Une Femme, le Carmel, la République. La Princesse Jeanne Bibesco. Mémoires apocryphes (review)

Historians will approach this work with caution. Christine Oddo identifies her study as a “biography” of Princess Jeanne Bibesco (p. 341). However, Oddo has chosen to write in the first person, as if the princess were composing her memoirs. The text contains no references, although there are abundant direct quotes and an eight-page bibliography, including important archival material. Despite the inevitable misgivings raised by Oddo’s approach, it would be a mistake to neglect the fascinating Bibesco.

Her long life (1864–1944) and her social position as the daughter of Rumanian-French aristocrats gave her a unique position from which to experience the closing of the nineteenth century. Further enhancing that position was her decision to enter the Carmelite order. At twenty-six Bibesco became the prioress of a Carmelite convent in Algiers. Her personal donation and a very large dowry enabled her to establish new quarters for the convent and ensured her importance within the Algerian archdiocese. She supported the work of Cardinal Charles-Martial-Allemand Lavigerie, who, following the direction of Pope Leo XIII, sought to reconcile Catholics with the Republican state. Even after their deaths, the Carmelite prioress attempted to continue this course in the midst of the bitterest conflict between the Church and the Republic. Anticlerical electoral victories brought the passage of the 1901 Law of Associations, requiring that all religious communities apply for state authorization; those failing to meet the republicans’ criteria would be closed, as many congregations, monasteries, and convents experienced.

Yet, in 1903 the Carmelite prioress of Algiers took the unusual step of traveling to Paris, gaining a private interview with the premier of the Republic, Émile Combes, and securing his support for the approval of her convent’s authorization. The Algiers Carmel remained open, and the prioress began a lifelong friendship and intimate correspondence with Combes whom almost all Catholics viewed as the devil incarnate. That correspondence, published in 2005, certainly serves as a major source for Oddo’s “biography.”

The prioress’s success with the chief anticlerical republican must have shocked clergy in Algeria and Rome. The Church and the French state fought from positions of ever mounting intransigence, especially during the papacy of Pius X (1903). Bibesco’s supporters within the Algerian archdiocese retired or were passed over. Her critics gained prominence. Former members of the order accused her of improper financial, moral, and spiritual conduct. In 1911 Pope Pius X authorized the closing of the Carmelite convent in Algiers. The princess returned to secular life in the fashionable neighborhoods of Paris and struggled with the Algerian archdiocese for a decade over property claims. She continued her friendship with Combes and expanded her acquaintances among republican politicians. By the 1920s and 1930s the aging princess had fallen on hard times. Inflation and the devaluation of the franc had eroded her income. Her final days were spent in a retirement home for indigent “personalities” recommended by the Académie française.

There is much that is illuminating in this study. It offers an almost carnivalesque reversal of the standard portrait of the Third Republic clerical-anticlerical conflict. Combes, generally presented as the fanatic anticlerical, saves the Carmelite convent and Pius X closes it, forcing its members to secularize. Oddo provides an interesting portrait of the inner workings of a convent, particularly its material and financial concerns. Bibesco certainly stands as a fascinating woman who achieved a measure of power and autonomy. Despite her independence, she is clearly a member of her class, the fading European aristocracy drastically diminished by wars, revolutions, and economic crises.

Unfortunately, these valuable historical elements are not thoroughly explored. The reader almost wishes that Oddo had chosen the radical departure of writing fiction. Then she might have speculated on important unanswered question—for example, why does an aristocratic girl choose to become a nun in late-nineteenth-century France. On...