns and pensionnaires with their loud shouts and crude language; trespassers could, with a little will and agility, break in to do damage, steal, or just play tricks. Even the town worthies were not above the occasional peek into the cloister. Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, confided to his journal that he had climbed a ladder in order to peer over the wall at a funeral taking place in the grounds of the local monastery.12 He gave no indication that this was unusual or reprehensible behaviour. A historian of medieval nuns has suggested that whatever the Church’s intention, convent walls served the communities within them “as permeable membranes rather than watertight seals.”13 How much more was this true of the city-based convents of the Old Regime! Yet there seems to be no doubt that the religious women of these convents took their clausura seriously, for several reasons. For one thing, they themselves and the families from which they came equated clausura with respectability. From the very beginning of the reform movement in the early seventeenth century, dévot society had made it plain that religious life without enclosure was déclassé. It was only after the congregations submitted to enclosure that they started their major expansion. “It was then that persons of condition engaged themselves, who would not have entered a simple congregation.”14 Underlying the discourse about social status was a subliminal message, a lingering echo of Periculoso. Cloistered women were safe women; as long as they stayed within their walls, no one could impugn their virtue. “A prodigious number of virgins find [there] a protection for their innocence; far from the world and its dangers, they can safeguard their salvation.”15 This was a sadly vapid view of female religious life, but it was the justification that the leaders of society, both ecclesiastical and secular, gave for the cloistering of women throughout the Old Regime.

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Secondly, the nuns had every reason to fear the wagging tongues of their neighbours. The wider public, for all that it disliked clausura, was paradoxically its greatest enforcer because of the scandalous delight it took in hearing and spreading news of untoward behaviour in the convent. Stories of wayward nuns had been told as early as the Middle Ages, if not before; it has been suggested that they may have been a form of wish fulfillment on the part of the tellers.16 The delectation persisted into modern times. “Désir de fille est un feu qui dévore / Désir de nonne est cent fois pis encore,”17 went the ditty. The Enlightenment which, as Olwen Hufton has said, “immersed woman in nature and made her the creature of her reproductive organs”18 was able to state the same notion in more learned language: “The passions concentrated in the silence and obscurity of the cloister have a vehemence and force which the openness and delicacy of a dissipated world cannot attain … One can compare spirits of this kind to volcanoes.”19 In the face of such stereotypes, respectable communities could only react by making their silence deeper and their obscurity more impenetrable – by trying to ensure that their nuns never appeared at the windows, traded conversations at the gate with outsiders, received unauthorized letters, confided too much to their relatives in the parlour, or lifted their veils in front of strangers. Communities that were found lacking were likely to pay a heavy price. Failure to achieve and maintain enclosure was sufficient cause to close a monastery down.20 The official guarantors of clausura were the bishops and their delegates. If a community’s vigilance slackened – if it put an extra gate in the wall or allowed windows to be installed with a view of the street – the next canonical visitation could become an event to be dreaded. Bishops, according to one historian, were permanently obsessed with the question of clausura, and their directives prove it. “The words ‘walls, doors, windows, grilles, locks, keys’ multiply and pile up, and criss-cross every page.”21 No other matter occupied as much space in their ordinances for female houses. But in fairness, we can see why. They were working for two masters: the Council of Trent, which made them responsible under pain of excommunication for the enclosure of monastic women; and the court of public opinion, which even the aristocratic bishops of the Old Regime were loath to scandalize. Their first concern was the physical restraints – the height of the walls, the shuttering of the outside windows, the doubling of the locks on all entrances, and the refinement of the grilles that separated the nuns from their visitors in the parlours: “The wall that separates the convent from the college is too low and pierced by two or three openings” … “As soon as possible, iron bars must be put on the windows of the choir, the sacristy, the common room and the vestibule, also on the

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windows of the parlours, so that enclosure is guaranteed … In all the parlours, there is to be a second grille on the inner side; it can be made of simple wood until it can be replaced with iron” … “The sacristy window opening onto the street is to be blocked up … The windows of the pensionnaires’ refectory are to be walled up, if possible, or at least closed by iron bars and wooden shutters” … “The outside grilles of the main parlour are only of wood, and the inside ones simple vertical iron bars widely separated from each other, one can easily pass one’s hand through this double grille.”22 The list goes on; there is hardly a record of a pastoral visit that does not mention some aperture needing to be blocked up. These strictures were all directed at “active” clausura: the possibility that nuns might leave the precincts or communicate illicitly with outsiders. The bishops also concerned themselves with “passive” clausura: what strangers might be admitted into the cloister and in what circumstances. Where men were concerned, the list was short: priests to attend the dying, doctors and surgeons, builders and repairmen, gardeners and bakers (sometimes), and – very occasionally – “a man to butcher the pig” or perform some other such duty.23 Wherever the men went, they were to be accompanied by senior nuns.24 As for women, their entry into the cloister was contingent on the bishop’s permission, and in the early years it was not easily given. Even older girls were eyed with some suspicion, as the potential purveyors of worldly news and bad attitudes. They were normally expected to be either gone or in the novitiate by the time they were sixteen or eighteen. Two points should be made. First, the bishops themselves became increasingly generous in granting permission both for the departure of nuns from the monastery for reasons of health or incompatibility, and for the reception into the pensionnat of older women. Second, the fact that the same directives were repeated time and again through much of two centuries suggests that the rules were not always scrupulously observed. If all the exterior windows had been blocked up, there would have been no need to keep warning the nuns “to avoid looking out of the windows onto the street, which is a symptom of dissipated spirits who are beginning to tire of their estate.”25 If the entrances had been properly locked, there should have been no complaints about pensionnaires “loitering at the door, without supervision.”26 The impression given by the records is that nuns allowed creeping modifications to their strict clausura, enough to attract occasional censure but not enough to damage the essential integrity of the cloister. There is negative evidence to support this impression. Even during the Jansenist crisis of the eighteenth century, when many bishops were bent on disciplining rebellious communities, they did

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not allege that clausura was being violated. Most female monasteries kept their record clean enough to escape the order of suppression that the Commission des secours, cooperating with the bishops, would gladly have handed them.27 Thus there were good institutional reasons to explain why, until the very end of the Old Regime, some five out of every six religious women were enclosed.28 The cloister was a defence against ill repute and a haven of respectability for unmarried daughters of “good” family – but only if it remained a true cloister. The women within had to be safe in the one respect that really mattered: their chastity. “When a religious wants to do wrong, the grille is locked,” remarked Vincent de Paul.29 Was there anything else to be achieved behind that locked grille? In the public perception, it seems that the answer was no. Once enclosure was secured, the life within it was assumed to be largely meaningless, even destructive. Colbert is reputed to have said that monasteries “only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”30 From the days of Colbert to those of Diderot, the notion of victimization went from strength to strength.31 The talk on the streets can be summed up by an opinion voiced in 1720, by a man of irreprochable dévot antecedents, on the occasion of a young nun’s death: “This is an early end to her sacrifice. In my mind it is the happiest thing that could happen to a religious.”32 But this assessment of clausura as a negative value was countered by the highly positive case made of it in the writings of the nuns themselves. Whether by choice or necessity, the cloister was the place where these women were going to spend their lives, and it was up to them to decide whether they would do so as prisoners or as true lovers of Jesus Christ. The result was a spirituality built against the backdrop of their enclosure – “our beloved solitude,” as Marie Guyart, and many others after her, called it. The sense of sacrifice was overlaid with a sense of election. The first Ursulines of Quebec were urged to regard the cloister as “a fortress in which are housed the principal riches and treasures of the blood of Jesus Christ.”33 Half a century later the Ursuline Jeanne de Bourges described it as “the Lord’s vineyard where hedges and fences must be raised to protect the fruit, and to make it a garden of pleasure for the heavenly Bridegroom.”34 In 1790, when the National Assembly abolished all solemn vows, a great chorus of protests broke out among nuns across the country, the following being from the Ursulines of Le Mans: Someone has dared to paint a picture for you of the cloister as a place of horror and slavery, with the religious as so many victims in chains, who long for a happy revolution to come and break their bonds and rescue them from their servitude … We have God alone for our portion, we have taken Him by choice,

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and our only ambition is to be as faithful as possible in fulfilling the purposes of our institut.35

Loving testimonials such as these do not prove, by themselves, that every nun was at every time contented with her cloister. But they certainly affirm that there were some, and possibly many, who were. A historian of religious communities has listed the possible reasons for their contentment: stability, the support of a spiritual “family,” security, social prestige.36 In the writings of another historian we learn of a further powerful motivation: pride, “an aristocratic and proud morality which pushes the spirit of sacrifice to its extreme.”37 Cloistered nuns were invited to take pride in belonging to an elite company. It is impossible to know how many did so. But there is evidence that clausura was a way of life that had its attractions, even when the walls had fallen away. The small colony of Ursulines who made their way across the Atlantic towards Louisiana in 1727 did their best to maintain clausura, shuttling between the deck and their single cabin with its six bunks to a side, where the porthole was permanently closed in spite of the stifling heat. They had most certainly “paid their tribute to the sea,” and a landfall in Madeira must have been welcome to them. But when the ship docked and their Jesuit directors gave them permission to go ashore, they proudly stayed aboard within the limits of their temporary enclosure. A small sacrifice, perhaps, but a completely voluntary one.38 The “beloved solitude” was more than just a matter of walls and grilles.

the community offices Every monastic rule started out with the premise that community order depended on a strict internal hierarchy, culminating at the summit in a single person. Whether an abbot or abbess, a prior or father guardian, this person was entrusted with large powers of discretion for which he/she would be answerable in the world to come. “Let him know,” ran the Rule of Saint Benedict, “that he who has undertaken the government of souls must prepare himself to render an account of them [on the Day of Judgment].”39 It was very much the same charge as that laid on every absolute ruler. As originally framed, it did not carry with it an obligation to make an accounting here on earth, any more than that of the king did. The Superior The superior of a women’s monastery inherited the same solemn mandate. However, in the “new” women’s monasteries, while the superior’s

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responsibilities were numerous, her power was anything but absolute. She was hedged around with a number of safeguards to keep her from exceeding her powers. After all, she was a woman: “Let her never forget the quality of her sex and the sex of those whom she has in charge; which, it should be recognized according to the judgment of the wisest persons, is as weak and inherently incapable of governing either others or itself as it is difficult and dangerous to be governed.”40 For this reason, she was subject to the bishop (the community’s ultimate superior) and to the priest whom the bishop named as director.41 She was also bound by a special oath to the most stringent observance of the Rule and constitutions. How close was the community’s subjection to the bishop? He came from time to time, in the course of a regular pastoral visit or when some crisis arose. A more regular supervision was provided in his name by the director. This priest’s function was largely one of support and spiritual guidance, though (it was to be hoped) always within the boundaries of the Rule. His regular responsibilities included overseeing the community’s choice of confessors and, with the bishop’s authorization, presiding at the election of the superior. If any major expenditure was being considered, he had to be consulted. He also exercised the right of intervention: he could, in extraordinary circumstances, overrule the superior. But his influence on the day-to-day running of the monastery should not be exaggerated. In fact, the director sometimes lived in another town and, on the evidence of the monastic annales, could be difficult to get hold of when he was needed. Of course, when troubles arose, as for instance during the Jansenist crisis, he could become an active agent of the bishop’s power. But for many communities and for much of the time, he was a distant figure whose interventions were little more than formalities.42 As an Ursuline historian tells us, “It was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed.”43 The superior was responsible for the community’s material wellbeing and smooth running. She maintained relations with the outside world, with clergy, patrons, friends, and business acquaintances. If there was a question of going to court, it was she who decided it. If plans were to be made for building or renovation, it was she who initiated them. Together with the bursar, she managed the monastery’s financial affairs. She was also the ultimate manager of operations; immediately after her election she was expected to shuffle the community, so to speak, assigning the sisters to new posts or keeping them where they were. She was expected at the beginning of her mandate to visit the schools regularly until she was well acquainted with them, and thereafter to confer frequently with the mistresses in charge. Every decision of consequence within the community had to have her approval.

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And at the end of every day, with her keys in hand, she was expected to visit the monastery gates to ensure, in person, the perfect maintenance of clausura for another night.44 A good superior was more than an administrator. She was also required to be a spiritual guide, to preside over the weekly chapter for the correction of faults, known as the Coulpes, and to give regular spiritual conferences to the community. She was expected to meet with the nuns individually, “to know their interior, and to have them report to her on the state of their prayer life and their temptations.”45 And of course she had to maintain the deepest discretion, “[her] heart being like a faithful deposit of the secrets communicated to her.”46 She was to show no favouritism. Obviously, the trust and respect of the sisters were of great consequence to a superior: “Her government as Mother should be gentler than a father’s, inasmuch as this can be despotic and seigneurial, and similar to those who command as masters or kings of nations.”47 As part of her mothering role, she was to set an example of humility. The Rule ordered her to take her turn in the lowlier tasks of the monastery. Jeanne de Lestonnac, foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame and superior of the Bordeaux monastery, worked regularly in the kitchen and, while she was there, took orders from the cook, who was a lay sister.48 Of all the superior’s responsibilities, the maintenance of good order and smooth relations among the sisters must have been one of the most challenging. “She must never permit any partiality or unusual familiarity of affection among the religious, in order that selfish love given to creatures does not chase away the pure love of God.”49 The danger that she had to guard against was not only that of “disorderly affections” but also that of cliquishness. Divided communities could be hellish places, the sisters “like harpies one side against the other.”50 On the other hand, harmonious communities were places to be proud of.51 Division or harmony, prosperity or poverty – much depended on the superiors. Some of them succeeded triumphantly: “She seemed born to govern” … “It required a genius like hers to tide us over the bad times when the billets de banque were in circulation” … “She displayed to perfection the qualities needed to be a superior … She understood business; [she had] prudence and firmness, and a great vigilance both to maintain good order and procure the temporal and spiritual good of the community” … “Firm and watchful in maintaining the Rule and the discipline of the house, sustaining and animating by her example, prudent and wise in delicate situations, ordering everything with sensitivity and gentleness; caring and compassionate for the infirm, providing for everyone’s needs with true motherly tenderness … never

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thinking of her own needs, so attentive was she to those of others.”52 A really good superior was more precious than rubies to the community she ruled. And, it must be pointed out, just as rare. Of the twenty, or thirty, or forty nuns eligible at any given time, the chances of having one such person were slim; of having even two or three, remote. The nuns knew by experience what made a good superior. “The more the person in command was esteemed, the easier it was to obey,” remarked one eulogist.53 One of the preconditions for esteem was seniority. According to the rules, the superior had to be of a certain age – usually thirty – and with five years of profession. In the early years of communities, some superiors were young, very young,54 but that was because the communities themselves were young and so had little choice. As they matured, they came to expect their superiors to be middle-aged, if not elderly. Geneviève de Razes’s election at the early age of forty was, her eulogist remarked, almost unprecedented in the community.55 It should not come as a surprise that the superior was often one of the more aristocratic members of the community. One of the qualities that made for esteem was noble birth. As long as noblewomen continued to enter the teaching monasteries, they took the lion’s share of the superiorats.56 The tone they gave to the community and the respect and influence they commanded in the world outside, combined with what were considered their inborn qualities of leadership, made them natural candidates for the position. As has already been said, Old Regime monasticism was transfused with aristocratic values. Self-sacrifice and generosity in the service of the Lord were seen as essentially aristocratic qualities, as natural to the breed as self-sacrifice and generosity were in the service of the Crown. Thus, the Ursulines of Blois could say of Marguerite d’Illiers: “Though her brothers and nephews died on the field of honour in the service of the king, her death is more precious, since she became sick in the exercises of our holy institut.”57 Similarly, the historian of Notre-Dame in Poitiers could commemorate the achievements of the late superior, Thérèse de Brilhac, by saying that she “reaffirmed, by her piety and her other excellent virtues, the glory of her family who have done so much honour to Justice in the Parlement of Paris and in the Presidial of Poitiers and to the service of arms in defence of the château against the leader of the heretic rebels, Admiral de Coligny.”58 The achievements of some superiors should not obscure the failures of others. Many houses languished under the rule of inadequate superiors, such as the woman who asked to be relieved of her duties, pleading that she “did not have the strength or courage” to sustain the trials of her little community.59 From time to time, superiors were

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sent packing to other houses. In Châteauroux in 1770, a complaint from the community about the superior’s nepotism and extravagance led to her banishment.60 In La Ferté-Bernard in 1766, when the superior had some sort of a breakdown and physically attacked a novice, other members of the community swiftly notified the authorities, and she was removed.61 Sometimes the shoe was on the other foot; there were communities that seem to have made a habit of being critical of their superiors – Châtellerault being a case in point. “In choosing them to govern us we do not render them impeccable,” wrote the annalist tolerantly,62 but it does not seem that her sisters paid her much heed. They had been tearing their superiors apart for decades. Perhaps the joy which some women expressed when leaving the office, and the tears which others shed when elected, were more genuine than is sometimes suspected. The right given it by the Council of Trent to elect its own superiors was treasured by the community and, as has been seen, interference in the process by bishops or directors often met with resistance.63 The procedures for elections were laid out with care. “It is very important that the superiors be legitimately elected,” warned one Rule. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of these regulations and constitutions.”64 For a month before an election, members were ordered to stop discussing the subject in order to avoid divisiveness. They were not to campaign: “They are forbidden, under pain of losing their … voice [in the Chapter] for three years, to intrigue or cabal, either for themselves or for others.”65 On the day itself, under the eye of the bishop or his deputy, the process began with the election of scrutineers, who distributed the ballots (one for each vocale) and, in the presence of the Chapter, displayed the empty ballot box before locking it. The votes were cast, then counted, in the presence of everyone involved. If necessary, second and third ballots could take place, until one candidate emerged with a plurality of votes. The new superior was then acclaimed and the keys to the monastery delivered to her as a symbol of the authority now vested in her. The ballot papers were immediately burnt to ensure that secrecy was preserved.66 The superior’s term lasted for three, four, or six years, depending on the congregation. Sometimes she could be re-elected, sometimes not. But whatever the particular Rule stipulated, there was going to be an end to her term, at which time she was expected to revert to the ranks. Often she served as assistant for a while and then was re-elected to office – a sort of turning of the Rule, according to one historian, which allowed two women congenial to each other to retain control indefinitely.67 But if the community decided otherwise, both superior and assistant had to be content with a single term.

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The final task of election day was the choice of the new superior’s discrètes.68 This small council of senior nuns acted in both an advisory and executive capacity. They were charged to meet regularly with the superior to discuss the management of the community: the financial policy, the sale or purchase of property, the dispatch of sisters to other foundations, the admission of mature pensionnaires, and, of course, the reception of postulants. They were also consulted over matters concerning the spiritual welfare of the community. Thus, a sort of control was put in place over the superior’s actions: “The prioress is not to resolve any affair without the advice of her assistants.”69 She was to take this advice “readily and with good nature and cheerfulness.”70 However, it was always made clear that she had the final say.71 If the superior was expected to consult the discrètes on matters of importance to the community, she and they together were also expected to report to the Chapter at least once or twice a year. The Chapter was made up of the vocales, choir nuns with a certain seniority. Their “voice,” or right to vote, was precious to them and, in principle, could be denied only in cases of serious fault.72 During the Jansenist crisis, women who were stripped of their vote because of suspected heterodoxy made frequent attempts to appeal to Parlement against their bishops’ ruling. The authorities may not always have taken their rights seriously, but they themselves did. As Madame Jégou has remarked, the democratic character of Chapter meetings should not be exaggerated. “Although the nuns, through the intermediary of the Chapter, could prevent abuses, they seldom took the initative.” The superior proposed, and the Chapter disposed, almost always concurring with her opinions.73 However, the Chapter’s function of control was an important one, which the superior disregarded at her peril. Strictly speaking, it was the Chapter that authorized the superior and her council “to act and negotiate all the temporal affairs of the monastery in the name of the community.”74 A contemporary memoir advised that “for a financial transaction by the superior to be valid, she must have authority from the community in the form of a capitular act.”75 Communities could even challenge transactions that were made without their knowledge. Thus the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Loches won the right to reoccupy a house which the superior and council had sold without the Chapter’s approval.76 The Chapter of Notre-Dame of Poitiers was less successful: its attempt to disavow a dowry of billets de banque accepted by the superior without its authorization came to naught.77 But given the privacy with which nuns preferred to surround their dealings, an open rebuke of this kind amounted to a serious disgrace. When it was discovered in 1708 that the superior of the Ursulines of Rouen had kept the Chapter

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in the dark while the agent made free with their finances, she was discreetly allowed to retire to another monastery to end her days.78 The niceties were observed, but everyone knew that it was a hardship to die in any house but one’s own. A final check on the doings of the executive branch of the house was exercised by the canonical visitor – a priest, secular, or regular, who came from outside to evaluate the regularity of the monastery. He was authorized to speak to every professed member of the community, including the lay sisters, and to recommend improvements. His effectiveness, however, was dependent on the cooperation of the community. “Those whom God gives the confidence to open their hearts to the grand vicar or to the director must not be censured,” wrote one visitor.79 We can guess the reason for his frustration. Communities sometimes had a way of keeping things to themselves and persuading their members not to confide in the men who came to correct them. We have corroboration of this from the other side: from the annalist of the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault. She reported on a long-standing internal quarrel, made worse when the bishop sent in a visitor – from another town, no less! – to interview the community. The annalist expressed surprise that the sisters would have spoken about one another to a “stranger.”80 A sort of omerta could be practised by religious communities, shielding their internal affairs from the eyes of others; this explains why serious problems sometimes persisted without the authorities’ knowledge. However, the community itself, as long as it was well run, was its own most potent enforcer. The assistant, or subprioress, had the power to advise and reproach the superior and, indeed, to go over her head to the director if the matter was serious enough.81 And watching in the wings there were other nuns, well versed in the Rule and determined to prevent the least infraction. We see their outlines in the death notices: “Our dear sister was a pillar of the community, a friend of all the observances, of good order and exactitude … One could be sure that everything she said was free of dissimulation” … “She always had an ardent zeal for the regularity of the monastery” … “Her mind was made up in support of regularity” … “She had a great veneration for all the ancient customs, and was the enemy of all novelty and singularity.”82 All in all, the superior did not suffer from lack of scrutiny, and it is difficult to see how she could have gone far astray if the community was not willing to go with her. It can be argued, then, that women’s monasteries had their own form of constitutional government – not representative government, to be sure, but government according to known statutes, carried out by a single elected head in consultation with a chosen or elected council

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and a larger body made up of senior members, all subject to the ultimate control of the ordinary, and all, in a subtle way, answerable to the women whom they governed. The framers of the rules had done everything in their power to ensure stability and fairness. If communities ran into difficulties, it was not for lack of a blueprint. The Community Officers The council of discrètes normally included the other executive officers of the house: the assistant, the zélatrice, and the dépositaire or bursar. The assistant was often either an ex-superior or a superior-in-waiting. Her first role was to stand in for the superior when extraordinary circumstances arose. Under normal conditions she was the superior’s chief adviser and confidante, and her right arm in the management of the community. It was her duty to work closely with the sisters, listening to their complaints and correcting their shortcomings. She was also expected to carry their concerns to the superior and, if necessary, to warn her of problems. While the superior dealt with the larger issues, the assistant concentrated on smaller administrative details. “Nothing escaped her, she was always attentive to all our needs,” wrote one eulogist.83 She also had the practical management of the house. “She made every effort to keep the house in a charming state of neatness,” wrote another.84 The zélatrice was a specialist in the Rule, and her business was to guard against infractions, even by the superior. She seems a more shadowy figure in the literature, and it may be assumed that her function was often absorbed into that of the assistant. This would certainly be the case as the monastic populations diminished and the nuns were forced to combine their roles. On the other hand, the bursar became more and more visible among monastic officers and, as the economic environment turned unfavourable, more and more essential to the survival of the community. Her office, according to one death notice, was “one of the most arduous in the religious life.”85 She was charged with keeping the accounts, inventories, and registers, paying the bills, collecting debts and pensions, and, together with the superior, planning the budget and anticipating extraordinary expenses. The Rule attempted to instruct her. It advised her on how to manage the payment of dowries (securing the cash as soon as possible) and how to deal with outside agents (“She will not pay the procureur entirely until the business is completed and he has given her all the pieces”).86 But no amount of instruction could substitute for native ability. Like a good superior, a good bursar was a precious commodity, as we can see from the encomiums of the death

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notices: “She did not find any business dealing difficult; outsiders were amazed at the way in which she explained them; she was firm in exacting payments from our debtors” … “She was skilled in business affairs … In different consultations with the ablest of lawyers, the solidity of her judgment was admired” … “Chosen to be our bursar at a time when our affairs were extremely complicated, she straightened them out with a skill that surpassed the ordinary capability of our sex. It is to her rare prudence and excellent management that this house is indebted for the good state in which we see it today.”87 As if this was not enough, the bursar was also responsible for the physical functioning of the house. If workers came into the enclosure, she had to direct, supervise, and pay them. At the same time, she oversaw the lesser officers: the cellarer, the refectorian, the cook, the nuns in charge of the linen room, the gardener, and so on. Hers was a formidable workload. It is little wonder that many women who held the office were seen to have compromised their health as a result.88 All the monastery’s business dealings with the outside world went through the bursar’s office. The layout of this office was minutely described: “A room with stone vaults, to avoid the accident of fire … Around the room, wooden triangles, on which there will be iron hooks to hang labelled bundles of different sorts of papers [such as] permanent contracts, land rents, acquisitions of land and houses, judgments passed for rentes … land registrations … dowry contracts, contracts of constitution, farm leases … receipts for payments, sentences and orders, etc.” The bursar was also to have a chest with a triple lock in which to keep important papers, and four ledgers.89 As in so many other instances, the framers of the rules did everything they could to create a smooth-running community. But in the final analysis, they could not guarantee the entry of women with the talents necessary for success. Without the power to move their members from house to house as need arose, the women’s monasteries suffered the handicaps imposed by their isolation. Other Positions Beneath the superior and the discrètes there was a host of lesser functionaries, too numerous to detail here. The community was subdivided into a network of obediences under the final obedience owed to the superior. In the infirmary, the infirmarian ruled; in the novitiate, the novice mistress; in the day school, the prefect; and so on. If other nuns were sent to assist in these jurisdictions, they came under the obedience of the person in charge. This made good sense: a monastery was a crowded environment, in which multiple activities were always taking

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place. With clear lines drawn around each task, and a clear delegation of authority within those lines, there was less likelihood of conflict. The Rule made it incumbent on the superior to maintain these lines, “[so] that all the officers are obeyed and respected in their charges and do not interfere with each other.”90 The more important officers were the mistress of novices, the mistress general of the pensionnat, the prefect of the externat, the portress, and the sacristan. The first three will be mentioned elsewhere, so they need not detain us here. The portress, whose role was seemingly undemanding, in fact shouldered one of the gravest responsibilities in the community. Nowhere is the awesomeness of clausura better illustrated than in the concern that surrounded her office. For the portress controlled access into the monastery. It was at her command that the gate was opened and the persons waiting there were ushered in or turned away. She needed considerable powers of discretion, “to summon those who were wanted in the parlours, to warn the superior, and to distinguish what was necessary and proper from what was not.”91 Once incomers were admitted it was up to her, heavily veiled and in silence, to lead the way to their destination, all the time ringing a small bell to warn the sisters to remove themselves from sight. At nightfall, together with the superior or the assistant, she took part in the double locking of the gate and the various doors of the monastery.92 According to the Rule, the portress was to be one of the older members of the community. The reason is obvious: an open door and the sight of the world outside might tempt a younger or flightier woman to step across the threshold and thus incur automatic excommunication. But there was a drawback to all this age and discretion. The portress was deliberately intended to be the sentry at what Madame Jégou has called “a cold and rigid barrier.”93 The image she presented to outsiders must have been that of a wardress, ancient and stony-faced, guarding the entrances to the prison where the young-blooded were kept incarcerated. We may speculate that such an image helped to feed the public’s prejudice against monasteries. The sacristan’s was a highly honoured position. It was she, of all the community, who had “the honour of approaching the Divine Majesty most closely and most often.”94 She was responsible for the care and decoration of the altar, the maintenance of the sacred vessels and vestments, and the correct disposition of the church for the various feast and fast days in the liturgical calendar. It should be remembered that the convent church was a public place, where the community had the opportunity to serve (and impress) its friends and supporters. An atmosphere of beauty and cleanliness was important not only to the

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nuns in their choir but to the people who sat in the nave. All this fell to the sacristan – though, it must be noted, she did not herself set foot in the main church; she cleaned and cared for it vicariously, with the help of a paid male sacristan.95 The sacristan had a further responsibility: she held the key to the grille that separated the church from the monastery. Although she was meant never to use it for any purpose save those connected with her duties, it was nonetheless a weak spot in clausura, which could only be safeguarded by the appointment of a totally reliable woman to the position. In most community lists where seniority and importance were designated by position, the sacristan appeared close to the top. For the allotted time during which they exercised their charges, women were able to feel that they “owned” them. We see this in the fact that they often expended money and effort in improving them. Henriette de Boisseleau, while she was infirmarian, renovated the infirmary; when she was assigned to the pensionnat, she renovated that – both at her own expense.96 Magdelaine Morel, while she was sacristan, gilded the candlesticks and painted the choir.97 Barbe Guyot, a senior lay sister, maintained and decorated a small shrine in the kitchen.98 Monasteries benefited greatly from small projects such as these, by which individual sisters made their own imprint on the community. Of the lesser functions of the monastery, little will be said here, except that the attention paid to them in the rules was painstaking and exact. Every task was given a transcendant significance. Thus the refectorian, as she cut the bread and measured out the wine and water, was reminded that while she performed this office, she was “standing in the presence of Our Lord and should think of one of the mysteries of His life on earth, like the meal that He took with His apostles.”99 The sister in charge of the laundry should think with “amorous regret” of the sad state to which the baptismal garments of innocence had been reduced by sin, and she should rejoice in the Lord who was prepared to wash them clean in His blood.100 The dressmaker, while she sewed new habits for the sisters or mended old, could be assured that “the divine Bridegroom … [was] in turn preparing for her a garment of glory of a very special weave, as a recompense for the services which she performs for those whom He loves tenderly.”101 The value of humble duty was promoted in the death notices. Over and over again, women were celebrated for their performance of these duties. “For a long time she had the care of regulating our clock, which she acquitted with such punctuality and exactitude that it would be difficult to find anyone who could do it better” … “She sounded the wake-up bell for almost twenty years” … “Her sewing was so well done that it sold better than that of the rest” … “We have never tasted

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bread so well made.”102 The genius of the rules lay in the way they made every service important. “Nothing is small in the service of the house of God.”103 This principle was capable of transforming the daily life of women’s convents and making a holy vocation out of the dullest routine. “Since the perfection of a religious soul consists principally in the faithful execution of the will of God, marked out for her by her Rules, it is above all necessary that she apply herself carefully to the performance of her daily actions.”104 As long as the women sincerely subscribed to this principle, the community held together and ran well. That was what was meant by “regularity.” It would seem that the preservation of enclosure and of good relations within that enclosure was something that, though it had to be worked for, was not out of reach. Madame Jégou insists that within “the rigid, cold barrier” of the walls, community life could be warm and familial.105 It could also be painful and unhappy. Given the large number of convents across the country and the broad variation in their circumstances, there must have been both happiness and unhappiness within them, as well as every shade of contentment or lack of it. But the rules did at least provide a grounding of stability for those who observed them.

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8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

poverty The Old Regime knew poverty well. Never a day went by that it did not see beggars at its gates. In times of dearth and epidemic disease, poverty could swiftly swell into death, with corpses lying in the streets, in the corners of barns, or in hedgerows along country roads. Even in ordinary times, the poor struggled to make ends meet and all too often ended up in paupers’ graves. This was not the kind of poverty to which religious women vowed themselves. Indeed, the Church had long since laid down that female communities (apart from mendicant sisters, whose right to beg had been granted to them with great reluctance) were not to be poor.1 The new religious orders of the seventeenth century wrote this obligation into their rules. Communities were not to be established until they were assured of sufficient revenues to maintain themselves. Secular society underscored this with great emphasis: new convents were allowed into cities only on condition that they would not beg or otherwise become a charge on local citizens. They were expected to have at their disposal property and a solid bank of rentes. Although many of them broke the terms of the agreement and started up with little or nothing, most communities soon achieved financial sufficiency. Then they bought as much land as they could afford, and on it they built solid, spacious houses, many of which survive to this day. But their rules warned them against extravagance:

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“The buildings must be commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous” … “Care must be taken that they do not resemble châteaux and palaces, castles, and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”2 If the nuns did give way to temptation, it was in the construction and decoration of their churches. Elsewhere their architecture was appropriately subdued. But when the occasion allowed, they did panel their refectories, put flagstones down on their walks, and plant extensive gardens complete with handsome shrines. Some of the larger monasteries ended up as very fine places indeed.3 Within these premises, the rules dictated that the nuns should live decently, though without excess: “Each religious … shall have three dishes at each meal, morning and evening: to wit, a soup or an entrée, a portion of meat, and a dessert.”4 The quality of their food was to be good.5 They were expected to be well groomed, cutting their hair regularly and “taking care to wash their hands, mouths and teeth” and – “once or twice a year, during the summer heat” – their legs.6 Their linen was changed weekly, their bedsheets monthly;7 their robes were renewed once a year. The Rule forbade heat in sleeping quarters,8 but there were to be fireplaces in the common rooms, and stoves outside the schoolrooms so that mistresses coming out of class could warm themselves. When the sisters were sick, they were to be given care in specially equipped infirmaries. This comfortable sufficiency did not fail to arouse snide comment among outsiders.9 However, the nuns were observing their own version of poverty, “a total shedding of all temporal and exterior goods and an incapacity to possess and dispose of anything personally, whatever it may be.”10 For them, poverty meant not physical neediness but a personal surrender of all rights of ownership: “The sisters will have no private possessions and will own nothing on the face of the earth, so that none of them can so much as say, ‘This pin is mine›11 … “The revenues and goods of the monastery will be distributed to each according to her need but without superfluity … [Each sister] will consider what she has as being only lent to her.”12 Among the sisters there was to be no talk of “mine” or “thine”; everything was to be “ours.”13 Their cells were to be open to the inspection of the superior, and they were to have no locked boxes. To further their spirit of detachment, the Rule in some communities recommended that once a year they should exchange their personal effects, such as rosaries, prayer books, and even beds and cells.14 Anything they received from family and friends or earned by their own industry was to be surrendered to the superior. Failure to do this was considered to be more or less serious, depending on the value of the goods. If the value was over twenty sols,

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the perpetrator was deemed to be in mortal sin; and if after her death she was found to have been concealing possessions in her cell, she was to be deprived of ecclesiastical burial.15 According to one Rule, this spirit of poverty was so essential to the religious life “that even our holy father the Pope cannot dispense from it.”16 However, it seems that in its primitive perfection it was beyond the grasp of most communities, and it soon began to disintegrate. In chance remarks and in official documents, signs appear that whatever name they gave to it, communities were allowing private ownership. In the 1660s, for instance, Barbe Buvée, after being forced out of the Ursuline convent of Auxonne, claimed to have left in her cell (besides her clothes and bedclothes) “a large wooden chest and a little cabinet, a writing case with a lock to use as a desk … a pair of silver candlesticks, a salt-cellar and goblet of silver, a chain, a cross and two gold rings,” as well as numerous books and private papers.17 Auxonne was at the time a house out of control, which might explain this accumulation of property; but similar problems could also be found in “regular” communities. In 1672 the official visitor to the Ursuline convent of Mâcon reported, “They are lacking in what seems to be essential to communities [that is, poverty]”; private pensions and private possessions, as well as the continued use of the nuns’ family names, were all being permitted.18 Through the succeeding years, Our Lady Poverty continued to beat a retreat. In 1713 Archbishop Hardouin of Sens forbade the sisters of the Congrégation in Provins to keep mirrors or clocks in their cells.19 A census in 1732 took note of two nuns in the Ursuline house in Carpentras who were being served by maids, whom they paid themselves.20 In 1737 the bishop of Rodez found that the Ursulines in the town of Villefranche were keeping money – and wine! – in their cells, and were treating the gifts received from their families and the money raised by their handwork as their own.21 These cases were not exceptional. Evangelical poverty was by this time an ideal which most people agreed was out of reach. At least that is the implication of a death notice written in Poitiers in the year 1698, which made a special case of a deceased nun who “excelled above all in the love of poverty, having in her cell only those things that are marked by the Rule.”22 There were several reasons why the vow of poverty was under stress. First, the surrender of all sense of ownership must, at any time, be extremely challenging. “This shedding of things, this divesting of all property, was perhaps the most difficult reformation the monastic undertook,” remarks a historian of medieval nuns,23 and it must have been equally difficult for the nuns of the Old Regime. Secondly, the

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sisters, many of them accomplished needlewomen, knew that the work of their hands had a value in the marketplace, so it seemed only fair that they and their families should share the profits. Furthermore, their commitment to poverty was constantly being undermined by indulgent relatives offering little douceurs. Parents wanted their daughters to be chaste but were not as anxious to see them poor. They were often ready to grant them an extra allowance, known as a petite pension, for their own use. To take one example out of many, when Marie-Anne de Villeneuve professed in 1762, her father stipulated that she should receive, from the rentes he made over to the monastery, 100 livres per year “to procure for her the little treats that are not ordinarily given out in convents.”24 This slippage from the ideals of the earliest days might have been averted if the practice of petites pensions had not been countenanced by ordinaries and communities alike. Certainly, they set conditions: the money must remain physically in the hands of the designated officers, and the disposition of it must receive the approval of the superior. Also, in many cases, as the death notices show, the nuns who received pensions dedicated them to improving the monastery. Nevertheless, the equality that lay at the heart of successful community life was diminished, and some nuns were “rich” while others were “poor.” Going by the references made to them in the death notices, it appears that these petites pensions came into use fairly soon after foundation.25 Since they were subject to diocesan jurisdiction, we may assume that different bishops authorized them at different times and in response to different needs. The rub was that once they were in place, they tended to remain. For example, they were introduced into the monastery of the Congrégation in Reims in 1653, when the community was in financial difficulties; they were still around in 1700, when they received the bishop’s ratification on condition that they be employed “according to our custom.” Thereafter they became part of the monastery’s economy. In the 1770s a community member was able to write: “I lack for nothing … I have a pension sufficient to leave me with nothing or almost nothing to be desired, and I have used it until now to procure whatever pleases me, but always with complete dependence [on the superior].”26 The critical difference between licit and illicit ownership lay in the fact of permission. The private enjoyment of goods was not considered a breach of the ancient rule of poverty as long as it remained under obedience. But however lawful, the selective privileging of some members threatened community morale; and this was recognized by the nuns. “It had consequences,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “which

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obliged us to make the prayer of the Wise, and ask God to give us neither riches nor poverty, but only what is necessary to live.”27 Once the practice was in place, however, it was hard to break. In 1656 a religious author had written: ‹Mine’ and ‘Thine’ are dangerous demons that enmesh the hearts of the religious in coils that can only be broken with violent effort.”28 But ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ never disappeared from the records of Old Regime monasticism; indeed, they seem to have grown stronger with time. Perhaps the basic reason is that in any age it is difficult to give up all possessions. But beyond that, the new female congregations of the Old Regime suffered a specific set of problems. The open wound through which their commitment to poverty threatened to bleed away was, paradoxically, the other kind of poverty, caused by reversals of fortune which left them in severe financial need. The monasteries were too often insufficiently endowed; their populations were out of proportion to their investments; and the Crown had too many ways of getting at their money. When trouble struck and their debts with grocers and butchers rose to impossible heights, the authorities had to let them find money where they could: from their families and friends or from their own labours. When families were called on for extra aid, they naturally enough insisted that whatever they gave should go to their relatives alone, and not into the bottomless hole of the community debt. “If these pensions and presents were put in common, the donors would refuse to continue giving them,” remarked a bishop during the crisis of the 1720s.29 But since some nuns did not have families to call on, the result could be inequitable in the extreme. “Ever since our temporal was thrown into disorder, there has been almost nothing held in common; private property leads to a sense of ownership, an open door to a multitude of faults,” wrote a superior in the aftermath of the Law Crash.30 “Some go hungry while others eat,” wrote the director of another house in the same difficult time.31 The rules were right in the first place: private property was the bane of community life. What poverty created, prosperity finally eradicated. By the end of the Old Regime, many communities had righted themselves and petites pensions had ceased to be a problem. In 1776 the community of SaintMarcellin honoured its deceased superior with the following eulogy: It is to her that we owe our renewal of regularity in the observance of the vow of poverty. Her grace, gentleness and engaging manners drew to her side all those with whom her predecessor had been unable to succeed … Amour-propre had formed obstacles that had appeared insurmountable … but now everything has been put in common.

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May the Lord by His grace make us more and more enthusiastic in our common work to sustain this point so essential to our Constitutions.32

However much the nuns of this community owed to their dynamic superior, they also owed a great deal to the rising income from their farms and rentes. No longer at their wits’ end to put food in their mouths, they were able to forgo the security of their private pensions. Thus, although the re-establishment of the common life, celebrated in Saint-Marcellin and other houses, was a major victory for the monastic spirit, it also stemmed from the return of prosperity. There was a great deal of truth to the old adage that “it was necessary to be rich to make a vow of poverty.”

chastity In 1647 Père Jérôme Lalemant, after studying the rules of the Ursuline congregations of Paris and Bordeaux, and consulting with the community on the spot, sat down to draw up constitutions for the Ursuline monastery of Québec. The resulting document was a harmonization of the two principal rules then being followed by Ursulines in France, informed and coloured by the circumstances of North America and by his own Jesuit spirituality.33 For all these reasons Père Lalemant’s Rule comes down to us as an excellent introduction to the science of religious community life as it was being transmitted during the middle of the seventeenth century. It had a didactic intention. The author clearly believed that those for whom the Rule was intended should be expected not only to obey it but to understand it in its deepest sense. In common with the other evangelical virtues, he explained, the vow of chastity depended for all its meaning and value on Him for whom it was undertaken – the “adorable and lovable Bridegroom”: “After this vow is taken the holy and sacred Spouse takes possession of religious persons in such a particular way that the offences against the sixth commandment of God, which in other people would only be simple sins, become in their case sacrileges, in virtue of what they are and the way in which they belong to Jesus Christ.”34 At the very least, the vow of chastity rendered the sisters incapable of marriage and obliged them to a scrupulous observation of the sixth commandment. But according to Lalemant, there was much more to chastity than this: “What is generally said of the religious woman, that by her vows she becomes an entire and perfect holocaust, cannot be true if the vow of chastity … does not also entail the sacrifice of all other

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bodily pleasures and goods, even those that are lawful and indifferent, and a placing of all … at the disposal of Jesus Christ her beloved Spouse.”35 Under this expanded definition of chastity, a whole set of behaviours became implicated: modesty in dress and bearing, a physical reserve to the point of never touching another person unnecessarily, control of one’s tongue, moderation in eating, avoidance of profane books “and the use of all other things that can give pleasure to the senses,” readiness to accept the austerities and mortifications prescribed in the Rule, and in general forbearance from “a certain tenderness … which women usually have toward themselves, and which leads to complaints, caused for the most part by unreasonable resentments over the lack of appreciation of their merit or the lack of care given to their person.”36 In other words, evangelical chastity called for an all-out assault on self-love, “this miserable life of ourself,” as Marie Guyart called it. The Rule that Père Lalemant constructed was faithful to the spirit of previous rules. In all these rules, the vow of chastity was treated in much the same circumspect way. For the Filles de Notre-Dame, chastity consisted of “setting a guard on the eyes, ears, and tongue,” preserving inner humility, behaving modestly in speech and movement “without showing any sign of impatience or pride,” respecting other sisters, and eating temperately – in sum, “imitating the purity of the Angels by the cleanliness of body and of soul.”37 The Ursulines of Bordeaux were admonished “to guard the gates of their senses, principally those of sight, hearing, and speech, against all disorder” and to avoid demonstrations of excessive familiarity.38 Those of Tours were warned never “to lift their eyes and their thoughts towards men” and never to show overt signs of affection to one another.39 “Particular friendships” were to be rigorously avoided – not only because they might lead to illicit relations but because human bonding, however innocent, was simply another way of cheating the divine Bridegroom. “Wishing to purify the inclination which I feel for someone,” wrote Catherine Chauvel of Blois, “each time I hear or see her, I desire it to be for me an occasion to return towards my Spouse … At the same time, I shall ask Him that, no matter how little natural love remains in me towards this person, He will be pleased to destroy it altogether.”40 This delicate approach to the problem of chastity was a major departure from that of past centuries. The chastity which Periculoso had been at such pains to protect had been, so to speak, hard-core chastity: the preservation of virginity and the avoidance of sexual pollution, which could be achieved by erecting barriers between women and men.41 It was as though the medieval Church was content to put

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its religious women into a donjon – a circle of strong walls closely enclosing their ultimate virtue, sexual continence. In the more complicated atmosphere of the seventeenth century a series of outworks – modesty, temperance, and self-denial – were thrown up at some considerable distance from the central donjon. The thinking seems to have been that if the Enemy was held at the outer gates, the centre would remain free from attack. This suggests a certain view of human nature that is at odds with the one we usually ascribe to seventeenth-century religious thought, according to which human nature soiled by original sin is essentially evil, corrupt, full of infection, and always on the verge of self-destruction. Without denying this theology, some educationists took the position that evil does not breed spontaneously within the baptized soul but creeps in through the senses. It infests an otherwise pure and clean spirit and, once it has done so, is difficult to dislodge. But if it can be excluded from the beginning by tightly controlled behaviour and temperate living, then the soul can thrive in all innocence. The secret lies in education and training. Pierre Fourier was saying this at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Antoine Arnauld at the middle, and François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon at the end: “For all that the nature of children has little good in it, they can be rendered docile, patient, firm, cheerful and peaceful.” It was only when left to themselves that “the still-tender body and the soul which as yet has no particular leaning in any direction will incline towards evil, and a kind of second original sin is created in them.”42 This essentially neutral quality of body and soul was known as “baptismal innocence,” and it was clearly associated with young girls (wellbrought-up young girls, at any rate) and therefore, by extension, with at least part of the religious population. Given the fact that in the seventeenth century most nuns began their religious lives in their midteens and may well have been in the pensionnat since early childhood, it was thought possible that with proper management they could be kept in innocence from the cradle to the grave. “A person who enters the cloister in blessed ignorance of the evil maxims and practices of the world, and who has kept her baptismal innocence, has almost nothing to destroy and has only to build, following the holy desires that lead her to God alone,” wrote a respected religious of the day.43 Numerous death notices agreed with her. A truly privileged person was one who “had the advantage of bearing an innocent soul, having left the world before knowing it.”44 This was the preferred path to holiness. Women who had to struggle with temptations against purity were seen more as people who had forfeited something than as the true heroines of the cloister.45

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Going back, then, to the rules, it seems that these were shaped more around the notion of baptismal innocence than around that of innate concupiscence. Their premise was that as long as the gates of the senses were guarded from the recurring temptations of daily life, serious problems of impurity could be avoided. They contained not the slightest suggestion that women were fundamentally sexual beings, with urges that might arise independently of outside stimuli. In this respect the rules, as the official guides to monastic management, offered no support for difficult cases involving chastity. On the occasions (fortunately rare) when communities truly ran amok, as in Loudun in the 1630s, Louviers in the 1640s, and Auxonne in the 1660s, they offered no psychological insight broad enough to deal with the problem. Women of good family, carefully raised and properly cloistered, were not believed capable of such outrageously erotic behaviour. The only conclusion could be that they were demonically possessed. None of this is to say that the burden of evangelical chastity, as constructed by the rules, was easy to bear. “Let no one think that she has satisfied the spirit of her vocation unless she is perfectly dead to all her senses,” wrote Père Lalemant.46 The implications of the vow were hugely expanded. Lust was one of the seven deadly sins; the suppression of it might be difficult to achieve, but it was feasible, and the day might come when, all passions spent, victory could be claimed. But the holocaust of the “detestable myself,” the destruction of selfsatisfaction in all its forms, was a different matter; it would require a lifetime, and even then there would be no victory. “The holiest of the saints suffer its attacks until their death,” wrote Marie Guyart, “and in this they are truly humbled.”47 This being said, it is obvious that for some nuns more than others, the struggle against the “detestable myself” was a sexual struggle. This becomes plain in a comment made by Catherine Ranquet, describing a duty that was to her a subject of humiliation: [that of] confronting souls that are afflicted with distressing and unmanageable temptations, principally of impurity, because God has never allowed me to be thus affected, so that even now I cannot comprehend what it is that is called pleasure in that respect. However, I greatly esteem these souls because they are given the chance to fight generously and win glorious victories; that is what I call virtue, and it is that, and not the peace in which I live, that is worthy of the honour and esteem of God.48

Catherine, who had entered the Lyon monastery at the age of twelve, had become a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom; many of the women with whose guidance she was entrusted had not. The death notices, in

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their circumspect way, confirmed this unevenness of experience. On the one hand, they eulogized the many peaceful souls for whom religious life had been “a yoke both gentle and light,” whose souls had remained “tranquil and peaceful.”49 On the other, they paid their respects to those who had had “a temperament naturally hot and ebullient” and whom “the devils never ceased to attack”; those who had been “fiery in [their] desires”; and those with “temperaments of fire in which virtue finds more resistance and has more difficulty prevailing.”50 There is, as shall be seen, a close and suggestive connection between the women of “fiery temperament” and those who practised excessive mortification, the brutal disciplining of their own bodies. But the reading of the rules and the eulogies written after death keep us standing on the outside of things. The reticence with which the monastic literature treats the problem of chastity may be misleading.51 The cool and reserved conduct which the rules prescribe may indeed have covered the “volcanoes” of sexual desire which the public suspected. We can only argue that it is dangerous to paint with too broad a brush. It appears that the vow of chastity demanded greater sacrifice from some women than from others. In no case, however, was it a vow easily honoured as long as every concession to self – selfesteem, affection for other people, fondness for food, the enjoyment of warmth, and other comforting sensations – was regarded as impure. “Our nature,” wrote Catherine Ranquet, “is a chained dog which cannot harm us if we don’t touch him.”52 But the chaining of that dog was itself a lifelong business, which could lead some souls into terrible confusion.

obedience “Whom do we seek if not God? And where can we better find Him than in obedience?”53 Obedience had been the keystone of monastic life ever since the days of Saint Benedict. The rules of the seventeenth century demanded nothing that had not been demanded for a thousand years. What was new was the endorsement which this evangelical virtue now received from society beyond the monastery walls. The seventeenth century saw an increasing insistence on the need for civic order and obedience to authority. The training ground for this obedience was the family, in which, according to the royal declaration of 1639, “the natural reverence of children for their parents is the bond of legitimate obedience of subjects for their sovereigns.”54 The authority which the lawmakers of the Old Regime accorded to parents – mainly to fathers, but to mothers too – required, for enforcement, a strong culture of obedience.55 Children were expected to be submissive. And

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girls, of course, were expected to be the most submissive of all. By nurture if not by nature, young women entering the convent must already have been shaped according to the principle enunciated by Madame de Maintenon: “We [women] are destined to obey all our lives.”56 Evangelical obedience, however, was meant to take them to a different level, with “the perfect and entire sacrifice of the religious person by this final surrender of the most precious things remaining to her: her will and understanding and everything that depends on them.”57 Like the vow of chastity, there was no end to it for those who wished to be perfect. The more repugnant the order and the more inadequate or mistaken the person giving it, the more meritorious was the obedience. “It is then that there ought to appear the true submission and complaisance of a religious soul toward her sacred Spouse.”58 True obedience needed no support from understanding: “There is nothing that so obscures the lustre and beauty of this virtue of obedience as the wish to understand clearly what is being ordered.”59 In other words, there was no excuse for disobedience, whakever the circumstances; a truly virtuous nun had to practise perfect obedience. The eulogy of Françoise Fournier, an Ursuline of Angers whom many hoped to see canonized, said it all: “From the first day of her novitiate to the last breath of her life, she was always faithful to the practice of regular observances, and during the fifty years that she lived in the house, she was never seen to break the smallest rule.”60 The religious woman was under obedience to the superiors of her house, male and female, and to the bishop. They were for her the “living rule,” representing the hidden God. She also owed obedience to the written Rule, which was, so to speak, etched in stone, not only in its main outlines but in its finest details. “There is nothing small in religion.” This conviction, drummed into succeeding generations of novices, gave value to the closed-in lives that religious women were destined to lead. It also threatened to leave them inflexible in spirit and resistant to the least change. “One of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form,” wrote Cardinal de Fleury, adding that in this respect religious women were immovable.61 Looked at in one light, obedience was a regressive force, turning women into children. An ideal community was one that had “a rigorous punctuality in observance of the rules, a docility marked with simplicity and a childlike spirit.”62 Ideal nuns were those imbued with the same spirit – “submission towards superiors, not doing the least thing without permission.”63 The death notices sang their praise: “Those who had her for companion in obediences were sure that she would not so much as move a finger without their order” … “She was like soft

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wax in the hands of her superiors” … “She was like a child in the hands of her superiors.”64 Obedience was frequently associated with contentment: “She lived peacefully since her profession in the observance of the Rule.”65 Eulogies of this kind seem to be praising what William James has called “the insipidity of passive happiness.”66 But what is wrong with happiness? In an age when so many vocations were ambiguous in their origins, it was highly unlikely that all nuns would be called to heroic virtue. Nor would it have helped their communities if they had been. Healthy communities needed women who were cooperative, forbearing, and faithful to their duties. The only cement that could hold them together, for long years in a small space, was obedience. Although obedience was a burden, it was also a comfort. And at the end of the day, it was a guarantee of salvation: “They can be assured that, always living thus in Jesus Christ, they cannot but die in His arms, and it is above all at this moment of death that … the blessed soul will fully understand how true and certain are the words and promises of a God of goodness and mercy for those who persevere to the end in doing their duty.”67

self-mortification: th e g r eat te m ptatio n Nevertheless, many women could not accept obedience wholeheartedly. Between its demands and the demands of their nature there developed an unbearable tension. A deeper urgency brought them into conflict with their Rule: a spiritual condition called “scrupulosity.” Strict monastic practice had always included self-mortification and selfdeprivation. But while the rules of the teaching congregations continued this tradition, they did so with moderation. Penitential practices, they insisted, were to be approached with caution, for fear they might undermine the apostolate. “The chastisement of the body ought not to be excessive or indiscreet in the way of vigils, fasting, and other exterior penances and austerities, which often damage and prevent greater good.”68 These were Jeanne de Lestonnac’s words, but all three congregations shared the message. The difficulty about this call to moderation was that it was being sounded within a religious culture that in other respects cried out for extremism. The message that the church of the Old Regime presented to its members was one of guilt and fear. “We must satisfy divine justice either in this world or in the other,” wrote Vincent de Paul in the midseventeenth century.69 “It is an indispensable law that sin must be paid for and the justice of God satisfied, either now or after death,” preached Hyacinthe de Montargon in the late eighteenth century.70

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The fact of being a priest or a religious brought no relief from anxiety; indeed, such persons knew that they were being held to a higher account. “Priests (but nuns as well) were more conscious of guilt than were laypeople. Their constantly invoked and exalted ‘supereminent dignity’ had its counterpart in the continual encouragement of a guilty conscience.”71 Sins that would matter little in others became sacrilegious for them. The standards to which, in theory, they were to be held were unbearably high. To be truly open to God, wrote one nun, a religious soul must be “without desire, without affection, without choice … without inclinations, without will, without passions.”72 Human nature, “the detestable myself,” wrote another, was the principal obstacle to the soul’s perfection. “It is a scoundrel and our enemy, and it can only be overcome by being insulted.”73 The body was a dead weight, its humours and affections so many traps entangling the soul. The duty of the consecrated person was to transcend all this, to cut the ties of the flesh. If she failed, the consequences were clear: “Many are called but few are chosen.” A powerful body of teaching about the pains of hell was available to prod consciences. Even the saints had cause for fear.74 So it is not difficult to understand why the “syndrome of scruple” flourished in a special way in this culture and during this age.75 Although many hearers of the message managed to buffer it in some way or dismiss it as hyperbole, for others the urgings and threats crystallized into a haunting terror, and the terror gave rise to a compulsion to redeem themselves. The need to punish their bodies overwhelmed them. Thus it was that even in the moderate communities of the teaching congregations, with classrooms of children close by, and often in clear contravention of their vow of obedience, some women practised ferocious penances. In 1652 Jeanne Bourelier entered the Ursuline house of Montbard.76 She was not a typical novice. She came from another convent, which had suffered financial collapse, taking with it all her dowry money. Although she was destitute, the Ursulines accepted her because she was a skilled pharmacist and therefore useful to the community. Jeanne, however, took her suppliant position seriously. She asked to be fed on bread and water only, and when her request was turned down she set to work to make it happen anyway. “She used a thousand tricks to get her way, sometimes even collecting the bread that was meant for the dogs.” Her superior found out and scolded her for her failure of obedience. Jeanne’s reaction gave the superior cause for reflection: “She showed by her humility that it was a true spirit of mortification that drew her into such rigorous austerity.”

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But this was not the end of the matter. A new religious devotion had come upon the scene, which involved making a vow of slavery. As conceived by Pierre de Bérulle, it was meant to foster a spiritual servitude, a surrender of personal freedom to God’s will. But Jeanne added a physical dimension. She wrapped a chain around her arm, above the elbow where it would not be seen, and fastened it so tightly that it bit into the flesh. Eventually this too was found out, and the chain was cut off. All the while, Jeanne was starving herself, until “there was nothing left to her but skin and bones.” Her behaviour was so unusual that it caused her superiors to suspect that she might be under the influence of the Devil. Finally, however, they concluded that she was being led in secret ways by God and that they had no business interfering. Madeline de Riquety experienced the classic childhood vocation that is familiar in the hagiographies of female saints.77 By the age of eleven she had taken a vow of chastity, which she then had to defend against her mother’s determination to “engage her in the world.” Far from being forced into the convent, Madeline had to cling to it with might and main as her mother fought to take her home. But having once achieved her victory, she knew no inner peace: “She wanted to destroy her poor body with disciplines, hair shirts, crosses studded with pins and other tortures.” Like Jeanne Bourelier, she was able to persuade her anxious superiors that it was the spirit of God that was moving her. Marie Helyes took a similarly aggressive approach to her body: “She gave it as little consideration as if it were a carcass” and “bore it an implacable hatred.” She scourged herself daily, often in sight of the community, causing some nuns to groan out loud at the sight of her bleeding shoulders. Only the onset of consumption of the lungs forced her superiors to call a halt.78 Barbe de la Motte also sought to destroy her body: “Everything that could damage it pleased her.” In addition to wearing the usual penitential wardrobe, she refused to warm herself at the fire, no matter how cold it was.79 We see the same ferocious appetite for self-mortification in Marguerite Loyauté, who disciplined herself with an iron chain and ate leftovers instead of ordinary food. “She treated her body as a slave and a mortal enemy.”80 Geneviève Cousteughol flagellated herself until the walls of her cell were splattered with blood. “She would gladly have torn her body to pieces, treating it like a deadly enemy.”81 Françoise de Fabre “treated her body as a beast of burden, from which, she said, one should exact everything possible.”82 As for Louise de Myr, “her body was a stranger to her.”83 And so the list goes on, the theme always the same – that the body is a foul carcass, a dead weight, an enemy. How is such behaviour explained? By youth, perhaps? Unbridled fervour was to be expected in the young. With age and the passing of

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the years, this passion for self-mortification might be expected to abate. But when Louise Vallette de Bosredon died at the age of ninetyfive, her eulogist wrote: “It required all her confessor’s authority during these last years to take away her instruments of penance.” Marie de Lavergne, dead at the age of eighty-two, had practised mortification “until her extreme old age.” Another stubborn old nun, Galiotte de Foucaud, was found on her deathbed to have “brooches of sharp iron dug into her flesh.” Anne Toutain, at the age of seventy-six, “said that it was no time to give up her penances, that she ought rather to increase them to prepare herself for death.” And when Catherine de Buges, seventy-eight years old, sensed the onset of her final illness, “she got up in the usual way, used the discipline on her shoulders, and said her rosary with her arms in the form of a cross.”84 For such women, the war against the body ended only with death. It is clear that some personality types were addicted to scrupulosity and therefore to self-punishment: “By nature hot-tempered … the demons never ceased to attack her” … “A quick temper, full of fire … she punished her innocent body with disciplines and other instruments of penance, so that gentleness became natural to her” … “Thus did she overcome the vivacity of a hot and fiery temperament.”85 What lay behind these phrases? Possibly, the failings of a quick tongue and a hot temper. At least that is suggested about Salome Bernard, who was of a “quick temper, little accustomed to submission,” and Catherine de Moutte, who “if ever a hasty word or action escaped her … knew how to punish herself … [going] so far as to put manure in her mouth, in which worms could be felt moving around”; also Marie de Pons, whose self-punishment was so successful “that during thirty three years, she never gave in to the slightest outburst of temper.”86 However, the term “fiery temperament” was often used in the “Lives of the Saints” as a codeword for sexual restlessness,87 and the death notices may have been employing the same code. The diagnosis would have been consistent with the opinion of contemporary experts, who held that “scruples that arise from wicked thoughts are the most frequent [of all] and outnumber those that beset the spirit.”88 Self-punishment took different forms. Magdelaine Chomel carved the name of Jesus on one breast, the name of Mary on the other. Marie Françoise Theterel pressed a red hot iron to her breast and arm, until “several pieces of flesh fell off.” Adrienne Theterel immersed herself in cold water and remained there with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross until her superior discovered her and gave her a severe scolding.89 Others slept on the ground, starved themselves, or ate disgusting food.90 Some women went even further, swallowing the contents of infirmary vessels, drinking blood and pus, or kissing the sores of the sick. Others dressed in rags or went barefoot.91

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The people who were most challenged by self-mortifying nuns were their superiors. By a happy coincidence, the death notices were normally written by these superiors, so we can gain some idea of how they viewed their troublesome charges. Experienced superiors and spiritual directors had known for centuries that refusal to eat and other ascetic behaviour could have a physical or psychological as well as spiritual motivation.92 They seem to have anticipated such behaviour in the novitiate as part of the normal wilfulness of youth. With time, however, they expected to bring it under control. At some critical point, the women were ordered to give up their austerities or at least to submit them to the guidance of their superiors. Their response to the demands of obedience varied. Some women panicked, even to the point where they considered leaving the convent.93 Their resistance was logical enough. Adrienne Theterel, the girl of the ice-cold bath, argued that “she had never thought she would have to ask permission to imitate the Saints.”94 Others submitted, though it seems that their submission was often less than total. One young woman’s “penchant for austerity obliged the Superiors, more than once, to use all their authority to put limits on it.” But she simply went underground. “[She was so] ingenious in getting what she wanted, and clever in knowing how to conceal it, that they saw they could not win.”95 This was a common story: “In spite of the watchfulness of her superiors she destroyed her health.”96 Others pestered their superiors and confessors with pleas and promises, even playing them off against one another, like children trying to get their own way.97 Some of them were openly defiant. When Françoise Garraud was warned that her self-starvation was killing her, “she answered that she found pleasure and enjoyment in it.” When Gabrielle de la Viale was ordered by her confessor to give up her mortifications for the sake of her health, she answered him: “I do not know, Father, if I can obey you in this.”98 There was a hard core, so to speak, of women for whom the ascetic life was far more than a passing attraction. Rather than give it up, they were prepared to defy the very authority they had vowed to obey. We are reminded of the young Catherine of Siena, standing up to her parents: “I must obey God not men.”99 How did the superiors view the problem? First, they clearly saw it as a failure of obedience. Second, they recognized its potential for damage, both physical and psychological. Scrupulosity was a mental illness; they knew that. And they had no difficulty connecting excessive physical austerities with “a very fearful conscience,” “spiritual pains and violent temptations,” “an excess of scruple,” “an extraordinary desire to satisfy divine justice,” and “the fear of damnation.”100 Where they could, they used the obligation of obedience to set anxious consciences at ease. Thus when Magdeleine du Mesnil, who “had a naturally tender and

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fearful conscience … became scrupulous, she found peace and calm for her conscience only in submission to her superiors.”101 Similarly, the young Petronille Senemaud asked for permission to practise extra mortifications, but as her superior later recalled, “I told her that God would be satisfied with her wish alone. She made no reply, but the manner in which she accepted this refusal convinced me that her submission was even more agreeable than the macerations that she had planned to practise.”102 Obedience protected moderation. However, the superiors were sometimes hesitant to lay down the law; and their hesitation reveals both an empathy with the individuals who were causing the problem and a deep-rooted respect for what was, after all, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian Church. Many saints had practised severe self-mortification, and therefore it could not be altogether wrong. “If she was perhaps somewhat to blame [for her disobedient behaviour], nevertheless we saw that it surely was the spirit of all the saints,” wrote one superior.103 In any case, faced with the vehemence with which some women clung to it, they were not sure how they could forbid it. In the case of one nun, the superiors recognized that their efforts to force her out of her self-abasement had done her “a violence which pulled her away from her centre, to which we had to return her so that her heart could go free.” In the case of another, who had resolved not to warm herself, the superior’s efforts to make her sit by the fire caused “such a violent state that we told her straightaway not to upset herself.”104 To a surprising degree, authority seems to have been ready to retreat out of respect for individual conscience. “Spiritual athletes” were given their space, even at the expense of their health. “Content with the sacrifice of her body,” runs the death notice of one nun, “Our Lord almost never made her suffer the pains of the spirit.”105 One of the great virtues of self-mortification was that it allayed fear. More frequently than one might expect, nuns were terrified of death and judgment. “God asks more of me than of others,” cried one woman. “If I relaxed my efforts I would be lost.”106 She, and many others, tried to blunt their terror by punishing their bodies. Who was to say they were wrong? How could the superiors be sure that in forbidding penance they were not thwarting the justice of God? Thus, at least as the death notices tell it, superiors made a serious effort to understand the torments of the scrupulous. Communities were not always so long-suffering. In the monastic records, the cruelty to which “singular” nuns were sometimes subjected is revealed. At best, they were treated as a cross to be borne. It is not difficult to read between the lines of Anne de Valet’s death notice: “There was no holy cruelty which she did not practise, to the point where her neighbours,

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who often witnessed them, asked her to please have regard for their delicacy.”107 Hers was an unsettling presence; the zeal behind her excesses may well have struck them as a reproach. The “holier than thou” person is not easy to live with. Historians of sanctity argue that even in the Middle Ages, heroic behaviour did nothing to endear the saints to their fellows.108 While these cases stand out in the records, they are still in the minority. Most nuns did not practise such austerities. Some actively opposed them, as did Marie de Vigier, who was “convinced that true virtue need not be sombre or unpleasant,” and Marguerite Bernière, who tartly rejected “the illusion of some people who are so occupied with their own perfection that they neglect the duties of their state.”109 When a nun looked for mystical experience or the martyrdom of her body, the sisters of less heroic temperament were there to remind her: “It is only perfect obedience that makes a true religious.”110 The vow of obedience could be violated by those who went beyond the Rule, just as much as by those who fell below the Rule. The ideal course was to live the community life in an unassuming way, “in punctuality, exactitude and unshakeable fidelity to all [one’s] duties.”111 Jean de Viguerie has said that, while the institut of a religious congregation was a “holy enterprise,” the creation of that congregation was “a work in itself.”112 The creation and maintenance of a community was a work forever in progress, which demanded constant attention both temporal and spiritual. There was an inherent fragility in a collection of human beings obliged to live together in close quarters all their lives. Their physical needs had to be met. Their psychological well-being had to be safeguarded. Their interpersonal relationships had to be kept healthy. Without these conditions, communities were in danger of going terribly wrong. The three monastic vows – poverty, chastity, and obedience – formed the basis on which religious communities were built. Each of these vows required personal sacrifice, the surrender of individuality. The health of the collectivities depended on the degree to which these vows were observed by the members. If for any reason they were eroded, community life suffered erosion too. This chapter, in describing what the vows involved, has dwelt on the frequent difficulties and contradictions to which they were subject. But they must be recognized also for their value. Without them and the stability, equity, and mutual respect they made possible, the religious communities of the Old Regime could not have functioned as well as they did.

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9 Prehistories

The idea that contemporaries have of the society in which they live, and to which they give expression, is incomplete and sometimes mistaken. There are facts, even important ones, of which contemporaries are unaware, others that they prefer not to admit or confess to, and others again that are so basic that they seem commonplace to such a degree that contemporaries do not take the trouble to describe them, and they come to our notice only through a few words dropped in passing in some document. Ronald Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings1

The problem identified by Mousnier is exactly the one we face when we apply the monastic literature to the purposes of social history. The questions we ask are not questions that its authors even dreamed of answering. To satisfy our curiosity, we must treat it as an archeological dig, furrowing through the intended message in search of inadvertent asides. This is certainly true of the monasteries’ notices nécrologiques, or death notices. They are sometimes called “spiritual biographies.” Ninetenths of their attention is devoted to their subjects’ lives in religion – their particular virtues, devotions, and achievements – and to the deaths which finally crowned those lives. Relatively little survives regarding their former lives “in the world.” This is hardly surprising. Community memory began at the monastery door. It was unlikely that the nuns, ransacking their recollections of their deceased sisters, would come up with much that preceded their entry into religion. But here and there, an episode from a previous life caught the community’s attention and continued to be related until the time when it was enshrined in the annales or death notices.2 It is difficult to know how to evaluate this material. The very fact that certain events became part of community lore may mean that although they were in some way exemplary, they were also unusual. From these stories we may be learning as much about what the community loved to hear as about what was commonly the experience of young women living in Old Regime society. On the other hand, some events and situations, because they are replicated so many times, take on the ring of authenticity. And while the stories themselves may be mannered and conventional, they

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sometimes bring with them a cloud of small details about daily life, thrown in at random and without much consideration – immaterial to writers and readers of their own time but highly valuable to us. If enough of them fit the same mold, they may become the stuff of generalizations. One generalization they lead to is that a large number of families were broken by the premature death of parents. This comes as no surprise. It is already known that many children in the Old Regime experienced the loss of parents before reaching adulthood. Certainly, many of these nuns-to-be did. The death notices speak of their bereavement and then pass on to their subsequent circumstances. Some went to live with relatives; some remained at home with widowed parents or in the step-families created by remarriages. There are numerous subtle indications that these arrangements were not always happy. Others were put aside permanently. If both parents died and family members were given the task of planning the orphan’s future, the cloister offered an attractive solution. When Edmé Durand, an advocate in Montargis, died leaving seven orphans and it fell to his relatives to decide what to do with them, the youngest, Elisabeth, “trembled with fear lest they suggest that she become a religious.” Her fears were justified. We can only speculate on the pressure to which she was subjected, no less effective for being clothed in the garb of free choice. The record simply tells us that after praying hard and long, she accepted God’s will and, “bathed with tears,” told the her relatives to arrange her entry. “Like another Abraham obeying the order of God, she went out from her father’s house, her spirit stripped of all earthly things, and in her hand an image of the Saviour with his cross … saying, ‘This is all I need from now on, I want nothing of the world.›3 Even when parents were alive, children could be handed around within families with the greatest of ease. In some cases, when parents had financial difficulties or were “burdened with many children” (a common phrase), grandparents, uncles, aunts, or older siblings stepped in. Young girls were sometimes left with relatives while their parents went abroad or to other cities. Sometimes, it seems, their families moved them around to give them the benefit of wholesome air (much sought after in that age), to introduce them into society, or to shield them from the influences of that same society. One wonders which of these motives was uppermost in Madame de Faverolle’s mind when she sent her daughter to live with an aunt, the comtesse de Blet, and then – when the young girl became totally enamoured of a life “which threatened her sentiments of virtue with shipwreck” – hastily put her into a convent pensionnat.4 Did she want her child to shine,

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and then suddenly realize that she could not protect her once she entered that glittering world? And what must have been in the mind of the Ursuline Isabelle de la Baume de la Vallière as she learned of her beloved niece’s liaison with the young king, Louis XIV? “We cannot imagine the vows, the prayers, the pilgrimages and penances which [she] made to obtain from Heaven a grace strong enough to break these culpable engagements,” wrote Dom Claude Martin.5 The highest society in the land, the Court, was recognized as a serious danger to young virtue, and parents who had business there were wise to leave their children elsewhere – preferably a long way off.6 One obvious choice for parents who needed to place their daughters was the monastery pensionnat. According to all the rules, this course was not available until the child was five or six; but quite clearly the rules were often bypassed, with or without permission from the bishop. “Monsieur her father who was employed on important business gave her to us at the age of three and a half.” This was a story often told.7 It arouses the suspicion that many children were passed straight from the wet nurse to the convent. The harshness of this practice was frequently softened by the fact that the children had relatives in the cloister – aunts or older sisters – who were allowed to exercise some care over them. Furthermore, years of separation did not necessarily mean that parents lost interest permanently. A number of records tell of mothers and fathers who decided to take back their grown daughters for companionship – and were outraged when the daughters opted to stay in the convent! Or, to return to the case cited above, Monsieur intended his daughter for the convent and allowed her to enter the novitiate at thirteen, but he later had thoughts of finding her an advantageous marriage. When she resisted this change of plan, he gave in “generously,” provided her with a large dowry, and thereafter remained a friend and patron of the house.8 But whether the distance separating daughters and parents was physical or spiritual, and whatever the reason behind it, it was real nonetheless and was not broken by the sort of holidays that modern school-age boarders can expect. In the seventeenth century at least, many children, once they were in the pensionnat, stayed there year in, year out, in sickness and in health – and even unto death. “On the twenty-ninth there died a little pensionnaire aged 5 or 6, the daughter of Monsieur Poupart, secretary to the king, and Madame Fournier his wife … The parents, when warned of her extreme danger, asked us if she died to have her body opened and to bury her in the monastery … We buried her in the chapel of the Infant Jesus, in the garden.”9 This sad little obit appears in the records of the Ursulines of Montargis. It is

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difficult to read it without wondering about the family relationships that lay behind it.10 All too often, families of the Old Regime used the cloister as a dumping ground for surplus or unloved children. Among the fiercest critics of this practice were the great spiritual leaders of the age. François de Sales warned that the monasteries were home to many unsuitable people: These are they who enter religion because of some fault of body or character, being lame or blind or unsightly … and what seems even worse is that they are frequently put there by their parents, who only too often, when they have such children, leave them in the corner by the fire, saying that since they are unfit for the world they must be put in religion … Others have a large number of children; Well and good, they say, we must lighten the load on the house, and send the younger ones into religion so that the older ones can have everything and cut a fine figure in the world.11

Vincent de Paul remarked that such arrangements opened the convents to insipid and unmotivated religious: “They do not have a true vocation, since they were put there by their parents, and stay there out of human respect.”12 There is no doubt that many nuns fitted these descriptions. A comparison of their dowries with those of their marrying brothers and sisters strongly suggests that the monastery was an excellent moneysaving device for their parents.13 Was it also, in the parents’ minds, a warehouse for the handicapped? Few of them said so as directly as Marie Martel of Dieppe, who in her will asked that her daughter be put into a convent, “either the Ursulines or some other, seeing that because of her feeble-mindedness she is incapable of marriage.”14 Clearly, many parents took their unmarriageable daughters to the convent, and the convent kept them and sometimes made nuns out of them. Marie Prisve was only three when the Ursulines of Nevers accepted her in spite of her impaired breathing, hearing, and speech. She died a nun. Angèle Pellerin was a near invalid whose father and brother served as doctors to the Ursuline community of Mâcon. “For our part, we have tried to show our gratitude by receiving this dear sister.”15 These are just two out of a host of examples of girls whose health was already poor when they entered the convent. Families initiated the arrangements, and religious communities carried them out. It is easy to see the benefit to families. The question is, Why did the communities accept these problematical cases? The answer, almost always, is money. The entrance of sickly or inappropriate girls was often

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smoothed by larger than average dowries. In Saint-Emilion in 1638, when Marie de la Rocque was being interrogated before making her profession (in the presence of her mother, which in itself was a contravention of canon law), she answered so apathetically that the official became suspicious. When the superior was questioned, she could only protest that the girl suffered from “a weakness of the brain,” that the community had made special arrangements in this case, and that the parents had given an unusually large dowry.16 In other words, the nuns were preparing to absorb into their community a person whom her parents most emphatically did not wish to keep at home – but they were doing it for a price. Monastic records attest to the existence of a special invalid status, negotiated at the time of entry, which guaranteed some entrants certain dispensations from the Rule because of their poor health.17 Since they were not going to be able to contribute by their labour to the monastic economy, it was only fair that they should bring a larger dowry. That was the nuns’ point of view. From the point of view of the families, the option was highly convenient and not always inhumane. There is no way of drawing on such cases to generalize about the love or lack of love between fathers and mothers and their daughters. In the absence of alternatives, parents may have been securing the best possible future for their children. When, at the age of ten, Marguerite Lombard lost the sight of one eye, her father persuaded her to enter a convent pensionnat with the object of one day becoming a nun. By the time she lost all sight she was professed and was thus assured of the care of her community for life. Jeanne Louvet, “simple of mind,” was placed by her widowed mother in the community of Blois where, in return for a large dowry plus a generous life pension, she was given a lay sister as her personal servant. Could these parents have done better for their daughters by leaving them in “the world”?18 There were, of course, girls whose parents simply wanted them out of the way. Here, the death notices are understandably reticent. Occasionally, a hint of an unhappy home life comes through: “Some sort of falling-out between her father and her mother caused her and her sister to be put in our community” … “God took advantage of the lack of friendship which her mother felt for her to deliver her to the religious life.”19 But following the spirit of their calling, nuns learned to count their losses as gain for the sake of the Kingdom, and therefore – in formal documents, at least – their true feelings are hard to divine. When Hélène de Meulle (the child whose busy father had handed her over to the convent at the age of three and a half) died in 1670, she left among her papers a written thanksgiving to God “for the choice that He had made of her to be His bride, even before she reached the age

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of reason.” Anne-Françoise de Sales, who entered religion at the age of fifteen, was recorded as having accepted and even solicited the sacrifice of her own inheritance in order to further her sister’s advantageous marriage.20 Were their feelings really so serene? In this matter the monastic literature has a line to follow and cannot be trusted. But we do notice, from time to time, mention of nuns who “since entering, have never gone to the parlour” or who “had an aversion for the world and for their relatives,”21 and we may wonder what caused this detachment or aversion. Another small and shadowy group appears in the literature – exProtestants who over the course of time became nuns. Some entered of their own free will and in defiance of their parents; for instance, Jeanne-Elisabeth Hofer, who came in secret from her home in Switzerland to abjure and later to enter the novitiate; and Marguerite de Labouchère, who was actually on her way to her wedding, complete with parents and bridegroom, when she suddenly turned aside and ran into the local monastery; and Marie de Quiroye, who resisted all her father’s pleas and came without his permission to the religious life.22 But other women first came to the convent as pensionnaires by lettre de cachet, and there is no way of knowing whether they were ever offered the chance to leave. Celeste de Vautron, for instance, was confined in a monastic pensionnat in 1694, when she was nineteen. Eleven years later she entered the novitiate.23 Possibly, like the nuns who learned to live in peace with their parents’ decisions, she was making the best of the fate that an even greater authority had laid out for her. So girls were “put into religion.” But it would be unfair to suggest that all of them were the victims of unfeeling family strategies. Given the restricted choices available, parents had to take seriously the duty to arrange their children’s future. Whatever that future, it was up to them to plan for it and predispose the children to accept it. “When the children’s [future] state is decided for them early, it is easy to present them with this perspective as a matter of habit, and thus to place before their eyes the various objectives that reason desires them to consider … The order of duties, the choice of pleasures compatible with the role which they will have to fulfil, will develop naturally with the knowledge of their situation.”24 This advice, directed to fathers in the legal profession, could have been used by the parents of all young boys and girls, whether they were destined for a career, marriage, the church, or religious life. How successful it was across the board we shall never know. But in the case of many young girls destined for the convent, it seems that conditioning, as the weapon of choice, was highly successful: “Children, sometimes very young children, were placed in an environment or in a situation in which they had

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little choice but to embrace the … [religious] life.”25 In the closed gardens of their childhood, they had little opportunity to yearn after greener fields outside. In the most extreme cases, a devout family dedicated a daughter to religion at birth, and often the child was dressed in white until the age of seven as a public avowal of her parents’ intentions. A number of such practices appear in the death notices. Usually the parents persevered in their intention to raise the child for religion, but it seems that the passage of time could sometimes dampen their ardour. Marie de la Grandière Cornuau had been dedicated at birth and dressed in white, but later her parents changed their minds and decided to raise her for “the world.” Her decision at the age of twenty-two to enter religion so infuriated them that they made her take her journey to the Ursuline monastery alone and in disgrace.26 Sometimes the dedication was made later, when a parent was under some form of stress. Jacqueline Bouvot’s father, finding his life in danger, promised his daughter to God if he was spared. (“Her particular characteristic,” ran her death notice only a few years later, “was obedience and submissiveness.”)27 But these circumstances were exceptional. Many more families simply regarded the monastery as a respectable alternative for the daughters they could not marry off. They raised these daughters well and, in words that the annalists frequently repeated, “gave them to religion.” The nuns were fully in accord with the practice of conditioning. The death notices made it plain, over and over again, that the best nursery for future religious was a family “in whom piety and virtue are hereditary.”28 The most certain avenue to “a good education” was the monastery pensionnat, but unless and until this could be achieved, the child was best fitted for the cloister if she had “sucked the milk of piety” (to use a hackneyed conventual phrase) from her earliest days. The eulogists tell us that Françoise Galland, under her mother’s hand, “lived in the world but led a truly religious life.” They tell of Françoise La Lande, who followed her mother in her devotions and on her visits to hospitals; and Bonne Tierce, who was three when she began to say her rosary on her knees.29 There are many such stories. At the age of five, Catherine de Suus was delivering little sermons on sin and contrition to those around her. By the age of seven, Louise de Mazon, under her mother’s direction, was teaching catechism to the servants in the family’s château. Marie de Hocquinquan, orphaned at the age of nine, went to live with her older sisters in a self-imposed cloister: “She never looked men in the face … she avoided them as enemies of her angelic virtue.”30 Elisabeth Fleuret was brought up by an aunt who, as she later wrote, “raised me in the fear of God … never

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permitting me any of the faults so common to children, and because she loved me deeply, punishing me with great severity.”31 She followed her aunt in her religious observances and almsgiving. By the age of five she was reflecting seriously on death. To the modern mind, these hothouse cultivations seem risky if not reprehensible, but in the religious culture of the Old Regime they were highly commended. “It is necessary to get the children as they leave the cradle, in order to defend them against the disorders of the world,” wrote a respected nun.32 Vocations could also blossom in ground that was less carefully prepared. Sometimes the impulse to religious life seems to have originated within the child herself, with or without parental encouragement. According to Marie de Siougeat’s death notice, she was only four when she began to feel special graces. Marie Spens was her parents’ favourite child, but “the Lord loved her much more … Her life of grace and piety began with the age of reason, without any guide but the Holy Spirit.” Anne d’Arripe “wanted to be a religious almost as soon as she could talk.” At the age of eight, Marie Tissendier “conceived the desire to give herself entirely to the Blessed Virgin”; at the same age, Claire Beaumont made a vow of chastity. Gabrielle Rubens, at ten, was teaching other little girls “to serve God by giving up things, explaining the love which Our Lord would show them in return.” At the same age, Cecile de Belloy learned from the experience of a serious illness to know “the vanity of all that is not God, the inevitability of death and the importance of this last hour.” Nicole le Doux “deprived herself of the normal amusements of children in order to visit the churches.” When Catherine Ranquet entered the novitiate at the age of twelve, she was already experienced in the ways of prayer and mortification.33 This sort of early childhood gravity, this “spirit far beyond mere bagatelle,”34 was greatly admired in the monastic literature because it was seen to presage a religious vocation. It has been pointed out that in the Middle Ages the call to sanctity was often experienced by very young children even without the encouragement of their parents.35 This may be hard to credit, unless we believe that in some way a child’s affections could be so totally and intensely engaged that her whole personality would come to take shape around her love object. If this is difficult to imagine, we have only to offer the example of Marie Guyart, the seven-year-old daughter of a master baker in the city of Tours, who in 1607 had a dream: I was looking upward when I saw the heaven open and Our Lord Jesus Christ in human form emerge and come toward me … As this most adorable Majesty approached me, my heart felt on fire with love for him and I started to open my arms to embrace him. Then he, the most

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beautiful of all the children of men, took me in his arms and with a look full of indescribable sweetness and charm, kissed me with great love and asked me, “Will you be mine?” I answered, “Yes!”36

The Lord who kissed her in that dream was not a father figure but, in the words of her biographer, “the fiancé of her heart.”37 From that time on, as she later wrote, “this sweet attraction was incomparably more pleasing to me than everything else that I saw.”38 Was this the effect of parental conditioning? Hardly. Her family was only conventionally pious, and in due course it provided her with a bridegroom of the human variety, very different from the Bridegroom she desired. But there were other influences beyond the family. Seventeenthcentury Catholicism, as practised in cities such as Tours, was vivid, full of imagery, highly emotive; the sights and sounds of its liturgies and the splendour of its ceremonial must have had a powerful effect on young minds. The same Marie wrote later from Canada to her son that “one of the things that greatly strengthened my spirit of devotion was the ceremonial of the Church which, from my childhood, powerfully attracted me … When in its processions I saw the cross and the banners … my mind and my heart leaped for joy. I had seen a captain lodging in our neighbourhood, followed by his soldiers with their flags. So when I saw the figure attached to the cross, and the banner with its images, I said to myself, ‘Ah! this is my captain, and there is his banner.›39 Marie was always driven by love. But the Church was also delivering a message of fear – fear of sin and hell. Again, it was a message easily transmitted to young imaginations. Barbe des Nots was seven when she learned that she could commit mortal sin; she was reduced to tears by the thought. As a child, Marguerite Colin had the same horror of sin and at least once had a vision of the Devil, whom she drove away by making the sign of the cross. When as a little girl Catherine Ranquet was taken to a comedy, “she thought herself to have been in Hell, and feared that she would never again belong to Our Lord.” Marie de Poilleve had a vision of the Virgin, “who showed her the place waiting for her in Hell if she engaged herself in the world.” She entered the novitiate at the age of twelve.40 But the real battle for the souls of these young people typically started in their adolescence, and by then they were under the influence of nuns, either in day school or in the pensionnat (or so we can suspect even when we are not specifically told so). The role the nuns played was somewhat two-faced. According to their institut, they were not in the business of educating girls “expressly to make them into religious.”41 Yet the death notices suggest that they actively recruited young women and that they did so, partly at least, with a message of fear.

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A historian of cloistered nuns has remarked that, in their mind, the world was a sort of quicksand, waiting to swallow souls down to damnation.42 So it was only natural for them to relay their belief to those around them. “Consider the occasions there are to damn oneself in the world,” said Bossuet. They did consider, and they took it upon themselves to warn their charges of the risks.43 The effect on impressionable young minds was predictable. In numerous cases, when girls came out of the pensionnat they were confused and alarmed by what they saw before them. Marie de Martin left boarding school determined never to return. But “God filled her mind with great terrors and apprehensions of his judgments; these turned her little by little from the pleasures of the world.” Jeanne Thubert loved the world but came to recognize “the danger to her salvation and the necessity of flight,” and entered the novitiate at the age of fifteen. Marie de Sillegue “constantly thought that she saw Hell opening under her feet. She then sought sanctuary in our community” – at the age of seventeen. Madeleine de Bonhore was already engaged to be married “when in the college church she heard a sermon on Hell” and decided to enter religion.44 A similar story is told in more detail of Marie Anne Dugué. Born in 1665 in Paris, and raised first by her grandfather and then by the Ursulines, she was called back into “the world” at the age of fourteen: As she was a pretty young lady, well built and vivacious, with plenty of spirit, the world thought that it had gained her, and spared nothing to make sure of her. In these circumstances she was often the victim of trouble and agitation, feeling her heart pulled one way by God and the other by the world. Not knowing what to do, it seemed to her several times that she held the victory in her hand; at other times, to escape her anxieties she gave herself over to pleasure and amusement. But the Lord did not let her go far; He kept his eye on his prey at all times. She could not hear a sermon or say her prayers without this jealous Spouse redoubling His pursuits, and this served as a bulwark against the torrent that threatened to drag her away.45

After a long hesitation, she made up her mind in favour of the convent. Some of these decisions were welcomed by parents; others most decidedly were not. Young women who of their own volition declared for the convent could meet with outrage on the part of their family. The outrage was grounded in the same mentality that forced other young women into convents against their will: the belief in “the commandment of God according to which children who are in their parents’ power owe them obedience.”46 It could be that the parents had marriage plans in mind; sometimes they simply looked forward to enjoying their daughters’ company.47 Over and over again, the death

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notices refer to confrontations that were extremely painful to both parents and children. The parents could bring their daughters home, but they could not always force them to conform to the mores of the world. Agnez le Duc “closed her eyes to objects that might afford her pleasure and decided to spoil her skin colour (which was very handsome) so as to achieve an early victory over vanity.” Marguerite Charlet did the same: “She decided to disfigure herself and to rub her face with oil and go out into the sun in order to be darkened, so that she would no longer be beautiful except in the eyes of the Bridegroom.” Marguerite de Villeurbanne cut off her hair to avoid being taken to a ball. Claude Damond tried to enter the convent while her father was away; on his return he brought her home, but in the end he was defeated by her practices of mortification. Less openly defiant but equally embarrassing to their parents were Marguerite Penet, who dissolved into tears whenever she was brought out in company, and Edmée Renard, who hid herself in the attic of her house, where she could hear the monastery’s bell and follow its prayers. What, in the end, could be done with such obstinate girls? Marie Françoise Theterel, on being told by her father that she could not become a nun, simply fell ill. “It was commonly said that if he wanted to make her better he would have to bring her to the convent.” One can imagine the smirks of the neighbours when, finally, he gave in and did exactly that, saying that it was the only way to control her.48 Such was the emotional blackmail that quite a few daughters practised on their parents. In other instances, the girls were happy enough in “the world,” and the decision to enter religion came later as the immediate consequence of some personal trauma, which in the tradition of the death notices was taken as a direct message from God. The Bridegroom sometimes spoke through sickness and disfigurement. Françoise de Pousol was only twelve when she suffered an “incommodity.” She vowed that if she was cured she would become a nun, and she persevered in her vow despite her parents’ opposition. On the other hand, Madeleine Le Vasseur, when old enough to see the world, “took to it, loved it and was loved by it. However, in the midst of her pleasure an interior inspiration warned her that she was made not for the world but for God, who wanted her to be a nun. She failed to heed this inspiration, consulting her natural repugnance for this state, but the Lord … sent her a great illness. After receiving Extreme Unction, she recognized what Heaven wanted of her.” Similarly, Madeleine Bonnet, “well-built and very pretty,” had no intention of entering a convent until “a fluxion on her eyes deformed her … This led her often, when looking at herself in the mirror, to deplore her misfortune, saying to herself: ‘What! Am I so

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unlucky as to have been born to be a nun?› Elisabeth de Vancé, too, was “highly advantaged in outward graces.” But “God, looking down on her with mercy, allowed the smallpox to cause considerable damage to this beauty, which would have been the occasion of her damnation.” She accepted the message that He wanted her for Himself.49 Other women were brought to the monastery by financial disaster. Louise Le Grand had been happy in the world; then “her family’s reversal of fortune furnished her with a favourable occasion to know the emptiness of riches and pleasures … Struck by the vanity of the things of this earth,” she came to Blois with her sister, and the two entered the Ursuline convent together. Similarly, Françoise Baullard’s future was decided for her when her parents “were stripped of all that they had been.” Jeanne Serpe belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais; but when its business affairs collapsed, she had no choice but to enter without a dowry, as a lay sister.50 The death of loved ones could also act as a powerful agent. Frequently the death notices mention girls who, upon the death of their mothers, adopted the Virgin as a replacement. From there it was no great step into the cloister. Françoise Belot, “God having taken away her mother … saw the fragility of earthly things.” Anne Godfrey had already lost her mother, but it was the sudden death of her father that overwhelmed her and sent her into the convent. In Bonne Mejot’s case, it was the death of a friend that turned her to religion: “The Divine Bridegroom, to whom all sharing is an insult, used the loss … to touch her and attach her to Him alone.” In the same way, Françoise de Gorlier, already an orphan, lost her beloved uncle: “God, who could not suffer her to have anyone but Him alone, permitted that … he be killed.” Henriette du Reinier was taken by her father to Charleroi, where “the world’s countenance, so brilliant in her eyes, began to dazzle her.” But God took away her father, and she came safely back into the care of her Ursuline aunts. Less immediately personal but obviously traumatic was the experience of Anne de Lichigaray of Pau: “At the time when the plague ravaged Marseille and threw all France into alarm, our dear mother was struck by what she was told; this huge number of sudden deaths led her to reflect seriously on the instability of human things and on the danger of appearing before God with empty hands.” Her death notice remarks that her vocation was always grounded in fear.51 There is no doubt about it: the literature tells us that many vocations were built on fear and guilt. Catherine Moulinier de Puidieu was preparing to marry when her crucifix told her, “You are leaving me.” So “like another Saint Paul, she was turned around.” But her long life in religion was marked by mortifications and austerities – often the

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symptoms of a troubled soul. Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau had already been received at Court – “which helped greatly to puff her up” – when she was warned by a nun of her acquaintance that “however hard she tried to resist and struggle against God, she would surely give in and become a religious.” And so she did. Marguerite de Courcelles was first drawn to the convent by her sister, who was already a professed nun. But after some time in the novitiate she decided that this was not for her, and she made ready to leave. The nun reproached her: “What, sister! You want to abandon God? Understand that He, in turn, will abandon you!” Not surprisingly, Marguerite decided to stay.52 In all the above cases, the literature suggests that conditioning worked and that through appeals to their affections, sense of duty, or fears, girls were brought to accept and even desire the cloister. But conditioning does not explain every vocation. Some women entered religion because they felt that they had talents to offer to the monastery. Eleonor de Moulins, a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, chose to enter a teaching convent because she was “persuaded that the talents with which Heaven had favoured her would be most useful in the education of youth.”53 Other women, such as Françoise de Monplaisire and Marguerite de Terneyre, were “born to govern” and “possessed the qualities to be superiors … and understood [business] affairs.”54 Recent scholarship has recognized that for those who were appropriately gifted, the female religious orders offered leadership opportunities not available elsewhere.55 In fact, this was already known in the Old Regime. An anonymous observer deplored the multiplication of religious houses which, he said, only served to “augment the ambition of those who wish to command” in abbeys or convents of different kinds.56 Commanding women may be found throughout the records. As often as not they were daughters of the nobility, who were thus fulfilling the belief of their social order that leadership was bred in the bone. Many women came to religion from the opposite direction. Quiet and withdrawn by nature, they longed for the hidden life. Marguerite Trumel had “an attraction for solitude.” When her parents, not knowing what to make of her, asked her what she wanted in life, “she who had never seen or heard tell of a convent did not know how to explain herself; all that she said to them was ‘Enclose me.› Marie Anne Bourdois, too, “was called by a particular touch of grace to the religious vocation without knowing what a convent was.”57 Others were repelled by the thought of life in the world. Marie Truffit “had always felt the greatest repugnance towards any establishment in the world, even before she knew what was meant by the religious state.” Marie d’Artois “fled the sight of men as one would that of serpents.” The very suggestion of marriage made her fall sick. Elisabeth Driu rejected everything

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to do with being a “demoiselle,” possibly because, as her eulogist tactfully put it, she lacked “the gifts of nature.” She herself asked to be placed in a convent.58 Others discovered the life by accident; they stumbled into it and then, emotionally, temperamentally, found it satisfying. Madeleine Tiballier entered the convent on her own whim, “without being too certain where she was going.” Marguerite Guillier “was much engaged [in the vanities of the world], which gave her parents the idea of putting her into our house to be taught some piety; she had no sooner tasted the air of the cloister than she was charmed by it.” Anne Moussey had never had any intention of entering religion until one day, passing an open convent door, she slipped inside. “She was amazed that anyone could have difficulty with anything [there].” Marie Madeleine Tubert was one of a group of friends who dared each other to spend three months in the novitiate. “As soon as she was in our house, she was charmed by the community.” Françoise Saron, when she entered the same house, was rather a wild thing. “This good sister asked to be made a religious without any idea what obligations this state imposes on us; she did not even know her Pater and Ave, which it took us a long time to teach her … She was admitted out of charity” – and in time became a worthy lay sister.59 For other women, both young and old, entry into religion was the completion of a love match, the end of a long period of waiting. In many cases, these were women whose entry had been held up for some time, for reasons beyond their control. A few of them were widows, and a few of these were widows with children. Marie Guyart and Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal may have been the most famous mothers who left their children to enter religion, but they were not the only ones. However, such cases were rare, because they were frowned on by society and were not altogether welcomed by communities. When Françoise Icarde, a thirty-six-year-old widow, decided to enter religion, “it was not without many assaults made on her by the Devil and her own nature, when she had to give up her little comforts and her own will, which is most difficult for a person who has lived independently for a long time.”60 She, and other women like her, could be a somewhat unsettling presence in a novitiate full of teenagers; their independence of mind and the fact of their previous sexual experience were not easily overlooked. More often the latecomers were celibate ladies who had laid their own wishes aside to care for ailing parents, raise orphaned younger siblings, or mind the family business. Jeanne Descaiul was seventeen and already on her way to becoming a nun when her mother died; she was forced to go home and look after her younger sister for the next five

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years. Françoise Bentejac was called upon to bring up her brothers and sisters; at twenty-eight, “breaking out of her chains, she entered our house to sing the canticle of her deliverance.”61 Marguerite Le Roux stayed home to help her mother manage her dead father’s affairs: “Finally, when she was free to make her own life, she hurried to our house.” Euphémie du Roux de Sigy was thirty-eight when she professed in 1731, having remained at home to manage her brother’s estate until he came of age.62 Other women were delayed for financial reasons. Agnez Delsol, whose parents refused to give her a dowry, laboured for years to earn it herself as manager of a small lace-manufacturing business. Christine du Tartre worked as a schoolmistress until the age of forty – always faithful to the vow of chastity she had made at the age of twelve.63 Such women often built themselves a life in the world as dévotes, living under the guidance of spiritual directors and haunting the churches. Jeanne Perault was forty-five when she entered religion after a secular life during which “her usual place of residence was in the churches.” Elisabeth Carlier spent her working hours plying her trade as a seamstress, and for the rest, “she was counted among the number of the dévotes.” Jeanne LeCoeur managed, in spite of her late vocation, to lead “an innocent and very pious life under the conduct of a Feuillant priest and in the company of several devout ladies.” Before entering the monastery Noel Fontaine lived for several years “under the direction of a virtuous priest, who trained her in all the most austere virtues of the religious life.” Geneviève de Lamotte Luchet found the courage to retire from her social circle by invoking the protection of the local Jesuits until such time as she was able to enter the convent.64 Without the support of like-minded people, the devout life in the world could be a lonely and difficult experience. The literature left to us by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns insists on the stark polarity of existence. In their minds the world was, as one death notice phrased it, “a foreign country, the maxims of which are opposed to piety, retreat, and all the practices of religion.”65 “I found the secular life unbearable,” wrote Marie Guyart, “being unable to see how one could observe the counsels of the Gospel there as in a cloister.” In the privacy of her room, she sat on the floor and wept at the profanity and irreligion with which she was surrounded: “My chaste Spouse, my divine Beloved, what pleasure do you take in making me suffer like this? You must put me into this blessed retreat, and you must take me out of the corruption of the world, since its spirit is so contrary to yours.”66 Such a view of secular life afforded no comfort to those who were waiting and hoping to leave it.

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It was the purpose of the religious life to shape all its practitioners into uniformity, right down to their dress, manners, deportment, prayers, and daily practices. Religious women were occasionally twitted for all being the same, acting “like sheep who, when one threw herself over a cliff, would all follow her over the same precipice.”67 But in fact the appearance of uniformity covered a great deal of diversity. Even after they had been through the mill of the novitiate, nuns remained fundamentally themselves. “Human nature does not die away,” warned Jeanne Françoise de Chantal; “in the long run, it has its day.”68 The women who came into the religious communities of the Old Regime brought with them a variety of experiences and exhibited a variety of temperaments. Old or young, worldly-wise or innocent as newborn lambs, loved or unloved, docile or fiery, gifted or average or slow-witted, ecstatic with their new estate or merely contented, or even bitterly unhappy – they all came together within the confines of four walls to form that delicate organism, a religious community. On them, and on the particular mix of strengths and weaknesses they possessed, depended the health of that community. If they were talented or inspired, the community would benefit from their talents and inspiration; if they were mediocre in intellect or motivation, the community would feel the effects of that mediocrity. For all these reasons, their earlier life was important. The founders had said it, and it continued to be proved true: “It is not gold and silver that make good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.”69

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10 Novices

In 1659 Marie Françoise de Meulinare, daughter of a prominent family in Saint-Omer, decided to enter the local Ursuline convent. “Finding the means to climb the wall, she let herself drop down inside; then she told the valet who had accompanied her to go and inform his mistress and assure her that she would pray for her. The whole community was surprised to discover her upon leaving afternoon prayers.”1 This is a wonderful story, the stuff of monastic legend, and there are many similar stories in the records of Old Regime monasteries. But for most nuns, the method of entry into religion was much more orderly. It took place, as it should, through the convent door, and it was preceded by carefully considered and duly notarized negotiations between parents or guardians and the officers of the convent. It was normally at the time of entry that the dowry contract was drawn up. The amount of the dowry was agreed upon, but since as yet there was no certainty that the young woman would persevere or that the community would wish to keep her, its payment was deferred until the eve of her profession. In the meantime, the parents agreed to pay an annual pension, set at 100 to 200 livres, and an extra sum to cover the costs of their daughter’s religious habit and the festive meal to which she would treat the community on the day of her clothing. A typical arrangement was that of the young woman who entered the Ursuline monastery of Landerneau in the late 1690s with a dowry of 4000 livres, plus an extra 400 livres for her two years’ board in the novitiate, 300 livres “expenses for clothing,” and 90 livres for the meal.2 As well, the postulant was expected to bring a trousseau: chemises,

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stockings, wimples, handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, and nightcaps by the dozen, bedlinens and table napkins, a place setting (usually pewter), and sometimes the furnishings for her cell and a gift for the altar.3 All these gifts were conditional. In the event that the postulant decided to leave the monastery, the money and goods were returned to her, the nuns retaining only whatever fraction was agreed to be fair. Clearly, neither side was meant to profit from a failed vocation. For many young girls, entry was made less daunting by the fact that, as pensionnaires, they were already familiar with the community and had some sense of what to expect. Equally, the community knew what to expect of them. Indeed, it may well have been eyeing them for several years – at least, this is what the circumspect language of the death notices suggests. When Marguerite de Vançé, still a child, was put into the Ursulines’ pensionnat in Blois, “from that time on, she made us see … what she would be one day.” In the pensionnat of Notre-Dame in Le Puy, Marie Dulac attracted the same hopeful attention: “The striking development of virtue in this young lady … caught the attention of our whole community.” When Florence Campion began school, “her mistresses soon saw that she had good dispositions for virtue, and so made great efforts with her education.” As for Geneviève Peleus, the community was so open in its desire to have her that “our Reverend Mother asked God for her … Heaven soon seemed to favour this worthy desire by the death of Mademoiselle her mother, who would have been the greatest obstacle to the grace of the Lord.”4 The ability of the teaching monasteries to supply the novitiate directly from the pensionnat was a source of strength to them. It allowed them to know their subjects, to divert those who were unsuitable, and to start building a religious character in those whom they coveted.5 All the evidence suggests that the majority of nuns who entered the teaching orders had first spent time in their pensionnats. Some had lived there most of their lives – had become boarders “very young,” possibly as young as three or four. They had been accepted as special cases, often after the death of parents, like Françoise Becquerel, whose mother died when she was five, leaving her with a father whose only desire was to live as a hermit.6 Others, especially in the seventeenth century, were placed in the pensionnat with the clear understanding that in due course they would enter religion. Catherine Simean was only five years old when she was “put into religion.”7 Françoise Borelly, seven years old, was brought to the Ursuline house in Villefranche “to be fed, boarded and instructed, until such time as she is old enough to be received as a choir nun.”8 Barbe Millet became a pensionnaire at Saint-Germain at the age of twelve, “until she reaches the necessary age to enter the Novitiate.” Marie de Savonnières, whom her parents

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had dedicated at birth to the Blessed Virgin, lived in the Ursuline monastery of Tours from the age of nine; and then, at thirteen, she entered the novitiate “not as a novice, because she was not old enough, but to wear the habit of a postulant, and by this means to strengthen her vocation.” Marie Thérèse Jourdain was finally professed at the age of twenty-four, “having lived in our monastery since the age of four.”9 For women like these, the monastery was home, and the world outside was a distant and unfamiliar place. As one of their eulogists put it, they “renounced the world … before ever having loved it and before being seduced by it.”10 However, this was not the majority experience. Most pensionnaires were put into the monastery in their early adolescence – at ten, eleven, or twelve – for a limited time and purpose: to prepare for their First Communion under the expert guidance of the nuns. We need not suspect any deeper parental motive than the hope that a few years in the convent would make their daughters both more polished and more pious. At fifteen or sixteen the girls would be ready to “come out” into society, just at the time when serious marriage negotiations could be considered. However, there were exceptions to this rule. Some girls decided that they wanted to stay. Frequently their parents took them home for a while to see the world and to test their vocation. The nuns approved of this, or so it seems. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended that if a pensionnaire thought she had a vocation, the superior should consider “if it would be useful to make her return to the world before putting her in the Novitiate … and if it is judged appropriate for her to return to the world in order to test and strengthen her resolve, or even if she simply feels the inclination to do so, she must not be made to ask before leaving that a place be kept open for her; thus she will be left at greater liberty.”11 But where there was no question of choice, where parents and daughter together were decided on her entry, the rite of passage took place smoothly, and the girl moved from pensionnat to novitiate without so much as a breath of the air outside. “These blessed souls,” wrote the annalist of Blois, “have borne the yoke of the Lord from their earliest years, because [they] never knew their father’s house.”12 There were also postulants who were strangers to the convent and its ways. Some of them simply arrived at the door. Take, for instance, Louise de Tusseau de Maisontiers, brought in 1722 by her father to the Ursuline convent of Ile-Bouchard. “When they had a foot on the threshold, a sudden misunderstanding caused Monsieur her father to protest that she would not enter there; straightway he decided to take her to our house at Poitiers.” But on the way, as they passed through Richelieu, Papa just as suddenly opted for the monastery in that town

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– and on the strength of his whim the place was chosen where she would spend the remaining forty-six years of her life. Almost as precipitate was the arrival of Elisabeth Fleuret at the door of Sainte-Ursule in 1738. She had had a serious falling-out with her stepmother the day before, and her father had decided that the only solution was to put her into religion. Later, when she was ready to apologize, she was allowed to leave the novitiate.13 There was also always a trickle of older women who had spent time in the world, running small businesses, caring for their fathers’ households or looking after orphaned brothers and sisters, or even being married and raising their own children. Late in life – in middle age and sometimes even later – they came to the monastery. Marie Pelloquin entered at twenty-nine, having managed her father’s household for several years. “Her retreat into the cloister,” ran her death notice, “was not one of the kind that the world in its malice attributes to the haste of a thoughtless youth or to the inspiration of a family in search of its own interests, since our dear deceased was fully mature at the time.”14 As often as not, such women were placed in the pensionnat for a period of testing before being admitted to the novitiate. It was common knowledge in the monasteries that older women had difficulty adapting to religious life, given their “long habit of following [their] own will.”15 This remark tells us, better than a thousand scholarly words, what was waiting for them in the novitiate.

the first stage Once the formalities were completed, the postulant entered the cloister. There, waiting for her, would be the superior and two of the discrètes. They would lead her into the choir for a dedication and blessing, and then deliver her solemnly into the hands of the mistress of novices.16 The novitiate was a little kingdom unto itself, normally set apart from the rest of the enclosure. As long as the novice was there, the Rule dictated that she should have no regular communication with her family and friends. Nor could she speak to other members of the community except with special permission.17 Her entire time was to be spent in the company of the other novices under the watchful eye of the mistress, or “mother,” of novices. She slept in a dormitory, cheek by jowl with her companions; she ate with them at a table apart from the rest of the community; and when she took her recreation (the only time she was allowed free conversation), it was with them and her immediate mistresses. In other words, all her work, prayer, and recreation took place within the same group.

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Her first task as a novice was to make a general confession, “to purge and cleanse her soul and put it into the disposition and fervent desire to make a good beginning in the service of God.”18 After this, her work for the first year consisted of learning the abc s of religious life – how to pray and approach the sacraments, how to recite and chant Office (which required an introduction to Latin), and how to examine her conscience. She also learned the basics of the teaching profession – the catechism, reading, writing, and handwork that she would some day teach her young pupils.19 She was expected once a week to open her soul to the Mother, once a month to listen to a reading of the Rule,20 and three or four times a year to perform spiritual exercises.21 In the second year, while continuing these practices, she deepened her knowledge of the Scriptures and the major works of spirituality, and she studied her Rule more profoundly, knowing that when she made her vows she must do so in the full understanding of all that they meant. And when she was considered ready, she worked wherever she was ordered to in the monastery, at “the lowest and most humiliating” tasks.22 In the seventeenth century there was seldom any question of her teaching in the schools, but in the eighteenth, as communities grew smaller and their resources were stretched, it was quite possible that she might become a schoolmistress before taking her final vows. The novitiate was an all-important phase in the formation of religious women, so much so that it was seen as the key to the quality of a community. Heavy demands were made on novices’ intelligence and self-discipline. They were trained in the practice of meditation, according to methods which – like everything else in the Rule – owed much to the Society of Jesus. They were subjected to a deluge of spiritual advice, as much through verbal instruction as through private reading. And they were taught their Scriptures. Anyone who questions the biblical formation of Old Regime nuns should take note of the density of biblical allusions in their discourse.23 This may not have come from private reading. In convents the main channels for the transmission of religious knowledge had always been retreats and spiritual conferences and sessions with superiors and directors – an oral transmission, not inappropriate in a time that still depended heavily on the spoken word.24 In novitiates the responsibility for these conferences fell to the novice mistresses. For the most part, their content was not recorded, but we have an exception in a collection published by Claude Martin of Retraites given by his mother, Marie Guyart, during her time as subnovice mistress in Tours. In the course of a cycle of spiritual instructions, Marie introduced her novices to the “Song of Songs” and its imagery. In one conference she introduced the text “Our sister is little: her

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breasts are not yet formed,” and then explained that this was how the novices should see themselves, small and undeveloped, totally dependent on their Beloved. Dom Claude wrote, “These explications were so beautiful … that those who heard her were enraptured.”25 Marie’s biblical knowledge came from the text itself and from the commentaries of Saint Bernard; but the thirty girls under her care acquired it first and perhaps most memorably through her verbal instruction. The novitiate was hard; it was meant to be. It was both a place of learning and a place of testing. Its closest modern equivalent would be the military boot camp, in that it was designed to test the mettle of the trainee and at the same time break her to the discipline of the monastery. In the writings of the nuns about themselves, it is made clear that they believed that a good novitiate was the beginning of a good religious life. Without the virtues that it inculcated, the virtues necessary to live through the subsequent years would be unachievable. Marie Guyart likened the novitiate to an apprenticeship, the métier here aspired to being “to die to oneself first of all and then to live to Jesus Christ.”26 The severity to which the novice was subjected and the willingness with which she accepted it were gauges of her readiness for the life that lay ahead. A fair number of novices failed the test. Wherever the monastic registers recorded all entries (not just those that came to profession), they also recorded departures. Of the three hundred women who entered the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, twenty-three left without professing.27 This wastage was unexceptional: in a survey of entries into the Ursuline novitiates of Auxerre, Langres, and Dijon, Dominique Dinet concludes that 13 percent left before professing.28 The reasons for departure varied. Sometimes parents opposed their daughter’s vocation to the point of taking their case to court. Adrienne de Saulnier, for one, was withdrawn from the novitiate and sequestered while Parlement considered her parents’ appeal. Toinette de Comère also was removed on the authority of Parlement; only a mortal illness persuaded her mother to let her return.29 While we know that these two girls were allowed back into their convents, we have no way of knowing of those who were not. But we do have details of many departures. Sometimes families failed to come up with the promised dowry. It was for this reason that Jacquete de Bergos, whose father was lieutenant of surgeons in Bordeaux, had to leave the novitiate after eighteen months – “which caused her extreme distress.”30 Marie Duchemin had been of age when she entered the Ursuline house of Blois in 1632 and therefore had negotiated her own dowry with the nuns. But while she was still in the novitiate her sister appeared and demanded to see the

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contract, “which she tore up, saying that she could not honour it.” Marie stayed, but only by accepting to become a lay sister rather than a choir nun – thus avoiding the need for a dowry.31 Sometimes, especially after the Law Crash, it was the monastery that was found lacking. When one young woman entered the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon in 1730, “our house was in a terrible state owing to the loss we had suffered because of the Billets de Banque,” and her parents urged her to withdraw.32 She stayed on, but others did not. In Quimperlé during the same miserable years, the annalist wrote: “The novitiate was empty; our reputation lost us … a young girl of exceptional talents, who was to bring us a dowry of 4000 livres … Someone wrote to her mother that we were dying of hunger and were totally ruined. She refused her consent to her daughter and allowed her to enter the Ursulines of Tréguier.”33 The records of the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, another community crippled by the Law Crash, mentioned a number of novices who withdrew around that time to enter more financially secure houses. Some novices were dismissed by the community on grounds of inaptitude. The grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques sent away Catherine de Langlée before profession “because of her inclination to melancholy.”34 Mental disorder could be a problem in a community and even a threat, as the nuns of Montluçon discovered when their latest novice turned out to be positively deranged, screaming day and night, attacking the other nuns, and threatening to kill herself. But her family was reluctant to take her back; only after prolonged negotiations did her brother arrive, tie her onto a horse, and cart her away.35 Most often the reason for departure was ill health. Over and over again in the records, the word sortie (gone) is followed by the explanation “for fear of ruining her health.” The novitiate’s rigorous discipline, its cold dormitory with rough linens on the beds, and its fasting, abstinence, and many penances were hard on young women, especially those from comfortable homes.36 Discipline was in the hands and at the discretion of the mistress of novices. Hers was a demanding task. In the first place, the young women who came to her were not all meant for the cloister, and she was expected to have the discernment to winnow them out; on the other hand, she was warned “to make great estate of those whom God has truly sent, as the most beautiful gift that can be given to the house by His Divine Majesty.”37 All the rules bade her be prudent, “seeking to recognize the nature, ability and capacity of each one … always more inclined to kindness than sternness.”38 Yet at the same time she was to be strict with her charges, to grind down their self-esteem and strengthen their humility. In particular, she was warned to be on the

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lookout for voies extraordinaires: “Let her take care that her novices do not desire, or in their prayers ask God for, visions, revelations or ecstacies, but that they devote themselves body and soul to the acquisition of the solid virtues of humility, charity, patience, obedience, and all the rest.”39 The more “special” the novice, the more rigorous her mistress had to be: “When she sees that God is showing particular favour to a novice, let her be sure always to humiliate and despise her, and never to praise her.”40 Catherine Ranquet’s mistress was unmercifully hard on her for the simple reason that Catherine was already on the high road to sanctity, as the mistress was the first to recognize: “This good mother took every opportunity to mortify her … which gave a sister cause to ask why she treated her thus. She answered that this was good earth, and it was necessary to make it fertile, and that she [Catherine] would profit from it.”41 For the most part, novice mistresses were celebrated in memory. Of Blanche Doiron de la Barre it was written, “Most of our sisters take pride in having been her daughters, raised by her hand.” Similarly, Jeanne-Marie Bachelier had “lit in the hearts of her daughters the same fire of divine love with which she was consumed … [being] for them a living example of all the duties of the religious life.”42 But not all novice mistresses lived up to expectations. Through the discreet words of the eulogists we can occasionally glimpse a veiled disapproval of their conduct. When Marie Odean died at the age of sixty-eight, her community still remembered how as a novice she had been subjected “every day to hundreds of mortifications.” In the same spirit, long after the event, Jeanne Salomon’s eulogist wrote: “I saw her practise heroic virtues in the novitiate, suffering humbly and uncomplainingly the harshest penances … for the slightest faults.” When Françoise de Goutefroy died two days after her profession, the eulogist knew where to lay the blame: “She fell into the hands of a mistress who treated her very severely … without sparing her any more than the strongest and most robust, or appearing to recognize her infirmities, even though she was asthmatic and afflicted with a violent cough.”43 A novice mistress could fail through excessive zeal and by misjudging the capacity of the person she was directing. Novice mistresses approached their work in different ways. Marie Guyart, who had experienced the rougher sort of discipline in the novitiate, did not herself practise it when she was entrusted with the care of novices. Isabelle de la Baume drew criticism for being too indulgent, and perhaps she deserved it; when one young novice confessed to being always hungry, she took to providing her secretly with small snacks.44 The girls themselves looked for different handling. Some of them submitted to the new discipline with the greatest of ease, like

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Charlotte de Miramon, who “made her novitiate with great exactitude and without anything bothering her,” or Marie-Anne Dufourd, of whom the eulogist wrote, “This young novice flew, so to speak, along the paths of perfection.”45 Others had to be cosseted, like Claude de Giverzac: “The delicacy of her constitution forced the superiors to treat her carefully during her novitiate.”46 Some suffered agonies of doubt and revulsion, as did Madeleine Bonnet, who hated the novitiate with its “contempt, confusions and acts of humility.”47 There were always a few who wanted more austerity; for example, Claudine l’Empereur, who “had some difficulty entering our order, since she did not find it severe enough for her taste”; and Thérèse Romanet de Labriderie, whose “attraction for austerities and mortifications [inclined] her to leave because we were putting limits on her zeal.”48 Such novices often proved to be the most difficult to handle and the most given to disobedience. Marie Françoise Theterel, for instance, pestered her novice mistress for permission to practise extra mortifications, and when she found these too limited she took matters into her own hands, heating up a religious medal and pressing it to her arm and breast until “several pieces of flesh fell away.” Alarmed at what she had done, she then prayed to Saint François de Sales to heal the wound before her mistress found out!49 For her and others like her, the superiors had to apply the bit rather than the spurs. Punishment in the novitiate entailed embarrassment rather than physical pain. Agnes Hurault’s rudeness and obstinancy earned her numerous penances, such as being deprived of the habit and returned to secular dress, and making crosses with her tongue on the floor of the novitiate. Claude Chamereau, who committed the sin of taking herself too seriously, was ordered to dance and sing and in general make a fool of herself in front of the community.50 When some novices were caught talking to each other on the staircase of the Tours monastery, they were made to walk around wearing gags across their mouths.51 The purpose was plain. A novice must be stripped of her amour-propre. And she must be made obedient or, as the nuns themselves put it, “like soft wax in the hands of her superiors.” More than anything else, the novitiate demanded the virtue of obedience – “the final sacrifice of the most precious things remaining to her, her will and understanding and then everything that follows from these.”52 The novice was expected to carry out every command promptly and without reflection, no matter how uncongenial or farfetched it was. The annales are sprinkled with examples. In the early days of the Ursuline monastery at Mâcon, “obedience was held in such high esteem that the smallest commands coming from the superiors were received by the sisters like so many oracles.”53 Among the exam-

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ples given was that of a novice who had been reprimanded for coming late to prayers; the next time she was behindhand, “wishing nevertheless to obey at the first sound of the bell, she came to prayers without having had time to put on anything but her robe, and with her stockings tucked into her belt for lack of opportunity to put them on; she remained with bare legs … although it was extremely cold … Health meant nothing to her compared to obedience.” Another example of unswerving obedience was that of a novice who was ordered to fetch some white bread for an invalid. Finding none, she went to report to the superior, who, busy with other matters, told her to deal with the problem herself, “which the novice took so literally and so simply that she ran straight out into the town to get a loaf at the baker’s, without even giving herself time to let down her black overskirt … under which she was wearing a coloured one.” This breaking of clausura (and in a coloured underskirt!) would normally have caused a scandal in the town, but because it was an act of obedience pure and simple, the Lord protected her by ensuring that she met no one on her way to the bakery. It did not matter if the orders were improper or capricious. One young girl was sent to the community’s confessor (whom the novice mistress disliked) with “messages and words that were harsh and hurtful, which duty nevertheless she accomplished faithfully … He saw her blush and then turn pale, all the while with tears in her eyes … The good man praised and comforted her for being entirely blind in her obedience, no matter how difficult it might be.” In another house, that of Orléans, a young novice was the object of an unusual degree of mortification. “Once when she was picking over the herbs she found a slug under her hands; her mistress, seeing her give a little shiver, told her to pick it up and swallow it – only intending to see what she would do – but she swallowed it so quickly that she did not have time to tell her to leave it.”54 These two cases can be seen as illustrations of abuse of power by the novice mistresses, but the annalists did not waste time on that. What interested them was the exemplary obedience displayed by the novices.

clothing After a certain time, which differed with the congregation, the novice was ready to be “clothed” – to put aside her secular dress and put on the religious habit. This was the occasion of her first official test. On the basis of a character report presented by the “mother” to the Chapter, she would or would not be allowed into the second phase of the novitiate. The decision was solemn and was solemnly taken. “There is

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nothing in the religious state in which it is more dangerous to fail,” said the Rule.55 The Chapter was summoned by the bell. Each vocale was given a white bean and a black bean, and it was up to her to choose which bean to cast into the box. The Rule stipulated that the pretendant must have a plurality of votes to be admitted to clothing. The requirements were well known. She must be legitimate, healthy, and free from any crippling or disfiguring conditions. “[She] must have a vocation from God, and come freely for love of Him, without force or constraint.”56 She must be of suitable temperament. “It would only take one imperfect, one haughty, one proud, one self-lover to infect your little flock,” wrote Fourier to the sisters of the Congrégation.57 Given the permanence and closeness of community life, it is easy to see why the vocales might turn down some candidates – after all, they were going to have to live with them for a long time. Louise Grosil was almost rejected on several counts, being “hunchbacked and lame, stubborn in spirit, vulgar and difficult in humour.” As a novice, Elisabeth de Villaret took her self-disgust to such extremes and allowed herself to become so dirty and unsightly that the community thought twice about admitting her. She improved just in time, and from then on “was guided along a gentler, more pleasant path.”58 Marie Baudin, because of her delicate health, was accepted only after a second ballot.59 One of the most famous close calls was that of Thérèse du Terrail, who after six months in the novitiate was in such poor health that she was almost sent away from her monastery in Toulouse. “There are fifty of us vocales,” her superior told her, “and barely ten are favourable to you.”60 But she survived the vote and went on to become the chief rebuilder of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame after the Revolution. The choices confronting the Chapter could sometimes be complicated. When all things were equal, it was clearly in the community’s interest to allow only compatible women to join it. But other factors could interfere, with the result that every stricture of the Rule was disregarded on occasion. The dismissal of a novice, especially if she was from a prominent family, could have nasty repercussions in local society. Parents might take the decision as an insult and retaliate, as did a father in Rennes who accused the Ursulines of having treated his daughter like a domestic and demanded all his money back.61 Disabilities and infirmities were often winked at for the sake of compassion or because of a generous dowry. The Chapter might feel an obligation to accept a girl in return for services rendered by her family, as in the case of the novice in Villefranche mentioned above, or that of a novice in Mâcon, whose father and brother were the community’s doctors.62

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Or if times were hard and the novice’s dowry was particularly tempting, it might be difficult to bid her (and it) adieu. As Dominique Dinet has remarked, “Money was not neutral in the matter.”63 The clothing ceremony was the closest thing that a novice would get to a wedding. Arrayed in whatever splendour her family could afford, she was led up to receive her religious habit. The ceremony could be a magnificent affair. It might star a famous preacher and draw a great concourse of important people to the monastery church. Afterwards, the community might be treated to a lavish feast, complete with little packages of sweets – the ancestors of the sugared almonds still associated with religious celebrations in France. Everything depended on the practice of the community and the wealth and generosity of the family. At the end of the day, dressed now in the religious habit with only her white veil distinguishing her from the professed nuns, the novice returned to the novitiate and to the awareness, inculcated again and again, that she was among the lowliest of creatures. But no longer quite the lowliest. Beneath her now were the newcomers still in their secular dress, whose place in the scheme of things was even more humble than hers and to whom she was expected to give leadership and set a good example. She still faced an indeterminate future. The Chapter was still free to send her away if it thought fit. Her time in the novitiate might be prolonged, either because she was not considered mature or disciplined enough to profess or because her family was falling short on its financial commitments. Francoise La Lande spent four years as a novice, “her parents being unable to do otherwise because of family problems.” Marie Le Tort faced an even longer delay, not because her parents could not afford her dowry but because they wanted her out and married. She remained seven years in the novitiate, “waiting for matters to be sorted out.” In Marie Anne de Sarre’s case, the wait lasted fourteen years: “Monsieur her father … claimed that he had raised her to be his helpmate in governing his household, since she was his only daughter.”64 Finally, given the high mortality of the age, there was a chance that she might die in the novitiate, as did Catherine Choillon in August 1676. Her grieving father recorded the death of this “dear and beloved and most amiable eldest daughter, aged nineteen years and thirty days,” as follows: Of my children she was the one in whom I took, and looked forward to, the most pleasure; she had an intelligence uncommon in her sex, and she was as mature as a forty-year-old … She died at Limoges, where I had taken her last

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March, after fighting for more than a year to keep her with me … I went twice to Limoges during her illness; I entered the monastery and was present at her death; and for my consolation and that of my family, I had her body brought back to this town, so that I could keep her close to me in death when I had not been able to hold her during life.65

Catherine’s case was not unique. Here and there in the records the deaths of novices were mentioned. Such young deaths were a cause of grief in the community. “Judge … the consternation into which this loss has thrown us,” wrote one superior.66 But sometimes they came as no surprise. Whatever the Rule said, the nuns often accepted sickly girls. In 1728 Marguerite de Villeurbanne pleaded to be taken into the community of Notre-Dame in Narbonne. Her mother had died, and her inheritance had been lost to her. “All that she had left was Providence,” wrote her superior, “and I was … so touched by the warmth of her trust that I did not hesitate to receive her.” The Chapter was less easily persuaded, because of her poor health. “But she pressed us … saying that it was because she had not much time to live that she had to make haste to obey God, who wanted her to die as a nun.”67 The young woman was dead within four years. Occasionally a novice was allowed to make her profession on her deathbed. The nuns treated this as a privilege, but it was a privilege that might lead to unpleasantness if relatives suspected the community of angling for her dowry. The death of Anthoinette Bodin in the Ursuline monastery of Blois only six months after her profession gave rise to just such a suspicion. A judge representing the family presented himself at the monastery and asked to see the register of professions in order to ascertain whether the deceased had fulfilled the mandatory two years in the novitiate. It was alleged that “the said Anthoinette … only lived in their convent for thirteen months” and was therefore ineligible for profession. At issue was a handsome dowry of 15,000 livres.68 It was easy to suspect the worst. There was always a segment of society that was ready to label nuns as money-grubbers and simoniacs. The nuns had to be sensitive to the situation. In the same monastery in which Anthoinette Bodin died, another young novice, Magdelaine Chauvel, was so sick on the day of her profession that she had to be carried in a chair to the parlour to receive her father’s permission. After he had given it – thus “generously” risking the loss of her dowry to no purpose – she was carried into the church to make her profession.69 In Pau in 1750, when a young novice of noble family showed signs of poor health, the superior notified her father, “to avoid any suggestion of cupidity.”70 Only after he had talked to the girl and satisfied himself as to her wishes was she allowed to continue her novitiate.

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Needless to say, families did not complain when communities accepted sickly girls who were also poor. Madeleine Bourgeois was an orphan who had grown up in the care of her curé brother and two sisters. She came to the Ursuline monastery in Blois with “a chest … that threatened ruin” and no dowry at all. By rights the Chapter should have refused her. But she professed in 1780, in time to claim the privilege of dying as a bride of Christ. “Like a dove, she flew towards him,” wrote the annalist.71 There was no question here of money-grubbing or simony. But that is the way of public opinion. Simony is news: generosity is not.

profession Ahead now lay the solemn profession, the moment of final commitment to the religious life. The conditions for this were carefully laid out. The novice’s case must be examined by the Chapter, and another vote taken; again, she must have a plurality of votes to be accepted. According to canon law, she had to be sixteen years at least and to have completed two full years in the novitiate in order to make this irrevocable decision. She also had to be examined by the bishop or his representative to make sure that her decision was made freely and in the full knowledge of what lay ahead. If these conditions were not met, the profession could be appealed and annulled. To ensure her independence, the Rule stipulated that the examination of the novice should take place in private, out of earshot of her superiors or anybody else. In the case of the sisters of the Congrégation, it was to take place entirely outside the cloister. The interrogation and the novice’s answers were to be recorded and the document signed by herself and her examiner. Hundreds of these documents survive among the diocesan records of the Old Regime. The chief impression they convey is one of conventionality. The questions took a set form; indeed, by the eighteenth century they were usually printed, with blanks to be filled in. To all appearances the young women were coached, either by their novice mistresses or by their questioners. This does not mean that they were answering under duress, for it is clear that most novices who wished to leave the monastery could have done so before this final moment. But it leaves no way of penetrating the opaque wording to sense how they really felt about their religious vocation: how joyful they were, how content, how resigned, or how resentful. The conditions laid down by the Council of Trent were observed – that was all. And that was enough. The vast majority of nuns lived out their days in the convent in which they had been professed. But a tiny minority later brought complaints

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that their profession had been uncanonical. In 1700 Suzanne-Marie Poulleau appealed to the pope for release from her vows, claiming that her age at profession had been not seventeen as she had declared and as she had believed, but twelve – a deception practised on her by her father, which rendered her vows null and void. After three years she received her release. In 1756 Marie de Vaucelle appealed against her parents and the Ursulines of Troyes on the grounds that her profession had never been registered, nor signed by her. Françoise de Laval claimed that in 1768 she had pronounced her vows in the Ursuline monastery of Lyon as a result “of the persecutions that she had suffered in her family, notably at the hands of her mother, who favoured an older son.” As soon as her mother died, she appealed to the archbishop of Lyon for her freedom, which was granted in 1783. It is interesting to note that she stayed on in the convent for some years as a pensionnaire. A middle-aged woman, no longer marriageable, she faced a dismal future in “the world.” The Revolution found her impoverished and alone.72 During the same years, Catherine de Beuzeville was struggling to free herself from her vows. The illegitimate daughter of distinguished parents, she had been hidden in the country during childhood. At the age of sixteen she was brought by two royal officers to the Ursuline house in Argenteuil, to become a pensionnaire “with formal interdiction of all communication with the outside.” In 1751 she entered the novitiate, the official record listing her parents as “unknown”; in 1753 she was forced to profess. Her dowry, deposited by an anonymous hand, was a generous 6000 livres. However, Catherine turned out to be a troublesome nun who was sent from one place to another until finally, some twenty years later, she started agitating for her freedom. The case dragged on until 1789, at which time Catherine, nearing the age of fifty, found herself free but poor and, apparently, alone.73 These two cases underscore an incontrovertible fact of life. For nuns, the moral finality which their vows represented was reinforced by the lack of alternatives if they later wished to leave the convent. An intendant in the late eighteenth century remarked, “The majority of persons who become nuns would renounce this state if they could find the occasion of some establishment in the world.”74 This was a sweeping statement, made at a time when it was fashionable to denigrate monasticism; but there was a kernel of truth in it. Within a few years of profession many nuns would have found it difficult to re-establish themselves in society. The rarity of appeals by religious women for annulment of their vows may indicate the great majority’s contentment in religion, but it may equally reflect a practical reality – that there was no longer anywhere for them to go.

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Much more common were the cases of young women who presented themselves for profession of their own free will even while they remained in a state of deep uncertainty. The superiors recognized this and to some extent discounted it. Uncertainty, they argued, was natural as long as the future remained uncertain, and it was often cured by the taking of vows. One young woman’s anxieties were relieved instantly when the superior gave her back her secular clothes and offered her the door.75 However, this treatment was sometimes taken to extremes. Uncertainty was one thing, but resistance was another, and it was not always clear where one ended and the other began. Uncertainty could be overcome by persuasion and inner struggle; resistance might be beaten down by the unyielding logic of the convent walls. The death notice of one nun in Avignon recalled that long ago, as a young woman, she had been placed against her will in a monastery: “Few people have shown … a greater determination to return to the world,” but finally “religion reined in her desires.”76 These anodyne words may cover an ugly reality, as the following account shows. A girl, also of Avignon, had been in one monastic pensionnat and then another since the age of five. At sixteen, she was “received into the novitiate” – which in her case meant that force was used to transfer her clothes chest from the pensionnat to the novices’ quarters and to put her into the religious habit. She protested, whereupon her father came to tell her that if she refused to become a nun, he would lock her up in a room and mistreat her and not allow her to see anyone. When she continued to protest, her brother reinforced the family’s position by threatening “to run her through with a sword if she left the monastery.”77 Too often, it seems, the nuns cooperated with the families in such discreditable behaviour. But in their defence it should be pointed out that their communities were always highly dependent on public support and had little leverage against the powerful families of their neighbourhood. If they refused to cooperate, they could suffer reprisals. In Gien in 1676, when the Ursulines refused to accept an unwilling postulant, the family reacted – the mother by threatening “to strangle both her daughter and all the nuns,” and other relatives by breaking into the monastery and creating general havoc.78 It was probably easier to bully the girl than to defy the family. The death notices would never reveal such behaviour because it disgraced both the convent and the nun – the convent because the use of force flew in the face of all its rules, the nun because, in the final analysis, she was expected to resign herself to her fate. Far more typical of the notices is the eulogy of a nun whose parents had given her to the convent “at a time when she had no inclination at all for the cloister”

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and who accepted her lot only after “suffering several struggles over her vocation.”79 Whatever this woman’s travail may have been, it ended up being cloaked in a kind of placid dignity and treated as a triumph. A complex picture of what might, and did, happen can be seen in the death notice of Marie le Coigneux, daughter of a chancellor to the duc d’Orléans, Louis XIII’s troublesome brother.80 After her mother’s death, she and her sisters lived in the pensionnat of the Abbey of Pont aux Dames. “Then came the disgrace of Monsieur le President their father, who followed in the Duke’s entourage.” The girls were brought back to Paris, where Marie was placed in the pensionnat of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. “Later her relatives forced her to agree to enter the convent, and to soften her displeasure they gave her her younger sister to keep her company.” But the girls rebelled against their new circumstances. “They railed at us all day long … they breathed nothing so much as their liberty.” Marie finally decided to become a nun, after being told by the Jesuit Père Binet that this was God’s will for her. But “her temptations were interior and continual against her vocation, and she passed her entire novitiate struggling with herself.” So she was offered her freedom: “Once when she confided in her mistress, she received the answer that Monsieur her uncle was waiting for her at the grille, and she was free to go and ask him to take her away.” But she could not bring herself to do this. Even so, at the ceremony of clothing her repugnance was so great that she could hardly bring herself to enter the church. “The Mother Assistant took her by the hand, saying: ‘You will take the veil, since you asked for it, and you can quit it later whenever you want.› In the event, Marie neither discarded the veil nor ceased to struggle. As the date of her profession approached and her agitation increased, her superior felt anxious enough about her state of mind to confer with a prominent Jesuit, Père Saint-Jure. His recommendation was, “Let her complete her sacrifice; it is what God wants.” And apparently the act of profession brought relief and a sense of liberation: “Prostrating herself on the ground, as though throwing herself at the feet of her conqueror,” she repeated the words of the psalmist, “You have broken my bonds, to you will I sacrifice all my life.” How can we categorize this decision? In the seventeenth century, people had no problem reconciling true freedom with total obedience. “Liberty lies not in doing what one wishes, but in wishing to do what one ought,” wrote Bossuet, who was tonsured at the age of eleven.81 According to this view of things, Marie was only acquiescing in God’s design for her. But the nuns themselves respected and remembered her agony, and recognized that her vocation was one built on fear.

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For all novices, willing or unwilling, solemn profession was a legal act, heralding a permanent change of state. Thousands of acts of profession have been preserved in the archives. Essentially, they are written repetitions of the vows made “aloud, with my mouth and all my heart” before community and family in the presence and “into the hands” of the superior or the bishop. These were the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, made under the Rule and under the authority of the bishop. To these vows, depending on her congregation, the woman added a fourth: “Never to consent to the abandonment of the instruction of young girls.”82 She then received her black veil. To symbolize her new state, she prostrated herself before the altar, and a funeral pall was laid over her while the Office of the Dead was recited. For all the direness of the liturgy, the solemn profession was an occasion for celebration. When Marie Dupuy professed in Blois, her father invited all her extended family “and ordered that the feast be prepared and the convent church decorated, and that the Reverend Père Baillet, preacher, be brought in for the ceremony.”83 Many young women made their vows amid similar demonstrations of family pride, as we can tell from the long lists of signatures appended to their acts. But others professed in total separation from their families, with only the celebrant and the community to witness their sacrifice. The occasion being passed, the newly professed nun returned to the novitiate for a further four years (or more) of training. Mère de Pommereu once remarked that it took seven years to make an Ursuline, and it certainly must have required a great deal of patience. However, her status was now changed. Her commitment was permanent, a fact symbolized by her black veil and newly cropped hair. She now took her place in the monastery’s order of seniority. For the rest of her life, in every formal list drawn up in the community, she would occupy the same position – after the sister whose profession had preceded hers, ahead of the sister whose profession followed.84 At the exact moment she “died to the world,” she became a full member of her religious community. She and it were now committed to each other for life – indeed, for eternity.

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11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ” He that is down needs fear no fall, He that is low no pride. He that is humble ever shall Have God to be his guide. I am content with what I have, Little it be or much: And, Lord, contentment still I crave, Because Thou savest such. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress1

For historians, the least visible members of past religious communities are the converses, or lay sisters. More than any other religious women, they have slipped through the cracks of monastic history. There are practical reasons for this. Most of them entered religion without a dowry and therefore without the services of a notary, thus eluding one of our most important channels of information. Furthermore, they were subject from the outset to a deliberate act of abasement; the records of their entry and profession were usually drawn up without the personal details – parentage, place of origin, date of birth – which were normally given in the case of choir nuns. They came to the monastery as nobodies, “servants of the brides of Christ” rather than brides themselves, and this institutionalized unimportance tended to stay with them to their death. Historians have had to defer to the intentions of the original record makers, with the result that lay sisters have remained more or less ignored into our own times. Fortunately, the story does not end there. In the small closed society of the cloister, lay sisters played an important part. Their status might be low, but their contribution to the physical and, indeed, spiritual well-being of the community was invaluable, so they figured in the annales and death notices much more distinctly than they did in the official records. By combining the meagre information garnered from the latter with the anecdotes provided by the former, we can tease out a profile of sorts of these monastic servants as they laboured their way through the greater part of two hundred years.

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From the very beginning, years before they were cloistered, the teaching congregations depended on some of their members to keep house and make dinner while the others went off to work. We catch glimpses of these women in Fourier’s letters: tantes and veuves, hardworking women, often older and less educated than the young teaching sisters, but absolutely essential to the running of the community. The same sort of women worked among the first Ursulines. We have, for example, Soeur Madeleine, a fille âgée who served in the Paris and Lyon houses before ending up as a founding member of the Mâcon community. “Old though she was,” wrote the annalist, “she made the bread, did the washing and drew all the water that we used in the house for every purpose; … she did the cooking with the help of one of the novices, the garden being one of their constant occupations … and on top of all that she bought our provisions in the town and paid visits on behalf of the mothers to all our friends and benefactors.”2 In similar spirit, when Marguerite Arnaude sallied forth to do the community’s shopping, “it cost her innumerable fatigues. She would have gone for leagues along the road to get the best bargain.”3 There was a sort of motherliness about such women, which their eulogists freely acknowledged and appreciated. The annalist of Mâcon, remembering Soeur Madeleine, wrote: “We called her our mother and our nurse and we loved her as such.”4 With the coming of clausura, these women were turned into enclosed nuns, and their outdoor functions were handed over to another layer of servants: tourières, salaried employees who, since they took no solemn vows, were free to come and go between the community and the world outside. From then on, the lay sisters were bound as irrevocably as the choir nuns by the law of enclosure, and their duties became as circumscribed as their physical surroundings. Also with the coming of clausura, the teaching monasteries underwent a process of social stratification. Entry into the choir now depended on payment of a dowry. This dowry, in addition to supporting the woman for life and contributing something to the improvement of the house, had to help provide for the upkeep of the lay sisters.5 So women who had little or nothing to offer except their own strong arms represented a drain on the community’s finances; they were supported by the “paying” nuns, so to speak, and their presence could be justified only by the services they performed. The various rules drawn up for the new congregations stipulated that lay sisters must be admitted with caution and only as needed: “The number of converses will not normally exceed one-sixth of the number of sisters of the choir.”6 This ratio or a somewhat more generous one was generally observed in the

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seventeenth century. During those early years monasteries employed as few lay sisters as they could. It is interesting to note how the imposition of clausura formalized the structure of the communities: “Care must be taken that the monastery has all the officers that it needs, for on them depends good government.” So wrote Pierre Fourier – he who had previously fought so hard and long to keep his sisters free of the cloister.7 By his careful enumeration of a score of discrete offices, he was serving notice that whatever the women had been free to do before, different rules must apply now that they were cloistered. The monastic community was divided into formal jurisdictions and seniorities: the superior and her officers; the vocales, or senior nuns with a voice in the Chapter; the junior professed (but still voiceless) nuns; the novices; the postulants; and at the very bottom of the pyramid, the converses, or “sisters of the white veil,” those who “never have a voice in [the monastery’s] affairs, and are received only for service and for heavy labour.”8 In the strict precedence that reigned within the community, the senior converse came immediately after the junior choir novice. Lay sisters were domestic servants in an age that had clear ideas about the place of domestic servants. Cissie Fairchilds has pointed to the affinity between patriarchy and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation period. “In the seventeenth century patriarchy was not simply a theory of the way families and societies should function; it was a paradigm for all social organizations, political and religious as well as familial.”9 A household was “family” writ large, its head exercising all the rights and privileges of a father, its members – wives, children, servants – bound by obedience to but also enjoying the protection of the head. Thus, the female religious community was “patriarchal” in every respect except for its unsullied femininity,10 and the principles of authority and subordination were practised to perfection. Everyone had her place in life, and woe to her if she tried to step outside it. The humble status of the lay sisters was the will of God: “Let the converses take care not to lose the character of their condition, tending always towards the lowliest; otherwise they would wrong Him who, in the souls of His elect, has established diverse orders and functions … and would trouble all the order and economy of His adorable Providence.”11 Lay sisters were menials, and their status was designed to reflect the fact. They had no voice in community deliberations. They were not allowed to participate in the opus Dei, the recitation of Office which was traditionally the principal duty of monks and nuns; and they did not engage in the classroom instruction of children which was the raison d’être of the teaching congregations. In some communities (though not many) the Rule for bade them to learn to read or write “under pain of severe punishment.”12 In

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community gatherings, they were to stand at the back of the room, and while the choir nuns stitched and embroidered, they were to work their spindles as women of their station were expected to do.13 Their dress was of coarse fabric and straight-cut “so that they can be distinguished from the choir nuns.”14 Similarly, their veils were white rather than black in order to differentiate them from the “brides of Christ,” whose servants they were. It might be inferred that communities divided along such lines were cold unfriendly places and that the lay sisters caught up in such a system were the victims of discrimination and exploitation. But this would be to simplify a complex situation. Historians of domestic service in Old Regime France have remarked on its ambiguities. Patriarchy had its rewards and consolations, even for subordinates. At the most basic level, it offered them the certainty of food and shelter in an uncertain world. “They never have to care either about drink and food or about their clothing; these are problems for their masters,” wrote Vauban.15 For the many servants who had known true poverty, this must have been a real and lasting relief. Furthermore, the sense of belonging to “a house,” the intimacy with the master which close quarters made almost inevitable, and the gratification that came from identifying with that master could go a long way towards compensating for the loss of autonomy which domestic service entailed.16 All this could also be said about lay sisters. In return for accepting a condition of perpetual inferiority and an often crushing burden of work, they gained security and a sense of belonging to a community, together with the privileges and status which that entailed. In many ways they were better off than the typical female servant. They could not be dismissed; they would be cared for in sickness and honoured in death. Moreover, the worst dangers of domestic service – the sexual predations of the master and the caprices and tyrannies of masters or mistresses – were neutralized for them, the first for obvious reasons and the second because there was a system in place by which they could appeal beyond their superiors to the bishop.17 Finally, they were empowered by a second dimension in their lives; they belonged to a religion whose founder had promised that “many who are first will be last and the last, first.”18 This may not have affected the community’s everyday arrangements, but it must have been in the back of everyone’s mind. Cissie Fairchilds writes disparagingly of a “peculiar form of self-abnegation which passed for servant ‘devotion’ during the Old Regime.”19 In a world guided by amour-propre, this frame of mind would naturally appear most servile. But in convents, self-abnegation was a virtue to be prized, and those who achieved it, whatever their rank, were given high respect. It is not surprising, then, that a sizable number of lay sisters were raised by

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popular acclaim to unofficial sainthood and that their funerals became the scenes of almost hysterical devotion.20 Thus there was an ambiguity in the position of lay sister, which can be looked at partly in the light of Old Regime master-servant relationships and partly in the light of the gospel and the paradox it has always presented to the powerful of this world. “You may go dancing but I’ll play the tune,” said Figaro to his master; Susanna conspired with the countess to outwit the count. No lay sister would have practised such a reversal, but she might legitimately have repeated to herself the words, “He has routed the proud of heart, He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.”21 Certainly the nun who wrote her eulogy did not hesitate to make the point. A perfect example of this double identity can be found in Marie Le Grand, a converse in the Ursuline monastery of Blois from its earliest days until her death in 1653. The annales, which cover the period from 1621 to 1801, contain more than three hundred hand-written folio pages. Most of the death notices included therein take up two folio pages at most. The section entitled “Ce que nous avons remarqué et Sceu de la vie et des dispositions de ma Soeur Marie Le Grand … Converse de Notre Monastère de Ste Ursule de Blois” takes up twenty-five folio pages.22 This space is divided between an account of her life and a reproduction of her prayers and voluminous spiritual writings, copied out at a later date (1714) by some long-suffering sister. Why this singular attention? Clearly, this “servant of the brides of Christ” was considered by her community to be the right stuff for canonization. Marie was born in 1603 into a poor family, mercers by trade. After her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her life became a sad tale of abuse and neglect, severe enough to raise the concern of her neighbours. Her good luck – perhaps her salvation – came in the form of the porter at the local Capuchin convent, who took pity on her and taught her how to read and to pray. In spite of his kindness, her early years were marked by ill health (“infirmities resulting from pale colours,” according to the annales) and by depression almost to the point of suicide. In her twenties, still poor, and working without much success in her brother’s shop, she started to long for the monastic life: “She begged and pleaded with God to grant her a haven in some religious house.” Marie became acquainted with the Ursulines by chance, when she accompanied a group of young ladies on a pilgrimage to Saumur. On returning to Blois, she was accepted into the newly established community, first as a tourière, then – after much pleading – as a converse. Here her happiness began. “Although she was physically very delicate

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she carried her burdens as though they were a feather.” No penance was too hard for her: “When the mistress of novices set her to some exercise, it seems that her heart leaped with joy.” The waves of depression continued, but she appears now to have learned how to handle them. The virtue that characterized Marie, and perhaps first set her apart from others was a most stringent obedience. Shortly after her profession, she was ordered into quarantine with a pensionnaire suffering from the plague; without a word she gathered up the child, together with her bedding, and carried her into a “separate place.” She admitted later that she had been terrified that she would wake up alone in the presence of a corpse, but fortunately the child recovered. Soon after, another case of the plague necessitated another quarantine, and again it was Marie who was chosen for the duty. In all fairness, she might have asked, “Why me, again?” But her obedience was instantaneous as before. “She [would have] made no point of distinction, she [would have] had no point of view on what was ordered of her, even if she was told to throw herself in a well,” wrote the annalist. The sick woman died, but Marie survived to serve another twenty years in her community. What made her so striking, the annales seem to be telling us, was the excessive degree to which she pursued holiness. She habitually wore the oldest clothes, used the oldest pens and scraps of paper, and ate the most unattractive food. “She … drank out of a death’s head and looked every day for new instruments of penance.” When told by her superior that, for something she had done, she deserved to take the discipline in every corner of the house, she did exactly that – in three hundred corners, including those of the cellars! She undertook, as a measure of perfect chastity, never even to raise her eyes to the sisters’ faces. She wrote out her sins and then read them aloud to the community (an exercise which they may not have appreciated!). As she grew older her behaviour became more eccentric. For four years before her death she was subject to convulsions, and when she felt them coming on, she kept them at bay by shouting out her prayers so loudly and so continuously that an important churchman was called in along with her confessor to order her to be silent. She obeyed at once, but when the priest saw what this cost her he relented and allowed her to continue, and “went away edified.” During her last illness, which coincided with the Fronde, when she heard that sacrileges were being committed locally by soldiers, she pleaded to be allowed to make amende honorable, bare-headed, wearing the white robe and carrying the noose around her neck as though she herself were a criminal. This

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was denied her, but she was permitted to lead the community in a formal procession of atonement – an extraordinary privilege for a simple lay sister, even one who was at death’s door. It might be thought that Marie Le Grand was far too radical for her community’s comfort, that her way of life was an embarrassment to them. Yet during all her working years, she served in the pensionnat almost without a break, and the girls loved her. Far from confining herself to their physical needs, as a lay sister was expected to do, Marie was in constant interaction with the girls – talking, exhorting, singing. She composed numerous plays and concerts in which they were allowed to perform, and she made them walk in processions with crowns of flowers on their heads. The greatest punishment that the mistress of pensionnaires could give the children, according to the annalist, was to deprive them of these activities. So valued was Marie that whenever the superior tried to assign her to other duties, the mistresses would plead to have her back. When she finally became too ill to care for her pensionnaires, they were allowed to come to visit her in the infirmary until the day when “she kissed them all and told them this was the last time she would be with them.” “As soon as she was dead, everyone both inside and outside our monastery proclaimed her a saint.” Crowds came to view Marie’s body and to touch it with medals and rosaries. In one of the more macabre gestures that we occasionally witness among Old Regime nuns, several sisters kissed her on the lips – something they would never have done when she was alive – and reported that they smelled no unpleasant odour, even though her breath during life had been “somewhat strong.” Whatever the community’s hopes at the time, Soeur Marie Le Grand was never canonized. But the signal honour which she was paid in the annales – far surpassing that given to even the most respected superiors – is proof that in the community’s memory, sanctity could outweigh rank as a mark of distinction. But it also emphasizes how that sanctity had to be acquired. Marie may not have been typical of the run-of-themill converses, but she practised in a special way the virtues to which they were expected to aspire: obedience, humility, poverty, laboriousness, and a kind of simple, unconditional faith which, in the religious mind, outshone all the wisdom of the world. These virtues may have been available to choir nuns as well, but they were the special attributes of converses. It was for this reason that certain serious seekers after holiness, such as Barbe Acarie, opted to live in that condition. While holiness might be the end product of a lay sister’s life, it was not one of the preconditions. According to the Rule, the most important qualifications for the job were “an even spirit and a robust body,”23

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for the workload was heavy and the life hard. The suitability of pretendants was supposed to be measured by their docility and stamina. No matter how spiritual they were, if they balked at hard work or were not strong enough, they were to be asked to leave. By and large, they met the challenge, if their average age at death (over sixty-two years) is anything to go by.24 The ideal candidate for the position was a countrywoman from a village or small town. The occasional records that give place of origin suggest that most lay sisters did indeed fit this description. In the Ursuline monastery of Lille, for instance, of the forty-seven converses who professed between 1627 and 1772, only seven were natives of the city, while twenty-seven came from villages nearby, and the rest from small towns.25 In this they resembled the eighteenth-century servant populations of Bordeaux and Toulouse, as studied by Cissie Fairchilds.26 There was a high proportion of country people among servants because the elites considered them hard-working and unspoilt: “They mostly are content to have bread to eat and clothing to wear, whereas in the cities … the men of this condition are almost all drunkards and the women prefer to buy fripperies to adorn themselves rather than cloth to dress their children.”27 In one way, however, lay sisters differed from the servant women of “the world.” Most female servants, according to Fairchilds, got their first job in their mid-to-late teens.28 This was the average age, coincidentally, at which choir nuns entered religion. But not lay sisters. By and large they came later, in their mid-twenties.29 Given their modest backgrounds, this means that they almost certainly had several years of work experience behind them. The move to the monastery was often a job promotion, as can be seen from the number of tourières and “outside servants” who ended up as converses. The position was quite a plum for the women, as long as they were resigned to remaining celibate. For its part, the monastery enjoyed a certain luxury of choice. For one thing, in addition to its own ex-servants, it could target servants of friends or women who had once been pupils in its externe school, whose behaviour and skills were therefore known quantities. So, at entry, the ideal lay sister was a strong, healthy countrywoman in her twenties, with “an advantageous build and an apparently robust temperament, joined to a great gentleness.”30 Her intellect did not matter. She could be very simple, like Marguerite Trumel, who, when asked what the gravest sin in her life had been, confessed with tears that she had beaten her cows in anger; or Marie Testuat, who had been raised in the country and “when she was brought to the city and asked if she thought it beautiful, answered that all the houses had prevented her from seeing it.”31

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The new lay sister might be illiterate. Although illiteracy does not appear to have been the rule, it was not considered a disqualification. Marie Wyart, according to her death notice, “had in the world been lacking in all human knowledge, but in a short time she became learned in the wisdom which is taught in the school of Divine Love.”32 As Marie Le Grand (herself a practised writer) put it, “She who would be wise need read only one book, which is Jesus Christ.”33 There were plenty of opportunities for the practice of domestic skills in the monastery and plenty of spiritual exercises for those who could not read. The important thing was to be healthy. It was her “good and vigorous constitution” that mattered most in a converse. But whatever the theoretical standards set down for lay sisters, the fact is that some of them did not fit that pattern. And the disconnection between the nature of the service and the character of this minority may be one of the reasons why, over time, the nature of the service was subtly altered. Some women became lay sisters in spite of, not because of, their health, upbringing, and social background. One reason already mentioned – the desire for self-abnegation (as in the case of Madame Acarie, who became a Carmelite lay sister) – was probably fairly unusual.34 A more likely reason was that somehow they felt incapable of, or uncomfortable with, the duties of the choir and the schools. Marie Ethienette de la Rouge Foucaut, a girl of noble parentage, first entered religion as a lay sister in 1680; eight years later, having developed the necessary skills, she decided (or was allowed) to take the fourth vow and teach – and was raised to the choir.35 The death notices rarely say so, but it seems certain that some, like Marie Testuat, were simple-minded. Her father was a benefactor, and she had been received as a choir nun, “but shortly before her profession it was decided that she was more suited to be a converse … she was extremely slow-witted.” Or they might be temperamentally unsuited. Louise Villeret, whose father was in the legal profession, seems to have had a difficult temper and restless spirit; in any case, she adamantly refused to be raised to the choir, choosing instead to pass her life in physical labours that relieved her of her excessive energy. In exactly the same way, Marie Gachet, whose father, a wholesale silk merchant, “could easily have given her a dowry,” insisted on becoming a lay sister. “Her weakness was to be naturally somewhat attached to her own judgment; this made it necessary to keep her almost constantly busy with her baking, to practise her submission and her obedience.”36 Other women came into the monastery with specific skills. If they were trained apothecaries, they could almost have their choice of mon-

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asteries, so highly were they prized; and it seems that they could be assured from the beginning that they would not be transferred to other tasks. Magdelaine Roger of Bordeaux, who was “of a very good family of this city,” entered religion specifically to be an apothecary; Jeanne Piquenot of Vernon did the same: “[Her father] hopes that in exercising her skills in surgery and pharmacy she will repay the community.”37 In Toulouse, Françoise Poullaille exercised the same charge from the time she was professed until her death, as did Marie Vattier in Le Havre – which suggests that they, also, had been given some sort of understanding.38 Naturally, women had an advantage if they could offer a skill that the monastery lacked. Jeanne Andoui, according to her eulogist, “was received into our house to be employed as a shoemaker.”39 When Marie Bignon entered religion at the age of fifty-nine, it was on the understanding that she would be asked only to sew.40 Some of these women could have qualified for the choir, for instance, Magdelaine Rollant, a converse-infirmarian in the Ursuline house in Amiens, whose family – illustrious but poor – secured for her the promise of a choir position in another monastery.41 But Magdelaine preferred to remain as a lay sister, plying a trade that earned her some respect; others probably did likewise. The women’s previously acquired skills set them apart from the other converses and moderated the shock of entry into what was essentially a servile and laborious sisterhood. But how did this affect the spirit that was supposed to bind this group together? These entrants did not have to meet all the criteria of the Rule; in particular, their delicate health might induce their new superiors to make special arrangements for them.42 Dispensed from the heavy work of the monastery, they formed a sort of labouring aristocracy. Like servants in the larger households in “the world,” the “servants of the brides of Christ” divided into ranks among themselves. But the factor which more than anything else distorted the original symmetry of the Rule was money – or rather, lack of it. It was often the dowry requirement rather than rank or education that divided “servants” from “brides.” Without a dowry, a woman was almost certainly destined for the lay condition. With a dowry, she was automatically considered for the choir. The annales of Blois provide simultaneous examples of both situations. In 1632 Marie Duchemin was received “in the quality of a choir nun.” But before she was professed, her sister, who had pledged to pay her dowry, reneged on the commitment, and Marie found that her only choice, other than leaving, was to become a converse. And at the same time, Françoise Bercerolle, who had been serving as a tourière with no hope of entering the choir, learned that her

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brother’s death on the battlefield had left her with a legacy and hence a dowry – and therefore a stall in the choir.43 Two women of similar social background thus found their roles reversed for dowry considerations. The records show that a sizable number of lay sisters owed their situation to their families’ poverty. Oudart Coquault, never a friend to religious houses, described the process: If a girl of good family is a minor with little fortune, she will not find anyone to marry in keeping with her station. To make this poor girl give in, her relatives and people speaking for the convent represent to her young mind the problems of marriage … They persuade her that in religion she will find salvation; she listens to that. But there is not enough money to be a choir nun; that requires seven or eight thousand livres. They make her resolve to be a converse, that is to say, a servant of Mesdames, to cook their dinner.44

Certainly, the link between a family’s financial difficulties and the settlement of its daughter(s) as lay sister(s) was often pointed to in the records. Jeanne Serpe, said her eulogist, belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais and was close to an engagement in the world when her father went bankrupt. There was nothing for her to do but become a lay sister. Jeanne de Calvid “was born noble and of quality,” but “the goods of this family did not respond to their extraction.” Marie Hachin came from “a very good family,” but her father’s fortune was “insufficient to establish all his children as advantageously as he would have wished.” Anne Benoist, also “of very good family” but an orphan, was almost forced upon the Ursulines of Blois by her relatives, “who begged us to admit her to the exercises of a lay sister.” Sent away because of her difficult humour and then readmitted (under what pressure?), she proved to be too delicate to perform the standard domestic service and so was put to sewing.45 This practice continued through the eighteenth century. Madame Roland in her recollections of her one year (1767–68) spent in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris tells of a young converse, Angélique Bouflers, who became her friend. “The lack of a dowry had placed her among the lay sisters, with whom she had nothing in common except their arduous exercises.”46 Finally, we should mention the name of Marie-Anne Depeyre, daughter of a ruined nobleman, who for lack of a sufficient dowry entered the monastery of Carpentras as a converse, was arrested in 1794, and executed by the Commission populaire of Orange for having expressed, in public, “the culpable wish for a return to royalty, fanaticism, and counter-revolution.”47 The line, then, between choir nuns and converses, at least where their upbringing was concerned, was much more indefinite than the Rule

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had anticipated. In terms of social background, we can visualize the monastic community as something of a continuum, with aristocrats at one end and true plebians at the other, and with a sort of jumble through the middle ranks. Some lay sisters equalled and perhaps even outranked their sisters in the choir, in both birth and ability. Occasionally, if there was need, they were raised to the choir, and there were even cases where lay sisters who had become choir nuns went on to be superiors.48 The mistress-servant relationship, though sanctioned and sanctified by their original vows, must sometimes have been a little strained. Another factor contributing to the blurring of the community caste system was the practice, within the house, of sharing in the converses’ workload. The work assigned to the lay sisters was “the care of all the farmyard, the housekeeping, and the heavy labour of the house.”49 It is worth remembering what “the housekeeping” involved in the seventeenth century. Some houses had water piped in; others did not. One way or another, water had to be provided and, where necessary, heated. There was, of course, no public sewage system; the lieux réguliers had to be emptied out by hand. Heating and cooking required that fireplaces be cleaned and that coal or wood be carried in from outside. Floors had to be swept and scrubbed, furniture dusted, and “spider webs cleaned out from time to time.”50 Although all the sisters were expected to take care of their own cells, the pensionnaires had to be served: their beds made, their fires laid, their clothes mended, and their wash basins and chamber pots scoured. The little ones had to be dressed in the morning and attended to during the night.51 In the infirmary, invalid nuns required more or less care according to their condition, and the death notices describe situations in which nursing must have required the most intense effort. Apart from the actual nursing, laundry had to be sorted and special food prepared, and sick rooms and invalid vessels had to be kept clean. As well, the Rule ordained that twice a year at least, all infirmary beds had to be taken apart and cleaned.52 In the bakehouse, the yeast had to be prepared and the flour sieved, then the bread kneaded, set to rise, and finally put into the oven (which, of course, had first to be fired up).53 From the kitchen there had to come two meals a day for the whole community: soup, boiled and roast meat or fish, and dessert.54 There was fruit to be conserved, vegetables to be cleaned, pot herbs to be prepared and dried. In the refectory, tables had to be set and bread and wine served out in advance; and the hot dishes had to be carried out in the course of the meal, with washing up to follow. “Bowls, spoons, salt-cellars, cups, knives and forks [had to be] washed and scoured every fortnight, and

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rinsed and dried with a clean cloth at least once a week.”55 The garden had to be planted and cultivated;56 the herbs, fruit, and vegetables picked, cleaned, and delivered to the kitchen or the pharmacy.57 In the basse-court, or farmyard, the cows (if there were any) had to be milked, the pigs and chickens tended, the byres and pens cleaned out. The laundry was a huge undertaking, starting early in the morning and lasting through the day. From each sister came two chemises, two veils, two caps, and two wimples per week, plus aprons, stockings, nightcaps, and handkerchiefs58 – and, we must remember, their menstrual cloths as well as all the soiled linen of the infirmary. Their woollen outer habits were cleaned twice a year. Sheets were changed every month, tablecloths every fortnight, napkins every week, community hand towels two or three times a week.59 The wet wash was strung out in the garden or stretched out in the attic.60 Once clean, the linen had to be pressed, sorted, mended, and stored, then handed out according to regulations – “which is heavy work in a community as numerous as ours,” wrote one eulogist.61 These were all day-to-day tasks. In times of special need, extra labour might be required. A monastery’s natural instinct was to avoid extra expense whenever possible, and if any sister was capable of doing the job, she was likely to be recruited. When the grand couvent got the chance to bring city water into the house, it was a lay sister who laid the pipe. When the monastery of Montargis bought an adjacent house in 1681 and decided to incorporate it into the cloister, it was a lay sister who reworked the masonry, closing up the windows overlooking the street and making new windows on the inside, edged with brick, which were “as well measured as an experienced mason could have made them.”62 On all sorts of occasions like these, by undertaking tasks traditionally reserved to men, lay sisters were able, as one eulogist put it, “to spare us the entry of workmen.”63 This, it would seem, was a herculean mountain of tasks for the one in six nuns (or so) who were officially designated as servants of the monastery. Too herculean, in fact. Every community found some way to supplement the labour force. Help came from inside the community, from the ranks of the choir. It was always the practice for the junior nuns and the novices to work with the converses; it was considered part of their formation. The records tell us that this heavy labour often came as a shock to the girls, some of whom had never done housework in their lives; indeed, parents were known to complain that their novice daughters were being used as servants. Older choir nuns also crossed the demarcation line to work with the lay sisters, either for reasons of humility or obedience or because they thrived on the physical labour. Anne Herbelin asked to be relieved of the duties of the

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Chapter “because she does not have a good enough mind to manage affairs.” Instead, she rang the bells, carried lamps to the sisters’ cells during winter, ironed the wimples, and helped with sweeping and dishwashing where needed. Similarly, Marguerite Le Clerc expended some of her energy in helping with the laundry: “One wash day we decided to watch her, and we counted thirty-three loads of laundry that she carried up to the attic.” Likewise, Jeanne Guenichot “gladly took part in the most arduous tasks with our converse sisters.”64 At the same time, some of the heavier work was being turned over to nonmonastic servants. In many instances, the records attest to the existence of these extra servants: scullery and basse-court maids, washerwomen, and the occasional male gardener or valet. If the workload exceeded the sisters’ capacity and if the house had money for wages, this was an option, even though it detracted from the self-sufficiency that was a monastery’s pride. On the whole, the work delegated to these servants was the heaviest work of the monastery. The lay sisters kept the middle-duty tasks – and at the same time edged up into new areas of responsibility. According to the original conception of the rules, almost none of the lay sisters’ tasks was supposed to be in their hands alone. Almost without exception, choir nuns were to be put in charge, with the converses in the role of assistants. In the sacristy, infirmary, pharmacy, linen room, bakehouse, kitchen, refectory, garden, and so on – in virtually every department of domestic activity – choir nuns were expected to be the decision makers, the managers, and the experts. Take, for instance, the responsibilies of the cellarer, the officer in charge of the stores and the kitchen: She has the duty to watch over the sisters who prepare the food, and to have the servings [for the community] made according to the quality and quantity prescribed, and [to ensure that] all is ready in time, and with suitable cleanliness and neatness … [Let her avoid making difficulty for the converses] by failing to tell them clearly, in good time and distinctly, what they must do, and to give them what they need to execute it; or by telling them one thing and then another … [Let her] support with patience and kindness their faults and forgetfulness, their sulkiness and bad humour if these occur … carrying them along by her good example, and by the help which she herself will give them if needs be.65

Here was a model of subordination – softened by forbearance and charity, but subordination nonetheless. Here were personality types: sturdy, simple, hard-working women, used to service but in need of direction – the very kind of servants that the rules had envisaged.

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But the rules had been written in the early seventeenth century, when choir nuns were easily come by and the class differential between choir nuns and converses was clearly marked. With time and the changing needs of communities, the model came to be altered. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the great glut of choir nuns which had marked the years of the Catholic Reformation began to drain away. This had a dramatic effect on monastic economies. Far from having to find work for their choir nuns to do, communities now had to scramble to find choir nuns to do the work. Certain duties – the principal charges of the monastery, the recitation of Office, and all branches of teaching – remained within the purview of the choir. But with their numbers continuing to drop, they were forced to use their available talent more economically. In the domestic arena where the work had previously been shared, lay sisters began to take over. Here and there, depending on their abilities, lay sisters became infirmarians, gardeners, linen-room managers, refectorians and so on. They took over the kitchen and the bakehouse – and proved that they could manage their own responsibilities. Something else changed as well. New activities began to absorb the energies of the nuns, and these activities were as suitable for lay sisters as for choir nuns. As the eighteenth century progressed and as entries into the choir became rarer, communities had to find ways to supplement the dowries they no longer received. One obvious way was by making consumer goods. In their kitchens and pharmacies, they turned out sweets and medications for sale. Their community rooms became workshops where the sisters spent long hours on their ouvrages – even, if necessary, curtailing their prayer and study time. Their products ranged from refined works such as church vestments and linens to such mundane items as knitted-to-order stockings.66 The money thus made could be very important to a monastery’s economy. In the death notices, those women – converses or choir nuns – who excelled at ouvrages were singled out, and the reader is left in no doubt that their contribution to their community was as essential as any other. But the great money raiser was the pensionnat. From the late seventeenth century, monastic pensionnats began to change and expand to meet the demands of the public and also the Crown. Once almost entirely dedicated to schoolchildren, they now became retirement homes, hotels, and sometimes prisons for all varieties of women.67 What the nuns thought of this was not important; they entered into the business out of obedience to authority and because it enabled them to augment their income considerably – which, in the critical years of the eighteenth century, was what mattered most.

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We can see the consequences of this in the changing composition of communities. The labour required to maintain these adult pensionnats (where no teaching was required) was converse labour, not choir nun labour. In houses where such pensionnats were established, lay sisters ceased to be a drain on the economy and became an asset. Their numbers remained constant and sometimes even rose, compensating to some degree for the decline in the number of choir nuns.68 This must only have accentuated a transformation that was already taking place: the déclassement of the monastic population. As described in part 1, in the eighteenth century the elites largely walked away from the religious institutions which their forebears had created. At the same time, women of the lower ranks of society – the honorables and honnêtes – were finding their way in force into the religious life. Most of them joined the new secular and uncloistered congregations, of which the Filles de la Charité were the most famous. Here, they achieved an influence and respect and a pedagogical reputation that may well have rivalled that of the older teaching orders. “[They] have the same objectives as the Ursulines and, by diverting both subjects and students at a furious rate, are building themselves at [our] expense and to [our] detriment,” wrote a grumpy Ursuline superior in 1745.69 If the older institutions hoped to compete, they had to show a friendly face to these women of lesser quality. The less exclusive monasteries lowered their dowry requirements and welcomed women whom, a century earlier, they would have spurned. In 1790 the social difference between choir nuns and lay sisters, and their monetary value to the community, was much less marked than it had been in 1690. Although we have no evidence for it, we may surmise that this, and the need to cooperate in order to get through the daily workload, led to a mellowing of the old hierarchical practices. The change must not be exaggerated, however. Like the generations that had gone before them, the lay sisters of 1790 were excluded from teaching, from the recitation of Office, and from the deliberations of the Chapter. Their canonical status remained the same, and as such it was an affront to the Revolution’s principles of equality. One of the moves that the National Assembly made in 1790 was meant to reform this by giving them a vote in the upcoming monastic elections (a privilege which the lay sisters almost always rejected). Their inferiority followed them to the end. When the Church’s goods were confiscated and the Nation became the paymaster of all monks and nuns, it was the Nation that decreed that converses’ pensions should be exactly half those of choir nuns.

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12 Of Death and Dying

When a man is dead to himself, the death of the body is no more than the consummation of the work of grace. François de Salignac Fénelon1

By her very state, every nun was “dead to herself.” Her earthly life was gathered up and placed on the altar and immolated, consumed completely, with nothing left over. This is the message implicit in the ritual of solemn monastic profession. The newly professed nun prostrates herself on the ground, and the funeral pall is draped over her body. “Here will I rest for all eternity,”2 she states. The monastery church in which she makes her vows will almost certainly one day witness her committal to the earth. In a sense her physical death, whenever it arrives, will be only the final crowning of her martyrdom. Death is not just the termination of life; it is its consummation, the end towards which everything else has been directed. However, no matter how virtuous her life, the hour of death is a time fraught with danger, because at that moment the nun is still vulnerable – and perhaps especially so – to the lures of Satan. As Philippe Ariès describes it, the deathbed is the scene of a monumental battle: “Supernatural beings have invaded the chamber and cluster about the bed of the recumbent figure, the ‘gisant.’ On one side are the Trinity, the Virgin, and the celestial court; on the other, Satan and a monstrous army of demons.”3 The ritual of anointing and the prayers of those gathered around are manoeuvres in this battle. The “last agony” is the climactic act of a baroque morality play about good and evil, temptation and triumph. And nowhere is this drama played out with more virtuosity than at the deathbed of religious women. Innumerable descriptions of deathbeds have come down to us from the nuns themselves. In the surviving necrologies, or death notices,

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the events are amply described. When a death was imminent a timehonoured ritual began. The priest was called in to hear the dying woman’s confession and to give her Holy Communion if she was still conscious and capable of receiving, or at the very least, to anoint her. The community assembled around her bed to keep vigil, to sustain and encourage her with their prayers. For her part, the dying woman would do her best to maintain herself in faith and resignation. In a gently consoling phrase, Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, wrote that a recently deceased sister “went straight from her bed to heaven.”4 The authors of the necrologies did not write so confidently, but they did love to dwell on the final whisper, the eyes fixed on the crucifix, the hands joined in prayer. It is hardly surprising that women consciously tried to fulfil these expectations, as did Madeleine de Meulle, for instance, dying at the age of twentyeight: “As her sister, close by her, burst into tears, she said, ‘Sister, let me die courageously,’ and, lifting herself on her bed, took up the posture in which she wished to die.”5 Did the ceremonies around the deathbed soften the fear of dying? Or did they sharpen it by adding a metaphysical dimension? It is impossible to say. One authority on convent life, Geneviève BaudetDrillat, believes that the communities she studied took death in their stride as the logical ending to life.6 Another, Georges Minois, concurs: “All conventual life was directed towards this end and seems to have been no more than a preparation for it.”7 Another, Philippe Loupès, goes further: “Death was … in general, desired; and its coming was often accelerated in a context of baroque exaltation by growing mortifications. But it was sometimes experienced slowly, with a sort of delectation.”8 Are these conclusions altogether convincing? Was this how real, living women experienced death, or may we suspect a certain seasoning of the facts by the eulogists, the better to edify their readers? Interestingly enough, the notices, our source for a host of death scenes, offer a mix of evidence. Certainly they tell of many women who met their death calmly: “Death caused her no fear, she had made herself familiar with it all through her life.”9 These women received their reward: “Death arrived with great gentleness” … “She passed away in an admirable gentleness … This precious death was only the echo of her good and holy life.”10 Sometimes the necrologies even add a note of comfort. Jeanne du Bourbet, when she felt death approaching, turned to her superior and said with a smile, “It is time to leave this world and go to sing Alleluia in Paradise.” Marthe de Langlée, who died during her term as superior, “before death … cast a glance over all the community, and gave a little smile.” Guijonne Hacou asked for

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her prayer book, put on her spectacles, and did a half-hour of preparation for death, after which “the death-sweat overtook her, her face changed noticeably, she took her handkerchief and wiped her face, and asked for Monsieur our confessor.” Less typically but with a certain charm, Catherine Chrétien found the prayerful scene around her too distracting: “As we kept on suggesting acts suitable for this last passage, she said to us: ‘Leave me alone with my God.›11 The eulogists loved these familiar touches, which showed their subjects both human and unafraid. On the other hand, they were also ready to admit that death was the subject of anxiety and distress for many religious women. Louise Vallette “had in a strange way feared death all her life.” As for Marie Ursule d’Oizelley, “the fears of death … were very strong in her.” Agnez le Duc, after a long and successful religious life, suffered for two years from “anxieties, scruples, and fears of death.” Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau felt such terror of death that the very sight of preparations for her anointing threw her into a panic.12 To all appearances, their anxiety was fuelled by more than the physical fact of dying. Death by itself is frightening enough; death followed by the final judgment must have been infinitely more frightening. In those times, it was common belief that no one except baptised babies had the right to expect easy passage through the gates of heaven – certainly not nuns, who as consecrated women bore an extra responsibility for their own sinfulness. Fourier’s expression of confidence is not typical of the religious literature of the Catholic Reformation. For those who listened attentively to the message of the teaching church, sinfulness and punishment were huge obsessions. One might think that nuns had earned the right to a peaceful conscience, but this was far from the case. “I saw that I merited hell,” wrote Marie Guyart, Ursuline of Québec, “and that the justice of God would be served by casting me into its abyss.”13 The monastic life did nothing to dispel anxiety; indeed, its pedagogy was designed to sharpen the consciousness of sin and the fear of judgment.14 In many instances, the women’s anxiety was expressed in terms of the second fear, that of God’s wrath. Marie Françoise Proboist “was very fearful of the judgments of God.” Marie Anne Gohin had “a lifelong, extreme apprehension of death and the judgments of God.” Angélique de Bailleul suffered “great interior pains, fear of the judgments of God.” Marie Descluseaux spent her declining years in terror: “She envisaged God as a fearful judge with vengeance in His hand [ready] to punish her mercilessly for the scandal she believed she had given to the community.” As for Marie-Anne Dufourd, “the fear of

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God’s judgments filled her with terror; despite frequent confessions, the memory of a life entirely employed in the service of the Lord, and the assurance her confessors gave her that God looked kindly on her, in spite of all this … she was always in a state of fear.”15 However, the story was never allowed to end there. The purpose of the necrologies was to edify their readers. If they chose to discuss the fear of death, it was in order to signal the benevolence of God, who took away this fear in the end. “Peace at the last” has always been the prayer of Christians.16 Almost universally, if the eulogists are to be believed, these dying nuns were granted it. Sometimes God took away their consciousness so as to relieve them of their terror. But in a remarkably high number of cases they remained alert to the last moment, and virtually never were they said to have died in a state of fear.17 That final triumph gave dignity to all the previous fear. Dorothée de Luc must have offered encouragement to a number of her sisters when she remarked that she had always been afraid of death but that now, on her deathbed, she “would be quite annoyed not to die.”18 The other aspect of death was bereavement. Madame Drillat sees this also as being attenuated by the training and ethos of religious life: “A death did not arouse a great deal of emotion.”19 Or, as one eulogist put it, “There ought to be moderation in weeping for the dead who enjoy eternal rest.”20 But here again, other death notices raise doubts. The conventionally pious phrases come first, it is true. But after them come numerous allusions to the real human distress of the people left behind: “The death of our dear sister has plunged us into the profoundest bitterness” … “General consternation, and the tears of her sisters, announced her death, each regretting her as if she had lost her own mother.”21 Phrases like these occur time and again, and they should come as no surprise. First, it must be remembered that the female monastery was often home to family groups of sisters, aunts, and nieces. The loss of a relative was considered sufficient reason for deep grieving. In his memoirs Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, described his daughter’s desolation at her aunt’s death in the monastery: “My daughter the nun is inconsolable; she loved her; she was holding her hand when she died.”22 The loss of a relative could lead to nervous prostration, physical collapse, and even death – as in the case of Elisabeth de Rapin, who was felled by a stroke the day after her sister’s demise.23 Over and over, family grieving was openly acknowledged: “She leaves behind her a dear sister who is deeply afflicted by the loss she has just experienced” … “Her three nieces are in pain for the loss they have suffered” … “Her dear niece whom we have as a religious … is inconsolable.”24 Frequently

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the superior herself, who was supposed to write the letter, was unable to do so because as a relative of the deceased she was too overcome – as one letter put it – “with good reason, by an unequalled affliction.”25 “This is how this dear child has taken leave of us,” wrote one eulogist, adding that Reverend Mother, the dead girl’s aunt, is in consternation and incapable of writing herself.26 There seems to have been no shame in this surrender to grief. Bereavement was not only a family affair. Many a necrology paid homage to a friendship that had been “tender, constant, generous, disinterested.”27 “I have lost … a true friend,” wrote one superior. Another, reporting the death of her friend, confessed: “I have lost everything in losing her; in my infirmities and at my advanced age, there is no service that she did not render me.”28 It was acceptable for women to wish to be linked in death as they had been linked in life. Anne de Mestres was thought to have died of grief at the loss of another sister: “The tender and sincere love she felt for her made her shed so many tears, and filled her heart with an affliction so bitter, that seemingly it was from this that there came an inflammation of the chest, which took her from us in a few days.”29 When an old nun died in Toulouse, and another followed her within days, the eulogist remarked: “They were bound in a friendship so close that the former often prayed to God that she would not survive the latter.”30 For the aged, living in such closed and close circles, the death of a lifelong companion must have been an irreparable loss. The death of the young brought distress of a different order: the endangering of the community’s future. A poignant illustration of this can be found in a string of letters from the superior of the Filles de Notre-Dame in Narbonne. The first, written in 1726, reported the death from consumption of a nun of twenty-five. She was followed a year later by a thirty-six year old, and a year after that by a twenty-one year old. Then in 1731 her younger sister also died: “When she reached the same age as her dear older sister … she was attacked by the same malady.” With each death, the superior’s tone had become more anxious, and now she openly mourned “both for the death of this dear girl and for the others who preceded her, who were all young subjects of great promise.” But the community’s troubles were not over yet. In 1732 and 1733 came two more young deaths; in 1735 another; in 1737 another two, and in 1739 and 1742 two more. The average age of the eleven deceased nuns was 28 12 .31 To imagine how the loss of these young women touched the Narbonne community, we can look at another community similarly affected exactly a hundred years earlier, when a cluster of young deaths at Eymoutiers caused so much alarm that there were no new entries for several years.32 —

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th e c e re m on i e s of d e ath After death came the laying-out, the funeral, and the interment in the monastery’s cemetery. This was a major event conducted with dignity and honour. The dead sisters, professed or novices, will be carried into the choir by their peers, with their face uncovered, with their habit and veil of religion, a crown of flowers on their head, holding a wooden cross, and their vows held in their joined hands, if they have made their profession … There will be six burning candles around the coffin, and six sisters who will stand guard on the body … When the sign is given to commence the office of interment all the sisters will be present in the choir in their great veils, with lit white candles in their hands.33

These last honours were payment owing, so to speak, to the woman whose sacrifice had just been perfected. For the more distinguished, there was the local equivalent of a state funeral, with all the notables of the town attending, “an incredible gathering of all the people of distinction in this city.”34 For nuns who had achieved the reputation of sainthood, there were often touching manifestations of affection from their students and from the poor. When Marie de Pluvinel was laid out in the chapel of the Ursulines of Saint-Marcellin, “everybody came from everywhere to touch her body with medals and rosaries.” The same tribute was paid to Catherine de Chevalier, who had been a nun for forty-nine years in the town of Salers: “At her burial there was a great crowd of people, who proclaimed her a saint; over and over again we had to give away pieces of her choir mantle and to touch her body with rosaries.” In Montargis, at the funeral of Marie Houre, a simple Ursuline lay sister, “there was reason to fear that all the poor of the town who revered her as a saint might break down our grille to get hold of her relics.”35 Burial took place either in the church or in the sisters’ cemetery within the monastery walls. The privilege of being buried in the monastery, and in the monastic habit, was coveted by many devout laywomen; sometimes, in return for their devotion or generosity, they were accorded this privilege. Finally, word of the death went out to other monasteries of the order “so that they might pray and have prayers said for the soul of the deceased.”36 But the notices were intended to do more than elicit prayers; they were also meant to be read to the community so that those who read them would be “moved … to imitate their virtues and to praise

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God who has taken for Himself the hearts of such a great number of virgins.”37 The dead sisters joined a kind of court of honour to which their successors could have constant recourse.

religious women and sickness However honourably the Grim Reaper was treated when he arrived, it does not follow that he was welcomed in. Monasteries of the Old Regime yielded to no one in their efforts to cure their sick. They built special infirmaries which they staffed with senior members of the community; they maintained pharmacies whenever possible; and they called in doctors, surgeons, and specialists as needed. On occasion, they sent their sick members out for treatment elsewhere.38 The medical care of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was of doubtful value, but to all appearances, nuns enjoyed as much of it as anyone else. This made for some ambivalence in their approach to suffering. The monastic rules gave mixed advice: “Sickness is a state of penance,” which the sisters should bear willingly, “as satisfaction for their infidelities and ingratitudes” and in conformity with “the suffering Christ.” So they should not pamper themselves.39 On the other hand, they were expected to do everything necessary to remain healthy:40 “If anyone is sick and requires care, it must not be deferred but given to her without demur as soon as possible, following the advice of the doctor; if she does not respond of her own accord, the superior will order her to do what she must to regain her health.”41 The community was warned that God would be offended if its sick members suffered needlessly: “He considers all the good and all the harm done to them as if it were done to Himself … Among all the works of mercy, there is none more agreeable to Him … than that of assisting, treating and consoling the sick.”42 So the rules were open to interpretation, and the degree of suffering that was acceptable remained a matter for individual judgment. It appears that the refusal of medicines was permitted but unusual, and “all the more rare in even the most virtuous persons because they can ask for them without guilt.”43 The records indicate that the rules were often interpreted generously, and that from time to time women were allowed to leave their convents for weeks, months, and even years to breathe their air natal, receive specialized medical treatment,44 or take the cure at one spa or another.45 However, the favourite models of monastic life were the stoical women who bore or even hid their ailments so that they could continue working, fasting, and observing community practices.

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The necrologies sang their praises. There was Catherine de la Massuère, for instance, who lived with her cancer for twenty-five years: “She had promised the Divine Majesty to seek neither relief through remedies nor consolation from other creatures.” Gilberte Nicaud, suffering the agonies of colera morbus, had “the courage to remain on her feet until the day of her death.” Marie Gasparde “did herself great violence in order to come to Communion in the church, even though she was dropsical.” Marguerite Colin, an aged lay sister, was ordered to rest: “But our cares irritated her; she wished to die as she had lived, in the fatigues of a laborious life, standing at arms as befits a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” Magdelaine de Cholet, another old lady, insisted on getting up at three in the morning: “When she was sick we had to take her clothes away to prevent her from doing so.” Barbe Guyot struggled for five years to overcome her illness: “It is impossible to describe the efforts to which she submitted herself … to continue to serve the community with the same courage and the same energy that she had shown during her years of health.” Marie Houre, eighty years old, insisted on washing the dishes, “even while experiencing the shivering” that announced her mortal illness.46 The litany of these saints could go on and on, but we will end it with the eulogy of an old lay sister, Catherine Humbert, who demonstrated the perseverance that was admired in choir nuns and lay sisters alike: “To content her we had to let her ring the bell, wash the dishes every day, and sweep the community room; we saw this poor woman with a cane in one hand to support her and a broom in the other; it would have been a great insult to her to prevent her from doing this task.”47 Equally, nuns who refused to break their vow of clausura in order to seek a cure elsewhere (even when this was authorized by the bishop) were especially commended. Among these heroines was a woman who refused to go to the waters of Bagnières, saying that “she would prefer death a thousand times to regaining her health at this price.” Another, when offered a trip to Paris to see a specialist, insisted that “if they promised her her health at the city gates, she would not want to take a step outside to obtain it.”48 Another said that “if it was a question of abandoning enclosure for only an hour, she would not do it, even if she was promised her health by leaving her beloved solitude for such a short time.” Women like this were the stuff of which monastic legends were made. But this last nun’s eulogist went on to say, “Few religious souls … carry their love of the cloister to this point.”49 The line between heroism and foolhardiness was a thin one. Monasteries needed healthy women, not sick ones; there was a certain exasperation for superiors in seeing their charges neglect their health. In

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one letter the superior complained: “It has to be said that this dear mother went too far in her pious excesses, and that they perhaps contributed to the sad state to which she was reduced these last twentythree years.” Another wrote: “As soon as I saw this illness, I judged it incurable, and I rebuked her soundly for having hidden it so long.” And another: “It is the only point on which I could complain of the dear departed, that she hid her ailments for too long and was too difficult about accepting the most necessary remedies.”50 The doctors often had their say too: “I made her show her tumour to the doctor, and she did so with great repugnance … He did not fail to scold her for having waiting so long to reveal it.”51 There was a tension built into the religious life between the glory of self-immolation and the common sense of self-preservation. Many nuns failed to resolve that tension. There was also a less heroic reason for feigning good health. Sometimes women hid their condition out of delicacy. A nun in Magny had “a serious and dangerous condition … of which she would rather have died than commit herself to the hands of the surgeons”; and in Rouen a nun’s “love of purity was such that she had difficulty allowing her pulse to be taken and was prepared to bear the agonies of nephritis … rather than to be exposed in the course of the cure.”52 It must have been very hard for women who had lived in the convent for most of their lives to submit their bodies to male scrutiny. Whatever their health and whatever their level of stoicism, nuns must have expected from their earliest days that sooner or later they would spend time in the infirmary. In the small world bounded by their monastery walls it remained a constant presence. Many of them were assigned to work in it at one time or another; all certainly visited it when occasion demanded; and all would be present at the deathbed of their sisters. Inasmuch, then, as the infirmary impinged upon the monastery’s daily life and experience, it is worth looking for a moment at this sad little community lodged within the larger body.

the infirmary The infirmary was not usually included in the first round of monastic buildings, for two good reasons. First, money was usually short to begin with, given all the initial disbursements, and other buildings such as dormitories for the sisters and living quarters for the pensionnaires took precedence. Second, when most construction started, the community was still young, and the problems of sickness and death may not have loomed large. However, with the passing years, the need for an infirmary became more pressing. Finally, in the eighteenth century, when vocations grew scarce, a spacious, well-designed infirmary became a

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drawing feature, an attraction for would-be entrants, who were much more concerned with “quality of life” than their predecessors had been.53 From numerous descriptions in the inventories of 1790, we get a picture of these quarters. The infirmary occupied its own corner of the monastery, sometimes being built directly over the church with a squint hole allowing a view of the altar. The various communities’ rules concurred in requiring that it be sufficiently large, with more comfortable beds and better quality linen than normally used.54 It was usually furnished in dormitory style, with cubicles divided by curtains, but it also had one or two small rooms for special needs; also an oratory and a cell for the infirmarian, who had to sleep on the premises. There were armchairs to sit in, large cupboards to store the linen, and special dishes to handle the invalid diet. The price that sick nuns paid for these small comforts was separation from community life. The infirmary was a world unto itself; patients were placed under obedience to the infirmarian, and the only contacts they had with their companions in the monastery were the visits which these were authorized to make. The infirmarian’s responsibilities included recording the course of the sisters’ illnesses, calling the doctor when necessary, and notifying the superior when it was time to bring in a priest.55 Numerous descriptions of infirmarians survive in the necrologies: “She had a natural penchant for the most unpleasant services and for the care even of those suffering the most contagious diseases” … “Our doctors often followed her advice and always approved the remedies that she had ordered in their absence” … “The nuns preferred her advice to that of the doctors” … “The doctors said that she was a treasure to them” … “She bled patients with a delicate touch that would have done honour to the ablest of surgeons. She was equally skilful in making remedies.” She had “a great knowledge of simples and their properties, she was able to bleed, to bandage wounds; she performed highly successful operations … [she] had very good secrets”56 … “She was … vigilant, knowing by her own experience what sickness was and how one must have compassion for the misery of others; she recognized the different maladies, and she applied the appropriate remedies; she did the bleeding for more than twenty years and kept the pharmacy.”57 This last activity, the making of medications, was a skill greatly valued in the monasteries, to the degree that communities would accept postulants with reduced dowries or no dowries at all if they had pharmaceutical skills.58 Among these skills was the care of the herb garden and the knowledge of when to pick the herbs for best effect: “She would go out in the middle of the night, even in snow and heavy rain, to search in her garden for the herbs necessary for the relief of the

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sick.”59 The monasteries took their pharmacies seriously; an inventory taken in 1721 at the Ursuline house in Guincamp shows that its pharmacy contained 176 medicinal products.60 In some cases they marketed their medications or offered them free to the general public. Medical care for outsiders was a small sideline in some teaching monasteries, and the women involved – often lay sisters – might well be rewarded with public tributes at their funerals. Depending on the size of the community and the number of invalids, the infirmarian might be given assistants. The work could be dangerous. There are numerous instances of infirmarians and their assistants catching fatal diseases from their patients. In Arnay in 1691, three women died one after the other, of “violent fever and oppression of the chest.” The fourth to die was the infirmarian herself, followed by a lay sister: “Her sickness is the same as those preceding her; she caught it in nursing them.” In Aurillac the same story was told twenty years later. An epidemic of malignant fever tore through the community, and four women died within days, the last of them being the infirmarian.61 The work could also be arduous. Paralysed or extremely sick patients might require two or more women to lift and turn them. It could also be repugnant, as the necrologies frequently pointed out. But this provided the opportunity, for those brave enough to take it, to imitate the holy example of Saint Francis embracing the leper. Louise Gautrin cared for a nun dying of a “hideous” cancer: “Only she was willing to nurse her, with a manner so pleasant and so tender that to see her you would have thought she was taking great pleasure in it. To persuade her patient that she was not causing her any disgust, she ate her leftovers after bandaging her, and she did this without even washing her hands.”62 In much the same spirit, Françoise Cormane devoted herself to a nun whose body “was all covered with sores, sores on which worms were feeding”; and Jeanne de Belcier, soon to be famous as the “possessed” Ursuline of Loudun, asked to take over the care of a sick nun “all covered with sores caused by scrofula, from which came such an unpleasant odour that it was difficult to bear it.”63 What do we know about nursing procedures in the monasteries? One of the passages just quoted mentions bandaging. This was a procedure to which considerable attention was given, though one historian remarks that it may have done more harm than good. There are also numerous references to bleeding. This involved using a lancet to open a vein – not just any vein but one strategically located – and allowing as much blood as required to escape. Medical science blamed impure blood for a host of ailments and prescribed the removal of it as a sovereign remedy for just about everything. After all, “the more water you

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draw from a well, the more good water comes in,”64 and the same principle was applied to blood. The body was thought to contain twentyfour litres of blood, of which the patient could lose twenty and still live, so there was scope for some risk taking.65 But the procedure was not without danger, as the nuns of Eymoutiers found when one of their sisters “lost all her blood when a vein was broken open in her body by a woman who was trying to relieve her stomach pain.”66 One of the conditions for which bleeding was highly recommended was inflammation of the lungs – a major killer in convents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, respected authorities were explaining that since the condition was believed to arise from a build-up of blood in the lungs, bleeding was “the first and foremost remedy.”67 So the monastic infirmarians were only following a prominent school of medical thought when they drew blood from their patients. But they sometimes had their doubts about it. Colombe Saint-Memin was bled for her pleurisy, and the eulogist reported that it did her no good. Marie-Louise Valette was bled a dozen times for her lung ailment, and her eulogist remarked that the bleeding caused other infirmities, “which forced her into a regime with extremely mortifying remedies.”68 This expression of doubt may have reflected another school of medical thought. According to the highly respected physician Paul Dubé, whose patients included a community of Ursulines, there was altogether too much bleeding and not enough purging.69 The necrologies are reticent on the latter, though occasional references to “mortifying” and “violent” remedies probably covered emetics, purges, and enemas. These treatments, like bleeding, were tempting but dangerous interventions.70 Too much could damage the digestive system and lead to dropsy. Sometimes, though rarely, a bath might be used to treat a victim of nephritis.71 Conditions of “oppression of the lungs” and dropsy were often addressed by keeping the patient upright in an armchair, and there are harrowing descriptions of women remaining in this position for incredibly long periods. “Since it was impossible for her to stay in bed, we were forced to put her on a chair, which was uncomfortable for her because of the distress she was suffering; for three weeks she was unable to keep her head up.”72 One nun, Antoinette de Sigy of Provins, who achieved some notoriety as the result of a miraculous cure, recalled that she had spent two years sitting in a chair: “I had to keep my body upright, otherwise it seemed that I was going to suffocate.”73 The nuns’ home remedies have come in for occasional scoffing, but there is no reason to believe that they differed substantially from the general run of medications of their day. If the nuns of Guincamp stocked crayfish eyes and scrapings from staghorns in their pharmacy,

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they were surely following the same lines as highly respected compendiums such as The English Housewife, which recommended foxes’ lungs boiled in rosewater as a cure for tuberculosis, and the Pharmacopée universelle, which recommended newborn puppies stewed with earthworms as a treatment for sciatica.74 If anything is revealing in the necrologies, it is the nuns’ own scepticism about the value of the cures available. A number of necrologies echoed the critical opinion that these might have done more harm than good.75 But the doctors kept visiting.76 There is one cure that is worthy of mention because it shows that the nuns and their doctors were – at least occasionally – up with the times. In the early 1780s Clotilde de Laurent had been in a state of nervous collapse, “nailed to her bed” for five years. A visiting priest remarked on her case and spoke of it to a colleague, a professor of mathematics, who suggested a cure through the use of electricity. To the nuns’ amazement, it worked! “The first movement that she made with her head seemed to us a prodigy; but when we saw her walking, it was in our eyes a true resurrection.” She lived for two more years, though a semi-invalid.77

contagion The nuns under consideration here were all teaching nuns. Although they lived within a cloister, they taught school, usually to two sorts of students: the demoiselles in the boarding school, and the day students who attended school during part of the day but ate and slept at home. The day students were sometimes poor children, with all that this meant in Old Regime France. There are references in the necrologies to heads crawling with lice, scabby faces, encrusted eyes, and filthy ragged clothes. More than anybody else, these children were marked with the sign of death at a time when, even among the comfortable classes, only half the babies born survived to adulthood. The nuns, therefore, were not insulated from the ills and dangers of their society, and a major danger of early modern society was epidemic disease. Often the sisters who taught in the day schools brought contagion back into their communities: “The chill of fever seized her while she was in class.” Another was “struck down while teaching in the externe school.” Another, “at the very time she was working in the senior externe class.”78 Once a contagious disease entered a monastery, the results could be frightening, since the nuns lived in close quarters with one another and could not take much evasive action. There were occasions when entire communities were stricken at the same time. One contagious disease above all others struck terror into the hearts of early modern Europeans – the plague. Ever since the Black Death of

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the 1340s, plague had been ravaging the European population. During the early part of the seventeenth century it remained endemic in western Europe, with dramatic outbreaks in 1628–31, 1636–37, and 1668–69. Its last appearance in France, in 1720, was horrific in its virulence (killing 50,000 in Marseille within six months), but it was contained within a relatively narrow section of Provence – a tribute to the country’s vastly improved quarantine techniques. It says something for the plague’s fearsome reputation that it was one of the very few things that could disperse a cloistered monastery. Ever since the Middle Ages nuns had been allowed to leave their cloister when plague struck. In this they were seeking the only remedy known: “to take flight soon and far, and to return after a long time.” The plagues of the 1630s were particularly disruptive for the new teaching communities because they hit just as these were being established. No sooner had the nuns of the Congrégation opened their school in Troyes in 1628 than they were fleeing to the countryside. The Ursulines of Limoges were luckier in 1631 because they were able to take shelter with their sister community in Eymoutiers.79 This was a rare show of hospitality, considering the terror of contagion. More typical was the experience in 1629 of the Ursulines of Carcassonne, a new community whom the local population treated as a bunch of Typhoid Marys. When one of the sisters died of the plague they were all forced to leave the town. After eight months they returned, only to lose another sister and to leave again for another six months. All seemed to have returned to normal, when in 1632 “one of our nuns caught the plague in the classes while exercising our holy institut, from a little girl whose brother had died of it without anyone in the town knowing of it.” When word got out, the townspeople “rose up and subjected the community … to harsh treatment; they forced them to leave the town for the third time.”80 It is hard for us to imagine the panic caused by the plague. “Brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and – even worse, almost unbelieveable – fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children.” These were the words of an eyewitness of the Black Death.81 The seventeenth-century manifestations would have been no less terrifying. A passage in the annales of the Ursulines of Blois captures some of the feeling. In 1631 the nuns obeyed the bishop’s order to retire with their pensionnaires to the countryside, where they lived in considerable poverty and hunger but not enough isolation. After the mother of one of the young nuns was allowed to visit, her daughter caught the disease. At recreation, “we saw the epidemic appear on her face.” Everyone promptly rose and fled from the room – all except two who

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remained to care for the sick woman. The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) – an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist. The community decided to quit the house altogether. One by one, nuns and pensionnaires went into the courtyard, removed all their clothes and dressed in new ones, then immediately departed for another house, leaving the two caregivers to face their quarantine alone.82 Happily, all lived to meet again in their house in Blois, and their deliverance was celebrated by a procession every year until the Revolution. In the panic exhibited by the majority, we should not forget the heroism of the minority. Mary Margaret Gordon, a Scottish expatriate turned French Ursuline, was remembered in her death notice for her courage during the plague of 1668–69, when she closeted herself and a sick sister in a little house at the end of the garden, nursed the woman until she died, and then buried her with her own hands: “Our Lord then allowed her to have the buboe, and as she knew how to bleed and to make all the drugs, she bandaged herself”83 – and survived! Mère Gordon must have been one of the last Ursulines to suffer from the plague.84 The great “scourge of God” was on the wane, though it could still arouse terror. While people shook with fear of its return, other epidemics were taking its place: smallpox, dysentery, typhus, diptheria, and malaria, to name a few. These swept through the country with terrifying regularity and were the commonplace diseases of monastic infirmaries. Neither the nuns nor their doctors knew what caused the different diseases or exactly how they were spread, but they understood their contagious nature. Over and over again, the necrologies made reference to “malignant fever,” “the fever of the season,” “the common people’s sickness,” “the scourge of God,” “the mortality that has reigned for a long time in this province,”85 and so on – all terms indicating epidemic conditions. The nuns recognized that these illnesses could be passed from one person to the next, and took what precautions they could. Smallpox was of course a familiar enemy, then and for many years to come. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it reigned supreme as Europe’s foremost killer.86 It also maimed. A contemporary authority estimated that for every hundred people, twenty-six or twenty-eight died or were disfigured as a result of smallpox.87 Many nuns had already suffered it in childhood, and some were scarred or otherwise handicapped by it even before they entered religion. So for what it was worth, they had the advantage of being forewarned. They knew enough to quarantine. The usual precautions were recorded in the necrology of a twenty year old smallpox victim: “On Saturday, a high

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fever; on Monday the pox appeared; we moved her at once to a separate place.” Unfortunately, as they also knew, if the “poison” did not come out in pustules but remained within the body, it could result in fatal hemorrhaging. The same necrology continued: “Suddenly an abcess in her head discharged, pouring out through her nose and her mouth; from her throat came the death rattle, and she lost consciousness at that moment.”88 There was little they could do to affect the outcome. Even the best medical authorities were divided on how to treat the disease. Another contagious disease that frequently visited monastic infirmaries was quinsy, an inflammation of the muscles of the larynx.89 The resultant swelling could prevent the victim from swallowing and even breathing. Even in a literature marked by stoicism, the condition was acknowledged as painful and distressing in the extreme: “A type of colic which left her almost beside herself. Inflammation of the throat, tongue, and mouth which prevented her from swallowing” … “Inflammation of her throat which grew worse as she approached her end … She could find relief for her pain only by moistening her poor tongue all cut up with heat in cool water.”90 Bleeding was sometimes prescribed: “The quinsy lasted two days: an inflammation of her throat made her unable to swallow anything … We bled her from the arm and from the jugular vein, but neither these bleedings nor any other remedies could relieve her suffering.”91 The infirmarians’ helplessness must have added to the burden of their work. A host of ailments did their damage without ever being identified. In many cases neither infirmarians nor doctors recognized what they were dealing with. However, they were conscientious about observing symptoms. Thus, “asthma” signified one kind of difficulty in breathing, “oppression of the chest” another. “Gout” meant pain in the joints. “Languor” and “wasting,” combined with “pallor,” described the condition of the victim even if it does not tell us what she died of. A common problem in monasteries was “disgust [for food].”92 Frequently, doctors and infirmarians fell back on the term “complication of ills.” At the end of the line were dropsy and gangrene – well known as killers, though they had not initiated the disease. The symptom that received most attention was “fever.” In early modern Europe, where eight out of every ten deaths was preceded by fever of one kind or another,93 it was seen not as an effect but as the central reality of disease. Doctors classified and subclassified it under 128 different headings. They measured its intensity and rhythm; they counted the days it lasted and anticipated when it would come to a crisis. The nuns who managed the infirmaries knew how to do all these things correctly. Thus, one necrology after another told how many days a

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“simple” fever lasted before it became “ardent”; whether it was “continuous” or “intermittent,” “tertian” or “quartain,” “putrid” or “bilious,” and so on. Behind these fevers lay real diseases, many of them epidemic, such as malaria, typhoid, and dysentery,94 but it was fever that was perceived as the principal feature of the fatal illness. The romantic literature of the nineteenth century dwells on the drama of fever, its rising intensity, and the crisis that leads suddenly to death or recovery. This same drama must have been played out in many early modern sickrooms. From the evidence of the necrologies, disorders of the lungs ranked as a major scourge in women’s monasteries. Chief among these was “phthisis,” a term that is usually taken to signify tuberculosis. It was generally recognized by three symptoms: a wasting of the body, a fever known as “hectic fever,” which mantled the face with a bright flush, and a cough that was dry to begin with but later became (in the terrible term used by doctors) “productive” – productive of blood and pieces of lung, torn out by the relentless progress of the disease. The nuns and their doctors would have been only too familiar with the blood – “bright red, boiling and frothy” as a contemporary authority described it95 – which came straight from the lungs. The necrologies echoed a depressing refrain: “For six months, spitting of blood and a low fever; death came to her with great gentleness” … “For a year she coughed up blood, until she was dried up, having spat out her lungs bit by bit” … “Consumption for several years, and a slow fever that reduced her to skin and bones” … “Stricken in the lungs” with a dry cough and a fever; she languished for five to six months and then “fell asleep peacefully in the embrace of the Lord” … “She suffered from a weak chest … Her illness made surprising progress … We saw this innocent victim slip into death almost overnight.”96 In these five cases the women’s ages ranged from eighteen to thirty-five, and this was perhaps the worst feature of the disease: its appetite for young victims, the novices and junior nuns who represented the future of communities. There was no known way of preventing the disease, nor did the nuns seem to recognize its infectious nature. One necrology praised the determination of a dying woman, who dragged herself daily to school to teach her students “and often came out [of the classroom] spitting blood.”97 There never seems to have been any attempt to isolate tuberculosis victims. The nuns also knew pleurisy and pneumonia in their various forms. Pleurisy is a filling of the lungs with fluid or, as it was then known, a “fluxion.” Doctors identified it by a gurgling sound in the chest, “like a vessel half-full of water when it is being shaken.”98 The victim suffered from fever and swelling and had difficulty breathing. “Malignant”

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pleurisy appears to have been what we would call lobar pneumonia. The Journal de Trévoux decribed its progress: “It begins ordinarily with cold and shivering, followed almost at once by heat, restlessness, alteration and coughing. Some hours later there is a sharp pain in the side, under the ribs.”99 It progressed rapidly, so that within three or four days the victim might be dead. The nuns were obviously horrified by its lethal suddenness. Letter after letter described the sudden shivering, the pain under the ribs, the burning fever, and the spitting of blood. In some cases, two or three women died one after the other; in one case, fifty members of the same community were stricken all together, though only one succumbed.100 “Colic” was a term that covered a multitude of ills. The most terrifying of these must have been the miserere, which the nuns described as a tangling of the intestines, which caused terrible agony and killed within a short time. “We had the affliction of seeing her die in extreme pain,” ran one letter.101 According to Furetière’s dictionary, a miserere could possibly be cured by giving the victim a musket ball to swallow and then keeping him upright while gravity took its course! But the more conventional procedure was an operation, and one or two of these appear in the necrologies. One letter speaks of “a painful operation, of the kind that it is customary to perform in these sorts of illnesses. She did not fail to apologize to the surgeons for the three or four groans that their razors and scissors forced out of her.”102 The word “colic” could also apply to the many conditions that affected the digestive system or the bowel. The doctors also knew enough to suspect the presence of internal cancers. “Colics and vomiting for four years, until she was all skin and bones … there was a tumour in her liver,” ran one necrology.103 Cancer, at least in some of its forms, was recognized in the early modern period, and it was already seen by contemporary medical authorities as “the most horrible of all the ills that attack mankind.”104 The visible ravaging of the flesh – “this condition so frightful to the senses and to nature”105 – may have struck a deep chord in these religious women, a sense of premonition of the corruption for which their bodies were destined. “She watched herself die from one day to another in different parts of her body,” ran one necrology. Another claimed that the dying woman welcomed the putrefaction of her body that would send her soul to heaven.106 The cancer most commonly recognized in the necrologies was cancer of the breast. The accepted treatment for this was fer et feu – the knife and the cauterizing iron, wielded without the benefit of anaesthetic. As one historian remarks, “[This] supposes in the first place, a very resolute patient.”107 The occasional sufferer survived the treatment,108

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though more often death followed quickly, probably from shock. Surgery was also employed for other cancers; one nun endured six operations to remove lumps from her thigh; another died after her foot was amputated.109 When acute crises like these occurred, the monastic infirmary must have been an extremely stressful place. In the face of intensifying pain and terrifying suffocations, convulsions and sudden hemorrhages, massive vomiting and diarrhoea, the infirmarians could offer almost no relief. In the crowded conditions of the dormitory the other patients must have watched and listened in horror. “Despite all our care for her she often brought tears to our eyes by the agonized cries which the illness forced from her,” wrote one eulogist.110 The fact that the eulogists felt compelled to dwell on all the repellent details of the deceased person’s agony suggests that they, and other nuns with them, were not immune to the shock and distress that come with death.111 But we should not forget that even if the acute cases took centre stage, in the wings lay other women whose condition, while not critical, would nevertheless eventually lead to their death. The medical history of Old Regime France has always given priority to crises, especially the killer epidemics, because it was on these that the nascent medical service of the eighteenth century concentrated, thus building up a fund of written information. But the day-to-day work of convent infirmarians – and of the country’s caregivers in general – must have been at least as much involved with the nursing of the chronically ill. It might be supposed that in an age when medical and nursing procedures were so primitive, the sick would not long survive once they had taken to their beds. But the necrologies suggest that the contrary was the case. The long and doleful experience of chronic illness is alluded to over and over again. Louise de Gach died at eighty, having suffered a “contraction of the nerves which had reduced her body almost to a ball, so that her head was pressed against her knees.” Jaquette de Villeneuve died at seventy-nine after two years of “a general paralysis … with her head touching her knees.” Anne Cusson was eighty-two when she was confined to the infirmary; four years later she died, having long lost both memory and eyesight. Catherine Ryot endured five years of “universal paralysis, which took away the use of her limbs.” Marguerite Barroche’s purgatory lasted six months: “feet and hands useless, deprived of sight and hearing, her body all covered with sores.”112 These and many other sad lingerers were elderly women, and in many cases their initial “accident” (to use a word favoured in the necrologies) was “apoplexy” or caterre – most probably stroke.113 “Apoplexy … paralysis throughout the organs of her head, her tongue and the whole of one side” … “An apoplexy … left her paralyzed in

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one side for twenty years” … “A catarreuse attack … made her mouth and tongue all crooked and grossly swollen, and made her unable to walk” … “A paralysis that lasted twenty years crippled her, so that she could neither walk nor lift her food to her mouth.”114 But not all the long-term inmates of the infirmary were old, nor had they all suffered strokes. Françoise Richer was thirty when she started four years of “incurable pains,” the last eighteen months of which saw her lying in bed without changing position; Louise Chochon, fiftyseven, after suffering for two years from a dropsical body “of prodigious size,” spent the last three weeks sitting in a chair, “unable to stay for a moment in her bed.” Marie Dolet, also fifty-seven and also dropsical, was forced to spend “one year without lying down in bed.”115 Dropsy seems to have been a major villain; even if they started with different ailments, numerous women came to the same end: the swelling of their bodies to enormous size and then the collapse of the swelling, the development of horrible sores, and the onset of gangrene. Whether reduced to helplessness through paralysis or dropsy, through loss of memory or failure of bodily functions, these women depended entirely on the services of the infirmarian and her assistants. For the most part the effort involved in caring for them is left to our imagination, though there are occasional references. One paralysed nun required the constant care of a sister for fourteen years, “who gave up most of her sleep almost every night”; another, also paralysed, had two nuns assigned to her care.116 For the women who escaped these diseases and the myriad other ailments which the necrologies described, old age brought threats that still have a familiar ring. Some women collapsed with what was called a “syncope,” a sudden loss of consciousness which suggests a heart attack: “She had been unwell for several years with pain in her chest, which seemed to oppress her. She lost all her senses and died within an hour” … “At three o’ clock she felt uncomfortable, at five a syncope carried her off.”117 Then there was pneumonia, which in later years would be nicknamed “the old man’s friend” because it gently released the soul from an aging body. Perhaps this was the spirit in which one necrology was written: “She had had several attacks of apoplexy, and her mind was a little enfeebled. A fluxion in her chest took her from us.” Finally, the necrologies reported plenty of cases of simple old age, sometimes with a wandering mind, indicated by the single word enfance. One is struck, in fact, by the number of old ladies in the records. Contrary to the belief of their contemporaries, nuns lived reasonably long lives by the standards of their times.118 But the dark side of this is that many of them spent a portion of those long lives in the monastery infirmary.

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The men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived in hard times, at least where physical suffering was concerned. Nuns were no exception. How did they respond? The necrologies throw up a mass of answers, most of them opaque with conventional piety. In all ages, eulogies have to conform to certain standards. But within the edifying and conformist phrases lie traces of a more sincere, and indeed more visceral, attitude towards sickness and death. When sickness struck, they followed the best medical practice of the day, even though it was not far short of useless. Once it was over, they accepted the outcome with resignation but also with real human feeling.

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13 The Institut

Women’s work consisted largely of making perishables … So if we are to retrieve significant amounts of women’s history, or of the history of any evanescent occupation in particular … we need better evidence than just that which falls into our laps. Elizabeth Barber, Women’s Work1

Strange to say, the teaching of children was one of these “evanescent occupations.” Historians of women’s teaching congregations of the Old Regime have to live with a fundamental frustration: they have little solid information about how and whom these congregations actually taught. Once away from the rich vein of school rules and customs belonging to the foundation period, the historiography of girls’ schooling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looks like a desert.2 Of pensionnaires there can be no doubt; numerous sources point to their existence and to some extent describe it. Consequently, since the availability of sources has a great deal of bearing on what gets written, these demoiselles have traditionally received the lion’s share of our attention. This fits neatly with a tendency, which is only now disappearing, to focus our attention on the well born. Yet it was in day schools, not boarding schools, that the great majority of girls acquired their education; and it was through the work of day schools that the curve of feminine literacy began its slow but steady ascent.3 “The pensionnats … only held a tiny minority of scholars; it seems abusive to use them alone as the basis for an analysis of the entire school system,” writes Marie-Madeleine Compère.4 Inasmuch as the monasteries participated in the running of day schools, they must surely share the credit for the rising educational standards of Frenchwomen. But that is the question: Did they participate? And how much? Some historians have concluded that whatever the intentions of their founders, the teaching monasteries gradually abandoned their obligation of free instruction, or at least reduced it to the merely symbolic,

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and turned wholeheartedly to the more lucrative business of educating pensionnaires.5 In many cases there is little positive evidence to support this view, just as there is little positive evidence to counter it. These historians’ main argument is the absence of any major body of evidence attesting to a serious commitment on the part of women’s monasteries to free day schools. The monastic records, which yield a great deal of information on life within the cloister, barely mention the schools;6 the pastoral visits virtually ignore them; even the surviving plans of monasteries fail in many cases to show the placement of their buildings. The researcher has to ask, If day schools existed, would they not show up somewhere in the records? There are two ways of answering this question. First, by deduction – by providing certain good reasons why the monastic free schools should have existed. Second, by scraping up what paltry evidence there is. After all, one fingerprint is enough to place the suspect at the scene of the crime. One reference to ongoing school business, standing alone in a century and a half of silence, is enough to suggest that something was going on. Deduction begins with a definition of the word institut. As “the founding principle of a religious order,”7 it varied from order to order but was always spoken of as a sacred trust. The institut of the women’s teaching congregations was “To devote oneself entirely to the free instruction of young girls.”8 “Instruction,” in its seventeenth-century sense, meant religious instruction, and it was this function – not the “profane” teaching, which was of only secondary importance – that earned it the dignity of an apostolate. Because it was sacred, this instruction had to be free. The sacred could not be bought and sold. “As for us who teach,” ran one Rule, “let God alone be our salary and our paymaster.”9 To contravene the principle of free instruction would, in the eyes of the founding generation, have been tantamount to destroying the whole raison d’être of their community. The teaching congregations’ constitutions insisted on the centrality of their institut: “Insofar as the first end and principal aim of this monastery is the teaching of Christian doctrine … they must content themselves to be not only ordinary religious but also teachers of Christian doctrine.” At the time of profession, individual sisters were asked, “Will you have the courage to instruct young girls, in conformity with the institute of this monastery?”10 And many of them were required to make a special vow or promise never to give up this instruction, “which they consider, truly, the principal purpose of their vocation.”11 Even in old age, they were to be held to their commitment: “The mothers and senior sisters will be put to teaching, and whatever seniority and whatever charge a person has exercised, she may not pretend to be dispensed from this function.”12

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Thus, we can be certain of the intention of the founders, as well as the observance of the earliest generations of teaching nuns. But things change with the years, and between the establishment of the teaching congregations in the early seventeenth century and their suppression in 1792 there lay a long stretch of time, with abundant possibilities for compromise and the erosion of ideals. No one should insist that simply because rules existed, they must have been obeyed throughout this time. But there is another reason to suppose that the nuns kept their promise: they were bound by a civil contract. The establishment of new religious houses in the cities of France in the early seventeenth century was seldom popular with the city fathers.13 It was the practice of these gentlemen to make things as difficult as possible for the incomers and to hedge their residency around with every legal restriction available. The female teaching monasteries, wherever they established, were faced with substantively the same tough contracts: that on no account might they beg publicly; that they must have sufficient funding to support themselves; that they must not acquire further property within a given distance of the city without express permission from the municipality; and that they must provide free instruction to all young girls of the city who came to them.14 In a society that did not love its convents unreservedly or support them uncritically, we can surmise that it was risky for the nuns to be in breach of contract. It seems unlikely that they could have given up the central provision of the contracts – the obligation to provide schooling free of charge to the girls of the city – without running into some opposition. Nor, by and large, did they do so. We can tell this because from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries a succession of government inquiries took place into the state of the women’s monasteries. They turned up large numbers of communities that were running free schools in conscious and openly proclaimed observance of the terms of their original contracts. “Our establishment in this city … took place on August 25 1641, on condition that we should instruct freely and without recompense the girls of the town; this we do faithfully.”15 Agreements of this sort could not easily be forgotten, especially when one of the parties – the city – stood to benefit so substantially by their continuing observance. It would seem that even if the nuns had wished to renege, their towns had the power to hold their feet to the fire. So it is more than likely that monastic day schools were a going concern throughout the Old Regime. But then the question must be asked: If numerous monasteries continued the free instruction of young girls, why are references to this instruction almost non-existent in their records? Even if some communities had retreated from the

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obligation, there must have remained several hundred institutions observing a school year almost as long as our own and teaching children – as many as five hundred or as few as thirty each.16 How could such a major commitment of time and energy be so largely unremembered? The first answer is that the information available to us today is the product of a culling process during the Revolution, which tended to eliminate records of no particular interest to itself.17 But beyond that, it can be argued that the records were never there in the first place, that in the early modern period ordinary people were not yet accustomed to recording the details of their daily life. Women cooked, but we would not know it if we had to depend on a count of the recipe books they themselves wrote; they raised children but left precious little written indication of how they did it. In the same way, it is possible to argue that nuns taught school but recorded little about the craft of teaching. They worked from their original rules and from the person-to-person training they received in the novitiate. If they wrote at all, they wrote about spiritual matters or they kept their communities’ records. As a result, we know much more about their devotions and their debts than we know about their day students.18 Another fact of monastery life may have some bearing on the subject. This goes back to the terms of the original contracts. Between the nuns and the municipalities there persisted a difference of opinion about who was responsible for the externe school buildings. The records show some communities behaving as if their commitment was limited to the provision of free instruction, nothing more, with responsibility for the buildings being borne by the city. This would be in line with the arrangements made for male colleges that belonged to the cities and not to the religious congregations that taught in them. But the authorities thought otherwise and not only neglected the nuns’ schools but taxed them as though they were private property. The free classrooms suffered in this ongoing battle of wills. Over and over again we find official reports stating that the schools were “ready to collapse.”19 Eventually most of them were saved by a variety of compromises involving nuns, city officials, and bishops. But whatever the compromise, the monasteries seem deliberately to have kept public school expenses separate from their regular accounts. It is possible, therefore, to draw the conclusion that monastic free day schools did exist and function until the end of the Old Regime – but to admit at the same time that not much can be said about them. It is with this ambiguous conclusion in mind that the following word picture of “the monastic day school” is offered. It is built from the occasional records and random references which the author has collected in her study of the teaching congregations. If it looks very much like

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an attempt to make bricks without straw, she offers the excuse that some thoughts on the subject are better than no thoughts at all. The sketchiness of the work must be acknowledged, as also must the fact that it is drawn from dozens of sources and so represents none completely. Nothing in the Old Regime was uniform, not even its nuns. In a hundred different ways they belonged to their own localities and regions, in a country characterized by enormous diversity. The following composite picture, made up of excerpts from widely scattered sources, must not be taken for “typical” because there was no such thing. Yet there was a certain consonance between teaching communities, born of their similar goals and similar circumstances, and this gives the picture some integrity.

i n s i d e t h e d ay s c h o o l s The girls would have begun to gather outside the school door of the monastery at about eight o’clock. They would have had to dodge the city’s morning traffic – often a dirty, dangerous situation, as surviving complaints from the nuns to the authorities make clear: “Their street is covered with mud and filth … The carts have to run alongside the walls and the buildings, and the young girls have a great deal of difficulty getting to their classes” … “God himself is offended by the carters and drovers … by the disgraceful oaths which, with indignation, we hear them proffer.”20 The municipalities’ answers are also on record: that the state of the pavement was the responsibility of the property owners (in this case, the nuns), and that the language of the passersby was beyond anybody’s power to control. The school door – “a little entrance within the great gate”21 – was usually unlocked by a servant of the monastery. Behind her, with her veil drawn down over her face, would stand the portress, a senior officer in the community. She would not herself approach the door, because if she so much as stepped across the threshold she would be in violation of her obligation of clausura. The students would first come into an inner room or courtyard, and the outer door would be locked behind them. They were free now to do whatever they wanted, within reason: “[They] will take this time to have breakfast, to learn their prayers and the catechism; and they will be truly obedient to the person in charge.”22 The children who came to school hungry might receive free bread from a lay sister.23 Close by, “in a corner apart”, stood a little commodité so that they did not need to go back into the street to answer the call of nature.24 At the sound of the bell they would line up two by two, class by class, in front of the inner door; and from then on, silence was supposed to

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prevail. Once they were in the classroom and the door behind them locked, an interior door connecting the classrooms with the monastery would open, and the headmistress – called the “mistress general” or “prefect” – and her teaching sisters, or regents, would enter. This interior door would then be locked, still in obedience to the law of clausura. Teachers and students came together in the most controlled circumstances possible, in obedience to rules laid down at the time of the Counter-Reformation. What was the classroom like, and how was it furnished? It was probably small by modern standards. Most monastic day schools seem to have occupied converted private houses – usually an adjacent building which the monastery had managed to buy. The Ursulines of Avallon conducted their school “in the upper chambers of a neighbouring house,” while the Ursulines of Saint-Dizier turned over a whole private house to their day school, as did those of Guincamp.25 In the monastery of Argenteuil, “at the bottom of the garden [was] a little building, giving onto the main street of Argenteuil, which serve[d] as classrooms for the girls of the town.”26 In the eighteenth century, as their original school buildings came close to collapse, communities that could afford it or could find outside assistance constructed new buildings. In Valenciennes the Ursulines’ day school, rebuilt in 1728, was a “school on two floors” valued at 6388 livres in 1790;27 the Ursulines of Toulouse owned “a separate building constructed at their own expense for the purpose of free instruction”;28 the externe school of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Nancy, remodelled in 1743, occupied a sizable wing of the monastery and accommodated four hundred students;29 and the Ursulines of Sainte-Avoye in Paris held their public school classes in a large threestory building, reconstructed in 1782 at a cost of 28,000 livres.30 But many communities, stricken by the poverty resulting from the Law Crash of 1720, had no choice but to continue teaching in their ancient buildings. The archbishop of Avignon, on his pastoral visit in 1760 to the Filles de Notre Dame of that city, found their junior classrooms “small and barely sufficient for the large number of children who are asking to be received … damp, badly lit,” and the workshop for older girls nothing but “a tunnel.”31 The bishop of Lisieux decided to rebuild the Ursulines’ school in Pont Audemer at his own expense, so close was it to collapse.32 To the modern observer, the sparseness of furnishings would come as a shock. The junior classrooms would contain only the benches on which the children sat, a chair for each mistress, and, fixed to the walls, a crucifix and a few holy pictures. Hanging in plain view there might be a table or two of printed letters and syllables or “a slate, or board,

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placed so that all the pupils can see it easily”33 – the ancestor of our present-day blackboard. Classrooms for senior students would be better furnished, with tables for writing and “cupboards to hold the children’s books and papers.”34 Only a few favoured institutions could boast special facilities, such as the cotton spinning equipment in a monastery in Auxerre.35 A bell and an hourglass were desirable but optional,36 as was a fireplace or stove. In many free classrooms, heating of any kind was provided only “if the scholars bring the fuel.”37 This illustrates the point that it was only instruction that the nuns were offering free of charge, not the furnishings or even the materials required for the lessons. For the latter, there was a tariff, the regulations for which we can see laid down in the school rule of the Ursulines of Paris: [The mistress general] will keep the money that the scholars give for the ink, pens, brooms, and other little classroom necessities … and will make sure that those who have the means contribute something to the fund, to wit, those who are writing, two or three sols each year for ink and pens; and all the students, except the poor, one sol each month for the small needs of the classrooms … and also that they must bring wood in the winter.38

Over the years, by charging small fees to those who could afford it and by using the money from charitable donations, the nuns were able to buy equipment, treats, and small prizes for their students.39 But the furnishing of their classrooms was always subject to their own financial circumstances and those of the student population, which do not appear to have improved much with time. “Feminine instruction, in fact, enjoyed a limited recognition,” writes Martine Sonnet. “The classrooms multiplied in response to the pressure of families, but in material conditions which often hindered their smooth functioning.”40 After opening prayers, the lessons began. The day started with recitation, then the class mistress “showed” the lesson. At about nine o’clock, books were given out, and the children worked at their reading, writing, catechism, and civilité for the rest of the morning.41 Throughout all these activities, one thing is clear. For all that it was uncomfortable and crowded, the monastery classroom was carefully structured along strictly hierarchical lines, and teachers operated within a clear chain of command. As the senior officer, the mistress general, or prefect, had “responsibility for the whole college … regents, aides, scholars.” She was supposed to go “once a day through all the classrooms during the lesson, to see if the regents [were] doing their duty, and if silence [was] being observed.”42 It was her responsibility to admit students (after interviews with their parents) and to

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expel them if need be; to record their attendance and to penalize malingerers; to promote students from one level to another after due examinations; to give out prizes and adjudge punishments.43 It was usually up to her to undertake the most solemn part of their education, the preparation for First Communion. In smaller communities she might also be mistress general of pensionnaires or regent of the senior class of day students. As one might expect, she was a person of some standing, and she was probably formidable in the eyes of the children. Madame de Maintenon, who must have known a thing or two about power, recalled this from her days as a pensionnaire with the Ursulines: “When the mistress general came to the classes, it was news that we talked about for a fortnight before and a fortnight after; she had her robe and her sleeves lowered and we trembled with respect!”44 Gentler pictures of mistresses general appear in the death notices: “The externes [were] the children of her heart”45 … “She kept intact the union … between the mistresses and the children.”46 Under the mistress general were the regents, or class mistresses. The rules alloted one regent, or sometimes two, to a class of up to fifty, with specialists in writing, handwork, and arithmetic to assist them.47 They were professed nuns, with some years of experience behind them and a familiarity with their community’s teaching system. It is safe to assume that they were chosen for this work because of their teaching abilities. Some of them are celebrated for that in the monastic records. Florence Campion “worked with her girls in so engaging a manner that she won over the most rebellious, of whom she took very particular care”; Michelle Gueland “had a good memory, and explained things easily and in expressive language”; Anne de Soulfour de Gousengres, though only twenty, had “a gravity which inspired the unruliest of children with respect and self-control”; Marguerite Laurens had “a special talent for teaching those young girls who had the most difficulty in learning”; Louise Gautrin had “a method so simple and straightforward that she enlightened the most muddled minds”; Marguerite de Moi-Richebourg, Mère de Jésus in religion, “had such a hold over [the children] that if some small disorder occurred in the classrooms, or if there were difficult and incorrigible spirits, as soon as they were given Mère de Jésus for their mistress, with skill and gentleness she tamed them and returned them all to order.” Anne de Gerard “was highly suitable for this position because she both read and wrote very well and because she made the girls love her.”48 Considering the importance which the congregations attached to their institut, the number of nuns formally assigned to public school teaching – two to a class, probably amounting to only six or eight per

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community – represents a surprisingly small proportion of the monastic population.49 However, a closer look will show that as well as the official regents, a number of other nuns were involved in the school in a less formal way. Many combined their principal charges in the monastery with assistant roles in the school.50 These would be the “aides” mentioned above, and no matter what their seniority in the monastery, as long as they were in the day school they were subject to the regents. The class, if it was large enough, was subdivided into “benches” of ten to fifteen children. Each bench had its own teacher – one of the aides, most likely – who had the task of watching more particularly over her own charges. These aides varied in age and experience. They might be very young nuns, such as eighteen-year-old Louise Provençal, who “as soon as she was professed was directed to the education of the girls in the free classes, according to the practice of the Company.” Or they might be as old as Anne de la Mare, who “at eighty years, decided to spend an hour each day in the junior class.” Charlotte de Girois, also in her eighties, “had her bench like the ablest regents,” and however much the other nuns “begged her to give up this work, she continued it until she was forced to surrender to her weakness and infirmity.”51 These women’s involvement in the classrooms might well make the teacher-pupil ratio in the monastery schools satisfactory by any standards. Unfortunately their contribution can only be signalled; it cannot be measured. The subdivision of the large classroom into smaller units allowed the nuns’ teaching system to work. Monastery schools did not boast many levels. In the schools run by the Congrégation there were three: “In the upper classes they will be made to read in Latin books in the morning and in French books in the afternoon, as well as to write; in the middle classes they will be taught the same lessons, except writing … In the bottom classes they will simply be taught to recognize letters, to form syllables and to assemble them so as to pronounce words.”52 Within these major groupings, however, the children on the individual benches were able to move at their own speed: “The mistresses will be careful not to anticipate each other’s work, but to keep to the rules of each class by staying within the assigned limits.”53 No child was to be promoted from one bench to another until she had mastered the skills pertaining to her level. Even her position on the bench was assigned according to her achievement. The day schools also had a troop of noncommissioned officers in the form of the décurionnes, or dizainières. These were students, “wiser and more knowledgeable” than the rest, who were given responsibility for their own “benches” both inside and outside the school.54 Inside the school, they performed small tasks, such as giving out books and

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leading the prayers, for which they were rewarded with prizes and honours. Outside the school, they acted as deputies of the cloistered nuns, watching over the public behaviour of the children: “To keep an eye on them, to remind them to be modest as they go to and from the college and to make the sign of the cross as they enter and leave the church; and, while there, they are to make them keep their order without noise and say their prayers to God with respect and reverence.”55 At ten o’clock, at the sound of the bell, the books were put away. The morning ceremony was reversed, with the teachers first withdrawing into the monastery and the doors closing firmly behind them. Then the outside doors were unlocked and the students filed out, to go first to Mass and then home for dinner, always with the nuns’ admonitions ringing in their ears: “[They] will refrain from running through the streets or appearing silly and hare-brained, because that is highly unbecoming to girls who are instructed in piety; but they will go modestly to their homes, without loitering on the way.”56 After dinner, at two o’clock, the whole ritual was repeated as the children returned for a further two hours of schooling. At half-past three a light tinkling of the school bell warned teachers and students to prepare the homework. At four o’clock the bell was rung vigorously, the class sang its last hymn and got ready to end the day.57 Again the ritual was repeated. First the inner monastery door would be opened, allowing the regents to retreat into the cloister. Then the classroom door would be unlocked, and the students would file out into the courtyard. Once the outer monastery door was opened, they would fan out into the city streets. The door would be shut, and all communication between the two worlds would come to an end until another school day was ready to begin.

the students What do we know about these children? First and foremost, that they were the children of the city. In principle, all daughters of city residents had the right to a free education in a teaching monastery’s day school. Of course, the school population was in fact limited by the community’s capacity to teach and also by the availability of children to be taught.58 According to the rules, the students had to be older than four and younger than eighteen,59 but it seems likely that the majority were between eight and eleven and were at school in order to prepare for their First Communion. Once this great event was achieved, the children of “the artisans and the people” were ready for the job market.60 The daughters of “good” families, especially girls who had shown an

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aptitude for learning or exceptional piety, might well go on to the boarding school.61 However, some monastic day schools continued to provide lessons for advanced students from families who could not afford the costs of boarding.62 It is difficult to generalize about the social composition of the monastic day school population. “The poor occupy most of the places,” wrote one nun in 1790;63 but any number of local circumstances could be influential in deciding the makeup of the day schools. According to their rules, the nuns were obliged to receive all young girls “rich or poor without distinction,” excepting only those “who have vicious inclinations which they do not wish to correct, or some dangerous ailment which might infect the others.”64 In itself, poverty – “to which the regents are [themselves] vowed”65 – was not to be treated as grounds for disqualification. However, families of quality expected something different for their daughters. The records suggest that there was considerable pressure on the nuns to segregate the poor, “because the incivility which is normal to them could be prejudicial to girls of good family.”66 This would require a major modification to the teaching monasteries’ original mandate. The nuns’ response to the pressure varied. In some regions – for instance, the north – the day schools continued to mix the children together.67 But many monasteries heeded the demand for segregation. The Ursulines of Angers divided their students into four categories: “demoiselles,” “daughters of bourgeois and merchants,” “daughters of artisans,” and “the poor.”68 The Ursulines of Avignon divided theirs into “girls of good family” and “the poor [who] have need of a rougher instruction.”69 There was the hint of an uneasy conscience in this decision. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended “not to put girls of quality close to the poorer and dirtier, so as not to cause them any disgust”; but it charged the nuns to do this “with discretion, so that the poor do not feel themselves despised.”70 The Constitutions of the Filles de Notre-Dame stated: “As much as possible, the poor and ill-clothed will be kept apart, to avoid various inconveniences and complaints; but they will not fail to be well taught according to their condition.”71 According to the Rule of the Ursulines of Troyes, there were to be different classes for “girls of quality” and “those of base condition.” But it added: “Everyone must know that this separation of the poor from those of quality is not ordered so as to prefer the ones over the others; but experience teaches us that girls of condition who are raised to good manners and civility will lose them in the frequent and familiar association with the poor, and for this reason people of condition would hesitate to send their [children] to the college.”72

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The diversification of teaching to meet the demands of different social levels in the cities led in time to a further segregation as the teaching orders established fee-paying day schools in some cities.73 In these, families of quality were able to shelter their daughters from the rough and tumble of the commoner classrooms while not committing to the full discipline – and expense – of the boarding schools. Such a separation can be seen in the records of Saint-Galmier, where the Ursulines ran two schools, “one of them for the daughters of bourgeois and well-off artisans and the other for the poor, whom they teach free of charge to read and write [my emphasis].”74 At the same time, new choices were appearing for children at the lower end of the social scale. Écoles charitables, run by secular schoolmistresses, became the public schools of choice during the eighteenth century. They were cheaper to establish than monastic schools, less prodigal with their personnel, and freer to locate or relocate where they were most needed. They certainly siphoned off many of the children of poorer parents. Also, as the eighteenth century progressed, hundreds of tiny private schools appeared, each numbering perhaps a dozen children to a single schoolmistress; these served the growing needs of prosperous artisans and shopkeepers.75 But these indications all concern larger cities, where the population was big enough and varied enough to support a choice of institutions. In many smaller centres across France, it seems certain that there was no room for such choice. For thousands of children of the working poor and of the struggling small-town bourgeoisie, the local monastery school was the only school available. “[The religious] are still absolutely necessary for the day schools,” ran a memoir in favour of the Ursulines of Mâcon. “Many mothers in the city whose occupations prevent them from watching over the instruction and conduct of their daughters find there a sanctuary to which they … can entrust a treasure precious in the eyes of religion and of the country.”76 Other towns voiced the same concern: “We have no other resources for the education of girls … being of very modest fortune” … “There are no other schools operating for girls, the place being neither important nor rich enough” … “There is only this community in the town … At present they have two hundred and forty young girls being instructed in their school.”77 In towns such as these, all the schoolchildren sat side by side78 and took lessons from the same teacher – a teacher such as Charlotte Augier of Aiguepercé, who died in 1694, “there being scarcely a family in this town that has not benefited from her good instructions.”79 Thus, the typical student of a monastic day school is not easy to delineate. We can only say that she was urban (or at least within walking

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distance of a town) and that she was neither excessively blue-blooded nor so poor that a pressing need to work prevented her attending school. This suggests that the children standing outside the monastery door at eight o’clock on a weekday morning came from a wide variety of backgrounds, beginning with the daughters of the “best” local families,80 and ranging through children from families of modest means (who “once they have learned … to read, write, and do their sums are ready to become merchants and go into commerce”)81 to the children of “the artisans and the people.” Let us concentrate on these last. Since their education normally ended at age eleven or twelve, it follows that the typical poor school population was predominantly pre-adolescent. By all accounts, discipline was not their greatest virtue. Some exasperated teachers have left us descriptions of these children: Extremely distracted by the company, and by the various objects which catch their attention on all sides … While you are turned to one side, the other becomes disorderly; if you pay attention to one child, ten others begin to play; everything must always be begun again.82 Their memory, for lack of training, cannot hold on to many things or fulfil a string of instructions; a new lesson makes them forget the preceding one, which they had learned only with great difficulty and by forgetting other [lessons]. We see by experience that by trying to teach them many things we only waste their time; at Easter we find them ignorant, we press them, we tire them out and upset them, we turn them off; we dismiss them until Pentecost, and when they have come to that they are no further ahead.83

The teaching of these children was not an easy task. At midseventeenth century an admirer of the teaching nuns challenged his readers to recognize that: “This institut is a difficult and highly laborious … unpleasant, common, base, ordinary, vexing and tiresome one, in which maiden ladies of intelligence have for their scholars only children who are rude and difficult to teach. To do this, and to do it well, requires great courage and resolution.”84 Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise in a society still largely illiterate and unaccustomed to the kind of discipline and preconditioning that the classroom demands. This was the age and the social milieu for which Jean-Baptiste de la Salle drew up his Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrestiennes, instructing young people on the impropriety of blowing their noses with their fingers or spitting out of the window.85 If such civilizing admonitions were necessary for the boys of Louis XIV’s France, could the girls have been that much better? By the

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nuns’ own testimony, their students were “flighty and indocile” and given to “quarrels, injuries, stealing, fighting, running in the streets, playing bad games with boys, making noise in the [school]room, and not wanting to settle down when ordered to do so.”86 A story has survived that illustrates the potential of some of these young ladies. In Angers in 1689, the Ursulines were locked in a legal battle with the Oratorians over a disputed property. The verbal wrangling spilled over into the classroom, and the students of the two institutions decided to take it to the streets. The girls ambushed the boys in the rue de l’Hôpital, a narrow no-man’s-land between the two schools. The resulting battle ended in a total rout of the Oratorians. It is said that the local residents applauded as the boys disappeared hastily around the end of the street.87 In comparison with the genteel, mostly upper-class nuns who taught them, the children were rough and uncivilized. They were also, many of them, pretty filthy, even by the standards of an unhygienic age. Mère de Pommereu, the Ursuline annalist of Paris, knew that her audience in the convent would understand her when she described the poor students of the past as “neither cleaner nor sweeter-smelling than [they are] today.”88 The teachers spent their time among children “who often assailed them with stinking breath resulting from eating garlic, onions and other such food,”89 who had lice in their hair and sores and scabs on their bodies and faces. These deficiencies all had to be combatted, as far as was possible. The Rule of the Ursulines of Bordeaux enjoined the schoolmistresses “to make their students go about in neat, clean clothes, and to abhor dirt and bad smells.” Students who did not mend their ways were to be expelled.90 Work in the poor school, especially in the “petite,” or junior class, was considered by most communities to be a hardship. But some nuns were positively attracted to these disadvantaged children. It was said of Edmée Renard that “while she was with the externes it seemed that she was all heart in loving her poor children, all voice in teaching them, and all hands in helping them.”91 Marie de Dracqueville “succeeded perfectly in making the children love her, but dearest to her heart were her beloved externes; the poor were those whom she thought of the most.”92 Some nuns mended, washed, and even replaced the children’s clothes.93 Others went further. Marie Dacheu du Plouys, “if any of them were found to have vermin … set herself the duty to see that they were cleaned, as also those who had scabies.”94 Geneviève Cousteughol, “one day while in class, saw a girl who was a horror to look at, with her face all covered with sores and so hideous that her heart shuddered at the sight … She drew this child apart, kissed her, and licked her face.”95

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Their attraction cannot be dismissed as pious do-goodism, since true human emotion was often involved. Gabrielle de Saint-Pierre spent twenty-five years teaching in the free school, “always surrounded by the poorest and most disfavoured, who were the darlings of her heart. All that she wanted to do at recreation was to talk about the charms she found in these little waifs.” Marie de la Ferrière loved her work so much that when her superior wished to relieve her for health reasons, “she lost her usual calm and, falling on her knees, pleaded so persuasively that she could not stop her from going to teach her ‘dear children’ (as she called them).” Jeanne Le Coeur “never had enough children in her class; when they were removed and promoted to other classes, it seemed as if they were being torn from her heart.” Barbe de la Motte, in her last illness, found it hard to endure the separation from her students: “Upon learning that they had put a sister in her place, she feared that she was there for good, and this distressed her greatly; we had to console her by saying that this was only as a replacement, and that as soon as she felt better she would return there; upon this she cried out that we had given her back her life; she asked for news … of all her little girls, one after the other, with the true heart of a mother.”96 Sometimes the records speak of affection reciprocated: “The children loved her dearly” … “When it was time for her funeral, the little girls of the town whom she had taught all came to our church without being called, bringing lit candles, and appeared with tears, sobs and cries.”97 It had been the teaching congregations’ ambition, in the early seventeenth century, to change the world by changing the women who nurtured that world: “They will bear in mind that the mothers of families who will have been their disciples are the first to teach … Christian doctrine to their children … reminding themselves often of the holiness of Saint Augustine … and of many other saints, which is attributed to the care which their mothers took to guide them to it.”98 It would be interesting to know in what way, and how much, their efforts affected the behaviour and outlook of Frenchwomen. Did succeeding generations of girls become more disciplined? More accomplished? More civil? Unfortunately, these effects of the schoolroom are even harder to measure than literacy. One significant fact has been noted, however – that women continued to practise their religion during an era when men were turning away from it. “In their detachment or their distancing from the Church, many men were not followed by their wives.”99 For this, surely, the nuns must be given some credit.

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14 The Pensionnat

The first task of the teaching congregations had been to open schools for free public instruction. This was what they had vowed to do and what the public expected of them. The establishment of pensionnats usually came slightly later. The Ursulines of Paris accepted their first boarders in 1612, those of Toulouse in 1616, those of Bordeaux in 1618. It was a step they sometimes took with reluctance, for (as the nuns of Toulouse explained) they were afraid that “being too attached to the functions of Martha, they will lose the spirit of Mary.”1 Indeed, one Ursuline foundress, Anne de Xainctonge, refused to accept any boarders at all, “knowing that such a path of action can harm the spirit and hinder [the community’s] perfection and exercises of devotion.”2 The fear was that the presence of children in a religious house would create distraction and cut into the peace which spiritual life required. This sentiment echoed that of the Jesuits, who, if left to themselves, might well have stayed out of the business of internats altogether.3 However, as the Jesuits themselves were the first to prove, there was a good deal to be said for internats. Early religious reformers started with the premise that the world was hopelessly corrupt. They despaired of the morality of adults and agreed that the best way to safeguard the future was to remove children from their influence. The Jesuit Lancelot Marin used the metaphor of an apple gone so bad that the only thing left to do was to take its seeds and replant them in a healthy environment: In order to renew the corrupted world, we have to start with the youth. Our blessed father Ignatius had this end in view when he dedicated our Company

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to the good education of young boys. What a praiseworthy and useful undertaking it would be to establish a congregation where one could transport little girls, as it were, into a fertile soil, so that, after receiving good instructions, they would go out to bring virtue to families! Families, well raised, would reform the cities and the provinces, and thus the world would be made anew.4

The nuns embraced these principles, as they did so much else that came from the Jesuits. They subscribed to the strategy of separation from outside influence that was already being practised in the Society’s colleges – not, of course, for the great majority of students, who were destined always to be externes, but for the select few who would provide the future leadership of church and state. Pensionnats, in the words of a historian of Old Regime education, provided the young with “a pedagogical ‘other place’ that was purified and sterilized.”5 The walls that enclosed this ‘other place’ served a double purpose: they kept out the evil influences of the world, and they allowed the space within to be continually monitored. Once in the pensionnat, students were supposed never to be out of their supervisors’ company. Chaperonage at this level was clearly impossible in many homes; children were left to their own devices or entrusted to untrained servants. Even the king had been treated this way as a child, according to Madame de Maintenon, who shared with her demoiselles a word-picture of the little Dieudonné romping around, unsupervised, with a maidservant.6 In the minds of the dévots, such neglect was truly reprehensible. They argued that children were so vulnerable to the snares of the Devil that a moment of inattention on the part of those in charge was all they needed to find their way to sin. “Never trust them,” Madame de Maintenon warned her mistresses at Saint-Cyr. “They mustn’t even trust themselves, and if they want to continue to be prudent, they ought to desire to be watched.”7 In the minds of religious pedagogues, the work of the pensionnat was the work of salvation. Parents saw things from a different angle. The pensionnat offered a convenient way to raise and educate their daughters. For a reasonable price (150 livres and up per year, depending on the convent) it kept them safe and turned them into young ladies, polished and pious. So after being virtually non-existent in the sixteenth century, pensionnats for girls became the rage in the seventeenth, and the demand for them grew from region to region. They clinched the argument for establishing teaching communities, as we can see from the second of the three reasons given for the introduction of an Ursuline house into Elbeuf in the 1660s: “The town is full of Protestants; the gentlemen of the neighbourhood confide their daughters to these nuns; there is no other school.”8 Since the nuns’ apostolate meshed perfectly with the

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interests of the local elites, the result was a happy alliance cemented by mutual need. Not to be forgotten was the fact that pensionnats made money, which the nuns always needed. What was necessary, therefore, was to find a way to accommodate a boarding school within the monastery without compromising the peace and quiet of the cloister. The answer was interior separation. The rules of the teaching orders stipulated that the pensionnaires were to be assigned their own building or wing, which was to be within the walls but closed off by lock and key from the nuns’ quarters. The girls were to have their own classrooms, dormitory, refectory, courtyard, and garden, their own parlour, and their own enclosed space in the church.9 They were not to interfere with the community: “The demoiselles are forbidden to mix with the religious except in cases of necessity, which should be very rare.”10 According to the rules, the only nuns with whom they were allowed to talk were the mistresses assigned to their care. These nuns were forbidden to discuss their charges with anyone other than the superior – and, needless to say, they were also forbidden to discuss community matters with the demoiselles.11 In other words, the pensionnat was to be as self-contained as possible. How much this internal separation was maintained in real life is questionable. Where a large enough group of pensionnaires collected, the maintenance of special quarters made good sense. But many monasteries never achieved more than a handful of pensionnaires.12 It is difficult to imagine that such small groups could have been held in isolation. Furthermore, the death notices affirm that many young pensionnaires were specifically entrusted to the care of their relatives within the house. These multiple links must have added to the coming and going between cloister and pensionnat. In any case, communities may simply have found total separation from their pensionnaires unworkable. This must have been the case in the monastery of Niort, described in the memoirs of Anne de Chauffepié, a Protestant who was interned there in 1687: “After a fortnight’s stay among them, I had the good fortune to be much loved by them and to be given more liberty; since they saw that I would not abuse it, they were not afraid to let me enjoy all the little pleasures that I could find in this place, walking in the garden and freely associating with the religious and the pensionnaires.”13 In Niort, at least, nuns and demoiselles lived together as a community, without the isolation enjoined by the Rule. But let us go to the model of the monastic pensionnat as constructed in the rules. The ideal group of students numbered between twelve and fourteen girls, reasonably close to each other in age. If

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there were more pensionnaires than that, they were to be divided into groups, each group with its own two mistresses. The mistresses were to take turns week and week about, the nun on duty taking full responsibity for the girls while the other had time off to participate in regular community activities. At moments of peak activity, such as getting-up time in the morning, both were to be present, plus as many other nuns, or young women waiting to enter the novitiate, as the superior designated to help the children dress. The pensionnaires’ toilet conformed to the accepted hygienic practices of the day. The cleanliness of their heads was of particular concern. The nuns in attendance were instructed by the Rule to comb the girls’ hair and rub it with a brush or linen towel.14 They were to deal with vermin, from which even the most aristocratic heads were not free.15 After this, the girls dressed themselves, “the lay sister having brought candles and shoes and clean clothes, and fuel for the fire during the winter and at other times when there is need.”16 Younger children required special treatment: “Those who dress the little ones will come and get them up and put their shoes on while they are still on their beds if they cannot do it themselves; they will lace them and make them say their prayers properly. After combing and coiffing them, they will dress them and neatly fold their things into their clothes chests, or show them how to do it themselves.”17 All this accomplished, the supernumeraries would disappear, and the sémainière (the on-duty nun) would inspect the girls: “She will be sure to see that they are properly laced, coiffed and dressed, [then she will] have them put away their things and wash their mouths and their hands; she will make certain that they have their handkerchiefs, bonnets, gloves, etc., before leaving the bedroom.”18 Amidst all this careful preparation, washing occupied only a brief moment. The use of water was almost taboo in the seventeenth century, not only for reasons of modesty but because it was thought to be bad for the constitution.19 “Children should clean their eyes with a white cloth, which cleanses and leaves the complexion and colour in their natural state. Washing with water is bad for the sight, causes toothache and catarrh, makes the face pale, and renders it more susceptible to cold in winter and sun in summer.” So ran a contemporary instruction.20 For the same reason, there was no washing of the body; at most, in the summer months, a lay sister would wash the children’s feet.21 Such cleanliness as was achieved was the result of wiping and frequent changes of linen. This was fully in keeping with the times; the Sun King himself did no more.22 We have no way of knowing whether, in a later age, the nuns extended the use of water. Probably not, considering that the practice continued to be held in suspicion by the

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male religious orders who were their mentors.23 In any case, if they did, they were ahead of their times. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, bathing remained rare, even among aristocrats.24 Mention has been made of the lay sister who was assigned to the girls’ service to keep their rooms warm and clean, to see to the changing of their linen and bedding, to clean basins and chamber pots, set the fires, and be on call during the night. She must have been the closest thing to a nursemaid, and she often elicited the same warm feelings. Numerous death notices pay tribute to these sisters and to the affection with which the children regarded them. An hour after being awakened, the students were expected to be ready for the day. Now their mistress would take them to Mass, to breakfast, and to class. Part of the school day fell to other mistresses: “One mistress to teach handwork, and another to teach arithmetic, the reading of handwritten letters, and spelling.”25 But during out-ofschool hours, the on-duty mistress was expected to be on hand, acting as a governess to her charges. Whether at work, at play, or at prayer, they were her responsibility. From the details that the rules lavished on the upbringing of pensionnaires, we can reconstruct an image of the female child as the teaching nuns saw her, and of the feminine and domestic ideals which they proposed for her. In all their prescriptions for the care of pensionnaires, the rules showed serious concern for physical well-being. The students’ diet was to be carefully planned and measured, and only the older girls were expected to observe the religious fast days. Whereas the pensionnats of Port-Royal and Saint-Cyr offered a spartan environment, the teaching congregations advocated care that amounted almost to coddling. The girls were not to go outside in inclement weather or without their gloves. The rooms in which they lived were always to be kept warm. If they went into other rooms – for instance, to be fitted for new clothes – those rooms were to be warmed in advance. In writing class, the mistress was ordered to guard against the curvature of young spines. The smaller pensionnaires were to be the object of special concern. Their days were to start later and to be less demanding. “They [the mistresses] will take account of their temperament and age, so that they do not expect from a seven year old what they find in a twelve year old,” ran one Rule.26 In many different ways the teaching congregations showed a sensitivity to the needs of childhood that was ahead of their times. Yet it seems sometimes as though they overdid it, treating female children as delicate organisms in need more of corseting than of physical development. The games available to the pensionnaires were not only seemly; they were sedentary, or almost so.27 No concern

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was shown in the rules for serious physical activity or taking the air – a concern which the Jesuits, for example, demonstrated for boys.28 The behaviour of the young ladies was to be cast in a mold that would endure into their later years, displaying piety, modesty, courtesy, and moderation. Religion came first, of course; its propagation was the teaching congregations’ raison d’être. However, it was treated not so much as a subject to be learned as a way of life to be absorbed. The church of the Old Regime was cautious about dispensing religious knowledge to women. “The theology of women is devotion,” it argued.29 And it was devotion, rather than religious instruction, that occupied the pensionnaires’ time. In the order of their day, relatively little space – a half-hour or an hour at most – was devoted to catechism. But the entire day, after morning prayers and Mass were over, was interwoven with prayers: the Angelus, the rosary, litanies of Our Lady, and so on. Over and above these formal recitations, the girls were invited to accompany all their activities with appropriate silent prayers. There were prayers for getting up in the morning, for carrying out the mundane duties of the day, for undressing at night, and finally for going to sleep. According to one school manual, the moment of climbing into bed was to be given over to the following meditation: “Alas! This is how one day, in the same manner, my body will be put into the tomb to be eaten by worms. Oh my God, how stupid man is to work only for his body, which will soon be reduced to dust, and to neglect his soul which is immortal.”30 We must wonder how many young girls took their devotion to this level. But the fact that the nuns encouraged it suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, they were preparing their charges for religious life. Frequently in the literature we find proud references to pensionnats that doubled as “a sort of novitiate.” The teaching communities’ pensionnaires may not have dressed in miniature habits as did those of the Visitation, but they called each other “Sister” and they were were allowed, as they grew older, to share in the nuns’ Office and, in some communities, to participate in a formal gathering very much like the nuns’ coulpe, receiving admonitions for their misdeeds and accepting penances.31 It was not unknown for some groups of pensionnaires to go even further and set up their own communitywithin-the-community, acting out the parts that one day they would adopt in earnest.32 This not so subtle conditioning was considered acceptable as long as society felt the need to place numerous children in religious life. In a later age, family strategies changed and the monastic option lost its popularity. From Louisiana in 1728, Marie-Madeleine Hachard wrote: “All [our pensionnaires] would like to be nuns, which does not sit well

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with Reverend Father de Beaubois, who thinks it more appropriate that they become Christian mothers.”33 Louisiana was not France, of course, but the resistance to religious life was growing in the mother country as in the colony. The nuns’ tendency to draw their students into their own way of life was now often held against them. Next in importance came civility. Good manners were the stock-intrade of convents and, in the minds of some parents, perhaps their greatest asset: “Let them [the pensionnaires] be civil and polite, speaking well, standing straight and with grace, deferring to each other, and showing respect to the religious … They will be very polite at table … and will never appear to dislike what is given to them; that would be unbecoming and in no way befitting a well-born and well-brought-up girl.”34 Along with good manners came modesty. Though the parents provided the clothes, the convent rules dictated the style: no excess decoration, no open necks, no panniers, no powder “or other vanities.” That these rules were sometimes bent in afteryears can be deduced from the stern reminders issued from time to time in the ordinances given after pastoral visits: “The parents may give their daughters whatever clothes they please, but there must be no curling of the hair, and care must be taken that they all wear a neckerchief and that they be decently covered so as not to allow the entry of vanity into the house of God” … “The superior may not permit the wearing of any beauty spots or curled hair or other indecent and worldly adornments.”35 Well-brought-up young ladies were also to avoid idleness, which in the nuns’ minds led straight to sin. A good woman was a busy woman. For this reason, the pensionnaires’ day, like that of the nuns, was packed with alternating periods of prayer and activity, leaving no time free for wandering or wondering. All this formation was to take place within an atmosphere of domesticity. The pensionnat was meant to resemble the perfect home. The mistresses were enjoined to see themselves as “true mothers,” giving their charges “the same care that they would have had in their parents’ house.”36 The girls were to treat one another as sisters, the older watching over the younger. They were to learn the sort of tasks that they might well be expected to perform at home.37 An evocative description of this atmosphere of domesticity has been left to us in Madame de Maintenon’s recollection of her efforts as a girl to please a mistress whom she loved to distraction: “I passed whole nights starching the pensionnaires’ linens so that they would always be clean and do honour to the mistress without her having to take the trouble … I made my companions go to bed promptly, I pressed them so urgently that they didn’t have time to think; but they went to bed diligently and cheerfully to please me, because I was very popular.”38

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It should be said in passing that this relationship between Mère Sainte-Celeste, Ursuline of Niort, and the future Madame Louis XIV stands as a contradiction to any generalization of monasteries as cold and overformal places. “I thought I would die of grief when I left that convent,” wrote the great lady.39 Next to piety and good manners, home management ranked as the most important subject that the children had to master: They will be taught to smoothe out their linen, to keep themselves clean and neat in their persons, to dress themselves, to keep their clothes chest tidy, and not to let anything be left about or in disorder, whether their linens, clothes, handwork, papers or anything else, so that one day they will be good managers of their households.40 Let them learn to master the domestic arts, to take care of their clothes, etc., to be always neat, and careful with their handwork; let them also be shown how to mend what has come unstitched and torn, and to repair their linen.41

Handwork of all kinds – embroidery and straight sewing, as well as mending – loomed large in every pensionnat’s syllabus. Skill with the needle was an essential part of the good woman’s portfolio. As well, the students were to be trained in arithmetic and the reading of handwritten documents, all as an introduction to domestic management. They needed to understand legal papers, no matter how illegible; they needed to be able to manage money. True to its penchant for detail, the Rule of the Ursulines of Paris prepared examples of practical arithmetic: “How much the things that they might buy would come to, as for instance 15 yards of lace at 35/4d a yard” – which, once they had made their calculation, they would have to pay for in different coinages.42 The mental world to which the nuns belonged held that the responsibility for running the household rested with the wife and that good management skills would avail her better, in the long run, than charm and polish. As Fénelon explained, “It requires a much higher and broader intelligence to learn all the arts that pertain to domestic economy and to be capable of managing a whole family … than to play, discuss fashions, and practise the fine tricks of conversation.”43 This viewpoint did not carry over into intellectual pursuits. Even the most ambitious learning programs for girls failed to include the sort of training of the mind that was available to their brothers. Girls were never formally introduced to the study of logic. The significance of this must be measured by the importance which early modern pedagogues attached to that discipline. “Logic is needed in any mental activity. Above all it is needed to grasp other sciences more fully, promptly and certainly,” wrote the Parisian professor Desperiers in

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1648.44 Recognized as a basic learning tool for boys, it was witheld from girls. Proficiency in Latin grammar, a basic requirement of college education, was also almost unknown in convents – a lacuna made all the stranger by the fact that it had often been achieved in the same convents during their early days.45 On the other hand, certain academic subjects, such as history and geography, did edge their way into the pensionnats. So, after some debate, did modern languages, though the fear was expressed that certain languages – Italian, above all – would encourage lascivousness. The same anxiety dictated that the students’ reading should always be strictly controlled. “They are not to have any profane books, under pain of being expelled in disgrace,” the bishop of Carcassonne ordered the local Ursulines.46 Throughout the period, femininity and serious learning were regarded as mutually exclusive, either because of women’s presumed inability to learn or because of their curiosity and vanity, which needed to be mortified constantly. “The repression of ‘curiosity’ … was one of the principal objectives pursued in the education of women,” writes a historian of women’s culture.47 We cannot blame the teaching nuns for bowing to this; apart from the fact that they had a clientele to please, they were themselves schooled in the practice of self-deprecation. Privately they delighted in the learning which some members of their communities achieved, but they knew enough not to display such learning among their scholastic wares.48 It would take spirits prouder and more independent than theirs to break the mold in which, as women, they were contained. If academic pursuits were off-limits, the fine arts were not. Music, drawing, drama, and even dancing made their way into monastic pensionnats before the end of the Old Regime. In each case there was a chorus of naysayers, anxious to prevent the slightest blot of worldliness on the demoiselle psyche. But the will of parents, and the need of the nuns to satisfy that will, overcame the opposition.49 Whereas the initial constitutions of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame had placed a total ban on worldly songs, dancing, and musical instruments, the same order’s pensionnats (at least, those of Paris and Reims) were, by the eighteenth century, offering their pupils lessons with dancing masters and drawing mistresses, as well as the use of pianos and harpsichords.50 The monastic account books, as well as the inventories of 1790–91, bear witness to musical instruments in convent parlours – and the lessons they made possible.51 Perhaps the liveliest debate took place over the appropriateness of staging dramas – a learning experience in which the Jesuits put much faith and which the teaching congregations were anxious to adopt,

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seeing it as a means, as one nun put it, “to perfect the pensionnaires in all kinds of ways, to train them in gracefulness and to exercise their memory.”52 But other pedagogues condemned it outright, and towards the end of the seventeenth century the hierarchy took their part. Archbishop de Noailles made the ruling: “These kinds of exercises serve only to dissipate, and to waste the nuns’ time, allowing the pensionnaires to develop a spirit of vanity contrary to the modesty in which they should be raised.”53 However, bishops came and went, and the debate continued unresolved. There are various references to monastic schools putting on plays, and almost as many references to protests from scandalized critics. One particularly contentious event was the presentation of the play Zaïre, complete with its prologue praising Voltaire, by the pensionnaires of the Ursulines of Auxerre in 1763. The news of it got as far as the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which professed outrage. But it should be noted that a special performance was staged for the clergy of the city – and they did not complain!54 This, then, outlined in the broadest of brush strokes, was the schooling received by many young ladies in Old Regime France. But not all. Daughters of the haute noblesse, from the princesses of the blood down, tended to go to the pensionnats of the ancient Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, where they received an education appropriate to their station – light on academics, heavy on the arts of refinement. Next in rank came the pensionnats of the Visitation. The teaching monasteries, with their more serious educational agenda, drew heavily on the lesser elites: minor nobility, and girls whose fathers were officers, men of the law, members of the liberal professions, or wealthy merchants.55 With advancing years, family strategies evolved. Among the upper classes it became fashionable to tutor girls at home. On the face of it, this should have diminished the monastic pensionnaire population. But in fact the population tended to increase. We must suppose that families of more modest circumstances were now ready to foot the bill to have their daughters boarded – at least for a while. Martine Sonnet has noted that the typical stay in a Parisian pensionnat in the eighteenth century lasted less than two years.56 This would be long enough to prepare a child for First Communion, but not long enough, perhaps, to endow her with a vocation. At the end of the Old Regime, pensionnats were no longer “antechambers to the novitiate.” The requirements of families changed too. The advances in literacy over the past century – for which they had partly to thank the teaching congregations – raised their expectations. History, geography, art, instrumental music, and dancing were subjects that parents would never have demanded of the first generation of nuns. But they did now, and the monasteries had perforce to comply. Slowly, and in spite

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of the conservatism that gripped both them and the people who watched over them, some communities updated their curriculum and their methods. Others continued in their established ways, often because of their poverty, isolation, or location. Claude-Alain Sarre maintains that in the forty Ursuline monasteries under his eye in the southeast, at no time could he discern “the suggestion of an opening towards history, geography, non-religious literature, the sciences and the arts.”57 The nuns of the southeast reflected, and at the same time reinforced, lower educational expectations than were general in the north. By and large, however, the pensionnats of the teaching congregations provided French women with the best education they were going to receive either during the Old Regime or for many years thereafter.58 Madame de Genlis, famous for her concern with feminine schooling, wrote of these teaching congregations: “I dare to say that their education is, in general, far better than that which is commonly received from parents who do not make it their principal business to treat the raising of their children as a sacred duty. Anyone who knows the plan of education which [they] follow will certainly not contradict me.”59

th e da m es p en s i o n na i r e s While the boarding of children had been a part of the teaching monasteries’ mission from early days, the boarding of older women definitely had not been. The founding generation considered the presence of such women to be absolutely inimical to the spirit of clausura. It was not long, however, before their determination was undermined. In fact, Pope Paul V himself, in the various bulls of foundation which he issued in the early seventeenth century, opened the first chink in the cloister wall, ordaining that “besides the virgins and widows who are being admitted to take the habit and make profession … other devout married women may be received, though only under the circumstances permitted by the sacred canons of the Council of Trent.”60 This meant that foundresses and other substantial patrons could be awarded the right to retire into the cloister, providing they lived piously and in harmony with the pattern of community life. From that time on, their presence can be noted in house after house, the teaching communities as much as any others. Mademoiselle de Valavès, benefactress and foundress of the Ursuline house of Barjols, was given permission by the bishop of Fréjus to live there “under the vows only of chastity and clausura.”61 Similarly, Catherine de Montholon’s donation to the Ursuline house of Dijon earned her the right to live within its walls together with her maid, and to be buried in

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its church.62 Marie Madeleine, daughter of the baron d’Avigno, was for many years a pensionnaire perpetuelle in the Ursuline community of Auxerre, with the privilege of wearing their religious habit and being buried in their cemetery. The marquise de Plainville, “flying from her husband’s presence,” entered the Ursuline monastery of Blois in 1666 and remained there for thirty-six years.63 The shades of these semi-nuns cluster around the monastic annals. Most of them were either the widows or the unmarried daughters of prominent citizens. In many cases, they had relatives in the community – usually sisters or daughters. They seem to have slipped easily into the life of the cloister, joining the religious services and sharing in the activities, but being only partly subject to the discipline of the community. Sometimes, however, the relationship went sour. Mademoiselle Doblère caused nothing but headaches to the Ursulines of Tonnerre because of her “scandalous and capricious moods” and her refusal to follow house rules. In 1654 the Chapter broke her contract and turned her out. A few years later the same Chapter faced another difficult resident, Madame de Beaujeu, whose good social standing was matched by her bad temper. Having walked out of the house in a huff, she later sought readmittance, which the Chapter refused, invoking the rule that no secular persons should be admitted “unless there are great advantages in it for the community.” When these advantages were made concrete, in the form of 1200 livres and the promise that a wall would be erected between Madame de Beaujeu’s lodging and the convent proper, she was allowed back in.64 So the arrangement could be profitable, and clearly this was the nuns’ principal reason for accepting mature women. In return for the care which they promised to give Madame de la Borderie until her death, she endowed the nuns of the Congrégation in Châteaudun with a house, lands, and seigneurial rights.65 Anne Joly de Champigny, a pensionnaire in the monastery of the Congrégation of Provins, bequeathed 11,000 livres to the community when she died in 1685.66 Madame de Plainville attempted to make over a fortune of 20,000 livres to the Ursulines of Blois, though she was thwarted by her husband’s profligacy and her heir’s legal challenge.67 In 1728, after many years of residence in the Ursuline monastery of Montargis, Madame de la Rivière died, leaving a lump sum of 3000 livres plus life pensions of 350 livres each for five nuns.68 Alongside these major benefactresses there were numerous lesser donors, such as the brave fille of Quimperlé “who wanted to finish her days in a religious community” and who “became fond of the religious and left them all that she had.”69

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However, throughout most of the seventeenth century the business of boarding adult women remained a minor concern for the teaching congregations and one that did not often yield great returns. And for the most part the understanding remained clear: the women were special cases; they intended to live there permanently, piously, and, as Archbishop de Noailles instructed in 1697, “without prejudice to the perfection of the religious.”70 Yet gradually, from one decade to the next, the wedge was driven farther in. Enclosed monasteries, because they were at the same time both respectable and secure, were a tempting resource for a society that was increasingly concerned with law and order and had on occasion to deal with “difficult” women. Before the monasteries were terminated in the 1790s, they were put to uses which their founders would not have imagined. The Widening of the Breach In their early years, the teaching congregations remained virtually closed to the short-duration visitor. Madame de Sainte-Beuve, for all that she was foundress of the grand couvent of the Ursulines of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris, was careful to limit her visits to the cloister. Her niece was permitted to enter the house seven or eight times a year, though not during Lent or Advent. Madame de Laval, another benefactress, had to seek permission from Rome to spend a few days in the community, to console herself after the death of her husband.71 These and other visits – which were very rare – had to be conducted in such a way as not to trouble “the inner peace of the religious”. The Ursuline community in Rennes was less rigid. The duchesse de Vendôme received permission from the bishop to enter its enclosure once a week whenever she was in town. But the fact remained, she had to have permission from the bishop, and she was allowed to enter only once a week.72 This separateness did not – could not – last for long. To find out why, we can look to Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. In 1628 he wrote to the sisters at Saint-Nicolas du Port, asking them on behalf of the Princesse de Pfalzbourg to board a protégée of hers for a week or, at the most, ten days.73 In July 1630 he was urging the sisters of Saint-Mihiel to do a similar favour – this time for an indefinite period – for a protégée of the Princesse Marguerite de Gonzague. On this occasion he explained his reasons: “It is no small thing to please the princes … and I maintain strongly that it would be an unheard-of show of incivility not to agree at once to what our devoted princesses are asking of you here.”74 Fourier was teaching his

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nuns about real life. One good turn deserved another; the princess would remember the favour and would repay it some other time. On the other hand, a refusal would rebound, sooner or later, against a community that owed so much to the princess’s patronage. Then he added a new twist. “If they [the princes] ask us humbly to make room for some poor soul for a little while … [surely we are not] so soft, so delicate, so retired, so worthy, so precious, so perfect, so holy that we mustn’t let a soul like this one, coming from the Court, touch us at all or even come close to us.”75 An interesting argument indeed, because it went against the accepted tradition of reformed female monasticism. The purity of clausura, so heavily stressed by the Council of Trent, was being weighed against the friendship of princes. Needless to say, the sisters complied. These two requests are interesting for two other reasons: first, that Fourier, as founder of the Congrégation and author of its Rule, knew full well that what he was asking went against the grain, yet could see no way out; second, that he made such a big issue of such short stays. These were exceptions, he was saying, but even so they had to be ringed around with precautions. In each case the guest was to have no blot on her reputation; she was to dress and behave modestly and to obey the nun designated to be her director; and her stay was to be kept a secret from all except her patroness. If she broke any of these conditions, she was to leave at once.76 The tranquillity of the cloister was still a matter of prime concern. Fourier kept silent about the nature of the women’s problems, though in a later letter he implied that the second case involved a serious mother-daughter disagreement. Another case, known to us through the letters of Marie Guyart of Quebec to her family in Tours, is clearer and more dramatic. In 1644 Marie Buisson, her niece, was pursued and abducted by an admirer. Although she was freed through her family’s efforts, the pursuit went on and became even threatening, the man in question gaining the ear of the duc d’Orléans. When the younger Marie took shelter in the Ursuline monastery, the authorities ordered her out. It was at this point that she decided to enter the novitiate – more out of spite than because of a vocation, remarks the historian.77 The pursuer admitted defeat; Marie remained a nun to the end of her days. The sheltering of young women at risk was the major exception to the teaching communities’ original policy towards adult pensionnaires. Indeed, the nuns accepted it as a clear responsibility. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris allowed for the admission of “an heiress or any other … put into pension by the Justice or by her relatives in order to be instructed and preserved from the accidents which, it is

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feared, might befall such persons.”78 In 1641 and again in 1646, the grand couvent took in young women as pensionnaires on the grounds that they were in danger of being kidnapped. In 1653 it accepted Mademoiselle Renoir d’Orsy, whose tutors were seeking to marry her by force. It later turned out that she was already secretly married to the man of her choice, whereupon the lieutenant civil ordered that she be detained in the house until further notice.79 In 1637 Thomas Duval, sieur de Noyer, engaged in furious legal battle with the superior of the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon over what he claimed was the illegal detention of his daughter, Marthe. The superior responded that she was “ready to open the door and let her leave, but cannot force her out, since her conscience does not permit it.” Marthe, on interrogation, declared that her father had mistreated her because of her conversion to Catholicism, that she was acting of her own free will, and that she had no intention of leaving the convent, “to which she has retired as to a sanctuary.”80 Duval lost his legal battle and was forced to pay her pension. In a somewhat similar case of conscience, a young woman was placed by lettre de cachet, and against the will of her guardian, in the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Montargis because she had declared a wish to become a nun. She changed her mind, but the circumstances were deemed too dangerous to set her free. “We were obliged to keep her to a certain age, so she remained during this time in the religious habit without causing any disorder.”81 However, “the world” was discovering less benevolent uses for women’s monasteries. In 1653 Françoise Baillé was officially committed to the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Blois at the behest of her sister and brother-in-law, who inherited her goods in return for a promise to pay her expenses.82 In 1665 Louis Descluseaux, sieur de Rocons, put his wife into the same pensionnat “on condition that the said religious cannot let the said lady leave their convent without the express consent of the said sieur her husband, and that furthermore she will not write any letters or talk with anyone in the parlour without being accompanied by a religious.”83 At about the same time, a young woman was raging helplessly against her incarceration in the Ursuline convent of Montargis. “There were reasons why she had to stay,” wrote the annalist, “but as it was against her will, it made her angry.” Only the onset of consumption destroyed her defiance; she finally submitted to the fate that had been prepared for her. The man who had arranged her imprisonment, the surintendant of the duc d’Orléans, “very properly” defrayed the costs of her illness and burial.84 Such pensionnaires were hardly likely to be the peaceful souls bent on heaven that Paul V had had in mind when he drew up his bulls. Indeed, they were more than likely to have serious problems, which the

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nuns were presumably expected to tolerate, at whatever the cost to their inner peace. Many of these cases were private family matters. But with the passing of time, public policy intruded more and more. In 1670, for instance, the bishop of Troyes persuaded the Ursulines of that city to lodge Catherine Charpy, “a woman who has claimed to work miracles,” on a pension of 120 livres per annum.85 Clearly, he wanted her removed from the public view. The idea that the teaching monasteries could serve as places of official detention was taking its final shape. What changed the situation most of all was the Crown’s policy towards its Protestant subjects. From the mid-seventeenth century on, Protestant women could be found in convent pensionnats, often as involuntary inmates. But the great invasion of mature pensionnaires started later, with the Edict of Fontainebleau. As the annalist of Montargis described it, in 1685 “they decided to put the most obstinate ladies and young ladies in religious houses.” Montargis got a niece of the secretary of the duc de la Force. She was placed in the house by lettre de cachet, there to pass the first six months in what amounted to solitary confinement. Various learned people, from the archbishop down to the superior, reasoned with her, but in vain. After a while the community agreed to change its strategy: “We decided not to talk to her any more about her religion, both out of despair of success and to avoid hearing her express sentiments against ours.” There then began a time of détente, during which the nuns taught her geography, arithmetic, and history, and the young woman took a liking to the community “and recovered a little from the terrors that she had for the cloister.” Finally, after two years, she was granted permission to go with her mother (who had been incarcerated elsewhere) to Holland, “where they were happy to find the full exercise of their evil religion.” From her new home she wrote “with friendship” to the nuns for several years.86 Similar testimonials to the nuns’ forbearance can be found elsewhere. Anne de Chauffepié, whose memories of the Ursulines of Niort are recorded above, was clearly touched by their kindness, even though she was not won over to their religion. Some nuns were more successful in their attempts to convert their charges. In 1685, in the Ursuline chapel of Rouen, Catherine de la Motte Pilastre solemnly abjured her religion in the presence of the prioress who had “conquered” her.87 In 1701 Marie Allardin, an involuntary pensionnaire in the convent of the Congrégation in Reims, “after several months of discussion” declared herself convinced and made her abjuration.88 These women did not subsequently join the community in which they had been placed, but others did. Marguerite de Brouset entered the Ursuline house in Toulouse with a pension from

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the king, given to her as a nouvelle convertie. She died a nun.89 Renée de Saint-Ours, Celeste de Vautron, and Jeanne de Beuves, three members of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, all left their mark in the death notices of their order as converted Huguenots who eventually entered religion in the houses that had been their prisons.90 If the records were complete, there would doubtless be many more such cases to cite. A serious difficulty soon arose, which over the years led to many complaints: Who was to foot the bill? Jacques Conseil, father of a nouvelle convertie who had been taken into a convent pensionnat, suggested, “Those who are so anxious to instruct my child in your religion will surely have the charity to wish to pay her pension.”91 But the government was a bad risk where the payment of pensions was concerned. The nuns were frequently left in the lurch. In one teaching convent, the sisters complained that they had found themselves “charged with a number of women and girls of the so-called reformed religion whom the bishops and the intendant forced them to receive, and whose pensions have never been paid … They have fed and boarded some of them for four, five and six years without anyone caring. This translates into pure loss for this community which already has infinite difficulty to subsist.”92 In another, the nuns complained: “Our lords the Intendants … have these last years placed in our hands and confided to us several women and girls, both Huguenots and new converts, of whom ten or twelve have not paid any pension.”93 In yet another house the nuns’ grievance was even stronger, because of the costs incurred in securing their involuntary pensionnaire: “This girl exposed the community to some expense, because we were obliged to put bars on some windows, through which attempts were made more than once to carry her off.”94 Many years later, the Crown was still putting Protestant women into convents and still, as often as not, failing to pay what it owed for their pensions.95 By the turn of the century, the teaching monasteries had been awarded a niche in society as the instruments of royal policy towards recalcitrant Protestant subjects. So it was not a great step for them to begin taking in other kinds of difficult people. It should be noted that these convents were not yet used in the discipline and control of debauched women or penitents; that was a task reserved for certain specialist communities. However, they were clearly taking on the character of prisons. Alongside the pious widows and spinsters who followed community life with such loving devotion, there was a growing population of detainees who must have had very different attitudes. Let us take, as an example, the lettres de cachet that were delivered to one small monastery in Valençay, in Berry. In 1722 the monastery re-

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ceived an order for the incarceration of the superior of the Ursulines of Saint-Charles of Orléans; in 1760, an order for the arrest of Marie Langevin and her incarceration at the expense of Sieur and Dame Séguier; in 1771, an order for the incarceration of Thérèse Bezançon at the expense of her family; also an order for the incarceration of Marguerite Denis de Landry at the expense of her husband; in 1772, an order for the incarceration of Soeur Barrey, a Bernardine nun from Saint-Aignan, at the expense of her community; in 1777, an order for the incarceration of Marie Anne de Blandin at the expense of her father. To these orders must be added three for the release of persons not otherwise named, which suggests that the extant list of lettres de cachet may not be complete.96 The Valençay monastery seems to have been a busy place; whether it was typical or not, there is no way of knowing. It is possible that its readiness to accept prisoners was related to its extreme poverty.97 From time to time the nuns resisted. In 1725 a Sieur Courtin used a lettre de cachet to put his wife into the Ursuline monastery of Blois. But when he quibbled over the cost of the pension, the nuns demanded that she be removed, and the lieutenant of the marechaussée came to take her away. Two years later they were not so successful. Madame Andins, wife of Sieur Lorin, asked to enter the pensionnat. The community was opposed, “knowing the prejudice that persons of this kind ordinarily cause in religious houses.” But their protests were overridden by an arrêt from the court, and she came to stay, along with her own domestics.98 In the official mind, the monasteries offered the perfect solution to thorny little social problems. In 1728 the new Ursuline community in Louisiana – despite a lack of space and an overload of responsibilities – was faced with a difficult request: “Monsieur Perier, our commandant, made us set up a prison here a few days ago to house a lady among our pensionnaires whom he had given to us after she was separated from her husband; but as this lady began to tire of the convent and to want to have dealings with a secular person, he put her in prison with her husband’s consent until such time as she could be sent back to France: that’s the way they do things here.”99 The sisters’ distaste was clear, and the woman was soon removed. But the incident was symptomatic of the times. The priority that had once been given to the regularity of the cloister and the perfection of its members was a thing of the past. The trend towards the warehousing of mature women in monastic pensionnats was given great impetus by the Crown’s growing fondness for the lettre de cachet. The number of these documents issued was hugely increased in the eighteenth century with

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the spread of Jansenism, when Jansenist women – sometimes laywomen but more often nuns – replaced Protestants as the Crown’s main targets. In 1716 Louise de Mesnil, last prioress of Port-Royal, died in the Ursuline monastery of Blois after six and a half years as a prisoner. “We had the sorrow to see her die without giving any mark of submission,” wrote the annalist of the house. “This death has distressed all our community who otherwise loved her and honoured her perfectly.”100 Madame de Mesnil may have gained the community’s love, but she had to do it from within the four walls of her cell, separated entirely from the monastery’s life and conversation. The same fate befell the superior of the Jansenist monastery of Saint-Charles of Orléans101 and the many other religious women who were taken from their own communities and confined in others. “A veritable rain of lettres de cachet fell on the communities and dispersed the members infected with heresy among the orthodox convents,” writes a historian of Tours.102 The rain he speaks of also fell in other parts of the country. Wherever Jansenism was an issue, women were in danger of being removed from their communities and placed in others, not as nuns but as prisoners. The Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques are full of such events, only one of which will be mentioned here: an exchange between two communities in Troyes, where five dissident nuns from each house were imprisoned in the other.103 Thus, at one blow two communities lost an important part of their personnel, and ten names were added to the Crown’s list of involuntary pensionnaires. Whatever the “orthodox” nuns felt about this seems to have been immaterial. The lettre de cachet and the order from the bishop were facts of life. But there are signs that, from the nuns’ point of view, there were good reasons to open the door to pensionnaires, whatever the terms. As described in part 1, the last years of Louis XIV’s reign had brought serious financial distress to the country, the convents included, and this was compounded by the national bankruptcy of 1720. With much of their fortune turned into worthless paper money, and the returns on their investments radically reduced, many female communities faced total ruin.104 In exploring every available money-raising expedient, they found that one of the best was to take in mature pensionnaires. “We received ladies as perpetual pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of the Congrégation of Reims. “We hoped that their pensions, being considerable and regularly paid, would help us to keep going at a time when there were so few rentes.”105 It was “the harshness of the times,”106 as much as anything else, that made the monasteries’ pensionnats into a big business. Their financial considerations corre-

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sponded neatly with the policies of the government and the wishes of society. The result was a widening of the breach in the cloister walls. As the eighteenth century progressed, the names of dames pensionnaires appeared more frequently in the convent records. Some of these women, as in earlier times, were faithful pensionnaires for life. Among the death notices of the Filles de Notre-Dame we find mention of the death in 1729 of Louise de Ponteau des Roys, who left the community 1000 écus on condition that she be buried in the chapel; and in 1733, of “a lady of good family … who has died after spending 43 years with us.”107 The lives of such women appear only for a brief instant, encapsulated in the notices of their deaths: in 1747, Françoise Setier de la Sallière, eighty years old, buried in the Ursuline house of Meaux; in 1748, Jeanne Dalichou, widow of an officer in the Régiment d’Agenois, dead at the age of sixty-one in the Ursuline convent of Châlons; in 1765, Marie Regnaudin, a deaf mute, dead after thirtyeight years as a pensionnaire in the Ursuline house of Auxerre. In the Ursuline house of Magny, five elderly ladies were buried at the rate of one per decade between 1737 and 1791, which suggests a continuing though never massive presence.108 But the brevity of their appearance in the records may belie the effort that their room and board entailed. In 1790 the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux were still burdened with a woman “in dementia” who had been in the house for six years, though her family had defaulted on her pension for the past thirtythree months.109 At the same time, their sister community in Poitiers was begging the authorities to solve the problem of an eighty-eightyear-old woman who had been incarcerated for forty years and bedridden for twenty, with nothing to support her but “the modest pension that the king gives her.”110 In addition to these faithful ladies of long duration there was now a floating population. In the records of the little Ursuline house in Saint-Symphorien le Château, near Lyon, the entries include, for 1743, a receipt from Joseph Guyot (“for a month and some days of pension for his fiancée … 12 livres 10 sols”) and for 1745, several acknowledgements of payments for short-term stays for ladies and their maids.111 In 1752 Madeleine Roche boarded in the Ursuline monastery of Périgueux while the Parlement of Bordeaux considered her bid to marry without parental permission.112 An actress by the name of Favart spent time with the Ursulines of Issoudun for no other reason, according to local historians, than that she had failed to respond to the advances of the maréchal de Saxe.113 Mademoiselle Deboulimbert had her own page in the account book of the monastery of Châteauroux, in Berry, from 1779 until she left the pensionnat in 1785.

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In 1788 she returned, “separated from her husband,” and resumed payments for herself and her maid until 1790. The same house also records the stay of Madame de Guenan, two daughters, and a maid from May 1782 to March 1783. And many others.114 Women came and went, and not always for weighty reasons: leaving for the summer and returning in the autumn; taking up residence when their husbands went on trips, leaving to go on trips themselves. So it can be seen that by the later years of the eighteenth century, the monasteries were openly serving as private hotels. The justification for this, from the nuns’ point of view, was the size of the pension. Whereas the typical annual pension for a student was 120 to 150 livres, the pension for a dame ranged from 250 livres up. Mademoiselle Laquin paid the monastery of Châteauroux 300 livres (“she has a room to herself”); Madame Labastière, her sister, and their servant paid together 850 livres.115 Madame D’Hermonville paid the Congrégation of Sainte-Menehould 300 livres, while Madame Cliquot paid the Ursulines of Épernay 468 livres for herself and her maid.116 We can speculate that although the presence of a maid meant another mouth to feed, it involved less labour for the monastery and was therefore not a bad arrangement. As for the question of space, this was probably no longer a problem in most monasteries, where shrinking populations of nuns were the order of the day. “Fewer religious, more pensionnaires,” one historian observes.117 “Our pensionnaires help us to subsist, we could not do it without their help,” wrote the Ursulines of Vendôme in 1710. “It is the only resource that we have to alleviate the misery with which we are burdened,” wrote the Ursulines of Tréguier in 1729.118 Increasingly, pensionnats became indispensable to the survival of many houses. Where the evidence exists, we can see that the rise in the number of pensionnaires was paralleled by a rise in the value of their contribution to the monastic coffers. In Châteauroux, for example, the receipts from the Congrégation’s pensionnat quintupled between 1702 and 1745;119 in Lannion, in Brittany, those from the Ursulines’ pensionnat increased almost sixfold between 1710 and 1790, while those of another convent, the Ursulines of Rennes, multiplied sevenfold.120 In many cases, by the end of the Old Regime the pensionnat was providing one-third or more of a monastery’s total income.121 While it is impossible, given the state of most monastic accounts, to disentangle the women from the children among the pensionnaires, it is safe to assume that the former provided a lucrative market for the houses that were ready to exploit it. The progressive opening of the teaching monasteries to this field of activity – which most certainly was not part of their original mission – offers an illustration of the way in which society and government were

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able to shape institutions to suit their purposes. The teaching monasteries, because they never achieved permanent financial independence, were unable to resist the push and pull of the outside world. “Their revenues, like their raison d’être, came essentially from their social rôle,” writes one historian, arguing that this resulted in the attenuation of their mystical character and the enhancement of a new social and practical personality.122 The reception of women – all kinds of women – within the monastery enclosure is a case in point. What Fourier in the 1630s had seen as the tiniest hole in the wall of the cloister had become, a century later, a wide-open breach. It could not have failed to have its impact on the spirit of enclosure. What were the consequences? A modern-day Ursuline sees the reception of dames pensionnaires as a serious mistake, one that cost the communities dearly.123 There are signs that some of her predecessors would have agreed with her. “It is not our practice to take women into our pensionnat,” wrote the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux. “We have no ladies boarding,” proclaimed the nuns of the Congrégation in Bernay, “we don’t want them because they are a trap to regularity.” Similarly, “We were so uncomfortable with these sorts of pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “that we resolved never to receive them again. A wise resolution, which ought to be kept always, because the presence of strange persons can only alter regularity and charity.”124 Other communities tried fruitlessly to end the practice of boarding adults.125 But supposing they had succeeded, would the monasteries have been better places? The same modern Ursuline makes the point that her predecessors were always marked with the spirit of their times. Was there any possibility that the mystical ambiance that suffused the early years of the Catholic Reformation could have survived in the age of the Enlightenment? In other words, did not the women of the eighteenth century already have a more pragmatic outlook, one that was at odds with the intense inwardness of the earlier age? And were they not now, perhaps, capable of doing what Fourier had challenged their predecessors to do – rubbing shoulders with “the world” without losing their raison d’être? It is more pertinent to ask whether the women of “the world” might not have been better off without the monastic pensionnats. Let us set aside those devoted pensionnaires perpetuelles for whom the monasteries were a place of peace and rest, and those in transit for whom they were a convenient oasis. It could be argued that the availability of so many secure, discreet places of confinement tempted a whole gamut of people – government officials, bishops, dissatisfied husbands, angry parents, greedy families – to create a prison population that would not have existed otherwise.

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The opening of the pensionnats to older women was a compromise, without a doubt. It had significant consequences, creating havens for them but also prisons. Willingly or unwillingly, the feminine monasteries became accomplices in the repressive policies of the Old Regime and sometimes in the less than laudable designs of individuals. This contributed, in a certain degree, to their contamination. But it also allowed for their survival.

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Conclusion

The two centuries that lay between the appearance of the teaching communities and their suppression were anything but uneventful. The country evolved. Peace succeeded war, and war, peace. Economic expansion turned into depression and serious crisis and then, finally, back to expansion. The general turbulence of the seventeenth century yielded to the more settled atmosphere of the eighteenth. In the intellectual world there was a momentous revolution as the siècle sacral gave way to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Ultimately, new ideas were translated into action, and the Old Regime, like the Bastille which was one of its symbols, crumbled into ruins. What we have been concerned with here, though, is not “the world” but the cloister; and the cloister followed its own rhythm. That is not to say that monasticism was timeless. It was always subject to the movement of public opinion. The very creation of the new teaching congregations, and the adaptations they made through the years, bear witness to that. But it was, in a sense, seamless. From the day in 1592 when the young women of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues gathered in community until the day in 1792 when, somewhere in France, the last nun left the last convent, there was time enough for French society to move from CounterReformation to Enlightenment, from Absolutism to Revolution. Within the cloister, however, change proceeded at a snail’s pace, surrounded and almost smothered by the ordered sameness of convent life. Generation after generation of women walked the same halls and garden paths, read the same Rule, wore the same religious habit, observed the same devotional practices, and cherished the same memories. Long

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years after they had passed from the scene, the anciennes mères continued to exercise control; their successors were bound to them by the thick braided cord of daily observance. The standard by which the generations measured themselves was “regularity,” their fidelity to the Rule, even in its smallest details. So while this history has been about changes – extreme changes in material fortune and more subtle changes of spirit and condition – it has also been about unchangingness: the profound stability inculcated by the Rule and protected by the cloister. It is also about the mutedness of the monasteries’ awareness of the wider society of the Old Regime. To be sure, nuns maintained close ties with their families so that news and views leaked both into and out of the cloister. But the convent walls that cut off the sights and sounds of outside also buffered impressions and attenuated natural sympathies. Communities, if they were successful, had an inner organization and purpose that absorbed much of the consciousness of their members. When, perforce, they had to look beyond themselves, a strong sense of self-justification together with a strong habit of perseverance protected them against “the world.” Dependent in many ways on their milieu, they were also independent of it, so sure were they of their calling. “The religious orders are the work of God,” wrote a monastic annalist at a difficult moment in their relationship with the Crown. “He sustains them and will continue to sustain them until the end of time … conserving them against all those who have worked through many centuries to destroy them.”1 This conviction of election and apartness enabled them to delay the impacts of outside events, even if they could not finally avoid them. “We are not aware of the laws, because we don’t read any news sheets,” said the Ursuline Clothilde Paillot as she stood before the revolutionary tribunal in 1792. She was guillotined the same day.2 The issues of the day counted less for religious communities than for the rest of society. In that fact lay inner strength and cohesion as well as danger. At the time of the Revolution, the teaching communities were proud to proclaim that they had not changed, that they were true to the order of things as they had always known it. At this, the world – which had changed, and changed radically – turned on them and cast them out. However, once the Revolution had run its course, the durability of their institut drew some of them back. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century groups of survivors, here and there, found the means to re-establish their communities. Their numbers were small, and this has allowed some historians to question the solidity of their original commitment. Geneviève Reynes believes that it was inertia that

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had kept nuns in their convents in 1792, and inertia that now prevented them from returning.3 However, this is to make light of the difficulties they faced when in 1806 they received official permission to resume their teaching. These difficulties included their personal poverty and their dependence on outside assistance, and above all their average age, now in the late fifties and early sixties.4 Only a few years were left for the survivors of the Revolution to make a personal contribution to the rebuilding of the cloisters.5 Nevertheless, by slow stages they set up their clausura, resumed their religious dress, and returned to the old order of day. To begin with, they took in pensionnaires to supplement their funds. Finally they reopened their day schools and, with that, took back some of the position they had lost.6 “Now, surrounded by poor children, we have again become true Ursulines,” said one of them.7 It should come as no surprise that, as much as was possible, they meant to go on with their lives as though nothing at all had happened.

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appendix Demographics of the Cloister

There is something presumptuous about attempting to write the history of a large group of people that is scattered over a whole country and the better part of two hundred years. We know full well that by our choice of examples we will give a certain shape – perhaps too much shape – to this great unwieldy mass, and that by our exclusion of other examples we will reinforce our own, possibly faulty, construction. But what else can we do? How many anecdotes would we have to produce to encompass a population that may have numbered, from start to finish, close to 90,000 souls?1 Fortunately, in the case of cloistered nuns the historian does not have to depend on anecdotes alone. This was a closed society par excellence, and one that left a wealth of source material for statistics, thanks to the fact that every selfrespecting monastery kept records of its membership. If these registers had all survived, we would have had access to a near-complete head count of the teaching nuns of the Old Regime, together with the dates of their baptism, profession, and death, plus a great deal of background information on family and birthplace. As it is, most registers have disappeared. Even so, enough remain to furnish a sizable sample of the monastic population and to trace the way it evolved. The registers are supplemented by a mass of other information: capitular records, account books, annales and death notices, and the numerous états in which the women were required to account for themselves and their communities to an ever more intrusive government. Although nuns’ selfproclaimed lot was to remain as anonymous as possible, they may well have been the best-recorded group of “ordinary” women in Old Regime France. This sample is large enough to answer some questions about the behaviour of monastic women: their backgrounds, the patterns of their entry into religion, their life expectancy, and their age at death. It can also help us visualize

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religious communities: their formation, their recruitment, the way they adapted to changing times, their successes, and their decline.

the questions The first three questions concern patterns of entry into religion: 1 What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? 2 Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? 3 How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? It must be pointed out that the day a girl entered religion was the day she exited family life, the inheritance, and the marriage market. Therefore the data serve two perspectives. They tell us about the development of monastic populations, and they point to certain behaviours in society and certain strategies within families. The next three questions approach the problem of mortality, using different perspectives: 4 What was the average age at which monastic women died? 5 What was the average life expectancy for monastic women? 6 At what age did most monastic women die? From the beginning in all three inquiries, we looked for indications of how mortality was influenced by the passage of time. Later, while working with the data, we became aware of another indication – that northern and southern populations did not follow the same pattern with regard to either entry or mortality. We have sought to illustrate this by dividing the country along the line (Nantes-Geneva) already favoured by demographic historians2 and by separating the populations to the north of this line from those to the south. Comparisons of mortality in the two populations will be found in tables 9 and 10. The next questions concern communities, their formation and functioning: 7 After the “rush” of the early seventeenth century, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? 8 How did the population of teaching monasteries change, both in collective age and in numbers, over the two centuries? These two questions deal in generalities. But as we have argued, there were numerous locally driven variations between houses. A final question therefore asks how the population changed in individual houses, and it focuses on five different houses, one by one.

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the sources Monastic Registers Most of our information comes directly from the monastic registers of clothing (c), profession (p), and death (d), including sometimes, though not essentially, entry (e). These registers are particularly reliable because, being bound, they present the records in sequence, with none (or almost none) left out. Most registers also indicate year of birth/baptism (b). The way the lists were compiled varies. In some cases, the three main rites of clothing, profession, and burial were entered in one and the same register; in others, they were divided among different registers. For instance, the information on the Provins community comes from a single ledger, in which each nun was assigned one page, with clothing and profession recorded on one side, and death (any number of years later) on the other. But there were separate registers for clothing/profession and for death for the Gisors and Romans communities. Where the information was dispersed, it is far less likely to be wholly recoverable. For Châteauroux, for example, there is a perfect record of clothing/profession, but the register of deaths has been lost. In the case of Le Mans, the surviving source is a record of deaths, but other information was entered only at the pleasure of the registrar. Thus, many monastic registers fail to supply all the details necessary to construct a profile of their membership from birth, through clothing and profession, to death. In some cases, the surviving registers provide all these details but do not cover the entire life of the community. The register of the Ursulines of Paris is complete only to 1678, though the house continued until the Revolution; that of the Ursulines of Saumur begins in 1668, though the house was actually founded in 1619. Sometimes the lists from the registers have been transcribed into monographs by insiders who had privileged access to the records of the monasteries in question, or by researchers who have found such lists in the archives (see table 1, nos. 1, 2, 8, 9, 13, 15). To all appearances they are accurate. Table 1 lists all the registers I have found and used. Only a few of them contain all the details necessary to create profiles of the houses involved. These are marked with an asterisk (*). Table 1 The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Annonay, Notre-Dame Frappa; aodn Annonay, b 3j 133 cases

Dates

B

1630–1784

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (2) Auxerre, Ursulines Bonneau, 297–303 205 cases (3) Avignon, Ursulines i ad Vaucluse, h (3 registers) 132 cases (incomplete) (4) Châteauroux, Congrégation ad Indre, h 904 230 cases (5) Gisors, Ursulines* ad Eure, ii f2215 218 cases (6) Lille, Ursulines* ad Nord, h6, h149 212 cases (7) Le Mans, Ursulines Chambois 232 cases (8) Nancy, Congrégation Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien” 199 cases (9) Paris, Ursulines Jégou, app. 2 108 cases (10) Poitiers, Notre-Dame* aodn Poitiers, b 1j1 293 cases

Dates

B

1614–1792

x

1623–1789

x

1641–1790

x

1621–1790

x

1627–1790

x

1628–1791

x

1617–1790

x

1614–1678

x

1618–1789

x

E

x

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (11) Provins, Congrégation* bm Provins, ms. 251 179 cases (12) Quimper, Ursulines ba 4990–213 34 cases (13) Reims, Congrégation Péchenard i 189 cases (choir nuns only) (14) Romans, Ursulines* ad Drôme, 31 h2; bm Grenoble 189 cases (15) Rouen, Ursulines Reneault, 294–319 198 cases (choir nuns only) (16) Saint-Marcellin, Ursulines* ad Isère, 14.171 170 cases (17) Saint-Nicolas, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2609–10 92 cases (18) Saumur, Ursulines ad Maine-et-Loire, h 261, h1 122 cases (19) Toulouse, Notre-Dame aodn Toulouse, b 1j 281 cases

Dates

B

E

C

P

D

1629–1788

x

x

x

x

x

1624–1683

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

1636–1783

1635–1789

x

x

1619–1790

x

1632–1788

x

1697–1789

x

x

x

1668–1790

x

x

x

1631–1784

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (20) Toulouse, Ursulines* ad Haute-Garonne, h 221 227 cases (21) Tulle, Ursulines* ad Haute-Vienne, h 236 cases (22) Vézelise, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2612 75 cases

Dates

B

1615–1788

x

1618–1789

x

1631–1789

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Annales Many monasteries kept annales. Sometimes they recorded entries and professions as they took place; sometimes they mentioned only deaths (see convents marked †), taking the occasion to refer to the age of the deceased and her years in religion. Unless the annalist had other records to hand, the timing of the earlier events may have been only approximate. Some margin of error must then be allowed – though, obviously, the death date was accurate. Table 2 Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases

Dates

(1) 1625–1788 Blois, Ursulines*† ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43; and Notter (personal communication) 236 cases (2) Carcassonne, Ursulines ad Aude, h 439 161 cases (3) Châtellerault, Congrégation* am Châtellerault, ms. xxix 141 cases

B

C

x

1627–1788

1641–1789

E

x

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 2 (continued) Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (4) Montargis, Ursulines† bsem, passim 65 cases (5) Poitiers, Ursulines ad Vienne, j 36 53 cases

Dates

B

1649–1713

x

1696–1762

x

E

C

x

P

D

x

x

x

Lists in Secondary Sources Some communities have been reconstructed by later historians using a combination of monastic, notarial, and revolutionary records. While such information as is given is probably trustworthy, there can be no guarantee that it is complete. Table 3 Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Châlons, Congrégation Carrez, passim 276 cases (2) La Flèche, Notre-Dame Calendini, passim 182 cases (3) Laval, Ursulines Morin de la Baluère 217 cases (4) Orléans, Ursulines ii Ratouis, 671–6 90 cases (5) Périgueux, Ursulines E. Roux, passim 165 cases

Dates

B

1617–1790

1623–1794

C

P

x

x

x

x

x

x

1617–1787

E

D

x

1656–1709

x

x

1641–1790

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 3 (continued) Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (6) Saint-Symphorien, Ursulines C. Roux, 15–62 123 cases (7) Valenciennes, Ursulines Loridan, Les bienheureuses, 300–3 136 cases

Dates

B

1635–1790

x

1654–1794

x

E

C

P

x

x

x

D

x

Diocesan Records Immediately before professing, prospective nuns were examined by representatives of their bishops. The procès-verbaux of these interviews were conserved in the diocesan records. Where they have survived they are a good source of information on the overall number of entries into convents, the age of the entrants, and often the names and professions of their parents. However, the lists do not tell us what happened to the women from then on, so cannot be used to reconstruct community populations. Table 4 Diocesan Records Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Bordeaux, Notre-Dame ad Gironde, g 631, 634 168 cases (2) Bordeaux, Ursulines ad Gironde, g 631, 632, 634 193 cases (3) Pontoise, Ursulines ad Val d’Oise, g 151 66 cases

Dates

B

1613–1776

x

x

1622–1730

x

x

1712–1789

E

C

P

x

D

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Liasses de Vêtures, Professions, Sepultures (1736–1790) These were small booklets of stamped paper in which were entered all a monastery’s entries, professions, and deaths by five-year periods. They had been made mandatory by royal decree on 9 April 1736, as part of a larger effort to organize the recording of the country’s births, deaths, and marriages. These booklets, each covering five years, survive in large numbers, but enough of them are missing that a complete sequence is seldom achieved for any single house. We can, however, learn from them a great deal about the ages at which women entered, professed, and died, where they originated, and what their social status was during this last half-century of the Old Regime. Those used are as follows: ad Aisne, h 1701 ad Finistère, 34 h 1 – 34 h 3 – 39 h 1 – 39 h 2 ad Isère, 22 h 32 – 22 h 102 ad Loir-et-Cher, 4 e 287 ad Marne, 78 h – 84 h ad Pas-de-Calais, 3 e 160 ad Rhône, 32 h 9 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1716 ad Sarthe, 2 e 140/38 ad Seine-Maritime, d 345 ad Seine-et-Marne h 877 ad Val d’Oise d 1791 – d 1796 ad Vienne 2 h5 95 ad Haute-Vienne g 373 – g 373 – g 374

Laon, Congrégation (1737–87) Carhaix, Ursulines (1744–87) Pont-Croix, Ursulines (1749–81) Quimper, Ursulines (1743–88) Quimperlé, Ursulines (1739–88) Crémieux, Ursulines (1741–80) Grenoble, Ursulines (1768–88) Vendôme, Ursulines (1737–84) Sainte-Ménehould, Congrégation (1740–90) Épernay, Ursulines (1762–88) Boulogne, Ursulines (1740–87) Lyon, Ursulines (1737–78) Autun, Ursulines (1738–68) La Ferté, Notre-Dame (1736–80) Dieppe, Ursulines, (1736–89) Meaux, Ursulines (1738–88) Argenteuil, Ursulines (1737–87) Magny, Ursulines (1737–88) Poitiers, Ursulines (1756–88) Saint-Léonard, Notre-Dame (1737–72) Limoges, Ursulines (1737–89) Limoges, Notre-Dame (1737–87)

The Lettres Circulaires (Éloges Funèbres) It was common practice in religious orders to notify sister houses of the death of members. These notices took the form of small eulogies, a page or so in length. In an age when women seldom wrote about themselves, these were in fact mini-biographies written by women about women.

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The death notice is trustworthy for date of death, but less so regarding the deceased nun’s age and her years in religion. Of great anecdotal value is the other information: stories about her childhood and her life in the convent; tributes to her character, her virtues, and her special devotions; details about her ailments and the cause of death. More than thirteen hundred death notices were consulted in the preparation of this book, the earliest from the 1630s, the last from the 1780s. Most are in bound collections that were originally compiled in monasteries of Ursulines and Filles de Marie Notre-Dame. Before the data can be used, questions should be asked about the original criteria by which, out of the many thousands of death notices that must have been in circulation through the years, these particular ones were selected for preservation. Do we have a truly random selection here? Were these subjects typical of the convent population as a whole? or were they chosen for their social distinction, outstanding virtue, or longevity? As far as I can determine, what decided their inclusion in the bound volumes was the date of death. The monastic compilers aimed to create an honour roll, starting on 1 January and ending on 31 December. On each day of the year communities were to celebrate women who had died on that day, much as they celebrated the saints.3 This pious practice allows us to believe that the choice of eulogies was random in other respects. While distinguished women did indeed receive more space than their numbers would justify, the letters commemorated every kind of woman, from superior to novice to simple lay sister, and from the highly successful to the clearly unsuccesful nun. The Ursuline death notices are found in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (ba) and the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne (bs), both in Paris. Those of the Filles de Notre-Dame are found in the Archives de Marie Notre-Dame, Bordeaux (aodn), and the Archives de Saint-Sulpice, Paris (ass).

Breakdown of the Data From these various sources we have compiled a database containing 8499 records. Table 5 Records 1611–1790 All of France

North

South

Choir nuns Lay sisters Total

7624 875 8499

3574 523 4097

4050 352 4402

With date of clothing With age at time of clothing With date of profession

8068 6798 7520

3780 3300 3618

4288 3498 3902

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Table 5 Records 1611–1790 (continued)

With date of death (through 1790)* With age at time of death (through 1790)*

All of France

North

South

4447 4103

2368 2207

2079 1896

* 1790 marks the end of the survey period. After then no clothings or professions took place. Some deaths were recorded for the interim period 1790–92 and some for the years after dispersion but in too haphazard a fashion to be useful.

Other Sources In March 1790 the National Assembly ordered a nationwide inventory of religious houses, including an interview with each religious person separately to find out if he/she was willing to leave community life.4 Thousands of these interviews were recorded, and copies of the procès-verbaux giving names, ages, and sometimes years of profession were sent to Paris (where they remain in the Archives nationales under the heading ms. d xix) and to the departments (where they may be found in the departmental archives, usually in the l series). For the three orders of teaching nuns being studied here, we have records for 6087 individuals in 275 houses. These records allow us to build up profiles of communities as they existed in 1790, and to know how many nuns chose to stay, how many to leave.5 Other sources of information on the personnel of monasteries include notarial records, the various états drawn up in the course of government inquiries, and internal lists made by communities for their own purposes.

questions and answers Table 6 addresses question 1 asked on p. 262: What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? Table 7 addresses question 2 asked on p. 262: Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? The answers to these questions throw light on the relationship between families and monasteries. An eminent historian of religious life in the Old Regime has described the monastic option as “quasi-necessary for the preservation of the equilibrium of families.”6 There were times when as many as half of the daughters of “good” families were put into religion. There can be little doubt that the difference between the value of their dowries and those of their marrying siblings had much to do with this practice. However, it has also been observed that somewhere around the middle of the seventeenth century this option began to lose favour – not necessarily among

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the women themselves but among their families. Parental opposition to religious vocations became more vocal and widespread.7 Our figures, by showing a rise in the age at which women left their homes to enter convents, seem to confirm a shift in family strategies. To what end? It was not because marriage became cheaper or more prevalent. In the eighteenth century many women were still remaining celibate, but now they lived their celibacy in the world.8 Possibly, as spinsterhood became more commonplace, there was no longer the same need to seek out the cloister for reasons of respectability. The good side of this is that women in the eighteenth century, entering religion in their late teens or early twenties, might have been freer to choose this state than their predecessors had been. Table 6 Average Age of Choir Nuns at Time of Clothing, 1611–1790 Average age at clothing Decade 1611–20* 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–00 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

France

North

South

22.31 years 18.86 18.05 17.86 18.05 18.15 18.34 18.60 19.01 19.11 18.77 19.70 19.55 20.01 20.61 21.81 21.80 21.79

23.04 years 19.51 17.85 17.83 18.76 18.61 18.94 18.35 18.74 18.94 19.25 19.57 19.61 20.53 20.70 22.04 22.34 22.04

21.82 years 18.27 18.23 17.89 17.05 17.72 17.76 18.85 19.23 19.23 18.49 19.80 19.53 19.60 20.52 21.58 21.20 21.46

Database: The table is based on the date and age of clothing of all choir nuns, 1611–1790. Lay sisters are excluded because (as will be seen in Table 8) their patterns of entry were different from those of choir nuns. Out of our 7624 records of choir nuns, 6079 give both year and age of clothing: 2856 cases (north) and 3223 cases (south). It is from this sample that the statistics are taken. * Figures are high in this decade because many “founder” nuns were later professed.

Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790

from 1611 to 1700 16 and under 17–20

No.

%

1380 1083

43.26 33.95

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Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790 (continued) No.

%

21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

613 79 35 3190

19.22 2.48 1.10

from 1701 to 1790 16 and under 17–20 21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

559 1193 1048 76 13 2889

19.35 41.30 36.28 2.63 0.45

Database: Same as for Table 6, all records of choir nuns (6079) in which age and year of clothing are given.

The distribution of ages in the under-sixteen group is worth noting. In the seventeenth century, 469 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 342 at fourteen years, 40 at thirteen years, and 12 (including several ten and eleven year olds) at twelve years or under (863 girls, or 27.05% of the group). In the eighteenth century, 180 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 93 at fourteen years, 6 at thirteen years, and 1 at twelve years (280 girls, 9.69% of the group). Table 8 addresses question 3: How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? Table 8 Age at Clothing: Choir Nuns Compared with Lay Sisters

choir nuns only ( 6079 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older lay sisters only ( 719 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older

No.

%

1939 2276 1661 155 48

31.9 37.4 27.3 2.5 0.8

25 175 471 34 14

3.5 24.3 65.5 4.7 1.9

Database: All records of choir nuns and lay sisters (wherever found) that give their age at clothing.

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Social status played a large part in deciding the age at which women entered religion. The more exalted their status, the more likely they were to enter at an early age. I have argued elsewhere that, as a group, the youngest entrants of all were those identified as “nobility” in the records (“Women and the Religious Vocation,” 617–18). The more important the family, the more critical (and expensive) were its alliances; some children were therefore placed in convents or the priesthood for the sake of enhancing other children’s dowries. Lay sisters were not as likely to be subject to such family strategies, and their humble social status allowed them to work before adopting a “state.” The next three tables deal with one subject – mortality – approaching it from different angles. First we address the question, what was the average age at which monastic women died? Did this average age fluctuate over time in such a way as to indicate periodic changes in “quality of life”? This table begins in 1681, because during the foundation period almost all the deaths occurred at an abnormally young age – the population itself being young. Table 9 Average Age of Death, Monastic Women who Died 1681–1790 Average age at death Death decade

France

North

South

1681–90 1691–1700 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

59.07 years 60.30 60.73 58.11 58.64 60.50 62.12 63.95 61.60 64.68 62.57

59.04 years 61.50 64.44 60.97 60.29 64.15 62.01 65.75 63.42 62.46 62.63

59.12 years 57.55 56.66 56.08 55.35 58.06 62.26 61.80 59.56 66.49 62.50

Database: 3232 records, for the period 1681–1790, of choir nuns and lay sisters that give both death year and age of death; 1714 cases (north), 1518 cases (south)

Generally speaking, compared with others in the same period, these teaching nuns seem to have enjoyed long lives.9 There are, however, significant variations within the group. Note the rise in mortality in the second two decades of the eighteenth century and the difference between northern and southern death rates, almost always in favour of the north. We may ask what occasioned these variations. The next table answers question 5: What was the average life expectancy for nuns born in the same decade? We may now begin with the early data, but we end in 1700, because thereafter the interruption caused by the Revolution in 1790 increasingly distorts the findings.

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Houses of the three teaching congregations, 1789, showing the division between north and south.

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Table 10 Average Life Expectancy, Monastic Women Born 1591–1700 Average life expectancy Birth decade

France

North

South

1591–1600 1601–10 1611–20 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–1700

59.41 years 60.55 59.89 57.91 57.16 58.01 60.50 62.04 61.35 61.18 58.60

58.87 years 62.87 61.46 58.76 56.05 54.31 59.96 61.71 64.92 65.57 63.33

59.98 years 57.21 56.85 56.29 58.50 63.62 61.15 62.40 58.56 57.07 55.71

Database: 3359 cases with birth year 1700 or earlier, which also record death year and age at death; 1842 cases (north), 1517 cases (south).

The first generation of nuns (b. 1591–1620) enjoyed a greater longevity than their immediate successors, possibly because the cloister was not yet being used as a receptacle for sickly or delicate daughters. During the peak years of the “rush,” life expectancy dropped; then, after mid-century, it improved. The difference between life expectancy in northern and southern populations fluctuated unpredictably but became dramatic in the last decades of the century. Table 11 takes a closer look at life expectancy by addressing question 6: At what age did most monastic women die? Table 11 Age at Death, Monastic Women Who Died in the Decades 1601–10, 1661–70, and 1691–1700 Birth decade 1601–10 Age at death 20 and under 21–30 31–40 41–50 51–60 61–70 71–80 81–90 over 90 Total

No 6 23 20 34 59 62 77 36 1 318

% 1.9 7.2 6.3 10.7 18.6 19.5 24.2 11.3 0.3

1661–70 No 4 34 15 29 35 71 87 41 6 322

% 1.2 10.6 4.7 9.0 10.9 22.1 27.0 12.7 1.9

1691–1700 No 5 34 34 34 37 69 71 38 2

% 1.5 10.5 10.5 10.5 11.4 21.3 21.9 11.7 0.6

324

Database: All nuns born in three different decades (1601–10, 1661–70, 1691–1700) for whom age of death is given.

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Note that in all three groups, the age at which most deaths occurred was between seventy-one and eighty. This confirms the impression that there were a lot of old nuns in Old Regime monasteries. Other analyses may be found in Dinet, “Mourir en religion,” 36, and Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 176. The following tables address questions concerning the formation and functioning of communities. This requires data from “complete” communities only (those in which professions and deaths are comprehensively recorded) in order to illustrate the fluctuations of those communities over time. The “rush” of the early seventeenth century was a phenomenon of limited duration. After it ended, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? To address this question (no. 7 on p. 262), we have selected twenty houses that have complete clothing records (choir nuns and lay sisters) through the period 1671–1785 (2393 records). We calculated elsewhere (Rapley and Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 395) that a forty-member community needed an addition of one member per year to maintain itself. When that community was reduced in size, its need for new members decreased accordingly. Thus, a twenty-six-member community required only two entries every three years; a thirty-member community required three entries every four years. In the 1730s, the Commission des secours mandated the reduction of the female religious population by about one-third (see above, part 1, chapter 5). The drop in the number of entrants through the following years corresponds to the implementation of this policy. Once the lower levels were reached the situation stabilized. The group of twenty houses in this sample, each with a population averaging over forty in the seventeenth century, needed at least a hundred recruits per five-year period to sustain itself. A century later, with populations of around thirty each, the group needed only seventy-five. Table 12 shows that it kept up the required level of entries. Table 12 Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date 1671–75 1676–80 1681–85 1686–90 1691–95 1696–1701 1701–05 1706–10 1711–15 1716–20 1721–25 1726–30

No of entries* 113 124 131 111 123 158 137 96 143 98 122 106

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Table 12 (continued) Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date

No of entries*

1731–35 1736–40 1741–45 1746–50 1751–55 1756–60 1761–65 1766–70 1771–75 1776–80 1781–85 1786–90

91 72 83 120 89 97 76 87 62 70 84 incomplete

Database: Records from the following houses: Annonay, Blois, Carcassonne, Châlons, Châtellerault, Châteauroux, Gisors, La Flèche, Lille, Nancy, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Reims, Romans, SaintMarcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Saumur, Toulouse, Tulle. * 100 = an average of one entry per house per year.

Tables 13 to 18 address question 8, looking at how the population inside teaching monasteries evolved, in both age and numbers, over the whole period. The decline in the quality of monastic life is traditionally measured by the two criteria: numbers and age of members. A certain minimum number (which the government set at twelve)10 was essential to keep a monastery functioning; and it goes without saying that some of these members had to be able-bodied. Table 13 shows that immediately after the foundation period, the number of women in the communities in the sample averaged forty or more, and that this number remained constant until about 1730; their age (both median and average) rose steadily until it reached the lower forties, then remained stable until 1730. The subsequent drop in numbers and rise in age corresponds to the period when the Commission des secours was actively reducing the female religious population by means of its ban on novices (see part 1, chapter 5). By 1770 the communities, now shrunken but also marginally younger, seemed to be regaining their balance. Table 13 Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date 1630* 1640*

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

223 389

– –

26 32

27.5 31.7

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Table 13 (continued) Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

476 507 533 485 504 514 475 468 449 415 376 333 294 277 274

40 42 44 40 42 43 40 39 37 35 31 28 25 23 23

36 40 43 44 44 41 42 43 46 46 48 47 45 46 47

36.5 40.2 43.3 45.1 44.5 44.1 43.9 44.4 46.0 48.2 48.1 46.4 47.6 47.7 47.5

Database: Records of all professed nuns (choir nuns and lay sisters) in twelve houses for which the registers of both professions and deaths are complete, for the period 1630–1790 (2026 records). The houses are Annonay, Gisors, Lille, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Romans, Rouen, Saint-Marcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Toulouse, Tulle. * These first numbers have no value, since some of the twelve houses were established only during these decades. However, average age is significant for houses already in existence.

We now look at how the population inside individual teaching monasteries evolved, in both collective age and numbers, over the period. To do so, we take five houses that have complete records: Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, and Saint-Marcellin. No generalization can be found to cover all women’s monasteries during the Old Regime; their circumstances were much too localized, much too dependent on the vagaries of their own environment. Some communities prospered while others deteriorated. The five following examples support this picture of diversity.

Table 14 Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670

30 52 64 60 61

24.70 years 30.19 35.43 39.95 41.19

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Table 14 (continued) Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

63 59 64 54 47 50 52 47 36 24 16 15

Average age 45.84 45.15 41.92 44.57 46.09 44.30 47.02 52.51 54.64 57.54 53.06 49.67

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Gisors.

The Gisors community was a sort of branch plant, depending for its recruitment on Paris, Beauvais, and Rouen. There was no possible way that the small, economically depressed town of Gisors and its surrounding countryside could have provided the nuns and the dowries necessary for its subsistence. After a century of success, the house suffered a serious setback at the time of the Law Crash and thereafter appeared frequently in the records of the Commission des secours because of its poverty. Given the importance of its day school, the only one in town, the community received assistance, but it did not recover. In 1790 it was still reported to be “subsisting with great difficulty.”11 The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 57.36 years. Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760

11 18 42 58 52 53 54 50 39 42 49 46 47

25.67 years 33.44 34.21 36.60 40.62 45.83 46.83 48.32 47.82 42.83 41.47 46.30 44.28

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Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) (continued) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1770 1780 1790

45

47.24 no records 43.19

46

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Lille.

From early days, the house at Lille achieved a good balance. Although it suffered in the Law Crash, it recovered swiftly, keeping its numbers up and its collective age steady. The size of the city and the demands for schooling seem to have worked to its advantage. At the time of the Revolution it was running both a pensionnat and a day school for two hundred pupils. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 58.83 years. (see Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” and “Pieuses contre-révolutionnaires”). Table 16 Poitiers, Poitou (estab. 1617) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

7 54 74 79 76 87 75 79 84 75 61 48 36 22 21 21 20 19

31.00 years 27.54 34.00 39.68 41.51 43.95 43.48 45.77 44.82 45.15 46.97 52.51 58.94 53.05 45.29 50.05 46.05 48.79

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Poitiers.

The Poitiers community enjoyed a stunning rise, then almost collapsed at the time of the Law Crash, as can be seen from the steep plunge in numbers and rise in average age in the 1730s and 1740s. From being the richest and most prestigious convent in its city, it became one of the poorest. Mismanagement of its estates was a major factor, but there may have been others. For instance,

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Appendix

the highly aristocratic character of the community may have made it less flexible during the later years when “democratization” was the key to recruitment. The history of this riches-to-rags monastery can be found in Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.41 years. Table 17 Provins, Ile de France (estab. 1629) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

4 28 45 54 53 54 57 51 40 45 41 39 37 32 34 35 30

25.00 years 24.75 29.53 34.83 40.68 45.98 42.12 45.22 41.97 46.58 54.90 52.33 47.89 42.40 46.68 51.74 50.00

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Provins.

The house at Provins was situated in a modest country town in the farm belt that surrounded and served the Parisian market. Like Gisors, it benefited from its proximity to a big city for recruitment of both pensionnaires and nuns. After the usual success of the early days, it went through a difficult period, then recovered financially, thanks largely to its landholdings and the rising price of grain. But at the end of the Old Regime, when many other communities were picking up, it appears to have stagnated. See Rapley, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.77 years. Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640

8

43.13 years

1650

10

49.10

1660

23

37.56

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Table 18 Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, (continued) erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

31 34 40 33 28 44 41 35 36 40 34 29 31

35.23 years 38.50 40.58 45.09 40.36 36.25 40.66 42.34 44.75 44.33 45.50 48.19 48.19

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Saint-Marcellin.

Since the Ursuline community at Saint-Marcellin had had a previous existence as a congregation without solemn vows, the average age of its members was atypically high when the monastery was erected and records began to be kept. A wave of recruits came in in the 1660s, whereupon the average age of the community dropped steeply. A similar wave occurred in 1710–20, at a time when other communities were foundering. Generally speaking, numbers and average age remained satisfactory throughout the following years, thanks perhaps to the landholdings that shielded it from the worst effects of the Law Crash. However, in the last decades of the Old Regime, the community began to show some weakness. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 53.74 years. This community was not very healthy. As these five cases show, the histories of individual communities were far from uniform. The reasons for their differences are often beyond recall – the vagaries of patrons and supporters, perhaps, or the morale of the membership itself. But there are records of other circumstances: location; the prosperity and salubrity, or lack thereof, of surroundings; and the nature of assets as well as the way they were managed. Each one of these monasteries – Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, Saint-Marcellin – existed within its own set of circumstances, and as their vital statistics show, each fared differently. Perhaps, had it not been for the intervention of the Revolution, one or two of them might eventually have died a natural death even as the others flourished.

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Glossary

amortissement: “a permanent rule declaring gens de mainmorte [secular and regular clergy, hospitals, secular communities] … incapable of possessing any property without special permission from the prince, and without paying him a tax” (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le clergé de France, 16) appel comme d’abus: a means of recourse against an ecclesiastical judge or superior who contravened canon or civil law. The appeal was addressed to Parlement, which had the power to amend or nullify the action biens de mainmorte: goods belonging to a corporate body, such as a religious community or a hospital, which had to remain in its possession or that of another such body and could not be returned to public use billet de confession: a certificate from the curé attesting that he had received the bearer in confession. Without this certificate, a dying person could be denied the last sacraments and burial in consecrated ground. Originally designed to flush out Protestants, it was revived by the constitutionnaire clergy as a way of identifying and punishing Jansenists. Because the persons affected were often highly respected in the community, the “affair of the billets” created an uproar and became a political cause célèbre, which was only ended (more or less) by the “law of silence” of 1754 (Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 80–3) bull: a papal edict; from the Latin bulla, meaning seal, indicating the official importance of the document cahiers de doléances: “The guiding memoranda prepared for deputies by their electoral assemblies, and for these assemblies by the general electorate, nominally as petitions calling for the redress of grievances” (Sydenham, The

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286

Glossary

French Revolution, 32n1). The cahiers of 1788 are used extensively as a source of information on the mind of the nation on the eve of the Revolution catechism: a manual of religious knowledge, formulated to assist in the instruction of the faithful. The printed questions and answers were designed to be memorized for recitation before the instructor or catechist. It was common practice in the Old Regime for bishops to design their own versions of the catechism for use within their dioceses clausura: the obligation to remain within the confines of the monastery, a condition incumbent on religious women who had taken solemn vows clothing: the formal ceremony in which a postulant received the dress, or habit, of the community. It could take place any time up to a year after her entry commende: The assigning of the income of a benefice to a person who was not the holder of the benefice (Mousnier, Institutions, 1:310) commission des réguliers: a commission established by the Crown in 1766 to investigate abuses in men’s monasteries. By the time it completed its work in 1780, it had closed down 458 houses and suppressed several religious orders altogether. Also, it raised the age at which religious profession could be made to twenty-one years for men and eighteen for women. The commission represented a serious invasion by the Crown into the interior working of the church (Chevallier, Loménie de Brienne et l’ordre monastique) décimateurs: tithe owners. Gros décimateurs were the individuals or institutions allowed to appropriate the tithe, on condition that they guaranteed church services in the area from which they collected first communion: a Catholic’s first reception of the Eucharist; in the Old Regime an important rite of passage formulary: a statement of orthodox beliefs (in this case specifically targeting the questions raised in the Jansenist quarrel) to which all the clergy were required to assent in writing founder/foundress: (1) the spiritual parent of a community who set it up and gave it its original form; (2) the first temporal benefactor who, for his or her benevolence, was given a permanent and sometimes hereditary status of privilege in the community gallicanism: a theory (implicit for centuries and then articulated clearly in the Four Articles of 1682) that while the papacy exercised a spiritual authority over the Catholics of France, its temporal authority was limited by the rights of the Crown and the ancient liberties of the French Church; also that its judgments and rulings were subject to approval by an ecumenical council generalate: a system of central direction for a group or congregation of communities. Today most women’s congregations have generalates; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very few did institut: the Rule of a religious order as laid down at its foundation (Trésor de la langue française); the prime and central purpose of the order

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287

Glossary

instruction: in the terminology of the Old Regime, religious education lettre de cachet: a closed letter bearing the king’s private seal, signed by him and by a secretary of state, conveying an order which was to be executed without publicity office (from the Latin officium, meaning duty or responsibility): the official communal prayer of the church which all monastic communities were required to sing or recite. In teaching monasteries a shorter version, the Little Office of Our Lady, was often substituted for the original and extremely time-consuming Divine Office ordinary: the person entitled to exercise jurisdiction over an ecclesiastical circumscription. Thus, the bishop was the ordinary within his diocese; the abbot, within his monastery and all its dependencies postulant: a person requesting admission to a community or undergoing the very first stage of testing in the novitiate profession: the formal taking of religious vows, usually accompanied for nuns by the taking of the black veil. Before profession, a novice was free to withdraw or be sent away. After it, she was given totally to the religious life regularity: the observance by a religious community of its Rule in all particulars, an important concept in religious thinking regulars: clerics living under a rule, e.g., Jesuits, Capuchins religion: a recognized and approved association of persons living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This use of the word is seldom found in modern times but was common in the seventeenth century. Thus, “to enter religion” was to become a monk or nun, and a “religious” was a person living in one of these associations rente constituée: essentially a long-term loan, though in order to avoid appearing usurious it took the form of the purchase of an annual payment in return for a lump sum. Certain limitations were set: it was redeemable at the will of the borrower; the rate of interest could not exceed 10 percent; and it had, for security, real estate (Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 2:343) rule: the basic template of a religious order. Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, all religious orders and congregations were required to adopt one of the four Rules then existing: Benedictine, Basilian, Augustinian, or Franciscan. The Ursulines and the Congrégation chose the Rule of Saint Augustine, the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, that of Saint Benedict. To the bare bones of the Rule they then added a host of their own statutes to deal with their particular circumstances superior: the person in charge of a religious community. In women’s communities, this charge was divided between the supérieure and the supérieur. Because the English language does not allow for the difference in gender, the supérieur will, for the purposes of this book, be called the “director” or the “canonical superior”

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288

Glossary

visitor: an outside priest, often a regular, who was assigned to inspect a religious house, interview its members, and ascertain that the Rule was being correctly followed vows: voluntary commitments to perform something not otherwise required vows of religion: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Until the thirteenth century these were simple vows (i.e., they did not nullify actions taken in violation of them). After the thirteenth century they took on a solemn character. Once professed, a religious could not possess property, succeed to an inheritance, or marry

20_Notes.fm Page 289 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

Notes

abbreviations ac ad aguur am an aodn ass ba bm bn bs bsem

Archives communales Archives départementales Archives générales des Ursulines de l’union romaine à Rome Archives municipales Archives nationales Archives de l’ordre de Notre-Dame Archives de Saint-Sulpice Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Bibliothèque municipales Bibliothèque nationale Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne Bulletin de la Société d’émulation de Montargis introduction

1 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, chap. 12. 2 Quoted in Gueudré, “La femme et la vie spirituelle,” 47–8. All translations are by the author, except for a few translations quoted from Englishlanguage sources. 3 Ponton, La religieuse dans la litterature française, 101. 4 Ibid., 75, 101. 5 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 4. 6 Typical of this isolationism was the reaction of the French Ursuline monasteries in 1857 to an attempt to synthesize their individual histories into a

20_Notes.fm Page 290 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

290 Notes to pages 5–14 history of the order. Twenty-five percent of the monasteries did not even answer the request for information (Oury, “Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 7 This is a point made by Dominique Dinet in his new book, Religion et société. Even now, publications on discrete orders and congregations greatly outnumber collective studies. 8 Letter of 3 September 1790, quoted in Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 40. 9 Quoted in Gabbois, “Vous êtes la seule consolation de l’Église,” 312. chapter one 1 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 38–9. 2 On the origins of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, see Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 134. 3 Papal bull of 1607, quoted in Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 97. 4 From the title of his article “Une question mal posée: Les origines de la réforme française et le problème des causes de la réforme,” Revue historique 161 (1929): 1–73. Febvre argues that historians of different nationalities who wrangle over where and under whose guidance the Reformation began are missing the point, which was the widespread spirit that inspired the movement. 5 I am grateful to Dr Marshall Jones of the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine for introducing me to the principle of “social contagion” – that behaviours, both good and bad, can spread through a population in much the same way as epidemics, and that the “rush” of men and women into religious life in the early seventeenth century was a convincing manifestation of this principle. General treatments of behavioural contagion or the diffusion of innovations can be found in J.S. Coleman, E. Katz and H. Menzel, Medical Innovation (New York 1966); J.S. Coleman, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (London 1964); and E.M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York 1983). More recent work has focused on the mode of transmission or antisocial behaviour: R.S. Burt, “Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural Equivalence,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 1287–1335; J.L. Rodgers and D.C. Rowe, “Social Contagion and Adolescent Sexual Behaviour,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 479–510; M.B. Jones and D.R. Jones, “The Contagious Nature of Antisocial Behavior,” Criminology 38 (2000): 25–46. 6 Grosperrin, Les petites écoles sous l’Ancien Régime, 142. It has to be remembered that for poor families, both sons and daughters were a source of income. 7 This is a point made by Jacques Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:253: “If seminaries were created, if the religious orders were able

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291 Notes to pages 14–19

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

to reform themselves and prosper, if the material – and moral – condition of the priest improved, these facts were due to the rise during the first half of the seventeenth century of the rural economy” – which, he argues, was in the hands of the elites. Alix Le Cler, co-founder with Pierre Fourier of the Congrégation de NotreDame; quoted in Besancet, Le bienheureux Pierre Fourier et la Lorraine, 44–5. There was already a nunnery in Marseille in the early fourth century. See Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 19. Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les campagnes parisiennes, 118–21. Jeanne de Lestonnac, “Abregé ou forme de l’institut des filles religieuses de la glorieuse Vierge Marie Notre-Dame” (1606), aodn Bordeaux, 1a. The Compagnie de Notre-Dame, the creation of Jeanne de Lestonnac, was cloistered from the beginning; the others spent their early years uncloistered until they were enclosed by order of the hierarchy. See Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 59. The word – originally used in English – comes from Furet and Ozouf, Lire et écrire, 1:82. Châtellier, Le catholicisme en France, 2:20. Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:90. Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 89. See the maps on the subsequent pages for examples of the immense holdings of some abbeys. Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:254. Quoted in Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France, art. “clergé.” Jean de Viguerie sees 1660 as a turning point, after which “the opposition of the family to an entry into religion becomes an ordinary occurrence” (“La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 34). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 114. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. Quoted in Babeau, La ville sous l’Ancien Régime, 465. Quoted in Sedgewick, The Travails of Conscience, 52. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 105, 107. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. “And music, and the playing of tiresome instruments” (ad Nord, 149, 44, Petition of the superiors of the mendicant orders of Lille, 1639). Their real concern was that the Ursulines were drawing vocations away from their own sisters. See Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 182 ff. “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent” (s.d.), in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:443. Histoire de Laon et du Laonnais, 179. For example, Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 190.

20_Notes.fm Page 292 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

292 Notes to pages 20–5 32 In all, Richelieu succeeded in extracting 18 million livres in subsidies from the clergy, whereas his predecessors had managed only 1,150,000 livres during Henri IV’s reign (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 3). 33 Ibid., 59. 34 Rapport anonyme, Mélanges Colbert, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France des xvii e et xviii e siècles, 370. 35 Lettres vi, quoted in ibid., 369. 36 Ibid., 371. 37 For fiefs held from the king, if noble, one-third of the capital; if roturier, onefifth; for fiefs held from a seigneur, if noble, one-fifth; if roturier, one-sixth. To this was added a charge of 5 percent of annual revenue for every year of ownership (nouvel acquêt), plus one-tenth of the whole sum, known as deux sols pour livre. 38 Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 32. 39 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, quoted in Tournyol de Clos, La contribution du Clergé, 8. 40 Ibid., 97. 41 Ibid., 98. 42 Ibid., 43–4. 43 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, annales. 44 Remonstrance of 1720, quoted in Levasseur, Recherches historiques sur le système de Law, 226. 45 For more details, see Faure, La banqueroute de Law. 46 Lehoreau, Cérémonial de l’église d’Angers 1692–1721, 376. 47 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 65. 48 bn fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 206, fol. 23, quoted in ibid., 33. 49 Mémoire de 1720, quoted in ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 103. 51 The year that Arnelle Sabbagh’s thesis appeared. For an appraisal in English of the commission’s work, see Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 52 Ibid., 420–1, 440–1. 53 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 209. 54 For a summary of the evidence for this, see E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 55 See appendix, table 13. 56 Vallery-Radot, Un administrateur ecclésiastique, 166. 57 An advice of 1755, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 23. 58 bn Fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 205, fol. 54, quoted in ibid., 82. 59 This is my own conclusion, after extensive reading in the an g9 series. 60 Quoted in Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras, 163. 61 Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:334–5. The priest’s salary was known as the congrue. It should be noted that the congrue was raised to 500 livres in

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293 Notes to pages 25–32

62 63

64 65 66

1768 and to 700 livres just before the Revolution; also that many curés were not salaried but owned their benefices and were sometimes very well off. However, the fact remains that distribution of wealth was extremely uneven. Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:37. Peronnet, “Les problèmes du clergé,” 44. One example of the system comes from the abbey of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre, where the abbot’s share of the revenues was 11,128 livres while that of all the monks together was 9,540 livres (Dinet, Religion et société, 1:290). Tableau de Paris (1783), 7:93, quoted in Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 18. Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 14. This particular statement came from Jean-Baptiste Morgan de Belloy, president of the Department of the Somme (3/11/1790), quoted in Desobry, Le monastère des Clarisses. But the same language of victimization was used by officials up and down the country. chapter two

1 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, “La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon.” 2 am Châtellerault, xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, Annales i. 3 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 9. 4 The petit narré of Mère Angélique de Saint-Marie describing the establishment of the monastery, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. The grille was a feature of an established monastic house. 5 “Until it fills the whole world.” am Châteaudun, gg 51. 6 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, [219]. 7 Thus the monastery of the Congrégation in Troyes was founded expressly because the daughter of a municipal official had gone to Châlons to take the veil, and he wished to have her closer to home (Carrez, Histoire du monastère de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 1:253); the foundation of the Ursuline house in Blois was forwarded by Claude Le Roux, sieur de Créneaux, so that his daughter could return from the convent in Orléans (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 111); Jacques d’André, councillor in the Parlement of Provence, founded a convent of Ursulines in Aix and thus brought “home” his sister, niece, and daughter from Brignoles (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 109–10). 8 bm Chartres, 26–xv, Couvent des Ursulines, 189. 9 Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:74. 10 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:376. 11 H.Lamiray, Evreux, 156. 12 Grignon, Topographie historique de la ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 223.

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294 Notes to pages 32–4 13 Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 53–4. At that time Avallon numbered some 3000 inhabitants. 14 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 336–7. The author remarks that at the time of the Revolution, in that neighbourhood “only a few private houses remained in the island of Ursulines.” 15 Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 67. According to the annalist whom the author quotes, their prayers worked so well “that it became a proverb in the community, and one said, ‘If so-and-so gives us trouble, we will say a novena to change him or send him to another world!› 16 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 173. He goes on to say that the foundress of the Ursulines, Françoise de Cazères, “everywhere took the Compagnie de Notre-Dame to be an obstacle to her zeal.” However, the latter called on their own champions, the Jesuits, and the bishop soon changed his mind. 17 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 242. 18 Fourier, Correspondance 1598–1640, 2:79. 19 R. Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (1978), quoted in Braudel, The Identity of France, 2:117. 20 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. She remarks that they were extremely reluctant even to allow other Ursulines into their cloister. 21 Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” 134. 22 Occasionally monasteries of the same congregation aided each other. In 1650 the grand couvent sent a gift of 1500 livres to the Ursuline monastery of Meaux (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 105). But when other houses, including those of Tonnerre and Cravant, appealed for help, they were met with a flat “no” (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135). There was no need to feel obligation toward sister houses. 23 Furthermore, founders tended to load their foundations with obligations, such as foundation masses and the commitment to accept certain pensionnaires or novices (usually members of the family) free of charge. These obligations could become burdensome in later years. See Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, chap. 4. 24 These details come from the petit narré, in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. 25 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 258. 26 ad Gironde, g 628. It also found itself penniless at mid-century. It offers an outstanding example of financial mismanagement. 27 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:128. 28 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 260. 29 Garnier, “Le couvent de la Congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 3. 30 For descriptions of the buildings and for photographs of some of them, see Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2. 31 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 3:2; Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254.

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295 Notes to pages 34–8 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

See below, 310n20. Notter, “Contrats de dots,” 258. Ibid., 262. “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that out of the accruing revenue she can be fed and maintained; and further contribute something to the necessities of the house … and also to the food and maintenance of the [lay sisters]” (bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et reglemens pour les religieuses de Ste-Ursule de Troyes, 1:43). We have this from an anonymous commentary, printed in Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:464. Sarre has used financial records of thirty-three Ursuline convents, dating from 1651 to 1791, to compute the gross amount available per head for living expenses. This varies greatly by house and year, from a low of 56 livres to a high of 474 livres, but the great majority of values (59 out of 77) fall below 200 livres (Vivre sa soumission, annexe 51). Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 75. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95. Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:331; “Souvenirs d’un nonagenaire,” quoted in Kaplow, France, 86. A study of all known cases of daughters of the generation of parlementaires of Aix who were born before 1701 shows that 51.0 percent became nuns, 41.7 percent married, and 5.6 percent remained single (Cubells, La Provence des Lumières, 367). Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95; ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29; Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 252. Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 223. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Mémoire de la supérieure, 1689, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 130. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:passim. ad Indre, h 909. am Châtellerault, xxix. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 77. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 250. The écu was worth about 3 livres; the dowry usually demanded at Montargis was 5000 livres. ad Isère, 22 h 174. ad Yonne, g 195. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 231–2. To prevent this loss of reputation, houses did their best to keep their financial problems secret. Thus, in 1722, “for fear that [our] extremity would come to the knowledge of seculars and drive away novices, our Mother Superior forbade us to speak about it with outsiders” (Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:297).

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296 Notes to pages 38–41 56 ad Aube, 128. 57 ad Vienne, j 36 152–3. It is not clear that she ever professed. 58 Avocat Prevost, adviser to the commission, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours.” 59 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:217. 60 ad Yonne, g 195. 61 Avocat Prévost, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 97. 62 Thus, in the archdiocese of Bourges, the abbaye de Landais paid 168 livres in amortissement dues and the abbaye des Dames de l’Estoile, 17 livres (an q3-12). 63 ad Seine-Maritime, d 405. 64 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 172. 65 This was a reduction, allowed after much wrangling. The bill had originally been 42,195 livres (ad Seine-Maritime, d 405). Within a few years the house was bankrupt and the nuns were forced to disperse. 66 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 226; ad Cher, 45 h 8. 67 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346; Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 73; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837. 68 “The classrooms in which they instruct most of the girls of the city, and which make up part of their frontage, have been included in the amortissement tax; however, the said sisters … do not receive any payment for the instruction which they give the girls of the said city” (ad Seine-Maritime, d 346, Ursulines of Dieppe). “Since they devote time and care to the public, they ought to be distinguished from other communities and treated like the workhouses and hôtels-dieu that are employed in the support and feeding of the poor” (ad Rhône, 32 h 5, Ursulines of Lyon). 69 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346. 70 But did not always stay. Mademoiselle d’Arbouville was allotted to the Ursulines of Grenoble, but after finding out that the house was situated near a powder magazine she took her leave. It appears that the community held onto the tax credit (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:140–1). 71 “The seigneurs of the realm who were owed indemnities by the gens de mainmorte, seeing His Majesty seeking out the rights that belonged to his crown, started urgently to demand their rights of indemnity. This was certainly painful, and a heavy burden to the house that had just paid a large sum to the king” (bsem 77 [déc. 1987]: 238). One seigneur, the Princess of Mecklembourg, demanded payment of 2000 livres (ibid., 244). 72 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. 73 Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 221, 226. 74 an g9 160–18. 75 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675, Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins, Journal des fermes. 76 Goubert, 100,000 provinciaux au xvii e siècle, 207.

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297 Notes to pages 41–4 77 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. Since this was a statement accompanying the nuns’ appeal for relief, it should be treated with some caution. 78 bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 180. 79 bsem 70 (mars 1986): 56. 80 Sarre calculates that for the Ursuline houses of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, returns on real estate ran between 3 and 5 percent, while investments in the money market brought in 5.7 percent (later 5 percent) (Vivre sa soumission, 358). This local example supports the general conclusion of Pierre Goubert that in the seventeenth century neither purchase of offices nor investment in land paid as well as rentes constituées (“Le tragique xvii e siècle,” in Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire économique, 2:343). 81 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 175–6. 82 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 227. 83 ad Aude, h 439, 48. 84 Quoted in Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 66. 85 The archbishop of Aix (1739), quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 202. I cannot resist the temptation to point out that the Commission des secours itself discovered one morning that its treasury was short 543,000 livres; that later it had to turn down requests for help because the king had raided its funds and used them to build his own church of SainteGeneviève (ibid., 153; an g9 155–17). I agree with the historian of one small overextended monastery that the women’s fecklessness was not unusual and that under the Old Regime “all bodies charged with the public service … failed to be careful, to match expenses to resources, and to observe wise economies” (Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 21). 86 Lemarchand, “Les monastères de Haute-Normandie,” 14. 87 Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 65. 88 See Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 356–7. Among the monasteries in Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, he has identified five with extensive rural holdings, ten without: “It is interesting to note that these five were established in small or medium-sized towns … and that none of the ten convents of the larger cities … chose to invest in this type of property.” In Rennes, the landholdings of the religious houses were insignificant compared to their other investments (Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 100–1). 89 See, for instance, Gaussin and Vallet. “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 468: “The Ursulines … came to play the role of bankers in the towns of Forez.” 90 Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 131. 91 Ibid., 102–3. 92 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, a poor manager in any case, was also hurt by nonpayment of debts. In 1699 it was owed 80,000 livres by families that had been ruined (ad Vienne, 2 h 77).

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298 Notes to pages 45–50 93 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135. The account that follows is taken from the same source, 136–45. 94 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 328, 547. 95 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 387; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:146. 96 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:102. 97 ad Orne, h 4960. 98 ad Orne, h 4854. 99 In Châteauroux, 34,317 livres instead of around 3400 livres (ad Indre, h 909); in Rennes, 67,000 livres instead of 6000 livres (Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 132). The nuns of Valençay, a small community in Berry, were forced to accept repayments of 36,790 livres, which, they claimed, “accounted for the greater part of their income” (ad Indre, h 47). 100 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 523. 101 Bonney, “The State and Its Revenues,” 171n87. 102 Pocquet gives as an example a rente constituted on the tailles. Before the Visa, the invested capital of 10,800 livres rendered a return of 217 livres; after it, the same capital, reduced to 4123 livres, rendered a return of 89 livres (La vie temporelle, 131). 103 ad Val d’Oise, d 1790; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 840. Argenteuil survived; l’Ile-Bouchard did not. 104 Quoted in Taillard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 18. 105 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. 106 A bitter little comment in one monastery’s annales is revealing in this respect. It had paid the taxes that were demanded, without argument, only to learn afterwards that it “had paid too much, and the collector even made jokes about it” (am Châtellerault, ms. xxix). 107 ad Allier, c 121, report of the subdelegate of Nevers [1728]; an g9 84, report of the intendant on the filles de Notre-Dame of Perpignan [1723]. 108 ad Isère, 22 h 101. 109 Ursulines de Quimperlé, Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:148. chapter three 1 Gabrielle Rubens (1617–57), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:360. 2 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 97. 3 Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and Reform, 114. 4 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 100. 5 Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapters v, vii, ix, x, xvii, xviii, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9.

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299 Notes to pages 50–5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 225. ad Aisne, h 1693, Congrégation de Laon. Printed in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:330–42. Rapley, “La Congregation de Notre-Dame de Provins,” 41. Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 215n. This information has been collated from the record of professions in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 294–319. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 94. Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:152. Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 10–11. Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:166. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 123. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon. For more on this, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. A situation very much regretted by Madame Gueudré, who blames this isolation for the Ursulines’ inability to move with the times. See Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:220. Hugon, “Structure et temporel d’une communauté religieuse,” 61. ad Gironde, g 628–186. ad Gironde, g 628–255. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 34. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Annales ii. Livre d’or de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. The double obligation was entrenched in the vows which superiors took after their election, “to live and die in the the Rule, constitutions, and regulations of our order and to ensure their observance by those with whom I am charged, as also to render obedience to the prelate of this monastery” (quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 241). Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter v, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions du collège et monastère des religeuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 341. “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame (1638),” Documents d’origine odn, vi 12. Petition of the Ursulines of Dijon to Bishop Zamet (1623), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:245. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 126. For details on the way clausura was imposed, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3; Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 2.

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300 Notes to pages 55–62 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 95. Ibid., 98. Quoted in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 129. Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 127–8. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:243. He had reason to dislike this superior, “because she seemed to him to be challenging his authority” (Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 129). She had argued vehemently against him at the Chapter-general. “Recit véritable de ce qui s’est fait et passé en la démission de la Supérieure du monastère de Dijon,” quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:122. “Humbles remontrances que font les Supérieures et religieuses de Sainte Ursule de Langres” (28 juin 1622), printed in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 451–4. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, printed in ibid., 130–1n3. See Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:187. Ibid., 1:xlvi. Ibid., 3:261. Ibid., 1:xlvi. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, suite aux annales. Ibid., Annales ii. bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496, “Mémoire à consulter pour les Religieuses Ursulines de la ville du Mans.” See below, chapter 4. Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter vi, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. Chapter vii, in ibid., 222. ad Orne, h 4837. ad Gironde, g 628. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:125–7; Nanglard, Pouillé historique du diocèse d’Angoulême, 485. Mahul, Cartulaire et archives des communes de Carcassone, 475. ad Aude, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, fol. 17. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:208. bm Provins, ms. 120, 108–9. Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 4. bm Provins, ms. 120, 141. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:233. E. Roux, “Les Ursulines de Périgueux,” 71 ff. The following account is taken from this source. Letter to the superior of the Ursulines of Tours, 13 September 1661, quoted in Jetté, The Spiritual Teaching of Mary of the Incarnation, 66. Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:203.

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301 Notes to pages 62–9 66 See below, chapter 14. 67 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:180. 68 ad Bouches-du-Rhône, 83 h 3, 265–7, printed in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 31. 69 The office appears occasionally in various reports, e.g., in 1790 the Ursuline convent of La Vallette had a prieure perpetuelle (an d xix.6), as in 1777 did the house of the Filles de Notre-Dame in La Ferté Bernard (ad Sarthe, 2e 140/38). chapter four 1 Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme, 10. 2 René Taveneaux, “The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation,” in Pierre Chaunu, The Reformation, 270. 3 Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 4 Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout, 148–58. 5 Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 104. 6 Loupès, La vie religieuse en France au xviii e siècle, 56. 7 Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 124. 8 Dominique Julia, “Le Catholicisme, religion de royaume,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:11. 9 This was the term used by Père Lallemand, sj, in a letter to Fénelon in early 1714. 10 It has even been argued that most of the panel members did not understand French. See Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 320. 11 Briggs, Early Modern France 1560–1715, 191. 12 The text of the bull may be found in Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 24–34. 13 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 344. 14 Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 324–7. 15 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 343; Sarre, “Une enquête délicate,” 397. 16 Julia, “Le catholicisme, religion du royaume,” in Legoff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 21. 17 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 348. 18 Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics, 41. 19 “One point can be taken for granted, the preponderant influence of the bishops in their dioceses in the diffusion or, conversely, the repression of Jansenism” (Schmitt, L’organisation ecclésiastique et la pratique religieuse, 232). 20 Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 54–73. 21 Les Héxaples i, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 22 “A bishop, a parlement can be intimidated; a mystical sect can be ruined by violence or by the use of ridicule; but it is more difficult to overcome a

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302 Notes to pages 69–74

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

conviction that has come to maturity in the solitude of the cloister” (Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323). Quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 84. Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. Hélène Arlon, superior of the Ursuline house of Beauvais, in 1715, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:494. ad Marne, ch. 15588, “Lettre de Monseigneur … l’Evesque Comte de Chaalons … aux Religieuses de son Diocese, au sujet de la Constitution de N.S.P. le Pape, Unigenitus Dei Filius” [emphasis in the original]. Report on the Ursulines of Arc-en-Barrois, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 107. Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:185. Ibid., 3:314–15. ad Aisne, 8 2099/2, “Observations sur l’avertissement de M. l’Evesque de Soissons” (s.d.), 9. Dawson, “Catéchisme de Sens,” 245. See also Armogathe, “Les catéchismes et l’enseignement populaire.” Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:313. Procès-verbal of the visit of 1 November 1733 to the Congrégation of Étampes, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 85. An Ursuline of Melun, quoted in Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1733, 55. Procès-verbal of Languet’s visit to the Congrégation of Joigny, October 1732, quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. ad Aisne, Languet (then bishop of Soissons), seventh pastoral letter (1726). See Bishop Montmorin’s answer when the nuns of Noyers argued that the bull was not a rule of faith: “That it became a rule of faith as far as they were concerned, as soon as he commanded them to submit; that it was the Holy Spirit speaking to them, when he gave them an order” (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1737, 22). Ibid., 1733, 54. Ibid., 1731, 54. Ibid., 1733, 156. ad Yonne, h 2185, “Mémoire pour la Ville de Noyers … au sujet des biens des Dames Religieuses Ursulines, supprimées par Arrêt du Conseil au mois d’Août 1750.” For his actions against the Ursuline communities of Auxerre, Cravant, and Gien, see Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79–80. Ordioni, La resistance gallicane et janséniste, 117. ad Yonne, g 197, quoted in Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours.”

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303 Notes to pages 74–8 45 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1732, 210. Upon which a nun is said to have remarked, “The omnipotence that is attributed to God is due only to M. the archbishop of Sens.” 46 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 47 sne 1735, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 83. 48 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 49 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1734, 219. 50 Ibid., 1741, 42. 51 Ibid., quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 78. 52 There are instances of communities losing their priests almost permanently, e.g., the Ursuline house of Saint-Charles in Orléans, which went thirty-three years without the sacraments (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1756, 60). 53 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 65–6. 54 The grand remonstrances, of which this passage was a part, were drawn up by Jansenist magistrates and reflected the indignation aroused in Paris by the billets de confession affair. See Doyle, Jansenism, 62–3. 55 The most spectacular disgrace was that of the archbishop of Paris, who was exiled on several occasions. But there were others, such as the bishop of Laon, who was called an enemy of the peace by the municipal council, accused of lack of respect by the Crown, and eventually abandoned by his fellow bishops (Labouret, “Démêlés entre Mgr de la Fare Evêque de Laon et la Justice”); and the bishops of Auxerre and of Troyes, both banished from their dioceses. 56 The following incident is described in “Mémoire à consulter pour les Ursulines du Ville du Mans.” (bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496). 57 Grimaldi of Le Mans was one of the least edifying of Old Regime bishops and was thoroughly disliked in his diocese. “The attempts to destroy this house [the Ursulines] was one of the griefs most often alleged against Louis de Grimaldi and his vicars general,” wrote Dom Paul Piolon, who was anything but pro-Jansenist (Histoire de l’église du Mans, 6:523). 58 It regenerated itself, however. By 1790 it numbered nearly forty (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:497). 59 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79. 60 Quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 10. 61 Quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. 62 Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, Le courrier des départements 23 (28 April 1791): 441. chapter five 1 Rogier, Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:122–3. The use of the term “bourgeois” as a synonym for “mediocre” is revealing. It supports a point that I will be

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304 Notes to pages 78–81

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

making, that Catholic historiography has in the past tended to see heroic sanctity as essentially aristocratic. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:56. Pomeau, quoted in ibid., 3:56. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 21. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 312. Ibid., 102. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:436. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 152. Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français au xviii e siècle,” 337. Ibid., 336. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 67. Chaline et al., L’Église de France et la Révolution, 21. Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 15. Chapter general of the Capuchins of Brittany, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 227. Oury, Histoire religieuse du Maine, 149. Plongeron, La vie quotidienne du clergé français, 154. This number includes the 750 abbeys just referred to. Minois, Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne, 70. In the case of Brittany, the male monastic population fell from 1107 in 1768 to 450 in 1790. In 1770, 412 rich Benedictine abbeys housed, on average, ten monks apiece (Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:124). Jean de Viguerie argues that discipline had begun to deteriorate as early as 1660. See “Y a-t-il une crise de l’observance régulière entre 1660 et 1715?” in Sous la Règle de Saint Benoît, 135–47. Of course, there are always problems with generalization. Dinet points out that much of our understanding comes to us through the filter of the Enlightenment, which detested monasticism pure and simple (Religion et société, vol. 2, chap. 5: “Les réguliers et l’observance”). Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:123. But no longer. The number of works that treat religious women seriously is growing all the time. See the bibliography. Julia, “La ‘déchristianisation,› in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 527. Madame de Messey on the subject of the dames of Remiremont, quoted in Bluche, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse française, 186. Dollot, Folles ou sages, 167.

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305 Notes to pages 82–4 28 This is a point made by Timmermans: “From the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for many years thereafter, women did not seek an outlet for their intellectual aspirations in religion” (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 810–11). 29 Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 16–17. 30 Some twenty-five women to a house. See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 31 Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français,” 339. 32 See below, chapter 13, and Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited.” For a tribute to the Ursulines, see Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 202; and to the Congrégation, see idem, 175. Sonnet makes the point that the two congregations offered a more serious education than did the highly aristocratic abbeys. As for the third congregation, the Filles de Notre-Dame, they had no house in Paris and thus escape Sonnet’s notice; but perhaps the sobriquet by which they were generally known – enseignantes – is evidence enough of their serious purpose. 33 For 89 Ursuline houses studied, Sabbagh finds an average of 41.4 nuns per house (“La Commission des secours,” 212). 34 Ibid., appendix, table 2. 35 Madame Gueudré suggests twenty houses. I have counted thirty, plus several houses of the Congrégation. I can find no cases of closings of monasteries of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. An accurate count remains to be made. 36 bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Mémoire de la Commission. 37 Ursulines of Bourges: 73 nuns; should be 46. Congrégation of Bourges: 52 nuns; should be 36. Congrégation of Châteauroux: 54 nuns; should be 43. Ursulines of Linières: 36 nuns; should be 23. Ursulines of Montluçon: 50 nuns; should be 35. Ursulines of Issoudun: 69 nuns; should be 46. The small communities at Valençay and Selles should be united. (an g9 124.) 38 Julia, “La déchristianisation,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. This scenario of “apogee” may be based more on the number of people in the convents during those decades (whose decision to enter religion was already taken, possibly long before) rather than on the number entering. 39 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. My own records for three Breton houses (Carhaix, Quimper, and Quimperlé) show a solid stream of professions throughout the late eighteenth century. In fact, Quimperlé accepted the extraordinary number of eight novices in 1787–88 (ad Finistère, 39 h 1), but too late, of course, to be professed. 40 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 93, 127. 41 See appendix, table 12. My figures do not show the rebound that Dinet refers to.

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306 Notes to pages 85–90 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 394. an g9 121–12. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1762. bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Letter from the Cardinal de Rohan, 20 March 1731. an g9 141–1. Later correspondence reveals considerable anger in the city over the action, because the promised pensions were not being paid on time. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 250. The whole incident is cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 407. an g9 148–15. The Ursulines lost and were closed down (Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come,” 437). an g9 119–16. They fought to a draw; so the bishop was ordered to close a house in another town instead. an g9 147–3. an g9 83. an g9 147–25. They had appealed against Unigenitus during the episcopate of the Jansenist bishop Colbert. an g9 140–4. an g9 121–8 (Auxerre, 1726); an g9 123–2 (Bernay, 1778); ad Allier, c 121 (Nevers, 1728). Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2: passim. The delays were often ended by pursuits in the courts; the defaults were sometimes dealt with only when those responsible found themselves facing a tough new creditor – the First Republic. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:106. Frappa, “Le registre des religieuses de Notre-Dame d’Annonay,” 97. See, for instance, the tables given by Minois in Les religieux en Bretagne, 240, which illustrate what he terms le reflux de la noblesse in several Ursuline convents. Feillens, in “Les Ursulines de Lyon,” gives a table illustrating the fading of the nobility in the Ursuline convents of that city: from 34.6 percent of entrants in the seventeenth century to 24.56 percent in the eighteenth. The decline was most marked among the “old” nobility: 21.96 percent to 7.02 percent (ibid., 49). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:115. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 232. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur d’une congregation féminine,” 216. See, for instance, the improvements in the accounts of the monasteries of Saint-Marcellin (ad Isère, 22 h 178) and Provins (ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675). ad Nord 14946, no. 12. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237.

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307 Notes to pages 90–3 65 “The well-ordered dévot avoided the multiplicity of religious exercises, external manifestations of piety, and mortifications. He was a man of good taste and discretion” (Viguerie, “La sainteté au xviii e siècle,” 125). 66 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 5. The study involves 3245 nuns. 67 Ibid., 196. 68 Quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 133. 69 Mémoires, quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187. 70 Linda Timmermans makes this point with reference to Port-Royal, comparing Angélique Arnauld’s approach to obedience with that of Jacqueline Arnauld (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 792). 71 Ibid., 731, 729. 72 Weaver, “Erudition, Spirituality and Women,” 191. 73 Dinet, “Les visites pastorales,” 46; Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281. 74 Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187; Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 148. 75 Rondeau, Histoire du monastère des Ursulines d’Angers, 197. 76 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 313. Sarre maintains that in Provence, “the education of externes, which had been the original purpose of the [Ursuline] Institute, was not assured always and everywhere” (314). 77 Thus, with regard to the faltering Ursuline monastery of Martigues, the archbishop of Arles recommended in 1749 the hiring of “three or four grey nuns, who would be much more helpful to this town than the monastery” (quoted in ibid., 410). 78 As in Paris in the late eighteenth century, where spaces in the charity schools outnumbered those in the externats of the monasteries by three to one (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, table 17). For more on the development of these congregations, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 6. 79 An entry in the records of the Ursulines of Chinon illustrates this point. Soon after their arrival in the town they received a favour from a local gabelleur (officer in charge of the salt monopoly): “But this charity and relief brought down other troubles upon us, the invectives of the common people who thought that they were only paying the gabelle for our benefit; the peasants … could not look at our house without cursing it, and when we passed them on the water, the washerwomen and the riff-raff called out insults at us” (bs 769–260). 80 This is a point made by Colin Jones with regard to the nursing sisters. See Charity and Bienfaisance, 108. 81 Le jérémaiade des maîtres Portefaix (November 1789), quoted in Fleury, Le clergé du Département de l’Aisne pendant la Révolution, 72. 82 ad Eure, h 1562, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines of Evreux (1700); ad Indre, h 932, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines de Châtillon; report from 1772, quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 281.

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308 Notes to pages 93–102 83 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 80 (Ursulines of Rennes, 1652); ad Drôme, 31 h3 (Ursulines of Romans, 1756). 84 ad Ande, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, 94. 85 Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:115. 86 Ibid., 115–16. 87 A casual entry in the annales of Blois for 1770 mentioned an inspection of the library. “Numbers of unmatched books” were sold for 98 livres, and the proceeds used to buy an eight-volume series and to repair a window (fol. 301). 88 J. Meyer, “La vie religieuse en Bretagne,” 140. chapter six 1 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 5. 2 This memoir was recorded in the early nineteenth century by Marie-Anne de Viarnez, who had been a nun in the convent of Saint-Sever and had come back to be superior of the reconstituted house in 1804. It is one of several written by nuns and printed in the appendix to the third volume of Gueudré’s Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines. 3 aguur (Rome) bc 33, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 436; ac Lille, 17.647, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:296–7. 4 Quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. See above, chapter 4. 5 “Extrait des circonstances concernant la destruction de notre maison de Bourg-Argental,” printed in full in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13. 6 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 7 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:15–17. 8 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 9 ad Marne, 1 l 1386. Madame Coqteaulx was not a particularly senior nun, having professed in 1781. 10 “These alleged slaves mourned nothing but the liberty that was offered to them while, in reality, being taken from them” (Canon Duplessis, quoted in Dinet, in “Les communautés religieuses féminines de Bourgogne et de Champagne,” 478). 11 Viguerie Christianisme et révolution, 71; Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:466; Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras (1949), 175. 12 Boussoulade, Moniales et hospitalières, 253. 13 Le Foll, “La crise religieuse à Rouen,” 334. 14 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 15 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 438. 16 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:14. 17 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:58.

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309 Notes to pages 103–8 18 Relation de la Mère Michèle Bruneau, Ursuline de Château-Gontier, quoted in ibid., 3:507. 19 For example, Anne Dudon of the Congrégation in Longwy, who claimed to have been imprisoned by the other nuns (Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle pendant la Révolution, 3:149). 20 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 264. 21 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 22 Quoted in Nadal, Essais sur les origines monastiques du diocèse de Valence, 27. 23 Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:170–1. 24 They did insist that those wishing to leave should seek authorization from their superiors (Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:77, 82). 25 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 3. 26 It was estimated by an observer that 300 nuns were whipped in Paris (Rapley, “No More Chains,” 911). 27 Le courrier des départements (Paris), 14 April 1791. 28 Ibid., 14 March 1791. 29 ad Nord, l 8867. 30 am Bordeaux, no. 94 (16 February 1792). 31 Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:218. 32 ac Valenciennes, d, 4, 5, quoted in ibid., 1:218. 33 Jacobins of Metz, in a brief demanding the closure of the school of the Congrégation. Quoted in Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle, 3:143. 34 Quoted in Fosseyeux, Les écoles de charité à Paris, 81. 35 Quoted in La Congrégation à Vézelise, 122. 36 Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:128. 37 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 177. 38 Marie-Paule Biron, Les messes clandestines pendant la Révolution (Paris: NEL 1989), 74. 39 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 123–4. 40 Lebrun, Histoire des catholiques en France, 76. 41 Madame Gueudré estimates that 1000 Ursulines out of 10,000 spent some time in prison (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 3:158). Some were executed, notably eleven in Valenciennes and sixteen in Orange – all for fanatisme. 42 For more on those reasons, see Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship. 43 Jean de Viguerie claims that two-thirds of all girls who went to school were taught by nuns (Christianisme et révolution, 31). 44 Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. 45 Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation, 608. 46 Quoted in Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir, 329–30. 47 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 99. 48 Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 307.

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310 Notes to pages 108–15 49 Quoted in Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 190. 50 Tephany, Histoire de la persecution religieuse dans Quimper et Léon, 340. 51 An Ursuline tradition, recorded in Blivet, Quintin: Deux siècles d’un monastère d’Ursulines, 183. chapter seven 1 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:191. 2 See Rapley, The Dévotes, chaps. 2 and 3. 3 Cardinal Bellarmine to François de Sales, 29/12/1616, in Sales, Oeuvres, 17:416. 4 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 1. 5 Ibid., 71–2. 6 Anne-Marie Le Bourgeois, “Dieu aime-t-il les murs?”, quoted in ibid., 3n5. 7 Ibid., 126, 127. 8 Council of Trent, session 25:1, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. 9 Sales, Oeuvres, 11: preface; 25:19–20. 10 Rule of the Ursuline monastery of the Presentation Notre-Dame of Avignon, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 11 See the papal bull for the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques: “The permission to teach young girls who are not pensionnaires will last only as long as it pleases us and the Holy Apostolic See” (quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:104). The founders of the community tried to counter the provisionality of this bull by instituting a “fourth vow” to teach young girls free of charge. 12 “Which I ought not to do, since as I am getting very heavy, if I had fallen, I would have surely hurt myself or perhaps broken my neck” (Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 208). 13 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 152. 14 Contemporary comment on the erection of the Ursuline monastery at Chabeuil, quoted in Nadal, Essai sur les origines monastiques, 25. 15 an g9 151–24, Mémoire sur les communautés de religieuses et de filles non cloîtrées [s.d.]. 16 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 130. 17 “A girl’s desire is a devouring fire / a nun’s desire is a hundred times worse” (quoted in Graham, “The Married Nuns before Cardinal Caprara,” 327). 18 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 101. 19 Quoted in Ponton, La religieuse, 20. 20 For example, the archbishop’s sanction against a monastery in SaintRemy in 1671: “For five years, no novices to be received, to see if in that time the religious can find a place to live in the city, with tighter security and

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311 Notes to pages 115–19

21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

clausura” (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247); the suppression in 1699 of the third Ursuline house in Lyon for “absence of enclosure, being separated from their neighbours only by hedges on one side, so that it would be easy for them [the nuns] to go out and come back in” (official document of suppression, quoted in Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 141). Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 245. Ordinances as follows: for the Ursulines of Angers (1628), quoted in Rondeau, Les Ursulines d’Angers, 69; for the Ursulines of Rouen (1654), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:174; for the Ursulines of Carcassonne (1686), quoted in ibid; for the Ursulines of Cravant (1682), in ad Yonne, g 1640. bm Carpentras, ms. 1419, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 5:3; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 19. Ordinance of the bishop of Fréjus to the Ursulines of Draguignan (1717), quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Report of diocesan inspectors (1670), quoted in C. Roux, Le monastère des Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-le-Château, 67. See above, chapter 5. Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 78. Paul, Correspondance, Entretiens, Documents, 10:658. Colbert, Lettres vi, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France, 369. Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 30. J.-C. Gousselin, quoted in Viard, Langres au xviii e siècle, 354. The fact that Gousselin, a councillor to the presidial in Langres, came from so pious a background makes this and other negative references to monastic life all the more interesting (Dinet, Vocation et fidélité, 193 and table 2). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 10. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 69. Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:245. Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 23–5. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 226. Gueudré makes the same point, commenting that the mystical life of many Ursulines “crystallized around the idea of holocaust and of the state of ‘victim› (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:345). Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 40. Rule of St Benedict, Chap. 2, “What kind of man the abbot should be.” “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame” (1638), in Documents d’origine odn. The usual term in French is supérieur. But since in English the masculine cannot be distinguished from the feminine supérieure, I shall use the term “director.”

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312 Notes to pages 119–22 42 Thus the Ursulines of Aiguepercé had to admit in 1728 that they had had no formal pastoral visit for thirty-five years and that their directors, when they did come, gave only superficial attention to their accounts (ad Allier, c 119). 43 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115. 44 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, viii. 45 Ibid., De l’office de la Supérieure. 46 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, De l’office de la mère prieure, 10. 47 “Règles de la mère première,” in Documents d’origine odn, 7. 48 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 322. Her example was followed by other superiors, among them Thérèse de Brilhac, seven times elected superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, who “went once a week to wash the dishes” (ass s 197 [2/11/1701]). 49 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, De l’office de la supérieure, 26. 50 Description of the Ursuline community of Arc-en-Barrois (1746), quoted in Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 207. 51 “We lived in the most perfect union,” wrote an Ursuline, reflecting on the prerevolutionary days (“Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13). It was a state not easily achieved. 52 Obituaries of Constance de Noguez, Pau (ass s 197, 28/11/1741), AnneThérèse Brunet de la Socelière, Fontenay (ass s 197, 18/4/1740), Marguerite de Terneyre, Riom (ass s 197, 23/12/1741), and Jacquette de Resseguier, Toulouse (aodn b 3j, 6/5/1741) – all superiors in the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. 53 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/5/1711). 54 For example, Catherine Ranquet, superior of the Ursuline house of Grenoble at twenty-one (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 278); Anne d’Arrerac, superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers at twenty-five (aodn Poitiers, b 1j1). 55 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 9/4/1727). 56 In the various Ursuline houses of the diocese of Tréguier, Georges Minois states that women of noble blood “had a quasi-monopoly on the position of superior” (Les religieux en Bretagne, 133). In my own collection, out of 6960 ordinary choir nuns, 980 (14.1 percent) were identified as noble, while out of 517 nuns who were at one time or another superiors, 114 (22.1 percent) were identified as noble. 57 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 99. Marguerite was the daughter of a baron. 58 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 180. 59 ad Yonne, g 1643 (Gien, 1739). 60 an g9 128–9; an g9 83.

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313 Notes to pages 122–6 61 Besnard, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à La Ferté-Bernard,” 245–8. 62 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 63 Though not always. Sarre describes a number of occasions on which bishops took control of the elections. He suggests that by the end of the seventeenth century they had established their authority so effectively that henceforth the communities in his study rarely challenged it (Vivre sa soumission, 218–20). 64 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. 65 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 4, De l’election de la prieure. 66 Ibid.; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris 4. 67 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 216. He gives examples of this practice of alternating the two offices. 68 The different Rules diverged here. Some allowed the superior to appoint them herself, others called for their election by the Chapter. 69 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 39:12. See also Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 116–17. 70 Documents d’origine odn: “Règles de la mère première,” 20. 71 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 1:8. 72 The right to vote was also witheld from nuns if they had three sisters who were already vocales. The object was to avoid the development of cliques within the Chapter. 73 In all the acts of the Chapter of the grand couvent between 1626 and 1662, there was only one case of opposition to the superior’s proposals, and this was overruled ( Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 118). 74 ad Eure, 1475: capitular act of the Congrégation of Bernay. 75 ad Vienne, 2 h 77: Mémoire pour les Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 76 ad Indre-et-Loire, h 844 (1740). 77 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 228. 78 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 171–85. 79 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. 80 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 81 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 3; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 73. 82 ba 4991–280 (Dijon, 15/12/1692); ba 4991–59 (Melun, 28/2/1690); ba 4992–84 (Seurre, 13/8/1691); ba 4990–157 (Evreux, 15/9/1687). 83 aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Langeac, 12/3/1767). 84 ba 4991–27 (Gisors, 21/1/1694). 85 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 8/2/1704). 86 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 8. 87 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 26/8/1737); aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Toulouse, 1754); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 6/10/1714).

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314 Notes to pages 126–31 88 For example, Jeanne Chimbaut de Filhot, who “ruined her health in the continual activity that she undertook to procure the good of the house” (ass s 197 [Bordeaux, 8/2/1704]). 89 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 49. A description of one such chest comes from the inventory of 1790: “a small casket of morocco-leather [containing] eight bags containing 169 items relevant to the foundation and the properties of the convent” (Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 82). 90 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes, 3:231. 91 ass s 197 (Salers, 12/4/1735). 92 Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 105. 93 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. 94 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 230. 95 It should be noted that the upkeep of their churches and the provision of religious services caused a continuing drain on the convents’ finances, because even in the leanest years they had to pay for priests, clerks, and sacristans. No men’s orders had this problem. For convents that went bankrupt, the only hope was that local priests would serve them out of charity; otherwise, they had to go without the sacraments. 96 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 198. 97 ass s 197 (Riom, 1/9/1733). 98 ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692). 99 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 100 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 243. 101 Ibid., 245. 102 ba 4991–83 (Flavigny, 13/3/1694); bs 769 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ad Eure, ii f 2215 (Gisors, 1702); bs 769 (Montbard, 15/4/1675). 103 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 104 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 1. 105 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. chapter eight 1 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, passim. 2 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville at diocèse de Tours, 3:2; “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame,” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254. 3 See the description of the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, recorded by visitors in 1732: “There are certainly towns which do not have as much space as the ‘great convent’ encloses within its walls … They have several gardens, vineyards which supply enough grapes to meet their need for

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315 Notes to pages 131–2

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

wine; a great wood of wild chestnuts” (Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281–2). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58. Regents were given an extra collation before going into the classroom. See, in this regard, an interesting reference in an obituary to a nun who practised unusual mortifications – including eating the bread that was baked specially for the poor! (bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Régistre des décès, 1676). Règlemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:40. Ibid., 2:2. A rule that seems to have been broken regularly during the eighteenth century. Oudart Coquault of Reims, who can always be relied on for the negative view, wrote that “they live like great ladies; their food consists for the very least of beef, veal and mutton … bread made of pure white flour, all the best fruits in their season, and likewise the best vegetables” (Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:381). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 5. ad Vaucluse, Ursulines d’Avignon Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 4:9. ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, État, règlement et statuts des religieuses et autres filles de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. The young Marie Madeleine Hachard, on her way to Louisiana in 1727, had to be warned that the sailors on board ship would laugh at her turn of phrase. “I don’t know how to avoid saying it, even to talking about ‘our nose,’ and Father Tartarine often says, ‘Sister, raise our head’ – all for fun and to distract us from our fatigues” (De Rouen en Louisiane, 60). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 7. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. Ibid., 15. Garnot, Le diable au couvent, 146–7. Barbe was an unusual nun in that she was accused by her community of sorcery, but there is no suggestion that her ownership of so many goods was contrary to the convent’s practice. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. ad Yonne, g 192. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 570. Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 77. ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/7/1698). Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 107. She adds that “owning property in spite of one’s vow of poverty seems to have been more commonly a failing of nuns than of monks” (111).

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316 Notes to pages 133–8 24 Contract cited in Bonneau, Les Ursulines d’Auxerre, 14. 25 For example, Anne de Chaludet, who professed in 1635, thirteen years after the opening of her house, “used (with permission) the money that she received from her parents for the decoration of the chapel” (ba 4991–114 [Nevers, 22/4/1694]). Similarly, Marguerite d’Illiers, whose profession took place eleven years after the foundation of her monastery in Blois, was given a pension of 100 livres “for her small pleasures” (ad Loir-et-Cher 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 99–100). 26 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:133, 236; 2:81. 27 Quoted in ibid., 1:134. The reference is to the Book of Proverbs, 30:8. 28 C. de Marcigny, Le palais de la sagesse ou le miroir de la vie religieuse, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 29 Quoted in Pérouas, La diocèse de La Rochelle, 440 n5. 30 an g9 147–3. 31 ad Yonne, g 192, Ursulines de Montargis. 32 ad Isère, 22 h 171. 33 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, Introduction. 34 Ibid., 8–9. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Ibid., 9–14. 37 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” articles 10 ff. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule, Constitutions, chap. 2. 39 Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 4. 40 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:221. 41 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 126. 42 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 16. Fourier’s philosophy is illustrated in a letter which he wrote in 1606 to the sisters of Saint-Nicolas: “While your little pensionnaires are still all modest, and seem to progress without being led by anybody … you should try to maintain them with gentleness and praise in a spirit of devotion.” Fourier emphatically believed that a child could be maintained in her baptismal innocence. 43 Mère Boulier, Visitandine, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:65. 44 ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737). 45 Jacques Le Brun cites a seventeenth-century debate about which was the more meritorious, holiness “from one’s mother’s womb” or latter-day conversion and hard-won redemption; he concludes that in the seventeenthcentury mind inborn innocence carried the day (“Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 317–30). 46 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 9. 47 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 4:289. 48 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 69.

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317 Notes to pages 139–43 49 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 5/3/1750); ba 4990–140 (Lisieux, 1/11/1684). 50 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709); bs 769–66 (Saint-Pierre le Moûtier, 26/11/1679); ba 4992–158 (Selles-en-Berry, 12/8/1691). 51 Even the autobiography of Jeanne Belcier, the famous Ursuline of Loudun whose erotic behaviour during her possessions was a matter of record, is remarkably tame. See Le Hir, “L’expression mystique dans l’autobiographie de Soeur Jeanne des Anges,” 456. 52 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 53 Marie Le Grand, Ursuline lay sister, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:264. 54 Isambert, Recueil général, 16–520. 55 For more on this, see Hanley, “Engendering the State,” 4–27. 56 Quoted in Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 160. 57 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 58 Ibid., 16. 59 Ibid., 21. 60 La vie de la mère Françoise Fournier (Paris 1685), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 314. 61 Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. 62 Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. 63 ba 4990–215. 64 ba 4991–15 (Eu, 14/1/1693); bs 769–23 (Dijon, 23/9/1684); ba 4990–183 (Quimper, 15/11/1687). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). 66 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 236. 67 “Du voeu d’obéissance,” in Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 22. 68 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” 15:44. 69 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, entretiens, documents, 10:396. 70 Montargon, Dictionnaire apostolique, 6:222. 71 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 321. 72 Catherine de Bar, quoted in Une amitié spirituelle au grand siècle, 67, 160. 73 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 74 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” 75 A point made by Emmanuel Mounier and cited in ibid., 315. It had no counterpart in the Eastern Church, and it did not surface in the Latin west until the later Middle Ages. 76 The following relation comes from bs 769 (Montbard, 15/11/1677). 77 bs 769 (Apt, July 1678). For comparisons, see Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, 42; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 24. 78 ba 4990–211 (Bayeux, 6/12/1643).

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318 Notes to pages 143–7 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). ba 4992–64 (Meaux, 28/10/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). aodn Annonay, b 3j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740; Rodez, 23/2/1730; Périgueux, 18/4/ 1709); ba 4991–120 (Lisieux, 18/4/1693); ba 4991–57 (Montferrand, 19/2/1693). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709, Limoges, 1728, Bordeaux, 9/4/ 1708). ba 4990–14 (Caen, 16/2/1687); bs 769 (Apt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Salers, 19/11/1733). See, for instance, The Life of Henry Suso, referred to in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 241–2. C. Gillotte, Le directeur (1723 edition), quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 316. aodn Annonay, 1j 2; bs 769 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1693); ba 4991–89 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685); aodn b 1j (Toulouse, 17/1/1758). ass s 197 (Béziers, 20/3/1743); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/ 1679). Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 195. ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Forêt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Pau, 20/6/1765). ba 4991 (Amiens, 2/11/1692). bs 769 (Apt, 23/6/1682, Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4993–183 (Montcenis, 12/7/1694). ass s 197 (Riom, 16/1/1740, Le Puy, 10/9/1726). Quoted in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 42. ba 4993–74 (Thiers, 28/2/1685); bs 769 (Saint-Malo, s.d.); ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); ass s 197 (Agen, 25/1/1717); bs 769 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 26/10/1669); ba 4990–196 (Bayeux, 17/12/1683). ba 4991–7 (Meaux, 8/1/1694). ass s 197 (Limoges, 20/11/1735). See above, n97. ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737). ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ass s 197 (Sarlat, 29/4/1727). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 26/1/1765).

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319 Notes to pages 147–52 108 109 110 111 112

See, for instance, Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 120. ass s 197 (Aurillac, 7/5/1719; Béziers 14/2/1734). aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Langeac, 20/10/1786). ba 4990–151 (Bayeux, 6/9/1685). Viguerie, Une oeuvre d’éducation sous l’Ancien Régime, 25. chapter nine

1 Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 15. 2 Thus in 1789 the annalist of Blois, sketching out the life of an eightythree-year-old sister recently deceased, remarked that she was repeating what the older nun had told her many years ago (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 313). 3 Most of the other children also entered either the priesthood or the religious life. See bsem 83 (déc. 1990): 20. 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 152. 5 Isabelle died in the conviction that her prayers would be answered, and so they were. Four months later, Louise entered a convent (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:376–7). 6 When a teaching monastery was first planned for Versailles (not at some distance, like Saint-Cyr, but right in the town, to serve the daughters of royal officers), the authorities warned that the proximity of the Court made the project inappropriate (ibid., 101). 7 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 84–84v. 8 Ibid. 9 bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. 10 This little pensionnaire had a sister, also placed in the convent “while very young,” who eventually became a nun. The annalist recalled that she later said of this pensionnaire “that she had been, as it were, snatched from her family, and that this had been infinitely painful to her.” This suggests that her vocation was pressed upon her by her parents (ibid., 80 [mars 1989]: 5). 11 Recueil des Entretiens spirituels, Oeuvres IX, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 260. 12 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, 5:563–4. 13 A number of studies of Old Regime dowries make this point. For one such study, see Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 241–66. 14 ad Seine-Maritime, d 408. 15 bs 769–91 (Nevers, 8/3/1689); ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 16 ad Gironde, g 632. 17 See, for instance, the death notice of Angélique Mahy, “received in the house in the quality of an invalid” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 212).

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320 Notes to pages 152–6 18 bs 769–185 (Draguignan, 13/5/1684); Notter, “Contrats de dot,” 247. 19 bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès: Marie Romanet (1645); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1652). 20 Ibid., fol. 83 (1670); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Avignon, 9/2/1730). 21 ba 4990–215, Des vertus et saints practices des Rses. decédées en cette maison de Quimper Carentin; ad Eure, Registre pour le couvent de Sainte Ursule de Gisors, no. 96. 22 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:344; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:275; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/10/1781). 23 ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736). 24 Essai sur les nécessités et sur les moyens de plaire, quoted in Bluche, Les magistrats du Parlement, 243. 25 Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse,” 32; Rapley, “Women and the Religious Vocation,” 621 ff. 26 ba 4990–3 (Angers, 1682). 27 bs 769–193 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 12/8/1649). 28 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 12/12/1725). 29 ba 4990–149 (Gournay, 19/6/1685); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ba 4991–134 (Andelys, 15/5/1694). 30 ass s 197 (Pau, 23/3/1739); Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 349; ba 4992–25 (Saint-Denis, 23/10/1690). 31 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:2. 32 Mère de Blémur, Éloges, quoted in Le Brun, “Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 321n17. 33 ba 4991–154 (Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, 24/7/1693); bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 176; ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737); ass s 197 (Salers, 18/10/1728); ba 4993–93 (Clermont-en-Auvergne, February 1670); Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:357; Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 123; ba 4991–30 (Saint-Denis, 28/1/1693); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114. 34 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 261. 35 Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, part 1. 36 Marie of the Incarnation, Selected Writings, 41–2. 37 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 23. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Quoted in ibid., 15. 40 Annales manuscrits du premier couvent de Paris, fol. 92; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1724); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114; ass s 197 (Limoges, 8/6/1713). 41 Annales des Ursulines du Premier Monastère de la Congrégation de Paris, 1:310, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 56.

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321 Notes to pages 157–61 42 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 209. 43 Thus Marie Agathe Marseault was remembered for “diverting some who were on the point of marrying, persuading them to resolve to live in continence” (bs 769–2 [Erfort, 4/7/1677]). 44 bs 769–179 (Draguignan, 11/12/1680); ad Loir-et-Cher, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 196; ass s 197 (Pau, 24/1/1742); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 12/9/1761). 45 bsem 84 (déc. 1990): 21. 46 P. Ayrault, De la puissance paternelle (1598), quoted in Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 11. 47 For example, Marie de Loberie, whose father “loved this dear girl tenderly, as the support of his house” (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Langeac, 12/3/1767]); Françoise Dalon, whose father brought her from Bordeaux to Pau expressly for companionship, only to lose her to the local monastery (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Pau, 31/10/1761]). 48 ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); ass s 197 (Poitiers, c. 1700); ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732); ba 4992–52 (Nevers, 24/5/1691); ba 4990–170 (Toissay-en-Dombes, 13/10/1686); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62; bs 769–84 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690). 49 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 28/1/1763); bsem 77 (déc. 1987): 242; ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 278. 50 Ibid., fol. 300; ba 4990–125 (Bourges, 10/8/1684); ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694). 51 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/2/1770); ibid., fol. 307; ibid., fol. 203; bs 769–42 (Montbard, 15/12/1676); Annales des Ursulines de Blois (20/5/1719); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 23/1/1787). 52 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/11/1733); bs 769–59 (Montbard, 22/11/1676); ba 4992–62 (Noyon, 23/1/1691). 53 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1755). 54 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 26/8/1728; Riom, 23/12/1741). 55 Natalie Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 92. 56 “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent,” in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 462. 57 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 301. 58 ad Vienne, g 723, Sainte-Ursule de Poitiers, Examinations des novices; ba 4990–104 (Magny, 2/7/1675); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 19/10/1781.

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322 Notes to pages 161–5 59 bsem 67 (juin 1985): 252; ba 4991–17 (Seurre, 29/1/1694); bs 769 (Troyes, 24/2/1690); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188; ibid. fol. 111v–112. 60 ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 61 ba 4991–47 (Boulogne, 14/4/1693); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 12/4/1768). 62 Ibid. (Alençon, 6/10/1762); bm Provins, ms. 98: Rivot, Histoire ecclésiastique de Provins, 4:1106. It is interesting to note that these two women became the financial and management experts of their respective monasteries. 63 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737); bs 769 (Montbard, 26/11/1678). 64 ba 4990–215 (Quimper); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (16/3/1691); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–80 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ass s 197 (Saintes, 2/10/1733). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 113v. 66 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2:268. 67 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. 68 Responses sur les règles, constitutions et coustumiers de notre ordre de la Visitation (Paris 1632), quoted in Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 224. 69 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire des Ursulines, 2:217. chapter ten 1 ba 4991–53 (Saint-Omer, 7/2/1693). She was made to wait a year before being received into the novitiate. 2 ad Finistère, 35 h 2, Cahiers pour les entrées des novices de ce monastère de Ste Ursule à Landerneau. Typical of the requirements for the meal are those noted in the customs of the Ursulines of Montbrison: 50 lbs. of sugared almonds for the community, two jars of preserves for the almoners, four loaves of sugar and 6 lbs of preserves for the sacristy (Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:109. Broutin goes on to comment: “Luxury and sensuality have made their way even into the convents.” Given the “crime,” this seems a rather harsh judgment). 3 This list comes from ad Isère, 22 h 202 (Ursulines de Tullins). 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (4/7/1704); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 22/7/1718); ba 4991–262 (Caen, 23/12/1693); ba 4991–138 (Meaux, 15/7/1691). 5 Dinet notes in his regional study of religious orders that the perseverance rate of novices was greater in feminine than in masculine orders, and he attributes this to the “preselection” that took place in their pensionnats (Vocation et fidelité, 69). 6 bs 769–70 (Amiens, 28/12/1689). 7 bm Grenoble, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès, no. 579.

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323 Notes to pages 165–9 8 Contract of 1646, quoted in Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 69. The fact that her father was a creditor of the convent may well have made the success of her vocation more likely. 9 ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); “La vie, les vertus et la mort de la Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph,” in Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 438; ad Eure, h 1577 (Ursulines de Gisors). 10 From the death notice of Marie Geneviève de Razes of Notre-Dame in Poitiers (ass s 197). 11 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:29. 12 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 242. 13 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Richelieu, 13/1/1768); Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:17. 14 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (7/11/1708). 15 bs 769–271 (Chinon, 1638). 16 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 111. 17 Conduite générale et spirituelle que doivent garder les novices, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 18 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 112. 19 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Ste Ursule de Troyes, 3:247; Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 42:4. 20 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule. 21 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, ii, 14:32. 22 Les vrayes constitutions, 1:45, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 23 Gueudré makes this point: “We only need to open the rare writings that have survived the Revolution to appreciate the Ursulines’ familiarity with the Old Testament” – not to mention the New Testament and the Fathers, especially Saint Augustine (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 28). 24 Thus the annalist of the Ursulines of Blois, eulogizing their late superior, Marie-Madeleine Tubert, exclaimed: “How often, coming away from her conferences, did we say to one another that they were worth more to us than many sermons!” (fol. 188). But none of Mère Tubert’s conferences have survived. 25 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:235. The only text that immediately survived Marie’s conferences was a hand-written copy by one of the novices. Most of Marie’s writings were burned before she left for Canada, a practice in self-abasement so common among nuns that it seriously depleted their written legacy to future generations – and to historians. 26 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 114. 27 aodn Poitiers, b 1j. 28 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 68. 29 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/1/1705, Toulouse, 17/12/1704). 30 ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29.

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324 Notes to pages 170–4 31 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89. 32 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon 20/1/1746). 33 Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:148–9. 34 Registre des actes du chapitre, 17 août 1631, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106. 35 Laguérenne, Le couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 58. 36 As, for instance, Françoise le Georgelier, “whose natural delicacy provided a thousand occasions of mortification: the slightest dirtiness, the smell of meat, and all sorts of other things caused a fluttering of her heart” (ba 4991–227 [Rouen, 23/11/1692]). There was even a condition known as mal des novices: a tumour on the knee, brought about by long hours of kneeling (Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 431). 37 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 108. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule. 39 bn ms. 16, Ld 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle. 40 Ibid. 41 G. Augeri, La vie et vertus de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet (1670), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 184. 42 ba 4992–35 (Montluçon, 6/9/1689); Péchenard, La Congrégation de NotreDame de Reims, 1:265. 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662); ba 4992–118 (Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, 12/11/1691); aodn La Flèche, b 1j, Registre des décès (Annonay, 12/5/1641). 44 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:373. 45 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 20/4/1751, Toulouse, 24/2/1772). 46 ass s 197 (Sarlat, 15/5/1729). 47 ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683). 48 ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Fôret, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). 49 bs 768–84. The necrology does not tell us whether her prayers were answered; the fact that the self-abuse made its way into the record allows us to suspect that they were not. 50 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/6/1643); bs 769 (Montbard 15/4/1675). 51 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:197. 52 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 53 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. The following examples are from the same source. 54 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). The author goes on to remark that this nun’s habit of extreme, prompt obedience lasted all her life. 55 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 42.

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325 Notes to pages 174–81 56 ad Seine-Maritime, Règle de Saint-Augustin à l’usage des religieuses de Notre-Dame, 17 verso. 57 Fourier, Correspondance, 3:293. 58 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1645); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/1679). 59 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/3/1730). 60 Benezet, Vie des RR. mères de Terrail et de Bruncan, 53. 61 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 79, cited in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 86. 62 See above, 165, and ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 63 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 81. 64 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (6/5/1704); ba 4991–211 (Montluçon, 26/10/1692). 65 “Les annales des Ursulines de Limoges,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques du Limousin, 168n1. 66 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon, 26/11/1770). 67 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732). 68 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 257. 69 His generosity was rewarded. Magdelaine lived for another twenty-nine years (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 103v). 70 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/6/1784). 71 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/11/1782). 72 Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 65–75; Rivière, Les communautés de religieuses de l’ancien Châlons, 54; an g9 141–5. 73 ad Val d’Oise, d 1791; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:549–50. 74 Intendant Depassier, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 271. 75 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 66. 76 ad Vaucluse, série h, Avignon les Royales, Livre des vêtures et professions. 77 ad Vaucluse, série h, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 184–5. The case was made public when she appealed for an annulment of her vows, after her family was safely dead. 78 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 73. 79 ba 4991–8 (Pont Audemer, 9/1/1693). 80 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692). 81 Quoted in Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 27. 82 Quoted in full in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 93–4. 83 Sommation aux Ursulines, le 3 février 1648, quoted in Notter, “Les contrats de dots,” 249. 84 This rigorous seniority is a boon to the researcher, because it enables her to follow individuals throughout their religious life and also to take note of their disappearance.

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326 Notes to pages 182–5 chapter eleven 1 From John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, part 2. 2 And often came home loaded with donations of money and food, having spent none of the money she had taken with her (ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez). 3 bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1668). 4 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez. Nevertheless Soeur Madelaine received a severe reprimand from the bishop when she exceeded her station and meddled in things that concerned the community (ibid.). 5 “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that, out of the revenue that it provides, they can be fed and maintained; and as well provide something to the needs of the House … as also for the food and maintenance of the sisters of the white veil who bring no dowry, or at any rate, so little that it is not sufficient for their upkeep” (bm Troyes, 2577, Reglements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, 43). 6 ad Vaucluse, h 1, Règles manuscrits de la présentation Notre-Dame (1623), 63. 7 Constitutions de Nancy, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 103. 8 bm Troyes, ms. 2577, Règlements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, no. 93. 9 Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France, 138. 10 I may be criticized for ignoring the male officers of the house: the director, the visitor, and the confessor. I defend myself by quoting Marie-Andrée Jégou, herself an Ursuline: “If the director and the visitor bound the convent to the Church, it was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115). 11 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15. 12 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. This was not the general practice. Other congregations allowed and sometimes encouraged their lay sisters to read. 13 This arrangement is suggested in the death notice of Gabrielle de SaintPierre, a choir nun of noble birth, who was remembered for “not taking the seat due to her rank of seniority, but standing behind the others or among our lay sisters, spinning coarse hemp, or mending the clothes of our poor externes” (ba 4993–166 [Fougères, 3/2/1693]). 14 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. 15 Quoted in Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, 175. 16 See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, and Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs. 17 In his first visit to the Ursuline convent of his town, in 1628, Bishop de Rueil of Angers noted as a “fault against the Rule” the fact that the lay

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327 Notes to pages 185–9

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30

sisters “were given scant consideration by the religious of the choir.” This came after he had interviewed each of the sisters in private (Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 67–71). A similar reproach came down to the Ursulines of Tarbes from their bishop in 1697. He ordered them “to treat the lay sisters with love and charity … not giving them jobs that are useless and beyond their strength, and avoiding speaking to them injuriously and scornfully” (Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses, 223). Mark 10:31. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 119. For example, the veneration after her death of Marie Le Grand (see below); and that of Marie Houre (1693): “There was a danger that all the poor of the city, who revered her as a saint, would break down our grille to have her relics” (ba 4991–77, Montargis). Luke 1:51–2 (The Magnificat). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 26–61. The following account is drawn from these pages. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 51. 62.32 years is the average age at death for all 443 lay sisters for whom my records give age of death, compared with 57.98 years, the average age at death for all 3801 choir nuns for whom age of death is given. Women living in the same house and eating the same food had different levels of longevity, depending on their status. This contrast is noted by Jégou, who remarks that in the first fifty years of the grand couvent, 50 out of the 140 professed choir nuns died, while only 4 out of 29 converses died. Jégou goes on to give what is probably the universal reason for this difference: “The moment a converse postulant showed physical weakness, she was sent away; on the other hand, a choir novice in delicate health could go on to profession if she compensated the house [with a large dowry]” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106). ad Nord, 149 h 8, Ursulines de Lille. See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, tables 6 and 7. Over 90 percent of female servants in these two cities were of rural origin; in both cases, the majority came from districts immediately adjacent. Nicolas de Pesant de Boisguilbert, quoted in Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:261. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 66. The average age at entry of the 719 lay sisters in the sample was 23.74 years. Compare this to the average age of choir nuns entering the same houses during the same period, which was 19.51 years. This was how the converse Jeanne Lanaspeze was described in her death notice (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Toulouse, 10/4/1768]).

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328 Notes to pages 189–93 31 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639). 32 ba 4990–138 (Crépy, 29/8/1686). 33 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:320. 34 Similar cases appear, though rarely, in the records. In 1623 Marie L’honoré, the daughter of a nobleman, “embraced the condition [of lay sister] with fervour … to imitate the example of Our Lord, saying that she had come to serve and not to be served” (ba 4990–472 [Quimper, 1680]). In 1785 Marie-Elisabeth Desmares, a choir novice, made over her dowry to a young woman who had none, and took her place as a lay sister. She survived the Revolution and came back to join the community when it was re-established in 1802 (Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 289, 316). 35 ad Eure, ii f 2215, Registre pour le couvent de Saincte Ursule de Gisors. 36 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639); ibid., fol. 213 (1721); ibid., fol. 109v (1680). 37 ass s 197 (Bordeaux 7/5/1739); ad Eure, h 1593, Congrégation NotreDame de Vernon. 38 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 14/8/1738); ba 4990–194 (Le Havre, 9/12/1685). Marie was credited in her obituary with actually setting up the convent’s pharmacy. 39 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 23/5/1740). A number of other converses are described as shoemakers, though it is unclear whether they brought the skill in with them. 40 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 160. 41 ba 4992–60 (Amiens, 22/1/1684). 42 Marie Vattier, mentioned above, was small and far from robust. However, she lived to be eighty-four, “the most amiable little old lady that one could ever have known,” according to her eulogist (ba 4990–194 [Le Havre, 9/12/1685]). 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89 (1672), fol. 78 (1667). See also Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 245–6. 44 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:514. 45 ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 53–4; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, (1702), fol. 246 (1732). 46 Quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 189. 47 Case cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 460n100. For more on Marie Anne Depeyre, see Reyne and Brehier, Les trente-deux religieuses martyres d’Orange, 308–12. 48 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:131; Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 41n2. 49 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15, “Des soeurs converses.”

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329 Notes to pages 193–6 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60

61 62 63

64

65 66

67

Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:1. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 12:1–20. Ibid., 20:11–14. In a large community this was a full-time job. In her monastery, Magdelaine de Durand “was almost constantly busy making the bread for one hundred and twenty people, religious and pensionnaires” (ass s 197 [Toulouse, 25/4/1719]). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58–9. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 324. Thus, in the Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, the sister-gardener’s tasks included “planting the edges of the walks with dwarf fruit trees and berries such as currants, raspberries, etc., and also roses, rosemary, and such like … which she will keep well clipped and neat” (3:12). Though no tree-climbing was permitted; “that would be indecent and contrary to modesty” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 64:2). ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 54; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 15:2. Ibid., 15:2, 17:4, See, on this subject, an account in the annales of Montargis for the year 1701, of a theft of two dozen chemises off a clothesline in the cloister. “We no longer have to fear such an event now that we are hanging the laundry in the attic” (bsem 80 [mars 1989]: 12). ass s 197 (Poitiers, 8/7/1708). bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 174. aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). It should be added that when workmen were brought in, for building or for repairs, the younger choir nuns were recruited to fetch and carry for them. “They are legion, the Ursulines who served as labourers,” comments Madame Gueudré (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:42). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 112v–113; ba 4993–146 (Magny, 6/2/1685); ba 4990–62 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 4/5/1684). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 10. With more or less skill! Georges Minois records a series of letters written in 1771 by a parish priest in Brittany to the nuns who knitted his stockings: “They are horrible, both for the coarseness of the material and for the ridiculousness of the dimensions. Even the pairs don’t resemble each other, and I believe that twenty-two workers have each had a part in making the eleven pairs.” And so on. See Les religieux en Bretagne, 234. See below, chapter 14.

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330 Notes to pages 197–201 68 Some examples of the changing ratio, during the eighteenth century, of choir nuns to converses: Notre-Dame, Bordeaux: 70:2 (1718) – 27:7 (1790); Ursulines, Carcassonne: 41:6 (1727) – 18:6 (1792); Congrégation, Châlons-sur-Marne: 83:10 (1705) – 33:10 (1790); Ursulines, Evreux: 43:10 (1727) – 20:10 (1790); Ursulines, Gournay: 30:7 (1727) – 18:7 (1790); Ursulines, Guincamp: 59:14 (1729) – 21:13 (1790); Congrégation, Nemours: 55:6 (1718) – 16:6 (1790); Ursulines, Toulouse: 41:12 (1729) – 34:11 (1790); Ursulines, Châtillon: 56:8 (1730) – 21:6 (1790). 69 The superior of Saint-Denis to cardinal de Rohan, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:118. The gist of her letter was that the secular congregations should be suppressed. chapter twelve 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

Fénelon, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 61. “Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi.” Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, 34. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:286. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 1657. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158. Loupès, “La bonne mort en religion,” 8. ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/7/1735); bs 769–140 (Montluçon, 16/3/1666); bs 769–98 (St-Malo, 4/11/1689); ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740); ba 4990–115 (Dijon, 24/6/1684); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); bs 769 (Montbard, 22/11/1676). Oury, Marie Guyart, 328. She would not have been impressed by the fact that the Church would one day beatify her. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, especially chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” ba 4991–21 (Aiguepercé, 14/1/1694); ba 4991–233 (Angers, 1/9/ 1692); ba 4991–186 (Dieppe, 9/9/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 153; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 24/2/1772). “May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last” ( John Henry Newman, sermon, 1834).

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331 Notes to pages 201–4 17 The few exceptions were either women who died while away from the convent or Jansenists. It so happens that all the death notices I have seen were circulated among orthodox communities. For them, the moral would be clear: abandonment could be physical or it could be spiritual; either way, it merited the wrath of God. 18 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 28/3/1725). 19 Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. 20 Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 212. 21 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/1/1764); aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). 22 Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 175. 23 bs 769 (Uzès, 3/2/1722). 24 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 15/4/1733); ass s 197 (Toulouse, 8/6/1738); ba 4992–54 (Montdidier, 22/9/1691). 25 ass s 197 (Saint-Léonard, 13/3/1736). See also ba 4990–94 (Vannes, 15/6/1675): “We beg you to excuse us if Reverend Mother Superior does not herself perform the duty of notifying you of the death of our dear late Mother, but proximity of blood (since she was her sister) obliges us to dispense her from renewing her grief in talking about the subject that has caused it.” 26 ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693). 27 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/3/1723). 28 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/11/1704, Salers, 12/4/1735). 29 aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Perpignan, 22/2/1730). 30 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 23/4/1713). 31 ass s 197 (Narbonne). 32 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 33 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 110. 34 Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 218. 35 ad Isère, 22 h 171; ass s 197 (Salers 1/4/1722); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). 36 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 72. It is to this pious practice that we owe the necrologies and their fund of inside information on the sisters’ lives. 37 bs 769, notice inside the front cover. See also Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 7:8. 38 ba 4990–155 (Dijon, 14/9/1685); ba 4991–99 (Nevers, 27/4/1694). 39 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 14, “Comment les malades se doivent comporter”; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, fol. 36. 40 Thus, “When they have the infirmity that is ordinary to their sex, they will warn the Mother Superior … who will dispense them for three days from

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332 Notes to pages 204–8

41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56

57 58

59 60

performing their mental prayer and assisting at choir … They will perform no austerities … and will get up only at five hours and a half or thereabouts” (Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:16). ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, Règles et statuts des filles de Notre Dame ordre de St Augustin, chap. 8. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 54. For example, Catherine Gignon, who was sent to Paris to receive treatment for “a malignant tumour in her mouth,” and Soeur Tessier, who went to Marmoutier to see an occulist (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 266, 288); and Jeanne Sallonnier, who was sent to Paris to be treated for cancer of the breast (ba 4991–99). ass s 197 (Le Puy, 11/11/1737). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 147; ba 4991–66 (Montluçon, 3/3/1694); ba 4991–205 (Moulins, 29/10/ 1692); Annales des Ursulines de Blois; ass s 197 (Agen, 23/5/1721); ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). ba 4990–185 (Saulieu, 20/11/1687). ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/11/1714); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Le Puy, 16/2/1733). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 14/3/1761); ba 4990–129 (Lamballe, 10/1/1686); ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ba 4992–45 (Épernay, 6/5/1691). ba 4992–6 (Magny, 8/4/1691); ba 4991–227 (Rouen, 23/11/1692). One such infirmary, costing 46,000 livres, was built in Rouen just before the Revolution. Its historian sees it as the product of an eighteenth-century vogue among convents, especially those that received pensionnaires (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 244–5). Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 37. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53. ass s 197 (Sarlat, 13/2/1733); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693); bs 769 (Chinon, 16/5/1664); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Périgueux, 1734); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). The alternative was to buy the medications, and this could mount up. In 1766 the convent of Eymoutiers claimed that its average annual expenditure on “apothecary, drugs, and other things necessary for the sick” was 300 livres, while the doctor’s honorarium was 36 livres (ad HauteVienne, g 723). ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158–9.

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333 Notes to pages 208–11 61 ba 4992–146 (Arnay, 23/6/1691); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 22/5/1711). 62 ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/5/1691). 63 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 6/12/1713); “Abrégé de la vie de la mère Jeanne des Anges,” in Surin, Histoire abrégée de la possession des Ursulines de Loudun, 1:93. 64 Botallo, physician to Charles IX and Henry III, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 63. 65 Ibid. The author goes on to quote an eighteenth-century authority: “We see with distress that some people are bled eighteen, twenty, twenty-four times in two days … If the patient recovers, we must thank the resources of Nature for not succumbing to so many murderous blows.” 66 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 67 Journal de Trévoux, 2185. 68 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Riom, 13/11/1723). 69 Le medecin des pauvres (Paris 1672), quoted in Andrew Wear, “Popularized Ideas of Health and Illness in Seventeenth-Century France,” SeventeenthCentury French Studies 8 (1986): 240. 70 Lebrun tells us that Louis XIV was purged more than 2000 times in fifty years (Médecins, saints et sorciers, 67). 71 ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). 72 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 30/11/1722). 73 ad Yonne, g 192, relation of Antoinette de Sigy. 74 Markham, The English Housewife (1615), chap. 1, no. 99; Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 74. 75 ass s 197 (Riom, 13/11/1723; La Ferté Bernard, 30/6/1727; Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Saintes, 29/2/1736). 76 Most houses kept their doctors on salary, which makes it difficult to know how often they were called in. But we know that Claude Hauterre, physician to the Congrégation of Vernon, paid eighty-nine visits to the community in four years, at a time when there would have been some thirty nuns and possibly as many pensionnaires in the house (ad Eure, h 1591). 77 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 16/5/1785). This “cure through use of electricity” should not be taken to mean electroshock therapy, a development of much more recent times. The use of electricity in the treatment of the sick was in its experimental stage in the late eighteenth century. 78 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/6/1714, Pau, 28/8/1740); ba 4993–97 (SaintGermain, 21/4/1689). 79 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 209. 80 ad Ande, h 439, Annales du couvent des Ursulines fondé à Carcassonne, 3–5. In 1652 they were forced to flee again (13). 81 Boccaccio, The Decameron, 9.

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334 Notes to pages 212–15 82 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 11–12. 83 ba 4991–273 (Amiens, 18/12/1692). 84 Only the plague of 1720 remained, and this was confined to Provence. Sarre concludes from the records that for the Ursulines the incidence of death from that plague was “astonishingly small”: two deaths for a total population of 1100 nuns (Vivre sa soumission, 383). 85 ba 4991–127 (Andelys, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Pau, 18/12/1735, Périgueux, 12/9/1710, Pau, 28/8/1740). 86 Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History, 33. 87 La Condamine, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 170. 88 ba 4993–97 (St-Germain, 21/4/1689). See, also ass s 197 (Limoges, 28/1/1706): “Since the poison could not come out, she expired.” 89 Peter, “Malades et maladies à la fin du xviii e siècle,” 157. 90 bs 769–2 (Erfort, 4/7/1671); ba 4990–155 (Dijon 14/9/1685). 91 ba 4991–225 (Meaux, 16/11/1691). 92 Thus Jeanne Bourelier’s “inner distress … made her so thin that nothing remained to her but skin and bone, and so disgusted by food that one could say she ate only a sixth part of what was needed to sustain her” (bs 769 [Montbard, 15/11/1677]). One wonders if there is a case here for the “Holy Anorexia” of which Rudolph Bell writes so persuasively. 93 King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 123. 94 Jarcho, “A History of Semitertian Fever,” 414; Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 279; King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 134. 95 “L’Hémoptysie,” in Journal de Trévoux, 2190–1. 96 ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 29 (Ursulines de Toulouse), no. 201 (1674); ba 4992–106 (Moulins, 11/12/1688); ba 4993–8 (Meaux, 15/11/1694); ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/4/1711). 97 bs 769 (Sémur, 23/12/1688). 98 Quoted in Lévy-Valensi, La médecine et les médecins français. 99 Journal de Trévoux, 2189. 100 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730). 101 ba 4990–110 (Noyon, 13/11/1687). See also ba 4991–283 (Seurre, 12/12/1692); ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 102 ba 4992–58 (Mante, 14/5/1691). 103 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 1723). 104 “Though the rage [hydrophobia] and plague kill more quickly, they do not seem as cruel as cancer, which leads surely but slowly to the grave, causing its victim agonies which daily make him long for death” (Dionis, Cours de chirugerie [1697], quoted in Darmon, “Être cancereux et mourir,” 296). 105 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 31/1/1784). 106 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 15/2/1743; Béziers, 22/2/1728).

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335 Notes to pages 215–19 107 Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 288–9. 108 bs 769–4 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ass s 197 (Perpignan, 10/2/1730); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/12/1761). 109 bs 769 (Dignans, 6/5/1678); ba 4993–180 (Carcassonne, 26/10/ 1694). 110 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 3/4/1754). 111 I am joining with Georges Minois here, in taking note of “the morbid preoccupation” with death exhibited in the necrologies (Les religieux en Bretagne, 158). But unlike him, I find this preoccupation unsurprising, given the fact that the notices were written immediately after decease, when the authors were still deeply affected by the event. We experience the same reaction today. 112 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 17/9/1725; Toulouse, 29/7/1728); ba 4991–129 (Fougères, 15/5/1691); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 22/4/1742); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685). 113 Caterre, or cathare, is usually understood to be “what we would call bronchitis” (King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 1:24), and it is sometimes used in the necrologies in that sense. But more often it appears as a synonym for stroke, viz. “an attack of paralysis, or a cathare on all of one side.” 114 ba 4993–179 (Rennes, 28/8/1691); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/11/1684); ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ad HauteGaronne, h 221–9, Ursulines of Toulouse. 115 ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733); ba 4990–114 (Avallon, 18/7/1686); ba 4991–11 (Nevers, 10/1/1694). 116 ba 4990–213 (Quimper, 1647); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1694). 117 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692); ass s 197 (Limoges, 22/1/1742). 118 See appendix, tables 9, 10, and 11. chapter thirteen 1 Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, 286. 2 Even the historians of the teaching orders are thwarted by the dearth of evidence. Thus Françoise Soury-Lavergne, late archivist and historian of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame, speaks of the eighteenth century as a period “still poorly known in the history of our company” (Chemin d’éducation, 290). 3 Martine Sonnet makes the point that literacy rose in direct relation to the number of schools available. In Paris, the percentage of working women who could sign their names rose from 34 percent in the seventeenth century to 62 percent in the eighteenth. See her book L’éducation des filles, 84. 4 Compère, Du collège au lycée (1500–1850), 103. Her reference is to male education, but it applies equally to female.

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336 Notes to pages 220–2 5 The lack of much significant evidence, despite his intensive searching, has led Sarre to the conclusion that for the Ursulines of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, free schooling became a matter of minor importance: “The education of externes, the original aim of the Institute, was not constantly, everywhere assured” (Vivre sa soumission, 314). 6 A study of teaching monasteries in Forez remarks on the fact that in all the documents regarding entries, professions, and so on, there is not one mention of a schoolmistress. See Gaussin and Vallet, “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 464. 7 “Institut,” in Trésor de la langue française. 8 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, preface. The Congrégation, together with the Ursulines and the Filles de Notre-Dame, all used the word institut to describe their teaching apostolate. 9 “Extrait de quelques articles du règlement provisionnel [1598],” in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 401–3. 10 La manière de procéder à la réception et profession des religeuses de Sainte-Ursule, 45. 11 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, no. 44, Conclusion. 12 ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon: “Des Classes.” This rule was not often invoked, but it was never completely set aside. At the age of sixty, the distinguished Ursuline of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, Marie de Pommereu, was put back into the senior externe class. The assignment was hard to accept; but, as she wrote, “It fits in with my path and my plan of humiliation” (quoted in Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 47). 13 See above, chapters 1 and 2, and Rapley, The Dévotes, 114–15. 14 This is a resumé of the contract between the city of Tonnerre and the Ursulines (1628), cited in Hardy, “Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 8–9. Many similar contracts survive. 15 an g9 128, Congrégation de Châteauroux, 1723. Many comparable statements exist. To give some examples: “In conformity with the contract passed with the town … they have given all the instructions necessary for young people, without retribution” (an g9 164–19, Ursulines de SaintPierre le Moûtier, 1742); “They have always complied with their duty for the instruction of young girls; they do this gratis” (an g9 119–14, Ursulines d’Angoulême, 1763); “The religious were instituted with a view to the public good of the city, that is the free instruction and teaching of poor girls” (ad Haute-Loire, série L, Ursulines de Montbrison, 1790). Françoise Soury-Lavergne has collected testimonials of this type for almost every convent in the Compagnie de Filles de Notre-Dame (Chemin d’éducation, 316–17). 16 Annaert (Les collèges au féminin, 173) gives the higher number, which he argues was common across the north and in the Low Countries. The lower number comes from Saint-Bonnet-le-Château in Forez (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:176). It is probably typical of school populations in

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337 Notes to pages 222–4

17

18

19

20

21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

other small towns such as Gisors, which declared about the same number who were “instructed and taught to read for nothing” in 1767 (an g9 134). “Culling” may be too controlled a word to describe the process. In some places, bags of ecclesiastical or feudal records were used to light revolutionary feux de joie (Saint–Genlis, Inventaire des archives municipales de Châtellerault, introduction). A.-L. Gazier makes the same observation about the hospitalières of the rue Mouffetard in Paris; he points out that in a correspondence lasting for thirty-five years and filling four large volumes, “never … is there any question of the hospital and the patients” (Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal, ix, 165–6). See, for instance, am Lyon, gg xix, 371, Request from the Ursulines for assistance (1659): “For the last fifty years they have always taught the girls of the city to pray, sew, read and write, and without any recompense; and they have done this in a low room … in eminent peril of total collapse.” The city council, “being duly informed of the usefulness and benefit which comes to the public of this city through the instruction of girls which the religious undertake at no charge,” awarded them 1200 livres. ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2560, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 54; ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h 3 90, quoted in Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 124. ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837, Ursulines de Chinon. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:176–7. The nourishment of needy students was a serious commitment for teaching monasteries. See “Direction des classes externes,” quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 198. Also see the accounts of the Ursulines of Épernay, which record in 1735 “each week, from November 1 until Easter, twelve pounds of bread” for their poor children (ad Marne, 84 h2). Entries like this are found in other monastic records. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:3. Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 56; Petit, “Les Ursulines de SaintDizier,” 61; Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 264. This last house, the nuns claimed in a statement in 1760, represented a lost rental of 300 livres. ad Val d’Oise, d 1790. Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 297. an g9 167–10, Religieuses de Toulouse, 1729. Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 55–6. an g9 154–16. ad Vaucluse, 1g 26. The record adds that “he has been edified by the manner in which they observe this important point of their institut.” He later moved them into a new building. an g9 156–17.

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338 Notes to pages 225–6 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47

Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:45. bm Provins, 211, item 13. See also Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 61. an g9 121–8, Ursulines d’Auxerre, 1766. Filles de Notre-Dame, Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon. That in some parts of the country the classrooms could become very uncomfortable may be gauged from the fact that “in the worst cold” a stove might be provided in the anteroom “so that the regents can warm themselves after they leave the College” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 60:7). Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:155–6. Thus the Ursulines of Épernay were able to buy brooms, pens, ink and paper, sewing materials, and sweets and prizes for the children, all out of a legacy from a priest (ad Marne, 84 h2); the Ursulines of Faubourg SaintJacques in Paris benefited from a fund set up by one of their nuns to provide heating for the free classrooms (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 143). Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 74. She makes the point however, that the monasteries’ day schools were generally better off than other free schools. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. For more on the content of the pedagogy, see Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited,” 310–17. Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux (Mons), quoted in Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 165. Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de Tours, 55:3. Neither she nor the regents were to administer physical punishments themselves; this task fell to a lay sister “with her face veiled,” in a private place (Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:54). Prizes, on the other hand, seem to have been given out fairly lavishly, if we can judge by their place in surviving day school accounts. Quoted in Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 375. Re the “turning down” of skirts and sleeves, during working hours the sisters doubled up their outer skirts, securing them at the back with a pin. Their shorter, less voluminous underskirts allowed them more freedom of action. For the same reason they folded back their long outer sleeves. The full regalia of overskirts to the floor and sleeves that covered the knuckles was reserved for formal occasions. ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). This is how Anne de Pileadvoyne de Coudraye is described. The notice adds: “She was still mistress general of externes and was preparing to teach the catechism lesson when she fell sick” (ba 4991–125 [Andelys, 12/5/1694]). The existence of these specialists is frequently noted in the records, e.g., Marie de La Barre, Ursuline of Paris, who acted as “assistant to the mistresses in the Externe school, so as to help them wherever she could; and

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339 Notes to pages 226–9

48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63

she taught these little girls their reading and arithmetic“(Journal des illustres religieuses, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 146). ba 4991–263 (Caen, 23/12/1693); bs 769 (Dijon, 30/11/1682); ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693); ba 4991–152 (Mâcon, 10/6/1693); ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/4/1691); ba 4990–177 (Magny, 4/11/1681); ass s 197 (Béziers, 10/6/1707). In 1729 seven nuns out of a community of forty-one were “constantly occupied” in the Ursulines’ free school in Toulouse (an g9 167–10); in 1757, of the thirty professed choir nuns at the Ursuline monastery of Gournay, only four were assigned to the day school (ad Seine-Maritime, d 392). These ratios are fairly typical. The Ursuline community of Quimper numbered twenty-seven in 1790; of these, only four were offically “aux externes”; but the mistress of novices, the cellarer, and two novices were also working in the day school, thus doubling its staff (an dxix/15). Lefebvre, “Gisors: Les écoles avant la Révolution,” 10:27; ass s 197 (Avignon, 24/10/1734); ba 4993–66 (Laval, 26/9/1686). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame (1690),” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. Morey, La vénérable Anne de Xainctonge, 2:71. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 144. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 55:9. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 180. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. Thus the nuns of the Congrégation in Bourges complained in 1667 that “because the city is large the classes are always full, so that they cannot even receive the smallest children who present themselves, for lack of space” (ad Cher, 48 10). On the other hand, the Ursuline monastery in Montbard, with its fifty nuns, had only the girls of a town of some 1300 inhabitants to teach (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 51). Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 8. Lebrun, La vie conjugale sous l’Ancien Régime, 138; Babeau, Les artisans et les domestiques d’autrefois, 158. The Ursulines of Avallon, in a deposition in 1747, claimed to be teaching 100 externes, including bourgeois children not yet old enough for the pensionnat (an g9 121–12). Many nuns whose names appear in the monastic records began their own schooling this way, e.g., ba 4991–47, 4991–61, 4991–66, 4991–97, 4991–263, 4993–83; ass s 197, Alençon (23/2/1741), Perpignan (21/8/1737). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre Dame de Châlons,” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. an dxix/6, Religieuses de Notre-Dame du Puy.

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340 Notes to pages 229–31 64 “Règlement pour les religieuses de Saincte Ursule du diocèse de Langres,” quoted in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 457. 65 Règles, quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. 66 ad Vaucluse, h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 67 “Among the Ursulines, at least in the externat, rich and poor sat side by side without any question of any kind of segregation” (Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 136). 68 Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 196–7. 69 ad Vaucluse h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Presentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 70 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, part 2, 3:166. 71 Filles de Notre-Dame, “Règles et constitutions (1638),” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 206. 72 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes. 73 In Grenoble the decision to erect a paying externat was made, not without some soul-searching, in 1660 (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 262). 74 an g9 163–6 (1763). “School” is here used in the old sense of classroom. 75 Martine Sonnet gives a detailed list of all these different schools as they existed in Paris in the late eighteenth century. By her calculation, there were 11,000 places available for a total feminine school-age population of 49,000 to 66,000 (L’éducation des filles, 292, 82). 76 an g9 83 (1763). 77 an g9 160–10, Protest of the mayor and consuls of Saugues against the suppression of the Ursuline monastery of that town (1762); an g9 134–15, Protest of the notables of Gisors against the suppression of their Ursuline house (1768); ad Haute-Vienne, g 727, “État des religieuses du diocèse de Limoges” (1750). 78 In Noyon, for instance, towards the end of the Old Regime, the Ursulines’ day school of almost 200 students was divided simply into one senior and one junior class (an g9 149–23). In 1734 the Ursulines of Saumur claimed in a deposition that “they instruct free of charge [my emphasis] all girls poor and rich” (an g9 119–10). 79 ba 4993–14. I am reminded here of a book to which I contributed, A Century of Schools, which honoured the memory of a woman who had for many years been the first-grade teacher in the village of Wakefield, Quebec. The same thing was said of her. 80 For example, Marguerite du Bocs Dangiens, a member of “one of the most noble families of Basse-Normandie,” who was “instructed in the day school of our reverend mothers the Ursulines of Rouen,” and Anne d’Arripe, “of a very good family” of Pau, who passed from the day school into the board-

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341 Notes to pages 231–5

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98 99

ing school and then into the novitiate (ba 4991–97 [Gisors, 8/4/1694]; ass s 197 [Pau, 12/7/1737]). Petition of the town council of Hédé in favour of the Ursulines (1768), quoted in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 148. Fleury, preface to Grand catechisme historique, quoted in Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 9:324. “Règlements de la communauté des filles de Ste-Anne,” quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 229. Guerin, L’eloge des religieuses de Saincte Ursule, 31. La Salle, Règles chrestiennes, chap. 7, “Du nez”; chap. 10, “Du baillir, du cracher et du tousser.” aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Saint-Flour, 10/11/1791); Reglemens des Ursulines de Paris, 186. This story is recounted by Rondeau, who claims that it was first recorded by contemporary chroniclers. See Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 182–3. Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 273. Quoted in Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 46. Règles (1623), cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. ba 4991–181 (Saint-Denis, 25/9/1691). bsem 79 (oct. 1988): 52; ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733). ba 4992–160 (Abbeville, 28/5/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). For some reason, the eulogist tells us, she never saw the child again. Were the parents offended? But the practice of licking the matter from a child’s eyes was common, though it was usually done by servants. ba 4993–166 (Fougères, 3/2/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1/11/1715); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). bs 769 (Semur, 19/12/1675); ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux, cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 202–3. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. chapter fourteen

1 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 4:1. 2 Quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 241. 3 Brockliss, French Higher Education, 82–3. 4 Quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 104. 5 Snyders, La pédagogie en France, 39.

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342 Notes to pages 235–40 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 19. Conference of 1702, quoted in ibid., 30. ad Seine-Maritime, d 371. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 71. Règlements, quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 6. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:40. According to Sarre, the pensionnats of the Ursulines of Provence held, on average, about a dozen girls each; often the numbers fell to three or four (Vivre sa soumission, 305). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:268. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:101. Madame de Maintenon herself, who often helped in the morning combout at Saint-Cyr, frequently encountered them there (Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 102). aodn, Code d’Alençon, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 238. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:5. Ibid., 3:7. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, part 1. La civilité nouvelle contenant la vraie et parfaite instruction de la jeunesse (1671), quoted in ibid., 18. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 3:332. “The monarch took no baths, save (rarely) for medicinal reasons” (Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, 61). See Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 437, for negative comments collected in 1734. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 96. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:6. bn 16, Ld. 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle, vi. “Checkers, chess, billiards and other like games where the mind and the body are exercised together” (Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation 239. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 91. Quoted in Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 771. Conduite chrétienne ou Formulaire de prières à l’usage des pensionnaires des religieuses ursulines (1734), quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 167. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 248–9. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:57. Hachard, De Rouen à la Louisiane, 10. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:24,2; 3:23,31. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 26 (Ursulines); Baichère “Procès verbaux et ordonnances des visites episcopales,” 156. ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 29/9/1710).

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343 Notes to pages 240–4 37 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:24. 38 Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 117. 39 Loc. cit. However, she hated her subsequent stay in the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. 40 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 270. 41 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:34–5. 42 Ibid., 8:85. 43 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 96–7. 44 Quoted in Brockliss, French Higher Education, 186. 45 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:235. 46 Ordinance for the Ursulines of Carcassonne, in Baichère, “Procès verbaux et ordonnances,” 156. 47 Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 732. 48 For example, the death notice of Marie Mahi (d. 1688): “She was so well grounded in her religion that she would have amazed people by her power to defend it if her state and sex had permitted her to speak in public” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 115v). 49 As happened in Rouen in 1717: “That year, in response to the pressing demands of the families, a dancing master was admitted into the convent.” The archbishop agreed to it, and “the nuns submitted” (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 197). 50 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 85; Sonnet, L’éducation des filles 111; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:9. 51 Thus the account books of the Ursuline monastery of Montbard noted payments for drawing and painting lessons, as well as lessons in harp, harpsichord, guitar, violin, and mandolin (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 40). 52 Quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 190–1. 53 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:249. 54 Ordioni, La résistance gallicane et janséniste, 118. 55 The records kept by the Ursulines of Saint-Avoye in Paris show that between 1763 and 1792, 10.6 percent of pensionnaires came from the titled, military, and land-owning noblesse, and over 50 percent from “officers, financiers, and liberal professions.” Most of the rest came from the merchant classes (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 90). Fifteen percent of the house’s pensionnaires during this same period came from the colonies (ibid., 95). 56 Ibid., 198–9. 57 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 302. Compare this situation to the serious advances made by the Ursulines of the north, catalogued by Philippe Annaert in Les collèges au féminin, passim. 58 This is a point made by Julia (Les trois couleurs du tableau noir) and also by Sonnet, who speaks of “the missed rendezvous between feminine education

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344 Notes to pages 244–50

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

and the Enlightenment [which] is repeated with the Revolution” (L’éducation des filles, 287). Quoted in ibid., 283. Cited in Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 53. ad Var, 34 h 4, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 309. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, cited in Dinet, Religion et société, 1:59–60. Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:356–60. Both these cases are drawn from Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 26–7. am Châteaudun, gg 51. bm Provins, 115, 565. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 152–9. ad Yonne, g 192. Mémoires de la mère de Kervénozaël (Quimperlé), cited in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:151. Letter to the religious of his diocese, quoted in ibid., 2:150. All these examples come from Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 124. For this, the record shows, she rewarded the nuns generously (Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 74). Fourier, Correspondance, 3:73. Ibid., 276. Loc. cit. Ibid., 73–4. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:358. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:13. The young woman escaped from the parlour some time later, in circumstances that must have seemed as suspicious then as they do now (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 151–2). ad Orne, h 4860. bsem 70 (mars 1986): 197. This promise remained unfulfilled ten years later (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:364–5). Ibid. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 254–5. ad Aube, g 148. bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 187. Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 151–2. The word is quoted from this text. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:234–5. ad Haute-Garonne, h 221.29–135. ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736; Sarlat, 12/7/1736; Agde, 14/3/1743). ad Orne, h 4862.

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345 Notes to pages 250–5 92 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 93 ad Vienne, 2 h 77, Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 94 The Ursulines of Nîmes, quoted in Doumergue, Nos garrigues et les assemblées au désert, 45. 95 an g9 167–9. 96 ad Indre, h 944. 97 A poverty documented in its appeal to the Commission des secours (ad Indre, h 947). 98 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 229, 234. 99 Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 12. 100 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188. 101 ad Indre, h 944. 102 Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 30. He notes that two strange nuns were imprisoned in this convent until they accepted the bull Unigenitus. 103 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 5. 104 See Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 105 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 106 ad Yonne, g 192. 107 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 1729; Toulouse, 1733). 108 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 627; am Châlons-sur-Marne, gg 62; Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; ad Val d’Oise, d 1861. 109 Letter of 27 October 1790, cited in Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16. 110 ad Vienne, 2 h 5–77. 111 Roux, Les Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-en-Lyonnais, 67–8. 112 After Parlement ruled in her favour, she left the monastery and married (C. Roux, Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:170–6). 113 Sallé, “Ecclésiastiques et religieuses à Issoudun,” 23. 114 ad Indre, h 905. 115 Ibid. 116 ad Marne, 1 l 1405, 84 h. 117 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 118 ad Cher-et-Loir, 61 h 3; ad cdn h, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. 119 ad Indre, h 910. 120 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237; Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 111. 121 According to Provost, by the time of the Revolution the convents of Brittany were drawing the bulk of their revenues from their pensionnats (“Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 258). 122 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 123 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:554.

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346 Notes to pages 255–61 124 Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16; an g9 123; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 125 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. conclusion 1 2 3 4

am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame. Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 167. Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 56. According to Langlois, 60 percent of religious women were now over fifty years old, 33 percent over sixty (Le catholicisme au féminin, 90). 5 According to Oury, the period of reconstitution of monasteries lasted from 1806 to 1811. After that, a new phase began, of completely new foundations (“Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 6 In all, some 130 Ursuline monasteries were established by the late nineteenth century (ibid., 115); the other two congregations also rebuilt themselves successfully. But by now the monastic orders had been largely bypassed by secular congregations working under central direction (Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 84). 7 Quoted in Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 194. appendix 1 The exact number of women who belonged to the three teaching congregations during the Old Regime has never been accurately computed and never can be. In 1700 there were some 460 houses (62 Congrégation, 51 Notre-Dame, approximately 350 Ursuline), but there had been more previously, and there were fewer in the following years. To our uncertainty about the number of houses is added an uncertainty regarding their populations. These varied enormously. From house to house and from one time to another, they might exceed sixty, or they might number twenty or less. However, surviving monastic registers allow us to gauge the size of communities from the total number of professions they recorded. If around 200 from foundation to suppression, we may posit a medium-sized community of 30 members on average; anything under 150 would suggest a small community averaging 20 or less; anything over 250 would indicate that, at certain periods at least, this was what Dominique Dinet has called a “plethoric” community. Taking the 25 communities for which I have complete lists of professions, I find that the average number of professions per community, from foundation to suppression, is 200. If I multiply this by 460, I reach the number 92,000.

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347 Notes to pages 262–80 2 Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population française, 2:317. The northern region was the domain of nuclear families, the southern, of extended families. See map above, 275. 3 See the notation on the first page of one of the volumes: “Read on October 1777 during the meal” (ba 4990). 4 Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 161. 5 See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women.” 6 Devos, L’origine sociale, 259. 7 Viguerie, “La vocation,” 30–4. 8 L. Henry and J. Houdaille, “Célibat et âge au mariage aux xviii e et xix e siècles en France,” Population 24 (1979): 60; Hufton, “Women without men,” 357. 9 In Beauvais in the seventeenth century, according to Mousnier, “well-to-do people died between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-five” (Institutions, 1:707). 10 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 90. 11 Inventory of 1790, quoted in ad Eure, 283.

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Mesguen, E. Trois cent ans d’apostolat (1629–1929): Les Ursulines de Saint-Pol-deLéon. Quimper 1929 Minois, Georges. “L’ordre des Ursulines à Tréguier, Lannion et Guincamp sous l’Ancien Régime.” Bulletin de la Société d’émulation des Côtes-du-Nord 109 (1980): 19–46 Montaut, J.C. Le couvent de Tartas de ses origines à nos jours. Bergerac 1907 Morin de la Baluère, L.-J. “Les Ursulines.” In Études sur les communautés et chapitres de Laval. Laval 1891 Nadal, Chanoine. Essais sur les origines monastiques du diocèse de Valence. Fasc. 1: Les Ursulines de Valence. Valence 1880 Noye, Irenée. “Paule de Fénelon, religieuse à Sarlat (1641–1723).” Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord 100 (1973): 211–19 Oury, G.-M. “La formation donnée par les Ursulines du Mans à la fin de l’Ancien Régime.” La Province du Maine, série 4, 5 (1976): 124–32 Parenty, Abbé. Histoire de Sainte Angèle fondatrice de l’ordre de Sainte-Ursule, suivie de notices historiques et biographiques sur les communautés d’Ursulines du Nord de la France et de la Belgique. Arras 1842 Parmentier, Dr. Les Ursulines de Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. Laval 1927 Péchenard, P.L. La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims. 2 vols. Reims 1886 Perouas, Louis. “Les religieuses dans le pays creusois du xviii e au xx e siècle”. Cahiers d’histoire 24 (1979): 17–43 Petit, Abbé. “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier, 1646–1792.” Mémoires de la Société des lettres de Saint-Dizier 24 (1938): 51–101 Peyrusqueou, H. Les Ursulines de Saint-Sever. Aire-sur-l’Adour 1905. Prévost, Abbé. Répertoire biographique des religieuses du diocèse de Troyes à la Révolution. Domois-par-Ouges 1933 – “Les Ursulines d’Avallon.” Bulletin de la Société d’études d’Avallon 36:42–88 Provost, G. “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille aux xvii e et xviii e siècles.” Annales de Bretagne 96 (1989): 247–68 Rapley, Elizabeth. “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins.” Provins et sa région 148 (1994): 39–52 Ratouis, P. Histoire intime d’un couvent des Ursulines: Les bourniquettes de SaintCharles (1562–1770). Orléans 1892 Reneault, Abbé. Les Ursulines de Rouen (1619–1906). Fécamp 1919 Richaudeau, Abbé. Les Ursulines de Blois. 2 vols. Paris 1859 Rivière, A. Les communautés religieuses de l’ancien Châlons. Châlons 1896 Rondeau, E. L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers au xvii e siècle. Angers 1909 – Histoire du monastère des Ursulines d’Angers 1618–1910. Angers 1911 Roux, C. Les Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-en-Lyonnais. Lyon 1924 Roux, E. “Les Ursulines de Périgueux.” Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord 32 (1905): 67–101, 319–48, 467–86 – Les Ursulines de Périgueux. 2 vols. Périgueux 1905–1915

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Sabarthes, Chanoine. “L’enseignement en pays d’Aude aux xvi e, xvii e, et xviii e siècles: Les Ursulines.” Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Carcassonne, a 100, no. 10: 180–7 Salviani, S. Histoire du couvent des Ursulines de Langon. Langon 1897 Serres, J.-B. Le monastère de Notre-Dame d’Aurillac. Aurillac 1983 Taillard, Mère. La Congrégation Notre-Dame: Son école à Reims depuis 1685. 1985 Tenon, Germaine. “Les congrégations enseignantes de femmes dans le diocèse d’Evreux aux xvii e et xviii e siècles.” Les abbayes de Normandie. 13e Congrés Soc. hist. archéol., Caudebec-en-Caux 1978 (1979) Terre, M. Trois siècles de vie monastique chez les Ursulines d’Avallon. Sens 1950 Tisseur, Clair. Marie-Lucrèce et le grand couvent de La Monnaie. Lyon 1880 Les Ursulines de Nozeray. Lons-le-Saunier 1886 Uzereau, F. “Les religieuses de La Flèche en 1790.” Annales fléchois 2 (1903): 5–8 – “Les Ursulines de Château-Gontier pendant la Révolution.” Revue dans la Maine 6 (1930): 97–114 Valfrid, P. Les Ursulines à Thonon. Thonon-les-Bains 1890

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abbeys, 15, 62, 80, 238, 243, 293n63 Acarie, Barbe, 188, 190 André, Gante (Congrégation), 91 annales, 95, 119, 182, 186–7, 188, 191, 245, 266–7 anticlericalism, 4, 18–19, 21 Ariès, Philippe, 198 Arnauld, Angélique, 18 Arnauld, Antoine, 137 Augustine, Saint, 64–5, 67 Augustinians, 65–7 Augustinus: condemned by Rome, 65 “baptismal innocence,” 137–8 Baudet-Drillat, Geneviève, 199, 201 Belcier, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 208, 317n51 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, 112 Bellegarde, Octave de, archbishop of Sens, 51, 52, 58 Benedict, Saint, 139; Rule of, 118 bereavement, 202 Bérulle, Pierre de, Cardinal, 143 Bible: studied in convents, 91, 95, 168–9 billets de banque, 22–3, 45–7, 120, 123, 170 bishops, 7, 24–5, 31, 32, 33, 35, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 76, 101, 132, 133, 134, 181, 222, 250, 252, 255; appellant, 68, 70; constitutionnaires,

68–9, 75–6; and free schools, 222; Jansenist, 24, 68–9; ordinances of, 35, 115–16; pastoral visits by, 115, 119, 220; powers of, 42, 49–50, 54, 68–9, 75, 122, 177; and regulars, 50–1; relations of with communities, 7, 49, 50–1, 54, 140, 185; responsibility for ensuring clausura, 34, 115–17; and Revolution, 96, 103–4 Bona, Cardinal, 66 Boniface VIII, Pope, 112 Bordeaux (city), 13, 104, 189 Borromeo, Carlo, archbishop of Milan, 56 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, bishop of Meaux, 157, 180 Boufflers, Angélique (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 192 Bourdaloue, Louis, 91 Bourelier, Jeanne (Ursuline) 142–3, 334n92 bourgeoisie: in monasteries, 89, 94 Bourges (archdiocese), 83 Bourges, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 38, 117 Brichanteau, Philibert de, bishop of Laon, 51, 58 “the Bridegroom,” 128, 135, 136, 140, 141, 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 162. See also Jesus Christ

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Brilhac, Thérèse de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121, 312n48 Brittany, 8, 17, 108, 304n19, 345n121 Buvée, Barbe (Ursuline), 132 cahiers de doléances, 26, 80 canon law, 151, 177 Capuchin(s), 18, 65, 97–8. See also regulars Carcassonne (city), 93–4, 211 Carmelites, 15 catechism: in the eighteenth century, 79; Gondrin's, 71–2; Languet's, 71–2, 73 Catholic Church, 14; and the Crown, 24; eighteenth-century, 78–80; nineteenthcentury, 107–8; and the Revolution, 96, 100–1, 103–4; on sin and guilt, 200; and women, 9, 239. See also Catholicism Catholic historiography, 5, 289n6, 303n1 Catholicism: eighteenth-century, 78–80, 83, 90; seventeenth-century, 27, 66, 79, 141–2, 156. See also Catholic Church Catholic Reformation, 24, 27, 65, 66, 79, 255 Caylus, Charles de, bishop of Auxerre, 69, 73, 77 Châlons-sur-Marne (city), 32 Chantal, Jeanne-Françoise de, 161, 163 chapter, 56, 197; powers of, 58, 75, 76, 122–3, 173–4 chastity: feminine, 112, 117; vow of, 13, 135–9, 140, 155, 162, 187 choir nuns, 182, 183, 185, 194–7, 270; decline in numbers of, 196 Cistercians, 18. See also regulars Civic Oath (1790–91), 96, 99, 103–5 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), 96–7, 99, 103 clausura, 8, 34, 111–18, 127–8, 183–4, 205; bishops the guarantors of, 115–17; and day schools, 113–14, 223–4; exemptions from, 204, 205, 211; legislated by Boniface VIII, 112–13; legislated by Trent, 50, 113; limitations created by, 23, 32–3, 41, 42, 43, 98; women's defence of, 117–18; women's resistance to, 55, 63. See also cloister clergy, 46; constitutional, 96, 106–7; refractory, 96, 104, 105, 106–7; secular, 30, 50, 79; tax exemptions of, 19–20 cloister, 8, 26, 56, 162, 182–3; adult pensionnaires in, 244–56; men allowed

into, 116; pensionnat separated from, 236. See also clausura clothing: admission to, 173–5; age at, 272–4, 277–8; ceremony of, 164, 180; expenses of, 164–5; records of, 263, 271 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 21, 23, 35, 117 college(s), male, 93, 222, 235, 242 commende, 25 Commission des réguliers, 24, 80, 103 Commission des secours, 24, 49, 82, 83, 84, 87, 103, 117; policies of, 42, 83, 85– 7, 277, 278, 297n85 communities, 111; cliques in, 120; democratization of, 89, 94–5, 282; drop of numbers in, 82, 278–83; and Law Crash, 7; morale in, 82, 129, 133–4; mutual isolation of, 126; recruitment to, 262, 277–8; similarities between, 11; and “singular” nuns, 146–7 community, 14, 147, 163, 199; converses in, 182–3; internal organization of, 184, 192–3, 197 Compagnie de Notre-Dame, 6, 15, 120, 174, 250, 253, 270; Rule of, 136, 229 Compère, Marie-Madeleine, 219 Comtat Venaissin, 13 Condorcet, Jacques-Marie de, bishop of Auxerre, 73 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 6, 91, 93, 174, 177, 199, 211, 227, 242, 246–7; desire of for a generalate, 52 congregations, teaching, 9, 82, 219, 234, 261; and elites, 243; religious instruction the priority of, 239; tributes to, 231, 243–4; views of on childhood, 238–9 constitutional church, 27 consumption of the lungs, 143 “conventual invasion,” 16–18, 27, 28, 33, 276–7 converses, 124, 182–97, 262, 270–1, 273–4, 295n35; average age at entry, 327n29; average age at death, 327n24; duties of, 193–4, 237–8; forbidden to teach, 184, 196; illiteracy among, 190; loyalty of at Revolution, 103; noble, 192, 328n34; rules for, 183–4, 188–9 Coqteaulx, Marie-Jeanne (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 101 Coquault, Oudart, 31, 192, 315n9

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Cordeliers, 18. See also regulars Counter-Reformation, 5, 14–15, 224; women in, 106–7 Court, 23, 87, 150, 319n6 Cromwell, Oliver, 3 Crown: and coeducation, 14; information gathering by, 221, 261, 269; officials of, 178, 250, 251; policy toward religious houses, 20–1, 85–7; and taxation of the clergy, 19–22 day schools. See externats death, 198–204; attitudes towards, 200–1, 218; records of, 263, 269–71 death notices, 124, 132, 133, 138–9, 143–7, 148–9, 152, 154–5, 156–63, 165–7, 182, 186, 199, 201, 203–4, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 236, 238, 261, 269–70 Devil. See Satan dévotes: eighteenth-century, 82, 107, 162; as seen by revolutionaries, 104 dévots: and education of children, 235; and education of girls, 241–2; eighteenth-century, 90, 107; seventeenth-century, 65 Dinet, Dominique, 84, 103, 169, 175, 277 director (canonical superior), 57, 119, 124 diseases: cancer, 205, 208, 215–16; colera morbus, 205; “colic,” 215; dropsy, 205, 209, 213, 217; epidemic, 208, 210, 212–14; malaria, 212, 214; “miserere,” 215; nephritis, 206, 209; phthisis, 214, 248; plague, 187, 210–12; pleurisy, 209, 214–15; pneumonia, 215, 217; quinsy, 213; scrofula, 208; smallpox, 212–13; typhus, 212 dizainières, 227–8 doctor(s), 116, 204, 206 dowries, religious, 20, 32–8, 84, 87, 89, 90, 125, 196; compared to marriage settlements, 151, 271; unpaid, 88 dowry, 150, 152, 164–5, 170, 175, 182, 183, 190; lack of, 191–2; lowered in times of need, 37, 197; problems over, 169–70, 175, 176; work to earn, 162 drama: in monastic pensionnats, 92, 242–3 Dubé, Dr Paul, 209 Du Terrail, Thérèse (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 174

education. See instruction election of superiors, 50, 58–9, 122; uncanonical, 59, 74, 75, 197 elites: and monasticism, 21; and religion (eighteenth century), 80; and teaching communities, 16–17, 88–9, 94–5, 235–6, 243 Enlightenment, 78–9, 80, 82, 103, 255, 257; and girls' education, 343n58; and monasticism, 24, 26, 28, 115, 304n21; and religion, 78–9 entry: records of, 263, 269 Evenett, H. Outram, 50, 80 externats, 16, 92, 156, 210, 219–33, 259, 280, 281; buildings dedicated to, 222, 224; closed by Revolution, 105; discipline in, 231–2; fees in, 225; furnishings in, 224–5; heating in, 225; “poor class” in, 232; population of, 189, 229–31, 235; in small towns, 230; social divisions in, 229–30; subjects taught in, 227; taxation of, 39; teachers in, 224, 226–7, 232–3 Fairchilds, Cissie, 184, 185, 189 families, 87, 179, 235–6, 258, 261–2; “dévot,” 154–5; educational expectations of, 235–6, 243–4; financial difficulties of, 159, 192; strategies of, 13, 149–54, 239, 262, 272, 274; support of monasteries by, 131, 132, 133, 134, 181 fanatisme, 192, 309n41 Febvre, Lucien, 13 Fénelon, François La Mothe de, bishop of Cambrai, 137, 198, 241 First Communion, 166, 226, 228, 243 Fleuret, Elisabeth (Congrégation), 133, 154–5, 167 Fleury, André Hercule de, Cardinal, 62, 68, 71, 74; opinion of religious women, 69, 100, 140 Fontainebleau, Edict of, 249 Formulary, 75 founders (religious), 4, 246 foundresses (lay), 33; privileges of, 244–5, 246–7. See also patrons foundresses (religious), 234 Fourier, Pierre, 174, 183, 184, 199, 200, 246–7, 255; and the “conventual invasion,” 32; on the education of children, 137; on the Gallican bishops, 57–8

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Fournier, Françoise (Ursuline), 140 Fronde, 37, 51, 187 funerals, 203; demonstrations at, 185–6, 188, 203, 208, 233 Genlis, Madame de, 244 Gondrin, Louis-Henri de, archbishop of Sens, 59–60, 71 Gorsas, Antoine, 104 grace: theology of, 64–5, 66 Gueudré, Marie-Chantal, 90, 255, 299n19, 329n63 Guyart, Marie (Ursuline), 52, 61, 111, 117, 136, 138, 155–6, 161, 162, 168–9, 171, 200, 247 handwork, 131, 133, 168, 196 health: a requirement in novices, 170, 174, 189 Hell: fear of, 142, 145, 146, 156–7, 159, 200–1 heresy, 14 Hufton, Olwen, 107–8, 115 Huguenots, 14, 16, 66. See also Protestants hygiene: in monastic pensionnats, 237–8; in society, 237–8 infirmarians, 213, 216. See also monastery functions infirmaries, 131, 204. See also monastery buildings infirmary, 193, 195, 206–7, 216–17 inheritance: renounced by nuns, 153, 262 inquest of 1790–91, 101–3, 271 institut, 8, 15, 55, 118, 121, 147, 156, 219–20, 226, 231, 258 instruction of girls, 14, 15, 24, 82, 105, 160, 219; as an apostolate, 220; diversification of, 229–30; free, 219–20, 222, 225; importance of, according to the dévots, 235, 241; religious, 239; to preserve innocence, 137 “invalid status,” 151–2, 176–7, 327n24 Jacobin clubs, 99, 105 James, William, 141 Jansen, Cornelius, 65 Jansenism, 65–9, 76, 78; in convents, 24, 49, 56, 69–77, 91, 100; policy of Crown towards, 68, 69, 71, 251–2; policy of Louis XIV, 67–8

“Jansenist crisis,” 7, 10, 48, 49, 63, 65–7, 77, 116, 119, 123 Jégou, Marie-Andrée, 123, 127, 129, 326n10, 327n24 Jesuits, 18, 23, 49, 65–6, 71, 135–6, 180, 162, 234–5, 240; and Augustinus, 65; educational strategies of, 234–5, 238–9, 242– 3; expulsion of, 78, 103; influence of, 168 Jesus Christ, 155–6, 190. See also “the Bridegroom” La Béraudière, François de, bishop of Périgueux, 60–1 Languet de Gergy, Jean-Joseph, archbishop of Sens, 71–5, 77 Laon (city): effects of “conventual invasion” in, 18 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 231 Latin, 242 Law, John: economic policy of, 22 Law Crash, 7, 28, 44, 47, 48, 82–3, 84, 85, 134, 170, 224, 252, 280, 281, 283; and the rentier class, 22, 88 lay sisters. See converses Lebrun, François, 107 Lecler, Alix (Congrégation), 91 Le Coigneux, Marie (Ursuline), 180 Le Grand, Marie (Ursuline), 186–8, 190 Lestonnac, Jeanne de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 13, 15, 55, 120, 141 lettres de cachet, 68, 71, 74, 76, 83, 87, 153, 248, 249, 250–2 libraries: in women's monasteries, 94–5 Lille (city), 104; mendicant orders of, 18 Lorraine, 13, 29, 37 Louis XIII, 19, 31 Louis XIV, 150, 235, 237; and Jansenism, 67–8; reign of, 22, 28, 39, 40, 252 Loupès, Philippe, 199 Maillefer, Jean, 114, 201 Maintenon, Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de, 40, 140, 226, 235, 240–1, 342n15 Marie de Medicis, 19, 31 marriage: cloister an alternative to, 150–1, 154, 262, 271; parental planning for, 150, 153–4 Marseille (city): plague in, 159, 211 Martin, Dom Claude, 150, 168 medical procedures: bandaging, 208; bleeding, 207, 208–9, 213; medication,

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204, 208, 209, 209–10; purging, 209; quarantine, 211–12, 212–13 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 26 Minims, 18. See also regulars Minois, Georges, 199, 329n66, 335n111 Mississippi Company, 22, 45 monasteries mentioned in text: – Compagnie de Notre-Dame: Alençon, 46, 59, 170, 248; Annonay, 86–7, 88, 263; Aurillac, 208; Avignon, 224; Bordeaux, 52, 53, 120, 191, 253, 255, 268, 330n68; La Ferté Bernard, 122, 269, 301n69; La Flèche, 93, 267; Le Puy, 165; Limoges, 269; Narbonne, 176, 202; Pau, 176, 340n80; Poitiers, 37, 39, 40, 42, 121, 123, 132, 169, 170, 253, 264, 281–2, 297n92; Richelieu, 166–7; Saint-Léonard, 269; Salers, 203; Sarlat, 51; Toulouse, 31, 174, 191, 202, 265 – Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule: Aiguepercé, 230, 312n42; Aix (first monastery), 32, 45, 52, 55, 62; Aix (Andrettes), 293n7; Amiens, 191; Angers, 35, 92, 229, 232; Angoulême, 59, 336n15; Apt, 183; Arc-en-Barrois, 302n27; Argenteuil, 47, 178, 224, 269; Arnay, 208; Autun, 269; Auxerre, 77, 169, 225, 243, 245, 253, 264, 302n42; Auxonne, 132, 138; Avallon, 85, 224, 339n61; Avignon (Présentation), 55, 179, 229, 264; Beauvais, 41, 76–7, 87, 302n25; Blois, 1, 29, 32, 34, 52, 94, 121, 152, 159, 165, 169, 176, 177, 181, 186–8, 192, 211–12, 245, 248, 251, 252, 266, 293n7; Bordeaux, 51, 59, 135, 234, 268; Boulogne, 269; Bourg, 53; BourgArgental, 101, 102; Bourges, 39, 305n37; Caen, 165; Carcassonne, 42, 59, 93–4, 211, 242, 266, 330n68; Carhaix, 269, 305n39; Carpentras, 100, 132, 192; Châlons-sur-Marne, 253; Château-Gontier, 309n18; Châtillon, 330n68; Chinon, 39, 307n79; Cravant, 294n22, 302n42; Crémieux, 269; Dax, 77; Dieppe, 39–40, 269; Digne, 102; Dijon, 56, 169, 244; Elbeuf, 43, 235; Épernay, 254, 269, 337n23, 338n39; Evreux, 330n68; Eymoutiers, 202, 209, 211, 332n58; Gien, 179, 302n42; Gisors, 264, 279–80, 282, 336n16, 340n77; Gournay, 330n68, 339n49; Grenoble, 48, 269, 340n73; Guincamp,

62, 208, 209–10, 224, 330n68; Hédé, 341n81; Ile-Bouchard, 47, 166; Ile-surSorgues, 13, 257; Issoudun, 252, 305n37; Landerneau, 164; Langres, 57, 169; Lannion, 254; Laval, 267; La Vallette, 301n69; Le Havre, 191; Le Mans, 58, 76, 117, 263, 264; Libourne, 53; Lille, 90, 100, 189, 264, 280–1; Limoges, 175–6, 211, 269; Linières, 305n37; Loches, 88, 123; Lorgues, 92; Loudun, 138, 208; Louisiana, 118, 239–40, 251, 315n13; Louviers, 138; Lyon (first monastery), 183, 269, 306n58, 337n19; Lyon (third monastery), 310n20; Mâcon, 29, 52, 132, 151, 172–3, 174, 183, 230; Magny, 269; Martigues, 307n77; Meaux, 294n22, 253, 269; Melun, 37, 74; Montargis, 41, 52, 149, 150, 194, 203, 245, 248, 249, 267; Montbard, 142, 339n58, 343n49; Montbrison, 46, 88, 322n2, 336n15; Montcenis, 87; Montluçon, 32, 39, 170, 305n37; Montpellier, 87; Moulins, 86–7; Nantes, 59; Nevers, 151; Nîmes, 345n94; Niort, 236, 240–1, 249; Noyers, 302nn37, 41; Noyon, 340n78; Orléans I, 173; Orléans (Bourniquettes), 251, 252, 267, 303n52; Paris (Faubourg Saint-Jacques), 36, 44–6, 170, 183, 194, 234, 246, 247–8, 263, 264, 294n22, 310n11, 313n73, 314n3, 338n39; Paris (Saint-Avoye), 224, 343n55; Périgueux, 36, 60–1, 88, 253, 267; Perpignan, 298n107; Poitiers, 267, 269; Pont Audemer, 224; Pont Croix, 269; Pontoise, 268; Québec, 61, 111, 117, 135; Quimper, 265, 269, 305n39, 339n50; Quimperlé, 48, 245, 269, 305n39; Rennes, 92, 174, 246, 254, 298n99; Romans, 265; Rouen, 39, 51, 56, 92, 123–4, 249, 265, 332n53, 340n80; Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, 336n16; Saint-Brieuc, 52; Saint-Dizier, 42, 43, 224; Saint-Emilion, 152; SaintGengoux, 85–6; Saint-Germain, 165; Saint-Marcellin, 37, 134–5, 203, 265, 282–3, 306n62; Saint-Omer, 164; SaintPierre le Moûtier, 336n15; Saint-Remy, 53–4, 86, 310n20; Saint-Sever, 96–9; Saint-Symphorien, 253, 268; Saugues, 340n77; Saumur, 263, 265, 340n78; Selles, 305n37; Sens, 59, 74–5; Som-

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mières, 89; Tarbes, 326n17; Tonnerre, 38, 245, 294n22; Toulouse, 224, 234, 249–50, 266, 330n68, 339n49; Tours, 52, 136, 166, 168, 247; Tréguier, 36, 170, 254; Troyes, 32, 178, 229, 249; Tulle, 266; Valençay, 250–1, 298n99, 305n37; Valence, 103; Valenciennes, 92, 224, 268; Vendôme, 254, 269; Villefranche, 132, 165, 174 – Congrégation de Notre-Dame: Bernay, 255; Bourges, 41, 305n37, 339n58; Châlonssur-Marne, 32, 101, 330n68; Châteaudun, 30, 245; Châteauroux, 36, 122, 253–4, 263, 264, 298n99, 305n37; Châtellerault, 29, 37, 41, 54, 58, 122, 124, 266, 298n106; Étampes, 74, 302n33; Joigny, 74, 302n35; Laon, 31, 51, 269; Longwy, 103n19; Nancy, 92, 224, 264; Nemours, 34, 60, 73–74, 330n68; Paris, 91, 192; Provins, 41, 59–60, 132, 245, 263, 265, 282, 306n62; Reims, 29, 32, 34, 47, 59, 61–2, 105, 133–4, 249, 252, 255, 265, 295n55; Sainte-Ménehoulde, 254, 269; Saint-Mihiel, 246–7; Saint-Nicolas du Port, 246–7, 265; Troyes, 32, 293n7; Vernon, 191, 333n76; Vézelise, 105, 266 monasteries of women: agents for, 42, 45; building programs of, 33–4, 130–1; decline in numbers in, 84–5, 95; diet in, 131, 193; differences between, 6; difficulties in collecting debts, 44, 88; financial crises in, 44–8, 84, 85, 88, 95, 134; hygiene in, 131; medical care in, 204; morale in, 82, 84, 95, 99–100; property of, 40–1; quality of life in, 278–9; as refuges for the rich, 81; relatives in, 201–2, 236; spiritual decline of, 89–91, 94–5; water piped into, 193, 194 monastery buildings: cemetery, 27, 203; church, 98, 127–8, 131, 198; gardens, 194; grilles, 62, 98, 111, 113, 115–16, 117, 128, 293n4; infirmary, 206–7; kitchen, 195, 196; pensionnat, 236; pharmacy, 194, 195, 196, 207–8, 209–10; sacristy, 98, 195; yard, 193, 194 monastery functions: apothecary, 190–1, 207–8; cellarer, 126, 195; cook, 126; dressmaker, 128; gardener, 126, 195; infirmarian, 126, 191, 196, 207–8;

laundry, 128, 194; linen room, 126; mistress general, 127, 225–6; mistress of novices, 126, 167–8, 170–1, 173; mistress of pensionnaires, 188, 237–8, 240–1; pharmacist, 142; portress, 127, 223; prefect, 127, 224, 225–6; refectorian, 128, 196; regent, 226–7, 315n4; sacristan, 127–8 monastery officers: assistant, 122, 124, 125, 180; bursar, 125–6; confessor(s), 50, 119, 187, 200, 201; director(s), 42, 50, 119, 122; discrètes, 123, 125–6, 167; visitor, 124, 132; zélatrice, 125. See also superior monasticism, 7; aristocratic values of, 89, 94–5, 118; public opinion of, 20–1, 178; and the state of Catholicism, 79 monasticism, female, 14–15; “democratization” of, 89, 94–5, 197, 282; and the elites, 16–17; in historical record, 4–5; public opinion of, 26, 115, 178, 307n79 monasticism, male: decline of, 80–1; in historical record, 5; public opinion of, 18–19, 25 monks, 81; and enclosure, 112; and public opinion, 20–1. See also regulars Montargon, Hyacinthe de, 141 Montesquiou, François-Xavier, 81 mortality: in monasteries, 274–7; in novitiate, 175–6 mortification of the body, 82, 136, 141–7, 158, 159 mortmain, 19, 34 Mousnier, Roland, 148 municipalities: attitude of towards religious orders, 17–19, 222, 223; contracts with teaching congregations, 221 mysticism, 82, 147, 171 Nancy (city), 30 “Nation,” 38, 101; and Church, 96, 103–4 National Assembly, 81, 89, 197, 271; abolition of solemn vows by, 26, 100, 117; Civil Constitution of the Clergy enacted by, 96; Ecclesiastical Committee of, 101, 103; eviction of religious population by, 105–6; freedom of worship declared by, 99; protests by nuns to, 101, 117–18 necrologies. See death notices Noailles, Gaston de, bishop of Châlonssur-Marne, 70

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Noailles, Louis de, archbishop of Paris, 68, 243, 246 nobility, 274; and monasticism, 16, 17, 89, 118, 121, 160 notaries, 60 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 75, 77, 243, 252 novices, 164–81, 194, 294n23; clothing of, 173–5; disappearance of in bad times, 170, 195n55; failure rate among, 169–70; “invalid” status,” 151–2, 176–7; reception of, 24, 167; sent away or banned, 75, 83, 85, 87, 101, 278; training of, 168–9; in Mâcon, 172–3 novitiate, 167–9, 170, 175, 181; discipline in, 169, 172; mortality in, 175–6, 214; mortifications in, 172; penances in, 170, 171–2, 187 nuns, 7, 9, 13–14; eighteenth-century, 2, 7, 81–2, 90–1, 133; eviction of, 105–6; “feminism” among, 91; and learning, 242; life expectancy of, 9, 217, 262, 276; medieval, 114, 115, 132, 136–7, 211; nineteenth-century, 4, 7, 108, 258–9, 289n6; and public opinion, 92–4, 115, 117, 127, 307n79; as rentiers, 82; and the Revolution, 97–103, 104–5, 106–7; as seen by historians, 108; as seen by revolutionaries, 104–5, 107–8; seventeenth-century, 15, 255; as “victims,” 26, 117, 311n37 obedience: vow of, 49, 57, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188 Office: in teaching monasteries, 168, 184, 196, 197, 239 Old Regime, 3, 6, 9, 27, 111, 117, 257; economic depression during, 22, 40–1, 257; economic expansion during, 42–3, 257, 282; emphasis of on obedience, 139–40; and female education, 221–2, 233; poverty in, 130; religious culture of, 148–9, 155; women's religious communities during, 8, 114, 134, 219, 257–8, 261–2, 269, 271–2, 279–83 Orange, commission populaire of, 192 Orléans, ducs de, 180, 247 (1644), 248 (1660s), 22 (1720) ouvrages. See handwork papacy, 66; and Gallican church, 67; and regulation of women's monasteries,

54–5, 57, 114; and religious exemptions, 50; and Revolution, 96 papal bulls, 54; Cum occasione (1632), 65; Periculoso (1298), 112–13, 114, 136; Unigenitus (1713), 67, 70, 71, 73 parents: coercion by, 178, 179; complaints from, 194; death of, 149, 165; obedience to, 139–40, 157; strategies of, 149–55; vocations opposed by, 153, 157–8, 169, 272, 291n20 Paris (city), 35, 102, 104, 280, 282; Jansenism in, 66 Pâris, François de, 73 Parlement, 31, 121, 169, 253; appeals to by nuns, 55, 59, 70, 74, 123; gallicanism of, 66, 67; support of episcopal authority, 56; support of nuns' rights, 60, 75–6 patriarchy, 184, 185 patrons: as boarders in monasteries, 244–5; legacies from, 245; privileges of, 203, 246–7. See also foundresses (lay) Paul V, Pope, 244, 248 Paul, Vincent de, 117, 141, 151 Pelagius, 64 pensionnaires, 294n23, 343n55; adult, 62, 123, 244–56; initial limitations on, 113, 116; qualities expected in, 239–40; young, 75, 188, 193, 210, 219, 234–44, 282, 319n10 pensionnat, 167, 229, 234–56, 281; as “antechamber to the novitiate,” 154, 156, 165–6, 239; diet in, 238; financial value of, 89, 196, 236, 254; games allowed in, 238; hygiene in, 237–8; loss of respect for, 26, 92; as prison, 248–52, 256; profane reading forbidden in, 136; separated from cloister, 236; subjects taught in, 92, 239–43; use made of by families, 150–1, 165–6, 235–6 pensions: of novices, 164; private, in monasteries, 133–4 phthisis. See consumption of the lungs plague, 51, 159, 211–12 Pluvinel, Marie de (Ursuline), 203 Pommereu, Marie-Augustine de (Ursuline), 181, 232, 336n12 Port-Royal, 15, 18, 238, 252 postulants, 164–5, 166, 167 poverty, 88, 95, 130, 134, 259; vow of, 130–5, 147, 188 profession(s), religious, 164, 177–81, 220; canon law regarding, 177; conflicts

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over, 58, 176–7; interrogation before, 177, 268; records of, 36, 263, 269; uncanonical, 152, 178–9 property: held personally by nuns, 132; monastic, 130, 221; rural, 40–3, 101, 282, 283; urban, 43 Protestants, 153, 235, 236, 249–50. See also Huguenots Provence, 211, 334n84 public: opinion of regarding nuns, 92–4, 105, 115, 117, 127 purity: temptations against, 120, 138–9, 144 Quéniart, Jean, 107 Quesnel, 67, 69 Ranquet, Catherine (Ursuline), 138–9, 156, 171, 312n54 Razes, Geneviève de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121 Recollets, 18. See also regulars records: diocesan, 268; monastic, 36, 48, 94, 148–9, 152, 164, 176, 182, 195, 242, 261, 263–7, 267–8, 283; notarial, 271 Reformation, Protestant, 64 Regency, 84, 94 “regularity,” 49, 129, 258 regulars, 80–1, 84–5; and bishops, 49–50; competition among, 5, 18–19. See also Capuchins; Cistercians; Cordeliers; Jesuits; Minims; Recollets Reims (city), 31, 105 rentes, 23, 33, 35, 40, 43–4, 101 130, 135, 252, 298n102 rentiers: John Law's plans for, 22, 45; and the Law Crash, 22–3, 88 Revolution of 1789, 7, 8, 95, 258–9, 281; anti-monastic bias of, 26; and the Church, 96, 105, 197; confiscation of monastic archives during, 60; and women, 106–7 Reynes, Geneviève, 103, 258–9 Richaudeau, Chanoine, 94 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de, 19, 21, 59 Richerism, 72 Rogier, L., 78, 103 Roland, Jeanne-Marie, 91, 192 Rouen (city) 102, 280 Rule, monastic, 7, 15, 49, 80, 94, 111, 121, 122, 126, 128–9, 131, 132, 134–5,

138, 139–40, 167, 168, 170, 174, 177, 181; Benedictine, 118; counterweight to episcopal authority, 55, 59; dispensations from, 152; infractions of, 38, 47–8, 176, 179, 326n17; loyalty to, 6, 7; monthly reading of, 168; protected by the Crown, 76; protests over infractions of, 59–60, 70; sacrosanctity of, 55, 62, 69, 124, 258; Ursuline (Bordeaux), 232; Ursuline (Paris), 166, 225, 229; Ursuline (Québec), 135–6 rules, 9; on education of pensionnaires, 236–43; on infirmaries, 207; moderation counselled by, 82, 141; on preparation for profession, 177; on reception of students, 229; on reception of women at risk, 247–8; school, 222, 228; on sickness, 204, 205–6; similarities between, 8; on teaching, 220, 226 sacraments, 168; anointing of the sick, 198–9; Communion, 91, 199; deprivation of as punishment, 57, 60, 62, 75, 76, 77; penance, 65, 91, 199, 201 Saint-Cyr, 39, 235, 238, 342n15; “demoiselles” of, 40, 160 Sainte-Beuve, Madame de, 246 Sales, François de, 112, 113, 151 sanctity, 112, 188, 203 Sarre, Claude-Alain, 85, 244, 277, 336n5, 342n12 Satan, 156, 161, 198, 235 Saumur (city), 186 Saurine, Jean-Pierre, constitutional bishop of Saint-Sever, 97–9 schoolmistresses, secular, 92–3, 104–5, 230; teaching nuns replaced by, 86 scrupulosity, 141–2, 145–6 Sens (archdiocese): Jansenism in, 71–2 servants, 184–5, 189, 191; in charge of children, 235; in monasteries, 189, 195 sickness: chronic, 216–17; fever in, 213–14; as an inducement to religion, 155, 158–9; monastic attitudes towards, 204–6, 218 Sigy, Antoinette de (Congrégation), 209 Sigy, Euphémie du Roux de (Congrégation), 162 sin, 137; consciousness of, 141–2, 200–1 Sonnet, Martine, 225, 243, 335n3 Sorbonne, 57, 68

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Index

Sourdis, François de, archbishop of Bordeaux, 51, 56, 59 Soury-Lavergne, Françoise, 335n2 “spiritual exercises,” 168, 190 superior, 27, 33, 131, 134–5, 145–6, 167; election of, 50, 58–9, 75, 122; leadership of during Revolution, 102; limitations on, 118–19, 125; perpetual, 63; powers of, 57, 118–23; qualities required in, 121, 160 superior, canonical. See director surgeons, 204, 206 surgery, 215–16 Tackett, Timothy, 96, 104, 106 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 81 tax exemptions, clerical, 17, 19, 20 taxes, clerical: dues of amortissement claimed by Crown, 19, 21, 38–40, 43, 44; effect of, on women's monasteries, 22, 134; “free gifts,” 20–1, 40 teaching congregations, 15–16, 82–3, 244, 254–5, 305n32; and the Civic Oath, 104–5; contracts with cities, 221; influence of on women, 107; and public opinion, 92–4, 105; suppression of (1792), 105–6 tithe, 25 tourière(s), 183, 189, 191 Tours (city), 156 Trent, Council of, 57, 244; clausura ordained by, 111, 113, 115, 247; legislation of, for women’s monasteries, 50, 54, 58, 122, 177; and theology of grace, 65 Troyes (city): plague in, 211 Ursulines, 6, 18, 83, 90, 183, 259; of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, 85, 90, 297n88, 307n76, 336n5 Vallière, Isabelle de la Baume de (Ursuline), 150, 171

Vallière, Louise de, 150 Varet, Alexandre, 60 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 185 Versailles. See Court Vesvres, Anne de (Ursuline), 38 Viguerie, Jean de, 79, 90, 147 Virgin Mary, 90, 155, 156, 159, 198 “Visa,” 44 Visitation, 15, 32, 113, 239, 243 vocales, 58, 122, 123, 174, 184. See also chapter vocations, 155–62; built on fear, 159–60, 180; childhood, 143, 155–7, 162; conditioned, 153–5, 160; during the “conventual invasion,” 33; forced, 178, 179; late, 161–2, 167; opposition of parents to, 157–8, 272, 291n20; testing of, 166; of widows, 161 Vovelle, Michel, 107 vows, 4, 8, 27, 58, 181, 198; annulment of, 177, 178; to bishop, 54, 181; of chastity, 13, 112, 117, 135–9, 140, 147, 155, 162, 187; inviolability of, 97, 100, 101; of obedience, 49, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188; of poverty, 130–5, 147, 188; to the Rule, 54–5; suspension and abolition of, 26, 100; of teaching, 190, 220 women: as bearers of the faith, 233; in the Counter-Revolution, 106–8; and learning, 239, 241–2; and literacy, 219; in the nineteenth-century church, 108; nuns in the history of, 9; weakness of historical record for, 106, 219, 222 “the world,” 4, 6, 9, 137, 148, 153, 154, 156–7, 159, 160, 162, 166, 178, 248, 255, 257, 258 Zamet, Sébastien, bishop of Langres, 50, 56–7

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A Social History of the Cloister

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m c gill-queen’s studies in the history of religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. series two In memory of George Rawlyk Donald Harman Akenson, Editor Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk Inifinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston, editors The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

Gentle Eminence A Life of George Bernard Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William Katerberg The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel, 1948–2000 Paul Charles Merkley A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley

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series one G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for an New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Monreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution John Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844– 1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827 to 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanna M. Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

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A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime elizabeth rapley

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2222-0 Legal deposit third quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Rapley, Elizabeth A social history of the cloister: daily life in the teaching monasteries of the Old Regime (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2222-0 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women – France – History. I. Title. II. Series. lc506.f8r36 2001 271′.903044 c2001900081-2

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations

ix

xi

Introduction

3

part one

two hundred years

1 The Nuns and Their World

13

2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy 29 3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

49

4 “Personae non gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus 64 5 The Decline of the Monasteries 6 Aftermath part two

78

96 t h e a n at o m y o f t h e c l o i s t e r

7 Clausura and Community

111

8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience 130 9 Prehistories

148

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viii

Contents

10 Novices

164

11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ”

182

12 Of Death and Dying 198 13 The Institut

219

14 The Pensionnat Conclusion

234

257

Appendix: Demographics of the Cloister 261 Glossary Notes

285

289

Bibliography

349

Index 371 A map of the three teaching congregations appears on page

275

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank her husband, who has encouraged her and researched with her during all the years that she has worked on this book. Most particularly, she thanks him for the many patient hours he has spent bringing order and meaning to her data. She acknowledges the assistance given to her by a number of people in France, notably Chanoine Michel Veissière, Madame Marie-Thérèse Notter, Cécile Amalric, odn, and the municipal librarians in Montargis and Provins. She thanks the editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History for agreeing to the inclusion in the book of material previously published in that journal. Finally, she would like to express her lifelong gratitude to Beatrice Binney, rscj, a wonderful history teacher, to whose memory she dedicates this work.

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01_deb.fm Page xi Tuesday, July 24, 2001 1:27 PM

P. Helyot, Dictionnaire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires (Paris: N. Gosselin, 1714–1719),vol. 6, opposite p. 355. Courtesy of University of Ottawa, Rare Books Collection.

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xii

Contents

Vol. 2, opposite p. 425.

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xiii

Folio

Vol. 4, opposite p. 185.

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xiv Contents

Vol. 4, opposite p. 166.

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Introduction

I think I must start by saying that during the years the nuns in my study were bending themselves to their mission of recatholicizing the world, my own ancestors, both English and Scots, were all dyed-in-thewool Protestants, who probably never saw a papist in their lives. My English ancestors lived in Huntingdonshire, one of the most Puritan of counties, and their allegiance was to Oliver Cromwell. Even during my mother’s childhood in the early years of the twentieth century, no family member was allowed to criticize the great man. A sort of residual loyalty, then, gives me my excuse for starting with a story about Cromwell. Having risen to power, he needed to do the right thing and pose for a portrait. But while the portrait was necessary, the flattery that customarily went into it was not. In that respect, Cromwell was not like most other great men. His words to the artist have lived on, even though most of his other words have faded: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”1 Far be it from me to compare French nuns in their convents to a soldier-statesman in Westminster – surely, both nuns and statesman would have been most insulted at the suggestion – but I think that perhaps they too would have appreciated a faithful portrait, warts and all. This would not have been their first choice, which would be no portrait at all; for they wished to live in obscurity. “The name of a religious ought to be as unknown and solitary as her person,” wrote one of them.2 Many of the more eminent among them took care to preserve

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4 Introduction

that obscurity by burning their papers before their death. But the problem is that obscurity has not been kind to them. If you do not see to your own history, someone else will see to it for you. In their case, the absence of evidence has been taken for irrelevance, and self-disparagement has turned into disparagement by others. A true portrayal, warts and all, is one thing, but a concentration on warts to the exclusion of all else is another. The nuns of the Old Regime were the subject of considerable hostile analysis by people who had never been inside their convents’ doors. They were accused of “idleness, childishness, back-biting, hypocrisy, sentimentality in prayer, prudery, preciousness, affectation and vanity.”3 Worse, they were suspected of harbouring “volcanic” passions, which were kept in check only by the locks on their doors and the bars on their windows. Their image did not improve with time. In the nineteenth century, when France was shaken by monumental church-state battles, religious women, loyal troops of the church as they were, caught the edge of the anticlericals’ hostility. The literature abounded in negative images; a nun was “the disappointed lover, the intriguer, the harridan, the person whom one designates … by the intentionally equivocal expression ‘good sister,’ and finally, the pseudo-mystic.”4 What had nuns done to deserve such harsh treatment? In answer to this question there was only silence. No one had entered the public domain to speak for the nuns. If they themselves had spoken, they would probably have said, “I will not dignify this with a response.” That is certainly how they acted. For the most part they swathed themselves in privacy. However warm and kind they may or may not have been among themselves, they treated “the world” with hauteur. They did not owe it an explanation, still less a justification. They cherished their apartness, cultivating the “us against them” mentality. Had they wished to persuade others of their value, they certainly had the means. Over the years they produced, or arranged to have produced, many biographies and historical monographs. But these works were designed strictly for home consumption, and their purpose was hagiographical. Their subjects were the institutions or the founders and other women who might qualify for canonization. Intended to edify, these writings seldom allowed even the mildest criticism, the slightest hint of humanity. Hagiographies, of course, preach only to the converted. This was the problem with this old convent literature. It had no intention of reaching across the great divide, to tell the world what it was really like to live in community under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. So the reader was left with two extremes: the hostile and generally uninformed writings of the outsiders, and the carefully crafted and

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5 Introduction

sanitized tributes of the insiders. The consequence of this extremism was the loss of a sense of balance. Only recently have there been an increasing number of works that seek to portray religious women as they really must have been – warts and all, and far more connected to the human race than we have ever been allowed to believe. Another great problem with the insider literature is that it was fragmented. No one spoke for monasticism or even Catholicism as a whole. This is characteristic of older Catholic historiography. It has been pointed out that in the period when Reformation history was taking shape under the hands of great Protestant scholars, “Catholic historical scholarship, chartless and rudderless … hardly sought to synthesize but was content to record, piecemeal, reforms, resistances, counter-offensives.” As a result, for many years the movement known as the Counter-Reformation was defined by its opposition, and suffered accordingly.5 This failure of Catholic historiography must surely be blamed partly on the religious orders, whose allegiance seemed too often to belong to their own institutions rather than to the universal Church. The infighting to which they were so prone found permanent expression in their writings. In the older literature of any religious order you will find yourself within an intellectual cloister where the brothers are everything and the rest of the world is barely mentioned. Loyalty to the in-group was matched by indifference and sometimes even hostility towards the outsider. The history of monasticism and the religious orders was, for these earlier historians, the history of individual orders and societies. With religious women, this fragmentation was taken to extremes: from individual societies to individual houses. Look at the bibliography at the end of this book, and among the older works you will see a host of monographs, each dedicated to a single community. We can fit them together to form a sort of mosaic of female monasticism, but in doing so we are circumventing their original purpose. In keeping with the dictates of the Church and the prejudices of society, the female monasteries of France were cut off, not only from the world but from each other. The spirit of isolation was built into their communities at the time of foundation, and it endured through the years.6 From within the circle of their own walls, nuns tended to regard outsiders with caution, and other religious orders with outright coolness. A sense of apartness filled their minds, so they would have been most surprised to learn that they were really not as unusual as they thought. It was only in the later twentieth century that historians began to supply the syntheses that treat religious women as members of an identifiable countrywide group, sharing many of the same ideals, objectives, and problems.7

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I have followed this path, drawing a large picture with material that was originally intended for small pictures. This has required some audacity, because the three congregations with which I am concerned – the Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule, the Compagnie de Marie NotreDame, and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame – are still very much alive and active, teaching children all over the world. They have every right to shake their heads at the liberties I have taken in grouping them together; after all, there were differences between them; they were not the close copies of each other that my broad-brush methodology may suggest. And even if similarities may be found in their rules, organization, and lifestyle, the geographical distribution of their communities always tended to intensify their differences. Each cloister had its own character at a time of great regional diversity in France. So is it legitimate to group together the large and prestigious monasteries of great cities with the small houses buried in towns of two or three thousand souls? Or to group the communities of bustling port cities with those of slumbering provincial backwaters? My only defence can be that while some particularities are lost, many perspectives are gained in the telling, and I hope that the latter will make up for the former. The other great problem has been the passage of time. The period covered in this book extends from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth – the period generally known as the Old Regime. In writing social history, it is tempting to treat blocks of time as though they were a unified whole. Yet during those two centuries French society did not remain static. At its different levels it progressed unevenly, some parts of it leaping ahead while others remained virtually immobile. The cloisters about which I write existed simultaneously on these different levels. They were (for the most part) urban and therefore were not immune to the forces at work in their cities; they were populated largely by daughters of the better off and better educated, and were therefore not entirely closed off from the winds of change. On the other hand, their way of life was inspired by the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, and their rules were designed to keep this way of life as intact as possible. “Edified and encouraged by the example of those who have gone before us,” the nuns of 1790 proclaimed, “we have no other ambition than to model our conduct on the exact discipline and constant regularity which they supported.”8 Was this unchangingness an illusion, or was it genuine? Were the sisters of 1790 really clones of the sisters of 1630? That was a question I asked over and over again as I researched this work. Time did make a difference. Monastery walls were not impervious to the currents that flowed through society at large. Had the cloister

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7 Introduction

existed in a vacuum, it might have remained unchanging. But events battered against its walls, creating circumstances to which the women inside simply had to respond. Whether they knew it or not, they did evolve – if only just enough to survive in a changing environment. Because the forces for change originated outside the walls, it is necessary to explain what was happening there. Part 1 is an introduction to the events which, over nearly two hundred years, dictated what happened to the women’s monasteries. Chapter 1 begins in the broadest terms, touching on the general topic of monasticism, both male and female, tracing the great fluctuations in its fortunes from the extraordinary period of growth in the earlier seventeenth century, through the dark days in the eighteenth century, and to the French Revolution. Chapter 2 turns to the three teaching communities with which we are concerned. They developed in the same context, enjoying the same rapid expansion before falling into the same drastically unstable economic environment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nothing before or after, until the Revolution, provided such a unifying experience for thousands of religious women as the misery they shared during these years. Chapter 3 falls back in time to consider the tensions inherent in the communities’ relationships with their bishops. One of the fictions about religious women is their supposed docility. “Their spirit, being sedentary, calm and patient, banishes the fear that they would ever wish to leave the circle which is traced for them by their duty and their Rule,” wrote a Crown minister at the time of the Restoration.9 This may have been true, both then and in the preceding centuries. But how did the nuns react when outsiders encroached on that circle of duty and Rule? On numerous occasions, the sensitivity of monastic communities to what they themselves called their “rights” led them into serious confrontations with the ecclesiastical authorities to whom they were subject. The degree to which they could be stubborn, combative, and downright disobedient was demonstrated in the eighteenth century in the regions of France that experienced the Jansenist crisis. Chapter 4 considers this crisis and its often tragic results. Chapter 5 takes up the themes of chapter 2. In the history of monasticism, the eighteenth century is remembered mainly for decadence and decline. Religious women have been associated in that decline, albeit with some reservations. This author joins with others in questioning that historiographical tradition. The female monastic population decreased, to be sure. But the convents were the victims not so much of moral decline as of an extremely adverse economy and an unsympathetic government. The Law Crash brought hundreds of communities to their knees. It is remarkable that so few of them actually

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8 Introduction

collapsed and that so many were still alive and in tolerable financial health at the time of the Revolution. Chapter 6, “Aftermath,” offers a brief glance at the women’s experience during the Revolution. While strictly speaking this experience belongs to another historical period, it is important to remember that it had its roots in an earlier time. The nuns who faced the guillotine, sat in the crowded prisons, or simply survived as best they could in rented rooms and garrets had been formed in the orderly and protected environment of the Old Regime cloister. Their negative reaction to the Revolution, unexpected at the time and mildly controversial to this day, was the fruit of that earlier life. Part 2 seeks to describe life within the cloister: the framework provided by the institutions, the spiritual and material problems of every day, the relationship of the women with one another, and their relationship to the world outside. Having paid due respect to time and space in part 1, I now sidestep their restrictions, drawing from sources scattered across the whole period and the whole country to create a composite picture of teaching nuns in the Old Regime. I am emboldened to make these generalizations by the knowledge that the very act of entering a convent and submitting to a Rule involved a certain loss of individuality. When all is said and done, there was much that was invariable about the cloister, whether in 1650 or 1750 and whether in Brittany or the Dauphiné, Burgundy or Poitou. In the early modern period, women’s horizons were limited, and religious women’s even more so. Once the parameters of their life had been set, few serious deviations were open to them. All monastic communities were built on the same foundations: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and clausura (the obligation to remain within the cloister). To these obligations the three congregations in question added another: the holy apostolate of instruction, which they called their institut. The obligations imposed patterns on the lives of the women who undertook them. All their regional, cultural, and personal particularities and all the modifications caused by the passage of time had to fit within these patterns. At the same time, religious women always remained physically connected to the society around them. They shared in many of its customs and practices. They employed the same notaries, doctors, and legal advisers. They drank the same water and patronized the same butchers and grocers. They approached the problems of child rearing, nursed and medicated their sick, and attended their dying in much the same way as “the world” did. In fact, the records they kept about these things, at a time when women as a whole seldom wrote much about daily life, can provide useful information on life not only in the cloister

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9 Introduction

but also in the larger community that swirled around it only a stone wall away. Thus, this “social history of the cloister” is more than a cameo study of a small closed-off section of society; it has a bearing on the general history of women in early modern France. In a field of study where women’s self-expressions are difficult to find, it offers a wealth of material composed by women for women. Part 2 of the book is, for the most part, a collection of anecdotal evidence, drawn from the annales and other writings of religious women. In the appendix another perspective is offered: a look at the demographics of the population, extracted from the thousands of records of individual nuns that survive in various French archives, public and private. They provide sufficient evidence to reconstruct, at least in part, the life courses of the women: the age at which they entered religion, their staying power in the novitiate, and their age at death – and the effects on these life courses of time and geography. The records also reveal the changing shape of communities and the rise and decline in their populations, with all that this has to say about the evolution of the public’s opinion regarding the female monastic life. The importance of religious women in the world of the Old Regime should not be underestimated. As celibates in a society that counted on leaving many of its members celibate, as dutiful children in a system where family strategies were key to economic and social development, as devout practitioners of a faith and a moral code that sought to cover and permeate the whole land, as exponents of the state-building virtues of order and obedience, as pioneers in numerous fields of health care, and as the principal educators of thousands of growing girls – in all these roles, the religious women surely deserve to be recognized as full members of their society, especially its female part. As for the church of the Old Regime, if religious women do not loom large in its history, it is not so much for lack of evidence as for lack of interest. Few other groups have contributed so much to the life of an institution. It is the perception that others have had of their unimportance, added to their own obsession with privacy, that has kept them so long in the shadows. As I have said, this situation is now changing. Mine is only one of a number of studies that have been undertaken in the last decades, as a quick visit to my bibliography will show. I am sure that many more will follow; I certainly hope so. Other orders and congregations of nuns, both in France and in other countries, await their historians. Only when they too are documented will the religious women of the past have the history they deserve.

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1 The Nuns and Their World

Of the millions of women who have become Roman Catholic nuns over the last four centuries, a large proportion have been teachers. Most of these teaching nuns have belonged to religious orders that had their genesis in France. Who were the first professional nunteachers of France? Were they the little group of young women who joined together in 1592 in the Isle-sur-Sorgues, in the Comtat Venaissin, to live under the vow of chastity and to teach Christian doctrine?1 Or were they the five young women of Mattaincourt in Lorraine who, on Christmas Eve 1597, put black veils on their heads and announced that thenceforth they were going to live in community and teach school?2 Or – since none of these actually lived in the France of their day – was it yet another small group of women, established in Bordeaux and led by Jeanne de Lestonnac, baroness of Montferrand, who in 1607 received papal authorization “to offer to God a vow of perpetual chastity and to dedicate to Him their lifelong service in the formation of young girls in good morals and Christian virtues”?3 To borrow a phrase from Lucien Febvre, all this is “une question mal posée.”4 It matters little who was first across the starting line in this race to educate and Christianize, and thus save the female children of France. What is significant is the extraordinary power of the idea and the fact that, within a very few decades, it spread throughout the country. It has been described as a “contagion” and indeed it was, leaping from person to person and from town to town.5

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Two Hundred Years

If the contagion was to spread, it required certain conditions: young girls needing to be schooled, teachers to school them, and a heavy infusion of wealth to finance the whole complex of undertakings. None of these conditions could have been taken for granted in the circumstances of 1600. Girls had never before been thought to need schooling. One might well ask why they were thought to need it now. As a historian of primary education has remarked, it is astonishing that so many parents of the seventeenth century strove so hard to ensure that their children, both boys and girls, received instruction.6 There was little of the necessary infrastructure immediately available in the France of 1600 – the country, newly emerged from war, already had a great deal to do just to repair past damage. However, its distress at the devastation in its ancient Church, coupled with its alarm at the superiority of Huguenot teaching and preaching, provided the motive power. Thinking Catholics were convinced that heresy could only be combated by its own weapons – by better preaching and by building and staffing schools and colleges; and the postwar expansion in the agricultural sector that fuelled the economy provided them with the means to accomplish their new purpose.7 There remained the third necessary condition: teachers to do the work. Where girls were concerned these teachers had to be female, since both the Crown and the Church viewed any kind of coeducation with horror. Women had always taught school here and there, but never in great numbers. Now they crowded onto the scene, even before there were children to be taught or money to fund their efforts. The need that drove them was the need to do something about the desolate state of the Catholic faith – and, at the same time, to give vent to their own religious energy. Those early groups of women were inspired not so much by any pedagogical aspirations as by the desire, as one of them put it, “to do all the good that is possible.”8 And the good they sought to do was to be done from the base of a community life. Their decision to live in this way was as fundamental to their plans as was their apostolic purpose. The movement was highly dynamic. Its real growth spurt began after 1610. By the time this was over in 1670, the three small groups of 1592, 1597, and 1607 numbered among them close to five hundred communities – about a one-quarter of the total number of female monasteries of every kind that have been counted for the Old Regime. Virtually every substantial town possessed at least one convent of teaching nuns. The phenomenal growth of the teaching congregations was part of a wider sea change taking place in French female monasticism. The women’s monastery was not, of course, an invention of the Counter-

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Reformation; it was as old as France itself.9 But the passage of years and the ravages of the religious wars had taken their toll, so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century both the population of monastic women and their religious purpose were sadly attenuated. Whereas, at their apogee, the great abbeys – Benedictine, Cistercian, Fontevrist, and others – had housed hundreds of nuns, their numbers were now diminished and their purpose degraded. In the countryside around Paris, for example, seven abbeys and one priory existed in a state of vegetation, with populations of between twelve and sixteen nuns apiece, leading lives largely innocent of any monastic discipline.10 Within the cities, convents of mendicant nuns – Franciscan, Dominican, and others, some richer, some poorer – also struggled to survive. But the life they offered did not seem to meet the needs of contemporary women. As Jeanne de Lestonnac explained, they were either too physically demanding or too relaxed: [Of] the many women who would like to serve God in religion some are constrained, because of the austerity of the Rule and the weakness of their bodies, to remain in the world … Others, seeing that the primitive spirit of charity, devotion and perfection is almost extinguished in the ancient [monastic] families, and [that there is a] lack of spiritual aids therein, do not dare to join them … for fear of finding spiritual death where they looked for life.11

It was not from these ancient institutions that the great surge of religious activism arose. By the time such institutions managed to renew themselves, they were already almost submerged in the flood of new monastic creations. Port-Royal, Montmartre, and other famous houses might have had great influence and respect in French society, but the huge energy of the years of “Spiritual Conquest” came from newly established communities such as the Carmelites, the Visitation, and the three teaching congregations to whom this work is dedicated. The teaching congregations represented a new, hybrid form of religious life. In accordance with the custom at the time of their foundation, they were strictly enclosed,12 and they gave a good part of their day to prayer, spiritual reading, and meditation. Their originality lay in their apostolic intention, their institut* – the saving of souls through the instruction of children. They differed from the contemplative orders in that teaching rather than prayer was their principal objective. “The teaching function is the prime purpose of our institute, for the greater glory of God, for the salvation of souls and for the public good,” stated the Rule of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame;13 the other * Words marked with an asterisk are defined in the glossary.

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two congregations held the same view. “The public good” was an idea to which they readily paid homage. Wherever they went, they drew up contracts with the city authorities whereby they undertook to teach, at no charge, all young girls who came to their door. As soon as they could, they opened their classrooms, and the children always came flooding in. If there is one fact that appears universally in their records, it is the instant popularity of their free schools. These schools became an integral part of the social structure, and they changed the way France felt about female education. The opening pages in the history of convent education are marked by intense enthusiasm and a supernormal degree of dedication. The movement was young, as were the women who joined it; it was given to all the extremes and excesses that accompany a religious revival – which, of course, is what it was. We shall see it grow older and wiser with the passage of time. But the point to remember is that many of the first generation of nuns were zealots, and as zealots they simultaneously aroused both admiration and alienation in the society around them.

th e c o nv e nt ua l i n vas i o n The movement of women into the religious life in the early seventeenth century was part of what has been called a “rush”,14 a levée en masse.15 Again, it has to be emphasized that the great change came from the mushroom growth of new religious congregations, both male and female. It was they who provided the muscle for what has been called “a fantastic conventual invasion.”16 Communities of every stripe and every purpose formed up and then, within a few years, spun off subcommunities and even sub-subcommunities. They became Catholicism’s front-line fighters in the battle to regain the advantage from the Huguenots. In this they were highly successful, and along with their proselytizing, they brought civility and learning to a people badly scarred by war. But in their very success lay a serious social problem. Each of these new communities had to find its own place in the sun: its funding, its circle of supporters, and its living quarters. The older orders were already well endowed with land and feudal revenues, the fruit of centuries of acquisition.17 The new orders had nothing until they could find new sources of wealth. The supply, however, was not equal to the demand. The wealth of the countryside depended on the labour of the peasantry, which – no matter how pushed – was finite. Naturally, the landowning families had their own ideas on how to use any surplus. When some of their more devout members began to divert large

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slices of the family fortune into religious institutions, serious internal divisions developed. These became more intense as the century progressed and as the provincial nobility began to suffer economic and social decline.18 The huge generosity which the gens de bien showed the monasteries at the outset did not last long. The local elites bestowed more than money on the religious congregations; they also gave them their children. “It was not unusual, in Paris and everywhere else, for the sons and daughters of good houses – men and women of quality – to go off and enter these orders,” wrote Pierre de l’Estoile in 1606.19 Many families followed up with support and affection for the same orders. But with the passage of years, as they became more straitened in their circumstances and more sceptical in their thinking, they began to withhold both money and children.20 This put the new religious communities at risk. Since their strength had come from their close identification with the upper classes, their decline began when the same upper classes lost interest. “The solidarity of noble and convent, so complete in the seventeenth century, carried within it problems for the future, when the descendants of the zealous reformers would become more indifferent towards the Church, and begin to oppose the diminishment of their patrimony in favour of the religious orders.” So writes the historian of religious orders in Brittany.21 What he says applied equally across the country. The last of the new communities’ requirements was perhaps the one that caused the most trouble: the need for space. Almost to a man (or woman), they looked for a place inside the cities. But these cities, in the early 1600s, were still cramped tightly within their defensive walls, with houses piled on each other across narrow alleyways, and public space always at a premium. The arrival of a new religious community meant the dislodgement of ordinary households. The establishment of seven, eight, or more new religious communities, complete with cloisters, gardens, cemeteries, and churches, meant in many cases the virtual takeover of the intra-muros. And more than space was involved. Church property enjoyed numerous tax exemptions. Thus, every private house that was absorbed into a monastic space meant a loss for a city’s tax base. So while some people were enthusiastically encouraging the establishment of new religious communities, others (including municipal officials, assemblies of citizens, and local parish clergy) actively opposed them.22 These people feared that whatever limitations on expansion the new communities initially agreed to, they would break the agreements once they were installed. “We all know that the communities settle for an inch of land when they arrive, and then afterwards spread out by degrees,” commented a critic.23 A truer word was never spoken.

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The conventual invasion was rather like a gold rush in that literally hundreds of communities, male and female, appeared at the gates of scores of cities, anxious to stake their claims. At issue was the wealth, patronage, and support of the elites of those cities. The first to come were usually the first served. Others were closed out or had to settle for less affluent locations with less promising prospects – in the faubourgs or in smaller towns. Given the overcrowding of the course, it is easy to see why the competition was so fierce. This brings up a dark side of the conventual invasion – the rough way in which the congregations treated one another in their haste to secure for themselves the best places in the best cities. They slandered each other without hesitation and used all their influence to keep others off what they considered to be their territory. The Jesuits came to have a bad name for their use of defamation and dirty tricks, but in fact the other orders did the same. Cistercian monks, jealous of the influence which the Capuchins were beginning to exercise over PortRoyal, labelled them “sneaks, sanctimonious hypocrites and zealots,” according to Angélique Arnauld.24 The Cordeliers battled against the Capuchins in one town; they kept the Récollets out of another, preaching that they were parasites who took bread from the mouths of the poor.25 The Minims succeeded in persuading the commune of Abbéville to keep a group of nuns out of the city.26 The mendicants of Lille petitioned the authorities to get rid of the Ursulines whose schools, they claimed, were teaching vanity rather than piety.27 The examples could go on and on, some of them involving fisticuffs.28 Even in an age known for its quarrelsomeness, this infighting was damaging to the image of the orders and was grist to the mill of the ever-present anticlericals: “These ambitious men,” wrote one of them, “when they get the ear of powerful people at court or among the Robe, never fail to speak ill of the others, so as to make them despised, and to build themselves up on their ruins.”29 Thus, the religious rebirth of the seventeenth century, though impressive in so many ways, had its negative side. Catholic France made space for the new orders, but it did not wholeheartedly embrace them. As the years passed, its fears about them were confirmed: the economic base of the cities did indeed begin to dwindle away. “It is certain that the [religious] communities, very numerous, occupy the greater part of the city’s terrain,” wrote a royal engineer in Laon in 1701. “The said communities, founded more than a century ago, [have ruined] more than 150 houses, uniting entire streets to their monasteries, so that the number of inhabitants, the only contributors to the expenses of the city, is notably diminished.”30 It was a grievance that could not be redressed and was never forgotten. The superabundance of regular

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clergy contributed greatly to their unpopularity – and, some have said, to their eventual decadence.31

the first confrontations The naysayers had always been there, but in the first exuberant years they may have sounded like frogs croaking in the marsh. With time, however, their chorus began to swell. At the mid-seventeenth century, disenchantment was turned into action. The first sign that the times were changing came from the Crown itself, and it was over the question of money. The difficulty lay in the Church’s tax exemption. According to ageold custom, ecclesiastical property, whether land or buildings, was considered to be the portion given to God and the service of the poor, and on this account to be withdrawn forever from general circulation. It was held “in mortmain.” In this condition it escaped the taille, the Crown’s main tax, and various feudal dues. At the beginning of the Bourbon regime, huge holdings across France – as much as 10 percent of the country’s landed wealth – were already off limits to the royal fisc. The acquisitions of the new religious congregations only enlarged this pool of untaxable wealth. However, the Crown had its own ways of compensating for its losses. To make up for the revenues that it would henceforth forfeit, it was entitled to collect, at the time of purchase, a fixed percentage of the sale price. This was known as the due of amortissement. If paid at the time of purchase, it was not too hard on the purchaser, but the Crown often overlooked the dues until such time as it was in financial straits; it then demanded the arrears in a single payment. This is what happened around the middle of the century. Under the regency of Marie de Médicis and through the earlier part of Louis XIII’s reign, the Crown had been indulgent to the new religious communities. Because they had been founded recently, they had no inherited property, so it was only natural that as soon as possible they would go on a buying spree, acquiring not only their conventual buildings but also investment property, both urban and rural. Legally, all this property was subject to dues of amortissement. But in the climate of benevolence then prevailing, the fees were either waived or – more often – simply ignored. In 1638, however, as the government’s need for money grew more pressing, the king’s first minister, Cardinal Richelieu, turned his eyes in this direction, claiming that the Crown had the right to the payment of dues of amortissement, with or without the consent of the Clergy. He faced stiff resistance from most churchmen, who were exceedingly

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jealous of their privileges. A confrontation followed, which was settled only when the Clergy offered the Crown a “free gift” of 5,500,000 livres, and the Crown agreed to forgive all dues then owing.32 It was the Clergy’s hope that it might, now and forever, escape paying directly to the Treasury. However, the Crown did not surrender the right to tax religious corporations at will. “The law of amortissement is just, because the State renders it necessary,” the Crown argued. The king was free to levy taxes or not, at his pleasure.33 It was only a matter of time before the government would return to the attack. Meanwhile, with the passing years, the Clergy was losing popular support. Its tax privileges, so fiercely defended, cost it dear in the eyes of the public. Furthermore, the proliferation of monks and nuns, at a time when the economy was under stress, seemed to more critical minds to be tantamount to the creation of a new class of expensive idlers – “much like fleshy excrescences, which drain nourishment from a body of which they are an integral part.”34 It was also said that such people, by their celibacy, were depriving the state of much-needed future citizens. These populationist theories lent weight to the outand-out resentment that many felt towards the monasteries, over what was perceived as their unfair share of the country’s wealth. These views found expression through Louis XIV’s omnicompetent minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who came to power determined to cut down to size the various institutions which he considered a burden on the economy. As early as 1664, he was looking for ways to diminish the number of “monks of both sexes, who only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”35 Colbert consulted with several councillors of state and in 1666, when the answers he received confirmed his own opinions, published an edict ordering a countrywide investigation into religious houses, with the intention of reducing their numbers where possible. Communities were visited by commissioners of the Crown and were required to show their letterspatent of authorization and their statements of accounts. Those that could not justify their existence were forced to close. The minister would have gone further, by raising the minimum age of entry to twenty-five for men and twenty for women, and by placing a limit on the value of religious dowries – and also, significantly, on the value of marriage dowries, which, in Colbert’s opinion, were becoming so high that they were forcing parents to put some of their daughters into convents. But in this he was ahead of his time, and he had to abandon the project. Even with all the resources of the Crown at his disposal, Colbert could not overcome the resistance of the Clergy. However, the line of thought he was following remained fixed in the minds of certain influential people. “There are too many monks,”

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claimed a pamphlet in 1669. “It is an abuse that prejudices the realm … and it is time to deal with it seriously and powerfully. Monks live in celibacy and make neither families nor children … Furthermore, the blind dependence by which they are attached to the wishes of the Pope forms an alien monarchy within the heart of France; and they draw the credulous to it, which is a matter of extreme consequence.”36 The respect with which the French elites had once viewed the monasteries was changing to irritation, even hostility; and the twin issues of money and power were, more than anything else, responsible.

the beginnings of decline If the clergy could not yet be brought to heel, they could at least be taxed. Colbert made the effort in 1674; he was blocked in the usual fashion, by another “free gift” of 520,000 livres. But time and the ineluctable logic of the Crown’s wartime financial needs brought the government to the attack once more in 1689. This time it had its way. The royal declaration of 1689 demanded payment of dues of amortissement on all investment property acquired by the gens de mainmorte since 1641.37 The clergy, no longer able to shelter behind a “free gift,” saw themselves subjected to out-and-out impositions. The Crown reaped a fine reward: 18,000,000 livres, as much as Richelieu had secured in twenty years of effort.38 The Crown’s gain was, of course, the clergy’s loss. Try as it could, the Assembly of the Clergy could not fend off the collection of the dues of amortissement. The tax was justified by custom and by law; what made it oppressive was its size and suddenness. If the dues had been paid regularly when property was purchased, they would have been manageable. But now, communities and corporations were required to pay out, in arrears, lump sums that could easily dwarf their total annual incomes. The result was, in the words of a contemporary publication, “a veritable Saint-Bartholomew for the clergy.”39 Since the Crown’s problems were far from over, the financial carnage (to continue the metaphor) was extended, with the invention of other taxes and the forced sale of offices, in the clerical as in the lay sphere. On average, the Clergy was now paying the Crown 6,400,000 livres per year, where in the period 1660–90 it had been paying 1,230,000.40 It still clung to its privileges by calling these tax payments “free gifts.” But one way or another, the king got his money. This all has to be placed in the context of massive overtaxation right across French society. Even with these increases in its burden, the Clergy was paying only a small fraction – about 3 percent – of the country’s annual taxes.41 The Church as a whole remained rich and its

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credit solid. However, its weaker members were seriously affected by the new tax regime.42 Many individuals and communities – especially new communities and especially female ones – found that they were paying more than they could afford. Their carefully tended economies began to fall apart. “In the year that the taxes commenced, commenced also our decadence,” wrote one monastic annalist.43 Surviving financial records of Old Regime monasteries bear her out: 1689 was a watershed year, ending an era of expansion and beginning an era of decline. Taxes do not tell the whole story. The communities, struggling to make ends meet, found that much of their capital, which was placed out in loans, was now forever out of reach. The economic depression that dogged the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, combined with the continuing war and the government’s desperate attempts to raise more revenue, impoverished the whole society. The agricultural crisis, which brought the poor to starvation, also brought many once-prosperous people to bankruptcy. Those who had lent money to these people now found much of their money uncollectable. At the same time, the cost of living rose and the income from land dropped precipitously. Peace brought no relief. Indeed, as one observer remarked, “Those who have had the misfortune to have all their wealth in [financial investments] have already, in the space of six months of peace, faced more damage to their fortune and experienced more hardship than they suffered during twenty years of war.”44 The last years of Louis XIV’s reign were marked by severe instability in the money market. Then, in 1720, came what was to be the final disaster for the rentier class. France went into a giddy spiral of inflation, then collapsed into bankruptcy. This all resulted from the efforts made by John Law, with the regent’s full backing, to re-invigorate the country’s finances and refloat its economy. Law argued that the shortage of specie, which had depressed the country for years, could be corrected by creating a larger money supply through the issue of paper money. Part of the scheme involved forcing the rentier class, which for so many years had locked up a good part of the country’s wealth, to cough up its treasure and in return to receive shares in a new company, the Mississippi Company, and billets de banque. Thus, money that had been sterile would be put to work, and France would claim its rightful part of the rich returns that were pouring into other countries (mainly Britain and Holland). The country, Law predicted, would be lifted off the rocks by a buoyant tide of capital. But the scheme, which had much to commend it, was too ambitious for the society onto which it was foisted. Throughout the summer, inflation ran out of control; fortunes were made and lost with dizzying

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speed. In December came the crash. The billets de banque were declared to be worth little more than the paper they were printed on. The collapse in the value of money was particularly hard on the country’s lenders.45 Both public bodies and private debtors took advantage of the situation to pay off their debts in devalued paper money or to demand a reduction in the interest on their loans. All too often, threatened with bankruptcy themselves, they refused to pay up at all. In other words, as borrowers benefited from the bankruptcy, lenders suffered. Foremost among these lenders were religious corporations and communities. As one observer wrote, “Hospitals, parish vestries, secular and regular communities, above all those of women, and many other people who had no wealth other than their rentes, have been reduced to indigence.”46 This was no exaggeration. Many communities found their revenues reduced by as much as one-third or one-half.47 Recovery from the bankruptcy was, of course, a slow and painful process. Even societies as prestigious as the Jesuits had to conserve and save and scrimp. Women’s monasteries were particularly handicapped by their lack of flexibility. Tied down by their clausura and hampered by the sheer number of mouths they had to feed, they had few ways to help themselves. Their only option was to appeal for government assistance. And this threw them into a new jeopardy, because it made them dependent on an outside and none too friendly force. Starting in the mid-1720s, religious communities across the country began bombarding Versailles with appeals for help. The more audacious suggested that since the Crown had precipitated the crisis, the Crown ought to solve it. But the Crown’s first response was to turn the tables: to accuse the communities of improvidence, of extravagant building programs, of poor management of their property, and of accepting more women, for the sake of their dowries, than they could afford. “It is this excessive number, out of proportion to the monastery’s revenues, that has caused the failure of a great number of women’s communities,” wrote one jurist.48 After some reflection, it was also decided that the problem was systemic. There were too many convents for the good of the country, and it was “absolutely necessary to suppress an infinity of houses.”49 A commission was established by royal decree in 1727 to hand out assistance to communities in need. This “Commission des secours” was assigned a fund, out of which, in the first five years alone, it paid pensions to 558 houses.50 But it was also instructed to reduce “the excessive number of female communities with which the kingdom is burdened.” Poverty had laid the women’s monasteries bare to the censorious gaze of an officialdom, which had never liked them much and now found its opportunity to do something about them. Colbert’s chickens had come home to roost sixty years late.

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The Commission des secours has been overshadowed by its successor, the Commission des réguliers,* to the point where, in many church histories, it is not even mentioned. Indeed, until 1969,51 it never received any serious attention. But it was in fact a major experiment in social engineering and a significant intrusion by the Crown into the business of the Gallican Church.52 Before it closed its doors in 1788, it had mandated the suppression of some 244 female monasteries and the reduction in size of many more. If this achievement fell far short of its initial ambition, it was only for lack of resources and the declining interest of the Crown.53 However, it had fulfilled its purpose. Between 1720 and 1789 the population of nuns in France was reduced by about one-third.54 It was altered, too, in other subtle ways. The reduction had been achieved not by throwing nuns out but by banning entries, thus limiting the intake of young subjects. As a result, female communities found themselves growing older as they grew smaller.55 They found themselves, as well, subjected to a much stricter tutelage than they had hitherto known – for the ostensible reason that they were becoming too independent.56 From now on, if they offended their bishops, tried to act independently, or showed signs of heterodoxy (in effect, Jansenism), the ban on the reception of novices could be continued indefinitely and pensions could be witheld. This fitted well with the prevailing passion for order. “For their own good,” wrote an adviser to the commission, “they need a greater subjection. They ought to be kept under a very close eye, by a power near enough to them to oversee their conduct.”57 The activity of the Commission des secours reached its peak in the years leading up to 1751. In other words, the reconfiguration of the female monastic world – a world that had been shaped during the Catholic Reformation – took place in an atmosphere already steeped in Enlightenment thinking. Not that the women themselves were penetrated by Enlightenment principles – they seem to have been more or less impervious to them – but the men who decided their future, whether laymen or prelates, were decidedly so. “Women’s convents,” they maintained, “ought to subsist only insofar as they are useful to the State, through the edification of prayer, through the instruction and education of children, through the care of the sick and the poor.”58 Utility remained one of their principal criteria. As for the bishops who were called upon to collaborate in the initiatives of the commission, their responses are revealing. Most of the serious opposition to the reengineering came from men with Jansenist leanings. This is not surprising; they had already forfeited the Crown’s good will because of their independence and so had little to lose from speaking their minds. The

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more worldly bishops, those with ambitions, concurred willingly with the commission’s initiatives.59 But we cannot dismiss them as mere sycophants. The free hand they enjoyed for many years suggests that their thinking reflected that of their own elite milieu. The spirit that had built the monasteries in the first place was now buried in the past.

monasticism, the “unloved” institution From mid-century onwards, the prevailing mood was hostile to monasticism. “At present it is fashionable to slander monks,” wrote a learned Benedictine monk in 1783.60 The chief reasons for this hostility were their perceived idleness and excessive wealth. And indeed the records show truly scandalous divides between the “haves” and “have-nots” of the ecclesiastical world. Canons and monks might enjoy revenues in the tens of thousands of livres at a time when parish churches were crumbling and salaried curés earned only 300 livres.61 “This handful of monks … possesses more wealth than all the curés of Cambrai, to the number of 700,” wrote the priests of that diocese, referring to the monks of a local monastery. They went on to berate the monks for their idleness: “We spend night and day in the rain going about the countryside to administer the sacraments, but these gentlemen would refuse to take four steps away from their home without a good carriage or at least a horse to carry them and a well-equipped valet to serve them.”62 The reason for this serious imbalance was the diversion, over a long stretch of time, of the wealth of the Church into the pockets of the rich and powerful. The diversion had proceeded in two stages. First, the tithe, which should properly have been applied directly to the support of worship and the care of the poor, was largely reserved for the gros décimateurs* – rich, old monasteries for the most part. Their only responsibility was to ensure the provision of religious services, which they could do by hiring priests at economical rates. The difference between intake and output was theirs to enjoy, while often the priests had to supplement their income by charging fees for services. In the second stage of diversion, the wealth of the monasteries themselves was shared out between the monks (or nuns) and their so-called abbots or abbesses – men and women appointed by the Crown, who often had only a pro forma connection to their abbeys but were entitled to a part of their revenues. This was known as commende, and it was an important part of the royal patronage system. If the king benefited from his power to bestow or withold such significant riches, the nobility benefited even more; it “confiscated for its own profit a large part

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of the revenues of the Church.”63 The public anger which this aroused was expressed in no uncertain terms in the cahiers de doléances* of 1788. How did this affect the great majority of religious women in France, who were anything but rich? They seem to have suffered from guilt by association. They were not accused of excessive wealth or evil living, but they were dismissed as irrelevant, petty, and superstitious. Their monasteries were seen as gothic prisons, and they as poor silly victims. Their methods of hospital care came under fire from philosophes and physiocrats whose prime target was the hospital system itself. Their schooling, which had drawn so many people to them in the early decades of the seventeenth century, was pronounced outmoded. Many upper-class girls whose predecessors had grown up in monastic pensionnats were now tutored at home, where piety mattered less than social graces. As for the religious life itself, elite opinion was now strongly against it. “The convents have been judged and condemned,” wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier. “Excessive inquisitiveness, bigotry and hypocrisy, monastic nonsense and claustral prudishness reign there. These deplorable monuments of an ancient superstition exist in the middle of a city where Philosophy has spread its light.”64 He would have argued, as others did, that the fact that women could still be found in them was simply proof that parental cruelty existed even in the Age of Enlightenment. It was time to open up these prisons and release the victims who languished within. It is no wonder, then, that the men of the Revolution were decided, from the very start, to do exactly that. In October 1789 they took action. Monasteries across the country were ordered to receive no more candidates to profession until further notice.65 The following February, all monastic vows were abolished. The religious orders were put on notice. In one way or another, the same message was delivered: “Liberty, or rather, life [will be] restored to the mass of victims of both sexes whom the self-interest of families, personal obligation or a passing fervour have cast into the horrors of the cloister and loaded with insupportable chains.”66 Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1790, commissioners went to every religious community in the country, offering the members freedom while at the same time making an inventory of their property. For monks, the options were stark: freedom with a pension or a continuation of religious life in changed circumstances, regrouped with strangers in houses other than their own. For nuns, there was a concession: they would be allowed to stay in their own houses, even though these now passed into state ownership. But they were encouraged to leave. This inquest was the closing ceremony in the history of religious communities in the Old Regime. In 1790, when it was launched, the

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king was still king, and the Church had not yet been reduced to a department of the nation. The nuns appeared in the records for the last time as communities, coming before the commissioners in solemn order, the superior first, the senior nuns next, the juniors bringing up the rear, their names in religion and their dates of profession all registered – as though all this was still important. Their responses to the inquiries of 1790–91 can be taken as a referendum on female religious life as viewed by those who lived it in the last years of the Old Regime. Whatever the reason (and various explanations have been offered), the overwhelming majority did not wish to leave it. From then until September 1792 those nuns who had opted to remain in community lived in limbo: still enclosed in their cloisters even though their vows were no longer legally valid; unable, as often as not, to receive the sacraments from their own priests; surrounded by familiar property and goods that were no longer theirs; and forbidden to receive pensionnaires or teach school, or even bury their dead in the cemeteries that lay within their walls. Some communities showed spirit, defying the constitutional church in every way they could. Others lay low and waited for better times. It made no difference what they did. In late September and early October 1792 they were all evicted. From then on, if the nuns appear in official records at all, it is as solitary individuals, ci-devant religieuses – prisoners on their way to punishment or small entrepreneurs eking out an existence in private teaching or in the production of goods; or petitioners, aging and impoverished, pleading for their pensions. The year 1792 drew a line under their history. Between the death of the monasteries that year and their revitalization in the nineteenth century lay an empty space of a decade and more. Although some nuns eventually returned to religious life, it was to new communities and new surroundings in a new age. This has been a broad-brush outline of the history of religious orders in France under the Bourbon monarchy, from the early 1600s to 1792. The conventual invasion of the seventeenth century was an extraordinary phenomenon, a huge display of human energy. It achieved its aim – the recatholicizing of French society. But the achievement was not without cost. The very size of the movement laid it open to charges of being overbearing and counterproductive. For all its spiritual vigour, the Catholic Reformation had its negative side. In material terms, the conventual invasion led to a reconfiguration of the urban landscape, with the apparatus of reformed Catholicism – the convents, colleges, churches, schools, and hospitals – absorbing more and more of the available space. Financially, it occasioned a drain

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on the country’s wealth, during the very years when the state was seeking to corner more and more of the wealth for itself. The very part of society upon which the religious orders depended for support – the elites – came to see this as an imposition which the country could ill afford. As the general economic climate worsened, the situation of religious communities became precarious. The more vulnerable of them, the female communities, were the first to fall. Stricken by the Law Crash of 1720, they were forced to throw themselves on the charity of the government – a dangerous move, as it turned out, since the government had already decided that there were too many of them. For the religious women of France, the 1720s and 1730s were the bleakest of times as they faced both impoverishment and the mandated reduction in their numbers. Eventually they achieved a financial recovery of sorts, but the damage to their public image was less easily mended. In the mind of the Enlightenment, monasticism, including female monasticism, simply had no raison d’être. The teaching communities were not immune to these changing circumstances. When the conventual invasion began they were there, instructing and proselytizing – and also accumulating property and wealth, thus making friends and enemies at the same time. They shared in the depression of Louis XIV’s later years and in the bankruptcy of 1720. And in the aftermath, as the antimonastic spirit of the prerevolutionary years billowed up, they were caught within it. All these events helped to shape their life within the convent walls. The following chapter will go into the records of these communities to examine the way in which they gained their fortunes and then lost them during their first century of existence (1620–1720). It will, I hope, serve to illustrate how closely the cloistered life was dependent on material conditions. Throughout the rest of the book this dependency should not be forgotten. It formed the foundation on which religious women built their social and spiritual life.

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2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy

t h e w ay s a n d m e a n s o f a c q u i s i t i o n There are two ways of looking at the crucial decades 1620–40, which saw the foundation of most of the teaching communities. One of them is the view from inside: the stories of the heroism of the anciennes mères and their battle against poverty and the inhumanity of man. Stories like that of the little community of Mâcon passing its first winter in a halfruined house, where “the wind came in from every side … and they had at night to hang their robes up to block the windows”; where the rain and snow leaked through the chapel ceiling; where the best they could afford was a pathetic little altar decorated with coloured paper; and where the senior nuns had to post guard at night over the gap in the wall that threatened their enclosure1 … Or stories of the six young women of the Congrégation, refugees from the war in Lorraine, who struggled to set up a community and a school in far-off Châtellerault, working long hours in their school “and eating dinner while warming themselves and diverting themselves a little … not being able to keep a regular order because they had so much work, work that was a joy for them, so great was their fervour”2 … Or stories of the first Ursulines of Blois living on a starvation diet and taking turns to warm themselves at their one small fire; rising early “to do the laundry, bake, chop and stack the wood, and carry in all the water, even for the wash”3 … And of the five young nuns of the Congrégation in Reims, who for several months slept on straw pallets and drank out of a single, shared earthenware pot, all the while facing down the city council, “who were well and

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truly angry, and seldom left us in peace … wishing to force us to leave, and threatening to tear down our grille.”4 Such stories took on the quality of legends, to be repeated by succeeding generations of nuns and shared with their many friends, supporters, and students. The other view of this period is the one from outside, held by people who saw the new congregations as invaders threatening the delicate balance of their cities. The communities were aggressive and tenacious, all for the sake of their sacred cause. They were accused of taking advantage of friendship wherever they found it, of knowing how to manipulate the networks of patronage, and of using their own self-sacrifice to soften or shame the hardest hearts. We see all these accusations in a memorandum drawn up in 1694 by Edmé Leveil, curé of Saint-Valérien in the city of Châteaudun: In the time of the most illustrious … bishop of Chartres, Jacques Lescot, the religious of the Congrégation … came from Lorraine to establish in the parish of Saint-Valérien … They were 3 or 4 from the city of Nancy who began this establishment … They begged M. Coffinier, canon of the château, and myself to take up a collection through the town for them.

The proceeds from this collection provided the nuns with enough to live on while they pursued a longer strategy: “They laid siege to Messire Jacques de la Ferté, dean of Saint-André, through the intermediary of one Barbier, his attendant,” asserted Leveil, and by their flattery persuaded the dean to give them his niece, with a considerable dowry – “upon which they forgot their country and resolved to stay in this city.” Later, they again “mounted a powerful barrage,” this time on another notable who had come into money. After receiving liberal gifts from him, said Leveil, they just as quickly forgot him and looked for patrons elsewhere: I write this to inform posterity of the humble beginnings of these religious and the disrespect that they have shown for those who rendered them all the services that piety could expect of them … Through the exercise of a deplorable poverty deserving of compassion and assistance, in no time at all they will be in a position to concede nothing to the “poor” order of Saint Benedict which has around 300 millions in revenue every year; what is more, this monastery will never be at peace, donec totum impleat orbem.5

This is bitter language coming from a parish priest. It should not be forgotten that the parish clergy were often hostile witnesses because of the inroads that religious communities made into their congregations. But it rings true: the religious of the Counter-Reformation were zealots,

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with the strengths and failings of zealots, and their cause emboldened them to win, even at the expense of others. They did not hesitate to use the patronage of powerful people to force their way in. Bishops were invaluable; so were local seigneurs and prominent ladies. The sisters proved that even the most dogged municipal resistance would crack if they could win over the daughters of important men. Fond papas had to forgo their opposition when they realized that the only way they could keep their children close by was to allow the opening of a convent in their city. When the sisters of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame arrived in 1630 to set up a community in Toulouse, the president of the Parlement sent them six separate orders to leave the city, and when they protested that one of their members was sick, he answered that “whether the sick woman found health or the tomb, it was going to be outside Toulouse.” But then his daughter decided to join the community, and “the magistrate had a sudden change of heart” and began actively to promote the foundation.6 It was blackmail of a sort, and it worked over and over again.7 In other cases, the sisters used their credit at court. In more than one city, municipal officers received a letter from the king or the queen mother, warning them “not to make difficulties over this establishment.”8 For example, in 1634 the Congrégation in Laon had ambitions to open a house in Reims. The sisters knew they had to move fast because the Ursulines were also eyeing the city. But they held a trump card: a young novice, Gabrielle de Beaumont, niece of Cardinal Richelieu’s éminence grise and herself a native of Reims. Her mother badly wanted her closer to home even if it meant opening a local house especially for her, so the matter was forwarded at court, and letters patent were issued. But the royal will met resistance from the city council of Reims, which was already wrestling with a superabundance of religious houses. Order after order was dispatched without effect, until finally the persistent pressure of Gabrielle’s mother at court resulted in a letter to the council, signed by the king and using stern language: “The present is to order you … under pain of disobedience, to receive the said religious … into our city of Reims, and to let them enjoy, fully and peaceably, the effect of our Letters Patent, desisting from all pursuits contrary to our intention.”9 And so it was done. The nuns got their foundation, and Gabrielle came home to Reims. But the affair aroused ill feeling. A bourgeois of the city, no friend of the religious, commented: “Where they have been refused, they have begged the authority of princes and grand seigneurs … And for fear of disobliging his Highness and making him resent us, we have to receive them.”10 The citizens could only watch sourly as the community settled in and started buying up urban properties.

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In city after city, the creeping invasion took place. In Evreux the Ursuline building program dislodged the residents of twenty-five houses;11 in Châlons-sur-Marne, that of the Congrégation absorbed all the houses between two streets.12 One by one, over seventy years and at a cost of some 40,000 livres, the Ursulines of Avallon absorbed twenty properties adjacent to their monastery.13 An Ursuline convent in Aix pursued a building program that began in 1623 and ended in 1755, and consumed twenty-five private properties.14 From the nuns’ point of view, focused entirely on the completion of their enclosure, there was nothing wrong, and everything right, with their efforts. Indeed, the Ursuline community of Montluçon, confronted by neighbours who refused to sell their property, actually set itself to praying for their conversion – or their death!15 Nuns were also guilty on some occasions of the same disreputable infighting that was so notorious among the regulars.* The Ursulines used their credit with the bishop of Poitiers to keep the Filles de NotreDame out of the city, “hoping to block the progress of those whose happy beginnings they had not been able to prevent in Bordeaux,” wrote the historian of the latter.16 And in Blois they did their best to prevent the Visitandines from entering the city.17 On the other hand, in Troyes, Provins, and Reims it was they who were blocked, while the sisters of the Congrégation made a triumphal entry. The important thing was “to get there first,” while space and good will were still available. Pierre Fourier, founder and mentor of the Congrégation, on observing from afar the frantic efforts of the sisters to reach Troyes before the Ursulines, wrote to them reprovingly: “If other religious get ahead of you … in the name of God, we must thank His providence and infinite bounty for providing, in our time, so many good examples on all sides.”18 But his advice fell on deaf ears. The sisters were too much gripped by the spirit of the race to slacken their efforts.

sources of income: dowries Old Regime France has been described as an aggregate of microcosms.19 This description is entirely appropriate for female monasticism. It must be understood that none of the three congregations in question were “congregations” in the modern sense of the word, with central direction and the freedom to move members from house to house. These practices, though prescribed for reformed male congregations, were still forbidden to women in the early seventeenth century. Constrained by canon law to remain physically isolated even from each other, women’s monasteries were turned in on themselves and their own concerns, and failed to develop the solidarity that might

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have given them strength and – in hard times – comfort. Spiritually, each community surrounded itself with what an Ursuline of our day has called “a rigid, cold barrier.”20 Houses corresponded with each other periodically, and neighbouring communities belonging to different orders even made some mutual gestures of friendship, once the “rush” of the foundation period was over. But one has only to read their various works to suspect that the friendship was more pro forma than heartfelt. They valued their own entities so single-mindedly that they set little store by those of others. Materially, women’s monasteries grew up as small business enterprises, each embedded in its own local “market” of supporters and patrons.21 Each monastery fought its own battle for survival; if it faltered, there was little chance that other houses would help out.22 Success, or lack of it, depended on conditions peculiar to each community: its patrons and protectors; its location and the state of its buildings; the regularity and health of its members; and its business acumen. One superior with good management skills could make a house; one bungler could break it. As a result of all these variables, fortunes could be very different, and some houses thrived while others withered away. From the beginning, these small, independent businesses had to operate in a fairly difficult climate. Unlike older monastic communities, they had inherited nothing from previous generations. The date of their establishment was the date on which they started acquiring wealth, wherever and whenever they could find it. Some of them had temporal founders (or, more often, foundresses) who endowed them with houses, land, and rentes. But the contributions of the founders were generally small in relation to the continuing expenses that communities were forced to incur.23 Nearly always, other important persons – bishops, local seigneurs or merchants, or widows of substance – were called on to help them through their early years. A host of lesser benefactors also chipped in: a table here, a dresser there, a half-dozen stools and a soup ladle from one lady, a tablecloth and napkins from another, two measures of flour and a pair of candlesticks from a third, and so on.24 What really launched the communities, however, was the flood of vocations that burst upon them, usually within months of their arrival. Across the country the conventual invasion was fuelled by hundreds, even thousands, of young women seeking entry at their respective monastery doors. Almost all these young women came with a dowry. Dowries provided the basic wealth upon which communities were built; at a most fundamental level, they made the difference between success and failure.

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The Ursuline house in Blois, so poor at the outset, brought in 280,160 livres in its first forty-five years, from the dowries of some ninety entrants.25 Its mother house in Bordeaux took only thirty-two years to acquire somewhat more, from the one hundred and seventeen women whom it professed.26 The new communities found themselves suddenly blessed with a great deal of disposable wealth – just in time to buy the properties and build the monasteries necessary to house their growing populations. The nuns of the Congrégation in Reims borrowed wildly to acquire property and build a monastery; their debts of 88,000 livres were paid off within seventeen years, thanks to the rapid influx of dowries.27 A great deal of the money went out as fast as it came in. The building at Blois, begun in 1655 and completed ten years later, cost about 120,000 livres – no small achievement for a community that had started forty years earlier with almost nothing.28 Yet it was an achievement frequently matched elsewhere. For instance, the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours – a city that could not have competed with Blois in terms of prestige – built its monastery, worth 100,000 livres, in twenty years.29 Successful building programs put some monasteries ahead of others in the race for acceptance – and more dowries. Although additions and improvements continued to be made to the fabric of the monasteries, the main building boom took place around mid-century.30 Some of the buildings, and especially the attached churches, were perhaps grander than they needed to be. But on the whole they followed the prescriptions of the founders: to be “commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous”; not to “resemble châteaux and palaces, castles and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”31 The “overambitious building projects” for which the Crown was later to blame them were more a fact of men’s monasteries – and some women’s abbeys – and mostly took place in the eighteenth century. But buildings did cost money. It was impossible to erect housing for fifty, sixty, or a hundred persons without a heavy investment of wealth. Monasteries were, by their very nature, expensive establishments. Without sufficient space and decent living conditions, they could not hope to attract entrants. And if they failed to establish clausura, their bishops might close them down.32 In other words, they had to satisfy their market, even if this meant alienating other people. Problems began as the public witnessed more and more of its wealth, in the form of dowries, being absorbed into the black hole of mortmain. To take Blois as an example, between 1625 and 1670 more than 800,000 livres in dowry money made its way into the coffers of the city’s four female convents.33 Since most of the women who entered these

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convents came from the city and its environs, this meant a loss to the patrimony of local families. Wherever the conventual invasion struck, this loss eventually began to be felt. It was for financial reasons more than any other that the country’s elites began to cool towards the monasteries. One of the first signs was a significant increase in lawsuits over disputed dowries.34 In the 1660s Colbert gave voice to the opinion that religious houses were draining the country’s wealth with their demand for dowries. In 1693 the Crown took decisive action, forbidding religious dowries of more than 10,000 livres in Paris and the parlementary cities, and more than 6000 livres elsewhere – which meant that pensions were not to exceed 500 and 350 livres, respectively. The purpose of this legislation was clearly to rein in the avarice of monastic houses. Ironically, whatever the public thought, the difficulty that bedevilled many convents was not that dowries were too large but that they were too small. After all, a dowry was the final settlement that a family made on a daughter before she took vows, became “dead to the world,” and was barred from the succession. The dowries were supposed to meet the women’s needs for the rest of their lives, as well as contributing towards the general upkeep of their monasteries.35 The thinking, even of the critics, was that every nun should be supported by rentes of 300 livres.36 Few teaching nuns ever enjoyed such luxury.37 When visiting bishops spoke out on the subject of dowries, it was usually to scold communities for lowering their requirements to unrealistic levels. This was the gist of Bishop de Rueil’s criticism, in 1628, of the Ursuline community in his city of Angers. The sisters, he ordered, must insist on dowries worth 150 livres per annum in rentes and resist any efforts to lower or circumvent them.38 In the same vein, in 1684, Archbishop de Neufville de Villeroy of Lyon ordered that women’s dowries had to be worth at least 2400 livres in the city and 1200 livres elsewhere in his diocese.39 This translated into 200 and 100 livres, respectively, in rentes – hardly conducive to an extravagant lifestyle, especially since the additional costs of maintaining the monastery and supporting the lay sisters had to be deducted from the same account.

the social significance of dowries If dowries were the foundation of a community’s material success, they were also a statement to the world of its social standing. At a time when one livre was a simple worker’s daily wage and a businessman would be happy to retire on an income of 3000 or 4000 livres per annum,40 the dowries required by cloistered convents presupposed a substantial level of disposable income in the families of their entrants.

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Teaching communities were seldom exclusively noble in their recruitment – their registers of profession bear witness to that – but they certainly drew from the “haves” of French society: the rentiers, the men of the law, the officer class, the rich merchants, and the nous-ferons of cities. The practice of placing children in religion* was all the rage among the elites of the seventeenth century, to the point where in parts of France girls of good family were as likely to become nuns as to be married.41 One of the benefits that women and families gained from the convent of their choice was social status, and postulants were expected to bring in the kind of dowries that befitted that status. In the case of the teaching monasteries, these were usually solid but seldom spectacular. In the mid-seventeenth century, the customary dowry payment in the Ursuline monastery of Montbrison was 2300 livres; in that of Toulouse, 3000 livres, and of Blois, 4120.42 Here and there, in highly soughtafter houses such as that of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, the dowries could rise as high as 10,000 livres.43 What we are seeing, in fact, are market forces at play. Dowries varied widely, according to the drawing power of a house and the ability of its clientele to pay. The Ursulines of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris could command dowries of up to 10,000 livres;44 on the other hand, their sister Ursulines in Tréguier, who probably boasted as many quarterings of nobility, could seldom raise more than 1800 livres, plus 150 livres in life pensions. Nobility, wrote the superior, did not translate into wealth “in a city where there is no commerce and where most of the inhabitants are in no state to dower their daughters.”45 The monasteries’ fortunes were dictated not only by place but by time. At the height of the monastic fashion, communities could weigh the demands for admission against the availability of space and, if things looked favourable, drive a hard bargain. Thus in 1642 the grand couvent accepted one entrant at 6000 livres but demanded that the next candidate pay 8000, on the grounds that the house was almost full, and thereafter raised the dowry requirement to 10,000 livres.46 In the Ursuline house in Périgueux the dowry hovered around 3000 livres for many years and then, in the 1730s, rose to a more or less solid 4000 livres – a tribute, no doubt, to its stable financial situation at a time when other houses were in serious difficulties.47 At about the same time the monastery of the Congrégation in Châteauroux, which had barely survived until it became the protégé of the archbishop of Bourges, was able to raise the dowries of its entrants accordingly – from 2500 to 4000 livres.48 Wherever we see the value of dowries rising, we may be sure that the communities demanding them were also on the rise.

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Conversely, nothing betrayed the weakness of a house so much as its inability to maintain the level of its dowries. The experience of the little community of the Congrégation in Châtellerault shows this clearly. Established in 1640 by refugees from the war in Lorraine, it was slow to gain the favour of the local clergy; this, together with its internal dissensions, may have been the reason for its shaky financial start. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century it was receiving novices with dowries of 2500 to 4000 livres – a respectable level for a house in a minor city. The dowries continued at this level until the mid-eighteenth century, then began to drop. In 1770 and 1771 two women professed with dowries of 1800 livres and 1000 livres respectively. The registrar remarked, “One will no doubt be astonished that these two young nuns gave so modest a dowry, but the great shortage of subjects to sustain our duties, above all our beloved instruction, led the community to obtain … permission to receive them.” But the news was out: this community was not in a position to bargain. From then until the Revolution, most of its dowries were modest indeed. The last entrant, in 1789, brought a dowry of only 900 livres. “It is to be hoped,” wrote the registrar, “that her good qualities will make up for the rest.”49 The advantage of dowries, according to one historian, was that they answered directly to need. More entrants meant more demands on the community’s resources and at the same time provided more money to meet those demands.50 The drawback to dowries, however, was that they were often lowest when they were needed most. Sometimes this was simply a function of a depressed economy. After the Fronde, the novitiate at Montargis was without novices, according to the annalist: “The Chapter, after considering the need that we had of subjects, and also that many of those offering themselves could only afford 1000 écus, consented to receive some at this price, by reason of [our] need, and the miseries of the times, which affected both seculars and religious.”51 In the same way, in 1694, it was “the shortage of money,” together with “the poverty of the house,” that forced the monastery of Saint-Marcellin to lower its dowry requirement from 3000 to 2400 livres, and sometimes even lower.52 However, it appears that the problems that individual monasteries experienced often came from the fact that, as businesses, they failed to impress their clientele. This affected their bargaining power. “Our house is not rich, so we are sometimes forced to receive [novices] for less,” complained the Ursulines of Melun in 1706.53 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, which at the height of its popularity could command dowries of 10,000 livres, was constrained after its near bankruptcy in the 1720s to accept women with dowries that averaged

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2990 livres.54 We may suspect that families were taking advantage of the damage that had been done to the house’s good name to settle their daughters for less.55 In times of weakness, chapters sometimes were tempted to make serious and damaging concessions. The Ursulines of Tonnerre agreed to receive Anne Baillot, to give her a room of her own with hangings, to let her get up late, and to excuse her from saying Office and from fasting. It can only have been the 10,000 livres of dowry that her father offered, and their own financial desperation, that allowed such a bending of the Rule.56 The same must be supposed of the decision of the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Poitiers to allow a sister, who had been in the community only a few months, to request profession at once and to give her the right of seniority that would entitle her to the next room with a fireplace that came vacant – all for a dowry of 8000 livres.57 Arrangements like these do not seem to have been common, but when they occurred they must have been damaging to community life. Certainly they gave credence to the public’s belief that “the monasteries often substitute dowries for vocations and load themselves down with unworthy subjects.”58 The public had a point: money does not make a vocation. The founders would have agreed with them. “It is not gold and silver that makes good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.” So wrote an eminent Ursuline of the early seventeenth century, Anne de Vesvres.59 But the nuns of the early eighteenth century were living with a different reality. “If a dowry in cash arrives, we use it; if it doesn’t, we borrow,” wrote another eminent Ursuline, Jeanne de Bourges.60 Dowries had become the only alternative to debt. The public found this scandalous, considering all the money that had poured into the monasteries through the years. Looking around for cause, people blamed the situation on the women’s mismanagement: “Experience shows that the ruin of monasteries comes all too often from the frivolous and vain expenses that are incurred within them.”61 It was an argument that the government took up with great gusto in the 1730s.

th e bu r de n o f tax at i o n Does the evidence suggest that this accusation was indeed true of the teaching communities? Of all the monastic records that survived the revolutionary period, the financial records are the most complete – for the obvious reason that they were of value to the new proprietor, the Nation. Lists of purchases of land, of money transactions, assets, and debts exist in the archives for houses that in every other respect have

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disappeared altogether. What these lists show is that almost all investments preceded and almost all borrowing took place after the amortissement crisis of 1689. The year 1689 marked a watershed between sufficiency and decline. The costs of Louis XIV’s wars had placed the government in desperate need of money. It had been considering amortissement for a long time, and now it decided to move. A royal declaration ordered that religious bodies must pay dues of amortissement and nouvel acquêt on all property acquired since 1641. Many communities now found themselves facing demands for lump sums that exceeded their total annual revenue. A half-century or more of back taxes would be difficult for anyone to bear. What made this tax worse was that it bypassed the rich and struck the poor. The older ecclesiastical institutions – bishoprics, cathedral chapters, abbeys – were already adequately furnished with land and feudal dues, and therefore had not been active in the real estate market. They escaped the tax almost unscathed.62 But the “new” monasteries, like those of the three teaching orders, had acquired their property recently; and as fast as dowries had come in they had invested them, leaving themselves a bare minimum to live on. For example, in 1690 the Ursulines of Rouen were found to have spent more than 130,000 livres purchasing property over the past seventy years.63 It did not matter that, as a later survey would show, their actual revenues totalled little more than 8000 livres for the support of seventy-five women.64 It was their past purchases, not their present straitened circumstances, that counted with the tax collector. The bill for amortissement dues and arrears combined came to 20,660 livres.65 Similarly, the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers was charged 34,284 livres, and that of the Ursulines of Bourges, 24,320 livres.66 Houses that had acquired less property paid accordingly: the Ursulines of Dieppe, 13,793 livres; those of Montluçon, 8200 livres; those of Chinon, 2568 livres.67 Convent after convent appealed the tax. They pleaded poverty; they pointed to the service they provided, at their own expense, to their cities; they protested that even those of their buildings dedicated to free instruction were being taxed – they felt they deserved the same exemption that hospitals enjoyed.68 A few communities offered to hand over all their goods in return for a pension. The taxmen answered them all in the same way: Pay up or face distraint of your goods; pay up quickly, and we will allow you some moderation in your tax bill. The communities paid, even if it meant borrowing to do so. One strange little feature of the process should be mentioned here. In 1696 the king gave Saint-Cyr, the school set up near Versailles for

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the daughters of impoverished noblemen, the right to receive the amortissement dues still outstanding. Madame de Maintenon, the king’s wife, who was in charge of Saint-Cyr, saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: she had a surplus of young ladies who needed to be “placed,” and the communities had a deficit of funds. So she offered to forgive part or all of the amortissement payment due from any convent that would admit one of her girls as a nun. Numerous religious houses were given the offer; most appear to have accepted it, as did the Ursulines of Dieppe, who received the following letter: “Madame de Maintenon has done me the honour of informing me that you have asked for a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, for whom the 6076 livres 17 sols which you still owe for amortissement will take the place of a dowry.”69 Soon afterwards, the demoiselle arrived.70 We find mention of these women in later records, in communities all across the country. The communities might in time have recovered from the amortissement tax if it had been the only demand on their resources during those last years of Louis XIV’s reign. Unfortunately for them, the declaration of July 1689 opened the floodgates; the government’s initiative raised the consciousness of many seigneurs, who went back to their records and realized that they, too, could demand back payment of amortissement dues.71 The next blow came in 1704, when the Crown decreed that investments in the money market, like investments in real estate, were to be subject to amortissement charges; and at the same time the Clergy began to collect regular taxes for its “free gifts.” In some sixteen years, the taxmen imposed thousands of livres in taxes on even the poorest houses, bringing many of them to their knees. Some communities “were looking to borrow on all sides, beginning to create new rentes on their revenues just to live … and to consume the dowries of the girls that they received,” wrote one annalist.72 Weaker communities were forced to send their younger members home to their families; some closed altogether.

the problems of land ownership Although land ownership had its advantages, many communities had so far failed to extract significant profit from their property. In return for the cost of their initial investment and the running repairs which they were constantly being forced to make, their income was often ridiculously low. Notre-Dame in Poitiers is a case in point: after an investment in land and farms which, according to its historian, amounted to 4000 livres a year for nearly forty years, the monastery received in 1727 only a little more (7134 livres) than it had in 1660 (6000 livres).73 Much of the problem lay in the long-lasting agricultural depression

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that plagued the country. “We are ruined by our sharecroppers,” complained the sisters of the Congrégation in Bourges. “They owe us more than 12,000 livres, because they themselves are all ruined by taxes and their workers, bad crop years, and fires.”74 The accounts of the sisters of Provins tell the same story: years of low yield, years of no yield at all, culminating in the bankruptcy and disappearance of their tenants.75 It was a widespread problem. The very considerable properties of the Ursulines of Beauvais – 160 hectares, for which in 1631 they had paid 26,300 livres – were supposed to bring them 1500 livres a year; but half a century and several tenant bankruptcies intervened before they realized this income.76 Sometimes the monasteries had only themselves to blame. Their original purchases were often imprudent and ill-advised. In Châtellerault, a domaine which the sisters bought for 14,225 livres and hoped to farm out for at least 450 livres, fell far below their expectations. “They were terribly deceived,” wrote their memoirist.77 In Montargis the community accepted a domaine of doubtful quality in lieu of a dowry: “We were in such a hurry to conclude the agreement that we did not give ourselves the time to reflect and to send someone to visit it, as was our custom. The season was not suitable, because it was very cold, and snow covered the ground.” In consequence, “we have since then been very dissatisfied with it.”78 Even where the farms were productive, the nuns often lacked the means to get the produce to market. Cartage could be written into their contracts, but it was expensive. Often, the best that the sisters could hope for was to provide grain, meat, and dairy products for their own needs. For many years, their investments in land, for which they paid heavily in amortissement dues, gave them only meagre returns. Over the whole “long seventeenth century” of agricultural depression, land ownership was a difficult business. The communities had entered into it partly because many dowries and donations involved land, and partly because it seemed the right thing to do. “Having learned of the savings that a monastery could enjoy from the produce of nature, the superior was most anxious that we should buy some métairie according to our small power,” wrote the annalist of Montargis, adding that the convent later came to regret the decision.79 Without the requisite management skills and the right conditions, the nuns were unable to get value for money. Their capital would have been better employed in the money market – at least, until 1720.80 Equally serious was their vulnerability to fraud. Their clausura turned them into absentee landlords. At most, the officers of the house were allowed by the bishop to view their properties before buying. From then on a servant might visit occasionally. Other than that,

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their interests were left in the hands of friends or salaried agents. The annales suggest that friendly help was freely given in the early days but tended to dwindle as communities grew older, more established, and less loved. Thereafter, the nuns depended on agents to know where their money was going, what repairs were really needed, and whether those repairs were faithfully carried out. Of course, these agents could themselves be part of the problem. When the Ursuline monastery of Rouen suffered bankruptcy in 1707, a commission appointed by the archbishop to investigate the matter discovered that the nuns’ agent had been cheating them for twenty years.81 Cloistered nuns were easy targets for dishonesty. At one of the Poitiers monastery’s domaines, the farmer kept seven domestics at the community’s expense; at another, the workers helped themselves freely to the wine; at another, the farmer cut down trees in the woods for his own profit and still fell short on his annual rent.82 The Ursulines in Carcassonne discovered one day that the farmer had simply disappeared, causing a loss to the monastery of 300 livres.83 The only redress, once the damage was done, was to take the matter to court, and this was itself an expensive business. “We couldn’t get anything out of them, no matter how much care and diligence we spent pursuing them. What’s more, we lost the advances that we had been obliged to make,” complained the nuns of Saint-Dizier.84 Legal costs were an ongoing drain on finances. Later, as times grew harder, more and more communities could not even afford them. They were no longer able to protect their interests. These deficiencies were noted and discussed at length by the advisers to the Commission des secours, and it was agreed that cloistered nuns were not in a position to manage their own property: “Because women enclosed in a cloister, incapable of knowing everything, still less of doing everything on their own, are forced to depend for many things on strangers (sometimes lacking in intelligence or attention, and sometimes not too honest), there is danger that the temporal of monasteries will fall, little by little, into great disorder.”85 The solution (since any loosening of the rules of clausura was out of the question) was to subject them more closely to the surveillance of their bishops and directors. From the mid-eighteenth century on, religious women might make no transaction involving more than 1500 livres without the permission of the ordinary. In 1749 their freedom of action was further circumscribed, for they were forbidden by law to acquire land. The Crown made sure that thenceforth they would invest their money in rentes constituted on itself and other public bodies. By then, however, the economic climate had changed, and rural investments, far from being a burden, were beginning to pay off handsomely. As the value of agricultural products rose, so did the wealth of

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the houses that had land and received payments in kind. Thus the Ursulines of Elbeuf, whose ground rents had totalled 1300 livres in 1729, were before the end of the Old Regime enjoying 11,200 livres.86 In the same period their faraway sisters in Saint-Dizier saw the income from their four farms rise from 379 livres to 1,182 livres.87 Such improvement may be attributed in part to the fact that many communities learned to take better care of their farms; this is certainly evidenced by their account books and journals. But their fundamental handicap, their clausura, remained as confining as it had been in the 1730s. What had changed was the conjoncture, now as favourable to them as it had once been unfavourable.

the problems of the money market Investments in rural property were made largely by monasteries that had one foot in the land – monasteries in small towns.88 Urban communities, on the other hand, tended to put their money into urban property or into the money market. The first property they bought was, naturally, that which they needed to establish their monastery and enclosure. Once this was achieved, and with dowries still coming in, they looked for safe places to put their capital so as to ensure a steady income in the years to come. Their preferred choice was property adjoining or close to their own houses – under their eye, so to speak, and therefore easier to manage. These buildings might serve some day to enlarge the monastery; in the meantime, they were renovated as necessary and rented out to householders and shopkeepers. The disadvantage of this rental property was revealed in 1689: like land, it was subject to amortissement dues. The other course open to communities, and the one which they most frequently chose, was to invest their capital in rentes constituées. These were loans, in the thinnest of disguises. In return for a fixed payment per annum, a lump sum was “sold” to the borrower. The transaction was notarized and therefore backed by the law. A rente constituée, like any other property, could be passed from one party to the next, by purchase or gift – or, in a monastery’s case, by dowry. Its chief advantage was its flexibility. Any large influx of capital – a dowry or several dowries – could quickly be put to making money. On the other hand, any large expenditure – a new building project, for instance – could be met by reversing the procedure and constituting a rente on the community itself. It was not difficult, when the occasion required, to turn from lending to borrowing. By moving money about in such ways, religious communities were often important actors in their local economies.89 Initially, most of their rentes were constituted on individuals; in other words, most money was

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lent out privately. But as time went on, more and more of the monasteries’ capital was placed on public bodies such as local municipal corporations, the Clergy, the provincial États, or the Hôtel de Ville of Paris (the Crown by another name). Finally, in 1749, the government barred religious houses from lending to private parties, and from then on all new money was invested in public bodies. However, until the end of the Old Regime, the records of many convents continued to show a welter of private loans made in the distant past and paying (or often, no longer paying) dividends every year. Because the great bulk of their collective wealth was invested in this way, the fortunes of the new religious houses (those established after 1600) were closely dependent on the money market. It was this dependency, rather than their investments in land and buildings, that caused their gravest troubles. Amortissement, argues one historian, would have been supportable had it not been for “the accumulation of public calamities that came upon them, blow by blow: the variations in the value of money, the visa, the Law bankruptcy, the reduction of rentes.”90 The exemption from amortissement dues on money investments ended in 1704. The government, having for many years declared such investments off limits to the taxmen, reversed itself. From then on, investors had to pay dues on their rentes – this in spite of the fact that rentes were already bringing in much less than they used to do. During the foundation period, rentes constituées had usually carried a return of 6.5 percent. It was on the basis of this generous rate, which the first nuns probably imagined to be immutable, that monastic economies were designed and rounded out, and dowries and pensions set. However, in the late seventeenth century the money market became increasingly unstable. In 1679 the rate was lowered to 5.5 percent, and it remained there until 1720. Then, with the Law Crash, it dropped briefly to 2.0 percent before rising to 2.5 percent. Five years later it rose again, to 5 percent.91 The monasteries sank into financial difficulties and climbed out of them in more or less the same cadence. The difficulties arising from the diminished returns were compounded by the fact that, more and more often, returns were not forthcoming at all. As the economic depression deepened towards the end of the seventeenth century, borrowers began to default on their payments. Thus began a build-up of uncollectable debts, which would in time be the undoing of many communities.92 The truth was that no matter how well built their houses and no matter how impressive their holdings on paper, the monasteries had little cash to spare. Rarely was there to be found the frivolity and wastefulness which, the Crown later charged, was the cause of their misfortunes. The injustice of this charge can be seen in the history of the

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grand couvent during these critical years. From the start it had earned its reputation as “a house built on prudence.” Its budget was always balanced, its expenses carefully calibrated. It was able to insist on large dowries. It maintained an agent to watch over its business interests – which included the loans it was able to make to other bodies in the capital.93 But in 1678 the Chapter heard something that it had never heard before: the bursar could not pay for the groceries, “since she cannot get anything out of the debtors.” She was authorized to borrow 8000 livres. She was back again for more in 1689, again in 1690, twice in 1692, twice in 1693, once in 1694, and again in 1695, 1698, and 1701. By now the Chapter was thoroughly alarmed. A community that had been building steadily since 1612 was, for the first time, having to borrow just to live. This was all before the shock of 1706, when the poor woman had to announce that the amortissement dues on the convent’s rentes would take up two years’ revenues. And still in the future, at that time, lay the “system” of John Law, with its terrible consequences for the women’s monasteries. If the grand couvent was feeling pain, other smaller houses were experiencing agony. Even before 1720 many of them were selling their real estate and their church treasures, and sending some of their members home to live. Then came “the Revolution of Law,” as they would later refer to it. As has already been said, John Law’s original scheme was intended to enrich the whole country, even the rentiers. This was the thinking at the top. The nuns in their cloisters, scattered far and wide across the country, were of course not to know any of this. All they knew was that they were ordered to transact no new business in cash beyond a certain level and to constitute no new rentes. Their specie, with the rest of their gold and silver, was to be carried to the Treasury, and their rentes on the government were to be removed from them, with the assurance that they would be reimbursed in billets, which they could immediately place on the Mississippi Company at an advantageous rate of interest.94 This must all have caused them anxiety, in view of their recent experiences and their natural distrust of government which, if their own writings are to be believed, was as great as that of the rest of the population. As it turned out, their distrust was justified. The reimbursement was so slow in coming that in most cases they were too late to buy into the Mississippi Company. The question which then faced them was: What should they do with all this paper money? The right thing to do was to place it immediately by paying off debts, buying in provisions, or purchasing property; this was what some welladvised houses managed to do. An Ursuline community in Aix at once reinvested as many of its billets as possible, as did the grand couvent in

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Paris.95 The Ursulines of Montbrison, quick off the mark, bought a domaine on 9 July 1720 for 9150 livres, of which 8000 livres were in billets.96 But the majority of houses were not so wise or so well served. The traces of one such house’s travails survive in the archives. They begin with a letter, dated 4 September 1720, to the superior of NotreDame in Alençon from a friend in Paris: I wish that my powers equalled my inclinations in the matter of your billets de banque. I would then handle them in a way which would please you; but unfortunately I find myself, like you, in the same difficulty and the same evil predicament … In all good faith I gave up my small bills and my money, but can get nothing back just now except heavy losses, because of the ill usage and the frightful usury that is being practised – and allowed – at present … Imagine, Madame, the bad situation in which people find themselves, here and in the provinces, especially those who are not used to these practices.

There follows an official letter, dated 13 May 1721: M. de Mahault, notary at Paris, charged with placing your billets de banque in a rente on the Hôtel de Ville, told me yesterday that your contract has not yet been expedited by the provost and aldermen, and that you need to make a declaration for your community before the intendant … that on 7 October 1720 you placed in Sieur Mahault’s hands … 45,000 livres in billets de banque, to be placed on the Hôtel de Ville … on behalf of your community, this money coming from a number of reimbursements that were made to you … these rentes having previously constituted the income of the community.97

What happened subsequently is not clear; perhaps, like many others, the nuns simply took the paper money back and put it into their coffers, to wait for a better day that never came. What is known is that the community of Alençon remained drastically poor until the Revolution.98 Mention has been made of reimbursements. The billets de banque continued to be the only legal tender long after their fate was becoming evident. Private debtors, their hands full of paper money that promised soon to be valueless, hastened to use it to pay off their debts. A stampede of reimbursements took place. The result appears in many monastic account books: extraordinary number of receipts, as many as ten times the normal amount, during 1720.99 If the monasteries attempted to refuse the billets, they could be constrained by the law. The reimbursers were every type of debtor: public institutions (in the case of Alençon, the Clergy), nobles, businessmen, friends – even the nuns’ own fathers, who hastened to make up their daughters’ dowries in

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soon-to-be-worthless paper. The convents themselves tried their hands at reimbursing but, on the whole, lost more than they gained. It was a golden opportunity for debtors, but a disaster for lenders. The only way to avoid full repayment was to offer the borrower a reduction in interest rates. Thus, the private lending rate followed the official rate downwards, to 2.5 percent. “The diminution of the regular charges made to debtors can be evaluated in a very general way at 50 percent,” writes the historian of the bankruptcy.100 The loss to the lenders can be pegged at exactly the same level. This was the situation when the bankruptcy finally became official at the end of 1720. One last shock lay in store for the lenders of France: the Visa. The government, faced with some half-million claimants brandishing 2,452.6 million livres’ worth of paper money and shares in the Mississippi Company, in 1721 set up a body to verify the claims and refund those that it acknowledged. By 1724, when the Visa’s work was finished, the government’s debt had been reduced to 1,1936.5 million livres.101 The government’s gain was, of course, its creditors’ loss.102 For communities that depended heavily on rentes, this reduction of their capital and its reinvestment at the now standard 2.5 percent was the hardest blow yet. The Ursuline house at Argenteuil, which had previously received 6419 livres per annum from its rentes, now had to do with 412 livres; the house at l’Ile-Bouchard found its revenues reduced from 4957 livres to 500 livres.103 The list could go on and on. The reversal of fortune could not have been more dramatic. “In less than a year,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “in spite of all our precautions, we lost half our rentes.”104 Some historians have suspected that in their efforts to secure assistance the nuns “outrageously” exaggerated their distress.105 It is true that, in the best tradition of citizens of the Old Regime, they treated the truth somewhat cavalierly when dealing with the fiscal authorities. But they were expected to do that,106 and indeed this is why the authorities, in a second round of inquiries, called upon intendants and bishops to verify their complaints. While these men found many errors and some exaggerations, they did confirm the communities’ situation on the whole; over and over again, they found women “in the greatest need,” living on the charity of families and friends, even begging their bread from door to door.107 In many cases, the free schools had to close because the nuns, in order to put food on the table, were sewing for dear life and could not afford the time and effort to teach. Community solidarity was threatened as private assistance from families allowed some sisters to eat while others starved. Community discipline broke down. Without the bond of the Rule, some monasteries were in

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danger of becoming mere group homes, whose residents shared little more than their anxiety and distress. The internal evidence of serious damage is everywhere in the monastic records. We find registers suddenly neglected, deaths no longer entered, entries simply not being made; bills left unpaid and account books hopelessly confused, the penmanship sloppy and hurried. A document from a Grenoble monastery locates the crisis perfectly. In its register of professions a space was set apart to record the community’s annual renewal of its solemn vows. The practice had been meticulously observed, and every year from 1654 onwards the professed nuns had, one by one, entered their signatures to this effect. Then, in 1727, the practice ceased. In 1732 it was resumed, “to conform to traditional usage,” according to a note in the margin.108 In later decades the sisters wrote feelingly about the experience. In their private correspondence, their death notices, and their annales they frequently alluded to what was, for them, a traumatic event. With no axe to grind, no official to impress, and therefore no reason to exaggerate, they spoke with feeling about “the revolution of 1720.” Years after the event one annalist recalled: “Everyone was emboldened to insult us. In one day we received three summonses, one for fifty livres, the price of a pig; another for ten écus owing to a grocer; another from the butcher for several weeks’ worth of meat … Our impoverishment became public knowledge; families refused to entrust us with their children … The novitiate was empty.”109 The Law Crash and the years immediately following it were arguably the rock-bottom of female monastic fortunes under the Old Regime. For many monasteries, however, another misery was about to fall upon them, for they became involved in “the Jansenist quarrel.”

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3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

My soul finds peace and assurance in obedience and regularity … It is there that I meet God without fear of being deceived. Gabrielle Rubens1

This was a sentiment often repeated in the writings and sayings of religious women. It expressed their longing for security, a security which, they were confident, would come with conformity to the will of God. This conformity would be achieved by (1) obedience, by which was meant submission to authority – an authority invested, first and foremost, in the bishop – and (2) regularity, by which was meant the faithful observance of the Rule. For thousands of nuns there was never a conflict. However, there were moments and situations in which obedience and regularity came into jarring collision for some women. The following two chapters interrupt the discussion of the material fortunes of religious women in order to address the question of their involvement in the Jansenist quarrel. This quarrel came to a head during the years 1730–55 – the same years when convents were feeling the worst pinch of poverty and when the Commission des secours was most actively intervening in their lives. The quarrel affected communities only in some parts of the country, but their defiance of authority, by its stubborn intensity, challenged the conventional wisdom about the natural gentleness and tractability of their kind. Was it something peculiar to Jansenism that fired up their blood? Or was it something in community life that made them obstinate in the pursuit of what they thought was right? To establish a context, we should go back to the beginning and examine the relationship of religious women to their two sources of authority: their bishops and their Rule. “The strengthening of the episcopate in every respect, as the nodal point of every aspect of reform, may be regarded as the corner-stone of

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the counter-reformation Church.” So said Henry Outram Evenett in a famous set of lectures published posthumously in the 1960s.2 He went on to remark that although traditionally the Jesuits are seen as the maids-of-all-work of the Counter-Reformation, it was in fact the bishops who had everything thrust upon them: the total care of their dioceses, spiritual, temporal, and charitable. Included in the massive list of their responsibilities was the supervision of the regulars* who lived within their diocesan boundaries. This, he pointed out, flew in the face of long-established practice; and the regulars, who were used to shouldering much of the responsibility for the care of souls, were loath to accept the new order of things. As a result, one aspect of reform, in France at least, was a long-running battle to establish new lines of authority. The bishops knew that the implementation of reform depended on their ability to take control of a fairly turbulent church and to harness the multitude of competing authorities.3 The religious orders, on the other hand, might be forgiven for pointing to their past devotion to the pastoral care of the faithful throughout the years when the secular clergy had been unable or unwilling to do the work.4 And in any case, they might add, they had exemptions from episcopal control, and these exemptions came straight from Rome. Neither Rome nor the bishops cared to attack the orders’ exemptions head-on. But wherever authority was not specifically delegated elsewhere, it now passed into the hands of local hierarchies. One of the powers which the Council of Trent handed to the bishops was superiority over all non-exempt female monasteries – which, in fact, meant the majority of monasteries founded after 1600. The bishops were commanded to restore and safeguard clausura, to ensure the religious practice of nuns, to examine all candidates for profession as to their age and motives, and to preside over the election of superiors.5 Implicit in these very specific prescriptions was a general understanding that the bishops, though they themselves were in large majority members of the secular clergy, were to become the ultimate arbiters of female religious life. The subjection of the female communities was essential, if only as a stage in the more difficult process of gaining ascendancy over the male religious orders. “What we have to desire is power, not over the nuns, but over the regulars, who, taking advantage of their privileges, often challenge and disrupt hierarchical authority,” wrote Bishop Zamet of Langres in 1627. The problem with nuns, he contended, was that they were under the influence of the men with whom they had contact, their confessors and directors; if these men chose to, they could incite the women to disobedience – even to the point of trying to shut their bishops out altogether, “as has happened here in several places.”6

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Zamet, along with other reforming bishops, felt that it was essential for good order that both men and women be kept in line. Consequently, all new communities of nuns – except those with affiliation to older religious orders – faced the same conditions from the outset: “that they place themselves under the perpetual charge, visit, correction, government and entire obedience” of the ordinaries. They were shaped from the start in postures of submission to and dependence on their bishops. Every religious rule stated this clearly and unequivocally. Most nuns must have been heartily grateful for this, if for no other reason than that their early years in community were fraught with difficulties and often enough the bishops’ protection made the difference between survival and collapse. We can see this protection at work in many different instances. Philibert de Brichanteau of Laon supported his protégées, the sisters of the Congrégation, with both money and political influence during the long struggle to have them accepted into the city: “The bishop lodged the religious in his house of Petit-Vincent 9 years and 3 months. He paid all the expenses of establishment, of securing letters patent and of confirmation by Parlement, and has put out more than 5000 écus, not counting other charities made since.”7 Cardinal de Sourdis, when he learned that certain notables in Bordeaux were criticizing “his” Ursulines, issued a fiery pastoral letter in their defence, threatening sanctions against anyone who spoke against them.8 An archbishop and a bishop accompanied the sisters of the Congrégation into Provins in order to prevent the local opposition from turning them away.9 When plague struck in the 1620s and 1630s, it was often the bishops who offered their country residences as refuges for the nuns. After the destruction of their property during the Fronde, the Filles de NotreDame of Sarlat found a champion in their bishop, who was the uncle of their superior: “He took care to put their funds in security and he gave them one of his châteaux to live in while they were building; so that, with this support, they turned a house ruined by fire and war into one of the finest that their company can boast.”10 There are many such recollections in the surviving literature, and we may take it that these represent many others that have gone into oblivion. The bishops’ help was often needed. In the 1630s and 1640s most nuns and therefore most communities were very young, for the sudden expansion in the female monastic population that took place in the first decades of the seventeenth century was largely fuelled by an influx of girls and young women. In the Ursuline monastery of Rouen, for example, the average age of the community in 1630 was twenty-five, and fifteen of the forty-eight professed choir nuns were still teenagers.11 In

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1632 nineteen of the forty professed choir nuns in Aix were twenty years old or younger.12 At about the same time, the Ursulines in the new house in Blois ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-five.13 How could it have been otherwise, given the newness of the foundations? The monastery that Marie Guyart entered in Tours in 1631 was only nine years old, but it had already professed some thirty nuns and was holding in its novitiate twenty-eight more, all of whom, except Marie, were sixteen years or under.14 This meant that within two years, the majority of the professed members of this community would be under twenty. This was not unusual. All across France the new monasteries were full of young women who had more zeal than experience and were dangerously liable to make mistakes. Consequently, there often developed a paternal-filial relationship between prelates and nuns. Bishop Le Porc of Saint-Brieuc watched over the nascent Ursuline community in his city with fatherly solicitude: “He knew the name and family of all the nuns and took interest in all their relatives … During the building, His Grandeur often came to see the builders … From his palace, he noted if the bell rang exactly on time.”15 When the Ursulines of Montargis – most of them still in their twenties – were faced with the prospect of running their community without help from the mother house in Paris, it was their archbishop who calmed them, promising the new superior that all would go well in spite of her immaturity: “The Lord Archbishop … said to her in front of all the assembly that he gave her from his own years all that lacked in hers.”16 In Mâcon in 1627, when the handful of adolescents who constituted the community lost their superior, the bishop promised “that he would be a faithful father to them – and indeed, even a mother – while they were without,” and he was true to his promise.17 In circumstances like these, affection and dependency tightened the bonds of obedience. In any case, the structure of female monastic life ensured that the women, even after they were mature, would continue to need outside help. Their monasteries were constructed in virtual isolation from each other; there were no normal avenues for interchange of personnel and ideas, few ways in which they could assist each other in times of difficulty. During the formative years, various plans had been set out to avoid this atomization. Both the Compagnie de Notre-Dame in Bordeaux and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Lorraine had begun with plans for a generalate, in which all communities would be subject to a mother house and a superior general, who would have the power to intervene when needed and to move nuns between houses.18 A number of prominent Ursulines tried for years to establish a union between houses. Several bishops tried to construct something of the

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same type on a diocesan scale, with themselves in charge. But all these plans foundered on the rocks of tradition and local particularism. During the very time when male monastic communities were joining together in larger organizations, female monastic communities were left in their own isolation. From their foundation until their end in the French Revolution, they lived very much within the closed circles of their own cloisters.19 This isolation did not necessarily lead to trouble. Many women’s communities maintained a model life of harmony and regularity, and were commended for this by their bishops. But it did make the women more dependent on outside help. Even the larger houses could experience difficulties. In the monastery of Notre-Dame in Bordeaux in 1645, less than thirty years after its foundation, the canonical visitor* was surprised to find that many of the nuns owned personal possessions, that the refectory was the scene of noisy gossip, and that strangers were entering the cloister without permission.20 For smaller or more inaccessible houses, the problems could become malignant. In Libourne in 1642, two factions fought for control of the Ursuline house; peace was restored only when a commissioner from the bishop removed one of the factions by force.21 Some twenty-five years later, in Bourg at the mouth of the Gironde, the little Ursuline community found itself terrorized by one of its members, Jeanne Peychaud. Shortly after her profession, she began “to reveal her evil nature”; when her scheme to get the position of sacristan (and with it the key to the outside church) was thwarted, she became enraged and forced the rightful sacristan to give her the keys. “We realized she was with child in the month of December 1667,” her superior wrote later, naming as father the Mass priest, a certain Sieur de Cosso. After trying unsuccessfully to abort the child, Jeanne changed into secular clothes and went off to Bordeaux for the birth, then bullied her way back into the house! Her bad behaviour continued. She went on writing to Sieur de Cosso; she attacked a pensionnaire and a lay sister, threatened the superior with her fist, and again stole the keys to the sacristy. Only then was the archbishop of Bordeaux informed and the offending woman carried off to prison in a Bordeaux monastery.22 Clearly, given the small size of the community and the weakness of its superior, a case like this required the application of force majeure. An even more bizarre case began to unfold in the Ursuline house of Saint-Remy in 1685. A recently professed nun, Simone Cullevier, who claimed to have the power to deliver souls from purgatory, was elected superior. Then began a reign of terror in the monastery rivalling the abuses that are sometimes seen in twentieth-century cults. “She went for more than twenty-four years without assisting at a single community

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act, or at any offices, saying that the Blessed Virgin took pleasure in seeing her enjoying herself,” and this in the daily company of the provost of the Collegial of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues, her too-close friend and supporter. Under her the nuns were subjected to a harsh new Rule, and those who resisted were beaten and even imprisoned. In the absence of any outside intervention (the foremost families of the town being favourable to Simone) this tyranny lasted until 1708, when the archbishop of Avignon arrived, assessed the situation, and finally took steps to have the woman removed.23 In all such cases, communities simply lacked the ability to right themselves. Once the authority structure of the community broke down or fell into the wrong hands, there was nothing that could be done except call in outside help. Every now and then in the diocesan records we come across a pathetic letter from some distressed nun, alleging dysfunction in her community and appealing for intervention. We find numerous mentions of troublemakers being removed or “foreign” superiors being brought in to re-establish monastic regularity. The problems did not have to be egregious. Sometimes communities were simply divided over interpretations of lifestyle. In Châtellerault in 1649, not long after foundation, the nuns fell to arguing over which version of their Rule was the authentic and legitimate one. The conflict became heated, and the bishop of Poitiers was forced to appoint a referee.24 In all such cases, which in exempt orders would have been handled by a superior general, remedial action depended on the bishops or their delegates. It is difficult to see how women’s monasteries could have survived their internal crises without this outside help. Thus, from the very beginning of the seventeenth-century monastic revival, religious women found themselves engaged in a structure of dependence on their bishops, to which they were expected to contribute “a docility marked by simplicity and childlikeness.”25 Not only did their bishops expect this, but society did as well; and so, it appears, did they. In a time when obedience was the cornerstone of all religious virtue, theirs was meant to be the most perfect obedience of all. However, from the start there was a certain ambiguity in this vocation of obedience. It was not that nuns desired freedom or the right to disobey; it was that they were vowed to two obediences – obedience to their bishop, and obedience to their Rule.26 The bishops’ authority over them was written into their papal bulls.* On the other hand, the Fathers of Trent had reiterated the binding obligation on all religious, men and women alike, to follow their monastic rules: “For if those things which constitute the basis and foundation of all regular discipline are not strictly observed, the whole edifice must necessarily fall.”27 Women who were serious about their profession took this obligation

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literally. Their Rule was sacrosanct and was confirmed by Rome. When they received the papal bulls sanctioning their new religious life, they were given to understand that the regimens thereby established were to be observed on pain of serious fault, that no change was allowable, even in small details. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of its vows, rules and constitutions,” they were told.28 It was customary for new superiors, upon election, to vow never to make any changes whatsoever to the Rule: “Just as the instrument should do nothing of its own initiative but work according to the intention of him who wields it, so ought the superior to watch over the convent according to the ideas and intentions of the Lord, as expressed in the constitutions and regulations – the unique means by which God intends all to arrive at holiness.”29 This belief in the immutability of the Rule was built into the religious mentality. To follow the Rule was to follow it to the letter, for, as the foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, Jeanne de Lestonnac, put it, “there is nothing small in religious life.”30 It was logical for the nuns to believe that this observance was incumbent even on their bishops: “Authority is given in order to make the law respected.”31 This refrain was being voiced by nuns from the earliest days. In fact, we have a black-and-white illustration of it in the first draft of the Rule of the Ursuline community of Présentation NotreDame, in Avignon, which stated that it was up to the bishop to ensure the observation of the rules, “without power to innovate, change or abolish [anything in] the statutes and constitutions.” The manuscript is still held in the departmental archives of Vaucluse, and in it still appears this phrase, struck out – the only correction made to the entire Rule.32 The original phrase suggests an inspiration from a member of one of the masculine religious orders whose influence over the nuns was pervasive. The striking out suggests that it contained implications of what seemed, to the ecclesiastical authorities, an unacceptable independence. For most communities, we may assume, this conflict of obediences was never an issue. Only when the authority of the Rule collided with that of the bishop was the contentiousness of the situation revealed. A flurry of such collisions occurred initially, during the years when the authorities were committing communities to clausura. In some women’s minds this new obligation contravened the spirit of their institut, the apostolic work to which they had dedicated themselves.33 In most cases they simply left their houses quietly. But in others, community structures had to be altered and superiors and officers forcibly removed before the nuns accepted enclosure. There were even some appels comme d’abus,* as in Aix in 1632.34 In these early days, however, Parlement seemed deaf to the complaints of religious women and did nothing to

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support their claims. “Henceforth the cloister was victorious,” writes the historian of the Ursulines of Provence.35 What is true for Provence is true for the rest of France. The cloister closed over the heads of religious women with barely a ripple to mark what had gone. Bishops also intervened in community life when they saw a risk to orthodoxy. In 1660 Archbishop Harlay, concerned over rumours of Jansenism among the Ursulines of Rouen, bypassed established procedure and himself named the officers of the monastery. The nuns were shocked by this attack on their right of election. “We were more dead than alive,” wrote the secretary of the Chapter.36 But they obeyed. With reliable women installed in all the positions of power, the community soon lost its Jansenist tinge. But more often than not, conflicts arose for less weighty reasons, such as incompatibility between the bishops’ interpretation of their powers and the nuns’ interpretation of their rights. In the diocese of Langres, in 1619, the Ursulines of one house (Dijon) received a papal bull elevating their community into a monastery. The terms of the bull were later extended to the other houses of the diocese. This gave Bishop Zamet of Langres the idea of creating a diocesan union of Ursuline houses, all under his immediate control.37 The project had precedents: the union of Ursuline houses of the archdiocese of Bordeaux under Cardinal de Sourdis; and, even more authoritatively, the “congregation” of all the Ursulines in the diocese of Milan under the saintly Archbishop Borromeo. But such a union contradicted the papal bull.38 A General Chapter of the superiors involved rejected the plan as contrary to their Rule, but Zamet overrode their objections and proceeded in 1623 to install a provincial superior at Dijon. To achieve this he had to force the current superior of Dijon not to accept a second term.39 When she refused to step down, he armed himself with letters from Parlement enforcing his authority, then went to the monastery, transferred the keys, and had the protesting woman carried away. When the community resisted this act of force, they were excommunicated and deprived of the sacraments.40 They were not vanquished, however: in the elections of the following year, they chose one of their own, an assistant to the exiled superior. Then, in May 1624, they obtained a papal brief confirming their existing statutes. Zamet accepted the papacy’s decision, but he was only biding his time. In 1637 he called together the superiors of all the houses founded from Dijon and presented them with constitutions designed to create a centralized province. This time the superiors did not argue; they simply allowed the constitutions to remain a dead letter. This kind of respectful noncompliance was a powerful weapon in the nuns’ armory.

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The Ursulines in Zamet’s own episcopal city of Langres were equally unresponsive to his plans for union. To overcome their objections, he procured a ruling in his favour from a group of doctors from the Sorbonne. When the sisters continued to resist, he showed what mutinous nuns might expect. He put them in spiritual quarantine, forbidding his clergy to have any further dealings with them until he gave permission. To their pleas that they be allowed to keep their confessor, he answered sarcastically that “they were so good that when they died without the sacraments, they would still be in a state of grace.” The sudden illness of a novice while he was out of town created a crisis, because no priest dared give her the last sacraments. The community’s request for a confessor fell on deaf ears. With the bishop away, the grand vicar refused even to hear the case. The girl was removed to her relatives’ home, where she was able to die fortified by the sacraments. In June the Chapter remonstrated against the grand vicar’s “overly stern refusal.” He retorted that the novice’s sickness had only been a pretext for the community’s disobedience, that the nuns’ open defiance was causing scandal, that until the Holy See ruled otherwise they were bound by the opinion of the doctors of the Sorbonne (to which, he pointed out, those persons advising them ought also to submit), and that he wanted nothing further to do with them.41 The quarrel was resolved two months later when a bull arrived from Rome confirming the women in their existing Rule. The papal confirmation solidified certain important rights for the nuns. In future, all professions were to be made “between the hands of the superior, while observing the form laid down by the Council of Trent” (no mention being made of the bishop). The administration of the monastery’s property was to be the responsibility of the superior, with the advice of her Chapter, an accounting being made annually to the bishop or his appointee. The director, or canonical superior, of the convent was to be chosen by the superior and Chapter, and could be dismissed by them, with the approval of the bishop.42 Zamet accepted the ruling, though with as little publicity as possible. The sisters of the Congrégation faced the same dilemma of obedience. Their founder, Pierre Fourier, had originally hoped that they would have a central direction to manage their affairs, much like that of the masculine congregations. When this project was quashed by Rome, he had to accept the fact that their houses would remain autonomous and under diocesan control.43 But he alerted them early to the difficulties that awaited them: “The Lord Bishops are powerful, and learned, and prudent and holy in their lives, and in possession of your persons where spiritual jurisdiction is concerned, and of your

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monasteries.”44 He foresaw, quite correctly, that these bishops would interfere with the constitutions that he had drawn up. And over the years, he faulted the bishops, one by one – Sens, Laon, Châlons, Metz, Troyes – and counselled the sisters to resist such interference, even at the risk of excommunication.45 The earliest interferences concerned the form that religious vows should take. Fourier had developed, and Rome had approved, a formula by which the professing nun vowed obedience to her superior. A number of bishops changed this so that the obedience would be directed to themselves. This incensed Fourier: “It is the superior of the woman’s monastery who should admit [candidates] to profession … without the bishop having a hand in it.”46 He threatened to cut off nuns from the congregation if they gave in.47 The problem continued to surface, here and there, for a long time, and it was settled in different ways, according to the determination of the bishop and the situation of the community. Thus, in 1686 we see a new bishop of Poitiers visiting the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault and promptly changing the order of profession: “He wanted the novice to make her profession between his hands and to him, and not to the superior as others had done since the start of the monastery.” But since Châtellerault was some distance from Poitiers and the bishop visited rarely, the nuns waited a while and then returned to their old ways.48 In many other houses, however, the order of profession that made the bishop the recipient of the nuns’ vows, and even excluded the superior altogether, became fixed and remained so throughout the Old Regime. Another right which communities guarded jealously was the right to choose their own members. They did this through their Chapter, which was a sort of senate made up of the senior nuns, or vocales. The process of admitting new members was governed by precise rules. After discussion of the applicant’s case, each member of the Chapter was given a white and a black bean, and she cast into the box whichever she felt appropriate. Applicants who did not receive a plurality of white beans were asked to leave. Every now and then, a bishop would attempt to force some protégée on a community. It was not unheard-of for the Chapter to resist his efforts. In Châtellerault in 1660, when the bishop came personally to promote a young postulant’s candidacy, the nuns turned him down flat.49 In Le Mans a century later, a similar response led the Ursulines into a fierce wrangle with the grand vicar, which cost them the sacraments for several months.50 The most important right that religious women were given by the Council of Trent was the right to elect their own superiors. The prescriptions for free and secret elections, conducted at regular intervals, was spelled out: “That all things may be done properly and without

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fraud in the election of superiors … the holy council above all things strictly commands that all the aforesaid must be chosen by secret ballot.”51 But there was a loophole: the council had also made provision for the appointment of a superior in circumstances where no qualified person could be found.52 Thus, a right which initially appeared inviolable became capable of modification, and it was not long before modifications were taking place. We can see it in the procès verbal of the assembly of notables of Alençon granting the Filles de Notre-Dame admittance to their city, in which it was stipulated that the superior was to be elected every three years, “or at such time as it pleases Monseigneur the Bishop of Sées to order.”53 Archbishop de Sourdis of Bordeaux, after approving a rule drawn up for his Ursulines which stipulated triennial elections, straightway allowed it to be contravened by keeping the same superior in place for more than twenty years. When finally, in 1645, half the community protested against what they saw as “prejudice to their rules and to the law,” their mutiny was punished severely.54 The France of Richelieu had no time for rebellious behaviour in religious women. The same disregard for the Rule was shown in Reims in 1650, when an uncanonical election was allowed to stand, despite the upset it caused to the community; and in 1659 in Angoulême, when a superior named by the bishop but rejected by the community was finally installed.55 In 1663 the Ursulines of Carcassonne were equally unsuccessful in challenging episcopal authority. According to their complaint, Bishop Nogaret de La Vallette had presided over an uncanonical election. The appel comme d’abus which the nuns then made to the Parlement of Toulouse brought down on them the wrath of both episcopal and civil authorities. Their community was pronounced to be “a school of disobedience” that was trying to throw off the submission it owed to the bishop. It is interesting to note that their opponents challenged them to bring out their original titles, which, they argued, “subjected them formally to the authority of the bishop,” and that the nuns refused because they knew this to be true.56 After two years of legal battle, the election was confirmed.57 On the other hand, the Ursulines of Nantes were successful with their appel comme d’abus, which they brought in 1656 against their bishop’s effort to install his own candidate as superior. “We wish to live and die in obedience to our rules, bull and apostolic constitutions,” they wrote, and the bishop’s candidate never took office.58 The Ursulines of Sens in 1666 and the sisters of the Congrégation of Provins several years later spoke much the same language when they criticized Archbishop Gondrin’s effort to manage their elections, “because of the right which the constitutions give us to elect our superiors.”59

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Gondrin’s plans for the monasteries of the Congrégation in his diocese led to other confrontations. In or around 1672 he authorized Alexandre Varet, his grand vicar and a prominent Jansenist, to redesign their constitutions. “There are a great number of deletions and changes to make to these constitutions in order to maintain the bishops in the rights and jurisdiction which they ought to have over these religious,” wrote Varet.60 But this was more easily said than done. The nuns put up a fight. While the superior of Nemours approved the changes, her Chapter rejected them. So did the community of Provins. “The prelate, when he was informed of this, wrote a thunderous letter to the superior … Despite all his efforts and his threats, he did not succeed in putting this famous Rule into force,” commented the annalist of the Provins house.61 The contest of wills ended only with the death of Gondrin, and Varet. These combats have attracted little attention from historians, probably because the scale on which they were conducted was so small and the women who conducted them were so uninfluential. Indeed, it is argued that the concept of “rights” did not even take hold inside women’s monasteries until Parlement put it there, somewhat mischievously, in the eighteenth century. But in fact religious women had always had an independent streak. If seventeenth-century nuns were tamer than their medieval predecessors (who sometimes resorted to physical force), it was partly because they had learned to appeal to the law. Not for nothing, as one of their historians has observed, were so many of them the daughters and sisters of men in the legal profession.62 Thanks to their knowledge of legal procedure – and, almost certainly, to the advice of their families and friends – they knew when to call in notaries and when and how to appeal to the courts or to higher authorities. The confiscation of their archives during the Revolution, which put their private dealings into the public record, has allowed us a glimpse of their habits of litigation. Collectively, these make a bulging dossier in which there appear a certain number of remonstrances and appeals against ordinaries and directors. An epic battle broke out in 1643 between the Ursulines of Périgueux and their bishop, François de La Béraudière.63 It seems that the founder of the new community, the baron de la Tour, had not lived up to the financial terms of foundation. The bishop turned on the nuns, demanding that they pay 5000 livres within three months. When the deadline expired without payment, he deprived them of the sacraments, then threatened to go himself to throw them out of their house. At this, their agent protested: “Monseigneur, your power is great, but it does not extend that far. The Ursulines are in their own home, and you will perhaps encounter some difficulties in throwing them out.” To this

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La Béraudière responded: “Well! that is to be seen. We shall find out who is the master.” When the nuns could make no headway with the bishop, they appealed past him to his metropolitan, Archbishop Henri de Sourdis of Bordeaux. The archbishop took their part and ordered an end to the excommunication. But since relations were bad between him and La Béraudière, this only made the bishop angrier. “All we had were words of thunder and lightning pronounced against us,” wrote one of the nuns. “He swore to exterminate us, to crush us … He would surely make us pay sooner or later.” Given the reality of the situation – that he was nearby and the archbishop far off – the nuns had gained nothing. His clergy, though privately sympathetic, feared him enough to stay away. The Ursulines prevailed in the end, but only because the bishop died. This was probably an exceptional case. For the most part, it seems, the newly founded convents behaved as their bishops wanted them to, and the bishops did not intrude too far into the charmed circle of the Rule. We see this mutual forbearance at work in Quebec, after Bishop Laval decided quite suddenly to modify the constitutions of the Ursuline monastery to the point where, in the sisters’ opinion, they became “more suitable for Carmelites … than for Ursulines.” The nuns were most unhappy, as their superior, Marie Guyart, wrote: The matter has already been thrashed out and our minds made up. We shall not accept unless commanded by virtue of holy obedience. Nevertheless, we do not mention it so as not to aggravate the situation … I attribute it all to the zeal of this worthy bishop, but as you know, dearest Mother, in matters of rule, experience should prevail over theory. When things are going smoothly, we should leave well enough alone, because we are sure all is well; but if we change, we cannot be certain whether things will turn out well or not.64

As it turned out, Laval did not pursue his project, and the nuns’ vow of obedience was not put to the test. Each party remained, so to speak, on its own side of a fine line, and no damage was done. A similar standoff with an equally happy ending occurred in Reims in 1684. According to the annalist of Notre-Dame, the community was faced with a newly appointed director who greatly exceeded his authority. “He [gave out] a number of rulings, which by their novelty alarmed the community, all the more so because he promised that there were more to come; and he wanted us to sign the first. But we refused steadfastly to do so, on the grounds that this was not our usage, and that we absolutely did not wish to agree to observe them.” The community’s distress was so profound and so vocal that it reached the archbishop’s ears, and he appointed another, more congenial director.

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“The pleasant surprise that we felt was so great that for a moment we forgot the respect that we owed him, clapping our hands and making a thousand joyful acclamations.”65 But in cases where the fine line was crossed and positions hardened, two principles were generally applicable: first, that an overt breach of obedience by religious women, however justified, was construed as an intolerable affront to the order of things; second, that when such a breach occurred, even in small matters, the practice of excommunicating an entire community was not considered too extreme. This remained true throughout the Old Regime, as the following examples show. In 1730 the bishop of Tréguier ordered the Ursulines of Guincamp not to admit pensionnaires over the age of sixteen. This was consistent with the earliest practice of the community, which kept most older women out of the cloister for most of the time.66 But since these older pensionnaires now provided the house with a large part of its revenue, the nuns were understandably upset and made the mistake of appealing past the bishop to Cardinal de Fleury. The penalty for their action was suspension of all the sacraments for three months.67 In 1739 the archbishop of Aix issued an ordinance laying down certain general rules for all women’s houses in his diocese. One article in the ordinance concerned the design of the grilles in monastic parlours: the archbishop wanted them narrower, to prevent the passing of notes. An Ursuline community in Aix, pointing to its unbroken record of good behaviour, protested that the change would suggest past deficiency “through the malicious interpretations of which it appeared to us to be susceptible.” The nuns made a further argument: for “our right not to be subjected to laws that we had not embraced.” The archbishop responded by forbidding his priests to confess them until the new grilles were installed. The women dug in: “We refused to confess under these conditions … [But] the storm was too strong and our consciences too alarmed by the loss of the sacraments. We finally gave in, without obligation for the future. The bars were installed on the 17 of March 1740.”68 To twentieth-century minds this whole affair seems extraordinarily petty. The community’s reaction to the ordinance seems out of proportion, the archbishop’s response even more so. But we have to consider, on the one hand, the nuns’ ingrained adherence to the letter of their Rule and their suspicion of anything new; and on the other, the sensitivity of the archbishop to anything that was seen to diminish his authority. Neither side believed that obedience could be compromised; their difference lay in how they defined that obedience.

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These incidents must be placed in context. The three congregations with which we are concerned counted close to five hundred monasteries in Old Regime France, and there is no evidence that conflicts such as those described above occurred frequently. After the early spate of problems triggered by the vexed question of enclosure and the efforts of the authorities to impose it, the religious women of France and their bishops seem to have entered a period of harmony. Crises arose here and there as Jansenist thinking began to infiltrate the convents and the authorities sought to enforce orthodoxy, but these cases appear to have been limited. More widely troublesome to the women was the desire of many episcopal authorities to redesign the communities’ rules. At the very least, this meant “novelties,” which the nuns instinctively distrusted; at the worst, there was the danger that communities could be placed in permanent tutelage, without the right to organize their own lives or choose their own superiors. This would have been consistent with Gallican thinking, and it would have given bishops or founders a neat little source of patronage. Here and there in smaller houses, the office of “perpetual superior” did replace the elective office.69 However, in general the situation remained stable. Religious women were deferential to the authorities, and the authorities maintained a benevolent distance, intervening only when outward appearances or inward community difficulties required it. But the ambiguity, the pull of loyalties, remained. In the eighteenth century it surfaced with painful effect as the Jansenist crisis pitted many communities against their lawful superiors.

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4 “Personae Non Gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus

Without the word grace, there is no Christianity. It designates the gift of God, His love offered to men, His presence in their lives and their destiny, and, finally, salvation itself. Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme1

Out of the Christian theology of grace there arises a whole understanding of the relationship of man to God. The word, from the Latin gratia, signifies something freely given, in no way earned or deserved. There is no question of worthiness in the recipient, only of goodness in the giver. Man does not earn merit, still less salvation; he is given these things by the all-powerful God. What, then, is the nature of man? How does he relate to this gift? Is he capable of doing anything to further his own salvation? Has he any free choice in the matter? If the answer is yes, then it follows that human nature has been endowed by God with power enough to will to do good and to work towards its own salvation. This was the conclusion of Pelagius in the fifth century. If the answer is no, then it follows that human nature is so weak that it is incapable in itself of doing the slightest good. It is also incapable of choosing its destiny; this is left to the preordination of God, through the giving or witholding of grace. This was the argument of Augustine, the great antagonist of Pelagius. Although Augustine’s teaching triumphed, Pelagianism never really died. It was brought to new life during the Renaissance, with the elevation of the human spirit and the human will to heights never before known in the Christian centuries. But with the coming of the Reformation, Augustinian theology in turn prevailed, and in an extreme form. In the mind of the reformers, all the efforts of man to save himself were but “works”, good for nothing; the inherent evil in his nature made him fit only for damnation. If he found salvation, it was through no virtue of his own. God saved him or damned him, according to His own inscrutable purpose.

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At the Council of Trent the Catholic Church adopted a middle ground, which affirmed the centrality of grace but insisted on the existence of free will. “The Christian could progress on the way of justification by the constant co-operation of his own will with divine grace.”2 But through the following years, as Catholics lived out their own reformation, this central doctrine came to be shaded in different ways: on the one hand, with a more optimistic vision, in the humanist tradition, of the freedom and dignity of man under God’s grace; on the other, with a new theocentrism, a new sense of the transcendance of God, which brought man and all his pretensions crashing down to the earth and lower than the earth. The Catholic Reformation in early-seventeenth-century France embraced both visions. It saw the apogee of Augustinianism. The great men and women of this “Age of Saints” practised the most rigorous austerity, both in behaviour and in prayer. For them, true religion required denial of the things of this world and a total attachment to those of the next – a self-abnegation without parallel. “May God be magnified, and may His grandeur be nurtured from all that is in me, from the substance of my being! I want no freedom in relation to God, I want to reserve nothing for myself!”3 It was a magnificent prayer, resonant with the aristocratic values of generosity and self-sacrifice. It was a prayer of the elite. The problem was that it was well above the reach of most people. At the same time but in another arena, reformed Catholicism was out to save the world. The great preaching orders, led by the Jesuits and Capuchins, were hammering out an apostolate that aimed at nothing less than the conversion of the total society. The religion these orders preached was inclusive and therefore by necessity not too rigorous: frequent confessions, frequent communions, a certain tolerance of human weakness. Their method involved huge public demonstrations: processions, plays, and theatrical rituals – religion practised by group, which ran counter to the severe individualism of the dévots.4 Whereas, for the Augustinians, the crucified Christ hung with arms only partially extended, as though to save only part of the world, the Christ whom they preached to their mass audiences hung with arms stretched wide. There was contradiction here, and it surfaced before long. The Augustinian tendency in the French Church found its extreme expression in Cornelius Jansen’s work, the Augustinus, published in 1640. This book became the lightning rod for a fatal quarrel. The Jesuits fell on it immediately, and Rome was persuaded to condemn it – or rather, parts of it – in the bull Cum occasione, in 1653. But the effect of the condemnation was uncertain, since the supporters of Jansen insisted that what was being condemned was not what he had taught. The fight

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continued, with both Rome and Paris swinging between tolerance and severity. The equivocation, according to Jean Delumeau, “was heavy with conflict.”5 A hundred years later the Jansenist quarrel was still unresolved, and French men and women on both sides of the fight still believed with all their hearts in the justice and orthodoxy of their own cause. The damage would not have been so great if the quarrel had been contained in the theological arena. But the seventeenth century was a time when religion and politics were intermixed to the point of total fusion, when vicious power struggles were conducted under the cloak of theology, but also when true theological differences led to vicious power struggles. The eighteenth century took its religion more calmly, yet it raised the Jansenist quarrel to unprecedented levels. This was because politics sustained and reinvigorated the old debate. The extreme Augustinians, those who were given the name of Jansenists, were always the minority party, and over the long run they were no match for their opponents. They were generally the sentimental favourites in regions where anti-Jesuit feeling tended to run high: Paris and the Paris basin, the Vexin, Champagne, Lorraine and Normandy, and part of Provence.6 In regions of France where Jesuit influence was strong, Jansenists never gained a foothold. Like the Huguenots of the sixteenth century, they were powerful enough to make an impact but never powerful enough to gain the upper hand. However, they had their own strengths. They enjoyed huge support among certain religious orders. They had friends in high places, including a number of bishops, and they also benefited from the forbearance of many other bishops who preferred a peaceful existence to struggling with such difficult subjects. As time went on, they could count more and more on the sympathy of parlementarians who, as Gallicans, sympathized with anyone who defied the ultramontanism of the Jesuits. And there were numerous other Frenchmen who felt that any enemy of the Jesuits was a friend of theirs. So much did Jansenism identify with anti-Jesuitism that some people thought there was nothing to it beyond that. “Jansenists are [simply] fervent Catholics who don’t like the Jesuits,” wrote Cardinal Bona. But they were much more than that. Jansenism harmonized with the spirituality that had been born of the Catholic Reformation. It was indeed “simply an extreme expression” of this Reformation,7 and as such it struck a deep chord among pious French men and women. Thus, looking at the wrangle as it spilled into the early eighteenth century, we can see a number of features. It was theological; questions of divine grace and human response were still hotly debated. It had powerful moral implications; true Jansenists were not prepared to

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compromise with the world, to sanction dancing, theatre going, and other forms of “laxity.” It was internal, in that both sides claimed communion with the Catholic Church. It was political, in that at a time when church and state were intimately connected, various political institutions had a stake in its outcome. It was uneven, but not sufficiently for it to be finished off easily. In the early 1700s Jansenism seemed to be alive and well and deeply embedded, at least among the religious elites in many major centres. And then in 1713 came Unigenitus. This papal bull, or constitution, has been described as “a political and religious earthquake.”8 It caused upheaval in the religious landscape of France by cutting the ground from under the Augustinians. At the same time it threw the debate into the public domain. It introduced a sort of violence into the French Church which greatly sapped its strength and morale at a time when both were badly needed. It was wrung from the pope by an aging king who had decided that the Jansenist “party” was a threat to the stability of his kingdom. The immediate occasion was the capture of the correspondence of the Jansenist theologian Pasquier Quesnel, which revealed a network of Jansenist sympathizers in Paris and Rome. Louis XIV saw conspiracy, and he imagined that by targeting the individual he could bring down the entire movement. Hence the drive to condemn Quesnel’s work, Moral Reflections on the New Testament. This very limited intervention was seen as a way of “lancing the boil” of heresy.9 However, once underway, the papal bull grew prodigiously. Instead of the anticipated thirty-three propositions, the Roman commission to whom it was entrusted was persuaded by Versailles to condemn a hundred and one, including a number that appeared even to nonJansenists to be perfectly orthodox.10 “The Bull effectively condemned a whole conception of Christianity which was widespread in France,”11 and it did so in the most virulent language. Doctrines that were held by respectable French clergymen to have come straight from Saint Augustine were now declared to be blasphemous and heretical, and the faithful were adjured to stamp them out, by force if necessary.12 In other words, the bull expanded the definition of Jansenism and then called for its ruthless extirpation. Furthermore, Gallicans viewed it as “a pontifical coup d’état.”13 The papacy’s claim to jurisdiction over the French Church was asserted in a way that was bound to offend their sensibilities. Louis had promised Rome that the bull would be received without contest by the French Church, but this did not happen. Religious orders, faculties of theology, the parlements, officers of the Crown – all sorts of people protested, only to draw upon themselves the king’s

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wrath.14 The bishops were profoundly disturbed. A falling-out occurred among them that foreshadowed the serious divisions to come. Some bishops refused to publish the bull as it stood. Later, after Louis’ death, they became the leaders of the appellant movement, which sought to appeal against the bull to a general council of the Church. Others demanded total and immediate submission to the bull in all its particulars. They became known as constitutionnaires – the hawks, if you will, of the eighteenth-century Church. Another group decided that although the bull was bad, disobedience to it would be worse. The future Cardinal de Fleury was one of these; another was the future archbishop of Paris, Charles Gaspard de Vintimille, who called the quarrel over the bull “a stupid, sad affair”15 but was ready to prosecute rebels nonetheless. These three groups spent the next few years struggling to control the agenda, variously assisted by shifts in power in both Paris and Rome. However, with Fleury’s rise to power in 1726 and the submission and death in 1729 of the leader of the appellants, Archbishop de Noailles of Paris, the situation stabilized. “Jansenism became the object of an unremitting repression which fell upon all the strongholds of the party: the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the colleges, the lower clergy, the orders and religious congregations.”16 After Fleury had neutralized the focal points of Jansenism – institutions such as the Sorbonne, and the central councils of the principal religious orders of men – he embarked on a careful stalking operation, “a long campaign of kidnappings, exiles, and imprisonments,”17 to mop up individual Jansenists. His favoured weapon was the lettre de cachet.* It is reckoned that 40,000 lettres de cachet were issued during his seventeen years in power.18 Of these, a sizable share went to Jansenists. But in every case the person targeted – most often a member of the clergy – was first given the choice of accepting the bull and avoiding punishment; if he or she refused, the sentence might still be reversed if he or she later recanted. It was a very personalized form of persecution. Thousands of individual consciences were wrenched from their places of rest as the choice between obedience and conviction fell upon them. Yet even with all the power of the Crown engaged, it took more than forty years to eliminate Jansenism as a force in the Gallican Church. The main reason for this was that France was divided into 130 dioceses, and in each diocese the bishop presided as a virtual autocrat where matters of faith and morals were concerned. Over the years, successions of bishops had fashioned their dioceses according in their own particular image, so that by 1700 some dioceses were solidly proJansenist and others solidly anti-Jansenist.19 In the years after Unigenitus, each bishop acted as the gatekeeper of his own diocese; so intro-

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duction of the bull depended on his cooperation. The division of opinion among bishops now became critical. Some accepted the bull with enthusiasm, some prevaricated and asked for further explanations, while others rejected it outright.20 There was little that anybody could do about this. When a bishop remained defiant, the Crown had learned by experience to wait patiently until death removed the obstacle. Thus, the pro-Jansenist dioceses crumbled only as old Jansenist bishops died and constitutionnaires were named to succeed them. With every such changing of the guard, there was a flight of Jansenist clergy to other, safer places until finally, with the death of Bishop de Caylus of Auxerre in 1754, the last bastion of Jansenism lay open to the action of the Crown.

ja ns én is me au fé m i n i n It was in these circumstances that a number of nuns of Old Regime France had to make painful choices. These women were Jansenist by the new definition, but their Jansenism often had ancient roots. They, their families, and their religious communities were natives of dioceses that had been Augustinian for generations. What other people called Jansenism was, for them, the true Catholicism. With others of the same persuasion, they were ready to cry, “We combat those who would take from us the heritage of our fathers.”21 Many historians of Jansenism have remarked on the loyal support it enjoyed in convents even after it faded from the wider scene.22 This should be no surprise, given the character of life in a religious community. The austere message of Jansenism must have appealed to many religious women. “Salvation has to cost, it has to cost everything,” wrote Quesnel.23 How consoling a thought to women who felt that they had given so much, compared with most other people! It challenged them to stay the course, no matter what or who stood in their way. In the cloister’s lexicon of virtues, fidelity to the past took a high place. “Novelty” was always a bad word, smacking of heresy. One has only to know what one community of nuns or another considered a novelty to know what they considered heretical. They were convinced that their rules and customs were right and that as long as they adhered to them, they could not go wrong. Cardinal de Fleury himself understood this well. “Religious women are a special breed,” he wrote. “They will submit to the powers that be only in matters that do not offend their consciences; and one of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form. They are inexorable in this respect.”24 The community and its history provided the standards by which they lived. How could they betray what

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their predecessors had professed? Jansenist or non-Jansenist, they stood by the teachings and practices of their anciennes mères. One Jansenist nun, defending her beliefs, put it thus: “[These are the truths] with which we have been nourished since our childhood, and which have become familiar to us through the use we have made of them, and still make every day, in the exercise of our profession.”25 Such loyalty to the past was like a rock, upon which Unigenitus came crashing down with devastating effect. The bull had cast the issues in absolute terms. The question now became one of obedience. The pope had spoken, and the Crown had thrown its full authority behind the bull. But where did true obedience lie for women whose bishops persisted in opposing Rome and Versailles? In a letter to the religious women of his diocese, the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, Gaston de Noailles – soon to be an appellant – made it quite clear: I cannot dispense myself from addressing my two instructions to you, so that you may learn from the mouth of your pastor, how far you must carry your respect for Our Lord the Pope, and for his decrees, and so that you may know to whom you should turn. It is in my person that you must respect the authority of Jesus Christ; when you hear me you are hearing Him. I hope that with the help of His grace, I shall never teach you any doctrine contrary to that which He has taught His Church, and which has come to us through the channels of Holy Scripture and Tradition. It is in this confidence that I say to you, with Saint Paul: If anyone offers you with a gospel different from that which I preach, even though it be an angel from Heaven, say to him anathema, and do not listen to him.26

But this instruction did not really solve the nuns’ basic difficulty. Only too soon, this appellant bishop was going to disappear, and a new bishop would preach a radically different gospel. He would demand of his flock not just a change in discipline but a change in belief. In imposing his own authority on them, he would require them to say anathema to that of his predecessor. How, then, were the nuns to respond? Many communities were split along both doctrinal and temperamental lines, the conscientious objectors against the true believers, together with their allies, the more pragmatic souls whose priority was survival – for themselves and their communities. Where the former had their way and their defiance of authority became too blatant, authority had to act, and in many of its punitive measures it ignored or bypassed community rules. Often at this stage nuns who had hitherto not been involved would flail out in all directions, appealing to Parlement and other authorities against the violation of their constitutions. The response was predictable: more

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draconian punishments, sometimes targeting individuals, sometimes whole communities. Monasteries that were dragged into these escalations faced the danger of a further misery: internal breakdown, as the more politic nuns were forced to pay the price for the indiscretions of the more intrepid; “frightful division,” in which the poor women became “like harpies, one group against the other.”27 This was the fate that awaited many religious houses as Cardinal de Fleury’s repression heated up. Their obscurity initially gave them protection. But in the 1730s, as new bishops were installed, they were visited and their sympathies were laid bare. They were told that they must submit to the bull at once, in writing. If they chose to disobey, they knew they must accept the consequences. Unlike the male clergy, they could not run or hide; their obligation of stability made them easy targets for anti-Jansenist discipline. No diocese provides a better illustration of this dilemma than the Archdiocese of Sens. It had been a Jansenist stronghold since the 1640s, when its archbishop, Gondrin, had entered into a power struggle with the local Jesuits.28 By the time of his death in 1674, Jansenism was solidly implanted in the archdiocese. None of his successors had the will to confront it until, in 1731, Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy was installed. Languet had made his name as the most ardent of constitutionnaires, and it was for this reason that Fleury gave him the assignment of “cleaning up” Sens. Languet knew that his task would not be easy. “In general I cannot count on a quarter of the priests and the houses of nuns in my diocese,” he wrote to Fleury. “That’s the result of my predecessor’s forbearance, while the grand vicars filled all the posts with persons of their persuasion … If I were not supported by confidence in God and in the goodness of your Excellency, I should despair of succeeding in this diocese.”29 Fleury did not let him down. A steady rain of lettres de cachet descended, and Jansenist priests and educators began to disappear – into exile or prison. Within a few months of entering his diocese, Languet started visiting the women’s convents. He had a mixed reception. While some of them were docile, others were in a state of mutiny. Two issues were causing them distress. First, they were required, like the rest of the clergy, to sign a formulary submitting to Unigenitus in all its particulars; this involved renouncing beliefs in which they had been raised. Second, nuns who taught school were ordered to put away their old catechisms, which dated from Gondrin’s time, and teach their students only from the new catechism that Languet had drawn up. A recent study of this catechism tells us that while it introduced some doctrinal “innovations,” its most striking break with tradition

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came in its ecclesiology. Languet himself admitted that he was not a dedicated theologian.30 Like many other bishops in the eighteenth century, he was more interested in discipline. He had a vision of the Church as an institution in which all authority resided in the pope and the bishops, and in which the lower clergy had no voice at all.31 This was bound to offend the many priests who mixed their Jansenism with a good dose of what is known as Richerism: the theory that, as successors of the seventy-two disciples, the ordinary priesthood had an important voice in the running of the Church. The catechism raised a storm of protest. A brochure was circulated widely in the diocese, warning schoolteachers to reject it, even at the risk of punishment: “There is no other course to take but to walk straight to the truth of the Gospel and to be prepared to suffer persecution.”32 For many nuns this was a call to action, to martyrdom if need be, for the purity of the faith. For Languet it was a provocation that could not be ignored. Wherever he went, the issue of the catechism came up. He gave away copies of it, he pressured the superiors to enforce its use, and he questioned individual nuns about it. He took careful notes of his interviews – for future use if he should be forced to separate the sheep from the goats. The women’s responses were often audacious in the extreme, considering the power he exercised over them. In one house, “Sister SaintAugustine and several others told him that the new catechism went against their conscience and that they would never accept it; Sister Misericorde judged impertinently that the catechism is obscure and confused.”33 In another house, a sister argued that “she could not in conscience teach the new catechism; that she would keep to the old one, which had been in use for eighty years and had been approved by four archbishops.”34 In another house, a sister remonstrated that “the old catechism, that of Monseigneur de Gondrin, was orthodox, and she did not wish to change it.”35 She had a point. How could a catechism be orthodox for eighty years and then, suddenly, unorthodox? But it was a point that Languet refused to accept. For him, it was a question of discipline. The sisters must be reduced to obedience. But where was obedience to be found? For Languet the answer was simple: in submission to the authority of the Church – in the form of himself. He had written that “the faithful ought to be more docile to what the holy ministry teaches them, than to an angel from heaven.”36 This was exactly what other bishops were saying at the same time. Each in his own diocese claimed to be speaking with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.37 But the problem was that they were saying different things. This did not escape the attention of the sisters – especially those who were reading Jansenist books and journals.

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Bombarded by instructions from both sides, the nuns began to exercise their own judgment. One woman, on being asked what she thought of the famous Jansenist deacon François de Pâris, on whose grave miracles were allegedly taking place, answered that she thought him a saint. To Languet’s objection that Pâris had died without submitting to the bull and therefore outside the Church, she responded, “The [bull] is not a rule of faith; people who do not accept it are not cut off from the Church.” The archbishop is said to have replied in anger, “Rule of faith or rule of the Church or rule of discipline, you have to submit to it!”38 To another argumentative woman he exclaimed, “You are damning yourself, my child! there is no salvation without obedience; it is so essential that even if I gave an unjust order, you would not be dispensed from obeying me; the responsibility would be mine; that is the certitude of the faithful!” To which she replied, “Monseigneur, with your permission, what you have said goes against the gospel, which tells us that whoever follows a blind leader will also fall into the ditch.”39 Over and over again, Languet found himself disputing with women. He came away complaining “that they thought themselves to be more learned than he, and that they wished, apparently, to teach him his catechism and reform his theology!”40 This accusation was fraught with menace. Women, especially nuns, had no business being learned. This was not just Languet’s opinion; it was part of the religious culture, and rare indeed was the churchman who would contradict it. However, the doctrinal disarray in the Church left an opening for individual judgment – even that of women. Bishops on both sides of the quarrel had no hesitation in striking down such mutiny. Communities of nuns who argued too much ran the risk of being suppressed, for the simple reason that “they thought themselves to be learned.”41 This harshness was not unusual for the times. Languet, a careful, painstaking man, was as ready to use persuasion as punishment to gain his ascendancy. Submissive houses experienced his favour and protection, and those that began by kicking against the goad but later complied found him forgiving. He was no more ruthless than his contemporary Caylus, the Jansenist bishop of Auxerre, who also punished communities that did not conform to his doctrinal demands;42 or Jacques-Marie de Condorcet, Caylus’s successor, who reversed everything and “put the diocese to fire and blood.”43 Given the temper of the times and the ferment developing amongst both clergy and laity, no one in authority could countenance insubordination in the rank and file. But though control was neat and tidy in principle, its practice was sometimes messy, as Languet found in his dealings with the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours.

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On visiting the convent in 1732, the archbishop found fifty-one women, of whom, according to his notes, “barely a dozen are truly submissive.”44 In his opinion, one of the chief troublemakers was the mistress of novices; he deposed her outright, and when certain nuns protested, he warned that he had the right “to make a stick of wood into the mistress of novices” if he so wished.45 To eliminate the contamination that came from other sources, “the parlours and the communications with Paris,” he forbade the community to read any literature coming in from outside. But on his return a year later, he discovered that his orders had been ignored. “They read books in defiance of obedience … they receive letters from outside,” he wrote.46 Worse, twenty-five nuns were refusing to confess to the new confessors and had therefore failed to perform their Easter duties. So he now took sterner action. “He spared those who had given him some hope that they would return to their duty, but as for the fifteen who had gone to excess, he did not feel that he could let their stubbornness and insolence go unpunished … He deprived them of all voice … in the Chapters.”47 There was more than the discipline of individuals on Languet’s mind now. The election for superior was approaching, and he wanted a docile Chapter in order to ensure the re-election of the right superior. But when he arrived to preside over the election, eleven more nuns refused to take part, protesting what they claimed was the uncanonical exclusion of their sisters. This reduced the Chapter to less than the required quorum. Languet proceeded with the election anyway, but since only a minority of the Chapter took part, the rebels had cause to call the proceedings null and void. They appealed to Parlement, to the great scandal and titillation of the people of Nemours.48 Only the intervention of Fleury to remove the case from Parlement’s competence saved the archbishop from embarrassment. In 1734, lettres de cachet exiled the eight most intransigent nuns to Melun.49 Gradually the rebellion at Nemours subsided, though a hardy remnant continued to regard the new superior as an intruder and to hail their absent companions as true heroines. Similar discipline was exercised elsewhere. In both Étampes and Joigny, hand-picked superiors were forced on the communities; when some nuns protested to Cardinal de Fleury that their constitutions were being flouted, they were exiled.50 The Ursulines of Sens were deprived of the sacraments and also of the pension recently promised them by the Commission des secours. To their protests that “you would not wish to deprive your children of their bread,” Languet answered, “Since you have refused to receive the bread of the Word from my hands, I cannot undertake to furnish you with material bread.”51 The Ursulines of Melun received a lettre de cachet forbidding them to

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receive pensionnaires, their chief source of income. Stripped of their financial security, both these houses would later disappear. The confrontations that took place in Sens had their counterparts in other parts of the country. The armory of punishments available to Languet and other constitutionnaire bishops was large and versatile. The government, by its lettres de cachet, enabled these bishops to isolate communities from the outside world, forbidding visits, even by families. It allowed them to banish as many nuns as they wished to confinement in other convents at the king’s pleasure. It allowed them to send away novices and pensionnaires, thus removing the communities’ main sources of income. As well, the bishops in their own right had the power to condemn women to loss of all status within the community, to subject them to a diet of bread and water, and to confine them in their cells without books or the conversation of others. They could deprive individuals or whole communities of the mass and the sacraments, even the sacrament of the dying.52 It is difficult to imagine what these punishments meant to them, but the women had to accept them or submit. Cases were reported in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques of whole communities begging on bended knee not to be deprived of the sacraments while at the same time refusing to sign the formulary. But in taking action the bishops were within their rights, and the women knew it. There was more resistance when the bishops intervened in the communities’ procedures, especially in the election of superiors and the choice of confessors. Here the nuns were able to appeal to civil authority on the grounds that their rules were being violated.53 For many years the Crown continued to support the constitutionnaires and to reject such appeals, but eventually, as Parlement became more involved in the Jansenist quarrel, the dissident women began to be heard. A parlementary remonstrance of 1753 marked a turning point: Numberless clergymen have been snatched from their benefices and their families, and dispersed in the far corners of the realm … Others have been led into prisons, where they languish still … What a distressing sight for religion! the dispersal of an infinite number of religious women, snatched from those sanctuaries which they had vowed to God never to leave … We entreat you, Sire, not to allow yourself to be distracted as to the true source of so many ills: their origin lies in the infinite number of orders extracted by stealth from your piety. The only way to stop this in its tracks is no longer to abandon your authority to the hands of the ecclesiastics who abuse it.54

The constitutionnaires were facing heavy artillery now. Many of the more extreme bishops endured exile and humiliation at the hands of a

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Parlement riding high.55 Because it furthered their own strategies, the men of the law espoused the cause of the Jansenist nuns. Where as their seventeenth-century predecessors had upheld the authority of the bishops, they were now only too glad to support the rights of the women. In 1774 the King’s Council heard an appeal from the Ursulines of Le Mans, against what they alleged was an uncanonical election. “The rules of election have never been disobeyed in the house before,” they claimed.56 But on election day the grand vicar had arrived with a royal order, stating that no election was to take place and that the previous superior was to continue and to choose her own councillors. This order, the nuns argued, was “a reversal of the rights, the rules and the constitutions of the community.” The step was taken, according to them, in revenge for the Chapter’s refusal to admit the grand vicar’s niece to the novitiate. But the fundamental reason for his action was the community’s Jansenist bent, which the grand vicar was determined to reverse. When the nuns refused to accept the superior, he placed them under anathema for three years. Their protest to the bishop of Le Mans elicited the answer that, as their superior, he had every right to change their Rule.57 The King’s Council thought otherwise. It considered the conduct of the grand vicar to be “so revolting, that the Ursulines may with confidence lay their complaints at the feet of the Throne.” Previous kings, it argued, had invited the Ursulines to establish in France and had undertaken to protect their Rule, which included the right of electing their superiors. Anyone who interfered with this right should be subject to serious penalties, including excommunication and loss of benefices. As for the nuns, they were to be reinstated in their rights – in the defence of which, according to the council, they were “also defending the rights of their fellow citizens.” In their own small way, and certainly without intending it, the Ursulines of Le Mans had become champions of the Rights of Man! But the Jansenist cause was sinking fast as a result of the death and defection of its members and the exhaustion of the public. Equally, the strong anti-Jansenist movement was fading. The constitutionnaires were followed by more conciliatory men. Their passing allowed the turmoil in the French Church to subside. However, the nuns who had been involved had suffered serious damage. Some communities had simply disappeared, ordered out of existence by their bishops, starved of revenues and new recruits by lettres de cachet, or destroyed by internal dissension. Others survived, but only barely – like the Ursuline house in Beauvais, which had numbered eighty nuns when it appealed against the bull in 1718 but had

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only three or four when it emerged in 1773 from a thirty-year interdiction;58 or the Ursuline house in Auxerre, punished for twenty-two years for the opposite reason (because it was anti-Jansenist), and saved just in time by the death of Bishop de Caylus.59 Other communities patched up their internal differences as best they could. But sometimes, within their walls, there remained for years to come the lonely prisoners of conscience, the women who refused to submit. By their very presence they must have thrown a shadow over the lives of their companions. Their deaths without the sacraments were sad and scandalous, as we can see in the case of a nun in Dax, the only persevering member of a once-Jansenist community: “Around midnight, barely six hours after the woman had died, four men arrived at the convent. Only two nuns appeared to open the door for them. They entered the dead woman’s cell, picked her up and went to bury her at the end of the church. Two masons closed the grave, swept the place with care, and covered the tomb with a great paving stone, so that there would be no trace of her.”60 The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques reporting this story ended by remarking that with her death (in 1743, after six years of resistance), the bishop achieved a community totally subject to his wishes. The whole tragic Jansenist quarrel provides the historian of religious women with a valuable insight into the dogged and ferocious fight which these women were prepared to put up when their beliefs and practices were threatened. It was Languet who said of them: “These women are so opinionated, that one could burn them alive without changing their minds.”61 Obviously no compliment was intended; authority could see no virtue in such behaviour among those who were born to obey. But sixty years later it was a different story, as the generation of 1789 put up an equally stubborn, equally hopeless resistance to the new regime. “These beguines covet the martyr’s crown,” one revolutionary wrote in disgust.62 Across the country, religious communities, whether they had once been pro-Jansenist or not, rallied to their bishops and followed their commands. The same conservatism and adherence to “the old ways” that had put so many of them at odds with their Church in the 1730s now gave them entitlement to its highest praise.

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5 The Decline of the Monasteries

th e h i s tor ic al d e bat e The history of the Catholic Church in France has its highs and lows, and the eighteenth century has long been considered one of the lows. Bracketed between the “sacred” seventeenth and the more spiritually fraught nineteenth, it is remembered for its Jansenism, its Josephism, the expulsion of the Jesuits, Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme, and a goodhearted king’s protest that the archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God. It has traditionally been described as a time of religious mediocrity. “Christian life in the eighteenth century does not give an impression of heroism, or even of fervour,” writes L.J. Rogier. “By its well-groomed appearance, the devout life of the eighteenth century makes us think of the gardens of Le Nôtre, emanating order, correction, bourgeois sufficiency … a devotion made up of the juste milieu and of little obligations. It is hardly surprising that ardent souls were anxious to flee from it.”1 Many historians have observed that religion no longer had a hold on the government, the ruling classes, or the court aristocracy. “Belief in God became a source of ridicule, from which one took care to protect oneself.”2 Catholicism had no brilliant defenders to match wits with its detractors. “It was in the enemy camp that the freshness of novelty, the intellectual activity, the creative power, shone out.”3 “The faith of the philosophers was new and burning … The faith of Catholicism … was more casually held, as though an inherited possession.”4 Even within the Church, among its leaders, a mutant version of the faith, laced with

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utilitarianism and rationalism, was beginning to make itself felt. God Himself was the first to change. “He was, more and more, the supreme Sovereign, useful to all the ideologies of order.”5 This change was conveyed to the faithful by way of newly minted catechisms: “Evangelical ferment was transformed into accountability; fear of damnation was dissolved into a hierarchy of submissions to the family, the king, the Church, and God.”6 This is a picture of a faith drying up. It is made all the more poignant by the comparisons that are often drawn with what had gone before: the Age of Saints, the heroic age of the Catholic Reformation. However, in recent years counterarguments have begun to appear. The light of the first period was not altogether light, the dark of the second not altogether dark: “Today we no longer oppose a seventeenth-century bloc, organic and Christian, to an eighteenth century, critical and libertine.”7 It is pointed out that past historians have been so taken up with the study of elite spiritualities that they failed to consider their actual diffusion.8 The great men and women of the seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation lived in a world where the general practice of religion was miserably deficient and there was deep-rooted resistance to their message. The fervour of their own faith did not soon penetrate this resistance. Only after their time was Tridentine Christianity really taken to the people: “It was at the moment of the decline of the mystics that France was converted.”9 So the Catholicism of eighteenth-century France has been revised by some historians to be much more than just “the autumn of the Catholic Reformation.” Jean de Viguerie writes: “To the heritage of the preceding century it added much of its own; and above all, it excelled in distributing its goods, so as to make them accessible to the greatest number.”10 Observance was up, the liturgy was better performed and better understood, and religious books were being read in huge numbers. The eighteenth century was the age of the bon curé, respected for his decorum and his devotion to his parish. However, the same historian points out that it was characteristic of the age that this “distribution of goods” found little favour among the elites: “Literature, philosophy, the theatre, the gazettes, the salons, the academies – all that constituted the world of high intellect or public opinion either was unaware of it or kept quiet on the subject.”11 Absorbed and entranced by their brave new world, and elitist to the core, they saw little that was admirable in the strengthening of religious observance among ordinary people. And to a large extent, by their very brilliance they dazzled generations of historians to come and held them in their thrall. Even historians who disliked the Enlightenment felt constrained to fight it on its own high ground.

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Given this focus, earlier generations of church historians had good reason to feel defensive. Whether it was in the political field, the spiritual, the intellectual, or the institutional, the Gallican Church of the eighteenth century seemed always to be fighting a rearguard action. If there was progress at the grassroots, what did it matter? As long as the attention of historians remained fixed on the upper echelons of society, the picture remained bleak. Only recently has the lowlier dimension been explored. “Both more modest in their chosen terrain and more ambitious in their goals, recent works, growing in numbers year by year, seek to reach into the effective religious life of [ordinary people].”12 As their conclusions become known, the dark picture begins to brighten. The same question of focus can be posed with respect to the history of Old Regime monasticism. One of the truisms of Catholic history is that the health of the Church can be measured by the health of its monasteries. “The life of religious communities,” writes Evenett, “has always been so intimately bound up with the bene esse of Catholicism that their condition at any given historical moment is an almost infallible guide to the condition of the Church as a whole.”13 If this is true, it matters a great deal which monasteries we choose to examine. Always in the forefront of historical memory are the 750 male abbeys of France and the 250 female, many of them with large revenues and idle populations, “too rich to be faithful to their Rule,” as one cahier de doléances put it.14 This image stuck like a bone in the throats of contemporaries – and has stuck in historians’ throats ever since. In the intellectual sphere, the verdict on monasticism is mixed but generally negative: the more erudite among the regulars are seen to have thrown themselves into the new thinking, to the point of becoming éclairés themselves,15 while others forsook both learning and observance to become, in words taken from the report of the General Chapter of one order, “altogether incapable and without talent, without [good] dispositions and sometimes without morals.”16 Institutionally, there is no doubt about it: “The century of Enlightenment appears as a period of continuous and irremediable decline.”17 The figures are there to prove it: in 1768 there were some 25,000 regulars living in 2966 communities.18 Their numbers – ten or eleven men to a house on average – were already low, even before the Commission des réguliers moved in and roughed them up. In the following twenty years their numbers dropped even further, to 17,000. “Among the regulars,” says one historian, “it was not just a decline, it was a collapse.”19 Wealth had little to do with it: the rich institutions were as stricken as the poor.20

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If the problem was not one of poverty, it had to be one of morale. The great days of monastic observance were long gone.21 Eighteenthcentury monks are seen to have been the heirs to a number of longstanding moral disabilities: too much wealth and not enough to do; a loss of regularity and consequently a serious questioning of their profession. Hence their low numbers, which in the 1770s dropped even more precipitously. After years of compromise, we are told, “the existing institutions produced relatively few men or women of value.”22 “Men or women” – with this remark we stumble into a question of historical method. Suddenly, in a discussion about men and their problems, women are included. What this reminds us is that general church histories have been overwhelmingly male histories. Until recently, historians have been ready to subsume religious women under the general heading of “monastics,” with only a brief acknowledgment of their differences.23 Women, it is known, experienced a decline in numbers of about one-third between 1730 and 1790 – a decline, it is said, “quite as flagrant as, and parallel to, that of the regulars.”24 In what way was the decline parallel? And does this mean that their problems also paralleled those of regulars? Given a certain similarity of effect, must we assume a similarity of cause? No serious historian accuses eighteenth-century nuns, en masse, of irregular behaviour. But some suggest that there was a loss of purpose, a smothering of vocations in a soft and meaningless lifestyle: “Within their cloister, most nuns lived a decorous and pleasant life. With their servants, their pets, their pastimes and their visitors, they partook easily of that sweetness of life that the nostalgic Maurice de Talleyrand remembered as reserved to the generation fortunate enough to have matured before 1789.”25 For the nuns and, better still, the noble canonesses of the high aristocracy, there was indeed a good life amid splendid surroundings. “Their state was so agreeable and so fine that they were little disposed to change it for another,” wrote a woman who had known it.26 For the less noble but still very much upper-class clientele, there were other convents that were little more than “wellfurnished hotels and respectable retreats.”27 But to focus on these is to go back into that elitist concentration that so distorts church history. “Most nuns” did not live like that. Most nuns of the eighteenth century were lucky if they could maintain a standard of life suitable to their station. They were bedevilled by poverty, as the Abbé Montesquiou was to point out to the National Assembly in 1790. And it was these poor nuns – respectably poor, but poor nonetheless, and not the rich nuns in their abbeys – who by their numbers and distribution had the closest connection to French society.

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Nor was it just their wealth, or lack of it, that differentiated religious women from religious men. There was a significant difference in mindset. Most female communities (with the exception of some of the more prestigious houses) operated on a relatively nonpolitical, nonintellectual level. They laid no claim to erudition or even to breadth of interest.28 Girded by their walls, regulated by their usages, and closed away from the intellectual currents that swirled around their male counterparts, they largely escaped the angst that afflicted so many monks. They remained firmly anchored in that great troop of dévotes who were such a distinctive part of the late-eighteenth-century Church.29 If they had problems of morale, these were unlikely to be caused by the action of the Enlightenment. Another difference lay in their numbers. High to the point of being “plethoric” at the beginning of the century, their numbers remained, even after the decline, two or three times higher per community than those of their male counterparts.30 This helps to explain the great difference in wealth. As rentiers they had experienced an unparalleled financial collapse at the time of the Law Crash – not necessarily because they lost more revenue than the men but because they had many more mouths to feed. The Commission des secours was established not to restore regularity to the female communities but to save them from destitution. Finally, the timing of their numerical decline is important. Whereas the great plunge in the male religious population took place in the 1770s and early 1780s, the most serious drop in the female religious population took place earlier – and, it can be argued, for different reasons.

the teaching nuns To illustrate all these arguments, I offer the experience of my own subjects, the cloistered teaching nuns. They were, by intention at least, typical eighteenth-century dévotes. Following the direction laid out by their rules, they avoided the high ground of heroic religious practice and specialized in the unglamorous profession of teaching. From the beginning, their congregations frowned upon mysticism, extreme austerities, and voies extraordinaires – a practical view of life that accorded well with the eighteenth-century mentality. These nuns had adopted for themselves the great virtue of “littleness.” In the face of the intellectual challenges presented to them by their religion, they had become, if anything, more demure than before. This lowering of their sights kept them safe from the intellectual temptations that assailed their male counterparts.

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They were more in tune with the eighteenth-century ethos than the purely contemplative nuns were, because they served a useful social purpose. It has been noted that one of the most striking signs of Catholicism’s success was “the remarkable progress, throughout the whole century, in the alphabetization of girls.”31 A good part of the credit for this must go to the cloistered nuns. Even as other institutions opened their classroom doors, the teaching monasteries continued to offer, in general, the best education available to girls32 – and in many smaller towns the only education for them. Their social usefulness did not, however, preserve them from the financial disasters of 1720. In the records of the Commission des secours there are as many cases of desperate teaching convents as of others. We have to visualize their situation. Their communities were among the largest in the country,33 but their financial losses were as drastic as any.34 While the commission gave them credit for their “utility” and put many of them on the dole, it did not hesitate to close others. The Ursulines alone lost about one-tenth of their houses.35 Even for the communities that it decided to sustain, the relief the commission meted out was both cautious and conditional. The commissioners were driven by two considerations: first, that there was no fund in existence sufficient to restore the women to their previous financial standing; second, that there were too many convents anyway, “to the point where they destroy each other,”36 so this was an opportunity to rectify the situation. Communities desperate enough to lay their problems bare to the commission found themselves forced to take its medicine: a reduction in their numbers until these fitted their straitened financial circumstances. The reduction was achieved by the dispatch of lettres de cachet banning the reception of novices until further notice. No one has yet counted the number of houses actually placed under the ban. But one example may set the scene. For the archdiocese of Bourges, the commission’s records show six teaching houses (holding in the 1720s about 55 nuns each!) all recommended for reduction, from a total of 334 women to 229, while a further two small houses were directed to unite.37 These recommendations conformed to the commission’s usual practice. Across the board, the reduction it ordered came to about one-third. Once a community’s numbers had fallen to the desired level, a second lettre de cachet would arrive, lifting the ban. Or in the case of doomed houses, it would not arrive at all. There was no way for an individual house to predict what its end would be. The prescription was painful and debilitating. But it worked. At the end of the Old Regime the female religious population

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was more or less the size that had been ordered in the 1730s; and the female communities had, more or less, balanced their books. This makes for a different scenario, in which the decline in the number of religious women was mandated, rather than being spontaneous. In other words, inadequacies within communities and the public’s dissatisfaction with the female monastic institution as a whole were not major factors, at least not to begin with. More important were the reductions and closures which the government forced on the congregations. These made their problems different in nature from those of the male religious orders. If this scenario is to stand, it is by reason of the timing of the decline. According to an authoritative general history of the Church, the decade 1730–40 was the time during which religious congregations – male and female – were at their apogee.38 One historian of religious women adheres to this timing, drawing the obvious conclusion that “the financial turbulences of the Regency did not constitute a sharp turning point in the history of [religious] houses.” He argues that the decline in their populations was a phenomenon of the later years of the century – in other words, a time when they were reasonably free of financial problems. This would point to some other malaise: a dryingup of the religious life within or a loss of support from the society without. The problem with his argument is that while his figures confirm the decline, they do not establish when in the century it took place.39 Another historian argues the opposite: that it was between 1725 and 1740 that the feminine religious vocation faced its severest hindrances. He adds that for the nuns in his study, the years 1770–74 were among the best in the century.40 If his chronology is correct, it would seem difficult to discuss decline in feminine monasteries without implicating the financial crisis and the policy of suppression launched by the Commission des secours in 1727. My own research indicates that decline in the number of entries did, in fact, set in around 1730.41 Despite the jolts to their finances between 1689 and 1720, women’s communities had continued to recruit members. Indeed, a bumper crop of entries in 1696–1700 suggests that they had done what the Commission des secours later accused them of doing – accepting more entrants than usual as a way of acquiring dowry money. But the Law Crash was beyond anything that their economies could withstand. They endured several years of poverty severe enough to drive many entrants away from their doors. Then a regimen imposed from above led to the winnowing out of some communities and the slimming down of others. The years 1731–45 mark the time when the number of entrants first fell away significantly. Just when monastic numbers as a whole are seen

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to have been high and healthy, a closer view shows that the number of female monastics was beginning to shrink. This raises a question. If male regulars were still feeling their oats, why were female regulars starting to stagger? No one has yet suggested that women were ahead of men in moral and spiritual deterioration. The sources need to be much more closely examined, with special reference to women, before any firm conclusion can be reached. But I argue that if the female religious population declined before the male, it was because external action made the earlier period peculiarly difficult for women, with the ban on reception of novices. Of course, what started from outside could eventually be internalized. The ban on novices drained communities of their youth, year by year. Already crushed by their debts and facing an uncertain future, their community spirit might well begin to erode. But it must be emphasized that this happened only after the Law Crash opened them up to the commission’s restructuring. The historian of the Provençal Ursulines makes this point, emphasizing that the Law Crash caused a far-reaching trauma among religious communities: “Its direct consequences were serious. Above all, it provoked profound troubles in them, which were not only of a financial order. To repeat a sometimes overused formula, ‘nothing would be the same as before.›42 The women whose monasteries were suppressed outright suffered the most. The commission’s correspondence discussing their fate makes sad reading. The nuns could not believe that they would be targeted without serious moral or material cause. The Ursulines of Avallon wrote a petition in which they listed “the reasons that would be grounds for the extinction, transfer, or destruction of a community.” These were: “Firstly, the lack of observance of the Rule … Secondly, the indigence and poverty of a monastery which, being useful for nothing, becomes a charge on the King and the State … And finally … when this community is so low in numbers that it is not in a state to subsist of itself, that is to say, to fulfil and acquit the charges to which it is bound.”43 Since none of these conditions applied to them, they proclaimed their confidence that the Crown would not wish to close them down. But the commission had already decided that the number of female convents must be reduced at all costs. If it deemed a region to have too many, it was ready to assign a quota of houses for suppression, regardless of merit. The Ursuline monastery in Saint-Gengoux was a victim of this policy. It had been under the dreaded ban for some years when in 1747 the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône wrote to the commission asking that the house be given a reprieve because of its value to the town. The commission at first turned him down flat. Then, in 1748, it wrote to him to

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say that it had information that the nuns were in misery and to ask that a “trustworthy, sensible man” be sent to take an inventory. The report from a local archpriest came back, almost by return of mail. The house, he wrote, was spacious, clean, and in good order, with a wellkept church that could hold four hundred people, a pensionnat, and public classrooms for sixty children. All the buildings were of stone and tile, with a large enclosure producing fruit and vegetables and enough hay to feed four cows. The community had no debts (indeed, it was owed over 7000 livres) and its twenty-one members all had pensions. It sounded idyllic, and it weakened the commission’s resolve. But now came the rub. The commission announced that it was ready to spare the house, but only if the bishop would suggest another to suppress in its place. This the bishop would not do, so Saint-Gengoux went to the block. It was closed in 1752 and its nuns sent off to Chalon where, they later complained, they were left with pensions of 80 livres each instead of the promised 115 livres. The house was sold. When all expenses were paid and a fund set up to support the filles dévotes who were brought in as replacement schoolteachers, there was nothing left over.44 Scenes like this took place across the country. When the suffragan bishop of Lyon protested to the commission against an order, sent him in 1734, to close eight convents, he was told: “This suppression of several religious communities and this diminution in the number of nuns in several [other] religious communities have been among the principal objectives proposed by His Majesty in granting them assistance.”45 In the event, all eight houses were suppressed and 191 nuns dispersed with pensions.46 Once it became public knowledge, the commission’s policy of culling houses gave rise to a fierce and unseemly scramble among communities. If a monastery could convince the authorities to target someone else, it not only saved its own life but had a good chance of receiving some of the spoils from the victim. Epic wars of words broke out between neighbouring convents. Two Ursuline communities in the Provençal town of Saint-Remy fought it out, each in turn gaining favour with the commission. Finally, the house that had initially been targeted for suppression won the battle, with help from two archbishops, a duchess, and Madame la Dauphine herself. The nuns of the losing house were dispersed among other houses, “according to the availability of empty and suitable rooms.”47 In Moulins, the Ursulines and another teaching community engaged in a long and unedifying slanging match in which, it seems, everybody in the town became involved.48 In Annonay, the Filles de Notre-Dame were the underdogs in a bitter struggle with the local royal abbey, during which each side sent

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the commission reams of testimonials for itself and reams of slurs about the other.49 In all such contests, the nuns had to find champions to speak for them. Everything depended on whom they knew and how much influence that person had in Versailles. It went hard for those who had no patrons and no visibility, like the Ursuline monastery in Montcenis, which was consigned to oblivion because it was “tucked away in a small town without support and without protection.”50 Next to losing their houses altogether, the nuns’ worst pain came from the temporary ban on novices. This deprived them of the dowries they would otherwise have enjoyed and also of the young members whom they needed to replenish the community. A further grief came from the fact that the ban by lettre de cachet was increasingly used as a disciplinary tool to bring them to heel if they were too independent. This was particularly hard on communities with Jansenist leanings. We see the Ursuline house in Beauvais placed under the ban for thirty years – not for reasons of poverty, as the bishop explained in 1763, but for “particular circumstances.”51 The Jansenist connection was stated more explicitly in 1786 when the bishop of Montpellier reported on a local Ursuline convent: This community was dear to the inhabitants of Montpellier; the newly converted brought their children there with as much confidence as did the old Catholics; but the errors of the times penetrated the house, and the religious were almost all seduced to the point where they challenged all authority. It was necessary to deprive them of the permission to receive pensionnaires and novices; they remained for eighteen years without a director or superior, and almost without a Rule.

When the original forty nuns had been reduced to eighteen, twelve of whom were then sent away, the remaining six, whose orthodoxy was satisfactory, were allowed to function once more.52 Goings-on like this were bound to have an impact on community support. When families placed their daughters in religion, they expected them to have a stable and predictable future. Now, in the sequence of misfortunes that struck the convents, they saw their daughters impoverished or dispersed; or perhaps worse still, if the community collapsed, deposited back on their families’ doorsteps! Furthermore, town officials and ordinary citizens looked unfavourably on the closing-down and selling-up of “their” institutions, to the benefit of others, elsewhere. The commission’s records are full of their angry protests and its own efforts to pacify them. In such an atmosphere, parents were understandably nervous about putting their daughters into convents.

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From now on, individual houses were more than ever on their own, their fortunes depending on their own good luck and good management, and the favour of the commission. As their freedom to buy land or to lend to private individuals was curtailed by the Crown, and as the influx of dowries slowed down, they found it increasingly difficult to administer what they already had. For some houses, “sufficiency” was almost impossible to achieve. This had a dampening effect on recruitment, a problem the Ursulines of Loches experienced as late as 1783: “Their situation, about which the public is informed (no matter what precautions they take to keep their trouble secret) discourages aspirants who would be forthcoming if they were known to enjoy a modest but decent living.”53 Once a house was on the downward slope, it was difficult to reverse the trend. Fewer novices meant an aging and diminishing population, and hence more difficulty in running good schools and attracting pensionnaires. Less money meant that repairs to the buildings might have to be postponed, that the hiring of lawyers and property agents had to be forgone, and sometimes even that the number of religious services in the community had to be cut back. The appearance of deterioration might in turn lead, to a further flight of prospective candidates. It was a vicious circle. For many, poverty remained a pervasive problem. The national bankruptcy of 1720 had caused damage to a great part of the rentier class. The religious communities found that they could not hope for much in the way of generosity from the people who had traditionally been their friends. Moreover, the difficulty they had always experienced in recovering moneys owing to them was now a major problem. Every convent’s book of accounts held records of debts no longer recoverable because of the insolvency of the debtors: 1800 livres in one case, 2676 livres in another, 8600 livres in another.54 Sometimes it was impossible even to collect the sisters’ dowry payments. A historian of the Ursulines of Périgueux who traced their dowry contracts discovered that throughout the eighteenth century families were as likely as not to delay payment for decades or to default altogether.55 The Ursulines of Montbrison experienced the same problem and for the same reason – “the poverty of the noble families of our province.”56 The Filles de Notre-Dame of Annonay, totally without funds in 1786, claimed that their indebtedness was caused mainly by that of others: “They are owed almost 39,000 livres from dowries or pensions [of which] they cannot secure payment. That is the principal cause of their situation.”57 Where there was impoverishment there was also loss of social esteem. By the late eighteenth century, most teaching monasteries were

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less able than before to attract the upper-class candidates who had once been their boast.58 They had to settle for women of less elevated station. Houses that refused to bend the knee and admit commoners found themselves in trouble. As one observer remarked of the Ursuline community in Sommières: “These religious, since they belong to the principal nobility of the region, have never wished to admit subjects of more modest origins; if their numbers have diminished, it is because of that.”59 But houses that moved with the times and admitted commoners in large numbers found that their upper-class novices (who were fewer to begin with anyway) fled to more exalted institutions – and a certain social cachet departed with them. The teaching monasteries, once largely populated by daughters of officers and the minor nobility, now became the natural home for the middling sort. “We no longer find ‘rich and powerful seigneurs,’ as in the contracts of the seventeenth century, but simple squires,” writes one historian; “to the rich merchants capable of giving 4000 livres … succeeds a minor bourgeoisie of the robe.”60 In the perception of many of its erstwhile supporters, this led to a deterioration in the quality of the monasteries. An interesting subtheme appears here: social déclassement was somehow equated with spiritual decline. The monasticism of the Counter-Reformation had been profoundly aristocratic in its prejudices, equating virtue with birth and social rank.61 The opinion had long been held in influential circles that monasteries were really intended to be the preserve of the aristocracy and that their invasion by the lesser breeds was a betrayal of their purpose. Now, in the years of the “aristocratic reaction,” the belief took on new force. The fear was all the more potent because it was founded on fact: the social derogation so greatly deplored was indeed taking place. This “democratization” during the eighteenth century was the saving grace of many a monastery. But it alienated the upper classes even more. In other ways the ethos of the convents changed. With less support coming in from outside, the sisters had to orient themselves to the business of making money. The success of their early years in attracting dowries had allowed them to be careless about the management of their affairs. In the late eighteenth century their records show them more knowledgeable, more canny in their dealings, more accurate in their accounting, and more astute in the exploitation of their farms.62 Their pensionnats were expanded to become major sources of income. All this material improvement was achieved without much help from outside. Whatever they now had, they enjoyed as a result of their own efforts, not the charity of others. This was a point they made when, in the early days of the Revolution, the National Assembly decided to lay

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hands on the goods of the Church, including theirs. “The dowries of the religious, their handwork and their economies, have sufficed for the acquisition of their house, its reconstruction and its maintenance to this day,” wrote the Ursulines of Lille. “By means of these economies, they have acquired almost all their revenues.”63 They, and many other communities, argued (in vain, as it turned out) that the law protecting private property should protect their private property as well. Was this increase in the communities’ efficiency achieved at the expense of their spirituality? There seems to be a consensus in the affirmative. The historian of the Ursulines points to the reduction of their time spent in prayer, reflection, and reading, to the benefit of their “productive” work, and regrets the change of spirit which this brought about. Another historian concurs. “Women’s convents came to live only by their social function,” he claims, adding that in the eighteenth century nuns became less mystical and more practical.64 Whether the first assertion is true or not, the second almost certainly is. In various subtle ways, the communities’ records do suggest that by the eighteenth century the high exaltation of the early days had given way to more practical expressions. Nuns, too, were affected by the general trend towards “enlightened” Catholicism, as described by Jean de Viguerie.65 The change is reflected in their language. In their death notices the sense of other-worldliness fades; allusions to miracles disappear altogether; and more restrained forms of expression make their appearance. In the late eighteenth century we even see God referred to from time to time as “the Supreme Being,” and we read that another citoyenne has been added to the heavenly host! A change has also been discerned in their choice of names in religion. It was age-old practice for monastics to adopt new names as a sign of their break with their old lives “in the world.” These names were chosen to honour a member of the Trinity, one of the great saints, or one of the lesser saints or angels. A study of Ursuline nuns in the southeast shows that from 1592 to 1649, the great age of Christocentrism, one-third of the nuns in the sample adopted names that honoured Jesus Christ in his different “states” (Incarnation, Passion, Holy Childhood, etc.).66 By the late eighteenth century such titles had fallen to a mere 8.5 percent, and even the Virgin had become less popular, while the percentage of names of lesser saints – unchallenging saints such as Rosalie and Felicité – had swollen to 63.2 percent. “A more reassuring, more human proximity,” the historian suggests, “permitting an easier identification than with God”;67 or put differently, a retreat from the high spirituality of the anciennes mères into a less demanding approach to life in religion.

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The first generations were still revered for their heroism and bounding mystical spirit. No sister of the Congrégation could ever forget Alix Lecler, whose life was shot through and through with dreams and visions, or Gante André, of whom it was said that “she was brave enough to swallow down difficulties without even chewing them.”68 But that was then, and this was now. In the late eighteenth century Madame Roland, looking back on her days in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris, recalled a time of calm and happiness: “The house was respectable, the order not too austere; as a result, the nuns dispensed altogether with those excesses and nonsenses which are characteristic of most [monasteries]”69 – a favourable verdict, given the times, but one that would have sounded strange to Alix and Gante and their sisters. It can be argued, too, that the heroic obedience and humility of the founding generations had suffered with the passage of time.70 It is easy to see why. Religious women had learned to ask questions. This female “curiosity” was seen by some as a baneful characteristic of the new age. The great Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue had only harsh words for “the pernicious effect, in women’s monasteries, of this itch to learn and to appear learned.” He complained: “They want to know everything, discuss everything, judge everything. If disputes arise in the Church on highly subtle, highly abstract questions, they have to find out about them; and scarcely have they acquired the feeblest and most superficial veneer of knowledge than they think themselves as enlightened as the ablest theologians.”71 It can be conjectured that the “itch to learn” was the logical outcome of a long exposure to the divisions within the Church. Nuns had spent years disputing among themselves the importance of contrition to the sacrament of penance, and the rightness or wrongness of frequent communion. Many of them had been introduced to Bible reading, and they were promoting it in their schools. In all of this there was, in germ at least, a kind of “spiritual feminism.”72 Jansenism was at the root of a great deal of it; disillusionment with authority had opened the door to ideas and attitudes that would have been unthinkable in the early seventeenth century. But it is equally possible that in non-Jansenist houses, away from the sort of confrontations that have surfaced in the historical record, other religious women were also acquiring a certain independence of mind. Furthermore, the late eighteenth century saw a few of the world’s new comforts filtering through the monastery walls. Once nuns had recovered from the great bankruptcy, they became more comfortable than their predecessors – better heated, and with more varied food, such as dried fruit and conserves. Coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco

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were not unknown within their walls.73 None of this should surprise. Nuns belonged to their times; if the milieu from which they came enjoyed more consumer goods, it was natural that they should do so too. More controversial was the challenge which, as teaching communities, they faced when asked to update their curriculum. Parents wanted different things for their girls, so in some convent pensionnats, dancing and music lessons were offered, small dramas were produced, and new subjects such as geography were taught.74 However, the tension between tradition and novelty continued. Every innovation had to run the gauntlet of community conservatism. Furthermore, on the occasions when the nuns did attempt to cater to a more worldly clientele, they were likely to find themselves reprimanded by the more conservative elements of the local clergy. So their efforts to update their syllabus – never exactly strenuous – were always subject to the drag of the past. Once the last word in the education of girls, by the late eighteenth century their pensionnats were in danger of being considered “passé.” And once the support of the elites was eroded, what was left to them? Where were “the people,” for whose benefit they had originally been instituted? The public’s verdict on the teaching nuns seems always to have been mixed, and there were various reasons for this. For one thing, their record on free schooling was irregular. The reputation of many houses rested on the size and seriousness of their day schools: 400 children in Nancy, 400 in Rouen, 500 in Valenciennes, 300 in Rennes, to give a few examples. Many others, though their day schools were smaller, nevertheless continued to satisfy all the demands for girls’ education in their little towns. But serious questions could arise where the monastery grew and the day school remained the same size – or sometimes shrank. In Angers in the eighteenth century, the large and well-endowed Ursuline monastery offered spaces to sixty non-paying students – hardly a return on the expenditure of money and space that a community of thirty-three women required.75 In Lorgues, forty Ursuline nuns occupied themselves otherwise while the city paid a schoolmistress to manage the free school.76 This was a breach of their original trust and it carried a danger: wherever the authorities saw cause to suppress a teaching monastery, they were able to do so by bringing in alternative schoolmistresses without much public outcry.77 The rapid growth in the number of secular congregations dedicated to teaching – congregations such as the Dames de Saint-Maur and the Filles de la Croix – had by the eighteenth century made a significant inroad into the cloistered orders’ near monopoly of female education.78 These schoolmistresses, since they were not cloistered, were

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able to live much more cheaply than their monastic counterparts. Once value for money became the main criterion, the expensive monastic option was in danger of losing its charm, at least where public education was concerned. The cloistered nuns suffered from another disadvantage. Even where they continued to offer their services, the common people who furnished many of their day students remained on the other side of a social divide. From the very beginning, the nuns had taken their place among the privilégiés.79 Nothing they could do could eradicate the resentment caused by that fact. Although they taught without charge, gave alms, and handed out soup and bread to the poor at their doors, and although they scrimped to provide small gifts and prizes to the children in the free classrooms and made many friends and clients, they seem never to have gained the hearts of the people. It is possible that the very nature of their service was irksome to their clients. The nuns taught decorum, control, piety, respect for authority; they urged their students to give up the ways of the street and the slum. In outlying regions of the country, they decried the local dialects and acted as missionaries of the French language. Even as the people benefited by their schooling, they may have resented its tone. As the eighteenth century wore on, the pride of the poor became more “ticklish,”80 and they accepted the condescension of their betters with less and less grace. “Forget about those biddies in the Congrégation,” declaimed a pamphlet-writer in 1789. “The service they say they render to the public does us more harm than good. They feed young girls – and turn their heads – with pruderies, affectations, and nonsenses which are of no use in the world … They raise them … to be haughty, proud, contemptuous, curious, and backbiting.”81 It seems that this kind of diatribe did not lack a sympathetic audience. One is struck by the flickering hostility which the public showed to the convents over the years. One could overlook the pranks of young men – the “libertines who entered the convent by night … [and] made various attempts to enter the pensionnaires’ room by force”; the boys who insisted on bathing in the river within view of the nuns, “pronouncing indecent words and even stealing their vegetables and breaking their washboard”; or the two students of the college of La Flèche who scaled the walls of the local monastery during the night and later received “a sharp lesson”82 – but there is also evidence of harassment of a darker sort: stones and refuse thrown against convent doors, windows broken, and obscenities uttered.83 Occasionally, there were incidents that carried a threat of worse to come. In 1776, when the city of Carcassonne ordered that all burials must take place in public cemeteries, the Ursulines complied by sending out a deceased nun to be

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buried, whereupon the body was accompanied to the grave by a hostile crowd, “pouring out a thousand invectives against us.”84 Less than twenty years later, a similarly hostile crowd surrounded the sisters when they were forced to leave their house. The incident reveals the ambiguity that always existed in the nuns’ relationship with “the people,” and it helps explain the harshness with which many of them were treated during the revolutionary years, once the authorities were no longer on their side.

the problem of evidence Where does this leave us in passing judgment on the spirit of eighteenth-century communities? Is it reasonable to assume that because they were more modern, more inquiring, more businesslike, more middle class – and, it appears, less loved – the nuns had suffered a loss of authentic religious vocation? What accounts for the aura that hangs over these nuns, the aura of stagnation and mediocrity? Since we have little to go by in the way of their own testimony, it is difficult to tell whence this opinion arises. Perhaps it is from the visible decline in their numbers and the collective aging that went with it; or from the deteriorating quality of their written records, which has been attributed to dropping standards of literacy and dedication; or from the pathetic inadequacy of their libraries, brought to light when they were inventoried at the time of the Revolution. Other than these physical signs, there is not much that supports such a very sweeping verdict – except that it was the firmly held opinion of nineteenth-century monographers, the first in this field of women’s history. “Piety still reigned there,” wrote the Abbé Richaudeau, historian of the Ursulines of Blois, “and the Rule was still observed … but we no longer see characters as well-formed, or at least, there were only a few.”85 Having read the same records as Richaudeau, I am mystified to know how he came to this conclusion. Because the entries in the annales are briefer, it is difficult to pass any judgment, positive or negative, on the question of character formation. Perhaps the answer is in his next sentence: “This was because society itself was enfeebled, and it could not give what it did not have.” We are back with the piety-birth equation. He went on to say: “From the Regency onward, noble families ceased almost entirely to furnish subjects to monasteries, and, as the bourgeoisie did not, so to speak, know the way, the number of subjects decreased notably in communities.”86 While few of his compeers were as forthright as Richaudeau, they worked from the same prejudice. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century churchmen, highly class-

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conscious and elitist, did not value “democratization” any more than their eighteenth-century forbears had done. As for the material indicators mentioned above – the diminution of their population, the sketchiness of their records, the abysmal state of their libraries – these can all be attributed to one cause: poverty. The questions surrounding the first have already been discussed. As to the second, it is surely arguable that a smaller community struggling with an unchanged workload might not have had the time to compose flowery eulogies or extensive annales – even though it did, often, keep better accounts. As to the third, the number of books a person or a community owns does not tell us how many books she/it reads. There is ample evidence scattered through the records to prove that nuns borrowed books – from family, friends, and spiritual advisers – and also that many of them owned their own New Testaments and other works of piety. During the years that communities could not pay their debts, it is highly unlikely that they would build up their houses’ libraries.87 Symptoms such as these scarcely merit a diagnosis of “mediocrity.” Indeed, there is little in their records that informs us about the morale and inner spirit of religious women on the eve of their disappearance. The wisest course is to admit that we do not know. “The essential often escapes us and will continue to escape us, by the very force of things,” writes a religious historian.88 As long as their lives remained cloaked in anonymity, we cannot in fairness pass judgment on them. The most convincing measure of their private state of mind is to be found in the very public behaviour they exhibited at the beginning of the Revolution. And this, whatever we choose to make of it, was not mediocre.

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6 Aftermath

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, promulgated in July 1790, is considered to have been one of the great turning points of the Revolution. By attempting to include the clergy in its administrative reforms, the government moved unequivocally into the jurisdiction of the Church. It abolished the concordat of 1516 and eliminated the papacy’s influence in national religious affairs. It turned bishops and priests into salaried, elected officials of the state. And it redrew the ecclesiastical map, eliminating dioceses and reapportioning parishes. This was an unprecedented challenge to the Church, and opposition to the constitution grew swiftly. In order to enforce compliance, the National Assembly instituted an oath of allegiance to both the Nation and the constitution, “and especially the Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and demanded that it be taken by the entire serving clergy. The oath ceremony, which was scheduled in the winter of 1790–91, broke the clergy in two. On one hand were the “constitutionals,” who by taking the oath acknowledged the power of the Nation to legislate changes in church matters; on the other side were the “refractories,” or nonjurors, who persisted in their allegiance to the pope and the old hierarchy. All but 4 of the 135 bishops refused the oath, as did some 45 percent of the priests. From this time on, the division between Church and Nation became increasingly serious. “The oath of 1791 marked a major crisis in the political life of the nation,” writes Timothy Tackett.1 A very minor crisis occurred in the town of Saint-Sever, in the extreme southwest of France, as the Civil Constitution was being put in

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place.2 On 9 April 1791 the town prepared to receive its new constitutional bishop, Jean-Pierre Saurine, with full honours. At four in the afternoon the cannon sounded and the bells rang out as planned – all except those of the Ursuline convent. Immediately several armed men went to the convent and demanded that the bells be rung. When the nuns replied that they could not do so in good conscience, the soldiers began to chop down the door. Thereupon Reverend Mother capitulated – after a fashion: “We are not going to ring them, but since you want it done, come in and ring them yourselves.” By this time the troop had swollen in numbers, and the community waited anxiously as the men tramped through the building and rang the bell. They left peaceably enough, but war had been joined, and the nuns knew it. Next morning the new bishop – “the intruder,” as the nuns persisted in calling him – departed, leaving orders for the convent to conform to the new laws. Several hours later the bishop’s delegate, accompanied by the mayor, the syndic, another notable, and “an ex-Capuchin” arrived at the grille. The syndic read out an official order installing the ex-Capuchin as the monastery’s director and forbidding the nuns to hear Mass from anyone else. Then the delegate began to speak with charm and benevolence, only to be cut short by Reverend Mother: “Permit me to speak from my heart and that of my community. We will not recognize any other bishop than the one to whom we have vowed obedience. We cannot accept Mr Saurine; we will not obey any order from him, and we will never communicate with a priest sent by him. These are the sentiments of the Ursulines of Saint-Sever. They cannot be false to the promises they made at the foot of the altar on the day of their profession; to be faithful to those promises, they will bear everything and joyfully suffer even death itself.” The delegate asked if he could have this in writing. The nuns assented, the whole community signing the statement. Still the delegate tried to persuade them “with seducing and artful words.” Then he presented Reverend Mother with a pastoral letter from the new bishop, but she refused even to touch it. On this promising note the group retired, “very confused,” as the nuns heard later from their friends in the town. The following day some city officials tried to deliver the letter at the door, but the portress rejected it “with indignation and scorn.” When a departmental official arrived some days later and summoned the superior to accept the letter, she again refused. “Just take it,” he urged. “If you don’t want to read it, burn it!” But he, too, had to leave without success, all the more chagrined because he had said publicly that he would win the community over. Two days later the ex-Capuchin arrived to demand the keys to the sacristy and the tabernacle, and to warn the nuns that he would be

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arriving to say Mass and that they must ring the bells for him. “The superior told him that he would have to ring them himself and that she would arrange to have the bell-ropes passed out of the cloister and into the church.” Needless to say, the nuns did not present themselves for his Mass. Every attempt he made to regularize his situation – to have the palms ready for the blessing on Palm Sunday, to secure the Easter candle and the various church ornaments used during the season – was met with stubborn resistance. It should be pointed out that most convents maintained a church for the public, into which the nuns could not even step because of their vow of clausura. Their choir was situated to one side, facing the altar but angled so as to be invisible to the public and fronted by a grille, in which was a small aperture that was opened only at Communion time. The standoff between the nuns and their unwanted chaplain took place at this grille. He had the church, they had the altar furnishings. It took a visit from the municipal officers to force them to hand over the sacred vessels. The men’s move to enter the inner sacristy (which was inside the cloister) was met with furious resistance from within. In the end, to prevent a forcible entry, the nuns handed the vestments and sacred vessels through the sacristy turntable; they also sent through a large cupboard, which was dismantled on one side and reassembled on the other so as to avoid the capitulation implied in opening the door. After that, the officials made sure that the nuns could no longer receive Communion – they locked the opening in their grille. The convent church, previously a space shared by the town and the community, was now in the hands of “the intruders.” During the night, however, the nuns arranged to have a lock put on the inner side of the church door that connected with the street. Thus they took the church back. “Immediately a complaint was taken to the mayor,” and he arrived post-haste with a locksmith to remove the lock – and, for good measure, to put bars on all the convent’s accesses to the church. By this time the Ursulines had become the centre of public attention. “The church was like a marketplace all day long. The rabble who had invaded it made jokes at our expense, and the lackeys of the town watched from the tower to make sure the work was not interrupted from inside. One would have thought that they were locking up criminals. We recited our office and said our prayers in the common room, because the abomination of desolation was truly in the holy place.” During this time, rumours were circulating that the nuns would soon be forced out or, at the very least, made to attend Mass in the parish church. “We then felt so troubled that we were more dead than alive,” wrote the memoirist. However, this did not stop them on Easter

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Monday, when Bishop Saurine returned to Saint-Sever, from again refusing to sound their bells and again receiving a violent visit from the soldiers. Saurine decided against visiting them, as he was being urged to do, and left them to the discretion of the municipality. Two days later the mayor arrived with a letter from a member of the National Assembly warning the community that if they did not accept the Civil Constitution they would be cut off from their pensions. Again the community refused unanimously. For six months the standoff lasted – the ex-Capuchin in the church, the nuns in the convent, neither having anything to do with the other. For the women, this meant no Mass, no Communion, no confession – nothing but the services they organized for themselves. On the Feast of the Federation, 14 July 1791, they again refused to ring their bells and again were visited by soldiers. Then came a surcease as the local authorities were forced to acknowledge the law passed by the National Assembly that “freedom of worship is implicit in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Despite the reluctance of the commune and the fierce opposition of the local Jacobin Club, the sisters regained the key to their own church and, better still, their own nonjuring chaplain. However, their contacts with the outside world were cut off; the outer door of their church was closed to the public (turning it, in effect, into a private chapel), and they were forbidden to teach day students. At the end of 1791 their bells were removed – a relief, they agreed among themselves, because they would no longer be summoned to salute “the intruder” or celebrate the Feast of the Federation. “In February the persecutions resumed … From that time on it was constantly being said that we were to be chased from our monastery … They [the Jacobin Club] went to Saurine and urged him to come to our convent and force us to receive him and to take the [civic] oath or, if we refused, to turn us out.” By now, much of the town had turned against them, including old friends. Only the bishop’s pacifism protected them; he argued, with considerable wisdom, “that harassments would never make us abandon our errors.” And so passed the spring, summer, and autumn of 1792. When the sisters were expelled that October, it was the end of a siege that had lasted eighteen months. The experience of this one monastery cannot be treated as typical. Many communities lived through the years 1790–92 with less difficulty; many others lived through it with more. But in several ways the episode throws light on the minds of the nuns and their relations with authority and the world around them. First of all, it is obvious that this community enjoyed both a strong superior and a strong esprit de corps. Reverend Mother was firm to the point of stubbornness in her dealings with the various officials who came to browbeat or cajole her. But on

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every occasion the community backed her, sometimes after discussion, sometimes spontaneously. Not every community was capable of such solidarity, which was the sine qua non of resistance. Furthermore, at the very beginning of the confrontation, the nuns had framed the issue as a choice between betrayal of their vows and martyrdom. Once declared, neither threats nor blandishments could rob them of their high sense of mission. We frequently find the language of martyrdom on the lips of religious women. “We are resolved to die rather than leave our house,” wrote the Ursulines of Carpentras in 1790. “We will all suffer a thousand deaths before renouncing our holy religion,” proclaimed the Ursulines of Lille in 1791.3 Both communities were anticipating by some considerable time the reality of the guillotine, and reasonable folk may well have thought them overdramatic. Yet how small and insignificant were the issues over which this battle raged! – The ringing of bells, the control of vestments and church plate, the acceptance or nonacceptance of a letter. One can imagine the frustration of the revolutionary officials at being foiled at such a level – and the fury of the clubmen on seeing this happen. The law was being flouted, and by mere women. Moreover, the public was watching with keen awareness and, no doubt, some amusement. It became imperative for the sake of law and order that something be done, that the nuns not be allowed to win. On the other side, the women were in their own element, where black was black and white was white, and small things mattered intensely. It was difficult to make deals with people who were talking martyrdom. “Religious women are a special breed,” Cardinal de Fleury had written fifty years earlier. “They will submit to outside power only in matters that do not offend their consciences.”4 Had the revolutionaries known of the earlier behaviour of Jansenist nuns – the last holdouts in that bitter and protracted struggle – they might have been more prepared for the contradictions they now faced.

the larger view Between the outbreak of the Revolution and the evacuation of the religious houses in the autumn of 1792, the relationship of the nuns of France with their new masters went through several different phases. First came a few months of peace, then a series of laws that threw them into adversity: the suspension of solemn vows on 28 October 1789, followed by their outright abolition on 13 February 1790; the nationalization of the Church’s property on 2 November 1789, followed on 20 March 1790 by a decree ordering an inquest into the properties and a census of the personnel of the monasteries. As early as January

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1790 communities were sending away their novices, often amid scenes of great distress. “It was like a bolt of lightning for us … our poor novices were inconsolable,” wrote a monastic annalist years later.5 They knew well what it portended. “They are respectfully bowing to your intentions,” wrote the bishop of Marseille to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “but they are very much alarmed by the fate that seems to be being prepared for them.”6 So they were already filled with suspicious anxiety as they were forced to open their houses up to the commissioners who came to inventory their possessions. And of course their fears were realized. “After the inventory all our goods were seized; our domaines were farmed out by the district, and our invested money was also taken from us,” wrote the annalist quoted above. Even though they were promised a pension, the loss of autonomy was clear to them. It is little wonder that when the mayor came and preached to them on the advantages of the Civil Constitution (“inestimable, according to him; we were citizens of liberty and equality!”), they reacted negatively, “many of us finding it difficult to contain our indignation.”7 Thus the great inquest of 1790, for all the decorum of the procèsverbaux, took place in an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. The commissioners thought they were offering the women their freedom; the nuns perceived that they were being denied their rights: “Is it possible,” wrote one of them to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “at a time when we hear the word ‘liberty’ sounding from every side, that we should be excluded from this privilege, in finding ourselves forced to quit a sanctuary that we chose in all freedom?”8 When they were asked, one by one, if they wished to renounce the religious life, many of them must already have been feeling furious. This certainly is the impression we get from one deponent, Marie-Jeanne Coqteaulx of the monastery of the Congrégation in Châlons-sur-Marne: She declares that at a time when oaths are being taken everywhere to be faithful to the Nation, the law and the king, she finds it very strange that religious are given permission to be unfaithful to God, and to forget the engagements which they contracted with Him; this permission is an injury to the Divinity and a dishonour to those who give it when they certainly do not have the right. She says: “Our duties are inviolable, no authority on earth can dispense us from them. Does anyone believe that we could in conscience go against a solemn oath made to God before the altars? How much weight could henceforth be put on oaths, even those made in public places? Whatever the consequences, I declare that I will hold to my vows … Such are my intentions, and you will please make them public, to disabuse those who might think me in a different disposition.”9

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The near unanimity of the nuns’ initial refusal to leave their convents may be attributed in good part to a spirit of anger.10 They believed in themselves and in their place in society; they had as yet no reason for physical fear; and they had every right to take umbrage over their treatment. Not every community or every nun resisted this invitation to freedom, but the number of women who accepted it was tiny. Four out of 515 nuns in the Côtes du Nord chose to leave; 2 out of 195 in Aude; 1 out of 466 in Douai; 1 out of 304 in the diocese of Arras.11 These numbers are typical of the breakdown across the country. Even in Paris, hotbed of revolution, the number of departures was “infinitely small.”12 The thirty defections in Rouen were almost entirely attributable to one community, the Dominicaines emmurées; the rest of the 600 nuns held firm to their communities. “The history of religious communities in Rouen during the Revolution is in large part a feminine history,” writes their historian.13 There was no clear pattern to the defections. Lack of discipline was a factor (though some unedifying houses, such as the abbey of Longchamp, chose to continue).14 Division in the community was another; once solidarity was lost, morale was weakened, and it became easier for the sisters to walk away. Thus in the Ursuline convent of Digne, the original nineteen nuns of the 1790 census were only seventeen a year later, at which time six of them, including the superior and three of the officers, decided to leave.15 Life in the cloister, once the common property was confiscated and each nun had her own pension, was difficult. “They wanted to see if by making us into proprietors, discord would come to divide us,” wrote the annalist of Bourg-Argental.16 Clearly, the strategem sometimes worked. Furthermore, the idea of freedom was unsettling enough to make some communities mutinous and quarrelsome. A strong esprit de corps and a superior with leadership qualities were necessary to prevent this from happening. On the other hand, esprit de corps and a strong superior could sometimes go too far, and some of the unanimity which the commissioners recorded in 1790 was grounded in timidity in the face of community pressure. Nuns who expressed a desire to leave were subjected to intense argument and even persecution. “They were in hell, so much were they being tormented,” ran one memoir.17 A later recollection, totally unsympathetic of course, allows us to imagine their feelings: Two of our sisters, seduced by the charm of a false liberty … deserted the cloister and re-entered the world. The superiors had spared no pains to prevent these unhappy sheep from leaving the fold. Mère Besnard, respectable for her age and her virtues, seeing one of them before the Blessed Sacrament, went

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and knelt beside her and, in friendly tones, said: “Remember, Sister, the commitments you made to the Lord in front of this altar.” She replied: “Don’t say anything more; I am tormented enough.”18

There were some even more extreme cases, where nuns were detained under duress and had to be liberated by the municipal authorities.19 Some thought has been given to the type of women who opted to leave. Dominique Dinet suggests that they tended to be middle-aged, isolated from their families, and often from out of town.20 Geneviève Reynes thinks the opposite: “Only women who were still young, and who had kept up their ties with their families, could be tempted by this adventure.”21 In fact, I have seen nothing that supports her view. The women who left were overwhelmingly middle-aged – most in their fifties, but some even older. Their reasons were not often given, but they probably ranged from a genuine desire for freedom to a real foreboding about the future of their communities. Some of them openly admitted that they could not face the hardships that seemed to be awaiting them in the convent. “I am 73 years old,” wrote a nun of Valence. “If our sisters continue to live in community, I shall continue the common life. If this hope is a vain one, I shall go where I can. I put my confidence and my resignation into the hands of Jesus Christ; He will give me the strength and consolation that I need.”22 Young nuns seldom deserted the religious life. Lay sisters were the most tenacious of all. Throughout these months, as monasticism was being dismantled, the Gallican hierarchy remained silent. Its situation was somewhat awkward. Over the past sixty years it had tolerated the state’s growing interference in its business, with the Commission des secours, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the Commission des réguliers. So when in 1790 the Ecclesiastical Committee claimed that the state had the right to decide on the existence of religious orders, it was able to point to precedents in the Old Regime. “To judge by past events, we have to admit that all of this flowed normally from the worldly spirit of the Enlightenment,” writes Rogier, and he surmises that the bishops were not upset to see an end to the monks.23 At any rate, the church authorities gave no intimation that the inventory or confiscation were illegal, and they made no major issue of the invitation to monks and nuns to leave their convents.24 No matter how distressed the religious communities felt, they had to comply. On the surface, things were still peaceful; there was as yet no open confrontation between the Revolution and the Church. Everything changed with the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath that followed. The offering of the oath and its public acceptance or rejection by parish priests throughout the

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country “thrust the Revolution clearly and unambiguously into the lives of common men and women everywhere.”25 France was forced to choose sides. For the great body of religious women still living in community, there was no contest. Now that they had the clear direction of their bishops, they rallied to the support of the nonjurors. Their chapels became the centres for refractory worship and their convents the hiding places for refractory priests. And as we have seen, their resistance to the constitutional clergy was often overt and, in the minds of the revolutionaries, not to be tolerated. In early April, in Paris and some other locations, nuns were seized and subjected to public whippings.26 For the most part the women who were thus maltreated were secular sisters, the cloistered nuns being perhaps protected by their higher social status and the fact that they were relatives of local notables. But the writing was on the wall. The Nation was growing more radical, and it was turning its angry eyes upon them. “[The] convents are usually the receptacle where the refractory priests and their dévotes unite,” wrote the journalist AntoineJoseph Gorsas, calling the nuns “furies under their veils and wimples,” “old witches,” and “hideous fanatics.”27 The teaching nuns faced a further challenge. In their capacity as public school teachers, they were, legally speaking, as much servants of the nation as the parish clergy were. “Are not catechists – black sisters, grey sisters, sisters of all colours – responsible for education, are they not public servants? Was it not the purpose of the decree of 27 November to submit them, too, to the taking of the oath?” wrote Gorsas.28 In late 1791, they too were ordered to take the oath on pain of losing their pensions and seeing their public schools closed. Again, there was massive refusal. This put the authorities in a quandary, because the closings would cause serious inconvenience to the public. “Where will you find schoolmasters as zealous and as disinterested as these virtuous teachers?” asked a petition drawn up by the citizens of Lille in early 1792,29 and moderates across the country agreed with them. Some administrations simply allowed the nuns to go on teaching. The municipal council of Bordeaux, for instance, while deploring the fact that “the religious of Sainte-Ursule and Notre-Dame … have declared that they will close their schools if we attempt to force this on them,” argued that “these schools are most useful to the less fortunate of our citizens, and their suppression would occasion discontent,” and decided to leave them open for the time being.30 The minister of the interior concurred: “It would be extremely unfortunate if the instruction of children was interrupted.”31 He ordered that schools across the country remain open.

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But if the nuns had won a battle, they were losing the war. By their defiance they had drawn upon themselves the full attention of the more radical revolutionaries. They were now being identified as tools of the refractories and therefore of the Counter-Revolution. “The nuns … are teaching their pupils principles contrary to the Constitution,” protested the Jacobin clubs, with justification.32 They argued that “it would be better for the children to receive no instruction at all than to receive a bad one.”33 The day came when the Nation agreed with them: “No part of public education will from now on be entrusted to … any houses of the çi-devant congregations of men and women.”34 The congregational schools were closed down. With that, the fate of the teaching congregations, along with that of the rest of the monastic world, was sealed. On 4 August 1792 the National Assembly ordered that all convents be evacuated. The sisters’ plight was made worse by the fact that through the drama of the oath they had incurred the public’s wrath. By causing the closing of schools, they had done something that directly affected ordinary people, and now the ordinary people turned against them. In a petition to the government, the sisters of the Congrégation in Vézelise wrote that since they had refused to take the oath, they were daily the target of new outrages: “Their cloister has been violated with impunity by crowds of madmen who have created much disorder.”35 They protested that anyone would have thought that their longtime service as free schoolteachers would have earned them the gratitude of the town. Their bewilderment and bitterness are understandable; in their own minds, they had done nothing but good to their neighbours. But the incident reveals the fragility of their relationship with “the people.” Once the rulers of the nation turned against them, the religious congregations found themselves exposed, as the following story shows. In Reims, at the same time that the September massacres were taking place in Paris, a mob seized and lynched several nonjuring priests, then roamed the city looking for more. The first the sisters in their monastery knew of it was when they heard the clamour outside their walls: “The crowd, pressing in front of our monastery gate continued to grow. They stayed there all the day … They demanded with great cries that our door be opened so that they could take the priests who (they believed) were hidden among us.”36 One can imagine the women’s fear and confusion. Magistrates arrived, but only to warn them that the crowd was out of control and that they should leave as soon as they could. They fled under cover of night, with a few trusted men to protect them.

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Up and down the country similar scenes were played out. Sometimes amid jeering or indifferent crowds, sometimes at night and in secret, the religious population took flight. Dressed awkwardly in secular clothes, carting the few possessions they were allowed to keep, they left on foot or in rented coaches and wagons. Some of the very old and very sick had to be carried out on chairs.

epilogue This is intended to be a study of cloistered life under the Old Regime, a regime that ended with the establishment of the First Republic on 22 September 1792. Its monastic institutions vanished almost completely within the next fortnight. However, there is an aftermath, a life after death so to speak, which deserves to be noted. During the revolutionary years, the nonjuring church owed its survival partly to the support of women. And active among these women were çi-devant religieuses. We have to recognize that the history of women in the revolutionary years is almost inaccessible. It is heavily dependent on the impressions of men, because women had hardly any means of speaking for themselves. Seen through the eyes of officialdom and journalists, they were either virtuous citoyennes and patriotic wives and mothers or irrational femmelettes doing the bidding of traitorous priests. Their own motivations – whether for actions in favour of or against the Revolution, or for simple indifference to it – were not considered and therefore have to remain a matter of conjecture. What is clear is that the decision that many of them made to defy the Revolution’s ecclesiastical reform was a factor in that reform’s ultimate failure. Timothy Tackett has written that although historians have given pride of place to the sans-jupons and tricoteuses of revolutionary Paris, “it was perhaps the humble women of provincial and rural France, protesting with their whole beings this ‘change in religion’ thrust upon them by the men in Paris, who delivered the single most influential political statement by any women of the revolutionary decade.”37 It should be remarked that while the majority of such protesters were simple peasant women (a fact that officials loved to dwell on at the time), not all counter-revolutionary women were of humble origin. They came from every social milieu.38 Their defiance was multiform – sometimes violent and open, sometimes clandestine. They harassed constitutional priests, sheltered nonjuring priests, and organized underground masses and distributions of sacraments. Children were secretly taught from old catechisms, “fanatical” pamphlets were circulated, and religious services were devised when the Mass could no longer be said. When all

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else failed, the faithful gathered in groups to say the rosary. When finally the Thermidoreans again allowed freedom of worship, it was often women who arranged for the repurchase and reoccupation of disaffected churches.39 In all this female counter-revolutionary activity, François Lebrun sees the hand of “the great mass of religious women, dispersed in 1792, living, for the most part, in France, and not too much interfered with during the Terror.”40 Certainly, nuns took an active role in the mischief that was done to the Constitutional Church; that much can be deduced by the number of them who, at one time or another, went to prison.41 But their importance as leaders in the female version of the Counter-Revolution can only be left to conjecture. For however much civic officals and constitutional priests in their exasperation wanted to make nuns scapegoats for the incivisme of women in general, there were plenty of other reasons why so many of the female sex disliked and opposed the Revolution.42 Arguably, the greatest contribution of the teaching nuns, both cloistered and secular, to the survival of the Catholic Church in France was made long before that church was in any danger – during the long, uneventful stretch of years when they met their students day after day and taught them to read, write, and pray.43 Attendance at a school operated by regulars did not of itself ensure lifelong fidelity to the Church (as the men of the Revolution, alumni of Jesuit- and Oratorian-run colleges, were to prove). So, again, we have to admit that we cannot quantify the influence of religious schoolmistresses on the women they taught. But we do know that well before 1789 there were more dévotes than dévots in France. As the century progressed and men forsook the Church, women became its chief mainstay. “In their detachment or their distancing [from the Church] many men were not followed by their wives,” remarks Jean Quéniart;44 and Michel Vovelle, reaching the same conclusion, maintains that even as the churches emptied of men, religious practice thrived among women: “The theme of the feminization of devotion recurs as a leitmotiv in our analyses.”45 Historians are now agreed that there was a long history behind the dechristianization movement of the Revolution; by the same token, there was a long history behind the attachment, manifested during the Revolution, of many people – and more women than men – to the old religion. “If women had been enlightened,” complained a representative to the Convention in 1793, “priestly fanaticism would not have written the Revolution in characters of blood in so many unfortunate cities.”46 How proud the teaching sisters would have been to hear those words! The gender divide was of utmost importance to the future of France and the church in France. As a result of the loyalty of women to the

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old religion, even as their menfolk were adhering to the Revolution, “a model homme/patriot, femme/fidèle aux prêtres” was allowed to emerge, which coloured the thinking of Frenchmen for over a century to come.47 Women were seen by republicans as the tools of the clergy, the fifth column in society, undermining the rule of Reason. Apologists for the Church sought to counteract this image by consistently downplaying the “feminization” aspect. But the fact remains that without women, the pews would have been empty. As for the women themselves, they simply continued their march, as can be seen from the extraordinary burgeoning of their religious population (from 13,000 in 1808 to 130,000 in 1880).48 One of the casualties of this struggle for male validation was the nuns’ reputation for courage in the face of danger. The men of the Revolution had always decried them as the poor silly victims of scheming nonjurors. Women’s convents, they had maintained, were “monastic bastilles, with refractory priests for jailers.”49 It was natural for republican historians to adopt the same line. But it is disappointing that church historians – most of them clergymen – often did the same thing. While granting that many women went to their death for their principles, they still loved to depict the gender in outlines of soft and fragile femininity: “doves … all trembling with fear,”50 made strong (temporarily) through a miracle of grace. The nuns themselves retained memories of a different sort, of resilient no-nonsense women who faced danger and disruption with an obstinate and often outspoken courage. But their memories remained locked within their communities and did not often impinge on the public historiographical sphere. I should like to conclude with one of these in-house memories – of an encounter between a republican official and an old nun in Brittany. Like the little confrontation with which this chapter started, it was of no consequence in the greater scheme of things. But the fact that it was treasured for most of a century shows that religious women did not see themselves as “trembling doves” and that they valued courage and outspokenness as much as any man. The official’s interrogation of the old lady, an ex-Ursuline, who had been discovered running a small clandestine school, occurred in the Year V. Here is a part of the interview as it survived in local tradition: (q) “What doctrine are you teaching your pupils?” (a) “The faith of our fathers.” (q) “And if our fathers were mad, would we have to follow them?” (a) “Citizen, I knew your father; he was a good Catholic and a man of sense and character. He would not have spoken to me as you are doing.”51 The official’s reply is not recorded. He did not have spiritual descendants to commemorate his words and deeds. The old nun did.

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7 Clausura and Community

The female monastic community was an organism with two skeletons, so to speak: the exoskeleton of clausura, which kept the women close to each other and apart from the world outside; and the endoskeleton of the Rule and constitutions, which defined all the functions of the community and spelled out the way in which they should be performed. Without these two skeletons, female monasticism could not have operated as it did.

cl au s u r a In 1640 Marie Guyart was visited in her Québec monastery by a group of Abenakis: “They asked me why we had our heads all covered up, and why we were only seen through holes (that is what they called our grille). I told them that this was the custom for virgins in our country, and that they were not seen otherwise.”1 If the Abenakis went away mystified, it is not altogether surprising. This must have been, for them, an extraordinary sight. Clausura, the physical enclosing of female religious, cannot have made any sense to their society. It is arguable that in the strict form to which it had been restored by the Council of Trent, clausura was already at odds with the currents of life in Marie’s own country. Yet it was to stand, rock solid or almost so, until the end of the Old Regime. At the beginning of Catholic renewal in France, several influential reformers had argued for the mitigation of clausura.2 They had insisted that a less trammelled life would allow women to do more good

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in a world that badly needed it. They had also maintained that clausura was a recent phenomenon in the Church’s life and was therefore dispensable. Their argument received some support in Rome, since Cardinal Bellarmine himself, in a letter to François de Sales, approved the latter’s plan for an uncloistered community, adding that what the Church had done the Church could now undo: “Before Boniface VIII, there were religious who were not confined to their monasteries in the sense that they could not go out when necessary … Solemn vows and strict clausura only became church law under Boniface VIII.”3 The event to which Bellarmine referred was Pope Boniface’s promulgation of the bull Periculoso in 1298. Until then, enclosure of nuns had been a counsel of perfection. Now it was on its way to becoming universal law.4 Over the following centuries the pope’s directives, which were fairly general in their wording, received the attention of glossators – with powerful consequences. On the one hand their focus was narrowed, while on the other, their stringency was increased. The tradition that perfection was best achieved within monastic enclosure was very old. “A monk outside his monastery is like a fish out of water,” ran the saying. But it had originally applied to both monks and nuns. Now Periculoso initiated a process by which, at the very time that male monastics were relieved of the need for enclosure, it became for female monastics the keystone of the religious life.5 “Clausura, which to start with was only a means and a precaution for men and women engaging themselves in ‘celibacy for the kingdom,’ became little by little, and exclusively for women, an end in itself to which all feminine religious life had to be subordinated.”6 Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commentators elaborated on the requirements of clausura and the punishments for infractions. With developing laws came a developing rationale. Each generation of glossators added strength to the principle that as far as nuns were concerned, chastity was virtually their raison d’être. “There is hardly a hint in the literature that religious women might encounter any other moral dangers, or that the cultivation of other virtues might be in order.”7 It was a peculiarly limited vision of female sanctity that Periculoso and its glosses developed. The immense burden of remaining chaste required high walls, barred windows, and double-locked gates. But once those gates were locked and those windows barred, there was little left for nuns to achieve. Furthermore, this definition, this downsizing so to speak, of the female calling to sanctity was made during an era of spiritual effervescence when many women were experimenting with new forms of religious life. At a time when female devotion was becoming somewhat ebullient in the wider world, Periculoso tried to confine the devotion of nuns within safe though uninspiring channels. It had

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only limited success among monastic women, while a flood of semireligious women – beguines and tertiaries – simply overflowed the banks and went their own way. The Council of Trent came down firmly on the side of Periculoso. In its final session it renewed the decree, adding stiff sanctions for violators. All religious women were to be enclosed. Clausura was to be enforced by the church authorities on pain of excommunication.8 This meant that the walls of women’s monasteries were to be high enough to close off any view, either from within or from without. The entrances were to be locked and double-locked, their keys remaining in the possession of senior officers of the monastery. Spaces where the nuns came close to the outside world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed grilles. No men, not even priests, might enter the enclosure except for the most pressing reasons. Where female pensionnaires were allowed, strict limitions were imposed: only girls from five to eighteen years of age were eligible, and they were to leave the convent rarely and then under the most rigorous supervision. Mature women had no place within the cloisters, since their worldliness constituted an unacceptable temptation for the nuns. In other words, religious women were to be shielded from all disturbing influences. Trent left a lasting image of nuns as frail, susceptible beings whose virtue required heroic protection. Some reformers of the seventeenth century wanted more for religious women. They wanted them to be free to go where they were needed (though always with modesty and under obedience); but beyond that, they wanted to foster a much more spiritual life within the cloister. François de Sales once said that he wished to fill his monastery not with inmates but with religious; he did not want prisoners, he wanted true lovers of Jesus Christ. It was not enough to build high walls; a new energy had to infuse the cloister. “If the spirit of true devotion reigns in a congregation, a moderate enclosure will suffice to make good servants of Christ; if it does not reign there, the strictest enclosure will not be sufficient.”9 His words found an echo among the new congregations. “The enclosure of walls without an interior retreat of the spirit would be a prison rather than a religious haven.”10 However, to reformers of a more conservative stripe, François de Sales seemed to be asking for less, not more: for relaxation of the established rules. The conservatives held firm, and the new religious orders for women – not only the one in question (the Visitation) but all three teaching congregations being studied here – were constrained to submit to strict clausura. However, serious contradictions remained. For one thing, the classroom teaching of externe students to which the three congregations

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were committed was incompatible with old-fashioned clausura, an obvious fact that gave the Holy See cause for anxiety for several years.11 Physical enclosure could be maintained by a complicated system of locking and unlocking doors, but exposure to outside influences could not be avoided as long as children went in and out of the monastery school. For another thing, the new orders were essentially urban, as they had to be if they were to serve their teaching purpose. They had inched their way into the crowded cities of Old Regime France, buying up property as the market and their own financial situation allowed. The monastic solitude that could be achieved in wooded valleys and remote countryside was beyond their grasp. Their space was limited and forever threatened; neighbours might punch holes through their walls or raise tall buildings that overlooked their grounds; passersby could singe the ears of both nuns and pensionnaires with their loud shouts and crude language; trespassers could, with a little will and agility, break in to do damage, steal, or just play tricks. Even the town worthies were not above the occasional peek into the cloister. Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, confided to his journal that he had climbed a ladder in order to peer over the wall at a funeral taking place in the grounds of the local monastery.12 He gave no indication that this was unusual or reprehensible behaviour. A historian of medieval nuns has suggested that whatever the Church’s intention, convent walls served the communities within them “as permeable membranes rather than watertight seals.”13 How much more was this true of the city-based convents of the Old Regime! Yet there seems to be no doubt that the religious women of these convents took their clausura seriously, for several reasons. For one thing, they themselves and the families from which they came equated clausura with respectability. From the very beginning of the reform movement in the early seventeenth century, dévot society had made it plain that religious life without enclosure was déclassé. It was only after the congregations submitted to enclosure that they started their major expansion. “It was then that persons of condition engaged themselves, who would not have entered a simple congregation.”14 Underlying the discourse about social status was a subliminal message, a lingering echo of Periculoso. Cloistered women were safe women; as long as they stayed within their walls, no one could impugn their virtue. “A prodigious number of virgins find [there] a protection for their innocence; far from the world and its dangers, they can safeguard their salvation.”15 This was a sadly vapid view of female religious life, but it was the justification that the leaders of society, both ecclesiastical and secular, gave for the cloistering of women throughout the Old Regime.

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Secondly, the nuns had every reason to fear the wagging tongues of their neighbours. The wider public, for all that it disliked clausura, was paradoxically its greatest enforcer because of the scandalous delight it took in hearing and spreading news of untoward behaviour in the convent. Stories of wayward nuns had been told as early as the Middle Ages, if not before; it has been suggested that they may have been a form of wish fulfillment on the part of the tellers.16 The delectation persisted into modern times. “Désir de fille est un feu qui dévore / Désir de nonne est cent fois pis encore,”17 went the ditty. The Enlightenment which, as Olwen Hufton has said, “immersed woman in nature and made her the creature of her reproductive organs”18 was able to state the same notion in more learned language: “The passions concentrated in the silence and obscurity of the cloister have a vehemence and force which the openness and delicacy of a dissipated world cannot attain … One can compare spirits of this kind to volcanoes.”19 In the face of such stereotypes, respectable communities could only react by making their silence deeper and their obscurity more impenetrable – by trying to ensure that their nuns never appeared at the windows, traded conversations at the gate with outsiders, received unauthorized letters, confided too much to their relatives in the parlour, or lifted their veils in front of strangers. Communities that were found lacking were likely to pay a heavy price. Failure to achieve and maintain enclosure was sufficient cause to close a monastery down.20 The official guarantors of clausura were the bishops and their delegates. If a community’s vigilance slackened – if it put an extra gate in the wall or allowed windows to be installed with a view of the street – the next canonical visitation could become an event to be dreaded. Bishops, according to one historian, were permanently obsessed with the question of clausura, and their directives prove it. “The words ‘walls, doors, windows, grilles, locks, keys’ multiply and pile up, and criss-cross every page.”21 No other matter occupied as much space in their ordinances for female houses. But in fairness, we can see why. They were working for two masters: the Council of Trent, which made them responsible under pain of excommunication for the enclosure of monastic women; and the court of public opinion, which even the aristocratic bishops of the Old Regime were loath to scandalize. Their first concern was the physical restraints – the height of the walls, the shuttering of the outside windows, the doubling of the locks on all entrances, and the refinement of the grilles that separated the nuns from their visitors in the parlours: “The wall that separates the convent from the college is too low and pierced by two or three openings” … “As soon as possible, iron bars must be put on the windows of the choir, the sacristy, the common room and the vestibule, also on the

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windows of the parlours, so that enclosure is guaranteed … In all the parlours, there is to be a second grille on the inner side; it can be made of simple wood until it can be replaced with iron” … “The sacristy window opening onto the street is to be blocked up … The windows of the pensionnaires’ refectory are to be walled up, if possible, or at least closed by iron bars and wooden shutters” … “The outside grilles of the main parlour are only of wood, and the inside ones simple vertical iron bars widely separated from each other, one can easily pass one’s hand through this double grille.”22 The list goes on; there is hardly a record of a pastoral visit that does not mention some aperture needing to be blocked up. These strictures were all directed at “active” clausura: the possibility that nuns might leave the precincts or communicate illicitly with outsiders. The bishops also concerned themselves with “passive” clausura: what strangers might be admitted into the cloister and in what circumstances. Where men were concerned, the list was short: priests to attend the dying, doctors and surgeons, builders and repairmen, gardeners and bakers (sometimes), and – very occasionally – “a man to butcher the pig” or perform some other such duty.23 Wherever the men went, they were to be accompanied by senior nuns.24 As for women, their entry into the cloister was contingent on the bishop’s permission, and in the early years it was not easily given. Even older girls were eyed with some suspicion, as the potential purveyors of worldly news and bad attitudes. They were normally expected to be either gone or in the novitiate by the time they were sixteen or eighteen. Two points should be made. First, the bishops themselves became increasingly generous in granting permission both for the departure of nuns from the monastery for reasons of health or incompatibility, and for the reception into the pensionnat of older women. Second, the fact that the same directives were repeated time and again through much of two centuries suggests that the rules were not always scrupulously observed. If all the exterior windows had been blocked up, there would have been no need to keep warning the nuns “to avoid looking out of the windows onto the street, which is a symptom of dissipated spirits who are beginning to tire of their estate.”25 If the entrances had been properly locked, there should have been no complaints about pensionnaires “loitering at the door, without supervision.”26 The impression given by the records is that nuns allowed creeping modifications to their strict clausura, enough to attract occasional censure but not enough to damage the essential integrity of the cloister. There is negative evidence to support this impression. Even during the Jansenist crisis of the eighteenth century, when many bishops were bent on disciplining rebellious communities, they did

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not allege that clausura was being violated. Most female monasteries kept their record clean enough to escape the order of suppression that the Commission des secours, cooperating with the bishops, would gladly have handed them.27 Thus there were good institutional reasons to explain why, until the very end of the Old Regime, some five out of every six religious women were enclosed.28 The cloister was a defence against ill repute and a haven of respectability for unmarried daughters of “good” family – but only if it remained a true cloister. The women within had to be safe in the one respect that really mattered: their chastity. “When a religious wants to do wrong, the grille is locked,” remarked Vincent de Paul.29 Was there anything else to be achieved behind that locked grille? In the public perception, it seems that the answer was no. Once enclosure was secured, the life within it was assumed to be largely meaningless, even destructive. Colbert is reputed to have said that monasteries “only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”30 From the days of Colbert to those of Diderot, the notion of victimization went from strength to strength.31 The talk on the streets can be summed up by an opinion voiced in 1720, by a man of irreprochable dévot antecedents, on the occasion of a young nun’s death: “This is an early end to her sacrifice. In my mind it is the happiest thing that could happen to a religious.”32 But this assessment of clausura as a negative value was countered by the highly positive case made of it in the writings of the nuns themselves. Whether by choice or necessity, the cloister was the place where these women were going to spend their lives, and it was up to them to decide whether they would do so as prisoners or as true lovers of Jesus Christ. The result was a spirituality built against the backdrop of their enclosure – “our beloved solitude,” as Marie Guyart, and many others after her, called it. The sense of sacrifice was overlaid with a sense of election. The first Ursulines of Quebec were urged to regard the cloister as “a fortress in which are housed the principal riches and treasures of the blood of Jesus Christ.”33 Half a century later the Ursuline Jeanne de Bourges described it as “the Lord’s vineyard where hedges and fences must be raised to protect the fruit, and to make it a garden of pleasure for the heavenly Bridegroom.”34 In 1790, when the National Assembly abolished all solemn vows, a great chorus of protests broke out among nuns across the country, the following being from the Ursulines of Le Mans: Someone has dared to paint a picture for you of the cloister as a place of horror and slavery, with the religious as so many victims in chains, who long for a happy revolution to come and break their bonds and rescue them from their servitude … We have God alone for our portion, we have taken Him by choice,

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and our only ambition is to be as faithful as possible in fulfilling the purposes of our institut.35

Loving testimonials such as these do not prove, by themselves, that every nun was at every time contented with her cloister. But they certainly affirm that there were some, and possibly many, who were. A historian of religious communities has listed the possible reasons for their contentment: stability, the support of a spiritual “family,” security, social prestige.36 In the writings of another historian we learn of a further powerful motivation: pride, “an aristocratic and proud morality which pushes the spirit of sacrifice to its extreme.”37 Cloistered nuns were invited to take pride in belonging to an elite company. It is impossible to know how many did so. But there is evidence that clausura was a way of life that had its attractions, even when the walls had fallen away. The small colony of Ursulines who made their way across the Atlantic towards Louisiana in 1727 did their best to maintain clausura, shuttling between the deck and their single cabin with its six bunks to a side, where the porthole was permanently closed in spite of the stifling heat. They had most certainly “paid their tribute to the sea,” and a landfall in Madeira must have been welcome to them. But when the ship docked and their Jesuit directors gave them permission to go ashore, they proudly stayed aboard within the limits of their temporary enclosure. A small sacrifice, perhaps, but a completely voluntary one.38 The “beloved solitude” was more than just a matter of walls and grilles.

the community offices Every monastic rule started out with the premise that community order depended on a strict internal hierarchy, culminating at the summit in a single person. Whether an abbot or abbess, a prior or father guardian, this person was entrusted with large powers of discretion for which he/she would be answerable in the world to come. “Let him know,” ran the Rule of Saint Benedict, “that he who has undertaken the government of souls must prepare himself to render an account of them [on the Day of Judgment].”39 It was very much the same charge as that laid on every absolute ruler. As originally framed, it did not carry with it an obligation to make an accounting here on earth, any more than that of the king did. The Superior The superior of a women’s monastery inherited the same solemn mandate. However, in the “new” women’s monasteries, while the superior’s

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responsibilities were numerous, her power was anything but absolute. She was hedged around with a number of safeguards to keep her from exceeding her powers. After all, she was a woman: “Let her never forget the quality of her sex and the sex of those whom she has in charge; which, it should be recognized according to the judgment of the wisest persons, is as weak and inherently incapable of governing either others or itself as it is difficult and dangerous to be governed.”40 For this reason, she was subject to the bishop (the community’s ultimate superior) and to the priest whom the bishop named as director.41 She was also bound by a special oath to the most stringent observance of the Rule and constitutions. How close was the community’s subjection to the bishop? He came from time to time, in the course of a regular pastoral visit or when some crisis arose. A more regular supervision was provided in his name by the director. This priest’s function was largely one of support and spiritual guidance, though (it was to be hoped) always within the boundaries of the Rule. His regular responsibilities included overseeing the community’s choice of confessors and, with the bishop’s authorization, presiding at the election of the superior. If any major expenditure was being considered, he had to be consulted. He also exercised the right of intervention: he could, in extraordinary circumstances, overrule the superior. But his influence on the day-to-day running of the monastery should not be exaggerated. In fact, the director sometimes lived in another town and, on the evidence of the monastic annales, could be difficult to get hold of when he was needed. Of course, when troubles arose, as for instance during the Jansenist crisis, he could become an active agent of the bishop’s power. But for many communities and for much of the time, he was a distant figure whose interventions were little more than formalities.42 As an Ursuline historian tells us, “It was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed.”43 The superior was responsible for the community’s material wellbeing and smooth running. She maintained relations with the outside world, with clergy, patrons, friends, and business acquaintances. If there was a question of going to court, it was she who decided it. If plans were to be made for building or renovation, it was she who initiated them. Together with the bursar, she managed the monastery’s financial affairs. She was also the ultimate manager of operations; immediately after her election she was expected to shuffle the community, so to speak, assigning the sisters to new posts or keeping them where they were. She was expected at the beginning of her mandate to visit the schools regularly until she was well acquainted with them, and thereafter to confer frequently with the mistresses in charge. Every decision of consequence within the community had to have her approval.

