ABSTRACT BUTLER, JAY. Monastic Revival In

Home , Cistercian nuns, Mount Melleray Abbey, Trappists

ABSTRACT

BUTLER, JAY. Monastic Revival in France 1815-1848: The Trappistines of Notre-Dame des Gardes and the Trappists of Melleray. (Under the direction of Dr. Keith Luria).

Monastic life in France arose from the ashes of the Revolution following the fall of

Napoleon and the restoration of a French monarchy sympathetic to Catholicism in 1815. The

Trappists led the return of contemplative monastic orders despite cultural changes that had undercut traditional monastic functions, despite the loss of monastic property and sources of income, and despite the continued refusal of the state to authorize contemplative monasticism.

This thesis argues that the Trappists succeeded by adopting a new form of monasticism that valorized manual labor while emphasizing asceticism and poverty. This allowed the Trappists both to reestablish monastic life without the rents and tithe rights available to ancien régime monasteries and to prove themselves useful in a changed society that no longer valued a life dedicated solely to prayer. The geography of religion also played a role in the monastic revival.

French monasteries succeeded in the first half of the nineteenth century by locating in areas where religious observance was relatively strong. The return of monasteries, this thesis goes on to argue, formed the vanguard of a religious revival in France. It cut across the grain of predominant cultural trends toward individualism and materialism. At the same time, the monastic revival fit within the current of nineteenth-century French romantic and utopian ideas displayed by other groups who also bridled against the predominant trend of materialistic individualism.

This thesis explores the Trappist revival by focusing on two examples, both in western

France: the women’s monastery Notre-Dame des Gardes during the Restoration (1815-1830) and the men’s monastery of Melleray during the July Monarchy (1830-1848).

Monastic Revival in France 1815-1848: The Trappistines of Notre-Dame des Gardes and the Trappists of Melleray

by Jay Butler

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

History

Raleigh, North Carolina 2020

APPROVED BY:

______Keith Luria K. Steven Vincent Committee Chair

______Mi Gyung Kim

BIOGRAPHY

John “Jay” Butler was born on June 1, 1957 in Arlington, Virginia. He has lived in

Raleigh for the past 34 years with his wife, Grace Evans, where they raised two daughters both of whom have left for New York to attend graduate schools themselves. After primary and secondary education in the Fairfax County, Virginia public schools, Mr. Butler entered the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he graduated summa cum laude in

1979 with a major in history and a minor in French. He then undertook a period of study and travel, predominantly in France, before entering Harvard Law School from which he graduated in 1983. After clerking for a judge on the United States Fourth Circuit Court of

Appeals, he started law practice in 1984 with the predecessor of Parker Poe Adams &

Bernstein, a law partnership he remains in today. Throughout his years of law practice, Mr.

Butler read history voraciously. He also started visiting Trappist monasteries. In 2011, he met with one of the French monks of Melleray Abbey who sparked his interest in the subject of this thesis by providing him copies of archival material concerning Melleray’s establishment in 1848 of the first Trappist monastery in America. In 2015, he began graduate studies in history on a part time basis at North Carolina State University where he has been generously supported in his continued investigation of French Trappist history.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the monks and nuns who have taken an interest in my work and spent hours helping me find and understand archival material at the monasteries of Notre-Dame des Gardes, Melleray, Cîteaux, La Trappe, and Gethsemani. I have also been encouraged by the community of scholars who attend the Cistercian and

Monastic Studies Conference in Kalamzoo each year and by the editors of Cistercian Studies

Quarterly.

I have been graciously supported in this endeavor by the History Department at North

Carolina State University, which helped me attend two Cistercian and Monastic Studies

Conferences in 2018 and 2019, and the 2019 annual meeting of the Western Society for

French History, in each case to present papers relating to this thesis.

Most importantly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the history faculty. Ross Bassett took a supportive interest in my paper on Melleray in connection with his historical writing class, and Steven Vincent guided me through an independent study on the Trappists and French colonial affairs under the July Monarchy. My thesis advisor Keith Luria has spent hours reviewing my work and providing insightful comments that have greatly improved the final product. I thank all my thesis committee members, Dr. Luria, Dr. Vincent, and Dr. Mi

Gyung Kim for taking the time to dive into this project with me.

