Holy Tears, Holy Blood:Women, Catholicism, and the Culture of Suffering in France, 1840-1909 (review)

Richard Burton's haunting study of the religious sensibilities of eleven French women makes an original contribution to the history of modern France. Many of these women—Thérèse de Lisieux, Raïssa Maritain, Claire Ferchaud, Simone Weil, and Camille Claudel—are well known figures in the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The others—Mélanie Calvat and Colette Peignot, for example—are less so. In a period during which the state and civil society became increasingly secularized and the Catholic Church increasingly "feminized," Burton seeks to understand the emergence of a distinctive kind of female religiosity, characterized by a conscious embrace of both suffering and sacrifice, which reflected the Catholic doctrine of "vicarious suffering." It should be emphasized, as Burton himself does, that these women are not representative of French Catholic women as a whole. Indeed, the majority of women lived ordinary lives and those who entered religious life joined active religious orders and were congréganistes, not nuns in cloistered orders, like Mélanie Calvat or Thérèse Martin. In this sense it is difficult to claim, as Burton does, that they illuminate what was "the most publicized, if not the most generalized, expression of female Catholic spirituality in France" (p. xv).

What all these women share is a life of suffering, which could take the form of mental anguish, as in the case of the sculptress Camille Claudel, the one-time mistress of Auguste Rodin and sister of the poet Paul Claudel, or physical pain associated with tuberculosis, stigmata, and eating disorders. Burton charts the way in which each of these women transformed often excruciating suffering into forms of holiness or martyrdom, which was celebrated or appropriated for their own purposes by the men around them. These include some of the most significant intellectual figures of the day—Paul Claudel, Jacques Maritain, Georges Bataille, Léon Bloy, Joris-Karl Huysman, and Georges Bernanos, among others.

The book is divided into seven chapters, six of which are devoted to the women's biographies and an analysis of their writings and visions. Burton tells their stories with great subtlety and sensitivity. In a highly suggestive final chapter, he draws together the similiarities in the lives of women as different as the political activist Simone Weil and Georges Bataille's renegade mistress Colette Peignot, while pointing to the common experience of absent mothers and "feminized" fathers, their curious relationship to food, their classification as hysterics (or "mysterics") by the medical profession, and their preoccupations with tears, blood, and hair.

The importance of this carefully crafted book is that Burton not only sheds light on the interior lives of his female protagonists, but he also illuminates the political implications of the doctrine of vicarious suffering, by showing how it was intimately associated with an ultrareactionary political right wing. To this extent this form of Catholicism continued to propagate the close association between the Church and the right wing in France. Burton demonstrates that the suffering of women was viewed as a means to redeem an afflicted Church and nation for much of the period between the early nineteenth century to the World War II, and he asks an inevitable question regarding who reaped the benefits of this suffering. He concludes that it was "the men in their lives or, more generally, the male-dominated order of things, particularly in the Church . . . who did not go nearly as far along the Via Dolorosa as they did" (p. 249). Burton suggests that the principle of patriarchal authority remained unchallenged. There is, however, considerable evidence that "women religious" frequently clashed with the church hierarchy, as he himself admits in his discussion of M...