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And at the end of every day, with her keys in hand, she was expected to visit the monastery gates to ensure, in person, the perfect maintenance of clausura for another night.44 A good superior was more than an administrator. She was also required to be a spiritual guide, to preside over the weekly chapter for the correction of faults, known as the Coulpes, and to give regular spiritual conferences to the community. She was expected to meet with the nuns individually, “to know their interior, and to have them report to her on the state of their prayer life and their temptations.”45 And of course she had to maintain the deepest discretion, “[her] heart being like a faithful deposit of the secrets communicated to her.”46 She was to show no favouritism. Obviously, the trust and respect of the sisters were of great consequence to a superior: “Her government as Mother should be gentler than a father’s, inasmuch as this can be despotic and seigneurial, and similar to those who command as masters or kings of nations.”47 As part of her mothering role, she was to set an example of humility. The Rule ordered her to take her turn in the lowlier tasks of the monastery. Jeanne de Lestonnac, foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame and superior of the Bordeaux monastery, worked regularly in the kitchen and, while she was there, took orders from the cook, who was a lay sister.48 Of all the superior’s responsibilities, the maintenance of good order and smooth relations among the sisters must have been one of the most challenging. “She must never permit any partiality or unusual familiarity of affection among the religious, in order that selfish love given to creatures does not chase away the pure love of God.”49 The danger that she had to guard against was not only that of “disorderly affections” but also that of cliquishness. Divided communities could be hellish places, the sisters “like harpies one side against the other.”50 On the other hand, harmonious communities were places to be proud of.51 Division or harmony, prosperity or poverty – much depended on the superiors. Some of them succeeded triumphantly: “She seemed born to govern” … “It required a genius like hers to tide us over the bad times when the billets de banque were in circulation” … “She displayed to perfection the qualities needed to be a superior … She understood business; [she had] prudence and firmness, and a great vigilance both to maintain good order and procure the temporal and spiritual good of the community” … “Firm and watchful in maintaining the Rule and the discipline of the house, sustaining and animating by her example, prudent and wise in delicate situations, ordering everything with sensitivity and gentleness; caring and compassionate for the infirm, providing for everyone’s needs with true motherly tenderness … never

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thinking of her own needs, so attentive was she to those of others.”52 A really good superior was more precious than rubies to the community she ruled. And, it must be pointed out, just as rare. Of the twenty, or thirty, or forty nuns eligible at any given time, the chances of having one such person were slim; of having even two or three, remote. The nuns knew by experience what made a good superior. “The more the person in command was esteemed, the easier it was to obey,” remarked one eulogist.53 One of the preconditions for esteem was seniority. According to the rules, the superior had to be of a certain age – usually thirty – and with five years of profession. In the early years of communities, some superiors were young, very young,54 but that was because the communities themselves were young and so had little choice. As they matured, they came to expect their superiors to be middle-aged, if not elderly. Geneviève de Razes’s election at the early age of forty was, her eulogist remarked, almost unprecedented in the community.55 It should not come as a surprise that the superior was often one of the more aristocratic members of the community. One of the qualities that made for esteem was noble birth. As long as noblewomen continued to enter the teaching monasteries, they took the lion’s share of the superiorats.56 The tone they gave to the community and the respect and influence they commanded in the world outside, combined with what were considered their inborn qualities of leadership, made them natural candidates for the position. As has already been said, Old Regime monasticism was transfused with aristocratic values. Self-sacrifice and generosity in the service of the Lord were seen as essentially aristocratic qualities, as natural to the breed as self-sacrifice and generosity were in the service of the Crown. Thus, the Ursulines of Blois could say of Marguerite d’Illiers: “Though her brothers and nephews died on the field of honour in the service of the king, her death is more precious, since she became sick in the exercises of our holy institut.”57 Similarly, the historian of Notre-Dame in Poitiers could commemorate the achievements of the late superior, Thérèse de Brilhac, by saying that she “reaffirmed, by her piety and her other excellent virtues, the glory of her family who have done so much honour to Justice in the Parlement of Paris and in the Presidial of Poitiers and to the service of arms in defence of the château against the leader of the heretic rebels, Admiral de Coligny.”58 The achievements of some superiors should not obscure the failures of others. Many houses languished under the rule of inadequate superiors, such as the woman who asked to be relieved of her duties, pleading that she “did not have the strength or courage” to sustain the trials of her little community.59 From time to time, superiors were

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sent packing to other houses. In Châteauroux in 1770, a complaint from the community about the superior’s nepotism and extravagance led to her banishment.60 In La Ferté-Bernard in 1766, when the superior had some sort of a breakdown and physically attacked a novice, other members of the community swiftly notified the authorities, and she was removed.61 Sometimes the shoe was on the other foot; there were communities that seem to have made a habit of being critical of their superiors – Châtellerault being a case in point. “In choosing them to govern us we do not render them impeccable,” wrote the annalist tolerantly,62 but it does not seem that her sisters paid her much heed. They had been tearing their superiors apart for decades. Perhaps the joy which some women expressed when leaving the office, and the tears which others shed when elected, were more genuine than is sometimes suspected. The right given it by the Council of Trent to elect its own superiors was treasured by the community and, as has been seen, interference in the process by bishops or directors often met with resistance.63 The procedures for elections were laid out with care. “It is very important that the superiors be legitimately elected,” warned one Rule. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of these regulations and constitutions.”64 For a month before an election, members were ordered to stop discussing the subject in order to avoid divisiveness. They were not to campaign: “They are forbidden, under pain of losing their … voice [in the Chapter] for three years, to intrigue or cabal, either for themselves or for others.”65 On the day itself, under the eye of the bishop or his deputy, the process began with the election of scrutineers, who distributed the ballots (one for each vocale) and, in the presence of the Chapter, displayed the empty ballot box before locking it. The votes were cast, then counted, in the presence of everyone involved. If necessary, second and third ballots could take place, until one candidate emerged with a plurality of votes. The new superior was then acclaimed and the keys to the monastery delivered to her as a symbol of the authority now vested in her. The ballot papers were immediately burnt to ensure that secrecy was preserved.66 The superior’s term lasted for three, four, or six years, depending on the congregation. Sometimes she could be re-elected, sometimes not. But whatever the particular Rule stipulated, there was going to be an end to her term, at which time she was expected to revert to the ranks. Often she served as assistant for a while and then was re-elected to office – a sort of turning of the Rule, according to one historian, which allowed two women congenial to each other to retain control indefinitely.67 But if the community decided otherwise, both superior and assistant had to be content with a single term.

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The final task of election day was the choice of the new superior’s discrètes.68 This small council of senior nuns acted in both an advisory and executive capacity. They were charged to meet regularly with the superior to discuss the management of the community: the financial policy, the sale or purchase of property, the dispatch of sisters to other foundations, the admission of mature pensionnaires, and, of course, the reception of postulants. They were also consulted over matters concerning the spiritual welfare of the community. Thus, a sort of control was put in place over the superior’s actions: “The prioress is not to resolve any affair without the advice of her assistants.”69 She was to take this advice “readily and with good nature and cheerfulness.”70 However, it was always made clear that she had the final say.71 If the superior was expected to consult the discrètes on matters of importance to the community, she and they together were also expected to report to the Chapter at least once or twice a year. The Chapter was made up of the vocales, choir nuns with a certain seniority. Their “voice,” or right to vote, was precious to them and, in principle, could be denied only in cases of serious fault.72 During the Jansenist crisis, women who were stripped of their vote because of suspected heterodoxy made frequent attempts to appeal to Parlement against their bishops’ ruling. The authorities may not always have taken their rights seriously, but they themselves did. As Madame Jégou has remarked, the democratic character of Chapter meetings should not be exaggerated. “Although the nuns, through the intermediary of the Chapter, could prevent abuses, they seldom took the initative.” The superior proposed, and the Chapter disposed, almost always concurring with her opinions.73 However, the Chapter’s function of control was an important one, which the superior disregarded at her peril. Strictly speaking, it was the Chapter that authorized the superior and her council “to act and negotiate all the temporal affairs of the monastery in the name of the community.”74 A contemporary memoir advised that “for a financial transaction by the superior to be valid, she must have authority from the community in the form of a capitular act.”75 Communities could even challenge transactions that were made without their knowledge. Thus the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Loches won the right to reoccupy a house which the superior and council had sold without the Chapter’s approval.76 The Chapter of Notre-Dame of Poitiers was less successful: its attempt to disavow a dowry of billets de banque accepted by the superior without its authorization came to naught.77 But given the privacy with which nuns preferred to surround their dealings, an open rebuke of this kind amounted to a serious disgrace. When it was discovered in 1708 that the superior of the Ursulines of Rouen had kept the Chapter

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in the dark while the agent made free with their finances, she was discreetly allowed to retire to another monastery to end her days.78 The niceties were observed, but everyone knew that it was a hardship to die in any house but one’s own. A final check on the doings of the executive branch of the house was exercised by the canonical visitor – a priest, secular, or regular, who came from outside to evaluate the regularity of the monastery. He was authorized to speak to every professed member of the community, including the lay sisters, and to recommend improvements. His effectiveness, however, was dependent on the cooperation of the community. “Those whom God gives the confidence to open their hearts to the grand vicar or to the director must not be censured,” wrote one visitor.79 We can guess the reason for his frustration. Communities sometimes had a way of keeping things to themselves and persuading their members not to confide in the men who came to correct them. We have corroboration of this from the other side: from the annalist of the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault. She reported on a long-standing internal quarrel, made worse when the bishop sent in a visitor – from another town, no less! – to interview the community. The annalist expressed surprise that the sisters would have spoken about one another to a “stranger.”80 A sort of omerta could be practised by religious communities, shielding their internal affairs from the eyes of others; this explains why serious problems sometimes persisted without the authorities’ knowledge. However, the community itself, as long as it was well run, was its own most potent enforcer. The assistant, or subprioress, had the power to advise and reproach the superior and, indeed, to go over her head to the director if the matter was serious enough.81 And watching in the wings there were other nuns, well versed in the Rule and determined to prevent the least infraction. We see their outlines in the death notices: “Our dear sister was a pillar of the community, a friend of all the observances, of good order and exactitude … One could be sure that everything she said was free of dissimulation” … “She always had an ardent zeal for the regularity of the monastery” … “Her mind was made up in support of regularity” … “She had a great veneration for all the ancient customs, and was the enemy of all novelty and singularity.”82 All in all, the superior did not suffer from lack of scrutiny, and it is difficult to see how she could have gone far astray if the community was not willing to go with her. It can be argued, then, that women’s monasteries had their own form of constitutional government – not representative government, to be sure, but government according to known statutes, carried out by a single elected head in consultation with a chosen or elected council

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and a larger body made up of senior members, all subject to the ultimate control of the ordinary, and all, in a subtle way, answerable to the women whom they governed. The framers of the rules had done everything in their power to ensure stability and fairness. If communities ran into difficulties, it was not for lack of a blueprint. The Community Officers The council of discrètes normally included the other executive officers of the house: the assistant, the zélatrice, and the dépositaire or bursar. The assistant was often either an ex-superior or a superior-in-waiting. Her first role was to stand in for the superior when extraordinary circumstances arose. Under normal conditions she was the superior’s chief adviser and confidante, and her right arm in the management of the community. It was her duty to work closely with the sisters, listening to their complaints and correcting their shortcomings. She was also expected to carry their concerns to the superior and, if necessary, to warn her of problems. While the superior dealt with the larger issues, the assistant concentrated on smaller administrative details. “Nothing escaped her, she was always attentive to all our needs,” wrote one eulogist.83 She also had the practical management of the house. “She made every effort to keep the house in a charming state of neatness,” wrote another.84 The zélatrice was a specialist in the Rule, and her business was to guard against infractions, even by the superior. She seems a more shadowy figure in the literature, and it may be assumed that her function was often absorbed into that of the assistant. This would certainly be the case as the monastic populations diminished and the nuns were forced to combine their roles. On the other hand, the bursar became more and more visible among monastic officers and, as the economic environment turned unfavourable, more and more essential to the survival of the community. Her office, according to one death notice, was “one of the most arduous in the religious life.”85 She was charged with keeping the accounts, inventories, and registers, paying the bills, collecting debts and pensions, and, together with the superior, planning the budget and anticipating extraordinary expenses. The Rule attempted to instruct her. It advised her on how to manage the payment of dowries (securing the cash as soon as possible) and how to deal with outside agents (“She will not pay the procureur entirely until the business is completed and he has given her all the pieces”).86 But no amount of instruction could substitute for native ability. Like a good superior, a good bursar was a precious commodity, as we can see from the encomiums of the death

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notices: “She did not find any business dealing difficult; outsiders were amazed at the way in which she explained them; she was firm in exacting payments from our debtors” … “She was skilled in business affairs … In different consultations with the ablest of lawyers, the solidity of her judgment was admired” … “Chosen to be our bursar at a time when our affairs were extremely complicated, she straightened them out with a skill that surpassed the ordinary capability of our sex. It is to her rare prudence and excellent management that this house is indebted for the good state in which we see it today.”87 As if this was not enough, the bursar was also responsible for the physical functioning of the house. If workers came into the enclosure, she had to direct, supervise, and pay them. At the same time, she oversaw the lesser officers: the cellarer, the refectorian, the cook, the nuns in charge of the linen room, the gardener, and so on. Hers was a formidable workload. It is little wonder that many women who held the office were seen to have compromised their health as a result.88 All the monastery’s business dealings with the outside world went through the bursar’s office. The layout of this office was minutely described: “A room with stone vaults, to avoid the accident of fire … Around the room, wooden triangles, on which there will be iron hooks to hang labelled bundles of different sorts of papers [such as] permanent contracts, land rents, acquisitions of land and houses, judgments passed for rentes … land registrations … dowry contracts, contracts of constitution, farm leases … receipts for payments, sentences and orders, etc.” The bursar was also to have a chest with a triple lock in which to keep important papers, and four ledgers.89 As in so many other instances, the framers of the rules did everything they could to create a smooth-running community. But in the final analysis, they could not guarantee the entry of women with the talents necessary for success. Without the power to move their members from house to house as need arose, the women’s monasteries suffered the handicaps imposed by their isolation. Other Positions Beneath the superior and the discrètes there was a host of lesser functionaries, too numerous to detail here. The community was subdivided into a network of obediences under the final obedience owed to the superior. In the infirmary, the infirmarian ruled; in the novitiate, the novice mistress; in the day school, the prefect; and so on. If other nuns were sent to assist in these jurisdictions, they came under the obedience of the person in charge. This made good sense: a monastery was a crowded environment, in which multiple activities were always taking

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place. With clear lines drawn around each task, and a clear delegation of authority within those lines, there was less likelihood of conflict. The Rule made it incumbent on the superior to maintain these lines, “[so] that all the officers are obeyed and respected in their charges and do not interfere with each other.”90 The more important officers were the mistress of novices, the mistress general of the pensionnat, the prefect of the externat, the portress, and the sacristan. The first three will be mentioned elsewhere, so they need not detain us here. The portress, whose role was seemingly undemanding, in fact shouldered one of the gravest responsibilities in the community. Nowhere is the awesomeness of clausura better illustrated than in the concern that surrounded her office. For the portress controlled access into the monastery. It was at her command that the gate was opened and the persons waiting there were ushered in or turned away. She needed considerable powers of discretion, “to summon those who were wanted in the parlours, to warn the superior, and to distinguish what was necessary and proper from what was not.”91 Once incomers were admitted it was up to her, heavily veiled and in silence, to lead the way to their destination, all the time ringing a small bell to warn the sisters to remove themselves from sight. At nightfall, together with the superior or the assistant, she took part in the double locking of the gate and the various doors of the monastery.92 According to the Rule, the portress was to be one of the older members of the community. The reason is obvious: an open door and the sight of the world outside might tempt a younger or flightier woman to step across the threshold and thus incur automatic excommunication. But there was a drawback to all this age and discretion. The portress was deliberately intended to be the sentry at what Madame Jégou has called “a cold and rigid barrier.”93 The image she presented to outsiders must have been that of a wardress, ancient and stony-faced, guarding the entrances to the prison where the young-blooded were kept incarcerated. We may speculate that such an image helped to feed the public’s prejudice against monasteries. The sacristan’s was a highly honoured position. It was she, of all the community, who had “the honour of approaching the Divine Majesty most closely and most often.”94 She was responsible for the care and decoration of the altar, the maintenance of the sacred vessels and vestments, and the correct disposition of the church for the various feast and fast days in the liturgical calendar. It should be remembered that the convent church was a public place, where the community had the opportunity to serve (and impress) its friends and supporters. An atmosphere of beauty and cleanliness was important not only to the

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nuns in their choir but to the people who sat in the nave. All this fell to the sacristan – though, it must be noted, she did not herself set foot in the main church; she cleaned and cared for it vicariously, with the help of a paid male sacristan.95 The sacristan had a further responsibility: she held the key to the grille that separated the church from the monastery. Although she was meant never to use it for any purpose save those connected with her duties, it was nonetheless a weak spot in clausura, which could only be safeguarded by the appointment of a totally reliable woman to the position. In most community lists where seniority and importance were designated by position, the sacristan appeared close to the top. For the allotted time during which they exercised their charges, women were able to feel that they “owned” them. We see this in the fact that they often expended money and effort in improving them. Henriette de Boisseleau, while she was infirmarian, renovated the infirmary; when she was assigned to the pensionnat, she renovated that – both at her own expense.96 Magdelaine Morel, while she was sacristan, gilded the candlesticks and painted the choir.97 Barbe Guyot, a senior lay sister, maintained and decorated a small shrine in the kitchen.98 Monasteries benefited greatly from small projects such as these, by which individual sisters made their own imprint on the community. Of the lesser functions of the monastery, little will be said here, except that the attention paid to them in the rules was painstaking and exact. Every task was given a transcendant significance. Thus the refectorian, as she cut the bread and measured out the wine and water, was reminded that while she performed this office, she was “standing in the presence of Our Lord and should think of one of the mysteries of His life on earth, like the meal that He took with His apostles.”99 The sister in charge of the laundry should think with “amorous regret” of the sad state to which the baptismal garments of innocence had been reduced by sin, and she should rejoice in the Lord who was prepared to wash them clean in His blood.100 The dressmaker, while she sewed new habits for the sisters or mended old, could be assured that “the divine Bridegroom … [was] in turn preparing for her a garment of glory of a very special weave, as a recompense for the services which she performs for those whom He loves tenderly.”101 The value of humble duty was promoted in the death notices. Over and over again, women were celebrated for their performance of these duties. “For a long time she had the care of regulating our clock, which she acquitted with such punctuality and exactitude that it would be difficult to find anyone who could do it better” … “She sounded the wake-up bell for almost twenty years” … “Her sewing was so well done that it sold better than that of the rest” … “We have never tasted

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bread so well made.”102 The genius of the rules lay in the way they made every service important. “Nothing is small in the service of the house of God.”103 This principle was capable of transforming the daily life of women’s convents and making a holy vocation out of the dullest routine. “Since the perfection of a religious soul consists principally in the faithful execution of the will of God, marked out for her by her Rules, it is above all necessary that she apply herself carefully to the performance of her daily actions.”104 As long as the women sincerely subscribed to this principle, the community held together and ran well. That was what was meant by “regularity.” It would seem that the preservation of enclosure and of good relations within that enclosure was something that, though it had to be worked for, was not out of reach. Madame Jégou insists that within “the rigid, cold barrier” of the walls, community life could be warm and familial.105 It could also be painful and unhappy. Given the large number of convents across the country and the broad variation in their circumstances, there must have been both happiness and unhappiness within them, as well as every shade of contentment or lack of it. But the rules did at least provide a grounding of stability for those who observed them.

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8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

poverty The Old Regime knew poverty well. Never a day went by that it did not see beggars at its gates. In times of dearth and epidemic disease, poverty could swiftly swell into death, with corpses lying in the streets, in the corners of barns, or in hedgerows along country roads. Even in ordinary times, the poor struggled to make ends meet and all too often ended up in paupers’ graves. This was not the kind of poverty to which religious women vowed themselves. Indeed, the Church had long since laid down that female communities (apart from mendicant sisters, whose right to beg had been granted to them with great reluctance) were not to be poor.1 The new religious orders of the seventeenth century wrote this obligation into their rules. Communities were not to be established until they were assured of sufficient revenues to maintain themselves. Secular society underscored this with great emphasis: new convents were allowed into cities only on condition that they would not beg or otherwise become a charge on local citizens. They were expected to have at their disposal property and a solid bank of rentes. Although many of them broke the terms of the agreement and started up with little or nothing, most communities soon achieved financial sufficiency. Then they bought as much land as they could afford, and on it they built solid, spacious houses, many of which survive to this day. But their rules warned them against extravagance:

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“The buildings must be commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous” … “Care must be taken that they do not resemble châteaux and palaces, castles, and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”2 If the nuns did give way to temptation, it was in the construction and decoration of their churches. Elsewhere their architecture was appropriately subdued. But when the occasion allowed, they did panel their refectories, put flagstones down on their walks, and plant extensive gardens complete with handsome shrines. Some of the larger monasteries ended up as very fine places indeed.3 Within these premises, the rules dictated that the nuns should live decently, though without excess: “Each religious … shall have three dishes at each meal, morning and evening: to wit, a soup or an entrée, a portion of meat, and a dessert.”4 The quality of their food was to be good.5 They were expected to be well groomed, cutting their hair regularly and “taking care to wash their hands, mouths and teeth” and – “once or twice a year, during the summer heat” – their legs.6 Their linen was changed weekly, their bedsheets monthly;7 their robes were renewed once a year. The Rule forbade heat in sleeping quarters,8 but there were to be fireplaces in the common rooms, and stoves outside the schoolrooms so that mistresses coming out of class could warm themselves. When the sisters were sick, they were to be given care in specially equipped infirmaries. This comfortable sufficiency did not fail to arouse snide comment among outsiders.9 However, the nuns were observing their own version of poverty, “a total shedding of all temporal and exterior goods and an incapacity to possess and dispose of anything personally, whatever it may be.”10 For them, poverty meant not physical neediness but a personal surrender of all rights of ownership: “The sisters will have no private possessions and will own nothing on the face of the earth, so that none of them can so much as say, ‘This pin is mine›11 … “The revenues and goods of the monastery will be distributed to each according to her need but without superfluity … [Each sister] will consider what she has as being only lent to her.”12 Among the sisters there was to be no talk of “mine” or “thine”; everything was to be “ours.”13 Their cells were to be open to the inspection of the superior, and they were to have no locked boxes. To further their spirit of detachment, the Rule in some communities recommended that once a year they should exchange their personal effects, such as rosaries, prayer books, and even beds and cells.14 Anything they received from family and friends or earned by their own industry was to be surrendered to the superior. Failure to do this was considered to be more or less serious, depending on the value of the goods. If the value was over twenty sols,

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the perpetrator was deemed to be in mortal sin; and if after her death she was found to have been concealing possessions in her cell, she was to be deprived of ecclesiastical burial.15 According to one Rule, this spirit of poverty was so essential to the religious life “that even our holy father the Pope cannot dispense from it.”16 However, it seems that in its primitive perfection it was beyond the grasp of most communities, and it soon began to disintegrate. In chance remarks and in official documents, signs appear that whatever name they gave to it, communities were allowing private ownership. In the 1660s, for instance, Barbe Buvée, after being forced out of the Ursuline convent of Auxonne, claimed to have left in her cell (besides her clothes and bedclothes) “a large wooden chest and a little cabinet, a writing case with a lock to use as a desk … a pair of silver candlesticks, a salt-cellar and goblet of silver, a chain, a cross and two gold rings,” as well as numerous books and private papers.17 Auxonne was at the time a house out of control, which might explain this accumulation of property; but similar problems could also be found in “regular” communities. In 1672 the official visitor to the Ursuline convent of Mâcon reported, “They are lacking in what seems to be essential to communities [that is, poverty]”; private pensions and private possessions, as well as the continued use of the nuns’ family names, were all being permitted.18 Through the succeeding years, Our Lady Poverty continued to beat a retreat. In 1713 Archbishop Hardouin of Sens forbade the sisters of the Congrégation in Provins to keep mirrors or clocks in their cells.19 A census in 1732 took note of two nuns in the Ursuline house in Carpentras who were being served by maids, whom they paid themselves.20 In 1737 the bishop of Rodez found that the Ursulines in the town of Villefranche were keeping money – and wine! – in their cells, and were treating the gifts received from their families and the money raised by their handwork as their own.21 These cases were not exceptional. Evangelical poverty was by this time an ideal which most people agreed was out of reach. At least that is the implication of a death notice written in Poitiers in the year 1698, which made a special case of a deceased nun who “excelled above all in the love of poverty, having in her cell only those things that are marked by the Rule.”22 There were several reasons why the vow of poverty was under stress. First, the surrender of all sense of ownership must, at any time, be extremely challenging. “This shedding of things, this divesting of all property, was perhaps the most difficult reformation the monastic undertook,” remarks a historian of medieval nuns,23 and it must have been equally difficult for the nuns of the Old Regime. Secondly, the

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sisters, many of them accomplished needlewomen, knew that the work of their hands had a value in the marketplace, so it seemed only fair that they and their families should share the profits. Furthermore, their commitment to poverty was constantly being undermined by indulgent relatives offering little douceurs. Parents wanted their daughters to be chaste but were not as anxious to see them poor. They were often ready to grant them an extra allowance, known as a petite pension, for their own use. To take one example out of many, when Marie-Anne de Villeneuve professed in 1762, her father stipulated that she should receive, from the rentes he made over to the monastery, 100 livres per year “to procure for her the little treats that are not ordinarily given out in convents.”24 This slippage from the ideals of the earliest days might have been averted if the practice of petites pensions had not been countenanced by ordinaries and communities alike. Certainly, they set conditions: the money must remain physically in the hands of the designated officers, and the disposition of it must receive the approval of the superior. Also, in many cases, as the death notices show, the nuns who received pensions dedicated them to improving the monastery. Nevertheless, the equality that lay at the heart of successful community life was diminished, and some nuns were “rich” while others were “poor.” Going by the references made to them in the death notices, it appears that these petites pensions came into use fairly soon after foundation.25 Since they were subject to diocesan jurisdiction, we may assume that different bishops authorized them at different times and in response to different needs. The rub was that once they were in place, they tended to remain. For example, they were introduced into the monastery of the Congrégation in Reims in 1653, when the community was in financial difficulties; they were still around in 1700, when they received the bishop’s ratification on condition that they be employed “according to our custom.” Thereafter they became part of the monastery’s economy. In the 1770s a community member was able to write: “I lack for nothing … I have a pension sufficient to leave me with nothing or almost nothing to be desired, and I have used it until now to procure whatever pleases me, but always with complete dependence [on the superior].”26 The critical difference between licit and illicit ownership lay in the fact of permission. The private enjoyment of goods was not considered a breach of the ancient rule of poverty as long as it remained under obedience. But however lawful, the selective privileging of some members threatened community morale; and this was recognized by the nuns. “It had consequences,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “which

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obliged us to make the prayer of the Wise, and ask God to give us neither riches nor poverty, but only what is necessary to live.”27 Once the practice was in place, however, it was hard to break. In 1656 a religious author had written: ‹Mine’ and ‘Thine’ are dangerous demons that enmesh the hearts of the religious in coils that can only be broken with violent effort.”28 But ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ never disappeared from the records of Old Regime monasticism; indeed, they seem to have grown stronger with time. Perhaps the basic reason is that in any age it is difficult to give up all possessions. But beyond that, the new female congregations of the Old Regime suffered a specific set of problems. The open wound through which their commitment to poverty threatened to bleed away was, paradoxically, the other kind of poverty, caused by reversals of fortune which left them in severe financial need. The monasteries were too often insufficiently endowed; their populations were out of proportion to their investments; and the Crown had too many ways of getting at their money. When trouble struck and their debts with grocers and butchers rose to impossible heights, the authorities had to let them find money where they could: from their families and friends or from their own labours. When families were called on for extra aid, they naturally enough insisted that whatever they gave should go to their relatives alone, and not into the bottomless hole of the community debt. “If these pensions and presents were put in common, the donors would refuse to continue giving them,” remarked a bishop during the crisis of the 1720s.29 But since some nuns did not have families to call on, the result could be inequitable in the extreme. “Ever since our temporal was thrown into disorder, there has been almost nothing held in common; private property leads to a sense of ownership, an open door to a multitude of faults,” wrote a superior in the aftermath of the Law Crash.30 “Some go hungry while others eat,” wrote the director of another house in the same difficult time.31 The rules were right in the first place: private property was the bane of community life. What poverty created, prosperity finally eradicated. By the end of the Old Regime, many communities had righted themselves and petites pensions had ceased to be a problem. In 1776 the community of SaintMarcellin honoured its deceased superior with the following eulogy: It is to her that we owe our renewal of regularity in the observance of the vow of poverty. Her grace, gentleness and engaging manners drew to her side all those with whom her predecessor had been unable to succeed … Amour-propre had formed obstacles that had appeared insurmountable … but now everything has been put in common.

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May the Lord by His grace make us more and more enthusiastic in our common work to sustain this point so essential to our Constitutions.32

However much the nuns of this community owed to their dynamic superior, they also owed a great deal to the rising income from their farms and rentes. No longer at their wits’ end to put food in their mouths, they were able to forgo the security of their private pensions. Thus, although the re-establishment of the common life, celebrated in Saint-Marcellin and other houses, was a major victory for the monastic spirit, it also stemmed from the return of prosperity. There was a great deal of truth to the old adage that “it was necessary to be rich to make a vow of poverty.”

chastity In 1647 Père Jérôme Lalemant, after studying the rules of the Ursuline congregations of Paris and Bordeaux, and consulting with the community on the spot, sat down to draw up constitutions for the Ursuline monastery of Québec. The resulting document was a harmonization of the two principal rules then being followed by Ursulines in France, informed and coloured by the circumstances of North America and by his own Jesuit spirituality.33 For all these reasons Père Lalemant’s Rule comes down to us as an excellent introduction to the science of religious community life as it was being transmitted during the middle of the seventeenth century. It had a didactic intention. The author clearly believed that those for whom the Rule was intended should be expected not only to obey it but to understand it in its deepest sense. In common with the other evangelical virtues, he explained, the vow of chastity depended for all its meaning and value on Him for whom it was undertaken – the “adorable and lovable Bridegroom”: “After this vow is taken the holy and sacred Spouse takes possession of religious persons in such a particular way that the offences against the sixth commandment of God, which in other people would only be simple sins, become in their case sacrileges, in virtue of what they are and the way in which they belong to Jesus Christ.”34 At the very least, the vow of chastity rendered the sisters incapable of marriage and obliged them to a scrupulous observation of the sixth commandment. But according to Lalemant, there was much more to chastity than this: “What is generally said of the religious woman, that by her vows she becomes an entire and perfect holocaust, cannot be true if the vow of chastity … does not also entail the sacrifice of all other

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bodily pleasures and goods, even those that are lawful and indifferent, and a placing of all … at the disposal of Jesus Christ her beloved Spouse.”35 Under this expanded definition of chastity, a whole set of behaviours became implicated: modesty in dress and bearing, a physical reserve to the point of never touching another person unnecessarily, control of one’s tongue, moderation in eating, avoidance of profane books “and the use of all other things that can give pleasure to the senses,” readiness to accept the austerities and mortifications prescribed in the Rule, and in general forbearance from “a certain tenderness … which women usually have toward themselves, and which leads to complaints, caused for the most part by unreasonable resentments over the lack of appreciation of their merit or the lack of care given to their person.”36 In other words, evangelical chastity called for an all-out assault on self-love, “this miserable life of ourself,” as Marie Guyart called it. The Rule that Père Lalemant constructed was faithful to the spirit of previous rules. In all these rules, the vow of chastity was treated in much the same circumspect way. For the Filles de Notre-Dame, chastity consisted of “setting a guard on the eyes, ears, and tongue,” preserving inner humility, behaving modestly in speech and movement “without showing any sign of impatience or pride,” respecting other sisters, and eating temperately – in sum, “imitating the purity of the Angels by the cleanliness of body and of soul.”37 The Ursulines of Bordeaux were admonished “to guard the gates of their senses, principally those of sight, hearing, and speech, against all disorder” and to avoid demonstrations of excessive familiarity.38 Those of Tours were warned never “to lift their eyes and their thoughts towards men” and never to show overt signs of affection to one another.39 “Particular friendships” were to be rigorously avoided – not only because they might lead to illicit relations but because human bonding, however innocent, was simply another way of cheating the divine Bridegroom. “Wishing to purify the inclination which I feel for someone,” wrote Catherine Chauvel of Blois, “each time I hear or see her, I desire it to be for me an occasion to return towards my Spouse … At the same time, I shall ask Him that, no matter how little natural love remains in me towards this person, He will be pleased to destroy it altogether.”40 This delicate approach to the problem of chastity was a major departure from that of past centuries. The chastity which Periculoso had been at such pains to protect had been, so to speak, hard-core chastity: the preservation of virginity and the avoidance of sexual pollution, which could be achieved by erecting barriers between women and men.41 It was as though the medieval Church was content to put

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its religious women into a donjon – a circle of strong walls closely enclosing their ultimate virtue, sexual continence. In the more complicated atmosphere of the seventeenth century a series of outworks – modesty, temperance, and self-denial – were thrown up at some considerable distance from the central donjon. The thinking seems to have been that if the Enemy was held at the outer gates, the centre would remain free from attack. This suggests a certain view of human nature that is at odds with the one we usually ascribe to seventeenth-century religious thought, according to which human nature soiled by original sin is essentially evil, corrupt, full of infection, and always on the verge of self-destruction. Without denying this theology, some educationists took the position that evil does not breed spontaneously within the baptized soul but creeps in through the senses. It infests an otherwise pure and clean spirit and, once it has done so, is difficult to dislodge. But if it can be excluded from the beginning by tightly controlled behaviour and temperate living, then the soul can thrive in all innocence. The secret lies in education and training. Pierre Fourier was saying this at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Antoine Arnauld at the middle, and François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon at the end: “For all that the nature of children has little good in it, they can be rendered docile, patient, firm, cheerful and peaceful.” It was only when left to themselves that “the still-tender body and the soul which as yet has no particular leaning in any direction will incline towards evil, and a kind of second original sin is created in them.”42 This essentially neutral quality of body and soul was known as “baptismal innocence,” and it was clearly associated with young girls (wellbrought-up young girls, at any rate) and therefore, by extension, with at least part of the religious population. Given the fact that in the seventeenth century most nuns began their religious lives in their midteens and may well have been in the pensionnat since early childhood, it was thought possible that with proper management they could be kept in innocence from the cradle to the grave. “A person who enters the cloister in blessed ignorance of the evil maxims and practices of the world, and who has kept her baptismal innocence, has almost nothing to destroy and has only to build, following the holy desires that lead her to God alone,” wrote a respected religious of the day.43 Numerous death notices agreed with her. A truly privileged person was one who “had the advantage of bearing an innocent soul, having left the world before knowing it.”44 This was the preferred path to holiness. Women who had to struggle with temptations against purity were seen more as people who had forfeited something than as the true heroines of the cloister.45

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Going back, then, to the rules, it seems that these were shaped more around the notion of baptismal innocence than around that of innate concupiscence. Their premise was that as long as the gates of the senses were guarded from the recurring temptations of daily life, serious problems of impurity could be avoided. They contained not the slightest suggestion that women were fundamentally sexual beings, with urges that might arise independently of outside stimuli. In this respect the rules, as the official guides to monastic management, offered no support for difficult cases involving chastity. On the occasions (fortunately rare) when communities truly ran amok, as in Loudun in the 1630s, Louviers in the 1640s, and Auxonne in the 1660s, they offered no psychological insight broad enough to deal with the problem. Women of good family, carefully raised and properly cloistered, were not believed capable of such outrageously erotic behaviour. The only conclusion could be that they were demonically possessed. None of this is to say that the burden of evangelical chastity, as constructed by the rules, was easy to bear. “Let no one think that she has satisfied the spirit of her vocation unless she is perfectly dead to all her senses,” wrote Père Lalemant.46 The implications of the vow were hugely expanded. Lust was one of the seven deadly sins; the suppression of it might be difficult to achieve, but it was feasible, and the day might come when, all passions spent, victory could be claimed. But the holocaust of the “detestable myself,” the destruction of selfsatisfaction in all its forms, was a different matter; it would require a lifetime, and even then there would be no victory. “The holiest of the saints suffer its attacks until their death,” wrote Marie Guyart, “and in this they are truly humbled.”47 This being said, it is obvious that for some nuns more than others, the struggle against the “detestable myself” was a sexual struggle. This becomes plain in a comment made by Catherine Ranquet, describing a duty that was to her a subject of humiliation: [that of] confronting souls that are afflicted with distressing and unmanageable temptations, principally of impurity, because God has never allowed me to be thus affected, so that even now I cannot comprehend what it is that is called pleasure in that respect. However, I greatly esteem these souls because they are given the chance to fight generously and win glorious victories; that is what I call virtue, and it is that, and not the peace in which I live, that is worthy of the honour and esteem of God.48

Catherine, who had entered the Lyon monastery at the age of twelve, had become a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom; many of the women with whose guidance she was entrusted had not. The death notices, in

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their circumspect way, confirmed this unevenness of experience. On the one hand, they eulogized the many peaceful souls for whom religious life had been “a yoke both gentle and light,” whose souls had remained “tranquil and peaceful.”49 On the other, they paid their respects to those who had had “a temperament naturally hot and ebullient” and whom “the devils never ceased to attack”; those who had been “fiery in [their] desires”; and those with “temperaments of fire in which virtue finds more resistance and has more difficulty prevailing.”50 There is, as shall be seen, a close and suggestive connection between the women of “fiery temperament” and those who practised excessive mortification, the brutal disciplining of their own bodies. But the reading of the rules and the eulogies written after death keep us standing on the outside of things. The reticence with which the monastic literature treats the problem of chastity may be misleading.51 The cool and reserved conduct which the rules prescribe may indeed have covered the “volcanoes” of sexual desire which the public suspected. We can only argue that it is dangerous to paint with too broad a brush. It appears that the vow of chastity demanded greater sacrifice from some women than from others. In no case, however, was it a vow easily honoured as long as every concession to self – selfesteem, affection for other people, fondness for food, the enjoyment of warmth, and other comforting sensations – was regarded as impure. “Our nature,” wrote Catherine Ranquet, “is a chained dog which cannot harm us if we don’t touch him.”52 But the chaining of that dog was itself a lifelong business, which could lead some souls into terrible confusion.

obedience “Whom do we seek if not God? And where can we better find Him than in obedience?”53 Obedience had been the keystone of monastic life ever since the days of Saint Benedict. The rules of the seventeenth century demanded nothing that had not been demanded for a thousand years. What was new was the endorsement which this evangelical virtue now received from society beyond the monastery walls. The seventeenth century saw an increasing insistence on the need for civic order and obedience to authority. The training ground for this obedience was the family, in which, according to the royal declaration of 1639, “the natural reverence of children for their parents is the bond of legitimate obedience of subjects for their sovereigns.”54 The authority which the lawmakers of the Old Regime accorded to parents – mainly to fathers, but to mothers too – required, for enforcement, a strong culture of obedience.55 Children were expected to be submissive. And

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girls, of course, were expected to be the most submissive of all. By nurture if not by nature, young women entering the convent must already have been shaped according to the principle enunciated by Madame de Maintenon: “We [women] are destined to obey all our lives.”56 Evangelical obedience, however, was meant to take them to a different level, with “the perfect and entire sacrifice of the religious person by this final surrender of the most precious things remaining to her: her will and understanding and everything that depends on them.”57 Like the vow of chastity, there was no end to it for those who wished to be perfect. The more repugnant the order and the more inadequate or mistaken the person giving it, the more meritorious was the obedience. “It is then that there ought to appear the true submission and complaisance of a religious soul toward her sacred Spouse.”58 True obedience needed no support from understanding: “There is nothing that so obscures the lustre and beauty of this virtue of obedience as the wish to understand clearly what is being ordered.”59 In other words, there was no excuse for disobedience, whakever the circumstances; a truly virtuous nun had to practise perfect obedience. The eulogy of Françoise Fournier, an Ursuline of Angers whom many hoped to see canonized, said it all: “From the first day of her novitiate to the last breath of her life, she was always faithful to the practice of regular observances, and during the fifty years that she lived in the house, she was never seen to break the smallest rule.”60 The religious woman was under obedience to the superiors of her house, male and female, and to the bishop. They were for her the “living rule,” representing the hidden God. She also owed obedience to the written Rule, which was, so to speak, etched in stone, not only in its main outlines but in its finest details. “There is nothing small in religion.” This conviction, drummed into succeeding generations of novices, gave value to the closed-in lives that religious women were destined to lead. It also threatened to leave them inflexible in spirit and resistant to the least change. “One of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form,” wrote Cardinal de Fleury, adding that in this respect religious women were immovable.61 Looked at in one light, obedience was a regressive force, turning women into children. An ideal community was one that had “a rigorous punctuality in observance of the rules, a docility marked with simplicity and a childlike spirit.”62 Ideal nuns were those imbued with the same spirit – “submission towards superiors, not doing the least thing without permission.”63 The death notices sang their praise: “Those who had her for companion in obediences were sure that she would not so much as move a finger without their order” … “She was like soft

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wax in the hands of her superiors” … “She was like a child in the hands of her superiors.”64 Obedience was frequently associated with contentment: “She lived peacefully since her profession in the observance of the Rule.”65 Eulogies of this kind seem to be praising what William James has called “the insipidity of passive happiness.”66 But what is wrong with happiness? In an age when so many vocations were ambiguous in their origins, it was highly unlikely that all nuns would be called to heroic virtue. Nor would it have helped their communities if they had been. Healthy communities needed women who were cooperative, forbearing, and faithful to their duties. The only cement that could hold them together, for long years in a small space, was obedience. Although obedience was a burden, it was also a comfort. And at the end of the day, it was a guarantee of salvation: “They can be assured that, always living thus in Jesus Christ, they cannot but die in His arms, and it is above all at this moment of death that … the blessed soul will fully understand how true and certain are the words and promises of a God of goodness and mercy for those who persevere to the end in doing their duty.”67

self-mortification: th e g r eat te m ptatio n Nevertheless, many women could not accept obedience wholeheartedly. Between its demands and the demands of their nature there developed an unbearable tension. A deeper urgency brought them into conflict with their Rule: a spiritual condition called “scrupulosity.” Strict monastic practice had always included self-mortification and selfdeprivation. But while the rules of the teaching congregations continued this tradition, they did so with moderation. Penitential practices, they insisted, were to be approached with caution, for fear they might undermine the apostolate. “The chastisement of the body ought not to be excessive or indiscreet in the way of vigils, fasting, and other exterior penances and austerities, which often damage and prevent greater good.”68 These were Jeanne de Lestonnac’s words, but all three congregations shared the message. The difficulty about this call to moderation was that it was being sounded within a religious culture that in other respects cried out for extremism. The message that the church of the Old Regime presented to its members was one of guilt and fear. “We must satisfy divine justice either in this world or in the other,” wrote Vincent de Paul in the midseventeenth century.69 “It is an indispensable law that sin must be paid for and the justice of God satisfied, either now or after death,” preached Hyacinthe de Montargon in the late eighteenth century.70

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The fact of being a priest or a religious brought no relief from anxiety; indeed, such persons knew that they were being held to a higher account. “Priests (but nuns as well) were more conscious of guilt than were laypeople. Their constantly invoked and exalted ‘supereminent dignity’ had its counterpart in the continual encouragement of a guilty conscience.”71 Sins that would matter little in others became sacrilegious for them. The standards to which, in theory, they were to be held were unbearably high. To be truly open to God, wrote one nun, a religious soul must be “without desire, without affection, without choice … without inclinations, without will, without passions.”72 Human nature, “the detestable myself,” wrote another, was the principal obstacle to the soul’s perfection. “It is a scoundrel and our enemy, and it can only be overcome by being insulted.”73 The body was a dead weight, its humours and affections so many traps entangling the soul. The duty of the consecrated person was to transcend all this, to cut the ties of the flesh. If she failed, the consequences were clear: “Many are called but few are chosen.” A powerful body of teaching about the pains of hell was available to prod consciences. Even the saints had cause for fear.74 So it is not difficult to understand why the “syndrome of scruple” flourished in a special way in this culture and during this age.75 Although many hearers of the message managed to buffer it in some way or dismiss it as hyperbole, for others the urgings and threats crystallized into a haunting terror, and the terror gave rise to a compulsion to redeem themselves. The need to punish their bodies overwhelmed them. Thus it was that even in the moderate communities of the teaching congregations, with classrooms of children close by, and often in clear contravention of their vow of obedience, some women practised ferocious penances. In 1652 Jeanne Bourelier entered the Ursuline house of Montbard.76 She was not a typical novice. She came from another convent, which had suffered financial collapse, taking with it all her dowry money. Although she was destitute, the Ursulines accepted her because she was a skilled pharmacist and therefore useful to the community. Jeanne, however, took her suppliant position seriously. She asked to be fed on bread and water only, and when her request was turned down she set to work to make it happen anyway. “She used a thousand tricks to get her way, sometimes even collecting the bread that was meant for the dogs.” Her superior found out and scolded her for her failure of obedience. Jeanne’s reaction gave the superior cause for reflection: “She showed by her humility that it was a true spirit of mortification that drew her into such rigorous austerity.”

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But this was not the end of the matter. A new religious devotion had come upon the scene, which involved making a vow of slavery. As conceived by Pierre de Bérulle, it was meant to foster a spiritual servitude, a surrender of personal freedom to God’s will. But Jeanne added a physical dimension. She wrapped a chain around her arm, above the elbow where it would not be seen, and fastened it so tightly that it bit into the flesh. Eventually this too was found out, and the chain was cut off. All the while, Jeanne was starving herself, until “there was nothing left to her but skin and bones.” Her behaviour was so unusual that it caused her superiors to suspect that she might be under the influence of the Devil. Finally, however, they concluded that she was being led in secret ways by God and that they had no business interfering. Madeline de Riquety experienced the classic childhood vocation that is familiar in the hagiographies of female saints.77 By the age of eleven she had taken a vow of chastity, which she then had to defend against her mother’s determination to “engage her in the world.” Far from being forced into the convent, Madeline had to cling to it with might and main as her mother fought to take her home. But having once achieved her victory, she knew no inner peace: “She wanted to destroy her poor body with disciplines, hair shirts, crosses studded with pins and other tortures.” Like Jeanne Bourelier, she was able to persuade her anxious superiors that it was the spirit of God that was moving her. Marie Helyes took a similarly aggressive approach to her body: “She gave it as little consideration as if it were a carcass” and “bore it an implacable hatred.” She scourged herself daily, often in sight of the community, causing some nuns to groan out loud at the sight of her bleeding shoulders. Only the onset of consumption of the lungs forced her superiors to call a halt.78 Barbe de la Motte also sought to destroy her body: “Everything that could damage it pleased her.” In addition to wearing the usual penitential wardrobe, she refused to warm herself at the fire, no matter how cold it was.79 We see the same ferocious appetite for self-mortification in Marguerite Loyauté, who disciplined herself with an iron chain and ate leftovers instead of ordinary food. “She treated her body as a slave and a mortal enemy.”80 Geneviève Cousteughol flagellated herself until the walls of her cell were splattered with blood. “She would gladly have torn her body to pieces, treating it like a deadly enemy.”81 Françoise de Fabre “treated her body as a beast of burden, from which, she said, one should exact everything possible.”82 As for Louise de Myr, “her body was a stranger to her.”83 And so the list goes on, the theme always the same – that the body is a foul carcass, a dead weight, an enemy. How is such behaviour explained? By youth, perhaps? Unbridled fervour was to be expected in the young. With age and the passing of

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the years, this passion for self-mortification might be expected to abate. But when Louise Vallette de Bosredon died at the age of ninetyfive, her eulogist wrote: “It required all her confessor’s authority during these last years to take away her instruments of penance.” Marie de Lavergne, dead at the age of eighty-two, had practised mortification “until her extreme old age.” Another stubborn old nun, Galiotte de Foucaud, was found on her deathbed to have “brooches of sharp iron dug into her flesh.” Anne Toutain, at the age of seventy-six, “said that it was no time to give up her penances, that she ought rather to increase them to prepare herself for death.” And when Catherine de Buges, seventy-eight years old, sensed the onset of her final illness, “she got up in the usual way, used the discipline on her shoulders, and said her rosary with her arms in the form of a cross.”84 For such women, the war against the body ended only with death. It is clear that some personality types were addicted to scrupulosity and therefore to self-punishment: “By nature hot-tempered … the demons never ceased to attack her” … “A quick temper, full of fire … she punished her innocent body with disciplines and other instruments of penance, so that gentleness became natural to her” … “Thus did she overcome the vivacity of a hot and fiery temperament.”85 What lay behind these phrases? Possibly, the failings of a quick tongue and a hot temper. At least that is suggested about Salome Bernard, who was of a “quick temper, little accustomed to submission,” and Catherine de Moutte, who “if ever a hasty word or action escaped her … knew how to punish herself … [going] so far as to put manure in her mouth, in which worms could be felt moving around”; also Marie de Pons, whose self-punishment was so successful “that during thirty three years, she never gave in to the slightest outburst of temper.”86 However, the term “fiery temperament” was often used in the “Lives of the Saints” as a codeword for sexual restlessness,87 and the death notices may have been employing the same code. The diagnosis would have been consistent with the opinion of contemporary experts, who held that “scruples that arise from wicked thoughts are the most frequent [of all] and outnumber those that beset the spirit.”88 Self-punishment took different forms. Magdelaine Chomel carved the name of Jesus on one breast, the name of Mary on the other. Marie Françoise Theterel pressed a red hot iron to her breast and arm, until “several pieces of flesh fell off.” Adrienne Theterel immersed herself in cold water and remained there with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross until her superior discovered her and gave her a severe scolding.89 Others slept on the ground, starved themselves, or ate disgusting food.90 Some women went even further, swallowing the contents of infirmary vessels, drinking blood and pus, or kissing the sores of the sick. Others dressed in rags or went barefoot.91

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The people who were most challenged by self-mortifying nuns were their superiors. By a happy coincidence, the death notices were normally written by these superiors, so we can gain some idea of how they viewed their troublesome charges. Experienced superiors and spiritual directors had known for centuries that refusal to eat and other ascetic behaviour could have a physical or psychological as well as spiritual motivation.92 They seem to have anticipated such behaviour in the novitiate as part of the normal wilfulness of youth. With time, however, they expected to bring it under control. At some critical point, the women were ordered to give up their austerities or at least to submit them to the guidance of their superiors. Their response to the demands of obedience varied. Some women panicked, even to the point where they considered leaving the convent.93 Their resistance was logical enough. Adrienne Theterel, the girl of the ice-cold bath, argued that “she had never thought she would have to ask permission to imitate the Saints.”94 Others submitted, though it seems that their submission was often less than total. One young woman’s “penchant for austerity obliged the Superiors, more than once, to use all their authority to put limits on it.” But she simply went underground. “[She was so] ingenious in getting what she wanted, and clever in knowing how to conceal it, that they saw they could not win.”95 This was a common story: “In spite of the watchfulness of her superiors she destroyed her health.”96 Others pestered their superiors and confessors with pleas and promises, even playing them off against one another, like children trying to get their own way.97 Some of them were openly defiant. When Françoise Garraud was warned that her self-starvation was killing her, “she answered that she found pleasure and enjoyment in it.” When Gabrielle de la Viale was ordered by her confessor to give up her mortifications for the sake of her health, she answered him: “I do not know, Father, if I can obey you in this.”98 There was a hard core, so to speak, of women for whom the ascetic life was far more than a passing attraction. Rather than give it up, they were prepared to defy the very authority they had vowed to obey. We are reminded of the young Catherine of Siena, standing up to her parents: “I must obey God not men.”99 How did the superiors view the problem? First, they clearly saw it as a failure of obedience. Second, they recognized its potential for damage, both physical and psychological. Scrupulosity was a mental illness; they knew that. And they had no difficulty connecting excessive physical austerities with “a very fearful conscience,” “spiritual pains and violent temptations,” “an excess of scruple,” “an extraordinary desire to satisfy divine justice,” and “the fear of damnation.”100 Where they could, they used the obligation of obedience to set anxious consciences at ease. Thus when Magdeleine du Mesnil, who “had a naturally tender and

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fearful conscience … became scrupulous, she found peace and calm for her conscience only in submission to her superiors.”101 Similarly, the young Petronille Senemaud asked for permission to practise extra mortifications, but as her superior later recalled, “I told her that God would be satisfied with her wish alone. She made no reply, but the manner in which she accepted this refusal convinced me that her submission was even more agreeable than the macerations that she had planned to practise.”102 Obedience protected moderation. However, the superiors were sometimes hesitant to lay down the law; and their hesitation reveals both an empathy with the individuals who were causing the problem and a deep-rooted respect for what was, after all, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian Church. Many saints had practised severe self-mortification, and therefore it could not be altogether wrong. “If she was perhaps somewhat to blame [for her disobedient behaviour], nevertheless we saw that it surely was the spirit of all the saints,” wrote one superior.103 In any case, faced with the vehemence with which some women clung to it, they were not sure how they could forbid it. In the case of one nun, the superiors recognized that their efforts to force her out of her self-abasement had done her “a violence which pulled her away from her centre, to which we had to return her so that her heart could go free.” In the case of another, who had resolved not to warm herself, the superior’s efforts to make her sit by the fire caused “such a violent state that we told her straightaway not to upset herself.”104 To a surprising degree, authority seems to have been ready to retreat out of respect for individual conscience. “Spiritual athletes” were given their space, even at the expense of their health. “Content with the sacrifice of her body,” runs the death notice of one nun, “Our Lord almost never made her suffer the pains of the spirit.”105 One of the great virtues of self-mortification was that it allayed fear. More frequently than one might expect, nuns were terrified of death and judgment. “God asks more of me than of others,” cried one woman. “If I relaxed my efforts I would be lost.”106 She, and many others, tried to blunt their terror by punishing their bodies. Who was to say they were wrong? How could the superiors be sure that in forbidding penance they were not thwarting the justice of God? Thus, at least as the death notices tell it, superiors made a serious effort to understand the torments of the scrupulous. Communities were not always so long-suffering. In the monastic records, the cruelty to which “singular” nuns were sometimes subjected is revealed. At best, they were treated as a cross to be borne. It is not difficult to read between the lines of Anne de Valet’s death notice: “There was no holy cruelty which she did not practise, to the point where her neighbours,

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who often witnessed them, asked her to please have regard for their delicacy.”107 Hers was an unsettling presence; the zeal behind her excesses may well have struck them as a reproach. The “holier than thou” person is not easy to live with. Historians of sanctity argue that even in the Middle Ages, heroic behaviour did nothing to endear the saints to their fellows.108 While these cases stand out in the records, they are still in the minority. Most nuns did not practise such austerities. Some actively opposed them, as did Marie de Vigier, who was “convinced that true virtue need not be sombre or unpleasant,” and Marguerite Bernière, who tartly rejected “the illusion of some people who are so occupied with their own perfection that they neglect the duties of their state.”109 When a nun looked for mystical experience or the martyrdom of her body, the sisters of less heroic temperament were there to remind her: “It is only perfect obedience that makes a true religious.”110 The vow of obedience could be violated by those who went beyond the Rule, just as much as by those who fell below the Rule. The ideal course was to live the community life in an unassuming way, “in punctuality, exactitude and unshakeable fidelity to all [one’s] duties.”111 Jean de Viguerie has said that, while the institut of a religious congregation was a “holy enterprise,” the creation of that congregation was “a work in itself.”112 The creation and maintenance of a community was a work forever in progress, which demanded constant attention both temporal and spiritual. There was an inherent fragility in a collection of human beings obliged to live together in close quarters all their lives. Their physical needs had to be met. Their psychological well-being had to be safeguarded. Their interpersonal relationships had to be kept healthy. Without these conditions, communities were in danger of going terribly wrong. The three monastic vows – poverty, chastity, and obedience – formed the basis on which religious communities were built. Each of these vows required personal sacrifice, the surrender of individuality. The health of the collectivities depended on the degree to which these vows were observed by the members. If for any reason they were eroded, community life suffered erosion too. This chapter, in describing what the vows involved, has dwelt on the frequent difficulties and contradictions to which they were subject. But they must be recognized also for their value. Without them and the stability, equity, and mutual respect they made possible, the religious communities of the Old Regime could not have functioned as well as they did.

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9 Prehistories

The idea that contemporaries have of the society in which they live, and to which they give expression, is incomplete and sometimes mistaken. There are facts, even important ones, of which contemporaries are unaware, others that they prefer not to admit or confess to, and others again that are so basic that they seem commonplace to such a degree that contemporaries do not take the trouble to describe them, and they come to our notice only through a few words dropped in passing in some document. Ronald Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings1

The problem identified by Mousnier is exactly the one we face when we apply the monastic literature to the purposes of social history. The questions we ask are not questions that its authors even dreamed of answering. To satisfy our curiosity, we must treat it as an archeological dig, furrowing through the intended message in search of inadvertent asides. This is certainly true of the monasteries’ notices nécrologiques, or death notices. They are sometimes called “spiritual biographies.” Ninetenths of their attention is devoted to their subjects’ lives in religion – their particular virtues, devotions, and achievements – and to the deaths which finally crowned those lives. Relatively little survives regarding their former lives “in the world.” This is hardly surprising. Community memory began at the monastery door. It was unlikely that the nuns, ransacking their recollections of their deceased sisters, would come up with much that preceded their entry into religion. But here and there, an episode from a previous life caught the community’s attention and continued to be related until the time when it was enshrined in the annales or death notices.2 It is difficult to know how to evaluate this material. The very fact that certain events became part of community lore may mean that although they were in some way exemplary, they were also unusual. From these stories we may be learning as much about what the community loved to hear as about what was commonly the experience of young women living in Old Regime society. On the other hand, some events and situations, because they are replicated so many times, take on the ring of authenticity. And while the stories themselves may be mannered and conventional, they

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sometimes bring with them a cloud of small details about daily life, thrown in at random and without much consideration – immaterial to writers and readers of their own time but highly valuable to us. If enough of them fit the same mold, they may become the stuff of generalizations. One generalization they lead to is that a large number of families were broken by the premature death of parents. This comes as no surprise. It is already known that many children in the Old Regime experienced the loss of parents before reaching adulthood. Certainly, many of these nuns-to-be did. The death notices speak of their bereavement and then pass on to their subsequent circumstances. Some went to live with relatives; some remained at home with widowed parents or in the step-families created by remarriages. There are numerous subtle indications that these arrangements were not always happy. Others were put aside permanently. If both parents died and family members were given the task of planning the orphan’s future, the cloister offered an attractive solution. When Edmé Durand, an advocate in Montargis, died leaving seven orphans and it fell to his relatives to decide what to do with them, the youngest, Elisabeth, “trembled with fear lest they suggest that she become a religious.” Her fears were justified. We can only speculate on the pressure to which she was subjected, no less effective for being clothed in the garb of free choice. The record simply tells us that after praying hard and long, she accepted God’s will and, “bathed with tears,” told the her relatives to arrange her entry. “Like another Abraham obeying the order of God, she went out from her father’s house, her spirit stripped of all earthly things, and in her hand an image of the Saviour with his cross … saying, ‘This is all I need from now on, I want nothing of the world.›3 Even when parents were alive, children could be handed around within families with the greatest of ease. In some cases, when parents had financial difficulties or were “burdened with many children” (a common phrase), grandparents, uncles, aunts, or older siblings stepped in. Young girls were sometimes left with relatives while their parents went abroad or to other cities. Sometimes, it seems, their families moved them around to give them the benefit of wholesome air (much sought after in that age), to introduce them into society, or to shield them from the influences of that same society. One wonders which of these motives was uppermost in Madame de Faverolle’s mind when she sent her daughter to live with an aunt, the comtesse de Blet, and then – when the young girl became totally enamoured of a life “which threatened her sentiments of virtue with shipwreck” – hastily put her into a convent pensionnat.4 Did she want her child to shine,

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and then suddenly realize that she could not protect her once she entered that glittering world? And what must have been in the mind of the Ursuline Isabelle de la Baume de la Vallière as she learned of her beloved niece’s liaison with the young king, Louis XIV? “We cannot imagine the vows, the prayers, the pilgrimages and penances which [she] made to obtain from Heaven a grace strong enough to break these culpable engagements,” wrote Dom Claude Martin.5 The highest society in the land, the Court, was recognized as a serious danger to young virtue, and parents who had business there were wise to leave their children elsewhere – preferably a long way off.6 One obvious choice for parents who needed to place their daughters was the monastery pensionnat. According to all the rules, this course was not available until the child was five or six; but quite clearly the rules were often bypassed, with or without permission from the bishop. “Monsieur her father who was employed on important business gave her to us at the age of three and a half.” This was a story often told.7 It arouses the suspicion that many children were passed straight from the wet nurse to the convent. The harshness of this practice was frequently softened by the fact that the children had relatives in the cloister – aunts or older sisters – who were allowed to exercise some care over them. Furthermore, years of separation did not necessarily mean that parents lost interest permanently. A number of records tell of mothers and fathers who decided to take back their grown daughters for companionship – and were outraged when the daughters opted to stay in the convent! Or, to return to the case cited above, Monsieur intended his daughter for the convent and allowed her to enter the novitiate at thirteen, but he later had thoughts of finding her an advantageous marriage. When she resisted this change of plan, he gave in “generously,” provided her with a large dowry, and thereafter remained a friend and patron of the house.8 But whether the distance separating daughters and parents was physical or spiritual, and whatever the reason behind it, it was real nonetheless and was not broken by the sort of holidays that modern school-age boarders can expect. In the seventeenth century at least, many children, once they were in the pensionnat, stayed there year in, year out, in sickness and in health – and even unto death. “On the twenty-ninth there died a little pensionnaire aged 5 or 6, the daughter of Monsieur Poupart, secretary to the king, and Madame Fournier his wife … The parents, when warned of her extreme danger, asked us if she died to have her body opened and to bury her in the monastery … We buried her in the chapel of the Infant Jesus, in the garden.”9 This sad little obit appears in the records of the Ursulines of Montargis. It is

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difficult to read it without wondering about the family relationships that lay behind it.10 All too often, families of the Old Regime used the cloister as a dumping ground for surplus or unloved children. Among the fiercest critics of this practice were the great spiritual leaders of the age. François de Sales warned that the monasteries were home to many unsuitable people: These are they who enter religion because of some fault of body or character, being lame or blind or unsightly … and what seems even worse is that they are frequently put there by their parents, who only too often, when they have such children, leave them in the corner by the fire, saying that since they are unfit for the world they must be put in religion … Others have a large number of children; Well and good, they say, we must lighten the load on the house, and send the younger ones into religion so that the older ones can have everything and cut a fine figure in the world.11

Vincent de Paul remarked that such arrangements opened the convents to insipid and unmotivated religious: “They do not have a true vocation, since they were put there by their parents, and stay there out of human respect.”12 There is no doubt that many nuns fitted these descriptions. A comparison of their dowries with those of their marrying brothers and sisters strongly suggests that the monastery was an excellent moneysaving device for their parents.13 Was it also, in the parents’ minds, a warehouse for the handicapped? Few of them said so as directly as Marie Martel of Dieppe, who in her will asked that her daughter be put into a convent, “either the Ursulines or some other, seeing that because of her feeble-mindedness she is incapable of marriage.”14 Clearly, many parents took their unmarriageable daughters to the convent, and the convent kept them and sometimes made nuns out of them. Marie Prisve was only three when the Ursulines of Nevers accepted her in spite of her impaired breathing, hearing, and speech. She died a nun. Angèle Pellerin was a near invalid whose father and brother served as doctors to the Ursuline community of Mâcon. “For our part, we have tried to show our gratitude by receiving this dear sister.”15 These are just two out of a host of examples of girls whose health was already poor when they entered the convent. Families initiated the arrangements, and religious communities carried them out. It is easy to see the benefit to families. The question is, Why did the communities accept these problematical cases? The answer, almost always, is money. The entrance of sickly or inappropriate girls was often

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smoothed by larger than average dowries. In Saint-Emilion in 1638, when Marie de la Rocque was being interrogated before making her profession (in the presence of her mother, which in itself was a contravention of canon law), she answered so apathetically that the official became suspicious. When the superior was questioned, she could only protest that the girl suffered from “a weakness of the brain,” that the community had made special arrangements in this case, and that the parents had given an unusually large dowry.16 In other words, the nuns were preparing to absorb into their community a person whom her parents most emphatically did not wish to keep at home – but they were doing it for a price. Monastic records attest to the existence of a special invalid status, negotiated at the time of entry, which guaranteed some entrants certain dispensations from the Rule because of their poor health.17 Since they were not going to be able to contribute by their labour to the monastic economy, it was only fair that they should bring a larger dowry. That was the nuns’ point of view. From the point of view of the families, the option was highly convenient and not always inhumane. There is no way of drawing on such cases to generalize about the love or lack of love between fathers and mothers and their daughters. In the absence of alternatives, parents may have been securing the best possible future for their children. When, at the age of ten, Marguerite Lombard lost the sight of one eye, her father persuaded her to enter a convent pensionnat with the object of one day becoming a nun. By the time she lost all sight she was professed and was thus assured of the care of her community for life. Jeanne Louvet, “simple of mind,” was placed by her widowed mother in the community of Blois where, in return for a large dowry plus a generous life pension, she was given a lay sister as her personal servant. Could these parents have done better for their daughters by leaving them in “the world”?18 There were, of course, girls whose parents simply wanted them out of the way. Here, the death notices are understandably reticent. Occasionally, a hint of an unhappy home life comes through: “Some sort of falling-out between her father and her mother caused her and her sister to be put in our community” … “God took advantage of the lack of friendship which her mother felt for her to deliver her to the religious life.”19 But following the spirit of their calling, nuns learned to count their losses as gain for the sake of the Kingdom, and therefore – in formal documents, at least – their true feelings are hard to divine. When Hélène de Meulle (the child whose busy father had handed her over to the convent at the age of three and a half) died in 1670, she left among her papers a written thanksgiving to God “for the choice that He had made of her to be His bride, even before she reached the age

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of reason.” Anne-Françoise de Sales, who entered religion at the age of fifteen, was recorded as having accepted and even solicited the sacrifice of her own inheritance in order to further her sister’s advantageous marriage.20 Were their feelings really so serene? In this matter the monastic literature has a line to follow and cannot be trusted. But we do notice, from time to time, mention of nuns who “since entering, have never gone to the parlour” or who “had an aversion for the world and for their relatives,”21 and we may wonder what caused this detachment or aversion. Another small and shadowy group appears in the literature – exProtestants who over the course of time became nuns. Some entered of their own free will and in defiance of their parents; for instance, Jeanne-Elisabeth Hofer, who came in secret from her home in Switzerland to abjure and later to enter the novitiate; and Marguerite de Labouchère, who was actually on her way to her wedding, complete with parents and bridegroom, when she suddenly turned aside and ran into the local monastery; and Marie de Quiroye, who resisted all her father’s pleas and came without his permission to the religious life.22 But other women first came to the convent as pensionnaires by lettre de cachet, and there is no way of knowing whether they were ever offered the chance to leave. Celeste de Vautron, for instance, was confined in a monastic pensionnat in 1694, when she was nineteen. Eleven years later she entered the novitiate.23 Possibly, like the nuns who learned to live in peace with their parents’ decisions, she was making the best of the fate that an even greater authority had laid out for her. So girls were “put into religion.” But it would be unfair to suggest that all of them were the victims of unfeeling family strategies. Given the restricted choices available, parents had to take seriously the duty to arrange their children’s future. Whatever that future, it was up to them to plan for it and predispose the children to accept it. “When the children’s [future] state is decided for them early, it is easy to present them with this perspective as a matter of habit, and thus to place before their eyes the various objectives that reason desires them to consider … The order of duties, the choice of pleasures compatible with the role which they will have to fulfil, will develop naturally with the knowledge of their situation.”24 This advice, directed to fathers in the legal profession, could have been used by the parents of all young boys and girls, whether they were destined for a career, marriage, the church, or religious life. How successful it was across the board we shall never know. But in the case of many young girls destined for the convent, it seems that conditioning, as the weapon of choice, was highly successful: “Children, sometimes very young children, were placed in an environment or in a situation in which they had

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little choice but to embrace the … [religious] life.”25 In the closed gardens of their childhood, they had little opportunity to yearn after greener fields outside. In the most extreme cases, a devout family dedicated a daughter to religion at birth, and often the child was dressed in white until the age of seven as a public avowal of her parents’ intentions. A number of such practices appear in the death notices. Usually the parents persevered in their intention to raise the child for religion, but it seems that the passage of time could sometimes dampen their ardour. Marie de la Grandière Cornuau had been dedicated at birth and dressed in white, but later her parents changed their minds and decided to raise her for “the world.” Her decision at the age of twenty-two to enter religion so infuriated them that they made her take her journey to the Ursuline monastery alone and in disgrace.26 Sometimes the dedication was made later, when a parent was under some form of stress. Jacqueline Bouvot’s father, finding his life in danger, promised his daughter to God if he was spared. (“Her particular characteristic,” ran her death notice only a few years later, “was obedience and submissiveness.”)27 But these circumstances were exceptional. Many more families simply regarded the monastery as a respectable alternative for the daughters they could not marry off. They raised these daughters well and, in words that the annalists frequently repeated, “gave them to religion.” The nuns were fully in accord with the practice of conditioning. The death notices made it plain, over and over again, that the best nursery for future religious was a family “in whom piety and virtue are hereditary.”28 The most certain avenue to “a good education” was the monastery pensionnat, but unless and until this could be achieved, the child was best fitted for the cloister if she had “sucked the milk of piety” (to use a hackneyed conventual phrase) from her earliest days. The eulogists tell us that Françoise Galland, under her mother’s hand, “lived in the world but led a truly religious life.” They tell of Françoise La Lande, who followed her mother in her devotions and on her visits to hospitals; and Bonne Tierce, who was three when she began to say her rosary on her knees.29 There are many such stories. At the age of five, Catherine de Suus was delivering little sermons on sin and contrition to those around her. By the age of seven, Louise de Mazon, under her mother’s direction, was teaching catechism to the servants in the family’s château. Marie de Hocquinquan, orphaned at the age of nine, went to live with her older sisters in a self-imposed cloister: “She never looked men in the face … she avoided them as enemies of her angelic virtue.”30 Elisabeth Fleuret was brought up by an aunt who, as she later wrote, “raised me in the fear of God … never

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permitting me any of the faults so common to children, and because she loved me deeply, punishing me with great severity.”31 She followed her aunt in her religious observances and almsgiving. By the age of five she was reflecting seriously on death. To the modern mind, these hothouse cultivations seem risky if not reprehensible, but in the religious culture of the Old Regime they were highly commended. “It is necessary to get the children as they leave the cradle, in order to defend them against the disorders of the world,” wrote a respected nun.32 Vocations could also blossom in ground that was less carefully prepared. Sometimes the impulse to religious life seems to have originated within the child herself, with or without parental encouragement. According to Marie de Siougeat’s death notice, she was only four when she began to feel special graces. Marie Spens was her parents’ favourite child, but “the Lord loved her much more … Her life of grace and piety began with the age of reason, without any guide but the Holy Spirit.” Anne d’Arripe “wanted to be a religious almost as soon as she could talk.” At the age of eight, Marie Tissendier “conceived the desire to give herself entirely to the Blessed Virgin”; at the same age, Claire Beaumont made a vow of chastity. Gabrielle Rubens, at ten, was teaching other little girls “to serve God by giving up things, explaining the love which Our Lord would show them in return.” At the same age, Cecile de Belloy learned from the experience of a serious illness to know “the vanity of all that is not God, the inevitability of death and the importance of this last hour.” Nicole le Doux “deprived herself of the normal amusements of children in order to visit the churches.” When Catherine Ranquet entered the novitiate at the age of twelve, she was already experienced in the ways of prayer and mortification.33 This sort of early childhood gravity, this “spirit far beyond mere bagatelle,”34 was greatly admired in the monastic literature because it was seen to presage a religious vocation. It has been pointed out that in the Middle Ages the call to sanctity was often experienced by very young children even without the encouragement of their parents.35 This may be hard to credit, unless we believe that in some way a child’s affections could be so totally and intensely engaged that her whole personality would come to take shape around her love object. If this is difficult to imagine, we have only to offer the example of Marie Guyart, the seven-year-old daughter of a master baker in the city of Tours, who in 1607 had a dream: I was looking upward when I saw the heaven open and Our Lord Jesus Christ in human form emerge and come toward me … As this most adorable Majesty approached me, my heart felt on fire with love for him and I started to open my arms to embrace him. Then he, the most

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beautiful of all the children of men, took me in his arms and with a look full of indescribable sweetness and charm, kissed me with great love and asked me, “Will you be mine?” I answered, “Yes!”36

The Lord who kissed her in that dream was not a father figure but, in the words of her biographer, “the fiancé of her heart.”37 From that time on, as she later wrote, “this sweet attraction was incomparably more pleasing to me than everything else that I saw.”38 Was this the effect of parental conditioning? Hardly. Her family was only conventionally pious, and in due course it provided her with a bridegroom of the human variety, very different from the Bridegroom she desired. But there were other influences beyond the family. Seventeenthcentury Catholicism, as practised in cities such as Tours, was vivid, full of imagery, highly emotive; the sights and sounds of its liturgies and the splendour of its ceremonial must have had a powerful effect on young minds. The same Marie wrote later from Canada to her son that “one of the things that greatly strengthened my spirit of devotion was the ceremonial of the Church which, from my childhood, powerfully attracted me … When in its processions I saw the cross and the banners … my mind and my heart leaped for joy. I had seen a captain lodging in our neighbourhood, followed by his soldiers with their flags. So when I saw the figure attached to the cross, and the banner with its images, I said to myself, ‘Ah! this is my captain, and there is his banner.›39 Marie was always driven by love. But the Church was also delivering a message of fear – fear of sin and hell. Again, it was a message easily transmitted to young imaginations. Barbe des Nots was seven when she learned that she could commit mortal sin; she was reduced to tears by the thought. As a child, Marguerite Colin had the same horror of sin and at least once had a vision of the Devil, whom she drove away by making the sign of the cross. When as a little girl Catherine Ranquet was taken to a comedy, “she thought herself to have been in Hell, and feared that she would never again belong to Our Lord.” Marie de Poilleve had a vision of the Virgin, “who showed her the place waiting for her in Hell if she engaged herself in the world.” She entered the novitiate at the age of twelve.40 But the real battle for the souls of these young people typically started in their adolescence, and by then they were under the influence of nuns, either in day school or in the pensionnat (or so we can suspect even when we are not specifically told so). The role the nuns played was somewhat two-faced. According to their institut, they were not in the business of educating girls “expressly to make them into religious.”41 Yet the death notices suggest that they actively recruited young women and that they did so, partly at least, with a message of fear.

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A historian of cloistered nuns has remarked that, in their mind, the world was a sort of quicksand, waiting to swallow souls down to damnation.42 So it was only natural for them to relay their belief to those around them. “Consider the occasions there are to damn oneself in the world,” said Bossuet. They did consider, and they took it upon themselves to warn their charges of the risks.43 The effect on impressionable young minds was predictable. In numerous cases, when girls came out of the pensionnat they were confused and alarmed by what they saw before them. Marie de Martin left boarding school determined never to return. But “God filled her mind with great terrors and apprehensions of his judgments; these turned her little by little from the pleasures of the world.” Jeanne Thubert loved the world but came to recognize “the danger to her salvation and the necessity of flight,” and entered the novitiate at the age of fifteen. Marie de Sillegue “constantly thought that she saw Hell opening under her feet. She then sought sanctuary in our community” – at the age of seventeen. Madeleine de Bonhore was already engaged to be married “when in the college church she heard a sermon on Hell” and decided to enter religion.44 A similar story is told in more detail of Marie Anne Dugué. Born in 1665 in Paris, and raised first by her grandfather and then by the Ursulines, she was called back into “the world” at the age of fourteen: As she was a pretty young lady, well built and vivacious, with plenty of spirit, the world thought that it had gained her, and spared nothing to make sure of her. In these circumstances she was often the victim of trouble and agitation, feeling her heart pulled one way by God and the other by the world. Not knowing what to do, it seemed to her several times that she held the victory in her hand; at other times, to escape her anxieties she gave herself over to pleasure and amusement. But the Lord did not let her go far; He kept his eye on his prey at all times. She could not hear a sermon or say her prayers without this jealous Spouse redoubling His pursuits, and this served as a bulwark against the torrent that threatened to drag her away.45

After a long hesitation, she made up her mind in favour of the convent. Some of these decisions were welcomed by parents; others most decidedly were not. Young women who of their own volition declared for the convent could meet with outrage on the part of their family. The outrage was grounded in the same mentality that forced other young women into convents against their will: the belief in “the commandment of God according to which children who are in their parents’ power owe them obedience.”46 It could be that the parents had marriage plans in mind; sometimes they simply looked forward to enjoying their daughters’ company.47 Over and over again, the death

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notices refer to confrontations that were extremely painful to both parents and children. The parents could bring their daughters home, but they could not always force them to conform to the mores of the world. Agnez le Duc “closed her eyes to objects that might afford her pleasure and decided to spoil her skin colour (which was very handsome) so as to achieve an early victory over vanity.” Marguerite Charlet did the same: “She decided to disfigure herself and to rub her face with oil and go out into the sun in order to be darkened, so that she would no longer be beautiful except in the eyes of the Bridegroom.” Marguerite de Villeurbanne cut off her hair to avoid being taken to a ball. Claude Damond tried to enter the convent while her father was away; on his return he brought her home, but in the end he was defeated by her practices of mortification. Less openly defiant but equally embarrassing to their parents were Marguerite Penet, who dissolved into tears whenever she was brought out in company, and Edmée Renard, who hid herself in the attic of her house, where she could hear the monastery’s bell and follow its prayers. What, in the end, could be done with such obstinate girls? Marie Françoise Theterel, on being told by her father that she could not become a nun, simply fell ill. “It was commonly said that if he wanted to make her better he would have to bring her to the convent.” One can imagine the smirks of the neighbours when, finally, he gave in and did exactly that, saying that it was the only way to control her.48 Such was the emotional blackmail that quite a few daughters practised on their parents. In other instances, the girls were happy enough in “the world,” and the decision to enter religion came later as the immediate consequence of some personal trauma, which in the tradition of the death notices was taken as a direct message from God. The Bridegroom sometimes spoke through sickness and disfigurement. Françoise de Pousol was only twelve when she suffered an “incommodity.” She vowed that if she was cured she would become a nun, and she persevered in her vow despite her parents’ opposition. On the other hand, Madeleine Le Vasseur, when old enough to see the world, “took to it, loved it and was loved by it. However, in the midst of her pleasure an interior inspiration warned her that she was made not for the world but for God, who wanted her to be a nun. She failed to heed this inspiration, consulting her natural repugnance for this state, but the Lord … sent her a great illness. After receiving Extreme Unction, she recognized what Heaven wanted of her.” Similarly, Madeleine Bonnet, “well-built and very pretty,” had no intention of entering a convent until “a fluxion on her eyes deformed her … This led her often, when looking at herself in the mirror, to deplore her misfortune, saying to herself: ‘What! Am I so

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unlucky as to have been born to be a nun?› Elisabeth de Vancé, too, was “highly advantaged in outward graces.” But “God, looking down on her with mercy, allowed the smallpox to cause considerable damage to this beauty, which would have been the occasion of her damnation.” She accepted the message that He wanted her for Himself.49 Other women were brought to the monastery by financial disaster. Louise Le Grand had been happy in the world; then “her family’s reversal of fortune furnished her with a favourable occasion to know the emptiness of riches and pleasures … Struck by the vanity of the things of this earth,” she came to Blois with her sister, and the two entered the Ursuline convent together. Similarly, Françoise Baullard’s future was decided for her when her parents “were stripped of all that they had been.” Jeanne Serpe belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais; but when its business affairs collapsed, she had no choice but to enter without a dowry, as a lay sister.50 The death of loved ones could also act as a powerful agent. Frequently the death notices mention girls who, upon the death of their mothers, adopted the Virgin as a replacement. From there it was no great step into the cloister. Françoise Belot, “God having taken away her mother … saw the fragility of earthly things.” Anne Godfrey had already lost her mother, but it was the sudden death of her father that overwhelmed her and sent her into the convent. In Bonne Mejot’s case, it was the death of a friend that turned her to religion: “The Divine Bridegroom, to whom all sharing is an insult, used the loss … to touch her and attach her to Him alone.” In the same way, Françoise de Gorlier, already an orphan, lost her beloved uncle: “God, who could not suffer her to have anyone but Him alone, permitted that … he be killed.” Henriette du Reinier was taken by her father to Charleroi, where “the world’s countenance, so brilliant in her eyes, began to dazzle her.” But God took away her father, and she came safely back into the care of her Ursuline aunts. Less immediately personal but obviously traumatic was the experience of Anne de Lichigaray of Pau: “At the time when the plague ravaged Marseille and threw all France into alarm, our dear mother was struck by what she was told; this huge number of sudden deaths led her to reflect seriously on the instability of human things and on the danger of appearing before God with empty hands.” Her death notice remarks that her vocation was always grounded in fear.51 There is no doubt about it: the literature tells us that many vocations were built on fear and guilt. Catherine Moulinier de Puidieu was preparing to marry when her crucifix told her, “You are leaving me.” So “like another Saint Paul, she was turned around.” But her long life in religion was marked by mortifications and austerities – often the

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symptoms of a troubled soul. Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau had already been received at Court – “which helped greatly to puff her up” – when she was warned by a nun of her acquaintance that “however hard she tried to resist and struggle against God, she would surely give in and become a religious.” And so she did. Marguerite de Courcelles was first drawn to the convent by her sister, who was already a professed nun. But after some time in the novitiate she decided that this was not for her, and she made ready to leave. The nun reproached her: “What, sister! You want to abandon God? Understand that He, in turn, will abandon you!” Not surprisingly, Marguerite decided to stay.52 In all the above cases, the literature suggests that conditioning worked and that through appeals to their affections, sense of duty, or fears, girls were brought to accept and even desire the cloister. But conditioning does not explain every vocation. Some women entered religion because they felt that they had talents to offer to the monastery. Eleonor de Moulins, a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, chose to enter a teaching convent because she was “persuaded that the talents with which Heaven had favoured her would be most useful in the education of youth.”53 Other women, such as Françoise de Monplaisire and Marguerite de Terneyre, were “born to govern” and “possessed the qualities to be superiors … and understood [business] affairs.”54 Recent scholarship has recognized that for those who were appropriately gifted, the female religious orders offered leadership opportunities not available elsewhere.55 In fact, this was already known in the Old Regime. An anonymous observer deplored the multiplication of religious houses which, he said, only served to “augment the ambition of those who wish to command” in abbeys or convents of different kinds.56 Commanding women may be found throughout the records. As often as not they were daughters of the nobility, who were thus fulfilling the belief of their social order that leadership was bred in the bone. Many women came to religion from the opposite direction. Quiet and withdrawn by nature, they longed for the hidden life. Marguerite Trumel had “an attraction for solitude.” When her parents, not knowing what to make of her, asked her what she wanted in life, “she who had never seen or heard tell of a convent did not know how to explain herself; all that she said to them was ‘Enclose me.› Marie Anne Bourdois, too, “was called by a particular touch of grace to the religious vocation without knowing what a convent was.”57 Others were repelled by the thought of life in the world. Marie Truffit “had always felt the greatest repugnance towards any establishment in the world, even before she knew what was meant by the religious state.” Marie d’Artois “fled the sight of men as one would that of serpents.” The very suggestion of marriage made her fall sick. Elisabeth Driu rejected everything

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to do with being a “demoiselle,” possibly because, as her eulogist tactfully put it, she lacked “the gifts of nature.” She herself asked to be placed in a convent.58 Others discovered the life by accident; they stumbled into it and then, emotionally, temperamentally, found it satisfying. Madeleine Tiballier entered the convent on her own whim, “without being too certain where she was going.” Marguerite Guillier “was much engaged [in the vanities of the world], which gave her parents the idea of putting her into our house to be taught some piety; she had no sooner tasted the air of the cloister than she was charmed by it.” Anne Moussey had never had any intention of entering religion until one day, passing an open convent door, she slipped inside. “She was amazed that anyone could have difficulty with anything [there].” Marie Madeleine Tubert was one of a group of friends who dared each other to spend three months in the novitiate. “As soon as she was in our house, she was charmed by the community.” Françoise Saron, when she entered the same house, was rather a wild thing. “This good sister asked to be made a religious without any idea what obligations this state imposes on us; she did not even know her Pater and Ave, which it took us a long time to teach her … She was admitted out of charity” – and in time became a worthy lay sister.59 For other women, both young and old, entry into religion was the completion of a love match, the end of a long period of waiting. In many cases, these were women whose entry had been held up for some time, for reasons beyond their control. A few of them were widows, and a few of these were widows with children. Marie Guyart and Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal may have been the most famous mothers who left their children to enter religion, but they were not the only ones. However, such cases were rare, because they were frowned on by society and were not altogether welcomed by communities. When Françoise Icarde, a thirty-six-year-old widow, decided to enter religion, “it was not without many assaults made on her by the Devil and her own nature, when she had to give up her little comforts and her own will, which is most difficult for a person who has lived independently for a long time.”60 She, and other women like her, could be a somewhat unsettling presence in a novitiate full of teenagers; their independence of mind and the fact of their previous sexual experience were not easily overlooked. More often the latecomers were celibate ladies who had laid their own wishes aside to care for ailing parents, raise orphaned younger siblings, or mind the family business. Jeanne Descaiul was seventeen and already on her way to becoming a nun when her mother died; she was forced to go home and look after her younger sister for the next five

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years. Françoise Bentejac was called upon to bring up her brothers and sisters; at twenty-eight, “breaking out of her chains, she entered our house to sing the canticle of her deliverance.”61 Marguerite Le Roux stayed home to help her mother manage her dead father’s affairs: “Finally, when she was free to make her own life, she hurried to our house.” Euphémie du Roux de Sigy was thirty-eight when she professed in 1731, having remained at home to manage her brother’s estate until he came of age.62 Other women were delayed for financial reasons. Agnez Delsol, whose parents refused to give her a dowry, laboured for years to earn it herself as manager of a small lace-manufacturing business. Christine du Tartre worked as a schoolmistress until the age of forty – always faithful to the vow of chastity she had made at the age of twelve.63 Such women often built themselves a life in the world as dévotes, living under the guidance of spiritual directors and haunting the churches. Jeanne Perault was forty-five when she entered religion after a secular life during which “her usual place of residence was in the churches.” Elisabeth Carlier spent her working hours plying her trade as a seamstress, and for the rest, “she was counted among the number of the dévotes.” Jeanne LeCoeur managed, in spite of her late vocation, to lead “an innocent and very pious life under the conduct of a Feuillant priest and in the company of several devout ladies.” Before entering the monastery Noel Fontaine lived for several years “under the direction of a virtuous priest, who trained her in all the most austere virtues of the religious life.” Geneviève de Lamotte Luchet found the courage to retire from her social circle by invoking the protection of the local Jesuits until such time as she was able to enter the convent.64 Without the support of like-minded people, the devout life in the world could be a lonely and difficult experience. The literature left to us by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns insists on the stark polarity of existence. In their minds the world was, as one death notice phrased it, “a foreign country, the maxims of which are opposed to piety, retreat, and all the practices of religion.”65 “I found the secular life unbearable,” wrote Marie Guyart, “being unable to see how one could observe the counsels of the Gospel there as in a cloister.” In the privacy of her room, she sat on the floor and wept at the profanity and irreligion with which she was surrounded: “My chaste Spouse, my divine Beloved, what pleasure do you take in making me suffer like this? You must put me into this blessed retreat, and you must take me out of the corruption of the world, since its spirit is so contrary to yours.”66 Such a view of secular life afforded no comfort to those who were waiting and hoping to leave it.

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It was the purpose of the religious life to shape all its practitioners into uniformity, right down to their dress, manners, deportment, prayers, and daily practices. Religious women were occasionally twitted for all being the same, acting “like sheep who, when one threw herself over a cliff, would all follow her over the same precipice.”67 But in fact the appearance of uniformity covered a great deal of diversity. Even after they had been through the mill of the novitiate, nuns remained fundamentally themselves. “Human nature does not die away,” warned Jeanne Françoise de Chantal; “in the long run, it has its day.”68 The women who came into the religious communities of the Old Regime brought with them a variety of experiences and exhibited a variety of temperaments. Old or young, worldly-wise or innocent as newborn lambs, loved or unloved, docile or fiery, gifted or average or slow-witted, ecstatic with their new estate or merely contented, or even bitterly unhappy – they all came together within the confines of four walls to form that delicate organism, a religious community. On them, and on the particular mix of strengths and weaknesses they possessed, depended the health of that community. If they were talented or inspired, the community would benefit from their talents and inspiration; if they were mediocre in intellect or motivation, the community would feel the effects of that mediocrity. For all these reasons, their earlier life was important. The founders had said it, and it continued to be proved true: “It is not gold and silver that make good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.”69

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In 1659 Marie Françoise de Meulinare, daughter of a prominent family in Saint-Omer, decided to enter the local Ursuline convent. “Finding the means to climb the wall, she let herself drop down inside; then she told the valet who had accompanied her to go and inform his mistress and assure her that she would pray for her. The whole community was surprised to discover her upon leaving afternoon prayers.”1 This is a wonderful story, the stuff of monastic legend, and there are many similar stories in the records of Old Regime monasteries. But for most nuns, the method of entry into religion was much more orderly. It took place, as it should, through the convent door, and it was preceded by carefully considered and duly notarized negotiations between parents or guardians and the officers of the convent. It was normally at the time of entry that the dowry contract was drawn up. The amount of the dowry was agreed upon, but since as yet there was no certainty that the young woman would persevere or that the community would wish to keep her, its payment was deferred until the eve of her profession. In the meantime, the parents agreed to pay an annual pension, set at 100 to 200 livres, and an extra sum to cover the costs of their daughter’s religious habit and the festive meal to which she would treat the community on the day of her clothing. A typical arrangement was that of the young woman who entered the Ursuline monastery of Landerneau in the late 1690s with a dowry of 4000 livres, plus an extra 400 livres for her two years’ board in the novitiate, 300 livres “expenses for clothing,” and 90 livres for the meal.2 As well, the postulant was expected to bring a trousseau: chemises,

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stockings, wimples, handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, and nightcaps by the dozen, bedlinens and table napkins, a place setting (usually pewter), and sometimes the furnishings for her cell and a gift for the altar.3 All these gifts were conditional. In the event that the postulant decided to leave the monastery, the money and goods were returned to her, the nuns retaining only whatever fraction was agreed to be fair. Clearly, neither side was meant to profit from a failed vocation. For many young girls, entry was made less daunting by the fact that, as pensionnaires, they were already familiar with the community and had some sense of what to expect. Equally, the community knew what to expect of them. Indeed, it may well have been eyeing them for several years – at least, this is what the circumspect language of the death notices suggests. When Marguerite de Vançé, still a child, was put into the Ursulines’ pensionnat in Blois, “from that time on, she made us see … what she would be one day.” In the pensionnat of Notre-Dame in Le Puy, Marie Dulac attracted the same hopeful attention: “The striking development of virtue in this young lady … caught the attention of our whole community.” When Florence Campion began school, “her mistresses soon saw that she had good dispositions for virtue, and so made great efforts with her education.” As for Geneviève Peleus, the community was so open in its desire to have her that “our Reverend Mother asked God for her … Heaven soon seemed to favour this worthy desire by the death of Mademoiselle her mother, who would have been the greatest obstacle to the grace of the Lord.”4 The ability of the teaching monasteries to supply the novitiate directly from the pensionnat was a source of strength to them. It allowed them to know their subjects, to divert those who were unsuitable, and to start building a religious character in those whom they coveted.5 All the evidence suggests that the majority of nuns who entered the teaching orders had first spent time in their pensionnats. Some had lived there most of their lives – had become boarders “very young,” possibly as young as three or four. They had been accepted as special cases, often after the death of parents, like Françoise Becquerel, whose mother died when she was five, leaving her with a father whose only desire was to live as a hermit.6 Others, especially in the seventeenth century, were placed in the pensionnat with the clear understanding that in due course they would enter religion. Catherine Simean was only five years old when she was “put into religion.”7 Françoise Borelly, seven years old, was brought to the Ursuline house in Villefranche “to be fed, boarded and instructed, until such time as she is old enough to be received as a choir nun.”8 Barbe Millet became a pensionnaire at Saint-Germain at the age of twelve, “until she reaches the necessary age to enter the Novitiate.” Marie de Savonnières, whom her parents

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had dedicated at birth to the Blessed Virgin, lived in the Ursuline monastery of Tours from the age of nine; and then, at thirteen, she entered the novitiate “not as a novice, because she was not old enough, but to wear the habit of a postulant, and by this means to strengthen her vocation.” Marie Thérèse Jourdain was finally professed at the age of twenty-four, “having lived in our monastery since the age of four.”9 For women like these, the monastery was home, and the world outside was a distant and unfamiliar place. As one of their eulogists put it, they “renounced the world … before ever having loved it and before being seduced by it.”10 However, this was not the majority experience. Most pensionnaires were put into the monastery in their early adolescence – at ten, eleven, or twelve – for a limited time and purpose: to prepare for their First Communion under the expert guidance of the nuns. We need not suspect any deeper parental motive than the hope that a few years in the convent would make their daughters both more polished and more pious. At fifteen or sixteen the girls would be ready to “come out” into society, just at the time when serious marriage negotiations could be considered. However, there were exceptions to this rule. Some girls decided that they wanted to stay. Frequently their parents took them home for a while to see the world and to test their vocation. The nuns approved of this, or so it seems. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended that if a pensionnaire thought she had a vocation, the superior should consider “if it would be useful to make her return to the world before putting her in the Novitiate … and if it is judged appropriate for her to return to the world in order to test and strengthen her resolve, or even if she simply feels the inclination to do so, she must not be made to ask before leaving that a place be kept open for her; thus she will be left at greater liberty.”11 But where there was no question of choice, where parents and daughter together were decided on her entry, the rite of passage took place smoothly, and the girl moved from pensionnat to novitiate without so much as a breath of the air outside. “These blessed souls,” wrote the annalist of Blois, “have borne the yoke of the Lord from their earliest years, because [they] never knew their father’s house.”12 There were also postulants who were strangers to the convent and its ways. Some of them simply arrived at the door. Take, for instance, Louise de Tusseau de Maisontiers, brought in 1722 by her father to the Ursuline convent of Ile-Bouchard. “When they had a foot on the threshold, a sudden misunderstanding caused Monsieur her father to protest that she would not enter there; straightway he decided to take her to our house at Poitiers.” But on the way, as they passed through Richelieu, Papa just as suddenly opted for the monastery in that town

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– and on the strength of his whim the place was chosen where she would spend the remaining forty-six years of her life. Almost as precipitate was the arrival of Elisabeth Fleuret at the door of Sainte-Ursule in 1738. She had had a serious falling-out with her stepmother the day before, and her father had decided that the only solution was to put her into religion. Later, when she was ready to apologize, she was allowed to leave the novitiate.13 There was also always a trickle of older women who had spent time in the world, running small businesses, caring for their fathers’ households or looking after orphaned brothers and sisters, or even being married and raising their own children. Late in life – in middle age and sometimes even later – they came to the monastery. Marie Pelloquin entered at twenty-nine, having managed her father’s household for several years. “Her retreat into the cloister,” ran her death notice, “was not one of the kind that the world in its malice attributes to the haste of a thoughtless youth or to the inspiration of a family in search of its own interests, since our dear deceased was fully mature at the time.”14 As often as not, such women were placed in the pensionnat for a period of testing before being admitted to the novitiate. It was common knowledge in the monasteries that older women had difficulty adapting to religious life, given their “long habit of following [their] own will.”15 This remark tells us, better than a thousand scholarly words, what was waiting for them in the novitiate.

the first stage Once the formalities were completed, the postulant entered the cloister. There, waiting for her, would be the superior and two of the discrètes. They would lead her into the choir for a dedication and blessing, and then deliver her solemnly into the hands of the mistress of novices.16 The novitiate was a little kingdom unto itself, normally set apart from the rest of the enclosure. As long as the novice was there, the Rule dictated that she should have no regular communication with her family and friends. Nor could she speak to other members of the community except with special permission.17 Her entire time was to be spent in the company of the other novices under the watchful eye of the mistress, or “mother,” of novices. She slept in a dormitory, cheek by jowl with her companions; she ate with them at a table apart from the rest of the community; and when she took her recreation (the only time she was allowed free conversation), it was with them and her immediate mistresses. In other words, all her work, prayer, and recreation took place within the same group.

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Her first task as a novice was to make a general confession, “to purge and cleanse her soul and put it into the disposition and fervent desire to make a good beginning in the service of God.”18 After this, her work for the first year consisted of learning the abc s of religious life – how to pray and approach the sacraments, how to recite and chant Office (which required an introduction to Latin), and how to examine her conscience. She also learned the basics of the teaching profession – the catechism, reading, writing, and handwork that she would some day teach her young pupils.19 She was expected once a week to open her soul to the Mother, once a month to listen to a reading of the Rule,20 and three or four times a year to perform spiritual exercises.21 In the second year, while continuing these practices, she deepened her knowledge of the Scriptures and the major works of spirituality, and she studied her Rule more profoundly, knowing that when she made her vows she must do so in the full understanding of all that they meant. And when she was considered ready, she worked wherever she was ordered to in the monastery, at “the lowest and most humiliating” tasks.22 In the seventeenth century there was seldom any question of her teaching in the schools, but in the eighteenth, as communities grew smaller and their resources were stretched, it was quite possible that she might become a schoolmistress before taking her final vows. The novitiate was an all-important phase in the formation of religious women, so much so that it was seen as the key to the quality of a community. Heavy demands were made on novices’ intelligence and self-discipline. They were trained in the practice of meditation, according to methods which – like everything else in the Rule – owed much to the Society of Jesus. They were subjected to a deluge of spiritual advice, as much through verbal instruction as through private reading. And they were taught their Scriptures. Anyone who questions the biblical formation of Old Regime nuns should take note of the density of biblical allusions in their discourse.23 This may not have come from private reading. In convents the main channels for the transmission of religious knowledge had always been retreats and spiritual conferences and sessions with superiors and directors – an oral transmission, not inappropriate in a time that still depended heavily on the spoken word.24 In novitiates the responsibility for these conferences fell to the novice mistresses. For the most part, their content was not recorded, but we have an exception in a collection published by Claude Martin of Retraites given by his mother, Marie Guyart, during her time as subnovice mistress in Tours. In the course of a cycle of spiritual instructions, Marie introduced her novices to the “Song of Songs” and its imagery. In one conference she introduced the text “Our sister is little: her

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breasts are not yet formed,” and then explained that this was how the novices should see themselves, small and undeveloped, totally dependent on their Beloved. Dom Claude wrote, “These explications were so beautiful … that those who heard her were enraptured.”25 Marie’s biblical knowledge came from the text itself and from the commentaries of Saint Bernard; but the thirty girls under her care acquired it first and perhaps most memorably through her verbal instruction. The novitiate was hard; it was meant to be. It was both a place of learning and a place of testing. Its closest modern equivalent would be the military boot camp, in that it was designed to test the mettle of the trainee and at the same time break her to the discipline of the monastery. In the writings of the nuns about themselves, it is made clear that they believed that a good novitiate was the beginning of a good religious life. Without the virtues that it inculcated, the virtues necessary to live through the subsequent years would be unachievable. Marie Guyart likened the novitiate to an apprenticeship, the métier here aspired to being “to die to oneself first of all and then to live to Jesus Christ.”26 The severity to which the novice was subjected and the willingness with which she accepted it were gauges of her readiness for the life that lay ahead. A fair number of novices failed the test. Wherever the monastic registers recorded all entries (not just those that came to profession), they also recorded departures. Of the three hundred women who entered the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, twenty-three left without professing.27 This wastage was unexceptional: in a survey of entries into the Ursuline novitiates of Auxerre, Langres, and Dijon, Dominique Dinet concludes that 13 percent left before professing.28 The reasons for departure varied. Sometimes parents opposed their daughter’s vocation to the point of taking their case to court. Adrienne de Saulnier, for one, was withdrawn from the novitiate and sequestered while Parlement considered her parents’ appeal. Toinette de Comère also was removed on the authority of Parlement; only a mortal illness persuaded her mother to let her return.29 While we know that these two girls were allowed back into their convents, we have no way of knowing of those who were not. But we do have details of many departures. Sometimes families failed to come up with the promised dowry. It was for this reason that Jacquete de Bergos, whose father was lieutenant of surgeons in Bordeaux, had to leave the novitiate after eighteen months – “which caused her extreme distress.”30 Marie Duchemin had been of age when she entered the Ursuline house of Blois in 1632 and therefore had negotiated her own dowry with the nuns. But while she was still in the novitiate her sister appeared and demanded to see the

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contract, “which she tore up, saying that she could not honour it.” Marie stayed, but only by accepting to become a lay sister rather than a choir nun – thus avoiding the need for a dowry.31 Sometimes, especially after the Law Crash, it was the monastery that was found lacking. When one young woman entered the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon in 1730, “our house was in a terrible state owing to the loss we had suffered because of the Billets de Banque,” and her parents urged her to withdraw.32 She stayed on, but others did not. In Quimperlé during the same miserable years, the annalist wrote: “The novitiate was empty; our reputation lost us … a young girl of exceptional talents, who was to bring us a dowry of 4000 livres … Someone wrote to her mother that we were dying of hunger and were totally ruined. She refused her consent to her daughter and allowed her to enter the Ursulines of Tréguier.”33 The records of the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, another community crippled by the Law Crash, mentioned a number of novices who withdrew around that time to enter more financially secure houses. Some novices were dismissed by the community on grounds of inaptitude. The grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques sent away Catherine de Langlée before profession “because of her inclination to melancholy.”34 Mental disorder could be a problem in a community and even a threat, as the nuns of Montluçon discovered when their latest novice turned out to be positively deranged, screaming day and night, attacking the other nuns, and threatening to kill herself. But her family was reluctant to take her back; only after prolonged negotiations did her brother arrive, tie her onto a horse, and cart her away.35 Most often the reason for departure was ill health. Over and over again in the records, the word sortie (gone) is followed by the explanation “for fear of ruining her health.” The novitiate’s rigorous discipline, its cold dormitory with rough linens on the beds, and its fasting, abstinence, and many penances were hard on young women, especially those from comfortable homes.36 Discipline was in the hands and at the discretion of the mistress of novices. Hers was a demanding task. In the first place, the young women who came to her were not all meant for the cloister, and she was expected to have the discernment to winnow them out; on the other hand, she was warned “to make great estate of those whom God has truly sent, as the most beautiful gift that can be given to the house by His Divine Majesty.”37 All the rules bade her be prudent, “seeking to recognize the nature, ability and capacity of each one … always more inclined to kindness than sternness.”38 Yet at the same time she was to be strict with her charges, to grind down their self-esteem and strengthen their humility. In particular, she was warned to be on the

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lookout for voies extraordinaires: “Let her take care that her novices do not desire, or in their prayers ask God for, visions, revelations or ecstacies, but that they devote themselves body and soul to the acquisition of the solid virtues of humility, charity, patience, obedience, and all the rest.”39 The more “special” the novice, the more rigorous her mistress had to be: “When she sees that God is showing particular favour to a novice, let her be sure always to humiliate and despise her, and never to praise her.”40 Catherine Ranquet’s mistress was unmercifully hard on her for the simple reason that Catherine was already on the high road to sanctity, as the mistress was the first to recognize: “This good mother took every opportunity to mortify her … which gave a sister cause to ask why she treated her thus. She answered that this was good earth, and it was necessary to make it fertile, and that she [Catherine] would profit from it.”41 For the most part, novice mistresses were celebrated in memory. Of Blanche Doiron de la Barre it was written, “Most of our sisters take pride in having been her daughters, raised by her hand.” Similarly, Jeanne-Marie Bachelier had “lit in the hearts of her daughters the same fire of divine love with which she was consumed … [being] for them a living example of all the duties of the religious life.”42 But not all novice mistresses lived up to expectations. Through the discreet words of the eulogists we can occasionally glimpse a veiled disapproval of their conduct. When Marie Odean died at the age of sixty-eight, her community still remembered how as a novice she had been subjected “every day to hundreds of mortifications.” In the same spirit, long after the event, Jeanne Salomon’s eulogist wrote: “I saw her practise heroic virtues in the novitiate, suffering humbly and uncomplainingly the harshest penances … for the slightest faults.” When Françoise de Goutefroy died two days after her profession, the eulogist knew where to lay the blame: “She fell into the hands of a mistress who treated her very severely … without sparing her any more than the strongest and most robust, or appearing to recognize her infirmities, even though she was asthmatic and afflicted with a violent cough.”43 A novice mistress could fail through excessive zeal and by misjudging the capacity of the person she was directing. Novice mistresses approached their work in different ways. Marie Guyart, who had experienced the rougher sort of discipline in the novitiate, did not herself practise it when she was entrusted with the care of novices. Isabelle de la Baume drew criticism for being too indulgent, and perhaps she deserved it; when one young novice confessed to being always hungry, she took to providing her secretly with small snacks.44 The girls themselves looked for different handling. Some of them submitted to the new discipline with the greatest of ease, like

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Charlotte de Miramon, who “made her novitiate with great exactitude and without anything bothering her,” or Marie-Anne Dufourd, of whom the eulogist wrote, “This young novice flew, so to speak, along the paths of perfection.”45 Others had to be cosseted, like Claude de Giverzac: “The delicacy of her constitution forced the superiors to treat her carefully during her novitiate.”46 Some suffered agonies of doubt and revulsion, as did Madeleine Bonnet, who hated the novitiate with its “contempt, confusions and acts of humility.”47 There were always a few who wanted more austerity; for example, Claudine l’Empereur, who “had some difficulty entering our order, since she did not find it severe enough for her taste”; and Thérèse Romanet de Labriderie, whose “attraction for austerities and mortifications [inclined] her to leave because we were putting limits on her zeal.”48 Such novices often proved to be the most difficult to handle and the most given to disobedience. Marie Françoise Theterel, for instance, pestered her novice mistress for permission to practise extra mortifications, and when she found these too limited she took matters into her own hands, heating up a religious medal and pressing it to her arm and breast until “several pieces of flesh fell away.” Alarmed at what she had done, she then prayed to Saint François de Sales to heal the wound before her mistress found out!49 For her and others like her, the superiors had to apply the bit rather than the spurs. Punishment in the novitiate entailed embarrassment rather than physical pain. Agnes Hurault’s rudeness and obstinancy earned her numerous penances, such as being deprived of the habit and returned to secular dress, and making crosses with her tongue on the floor of the novitiate. Claude Chamereau, who committed the sin of taking herself too seriously, was ordered to dance and sing and in general make a fool of herself in front of the community.50 When some novices were caught talking to each other on the staircase of the Tours monastery, they were made to walk around wearing gags across their mouths.51 The purpose was plain. A novice must be stripped of her amour-propre. And she must be made obedient or, as the nuns themselves put it, “like soft wax in the hands of her superiors.” More than anything else, the novitiate demanded the virtue of obedience – “the final sacrifice of the most precious things remaining to her, her will and understanding and then everything that follows from these.”52 The novice was expected to carry out every command promptly and without reflection, no matter how uncongenial or farfetched it was. The annales are sprinkled with examples. In the early days of the Ursuline monastery at Mâcon, “obedience was held in such high esteem that the smallest commands coming from the superiors were received by the sisters like so many oracles.”53 Among the exam-

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ples given was that of a novice who had been reprimanded for coming late to prayers; the next time she was behindhand, “wishing nevertheless to obey at the first sound of the bell, she came to prayers without having had time to put on anything but her robe, and with her stockings tucked into her belt for lack of opportunity to put them on; she remained with bare legs … although it was extremely cold … Health meant nothing to her compared to obedience.” Another example of unswerving obedience was that of a novice who was ordered to fetch some white bread for an invalid. Finding none, she went to report to the superior, who, busy with other matters, told her to deal with the problem herself, “which the novice took so literally and so simply that she ran straight out into the town to get a loaf at the baker’s, without even giving herself time to let down her black overskirt … under which she was wearing a coloured one.” This breaking of clausura (and in a coloured underskirt!) would normally have caused a scandal in the town, but because it was an act of obedience pure and simple, the Lord protected her by ensuring that she met no one on her way to the bakery. It did not matter if the orders were improper or capricious. One young girl was sent to the community’s confessor (whom the novice mistress disliked) with “messages and words that were harsh and hurtful, which duty nevertheless she accomplished faithfully … He saw her blush and then turn pale, all the while with tears in her eyes … The good man praised and comforted her for being entirely blind in her obedience, no matter how difficult it might be.” In another house, that of Orléans, a young novice was the object of an unusual degree of mortification. “Once when she was picking over the herbs she found a slug under her hands; her mistress, seeing her give a little shiver, told her to pick it up and swallow it – only intending to see what she would do – but she swallowed it so quickly that she did not have time to tell her to leave it.”54 These two cases can be seen as illustrations of abuse of power by the novice mistresses, but the annalists did not waste time on that. What interested them was the exemplary obedience displayed by the novices.

clothing After a certain time, which differed with the congregation, the novice was ready to be “clothed” – to put aside her secular dress and put on the religious habit. This was the occasion of her first official test. On the basis of a character report presented by the “mother” to the Chapter, she would or would not be allowed into the second phase of the novitiate. The decision was solemn and was solemnly taken. “There is

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nothing in the religious state in which it is more dangerous to fail,” said the Rule.55 The Chapter was summoned by the bell. Each vocale was given a white bean and a black bean, and it was up to her to choose which bean to cast into the box. The Rule stipulated that the pretendant must have a plurality of votes to be admitted to clothing. The requirements were well known. She must be legitimate, healthy, and free from any crippling or disfiguring conditions. “[She] must have a vocation from God, and come freely for love of Him, without force or constraint.”56 She must be of suitable temperament. “It would only take one imperfect, one haughty, one proud, one self-lover to infect your little flock,” wrote Fourier to the sisters of the Congrégation.57 Given the permanence and closeness of community life, it is easy to see why the vocales might turn down some candidates – after all, they were going to have to live with them for a long time. Louise Grosil was almost rejected on several counts, being “hunchbacked and lame, stubborn in spirit, vulgar and difficult in humour.” As a novice, Elisabeth de Villaret took her self-disgust to such extremes and allowed herself to become so dirty and unsightly that the community thought twice about admitting her. She improved just in time, and from then on “was guided along a gentler, more pleasant path.”58 Marie Baudin, because of her delicate health, was accepted only after a second ballot.59 One of the most famous close calls was that of Thérèse du Terrail, who after six months in the novitiate was in such poor health that she was almost sent away from her monastery in Toulouse. “There are fifty of us vocales,” her superior told her, “and barely ten are favourable to you.”60 But she survived the vote and went on to become the chief rebuilder of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame after the Revolution. The choices confronting the Chapter could sometimes be complicated. When all things were equal, it was clearly in the community’s interest to allow only compatible women to join it. But other factors could interfere, with the result that every stricture of the Rule was disregarded on occasion. The dismissal of a novice, especially if she was from a prominent family, could have nasty repercussions in local society. Parents might take the decision as an insult and retaliate, as did a father in Rennes who accused the Ursulines of having treated his daughter like a domestic and demanded all his money back.61 Disabilities and infirmities were often winked at for the sake of compassion or because of a generous dowry. The Chapter might feel an obligation to accept a girl in return for services rendered by her family, as in the case of the novice in Villefranche mentioned above, or that of a novice in Mâcon, whose father and brother were the community’s doctors.62

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Or if times were hard and the novice’s dowry was particularly tempting, it might be difficult to bid her (and it) adieu. As Dominique Dinet has remarked, “Money was not neutral in the matter.”63 The clothing ceremony was the closest thing that a novice would get to a wedding. Arrayed in whatever splendour her family could afford, she was led up to receive her religious habit. The ceremony could be a magnificent affair. It might star a famous preacher and draw a great concourse of important people to the monastery church. Afterwards, the community might be treated to a lavish feast, complete with little packages of sweets – the ancestors of the sugared almonds still associated with religious celebrations in France. Everything depended on the practice of the community and the wealth and generosity of the family. At the end of the day, dressed now in the religious habit with only her white veil distinguishing her from the professed nuns, the novice returned to the novitiate and to the awareness, inculcated again and again, that she was among the lowliest of creatures. But no longer quite the lowliest. Beneath her now were the newcomers still in their secular dress, whose place in the scheme of things was even more humble than hers and to whom she was expected to give leadership and set a good example. She still faced an indeterminate future. The Chapter was still free to send her away if it thought fit. Her time in the novitiate might be prolonged, either because she was not considered mature or disciplined enough to profess or because her family was falling short on its financial commitments. Francoise La Lande spent four years as a novice, “her parents being unable to do otherwise because of family problems.” Marie Le Tort faced an even longer delay, not because her parents could not afford her dowry but because they wanted her out and married. She remained seven years in the novitiate, “waiting for matters to be sorted out.” In Marie Anne de Sarre’s case, the wait lasted fourteen years: “Monsieur her father … claimed that he had raised her to be his helpmate in governing his household, since she was his only daughter.”64 Finally, given the high mortality of the age, there was a chance that she might die in the novitiate, as did Catherine Choillon in August 1676. Her grieving father recorded the death of this “dear and beloved and most amiable eldest daughter, aged nineteen years and thirty days,” as follows: Of my children she was the one in whom I took, and looked forward to, the most pleasure; she had an intelligence uncommon in her sex, and she was as mature as a forty-year-old … She died at Limoges, where I had taken her last

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March, after fighting for more than a year to keep her with me … I went twice to Limoges during her illness; I entered the monastery and was present at her death; and for my consolation and that of my family, I had her body brought back to this town, so that I could keep her close to me in death when I had not been able to hold her during life.65

Catherine’s case was not unique. Here and there in the records the deaths of novices were mentioned. Such young deaths were a cause of grief in the community. “Judge … the consternation into which this loss has thrown us,” wrote one superior.66 But sometimes they came as no surprise. Whatever the Rule said, the nuns often accepted sickly girls. In 1728 Marguerite de Villeurbanne pleaded to be taken into the community of Notre-Dame in Narbonne. Her mother had died, and her inheritance had been lost to her. “All that she had left was Providence,” wrote her superior, “and I was … so touched by the warmth of her trust that I did not hesitate to receive her.” The Chapter was less easily persuaded, because of her poor health. “But she pressed us … saying that it was because she had not much time to live that she had to make haste to obey God, who wanted her to die as a nun.”67 The young woman was dead within four years. Occasionally a novice was allowed to make her profession on her deathbed. The nuns treated this as a privilege, but it was a privilege that might lead to unpleasantness if relatives suspected the community of angling for her dowry. The death of Anthoinette Bodin in the Ursuline monastery of Blois only six months after her profession gave rise to just such a suspicion. A judge representing the family presented himself at the monastery and asked to see the register of professions in order to ascertain whether the deceased had fulfilled the mandatory two years in the novitiate. It was alleged that “the said Anthoinette … only lived in their convent for thirteen months” and was therefore ineligible for profession. At issue was a handsome dowry of 15,000 livres.68 It was easy to suspect the worst. There was always a segment of society that was ready to label nuns as money-grubbers and simoniacs. The nuns had to be sensitive to the situation. In the same monastery in which Anthoinette Bodin died, another young novice, Magdelaine Chauvel, was so sick on the day of her profession that she had to be carried in a chair to the parlour to receive her father’s permission. After he had given it – thus “generously” risking the loss of her dowry to no purpose – she was carried into the church to make her profession.69 In Pau in 1750, when a young novice of noble family showed signs of poor health, the superior notified her father, “to avoid any suggestion of cupidity.”70 Only after he had talked to the girl and satisfied himself as to her wishes was she allowed to continue her novitiate.

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Needless to say, families did not complain when communities accepted sickly girls who were also poor. Madeleine Bourgeois was an orphan who had grown up in the care of her curé brother and two sisters. She came to the Ursuline monastery in Blois with “a chest … that threatened ruin” and no dowry at all. By rights the Chapter should have refused her. But she professed in 1780, in time to claim the privilege of dying as a bride of Christ. “Like a dove, she flew towards him,” wrote the annalist.71 There was no question here of money-grubbing or simony. But that is the way of public opinion. Simony is news: generosity is not.

profession Ahead now lay the solemn profession, the moment of final commitment to the religious life. The conditions for this were carefully laid out. The novice’s case must be examined by the Chapter, and another vote taken; again, she must have a plurality of votes to be accepted. According to canon law, she had to be sixteen years at least and to have completed two full years in the novitiate in order to make this irrevocable decision. She also had to be examined by the bishop or his representative to make sure that her decision was made freely and in the full knowledge of what lay ahead. If these conditions were not met, the profession could be appealed and annulled. To ensure her independence, the Rule stipulated that the examination of the novice should take place in private, out of earshot of her superiors or anybody else. In the case of the sisters of the Congrégation, it was to take place entirely outside the cloister. The interrogation and the novice’s answers were to be recorded and the document signed by herself and her examiner. Hundreds of these documents survive among the diocesan records of the Old Regime. The chief impression they convey is one of conventionality. The questions took a set form; indeed, by the eighteenth century they were usually printed, with blanks to be filled in. To all appearances the young women were coached, either by their novice mistresses or by their questioners. This does not mean that they were answering under duress, for it is clear that most novices who wished to leave the monastery could have done so before this final moment. But it leaves no way of penetrating the opaque wording to sense how they really felt about their religious vocation: how joyful they were, how content, how resigned, or how resentful. The conditions laid down by the Council of Trent were observed – that was all. And that was enough. The vast majority of nuns lived out their days in the convent in which they had been professed. But a tiny minority later brought complaints

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that their profession had been uncanonical. In 1700 Suzanne-Marie Poulleau appealed to the pope for release from her vows, claiming that her age at profession had been not seventeen as she had declared and as she had believed, but twelve – a deception practised on her by her father, which rendered her vows null and void. After three years she received her release. In 1756 Marie de Vaucelle appealed against her parents and the Ursulines of Troyes on the grounds that her profession had never been registered, nor signed by her. Françoise de Laval claimed that in 1768 she had pronounced her vows in the Ursuline monastery of Lyon as a result “of the persecutions that she had suffered in her family, notably at the hands of her mother, who favoured an older son.” As soon as her mother died, she appealed to the archbishop of Lyon for her freedom, which was granted in 1783. It is interesting to note that she stayed on in the convent for some years as a pensionnaire. A middle-aged woman, no longer marriageable, she faced a dismal future in “the world.” The Revolution found her impoverished and alone.72 During the same years, Catherine de Beuzeville was struggling to free herself from her vows. The illegitimate daughter of distinguished parents, she had been hidden in the country during childhood. At the age of sixteen she was brought by two royal officers to the Ursuline house in Argenteuil, to become a pensionnaire “with formal interdiction of all communication with the outside.” In 1751 she entered the novitiate, the official record listing her parents as “unknown”; in 1753 she was forced to profess. Her dowry, deposited by an anonymous hand, was a generous 6000 livres. However, Catherine turned out to be a troublesome nun who was sent from one place to another until finally, some twenty years later, she started agitating for her freedom. The case dragged on until 1789, at which time Catherine, nearing the age of fifty, found herself free but poor and, apparently, alone.73 These two cases underscore an incontrovertible fact of life. For nuns, the moral finality which their vows represented was reinforced by the lack of alternatives if they later wished to leave the convent. An intendant in the late eighteenth century remarked, “The majority of persons who become nuns would renounce this state if they could find the occasion of some establishment in the world.”74 This was a sweeping statement, made at a time when it was fashionable to denigrate monasticism; but there was a kernel of truth in it. Within a few years of profession many nuns would have found it difficult to re-establish themselves in society. The rarity of appeals by religious women for annulment of their vows may indicate the great majority’s contentment in religion, but it may equally reflect a practical reality – that there was no longer anywhere for them to go.

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Much more common were the cases of young women who presented themselves for profession of their own free will even while they remained in a state of deep uncertainty. The superiors recognized this and to some extent discounted it. Uncertainty, they argued, was natural as long as the future remained uncertain, and it was often cured by the taking of vows. One young woman’s anxieties were relieved instantly when the superior gave her back her secular clothes and offered her the door.75 However, this treatment was sometimes taken to extremes. Uncertainty was one thing, but resistance was another, and it was not always clear where one ended and the other began. Uncertainty could be overcome by persuasion and inner struggle; resistance might be beaten down by the unyielding logic of the convent walls. The death notice of one nun in Avignon recalled that long ago, as a young woman, she had been placed against her will in a monastery: “Few people have shown … a greater determination to return to the world,” but finally “religion reined in her desires.”76 These anodyne words may cover an ugly reality, as the following account shows. A girl, also of Avignon, had been in one monastic pensionnat and then another since the age of five. At sixteen, she was “received into the novitiate” – which in her case meant that force was used to transfer her clothes chest from the pensionnat to the novices’ quarters and to put her into the religious habit. She protested, whereupon her father came to tell her that if she refused to become a nun, he would lock her up in a room and mistreat her and not allow her to see anyone. When she continued to protest, her brother reinforced the family’s position by threatening “to run her through with a sword if she left the monastery.”77 Too often, it seems, the nuns cooperated with the families in such discreditable behaviour. But in their defence it should be pointed out that their communities were always highly dependent on public support and had little leverage against the powerful families of their neighbourhood. If they refused to cooperate, they could suffer reprisals. In Gien in 1676, when the Ursulines refused to accept an unwilling postulant, the family reacted – the mother by threatening “to strangle both her daughter and all the nuns,” and other relatives by breaking into the monastery and creating general havoc.78 It was probably easier to bully the girl than to defy the family. The death notices would never reveal such behaviour because it disgraced both the convent and the nun – the convent because the use of force flew in the face of all its rules, the nun because, in the final analysis, she was expected to resign herself to her fate. Far more typical of the notices is the eulogy of a nun whose parents had given her to the convent “at a time when she had no inclination at all for the cloister”

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and who accepted her lot only after “suffering several struggles over her vocation.”79 Whatever this woman’s travail may have been, it ended up being cloaked in a kind of placid dignity and treated as a triumph. A complex picture of what might, and did, happen can be seen in the death notice of Marie le Coigneux, daughter of a chancellor to the duc d’Orléans, Louis XIII’s troublesome brother.80 After her mother’s death, she and her sisters lived in the pensionnat of the Abbey of Pont aux Dames. “Then came the disgrace of Monsieur le President their father, who followed in the Duke’s entourage.” The girls were brought back to Paris, where Marie was placed in the pensionnat of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. “Later her relatives forced her to agree to enter the convent, and to soften her displeasure they gave her her younger sister to keep her company.” But the girls rebelled against their new circumstances. “They railed at us all day long … they breathed nothing so much as their liberty.” Marie finally decided to become a nun, after being told by the Jesuit Père Binet that this was God’s will for her. But “her temptations were interior and continual against her vocation, and she passed her entire novitiate struggling with herself.” So she was offered her freedom: “Once when she confided in her mistress, she received the answer that Monsieur her uncle was waiting for her at the grille, and she was free to go and ask him to take her away.” But she could not bring herself to do this. Even so, at the ceremony of clothing her repugnance was so great that she could hardly bring herself to enter the church. “The Mother Assistant took her by the hand, saying: ‘You will take the veil, since you asked for it, and you can quit it later whenever you want.› In the event, Marie neither discarded the veil nor ceased to struggle. As the date of her profession approached and her agitation increased, her superior felt anxious enough about her state of mind to confer with a prominent Jesuit, Père Saint-Jure. His recommendation was, “Let her complete her sacrifice; it is what God wants.” And apparently the act of profession brought relief and a sense of liberation: “Prostrating herself on the ground, as though throwing herself at the feet of her conqueror,” she repeated the words of the psalmist, “You have broken my bonds, to you will I sacrifice all my life.” How can we categorize this decision? In the seventeenth century, people had no problem reconciling true freedom with total obedience. “Liberty lies not in doing what one wishes, but in wishing to do what one ought,” wrote Bossuet, who was tonsured at the age of eleven.81 According to this view of things, Marie was only acquiescing in God’s design for her. But the nuns themselves respected and remembered her agony, and recognized that her vocation was one built on fear.

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For all novices, willing or unwilling, solemn profession was a legal act, heralding a permanent change of state. Thousands of acts of profession have been preserved in the archives. Essentially, they are written repetitions of the vows made “aloud, with my mouth and all my heart” before community and family in the presence and “into the hands” of the superior or the bishop. These were the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, made under the Rule and under the authority of the bishop. To these vows, depending on her congregation, the woman added a fourth: “Never to consent to the abandonment of the instruction of young girls.”82 She then received her black veil. To symbolize her new state, she prostrated herself before the altar, and a funeral pall was laid over her while the Office of the Dead was recited. For all the direness of the liturgy, the solemn profession was an occasion for celebration. When Marie Dupuy professed in Blois, her father invited all her extended family “and ordered that the feast be prepared and the convent church decorated, and that the Reverend Père Baillet, preacher, be brought in for the ceremony.”83 Many young women made their vows amid similar demonstrations of family pride, as we can tell from the long lists of signatures appended to their acts. But others professed in total separation from their families, with only the celebrant and the community to witness their sacrifice. The occasion being passed, the newly professed nun returned to the novitiate for a further four years (or more) of training. Mère de Pommereu once remarked that it took seven years to make an Ursuline, and it certainly must have required a great deal of patience. However, her status was now changed. Her commitment was permanent, a fact symbolized by her black veil and newly cropped hair. She now took her place in the monastery’s order of seniority. For the rest of her life, in every formal list drawn up in the community, she would occupy the same position – after the sister whose profession had preceded hers, ahead of the sister whose profession followed.84 At the exact moment she “died to the world,” she became a full member of her religious community. She and it were now committed to each other for life – indeed, for eternity.

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11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ” He that is down needs fear no fall, He that is low no pride. He that is humble ever shall Have God to be his guide. I am content with what I have, Little it be or much: And, Lord, contentment still I crave, Because Thou savest such. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress1

For historians, the least visible members of past religious communities are the converses, or lay sisters. More than any other religious women, they have slipped through the cracks of monastic history. There are practical reasons for this. Most of them entered religion without a dowry and therefore without the services of a notary, thus eluding one of our most important channels of information. Furthermore, they were subject from the outset to a deliberate act of abasement; the records of their entry and profession were usually drawn up without the personal details – parentage, place of origin, date of birth – which were normally given in the case of choir nuns. They came to the monastery as nobodies, “servants of the brides of Christ” rather than brides themselves, and this institutionalized unimportance tended to stay with them to their death. Historians have had to defer to the intentions of the original record makers, with the result that lay sisters have remained more or less ignored into our own times. Fortunately, the story does not end there. In the small closed society of the cloister, lay sisters played an important part. Their status might be low, but their contribution to the physical and, indeed, spiritual well-being of the community was invaluable, so they figured in the annales and death notices much more distinctly than they did in the official records. By combining the meagre information garnered from the latter with the anecdotes provided by the former, we can tease out a profile of sorts of these monastic servants as they laboured their way through the greater part of two hundred years.

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From the very beginning, years before they were cloistered, the teaching congregations depended on some of their members to keep house and make dinner while the others went off to work. We catch glimpses of these women in Fourier’s letters: tantes and veuves, hardworking women, often older and less educated than the young teaching sisters, but absolutely essential to the running of the community. The same sort of women worked among the first Ursulines. We have, for example, Soeur Madeleine, a fille âgée who served in the Paris and Lyon houses before ending up as a founding member of the Mâcon community. “Old though she was,” wrote the annalist, “she made the bread, did the washing and drew all the water that we used in the house for every purpose; … she did the cooking with the help of one of the novices, the garden being one of their constant occupations … and on top of all that she bought our provisions in the town and paid visits on behalf of the mothers to all our friends and benefactors.”2 In similar spirit, when Marguerite Arnaude sallied forth to do the community’s shopping, “it cost her innumerable fatigues. She would have gone for leagues along the road to get the best bargain.”3 There was a sort of motherliness about such women, which their eulogists freely acknowledged and appreciated. The annalist of Mâcon, remembering Soeur Madeleine, wrote: “We called her our mother and our nurse and we loved her as such.”4 With the coming of clausura, these women were turned into enclosed nuns, and their outdoor functions were handed over to another layer of servants: tourières, salaried employees who, since they took no solemn vows, were free to come and go between the community and the world outside. From then on, the lay sisters were bound as irrevocably as the choir nuns by the law of enclosure, and their duties became as circumscribed as their physical surroundings. Also with the coming of clausura, the teaching monasteries underwent a process of social stratification. Entry into the choir now depended on payment of a dowry. This dowry, in addition to supporting the woman for life and contributing something to the improvement of the house, had to help provide for the upkeep of the lay sisters.5 So women who had little or nothing to offer except their own strong arms represented a drain on the community’s finances; they were supported by the “paying” nuns, so to speak, and their presence could be justified only by the services they performed. The various rules drawn up for the new congregations stipulated that lay sisters must be admitted with caution and only as needed: “The number of converses will not normally exceed one-sixth of the number of sisters of the choir.”6 This ratio or a somewhat more generous one was generally observed in the

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seventeenth century. During those early years monasteries employed as few lay sisters as they could. It is interesting to note how the imposition of clausura formalized the structure of the communities: “Care must be taken that the monastery has all the officers that it needs, for on them depends good government.” So wrote Pierre Fourier – he who had previously fought so hard and long to keep his sisters free of the cloister.7 By his careful enumeration of a score of discrete offices, he was serving notice that whatever the women had been free to do before, different rules must apply now that they were cloistered. The monastic community was divided into formal jurisdictions and seniorities: the superior and her officers; the vocales, or senior nuns with a voice in the Chapter; the junior professed (but still voiceless) nuns; the novices; the postulants; and at the very bottom of the pyramid, the converses, or “sisters of the white veil,” those who “never have a voice in [the monastery’s] affairs, and are received only for service and for heavy labour.”8 In the strict precedence that reigned within the community, the senior converse came immediately after the junior choir novice. Lay sisters were domestic servants in an age that had clear ideas about the place of domestic servants. Cissie Fairchilds has pointed to the affinity between patriarchy and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation period. “In the seventeenth century patriarchy was not simply a theory of the way families and societies should function; it was a paradigm for all social organizations, political and religious as well as familial.”9 A household was “family” writ large, its head exercising all the rights and privileges of a father, its members – wives, children, servants – bound by obedience to but also enjoying the protection of the head. Thus, the female religious community was “patriarchal” in every respect except for its unsullied femininity,10 and the principles of authority and subordination were practised to perfection. Everyone had her place in life, and woe to her if she tried to step outside it. The humble status of the lay sisters was the will of God: “Let the converses take care not to lose the character of their condition, tending always towards the lowliest; otherwise they would wrong Him who, in the souls of His elect, has established diverse orders and functions … and would trouble all the order and economy of His adorable Providence.”11 Lay sisters were menials, and their status was designed to reflect the fact. They had no voice in community deliberations. They were not allowed to participate in the opus Dei, the recitation of Office which was traditionally the principal duty of monks and nuns; and they did not engage in the classroom instruction of children which was the raison d’être of the teaching congregations. In some communities (though not many) the Rule for bade them to learn to read or write “under pain of severe punishment.”12 In

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community gatherings, they were to stand at the back of the room, and while the choir nuns stitched and embroidered, they were to work their spindles as women of their station were expected to do.13 Their dress was of coarse fabric and straight-cut “so that they can be distinguished from the choir nuns.”14 Similarly, their veils were white rather than black in order to differentiate them from the “brides of Christ,” whose servants they were. It might be inferred that communities divided along such lines were cold unfriendly places and that the lay sisters caught up in such a system were the victims of discrimination and exploitation. But this would be to simplify a complex situation. Historians of domestic service in Old Regime France have remarked on its ambiguities. Patriarchy had its rewards and consolations, even for subordinates. At the most basic level, it offered them the certainty of food and shelter in an uncertain world. “They never have to care either about drink and food or about their clothing; these are problems for their masters,” wrote Vauban.15 For the many servants who had known true poverty, this must have been a real and lasting relief. Furthermore, the sense of belonging to “a house,” the intimacy with the master which close quarters made almost inevitable, and the gratification that came from identifying with that master could go a long way towards compensating for the loss of autonomy which domestic service entailed.16 All this could also be said about lay sisters. In return for accepting a condition of perpetual inferiority and an often crushing burden of work, they gained security and a sense of belonging to a community, together with the privileges and status which that entailed. In many ways they were better off than the typical female servant. They could not be dismissed; they would be cared for in sickness and honoured in death. Moreover, the worst dangers of domestic service – the sexual predations of the master and the caprices and tyrannies of masters or mistresses – were neutralized for them, the first for obvious reasons and the second because there was a system in place by which they could appeal beyond their superiors to the bishop.17 Finally, they were empowered by a second dimension in their lives; they belonged to a religion whose founder had promised that “many who are first will be last and the last, first.”18 This may not have affected the community’s everyday arrangements, but it must have been in the back of everyone’s mind. Cissie Fairchilds writes disparagingly of a “peculiar form of self-abnegation which passed for servant ‘devotion’ during the Old Regime.”19 In a world guided by amour-propre, this frame of mind would naturally appear most servile. But in convents, self-abnegation was a virtue to be prized, and those who achieved it, whatever their rank, were given high respect. It is not surprising, then, that a sizable number of lay sisters were raised by

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popular acclaim to unofficial sainthood and that their funerals became the scenes of almost hysterical devotion.20 Thus there was an ambiguity in the position of lay sister, which can be looked at partly in the light of Old Regime master-servant relationships and partly in the light of the gospel and the paradox it has always presented to the powerful of this world. “You may go dancing but I’ll play the tune,” said Figaro to his master; Susanna conspired with the countess to outwit the count. No lay sister would have practised such a reversal, but she might legitimately have repeated to herself the words, “He has routed the proud of heart, He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.”21 Certainly the nun who wrote her eulogy did not hesitate to make the point. A perfect example of this double identity can be found in Marie Le Grand, a converse in the Ursuline monastery of Blois from its earliest days until her death in 1653. The annales, which cover the period from 1621 to 1801, contain more than three hundred hand-written folio pages. Most of the death notices included therein take up two folio pages at most. The section entitled “Ce que nous avons remarqué et Sceu de la vie et des dispositions de ma Soeur Marie Le Grand … Converse de Notre Monastère de Ste Ursule de Blois” takes up twenty-five folio pages.22 This space is divided between an account of her life and a reproduction of her prayers and voluminous spiritual writings, copied out at a later date (1714) by some long-suffering sister. Why this singular attention? Clearly, this “servant of the brides of Christ” was considered by her community to be the right stuff for canonization. Marie was born in 1603 into a poor family, mercers by trade. After her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her life became a sad tale of abuse and neglect, severe enough to raise the concern of her neighbours. Her good luck – perhaps her salvation – came in the form of the porter at the local Capuchin convent, who took pity on her and taught her how to read and to pray. In spite of his kindness, her early years were marked by ill health (“infirmities resulting from pale colours,” according to the annales) and by depression almost to the point of suicide. In her twenties, still poor, and working without much success in her brother’s shop, she started to long for the monastic life: “She begged and pleaded with God to grant her a haven in some religious house.” Marie became acquainted with the Ursulines by chance, when she accompanied a group of young ladies on a pilgrimage to Saumur. On returning to Blois, she was accepted into the newly established community, first as a tourière, then – after much pleading – as a converse. Here her happiness began. “Although she was physically very delicate

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she carried her burdens as though they were a feather.” No penance was too hard for her: “When the mistress of novices set her to some exercise, it seems that her heart leaped with joy.” The waves of depression continued, but she appears now to have learned how to handle them. The virtue that characterized Marie, and perhaps first set her apart from others was a most stringent obedience. Shortly after her profession, she was ordered into quarantine with a pensionnaire suffering from the plague; without a word she gathered up the child, together with her bedding, and carried her into a “separate place.” She admitted later that she had been terrified that she would wake up alone in the presence of a corpse, but fortunately the child recovered. Soon after, another case of the plague necessitated another quarantine, and again it was Marie who was chosen for the duty. In all fairness, she might have asked, “Why me, again?” But her obedience was instantaneous as before. “She [would have] made no point of distinction, she [would have] had no point of view on what was ordered of her, even if she was told to throw herself in a well,” wrote the annalist. The sick woman died, but Marie survived to serve another twenty years in her community. What made her so striking, the annales seem to be telling us, was the excessive degree to which she pursued holiness. She habitually wore the oldest clothes, used the oldest pens and scraps of paper, and ate the most unattractive food. “She … drank out of a death’s head and looked every day for new instruments of penance.” When told by her superior that, for something she had done, she deserved to take the discipline in every corner of the house, she did exactly that – in three hundred corners, including those of the cellars! She undertook, as a measure of perfect chastity, never even to raise her eyes to the sisters’ faces. She wrote out her sins and then read them aloud to the community (an exercise which they may not have appreciated!). As she grew older her behaviour became more eccentric. For four years before her death she was subject to convulsions, and when she felt them coming on, she kept them at bay by shouting out her prayers so loudly and so continuously that an important churchman was called in along with her confessor to order her to be silent. She obeyed at once, but when the priest saw what this cost her he relented and allowed her to continue, and “went away edified.” During her last illness, which coincided with the Fronde, when she heard that sacrileges were being committed locally by soldiers, she pleaded to be allowed to make amende honorable, bare-headed, wearing the white robe and carrying the noose around her neck as though she herself were a criminal. This

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was denied her, but she was permitted to lead the community in a formal procession of atonement – an extraordinary privilege for a simple lay sister, even one who was at death’s door. It might be thought that Marie Le Grand was far too radical for her community’s comfort, that her way of life was an embarrassment to them. Yet during all her working years, she served in the pensionnat almost without a break, and the girls loved her. Far from confining herself to their physical needs, as a lay sister was expected to do, Marie was in constant interaction with the girls – talking, exhorting, singing. She composed numerous plays and concerts in which they were allowed to perform, and she made them walk in processions with crowns of flowers on their heads. The greatest punishment that the mistress of pensionnaires could give the children, according to the annalist, was to deprive them of these activities. So valued was Marie that whenever the superior tried to assign her to other duties, the mistresses would plead to have her back. When she finally became too ill to care for her pensionnaires, they were allowed to come to visit her in the infirmary until the day when “she kissed them all and told them this was the last time she would be with them.” “As soon as she was dead, everyone both inside and outside our monastery proclaimed her a saint.” Crowds came to view Marie’s body and to touch it with medals and rosaries. In one of the more macabre gestures that we occasionally witness among Old Regime nuns, several sisters kissed her on the lips – something they would never have done when she was alive – and reported that they smelled no unpleasant odour, even though her breath during life had been “somewhat strong.” Whatever the community’s hopes at the time, Soeur Marie Le Grand was never canonized. But the signal honour which she was paid in the annales – far surpassing that given to even the most respected superiors – is proof that in the community’s memory, sanctity could outweigh rank as a mark of distinction. But it also emphasizes how that sanctity had to be acquired. Marie may not have been typical of the run-of-themill converses, but she practised in a special way the virtues to which they were expected to aspire: obedience, humility, poverty, laboriousness, and a kind of simple, unconditional faith which, in the religious mind, outshone all the wisdom of the world. These virtues may have been available to choir nuns as well, but they were the special attributes of converses. It was for this reason that certain serious seekers after holiness, such as Barbe Acarie, opted to live in that condition. While holiness might be the end product of a lay sister’s life, it was not one of the preconditions. According to the Rule, the most important qualifications for the job were “an even spirit and a robust body,”23

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for the workload was heavy and the life hard. The suitability of pretendants was supposed to be measured by their docility and stamina. No matter how spiritual they were, if they balked at hard work or were not strong enough, they were to be asked to leave. By and large, they met the challenge, if their average age at death (over sixty-two years) is anything to go by.24 The ideal candidate for the position was a countrywoman from a village or small town. The occasional records that give place of origin suggest that most lay sisters did indeed fit this description. In the Ursuline monastery of Lille, for instance, of the forty-seven converses who professed between 1627 and 1772, only seven were natives of the city, while twenty-seven came from villages nearby, and the rest from small towns.25 In this they resembled the eighteenth-century servant populations of Bordeaux and Toulouse, as studied by Cissie Fairchilds.26 There was a high proportion of country people among servants because the elites considered them hard-working and unspoilt: “They mostly are content to have bread to eat and clothing to wear, whereas in the cities … the men of this condition are almost all drunkards and the women prefer to buy fripperies to adorn themselves rather than cloth to dress their children.”27 In one way, however, lay sisters differed from the servant women of “the world.” Most female servants, according to Fairchilds, got their first job in their mid-to-late teens.28 This was the average age, coincidentally, at which choir nuns entered religion. But not lay sisters. By and large they came later, in their mid-twenties.29 Given their modest backgrounds, this means that they almost certainly had several years of work experience behind them. The move to the monastery was often a job promotion, as can be seen from the number of tourières and “outside servants” who ended up as converses. The position was quite a plum for the women, as long as they were resigned to remaining celibate. For its part, the monastery enjoyed a certain luxury of choice. For one thing, in addition to its own ex-servants, it could target servants of friends or women who had once been pupils in its externe school, whose behaviour and skills were therefore known quantities. So, at entry, the ideal lay sister was a strong, healthy countrywoman in her twenties, with “an advantageous build and an apparently robust temperament, joined to a great gentleness.”30 Her intellect did not matter. She could be very simple, like Marguerite Trumel, who, when asked what the gravest sin in her life had been, confessed with tears that she had beaten her cows in anger; or Marie Testuat, who had been raised in the country and “when she was brought to the city and asked if she thought it beautiful, answered that all the houses had prevented her from seeing it.”31

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The new lay sister might be illiterate. Although illiteracy does not appear to have been the rule, it was not considered a disqualification. Marie Wyart, according to her death notice, “had in the world been lacking in all human knowledge, but in a short time she became learned in the wisdom which is taught in the school of Divine Love.”32 As Marie Le Grand (herself a practised writer) put it, “She who would be wise need read only one book, which is Jesus Christ.”33 There were plenty of opportunities for the practice of domestic skills in the monastery and plenty of spiritual exercises for those who could not read. The important thing was to be healthy. It was her “good and vigorous constitution” that mattered most in a converse. But whatever the theoretical standards set down for lay sisters, the fact is that some of them did not fit that pattern. And the disconnection between the nature of the service and the character of this minority may be one of the reasons why, over time, the nature of the service was subtly altered. Some women became lay sisters in spite of, not because of, their health, upbringing, and social background. One reason already mentioned – the desire for self-abnegation (as in the case of Madame Acarie, who became a Carmelite lay sister) – was probably fairly unusual.34 A more likely reason was that somehow they felt incapable of, or uncomfortable with, the duties of the choir and the schools. Marie Ethienette de la Rouge Foucaut, a girl of noble parentage, first entered religion as a lay sister in 1680; eight years later, having developed the necessary skills, she decided (or was allowed) to take the fourth vow and teach – and was raised to the choir.35 The death notices rarely say so, but it seems certain that some, like Marie Testuat, were simple-minded. Her father was a benefactor, and she had been received as a choir nun, “but shortly before her profession it was decided that she was more suited to be a converse … she was extremely slow-witted.” Or they might be temperamentally unsuited. Louise Villeret, whose father was in the legal profession, seems to have had a difficult temper and restless spirit; in any case, she adamantly refused to be raised to the choir, choosing instead to pass her life in physical labours that relieved her of her excessive energy. In exactly the same way, Marie Gachet, whose father, a wholesale silk merchant, “could easily have given her a dowry,” insisted on becoming a lay sister. “Her weakness was to be naturally somewhat attached to her own judgment; this made it necessary to keep her almost constantly busy with her baking, to practise her submission and her obedience.”36 Other women came into the monastery with specific skills. If they were trained apothecaries, they could almost have their choice of mon-

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asteries, so highly were they prized; and it seems that they could be assured from the beginning that they would not be transferred to other tasks. Magdelaine Roger of Bordeaux, who was “of a very good family of this city,” entered religion specifically to be an apothecary; Jeanne Piquenot of Vernon did the same: “[Her father] hopes that in exercising her skills in surgery and pharmacy she will repay the community.”37 In Toulouse, Françoise Poullaille exercised the same charge from the time she was professed until her death, as did Marie Vattier in Le Havre – which suggests that they, also, had been given some sort of understanding.38 Naturally, women had an advantage if they could offer a skill that the monastery lacked. Jeanne Andoui, according to her eulogist, “was received into our house to be employed as a shoemaker.”39 When Marie Bignon entered religion at the age of fifty-nine, it was on the understanding that she would be asked only to sew.40 Some of these women could have qualified for the choir, for instance, Magdelaine Rollant, a converse-infirmarian in the Ursuline house in Amiens, whose family – illustrious but poor – secured for her the promise of a choir position in another monastery.41 But Magdelaine preferred to remain as a lay sister, plying a trade that earned her some respect; others probably did likewise. The women’s previously acquired skills set them apart from the other converses and moderated the shock of entry into what was essentially a servile and laborious sisterhood. But how did this affect the spirit that was supposed to bind this group together? These entrants did not have to meet all the criteria of the Rule; in particular, their delicate health might induce their new superiors to make special arrangements for them.42 Dispensed from the heavy work of the monastery, they formed a sort of labouring aristocracy. Like servants in the larger households in “the world,” the “servants of the brides of Christ” divided into ranks among themselves. But the factor which more than anything else distorted the original symmetry of the Rule was money – or rather, lack of it. It was often the dowry requirement rather than rank or education that divided “servants” from “brides.” Without a dowry, a woman was almost certainly destined for the lay condition. With a dowry, she was automatically considered for the choir. The annales of Blois provide simultaneous examples of both situations. In 1632 Marie Duchemin was received “in the quality of a choir nun.” But before she was professed, her sister, who had pledged to pay her dowry, reneged on the commitment, and Marie found that her only choice, other than leaving, was to become a converse. And at the same time, Françoise Bercerolle, who had been serving as a tourière with no hope of entering the choir, learned that her

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brother’s death on the battlefield had left her with a legacy and hence a dowry – and therefore a stall in the choir.43 Two women of similar social background thus found their roles reversed for dowry considerations. The records show that a sizable number of lay sisters owed their situation to their families’ poverty. Oudart Coquault, never a friend to religious houses, described the process: If a girl of good family is a minor with little fortune, she will not find anyone to marry in keeping with her station. To make this poor girl give in, her relatives and people speaking for the convent represent to her young mind the problems of marriage … They persuade her that in religion she will find salvation; she listens to that. But there is not enough money to be a choir nun; that requires seven or eight thousand livres. They make her resolve to be a converse, that is to say, a servant of Mesdames, to cook their dinner.44

Certainly, the link between a family’s financial difficulties and the settlement of its daughter(s) as lay sister(s) was often pointed to in the records. Jeanne Serpe, said her eulogist, belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais and was close to an engagement in the world when her father went bankrupt. There was nothing for her to do but become a lay sister. Jeanne de Calvid “was born noble and of quality,” but “the goods of this family did not respond to their extraction.” Marie Hachin came from “a very good family,” but her father’s fortune was “insufficient to establish all his children as advantageously as he would have wished.” Anne Benoist, also “of very good family” but an orphan, was almost forced upon the Ursulines of Blois by her relatives, “who begged us to admit her to the exercises of a lay sister.” Sent away because of her difficult humour and then readmitted (under what pressure?), she proved to be too delicate to perform the standard domestic service and so was put to sewing.45 This practice continued through the eighteenth century. Madame Roland in her recollections of her one year (1767–68) spent in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris tells of a young converse, Angélique Bouflers, who became her friend. “The lack of a dowry had placed her among the lay sisters, with whom she had nothing in common except their arduous exercises.”46 Finally, we should mention the name of Marie-Anne Depeyre, daughter of a ruined nobleman, who for lack of a sufficient dowry entered the monastery of Carpentras as a converse, was arrested in 1794, and executed by the Commission populaire of Orange for having expressed, in public, “the culpable wish for a return to royalty, fanaticism, and counter-revolution.”47 The line, then, between choir nuns and converses, at least where their upbringing was concerned, was much more indefinite than the Rule

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had anticipated. In terms of social background, we can visualize the monastic community as something of a continuum, with aristocrats at one end and true plebians at the other, and with a sort of jumble through the middle ranks. Some lay sisters equalled and perhaps even outranked their sisters in the choir, in both birth and ability. Occasionally, if there was need, they were raised to the choir, and there were even cases where lay sisters who had become choir nuns went on to be superiors.48 The mistress-servant relationship, though sanctioned and sanctified by their original vows, must sometimes have been a little strained. Another factor contributing to the blurring of the community caste system was the practice, within the house, of sharing in the converses’ workload. The work assigned to the lay sisters was “the care of all the farmyard, the housekeeping, and the heavy labour of the house.”49 It is worth remembering what “the housekeeping” involved in the seventeenth century. Some houses had water piped in; others did not. One way or another, water had to be provided and, where necessary, heated. There was, of course, no public sewage system; the lieux réguliers had to be emptied out by hand. Heating and cooking required that fireplaces be cleaned and that coal or wood be carried in from outside. Floors had to be swept and scrubbed, furniture dusted, and “spider webs cleaned out from time to time.”50 Although all the sisters were expected to take care of their own cells, the pensionnaires had to be served: their beds made, their fires laid, their clothes mended, and their wash basins and chamber pots scoured. The little ones had to be dressed in the morning and attended to during the night.51 In the infirmary, invalid nuns required more or less care according to their condition, and the death notices describe situations in which nursing must have required the most intense effort. Apart from the actual nursing, laundry had to be sorted and special food prepared, and sick rooms and invalid vessels had to be kept clean. As well, the Rule ordained that twice a year at least, all infirmary beds had to be taken apart and cleaned.52 In the bakehouse, the yeast had to be prepared and the flour sieved, then the bread kneaded, set to rise, and finally put into the oven (which, of course, had first to be fired up).53 From the kitchen there had to come two meals a day for the whole community: soup, boiled and roast meat or fish, and dessert.54 There was fruit to be conserved, vegetables to be cleaned, pot herbs to be prepared and dried. In the refectory, tables had to be set and bread and wine served out in advance; and the hot dishes had to be carried out in the course of the meal, with washing up to follow. “Bowls, spoons, salt-cellars, cups, knives and forks [had to be] washed and scoured every fortnight, and

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rinsed and dried with a clean cloth at least once a week.”55 The garden had to be planted and cultivated;56 the herbs, fruit, and vegetables picked, cleaned, and delivered to the kitchen or the pharmacy.57 In the basse-court, or farmyard, the cows (if there were any) had to be milked, the pigs and chickens tended, the byres and pens cleaned out. The laundry was a huge undertaking, starting early in the morning and lasting through the day. From each sister came two chemises, two veils, two caps, and two wimples per week, plus aprons, stockings, nightcaps, and handkerchiefs58 – and, we must remember, their menstrual cloths as well as all the soiled linen of the infirmary. Their woollen outer habits were cleaned twice a year. Sheets were changed every month, tablecloths every fortnight, napkins every week, community hand towels two or three times a week.59 The wet wash was strung out in the garden or stretched out in the attic.60 Once clean, the linen had to be pressed, sorted, mended, and stored, then handed out according to regulations – “which is heavy work in a community as numerous as ours,” wrote one eulogist.61 These were all day-to-day tasks. In times of special need, extra labour might be required. A monastery’s natural instinct was to avoid extra expense whenever possible, and if any sister was capable of doing the job, she was likely to be recruited. When the grand couvent got the chance to bring city water into the house, it was a lay sister who laid the pipe. When the monastery of Montargis bought an adjacent house in 1681 and decided to incorporate it into the cloister, it was a lay sister who reworked the masonry, closing up the windows overlooking the street and making new windows on the inside, edged with brick, which were “as well measured as an experienced mason could have made them.”62 On all sorts of occasions like these, by undertaking tasks traditionally reserved to men, lay sisters were able, as one eulogist put it, “to spare us the entry of workmen.”63 This, it would seem, was a herculean mountain of tasks for the one in six nuns (or so) who were officially designated as servants of the monastery. Too herculean, in fact. Every community found some way to supplement the labour force. Help came from inside the community, from the ranks of the choir. It was always the practice for the junior nuns and the novices to work with the converses; it was considered part of their formation. The records tell us that this heavy labour often came as a shock to the girls, some of whom had never done housework in their lives; indeed, parents were known to complain that their novice daughters were being used as servants. Older choir nuns also crossed the demarcation line to work with the lay sisters, either for reasons of humility or obedience or because they thrived on the physical labour. Anne Herbelin asked to be relieved of the duties of the

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Chapter “because she does not have a good enough mind to manage affairs.” Instead, she rang the bells, carried lamps to the sisters’ cells during winter, ironed the wimples, and helped with sweeping and dishwashing where needed. Similarly, Marguerite Le Clerc expended some of her energy in helping with the laundry: “One wash day we decided to watch her, and we counted thirty-three loads of laundry that she carried up to the attic.” Likewise, Jeanne Guenichot “gladly took part in the most arduous tasks with our converse sisters.”64 At the same time, some of the heavier work was being turned over to nonmonastic servants. In many instances, the records attest to the existence of these extra servants: scullery and basse-court maids, washerwomen, and the occasional male gardener or valet. If the workload exceeded the sisters’ capacity and if the house had money for wages, this was an option, even though it detracted from the self-sufficiency that was a monastery’s pride. On the whole, the work delegated to these servants was the heaviest work of the monastery. The lay sisters kept the middle-duty tasks – and at the same time edged up into new areas of responsibility. According to the original conception of the rules, almost none of the lay sisters’ tasks was supposed to be in their hands alone. Almost without exception, choir nuns were to be put in charge, with the converses in the role of assistants. In the sacristy, infirmary, pharmacy, linen room, bakehouse, kitchen, refectory, garden, and so on – in virtually every department of domestic activity – choir nuns were expected to be the decision makers, the managers, and the experts. Take, for instance, the responsibilies of the cellarer, the officer in charge of the stores and the kitchen: She has the duty to watch over the sisters who prepare the food, and to have the servings [for the community] made according to the quality and quantity prescribed, and [to ensure that] all is ready in time, and with suitable cleanliness and neatness … [Let her avoid making difficulty for the converses] by failing to tell them clearly, in good time and distinctly, what they must do, and to give them what they need to execute it; or by telling them one thing and then another … [Let her] support with patience and kindness their faults and forgetfulness, their sulkiness and bad humour if these occur … carrying them along by her good example, and by the help which she herself will give them if needs be.65

Here was a model of subordination – softened by forbearance and charity, but subordination nonetheless. Here were personality types: sturdy, simple, hard-working women, used to service but in need of direction – the very kind of servants that the rules had envisaged.

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But the rules had been written in the early seventeenth century, when choir nuns were easily come by and the class differential between choir nuns and converses was clearly marked. With time and the changing needs of communities, the model came to be altered. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the great glut of choir nuns which had marked the years of the Catholic Reformation began to drain away. This had a dramatic effect on monastic economies. Far from having to find work for their choir nuns to do, communities now had to scramble to find choir nuns to do the work. Certain duties – the principal charges of the monastery, the recitation of Office, and all branches of teaching – remained within the purview of the choir. But with their numbers continuing to drop, they were forced to use their available talent more economically. In the domestic arena where the work had previously been shared, lay sisters began to take over. Here and there, depending on their abilities, lay sisters became infirmarians, gardeners, linen-room managers, refectorians and so on. They took over the kitchen and the bakehouse – and proved that they could manage their own responsibilities. Something else changed as well. New activities began to absorb the energies of the nuns, and these activities were as suitable for lay sisters as for choir nuns. As the eighteenth century progressed and as entries into the choir became rarer, communities had to find ways to supplement the dowries they no longer received. One obvious way was by making consumer goods. In their kitchens and pharmacies, they turned out sweets and medications for sale. Their community rooms became workshops where the sisters spent long hours on their ouvrages – even, if necessary, curtailing their prayer and study time. Their products ranged from refined works such as church vestments and linens to such mundane items as knitted-to-order stockings.66 The money thus made could be very important to a monastery’s economy. In the death notices, those women – converses or choir nuns – who excelled at ouvrages were singled out, and the reader is left in no doubt that their contribution to their community was as essential as any other. But the great money raiser was the pensionnat. From the late seventeenth century, monastic pensionnats began to change and expand to meet the demands of the public and also the Crown. Once almost entirely dedicated to schoolchildren, they now became retirement homes, hotels, and sometimes prisons for all varieties of women.67 What the nuns thought of this was not important; they entered into the business out of obedience to authority and because it enabled them to augment their income considerably – which, in the critical years of the eighteenth century, was what mattered most.

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We can see the consequences of this in the changing composition of communities. The labour required to maintain these adult pensionnats (where no teaching was required) was converse labour, not choir nun labour. In houses where such pensionnats were established, lay sisters ceased to be a drain on the economy and became an asset. Their numbers remained constant and sometimes even rose, compensating to some degree for the decline in the number of choir nuns.68 This must only have accentuated a transformation that was already taking place: the déclassement of the monastic population. As described in part 1, in the eighteenth century the elites largely walked away from the religious institutions which their forebears had created. At the same time, women of the lower ranks of society – the honorables and honnêtes – were finding their way in force into the religious life. Most of them joined the new secular and uncloistered congregations, of which the Filles de la Charité were the most famous. Here, they achieved an influence and respect and a pedagogical reputation that may well have rivalled that of the older teaching orders. “[They] have the same objectives as the Ursulines and, by diverting both subjects and students at a furious rate, are building themselves at [our] expense and to [our] detriment,” wrote a grumpy Ursuline superior in 1745.69 If the older institutions hoped to compete, they had to show a friendly face to these women of lesser quality. The less exclusive monasteries lowered their dowry requirements and welcomed women whom, a century earlier, they would have spurned. In 1790 the social difference between choir nuns and lay sisters, and their monetary value to the community, was much less marked than it had been in 1690. Although we have no evidence for it, we may surmise that this, and the need to cooperate in order to get through the daily workload, led to a mellowing of the old hierarchical practices. The change must not be exaggerated, however. Like the generations that had gone before them, the lay sisters of 1790 were excluded from teaching, from the recitation of Office, and from the deliberations of the Chapter. Their canonical status remained the same, and as such it was an affront to the Revolution’s principles of equality. One of the moves that the National Assembly made in 1790 was meant to reform this by giving them a vote in the upcoming monastic elections (a privilege which the lay sisters almost always rejected). Their inferiority followed them to the end. When the Church’s goods were confiscated and the Nation became the paymaster of all monks and nuns, it was the Nation that decreed that converses’ pensions should be exactly half those of choir nuns.

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12 Of Death and Dying

When a man is dead to himself, the death of the body is no more than the consummation of the work of grace. François de Salignac Fénelon1

By her very state, every nun was “dead to herself.” Her earthly life was gathered up and placed on the altar and immolated, consumed completely, with nothing left over. This is the message implicit in the ritual of solemn monastic profession. The newly professed nun prostrates herself on the ground, and the funeral pall is draped over her body. “Here will I rest for all eternity,”2 she states. The monastery church in which she makes her vows will almost certainly one day witness her committal to the earth. In a sense her physical death, whenever it arrives, will be only the final crowning of her martyrdom. Death is not just the termination of life; it is its consummation, the end towards which everything else has been directed. However, no matter how virtuous her life, the hour of death is a time fraught with danger, because at that moment the nun is still vulnerable – and perhaps especially so – to the lures of Satan. As Philippe Ariès describes it, the deathbed is the scene of a monumental battle: “Supernatural beings have invaded the chamber and cluster about the bed of the recumbent figure, the ‘gisant.’ On one side are the Trinity, the Virgin, and the celestial court; on the other, Satan and a monstrous army of demons.”3 The ritual of anointing and the prayers of those gathered around are manoeuvres in this battle. The “last agony” is the climactic act of a baroque morality play about good and evil, temptation and triumph. And nowhere is this drama played out with more virtuosity than at the deathbed of religious women. Innumerable descriptions of deathbeds have come down to us from the nuns themselves. In the surviving necrologies, or death notices,

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the events are amply described. When a death was imminent a timehonoured ritual began. The priest was called in to hear the dying woman’s confession and to give her Holy Communion if she was still conscious and capable of receiving, or at the very least, to anoint her. The community assembled around her bed to keep vigil, to sustain and encourage her with their prayers. For her part, the dying woman would do her best to maintain herself in faith and resignation. In a gently consoling phrase, Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, wrote that a recently deceased sister “went straight from her bed to heaven.”4 The authors of the necrologies did not write so confidently, but they did love to dwell on the final whisper, the eyes fixed on the crucifix, the hands joined in prayer. It is hardly surprising that women consciously tried to fulfil these expectations, as did Madeleine de Meulle, for instance, dying at the age of twentyeight: “As her sister, close by her, burst into tears, she said, ‘Sister, let me die courageously,’ and, lifting herself on her bed, took up the posture in which she wished to die.”5 Did the ceremonies around the deathbed soften the fear of dying? Or did they sharpen it by adding a metaphysical dimension? It is impossible to say. One authority on convent life, Geneviève BaudetDrillat, believes that the communities she studied took death in their stride as the logical ending to life.6 Another, Georges Minois, concurs: “All conventual life was directed towards this end and seems to have been no more than a preparation for it.”7 Another, Philippe Loupès, goes further: “Death was … in general, desired; and its coming was often accelerated in a context of baroque exaltation by growing mortifications. But it was sometimes experienced slowly, with a sort of delectation.”8 Are these conclusions altogether convincing? Was this how real, living women experienced death, or may we suspect a certain seasoning of the facts by the eulogists, the better to edify their readers? Interestingly enough, the notices, our source for a host of death scenes, offer a mix of evidence. Certainly they tell of many women who met their death calmly: “Death caused her no fear, she had made herself familiar with it all through her life.”9 These women received their reward: “Death arrived with great gentleness” … “She passed away in an admirable gentleness … This precious death was only the echo of her good and holy life.”10 Sometimes the necrologies even add a note of comfort. Jeanne du Bourbet, when she felt death approaching, turned to her superior and said with a smile, “It is time to leave this world and go to sing Alleluia in Paradise.” Marthe de Langlée, who died during her term as superior, “before death … cast a glance over all the community, and gave a little smile.” Guijonne Hacou asked for

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her prayer book, put on her spectacles, and did a half-hour of preparation for death, after which “the death-sweat overtook her, her face changed noticeably, she took her handkerchief and wiped her face, and asked for Monsieur our confessor.” Less typically but with a certain charm, Catherine Chrétien found the prayerful scene around her too distracting: “As we kept on suggesting acts suitable for this last passage, she said to us: ‘Leave me alone with my God.›11 The eulogists loved these familiar touches, which showed their subjects both human and unafraid. On the other hand, they were also ready to admit that death was the subject of anxiety and distress for many religious women. Louise Vallette “had in a strange way feared death all her life.” As for Marie Ursule d’Oizelley, “the fears of death … were very strong in her.” Agnez le Duc, after a long and successful religious life, suffered for two years from “anxieties, scruples, and fears of death.” Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau felt such terror of death that the very sight of preparations for her anointing threw her into a panic.12 To all appearances, their anxiety was fuelled by more than the physical fact of dying. Death by itself is frightening enough; death followed by the final judgment must have been infinitely more frightening. In those times, it was common belief that no one except baptised babies had the right to expect easy passage through the gates of heaven – certainly not nuns, who as consecrated women bore an extra responsibility for their own sinfulness. Fourier’s expression of confidence is not typical of the religious literature of the Catholic Reformation. For those who listened attentively to the message of the teaching church, sinfulness and punishment were huge obsessions. One might think that nuns had earned the right to a peaceful conscience, but this was far from the case. “I saw that I merited hell,” wrote Marie Guyart, Ursuline of Québec, “and that the justice of God would be served by casting me into its abyss.”13 The monastic life did nothing to dispel anxiety; indeed, its pedagogy was designed to sharpen the consciousness of sin and the fear of judgment.14 In many instances, the women’s anxiety was expressed in terms of the second fear, that of God’s wrath. Marie Françoise Proboist “was very fearful of the judgments of God.” Marie Anne Gohin had “a lifelong, extreme apprehension of death and the judgments of God.” Angélique de Bailleul suffered “great interior pains, fear of the judgments of God.” Marie Descluseaux spent her declining years in terror: “She envisaged God as a fearful judge with vengeance in His hand [ready] to punish her mercilessly for the scandal she believed she had given to the community.” As for Marie-Anne Dufourd, “the fear of

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God’s judgments filled her with terror; despite frequent confessions, the memory of a life entirely employed in the service of the Lord, and the assurance her confessors gave her that God looked kindly on her, in spite of all this … she was always in a state of fear.”15 However, the story was never allowed to end there. The purpose of the necrologies was to edify their readers. If they chose to discuss the fear of death, it was in order to signal the benevolence of God, who took away this fear in the end. “Peace at the last” has always been the prayer of Christians.16 Almost universally, if the eulogists are to be believed, these dying nuns were granted it. Sometimes God took away their consciousness so as to relieve them of their terror. But in a remarkably high number of cases they remained alert to the last moment, and virtually never were they said to have died in a state of fear.17 That final triumph gave dignity to all the previous fear. Dorothée de Luc must have offered encouragement to a number of her sisters when she remarked that she had always been afraid of death but that now, on her deathbed, she “would be quite annoyed not to die.”18 The other aspect of death was bereavement. Madame Drillat sees this also as being attenuated by the training and ethos of religious life: “A death did not arouse a great deal of emotion.”19 Or, as one eulogist put it, “There ought to be moderation in weeping for the dead who enjoy eternal rest.”20 But here again, other death notices raise doubts. The conventionally pious phrases come first, it is true. But after them come numerous allusions to the real human distress of the people left behind: “The death of our dear sister has plunged us into the profoundest bitterness” … “General consternation, and the tears of her sisters, announced her death, each regretting her as if she had lost her own mother.”21 Phrases like these occur time and again, and they should come as no surprise. First, it must be remembered that the female monastery was often home to family groups of sisters, aunts, and nieces. The loss of a relative was considered sufficient reason for deep grieving. In his memoirs Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, described his daughter’s desolation at her aunt’s death in the monastery: “My daughter the nun is inconsolable; she loved her; she was holding her hand when she died.”22 The loss of a relative could lead to nervous prostration, physical collapse, and even death – as in the case of Elisabeth de Rapin, who was felled by a stroke the day after her sister’s demise.23 Over and over, family grieving was openly acknowledged: “She leaves behind her a dear sister who is deeply afflicted by the loss she has just experienced” … “Her three nieces are in pain for the loss they have suffered” … “Her dear niece whom we have as a religious … is inconsolable.”24 Frequently

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the superior herself, who was supposed to write the letter, was unable to do so because as a relative of the deceased she was too overcome – as one letter put it – “with good reason, by an unequalled affliction.”25 “This is how this dear child has taken leave of us,” wrote one eulogist, adding that Reverend Mother, the dead girl’s aunt, is in consternation and incapable of writing herself.26 There seems to have been no shame in this surrender to grief. Bereavement was not only a family affair. Many a necrology paid homage to a friendship that had been “tender, constant, generous, disinterested.”27 “I have lost … a true friend,” wrote one superior. Another, reporting the death of her friend, confessed: “I have lost everything in losing her; in my infirmities and at my advanced age, there is no service that she did not render me.”28 It was acceptable for women to wish to be linked in death as they had been linked in life. Anne de Mestres was thought to have died of grief at the loss of another sister: “The tender and sincere love she felt for her made her shed so many tears, and filled her heart with an affliction so bitter, that seemingly it was from this that there came an inflammation of the chest, which took her from us in a few days.”29 When an old nun died in Toulouse, and another followed her within days, the eulogist remarked: “They were bound in a friendship so close that the former often prayed to God that she would not survive the latter.”30 For the aged, living in such closed and close circles, the death of a lifelong companion must have been an irreparable loss. The death of the young brought distress of a different order: the endangering of the community’s future. A poignant illustration of this can be found in a string of letters from the superior of the Filles de Notre-Dame in Narbonne. The first, written in 1726, reported the death from consumption of a nun of twenty-five. She was followed a year later by a thirty-six year old, and a year after that by a twenty-one year old. Then in 1731 her younger sister also died: “When she reached the same age as her dear older sister … she was attacked by the same malady.” With each death, the superior’s tone had become more anxious, and now she openly mourned “both for the death of this dear girl and for the others who preceded her, who were all young subjects of great promise.” But the community’s troubles were not over yet. In 1732 and 1733 came two more young deaths; in 1735 another; in 1737 another two, and in 1739 and 1742 two more. The average age of the eleven deceased nuns was 28 12 .31 To imagine how the loss of these young women touched the Narbonne community, we can look at another community similarly affected exactly a hundred years earlier, when a cluster of young deaths at Eymoutiers caused so much alarm that there were no new entries for several years.32 —

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th e c e re m on i e s of d e ath After death came the laying-out, the funeral, and the interment in the monastery’s cemetery. This was a major event conducted with dignity and honour. The dead sisters, professed or novices, will be carried into the choir by their peers, with their face uncovered, with their habit and veil of religion, a crown of flowers on their head, holding a wooden cross, and their vows held in their joined hands, if they have made their profession … There will be six burning candles around the coffin, and six sisters who will stand guard on the body … When the sign is given to commence the office of interment all the sisters will be present in the choir in their great veils, with lit white candles in their hands.33

These last honours were payment owing, so to speak, to the woman whose sacrifice had just been perfected. For the more distinguished, there was the local equivalent of a state funeral, with all the notables of the town attending, “an incredible gathering of all the people of distinction in this city.”34 For nuns who had achieved the reputation of sainthood, there were often touching manifestations of affection from their students and from the poor. When Marie de Pluvinel was laid out in the chapel of the Ursulines of Saint-Marcellin, “everybody came from everywhere to touch her body with medals and rosaries.” The same tribute was paid to Catherine de Chevalier, who had been a nun for forty-nine years in the town of Salers: “At her burial there was a great crowd of people, who proclaimed her a saint; over and over again we had to give away pieces of her choir mantle and to touch her body with rosaries.” In Montargis, at the funeral of Marie Houre, a simple Ursuline lay sister, “there was reason to fear that all the poor of the town who revered her as a saint might break down our grille to get hold of her relics.”35 Burial took place either in the church or in the sisters’ cemetery within the monastery walls. The privilege of being buried in the monastery, and in the monastic habit, was coveted by many devout laywomen; sometimes, in return for their devotion or generosity, they were accorded this privilege. Finally, word of the death went out to other monasteries of the order “so that they might pray and have prayers said for the soul of the deceased.”36 But the notices were intended to do more than elicit prayers; they were also meant to be read to the community so that those who read them would be “moved … to imitate their virtues and to praise

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God who has taken for Himself the hearts of such a great number of virgins.”37 The dead sisters joined a kind of court of honour to which their successors could have constant recourse.

religious women and sickness However honourably the Grim Reaper was treated when he arrived, it does not follow that he was welcomed in. Monasteries of the Old Regime yielded to no one in their efforts to cure their sick. They built special infirmaries which they staffed with senior members of the community; they maintained pharmacies whenever possible; and they called in doctors, surgeons, and specialists as needed. On occasion, they sent their sick members out for treatment elsewhere.38 The medical care of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was of doubtful value, but to all appearances, nuns enjoyed as much of it as anyone else. This made for some ambivalence in their approach to suffering. The monastic rules gave mixed advice: “Sickness is a state of penance,” which the sisters should bear willingly, “as satisfaction for their infidelities and ingratitudes” and in conformity with “the suffering Christ.” So they should not pamper themselves.39 On the other hand, they were expected to do everything necessary to remain healthy:40 “If anyone is sick and requires care, it must not be deferred but given to her without demur as soon as possible, following the advice of the doctor; if she does not respond of her own accord, the superior will order her to do what she must to regain her health.”41 The community was warned that God would be offended if its sick members suffered needlessly: “He considers all the good and all the harm done to them as if it were done to Himself … Among all the works of mercy, there is none more agreeable to Him … than that of assisting, treating and consoling the sick.”42 So the rules were open to interpretation, and the degree of suffering that was acceptable remained a matter for individual judgment. It appears that the refusal of medicines was permitted but unusual, and “all the more rare in even the most virtuous persons because they can ask for them without guilt.”43 The records indicate that the rules were often interpreted generously, and that from time to time women were allowed to leave their convents for weeks, months, and even years to breathe their air natal, receive specialized medical treatment,44 or take the cure at one spa or another.45 However, the favourite models of monastic life were the stoical women who bore or even hid their ailments so that they could continue working, fasting, and observing community practices.

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The necrologies sang their praises. There was Catherine de la Massuère, for instance, who lived with her cancer for twenty-five years: “She had promised the Divine Majesty to seek neither relief through remedies nor consolation from other creatures.” Gilberte Nicaud, suffering the agonies of colera morbus, had “the courage to remain on her feet until the day of her death.” Marie Gasparde “did herself great violence in order to come to Communion in the church, even though she was dropsical.” Marguerite Colin, an aged lay sister, was ordered to rest: “But our cares irritated her; she wished to die as she had lived, in the fatigues of a laborious life, standing at arms as befits a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” Magdelaine de Cholet, another old lady, insisted on getting up at three in the morning: “When she was sick we had to take her clothes away to prevent her from doing so.” Barbe Guyot struggled for five years to overcome her illness: “It is impossible to describe the efforts to which she submitted herself … to continue to serve the community with the same courage and the same energy that she had shown during her years of health.” Marie Houre, eighty years old, insisted on washing the dishes, “even while experiencing the shivering” that announced her mortal illness.46 The litany of these saints could go on and on, but we will end it with the eulogy of an old lay sister, Catherine Humbert, who demonstrated the perseverance that was admired in choir nuns and lay sisters alike: “To content her we had to let her ring the bell, wash the dishes every day, and sweep the community room; we saw this poor woman with a cane in one hand to support her and a broom in the other; it would have been a great insult to her to prevent her from doing this task.”47 Equally, nuns who refused to break their vow of clausura in order to seek a cure elsewhere (even when this was authorized by the bishop) were especially commended. Among these heroines was a woman who refused to go to the waters of Bagnières, saying that “she would prefer death a thousand times to regaining her health at this price.” Another, when offered a trip to Paris to see a specialist, insisted that “if they promised her her health at the city gates, she would not want to take a step outside to obtain it.”48 Another said that “if it was a question of abandoning enclosure for only an hour, she would not do it, even if she was promised her health by leaving her beloved solitude for such a short time.” Women like this were the stuff of which monastic legends were made. But this last nun’s eulogist went on to say, “Few religious souls … carry their love of the cloister to this point.”49 The line between heroism and foolhardiness was a thin one. Monasteries needed healthy women, not sick ones; there was a certain exasperation for superiors in seeing their charges neglect their health. In

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one letter the superior complained: “It has to be said that this dear mother went too far in her pious excesses, and that they perhaps contributed to the sad state to which she was reduced these last twentythree years.” Another wrote: “As soon as I saw this illness, I judged it incurable, and I rebuked her soundly for having hidden it so long.” And another: “It is the only point on which I could complain of the dear departed, that she hid her ailments for too long and was too difficult about accepting the most necessary remedies.”50 The doctors often had their say too: “I made her show her tumour to the doctor, and she did so with great repugnance … He did not fail to scold her for having waiting so long to reveal it.”51 There was a tension built into the religious life between the glory of self-immolation and the common sense of self-preservation. Many nuns failed to resolve that tension. There was also a less heroic reason for feigning good health. Sometimes women hid their condition out of delicacy. A nun in Magny had “a serious and dangerous condition … of which she would rather have died than commit herself to the hands of the surgeons”; and in Rouen a nun’s “love of purity was such that she had difficulty allowing her pulse to be taken and was prepared to bear the agonies of nephritis … rather than to be exposed in the course of the cure.”52 It must have been very hard for women who had lived in the convent for most of their lives to submit their bodies to male scrutiny. Whatever their health and whatever their level of stoicism, nuns must have expected from their earliest days that sooner or later they would spend time in the infirmary. In the small world bounded by their monastery walls it remained a constant presence. Many of them were assigned to work in it at one time or another; all certainly visited it when occasion demanded; and all would be present at the deathbed of their sisters. Inasmuch, then, as the infirmary impinged upon the monastery’s daily life and experience, it is worth looking for a moment at this sad little community lodged within the larger body.

the infirmary The infirmary was not usually included in the first round of monastic buildings, for two good reasons. First, money was usually short to begin with, given all the initial disbursements, and other buildings such as dormitories for the sisters and living quarters for the pensionnaires took precedence. Second, when most construction started, the community was still young, and the problems of sickness and death may not have loomed large. However, with the passing years, the need for an infirmary became more pressing. Finally, in the eighteenth century, when vocations grew scarce, a spacious, well-designed infirmary became a

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drawing feature, an attraction for would-be entrants, who were much more concerned with “quality of life” than their predecessors had been.53 From numerous descriptions in the inventories of 1790, we get a picture of these quarters. The infirmary occupied its own corner of the monastery, sometimes being built directly over the church with a squint hole allowing a view of the altar. The various communities’ rules concurred in requiring that it be sufficiently large, with more comfortable beds and better quality linen than normally used.54 It was usually furnished in dormitory style, with cubicles divided by curtains, but it also had one or two small rooms for special needs; also an oratory and a cell for the infirmarian, who had to sleep on the premises. There were armchairs to sit in, large cupboards to store the linen, and special dishes to handle the invalid diet. The price that sick nuns paid for these small comforts was separation from community life. The infirmary was a world unto itself; patients were placed under obedience to the infirmarian, and the only contacts they had with their companions in the monastery were the visits which these were authorized to make. The infirmarian’s responsibilities included recording the course of the sisters’ illnesses, calling the doctor when necessary, and notifying the superior when it was time to bring in a priest.55 Numerous descriptions of infirmarians survive in the necrologies: “She had a natural penchant for the most unpleasant services and for the care even of those suffering the most contagious diseases” … “Our doctors often followed her advice and always approved the remedies that she had ordered in their absence” … “The nuns preferred her advice to that of the doctors” … “The doctors said that she was a treasure to them” … “She bled patients with a delicate touch that would have done honour to the ablest of surgeons. She was equally skilful in making remedies.” She had “a great knowledge of simples and their properties, she was able to bleed, to bandage wounds; she performed highly successful operations … [she] had very good secrets”56 … “She was … vigilant, knowing by her own experience what sickness was and how one must have compassion for the misery of others; she recognized the different maladies, and she applied the appropriate remedies; she did the bleeding for more than twenty years and kept the pharmacy.”57 This last activity, the making of medications, was a skill greatly valued in the monasteries, to the degree that communities would accept postulants with reduced dowries or no dowries at all if they had pharmaceutical skills.58 Among these skills was the care of the herb garden and the knowledge of when to pick the herbs for best effect: “She would go out in the middle of the night, even in snow and heavy rain, to search in her garden for the herbs necessary for the relief of the

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sick.”59 The monasteries took their pharmacies seriously; an inventory taken in 1721 at the Ursuline house in Guincamp shows that its pharmacy contained 176 medicinal products.60 In some cases they marketed their medications or offered them free to the general public. Medical care for outsiders was a small sideline in some teaching monasteries, and the women involved – often lay sisters – might well be rewarded with public tributes at their funerals. Depending on the size of the community and the number of invalids, the infirmarian might be given assistants. The work could be dangerous. There are numerous instances of infirmarians and their assistants catching fatal diseases from their patients. In Arnay in 1691, three women died one after the other, of “violent fever and oppression of the chest.” The fourth to die was the infirmarian herself, followed by a lay sister: “Her sickness is the same as those preceding her; she caught it in nursing them.” In Aurillac the same story was told twenty years later. An epidemic of malignant fever tore through the community, and four women died within days, the last of them being the infirmarian.61 The work could also be arduous. Paralysed or extremely sick patients might require two or more women to lift and turn them. It could also be repugnant, as the necrologies frequently pointed out. But this provided the opportunity, for those brave enough to take it, to imitate the holy example of Saint Francis embracing the leper. Louise Gautrin cared for a nun dying of a “hideous” cancer: “Only she was willing to nurse her, with a manner so pleasant and so tender that to see her you would have thought she was taking great pleasure in it. To persuade her patient that she was not causing her any disgust, she ate her leftovers after bandaging her, and she did this without even washing her hands.”62 In much the same spirit, Françoise Cormane devoted herself to a nun whose body “was all covered with sores, sores on which worms were feeding”; and Jeanne de Belcier, soon to be famous as the “possessed” Ursuline of Loudun, asked to take over the care of a sick nun “all covered with sores caused by scrofula, from which came such an unpleasant odour that it was difficult to bear it.”63 What do we know about nursing procedures in the monasteries? One of the passages just quoted mentions bandaging. This was a procedure to which considerable attention was given, though one historian remarks that it may have done more harm than good. There are also numerous references to bleeding. This involved using a lancet to open a vein – not just any vein but one strategically located – and allowing as much blood as required to escape. Medical science blamed impure blood for a host of ailments and prescribed the removal of it as a sovereign remedy for just about everything. After all, “the more water you

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draw from a well, the more good water comes in,”64 and the same principle was applied to blood. The body was thought to contain twentyfour litres of blood, of which the patient could lose twenty and still live, so there was scope for some risk taking.65 But the procedure was not without danger, as the nuns of Eymoutiers found when one of their sisters “lost all her blood when a vein was broken open in her body by a woman who was trying to relieve her stomach pain.”66 One of the conditions for which bleeding was highly recommended was inflammation of the lungs – a major killer in convents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, respected authorities were explaining that since the condition was believed to arise from a build-up of blood in the lungs, bleeding was “the first and foremost remedy.”67 So the monastic infirmarians were only following a prominent school of medical thought when they drew blood from their patients. But they sometimes had their doubts about it. Colombe Saint-Memin was bled for her pleurisy, and the eulogist reported that it did her no good. Marie-Louise Valette was bled a dozen times for her lung ailment, and her eulogist remarked that the bleeding caused other infirmities, “which forced her into a regime with extremely mortifying remedies.”68 This expression of doubt may have reflected another school of medical thought. According to the highly respected physician Paul Dubé, whose patients included a community of Ursulines, there was altogether too much bleeding and not enough purging.69 The necrologies are reticent on the latter, though occasional references to “mortifying” and “violent” remedies probably covered emetics, purges, and enemas. These treatments, like bleeding, were tempting but dangerous interventions.70 Too much could damage the digestive system and lead to dropsy. Sometimes, though rarely, a bath might be used to treat a victim of nephritis.71 Conditions of “oppression of the lungs” and dropsy were often addressed by keeping the patient upright in an armchair, and there are harrowing descriptions of women remaining in this position for incredibly long periods. “Since it was impossible for her to stay in bed, we were forced to put her on a chair, which was uncomfortable for her because of the distress she was suffering; for three weeks she was unable to keep her head up.”72 One nun, Antoinette de Sigy of Provins, who achieved some notoriety as the result of a miraculous cure, recalled that she had spent two years sitting in a chair: “I had to keep my body upright, otherwise it seemed that I was going to suffocate.”73 The nuns’ home remedies have come in for occasional scoffing, but there is no reason to believe that they differed substantially from the general run of medications of their day. If the nuns of Guincamp stocked crayfish eyes and scrapings from staghorns in their pharmacy,

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they were surely following the same lines as highly respected compendiums such as The English Housewife, which recommended foxes’ lungs boiled in rosewater as a cure for tuberculosis, and the Pharmacopée universelle, which recommended newborn puppies stewed with earthworms as a treatment for sciatica.74 If anything is revealing in the necrologies, it is the nuns’ own scepticism about the value of the cures available. A number of necrologies echoed the critical opinion that these might have done more harm than good.75 But the doctors kept visiting.76 There is one cure that is worthy of mention because it shows that the nuns and their doctors were – at least occasionally – up with the times. In the early 1780s Clotilde de Laurent had been in a state of nervous collapse, “nailed to her bed” for five years. A visiting priest remarked on her case and spoke of it to a colleague, a professor of mathematics, who suggested a cure through the use of electricity. To the nuns’ amazement, it worked! “The first movement that she made with her head seemed to us a prodigy; but when we saw her walking, it was in our eyes a true resurrection.” She lived for two more years, though a semi-invalid.77

contagion The nuns under consideration here were all teaching nuns. Although they lived within a cloister, they taught school, usually to two sorts of students: the demoiselles in the boarding school, and the day students who attended school during part of the day but ate and slept at home. The day students were sometimes poor children, with all that this meant in Old Regime France. There are references in the necrologies to heads crawling with lice, scabby faces, encrusted eyes, and filthy ragged clothes. More than anybody else, these children were marked with the sign of death at a time when, even among the comfortable classes, only half the babies born survived to adulthood. The nuns, therefore, were not insulated from the ills and dangers of their society, and a major danger of early modern society was epidemic disease. Often the sisters who taught in the day schools brought contagion back into their communities: “The chill of fever seized her while she was in class.” Another was “struck down while teaching in the externe school.” Another, “at the very time she was working in the senior externe class.”78 Once a contagious disease entered a monastery, the results could be frightening, since the nuns lived in close quarters with one another and could not take much evasive action. There were occasions when entire communities were stricken at the same time. One contagious disease above all others struck terror into the hearts of early modern Europeans – the plague. Ever since the Black Death of

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the 1340s, plague had been ravaging the European population. During the early part of the seventeenth century it remained endemic in western Europe, with dramatic outbreaks in 1628–31, 1636–37, and 1668–69. Its last appearance in France, in 1720, was horrific in its virulence (killing 50,000 in Marseille within six months), but it was contained within a relatively narrow section of Provence – a tribute to the country’s vastly improved quarantine techniques. It says something for the plague’s fearsome reputation that it was one of the very few things that could disperse a cloistered monastery. Ever since the Middle Ages nuns had been allowed to leave their cloister when plague struck. In this they were seeking the only remedy known: “to take flight soon and far, and to return after a long time.” The plagues of the 1630s were particularly disruptive for the new teaching communities because they hit just as these were being established. No sooner had the nuns of the Congrégation opened their school in Troyes in 1628 than they were fleeing to the countryside. The Ursulines of Limoges were luckier in 1631 because they were able to take shelter with their sister community in Eymoutiers.79 This was a rare show of hospitality, considering the terror of contagion. More typical was the experience in 1629 of the Ursulines of Carcassonne, a new community whom the local population treated as a bunch of Typhoid Marys. When one of the sisters died of the plague they were all forced to leave the town. After eight months they returned, only to lose another sister and to leave again for another six months. All seemed to have returned to normal, when in 1632 “one of our nuns caught the plague in the classes while exercising our holy institut, from a little girl whose brother had died of it without anyone in the town knowing of it.” When word got out, the townspeople “rose up and subjected the community … to harsh treatment; they forced them to leave the town for the third time.”80 It is hard for us to imagine the panic caused by the plague. “Brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and – even worse, almost unbelieveable – fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children.” These were the words of an eyewitness of the Black Death.81 The seventeenth-century manifestations would have been no less terrifying. A passage in the annales of the Ursulines of Blois captures some of the feeling. In 1631 the nuns obeyed the bishop’s order to retire with their pensionnaires to the countryside, where they lived in considerable poverty and hunger but not enough isolation. After the mother of one of the young nuns was allowed to visit, her daughter caught the disease. At recreation, “we saw the epidemic appear on her face.” Everyone promptly rose and fled from the room – all except two who

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remained to care for the sick woman. The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) – an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist. The community decided to quit the house altogether. One by one, nuns and pensionnaires went into the courtyard, removed all their clothes and dressed in new ones, then immediately departed for another house, leaving the two caregivers to face their quarantine alone.82 Happily, all lived to meet again in their house in Blois, and their deliverance was celebrated by a procession every year until the Revolution. In the panic exhibited by the majority, we should not forget the heroism of the minority. Mary Margaret Gordon, a Scottish expatriate turned French Ursuline, was remembered in her death notice for her courage during the plague of 1668–69, when she closeted herself and a sick sister in a little house at the end of the garden, nursed the woman until she died, and then buried her with her own hands: “Our Lord then allowed her to have the buboe, and as she knew how to bleed and to make all the drugs, she bandaged herself”83 – and survived! Mère Gordon must have been one of the last Ursulines to suffer from the plague.84 The great “scourge of God” was on the wane, though it could still arouse terror. While people shook with fear of its return, other epidemics were taking its place: smallpox, dysentery, typhus, diptheria, and malaria, to name a few. These swept through the country with terrifying regularity and were the commonplace diseases of monastic infirmaries. Neither the nuns nor their doctors knew what caused the different diseases or exactly how they were spread, but they understood their contagious nature. Over and over again, the necrologies made reference to “malignant fever,” “the fever of the season,” “the common people’s sickness,” “the scourge of God,” “the mortality that has reigned for a long time in this province,”85 and so on – all terms indicating epidemic conditions. The nuns recognized that these illnesses could be passed from one person to the next, and took what precautions they could. Smallpox was of course a familiar enemy, then and for many years to come. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it reigned supreme as Europe’s foremost killer.86 It also maimed. A contemporary authority estimated that for every hundred people, twenty-six or twenty-eight died or were disfigured as a result of smallpox.87 Many nuns had already suffered it in childhood, and some were scarred or otherwise handicapped by it even before they entered religion. So for what it was worth, they had the advantage of being forewarned. They knew enough to quarantine. The usual precautions were recorded in the necrology of a twenty year old smallpox victim: “On Saturday, a high

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fever; on Monday the pox appeared; we moved her at once to a separate place.” Unfortunately, as they also knew, if the “poison” did not come out in pustules but remained within the body, it could result in fatal hemorrhaging. The same necrology continued: “Suddenly an abcess in her head discharged, pouring out through her nose and her mouth; from her throat came the death rattle, and she lost consciousness at that moment.”88 There was little they could do to affect the outcome. Even the best medical authorities were divided on how to treat the disease. Another contagious disease that frequently visited monastic infirmaries was quinsy, an inflammation of the muscles of the larynx.89 The resultant swelling could prevent the victim from swallowing and even breathing. Even in a literature marked by stoicism, the condition was acknowledged as painful and distressing in the extreme: “A type of colic which left her almost beside herself. Inflammation of the throat, tongue, and mouth which prevented her from swallowing” … “Inflammation of her throat which grew worse as she approached her end … She could find relief for her pain only by moistening her poor tongue all cut up with heat in cool water.”90 Bleeding was sometimes prescribed: “The quinsy lasted two days: an inflammation of her throat made her unable to swallow anything … We bled her from the arm and from the jugular vein, but neither these bleedings nor any other remedies could relieve her suffering.”91 The infirmarians’ helplessness must have added to the burden of their work. A host of ailments did their damage without ever being identified. In many cases neither infirmarians nor doctors recognized what they were dealing with. However, they were conscientious about observing symptoms. Thus, “asthma” signified one kind of difficulty in breathing, “oppression of the chest” another. “Gout” meant pain in the joints. “Languor” and “wasting,” combined with “pallor,” described the condition of the victim even if it does not tell us what she died of. A common problem in monasteries was “disgust [for food].”92 Frequently, doctors and infirmarians fell back on the term “complication of ills.” At the end of the line were dropsy and gangrene – well known as killers, though they had not initiated the disease. The symptom that received most attention was “fever.” In early modern Europe, where eight out of every ten deaths was preceded by fever of one kind or another,93 it was seen not as an effect but as the central reality of disease. Doctors classified and subclassified it under 128 different headings. They measured its intensity and rhythm; they counted the days it lasted and anticipated when it would come to a crisis. The nuns who managed the infirmaries knew how to do all these things correctly. Thus, one necrology after another told how many days a

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“simple” fever lasted before it became “ardent”; whether it was “continuous” or “intermittent,” “tertian” or “quartain,” “putrid” or “bilious,” and so on. Behind these fevers lay real diseases, many of them epidemic, such as malaria, typhoid, and dysentery,94 but it was fever that was perceived as the principal feature of the fatal illness. The romantic literature of the nineteenth century dwells on the drama of fever, its rising intensity, and the crisis that leads suddenly to death or recovery. This same drama must have been played out in many early modern sickrooms. From the evidence of the necrologies, disorders of the lungs ranked as a major scourge in women’s monasteries. Chief among these was “phthisis,” a term that is usually taken to signify tuberculosis. It was generally recognized by three symptoms: a wasting of the body, a fever known as “hectic fever,” which mantled the face with a bright flush, and a cough that was dry to begin with but later became (in the terrible term used by doctors) “productive” – productive of blood and pieces of lung, torn out by the relentless progress of the disease. The nuns and their doctors would have been only too familiar with the blood – “bright red, boiling and frothy” as a contemporary authority described it95 – which came straight from the lungs. The necrologies echoed a depressing refrain: “For six months, spitting of blood and a low fever; death came to her with great gentleness” … “For a year she coughed up blood, until she was dried up, having spat out her lungs bit by bit” … “Consumption for several years, and a slow fever that reduced her to skin and bones” … “Stricken in the lungs” with a dry cough and a fever; she languished for five to six months and then “fell asleep peacefully in the embrace of the Lord” … “She suffered from a weak chest … Her illness made surprising progress … We saw this innocent victim slip into death almost overnight.”96 In these five cases the women’s ages ranged from eighteen to thirty-five, and this was perhaps the worst feature of the disease: its appetite for young victims, the novices and junior nuns who represented the future of communities. There was no known way of preventing the disease, nor did the nuns seem to recognize its infectious nature. One necrology praised the determination of a dying woman, who dragged herself daily to school to teach her students “and often came out [of the classroom] spitting blood.”97 There never seems to have been any attempt to isolate tuberculosis victims. The nuns also knew pleurisy and pneumonia in their various forms. Pleurisy is a filling of the lungs with fluid or, as it was then known, a “fluxion.” Doctors identified it by a gurgling sound in the chest, “like a vessel half-full of water when it is being shaken.”98 The victim suffered from fever and swelling and had difficulty breathing. “Malignant”

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pleurisy appears to have been what we would call lobar pneumonia. The Journal de Trévoux decribed its progress: “It begins ordinarily with cold and shivering, followed almost at once by heat, restlessness, alteration and coughing. Some hours later there is a sharp pain in the side, under the ribs.”99 It progressed rapidly, so that within three or four days the victim might be dead. The nuns were obviously horrified by its lethal suddenness. Letter after letter described the sudden shivering, the pain under the ribs, the burning fever, and the spitting of blood. In some cases, two or three women died one after the other; in one case, fifty members of the same community were stricken all together, though only one succumbed.100 “Colic” was a term that covered a multitude of ills. The most terrifying of these must have been the miserere, which the nuns described as a tangling of the intestines, which caused terrible agony and killed within a short time. “We had the affliction of seeing her die in extreme pain,” ran one letter.101 According to Furetière’s dictionary, a miserere could possibly be cured by giving the victim a musket ball to swallow and then keeping him upright while gravity took its course! But the more conventional procedure was an operation, and one or two of these appear in the necrologies. One letter speaks of “a painful operation, of the kind that it is customary to perform in these sorts of illnesses. She did not fail to apologize to the surgeons for the three or four groans that their razors and scissors forced out of her.”102 The word “colic” could also apply to the many conditions that affected the digestive system or the bowel. The doctors also knew enough to suspect the presence of internal cancers. “Colics and vomiting for four years, until she was all skin and bones … there was a tumour in her liver,” ran one necrology.103 Cancer, at least in some of its forms, was recognized in the early modern period, and it was already seen by contemporary medical authorities as “the most horrible of all the ills that attack mankind.”104 The visible ravaging of the flesh – “this condition so frightful to the senses and to nature”105 – may have struck a deep chord in these religious women, a sense of premonition of the corruption for which their bodies were destined. “She watched herself die from one day to another in different parts of her body,” ran one necrology. Another claimed that the dying woman welcomed the putrefaction of her body that would send her soul to heaven.106 The cancer most commonly recognized in the necrologies was cancer of the breast. The accepted treatment for this was fer et feu – the knife and the cauterizing iron, wielded without the benefit of anaesthetic. As one historian remarks, “[This] supposes in the first place, a very resolute patient.”107 The occasional sufferer survived the treatment,108

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though more often death followed quickly, probably from shock. Surgery was also employed for other cancers; one nun endured six operations to remove lumps from her thigh; another died after her foot was amputated.109 When acute crises like these occurred, the monastic infirmary must have been an extremely stressful place. In the face of intensifying pain and terrifying suffocations, convulsions and sudden hemorrhages, massive vomiting and diarrhoea, the infirmarians could offer almost no relief. In the crowded conditions of the dormitory the other patients must have watched and listened in horror. “Despite all our care for her she often brought tears to our eyes by the agonized cries which the illness forced from her,” wrote one eulogist.110 The fact that the eulogists felt compelled to dwell on all the repellent details of the deceased person’s agony suggests that they, and other nuns with them, were not immune to the shock and distress that come with death.111 But we should not forget that even if the acute cases took centre stage, in the wings lay other women whose condition, while not critical, would nevertheless eventually lead to their death. The medical history of Old Regime France has always given priority to crises, especially the killer epidemics, because it was on these that the nascent medical service of the eighteenth century concentrated, thus building up a fund of written information. But the day-to-day work of convent infirmarians – and of the country’s caregivers in general – must have been at least as much involved with the nursing of the chronically ill. It might be supposed that in an age when medical and nursing procedures were so primitive, the sick would not long survive once they had taken to their beds. But the necrologies suggest that the contrary was the case. The long and doleful experience of chronic illness is alluded to over and over again. Louise de Gach died at eighty, having suffered a “contraction of the nerves which had reduced her body almost to a ball, so that her head was pressed against her knees.” Jaquette de Villeneuve died at seventy-nine after two years of “a general paralysis … with her head touching her knees.” Anne Cusson was eighty-two when she was confined to the infirmary; four years later she died, having long lost both memory and eyesight. Catherine Ryot endured five years of “universal paralysis, which took away the use of her limbs.” Marguerite Barroche’s purgatory lasted six months: “feet and hands useless, deprived of sight and hearing, her body all covered with sores.”112 These and many other sad lingerers were elderly women, and in many cases their initial “accident” (to use a word favoured in the necrologies) was “apoplexy” or caterre – most probably stroke.113 “Apoplexy … paralysis throughout the organs of her head, her tongue and the whole of one side” … “An apoplexy … left her paralyzed in

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one side for twenty years” … “A catarreuse attack … made her mouth and tongue all crooked and grossly swollen, and made her unable to walk” … “A paralysis that lasted twenty years crippled her, so that she could neither walk nor lift her food to her mouth.”114 But not all the long-term inmates of the infirmary were old, nor had they all suffered strokes. Françoise Richer was thirty when she started four years of “incurable pains,” the last eighteen months of which saw her lying in bed without changing position; Louise Chochon, fiftyseven, after suffering for two years from a dropsical body “of prodigious size,” spent the last three weeks sitting in a chair, “unable to stay for a moment in her bed.” Marie Dolet, also fifty-seven and also dropsical, was forced to spend “one year without lying down in bed.”115 Dropsy seems to have been a major villain; even if they started with different ailments, numerous women came to the same end: the swelling of their bodies to enormous size and then the collapse of the swelling, the development of horrible sores, and the onset of gangrene. Whether reduced to helplessness through paralysis or dropsy, through loss of memory or failure of bodily functions, these women depended entirely on the services of the infirmarian and her assistants. For the most part the effort involved in caring for them is left to our imagination, though there are occasional references. One paralysed nun required the constant care of a sister for fourteen years, “who gave up most of her sleep almost every night”; another, also paralysed, had two nuns assigned to her care.116 For the women who escaped these diseases and the myriad other ailments which the necrologies described, old age brought threats that still have a familiar ring. Some women collapsed with what was called a “syncope,” a sudden loss of consciousness which suggests a heart attack: “She had been unwell for several years with pain in her chest, which seemed to oppress her. She lost all her senses and died within an hour” … “At three o’ clock she felt uncomfortable, at five a syncope carried her off.”117 Then there was pneumonia, which in later years would be nicknamed “the old man’s friend” because it gently released the soul from an aging body. Perhaps this was the spirit in which one necrology was written: “She had had several attacks of apoplexy, and her mind was a little enfeebled. A fluxion in her chest took her from us.” Finally, the necrologies reported plenty of cases of simple old age, sometimes with a wandering mind, indicated by the single word enfance. One is struck, in fact, by the number of old ladies in the records. Contrary to the belief of their contemporaries, nuns lived reasonably long lives by the standards of their times.118 But the dark side of this is that many of them spent a portion of those long lives in the monastery infirmary.

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The men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived in hard times, at least where physical suffering was concerned. Nuns were no exception. How did they respond? The necrologies throw up a mass of answers, most of them opaque with conventional piety. In all ages, eulogies have to conform to certain standards. But within the edifying and conformist phrases lie traces of a more sincere, and indeed more visceral, attitude towards sickness and death. When sickness struck, they followed the best medical practice of the day, even though it was not far short of useless. Once it was over, they accepted the outcome with resignation but also with real human feeling.

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13 The Institut

Women’s work consisted largely of making perishables … So if we are to retrieve significant amounts of women’s history, or of the history of any evanescent occupation in particular … we need better evidence than just that which falls into our laps. Elizabeth Barber, Women’s Work1

Strange to say, the teaching of children was one of these “evanescent occupations.” Historians of women’s teaching congregations of the Old Regime have to live with a fundamental frustration: they have little solid information about how and whom these congregations actually taught. Once away from the rich vein of school rules and customs belonging to the foundation period, the historiography of girls’ schooling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looks like a desert.2 Of pensionnaires there can be no doubt; numerous sources point to their existence and to some extent describe it. Consequently, since the availability of sources has a great deal of bearing on what gets written, these demoiselles have traditionally received the lion’s share of our attention. This fits neatly with a tendency, which is only now disappearing, to focus our attention on the well born. Yet it was in day schools, not boarding schools, that the great majority of girls acquired their education; and it was through the work of day schools that the curve of feminine literacy began its slow but steady ascent.3 “The pensionnats … only held a tiny minority of scholars; it seems abusive to use them alone as the basis for an analysis of the entire school system,” writes Marie-Madeleine Compère.4 Inasmuch as the monasteries participated in the running of day schools, they must surely share the credit for the rising educational standards of Frenchwomen. But that is the question: Did they participate? And how much? Some historians have concluded that whatever the intentions of their founders, the teaching monasteries gradually abandoned their obligation of free instruction, or at least reduced it to the merely symbolic,

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and turned wholeheartedly to the more lucrative business of educating pensionnaires.5 In many cases there is little positive evidence to support this view, just as there is little positive evidence to counter it. These historians’ main argument is the absence of any major body of evidence attesting to a serious commitment on the part of women’s monasteries to free day schools. The monastic records, which yield a great deal of information on life within the cloister, barely mention the schools;6 the pastoral visits virtually ignore them; even the surviving plans of monasteries fail in many cases to show the placement of their buildings. The researcher has to ask, If day schools existed, would they not show up somewhere in the records? There are two ways of answering this question. First, by deduction – by providing certain good reasons why the monastic free schools should have existed. Second, by scraping up what paltry evidence there is. After all, one fingerprint is enough to place the suspect at the scene of the crime. One reference to ongoing school business, standing alone in a century and a half of silence, is enough to suggest that something was going on. Deduction begins with a definition of the word institut. As “the founding principle of a religious order,”7 it varied from order to order but was always spoken of as a sacred trust. The institut of the women’s teaching congregations was “To devote oneself entirely to the free instruction of young girls.”8 “Instruction,” in its seventeenth-century sense, meant religious instruction, and it was this function – not the “profane” teaching, which was of only secondary importance – that earned it the dignity of an apostolate. Because it was sacred, this instruction had to be free. The sacred could not be bought and sold. “As for us who teach,” ran one Rule, “let God alone be our salary and our paymaster.”9 To contravene the principle of free instruction would, in the eyes of the founding generation, have been tantamount to destroying the whole raison d’être of their community. The teaching congregations’ constitutions insisted on the centrality of their institut: “Insofar as the first end and principal aim of this monastery is the teaching of Christian doctrine … they must content themselves to be not only ordinary religious but also teachers of Christian doctrine.” At the time of profession, individual sisters were asked, “Will you have the courage to instruct young girls, in conformity with the institute of this monastery?”10 And many of them were required to make a special vow or promise never to give up this instruction, “which they consider, truly, the principal purpose of their vocation.”11 Even in old age, they were to be held to their commitment: “The mothers and senior sisters will be put to teaching, and whatever seniority and whatever charge a person has exercised, she may not pretend to be dispensed from this function.”12

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Thus, we can be certain of the intention of the founders, as well as the observance of the earliest generations of teaching nuns. But things change with the years, and between the establishment of the teaching congregations in the early seventeenth century and their suppression in 1792 there lay a long stretch of time, with abundant possibilities for compromise and the erosion of ideals. No one should insist that simply because rules existed, they must have been obeyed throughout this time. But there is another reason to suppose that the nuns kept their promise: they were bound by a civil contract. The establishment of new religious houses in the cities of France in the early seventeenth century was seldom popular with the city fathers.13 It was the practice of these gentlemen to make things as difficult as possible for the incomers and to hedge their residency around with every legal restriction available. The female teaching monasteries, wherever they established, were faced with substantively the same tough contracts: that on no account might they beg publicly; that they must have sufficient funding to support themselves; that they must not acquire further property within a given distance of the city without express permission from the municipality; and that they must provide free instruction to all young girls of the city who came to them.14 In a society that did not love its convents unreservedly or support them uncritically, we can surmise that it was risky for the nuns to be in breach of contract. It seems unlikely that they could have given up the central provision of the contracts – the obligation to provide schooling free of charge to the girls of the city – without running into some opposition. Nor, by and large, did they do so. We can tell this because from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries a succession of government inquiries took place into the state of the women’s monasteries. They turned up large numbers of communities that were running free schools in conscious and openly proclaimed observance of the terms of their original contracts. “Our establishment in this city … took place on August 25 1641, on condition that we should instruct freely and without recompense the girls of the town; this we do faithfully.”15 Agreements of this sort could not easily be forgotten, especially when one of the parties – the city – stood to benefit so substantially by their continuing observance. It would seem that even if the nuns had wished to renege, their towns had the power to hold their feet to the fire. So it is more than likely that monastic day schools were a going concern throughout the Old Regime. But then the question must be asked: If numerous monasteries continued the free instruction of young girls, why are references to this instruction almost non-existent in their records? Even if some communities had retreated from the

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obligation, there must have remained several hundred institutions observing a school year almost as long as our own and teaching children – as many as five hundred or as few as thirty each.16 How could such a major commitment of time and energy be so largely unremembered? The first answer is that the information available to us today is the product of a culling process during the Revolution, which tended to eliminate records of no particular interest to itself.17 But beyond that, it can be argued that the records were never there in the first place, that in the early modern period ordinary people were not yet accustomed to recording the details of their daily life. Women cooked, but we would not know it if we had to depend on a count of the recipe books they themselves wrote; they raised children but left precious little written indication of how they did it. In the same way, it is possible to argue that nuns taught school but recorded little about the craft of teaching. They worked from their original rules and from the person-to-person training they received in the novitiate. If they wrote at all, they wrote about spiritual matters or they kept their communities’ records. As a result, we know much more about their devotions and their debts than we know about their day students.18 Another fact of monastery life may have some bearing on the subject. This goes back to the terms of the original contracts. Between the nuns and the municipalities there persisted a difference of opinion about who was responsible for the externe school buildings. The records show some communities behaving as if their commitment was limited to the provision of free instruction, nothing more, with responsibility for the buildings being borne by the city. This would be in line with the arrangements made for male colleges that belonged to the cities and not to the religious congregations that taught in them. But the authorities thought otherwise and not only neglected the nuns’ schools but taxed them as though they were private property. The free classrooms suffered in this ongoing battle of wills. Over and over again we find official reports stating that the schools were “ready to collapse.”19 Eventually most of them were saved by a variety of compromises involving nuns, city officials, and bishops. But whatever the compromise, the monasteries seem deliberately to have kept public school expenses separate from their regular accounts. It is possible, therefore, to draw the conclusion that monastic free day schools did exist and function until the end of the Old Regime – but to admit at the same time that not much can be said about them. It is with this ambiguous conclusion in mind that the following word picture of “the monastic day school” is offered. It is built from the occasional records and random references which the author has collected in her study of the teaching congregations. If it looks very much like

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an attempt to make bricks without straw, she offers the excuse that some thoughts on the subject are better than no thoughts at all. The sketchiness of the work must be acknowledged, as also must the fact that it is drawn from dozens of sources and so represents none completely. Nothing in the Old Regime was uniform, not even its nuns. In a hundred different ways they belonged to their own localities and regions, in a country characterized by enormous diversity. The following composite picture, made up of excerpts from widely scattered sources, must not be taken for “typical” because there was no such thing. Yet there was a certain consonance between teaching communities, born of their similar goals and similar circumstances, and this gives the picture some integrity.

i n s i d e t h e d ay s c h o o l s The girls would have begun to gather outside the school door of the monastery at about eight o’clock. They would have had to dodge the city’s morning traffic – often a dirty, dangerous situation, as surviving complaints from the nuns to the authorities make clear: “Their street is covered with mud and filth … The carts have to run alongside the walls and the buildings, and the young girls have a great deal of difficulty getting to their classes” … “God himself is offended by the carters and drovers … by the disgraceful oaths which, with indignation, we hear them proffer.”20 The municipalities’ answers are also on record: that the state of the pavement was the responsibility of the property owners (in this case, the nuns), and that the language of the passersby was beyond anybody’s power to control. The school door – “a little entrance within the great gate”21 – was usually unlocked by a servant of the monastery. Behind her, with her veil drawn down over her face, would stand the portress, a senior officer in the community. She would not herself approach the door, because if she so much as stepped across the threshold she would be in violation of her obligation of clausura. The students would first come into an inner room or courtyard, and the outer door would be locked behind them. They were free now to do whatever they wanted, within reason: “[They] will take this time to have breakfast, to learn their prayers and the catechism; and they will be truly obedient to the person in charge.”22 The children who came to school hungry might receive free bread from a lay sister.23 Close by, “in a corner apart”, stood a little commodité so that they did not need to go back into the street to answer the call of nature.24 At the sound of the bell they would line up two by two, class by class, in front of the inner door; and from then on, silence was supposed to

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prevail. Once they were in the classroom and the door behind them locked, an interior door connecting the classrooms with the monastery would open, and the headmistress – called the “mistress general” or “prefect” – and her teaching sisters, or regents, would enter. This interior door would then be locked, still in obedience to the law of clausura. Teachers and students came together in the most controlled circumstances possible, in obedience to rules laid down at the time of the Counter-Reformation. What was the classroom like, and how was it furnished? It was probably small by modern standards. Most monastic day schools seem to have occupied converted private houses – usually an adjacent building which the monastery had managed to buy. The Ursulines of Avallon conducted their school “in the upper chambers of a neighbouring house,” while the Ursulines of Saint-Dizier turned over a whole private house to their day school, as did those of Guincamp.25 In the monastery of Argenteuil, “at the bottom of the garden [was] a little building, giving onto the main street of Argenteuil, which serve[d] as classrooms for the girls of the town.”26 In the eighteenth century, as their original school buildings came close to collapse, communities that could afford it or could find outside assistance constructed new buildings. In Valenciennes the Ursulines’ day school, rebuilt in 1728, was a “school on two floors” valued at 6388 livres in 1790;27 the Ursulines of Toulouse owned “a separate building constructed at their own expense for the purpose of free instruction”;28 the externe school of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Nancy, remodelled in 1743, occupied a sizable wing of the monastery and accommodated four hundred students;29 and the Ursulines of Sainte-Avoye in Paris held their public school classes in a large threestory building, reconstructed in 1782 at a cost of 28,000 livres.30 But many communities, stricken by the poverty resulting from the Law Crash of 1720, had no choice but to continue teaching in their ancient buildings. The archbishop of Avignon, on his pastoral visit in 1760 to the Filles de Notre Dame of that city, found their junior classrooms “small and barely sufficient for the large number of children who are asking to be received … damp, badly lit,” and the workshop for older girls nothing but “a tunnel.”31 The bishop of Lisieux decided to rebuild the Ursulines’ school in Pont Audemer at his own expense, so close was it to collapse.32 To the modern observer, the sparseness of furnishings would come as a shock. The junior classrooms would contain only the benches on which the children sat, a chair for each mistress, and, fixed to the walls, a crucifix and a few holy pictures. Hanging in plain view there might be a table or two of printed letters and syllables or “a slate, or board,

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placed so that all the pupils can see it easily”33 – the ancestor of our present-day blackboard. Classrooms for senior students would be better furnished, with tables for writing and “cupboards to hold the children’s books and papers.”34 Only a few favoured institutions could boast special facilities, such as the cotton spinning equipment in a monastery in Auxerre.35 A bell and an hourglass were desirable but optional,36 as was a fireplace or stove. In many free classrooms, heating of any kind was provided only “if the scholars bring the fuel.”37 This illustrates the point that it was only instruction that the nuns were offering free of charge, not the furnishings or even the materials required for the lessons. For the latter, there was a tariff, the regulations for which we can see laid down in the school rule of the Ursulines of Paris: [The mistress general] will keep the money that the scholars give for the ink, pens, brooms, and other little classroom necessities … and will make sure that those who have the means contribute something to the fund, to wit, those who are writing, two or three sols each year for ink and pens; and all the students, except the poor, one sol each month for the small needs of the classrooms … and also that they must bring wood in the winter.38

Over the years, by charging small fees to those who could afford it and by using the money from charitable donations, the nuns were able to buy equipment, treats, and small prizes for their students.39 But the furnishing of their classrooms was always subject to their own financial circumstances and those of the student population, which do not appear to have improved much with time. “Feminine instruction, in fact, enjoyed a limited recognition,” writes Martine Sonnet. “The classrooms multiplied in response to the pressure of families, but in material conditions which often hindered their smooth functioning.”40 After opening prayers, the lessons began. The day started with recitation, then the class mistress “showed” the lesson. At about nine o’clock, books were given out, and the children worked at their reading, writing, catechism, and civilité for the rest of the morning.41 Throughout all these activities, one thing is clear. For all that it was uncomfortable and crowded, the monastery classroom was carefully structured along strictly hierarchical lines, and teachers operated within a clear chain of command. As the senior officer, the mistress general, or prefect, had “responsibility for the whole college … regents, aides, scholars.” She was supposed to go “once a day through all the classrooms during the lesson, to see if the regents [were] doing their duty, and if silence [was] being observed.”42 It was her responsibility to admit students (after interviews with their parents) and to

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expel them if need be; to record their attendance and to penalize malingerers; to promote students from one level to another after due examinations; to give out prizes and adjudge punishments.43 It was usually up to her to undertake the most solemn part of their education, the preparation for First Communion. In smaller communities she might also be mistress general of pensionnaires or regent of the senior class of day students. As one might expect, she was a person of some standing, and she was probably formidable in the eyes of the children. Madame de Maintenon, who must have known a thing or two about power, recalled this from her days as a pensionnaire with the Ursulines: “When the mistress general came to the classes, it was news that we talked about for a fortnight before and a fortnight after; she had her robe and her sleeves lowered and we trembled with respect!”44 Gentler pictures of mistresses general appear in the death notices: “The externes [were] the children of her heart”45 … “She kept intact the union … between the mistresses and the children.”46 Under the mistress general were the regents, or class mistresses. The rules alloted one regent, or sometimes two, to a class of up to fifty, with specialists in writing, handwork, and arithmetic to assist them.47 They were professed nuns, with some years of experience behind them and a familiarity with their community’s teaching system. It is safe to assume that they were chosen for this work because of their teaching abilities. Some of them are celebrated for that in the monastic records. Florence Campion “worked with her girls in so engaging a manner that she won over the most rebellious, of whom she took very particular care”; Michelle Gueland “had a good memory, and explained things easily and in expressive language”; Anne de Soulfour de Gousengres, though only twenty, had “a gravity which inspired the unruliest of children with respect and self-control”; Marguerite Laurens had “a special talent for teaching those young girls who had the most difficulty in learning”; Louise Gautrin had “a method so simple and straightforward that she enlightened the most muddled minds”; Marguerite de Moi-Richebourg, Mère de Jésus in religion, “had such a hold over [the children] that if some small disorder occurred in the classrooms, or if there were difficult and incorrigible spirits, as soon as they were given Mère de Jésus for their mistress, with skill and gentleness she tamed them and returned them all to order.” Anne de Gerard “was highly suitable for this position because she both read and wrote very well and because she made the girls love her.”48 Considering the importance which the congregations attached to their institut, the number of nuns formally assigned to public school teaching – two to a class, probably amounting to only six or eight per

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community – represents a surprisingly small proportion of the monastic population.49 However, a closer look will show that as well as the official regents, a number of other nuns were involved in the school in a less formal way. Many combined their principal charges in the monastery with assistant roles in the school.50 These would be the “aides” mentioned above, and no matter what their seniority in the monastery, as long as they were in the day school they were subject to the regents. The class, if it was large enough, was subdivided into “benches” of ten to fifteen children. Each bench had its own teacher – one of the aides, most likely – who had the task of watching more particularly over her own charges. These aides varied in age and experience. They might be very young nuns, such as eighteen-year-old Louise Provençal, who “as soon as she was professed was directed to the education of the girls in the free classes, according to the practice of the Company.” Or they might be as old as Anne de la Mare, who “at eighty years, decided to spend an hour each day in the junior class.” Charlotte de Girois, also in her eighties, “had her bench like the ablest regents,” and however much the other nuns “begged her to give up this work, she continued it until she was forced to surrender to her weakness and infirmity.”51 These women’s involvement in the classrooms might well make the teacher-pupil ratio in the monastery schools satisfactory by any standards. Unfortunately their contribution can only be signalled; it cannot be measured. The subdivision of the large classroom into smaller units allowed the nuns’ teaching system to work. Monastery schools did not boast many levels. In the schools run by the Congrégation there were three: “In the upper classes they will be made to read in Latin books in the morning and in French books in the afternoon, as well as to write; in the middle classes they will be taught the same lessons, except writing … In the bottom classes they will simply be taught to recognize letters, to form syllables and to assemble them so as to pronounce words.”52 Within these major groupings, however, the children on the individual benches were able to move at their own speed: “The mistresses will be careful not to anticipate each other’s work, but to keep to the rules of each class by staying within the assigned limits.”53 No child was to be promoted from one bench to another until she had mastered the skills pertaining to her level. Even her position on the bench was assigned according to her achievement. The day schools also had a troop of noncommissioned officers in the form of the décurionnes, or dizainières. These were students, “wiser and more knowledgeable” than the rest, who were given responsibility for their own “benches” both inside and outside the school.54 Inside the school, they performed small tasks, such as giving out books and

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leading the prayers, for which they were rewarded with prizes and honours. Outside the school, they acted as deputies of the cloistered nuns, watching over the public behaviour of the children: “To keep an eye on them, to remind them to be modest as they go to and from the college and to make the sign of the cross as they enter and leave the church; and, while there, they are to make them keep their order without noise and say their prayers to God with respect and reverence.”55 At ten o’clock, at the sound of the bell, the books were put away. The morning ceremony was reversed, with the teachers first withdrawing into the monastery and the doors closing firmly behind them. Then the outside doors were unlocked and the students filed out, to go first to Mass and then home for dinner, always with the nuns’ admonitions ringing in their ears: “[They] will refrain from running through the streets or appearing silly and hare-brained, because that is highly unbecoming to girls who are instructed in piety; but they will go modestly to their homes, without loitering on the way.”56 After dinner, at two o’clock, the whole ritual was repeated as the children returned for a further two hours of schooling. At half-past three a light tinkling of the school bell warned teachers and students to prepare the homework. At four o’clock the bell was rung vigorously, the class sang its last hymn and got ready to end the day.57 Again the ritual was repeated. First the inner monastery door would be opened, allowing the regents to retreat into the cloister. Then the classroom door would be unlocked, and the students would file out into the courtyard. Once the outer monastery door was opened, they would fan out into the city streets. The door would be shut, and all communication between the two worlds would come to an end until another school day was ready to begin.

the students What do we know about these children? First and foremost, that they were the children of the city. In principle, all daughters of city residents had the right to a free education in a teaching monastery’s day school. Of course, the school population was in fact limited by the community’s capacity to teach and also by the availability of children to be taught.58 According to the rules, the students had to be older than four and younger than eighteen,59 but it seems likely that the majority were between eight and eleven and were at school in order to prepare for their First Communion. Once this great event was achieved, the children of “the artisans and the people” were ready for the job market.60 The daughters of “good” families, especially girls who had shown an

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aptitude for learning or exceptional piety, might well go on to the boarding school.61 However, some monastic day schools continued to provide lessons for advanced students from families who could not afford the costs of boarding.62 It is difficult to generalize about the social composition of the monastic day school population. “The poor occupy most of the places,” wrote one nun in 1790;63 but any number of local circumstances could be influential in deciding the makeup of the day schools. According to their rules, the nuns were obliged to receive all young girls “rich or poor without distinction,” excepting only those “who have vicious inclinations which they do not wish to correct, or some dangerous ailment which might infect the others.”64 In itself, poverty – “to which the regents are [themselves] vowed”65 – was not to be treated as grounds for disqualification. However, families of quality expected something different for their daughters. The records suggest that there was considerable pressure on the nuns to segregate the poor, “because the incivility which is normal to them could be prejudicial to girls of good family.”66 This would require a major modification to the teaching monasteries’ original mandate. The nuns’ response to the pressure varied. In some regions – for instance, the north – the day schools continued to mix the children together.67 But many monasteries heeded the demand for segregation. The Ursulines of Angers divided their students into four categories: “demoiselles,” “daughters of bourgeois and merchants,” “daughters of artisans,” and “the poor.”68 The Ursulines of Avignon divided theirs into “girls of good family” and “the poor [who] have need of a rougher instruction.”69 There was the hint of an uneasy conscience in this decision. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended “not to put girls of quality close to the poorer and dirtier, so as not to cause them any disgust”; but it charged the nuns to do this “with discretion, so that the poor do not feel themselves despised.”70 The Constitutions of the Filles de Notre-Dame stated: “As much as possible, the poor and ill-clothed will be kept apart, to avoid various inconveniences and complaints; but they will not fail to be well taught according to their condition.”71 According to the Rule of the Ursulines of Troyes, there were to be different classes for “girls of quality” and “those of base condition.” But it added: “Everyone must know that this separation of the poor from those of quality is not ordered so as to prefer the ones over the others; but experience teaches us that girls of condition who are raised to good manners and civility will lose them in the frequent and familiar association with the poor, and for this reason people of condition would hesitate to send their [children] to the college.”72

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The diversification of teaching to meet the demands of different social levels in the cities led in time to a further segregation as the teaching orders established fee-paying day schools in some cities.73 In these, families of quality were able to shelter their daughters from the rough and tumble of the commoner classrooms while not committing to the full discipline – and expense – of the boarding schools. Such a separation can be seen in the records of Saint-Galmier, where the Ursulines ran two schools, “one of them for the daughters of bourgeois and well-off artisans and the other for the poor, whom they teach free of charge to read and write [my emphasis].”74 At the same time, new choices were appearing for children at the lower end of the social scale. Écoles charitables, run by secular schoolmistresses, became the public schools of choice during the eighteenth century. They were cheaper to establish than monastic schools, less prodigal with their personnel, and freer to locate or relocate where they were most needed. They certainly siphoned off many of the children of poorer parents. Also, as the eighteenth century progressed, hundreds of tiny private schools appeared, each numbering perhaps a dozen children to a single schoolmistress; these served the growing needs of prosperous artisans and shopkeepers.75 But these indications all concern larger cities, where the population was big enough and varied enough to support a choice of institutions. In many smaller centres across France, it seems certain that there was no room for such choice. For thousands of children of the working poor and of the struggling small-town bourgeoisie, the local monastery school was the only school available. “[The religious] are still absolutely necessary for the day schools,” ran a memoir in favour of the Ursulines of Mâcon. “Many mothers in the city whose occupations prevent them from watching over the instruction and conduct of their daughters find there a sanctuary to which they … can entrust a treasure precious in the eyes of religion and of the country.”76 Other towns voiced the same concern: “We have no other resources for the education of girls … being of very modest fortune” … “There are no other schools operating for girls, the place being neither important nor rich enough” … “There is only this community in the town … At present they have two hundred and forty young girls being instructed in their school.”77 In towns such as these, all the schoolchildren sat side by side78 and took lessons from the same teacher – a teacher such as Charlotte Augier of Aiguepercé, who died in 1694, “there being scarcely a family in this town that has not benefited from her good instructions.”79 Thus, the typical student of a monastic day school is not easy to delineate. We can only say that she was urban (or at least within walking

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distance of a town) and that she was neither excessively blue-blooded nor so poor that a pressing need to work prevented her attending school. This suggests that the children standing outside the monastery door at eight o’clock on a weekday morning came from a wide variety of backgrounds, beginning with the daughters of the “best” local families,80 and ranging through children from families of modest means (who “once they have learned … to read, write, and do their sums are ready to become merchants and go into commerce”)81 to the children of “the artisans and the people.” Let us concentrate on these last. Since their education normally ended at age eleven or twelve, it follows that the typical poor school population was predominantly pre-adolescent. By all accounts, discipline was not their greatest virtue. Some exasperated teachers have left us descriptions of these children: Extremely distracted by the company, and by the various objects which catch their attention on all sides … While you are turned to one side, the other becomes disorderly; if you pay attention to one child, ten others begin to play; everything must always be begun again.82 Their memory, for lack of training, cannot hold on to many things or fulfil a string of instructions; a new lesson makes them forget the preceding one, which they had learned only with great difficulty and by forgetting other [lessons]. We see by experience that by trying to teach them many things we only waste their time; at Easter we find them ignorant, we press them, we tire them out and upset them, we turn them off; we dismiss them until Pentecost, and when they have come to that they are no further ahead.83

The teaching of these children was not an easy task. At midseventeenth century an admirer of the teaching nuns challenged his readers to recognize that: “This institut is a difficult and highly laborious … unpleasant, common, base, ordinary, vexing and tiresome one, in which maiden ladies of intelligence have for their scholars only children who are rude and difficult to teach. To do this, and to do it well, requires great courage and resolution.”84 Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise in a society still largely illiterate and unaccustomed to the kind of discipline and preconditioning that the classroom demands. This was the age and the social milieu for which Jean-Baptiste de la Salle drew up his Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrestiennes, instructing young people on the impropriety of blowing their noses with their fingers or spitting out of the window.85 If such civilizing admonitions were necessary for the boys of Louis XIV’s France, could the girls have been that much better? By the

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nuns’ own testimony, their students were “flighty and indocile” and given to “quarrels, injuries, stealing, fighting, running in the streets, playing bad games with boys, making noise in the [school]room, and not wanting to settle down when ordered to do so.”86 A story has survived that illustrates the potential of some of these young ladies. In Angers in 1689, the Ursulines were locked in a legal battle with the Oratorians over a disputed property. The verbal wrangling spilled over into the classroom, and the students of the two institutions decided to take it to the streets. The girls ambushed the boys in the rue de l’Hôpital, a narrow no-man’s-land between the two schools. The resulting battle ended in a total rout of the Oratorians. It is said that the local residents applauded as the boys disappeared hastily around the end of the street.87 In comparison with the genteel, mostly upper-class nuns who taught them, the children were rough and uncivilized. They were also, many of them, pretty filthy, even by the standards of an unhygienic age. Mère de Pommereu, the Ursuline annalist of Paris, knew that her audience in the convent would understand her when she described the poor students of the past as “neither cleaner nor sweeter-smelling than [they are] today.”88 The teachers spent their time among children “who often assailed them with stinking breath resulting from eating garlic, onions and other such food,”89 who had lice in their hair and sores and scabs on their bodies and faces. These deficiencies all had to be combatted, as far as was possible. The Rule of the Ursulines of Bordeaux enjoined the schoolmistresses “to make their students go about in neat, clean clothes, and to abhor dirt and bad smells.” Students who did not mend their ways were to be expelled.90 Work in the poor school, especially in the “petite,” or junior class, was considered by most communities to be a hardship. But some nuns were positively attracted to these disadvantaged children. It was said of Edmée Renard that “while she was with the externes it seemed that she was all heart in loving her poor children, all voice in teaching them, and all hands in helping them.”91 Marie de Dracqueville “succeeded perfectly in making the children love her, but dearest to her heart were her beloved externes; the poor were those whom she thought of the most.”92 Some nuns mended, washed, and even replaced the children’s clothes.93 Others went further. Marie Dacheu du Plouys, “if any of them were found to have vermin … set herself the duty to see that they were cleaned, as also those who had scabies.”94 Geneviève Cousteughol, “one day while in class, saw a girl who was a horror to look at, with her face all covered with sores and so hideous that her heart shuddered at the sight … She drew this child apart, kissed her, and licked her face.”95

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Their attraction cannot be dismissed as pious do-goodism, since true human emotion was often involved. Gabrielle de Saint-Pierre spent twenty-five years teaching in the free school, “always surrounded by the poorest and most disfavoured, who were the darlings of her heart. All that she wanted to do at recreation was to talk about the charms she found in these little waifs.” Marie de la Ferrière loved her work so much that when her superior wished to relieve her for health reasons, “she lost her usual calm and, falling on her knees, pleaded so persuasively that she could not stop her from going to teach her ‘dear children’ (as she called them).” Jeanne Le Coeur “never had enough children in her class; when they were removed and promoted to other classes, it seemed as if they were being torn from her heart.” Barbe de la Motte, in her last illness, found it hard to endure the separation from her students: “Upon learning that they had put a sister in her place, she feared that she was there for good, and this distressed her greatly; we had to console her by saying that this was only as a replacement, and that as soon as she felt better she would return there; upon this she cried out that we had given her back her life; she asked for news … of all her little girls, one after the other, with the true heart of a mother.”96 Sometimes the records speak of affection reciprocated: “The children loved her dearly” … “When it was time for her funeral, the little girls of the town whom she had taught all came to our church without being called, bringing lit candles, and appeared with tears, sobs and cries.”97 It had been the teaching congregations’ ambition, in the early seventeenth century, to change the world by changing the women who nurtured that world: “They will bear in mind that the mothers of families who will have been their disciples are the first to teach … Christian doctrine to their children … reminding themselves often of the holiness of Saint Augustine … and of many other saints, which is attributed to the care which their mothers took to guide them to it.”98 It would be interesting to know in what way, and how much, their efforts affected the behaviour and outlook of Frenchwomen. Did succeeding generations of girls become more disciplined? More accomplished? More civil? Unfortunately, these effects of the schoolroom are even harder to measure than literacy. One significant fact has been noted, however – that women continued to practise their religion during an era when men were turning away from it. “In their detachment or their distancing from the Church, many men were not followed by their wives.”99 For this, surely, the nuns must be given some credit.