Finally, I thank the family of artists I am privileged to be part of—my wife Grace

Evans and our daughters Kate and Anna—for listening to me over the years as I talked about centuries old monks and nuns and the lives they led.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: The Context and Contours of the Monastic Revival ...... 9 A: Context ...... 9 B: Contours ...... 21

Chapter 2: Notre-Dame des Gardes ...... 33

Chapter 3: Notre-Dame de Melleray ...... 57 A: Background and Re-establishment under the Bourbons ...... 57 B: Melleray under the July Monarchy ...... 62 C: Foreign Expansion ...... 80

Conclusion ...... 88

References ...... 91

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Trappist Monasteries ...... 29

Figure 1.2 Map of Oath Taking ...... 29

INTRODUCTION

This is the study of an unexpected revival—the return and growth of French contemplative monasteries following the 1815 fall of Napoleon through the 1848

Revolution.1 It focuses on two early examples of that revival: the Trappistine monastery of

Notre-Dame des Gardes in the Maine and Loire and the Trappist monastery of Melleray in the neighboring department of the Loire Atlantic. The monks and nuns of early nineteenth- century France “deserve to be considered on their own terms and in the context of their own social and cultural milieu,” as Rosamond McKitterick aptly wrote.2 This requires serious consideration of the spiritual concerns that motivated their life choices as well as an understanding of the cultural and socio-political context in which they lived. It also requires an appreciation of how the tremendous political, religious, and cultural changes that shook

France in the half-century preceding 1815 affected their ability to reconstitute monastic life.

The monastic revival raises fundamental questions. Why did any monastic revival occur following the Revolution and Empire? What motivated it and what sustained it in the first half of the nineteenth century? How did the cultural context of early nineteenth-century

France affect the form of that revival? The return of monastic orders seemed unlikely in 1815

France. The monastic properties that had accumulated over centuries had been auctioned off and most monasteries were now just ancient ruins. Monastics had largely been absent from

1By contemplative monasticism, I mean cloistered monastic orders whose primary purpose is prayer in community like the Cistercians (including the Trappists), the Benedictines, the Carthusians, the Carmelites, the Poor Claires, and the female Dominicans among others. In contrast are service orders that may have had a monastic element like the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the men’s Dominicans, and the wide variety of congregational orders, particularly for women, active in nineteenth-century France, all of which were service oriented. 2 Rosamond McKitterick, “Great Light,” Times Literary Supplement (May 22, 2009)(speaking broadly on historical inquiries) (quoted in Roger Price, Religious Renewal in France, 1789-1870: The Roman Catholic Church between Catastrophe and Triumph (Aberystwyth, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 9.

the country for a generation and had come to be seen by segments of French society as useless, even dangerous. French law reflected the continued influence of this attitude.

Contemplative monastic orders like the Trappists remained unauthorized in France throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet these contemplatives returned to

France in force and continued to increase their numbers in the period studied here—that of the constitutional monarchies from 1815-1848.

I argue that the Trappist-led revival of contemplative monastics formed part of the vanguard of a Catholic revival in France and reflected the depth of that revival, a depth we can plumb by understanding from the point of view of the men and women involved what may have motivated them to reestablish the monasteries. The monastic revival, I contend, was sustained by the authenticity with which these men and women engaged in the particularly austere form of monasticism they adopted, an authenticity that generated admiration from the faithful and respect, albeit grudging, even from many of those who did not admire religious devotion. That revival generated a new form of monasticism that differed from that which prevailed just before the Enlightenment. Whereas monasteries had largely become places where few monks lived on the rents of large landholdings, the new monasticism required monks and nuns to earn their own way and it consequently focused on manual labor. This earned monastics admiration for their genuine and rigorous adherence to monastic principles as well as for their utility.

By 1815, a generation had grown up without the Catholic religious instruction that had formed the backbone of French religious life before the Revolution. The culture had shifted. Catholicism no longer retained its position of unchallenged dominance. France had become more multi-dimensional (fragmented from the Catholic perspective), with

Catholicism now only an option among other spiritual avenues or none at all. A gaping cultural divide developed between Catholics on the one hand and Republicans on the other.3

Thomas Kselman has suggested that “[i]nstead of restricting ourselves to the language of conflict and decline, we need to think of religion in France in the century following the

Revolution as characterized by pluralism, volunteerism, and experimentation.”4 While this is a good reminder of the diversity of religious experience in nineteenth-century France, pluralism and experimentation did not do away with the culture conflict between Catholics and Republicans that ran through nineteenth-century France and that impacted the reception the new monasticism received.

