The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War (review)

Claire Ferchaud (1896–1972) was born into a family of peasant farmers from the Vendée. At the age of eleven, her formal education was curtailed so that she could work on the family farm. A decade later, at the height of the Great War, she would be granted an audience by the President of the French Republic. Although Claire's story has been told before, Jonas makes it available for the first time to non-francophone readers. More importantly, building on his previous book, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: an Epic Tale for Modern Times (see FS, lvi (2002), 289–90), he locates the significance of Claire's 'tragic tale' within the broader context of the relationship between Church and State in modern France. Claire experienced visions of Jesus from the age of three; as she matured, the visions came to focus on the Sacred Heart. A series of Catholic men would guide, protect and promote the young peasant visionary (Jonas is alert to the issues relating to gender and class underlying these relationships). With the war, her visions became more political: to achieve military victory, France would need to be publicly consecrated to the Sacred Heart whose emblem should be placed in the middle of the republican tricolour. Claire's growing celebrity led to an appearance before an ecclesiastical commission in Poitiers. Though mindful of the obvious parallel with Joan of Arc, Jonas stresses the differences between the woman of action who could galvanize an army and the timid Claire, who failed to impress in public. Nevertheless, Claire was taken to Paris early in 1917 and, thanks to the connections of her new mentors, met with Raymond Poincaré. Jonas shows how Claire's visions dovetailed with a popular campaign (bolstered by the 'miracle' of the Marne) to consecrate families, military units, towns and, indeed, the entire nation to the Sacred Heart. He also explains how and why this campaign was suppressed in the name of the union sacrée. The sceptical archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Amette, ordered Claire to return to the Vendée where a small, unofficial religious community gathered around her at Loublande. The Vatican refused to give any official credence to her visions and, in March 1920 (just a few weeks before the canonization of both Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and Joan of Arc), publicly repudiated the movement associated with Claire, leaving her to endure the rest of her life as a 'Calvary'. Jonas highlights the irony of the Catholic hierarchy drawing on the secularized medical discourse of Charcot to discredit Claire's visions as a form of hysteria. Jonas might have spent a little more time assessing the extent of Claire's wartime reputation: was her fame essentially regional or genuinely national? However, this is a minor quibble. Overall, thanks to his vivid evocation of Claire's life, his expert grasp of the politico-religious context, and the fruits of his detailed research in numerous archives, Jonas's well-illustrated book provides an extremely engaging and informative read.