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14 The Pensionnat

The first task of the teaching congregations had been to open schools for free public instruction. This was what they had vowed to do and what the public expected of them. The establishment of pensionnats usually came slightly later. The Ursulines of Paris accepted their first boarders in 1612, those of Toulouse in 1616, those of Bordeaux in 1618. It was a step they sometimes took with reluctance, for (as the nuns of Toulouse explained) they were afraid that “being too attached to the functions of Martha, they will lose the spirit of Mary.”1 Indeed, one Ursuline foundress, Anne de Xainctonge, refused to accept any boarders at all, “knowing that such a path of action can harm the spirit and hinder [the community’s] perfection and exercises of devotion.”2 The fear was that the presence of children in a religious house would create distraction and cut into the peace which spiritual life required. This sentiment echoed that of the Jesuits, who, if left to themselves, might well have stayed out of the business of internats altogether.3 However, as the Jesuits themselves were the first to prove, there was a good deal to be said for internats. Early religious reformers started with the premise that the world was hopelessly corrupt. They despaired of the morality of adults and agreed that the best way to safeguard the future was to remove children from their influence. The Jesuit Lancelot Marin used the metaphor of an apple gone so bad that the only thing left to do was to take its seeds and replant them in a healthy environment: In order to renew the corrupted world, we have to start with the youth. Our blessed father Ignatius had this end in view when he dedicated our Company

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to the good education of young boys. What a praiseworthy and useful undertaking it would be to establish a congregation where one could transport little girls, as it were, into a fertile soil, so that, after receiving good instructions, they would go out to bring virtue to families! Families, well raised, would reform the cities and the provinces, and thus the world would be made anew.4

The nuns embraced these principles, as they did so much else that came from the Jesuits. They subscribed to the strategy of separation from outside influence that was already being practised in the Society’s colleges – not, of course, for the great majority of students, who were destined always to be externes, but for the select few who would provide the future leadership of church and state. Pensionnats, in the words of a historian of Old Regime education, provided the young with “a pedagogical ‘other place’ that was purified and sterilized.”5 The walls that enclosed this ‘other place’ served a double purpose: they kept out the evil influences of the world, and they allowed the space within to be continually monitored. Once in the pensionnat, students were supposed never to be out of their supervisors’ company. Chaperonage at this level was clearly impossible in many homes; children were left to their own devices or entrusted to untrained servants. Even the king had been treated this way as a child, according to Madame de Maintenon, who shared with her demoiselles a word-picture of the little Dieudonné romping around, unsupervised, with a maidservant.6 In the minds of the dévots, such neglect was truly reprehensible. They argued that children were so vulnerable to the snares of the Devil that a moment of inattention on the part of those in charge was all they needed to find their way to sin. “Never trust them,” Madame de Maintenon warned her mistresses at Saint-Cyr. “They mustn’t even trust themselves, and if they want to continue to be prudent, they ought to desire to be watched.”7 In the minds of religious pedagogues, the work of the pensionnat was the work of salvation. Parents saw things from a different angle. The pensionnat offered a convenient way to raise and educate their daughters. For a reasonable price (150 livres and up per year, depending on the convent) it kept them safe and turned them into young ladies, polished and pious. So after being virtually non-existent in the sixteenth century, pensionnats for girls became the rage in the seventeenth, and the demand for them grew from region to region. They clinched the argument for establishing teaching communities, as we can see from the second of the three reasons given for the introduction of an Ursuline house into Elbeuf in the 1660s: “The town is full of Protestants; the gentlemen of the neighbourhood confide their daughters to these nuns; there is no other school.”8 Since the nuns’ apostolate meshed perfectly with the

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interests of the local elites, the result was a happy alliance cemented by mutual need. Not to be forgotten was the fact that pensionnats made money, which the nuns always needed. What was necessary, therefore, was to find a way to accommodate a boarding school within the monastery without compromising the peace and quiet of the cloister. The answer was interior separation. The rules of the teaching orders stipulated that the pensionnaires were to be assigned their own building or wing, which was to be within the walls but closed off by lock and key from the nuns’ quarters. The girls were to have their own classrooms, dormitory, refectory, courtyard, and garden, their own parlour, and their own enclosed space in the church.9 They were not to interfere with the community: “The demoiselles are forbidden to mix with the religious except in cases of necessity, which should be very rare.”10 According to the rules, the only nuns with whom they were allowed to talk were the mistresses assigned to their care. These nuns were forbidden to discuss their charges with anyone other than the superior – and, needless to say, they were also forbidden to discuss community matters with the demoiselles.11 In other words, the pensionnat was to be as self-contained as possible. How much this internal separation was maintained in real life is questionable. Where a large enough group of pensionnaires collected, the maintenance of special quarters made good sense. But many monasteries never achieved more than a handful of pensionnaires.12 It is difficult to imagine that such small groups could have been held in isolation. Furthermore, the death notices affirm that many young pensionnaires were specifically entrusted to the care of their relatives within the house. These multiple links must have added to the coming and going between cloister and pensionnat. In any case, communities may simply have found total separation from their pensionnaires unworkable. This must have been the case in the monastery of Niort, described in the memoirs of Anne de Chauffepié, a Protestant who was interned there in 1687: “After a fortnight’s stay among them, I had the good fortune to be much loved by them and to be given more liberty; since they saw that I would not abuse it, they were not afraid to let me enjoy all the little pleasures that I could find in this place, walking in the garden and freely associating with the religious and the pensionnaires.”13 In Niort, at least, nuns and demoiselles lived together as a community, without the isolation enjoined by the Rule. But let us go to the model of the monastic pensionnat as constructed in the rules. The ideal group of students numbered between twelve and fourteen girls, reasonably close to each other in age. If

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there were more pensionnaires than that, they were to be divided into groups, each group with its own two mistresses. The mistresses were to take turns week and week about, the nun on duty taking full responsibity for the girls while the other had time off to participate in regular community activities. At moments of peak activity, such as getting-up time in the morning, both were to be present, plus as many other nuns, or young women waiting to enter the novitiate, as the superior designated to help the children dress. The pensionnaires’ toilet conformed to the accepted hygienic practices of the day. The cleanliness of their heads was of particular concern. The nuns in attendance were instructed by the Rule to comb the girls’ hair and rub it with a brush or linen towel.14 They were to deal with vermin, from which even the most aristocratic heads were not free.15 After this, the girls dressed themselves, “the lay sister having brought candles and shoes and clean clothes, and fuel for the fire during the winter and at other times when there is need.”16 Younger children required special treatment: “Those who dress the little ones will come and get them up and put their shoes on while they are still on their beds if they cannot do it themselves; they will lace them and make them say their prayers properly. After combing and coiffing them, they will dress them and neatly fold their things into their clothes chests, or show them how to do it themselves.”17 All this accomplished, the supernumeraries would disappear, and the sémainière (the on-duty nun) would inspect the girls: “She will be sure to see that they are properly laced, coiffed and dressed, [then she will] have them put away their things and wash their mouths and their hands; she will make certain that they have their handkerchiefs, bonnets, gloves, etc., before leaving the bedroom.”18 Amidst all this careful preparation, washing occupied only a brief moment. The use of water was almost taboo in the seventeenth century, not only for reasons of modesty but because it was thought to be bad for the constitution.19 “Children should clean their eyes with a white cloth, which cleanses and leaves the complexion and colour in their natural state. Washing with water is bad for the sight, causes toothache and catarrh, makes the face pale, and renders it more susceptible to cold in winter and sun in summer.” So ran a contemporary instruction.20 For the same reason, there was no washing of the body; at most, in the summer months, a lay sister would wash the children’s feet.21 Such cleanliness as was achieved was the result of wiping and frequent changes of linen. This was fully in keeping with the times; the Sun King himself did no more.22 We have no way of knowing whether, in a later age, the nuns extended the use of water. Probably not, considering that the practice continued to be held in suspicion by the

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male religious orders who were their mentors.23 In any case, if they did, they were ahead of their times. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, bathing remained rare, even among aristocrats.24 Mention has been made of the lay sister who was assigned to the girls’ service to keep their rooms warm and clean, to see to the changing of their linen and bedding, to clean basins and chamber pots, set the fires, and be on call during the night. She must have been the closest thing to a nursemaid, and she often elicited the same warm feelings. Numerous death notices pay tribute to these sisters and to the affection with which the children regarded them. An hour after being awakened, the students were expected to be ready for the day. Now their mistress would take them to Mass, to breakfast, and to class. Part of the school day fell to other mistresses: “One mistress to teach handwork, and another to teach arithmetic, the reading of handwritten letters, and spelling.”25 But during out-ofschool hours, the on-duty mistress was expected to be on hand, acting as a governess to her charges. Whether at work, at play, or at prayer, they were her responsibility. From the details that the rules lavished on the upbringing of pensionnaires, we can reconstruct an image of the female child as the teaching nuns saw her, and of the feminine and domestic ideals which they proposed for her. In all their prescriptions for the care of pensionnaires, the rules showed serious concern for physical well-being. The students’ diet was to be carefully planned and measured, and only the older girls were expected to observe the religious fast days. Whereas the pensionnats of Port-Royal and Saint-Cyr offered a spartan environment, the teaching congregations advocated care that amounted almost to coddling. The girls were not to go outside in inclement weather or without their gloves. The rooms in which they lived were always to be kept warm. If they went into other rooms – for instance, to be fitted for new clothes – those rooms were to be warmed in advance. In writing class, the mistress was ordered to guard against the curvature of young spines. The smaller pensionnaires were to be the object of special concern. Their days were to start later and to be less demanding. “They [the mistresses] will take account of their temperament and age, so that they do not expect from a seven year old what they find in a twelve year old,” ran one Rule.26 In many different ways the teaching congregations showed a sensitivity to the needs of childhood that was ahead of their times. Yet it seems sometimes as though they overdid it, treating female children as delicate organisms in need more of corseting than of physical development. The games available to the pensionnaires were not only seemly; they were sedentary, or almost so.27 No concern

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was shown in the rules for serious physical activity or taking the air – a concern which the Jesuits, for example, demonstrated for boys.28 The behaviour of the young ladies was to be cast in a mold that would endure into their later years, displaying piety, modesty, courtesy, and moderation. Religion came first, of course; its propagation was the teaching congregations’ raison d’être. However, it was treated not so much as a subject to be learned as a way of life to be absorbed. The church of the Old Regime was cautious about dispensing religious knowledge to women. “The theology of women is devotion,” it argued.29 And it was devotion, rather than religious instruction, that occupied the pensionnaires’ time. In the order of their day, relatively little space – a half-hour or an hour at most – was devoted to catechism. But the entire day, after morning prayers and Mass were over, was interwoven with prayers: the Angelus, the rosary, litanies of Our Lady, and so on. Over and above these formal recitations, the girls were invited to accompany all their activities with appropriate silent prayers. There were prayers for getting up in the morning, for carrying out the mundane duties of the day, for undressing at night, and finally for going to sleep. According to one school manual, the moment of climbing into bed was to be given over to the following meditation: “Alas! This is how one day, in the same manner, my body will be put into the tomb to be eaten by worms. Oh my God, how stupid man is to work only for his body, which will soon be reduced to dust, and to neglect his soul which is immortal.”30 We must wonder how many young girls took their devotion to this level. But the fact that the nuns encouraged it suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, they were preparing their charges for religious life. Frequently in the literature we find proud references to pensionnats that doubled as “a sort of novitiate.” The teaching communities’ pensionnaires may not have dressed in miniature habits as did those of the Visitation, but they called each other “Sister” and they were were allowed, as they grew older, to share in the nuns’ Office and, in some communities, to participate in a formal gathering very much like the nuns’ coulpe, receiving admonitions for their misdeeds and accepting penances.31 It was not unknown for some groups of pensionnaires to go even further and set up their own communitywithin-the-community, acting out the parts that one day they would adopt in earnest.32 This not so subtle conditioning was considered acceptable as long as society felt the need to place numerous children in religious life. In a later age, family strategies changed and the monastic option lost its popularity. From Louisiana in 1728, Marie-Madeleine Hachard wrote: “All [our pensionnaires] would like to be nuns, which does not sit well

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with Reverend Father de Beaubois, who thinks it more appropriate that they become Christian mothers.”33 Louisiana was not France, of course, but the resistance to religious life was growing in the mother country as in the colony. The nuns’ tendency to draw their students into their own way of life was now often held against them. Next in importance came civility. Good manners were the stock-intrade of convents and, in the minds of some parents, perhaps their greatest asset: “Let them [the pensionnaires] be civil and polite, speaking well, standing straight and with grace, deferring to each other, and showing respect to the religious … They will be very polite at table … and will never appear to dislike what is given to them; that would be unbecoming and in no way befitting a well-born and well-brought-up girl.”34 Along with good manners came modesty. Though the parents provided the clothes, the convent rules dictated the style: no excess decoration, no open necks, no panniers, no powder “or other vanities.” That these rules were sometimes bent in afteryears can be deduced from the stern reminders issued from time to time in the ordinances given after pastoral visits: “The parents may give their daughters whatever clothes they please, but there must be no curling of the hair, and care must be taken that they all wear a neckerchief and that they be decently covered so as not to allow the entry of vanity into the house of God” … “The superior may not permit the wearing of any beauty spots or curled hair or other indecent and worldly adornments.”35 Well-brought-up young ladies were also to avoid idleness, which in the nuns’ minds led straight to sin. A good woman was a busy woman. For this reason, the pensionnaires’ day, like that of the nuns, was packed with alternating periods of prayer and activity, leaving no time free for wandering or wondering. All this formation was to take place within an atmosphere of domesticity. The pensionnat was meant to resemble the perfect home. The mistresses were enjoined to see themselves as “true mothers,” giving their charges “the same care that they would have had in their parents’ house.”36 The girls were to treat one another as sisters, the older watching over the younger. They were to learn the sort of tasks that they might well be expected to perform at home.37 An evocative description of this atmosphere of domesticity has been left to us in Madame de Maintenon’s recollection of her efforts as a girl to please a mistress whom she loved to distraction: “I passed whole nights starching the pensionnaires’ linens so that they would always be clean and do honour to the mistress without her having to take the trouble … I made my companions go to bed promptly, I pressed them so urgently that they didn’t have time to think; but they went to bed diligently and cheerfully to please me, because I was very popular.”38

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It should be said in passing that this relationship between Mère Sainte-Celeste, Ursuline of Niort, and the future Madame Louis XIV stands as a contradiction to any generalization of monasteries as cold and overformal places. “I thought I would die of grief when I left that convent,” wrote the great lady.39 Next to piety and good manners, home management ranked as the most important subject that the children had to master: They will be taught to smoothe out their linen, to keep themselves clean and neat in their persons, to dress themselves, to keep their clothes chest tidy, and not to let anything be left about or in disorder, whether their linens, clothes, handwork, papers or anything else, so that one day they will be good managers of their households.40 Let them learn to master the domestic arts, to take care of their clothes, etc., to be always neat, and careful with their handwork; let them also be shown how to mend what has come unstitched and torn, and to repair their linen.41

Handwork of all kinds – embroidery and straight sewing, as well as mending – loomed large in every pensionnat’s syllabus. Skill with the needle was an essential part of the good woman’s portfolio. As well, the students were to be trained in arithmetic and the reading of handwritten documents, all as an introduction to domestic management. They needed to understand legal papers, no matter how illegible; they needed to be able to manage money. True to its penchant for detail, the Rule of the Ursulines of Paris prepared examples of practical arithmetic: “How much the things that they might buy would come to, as for instance 15 yards of lace at 35/4d a yard” – which, once they had made their calculation, they would have to pay for in different coinages.42 The mental world to which the nuns belonged held that the responsibility for running the household rested with the wife and that good management skills would avail her better, in the long run, than charm and polish. As Fénelon explained, “It requires a much higher and broader intelligence to learn all the arts that pertain to domestic economy and to be capable of managing a whole family … than to play, discuss fashions, and practise the fine tricks of conversation.”43 This viewpoint did not carry over into intellectual pursuits. Even the most ambitious learning programs for girls failed to include the sort of training of the mind that was available to their brothers. Girls were never formally introduced to the study of logic. The significance of this must be measured by the importance which early modern pedagogues attached to that discipline. “Logic is needed in any mental activity. Above all it is needed to grasp other sciences more fully, promptly and certainly,” wrote the Parisian professor Desperiers in

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1648.44 Recognized as a basic learning tool for boys, it was witheld from girls. Proficiency in Latin grammar, a basic requirement of college education, was also almost unknown in convents – a lacuna made all the stranger by the fact that it had often been achieved in the same convents during their early days.45 On the other hand, certain academic subjects, such as history and geography, did edge their way into the pensionnats. So, after some debate, did modern languages, though the fear was expressed that certain languages – Italian, above all – would encourage lascivousness. The same anxiety dictated that the students’ reading should always be strictly controlled. “They are not to have any profane books, under pain of being expelled in disgrace,” the bishop of Carcassonne ordered the local Ursulines.46 Throughout the period, femininity and serious learning were regarded as mutually exclusive, either because of women’s presumed inability to learn or because of their curiosity and vanity, which needed to be mortified constantly. “The repression of ‘curiosity’ … was one of the principal objectives pursued in the education of women,” writes a historian of women’s culture.47 We cannot blame the teaching nuns for bowing to this; apart from the fact that they had a clientele to please, they were themselves schooled in the practice of self-deprecation. Privately they delighted in the learning which some members of their communities achieved, but they knew enough not to display such learning among their scholastic wares.48 It would take spirits prouder and more independent than theirs to break the mold in which, as women, they were contained. If academic pursuits were off-limits, the fine arts were not. Music, drawing, drama, and even dancing made their way into monastic pensionnats before the end of the Old Regime. In each case there was a chorus of naysayers, anxious to prevent the slightest blot of worldliness on the demoiselle psyche. But the will of parents, and the need of the nuns to satisfy that will, overcame the opposition.49 Whereas the initial constitutions of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame had placed a total ban on worldly songs, dancing, and musical instruments, the same order’s pensionnats (at least, those of Paris and Reims) were, by the eighteenth century, offering their pupils lessons with dancing masters and drawing mistresses, as well as the use of pianos and harpsichords.50 The monastic account books, as well as the inventories of 1790–91, bear witness to musical instruments in convent parlours – and the lessons they made possible.51 Perhaps the liveliest debate took place over the appropriateness of staging dramas – a learning experience in which the Jesuits put much faith and which the teaching congregations were anxious to adopt,

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seeing it as a means, as one nun put it, “to perfect the pensionnaires in all kinds of ways, to train them in gracefulness and to exercise their memory.”52 But other pedagogues condemned it outright, and towards the end of the seventeenth century the hierarchy took their part. Archbishop de Noailles made the ruling: “These kinds of exercises serve only to dissipate, and to waste the nuns’ time, allowing the pensionnaires to develop a spirit of vanity contrary to the modesty in which they should be raised.”53 However, bishops came and went, and the debate continued unresolved. There are various references to monastic schools putting on plays, and almost as many references to protests from scandalized critics. One particularly contentious event was the presentation of the play Zaïre, complete with its prologue praising Voltaire, by the pensionnaires of the Ursulines of Auxerre in 1763. The news of it got as far as the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which professed outrage. But it should be noted that a special performance was staged for the clergy of the city – and they did not complain!54 This, then, outlined in the broadest of brush strokes, was the schooling received by many young ladies in Old Regime France. But not all. Daughters of the haute noblesse, from the princesses of the blood down, tended to go to the pensionnats of the ancient Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, where they received an education appropriate to their station – light on academics, heavy on the arts of refinement. Next in rank came the pensionnats of the Visitation. The teaching monasteries, with their more serious educational agenda, drew heavily on the lesser elites: minor nobility, and girls whose fathers were officers, men of the law, members of the liberal professions, or wealthy merchants.55 With advancing years, family strategies evolved. Among the upper classes it became fashionable to tutor girls at home. On the face of it, this should have diminished the monastic pensionnaire population. But in fact the population tended to increase. We must suppose that families of more modest circumstances were now ready to foot the bill to have their daughters boarded – at least for a while. Martine Sonnet has noted that the typical stay in a Parisian pensionnat in the eighteenth century lasted less than two years.56 This would be long enough to prepare a child for First Communion, but not long enough, perhaps, to endow her with a vocation. At the end of the Old Regime, pensionnats were no longer “antechambers to the novitiate.” The requirements of families changed too. The advances in literacy over the past century – for which they had partly to thank the teaching congregations – raised their expectations. History, geography, art, instrumental music, and dancing were subjects that parents would never have demanded of the first generation of nuns. But they did now, and the monasteries had perforce to comply. Slowly, and in spite

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of the conservatism that gripped both them and the people who watched over them, some communities updated their curriculum and their methods. Others continued in their established ways, often because of their poverty, isolation, or location. Claude-Alain Sarre maintains that in the forty Ursuline monasteries under his eye in the southeast, at no time could he discern “the suggestion of an opening towards history, geography, non-religious literature, the sciences and the arts.”57 The nuns of the southeast reflected, and at the same time reinforced, lower educational expectations than were general in the north. By and large, however, the pensionnats of the teaching congregations provided French women with the best education they were going to receive either during the Old Regime or for many years thereafter.58 Madame de Genlis, famous for her concern with feminine schooling, wrote of these teaching congregations: “I dare to say that their education is, in general, far better than that which is commonly received from parents who do not make it their principal business to treat the raising of their children as a sacred duty. Anyone who knows the plan of education which [they] follow will certainly not contradict me.”59

th e da m es p en s i o n na i r e s While the boarding of children had been a part of the teaching monasteries’ mission from early days, the boarding of older women definitely had not been. The founding generation considered the presence of such women to be absolutely inimical to the spirit of clausura. It was not long, however, before their determination was undermined. In fact, Pope Paul V himself, in the various bulls of foundation which he issued in the early seventeenth century, opened the first chink in the cloister wall, ordaining that “besides the virgins and widows who are being admitted to take the habit and make profession … other devout married women may be received, though only under the circumstances permitted by the sacred canons of the Council of Trent.”60 This meant that foundresses and other substantial patrons could be awarded the right to retire into the cloister, providing they lived piously and in harmony with the pattern of community life. From that time on, their presence can be noted in house after house, the teaching communities as much as any others. Mademoiselle de Valavès, benefactress and foundress of the Ursuline house of Barjols, was given permission by the bishop of Fréjus to live there “under the vows only of chastity and clausura.”61 Similarly, Catherine de Montholon’s donation to the Ursuline house of Dijon earned her the right to live within its walls together with her maid, and to be buried in

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its church.62 Marie Madeleine, daughter of the baron d’Avigno, was for many years a pensionnaire perpetuelle in the Ursuline community of Auxerre, with the privilege of wearing their religious habit and being buried in their cemetery. The marquise de Plainville, “flying from her husband’s presence,” entered the Ursuline monastery of Blois in 1666 and remained there for thirty-six years.63 The shades of these semi-nuns cluster around the monastic annals. Most of them were either the widows or the unmarried daughters of prominent citizens. In many cases, they had relatives in the community – usually sisters or daughters. They seem to have slipped easily into the life of the cloister, joining the religious services and sharing in the activities, but being only partly subject to the discipline of the community. Sometimes, however, the relationship went sour. Mademoiselle Doblère caused nothing but headaches to the Ursulines of Tonnerre because of her “scandalous and capricious moods” and her refusal to follow house rules. In 1654 the Chapter broke her contract and turned her out. A few years later the same Chapter faced another difficult resident, Madame de Beaujeu, whose good social standing was matched by her bad temper. Having walked out of the house in a huff, she later sought readmittance, which the Chapter refused, invoking the rule that no secular persons should be admitted “unless there are great advantages in it for the community.” When these advantages were made concrete, in the form of 1200 livres and the promise that a wall would be erected between Madame de Beaujeu’s lodging and the convent proper, she was allowed back in.64 So the arrangement could be profitable, and clearly this was the nuns’ principal reason for accepting mature women. In return for the care which they promised to give Madame de la Borderie until her death, she endowed the nuns of the Congrégation in Châteaudun with a house, lands, and seigneurial rights.65 Anne Joly de Champigny, a pensionnaire in the monastery of the Congrégation of Provins, bequeathed 11,000 livres to the community when she died in 1685.66 Madame de Plainville attempted to make over a fortune of 20,000 livres to the Ursulines of Blois, though she was thwarted by her husband’s profligacy and her heir’s legal challenge.67 In 1728, after many years of residence in the Ursuline monastery of Montargis, Madame de la Rivière died, leaving a lump sum of 3000 livres plus life pensions of 350 livres each for five nuns.68 Alongside these major benefactresses there were numerous lesser donors, such as the brave fille of Quimperlé “who wanted to finish her days in a religious community” and who “became fond of the religious and left them all that she had.”69

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However, throughout most of the seventeenth century the business of boarding adult women remained a minor concern for the teaching congregations and one that did not often yield great returns. And for the most part the understanding remained clear: the women were special cases; they intended to live there permanently, piously, and, as Archbishop de Noailles instructed in 1697, “without prejudice to the perfection of the religious.”70 Yet gradually, from one decade to the next, the wedge was driven farther in. Enclosed monasteries, because they were at the same time both respectable and secure, were a tempting resource for a society that was increasingly concerned with law and order and had on occasion to deal with “difficult” women. Before the monasteries were terminated in the 1790s, they were put to uses which their founders would not have imagined. The Widening of the Breach In their early years, the teaching congregations remained virtually closed to the short-duration visitor. Madame de Sainte-Beuve, for all that she was foundress of the grand couvent of the Ursulines of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris, was careful to limit her visits to the cloister. Her niece was permitted to enter the house seven or eight times a year, though not during Lent or Advent. Madame de Laval, another benefactress, had to seek permission from Rome to spend a few days in the community, to console herself after the death of her husband.71 These and other visits – which were very rare – had to be conducted in such a way as not to trouble “the inner peace of the religious”. The Ursuline community in Rennes was less rigid. The duchesse de Vendôme received permission from the bishop to enter its enclosure once a week whenever she was in town. But the fact remained, she had to have permission from the bishop, and she was allowed to enter only once a week.72 This separateness did not – could not – last for long. To find out why, we can look to Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. In 1628 he wrote to the sisters at Saint-Nicolas du Port, asking them on behalf of the Princesse de Pfalzbourg to board a protégée of hers for a week or, at the most, ten days.73 In July 1630 he was urging the sisters of Saint-Mihiel to do a similar favour – this time for an indefinite period – for a protégée of the Princesse Marguerite de Gonzague. On this occasion he explained his reasons: “It is no small thing to please the princes … and I maintain strongly that it would be an unheard-of show of incivility not to agree at once to what our devoted princesses are asking of you here.”74 Fourier was teaching his

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nuns about real life. One good turn deserved another; the princess would remember the favour and would repay it some other time. On the other hand, a refusal would rebound, sooner or later, against a community that owed so much to the princess’s patronage. Then he added a new twist. “If they [the princes] ask us humbly to make room for some poor soul for a little while … [surely we are not] so soft, so delicate, so retired, so worthy, so precious, so perfect, so holy that we mustn’t let a soul like this one, coming from the Court, touch us at all or even come close to us.”75 An interesting argument indeed, because it went against the accepted tradition of reformed female monasticism. The purity of clausura, so heavily stressed by the Council of Trent, was being weighed against the friendship of princes. Needless to say, the sisters complied. These two requests are interesting for two other reasons: first, that Fourier, as founder of the Congrégation and author of its Rule, knew full well that what he was asking went against the grain, yet could see no way out; second, that he made such a big issue of such short stays. These were exceptions, he was saying, but even so they had to be ringed around with precautions. In each case the guest was to have no blot on her reputation; she was to dress and behave modestly and to obey the nun designated to be her director; and her stay was to be kept a secret from all except her patroness. If she broke any of these conditions, she was to leave at once.76 The tranquillity of the cloister was still a matter of prime concern. Fourier kept silent about the nature of the women’s problems, though in a later letter he implied that the second case involved a serious mother-daughter disagreement. Another case, known to us through the letters of Marie Guyart of Quebec to her family in Tours, is clearer and more dramatic. In 1644 Marie Buisson, her niece, was pursued and abducted by an admirer. Although she was freed through her family’s efforts, the pursuit went on and became even threatening, the man in question gaining the ear of the duc d’Orléans. When the younger Marie took shelter in the Ursuline monastery, the authorities ordered her out. It was at this point that she decided to enter the novitiate – more out of spite than because of a vocation, remarks the historian.77 The pursuer admitted defeat; Marie remained a nun to the end of her days. The sheltering of young women at risk was the major exception to the teaching communities’ original policy towards adult pensionnaires. Indeed, the nuns accepted it as a clear responsibility. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris allowed for the admission of “an heiress or any other … put into pension by the Justice or by her relatives in order to be instructed and preserved from the accidents which, it is

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feared, might befall such persons.”78 In 1641 and again in 1646, the grand couvent took in young women as pensionnaires on the grounds that they were in danger of being kidnapped. In 1653 it accepted Mademoiselle Renoir d’Orsy, whose tutors were seeking to marry her by force. It later turned out that she was already secretly married to the man of her choice, whereupon the lieutenant civil ordered that she be detained in the house until further notice.79 In 1637 Thomas Duval, sieur de Noyer, engaged in furious legal battle with the superior of the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon over what he claimed was the illegal detention of his daughter, Marthe. The superior responded that she was “ready to open the door and let her leave, but cannot force her out, since her conscience does not permit it.” Marthe, on interrogation, declared that her father had mistreated her because of her conversion to Catholicism, that she was acting of her own free will, and that she had no intention of leaving the convent, “to which she has retired as to a sanctuary.”80 Duval lost his legal battle and was forced to pay her pension. In a somewhat similar case of conscience, a young woman was placed by lettre de cachet, and against the will of her guardian, in the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Montargis because she had declared a wish to become a nun. She changed her mind, but the circumstances were deemed too dangerous to set her free. “We were obliged to keep her to a certain age, so she remained during this time in the religious habit without causing any disorder.”81 However, “the world” was discovering less benevolent uses for women’s monasteries. In 1653 Françoise Baillé was officially committed to the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Blois at the behest of her sister and brother-in-law, who inherited her goods in return for a promise to pay her expenses.82 In 1665 Louis Descluseaux, sieur de Rocons, put his wife into the same pensionnat “on condition that the said religious cannot let the said lady leave their convent without the express consent of the said sieur her husband, and that furthermore she will not write any letters or talk with anyone in the parlour without being accompanied by a religious.”83 At about the same time, a young woman was raging helplessly against her incarceration in the Ursuline convent of Montargis. “There were reasons why she had to stay,” wrote the annalist, “but as it was against her will, it made her angry.” Only the onset of consumption destroyed her defiance; she finally submitted to the fate that had been prepared for her. The man who had arranged her imprisonment, the surintendant of the duc d’Orléans, “very properly” defrayed the costs of her illness and burial.84 Such pensionnaires were hardly likely to be the peaceful souls bent on heaven that Paul V had had in mind when he drew up his bulls. Indeed, they were more than likely to have serious problems, which the

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nuns were presumably expected to tolerate, at whatever the cost to their inner peace. Many of these cases were private family matters. But with the passing of time, public policy intruded more and more. In 1670, for instance, the bishop of Troyes persuaded the Ursulines of that city to lodge Catherine Charpy, “a woman who has claimed to work miracles,” on a pension of 120 livres per annum.85 Clearly, he wanted her removed from the public view. The idea that the teaching monasteries could serve as places of official detention was taking its final shape. What changed the situation most of all was the Crown’s policy towards its Protestant subjects. From the mid-seventeenth century on, Protestant women could be found in convent pensionnats, often as involuntary inmates. But the great invasion of mature pensionnaires started later, with the Edict of Fontainebleau. As the annalist of Montargis described it, in 1685 “they decided to put the most obstinate ladies and young ladies in religious houses.” Montargis got a niece of the secretary of the duc de la Force. She was placed in the house by lettre de cachet, there to pass the first six months in what amounted to solitary confinement. Various learned people, from the archbishop down to the superior, reasoned with her, but in vain. After a while the community agreed to change its strategy: “We decided not to talk to her any more about her religion, both out of despair of success and to avoid hearing her express sentiments against ours.” There then began a time of détente, during which the nuns taught her geography, arithmetic, and history, and the young woman took a liking to the community “and recovered a little from the terrors that she had for the cloister.” Finally, after two years, she was granted permission to go with her mother (who had been incarcerated elsewhere) to Holland, “where they were happy to find the full exercise of their evil religion.” From her new home she wrote “with friendship” to the nuns for several years.86 Similar testimonials to the nuns’ forbearance can be found elsewhere. Anne de Chauffepié, whose memories of the Ursulines of Niort are recorded above, was clearly touched by their kindness, even though she was not won over to their religion. Some nuns were more successful in their attempts to convert their charges. In 1685, in the Ursuline chapel of Rouen, Catherine de la Motte Pilastre solemnly abjured her religion in the presence of the prioress who had “conquered” her.87 In 1701 Marie Allardin, an involuntary pensionnaire in the convent of the Congrégation in Reims, “after several months of discussion” declared herself convinced and made her abjuration.88 These women did not subsequently join the community in which they had been placed, but others did. Marguerite de Brouset entered the Ursuline house in Toulouse with a pension from

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the king, given to her as a nouvelle convertie. She died a nun.89 Renée de Saint-Ours, Celeste de Vautron, and Jeanne de Beuves, three members of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, all left their mark in the death notices of their order as converted Huguenots who eventually entered religion in the houses that had been their prisons.90 If the records were complete, there would doubtless be many more such cases to cite. A serious difficulty soon arose, which over the years led to many complaints: Who was to foot the bill? Jacques Conseil, father of a nouvelle convertie who had been taken into a convent pensionnat, suggested, “Those who are so anxious to instruct my child in your religion will surely have the charity to wish to pay her pension.”91 But the government was a bad risk where the payment of pensions was concerned. The nuns were frequently left in the lurch. In one teaching convent, the sisters complained that they had found themselves “charged with a number of women and girls of the so-called reformed religion whom the bishops and the intendant forced them to receive, and whose pensions have never been paid … They have fed and boarded some of them for four, five and six years without anyone caring. This translates into pure loss for this community which already has infinite difficulty to subsist.”92 In another, the nuns complained: “Our lords the Intendants … have these last years placed in our hands and confided to us several women and girls, both Huguenots and new converts, of whom ten or twelve have not paid any pension.”93 In yet another house the nuns’ grievance was even stronger, because of the costs incurred in securing their involuntary pensionnaire: “This girl exposed the community to some expense, because we were obliged to put bars on some windows, through which attempts were made more than once to carry her off.”94 Many years later, the Crown was still putting Protestant women into convents and still, as often as not, failing to pay what it owed for their pensions.95 By the turn of the century, the teaching monasteries had been awarded a niche in society as the instruments of royal policy towards recalcitrant Protestant subjects. So it was not a great step for them to begin taking in other kinds of difficult people. It should be noted that these convents were not yet used in the discipline and control of debauched women or penitents; that was a task reserved for certain specialist communities. However, they were clearly taking on the character of prisons. Alongside the pious widows and spinsters who followed community life with such loving devotion, there was a growing population of detainees who must have had very different attitudes. Let us take, as an example, the lettres de cachet that were delivered to one small monastery in Valençay, in Berry. In 1722 the monastery re-

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ceived an order for the incarceration of the superior of the Ursulines of Saint-Charles of Orléans; in 1760, an order for the arrest of Marie Langevin and her incarceration at the expense of Sieur and Dame Séguier; in 1771, an order for the incarceration of Thérèse Bezançon at the expense of her family; also an order for the incarceration of Marguerite Denis de Landry at the expense of her husband; in 1772, an order for the incarceration of Soeur Barrey, a Bernardine nun from Saint-Aignan, at the expense of her community; in 1777, an order for the incarceration of Marie Anne de Blandin at the expense of her father. To these orders must be added three for the release of persons not otherwise named, which suggests that the extant list of lettres de cachet may not be complete.96 The Valençay monastery seems to have been a busy place; whether it was typical or not, there is no way of knowing. It is possible that its readiness to accept prisoners was related to its extreme poverty.97 From time to time the nuns resisted. In 1725 a Sieur Courtin used a lettre de cachet to put his wife into the Ursuline monastery of Blois. But when he quibbled over the cost of the pension, the nuns demanded that she be removed, and the lieutenant of the marechaussée came to take her away. Two years later they were not so successful. Madame Andins, wife of Sieur Lorin, asked to enter the pensionnat. The community was opposed, “knowing the prejudice that persons of this kind ordinarily cause in religious houses.” But their protests were overridden by an arrêt from the court, and she came to stay, along with her own domestics.98 In the official mind, the monasteries offered the perfect solution to thorny little social problems. In 1728 the new Ursuline community in Louisiana – despite a lack of space and an overload of responsibilities – was faced with a difficult request: “Monsieur Perier, our commandant, made us set up a prison here a few days ago to house a lady among our pensionnaires whom he had given to us after she was separated from her husband; but as this lady began to tire of the convent and to want to have dealings with a secular person, he put her in prison with her husband’s consent until such time as she could be sent back to France: that’s the way they do things here.”99 The sisters’ distaste was clear, and the woman was soon removed. But the incident was symptomatic of the times. The priority that had once been given to the regularity of the cloister and the perfection of its members was a thing of the past. The trend towards the warehousing of mature women in monastic pensionnats was given great impetus by the Crown’s growing fondness for the lettre de cachet. The number of these documents issued was hugely increased in the eighteenth century with

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the spread of Jansenism, when Jansenist women – sometimes laywomen but more often nuns – replaced Protestants as the Crown’s main targets. In 1716 Louise de Mesnil, last prioress of Port-Royal, died in the Ursuline monastery of Blois after six and a half years as a prisoner. “We had the sorrow to see her die without giving any mark of submission,” wrote the annalist of the house. “This death has distressed all our community who otherwise loved her and honoured her perfectly.”100 Madame de Mesnil may have gained the community’s love, but she had to do it from within the four walls of her cell, separated entirely from the monastery’s life and conversation. The same fate befell the superior of the Jansenist monastery of Saint-Charles of Orléans101 and the many other religious women who were taken from their own communities and confined in others. “A veritable rain of lettres de cachet fell on the communities and dispersed the members infected with heresy among the orthodox convents,” writes a historian of Tours.102 The rain he speaks of also fell in other parts of the country. Wherever Jansenism was an issue, women were in danger of being removed from their communities and placed in others, not as nuns but as prisoners. The Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques are full of such events, only one of which will be mentioned here: an exchange between two communities in Troyes, where five dissident nuns from each house were imprisoned in the other.103 Thus, at one blow two communities lost an important part of their personnel, and ten names were added to the Crown’s list of involuntary pensionnaires. Whatever the “orthodox” nuns felt about this seems to have been immaterial. The lettre de cachet and the order from the bishop were facts of life. But there are signs that, from the nuns’ point of view, there were good reasons to open the door to pensionnaires, whatever the terms. As described in part 1, the last years of Louis XIV’s reign had brought serious financial distress to the country, the convents included, and this was compounded by the national bankruptcy of 1720. With much of their fortune turned into worthless paper money, and the returns on their investments radically reduced, many female communities faced total ruin.104 In exploring every available money-raising expedient, they found that one of the best was to take in mature pensionnaires. “We received ladies as perpetual pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of the Congrégation of Reims. “We hoped that their pensions, being considerable and regularly paid, would help us to keep going at a time when there were so few rentes.”105 It was “the harshness of the times,”106 as much as anything else, that made the monasteries’ pensionnats into a big business. Their financial considerations corre-

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sponded neatly with the policies of the government and the wishes of society. The result was a widening of the breach in the cloister walls. As the eighteenth century progressed, the names of dames pensionnaires appeared more frequently in the convent records. Some of these women, as in earlier times, were faithful pensionnaires for life. Among the death notices of the Filles de Notre-Dame we find mention of the death in 1729 of Louise de Ponteau des Roys, who left the community 1000 écus on condition that she be buried in the chapel; and in 1733, of “a lady of good family … who has died after spending 43 years with us.”107 The lives of such women appear only for a brief instant, encapsulated in the notices of their deaths: in 1747, Françoise Setier de la Sallière, eighty years old, buried in the Ursuline house of Meaux; in 1748, Jeanne Dalichou, widow of an officer in the Régiment d’Agenois, dead at the age of sixty-one in the Ursuline convent of Châlons; in 1765, Marie Regnaudin, a deaf mute, dead after thirtyeight years as a pensionnaire in the Ursuline house of Auxerre. In the Ursuline house of Magny, five elderly ladies were buried at the rate of one per decade between 1737 and 1791, which suggests a continuing though never massive presence.108 But the brevity of their appearance in the records may belie the effort that their room and board entailed. In 1790 the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux were still burdened with a woman “in dementia” who had been in the house for six years, though her family had defaulted on her pension for the past thirtythree months.109 At the same time, their sister community in Poitiers was begging the authorities to solve the problem of an eighty-eightyear-old woman who had been incarcerated for forty years and bedridden for twenty, with nothing to support her but “the modest pension that the king gives her.”110 In addition to these faithful ladies of long duration there was now a floating population. In the records of the little Ursuline house in Saint-Symphorien le Château, near Lyon, the entries include, for 1743, a receipt from Joseph Guyot (“for a month and some days of pension for his fiancée … 12 livres 10 sols”) and for 1745, several acknowledgements of payments for short-term stays for ladies and their maids.111 In 1752 Madeleine Roche boarded in the Ursuline monastery of Périgueux while the Parlement of Bordeaux considered her bid to marry without parental permission.112 An actress by the name of Favart spent time with the Ursulines of Issoudun for no other reason, according to local historians, than that she had failed to respond to the advances of the maréchal de Saxe.113 Mademoiselle Deboulimbert had her own page in the account book of the monastery of Châteauroux, in Berry, from 1779 until she left the pensionnat in 1785.

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In 1788 she returned, “separated from her husband,” and resumed payments for herself and her maid until 1790. The same house also records the stay of Madame de Guenan, two daughters, and a maid from May 1782 to March 1783. And many others.114 Women came and went, and not always for weighty reasons: leaving for the summer and returning in the autumn; taking up residence when their husbands went on trips, leaving to go on trips themselves. So it can be seen that by the later years of the eighteenth century, the monasteries were openly serving as private hotels. The justification for this, from the nuns’ point of view, was the size of the pension. Whereas the typical annual pension for a student was 120 to 150 livres, the pension for a dame ranged from 250 livres up. Mademoiselle Laquin paid the monastery of Châteauroux 300 livres (“she has a room to herself”); Madame Labastière, her sister, and their servant paid together 850 livres.115 Madame D’Hermonville paid the Congrégation of Sainte-Menehould 300 livres, while Madame Cliquot paid the Ursulines of Épernay 468 livres for herself and her maid.116 We can speculate that although the presence of a maid meant another mouth to feed, it involved less labour for the monastery and was therefore not a bad arrangement. As for the question of space, this was probably no longer a problem in most monasteries, where shrinking populations of nuns were the order of the day. “Fewer religious, more pensionnaires,” one historian observes.117 “Our pensionnaires help us to subsist, we could not do it without their help,” wrote the Ursulines of Vendôme in 1710. “It is the only resource that we have to alleviate the misery with which we are burdened,” wrote the Ursulines of Tréguier in 1729.118 Increasingly, pensionnats became indispensable to the survival of many houses. Where the evidence exists, we can see that the rise in the number of pensionnaires was paralleled by a rise in the value of their contribution to the monastic coffers. In Châteauroux, for example, the receipts from the Congrégation’s pensionnat quintupled between 1702 and 1745;119 in Lannion, in Brittany, those from the Ursulines’ pensionnat increased almost sixfold between 1710 and 1790, while those of another convent, the Ursulines of Rennes, multiplied sevenfold.120 In many cases, by the end of the Old Regime the pensionnat was providing one-third or more of a monastery’s total income.121 While it is impossible, given the state of most monastic accounts, to disentangle the women from the children among the pensionnaires, it is safe to assume that the former provided a lucrative market for the houses that were ready to exploit it. The progressive opening of the teaching monasteries to this field of activity – which most certainly was not part of their original mission – offers an illustration of the way in which society and government were

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able to shape institutions to suit their purposes. The teaching monasteries, because they never achieved permanent financial independence, were unable to resist the push and pull of the outside world. “Their revenues, like their raison d’être, came essentially from their social rôle,” writes one historian, arguing that this resulted in the attenuation of their mystical character and the enhancement of a new social and practical personality.122 The reception of women – all kinds of women – within the monastery enclosure is a case in point. What Fourier in the 1630s had seen as the tiniest hole in the wall of the cloister had become, a century later, a wide-open breach. It could not have failed to have its impact on the spirit of enclosure. What were the consequences? A modern-day Ursuline sees the reception of dames pensionnaires as a serious mistake, one that cost the communities dearly.123 There are signs that some of her predecessors would have agreed with her. “It is not our practice to take women into our pensionnat,” wrote the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux. “We have no ladies boarding,” proclaimed the nuns of the Congrégation in Bernay, “we don’t want them because they are a trap to regularity.” Similarly, “We were so uncomfortable with these sorts of pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “that we resolved never to receive them again. A wise resolution, which ought to be kept always, because the presence of strange persons can only alter regularity and charity.”124 Other communities tried fruitlessly to end the practice of boarding adults.125 But supposing they had succeeded, would the monasteries have been better places? The same modern Ursuline makes the point that her predecessors were always marked with the spirit of their times. Was there any possibility that the mystical ambiance that suffused the early years of the Catholic Reformation could have survived in the age of the Enlightenment? In other words, did not the women of the eighteenth century already have a more pragmatic outlook, one that was at odds with the intense inwardness of the earlier age? And were they not now, perhaps, capable of doing what Fourier had challenged their predecessors to do – rubbing shoulders with “the world” without losing their raison d’être? It is more pertinent to ask whether the women of “the world” might not have been better off without the monastic pensionnats. Let us set aside those devoted pensionnaires perpetuelles for whom the monasteries were a place of peace and rest, and those in transit for whom they were a convenient oasis. It could be argued that the availability of so many secure, discreet places of confinement tempted a whole gamut of people – government officials, bishops, dissatisfied husbands, angry parents, greedy families – to create a prison population that would not have existed otherwise.

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The opening of the pensionnats to older women was a compromise, without a doubt. It had significant consequences, creating havens for them but also prisons. Willingly or unwillingly, the feminine monasteries became accomplices in the repressive policies of the Old Regime and sometimes in the less than laudable designs of individuals. This contributed, in a certain degree, to their contamination. But it also allowed for their survival.

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Conclusion

The two centuries that lay between the appearance of the teaching communities and their suppression were anything but uneventful. The country evolved. Peace succeeded war, and war, peace. Economic expansion turned into depression and serious crisis and then, finally, back to expansion. The general turbulence of the seventeenth century yielded to the more settled atmosphere of the eighteenth. In the intellectual world there was a momentous revolution as the siècle sacral gave way to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Ultimately, new ideas were translated into action, and the Old Regime, like the Bastille which was one of its symbols, crumbled into ruins. What we have been concerned with here, though, is not “the world” but the cloister; and the cloister followed its own rhythm. That is not to say that monasticism was timeless. It was always subject to the movement of public opinion. The very creation of the new teaching congregations, and the adaptations they made through the years, bear witness to that. But it was, in a sense, seamless. From the day in 1592 when the young women of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues gathered in community until the day in 1792 when, somewhere in France, the last nun left the last convent, there was time enough for French society to move from CounterReformation to Enlightenment, from Absolutism to Revolution. Within the cloister, however, change proceeded at a snail’s pace, surrounded and almost smothered by the ordered sameness of convent life. Generation after generation of women walked the same halls and garden paths, read the same Rule, wore the same religious habit, observed the same devotional practices, and cherished the same memories. Long

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years after they had passed from the scene, the anciennes mères continued to exercise control; their successors were bound to them by the thick braided cord of daily observance. The standard by which the generations measured themselves was “regularity,” their fidelity to the Rule, even in its smallest details. So while this history has been about changes – extreme changes in material fortune and more subtle changes of spirit and condition – it has also been about unchangingness: the profound stability inculcated by the Rule and protected by the cloister. It is also about the mutedness of the monasteries’ awareness of the wider society of the Old Regime. To be sure, nuns maintained close ties with their families so that news and views leaked both into and out of the cloister. But the convent walls that cut off the sights and sounds of outside also buffered impressions and attenuated natural sympathies. Communities, if they were successful, had an inner organization and purpose that absorbed much of the consciousness of their members. When, perforce, they had to look beyond themselves, a strong sense of self-justification together with a strong habit of perseverance protected them against “the world.” Dependent in many ways on their milieu, they were also independent of it, so sure were they of their calling. “The religious orders are the work of God,” wrote a monastic annalist at a difficult moment in their relationship with the Crown. “He sustains them and will continue to sustain them until the end of time … conserving them against all those who have worked through many centuries to destroy them.”1 This conviction of election and apartness enabled them to delay the impacts of outside events, even if they could not finally avoid them. “We are not aware of the laws, because we don’t read any news sheets,” said the Ursuline Clothilde Paillot as she stood before the revolutionary tribunal in 1792. She was guillotined the same day.2 The issues of the day counted less for religious communities than for the rest of society. In that fact lay inner strength and cohesion as well as danger. At the time of the Revolution, the teaching communities were proud to proclaim that they had not changed, that they were true to the order of things as they had always known it. At this, the world – which had changed, and changed radically – turned on them and cast them out. However, once the Revolution had run its course, the durability of their institut drew some of them back. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century groups of survivors, here and there, found the means to re-establish their communities. Their numbers were small, and this has allowed some historians to question the solidity of their original commitment. Geneviève Reynes believes that it was inertia that

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had kept nuns in their convents in 1792, and inertia that now prevented them from returning.3 However, this is to make light of the difficulties they faced when in 1806 they received official permission to resume their teaching. These difficulties included their personal poverty and their dependence on outside assistance, and above all their average age, now in the late fifties and early sixties.4 Only a few years were left for the survivors of the Revolution to make a personal contribution to the rebuilding of the cloisters.5 Nevertheless, by slow stages they set up their clausura, resumed their religious dress, and returned to the old order of day. To begin with, they took in pensionnaires to supplement their funds. Finally they reopened their day schools and, with that, took back some of the position they had lost.6 “Now, surrounded by poor children, we have again become true Ursulines,” said one of them.7 It should come as no surprise that, as much as was possible, they meant to go on with their lives as though nothing at all had happened.

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appendix Demographics of the Cloister

There is something presumptuous about attempting to write the history of a large group of people that is scattered over a whole country and the better part of two hundred years. We know full well that by our choice of examples we will give a certain shape – perhaps too much shape – to this great unwieldy mass, and that by our exclusion of other examples we will reinforce our own, possibly faulty, construction. But what else can we do? How many anecdotes would we have to produce to encompass a population that may have numbered, from start to finish, close to 90,000 souls?1 Fortunately, in the case of cloistered nuns the historian does not have to depend on anecdotes alone. This was a closed society par excellence, and one that left a wealth of source material for statistics, thanks to the fact that every selfrespecting monastery kept records of its membership. If these registers had all survived, we would have had access to a near-complete head count of the teaching nuns of the Old Regime, together with the dates of their baptism, profession, and death, plus a great deal of background information on family and birthplace. As it is, most registers have disappeared. Even so, enough remain to furnish a sizable sample of the monastic population and to trace the way it evolved. The registers are supplemented by a mass of other information: capitular records, account books, annales and death notices, and the numerous états in which the women were required to account for themselves and their communities to an ever more intrusive government. Although nuns’ selfproclaimed lot was to remain as anonymous as possible, they may well have been the best-recorded group of “ordinary” women in Old Regime France. This sample is large enough to answer some questions about the behaviour of monastic women: their backgrounds, the patterns of their entry into religion, their life expectancy, and their age at death. It can also help us visualize

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religious communities: their formation, their recruitment, the way they adapted to changing times, their successes, and their decline.

the questions The first three questions concern patterns of entry into religion: 1 What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? 2 Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? 3 How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? It must be pointed out that the day a girl entered religion was the day she exited family life, the inheritance, and the marriage market. Therefore the data serve two perspectives. They tell us about the development of monastic populations, and they point to certain behaviours in society and certain strategies within families. The next three questions approach the problem of mortality, using different perspectives: 4 What was the average age at which monastic women died? 5 What was the average life expectancy for monastic women? 6 At what age did most monastic women die? From the beginning in all three inquiries, we looked for indications of how mortality was influenced by the passage of time. Later, while working with the data, we became aware of another indication – that northern and southern populations did not follow the same pattern with regard to either entry or mortality. We have sought to illustrate this by dividing the country along the line (Nantes-Geneva) already favoured by demographic historians2 and by separating the populations to the north of this line from those to the south. Comparisons of mortality in the two populations will be found in tables 9 and 10. The next questions concern communities, their formation and functioning: 7 After the “rush” of the early seventeenth century, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? 8 How did the population of teaching monasteries change, both in collective age and in numbers, over the two centuries? These two questions deal in generalities. But as we have argued, there were numerous locally driven variations between houses. A final question therefore asks how the population changed in individual houses, and it focuses on five different houses, one by one.

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the sources Monastic Registers Most of our information comes directly from the monastic registers of clothing (c), profession (p), and death (d), including sometimes, though not essentially, entry (e). These registers are particularly reliable because, being bound, they present the records in sequence, with none (or almost none) left out. Most registers also indicate year of birth/baptism (b). The way the lists were compiled varies. In some cases, the three main rites of clothing, profession, and burial were entered in one and the same register; in others, they were divided among different registers. For instance, the information on the Provins community comes from a single ledger, in which each nun was assigned one page, with clothing and profession recorded on one side, and death (any number of years later) on the other. But there were separate registers for clothing/profession and for death for the Gisors and Romans communities. Where the information was dispersed, it is far less likely to be wholly recoverable. For Châteauroux, for example, there is a perfect record of clothing/profession, but the register of deaths has been lost. In the case of Le Mans, the surviving source is a record of deaths, but other information was entered only at the pleasure of the registrar. Thus, many monastic registers fail to supply all the details necessary to construct a profile of their membership from birth, through clothing and profession, to death. In some cases, the surviving registers provide all these details but do not cover the entire life of the community. The register of the Ursulines of Paris is complete only to 1678, though the house continued until the Revolution; that of the Ursulines of Saumur begins in 1668, though the house was actually founded in 1619. Sometimes the lists from the registers have been transcribed into monographs by insiders who had privileged access to the records of the monasteries in question, or by researchers who have found such lists in the archives (see table 1, nos. 1, 2, 8, 9, 13, 15). To all appearances they are accurate. Table 1 lists all the registers I have found and used. Only a few of them contain all the details necessary to create profiles of the houses involved. These are marked with an asterisk (*). Table 1 The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Annonay, Notre-Dame Frappa; aodn Annonay, b 3j 133 cases

Dates

B

1630–1784

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (2) Auxerre, Ursulines Bonneau, 297–303 205 cases (3) Avignon, Ursulines i ad Vaucluse, h (3 registers) 132 cases (incomplete) (4) Châteauroux, Congrégation ad Indre, h 904 230 cases (5) Gisors, Ursulines* ad Eure, ii f2215 218 cases (6) Lille, Ursulines* ad Nord, h6, h149 212 cases (7) Le Mans, Ursulines Chambois 232 cases (8) Nancy, Congrégation Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien” 199 cases (9) Paris, Ursulines Jégou, app. 2 108 cases (10) Poitiers, Notre-Dame* aodn Poitiers, b 1j1 293 cases

Dates

B

1614–1792

x

1623–1789

x

1641–1790

x

1621–1790

x

1627–1790

x

1628–1791

x

1617–1790

x

1614–1678

x

1618–1789

x

E

x

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (11) Provins, Congrégation* bm Provins, ms. 251 179 cases (12) Quimper, Ursulines ba 4990–213 34 cases (13) Reims, Congrégation Péchenard i 189 cases (choir nuns only) (14) Romans, Ursulines* ad Drôme, 31 h2; bm Grenoble 189 cases (15) Rouen, Ursulines Reneault, 294–319 198 cases (choir nuns only) (16) Saint-Marcellin, Ursulines* ad Isère, 14.171 170 cases (17) Saint-Nicolas, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2609–10 92 cases (18) Saumur, Ursulines ad Maine-et-Loire, h 261, h1 122 cases (19) Toulouse, Notre-Dame aodn Toulouse, b 1j 281 cases

Dates

B

E

C

P

D

1629–1788

x

x

x

x

x

1624–1683

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

1636–1783

1635–1789

x

x

1619–1790

x

1632–1788

x

1697–1789

x

x

x

1668–1790

x

x

x

1631–1784

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (20) Toulouse, Ursulines* ad Haute-Garonne, h 221 227 cases (21) Tulle, Ursulines* ad Haute-Vienne, h 236 cases (22) Vézelise, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2612 75 cases

Dates

B

1615–1788

x

1618–1789

x

1631–1789

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Annales Many monasteries kept annales. Sometimes they recorded entries and professions as they took place; sometimes they mentioned only deaths (see convents marked †), taking the occasion to refer to the age of the deceased and her years in religion. Unless the annalist had other records to hand, the timing of the earlier events may have been only approximate. Some margin of error must then be allowed – though, obviously, the death date was accurate. Table 2 Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases

Dates

(1) 1625–1788 Blois, Ursulines*† ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43; and Notter (personal communication) 236 cases (2) Carcassonne, Ursulines ad Aude, h 439 161 cases (3) Châtellerault, Congrégation* am Châtellerault, ms. xxix 141 cases

B

C

x

1627–1788

1641–1789

E

x

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 2 (continued) Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (4) Montargis, Ursulines† bsem, passim 65 cases (5) Poitiers, Ursulines ad Vienne, j 36 53 cases

Dates

B

1649–1713

x

1696–1762

x

E

C

x

P

D

x

x

x

Lists in Secondary Sources Some communities have been reconstructed by later historians using a combination of monastic, notarial, and revolutionary records. While such information as is given is probably trustworthy, there can be no guarantee that it is complete. Table 3 Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Châlons, Congrégation Carrez, passim 276 cases (2) La Flèche, Notre-Dame Calendini, passim 182 cases (3) Laval, Ursulines Morin de la Baluère 217 cases (4) Orléans, Ursulines ii Ratouis, 671–6 90 cases (5) Périgueux, Ursulines E. Roux, passim 165 cases

Dates

B

1617–1790

1623–1794

C

P

x

x

x

x

x

x

1617–1787

E

D

x

1656–1709

x

x

1641–1790

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 3 (continued) Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (6) Saint-Symphorien, Ursulines C. Roux, 15–62 123 cases (7) Valenciennes, Ursulines Loridan, Les bienheureuses, 300–3 136 cases

Dates

B

1635–1790

x

1654–1794

x

E

C

P

x

x

x

D

x

Diocesan Records Immediately before professing, prospective nuns were examined by representatives of their bishops. The procès-verbaux of these interviews were conserved in the diocesan records. Where they have survived they are a good source of information on the overall number of entries into convents, the age of the entrants, and often the names and professions of their parents. However, the lists do not tell us what happened to the women from then on, so cannot be used to reconstruct community populations. Table 4 Diocesan Records Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Bordeaux, Notre-Dame ad Gironde, g 631, 634 168 cases (2) Bordeaux, Ursulines ad Gironde, g 631, 632, 634 193 cases (3) Pontoise, Ursulines ad Val d’Oise, g 151 66 cases

Dates

B

1613–1776

x

x

1622–1730

x

x

1712–1789

E

C

P

x

D

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Liasses de Vêtures, Professions, Sepultures (1736–1790) These were small booklets of stamped paper in which were entered all a monastery’s entries, professions, and deaths by five-year periods. They had been made mandatory by royal decree on 9 April 1736, as part of a larger effort to organize the recording of the country’s births, deaths, and marriages. These booklets, each covering five years, survive in large numbers, but enough of them are missing that a complete sequence is seldom achieved for any single house. We can, however, learn from them a great deal about the ages at which women entered, professed, and died, where they originated, and what their social status was during this last half-century of the Old Regime. Those used are as follows: ad Aisne, h 1701 ad Finistère, 34 h 1 – 34 h 3 – 39 h 1 – 39 h 2 ad Isère, 22 h 32 – 22 h 102 ad Loir-et-Cher, 4 e 287 ad Marne, 78 h – 84 h ad Pas-de-Calais, 3 e 160 ad Rhône, 32 h 9 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1716 ad Sarthe, 2 e 140/38 ad Seine-Maritime, d 345 ad Seine-et-Marne h 877 ad Val d’Oise d 1791 – d 1796 ad Vienne 2 h5 95 ad Haute-Vienne g 373 – g 373 – g 374

Laon, Congrégation (1737–87) Carhaix, Ursulines (1744–87) Pont-Croix, Ursulines (1749–81) Quimper, Ursulines (1743–88) Quimperlé, Ursulines (1739–88) Crémieux, Ursulines (1741–80) Grenoble, Ursulines (1768–88) Vendôme, Ursulines (1737–84) Sainte-Ménehould, Congrégation (1740–90) Épernay, Ursulines (1762–88) Boulogne, Ursulines (1740–87) Lyon, Ursulines (1737–78) Autun, Ursulines (1738–68) La Ferté, Notre-Dame (1736–80) Dieppe, Ursulines, (1736–89) Meaux, Ursulines (1738–88) Argenteuil, Ursulines (1737–87) Magny, Ursulines (1737–88) Poitiers, Ursulines (1756–88) Saint-Léonard, Notre-Dame (1737–72) Limoges, Ursulines (1737–89) Limoges, Notre-Dame (1737–87)

The Lettres Circulaires (Éloges Funèbres) It was common practice in religious orders to notify sister houses of the death of members. These notices took the form of small eulogies, a page or so in length. In an age when women seldom wrote about themselves, these were in fact mini-biographies written by women about women.

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The death notice is trustworthy for date of death, but less so regarding the deceased nun’s age and her years in religion. Of great anecdotal value is the other information: stories about her childhood and her life in the convent; tributes to her character, her virtues, and her special devotions; details about her ailments and the cause of death. More than thirteen hundred death notices were consulted in the preparation of this book, the earliest from the 1630s, the last from the 1780s. Most are in bound collections that were originally compiled in monasteries of Ursulines and Filles de Marie Notre-Dame. Before the data can be used, questions should be asked about the original criteria by which, out of the many thousands of death notices that must have been in circulation through the years, these particular ones were selected for preservation. Do we have a truly random selection here? Were these subjects typical of the convent population as a whole? or were they chosen for their social distinction, outstanding virtue, or longevity? As far as I can determine, what decided their inclusion in the bound volumes was the date of death. The monastic compilers aimed to create an honour roll, starting on 1 January and ending on 31 December. On each day of the year communities were to celebrate women who had died on that day, much as they celebrated the saints.3 This pious practice allows us to believe that the choice of eulogies was random in other respects. While distinguished women did indeed receive more space than their numbers would justify, the letters commemorated every kind of woman, from superior to novice to simple lay sister, and from the highly successful to the clearly unsuccesful nun. The Ursuline death notices are found in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (ba) and the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne (bs), both in Paris. Those of the Filles de Notre-Dame are found in the Archives de Marie Notre-Dame, Bordeaux (aodn), and the Archives de Saint-Sulpice, Paris (ass).

Breakdown of the Data From these various sources we have compiled a database containing 8499 records. Table 5 Records 1611–1790 All of France

North

South

Choir nuns Lay sisters Total

7624 875 8499

3574 523 4097

4050 352 4402

With date of clothing With age at time of clothing With date of profession

8068 6798 7520

3780 3300 3618

4288 3498 3902

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Table 5 Records 1611–1790 (continued)

With date of death (through 1790)* With age at time of death (through 1790)*

All of France

North

South

4447 4103

2368 2207

2079 1896

* 1790 marks the end of the survey period. After then no clothings or professions took place. Some deaths were recorded for the interim period 1790–92 and some for the years after dispersion but in too haphazard a fashion to be useful.

Other Sources In March 1790 the National Assembly ordered a nationwide inventory of religious houses, including an interview with each religious person separately to find out if he/she was willing to leave community life.4 Thousands of these interviews were recorded, and copies of the procès-verbaux giving names, ages, and sometimes years of profession were sent to Paris (where they remain in the Archives nationales under the heading ms. d xix) and to the departments (where they may be found in the departmental archives, usually in the l series). For the three orders of teaching nuns being studied here, we have records for 6087 individuals in 275 houses. These records allow us to build up profiles of communities as they existed in 1790, and to know how many nuns chose to stay, how many to leave.5 Other sources of information on the personnel of monasteries include notarial records, the various états drawn up in the course of government inquiries, and internal lists made by communities for their own purposes.

questions and answers Table 6 addresses question 1 asked on p. 262: What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? Table 7 addresses question 2 asked on p. 262: Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? The answers to these questions throw light on the relationship between families and monasteries. An eminent historian of religious life in the Old Regime has described the monastic option as “quasi-necessary for the preservation of the equilibrium of families.”6 There were times when as many as half of the daughters of “good” families were put into religion. There can be little doubt that the difference between the value of their dowries and those of their marrying siblings had much to do with this practice. However, it has also been observed that somewhere around the middle of the seventeenth century this option began to lose favour – not necessarily among

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the women themselves but among their families. Parental opposition to religious vocations became more vocal and widespread.7 Our figures, by showing a rise in the age at which women left their homes to enter convents, seem to confirm a shift in family strategies. To what end? It was not because marriage became cheaper or more prevalent. In the eighteenth century many women were still remaining celibate, but now they lived their celibacy in the world.8 Possibly, as spinsterhood became more commonplace, there was no longer the same need to seek out the cloister for reasons of respectability. The good side of this is that women in the eighteenth century, entering religion in their late teens or early twenties, might have been freer to choose this state than their predecessors had been. Table 6 Average Age of Choir Nuns at Time of Clothing, 1611–1790 Average age at clothing Decade 1611–20* 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–00 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

France

North

South

22.31 years 18.86 18.05 17.86 18.05 18.15 18.34 18.60 19.01 19.11 18.77 19.70 19.55 20.01 20.61 21.81 21.80 21.79

23.04 years 19.51 17.85 17.83 18.76 18.61 18.94 18.35 18.74 18.94 19.25 19.57 19.61 20.53 20.70 22.04 22.34 22.04

21.82 years 18.27 18.23 17.89 17.05 17.72 17.76 18.85 19.23 19.23 18.49 19.80 19.53 19.60 20.52 21.58 21.20 21.46

Database: The table is based on the date and age of clothing of all choir nuns, 1611–1790. Lay sisters are excluded because (as will be seen in Table 8) their patterns of entry were different from those of choir nuns. Out of our 7624 records of choir nuns, 6079 give both year and age of clothing: 2856 cases (north) and 3223 cases (south). It is from this sample that the statistics are taken. * Figures are high in this decade because many “founder” nuns were later professed.

Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790

from 1611 to 1700 16 and under 17–20

No.

%

1380 1083

43.26 33.95

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Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790 (continued) No.

%

21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

613 79 35 3190

19.22 2.48 1.10

from 1701 to 1790 16 and under 17–20 21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

559 1193 1048 76 13 2889

19.35 41.30 36.28 2.63 0.45

Database: Same as for Table 6, all records of choir nuns (6079) in which age and year of clothing are given.

The distribution of ages in the under-sixteen group is worth noting. In the seventeenth century, 469 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 342 at fourteen years, 40 at thirteen years, and 12 (including several ten and eleven year olds) at twelve years or under (863 girls, or 27.05% of the group). In the eighteenth century, 180 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 93 at fourteen years, 6 at thirteen years, and 1 at twelve years (280 girls, 9.69% of the group). Table 8 addresses question 3: How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? Table 8 Age at Clothing: Choir Nuns Compared with Lay Sisters

choir nuns only ( 6079 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older lay sisters only ( 719 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older

No.

%

1939 2276 1661 155 48

31.9 37.4 27.3 2.5 0.8

25 175 471 34 14

3.5 24.3 65.5 4.7 1.9

Database: All records of choir nuns and lay sisters (wherever found) that give their age at clothing.

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Social status played a large part in deciding the age at which women entered religion. The more exalted their status, the more likely they were to enter at an early age. I have argued elsewhere that, as a group, the youngest entrants of all were those identified as “nobility” in the records (“Women and the Religious Vocation,” 617–18). The more important the family, the more critical (and expensive) were its alliances; some children were therefore placed in convents or the priesthood for the sake of enhancing other children’s dowries. Lay sisters were not as likely to be subject to such family strategies, and their humble social status allowed them to work before adopting a “state.” The next three tables deal with one subject – mortality – approaching it from different angles. First we address the question, what was the average age at which monastic women died? Did this average age fluctuate over time in such a way as to indicate periodic changes in “quality of life”? This table begins in 1681, because during the foundation period almost all the deaths occurred at an abnormally young age – the population itself being young. Table 9 Average Age of Death, Monastic Women who Died 1681–1790 Average age at death Death decade

France

North

South

1681–90 1691–1700 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

59.07 years 60.30 60.73 58.11 58.64 60.50 62.12 63.95 61.60 64.68 62.57

59.04 years 61.50 64.44 60.97 60.29 64.15 62.01 65.75 63.42 62.46 62.63

59.12 years 57.55 56.66 56.08 55.35 58.06 62.26 61.80 59.56 66.49 62.50

Database: 3232 records, for the period 1681–1790, of choir nuns and lay sisters that give both death year and age of death; 1714 cases (north), 1518 cases (south)

Generally speaking, compared with others in the same period, these teaching nuns seem to have enjoyed long lives.9 There are, however, significant variations within the group. Note the rise in mortality in the second two decades of the eighteenth century and the difference between northern and southern death rates, almost always in favour of the north. We may ask what occasioned these variations. The next table answers question 5: What was the average life expectancy for nuns born in the same decade? We may now begin with the early data, but we end in 1700, because thereafter the interruption caused by the Revolution in 1790 increasingly distorts the findings.

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Houses of the three teaching congregations, 1789, showing the division between north and south.

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Table 10 Average Life Expectancy, Monastic Women Born 1591–1700 Average life expectancy Birth decade

France

North

South

1591–1600 1601–10 1611–20 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–1700

59.41 years 60.55 59.89 57.91 57.16 58.01 60.50 62.04 61.35 61.18 58.60

58.87 years 62.87 61.46 58.76 56.05 54.31 59.96 61.71 64.92 65.57 63.33

59.98 years 57.21 56.85 56.29 58.50 63.62 61.15 62.40 58.56 57.07 55.71

Database: 3359 cases with birth year 1700 or earlier, which also record death year and age at death; 1842 cases (north), 1517 cases (south).

The first generation of nuns (b. 1591–1620) enjoyed a greater longevity than their immediate successors, possibly because the cloister was not yet being used as a receptacle for sickly or delicate daughters. During the peak years of the “rush,” life expectancy dropped; then, after mid-century, it improved. The difference between life expectancy in northern and southern populations fluctuated unpredictably but became dramatic in the last decades of the century. Table 11 takes a closer look at life expectancy by addressing question 6: At what age did most monastic women die? Table 11 Age at Death, Monastic Women Who Died in the Decades 1601–10, 1661–70, and 1691–1700 Birth decade 1601–10 Age at death 20 and under 21–30 31–40 41–50 51–60 61–70 71–80 81–90 over 90 Total

No 6 23 20 34 59 62 77 36 1 318

% 1.9 7.2 6.3 10.7 18.6 19.5 24.2 11.3 0.3

1661–70 No 4 34 15 29 35 71 87 41 6 322

% 1.2 10.6 4.7 9.0 10.9 22.1 27.0 12.7 1.9

1691–1700 No 5 34 34 34 37 69 71 38 2

% 1.5 10.5 10.5 10.5 11.4 21.3 21.9 11.7 0.6

324

Database: All nuns born in three different decades (1601–10, 1661–70, 1691–1700) for whom age of death is given.

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Note that in all three groups, the age at which most deaths occurred was between seventy-one and eighty. This confirms the impression that there were a lot of old nuns in Old Regime monasteries. Other analyses may be found in Dinet, “Mourir en religion,” 36, and Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 176. The following tables address questions concerning the formation and functioning of communities. This requires data from “complete” communities only (those in which professions and deaths are comprehensively recorded) in order to illustrate the fluctuations of those communities over time. The “rush” of the early seventeenth century was a phenomenon of limited duration. After it ended, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? To address this question (no. 7 on p. 262), we have selected twenty houses that have complete clothing records (choir nuns and lay sisters) through the period 1671–1785 (2393 records). We calculated elsewhere (Rapley and Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 395) that a forty-member community needed an addition of one member per year to maintain itself. When that community was reduced in size, its need for new members decreased accordingly. Thus, a twenty-six-member community required only two entries every three years; a thirty-member community required three entries every four years. In the 1730s, the Commission des secours mandated the reduction of the female religious population by about one-third (see above, part 1, chapter 5). The drop in the number of entrants through the following years corresponds to the implementation of this policy. Once the lower levels were reached the situation stabilized. The group of twenty houses in this sample, each with a population averaging over forty in the seventeenth century, needed at least a hundred recruits per five-year period to sustain itself. A century later, with populations of around thirty each, the group needed only seventy-five. Table 12 shows that it kept up the required level of entries. Table 12 Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date 1671–75 1676–80 1681–85 1686–90 1691–95 1696–1701 1701–05 1706–10 1711–15 1716–20 1721–25 1726–30

No of entries* 113 124 131 111 123 158 137 96 143 98 122 106

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Table 12 (continued) Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date

No of entries*

1731–35 1736–40 1741–45 1746–50 1751–55 1756–60 1761–65 1766–70 1771–75 1776–80 1781–85 1786–90

91 72 83 120 89 97 76 87 62 70 84 incomplete

Database: Records from the following houses: Annonay, Blois, Carcassonne, Châlons, Châtellerault, Châteauroux, Gisors, La Flèche, Lille, Nancy, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Reims, Romans, SaintMarcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Saumur, Toulouse, Tulle. * 100 = an average of one entry per house per year.

Tables 13 to 18 address question 8, looking at how the population inside teaching monasteries evolved, in both age and numbers, over the whole period. The decline in the quality of monastic life is traditionally measured by the two criteria: numbers and age of members. A certain minimum number (which the government set at twelve)10 was essential to keep a monastery functioning; and it goes without saying that some of these members had to be able-bodied. Table 13 shows that immediately after the foundation period, the number of women in the communities in the sample averaged forty or more, and that this number remained constant until about 1730; their age (both median and average) rose steadily until it reached the lower forties, then remained stable until 1730. The subsequent drop in numbers and rise in age corresponds to the period when the Commission des secours was actively reducing the female religious population by means of its ban on novices (see part 1, chapter 5). By 1770 the communities, now shrunken but also marginally younger, seemed to be regaining their balance. Table 13 Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date 1630* 1640*

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

223 389

– –

26 32

27.5 31.7

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Table 13 (continued) Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

476 507 533 485 504 514 475 468 449 415 376 333 294 277 274

40 42 44 40 42 43 40 39 37 35 31 28 25 23 23

36 40 43 44 44 41 42 43 46 46 48 47 45 46 47

36.5 40.2 43.3 45.1 44.5 44.1 43.9 44.4 46.0 48.2 48.1 46.4 47.6 47.7 47.5

Database: Records of all professed nuns (choir nuns and lay sisters) in twelve houses for which the registers of both professions and deaths are complete, for the period 1630–1790 (2026 records). The houses are Annonay, Gisors, Lille, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Romans, Rouen, Saint-Marcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Toulouse, Tulle. * These first numbers have no value, since some of the twelve houses were established only during these decades. However, average age is significant for houses already in existence.

We now look at how the population inside individual teaching monasteries evolved, in both collective age and numbers, over the period. To do so, we take five houses that have complete records: Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, and Saint-Marcellin. No generalization can be found to cover all women’s monasteries during the Old Regime; their circumstances were much too localized, much too dependent on the vagaries of their own environment. Some communities prospered while others deteriorated. The five following examples support this picture of diversity.

Table 14 Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670

30 52 64 60 61

24.70 years 30.19 35.43 39.95 41.19

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Table 14 (continued) Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

63 59 64 54 47 50 52 47 36 24 16 15

Average age 45.84 45.15 41.92 44.57 46.09 44.30 47.02 52.51 54.64 57.54 53.06 49.67

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Gisors.

The Gisors community was a sort of branch plant, depending for its recruitment on Paris, Beauvais, and Rouen. There was no possible way that the small, economically depressed town of Gisors and its surrounding countryside could have provided the nuns and the dowries necessary for its subsistence. After a century of success, the house suffered a serious setback at the time of the Law Crash and thereafter appeared frequently in the records of the Commission des secours because of its poverty. Given the importance of its day school, the only one in town, the community received assistance, but it did not recover. In 1790 it was still reported to be “subsisting with great difficulty.”11 The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 57.36 years. Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760

11 18 42 58 52 53 54 50 39 42 49 46 47

25.67 years 33.44 34.21 36.60 40.62 45.83 46.83 48.32 47.82 42.83 41.47 46.30 44.28

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Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) (continued) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1770 1780 1790

45

47.24 no records 43.19

46

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Lille.

From early days, the house at Lille achieved a good balance. Although it suffered in the Law Crash, it recovered swiftly, keeping its numbers up and its collective age steady. The size of the city and the demands for schooling seem to have worked to its advantage. At the time of the Revolution it was running both a pensionnat and a day school for two hundred pupils. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 58.83 years. (see Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” and “Pieuses contre-révolutionnaires”). Table 16 Poitiers, Poitou (estab. 1617) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

7 54 74 79 76 87 75 79 84 75 61 48 36 22 21 21 20 19

31.00 years 27.54 34.00 39.68 41.51 43.95 43.48 45.77 44.82 45.15 46.97 52.51 58.94 53.05 45.29 50.05 46.05 48.79

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Poitiers.

The Poitiers community enjoyed a stunning rise, then almost collapsed at the time of the Law Crash, as can be seen from the steep plunge in numbers and rise in average age in the 1730s and 1740s. From being the richest and most prestigious convent in its city, it became one of the poorest. Mismanagement of its estates was a major factor, but there may have been others. For instance,

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the highly aristocratic character of the community may have made it less flexible during the later years when “democratization” was the key to recruitment. The history of this riches-to-rags monastery can be found in Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.41 years. Table 17 Provins, Ile de France (estab. 1629) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

4 28 45 54 53 54 57 51 40 45 41 39 37 32 34 35 30

25.00 years 24.75 29.53 34.83 40.68 45.98 42.12 45.22 41.97 46.58 54.90 52.33 47.89 42.40 46.68 51.74 50.00

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Provins.

The house at Provins was situated in a modest country town in the farm belt that surrounded and served the Parisian market. Like Gisors, it benefited from its proximity to a big city for recruitment of both pensionnaires and nuns. After the usual success of the early days, it went through a difficult period, then recovered financially, thanks largely to its landholdings and the rising price of grain. But at the end of the Old Regime, when many other communities were picking up, it appears to have stagnated. See Rapley, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.77 years. Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640

8

43.13 years

1650

10

49.10

1660

23

37.56

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Table 18 Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, (continued) erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

31 34 40 33 28 44 41 35 36 40 34 29 31

35.23 years 38.50 40.58 45.09 40.36 36.25 40.66 42.34 44.75 44.33 45.50 48.19 48.19

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Saint-Marcellin.

Since the Ursuline community at Saint-Marcellin had had a previous existence as a congregation without solemn vows, the average age of its members was atypically high when the monastery was erected and records began to be kept. A wave of recruits came in in the 1660s, whereupon the average age of the community dropped steeply. A similar wave occurred in 1710–20, at a time when other communities were foundering. Generally speaking, numbers and average age remained satisfactory throughout the following years, thanks perhaps to the landholdings that shielded it from the worst effects of the Law Crash. However, in the last decades of the Old Regime, the community began to show some weakness. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 53.74 years. This community was not very healthy. As these five cases show, the histories of individual communities were far from uniform. The reasons for their differences are often beyond recall – the vagaries of patrons and supporters, perhaps, or the morale of the membership itself. But there are records of other circumstances: location; the prosperity and salubrity, or lack thereof, of surroundings; and the nature of assets as well as the way they were managed. Each one of these monasteries – Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, Saint-Marcellin – existed within its own set of circumstances, and as their vital statistics show, each fared differently. Perhaps, had it not been for the intervention of the Revolution, one or two of them might eventually have died a natural death even as the others flourished.

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Glossary

amortissement: “a permanent rule declaring gens de mainmorte [secular and regular clergy, hospitals, secular communities] … incapable of possessing any property without special permission from the prince, and without paying him a tax” (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le clergé de France, 16) appel comme d’abus: a means of recourse against an ecclesiastical judge or superior who contravened canon or civil law. The appeal was addressed to Parlement, which had the power to amend or nullify the action biens de mainmorte: goods belonging to a corporate body, such as a religious community or a hospital, which had to remain in its possession or that of another such body and could not be returned to public use billet de confession: a certificate from the curé attesting that he had received the bearer in confession. Without this certificate, a dying person could be denied the last sacraments and burial in consecrated ground. Originally designed to flush out Protestants, it was revived by the constitutionnaire clergy as a way of identifying and punishing Jansenists. Because the persons affected were often highly respected in the community, the “affair of the billets” created an uproar and became a political cause célèbre, which was only ended (more or less) by the “law of silence” of 1754 (Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 80–3) bull: a papal edict; from the Latin bulla, meaning seal, indicating the official importance of the document cahiers de doléances: “The guiding memoranda prepared for deputies by their electoral assemblies, and for these assemblies by the general electorate, nominally as petitions calling for the redress of grievances” (Sydenham, The

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French Revolution, 32n1). The cahiers of 1788 are used extensively as a source of information on the mind of the nation on the eve of the Revolution catechism: a manual of religious knowledge, formulated to assist in the instruction of the faithful. The printed questions and answers were designed to be memorized for recitation before the instructor or catechist. It was common practice in the Old Regime for bishops to design their own versions of the catechism for use within their dioceses clausura: the obligation to remain within the confines of the monastery, a condition incumbent on religious women who had taken solemn vows clothing: the formal ceremony in which a postulant received the dress, or habit, of the community. It could take place any time up to a year after her entry commende: The assigning of the income of a benefice to a person who was not the holder of the benefice (Mousnier, Institutions, 1:310) commission des réguliers: a commission established by the Crown in 1766 to investigate abuses in men’s monasteries. By the time it completed its work in 1780, it had closed down 458 houses and suppressed several religious orders altogether. Also, it raised the age at which religious profession could be made to twenty-one years for men and eighteen for women. The commission represented a serious invasion by the Crown into the interior working of the church (Chevallier, Loménie de Brienne et l’ordre monastique) décimateurs: tithe owners. Gros décimateurs were the individuals or institutions allowed to appropriate the tithe, on condition that they guaranteed church services in the area from which they collected first communion: a Catholic’s first reception of the Eucharist; in the Old Regime an important rite of passage formulary: a statement of orthodox beliefs (in this case specifically targeting the questions raised in the Jansenist quarrel) to which all the clergy were required to assent in writing founder/foundress: (1) the spiritual parent of a community who set it up and gave it its original form; (2) the first temporal benefactor who, for his or her benevolence, was given a permanent and sometimes hereditary status of privilege in the community gallicanism: a theory (implicit for centuries and then articulated clearly in the Four Articles of 1682) that while the papacy exercised a spiritual authority over the Catholics of France, its temporal authority was limited by the rights of the Crown and the ancient liberties of the French Church; also that its judgments and rulings were subject to approval by an ecumenical council generalate: a system of central direction for a group or congregation of communities. Today most women’s congregations have generalates; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very few did institut: the Rule of a religious order as laid down at its foundation (Trésor de la langue française); the prime and central purpose of the order

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instruction: in the terminology of the Old Regime, religious education lettre de cachet: a closed letter bearing the king’s private seal, signed by him and by a secretary of state, conveying an order which was to be executed without publicity office (from the Latin officium, meaning duty or responsibility): the official communal prayer of the church which all monastic communities were required to sing or recite. In teaching monasteries a shorter version, the Little Office of Our Lady, was often substituted for the original and extremely time-consuming Divine Office ordinary: the person entitled to exercise jurisdiction over an ecclesiastical circumscription. Thus, the bishop was the ordinary within his diocese; the abbot, within his monastery and all its dependencies postulant: a person requesting admission to a community or undergoing the very first stage of testing in the novitiate profession: the formal taking of religious vows, usually accompanied for nuns by the taking of the black veil. Before profession, a novice was free to withdraw or be sent away. After it, she was given totally to the religious life regularity: the observance by a religious community of its Rule in all particulars, an important concept in religious thinking regulars: clerics living under a rule, e.g., Jesuits, Capuchins religion: a recognized and approved association of persons living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This use of the word is seldom found in modern times but was common in the seventeenth century. Thus, “to enter religion” was to become a monk or nun, and a “religious” was a person living in one of these associations rente constituée: essentially a long-term loan, though in order to avoid appearing usurious it took the form of the purchase of an annual payment in return for a lump sum. Certain limitations were set: it was redeemable at the will of the borrower; the rate of interest could not exceed 10 percent; and it had, for security, real estate (Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 2:343) rule: the basic template of a religious order. Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, all religious orders and congregations were required to adopt one of the four Rules then existing: Benedictine, Basilian, Augustinian, or Franciscan. The Ursulines and the Congrégation chose the Rule of Saint Augustine, the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, that of Saint Benedict. To the bare bones of the Rule they then added a host of their own statutes to deal with their particular circumstances superior: the person in charge of a religious community. In women’s communities, this charge was divided between the supérieure and the supérieur. Because the English language does not allow for the difference in gender, the supérieur will, for the purposes of this book, be called the “director” or the “canonical superior”

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visitor: an outside priest, often a regular, who was assigned to inspect a religious house, interview its members, and ascertain that the Rule was being correctly followed vows: voluntary commitments to perform something not otherwise required vows of religion: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Until the thirteenth century these were simple vows (i.e., they did not nullify actions taken in violation of them). After the thirteenth century they took on a solemn character. Once professed, a religious could not possess property, succeed to an inheritance, or marry

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Notes

abbreviations ac ad aguur am an aodn ass ba bm bn bs bsem

Archives communales Archives départementales Archives générales des Ursulines de l’union romaine à Rome Archives municipales Archives nationales Archives de l’ordre de Notre-Dame Archives de Saint-Sulpice Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Bibliothèque municipales Bibliothèque nationale Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne Bulletin de la Société d’émulation de Montargis introduction

1 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, chap. 12. 2 Quoted in Gueudré, “La femme et la vie spirituelle,” 47–8. All translations are by the author, except for a few translations quoted from Englishlanguage sources. 3 Ponton, La religieuse dans la litterature française, 101. 4 Ibid., 75, 101. 5 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 4. 6 Typical of this isolationism was the reaction of the French Ursuline monasteries in 1857 to an attempt to synthesize their individual histories into a

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290 Notes to pages 5–14 history of the order. Twenty-five percent of the monasteries did not even answer the request for information (Oury, “Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 7 This is a point made by Dominique Dinet in his new book, Religion et société. Even now, publications on discrete orders and congregations greatly outnumber collective studies. 8 Letter of 3 September 1790, quoted in Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 40. 9 Quoted in Gabbois, “Vous êtes la seule consolation de l’Église,” 312. chapter one 1 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 38–9. 2 On the origins of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, see Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 134. 3 Papal bull of 1607, quoted in Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 97. 4 From the title of his article “Une question mal posée: Les origines de la réforme française et le problème des causes de la réforme,” Revue historique 161 (1929): 1–73. Febvre argues that historians of different nationalities who wrangle over where and under whose guidance the Reformation began are missing the point, which was the widespread spirit that inspired the movement. 5 I am grateful to Dr Marshall Jones of the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine for introducing me to the principle of “social contagion” – that behaviours, both good and bad, can spread through a population in much the same way as epidemics, and that the “rush” of men and women into religious life in the early seventeenth century was a convincing manifestation of this principle. General treatments of behavioural contagion or the diffusion of innovations can be found in J.S. Coleman, E. Katz and H. Menzel, Medical Innovation (New York 1966); J.S. Coleman, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (London 1964); and E.M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York 1983). More recent work has focused on the mode of transmission or antisocial behaviour: R.S. Burt, “Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural Equivalence,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 1287–1335; J.L. Rodgers and D.C. Rowe, “Social Contagion and Adolescent Sexual Behaviour,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 479–510; M.B. Jones and D.R. Jones, “The Contagious Nature of Antisocial Behavior,” Criminology 38 (2000): 25–46. 6 Grosperrin, Les petites écoles sous l’Ancien Régime, 142. It has to be remembered that for poor families, both sons and daughters were a source of income. 7 This is a point made by Jacques Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:253: “If seminaries were created, if the religious orders were able

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291 Notes to pages 14–19

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

to reform themselves and prosper, if the material – and moral – condition of the priest improved, these facts were due to the rise during the first half of the seventeenth century of the rural economy” – which, he argues, was in the hands of the elites. Alix Le Cler, co-founder with Pierre Fourier of the Congrégation de NotreDame; quoted in Besancet, Le bienheureux Pierre Fourier et la Lorraine, 44–5. There was already a nunnery in Marseille in the early fourth century. See Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 19. Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les campagnes parisiennes, 118–21. Jeanne de Lestonnac, “Abregé ou forme de l’institut des filles religieuses de la glorieuse Vierge Marie Notre-Dame” (1606), aodn Bordeaux, 1a. The Compagnie de Notre-Dame, the creation of Jeanne de Lestonnac, was cloistered from the beginning; the others spent their early years uncloistered until they were enclosed by order of the hierarchy. See Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 59. The word – originally used in English – comes from Furet and Ozouf, Lire et écrire, 1:82. Châtellier, Le catholicisme en France, 2:20. Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:90. Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 89. See the maps on the subsequent pages for examples of the immense holdings of some abbeys. Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:254. Quoted in Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France, art. “clergé.” Jean de Viguerie sees 1660 as a turning point, after which “the opposition of the family to an entry into religion becomes an ordinary occurrence” (“La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 34). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 114. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. Quoted in Babeau, La ville sous l’Ancien Régime, 465. Quoted in Sedgewick, The Travails of Conscience, 52. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 105, 107. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. “And music, and the playing of tiresome instruments” (ad Nord, 149, 44, Petition of the superiors of the mendicant orders of Lille, 1639). Their real concern was that the Ursulines were drawing vocations away from their own sisters. See Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 182 ff. “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent” (s.d.), in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:443. Histoire de Laon et du Laonnais, 179. For example, Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 190.

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292 Notes to pages 20–5 32 In all, Richelieu succeeded in extracting 18 million livres in subsidies from the clergy, whereas his predecessors had managed only 1,150,000 livres during Henri IV’s reign (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 3). 33 Ibid., 59. 34 Rapport anonyme, Mélanges Colbert, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France des xvii e et xviii e siècles, 370. 35 Lettres vi, quoted in ibid., 369. 36 Ibid., 371. 37 For fiefs held from the king, if noble, one-third of the capital; if roturier, onefifth; for fiefs held from a seigneur, if noble, one-fifth; if roturier, one-sixth. To this was added a charge of 5 percent of annual revenue for every year of ownership (nouvel acquêt), plus one-tenth of the whole sum, known as deux sols pour livre. 38 Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 32. 39 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, quoted in Tournyol de Clos, La contribution du Clergé, 8. 40 Ibid., 97. 41 Ibid., 98. 42 Ibid., 43–4. 43 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, annales. 44 Remonstrance of 1720, quoted in Levasseur, Recherches historiques sur le système de Law, 226. 45 For more details, see Faure, La banqueroute de Law. 46 Lehoreau, Cérémonial de l’église d’Angers 1692–1721, 376. 47 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 65. 48 bn fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 206, fol. 23, quoted in ibid., 33. 49 Mémoire de 1720, quoted in ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 103. 51 The year that Arnelle Sabbagh’s thesis appeared. For an appraisal in English of the commission’s work, see Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 52 Ibid., 420–1, 440–1. 53 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 209. 54 For a summary of the evidence for this, see E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 55 See appendix, table 13. 56 Vallery-Radot, Un administrateur ecclésiastique, 166. 57 An advice of 1755, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 23. 58 bn Fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 205, fol. 54, quoted in ibid., 82. 59 This is my own conclusion, after extensive reading in the an g9 series. 60 Quoted in Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras, 163. 61 Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:334–5. The priest’s salary was known as the congrue. It should be noted that the congrue was raised to 500 livres in

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293 Notes to pages 25–32

62 63

64 65 66

1768 and to 700 livres just before the Revolution; also that many curés were not salaried but owned their benefices and were sometimes very well off. However, the fact remains that distribution of wealth was extremely uneven. Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:37. Peronnet, “Les problèmes du clergé,” 44. One example of the system comes from the abbey of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre, where the abbot’s share of the revenues was 11,128 livres while that of all the monks together was 9,540 livres (Dinet, Religion et société, 1:290). Tableau de Paris (1783), 7:93, quoted in Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 18. Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 14. This particular statement came from Jean-Baptiste Morgan de Belloy, president of the Department of the Somme (3/11/1790), quoted in Desobry, Le monastère des Clarisses. But the same language of victimization was used by officials up and down the country. chapter two

1 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, “La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon.” 2 am Châtellerault, xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, Annales i. 3 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 9. 4 The petit narré of Mère Angélique de Saint-Marie describing the establishment of the monastery, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. The grille was a feature of an established monastic house. 5 “Until it fills the whole world.” am Châteaudun, gg 51. 6 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, [219]. 7 Thus the monastery of the Congrégation in Troyes was founded expressly because the daughter of a municipal official had gone to Châlons to take the veil, and he wished to have her closer to home (Carrez, Histoire du monastère de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 1:253); the foundation of the Ursuline house in Blois was forwarded by Claude Le Roux, sieur de Créneaux, so that his daughter could return from the convent in Orléans (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 111); Jacques d’André, councillor in the Parlement of Provence, founded a convent of Ursulines in Aix and thus brought “home” his sister, niece, and daughter from Brignoles (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 109–10). 8 bm Chartres, 26–xv, Couvent des Ursulines, 189. 9 Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:74. 10 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:376. 11 H.Lamiray, Evreux, 156. 12 Grignon, Topographie historique de la ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 223.

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294 Notes to pages 32–4 13 Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 53–4. At that time Avallon numbered some 3000 inhabitants. 14 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 336–7. The author remarks that at the time of the Revolution, in that neighbourhood “only a few private houses remained in the island of Ursulines.” 15 Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 67. According to the annalist whom the author quotes, their prayers worked so well “that it became a proverb in the community, and one said, ‘If so-and-so gives us trouble, we will say a novena to change him or send him to another world!› 16 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 173. He goes on to say that the foundress of the Ursulines, Françoise de Cazères, “everywhere took the Compagnie de Notre-Dame to be an obstacle to her zeal.” However, the latter called on their own champions, the Jesuits, and the bishop soon changed his mind. 17 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 242. 18 Fourier, Correspondance 1598–1640, 2:79. 19 R. Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (1978), quoted in Braudel, The Identity of France, 2:117. 20 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. She remarks that they were extremely reluctant even to allow other Ursulines into their cloister. 21 Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” 134. 22 Occasionally monasteries of the same congregation aided each other. In 1650 the grand couvent sent a gift of 1500 livres to the Ursuline monastery of Meaux (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 105). But when other houses, including those of Tonnerre and Cravant, appealed for help, they were met with a flat “no” (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135). There was no need to feel obligation toward sister houses. 23 Furthermore, founders tended to load their foundations with obligations, such as foundation masses and the commitment to accept certain pensionnaires or novices (usually members of the family) free of charge. These obligations could become burdensome in later years. See Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, chap. 4. 24 These details come from the petit narré, in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. 25 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 258. 26 ad Gironde, g 628. It also found itself penniless at mid-century. It offers an outstanding example of financial mismanagement. 27 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:128. 28 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 260. 29 Garnier, “Le couvent de la Congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 3. 30 For descriptions of the buildings and for photographs of some of them, see Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2. 31 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 3:2; Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254.

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295 Notes to pages 34–8 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

See below, 310n20. Notter, “Contrats de dots,” 258. Ibid., 262. “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that out of the accruing revenue she can be fed and maintained; and further contribute something to the necessities of the house … and also to the food and maintenance of the [lay sisters]” (bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et reglemens pour les religieuses de Ste-Ursule de Troyes, 1:43). We have this from an anonymous commentary, printed in Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:464. Sarre has used financial records of thirty-three Ursuline convents, dating from 1651 to 1791, to compute the gross amount available per head for living expenses. This varies greatly by house and year, from a low of 56 livres to a high of 474 livres, but the great majority of values (59 out of 77) fall below 200 livres (Vivre sa soumission, annexe 51). Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 75. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95. Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:331; “Souvenirs d’un nonagenaire,” quoted in Kaplow, France, 86. A study of all known cases of daughters of the generation of parlementaires of Aix who were born before 1701 shows that 51.0 percent became nuns, 41.7 percent married, and 5.6 percent remained single (Cubells, La Provence des Lumières, 367). Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95; ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29; Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 252. Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 223. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Mémoire de la supérieure, 1689, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 130. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:passim. ad Indre, h 909. am Châtellerault, xxix. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 77. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 250. The écu was worth about 3 livres; the dowry usually demanded at Montargis was 5000 livres. ad Isère, 22 h 174. ad Yonne, g 195. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 231–2. To prevent this loss of reputation, houses did their best to keep their financial problems secret. Thus, in 1722, “for fear that [our] extremity would come to the knowledge of seculars and drive away novices, our Mother Superior forbade us to speak about it with outsiders” (Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:297).

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296 Notes to pages 38–41 56 ad Aube, 128. 57 ad Vienne, j 36 152–3. It is not clear that she ever professed. 58 Avocat Prevost, adviser to the commission, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours.” 59 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:217. 60 ad Yonne, g 195. 61 Avocat Prévost, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 97. 62 Thus, in the archdiocese of Bourges, the abbaye de Landais paid 168 livres in amortissement dues and the abbaye des Dames de l’Estoile, 17 livres (an q3-12). 63 ad Seine-Maritime, d 405. 64 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 172. 65 This was a reduction, allowed after much wrangling. The bill had originally been 42,195 livres (ad Seine-Maritime, d 405). Within a few years the house was bankrupt and the nuns were forced to disperse. 66 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 226; ad Cher, 45 h 8. 67 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346; Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 73; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837. 68 “The classrooms in which they instruct most of the girls of the city, and which make up part of their frontage, have been included in the amortissement tax; however, the said sisters … do not receive any payment for the instruction which they give the girls of the said city” (ad Seine-Maritime, d 346, Ursulines of Dieppe). “Since they devote time and care to the public, they ought to be distinguished from other communities and treated like the workhouses and hôtels-dieu that are employed in the support and feeding of the poor” (ad Rhône, 32 h 5, Ursulines of Lyon). 69 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346. 70 But did not always stay. Mademoiselle d’Arbouville was allotted to the Ursulines of Grenoble, but after finding out that the house was situated near a powder magazine she took her leave. It appears that the community held onto the tax credit (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:140–1). 71 “The seigneurs of the realm who were owed indemnities by the gens de mainmorte, seeing His Majesty seeking out the rights that belonged to his crown, started urgently to demand their rights of indemnity. This was certainly painful, and a heavy burden to the house that had just paid a large sum to the king” (bsem 77 [déc. 1987]: 238). One seigneur, the Princess of Mecklembourg, demanded payment of 2000 livres (ibid., 244). 72 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. 73 Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 221, 226. 74 an g9 160–18. 75 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675, Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins, Journal des fermes. 76 Goubert, 100,000 provinciaux au xvii e siècle, 207.

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297 Notes to pages 41–4 77 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. Since this was a statement accompanying the nuns’ appeal for relief, it should be treated with some caution. 78 bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 180. 79 bsem 70 (mars 1986): 56. 80 Sarre calculates that for the Ursuline houses of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, returns on real estate ran between 3 and 5 percent, while investments in the money market brought in 5.7 percent (later 5 percent) (Vivre sa soumission, 358). This local example supports the general conclusion of Pierre Goubert that in the seventeenth century neither purchase of offices nor investment in land paid as well as rentes constituées (“Le tragique xvii e siècle,” in Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire économique, 2:343). 81 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 175–6. 82 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 227. 83 ad Aude, h 439, 48. 84 Quoted in Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 66. 85 The archbishop of Aix (1739), quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 202. I cannot resist the temptation to point out that the Commission des secours itself discovered one morning that its treasury was short 543,000 livres; that later it had to turn down requests for help because the king had raided its funds and used them to build his own church of SainteGeneviève (ibid., 153; an g9 155–17). I agree with the historian of one small overextended monastery that the women’s fecklessness was not unusual and that under the Old Regime “all bodies charged with the public service … failed to be careful, to match expenses to resources, and to observe wise economies” (Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 21). 86 Lemarchand, “Les monastères de Haute-Normandie,” 14. 87 Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 65. 88 See Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 356–7. Among the monasteries in Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, he has identified five with extensive rural holdings, ten without: “It is interesting to note that these five were established in small or medium-sized towns … and that none of the ten convents of the larger cities … chose to invest in this type of property.” In Rennes, the landholdings of the religious houses were insignificant compared to their other investments (Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 100–1). 89 See, for instance, Gaussin and Vallet. “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 468: “The Ursulines … came to play the role of bankers in the towns of Forez.” 90 Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 131. 91 Ibid., 102–3. 92 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, a poor manager in any case, was also hurt by nonpayment of debts. In 1699 it was owed 80,000 livres by families that had been ruined (ad Vienne, 2 h 77).

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298 Notes to pages 45–50 93 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135. The account that follows is taken from the same source, 136–45. 94 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 328, 547. 95 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 387; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:146. 96 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:102. 97 ad Orne, h 4960. 98 ad Orne, h 4854. 99 In Châteauroux, 34,317 livres instead of around 3400 livres (ad Indre, h 909); in Rennes, 67,000 livres instead of 6000 livres (Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 132). The nuns of Valençay, a small community in Berry, were forced to accept repayments of 36,790 livres, which, they claimed, “accounted for the greater part of their income” (ad Indre, h 47). 100 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 523. 101 Bonney, “The State and Its Revenues,” 171n87. 102 Pocquet gives as an example a rente constituted on the tailles. Before the Visa, the invested capital of 10,800 livres rendered a return of 217 livres; after it, the same capital, reduced to 4123 livres, rendered a return of 89 livres (La vie temporelle, 131). 103 ad Val d’Oise, d 1790; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 840. Argenteuil survived; l’Ile-Bouchard did not. 104 Quoted in Taillard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 18. 105 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. 106 A bitter little comment in one monastery’s annales is revealing in this respect. It had paid the taxes that were demanded, without argument, only to learn afterwards that it “had paid too much, and the collector even made jokes about it” (am Châtellerault, ms. xxix). 107 ad Allier, c 121, report of the subdelegate of Nevers [1728]; an g9 84, report of the intendant on the filles de Notre-Dame of Perpignan [1723]. 108 ad Isère, 22 h 101. 109 Ursulines de Quimperlé, Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:148. chapter three 1 Gabrielle Rubens (1617–57), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:360. 2 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 97. 3 Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and Reform, 114. 4 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 100. 5 Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapters v, vii, ix, x, xvii, xviii, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9.

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299 Notes to pages 50–5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 225. ad Aisne, h 1693, Congrégation de Laon. Printed in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:330–42. Rapley, “La Congregation de Notre-Dame de Provins,” 41. Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 215n. This information has been collated from the record of professions in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 294–319. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 94. Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:152. Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 10–11. Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:166. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 123. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon. For more on this, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. A situation very much regretted by Madame Gueudré, who blames this isolation for the Ursulines’ inability to move with the times. See Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:220. Hugon, “Structure et temporel d’une communauté religieuse,” 61. ad Gironde, g 628–186. ad Gironde, g 628–255. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 34. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Annales ii. Livre d’or de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. The double obligation was entrenched in the vows which superiors took after their election, “to live and die in the the Rule, constitutions, and regulations of our order and to ensure their observance by those with whom I am charged, as also to render obedience to the prelate of this monastery” (quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 241). Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter v, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions du collège et monastère des religeuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 341. “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame (1638),” Documents d’origine odn, vi 12. Petition of the Ursulines of Dijon to Bishop Zamet (1623), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:245. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 126. For details on the way clausura was imposed, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3; Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 2.

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300 Notes to pages 55–62 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 95. Ibid., 98. Quoted in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 129. Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 127–8. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:243. He had reason to dislike this superior, “because she seemed to him to be challenging his authority” (Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 129). She had argued vehemently against him at the Chapter-general. “Recit véritable de ce qui s’est fait et passé en la démission de la Supérieure du monastère de Dijon,” quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:122. “Humbles remontrances que font les Supérieures et religieuses de Sainte Ursule de Langres” (28 juin 1622), printed in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 451–4. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, printed in ibid., 130–1n3. See Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:187. Ibid., 1:xlvi. Ibid., 3:261. Ibid., 1:xlvi. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, suite aux annales. Ibid., Annales ii. bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496, “Mémoire à consulter pour les Religieuses Ursulines de la ville du Mans.” See below, chapter 4. Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter vi, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. Chapter vii, in ibid., 222. ad Orne, h 4837. ad Gironde, g 628. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:125–7; Nanglard, Pouillé historique du diocèse d’Angoulême, 485. Mahul, Cartulaire et archives des communes de Carcassone, 475. ad Aude, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, fol. 17. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:208. bm Provins, ms. 120, 108–9. Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 4. bm Provins, ms. 120, 141. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:233. E. Roux, “Les Ursulines de Périgueux,” 71 ff. The following account is taken from this source. Letter to the superior of the Ursulines of Tours, 13 September 1661, quoted in Jetté, The Spiritual Teaching of Mary of the Incarnation, 66. Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:203.

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301 Notes to pages 62–9 66 See below, chapter 14. 67 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:180. 68 ad Bouches-du-Rhône, 83 h 3, 265–7, printed in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 31. 69 The office appears occasionally in various reports, e.g., in 1790 the Ursuline convent of La Vallette had a prieure perpetuelle (an d xix.6), as in 1777 did the house of the Filles de Notre-Dame in La Ferté Bernard (ad Sarthe, 2e 140/38). chapter four 1 Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme, 10. 2 René Taveneaux, “The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation,” in Pierre Chaunu, The Reformation, 270. 3 Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 4 Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout, 148–58. 5 Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 104. 6 Loupès, La vie religieuse en France au xviii e siècle, 56. 7 Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 124. 8 Dominique Julia, “Le Catholicisme, religion de royaume,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:11. 9 This was the term used by Père Lallemand, sj, in a letter to Fénelon in early 1714. 10 It has even been argued that most of the panel members did not understand French. See Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 320. 11 Briggs, Early Modern France 1560–1715, 191. 12 The text of the bull may be found in Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 24–34. 13 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 344. 14 Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 324–7. 15 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 343; Sarre, “Une enquête délicate,” 397. 16 Julia, “Le catholicisme, religion du royaume,” in Legoff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 21. 17 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 348. 18 Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics, 41. 19 “One point can be taken for granted, the preponderant influence of the bishops in their dioceses in the diffusion or, conversely, the repression of Jansenism” (Schmitt, L’organisation ecclésiastique et la pratique religieuse, 232). 20 Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 54–73. 21 Les Héxaples i, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 22 “A bishop, a parlement can be intimidated; a mystical sect can be ruined by violence or by the use of ridicule; but it is more difficult to overcome a

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302 Notes to pages 69–74

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

conviction that has come to maturity in the solitude of the cloister” (Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323). Quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 84. Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. Hélène Arlon, superior of the Ursuline house of Beauvais, in 1715, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:494. ad Marne, ch. 15588, “Lettre de Monseigneur … l’Evesque Comte de Chaalons … aux Religieuses de son Diocese, au sujet de la Constitution de N.S.P. le Pape, Unigenitus Dei Filius” [emphasis in the original]. Report on the Ursulines of Arc-en-Barrois, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 107. Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:185. Ibid., 3:314–15. ad Aisne, 8 2099/2, “Observations sur l’avertissement de M. l’Evesque de Soissons” (s.d.), 9. Dawson, “Catéchisme de Sens,” 245. See also Armogathe, “Les catéchismes et l’enseignement populaire.” Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:313. Procès-verbal of the visit of 1 November 1733 to the Congrégation of Étampes, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 85. An Ursuline of Melun, quoted in Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1733, 55. Procès-verbal of Languet’s visit to the Congrégation of Joigny, October 1732, quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. ad Aisne, Languet (then bishop of Soissons), seventh pastoral letter (1726). See Bishop Montmorin’s answer when the nuns of Noyers argued that the bull was not a rule of faith: “That it became a rule of faith as far as they were concerned, as soon as he commanded them to submit; that it was the Holy Spirit speaking to them, when he gave them an order” (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1737, 22). Ibid., 1733, 54. Ibid., 1731, 54. Ibid., 1733, 156. ad Yonne, h 2185, “Mémoire pour la Ville de Noyers … au sujet des biens des Dames Religieuses Ursulines, supprimées par Arrêt du Conseil au mois d’Août 1750.” For his actions against the Ursuline communities of Auxerre, Cravant, and Gien, see Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79–80. Ordioni, La resistance gallicane et janséniste, 117. ad Yonne, g 197, quoted in Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours.”

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303 Notes to pages 74–8 45 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1732, 210. Upon which a nun is said to have remarked, “The omnipotence that is attributed to God is due only to M. the archbishop of Sens.” 46 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 47 sne 1735, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 83. 48 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 49 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1734, 219. 50 Ibid., 1741, 42. 51 Ibid., quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 78. 52 There are instances of communities losing their priests almost permanently, e.g., the Ursuline house of Saint-Charles in Orléans, which went thirty-three years without the sacraments (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1756, 60). 53 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 65–6. 54 The grand remonstrances, of which this passage was a part, were drawn up by Jansenist magistrates and reflected the indignation aroused in Paris by the billets de confession affair. See Doyle, Jansenism, 62–3. 55 The most spectacular disgrace was that of the archbishop of Paris, who was exiled on several occasions. But there were others, such as the bishop of Laon, who was called an enemy of the peace by the municipal council, accused of lack of respect by the Crown, and eventually abandoned by his fellow bishops (Labouret, “Démêlés entre Mgr de la Fare Evêque de Laon et la Justice”); and the bishops of Auxerre and of Troyes, both banished from their dioceses. 56 The following incident is described in “Mémoire à consulter pour les Ursulines du Ville du Mans.” (bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496). 57 Grimaldi of Le Mans was one of the least edifying of Old Regime bishops and was thoroughly disliked in his diocese. “The attempts to destroy this house [the Ursulines] was one of the griefs most often alleged against Louis de Grimaldi and his vicars general,” wrote Dom Paul Piolon, who was anything but pro-Jansenist (Histoire de l’église du Mans, 6:523). 58 It regenerated itself, however. By 1790 it numbered nearly forty (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:497). 59 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79. 60 Quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 10. 61 Quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. 62 Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, Le courrier des départements 23 (28 April 1791): 441. chapter five 1 Rogier, Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:122–3. The use of the term “bourgeois” as a synonym for “mediocre” is revealing. It supports a point that I will be

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304 Notes to pages 78–81

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

making, that Catholic historiography has in the past tended to see heroic sanctity as essentially aristocratic. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:56. Pomeau, quoted in ibid., 3:56. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 21. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 312. Ibid., 102. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:436. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 152. Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français au xviii e siècle,” 337. Ibid., 336. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 67. Chaline et al., L’Église de France et la Révolution, 21. Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 15. Chapter general of the Capuchins of Brittany, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 227. Oury, Histoire religieuse du Maine, 149. Plongeron, La vie quotidienne du clergé français, 154. This number includes the 750 abbeys just referred to. Minois, Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne, 70. In the case of Brittany, the male monastic population fell from 1107 in 1768 to 450 in 1790. In 1770, 412 rich Benedictine abbeys housed, on average, ten monks apiece (Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:124). Jean de Viguerie argues that discipline had begun to deteriorate as early as 1660. See “Y a-t-il une crise de l’observance régulière entre 1660 et 1715?” in Sous la Règle de Saint Benoît, 135–47. Of course, there are always problems with generalization. Dinet points out that much of our understanding comes to us through the filter of the Enlightenment, which detested monasticism pure and simple (Religion et société, vol. 2, chap. 5: “Les réguliers et l’observance”). Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:123. But no longer. The number of works that treat religious women seriously is growing all the time. See the bibliography. Julia, “La ‘déchristianisation,› in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 527. Madame de Messey on the subject of the dames of Remiremont, quoted in Bluche, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse française, 186. Dollot, Folles ou sages, 167.

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305 Notes to pages 82–4 28 This is a point made by Timmermans: “From the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for many years thereafter, women did not seek an outlet for their intellectual aspirations in religion” (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 810–11). 29 Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 16–17. 30 Some twenty-five women to a house. See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 31 Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français,” 339. 32 See below, chapter 13, and Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited.” For a tribute to the Ursulines, see Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 202; and to the Congrégation, see idem, 175. Sonnet makes the point that the two congregations offered a more serious education than did the highly aristocratic abbeys. As for the third congregation, the Filles de Notre-Dame, they had no house in Paris and thus escape Sonnet’s notice; but perhaps the sobriquet by which they were generally known – enseignantes – is evidence enough of their serious purpose. 33 For 89 Ursuline houses studied, Sabbagh finds an average of 41.4 nuns per house (“La Commission des secours,” 212). 34 Ibid., appendix, table 2. 35 Madame Gueudré suggests twenty houses. I have counted thirty, plus several houses of the Congrégation. I can find no cases of closings of monasteries of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. An accurate count remains to be made. 36 bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Mémoire de la Commission. 37 Ursulines of Bourges: 73 nuns; should be 46. Congrégation of Bourges: 52 nuns; should be 36. Congrégation of Châteauroux: 54 nuns; should be 43. Ursulines of Linières: 36 nuns; should be 23. Ursulines of Montluçon: 50 nuns; should be 35. Ursulines of Issoudun: 69 nuns; should be 46. The small communities at Valençay and Selles should be united. (an g9 124.) 38 Julia, “La déchristianisation,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. This scenario of “apogee” may be based more on the number of people in the convents during those decades (whose decision to enter religion was already taken, possibly long before) rather than on the number entering. 39 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. My own records for three Breton houses (Carhaix, Quimper, and Quimperlé) show a solid stream of professions throughout the late eighteenth century. In fact, Quimperlé accepted the extraordinary number of eight novices in 1787–88 (ad Finistère, 39 h 1), but too late, of course, to be professed. 40 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 93, 127. 41 See appendix, table 12. My figures do not show the rebound that Dinet refers to.

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306 Notes to pages 85–90 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 394. an g9 121–12. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1762. bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Letter from the Cardinal de Rohan, 20 March 1731. an g9 141–1. Later correspondence reveals considerable anger in the city over the action, because the promised pensions were not being paid on time. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 250. The whole incident is cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 407. an g9 148–15. The Ursulines lost and were closed down (Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come,” 437). an g9 119–16. They fought to a draw; so the bishop was ordered to close a house in another town instead. an g9 147–3. an g9 83. an g9 147–25. They had appealed against Unigenitus during the episcopate of the Jansenist bishop Colbert. an g9 140–4. an g9 121–8 (Auxerre, 1726); an g9 123–2 (Bernay, 1778); ad Allier, c 121 (Nevers, 1728). Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2: passim. The delays were often ended by pursuits in the courts; the defaults were sometimes dealt with only when those responsible found themselves facing a tough new creditor – the First Republic. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:106. Frappa, “Le registre des religieuses de Notre-Dame d’Annonay,” 97. See, for instance, the tables given by Minois in Les religieux en Bretagne, 240, which illustrate what he terms le reflux de la noblesse in several Ursuline convents. Feillens, in “Les Ursulines de Lyon,” gives a table illustrating the fading of the nobility in the Ursuline convents of that city: from 34.6 percent of entrants in the seventeenth century to 24.56 percent in the eighteenth. The decline was most marked among the “old” nobility: 21.96 percent to 7.02 percent (ibid., 49). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:115. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 232. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur d’une congregation féminine,” 216. See, for instance, the improvements in the accounts of the monasteries of Saint-Marcellin (ad Isère, 22 h 178) and Provins (ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675). ad Nord 14946, no. 12. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237.

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307 Notes to pages 90–3 65 “The well-ordered dévot avoided the multiplicity of religious exercises, external manifestations of piety, and mortifications. He was a man of good taste and discretion” (Viguerie, “La sainteté au xviii e siècle,” 125). 66 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 5. The study involves 3245 nuns. 67 Ibid., 196. 68 Quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 133. 69 Mémoires, quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187. 70 Linda Timmermans makes this point with reference to Port-Royal, comparing Angélique Arnauld’s approach to obedience with that of Jacqueline Arnauld (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 792). 71 Ibid., 731, 729. 72 Weaver, “Erudition, Spirituality and Women,” 191. 73 Dinet, “Les visites pastorales,” 46; Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281. 74 Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187; Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 148. 75 Rondeau, Histoire du monastère des Ursulines d’Angers, 197. 76 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 313. Sarre maintains that in Provence, “the education of externes, which had been the original purpose of the [Ursuline] Institute, was not assured always and everywhere” (314). 77 Thus, with regard to the faltering Ursuline monastery of Martigues, the archbishop of Arles recommended in 1749 the hiring of “three or four grey nuns, who would be much more helpful to this town than the monastery” (quoted in ibid., 410). 78 As in Paris in the late eighteenth century, where spaces in the charity schools outnumbered those in the externats of the monasteries by three to one (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, table 17). For more on the development of these congregations, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 6. 79 An entry in the records of the Ursulines of Chinon illustrates this point. Soon after their arrival in the town they received a favour from a local gabelleur (officer in charge of the salt monopoly): “But this charity and relief brought down other troubles upon us, the invectives of the common people who thought that they were only paying the gabelle for our benefit; the peasants … could not look at our house without cursing it, and when we passed them on the water, the washerwomen and the riff-raff called out insults at us” (bs 769–260). 80 This is a point made by Colin Jones with regard to the nursing sisters. See Charity and Bienfaisance, 108. 81 Le jérémaiade des maîtres Portefaix (November 1789), quoted in Fleury, Le clergé du Département de l’Aisne pendant la Révolution, 72. 82 ad Eure, h 1562, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines of Evreux (1700); ad Indre, h 932, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines de Châtillon; report from 1772, quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 281.

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308 Notes to pages 93–102 83 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 80 (Ursulines of Rennes, 1652); ad Drôme, 31 h3 (Ursulines of Romans, 1756). 84 ad Ande, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, 94. 85 Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:115. 86 Ibid., 115–16. 87 A casual entry in the annales of Blois for 1770 mentioned an inspection of the library. “Numbers of unmatched books” were sold for 98 livres, and the proceeds used to buy an eight-volume series and to repair a window (fol. 301). 88 J. Meyer, “La vie religieuse en Bretagne,” 140. chapter six 1 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 5. 2 This memoir was recorded in the early nineteenth century by Marie-Anne de Viarnez, who had been a nun in the convent of Saint-Sever and had come back to be superior of the reconstituted house in 1804. It is one of several written by nuns and printed in the appendix to the third volume of Gueudré’s Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines. 3 aguur (Rome) bc 33, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 436; ac Lille, 17.647, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:296–7. 4 Quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. See above, chapter 4. 5 “Extrait des circonstances concernant la destruction de notre maison de Bourg-Argental,” printed in full in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13. 6 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 7 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:15–17. 8 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 9 ad Marne, 1 l 1386. Madame Coqteaulx was not a particularly senior nun, having professed in 1781. 10 “These alleged slaves mourned nothing but the liberty that was offered to them while, in reality, being taken from them” (Canon Duplessis, quoted in Dinet, in “Les communautés religieuses féminines de Bourgogne et de Champagne,” 478). 11 Viguerie Christianisme et révolution, 71; Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:466; Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras (1949), 175. 12 Boussoulade, Moniales et hospitalières, 253. 13 Le Foll, “La crise religieuse à Rouen,” 334. 14 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 15 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 438. 16 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:14. 17 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:58.

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309 Notes to pages 103–8 18 Relation de la Mère Michèle Bruneau, Ursuline de Château-Gontier, quoted in ibid., 3:507. 19 For example, Anne Dudon of the Congrégation in Longwy, who claimed to have been imprisoned by the other nuns (Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle pendant la Révolution, 3:149). 20 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 264. 21 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 22 Quoted in Nadal, Essais sur les origines monastiques du diocèse de Valence, 27. 23 Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:170–1. 24 They did insist that those wishing to leave should seek authorization from their superiors (Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:77, 82). 25 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 3. 26 It was estimated by an observer that 300 nuns were whipped in Paris (Rapley, “No More Chains,” 911). 27 Le courrier des départements (Paris), 14 April 1791. 28 Ibid., 14 March 1791. 29 ad Nord, l 8867. 30 am Bordeaux, no. 94 (16 February 1792). 31 Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:218. 32 ac Valenciennes, d, 4, 5, quoted in ibid., 1:218. 33 Jacobins of Metz, in a brief demanding the closure of the school of the Congrégation. Quoted in Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle, 3:143. 34 Quoted in Fosseyeux, Les écoles de charité à Paris, 81. 35 Quoted in La Congrégation à Vézelise, 122. 36 Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:128. 37 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 177. 38 Marie-Paule Biron, Les messes clandestines pendant la Révolution (Paris: NEL 1989), 74. 39 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 123–4. 40 Lebrun, Histoire des catholiques en France, 76. 41 Madame Gueudré estimates that 1000 Ursulines out of 10,000 spent some time in prison (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 3:158). Some were executed, notably eleven in Valenciennes and sixteen in Orange – all for fanatisme. 42 For more on those reasons, see Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship. 43 Jean de Viguerie claims that two-thirds of all girls who went to school were taught by nuns (Christianisme et révolution, 31). 44 Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. 45 Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation, 608. 46 Quoted in Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir, 329–30. 47 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 99. 48 Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 307.

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310 Notes to pages 108–15 49 Quoted in Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 190. 50 Tephany, Histoire de la persecution religieuse dans Quimper et Léon, 340. 51 An Ursuline tradition, recorded in Blivet, Quintin: Deux siècles d’un monastère d’Ursulines, 183. chapter seven 1 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:191. 2 See Rapley, The Dévotes, chaps. 2 and 3. 3 Cardinal Bellarmine to François de Sales, 29/12/1616, in Sales, Oeuvres, 17:416. 4 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 1. 5 Ibid., 71–2. 6 Anne-Marie Le Bourgeois, “Dieu aime-t-il les murs?”, quoted in ibid., 3n5. 7 Ibid., 126, 127. 8 Council of Trent, session 25:1, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. 9 Sales, Oeuvres, 11: preface; 25:19–20. 10 Rule of the Ursuline monastery of the Presentation Notre-Dame of Avignon, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 11 See the papal bull for the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques: “The permission to teach young girls who are not pensionnaires will last only as long as it pleases us and the Holy Apostolic See” (quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:104). The founders of the community tried to counter the provisionality of this bull by instituting a “fourth vow” to teach young girls free of charge. 12 “Which I ought not to do, since as I am getting very heavy, if I had fallen, I would have surely hurt myself or perhaps broken my neck” (Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 208). 13 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 152. 14 Contemporary comment on the erection of the Ursuline monastery at Chabeuil, quoted in Nadal, Essai sur les origines monastiques, 25. 15 an g9 151–24, Mémoire sur les communautés de religieuses et de filles non cloîtrées [s.d.]. 16 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 130. 17 “A girl’s desire is a devouring fire / a nun’s desire is a hundred times worse” (quoted in Graham, “The Married Nuns before Cardinal Caprara,” 327). 18 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 101. 19 Quoted in Ponton, La religieuse, 20. 20 For example, the archbishop’s sanction against a monastery in SaintRemy in 1671: “For five years, no novices to be received, to see if in that time the religious can find a place to live in the city, with tighter security and

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311 Notes to pages 115–19

21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

clausura” (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247); the suppression in 1699 of the third Ursuline house in Lyon for “absence of enclosure, being separated from their neighbours only by hedges on one side, so that it would be easy for them [the nuns] to go out and come back in” (official document of suppression, quoted in Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 141). Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 245. Ordinances as follows: for the Ursulines of Angers (1628), quoted in Rondeau, Les Ursulines d’Angers, 69; for the Ursulines of Rouen (1654), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:174; for the Ursulines of Carcassonne (1686), quoted in ibid; for the Ursulines of Cravant (1682), in ad Yonne, g 1640. bm Carpentras, ms. 1419, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 5:3; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 19. Ordinance of the bishop of Fréjus to the Ursulines of Draguignan (1717), quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Report of diocesan inspectors (1670), quoted in C. Roux, Le monastère des Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-le-Château, 67. See above, chapter 5. Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 78. Paul, Correspondance, Entretiens, Documents, 10:658. Colbert, Lettres vi, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France, 369. Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 30. J.-C. Gousselin, quoted in Viard, Langres au xviii e siècle, 354. The fact that Gousselin, a councillor to the presidial in Langres, came from so pious a background makes this and other negative references to monastic life all the more interesting (Dinet, Vocation et fidélité, 193 and table 2). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 10. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 69. Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:245. Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 23–5. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 226. Gueudré makes the same point, commenting that the mystical life of many Ursulines “crystallized around the idea of holocaust and of the state of ‘victim› (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:345). Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 40. Rule of St Benedict, Chap. 2, “What kind of man the abbot should be.” “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame” (1638), in Documents d’origine odn. The usual term in French is supérieur. But since in English the masculine cannot be distinguished from the feminine supérieure, I shall use the term “director.”

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312 Notes to pages 119–22 42 Thus the Ursulines of Aiguepercé had to admit in 1728 that they had had no formal pastoral visit for thirty-five years and that their directors, when they did come, gave only superficial attention to their accounts (ad Allier, c 119). 43 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115. 44 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, viii. 45 Ibid., De l’office de la Supérieure. 46 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, De l’office de la mère prieure, 10. 47 “Règles de la mère première,” in Documents d’origine odn, 7. 48 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 322. Her example was followed by other superiors, among them Thérèse de Brilhac, seven times elected superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, who “went once a week to wash the dishes” (ass s 197 [2/11/1701]). 49 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, De l’office de la supérieure, 26. 50 Description of the Ursuline community of Arc-en-Barrois (1746), quoted in Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 207. 51 “We lived in the most perfect union,” wrote an Ursuline, reflecting on the prerevolutionary days (“Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13). It was a state not easily achieved. 52 Obituaries of Constance de Noguez, Pau (ass s 197, 28/11/1741), AnneThérèse Brunet de la Socelière, Fontenay (ass s 197, 18/4/1740), Marguerite de Terneyre, Riom (ass s 197, 23/12/1741), and Jacquette de Resseguier, Toulouse (aodn b 3j, 6/5/1741) – all superiors in the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. 53 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/5/1711). 54 For example, Catherine Ranquet, superior of the Ursuline house of Grenoble at twenty-one (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 278); Anne d’Arrerac, superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers at twenty-five (aodn Poitiers, b 1j1). 55 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 9/4/1727). 56 In the various Ursuline houses of the diocese of Tréguier, Georges Minois states that women of noble blood “had a quasi-monopoly on the position of superior” (Les religieux en Bretagne, 133). In my own collection, out of 6960 ordinary choir nuns, 980 (14.1 percent) were identified as noble, while out of 517 nuns who were at one time or another superiors, 114 (22.1 percent) were identified as noble. 57 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 99. Marguerite was the daughter of a baron. 58 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 180. 59 ad Yonne, g 1643 (Gien, 1739). 60 an g9 128–9; an g9 83.

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313 Notes to pages 122–6 61 Besnard, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à La Ferté-Bernard,” 245–8. 62 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 63 Though not always. Sarre describes a number of occasions on which bishops took control of the elections. He suggests that by the end of the seventeenth century they had established their authority so effectively that henceforth the communities in his study rarely challenged it (Vivre sa soumission, 218–20). 64 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. 65 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 4, De l’election de la prieure. 66 Ibid.; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris 4. 67 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 216. He gives examples of this practice of alternating the two offices. 68 The different Rules diverged here. Some allowed the superior to appoint them herself, others called for their election by the Chapter. 69 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 39:12. See also Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 116–17. 70 Documents d’origine odn: “Règles de la mère première,” 20. 71 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 1:8. 72 The right to vote was also witheld from nuns if they had three sisters who were already vocales. The object was to avoid the development of cliques within the Chapter. 73 In all the acts of the Chapter of the grand couvent between 1626 and 1662, there was only one case of opposition to the superior’s proposals, and this was overruled ( Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 118). 74 ad Eure, 1475: capitular act of the Congrégation of Bernay. 75 ad Vienne, 2 h 77: Mémoire pour les Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 76 ad Indre-et-Loire, h 844 (1740). 77 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 228. 78 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 171–85. 79 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. 80 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 81 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 3; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 73. 82 ba 4991–280 (Dijon, 15/12/1692); ba 4991–59 (Melun, 28/2/1690); ba 4992–84 (Seurre, 13/8/1691); ba 4990–157 (Evreux, 15/9/1687). 83 aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Langeac, 12/3/1767). 84 ba 4991–27 (Gisors, 21/1/1694). 85 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 8/2/1704). 86 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 8. 87 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 26/8/1737); aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Toulouse, 1754); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 6/10/1714).

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314 Notes to pages 126–31 88 For example, Jeanne Chimbaut de Filhot, who “ruined her health in the continual activity that she undertook to procure the good of the house” (ass s 197 [Bordeaux, 8/2/1704]). 89 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 49. A description of one such chest comes from the inventory of 1790: “a small casket of morocco-leather [containing] eight bags containing 169 items relevant to the foundation and the properties of the convent” (Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 82). 90 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes, 3:231. 91 ass s 197 (Salers, 12/4/1735). 92 Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 105. 93 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. 94 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 230. 95 It should be noted that the upkeep of their churches and the provision of religious services caused a continuing drain on the convents’ finances, because even in the leanest years they had to pay for priests, clerks, and sacristans. No men’s orders had this problem. For convents that went bankrupt, the only hope was that local priests would serve them out of charity; otherwise, they had to go without the sacraments. 96 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 198. 97 ass s 197 (Riom, 1/9/1733). 98 ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692). 99 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 100 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 243. 101 Ibid., 245. 102 ba 4991–83 (Flavigny, 13/3/1694); bs 769 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ad Eure, ii f 2215 (Gisors, 1702); bs 769 (Montbard, 15/4/1675). 103 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 104 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 1. 105 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. chapter eight 1 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, passim. 2 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville at diocèse de Tours, 3:2; “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame,” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254. 3 See the description of the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, recorded by visitors in 1732: “There are certainly towns which do not have as much space as the ‘great convent’ encloses within its walls … They have several gardens, vineyards which supply enough grapes to meet their need for

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315 Notes to pages 131–2

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

wine; a great wood of wild chestnuts” (Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281–2). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58. Regents were given an extra collation before going into the classroom. See, in this regard, an interesting reference in an obituary to a nun who practised unusual mortifications – including eating the bread that was baked specially for the poor! (bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Régistre des décès, 1676). Règlemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:40. Ibid., 2:2. A rule that seems to have been broken regularly during the eighteenth century. Oudart Coquault of Reims, who can always be relied on for the negative view, wrote that “they live like great ladies; their food consists for the very least of beef, veal and mutton … bread made of pure white flour, all the best fruits in their season, and likewise the best vegetables” (Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:381). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 5. ad Vaucluse, Ursulines d’Avignon Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 4:9. ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, État, règlement et statuts des religieuses et autres filles de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. The young Marie Madeleine Hachard, on her way to Louisiana in 1727, had to be warned that the sailors on board ship would laugh at her turn of phrase. “I don’t know how to avoid saying it, even to talking about ‘our nose,’ and Father Tartarine often says, ‘Sister, raise our head’ – all for fun and to distract us from our fatigues” (De Rouen en Louisiane, 60). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 7. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. Ibid., 15. Garnot, Le diable au couvent, 146–7. Barbe was an unusual nun in that she was accused by her community of sorcery, but there is no suggestion that her ownership of so many goods was contrary to the convent’s practice. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. ad Yonne, g 192. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 570. Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 77. ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/7/1698). Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 107. She adds that “owning property in spite of one’s vow of poverty seems to have been more commonly a failing of nuns than of monks” (111).

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316 Notes to pages 133–8 24 Contract cited in Bonneau, Les Ursulines d’Auxerre, 14. 25 For example, Anne de Chaludet, who professed in 1635, thirteen years after the opening of her house, “used (with permission) the money that she received from her parents for the decoration of the chapel” (ba 4991–114 [Nevers, 22/4/1694]). Similarly, Marguerite d’Illiers, whose profession took place eleven years after the foundation of her monastery in Blois, was given a pension of 100 livres “for her small pleasures” (ad Loir-et-Cher 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 99–100). 26 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:133, 236; 2:81. 27 Quoted in ibid., 1:134. The reference is to the Book of Proverbs, 30:8. 28 C. de Marcigny, Le palais de la sagesse ou le miroir de la vie religieuse, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 29 Quoted in Pérouas, La diocèse de La Rochelle, 440 n5. 30 an g9 147–3. 31 ad Yonne, g 192, Ursulines de Montargis. 32 ad Isère, 22 h 171. 33 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, Introduction. 34 Ibid., 8–9. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Ibid., 9–14. 37 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” articles 10 ff. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule, Constitutions, chap. 2. 39 Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 4. 40 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:221. 41 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 126. 42 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 16. Fourier’s philosophy is illustrated in a letter which he wrote in 1606 to the sisters of Saint-Nicolas: “While your little pensionnaires are still all modest, and seem to progress without being led by anybody … you should try to maintain them with gentleness and praise in a spirit of devotion.” Fourier emphatically believed that a child could be maintained in her baptismal innocence. 43 Mère Boulier, Visitandine, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:65. 44 ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737). 45 Jacques Le Brun cites a seventeenth-century debate about which was the more meritorious, holiness “from one’s mother’s womb” or latter-day conversion and hard-won redemption; he concludes that in the seventeenthcentury mind inborn innocence carried the day (“Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 317–30). 46 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 9. 47 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 4:289. 48 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 69.

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317 Notes to pages 139–43 49 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 5/3/1750); ba 4990–140 (Lisieux, 1/11/1684). 50 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709); bs 769–66 (Saint-Pierre le Moûtier, 26/11/1679); ba 4992–158 (Selles-en-Berry, 12/8/1691). 51 Even the autobiography of Jeanne Belcier, the famous Ursuline of Loudun whose erotic behaviour during her possessions was a matter of record, is remarkably tame. See Le Hir, “L’expression mystique dans l’autobiographie de Soeur Jeanne des Anges,” 456. 52 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 53 Marie Le Grand, Ursuline lay sister, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:264. 54 Isambert, Recueil général, 16–520. 55 For more on this, see Hanley, “Engendering the State,” 4–27. 56 Quoted in Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 160. 57 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 58 Ibid., 16. 59 Ibid., 21. 60 La vie de la mère Françoise Fournier (Paris 1685), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 314. 61 Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. 62 Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. 63 ba 4990–215. 64 ba 4991–15 (Eu, 14/1/1693); bs 769–23 (Dijon, 23/9/1684); ba 4990–183 (Quimper, 15/11/1687). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). 66 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 236. 67 “Du voeu d’obéissance,” in Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 22. 68 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” 15:44. 69 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, entretiens, documents, 10:396. 70 Montargon, Dictionnaire apostolique, 6:222. 71 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 321. 72 Catherine de Bar, quoted in Une amitié spirituelle au grand siècle, 67, 160. 73 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 74 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” 75 A point made by Emmanuel Mounier and cited in ibid., 315. It had no counterpart in the Eastern Church, and it did not surface in the Latin west until the later Middle Ages. 76 The following relation comes from bs 769 (Montbard, 15/11/1677). 77 bs 769 (Apt, July 1678). For comparisons, see Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, 42; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 24. 78 ba 4990–211 (Bayeux, 6/12/1643).

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318 Notes to pages 143–7 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). ba 4992–64 (Meaux, 28/10/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). aodn Annonay, b 3j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740; Rodez, 23/2/1730; Périgueux, 18/4/ 1709); ba 4991–120 (Lisieux, 18/4/1693); ba 4991–57 (Montferrand, 19/2/1693). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709, Limoges, 1728, Bordeaux, 9/4/ 1708). ba 4990–14 (Caen, 16/2/1687); bs 769 (Apt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Salers, 19/11/1733). See, for instance, The Life of Henry Suso, referred to in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 241–2. C. Gillotte, Le directeur (1723 edition), quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 316. aodn Annonay, 1j 2; bs 769 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1693); ba 4991–89 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685); aodn b 1j (Toulouse, 17/1/1758). ass s 197 (Béziers, 20/3/1743); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/ 1679). Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 195. ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Forêt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Pau, 20/6/1765). ba 4991 (Amiens, 2/11/1692). bs 769 (Apt, 23/6/1682, Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4993–183 (Montcenis, 12/7/1694). ass s 197 (Riom, 16/1/1740, Le Puy, 10/9/1726). Quoted in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 42. ba 4993–74 (Thiers, 28/2/1685); bs 769 (Saint-Malo, s.d.); ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); ass s 197 (Agen, 25/1/1717); bs 769 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 26/10/1669); ba 4990–196 (Bayeux, 17/12/1683). ba 4991–7 (Meaux, 8/1/1694). ass s 197 (Limoges, 20/11/1735). See above, n97. ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737). ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ass s 197 (Sarlat, 29/4/1727). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 26/1/1765).

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319 Notes to pages 147–52 108 109 110 111 112

See, for instance, Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 120. ass s 197 (Aurillac, 7/5/1719; Béziers 14/2/1734). aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Langeac, 20/10/1786). ba 4990–151 (Bayeux, 6/9/1685). Viguerie, Une oeuvre d’éducation sous l’Ancien Régime, 25. chapter nine

1 Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 15. 2 Thus in 1789 the annalist of Blois, sketching out the life of an eightythree-year-old sister recently deceased, remarked that she was repeating what the older nun had told her many years ago (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 313). 3 Most of the other children also entered either the priesthood or the religious life. See bsem 83 (déc. 1990): 20. 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 152. 5 Isabelle died in the conviction that her prayers would be answered, and so they were. Four months later, Louise entered a convent (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:376–7). 6 When a teaching monastery was first planned for Versailles (not at some distance, like Saint-Cyr, but right in the town, to serve the daughters of royal officers), the authorities warned that the proximity of the Court made the project inappropriate (ibid., 101). 7 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 84–84v. 8 Ibid. 9 bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. 10 This little pensionnaire had a sister, also placed in the convent “while very young,” who eventually became a nun. The annalist recalled that she later said of this pensionnaire “that she had been, as it were, snatched from her family, and that this had been infinitely painful to her.” This suggests that her vocation was pressed upon her by her parents (ibid., 80 [mars 1989]: 5). 11 Recueil des Entretiens spirituels, Oeuvres IX, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 260. 12 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, 5:563–4. 13 A number of studies of Old Regime dowries make this point. For one such study, see Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 241–66. 14 ad Seine-Maritime, d 408. 15 bs 769–91 (Nevers, 8/3/1689); ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 16 ad Gironde, g 632. 17 See, for instance, the death notice of Angélique Mahy, “received in the house in the quality of an invalid” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 212).

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320 Notes to pages 152–6 18 bs 769–185 (Draguignan, 13/5/1684); Notter, “Contrats de dot,” 247. 19 bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès: Marie Romanet (1645); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1652). 20 Ibid., fol. 83 (1670); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Avignon, 9/2/1730). 21 ba 4990–215, Des vertus et saints practices des Rses. decédées en cette maison de Quimper Carentin; ad Eure, Registre pour le couvent de Sainte Ursule de Gisors, no. 96. 22 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:344; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:275; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/10/1781). 23 ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736). 24 Essai sur les nécessités et sur les moyens de plaire, quoted in Bluche, Les magistrats du Parlement, 243. 25 Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse,” 32; Rapley, “Women and the Religious Vocation,” 621 ff. 26 ba 4990–3 (Angers, 1682). 27 bs 769–193 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 12/8/1649). 28 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 12/12/1725). 29 ba 4990–149 (Gournay, 19/6/1685); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ba 4991–134 (Andelys, 15/5/1694). 30 ass s 197 (Pau, 23/3/1739); Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 349; ba 4992–25 (Saint-Denis, 23/10/1690). 31 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:2. 32 Mère de Blémur, Éloges, quoted in Le Brun, “Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 321n17. 33 ba 4991–154 (Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, 24/7/1693); bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 176; ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737); ass s 197 (Salers, 18/10/1728); ba 4993–93 (Clermont-en-Auvergne, February 1670); Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:357; Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 123; ba 4991–30 (Saint-Denis, 28/1/1693); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114. 34 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 261. 35 Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, part 1. 36 Marie of the Incarnation, Selected Writings, 41–2. 37 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 23. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Quoted in ibid., 15. 40 Annales manuscrits du premier couvent de Paris, fol. 92; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1724); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114; ass s 197 (Limoges, 8/6/1713). 41 Annales des Ursulines du Premier Monastère de la Congrégation de Paris, 1:310, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 56.

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321 Notes to pages 157–61 42 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 209. 43 Thus Marie Agathe Marseault was remembered for “diverting some who were on the point of marrying, persuading them to resolve to live in continence” (bs 769–2 [Erfort, 4/7/1677]). 44 bs 769–179 (Draguignan, 11/12/1680); ad Loir-et-Cher, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 196; ass s 197 (Pau, 24/1/1742); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 12/9/1761). 45 bsem 84 (déc. 1990): 21. 46 P. Ayrault, De la puissance paternelle (1598), quoted in Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 11. 47 For example, Marie de Loberie, whose father “loved this dear girl tenderly, as the support of his house” (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Langeac, 12/3/1767]); Françoise Dalon, whose father brought her from Bordeaux to Pau expressly for companionship, only to lose her to the local monastery (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Pau, 31/10/1761]). 48 ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); ass s 197 (Poitiers, c. 1700); ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732); ba 4992–52 (Nevers, 24/5/1691); ba 4990–170 (Toissay-en-Dombes, 13/10/1686); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62; bs 769–84 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690). 49 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 28/1/1763); bsem 77 (déc. 1987): 242; ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 278. 50 Ibid., fol. 300; ba 4990–125 (Bourges, 10/8/1684); ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694). 51 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/2/1770); ibid., fol. 307; ibid., fol. 203; bs 769–42 (Montbard, 15/12/1676); Annales des Ursulines de Blois (20/5/1719); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 23/1/1787). 52 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/11/1733); bs 769–59 (Montbard, 22/11/1676); ba 4992–62 (Noyon, 23/1/1691). 53 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1755). 54 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 26/8/1728; Riom, 23/12/1741). 55 Natalie Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 92. 56 “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent,” in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 462. 57 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 301. 58 ad Vienne, g 723, Sainte-Ursule de Poitiers, Examinations des novices; ba 4990–104 (Magny, 2/7/1675); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 19/10/1781.

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322 Notes to pages 161–5 59 bsem 67 (juin 1985): 252; ba 4991–17 (Seurre, 29/1/1694); bs 769 (Troyes, 24/2/1690); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188; ibid. fol. 111v–112. 60 ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 61 ba 4991–47 (Boulogne, 14/4/1693); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 12/4/1768). 62 Ibid. (Alençon, 6/10/1762); bm Provins, ms. 98: Rivot, Histoire ecclésiastique de Provins, 4:1106. It is interesting to note that these two women became the financial and management experts of their respective monasteries. 63 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737); bs 769 (Montbard, 26/11/1678). 64 ba 4990–215 (Quimper); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (16/3/1691); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–80 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ass s 197 (Saintes, 2/10/1733). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 113v. 66 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2:268. 67 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. 68 Responses sur les règles, constitutions et coustumiers de notre ordre de la Visitation (Paris 1632), quoted in Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 224. 69 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire des Ursulines, 2:217. chapter ten 1 ba 4991–53 (Saint-Omer, 7/2/1693). She was made to wait a year before being received into the novitiate. 2 ad Finistère, 35 h 2, Cahiers pour les entrées des novices de ce monastère de Ste Ursule à Landerneau. Typical of the requirements for the meal are those noted in the customs of the Ursulines of Montbrison: 50 lbs. of sugared almonds for the community, two jars of preserves for the almoners, four loaves of sugar and 6 lbs of preserves for the sacristy (Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:109. Broutin goes on to comment: “Luxury and sensuality have made their way even into the convents.” Given the “crime,” this seems a rather harsh judgment). 3 This list comes from ad Isère, 22 h 202 (Ursulines de Tullins). 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (4/7/1704); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 22/7/1718); ba 4991–262 (Caen, 23/12/1693); ba 4991–138 (Meaux, 15/7/1691). 5 Dinet notes in his regional study of religious orders that the perseverance rate of novices was greater in feminine than in masculine orders, and he attributes this to the “preselection” that took place in their pensionnats (Vocation et fidelité, 69). 6 bs 769–70 (Amiens, 28/12/1689). 7 bm Grenoble, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès, no. 579.

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323 Notes to pages 165–9 8 Contract of 1646, quoted in Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 69. The fact that her father was a creditor of the convent may well have made the success of her vocation more likely. 9 ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); “La vie, les vertus et la mort de la Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph,” in Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 438; ad Eure, h 1577 (Ursulines de Gisors). 10 From the death notice of Marie Geneviève de Razes of Notre-Dame in Poitiers (ass s 197). 11 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:29. 12 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 242. 13 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Richelieu, 13/1/1768); Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:17. 14 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (7/11/1708). 15 bs 769–271 (Chinon, 1638). 16 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 111. 17 Conduite générale et spirituelle que doivent garder les novices, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 18 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 112. 19 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Ste Ursule de Troyes, 3:247; Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 42:4. 20 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule. 21 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, ii, 14:32. 22 Les vrayes constitutions, 1:45, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 23 Gueudré makes this point: “We only need to open the rare writings that have survived the Revolution to appreciate the Ursulines’ familiarity with the Old Testament” – not to mention the New Testament and the Fathers, especially Saint Augustine (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 28). 24 Thus the annalist of the Ursulines of Blois, eulogizing their late superior, Marie-Madeleine Tubert, exclaimed: “How often, coming away from her conferences, did we say to one another that they were worth more to us than many sermons!” (fol. 188). But none of Mère Tubert’s conferences have survived. 25 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:235. The only text that immediately survived Marie’s conferences was a hand-written copy by one of the novices. Most of Marie’s writings were burned before she left for Canada, a practice in self-abasement so common among nuns that it seriously depleted their written legacy to future generations – and to historians. 26 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 114. 27 aodn Poitiers, b 1j. 28 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 68. 29 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/1/1705, Toulouse, 17/12/1704). 30 ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29.

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324 Notes to pages 170–4 31 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89. 32 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon 20/1/1746). 33 Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:148–9. 34 Registre des actes du chapitre, 17 août 1631, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106. 35 Laguérenne, Le couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 58. 36 As, for instance, Françoise le Georgelier, “whose natural delicacy provided a thousand occasions of mortification: the slightest dirtiness, the smell of meat, and all sorts of other things caused a fluttering of her heart” (ba 4991–227 [Rouen, 23/11/1692]). There was even a condition known as mal des novices: a tumour on the knee, brought about by long hours of kneeling (Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 431). 37 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 108. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule. 39 bn ms. 16, Ld 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle. 40 Ibid. 41 G. Augeri, La vie et vertus de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet (1670), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 184. 42 ba 4992–35 (Montluçon, 6/9/1689); Péchenard, La Congrégation de NotreDame de Reims, 1:265. 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662); ba 4992–118 (Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, 12/11/1691); aodn La Flèche, b 1j, Registre des décès (Annonay, 12/5/1641). 44 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:373. 45 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 20/4/1751, Toulouse, 24/2/1772). 46 ass s 197 (Sarlat, 15/5/1729). 47 ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683). 48 ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Fôret, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). 49 bs 768–84. The necrology does not tell us whether her prayers were answered; the fact that the self-abuse made its way into the record allows us to suspect that they were not. 50 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/6/1643); bs 769 (Montbard 15/4/1675). 51 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:197. 52 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 53 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. The following examples are from the same source. 54 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). The author goes on to remark that this nun’s habit of extreme, prompt obedience lasted all her life. 55 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 42.

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325 Notes to pages 174–81 56 ad Seine-Maritime, Règle de Saint-Augustin à l’usage des religieuses de Notre-Dame, 17 verso. 57 Fourier, Correspondance, 3:293. 58 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1645); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/1679). 59 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/3/1730). 60 Benezet, Vie des RR. mères de Terrail et de Bruncan, 53. 61 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 79, cited in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 86. 62 See above, 165, and ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 63 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 81. 64 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (6/5/1704); ba 4991–211 (Montluçon, 26/10/1692). 65 “Les annales des Ursulines de Limoges,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques du Limousin, 168n1. 66 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon, 26/11/1770). 67 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732). 68 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 257. 69 His generosity was rewarded. Magdelaine lived for another twenty-nine years (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 103v). 70 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/6/1784). 71 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/11/1782). 72 Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 65–75; Rivière, Les communautés de religieuses de l’ancien Châlons, 54; an g9 141–5. 73 ad Val d’Oise, d 1791; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:549–50. 74 Intendant Depassier, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 271. 75 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 66. 76 ad Vaucluse, série h, Avignon les Royales, Livre des vêtures et professions. 77 ad Vaucluse, série h, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 184–5. The case was made public when she appealed for an annulment of her vows, after her family was safely dead. 78 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 73. 79 ba 4991–8 (Pont Audemer, 9/1/1693). 80 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692). 81 Quoted in Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 27. 82 Quoted in full in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 93–4. 83 Sommation aux Ursulines, le 3 février 1648, quoted in Notter, “Les contrats de dots,” 249. 84 This rigorous seniority is a boon to the researcher, because it enables her to follow individuals throughout their religious life and also to take note of their disappearance.

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326 Notes to pages 182–5 chapter eleven 1 From John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, part 2. 2 And often came home loaded with donations of money and food, having spent none of the money she had taken with her (ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez). 3 bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1668). 4 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez. Nevertheless Soeur Madelaine received a severe reprimand from the bishop when she exceeded her station and meddled in things that concerned the community (ibid.). 5 “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that, out of the revenue that it provides, they can be fed and maintained; and as well provide something to the needs of the House … as also for the food and maintenance of the sisters of the white veil who bring no dowry, or at any rate, so little that it is not sufficient for their upkeep” (bm Troyes, 2577, Reglements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, 43). 6 ad Vaucluse, h 1, Règles manuscrits de la présentation Notre-Dame (1623), 63. 7 Constitutions de Nancy, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 103. 8 bm Troyes, ms. 2577, Règlements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, no. 93. 9 Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France, 138. 10 I may be criticized for ignoring the male officers of the house: the director, the visitor, and the confessor. I defend myself by quoting Marie-Andrée Jégou, herself an Ursuline: “If the director and the visitor bound the convent to the Church, it was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115). 11 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15. 12 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. This was not the general practice. Other congregations allowed and sometimes encouraged their lay sisters to read. 13 This arrangement is suggested in the death notice of Gabrielle de SaintPierre, a choir nun of noble birth, who was remembered for “not taking the seat due to her rank of seniority, but standing behind the others or among our lay sisters, spinning coarse hemp, or mending the clothes of our poor externes” (ba 4993–166 [Fougères, 3/2/1693]). 14 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. 15 Quoted in Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, 175. 16 See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, and Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs. 17 In his first visit to the Ursuline convent of his town, in 1628, Bishop de Rueil of Angers noted as a “fault against the Rule” the fact that the lay

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327 Notes to pages 185–9

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30

sisters “were given scant consideration by the religious of the choir.” This came after he had interviewed each of the sisters in private (Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 67–71). A similar reproach came down to the Ursulines of Tarbes from their bishop in 1697. He ordered them “to treat the lay sisters with love and charity … not giving them jobs that are useless and beyond their strength, and avoiding speaking to them injuriously and scornfully” (Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses, 223). Mark 10:31. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 119. For example, the veneration after her death of Marie Le Grand (see below); and that of Marie Houre (1693): “There was a danger that all the poor of the city, who revered her as a saint, would break down our grille to have her relics” (ba 4991–77, Montargis). Luke 1:51–2 (The Magnificat). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 26–61. The following account is drawn from these pages. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 51. 62.32 years is the average age at death for all 443 lay sisters for whom my records give age of death, compared with 57.98 years, the average age at death for all 3801 choir nuns for whom age of death is given. Women living in the same house and eating the same food had different levels of longevity, depending on their status. This contrast is noted by Jégou, who remarks that in the first fifty years of the grand couvent, 50 out of the 140 professed choir nuns died, while only 4 out of 29 converses died. Jégou goes on to give what is probably the universal reason for this difference: “The moment a converse postulant showed physical weakness, she was sent away; on the other hand, a choir novice in delicate health could go on to profession if she compensated the house [with a large dowry]” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106). ad Nord, 149 h 8, Ursulines de Lille. See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, tables 6 and 7. Over 90 percent of female servants in these two cities were of rural origin; in both cases, the majority came from districts immediately adjacent. Nicolas de Pesant de Boisguilbert, quoted in Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:261. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 66. The average age at entry of the 719 lay sisters in the sample was 23.74 years. Compare this to the average age of choir nuns entering the same houses during the same period, which was 19.51 years. This was how the converse Jeanne Lanaspeze was described in her death notice (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Toulouse, 10/4/1768]).

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328 Notes to pages 189–93 31 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639). 32 ba 4990–138 (Crépy, 29/8/1686). 33 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:320. 34 Similar cases appear, though rarely, in the records. In 1623 Marie L’honoré, the daughter of a nobleman, “embraced the condition [of lay sister] with fervour … to imitate the example of Our Lord, saying that she had come to serve and not to be served” (ba 4990–472 [Quimper, 1680]). In 1785 Marie-Elisabeth Desmares, a choir novice, made over her dowry to a young woman who had none, and took her place as a lay sister. She survived the Revolution and came back to join the community when it was re-established in 1802 (Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 289, 316). 35 ad Eure, ii f 2215, Registre pour le couvent de Saincte Ursule de Gisors. 36 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639); ibid., fol. 213 (1721); ibid., fol. 109v (1680). 37 ass s 197 (Bordeaux 7/5/1739); ad Eure, h 1593, Congrégation NotreDame de Vernon. 38 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 14/8/1738); ba 4990–194 (Le Havre, 9/12/1685). Marie was credited in her obituary with actually setting up the convent’s pharmacy. 39 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 23/5/1740). A number of other converses are described as shoemakers, though it is unclear whether they brought the skill in with them. 40 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 160. 41 ba 4992–60 (Amiens, 22/1/1684). 42 Marie Vattier, mentioned above, was small and far from robust. However, she lived to be eighty-four, “the most amiable little old lady that one could ever have known,” according to her eulogist (ba 4990–194 [Le Havre, 9/12/1685]). 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89 (1672), fol. 78 (1667). See also Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 245–6. 44 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:514. 45 ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 53–4; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, (1702), fol. 246 (1732). 46 Quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 189. 47 Case cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 460n100. For more on Marie Anne Depeyre, see Reyne and Brehier, Les trente-deux religieuses martyres d’Orange, 308–12. 48 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:131; Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 41n2. 49 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15, “Des soeurs converses.”

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329 Notes to pages 193–6 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60

61 62 63

64

65 66

67

Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:1. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 12:1–20. Ibid., 20:11–14. In a large community this was a full-time job. In her monastery, Magdelaine de Durand “was almost constantly busy making the bread for one hundred and twenty people, religious and pensionnaires” (ass s 197 [Toulouse, 25/4/1719]). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58–9. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 324. Thus, in the Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, the sister-gardener’s tasks included “planting the edges of the walks with dwarf fruit trees and berries such as currants, raspberries, etc., and also roses, rosemary, and such like … which she will keep well clipped and neat” (3:12). Though no tree-climbing was permitted; “that would be indecent and contrary to modesty” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 64:2). ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 54; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 15:2. Ibid., 15:2, 17:4, See, on this subject, an account in the annales of Montargis for the year 1701, of a theft of two dozen chemises off a clothesline in the cloister. “We no longer have to fear such an event now that we are hanging the laundry in the attic” (bsem 80 [mars 1989]: 12). ass s 197 (Poitiers, 8/7/1708). bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 174. aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). It should be added that when workmen were brought in, for building or for repairs, the younger choir nuns were recruited to fetch and carry for them. “They are legion, the Ursulines who served as labourers,” comments Madame Gueudré (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:42). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 112v–113; ba 4993–146 (Magny, 6/2/1685); ba 4990–62 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 4/5/1684). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 10. With more or less skill! Georges Minois records a series of letters written in 1771 by a parish priest in Brittany to the nuns who knitted his stockings: “They are horrible, both for the coarseness of the material and for the ridiculousness of the dimensions. Even the pairs don’t resemble each other, and I believe that twenty-two workers have each had a part in making the eleven pairs.” And so on. See Les religieux en Bretagne, 234. See below, chapter 14.

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330 Notes to pages 197–201 68 Some examples of the changing ratio, during the eighteenth century, of choir nuns to converses: Notre-Dame, Bordeaux: 70:2 (1718) – 27:7 (1790); Ursulines, Carcassonne: 41:6 (1727) – 18:6 (1792); Congrégation, Châlons-sur-Marne: 83:10 (1705) – 33:10 (1790); Ursulines, Evreux: 43:10 (1727) – 20:10 (1790); Ursulines, Gournay: 30:7 (1727) – 18:7 (1790); Ursulines, Guincamp: 59:14 (1729) – 21:13 (1790); Congrégation, Nemours: 55:6 (1718) – 16:6 (1790); Ursulines, Toulouse: 41:12 (1729) – 34:11 (1790); Ursulines, Châtillon: 56:8 (1730) – 21:6 (1790). 69 The superior of Saint-Denis to cardinal de Rohan, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:118. The gist of her letter was that the secular congregations should be suppressed. chapter twelve 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

Fénelon, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 61. “Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi.” Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, 34. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:286. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 1657. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158. Loupès, “La bonne mort en religion,” 8. ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/7/1735); bs 769–140 (Montluçon, 16/3/1666); bs 769–98 (St-Malo, 4/11/1689); ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740); ba 4990–115 (Dijon, 24/6/1684); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); bs 769 (Montbard, 22/11/1676). Oury, Marie Guyart, 328. She would not have been impressed by the fact that the Church would one day beatify her. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, especially chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” ba 4991–21 (Aiguepercé, 14/1/1694); ba 4991–233 (Angers, 1/9/ 1692); ba 4991–186 (Dieppe, 9/9/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 153; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 24/2/1772). “May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last” ( John Henry Newman, sermon, 1834).

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331 Notes to pages 201–4 17 The few exceptions were either women who died while away from the convent or Jansenists. It so happens that all the death notices I have seen were circulated among orthodox communities. For them, the moral would be clear: abandonment could be physical or it could be spiritual; either way, it merited the wrath of God. 18 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 28/3/1725). 19 Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. 20 Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 212. 21 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/1/1764); aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). 22 Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 175. 23 bs 769 (Uzès, 3/2/1722). 24 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 15/4/1733); ass s 197 (Toulouse, 8/6/1738); ba 4992–54 (Montdidier, 22/9/1691). 25 ass s 197 (Saint-Léonard, 13/3/1736). See also ba 4990–94 (Vannes, 15/6/1675): “We beg you to excuse us if Reverend Mother Superior does not herself perform the duty of notifying you of the death of our dear late Mother, but proximity of blood (since she was her sister) obliges us to dispense her from renewing her grief in talking about the subject that has caused it.” 26 ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693). 27 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/3/1723). 28 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/11/1704, Salers, 12/4/1735). 29 aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Perpignan, 22/2/1730). 30 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 23/4/1713). 31 ass s 197 (Narbonne). 32 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 33 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 110. 34 Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 218. 35 ad Isère, 22 h 171; ass s 197 (Salers 1/4/1722); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). 36 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 72. It is to this pious practice that we owe the necrologies and their fund of inside information on the sisters’ lives. 37 bs 769, notice inside the front cover. See also Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 7:8. 38 ba 4990–155 (Dijon, 14/9/1685); ba 4991–99 (Nevers, 27/4/1694). 39 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 14, “Comment les malades se doivent comporter”; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, fol. 36. 40 Thus, “When they have the infirmity that is ordinary to their sex, they will warn the Mother Superior … who will dispense them for three days from

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332 Notes to pages 204–8

41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56

57 58

59 60

performing their mental prayer and assisting at choir … They will perform no austerities … and will get up only at five hours and a half or thereabouts” (Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:16). ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, Règles et statuts des filles de Notre Dame ordre de St Augustin, chap. 8. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 54. For example, Catherine Gignon, who was sent to Paris to receive treatment for “a malignant tumour in her mouth,” and Soeur Tessier, who went to Marmoutier to see an occulist (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 266, 288); and Jeanne Sallonnier, who was sent to Paris to be treated for cancer of the breast (ba 4991–99). ass s 197 (Le Puy, 11/11/1737). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 147; ba 4991–66 (Montluçon, 3/3/1694); ba 4991–205 (Moulins, 29/10/ 1692); Annales des Ursulines de Blois; ass s 197 (Agen, 23/5/1721); ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). ba 4990–185 (Saulieu, 20/11/1687). ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/11/1714); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Le Puy, 16/2/1733). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 14/3/1761); ba 4990–129 (Lamballe, 10/1/1686); ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ba 4992–45 (Épernay, 6/5/1691). ba 4992–6 (Magny, 8/4/1691); ba 4991–227 (Rouen, 23/11/1692). One such infirmary, costing 46,000 livres, was built in Rouen just before the Revolution. Its historian sees it as the product of an eighteenth-century vogue among convents, especially those that received pensionnaires (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 244–5). Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 37. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53. ass s 197 (Sarlat, 13/2/1733); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693); bs 769 (Chinon, 16/5/1664); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Périgueux, 1734); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). The alternative was to buy the medications, and this could mount up. In 1766 the convent of Eymoutiers claimed that its average annual expenditure on “apothecary, drugs, and other things necessary for the sick” was 300 livres, while the doctor’s honorarium was 36 livres (ad HauteVienne, g 723). ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158–9.

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333 Notes to pages 208–11 61 ba 4992–146 (Arnay, 23/6/1691); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 22/5/1711). 62 ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/5/1691). 63 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 6/12/1713); “Abrégé de la vie de la mère Jeanne des Anges,” in Surin, Histoire abrégée de la possession des Ursulines de Loudun, 1:93. 64 Botallo, physician to Charles IX and Henry III, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 63. 65 Ibid. The author goes on to quote an eighteenth-century authority: “We see with distress that some people are bled eighteen, twenty, twenty-four times in two days … If the patient recovers, we must thank the resources of Nature for not succumbing to so many murderous blows.” 66 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 67 Journal de Trévoux, 2185. 68 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Riom, 13/11/1723). 69 Le medecin des pauvres (Paris 1672), quoted in Andrew Wear, “Popularized Ideas of Health and Illness in Seventeenth-Century France,” SeventeenthCentury French Studies 8 (1986): 240. 70 Lebrun tells us that Louis XIV was purged more than 2000 times in fifty years (Médecins, saints et sorciers, 67). 71 ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). 72 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 30/11/1722). 73 ad Yonne, g 192, relation of Antoinette de Sigy. 74 Markham, The English Housewife (1615), chap. 1, no. 99; Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 74. 75 ass s 197 (Riom, 13/11/1723; La Ferté Bernard, 30/6/1727; Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Saintes, 29/2/1736). 76 Most houses kept their doctors on salary, which makes it difficult to know how often they were called in. But we know that Claude Hauterre, physician to the Congrégation of Vernon, paid eighty-nine visits to the community in four years, at a time when there would have been some thirty nuns and possibly as many pensionnaires in the house (ad Eure, h 1591). 77 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 16/5/1785). This “cure through use of electricity” should not be taken to mean electroshock therapy, a development of much more recent times. The use of electricity in the treatment of the sick was in its experimental stage in the late eighteenth century. 78 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/6/1714, Pau, 28/8/1740); ba 4993–97 (SaintGermain, 21/4/1689). 79 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 209. 80 ad Ande, h 439, Annales du couvent des Ursulines fondé à Carcassonne, 3–5. In 1652 they were forced to flee again (13). 81 Boccaccio, The Decameron, 9.

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334 Notes to pages 212–15 82 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 11–12. 83 ba 4991–273 (Amiens, 18/12/1692). 84 Only the plague of 1720 remained, and this was confined to Provence. Sarre concludes from the records that for the Ursulines the incidence of death from that plague was “astonishingly small”: two deaths for a total population of 1100 nuns (Vivre sa soumission, 383). 85 ba 4991–127 (Andelys, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Pau, 18/12/1735, Périgueux, 12/9/1710, Pau, 28/8/1740). 86 Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History, 33. 87 La Condamine, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 170. 88 ba 4993–97 (St-Germain, 21/4/1689). See, also ass s 197 (Limoges, 28/1/1706): “Since the poison could not come out, she expired.” 89 Peter, “Malades et maladies à la fin du xviii e siècle,” 157. 90 bs 769–2 (Erfort, 4/7/1671); ba 4990–155 (Dijon 14/9/1685). 91 ba 4991–225 (Meaux, 16/11/1691). 92 Thus Jeanne Bourelier’s “inner distress … made her so thin that nothing remained to her but skin and bone, and so disgusted by food that one could say she ate only a sixth part of what was needed to sustain her” (bs 769 [Montbard, 15/11/1677]). One wonders if there is a case here for the “Holy Anorexia” of which Rudolph Bell writes so persuasively. 93 King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 123. 94 Jarcho, “A History of Semitertian Fever,” 414; Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 279; King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 134. 95 “L’Hémoptysie,” in Journal de Trévoux, 2190–1. 96 ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 29 (Ursulines de Toulouse), no. 201 (1674); ba 4992–106 (Moulins, 11/12/1688); ba 4993–8 (Meaux, 15/11/1694); ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/4/1711). 97 bs 769 (Sémur, 23/12/1688). 98 Quoted in Lévy-Valensi, La médecine et les médecins français. 99 Journal de Trévoux, 2189. 100 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730). 101 ba 4990–110 (Noyon, 13/11/1687). See also ba 4991–283 (Seurre, 12/12/1692); ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 102 ba 4992–58 (Mante, 14/5/1691). 103 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 1723). 104 “Though the rage [hydrophobia] and plague kill more quickly, they do not seem as cruel as cancer, which leads surely but slowly to the grave, causing its victim agonies which daily make him long for death” (Dionis, Cours de chirugerie [1697], quoted in Darmon, “Être cancereux et mourir,” 296). 105 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 31/1/1784). 106 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 15/2/1743; Béziers, 22/2/1728).

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335 Notes to pages 215–19 107 Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 288–9. 108 bs 769–4 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ass s 197 (Perpignan, 10/2/1730); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/12/1761). 109 bs 769 (Dignans, 6/5/1678); ba 4993–180 (Carcassonne, 26/10/ 1694). 110 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 3/4/1754). 111 I am joining with Georges Minois here, in taking note of “the morbid preoccupation” with death exhibited in the necrologies (Les religieux en Bretagne, 158). But unlike him, I find this preoccupation unsurprising, given the fact that the notices were written immediately after decease, when the authors were still deeply affected by the event. We experience the same reaction today. 112 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 17/9/1725; Toulouse, 29/7/1728); ba 4991–129 (Fougères, 15/5/1691); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 22/4/1742); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685). 113 Caterre, or cathare, is usually understood to be “what we would call bronchitis” (King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 1:24), and it is sometimes used in the necrologies in that sense. But more often it appears as a synonym for stroke, viz. “an attack of paralysis, or a cathare on all of one side.” 114 ba 4993–179 (Rennes, 28/8/1691); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/11/1684); ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ad HauteGaronne, h 221–9, Ursulines of Toulouse. 115 ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733); ba 4990–114 (Avallon, 18/7/1686); ba 4991–11 (Nevers, 10/1/1694). 116 ba 4990–213 (Quimper, 1647); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1694). 117 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692); ass s 197 (Limoges, 22/1/1742). 118 See appendix, tables 9, 10, and 11. chapter thirteen 1 Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, 286. 2 Even the historians of the teaching orders are thwarted by the dearth of evidence. Thus Françoise Soury-Lavergne, late archivist and historian of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame, speaks of the eighteenth century as a period “still poorly known in the history of our company” (Chemin d’éducation, 290). 3 Martine Sonnet makes the point that literacy rose in direct relation to the number of schools available. In Paris, the percentage of working women who could sign their names rose from 34 percent in the seventeenth century to 62 percent in the eighteenth. See her book L’éducation des filles, 84. 4 Compère, Du collège au lycée (1500–1850), 103. Her reference is to male education, but it applies equally to female.

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336 Notes to pages 220–2 5 The lack of much significant evidence, despite his intensive searching, has led Sarre to the conclusion that for the Ursulines of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, free schooling became a matter of minor importance: “The education of externes, the original aim of the Institute, was not constantly, everywhere assured” (Vivre sa soumission, 314). 6 A study of teaching monasteries in Forez remarks on the fact that in all the documents regarding entries, professions, and so on, there is not one mention of a schoolmistress. See Gaussin and Vallet, “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 464. 7 “Institut,” in Trésor de la langue française. 8 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, preface. The Congrégation, together with the Ursulines and the Filles de Notre-Dame, all used the word institut to describe their teaching apostolate. 9 “Extrait de quelques articles du règlement provisionnel [1598],” in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 401–3. 10 La manière de procéder à la réception et profession des religeuses de Sainte-Ursule, 45. 11 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, no. 44, Conclusion. 12 ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon: “Des Classes.” This rule was not often invoked, but it was never completely set aside. At the age of sixty, the distinguished Ursuline of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, Marie de Pommereu, was put back into the senior externe class. The assignment was hard to accept; but, as she wrote, “It fits in with my path and my plan of humiliation” (quoted in Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 47). 13 See above, chapters 1 and 2, and Rapley, The Dévotes, 114–15. 14 This is a resumé of the contract between the city of Tonnerre and the Ursulines (1628), cited in Hardy, “Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 8–9. Many similar contracts survive. 15 an g9 128, Congrégation de Châteauroux, 1723. Many comparable statements exist. To give some examples: “In conformity with the contract passed with the town … they have given all the instructions necessary for young people, without retribution” (an g9 164–19, Ursulines de SaintPierre le Moûtier, 1742); “They have always complied with their duty for the instruction of young girls; they do this gratis” (an g9 119–14, Ursulines d’Angoulême, 1763); “The religious were instituted with a view to the public good of the city, that is the free instruction and teaching of poor girls” (ad Haute-Loire, série L, Ursulines de Montbrison, 1790). Françoise Soury-Lavergne has collected testimonials of this type for almost every convent in the Compagnie de Filles de Notre-Dame (Chemin d’éducation, 316–17). 16 Annaert (Les collèges au féminin, 173) gives the higher number, which he argues was common across the north and in the Low Countries. The lower number comes from Saint-Bonnet-le-Château in Forez (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:176). It is probably typical of school populations in

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337 Notes to pages 222–4

17

18

19

20

21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

other small towns such as Gisors, which declared about the same number who were “instructed and taught to read for nothing” in 1767 (an g9 134). “Culling” may be too controlled a word to describe the process. In some places, bags of ecclesiastical or feudal records were used to light revolutionary feux de joie (Saint–Genlis, Inventaire des archives municipales de Châtellerault, introduction). A.-L. Gazier makes the same observation about the hospitalières of the rue Mouffetard in Paris; he points out that in a correspondence lasting for thirty-five years and filling four large volumes, “never … is there any question of the hospital and the patients” (Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal, ix, 165–6). See, for instance, am Lyon, gg xix, 371, Request from the Ursulines for assistance (1659): “For the last fifty years they have always taught the girls of the city to pray, sew, read and write, and without any recompense; and they have done this in a low room … in eminent peril of total collapse.” The city council, “being duly informed of the usefulness and benefit which comes to the public of this city through the instruction of girls which the religious undertake at no charge,” awarded them 1200 livres. ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2560, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 54; ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h 3 90, quoted in Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 124. ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837, Ursulines de Chinon. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:176–7. The nourishment of needy students was a serious commitment for teaching monasteries. See “Direction des classes externes,” quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 198. Also see the accounts of the Ursulines of Épernay, which record in 1735 “each week, from November 1 until Easter, twelve pounds of bread” for their poor children (ad Marne, 84 h2). Entries like this are found in other monastic records. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:3. Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 56; Petit, “Les Ursulines de SaintDizier,” 61; Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 264. This last house, the nuns claimed in a statement in 1760, represented a lost rental of 300 livres. ad Val d’Oise, d 1790. Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 297. an g9 167–10, Religieuses de Toulouse, 1729. Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 55–6. an g9 154–16. ad Vaucluse, 1g 26. The record adds that “he has been edified by the manner in which they observe this important point of their institut.” He later moved them into a new building. an g9 156–17.

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338 Notes to pages 225–6 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47

Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:45. bm Provins, 211, item 13. See also Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 61. an g9 121–8, Ursulines d’Auxerre, 1766. Filles de Notre-Dame, Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon. That in some parts of the country the classrooms could become very uncomfortable may be gauged from the fact that “in the worst cold” a stove might be provided in the anteroom “so that the regents can warm themselves after they leave the College” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 60:7). Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:155–6. Thus the Ursulines of Épernay were able to buy brooms, pens, ink and paper, sewing materials, and sweets and prizes for the children, all out of a legacy from a priest (ad Marne, 84 h2); the Ursulines of Faubourg SaintJacques in Paris benefited from a fund set up by one of their nuns to provide heating for the free classrooms (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 143). Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 74. She makes the point however, that the monasteries’ day schools were generally better off than other free schools. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. For more on the content of the pedagogy, see Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited,” 310–17. Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux (Mons), quoted in Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 165. Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de Tours, 55:3. Neither she nor the regents were to administer physical punishments themselves; this task fell to a lay sister “with her face veiled,” in a private place (Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:54). Prizes, on the other hand, seem to have been given out fairly lavishly, if we can judge by their place in surviving day school accounts. Quoted in Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 375. Re the “turning down” of skirts and sleeves, during working hours the sisters doubled up their outer skirts, securing them at the back with a pin. Their shorter, less voluminous underskirts allowed them more freedom of action. For the same reason they folded back their long outer sleeves. The full regalia of overskirts to the floor and sleeves that covered the knuckles was reserved for formal occasions. ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). This is how Anne de Pileadvoyne de Coudraye is described. The notice adds: “She was still mistress general of externes and was preparing to teach the catechism lesson when she fell sick” (ba 4991–125 [Andelys, 12/5/1694]). The existence of these specialists is frequently noted in the records, e.g., Marie de La Barre, Ursuline of Paris, who acted as “assistant to the mistresses in the Externe school, so as to help them wherever she could; and

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339 Notes to pages 226–9

48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63

she taught these little girls their reading and arithmetic“(Journal des illustres religieuses, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 146). ba 4991–263 (Caen, 23/12/1693); bs 769 (Dijon, 30/11/1682); ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693); ba 4991–152 (Mâcon, 10/6/1693); ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/4/1691); ba 4990–177 (Magny, 4/11/1681); ass s 197 (Béziers, 10/6/1707). In 1729 seven nuns out of a community of forty-one were “constantly occupied” in the Ursulines’ free school in Toulouse (an g9 167–10); in 1757, of the thirty professed choir nuns at the Ursuline monastery of Gournay, only four were assigned to the day school (ad Seine-Maritime, d 392). These ratios are fairly typical. The Ursuline community of Quimper numbered twenty-seven in 1790; of these, only four were offically “aux externes”; but the mistress of novices, the cellarer, and two novices were also working in the day school, thus doubling its staff (an dxix/15). Lefebvre, “Gisors: Les écoles avant la Révolution,” 10:27; ass s 197 (Avignon, 24/10/1734); ba 4993–66 (Laval, 26/9/1686). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame (1690),” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. Morey, La vénérable Anne de Xainctonge, 2:71. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 144. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 55:9. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 180. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. Thus the nuns of the Congrégation in Bourges complained in 1667 that “because the city is large the classes are always full, so that they cannot even receive the smallest children who present themselves, for lack of space” (ad Cher, 48 10). On the other hand, the Ursuline monastery in Montbard, with its fifty nuns, had only the girls of a town of some 1300 inhabitants to teach (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 51). Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 8. Lebrun, La vie conjugale sous l’Ancien Régime, 138; Babeau, Les artisans et les domestiques d’autrefois, 158. The Ursulines of Avallon, in a deposition in 1747, claimed to be teaching 100 externes, including bourgeois children not yet old enough for the pensionnat (an g9 121–12). Many nuns whose names appear in the monastic records began their own schooling this way, e.g., ba 4991–47, 4991–61, 4991–66, 4991–97, 4991–263, 4993–83; ass s 197, Alençon (23/2/1741), Perpignan (21/8/1737). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre Dame de Châlons,” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. an dxix/6, Religieuses de Notre-Dame du Puy.

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340 Notes to pages 229–31 64 “Règlement pour les religieuses de Saincte Ursule du diocèse de Langres,” quoted in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 457. 65 Règles, quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. 66 ad Vaucluse, h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 67 “Among the Ursulines, at least in the externat, rich and poor sat side by side without any question of any kind of segregation” (Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 136). 68 Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 196–7. 69 ad Vaucluse h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Presentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 70 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, part 2, 3:166. 71 Filles de Notre-Dame, “Règles et constitutions (1638),” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 206. 72 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes. 73 In Grenoble the decision to erect a paying externat was made, not without some soul-searching, in 1660 (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 262). 74 an g9 163–6 (1763). “School” is here used in the old sense of classroom. 75 Martine Sonnet gives a detailed list of all these different schools as they existed in Paris in the late eighteenth century. By her calculation, there were 11,000 places available for a total feminine school-age population of 49,000 to 66,000 (L’éducation des filles, 292, 82). 76 an g9 83 (1763). 77 an g9 160–10, Protest of the mayor and consuls of Saugues against the suppression of the Ursuline monastery of that town (1762); an g9 134–15, Protest of the notables of Gisors against the suppression of their Ursuline house (1768); ad Haute-Vienne, g 727, “État des religieuses du diocèse de Limoges” (1750). 78 In Noyon, for instance, towards the end of the Old Regime, the Ursulines’ day school of almost 200 students was divided simply into one senior and one junior class (an g9 149–23). In 1734 the Ursulines of Saumur claimed in a deposition that “they instruct free of charge [my emphasis] all girls poor and rich” (an g9 119–10). 79 ba 4993–14. I am reminded here of a book to which I contributed, A Century of Schools, which honoured the memory of a woman who had for many years been the first-grade teacher in the village of Wakefield, Quebec. The same thing was said of her. 80 For example, Marguerite du Bocs Dangiens, a member of “one of the most noble families of Basse-Normandie,” who was “instructed in the day school of our reverend mothers the Ursulines of Rouen,” and Anne d’Arripe, “of a very good family” of Pau, who passed from the day school into the board-

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341 Notes to pages 231–5

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98 99

ing school and then into the novitiate (ba 4991–97 [Gisors, 8/4/1694]; ass s 197 [Pau, 12/7/1737]). Petition of the town council of Hédé in favour of the Ursulines (1768), quoted in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 148. Fleury, preface to Grand catechisme historique, quoted in Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 9:324. “Règlements de la communauté des filles de Ste-Anne,” quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 229. Guerin, L’eloge des religieuses de Saincte Ursule, 31. La Salle, Règles chrestiennes, chap. 7, “Du nez”; chap. 10, “Du baillir, du cracher et du tousser.” aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Saint-Flour, 10/11/1791); Reglemens des Ursulines de Paris, 186. This story is recounted by Rondeau, who claims that it was first recorded by contemporary chroniclers. See Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 182–3. Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 273. Quoted in Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 46. Règles (1623), cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. ba 4991–181 (Saint-Denis, 25/9/1691). bsem 79 (oct. 1988): 52; ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733). ba 4992–160 (Abbeville, 28/5/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). For some reason, the eulogist tells us, she never saw the child again. Were the parents offended? But the practice of licking the matter from a child’s eyes was common, though it was usually done by servants. ba 4993–166 (Fougères, 3/2/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1/11/1715); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). bs 769 (Semur, 19/12/1675); ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux, cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 202–3. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. chapter fourteen

1 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 4:1. 2 Quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 241. 3 Brockliss, French Higher Education, 82–3. 4 Quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 104. 5 Snyders, La pédagogie en France, 39.

20_Notes.fm Page 342 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

342 Notes to pages 235–40 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 19. Conference of 1702, quoted in ibid., 30. ad Seine-Maritime, d 371. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 71. Règlements, quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 6. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:40. According to Sarre, the pensionnats of the Ursulines of Provence held, on average, about a dozen girls each; often the numbers fell to three or four (Vivre sa soumission, 305). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:268. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:101. Madame de Maintenon herself, who often helped in the morning combout at Saint-Cyr, frequently encountered them there (Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 102). aodn, Code d’Alençon, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 238. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:5. Ibid., 3:7. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, part 1. La civilité nouvelle contenant la vraie et parfaite instruction de la jeunesse (1671), quoted in ibid., 18. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 3:332. “The monarch took no baths, save (rarely) for medicinal reasons” (Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, 61). See Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 437, for negative comments collected in 1734. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 96. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:6. bn 16, Ld. 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle, vi. “Checkers, chess, billiards and other like games where the mind and the body are exercised together” (Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation 239. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 91. Quoted in Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 771. Conduite chrétienne ou Formulaire de prières à l’usage des pensionnaires des religieuses ursulines (1734), quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 167. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 248–9. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:57. Hachard, De Rouen à la Louisiane, 10. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:24,2; 3:23,31. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 26 (Ursulines); Baichère “Procès verbaux et ordonnances des visites episcopales,” 156. ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 29/9/1710).

20_Notes.fm Page 343 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

343 Notes to pages 240–4 37 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:24. 38 Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 117. 39 Loc. cit. However, she hated her subsequent stay in the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. 40 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 270. 41 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:34–5. 42 Ibid., 8:85. 43 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 96–7. 44 Quoted in Brockliss, French Higher Education, 186. 45 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:235. 46 Ordinance for the Ursulines of Carcassonne, in Baichère, “Procès verbaux et ordonnances,” 156. 47 Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 732. 48 For example, the death notice of Marie Mahi (d. 1688): “She was so well grounded in her religion that she would have amazed people by her power to defend it if her state and sex had permitted her to speak in public” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 115v). 49 As happened in Rouen in 1717: “That year, in response to the pressing demands of the families, a dancing master was admitted into the convent.” The archbishop agreed to it, and “the nuns submitted” (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 197). 50 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 85; Sonnet, L’éducation des filles 111; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:9. 51 Thus the account books of the Ursuline monastery of Montbard noted payments for drawing and painting lessons, as well as lessons in harp, harpsichord, guitar, violin, and mandolin (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 40). 52 Quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 190–1. 53 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:249. 54 Ordioni, La résistance gallicane et janséniste, 118. 55 The records kept by the Ursulines of Saint-Avoye in Paris show that between 1763 and 1792, 10.6 percent of pensionnaires came from the titled, military, and land-owning noblesse, and over 50 percent from “officers, financiers, and liberal professions.” Most of the rest came from the merchant classes (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 90). Fifteen percent of the house’s pensionnaires during this same period came from the colonies (ibid., 95). 56 Ibid., 198–9. 57 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 302. Compare this situation to the serious advances made by the Ursulines of the north, catalogued by Philippe Annaert in Les collèges au féminin, passim. 58 This is a point made by Julia (Les trois couleurs du tableau noir) and also by Sonnet, who speaks of “the missed rendezvous between feminine education

20_Notes.fm Page 344 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

344 Notes to pages 244–50

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

and the Enlightenment [which] is repeated with the Revolution” (L’éducation des filles, 287). Quoted in ibid., 283. Cited in Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 53. ad Var, 34 h 4, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 309. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, cited in Dinet, Religion et société, 1:59–60. Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:356–60. Both these cases are drawn from Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 26–7. am Châteaudun, gg 51. bm Provins, 115, 565. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 152–9. ad Yonne, g 192. Mémoires de la mère de Kervénozaël (Quimperlé), cited in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:151. Letter to the religious of his diocese, quoted in ibid., 2:150. All these examples come from Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 124. For this, the record shows, she rewarded the nuns generously (Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 74). Fourier, Correspondance, 3:73. Ibid., 276. Loc. cit. Ibid., 73–4. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:358. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:13. The young woman escaped from the parlour some time later, in circumstances that must have seemed as suspicious then as they do now (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 151–2). ad Orne, h 4860. bsem 70 (mars 1986): 197. This promise remained unfulfilled ten years later (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:364–5). Ibid. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 254–5. ad Aube, g 148. bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 187. Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 151–2. The word is quoted from this text. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:234–5. ad Haute-Garonne, h 221.29–135. ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736; Sarlat, 12/7/1736; Agde, 14/3/1743). ad Orne, h 4862.

20_Notes.fm Page 345 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

345 Notes to pages 250–5 92 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 93 ad Vienne, 2 h 77, Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 94 The Ursulines of Nîmes, quoted in Doumergue, Nos garrigues et les assemblées au désert, 45. 95 an g9 167–9. 96 ad Indre, h 944. 97 A poverty documented in its appeal to the Commission des secours (ad Indre, h 947). 98 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 229, 234. 99 Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 12. 100 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188. 101 ad Indre, h 944. 102 Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 30. He notes that two strange nuns were imprisoned in this convent until they accepted the bull Unigenitus. 103 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 5. 104 See Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 105 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 106 ad Yonne, g 192. 107 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 1729; Toulouse, 1733). 108 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 627; am Châlons-sur-Marne, gg 62; Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; ad Val d’Oise, d 1861. 109 Letter of 27 October 1790, cited in Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16. 110 ad Vienne, 2 h 5–77. 111 Roux, Les Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-en-Lyonnais, 67–8. 112 After Parlement ruled in her favour, she left the monastery and married (C. Roux, Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:170–6). 113 Sallé, “Ecclésiastiques et religieuses à Issoudun,” 23. 114 ad Indre, h 905. 115 Ibid. 116 ad Marne, 1 l 1405, 84 h. 117 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 118 ad Cher-et-Loir, 61 h 3; ad cdn h, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. 119 ad Indre, h 910. 120 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237; Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 111. 121 According to Provost, by the time of the Revolution the convents of Brittany were drawing the bulk of their revenues from their pensionnats (“Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 258). 122 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 123 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:554.

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346 Notes to pages 255–61 124 Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16; an g9 123; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 125 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. conclusion 1 2 3 4

am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame. Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 167. Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 56. According to Langlois, 60 percent of religious women were now over fifty years old, 33 percent over sixty (Le catholicisme au féminin, 90). 5 According to Oury, the period of reconstitution of monasteries lasted from 1806 to 1811. After that, a new phase began, of completely new foundations (“Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 6 In all, some 130 Ursuline monasteries were established by the late nineteenth century (ibid., 115); the other two congregations also rebuilt themselves successfully. But by now the monastic orders had been largely bypassed by secular congregations working under central direction (Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 84). 7 Quoted in Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 194. appendix 1 The exact number of women who belonged to the three teaching congregations during the Old Regime has never been accurately computed and never can be. In 1700 there were some 460 houses (62 Congrégation, 51 Notre-Dame, approximately 350 Ursuline), but there had been more previously, and there were fewer in the following years. To our uncertainty about the number of houses is added an uncertainty regarding their populations. These varied enormously. From house to house and from one time to another, they might exceed sixty, or they might number twenty or less. However, surviving monastic registers allow us to gauge the size of communities from the total number of professions they recorded. If around 200 from foundation to suppression, we may posit a medium-sized community of 30 members on average; anything under 150 would suggest a small community averaging 20 or less; anything over 250 would indicate that, at certain periods at least, this was what Dominique Dinet has called a “plethoric” community. Taking the 25 communities for which I have complete lists of professions, I find that the average number of professions per community, from foundation to suppression, is 200. If I multiply this by 460, I reach the number 92,000.

20_Notes.fm Page 347 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

347 Notes to pages 262–80 2 Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population française, 2:317. The northern region was the domain of nuclear families, the southern, of extended families. See map above, 275. 3 See the notation on the first page of one of the volumes: “Read on October 1777 during the meal” (ba 4990). 4 Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 161. 5 See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women.” 6 Devos, L’origine sociale, 259. 7 Viguerie, “La vocation,” 30–4. 8 L. Henry and J. Houdaille, “Célibat et âge au mariage aux xviii e et xix e siècles en France,” Population 24 (1979): 60; Hufton, “Women without men,” 357. 9 In Beauvais in the seventeenth century, according to Mousnier, “well-to-do people died between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-five” (Institutions, 1:707). 10 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 90. 11 Inventory of 1790, quoted in ad Eure, 283.

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abbeys, 15, 62, 80, 238, 243, 293n63 Acarie, Barbe, 188, 190 André, Gante (Congrégation), 91 annales, 95, 119, 182, 186–7, 188, 191, 245, 266–7 anticlericalism, 4, 18–19, 21 Ariès, Philippe, 198 Arnauld, Angélique, 18 Arnauld, Antoine, 137 Augustine, Saint, 64–5, 67 Augustinians, 65–7 Augustinus: condemned by Rome, 65 “baptismal innocence,” 137–8 Baudet-Drillat, Geneviève, 199, 201 Belcier, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 208, 317n51 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, 112 Bellegarde, Octave de, archbishop of Sens, 51, 52, 58 Benedict, Saint, 139; Rule of, 118 bereavement, 202 Bérulle, Pierre de, Cardinal, 143 Bible: studied in convents, 91, 95, 168–9 billets de banque, 22–3, 45–7, 120, 123, 170 bishops, 7, 24–5, 31, 32, 33, 35, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 76, 101, 132, 133, 134, 181, 222, 250, 252, 255; appellant, 68, 70; constitutionnaires,

68–9, 75–6; and free schools, 222; Jansenist, 24, 68–9; ordinances of, 35, 115–16; pastoral visits by, 115, 119, 220; powers of, 42, 49–50, 54, 68–9, 75, 122, 177; and regulars, 50–1; relations of with communities, 7, 49, 50–1, 54, 140, 185; responsibility for ensuring clausura, 34, 115–17; and Revolution, 96, 103–4 Bona, Cardinal, 66 Boniface VIII, Pope, 112 Bordeaux (city), 13, 104, 189 Borromeo, Carlo, archbishop of Milan, 56 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, bishop of Meaux, 157, 180 Boufflers, Angélique (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 192 Bourdaloue, Louis, 91 Bourelier, Jeanne (Ursuline) 142–3, 334n92 bourgeoisie: in monasteries, 89, 94 Bourges (archdiocese), 83 Bourges, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 38, 117 Brichanteau, Philibert de, bishop of Laon, 51, 58 “the Bridegroom,” 128, 135, 136, 140, 141, 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 162. See also Jesus Christ

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Brilhac, Thérèse de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121, 312n48 Brittany, 8, 17, 108, 304n19, 345n121 Buvée, Barbe (Ursuline), 132 cahiers de doléances, 26, 80 canon law, 151, 177 Capuchin(s), 18, 65, 97–8. See also regulars Carcassonne (city), 93–4, 211 Carmelites, 15 catechism: in the eighteenth century, 79; Gondrin's, 71–2; Languet's, 71–2, 73 Catholic Church, 14; and the Crown, 24; eighteenth-century, 78–80; nineteenthcentury, 107–8; and the Revolution, 96, 100–1, 103–4; on sin and guilt, 200; and women, 9, 239. See also Catholicism Catholic historiography, 5, 289n6, 303n1 Catholicism: eighteenth-century, 78–80, 83, 90; seventeenth-century, 27, 66, 79, 141–2, 156. See also Catholic Church Catholic Reformation, 24, 27, 65, 66, 79, 255 Caylus, Charles de, bishop of Auxerre, 69, 73, 77 Châlons-sur-Marne (city), 32 Chantal, Jeanne-Françoise de, 161, 163 chapter, 56, 197; powers of, 58, 75, 76, 122–3, 173–4 chastity: feminine, 112, 117; vow of, 13, 135–9, 140, 155, 162, 187 choir nuns, 182, 183, 185, 194–7, 270; decline in numbers of, 196 Cistercians, 18. See also regulars Civic Oath (1790–91), 96, 99, 103–5 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), 96–7, 99, 103 clausura, 8, 34, 111–18, 127–8, 183–4, 205; bishops the guarantors of, 115–17; and day schools, 113–14, 223–4; exemptions from, 204, 205, 211; legislated by Boniface VIII, 112–13; legislated by Trent, 50, 113; limitations created by, 23, 32–3, 41, 42, 43, 98; women's defence of, 117–18; women's resistance to, 55, 63. See also cloister clergy, 46; constitutional, 96, 106–7; refractory, 96, 104, 105, 106–7; secular, 30, 50, 79; tax exemptions of, 19–20 cloister, 8, 26, 56, 162, 182–3; adult pensionnaires in, 244–56; men allowed

into, 116; pensionnat separated from, 236. See also clausura clothing: admission to, 173–5; age at, 272–4, 277–8; ceremony of, 164, 180; expenses of, 164–5; records of, 263, 271 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 21, 23, 35, 117 college(s), male, 93, 222, 235, 242 commende, 25 Commission des réguliers, 24, 80, 103 Commission des secours, 24, 49, 82, 83, 84, 87, 103, 117; policies of, 42, 83, 85– 7, 277, 278, 297n85 communities, 111; cliques in, 120; democratization of, 89, 94–5, 282; drop of numbers in, 82, 278–83; and Law Crash, 7; morale in, 82, 129, 133–4; mutual isolation of, 126; recruitment to, 262, 277–8; similarities between, 11; and “singular” nuns, 146–7 community, 14, 147, 163, 199; converses in, 182–3; internal organization of, 184, 192–3, 197 Compagnie de Notre-Dame, 6, 15, 120, 174, 250, 253, 270; Rule of, 136, 229 Compère, Marie-Madeleine, 219 Comtat Venaissin, 13 Condorcet, Jacques-Marie de, bishop of Auxerre, 73 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 6, 91, 93, 174, 177, 199, 211, 227, 242, 246–7; desire of for a generalate, 52 congregations, teaching, 9, 82, 219, 234, 261; and elites, 243; religious instruction the priority of, 239; tributes to, 231, 243–4; views of on childhood, 238–9 constitutional church, 27 consumption of the lungs, 143 “conventual invasion,” 16–18, 27, 28, 33, 276–7 converses, 124, 182–97, 262, 270–1, 273–4, 295n35; average age at entry, 327n29; average age at death, 327n24; duties of, 193–4, 237–8; forbidden to teach, 184, 196; illiteracy among, 190; loyalty of at Revolution, 103; noble, 192, 328n34; rules for, 183–4, 188–9 Coqteaulx, Marie-Jeanne (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 101 Coquault, Oudart, 31, 192, 315n9

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Cordeliers, 18. See also regulars Counter-Reformation, 5, 14–15, 224; women in, 106–7 Court, 23, 87, 150, 319n6 Cromwell, Oliver, 3 Crown: and coeducation, 14; information gathering by, 221, 261, 269; officials of, 178, 250, 251; policy toward religious houses, 20–1, 85–7; and taxation of the clergy, 19–22 day schools. See externats death, 198–204; attitudes towards, 200–1, 218; records of, 263, 269–71 death notices, 124, 132, 133, 138–9, 143–7, 148–9, 152, 154–5, 156–63, 165–7, 182, 186, 199, 201, 203–4, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 236, 238, 261, 269–70 Devil. See Satan dévotes: eighteenth-century, 82, 107, 162; as seen by revolutionaries, 104 dévots: and education of children, 235; and education of girls, 241–2; eighteenth-century, 90, 107; seventeenth-century, 65 Dinet, Dominique, 84, 103, 169, 175, 277 director (canonical superior), 57, 119, 124 diseases: cancer, 205, 208, 215–16; colera morbus, 205; “colic,” 215; dropsy, 205, 209, 213, 217; epidemic, 208, 210, 212–14; malaria, 212, 214; “miserere,” 215; nephritis, 206, 209; phthisis, 214, 248; plague, 187, 210–12; pleurisy, 209, 214–15; pneumonia, 215, 217; quinsy, 213; scrofula, 208; smallpox, 212–13; typhus, 212 dizainières, 227–8 doctor(s), 116, 204, 206 dowries, religious, 20, 32–8, 84, 87, 89, 90, 125, 196; compared to marriage settlements, 151, 271; unpaid, 88 dowry, 150, 152, 164–5, 170, 175, 182, 183, 190; lack of, 191–2; lowered in times of need, 37, 197; problems over, 169–70, 175, 176; work to earn, 162 drama: in monastic pensionnats, 92, 242–3 Dubé, Dr Paul, 209 Du Terrail, Thérèse (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 174

education. See instruction election of superiors, 50, 58–9, 122; uncanonical, 59, 74, 75, 197 elites: and monasticism, 21; and religion (eighteenth century), 80; and teaching communities, 16–17, 88–9, 94–5, 235–6, 243 Enlightenment, 78–9, 80, 82, 103, 255, 257; and girls' education, 343n58; and monasticism, 24, 26, 28, 115, 304n21; and religion, 78–9 entry: records of, 263, 269 Evenett, H. Outram, 50, 80 externats, 16, 92, 156, 210, 219–33, 259, 280, 281; buildings dedicated to, 222, 224; closed by Revolution, 105; discipline in, 231–2; fees in, 225; furnishings in, 224–5; heating in, 225; “poor class” in, 232; population of, 189, 229–31, 235; in small towns, 230; social divisions in, 229–30; subjects taught in, 227; taxation of, 39; teachers in, 224, 226–7, 232–3 Fairchilds, Cissie, 184, 185, 189 families, 87, 179, 235–6, 258, 261–2; “dévot,” 154–5; educational expectations of, 235–6, 243–4; financial difficulties of, 159, 192; strategies of, 13, 149–54, 239, 262, 272, 274; support of monasteries by, 131, 132, 133, 134, 181 fanatisme, 192, 309n41 Febvre, Lucien, 13 Fénelon, François La Mothe de, bishop of Cambrai, 137, 198, 241 First Communion, 166, 226, 228, 243 Fleuret, Elisabeth (Congrégation), 133, 154–5, 167 Fleury, André Hercule de, Cardinal, 62, 68, 71, 74; opinion of religious women, 69, 100, 140 Fontainebleau, Edict of, 249 Formulary, 75 founders (religious), 4, 246 foundresses (lay), 33; privileges of, 244–5, 246–7. See also patrons foundresses (religious), 234 Fourier, Pierre, 174, 183, 184, 199, 200, 246–7, 255; and the “conventual invasion,” 32; on the education of children, 137; on the Gallican bishops, 57–8

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Fournier, Françoise (Ursuline), 140 Fronde, 37, 51, 187 funerals, 203; demonstrations at, 185–6, 188, 203, 208, 233 Genlis, Madame de, 244 Gondrin, Louis-Henri de, archbishop of Sens, 59–60, 71 Gorsas, Antoine, 104 grace: theology of, 64–5, 66 Gueudré, Marie-Chantal, 90, 255, 299n19, 329n63 Guyart, Marie (Ursuline), 52, 61, 111, 117, 136, 138, 155–6, 161, 162, 168–9, 171, 200, 247 handwork, 131, 133, 168, 196 health: a requirement in novices, 170, 174, 189 Hell: fear of, 142, 145, 146, 156–7, 159, 200–1 heresy, 14 Hufton, Olwen, 107–8, 115 Huguenots, 14, 16, 66. See also Protestants hygiene: in monastic pensionnats, 237–8; in society, 237–8 infirmarians, 213, 216. See also monastery functions infirmaries, 131, 204. See also monastery buildings infirmary, 193, 195, 206–7, 216–17 inheritance: renounced by nuns, 153, 262 inquest of 1790–91, 101–3, 271 institut, 8, 15, 55, 118, 121, 147, 156, 219–20, 226, 231, 258 instruction of girls, 14, 15, 24, 82, 105, 160, 219; as an apostolate, 220; diversification of, 229–30; free, 219–20, 222, 225; importance of, according to the dévots, 235, 241; religious, 239; to preserve innocence, 137 “invalid status,” 151–2, 176–7, 327n24 Jacobin clubs, 99, 105 James, William, 141 Jansen, Cornelius, 65 Jansenism, 65–9, 76, 78; in convents, 24, 49, 56, 69–77, 91, 100; policy of Crown towards, 68, 69, 71, 251–2; policy of Louis XIV, 67–8

“Jansenist crisis,” 7, 10, 48, 49, 63, 65–7, 77, 116, 119, 123 Jégou, Marie-Andrée, 123, 127, 129, 326n10, 327n24 Jesuits, 18, 23, 49, 65–6, 71, 135–6, 180, 162, 234–5, 240; and Augustinus, 65; educational strategies of, 234–5, 238–9, 242– 3; expulsion of, 78, 103; influence of, 168 Jesus Christ, 155–6, 190. See also “the Bridegroom” La Béraudière, François de, bishop of Périgueux, 60–1 Languet de Gergy, Jean-Joseph, archbishop of Sens, 71–5, 77 Laon (city): effects of “conventual invasion” in, 18 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 231 Latin, 242 Law, John: economic policy of, 22 Law Crash, 7, 28, 44, 47, 48, 82–3, 84, 85, 134, 170, 224, 252, 280, 281, 283; and the rentier class, 22, 88 lay sisters. See converses Lebrun, François, 107 Lecler, Alix (Congrégation), 91 Le Coigneux, Marie (Ursuline), 180 Le Grand, Marie (Ursuline), 186–8, 190 Lestonnac, Jeanne de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 13, 15, 55, 120, 141 lettres de cachet, 68, 71, 74, 76, 83, 87, 153, 248, 249, 250–2 libraries: in women's monasteries, 94–5 Lille (city), 104; mendicant orders of, 18 Lorraine, 13, 29, 37 Louis XIII, 19, 31 Louis XIV, 150, 235, 237; and Jansenism, 67–8; reign of, 22, 28, 39, 40, 252 Loupès, Philippe, 199 Maillefer, Jean, 114, 201 Maintenon, Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de, 40, 140, 226, 235, 240–1, 342n15 Marie de Medicis, 19, 31 marriage: cloister an alternative to, 150–1, 154, 262, 271; parental planning for, 150, 153–4 Marseille (city): plague in, 159, 211 Martin, Dom Claude, 150, 168 medical procedures: bandaging, 208; bleeding, 207, 208–9, 213; medication,

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204, 208, 209, 209–10; purging, 209; quarantine, 211–12, 212–13 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 26 Minims, 18. See also regulars Minois, Georges, 199, 329n66, 335n111 Mississippi Company, 22, 45 monasteries mentioned in text: – Compagnie de Notre-Dame: Alençon, 46, 59, 170, 248; Annonay, 86–7, 88, 263; Aurillac, 208; Avignon, 224; Bordeaux, 52, 53, 120, 191, 253, 255, 268, 330n68; La Ferté Bernard, 122, 269, 301n69; La Flèche, 93, 267; Le Puy, 165; Limoges, 269; Narbonne, 176, 202; Pau, 176, 340n80; Poitiers, 37, 39, 40, 42, 121, 123, 132, 169, 170, 253, 264, 281–2, 297n92; Richelieu, 166–7; Saint-Léonard, 269; Salers, 203; Sarlat, 51; Toulouse, 31, 174, 191, 202, 265 – Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule: Aiguepercé, 230, 312n42; Aix (first monastery), 32, 45, 52, 55, 62; Aix (Andrettes), 293n7; Amiens, 191; Angers, 35, 92, 229, 232; Angoulême, 59, 336n15; Apt, 183; Arc-en-Barrois, 302n27; Argenteuil, 47, 178, 224, 269; Arnay, 208; Autun, 269; Auxerre, 77, 169, 225, 243, 245, 253, 264, 302n42; Auxonne, 132, 138; Avallon, 85, 224, 339n61; Avignon (Présentation), 55, 179, 229, 264; Beauvais, 41, 76–7, 87, 302n25; Blois, 1, 29, 32, 34, 52, 94, 121, 152, 159, 165, 169, 176, 177, 181, 186–8, 192, 211–12, 245, 248, 251, 252, 266, 293n7; Bordeaux, 51, 59, 135, 234, 268; Boulogne, 269; Bourg, 53; BourgArgental, 101, 102; Bourges, 39, 305n37; Caen, 165; Carcassonne, 42, 59, 93–4, 211, 242, 266, 330n68; Carhaix, 269, 305n39; Carpentras, 100, 132, 192; Châlons-sur-Marne, 253; Château-Gontier, 309n18; Châtillon, 330n68; Chinon, 39, 307n79; Cravant, 294n22, 302n42; Crémieux, 269; Dax, 77; Dieppe, 39–40, 269; Digne, 102; Dijon, 56, 169, 244; Elbeuf, 43, 235; Épernay, 254, 269, 337n23, 338n39; Evreux, 330n68; Eymoutiers, 202, 209, 211, 332n58; Gien, 179, 302n42; Gisors, 264, 279–80, 282, 336n16, 340n77; Gournay, 330n68, 339n49; Grenoble, 48, 269, 340n73; Guincamp,

62, 208, 209–10, 224, 330n68; Hédé, 341n81; Ile-Bouchard, 47, 166; Ile-surSorgues, 13, 257; Issoudun, 252, 305n37; Landerneau, 164; Langres, 57, 169; Lannion, 254; Laval, 267; La Vallette, 301n69; Le Havre, 191; Le Mans, 58, 76, 117, 263, 264; Libourne, 53; Lille, 90, 100, 189, 264, 280–1; Limoges, 175–6, 211, 269; Linières, 305n37; Loches, 88, 123; Lorgues, 92; Loudun, 138, 208; Louisiana, 118, 239–40, 251, 315n13; Louviers, 138; Lyon (first monastery), 183, 269, 306n58, 337n19; Lyon (third monastery), 310n20; Mâcon, 29, 52, 132, 151, 172–3, 174, 183, 230; Magny, 269; Martigues, 307n77; Meaux, 294n22, 253, 269; Melun, 37, 74; Montargis, 41, 52, 149, 150, 194, 203, 245, 248, 249, 267; Montbard, 142, 339n58, 343n49; Montbrison, 46, 88, 322n2, 336n15; Montcenis, 87; Montluçon, 32, 39, 170, 305n37; Montpellier, 87; Moulins, 86–7; Nantes, 59; Nevers, 151; Nîmes, 345n94; Niort, 236, 240–1, 249; Noyers, 302nn37, 41; Noyon, 340n78; Orléans I, 173; Orléans (Bourniquettes), 251, 252, 267, 303n52; Paris (Faubourg Saint-Jacques), 36, 44–6, 170, 183, 194, 234, 246, 247–8, 263, 264, 294n22, 310n11, 313n73, 314n3, 338n39; Paris (Saint-Avoye), 224, 343n55; Périgueux, 36, 60–1, 88, 253, 267; Perpignan, 298n107; Poitiers, 267, 269; Pont Audemer, 224; Pont Croix, 269; Pontoise, 268; Québec, 61, 111, 117, 135; Quimper, 265, 269, 305n39, 339n50; Quimperlé, 48, 245, 269, 305n39; Rennes, 92, 174, 246, 254, 298n99; Romans, 265; Rouen, 39, 51, 56, 92, 123–4, 249, 265, 332n53, 340n80; Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, 336n16; Saint-Brieuc, 52; Saint-Dizier, 42, 43, 224; Saint-Emilion, 152; SaintGengoux, 85–6; Saint-Germain, 165; Saint-Marcellin, 37, 134–5, 203, 265, 282–3, 306n62; Saint-Omer, 164; SaintPierre le Moûtier, 336n15; Saint-Remy, 53–4, 86, 310n20; Saint-Sever, 96–9; Saint-Symphorien, 253, 268; Saugues, 340n77; Saumur, 263, 265, 340n78; Selles, 305n37; Sens, 59, 74–5; Som-

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mières, 89; Tarbes, 326n17; Tonnerre, 38, 245, 294n22; Toulouse, 224, 234, 249–50, 266, 330n68, 339n49; Tours, 52, 136, 166, 168, 247; Tréguier, 36, 170, 254; Troyes, 32, 178, 229, 249; Tulle, 266; Valençay, 250–1, 298n99, 305n37; Valence, 103; Valenciennes, 92, 224, 268; Vendôme, 254, 269; Villefranche, 132, 165, 174 – Congrégation de Notre-Dame: Bernay, 255; Bourges, 41, 305n37, 339n58; Châlonssur-Marne, 32, 101, 330n68; Châteaudun, 30, 245; Châteauroux, 36, 122, 253–4, 263, 264, 298n99, 305n37; Châtellerault, 29, 37, 41, 54, 58, 122, 124, 266, 298n106; Étampes, 74, 302n33; Joigny, 74, 302n35; Laon, 31, 51, 269; Longwy, 103n19; Nancy, 92, 224, 264; Nemours, 34, 60, 73–74, 330n68; Paris, 91, 192; Provins, 41, 59–60, 132, 245, 263, 265, 282, 306n62; Reims, 29, 32, 34, 47, 59, 61–2, 105, 133–4, 249, 252, 255, 265, 295n55; Sainte-Ménehoulde, 254, 269; Saint-Mihiel, 246–7; Saint-Nicolas du Port, 246–7, 265; Troyes, 32, 293n7; Vernon, 191, 333n76; Vézelise, 105, 266 monasteries of women: agents for, 42, 45; building programs of, 33–4, 130–1; decline in numbers in, 84–5, 95; diet in, 131, 193; differences between, 6; difficulties in collecting debts, 44, 88; financial crises in, 44–8, 84, 85, 88, 95, 134; hygiene in, 131; medical care in, 204; morale in, 82, 84, 95, 99–100; property of, 40–1; quality of life in, 278–9; as refuges for the rich, 81; relatives in, 201–2, 236; spiritual decline of, 89–91, 94–5; water piped into, 193, 194 monastery buildings: cemetery, 27, 203; church, 98, 127–8, 131, 198; gardens, 194; grilles, 62, 98, 111, 113, 115–16, 117, 128, 293n4; infirmary, 206–7; kitchen, 195, 196; pensionnat, 236; pharmacy, 194, 195, 196, 207–8, 209–10; sacristy, 98, 195; yard, 193, 194 monastery functions: apothecary, 190–1, 207–8; cellarer, 126, 195; cook, 126; dressmaker, 128; gardener, 126, 195; infirmarian, 126, 191, 196, 207–8;

laundry, 128, 194; linen room, 126; mistress general, 127, 225–6; mistress of novices, 126, 167–8, 170–1, 173; mistress of pensionnaires, 188, 237–8, 240–1; pharmacist, 142; portress, 127, 223; prefect, 127, 224, 225–6; refectorian, 128, 196; regent, 226–7, 315n4; sacristan, 127–8 monastery officers: assistant, 122, 124, 125, 180; bursar, 125–6; confessor(s), 50, 119, 187, 200, 201; director(s), 42, 50, 119, 122; discrètes, 123, 125–6, 167; visitor, 124, 132; zélatrice, 125. See also superior monasticism, 7; aristocratic values of, 89, 94–5, 118; public opinion of, 20–1, 178; and the state of Catholicism, 79 monasticism, female, 14–15; “democratization” of, 89, 94–5, 197, 282; and the elites, 16–17; in historical record, 4–5; public opinion of, 26, 115, 178, 307n79 monasticism, male: decline of, 80–1; in historical record, 5; public opinion of, 18–19, 25 monks, 81; and enclosure, 112; and public opinion, 20–1. See also regulars Montargon, Hyacinthe de, 141 Montesquiou, François-Xavier, 81 mortality: in monasteries, 274–7; in novitiate, 175–6 mortification of the body, 82, 136, 141–7, 158, 159 mortmain, 19, 34 Mousnier, Roland, 148 municipalities: attitude of towards religious orders, 17–19, 222, 223; contracts with teaching congregations, 221 mysticism, 82, 147, 171 Nancy (city), 30 “Nation,” 38, 101; and Church, 96, 103–4 National Assembly, 81, 89, 197, 271; abolition of solemn vows by, 26, 100, 117; Civil Constitution of the Clergy enacted by, 96; Ecclesiastical Committee of, 101, 103; eviction of religious population by, 105–6; freedom of worship declared by, 99; protests by nuns to, 101, 117–18 necrologies. See death notices Noailles, Gaston de, bishop of Châlonssur-Marne, 70

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Noailles, Louis de, archbishop of Paris, 68, 243, 246 nobility, 274; and monasticism, 16, 17, 89, 118, 121, 160 notaries, 60 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 75, 77, 243, 252 novices, 164–81, 194, 294n23; clothing of, 173–5; disappearance of in bad times, 170, 195n55; failure rate among, 169–70; “invalid” status,” 151–2, 176–7; reception of, 24, 167; sent away or banned, 75, 83, 85, 87, 101, 278; training of, 168–9; in Mâcon, 172–3 novitiate, 167–9, 170, 175, 181; discipline in, 169, 172; mortality in, 175–6, 214; mortifications in, 172; penances in, 170, 171–2, 187 nuns, 7, 9, 13–14; eighteenth-century, 2, 7, 81–2, 90–1, 133; eviction of, 105–6; “feminism” among, 91; and learning, 242; life expectancy of, 9, 217, 262, 276; medieval, 114, 115, 132, 136–7, 211; nineteenth-century, 4, 7, 108, 258–9, 289n6; and public opinion, 92–4, 115, 117, 127, 307n79; as rentiers, 82; and the Revolution, 97–103, 104–5, 106–7; as seen by historians, 108; as seen by revolutionaries, 104–5, 107–8; seventeenth-century, 15, 255; as “victims,” 26, 117, 311n37 obedience: vow of, 49, 57, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188 Office: in teaching monasteries, 168, 184, 196, 197, 239 Old Regime, 3, 6, 9, 27, 111, 117, 257; economic depression during, 22, 40–1, 257; economic expansion during, 42–3, 257, 282; emphasis of on obedience, 139–40; and female education, 221–2, 233; poverty in, 130; religious culture of, 148–9, 155; women's religious communities during, 8, 114, 134, 219, 257–8, 261–2, 269, 271–2, 279–83 Orange, commission populaire of, 192 Orléans, ducs de, 180, 247 (1644), 248 (1660s), 22 (1720) ouvrages. See handwork papacy, 66; and Gallican church, 67; and regulation of women's monasteries,

54–5, 57, 114; and religious exemptions, 50; and Revolution, 96 papal bulls, 54; Cum occasione (1632), 65; Periculoso (1298), 112–13, 114, 136; Unigenitus (1713), 67, 70, 71, 73 parents: coercion by, 178, 179; complaints from, 194; death of, 149, 165; obedience to, 139–40, 157; strategies of, 149–55; vocations opposed by, 153, 157–8, 169, 272, 291n20 Paris (city), 35, 102, 104, 280, 282; Jansenism in, 66 Pâris, François de, 73 Parlement, 31, 121, 169, 253; appeals to by nuns, 55, 59, 70, 74, 123; gallicanism of, 66, 67; support of episcopal authority, 56; support of nuns' rights, 60, 75–6 patriarchy, 184, 185 patrons: as boarders in monasteries, 244–5; legacies from, 245; privileges of, 203, 246–7. See also foundresses (lay) Paul V, Pope, 244, 248 Paul, Vincent de, 117, 141, 151 Pelagius, 64 pensionnaires, 294n23, 343n55; adult, 62, 123, 244–56; initial limitations on, 113, 116; qualities expected in, 239–40; young, 75, 188, 193, 210, 219, 234–44, 282, 319n10 pensionnat, 167, 229, 234–56, 281; as “antechamber to the novitiate,” 154, 156, 165–6, 239; diet in, 238; financial value of, 89, 196, 236, 254; games allowed in, 238; hygiene in, 237–8; loss of respect for, 26, 92; as prison, 248–52, 256; profane reading forbidden in, 136; separated from cloister, 236; subjects taught in, 92, 239–43; use made of by families, 150–1, 165–6, 235–6 pensions: of novices, 164; private, in monasteries, 133–4 phthisis. See consumption of the lungs plague, 51, 159, 211–12 Pluvinel, Marie de (Ursuline), 203 Pommereu, Marie-Augustine de (Ursuline), 181, 232, 336n12 Port-Royal, 15, 18, 238, 252 postulants, 164–5, 166, 167 poverty, 88, 95, 130, 134, 259; vow of, 130–5, 147, 188 profession(s), religious, 164, 177–81, 220; canon law regarding, 177; conflicts

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over, 58, 176–7; interrogation before, 177, 268; records of, 36, 263, 269; uncanonical, 152, 178–9 property: held personally by nuns, 132; monastic, 130, 221; rural, 40–3, 101, 282, 283; urban, 43 Protestants, 153, 235, 236, 249–50. See also Huguenots Provence, 211, 334n84 public: opinion of regarding nuns, 92–4, 105, 115, 117, 127 purity: temptations against, 120, 138–9, 144 Quéniart, Jean, 107 Quesnel, 67, 69 Ranquet, Catherine (Ursuline), 138–9, 156, 171, 312n54 Razes, Geneviève de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121 Recollets, 18. See also regulars records: diocesan, 268; monastic, 36, 48, 94, 148–9, 152, 164, 176, 182, 195, 242, 261, 263–7, 267–8, 283; notarial, 271 Reformation, Protestant, 64 Regency, 84, 94 “regularity,” 49, 129, 258 regulars, 80–1, 84–5; and bishops, 49–50; competition among, 5, 18–19. See also Capuchins; Cistercians; Cordeliers; Jesuits; Minims; Recollets Reims (city), 31, 105 rentes, 23, 33, 35, 40, 43–4, 101 130, 135, 252, 298n102 rentiers: John Law's plans for, 22, 45; and the Law Crash, 22–3, 88 Revolution of 1789, 7, 8, 95, 258–9, 281; anti-monastic bias of, 26; and the Church, 96, 105, 197; confiscation of monastic archives during, 60; and women, 106–7 Reynes, Geneviève, 103, 258–9 Richaudeau, Chanoine, 94 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de, 19, 21, 59 Richerism, 72 Rogier, L., 78, 103 Roland, Jeanne-Marie, 91, 192 Rouen (city) 102, 280 Rule, monastic, 7, 15, 49, 80, 94, 111, 121, 122, 126, 128–9, 131, 132, 134–5,

138, 139–40, 167, 168, 170, 174, 177, 181; Benedictine, 118; counterweight to episcopal authority, 55, 59; dispensations from, 152; infractions of, 38, 47–8, 176, 179, 326n17; loyalty to, 6, 7; monthly reading of, 168; protected by the Crown, 76; protests over infractions of, 59–60, 70; sacrosanctity of, 55, 62, 69, 124, 258; Ursuline (Bordeaux), 232; Ursuline (Paris), 166, 225, 229; Ursuline (Québec), 135–6 rules, 9; on education of pensionnaires, 236–43; on infirmaries, 207; moderation counselled by, 82, 141; on preparation for profession, 177; on reception of students, 229; on reception of women at risk, 247–8; school, 222, 228; on sickness, 204, 205–6; similarities between, 8; on teaching, 220, 226 sacraments, 168; anointing of the sick, 198–9; Communion, 91, 199; deprivation of as punishment, 57, 60, 62, 75, 76, 77; penance, 65, 91, 199, 201 Saint-Cyr, 39, 235, 238, 342n15; “demoiselles” of, 40, 160 Sainte-Beuve, Madame de, 246 Sales, François de, 112, 113, 151 sanctity, 112, 188, 203 Sarre, Claude-Alain, 85, 244, 277, 336n5, 342n12 Satan, 156, 161, 198, 235 Saumur (city), 186 Saurine, Jean-Pierre, constitutional bishop of Saint-Sever, 97–9 schoolmistresses, secular, 92–3, 104–5, 230; teaching nuns replaced by, 86 scrupulosity, 141–2, 145–6 Sens (archdiocese): Jansenism in, 71–2 servants, 184–5, 189, 191; in charge of children, 235; in monasteries, 189, 195 sickness: chronic, 216–17; fever in, 213–14; as an inducement to religion, 155, 158–9; monastic attitudes towards, 204–6, 218 Sigy, Antoinette de (Congrégation), 209 Sigy, Euphémie du Roux de (Congrégation), 162 sin, 137; consciousness of, 141–2, 200–1 Sonnet, Martine, 225, 243, 335n3 Sorbonne, 57, 68

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Index

Sourdis, François de, archbishop of Bordeaux, 51, 56, 59 Soury-Lavergne, Françoise, 335n2 “spiritual exercises,” 168, 190 superior, 27, 33, 131, 134–5, 145–6, 167; election of, 50, 58–9, 75, 122; leadership of during Revolution, 102; limitations on, 118–19, 125; perpetual, 63; powers of, 57, 118–23; qualities required in, 121, 160 superior, canonical. See director surgeons, 204, 206 surgery, 215–16 Tackett, Timothy, 96, 104, 106 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 81 tax exemptions, clerical, 17, 19, 20 taxes, clerical: dues of amortissement claimed by Crown, 19, 21, 38–40, 43, 44; effect of, on women's monasteries, 22, 134; “free gifts,” 20–1, 40 teaching congregations, 15–16, 82–3, 244, 254–5, 305n32; and the Civic Oath, 104–5; contracts with cities, 221; influence of on women, 107; and public opinion, 92–4, 105; suppression of (1792), 105–6 tithe, 25 tourière(s), 183, 189, 191 Tours (city), 156 Trent, Council of, 57, 244; clausura ordained by, 111, 113, 115, 247; legislation of, for women’s monasteries, 50, 54, 58, 122, 177; and theology of grace, 65 Troyes (city): plague in, 211 Ursulines, 6, 18, 83, 90, 183, 259; of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, 85, 90, 297n88, 307n76, 336n5 Vallière, Isabelle de la Baume de (Ursuline), 150, 171

Vallière, Louise de, 150 Varet, Alexandre, 60 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 185 Versailles. See Court Vesvres, Anne de (Ursuline), 38 Viguerie, Jean de, 79, 90, 147 Virgin Mary, 90, 155, 156, 159, 198 “Visa,” 44 Visitation, 15, 32, 113, 239, 243 vocales, 58, 122, 123, 174, 184. See also chapter vocations, 155–62; built on fear, 159–60, 180; childhood, 143, 155–7, 162; conditioned, 153–5, 160; during the “conventual invasion,” 33; forced, 178, 179; late, 161–2, 167; opposition of parents to, 157–8, 272, 291n20; testing of, 166; of widows, 161 Vovelle, Michel, 107 vows, 4, 8, 27, 58, 181, 198; annulment of, 177, 178; to bishop, 54, 181; of chastity, 13, 112, 117, 135–9, 140, 147, 155, 162, 187; inviolability of, 97, 100, 101; of obedience, 49, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188; of poverty, 130–5, 147, 188; to the Rule, 54–5; suspension and abolition of, 26, 100; of teaching, 190, 220 women: as bearers of the faith, 233; in the Counter-Revolution, 106–8; and learning, 239, 241–2; and literacy, 219; in the nineteenth-century church, 108; nuns in the history of, 9; weakness of historical record for, 106, 219, 222 “the world,” 4, 6, 9, 137, 148, 153, 154, 156–7, 159, 160, 162, 166, 178, 248, 255, 257, 258 Zamet, Sébastien, bishop of Langres, 50, 56–7

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A Social History of the Cloister

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m c gill-queen’s studies in the history of religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. series two In memory of George Rawlyk Donald Harman Akenson, Editor Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk Inifinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 Andrea Ebel Brozyna Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston, editors The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner

Gentle Eminence A Life of George Bernard Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William Katerberg The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel, 1948–2000 Paul Charles Merkley A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley

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series one G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson 2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall 3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau 6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer 7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for an New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright 8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart 9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson 11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors 12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke 13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Monreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution John Marshall 16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

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19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook 20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844– 1994 Brian J. Fraser 21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau

23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen 24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827 to 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanna M. Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

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A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime elizabeth rapley

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2222-0 Legal deposit third quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Rapley, Elizabeth A social history of the cloister: daily life in the teaching monasteries of the Old Regime (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2222-0 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women – France – History. I. Title. II. Series. lc506.f8r36 2001 271′.903044 c2001900081-2

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Baskerville.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations

ix

xi

Introduction

3

part one

two hundred years

1 The Nuns and Their World

13

2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy 29 3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

49

4 “Personae non gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus 64 5 The Decline of the Monasteries 6 Aftermath part two

78

96 t h e a n at o m y o f t h e c l o i s t e r

7 Clausura and Community

111

8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience 130 9 Prehistories

148

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viii

Contents

10 Novices

164

11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ”

182

12 Of Death and Dying 198 13 The Institut

219

14 The Pensionnat Conclusion

234

257

Appendix: Demographics of the Cloister 261 Glossary Notes

285

289

Bibliography

349

Index 371 A map of the three teaching congregations appears on page

275

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank her husband, who has encouraged her and researched with her during all the years that she has worked on this book. Most particularly, she thanks him for the many patient hours he has spent bringing order and meaning to her data. She acknowledges the assistance given to her by a number of people in France, notably Chanoine Michel Veissière, Madame Marie-Thérèse Notter, Cécile Amalric, odn, and the municipal librarians in Montargis and Provins. She thanks the editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History for agreeing to the inclusion in the book of material previously published in that journal. Finally, she would like to express her lifelong gratitude to Beatrice Binney, rscj, a wonderful history teacher, to whose memory she dedicates this work.

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01_deb.fm Page xi Tuesday, July 24, 2001 1:27 PM

P. Helyot, Dictionnaire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires (Paris: N. Gosselin, 1714–1719),vol. 6, opposite p. 355. Courtesy of University of Ottawa, Rare Books Collection.

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xii

Contents

Vol. 2, opposite p. 425.

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xiii

Folio

Vol. 4, opposite p. 185.

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xiv Contents

Vol. 4, opposite p. 166.

