Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (review)

On July 17, 1794, sixteen Carmelite nuns went to the guillotine, accused of royalism and counterrevolutionary behavior. These nuns became symbols to both opponents and supporters of the French Revolution. To the former, they were heroic martyrs; to the latter, dangerous fanatics. What made these nuns such potent political symbols? Mita Choudhury's study of the discourse around convents and nuns in eighteenth-century France provides us with some intriguing answers to this question.

Choudhury's study spans the period from the1730's, when Jansenist nuns resisted the papal bull Unigenitus, through the French Revolution, which, as it became increasingly radical, closed France's convents and monasteries and labeled those who resisted counterrevolutionaries. She argues that during this period, discussions of convents and nuns were central to critiques—and to the eventual dismantling—of the political and social institutions of the Old Regime. Like the Bastille, convents came to symbolize the arbitrary and despotic nature of power in pre-revolutionary France.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, debates about nuns and convents centered on matters of enclosure and authority. In the 1560's, the Council of Trent declared that all religious communities of women must be cloistered and submit to the authority of the bishop, though these prescriptions were challenged by new active women's congregations, such as the Ursulines, and by nuns who brought court cases against ecclesiastical superiors who challenged their traditional rights. The Enlightenment shifted the terms of the debate. As Sophie, Rousseau's "natural woman," became the basis for a new ideal of womanhood, convents and convent education were branded "unnatural." The religious "fanaticism" denounced by philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot tended to be gendered female, and in the latter writer's scurrilous novel, La Religieuse, the convent stood for all that was wrong with Old Regime politics and society.

Choudhury does a masterful job of unpacking the complex and contradictory images of nuns—as victims and despots, submissive and disobedient, holy and sexual—that appeared in the Jansenist controversy of the 1730's through the 1750's, in judicial memoirs of cases regarding the abuse of power by mother superiors, in narratives of forced vocations, and in debates over convent education. While for the most part these sources represent the perspectives of elite men, we do get some fascinating glimpses of how nuns themselves deployed this rhetoric toward their own ends, especially during the early years of the Revolution when nuns wrote pamphlets and addressed the National Assembly to defend their communities. However, Choudhury sometimes elides the distinction between women as actors and as images deployed by men, and at times it appears as if discussions about women's religious life were merely pretexts for addressing larger political issues. What tends to get lost is the real religious commitment—or, in the case of forced vocations, the lack of such commitment—on the part of these women. Admittedly, this is not the focus of the book, but as Choudhury herself argues, what made the convent such a potent symbol, even more so than other images of despotism like the seraglio or the Bastille, was its existence as an evolving social institution that played an important role in the real lives of people in eighteenth-century France.

By 1794, the convents of France had been shut down by the revolutionary government, and their former inhabitants dispersed, imprisoned, or killed. Although they would be revived during the nineteenth century, convents would never play the central role in society or have the same political significance that they had had in the Old Regime. This dismantling was facilitated by an increasingly hostile discourse that "desacralized" the convent and, like contemporaneous attacks on aristocratic women such as Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette...