Holy Tears, Holy Blood: Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840–1970 (review)

Richard Burton's Holy Tears, Holy Blood is an engaging historical, political, and psychological study of women's voluntary suffering in the name of religion. Focusing on the "centrality of Christ's Passion in French Catholic thought and practice," the book is about the practice of suffering, and specifically about eleven women who practiced, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France.

From the second epigraph by the Goncourt ("By bringing into the world the feeling for suffering, Jesus Christ has increased enormously the ability to suffer. His death was the death of physical and moral pagan health. Neurosis comes from Golgotha"), this study presents a rich compendium of perspectives on suffering. Indeed, the perspective or focus varies considerably from chapter to chapter, from literary analysis to psychological commentary to social history to theology, with the result that the book reads not as a linear argument or arguments, but rather as a series of slices of life and thought. It raises far more questions than it answers; however, there is great richness in the questions themselves and how they are raised, and this richness makes the book more than worthwhile.

After an introduction on suffering and the gendering of its permutations, the first chapter is devoted to Mélanie Calvat, the witness (or alleged witness) to the La Salette Marian apparition of 1846. In describing La Salette and the weeping, afflicted image of the Virgin associated with it, Burton establishes the sort of female religious image that found primacy in nineteenth-century France. He then moves in the second chapter to Thérèse Martin, who concentrated on God's love and mercy rather than on God's judgment and anger. This chapter is more psychological in nature; we see Thérèse's devout family, her mother's obsession with expiation and sacrifice, her assumption of the masculine voice in autobiographical writings, and her curious conflation of Jesus Christ with her own biological father. The third chapter shifts into literary territory to discuss Camille Claudel, principally as sister and inspiration to Paul Claudel; it contains an analysis of Claudel's play, L'Annonce faite à Marie. The fourth chapter is a wonderful piece of social history. Devoted to Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and their "conversion machine" headquarters at Meudon, it chronicles in lively detail the Maritains' relationship with Léon Bloy as well as the various converts, successful and unsuccessful (Jean Cocteau was one such unsuccessful) to their "congregation." The fifth chapter moves to the realm of pathology to present Marthe Robin, who ate nothing and re-enacted Christ's passion on a seven-day cycle for decades. Burton then passes to a discussion of more than thirty women and their "extraordinary phenomena," which included stigmatic bleeding, fasting, and visions, among others. This chapter contains some of the book's most fascinating biographical/ psychological portraits: in addition to Robin, we meet Pauline Lamotte/"Madeleine Lebouc," Eva Lavallière, Claire Ferchaud, and Simone Weil. The sixth chapter, combining the pathological and literary veins, discusses Colette Peignot, a "self-created negation of everything that the other Catholic women discussed here held dear." It examines Colette's sadomasochism, her relationship with Georges Bataille, as well as Bataille's review Acéphale.

The final chapter roams through numerous psychological and sociological questions raised by the book's portraits. It moves from the gendering of the Church in the nineteenth century to the medical concept of hysteria, from anorexia and mother-daughter dysfunction to the public and private phenomenon of dying, from homosexuality to hair and sacrifice. It also contains the book's eleventh portrait, this time of Anne-Marie Roulé, mistress and "mystagogue" to Bloy.

One important strength of this book is its extraordinary wealth of historical and anecdotal detail – from an intriguing discussion of Christian anti-Semitism to the relationship between the Tour de France and the crucifixion, to a description...