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A Social History of The Cloister

The persons whose virtues are proposed for our meditation are not strong men who have crossed the seas to take the Gospel to the infidels; they are simple women like ourselves, whom we have seen sanctifying themselves in our midst, in the practice of the same Rules, in fidelity to the same usages. “Annales des Ursulines de Blois,” 1714

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Introduction

I think I must start by saying that during the years the nuns in my study were bending themselves to their mission of recatholicizing the world, my own ancestors, both English and Scots, were all dyed-in-thewool Protestants, who probably never saw a papist in their lives. My English ancestors lived in Huntingdonshire, one of the most Puritan of counties, and their allegiance was to Oliver Cromwell. Even during my mother’s childhood in the early years of the twentieth century, no family member was allowed to criticize the great man. A sort of residual loyalty, then, gives me my excuse for starting with a story about Cromwell. Having risen to power, he needed to do the right thing and pose for a portrait. But while the portrait was necessary, the flattery that customarily went into it was not. In that respect, Cromwell was not like most other great men. His words to the artist have lived on, even though most of his other words have faded: “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”1 Far be it from me to compare French nuns in their convents to a soldier-statesman in Westminster – surely, both nuns and statesman would have been most insulted at the suggestion – but I think that perhaps they too would have appreciated a faithful portrait, warts and all. This would not have been their first choice, which would be no portrait at all; for they wished to live in obscurity. “The name of a religious ought to be as unknown and solitary as her person,” wrote one of them.2 Many of the more eminent among them took care to preserve

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4 Introduction

that obscurity by burning their papers before their death. But the problem is that obscurity has not been kind to them. If you do not see to your own history, someone else will see to it for you. In their case, the absence of evidence has been taken for irrelevance, and self-disparagement has turned into disparagement by others. A true portrayal, warts and all, is one thing, but a concentration on warts to the exclusion of all else is another. The nuns of the Old Regime were the subject of considerable hostile analysis by people who had never been inside their convents’ doors. They were accused of “idleness, childishness, back-biting, hypocrisy, sentimentality in prayer, prudery, preciousness, affectation and vanity.”3 Worse, they were suspected of harbouring “volcanic” passions, which were kept in check only by the locks on their doors and the bars on their windows. Their image did not improve with time. In the nineteenth century, when France was shaken by monumental church-state battles, religious women, loyal troops of the church as they were, caught the edge of the anticlericals’ hostility. The literature abounded in negative images; a nun was “the disappointed lover, the intriguer, the harridan, the person whom one designates … by the intentionally equivocal expression ‘good sister,’ and finally, the pseudo-mystic.”4 What had nuns done to deserve such harsh treatment? In answer to this question there was only silence. No one had entered the public domain to speak for the nuns. If they themselves had spoken, they would probably have said, “I will not dignify this with a response.” That is certainly how they acted. For the most part they swathed themselves in privacy. However warm and kind they may or may not have been among themselves, they treated “the world” with hauteur. They did not owe it an explanation, still less a justification. They cherished their apartness, cultivating the “us against them” mentality. Had they wished to persuade others of their value, they certainly had the means. Over the years they produced, or arranged to have produced, many biographies and historical monographs. But these works were designed strictly for home consumption, and their purpose was hagiographical. Their subjects were the institutions or the founders and other women who might qualify for canonization. Intended to edify, these writings seldom allowed even the mildest criticism, the slightest hint of humanity. Hagiographies, of course, preach only to the converted. This was the problem with this old convent literature. It had no intention of reaching across the great divide, to tell the world what it was really like to live in community under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. So the reader was left with two extremes: the hostile and generally uninformed writings of the outsiders, and the carefully crafted and

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5 Introduction

sanitized tributes of the insiders. The consequence of this extremism was the loss of a sense of balance. Only recently have there been an increasing number of works that seek to portray religious women as they really must have been – warts and all, and far more connected to the human race than we have ever been allowed to believe. Another great problem with the insider literature is that it was fragmented. No one spoke for monasticism or even Catholicism as a whole. This is characteristic of older Catholic historiography. It has been pointed out that in the period when Reformation history was taking shape under the hands of great Protestant scholars, “Catholic historical scholarship, chartless and rudderless … hardly sought to synthesize but was content to record, piecemeal, reforms, resistances, counter-offensives.” As a result, for many years the movement known as the Counter-Reformation was defined by its opposition, and suffered accordingly.5 This failure of Catholic historiography must surely be blamed partly on the religious orders, whose allegiance seemed too often to belong to their own institutions rather than to the universal Church. The infighting to which they were so prone found permanent expression in their writings. In the older literature of any religious order you will find yourself within an intellectual cloister where the brothers are everything and the rest of the world is barely mentioned. Loyalty to the in-group was matched by indifference and sometimes even hostility towards the outsider. The history of monasticism and the religious orders was, for these earlier historians, the history of individual orders and societies. With religious women, this fragmentation was taken to extremes: from individual societies to individual houses. Look at the bibliography at the end of this book, and among the older works you will see a host of monographs, each dedicated to a single community. We can fit them together to form a sort of mosaic of female monasticism, but in doing so we are circumventing their original purpose. In keeping with the dictates of the Church and the prejudices of society, the female monasteries of France were cut off, not only from the world but from each other. The spirit of isolation was built into their communities at the time of foundation, and it endured through the years.6 From within the circle of their own walls, nuns tended to regard outsiders with caution, and other religious orders with outright coolness. A sense of apartness filled their minds, so they would have been most surprised to learn that they were really not as unusual as they thought. It was only in the later twentieth century that historians began to supply the syntheses that treat religious women as members of an identifiable countrywide group, sharing many of the same ideals, objectives, and problems.7

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6 Introduction

I have followed this path, drawing a large picture with material that was originally intended for small pictures. This has required some audacity, because the three congregations with which I am concerned – the Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule, the Compagnie de Marie NotreDame, and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame – are still very much alive and active, teaching children all over the world. They have every right to shake their heads at the liberties I have taken in grouping them together; after all, there were differences between them; they were not the close copies of each other that my broad-brush methodology may suggest. And even if similarities may be found in their rules, organization, and lifestyle, the geographical distribution of their communities always tended to intensify their differences. Each cloister had its own character at a time of great regional diversity in France. So is it legitimate to group together the large and prestigious monasteries of great cities with the small houses buried in towns of two or three thousand souls? Or to group the communities of bustling port cities with those of slumbering provincial backwaters? My only defence can be that while some particularities are lost, many perspectives are gained in the telling, and I hope that the latter will make up for the former. The other great problem has been the passage of time. The period covered in this book extends from the early seventeenth century to the late eighteenth – the period generally known as the Old Regime. In writing social history, it is tempting to treat blocks of time as though they were a unified whole. Yet during those two centuries French society did not remain static. At its different levels it progressed unevenly, some parts of it leaping ahead while others remained virtually immobile. The cloisters about which I write existed simultaneously on these different levels. They were (for the most part) urban and therefore were not immune to the forces at work in their cities; they were populated largely by daughters of the better off and better educated, and were therefore not entirely closed off from the winds of change. On the other hand, their way of life was inspired by the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, and their rules were designed to keep this way of life as intact as possible. “Edified and encouraged by the example of those who have gone before us,” the nuns of 1790 proclaimed, “we have no other ambition than to model our conduct on the exact discipline and constant regularity which they supported.”8 Was this unchangingness an illusion, or was it genuine? Were the sisters of 1790 really clones of the sisters of 1630? That was a question I asked over and over again as I researched this work. Time did make a difference. Monastery walls were not impervious to the currents that flowed through society at large. Had the cloister

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7 Introduction

existed in a vacuum, it might have remained unchanging. But events battered against its walls, creating circumstances to which the women inside simply had to respond. Whether they knew it or not, they did evolve – if only just enough to survive in a changing environment. Because the forces for change originated outside the walls, it is necessary to explain what was happening there. Part 1 is an introduction to the events which, over nearly two hundred years, dictated what happened to the women’s monasteries. Chapter 1 begins in the broadest terms, touching on the general topic of monasticism, both male and female, tracing the great fluctuations in its fortunes from the extraordinary period of growth in the earlier seventeenth century, through the dark days in the eighteenth century, and to the French Revolution. Chapter 2 turns to the three teaching communities with which we are concerned. They developed in the same context, enjoying the same rapid expansion before falling into the same drastically unstable economic environment of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Nothing before or after, until the Revolution, provided such a unifying experience for thousands of religious women as the misery they shared during these years. Chapter 3 falls back in time to consider the tensions inherent in the communities’ relationships with their bishops. One of the fictions about religious women is their supposed docility. “Their spirit, being sedentary, calm and patient, banishes the fear that they would ever wish to leave the circle which is traced for them by their duty and their Rule,” wrote a Crown minister at the time of the Restoration.9 This may have been true, both then and in the preceding centuries. But how did the nuns react when outsiders encroached on that circle of duty and Rule? On numerous occasions, the sensitivity of monastic communities to what they themselves called their “rights” led them into serious confrontations with the ecclesiastical authorities to whom they were subject. The degree to which they could be stubborn, combative, and downright disobedient was demonstrated in the eighteenth century in the regions of France that experienced the Jansenist crisis. Chapter 4 considers this crisis and its often tragic results. Chapter 5 takes up the themes of chapter 2. In the history of monasticism, the eighteenth century is remembered mainly for decadence and decline. Religious women have been associated in that decline, albeit with some reservations. This author joins with others in questioning that historiographical tradition. The female monastic population decreased, to be sure. But the convents were the victims not so much of moral decline as of an extremely adverse economy and an unsympathetic government. The Law Crash brought hundreds of communities to their knees. It is remarkable that so few of them actually

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collapsed and that so many were still alive and in tolerable financial health at the time of the Revolution. Chapter 6, “Aftermath,” offers a brief glance at the women’s experience during the Revolution. While strictly speaking this experience belongs to another historical period, it is important to remember that it had its roots in an earlier time. The nuns who faced the guillotine, sat in the crowded prisons, or simply survived as best they could in rented rooms and garrets had been formed in the orderly and protected environment of the Old Regime cloister. Their negative reaction to the Revolution, unexpected at the time and mildly controversial to this day, was the fruit of that earlier life. Part 2 seeks to describe life within the cloister: the framework provided by the institutions, the spiritual and material problems of every day, the relationship of the women with one another, and their relationship to the world outside. Having paid due respect to time and space in part 1, I now sidestep their restrictions, drawing from sources scattered across the whole period and the whole country to create a composite picture of teaching nuns in the Old Regime. I am emboldened to make these generalizations by the knowledge that the very act of entering a convent and submitting to a Rule involved a certain loss of individuality. When all is said and done, there was much that was invariable about the cloister, whether in 1650 or 1750 and whether in Brittany or the Dauphiné, Burgundy or Poitou. In the early modern period, women’s horizons were limited, and religious women’s even more so. Once the parameters of their life had been set, few serious deviations were open to them. All monastic communities were built on the same foundations: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and clausura (the obligation to remain within the cloister). To these obligations the three congregations in question added another: the holy apostolate of instruction, which they called their institut. The obligations imposed patterns on the lives of the women who undertook them. All their regional, cultural, and personal particularities and all the modifications caused by the passage of time had to fit within these patterns. At the same time, religious women always remained physically connected to the society around them. They shared in many of its customs and practices. They employed the same notaries, doctors, and legal advisers. They drank the same water and patronized the same butchers and grocers. They approached the problems of child rearing, nursed and medicated their sick, and attended their dying in much the same way as “the world” did. In fact, the records they kept about these things, at a time when women as a whole seldom wrote much about daily life, can provide useful information on life not only in the cloister

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9 Introduction

but also in the larger community that swirled around it only a stone wall away. Thus, this “social history of the cloister” is more than a cameo study of a small closed-off section of society; it has a bearing on the general history of women in early modern France. In a field of study where women’s self-expressions are difficult to find, it offers a wealth of material composed by women for women. Part 2 of the book is, for the most part, a collection of anecdotal evidence, drawn from the annales and other writings of religious women. In the appendix another perspective is offered: a look at the demographics of the population, extracted from the thousands of records of individual nuns that survive in various French archives, public and private. They provide sufficient evidence to reconstruct, at least in part, the life courses of the women: the age at which they entered religion, their staying power in the novitiate, and their age at death – and the effects on these life courses of time and geography. The records also reveal the changing shape of communities and the rise and decline in their populations, with all that this has to say about the evolution of the public’s opinion regarding the female monastic life. The importance of religious women in the world of the Old Regime should not be underestimated. As celibates in a society that counted on leaving many of its members celibate, as dutiful children in a system where family strategies were key to economic and social development, as devout practitioners of a faith and a moral code that sought to cover and permeate the whole land, as exponents of the state-building virtues of order and obedience, as pioneers in numerous fields of health care, and as the principal educators of thousands of growing girls – in all these roles, the religious women surely deserve to be recognized as full members of their society, especially its female part. As for the church of the Old Regime, if religious women do not loom large in its history, it is not so much for lack of evidence as for lack of interest. Few other groups have contributed so much to the life of an institution. It is the perception that others have had of their unimportance, added to their own obsession with privacy, that has kept them so long in the shadows. As I have said, this situation is now changing. Mine is only one of a number of studies that have been undertaken in the last decades, as a quick visit to my bibliography will show. I am sure that many more will follow; I certainly hope so. Other orders and congregations of nuns, both in France and in other countries, await their historians. Only when they too are documented will the religious women of the past have the history they deserve.

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part one Two Hundred Years

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1 The Nuns and Their World

Of the millions of women who have become Roman Catholic nuns over the last four centuries, a large proportion have been teachers. Most of these teaching nuns have belonged to religious orders that had their genesis in France. Who were the first professional nunteachers of France? Were they the little group of young women who joined together in 1592 in the Isle-sur-Sorgues, in the Comtat Venaissin, to live under the vow of chastity and to teach Christian doctrine?1 Or were they the five young women of Mattaincourt in Lorraine who, on Christmas Eve 1597, put black veils on their heads and announced that thenceforth they were going to live in community and teach school?2 Or – since none of these actually lived in the France of their day – was it yet another small group of women, established in Bordeaux and led by Jeanne de Lestonnac, baroness of Montferrand, who in 1607 received papal authorization “to offer to God a vow of perpetual chastity and to dedicate to Him their lifelong service in the formation of young girls in good morals and Christian virtues”?3 To borrow a phrase from Lucien Febvre, all this is “une question mal posée.”4 It matters little who was first across the starting line in this race to educate and Christianize, and thus save the female children of France. What is significant is the extraordinary power of the idea and the fact that, within a very few decades, it spread throughout the country. It has been described as a “contagion” and indeed it was, leaping from person to person and from town to town.5

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If the contagion was to spread, it required certain conditions: young girls needing to be schooled, teachers to school them, and a heavy infusion of wealth to finance the whole complex of undertakings. None of these conditions could have been taken for granted in the circumstances of 1600. Girls had never before been thought to need schooling. One might well ask why they were thought to need it now. As a historian of primary education has remarked, it is astonishing that so many parents of the seventeenth century strove so hard to ensure that their children, both boys and girls, received instruction.6 There was little of the necessary infrastructure immediately available in the France of 1600 – the country, newly emerged from war, already had a great deal to do just to repair past damage. However, its distress at the devastation in its ancient Church, coupled with its alarm at the superiority of Huguenot teaching and preaching, provided the motive power. Thinking Catholics were convinced that heresy could only be combated by its own weapons – by better preaching and by building and staffing schools and colleges; and the postwar expansion in the agricultural sector that fuelled the economy provided them with the means to accomplish their new purpose.7 There remained the third necessary condition: teachers to do the work. Where girls were concerned these teachers had to be female, since both the Crown and the Church viewed any kind of coeducation with horror. Women had always taught school here and there, but never in great numbers. Now they crowded onto the scene, even before there were children to be taught or money to fund their efforts. The need that drove them was the need to do something about the desolate state of the Catholic faith – and, at the same time, to give vent to their own religious energy. Those early groups of women were inspired not so much by any pedagogical aspirations as by the desire, as one of them put it, “to do all the good that is possible.”8 And the good they sought to do was to be done from the base of a community life. Their decision to live in this way was as fundamental to their plans as was their apostolic purpose. The movement was highly dynamic. Its real growth spurt began after 1610. By the time this was over in 1670, the three small groups of 1592, 1597, and 1607 numbered among them close to five hundred communities – about a one-quarter of the total number of female monasteries of every kind that have been counted for the Old Regime. Virtually every substantial town possessed at least one convent of teaching nuns. The phenomenal growth of the teaching congregations was part of a wider sea change taking place in French female monasticism. The women’s monastery was not, of course, an invention of the Counter-

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Reformation; it was as old as France itself.9 But the passage of years and the ravages of the religious wars had taken their toll, so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century both the population of monastic women and their religious purpose were sadly attenuated. Whereas, at their apogee, the great abbeys – Benedictine, Cistercian, Fontevrist, and others – had housed hundreds of nuns, their numbers were now diminished and their purpose degraded. In the countryside around Paris, for example, seven abbeys and one priory existed in a state of vegetation, with populations of between twelve and sixteen nuns apiece, leading lives largely innocent of any monastic discipline.10 Within the cities, convents of mendicant nuns – Franciscan, Dominican, and others, some richer, some poorer – also struggled to survive. But the life they offered did not seem to meet the needs of contemporary women. As Jeanne de Lestonnac explained, they were either too physically demanding or too relaxed: [Of] the many women who would like to serve God in religion some are constrained, because of the austerity of the Rule and the weakness of their bodies, to remain in the world … Others, seeing that the primitive spirit of charity, devotion and perfection is almost extinguished in the ancient [monastic] families, and [that there is a] lack of spiritual aids therein, do not dare to join them … for fear of finding spiritual death where they looked for life.11

It was not from these ancient institutions that the great surge of religious activism arose. By the time such institutions managed to renew themselves, they were already almost submerged in the flood of new monastic creations. Port-Royal, Montmartre, and other famous houses might have had great influence and respect in French society, but the huge energy of the years of “Spiritual Conquest” came from newly established communities such as the Carmelites, the Visitation, and the three teaching congregations to whom this work is dedicated. The teaching congregations represented a new, hybrid form of religious life. In accordance with the custom at the time of their foundation, they were strictly enclosed,12 and they gave a good part of their day to prayer, spiritual reading, and meditation. Their originality lay in their apostolic intention, their institut* – the saving of souls through the instruction of children. They differed from the contemplative orders in that teaching rather than prayer was their principal objective. “The teaching function is the prime purpose of our institute, for the greater glory of God, for the salvation of souls and for the public good,” stated the Rule of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame;13 the other * Words marked with an asterisk are defined in the glossary.

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two congregations held the same view. “The public good” was an idea to which they readily paid homage. Wherever they went, they drew up contracts with the city authorities whereby they undertook to teach, at no charge, all young girls who came to their door. As soon as they could, they opened their classrooms, and the children always came flooding in. If there is one fact that appears universally in their records, it is the instant popularity of their free schools. These schools became an integral part of the social structure, and they changed the way France felt about female education. The opening pages in the history of convent education are marked by intense enthusiasm and a supernormal degree of dedication. The movement was young, as were the women who joined it; it was given to all the extremes and excesses that accompany a religious revival – which, of course, is what it was. We shall see it grow older and wiser with the passage of time. But the point to remember is that many of the first generation of nuns were zealots, and as zealots they simultaneously aroused both admiration and alienation in the society around them.

th e c o nv e nt ua l i n vas i o n The movement of women into the religious life in the early seventeenth century was part of what has been called a “rush”,14 a levée en masse.15 Again, it has to be emphasized that the great change came from the mushroom growth of new religious congregations, both male and female. It was they who provided the muscle for what has been called “a fantastic conventual invasion.”16 Communities of every stripe and every purpose formed up and then, within a few years, spun off subcommunities and even sub-subcommunities. They became Catholicism’s front-line fighters in the battle to regain the advantage from the Huguenots. In this they were highly successful, and along with their proselytizing, they brought civility and learning to a people badly scarred by war. But in their very success lay a serious social problem. Each of these new communities had to find its own place in the sun: its funding, its circle of supporters, and its living quarters. The older orders were already well endowed with land and feudal revenues, the fruit of centuries of acquisition.17 The new orders had nothing until they could find new sources of wealth. The supply, however, was not equal to the demand. The wealth of the countryside depended on the labour of the peasantry, which – no matter how pushed – was finite. Naturally, the landowning families had their own ideas on how to use any surplus. When some of their more devout members began to divert large

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slices of the family fortune into religious institutions, serious internal divisions developed. These became more intense as the century progressed and as the provincial nobility began to suffer economic and social decline.18 The huge generosity which the gens de bien showed the monasteries at the outset did not last long. The local elites bestowed more than money on the religious congregations; they also gave them their children. “It was not unusual, in Paris and everywhere else, for the sons and daughters of good houses – men and women of quality – to go off and enter these orders,” wrote Pierre de l’Estoile in 1606.19 Many families followed up with support and affection for the same orders. But with the passage of years, as they became more straitened in their circumstances and more sceptical in their thinking, they began to withhold both money and children.20 This put the new religious communities at risk. Since their strength had come from their close identification with the upper classes, their decline began when the same upper classes lost interest. “The solidarity of noble and convent, so complete in the seventeenth century, carried within it problems for the future, when the descendants of the zealous reformers would become more indifferent towards the Church, and begin to oppose the diminishment of their patrimony in favour of the religious orders.” So writes the historian of religious orders in Brittany.21 What he says applied equally across the country. The last of the new communities’ requirements was perhaps the one that caused the most trouble: the need for space. Almost to a man (or woman), they looked for a place inside the cities. But these cities, in the early 1600s, were still cramped tightly within their defensive walls, with houses piled on each other across narrow alleyways, and public space always at a premium. The arrival of a new religious community meant the dislodgement of ordinary households. The establishment of seven, eight, or more new religious communities, complete with cloisters, gardens, cemeteries, and churches, meant in many cases the virtual takeover of the intra-muros. And more than space was involved. Church property enjoyed numerous tax exemptions. Thus, every private house that was absorbed into a monastic space meant a loss for a city’s tax base. So while some people were enthusiastically encouraging the establishment of new religious communities, others (including municipal officials, assemblies of citizens, and local parish clergy) actively opposed them.22 These people feared that whatever limitations on expansion the new communities initially agreed to, they would break the agreements once they were installed. “We all know that the communities settle for an inch of land when they arrive, and then afterwards spread out by degrees,” commented a critic.23 A truer word was never spoken.

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The conventual invasion was rather like a gold rush in that literally hundreds of communities, male and female, appeared at the gates of scores of cities, anxious to stake their claims. At issue was the wealth, patronage, and support of the elites of those cities. The first to come were usually the first served. Others were closed out or had to settle for less affluent locations with less promising prospects – in the faubourgs or in smaller towns. Given the overcrowding of the course, it is easy to see why the competition was so fierce. This brings up a dark side of the conventual invasion – the rough way in which the congregations treated one another in their haste to secure for themselves the best places in the best cities. They slandered each other without hesitation and used all their influence to keep others off what they considered to be their territory. The Jesuits came to have a bad name for their use of defamation and dirty tricks, but in fact the other orders did the same. Cistercian monks, jealous of the influence which the Capuchins were beginning to exercise over PortRoyal, labelled them “sneaks, sanctimonious hypocrites and zealots,” according to Angélique Arnauld.24 The Cordeliers battled against the Capuchins in one town; they kept the Récollets out of another, preaching that they were parasites who took bread from the mouths of the poor.25 The Minims succeeded in persuading the commune of Abbéville to keep a group of nuns out of the city.26 The mendicants of Lille petitioned the authorities to get rid of the Ursulines whose schools, they claimed, were teaching vanity rather than piety.27 The examples could go on and on, some of them involving fisticuffs.28 Even in an age known for its quarrelsomeness, this infighting was damaging to the image of the orders and was grist to the mill of the ever-present anticlericals: “These ambitious men,” wrote one of them, “when they get the ear of powerful people at court or among the Robe, never fail to speak ill of the others, so as to make them despised, and to build themselves up on their ruins.”29 Thus, the religious rebirth of the seventeenth century, though impressive in so many ways, had its negative side. Catholic France made space for the new orders, but it did not wholeheartedly embrace them. As the years passed, its fears about them were confirmed: the economic base of the cities did indeed begin to dwindle away. “It is certain that the [religious] communities, very numerous, occupy the greater part of the city’s terrain,” wrote a royal engineer in Laon in 1701. “The said communities, founded more than a century ago, [have ruined] more than 150 houses, uniting entire streets to their monasteries, so that the number of inhabitants, the only contributors to the expenses of the city, is notably diminished.”30 It was a grievance that could not be redressed and was never forgotten. The superabundance of regular

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clergy contributed greatly to their unpopularity – and, some have said, to their eventual decadence.31

the first confrontations The naysayers had always been there, but in the first exuberant years they may have sounded like frogs croaking in the marsh. With time, however, their chorus began to swell. At the mid-seventeenth century, disenchantment was turned into action. The first sign that the times were changing came from the Crown itself, and it was over the question of money. The difficulty lay in the Church’s tax exemption. According to ageold custom, ecclesiastical property, whether land or buildings, was considered to be the portion given to God and the service of the poor, and on this account to be withdrawn forever from general circulation. It was held “in mortmain.” In this condition it escaped the taille, the Crown’s main tax, and various feudal dues. At the beginning of the Bourbon regime, huge holdings across France – as much as 10 percent of the country’s landed wealth – were already off limits to the royal fisc. The acquisitions of the new religious congregations only enlarged this pool of untaxable wealth. However, the Crown had its own ways of compensating for its losses. To make up for the revenues that it would henceforth forfeit, it was entitled to collect, at the time of purchase, a fixed percentage of the sale price. This was known as the due of amortissement. If paid at the time of purchase, it was not too hard on the purchaser, but the Crown often overlooked the dues until such time as it was in financial straits; it then demanded the arrears in a single payment. This is what happened around the middle of the century. Under the regency of Marie de Médicis and through the earlier part of Louis XIII’s reign, the Crown had been indulgent to the new religious communities. Because they had been founded recently, they had no inherited property, so it was only natural that as soon as possible they would go on a buying spree, acquiring not only their conventual buildings but also investment property, both urban and rural. Legally, all this property was subject to dues of amortissement. But in the climate of benevolence then prevailing, the fees were either waived or – more often – simply ignored. In 1638, however, as the government’s need for money grew more pressing, the king’s first minister, Cardinal Richelieu, turned his eyes in this direction, claiming that the Crown had the right to the payment of dues of amortissement, with or without the consent of the Clergy. He faced stiff resistance from most churchmen, who were exceedingly

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jealous of their privileges. A confrontation followed, which was settled only when the Clergy offered the Crown a “free gift” of 5,500,000 livres, and the Crown agreed to forgive all dues then owing.32 It was the Clergy’s hope that it might, now and forever, escape paying directly to the Treasury. However, the Crown did not surrender the right to tax religious corporations at will. “The law of amortissement is just, because the State renders it necessary,” the Crown argued. The king was free to levy taxes or not, at his pleasure.33 It was only a matter of time before the government would return to the attack. Meanwhile, with the passing years, the Clergy was losing popular support. Its tax privileges, so fiercely defended, cost it dear in the eyes of the public. Furthermore, the proliferation of monks and nuns, at a time when the economy was under stress, seemed to more critical minds to be tantamount to the creation of a new class of expensive idlers – “much like fleshy excrescences, which drain nourishment from a body of which they are an integral part.”34 It was also said that such people, by their celibacy, were depriving the state of much-needed future citizens. These populationist theories lent weight to the outand-out resentment that many felt towards the monasteries, over what was perceived as their unfair share of the country’s wealth. These views found expression through Louis XIV’s omnicompetent minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who came to power determined to cut down to size the various institutions which he considered a burden on the economy. As early as 1664, he was looking for ways to diminish the number of “monks of both sexes, who only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”35 Colbert consulted with several councillors of state and in 1666, when the answers he received confirmed his own opinions, published an edict ordering a countrywide investigation into religious houses, with the intention of reducing their numbers where possible. Communities were visited by commissioners of the Crown and were required to show their letterspatent of authorization and their statements of accounts. Those that could not justify their existence were forced to close. The minister would have gone further, by raising the minimum age of entry to twenty-five for men and twenty for women, and by placing a limit on the value of religious dowries – and also, significantly, on the value of marriage dowries, which, in Colbert’s opinion, were becoming so high that they were forcing parents to put some of their daughters into convents. But in this he was ahead of his time, and he had to abandon the project. Even with all the resources of the Crown at his disposal, Colbert could not overcome the resistance of the Clergy. However, the line of thought he was following remained fixed in the minds of certain influential people. “There are too many monks,”

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claimed a pamphlet in 1669. “It is an abuse that prejudices the realm … and it is time to deal with it seriously and powerfully. Monks live in celibacy and make neither families nor children … Furthermore, the blind dependence by which they are attached to the wishes of the Pope forms an alien monarchy within the heart of France; and they draw the credulous to it, which is a matter of extreme consequence.”36 The respect with which the French elites had once viewed the monasteries was changing to irritation, even hostility; and the twin issues of money and power were, more than anything else, responsible.

the beginnings of decline If the clergy could not yet be brought to heel, they could at least be taxed. Colbert made the effort in 1674; he was blocked in the usual fashion, by another “free gift” of 520,000 livres. But time and the ineluctable logic of the Crown’s wartime financial needs brought the government to the attack once more in 1689. This time it had its way. The royal declaration of 1689 demanded payment of dues of amortissement on all investment property acquired by the gens de mainmorte since 1641.37 The clergy, no longer able to shelter behind a “free gift,” saw themselves subjected to out-and-out impositions. The Crown reaped a fine reward: 18,000,000 livres, as much as Richelieu had secured in twenty years of effort.38 The Crown’s gain was, of course, the clergy’s loss. Try as it could, the Assembly of the Clergy could not fend off the collection of the dues of amortissement. The tax was justified by custom and by law; what made it oppressive was its size and suddenness. If the dues had been paid regularly when property was purchased, they would have been manageable. But now, communities and corporations were required to pay out, in arrears, lump sums that could easily dwarf their total annual incomes. The result was, in the words of a contemporary publication, “a veritable Saint-Bartholomew for the clergy.”39 Since the Crown’s problems were far from over, the financial carnage (to continue the metaphor) was extended, with the invention of other taxes and the forced sale of offices, in the clerical as in the lay sphere. On average, the Clergy was now paying the Crown 6,400,000 livres per year, where in the period 1660–90 it had been paying 1,230,000.40 It still clung to its privileges by calling these tax payments “free gifts.” But one way or another, the king got his money. This all has to be placed in the context of massive overtaxation right across French society. Even with these increases in its burden, the Clergy was paying only a small fraction – about 3 percent – of the country’s annual taxes.41 The Church as a whole remained rich and its

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credit solid. However, its weaker members were seriously affected by the new tax regime.42 Many individuals and communities – especially new communities and especially female ones – found that they were paying more than they could afford. Their carefully tended economies began to fall apart. “In the year that the taxes commenced, commenced also our decadence,” wrote one monastic annalist.43 Surviving financial records of Old Regime monasteries bear her out: 1689 was a watershed year, ending an era of expansion and beginning an era of decline. Taxes do not tell the whole story. The communities, struggling to make ends meet, found that much of their capital, which was placed out in loans, was now forever out of reach. The economic depression that dogged the last years of Louis XIV’s reign, combined with the continuing war and the government’s desperate attempts to raise more revenue, impoverished the whole society. The agricultural crisis, which brought the poor to starvation, also brought many once-prosperous people to bankruptcy. Those who had lent money to these people now found much of their money uncollectable. At the same time, the cost of living rose and the income from land dropped precipitously. Peace brought no relief. Indeed, as one observer remarked, “Those who have had the misfortune to have all their wealth in [financial investments] have already, in the space of six months of peace, faced more damage to their fortune and experienced more hardship than they suffered during twenty years of war.”44 The last years of Louis XIV’s reign were marked by severe instability in the money market. Then, in 1720, came what was to be the final disaster for the rentier class. France went into a giddy spiral of inflation, then collapsed into bankruptcy. This all resulted from the efforts made by John Law, with the regent’s full backing, to re-invigorate the country’s finances and refloat its economy. Law argued that the shortage of specie, which had depressed the country for years, could be corrected by creating a larger money supply through the issue of paper money. Part of the scheme involved forcing the rentier class, which for so many years had locked up a good part of the country’s wealth, to cough up its treasure and in return to receive shares in a new company, the Mississippi Company, and billets de banque. Thus, money that had been sterile would be put to work, and France would claim its rightful part of the rich returns that were pouring into other countries (mainly Britain and Holland). The country, Law predicted, would be lifted off the rocks by a buoyant tide of capital. But the scheme, which had much to commend it, was too ambitious for the society onto which it was foisted. Throughout the summer, inflation ran out of control; fortunes were made and lost with dizzying

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speed. In December came the crash. The billets de banque were declared to be worth little more than the paper they were printed on. The collapse in the value of money was particularly hard on the country’s lenders.45 Both public bodies and private debtors took advantage of the situation to pay off their debts in devalued paper money or to demand a reduction in the interest on their loans. All too often, threatened with bankruptcy themselves, they refused to pay up at all. In other words, as borrowers benefited from the bankruptcy, lenders suffered. Foremost among these lenders were religious corporations and communities. As one observer wrote, “Hospitals, parish vestries, secular and regular communities, above all those of women, and many other people who had no wealth other than their rentes, have been reduced to indigence.”46 This was no exaggeration. Many communities found their revenues reduced by as much as one-third or one-half.47 Recovery from the bankruptcy was, of course, a slow and painful process. Even societies as prestigious as the Jesuits had to conserve and save and scrimp. Women’s monasteries were particularly handicapped by their lack of flexibility. Tied down by their clausura and hampered by the sheer number of mouths they had to feed, they had few ways to help themselves. Their only option was to appeal for government assistance. And this threw them into a new jeopardy, because it made them dependent on an outside and none too friendly force. Starting in the mid-1720s, religious communities across the country began bombarding Versailles with appeals for help. The more audacious suggested that since the Crown had precipitated the crisis, the Crown ought to solve it. But the Crown’s first response was to turn the tables: to accuse the communities of improvidence, of extravagant building programs, of poor management of their property, and of accepting more women, for the sake of their dowries, than they could afford. “It is this excessive number, out of proportion to the monastery’s revenues, that has caused the failure of a great number of women’s communities,” wrote one jurist.48 After some reflection, it was also decided that the problem was systemic. There were too many convents for the good of the country, and it was “absolutely necessary to suppress an infinity of houses.”49 A commission was established by royal decree in 1727 to hand out assistance to communities in need. This “Commission des secours” was assigned a fund, out of which, in the first five years alone, it paid pensions to 558 houses.50 But it was also instructed to reduce “the excessive number of female communities with which the kingdom is burdened.” Poverty had laid the women’s monasteries bare to the censorious gaze of an officialdom, which had never liked them much and now found its opportunity to do something about them. Colbert’s chickens had come home to roost sixty years late.

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The Commission des secours has been overshadowed by its successor, the Commission des réguliers,* to the point where, in many church histories, it is not even mentioned. Indeed, until 1969,51 it never received any serious attention. But it was in fact a major experiment in social engineering and a significant intrusion by the Crown into the business of the Gallican Church.52 Before it closed its doors in 1788, it had mandated the suppression of some 244 female monasteries and the reduction in size of many more. If this achievement fell far short of its initial ambition, it was only for lack of resources and the declining interest of the Crown.53 However, it had fulfilled its purpose. Between 1720 and 1789 the population of nuns in France was reduced by about one-third.54 It was altered, too, in other subtle ways. The reduction had been achieved not by throwing nuns out but by banning entries, thus limiting the intake of young subjects. As a result, female communities found themselves growing older as they grew smaller.55 They found themselves, as well, subjected to a much stricter tutelage than they had hitherto known – for the ostensible reason that they were becoming too independent.56 From now on, if they offended their bishops, tried to act independently, or showed signs of heterodoxy (in effect, Jansenism), the ban on the reception of novices could be continued indefinitely and pensions could be witheld. This fitted well with the prevailing passion for order. “For their own good,” wrote an adviser to the commission, “they need a greater subjection. They ought to be kept under a very close eye, by a power near enough to them to oversee their conduct.”57 The activity of the Commission des secours reached its peak in the years leading up to 1751. In other words, the reconfiguration of the female monastic world – a world that had been shaped during the Catholic Reformation – took place in an atmosphere already steeped in Enlightenment thinking. Not that the women themselves were penetrated by Enlightenment principles – they seem to have been more or less impervious to them – but the men who decided their future, whether laymen or prelates, were decidedly so. “Women’s convents,” they maintained, “ought to subsist only insofar as they are useful to the State, through the edification of prayer, through the instruction and education of children, through the care of the sick and the poor.”58 Utility remained one of their principal criteria. As for the bishops who were called upon to collaborate in the initiatives of the commission, their responses are revealing. Most of the serious opposition to the reengineering came from men with Jansenist leanings. This is not surprising; they had already forfeited the Crown’s good will because of their independence and so had little to lose from speaking their minds. The

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more worldly bishops, those with ambitions, concurred willingly with the commission’s initiatives.59 But we cannot dismiss them as mere sycophants. The free hand they enjoyed for many years suggests that their thinking reflected that of their own elite milieu. The spirit that had built the monasteries in the first place was now buried in the past.

monasticism, the “unloved” institution From mid-century onwards, the prevailing mood was hostile to monasticism. “At present it is fashionable to slander monks,” wrote a learned Benedictine monk in 1783.60 The chief reasons for this hostility were their perceived idleness and excessive wealth. And indeed the records show truly scandalous divides between the “haves” and “have-nots” of the ecclesiastical world. Canons and monks might enjoy revenues in the tens of thousands of livres at a time when parish churches were crumbling and salaried curés earned only 300 livres.61 “This handful of monks … possesses more wealth than all the curés of Cambrai, to the number of 700,” wrote the priests of that diocese, referring to the monks of a local monastery. They went on to berate the monks for their idleness: “We spend night and day in the rain going about the countryside to administer the sacraments, but these gentlemen would refuse to take four steps away from their home without a good carriage or at least a horse to carry them and a well-equipped valet to serve them.”62 The reason for this serious imbalance was the diversion, over a long stretch of time, of the wealth of the Church into the pockets of the rich and powerful. The diversion had proceeded in two stages. First, the tithe, which should properly have been applied directly to the support of worship and the care of the poor, was largely reserved for the gros décimateurs* – rich, old monasteries for the most part. Their only responsibility was to ensure the provision of religious services, which they could do by hiring priests at economical rates. The difference between intake and output was theirs to enjoy, while often the priests had to supplement their income by charging fees for services. In the second stage of diversion, the wealth of the monasteries themselves was shared out between the monks (or nuns) and their so-called abbots or abbesses – men and women appointed by the Crown, who often had only a pro forma connection to their abbeys but were entitled to a part of their revenues. This was known as commende, and it was an important part of the royal patronage system. If the king benefited from his power to bestow or withold such significant riches, the nobility benefited even more; it “confiscated for its own profit a large part

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of the revenues of the Church.”63 The public anger which this aroused was expressed in no uncertain terms in the cahiers de doléances* of 1788. How did this affect the great majority of religious women in France, who were anything but rich? They seem to have suffered from guilt by association. They were not accused of excessive wealth or evil living, but they were dismissed as irrelevant, petty, and superstitious. Their monasteries were seen as gothic prisons, and they as poor silly victims. Their methods of hospital care came under fire from philosophes and physiocrats whose prime target was the hospital system itself. Their schooling, which had drawn so many people to them in the early decades of the seventeenth century, was pronounced outmoded. Many upper-class girls whose predecessors had grown up in monastic pensionnats were now tutored at home, where piety mattered less than social graces. As for the religious life itself, elite opinion was now strongly against it. “The convents have been judged and condemned,” wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier. “Excessive inquisitiveness, bigotry and hypocrisy, monastic nonsense and claustral prudishness reign there. These deplorable monuments of an ancient superstition exist in the middle of a city where Philosophy has spread its light.”64 He would have argued, as others did, that the fact that women could still be found in them was simply proof that parental cruelty existed even in the Age of Enlightenment. It was time to open up these prisons and release the victims who languished within. It is no wonder, then, that the men of the Revolution were decided, from the very start, to do exactly that. In October 1789 they took action. Monasteries across the country were ordered to receive no more candidates to profession until further notice.65 The following February, all monastic vows were abolished. The religious orders were put on notice. In one way or another, the same message was delivered: “Liberty, or rather, life [will be] restored to the mass of victims of both sexes whom the self-interest of families, personal obligation or a passing fervour have cast into the horrors of the cloister and loaded with insupportable chains.”66 Throughout the spring and into the summer of 1790, commissioners went to every religious community in the country, offering the members freedom while at the same time making an inventory of their property. For monks, the options were stark: freedom with a pension or a continuation of religious life in changed circumstances, regrouped with strangers in houses other than their own. For nuns, there was a concession: they would be allowed to stay in their own houses, even though these now passed into state ownership. But they were encouraged to leave. This inquest was the closing ceremony in the history of religious communities in the Old Regime. In 1790, when it was launched, the

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king was still king, and the Church had not yet been reduced to a department of the nation. The nuns appeared in the records for the last time as communities, coming before the commissioners in solemn order, the superior first, the senior nuns next, the juniors bringing up the rear, their names in religion and their dates of profession all registered – as though all this was still important. Their responses to the inquiries of 1790–91 can be taken as a referendum on female religious life as viewed by those who lived it in the last years of the Old Regime. Whatever the reason (and various explanations have been offered), the overwhelming majority did not wish to leave it. From then until September 1792 those nuns who had opted to remain in community lived in limbo: still enclosed in their cloisters even though their vows were no longer legally valid; unable, as often as not, to receive the sacraments from their own priests; surrounded by familiar property and goods that were no longer theirs; and forbidden to receive pensionnaires or teach school, or even bury their dead in the cemeteries that lay within their walls. Some communities showed spirit, defying the constitutional church in every way they could. Others lay low and waited for better times. It made no difference what they did. In late September and early October 1792 they were all evicted. From then on, if the nuns appear in official records at all, it is as solitary individuals, ci-devant religieuses – prisoners on their way to punishment or small entrepreneurs eking out an existence in private teaching or in the production of goods; or petitioners, aging and impoverished, pleading for their pensions. The year 1792 drew a line under their history. Between the death of the monasteries that year and their revitalization in the nineteenth century lay an empty space of a decade and more. Although some nuns eventually returned to religious life, it was to new communities and new surroundings in a new age. This has been a broad-brush outline of the history of religious orders in France under the Bourbon monarchy, from the early 1600s to 1792. The conventual invasion of the seventeenth century was an extraordinary phenomenon, a huge display of human energy. It achieved its aim – the recatholicizing of French society. But the achievement was not without cost. The very size of the movement laid it open to charges of being overbearing and counterproductive. For all its spiritual vigour, the Catholic Reformation had its negative side. In material terms, the conventual invasion led to a reconfiguration of the urban landscape, with the apparatus of reformed Catholicism – the convents, colleges, churches, schools, and hospitals – absorbing more and more of the available space. Financially, it occasioned a drain

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on the country’s wealth, during the very years when the state was seeking to corner more and more of the wealth for itself. The very part of society upon which the religious orders depended for support – the elites – came to see this as an imposition which the country could ill afford. As the general economic climate worsened, the situation of religious communities became precarious. The more vulnerable of them, the female communities, were the first to fall. Stricken by the Law Crash of 1720, they were forced to throw themselves on the charity of the government – a dangerous move, as it turned out, since the government had already decided that there were too many of them. For the religious women of France, the 1720s and 1730s were the bleakest of times as they faced both impoverishment and the mandated reduction in their numbers. Eventually they achieved a financial recovery of sorts, but the damage to their public image was less easily mended. In the mind of the Enlightenment, monasticism, including female monasticism, simply had no raison d’être. The teaching communities were not immune to these changing circumstances. When the conventual invasion began they were there, instructing and proselytizing – and also accumulating property and wealth, thus making friends and enemies at the same time. They shared in the depression of Louis XIV’s later years and in the bankruptcy of 1720. And in the aftermath, as the antimonastic spirit of the prerevolutionary years billowed up, they were caught within it. All these events helped to shape their life within the convent walls. The following chapter will go into the records of these communities to examine the way in which they gained their fortunes and then lost them during their first century of existence (1620–1720). It will, I hope, serve to illustrate how closely the cloistered life was dependent on material conditions. Throughout the rest of the book this dependency should not be forgotten. It formed the foundation on which religious women built their social and spiritual life.

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2 For Richer, for Poorer: The Monastic System and the Economy

t h e w ay s a n d m e a n s o f a c q u i s i t i o n There are two ways of looking at the crucial decades 1620–40, which saw the foundation of most of the teaching communities. One of them is the view from inside: the stories of the heroism of the anciennes mères and their battle against poverty and the inhumanity of man. Stories like that of the little community of Mâcon passing its first winter in a halfruined house, where “the wind came in from every side … and they had at night to hang their robes up to block the windows”; where the rain and snow leaked through the chapel ceiling; where the best they could afford was a pathetic little altar decorated with coloured paper; and where the senior nuns had to post guard at night over the gap in the wall that threatened their enclosure1 … Or stories of the six young women of the Congrégation, refugees from the war in Lorraine, who struggled to set up a community and a school in far-off Châtellerault, working long hours in their school “and eating dinner while warming themselves and diverting themselves a little … not being able to keep a regular order because they had so much work, work that was a joy for them, so great was their fervour”2 … Or stories of the first Ursulines of Blois living on a starvation diet and taking turns to warm themselves at their one small fire; rising early “to do the laundry, bake, chop and stack the wood, and carry in all the water, even for the wash”3 … And of the five young nuns of the Congrégation in Reims, who for several months slept on straw pallets and drank out of a single, shared earthenware pot, all the while facing down the city council, “who were well and

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truly angry, and seldom left us in peace … wishing to force us to leave, and threatening to tear down our grille.”4 Such stories took on the quality of legends, to be repeated by succeeding generations of nuns and shared with their many friends, supporters, and students. The other view of this period is the one from outside, held by people who saw the new congregations as invaders threatening the delicate balance of their cities. The communities were aggressive and tenacious, all for the sake of their sacred cause. They were accused of taking advantage of friendship wherever they found it, of knowing how to manipulate the networks of patronage, and of using their own self-sacrifice to soften or shame the hardest hearts. We see all these accusations in a memorandum drawn up in 1694 by Edmé Leveil, curé of Saint-Valérien in the city of Châteaudun: In the time of the most illustrious … bishop of Chartres, Jacques Lescot, the religious of the Congrégation … came from Lorraine to establish in the parish of Saint-Valérien … They were 3 or 4 from the city of Nancy who began this establishment … They begged M. Coffinier, canon of the château, and myself to take up a collection through the town for them.

The proceeds from this collection provided the nuns with enough to live on while they pursued a longer strategy: “They laid siege to Messire Jacques de la Ferté, dean of Saint-André, through the intermediary of one Barbier, his attendant,” asserted Leveil, and by their flattery persuaded the dean to give them his niece, with a considerable dowry – “upon which they forgot their country and resolved to stay in this city.” Later, they again “mounted a powerful barrage,” this time on another notable who had come into money. After receiving liberal gifts from him, said Leveil, they just as quickly forgot him and looked for patrons elsewhere: I write this to inform posterity of the humble beginnings of these religious and the disrespect that they have shown for those who rendered them all the services that piety could expect of them … Through the exercise of a deplorable poverty deserving of compassion and assistance, in no time at all they will be in a position to concede nothing to the “poor” order of Saint Benedict which has around 300 millions in revenue every year; what is more, this monastery will never be at peace, donec totum impleat orbem.5

This is bitter language coming from a parish priest. It should not be forgotten that the parish clergy were often hostile witnesses because of the inroads that religious communities made into their congregations. But it rings true: the religious of the Counter-Reformation were zealots,

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with the strengths and failings of zealots, and their cause emboldened them to win, even at the expense of others. They did not hesitate to use the patronage of powerful people to force their way in. Bishops were invaluable; so were local seigneurs and prominent ladies. The sisters proved that even the most dogged municipal resistance would crack if they could win over the daughters of important men. Fond papas had to forgo their opposition when they realized that the only way they could keep their children close by was to allow the opening of a convent in their city. When the sisters of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame arrived in 1630 to set up a community in Toulouse, the president of the Parlement sent them six separate orders to leave the city, and when they protested that one of their members was sick, he answered that “whether the sick woman found health or the tomb, it was going to be outside Toulouse.” But then his daughter decided to join the community, and “the magistrate had a sudden change of heart” and began actively to promote the foundation.6 It was blackmail of a sort, and it worked over and over again.7 In other cases, the sisters used their credit at court. In more than one city, municipal officers received a letter from the king or the queen mother, warning them “not to make difficulties over this establishment.”8 For example, in 1634 the Congrégation in Laon had ambitions to open a house in Reims. The sisters knew they had to move fast because the Ursulines were also eyeing the city. But they held a trump card: a young novice, Gabrielle de Beaumont, niece of Cardinal Richelieu’s éminence grise and herself a native of Reims. Her mother badly wanted her closer to home even if it meant opening a local house especially for her, so the matter was forwarded at court, and letters patent were issued. But the royal will met resistance from the city council of Reims, which was already wrestling with a superabundance of religious houses. Order after order was dispatched without effect, until finally the persistent pressure of Gabrielle’s mother at court resulted in a letter to the council, signed by the king and using stern language: “The present is to order you … under pain of disobedience, to receive the said religious … into our city of Reims, and to let them enjoy, fully and peaceably, the effect of our Letters Patent, desisting from all pursuits contrary to our intention.”9 And so it was done. The nuns got their foundation, and Gabrielle came home to Reims. But the affair aroused ill feeling. A bourgeois of the city, no friend of the religious, commented: “Where they have been refused, they have begged the authority of princes and grand seigneurs … And for fear of disobliging his Highness and making him resent us, we have to receive them.”10 The citizens could only watch sourly as the community settled in and started buying up urban properties.

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In city after city, the creeping invasion took place. In Evreux the Ursuline building program dislodged the residents of twenty-five houses;11 in Châlons-sur-Marne, that of the Congrégation absorbed all the houses between two streets.12 One by one, over seventy years and at a cost of some 40,000 livres, the Ursulines of Avallon absorbed twenty properties adjacent to their monastery.13 An Ursuline convent in Aix pursued a building program that began in 1623 and ended in 1755, and consumed twenty-five private properties.14 From the nuns’ point of view, focused entirely on the completion of their enclosure, there was nothing wrong, and everything right, with their efforts. Indeed, the Ursuline community of Montluçon, confronted by neighbours who refused to sell their property, actually set itself to praying for their conversion – or their death!15 Nuns were also guilty on some occasions of the same disreputable infighting that was so notorious among the regulars.* The Ursulines used their credit with the bishop of Poitiers to keep the Filles de NotreDame out of the city, “hoping to block the progress of those whose happy beginnings they had not been able to prevent in Bordeaux,” wrote the historian of the latter.16 And in Blois they did their best to prevent the Visitandines from entering the city.17 On the other hand, in Troyes, Provins, and Reims it was they who were blocked, while the sisters of the Congrégation made a triumphal entry. The important thing was “to get there first,” while space and good will were still available. Pierre Fourier, founder and mentor of the Congrégation, on observing from afar the frantic efforts of the sisters to reach Troyes before the Ursulines, wrote to them reprovingly: “If other religious get ahead of you … in the name of God, we must thank His providence and infinite bounty for providing, in our time, so many good examples on all sides.”18 But his advice fell on deaf ears. The sisters were too much gripped by the spirit of the race to slacken their efforts.

sources of income: dowries Old Regime France has been described as an aggregate of microcosms.19 This description is entirely appropriate for female monasticism. It must be understood that none of the three congregations in question were “congregations” in the modern sense of the word, with central direction and the freedom to move members from house to house. These practices, though prescribed for reformed male congregations, were still forbidden to women in the early seventeenth century. Constrained by canon law to remain physically isolated even from each other, women’s monasteries were turned in on themselves and their own concerns, and failed to develop the solidarity that might

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have given them strength and – in hard times – comfort. Spiritually, each community surrounded itself with what an Ursuline of our day has called “a rigid, cold barrier.”20 Houses corresponded with each other periodically, and neighbouring communities belonging to different orders even made some mutual gestures of friendship, once the “rush” of the foundation period was over. But one has only to read their various works to suspect that the friendship was more pro forma than heartfelt. They valued their own entities so single-mindedly that they set little store by those of others. Materially, women’s monasteries grew up as small business enterprises, each embedded in its own local “market” of supporters and patrons.21 Each monastery fought its own battle for survival; if it faltered, there was little chance that other houses would help out.22 Success, or lack of it, depended on conditions peculiar to each community: its patrons and protectors; its location and the state of its buildings; the regularity and health of its members; and its business acumen. One superior with good management skills could make a house; one bungler could break it. As a result of all these variables, fortunes could be very different, and some houses thrived while others withered away. From the beginning, these small, independent businesses had to operate in a fairly difficult climate. Unlike older monastic communities, they had inherited nothing from previous generations. The date of their establishment was the date on which they started acquiring wealth, wherever and whenever they could find it. Some of them had temporal founders (or, more often, foundresses) who endowed them with houses, land, and rentes. But the contributions of the founders were generally small in relation to the continuing expenses that communities were forced to incur.23 Nearly always, other important persons – bishops, local seigneurs or merchants, or widows of substance – were called on to help them through their early years. A host of lesser benefactors also chipped in: a table here, a dresser there, a half-dozen stools and a soup ladle from one lady, a tablecloth and napkins from another, two measures of flour and a pair of candlesticks from a third, and so on.24 What really launched the communities, however, was the flood of vocations that burst upon them, usually within months of their arrival. Across the country the conventual invasion was fuelled by hundreds, even thousands, of young women seeking entry at their respective monastery doors. Almost all these young women came with a dowry. Dowries provided the basic wealth upon which communities were built; at a most fundamental level, they made the difference between success and failure.

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The Ursuline house in Blois, so poor at the outset, brought in 280,160 livres in its first forty-five years, from the dowries of some ninety entrants.25 Its mother house in Bordeaux took only thirty-two years to acquire somewhat more, from the one hundred and seventeen women whom it professed.26 The new communities found themselves suddenly blessed with a great deal of disposable wealth – just in time to buy the properties and build the monasteries necessary to house their growing populations. The nuns of the Congrégation in Reims borrowed wildly to acquire property and build a monastery; their debts of 88,000 livres were paid off within seventeen years, thanks to the rapid influx of dowries.27 A great deal of the money went out as fast as it came in. The building at Blois, begun in 1655 and completed ten years later, cost about 120,000 livres – no small achievement for a community that had started forty years earlier with almost nothing.28 Yet it was an achievement frequently matched elsewhere. For instance, the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours – a city that could not have competed with Blois in terms of prestige – built its monastery, worth 100,000 livres, in twenty years.29 Successful building programs put some monasteries ahead of others in the race for acceptance – and more dowries. Although additions and improvements continued to be made to the fabric of the monasteries, the main building boom took place around mid-century.30 Some of the buildings, and especially the attached churches, were perhaps grander than they needed to be. But on the whole they followed the prescriptions of the founders: to be “commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous”; not to “resemble châteaux and palaces, castles and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”31 The “overambitious building projects” for which the Crown was later to blame them were more a fact of men’s monasteries – and some women’s abbeys – and mostly took place in the eighteenth century. But buildings did cost money. It was impossible to erect housing for fifty, sixty, or a hundred persons without a heavy investment of wealth. Monasteries were, by their very nature, expensive establishments. Without sufficient space and decent living conditions, they could not hope to attract entrants. And if they failed to establish clausura, their bishops might close them down.32 In other words, they had to satisfy their market, even if this meant alienating other people. Problems began as the public witnessed more and more of its wealth, in the form of dowries, being absorbed into the black hole of mortmain. To take Blois as an example, between 1625 and 1670 more than 800,000 livres in dowry money made its way into the coffers of the city’s four female convents.33 Since most of the women who entered these

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convents came from the city and its environs, this meant a loss to the patrimony of local families. Wherever the conventual invasion struck, this loss eventually began to be felt. It was for financial reasons more than any other that the country’s elites began to cool towards the monasteries. One of the first signs was a significant increase in lawsuits over disputed dowries.34 In the 1660s Colbert gave voice to the opinion that religious houses were draining the country’s wealth with their demand for dowries. In 1693 the Crown took decisive action, forbidding religious dowries of more than 10,000 livres in Paris and the parlementary cities, and more than 6000 livres elsewhere – which meant that pensions were not to exceed 500 and 350 livres, respectively. The purpose of this legislation was clearly to rein in the avarice of monastic houses. Ironically, whatever the public thought, the difficulty that bedevilled many convents was not that dowries were too large but that they were too small. After all, a dowry was the final settlement that a family made on a daughter before she took vows, became “dead to the world,” and was barred from the succession. The dowries were supposed to meet the women’s needs for the rest of their lives, as well as contributing towards the general upkeep of their monasteries.35 The thinking, even of the critics, was that every nun should be supported by rentes of 300 livres.36 Few teaching nuns ever enjoyed such luxury.37 When visiting bishops spoke out on the subject of dowries, it was usually to scold communities for lowering their requirements to unrealistic levels. This was the gist of Bishop de Rueil’s criticism, in 1628, of the Ursuline community in his city of Angers. The sisters, he ordered, must insist on dowries worth 150 livres per annum in rentes and resist any efforts to lower or circumvent them.38 In the same vein, in 1684, Archbishop de Neufville de Villeroy of Lyon ordered that women’s dowries had to be worth at least 2400 livres in the city and 1200 livres elsewhere in his diocese.39 This translated into 200 and 100 livres, respectively, in rentes – hardly conducive to an extravagant lifestyle, especially since the additional costs of maintaining the monastery and supporting the lay sisters had to be deducted from the same account.

the social significance of dowries If dowries were the foundation of a community’s material success, they were also a statement to the world of its social standing. At a time when one livre was a simple worker’s daily wage and a businessman would be happy to retire on an income of 3000 or 4000 livres per annum,40 the dowries required by cloistered convents presupposed a substantial level of disposable income in the families of their entrants.

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Teaching communities were seldom exclusively noble in their recruitment – their registers of profession bear witness to that – but they certainly drew from the “haves” of French society: the rentiers, the men of the law, the officer class, the rich merchants, and the nous-ferons of cities. The practice of placing children in religion* was all the rage among the elites of the seventeenth century, to the point where in parts of France girls of good family were as likely to become nuns as to be married.41 One of the benefits that women and families gained from the convent of their choice was social status, and postulants were expected to bring in the kind of dowries that befitted that status. In the case of the teaching monasteries, these were usually solid but seldom spectacular. In the mid-seventeenth century, the customary dowry payment in the Ursuline monastery of Montbrison was 2300 livres; in that of Toulouse, 3000 livres, and of Blois, 4120.42 Here and there, in highly soughtafter houses such as that of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, the dowries could rise as high as 10,000 livres.43 What we are seeing, in fact, are market forces at play. Dowries varied widely, according to the drawing power of a house and the ability of its clientele to pay. The Ursulines of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris could command dowries of up to 10,000 livres;44 on the other hand, their sister Ursulines in Tréguier, who probably boasted as many quarterings of nobility, could seldom raise more than 1800 livres, plus 150 livres in life pensions. Nobility, wrote the superior, did not translate into wealth “in a city where there is no commerce and where most of the inhabitants are in no state to dower their daughters.”45 The monasteries’ fortunes were dictated not only by place but by time. At the height of the monastic fashion, communities could weigh the demands for admission against the availability of space and, if things looked favourable, drive a hard bargain. Thus in 1642 the grand couvent accepted one entrant at 6000 livres but demanded that the next candidate pay 8000, on the grounds that the house was almost full, and thereafter raised the dowry requirement to 10,000 livres.46 In the Ursuline house in Périgueux the dowry hovered around 3000 livres for many years and then, in the 1730s, rose to a more or less solid 4000 livres – a tribute, no doubt, to its stable financial situation at a time when other houses were in serious difficulties.47 At about the same time the monastery of the Congrégation in Châteauroux, which had barely survived until it became the protégé of the archbishop of Bourges, was able to raise the dowries of its entrants accordingly – from 2500 to 4000 livres.48 Wherever we see the value of dowries rising, we may be sure that the communities demanding them were also on the rise.

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Conversely, nothing betrayed the weakness of a house so much as its inability to maintain the level of its dowries. The experience of the little community of the Congrégation in Châtellerault shows this clearly. Established in 1640 by refugees from the war in Lorraine, it was slow to gain the favour of the local clergy; this, together with its internal dissensions, may have been the reason for its shaky financial start. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century it was receiving novices with dowries of 2500 to 4000 livres – a respectable level for a house in a minor city. The dowries continued at this level until the mid-eighteenth century, then began to drop. In 1770 and 1771 two women professed with dowries of 1800 livres and 1000 livres respectively. The registrar remarked, “One will no doubt be astonished that these two young nuns gave so modest a dowry, but the great shortage of subjects to sustain our duties, above all our beloved instruction, led the community to obtain … permission to receive them.” But the news was out: this community was not in a position to bargain. From then until the Revolution, most of its dowries were modest indeed. The last entrant, in 1789, brought a dowry of only 900 livres. “It is to be hoped,” wrote the registrar, “that her good qualities will make up for the rest.”49 The advantage of dowries, according to one historian, was that they answered directly to need. More entrants meant more demands on the community’s resources and at the same time provided more money to meet those demands.50 The drawback to dowries, however, was that they were often lowest when they were needed most. Sometimes this was simply a function of a depressed economy. After the Fronde, the novitiate at Montargis was without novices, according to the annalist: “The Chapter, after considering the need that we had of subjects, and also that many of those offering themselves could only afford 1000 écus, consented to receive some at this price, by reason of [our] need, and the miseries of the times, which affected both seculars and religious.”51 In the same way, in 1694, it was “the shortage of money,” together with “the poverty of the house,” that forced the monastery of Saint-Marcellin to lower its dowry requirement from 3000 to 2400 livres, and sometimes even lower.52 However, it appears that the problems that individual monasteries experienced often came from the fact that, as businesses, they failed to impress their clientele. This affected their bargaining power. “Our house is not rich, so we are sometimes forced to receive [novices] for less,” complained the Ursulines of Melun in 1706.53 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, which at the height of its popularity could command dowries of 10,000 livres, was constrained after its near bankruptcy in the 1720s to accept women with dowries that averaged

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2990 livres.54 We may suspect that families were taking advantage of the damage that had been done to the house’s good name to settle their daughters for less.55 In times of weakness, chapters sometimes were tempted to make serious and damaging concessions. The Ursulines of Tonnerre agreed to receive Anne Baillot, to give her a room of her own with hangings, to let her get up late, and to excuse her from saying Office and from fasting. It can only have been the 10,000 livres of dowry that her father offered, and their own financial desperation, that allowed such a bending of the Rule.56 The same must be supposed of the decision of the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Poitiers to allow a sister, who had been in the community only a few months, to request profession at once and to give her the right of seniority that would entitle her to the next room with a fireplace that came vacant – all for a dowry of 8000 livres.57 Arrangements like these do not seem to have been common, but when they occurred they must have been damaging to community life. Certainly they gave credence to the public’s belief that “the monasteries often substitute dowries for vocations and load themselves down with unworthy subjects.”58 The public had a point: money does not make a vocation. The founders would have agreed with them. “It is not gold and silver that makes good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.” So wrote an eminent Ursuline of the early seventeenth century, Anne de Vesvres.59 But the nuns of the early eighteenth century were living with a different reality. “If a dowry in cash arrives, we use it; if it doesn’t, we borrow,” wrote another eminent Ursuline, Jeanne de Bourges.60 Dowries had become the only alternative to debt. The public found this scandalous, considering all the money that had poured into the monasteries through the years. Looking around for cause, people blamed the situation on the women’s mismanagement: “Experience shows that the ruin of monasteries comes all too often from the frivolous and vain expenses that are incurred within them.”61 It was an argument that the government took up with great gusto in the 1730s.

th e bu r de n o f tax at i o n Does the evidence suggest that this accusation was indeed true of the teaching communities? Of all the monastic records that survived the revolutionary period, the financial records are the most complete – for the obvious reason that they were of value to the new proprietor, the Nation. Lists of purchases of land, of money transactions, assets, and debts exist in the archives for houses that in every other respect have

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disappeared altogether. What these lists show is that almost all investments preceded and almost all borrowing took place after the amortissement crisis of 1689. The year 1689 marked a watershed between sufficiency and decline. The costs of Louis XIV’s wars had placed the government in desperate need of money. It had been considering amortissement for a long time, and now it decided to move. A royal declaration ordered that religious bodies must pay dues of amortissement and nouvel acquêt on all property acquired since 1641. Many communities now found themselves facing demands for lump sums that exceeded their total annual revenue. A half-century or more of back taxes would be difficult for anyone to bear. What made this tax worse was that it bypassed the rich and struck the poor. The older ecclesiastical institutions – bishoprics, cathedral chapters, abbeys – were already adequately furnished with land and feudal dues, and therefore had not been active in the real estate market. They escaped the tax almost unscathed.62 But the “new” monasteries, like those of the three teaching orders, had acquired their property recently; and as fast as dowries had come in they had invested them, leaving themselves a bare minimum to live on. For example, in 1690 the Ursulines of Rouen were found to have spent more than 130,000 livres purchasing property over the past seventy years.63 It did not matter that, as a later survey would show, their actual revenues totalled little more than 8000 livres for the support of seventy-five women.64 It was their past purchases, not their present straitened circumstances, that counted with the tax collector. The bill for amortissement dues and arrears combined came to 20,660 livres.65 Similarly, the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers was charged 34,284 livres, and that of the Ursulines of Bourges, 24,320 livres.66 Houses that had acquired less property paid accordingly: the Ursulines of Dieppe, 13,793 livres; those of Montluçon, 8200 livres; those of Chinon, 2568 livres.67 Convent after convent appealed the tax. They pleaded poverty; they pointed to the service they provided, at their own expense, to their cities; they protested that even those of their buildings dedicated to free instruction were being taxed – they felt they deserved the same exemption that hospitals enjoyed.68 A few communities offered to hand over all their goods in return for a pension. The taxmen answered them all in the same way: Pay up or face distraint of your goods; pay up quickly, and we will allow you some moderation in your tax bill. The communities paid, even if it meant borrowing to do so. One strange little feature of the process should be mentioned here. In 1696 the king gave Saint-Cyr, the school set up near Versailles for

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the daughters of impoverished noblemen, the right to receive the amortissement dues still outstanding. Madame de Maintenon, the king’s wife, who was in charge of Saint-Cyr, saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: she had a surplus of young ladies who needed to be “placed,” and the communities had a deficit of funds. So she offered to forgive part or all of the amortissement payment due from any convent that would admit one of her girls as a nun. Numerous religious houses were given the offer; most appear to have accepted it, as did the Ursulines of Dieppe, who received the following letter: “Madame de Maintenon has done me the honour of informing me that you have asked for a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, for whom the 6076 livres 17 sols which you still owe for amortissement will take the place of a dowry.”69 Soon afterwards, the demoiselle arrived.70 We find mention of these women in later records, in communities all across the country. The communities might in time have recovered from the amortissement tax if it had been the only demand on their resources during those last years of Louis XIV’s reign. Unfortunately for them, the declaration of July 1689 opened the floodgates; the government’s initiative raised the consciousness of many seigneurs, who went back to their records and realized that they, too, could demand back payment of amortissement dues.71 The next blow came in 1704, when the Crown decreed that investments in the money market, like investments in real estate, were to be subject to amortissement charges; and at the same time the Clergy began to collect regular taxes for its “free gifts.” In some sixteen years, the taxmen imposed thousands of livres in taxes on even the poorest houses, bringing many of them to their knees. Some communities “were looking to borrow on all sides, beginning to create new rentes on their revenues just to live … and to consume the dowries of the girls that they received,” wrote one annalist.72 Weaker communities were forced to send their younger members home to their families; some closed altogether.

the problems of land ownership Although land ownership had its advantages, many communities had so far failed to extract significant profit from their property. In return for the cost of their initial investment and the running repairs which they were constantly being forced to make, their income was often ridiculously low. Notre-Dame in Poitiers is a case in point: after an investment in land and farms which, according to its historian, amounted to 4000 livres a year for nearly forty years, the monastery received in 1727 only a little more (7134 livres) than it had in 1660 (6000 livres).73 Much of the problem lay in the long-lasting agricultural depression

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that plagued the country. “We are ruined by our sharecroppers,” complained the sisters of the Congrégation in Bourges. “They owe us more than 12,000 livres, because they themselves are all ruined by taxes and their workers, bad crop years, and fires.”74 The accounts of the sisters of Provins tell the same story: years of low yield, years of no yield at all, culminating in the bankruptcy and disappearance of their tenants.75 It was a widespread problem. The very considerable properties of the Ursulines of Beauvais – 160 hectares, for which in 1631 they had paid 26,300 livres – were supposed to bring them 1500 livres a year; but half a century and several tenant bankruptcies intervened before they realized this income.76 Sometimes the monasteries had only themselves to blame. Their original purchases were often imprudent and ill-advised. In Châtellerault, a domaine which the sisters bought for 14,225 livres and hoped to farm out for at least 450 livres, fell far below their expectations. “They were terribly deceived,” wrote their memoirist.77 In Montargis the community accepted a domaine of doubtful quality in lieu of a dowry: “We were in such a hurry to conclude the agreement that we did not give ourselves the time to reflect and to send someone to visit it, as was our custom. The season was not suitable, because it was very cold, and snow covered the ground.” In consequence, “we have since then been very dissatisfied with it.”78 Even where the farms were productive, the nuns often lacked the means to get the produce to market. Cartage could be written into their contracts, but it was expensive. Often, the best that the sisters could hope for was to provide grain, meat, and dairy products for their own needs. For many years, their investments in land, for which they paid heavily in amortissement dues, gave them only meagre returns. Over the whole “long seventeenth century” of agricultural depression, land ownership was a difficult business. The communities had entered into it partly because many dowries and donations involved land, and partly because it seemed the right thing to do. “Having learned of the savings that a monastery could enjoy from the produce of nature, the superior was most anxious that we should buy some métairie according to our small power,” wrote the annalist of Montargis, adding that the convent later came to regret the decision.79 Without the requisite management skills and the right conditions, the nuns were unable to get value for money. Their capital would have been better employed in the money market – at least, until 1720.80 Equally serious was their vulnerability to fraud. Their clausura turned them into absentee landlords. At most, the officers of the house were allowed by the bishop to view their properties before buying. From then on a servant might visit occasionally. Other than that,

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their interests were left in the hands of friends or salaried agents. The annales suggest that friendly help was freely given in the early days but tended to dwindle as communities grew older, more established, and less loved. Thereafter, the nuns depended on agents to know where their money was going, what repairs were really needed, and whether those repairs were faithfully carried out. Of course, these agents could themselves be part of the problem. When the Ursuline monastery of Rouen suffered bankruptcy in 1707, a commission appointed by the archbishop to investigate the matter discovered that the nuns’ agent had been cheating them for twenty years.81 Cloistered nuns were easy targets for dishonesty. At one of the Poitiers monastery’s domaines, the farmer kept seven domestics at the community’s expense; at another, the workers helped themselves freely to the wine; at another, the farmer cut down trees in the woods for his own profit and still fell short on his annual rent.82 The Ursulines in Carcassonne discovered one day that the farmer had simply disappeared, causing a loss to the monastery of 300 livres.83 The only redress, once the damage was done, was to take the matter to court, and this was itself an expensive business. “We couldn’t get anything out of them, no matter how much care and diligence we spent pursuing them. What’s more, we lost the advances that we had been obliged to make,” complained the nuns of Saint-Dizier.84 Legal costs were an ongoing drain on finances. Later, as times grew harder, more and more communities could not even afford them. They were no longer able to protect their interests. These deficiencies were noted and discussed at length by the advisers to the Commission des secours, and it was agreed that cloistered nuns were not in a position to manage their own property: “Because women enclosed in a cloister, incapable of knowing everything, still less of doing everything on their own, are forced to depend for many things on strangers (sometimes lacking in intelligence or attention, and sometimes not too honest), there is danger that the temporal of monasteries will fall, little by little, into great disorder.”85 The solution (since any loosening of the rules of clausura was out of the question) was to subject them more closely to the surveillance of their bishops and directors. From the mid-eighteenth century on, religious women might make no transaction involving more than 1500 livres without the permission of the ordinary. In 1749 their freedom of action was further circumscribed, for they were forbidden by law to acquire land. The Crown made sure that thenceforth they would invest their money in rentes constituted on itself and other public bodies. By then, however, the economic climate had changed, and rural investments, far from being a burden, were beginning to pay off handsomely. As the value of agricultural products rose, so did the wealth of

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the houses that had land and received payments in kind. Thus the Ursulines of Elbeuf, whose ground rents had totalled 1300 livres in 1729, were before the end of the Old Regime enjoying 11,200 livres.86 In the same period their faraway sisters in Saint-Dizier saw the income from their four farms rise from 379 livres to 1,182 livres.87 Such improvement may be attributed in part to the fact that many communities learned to take better care of their farms; this is certainly evidenced by their account books and journals. But their fundamental handicap, their clausura, remained as confining as it had been in the 1730s. What had changed was the conjoncture, now as favourable to them as it had once been unfavourable.

the problems of the money market Investments in rural property were made largely by monasteries that had one foot in the land – monasteries in small towns.88 Urban communities, on the other hand, tended to put their money into urban property or into the money market. The first property they bought was, naturally, that which they needed to establish their monastery and enclosure. Once this was achieved, and with dowries still coming in, they looked for safe places to put their capital so as to ensure a steady income in the years to come. Their preferred choice was property adjoining or close to their own houses – under their eye, so to speak, and therefore easier to manage. These buildings might serve some day to enlarge the monastery; in the meantime, they were renovated as necessary and rented out to householders and shopkeepers. The disadvantage of this rental property was revealed in 1689: like land, it was subject to amortissement dues. The other course open to communities, and the one which they most frequently chose, was to invest their capital in rentes constituées. These were loans, in the thinnest of disguises. In return for a fixed payment per annum, a lump sum was “sold” to the borrower. The transaction was notarized and therefore backed by the law. A rente constituée, like any other property, could be passed from one party to the next, by purchase or gift – or, in a monastery’s case, by dowry. Its chief advantage was its flexibility. Any large influx of capital – a dowry or several dowries – could quickly be put to making money. On the other hand, any large expenditure – a new building project, for instance – could be met by reversing the procedure and constituting a rente on the community itself. It was not difficult, when the occasion required, to turn from lending to borrowing. By moving money about in such ways, religious communities were often important actors in their local economies.89 Initially, most of their rentes were constituted on individuals; in other words, most money was

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lent out privately. But as time went on, more and more of the monasteries’ capital was placed on public bodies such as local municipal corporations, the Clergy, the provincial États, or the Hôtel de Ville of Paris (the Crown by another name). Finally, in 1749, the government barred religious houses from lending to private parties, and from then on all new money was invested in public bodies. However, until the end of the Old Regime, the records of many convents continued to show a welter of private loans made in the distant past and paying (or often, no longer paying) dividends every year. Because the great bulk of their collective wealth was invested in this way, the fortunes of the new religious houses (those established after 1600) were closely dependent on the money market. It was this dependency, rather than their investments in land and buildings, that caused their gravest troubles. Amortissement, argues one historian, would have been supportable had it not been for “the accumulation of public calamities that came upon them, blow by blow: the variations in the value of money, the visa, the Law bankruptcy, the reduction of rentes.”90 The exemption from amortissement dues on money investments ended in 1704. The government, having for many years declared such investments off limits to the taxmen, reversed itself. From then on, investors had to pay dues on their rentes – this in spite of the fact that rentes were already bringing in much less than they used to do. During the foundation period, rentes constituées had usually carried a return of 6.5 percent. It was on the basis of this generous rate, which the first nuns probably imagined to be immutable, that monastic economies were designed and rounded out, and dowries and pensions set. However, in the late seventeenth century the money market became increasingly unstable. In 1679 the rate was lowered to 5.5 percent, and it remained there until 1720. Then, with the Law Crash, it dropped briefly to 2.0 percent before rising to 2.5 percent. Five years later it rose again, to 5 percent.91 The monasteries sank into financial difficulties and climbed out of them in more or less the same cadence. The difficulties arising from the diminished returns were compounded by the fact that, more and more often, returns were not forthcoming at all. As the economic depression deepened towards the end of the seventeenth century, borrowers began to default on their payments. Thus began a build-up of uncollectable debts, which would in time be the undoing of many communities.92 The truth was that no matter how well built their houses and no matter how impressive their holdings on paper, the monasteries had little cash to spare. Rarely was there to be found the frivolity and wastefulness which, the Crown later charged, was the cause of their misfortunes. The injustice of this charge can be seen in the history of the

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grand couvent during these critical years. From the start it had earned its reputation as “a house built on prudence.” Its budget was always balanced, its expenses carefully calibrated. It was able to insist on large dowries. It maintained an agent to watch over its business interests – which included the loans it was able to make to other bodies in the capital.93 But in 1678 the Chapter heard something that it had never heard before: the bursar could not pay for the groceries, “since she cannot get anything out of the debtors.” She was authorized to borrow 8000 livres. She was back again for more in 1689, again in 1690, twice in 1692, twice in 1693, once in 1694, and again in 1695, 1698, and 1701. By now the Chapter was thoroughly alarmed. A community that had been building steadily since 1612 was, for the first time, having to borrow just to live. This was all before the shock of 1706, when the poor woman had to announce that the amortissement dues on the convent’s rentes would take up two years’ revenues. And still in the future, at that time, lay the “system” of John Law, with its terrible consequences for the women’s monasteries. If the grand couvent was feeling pain, other smaller houses were experiencing agony. Even before 1720 many of them were selling their real estate and their church treasures, and sending some of their members home to live. Then came “the Revolution of Law,” as they would later refer to it. As has already been said, John Law’s original scheme was intended to enrich the whole country, even the rentiers. This was the thinking at the top. The nuns in their cloisters, scattered far and wide across the country, were of course not to know any of this. All they knew was that they were ordered to transact no new business in cash beyond a certain level and to constitute no new rentes. Their specie, with the rest of their gold and silver, was to be carried to the Treasury, and their rentes on the government were to be removed from them, with the assurance that they would be reimbursed in billets, which they could immediately place on the Mississippi Company at an advantageous rate of interest.94 This must all have caused them anxiety, in view of their recent experiences and their natural distrust of government which, if their own writings are to be believed, was as great as that of the rest of the population. As it turned out, their distrust was justified. The reimbursement was so slow in coming that in most cases they were too late to buy into the Mississippi Company. The question which then faced them was: What should they do with all this paper money? The right thing to do was to place it immediately by paying off debts, buying in provisions, or purchasing property; this was what some welladvised houses managed to do. An Ursuline community in Aix at once reinvested as many of its billets as possible, as did the grand couvent in

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Paris.95 The Ursulines of Montbrison, quick off the mark, bought a domaine on 9 July 1720 for 9150 livres, of which 8000 livres were in billets.96 But the majority of houses were not so wise or so well served. The traces of one such house’s travails survive in the archives. They begin with a letter, dated 4 September 1720, to the superior of NotreDame in Alençon from a friend in Paris: I wish that my powers equalled my inclinations in the matter of your billets de banque. I would then handle them in a way which would please you; but unfortunately I find myself, like you, in the same difficulty and the same evil predicament … In all good faith I gave up my small bills and my money, but can get nothing back just now except heavy losses, because of the ill usage and the frightful usury that is being practised – and allowed – at present … Imagine, Madame, the bad situation in which people find themselves, here and in the provinces, especially those who are not used to these practices.

There follows an official letter, dated 13 May 1721: M. de Mahault, notary at Paris, charged with placing your billets de banque in a rente on the Hôtel de Ville, told me yesterday that your contract has not yet been expedited by the provost and aldermen, and that you need to make a declaration for your community before the intendant … that on 7 October 1720 you placed in Sieur Mahault’s hands … 45,000 livres in billets de banque, to be placed on the Hôtel de Ville … on behalf of your community, this money coming from a number of reimbursements that were made to you … these rentes having previously constituted the income of the community.97

What happened subsequently is not clear; perhaps, like many others, the nuns simply took the paper money back and put it into their coffers, to wait for a better day that never came. What is known is that the community of Alençon remained drastically poor until the Revolution.98 Mention has been made of reimbursements. The billets de banque continued to be the only legal tender long after their fate was becoming evident. Private debtors, their hands full of paper money that promised soon to be valueless, hastened to use it to pay off their debts. A stampede of reimbursements took place. The result appears in many monastic account books: extraordinary number of receipts, as many as ten times the normal amount, during 1720.99 If the monasteries attempted to refuse the billets, they could be constrained by the law. The reimbursers were every type of debtor: public institutions (in the case of Alençon, the Clergy), nobles, businessmen, friends – even the nuns’ own fathers, who hastened to make up their daughters’ dowries in

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soon-to-be-worthless paper. The convents themselves tried their hands at reimbursing but, on the whole, lost more than they gained. It was a golden opportunity for debtors, but a disaster for lenders. The only way to avoid full repayment was to offer the borrower a reduction in interest rates. Thus, the private lending rate followed the official rate downwards, to 2.5 percent. “The diminution of the regular charges made to debtors can be evaluated in a very general way at 50 percent,” writes the historian of the bankruptcy.100 The loss to the lenders can be pegged at exactly the same level. This was the situation when the bankruptcy finally became official at the end of 1720. One last shock lay in store for the lenders of France: the Visa. The government, faced with some half-million claimants brandishing 2,452.6 million livres’ worth of paper money and shares in the Mississippi Company, in 1721 set up a body to verify the claims and refund those that it acknowledged. By 1724, when the Visa’s work was finished, the government’s debt had been reduced to 1,1936.5 million livres.101 The government’s gain was, of course, its creditors’ loss.102 For communities that depended heavily on rentes, this reduction of their capital and its reinvestment at the now standard 2.5 percent was the hardest blow yet. The Ursuline house at Argenteuil, which had previously received 6419 livres per annum from its rentes, now had to do with 412 livres; the house at l’Ile-Bouchard found its revenues reduced from 4957 livres to 500 livres.103 The list could go on and on. The reversal of fortune could not have been more dramatic. “In less than a year,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “in spite of all our precautions, we lost half our rentes.”104 Some historians have suspected that in their efforts to secure assistance the nuns “outrageously” exaggerated their distress.105 It is true that, in the best tradition of citizens of the Old Regime, they treated the truth somewhat cavalierly when dealing with the fiscal authorities. But they were expected to do that,106 and indeed this is why the authorities, in a second round of inquiries, called upon intendants and bishops to verify their complaints. While these men found many errors and some exaggerations, they did confirm the communities’ situation on the whole; over and over again, they found women “in the greatest need,” living on the charity of families and friends, even begging their bread from door to door.107 In many cases, the free schools had to close because the nuns, in order to put food on the table, were sewing for dear life and could not afford the time and effort to teach. Community solidarity was threatened as private assistance from families allowed some sisters to eat while others starved. Community discipline broke down. Without the bond of the Rule, some monasteries were in

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danger of becoming mere group homes, whose residents shared little more than their anxiety and distress. The internal evidence of serious damage is everywhere in the monastic records. We find registers suddenly neglected, deaths no longer entered, entries simply not being made; bills left unpaid and account books hopelessly confused, the penmanship sloppy and hurried. A document from a Grenoble monastery locates the crisis perfectly. In its register of professions a space was set apart to record the community’s annual renewal of its solemn vows. The practice had been meticulously observed, and every year from 1654 onwards the professed nuns had, one by one, entered their signatures to this effect. Then, in 1727, the practice ceased. In 1732 it was resumed, “to conform to traditional usage,” according to a note in the margin.108 In later decades the sisters wrote feelingly about the experience. In their private correspondence, their death notices, and their annales they frequently alluded to what was, for them, a traumatic event. With no axe to grind, no official to impress, and therefore no reason to exaggerate, they spoke with feeling about “the revolution of 1720.” Years after the event one annalist recalled: “Everyone was emboldened to insult us. In one day we received three summonses, one for fifty livres, the price of a pig; another for ten écus owing to a grocer; another from the butcher for several weeks’ worth of meat … Our impoverishment became public knowledge; families refused to entrust us with their children … The novitiate was empty.”109 The Law Crash and the years immediately following it were arguably the rock-bottom of female monastic fortunes under the Old Regime. For many monasteries, however, another misery was about to fall upon them, for they became involved in “the Jansenist quarrel.”

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3 The Dilemmas of Obedience

My soul finds peace and assurance in obedience and regularity … It is there that I meet God without fear of being deceived. Gabrielle Rubens1

This was a sentiment often repeated in the writings and sayings of religious women. It expressed their longing for security, a security which, they were confident, would come with conformity to the will of God. This conformity would be achieved by (1) obedience, by which was meant submission to authority – an authority invested, first and foremost, in the bishop – and (2) regularity, by which was meant the faithful observance of the Rule. For thousands of nuns there was never a conflict. However, there were moments and situations in which obedience and regularity came into jarring collision for some women. The following two chapters interrupt the discussion of the material fortunes of religious women in order to address the question of their involvement in the Jansenist quarrel. This quarrel came to a head during the years 1730–55 – the same years when convents were feeling the worst pinch of poverty and when the Commission des secours was most actively intervening in their lives. The quarrel affected communities only in some parts of the country, but their defiance of authority, by its stubborn intensity, challenged the conventional wisdom about the natural gentleness and tractability of their kind. Was it something peculiar to Jansenism that fired up their blood? Or was it something in community life that made them obstinate in the pursuit of what they thought was right? To establish a context, we should go back to the beginning and examine the relationship of religious women to their two sources of authority: their bishops and their Rule. “The strengthening of the episcopate in every respect, as the nodal point of every aspect of reform, may be regarded as the corner-stone of

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the counter-reformation Church.” So said Henry Outram Evenett in a famous set of lectures published posthumously in the 1960s.2 He went on to remark that although traditionally the Jesuits are seen as the maids-of-all-work of the Counter-Reformation, it was in fact the bishops who had everything thrust upon them: the total care of their dioceses, spiritual, temporal, and charitable. Included in the massive list of their responsibilities was the supervision of the regulars* who lived within their diocesan boundaries. This, he pointed out, flew in the face of long-established practice; and the regulars, who were used to shouldering much of the responsibility for the care of souls, were loath to accept the new order of things. As a result, one aspect of reform, in France at least, was a long-running battle to establish new lines of authority. The bishops knew that the implementation of reform depended on their ability to take control of a fairly turbulent church and to harness the multitude of competing authorities.3 The religious orders, on the other hand, might be forgiven for pointing to their past devotion to the pastoral care of the faithful throughout the years when the secular clergy had been unable or unwilling to do the work.4 And in any case, they might add, they had exemptions from episcopal control, and these exemptions came straight from Rome. Neither Rome nor the bishops cared to attack the orders’ exemptions head-on. But wherever authority was not specifically delegated elsewhere, it now passed into the hands of local hierarchies. One of the powers which the Council of Trent handed to the bishops was superiority over all non-exempt female monasteries – which, in fact, meant the majority of monasteries founded after 1600. The bishops were commanded to restore and safeguard clausura, to ensure the religious practice of nuns, to examine all candidates for profession as to their age and motives, and to preside over the election of superiors.5 Implicit in these very specific prescriptions was a general understanding that the bishops, though they themselves were in large majority members of the secular clergy, were to become the ultimate arbiters of female religious life. The subjection of the female communities was essential, if only as a stage in the more difficult process of gaining ascendancy over the male religious orders. “What we have to desire is power, not over the nuns, but over the regulars, who, taking advantage of their privileges, often challenge and disrupt hierarchical authority,” wrote Bishop Zamet of Langres in 1627. The problem with nuns, he contended, was that they were under the influence of the men with whom they had contact, their confessors and directors; if these men chose to, they could incite the women to disobedience – even to the point of trying to shut their bishops out altogether, “as has happened here in several places.”6

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Zamet, along with other reforming bishops, felt that it was essential for good order that both men and women be kept in line. Consequently, all new communities of nuns – except those with affiliation to older religious orders – faced the same conditions from the outset: “that they place themselves under the perpetual charge, visit, correction, government and entire obedience” of the ordinaries. They were shaped from the start in postures of submission to and dependence on their bishops. Every religious rule stated this clearly and unequivocally. Most nuns must have been heartily grateful for this, if for no other reason than that their early years in community were fraught with difficulties and often enough the bishops’ protection made the difference between survival and collapse. We can see this protection at work in many different instances. Philibert de Brichanteau of Laon supported his protégées, the sisters of the Congrégation, with both money and political influence during the long struggle to have them accepted into the city: “The bishop lodged the religious in his house of Petit-Vincent 9 years and 3 months. He paid all the expenses of establishment, of securing letters patent and of confirmation by Parlement, and has put out more than 5000 écus, not counting other charities made since.”7 Cardinal de Sourdis, when he learned that certain notables in Bordeaux were criticizing “his” Ursulines, issued a fiery pastoral letter in their defence, threatening sanctions against anyone who spoke against them.8 An archbishop and a bishop accompanied the sisters of the Congrégation into Provins in order to prevent the local opposition from turning them away.9 When plague struck in the 1620s and 1630s, it was often the bishops who offered their country residences as refuges for the nuns. After the destruction of their property during the Fronde, the Filles de NotreDame of Sarlat found a champion in their bishop, who was the uncle of their superior: “He took care to put their funds in security and he gave them one of his châteaux to live in while they were building; so that, with this support, they turned a house ruined by fire and war into one of the finest that their company can boast.”10 There are many such recollections in the surviving literature, and we may take it that these represent many others that have gone into oblivion. The bishops’ help was often needed. In the 1630s and 1640s most nuns and therefore most communities were very young, for the sudden expansion in the female monastic population that took place in the first decades of the seventeenth century was largely fuelled by an influx of girls and young women. In the Ursuline monastery of Rouen, for example, the average age of the community in 1630 was twenty-five, and fifteen of the forty-eight professed choir nuns were still teenagers.11 In

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1632 nineteen of the forty professed choir nuns in Aix were twenty years old or younger.12 At about the same time, the Ursulines in the new house in Blois ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-five.13 How could it have been otherwise, given the newness of the foundations? The monastery that Marie Guyart entered in Tours in 1631 was only nine years old, but it had already professed some thirty nuns and was holding in its novitiate twenty-eight more, all of whom, except Marie, were sixteen years or under.14 This meant that within two years, the majority of the professed members of this community would be under twenty. This was not unusual. All across France the new monasteries were full of young women who had more zeal than experience and were dangerously liable to make mistakes. Consequently, there often developed a paternal-filial relationship between prelates and nuns. Bishop Le Porc of Saint-Brieuc watched over the nascent Ursuline community in his city with fatherly solicitude: “He knew the name and family of all the nuns and took interest in all their relatives … During the building, His Grandeur often came to see the builders … From his palace, he noted if the bell rang exactly on time.”15 When the Ursulines of Montargis – most of them still in their twenties – were faced with the prospect of running their community without help from the mother house in Paris, it was their archbishop who calmed them, promising the new superior that all would go well in spite of her immaturity: “The Lord Archbishop … said to her in front of all the assembly that he gave her from his own years all that lacked in hers.”16 In Mâcon in 1627, when the handful of adolescents who constituted the community lost their superior, the bishop promised “that he would be a faithful father to them – and indeed, even a mother – while they were without,” and he was true to his promise.17 In circumstances like these, affection and dependency tightened the bonds of obedience. In any case, the structure of female monastic life ensured that the women, even after they were mature, would continue to need outside help. Their monasteries were constructed in virtual isolation from each other; there were no normal avenues for interchange of personnel and ideas, few ways in which they could assist each other in times of difficulty. During the formative years, various plans had been set out to avoid this atomization. Both the Compagnie de Notre-Dame in Bordeaux and the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Lorraine had begun with plans for a generalate, in which all communities would be subject to a mother house and a superior general, who would have the power to intervene when needed and to move nuns between houses.18 A number of prominent Ursulines tried for years to establish a union between houses. Several bishops tried to construct something of the

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same type on a diocesan scale, with themselves in charge. But all these plans foundered on the rocks of tradition and local particularism. During the very time when male monastic communities were joining together in larger organizations, female monastic communities were left in their own isolation. From their foundation until their end in the French Revolution, they lived very much within the closed circles of their own cloisters.19 This isolation did not necessarily lead to trouble. Many women’s communities maintained a model life of harmony and regularity, and were commended for this by their bishops. But it did make the women more dependent on outside help. Even the larger houses could experience difficulties. In the monastery of Notre-Dame in Bordeaux in 1645, less than thirty years after its foundation, the canonical visitor* was surprised to find that many of the nuns owned personal possessions, that the refectory was the scene of noisy gossip, and that strangers were entering the cloister without permission.20 For smaller or more inaccessible houses, the problems could become malignant. In Libourne in 1642, two factions fought for control of the Ursuline house; peace was restored only when a commissioner from the bishop removed one of the factions by force.21 Some twenty-five years later, in Bourg at the mouth of the Gironde, the little Ursuline community found itself terrorized by one of its members, Jeanne Peychaud. Shortly after her profession, she began “to reveal her evil nature”; when her scheme to get the position of sacristan (and with it the key to the outside church) was thwarted, she became enraged and forced the rightful sacristan to give her the keys. “We realized she was with child in the month of December 1667,” her superior wrote later, naming as father the Mass priest, a certain Sieur de Cosso. After trying unsuccessfully to abort the child, Jeanne changed into secular clothes and went off to Bordeaux for the birth, then bullied her way back into the house! Her bad behaviour continued. She went on writing to Sieur de Cosso; she attacked a pensionnaire and a lay sister, threatened the superior with her fist, and again stole the keys to the sacristy. Only then was the archbishop of Bordeaux informed and the offending woman carried off to prison in a Bordeaux monastery.22 Clearly, given the small size of the community and the weakness of its superior, a case like this required the application of force majeure. An even more bizarre case began to unfold in the Ursuline house of Saint-Remy in 1685. A recently professed nun, Simone Cullevier, who claimed to have the power to deliver souls from purgatory, was elected superior. Then began a reign of terror in the monastery rivalling the abuses that are sometimes seen in twentieth-century cults. “She went for more than twenty-four years without assisting at a single community

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act, or at any offices, saying that the Blessed Virgin took pleasure in seeing her enjoying herself,” and this in the daily company of the provost of the Collegial of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues, her too-close friend and supporter. Under her the nuns were subjected to a harsh new Rule, and those who resisted were beaten and even imprisoned. In the absence of any outside intervention (the foremost families of the town being favourable to Simone) this tyranny lasted until 1708, when the archbishop of Avignon arrived, assessed the situation, and finally took steps to have the woman removed.23 In all such cases, communities simply lacked the ability to right themselves. Once the authority structure of the community broke down or fell into the wrong hands, there was nothing that could be done except call in outside help. Every now and then in the diocesan records we come across a pathetic letter from some distressed nun, alleging dysfunction in her community and appealing for intervention. We find numerous mentions of troublemakers being removed or “foreign” superiors being brought in to re-establish monastic regularity. The problems did not have to be egregious. Sometimes communities were simply divided over interpretations of lifestyle. In Châtellerault in 1649, not long after foundation, the nuns fell to arguing over which version of their Rule was the authentic and legitimate one. The conflict became heated, and the bishop of Poitiers was forced to appoint a referee.24 In all such cases, which in exempt orders would have been handled by a superior general, remedial action depended on the bishops or their delegates. It is difficult to see how women’s monasteries could have survived their internal crises without this outside help. Thus, from the very beginning of the seventeenth-century monastic revival, religious women found themselves engaged in a structure of dependence on their bishops, to which they were expected to contribute “a docility marked by simplicity and childlikeness.”25 Not only did their bishops expect this, but society did as well; and so, it appears, did they. In a time when obedience was the cornerstone of all religious virtue, theirs was meant to be the most perfect obedience of all. However, from the start there was a certain ambiguity in this vocation of obedience. It was not that nuns desired freedom or the right to disobey; it was that they were vowed to two obediences – obedience to their bishop, and obedience to their Rule.26 The bishops’ authority over them was written into their papal bulls.* On the other hand, the Fathers of Trent had reiterated the binding obligation on all religious, men and women alike, to follow their monastic rules: “For if those things which constitute the basis and foundation of all regular discipline are not strictly observed, the whole edifice must necessarily fall.”27 Women who were serious about their profession took this obligation

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literally. Their Rule was sacrosanct and was confirmed by Rome. When they received the papal bulls sanctioning their new religious life, they were given to understand that the regimens thereby established were to be observed on pain of serious fault, that no change was allowable, even in small details. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of its vows, rules and constitutions,” they were told.28 It was customary for new superiors, upon election, to vow never to make any changes whatsoever to the Rule: “Just as the instrument should do nothing of its own initiative but work according to the intention of him who wields it, so ought the superior to watch over the convent according to the ideas and intentions of the Lord, as expressed in the constitutions and regulations – the unique means by which God intends all to arrive at holiness.”29 This belief in the immutability of the Rule was built into the religious mentality. To follow the Rule was to follow it to the letter, for, as the foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, Jeanne de Lestonnac, put it, “there is nothing small in religious life.”30 It was logical for the nuns to believe that this observance was incumbent even on their bishops: “Authority is given in order to make the law respected.”31 This refrain was being voiced by nuns from the earliest days. In fact, we have a black-and-white illustration of it in the first draft of the Rule of the Ursuline community of Présentation NotreDame, in Avignon, which stated that it was up to the bishop to ensure the observation of the rules, “without power to innovate, change or abolish [anything in] the statutes and constitutions.” The manuscript is still held in the departmental archives of Vaucluse, and in it still appears this phrase, struck out – the only correction made to the entire Rule.32 The original phrase suggests an inspiration from a member of one of the masculine religious orders whose influence over the nuns was pervasive. The striking out suggests that it contained implications of what seemed, to the ecclesiastical authorities, an unacceptable independence. For most communities, we may assume, this conflict of obediences was never an issue. Only when the authority of the Rule collided with that of the bishop was the contentiousness of the situation revealed. A flurry of such collisions occurred initially, during the years when the authorities were committing communities to clausura. In some women’s minds this new obligation contravened the spirit of their institut, the apostolic work to which they had dedicated themselves.33 In most cases they simply left their houses quietly. But in others, community structures had to be altered and superiors and officers forcibly removed before the nuns accepted enclosure. There were even some appels comme d’abus,* as in Aix in 1632.34 In these early days, however, Parlement seemed deaf to the complaints of religious women and did nothing to

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support their claims. “Henceforth the cloister was victorious,” writes the historian of the Ursulines of Provence.35 What is true for Provence is true for the rest of France. The cloister closed over the heads of religious women with barely a ripple to mark what had gone. Bishops also intervened in community life when they saw a risk to orthodoxy. In 1660 Archbishop Harlay, concerned over rumours of Jansenism among the Ursulines of Rouen, bypassed established procedure and himself named the officers of the monastery. The nuns were shocked by this attack on their right of election. “We were more dead than alive,” wrote the secretary of the Chapter.36 But they obeyed. With reliable women installed in all the positions of power, the community soon lost its Jansenist tinge. But more often than not, conflicts arose for less weighty reasons, such as incompatibility between the bishops’ interpretation of their powers and the nuns’ interpretation of their rights. In the diocese of Langres, in 1619, the Ursulines of one house (Dijon) received a papal bull elevating their community into a monastery. The terms of the bull were later extended to the other houses of the diocese. This gave Bishop Zamet of Langres the idea of creating a diocesan union of Ursuline houses, all under his immediate control.37 The project had precedents: the union of Ursuline houses of the archdiocese of Bordeaux under Cardinal de Sourdis; and, even more authoritatively, the “congregation” of all the Ursulines in the diocese of Milan under the saintly Archbishop Borromeo. But such a union contradicted the papal bull.38 A General Chapter of the superiors involved rejected the plan as contrary to their Rule, but Zamet overrode their objections and proceeded in 1623 to install a provincial superior at Dijon. To achieve this he had to force the current superior of Dijon not to accept a second term.39 When she refused to step down, he armed himself with letters from Parlement enforcing his authority, then went to the monastery, transferred the keys, and had the protesting woman carried away. When the community resisted this act of force, they were excommunicated and deprived of the sacraments.40 They were not vanquished, however: in the elections of the following year, they chose one of their own, an assistant to the exiled superior. Then, in May 1624, they obtained a papal brief confirming their existing statutes. Zamet accepted the papacy’s decision, but he was only biding his time. In 1637 he called together the superiors of all the houses founded from Dijon and presented them with constitutions designed to create a centralized province. This time the superiors did not argue; they simply allowed the constitutions to remain a dead letter. This kind of respectful noncompliance was a powerful weapon in the nuns’ armory.

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The Ursulines in Zamet’s own episcopal city of Langres were equally unresponsive to his plans for union. To overcome their objections, he procured a ruling in his favour from a group of doctors from the Sorbonne. When the sisters continued to resist, he showed what mutinous nuns might expect. He put them in spiritual quarantine, forbidding his clergy to have any further dealings with them until he gave permission. To their pleas that they be allowed to keep their confessor, he answered sarcastically that “they were so good that when they died without the sacraments, they would still be in a state of grace.” The sudden illness of a novice while he was out of town created a crisis, because no priest dared give her the last sacraments. The community’s request for a confessor fell on deaf ears. With the bishop away, the grand vicar refused even to hear the case. The girl was removed to her relatives’ home, where she was able to die fortified by the sacraments. In June the Chapter remonstrated against the grand vicar’s “overly stern refusal.” He retorted that the novice’s sickness had only been a pretext for the community’s disobedience, that the nuns’ open defiance was causing scandal, that until the Holy See ruled otherwise they were bound by the opinion of the doctors of the Sorbonne (to which, he pointed out, those persons advising them ought also to submit), and that he wanted nothing further to do with them.41 The quarrel was resolved two months later when a bull arrived from Rome confirming the women in their existing Rule. The papal confirmation solidified certain important rights for the nuns. In future, all professions were to be made “between the hands of the superior, while observing the form laid down by the Council of Trent” (no mention being made of the bishop). The administration of the monastery’s property was to be the responsibility of the superior, with the advice of her Chapter, an accounting being made annually to the bishop or his appointee. The director, or canonical superior, of the convent was to be chosen by the superior and Chapter, and could be dismissed by them, with the approval of the bishop.42 Zamet accepted the ruling, though with as little publicity as possible. The sisters of the Congrégation faced the same dilemma of obedience. Their founder, Pierre Fourier, had originally hoped that they would have a central direction to manage their affairs, much like that of the masculine congregations. When this project was quashed by Rome, he had to accept the fact that their houses would remain autonomous and under diocesan control.43 But he alerted them early to the difficulties that awaited them: “The Lord Bishops are powerful, and learned, and prudent and holy in their lives, and in possession of your persons where spiritual jurisdiction is concerned, and of your

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monasteries.”44 He foresaw, quite correctly, that these bishops would interfere with the constitutions that he had drawn up. And over the years, he faulted the bishops, one by one – Sens, Laon, Châlons, Metz, Troyes – and counselled the sisters to resist such interference, even at the risk of excommunication.45 The earliest interferences concerned the form that religious vows should take. Fourier had developed, and Rome had approved, a formula by which the professing nun vowed obedience to her superior. A number of bishops changed this so that the obedience would be directed to themselves. This incensed Fourier: “It is the superior of the woman’s monastery who should admit [candidates] to profession … without the bishop having a hand in it.”46 He threatened to cut off nuns from the congregation if they gave in.47 The problem continued to surface, here and there, for a long time, and it was settled in different ways, according to the determination of the bishop and the situation of the community. Thus, in 1686 we see a new bishop of Poitiers visiting the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault and promptly changing the order of profession: “He wanted the novice to make her profession between his hands and to him, and not to the superior as others had done since the start of the monastery.” But since Châtellerault was some distance from Poitiers and the bishop visited rarely, the nuns waited a while and then returned to their old ways.48 In many other houses, however, the order of profession that made the bishop the recipient of the nuns’ vows, and even excluded the superior altogether, became fixed and remained so throughout the Old Regime. Another right which communities guarded jealously was the right to choose their own members. They did this through their Chapter, which was a sort of senate made up of the senior nuns, or vocales. The process of admitting new members was governed by precise rules. After discussion of the applicant’s case, each member of the Chapter was given a white and a black bean, and she cast into the box whichever she felt appropriate. Applicants who did not receive a plurality of white beans were asked to leave. Every now and then, a bishop would attempt to force some protégée on a community. It was not unheard-of for the Chapter to resist his efforts. In Châtellerault in 1660, when the bishop came personally to promote a young postulant’s candidacy, the nuns turned him down flat.49 In Le Mans a century later, a similar response led the Ursulines into a fierce wrangle with the grand vicar, which cost them the sacraments for several months.50 The most important right that religious women were given by the Council of Trent was the right to elect their own superiors. The prescriptions for free and secret elections, conducted at regular intervals, was spelled out: “That all things may be done properly and without

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fraud in the election of superiors … the holy council above all things strictly commands that all the aforesaid must be chosen by secret ballot.”51 But there was a loophole: the council had also made provision for the appointment of a superior in circumstances where no qualified person could be found.52 Thus, a right which initially appeared inviolable became capable of modification, and it was not long before modifications were taking place. We can see it in the procès verbal of the assembly of notables of Alençon granting the Filles de Notre-Dame admittance to their city, in which it was stipulated that the superior was to be elected every three years, “or at such time as it pleases Monseigneur the Bishop of Sées to order.”53 Archbishop de Sourdis of Bordeaux, after approving a rule drawn up for his Ursulines which stipulated triennial elections, straightway allowed it to be contravened by keeping the same superior in place for more than twenty years. When finally, in 1645, half the community protested against what they saw as “prejudice to their rules and to the law,” their mutiny was punished severely.54 The France of Richelieu had no time for rebellious behaviour in religious women. The same disregard for the Rule was shown in Reims in 1650, when an uncanonical election was allowed to stand, despite the upset it caused to the community; and in 1659 in Angoulême, when a superior named by the bishop but rejected by the community was finally installed.55 In 1663 the Ursulines of Carcassonne were equally unsuccessful in challenging episcopal authority. According to their complaint, Bishop Nogaret de La Vallette had presided over an uncanonical election. The appel comme d’abus which the nuns then made to the Parlement of Toulouse brought down on them the wrath of both episcopal and civil authorities. Their community was pronounced to be “a school of disobedience” that was trying to throw off the submission it owed to the bishop. It is interesting to note that their opponents challenged them to bring out their original titles, which, they argued, “subjected them formally to the authority of the bishop,” and that the nuns refused because they knew this to be true.56 After two years of legal battle, the election was confirmed.57 On the other hand, the Ursulines of Nantes were successful with their appel comme d’abus, which they brought in 1656 against their bishop’s effort to install his own candidate as superior. “We wish to live and die in obedience to our rules, bull and apostolic constitutions,” they wrote, and the bishop’s candidate never took office.58 The Ursulines of Sens in 1666 and the sisters of the Congrégation of Provins several years later spoke much the same language when they criticized Archbishop Gondrin’s effort to manage their elections, “because of the right which the constitutions give us to elect our superiors.”59

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Gondrin’s plans for the monasteries of the Congrégation in his diocese led to other confrontations. In or around 1672 he authorized Alexandre Varet, his grand vicar and a prominent Jansenist, to redesign their constitutions. “There are a great number of deletions and changes to make to these constitutions in order to maintain the bishops in the rights and jurisdiction which they ought to have over these religious,” wrote Varet.60 But this was more easily said than done. The nuns put up a fight. While the superior of Nemours approved the changes, her Chapter rejected them. So did the community of Provins. “The prelate, when he was informed of this, wrote a thunderous letter to the superior … Despite all his efforts and his threats, he did not succeed in putting this famous Rule into force,” commented the annalist of the Provins house.61 The contest of wills ended only with the death of Gondrin, and Varet. These combats have attracted little attention from historians, probably because the scale on which they were conducted was so small and the women who conducted them were so uninfluential. Indeed, it is argued that the concept of “rights” did not even take hold inside women’s monasteries until Parlement put it there, somewhat mischievously, in the eighteenth century. But in fact religious women had always had an independent streak. If seventeenth-century nuns were tamer than their medieval predecessors (who sometimes resorted to physical force), it was partly because they had learned to appeal to the law. Not for nothing, as one of their historians has observed, were so many of them the daughters and sisters of men in the legal profession.62 Thanks to their knowledge of legal procedure – and, almost certainly, to the advice of their families and friends – they knew when to call in notaries and when and how to appeal to the courts or to higher authorities. The confiscation of their archives during the Revolution, which put their private dealings into the public record, has allowed us a glimpse of their habits of litigation. Collectively, these make a bulging dossier in which there appear a certain number of remonstrances and appeals against ordinaries and directors. An epic battle broke out in 1643 between the Ursulines of Périgueux and their bishop, François de La Béraudière.63 It seems that the founder of the new community, the baron de la Tour, had not lived up to the financial terms of foundation. The bishop turned on the nuns, demanding that they pay 5000 livres within three months. When the deadline expired without payment, he deprived them of the sacraments, then threatened to go himself to throw them out of their house. At this, their agent protested: “Monseigneur, your power is great, but it does not extend that far. The Ursulines are in their own home, and you will perhaps encounter some difficulties in throwing them out.” To this

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La Béraudière responded: “Well! that is to be seen. We shall find out who is the master.” When the nuns could make no headway with the bishop, they appealed past him to his metropolitan, Archbishop Henri de Sourdis of Bordeaux. The archbishop took their part and ordered an end to the excommunication. But since relations were bad between him and La Béraudière, this only made the bishop angrier. “All we had were words of thunder and lightning pronounced against us,” wrote one of the nuns. “He swore to exterminate us, to crush us … He would surely make us pay sooner or later.” Given the reality of the situation – that he was nearby and the archbishop far off – the nuns had gained nothing. His clergy, though privately sympathetic, feared him enough to stay away. The Ursulines prevailed in the end, but only because the bishop died. This was probably an exceptional case. For the most part, it seems, the newly founded convents behaved as their bishops wanted them to, and the bishops did not intrude too far into the charmed circle of the Rule. We see this mutual forbearance at work in Quebec, after Bishop Laval decided quite suddenly to modify the constitutions of the Ursuline monastery to the point where, in the sisters’ opinion, they became “more suitable for Carmelites … than for Ursulines.” The nuns were most unhappy, as their superior, Marie Guyart, wrote: The matter has already been thrashed out and our minds made up. We shall not accept unless commanded by virtue of holy obedience. Nevertheless, we do not mention it so as not to aggravate the situation … I attribute it all to the zeal of this worthy bishop, but as you know, dearest Mother, in matters of rule, experience should prevail over theory. When things are going smoothly, we should leave well enough alone, because we are sure all is well; but if we change, we cannot be certain whether things will turn out well or not.64

As it turned out, Laval did not pursue his project, and the nuns’ vow of obedience was not put to the test. Each party remained, so to speak, on its own side of a fine line, and no damage was done. A similar standoff with an equally happy ending occurred in Reims in 1684. According to the annalist of Notre-Dame, the community was faced with a newly appointed director who greatly exceeded his authority. “He [gave out] a number of rulings, which by their novelty alarmed the community, all the more so because he promised that there were more to come; and he wanted us to sign the first. But we refused steadfastly to do so, on the grounds that this was not our usage, and that we absolutely did not wish to agree to observe them.” The community’s distress was so profound and so vocal that it reached the archbishop’s ears, and he appointed another, more congenial director.

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“The pleasant surprise that we felt was so great that for a moment we forgot the respect that we owed him, clapping our hands and making a thousand joyful acclamations.”65 But in cases where the fine line was crossed and positions hardened, two principles were generally applicable: first, that an overt breach of obedience by religious women, however justified, was construed as an intolerable affront to the order of things; second, that when such a breach occurred, even in small matters, the practice of excommunicating an entire community was not considered too extreme. This remained true throughout the Old Regime, as the following examples show. In 1730 the bishop of Tréguier ordered the Ursulines of Guincamp not to admit pensionnaires over the age of sixteen. This was consistent with the earliest practice of the community, which kept most older women out of the cloister for most of the time.66 But since these older pensionnaires now provided the house with a large part of its revenue, the nuns were understandably upset and made the mistake of appealing past the bishop to Cardinal de Fleury. The penalty for their action was suspension of all the sacraments for three months.67 In 1739 the archbishop of Aix issued an ordinance laying down certain general rules for all women’s houses in his diocese. One article in the ordinance concerned the design of the grilles in monastic parlours: the archbishop wanted them narrower, to prevent the passing of notes. An Ursuline community in Aix, pointing to its unbroken record of good behaviour, protested that the change would suggest past deficiency “through the malicious interpretations of which it appeared to us to be susceptible.” The nuns made a further argument: for “our right not to be subjected to laws that we had not embraced.” The archbishop responded by forbidding his priests to confess them until the new grilles were installed. The women dug in: “We refused to confess under these conditions … [But] the storm was too strong and our consciences too alarmed by the loss of the sacraments. We finally gave in, without obligation for the future. The bars were installed on the 17 of March 1740.”68 To twentieth-century minds this whole affair seems extraordinarily petty. The community’s reaction to the ordinance seems out of proportion, the archbishop’s response even more so. But we have to consider, on the one hand, the nuns’ ingrained adherence to the letter of their Rule and their suspicion of anything new; and on the other, the sensitivity of the archbishop to anything that was seen to diminish his authority. Neither side believed that obedience could be compromised; their difference lay in how they defined that obedience.

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These incidents must be placed in context. The three congregations with which we are concerned counted close to five hundred monasteries in Old Regime France, and there is no evidence that conflicts such as those described above occurred frequently. After the early spate of problems triggered by the vexed question of enclosure and the efforts of the authorities to impose it, the religious women of France and their bishops seem to have entered a period of harmony. Crises arose here and there as Jansenist thinking began to infiltrate the convents and the authorities sought to enforce orthodoxy, but these cases appear to have been limited. More widely troublesome to the women was the desire of many episcopal authorities to redesign the communities’ rules. At the very least, this meant “novelties,” which the nuns instinctively distrusted; at the worst, there was the danger that communities could be placed in permanent tutelage, without the right to organize their own lives or choose their own superiors. This would have been consistent with Gallican thinking, and it would have given bishops or founders a neat little source of patronage. Here and there in smaller houses, the office of “perpetual superior” did replace the elective office.69 However, in general the situation remained stable. Religious women were deferential to the authorities, and the authorities maintained a benevolent distance, intervening only when outward appearances or inward community difficulties required it. But the ambiguity, the pull of loyalties, remained. In the eighteenth century it surfaced with painful effect as the Jansenist crisis pitted many communities against their lawful superiors.

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4 “Personae Non Gratae”: Jansenist Nuns in the Wake of Unigenitus

Without the word grace, there is no Christianity. It designates the gift of God, His love offered to men, His presence in their lives and their destiny, and, finally, salvation itself. Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme1

Out of the Christian theology of grace there arises a whole understanding of the relationship of man to God. The word, from the Latin gratia, signifies something freely given, in no way earned or deserved. There is no question of worthiness in the recipient, only of goodness in the giver. Man does not earn merit, still less salvation; he is given these things by the all-powerful God. What, then, is the nature of man? How does he relate to this gift? Is he capable of doing anything to further his own salvation? Has he any free choice in the matter? If the answer is yes, then it follows that human nature has been endowed by God with power enough to will to do good and to work towards its own salvation. This was the conclusion of Pelagius in the fifth century. If the answer is no, then it follows that human nature is so weak that it is incapable in itself of doing the slightest good. It is also incapable of choosing its destiny; this is left to the preordination of God, through the giving or witholding of grace. This was the argument of Augustine, the great antagonist of Pelagius. Although Augustine’s teaching triumphed, Pelagianism never really died. It was brought to new life during the Renaissance, with the elevation of the human spirit and the human will to heights never before known in the Christian centuries. But with the coming of the Reformation, Augustinian theology in turn prevailed, and in an extreme form. In the mind of the reformers, all the efforts of man to save himself were but “works”, good for nothing; the inherent evil in his nature made him fit only for damnation. If he found salvation, it was through no virtue of his own. God saved him or damned him, according to His own inscrutable purpose.

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At the Council of Trent the Catholic Church adopted a middle ground, which affirmed the centrality of grace but insisted on the existence of free will. “The Christian could progress on the way of justification by the constant co-operation of his own will with divine grace.”2 But through the following years, as Catholics lived out their own reformation, this central doctrine came to be shaded in different ways: on the one hand, with a more optimistic vision, in the humanist tradition, of the freedom and dignity of man under God’s grace; on the other, with a new theocentrism, a new sense of the transcendance of God, which brought man and all his pretensions crashing down to the earth and lower than the earth. The Catholic Reformation in early-seventeenth-century France embraced both visions. It saw the apogee of Augustinianism. The great men and women of this “Age of Saints” practised the most rigorous austerity, both in behaviour and in prayer. For them, true religion required denial of the things of this world and a total attachment to those of the next – a self-abnegation without parallel. “May God be magnified, and may His grandeur be nurtured from all that is in me, from the substance of my being! I want no freedom in relation to God, I want to reserve nothing for myself!”3 It was a magnificent prayer, resonant with the aristocratic values of generosity and self-sacrifice. It was a prayer of the elite. The problem was that it was well above the reach of most people. At the same time but in another arena, reformed Catholicism was out to save the world. The great preaching orders, led by the Jesuits and Capuchins, were hammering out an apostolate that aimed at nothing less than the conversion of the total society. The religion these orders preached was inclusive and therefore by necessity not too rigorous: frequent confessions, frequent communions, a certain tolerance of human weakness. Their method involved huge public demonstrations: processions, plays, and theatrical rituals – religion practised by group, which ran counter to the severe individualism of the dévots.4 Whereas, for the Augustinians, the crucified Christ hung with arms only partially extended, as though to save only part of the world, the Christ whom they preached to their mass audiences hung with arms stretched wide. There was contradiction here, and it surfaced before long. The Augustinian tendency in the French Church found its extreme expression in Cornelius Jansen’s work, the Augustinus, published in 1640. This book became the lightning rod for a fatal quarrel. The Jesuits fell on it immediately, and Rome was persuaded to condemn it – or rather, parts of it – in the bull Cum occasione, in 1653. But the effect of the condemnation was uncertain, since the supporters of Jansen insisted that what was being condemned was not what he had taught. The fight

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continued, with both Rome and Paris swinging between tolerance and severity. The equivocation, according to Jean Delumeau, “was heavy with conflict.”5 A hundred years later the Jansenist quarrel was still unresolved, and French men and women on both sides of the fight still believed with all their hearts in the justice and orthodoxy of their own cause. The damage would not have been so great if the quarrel had been contained in the theological arena. But the seventeenth century was a time when religion and politics were intermixed to the point of total fusion, when vicious power struggles were conducted under the cloak of theology, but also when true theological differences led to vicious power struggles. The eighteenth century took its religion more calmly, yet it raised the Jansenist quarrel to unprecedented levels. This was because politics sustained and reinvigorated the old debate. The extreme Augustinians, those who were given the name of Jansenists, were always the minority party, and over the long run they were no match for their opponents. They were generally the sentimental favourites in regions where anti-Jesuit feeling tended to run high: Paris and the Paris basin, the Vexin, Champagne, Lorraine and Normandy, and part of Provence.6 In regions of France where Jesuit influence was strong, Jansenists never gained a foothold. Like the Huguenots of the sixteenth century, they were powerful enough to make an impact but never powerful enough to gain the upper hand. However, they had their own strengths. They enjoyed huge support among certain religious orders. They had friends in high places, including a number of bishops, and they also benefited from the forbearance of many other bishops who preferred a peaceful existence to struggling with such difficult subjects. As time went on, they could count more and more on the sympathy of parlementarians who, as Gallicans, sympathized with anyone who defied the ultramontanism of the Jesuits. And there were numerous other Frenchmen who felt that any enemy of the Jesuits was a friend of theirs. So much did Jansenism identify with anti-Jesuitism that some people thought there was nothing to it beyond that. “Jansenists are [simply] fervent Catholics who don’t like the Jesuits,” wrote Cardinal Bona. But they were much more than that. Jansenism harmonized with the spirituality that had been born of the Catholic Reformation. It was indeed “simply an extreme expression” of this Reformation,7 and as such it struck a deep chord among pious French men and women. Thus, looking at the wrangle as it spilled into the early eighteenth century, we can see a number of features. It was theological; questions of divine grace and human response were still hotly debated. It had powerful moral implications; true Jansenists were not prepared to

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compromise with the world, to sanction dancing, theatre going, and other forms of “laxity.” It was internal, in that both sides claimed communion with the Catholic Church. It was political, in that at a time when church and state were intimately connected, various political institutions had a stake in its outcome. It was uneven, but not sufficiently for it to be finished off easily. In the early 1700s Jansenism seemed to be alive and well and deeply embedded, at least among the religious elites in many major centres. And then in 1713 came Unigenitus. This papal bull, or constitution, has been described as “a political and religious earthquake.”8 It caused upheaval in the religious landscape of France by cutting the ground from under the Augustinians. At the same time it threw the debate into the public domain. It introduced a sort of violence into the French Church which greatly sapped its strength and morale at a time when both were badly needed. It was wrung from the pope by an aging king who had decided that the Jansenist “party” was a threat to the stability of his kingdom. The immediate occasion was the capture of the correspondence of the Jansenist theologian Pasquier Quesnel, which revealed a network of Jansenist sympathizers in Paris and Rome. Louis XIV saw conspiracy, and he imagined that by targeting the individual he could bring down the entire movement. Hence the drive to condemn Quesnel’s work, Moral Reflections on the New Testament. This very limited intervention was seen as a way of “lancing the boil” of heresy.9 However, once underway, the papal bull grew prodigiously. Instead of the anticipated thirty-three propositions, the Roman commission to whom it was entrusted was persuaded by Versailles to condemn a hundred and one, including a number that appeared even to nonJansenists to be perfectly orthodox.10 “The Bull effectively condemned a whole conception of Christianity which was widespread in France,”11 and it did so in the most virulent language. Doctrines that were held by respectable French clergymen to have come straight from Saint Augustine were now declared to be blasphemous and heretical, and the faithful were adjured to stamp them out, by force if necessary.12 In other words, the bull expanded the definition of Jansenism and then called for its ruthless extirpation. Furthermore, Gallicans viewed it as “a pontifical coup d’état.”13 The papacy’s claim to jurisdiction over the French Church was asserted in a way that was bound to offend their sensibilities. Louis had promised Rome that the bull would be received without contest by the French Church, but this did not happen. Religious orders, faculties of theology, the parlements, officers of the Crown – all sorts of people protested, only to draw upon themselves the king’s

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wrath.14 The bishops were profoundly disturbed. A falling-out occurred among them that foreshadowed the serious divisions to come. Some bishops refused to publish the bull as it stood. Later, after Louis’ death, they became the leaders of the appellant movement, which sought to appeal against the bull to a general council of the Church. Others demanded total and immediate submission to the bull in all its particulars. They became known as constitutionnaires – the hawks, if you will, of the eighteenth-century Church. Another group decided that although the bull was bad, disobedience to it would be worse. The future Cardinal de Fleury was one of these; another was the future archbishop of Paris, Charles Gaspard de Vintimille, who called the quarrel over the bull “a stupid, sad affair”15 but was ready to prosecute rebels nonetheless. These three groups spent the next few years struggling to control the agenda, variously assisted by shifts in power in both Paris and Rome. However, with Fleury’s rise to power in 1726 and the submission and death in 1729 of the leader of the appellants, Archbishop de Noailles of Paris, the situation stabilized. “Jansenism became the object of an unremitting repression which fell upon all the strongholds of the party: the Faculty of Theology in Paris, the colleges, the lower clergy, the orders and religious congregations.”16 After Fleury had neutralized the focal points of Jansenism – institutions such as the Sorbonne, and the central councils of the principal religious orders of men – he embarked on a careful stalking operation, “a long campaign of kidnappings, exiles, and imprisonments,”17 to mop up individual Jansenists. His favoured weapon was the lettre de cachet.* It is reckoned that 40,000 lettres de cachet were issued during his seventeen years in power.18 Of these, a sizable share went to Jansenists. But in every case the person targeted – most often a member of the clergy – was first given the choice of accepting the bull and avoiding punishment; if he or she refused, the sentence might still be reversed if he or she later recanted. It was a very personalized form of persecution. Thousands of individual consciences were wrenched from their places of rest as the choice between obedience and conviction fell upon them. Yet even with all the power of the Crown engaged, it took more than forty years to eliminate Jansenism as a force in the Gallican Church. The main reason for this was that France was divided into 130 dioceses, and in each diocese the bishop presided as a virtual autocrat where matters of faith and morals were concerned. Over the years, successions of bishops had fashioned their dioceses according in their own particular image, so that by 1700 some dioceses were solidly proJansenist and others solidly anti-Jansenist.19 In the years after Unigenitus, each bishop acted as the gatekeeper of his own diocese; so intro-

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duction of the bull depended on his cooperation. The division of opinion among bishops now became critical. Some accepted the bull with enthusiasm, some prevaricated and asked for further explanations, while others rejected it outright.20 There was little that anybody could do about this. When a bishop remained defiant, the Crown had learned by experience to wait patiently until death removed the obstacle. Thus, the pro-Jansenist dioceses crumbled only as old Jansenist bishops died and constitutionnaires were named to succeed them. With every such changing of the guard, there was a flight of Jansenist clergy to other, safer places until finally, with the death of Bishop de Caylus of Auxerre in 1754, the last bastion of Jansenism lay open to the action of the Crown.

ja ns én is me au fé m i n i n It was in these circumstances that a number of nuns of Old Regime France had to make painful choices. These women were Jansenist by the new definition, but their Jansenism often had ancient roots. They, their families, and their religious communities were natives of dioceses that had been Augustinian for generations. What other people called Jansenism was, for them, the true Catholicism. With others of the same persuasion, they were ready to cry, “We combat those who would take from us the heritage of our fathers.”21 Many historians of Jansenism have remarked on the loyal support it enjoyed in convents even after it faded from the wider scene.22 This should be no surprise, given the character of life in a religious community. The austere message of Jansenism must have appealed to many religious women. “Salvation has to cost, it has to cost everything,” wrote Quesnel.23 How consoling a thought to women who felt that they had given so much, compared with most other people! It challenged them to stay the course, no matter what or who stood in their way. In the cloister’s lexicon of virtues, fidelity to the past took a high place. “Novelty” was always a bad word, smacking of heresy. One has only to know what one community of nuns or another considered a novelty to know what they considered heretical. They were convinced that their rules and customs were right and that as long as they adhered to them, they could not go wrong. Cardinal de Fleury himself understood this well. “Religious women are a special breed,” he wrote. “They will submit to the powers that be only in matters that do not offend their consciences; and one of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form. They are inexorable in this respect.”24 The community and its history provided the standards by which they lived. How could they betray what

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their predecessors had professed? Jansenist or non-Jansenist, they stood by the teachings and practices of their anciennes mères. One Jansenist nun, defending her beliefs, put it thus: “[These are the truths] with which we have been nourished since our childhood, and which have become familiar to us through the use we have made of them, and still make every day, in the exercise of our profession.”25 Such loyalty to the past was like a rock, upon which Unigenitus came crashing down with devastating effect. The bull had cast the issues in absolute terms. The question now became one of obedience. The pope had spoken, and the Crown had thrown its full authority behind the bull. But where did true obedience lie for women whose bishops persisted in opposing Rome and Versailles? In a letter to the religious women of his diocese, the bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, Gaston de Noailles – soon to be an appellant – made it quite clear: I cannot dispense myself from addressing my two instructions to you, so that you may learn from the mouth of your pastor, how far you must carry your respect for Our Lord the Pope, and for his decrees, and so that you may know to whom you should turn. It is in my person that you must respect the authority of Jesus Christ; when you hear me you are hearing Him. I hope that with the help of His grace, I shall never teach you any doctrine contrary to that which He has taught His Church, and which has come to us through the channels of Holy Scripture and Tradition. It is in this confidence that I say to you, with Saint Paul: If anyone offers you with a gospel different from that which I preach, even though it be an angel from Heaven, say to him anathema, and do not listen to him.26

But this instruction did not really solve the nuns’ basic difficulty. Only too soon, this appellant bishop was going to disappear, and a new bishop would preach a radically different gospel. He would demand of his flock not just a change in discipline but a change in belief. In imposing his own authority on them, he would require them to say anathema to that of his predecessor. How, then, were the nuns to respond? Many communities were split along both doctrinal and temperamental lines, the conscientious objectors against the true believers, together with their allies, the more pragmatic souls whose priority was survival – for themselves and their communities. Where the former had their way and their defiance of authority became too blatant, authority had to act, and in many of its punitive measures it ignored or bypassed community rules. Often at this stage nuns who had hitherto not been involved would flail out in all directions, appealing to Parlement and other authorities against the violation of their constitutions. The response was predictable: more

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draconian punishments, sometimes targeting individuals, sometimes whole communities. Monasteries that were dragged into these escalations faced the danger of a further misery: internal breakdown, as the more politic nuns were forced to pay the price for the indiscretions of the more intrepid; “frightful division,” in which the poor women became “like harpies, one group against the other.”27 This was the fate that awaited many religious houses as Cardinal de Fleury’s repression heated up. Their obscurity initially gave them protection. But in the 1730s, as new bishops were installed, they were visited and their sympathies were laid bare. They were told that they must submit to the bull at once, in writing. If they chose to disobey, they knew they must accept the consequences. Unlike the male clergy, they could not run or hide; their obligation of stability made them easy targets for anti-Jansenist discipline. No diocese provides a better illustration of this dilemma than the Archdiocese of Sens. It had been a Jansenist stronghold since the 1640s, when its archbishop, Gondrin, had entered into a power struggle with the local Jesuits.28 By the time of his death in 1674, Jansenism was solidly implanted in the archdiocese. None of his successors had the will to confront it until, in 1731, Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy was installed. Languet had made his name as the most ardent of constitutionnaires, and it was for this reason that Fleury gave him the assignment of “cleaning up” Sens. Languet knew that his task would not be easy. “In general I cannot count on a quarter of the priests and the houses of nuns in my diocese,” he wrote to Fleury. “That’s the result of my predecessor’s forbearance, while the grand vicars filled all the posts with persons of their persuasion … If I were not supported by confidence in God and in the goodness of your Excellency, I should despair of succeeding in this diocese.”29 Fleury did not let him down. A steady rain of lettres de cachet descended, and Jansenist priests and educators began to disappear – into exile or prison. Within a few months of entering his diocese, Languet started visiting the women’s convents. He had a mixed reception. While some of them were docile, others were in a state of mutiny. Two issues were causing them distress. First, they were required, like the rest of the clergy, to sign a formulary submitting to Unigenitus in all its particulars; this involved renouncing beliefs in which they had been raised. Second, nuns who taught school were ordered to put away their old catechisms, which dated from Gondrin’s time, and teach their students only from the new catechism that Languet had drawn up. A recent study of this catechism tells us that while it introduced some doctrinal “innovations,” its most striking break with tradition

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came in its ecclesiology. Languet himself admitted that he was not a dedicated theologian.30 Like many other bishops in the eighteenth century, he was more interested in discipline. He had a vision of the Church as an institution in which all authority resided in the pope and the bishops, and in which the lower clergy had no voice at all.31 This was bound to offend the many priests who mixed their Jansenism with a good dose of what is known as Richerism: the theory that, as successors of the seventy-two disciples, the ordinary priesthood had an important voice in the running of the Church. The catechism raised a storm of protest. A brochure was circulated widely in the diocese, warning schoolteachers to reject it, even at the risk of punishment: “There is no other course to take but to walk straight to the truth of the Gospel and to be prepared to suffer persecution.”32 For many nuns this was a call to action, to martyrdom if need be, for the purity of the faith. For Languet it was a provocation that could not be ignored. Wherever he went, the issue of the catechism came up. He gave away copies of it, he pressured the superiors to enforce its use, and he questioned individual nuns about it. He took careful notes of his interviews – for future use if he should be forced to separate the sheep from the goats. The women’s responses were often audacious in the extreme, considering the power he exercised over them. In one house, “Sister SaintAugustine and several others told him that the new catechism went against their conscience and that they would never accept it; Sister Misericorde judged impertinently that the catechism is obscure and confused.”33 In another house, a sister argued that “she could not in conscience teach the new catechism; that she would keep to the old one, which had been in use for eighty years and had been approved by four archbishops.”34 In another house, a sister remonstrated that “the old catechism, that of Monseigneur de Gondrin, was orthodox, and she did not wish to change it.”35 She had a point. How could a catechism be orthodox for eighty years and then, suddenly, unorthodox? But it was a point that Languet refused to accept. For him, it was a question of discipline. The sisters must be reduced to obedience. But where was obedience to be found? For Languet the answer was simple: in submission to the authority of the Church – in the form of himself. He had written that “the faithful ought to be more docile to what the holy ministry teaches them, than to an angel from heaven.”36 This was exactly what other bishops were saying at the same time. Each in his own diocese claimed to be speaking with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.37 But the problem was that they were saying different things. This did not escape the attention of the sisters – especially those who were reading Jansenist books and journals.

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Bombarded by instructions from both sides, the nuns began to exercise their own judgment. One woman, on being asked what she thought of the famous Jansenist deacon François de Pâris, on whose grave miracles were allegedly taking place, answered that she thought him a saint. To Languet’s objection that Pâris had died without submitting to the bull and therefore outside the Church, she responded, “The [bull] is not a rule of faith; people who do not accept it are not cut off from the Church.” The archbishop is said to have replied in anger, “Rule of faith or rule of the Church or rule of discipline, you have to submit to it!”38 To another argumentative woman he exclaimed, “You are damning yourself, my child! there is no salvation without obedience; it is so essential that even if I gave an unjust order, you would not be dispensed from obeying me; the responsibility would be mine; that is the certitude of the faithful!” To which she replied, “Monseigneur, with your permission, what you have said goes against the gospel, which tells us that whoever follows a blind leader will also fall into the ditch.”39 Over and over again, Languet found himself disputing with women. He came away complaining “that they thought themselves to be more learned than he, and that they wished, apparently, to teach him his catechism and reform his theology!”40 This accusation was fraught with menace. Women, especially nuns, had no business being learned. This was not just Languet’s opinion; it was part of the religious culture, and rare indeed was the churchman who would contradict it. However, the doctrinal disarray in the Church left an opening for individual judgment – even that of women. Bishops on both sides of the quarrel had no hesitation in striking down such mutiny. Communities of nuns who argued too much ran the risk of being suppressed, for the simple reason that “they thought themselves to be learned.”41 This harshness was not unusual for the times. Languet, a careful, painstaking man, was as ready to use persuasion as punishment to gain his ascendancy. Submissive houses experienced his favour and protection, and those that began by kicking against the goad but later complied found him forgiving. He was no more ruthless than his contemporary Caylus, the Jansenist bishop of Auxerre, who also punished communities that did not conform to his doctrinal demands;42 or Jacques-Marie de Condorcet, Caylus’s successor, who reversed everything and “put the diocese to fire and blood.”43 Given the temper of the times and the ferment developing amongst both clergy and laity, no one in authority could countenance insubordination in the rank and file. But though control was neat and tidy in principle, its practice was sometimes messy, as Languet found in his dealings with the sisters of the Congrégation in Nemours.

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On visiting the convent in 1732, the archbishop found fifty-one women, of whom, according to his notes, “barely a dozen are truly submissive.”44 In his opinion, one of the chief troublemakers was the mistress of novices; he deposed her outright, and when certain nuns protested, he warned that he had the right “to make a stick of wood into the mistress of novices” if he so wished.45 To eliminate the contamination that came from other sources, “the parlours and the communications with Paris,” he forbade the community to read any literature coming in from outside. But on his return a year later, he discovered that his orders had been ignored. “They read books in defiance of obedience … they receive letters from outside,” he wrote.46 Worse, twenty-five nuns were refusing to confess to the new confessors and had therefore failed to perform their Easter duties. So he now took sterner action. “He spared those who had given him some hope that they would return to their duty, but as for the fifteen who had gone to excess, he did not feel that he could let their stubbornness and insolence go unpunished … He deprived them of all voice … in the Chapters.”47 There was more than the discipline of individuals on Languet’s mind now. The election for superior was approaching, and he wanted a docile Chapter in order to ensure the re-election of the right superior. But when he arrived to preside over the election, eleven more nuns refused to take part, protesting what they claimed was the uncanonical exclusion of their sisters. This reduced the Chapter to less than the required quorum. Languet proceeded with the election anyway, but since only a minority of the Chapter took part, the rebels had cause to call the proceedings null and void. They appealed to Parlement, to the great scandal and titillation of the people of Nemours.48 Only the intervention of Fleury to remove the case from Parlement’s competence saved the archbishop from embarrassment. In 1734, lettres de cachet exiled the eight most intransigent nuns to Melun.49 Gradually the rebellion at Nemours subsided, though a hardy remnant continued to regard the new superior as an intruder and to hail their absent companions as true heroines. Similar discipline was exercised elsewhere. In both Étampes and Joigny, hand-picked superiors were forced on the communities; when some nuns protested to Cardinal de Fleury that their constitutions were being flouted, they were exiled.50 The Ursulines of Sens were deprived of the sacraments and also of the pension recently promised them by the Commission des secours. To their protests that “you would not wish to deprive your children of their bread,” Languet answered, “Since you have refused to receive the bread of the Word from my hands, I cannot undertake to furnish you with material bread.”51 The Ursulines of Melun received a lettre de cachet forbidding them to

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receive pensionnaires, their chief source of income. Stripped of their financial security, both these houses would later disappear. The confrontations that took place in Sens had their counterparts in other parts of the country. The armory of punishments available to Languet and other constitutionnaire bishops was large and versatile. The government, by its lettres de cachet, enabled these bishops to isolate communities from the outside world, forbidding visits, even by families. It allowed them to banish as many nuns as they wished to confinement in other convents at the king’s pleasure. It allowed them to send away novices and pensionnaires, thus removing the communities’ main sources of income. As well, the bishops in their own right had the power to condemn women to loss of all status within the community, to subject them to a diet of bread and water, and to confine them in their cells without books or the conversation of others. They could deprive individuals or whole communities of the mass and the sacraments, even the sacrament of the dying.52 It is difficult to imagine what these punishments meant to them, but the women had to accept them or submit. Cases were reported in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques of whole communities begging on bended knee not to be deprived of the sacraments while at the same time refusing to sign the formulary. But in taking action the bishops were within their rights, and the women knew it. There was more resistance when the bishops intervened in the communities’ procedures, especially in the election of superiors and the choice of confessors. Here the nuns were able to appeal to civil authority on the grounds that their rules were being violated.53 For many years the Crown continued to support the constitutionnaires and to reject such appeals, but eventually, as Parlement became more involved in the Jansenist quarrel, the dissident women began to be heard. A parlementary remonstrance of 1753 marked a turning point: Numberless clergymen have been snatched from their benefices and their families, and dispersed in the far corners of the realm … Others have been led into prisons, where they languish still … What a distressing sight for religion! the dispersal of an infinite number of religious women, snatched from those sanctuaries which they had vowed to God never to leave … We entreat you, Sire, not to allow yourself to be distracted as to the true source of so many ills: their origin lies in the infinite number of orders extracted by stealth from your piety. The only way to stop this in its tracks is no longer to abandon your authority to the hands of the ecclesiastics who abuse it.54

The constitutionnaires were facing heavy artillery now. Many of the more extreme bishops endured exile and humiliation at the hands of a

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Parlement riding high.55 Because it furthered their own strategies, the men of the law espoused the cause of the Jansenist nuns. Where as their seventeenth-century predecessors had upheld the authority of the bishops, they were now only too glad to support the rights of the women. In 1774 the King’s Council heard an appeal from the Ursulines of Le Mans, against what they alleged was an uncanonical election. “The rules of election have never been disobeyed in the house before,” they claimed.56 But on election day the grand vicar had arrived with a royal order, stating that no election was to take place and that the previous superior was to continue and to choose her own councillors. This order, the nuns argued, was “a reversal of the rights, the rules and the constitutions of the community.” The step was taken, according to them, in revenge for the Chapter’s refusal to admit the grand vicar’s niece to the novitiate. But the fundamental reason for his action was the community’s Jansenist bent, which the grand vicar was determined to reverse. When the nuns refused to accept the superior, he placed them under anathema for three years. Their protest to the bishop of Le Mans elicited the answer that, as their superior, he had every right to change their Rule.57 The King’s Council thought otherwise. It considered the conduct of the grand vicar to be “so revolting, that the Ursulines may with confidence lay their complaints at the feet of the Throne.” Previous kings, it argued, had invited the Ursulines to establish in France and had undertaken to protect their Rule, which included the right of electing their superiors. Anyone who interfered with this right should be subject to serious penalties, including excommunication and loss of benefices. As for the nuns, they were to be reinstated in their rights – in the defence of which, according to the council, they were “also defending the rights of their fellow citizens.” In their own small way, and certainly without intending it, the Ursulines of Le Mans had become champions of the Rights of Man! But the Jansenist cause was sinking fast as a result of the death and defection of its members and the exhaustion of the public. Equally, the strong anti-Jansenist movement was fading. The constitutionnaires were followed by more conciliatory men. Their passing allowed the turmoil in the French Church to subside. However, the nuns who had been involved had suffered serious damage. Some communities had simply disappeared, ordered out of existence by their bishops, starved of revenues and new recruits by lettres de cachet, or destroyed by internal dissension. Others survived, but only barely – like the Ursuline house in Beauvais, which had numbered eighty nuns when it appealed against the bull in 1718 but had

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only three or four when it emerged in 1773 from a thirty-year interdiction;58 or the Ursuline house in Auxerre, punished for twenty-two years for the opposite reason (because it was anti-Jansenist), and saved just in time by the death of Bishop de Caylus.59 Other communities patched up their internal differences as best they could. But sometimes, within their walls, there remained for years to come the lonely prisoners of conscience, the women who refused to submit. By their very presence they must have thrown a shadow over the lives of their companions. Their deaths without the sacraments were sad and scandalous, as we can see in the case of a nun in Dax, the only persevering member of a once-Jansenist community: “Around midnight, barely six hours after the woman had died, four men arrived at the convent. Only two nuns appeared to open the door for them. They entered the dead woman’s cell, picked her up and went to bury her at the end of the church. Two masons closed the grave, swept the place with care, and covered the tomb with a great paving stone, so that there would be no trace of her.”60 The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques reporting this story ended by remarking that with her death (in 1743, after six years of resistance), the bishop achieved a community totally subject to his wishes. The whole tragic Jansenist quarrel provides the historian of religious women with a valuable insight into the dogged and ferocious fight which these women were prepared to put up when their beliefs and practices were threatened. It was Languet who said of them: “These women are so opinionated, that one could burn them alive without changing their minds.”61 Obviously no compliment was intended; authority could see no virtue in such behaviour among those who were born to obey. But sixty years later it was a different story, as the generation of 1789 put up an equally stubborn, equally hopeless resistance to the new regime. “These beguines covet the martyr’s crown,” one revolutionary wrote in disgust.62 Across the country, religious communities, whether they had once been pro-Jansenist or not, rallied to their bishops and followed their commands. The same conservatism and adherence to “the old ways” that had put so many of them at odds with their Church in the 1730s now gave them entitlement to its highest praise.

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5 The Decline of the Monasteries

th e h i s tor ic al d e bat e The history of the Catholic Church in France has its highs and lows, and the eighteenth century has long been considered one of the lows. Bracketed between the “sacred” seventeenth and the more spiritually fraught nineteenth, it is remembered for its Jansenism, its Josephism, the expulsion of the Jesuits, Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme, and a goodhearted king’s protest that the archbishop of Paris should at least believe in God. It has traditionally been described as a time of religious mediocrity. “Christian life in the eighteenth century does not give an impression of heroism, or even of fervour,” writes L.J. Rogier. “By its well-groomed appearance, the devout life of the eighteenth century makes us think of the gardens of Le Nôtre, emanating order, correction, bourgeois sufficiency … a devotion made up of the juste milieu and of little obligations. It is hardly surprising that ardent souls were anxious to flee from it.”1 Many historians have observed that religion no longer had a hold on the government, the ruling classes, or the court aristocracy. “Belief in God became a source of ridicule, from which one took care to protect oneself.”2 Catholicism had no brilliant defenders to match wits with its detractors. “It was in the enemy camp that the freshness of novelty, the intellectual activity, the creative power, shone out.”3 “The faith of the philosophers was new and burning … The faith of Catholicism … was more casually held, as though an inherited possession.”4 Even within the Church, among its leaders, a mutant version of the faith, laced with

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utilitarianism and rationalism, was beginning to make itself felt. God Himself was the first to change. “He was, more and more, the supreme Sovereign, useful to all the ideologies of order.”5 This change was conveyed to the faithful by way of newly minted catechisms: “Evangelical ferment was transformed into accountability; fear of damnation was dissolved into a hierarchy of submissions to the family, the king, the Church, and God.”6 This is a picture of a faith drying up. It is made all the more poignant by the comparisons that are often drawn with what had gone before: the Age of Saints, the heroic age of the Catholic Reformation. However, in recent years counterarguments have begun to appear. The light of the first period was not altogether light, the dark of the second not altogether dark: “Today we no longer oppose a seventeenth-century bloc, organic and Christian, to an eighteenth century, critical and libertine.”7 It is pointed out that past historians have been so taken up with the study of elite spiritualities that they failed to consider their actual diffusion.8 The great men and women of the seventeenth-century Catholic Reformation lived in a world where the general practice of religion was miserably deficient and there was deep-rooted resistance to their message. The fervour of their own faith did not soon penetrate this resistance. Only after their time was Tridentine Christianity really taken to the people: “It was at the moment of the decline of the mystics that France was converted.”9 So the Catholicism of eighteenth-century France has been revised by some historians to be much more than just “the autumn of the Catholic Reformation.” Jean de Viguerie writes: “To the heritage of the preceding century it added much of its own; and above all, it excelled in distributing its goods, so as to make them accessible to the greatest number.”10 Observance was up, the liturgy was better performed and better understood, and religious books were being read in huge numbers. The eighteenth century was the age of the bon curé, respected for his decorum and his devotion to his parish. However, the same historian points out that it was characteristic of the age that this “distribution of goods” found little favour among the elites: “Literature, philosophy, the theatre, the gazettes, the salons, the academies – all that constituted the world of high intellect or public opinion either was unaware of it or kept quiet on the subject.”11 Absorbed and entranced by their brave new world, and elitist to the core, they saw little that was admirable in the strengthening of religious observance among ordinary people. And to a large extent, by their very brilliance they dazzled generations of historians to come and held them in their thrall. Even historians who disliked the Enlightenment felt constrained to fight it on its own high ground.

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Given this focus, earlier generations of church historians had good reason to feel defensive. Whether it was in the political field, the spiritual, the intellectual, or the institutional, the Gallican Church of the eighteenth century seemed always to be fighting a rearguard action. If there was progress at the grassroots, what did it matter? As long as the attention of historians remained fixed on the upper echelons of society, the picture remained bleak. Only recently has the lowlier dimension been explored. “Both more modest in their chosen terrain and more ambitious in their goals, recent works, growing in numbers year by year, seek to reach into the effective religious life of [ordinary people].”12 As their conclusions become known, the dark picture begins to brighten. The same question of focus can be posed with respect to the history of Old Regime monasticism. One of the truisms of Catholic history is that the health of the Church can be measured by the health of its monasteries. “The life of religious communities,” writes Evenett, “has always been so intimately bound up with the bene esse of Catholicism that their condition at any given historical moment is an almost infallible guide to the condition of the Church as a whole.”13 If this is true, it matters a great deal which monasteries we choose to examine. Always in the forefront of historical memory are the 750 male abbeys of France and the 250 female, many of them with large revenues and idle populations, “too rich to be faithful to their Rule,” as one cahier de doléances put it.14 This image stuck like a bone in the throats of contemporaries – and has stuck in historians’ throats ever since. In the intellectual sphere, the verdict on monasticism is mixed but generally negative: the more erudite among the regulars are seen to have thrown themselves into the new thinking, to the point of becoming éclairés themselves,15 while others forsook both learning and observance to become, in words taken from the report of the General Chapter of one order, “altogether incapable and without talent, without [good] dispositions and sometimes without morals.”16 Institutionally, there is no doubt about it: “The century of Enlightenment appears as a period of continuous and irremediable decline.”17 The figures are there to prove it: in 1768 there were some 25,000 regulars living in 2966 communities.18 Their numbers – ten or eleven men to a house on average – were already low, even before the Commission des réguliers moved in and roughed them up. In the following twenty years their numbers dropped even further, to 17,000. “Among the regulars,” says one historian, “it was not just a decline, it was a collapse.”19 Wealth had little to do with it: the rich institutions were as stricken as the poor.20

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If the problem was not one of poverty, it had to be one of morale. The great days of monastic observance were long gone.21 Eighteenthcentury monks are seen to have been the heirs to a number of longstanding moral disabilities: too much wealth and not enough to do; a loss of regularity and consequently a serious questioning of their profession. Hence their low numbers, which in the 1770s dropped even more precipitously. After years of compromise, we are told, “the existing institutions produced relatively few men or women of value.”22 “Men or women” – with this remark we stumble into a question of historical method. Suddenly, in a discussion about men and their problems, women are included. What this reminds us is that general church histories have been overwhelmingly male histories. Until recently, historians have been ready to subsume religious women under the general heading of “monastics,” with only a brief acknowledgment of their differences.23 Women, it is known, experienced a decline in numbers of about one-third between 1730 and 1790 – a decline, it is said, “quite as flagrant as, and parallel to, that of the regulars.”24 In what way was the decline parallel? And does this mean that their problems also paralleled those of regulars? Given a certain similarity of effect, must we assume a similarity of cause? No serious historian accuses eighteenth-century nuns, en masse, of irregular behaviour. But some suggest that there was a loss of purpose, a smothering of vocations in a soft and meaningless lifestyle: “Within their cloister, most nuns lived a decorous and pleasant life. With their servants, their pets, their pastimes and their visitors, they partook easily of that sweetness of life that the nostalgic Maurice de Talleyrand remembered as reserved to the generation fortunate enough to have matured before 1789.”25 For the nuns and, better still, the noble canonesses of the high aristocracy, there was indeed a good life amid splendid surroundings. “Their state was so agreeable and so fine that they were little disposed to change it for another,” wrote a woman who had known it.26 For the less noble but still very much upper-class clientele, there were other convents that were little more than “wellfurnished hotels and respectable retreats.”27 But to focus on these is to go back into that elitist concentration that so distorts church history. “Most nuns” did not live like that. Most nuns of the eighteenth century were lucky if they could maintain a standard of life suitable to their station. They were bedevilled by poverty, as the Abbé Montesquiou was to point out to the National Assembly in 1790. And it was these poor nuns – respectably poor, but poor nonetheless, and not the rich nuns in their abbeys – who by their numbers and distribution had the closest connection to French society.

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Nor was it just their wealth, or lack of it, that differentiated religious women from religious men. There was a significant difference in mindset. Most female communities (with the exception of some of the more prestigious houses) operated on a relatively nonpolitical, nonintellectual level. They laid no claim to erudition or even to breadth of interest.28 Girded by their walls, regulated by their usages, and closed away from the intellectual currents that swirled around their male counterparts, they largely escaped the angst that afflicted so many monks. They remained firmly anchored in that great troop of dévotes who were such a distinctive part of the late-eighteenth-century Church.29 If they had problems of morale, these were unlikely to be caused by the action of the Enlightenment. Another difference lay in their numbers. High to the point of being “plethoric” at the beginning of the century, their numbers remained, even after the decline, two or three times higher per community than those of their male counterparts.30 This helps to explain the great difference in wealth. As rentiers they had experienced an unparalleled financial collapse at the time of the Law Crash – not necessarily because they lost more revenue than the men but because they had many more mouths to feed. The Commission des secours was established not to restore regularity to the female communities but to save them from destitution. Finally, the timing of their numerical decline is important. Whereas the great plunge in the male religious population took place in the 1770s and early 1780s, the most serious drop in the female religious population took place earlier – and, it can be argued, for different reasons.

the teaching nuns To illustrate all these arguments, I offer the experience of my own subjects, the cloistered teaching nuns. They were, by intention at least, typical eighteenth-century dévotes. Following the direction laid out by their rules, they avoided the high ground of heroic religious practice and specialized in the unglamorous profession of teaching. From the beginning, their congregations frowned upon mysticism, extreme austerities, and voies extraordinaires – a practical view of life that accorded well with the eighteenth-century mentality. These nuns had adopted for themselves the great virtue of “littleness.” In the face of the intellectual challenges presented to them by their religion, they had become, if anything, more demure than before. This lowering of their sights kept them safe from the intellectual temptations that assailed their male counterparts.

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They were more in tune with the eighteenth-century ethos than the purely contemplative nuns were, because they served a useful social purpose. It has been noted that one of the most striking signs of Catholicism’s success was “the remarkable progress, throughout the whole century, in the alphabetization of girls.”31 A good part of the credit for this must go to the cloistered nuns. Even as other institutions opened their classroom doors, the teaching monasteries continued to offer, in general, the best education available to girls32 – and in many smaller towns the only education for them. Their social usefulness did not, however, preserve them from the financial disasters of 1720. In the records of the Commission des secours there are as many cases of desperate teaching convents as of others. We have to visualize their situation. Their communities were among the largest in the country,33 but their financial losses were as drastic as any.34 While the commission gave them credit for their “utility” and put many of them on the dole, it did not hesitate to close others. The Ursulines alone lost about one-tenth of their houses.35 Even for the communities that it decided to sustain, the relief the commission meted out was both cautious and conditional. The commissioners were driven by two considerations: first, that there was no fund in existence sufficient to restore the women to their previous financial standing; second, that there were too many convents anyway, “to the point where they destroy each other,”36 so this was an opportunity to rectify the situation. Communities desperate enough to lay their problems bare to the commission found themselves forced to take its medicine: a reduction in their numbers until these fitted their straitened financial circumstances. The reduction was achieved by the dispatch of lettres de cachet banning the reception of novices until further notice. No one has yet counted the number of houses actually placed under the ban. But one example may set the scene. For the archdiocese of Bourges, the commission’s records show six teaching houses (holding in the 1720s about 55 nuns each!) all recommended for reduction, from a total of 334 women to 229, while a further two small houses were directed to unite.37 These recommendations conformed to the commission’s usual practice. Across the board, the reduction it ordered came to about one-third. Once a community’s numbers had fallen to the desired level, a second lettre de cachet would arrive, lifting the ban. Or in the case of doomed houses, it would not arrive at all. There was no way for an individual house to predict what its end would be. The prescription was painful and debilitating. But it worked. At the end of the Old Regime the female religious population

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was more or less the size that had been ordered in the 1730s; and the female communities had, more or less, balanced their books. This makes for a different scenario, in which the decline in the number of religious women was mandated, rather than being spontaneous. In other words, inadequacies within communities and the public’s dissatisfaction with the female monastic institution as a whole were not major factors, at least not to begin with. More important were the reductions and closures which the government forced on the congregations. These made their problems different in nature from those of the male religious orders. If this scenario is to stand, it is by reason of the timing of the decline. According to an authoritative general history of the Church, the decade 1730–40 was the time during which religious congregations – male and female – were at their apogee.38 One historian of religious women adheres to this timing, drawing the obvious conclusion that “the financial turbulences of the Regency did not constitute a sharp turning point in the history of [religious] houses.” He argues that the decline in their populations was a phenomenon of the later years of the century – in other words, a time when they were reasonably free of financial problems. This would point to some other malaise: a dryingup of the religious life within or a loss of support from the society without. The problem with his argument is that while his figures confirm the decline, they do not establish when in the century it took place.39 Another historian argues the opposite: that it was between 1725 and 1740 that the feminine religious vocation faced its severest hindrances. He adds that for the nuns in his study, the years 1770–74 were among the best in the century.40 If his chronology is correct, it would seem difficult to discuss decline in feminine monasteries without implicating the financial crisis and the policy of suppression launched by the Commission des secours in 1727. My own research indicates that decline in the number of entries did, in fact, set in around 1730.41 Despite the jolts to their finances between 1689 and 1720, women’s communities had continued to recruit members. Indeed, a bumper crop of entries in 1696–1700 suggests that they had done what the Commission des secours later accused them of doing – accepting more entrants than usual as a way of acquiring dowry money. But the Law Crash was beyond anything that their economies could withstand. They endured several years of poverty severe enough to drive many entrants away from their doors. Then a regimen imposed from above led to the winnowing out of some communities and the slimming down of others. The years 1731–45 mark the time when the number of entrants first fell away significantly. Just when monastic numbers as a whole are seen

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to have been high and healthy, a closer view shows that the number of female monastics was beginning to shrink. This raises a question. If male regulars were still feeling their oats, why were female regulars starting to stagger? No one has yet suggested that women were ahead of men in moral and spiritual deterioration. The sources need to be much more closely examined, with special reference to women, before any firm conclusion can be reached. But I argue that if the female religious population declined before the male, it was because external action made the earlier period peculiarly difficult for women, with the ban on reception of novices. Of course, what started from outside could eventually be internalized. The ban on novices drained communities of their youth, year by year. Already crushed by their debts and facing an uncertain future, their community spirit might well begin to erode. But it must be emphasized that this happened only after the Law Crash opened them up to the commission’s restructuring. The historian of the Provençal Ursulines makes this point, emphasizing that the Law Crash caused a far-reaching trauma among religious communities: “Its direct consequences were serious. Above all, it provoked profound troubles in them, which were not only of a financial order. To repeat a sometimes overused formula, ‘nothing would be the same as before.›42 The women whose monasteries were suppressed outright suffered the most. The commission’s correspondence discussing their fate makes sad reading. The nuns could not believe that they would be targeted without serious moral or material cause. The Ursulines of Avallon wrote a petition in which they listed “the reasons that would be grounds for the extinction, transfer, or destruction of a community.” These were: “Firstly, the lack of observance of the Rule … Secondly, the indigence and poverty of a monastery which, being useful for nothing, becomes a charge on the King and the State … And finally … when this community is so low in numbers that it is not in a state to subsist of itself, that is to say, to fulfil and acquit the charges to which it is bound.”43 Since none of these conditions applied to them, they proclaimed their confidence that the Crown would not wish to close them down. But the commission had already decided that the number of female convents must be reduced at all costs. If it deemed a region to have too many, it was ready to assign a quota of houses for suppression, regardless of merit. The Ursuline monastery in Saint-Gengoux was a victim of this policy. It had been under the dreaded ban for some years when in 1747 the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône wrote to the commission asking that the house be given a reprieve because of its value to the town. The commission at first turned him down flat. Then, in 1748, it wrote to him to

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say that it had information that the nuns were in misery and to ask that a “trustworthy, sensible man” be sent to take an inventory. The report from a local archpriest came back, almost by return of mail. The house, he wrote, was spacious, clean, and in good order, with a wellkept church that could hold four hundred people, a pensionnat, and public classrooms for sixty children. All the buildings were of stone and tile, with a large enclosure producing fruit and vegetables and enough hay to feed four cows. The community had no debts (indeed, it was owed over 7000 livres) and its twenty-one members all had pensions. It sounded idyllic, and it weakened the commission’s resolve. But now came the rub. The commission announced that it was ready to spare the house, but only if the bishop would suggest another to suppress in its place. This the bishop would not do, so Saint-Gengoux went to the block. It was closed in 1752 and its nuns sent off to Chalon where, they later complained, they were left with pensions of 80 livres each instead of the promised 115 livres. The house was sold. When all expenses were paid and a fund set up to support the filles dévotes who were brought in as replacement schoolteachers, there was nothing left over.44 Scenes like this took place across the country. When the suffragan bishop of Lyon protested to the commission against an order, sent him in 1734, to close eight convents, he was told: “This suppression of several religious communities and this diminution in the number of nuns in several [other] religious communities have been among the principal objectives proposed by His Majesty in granting them assistance.”45 In the event, all eight houses were suppressed and 191 nuns dispersed with pensions.46 Once it became public knowledge, the commission’s policy of culling houses gave rise to a fierce and unseemly scramble among communities. If a monastery could convince the authorities to target someone else, it not only saved its own life but had a good chance of receiving some of the spoils from the victim. Epic wars of words broke out between neighbouring convents. Two Ursuline communities in the Provençal town of Saint-Remy fought it out, each in turn gaining favour with the commission. Finally, the house that had initially been targeted for suppression won the battle, with help from two archbishops, a duchess, and Madame la Dauphine herself. The nuns of the losing house were dispersed among other houses, “according to the availability of empty and suitable rooms.”47 In Moulins, the Ursulines and another teaching community engaged in a long and unedifying slanging match in which, it seems, everybody in the town became involved.48 In Annonay, the Filles de Notre-Dame were the underdogs in a bitter struggle with the local royal abbey, during which each side sent

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the commission reams of testimonials for itself and reams of slurs about the other.49 In all such contests, the nuns had to find champions to speak for them. Everything depended on whom they knew and how much influence that person had in Versailles. It went hard for those who had no patrons and no visibility, like the Ursuline monastery in Montcenis, which was consigned to oblivion because it was “tucked away in a small town without support and without protection.”50 Next to losing their houses altogether, the nuns’ worst pain came from the temporary ban on novices. This deprived them of the dowries they would otherwise have enjoyed and also of the young members whom they needed to replenish the community. A further grief came from the fact that the ban by lettre de cachet was increasingly used as a disciplinary tool to bring them to heel if they were too independent. This was particularly hard on communities with Jansenist leanings. We see the Ursuline house in Beauvais placed under the ban for thirty years – not for reasons of poverty, as the bishop explained in 1763, but for “particular circumstances.”51 The Jansenist connection was stated more explicitly in 1786 when the bishop of Montpellier reported on a local Ursuline convent: This community was dear to the inhabitants of Montpellier; the newly converted brought their children there with as much confidence as did the old Catholics; but the errors of the times penetrated the house, and the religious were almost all seduced to the point where they challenged all authority. It was necessary to deprive them of the permission to receive pensionnaires and novices; they remained for eighteen years without a director or superior, and almost without a Rule.

When the original forty nuns had been reduced to eighteen, twelve of whom were then sent away, the remaining six, whose orthodoxy was satisfactory, were allowed to function once more.52 Goings-on like this were bound to have an impact on community support. When families placed their daughters in religion, they expected them to have a stable and predictable future. Now, in the sequence of misfortunes that struck the convents, they saw their daughters impoverished or dispersed; or perhaps worse still, if the community collapsed, deposited back on their families’ doorsteps! Furthermore, town officials and ordinary citizens looked unfavourably on the closing-down and selling-up of “their” institutions, to the benefit of others, elsewhere. The commission’s records are full of their angry protests and its own efforts to pacify them. In such an atmosphere, parents were understandably nervous about putting their daughters into convents.

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From now on, individual houses were more than ever on their own, their fortunes depending on their own good luck and good management, and the favour of the commission. As their freedom to buy land or to lend to private individuals was curtailed by the Crown, and as the influx of dowries slowed down, they found it increasingly difficult to administer what they already had. For some houses, “sufficiency” was almost impossible to achieve. This had a dampening effect on recruitment, a problem the Ursulines of Loches experienced as late as 1783: “Their situation, about which the public is informed (no matter what precautions they take to keep their trouble secret) discourages aspirants who would be forthcoming if they were known to enjoy a modest but decent living.”53 Once a house was on the downward slope, it was difficult to reverse the trend. Fewer novices meant an aging and diminishing population, and hence more difficulty in running good schools and attracting pensionnaires. Less money meant that repairs to the buildings might have to be postponed, that the hiring of lawyers and property agents had to be forgone, and sometimes even that the number of religious services in the community had to be cut back. The appearance of deterioration might in turn lead, to a further flight of prospective candidates. It was a vicious circle. For many, poverty remained a pervasive problem. The national bankruptcy of 1720 had caused damage to a great part of the rentier class. The religious communities found that they could not hope for much in the way of generosity from the people who had traditionally been their friends. Moreover, the difficulty they had always experienced in recovering moneys owing to them was now a major problem. Every convent’s book of accounts held records of debts no longer recoverable because of the insolvency of the debtors: 1800 livres in one case, 2676 livres in another, 8600 livres in another.54 Sometimes it was impossible even to collect the sisters’ dowry payments. A historian of the Ursulines of Périgueux who traced their dowry contracts discovered that throughout the eighteenth century families were as likely as not to delay payment for decades or to default altogether.55 The Ursulines of Montbrison experienced the same problem and for the same reason – “the poverty of the noble families of our province.”56 The Filles de Notre-Dame of Annonay, totally without funds in 1786, claimed that their indebtedness was caused mainly by that of others: “They are owed almost 39,000 livres from dowries or pensions [of which] they cannot secure payment. That is the principal cause of their situation.”57 Where there was impoverishment there was also loss of social esteem. By the late eighteenth century, most teaching monasteries were

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less able than before to attract the upper-class candidates who had once been their boast.58 They had to settle for women of less elevated station. Houses that refused to bend the knee and admit commoners found themselves in trouble. As one observer remarked of the Ursuline community in Sommières: “These religious, since they belong to the principal nobility of the region, have never wished to admit subjects of more modest origins; if their numbers have diminished, it is because of that.”59 But houses that moved with the times and admitted commoners in large numbers found that their upper-class novices (who were fewer to begin with anyway) fled to more exalted institutions – and a certain social cachet departed with them. The teaching monasteries, once largely populated by daughters of officers and the minor nobility, now became the natural home for the middling sort. “We no longer find ‘rich and powerful seigneurs,’ as in the contracts of the seventeenth century, but simple squires,” writes one historian; “to the rich merchants capable of giving 4000 livres … succeeds a minor bourgeoisie of the robe.”60 In the perception of many of its erstwhile supporters, this led to a deterioration in the quality of the monasteries. An interesting subtheme appears here: social déclassement was somehow equated with spiritual decline. The monasticism of the Counter-Reformation had been profoundly aristocratic in its prejudices, equating virtue with birth and social rank.61 The opinion had long been held in influential circles that monasteries were really intended to be the preserve of the aristocracy and that their invasion by the lesser breeds was a betrayal of their purpose. Now, in the years of the “aristocratic reaction,” the belief took on new force. The fear was all the more potent because it was founded on fact: the social derogation so greatly deplored was indeed taking place. This “democratization” during the eighteenth century was the saving grace of many a monastery. But it alienated the upper classes even more. In other ways the ethos of the convents changed. With less support coming in from outside, the sisters had to orient themselves to the business of making money. The success of their early years in attracting dowries had allowed them to be careless about the management of their affairs. In the late eighteenth century their records show them more knowledgeable, more canny in their dealings, more accurate in their accounting, and more astute in the exploitation of their farms.62 Their pensionnats were expanded to become major sources of income. All this material improvement was achieved without much help from outside. Whatever they now had, they enjoyed as a result of their own efforts, not the charity of others. This was a point they made when, in the early days of the Revolution, the National Assembly decided to lay

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hands on the goods of the Church, including theirs. “The dowries of the religious, their handwork and their economies, have sufficed for the acquisition of their house, its reconstruction and its maintenance to this day,” wrote the Ursulines of Lille. “By means of these economies, they have acquired almost all their revenues.”63 They, and many other communities, argued (in vain, as it turned out) that the law protecting private property should protect their private property as well. Was this increase in the communities’ efficiency achieved at the expense of their spirituality? There seems to be a consensus in the affirmative. The historian of the Ursulines points to the reduction of their time spent in prayer, reflection, and reading, to the benefit of their “productive” work, and regrets the change of spirit which this brought about. Another historian concurs. “Women’s convents came to live only by their social function,” he claims, adding that in the eighteenth century nuns became less mystical and more practical.64 Whether the first assertion is true or not, the second almost certainly is. In various subtle ways, the communities’ records do suggest that by the eighteenth century the high exaltation of the early days had given way to more practical expressions. Nuns, too, were affected by the general trend towards “enlightened” Catholicism, as described by Jean de Viguerie.65 The change is reflected in their language. In their death notices the sense of other-worldliness fades; allusions to miracles disappear altogether; and more restrained forms of expression make their appearance. In the late eighteenth century we even see God referred to from time to time as “the Supreme Being,” and we read that another citoyenne has been added to the heavenly host! A change has also been discerned in their choice of names in religion. It was age-old practice for monastics to adopt new names as a sign of their break with their old lives “in the world.” These names were chosen to honour a member of the Trinity, one of the great saints, or one of the lesser saints or angels. A study of Ursuline nuns in the southeast shows that from 1592 to 1649, the great age of Christocentrism, one-third of the nuns in the sample adopted names that honoured Jesus Christ in his different “states” (Incarnation, Passion, Holy Childhood, etc.).66 By the late eighteenth century such titles had fallen to a mere 8.5 percent, and even the Virgin had become less popular, while the percentage of names of lesser saints – unchallenging saints such as Rosalie and Felicité – had swollen to 63.2 percent. “A more reassuring, more human proximity,” the historian suggests, “permitting an easier identification than with God”;67 or put differently, a retreat from the high spirituality of the anciennes mères into a less demanding approach to life in religion.

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The first generations were still revered for their heroism and bounding mystical spirit. No sister of the Congrégation could ever forget Alix Lecler, whose life was shot through and through with dreams and visions, or Gante André, of whom it was said that “she was brave enough to swallow down difficulties without even chewing them.”68 But that was then, and this was now. In the late eighteenth century Madame Roland, looking back on her days in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris, recalled a time of calm and happiness: “The house was respectable, the order not too austere; as a result, the nuns dispensed altogether with those excesses and nonsenses which are characteristic of most [monasteries]”69 – a favourable verdict, given the times, but one that would have sounded strange to Alix and Gante and their sisters. It can be argued, too, that the heroic obedience and humility of the founding generations had suffered with the passage of time.70 It is easy to see why. Religious women had learned to ask questions. This female “curiosity” was seen by some as a baneful characteristic of the new age. The great Jesuit preacher Louis Bourdaloue had only harsh words for “the pernicious effect, in women’s monasteries, of this itch to learn and to appear learned.” He complained: “They want to know everything, discuss everything, judge everything. If disputes arise in the Church on highly subtle, highly abstract questions, they have to find out about them; and scarcely have they acquired the feeblest and most superficial veneer of knowledge than they think themselves as enlightened as the ablest theologians.”71 It can be conjectured that the “itch to learn” was the logical outcome of a long exposure to the divisions within the Church. Nuns had spent years disputing among themselves the importance of contrition to the sacrament of penance, and the rightness or wrongness of frequent communion. Many of them had been introduced to Bible reading, and they were promoting it in their schools. In all of this there was, in germ at least, a kind of “spiritual feminism.”72 Jansenism was at the root of a great deal of it; disillusionment with authority had opened the door to ideas and attitudes that would have been unthinkable in the early seventeenth century. But it is equally possible that in non-Jansenist houses, away from the sort of confrontations that have surfaced in the historical record, other religious women were also acquiring a certain independence of mind. Furthermore, the late eighteenth century saw a few of the world’s new comforts filtering through the monastery walls. Once nuns had recovered from the great bankruptcy, they became more comfortable than their predecessors – better heated, and with more varied food, such as dried fruit and conserves. Coffee, tea, chocolate, and tobacco

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were not unknown within their walls.73 None of this should surprise. Nuns belonged to their times; if the milieu from which they came enjoyed more consumer goods, it was natural that they should do so too. More controversial was the challenge which, as teaching communities, they faced when asked to update their curriculum. Parents wanted different things for their girls, so in some convent pensionnats, dancing and music lessons were offered, small dramas were produced, and new subjects such as geography were taught.74 However, the tension between tradition and novelty continued. Every innovation had to run the gauntlet of community conservatism. Furthermore, on the occasions when the nuns did attempt to cater to a more worldly clientele, they were likely to find themselves reprimanded by the more conservative elements of the local clergy. So their efforts to update their syllabus – never exactly strenuous – were always subject to the drag of the past. Once the last word in the education of girls, by the late eighteenth century their pensionnats were in danger of being considered “passé.” And once the support of the elites was eroded, what was left to them? Where were “the people,” for whose benefit they had originally been instituted? The public’s verdict on the teaching nuns seems always to have been mixed, and there were various reasons for this. For one thing, their record on free schooling was irregular. The reputation of many houses rested on the size and seriousness of their day schools: 400 children in Nancy, 400 in Rouen, 500 in Valenciennes, 300 in Rennes, to give a few examples. Many others, though their day schools were smaller, nevertheless continued to satisfy all the demands for girls’ education in their little towns. But serious questions could arise where the monastery grew and the day school remained the same size – or sometimes shrank. In Angers in the eighteenth century, the large and well-endowed Ursuline monastery offered spaces to sixty non-paying students – hardly a return on the expenditure of money and space that a community of thirty-three women required.75 In Lorgues, forty Ursuline nuns occupied themselves otherwise while the city paid a schoolmistress to manage the free school.76 This was a breach of their original trust and it carried a danger: wherever the authorities saw cause to suppress a teaching monastery, they were able to do so by bringing in alternative schoolmistresses without much public outcry.77 The rapid growth in the number of secular congregations dedicated to teaching – congregations such as the Dames de Saint-Maur and the Filles de la Croix – had by the eighteenth century made a significant inroad into the cloistered orders’ near monopoly of female education.78 These schoolmistresses, since they were not cloistered, were

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able to live much more cheaply than their monastic counterparts. Once value for money became the main criterion, the expensive monastic option was in danger of losing its charm, at least where public education was concerned. The cloistered nuns suffered from another disadvantage. Even where they continued to offer their services, the common people who furnished many of their day students remained on the other side of a social divide. From the very beginning, the nuns had taken their place among the privilégiés.79 Nothing they could do could eradicate the resentment caused by that fact. Although they taught without charge, gave alms, and handed out soup and bread to the poor at their doors, and although they scrimped to provide small gifts and prizes to the children in the free classrooms and made many friends and clients, they seem never to have gained the hearts of the people. It is possible that the very nature of their service was irksome to their clients. The nuns taught decorum, control, piety, respect for authority; they urged their students to give up the ways of the street and the slum. In outlying regions of the country, they decried the local dialects and acted as missionaries of the French language. Even as the people benefited by their schooling, they may have resented its tone. As the eighteenth century wore on, the pride of the poor became more “ticklish,”80 and they accepted the condescension of their betters with less and less grace. “Forget about those biddies in the Congrégation,” declaimed a pamphlet-writer in 1789. “The service they say they render to the public does us more harm than good. They feed young girls – and turn their heads – with pruderies, affectations, and nonsenses which are of no use in the world … They raise them … to be haughty, proud, contemptuous, curious, and backbiting.”81 It seems that this kind of diatribe did not lack a sympathetic audience. One is struck by the flickering hostility which the public showed to the convents over the years. One could overlook the pranks of young men – the “libertines who entered the convent by night … [and] made various attempts to enter the pensionnaires’ room by force”; the boys who insisted on bathing in the river within view of the nuns, “pronouncing indecent words and even stealing their vegetables and breaking their washboard”; or the two students of the college of La Flèche who scaled the walls of the local monastery during the night and later received “a sharp lesson”82 – but there is also evidence of harassment of a darker sort: stones and refuse thrown against convent doors, windows broken, and obscenities uttered.83 Occasionally, there were incidents that carried a threat of worse to come. In 1776, when the city of Carcassonne ordered that all burials must take place in public cemeteries, the Ursulines complied by sending out a deceased nun to be

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buried, whereupon the body was accompanied to the grave by a hostile crowd, “pouring out a thousand invectives against us.”84 Less than twenty years later, a similarly hostile crowd surrounded the sisters when they were forced to leave their house. The incident reveals the ambiguity that always existed in the nuns’ relationship with “the people,” and it helps explain the harshness with which many of them were treated during the revolutionary years, once the authorities were no longer on their side.

the problem of evidence Where does this leave us in passing judgment on the spirit of eighteenth-century communities? Is it reasonable to assume that because they were more modern, more inquiring, more businesslike, more middle class – and, it appears, less loved – the nuns had suffered a loss of authentic religious vocation? What accounts for the aura that hangs over these nuns, the aura of stagnation and mediocrity? Since we have little to go by in the way of their own testimony, it is difficult to tell whence this opinion arises. Perhaps it is from the visible decline in their numbers and the collective aging that went with it; or from the deteriorating quality of their written records, which has been attributed to dropping standards of literacy and dedication; or from the pathetic inadequacy of their libraries, brought to light when they were inventoried at the time of the Revolution. Other than these physical signs, there is not much that supports such a very sweeping verdict – except that it was the firmly held opinion of nineteenth-century monographers, the first in this field of women’s history. “Piety still reigned there,” wrote the Abbé Richaudeau, historian of the Ursulines of Blois, “and the Rule was still observed … but we no longer see characters as well-formed, or at least, there were only a few.”85 Having read the same records as Richaudeau, I am mystified to know how he came to this conclusion. Because the entries in the annales are briefer, it is difficult to pass any judgment, positive or negative, on the question of character formation. Perhaps the answer is in his next sentence: “This was because society itself was enfeebled, and it could not give what it did not have.” We are back with the piety-birth equation. He went on to say: “From the Regency onward, noble families ceased almost entirely to furnish subjects to monasteries, and, as the bourgeoisie did not, so to speak, know the way, the number of subjects decreased notably in communities.”86 While few of his compeers were as forthright as Richaudeau, they worked from the same prejudice. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century churchmen, highly class-

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conscious and elitist, did not value “democratization” any more than their eighteenth-century forbears had done. As for the material indicators mentioned above – the diminution of their population, the sketchiness of their records, the abysmal state of their libraries – these can all be attributed to one cause: poverty. The questions surrounding the first have already been discussed. As to the second, it is surely arguable that a smaller community struggling with an unchanged workload might not have had the time to compose flowery eulogies or extensive annales – even though it did, often, keep better accounts. As to the third, the number of books a person or a community owns does not tell us how many books she/it reads. There is ample evidence scattered through the records to prove that nuns borrowed books – from family, friends, and spiritual advisers – and also that many of them owned their own New Testaments and other works of piety. During the years that communities could not pay their debts, it is highly unlikely that they would build up their houses’ libraries.87 Symptoms such as these scarcely merit a diagnosis of “mediocrity.” Indeed, there is little in their records that informs us about the morale and inner spirit of religious women on the eve of their disappearance. The wisest course is to admit that we do not know. “The essential often escapes us and will continue to escape us, by the very force of things,” writes a religious historian.88 As long as their lives remained cloaked in anonymity, we cannot in fairness pass judgment on them. The most convincing measure of their private state of mind is to be found in the very public behaviour they exhibited at the beginning of the Revolution. And this, whatever we choose to make of it, was not mediocre.

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6 Aftermath

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, promulgated in July 1790, is considered to have been one of the great turning points of the Revolution. By attempting to include the clergy in its administrative reforms, the government moved unequivocally into the jurisdiction of the Church. It abolished the concordat of 1516 and eliminated the papacy’s influence in national religious affairs. It turned bishops and priests into salaried, elected officials of the state. And it redrew the ecclesiastical map, eliminating dioceses and reapportioning parishes. This was an unprecedented challenge to the Church, and opposition to the constitution grew swiftly. In order to enforce compliance, the National Assembly instituted an oath of allegiance to both the Nation and the constitution, “and especially the Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” and demanded that it be taken by the entire serving clergy. The oath ceremony, which was scheduled in the winter of 1790–91, broke the clergy in two. On one hand were the “constitutionals,” who by taking the oath acknowledged the power of the Nation to legislate changes in church matters; on the other side were the “refractories,” or nonjurors, who persisted in their allegiance to the pope and the old hierarchy. All but 4 of the 135 bishops refused the oath, as did some 45 percent of the priests. From this time on, the division between Church and Nation became increasingly serious. “The oath of 1791 marked a major crisis in the political life of the nation,” writes Timothy Tackett.1 A very minor crisis occurred in the town of Saint-Sever, in the extreme southwest of France, as the Civil Constitution was being put in

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place.2 On 9 April 1791 the town prepared to receive its new constitutional bishop, Jean-Pierre Saurine, with full honours. At four in the afternoon the cannon sounded and the bells rang out as planned – all except those of the Ursuline convent. Immediately several armed men went to the convent and demanded that the bells be rung. When the nuns replied that they could not do so in good conscience, the soldiers began to chop down the door. Thereupon Reverend Mother capitulated – after a fashion: “We are not going to ring them, but since you want it done, come in and ring them yourselves.” By this time the troop had swollen in numbers, and the community waited anxiously as the men tramped through the building and rang the bell. They left peaceably enough, but war had been joined, and the nuns knew it. Next morning the new bishop – “the intruder,” as the nuns persisted in calling him – departed, leaving orders for the convent to conform to the new laws. Several hours later the bishop’s delegate, accompanied by the mayor, the syndic, another notable, and “an ex-Capuchin” arrived at the grille. The syndic read out an official order installing the ex-Capuchin as the monastery’s director and forbidding the nuns to hear Mass from anyone else. Then the delegate began to speak with charm and benevolence, only to be cut short by Reverend Mother: “Permit me to speak from my heart and that of my community. We will not recognize any other bishop than the one to whom we have vowed obedience. We cannot accept Mr Saurine; we will not obey any order from him, and we will never communicate with a priest sent by him. These are the sentiments of the Ursulines of Saint-Sever. They cannot be false to the promises they made at the foot of the altar on the day of their profession; to be faithful to those promises, they will bear everything and joyfully suffer even death itself.” The delegate asked if he could have this in writing. The nuns assented, the whole community signing the statement. Still the delegate tried to persuade them “with seducing and artful words.” Then he presented Reverend Mother with a pastoral letter from the new bishop, but she refused even to touch it. On this promising note the group retired, “very confused,” as the nuns heard later from their friends in the town. The following day some city officials tried to deliver the letter at the door, but the portress rejected it “with indignation and scorn.” When a departmental official arrived some days later and summoned the superior to accept the letter, she again refused. “Just take it,” he urged. “If you don’t want to read it, burn it!” But he, too, had to leave without success, all the more chagrined because he had said publicly that he would win the community over. Two days later the ex-Capuchin arrived to demand the keys to the sacristy and the tabernacle, and to warn the nuns that he would be

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arriving to say Mass and that they must ring the bells for him. “The superior told him that he would have to ring them himself and that she would arrange to have the bell-ropes passed out of the cloister and into the church.” Needless to say, the nuns did not present themselves for his Mass. Every attempt he made to regularize his situation – to have the palms ready for the blessing on Palm Sunday, to secure the Easter candle and the various church ornaments used during the season – was met with stubborn resistance. It should be pointed out that most convents maintained a church for the public, into which the nuns could not even step because of their vow of clausura. Their choir was situated to one side, facing the altar but angled so as to be invisible to the public and fronted by a grille, in which was a small aperture that was opened only at Communion time. The standoff between the nuns and their unwanted chaplain took place at this grille. He had the church, they had the altar furnishings. It took a visit from the municipal officers to force them to hand over the sacred vessels. The men’s move to enter the inner sacristy (which was inside the cloister) was met with furious resistance from within. In the end, to prevent a forcible entry, the nuns handed the vestments and sacred vessels through the sacristy turntable; they also sent through a large cupboard, which was dismantled on one side and reassembled on the other so as to avoid the capitulation implied in opening the door. After that, the officials made sure that the nuns could no longer receive Communion – they locked the opening in their grille. The convent church, previously a space shared by the town and the community, was now in the hands of “the intruders.” During the night, however, the nuns arranged to have a lock put on the inner side of the church door that connected with the street. Thus they took the church back. “Immediately a complaint was taken to the mayor,” and he arrived post-haste with a locksmith to remove the lock – and, for good measure, to put bars on all the convent’s accesses to the church. By this time the Ursulines had become the centre of public attention. “The church was like a marketplace all day long. The rabble who had invaded it made jokes at our expense, and the lackeys of the town watched from the tower to make sure the work was not interrupted from inside. One would have thought that they were locking up criminals. We recited our office and said our prayers in the common room, because the abomination of desolation was truly in the holy place.” During this time, rumours were circulating that the nuns would soon be forced out or, at the very least, made to attend Mass in the parish church. “We then felt so troubled that we were more dead than alive,” wrote the memoirist. However, this did not stop them on Easter

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Monday, when Bishop Saurine returned to Saint-Sever, from again refusing to sound their bells and again receiving a violent visit from the soldiers. Saurine decided against visiting them, as he was being urged to do, and left them to the discretion of the municipality. Two days later the mayor arrived with a letter from a member of the National Assembly warning the community that if they did not accept the Civil Constitution they would be cut off from their pensions. Again the community refused unanimously. For six months the standoff lasted – the ex-Capuchin in the church, the nuns in the convent, neither having anything to do with the other. For the women, this meant no Mass, no Communion, no confession – nothing but the services they organized for themselves. On the Feast of the Federation, 14 July 1791, they again refused to ring their bells and again were visited by soldiers. Then came a surcease as the local authorities were forced to acknowledge the law passed by the National Assembly that “freedom of worship is implicit in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.” Despite the reluctance of the commune and the fierce opposition of the local Jacobin Club, the sisters regained the key to their own church and, better still, their own nonjuring chaplain. However, their contacts with the outside world were cut off; the outer door of their church was closed to the public (turning it, in effect, into a private chapel), and they were forbidden to teach day students. At the end of 1791 their bells were removed – a relief, they agreed among themselves, because they would no longer be summoned to salute “the intruder” or celebrate the Feast of the Federation. “In February the persecutions resumed … From that time on it was constantly being said that we were to be chased from our monastery … They [the Jacobin Club] went to Saurine and urged him to come to our convent and force us to receive him and to take the [civic] oath or, if we refused, to turn us out.” By now, much of the town had turned against them, including old friends. Only the bishop’s pacifism protected them; he argued, with considerable wisdom, “that harassments would never make us abandon our errors.” And so passed the spring, summer, and autumn of 1792. When the sisters were expelled that October, it was the end of a siege that had lasted eighteen months. The experience of this one monastery cannot be treated as typical. Many communities lived through the years 1790–92 with less difficulty; many others lived through it with more. But in several ways the episode throws light on the minds of the nuns and their relations with authority and the world around them. First of all, it is obvious that this community enjoyed both a strong superior and a strong esprit de corps. Reverend Mother was firm to the point of stubbornness in her dealings with the various officials who came to browbeat or cajole her. But on

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every occasion the community backed her, sometimes after discussion, sometimes spontaneously. Not every community was capable of such solidarity, which was the sine qua non of resistance. Furthermore, at the very beginning of the confrontation, the nuns had framed the issue as a choice between betrayal of their vows and martyrdom. Once declared, neither threats nor blandishments could rob them of their high sense of mission. We frequently find the language of martyrdom on the lips of religious women. “We are resolved to die rather than leave our house,” wrote the Ursulines of Carpentras in 1790. “We will all suffer a thousand deaths before renouncing our holy religion,” proclaimed the Ursulines of Lille in 1791.3 Both communities were anticipating by some considerable time the reality of the guillotine, and reasonable folk may well have thought them overdramatic. Yet how small and insignificant were the issues over which this battle raged! – The ringing of bells, the control of vestments and church plate, the acceptance or nonacceptance of a letter. One can imagine the frustration of the revolutionary officials at being foiled at such a level – and the fury of the clubmen on seeing this happen. The law was being flouted, and by mere women. Moreover, the public was watching with keen awareness and, no doubt, some amusement. It became imperative for the sake of law and order that something be done, that the nuns not be allowed to win. On the other side, the women were in their own element, where black was black and white was white, and small things mattered intensely. It was difficult to make deals with people who were talking martyrdom. “Religious women are a special breed,” Cardinal de Fleury had written fifty years earlier. “They will submit to outside power only in matters that do not offend their consciences.”4 Had the revolutionaries known of the earlier behaviour of Jansenist nuns – the last holdouts in that bitter and protracted struggle – they might have been more prepared for the contradictions they now faced.

the larger view Between the outbreak of the Revolution and the evacuation of the religious houses in the autumn of 1792, the relationship of the nuns of France with their new masters went through several different phases. First came a few months of peace, then a series of laws that threw them into adversity: the suspension of solemn vows on 28 October 1789, followed by their outright abolition on 13 February 1790; the nationalization of the Church’s property on 2 November 1789, followed on 20 March 1790 by a decree ordering an inquest into the properties and a census of the personnel of the monasteries. As early as January

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1790 communities were sending away their novices, often amid scenes of great distress. “It was like a bolt of lightning for us … our poor novices were inconsolable,” wrote a monastic annalist years later.5 They knew well what it portended. “They are respectfully bowing to your intentions,” wrote the bishop of Marseille to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “but they are very much alarmed by the fate that seems to be being prepared for them.”6 So they were already filled with suspicious anxiety as they were forced to open their houses up to the commissioners who came to inventory their possessions. And of course their fears were realized. “After the inventory all our goods were seized; our domaines were farmed out by the district, and our invested money was also taken from us,” wrote the annalist quoted above. Even though they were promised a pension, the loss of autonomy was clear to them. It is little wonder that when the mayor came and preached to them on the advantages of the Civil Constitution (“inestimable, according to him; we were citizens of liberty and equality!”), they reacted negatively, “many of us finding it difficult to contain our indignation.”7 Thus the great inquest of 1790, for all the decorum of the procèsverbaux, took place in an atmosphere of mutual incomprehension. The commissioners thought they were offering the women their freedom; the nuns perceived that they were being denied their rights: “Is it possible,” wrote one of them to the Ecclesiastical Committee, “at a time when we hear the word ‘liberty’ sounding from every side, that we should be excluded from this privilege, in finding ourselves forced to quit a sanctuary that we chose in all freedom?”8 When they were asked, one by one, if they wished to renounce the religious life, many of them must already have been feeling furious. This certainly is the impression we get from one deponent, Marie-Jeanne Coqteaulx of the monastery of the Congrégation in Châlons-sur-Marne: She declares that at a time when oaths are being taken everywhere to be faithful to the Nation, the law and the king, she finds it very strange that religious are given permission to be unfaithful to God, and to forget the engagements which they contracted with Him; this permission is an injury to the Divinity and a dishonour to those who give it when they certainly do not have the right. She says: “Our duties are inviolable, no authority on earth can dispense us from them. Does anyone believe that we could in conscience go against a solemn oath made to God before the altars? How much weight could henceforth be put on oaths, even those made in public places? Whatever the consequences, I declare that I will hold to my vows … Such are my intentions, and you will please make them public, to disabuse those who might think me in a different disposition.”9

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The near unanimity of the nuns’ initial refusal to leave their convents may be attributed in good part to a spirit of anger.10 They believed in themselves and in their place in society; they had as yet no reason for physical fear; and they had every right to take umbrage over their treatment. Not every community or every nun resisted this invitation to freedom, but the number of women who accepted it was tiny. Four out of 515 nuns in the Côtes du Nord chose to leave; 2 out of 195 in Aude; 1 out of 466 in Douai; 1 out of 304 in the diocese of Arras.11 These numbers are typical of the breakdown across the country. Even in Paris, hotbed of revolution, the number of departures was “infinitely small.”12 The thirty defections in Rouen were almost entirely attributable to one community, the Dominicaines emmurées; the rest of the 600 nuns held firm to their communities. “The history of religious communities in Rouen during the Revolution is in large part a feminine history,” writes their historian.13 There was no clear pattern to the defections. Lack of discipline was a factor (though some unedifying houses, such as the abbey of Longchamp, chose to continue).14 Division in the community was another; once solidarity was lost, morale was weakened, and it became easier for the sisters to walk away. Thus in the Ursuline convent of Digne, the original nineteen nuns of the 1790 census were only seventeen a year later, at which time six of them, including the superior and three of the officers, decided to leave.15 Life in the cloister, once the common property was confiscated and each nun had her own pension, was difficult. “They wanted to see if by making us into proprietors, discord would come to divide us,” wrote the annalist of Bourg-Argental.16 Clearly, the strategem sometimes worked. Furthermore, the idea of freedom was unsettling enough to make some communities mutinous and quarrelsome. A strong esprit de corps and a superior with leadership qualities were necessary to prevent this from happening. On the other hand, esprit de corps and a strong superior could sometimes go too far, and some of the unanimity which the commissioners recorded in 1790 was grounded in timidity in the face of community pressure. Nuns who expressed a desire to leave were subjected to intense argument and even persecution. “They were in hell, so much were they being tormented,” ran one memoir.17 A later recollection, totally unsympathetic of course, allows us to imagine their feelings: Two of our sisters, seduced by the charm of a false liberty … deserted the cloister and re-entered the world. The superiors had spared no pains to prevent these unhappy sheep from leaving the fold. Mère Besnard, respectable for her age and her virtues, seeing one of them before the Blessed Sacrament, went

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and knelt beside her and, in friendly tones, said: “Remember, Sister, the commitments you made to the Lord in front of this altar.” She replied: “Don’t say anything more; I am tormented enough.”18

There were some even more extreme cases, where nuns were detained under duress and had to be liberated by the municipal authorities.19 Some thought has been given to the type of women who opted to leave. Dominique Dinet suggests that they tended to be middle-aged, isolated from their families, and often from out of town.20 Geneviève Reynes thinks the opposite: “Only women who were still young, and who had kept up their ties with their families, could be tempted by this adventure.”21 In fact, I have seen nothing that supports her view. The women who left were overwhelmingly middle-aged – most in their fifties, but some even older. Their reasons were not often given, but they probably ranged from a genuine desire for freedom to a real foreboding about the future of their communities. Some of them openly admitted that they could not face the hardships that seemed to be awaiting them in the convent. “I am 73 years old,” wrote a nun of Valence. “If our sisters continue to live in community, I shall continue the common life. If this hope is a vain one, I shall go where I can. I put my confidence and my resignation into the hands of Jesus Christ; He will give me the strength and consolation that I need.”22 Young nuns seldom deserted the religious life. Lay sisters were the most tenacious of all. Throughout these months, as monasticism was being dismantled, the Gallican hierarchy remained silent. Its situation was somewhat awkward. Over the past sixty years it had tolerated the state’s growing interference in its business, with the Commission des secours, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the Commission des réguliers. So when in 1790 the Ecclesiastical Committee claimed that the state had the right to decide on the existence of religious orders, it was able to point to precedents in the Old Regime. “To judge by past events, we have to admit that all of this flowed normally from the worldly spirit of the Enlightenment,” writes Rogier, and he surmises that the bishops were not upset to see an end to the monks.23 At any rate, the church authorities gave no intimation that the inventory or confiscation were illegal, and they made no major issue of the invitation to monks and nuns to leave their convents.24 No matter how distressed the religious communities felt, they had to comply. On the surface, things were still peaceful; there was as yet no open confrontation between the Revolution and the Church. Everything changed with the promulgation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath that followed. The offering of the oath and its public acceptance or rejection by parish priests throughout the

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country “thrust the Revolution clearly and unambiguously into the lives of common men and women everywhere.”25 France was forced to choose sides. For the great body of religious women still living in community, there was no contest. Now that they had the clear direction of their bishops, they rallied to the support of the nonjurors. Their chapels became the centres for refractory worship and their convents the hiding places for refractory priests. And as we have seen, their resistance to the constitutional clergy was often overt and, in the minds of the revolutionaries, not to be tolerated. In early April, in Paris and some other locations, nuns were seized and subjected to public whippings.26 For the most part the women who were thus maltreated were secular sisters, the cloistered nuns being perhaps protected by their higher social status and the fact that they were relatives of local notables. But the writing was on the wall. The Nation was growing more radical, and it was turning its angry eyes upon them. “[The] convents are usually the receptacle where the refractory priests and their dévotes unite,” wrote the journalist AntoineJoseph Gorsas, calling the nuns “furies under their veils and wimples,” “old witches,” and “hideous fanatics.”27 The teaching nuns faced a further challenge. In their capacity as public school teachers, they were, legally speaking, as much servants of the nation as the parish clergy were. “Are not catechists – black sisters, grey sisters, sisters of all colours – responsible for education, are they not public servants? Was it not the purpose of the decree of 27 November to submit them, too, to the taking of the oath?” wrote Gorsas.28 In late 1791, they too were ordered to take the oath on pain of losing their pensions and seeing their public schools closed. Again, there was massive refusal. This put the authorities in a quandary, because the closings would cause serious inconvenience to the public. “Where will you find schoolmasters as zealous and as disinterested as these virtuous teachers?” asked a petition drawn up by the citizens of Lille in early 1792,29 and moderates across the country agreed with them. Some administrations simply allowed the nuns to go on teaching. The municipal council of Bordeaux, for instance, while deploring the fact that “the religious of Sainte-Ursule and Notre-Dame … have declared that they will close their schools if we attempt to force this on them,” argued that “these schools are most useful to the less fortunate of our citizens, and their suppression would occasion discontent,” and decided to leave them open for the time being.30 The minister of the interior concurred: “It would be extremely unfortunate if the instruction of children was interrupted.”31 He ordered that schools across the country remain open.

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But if the nuns had won a battle, they were losing the war. By their defiance they had drawn upon themselves the full attention of the more radical revolutionaries. They were now being identified as tools of the refractories and therefore of the Counter-Revolution. “The nuns … are teaching their pupils principles contrary to the Constitution,” protested the Jacobin clubs, with justification.32 They argued that “it would be better for the children to receive no instruction at all than to receive a bad one.”33 The day came when the Nation agreed with them: “No part of public education will from now on be entrusted to … any houses of the çi-devant congregations of men and women.”34 The congregational schools were closed down. With that, the fate of the teaching congregations, along with that of the rest of the monastic world, was sealed. On 4 August 1792 the National Assembly ordered that all convents be evacuated. The sisters’ plight was made worse by the fact that through the drama of the oath they had incurred the public’s wrath. By causing the closing of schools, they had done something that directly affected ordinary people, and now the ordinary people turned against them. In a petition to the government, the sisters of the Congrégation in Vézelise wrote that since they had refused to take the oath, they were daily the target of new outrages: “Their cloister has been violated with impunity by crowds of madmen who have created much disorder.”35 They protested that anyone would have thought that their longtime service as free schoolteachers would have earned them the gratitude of the town. Their bewilderment and bitterness are understandable; in their own minds, they had done nothing but good to their neighbours. But the incident reveals the fragility of their relationship with “the people.” Once the rulers of the nation turned against them, the religious congregations found themselves exposed, as the following story shows. In Reims, at the same time that the September massacres were taking place in Paris, a mob seized and lynched several nonjuring priests, then roamed the city looking for more. The first the sisters in their monastery knew of it was when they heard the clamour outside their walls: “The crowd, pressing in front of our monastery gate continued to grow. They stayed there all the day … They demanded with great cries that our door be opened so that they could take the priests who (they believed) were hidden among us.”36 One can imagine the women’s fear and confusion. Magistrates arrived, but only to warn them that the crowd was out of control and that they should leave as soon as they could. They fled under cover of night, with a few trusted men to protect them.

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Up and down the country similar scenes were played out. Sometimes amid jeering or indifferent crowds, sometimes at night and in secret, the religious population took flight. Dressed awkwardly in secular clothes, carting the few possessions they were allowed to keep, they left on foot or in rented coaches and wagons. Some of the very old and very sick had to be carried out on chairs.

epilogue This is intended to be a study of cloistered life under the Old Regime, a regime that ended with the establishment of the First Republic on 22 September 1792. Its monastic institutions vanished almost completely within the next fortnight. However, there is an aftermath, a life after death so to speak, which deserves to be noted. During the revolutionary years, the nonjuring church owed its survival partly to the support of women. And active among these women were çi-devant religieuses. We have to recognize that the history of women in the revolutionary years is almost inaccessible. It is heavily dependent on the impressions of men, because women had hardly any means of speaking for themselves. Seen through the eyes of officialdom and journalists, they were either virtuous citoyennes and patriotic wives and mothers or irrational femmelettes doing the bidding of traitorous priests. Their own motivations – whether for actions in favour of or against the Revolution, or for simple indifference to it – were not considered and therefore have to remain a matter of conjecture. What is clear is that the decision that many of them made to defy the Revolution’s ecclesiastical reform was a factor in that reform’s ultimate failure. Timothy Tackett has written that although historians have given pride of place to the sans-jupons and tricoteuses of revolutionary Paris, “it was perhaps the humble women of provincial and rural France, protesting with their whole beings this ‘change in religion’ thrust upon them by the men in Paris, who delivered the single most influential political statement by any women of the revolutionary decade.”37 It should be remarked that while the majority of such protesters were simple peasant women (a fact that officials loved to dwell on at the time), not all counter-revolutionary women were of humble origin. They came from every social milieu.38 Their defiance was multiform – sometimes violent and open, sometimes clandestine. They harassed constitutional priests, sheltered nonjuring priests, and organized underground masses and distributions of sacraments. Children were secretly taught from old catechisms, “fanatical” pamphlets were circulated, and religious services were devised when the Mass could no longer be said. When all

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else failed, the faithful gathered in groups to say the rosary. When finally the Thermidoreans again allowed freedom of worship, it was often women who arranged for the repurchase and reoccupation of disaffected churches.39 In all this female counter-revolutionary activity, François Lebrun sees the hand of “the great mass of religious women, dispersed in 1792, living, for the most part, in France, and not too much interfered with during the Terror.”40 Certainly, nuns took an active role in the mischief that was done to the Constitutional Church; that much can be deduced by the number of them who, at one time or another, went to prison.41 But their importance as leaders in the female version of the Counter-Revolution can only be left to conjecture. For however much civic officals and constitutional priests in their exasperation wanted to make nuns scapegoats for the incivisme of women in general, there were plenty of other reasons why so many of the female sex disliked and opposed the Revolution.42 Arguably, the greatest contribution of the teaching nuns, both cloistered and secular, to the survival of the Catholic Church in France was made long before that church was in any danger – during the long, uneventful stretch of years when they met their students day after day and taught them to read, write, and pray.43 Attendance at a school operated by regulars did not of itself ensure lifelong fidelity to the Church (as the men of the Revolution, alumni of Jesuit- and Oratorian-run colleges, were to prove). So, again, we have to admit that we cannot quantify the influence of religious schoolmistresses on the women they taught. But we do know that well before 1789 there were more dévotes than dévots in France. As the century progressed and men forsook the Church, women became its chief mainstay. “In their detachment or their distancing [from the Church] many men were not followed by their wives,” remarks Jean Quéniart;44 and Michel Vovelle, reaching the same conclusion, maintains that even as the churches emptied of men, religious practice thrived among women: “The theme of the feminization of devotion recurs as a leitmotiv in our analyses.”45 Historians are now agreed that there was a long history behind the dechristianization movement of the Revolution; by the same token, there was a long history behind the attachment, manifested during the Revolution, of many people – and more women than men – to the old religion. “If women had been enlightened,” complained a representative to the Convention in 1793, “priestly fanaticism would not have written the Revolution in characters of blood in so many unfortunate cities.”46 How proud the teaching sisters would have been to hear those words! The gender divide was of utmost importance to the future of France and the church in France. As a result of the loyalty of women to the

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old religion, even as their menfolk were adhering to the Revolution, “a model homme/patriot, femme/fidèle aux prêtres” was allowed to emerge, which coloured the thinking of Frenchmen for over a century to come.47 Women were seen by republicans as the tools of the clergy, the fifth column in society, undermining the rule of Reason. Apologists for the Church sought to counteract this image by consistently downplaying the “feminization” aspect. But the fact remains that without women, the pews would have been empty. As for the women themselves, they simply continued their march, as can be seen from the extraordinary burgeoning of their religious population (from 13,000 in 1808 to 130,000 in 1880).48 One of the casualties of this struggle for male validation was the nuns’ reputation for courage in the face of danger. The men of the Revolution had always decried them as the poor silly victims of scheming nonjurors. Women’s convents, they had maintained, were “monastic bastilles, with refractory priests for jailers.”49 It was natural for republican historians to adopt the same line. But it is disappointing that church historians – most of them clergymen – often did the same thing. While granting that many women went to their death for their principles, they still loved to depict the gender in outlines of soft and fragile femininity: “doves … all trembling with fear,”50 made strong (temporarily) through a miracle of grace. The nuns themselves retained memories of a different sort, of resilient no-nonsense women who faced danger and disruption with an obstinate and often outspoken courage. But their memories remained locked within their communities and did not often impinge on the public historiographical sphere. I should like to conclude with one of these in-house memories – of an encounter between a republican official and an old nun in Brittany. Like the little confrontation with which this chapter started, it was of no consequence in the greater scheme of things. But the fact that it was treasured for most of a century shows that religious women did not see themselves as “trembling doves” and that they valued courage and outspokenness as much as any man. The official’s interrogation of the old lady, an ex-Ursuline, who had been discovered running a small clandestine school, occurred in the Year V. Here is a part of the interview as it survived in local tradition: (q) “What doctrine are you teaching your pupils?” (a) “The faith of our fathers.” (q) “And if our fathers were mad, would we have to follow them?” (a) “Citizen, I knew your father; he was a good Catholic and a man of sense and character. He would not have spoken to me as you are doing.”51 The official’s reply is not recorded. He did not have spiritual descendants to commemorate his words and deeds. The old nun did.

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part two The Anatomy of the Cloister

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7 Clausura and Community

The female monastic community was an organism with two skeletons, so to speak: the exoskeleton of clausura, which kept the women close to each other and apart from the world outside; and the endoskeleton of the Rule and constitutions, which defined all the functions of the community and spelled out the way in which they should be performed. Without these two skeletons, female monasticism could not have operated as it did.

cl au s u r a In 1640 Marie Guyart was visited in her Québec monastery by a group of Abenakis: “They asked me why we had our heads all covered up, and why we were only seen through holes (that is what they called our grille). I told them that this was the custom for virgins in our country, and that they were not seen otherwise.”1 If the Abenakis went away mystified, it is not altogether surprising. This must have been, for them, an extraordinary sight. Clausura, the physical enclosing of female religious, cannot have made any sense to their society. It is arguable that in the strict form to which it had been restored by the Council of Trent, clausura was already at odds with the currents of life in Marie’s own country. Yet it was to stand, rock solid or almost so, until the end of the Old Regime. At the beginning of Catholic renewal in France, several influential reformers had argued for the mitigation of clausura.2 They had insisted that a less trammelled life would allow women to do more good

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in a world that badly needed it. They had also maintained that clausura was a recent phenomenon in the Church’s life and was therefore dispensable. Their argument received some support in Rome, since Cardinal Bellarmine himself, in a letter to François de Sales, approved the latter’s plan for an uncloistered community, adding that what the Church had done the Church could now undo: “Before Boniface VIII, there were religious who were not confined to their monasteries in the sense that they could not go out when necessary … Solemn vows and strict clausura only became church law under Boniface VIII.”3 The event to which Bellarmine referred was Pope Boniface’s promulgation of the bull Periculoso in 1298. Until then, enclosure of nuns had been a counsel of perfection. Now it was on its way to becoming universal law.4 Over the following centuries the pope’s directives, which were fairly general in their wording, received the attention of glossators – with powerful consequences. On the one hand their focus was narrowed, while on the other, their stringency was increased. The tradition that perfection was best achieved within monastic enclosure was very old. “A monk outside his monastery is like a fish out of water,” ran the saying. But it had originally applied to both monks and nuns. Now Periculoso initiated a process by which, at the very time that male monastics were relieved of the need for enclosure, it became for female monastics the keystone of the religious life.5 “Clausura, which to start with was only a means and a precaution for men and women engaging themselves in ‘celibacy for the kingdom,’ became little by little, and exclusively for women, an end in itself to which all feminine religious life had to be subordinated.”6 Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commentators elaborated on the requirements of clausura and the punishments for infractions. With developing laws came a developing rationale. Each generation of glossators added strength to the principle that as far as nuns were concerned, chastity was virtually their raison d’être. “There is hardly a hint in the literature that religious women might encounter any other moral dangers, or that the cultivation of other virtues might be in order.”7 It was a peculiarly limited vision of female sanctity that Periculoso and its glosses developed. The immense burden of remaining chaste required high walls, barred windows, and double-locked gates. But once those gates were locked and those windows barred, there was little left for nuns to achieve. Furthermore, this definition, this downsizing so to speak, of the female calling to sanctity was made during an era of spiritual effervescence when many women were experimenting with new forms of religious life. At a time when female devotion was becoming somewhat ebullient in the wider world, Periculoso tried to confine the devotion of nuns within safe though uninspiring channels. It had

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only limited success among monastic women, while a flood of semireligious women – beguines and tertiaries – simply overflowed the banks and went their own way. The Council of Trent came down firmly on the side of Periculoso. In its final session it renewed the decree, adding stiff sanctions for violators. All religious women were to be enclosed. Clausura was to be enforced by the church authorities on pain of excommunication.8 This meant that the walls of women’s monasteries were to be high enough to close off any view, either from within or from without. The entrances were to be locked and double-locked, their keys remaining in the possession of senior officers of the monastery. Spaces where the nuns came close to the outside world – the parlour, the church – were to be protected by narrow-meshed grilles. No men, not even priests, might enter the enclosure except for the most pressing reasons. Where female pensionnaires were allowed, strict limitions were imposed: only girls from five to eighteen years of age were eligible, and they were to leave the convent rarely and then under the most rigorous supervision. Mature women had no place within the cloisters, since their worldliness constituted an unacceptable temptation for the nuns. In other words, religious women were to be shielded from all disturbing influences. Trent left a lasting image of nuns as frail, susceptible beings whose virtue required heroic protection. Some reformers of the seventeenth century wanted more for religious women. They wanted them to be free to go where they were needed (though always with modesty and under obedience); but beyond that, they wanted to foster a much more spiritual life within the cloister. François de Sales once said that he wished to fill his monastery not with inmates but with religious; he did not want prisoners, he wanted true lovers of Jesus Christ. It was not enough to build high walls; a new energy had to infuse the cloister. “If the spirit of true devotion reigns in a congregation, a moderate enclosure will suffice to make good servants of Christ; if it does not reign there, the strictest enclosure will not be sufficient.”9 His words found an echo among the new congregations. “The enclosure of walls without an interior retreat of the spirit would be a prison rather than a religious haven.”10 However, to reformers of a more conservative stripe, François de Sales seemed to be asking for less, not more: for relaxation of the established rules. The conservatives held firm, and the new religious orders for women – not only the one in question (the Visitation) but all three teaching congregations being studied here – were constrained to submit to strict clausura. However, serious contradictions remained. For one thing, the classroom teaching of externe students to which the three congregations

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were committed was incompatible with old-fashioned clausura, an obvious fact that gave the Holy See cause for anxiety for several years.11 Physical enclosure could be maintained by a complicated system of locking and unlocking doors, but exposure to outside influences could not be avoided as long as children went in and out of the monastery school. For another thing, the new orders were essentially urban, as they had to be if they were to serve their teaching purpose. They had inched their way into the crowded cities of Old Regime France, buying up property as the market and their own financial situation allowed. The monastic solitude that could be achieved in wooded valleys and remote countryside was beyond their grasp. Their space was limited and forever threatened; neighbours might punch holes through their walls or raise tall buildings that overlooked their grounds; passersby could singe the ears of both nuns and pensionnaires with their loud shouts and crude language; trespassers could, with a little will and agility, break in to do damage, steal, or just play tricks. Even the town worthies were not above the occasional peek into the cloister. Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, confided to his journal that he had climbed a ladder in order to peer over the wall at a funeral taking place in the grounds of the local monastery.12 He gave no indication that this was unusual or reprehensible behaviour. A historian of medieval nuns has suggested that whatever the Church’s intention, convent walls served the communities within them “as permeable membranes rather than watertight seals.”13 How much more was this true of the city-based convents of the Old Regime! Yet there seems to be no doubt that the religious women of these convents took their clausura seriously, for several reasons. For one thing, they themselves and the families from which they came equated clausura with respectability. From the very beginning of the reform movement in the early seventeenth century, dévot society had made it plain that religious life without enclosure was déclassé. It was only after the congregations submitted to enclosure that they started their major expansion. “It was then that persons of condition engaged themselves, who would not have entered a simple congregation.”14 Underlying the discourse about social status was a subliminal message, a lingering echo of Periculoso. Cloistered women were safe women; as long as they stayed within their walls, no one could impugn their virtue. “A prodigious number of virgins find [there] a protection for their innocence; far from the world and its dangers, they can safeguard their salvation.”15 This was a sadly vapid view of female religious life, but it was the justification that the leaders of society, both ecclesiastical and secular, gave for the cloistering of women throughout the Old Regime.

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Secondly, the nuns had every reason to fear the wagging tongues of their neighbours. The wider public, for all that it disliked clausura, was paradoxically its greatest enforcer because of the scandalous delight it took in hearing and spreading news of untoward behaviour in the convent. Stories of wayward nuns had been told as early as the Middle Ages, if not before; it has been suggested that they may have been a form of wish fulfillment on the part of the tellers.16 The delectation persisted into modern times. “Désir de fille est un feu qui dévore / Désir de nonne est cent fois pis encore,”17 went the ditty. The Enlightenment which, as Olwen Hufton has said, “immersed woman in nature and made her the creature of her reproductive organs”18 was able to state the same notion in more learned language: “The passions concentrated in the silence and obscurity of the cloister have a vehemence and force which the openness and delicacy of a dissipated world cannot attain … One can compare spirits of this kind to volcanoes.”19 In the face of such stereotypes, respectable communities could only react by making their silence deeper and their obscurity more impenetrable – by trying to ensure that their nuns never appeared at the windows, traded conversations at the gate with outsiders, received unauthorized letters, confided too much to their relatives in the parlour, or lifted their veils in front of strangers. Communities that were found lacking were likely to pay a heavy price. Failure to achieve and maintain enclosure was sufficient cause to close a monastery down.20 The official guarantors of clausura were the bishops and their delegates. If a community’s vigilance slackened – if it put an extra gate in the wall or allowed windows to be installed with a view of the street – the next canonical visitation could become an event to be dreaded. Bishops, according to one historian, were permanently obsessed with the question of clausura, and their directives prove it. “The words ‘walls, doors, windows, grilles, locks, keys’ multiply and pile up, and criss-cross every page.”21 No other matter occupied as much space in their ordinances for female houses. But in fairness, we can see why. They were working for two masters: the Council of Trent, which made them responsible under pain of excommunication for the enclosure of monastic women; and the court of public opinion, which even the aristocratic bishops of the Old Regime were loath to scandalize. Their first concern was the physical restraints – the height of the walls, the shuttering of the outside windows, the doubling of the locks on all entrances, and the refinement of the grilles that separated the nuns from their visitors in the parlours: “The wall that separates the convent from the college is too low and pierced by two or three openings” … “As soon as possible, iron bars must be put on the windows of the choir, the sacristy, the common room and the vestibule, also on the

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windows of the parlours, so that enclosure is guaranteed … In all the parlours, there is to be a second grille on the inner side; it can be made of simple wood until it can be replaced with iron” … “The sacristy window opening onto the street is to be blocked up … The windows of the pensionnaires’ refectory are to be walled up, if possible, or at least closed by iron bars and wooden shutters” … “The outside grilles of the main parlour are only of wood, and the inside ones simple vertical iron bars widely separated from each other, one can easily pass one’s hand through this double grille.”22 The list goes on; there is hardly a record of a pastoral visit that does not mention some aperture needing to be blocked up. These strictures were all directed at “active” clausura: the possibility that nuns might leave the precincts or communicate illicitly with outsiders. The bishops also concerned themselves with “passive” clausura: what strangers might be admitted into the cloister and in what circumstances. Where men were concerned, the list was short: priests to attend the dying, doctors and surgeons, builders and repairmen, gardeners and bakers (sometimes), and – very occasionally – “a man to butcher the pig” or perform some other such duty.23 Wherever the men went, they were to be accompanied by senior nuns.24 As for women, their entry into the cloister was contingent on the bishop’s permission, and in the early years it was not easily given. Even older girls were eyed with some suspicion, as the potential purveyors of worldly news and bad attitudes. They were normally expected to be either gone or in the novitiate by the time they were sixteen or eighteen. Two points should be made. First, the bishops themselves became increasingly generous in granting permission both for the departure of nuns from the monastery for reasons of health or incompatibility, and for the reception into the pensionnat of older women. Second, the fact that the same directives were repeated time and again through much of two centuries suggests that the rules were not always scrupulously observed. If all the exterior windows had been blocked up, there would have been no need to keep warning the nuns “to avoid looking out of the windows onto the street, which is a symptom of dissipated spirits who are beginning to tire of their estate.”25 If the entrances had been properly locked, there should have been no complaints about pensionnaires “loitering at the door, without supervision.”26 The impression given by the records is that nuns allowed creeping modifications to their strict clausura, enough to attract occasional censure but not enough to damage the essential integrity of the cloister. There is negative evidence to support this impression. Even during the Jansenist crisis of the eighteenth century, when many bishops were bent on disciplining rebellious communities, they did

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not allege that clausura was being violated. Most female monasteries kept their record clean enough to escape the order of suppression that the Commission des secours, cooperating with the bishops, would gladly have handed them.27 Thus there were good institutional reasons to explain why, until the very end of the Old Regime, some five out of every six religious women were enclosed.28 The cloister was a defence against ill repute and a haven of respectability for unmarried daughters of “good” family – but only if it remained a true cloister. The women within had to be safe in the one respect that really mattered: their chastity. “When a religious wants to do wrong, the grille is locked,” remarked Vincent de Paul.29 Was there anything else to be achieved behind that locked grille? In the public perception, it seems that the answer was no. Once enclosure was secured, the life within it was assumed to be largely meaningless, even destructive. Colbert is reputed to have said that monasteries “only produce useless people in this world and, often enough, devils in the next.”30 From the days of Colbert to those of Diderot, the notion of victimization went from strength to strength.31 The talk on the streets can be summed up by an opinion voiced in 1720, by a man of irreprochable dévot antecedents, on the occasion of a young nun’s death: “This is an early end to her sacrifice. In my mind it is the happiest thing that could happen to a religious.”32 But this assessment of clausura as a negative value was countered by the highly positive case made of it in the writings of the nuns themselves. Whether by choice or necessity, the cloister was the place where these women were going to spend their lives, and it was up to them to decide whether they would do so as prisoners or as true lovers of Jesus Christ. The result was a spirituality built against the backdrop of their enclosure – “our beloved solitude,” as Marie Guyart, and many others after her, called it. The sense of sacrifice was overlaid with a sense of election. The first Ursulines of Quebec were urged to regard the cloister as “a fortress in which are housed the principal riches and treasures of the blood of Jesus Christ.”33 Half a century later the Ursuline Jeanne de Bourges described it as “the Lord’s vineyard where hedges and fences must be raised to protect the fruit, and to make it a garden of pleasure for the heavenly Bridegroom.”34 In 1790, when the National Assembly abolished all solemn vows, a great chorus of protests broke out among nuns across the country, the following being from the Ursulines of Le Mans: Someone has dared to paint a picture for you of the cloister as a place of horror and slavery, with the religious as so many victims in chains, who long for a happy revolution to come and break their bonds and rescue them from their servitude … We have God alone for our portion, we have taken Him by choice,

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and our only ambition is to be as faithful as possible in fulfilling the purposes of our institut.35

Loving testimonials such as these do not prove, by themselves, that every nun was at every time contented with her cloister. But they certainly affirm that there were some, and possibly many, who were. A historian of religious communities has listed the possible reasons for their contentment: stability, the support of a spiritual “family,” security, social prestige.36 In the writings of another historian we learn of a further powerful motivation: pride, “an aristocratic and proud morality which pushes the spirit of sacrifice to its extreme.”37 Cloistered nuns were invited to take pride in belonging to an elite company. It is impossible to know how many did so. But there is evidence that clausura was a way of life that had its attractions, even when the walls had fallen away. The small colony of Ursulines who made their way across the Atlantic towards Louisiana in 1727 did their best to maintain clausura, shuttling between the deck and their single cabin with its six bunks to a side, where the porthole was permanently closed in spite of the stifling heat. They had most certainly “paid their tribute to the sea,” and a landfall in Madeira must have been welcome to them. But when the ship docked and their Jesuit directors gave them permission to go ashore, they proudly stayed aboard within the limits of their temporary enclosure. A small sacrifice, perhaps, but a completely voluntary one.38 The “beloved solitude” was more than just a matter of walls and grilles.

the community offices Every monastic rule started out with the premise that community order depended on a strict internal hierarchy, culminating at the summit in a single person. Whether an abbot or abbess, a prior or father guardian, this person was entrusted with large powers of discretion for which he/she would be answerable in the world to come. “Let him know,” ran the Rule of Saint Benedict, “that he who has undertaken the government of souls must prepare himself to render an account of them [on the Day of Judgment].”39 It was very much the same charge as that laid on every absolute ruler. As originally framed, it did not carry with it an obligation to make an accounting here on earth, any more than that of the king did. The Superior The superior of a women’s monastery inherited the same solemn mandate. However, in the “new” women’s monasteries, while the superior’s

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responsibilities were numerous, her power was anything but absolute. She was hedged around with a number of safeguards to keep her from exceeding her powers. After all, she was a woman: “Let her never forget the quality of her sex and the sex of those whom she has in charge; which, it should be recognized according to the judgment of the wisest persons, is as weak and inherently incapable of governing either others or itself as it is difficult and dangerous to be governed.”40 For this reason, she was subject to the bishop (the community’s ultimate superior) and to the priest whom the bishop named as director.41 She was also bound by a special oath to the most stringent observance of the Rule and constitutions. How close was the community’s subjection to the bishop? He came from time to time, in the course of a regular pastoral visit or when some crisis arose. A more regular supervision was provided in his name by the director. This priest’s function was largely one of support and spiritual guidance, though (it was to be hoped) always within the boundaries of the Rule. His regular responsibilities included overseeing the community’s choice of confessors and, with the bishop’s authorization, presiding at the election of the superior. If any major expenditure was being considered, he had to be consulted. He also exercised the right of intervention: he could, in extraordinary circumstances, overrule the superior. But his influence on the day-to-day running of the monastery should not be exaggerated. In fact, the director sometimes lived in another town and, on the evidence of the monastic annales, could be difficult to get hold of when he was needed. Of course, when troubles arose, as for instance during the Jansenist crisis, he could become an active agent of the bishop’s power. But for many communities and for much of the time, he was a distant figure whose interventions were little more than formalities.42 As an Ursuline historian tells us, “It was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed.”43 The superior was responsible for the community’s material wellbeing and smooth running. She maintained relations with the outside world, with clergy, patrons, friends, and business acquaintances. If there was a question of going to court, it was she who decided it. If plans were to be made for building or renovation, it was she who initiated them. Together with the bursar, she managed the monastery’s financial affairs. She was also the ultimate manager of operations; immediately after her election she was expected to shuffle the community, so to speak, assigning the sisters to new posts or keeping them where they were. She was expected at the beginning of her mandate to visit the schools regularly until she was well acquainted with them, and thereafter to confer frequently with the mistresses in charge. Every decision of consequence within the community had to have her approval.

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And at the end of every day, with her keys in hand, she was expected to visit the monastery gates to ensure, in person, the perfect maintenance of clausura for another night.44 A good superior was more than an administrator. She was also required to be a spiritual guide, to preside over the weekly chapter for the correction of faults, known as the Coulpes, and to give regular spiritual conferences to the community. She was expected to meet with the nuns individually, “to know their interior, and to have them report to her on the state of their prayer life and their temptations.”45 And of course she had to maintain the deepest discretion, “[her] heart being like a faithful deposit of the secrets communicated to her.”46 She was to show no favouritism. Obviously, the trust and respect of the sisters were of great consequence to a superior: “Her government as Mother should be gentler than a father’s, inasmuch as this can be despotic and seigneurial, and similar to those who command as masters or kings of nations.”47 As part of her mothering role, she was to set an example of humility. The Rule ordered her to take her turn in the lowlier tasks of the monastery. Jeanne de Lestonnac, foundress of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame and superior of the Bordeaux monastery, worked regularly in the kitchen and, while she was there, took orders from the cook, who was a lay sister.48 Of all the superior’s responsibilities, the maintenance of good order and smooth relations among the sisters must have been one of the most challenging. “She must never permit any partiality or unusual familiarity of affection among the religious, in order that selfish love given to creatures does not chase away the pure love of God.”49 The danger that she had to guard against was not only that of “disorderly affections” but also that of cliquishness. Divided communities could be hellish places, the sisters “like harpies one side against the other.”50 On the other hand, harmonious communities were places to be proud of.51 Division or harmony, prosperity or poverty – much depended on the superiors. Some of them succeeded triumphantly: “She seemed born to govern” … “It required a genius like hers to tide us over the bad times when the billets de banque were in circulation” … “She displayed to perfection the qualities needed to be a superior … She understood business; [she had] prudence and firmness, and a great vigilance both to maintain good order and procure the temporal and spiritual good of the community” … “Firm and watchful in maintaining the Rule and the discipline of the house, sustaining and animating by her example, prudent and wise in delicate situations, ordering everything with sensitivity and gentleness; caring and compassionate for the infirm, providing for everyone’s needs with true motherly tenderness … never

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thinking of her own needs, so attentive was she to those of others.”52 A really good superior was more precious than rubies to the community she ruled. And, it must be pointed out, just as rare. Of the twenty, or thirty, or forty nuns eligible at any given time, the chances of having one such person were slim; of having even two or three, remote. The nuns knew by experience what made a good superior. “The more the person in command was esteemed, the easier it was to obey,” remarked one eulogist.53 One of the preconditions for esteem was seniority. According to the rules, the superior had to be of a certain age – usually thirty – and with five years of profession. In the early years of communities, some superiors were young, very young,54 but that was because the communities themselves were young and so had little choice. As they matured, they came to expect their superiors to be middle-aged, if not elderly. Geneviève de Razes’s election at the early age of forty was, her eulogist remarked, almost unprecedented in the community.55 It should not come as a surprise that the superior was often one of the more aristocratic members of the community. One of the qualities that made for esteem was noble birth. As long as noblewomen continued to enter the teaching monasteries, they took the lion’s share of the superiorats.56 The tone they gave to the community and the respect and influence they commanded in the world outside, combined with what were considered their inborn qualities of leadership, made them natural candidates for the position. As has already been said, Old Regime monasticism was transfused with aristocratic values. Self-sacrifice and generosity in the service of the Lord were seen as essentially aristocratic qualities, as natural to the breed as self-sacrifice and generosity were in the service of the Crown. Thus, the Ursulines of Blois could say of Marguerite d’Illiers: “Though her brothers and nephews died on the field of honour in the service of the king, her death is more precious, since she became sick in the exercises of our holy institut.”57 Similarly, the historian of Notre-Dame in Poitiers could commemorate the achievements of the late superior, Thérèse de Brilhac, by saying that she “reaffirmed, by her piety and her other excellent virtues, the glory of her family who have done so much honour to Justice in the Parlement of Paris and in the Presidial of Poitiers and to the service of arms in defence of the château against the leader of the heretic rebels, Admiral de Coligny.”58 The achievements of some superiors should not obscure the failures of others. Many houses languished under the rule of inadequate superiors, such as the woman who asked to be relieved of her duties, pleading that she “did not have the strength or courage” to sustain the trials of her little community.59 From time to time, superiors were

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sent packing to other houses. In Châteauroux in 1770, a complaint from the community about the superior’s nepotism and extravagance led to her banishment.60 In La Ferté-Bernard in 1766, when the superior had some sort of a breakdown and physically attacked a novice, other members of the community swiftly notified the authorities, and she was removed.61 Sometimes the shoe was on the other foot; there were communities that seem to have made a habit of being critical of their superiors – Châtellerault being a case in point. “In choosing them to govern us we do not render them impeccable,” wrote the annalist tolerantly,62 but it does not seem that her sisters paid her much heed. They had been tearing their superiors apart for decades. Perhaps the joy which some women expressed when leaving the office, and the tears which others shed when elected, were more genuine than is sometimes suspected. The right given it by the Council of Trent to elect its own superiors was treasured by the community and, as has been seen, interference in the process by bishops or directors often met with resistance.63 The procedures for elections were laid out with care. “It is very important that the superiors be legitimately elected,” warned one Rule. “The well-being of the monastery consists in the exact observance of these regulations and constitutions.”64 For a month before an election, members were ordered to stop discussing the subject in order to avoid divisiveness. They were not to campaign: “They are forbidden, under pain of losing their … voice [in the Chapter] for three years, to intrigue or cabal, either for themselves or for others.”65 On the day itself, under the eye of the bishop or his deputy, the process began with the election of scrutineers, who distributed the ballots (one for each vocale) and, in the presence of the Chapter, displayed the empty ballot box before locking it. The votes were cast, then counted, in the presence of everyone involved. If necessary, second and third ballots could take place, until one candidate emerged with a plurality of votes. The new superior was then acclaimed and the keys to the monastery delivered to her as a symbol of the authority now vested in her. The ballot papers were immediately burnt to ensure that secrecy was preserved.66 The superior’s term lasted for three, four, or six years, depending on the congregation. Sometimes she could be re-elected, sometimes not. But whatever the particular Rule stipulated, there was going to be an end to her term, at which time she was expected to revert to the ranks. Often she served as assistant for a while and then was re-elected to office – a sort of turning of the Rule, according to one historian, which allowed two women congenial to each other to retain control indefinitely.67 But if the community decided otherwise, both superior and assistant had to be content with a single term.

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The final task of election day was the choice of the new superior’s discrètes.68 This small council of senior nuns acted in both an advisory and executive capacity. They were charged to meet regularly with the superior to discuss the management of the community: the financial policy, the sale or purchase of property, the dispatch of sisters to other foundations, the admission of mature pensionnaires, and, of course, the reception of postulants. They were also consulted over matters concerning the spiritual welfare of the community. Thus, a sort of control was put in place over the superior’s actions: “The prioress is not to resolve any affair without the advice of her assistants.”69 She was to take this advice “readily and with good nature and cheerfulness.”70 However, it was always made clear that she had the final say.71 If the superior was expected to consult the discrètes on matters of importance to the community, she and they together were also expected to report to the Chapter at least once or twice a year. The Chapter was made up of the vocales, choir nuns with a certain seniority. Their “voice,” or right to vote, was precious to them and, in principle, could be denied only in cases of serious fault.72 During the Jansenist crisis, women who were stripped of their vote because of suspected heterodoxy made frequent attempts to appeal to Parlement against their bishops’ ruling. The authorities may not always have taken their rights seriously, but they themselves did. As Madame Jégou has remarked, the democratic character of Chapter meetings should not be exaggerated. “Although the nuns, through the intermediary of the Chapter, could prevent abuses, they seldom took the initative.” The superior proposed, and the Chapter disposed, almost always concurring with her opinions.73 However, the Chapter’s function of control was an important one, which the superior disregarded at her peril. Strictly speaking, it was the Chapter that authorized the superior and her council “to act and negotiate all the temporal affairs of the monastery in the name of the community.”74 A contemporary memoir advised that “for a financial transaction by the superior to be valid, she must have authority from the community in the form of a capitular act.”75 Communities could even challenge transactions that were made without their knowledge. Thus the Chapter of the Ursuline monastery in Loches won the right to reoccupy a house which the superior and council had sold without the Chapter’s approval.76 The Chapter of Notre-Dame of Poitiers was less successful: its attempt to disavow a dowry of billets de banque accepted by the superior without its authorization came to naught.77 But given the privacy with which nuns preferred to surround their dealings, an open rebuke of this kind amounted to a serious disgrace. When it was discovered in 1708 that the superior of the Ursulines of Rouen had kept the Chapter

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in the dark while the agent made free with their finances, she was discreetly allowed to retire to another monastery to end her days.78 The niceties were observed, but everyone knew that it was a hardship to die in any house but one’s own. A final check on the doings of the executive branch of the house was exercised by the canonical visitor – a priest, secular, or regular, who came from outside to evaluate the regularity of the monastery. He was authorized to speak to every professed member of the community, including the lay sisters, and to recommend improvements. His effectiveness, however, was dependent on the cooperation of the community. “Those whom God gives the confidence to open their hearts to the grand vicar or to the director must not be censured,” wrote one visitor.79 We can guess the reason for his frustration. Communities sometimes had a way of keeping things to themselves and persuading their members not to confide in the men who came to correct them. We have corroboration of this from the other side: from the annalist of the convent of Notre-Dame in Châtellerault. She reported on a long-standing internal quarrel, made worse when the bishop sent in a visitor – from another town, no less! – to interview the community. The annalist expressed surprise that the sisters would have spoken about one another to a “stranger.”80 A sort of omerta could be practised by religious communities, shielding their internal affairs from the eyes of others; this explains why serious problems sometimes persisted without the authorities’ knowledge. However, the community itself, as long as it was well run, was its own most potent enforcer. The assistant, or subprioress, had the power to advise and reproach the superior and, indeed, to go over her head to the director if the matter was serious enough.81 And watching in the wings there were other nuns, well versed in the Rule and determined to prevent the least infraction. We see their outlines in the death notices: “Our dear sister was a pillar of the community, a friend of all the observances, of good order and exactitude … One could be sure that everything she said was free of dissimulation” … “She always had an ardent zeal for the regularity of the monastery” … “Her mind was made up in support of regularity” … “She had a great veneration for all the ancient customs, and was the enemy of all novelty and singularity.”82 All in all, the superior did not suffer from lack of scrutiny, and it is difficult to see how she could have gone far astray if the community was not willing to go with her. It can be argued, then, that women’s monasteries had their own form of constitutional government – not representative government, to be sure, but government according to known statutes, carried out by a single elected head in consultation with a chosen or elected council

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and a larger body made up of senior members, all subject to the ultimate control of the ordinary, and all, in a subtle way, answerable to the women whom they governed. The framers of the rules had done everything in their power to ensure stability and fairness. If communities ran into difficulties, it was not for lack of a blueprint. The Community Officers The council of discrètes normally included the other executive officers of the house: the assistant, the zélatrice, and the dépositaire or bursar. The assistant was often either an ex-superior or a superior-in-waiting. Her first role was to stand in for the superior when extraordinary circumstances arose. Under normal conditions she was the superior’s chief adviser and confidante, and her right arm in the management of the community. It was her duty to work closely with the sisters, listening to their complaints and correcting their shortcomings. She was also expected to carry their concerns to the superior and, if necessary, to warn her of problems. While the superior dealt with the larger issues, the assistant concentrated on smaller administrative details. “Nothing escaped her, she was always attentive to all our needs,” wrote one eulogist.83 She also had the practical management of the house. “She made every effort to keep the house in a charming state of neatness,” wrote another.84 The zélatrice was a specialist in the Rule, and her business was to guard against infractions, even by the superior. She seems a more shadowy figure in the literature, and it may be assumed that her function was often absorbed into that of the assistant. This would certainly be the case as the monastic populations diminished and the nuns were forced to combine their roles. On the other hand, the bursar became more and more visible among monastic officers and, as the economic environment turned unfavourable, more and more essential to the survival of the community. Her office, according to one death notice, was “one of the most arduous in the religious life.”85 She was charged with keeping the accounts, inventories, and registers, paying the bills, collecting debts and pensions, and, together with the superior, planning the budget and anticipating extraordinary expenses. The Rule attempted to instruct her. It advised her on how to manage the payment of dowries (securing the cash as soon as possible) and how to deal with outside agents (“She will not pay the procureur entirely until the business is completed and he has given her all the pieces”).86 But no amount of instruction could substitute for native ability. Like a good superior, a good bursar was a precious commodity, as we can see from the encomiums of the death

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notices: “She did not find any business dealing difficult; outsiders were amazed at the way in which she explained them; she was firm in exacting payments from our debtors” … “She was skilled in business affairs … In different consultations with the ablest of lawyers, the solidity of her judgment was admired” … “Chosen to be our bursar at a time when our affairs were extremely complicated, she straightened them out with a skill that surpassed the ordinary capability of our sex. It is to her rare prudence and excellent management that this house is indebted for the good state in which we see it today.”87 As if this was not enough, the bursar was also responsible for the physical functioning of the house. If workers came into the enclosure, she had to direct, supervise, and pay them. At the same time, she oversaw the lesser officers: the cellarer, the refectorian, the cook, the nuns in charge of the linen room, the gardener, and so on. Hers was a formidable workload. It is little wonder that many women who held the office were seen to have compromised their health as a result.88 All the monastery’s business dealings with the outside world went through the bursar’s office. The layout of this office was minutely described: “A room with stone vaults, to avoid the accident of fire … Around the room, wooden triangles, on which there will be iron hooks to hang labelled bundles of different sorts of papers [such as] permanent contracts, land rents, acquisitions of land and houses, judgments passed for rentes … land registrations … dowry contracts, contracts of constitution, farm leases … receipts for payments, sentences and orders, etc.” The bursar was also to have a chest with a triple lock in which to keep important papers, and four ledgers.89 As in so many other instances, the framers of the rules did everything they could to create a smooth-running community. But in the final analysis, they could not guarantee the entry of women with the talents necessary for success. Without the power to move their members from house to house as need arose, the women’s monasteries suffered the handicaps imposed by their isolation. Other Positions Beneath the superior and the discrètes there was a host of lesser functionaries, too numerous to detail here. The community was subdivided into a network of obediences under the final obedience owed to the superior. In the infirmary, the infirmarian ruled; in the novitiate, the novice mistress; in the day school, the prefect; and so on. If other nuns were sent to assist in these jurisdictions, they came under the obedience of the person in charge. This made good sense: a monastery was a crowded environment, in which multiple activities were always taking

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place. With clear lines drawn around each task, and a clear delegation of authority within those lines, there was less likelihood of conflict. The Rule made it incumbent on the superior to maintain these lines, “[so] that all the officers are obeyed and respected in their charges and do not interfere with each other.”90 The more important officers were the mistress of novices, the mistress general of the pensionnat, the prefect of the externat, the portress, and the sacristan. The first three will be mentioned elsewhere, so they need not detain us here. The portress, whose role was seemingly undemanding, in fact shouldered one of the gravest responsibilities in the community. Nowhere is the awesomeness of clausura better illustrated than in the concern that surrounded her office. For the portress controlled access into the monastery. It was at her command that the gate was opened and the persons waiting there were ushered in or turned away. She needed considerable powers of discretion, “to summon those who were wanted in the parlours, to warn the superior, and to distinguish what was necessary and proper from what was not.”91 Once incomers were admitted it was up to her, heavily veiled and in silence, to lead the way to their destination, all the time ringing a small bell to warn the sisters to remove themselves from sight. At nightfall, together with the superior or the assistant, she took part in the double locking of the gate and the various doors of the monastery.92 According to the Rule, the portress was to be one of the older members of the community. The reason is obvious: an open door and the sight of the world outside might tempt a younger or flightier woman to step across the threshold and thus incur automatic excommunication. But there was a drawback to all this age and discretion. The portress was deliberately intended to be the sentry at what Madame Jégou has called “a cold and rigid barrier.”93 The image she presented to outsiders must have been that of a wardress, ancient and stony-faced, guarding the entrances to the prison where the young-blooded were kept incarcerated. We may speculate that such an image helped to feed the public’s prejudice against monasteries. The sacristan’s was a highly honoured position. It was she, of all the community, who had “the honour of approaching the Divine Majesty most closely and most often.”94 She was responsible for the care and decoration of the altar, the maintenance of the sacred vessels and vestments, and the correct disposition of the church for the various feast and fast days in the liturgical calendar. It should be remembered that the convent church was a public place, where the community had the opportunity to serve (and impress) its friends and supporters. An atmosphere of beauty and cleanliness was important not only to the

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nuns in their choir but to the people who sat in the nave. All this fell to the sacristan – though, it must be noted, she did not herself set foot in the main church; she cleaned and cared for it vicariously, with the help of a paid male sacristan.95 The sacristan had a further responsibility: she held the key to the grille that separated the church from the monastery. Although she was meant never to use it for any purpose save those connected with her duties, it was nonetheless a weak spot in clausura, which could only be safeguarded by the appointment of a totally reliable woman to the position. In most community lists where seniority and importance were designated by position, the sacristan appeared close to the top. For the allotted time during which they exercised their charges, women were able to feel that they “owned” them. We see this in the fact that they often expended money and effort in improving them. Henriette de Boisseleau, while she was infirmarian, renovated the infirmary; when she was assigned to the pensionnat, she renovated that – both at her own expense.96 Magdelaine Morel, while she was sacristan, gilded the candlesticks and painted the choir.97 Barbe Guyot, a senior lay sister, maintained and decorated a small shrine in the kitchen.98 Monasteries benefited greatly from small projects such as these, by which individual sisters made their own imprint on the community. Of the lesser functions of the monastery, little will be said here, except that the attention paid to them in the rules was painstaking and exact. Every task was given a transcendant significance. Thus the refectorian, as she cut the bread and measured out the wine and water, was reminded that while she performed this office, she was “standing in the presence of Our Lord and should think of one of the mysteries of His life on earth, like the meal that He took with His apostles.”99 The sister in charge of the laundry should think with “amorous regret” of the sad state to which the baptismal garments of innocence had been reduced by sin, and she should rejoice in the Lord who was prepared to wash them clean in His blood.100 The dressmaker, while she sewed new habits for the sisters or mended old, could be assured that “the divine Bridegroom … [was] in turn preparing for her a garment of glory of a very special weave, as a recompense for the services which she performs for those whom He loves tenderly.”101 The value of humble duty was promoted in the death notices. Over and over again, women were celebrated for their performance of these duties. “For a long time she had the care of regulating our clock, which she acquitted with such punctuality and exactitude that it would be difficult to find anyone who could do it better” … “She sounded the wake-up bell for almost twenty years” … “Her sewing was so well done that it sold better than that of the rest” … “We have never tasted

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bread so well made.”102 The genius of the rules lay in the way they made every service important. “Nothing is small in the service of the house of God.”103 This principle was capable of transforming the daily life of women’s convents and making a holy vocation out of the dullest routine. “Since the perfection of a religious soul consists principally in the faithful execution of the will of God, marked out for her by her Rules, it is above all necessary that she apply herself carefully to the performance of her daily actions.”104 As long as the women sincerely subscribed to this principle, the community held together and ran well. That was what was meant by “regularity.” It would seem that the preservation of enclosure and of good relations within that enclosure was something that, though it had to be worked for, was not out of reach. Madame Jégou insists that within “the rigid, cold barrier” of the walls, community life could be warm and familial.105 It could also be painful and unhappy. Given the large number of convents across the country and the broad variation in their circumstances, there must have been both happiness and unhappiness within them, as well as every shade of contentment or lack of it. But the rules did at least provide a grounding of stability for those who observed them.

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8 The Three Pillars of Monasticism: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

poverty The Old Regime knew poverty well. Never a day went by that it did not see beggars at its gates. In times of dearth and epidemic disease, poverty could swiftly swell into death, with corpses lying in the streets, in the corners of barns, or in hedgerows along country roads. Even in ordinary times, the poor struggled to make ends meet and all too often ended up in paupers’ graves. This was not the kind of poverty to which religious women vowed themselves. Indeed, the Church had long since laid down that female communities (apart from mendicant sisters, whose right to beg had been granted to them with great reluctance) were not to be poor.1 The new religious orders of the seventeenth century wrote this obligation into their rules. Communities were not to be established until they were assured of sufficient revenues to maintain themselves. Secular society underscored this with great emphasis: new convents were allowed into cities only on condition that they would not beg or otherwise become a charge on local citizens. They were expected to have at their disposal property and a solid bank of rentes. Although many of them broke the terms of the agreement and started up with little or nothing, most communities soon achieved financial sufficiency. Then they bought as much land as they could afford, and on it they built solid, spacious houses, many of which survive to this day. But their rules warned them against extravagance:

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“The buildings must be commodious, with nothing ostentatious or superfluous” … “Care must be taken that they do not resemble châteaux and palaces, castles, and the pavilions of worldly lords and ladies, rather than convents.”2 If the nuns did give way to temptation, it was in the construction and decoration of their churches. Elsewhere their architecture was appropriately subdued. But when the occasion allowed, they did panel their refectories, put flagstones down on their walks, and plant extensive gardens complete with handsome shrines. Some of the larger monasteries ended up as very fine places indeed.3 Within these premises, the rules dictated that the nuns should live decently, though without excess: “Each religious … shall have three dishes at each meal, morning and evening: to wit, a soup or an entrée, a portion of meat, and a dessert.”4 The quality of their food was to be good.5 They were expected to be well groomed, cutting their hair regularly and “taking care to wash their hands, mouths and teeth” and – “once or twice a year, during the summer heat” – their legs.6 Their linen was changed weekly, their bedsheets monthly;7 their robes were renewed once a year. The Rule forbade heat in sleeping quarters,8 but there were to be fireplaces in the common rooms, and stoves outside the schoolrooms so that mistresses coming out of class could warm themselves. When the sisters were sick, they were to be given care in specially equipped infirmaries. This comfortable sufficiency did not fail to arouse snide comment among outsiders.9 However, the nuns were observing their own version of poverty, “a total shedding of all temporal and exterior goods and an incapacity to possess and dispose of anything personally, whatever it may be.”10 For them, poverty meant not physical neediness but a personal surrender of all rights of ownership: “The sisters will have no private possessions and will own nothing on the face of the earth, so that none of them can so much as say, ‘This pin is mine›11 … “The revenues and goods of the monastery will be distributed to each according to her need but without superfluity … [Each sister] will consider what she has as being only lent to her.”12 Among the sisters there was to be no talk of “mine” or “thine”; everything was to be “ours.”13 Their cells were to be open to the inspection of the superior, and they were to have no locked boxes. To further their spirit of detachment, the Rule in some communities recommended that once a year they should exchange their personal effects, such as rosaries, prayer books, and even beds and cells.14 Anything they received from family and friends or earned by their own industry was to be surrendered to the superior. Failure to do this was considered to be more or less serious, depending on the value of the goods. If the value was over twenty sols,

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the perpetrator was deemed to be in mortal sin; and if after her death she was found to have been concealing possessions in her cell, she was to be deprived of ecclesiastical burial.15 According to one Rule, this spirit of poverty was so essential to the religious life “that even our holy father the Pope cannot dispense from it.”16 However, it seems that in its primitive perfection it was beyond the grasp of most communities, and it soon began to disintegrate. In chance remarks and in official documents, signs appear that whatever name they gave to it, communities were allowing private ownership. In the 1660s, for instance, Barbe Buvée, after being forced out of the Ursuline convent of Auxonne, claimed to have left in her cell (besides her clothes and bedclothes) “a large wooden chest and a little cabinet, a writing case with a lock to use as a desk … a pair of silver candlesticks, a salt-cellar and goblet of silver, a chain, a cross and two gold rings,” as well as numerous books and private papers.17 Auxonne was at the time a house out of control, which might explain this accumulation of property; but similar problems could also be found in “regular” communities. In 1672 the official visitor to the Ursuline convent of Mâcon reported, “They are lacking in what seems to be essential to communities [that is, poverty]”; private pensions and private possessions, as well as the continued use of the nuns’ family names, were all being permitted.18 Through the succeeding years, Our Lady Poverty continued to beat a retreat. In 1713 Archbishop Hardouin of Sens forbade the sisters of the Congrégation in Provins to keep mirrors or clocks in their cells.19 A census in 1732 took note of two nuns in the Ursuline house in Carpentras who were being served by maids, whom they paid themselves.20 In 1737 the bishop of Rodez found that the Ursulines in the town of Villefranche were keeping money – and wine! – in their cells, and were treating the gifts received from their families and the money raised by their handwork as their own.21 These cases were not exceptional. Evangelical poverty was by this time an ideal which most people agreed was out of reach. At least that is the implication of a death notice written in Poitiers in the year 1698, which made a special case of a deceased nun who “excelled above all in the love of poverty, having in her cell only those things that are marked by the Rule.”22 There were several reasons why the vow of poverty was under stress. First, the surrender of all sense of ownership must, at any time, be extremely challenging. “This shedding of things, this divesting of all property, was perhaps the most difficult reformation the monastic undertook,” remarks a historian of medieval nuns,23 and it must have been equally difficult for the nuns of the Old Regime. Secondly, the

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sisters, many of them accomplished needlewomen, knew that the work of their hands had a value in the marketplace, so it seemed only fair that they and their families should share the profits. Furthermore, their commitment to poverty was constantly being undermined by indulgent relatives offering little douceurs. Parents wanted their daughters to be chaste but were not as anxious to see them poor. They were often ready to grant them an extra allowance, known as a petite pension, for their own use. To take one example out of many, when Marie-Anne de Villeneuve professed in 1762, her father stipulated that she should receive, from the rentes he made over to the monastery, 100 livres per year “to procure for her the little treats that are not ordinarily given out in convents.”24 This slippage from the ideals of the earliest days might have been averted if the practice of petites pensions had not been countenanced by ordinaries and communities alike. Certainly, they set conditions: the money must remain physically in the hands of the designated officers, and the disposition of it must receive the approval of the superior. Also, in many cases, as the death notices show, the nuns who received pensions dedicated them to improving the monastery. Nevertheless, the equality that lay at the heart of successful community life was diminished, and some nuns were “rich” while others were “poor.” Going by the references made to them in the death notices, it appears that these petites pensions came into use fairly soon after foundation.25 Since they were subject to diocesan jurisdiction, we may assume that different bishops authorized them at different times and in response to different needs. The rub was that once they were in place, they tended to remain. For example, they were introduced into the monastery of the Congrégation in Reims in 1653, when the community was in financial difficulties; they were still around in 1700, when they received the bishop’s ratification on condition that they be employed “according to our custom.” Thereafter they became part of the monastery’s economy. In the 1770s a community member was able to write: “I lack for nothing … I have a pension sufficient to leave me with nothing or almost nothing to be desired, and I have used it until now to procure whatever pleases me, but always with complete dependence [on the superior].”26 The critical difference between licit and illicit ownership lay in the fact of permission. The private enjoyment of goods was not considered a breach of the ancient rule of poverty as long as it remained under obedience. But however lawful, the selective privileging of some members threatened community morale; and this was recognized by the nuns. “It had consequences,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “which

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obliged us to make the prayer of the Wise, and ask God to give us neither riches nor poverty, but only what is necessary to live.”27 Once the practice was in place, however, it was hard to break. In 1656 a religious author had written: ‹Mine’ and ‘Thine’ are dangerous demons that enmesh the hearts of the religious in coils that can only be broken with violent effort.”28 But ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ never disappeared from the records of Old Regime monasticism; indeed, they seem to have grown stronger with time. Perhaps the basic reason is that in any age it is difficult to give up all possessions. But beyond that, the new female congregations of the Old Regime suffered a specific set of problems. The open wound through which their commitment to poverty threatened to bleed away was, paradoxically, the other kind of poverty, caused by reversals of fortune which left them in severe financial need. The monasteries were too often insufficiently endowed; their populations were out of proportion to their investments; and the Crown had too many ways of getting at their money. When trouble struck and their debts with grocers and butchers rose to impossible heights, the authorities had to let them find money where they could: from their families and friends or from their own labours. When families were called on for extra aid, they naturally enough insisted that whatever they gave should go to their relatives alone, and not into the bottomless hole of the community debt. “If these pensions and presents were put in common, the donors would refuse to continue giving them,” remarked a bishop during the crisis of the 1720s.29 But since some nuns did not have families to call on, the result could be inequitable in the extreme. “Ever since our temporal was thrown into disorder, there has been almost nothing held in common; private property leads to a sense of ownership, an open door to a multitude of faults,” wrote a superior in the aftermath of the Law Crash.30 “Some go hungry while others eat,” wrote the director of another house in the same difficult time.31 The rules were right in the first place: private property was the bane of community life. What poverty created, prosperity finally eradicated. By the end of the Old Regime, many communities had righted themselves and petites pensions had ceased to be a problem. In 1776 the community of SaintMarcellin honoured its deceased superior with the following eulogy: It is to her that we owe our renewal of regularity in the observance of the vow of poverty. Her grace, gentleness and engaging manners drew to her side all those with whom her predecessor had been unable to succeed … Amour-propre had formed obstacles that had appeared insurmountable … but now everything has been put in common.

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May the Lord by His grace make us more and more enthusiastic in our common work to sustain this point so essential to our Constitutions.32

However much the nuns of this community owed to their dynamic superior, they also owed a great deal to the rising income from their farms and rentes. No longer at their wits’ end to put food in their mouths, they were able to forgo the security of their private pensions. Thus, although the re-establishment of the common life, celebrated in Saint-Marcellin and other houses, was a major victory for the monastic spirit, it also stemmed from the return of prosperity. There was a great deal of truth to the old adage that “it was necessary to be rich to make a vow of poverty.”

chastity In 1647 Père Jérôme Lalemant, after studying the rules of the Ursuline congregations of Paris and Bordeaux, and consulting with the community on the spot, sat down to draw up constitutions for the Ursuline monastery of Québec. The resulting document was a harmonization of the two principal rules then being followed by Ursulines in France, informed and coloured by the circumstances of North America and by his own Jesuit spirituality.33 For all these reasons Père Lalemant’s Rule comes down to us as an excellent introduction to the science of religious community life as it was being transmitted during the middle of the seventeenth century. It had a didactic intention. The author clearly believed that those for whom the Rule was intended should be expected not only to obey it but to understand it in its deepest sense. In common with the other evangelical virtues, he explained, the vow of chastity depended for all its meaning and value on Him for whom it was undertaken – the “adorable and lovable Bridegroom”: “After this vow is taken the holy and sacred Spouse takes possession of religious persons in such a particular way that the offences against the sixth commandment of God, which in other people would only be simple sins, become in their case sacrileges, in virtue of what they are and the way in which they belong to Jesus Christ.”34 At the very least, the vow of chastity rendered the sisters incapable of marriage and obliged them to a scrupulous observation of the sixth commandment. But according to Lalemant, there was much more to chastity than this: “What is generally said of the religious woman, that by her vows she becomes an entire and perfect holocaust, cannot be true if the vow of chastity … does not also entail the sacrifice of all other

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bodily pleasures and goods, even those that are lawful and indifferent, and a placing of all … at the disposal of Jesus Christ her beloved Spouse.”35 Under this expanded definition of chastity, a whole set of behaviours became implicated: modesty in dress and bearing, a physical reserve to the point of never touching another person unnecessarily, control of one’s tongue, moderation in eating, avoidance of profane books “and the use of all other things that can give pleasure to the senses,” readiness to accept the austerities and mortifications prescribed in the Rule, and in general forbearance from “a certain tenderness … which women usually have toward themselves, and which leads to complaints, caused for the most part by unreasonable resentments over the lack of appreciation of their merit or the lack of care given to their person.”36 In other words, evangelical chastity called for an all-out assault on self-love, “this miserable life of ourself,” as Marie Guyart called it. The Rule that Père Lalemant constructed was faithful to the spirit of previous rules. In all these rules, the vow of chastity was treated in much the same circumspect way. For the Filles de Notre-Dame, chastity consisted of “setting a guard on the eyes, ears, and tongue,” preserving inner humility, behaving modestly in speech and movement “without showing any sign of impatience or pride,” respecting other sisters, and eating temperately – in sum, “imitating the purity of the Angels by the cleanliness of body and of soul.”37 The Ursulines of Bordeaux were admonished “to guard the gates of their senses, principally those of sight, hearing, and speech, against all disorder” and to avoid demonstrations of excessive familiarity.38 Those of Tours were warned never “to lift their eyes and their thoughts towards men” and never to show overt signs of affection to one another.39 “Particular friendships” were to be rigorously avoided – not only because they might lead to illicit relations but because human bonding, however innocent, was simply another way of cheating the divine Bridegroom. “Wishing to purify the inclination which I feel for someone,” wrote Catherine Chauvel of Blois, “each time I hear or see her, I desire it to be for me an occasion to return towards my Spouse … At the same time, I shall ask Him that, no matter how little natural love remains in me towards this person, He will be pleased to destroy it altogether.”40 This delicate approach to the problem of chastity was a major departure from that of past centuries. The chastity which Periculoso had been at such pains to protect had been, so to speak, hard-core chastity: the preservation of virginity and the avoidance of sexual pollution, which could be achieved by erecting barriers between women and men.41 It was as though the medieval Church was content to put

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its religious women into a donjon – a circle of strong walls closely enclosing their ultimate virtue, sexual continence. In the more complicated atmosphere of the seventeenth century a series of outworks – modesty, temperance, and self-denial – were thrown up at some considerable distance from the central donjon. The thinking seems to have been that if the Enemy was held at the outer gates, the centre would remain free from attack. This suggests a certain view of human nature that is at odds with the one we usually ascribe to seventeenth-century religious thought, according to which human nature soiled by original sin is essentially evil, corrupt, full of infection, and always on the verge of self-destruction. Without denying this theology, some educationists took the position that evil does not breed spontaneously within the baptized soul but creeps in through the senses. It infests an otherwise pure and clean spirit and, once it has done so, is difficult to dislodge. But if it can be excluded from the beginning by tightly controlled behaviour and temperate living, then the soul can thrive in all innocence. The secret lies in education and training. Pierre Fourier was saying this at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Antoine Arnauld at the middle, and François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon at the end: “For all that the nature of children has little good in it, they can be rendered docile, patient, firm, cheerful and peaceful.” It was only when left to themselves that “the still-tender body and the soul which as yet has no particular leaning in any direction will incline towards evil, and a kind of second original sin is created in them.”42 This essentially neutral quality of body and soul was known as “baptismal innocence,” and it was clearly associated with young girls (wellbrought-up young girls, at any rate) and therefore, by extension, with at least part of the religious population. Given the fact that in the seventeenth century most nuns began their religious lives in their midteens and may well have been in the pensionnat since early childhood, it was thought possible that with proper management they could be kept in innocence from the cradle to the grave. “A person who enters the cloister in blessed ignorance of the evil maxims and practices of the world, and who has kept her baptismal innocence, has almost nothing to destroy and has only to build, following the holy desires that lead her to God alone,” wrote a respected religious of the day.43 Numerous death notices agreed with her. A truly privileged person was one who “had the advantage of bearing an innocent soul, having left the world before knowing it.”44 This was the preferred path to holiness. Women who had to struggle with temptations against purity were seen more as people who had forfeited something than as the true heroines of the cloister.45

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Going back, then, to the rules, it seems that these were shaped more around the notion of baptismal innocence than around that of innate concupiscence. Their premise was that as long as the gates of the senses were guarded from the recurring temptations of daily life, serious problems of impurity could be avoided. They contained not the slightest suggestion that women were fundamentally sexual beings, with urges that might arise independently of outside stimuli. In this respect the rules, as the official guides to monastic management, offered no support for difficult cases involving chastity. On the occasions (fortunately rare) when communities truly ran amok, as in Loudun in the 1630s, Louviers in the 1640s, and Auxonne in the 1660s, they offered no psychological insight broad enough to deal with the problem. Women of good family, carefully raised and properly cloistered, were not believed capable of such outrageously erotic behaviour. The only conclusion could be that they were demonically possessed. None of this is to say that the burden of evangelical chastity, as constructed by the rules, was easy to bear. “Let no one think that she has satisfied the spirit of her vocation unless she is perfectly dead to all her senses,” wrote Père Lalemant.46 The implications of the vow were hugely expanded. Lust was one of the seven deadly sins; the suppression of it might be difficult to achieve, but it was feasible, and the day might come when, all passions spent, victory could be claimed. But the holocaust of the “detestable myself,” the destruction of selfsatisfaction in all its forms, was a different matter; it would require a lifetime, and even then there would be no victory. “The holiest of the saints suffer its attacks until their death,” wrote Marie Guyart, “and in this they are truly humbled.”47 This being said, it is obvious that for some nuns more than others, the struggle against the “detestable myself” was a sexual struggle. This becomes plain in a comment made by Catherine Ranquet, describing a duty that was to her a subject of humiliation: [that of] confronting souls that are afflicted with distressing and unmanageable temptations, principally of impurity, because God has never allowed me to be thus affected, so that even now I cannot comprehend what it is that is called pleasure in that respect. However, I greatly esteem these souls because they are given the chance to fight generously and win glorious victories; that is what I call virtue, and it is that, and not the peace in which I live, that is worthy of the honour and esteem of God.48

Catherine, who had entered the Lyon monastery at the age of twelve, had become a eunuch for the sake of the Kingdom; many of the women with whose guidance she was entrusted had not. The death notices, in

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their circumspect way, confirmed this unevenness of experience. On the one hand, they eulogized the many peaceful souls for whom religious life had been “a yoke both gentle and light,” whose souls had remained “tranquil and peaceful.”49 On the other, they paid their respects to those who had had “a temperament naturally hot and ebullient” and whom “the devils never ceased to attack”; those who had been “fiery in [their] desires”; and those with “temperaments of fire in which virtue finds more resistance and has more difficulty prevailing.”50 There is, as shall be seen, a close and suggestive connection between the women of “fiery temperament” and those who practised excessive mortification, the brutal disciplining of their own bodies. But the reading of the rules and the eulogies written after death keep us standing on the outside of things. The reticence with which the monastic literature treats the problem of chastity may be misleading.51 The cool and reserved conduct which the rules prescribe may indeed have covered the “volcanoes” of sexual desire which the public suspected. We can only argue that it is dangerous to paint with too broad a brush. It appears that the vow of chastity demanded greater sacrifice from some women than from others. In no case, however, was it a vow easily honoured as long as every concession to self – selfesteem, affection for other people, fondness for food, the enjoyment of warmth, and other comforting sensations – was regarded as impure. “Our nature,” wrote Catherine Ranquet, “is a chained dog which cannot harm us if we don’t touch him.”52 But the chaining of that dog was itself a lifelong business, which could lead some souls into terrible confusion.

obedience “Whom do we seek if not God? And where can we better find Him than in obedience?”53 Obedience had been the keystone of monastic life ever since the days of Saint Benedict. The rules of the seventeenth century demanded nothing that had not been demanded for a thousand years. What was new was the endorsement which this evangelical virtue now received from society beyond the monastery walls. The seventeenth century saw an increasing insistence on the need for civic order and obedience to authority. The training ground for this obedience was the family, in which, according to the royal declaration of 1639, “the natural reverence of children for their parents is the bond of legitimate obedience of subjects for their sovereigns.”54 The authority which the lawmakers of the Old Regime accorded to parents – mainly to fathers, but to mothers too – required, for enforcement, a strong culture of obedience.55 Children were expected to be submissive. And

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girls, of course, were expected to be the most submissive of all. By nurture if not by nature, young women entering the convent must already have been shaped according to the principle enunciated by Madame de Maintenon: “We [women] are destined to obey all our lives.”56 Evangelical obedience, however, was meant to take them to a different level, with “the perfect and entire sacrifice of the religious person by this final surrender of the most precious things remaining to her: her will and understanding and everything that depends on them.”57 Like the vow of chastity, there was no end to it for those who wished to be perfect. The more repugnant the order and the more inadequate or mistaken the person giving it, the more meritorious was the obedience. “It is then that there ought to appear the true submission and complaisance of a religious soul toward her sacred Spouse.”58 True obedience needed no support from understanding: “There is nothing that so obscures the lustre and beauty of this virtue of obedience as the wish to understand clearly what is being ordered.”59 In other words, there was no excuse for disobedience, whakever the circumstances; a truly virtuous nun had to practise perfect obedience. The eulogy of Françoise Fournier, an Ursuline of Angers whom many hoped to see canonized, said it all: “From the first day of her novitiate to the last breath of her life, she was always faithful to the practice of regular observances, and during the fifty years that she lived in the house, she was never seen to break the smallest rule.”60 The religious woman was under obedience to the superiors of her house, male and female, and to the bishop. They were for her the “living rule,” representing the hidden God. She also owed obedience to the written Rule, which was, so to speak, etched in stone, not only in its main outlines but in its finest details. “There is nothing small in religion.” This conviction, drummed into succeeding generations of novices, gave value to the closed-in lives that religious women were destined to lead. It also threatened to leave them inflexible in spirit and resistant to the least change. “One of the priorities of monastic consciences is to conserve the order and type of government in its established form,” wrote Cardinal de Fleury, adding that in this respect religious women were immovable.61 Looked at in one light, obedience was a regressive force, turning women into children. An ideal community was one that had “a rigorous punctuality in observance of the rules, a docility marked with simplicity and a childlike spirit.”62 Ideal nuns were those imbued with the same spirit – “submission towards superiors, not doing the least thing without permission.”63 The death notices sang their praise: “Those who had her for companion in obediences were sure that she would not so much as move a finger without their order” … “She was like soft

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wax in the hands of her superiors” … “She was like a child in the hands of her superiors.”64 Obedience was frequently associated with contentment: “She lived peacefully since her profession in the observance of the Rule.”65 Eulogies of this kind seem to be praising what William James has called “the insipidity of passive happiness.”66 But what is wrong with happiness? In an age when so many vocations were ambiguous in their origins, it was highly unlikely that all nuns would be called to heroic virtue. Nor would it have helped their communities if they had been. Healthy communities needed women who were cooperative, forbearing, and faithful to their duties. The only cement that could hold them together, for long years in a small space, was obedience. Although obedience was a burden, it was also a comfort. And at the end of the day, it was a guarantee of salvation: “They can be assured that, always living thus in Jesus Christ, they cannot but die in His arms, and it is above all at this moment of death that … the blessed soul will fully understand how true and certain are the words and promises of a God of goodness and mercy for those who persevere to the end in doing their duty.”67

self-mortification: th e g r eat te m ptatio n Nevertheless, many women could not accept obedience wholeheartedly. Between its demands and the demands of their nature there developed an unbearable tension. A deeper urgency brought them into conflict with their Rule: a spiritual condition called “scrupulosity.” Strict monastic practice had always included self-mortification and selfdeprivation. But while the rules of the teaching congregations continued this tradition, they did so with moderation. Penitential practices, they insisted, were to be approached with caution, for fear they might undermine the apostolate. “The chastisement of the body ought not to be excessive or indiscreet in the way of vigils, fasting, and other exterior penances and austerities, which often damage and prevent greater good.”68 These were Jeanne de Lestonnac’s words, but all three congregations shared the message. The difficulty about this call to moderation was that it was being sounded within a religious culture that in other respects cried out for extremism. The message that the church of the Old Regime presented to its members was one of guilt and fear. “We must satisfy divine justice either in this world or in the other,” wrote Vincent de Paul in the midseventeenth century.69 “It is an indispensable law that sin must be paid for and the justice of God satisfied, either now or after death,” preached Hyacinthe de Montargon in the late eighteenth century.70

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The fact of being a priest or a religious brought no relief from anxiety; indeed, such persons knew that they were being held to a higher account. “Priests (but nuns as well) were more conscious of guilt than were laypeople. Their constantly invoked and exalted ‘supereminent dignity’ had its counterpart in the continual encouragement of a guilty conscience.”71 Sins that would matter little in others became sacrilegious for them. The standards to which, in theory, they were to be held were unbearably high. To be truly open to God, wrote one nun, a religious soul must be “without desire, without affection, without choice … without inclinations, without will, without passions.”72 Human nature, “the detestable myself,” wrote another, was the principal obstacle to the soul’s perfection. “It is a scoundrel and our enemy, and it can only be overcome by being insulted.”73 The body was a dead weight, its humours and affections so many traps entangling the soul. The duty of the consecrated person was to transcend all this, to cut the ties of the flesh. If she failed, the consequences were clear: “Many are called but few are chosen.” A powerful body of teaching about the pains of hell was available to prod consciences. Even the saints had cause for fear.74 So it is not difficult to understand why the “syndrome of scruple” flourished in a special way in this culture and during this age.75 Although many hearers of the message managed to buffer it in some way or dismiss it as hyperbole, for others the urgings and threats crystallized into a haunting terror, and the terror gave rise to a compulsion to redeem themselves. The need to punish their bodies overwhelmed them. Thus it was that even in the moderate communities of the teaching congregations, with classrooms of children close by, and often in clear contravention of their vow of obedience, some women practised ferocious penances. In 1652 Jeanne Bourelier entered the Ursuline house of Montbard.76 She was not a typical novice. She came from another convent, which had suffered financial collapse, taking with it all her dowry money. Although she was destitute, the Ursulines accepted her because she was a skilled pharmacist and therefore useful to the community. Jeanne, however, took her suppliant position seriously. She asked to be fed on bread and water only, and when her request was turned down she set to work to make it happen anyway. “She used a thousand tricks to get her way, sometimes even collecting the bread that was meant for the dogs.” Her superior found out and scolded her for her failure of obedience. Jeanne’s reaction gave the superior cause for reflection: “She showed by her humility that it was a true spirit of mortification that drew her into such rigorous austerity.”

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But this was not the end of the matter. A new religious devotion had come upon the scene, which involved making a vow of slavery. As conceived by Pierre de Bérulle, it was meant to foster a spiritual servitude, a surrender of personal freedom to God’s will. But Jeanne added a physical dimension. She wrapped a chain around her arm, above the elbow where it would not be seen, and fastened it so tightly that it bit into the flesh. Eventually this too was found out, and the chain was cut off. All the while, Jeanne was starving herself, until “there was nothing left to her but skin and bones.” Her behaviour was so unusual that it caused her superiors to suspect that she might be under the influence of the Devil. Finally, however, they concluded that she was being led in secret ways by God and that they had no business interfering. Madeline de Riquety experienced the classic childhood vocation that is familiar in the hagiographies of female saints.77 By the age of eleven she had taken a vow of chastity, which she then had to defend against her mother’s determination to “engage her in the world.” Far from being forced into the convent, Madeline had to cling to it with might and main as her mother fought to take her home. But having once achieved her victory, she knew no inner peace: “She wanted to destroy her poor body with disciplines, hair shirts, crosses studded with pins and other tortures.” Like Jeanne Bourelier, she was able to persuade her anxious superiors that it was the spirit of God that was moving her. Marie Helyes took a similarly aggressive approach to her body: “She gave it as little consideration as if it were a carcass” and “bore it an implacable hatred.” She scourged herself daily, often in sight of the community, causing some nuns to groan out loud at the sight of her bleeding shoulders. Only the onset of consumption of the lungs forced her superiors to call a halt.78 Barbe de la Motte also sought to destroy her body: “Everything that could damage it pleased her.” In addition to wearing the usual penitential wardrobe, she refused to warm herself at the fire, no matter how cold it was.79 We see the same ferocious appetite for self-mortification in Marguerite Loyauté, who disciplined herself with an iron chain and ate leftovers instead of ordinary food. “She treated her body as a slave and a mortal enemy.”80 Geneviève Cousteughol flagellated herself until the walls of her cell were splattered with blood. “She would gladly have torn her body to pieces, treating it like a deadly enemy.”81 Françoise de Fabre “treated her body as a beast of burden, from which, she said, one should exact everything possible.”82 As for Louise de Myr, “her body was a stranger to her.”83 And so the list goes on, the theme always the same – that the body is a foul carcass, a dead weight, an enemy. How is such behaviour explained? By youth, perhaps? Unbridled fervour was to be expected in the young. With age and the passing of

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the years, this passion for self-mortification might be expected to abate. But when Louise Vallette de Bosredon died at the age of ninetyfive, her eulogist wrote: “It required all her confessor’s authority during these last years to take away her instruments of penance.” Marie de Lavergne, dead at the age of eighty-two, had practised mortification “until her extreme old age.” Another stubborn old nun, Galiotte de Foucaud, was found on her deathbed to have “brooches of sharp iron dug into her flesh.” Anne Toutain, at the age of seventy-six, “said that it was no time to give up her penances, that she ought rather to increase them to prepare herself for death.” And when Catherine de Buges, seventy-eight years old, sensed the onset of her final illness, “she got up in the usual way, used the discipline on her shoulders, and said her rosary with her arms in the form of a cross.”84 For such women, the war against the body ended only with death. It is clear that some personality types were addicted to scrupulosity and therefore to self-punishment: “By nature hot-tempered … the demons never ceased to attack her” … “A quick temper, full of fire … she punished her innocent body with disciplines and other instruments of penance, so that gentleness became natural to her” … “Thus did she overcome the vivacity of a hot and fiery temperament.”85 What lay behind these phrases? Possibly, the failings of a quick tongue and a hot temper. At least that is suggested about Salome Bernard, who was of a “quick temper, little accustomed to submission,” and Catherine de Moutte, who “if ever a hasty word or action escaped her … knew how to punish herself … [going] so far as to put manure in her mouth, in which worms could be felt moving around”; also Marie de Pons, whose self-punishment was so successful “that during thirty three years, she never gave in to the slightest outburst of temper.”86 However, the term “fiery temperament” was often used in the “Lives of the Saints” as a codeword for sexual restlessness,87 and the death notices may have been employing the same code. The diagnosis would have been consistent with the opinion of contemporary experts, who held that “scruples that arise from wicked thoughts are the most frequent [of all] and outnumber those that beset the spirit.”88 Self-punishment took different forms. Magdelaine Chomel carved the name of Jesus on one breast, the name of Mary on the other. Marie Françoise Theterel pressed a red hot iron to her breast and arm, until “several pieces of flesh fell off.” Adrienne Theterel immersed herself in cold water and remained there with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross until her superior discovered her and gave her a severe scolding.89 Others slept on the ground, starved themselves, or ate disgusting food.90 Some women went even further, swallowing the contents of infirmary vessels, drinking blood and pus, or kissing the sores of the sick. Others dressed in rags or went barefoot.91

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The people who were most challenged by self-mortifying nuns were their superiors. By a happy coincidence, the death notices were normally written by these superiors, so we can gain some idea of how they viewed their troublesome charges. Experienced superiors and spiritual directors had known for centuries that refusal to eat and other ascetic behaviour could have a physical or psychological as well as spiritual motivation.92 They seem to have anticipated such behaviour in the novitiate as part of the normal wilfulness of youth. With time, however, they expected to bring it under control. At some critical point, the women were ordered to give up their austerities or at least to submit them to the guidance of their superiors. Their response to the demands of obedience varied. Some women panicked, even to the point where they considered leaving the convent.93 Their resistance was logical enough. Adrienne Theterel, the girl of the ice-cold bath, argued that “she had never thought she would have to ask permission to imitate the Saints.”94 Others submitted, though it seems that their submission was often less than total. One young woman’s “penchant for austerity obliged the Superiors, more than once, to use all their authority to put limits on it.” But she simply went underground. “[She was so] ingenious in getting what she wanted, and clever in knowing how to conceal it, that they saw they could not win.”95 This was a common story: “In spite of the watchfulness of her superiors she destroyed her health.”96 Others pestered their superiors and confessors with pleas and promises, even playing them off against one another, like children trying to get their own way.97 Some of them were openly defiant. When Françoise Garraud was warned that her self-starvation was killing her, “she answered that she found pleasure and enjoyment in it.” When Gabrielle de la Viale was ordered by her confessor to give up her mortifications for the sake of her health, she answered him: “I do not know, Father, if I can obey you in this.”98 There was a hard core, so to speak, of women for whom the ascetic life was far more than a passing attraction. Rather than give it up, they were prepared to defy the very authority they had vowed to obey. We are reminded of the young Catherine of Siena, standing up to her parents: “I must obey God not men.”99 How did the superiors view the problem? First, they clearly saw it as a failure of obedience. Second, they recognized its potential for damage, both physical and psychological. Scrupulosity was a mental illness; they knew that. And they had no difficulty connecting excessive physical austerities with “a very fearful conscience,” “spiritual pains and violent temptations,” “an excess of scruple,” “an extraordinary desire to satisfy divine justice,” and “the fear of damnation.”100 Where they could, they used the obligation of obedience to set anxious consciences at ease. Thus when Magdeleine du Mesnil, who “had a naturally tender and

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fearful conscience … became scrupulous, she found peace and calm for her conscience only in submission to her superiors.”101 Similarly, the young Petronille Senemaud asked for permission to practise extra mortifications, but as her superior later recalled, “I told her that God would be satisfied with her wish alone. She made no reply, but the manner in which she accepted this refusal convinced me that her submission was even more agreeable than the macerations that she had planned to practise.”102 Obedience protected moderation. However, the superiors were sometimes hesitant to lay down the law; and their hesitation reveals both an empathy with the individuals who were causing the problem and a deep-rooted respect for what was, after all, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian Church. Many saints had practised severe self-mortification, and therefore it could not be altogether wrong. “If she was perhaps somewhat to blame [for her disobedient behaviour], nevertheless we saw that it surely was the spirit of all the saints,” wrote one superior.103 In any case, faced with the vehemence with which some women clung to it, they were not sure how they could forbid it. In the case of one nun, the superiors recognized that their efforts to force her out of her self-abasement had done her “a violence which pulled her away from her centre, to which we had to return her so that her heart could go free.” In the case of another, who had resolved not to warm herself, the superior’s efforts to make her sit by the fire caused “such a violent state that we told her straightaway not to upset herself.”104 To a surprising degree, authority seems to have been ready to retreat out of respect for individual conscience. “Spiritual athletes” were given their space, even at the expense of their health. “Content with the sacrifice of her body,” runs the death notice of one nun, “Our Lord almost never made her suffer the pains of the spirit.”105 One of the great virtues of self-mortification was that it allayed fear. More frequently than one might expect, nuns were terrified of death and judgment. “God asks more of me than of others,” cried one woman. “If I relaxed my efforts I would be lost.”106 She, and many others, tried to blunt their terror by punishing their bodies. Who was to say they were wrong? How could the superiors be sure that in forbidding penance they were not thwarting the justice of God? Thus, at least as the death notices tell it, superiors made a serious effort to understand the torments of the scrupulous. Communities were not always so long-suffering. In the monastic records, the cruelty to which “singular” nuns were sometimes subjected is revealed. At best, they were treated as a cross to be borne. It is not difficult to read between the lines of Anne de Valet’s death notice: “There was no holy cruelty which she did not practise, to the point where her neighbours,

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who often witnessed them, asked her to please have regard for their delicacy.”107 Hers was an unsettling presence; the zeal behind her excesses may well have struck them as a reproach. The “holier than thou” person is not easy to live with. Historians of sanctity argue that even in the Middle Ages, heroic behaviour did nothing to endear the saints to their fellows.108 While these cases stand out in the records, they are still in the minority. Most nuns did not practise such austerities. Some actively opposed them, as did Marie de Vigier, who was “convinced that true virtue need not be sombre or unpleasant,” and Marguerite Bernière, who tartly rejected “the illusion of some people who are so occupied with their own perfection that they neglect the duties of their state.”109 When a nun looked for mystical experience or the martyrdom of her body, the sisters of less heroic temperament were there to remind her: “It is only perfect obedience that makes a true religious.”110 The vow of obedience could be violated by those who went beyond the Rule, just as much as by those who fell below the Rule. The ideal course was to live the community life in an unassuming way, “in punctuality, exactitude and unshakeable fidelity to all [one’s] duties.”111 Jean de Viguerie has said that, while the institut of a religious congregation was a “holy enterprise,” the creation of that congregation was “a work in itself.”112 The creation and maintenance of a community was a work forever in progress, which demanded constant attention both temporal and spiritual. There was an inherent fragility in a collection of human beings obliged to live together in close quarters all their lives. Their physical needs had to be met. Their psychological well-being had to be safeguarded. Their interpersonal relationships had to be kept healthy. Without these conditions, communities were in danger of going terribly wrong. The three monastic vows – poverty, chastity, and obedience – formed the basis on which religious communities were built. Each of these vows required personal sacrifice, the surrender of individuality. The health of the collectivities depended on the degree to which these vows were observed by the members. If for any reason they were eroded, community life suffered erosion too. This chapter, in describing what the vows involved, has dwelt on the frequent difficulties and contradictions to which they were subject. But they must be recognized also for their value. Without them and the stability, equity, and mutual respect they made possible, the religious communities of the Old Regime could not have functioned as well as they did.

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9 Prehistories

The idea that contemporaries have of the society in which they live, and to which they give expression, is incomplete and sometimes mistaken. There are facts, even important ones, of which contemporaries are unaware, others that they prefer not to admit or confess to, and others again that are so basic that they seem commonplace to such a degree that contemporaries do not take the trouble to describe them, and they come to our notice only through a few words dropped in passing in some document. Ronald Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings1

The problem identified by Mousnier is exactly the one we face when we apply the monastic literature to the purposes of social history. The questions we ask are not questions that its authors even dreamed of answering. To satisfy our curiosity, we must treat it as an archeological dig, furrowing through the intended message in search of inadvertent asides. This is certainly true of the monasteries’ notices nécrologiques, or death notices. They are sometimes called “spiritual biographies.” Ninetenths of their attention is devoted to their subjects’ lives in religion – their particular virtues, devotions, and achievements – and to the deaths which finally crowned those lives. Relatively little survives regarding their former lives “in the world.” This is hardly surprising. Community memory began at the monastery door. It was unlikely that the nuns, ransacking their recollections of their deceased sisters, would come up with much that preceded their entry into religion. But here and there, an episode from a previous life caught the community’s attention and continued to be related until the time when it was enshrined in the annales or death notices.2 It is difficult to know how to evaluate this material. The very fact that certain events became part of community lore may mean that although they were in some way exemplary, they were also unusual. From these stories we may be learning as much about what the community loved to hear as about what was commonly the experience of young women living in Old Regime society. On the other hand, some events and situations, because they are replicated so many times, take on the ring of authenticity. And while the stories themselves may be mannered and conventional, they

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sometimes bring with them a cloud of small details about daily life, thrown in at random and without much consideration – immaterial to writers and readers of their own time but highly valuable to us. If enough of them fit the same mold, they may become the stuff of generalizations. One generalization they lead to is that a large number of families were broken by the premature death of parents. This comes as no surprise. It is already known that many children in the Old Regime experienced the loss of parents before reaching adulthood. Certainly, many of these nuns-to-be did. The death notices speak of their bereavement and then pass on to their subsequent circumstances. Some went to live with relatives; some remained at home with widowed parents or in the step-families created by remarriages. There are numerous subtle indications that these arrangements were not always happy. Others were put aside permanently. If both parents died and family members were given the task of planning the orphan’s future, the cloister offered an attractive solution. When Edmé Durand, an advocate in Montargis, died leaving seven orphans and it fell to his relatives to decide what to do with them, the youngest, Elisabeth, “trembled with fear lest they suggest that she become a religious.” Her fears were justified. We can only speculate on the pressure to which she was subjected, no less effective for being clothed in the garb of free choice. The record simply tells us that after praying hard and long, she accepted God’s will and, “bathed with tears,” told the her relatives to arrange her entry. “Like another Abraham obeying the order of God, she went out from her father’s house, her spirit stripped of all earthly things, and in her hand an image of the Saviour with his cross … saying, ‘This is all I need from now on, I want nothing of the world.›3 Even when parents were alive, children could be handed around within families with the greatest of ease. In some cases, when parents had financial difficulties or were “burdened with many children” (a common phrase), grandparents, uncles, aunts, or older siblings stepped in. Young girls were sometimes left with relatives while their parents went abroad or to other cities. Sometimes, it seems, their families moved them around to give them the benefit of wholesome air (much sought after in that age), to introduce them into society, or to shield them from the influences of that same society. One wonders which of these motives was uppermost in Madame de Faverolle’s mind when she sent her daughter to live with an aunt, the comtesse de Blet, and then – when the young girl became totally enamoured of a life “which threatened her sentiments of virtue with shipwreck” – hastily put her into a convent pensionnat.4 Did she want her child to shine,

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and then suddenly realize that she could not protect her once she entered that glittering world? And what must have been in the mind of the Ursuline Isabelle de la Baume de la Vallière as she learned of her beloved niece’s liaison with the young king, Louis XIV? “We cannot imagine the vows, the prayers, the pilgrimages and penances which [she] made to obtain from Heaven a grace strong enough to break these culpable engagements,” wrote Dom Claude Martin.5 The highest society in the land, the Court, was recognized as a serious danger to young virtue, and parents who had business there were wise to leave their children elsewhere – preferably a long way off.6 One obvious choice for parents who needed to place their daughters was the monastery pensionnat. According to all the rules, this course was not available until the child was five or six; but quite clearly the rules were often bypassed, with or without permission from the bishop. “Monsieur her father who was employed on important business gave her to us at the age of three and a half.” This was a story often told.7 It arouses the suspicion that many children were passed straight from the wet nurse to the convent. The harshness of this practice was frequently softened by the fact that the children had relatives in the cloister – aunts or older sisters – who were allowed to exercise some care over them. Furthermore, years of separation did not necessarily mean that parents lost interest permanently. A number of records tell of mothers and fathers who decided to take back their grown daughters for companionship – and were outraged when the daughters opted to stay in the convent! Or, to return to the case cited above, Monsieur intended his daughter for the convent and allowed her to enter the novitiate at thirteen, but he later had thoughts of finding her an advantageous marriage. When she resisted this change of plan, he gave in “generously,” provided her with a large dowry, and thereafter remained a friend and patron of the house.8 But whether the distance separating daughters and parents was physical or spiritual, and whatever the reason behind it, it was real nonetheless and was not broken by the sort of holidays that modern school-age boarders can expect. In the seventeenth century at least, many children, once they were in the pensionnat, stayed there year in, year out, in sickness and in health – and even unto death. “On the twenty-ninth there died a little pensionnaire aged 5 or 6, the daughter of Monsieur Poupart, secretary to the king, and Madame Fournier his wife … The parents, when warned of her extreme danger, asked us if she died to have her body opened and to bury her in the monastery … We buried her in the chapel of the Infant Jesus, in the garden.”9 This sad little obit appears in the records of the Ursulines of Montargis. It is

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difficult to read it without wondering about the family relationships that lay behind it.10 All too often, families of the Old Regime used the cloister as a dumping ground for surplus or unloved children. Among the fiercest critics of this practice were the great spiritual leaders of the age. François de Sales warned that the monasteries were home to many unsuitable people: These are they who enter religion because of some fault of body or character, being lame or blind or unsightly … and what seems even worse is that they are frequently put there by their parents, who only too often, when they have such children, leave them in the corner by the fire, saying that since they are unfit for the world they must be put in religion … Others have a large number of children; Well and good, they say, we must lighten the load on the house, and send the younger ones into religion so that the older ones can have everything and cut a fine figure in the world.11

Vincent de Paul remarked that such arrangements opened the convents to insipid and unmotivated religious: “They do not have a true vocation, since they were put there by their parents, and stay there out of human respect.”12 There is no doubt that many nuns fitted these descriptions. A comparison of their dowries with those of their marrying brothers and sisters strongly suggests that the monastery was an excellent moneysaving device for their parents.13 Was it also, in the parents’ minds, a warehouse for the handicapped? Few of them said so as directly as Marie Martel of Dieppe, who in her will asked that her daughter be put into a convent, “either the Ursulines or some other, seeing that because of her feeble-mindedness she is incapable of marriage.”14 Clearly, many parents took their unmarriageable daughters to the convent, and the convent kept them and sometimes made nuns out of them. Marie Prisve was only three when the Ursulines of Nevers accepted her in spite of her impaired breathing, hearing, and speech. She died a nun. Angèle Pellerin was a near invalid whose father and brother served as doctors to the Ursuline community of Mâcon. “For our part, we have tried to show our gratitude by receiving this dear sister.”15 These are just two out of a host of examples of girls whose health was already poor when they entered the convent. Families initiated the arrangements, and religious communities carried them out. It is easy to see the benefit to families. The question is, Why did the communities accept these problematical cases? The answer, almost always, is money. The entrance of sickly or inappropriate girls was often

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smoothed by larger than average dowries. In Saint-Emilion in 1638, when Marie de la Rocque was being interrogated before making her profession (in the presence of her mother, which in itself was a contravention of canon law), she answered so apathetically that the official became suspicious. When the superior was questioned, she could only protest that the girl suffered from “a weakness of the brain,” that the community had made special arrangements in this case, and that the parents had given an unusually large dowry.16 In other words, the nuns were preparing to absorb into their community a person whom her parents most emphatically did not wish to keep at home – but they were doing it for a price. Monastic records attest to the existence of a special invalid status, negotiated at the time of entry, which guaranteed some entrants certain dispensations from the Rule because of their poor health.17 Since they were not going to be able to contribute by their labour to the monastic economy, it was only fair that they should bring a larger dowry. That was the nuns’ point of view. From the point of view of the families, the option was highly convenient and not always inhumane. There is no way of drawing on such cases to generalize about the love or lack of love between fathers and mothers and their daughters. In the absence of alternatives, parents may have been securing the best possible future for their children. When, at the age of ten, Marguerite Lombard lost the sight of one eye, her father persuaded her to enter a convent pensionnat with the object of one day becoming a nun. By the time she lost all sight she was professed and was thus assured of the care of her community for life. Jeanne Louvet, “simple of mind,” was placed by her widowed mother in the community of Blois where, in return for a large dowry plus a generous life pension, she was given a lay sister as her personal servant. Could these parents have done better for their daughters by leaving them in “the world”?18 There were, of course, girls whose parents simply wanted them out of the way. Here, the death notices are understandably reticent. Occasionally, a hint of an unhappy home life comes through: “Some sort of falling-out between her father and her mother caused her and her sister to be put in our community” … “God took advantage of the lack of friendship which her mother felt for her to deliver her to the religious life.”19 But following the spirit of their calling, nuns learned to count their losses as gain for the sake of the Kingdom, and therefore – in formal documents, at least – their true feelings are hard to divine. When Hélène de Meulle (the child whose busy father had handed her over to the convent at the age of three and a half) died in 1670, she left among her papers a written thanksgiving to God “for the choice that He had made of her to be His bride, even before she reached the age

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of reason.” Anne-Françoise de Sales, who entered religion at the age of fifteen, was recorded as having accepted and even solicited the sacrifice of her own inheritance in order to further her sister’s advantageous marriage.20 Were their feelings really so serene? In this matter the monastic literature has a line to follow and cannot be trusted. But we do notice, from time to time, mention of nuns who “since entering, have never gone to the parlour” or who “had an aversion for the world and for their relatives,”21 and we may wonder what caused this detachment or aversion. Another small and shadowy group appears in the literature – exProtestants who over the course of time became nuns. Some entered of their own free will and in defiance of their parents; for instance, Jeanne-Elisabeth Hofer, who came in secret from her home in Switzerland to abjure and later to enter the novitiate; and Marguerite de Labouchère, who was actually on her way to her wedding, complete with parents and bridegroom, when she suddenly turned aside and ran into the local monastery; and Marie de Quiroye, who resisted all her father’s pleas and came without his permission to the religious life.22 But other women first came to the convent as pensionnaires by lettre de cachet, and there is no way of knowing whether they were ever offered the chance to leave. Celeste de Vautron, for instance, was confined in a monastic pensionnat in 1694, when she was nineteen. Eleven years later she entered the novitiate.23 Possibly, like the nuns who learned to live in peace with their parents’ decisions, she was making the best of the fate that an even greater authority had laid out for her. So girls were “put into religion.” But it would be unfair to suggest that all of them were the victims of unfeeling family strategies. Given the restricted choices available, parents had to take seriously the duty to arrange their children’s future. Whatever that future, it was up to them to plan for it and predispose the children to accept it. “When the children’s [future] state is decided for them early, it is easy to present them with this perspective as a matter of habit, and thus to place before their eyes the various objectives that reason desires them to consider … The order of duties, the choice of pleasures compatible with the role which they will have to fulfil, will develop naturally with the knowledge of their situation.”24 This advice, directed to fathers in the legal profession, could have been used by the parents of all young boys and girls, whether they were destined for a career, marriage, the church, or religious life. How successful it was across the board we shall never know. But in the case of many young girls destined for the convent, it seems that conditioning, as the weapon of choice, was highly successful: “Children, sometimes very young children, were placed in an environment or in a situation in which they had

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little choice but to embrace the … [religious] life.”25 In the closed gardens of their childhood, they had little opportunity to yearn after greener fields outside. In the most extreme cases, a devout family dedicated a daughter to religion at birth, and often the child was dressed in white until the age of seven as a public avowal of her parents’ intentions. A number of such practices appear in the death notices. Usually the parents persevered in their intention to raise the child for religion, but it seems that the passage of time could sometimes dampen their ardour. Marie de la Grandière Cornuau had been dedicated at birth and dressed in white, but later her parents changed their minds and decided to raise her for “the world.” Her decision at the age of twenty-two to enter religion so infuriated them that they made her take her journey to the Ursuline monastery alone and in disgrace.26 Sometimes the dedication was made later, when a parent was under some form of stress. Jacqueline Bouvot’s father, finding his life in danger, promised his daughter to God if he was spared. (“Her particular characteristic,” ran her death notice only a few years later, “was obedience and submissiveness.”)27 But these circumstances were exceptional. Many more families simply regarded the monastery as a respectable alternative for the daughters they could not marry off. They raised these daughters well and, in words that the annalists frequently repeated, “gave them to religion.” The nuns were fully in accord with the practice of conditioning. The death notices made it plain, over and over again, that the best nursery for future religious was a family “in whom piety and virtue are hereditary.”28 The most certain avenue to “a good education” was the monastery pensionnat, but unless and until this could be achieved, the child was best fitted for the cloister if she had “sucked the milk of piety” (to use a hackneyed conventual phrase) from her earliest days. The eulogists tell us that Françoise Galland, under her mother’s hand, “lived in the world but led a truly religious life.” They tell of Françoise La Lande, who followed her mother in her devotions and on her visits to hospitals; and Bonne Tierce, who was three when she began to say her rosary on her knees.29 There are many such stories. At the age of five, Catherine de Suus was delivering little sermons on sin and contrition to those around her. By the age of seven, Louise de Mazon, under her mother’s direction, was teaching catechism to the servants in the family’s château. Marie de Hocquinquan, orphaned at the age of nine, went to live with her older sisters in a self-imposed cloister: “She never looked men in the face … she avoided them as enemies of her angelic virtue.”30 Elisabeth Fleuret was brought up by an aunt who, as she later wrote, “raised me in the fear of God … never

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permitting me any of the faults so common to children, and because she loved me deeply, punishing me with great severity.”31 She followed her aunt in her religious observances and almsgiving. By the age of five she was reflecting seriously on death. To the modern mind, these hothouse cultivations seem risky if not reprehensible, but in the religious culture of the Old Regime they were highly commended. “It is necessary to get the children as they leave the cradle, in order to defend them against the disorders of the world,” wrote a respected nun.32 Vocations could also blossom in ground that was less carefully prepared. Sometimes the impulse to religious life seems to have originated within the child herself, with or without parental encouragement. According to Marie de Siougeat’s death notice, she was only four when she began to feel special graces. Marie Spens was her parents’ favourite child, but “the Lord loved her much more … Her life of grace and piety began with the age of reason, without any guide but the Holy Spirit.” Anne d’Arripe “wanted to be a religious almost as soon as she could talk.” At the age of eight, Marie Tissendier “conceived the desire to give herself entirely to the Blessed Virgin”; at the same age, Claire Beaumont made a vow of chastity. Gabrielle Rubens, at ten, was teaching other little girls “to serve God by giving up things, explaining the love which Our Lord would show them in return.” At the same age, Cecile de Belloy learned from the experience of a serious illness to know “the vanity of all that is not God, the inevitability of death and the importance of this last hour.” Nicole le Doux “deprived herself of the normal amusements of children in order to visit the churches.” When Catherine Ranquet entered the novitiate at the age of twelve, she was already experienced in the ways of prayer and mortification.33 This sort of early childhood gravity, this “spirit far beyond mere bagatelle,”34 was greatly admired in the monastic literature because it was seen to presage a religious vocation. It has been pointed out that in the Middle Ages the call to sanctity was often experienced by very young children even without the encouragement of their parents.35 This may be hard to credit, unless we believe that in some way a child’s affections could be so totally and intensely engaged that her whole personality would come to take shape around her love object. If this is difficult to imagine, we have only to offer the example of Marie Guyart, the seven-year-old daughter of a master baker in the city of Tours, who in 1607 had a dream: I was looking upward when I saw the heaven open and Our Lord Jesus Christ in human form emerge and come toward me … As this most adorable Majesty approached me, my heart felt on fire with love for him and I started to open my arms to embrace him. Then he, the most

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beautiful of all the children of men, took me in his arms and with a look full of indescribable sweetness and charm, kissed me with great love and asked me, “Will you be mine?” I answered, “Yes!”36

The Lord who kissed her in that dream was not a father figure but, in the words of her biographer, “the fiancé of her heart.”37 From that time on, as she later wrote, “this sweet attraction was incomparably more pleasing to me than everything else that I saw.”38 Was this the effect of parental conditioning? Hardly. Her family was only conventionally pious, and in due course it provided her with a bridegroom of the human variety, very different from the Bridegroom she desired. But there were other influences beyond the family. Seventeenthcentury Catholicism, as practised in cities such as Tours, was vivid, full of imagery, highly emotive; the sights and sounds of its liturgies and the splendour of its ceremonial must have had a powerful effect on young minds. The same Marie wrote later from Canada to her son that “one of the things that greatly strengthened my spirit of devotion was the ceremonial of the Church which, from my childhood, powerfully attracted me … When in its processions I saw the cross and the banners … my mind and my heart leaped for joy. I had seen a captain lodging in our neighbourhood, followed by his soldiers with their flags. So when I saw the figure attached to the cross, and the banner with its images, I said to myself, ‘Ah! this is my captain, and there is his banner.›39 Marie was always driven by love. But the Church was also delivering a message of fear – fear of sin and hell. Again, it was a message easily transmitted to young imaginations. Barbe des Nots was seven when she learned that she could commit mortal sin; she was reduced to tears by the thought. As a child, Marguerite Colin had the same horror of sin and at least once had a vision of the Devil, whom she drove away by making the sign of the cross. When as a little girl Catherine Ranquet was taken to a comedy, “she thought herself to have been in Hell, and feared that she would never again belong to Our Lord.” Marie de Poilleve had a vision of the Virgin, “who showed her the place waiting for her in Hell if she engaged herself in the world.” She entered the novitiate at the age of twelve.40 But the real battle for the souls of these young people typically started in their adolescence, and by then they were under the influence of nuns, either in day school or in the pensionnat (or so we can suspect even when we are not specifically told so). The role the nuns played was somewhat two-faced. According to their institut, they were not in the business of educating girls “expressly to make them into religious.”41 Yet the death notices suggest that they actively recruited young women and that they did so, partly at least, with a message of fear.

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A historian of cloistered nuns has remarked that, in their mind, the world was a sort of quicksand, waiting to swallow souls down to damnation.42 So it was only natural for them to relay their belief to those around them. “Consider the occasions there are to damn oneself in the world,” said Bossuet. They did consider, and they took it upon themselves to warn their charges of the risks.43 The effect on impressionable young minds was predictable. In numerous cases, when girls came out of the pensionnat they were confused and alarmed by what they saw before them. Marie de Martin left boarding school determined never to return. But “God filled her mind with great terrors and apprehensions of his judgments; these turned her little by little from the pleasures of the world.” Jeanne Thubert loved the world but came to recognize “the danger to her salvation and the necessity of flight,” and entered the novitiate at the age of fifteen. Marie de Sillegue “constantly thought that she saw Hell opening under her feet. She then sought sanctuary in our community” – at the age of seventeen. Madeleine de Bonhore was already engaged to be married “when in the college church she heard a sermon on Hell” and decided to enter religion.44 A similar story is told in more detail of Marie Anne Dugué. Born in 1665 in Paris, and raised first by her grandfather and then by the Ursulines, she was called back into “the world” at the age of fourteen: As she was a pretty young lady, well built and vivacious, with plenty of spirit, the world thought that it had gained her, and spared nothing to make sure of her. In these circumstances she was often the victim of trouble and agitation, feeling her heart pulled one way by God and the other by the world. Not knowing what to do, it seemed to her several times that she held the victory in her hand; at other times, to escape her anxieties she gave herself over to pleasure and amusement. But the Lord did not let her go far; He kept his eye on his prey at all times. She could not hear a sermon or say her prayers without this jealous Spouse redoubling His pursuits, and this served as a bulwark against the torrent that threatened to drag her away.45

After a long hesitation, she made up her mind in favour of the convent. Some of these decisions were welcomed by parents; others most decidedly were not. Young women who of their own volition declared for the convent could meet with outrage on the part of their family. The outrage was grounded in the same mentality that forced other young women into convents against their will: the belief in “the commandment of God according to which children who are in their parents’ power owe them obedience.”46 It could be that the parents had marriage plans in mind; sometimes they simply looked forward to enjoying their daughters’ company.47 Over and over again, the death

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notices refer to confrontations that were extremely painful to both parents and children. The parents could bring their daughters home, but they could not always force them to conform to the mores of the world. Agnez le Duc “closed her eyes to objects that might afford her pleasure and decided to spoil her skin colour (which was very handsome) so as to achieve an early victory over vanity.” Marguerite Charlet did the same: “She decided to disfigure herself and to rub her face with oil and go out into the sun in order to be darkened, so that she would no longer be beautiful except in the eyes of the Bridegroom.” Marguerite de Villeurbanne cut off her hair to avoid being taken to a ball. Claude Damond tried to enter the convent while her father was away; on his return he brought her home, but in the end he was defeated by her practices of mortification. Less openly defiant but equally embarrassing to their parents were Marguerite Penet, who dissolved into tears whenever she was brought out in company, and Edmée Renard, who hid herself in the attic of her house, where she could hear the monastery’s bell and follow its prayers. What, in the end, could be done with such obstinate girls? Marie Françoise Theterel, on being told by her father that she could not become a nun, simply fell ill. “It was commonly said that if he wanted to make her better he would have to bring her to the convent.” One can imagine the smirks of the neighbours when, finally, he gave in and did exactly that, saying that it was the only way to control her.48 Such was the emotional blackmail that quite a few daughters practised on their parents. In other instances, the girls were happy enough in “the world,” and the decision to enter religion came later as the immediate consequence of some personal trauma, which in the tradition of the death notices was taken as a direct message from God. The Bridegroom sometimes spoke through sickness and disfigurement. Françoise de Pousol was only twelve when she suffered an “incommodity.” She vowed that if she was cured she would become a nun, and she persevered in her vow despite her parents’ opposition. On the other hand, Madeleine Le Vasseur, when old enough to see the world, “took to it, loved it and was loved by it. However, in the midst of her pleasure an interior inspiration warned her that she was made not for the world but for God, who wanted her to be a nun. She failed to heed this inspiration, consulting her natural repugnance for this state, but the Lord … sent her a great illness. After receiving Extreme Unction, she recognized what Heaven wanted of her.” Similarly, Madeleine Bonnet, “well-built and very pretty,” had no intention of entering a convent until “a fluxion on her eyes deformed her … This led her often, when looking at herself in the mirror, to deplore her misfortune, saying to herself: ‘What! Am I so

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unlucky as to have been born to be a nun?› Elisabeth de Vancé, too, was “highly advantaged in outward graces.” But “God, looking down on her with mercy, allowed the smallpox to cause considerable damage to this beauty, which would have been the occasion of her damnation.” She accepted the message that He wanted her for Himself.49 Other women were brought to the monastery by financial disaster. Louise Le Grand had been happy in the world; then “her family’s reversal of fortune furnished her with a favourable occasion to know the emptiness of riches and pleasures … Struck by the vanity of the things of this earth,” she came to Blois with her sister, and the two entered the Ursuline convent together. Similarly, Françoise Baullard’s future was decided for her when her parents “were stripped of all that they had been.” Jeanne Serpe belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais; but when its business affairs collapsed, she had no choice but to enter without a dowry, as a lay sister.50 The death of loved ones could also act as a powerful agent. Frequently the death notices mention girls who, upon the death of their mothers, adopted the Virgin as a replacement. From there it was no great step into the cloister. Françoise Belot, “God having taken away her mother … saw the fragility of earthly things.” Anne Godfrey had already lost her mother, but it was the sudden death of her father that overwhelmed her and sent her into the convent. In Bonne Mejot’s case, it was the death of a friend that turned her to religion: “The Divine Bridegroom, to whom all sharing is an insult, used the loss … to touch her and attach her to Him alone.” In the same way, Françoise de Gorlier, already an orphan, lost her beloved uncle: “God, who could not suffer her to have anyone but Him alone, permitted that … he be killed.” Henriette du Reinier was taken by her father to Charleroi, where “the world’s countenance, so brilliant in her eyes, began to dazzle her.” But God took away her father, and she came safely back into the care of her Ursuline aunts. Less immediately personal but obviously traumatic was the experience of Anne de Lichigaray of Pau: “At the time when the plague ravaged Marseille and threw all France into alarm, our dear mother was struck by what she was told; this huge number of sudden deaths led her to reflect seriously on the instability of human things and on the danger of appearing before God with empty hands.” Her death notice remarks that her vocation was always grounded in fear.51 There is no doubt about it: the literature tells us that many vocations were built on fear and guilt. Catherine Moulinier de Puidieu was preparing to marry when her crucifix told her, “You are leaving me.” So “like another Saint Paul, she was turned around.” But her long life in religion was marked by mortifications and austerities – often the

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symptoms of a troubled soul. Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau had already been received at Court – “which helped greatly to puff her up” – when she was warned by a nun of her acquaintance that “however hard she tried to resist and struggle against God, she would surely give in and become a religious.” And so she did. Marguerite de Courcelles was first drawn to the convent by her sister, who was already a professed nun. But after some time in the novitiate she decided that this was not for her, and she made ready to leave. The nun reproached her: “What, sister! You want to abandon God? Understand that He, in turn, will abandon you!” Not surprisingly, Marguerite decided to stay.52 In all the above cases, the literature suggests that conditioning worked and that through appeals to their affections, sense of duty, or fears, girls were brought to accept and even desire the cloister. But conditioning does not explain every vocation. Some women entered religion because they felt that they had talents to offer to the monastery. Eleonor de Moulins, a demoiselle of Saint-Cyr, chose to enter a teaching convent because she was “persuaded that the talents with which Heaven had favoured her would be most useful in the education of youth.”53 Other women, such as Françoise de Monplaisire and Marguerite de Terneyre, were “born to govern” and “possessed the qualities to be superiors … and understood [business] affairs.”54 Recent scholarship has recognized that for those who were appropriately gifted, the female religious orders offered leadership opportunities not available elsewhere.55 In fact, this was already known in the Old Regime. An anonymous observer deplored the multiplication of religious houses which, he said, only served to “augment the ambition of those who wish to command” in abbeys or convents of different kinds.56 Commanding women may be found throughout the records. As often as not they were daughters of the nobility, who were thus fulfilling the belief of their social order that leadership was bred in the bone. Many women came to religion from the opposite direction. Quiet and withdrawn by nature, they longed for the hidden life. Marguerite Trumel had “an attraction for solitude.” When her parents, not knowing what to make of her, asked her what she wanted in life, “she who had never seen or heard tell of a convent did not know how to explain herself; all that she said to them was ‘Enclose me.› Marie Anne Bourdois, too, “was called by a particular touch of grace to the religious vocation without knowing what a convent was.”57 Others were repelled by the thought of life in the world. Marie Truffit “had always felt the greatest repugnance towards any establishment in the world, even before she knew what was meant by the religious state.” Marie d’Artois “fled the sight of men as one would that of serpents.” The very suggestion of marriage made her fall sick. Elisabeth Driu rejected everything

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to do with being a “demoiselle,” possibly because, as her eulogist tactfully put it, she lacked “the gifts of nature.” She herself asked to be placed in a convent.58 Others discovered the life by accident; they stumbled into it and then, emotionally, temperamentally, found it satisfying. Madeleine Tiballier entered the convent on her own whim, “without being too certain where she was going.” Marguerite Guillier “was much engaged [in the vanities of the world], which gave her parents the idea of putting her into our house to be taught some piety; she had no sooner tasted the air of the cloister than she was charmed by it.” Anne Moussey had never had any intention of entering religion until one day, passing an open convent door, she slipped inside. “She was amazed that anyone could have difficulty with anything [there].” Marie Madeleine Tubert was one of a group of friends who dared each other to spend three months in the novitiate. “As soon as she was in our house, she was charmed by the community.” Françoise Saron, when she entered the same house, was rather a wild thing. “This good sister asked to be made a religious without any idea what obligations this state imposes on us; she did not even know her Pater and Ave, which it took us a long time to teach her … She was admitted out of charity” – and in time became a worthy lay sister.59 For other women, both young and old, entry into religion was the completion of a love match, the end of a long period of waiting. In many cases, these were women whose entry had been held up for some time, for reasons beyond their control. A few of them were widows, and a few of these were widows with children. Marie Guyart and Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal may have been the most famous mothers who left their children to enter religion, but they were not the only ones. However, such cases were rare, because they were frowned on by society and were not altogether welcomed by communities. When Françoise Icarde, a thirty-six-year-old widow, decided to enter religion, “it was not without many assaults made on her by the Devil and her own nature, when she had to give up her little comforts and her own will, which is most difficult for a person who has lived independently for a long time.”60 She, and other women like her, could be a somewhat unsettling presence in a novitiate full of teenagers; their independence of mind and the fact of their previous sexual experience were not easily overlooked. More often the latecomers were celibate ladies who had laid their own wishes aside to care for ailing parents, raise orphaned younger siblings, or mind the family business. Jeanne Descaiul was seventeen and already on her way to becoming a nun when her mother died; she was forced to go home and look after her younger sister for the next five

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years. Françoise Bentejac was called upon to bring up her brothers and sisters; at twenty-eight, “breaking out of her chains, she entered our house to sing the canticle of her deliverance.”61 Marguerite Le Roux stayed home to help her mother manage her dead father’s affairs: “Finally, when she was free to make her own life, she hurried to our house.” Euphémie du Roux de Sigy was thirty-eight when she professed in 1731, having remained at home to manage her brother’s estate until he came of age.62 Other women were delayed for financial reasons. Agnez Delsol, whose parents refused to give her a dowry, laboured for years to earn it herself as manager of a small lace-manufacturing business. Christine du Tartre worked as a schoolmistress until the age of forty – always faithful to the vow of chastity she had made at the age of twelve.63 Such women often built themselves a life in the world as dévotes, living under the guidance of spiritual directors and haunting the churches. Jeanne Perault was forty-five when she entered religion after a secular life during which “her usual place of residence was in the churches.” Elisabeth Carlier spent her working hours plying her trade as a seamstress, and for the rest, “she was counted among the number of the dévotes.” Jeanne LeCoeur managed, in spite of her late vocation, to lead “an innocent and very pious life under the conduct of a Feuillant priest and in the company of several devout ladies.” Before entering the monastery Noel Fontaine lived for several years “under the direction of a virtuous priest, who trained her in all the most austere virtues of the religious life.” Geneviève de Lamotte Luchet found the courage to retire from her social circle by invoking the protection of the local Jesuits until such time as she was able to enter the convent.64 Without the support of like-minded people, the devout life in the world could be a lonely and difficult experience. The literature left to us by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns insists on the stark polarity of existence. In their minds the world was, as one death notice phrased it, “a foreign country, the maxims of which are opposed to piety, retreat, and all the practices of religion.”65 “I found the secular life unbearable,” wrote Marie Guyart, “being unable to see how one could observe the counsels of the Gospel there as in a cloister.” In the privacy of her room, she sat on the floor and wept at the profanity and irreligion with which she was surrounded: “My chaste Spouse, my divine Beloved, what pleasure do you take in making me suffer like this? You must put me into this blessed retreat, and you must take me out of the corruption of the world, since its spirit is so contrary to yours.”66 Such a view of secular life afforded no comfort to those who were waiting and hoping to leave it.

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It was the purpose of the religious life to shape all its practitioners into uniformity, right down to their dress, manners, deportment, prayers, and daily practices. Religious women were occasionally twitted for all being the same, acting “like sheep who, when one threw herself over a cliff, would all follow her over the same precipice.”67 But in fact the appearance of uniformity covered a great deal of diversity. Even after they had been through the mill of the novitiate, nuns remained fundamentally themselves. “Human nature does not die away,” warned Jeanne Françoise de Chantal; “in the long run, it has its day.”68 The women who came into the religious communities of the Old Regime brought with them a variety of experiences and exhibited a variety of temperaments. Old or young, worldly-wise or innocent as newborn lambs, loved or unloved, docile or fiery, gifted or average or slow-witted, ecstatic with their new estate or merely contented, or even bitterly unhappy – they all came together within the confines of four walls to form that delicate organism, a religious community. On them, and on the particular mix of strengths and weaknesses they possessed, depended the health of that community. If they were talented or inspired, the community would benefit from their talents and inspiration; if they were mediocre in intellect or motivation, the community would feel the effects of that mediocrity. For all these reasons, their earlier life was important. The founders had said it, and it continued to be proved true: “It is not gold and silver that make good monasteries, but the virtues which the members bring and which they practise.”69

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10 Novices

In 1659 Marie Françoise de Meulinare, daughter of a prominent family in Saint-Omer, decided to enter the local Ursuline convent. “Finding the means to climb the wall, she let herself drop down inside; then she told the valet who had accompanied her to go and inform his mistress and assure her that she would pray for her. The whole community was surprised to discover her upon leaving afternoon prayers.”1 This is a wonderful story, the stuff of monastic legend, and there are many similar stories in the records of Old Regime monasteries. But for most nuns, the method of entry into religion was much more orderly. It took place, as it should, through the convent door, and it was preceded by carefully considered and duly notarized negotiations between parents or guardians and the officers of the convent. It was normally at the time of entry that the dowry contract was drawn up. The amount of the dowry was agreed upon, but since as yet there was no certainty that the young woman would persevere or that the community would wish to keep her, its payment was deferred until the eve of her profession. In the meantime, the parents agreed to pay an annual pension, set at 100 to 200 livres, and an extra sum to cover the costs of their daughter’s religious habit and the festive meal to which she would treat the community on the day of her clothing. A typical arrangement was that of the young woman who entered the Ursuline monastery of Landerneau in the late 1690s with a dowry of 4000 livres, plus an extra 400 livres for her two years’ board in the novitiate, 300 livres “expenses for clothing,” and 90 livres for the meal.2 As well, the postulant was expected to bring a trousseau: chemises,

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stockings, wimples, handkerchiefs, neckerchiefs, and nightcaps by the dozen, bedlinens and table napkins, a place setting (usually pewter), and sometimes the furnishings for her cell and a gift for the altar.3 All these gifts were conditional. In the event that the postulant decided to leave the monastery, the money and goods were returned to her, the nuns retaining only whatever fraction was agreed to be fair. Clearly, neither side was meant to profit from a failed vocation. For many young girls, entry was made less daunting by the fact that, as pensionnaires, they were already familiar with the community and had some sense of what to expect. Equally, the community knew what to expect of them. Indeed, it may well have been eyeing them for several years – at least, this is what the circumspect language of the death notices suggests. When Marguerite de Vançé, still a child, was put into the Ursulines’ pensionnat in Blois, “from that time on, she made us see … what she would be one day.” In the pensionnat of Notre-Dame in Le Puy, Marie Dulac attracted the same hopeful attention: “The striking development of virtue in this young lady … caught the attention of our whole community.” When Florence Campion began school, “her mistresses soon saw that she had good dispositions for virtue, and so made great efforts with her education.” As for Geneviève Peleus, the community was so open in its desire to have her that “our Reverend Mother asked God for her … Heaven soon seemed to favour this worthy desire by the death of Mademoiselle her mother, who would have been the greatest obstacle to the grace of the Lord.”4 The ability of the teaching monasteries to supply the novitiate directly from the pensionnat was a source of strength to them. It allowed them to know their subjects, to divert those who were unsuitable, and to start building a religious character in those whom they coveted.5 All the evidence suggests that the majority of nuns who entered the teaching orders had first spent time in their pensionnats. Some had lived there most of their lives – had become boarders “very young,” possibly as young as three or four. They had been accepted as special cases, often after the death of parents, like Françoise Becquerel, whose mother died when she was five, leaving her with a father whose only desire was to live as a hermit.6 Others, especially in the seventeenth century, were placed in the pensionnat with the clear understanding that in due course they would enter religion. Catherine Simean was only five years old when she was “put into religion.”7 Françoise Borelly, seven years old, was brought to the Ursuline house in Villefranche “to be fed, boarded and instructed, until such time as she is old enough to be received as a choir nun.”8 Barbe Millet became a pensionnaire at Saint-Germain at the age of twelve, “until she reaches the necessary age to enter the Novitiate.” Marie de Savonnières, whom her parents

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had dedicated at birth to the Blessed Virgin, lived in the Ursuline monastery of Tours from the age of nine; and then, at thirteen, she entered the novitiate “not as a novice, because she was not old enough, but to wear the habit of a postulant, and by this means to strengthen her vocation.” Marie Thérèse Jourdain was finally professed at the age of twenty-four, “having lived in our monastery since the age of four.”9 For women like these, the monastery was home, and the world outside was a distant and unfamiliar place. As one of their eulogists put it, they “renounced the world … before ever having loved it and before being seduced by it.”10 However, this was not the majority experience. Most pensionnaires were put into the monastery in their early adolescence – at ten, eleven, or twelve – for a limited time and purpose: to prepare for their First Communion under the expert guidance of the nuns. We need not suspect any deeper parental motive than the hope that a few years in the convent would make their daughters both more polished and more pious. At fifteen or sixteen the girls would be ready to “come out” into society, just at the time when serious marriage negotiations could be considered. However, there were exceptions to this rule. Some girls decided that they wanted to stay. Frequently their parents took them home for a while to see the world and to test their vocation. The nuns approved of this, or so it seems. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended that if a pensionnaire thought she had a vocation, the superior should consider “if it would be useful to make her return to the world before putting her in the Novitiate … and if it is judged appropriate for her to return to the world in order to test and strengthen her resolve, or even if she simply feels the inclination to do so, she must not be made to ask before leaving that a place be kept open for her; thus she will be left at greater liberty.”11 But where there was no question of choice, where parents and daughter together were decided on her entry, the rite of passage took place smoothly, and the girl moved from pensionnat to novitiate without so much as a breath of the air outside. “These blessed souls,” wrote the annalist of Blois, “have borne the yoke of the Lord from their earliest years, because [they] never knew their father’s house.”12 There were also postulants who were strangers to the convent and its ways. Some of them simply arrived at the door. Take, for instance, Louise de Tusseau de Maisontiers, brought in 1722 by her father to the Ursuline convent of Ile-Bouchard. “When they had a foot on the threshold, a sudden misunderstanding caused Monsieur her father to protest that she would not enter there; straightway he decided to take her to our house at Poitiers.” But on the way, as they passed through Richelieu, Papa just as suddenly opted for the monastery in that town

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– and on the strength of his whim the place was chosen where she would spend the remaining forty-six years of her life. Almost as precipitate was the arrival of Elisabeth Fleuret at the door of Sainte-Ursule in 1738. She had had a serious falling-out with her stepmother the day before, and her father had decided that the only solution was to put her into religion. Later, when she was ready to apologize, she was allowed to leave the novitiate.13 There was also always a trickle of older women who had spent time in the world, running small businesses, caring for their fathers’ households or looking after orphaned brothers and sisters, or even being married and raising their own children. Late in life – in middle age and sometimes even later – they came to the monastery. Marie Pelloquin entered at twenty-nine, having managed her father’s household for several years. “Her retreat into the cloister,” ran her death notice, “was not one of the kind that the world in its malice attributes to the haste of a thoughtless youth or to the inspiration of a family in search of its own interests, since our dear deceased was fully mature at the time.”14 As often as not, such women were placed in the pensionnat for a period of testing before being admitted to the novitiate. It was common knowledge in the monasteries that older women had difficulty adapting to religious life, given their “long habit of following [their] own will.”15 This remark tells us, better than a thousand scholarly words, what was waiting for them in the novitiate.

the first stage Once the formalities were completed, the postulant entered the cloister. There, waiting for her, would be the superior and two of the discrètes. They would lead her into the choir for a dedication and blessing, and then deliver her solemnly into the hands of the mistress of novices.16 The novitiate was a little kingdom unto itself, normally set apart from the rest of the enclosure. As long as the novice was there, the Rule dictated that she should have no regular communication with her family and friends. Nor could she speak to other members of the community except with special permission.17 Her entire time was to be spent in the company of the other novices under the watchful eye of the mistress, or “mother,” of novices. She slept in a dormitory, cheek by jowl with her companions; she ate with them at a table apart from the rest of the community; and when she took her recreation (the only time she was allowed free conversation), it was with them and her immediate mistresses. In other words, all her work, prayer, and recreation took place within the same group.

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Her first task as a novice was to make a general confession, “to purge and cleanse her soul and put it into the disposition and fervent desire to make a good beginning in the service of God.”18 After this, her work for the first year consisted of learning the abc s of religious life – how to pray and approach the sacraments, how to recite and chant Office (which required an introduction to Latin), and how to examine her conscience. She also learned the basics of the teaching profession – the catechism, reading, writing, and handwork that she would some day teach her young pupils.19 She was expected once a week to open her soul to the Mother, once a month to listen to a reading of the Rule,20 and three or four times a year to perform spiritual exercises.21 In the second year, while continuing these practices, she deepened her knowledge of the Scriptures and the major works of spirituality, and she studied her Rule more profoundly, knowing that when she made her vows she must do so in the full understanding of all that they meant. And when she was considered ready, she worked wherever she was ordered to in the monastery, at “the lowest and most humiliating” tasks.22 In the seventeenth century there was seldom any question of her teaching in the schools, but in the eighteenth, as communities grew smaller and their resources were stretched, it was quite possible that she might become a schoolmistress before taking her final vows. The novitiate was an all-important phase in the formation of religious women, so much so that it was seen as the key to the quality of a community. Heavy demands were made on novices’ intelligence and self-discipline. They were trained in the practice of meditation, according to methods which – like everything else in the Rule – owed much to the Society of Jesus. They were subjected to a deluge of spiritual advice, as much through verbal instruction as through private reading. And they were taught their Scriptures. Anyone who questions the biblical formation of Old Regime nuns should take note of the density of biblical allusions in their discourse.23 This may not have come from private reading. In convents the main channels for the transmission of religious knowledge had always been retreats and spiritual conferences and sessions with superiors and directors – an oral transmission, not inappropriate in a time that still depended heavily on the spoken word.24 In novitiates the responsibility for these conferences fell to the novice mistresses. For the most part, their content was not recorded, but we have an exception in a collection published by Claude Martin of Retraites given by his mother, Marie Guyart, during her time as subnovice mistress in Tours. In the course of a cycle of spiritual instructions, Marie introduced her novices to the “Song of Songs” and its imagery. In one conference she introduced the text “Our sister is little: her

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breasts are not yet formed,” and then explained that this was how the novices should see themselves, small and undeveloped, totally dependent on their Beloved. Dom Claude wrote, “These explications were so beautiful … that those who heard her were enraptured.”25 Marie’s biblical knowledge came from the text itself and from the commentaries of Saint Bernard; but the thirty girls under her care acquired it first and perhaps most memorably through her verbal instruction. The novitiate was hard; it was meant to be. It was both a place of learning and a place of testing. Its closest modern equivalent would be the military boot camp, in that it was designed to test the mettle of the trainee and at the same time break her to the discipline of the monastery. In the writings of the nuns about themselves, it is made clear that they believed that a good novitiate was the beginning of a good religious life. Without the virtues that it inculcated, the virtues necessary to live through the subsequent years would be unachievable. Marie Guyart likened the novitiate to an apprenticeship, the métier here aspired to being “to die to oneself first of all and then to live to Jesus Christ.”26 The severity to which the novice was subjected and the willingness with which she accepted it were gauges of her readiness for the life that lay ahead. A fair number of novices failed the test. Wherever the monastic registers recorded all entries (not just those that came to profession), they also recorded departures. Of the three hundred women who entered the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, twenty-three left without professing.27 This wastage was unexceptional: in a survey of entries into the Ursuline novitiates of Auxerre, Langres, and Dijon, Dominique Dinet concludes that 13 percent left before professing.28 The reasons for departure varied. Sometimes parents opposed their daughter’s vocation to the point of taking their case to court. Adrienne de Saulnier, for one, was withdrawn from the novitiate and sequestered while Parlement considered her parents’ appeal. Toinette de Comère also was removed on the authority of Parlement; only a mortal illness persuaded her mother to let her return.29 While we know that these two girls were allowed back into their convents, we have no way of knowing of those who were not. But we do have details of many departures. Sometimes families failed to come up with the promised dowry. It was for this reason that Jacquete de Bergos, whose father was lieutenant of surgeons in Bordeaux, had to leave the novitiate after eighteen months – “which caused her extreme distress.”30 Marie Duchemin had been of age when she entered the Ursuline house of Blois in 1632 and therefore had negotiated her own dowry with the nuns. But while she was still in the novitiate her sister appeared and demanded to see the

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contract, “which she tore up, saying that she could not honour it.” Marie stayed, but only by accepting to become a lay sister rather than a choir nun – thus avoiding the need for a dowry.31 Sometimes, especially after the Law Crash, it was the monastery that was found lacking. When one young woman entered the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon in 1730, “our house was in a terrible state owing to the loss we had suffered because of the Billets de Banque,” and her parents urged her to withdraw.32 She stayed on, but others did not. In Quimperlé during the same miserable years, the annalist wrote: “The novitiate was empty; our reputation lost us … a young girl of exceptional talents, who was to bring us a dowry of 4000 livres … Someone wrote to her mother that we were dying of hunger and were totally ruined. She refused her consent to her daughter and allowed her to enter the Ursulines of Tréguier.”33 The records of the monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, another community crippled by the Law Crash, mentioned a number of novices who withdrew around that time to enter more financially secure houses. Some novices were dismissed by the community on grounds of inaptitude. The grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques sent away Catherine de Langlée before profession “because of her inclination to melancholy.”34 Mental disorder could be a problem in a community and even a threat, as the nuns of Montluçon discovered when their latest novice turned out to be positively deranged, screaming day and night, attacking the other nuns, and threatening to kill herself. But her family was reluctant to take her back; only after prolonged negotiations did her brother arrive, tie her onto a horse, and cart her away.35 Most often the reason for departure was ill health. Over and over again in the records, the word sortie (gone) is followed by the explanation “for fear of ruining her health.” The novitiate’s rigorous discipline, its cold dormitory with rough linens on the beds, and its fasting, abstinence, and many penances were hard on young women, especially those from comfortable homes.36 Discipline was in the hands and at the discretion of the mistress of novices. Hers was a demanding task. In the first place, the young women who came to her were not all meant for the cloister, and she was expected to have the discernment to winnow them out; on the other hand, she was warned “to make great estate of those whom God has truly sent, as the most beautiful gift that can be given to the house by His Divine Majesty.”37 All the rules bade her be prudent, “seeking to recognize the nature, ability and capacity of each one … always more inclined to kindness than sternness.”38 Yet at the same time she was to be strict with her charges, to grind down their self-esteem and strengthen their humility. In particular, she was warned to be on the

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lookout for voies extraordinaires: “Let her take care that her novices do not desire, or in their prayers ask God for, visions, revelations or ecstacies, but that they devote themselves body and soul to the acquisition of the solid virtues of humility, charity, patience, obedience, and all the rest.”39 The more “special” the novice, the more rigorous her mistress had to be: “When she sees that God is showing particular favour to a novice, let her be sure always to humiliate and despise her, and never to praise her.”40 Catherine Ranquet’s mistress was unmercifully hard on her for the simple reason that Catherine was already on the high road to sanctity, as the mistress was the first to recognize: “This good mother took every opportunity to mortify her … which gave a sister cause to ask why she treated her thus. She answered that this was good earth, and it was necessary to make it fertile, and that she [Catherine] would profit from it.”41 For the most part, novice mistresses were celebrated in memory. Of Blanche Doiron de la Barre it was written, “Most of our sisters take pride in having been her daughters, raised by her hand.” Similarly, Jeanne-Marie Bachelier had “lit in the hearts of her daughters the same fire of divine love with which she was consumed … [being] for them a living example of all the duties of the religious life.”42 But not all novice mistresses lived up to expectations. Through the discreet words of the eulogists we can occasionally glimpse a veiled disapproval of their conduct. When Marie Odean died at the age of sixty-eight, her community still remembered how as a novice she had been subjected “every day to hundreds of mortifications.” In the same spirit, long after the event, Jeanne Salomon’s eulogist wrote: “I saw her practise heroic virtues in the novitiate, suffering humbly and uncomplainingly the harshest penances … for the slightest faults.” When Françoise de Goutefroy died two days after her profession, the eulogist knew where to lay the blame: “She fell into the hands of a mistress who treated her very severely … without sparing her any more than the strongest and most robust, or appearing to recognize her infirmities, even though she was asthmatic and afflicted with a violent cough.”43 A novice mistress could fail through excessive zeal and by misjudging the capacity of the person she was directing. Novice mistresses approached their work in different ways. Marie Guyart, who had experienced the rougher sort of discipline in the novitiate, did not herself practise it when she was entrusted with the care of novices. Isabelle de la Baume drew criticism for being too indulgent, and perhaps she deserved it; when one young novice confessed to being always hungry, she took to providing her secretly with small snacks.44 The girls themselves looked for different handling. Some of them submitted to the new discipline with the greatest of ease, like

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Charlotte de Miramon, who “made her novitiate with great exactitude and without anything bothering her,” or Marie-Anne Dufourd, of whom the eulogist wrote, “This young novice flew, so to speak, along the paths of perfection.”45 Others had to be cosseted, like Claude de Giverzac: “The delicacy of her constitution forced the superiors to treat her carefully during her novitiate.”46 Some suffered agonies of doubt and revulsion, as did Madeleine Bonnet, who hated the novitiate with its “contempt, confusions and acts of humility.”47 There were always a few who wanted more austerity; for example, Claudine l’Empereur, who “had some difficulty entering our order, since she did not find it severe enough for her taste”; and Thérèse Romanet de Labriderie, whose “attraction for austerities and mortifications [inclined] her to leave because we were putting limits on her zeal.”48 Such novices often proved to be the most difficult to handle and the most given to disobedience. Marie Françoise Theterel, for instance, pestered her novice mistress for permission to practise extra mortifications, and when she found these too limited she took matters into her own hands, heating up a religious medal and pressing it to her arm and breast until “several pieces of flesh fell away.” Alarmed at what she had done, she then prayed to Saint François de Sales to heal the wound before her mistress found out!49 For her and others like her, the superiors had to apply the bit rather than the spurs. Punishment in the novitiate entailed embarrassment rather than physical pain. Agnes Hurault’s rudeness and obstinancy earned her numerous penances, such as being deprived of the habit and returned to secular dress, and making crosses with her tongue on the floor of the novitiate. Claude Chamereau, who committed the sin of taking herself too seriously, was ordered to dance and sing and in general make a fool of herself in front of the community.50 When some novices were caught talking to each other on the staircase of the Tours monastery, they were made to walk around wearing gags across their mouths.51 The purpose was plain. A novice must be stripped of her amour-propre. And she must be made obedient or, as the nuns themselves put it, “like soft wax in the hands of her superiors.” More than anything else, the novitiate demanded the virtue of obedience – “the final sacrifice of the most precious things remaining to her, her will and understanding and then everything that follows from these.”52 The novice was expected to carry out every command promptly and without reflection, no matter how uncongenial or farfetched it was. The annales are sprinkled with examples. In the early days of the Ursuline monastery at Mâcon, “obedience was held in such high esteem that the smallest commands coming from the superiors were received by the sisters like so many oracles.”53 Among the exam-

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ples given was that of a novice who had been reprimanded for coming late to prayers; the next time she was behindhand, “wishing nevertheless to obey at the first sound of the bell, she came to prayers without having had time to put on anything but her robe, and with her stockings tucked into her belt for lack of opportunity to put them on; she remained with bare legs … although it was extremely cold … Health meant nothing to her compared to obedience.” Another example of unswerving obedience was that of a novice who was ordered to fetch some white bread for an invalid. Finding none, she went to report to the superior, who, busy with other matters, told her to deal with the problem herself, “which the novice took so literally and so simply that she ran straight out into the town to get a loaf at the baker’s, without even giving herself time to let down her black overskirt … under which she was wearing a coloured one.” This breaking of clausura (and in a coloured underskirt!) would normally have caused a scandal in the town, but because it was an act of obedience pure and simple, the Lord protected her by ensuring that she met no one on her way to the bakery. It did not matter if the orders were improper or capricious. One young girl was sent to the community’s confessor (whom the novice mistress disliked) with “messages and words that were harsh and hurtful, which duty nevertheless she accomplished faithfully … He saw her blush and then turn pale, all the while with tears in her eyes … The good man praised and comforted her for being entirely blind in her obedience, no matter how difficult it might be.” In another house, that of Orléans, a young novice was the object of an unusual degree of mortification. “Once when she was picking over the herbs she found a slug under her hands; her mistress, seeing her give a little shiver, told her to pick it up and swallow it – only intending to see what she would do – but she swallowed it so quickly that she did not have time to tell her to leave it.”54 These two cases can be seen as illustrations of abuse of power by the novice mistresses, but the annalists did not waste time on that. What interested them was the exemplary obedience displayed by the novices.

clothing After a certain time, which differed with the congregation, the novice was ready to be “clothed” – to put aside her secular dress and put on the religious habit. This was the occasion of her first official test. On the basis of a character report presented by the “mother” to the Chapter, she would or would not be allowed into the second phase of the novitiate. The decision was solemn and was solemnly taken. “There is

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nothing in the religious state in which it is more dangerous to fail,” said the Rule.55 The Chapter was summoned by the bell. Each vocale was given a white bean and a black bean, and it was up to her to choose which bean to cast into the box. The Rule stipulated that the pretendant must have a plurality of votes to be admitted to clothing. The requirements were well known. She must be legitimate, healthy, and free from any crippling or disfiguring conditions. “[She] must have a vocation from God, and come freely for love of Him, without force or constraint.”56 She must be of suitable temperament. “It would only take one imperfect, one haughty, one proud, one self-lover to infect your little flock,” wrote Fourier to the sisters of the Congrégation.57 Given the permanence and closeness of community life, it is easy to see why the vocales might turn down some candidates – after all, they were going to have to live with them for a long time. Louise Grosil was almost rejected on several counts, being “hunchbacked and lame, stubborn in spirit, vulgar and difficult in humour.” As a novice, Elisabeth de Villaret took her self-disgust to such extremes and allowed herself to become so dirty and unsightly that the community thought twice about admitting her. She improved just in time, and from then on “was guided along a gentler, more pleasant path.”58 Marie Baudin, because of her delicate health, was accepted only after a second ballot.59 One of the most famous close calls was that of Thérèse du Terrail, who after six months in the novitiate was in such poor health that she was almost sent away from her monastery in Toulouse. “There are fifty of us vocales,” her superior told her, “and barely ten are favourable to you.”60 But she survived the vote and went on to become the chief rebuilder of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame after the Revolution. The choices confronting the Chapter could sometimes be complicated. When all things were equal, it was clearly in the community’s interest to allow only compatible women to join it. But other factors could interfere, with the result that every stricture of the Rule was disregarded on occasion. The dismissal of a novice, especially if she was from a prominent family, could have nasty repercussions in local society. Parents might take the decision as an insult and retaliate, as did a father in Rennes who accused the Ursulines of having treated his daughter like a domestic and demanded all his money back.61 Disabilities and infirmities were often winked at for the sake of compassion or because of a generous dowry. The Chapter might feel an obligation to accept a girl in return for services rendered by her family, as in the case of the novice in Villefranche mentioned above, or that of a novice in Mâcon, whose father and brother were the community’s doctors.62

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Or if times were hard and the novice’s dowry was particularly tempting, it might be difficult to bid her (and it) adieu. As Dominique Dinet has remarked, “Money was not neutral in the matter.”63 The clothing ceremony was the closest thing that a novice would get to a wedding. Arrayed in whatever splendour her family could afford, she was led up to receive her religious habit. The ceremony could be a magnificent affair. It might star a famous preacher and draw a great concourse of important people to the monastery church. Afterwards, the community might be treated to a lavish feast, complete with little packages of sweets – the ancestors of the sugared almonds still associated with religious celebrations in France. Everything depended on the practice of the community and the wealth and generosity of the family. At the end of the day, dressed now in the religious habit with only her white veil distinguishing her from the professed nuns, the novice returned to the novitiate and to the awareness, inculcated again and again, that she was among the lowliest of creatures. But no longer quite the lowliest. Beneath her now were the newcomers still in their secular dress, whose place in the scheme of things was even more humble than hers and to whom she was expected to give leadership and set a good example. She still faced an indeterminate future. The Chapter was still free to send her away if it thought fit. Her time in the novitiate might be prolonged, either because she was not considered mature or disciplined enough to profess or because her family was falling short on its financial commitments. Francoise La Lande spent four years as a novice, “her parents being unable to do otherwise because of family problems.” Marie Le Tort faced an even longer delay, not because her parents could not afford her dowry but because they wanted her out and married. She remained seven years in the novitiate, “waiting for matters to be sorted out.” In Marie Anne de Sarre’s case, the wait lasted fourteen years: “Monsieur her father … claimed that he had raised her to be his helpmate in governing his household, since she was his only daughter.”64 Finally, given the high mortality of the age, there was a chance that she might die in the novitiate, as did Catherine Choillon in August 1676. Her grieving father recorded the death of this “dear and beloved and most amiable eldest daughter, aged nineteen years and thirty days,” as follows: Of my children she was the one in whom I took, and looked forward to, the most pleasure; she had an intelligence uncommon in her sex, and she was as mature as a forty-year-old … She died at Limoges, where I had taken her last

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March, after fighting for more than a year to keep her with me … I went twice to Limoges during her illness; I entered the monastery and was present at her death; and for my consolation and that of my family, I had her body brought back to this town, so that I could keep her close to me in death when I had not been able to hold her during life.65

Catherine’s case was not unique. Here and there in the records the deaths of novices were mentioned. Such young deaths were a cause of grief in the community. “Judge … the consternation into which this loss has thrown us,” wrote one superior.66 But sometimes they came as no surprise. Whatever the Rule said, the nuns often accepted sickly girls. In 1728 Marguerite de Villeurbanne pleaded to be taken into the community of Notre-Dame in Narbonne. Her mother had died, and her inheritance had been lost to her. “All that she had left was Providence,” wrote her superior, “and I was … so touched by the warmth of her trust that I did not hesitate to receive her.” The Chapter was less easily persuaded, because of her poor health. “But she pressed us … saying that it was because she had not much time to live that she had to make haste to obey God, who wanted her to die as a nun.”67 The young woman was dead within four years. Occasionally a novice was allowed to make her profession on her deathbed. The nuns treated this as a privilege, but it was a privilege that might lead to unpleasantness if relatives suspected the community of angling for her dowry. The death of Anthoinette Bodin in the Ursuline monastery of Blois only six months after her profession gave rise to just such a suspicion. A judge representing the family presented himself at the monastery and asked to see the register of professions in order to ascertain whether the deceased had fulfilled the mandatory two years in the novitiate. It was alleged that “the said Anthoinette … only lived in their convent for thirteen months” and was therefore ineligible for profession. At issue was a handsome dowry of 15,000 livres.68 It was easy to suspect the worst. There was always a segment of society that was ready to label nuns as money-grubbers and simoniacs. The nuns had to be sensitive to the situation. In the same monastery in which Anthoinette Bodin died, another young novice, Magdelaine Chauvel, was so sick on the day of her profession that she had to be carried in a chair to the parlour to receive her father’s permission. After he had given it – thus “generously” risking the loss of her dowry to no purpose – she was carried into the church to make her profession.69 In Pau in 1750, when a young novice of noble family showed signs of poor health, the superior notified her father, “to avoid any suggestion of cupidity.”70 Only after he had talked to the girl and satisfied himself as to her wishes was she allowed to continue her novitiate.

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Needless to say, families did not complain when communities accepted sickly girls who were also poor. Madeleine Bourgeois was an orphan who had grown up in the care of her curé brother and two sisters. She came to the Ursuline monastery in Blois with “a chest … that threatened ruin” and no dowry at all. By rights the Chapter should have refused her. But she professed in 1780, in time to claim the privilege of dying as a bride of Christ. “Like a dove, she flew towards him,” wrote the annalist.71 There was no question here of money-grubbing or simony. But that is the way of public opinion. Simony is news: generosity is not.

profession Ahead now lay the solemn profession, the moment of final commitment to the religious life. The conditions for this were carefully laid out. The novice’s case must be examined by the Chapter, and another vote taken; again, she must have a plurality of votes to be accepted. According to canon law, she had to be sixteen years at least and to have completed two full years in the novitiate in order to make this irrevocable decision. She also had to be examined by the bishop or his representative to make sure that her decision was made freely and in the full knowledge of what lay ahead. If these conditions were not met, the profession could be appealed and annulled. To ensure her independence, the Rule stipulated that the examination of the novice should take place in private, out of earshot of her superiors or anybody else. In the case of the sisters of the Congrégation, it was to take place entirely outside the cloister. The interrogation and the novice’s answers were to be recorded and the document signed by herself and her examiner. Hundreds of these documents survive among the diocesan records of the Old Regime. The chief impression they convey is one of conventionality. The questions took a set form; indeed, by the eighteenth century they were usually printed, with blanks to be filled in. To all appearances the young women were coached, either by their novice mistresses or by their questioners. This does not mean that they were answering under duress, for it is clear that most novices who wished to leave the monastery could have done so before this final moment. But it leaves no way of penetrating the opaque wording to sense how they really felt about their religious vocation: how joyful they were, how content, how resigned, or how resentful. The conditions laid down by the Council of Trent were observed – that was all. And that was enough. The vast majority of nuns lived out their days in the convent in which they had been professed. But a tiny minority later brought complaints

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that their profession had been uncanonical. In 1700 Suzanne-Marie Poulleau appealed to the pope for release from her vows, claiming that her age at profession had been not seventeen as she had declared and as she had believed, but twelve – a deception practised on her by her father, which rendered her vows null and void. After three years she received her release. In 1756 Marie de Vaucelle appealed against her parents and the Ursulines of Troyes on the grounds that her profession had never been registered, nor signed by her. Françoise de Laval claimed that in 1768 she had pronounced her vows in the Ursuline monastery of Lyon as a result “of the persecutions that she had suffered in her family, notably at the hands of her mother, who favoured an older son.” As soon as her mother died, she appealed to the archbishop of Lyon for her freedom, which was granted in 1783. It is interesting to note that she stayed on in the convent for some years as a pensionnaire. A middle-aged woman, no longer marriageable, she faced a dismal future in “the world.” The Revolution found her impoverished and alone.72 During the same years, Catherine de Beuzeville was struggling to free herself from her vows. The illegitimate daughter of distinguished parents, she had been hidden in the country during childhood. At the age of sixteen she was brought by two royal officers to the Ursuline house in Argenteuil, to become a pensionnaire “with formal interdiction of all communication with the outside.” In 1751 she entered the novitiate, the official record listing her parents as “unknown”; in 1753 she was forced to profess. Her dowry, deposited by an anonymous hand, was a generous 6000 livres. However, Catherine turned out to be a troublesome nun who was sent from one place to another until finally, some twenty years later, she started agitating for her freedom. The case dragged on until 1789, at which time Catherine, nearing the age of fifty, found herself free but poor and, apparently, alone.73 These two cases underscore an incontrovertible fact of life. For nuns, the moral finality which their vows represented was reinforced by the lack of alternatives if they later wished to leave the convent. An intendant in the late eighteenth century remarked, “The majority of persons who become nuns would renounce this state if they could find the occasion of some establishment in the world.”74 This was a sweeping statement, made at a time when it was fashionable to denigrate monasticism; but there was a kernel of truth in it. Within a few years of profession many nuns would have found it difficult to re-establish themselves in society. The rarity of appeals by religious women for annulment of their vows may indicate the great majority’s contentment in religion, but it may equally reflect a practical reality – that there was no longer anywhere for them to go.

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Much more common were the cases of young women who presented themselves for profession of their own free will even while they remained in a state of deep uncertainty. The superiors recognized this and to some extent discounted it. Uncertainty, they argued, was natural as long as the future remained uncertain, and it was often cured by the taking of vows. One young woman’s anxieties were relieved instantly when the superior gave her back her secular clothes and offered her the door.75 However, this treatment was sometimes taken to extremes. Uncertainty was one thing, but resistance was another, and it was not always clear where one ended and the other began. Uncertainty could be overcome by persuasion and inner struggle; resistance might be beaten down by the unyielding logic of the convent walls. The death notice of one nun in Avignon recalled that long ago, as a young woman, she had been placed against her will in a monastery: “Few people have shown … a greater determination to return to the world,” but finally “religion reined in her desires.”76 These anodyne words may cover an ugly reality, as the following account shows. A girl, also of Avignon, had been in one monastic pensionnat and then another since the age of five. At sixteen, she was “received into the novitiate” – which in her case meant that force was used to transfer her clothes chest from the pensionnat to the novices’ quarters and to put her into the religious habit. She protested, whereupon her father came to tell her that if she refused to become a nun, he would lock her up in a room and mistreat her and not allow her to see anyone. When she continued to protest, her brother reinforced the family’s position by threatening “to run her through with a sword if she left the monastery.”77 Too often, it seems, the nuns cooperated with the families in such discreditable behaviour. But in their defence it should be pointed out that their communities were always highly dependent on public support and had little leverage against the powerful families of their neighbourhood. If they refused to cooperate, they could suffer reprisals. In Gien in 1676, when the Ursulines refused to accept an unwilling postulant, the family reacted – the mother by threatening “to strangle both her daughter and all the nuns,” and other relatives by breaking into the monastery and creating general havoc.78 It was probably easier to bully the girl than to defy the family. The death notices would never reveal such behaviour because it disgraced both the convent and the nun – the convent because the use of force flew in the face of all its rules, the nun because, in the final analysis, she was expected to resign herself to her fate. Far more typical of the notices is the eulogy of a nun whose parents had given her to the convent “at a time when she had no inclination at all for the cloister”

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and who accepted her lot only after “suffering several struggles over her vocation.”79 Whatever this woman’s travail may have been, it ended up being cloaked in a kind of placid dignity and treated as a triumph. A complex picture of what might, and did, happen can be seen in the death notice of Marie le Coigneux, daughter of a chancellor to the duc d’Orléans, Louis XIII’s troublesome brother.80 After her mother’s death, she and her sisters lived in the pensionnat of the Abbey of Pont aux Dames. “Then came the disgrace of Monsieur le President their father, who followed in the Duke’s entourage.” The girls were brought back to Paris, where Marie was placed in the pensionnat of the grand couvent of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. “Later her relatives forced her to agree to enter the convent, and to soften her displeasure they gave her her younger sister to keep her company.” But the girls rebelled against their new circumstances. “They railed at us all day long … they breathed nothing so much as their liberty.” Marie finally decided to become a nun, after being told by the Jesuit Père Binet that this was God’s will for her. But “her temptations were interior and continual against her vocation, and she passed her entire novitiate struggling with herself.” So she was offered her freedom: “Once when she confided in her mistress, she received the answer that Monsieur her uncle was waiting for her at the grille, and she was free to go and ask him to take her away.” But she could not bring herself to do this. Even so, at the ceremony of clothing her repugnance was so great that she could hardly bring herself to enter the church. “The Mother Assistant took her by the hand, saying: ‘You will take the veil, since you asked for it, and you can quit it later whenever you want.› In the event, Marie neither discarded the veil nor ceased to struggle. As the date of her profession approached and her agitation increased, her superior felt anxious enough about her state of mind to confer with a prominent Jesuit, Père Saint-Jure. His recommendation was, “Let her complete her sacrifice; it is what God wants.” And apparently the act of profession brought relief and a sense of liberation: “Prostrating herself on the ground, as though throwing herself at the feet of her conqueror,” she repeated the words of the psalmist, “You have broken my bonds, to you will I sacrifice all my life.” How can we categorize this decision? In the seventeenth century, people had no problem reconciling true freedom with total obedience. “Liberty lies not in doing what one wishes, but in wishing to do what one ought,” wrote Bossuet, who was tonsured at the age of eleven.81 According to this view of things, Marie was only acquiescing in God’s design for her. But the nuns themselves respected and remembered her agony, and recognized that her vocation was one built on fear.

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For all novices, willing or unwilling, solemn profession was a legal act, heralding a permanent change of state. Thousands of acts of profession have been preserved in the archives. Essentially, they are written repetitions of the vows made “aloud, with my mouth and all my heart” before community and family in the presence and “into the hands” of the superior or the bishop. These were the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, made under the Rule and under the authority of the bishop. To these vows, depending on her congregation, the woman added a fourth: “Never to consent to the abandonment of the instruction of young girls.”82 She then received her black veil. To symbolize her new state, she prostrated herself before the altar, and a funeral pall was laid over her while the Office of the Dead was recited. For all the direness of the liturgy, the solemn profession was an occasion for celebration. When Marie Dupuy professed in Blois, her father invited all her extended family “and ordered that the feast be prepared and the convent church decorated, and that the Reverend Père Baillet, preacher, be brought in for the ceremony.”83 Many young women made their vows amid similar demonstrations of family pride, as we can tell from the long lists of signatures appended to their acts. But others professed in total separation from their families, with only the celebrant and the community to witness their sacrifice. The occasion being passed, the newly professed nun returned to the novitiate for a further four years (or more) of training. Mère de Pommereu once remarked that it took seven years to make an Ursuline, and it certainly must have required a great deal of patience. However, her status was now changed. Her commitment was permanent, a fact symbolized by her black veil and newly cropped hair. She now took her place in the monastery’s order of seniority. For the rest of her life, in every formal list drawn up in the community, she would occupy the same position – after the sister whose profession had preceded hers, ahead of the sister whose profession followed.84 At the exact moment she “died to the world,” she became a full member of her religious community. She and it were now committed to each other for life – indeed, for eternity.

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11 “The Servants of the Brides of Christ” He that is down needs fear no fall, He that is low no pride. He that is humble ever shall Have God to be his guide. I am content with what I have, Little it be or much: And, Lord, contentment still I crave, Because Thou savest such. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress1

For historians, the least visible members of past religious communities are the converses, or lay sisters. More than any other religious women, they have slipped through the cracks of monastic history. There are practical reasons for this. Most of them entered religion without a dowry and therefore without the services of a notary, thus eluding one of our most important channels of information. Furthermore, they were subject from the outset to a deliberate act of abasement; the records of their entry and profession were usually drawn up without the personal details – parentage, place of origin, date of birth – which were normally given in the case of choir nuns. They came to the monastery as nobodies, “servants of the brides of Christ” rather than brides themselves, and this institutionalized unimportance tended to stay with them to their death. Historians have had to defer to the intentions of the original record makers, with the result that lay sisters have remained more or less ignored into our own times. Fortunately, the story does not end there. In the small closed society of the cloister, lay sisters played an important part. Their status might be low, but their contribution to the physical and, indeed, spiritual well-being of the community was invaluable, so they figured in the annales and death notices much more distinctly than they did in the official records. By combining the meagre information garnered from the latter with the anecdotes provided by the former, we can tease out a profile of sorts of these monastic servants as they laboured their way through the greater part of two hundred years.

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From the very beginning, years before they were cloistered, the teaching congregations depended on some of their members to keep house and make dinner while the others went off to work. We catch glimpses of these women in Fourier’s letters: tantes and veuves, hardworking women, often older and less educated than the young teaching sisters, but absolutely essential to the running of the community. The same sort of women worked among the first Ursulines. We have, for example, Soeur Madeleine, a fille âgée who served in the Paris and Lyon houses before ending up as a founding member of the Mâcon community. “Old though she was,” wrote the annalist, “she made the bread, did the washing and drew all the water that we used in the house for every purpose; … she did the cooking with the help of one of the novices, the garden being one of their constant occupations … and on top of all that she bought our provisions in the town and paid visits on behalf of the mothers to all our friends and benefactors.”2 In similar spirit, when Marguerite Arnaude sallied forth to do the community’s shopping, “it cost her innumerable fatigues. She would have gone for leagues along the road to get the best bargain.”3 There was a sort of motherliness about such women, which their eulogists freely acknowledged and appreciated. The annalist of Mâcon, remembering Soeur Madeleine, wrote: “We called her our mother and our nurse and we loved her as such.”4 With the coming of clausura, these women were turned into enclosed nuns, and their outdoor functions were handed over to another layer of servants: tourières, salaried employees who, since they took no solemn vows, were free to come and go between the community and the world outside. From then on, the lay sisters were bound as irrevocably as the choir nuns by the law of enclosure, and their duties became as circumscribed as their physical surroundings. Also with the coming of clausura, the teaching monasteries underwent a process of social stratification. Entry into the choir now depended on payment of a dowry. This dowry, in addition to supporting the woman for life and contributing something to the improvement of the house, had to help provide for the upkeep of the lay sisters.5 So women who had little or nothing to offer except their own strong arms represented a drain on the community’s finances; they were supported by the “paying” nuns, so to speak, and their presence could be justified only by the services they performed. The various rules drawn up for the new congregations stipulated that lay sisters must be admitted with caution and only as needed: “The number of converses will not normally exceed one-sixth of the number of sisters of the choir.”6 This ratio or a somewhat more generous one was generally observed in the

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seventeenth century. During those early years monasteries employed as few lay sisters as they could. It is interesting to note how the imposition of clausura formalized the structure of the communities: “Care must be taken that the monastery has all the officers that it needs, for on them depends good government.” So wrote Pierre Fourier – he who had previously fought so hard and long to keep his sisters free of the cloister.7 By his careful enumeration of a score of discrete offices, he was serving notice that whatever the women had been free to do before, different rules must apply now that they were cloistered. The monastic community was divided into formal jurisdictions and seniorities: the superior and her officers; the vocales, or senior nuns with a voice in the Chapter; the junior professed (but still voiceless) nuns; the novices; the postulants; and at the very bottom of the pyramid, the converses, or “sisters of the white veil,” those who “never have a voice in [the monastery’s] affairs, and are received only for service and for heavy labour.”8 In the strict precedence that reigned within the community, the senior converse came immediately after the junior choir novice. Lay sisters were domestic servants in an age that had clear ideas about the place of domestic servants. Cissie Fairchilds has pointed to the affinity between patriarchy and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation period. “In the seventeenth century patriarchy was not simply a theory of the way families and societies should function; it was a paradigm for all social organizations, political and religious as well as familial.”9 A household was “family” writ large, its head exercising all the rights and privileges of a father, its members – wives, children, servants – bound by obedience to but also enjoying the protection of the head. Thus, the female religious community was “patriarchal” in every respect except for its unsullied femininity,10 and the principles of authority and subordination were practised to perfection. Everyone had her place in life, and woe to her if she tried to step outside it. The humble status of the lay sisters was the will of God: “Let the converses take care not to lose the character of their condition, tending always towards the lowliest; otherwise they would wrong Him who, in the souls of His elect, has established diverse orders and functions … and would trouble all the order and economy of His adorable Providence.”11 Lay sisters were menials, and their status was designed to reflect the fact. They had no voice in community deliberations. They were not allowed to participate in the opus Dei, the recitation of Office which was traditionally the principal duty of monks and nuns; and they did not engage in the classroom instruction of children which was the raison d’être of the teaching congregations. In some communities (though not many) the Rule for bade them to learn to read or write “under pain of severe punishment.”12 In

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community gatherings, they were to stand at the back of the room, and while the choir nuns stitched and embroidered, they were to work their spindles as women of their station were expected to do.13 Their dress was of coarse fabric and straight-cut “so that they can be distinguished from the choir nuns.”14 Similarly, their veils were white rather than black in order to differentiate them from the “brides of Christ,” whose servants they were. It might be inferred that communities divided along such lines were cold unfriendly places and that the lay sisters caught up in such a system were the victims of discrimination and exploitation. But this would be to simplify a complex situation. Historians of domestic service in Old Regime France have remarked on its ambiguities. Patriarchy had its rewards and consolations, even for subordinates. At the most basic level, it offered them the certainty of food and shelter in an uncertain world. “They never have to care either about drink and food or about their clothing; these are problems for their masters,” wrote Vauban.15 For the many servants who had known true poverty, this must have been a real and lasting relief. Furthermore, the sense of belonging to “a house,” the intimacy with the master which close quarters made almost inevitable, and the gratification that came from identifying with that master could go a long way towards compensating for the loss of autonomy which domestic service entailed.16 All this could also be said about lay sisters. In return for accepting a condition of perpetual inferiority and an often crushing burden of work, they gained security and a sense of belonging to a community, together with the privileges and status which that entailed. In many ways they were better off than the typical female servant. They could not be dismissed; they would be cared for in sickness and honoured in death. Moreover, the worst dangers of domestic service – the sexual predations of the master and the caprices and tyrannies of masters or mistresses – were neutralized for them, the first for obvious reasons and the second because there was a system in place by which they could appeal beyond their superiors to the bishop.17 Finally, they were empowered by a second dimension in their lives; they belonged to a religion whose founder had promised that “many who are first will be last and the last, first.”18 This may not have affected the community’s everyday arrangements, but it must have been in the back of everyone’s mind. Cissie Fairchilds writes disparagingly of a “peculiar form of self-abnegation which passed for servant ‘devotion’ during the Old Regime.”19 In a world guided by amour-propre, this frame of mind would naturally appear most servile. But in convents, self-abnegation was a virtue to be prized, and those who achieved it, whatever their rank, were given high respect. It is not surprising, then, that a sizable number of lay sisters were raised by

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popular acclaim to unofficial sainthood and that their funerals became the scenes of almost hysterical devotion.20 Thus there was an ambiguity in the position of lay sister, which can be looked at partly in the light of Old Regime master-servant relationships and partly in the light of the gospel and the paradox it has always presented to the powerful of this world. “You may go dancing but I’ll play the tune,” said Figaro to his master; Susanna conspired with the countess to outwit the count. No lay sister would have practised such a reversal, but she might legitimately have repeated to herself the words, “He has routed the proud of heart, He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.”21 Certainly the nun who wrote her eulogy did not hesitate to make the point. A perfect example of this double identity can be found in Marie Le Grand, a converse in the Ursuline monastery of Blois from its earliest days until her death in 1653. The annales, which cover the period from 1621 to 1801, contain more than three hundred hand-written folio pages. Most of the death notices included therein take up two folio pages at most. The section entitled “Ce que nous avons remarqué et Sceu de la vie et des dispositions de ma Soeur Marie Le Grand … Converse de Notre Monastère de Ste Ursule de Blois” takes up twenty-five folio pages.22 This space is divided between an account of her life and a reproduction of her prayers and voluminous spiritual writings, copied out at a later date (1714) by some long-suffering sister. Why this singular attention? Clearly, this “servant of the brides of Christ” was considered by her community to be the right stuff for canonization. Marie was born in 1603 into a poor family, mercers by trade. After her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her life became a sad tale of abuse and neglect, severe enough to raise the concern of her neighbours. Her good luck – perhaps her salvation – came in the form of the porter at the local Capuchin convent, who took pity on her and taught her how to read and to pray. In spite of his kindness, her early years were marked by ill health (“infirmities resulting from pale colours,” according to the annales) and by depression almost to the point of suicide. In her twenties, still poor, and working without much success in her brother’s shop, she started to long for the monastic life: “She begged and pleaded with God to grant her a haven in some religious house.” Marie became acquainted with the Ursulines by chance, when she accompanied a group of young ladies on a pilgrimage to Saumur. On returning to Blois, she was accepted into the newly established community, first as a tourière, then – after much pleading – as a converse. Here her happiness began. “Although she was physically very delicate

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she carried her burdens as though they were a feather.” No penance was too hard for her: “When the mistress of novices set her to some exercise, it seems that her heart leaped with joy.” The waves of depression continued, but she appears now to have learned how to handle them. The virtue that characterized Marie, and perhaps first set her apart from others was a most stringent obedience. Shortly after her profession, she was ordered into quarantine with a pensionnaire suffering from the plague; without a word she gathered up the child, together with her bedding, and carried her into a “separate place.” She admitted later that she had been terrified that she would wake up alone in the presence of a corpse, but fortunately the child recovered. Soon after, another case of the plague necessitated another quarantine, and again it was Marie who was chosen for the duty. In all fairness, she might have asked, “Why me, again?” But her obedience was instantaneous as before. “She [would have] made no point of distinction, she [would have] had no point of view on what was ordered of her, even if she was told to throw herself in a well,” wrote the annalist. The sick woman died, but Marie survived to serve another twenty years in her community. What made her so striking, the annales seem to be telling us, was the excessive degree to which she pursued holiness. She habitually wore the oldest clothes, used the oldest pens and scraps of paper, and ate the most unattractive food. “She … drank out of a death’s head and looked every day for new instruments of penance.” When told by her superior that, for something she had done, she deserved to take the discipline in every corner of the house, she did exactly that – in three hundred corners, including those of the cellars! She undertook, as a measure of perfect chastity, never even to raise her eyes to the sisters’ faces. She wrote out her sins and then read them aloud to the community (an exercise which they may not have appreciated!). As she grew older her behaviour became more eccentric. For four years before her death she was subject to convulsions, and when she felt them coming on, she kept them at bay by shouting out her prayers so loudly and so continuously that an important churchman was called in along with her confessor to order her to be silent. She obeyed at once, but when the priest saw what this cost her he relented and allowed her to continue, and “went away edified.” During her last illness, which coincided with the Fronde, when she heard that sacrileges were being committed locally by soldiers, she pleaded to be allowed to make amende honorable, bare-headed, wearing the white robe and carrying the noose around her neck as though she herself were a criminal. This

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was denied her, but she was permitted to lead the community in a formal procession of atonement – an extraordinary privilege for a simple lay sister, even one who was at death’s door. It might be thought that Marie Le Grand was far too radical for her community’s comfort, that her way of life was an embarrassment to them. Yet during all her working years, she served in the pensionnat almost without a break, and the girls loved her. Far from confining herself to their physical needs, as a lay sister was expected to do, Marie was in constant interaction with the girls – talking, exhorting, singing. She composed numerous plays and concerts in which they were allowed to perform, and she made them walk in processions with crowns of flowers on their heads. The greatest punishment that the mistress of pensionnaires could give the children, according to the annalist, was to deprive them of these activities. So valued was Marie that whenever the superior tried to assign her to other duties, the mistresses would plead to have her back. When she finally became too ill to care for her pensionnaires, they were allowed to come to visit her in the infirmary until the day when “she kissed them all and told them this was the last time she would be with them.” “As soon as she was dead, everyone both inside and outside our monastery proclaimed her a saint.” Crowds came to view Marie’s body and to touch it with medals and rosaries. In one of the more macabre gestures that we occasionally witness among Old Regime nuns, several sisters kissed her on the lips – something they would never have done when she was alive – and reported that they smelled no unpleasant odour, even though her breath during life had been “somewhat strong.” Whatever the community’s hopes at the time, Soeur Marie Le Grand was never canonized. But the signal honour which she was paid in the annales – far surpassing that given to even the most respected superiors – is proof that in the community’s memory, sanctity could outweigh rank as a mark of distinction. But it also emphasizes how that sanctity had to be acquired. Marie may not have been typical of the run-of-themill converses, but she practised in a special way the virtues to which they were expected to aspire: obedience, humility, poverty, laboriousness, and a kind of simple, unconditional faith which, in the religious mind, outshone all the wisdom of the world. These virtues may have been available to choir nuns as well, but they were the special attributes of converses. It was for this reason that certain serious seekers after holiness, such as Barbe Acarie, opted to live in that condition. While holiness might be the end product of a lay sister’s life, it was not one of the preconditions. According to the Rule, the most important qualifications for the job were “an even spirit and a robust body,”23

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for the workload was heavy and the life hard. The suitability of pretendants was supposed to be measured by their docility and stamina. No matter how spiritual they were, if they balked at hard work or were not strong enough, they were to be asked to leave. By and large, they met the challenge, if their average age at death (over sixty-two years) is anything to go by.24 The ideal candidate for the position was a countrywoman from a village or small town. The occasional records that give place of origin suggest that most lay sisters did indeed fit this description. In the Ursuline monastery of Lille, for instance, of the forty-seven converses who professed between 1627 and 1772, only seven were natives of the city, while twenty-seven came from villages nearby, and the rest from small towns.25 In this they resembled the eighteenth-century servant populations of Bordeaux and Toulouse, as studied by Cissie Fairchilds.26 There was a high proportion of country people among servants because the elites considered them hard-working and unspoilt: “They mostly are content to have bread to eat and clothing to wear, whereas in the cities … the men of this condition are almost all drunkards and the women prefer to buy fripperies to adorn themselves rather than cloth to dress their children.”27 In one way, however, lay sisters differed from the servant women of “the world.” Most female servants, according to Fairchilds, got their first job in their mid-to-late teens.28 This was the average age, coincidentally, at which choir nuns entered religion. But not lay sisters. By and large they came later, in their mid-twenties.29 Given their modest backgrounds, this means that they almost certainly had several years of work experience behind them. The move to the monastery was often a job promotion, as can be seen from the number of tourières and “outside servants” who ended up as converses. The position was quite a plum for the women, as long as they were resigned to remaining celibate. For its part, the monastery enjoyed a certain luxury of choice. For one thing, in addition to its own ex-servants, it could target servants of friends or women who had once been pupils in its externe school, whose behaviour and skills were therefore known quantities. So, at entry, the ideal lay sister was a strong, healthy countrywoman in her twenties, with “an advantageous build and an apparently robust temperament, joined to a great gentleness.”30 Her intellect did not matter. She could be very simple, like Marguerite Trumel, who, when asked what the gravest sin in her life had been, confessed with tears that she had beaten her cows in anger; or Marie Testuat, who had been raised in the country and “when she was brought to the city and asked if she thought it beautiful, answered that all the houses had prevented her from seeing it.”31

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The new lay sister might be illiterate. Although illiteracy does not appear to have been the rule, it was not considered a disqualification. Marie Wyart, according to her death notice, “had in the world been lacking in all human knowledge, but in a short time she became learned in the wisdom which is taught in the school of Divine Love.”32 As Marie Le Grand (herself a practised writer) put it, “She who would be wise need read only one book, which is Jesus Christ.”33 There were plenty of opportunities for the practice of domestic skills in the monastery and plenty of spiritual exercises for those who could not read. The important thing was to be healthy. It was her “good and vigorous constitution” that mattered most in a converse. But whatever the theoretical standards set down for lay sisters, the fact is that some of them did not fit that pattern. And the disconnection between the nature of the service and the character of this minority may be one of the reasons why, over time, the nature of the service was subtly altered. Some women became lay sisters in spite of, not because of, their health, upbringing, and social background. One reason already mentioned – the desire for self-abnegation (as in the case of Madame Acarie, who became a Carmelite lay sister) – was probably fairly unusual.34 A more likely reason was that somehow they felt incapable of, or uncomfortable with, the duties of the choir and the schools. Marie Ethienette de la Rouge Foucaut, a girl of noble parentage, first entered religion as a lay sister in 1680; eight years later, having developed the necessary skills, she decided (or was allowed) to take the fourth vow and teach – and was raised to the choir.35 The death notices rarely say so, but it seems certain that some, like Marie Testuat, were simple-minded. Her father was a benefactor, and she had been received as a choir nun, “but shortly before her profession it was decided that she was more suited to be a converse … she was extremely slow-witted.” Or they might be temperamentally unsuited. Louise Villeret, whose father was in the legal profession, seems to have had a difficult temper and restless spirit; in any case, she adamantly refused to be raised to the choir, choosing instead to pass her life in physical labours that relieved her of her excessive energy. In exactly the same way, Marie Gachet, whose father, a wholesale silk merchant, “could easily have given her a dowry,” insisted on becoming a lay sister. “Her weakness was to be naturally somewhat attached to her own judgment; this made it necessary to keep her almost constantly busy with her baking, to practise her submission and her obedience.”36 Other women came into the monastery with specific skills. If they were trained apothecaries, they could almost have their choice of mon-

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asteries, so highly were they prized; and it seems that they could be assured from the beginning that they would not be transferred to other tasks. Magdelaine Roger of Bordeaux, who was “of a very good family of this city,” entered religion specifically to be an apothecary; Jeanne Piquenot of Vernon did the same: “[Her father] hopes that in exercising her skills in surgery and pharmacy she will repay the community.”37 In Toulouse, Françoise Poullaille exercised the same charge from the time she was professed until her death, as did Marie Vattier in Le Havre – which suggests that they, also, had been given some sort of understanding.38 Naturally, women had an advantage if they could offer a skill that the monastery lacked. Jeanne Andoui, according to her eulogist, “was received into our house to be employed as a shoemaker.”39 When Marie Bignon entered religion at the age of fifty-nine, it was on the understanding that she would be asked only to sew.40 Some of these women could have qualified for the choir, for instance, Magdelaine Rollant, a converse-infirmarian in the Ursuline house in Amiens, whose family – illustrious but poor – secured for her the promise of a choir position in another monastery.41 But Magdelaine preferred to remain as a lay sister, plying a trade that earned her some respect; others probably did likewise. The women’s previously acquired skills set them apart from the other converses and moderated the shock of entry into what was essentially a servile and laborious sisterhood. But how did this affect the spirit that was supposed to bind this group together? These entrants did not have to meet all the criteria of the Rule; in particular, their delicate health might induce their new superiors to make special arrangements for them.42 Dispensed from the heavy work of the monastery, they formed a sort of labouring aristocracy. Like servants in the larger households in “the world,” the “servants of the brides of Christ” divided into ranks among themselves. But the factor which more than anything else distorted the original symmetry of the Rule was money – or rather, lack of it. It was often the dowry requirement rather than rank or education that divided “servants” from “brides.” Without a dowry, a woman was almost certainly destined for the lay condition. With a dowry, she was automatically considered for the choir. The annales of Blois provide simultaneous examples of both situations. In 1632 Marie Duchemin was received “in the quality of a choir nun.” But before she was professed, her sister, who had pledged to pay her dowry, reneged on the commitment, and Marie found that her only choice, other than leaving, was to become a converse. And at the same time, Françoise Bercerolle, who had been serving as a tourière with no hope of entering the choir, learned that her

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brother’s death on the battlefield had left her with a legacy and hence a dowry – and therefore a stall in the choir.43 Two women of similar social background thus found their roles reversed for dowry considerations. The records show that a sizable number of lay sisters owed their situation to their families’ poverty. Oudart Coquault, never a friend to religious houses, described the process: If a girl of good family is a minor with little fortune, she will not find anyone to marry in keeping with her station. To make this poor girl give in, her relatives and people speaking for the convent represent to her young mind the problems of marriage … They persuade her that in religion she will find salvation; she listens to that. But there is not enough money to be a choir nun; that requires seven or eight thousand livres. They make her resolve to be a converse, that is to say, a servant of Mesdames, to cook their dinner.44

Certainly, the link between a family’s financial difficulties and the settlement of its daughter(s) as lay sister(s) was often pointed to in the records. Jeanne Serpe, said her eulogist, belonged to one of the best families of Beauvais and was close to an engagement in the world when her father went bankrupt. There was nothing for her to do but become a lay sister. Jeanne de Calvid “was born noble and of quality,” but “the goods of this family did not respond to their extraction.” Marie Hachin came from “a very good family,” but her father’s fortune was “insufficient to establish all his children as advantageously as he would have wished.” Anne Benoist, also “of very good family” but an orphan, was almost forced upon the Ursulines of Blois by her relatives, “who begged us to admit her to the exercises of a lay sister.” Sent away because of her difficult humour and then readmitted (under what pressure?), she proved to be too delicate to perform the standard domestic service and so was put to sewing.45 This practice continued through the eighteenth century. Madame Roland in her recollections of her one year (1767–68) spent in the pensionnat of the Congrégation in Paris tells of a young converse, Angélique Bouflers, who became her friend. “The lack of a dowry had placed her among the lay sisters, with whom she had nothing in common except their arduous exercises.”46 Finally, we should mention the name of Marie-Anne Depeyre, daughter of a ruined nobleman, who for lack of a sufficient dowry entered the monastery of Carpentras as a converse, was arrested in 1794, and executed by the Commission populaire of Orange for having expressed, in public, “the culpable wish for a return to royalty, fanaticism, and counter-revolution.”47 The line, then, between choir nuns and converses, at least where their upbringing was concerned, was much more indefinite than the Rule

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had anticipated. In terms of social background, we can visualize the monastic community as something of a continuum, with aristocrats at one end and true plebians at the other, and with a sort of jumble through the middle ranks. Some lay sisters equalled and perhaps even outranked their sisters in the choir, in both birth and ability. Occasionally, if there was need, they were raised to the choir, and there were even cases where lay sisters who had become choir nuns went on to be superiors.48 The mistress-servant relationship, though sanctioned and sanctified by their original vows, must sometimes have been a little strained. Another factor contributing to the blurring of the community caste system was the practice, within the house, of sharing in the converses’ workload. The work assigned to the lay sisters was “the care of all the farmyard, the housekeeping, and the heavy labour of the house.”49 It is worth remembering what “the housekeeping” involved in the seventeenth century. Some houses had water piped in; others did not. One way or another, water had to be provided and, where necessary, heated. There was, of course, no public sewage system; the lieux réguliers had to be emptied out by hand. Heating and cooking required that fireplaces be cleaned and that coal or wood be carried in from outside. Floors had to be swept and scrubbed, furniture dusted, and “spider webs cleaned out from time to time.”50 Although all the sisters were expected to take care of their own cells, the pensionnaires had to be served: their beds made, their fires laid, their clothes mended, and their wash basins and chamber pots scoured. The little ones had to be dressed in the morning and attended to during the night.51 In the infirmary, invalid nuns required more or less care according to their condition, and the death notices describe situations in which nursing must have required the most intense effort. Apart from the actual nursing, laundry had to be sorted and special food prepared, and sick rooms and invalid vessels had to be kept clean. As well, the Rule ordained that twice a year at least, all infirmary beds had to be taken apart and cleaned.52 In the bakehouse, the yeast had to be prepared and the flour sieved, then the bread kneaded, set to rise, and finally put into the oven (which, of course, had first to be fired up).53 From the kitchen there had to come two meals a day for the whole community: soup, boiled and roast meat or fish, and dessert.54 There was fruit to be conserved, vegetables to be cleaned, pot herbs to be prepared and dried. In the refectory, tables had to be set and bread and wine served out in advance; and the hot dishes had to be carried out in the course of the meal, with washing up to follow. “Bowls, spoons, salt-cellars, cups, knives and forks [had to be] washed and scoured every fortnight, and

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rinsed and dried with a clean cloth at least once a week.”55 The garden had to be planted and cultivated;56 the herbs, fruit, and vegetables picked, cleaned, and delivered to the kitchen or the pharmacy.57 In the basse-court, or farmyard, the cows (if there were any) had to be milked, the pigs and chickens tended, the byres and pens cleaned out. The laundry was a huge undertaking, starting early in the morning and lasting through the day. From each sister came two chemises, two veils, two caps, and two wimples per week, plus aprons, stockings, nightcaps, and handkerchiefs58 – and, we must remember, their menstrual cloths as well as all the soiled linen of the infirmary. Their woollen outer habits were cleaned twice a year. Sheets were changed every month, tablecloths every fortnight, napkins every week, community hand towels two or three times a week.59 The wet wash was strung out in the garden or stretched out in the attic.60 Once clean, the linen had to be pressed, sorted, mended, and stored, then handed out according to regulations – “which is heavy work in a community as numerous as ours,” wrote one eulogist.61 These were all day-to-day tasks. In times of special need, extra labour might be required. A monastery’s natural instinct was to avoid extra expense whenever possible, and if any sister was capable of doing the job, she was likely to be recruited. When the grand couvent got the chance to bring city water into the house, it was a lay sister who laid the pipe. When the monastery of Montargis bought an adjacent house in 1681 and decided to incorporate it into the cloister, it was a lay sister who reworked the masonry, closing up the windows overlooking the street and making new windows on the inside, edged with brick, which were “as well measured as an experienced mason could have made them.”62 On all sorts of occasions like these, by undertaking tasks traditionally reserved to men, lay sisters were able, as one eulogist put it, “to spare us the entry of workmen.”63 This, it would seem, was a herculean mountain of tasks for the one in six nuns (or so) who were officially designated as servants of the monastery. Too herculean, in fact. Every community found some way to supplement the labour force. Help came from inside the community, from the ranks of the choir. It was always the practice for the junior nuns and the novices to work with the converses; it was considered part of their formation. The records tell us that this heavy labour often came as a shock to the girls, some of whom had never done housework in their lives; indeed, parents were known to complain that their novice daughters were being used as servants. Older choir nuns also crossed the demarcation line to work with the lay sisters, either for reasons of humility or obedience or because they thrived on the physical labour. Anne Herbelin asked to be relieved of the duties of the

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Chapter “because she does not have a good enough mind to manage affairs.” Instead, she rang the bells, carried lamps to the sisters’ cells during winter, ironed the wimples, and helped with sweeping and dishwashing where needed. Similarly, Marguerite Le Clerc expended some of her energy in helping with the laundry: “One wash day we decided to watch her, and we counted thirty-three loads of laundry that she carried up to the attic.” Likewise, Jeanne Guenichot “gladly took part in the most arduous tasks with our converse sisters.”64 At the same time, some of the heavier work was being turned over to nonmonastic servants. In many instances, the records attest to the existence of these extra servants: scullery and basse-court maids, washerwomen, and the occasional male gardener or valet. If the workload exceeded the sisters’ capacity and if the house had money for wages, this was an option, even though it detracted from the self-sufficiency that was a monastery’s pride. On the whole, the work delegated to these servants was the heaviest work of the monastery. The lay sisters kept the middle-duty tasks – and at the same time edged up into new areas of responsibility. According to the original conception of the rules, almost none of the lay sisters’ tasks was supposed to be in their hands alone. Almost without exception, choir nuns were to be put in charge, with the converses in the role of assistants. In the sacristy, infirmary, pharmacy, linen room, bakehouse, kitchen, refectory, garden, and so on – in virtually every department of domestic activity – choir nuns were expected to be the decision makers, the managers, and the experts. Take, for instance, the responsibilies of the cellarer, the officer in charge of the stores and the kitchen: She has the duty to watch over the sisters who prepare the food, and to have the servings [for the community] made according to the quality and quantity prescribed, and [to ensure that] all is ready in time, and with suitable cleanliness and neatness … [Let her avoid making difficulty for the converses] by failing to tell them clearly, in good time and distinctly, what they must do, and to give them what they need to execute it; or by telling them one thing and then another … [Let her] support with patience and kindness their faults and forgetfulness, their sulkiness and bad humour if these occur … carrying them along by her good example, and by the help which she herself will give them if needs be.65

Here was a model of subordination – softened by forbearance and charity, but subordination nonetheless. Here were personality types: sturdy, simple, hard-working women, used to service but in need of direction – the very kind of servants that the rules had envisaged.

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But the rules had been written in the early seventeenth century, when choir nuns were easily come by and the class differential between choir nuns and converses was clearly marked. With time and the changing needs of communities, the model came to be altered. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the great glut of choir nuns which had marked the years of the Catholic Reformation began to drain away. This had a dramatic effect on monastic economies. Far from having to find work for their choir nuns to do, communities now had to scramble to find choir nuns to do the work. Certain duties – the principal charges of the monastery, the recitation of Office, and all branches of teaching – remained within the purview of the choir. But with their numbers continuing to drop, they were forced to use their available talent more economically. In the domestic arena where the work had previously been shared, lay sisters began to take over. Here and there, depending on their abilities, lay sisters became infirmarians, gardeners, linen-room managers, refectorians and so on. They took over the kitchen and the bakehouse – and proved that they could manage their own responsibilities. Something else changed as well. New activities began to absorb the energies of the nuns, and these activities were as suitable for lay sisters as for choir nuns. As the eighteenth century progressed and as entries into the choir became rarer, communities had to find ways to supplement the dowries they no longer received. One obvious way was by making consumer goods. In their kitchens and pharmacies, they turned out sweets and medications for sale. Their community rooms became workshops where the sisters spent long hours on their ouvrages – even, if necessary, curtailing their prayer and study time. Their products ranged from refined works such as church vestments and linens to such mundane items as knitted-to-order stockings.66 The money thus made could be very important to a monastery’s economy. In the death notices, those women – converses or choir nuns – who excelled at ouvrages were singled out, and the reader is left in no doubt that their contribution to their community was as essential as any other. But the great money raiser was the pensionnat. From the late seventeenth century, monastic pensionnats began to change and expand to meet the demands of the public and also the Crown. Once almost entirely dedicated to schoolchildren, they now became retirement homes, hotels, and sometimes prisons for all varieties of women.67 What the nuns thought of this was not important; they entered into the business out of obedience to authority and because it enabled them to augment their income considerably – which, in the critical years of the eighteenth century, was what mattered most.

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We can see the consequences of this in the changing composition of communities. The labour required to maintain these adult pensionnats (where no teaching was required) was converse labour, not choir nun labour. In houses where such pensionnats were established, lay sisters ceased to be a drain on the economy and became an asset. Their numbers remained constant and sometimes even rose, compensating to some degree for the decline in the number of choir nuns.68 This must only have accentuated a transformation that was already taking place: the déclassement of the monastic population. As described in part 1, in the eighteenth century the elites largely walked away from the religious institutions which their forebears had created. At the same time, women of the lower ranks of society – the honorables and honnêtes – were finding their way in force into the religious life. Most of them joined the new secular and uncloistered congregations, of which the Filles de la Charité were the most famous. Here, they achieved an influence and respect and a pedagogical reputation that may well have rivalled that of the older teaching orders. “[They] have the same objectives as the Ursulines and, by diverting both subjects and students at a furious rate, are building themselves at [our] expense and to [our] detriment,” wrote a grumpy Ursuline superior in 1745.69 If the older institutions hoped to compete, they had to show a friendly face to these women of lesser quality. The less exclusive monasteries lowered their dowry requirements and welcomed women whom, a century earlier, they would have spurned. In 1790 the social difference between choir nuns and lay sisters, and their monetary value to the community, was much less marked than it had been in 1690. Although we have no evidence for it, we may surmise that this, and the need to cooperate in order to get through the daily workload, led to a mellowing of the old hierarchical practices. The change must not be exaggerated, however. Like the generations that had gone before them, the lay sisters of 1790 were excluded from teaching, from the recitation of Office, and from the deliberations of the Chapter. Their canonical status remained the same, and as such it was an affront to the Revolution’s principles of equality. One of the moves that the National Assembly made in 1790 was meant to reform this by giving them a vote in the upcoming monastic elections (a privilege which the lay sisters almost always rejected). Their inferiority followed them to the end. When the Church’s goods were confiscated and the Nation became the paymaster of all monks and nuns, it was the Nation that decreed that converses’ pensions should be exactly half those of choir nuns.

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12 Of Death and Dying

When a man is dead to himself, the death of the body is no more than the consummation of the work of grace. François de Salignac Fénelon1

By her very state, every nun was “dead to herself.” Her earthly life was gathered up and placed on the altar and immolated, consumed completely, with nothing left over. This is the message implicit in the ritual of solemn monastic profession. The newly professed nun prostrates herself on the ground, and the funeral pall is draped over her body. “Here will I rest for all eternity,”2 she states. The monastery church in which she makes her vows will almost certainly one day witness her committal to the earth. In a sense her physical death, whenever it arrives, will be only the final crowning of her martyrdom. Death is not just the termination of life; it is its consummation, the end towards which everything else has been directed. However, no matter how virtuous her life, the hour of death is a time fraught with danger, because at that moment the nun is still vulnerable – and perhaps especially so – to the lures of Satan. As Philippe Ariès describes it, the deathbed is the scene of a monumental battle: “Supernatural beings have invaded the chamber and cluster about the bed of the recumbent figure, the ‘gisant.’ On one side are the Trinity, the Virgin, and the celestial court; on the other, Satan and a monstrous army of demons.”3 The ritual of anointing and the prayers of those gathered around are manoeuvres in this battle. The “last agony” is the climactic act of a baroque morality play about good and evil, temptation and triumph. And nowhere is this drama played out with more virtuosity than at the deathbed of religious women. Innumerable descriptions of deathbeds have come down to us from the nuns themselves. In the surviving necrologies, or death notices,

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the events are amply described. When a death was imminent a timehonoured ritual began. The priest was called in to hear the dying woman’s confession and to give her Holy Communion if she was still conscious and capable of receiving, or at the very least, to anoint her. The community assembled around her bed to keep vigil, to sustain and encourage her with their prayers. For her part, the dying woman would do her best to maintain herself in faith and resignation. In a gently consoling phrase, Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, wrote that a recently deceased sister “went straight from her bed to heaven.”4 The authors of the necrologies did not write so confidently, but they did love to dwell on the final whisper, the eyes fixed on the crucifix, the hands joined in prayer. It is hardly surprising that women consciously tried to fulfil these expectations, as did Madeleine de Meulle, for instance, dying at the age of twentyeight: “As her sister, close by her, burst into tears, she said, ‘Sister, let me die courageously,’ and, lifting herself on her bed, took up the posture in which she wished to die.”5 Did the ceremonies around the deathbed soften the fear of dying? Or did they sharpen it by adding a metaphysical dimension? It is impossible to say. One authority on convent life, Geneviève BaudetDrillat, believes that the communities she studied took death in their stride as the logical ending to life.6 Another, Georges Minois, concurs: “All conventual life was directed towards this end and seems to have been no more than a preparation for it.”7 Another, Philippe Loupès, goes further: “Death was … in general, desired; and its coming was often accelerated in a context of baroque exaltation by growing mortifications. But it was sometimes experienced slowly, with a sort of delectation.”8 Are these conclusions altogether convincing? Was this how real, living women experienced death, or may we suspect a certain seasoning of the facts by the eulogists, the better to edify their readers? Interestingly enough, the notices, our source for a host of death scenes, offer a mix of evidence. Certainly they tell of many women who met their death calmly: “Death caused her no fear, she had made herself familiar with it all through her life.”9 These women received their reward: “Death arrived with great gentleness” … “She passed away in an admirable gentleness … This precious death was only the echo of her good and holy life.”10 Sometimes the necrologies even add a note of comfort. Jeanne du Bourbet, when she felt death approaching, turned to her superior and said with a smile, “It is time to leave this world and go to sing Alleluia in Paradise.” Marthe de Langlée, who died during her term as superior, “before death … cast a glance over all the community, and gave a little smile.” Guijonne Hacou asked for

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her prayer book, put on her spectacles, and did a half-hour of preparation for death, after which “the death-sweat overtook her, her face changed noticeably, she took her handkerchief and wiped her face, and asked for Monsieur our confessor.” Less typically but with a certain charm, Catherine Chrétien found the prayerful scene around her too distracting: “As we kept on suggesting acts suitable for this last passage, she said to us: ‘Leave me alone with my God.›11 The eulogists loved these familiar touches, which showed their subjects both human and unafraid. On the other hand, they were also ready to admit that death was the subject of anxiety and distress for many religious women. Louise Vallette “had in a strange way feared death all her life.” As for Marie Ursule d’Oizelley, “the fears of death … were very strong in her.” Agnez le Duc, after a long and successful religious life, suffered for two years from “anxieties, scruples, and fears of death.” Elisabeth de l’Ostelneau felt such terror of death that the very sight of preparations for her anointing threw her into a panic.12 To all appearances, their anxiety was fuelled by more than the physical fact of dying. Death by itself is frightening enough; death followed by the final judgment must have been infinitely more frightening. In those times, it was common belief that no one except baptised babies had the right to expect easy passage through the gates of heaven – certainly not nuns, who as consecrated women bore an extra responsibility for their own sinfulness. Fourier’s expression of confidence is not typical of the religious literature of the Catholic Reformation. For those who listened attentively to the message of the teaching church, sinfulness and punishment were huge obsessions. One might think that nuns had earned the right to a peaceful conscience, but this was far from the case. “I saw that I merited hell,” wrote Marie Guyart, Ursuline of Québec, “and that the justice of God would be served by casting me into its abyss.”13 The monastic life did nothing to dispel anxiety; indeed, its pedagogy was designed to sharpen the consciousness of sin and the fear of judgment.14 In many instances, the women’s anxiety was expressed in terms of the second fear, that of God’s wrath. Marie Françoise Proboist “was very fearful of the judgments of God.” Marie Anne Gohin had “a lifelong, extreme apprehension of death and the judgments of God.” Angélique de Bailleul suffered “great interior pains, fear of the judgments of God.” Marie Descluseaux spent her declining years in terror: “She envisaged God as a fearful judge with vengeance in His hand [ready] to punish her mercilessly for the scandal she believed she had given to the community.” As for Marie-Anne Dufourd, “the fear of

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God’s judgments filled her with terror; despite frequent confessions, the memory of a life entirely employed in the service of the Lord, and the assurance her confessors gave her that God looked kindly on her, in spite of all this … she was always in a state of fear.”15 However, the story was never allowed to end there. The purpose of the necrologies was to edify their readers. If they chose to discuss the fear of death, it was in order to signal the benevolence of God, who took away this fear in the end. “Peace at the last” has always been the prayer of Christians.16 Almost universally, if the eulogists are to be believed, these dying nuns were granted it. Sometimes God took away their consciousness so as to relieve them of their terror. But in a remarkably high number of cases they remained alert to the last moment, and virtually never were they said to have died in a state of fear.17 That final triumph gave dignity to all the previous fear. Dorothée de Luc must have offered encouragement to a number of her sisters when she remarked that she had always been afraid of death but that now, on her deathbed, she “would be quite annoyed not to die.”18 The other aspect of death was bereavement. Madame Drillat sees this also as being attenuated by the training and ethos of religious life: “A death did not arouse a great deal of emotion.”19 Or, as one eulogist put it, “There ought to be moderation in weeping for the dead who enjoy eternal rest.”20 But here again, other death notices raise doubts. The conventionally pious phrases come first, it is true. But after them come numerous allusions to the real human distress of the people left behind: “The death of our dear sister has plunged us into the profoundest bitterness” … “General consternation, and the tears of her sisters, announced her death, each regretting her as if she had lost her own mother.”21 Phrases like these occur time and again, and they should come as no surprise. First, it must be remembered that the female monastery was often home to family groups of sisters, aunts, and nieces. The loss of a relative was considered sufficient reason for deep grieving. In his memoirs Jean Maillefer, bourgeois of Reims, described his daughter’s desolation at her aunt’s death in the monastery: “My daughter the nun is inconsolable; she loved her; she was holding her hand when she died.”22 The loss of a relative could lead to nervous prostration, physical collapse, and even death – as in the case of Elisabeth de Rapin, who was felled by a stroke the day after her sister’s demise.23 Over and over, family grieving was openly acknowledged: “She leaves behind her a dear sister who is deeply afflicted by the loss she has just experienced” … “Her three nieces are in pain for the loss they have suffered” … “Her dear niece whom we have as a religious … is inconsolable.”24 Frequently

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the superior herself, who was supposed to write the letter, was unable to do so because as a relative of the deceased she was too overcome – as one letter put it – “with good reason, by an unequalled affliction.”25 “This is how this dear child has taken leave of us,” wrote one eulogist, adding that Reverend Mother, the dead girl’s aunt, is in consternation and incapable of writing herself.26 There seems to have been no shame in this surrender to grief. Bereavement was not only a family affair. Many a necrology paid homage to a friendship that had been “tender, constant, generous, disinterested.”27 “I have lost … a true friend,” wrote one superior. Another, reporting the death of her friend, confessed: “I have lost everything in losing her; in my infirmities and at my advanced age, there is no service that she did not render me.”28 It was acceptable for women to wish to be linked in death as they had been linked in life. Anne de Mestres was thought to have died of grief at the loss of another sister: “The tender and sincere love she felt for her made her shed so many tears, and filled her heart with an affliction so bitter, that seemingly it was from this that there came an inflammation of the chest, which took her from us in a few days.”29 When an old nun died in Toulouse, and another followed her within days, the eulogist remarked: “They were bound in a friendship so close that the former often prayed to God that she would not survive the latter.”30 For the aged, living in such closed and close circles, the death of a lifelong companion must have been an irreparable loss. The death of the young brought distress of a different order: the endangering of the community’s future. A poignant illustration of this can be found in a string of letters from the superior of the Filles de Notre-Dame in Narbonne. The first, written in 1726, reported the death from consumption of a nun of twenty-five. She was followed a year later by a thirty-six year old, and a year after that by a twenty-one year old. Then in 1731 her younger sister also died: “When she reached the same age as her dear older sister … she was attacked by the same malady.” With each death, the superior’s tone had become more anxious, and now she openly mourned “both for the death of this dear girl and for the others who preceded her, who were all young subjects of great promise.” But the community’s troubles were not over yet. In 1732 and 1733 came two more young deaths; in 1735 another; in 1737 another two, and in 1739 and 1742 two more. The average age of the eleven deceased nuns was 28 12 .31 To imagine how the loss of these young women touched the Narbonne community, we can look at another community similarly affected exactly a hundred years earlier, when a cluster of young deaths at Eymoutiers caused so much alarm that there were no new entries for several years.32 —

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th e c e re m on i e s of d e ath After death came the laying-out, the funeral, and the interment in the monastery’s cemetery. This was a major event conducted with dignity and honour. The dead sisters, professed or novices, will be carried into the choir by their peers, with their face uncovered, with their habit and veil of religion, a crown of flowers on their head, holding a wooden cross, and their vows held in their joined hands, if they have made their profession … There will be six burning candles around the coffin, and six sisters who will stand guard on the body … When the sign is given to commence the office of interment all the sisters will be present in the choir in their great veils, with lit white candles in their hands.33

These last honours were payment owing, so to speak, to the woman whose sacrifice had just been perfected. For the more distinguished, there was the local equivalent of a state funeral, with all the notables of the town attending, “an incredible gathering of all the people of distinction in this city.”34 For nuns who had achieved the reputation of sainthood, there were often touching manifestations of affection from their students and from the poor. When Marie de Pluvinel was laid out in the chapel of the Ursulines of Saint-Marcellin, “everybody came from everywhere to touch her body with medals and rosaries.” The same tribute was paid to Catherine de Chevalier, who had been a nun for forty-nine years in the town of Salers: “At her burial there was a great crowd of people, who proclaimed her a saint; over and over again we had to give away pieces of her choir mantle and to touch her body with rosaries.” In Montargis, at the funeral of Marie Houre, a simple Ursuline lay sister, “there was reason to fear that all the poor of the town who revered her as a saint might break down our grille to get hold of her relics.”35 Burial took place either in the church or in the sisters’ cemetery within the monastery walls. The privilege of being buried in the monastery, and in the monastic habit, was coveted by many devout laywomen; sometimes, in return for their devotion or generosity, they were accorded this privilege. Finally, word of the death went out to other monasteries of the order “so that they might pray and have prayers said for the soul of the deceased.”36 But the notices were intended to do more than elicit prayers; they were also meant to be read to the community so that those who read them would be “moved … to imitate their virtues and to praise

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God who has taken for Himself the hearts of such a great number of virgins.”37 The dead sisters joined a kind of court of honour to which their successors could have constant recourse.

religious women and sickness However honourably the Grim Reaper was treated when he arrived, it does not follow that he was welcomed in. Monasteries of the Old Regime yielded to no one in their efforts to cure their sick. They built special infirmaries which they staffed with senior members of the community; they maintained pharmacies whenever possible; and they called in doctors, surgeons, and specialists as needed. On occasion, they sent their sick members out for treatment elsewhere.38 The medical care of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was of doubtful value, but to all appearances, nuns enjoyed as much of it as anyone else. This made for some ambivalence in their approach to suffering. The monastic rules gave mixed advice: “Sickness is a state of penance,” which the sisters should bear willingly, “as satisfaction for their infidelities and ingratitudes” and in conformity with “the suffering Christ.” So they should not pamper themselves.39 On the other hand, they were expected to do everything necessary to remain healthy:40 “If anyone is sick and requires care, it must not be deferred but given to her without demur as soon as possible, following the advice of the doctor; if she does not respond of her own accord, the superior will order her to do what she must to regain her health.”41 The community was warned that God would be offended if its sick members suffered needlessly: “He considers all the good and all the harm done to them as if it were done to Himself … Among all the works of mercy, there is none more agreeable to Him … than that of assisting, treating and consoling the sick.”42 So the rules were open to interpretation, and the degree of suffering that was acceptable remained a matter for individual judgment. It appears that the refusal of medicines was permitted but unusual, and “all the more rare in even the most virtuous persons because they can ask for them without guilt.”43 The records indicate that the rules were often interpreted generously, and that from time to time women were allowed to leave their convents for weeks, months, and even years to breathe their air natal, receive specialized medical treatment,44 or take the cure at one spa or another.45 However, the favourite models of monastic life were the stoical women who bore or even hid their ailments so that they could continue working, fasting, and observing community practices.

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The necrologies sang their praises. There was Catherine de la Massuère, for instance, who lived with her cancer for twenty-five years: “She had promised the Divine Majesty to seek neither relief through remedies nor consolation from other creatures.” Gilberte Nicaud, suffering the agonies of colera morbus, had “the courage to remain on her feet until the day of her death.” Marie Gasparde “did herself great violence in order to come to Communion in the church, even though she was dropsical.” Marguerite Colin, an aged lay sister, was ordered to rest: “But our cares irritated her; she wished to die as she had lived, in the fatigues of a laborious life, standing at arms as befits a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” Magdelaine de Cholet, another old lady, insisted on getting up at three in the morning: “When she was sick we had to take her clothes away to prevent her from doing so.” Barbe Guyot struggled for five years to overcome her illness: “It is impossible to describe the efforts to which she submitted herself … to continue to serve the community with the same courage and the same energy that she had shown during her years of health.” Marie Houre, eighty years old, insisted on washing the dishes, “even while experiencing the shivering” that announced her mortal illness.46 The litany of these saints could go on and on, but we will end it with the eulogy of an old lay sister, Catherine Humbert, who demonstrated the perseverance that was admired in choir nuns and lay sisters alike: “To content her we had to let her ring the bell, wash the dishes every day, and sweep the community room; we saw this poor woman with a cane in one hand to support her and a broom in the other; it would have been a great insult to her to prevent her from doing this task.”47 Equally, nuns who refused to break their vow of clausura in order to seek a cure elsewhere (even when this was authorized by the bishop) were especially commended. Among these heroines was a woman who refused to go to the waters of Bagnières, saying that “she would prefer death a thousand times to regaining her health at this price.” Another, when offered a trip to Paris to see a specialist, insisted that “if they promised her her health at the city gates, she would not want to take a step outside to obtain it.”48 Another said that “if it was a question of abandoning enclosure for only an hour, she would not do it, even if she was promised her health by leaving her beloved solitude for such a short time.” Women like this were the stuff of which monastic legends were made. But this last nun’s eulogist went on to say, “Few religious souls … carry their love of the cloister to this point.”49 The line between heroism and foolhardiness was a thin one. Monasteries needed healthy women, not sick ones; there was a certain exasperation for superiors in seeing their charges neglect their health. In

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one letter the superior complained: “It has to be said that this dear mother went too far in her pious excesses, and that they perhaps contributed to the sad state to which she was reduced these last twentythree years.” Another wrote: “As soon as I saw this illness, I judged it incurable, and I rebuked her soundly for having hidden it so long.” And another: “It is the only point on which I could complain of the dear departed, that she hid her ailments for too long and was too difficult about accepting the most necessary remedies.”50 The doctors often had their say too: “I made her show her tumour to the doctor, and she did so with great repugnance … He did not fail to scold her for having waiting so long to reveal it.”51 There was a tension built into the religious life between the glory of self-immolation and the common sense of self-preservation. Many nuns failed to resolve that tension. There was also a less heroic reason for feigning good health. Sometimes women hid their condition out of delicacy. A nun in Magny had “a serious and dangerous condition … of which she would rather have died than commit herself to the hands of the surgeons”; and in Rouen a nun’s “love of purity was such that she had difficulty allowing her pulse to be taken and was prepared to bear the agonies of nephritis … rather than to be exposed in the course of the cure.”52 It must have been very hard for women who had lived in the convent for most of their lives to submit their bodies to male scrutiny. Whatever their health and whatever their level of stoicism, nuns must have expected from their earliest days that sooner or later they would spend time in the infirmary. In the small world bounded by their monastery walls it remained a constant presence. Many of them were assigned to work in it at one time or another; all certainly visited it when occasion demanded; and all would be present at the deathbed of their sisters. Inasmuch, then, as the infirmary impinged upon the monastery’s daily life and experience, it is worth looking for a moment at this sad little community lodged within the larger body.

the infirmary The infirmary was not usually included in the first round of monastic buildings, for two good reasons. First, money was usually short to begin with, given all the initial disbursements, and other buildings such as dormitories for the sisters and living quarters for the pensionnaires took precedence. Second, when most construction started, the community was still young, and the problems of sickness and death may not have loomed large. However, with the passing years, the need for an infirmary became more pressing. Finally, in the eighteenth century, when vocations grew scarce, a spacious, well-designed infirmary became a

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drawing feature, an attraction for would-be entrants, who were much more concerned with “quality of life” than their predecessors had been.53 From numerous descriptions in the inventories of 1790, we get a picture of these quarters. The infirmary occupied its own corner of the monastery, sometimes being built directly over the church with a squint hole allowing a view of the altar. The various communities’ rules concurred in requiring that it be sufficiently large, with more comfortable beds and better quality linen than normally used.54 It was usually furnished in dormitory style, with cubicles divided by curtains, but it also had one or two small rooms for special needs; also an oratory and a cell for the infirmarian, who had to sleep on the premises. There were armchairs to sit in, large cupboards to store the linen, and special dishes to handle the invalid diet. The price that sick nuns paid for these small comforts was separation from community life. The infirmary was a world unto itself; patients were placed under obedience to the infirmarian, and the only contacts they had with their companions in the monastery were the visits which these were authorized to make. The infirmarian’s responsibilities included recording the course of the sisters’ illnesses, calling the doctor when necessary, and notifying the superior when it was time to bring in a priest.55 Numerous descriptions of infirmarians survive in the necrologies: “She had a natural penchant for the most unpleasant services and for the care even of those suffering the most contagious diseases” … “Our doctors often followed her advice and always approved the remedies that she had ordered in their absence” … “The nuns preferred her advice to that of the doctors” … “The doctors said that she was a treasure to them” … “She bled patients with a delicate touch that would have done honour to the ablest of surgeons. She was equally skilful in making remedies.” She had “a great knowledge of simples and their properties, she was able to bleed, to bandage wounds; she performed highly successful operations … [she] had very good secrets”56 … “She was … vigilant, knowing by her own experience what sickness was and how one must have compassion for the misery of others; she recognized the different maladies, and she applied the appropriate remedies; she did the bleeding for more than twenty years and kept the pharmacy.”57 This last activity, the making of medications, was a skill greatly valued in the monasteries, to the degree that communities would accept postulants with reduced dowries or no dowries at all if they had pharmaceutical skills.58 Among these skills was the care of the herb garden and the knowledge of when to pick the herbs for best effect: “She would go out in the middle of the night, even in snow and heavy rain, to search in her garden for the herbs necessary for the relief of the

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sick.”59 The monasteries took their pharmacies seriously; an inventory taken in 1721 at the Ursuline house in Guincamp shows that its pharmacy contained 176 medicinal products.60 In some cases they marketed their medications or offered them free to the general public. Medical care for outsiders was a small sideline in some teaching monasteries, and the women involved – often lay sisters – might well be rewarded with public tributes at their funerals. Depending on the size of the community and the number of invalids, the infirmarian might be given assistants. The work could be dangerous. There are numerous instances of infirmarians and their assistants catching fatal diseases from their patients. In Arnay in 1691, three women died one after the other, of “violent fever and oppression of the chest.” The fourth to die was the infirmarian herself, followed by a lay sister: “Her sickness is the same as those preceding her; she caught it in nursing them.” In Aurillac the same story was told twenty years later. An epidemic of malignant fever tore through the community, and four women died within days, the last of them being the infirmarian.61 The work could also be arduous. Paralysed or extremely sick patients might require two or more women to lift and turn them. It could also be repugnant, as the necrologies frequently pointed out. But this provided the opportunity, for those brave enough to take it, to imitate the holy example of Saint Francis embracing the leper. Louise Gautrin cared for a nun dying of a “hideous” cancer: “Only she was willing to nurse her, with a manner so pleasant and so tender that to see her you would have thought she was taking great pleasure in it. To persuade her patient that she was not causing her any disgust, she ate her leftovers after bandaging her, and she did this without even washing her hands.”62 In much the same spirit, Françoise Cormane devoted herself to a nun whose body “was all covered with sores, sores on which worms were feeding”; and Jeanne de Belcier, soon to be famous as the “possessed” Ursuline of Loudun, asked to take over the care of a sick nun “all covered with sores caused by scrofula, from which came such an unpleasant odour that it was difficult to bear it.”63 What do we know about nursing procedures in the monasteries? One of the passages just quoted mentions bandaging. This was a procedure to which considerable attention was given, though one historian remarks that it may have done more harm than good. There are also numerous references to bleeding. This involved using a lancet to open a vein – not just any vein but one strategically located – and allowing as much blood as required to escape. Medical science blamed impure blood for a host of ailments and prescribed the removal of it as a sovereign remedy for just about everything. After all, “the more water you

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draw from a well, the more good water comes in,”64 and the same principle was applied to blood. The body was thought to contain twentyfour litres of blood, of which the patient could lose twenty and still live, so there was scope for some risk taking.65 But the procedure was not without danger, as the nuns of Eymoutiers found when one of their sisters “lost all her blood when a vein was broken open in her body by a woman who was trying to relieve her stomach pain.”66 One of the conditions for which bleeding was highly recommended was inflammation of the lungs – a major killer in convents. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, respected authorities were explaining that since the condition was believed to arise from a build-up of blood in the lungs, bleeding was “the first and foremost remedy.”67 So the monastic infirmarians were only following a prominent school of medical thought when they drew blood from their patients. But they sometimes had their doubts about it. Colombe Saint-Memin was bled for her pleurisy, and the eulogist reported that it did her no good. Marie-Louise Valette was bled a dozen times for her lung ailment, and her eulogist remarked that the bleeding caused other infirmities, “which forced her into a regime with extremely mortifying remedies.”68 This expression of doubt may have reflected another school of medical thought. According to the highly respected physician Paul Dubé, whose patients included a community of Ursulines, there was altogether too much bleeding and not enough purging.69 The necrologies are reticent on the latter, though occasional references to “mortifying” and “violent” remedies probably covered emetics, purges, and enemas. These treatments, like bleeding, were tempting but dangerous interventions.70 Too much could damage the digestive system and lead to dropsy. Sometimes, though rarely, a bath might be used to treat a victim of nephritis.71 Conditions of “oppression of the lungs” and dropsy were often addressed by keeping the patient upright in an armchair, and there are harrowing descriptions of women remaining in this position for incredibly long periods. “Since it was impossible for her to stay in bed, we were forced to put her on a chair, which was uncomfortable for her because of the distress she was suffering; for three weeks she was unable to keep her head up.”72 One nun, Antoinette de Sigy of Provins, who achieved some notoriety as the result of a miraculous cure, recalled that she had spent two years sitting in a chair: “I had to keep my body upright, otherwise it seemed that I was going to suffocate.”73 The nuns’ home remedies have come in for occasional scoffing, but there is no reason to believe that they differed substantially from the general run of medications of their day. If the nuns of Guincamp stocked crayfish eyes and scrapings from staghorns in their pharmacy,

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they were surely following the same lines as highly respected compendiums such as The English Housewife, which recommended foxes’ lungs boiled in rosewater as a cure for tuberculosis, and the Pharmacopée universelle, which recommended newborn puppies stewed with earthworms as a treatment for sciatica.74 If anything is revealing in the necrologies, it is the nuns’ own scepticism about the value of the cures available. A number of necrologies echoed the critical opinion that these might have done more harm than good.75 But the doctors kept visiting.76 There is one cure that is worthy of mention because it shows that the nuns and their doctors were – at least occasionally – up with the times. In the early 1780s Clotilde de Laurent had been in a state of nervous collapse, “nailed to her bed” for five years. A visiting priest remarked on her case and spoke of it to a colleague, a professor of mathematics, who suggested a cure through the use of electricity. To the nuns’ amazement, it worked! “The first movement that she made with her head seemed to us a prodigy; but when we saw her walking, it was in our eyes a true resurrection.” She lived for two more years, though a semi-invalid.77

contagion The nuns under consideration here were all teaching nuns. Although they lived within a cloister, they taught school, usually to two sorts of students: the demoiselles in the boarding school, and the day students who attended school during part of the day but ate and slept at home. The day students were sometimes poor children, with all that this meant in Old Regime France. There are references in the necrologies to heads crawling with lice, scabby faces, encrusted eyes, and filthy ragged clothes. More than anybody else, these children were marked with the sign of death at a time when, even among the comfortable classes, only half the babies born survived to adulthood. The nuns, therefore, were not insulated from the ills and dangers of their society, and a major danger of early modern society was epidemic disease. Often the sisters who taught in the day schools brought contagion back into their communities: “The chill of fever seized her while she was in class.” Another was “struck down while teaching in the externe school.” Another, “at the very time she was working in the senior externe class.”78 Once a contagious disease entered a monastery, the results could be frightening, since the nuns lived in close quarters with one another and could not take much evasive action. There were occasions when entire communities were stricken at the same time. One contagious disease above all others struck terror into the hearts of early modern Europeans – the plague. Ever since the Black Death of

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the 1340s, plague had been ravaging the European population. During the early part of the seventeenth century it remained endemic in western Europe, with dramatic outbreaks in 1628–31, 1636–37, and 1668–69. Its last appearance in France, in 1720, was horrific in its virulence (killing 50,000 in Marseille within six months), but it was contained within a relatively narrow section of Provence – a tribute to the country’s vastly improved quarantine techniques. It says something for the plague’s fearsome reputation that it was one of the very few things that could disperse a cloistered monastery. Ever since the Middle Ages nuns had been allowed to leave their cloister when plague struck. In this they were seeking the only remedy known: “to take flight soon and far, and to return after a long time.” The plagues of the 1630s were particularly disruptive for the new teaching communities because they hit just as these were being established. No sooner had the nuns of the Congrégation opened their school in Troyes in 1628 than they were fleeing to the countryside. The Ursulines of Limoges were luckier in 1631 because they were able to take shelter with their sister community in Eymoutiers.79 This was a rare show of hospitality, considering the terror of contagion. More typical was the experience in 1629 of the Ursulines of Carcassonne, a new community whom the local population treated as a bunch of Typhoid Marys. When one of the sisters died of the plague they were all forced to leave the town. After eight months they returned, only to lose another sister and to leave again for another six months. All seemed to have returned to normal, when in 1632 “one of our nuns caught the plague in the classes while exercising our holy institut, from a little girl whose brother had died of it without anyone in the town knowing of it.” When word got out, the townspeople “rose up and subjected the community … to harsh treatment; they forced them to leave the town for the third time.”80 It is hard for us to imagine the panic caused by the plague. “Brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and – even worse, almost unbelieveable – fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children.” These were the words of an eyewitness of the Black Death.81 The seventeenth-century manifestations would have been no less terrifying. A passage in the annales of the Ursulines of Blois captures some of the feeling. In 1631 the nuns obeyed the bishop’s order to retire with their pensionnaires to the countryside, where they lived in considerable poverty and hunger but not enough isolation. After the mother of one of the young nuns was allowed to visit, her daughter caught the disease. At recreation, “we saw the epidemic appear on her face.” Everyone promptly rose and fled from the room – all except two who

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remained to care for the sick woman. The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) – an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist. The community decided to quit the house altogether. One by one, nuns and pensionnaires went into the courtyard, removed all their clothes and dressed in new ones, then immediately departed for another house, leaving the two caregivers to face their quarantine alone.82 Happily, all lived to meet again in their house in Blois, and their deliverance was celebrated by a procession every year until the Revolution. In the panic exhibited by the majority, we should not forget the heroism of the minority. Mary Margaret Gordon, a Scottish expatriate turned French Ursuline, was remembered in her death notice for her courage during the plague of 1668–69, when she closeted herself and a sick sister in a little house at the end of the garden, nursed the woman until she died, and then buried her with her own hands: “Our Lord then allowed her to have the buboe, and as she knew how to bleed and to make all the drugs, she bandaged herself”83 – and survived! Mère Gordon must have been one of the last Ursulines to suffer from the plague.84 The great “scourge of God” was on the wane, though it could still arouse terror. While people shook with fear of its return, other epidemics were taking its place: smallpox, dysentery, typhus, diptheria, and malaria, to name a few. These swept through the country with terrifying regularity and were the commonplace diseases of monastic infirmaries. Neither the nuns nor their doctors knew what caused the different diseases or exactly how they were spread, but they understood their contagious nature. Over and over again, the necrologies made reference to “malignant fever,” “the fever of the season,” “the common people’s sickness,” “the scourge of God,” “the mortality that has reigned for a long time in this province,”85 and so on – all terms indicating epidemic conditions. The nuns recognized that these illnesses could be passed from one person to the next, and took what precautions they could. Smallpox was of course a familiar enemy, then and for many years to come. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it reigned supreme as Europe’s foremost killer.86 It also maimed. A contemporary authority estimated that for every hundred people, twenty-six or twenty-eight died or were disfigured as a result of smallpox.87 Many nuns had already suffered it in childhood, and some were scarred or otherwise handicapped by it even before they entered religion. So for what it was worth, they had the advantage of being forewarned. They knew enough to quarantine. The usual precautions were recorded in the necrology of a twenty year old smallpox victim: “On Saturday, a high

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fever; on Monday the pox appeared; we moved her at once to a separate place.” Unfortunately, as they also knew, if the “poison” did not come out in pustules but remained within the body, it could result in fatal hemorrhaging. The same necrology continued: “Suddenly an abcess in her head discharged, pouring out through her nose and her mouth; from her throat came the death rattle, and she lost consciousness at that moment.”88 There was little they could do to affect the outcome. Even the best medical authorities were divided on how to treat the disease. Another contagious disease that frequently visited monastic infirmaries was quinsy, an inflammation of the muscles of the larynx.89 The resultant swelling could prevent the victim from swallowing and even breathing. Even in a literature marked by stoicism, the condition was acknowledged as painful and distressing in the extreme: “A type of colic which left her almost beside herself. Inflammation of the throat, tongue, and mouth which prevented her from swallowing” … “Inflammation of her throat which grew worse as she approached her end … She could find relief for her pain only by moistening her poor tongue all cut up with heat in cool water.”90 Bleeding was sometimes prescribed: “The quinsy lasted two days: an inflammation of her throat made her unable to swallow anything … We bled her from the arm and from the jugular vein, but neither these bleedings nor any other remedies could relieve her suffering.”91 The infirmarians’ helplessness must have added to the burden of their work. A host of ailments did their damage without ever being identified. In many cases neither infirmarians nor doctors recognized what they were dealing with. However, they were conscientious about observing symptoms. Thus, “asthma” signified one kind of difficulty in breathing, “oppression of the chest” another. “Gout” meant pain in the joints. “Languor” and “wasting,” combined with “pallor,” described the condition of the victim even if it does not tell us what she died of. A common problem in monasteries was “disgust [for food].”92 Frequently, doctors and infirmarians fell back on the term “complication of ills.” At the end of the line were dropsy and gangrene – well known as killers, though they had not initiated the disease. The symptom that received most attention was “fever.” In early modern Europe, where eight out of every ten deaths was preceded by fever of one kind or another,93 it was seen not as an effect but as the central reality of disease. Doctors classified and subclassified it under 128 different headings. They measured its intensity and rhythm; they counted the days it lasted and anticipated when it would come to a crisis. The nuns who managed the infirmaries knew how to do all these things correctly. Thus, one necrology after another told how many days a

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“simple” fever lasted before it became “ardent”; whether it was “continuous” or “intermittent,” “tertian” or “quartain,” “putrid” or “bilious,” and so on. Behind these fevers lay real diseases, many of them epidemic, such as malaria, typhoid, and dysentery,94 but it was fever that was perceived as the principal feature of the fatal illness. The romantic literature of the nineteenth century dwells on the drama of fever, its rising intensity, and the crisis that leads suddenly to death or recovery. This same drama must have been played out in many early modern sickrooms. From the evidence of the necrologies, disorders of the lungs ranked as a major scourge in women’s monasteries. Chief among these was “phthisis,” a term that is usually taken to signify tuberculosis. It was generally recognized by three symptoms: a wasting of the body, a fever known as “hectic fever,” which mantled the face with a bright flush, and a cough that was dry to begin with but later became (in the terrible term used by doctors) “productive” – productive of blood and pieces of lung, torn out by the relentless progress of the disease. The nuns and their doctors would have been only too familiar with the blood – “bright red, boiling and frothy” as a contemporary authority described it95 – which came straight from the lungs. The necrologies echoed a depressing refrain: “For six months, spitting of blood and a low fever; death came to her with great gentleness” … “For a year she coughed up blood, until she was dried up, having spat out her lungs bit by bit” … “Consumption for several years, and a slow fever that reduced her to skin and bones” … “Stricken in the lungs” with a dry cough and a fever; she languished for five to six months and then “fell asleep peacefully in the embrace of the Lord” … “She suffered from a weak chest … Her illness made surprising progress … We saw this innocent victim slip into death almost overnight.”96 In these five cases the women’s ages ranged from eighteen to thirty-five, and this was perhaps the worst feature of the disease: its appetite for young victims, the novices and junior nuns who represented the future of communities. There was no known way of preventing the disease, nor did the nuns seem to recognize its infectious nature. One necrology praised the determination of a dying woman, who dragged herself daily to school to teach her students “and often came out [of the classroom] spitting blood.”97 There never seems to have been any attempt to isolate tuberculosis victims. The nuns also knew pleurisy and pneumonia in their various forms. Pleurisy is a filling of the lungs with fluid or, as it was then known, a “fluxion.” Doctors identified it by a gurgling sound in the chest, “like a vessel half-full of water when it is being shaken.”98 The victim suffered from fever and swelling and had difficulty breathing. “Malignant”

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pleurisy appears to have been what we would call lobar pneumonia. The Journal de Trévoux decribed its progress: “It begins ordinarily with cold and shivering, followed almost at once by heat, restlessness, alteration and coughing. Some hours later there is a sharp pain in the side, under the ribs.”99 It progressed rapidly, so that within three or four days the victim might be dead. The nuns were obviously horrified by its lethal suddenness. Letter after letter described the sudden shivering, the pain under the ribs, the burning fever, and the spitting of blood. In some cases, two or three women died one after the other; in one case, fifty members of the same community were stricken all together, though only one succumbed.100 “Colic” was a term that covered a multitude of ills. The most terrifying of these must have been the miserere, which the nuns described as a tangling of the intestines, which caused terrible agony and killed within a short time. “We had the affliction of seeing her die in extreme pain,” ran one letter.101 According to Furetière’s dictionary, a miserere could possibly be cured by giving the victim a musket ball to swallow and then keeping him upright while gravity took its course! But the more conventional procedure was an operation, and one or two of these appear in the necrologies. One letter speaks of “a painful operation, of the kind that it is customary to perform in these sorts of illnesses. She did not fail to apologize to the surgeons for the three or four groans that their razors and scissors forced out of her.”102 The word “colic” could also apply to the many conditions that affected the digestive system or the bowel. The doctors also knew enough to suspect the presence of internal cancers. “Colics and vomiting for four years, until she was all skin and bones … there was a tumour in her liver,” ran one necrology.103 Cancer, at least in some of its forms, was recognized in the early modern period, and it was already seen by contemporary medical authorities as “the most horrible of all the ills that attack mankind.”104 The visible ravaging of the flesh – “this condition so frightful to the senses and to nature”105 – may have struck a deep chord in these religious women, a sense of premonition of the corruption for which their bodies were destined. “She watched herself die from one day to another in different parts of her body,” ran one necrology. Another claimed that the dying woman welcomed the putrefaction of her body that would send her soul to heaven.106 The cancer most commonly recognized in the necrologies was cancer of the breast. The accepted treatment for this was fer et feu – the knife and the cauterizing iron, wielded without the benefit of anaesthetic. As one historian remarks, “[This] supposes in the first place, a very resolute patient.”107 The occasional sufferer survived the treatment,108

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though more often death followed quickly, probably from shock. Surgery was also employed for other cancers; one nun endured six operations to remove lumps from her thigh; another died after her foot was amputated.109 When acute crises like these occurred, the monastic infirmary must have been an extremely stressful place. In the face of intensifying pain and terrifying suffocations, convulsions and sudden hemorrhages, massive vomiting and diarrhoea, the infirmarians could offer almost no relief. In the crowded conditions of the dormitory the other patients must have watched and listened in horror. “Despite all our care for her she often brought tears to our eyes by the agonized cries which the illness forced from her,” wrote one eulogist.110 The fact that the eulogists felt compelled to dwell on all the repellent details of the deceased person’s agony suggests that they, and other nuns with them, were not immune to the shock and distress that come with death.111 But we should not forget that even if the acute cases took centre stage, in the wings lay other women whose condition, while not critical, would nevertheless eventually lead to their death. The medical history of Old Regime France has always given priority to crises, especially the killer epidemics, because it was on these that the nascent medical service of the eighteenth century concentrated, thus building up a fund of written information. But the day-to-day work of convent infirmarians – and of the country’s caregivers in general – must have been at least as much involved with the nursing of the chronically ill. It might be supposed that in an age when medical and nursing procedures were so primitive, the sick would not long survive once they had taken to their beds. But the necrologies suggest that the contrary was the case. The long and doleful experience of chronic illness is alluded to over and over again. Louise de Gach died at eighty, having suffered a “contraction of the nerves which had reduced her body almost to a ball, so that her head was pressed against her knees.” Jaquette de Villeneuve died at seventy-nine after two years of “a general paralysis … with her head touching her knees.” Anne Cusson was eighty-two when she was confined to the infirmary; four years later she died, having long lost both memory and eyesight. Catherine Ryot endured five years of “universal paralysis, which took away the use of her limbs.” Marguerite Barroche’s purgatory lasted six months: “feet and hands useless, deprived of sight and hearing, her body all covered with sores.”112 These and many other sad lingerers were elderly women, and in many cases their initial “accident” (to use a word favoured in the necrologies) was “apoplexy” or caterre – most probably stroke.113 “Apoplexy … paralysis throughout the organs of her head, her tongue and the whole of one side” … “An apoplexy … left her paralyzed in

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one side for twenty years” … “A catarreuse attack … made her mouth and tongue all crooked and grossly swollen, and made her unable to walk” … “A paralysis that lasted twenty years crippled her, so that she could neither walk nor lift her food to her mouth.”114 But not all the long-term inmates of the infirmary were old, nor had they all suffered strokes. Françoise Richer was thirty when she started four years of “incurable pains,” the last eighteen months of which saw her lying in bed without changing position; Louise Chochon, fiftyseven, after suffering for two years from a dropsical body “of prodigious size,” spent the last three weeks sitting in a chair, “unable to stay for a moment in her bed.” Marie Dolet, also fifty-seven and also dropsical, was forced to spend “one year without lying down in bed.”115 Dropsy seems to have been a major villain; even if they started with different ailments, numerous women came to the same end: the swelling of their bodies to enormous size and then the collapse of the swelling, the development of horrible sores, and the onset of gangrene. Whether reduced to helplessness through paralysis or dropsy, through loss of memory or failure of bodily functions, these women depended entirely on the services of the infirmarian and her assistants. For the most part the effort involved in caring for them is left to our imagination, though there are occasional references. One paralysed nun required the constant care of a sister for fourteen years, “who gave up most of her sleep almost every night”; another, also paralysed, had two nuns assigned to her care.116 For the women who escaped these diseases and the myriad other ailments which the necrologies described, old age brought threats that still have a familiar ring. Some women collapsed with what was called a “syncope,” a sudden loss of consciousness which suggests a heart attack: “She had been unwell for several years with pain in her chest, which seemed to oppress her. She lost all her senses and died within an hour” … “At three o’ clock she felt uncomfortable, at five a syncope carried her off.”117 Then there was pneumonia, which in later years would be nicknamed “the old man’s friend” because it gently released the soul from an aging body. Perhaps this was the spirit in which one necrology was written: “She had had several attacks of apoplexy, and her mind was a little enfeebled. A fluxion in her chest took her from us.” Finally, the necrologies reported plenty of cases of simple old age, sometimes with a wandering mind, indicated by the single word enfance. One is struck, in fact, by the number of old ladies in the records. Contrary to the belief of their contemporaries, nuns lived reasonably long lives by the standards of their times.118 But the dark side of this is that many of them spent a portion of those long lives in the monastery infirmary.

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The men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lived in hard times, at least where physical suffering was concerned. Nuns were no exception. How did they respond? The necrologies throw up a mass of answers, most of them opaque with conventional piety. In all ages, eulogies have to conform to certain standards. But within the edifying and conformist phrases lie traces of a more sincere, and indeed more visceral, attitude towards sickness and death. When sickness struck, they followed the best medical practice of the day, even though it was not far short of useless. Once it was over, they accepted the outcome with resignation but also with real human feeling.

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13 The Institut

Women’s work consisted largely of making perishables … So if we are to retrieve significant amounts of women’s history, or of the history of any evanescent occupation in particular … we need better evidence than just that which falls into our laps. Elizabeth Barber, Women’s Work1

Strange to say, the teaching of children was one of these “evanescent occupations.” Historians of women’s teaching congregations of the Old Regime have to live with a fundamental frustration: they have little solid information about how and whom these congregations actually taught. Once away from the rich vein of school rules and customs belonging to the foundation period, the historiography of girls’ schooling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries looks like a desert.2 Of pensionnaires there can be no doubt; numerous sources point to their existence and to some extent describe it. Consequently, since the availability of sources has a great deal of bearing on what gets written, these demoiselles have traditionally received the lion’s share of our attention. This fits neatly with a tendency, which is only now disappearing, to focus our attention on the well born. Yet it was in day schools, not boarding schools, that the great majority of girls acquired their education; and it was through the work of day schools that the curve of feminine literacy began its slow but steady ascent.3 “The pensionnats … only held a tiny minority of scholars; it seems abusive to use them alone as the basis for an analysis of the entire school system,” writes Marie-Madeleine Compère.4 Inasmuch as the monasteries participated in the running of day schools, they must surely share the credit for the rising educational standards of Frenchwomen. But that is the question: Did they participate? And how much? Some historians have concluded that whatever the intentions of their founders, the teaching monasteries gradually abandoned their obligation of free instruction, or at least reduced it to the merely symbolic,

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and turned wholeheartedly to the more lucrative business of educating pensionnaires.5 In many cases there is little positive evidence to support this view, just as there is little positive evidence to counter it. These historians’ main argument is the absence of any major body of evidence attesting to a serious commitment on the part of women’s monasteries to free day schools. The monastic records, which yield a great deal of information on life within the cloister, barely mention the schools;6 the pastoral visits virtually ignore them; even the surviving plans of monasteries fail in many cases to show the placement of their buildings. The researcher has to ask, If day schools existed, would they not show up somewhere in the records? There are two ways of answering this question. First, by deduction – by providing certain good reasons why the monastic free schools should have existed. Second, by scraping up what paltry evidence there is. After all, one fingerprint is enough to place the suspect at the scene of the crime. One reference to ongoing school business, standing alone in a century and a half of silence, is enough to suggest that something was going on. Deduction begins with a definition of the word institut. As “the founding principle of a religious order,”7 it varied from order to order but was always spoken of as a sacred trust. The institut of the women’s teaching congregations was “To devote oneself entirely to the free instruction of young girls.”8 “Instruction,” in its seventeenth-century sense, meant religious instruction, and it was this function – not the “profane” teaching, which was of only secondary importance – that earned it the dignity of an apostolate. Because it was sacred, this instruction had to be free. The sacred could not be bought and sold. “As for us who teach,” ran one Rule, “let God alone be our salary and our paymaster.”9 To contravene the principle of free instruction would, in the eyes of the founding generation, have been tantamount to destroying the whole raison d’être of their community. The teaching congregations’ constitutions insisted on the centrality of their institut: “Insofar as the first end and principal aim of this monastery is the teaching of Christian doctrine … they must content themselves to be not only ordinary religious but also teachers of Christian doctrine.” At the time of profession, individual sisters were asked, “Will you have the courage to instruct young girls, in conformity with the institute of this monastery?”10 And many of them were required to make a special vow or promise never to give up this instruction, “which they consider, truly, the principal purpose of their vocation.”11 Even in old age, they were to be held to their commitment: “The mothers and senior sisters will be put to teaching, and whatever seniority and whatever charge a person has exercised, she may not pretend to be dispensed from this function.”12

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Thus, we can be certain of the intention of the founders, as well as the observance of the earliest generations of teaching nuns. But things change with the years, and between the establishment of the teaching congregations in the early seventeenth century and their suppression in 1792 there lay a long stretch of time, with abundant possibilities for compromise and the erosion of ideals. No one should insist that simply because rules existed, they must have been obeyed throughout this time. But there is another reason to suppose that the nuns kept their promise: they were bound by a civil contract. The establishment of new religious houses in the cities of France in the early seventeenth century was seldom popular with the city fathers.13 It was the practice of these gentlemen to make things as difficult as possible for the incomers and to hedge their residency around with every legal restriction available. The female teaching monasteries, wherever they established, were faced with substantively the same tough contracts: that on no account might they beg publicly; that they must have sufficient funding to support themselves; that they must not acquire further property within a given distance of the city without express permission from the municipality; and that they must provide free instruction to all young girls of the city who came to them.14 In a society that did not love its convents unreservedly or support them uncritically, we can surmise that it was risky for the nuns to be in breach of contract. It seems unlikely that they could have given up the central provision of the contracts – the obligation to provide schooling free of charge to the girls of the city – without running into some opposition. Nor, by and large, did they do so. We can tell this because from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries a succession of government inquiries took place into the state of the women’s monasteries. They turned up large numbers of communities that were running free schools in conscious and openly proclaimed observance of the terms of their original contracts. “Our establishment in this city … took place on August 25 1641, on condition that we should instruct freely and without recompense the girls of the town; this we do faithfully.”15 Agreements of this sort could not easily be forgotten, especially when one of the parties – the city – stood to benefit so substantially by their continuing observance. It would seem that even if the nuns had wished to renege, their towns had the power to hold their feet to the fire. So it is more than likely that monastic day schools were a going concern throughout the Old Regime. But then the question must be asked: If numerous monasteries continued the free instruction of young girls, why are references to this instruction almost non-existent in their records? Even if some communities had retreated from the

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obligation, there must have remained several hundred institutions observing a school year almost as long as our own and teaching children – as many as five hundred or as few as thirty each.16 How could such a major commitment of time and energy be so largely unremembered? The first answer is that the information available to us today is the product of a culling process during the Revolution, which tended to eliminate records of no particular interest to itself.17 But beyond that, it can be argued that the records were never there in the first place, that in the early modern period ordinary people were not yet accustomed to recording the details of their daily life. Women cooked, but we would not know it if we had to depend on a count of the recipe books they themselves wrote; they raised children but left precious little written indication of how they did it. In the same way, it is possible to argue that nuns taught school but recorded little about the craft of teaching. They worked from their original rules and from the person-to-person training they received in the novitiate. If they wrote at all, they wrote about spiritual matters or they kept their communities’ records. As a result, we know much more about their devotions and their debts than we know about their day students.18 Another fact of monastery life may have some bearing on the subject. This goes back to the terms of the original contracts. Between the nuns and the municipalities there persisted a difference of opinion about who was responsible for the externe school buildings. The records show some communities behaving as if their commitment was limited to the provision of free instruction, nothing more, with responsibility for the buildings being borne by the city. This would be in line with the arrangements made for male colleges that belonged to the cities and not to the religious congregations that taught in them. But the authorities thought otherwise and not only neglected the nuns’ schools but taxed them as though they were private property. The free classrooms suffered in this ongoing battle of wills. Over and over again we find official reports stating that the schools were “ready to collapse.”19 Eventually most of them were saved by a variety of compromises involving nuns, city officials, and bishops. But whatever the compromise, the monasteries seem deliberately to have kept public school expenses separate from their regular accounts. It is possible, therefore, to draw the conclusion that monastic free day schools did exist and function until the end of the Old Regime – but to admit at the same time that not much can be said about them. It is with this ambiguous conclusion in mind that the following word picture of “the monastic day school” is offered. It is built from the occasional records and random references which the author has collected in her study of the teaching congregations. If it looks very much like

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an attempt to make bricks without straw, she offers the excuse that some thoughts on the subject are better than no thoughts at all. The sketchiness of the work must be acknowledged, as also must the fact that it is drawn from dozens of sources and so represents none completely. Nothing in the Old Regime was uniform, not even its nuns. In a hundred different ways they belonged to their own localities and regions, in a country characterized by enormous diversity. The following composite picture, made up of excerpts from widely scattered sources, must not be taken for “typical” because there was no such thing. Yet there was a certain consonance between teaching communities, born of their similar goals and similar circumstances, and this gives the picture some integrity.

i n s i d e t h e d ay s c h o o l s The girls would have begun to gather outside the school door of the monastery at about eight o’clock. They would have had to dodge the city’s morning traffic – often a dirty, dangerous situation, as surviving complaints from the nuns to the authorities make clear: “Their street is covered with mud and filth … The carts have to run alongside the walls and the buildings, and the young girls have a great deal of difficulty getting to their classes” … “God himself is offended by the carters and drovers … by the disgraceful oaths which, with indignation, we hear them proffer.”20 The municipalities’ answers are also on record: that the state of the pavement was the responsibility of the property owners (in this case, the nuns), and that the language of the passersby was beyond anybody’s power to control. The school door – “a little entrance within the great gate”21 – was usually unlocked by a servant of the monastery. Behind her, with her veil drawn down over her face, would stand the portress, a senior officer in the community. She would not herself approach the door, because if she so much as stepped across the threshold she would be in violation of her obligation of clausura. The students would first come into an inner room or courtyard, and the outer door would be locked behind them. They were free now to do whatever they wanted, within reason: “[They] will take this time to have breakfast, to learn their prayers and the catechism; and they will be truly obedient to the person in charge.”22 The children who came to school hungry might receive free bread from a lay sister.23 Close by, “in a corner apart”, stood a little commodité so that they did not need to go back into the street to answer the call of nature.24 At the sound of the bell they would line up two by two, class by class, in front of the inner door; and from then on, silence was supposed to

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prevail. Once they were in the classroom and the door behind them locked, an interior door connecting the classrooms with the monastery would open, and the headmistress – called the “mistress general” or “prefect” – and her teaching sisters, or regents, would enter. This interior door would then be locked, still in obedience to the law of clausura. Teachers and students came together in the most controlled circumstances possible, in obedience to rules laid down at the time of the Counter-Reformation. What was the classroom like, and how was it furnished? It was probably small by modern standards. Most monastic day schools seem to have occupied converted private houses – usually an adjacent building which the monastery had managed to buy. The Ursulines of Avallon conducted their school “in the upper chambers of a neighbouring house,” while the Ursulines of Saint-Dizier turned over a whole private house to their day school, as did those of Guincamp.25 In the monastery of Argenteuil, “at the bottom of the garden [was] a little building, giving onto the main street of Argenteuil, which serve[d] as classrooms for the girls of the town.”26 In the eighteenth century, as their original school buildings came close to collapse, communities that could afford it or could find outside assistance constructed new buildings. In Valenciennes the Ursulines’ day school, rebuilt in 1728, was a “school on two floors” valued at 6388 livres in 1790;27 the Ursulines of Toulouse owned “a separate building constructed at their own expense for the purpose of free instruction”;28 the externe school of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Nancy, remodelled in 1743, occupied a sizable wing of the monastery and accommodated four hundred students;29 and the Ursulines of Sainte-Avoye in Paris held their public school classes in a large threestory building, reconstructed in 1782 at a cost of 28,000 livres.30 But many communities, stricken by the poverty resulting from the Law Crash of 1720, had no choice but to continue teaching in their ancient buildings. The archbishop of Avignon, on his pastoral visit in 1760 to the Filles de Notre Dame of that city, found their junior classrooms “small and barely sufficient for the large number of children who are asking to be received … damp, badly lit,” and the workshop for older girls nothing but “a tunnel.”31 The bishop of Lisieux decided to rebuild the Ursulines’ school in Pont Audemer at his own expense, so close was it to collapse.32 To the modern observer, the sparseness of furnishings would come as a shock. The junior classrooms would contain only the benches on which the children sat, a chair for each mistress, and, fixed to the walls, a crucifix and a few holy pictures. Hanging in plain view there might be a table or two of printed letters and syllables or “a slate, or board,

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placed so that all the pupils can see it easily”33 – the ancestor of our present-day blackboard. Classrooms for senior students would be better furnished, with tables for writing and “cupboards to hold the children’s books and papers.”34 Only a few favoured institutions could boast special facilities, such as the cotton spinning equipment in a monastery in Auxerre.35 A bell and an hourglass were desirable but optional,36 as was a fireplace or stove. In many free classrooms, heating of any kind was provided only “if the scholars bring the fuel.”37 This illustrates the point that it was only instruction that the nuns were offering free of charge, not the furnishings or even the materials required for the lessons. For the latter, there was a tariff, the regulations for which we can see laid down in the school rule of the Ursulines of Paris: [The mistress general] will keep the money that the scholars give for the ink, pens, brooms, and other little classroom necessities … and will make sure that those who have the means contribute something to the fund, to wit, those who are writing, two or three sols each year for ink and pens; and all the students, except the poor, one sol each month for the small needs of the classrooms … and also that they must bring wood in the winter.38

Over the years, by charging small fees to those who could afford it and by using the money from charitable donations, the nuns were able to buy equipment, treats, and small prizes for their students.39 But the furnishing of their classrooms was always subject to their own financial circumstances and those of the student population, which do not appear to have improved much with time. “Feminine instruction, in fact, enjoyed a limited recognition,” writes Martine Sonnet. “The classrooms multiplied in response to the pressure of families, but in material conditions which often hindered their smooth functioning.”40 After opening prayers, the lessons began. The day started with recitation, then the class mistress “showed” the lesson. At about nine o’clock, books were given out, and the children worked at their reading, writing, catechism, and civilité for the rest of the morning.41 Throughout all these activities, one thing is clear. For all that it was uncomfortable and crowded, the monastery classroom was carefully structured along strictly hierarchical lines, and teachers operated within a clear chain of command. As the senior officer, the mistress general, or prefect, had “responsibility for the whole college … regents, aides, scholars.” She was supposed to go “once a day through all the classrooms during the lesson, to see if the regents [were] doing their duty, and if silence [was] being observed.”42 It was her responsibility to admit students (after interviews with their parents) and to

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expel them if need be; to record their attendance and to penalize malingerers; to promote students from one level to another after due examinations; to give out prizes and adjudge punishments.43 It was usually up to her to undertake the most solemn part of their education, the preparation for First Communion. In smaller communities she might also be mistress general of pensionnaires or regent of the senior class of day students. As one might expect, she was a person of some standing, and she was probably formidable in the eyes of the children. Madame de Maintenon, who must have known a thing or two about power, recalled this from her days as a pensionnaire with the Ursulines: “When the mistress general came to the classes, it was news that we talked about for a fortnight before and a fortnight after; she had her robe and her sleeves lowered and we trembled with respect!”44 Gentler pictures of mistresses general appear in the death notices: “The externes [were] the children of her heart”45 … “She kept intact the union … between the mistresses and the children.”46 Under the mistress general were the regents, or class mistresses. The rules alloted one regent, or sometimes two, to a class of up to fifty, with specialists in writing, handwork, and arithmetic to assist them.47 They were professed nuns, with some years of experience behind them and a familiarity with their community’s teaching system. It is safe to assume that they were chosen for this work because of their teaching abilities. Some of them are celebrated for that in the monastic records. Florence Campion “worked with her girls in so engaging a manner that she won over the most rebellious, of whom she took very particular care”; Michelle Gueland “had a good memory, and explained things easily and in expressive language”; Anne de Soulfour de Gousengres, though only twenty, had “a gravity which inspired the unruliest of children with respect and self-control”; Marguerite Laurens had “a special talent for teaching those young girls who had the most difficulty in learning”; Louise Gautrin had “a method so simple and straightforward that she enlightened the most muddled minds”; Marguerite de Moi-Richebourg, Mère de Jésus in religion, “had such a hold over [the children] that if some small disorder occurred in the classrooms, or if there were difficult and incorrigible spirits, as soon as they were given Mère de Jésus for their mistress, with skill and gentleness she tamed them and returned them all to order.” Anne de Gerard “was highly suitable for this position because she both read and wrote very well and because she made the girls love her.”48 Considering the importance which the congregations attached to their institut, the number of nuns formally assigned to public school teaching – two to a class, probably amounting to only six or eight per

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community – represents a surprisingly small proportion of the monastic population.49 However, a closer look will show that as well as the official regents, a number of other nuns were involved in the school in a less formal way. Many combined their principal charges in the monastery with assistant roles in the school.50 These would be the “aides” mentioned above, and no matter what their seniority in the monastery, as long as they were in the day school they were subject to the regents. The class, if it was large enough, was subdivided into “benches” of ten to fifteen children. Each bench had its own teacher – one of the aides, most likely – who had the task of watching more particularly over her own charges. These aides varied in age and experience. They might be very young nuns, such as eighteen-year-old Louise Provençal, who “as soon as she was professed was directed to the education of the girls in the free classes, according to the practice of the Company.” Or they might be as old as Anne de la Mare, who “at eighty years, decided to spend an hour each day in the junior class.” Charlotte de Girois, also in her eighties, “had her bench like the ablest regents,” and however much the other nuns “begged her to give up this work, she continued it until she was forced to surrender to her weakness and infirmity.”51 These women’s involvement in the classrooms might well make the teacher-pupil ratio in the monastery schools satisfactory by any standards. Unfortunately their contribution can only be signalled; it cannot be measured. The subdivision of the large classroom into smaller units allowed the nuns’ teaching system to work. Monastery schools did not boast many levels. In the schools run by the Congrégation there were three: “In the upper classes they will be made to read in Latin books in the morning and in French books in the afternoon, as well as to write; in the middle classes they will be taught the same lessons, except writing … In the bottom classes they will simply be taught to recognize letters, to form syllables and to assemble them so as to pronounce words.”52 Within these major groupings, however, the children on the individual benches were able to move at their own speed: “The mistresses will be careful not to anticipate each other’s work, but to keep to the rules of each class by staying within the assigned limits.”53 No child was to be promoted from one bench to another until she had mastered the skills pertaining to her level. Even her position on the bench was assigned according to her achievement. The day schools also had a troop of noncommissioned officers in the form of the décurionnes, or dizainières. These were students, “wiser and more knowledgeable” than the rest, who were given responsibility for their own “benches” both inside and outside the school.54 Inside the school, they performed small tasks, such as giving out books and

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leading the prayers, for which they were rewarded with prizes and honours. Outside the school, they acted as deputies of the cloistered nuns, watching over the public behaviour of the children: “To keep an eye on them, to remind them to be modest as they go to and from the college and to make the sign of the cross as they enter and leave the church; and, while there, they are to make them keep their order without noise and say their prayers to God with respect and reverence.”55 At ten o’clock, at the sound of the bell, the books were put away. The morning ceremony was reversed, with the teachers first withdrawing into the monastery and the doors closing firmly behind them. Then the outside doors were unlocked and the students filed out, to go first to Mass and then home for dinner, always with the nuns’ admonitions ringing in their ears: “[They] will refrain from running through the streets or appearing silly and hare-brained, because that is highly unbecoming to girls who are instructed in piety; but they will go modestly to their homes, without loitering on the way.”56 After dinner, at two o’clock, the whole ritual was repeated as the children returned for a further two hours of schooling. At half-past three a light tinkling of the school bell warned teachers and students to prepare the homework. At four o’clock the bell was rung vigorously, the class sang its last hymn and got ready to end the day.57 Again the ritual was repeated. First the inner monastery door would be opened, allowing the regents to retreat into the cloister. Then the classroom door would be unlocked, and the students would file out into the courtyard. Once the outer monastery door was opened, they would fan out into the city streets. The door would be shut, and all communication between the two worlds would come to an end until another school day was ready to begin.

the students What do we know about these children? First and foremost, that they were the children of the city. In principle, all daughters of city residents had the right to a free education in a teaching monastery’s day school. Of course, the school population was in fact limited by the community’s capacity to teach and also by the availability of children to be taught.58 According to the rules, the students had to be older than four and younger than eighteen,59 but it seems likely that the majority were between eight and eleven and were at school in order to prepare for their First Communion. Once this great event was achieved, the children of “the artisans and the people” were ready for the job market.60 The daughters of “good” families, especially girls who had shown an

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aptitude for learning or exceptional piety, might well go on to the boarding school.61 However, some monastic day schools continued to provide lessons for advanced students from families who could not afford the costs of boarding.62 It is difficult to generalize about the social composition of the monastic day school population. “The poor occupy most of the places,” wrote one nun in 1790;63 but any number of local circumstances could be influential in deciding the makeup of the day schools. According to their rules, the nuns were obliged to receive all young girls “rich or poor without distinction,” excepting only those “who have vicious inclinations which they do not wish to correct, or some dangerous ailment which might infect the others.”64 In itself, poverty – “to which the regents are [themselves] vowed”65 – was not to be treated as grounds for disqualification. However, families of quality expected something different for their daughters. The records suggest that there was considerable pressure on the nuns to segregate the poor, “because the incivility which is normal to them could be prejudicial to girls of good family.”66 This would require a major modification to the teaching monasteries’ original mandate. The nuns’ response to the pressure varied. In some regions – for instance, the north – the day schools continued to mix the children together.67 But many monasteries heeded the demand for segregation. The Ursulines of Angers divided their students into four categories: “demoiselles,” “daughters of bourgeois and merchants,” “daughters of artisans,” and “the poor.”68 The Ursulines of Avignon divided theirs into “girls of good family” and “the poor [who] have need of a rougher instruction.”69 There was the hint of an uneasy conscience in this decision. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris recommended “not to put girls of quality close to the poorer and dirtier, so as not to cause them any disgust”; but it charged the nuns to do this “with discretion, so that the poor do not feel themselves despised.”70 The Constitutions of the Filles de Notre-Dame stated: “As much as possible, the poor and ill-clothed will be kept apart, to avoid various inconveniences and complaints; but they will not fail to be well taught according to their condition.”71 According to the Rule of the Ursulines of Troyes, there were to be different classes for “girls of quality” and “those of base condition.” But it added: “Everyone must know that this separation of the poor from those of quality is not ordered so as to prefer the ones over the others; but experience teaches us that girls of condition who are raised to good manners and civility will lose them in the frequent and familiar association with the poor, and for this reason people of condition would hesitate to send their [children] to the college.”72

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The diversification of teaching to meet the demands of different social levels in the cities led in time to a further segregation as the teaching orders established fee-paying day schools in some cities.73 In these, families of quality were able to shelter their daughters from the rough and tumble of the commoner classrooms while not committing to the full discipline – and expense – of the boarding schools. Such a separation can be seen in the records of Saint-Galmier, where the Ursulines ran two schools, “one of them for the daughters of bourgeois and well-off artisans and the other for the poor, whom they teach free of charge to read and write [my emphasis].”74 At the same time, new choices were appearing for children at the lower end of the social scale. Écoles charitables, run by secular schoolmistresses, became the public schools of choice during the eighteenth century. They were cheaper to establish than monastic schools, less prodigal with their personnel, and freer to locate or relocate where they were most needed. They certainly siphoned off many of the children of poorer parents. Also, as the eighteenth century progressed, hundreds of tiny private schools appeared, each numbering perhaps a dozen children to a single schoolmistress; these served the growing needs of prosperous artisans and shopkeepers.75 But these indications all concern larger cities, where the population was big enough and varied enough to support a choice of institutions. In many smaller centres across France, it seems certain that there was no room for such choice. For thousands of children of the working poor and of the struggling small-town bourgeoisie, the local monastery school was the only school available. “[The religious] are still absolutely necessary for the day schools,” ran a memoir in favour of the Ursulines of Mâcon. “Many mothers in the city whose occupations prevent them from watching over the instruction and conduct of their daughters find there a sanctuary to which they … can entrust a treasure precious in the eyes of religion and of the country.”76 Other towns voiced the same concern: “We have no other resources for the education of girls … being of very modest fortune” … “There are no other schools operating for girls, the place being neither important nor rich enough” … “There is only this community in the town … At present they have two hundred and forty young girls being instructed in their school.”77 In towns such as these, all the schoolchildren sat side by side78 and took lessons from the same teacher – a teacher such as Charlotte Augier of Aiguepercé, who died in 1694, “there being scarcely a family in this town that has not benefited from her good instructions.”79 Thus, the typical student of a monastic day school is not easy to delineate. We can only say that she was urban (or at least within walking

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distance of a town) and that she was neither excessively blue-blooded nor so poor that a pressing need to work prevented her attending school. This suggests that the children standing outside the monastery door at eight o’clock on a weekday morning came from a wide variety of backgrounds, beginning with the daughters of the “best” local families,80 and ranging through children from families of modest means (who “once they have learned … to read, write, and do their sums are ready to become merchants and go into commerce”)81 to the children of “the artisans and the people.” Let us concentrate on these last. Since their education normally ended at age eleven or twelve, it follows that the typical poor school population was predominantly pre-adolescent. By all accounts, discipline was not their greatest virtue. Some exasperated teachers have left us descriptions of these children: Extremely distracted by the company, and by the various objects which catch their attention on all sides … While you are turned to one side, the other becomes disorderly; if you pay attention to one child, ten others begin to play; everything must always be begun again.82 Their memory, for lack of training, cannot hold on to many things or fulfil a string of instructions; a new lesson makes them forget the preceding one, which they had learned only with great difficulty and by forgetting other [lessons]. We see by experience that by trying to teach them many things we only waste their time; at Easter we find them ignorant, we press them, we tire them out and upset them, we turn them off; we dismiss them until Pentecost, and when they have come to that they are no further ahead.83

The teaching of these children was not an easy task. At midseventeenth century an admirer of the teaching nuns challenged his readers to recognize that: “This institut is a difficult and highly laborious … unpleasant, common, base, ordinary, vexing and tiresome one, in which maiden ladies of intelligence have for their scholars only children who are rude and difficult to teach. To do this, and to do it well, requires great courage and resolution.”84 Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise in a society still largely illiterate and unaccustomed to the kind of discipline and preconditioning that the classroom demands. This was the age and the social milieu for which Jean-Baptiste de la Salle drew up his Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrestiennes, instructing young people on the impropriety of blowing their noses with their fingers or spitting out of the window.85 If such civilizing admonitions were necessary for the boys of Louis XIV’s France, could the girls have been that much better? By the

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nuns’ own testimony, their students were “flighty and indocile” and given to “quarrels, injuries, stealing, fighting, running in the streets, playing bad games with boys, making noise in the [school]room, and not wanting to settle down when ordered to do so.”86 A story has survived that illustrates the potential of some of these young ladies. In Angers in 1689, the Ursulines were locked in a legal battle with the Oratorians over a disputed property. The verbal wrangling spilled over into the classroom, and the students of the two institutions decided to take it to the streets. The girls ambushed the boys in the rue de l’Hôpital, a narrow no-man’s-land between the two schools. The resulting battle ended in a total rout of the Oratorians. It is said that the local residents applauded as the boys disappeared hastily around the end of the street.87 In comparison with the genteel, mostly upper-class nuns who taught them, the children were rough and uncivilized. They were also, many of them, pretty filthy, even by the standards of an unhygienic age. Mère de Pommereu, the Ursuline annalist of Paris, knew that her audience in the convent would understand her when she described the poor students of the past as “neither cleaner nor sweeter-smelling than [they are] today.”88 The teachers spent their time among children “who often assailed them with stinking breath resulting from eating garlic, onions and other such food,”89 who had lice in their hair and sores and scabs on their bodies and faces. These deficiencies all had to be combatted, as far as was possible. The Rule of the Ursulines of Bordeaux enjoined the schoolmistresses “to make their students go about in neat, clean clothes, and to abhor dirt and bad smells.” Students who did not mend their ways were to be expelled.90 Work in the poor school, especially in the “petite,” or junior class, was considered by most communities to be a hardship. But some nuns were positively attracted to these disadvantaged children. It was said of Edmée Renard that “while she was with the externes it seemed that she was all heart in loving her poor children, all voice in teaching them, and all hands in helping them.”91 Marie de Dracqueville “succeeded perfectly in making the children love her, but dearest to her heart were her beloved externes; the poor were those whom she thought of the most.”92 Some nuns mended, washed, and even replaced the children’s clothes.93 Others went further. Marie Dacheu du Plouys, “if any of them were found to have vermin … set herself the duty to see that they were cleaned, as also those who had scabies.”94 Geneviève Cousteughol, “one day while in class, saw a girl who was a horror to look at, with her face all covered with sores and so hideous that her heart shuddered at the sight … She drew this child apart, kissed her, and licked her face.”95

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Their attraction cannot be dismissed as pious do-goodism, since true human emotion was often involved. Gabrielle de Saint-Pierre spent twenty-five years teaching in the free school, “always surrounded by the poorest and most disfavoured, who were the darlings of her heart. All that she wanted to do at recreation was to talk about the charms she found in these little waifs.” Marie de la Ferrière loved her work so much that when her superior wished to relieve her for health reasons, “she lost her usual calm and, falling on her knees, pleaded so persuasively that she could not stop her from going to teach her ‘dear children’ (as she called them).” Jeanne Le Coeur “never had enough children in her class; when they were removed and promoted to other classes, it seemed as if they were being torn from her heart.” Barbe de la Motte, in her last illness, found it hard to endure the separation from her students: “Upon learning that they had put a sister in her place, she feared that she was there for good, and this distressed her greatly; we had to console her by saying that this was only as a replacement, and that as soon as she felt better she would return there; upon this she cried out that we had given her back her life; she asked for news … of all her little girls, one after the other, with the true heart of a mother.”96 Sometimes the records speak of affection reciprocated: “The children loved her dearly” … “When it was time for her funeral, the little girls of the town whom she had taught all came to our church without being called, bringing lit candles, and appeared with tears, sobs and cries.”97 It had been the teaching congregations’ ambition, in the early seventeenth century, to change the world by changing the women who nurtured that world: “They will bear in mind that the mothers of families who will have been their disciples are the first to teach … Christian doctrine to their children … reminding themselves often of the holiness of Saint Augustine … and of many other saints, which is attributed to the care which their mothers took to guide them to it.”98 It would be interesting to know in what way, and how much, their efforts affected the behaviour and outlook of Frenchwomen. Did succeeding generations of girls become more disciplined? More accomplished? More civil? Unfortunately, these effects of the schoolroom are even harder to measure than literacy. One significant fact has been noted, however – that women continued to practise their religion during an era when men were turning away from it. “In their detachment or their distancing from the Church, many men were not followed by their wives.”99 For this, surely, the nuns must be given some credit.

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14 The Pensionnat

The first task of the teaching congregations had been to open schools for free public instruction. This was what they had vowed to do and what the public expected of them. The establishment of pensionnats usually came slightly later. The Ursulines of Paris accepted their first boarders in 1612, those of Toulouse in 1616, those of Bordeaux in 1618. It was a step they sometimes took with reluctance, for (as the nuns of Toulouse explained) they were afraid that “being too attached to the functions of Martha, they will lose the spirit of Mary.”1 Indeed, one Ursuline foundress, Anne de Xainctonge, refused to accept any boarders at all, “knowing that such a path of action can harm the spirit and hinder [the community’s] perfection and exercises of devotion.”2 The fear was that the presence of children in a religious house would create distraction and cut into the peace which spiritual life required. This sentiment echoed that of the Jesuits, who, if left to themselves, might well have stayed out of the business of internats altogether.3 However, as the Jesuits themselves were the first to prove, there was a good deal to be said for internats. Early religious reformers started with the premise that the world was hopelessly corrupt. They despaired of the morality of adults and agreed that the best way to safeguard the future was to remove children from their influence. The Jesuit Lancelot Marin used the metaphor of an apple gone so bad that the only thing left to do was to take its seeds and replant them in a healthy environment: In order to renew the corrupted world, we have to start with the youth. Our blessed father Ignatius had this end in view when he dedicated our Company

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to the good education of young boys. What a praiseworthy and useful undertaking it would be to establish a congregation where one could transport little girls, as it were, into a fertile soil, so that, after receiving good instructions, they would go out to bring virtue to families! Families, well raised, would reform the cities and the provinces, and thus the world would be made anew.4

The nuns embraced these principles, as they did so much else that came from the Jesuits. They subscribed to the strategy of separation from outside influence that was already being practised in the Society’s colleges – not, of course, for the great majority of students, who were destined always to be externes, but for the select few who would provide the future leadership of church and state. Pensionnats, in the words of a historian of Old Regime education, provided the young with “a pedagogical ‘other place’ that was purified and sterilized.”5 The walls that enclosed this ‘other place’ served a double purpose: they kept out the evil influences of the world, and they allowed the space within to be continually monitored. Once in the pensionnat, students were supposed never to be out of their supervisors’ company. Chaperonage at this level was clearly impossible in many homes; children were left to their own devices or entrusted to untrained servants. Even the king had been treated this way as a child, according to Madame de Maintenon, who shared with her demoiselles a word-picture of the little Dieudonné romping around, unsupervised, with a maidservant.6 In the minds of the dévots, such neglect was truly reprehensible. They argued that children were so vulnerable to the snares of the Devil that a moment of inattention on the part of those in charge was all they needed to find their way to sin. “Never trust them,” Madame de Maintenon warned her mistresses at Saint-Cyr. “They mustn’t even trust themselves, and if they want to continue to be prudent, they ought to desire to be watched.”7 In the minds of religious pedagogues, the work of the pensionnat was the work of salvation. Parents saw things from a different angle. The pensionnat offered a convenient way to raise and educate their daughters. For a reasonable price (150 livres and up per year, depending on the convent) it kept them safe and turned them into young ladies, polished and pious. So after being virtually non-existent in the sixteenth century, pensionnats for girls became the rage in the seventeenth, and the demand for them grew from region to region. They clinched the argument for establishing teaching communities, as we can see from the second of the three reasons given for the introduction of an Ursuline house into Elbeuf in the 1660s: “The town is full of Protestants; the gentlemen of the neighbourhood confide their daughters to these nuns; there is no other school.”8 Since the nuns’ apostolate meshed perfectly with the

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interests of the local elites, the result was a happy alliance cemented by mutual need. Not to be forgotten was the fact that pensionnats made money, which the nuns always needed. What was necessary, therefore, was to find a way to accommodate a boarding school within the monastery without compromising the peace and quiet of the cloister. The answer was interior separation. The rules of the teaching orders stipulated that the pensionnaires were to be assigned their own building or wing, which was to be within the walls but closed off by lock and key from the nuns’ quarters. The girls were to have their own classrooms, dormitory, refectory, courtyard, and garden, their own parlour, and their own enclosed space in the church.9 They were not to interfere with the community: “The demoiselles are forbidden to mix with the religious except in cases of necessity, which should be very rare.”10 According to the rules, the only nuns with whom they were allowed to talk were the mistresses assigned to their care. These nuns were forbidden to discuss their charges with anyone other than the superior – and, needless to say, they were also forbidden to discuss community matters with the demoiselles.11 In other words, the pensionnat was to be as self-contained as possible. How much this internal separation was maintained in real life is questionable. Where a large enough group of pensionnaires collected, the maintenance of special quarters made good sense. But many monasteries never achieved more than a handful of pensionnaires.12 It is difficult to imagine that such small groups could have been held in isolation. Furthermore, the death notices affirm that many young pensionnaires were specifically entrusted to the care of their relatives within the house. These multiple links must have added to the coming and going between cloister and pensionnat. In any case, communities may simply have found total separation from their pensionnaires unworkable. This must have been the case in the monastery of Niort, described in the memoirs of Anne de Chauffepié, a Protestant who was interned there in 1687: “After a fortnight’s stay among them, I had the good fortune to be much loved by them and to be given more liberty; since they saw that I would not abuse it, they were not afraid to let me enjoy all the little pleasures that I could find in this place, walking in the garden and freely associating with the religious and the pensionnaires.”13 In Niort, at least, nuns and demoiselles lived together as a community, without the isolation enjoined by the Rule. But let us go to the model of the monastic pensionnat as constructed in the rules. The ideal group of students numbered between twelve and fourteen girls, reasonably close to each other in age. If

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there were more pensionnaires than that, they were to be divided into groups, each group with its own two mistresses. The mistresses were to take turns week and week about, the nun on duty taking full responsibity for the girls while the other had time off to participate in regular community activities. At moments of peak activity, such as getting-up time in the morning, both were to be present, plus as many other nuns, or young women waiting to enter the novitiate, as the superior designated to help the children dress. The pensionnaires’ toilet conformed to the accepted hygienic practices of the day. The cleanliness of their heads was of particular concern. The nuns in attendance were instructed by the Rule to comb the girls’ hair and rub it with a brush or linen towel.14 They were to deal with vermin, from which even the most aristocratic heads were not free.15 After this, the girls dressed themselves, “the lay sister having brought candles and shoes and clean clothes, and fuel for the fire during the winter and at other times when there is need.”16 Younger children required special treatment: “Those who dress the little ones will come and get them up and put their shoes on while they are still on their beds if they cannot do it themselves; they will lace them and make them say their prayers properly. After combing and coiffing them, they will dress them and neatly fold their things into their clothes chests, or show them how to do it themselves.”17 All this accomplished, the supernumeraries would disappear, and the sémainière (the on-duty nun) would inspect the girls: “She will be sure to see that they are properly laced, coiffed and dressed, [then she will] have them put away their things and wash their mouths and their hands; she will make certain that they have their handkerchiefs, bonnets, gloves, etc., before leaving the bedroom.”18 Amidst all this careful preparation, washing occupied only a brief moment. The use of water was almost taboo in the seventeenth century, not only for reasons of modesty but because it was thought to be bad for the constitution.19 “Children should clean their eyes with a white cloth, which cleanses and leaves the complexion and colour in their natural state. Washing with water is bad for the sight, causes toothache and catarrh, makes the face pale, and renders it more susceptible to cold in winter and sun in summer.” So ran a contemporary instruction.20 For the same reason, there was no washing of the body; at most, in the summer months, a lay sister would wash the children’s feet.21 Such cleanliness as was achieved was the result of wiping and frequent changes of linen. This was fully in keeping with the times; the Sun King himself did no more.22 We have no way of knowing whether, in a later age, the nuns extended the use of water. Probably not, considering that the practice continued to be held in suspicion by the

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male religious orders who were their mentors.23 In any case, if they did, they were ahead of their times. As late as the mid-eighteenth century, bathing remained rare, even among aristocrats.24 Mention has been made of the lay sister who was assigned to the girls’ service to keep their rooms warm and clean, to see to the changing of their linen and bedding, to clean basins and chamber pots, set the fires, and be on call during the night. She must have been the closest thing to a nursemaid, and she often elicited the same warm feelings. Numerous death notices pay tribute to these sisters and to the affection with which the children regarded them. An hour after being awakened, the students were expected to be ready for the day. Now their mistress would take them to Mass, to breakfast, and to class. Part of the school day fell to other mistresses: “One mistress to teach handwork, and another to teach arithmetic, the reading of handwritten letters, and spelling.”25 But during out-ofschool hours, the on-duty mistress was expected to be on hand, acting as a governess to her charges. Whether at work, at play, or at prayer, they were her responsibility. From the details that the rules lavished on the upbringing of pensionnaires, we can reconstruct an image of the female child as the teaching nuns saw her, and of the feminine and domestic ideals which they proposed for her. In all their prescriptions for the care of pensionnaires, the rules showed serious concern for physical well-being. The students’ diet was to be carefully planned and measured, and only the older girls were expected to observe the religious fast days. Whereas the pensionnats of Port-Royal and Saint-Cyr offered a spartan environment, the teaching congregations advocated care that amounted almost to coddling. The girls were not to go outside in inclement weather or without their gloves. The rooms in which they lived were always to be kept warm. If they went into other rooms – for instance, to be fitted for new clothes – those rooms were to be warmed in advance. In writing class, the mistress was ordered to guard against the curvature of young spines. The smaller pensionnaires were to be the object of special concern. Their days were to start later and to be less demanding. “They [the mistresses] will take account of their temperament and age, so that they do not expect from a seven year old what they find in a twelve year old,” ran one Rule.26 In many different ways the teaching congregations showed a sensitivity to the needs of childhood that was ahead of their times. Yet it seems sometimes as though they overdid it, treating female children as delicate organisms in need more of corseting than of physical development. The games available to the pensionnaires were not only seemly; they were sedentary, or almost so.27 No concern

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was shown in the rules for serious physical activity or taking the air – a concern which the Jesuits, for example, demonstrated for boys.28 The behaviour of the young ladies was to be cast in a mold that would endure into their later years, displaying piety, modesty, courtesy, and moderation. Religion came first, of course; its propagation was the teaching congregations’ raison d’être. However, it was treated not so much as a subject to be learned as a way of life to be absorbed. The church of the Old Regime was cautious about dispensing religious knowledge to women. “The theology of women is devotion,” it argued.29 And it was devotion, rather than religious instruction, that occupied the pensionnaires’ time. In the order of their day, relatively little space – a half-hour or an hour at most – was devoted to catechism. But the entire day, after morning prayers and Mass were over, was interwoven with prayers: the Angelus, the rosary, litanies of Our Lady, and so on. Over and above these formal recitations, the girls were invited to accompany all their activities with appropriate silent prayers. There were prayers for getting up in the morning, for carrying out the mundane duties of the day, for undressing at night, and finally for going to sleep. According to one school manual, the moment of climbing into bed was to be given over to the following meditation: “Alas! This is how one day, in the same manner, my body will be put into the tomb to be eaten by worms. Oh my God, how stupid man is to work only for his body, which will soon be reduced to dust, and to neglect his soul which is immortal.”30 We must wonder how many young girls took their devotion to this level. But the fact that the nuns encouraged it suggests that, consciously or unconsciously, they were preparing their charges for religious life. Frequently in the literature we find proud references to pensionnats that doubled as “a sort of novitiate.” The teaching communities’ pensionnaires may not have dressed in miniature habits as did those of the Visitation, but they called each other “Sister” and they were were allowed, as they grew older, to share in the nuns’ Office and, in some communities, to participate in a formal gathering very much like the nuns’ coulpe, receiving admonitions for their misdeeds and accepting penances.31 It was not unknown for some groups of pensionnaires to go even further and set up their own communitywithin-the-community, acting out the parts that one day they would adopt in earnest.32 This not so subtle conditioning was considered acceptable as long as society felt the need to place numerous children in religious life. In a later age, family strategies changed and the monastic option lost its popularity. From Louisiana in 1728, Marie-Madeleine Hachard wrote: “All [our pensionnaires] would like to be nuns, which does not sit well

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with Reverend Father de Beaubois, who thinks it more appropriate that they become Christian mothers.”33 Louisiana was not France, of course, but the resistance to religious life was growing in the mother country as in the colony. The nuns’ tendency to draw their students into their own way of life was now often held against them. Next in importance came civility. Good manners were the stock-intrade of convents and, in the minds of some parents, perhaps their greatest asset: “Let them [the pensionnaires] be civil and polite, speaking well, standing straight and with grace, deferring to each other, and showing respect to the religious … They will be very polite at table … and will never appear to dislike what is given to them; that would be unbecoming and in no way befitting a well-born and well-brought-up girl.”34 Along with good manners came modesty. Though the parents provided the clothes, the convent rules dictated the style: no excess decoration, no open necks, no panniers, no powder “or other vanities.” That these rules were sometimes bent in afteryears can be deduced from the stern reminders issued from time to time in the ordinances given after pastoral visits: “The parents may give their daughters whatever clothes they please, but there must be no curling of the hair, and care must be taken that they all wear a neckerchief and that they be decently covered so as not to allow the entry of vanity into the house of God” … “The superior may not permit the wearing of any beauty spots or curled hair or other indecent and worldly adornments.”35 Well-brought-up young ladies were also to avoid idleness, which in the nuns’ minds led straight to sin. A good woman was a busy woman. For this reason, the pensionnaires’ day, like that of the nuns, was packed with alternating periods of prayer and activity, leaving no time free for wandering or wondering. All this formation was to take place within an atmosphere of domesticity. The pensionnat was meant to resemble the perfect home. The mistresses were enjoined to see themselves as “true mothers,” giving their charges “the same care that they would have had in their parents’ house.”36 The girls were to treat one another as sisters, the older watching over the younger. They were to learn the sort of tasks that they might well be expected to perform at home.37 An evocative description of this atmosphere of domesticity has been left to us in Madame de Maintenon’s recollection of her efforts as a girl to please a mistress whom she loved to distraction: “I passed whole nights starching the pensionnaires’ linens so that they would always be clean and do honour to the mistress without her having to take the trouble … I made my companions go to bed promptly, I pressed them so urgently that they didn’t have time to think; but they went to bed diligently and cheerfully to please me, because I was very popular.”38

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It should be said in passing that this relationship between Mère Sainte-Celeste, Ursuline of Niort, and the future Madame Louis XIV stands as a contradiction to any generalization of monasteries as cold and overformal places. “I thought I would die of grief when I left that convent,” wrote the great lady.39 Next to piety and good manners, home management ranked as the most important subject that the children had to master: They will be taught to smoothe out their linen, to keep themselves clean and neat in their persons, to dress themselves, to keep their clothes chest tidy, and not to let anything be left about or in disorder, whether their linens, clothes, handwork, papers or anything else, so that one day they will be good managers of their households.40 Let them learn to master the domestic arts, to take care of their clothes, etc., to be always neat, and careful with their handwork; let them also be shown how to mend what has come unstitched and torn, and to repair their linen.41

Handwork of all kinds – embroidery and straight sewing, as well as mending – loomed large in every pensionnat’s syllabus. Skill with the needle was an essential part of the good woman’s portfolio. As well, the students were to be trained in arithmetic and the reading of handwritten documents, all as an introduction to domestic management. They needed to understand legal papers, no matter how illegible; they needed to be able to manage money. True to its penchant for detail, the Rule of the Ursulines of Paris prepared examples of practical arithmetic: “How much the things that they might buy would come to, as for instance 15 yards of lace at 35/4d a yard” – which, once they had made their calculation, they would have to pay for in different coinages.42 The mental world to which the nuns belonged held that the responsibility for running the household rested with the wife and that good management skills would avail her better, in the long run, than charm and polish. As Fénelon explained, “It requires a much higher and broader intelligence to learn all the arts that pertain to domestic economy and to be capable of managing a whole family … than to play, discuss fashions, and practise the fine tricks of conversation.”43 This viewpoint did not carry over into intellectual pursuits. Even the most ambitious learning programs for girls failed to include the sort of training of the mind that was available to their brothers. Girls were never formally introduced to the study of logic. The significance of this must be measured by the importance which early modern pedagogues attached to that discipline. “Logic is needed in any mental activity. Above all it is needed to grasp other sciences more fully, promptly and certainly,” wrote the Parisian professor Desperiers in

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1648.44 Recognized as a basic learning tool for boys, it was witheld from girls. Proficiency in Latin grammar, a basic requirement of college education, was also almost unknown in convents – a lacuna made all the stranger by the fact that it had often been achieved in the same convents during their early days.45 On the other hand, certain academic subjects, such as history and geography, did edge their way into the pensionnats. So, after some debate, did modern languages, though the fear was expressed that certain languages – Italian, above all – would encourage lascivousness. The same anxiety dictated that the students’ reading should always be strictly controlled. “They are not to have any profane books, under pain of being expelled in disgrace,” the bishop of Carcassonne ordered the local Ursulines.46 Throughout the period, femininity and serious learning were regarded as mutually exclusive, either because of women’s presumed inability to learn or because of their curiosity and vanity, which needed to be mortified constantly. “The repression of ‘curiosity’ … was one of the principal objectives pursued in the education of women,” writes a historian of women’s culture.47 We cannot blame the teaching nuns for bowing to this; apart from the fact that they had a clientele to please, they were themselves schooled in the practice of self-deprecation. Privately they delighted in the learning which some members of their communities achieved, but they knew enough not to display such learning among their scholastic wares.48 It would take spirits prouder and more independent than theirs to break the mold in which, as women, they were contained. If academic pursuits were off-limits, the fine arts were not. Music, drawing, drama, and even dancing made their way into monastic pensionnats before the end of the Old Regime. In each case there was a chorus of naysayers, anxious to prevent the slightest blot of worldliness on the demoiselle psyche. But the will of parents, and the need of the nuns to satisfy that will, overcame the opposition.49 Whereas the initial constitutions of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame had placed a total ban on worldly songs, dancing, and musical instruments, the same order’s pensionnats (at least, those of Paris and Reims) were, by the eighteenth century, offering their pupils lessons with dancing masters and drawing mistresses, as well as the use of pianos and harpsichords.50 The monastic account books, as well as the inventories of 1790–91, bear witness to musical instruments in convent parlours – and the lessons they made possible.51 Perhaps the liveliest debate took place over the appropriateness of staging dramas – a learning experience in which the Jesuits put much faith and which the teaching congregations were anxious to adopt,

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seeing it as a means, as one nun put it, “to perfect the pensionnaires in all kinds of ways, to train them in gracefulness and to exercise their memory.”52 But other pedagogues condemned it outright, and towards the end of the seventeenth century the hierarchy took their part. Archbishop de Noailles made the ruling: “These kinds of exercises serve only to dissipate, and to waste the nuns’ time, allowing the pensionnaires to develop a spirit of vanity contrary to the modesty in which they should be raised.”53 However, bishops came and went, and the debate continued unresolved. There are various references to monastic schools putting on plays, and almost as many references to protests from scandalized critics. One particularly contentious event was the presentation of the play Zaïre, complete with its prologue praising Voltaire, by the pensionnaires of the Ursulines of Auxerre in 1763. The news of it got as far as the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, which professed outrage. But it should be noted that a special performance was staged for the clergy of the city – and they did not complain!54 This, then, outlined in the broadest of brush strokes, was the schooling received by many young ladies in Old Regime France. But not all. Daughters of the haute noblesse, from the princesses of the blood down, tended to go to the pensionnats of the ancient Benedictine and Cistercian abbeys, where they received an education appropriate to their station – light on academics, heavy on the arts of refinement. Next in rank came the pensionnats of the Visitation. The teaching monasteries, with their more serious educational agenda, drew heavily on the lesser elites: minor nobility, and girls whose fathers were officers, men of the law, members of the liberal professions, or wealthy merchants.55 With advancing years, family strategies evolved. Among the upper classes it became fashionable to tutor girls at home. On the face of it, this should have diminished the monastic pensionnaire population. But in fact the population tended to increase. We must suppose that families of more modest circumstances were now ready to foot the bill to have their daughters boarded – at least for a while. Martine Sonnet has noted that the typical stay in a Parisian pensionnat in the eighteenth century lasted less than two years.56 This would be long enough to prepare a child for First Communion, but not long enough, perhaps, to endow her with a vocation. At the end of the Old Regime, pensionnats were no longer “antechambers to the novitiate.” The requirements of families changed too. The advances in literacy over the past century – for which they had partly to thank the teaching congregations – raised their expectations. History, geography, art, instrumental music, and dancing were subjects that parents would never have demanded of the first generation of nuns. But they did now, and the monasteries had perforce to comply. Slowly, and in spite

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of the conservatism that gripped both them and the people who watched over them, some communities updated their curriculum and their methods. Others continued in their established ways, often because of their poverty, isolation, or location. Claude-Alain Sarre maintains that in the forty Ursuline monasteries under his eye in the southeast, at no time could he discern “the suggestion of an opening towards history, geography, non-religious literature, the sciences and the arts.”57 The nuns of the southeast reflected, and at the same time reinforced, lower educational expectations than were general in the north. By and large, however, the pensionnats of the teaching congregations provided French women with the best education they were going to receive either during the Old Regime or for many years thereafter.58 Madame de Genlis, famous for her concern with feminine schooling, wrote of these teaching congregations: “I dare to say that their education is, in general, far better than that which is commonly received from parents who do not make it their principal business to treat the raising of their children as a sacred duty. Anyone who knows the plan of education which [they] follow will certainly not contradict me.”59

th e da m es p en s i o n na i r e s While the boarding of children had been a part of the teaching monasteries’ mission from early days, the boarding of older women definitely had not been. The founding generation considered the presence of such women to be absolutely inimical to the spirit of clausura. It was not long, however, before their determination was undermined. In fact, Pope Paul V himself, in the various bulls of foundation which he issued in the early seventeenth century, opened the first chink in the cloister wall, ordaining that “besides the virgins and widows who are being admitted to take the habit and make profession … other devout married women may be received, though only under the circumstances permitted by the sacred canons of the Council of Trent.”60 This meant that foundresses and other substantial patrons could be awarded the right to retire into the cloister, providing they lived piously and in harmony with the pattern of community life. From that time on, their presence can be noted in house after house, the teaching communities as much as any others. Mademoiselle de Valavès, benefactress and foundress of the Ursuline house of Barjols, was given permission by the bishop of Fréjus to live there “under the vows only of chastity and clausura.”61 Similarly, Catherine de Montholon’s donation to the Ursuline house of Dijon earned her the right to live within its walls together with her maid, and to be buried in

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its church.62 Marie Madeleine, daughter of the baron d’Avigno, was for many years a pensionnaire perpetuelle in the Ursuline community of Auxerre, with the privilege of wearing their religious habit and being buried in their cemetery. The marquise de Plainville, “flying from her husband’s presence,” entered the Ursuline monastery of Blois in 1666 and remained there for thirty-six years.63 The shades of these semi-nuns cluster around the monastic annals. Most of them were either the widows or the unmarried daughters of prominent citizens. In many cases, they had relatives in the community – usually sisters or daughters. They seem to have slipped easily into the life of the cloister, joining the religious services and sharing in the activities, but being only partly subject to the discipline of the community. Sometimes, however, the relationship went sour. Mademoiselle Doblère caused nothing but headaches to the Ursulines of Tonnerre because of her “scandalous and capricious moods” and her refusal to follow house rules. In 1654 the Chapter broke her contract and turned her out. A few years later the same Chapter faced another difficult resident, Madame de Beaujeu, whose good social standing was matched by her bad temper. Having walked out of the house in a huff, she later sought readmittance, which the Chapter refused, invoking the rule that no secular persons should be admitted “unless there are great advantages in it for the community.” When these advantages were made concrete, in the form of 1200 livres and the promise that a wall would be erected between Madame de Beaujeu’s lodging and the convent proper, she was allowed back in.64 So the arrangement could be profitable, and clearly this was the nuns’ principal reason for accepting mature women. In return for the care which they promised to give Madame de la Borderie until her death, she endowed the nuns of the Congrégation in Châteaudun with a house, lands, and seigneurial rights.65 Anne Joly de Champigny, a pensionnaire in the monastery of the Congrégation of Provins, bequeathed 11,000 livres to the community when she died in 1685.66 Madame de Plainville attempted to make over a fortune of 20,000 livres to the Ursulines of Blois, though she was thwarted by her husband’s profligacy and her heir’s legal challenge.67 In 1728, after many years of residence in the Ursuline monastery of Montargis, Madame de la Rivière died, leaving a lump sum of 3000 livres plus life pensions of 350 livres each for five nuns.68 Alongside these major benefactresses there were numerous lesser donors, such as the brave fille of Quimperlé “who wanted to finish her days in a religious community” and who “became fond of the religious and left them all that she had.”69

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However, throughout most of the seventeenth century the business of boarding adult women remained a minor concern for the teaching congregations and one that did not often yield great returns. And for the most part the understanding remained clear: the women were special cases; they intended to live there permanently, piously, and, as Archbishop de Noailles instructed in 1697, “without prejudice to the perfection of the religious.”70 Yet gradually, from one decade to the next, the wedge was driven farther in. Enclosed monasteries, because they were at the same time both respectable and secure, were a tempting resource for a society that was increasingly concerned with law and order and had on occasion to deal with “difficult” women. Before the monasteries were terminated in the 1790s, they were put to uses which their founders would not have imagined. The Widening of the Breach In their early years, the teaching congregations remained virtually closed to the short-duration visitor. Madame de Sainte-Beuve, for all that she was foundress of the grand couvent of the Ursulines of Faubourg Saint-Jacques in Paris, was careful to limit her visits to the cloister. Her niece was permitted to enter the house seven or eight times a year, though not during Lent or Advent. Madame de Laval, another benefactress, had to seek permission from Rome to spend a few days in the community, to console herself after the death of her husband.71 These and other visits – which were very rare – had to be conducted in such a way as not to trouble “the inner peace of the religious”. The Ursuline community in Rennes was less rigid. The duchesse de Vendôme received permission from the bishop to enter its enclosure once a week whenever she was in town. But the fact remained, she had to have permission from the bishop, and she was allowed to enter only once a week.72 This separateness did not – could not – last for long. To find out why, we can look to Pierre Fourier, founder of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame. In 1628 he wrote to the sisters at Saint-Nicolas du Port, asking them on behalf of the Princesse de Pfalzbourg to board a protégée of hers for a week or, at the most, ten days.73 In July 1630 he was urging the sisters of Saint-Mihiel to do a similar favour – this time for an indefinite period – for a protégée of the Princesse Marguerite de Gonzague. On this occasion he explained his reasons: “It is no small thing to please the princes … and I maintain strongly that it would be an unheard-of show of incivility not to agree at once to what our devoted princesses are asking of you here.”74 Fourier was teaching his

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nuns about real life. One good turn deserved another; the princess would remember the favour and would repay it some other time. On the other hand, a refusal would rebound, sooner or later, against a community that owed so much to the princess’s patronage. Then he added a new twist. “If they [the princes] ask us humbly to make room for some poor soul for a little while … [surely we are not] so soft, so delicate, so retired, so worthy, so precious, so perfect, so holy that we mustn’t let a soul like this one, coming from the Court, touch us at all or even come close to us.”75 An interesting argument indeed, because it went against the accepted tradition of reformed female monasticism. The purity of clausura, so heavily stressed by the Council of Trent, was being weighed against the friendship of princes. Needless to say, the sisters complied. These two requests are interesting for two other reasons: first, that Fourier, as founder of the Congrégation and author of its Rule, knew full well that what he was asking went against the grain, yet could see no way out; second, that he made such a big issue of such short stays. These were exceptions, he was saying, but even so they had to be ringed around with precautions. In each case the guest was to have no blot on her reputation; she was to dress and behave modestly and to obey the nun designated to be her director; and her stay was to be kept a secret from all except her patroness. If she broke any of these conditions, she was to leave at once.76 The tranquillity of the cloister was still a matter of prime concern. Fourier kept silent about the nature of the women’s problems, though in a later letter he implied that the second case involved a serious mother-daughter disagreement. Another case, known to us through the letters of Marie Guyart of Quebec to her family in Tours, is clearer and more dramatic. In 1644 Marie Buisson, her niece, was pursued and abducted by an admirer. Although she was freed through her family’s efforts, the pursuit went on and became even threatening, the man in question gaining the ear of the duc d’Orléans. When the younger Marie took shelter in the Ursuline monastery, the authorities ordered her out. It was at this point that she decided to enter the novitiate – more out of spite than because of a vocation, remarks the historian.77 The pursuer admitted defeat; Marie remained a nun to the end of her days. The sheltering of young women at risk was the major exception to the teaching communities’ original policy towards adult pensionnaires. Indeed, the nuns accepted it as a clear responsibility. The Rule of the Ursulines of Paris allowed for the admission of “an heiress or any other … put into pension by the Justice or by her relatives in order to be instructed and preserved from the accidents which, it is

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feared, might befall such persons.”78 In 1641 and again in 1646, the grand couvent took in young women as pensionnaires on the grounds that they were in danger of being kidnapped. In 1653 it accepted Mademoiselle Renoir d’Orsy, whose tutors were seeking to marry her by force. It later turned out that she was already secretly married to the man of her choice, whereupon the lieutenant civil ordered that she be detained in the house until further notice.79 In 1637 Thomas Duval, sieur de Noyer, engaged in furious legal battle with the superior of the convent of Notre-Dame in Alençon over what he claimed was the illegal detention of his daughter, Marthe. The superior responded that she was “ready to open the door and let her leave, but cannot force her out, since her conscience does not permit it.” Marthe, on interrogation, declared that her father had mistreated her because of her conversion to Catholicism, that she was acting of her own free will, and that she had no intention of leaving the convent, “to which she has retired as to a sanctuary.”80 Duval lost his legal battle and was forced to pay her pension. In a somewhat similar case of conscience, a young woman was placed by lettre de cachet, and against the will of her guardian, in the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Montargis because she had declared a wish to become a nun. She changed her mind, but the circumstances were deemed too dangerous to set her free. “We were obliged to keep her to a certain age, so she remained during this time in the religious habit without causing any disorder.”81 However, “the world” was discovering less benevolent uses for women’s monasteries. In 1653 Françoise Baillé was officially committed to the pensionnat of the Ursulines of Blois at the behest of her sister and brother-in-law, who inherited her goods in return for a promise to pay her expenses.82 In 1665 Louis Descluseaux, sieur de Rocons, put his wife into the same pensionnat “on condition that the said religious cannot let the said lady leave their convent without the express consent of the said sieur her husband, and that furthermore she will not write any letters or talk with anyone in the parlour without being accompanied by a religious.”83 At about the same time, a young woman was raging helplessly against her incarceration in the Ursuline convent of Montargis. “There were reasons why she had to stay,” wrote the annalist, “but as it was against her will, it made her angry.” Only the onset of consumption destroyed her defiance; she finally submitted to the fate that had been prepared for her. The man who had arranged her imprisonment, the surintendant of the duc d’Orléans, “very properly” defrayed the costs of her illness and burial.84 Such pensionnaires were hardly likely to be the peaceful souls bent on heaven that Paul V had had in mind when he drew up his bulls. Indeed, they were more than likely to have serious problems, which the

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nuns were presumably expected to tolerate, at whatever the cost to their inner peace. Many of these cases were private family matters. But with the passing of time, public policy intruded more and more. In 1670, for instance, the bishop of Troyes persuaded the Ursulines of that city to lodge Catherine Charpy, “a woman who has claimed to work miracles,” on a pension of 120 livres per annum.85 Clearly, he wanted her removed from the public view. The idea that the teaching monasteries could serve as places of official detention was taking its final shape. What changed the situation most of all was the Crown’s policy towards its Protestant subjects. From the mid-seventeenth century on, Protestant women could be found in convent pensionnats, often as involuntary inmates. But the great invasion of mature pensionnaires started later, with the Edict of Fontainebleau. As the annalist of Montargis described it, in 1685 “they decided to put the most obstinate ladies and young ladies in religious houses.” Montargis got a niece of the secretary of the duc de la Force. She was placed in the house by lettre de cachet, there to pass the first six months in what amounted to solitary confinement. Various learned people, from the archbishop down to the superior, reasoned with her, but in vain. After a while the community agreed to change its strategy: “We decided not to talk to her any more about her religion, both out of despair of success and to avoid hearing her express sentiments against ours.” There then began a time of détente, during which the nuns taught her geography, arithmetic, and history, and the young woman took a liking to the community “and recovered a little from the terrors that she had for the cloister.” Finally, after two years, she was granted permission to go with her mother (who had been incarcerated elsewhere) to Holland, “where they were happy to find the full exercise of their evil religion.” From her new home she wrote “with friendship” to the nuns for several years.86 Similar testimonials to the nuns’ forbearance can be found elsewhere. Anne de Chauffepié, whose memories of the Ursulines of Niort are recorded above, was clearly touched by their kindness, even though she was not won over to their religion. Some nuns were more successful in their attempts to convert their charges. In 1685, in the Ursuline chapel of Rouen, Catherine de la Motte Pilastre solemnly abjured her religion in the presence of the prioress who had “conquered” her.87 In 1701 Marie Allardin, an involuntary pensionnaire in the convent of the Congrégation in Reims, “after several months of discussion” declared herself convinced and made her abjuration.88 These women did not subsequently join the community in which they had been placed, but others did. Marguerite de Brouset entered the Ursuline house in Toulouse with a pension from

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the king, given to her as a nouvelle convertie. She died a nun.89 Renée de Saint-Ours, Celeste de Vautron, and Jeanne de Beuves, three members of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, all left their mark in the death notices of their order as converted Huguenots who eventually entered religion in the houses that had been their prisons.90 If the records were complete, there would doubtless be many more such cases to cite. A serious difficulty soon arose, which over the years led to many complaints: Who was to foot the bill? Jacques Conseil, father of a nouvelle convertie who had been taken into a convent pensionnat, suggested, “Those who are so anxious to instruct my child in your religion will surely have the charity to wish to pay her pension.”91 But the government was a bad risk where the payment of pensions was concerned. The nuns were frequently left in the lurch. In one teaching convent, the sisters complained that they had found themselves “charged with a number of women and girls of the so-called reformed religion whom the bishops and the intendant forced them to receive, and whose pensions have never been paid … They have fed and boarded some of them for four, five and six years without anyone caring. This translates into pure loss for this community which already has infinite difficulty to subsist.”92 In another, the nuns complained: “Our lords the Intendants … have these last years placed in our hands and confided to us several women and girls, both Huguenots and new converts, of whom ten or twelve have not paid any pension.”93 In yet another house the nuns’ grievance was even stronger, because of the costs incurred in securing their involuntary pensionnaire: “This girl exposed the community to some expense, because we were obliged to put bars on some windows, through which attempts were made more than once to carry her off.”94 Many years later, the Crown was still putting Protestant women into convents and still, as often as not, failing to pay what it owed for their pensions.95 By the turn of the century, the teaching monasteries had been awarded a niche in society as the instruments of royal policy towards recalcitrant Protestant subjects. So it was not a great step for them to begin taking in other kinds of difficult people. It should be noted that these convents were not yet used in the discipline and control of debauched women or penitents; that was a task reserved for certain specialist communities. However, they were clearly taking on the character of prisons. Alongside the pious widows and spinsters who followed community life with such loving devotion, there was a growing population of detainees who must have had very different attitudes. Let us take, as an example, the lettres de cachet that were delivered to one small monastery in Valençay, in Berry. In 1722 the monastery re-

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ceived an order for the incarceration of the superior of the Ursulines of Saint-Charles of Orléans; in 1760, an order for the arrest of Marie Langevin and her incarceration at the expense of Sieur and Dame Séguier; in 1771, an order for the incarceration of Thérèse Bezançon at the expense of her family; also an order for the incarceration of Marguerite Denis de Landry at the expense of her husband; in 1772, an order for the incarceration of Soeur Barrey, a Bernardine nun from Saint-Aignan, at the expense of her community; in 1777, an order for the incarceration of Marie Anne de Blandin at the expense of her father. To these orders must be added three for the release of persons not otherwise named, which suggests that the extant list of lettres de cachet may not be complete.96 The Valençay monastery seems to have been a busy place; whether it was typical or not, there is no way of knowing. It is possible that its readiness to accept prisoners was related to its extreme poverty.97 From time to time the nuns resisted. In 1725 a Sieur Courtin used a lettre de cachet to put his wife into the Ursuline monastery of Blois. But when he quibbled over the cost of the pension, the nuns demanded that she be removed, and the lieutenant of the marechaussée came to take her away. Two years later they were not so successful. Madame Andins, wife of Sieur Lorin, asked to enter the pensionnat. The community was opposed, “knowing the prejudice that persons of this kind ordinarily cause in religious houses.” But their protests were overridden by an arrêt from the court, and she came to stay, along with her own domestics.98 In the official mind, the monasteries offered the perfect solution to thorny little social problems. In 1728 the new Ursuline community in Louisiana – despite a lack of space and an overload of responsibilities – was faced with a difficult request: “Monsieur Perier, our commandant, made us set up a prison here a few days ago to house a lady among our pensionnaires whom he had given to us after she was separated from her husband; but as this lady began to tire of the convent and to want to have dealings with a secular person, he put her in prison with her husband’s consent until such time as she could be sent back to France: that’s the way they do things here.”99 The sisters’ distaste was clear, and the woman was soon removed. But the incident was symptomatic of the times. The priority that had once been given to the regularity of the cloister and the perfection of its members was a thing of the past. The trend towards the warehousing of mature women in monastic pensionnats was given great impetus by the Crown’s growing fondness for the lettre de cachet. The number of these documents issued was hugely increased in the eighteenth century with

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the spread of Jansenism, when Jansenist women – sometimes laywomen but more often nuns – replaced Protestants as the Crown’s main targets. In 1716 Louise de Mesnil, last prioress of Port-Royal, died in the Ursuline monastery of Blois after six and a half years as a prisoner. “We had the sorrow to see her die without giving any mark of submission,” wrote the annalist of the house. “This death has distressed all our community who otherwise loved her and honoured her perfectly.”100 Madame de Mesnil may have gained the community’s love, but she had to do it from within the four walls of her cell, separated entirely from the monastery’s life and conversation. The same fate befell the superior of the Jansenist monastery of Saint-Charles of Orléans101 and the many other religious women who were taken from their own communities and confined in others. “A veritable rain of lettres de cachet fell on the communities and dispersed the members infected with heresy among the orthodox convents,” writes a historian of Tours.102 The rain he speaks of also fell in other parts of the country. Wherever Jansenism was an issue, women were in danger of being removed from their communities and placed in others, not as nuns but as prisoners. The Jansenist Nouvelles ecclésiastiques are full of such events, only one of which will be mentioned here: an exchange between two communities in Troyes, where five dissident nuns from each house were imprisoned in the other.103 Thus, at one blow two communities lost an important part of their personnel, and ten names were added to the Crown’s list of involuntary pensionnaires. Whatever the “orthodox” nuns felt about this seems to have been immaterial. The lettre de cachet and the order from the bishop were facts of life. But there are signs that, from the nuns’ point of view, there were good reasons to open the door to pensionnaires, whatever the terms. As described in part 1, the last years of Louis XIV’s reign had brought serious financial distress to the country, the convents included, and this was compounded by the national bankruptcy of 1720. With much of their fortune turned into worthless paper money, and the returns on their investments radically reduced, many female communities faced total ruin.104 In exploring every available money-raising expedient, they found that one of the best was to take in mature pensionnaires. “We received ladies as perpetual pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of the Congrégation of Reims. “We hoped that their pensions, being considerable and regularly paid, would help us to keep going at a time when there were so few rentes.”105 It was “the harshness of the times,”106 as much as anything else, that made the monasteries’ pensionnats into a big business. Their financial considerations corre-

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sponded neatly with the policies of the government and the wishes of society. The result was a widening of the breach in the cloister walls. As the eighteenth century progressed, the names of dames pensionnaires appeared more frequently in the convent records. Some of these women, as in earlier times, were faithful pensionnaires for life. Among the death notices of the Filles de Notre-Dame we find mention of the death in 1729 of Louise de Ponteau des Roys, who left the community 1000 écus on condition that she be buried in the chapel; and in 1733, of “a lady of good family … who has died after spending 43 years with us.”107 The lives of such women appear only for a brief instant, encapsulated in the notices of their deaths: in 1747, Françoise Setier de la Sallière, eighty years old, buried in the Ursuline house of Meaux; in 1748, Jeanne Dalichou, widow of an officer in the Régiment d’Agenois, dead at the age of sixty-one in the Ursuline convent of Châlons; in 1765, Marie Regnaudin, a deaf mute, dead after thirtyeight years as a pensionnaire in the Ursuline house of Auxerre. In the Ursuline house of Magny, five elderly ladies were buried at the rate of one per decade between 1737 and 1791, which suggests a continuing though never massive presence.108 But the brevity of their appearance in the records may belie the effort that their room and board entailed. In 1790 the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux were still burdened with a woman “in dementia” who had been in the house for six years, though her family had defaulted on her pension for the past thirtythree months.109 At the same time, their sister community in Poitiers was begging the authorities to solve the problem of an eighty-eightyear-old woman who had been incarcerated for forty years and bedridden for twenty, with nothing to support her but “the modest pension that the king gives her.”110 In addition to these faithful ladies of long duration there was now a floating population. In the records of the little Ursuline house in Saint-Symphorien le Château, near Lyon, the entries include, for 1743, a receipt from Joseph Guyot (“for a month and some days of pension for his fiancée … 12 livres 10 sols”) and for 1745, several acknowledgements of payments for short-term stays for ladies and their maids.111 In 1752 Madeleine Roche boarded in the Ursuline monastery of Périgueux while the Parlement of Bordeaux considered her bid to marry without parental permission.112 An actress by the name of Favart spent time with the Ursulines of Issoudun for no other reason, according to local historians, than that she had failed to respond to the advances of the maréchal de Saxe.113 Mademoiselle Deboulimbert had her own page in the account book of the monastery of Châteauroux, in Berry, from 1779 until she left the pensionnat in 1785.

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In 1788 she returned, “separated from her husband,” and resumed payments for herself and her maid until 1790. The same house also records the stay of Madame de Guenan, two daughters, and a maid from May 1782 to March 1783. And many others.114 Women came and went, and not always for weighty reasons: leaving for the summer and returning in the autumn; taking up residence when their husbands went on trips, leaving to go on trips themselves. So it can be seen that by the later years of the eighteenth century, the monasteries were openly serving as private hotels. The justification for this, from the nuns’ point of view, was the size of the pension. Whereas the typical annual pension for a student was 120 to 150 livres, the pension for a dame ranged from 250 livres up. Mademoiselle Laquin paid the monastery of Châteauroux 300 livres (“she has a room to herself”); Madame Labastière, her sister, and their servant paid together 850 livres.115 Madame D’Hermonville paid the Congrégation of Sainte-Menehould 300 livres, while Madame Cliquot paid the Ursulines of Épernay 468 livres for herself and her maid.116 We can speculate that although the presence of a maid meant another mouth to feed, it involved less labour for the monastery and was therefore not a bad arrangement. As for the question of space, this was probably no longer a problem in most monasteries, where shrinking populations of nuns were the order of the day. “Fewer religious, more pensionnaires,” one historian observes.117 “Our pensionnaires help us to subsist, we could not do it without their help,” wrote the Ursulines of Vendôme in 1710. “It is the only resource that we have to alleviate the misery with which we are burdened,” wrote the Ursulines of Tréguier in 1729.118 Increasingly, pensionnats became indispensable to the survival of many houses. Where the evidence exists, we can see that the rise in the number of pensionnaires was paralleled by a rise in the value of their contribution to the monastic coffers. In Châteauroux, for example, the receipts from the Congrégation’s pensionnat quintupled between 1702 and 1745;119 in Lannion, in Brittany, those from the Ursulines’ pensionnat increased almost sixfold between 1710 and 1790, while those of another convent, the Ursulines of Rennes, multiplied sevenfold.120 In many cases, by the end of the Old Regime the pensionnat was providing one-third or more of a monastery’s total income.121 While it is impossible, given the state of most monastic accounts, to disentangle the women from the children among the pensionnaires, it is safe to assume that the former provided a lucrative market for the houses that were ready to exploit it. The progressive opening of the teaching monasteries to this field of activity – which most certainly was not part of their original mission – offers an illustration of the way in which society and government were

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able to shape institutions to suit their purposes. The teaching monasteries, because they never achieved permanent financial independence, were unable to resist the push and pull of the outside world. “Their revenues, like their raison d’être, came essentially from their social rôle,” writes one historian, arguing that this resulted in the attenuation of their mystical character and the enhancement of a new social and practical personality.122 The reception of women – all kinds of women – within the monastery enclosure is a case in point. What Fourier in the 1630s had seen as the tiniest hole in the wall of the cloister had become, a century later, a wide-open breach. It could not have failed to have its impact on the spirit of enclosure. What were the consequences? A modern-day Ursuline sees the reception of dames pensionnaires as a serious mistake, one that cost the communities dearly.123 There are signs that some of her predecessors would have agreed with her. “It is not our practice to take women into our pensionnat,” wrote the Filles de Notre-Dame of Bordeaux. “We have no ladies boarding,” proclaimed the nuns of the Congrégation in Bernay, “we don’t want them because they are a trap to regularity.” Similarly, “We were so uncomfortable with these sorts of pensionnaires,” wrote the annalist of Reims, “that we resolved never to receive them again. A wise resolution, which ought to be kept always, because the presence of strange persons can only alter regularity and charity.”124 Other communities tried fruitlessly to end the practice of boarding adults.125 But supposing they had succeeded, would the monasteries have been better places? The same modern Ursuline makes the point that her predecessors were always marked with the spirit of their times. Was there any possibility that the mystical ambiance that suffused the early years of the Catholic Reformation could have survived in the age of the Enlightenment? In other words, did not the women of the eighteenth century already have a more pragmatic outlook, one that was at odds with the intense inwardness of the earlier age? And were they not now, perhaps, capable of doing what Fourier had challenged their predecessors to do – rubbing shoulders with “the world” without losing their raison d’être? It is more pertinent to ask whether the women of “the world” might not have been better off without the monastic pensionnats. Let us set aside those devoted pensionnaires perpetuelles for whom the monasteries were a place of peace and rest, and those in transit for whom they were a convenient oasis. It could be argued that the availability of so many secure, discreet places of confinement tempted a whole gamut of people – government officials, bishops, dissatisfied husbands, angry parents, greedy families – to create a prison population that would not have existed otherwise.

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The opening of the pensionnats to older women was a compromise, without a doubt. It had significant consequences, creating havens for them but also prisons. Willingly or unwillingly, the feminine monasteries became accomplices in the repressive policies of the Old Regime and sometimes in the less than laudable designs of individuals. This contributed, in a certain degree, to their contamination. But it also allowed for their survival.

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Conclusion

The two centuries that lay between the appearance of the teaching communities and their suppression were anything but uneventful. The country evolved. Peace succeeded war, and war, peace. Economic expansion turned into depression and serious crisis and then, finally, back to expansion. The general turbulence of the seventeenth century yielded to the more settled atmosphere of the eighteenth. In the intellectual world there was a momentous revolution as the siècle sacral gave way to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. Ultimately, new ideas were translated into action, and the Old Regime, like the Bastille which was one of its symbols, crumbled into ruins. What we have been concerned with here, though, is not “the world” but the cloister; and the cloister followed its own rhythm. That is not to say that monasticism was timeless. It was always subject to the movement of public opinion. The very creation of the new teaching congregations, and the adaptations they made through the years, bear witness to that. But it was, in a sense, seamless. From the day in 1592 when the young women of l’Isle-sur-Sorgues gathered in community until the day in 1792 when, somewhere in France, the last nun left the last convent, there was time enough for French society to move from CounterReformation to Enlightenment, from Absolutism to Revolution. Within the cloister, however, change proceeded at a snail’s pace, surrounded and almost smothered by the ordered sameness of convent life. Generation after generation of women walked the same halls and garden paths, read the same Rule, wore the same religious habit, observed the same devotional practices, and cherished the same memories. Long

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years after they had passed from the scene, the anciennes mères continued to exercise control; their successors were bound to them by the thick braided cord of daily observance. The standard by which the generations measured themselves was “regularity,” their fidelity to the Rule, even in its smallest details. So while this history has been about changes – extreme changes in material fortune and more subtle changes of spirit and condition – it has also been about unchangingness: the profound stability inculcated by the Rule and protected by the cloister. It is also about the mutedness of the monasteries’ awareness of the wider society of the Old Regime. To be sure, nuns maintained close ties with their families so that news and views leaked both into and out of the cloister. But the convent walls that cut off the sights and sounds of outside also buffered impressions and attenuated natural sympathies. Communities, if they were successful, had an inner organization and purpose that absorbed much of the consciousness of their members. When, perforce, they had to look beyond themselves, a strong sense of self-justification together with a strong habit of perseverance protected them against “the world.” Dependent in many ways on their milieu, they were also independent of it, so sure were they of their calling. “The religious orders are the work of God,” wrote a monastic annalist at a difficult moment in their relationship with the Crown. “He sustains them and will continue to sustain them until the end of time … conserving them against all those who have worked through many centuries to destroy them.”1 This conviction of election and apartness enabled them to delay the impacts of outside events, even if they could not finally avoid them. “We are not aware of the laws, because we don’t read any news sheets,” said the Ursuline Clothilde Paillot as she stood before the revolutionary tribunal in 1792. She was guillotined the same day.2 The issues of the day counted less for religious communities than for the rest of society. In that fact lay inner strength and cohesion as well as danger. At the time of the Revolution, the teaching communities were proud to proclaim that they had not changed, that they were true to the order of things as they had always known it. At this, the world – which had changed, and changed radically – turned on them and cast them out. However, once the Revolution had run its course, the durability of their institut drew some of them back. In the first two decades of the nineteenth century groups of survivors, here and there, found the means to re-establish their communities. Their numbers were small, and this has allowed some historians to question the solidity of their original commitment. Geneviève Reynes believes that it was inertia that

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had kept nuns in their convents in 1792, and inertia that now prevented them from returning.3 However, this is to make light of the difficulties they faced when in 1806 they received official permission to resume their teaching. These difficulties included their personal poverty and their dependence on outside assistance, and above all their average age, now in the late fifties and early sixties.4 Only a few years were left for the survivors of the Revolution to make a personal contribution to the rebuilding of the cloisters.5 Nevertheless, by slow stages they set up their clausura, resumed their religious dress, and returned to the old order of day. To begin with, they took in pensionnaires to supplement their funds. Finally they reopened their day schools and, with that, took back some of the position they had lost.6 “Now, surrounded by poor children, we have again become true Ursulines,” said one of them.7 It should come as no surprise that, as much as was possible, they meant to go on with their lives as though nothing at all had happened.

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appendix Demographics of the Cloister

There is something presumptuous about attempting to write the history of a large group of people that is scattered over a whole country and the better part of two hundred years. We know full well that by our choice of examples we will give a certain shape – perhaps too much shape – to this great unwieldy mass, and that by our exclusion of other examples we will reinforce our own, possibly faulty, construction. But what else can we do? How many anecdotes would we have to produce to encompass a population that may have numbered, from start to finish, close to 90,000 souls?1 Fortunately, in the case of cloistered nuns the historian does not have to depend on anecdotes alone. This was a closed society par excellence, and one that left a wealth of source material for statistics, thanks to the fact that every selfrespecting monastery kept records of its membership. If these registers had all survived, we would have had access to a near-complete head count of the teaching nuns of the Old Regime, together with the dates of their baptism, profession, and death, plus a great deal of background information on family and birthplace. As it is, most registers have disappeared. Even so, enough remain to furnish a sizable sample of the monastic population and to trace the way it evolved. The registers are supplemented by a mass of other information: capitular records, account books, annales and death notices, and the numerous états in which the women were required to account for themselves and their communities to an ever more intrusive government. Although nuns’ selfproclaimed lot was to remain as anonymous as possible, they may well have been the best-recorded group of “ordinary” women in Old Regime France. This sample is large enough to answer some questions about the behaviour of monastic women: their backgrounds, the patterns of their entry into religion, their life expectancy, and their age at death. It can also help us visualize

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religious communities: their formation, their recruitment, the way they adapted to changing times, their successes, and their decline.

the questions The first three questions concern patterns of entry into religion: 1 What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? 2 Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? 3 How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? It must be pointed out that the day a girl entered religion was the day she exited family life, the inheritance, and the marriage market. Therefore the data serve two perspectives. They tell us about the development of monastic populations, and they point to certain behaviours in society and certain strategies within families. The next three questions approach the problem of mortality, using different perspectives: 4 What was the average age at which monastic women died? 5 What was the average life expectancy for monastic women? 6 At what age did most monastic women die? From the beginning in all three inquiries, we looked for indications of how mortality was influenced by the passage of time. Later, while working with the data, we became aware of another indication – that northern and southern populations did not follow the same pattern with regard to either entry or mortality. We have sought to illustrate this by dividing the country along the line (Nantes-Geneva) already favoured by demographic historians2 and by separating the populations to the north of this line from those to the south. Comparisons of mortality in the two populations will be found in tables 9 and 10. The next questions concern communities, their formation and functioning: 7 After the “rush” of the early seventeenth century, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? 8 How did the population of teaching monasteries change, both in collective age and in numbers, over the two centuries? These two questions deal in generalities. But as we have argued, there were numerous locally driven variations between houses. A final question therefore asks how the population changed in individual houses, and it focuses on five different houses, one by one.

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the sources Monastic Registers Most of our information comes directly from the monastic registers of clothing (c), profession (p), and death (d), including sometimes, though not essentially, entry (e). These registers are particularly reliable because, being bound, they present the records in sequence, with none (or almost none) left out. Most registers also indicate year of birth/baptism (b). The way the lists were compiled varies. In some cases, the three main rites of clothing, profession, and burial were entered in one and the same register; in others, they were divided among different registers. For instance, the information on the Provins community comes from a single ledger, in which each nun was assigned one page, with clothing and profession recorded on one side, and death (any number of years later) on the other. But there were separate registers for clothing/profession and for death for the Gisors and Romans communities. Where the information was dispersed, it is far less likely to be wholly recoverable. For Châteauroux, for example, there is a perfect record of clothing/profession, but the register of deaths has been lost. In the case of Le Mans, the surviving source is a record of deaths, but other information was entered only at the pleasure of the registrar. Thus, many monastic registers fail to supply all the details necessary to construct a profile of their membership from birth, through clothing and profession, to death. In some cases, the surviving registers provide all these details but do not cover the entire life of the community. The register of the Ursulines of Paris is complete only to 1678, though the house continued until the Revolution; that of the Ursulines of Saumur begins in 1668, though the house was actually founded in 1619. Sometimes the lists from the registers have been transcribed into monographs by insiders who had privileged access to the records of the monasteries in question, or by researchers who have found such lists in the archives (see table 1, nos. 1, 2, 8, 9, 13, 15). To all appearances they are accurate. Table 1 lists all the registers I have found and used. Only a few of them contain all the details necessary to create profiles of the houses involved. These are marked with an asterisk (*). Table 1 The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Annonay, Notre-Dame Frappa; aodn Annonay, b 3j 133 cases

Dates

B

1630–1784

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (2) Auxerre, Ursulines Bonneau, 297–303 205 cases (3) Avignon, Ursulines i ad Vaucluse, h (3 registers) 132 cases (incomplete) (4) Châteauroux, Congrégation ad Indre, h 904 230 cases (5) Gisors, Ursulines* ad Eure, ii f2215 218 cases (6) Lille, Ursulines* ad Nord, h6, h149 212 cases (7) Le Mans, Ursulines Chambois 232 cases (8) Nancy, Congrégation Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien” 199 cases (9) Paris, Ursulines Jégou, app. 2 108 cases (10) Poitiers, Notre-Dame* aodn Poitiers, b 1j1 293 cases

Dates

B

1614–1792

x

1623–1789

x

1641–1790

x

1621–1790

x

1627–1790

x

1628–1791

x

1617–1790

x

1614–1678

x

1618–1789

x

E

x

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (11) Provins, Congrégation* bm Provins, ms. 251 179 cases (12) Quimper, Ursulines ba 4990–213 34 cases (13) Reims, Congrégation Péchenard i 189 cases (choir nuns only) (14) Romans, Ursulines* ad Drôme, 31 h2; bm Grenoble 189 cases (15) Rouen, Ursulines Reneault, 294–319 198 cases (choir nuns only) (16) Saint-Marcellin, Ursulines* ad Isère, 14.171 170 cases (17) Saint-Nicolas, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2609–10 92 cases (18) Saumur, Ursulines ad Maine-et-Loire, h 261, h1 122 cases (19) Toulouse, Notre-Dame aodn Toulouse, b 1j 281 cases

Dates

B

E

C

P

D

1629–1788

x

x

x

x

x

1624–1683

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

1636–1783

1635–1789

x

x

1619–1790

x

1632–1788

x

1697–1789

x

x

x

1668–1790

x

x

x

1631–1784

x

x

x

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Table 1 (continued) The Registers Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (20) Toulouse, Ursulines* ad Haute-Garonne, h 221 227 cases (21) Tulle, Ursulines* ad Haute-Vienne, h 236 cases (22) Vézelise, Congrégation ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2612 75 cases

Dates

B

1615–1788

x

1618–1789

x

1631–1789

x

E

C

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Annales Many monasteries kept annales. Sometimes they recorded entries and professions as they took place; sometimes they mentioned only deaths (see convents marked †), taking the occasion to refer to the age of the deceased and her years in religion. Unless the annalist had other records to hand, the timing of the earlier events may have been only approximate. Some margin of error must then be allowed – though, obviously, the death date was accurate. Table 2 Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases

Dates

(1) 1625–1788 Blois, Ursulines*† ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43; and Notter (personal communication) 236 cases (2) Carcassonne, Ursulines ad Aude, h 439 161 cases (3) Châtellerault, Congrégation* am Châtellerault, ms. xxix 141 cases

B

C

x

1627–1788

1641–1789

E

x

P

D

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 2 (continued) Annales Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (4) Montargis, Ursulines† bsem, passim 65 cases (5) Poitiers, Ursulines ad Vienne, j 36 53 cases

Dates

B

1649–1713

x

1696–1762

x

E

C

x

P

D

x

x

x

Lists in Secondary Sources Some communities have been reconstructed by later historians using a combination of monastic, notarial, and revolutionary records. While such information as is given is probably trustworthy, there can be no guarantee that it is complete. Table 3 Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Châlons, Congrégation Carrez, passim 276 cases (2) La Flèche, Notre-Dame Calendini, passim 182 cases (3) Laval, Ursulines Morin de la Baluère 217 cases (4) Orléans, Ursulines ii Ratouis, 671–6 90 cases (5) Périgueux, Ursulines E. Roux, passim 165 cases

Dates

B

1617–1790

1623–1794

C

P

x

x

x

x

x

x

1617–1787

E

D

x

1656–1709

x

x

1641–1790

x

x

x

x

x

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Table 3 (continued) Lists Convent Source of information Number of cases (6) Saint-Symphorien, Ursulines C. Roux, 15–62 123 cases (7) Valenciennes, Ursulines Loridan, Les bienheureuses, 300–3 136 cases

Dates

B

1635–1790

x

1654–1794

x

E

C

P

x

x

x

D

x

Diocesan Records Immediately before professing, prospective nuns were examined by representatives of their bishops. The procès-verbaux of these interviews were conserved in the diocesan records. Where they have survived they are a good source of information on the overall number of entries into convents, the age of the entrants, and often the names and professions of their parents. However, the lists do not tell us what happened to the women from then on, so cannot be used to reconstruct community populations. Table 4 Diocesan Records Used Convent Source of information Number of cases (1) Bordeaux, Notre-Dame ad Gironde, g 631, 634 168 cases (2) Bordeaux, Ursulines ad Gironde, g 631, 632, 634 193 cases (3) Pontoise, Ursulines ad Val d’Oise, g 151 66 cases

Dates

B

1613–1776

x

x

1622–1730

x

x

1712–1789

E

C

P

x

D

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Liasses de Vêtures, Professions, Sepultures (1736–1790) These were small booklets of stamped paper in which were entered all a monastery’s entries, professions, and deaths by five-year periods. They had been made mandatory by royal decree on 9 April 1736, as part of a larger effort to organize the recording of the country’s births, deaths, and marriages. These booklets, each covering five years, survive in large numbers, but enough of them are missing that a complete sequence is seldom achieved for any single house. We can, however, learn from them a great deal about the ages at which women entered, professed, and died, where they originated, and what their social status was during this last half-century of the Old Regime. Those used are as follows: ad Aisne, h 1701 ad Finistère, 34 h 1 – 34 h 3 – 39 h 1 – 39 h 2 ad Isère, 22 h 32 – 22 h 102 ad Loir-et-Cher, 4 e 287 ad Marne, 78 h – 84 h ad Pas-de-Calais, 3 e 160 ad Rhône, 32 h 9 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1716 ad Sarthe, 2 e 140/38 ad Seine-Maritime, d 345 ad Seine-et-Marne h 877 ad Val d’Oise d 1791 – d 1796 ad Vienne 2 h5 95 ad Haute-Vienne g 373 – g 373 – g 374

Laon, Congrégation (1737–87) Carhaix, Ursulines (1744–87) Pont-Croix, Ursulines (1749–81) Quimper, Ursulines (1743–88) Quimperlé, Ursulines (1739–88) Crémieux, Ursulines (1741–80) Grenoble, Ursulines (1768–88) Vendôme, Ursulines (1737–84) Sainte-Ménehould, Congrégation (1740–90) Épernay, Ursulines (1762–88) Boulogne, Ursulines (1740–87) Lyon, Ursulines (1737–78) Autun, Ursulines (1738–68) La Ferté, Notre-Dame (1736–80) Dieppe, Ursulines, (1736–89) Meaux, Ursulines (1738–88) Argenteuil, Ursulines (1737–87) Magny, Ursulines (1737–88) Poitiers, Ursulines (1756–88) Saint-Léonard, Notre-Dame (1737–72) Limoges, Ursulines (1737–89) Limoges, Notre-Dame (1737–87)

The Lettres Circulaires (Éloges Funèbres) It was common practice in religious orders to notify sister houses of the death of members. These notices took the form of small eulogies, a page or so in length. In an age when women seldom wrote about themselves, these were in fact mini-biographies written by women about women.

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The death notice is trustworthy for date of death, but less so regarding the deceased nun’s age and her years in religion. Of great anecdotal value is the other information: stories about her childhood and her life in the convent; tributes to her character, her virtues, and her special devotions; details about her ailments and the cause of death. More than thirteen hundred death notices were consulted in the preparation of this book, the earliest from the 1630s, the last from the 1780s. Most are in bound collections that were originally compiled in monasteries of Ursulines and Filles de Marie Notre-Dame. Before the data can be used, questions should be asked about the original criteria by which, out of the many thousands of death notices that must have been in circulation through the years, these particular ones were selected for preservation. Do we have a truly random selection here? Were these subjects typical of the convent population as a whole? or were they chosen for their social distinction, outstanding virtue, or longevity? As far as I can determine, what decided their inclusion in the bound volumes was the date of death. The monastic compilers aimed to create an honour roll, starting on 1 January and ending on 31 December. On each day of the year communities were to celebrate women who had died on that day, much as they celebrated the saints.3 This pious practice allows us to believe that the choice of eulogies was random in other respects. While distinguished women did indeed receive more space than their numbers would justify, the letters commemorated every kind of woman, from superior to novice to simple lay sister, and from the highly successful to the clearly unsuccesful nun. The Ursuline death notices are found in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (ba) and the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne (bs), both in Paris. Those of the Filles de Notre-Dame are found in the Archives de Marie Notre-Dame, Bordeaux (aodn), and the Archives de Saint-Sulpice, Paris (ass).

Breakdown of the Data From these various sources we have compiled a database containing 8499 records. Table 5 Records 1611–1790 All of France

North

South

Choir nuns Lay sisters Total

7624 875 8499

3574 523 4097

4050 352 4402

With date of clothing With age at time of clothing With date of profession

8068 6798 7520

3780 3300 3618

4288 3498 3902

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Table 5 Records 1611–1790 (continued)

With date of death (through 1790)* With age at time of death (through 1790)*

All of France

North

South

4447 4103

2368 2207

2079 1896

* 1790 marks the end of the survey period. After then no clothings or professions took place. Some deaths were recorded for the interim period 1790–92 and some for the years after dispersion but in too haphazard a fashion to be useful.

Other Sources In March 1790 the National Assembly ordered a nationwide inventory of religious houses, including an interview with each religious person separately to find out if he/she was willing to leave community life.4 Thousands of these interviews were recorded, and copies of the procès-verbaux giving names, ages, and sometimes years of profession were sent to Paris (where they remain in the Archives nationales under the heading ms. d xix) and to the departments (where they may be found in the departmental archives, usually in the l series). For the three orders of teaching nuns being studied here, we have records for 6087 individuals in 275 houses. These records allow us to build up profiles of communities as they existed in 1790, and to know how many nuns chose to stay, how many to leave.5 Other sources of information on the personnel of monasteries include notarial records, the various états drawn up in the course of government inquiries, and internal lists made by communities for their own purposes.

questions and answers Table 6 addresses question 1 asked on p. 262: What was the average age of choir nuns on entry into religion? Did this average age vary with time or by region? Table 7 addresses question 2 asked on p. 262: Was there a significant change in the age at which women entered religion between the seventeenth century and the eighteenth? The answers to these questions throw light on the relationship between families and monasteries. An eminent historian of religious life in the Old Regime has described the monastic option as “quasi-necessary for the preservation of the equilibrium of families.”6 There were times when as many as half of the daughters of “good” families were put into religion. There can be little doubt that the difference between the value of their dowries and those of their marrying siblings had much to do with this practice. However, it has also been observed that somewhere around the middle of the seventeenth century this option began to lose favour – not necessarily among

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the women themselves but among their families. Parental opposition to religious vocations became more vocal and widespread.7 Our figures, by showing a rise in the age at which women left their homes to enter convents, seem to confirm a shift in family strategies. To what end? It was not because marriage became cheaper or more prevalent. In the eighteenth century many women were still remaining celibate, but now they lived their celibacy in the world.8 Possibly, as spinsterhood became more commonplace, there was no longer the same need to seek out the cloister for reasons of respectability. The good side of this is that women in the eighteenth century, entering religion in their late teens or early twenties, might have been freer to choose this state than their predecessors had been. Table 6 Average Age of Choir Nuns at Time of Clothing, 1611–1790 Average age at clothing Decade 1611–20* 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–00 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

France

North

South

22.31 years 18.86 18.05 17.86 18.05 18.15 18.34 18.60 19.01 19.11 18.77 19.70 19.55 20.01 20.61 21.81 21.80 21.79

23.04 years 19.51 17.85 17.83 18.76 18.61 18.94 18.35 18.74 18.94 19.25 19.57 19.61 20.53 20.70 22.04 22.34 22.04

21.82 years 18.27 18.23 17.89 17.05 17.72 17.76 18.85 19.23 19.23 18.49 19.80 19.53 19.60 20.52 21.58 21.20 21.46

Database: The table is based on the date and age of clothing of all choir nuns, 1611–1790. Lay sisters are excluded because (as will be seen in Table 8) their patterns of entry were different from those of choir nuns. Out of our 7624 records of choir nuns, 6079 give both year and age of clothing: 2856 cases (north) and 3223 cases (south). It is from this sample that the statistics are taken. * Figures are high in this decade because many “founder” nuns were later professed.

Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790

from 1611 to 1700 16 and under 17–20

No.

%

1380 1083

43.26 33.95

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Table 7 Evolution in Age of Clothing: Choir Nuns, 1611–1790 (continued) No.

%

21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

613 79 35 3190

19.22 2.48 1.10

from 1701 to 1790 16 and under 17–20 21–30 31–40 41 and up Total

559 1193 1048 76 13 2889

19.35 41.30 36.28 2.63 0.45

Database: Same as for Table 6, all records of choir nuns (6079) in which age and year of clothing are given.

The distribution of ages in the under-sixteen group is worth noting. In the seventeenth century, 469 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 342 at fourteen years, 40 at thirteen years, and 12 (including several ten and eleven year olds) at twelve years or under (863 girls, or 27.05% of the group). In the eighteenth century, 180 girls were clothed at fifteen years, 93 at fourteen years, 6 at thirteen years, and 1 at twelve years (280 girls, 9.69% of the group). Table 8 addresses question 3: How did the entry age of lay sisters compare with that of choir nuns? Table 8 Age at Clothing: Choir Nuns Compared with Lay Sisters

choir nuns only ( 6079 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older lay sisters only ( 719 cases) 16 years and under 17–20 years 21–30 years 31–40 years 41 and older

No.

%

1939 2276 1661 155 48

31.9 37.4 27.3 2.5 0.8

25 175 471 34 14

3.5 24.3 65.5 4.7 1.9

Database: All records of choir nuns and lay sisters (wherever found) that give their age at clothing.

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Social status played a large part in deciding the age at which women entered religion. The more exalted their status, the more likely they were to enter at an early age. I have argued elsewhere that, as a group, the youngest entrants of all were those identified as “nobility” in the records (“Women and the Religious Vocation,” 617–18). The more important the family, the more critical (and expensive) were its alliances; some children were therefore placed in convents or the priesthood for the sake of enhancing other children’s dowries. Lay sisters were not as likely to be subject to such family strategies, and their humble social status allowed them to work before adopting a “state.” The next three tables deal with one subject – mortality – approaching it from different angles. First we address the question, what was the average age at which monastic women died? Did this average age fluctuate over time in such a way as to indicate periodic changes in “quality of life”? This table begins in 1681, because during the foundation period almost all the deaths occurred at an abnormally young age – the population itself being young. Table 9 Average Age of Death, Monastic Women who Died 1681–1790 Average age at death Death decade

France

North

South

1681–90 1691–1700 1701–10 1711–20 1721–30 1731–40 1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 1781–90

59.07 years 60.30 60.73 58.11 58.64 60.50 62.12 63.95 61.60 64.68 62.57

59.04 years 61.50 64.44 60.97 60.29 64.15 62.01 65.75 63.42 62.46 62.63

59.12 years 57.55 56.66 56.08 55.35 58.06 62.26 61.80 59.56 66.49 62.50

Database: 3232 records, for the period 1681–1790, of choir nuns and lay sisters that give both death year and age of death; 1714 cases (north), 1518 cases (south)

Generally speaking, compared with others in the same period, these teaching nuns seem to have enjoyed long lives.9 There are, however, significant variations within the group. Note the rise in mortality in the second two decades of the eighteenth century and the difference between northern and southern death rates, almost always in favour of the north. We may ask what occasioned these variations. The next table answers question 5: What was the average life expectancy for nuns born in the same decade? We may now begin with the early data, but we end in 1700, because thereafter the interruption caused by the Revolution in 1790 increasingly distorts the findings.

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Houses of the three teaching congregations, 1789, showing the division between north and south.

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Table 10 Average Life Expectancy, Monastic Women Born 1591–1700 Average life expectancy Birth decade

France

North

South

1591–1600 1601–10 1611–20 1621–30 1631–40 1641–50 1651–60 1661–70 1671–80 1681–90 1691–1700

59.41 years 60.55 59.89 57.91 57.16 58.01 60.50 62.04 61.35 61.18 58.60

58.87 years 62.87 61.46 58.76 56.05 54.31 59.96 61.71 64.92 65.57 63.33

59.98 years 57.21 56.85 56.29 58.50 63.62 61.15 62.40 58.56 57.07 55.71

Database: 3359 cases with birth year 1700 or earlier, which also record death year and age at death; 1842 cases (north), 1517 cases (south).

The first generation of nuns (b. 1591–1620) enjoyed a greater longevity than their immediate successors, possibly because the cloister was not yet being used as a receptacle for sickly or delicate daughters. During the peak years of the “rush,” life expectancy dropped; then, after mid-century, it improved. The difference between life expectancy in northern and southern populations fluctuated unpredictably but became dramatic in the last decades of the century. Table 11 takes a closer look at life expectancy by addressing question 6: At what age did most monastic women die? Table 11 Age at Death, Monastic Women Who Died in the Decades 1601–10, 1661–70, and 1691–1700 Birth decade 1601–10 Age at death 20 and under 21–30 31–40 41–50 51–60 61–70 71–80 81–90 over 90 Total

No 6 23 20 34 59 62 77 36 1 318

% 1.9 7.2 6.3 10.7 18.6 19.5 24.2 11.3 0.3

1661–70 No 4 34 15 29 35 71 87 41 6 322

% 1.2 10.6 4.7 9.0 10.9 22.1 27.0 12.7 1.9

1691–1700 No 5 34 34 34 37 69 71 38 2

% 1.5 10.5 10.5 10.5 11.4 21.3 21.9 11.7 0.6

324

Database: All nuns born in three different decades (1601–10, 1661–70, 1691–1700) for whom age of death is given.

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Note that in all three groups, the age at which most deaths occurred was between seventy-one and eighty. This confirms the impression that there were a lot of old nuns in Old Regime monasteries. Other analyses may be found in Dinet, “Mourir en religion,” 36, and Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 176. The following tables address questions concerning the formation and functioning of communities. This requires data from “complete” communities only (those in which professions and deaths are comprehensively recorded) in order to illustrate the fluctuations of those communities over time. The “rush” of the early seventeenth century was a phenomenon of limited duration. After it ended, did recruitment remain high enough to meet the communities’ needs? To address this question (no. 7 on p. 262), we have selected twenty houses that have complete clothing records (choir nuns and lay sisters) through the period 1671–1785 (2393 records). We calculated elsewhere (Rapley and Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 395) that a forty-member community needed an addition of one member per year to maintain itself. When that community was reduced in size, its need for new members decreased accordingly. Thus, a twenty-six-member community required only two entries every three years; a thirty-member community required three entries every four years. In the 1730s, the Commission des secours mandated the reduction of the female religious population by about one-third (see above, part 1, chapter 5). The drop in the number of entrants through the following years corresponds to the implementation of this policy. Once the lower levels were reached the situation stabilized. The group of twenty houses in this sample, each with a population averaging over forty in the seventeenth century, needed at least a hundred recruits per five-year period to sustain itself. A century later, with populations of around thirty each, the group needed only seventy-five. Table 12 shows that it kept up the required level of entries. Table 12 Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date 1671–75 1676–80 1681–85 1686–90 1691–95 1696–1701 1701–05 1706–10 1711–15 1716–20 1721–25 1726–30

No of entries* 113 124 131 111 123 158 137 96 143 98 122 106

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Table 12 (continued) Number of Entries per Five-Year Period in Twenty Houses Date

No of entries*

1731–35 1736–40 1741–45 1746–50 1751–55 1756–60 1761–65 1766–70 1771–75 1776–80 1781–85 1786–90

91 72 83 120 89 97 76 87 62 70 84 incomplete

Database: Records from the following houses: Annonay, Blois, Carcassonne, Châlons, Châtellerault, Châteauroux, Gisors, La Flèche, Lille, Nancy, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Reims, Romans, SaintMarcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Saumur, Toulouse, Tulle. * 100 = an average of one entry per house per year.

Tables 13 to 18 address question 8, looking at how the population inside teaching monasteries evolved, in both age and numbers, over the whole period. The decline in the quality of monastic life is traditionally measured by the two criteria: numbers and age of members. A certain minimum number (which the government set at twelve)10 was essential to keep a monastery functioning; and it goes without saying that some of these members had to be able-bodied. Table 13 shows that immediately after the foundation period, the number of women in the communities in the sample averaged forty or more, and that this number remained constant until about 1730; their age (both median and average) rose steadily until it reached the lower forties, then remained stable until 1730. The subsequent drop in numbers and rise in age corresponds to the period when the Commission des secours was actively reducing the female religious population by means of its ban on novices (see part 1, chapter 5). By 1770 the communities, now shrunken but also marginally younger, seemed to be regaining their balance. Table 13 Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date 1630* 1640*

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

223 389

– –

26 32

27.5 31.7

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Table 13 (continued) Number of Women in the Monastic Communities, 1630–1790 Age of Members Date

No. in houses

Average no. per house

Median

Average

1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

476 507 533 485 504 514 475 468 449 415 376 333 294 277 274

40 42 44 40 42 43 40 39 37 35 31 28 25 23 23

36 40 43 44 44 41 42 43 46 46 48 47 45 46 47

36.5 40.2 43.3 45.1 44.5 44.1 43.9 44.4 46.0 48.2 48.1 46.4 47.6 47.7 47.5

Database: Records of all professed nuns (choir nuns and lay sisters) in twelve houses for which the registers of both professions and deaths are complete, for the period 1630–1790 (2026 records). The houses are Annonay, Gisors, Lille, Périgueux, Poitiers, Provins, Romans, Rouen, Saint-Marcellin, Saint-Symphorien, Toulouse, Tulle. * These first numbers have no value, since some of the twelve houses were established only during these decades. However, average age is significant for houses already in existence.

We now look at how the population inside individual teaching monasteries evolved, in both collective age and numbers, over the period. To do so, we take five houses that have complete records: Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, and Saint-Marcellin. No generalization can be found to cover all women’s monasteries during the Old Regime; their circumstances were much too localized, much too dependent on the vagaries of their own environment. Some communities prospered while others deteriorated. The five following examples support this picture of diversity.

Table 14 Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670

30 52 64 60 61

24.70 years 30.19 35.43 39.95 41.19

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Table 14 (continued) Gisors, Normandy (estab. 1621) Date

Professed/in house

1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

63 59 64 54 47 50 52 47 36 24 16 15

Average age 45.84 45.15 41.92 44.57 46.09 44.30 47.02 52.51 54.64 57.54 53.06 49.67

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Gisors.

The Gisors community was a sort of branch plant, depending for its recruitment on Paris, Beauvais, and Rouen. There was no possible way that the small, economically depressed town of Gisors and its surrounding countryside could have provided the nuns and the dowries necessary for its subsistence. After a century of success, the house suffered a serious setback at the time of the Law Crash and thereafter appeared frequently in the records of the Commission des secours because of its poverty. Given the importance of its day school, the only one in town, the community received assistance, but it did not recover. In 1790 it was still reported to be “subsisting with great difficulty.”11 The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 57.36 years. Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760

11 18 42 58 52 53 54 50 39 42 49 46 47

25.67 years 33.44 34.21 36.60 40.62 45.83 46.83 48.32 47.82 42.83 41.47 46.30 44.28

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Table 15 Lille, French Flanders (estab. 1633) (continued) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1770 1780 1790

45

47.24 no records 43.19

46

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Lille.

From early days, the house at Lille achieved a good balance. Although it suffered in the Law Crash, it recovered swiftly, keeping its numbers up and its collective age steady. The size of the city and the demands for schooling seem to have worked to its advantage. At the time of the Revolution it was running both a pensionnat and a day school for two hundred pupils. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 58.83 years. (see Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” and “Pieuses contre-révolutionnaires”). Table 16 Poitiers, Poitou (estab. 1617) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

7 54 74 79 76 87 75 79 84 75 61 48 36 22 21 21 20 19

31.00 years 27.54 34.00 39.68 41.51 43.95 43.48 45.77 44.82 45.15 46.97 52.51 58.94 53.05 45.29 50.05 46.05 48.79

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Poitiers.

The Poitiers community enjoyed a stunning rise, then almost collapsed at the time of the Law Crash, as can be seen from the steep plunge in numbers and rise in average age in the 1730s and 1740s. From being the richest and most prestigious convent in its city, it became one of the poorest. Mismanagement of its estates was a major factor, but there may have been others. For instance,

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the highly aristocratic character of the community may have made it less flexible during the later years when “democratization” was the key to recruitment. The history of this riches-to-rags monastery can be found in Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.41 years. Table 17 Provins, Ile de France (estab. 1629) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

4 28 45 54 53 54 57 51 40 45 41 39 37 32 34 35 30

25.00 years 24.75 29.53 34.83 40.68 45.98 42.12 45.22 41.97 46.58 54.90 52.33 47.89 42.40 46.68 51.74 50.00

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Provins.

The house at Provins was situated in a modest country town in the farm belt that surrounded and served the Parisian market. Like Gisors, it benefited from its proximity to a big city for recruitment of both pensionnaires and nuns. After the usual success of the early days, it went through a difficult period, then recovered financially, thanks largely to its landholdings and the rising price of grain. But at the end of the Old Regime, when many other communities were picking up, it appears to have stagnated. See Rapley, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins.” The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 59.77 years. Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1640

8

43.13 years

1650

10

49.10

1660

23

37.56

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Table 18 Table 18 Saint-Marcellin, Dauphiné (established as a congregation in 1617, (continued) erected into a monastery 1624) Date

Professed/in house

Average age

1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750 1760 1770 1780 1790

31 34 40 33 28 44 41 35 36 40 34 29 31

35.23 years 38.50 40.58 45.09 40.36 36.25 40.66 42.34 44.75 44.33 45.50 48.19 48.19

Database: Records of all choir nuns and lay sisters at Saint-Marcellin.

Since the Ursuline community at Saint-Marcellin had had a previous existence as a congregation without solemn vows, the average age of its members was atypically high when the monastery was erected and records began to be kept. A wave of recruits came in in the 1660s, whereupon the average age of the community dropped steeply. A similar wave occurred in 1710–20, at a time when other communities were foundering. Generally speaking, numbers and average age remained satisfactory throughout the following years, thanks perhaps to the landholdings that shielded it from the worst effects of the Law Crash. However, in the last decades of the Old Regime, the community began to show some weakness. The average age of death, where death was recorded, was 53.74 years. This community was not very healthy. As these five cases show, the histories of individual communities were far from uniform. The reasons for their differences are often beyond recall – the vagaries of patrons and supporters, perhaps, or the morale of the membership itself. But there are records of other circumstances: location; the prosperity and salubrity, or lack thereof, of surroundings; and the nature of assets as well as the way they were managed. Each one of these monasteries – Gisors, Lille, Poitiers, Provins, Saint-Marcellin – existed within its own set of circumstances, and as their vital statistics show, each fared differently. Perhaps, had it not been for the intervention of the Revolution, one or two of them might eventually have died a natural death even as the others flourished.

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Glossary

amortissement: “a permanent rule declaring gens de mainmorte [secular and regular clergy, hospitals, secular communities] … incapable of possessing any property without special permission from the prince, and without paying him a tax” (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le clergé de France, 16) appel comme d’abus: a means of recourse against an ecclesiastical judge or superior who contravened canon or civil law. The appeal was addressed to Parlement, which had the power to amend or nullify the action biens de mainmorte: goods belonging to a corporate body, such as a religious community or a hospital, which had to remain in its possession or that of another such body and could not be returned to public use billet de confession: a certificate from the curé attesting that he had received the bearer in confession. Without this certificate, a dying person could be denied the last sacraments and burial in consecrated ground. Originally designed to flush out Protestants, it was revived by the constitutionnaire clergy as a way of identifying and punishing Jansenists. Because the persons affected were often highly respected in the community, the “affair of the billets” created an uproar and became a political cause célèbre, which was only ended (more or less) by the “law of silence” of 1754 (Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 80–3) bull: a papal edict; from the Latin bulla, meaning seal, indicating the official importance of the document cahiers de doléances: “The guiding memoranda prepared for deputies by their electoral assemblies, and for these assemblies by the general electorate, nominally as petitions calling for the redress of grievances” (Sydenham, The

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286

Glossary

French Revolution, 32n1). The cahiers of 1788 are used extensively as a source of information on the mind of the nation on the eve of the Revolution catechism: a manual of religious knowledge, formulated to assist in the instruction of the faithful. The printed questions and answers were designed to be memorized for recitation before the instructor or catechist. It was common practice in the Old Regime for bishops to design their own versions of the catechism for use within their dioceses clausura: the obligation to remain within the confines of the monastery, a condition incumbent on religious women who had taken solemn vows clothing: the formal ceremony in which a postulant received the dress, or habit, of the community. It could take place any time up to a year after her entry commende: The assigning of the income of a benefice to a person who was not the holder of the benefice (Mousnier, Institutions, 1:310) commission des réguliers: a commission established by the Crown in 1766 to investigate abuses in men’s monasteries. By the time it completed its work in 1780, it had closed down 458 houses and suppressed several religious orders altogether. Also, it raised the age at which religious profession could be made to twenty-one years for men and eighteen for women. The commission represented a serious invasion by the Crown into the interior working of the church (Chevallier, Loménie de Brienne et l’ordre monastique) décimateurs: tithe owners. Gros décimateurs were the individuals or institutions allowed to appropriate the tithe, on condition that they guaranteed church services in the area from which they collected first communion: a Catholic’s first reception of the Eucharist; in the Old Regime an important rite of passage formulary: a statement of orthodox beliefs (in this case specifically targeting the questions raised in the Jansenist quarrel) to which all the clergy were required to assent in writing founder/foundress: (1) the spiritual parent of a community who set it up and gave it its original form; (2) the first temporal benefactor who, for his or her benevolence, was given a permanent and sometimes hereditary status of privilege in the community gallicanism: a theory (implicit for centuries and then articulated clearly in the Four Articles of 1682) that while the papacy exercised a spiritual authority over the Catholics of France, its temporal authority was limited by the rights of the Crown and the ancient liberties of the French Church; also that its judgments and rulings were subject to approval by an ecumenical council generalate: a system of central direction for a group or congregation of communities. Today most women’s congregations have generalates; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very few did institut: the Rule of a religious order as laid down at its foundation (Trésor de la langue française); the prime and central purpose of the order

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Glossary

instruction: in the terminology of the Old Regime, religious education lettre de cachet: a closed letter bearing the king’s private seal, signed by him and by a secretary of state, conveying an order which was to be executed without publicity office (from the Latin officium, meaning duty or responsibility): the official communal prayer of the church which all monastic communities were required to sing or recite. In teaching monasteries a shorter version, the Little Office of Our Lady, was often substituted for the original and extremely time-consuming Divine Office ordinary: the person entitled to exercise jurisdiction over an ecclesiastical circumscription. Thus, the bishop was the ordinary within his diocese; the abbot, within his monastery and all its dependencies postulant: a person requesting admission to a community or undergoing the very first stage of testing in the novitiate profession: the formal taking of religious vows, usually accompanied for nuns by the taking of the black veil. Before profession, a novice was free to withdraw or be sent away. After it, she was given totally to the religious life regularity: the observance by a religious community of its Rule in all particulars, an important concept in religious thinking regulars: clerics living under a rule, e.g., Jesuits, Capuchins religion: a recognized and approved association of persons living under vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. This use of the word is seldom found in modern times but was common in the seventeenth century. Thus, “to enter religion” was to become a monk or nun, and a “religious” was a person living in one of these associations rente constituée: essentially a long-term loan, though in order to avoid appearing usurious it took the form of the purchase of an annual payment in return for a lump sum. Certain limitations were set: it was redeemable at the will of the borrower; the rate of interest could not exceed 10 percent; and it had, for security, real estate (Histoire économique et sociale de la France, 2:343) rule: the basic template of a religious order. Since the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, all religious orders and congregations were required to adopt one of the four Rules then existing: Benedictine, Basilian, Augustinian, or Franciscan. The Ursulines and the Congrégation chose the Rule of Saint Augustine, the Compagnie de Notre-Dame, that of Saint Benedict. To the bare bones of the Rule they then added a host of their own statutes to deal with their particular circumstances superior: the person in charge of a religious community. In women’s communities, this charge was divided between the supérieure and the supérieur. Because the English language does not allow for the difference in gender, the supérieur will, for the purposes of this book, be called the “director” or the “canonical superior”

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288

Glossary

visitor: an outside priest, often a regular, who was assigned to inspect a religious house, interview its members, and ascertain that the Rule was being correctly followed vows: voluntary commitments to perform something not otherwise required vows of religion: the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Until the thirteenth century these were simple vows (i.e., they did not nullify actions taken in violation of them). After the thirteenth century they took on a solemn character. Once professed, a religious could not possess property, succeed to an inheritance, or marry

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Notes

abbreviations ac ad aguur am an aodn ass ba bm bn bs bsem

Archives communales Archives départementales Archives générales des Ursulines de l’union romaine à Rome Archives municipales Archives nationales Archives de l’ordre de Notre-Dame Archives de Saint-Sulpice Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal Bibliothèque municipales Bibliothèque nationale Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne Bulletin de la Société d’émulation de Montargis introduction

1 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, chap. 12. 2 Quoted in Gueudré, “La femme et la vie spirituelle,” 47–8. All translations are by the author, except for a few translations quoted from Englishlanguage sources. 3 Ponton, La religieuse dans la litterature française, 101. 4 Ibid., 75, 101. 5 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 4. 6 Typical of this isolationism was the reaction of the French Ursuline monasteries in 1857 to an attempt to synthesize their individual histories into a

20_Notes.fm Page 290 Tuesday, July 24, 2001 9:24 AM

290 Notes to pages 5–14 history of the order. Twenty-five percent of the monasteries did not even answer the request for information (Oury, “Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 7 This is a point made by Dominique Dinet in his new book, Religion et société. Even now, publications on discrete orders and congregations greatly outnumber collective studies. 8 Letter of 3 September 1790, quoted in Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 40. 9 Quoted in Gabbois, “Vous êtes la seule consolation de l’Église,” 312. chapter one 1 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 38–9. 2 On the origins of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, see Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 134. 3 Papal bull of 1607, quoted in Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 97. 4 From the title of his article “Une question mal posée: Les origines de la réforme française et le problème des causes de la réforme,” Revue historique 161 (1929): 1–73. Febvre argues that historians of different nationalities who wrangle over where and under whose guidance the Reformation began are missing the point, which was the widespread spirit that inspired the movement. 5 I am grateful to Dr Marshall Jones of the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine for introducing me to the principle of “social contagion” – that behaviours, both good and bad, can spread through a population in much the same way as epidemics, and that the “rush” of men and women into religious life in the early seventeenth century was a convincing manifestation of this principle. General treatments of behavioural contagion or the diffusion of innovations can be found in J.S. Coleman, E. Katz and H. Menzel, Medical Innovation (New York 1966); J.S. Coleman, Introduction to Mathematical Sociology (London 1964); and E.M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York 1983). More recent work has focused on the mode of transmission or antisocial behaviour: R.S. Burt, “Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural Equivalence,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 1287–1335; J.L. Rodgers and D.C. Rowe, “Social Contagion and Adolescent Sexual Behaviour,” Psychological Review 100 (1993): 479–510; M.B. Jones and D.R. Jones, “The Contagious Nature of Antisocial Behavior,” Criminology 38 (2000): 25–46. 6 Grosperrin, Les petites écoles sous l’Ancien Régime, 142. It has to be remembered that for poor families, both sons and daughters were a source of income. 7 This is a point made by Jacques Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:253: “If seminaries were created, if the religious orders were able

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291 Notes to pages 14–19

8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

to reform themselves and prosper, if the material – and moral – condition of the priest improved, these facts were due to the rise during the first half of the seventeenth century of the rural economy” – which, he argues, was in the hands of the elites. Alix Le Cler, co-founder with Pierre Fourier of the Congrégation de NotreDame; quoted in Besancet, Le bienheureux Pierre Fourier et la Lorraine, 44–5. There was already a nunnery in Marseille in the early fourth century. See Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 19. Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les campagnes parisiennes, 118–21. Jeanne de Lestonnac, “Abregé ou forme de l’institut des filles religieuses de la glorieuse Vierge Marie Notre-Dame” (1606), aodn Bordeaux, 1a. The Compagnie de Notre-Dame, the creation of Jeanne de Lestonnac, was cloistered from the beginning; the others spent their early years uncloistered until they were enclosed by order of the hierarchy. See Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 59. The word – originally used in English – comes from Furet and Ozouf, Lire et écrire, 1:82. Châtellier, Le catholicisme en France, 2:20. Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:90. Parisse, Les nonnes au Moyen Age, 89. See the maps on the subsequent pages for examples of the immense holdings of some abbeys. Le Brun, in Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 3:254. Quoted in Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France, art. “clergé.” Jean de Viguerie sees 1660 as a turning point, after which “the opposition of the family to an entry into religion becomes an ordinary occurrence” (“La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 34). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 114. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. Quoted in Babeau, La ville sous l’Ancien Régime, 465. Quoted in Sedgewick, The Travails of Conscience, 52. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 105, 107. Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 16. “And music, and the playing of tiresome instruments” (ad Nord, 149, 44, Petition of the superiors of the mendicant orders of Lille, 1639). Their real concern was that the Ursulines were drawing vocations away from their own sisters. See Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 182 ff. “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent” (s.d.), in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:443. Histoire de Laon et du Laonnais, 179. For example, Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 190.

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292 Notes to pages 20–5 32 In all, Richelieu succeeded in extracting 18 million livres in subsidies from the clergy, whereas his predecessors had managed only 1,150,000 livres during Henri IV’s reign (Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 3). 33 Ibid., 59. 34 Rapport anonyme, Mélanges Colbert, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France des xvii e et xviii e siècles, 370. 35 Lettres vi, quoted in ibid., 369. 36 Ibid., 371. 37 For fiefs held from the king, if noble, one-third of the capital; if roturier, onefifth; for fiefs held from a seigneur, if noble, one-fifth; if roturier, one-sixth. To this was added a charge of 5 percent of annual revenue for every year of ownership (nouvel acquêt), plus one-tenth of the whole sum, known as deux sols pour livre. 38 Tournyol du Clos, Richelieu et le Clergé, 32. 39 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, quoted in Tournyol de Clos, La contribution du Clergé, 8. 40 Ibid., 97. 41 Ibid., 98. 42 Ibid., 43–4. 43 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, annales. 44 Remonstrance of 1720, quoted in Levasseur, Recherches historiques sur le système de Law, 226. 45 For more details, see Faure, La banqueroute de Law. 46 Lehoreau, Cérémonial de l’église d’Angers 1692–1721, 376. 47 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 65. 48 bn fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 206, fol. 23, quoted in ibid., 33. 49 Mémoire de 1720, quoted in ibid., 61. 50 Ibid., 103. 51 The year that Arnelle Sabbagh’s thesis appeared. For an appraisal in English of the commission’s work, see Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 52 Ibid., 420–1, 440–1. 53 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 209. 54 For a summary of the evidence for this, see E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 55 See appendix, table 13. 56 Vallery-Radot, Un administrateur ecclésiastique, 166. 57 An advice of 1755, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 23. 58 bn Fonds Joly de Fleury, ms. 205, fol. 54, quoted in ibid., 82. 59 This is my own conclusion, after extensive reading in the an g9 series. 60 Quoted in Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras, 163. 61 Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:334–5. The priest’s salary was known as the congrue. It should be noted that the congrue was raised to 500 livres in

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293 Notes to pages 25–32

62 63

64 65 66

1768 and to 700 livres just before the Revolution; also that many curés were not salaried but owned their benefices and were sometimes very well off. However, the fact remains that distribution of wealth was extremely uneven. Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:37. Peronnet, “Les problèmes du clergé,” 44. One example of the system comes from the abbey of Saint-Germain d’Auxerre, where the abbot’s share of the revenues was 11,128 livres while that of all the monks together was 9,540 livres (Dinet, Religion et société, 1:290). Tableau de Paris (1783), 7:93, quoted in Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 18. Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 14. This particular statement came from Jean-Baptiste Morgan de Belloy, president of the Department of the Somme (3/11/1790), quoted in Desobry, Le monastère des Clarisses. But the same language of victimization was used by officials up and down the country. chapter two

1 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, “La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon.” 2 am Châtellerault, xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, Annales i. 3 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 9. 4 The petit narré of Mère Angélique de Saint-Marie describing the establishment of the monastery, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. The grille was a feature of an established monastic house. 5 “Until it fills the whole world.” am Châteaudun, gg 51. 6 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, [219]. 7 Thus the monastery of the Congrégation in Troyes was founded expressly because the daughter of a municipal official had gone to Châlons to take the veil, and he wished to have her closer to home (Carrez, Histoire du monastère de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 1:253); the foundation of the Ursuline house in Blois was forwarded by Claude Le Roux, sieur de Créneaux, so that his daughter could return from the convent in Orléans (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 111); Jacques d’André, councillor in the Parlement of Provence, founded a convent of Ursulines in Aix and thus brought “home” his sister, niece, and daughter from Brignoles (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 109–10). 8 bm Chartres, 26–xv, Couvent des Ursulines, 189. 9 Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:74. 10 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:376. 11 H.Lamiray, Evreux, 156. 12 Grignon, Topographie historique de la ville de Châlons-sur-Marne, 223.

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294 Notes to pages 32–4 13 Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 53–4. At that time Avallon numbered some 3000 inhabitants. 14 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 336–7. The author remarks that at the time of the Revolution, in that neighbourhood “only a few private houses remained in the island of Ursulines.” 15 Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 67. According to the annalist whom the author quotes, their prayers worked so well “that it became a proverb in the community, and one said, ‘If so-and-so gives us trouble, we will say a novena to change him or send him to another world!› 16 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 173. He goes on to say that the foundress of the Ursulines, Françoise de Cazères, “everywhere took the Compagnie de Notre-Dame to be an obstacle to her zeal.” However, the latter called on their own champions, the Jesuits, and the bishop soon changed his mind. 17 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 242. 18 Fourier, Correspondance 1598–1640, 2:79. 19 R. Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (1978), quoted in Braudel, The Identity of France, 2:117. 20 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. She remarks that they were extremely reluctant even to allow other Ursulines into their cloister. 21 Rapley, “Profiles of Convent Society,” 134. 22 Occasionally monasteries of the same congregation aided each other. In 1650 the grand couvent sent a gift of 1500 livres to the Ursuline monastery of Meaux (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 105). But when other houses, including those of Tonnerre and Cravant, appealed for help, they were met with a flat “no” (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135). There was no need to feel obligation toward sister houses. 23 Furthermore, founders tended to load their foundations with obligations, such as foundation masses and the commitment to accept certain pensionnaires or novices (usually members of the family) free of charge. These obligations could become burdensome in later years. See Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, chap. 4. 24 These details come from the petit narré, in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:69–70. 25 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 258. 26 ad Gironde, g 628. It also found itself penniless at mid-century. It offers an outstanding example of financial mismanagement. 27 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:128. 28 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 260. 29 Garnier, “Le couvent de la Congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 3. 30 For descriptions of the buildings and for photographs of some of them, see Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2. 31 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 3:2; Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254.

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295 Notes to pages 34–8 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

See below, 310n20. Notter, “Contrats de dots,” 258. Ibid., 262. “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that out of the accruing revenue she can be fed and maintained; and further contribute something to the necessities of the house … and also to the food and maintenance of the [lay sisters]” (bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et reglemens pour les religieuses de Ste-Ursule de Troyes, 1:43). We have this from an anonymous commentary, printed in Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 14:464. Sarre has used financial records of thirty-three Ursuline convents, dating from 1651 to 1791, to compute the gross amount available per head for living expenses. This varies greatly by house and year, from a low of 56 livres to a high of 474 livres, but the great majority of values (59 out of 77) fall below 200 livres (Vivre sa soumission, annexe 51). Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 75. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95. Mousnier, The Institutions of France, 1:331; “Souvenirs d’un nonagenaire,” quoted in Kaplow, France, 86. A study of all known cases of daughters of the generation of parlementaires of Aix who were born before 1701 shows that 51.0 percent became nuns, 41.7 percent married, and 5.6 percent remained single (Cubells, La Provence des Lumières, 367). Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:95; ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29; Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 252. Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 223. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Mémoire de la supérieure, 1689, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 130. Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 103. Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:passim. ad Indre, h 909. am Châtellerault, xxix. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 77. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 250. The écu was worth about 3 livres; the dowry usually demanded at Montargis was 5000 livres. ad Isère, 22 h 174. ad Yonne, g 195. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 231–2. To prevent this loss of reputation, houses did their best to keep their financial problems secret. Thus, in 1722, “for fear that [our] extremity would come to the knowledge of seculars and drive away novices, our Mother Superior forbade us to speak about it with outsiders” (Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:297).

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296 Notes to pages 38–41 56 ad Aube, 128. 57 ad Vienne, j 36 152–3. It is not clear that she ever professed. 58 Avocat Prevost, adviser to the commission, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours.” 59 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:217. 60 ad Yonne, g 195. 61 Avocat Prévost, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 97. 62 Thus, in the archdiocese of Bourges, the abbaye de Landais paid 168 livres in amortissement dues and the abbaye des Dames de l’Estoile, 17 livres (an q3-12). 63 ad Seine-Maritime, d 405. 64 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 172. 65 This was a reduction, allowed after much wrangling. The bill had originally been 42,195 livres (ad Seine-Maritime, d 405). Within a few years the house was bankrupt and the nuns were forced to disperse. 66 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 226; ad Cher, 45 h 8. 67 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346; Laguerenne, Couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 73; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837. 68 “The classrooms in which they instruct most of the girls of the city, and which make up part of their frontage, have been included in the amortissement tax; however, the said sisters … do not receive any payment for the instruction which they give the girls of the said city” (ad Seine-Maritime, d 346, Ursulines of Dieppe). “Since they devote time and care to the public, they ought to be distinguished from other communities and treated like the workhouses and hôtels-dieu that are employed in the support and feeding of the poor” (ad Rhône, 32 h 5, Ursulines of Lyon). 69 ad Seine-Maritime, d 346. 70 But did not always stay. Mademoiselle d’Arbouville was allotted to the Ursulines of Grenoble, but after finding out that the house was situated near a powder magazine she took her leave. It appears that the community held onto the tax credit (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:140–1). 71 “The seigneurs of the realm who were owed indemnities by the gens de mainmorte, seeing His Majesty seeking out the rights that belonged to his crown, started urgently to demand their rights of indemnity. This was certainly painful, and a heavy burden to the house that had just paid a large sum to the king” (bsem 77 [déc. 1987]: 238). One seigneur, the Princess of Mecklembourg, demanded payment of 2000 livres (ibid., 244). 72 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. 73 Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 221, 226. 74 an g9 160–18. 75 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675, Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins, Journal des fermes. 76 Goubert, 100,000 provinciaux au xvii e siècle, 207.

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297 Notes to pages 41–4 77 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Memoir of 1720. Since this was a statement accompanying the nuns’ appeal for relief, it should be treated with some caution. 78 bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 180. 79 bsem 70 (mars 1986): 56. 80 Sarre calculates that for the Ursuline houses of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, returns on real estate ran between 3 and 5 percent, while investments in the money market brought in 5.7 percent (later 5 percent) (Vivre sa soumission, 358). This local example supports the general conclusion of Pierre Goubert that in the seventeenth century neither purchase of offices nor investment in land paid as well as rentes constituées (“Le tragique xvii e siècle,” in Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire économique, 2:343). 81 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 175–6. 82 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 227. 83 ad Aude, h 439, 48. 84 Quoted in Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 66. 85 The archbishop of Aix (1739), quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 202. I cannot resist the temptation to point out that the Commission des secours itself discovered one morning that its treasury was short 543,000 livres; that later it had to turn down requests for help because the king had raided its funds and used them to build his own church of SainteGeneviève (ibid., 153; an g9 155–17). I agree with the historian of one small overextended monastery that the women’s fecklessness was not unusual and that under the Old Regime “all bodies charged with the public service … failed to be careful, to match expenses to resources, and to observe wise economies” (Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 21). 86 Lemarchand, “Les monastères de Haute-Normandie,” 14. 87 Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 65. 88 See Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 356–7. Among the monasteries in Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, he has identified five with extensive rural holdings, ten without: “It is interesting to note that these five were established in small or medium-sized towns … and that none of the ten convents of the larger cities … chose to invest in this type of property.” In Rennes, the landholdings of the religious houses were insignificant compared to their other investments (Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 100–1). 89 See, for instance, Gaussin and Vallet. “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 468: “The Ursulines … came to play the role of bankers in the towns of Forez.” 90 Pocquet de Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 131. 91 Ibid., 102–3. 92 The monastery of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, a poor manager in any case, was also hurt by nonpayment of debts. In 1699 it was owed 80,000 livres by families that had been ruined (ad Vienne, 2 h 77).

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298 Notes to pages 45–50 93 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:135. The account that follows is taken from the same source, 136–45. 94 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 328, 547. 95 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 387; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:146. 96 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:102. 97 ad Orne, h 4960. 98 ad Orne, h 4854. 99 In Châteauroux, 34,317 livres instead of around 3400 livres (ad Indre, h 909); in Rennes, 67,000 livres instead of 6000 livres (Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 132). The nuns of Valençay, a small community in Berry, were forced to accept repayments of 36,790 livres, which, they claimed, “accounted for the greater part of their income” (ad Indre, h 47). 100 Faure, La banqueroute de Law, 523. 101 Bonney, “The State and Its Revenues,” 171n87. 102 Pocquet gives as an example a rente constituted on the tailles. Before the Visa, the invested capital of 10,800 livres rendered a return of 217 livres; after it, the same capital, reduced to 4123 livres, rendered a return of 89 livres (La vie temporelle, 131). 103 ad Val d’Oise, d 1790; ad Indre-et-Loire, h 840. Argenteuil survived; l’Ile-Bouchard did not. 104 Quoted in Taillard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 18. 105 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. 106 A bitter little comment in one monastery’s annales is revealing in this respect. It had paid the taxes that were demanded, without argument, only to learn afterwards that it “had paid too much, and the collector even made jokes about it” (am Châtellerault, ms. xxix). 107 ad Allier, c 121, report of the subdelegate of Nevers [1728]; an g9 84, report of the intendant on the filles de Notre-Dame of Perpignan [1723]. 108 ad Isère, 22 h 101. 109 Ursulines de Quimperlé, Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:148. chapter three 1 Gabrielle Rubens (1617–57), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:360. 2 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 97. 3 Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and Reform, 114. 4 Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 100. 5 Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapters v, vii, ix, x, xvii, xviii, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9.

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299 Notes to pages 50–5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 225. ad Aisne, h 1693, Congrégation de Laon. Printed in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:330–42. Rapley, “La Congregation de Notre-Dame de Provins,” 41. Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 215n. This information has been collated from the record of professions in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 294–319. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 94. Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:152. Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 10–11. Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:166. bsem 67 (juin 1985): 123. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez en la fondation de ce Monastère de Ste Ursule de Mascon. For more on this, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3. A situation very much regretted by Madame Gueudré, who blames this isolation for the Ursulines’ inability to move with the times. See Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:220. Hugon, “Structure et temporel d’une communauté religieuse,” 61. ad Gironde, g 628–186. ad Gironde, g 628–255. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 34. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Annales ii. Livre d’or de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. The double obligation was entrenched in the vows which superiors took after their election, “to live and die in the the Rule, constitutions, and regulations of our order and to ensure their observance by those with whom I am charged, as also to render obedience to the prelate of this monastery” (quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 241). Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter v, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 220–9. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions du collège et monastère des religeuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 341. “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame (1638),” Documents d’origine odn, vi 12. Petition of the Ursulines of Dijon to Bishop Zamet (1623), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:245. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 126. For details on the way clausura was imposed, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 3; Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 2.

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300 Notes to pages 55–62 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 95. Ibid., 98. Quoted in Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 129. Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 127–8. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:243. He had reason to dislike this superior, “because she seemed to him to be challenging his authority” (Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 129). She had argued vehemently against him at the Chapter-general. “Recit véritable de ce qui s’est fait et passé en la démission de la Supérieure du monastère de Dijon,” quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:122. “Humbles remontrances que font les Supérieures et religieuses de Sainte Ursule de Langres” (28 juin 1622), printed in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 451–4. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, printed in ibid., 130–1n3. See Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:187. Ibid., 1:xlvi. Ibid., 3:261. Ibid., 1:xlvi. am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame, suite aux annales. Ibid., Annales ii. bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496, “Mémoire à consulter pour les Religieuses Ursulines de la ville du Mans.” See below, chapter 4. Council of Trent, twenty-fifth session, chapter vi, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. Chapter vii, in ibid., 222. ad Orne, h 4837. ad Gironde, g 628. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:125–7; Nanglard, Pouillé historique du diocèse d’Angoulême, 485. Mahul, Cartulaire et archives des communes de Carcassone, 475. ad Aude, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, fol. 17. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:208. bm Provins, ms. 120, 108–9. Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours,” 4. bm Provins, ms. 120, 141. Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:233. E. Roux, “Les Ursulines de Périgueux,” 71 ff. The following account is taken from this source. Letter to the superior of the Ursulines of Tours, 13 September 1661, quoted in Jetté, The Spiritual Teaching of Mary of the Incarnation, 66. Quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:203.

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301 Notes to pages 62–9 66 See below, chapter 14. 67 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:180. 68 ad Bouches-du-Rhône, 83 h 3, 265–7, printed in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, annexe 31. 69 The office appears occasionally in various reports, e.g., in 1790 the Ursuline convent of La Vallette had a prieure perpetuelle (an d xix.6), as in 1777 did the house of the Filles de Notre-Dame in La Ferté Bernard (ad Sarthe, 2e 140/38). chapter four 1 Hildesheimer, Le Jansénisme, 10. 2 René Taveneaux, “The Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation,” in Pierre Chaunu, The Reformation, 270. 3 Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 4 Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout, 148–58. 5 Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, 104. 6 Loupès, La vie religieuse en France au xviii e siècle, 56. 7 Hildesheimer, Le jansénisme, 124. 8 Dominique Julia, “Le Catholicisme, religion de royaume,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:11. 9 This was the term used by Père Lallemand, sj, in a letter to Fénelon in early 1714. 10 It has even been argued that most of the panel members did not understand French. See Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 320. 11 Briggs, Early Modern France 1560–1715, 191. 12 The text of the bull may be found in Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 24–34. 13 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 344. 14 Adam, Du mysticisme à la révolte, 324–7. 15 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 343; Sarre, “Une enquête délicate,” 397. 16 Julia, “Le catholicisme, religion du royaume,” in Legoff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 21. 17 Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 348. 18 Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical Politics, 41. 19 “One point can be taken for granted, the preponderant influence of the bishops in their dioceses in the diffusion or, conversely, the repression of Jansenism” (Schmitt, L’organisation ecclésiastique et la pratique religieuse, 232). 20 Thomas, La querelle de l’Unigenitus, 54–73. 21 Les Héxaples i, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 81. 22 “A bishop, a parlement can be intimidated; a mystical sect can be ruined by violence or by the use of ridicule; but it is more difficult to overcome a

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302 Notes to pages 69–74

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

conviction that has come to maturity in the solitude of the cloister” (Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323). Quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 84. Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. Hélène Arlon, superior of the Ursuline house of Beauvais, in 1715, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:494. ad Marne, ch. 15588, “Lettre de Monseigneur … l’Evesque Comte de Chaalons … aux Religieuses de son Diocese, au sujet de la Constitution de N.S.P. le Pape, Unigenitus Dei Filius” [emphasis in the original]. Report on the Ursulines of Arc-en-Barrois, quoted in Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 107. Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:185. Ibid., 3:314–15. ad Aisne, 8 2099/2, “Observations sur l’avertissement de M. l’Evesque de Soissons” (s.d.), 9. Dawson, “Catéchisme de Sens,” 245. See also Armogathe, “Les catéchismes et l’enseignement populaire.” Bouvier, Histoire de l’église de Sens, 3:313. Procès-verbal of the visit of 1 November 1733 to the Congrégation of Étampes, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 85. An Ursuline of Melun, quoted in Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1733, 55. Procès-verbal of Languet’s visit to the Congrégation of Joigny, October 1732, quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. ad Aisne, Languet (then bishop of Soissons), seventh pastoral letter (1726). See Bishop Montmorin’s answer when the nuns of Noyers argued that the bull was not a rule of faith: “That it became a rule of faith as far as they were concerned, as soon as he commanded them to submit; that it was the Holy Spirit speaking to them, when he gave them an order” (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1737, 22). Ibid., 1733, 54. Ibid., 1731, 54. Ibid., 1733, 156. ad Yonne, h 2185, “Mémoire pour la Ville de Noyers … au sujet des biens des Dames Religieuses Ursulines, supprimées par Arrêt du Conseil au mois d’Août 1750.” For his actions against the Ursuline communities of Auxerre, Cravant, and Gien, see Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79–80. Ordioni, La resistance gallicane et janséniste, 117. ad Yonne, g 197, quoted in Garnier, “Le couvent de la congrégation Notre-Dame à Nemours.”

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303 Notes to pages 74–8 45 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1732, 210. Upon which a nun is said to have remarked, “The omnipotence that is attributed to God is due only to M. the archbishop of Sens.” 46 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 47 sne 1735, quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 83. 48 Garnier, “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame à Nemours.” 49 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1734, 219. 50 Ibid., 1741, 42. 51 Ibid., quoted in Fourrey, Le champion de la bulle Unigenitus, 78. 52 There are instances of communities losing their priests almost permanently, e.g., the Ursuline house of Saint-Charles in Orléans, which went thirty-three years without the sacraments (Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1756, 60). 53 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 65–6. 54 The grand remonstrances, of which this passage was a part, were drawn up by Jansenist magistrates and reflected the indignation aroused in Paris by the billets de confession affair. See Doyle, Jansenism, 62–3. 55 The most spectacular disgrace was that of the archbishop of Paris, who was exiled on several occasions. But there were others, such as the bishop of Laon, who was called an enemy of the peace by the municipal council, accused of lack of respect by the Crown, and eventually abandoned by his fellow bishops (Labouret, “Démêlés entre Mgr de la Fare Evêque de Laon et la Justice”); and the bishops of Auxerre and of Troyes, both banished from their dioceses. 56 The following incident is described in “Mémoire à consulter pour les Ursulines du Ville du Mans.” (bm Le Mans, ms. Maine 496). 57 Grimaldi of Le Mans was one of the least edifying of Old Regime bishops and was thoroughly disliked in his diocese. “The attempts to destroy this house [the Ursulines] was one of the griefs most often alleged against Louis de Grimaldi and his vicars general,” wrote Dom Paul Piolon, who was anything but pro-Jansenist (Histoire de l’église du Mans, 6:523). 58 It regenerated itself, however. By 1790 it numbered nearly forty (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:497). 59 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 79. 60 Quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 10. 61 Quoted in Franjou, La querelle janséniste à Joigny, 24. 62 Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, Le courrier des départements 23 (28 April 1791): 441. chapter five 1 Rogier, Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:122–3. The use of the term “bourgeois” as a synonym for “mediocre” is revealing. It supports a point that I will be

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304 Notes to pages 78–81

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

making, that Catholic historiography has in the past tended to see heroic sanctity as essentially aristocratic. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:56. Pomeau, quoted in ibid., 3:56. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers, 21. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 312. Ibid., 102. Latreille et al., Histoire du catholicisme en France, 3:436. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Lestocquoy, La vie religieuse en France, 152. Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français au xviii e siècle,” 337. Ibid., 336. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 9. Evenett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 67. Chaline et al., L’Église de France et la Révolution, 21. Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 15. Chapter general of the Capuchins of Brittany, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 227. Oury, Histoire religieuse du Maine, 149. Plongeron, La vie quotidienne du clergé français, 154. This number includes the 750 abbeys just referred to. Minois, Histoire religieuse de la Bretagne, 70. In the case of Brittany, the male monastic population fell from 1107 in 1768 to 450 in 1790. In 1770, 412 rich Benedictine abbeys housed, on average, ten monks apiece (Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:124). Jean de Viguerie argues that discipline had begun to deteriorate as early as 1660. See “Y a-t-il une crise de l’observance régulière entre 1660 et 1715?” in Sous la Règle de Saint Benoît, 135–47. Of course, there are always problems with generalization. Dinet points out that much of our understanding comes to us through the filter of the Enlightenment, which detested monasticism pure and simple (Religion et société, vol. 2, chap. 5: “Les réguliers et l’observance”). Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:123. But no longer. The number of works that treat religious women seriously is growing all the time. See the bibliography. Julia, “La ‘déchristianisation,› in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 527. Madame de Messey on the subject of the dames of Remiremont, quoted in Bluche, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse française, 186. Dollot, Folles ou sages, 167.

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305 Notes to pages 82–4 28 This is a point made by Timmermans: “From the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for many years thereafter, women did not seek an outlet for their intellectual aspirations in religion” (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 810–11). 29 Viguerie, Christianisme et révolution, 16–17. 30 Some twenty-five women to a house. See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women,” 392–3. 31 Viguerie, “Quelques aspects du catholicisme des français,” 339. 32 See below, chapter 13, and Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited.” For a tribute to the Ursulines, see Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 202; and to the Congrégation, see idem, 175. Sonnet makes the point that the two congregations offered a more serious education than did the highly aristocratic abbeys. As for the third congregation, the Filles de Notre-Dame, they had no house in Paris and thus escape Sonnet’s notice; but perhaps the sobriquet by which they were generally known – enseignantes – is evidence enough of their serious purpose. 33 For 89 Ursuline houses studied, Sabbagh finds an average of 41.4 nuns per house (“La Commission des secours,” 212). 34 Ibid., appendix, table 2. 35 Madame Gueudré suggests twenty houses. I have counted thirty, plus several houses of the Congrégation. I can find no cases of closings of monasteries of the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. An accurate count remains to be made. 36 bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Mémoire de la Commission. 37 Ursulines of Bourges: 73 nuns; should be 46. Congrégation of Bourges: 52 nuns; should be 36. Congrégation of Châteauroux: 54 nuns; should be 43. Ursulines of Linières: 36 nuns; should be 23. Ursulines of Montluçon: 50 nuns; should be 35. Ursulines of Issoudun: 69 nuns; should be 46. The small communities at Valençay and Selles should be united. (an g9 124.) 38 Julia, “La déchristianisation,” in Le Goff and Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 3:186. This scenario of “apogee” may be based more on the number of people in the convents during those decades (whose decision to enter religion was already taken, possibly long before) rather than on the number entering. 39 Provost, “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 257–8. My own records for three Breton houses (Carhaix, Quimper, and Quimperlé) show a solid stream of professions throughout the late eighteenth century. In fact, Quimperlé accepted the extraordinary number of eight novices in 1787–88 (ad Finistère, 39 h 1), but too late, of course, to be professed. 40 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 93, 127. 41 See appendix, table 12. My figures do not show the rebound that Dinet refers to.

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306 Notes to pages 85–90 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63 64

Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 394. an g9 121–12. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1762. bm Lyon, ms. 1592 (1570), Letter from the Cardinal de Rohan, 20 March 1731. an g9 141–1. Later correspondence reveals considerable anger in the city over the action, because the promised pensions were not being paid on time. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 250. The whole incident is cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 407. an g9 148–15. The Ursulines lost and were closed down (Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come,” 437). an g9 119–16. They fought to a draw; so the bishop was ordered to close a house in another town instead. an g9 147–3. an g9 83. an g9 147–25. They had appealed against Unigenitus during the episcopate of the Jansenist bishop Colbert. an g9 140–4. an g9 121–8 (Auxerre, 1726); an g9 123–2 (Bernay, 1778); ad Allier, c 121 (Nevers, 1728). Roux, Les Ursulines de Périgueux, 2: passim. The delays were often ended by pursuits in the courts; the defaults were sometimes dealt with only when those responsible found themselves facing a tough new creditor – the First Republic. Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:106. Frappa, “Le registre des religieuses de Notre-Dame d’Annonay,” 97. See, for instance, the tables given by Minois in Les religieux en Bretagne, 240, which illustrate what he terms le reflux de la noblesse in several Ursuline convents. Feillens, in “Les Ursulines de Lyon,” gives a table illustrating the fading of the nobility in the Ursuline convents of that city: from 34.6 percent of entrants in the seventeenth century to 24.56 percent in the eighteenth. The decline was most marked among the “old” nobility: 21.96 percent to 7.02 percent (ibid., 49). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:115. Marcadé, “Les filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 232. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur d’une congregation féminine,” 216. See, for instance, the improvements in the accounts of the monasteries of Saint-Marcellin (ad Isère, 22 h 178) and Provins (ad Seine-et-Marne, h 675). ad Nord 14946, no. 12. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237.

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307 Notes to pages 90–3 65 “The well-ordered dévot avoided the multiplicity of religious exercises, external manifestations of piety, and mortifications. He was a man of good taste and discretion” (Viguerie, “La sainteté au xviii e siècle,” 125). 66 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, chap. 5. The study involves 3245 nuns. 67 Ibid., 196. 68 Quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 133. 69 Mémoires, quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187. 70 Linda Timmermans makes this point with reference to Port-Royal, comparing Angélique Arnauld’s approach to obedience with that of Jacqueline Arnauld (L’accès des femmes à la culture, 792). 71 Ibid., 731, 729. 72 Weaver, “Erudition, Spirituality and Women,” 191. 73 Dinet, “Les visites pastorales,” 46; Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281. 74 Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 187; Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 148. 75 Rondeau, Histoire du monastère des Ursulines d’Angers, 197. 76 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 313. Sarre maintains that in Provence, “the education of externes, which had been the original purpose of the [Ursuline] Institute, was not assured always and everywhere” (314). 77 Thus, with regard to the faltering Ursuline monastery of Martigues, the archbishop of Arles recommended in 1749 the hiring of “three or four grey nuns, who would be much more helpful to this town than the monastery” (quoted in ibid., 410). 78 As in Paris in the late eighteenth century, where spaces in the charity schools outnumbered those in the externats of the monasteries by three to one (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, table 17). For more on the development of these congregations, see Rapley, The Dévotes, chap. 6. 79 An entry in the records of the Ursulines of Chinon illustrates this point. Soon after their arrival in the town they received a favour from a local gabelleur (officer in charge of the salt monopoly): “But this charity and relief brought down other troubles upon us, the invectives of the common people who thought that they were only paying the gabelle for our benefit; the peasants … could not look at our house without cursing it, and when we passed them on the water, the washerwomen and the riff-raff called out insults at us” (bs 769–260). 80 This is a point made by Colin Jones with regard to the nursing sisters. See Charity and Bienfaisance, 108. 81 Le jérémaiade des maîtres Portefaix (November 1789), quoted in Fleury, Le clergé du Département de l’Aisne pendant la Révolution, 72. 82 ad Eure, h 1562, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines of Evreux (1700); ad Indre, h 932, Complaint lodged by the Ursulines de Châtillon; report from 1772, quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 281.

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308 Notes to pages 93–102 83 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 80 (Ursulines of Rennes, 1652); ad Drôme, 31 h3 (Ursulines of Romans, 1756). 84 ad Ande, h 439, Annales des Ursulines de Carcassonne, 94. 85 Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:115. 86 Ibid., 115–16. 87 A casual entry in the annales of Blois for 1770 mentioned an inspection of the library. “Numbers of unmatched books” were sold for 98 livres, and the proceeds used to buy an eight-volume series and to repair a window (fol. 301). 88 J. Meyer, “La vie religieuse en Bretagne,” 140. chapter six 1 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 5. 2 This memoir was recorded in the early nineteenth century by Marie-Anne de Viarnez, who had been a nun in the convent of Saint-Sever and had come back to be superior of the reconstituted house in 1804. It is one of several written by nuns and printed in the appendix to the third volume of Gueudré’s Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines. 3 aguur (Rome) bc 33, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 436; ac Lille, 17.647, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:296–7. 4 Quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. See above, chapter 4. 5 “Extrait des circonstances concernant la destruction de notre maison de Bourg-Argental,” printed in full in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13. 6 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 7 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:15–17. 8 an d xix 12–179, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 435. 9 ad Marne, 1 l 1386. Madame Coqteaulx was not a particularly senior nun, having professed in 1781. 10 “These alleged slaves mourned nothing but the liberty that was offered to them while, in reality, being taken from them” (Canon Duplessis, quoted in Dinet, in “Les communautés religieuses féminines de Bourgogne et de Champagne,” 478). 11 Viguerie Christianisme et révolution, 71; Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:466; Lestocquoy, Le diocèse d’Arras (1949), 175. 12 Boussoulade, Moniales et hospitalières, 253. 13 Le Foll, “La crise religieuse à Rouen,” 334. 14 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 15 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 438. 16 “Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:14. 17 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:58.

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309 Notes to pages 103–8 18 Relation de la Mère Michèle Bruneau, Ursuline de Château-Gontier, quoted in ibid., 3:507. 19 For example, Anne Dudon of the Congrégation in Longwy, who claimed to have been imprisoned by the other nuns (Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle pendant la Révolution, 3:149). 20 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 264. 21 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 55. 22 Quoted in Nadal, Essais sur les origines monastiques du diocèse de Valence, 27. 23 Rogier et al., Nouvelle histoire de l’Église, 4:170–1. 24 They did insist that those wishing to leave should seek authorization from their superiors (Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:77, 82). 25 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 3. 26 It was estimated by an observer that 300 nuns were whipped in Paris (Rapley, “No More Chains,” 911). 27 Le courrier des départements (Paris), 14 April 1791. 28 Ibid., 14 March 1791. 29 ad Nord, l 8867. 30 am Bordeaux, no. 94 (16 February 1792). 31 Quoted in Peter and Paulet, Histoire religieuse du Département du Nord, 1:218. 32 ac Valenciennes, d, 4, 5, quoted in ibid., 1:218. 33 Jacobins of Metz, in a brief demanding the closure of the school of the Congrégation. Quoted in Lesprand, Le clergé de la Moselle, 3:143. 34 Quoted in Fosseyeux, Les écoles de charité à Paris, 81. 35 Quoted in La Congrégation à Vézelise, 122. 36 Annales, quoted in Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:128. 37 Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture, 177. 38 Marie-Paule Biron, Les messes clandestines pendant la Révolution (Paris: NEL 1989), 74. 39 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 123–4. 40 Lebrun, Histoire des catholiques en France, 76. 41 Madame Gueudré estimates that 1000 Ursulines out of 10,000 spent some time in prison (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 3:158). Some were executed, notably eleven in Valenciennes and sixteen in Orange – all for fanatisme. 42 For more on those reasons, see Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship. 43 Jean de Viguerie claims that two-thirds of all girls who went to school were taught by nuns (Christianisme et révolution, 31). 44 Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. 45 Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation, 608. 46 Quoted in Julia, Les trois couleurs du tableau noir, 329–30. 47 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 99. 48 Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 307.

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310 Notes to pages 108–15 49 Quoted in Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 190. 50 Tephany, Histoire de la persecution religieuse dans Quimper et Léon, 340. 51 An Ursuline tradition, recorded in Blivet, Quintin: Deux siècles d’un monastère d’Ursulines, 183. chapter seven 1 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:191. 2 See Rapley, The Dévotes, chaps. 2 and 3. 3 Cardinal Bellarmine to François de Sales, 29/12/1616, in Sales, Oeuvres, 17:416. 4 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 1. 5 Ibid., 71–2. 6 Anne-Marie Le Bourgeois, “Dieu aime-t-il les murs?”, quoted in ibid., 3n5. 7 Ibid., 126, 127. 8 Council of Trent, session 25:1, in Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 221. 9 Sales, Oeuvres, 11: preface; 25:19–20. 10 Rule of the Ursuline monastery of the Presentation Notre-Dame of Avignon, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 11 See the papal bull for the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques: “The permission to teach young girls who are not pensionnaires will last only as long as it pleases us and the Holy Apostolic See” (quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 1:104). The founders of the community tried to counter the provisionality of this bull by instituting a “fourth vow” to teach young girls free of charge. 12 “Which I ought not to do, since as I am getting very heavy, if I had fallen, I would have surely hurt myself or perhaps broken my neck” (Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 208). 13 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 152. 14 Contemporary comment on the erection of the Ursuline monastery at Chabeuil, quoted in Nadal, Essai sur les origines monastiques, 25. 15 an g9 151–24, Mémoire sur les communautés de religieuses et de filles non cloîtrées [s.d.]. 16 Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 130. 17 “A girl’s desire is a devouring fire / a nun’s desire is a hundred times worse” (quoted in Graham, “The Married Nuns before Cardinal Caprara,” 327). 18 Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship, 101. 19 Quoted in Ponton, La religieuse, 20. 20 For example, the archbishop’s sanction against a monastery in SaintRemy in 1671: “For five years, no novices to be received, to see if in that time the religious can find a place to live in the city, with tighter security and

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311 Notes to pages 115–19

21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41

clausura” (Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247); the suppression in 1699 of the third Ursuline house in Lyon for “absence of enclosure, being separated from their neighbours only by hedges on one side, so that it would be easy for them [the nuns] to go out and come back in” (official document of suppression, quoted in Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 141). Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 245. Ordinances as follows: for the Ursulines of Angers (1628), quoted in Rondeau, Les Ursulines d’Angers, 69; for the Ursulines of Rouen (1654), quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:174; for the Ursulines of Carcassonne (1686), quoted in ibid; for the Ursulines of Cravant (1682), in ad Yonne, g 1640. bm Carpentras, ms. 1419, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 5:3; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 19. Ordinance of the bishop of Fréjus to the Ursulines of Draguignan (1717), quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 247. Report of diocesan inspectors (1670), quoted in C. Roux, Le monastère des Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-le-Château, 67. See above, chapter 5. Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 78. Paul, Correspondance, Entretiens, Documents, 10:658. Colbert, Lettres vi, quoted in Esmonin, Études sur la France, 369. Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 30. J.-C. Gousselin, quoted in Viard, Langres au xviii e siècle, 354. The fact that Gousselin, a councillor to the presidial in Langres, came from so pious a background makes this and other negative references to monastic life all the more interesting (Dinet, Vocation et fidélité, 193 and table 2). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 10. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 69. Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 3:245. Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 23–5. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 226. Gueudré makes the same point, commenting that the mystical life of many Ursulines “crystallized around the idea of holocaust and of the state of ‘victim› (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:345). Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 40. Rule of St Benedict, Chap. 2, “What kind of man the abbot should be.” “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame” (1638), in Documents d’origine odn. The usual term in French is supérieur. But since in English the masculine cannot be distinguished from the feminine supérieure, I shall use the term “director.”

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312 Notes to pages 119–22 42 Thus the Ursulines of Aiguepercé had to admit in 1728 that they had had no formal pastoral visit for thirty-five years and that their directors, when they did come, gave only superficial attention to their accounts (ad Allier, c 119). 43 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115. 44 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, viii. 45 Ibid., De l’office de la Supérieure. 46 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, De l’office de la mère prieure, 10. 47 “Règles de la mère première,” in Documents d’origine odn, 7. 48 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 322. Her example was followed by other superiors, among them Thérèse de Brilhac, seven times elected superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers, who “went once a week to wash the dishes” (ass s 197 [2/11/1701]). 49 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, De l’office de la supérieure, 26. 50 Description of the Ursuline community of Arc-en-Barrois (1746), quoted in Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 207. 51 “We lived in the most perfect union,” wrote an Ursuline, reflecting on the prerevolutionary days (“Extrait des circonstances,” in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 2:13). It was a state not easily achieved. 52 Obituaries of Constance de Noguez, Pau (ass s 197, 28/11/1741), AnneThérèse Brunet de la Socelière, Fontenay (ass s 197, 18/4/1740), Marguerite de Terneyre, Riom (ass s 197, 23/12/1741), and Jacquette de Resseguier, Toulouse (aodn b 3j, 6/5/1741) – all superiors in the Compagnie de Notre-Dame. 53 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/5/1711). 54 For example, Catherine Ranquet, superior of the Ursuline house of Grenoble at twenty-one (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 278); Anne d’Arrerac, superior of Notre-Dame in Poitiers at twenty-five (aodn Poitiers, b 1j1). 55 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 9/4/1727). 56 In the various Ursuline houses of the diocese of Tréguier, Georges Minois states that women of noble blood “had a quasi-monopoly on the position of superior” (Les religieux en Bretagne, 133). In my own collection, out of 6960 ordinary choir nuns, 980 (14.1 percent) were identified as noble, while out of 517 nuns who were at one time or another superiors, 114 (22.1 percent) were identified as noble. 57 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 99. Marguerite was the daughter of a baron. 58 Bouzonnié, Histoire de l’ordre des religieuses Filles de Notre-Dame, 180. 59 ad Yonne, g 1643 (Gien, 1739). 60 an g9 128–9; an g9 83.

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313 Notes to pages 122–6 61 Besnard, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à La Ferté-Bernard,” 245–8. 62 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 63 Though not always. Sarre describes a number of occasions on which bishops took control of the elections. He suggests that by the end of the seventeenth century they had established their authority so effectively that henceforth the communities in his study rarely challenged it (Vivre sa soumission, 218–20). 64 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 63. 65 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 4, De l’election de la prieure. 66 Ibid.; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris 4. 67 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 216. He gives examples of this practice of alternating the two offices. 68 The different Rules diverged here. Some allowed the superior to appoint them herself, others called for their election by the Chapter. 69 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 39:12. See also Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 116–17. 70 Documents d’origine odn: “Règles de la mère première,” 20. 71 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 1:8. 72 The right to vote was also witheld from nuns if they had three sisters who were already vocales. The object was to avoid the development of cliques within the Chapter. 73 In all the acts of the Chapter of the grand couvent between 1626 and 1662, there was only one case of opposition to the superior’s proposals, and this was overruled ( Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 118). 74 ad Eure, 1475: capitular act of the Congrégation of Bernay. 75 ad Vienne, 2 h 77: Mémoire pour les Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 76 ad Indre-et-Loire, h 844 (1740). 77 Marcadé, “Les Filles de Notre-Dame à Poitiers,” 228. 78 Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 171–85. 79 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. 80 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 81 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 3; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 73. 82 ba 4991–280 (Dijon, 15/12/1692); ba 4991–59 (Melun, 28/2/1690); ba 4992–84 (Seurre, 13/8/1691); ba 4990–157 (Evreux, 15/9/1687). 83 aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Langeac, 12/3/1767). 84 ba 4991–27 (Gisors, 21/1/1694). 85 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 8/2/1704). 86 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, chap. 8. 87 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 26/8/1737); aodn Poitiers, b 3 j (Toulouse, 1754); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 6/10/1714).

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314 Notes to pages 126–31 88 For example, Jeanne Chimbaut de Filhot, who “ruined her health in the continual activity that she undertook to procure the good of the house” (ass s 197 [Bordeaux, 8/2/1704]). 89 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 49. A description of one such chest comes from the inventory of 1790: “a small casket of morocco-leather [containing] eight bags containing 169 items relevant to the foundation and the properties of the convent” (Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 82). 90 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes, 3:231. 91 ass s 197 (Salers, 12/4/1735). 92 Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 105. 93 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. 94 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 230. 95 It should be noted that the upkeep of their churches and the provision of religious services caused a continuing drain on the convents’ finances, because even in the leanest years they had to pay for priests, clerks, and sacristans. No men’s orders had this problem. For convents that went bankrupt, the only hope was that local priests would serve them out of charity; otherwise, they had to go without the sacraments. 96 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 198. 97 ass s 197 (Riom, 1/9/1733). 98 ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692). 99 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 100 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 243. 101 Ibid., 245. 102 ba 4991–83 (Flavigny, 13/3/1694); bs 769 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ad Eure, ii f 2215 (Gisors, 1702); bs 769 (Montbard, 15/4/1675). 103 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:8. 104 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 1. 105 Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 125. chapter eight 1 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, passim. 2 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville at diocèse de Tours, 3:2; “Constitutions et règles de l’ordre des religieuses de Notre-Dame,” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 254. 3 See the description of the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, recorded by visitors in 1732: “There are certainly towns which do not have as much space as the ‘great convent’ encloses within its walls … They have several gardens, vineyards which supply enough grapes to meet their need for

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315 Notes to pages 131–2

4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

wine; a great wood of wild chestnuts” (Loridan, Les voyages à Rome des Ursulines de Flandre, 281–2). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58. Regents were given an extra collation before going into the classroom. See, in this regard, an interesting reference in an obituary to a nun who practised unusual mortifications – including eating the bread that was baked specially for the poor! (bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Régistre des décès, 1676). Règlemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:40. Ibid., 2:2. A rule that seems to have been broken regularly during the eighteenth century. Oudart Coquault of Reims, who can always be relied on for the negative view, wrote that “they live like great ladies; their food consists for the very least of beef, veal and mutton … bread made of pure white flour, all the best fruits in their season, and likewise the best vegetables” (Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:381). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 5. ad Vaucluse, Ursulines d’Avignon Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 4:9. ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, État, règlement et statuts des religieuses et autres filles de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame. The young Marie Madeleine Hachard, on her way to Louisiana in 1727, had to be warned that the sailors on board ship would laugh at her turn of phrase. “I don’t know how to avoid saying it, even to talking about ‘our nose,’ and Father Tartarine often says, ‘Sister, raise our head’ – all for fun and to distract us from our fatigues” (De Rouen en Louisiane, 60). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 7. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. Ibid., 15. Garnot, Le diable au couvent, 146–7. Barbe was an unusual nun in that she was accused by her community of sorcery, but there is no suggestion that her ownership of so many goods was contrary to the convent’s practice. ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1741. ad Yonne, g 192. Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 570. Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 77. ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/7/1698). Johnson, Equal in Monastic Profession, 107. She adds that “owning property in spite of one’s vow of poverty seems to have been more commonly a failing of nuns than of monks” (111).

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316 Notes to pages 133–8 24 Contract cited in Bonneau, Les Ursulines d’Auxerre, 14. 25 For example, Anne de Chaludet, who professed in 1635, thirteen years after the opening of her house, “used (with permission) the money that she received from her parents for the decoration of the chapel” (ba 4991–114 [Nevers, 22/4/1694]). Similarly, Marguerite d’Illiers, whose profession took place eleven years after the foundation of her monastery in Blois, was given a pension of 100 livres “for her small pleasures” (ad Loir-et-Cher 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 99–100). 26 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:133, 236; 2:81. 27 Quoted in ibid., 1:134. The reference is to the Book of Proverbs, 30:8. 28 C. de Marcigny, Le palais de la sagesse ou le miroir de la vie religieuse, quoted in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 123. 29 Quoted in Pérouas, La diocèse de La Rochelle, 440 n5. 30 an g9 147–3. 31 ad Yonne, g 192, Ursulines de Montargis. 32 ad Isère, 22 h 171. 33 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, Introduction. 34 Ibid., 8–9. 35 Ibid., 9. 36 Ibid., 9–14. 37 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” articles 10 ff. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule, Constitutions, chap. 2. 39 Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, chap. 4. 40 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:221. 41 Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women, 126. 42 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 16. Fourier’s philosophy is illustrated in a letter which he wrote in 1606 to the sisters of Saint-Nicolas: “While your little pensionnaires are still all modest, and seem to progress without being led by anybody … you should try to maintain them with gentleness and praise in a spirit of devotion.” Fourier emphatically believed that a child could be maintained in her baptismal innocence. 43 Mère Boulier, Visitandine, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:65. 44 ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737). 45 Jacques Le Brun cites a seventeenth-century debate about which was the more meritorious, holiness “from one’s mother’s womb” or latter-day conversion and hard-won redemption; he concludes that in the seventeenthcentury mind inborn innocence carried the day (“Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 317–30). 46 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 9. 47 Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 4:289. 48 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 69.

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317 Notes to pages 139–43 49 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 5/3/1750); ba 4990–140 (Lisieux, 1/11/1684). 50 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709); bs 769–66 (Saint-Pierre le Moûtier, 26/11/1679); ba 4992–158 (Selles-en-Berry, 12/8/1691). 51 Even the autobiography of Jeanne Belcier, the famous Ursuline of Loudun whose erotic behaviour during her possessions was a matter of record, is remarkably tame. See Le Hir, “L’expression mystique dans l’autobiographie de Soeur Jeanne des Anges,” 456. 52 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 53 Marie Le Grand, Ursuline lay sister, quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:264. 54 Isambert, Recueil général, 16–520. 55 For more on this, see Hanley, “Engendering the State,” 4–27. 56 Quoted in Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 160. 57 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 58 Ibid., 16. 59 Ibid., 21. 60 La vie de la mère Françoise Fournier (Paris 1685), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 314. 61 Letter to the abbess of Chelles (1741), quoted in Hardy, Le cardinal de Fleury et le mouvement janséniste, 323. 62 Annales du monastère de Saint-Brieuc, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:166. 63 ba 4990–215. 64 ba 4991–15 (Eu, 14/1/1693); bs 769–23 (Dijon, 23/9/1684); ba 4990–183 (Quimper, 15/11/1687). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). 66 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 236. 67 “Du voeu d’obéissance,” in Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 22. 68 Documents d’origine odn, “Constitutions et règles,” 15:44. 69 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, entretiens, documents, 10:396. 70 Montargon, Dictionnaire apostolique, 6:222. 71 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 321. 72 Catherine de Bar, quoted in Une amitié spirituelle au grand siècle, 67, 160. 73 Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 45–6. 74 Delumeau, Sin and Fear, chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” 75 A point made by Emmanuel Mounier and cited in ibid., 315. It had no counterpart in the Eastern Church, and it did not surface in the Latin west until the later Middle Ages. 76 The following relation comes from bs 769 (Montbard, 15/11/1677). 77 bs 769 (Apt, July 1678). For comparisons, see Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, 42; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 24. 78 ba 4990–211 (Bayeux, 6/12/1643).

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318 Notes to pages 143–7 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). ba 4992–64 (Meaux, 28/10/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). aodn Annonay, b 3j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740; Rodez, 23/2/1730; Périgueux, 18/4/ 1709); ba 4991–120 (Lisieux, 18/4/1693); ba 4991–57 (Montferrand, 19/2/1693). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 18/4/1709, Limoges, 1728, Bordeaux, 9/4/ 1708). ba 4990–14 (Caen, 16/2/1687); bs 769 (Apt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Salers, 19/11/1733). See, for instance, The Life of Henry Suso, referred to in James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 241–2. C. Gillotte, Le directeur (1723 edition), quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 316. aodn Annonay, 1j 2; bs 769 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1693); ba 4991–89 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685); aodn b 1j (Toulouse, 17/1/1758). ass s 197 (Béziers, 20/3/1743); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/ 1679). Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 195. ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Forêt, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). ba 4992–1 (Le Havre, 12/9/1690). aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Pau, 20/6/1765). ba 4991 (Amiens, 2/11/1692). bs 769 (Apt, 23/6/1682, Le Havre, 18/2/1690); ba 4993–183 (Montcenis, 12/7/1694). ass s 197 (Riom, 16/1/1740, Le Puy, 10/9/1726). Quoted in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 42. ba 4993–74 (Thiers, 28/2/1685); bs 769 (Saint-Malo, s.d.); ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); ass s 197 (Agen, 25/1/1717); bs 769 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 26/10/1669); ba 4990–196 (Bayeux, 17/12/1683). ba 4991–7 (Meaux, 8/1/1694). ass s 197 (Limoges, 20/11/1735). See above, n97. ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737). ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ass s 197 (Sarlat, 29/4/1727). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 26/1/1765).

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319 Notes to pages 147–52 108 109 110 111 112

See, for instance, Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls, 120. ass s 197 (Aurillac, 7/5/1719; Béziers 14/2/1734). aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Langeac, 20/10/1786). ba 4990–151 (Bayeux, 6/9/1685). Viguerie, Une oeuvre d’éducation sous l’Ancien Régime, 25. chapter nine

1 Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 15. 2 Thus in 1789 the annalist of Blois, sketching out the life of an eightythree-year-old sister recently deceased, remarked that she was repeating what the older nun had told her many years ago (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 313). 3 Most of the other children also entered either the priesthood or the religious life. See bsem 83 (déc. 1990): 20. 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 152. 5 Isabelle died in the conviction that her prayers would be answered, and so they were. Four months later, Louise entered a convent (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:376–7). 6 When a teaching monastery was first planned for Versailles (not at some distance, like Saint-Cyr, but right in the town, to serve the daughters of royal officers), the authorities warned that the proximity of the Court made the project inappropriate (ibid., 101). 7 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 84–84v. 8 Ibid. 9 bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. 10 This little pensionnaire had a sister, also placed in the convent “while very young,” who eventually became a nun. The annalist recalled that she later said of this pensionnaire “that she had been, as it were, snatched from her family, and that this had been infinitely painful to her.” This suggests that her vocation was pressed upon her by her parents (ibid., 80 [mars 1989]: 5). 11 Recueil des Entretiens spirituels, Oeuvres IX, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 260. 12 Vincent de Paul, Correspondance, 5:563–4. 13 A number of studies of Old Regime dowries make this point. For one such study, see Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 241–66. 14 ad Seine-Maritime, d 408. 15 bs 769–91 (Nevers, 8/3/1689); ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 16 ad Gironde, g 632. 17 See, for instance, the death notice of Angélique Mahy, “received in the house in the quality of an invalid” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 212).

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320 Notes to pages 152–6 18 bs 769–185 (Draguignan, 13/5/1684); Notter, “Contrats de dot,” 247. 19 bm Grenoble, r 9122, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès: Marie Romanet (1645); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1652). 20 Ibid., fol. 83 (1670); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Avignon, 9/2/1730). 21 ba 4990–215, Des vertus et saints practices des Rses. decédées en cette maison de Quimper Carentin; ad Eure, Registre pour le couvent de Sainte Ursule de Gisors, no. 96. 22 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:344; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:275; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/10/1781). 23 ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736). 24 Essai sur les nécessités et sur les moyens de plaire, quoted in Bluche, Les magistrats du Parlement, 243. 25 Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse,” 32; Rapley, “Women and the Religious Vocation,” 621 ff. 26 ba 4990–3 (Angers, 1682). 27 bs 769–193 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 12/8/1649). 28 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 12/12/1725). 29 ba 4990–149 (Gournay, 19/6/1685); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ba 4991–134 (Andelys, 15/5/1694). 30 ass s 197 (Pau, 23/3/1739); Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 349; ba 4992–25 (Saint-Denis, 23/10/1690). 31 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:2. 32 Mère de Blémur, Éloges, quoted in Le Brun, “Conversion et continuité intérieure,” 321n17. 33 ba 4991–154 (Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, 24/7/1693); bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 176; ass s 197 (Pau, 12/7/1737); ass s 197 (Salers, 18/10/1728); ba 4993–93 (Clermont-en-Auvergne, February 1670); Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:357; Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 123; ba 4991–30 (Saint-Denis, 28/1/1693); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114. 34 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 261. 35 Bell and Weinstein, Saints and Society, part 1. 36 Marie of the Incarnation, Selected Writings, 41–2. 37 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 23. 38 Ibid., 24. 39 Quoted in ibid., 15. 40 Annales manuscrits du premier couvent de Paris, fol. 92; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1724); Gueudré, Écrits spirituels de Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet, 114; ass s 197 (Limoges, 8/6/1713). 41 Annales des Ursulines du Premier Monastère de la Congrégation de Paris, 1:310, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 56.

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321 Notes to pages 157–61 42 Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 209. 43 Thus Marie Agathe Marseault was remembered for “diverting some who were on the point of marrying, persuading them to resolve to live in continence” (bs 769–2 [Erfort, 4/7/1677]). 44 bs 769–179 (Draguignan, 11/12/1680); ad Loir-et-Cher, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 196; ass s 197 (Pau, 24/1/1742); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 12/9/1761). 45 bsem 84 (déc. 1990): 21. 46 P. Ayrault, De la puissance paternelle (1598), quoted in Pillorget, “Vocation religieuse et état,” 11. 47 For example, Marie de Loberie, whose father “loved this dear girl tenderly, as the support of his house” (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Langeac, 12/3/1767]); Françoise Dalon, whose father brought her from Bordeaux to Pau expressly for companionship, only to lose her to the local monastery (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Pau, 31/10/1761]). 48 ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); ass s 197 (Poitiers, c. 1700); ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732); ba 4992–52 (Nevers, 24/5/1691); ba 4990–170 (Toissay-en-Dombes, 13/10/1686); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62; bs 769–84 (Le Havre, 18/2/1690). 49 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 28/1/1763); bsem 77 (déc. 1987): 242; ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 278. 50 Ibid., fol. 300; ba 4990–125 (Bourges, 10/8/1684); ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694). 51 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/2/1770); ibid., fol. 307; ibid., fol. 203; bs 769–42 (Montbard, 15/12/1676); Annales des Ursulines de Blois (20/5/1719); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 23/1/1787). 52 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/11/1733); bs 769–59 (Montbard, 22/11/1676); ba 4992–62 (Noyon, 23/1/1691). 53 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1755). 54 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 26/8/1728; Riom, 23/12/1741). 55 Natalie Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 92. 56 “Le nombre des ecclésiastiques de France, celuy des religieux et des religieuses, le temps de leur établissement, ce dont ils subsistent et à quoy ils servent,” in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’histoire de France, 462. 57 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 301. 58 ad Vienne, g 723, Sainte-Ursule de Poitiers, Examinations des novices; ba 4990–104 (Magny, 2/7/1675); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 19/10/1781.

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322 Notes to pages 161–5 59 bsem 67 (juin 1985): 252; ba 4991–17 (Seurre, 29/1/1694); bs 769 (Troyes, 24/2/1690); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188; ibid. fol. 111v–112. 60 ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 61 ba 4991–47 (Boulogne, 14/4/1693); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 12/4/1768). 62 Ibid. (Alençon, 6/10/1762); bm Provins, ms. 98: Rivot, Histoire ecclésiastique de Provins, 4:1106. It is interesting to note that these two women became the financial and management experts of their respective monasteries. 63 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 13/5/1737); bs 769 (Montbard, 26/11/1678). 64 ba 4990–215 (Quimper); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (16/3/1691); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–80 (Argenteuil, 15/3/1693); ass s 197 (Saintes, 2/10/1733). 65 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 113v. 66 Marie de l’Incarnation, Écrits spirituels et historiques, 2:268. 67 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. 68 Responses sur les règles, constitutions et coustumiers de notre ordre de la Visitation (Paris 1632), quoted in Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 224. 69 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire des Ursulines, 2:217. chapter ten 1 ba 4991–53 (Saint-Omer, 7/2/1693). She was made to wait a year before being received into the novitiate. 2 ad Finistère, 35 h 2, Cahiers pour les entrées des novices de ce monastère de Ste Ursule à Landerneau. Typical of the requirements for the meal are those noted in the customs of the Ursulines of Montbrison: 50 lbs. of sugared almonds for the community, two jars of preserves for the almoners, four loaves of sugar and 6 lbs of preserves for the sacristy (Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:109. Broutin goes on to comment: “Luxury and sensuality have made their way even into the convents.” Given the “crime,” this seems a rather harsh judgment). 3 This list comes from ad Isère, 22 h 202 (Ursulines de Tullins). 4 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (4/7/1704); ass s 197 (Le Puy, 22/7/1718); ba 4991–262 (Caen, 23/12/1693); ba 4991–138 (Meaux, 15/7/1691). 5 Dinet notes in his regional study of religious orders that the perseverance rate of novices was greater in feminine than in masculine orders, and he attributes this to the “preselection” that took place in their pensionnats (Vocation et fidelité, 69). 6 bs 769–70 (Amiens, 28/12/1689). 7 bm Grenoble, Ursulines de Romans, Registre des décès, no. 579.

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323 Notes to pages 165–9 8 Contract of 1646, quoted in Ancourt, Les Ursulines-ermites de Saint-Augustin, 69. The fact that her father was a creditor of the convent may well have made the success of her vocation more likely. 9 ba 4993–97 (Saint-Germain, 21/4/1689); “La vie, les vertus et la mort de la Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph,” in Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 438; ad Eure, h 1577 (Ursulines de Gisors). 10 From the death notice of Marie Geneviève de Razes of Notre-Dame in Poitiers (ass s 197). 11 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:29. 12 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 242. 13 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Richelieu, 13/1/1768); Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:17. 14 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (7/11/1708). 15 bs 769–271 (Chinon, 1638). 16 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 111. 17 Conduite générale et spirituelle que doivent garder les novices, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 18 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 112. 19 bm Troyes, ms. 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Ste Ursule de Troyes, 3:247; Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 42:4. 20 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Règles des vierges religieuses de Ste Ursule. 21 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, ii, 14:32. 22 Les vrayes constitutions, 1:45, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 91. 23 Gueudré makes this point: “We only need to open the rare writings that have survived the Revolution to appreciate the Ursulines’ familiarity with the Old Testament” – not to mention the New Testament and the Fathers, especially Saint Augustine (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 28). 24 Thus the annalist of the Ursulines of Blois, eulogizing their late superior, Marie-Madeleine Tubert, exclaimed: “How often, coming away from her conferences, did we say to one another that they were worth more to us than many sermons!” (fol. 188). But none of Mère Tubert’s conferences have survived. 25 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:235. The only text that immediately survived Marie’s conferences was a hand-written copy by one of the novices. Most of Marie’s writings were burned before she left for Canada, a practice in self-abasement so common among nuns that it seriously depleted their written legacy to future generations – and to historians. 26 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 114. 27 aodn Poitiers, b 1j. 28 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 68. 29 ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/1/1705, Toulouse, 17/12/1704). 30 ad Haute-Garonne, h 221–29.

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324 Notes to pages 170–4 31 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89. 32 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon 20/1/1746). 33 Histoire manuscrite de la communauté, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines 2:148–9. 34 Registre des actes du chapitre, 17 août 1631, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106. 35 Laguérenne, Le couvent des Ursulines de Montluçon, 58. 36 As, for instance, Françoise le Georgelier, “whose natural delicacy provided a thousand occasions of mortification: the slightest dirtiness, the smell of meat, and all sorts of other things caused a fluttering of her heart” (ba 4991–227 [Rouen, 23/11/1692]). There was even a condition known as mal des novices: a tumour on the knee, brought about by long hours of kneeling (Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 431). 37 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 108. 38 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule. 39 bn ms. 16, Ld 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle. 40 Ibid. 41 G. Augeri, La vie et vertus de la Vénérable Mère Catherine de Jésus Ranquet (1670), quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 184. 42 ba 4992–35 (Montluçon, 6/9/1689); Péchenard, La Congrégation de NotreDame de Reims, 1:265. 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662); ba 4992–118 (Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, 12/11/1691); aodn La Flèche, b 1j, Registre des décès (Annonay, 12/5/1641). 44 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:373. 45 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 20/4/1751, Toulouse, 24/2/1772). 46 ass s 197 (Sarlat, 15/5/1729). 47 ba 4992–47 (Issoudun, 4/4/1683). 48 ba 4990–12 (Lyon-la-Fôret, s.d.); ass s 197 (Limoges, 17/5/1738). 49 bs 768–84. The necrology does not tell us whether her prayers were answered; the fact that the self-abuse made its way into the record allows us to suspect that they were not. 50 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (29/6/1643); bs 769 (Montbard 15/4/1675). 51 Oury, Marie de l’Incarnation, 18:197. 52 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, 14. 53 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740. The following examples are from the same source. 54 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1662). The author goes on to remark that this nun’s habit of extreme, prompt obedience lasted all her life. 55 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 42.

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325 Notes to pages 174–81 56 ad Seine-Maritime, Règle de Saint-Augustin à l’usage des religieuses de Notre-Dame, 17 verso. 57 Fourier, Correspondance, 3:293. 58 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1645); ba 4990–106 (Ile-Bouchard, 7/7/1679). 59 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/3/1730). 60 Benezet, Vie des RR. mères de Terrail et de Bruncan, 53. 61 ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h3 79, cited in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 86. 62 See above, 165, and ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). 63 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 81. 64 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 27/3/1725); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (6/5/1704); ba 4991–211 (Montluçon, 26/10/1692). 65 “Les annales des Ursulines de Limoges,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques du Limousin, 168n1. 66 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Alençon, 26/11/1770). 67 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 9/8/1732). 68 Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 257. 69 His generosity was rewarded. Magdelaine lived for another twenty-nine years (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 103v). 70 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 26/6/1784). 71 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (12/11/1782). 72 Tisseur, Marie-Lucrèce, 65–75; Rivière, Les communautés de religieuses de l’ancien Châlons, 54; an g9 141–5. 73 ad Val d’Oise, d 1791; Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:549–50. 74 Intendant Depassier, quoted in Devos, L’origine sociale des Visitandines d’Annecy, 271. 75 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 66. 76 ad Vaucluse, série h, Avignon les Royales, Livre des vêtures et professions. 77 ad Vaucluse, série h, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 184–5. The case was made public when she appealed for an annulment of her vows, after her family was safely dead. 78 Dinet, Vocation et fidelité, 73. 79 ba 4991–8 (Pont Audemer, 9/1/1693). 80 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692). 81 Quoted in Viguerie, “La vocation religieuse et sacerdotale,” 27. 82 Quoted in full in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 93–4. 83 Sommation aux Ursulines, le 3 février 1648, quoted in Notter, “Les contrats de dots,” 249. 84 This rigorous seniority is a boon to the researcher, because it enables her to follow individuals throughout their religious life and also to take note of their disappearance.

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326 Notes to pages 182–5 chapter eleven 1 From John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, part 2. 2 And often came home loaded with donations of money and food, having spent none of the money she had taken with her (ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez). 3 bs 769 (Apt, 4/10/1668). 4 ad Saône-et-Loire, h 1740, La relation des choses qui sont passez. Nevertheless Soeur Madelaine received a severe reprimand from the bishop when she exceeded her station and meddled in things that concerned the community (ibid.). 5 “The dowry of each of the sisters will be such that, out of the revenue that it provides, they can be fed and maintained; and as well provide something to the needs of the House … as also for the food and maintenance of the sisters of the white veil who bring no dowry, or at any rate, so little that it is not sufficient for their upkeep” (bm Troyes, 2577, Reglements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, 43). 6 ad Vaucluse, h 1, Règles manuscrits de la présentation Notre-Dame (1623), 63. 7 Constitutions de Nancy, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 103. 8 bm Troyes, ms. 2577, Règlements des religieuses de Ste Ursule, no. 93. 9 Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France, 138. 10 I may be criticized for ignoring the male officers of the house: the director, the visitor, and the confessor. I defend myself by quoting Marie-Andrée Jégou, herself an Ursuline: “If the director and the visitor bound the convent to the Church, it was above all by the superior that the monastery was governed” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 115). 11 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15. 12 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. This was not the general practice. Other congregations allowed and sometimes encouraged their lay sisters to read. 13 This arrangement is suggested in the death notice of Gabrielle de SaintPierre, a choir nun of noble birth, who was remembered for “not taking the seat due to her rank of seniority, but standing behind the others or among our lay sisters, spinning coarse hemp, or mending the clothes of our poor externes” (ba 4993–166 [Fougères, 3/2/1693]). 14 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse. 15 Quoted in Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs, 175. 16 See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, and Gutton, Domestiques et serviteurs. 17 In his first visit to the Ursuline convent of his town, in 1628, Bishop de Rueil of Angers noted as a “fault against the Rule” the fact that the lay

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327 Notes to pages 185–9

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29

30

sisters “were given scant consideration by the religious of the choir.” This came after he had interviewed each of the sisters in private (Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 67–71). A similar reproach came down to the Ursulines of Tarbes from their bishop in 1697. He ordered them “to treat the lay sisters with love and charity … not giving them jobs that are useless and beyond their strength, and avoiding speaking to them injuriously and scornfully” (Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses, 223). Mark 10:31. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 119. For example, the veneration after her death of Marie Le Grand (see below); and that of Marie Houre (1693): “There was a danger that all the poor of the city, who revered her as a saint, would break down our grille to have her relics” (ba 4991–77, Montargis). Luke 1:51–2 (The Magnificat). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 26–61. The following account is drawn from these pages. ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 51. 62.32 years is the average age at death for all 443 lay sisters for whom my records give age of death, compared with 57.98 years, the average age at death for all 3801 choir nuns for whom age of death is given. Women living in the same house and eating the same food had different levels of longevity, depending on their status. This contrast is noted by Jégou, who remarks that in the first fifty years of the grand couvent, 50 out of the 140 professed choir nuns died, while only 4 out of 29 converses died. Jégou goes on to give what is probably the universal reason for this difference: “The moment a converse postulant showed physical weakness, she was sent away; on the other hand, a choir novice in delicate health could go on to profession if she compensated the house [with a large dowry]” (Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 106). ad Nord, 149 h 8, Ursulines de Lille. See Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, tables 6 and 7. Over 90 percent of female servants in these two cities were of rural origin; in both cases, the majority came from districts immediately adjacent. Nicolas de Pesant de Boisguilbert, quoted in Bardet, Rouen aux xvii e et xviii e siècles, 1:261. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 66. The average age at entry of the 719 lay sisters in the sample was 23.74 years. Compare this to the average age of choir nuns entering the same houses during the same period, which was 19.51 years. This was how the converse Jeanne Lanaspeze was described in her death notice (aodn Poitiers, b 3j [Toulouse, 10/4/1768]).

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328 Notes to pages 189–93 31 ba 4993–6 (Magny, 20/8/1694); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639). 32 ba 4990–138 (Crépy, 29/8/1686). 33 Quoted in Richaudeau, Les Ursulines de Blois, 1:320. 34 Similar cases appear, though rarely, in the records. In 1623 Marie L’honoré, the daughter of a nobleman, “embraced the condition [of lay sister] with fervour … to imitate the example of Our Lord, saying that she had come to serve and not to be served” (ba 4990–472 [Quimper, 1680]). In 1785 Marie-Elisabeth Desmares, a choir novice, made over her dowry to a young woman who had none, and took her place as a lay sister. She survived the Revolution and came back to join the community when it was re-established in 1802 (Calendini, Le couvent des Filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 289, 316). 35 ad Eure, ii f 2215, Registre pour le couvent de Saincte Ursule de Gisors. 36 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1639); ibid., fol. 213 (1721); ibid., fol. 109v (1680). 37 ass s 197 (Bordeaux 7/5/1739); ad Eure, h 1593, Congrégation NotreDame de Vernon. 38 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 14/8/1738); ba 4990–194 (Le Havre, 9/12/1685). Marie was credited in her obituary with actually setting up the convent’s pharmacy. 39 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 23/5/1740). A number of other converses are described as shoemakers, though it is unclear whether they brought the skill in with them. 40 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 160. 41 ba 4992–60 (Amiens, 22/1/1684). 42 Marie Vattier, mentioned above, was small and far from robust. However, she lived to be eighty-four, “the most amiable little old lady that one could ever have known,” according to her eulogist (ba 4990–194 [Le Havre, 9/12/1685]). 43 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 89 (1672), fol. 78 (1667). See also Notter, “Les contrats de dot,” 245–6. 44 Loriquet, Mémoires d’Oudart Coquault, 2:514. 45 ba 4993–189 (Gisors, 5/7/1694); bsem 74 (mars 1987): 53–4; ad Loir-etCher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, (1702), fol. 246 (1732). 46 Quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 189. 47 Case cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 460n100. For more on Marie Anne Depeyre, see Reyne and Brehier, Les trente-deux religieuses martyres d’Orange, 308–12. 48 Broutin, Les couvents de Montbrison, 2:131; Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 41n2. 49 Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 15, “Des soeurs converses.”

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329 Notes to pages 193–6 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

57

58 59 60

61 62 63

64

65 66

67

Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 59:1. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 12:1–20. Ibid., 20:11–14. In a large community this was a full-time job. In her monastery, Magdelaine de Durand “was almost constantly busy making the bread for one hundred and twenty people, religious and pensionnaires” (ass s 197 [Toulouse, 25/4/1719]). Michel, “Une version modernisée,” 58–9. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 324. Thus, in the Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, the sister-gardener’s tasks included “planting the edges of the walks with dwarf fruit trees and berries such as currants, raspberries, etc., and also roses, rosemary, and such like … which she will keep well clipped and neat” (3:12). Though no tree-climbing was permitted; “that would be indecent and contrary to modesty” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 64:2). ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 54; Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 15:2. Ibid., 15:2, 17:4, See, on this subject, an account in the annales of Montargis for the year 1701, of a theft of two dozen chemises off a clothesline in the cloister. “We no longer have to fear such an event now that we are hanging the laundry in the attic” (bsem 80 [mars 1989]: 12). ass s 197 (Poitiers, 8/7/1708). bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 174. aodn Poitiers, b 1j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). It should be added that when workmen were brought in, for building or for repairs, the younger choir nuns were recruited to fetch and carry for them. “They are legion, the Ursulines who served as labourers,” comments Madame Gueudré (Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:42). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 112v–113; ba 4993–146 (Magny, 6/2/1685); ba 4990–62 (Saint-Jean-de-Losne, 4/5/1684). Constitutions et règlements des premières Ursulines de Québec, chap. 10. With more or less skill! Georges Minois records a series of letters written in 1771 by a parish priest in Brittany to the nuns who knitted his stockings: “They are horrible, both for the coarseness of the material and for the ridiculousness of the dimensions. Even the pairs don’t resemble each other, and I believe that twenty-two workers have each had a part in making the eleven pairs.” And so on. See Les religieux en Bretagne, 234. See below, chapter 14.

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330 Notes to pages 197–201 68 Some examples of the changing ratio, during the eighteenth century, of choir nuns to converses: Notre-Dame, Bordeaux: 70:2 (1718) – 27:7 (1790); Ursulines, Carcassonne: 41:6 (1727) – 18:6 (1792); Congrégation, Châlons-sur-Marne: 83:10 (1705) – 33:10 (1790); Ursulines, Evreux: 43:10 (1727) – 20:10 (1790); Ursulines, Gournay: 30:7 (1727) – 18:7 (1790); Ursulines, Guincamp: 59:14 (1729) – 21:13 (1790); Congrégation, Nemours: 55:6 (1718) – 16:6 (1790); Ursulines, Toulouse: 41:12 (1729) – 34:11 (1790); Ursulines, Châtillon: 56:8 (1730) – 21:6 (1790). 69 The superior of Saint-Denis to cardinal de Rohan, quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:118. The gist of her letter was that the secular congregations should be suppressed. chapter twelve 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

16

Fénelon, quoted in Groethuysen, The Bourgeois, 61. “Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi.” Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death, 34. Fourier, Correspondance, 3:286. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, 1657. Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158. Loupès, “La bonne mort en religion,” 8. ba 4991–75 (Mâcon, 2/3/1694). ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ba 4993–112 (Magny, 13/4/1687). ass s 197 (Périgueux, 20/7/1735); bs 769–140 (Montluçon, 16/3/1666); bs 769–98 (St-Malo, 4/11/1689); ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). ass s 197 (Riom, 30/7/1740); ba 4990–115 (Dijon, 24/6/1684); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1684); bs 769 (Montbard, 22/11/1676). Oury, Marie Guyart, 328. She would not have been impressed by the fact that the Church would one day beatify her. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, especially chap. 14, “A Lynx-eyed God.” ba 4991–21 (Aiguepercé, 14/1/1694); ba 4991–233 (Angers, 1/9/ 1692); ba 4991–186 (Dieppe, 9/9/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 153; aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Toulouse, 24/2/1772). “May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last” ( John Henry Newman, sermon, 1834).

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331 Notes to pages 201–4 17 The few exceptions were either women who died while away from the convent or Jansenists. It so happens that all the death notices I have seen were circulated among orthodox communities. For them, the moral would be clear: abandonment could be physical or it could be spiritual; either way, it merited the wrath of God. 18 ass s 197 (Narbonne, 28/3/1725). 19 Baudet-Drillat, “Regard à l’intérieur,” 227. 20 Quoted in Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 212. 21 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/1/1764); aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Narbonne, 8/4/1730). 22 Jadart, Mémoires de Jean Maillefer, 175. 23 bs 769 (Uzès, 3/2/1722). 24 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 15/4/1733); ass s 197 (Toulouse, 8/6/1738); ba 4992–54 (Montdidier, 22/9/1691). 25 ass s 197 (Saint-Léonard, 13/3/1736). See also ba 4990–94 (Vannes, 15/6/1675): “We beg you to excuse us if Reverend Mother Superior does not herself perform the duty of notifying you of the death of our dear late Mother, but proximity of blood (since she was her sister) obliges us to dispense her from renewing her grief in talking about the subject that has caused it.” 26 ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693). 27 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 5/3/1723). 28 ass s 197 (Poitiers, 12/11/1704, Salers, 12/4/1735). 29 aodn La Flèche, b 1j (Perpignan, 22/2/1730). 30 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 23/4/1713). 31 ass s 197 (Narbonne). 32 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 33 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 110. 34 Noye, “Paule de Fénelon,” 218. 35 ad Isère, 22 h 171; ass s 197 (Salers 1/4/1722); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). 36 bm Bordeaux, h 16525, Regles des vierges religieuses de S. Ursule, 72. It is to this pious practice that we owe the necrologies and their fund of inside information on the sisters’ lives. 37 bs 769, notice inside the front cover. See also Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 7:8. 38 ba 4990–155 (Dijon, 14/9/1685); ba 4991–99 (Nevers, 27/4/1694). 39 Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours 14, “Comment les malades se doivent comporter”; ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, fol. 36. 40 Thus, “When they have the infirmity that is ordinary to their sex, they will warn the Mother Superior … who will dispense them for three days from

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332 Notes to pages 204–8

41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55 56

57 58

59 60

performing their mental prayer and assisting at choir … They will perform no austerities … and will get up only at five hours and a half or thereabouts” (Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:16). ad Seine-Maritime, d 427, Règles et statuts des filles de Notre Dame ordre de St Augustin, chap. 8. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 54. For example, Catherine Gignon, who was sent to Paris to receive treatment for “a malignant tumour in her mouth,” and Soeur Tessier, who went to Marmoutier to see an occulist (Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 266, 288); and Jeanne Sallonnier, who was sent to Paris to be treated for cancer of the breast (ba 4991–99). ass s 197 (Le Puy, 11/11/1737). ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 147; ba 4991–66 (Montluçon, 3/3/1694); ba 4991–205 (Moulins, 29/10/ 1692); Annales des Ursulines de Blois; ass s 197 (Agen, 23/5/1721); ba 4991–79 (Meaux, 6/3/1692); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693). ba 4990–185 (Saulieu, 20/11/1687). ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/11/1714); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Le Puy, 16/2/1733). aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 14/3/1761); ba 4990–129 (Lamballe, 10/1/1686); ba 4991–156 (Moulins, 11/7/1691). ba 4992–45 (Épernay, 6/5/1691). ba 4992–6 (Magny, 8/4/1691); ba 4991–227 (Rouen, 23/11/1692). One such infirmary, costing 46,000 livres, was built in Rouen just before the Revolution. Its historian sees it as the product of an eighteenth-century vogue among convents, especially those that received pensionnaires (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 244–5). Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53:4; ad HauteGaronne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 37. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de la ville et diocèse de Tours, 53. ass s 197 (Sarlat, 13/2/1733); ba 4991–77 (Montargis, 20/3/1693); bs 769 (Chinon, 16/5/1664); ba 4991–130 (Mante, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Périgueux, 1734); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 21/11/1759). ba 4992–126 (Amiens, 19/7/1689). The alternative was to buy the medications, and this could mount up. In 1766 the convent of Eymoutiers claimed that its average annual expenditure on “apothecary, drugs, and other things necessary for the sick” was 300 livres, while the doctor’s honorarium was 36 livres (ad HauteVienne, g 723). ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 158–9.

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333 Notes to pages 208–11 61 ba 4992–146 (Arnay, 23/6/1691); ass s 197 (Aurillac, 22/5/1711). 62 ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/5/1691). 63 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 6/12/1713); “Abrégé de la vie de la mère Jeanne des Anges,” in Surin, Histoire abrégée de la possession des Ursulines de Loudun, 1:93. 64 Botallo, physician to Charles IX and Henry III, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 63. 65 Ibid. The author goes on to quote an eighteenth-century authority: “We see with distress that some people are bled eighteen, twenty, twenty-four times in two days … If the patient recovers, we must thank the resources of Nature for not succumbing to so many murderous blows.” 66 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 213. 67 Journal de Trévoux, 2185. 68 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Riom, 13/11/1723). 69 Le medecin des pauvres (Paris 1672), quoted in Andrew Wear, “Popularized Ideas of Health and Illness in Seventeenth-Century France,” SeventeenthCentury French Studies 8 (1986): 240. 70 Lebrun tells us that Louis XIV was purged more than 2000 times in fifty years (Médecins, saints et sorciers, 67). 71 ba 4991–37 (Magny, 18/1/1693). 72 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 30/11/1722). 73 ad Yonne, g 192, relation of Antoinette de Sigy. 74 Markham, The English Housewife (1615), chap. 1, no. 99; Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 74. 75 ass s 197 (Riom, 13/11/1723; La Ferté Bernard, 30/6/1727; Bordeaux, 25/2/1730; Saintes, 29/2/1736). 76 Most houses kept their doctors on salary, which makes it difficult to know how often they were called in. But we know that Claude Hauterre, physician to the Congrégation of Vernon, paid eighty-nine visits to the community in four years, at a time when there would have been some thirty nuns and possibly as many pensionnaires in the house (ad Eure, h 1591). 77 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 16/5/1785). This “cure through use of electricity” should not be taken to mean electroshock therapy, a development of much more recent times. The use of electricity in the treatment of the sick was in its experimental stage in the late eighteenth century. 78 ass s 197 (Limoges, 13/6/1714, Pau, 28/8/1740); ba 4993–97 (SaintGermain, 21/4/1689). 79 “Les annales des Ursulines d’Eymoutiers,” in Lecler, Chroniques ecclésiastiques, 209. 80 ad Ande, h 439, Annales du couvent des Ursulines fondé à Carcassonne, 3–5. In 1652 they were forced to flee again (13). 81 Boccaccio, The Decameron, 9.

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334 Notes to pages 212–15 82 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 11–12. 83 ba 4991–273 (Amiens, 18/12/1692). 84 Only the plague of 1720 remained, and this was confined to Provence. Sarre concludes from the records that for the Ursulines the incidence of death from that plague was “astonishingly small”: two deaths for a total population of 1100 nuns (Vivre sa soumission, 383). 85 ba 4991–127 (Andelys, 29/5/1694); ass s 197 (Pau, 18/12/1735, Périgueux, 12/9/1710, Pau, 28/8/1740). 86 Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History, 33. 87 La Condamine, quoted in Lebrun, Médecins, saints et sorciers, 170. 88 ba 4993–97 (St-Germain, 21/4/1689). See, also ass s 197 (Limoges, 28/1/1706): “Since the poison could not come out, she expired.” 89 Peter, “Malades et maladies à la fin du xviii e siècle,” 157. 90 bs 769–2 (Erfort, 4/7/1671); ba 4990–155 (Dijon 14/9/1685). 91 ba 4991–225 (Meaux, 16/11/1691). 92 Thus Jeanne Bourelier’s “inner distress … made her so thin that nothing remained to her but skin and bone, and so disgusted by food that one could say she ate only a sixth part of what was needed to sustain her” (bs 769 [Montbard, 15/11/1677]). One wonders if there is a case here for the “Holy Anorexia” of which Rudolph Bell writes so persuasively. 93 King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 123. 94 Jarcho, “A History of Semitertian Fever,” 414; Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 279; King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 134. 95 “L’Hémoptysie,” in Journal de Trévoux, 2190–1. 96 ba 4991–109 (Montluçon, 29/4/1690); ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 29 (Ursulines de Toulouse), no. 201 (1674); ba 4992–106 (Moulins, 11/12/1688); ba 4993–8 (Meaux, 15/11/1694); ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 12/4/1711). 97 bs 769 (Sémur, 23/12/1688). 98 Quoted in Lévy-Valensi, La médecine et les médecins français. 99 Journal de Trévoux, 2189. 100 ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 25/2/1730). 101 ba 4990–110 (Noyon, 13/11/1687). See also ba 4991–283 (Seurre, 12/12/1692); ba 4992–29 (Toulon, 25/2/1692). 102 ba 4992–58 (Mante, 14/5/1691). 103 ass s 197 (Aurillac, 1723). 104 “Though the rage [hydrophobia] and plague kill more quickly, they do not seem as cruel as cancer, which leads surely but slowly to the grave, causing its victim agonies which daily make him long for death” (Dionis, Cours de chirugerie [1697], quoted in Darmon, “Être cancereux et mourir,” 296). 105 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 31/1/1784). 106 ass s 197 (Perpignan, 15/2/1743; Béziers, 22/2/1728).

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335 Notes to pages 215–19 107 Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort, 288–9. 108 bs 769–4 (Paris, 21/9/1688); ass s 197 (Perpignan, 10/2/1730); aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Pau, 15/12/1761). 109 bs 769 (Dignans, 6/5/1678); ba 4993–180 (Carcassonne, 26/10/ 1694). 110 aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Aurillac, 3/4/1754). 111 I am joining with Georges Minois here, in taking note of “the morbid preoccupation” with death exhibited in the necrologies (Les religieux en Bretagne, 158). But unlike him, I find this preoccupation unsurprising, given the fact that the notices were written immediately after decease, when the authors were still deeply affected by the event. We experience the same reaction today. 112 ass s 197 (Toulouse, 17/9/1725; Toulouse, 29/7/1728); ba 4991–129 (Fougères, 15/5/1691); ass s 197 (Poitiers, 22/4/1742); ba 4993–68 (Tonnerre, 8/5/1685). 113 Caterre, or cathare, is usually understood to be “what we would call bronchitis” (King, The Medical World of the Eighteenth Century, 1:24), and it is sometimes used in the necrologies in that sense. But more often it appears as a synonym for stroke, viz. “an attack of paralysis, or a cathare on all of one side.” 114 ba 4993–179 (Rennes, 28/8/1691); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/11/1684); ba 4991–162 (Montferrand, 19/8/1693); ad HauteGaronne, h 221–9, Ursulines of Toulouse. 115 ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733); ba 4990–114 (Avallon, 18/7/1686); ba 4991–11 (Nevers, 10/1/1694). 116 ba 4990–213 (Quimper, 1647); ba 4990–165 (Rennes, 22/9/1694). 117 ba 4992–173 (Paris, 31/7/1692); ass s 197 (Limoges, 22/1/1742). 118 See appendix, tables 9, 10, and 11. chapter thirteen 1 Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, 286. 2 Even the historians of the teaching orders are thwarted by the dearth of evidence. Thus Françoise Soury-Lavergne, late archivist and historian of the Compagnie de Marie Notre-Dame, speaks of the eighteenth century as a period “still poorly known in the history of our company” (Chemin d’éducation, 290). 3 Martine Sonnet makes the point that literacy rose in direct relation to the number of schools available. In Paris, the percentage of working women who could sign their names rose from 34 percent in the seventeenth century to 62 percent in the eighteenth. See her book L’éducation des filles, 84. 4 Compère, Du collège au lycée (1500–1850), 103. Her reference is to male education, but it applies equally to female.

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336 Notes to pages 220–2 5 The lack of much significant evidence, despite his intensive searching, has led Sarre to the conclusion that for the Ursulines of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, free schooling became a matter of minor importance: “The education of externes, the original aim of the Institute, was not constantly, everywhere assured” (Vivre sa soumission, 314). 6 A study of teaching monasteries in Forez remarks on the fact that in all the documents regarding entries, professions, and so on, there is not one mention of a schoolmistress. See Gaussin and Vallet, “L’instruction secondaire des filles en Forez,” 464. 7 “Institut,” in Trésor de la langue française. 8 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, preface. The Congrégation, together with the Ursulines and the Filles de Notre-Dame, all used the word institut to describe their teaching apostolate. 9 “Extrait de quelques articles du règlement provisionnel [1598],” in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 401–3. 10 La manière de procéder à la réception et profession des religeuses de Sainte-Ursule, 45. 11 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, no. 44, Conclusion. 12 ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon: “Des Classes.” This rule was not often invoked, but it was never completely set aside. At the age of sixty, the distinguished Ursuline of Faubourg Saint-Jacques, Marie de Pommereu, was put back into the senior externe class. The assignment was hard to accept; but, as she wrote, “It fits in with my path and my plan of humiliation” (quoted in Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 47). 13 See above, chapters 1 and 2, and Rapley, The Dévotes, 114–15. 14 This is a resumé of the contract between the city of Tonnerre and the Ursulines (1628), cited in Hardy, “Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 8–9. Many similar contracts survive. 15 an g9 128, Congrégation de Châteauroux, 1723. Many comparable statements exist. To give some examples: “In conformity with the contract passed with the town … they have given all the instructions necessary for young people, without retribution” (an g9 164–19, Ursulines de SaintPierre le Moûtier, 1742); “They have always complied with their duty for the instruction of young girls; they do this gratis” (an g9 119–14, Ursulines d’Angoulême, 1763); “The religious were instituted with a view to the public good of the city, that is the free instruction and teaching of poor girls” (ad Haute-Loire, série L, Ursulines de Montbrison, 1790). Françoise Soury-Lavergne has collected testimonials of this type for almost every convent in the Compagnie de Filles de Notre-Dame (Chemin d’éducation, 316–17). 16 Annaert (Les collèges au féminin, 173) gives the higher number, which he argues was common across the north and in the Low Countries. The lower number comes from Saint-Bonnet-le-Château in Forez (Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:176). It is probably typical of school populations in

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337 Notes to pages 222–4

17

18

19

20

21 22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32

other small towns such as Gisors, which declared about the same number who were “instructed and taught to read for nothing” in 1767 (an g9 134). “Culling” may be too controlled a word to describe the process. In some places, bags of ecclesiastical or feudal records were used to light revolutionary feux de joie (Saint–Genlis, Inventaire des archives municipales de Châtellerault, introduction). A.-L. Gazier makes the same observation about the hospitalières of the rue Mouffetard in Paris; he points out that in a correspondence lasting for thirty-five years and filling four large volumes, “never … is there any question of the hospital and the patients” (Suite à l’histoire de Port-Royal, ix, 165–6). See, for instance, am Lyon, gg xix, 371, Request from the Ursulines for assistance (1659): “For the last fifty years they have always taught the girls of the city to pray, sew, read and write, and without any recompense; and they have done this in a low room … in eminent peril of total collapse.” The city council, “being duly informed of the usefulness and benefit which comes to the public of this city through the instruction of girls which the religious undertake at no charge,” awarded them 1200 livres. ad Meurthe-et-Moselle, h 2560, quoted in Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 54; ad Ille-et-Vilaine, 2 h 3 90, quoted in Pocquet du HautJussé, La vie temporelle, 124. ad Indre-et-Loire, h 837, Ursulines de Chinon. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:176–7. The nourishment of needy students was a serious commitment for teaching monasteries. See “Direction des classes externes,” quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 198. Also see the accounts of the Ursulines of Épernay, which record in 1735 “each week, from November 1 until Easter, twelve pounds of bread” for their poor children (ad Marne, 84 h2). Entries like this are found in other monastic records. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:3. Prévost, “Les Ursulines d’Avallon,” 56; Petit, “Les Ursulines de SaintDizier,” 61; Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 264. This last house, the nuns claimed in a statement in 1760, represented a lost rental of 300 livres. ad Val d’Oise, d 1790. Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 297. an g9 167–10, Religieuses de Toulouse, 1729. Aubry, “Le monastère nancéien,” 55–6. an g9 154–16. ad Vaucluse, 1g 26. The record adds that “he has been edified by the manner in which they observe this important point of their institut.” He later moved them into a new building. an g9 156–17.

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338 Notes to pages 225–6 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47

Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:45. bm Provins, 211, item 13. See also Petit, “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier,” 61. an g9 121–8, Ursulines d’Auxerre, 1766. Filles de Notre-Dame, Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. ad Vaucluse, h, Bénédictines Notre-Dame d’Avignon. That in some parts of the country the classrooms could become very uncomfortable may be gauged from the fact that “in the worst cold” a stove might be provided in the anteroom “so that the regents can warm themselves after they leave the College” (Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 60:7). Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:155–6. Thus the Ursulines of Épernay were able to buy brooms, pens, ink and paper, sewing materials, and sweets and prizes for the children, all out of a legacy from a priest (ad Marne, 84 h2); the Ursulines of Faubourg SaintJacques in Paris benefited from a fund set up by one of their nuns to provide heating for the free classrooms (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 143). Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 74. She makes the point however, that the monasteries’ day schools were generally better off than other free schools. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. For more on the content of the pedagogy, see Rapley, “Fénelon Revisited,” 310–17. Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux (Mons), quoted in Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 165. Statuts des religieuses Ursulines de Tours, 55:3. Neither she nor the regents were to administer physical punishments themselves; this task fell to a lay sister “with her face veiled,” in a private place (Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 3:54). Prizes, on the other hand, seem to have been given out fairly lavishly, if we can judge by their place in surviving day school accounts. Quoted in Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 375. Re the “turning down” of skirts and sleeves, during working hours the sisters doubled up their outer skirts, securing them at the back with a pin. Their shorter, less voluminous underskirts allowed them more freedom of action. For the same reason they folded back their long outer sleeves. The full regalia of overskirts to the floor and sleeves that covered the knuckles was reserved for formal occasions. ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). This is how Anne de Pileadvoyne de Coudraye is described. The notice adds: “She was still mistress general of externes and was preparing to teach the catechism lesson when she fell sick” (ba 4991–125 [Andelys, 12/5/1694]). The existence of these specialists is frequently noted in the records, e.g., Marie de La Barre, Ursuline of Paris, who acted as “assistant to the mistresses in the Externe school, so as to help them wherever she could; and

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339 Notes to pages 226–9

48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63

she taught these little girls their reading and arithmetic“(Journal des illustres religieuses, quoted in Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 146). ba 4991–263 (Caen, 23/12/1693); bs 769 (Dijon, 30/11/1682); ba 4991–3 (Gournay, 1/1/1693); ba 4991–152 (Mâcon, 10/6/1693); ba 4992–152 (Magny, 4/4/1691); ba 4990–177 (Magny, 4/11/1681); ass s 197 (Béziers, 10/6/1707). In 1729 seven nuns out of a community of forty-one were “constantly occupied” in the Ursulines’ free school in Toulouse (an g9 167–10); in 1757, of the thirty professed choir nuns at the Ursuline monastery of Gournay, only four were assigned to the day school (ad Seine-Maritime, d 392). These ratios are fairly typical. The Ursuline community of Quimper numbered twenty-seven in 1790; of these, only four were offically “aux externes”; but the mistress of novices, the cellarer, and two novices were also working in the day school, thus doubling its staff (an dxix/15). Lefebvre, “Gisors: Les écoles avant la Révolution,” 10:27; ass s 197 (Avignon, 24/10/1734); ba 4993–66 (Laval, 26/9/1686). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre-Dame (1690),” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. Morey, La vénérable Anne de Xainctonge, 2:71. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 144. Statuts des religieuses ursulines de Tours, 55:9. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 180. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 247. Thus the nuns of the Congrégation in Bourges complained in 1667 that “because the city is large the classes are always full, so that they cannot even receive the smallest children who present themselves, for lack of space” (ad Cher, 48 10). On the other hand, the Ursuline monastery in Montbard, with its fifty nuns, had only the girls of a town of some 1300 inhabitants to teach (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 51). Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 8. Lebrun, La vie conjugale sous l’Ancien Régime, 138; Babeau, Les artisans et les domestiques d’autrefois, 158. The Ursulines of Avallon, in a deposition in 1747, claimed to be teaching 100 externes, including bourgeois children not yet old enough for the pensionnat (an g9 121–12). Many nuns whose names appear in the monastic records began their own schooling this way, e.g., ba 4991–47, 4991–61, 4991–66, 4991–97, 4991–263, 4993–83; ass s 197, Alençon (23/2/1741), Perpignan (21/8/1737). “Usages des religieuses de la Congrégation de Notre Dame de Châlons,” quoted in Derréal, Un missionaire de la Contre-Réforme, 310n120. an dxix/6, Religieuses de Notre-Dame du Puy.

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340 Notes to pages 229–31 64 “Règlement pour les religieuses de Saincte Ursule du diocèse de Langres,” quoted in Prunel, Sébastien Zamet, 457. 65 Règles, quoted in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. 66 ad Vaucluse, h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Présentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 67 “Among the Ursulines, at least in the externat, rich and poor sat side by side without any question of any kind of segregation” (Annaert, Les collèges au féminin, 136). 68 Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 196–7. 69 ad Vaucluse h, Ursulines d’Avignon de Notre-Dame de la Presentation, Reigles et constitutions, 67–8. 70 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, part 2, 3:166. 71 Filles de Notre-Dame, “Règles et constitutions (1638),” quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 206. 72 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitutions et règlements pour les religieuses de Sainte-Ursule de Troyes. 73 In Grenoble the decision to erect a paying externat was made, not without some soul-searching, in 1660 (Gueudré, Au coeur des spiritualités, 262). 74 an g9 163–6 (1763). “School” is here used in the old sense of classroom. 75 Martine Sonnet gives a detailed list of all these different schools as they existed in Paris in the late eighteenth century. By her calculation, there were 11,000 places available for a total feminine school-age population of 49,000 to 66,000 (L’éducation des filles, 292, 82). 76 an g9 83 (1763). 77 an g9 160–10, Protest of the mayor and consuls of Saugues against the suppression of the Ursuline monastery of that town (1762); an g9 134–15, Protest of the notables of Gisors against the suppression of their Ursuline house (1768); ad Haute-Vienne, g 727, “État des religieuses du diocèse de Limoges” (1750). 78 In Noyon, for instance, towards the end of the Old Regime, the Ursulines’ day school of almost 200 students was divided simply into one senior and one junior class (an g9 149–23). In 1734 the Ursulines of Saumur claimed in a deposition that “they instruct free of charge [my emphasis] all girls poor and rich” (an g9 119–10). 79 ba 4993–14. I am reminded here of a book to which I contributed, A Century of Schools, which honoured the memory of a woman who had for many years been the first-grade teacher in the village of Wakefield, Quebec. The same thing was said of her. 80 For example, Marguerite du Bocs Dangiens, a member of “one of the most noble families of Basse-Normandie,” who was “instructed in the day school of our reverend mothers the Ursulines of Rouen,” and Anne d’Arripe, “of a very good family” of Pau, who passed from the day school into the board-

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341 Notes to pages 231–5

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96

97 98 99

ing school and then into the novitiate (ba 4991–97 [Gisors, 8/4/1694]; ass s 197 [Pau, 12/7/1737]). Petition of the town council of Hédé in favour of the Ursulines (1768), quoted in Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 148. Fleury, preface to Grand catechisme historique, quoted in Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, 9:324. “Règlements de la communauté des filles de Ste-Anne,” quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 229. Guerin, L’eloge des religieuses de Saincte Ursule, 31. La Salle, Règles chrestiennes, chap. 7, “Du nez”; chap. 10, “Du baillir, du cracher et du tousser.” aodn Poitiers, b 3j (Saint-Flour, 10/11/1791); Reglemens des Ursulines de Paris, 186. This story is recounted by Rondeau, who claims that it was first recorded by contemporary chroniclers. See Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 182–3. Leymont, Madame de Sainte-Beuve, 273. Quoted in Loridan, Les Ursulines de Valenciennes, 46. Règles (1623), cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 200. bsem 74 (mars 1987): 62. ba 4991–181 (Saint-Denis, 25/9/1691). bsem 79 (oct. 1988): 52; ass s 197 (La Flèche, 8/1/1733). ba 4992–160 (Abbeville, 28/5/1691). ba 4992–175 (Montferrand, 4/1/1692). For some reason, the eulogist tells us, she never saw the child again. Were the parents offended? But the practice of licking the matter from a child’s eyes was common, though it was usually done by servants. ba 4993–166 (Fougères, 3/2/1693); ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois (1/11/1715); ba 4992–182 (Andelys, 30/9/1694); ba 4991–19 (Elbeuf, 30/1/1694). bs 769 (Semur, 19/12/1675); ba 4990–80 (Périgueux, 21/5/1681). Constitutions des Ursulines de Bordeaux, cited in Rondeau, L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers, 202–3. Quéniart, Les hommes, l’Église et Dieu, 317. chapter fourteen

1 ad Haute-Garonne, 221 h 28, Constitutions des religieuses de Ste Ursule de Toulouse, 4:1. 2 Quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 241. 3 Brockliss, French Higher Education, 82–3. 4 Quoted in Cristiani, La merveilleuse histoire, 104. 5 Snyders, La pédagogie en France, 39.

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342 Notes to pages 235–40 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 19. Conference of 1702, quoted in ibid., 30. ad Seine-Maritime, d 371. Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 71. Règlements, quoted in Foix, L’ancien couvent des Ursulines de Dax, 6. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:40. According to Sarre, the pensionnats of the Ursulines of Provence held, on average, about a dozen girls each; often the numbers fell to three or four (Vivre sa soumission, 305). Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:268. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:101. Madame de Maintenon herself, who often helped in the morning combout at Saint-Cyr, frequently encountered them there (Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 102). aodn, Code d’Alençon, quoted in Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 238. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 11:5. Ibid., 3:7. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, part 1. La civilité nouvelle contenant la vraie et parfaite instruction de la jeunesse (1671), quoted in ibid., 18. bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 3:332. “The monarch took no baths, save (rarely) for medicinal reasons” (Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, 61). See Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 437, for negative comments collected in 1734. Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness, 96. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:6. bn 16, Ld. 172, 49, Constitutions des Ursulines de Tulle, vi. “Checkers, chess, billiards and other like games where the mind and the body are exercised together” (Règles et constitutions 1638, quoted in SouryLavergne, Chemin d’éducation 239. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 91. Quoted in Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 771. Conduite chrétienne ou Formulaire de prières à l’usage des pensionnaires des religieuses ursulines (1734), quoted in Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 167. Soury-Lavergne, Chemin d’éducation, 248–9. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:57. Hachard, De Rouen à la Louisiane, 10. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 3:24,2; 3:23,31. ad Vaucluse, 1 g 26 (Ursulines); Baichère “Procès verbaux et ordonnances des visites episcopales,” 156. ass s 197 (Bordeaux, 29/9/1710).

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343 Notes to pages 240–4 37 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:24. 38 Faguet, Madame de Maintenon institutrice, 117. 39 Loc. cit. However, she hated her subsequent stay in the monastery of Faubourg Saint-Jacques. 40 bm Troyes, 2652, Constitution et règlements pour les religieuses de SainteUrsule de Troyes, 270. 41 Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 1:34–5. 42 Ibid., 8:85. 43 Fénelon, Éducation des filles, 96–7. 44 Quoted in Brockliss, French Higher Education, 186. 45 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:235. 46 Ordinance for the Ursulines of Carcassonne, in Baichère, “Procès verbaux et ordonnances,” 156. 47 Timmermans, L’accès des femmes à la culture, 732. 48 For example, the death notice of Marie Mahi (d. 1688): “She was so well grounded in her religion that she would have amazed people by her power to defend it if her state and sex had permitted her to speak in public” (ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 115v). 49 As happened in Rouen in 1717: “That year, in response to the pressing demands of the families, a dancing master was admitted into the convent.” The archbishop agreed to it, and “the nuns submitted” (Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 197). 50 Fourier, Les vrayes constitutions, 85; Sonnet, L’éducation des filles 111; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 2:9. 51 Thus the account books of the Ursuline monastery of Montbard noted payments for drawing and painting lessons, as well as lessons in harp, harpsichord, guitar, violin, and mandolin (Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 40). 52 Quoted in Calendini, Le couvent des filles de Notre-Dame de La Flèche, 190–1. 53 Quoted in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:249. 54 Ordioni, La résistance gallicane et janséniste, 118. 55 The records kept by the Ursulines of Saint-Avoye in Paris show that between 1763 and 1792, 10.6 percent of pensionnaires came from the titled, military, and land-owning noblesse, and over 50 percent from “officers, financiers, and liberal professions.” Most of the rest came from the merchant classes (Sonnet, L’éducation des filles, 90). Fifteen percent of the house’s pensionnaires during this same period came from the colonies (ibid., 95). 56 Ibid., 198–9. 57 Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 302. Compare this situation to the serious advances made by the Ursulines of the north, catalogued by Philippe Annaert in Les collèges au féminin, passim. 58 This is a point made by Julia (Les trois couleurs du tableau noir) and also by Sonnet, who speaks of “the missed rendezvous between feminine education

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344 Notes to pages 244–50

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

and the Enlightenment [which] is repeated with the Revolution” (L’éducation des filles, 287). Quoted in ibid., 283. Cited in Buisson, Les religieuses ursulines de Montbard, 53. ad Var, 34 h 4, cited in Sarre, Vivre sa soumission, 309. ad Côte d’Or, h 1094, cited in Dinet, Religion et société, 1:59–60. Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:356–60. Both these cases are drawn from Hardy, “Histoire de la Congrégation des Ursulines de Tonnerre,” 26–7. am Châteaudun, gg 51. bm Provins, 115, 565. ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 152–9. ad Yonne, g 192. Mémoires de la mère de Kervénozaël (Quimperlé), cited in Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:151. Letter to the religious of his diocese, quoted in ibid., 2:150. All these examples come from Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 124. For this, the record shows, she rewarded the nuns generously (Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 74). Fourier, Correspondance, 3:73. Ibid., 276. Loc. cit. Ibid., 73–4. Oury, Correspondance de Marie de l’Incarnation, 3:358. Reglemens des religieuses ursulines de Paris, 2:13. The young woman escaped from the parlour some time later, in circumstances that must have seemed as suspicious then as they do now (Jégou, Les Ursulines du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, 151–2). ad Orne, h 4860. bsem 70 (mars 1986): 197. This promise remained unfulfilled ten years later (Notter, “Les ordres religieux féminins blésois,” 1:364–5). Ibid. bsem 66 (mars 1985): 254–5. ad Aube, g 148. bsem 76 (sep. 1987): 187. Reneault, Les Ursulines de Rouen, 151–2. The word is quoted from this text. Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:234–5. ad Haute-Garonne, h 221.29–135. ass s 197 (Saintes, 29/2/1736; Sarlat, 12/7/1736; Agde, 14/3/1743). ad Orne, h 4862.

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345 Notes to pages 250–5 92 am Châtellerault, ms. xxix. 93 ad Vienne, 2 h 77, Filles de Notre-Dame de Poitiers. 94 The Ursulines of Nîmes, quoted in Doumergue, Nos garrigues et les assemblées au désert, 45. 95 an g9 167–9. 96 ad Indre, h 944. 97 A poverty documented in its appeal to the Commission des secours (ad Indre, h 947). 98 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fols. 229, 234. 99 Hachard, De Rouen en Louisiane, 12. 100 ad Loir-et-Cher, 1 mi 43, Annales des Ursulines de Blois, fol. 188. 101 ad Indre, h 944. 102 Buisard, L’ancien monastère des Ursulines de Tours, 30. He notes that two strange nuns were imprisoned in this convent until they accepted the bull Unigenitus. 103 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 1745, 5. 104 See Rapley, “The Shaping of Things to Come.” 105 Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 106 ad Yonne, g 192. 107 ass s 197 (Le Puy, 1729; Toulouse, 1733). 108 ad Seine-et-Marne, h 627; am Châlons-sur-Marne, gg 62; Bonneau, “Les Ursulines d’Auxerre,” 304; ad Val d’Oise, d 1861. 109 Letter of 27 October 1790, cited in Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16. 110 ad Vienne, 2 h 5–77. 111 Roux, Les Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-en-Lyonnais, 67–8. 112 After Parlement ruled in her favour, she left the monastery and married (C. Roux, Ursulines de Périgueux, 2:170–6). 113 Sallé, “Ecclésiastiques et religieuses à Issoudun,” 23. 114 ad Indre, h 905. 115 Ibid. 116 ad Marne, 1 l 1405, 84 h. 117 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 118 ad Cher-et-Loir, 61 h 3; ad cdn h, quoted in Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. 119 ad Indre, h 910. 120 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237; Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La vie temporelle, 111. 121 According to Provost, by the time of the Revolution the convents of Brittany were drawing the bulk of their revenues from their pensionnats (“Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille,” 258). 122 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 237. 123 Gueudré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines, 2:554.

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346 Notes to pages 255–61 124 Lelièvre, Les religieuses de Notre-Dame à Bordeaux, 16; an g9 123; Péchenard, La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims, 1:303. 125 Minois, Les religieux en Bretagne, 188. conclusion 1 2 3 4

am Châtellerault, ms. xxix, Religieuses de Notre-Dame. Loridan, Les bienheureuses Ursulines de Valenciennes, 167. Reynes, Couvents des femmes, 56. According to Langlois, 60 percent of religious women were now over fifty years old, 33 percent over sixty (Le catholicisme au féminin, 90). 5 According to Oury, the period of reconstitution of monasteries lasted from 1806 to 1811. After that, a new phase began, of completely new foundations (“Les restaurations et fondations des monastères d’Ursulines au xix e siècle,” 116). 6 In all, some 130 Ursuline monasteries were established by the late nineteenth century (ibid., 115); the other two congregations also rebuilt themselves successfully. But by now the monastic orders had been largely bypassed by secular congregations working under central direction (Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin, 84). 7 Quoted in Parenty, Histoire de Sainte Angèle, 194. appendix 1 The exact number of women who belonged to the three teaching congregations during the Old Regime has never been accurately computed and never can be. In 1700 there were some 460 houses (62 Congrégation, 51 Notre-Dame, approximately 350 Ursuline), but there had been more previously, and there were fewer in the following years. To our uncertainty about the number of houses is added an uncertainty regarding their populations. These varied enormously. From house to house and from one time to another, they might exceed sixty, or they might number twenty or less. However, surviving monastic registers allow us to gauge the size of communities from the total number of professions they recorded. If around 200 from foundation to suppression, we may posit a medium-sized community of 30 members on average; anything under 150 would suggest a small community averaging 20 or less; anything over 250 would indicate that, at certain periods at least, this was what Dominique Dinet has called a “plethoric” community. Taking the 25 communities for which I have complete lists of professions, I find that the average number of professions per community, from foundation to suppression, is 200. If I multiply this by 460, I reach the number 92,000.

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347 Notes to pages 262–80 2 Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population française, 2:317. The northern region was the domain of nuclear families, the southern, of extended families. See map above, 275. 3 See the notation on the first page of one of the volumes: “Read on October 1777 during the meal” (ba 4990). 4 Aulard, La Révolution française et les congrégations, 161. 5 See E. and R. Rapley, “An Image of Religious Women.” 6 Devos, L’origine sociale, 259. 7 Viguerie, “La vocation,” 30–4. 8 L. Henry and J. Houdaille, “Célibat et âge au mariage aux xviii e et xix e siècles en France,” Population 24 (1979): 60; Hufton, “Women without men,” 357. 9 In Beauvais in the seventeenth century, according to Mousnier, “well-to-do people died between the ages of forty-eight and fifty-five” (Institutions, 1:707). 10 Sabbagh, “La Commission des secours,” 90. 11 Inventory of 1790, quoted in ad Eure, 283.

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Mesguen, E. Trois cent ans d’apostolat (1629–1929): Les Ursulines de Saint-Pol-deLéon. Quimper 1929 Minois, Georges. “L’ordre des Ursulines à Tréguier, Lannion et Guincamp sous l’Ancien Régime.” Bulletin de la Société d’émulation des Côtes-du-Nord 109 (1980): 19–46 Montaut, J.C. Le couvent de Tartas de ses origines à nos jours. Bergerac 1907 Morin de la Baluère, L.-J. “Les Ursulines.” In Études sur les communautés et chapitres de Laval. Laval 1891 Nadal, Chanoine. Essais sur les origines monastiques du diocèse de Valence. Fasc. 1: Les Ursulines de Valence. Valence 1880 Noye, Irenée. “Paule de Fénelon, religieuse à Sarlat (1641–1723).” Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord 100 (1973): 211–19 Oury, G.-M. “La formation donnée par les Ursulines du Mans à la fin de l’Ancien Régime.” La Province du Maine, série 4, 5 (1976): 124–32 Parenty, Abbé. Histoire de Sainte Angèle fondatrice de l’ordre de Sainte-Ursule, suivie de notices historiques et biographiques sur les communautés d’Ursulines du Nord de la France et de la Belgique. Arras 1842 Parmentier, Dr. Les Ursulines de Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. Laval 1927 Péchenard, P.L. La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Reims. 2 vols. Reims 1886 Perouas, Louis. “Les religieuses dans le pays creusois du xviii e au xx e siècle”. Cahiers d’histoire 24 (1979): 17–43 Petit, Abbé. “Les Ursulines de Saint-Dizier, 1646–1792.” Mémoires de la Société des lettres de Saint-Dizier 24 (1938): 51–101 Peyrusqueou, H. Les Ursulines de Saint-Sever. Aire-sur-l’Adour 1905. Prévost, Abbé. Répertoire biographique des religieuses du diocèse de Troyes à la Révolution. Domois-par-Ouges 1933 – “Les Ursulines d’Avallon.” Bulletin de la Société d’études d’Avallon 36:42–88 Provost, G. “Les Ursulines en Léon et Cornouaille aux xvii e et xviii e siècles.” Annales de Bretagne 96 (1989): 247–68 Rapley, Elizabeth. “La Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Provins.” Provins et sa région 148 (1994): 39–52 Ratouis, P. Histoire intime d’un couvent des Ursulines: Les bourniquettes de SaintCharles (1562–1770). Orléans 1892 Reneault, Abbé. Les Ursulines de Rouen (1619–1906). Fécamp 1919 Richaudeau, Abbé. Les Ursulines de Blois. 2 vols. Paris 1859 Rivière, A. Les communautés religieuses de l’ancien Châlons. Châlons 1896 Rondeau, E. L’établissement des Ursulines à Angers au xvii e siècle. Angers 1909 – Histoire du monastère des Ursulines d’Angers 1618–1910. Angers 1911 Roux, C. Les Ursulines de Saint-Symphorien-en-Lyonnais. Lyon 1924 Roux, E. “Les Ursulines de Périgueux.” Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique du Périgord 32 (1905): 67–101, 319–48, 467–86 – Les Ursulines de Périgueux. 2 vols. Périgueux 1905–1915

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Sabarthes, Chanoine. “L’enseignement en pays d’Aude aux xvi e, xvii e, et xviii e siècles: Les Ursulines.” Semaine religieuse du diocèse de Carcassonne, a 100, no. 10: 180–7 Salviani, S. Histoire du couvent des Ursulines de Langon. Langon 1897 Serres, J.-B. Le monastère de Notre-Dame d’Aurillac. Aurillac 1983 Taillard, Mère. La Congrégation Notre-Dame: Son école à Reims depuis 1685. 1985 Tenon, Germaine. “Les congrégations enseignantes de femmes dans le diocèse d’Evreux aux xvii e et xviii e siècles.” Les abbayes de Normandie. 13e Congrés Soc. hist. archéol., Caudebec-en-Caux 1978 (1979) Terre, M. Trois siècles de vie monastique chez les Ursulines d’Avallon. Sens 1950 Tisseur, Clair. Marie-Lucrèce et le grand couvent de La Monnaie. Lyon 1880 Les Ursulines de Nozeray. Lons-le-Saunier 1886 Uzereau, F. “Les religieuses de La Flèche en 1790.” Annales fléchois 2 (1903): 5–8 – “Les Ursulines de Château-Gontier pendant la Révolution.” Revue dans la Maine 6 (1930): 97–114 Valfrid, P. Les Ursulines à Thonon. Thonon-les-Bains 1890

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abbeys, 15, 62, 80, 238, 243, 293n63 Acarie, Barbe, 188, 190 André, Gante (Congrégation), 91 annales, 95, 119, 182, 186–7, 188, 191, 245, 266–7 anticlericalism, 4, 18–19, 21 Ariès, Philippe, 198 Arnauld, Angélique, 18 Arnauld, Antoine, 137 Augustine, Saint, 64–5, 67 Augustinians, 65–7 Augustinus: condemned by Rome, 65 “baptismal innocence,” 137–8 Baudet-Drillat, Geneviève, 199, 201 Belcier, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 208, 317n51 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, 112 Bellegarde, Octave de, archbishop of Sens, 51, 52, 58 Benedict, Saint, 139; Rule of, 118 bereavement, 202 Bérulle, Pierre de, Cardinal, 143 Bible: studied in convents, 91, 95, 168–9 billets de banque, 22–3, 45–7, 120, 123, 170 bishops, 7, 24–5, 31, 32, 33, 35, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 68, 76, 101, 132, 133, 134, 181, 222, 250, 252, 255; appellant, 68, 70; constitutionnaires,

68–9, 75–6; and free schools, 222; Jansenist, 24, 68–9; ordinances of, 35, 115–16; pastoral visits by, 115, 119, 220; powers of, 42, 49–50, 54, 68–9, 75, 122, 177; and regulars, 50–1; relations of with communities, 7, 49, 50–1, 54, 140, 185; responsibility for ensuring clausura, 34, 115–17; and Revolution, 96, 103–4 Bona, Cardinal, 66 Boniface VIII, Pope, 112 Bordeaux (city), 13, 104, 189 Borromeo, Carlo, archbishop of Milan, 56 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, bishop of Meaux, 157, 180 Boufflers, Angélique (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 192 Bourdaloue, Louis, 91 Bourelier, Jeanne (Ursuline) 142–3, 334n92 bourgeoisie: in monasteries, 89, 94 Bourges (archdiocese), 83 Bourges, Jeanne de (Ursuline), 38, 117 Brichanteau, Philibert de, bishop of Laon, 51, 58 “the Bridegroom,” 128, 135, 136, 140, 141, 155–6, 157, 158, 159, 162. See also Jesus Christ

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Brilhac, Thérèse de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121, 312n48 Brittany, 8, 17, 108, 304n19, 345n121 Buvée, Barbe (Ursuline), 132 cahiers de doléances, 26, 80 canon law, 151, 177 Capuchin(s), 18, 65, 97–8. See also regulars Carcassonne (city), 93–4, 211 Carmelites, 15 catechism: in the eighteenth century, 79; Gondrin's, 71–2; Languet's, 71–2, 73 Catholic Church, 14; and the Crown, 24; eighteenth-century, 78–80; nineteenthcentury, 107–8; and the Revolution, 96, 100–1, 103–4; on sin and guilt, 200; and women, 9, 239. See also Catholicism Catholic historiography, 5, 289n6, 303n1 Catholicism: eighteenth-century, 78–80, 83, 90; seventeenth-century, 27, 66, 79, 141–2, 156. See also Catholic Church Catholic Reformation, 24, 27, 65, 66, 79, 255 Caylus, Charles de, bishop of Auxerre, 69, 73, 77 Châlons-sur-Marne (city), 32 Chantal, Jeanne-Françoise de, 161, 163 chapter, 56, 197; powers of, 58, 75, 76, 122–3, 173–4 chastity: feminine, 112, 117; vow of, 13, 135–9, 140, 155, 162, 187 choir nuns, 182, 183, 185, 194–7, 270; decline in numbers of, 196 Cistercians, 18. See also regulars Civic Oath (1790–91), 96, 99, 103–5 Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), 96–7, 99, 103 clausura, 8, 34, 111–18, 127–8, 183–4, 205; bishops the guarantors of, 115–17; and day schools, 113–14, 223–4; exemptions from, 204, 205, 211; legislated by Boniface VIII, 112–13; legislated by Trent, 50, 113; limitations created by, 23, 32–3, 41, 42, 43, 98; women's defence of, 117–18; women's resistance to, 55, 63. See also cloister clergy, 46; constitutional, 96, 106–7; refractory, 96, 104, 105, 106–7; secular, 30, 50, 79; tax exemptions of, 19–20 cloister, 8, 26, 56, 162, 182–3; adult pensionnaires in, 244–56; men allowed

into, 116; pensionnat separated from, 236. See also clausura clothing: admission to, 173–5; age at, 272–4, 277–8; ceremony of, 164, 180; expenses of, 164–5; records of, 263, 271 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 21, 23, 35, 117 college(s), male, 93, 222, 235, 242 commende, 25 Commission des réguliers, 24, 80, 103 Commission des secours, 24, 49, 82, 83, 84, 87, 103, 117; policies of, 42, 83, 85– 7, 277, 278, 297n85 communities, 111; cliques in, 120; democratization of, 89, 94–5, 282; drop of numbers in, 82, 278–83; and Law Crash, 7; morale in, 82, 129, 133–4; mutual isolation of, 126; recruitment to, 262, 277–8; similarities between, 11; and “singular” nuns, 146–7 community, 14, 147, 163, 199; converses in, 182–3; internal organization of, 184, 192–3, 197 Compagnie de Notre-Dame, 6, 15, 120, 174, 250, 253, 270; Rule of, 136, 229 Compère, Marie-Madeleine, 219 Comtat Venaissin, 13 Condorcet, Jacques-Marie de, bishop of Auxerre, 73 Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 6, 91, 93, 174, 177, 199, 211, 227, 242, 246–7; desire of for a generalate, 52 congregations, teaching, 9, 82, 219, 234, 261; and elites, 243; religious instruction the priority of, 239; tributes to, 231, 243–4; views of on childhood, 238–9 constitutional church, 27 consumption of the lungs, 143 “conventual invasion,” 16–18, 27, 28, 33, 276–7 converses, 124, 182–97, 262, 270–1, 273–4, 295n35; average age at entry, 327n29; average age at death, 327n24; duties of, 193–4, 237–8; forbidden to teach, 184, 196; illiteracy among, 190; loyalty of at Revolution, 103; noble, 192, 328n34; rules for, 183–4, 188–9 Coqteaulx, Marie-Jeanne (Congrégation de Notre-Dame), 101 Coquault, Oudart, 31, 192, 315n9

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Cordeliers, 18. See also regulars Counter-Reformation, 5, 14–15, 224; women in, 106–7 Court, 23, 87, 150, 319n6 Cromwell, Oliver, 3 Crown: and coeducation, 14; information gathering by, 221, 261, 269; officials of, 178, 250, 251; policy toward religious houses, 20–1, 85–7; and taxation of the clergy, 19–22 day schools. See externats death, 198–204; attitudes towards, 200–1, 218; records of, 263, 269–71 death notices, 124, 132, 133, 138–9, 143–7, 148–9, 152, 154–5, 156–63, 165–7, 182, 186, 199, 201, 203–4, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 236, 238, 261, 269–70 Devil. See Satan dévotes: eighteenth-century, 82, 107, 162; as seen by revolutionaries, 104 dévots: and education of children, 235; and education of girls, 241–2; eighteenth-century, 90, 107; seventeenth-century, 65 Dinet, Dominique, 84, 103, 169, 175, 277 director (canonical superior), 57, 119, 124 diseases: cancer, 205, 208, 215–16; colera morbus, 205; “colic,” 215; dropsy, 205, 209, 213, 217; epidemic, 208, 210, 212–14; malaria, 212, 214; “miserere,” 215; nephritis, 206, 209; phthisis, 214, 248; plague, 187, 210–12; pleurisy, 209, 214–15; pneumonia, 215, 217; quinsy, 213; scrofula, 208; smallpox, 212–13; typhus, 212 dizainières, 227–8 doctor(s), 116, 204, 206 dowries, religious, 20, 32–8, 84, 87, 89, 90, 125, 196; compared to marriage settlements, 151, 271; unpaid, 88 dowry, 150, 152, 164–5, 170, 175, 182, 183, 190; lack of, 191–2; lowered in times of need, 37, 197; problems over, 169–70, 175, 176; work to earn, 162 drama: in monastic pensionnats, 92, 242–3 Dubé, Dr Paul, 209 Du Terrail, Thérèse (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 174

education. See instruction election of superiors, 50, 58–9, 122; uncanonical, 59, 74, 75, 197 elites: and monasticism, 21; and religion (eighteenth century), 80; and teaching communities, 16–17, 88–9, 94–5, 235–6, 243 Enlightenment, 78–9, 80, 82, 103, 255, 257; and girls' education, 343n58; and monasticism, 24, 26, 28, 115, 304n21; and religion, 78–9 entry: records of, 263, 269 Evenett, H. Outram, 50, 80 externats, 16, 92, 156, 210, 219–33, 259, 280, 281; buildings dedicated to, 222, 224; closed by Revolution, 105; discipline in, 231–2; fees in, 225; furnishings in, 224–5; heating in, 225; “poor class” in, 232; population of, 189, 229–31, 235; in small towns, 230; social divisions in, 229–30; subjects taught in, 227; taxation of, 39; teachers in, 224, 226–7, 232–3 Fairchilds, Cissie, 184, 185, 189 families, 87, 179, 235–6, 258, 261–2; “dévot,” 154–5; educational expectations of, 235–6, 243–4; financial difficulties of, 159, 192; strategies of, 13, 149–54, 239, 262, 272, 274; support of monasteries by, 131, 132, 133, 134, 181 fanatisme, 192, 309n41 Febvre, Lucien, 13 Fénelon, François La Mothe de, bishop of Cambrai, 137, 198, 241 First Communion, 166, 226, 228, 243 Fleuret, Elisabeth (Congrégation), 133, 154–5, 167 Fleury, André Hercule de, Cardinal, 62, 68, 71, 74; opinion of religious women, 69, 100, 140 Fontainebleau, Edict of, 249 Formulary, 75 founders (religious), 4, 246 foundresses (lay), 33; privileges of, 244–5, 246–7. See also patrons foundresses (religious), 234 Fourier, Pierre, 174, 183, 184, 199, 200, 246–7, 255; and the “conventual invasion,” 32; on the education of children, 137; on the Gallican bishops, 57–8

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Fournier, Françoise (Ursuline), 140 Fronde, 37, 51, 187 funerals, 203; demonstrations at, 185–6, 188, 203, 208, 233 Genlis, Madame de, 244 Gondrin, Louis-Henri de, archbishop of Sens, 59–60, 71 Gorsas, Antoine, 104 grace: theology of, 64–5, 66 Gueudré, Marie-Chantal, 90, 255, 299n19, 329n63 Guyart, Marie (Ursuline), 52, 61, 111, 117, 136, 138, 155–6, 161, 162, 168–9, 171, 200, 247 handwork, 131, 133, 168, 196 health: a requirement in novices, 170, 174, 189 Hell: fear of, 142, 145, 146, 156–7, 159, 200–1 heresy, 14 Hufton, Olwen, 107–8, 115 Huguenots, 14, 16, 66. See also Protestants hygiene: in monastic pensionnats, 237–8; in society, 237–8 infirmarians, 213, 216. See also monastery functions infirmaries, 131, 204. See also monastery buildings infirmary, 193, 195, 206–7, 216–17 inheritance: renounced by nuns, 153, 262 inquest of 1790–91, 101–3, 271 institut, 8, 15, 55, 118, 121, 147, 156, 219–20, 226, 231, 258 instruction of girls, 14, 15, 24, 82, 105, 160, 219; as an apostolate, 220; diversification of, 229–30; free, 219–20, 222, 225; importance of, according to the dévots, 235, 241; religious, 239; to preserve innocence, 137 “invalid status,” 151–2, 176–7, 327n24 Jacobin clubs, 99, 105 James, William, 141 Jansen, Cornelius, 65 Jansenism, 65–9, 76, 78; in convents, 24, 49, 56, 69–77, 91, 100; policy of Crown towards, 68, 69, 71, 251–2; policy of Louis XIV, 67–8

“Jansenist crisis,” 7, 10, 48, 49, 63, 65–7, 77, 116, 119, 123 Jégou, Marie-Andrée, 123, 127, 129, 326n10, 327n24 Jesuits, 18, 23, 49, 65–6, 71, 135–6, 180, 162, 234–5, 240; and Augustinus, 65; educational strategies of, 234–5, 238–9, 242– 3; expulsion of, 78, 103; influence of, 168 Jesus Christ, 155–6, 190. See also “the Bridegroom” La Béraudière, François de, bishop of Périgueux, 60–1 Languet de Gergy, Jean-Joseph, archbishop of Sens, 71–5, 77 Laon (city): effects of “conventual invasion” in, 18 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de, 231 Latin, 242 Law, John: economic policy of, 22 Law Crash, 7, 28, 44, 47, 48, 82–3, 84, 85, 134, 170, 224, 252, 280, 281, 283; and the rentier class, 22, 88 lay sisters. See converses Lebrun, François, 107 Lecler, Alix (Congrégation), 91 Le Coigneux, Marie (Ursuline), 180 Le Grand, Marie (Ursuline), 186–8, 190 Lestonnac, Jeanne de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 13, 15, 55, 120, 141 lettres de cachet, 68, 71, 74, 76, 83, 87, 153, 248, 249, 250–2 libraries: in women's monasteries, 94–5 Lille (city), 104; mendicant orders of, 18 Lorraine, 13, 29, 37 Louis XIII, 19, 31 Louis XIV, 150, 235, 237; and Jansenism, 67–8; reign of, 22, 28, 39, 40, 252 Loupès, Philippe, 199 Maillefer, Jean, 114, 201 Maintenon, Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de, 40, 140, 226, 235, 240–1, 342n15 Marie de Medicis, 19, 31 marriage: cloister an alternative to, 150–1, 154, 262, 271; parental planning for, 150, 153–4 Marseille (city): plague in, 159, 211 Martin, Dom Claude, 150, 168 medical procedures: bandaging, 208; bleeding, 207, 208–9, 213; medication,

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204, 208, 209, 209–10; purging, 209; quarantine, 211–12, 212–13 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 26 Minims, 18. See also regulars Minois, Georges, 199, 329n66, 335n111 Mississippi Company, 22, 45 monasteries mentioned in text: – Compagnie de Notre-Dame: Alençon, 46, 59, 170, 248; Annonay, 86–7, 88, 263; Aurillac, 208; Avignon, 224; Bordeaux, 52, 53, 120, 191, 253, 255, 268, 330n68; La Ferté Bernard, 122, 269, 301n69; La Flèche, 93, 267; Le Puy, 165; Limoges, 269; Narbonne, 176, 202; Pau, 176, 340n80; Poitiers, 37, 39, 40, 42, 121, 123, 132, 169, 170, 253, 264, 281–2, 297n92; Richelieu, 166–7; Saint-Léonard, 269; Salers, 203; Sarlat, 51; Toulouse, 31, 174, 191, 202, 265 – Compagnie de Sainte-Ursule: Aiguepercé, 230, 312n42; Aix (first monastery), 32, 45, 52, 55, 62; Aix (Andrettes), 293n7; Amiens, 191; Angers, 35, 92, 229, 232; Angoulême, 59, 336n15; Apt, 183; Arc-en-Barrois, 302n27; Argenteuil, 47, 178, 224, 269; Arnay, 208; Autun, 269; Auxerre, 77, 169, 225, 243, 245, 253, 264, 302n42; Auxonne, 132, 138; Avallon, 85, 224, 339n61; Avignon (Présentation), 55, 179, 229, 264; Beauvais, 41, 76–7, 87, 302n25; Blois, 1, 29, 32, 34, 52, 94, 121, 152, 159, 165, 169, 176, 177, 181, 186–8, 192, 211–12, 245, 248, 251, 252, 266, 293n7; Bordeaux, 51, 59, 135, 234, 268; Boulogne, 269; Bourg, 53; BourgArgental, 101, 102; Bourges, 39, 305n37; Caen, 165; Carcassonne, 42, 59, 93–4, 211, 242, 266, 330n68; Carhaix, 269, 305n39; Carpentras, 100, 132, 192; Châlons-sur-Marne, 253; Château-Gontier, 309n18; Châtillon, 330n68; Chinon, 39, 307n79; Cravant, 294n22, 302n42; Crémieux, 269; Dax, 77; Dieppe, 39–40, 269; Digne, 102; Dijon, 56, 169, 244; Elbeuf, 43, 235; Épernay, 254, 269, 337n23, 338n39; Evreux, 330n68; Eymoutiers, 202, 209, 211, 332n58; Gien, 179, 302n42; Gisors, 264, 279–80, 282, 336n16, 340n77; Gournay, 330n68, 339n49; Grenoble, 48, 269, 340n73; Guincamp,

62, 208, 209–10, 224, 330n68; Hédé, 341n81; Ile-Bouchard, 47, 166; Ile-surSorgues, 13, 257; Issoudun, 252, 305n37; Landerneau, 164; Langres, 57, 169; Lannion, 254; Laval, 267; La Vallette, 301n69; Le Havre, 191; Le Mans, 58, 76, 117, 263, 264; Libourne, 53; Lille, 90, 100, 189, 264, 280–1; Limoges, 175–6, 211, 269; Linières, 305n37; Loches, 88, 123; Lorgues, 92; Loudun, 138, 208; Louisiana, 118, 239–40, 251, 315n13; Louviers, 138; Lyon (first monastery), 183, 269, 306n58, 337n19; Lyon (third monastery), 310n20; Mâcon, 29, 52, 132, 151, 172–3, 174, 183, 230; Magny, 269; Martigues, 307n77; Meaux, 294n22, 253, 269; Melun, 37, 74; Montargis, 41, 52, 149, 150, 194, 203, 245, 248, 249, 267; Montbard, 142, 339n58, 343n49; Montbrison, 46, 88, 322n2, 336n15; Montcenis, 87; Montluçon, 32, 39, 170, 305n37; Montpellier, 87; Moulins, 86–7; Nantes, 59; Nevers, 151; Nîmes, 345n94; Niort, 236, 240–1, 249; Noyers, 302nn37, 41; Noyon, 340n78; Orléans I, 173; Orléans (Bourniquettes), 251, 252, 267, 303n52; Paris (Faubourg Saint-Jacques), 36, 44–6, 170, 183, 194, 234, 246, 247–8, 263, 264, 294n22, 310n11, 313n73, 314n3, 338n39; Paris (Saint-Avoye), 224, 343n55; Périgueux, 36, 60–1, 88, 253, 267; Perpignan, 298n107; Poitiers, 267, 269; Pont Audemer, 224; Pont Croix, 269; Pontoise, 268; Québec, 61, 111, 117, 135; Quimper, 265, 269, 305n39, 339n50; Quimperlé, 48, 245, 269, 305n39; Rennes, 92, 174, 246, 254, 298n99; Romans, 265; Rouen, 39, 51, 56, 92, 123–4, 249, 265, 332n53, 340n80; Saint-Bonnet-le-Château, 336n16; Saint-Brieuc, 52; Saint-Dizier, 42, 43, 224; Saint-Emilion, 152; SaintGengoux, 85–6; Saint-Germain, 165; Saint-Marcellin, 37, 134–5, 203, 265, 282–3, 306n62; Saint-Omer, 164; SaintPierre le Moûtier, 336n15; Saint-Remy, 53–4, 86, 310n20; Saint-Sever, 96–9; Saint-Symphorien, 253, 268; Saugues, 340n77; Saumur, 263, 265, 340n78; Selles, 305n37; Sens, 59, 74–5; Som-

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mières, 89; Tarbes, 326n17; Tonnerre, 38, 245, 294n22; Toulouse, 224, 234, 249–50, 266, 330n68, 339n49; Tours, 52, 136, 166, 168, 247; Tréguier, 36, 170, 254; Troyes, 32, 178, 229, 249; Tulle, 266; Valençay, 250–1, 298n99, 305n37; Valence, 103; Valenciennes, 92, 224, 268; Vendôme, 254, 269; Villefranche, 132, 165, 174 – Congrégation de Notre-Dame: Bernay, 255; Bourges, 41, 305n37, 339n58; Châlonssur-Marne, 32, 101, 330n68; Châteaudun, 30, 245; Châteauroux, 36, 122, 253–4, 263, 264, 298n99, 305n37; Châtellerault, 29, 37, 41, 54, 58, 122, 124, 266, 298n106; Étampes, 74, 302n33; Joigny, 74, 302n35; Laon, 31, 51, 269; Longwy, 103n19; Nancy, 92, 224, 264; Nemours, 34, 60, 73–74, 330n68; Paris, 91, 192; Provins, 41, 59–60, 132, 245, 263, 265, 282, 306n62; Reims, 29, 32, 34, 47, 59, 61–2, 105, 133–4, 249, 252, 255, 265, 295n55; Sainte-Ménehoulde, 254, 269; Saint-Mihiel, 246–7; Saint-Nicolas du Port, 246–7, 265; Troyes, 32, 293n7; Vernon, 191, 333n76; Vézelise, 105, 266 monasteries of women: agents for, 42, 45; building programs of, 33–4, 130–1; decline in numbers in, 84–5, 95; diet in, 131, 193; differences between, 6; difficulties in collecting debts, 44, 88; financial crises in, 44–8, 84, 85, 88, 95, 134; hygiene in, 131; medical care in, 204; morale in, 82, 84, 95, 99–100; property of, 40–1; quality of life in, 278–9; as refuges for the rich, 81; relatives in, 201–2, 236; spiritual decline of, 89–91, 94–5; water piped into, 193, 194 monastery buildings: cemetery, 27, 203; church, 98, 127–8, 131, 198; gardens, 194; grilles, 62, 98, 111, 113, 115–16, 117, 128, 293n4; infirmary, 206–7; kitchen, 195, 196; pensionnat, 236; pharmacy, 194, 195, 196, 207–8, 209–10; sacristy, 98, 195; yard, 193, 194 monastery functions: apothecary, 190–1, 207–8; cellarer, 126, 195; cook, 126; dressmaker, 128; gardener, 126, 195; infirmarian, 126, 191, 196, 207–8;

laundry, 128, 194; linen room, 126; mistress general, 127, 225–6; mistress of novices, 126, 167–8, 170–1, 173; mistress of pensionnaires, 188, 237–8, 240–1; pharmacist, 142; portress, 127, 223; prefect, 127, 224, 225–6; refectorian, 128, 196; regent, 226–7, 315n4; sacristan, 127–8 monastery officers: assistant, 122, 124, 125, 180; bursar, 125–6; confessor(s), 50, 119, 187, 200, 201; director(s), 42, 50, 119, 122; discrètes, 123, 125–6, 167; visitor, 124, 132; zélatrice, 125. See also superior monasticism, 7; aristocratic values of, 89, 94–5, 118; public opinion of, 20–1, 178; and the state of Catholicism, 79 monasticism, female, 14–15; “democratization” of, 89, 94–5, 197, 282; and the elites, 16–17; in historical record, 4–5; public opinion of, 26, 115, 178, 307n79 monasticism, male: decline of, 80–1; in historical record, 5; public opinion of, 18–19, 25 monks, 81; and enclosure, 112; and public opinion, 20–1. See also regulars Montargon, Hyacinthe de, 141 Montesquiou, François-Xavier, 81 mortality: in monasteries, 274–7; in novitiate, 175–6 mortification of the body, 82, 136, 141–7, 158, 159 mortmain, 19, 34 Mousnier, Roland, 148 municipalities: attitude of towards religious orders, 17–19, 222, 223; contracts with teaching congregations, 221 mysticism, 82, 147, 171 Nancy (city), 30 “Nation,” 38, 101; and Church, 96, 103–4 National Assembly, 81, 89, 197, 271; abolition of solemn vows by, 26, 100, 117; Civil Constitution of the Clergy enacted by, 96; Ecclesiastical Committee of, 101, 103; eviction of religious population by, 105–6; freedom of worship declared by, 99; protests by nuns to, 101, 117–18 necrologies. See death notices Noailles, Gaston de, bishop of Châlonssur-Marne, 70

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Noailles, Louis de, archbishop of Paris, 68, 243, 246 nobility, 274; and monasticism, 16, 17, 89, 118, 121, 160 notaries, 60 Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, 75, 77, 243, 252 novices, 164–81, 194, 294n23; clothing of, 173–5; disappearance of in bad times, 170, 195n55; failure rate among, 169–70; “invalid” status,” 151–2, 176–7; reception of, 24, 167; sent away or banned, 75, 83, 85, 87, 101, 278; training of, 168–9; in Mâcon, 172–3 novitiate, 167–9, 170, 175, 181; discipline in, 169, 172; mortality in, 175–6, 214; mortifications in, 172; penances in, 170, 171–2, 187 nuns, 7, 9, 13–14; eighteenth-century, 2, 7, 81–2, 90–1, 133; eviction of, 105–6; “feminism” among, 91; and learning, 242; life expectancy of, 9, 217, 262, 276; medieval, 114, 115, 132, 136–7, 211; nineteenth-century, 4, 7, 108, 258–9, 289n6; and public opinion, 92–4, 115, 117, 127, 307n79; as rentiers, 82; and the Revolution, 97–103, 104–5, 106–7; as seen by historians, 108; as seen by revolutionaries, 104–5, 107–8; seventeenth-century, 15, 255; as “victims,” 26, 117, 311n37 obedience: vow of, 49, 57, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188 Office: in teaching monasteries, 168, 184, 196, 197, 239 Old Regime, 3, 6, 9, 27, 111, 117, 257; economic depression during, 22, 40–1, 257; economic expansion during, 42–3, 257, 282; emphasis of on obedience, 139–40; and female education, 221–2, 233; poverty in, 130; religious culture of, 148–9, 155; women's religious communities during, 8, 114, 134, 219, 257–8, 261–2, 269, 271–2, 279–83 Orange, commission populaire of, 192 Orléans, ducs de, 180, 247 (1644), 248 (1660s), 22 (1720) ouvrages. See handwork papacy, 66; and Gallican church, 67; and regulation of women's monasteries,

54–5, 57, 114; and religious exemptions, 50; and Revolution, 96 papal bulls, 54; Cum occasione (1632), 65; Periculoso (1298), 112–13, 114, 136; Unigenitus (1713), 67, 70, 71, 73 parents: coercion by, 178, 179; complaints from, 194; death of, 149, 165; obedience to, 139–40, 157; strategies of, 149–55; vocations opposed by, 153, 157–8, 169, 272, 291n20 Paris (city), 35, 102, 104, 280, 282; Jansenism in, 66 Pâris, François de, 73 Parlement, 31, 121, 169, 253; appeals to by nuns, 55, 59, 70, 74, 123; gallicanism of, 66, 67; support of episcopal authority, 56; support of nuns' rights, 60, 75–6 patriarchy, 184, 185 patrons: as boarders in monasteries, 244–5; legacies from, 245; privileges of, 203, 246–7. See also foundresses (lay) Paul V, Pope, 244, 248 Paul, Vincent de, 117, 141, 151 Pelagius, 64 pensionnaires, 294n23, 343n55; adult, 62, 123, 244–56; initial limitations on, 113, 116; qualities expected in, 239–40; young, 75, 188, 193, 210, 219, 234–44, 282, 319n10 pensionnat, 167, 229, 234–56, 281; as “antechamber to the novitiate,” 154, 156, 165–6, 239; diet in, 238; financial value of, 89, 196, 236, 254; games allowed in, 238; hygiene in, 237–8; loss of respect for, 26, 92; as prison, 248–52, 256; profane reading forbidden in, 136; separated from cloister, 236; subjects taught in, 92, 239–43; use made of by families, 150–1, 165–6, 235–6 pensions: of novices, 164; private, in monasteries, 133–4 phthisis. See consumption of the lungs plague, 51, 159, 211–12 Pluvinel, Marie de (Ursuline), 203 Pommereu, Marie-Augustine de (Ursuline), 181, 232, 336n12 Port-Royal, 15, 18, 238, 252 postulants, 164–5, 166, 167 poverty, 88, 95, 130, 134, 259; vow of, 130–5, 147, 188 profession(s), religious, 164, 177–81, 220; canon law regarding, 177; conflicts

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over, 58, 176–7; interrogation before, 177, 268; records of, 36, 263, 269; uncanonical, 152, 178–9 property: held personally by nuns, 132; monastic, 130, 221; rural, 40–3, 101, 282, 283; urban, 43 Protestants, 153, 235, 236, 249–50. See also Huguenots Provence, 211, 334n84 public: opinion of regarding nuns, 92–4, 105, 115, 117, 127 purity: temptations against, 120, 138–9, 144 Quéniart, Jean, 107 Quesnel, 67, 69 Ranquet, Catherine (Ursuline), 138–9, 156, 171, 312n54 Razes, Geneviève de (Compagnie de Notre-Dame), 121 Recollets, 18. See also regulars records: diocesan, 268; monastic, 36, 48, 94, 148–9, 152, 164, 176, 182, 195, 242, 261, 263–7, 267–8, 283; notarial, 271 Reformation, Protestant, 64 Regency, 84, 94 “regularity,” 49, 129, 258 regulars, 80–1, 84–5; and bishops, 49–50; competition among, 5, 18–19. See also Capuchins; Cistercians; Cordeliers; Jesuits; Minims; Recollets Reims (city), 31, 105 rentes, 23, 33, 35, 40, 43–4, 101 130, 135, 252, 298n102 rentiers: John Law's plans for, 22, 45; and the Law Crash, 22–3, 88 Revolution of 1789, 7, 8, 95, 258–9, 281; anti-monastic bias of, 26; and the Church, 96, 105, 197; confiscation of monastic archives during, 60; and women, 106–7 Reynes, Geneviève, 103, 258–9 Richaudeau, Chanoine, 94 Richelieu, Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de, 19, 21, 59 Richerism, 72 Rogier, L., 78, 103 Roland, Jeanne-Marie, 91, 192 Rouen (city) 102, 280 Rule, monastic, 7, 15, 49, 80, 94, 111, 121, 122, 126, 128–9, 131, 132, 134–5,

138, 139–40, 167, 168, 170, 174, 177, 181; Benedictine, 118; counterweight to episcopal authority, 55, 59; dispensations from, 152; infractions of, 38, 47–8, 176, 179, 326n17; loyalty to, 6, 7; monthly reading of, 168; protected by the Crown, 76; protests over infractions of, 59–60, 70; sacrosanctity of, 55, 62, 69, 124, 258; Ursuline (Bordeaux), 232; Ursuline (Paris), 166, 225, 229; Ursuline (Québec), 135–6 rules, 9; on education of pensionnaires, 236–43; on infirmaries, 207; moderation counselled by, 82, 141; on preparation for profession, 177; on reception of students, 229; on reception of women at risk, 247–8; school, 222, 228; on sickness, 204, 205–6; similarities between, 8; on teaching, 220, 226 sacraments, 168; anointing of the sick, 198–9; Communion, 91, 199; deprivation of as punishment, 57, 60, 62, 75, 76, 77; penance, 65, 91, 199, 201 Saint-Cyr, 39, 235, 238, 342n15; “demoiselles” of, 40, 160 Sainte-Beuve, Madame de, 246 Sales, François de, 112, 113, 151 sanctity, 112, 188, 203 Sarre, Claude-Alain, 85, 244, 277, 336n5, 342n12 Satan, 156, 161, 198, 235 Saumur (city), 186 Saurine, Jean-Pierre, constitutional bishop of Saint-Sever, 97–9 schoolmistresses, secular, 92–3, 104–5, 230; teaching nuns replaced by, 86 scrupulosity, 141–2, 145–6 Sens (archdiocese): Jansenism in, 71–2 servants, 184–5, 189, 191; in charge of children, 235; in monasteries, 189, 195 sickness: chronic, 216–17; fever in, 213–14; as an inducement to religion, 155, 158–9; monastic attitudes towards, 204–6, 218 Sigy, Antoinette de (Congrégation), 209 Sigy, Euphémie du Roux de (Congrégation), 162 sin, 137; consciousness of, 141–2, 200–1 Sonnet, Martine, 225, 243, 335n3 Sorbonne, 57, 68

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Sourdis, François de, archbishop of Bordeaux, 51, 56, 59 Soury-Lavergne, Françoise, 335n2 “spiritual exercises,” 168, 190 superior, 27, 33, 131, 134–5, 145–6, 167; election of, 50, 58–9, 75, 122; leadership of during Revolution, 102; limitations on, 118–19, 125; perpetual, 63; powers of, 57, 118–23; qualities required in, 121, 160 superior, canonical. See director surgeons, 204, 206 surgery, 215–16 Tackett, Timothy, 96, 104, 106 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 81 tax exemptions, clerical, 17, 19, 20 taxes, clerical: dues of amortissement claimed by Crown, 19, 21, 38–40, 43, 44; effect of, on women's monasteries, 22, 134; “free gifts,” 20–1, 40 teaching congregations, 15–16, 82–3, 244, 254–5, 305n32; and the Civic Oath, 104–5; contracts with cities, 221; influence of on women, 107; and public opinion, 92–4, 105; suppression of (1792), 105–6 tithe, 25 tourière(s), 183, 189, 191 Tours (city), 156 Trent, Council of, 57, 244; clausura ordained by, 111, 113, 115, 247; legislation of, for women’s monasteries, 50, 54, 58, 122, 177; and theology of grace, 65 Troyes (city): plague in, 211 Ursulines, 6, 18, 83, 90, 183, 259; of Provence and the Comtat Venaissin, 85, 90, 297n88, 307n76, 336n5 Vallière, Isabelle de la Baume de (Ursuline), 150, 171

Vallière, Louise de, 150 Varet, Alexandre, 60 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de, 185 Versailles. See Court Vesvres, Anne de (Ursuline), 38 Viguerie, Jean de, 79, 90, 147 Virgin Mary, 90, 155, 156, 159, 198 “Visa,” 44 Visitation, 15, 32, 113, 239, 243 vocales, 58, 122, 123, 174, 184. See also chapter vocations, 155–62; built on fear, 159–60, 180; childhood, 143, 155–7, 162; conditioned, 153–5, 160; during the “conventual invasion,” 33; forced, 178, 179; late, 161–2, 167; opposition of parents to, 157–8, 272, 291n20; testing of, 166; of widows, 161 Vovelle, Michel, 107 vows, 4, 8, 27, 58, 181, 198; annulment of, 177, 178; to bishop, 54, 181; of chastity, 13, 112, 117, 135–9, 140, 147, 155, 162, 187; inviolability of, 97, 100, 101; of obedience, 49, 91, 133, 139–41, 147, 181, 187, 188; of poverty, 130–5, 147, 188; to the Rule, 54–5; suspension and abolition of, 26, 100; of teaching, 190, 220 women: as bearers of the faith, 233; in the Counter-Revolution, 106–8; and learning, 239, 241–2; and literacy, 219; in the nineteenth-century church, 108; nuns in the history of, 9; weakness of historical record for, 106, 219, 222 “the world,” 4, 6, 9, 137, 148, 153, 154, 156–7, 159, 160, 162, 166, 178, 248, 255, 257, 258 Zamet, Sébastien, bishop of Langres, 50, 56–7

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