Early nineteenth-century French monasticism, particularly among the Trappists, offered a rigorous form of Catholic Christianity that attracted devout Catholics in part by harkening back to an age before the cultural fragmentation. It did so with an authentic dedication to monastic principles that distinguished it from the type of wealthy and lax monasticism that the Enlightenment philosophes and Republican leaders had targeted in the eighteenth century and that continued to be the target of Republican barbs in the nineteenth.

This journey back to the supposed roots of monastic life was not unique in the history of monasticism. The Cistercians had tried to make that journey in the eleventh century when the group that formed their nucleus broke from the Benedictine monastery of Molesme, and

Armand de Rancé tried to return to fundamentals in the seventeenth century when he reformed Cistercian life at the Abbey of La Trappe. But the reforms adopted by the nineteenth-century Trappists reached a high pitch of austerity in response to the existential

3 Ralph Gibson, “Why Republicans and Catholics Couldn’t Stand Each Other in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, eds. Frank Tallet and Nicolas Atkin (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 108. 4 Thomas Kselman, “State and Religion,” in Revolutionary France 1788-1880, ed. Malcolm Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 64-65.

crisis of their times.

There is no general history of the monastic revival in nineteenth-century France such as Derek Beales has written concerning the monastic decline in eighteenth-century Europe.5

But there is an excellent history of the nineteenth-century Trappists, written by Bernard

Delpal and published in 1998.6 Carefully researched and documented, Delpal’s Le silence des moines examined the relationship between the Trappists, the state, the society, and the institutional church throughout nineteenth-century France. He did so by focusing on the

Trappist abbey of Aiguebelle and the Trappistine abbey of Maubec, both located in southeastern France, and their filiations including one in Algeria and one in Syria. Through archival sources, he focused more on the life experiences of monks and nuns than on leaders of the movement. He argued that the Trappists had created a kind of religious utopia that fascinated their contemporaries.

Augustin-Hervé Laffay wrote a biography of Augustin de Lestrange, the monk who led the initial Trappist revival in France.7 Published the same year as Le silence des moines and as meticulously researched as Delpal’s work, Laffay’s biography is particularly helpful in understanding the roots of the Trappist revival. Casimir Gaillardin included a history of the Trappist revival as it was unfolding in his 1844 history of the Trappists which covered

5 Derek Edward Dawson Beales, Prosperity and Plunder : European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650-1815 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). There was a symposium on the nineteenth-century monastic revival in Europe held at the Catholic University of Louvain in France in 1972, and the papers from that symposium have been published in the Revue Bénédictine LXXXII, nos. 1-2 (1973). 6 Bernard Delpal, Le silence des moines: les trappistes au XIXe siècle, France—Algèrie—Syrie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1998). 7 Hervé Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange et l’avenir du monachisme (Paris: Cerf 1998).

their origins in the eleventh century to his day.8 It is particularly valuable for its contemporary account of early nineteenth-century Trappist practices. Missing from

Gaillardin, and from other accounts of post-Revolution Trappists written before Delpal and

Laffay, was any mention of Trappistines.9 Marie de la Trinité Kervingant, herself a

Trappistine nun, remedied this in 1984 with a history of the nuns who fled France to join the

Trappists in Switzerland and who eventually returned to help revive monasticism.10 By accessing extensive archival sources, memoirs and correspondence, Kervingant was able to piece together events previously left untold and to “allow the sisters to speak for themselves through their letters and narratives.”11 Her work provides an important foundation for any further study of Trappistines in the nineteenth century.12

Histories of nineteenth-century French nuns have largely overlooked the unexpected monastic revival among women.13 They have focused instead on congregational orders that

8 Casimir Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, ou, l’ordre de Cîteaux au XIXe siècle : histoire de la Trappe depuis sa fondation jusqu’a nos jours, 1140-1844, 2 vols. (Paris: Comptior des imprimeurs-unis, 1844) 9 See Gaillardin, Les Trappistes; Abbaye de La Trappe, Odyssée monastique. Dom A. de Lestrange et les trappistes pendant la révolution. (Soligny-La-Trappe: Imp. de la Grande-Trappe, 1898). 10 Marie de la Trinité Kervingant, A Monastic Odyssey, trans. Jean Holman (Kalamazoo/Spencer: Cistercian Publications, 1999). 11 Kervingant, A Monastic Odyssey, 14. 12 In addition to the work of Kervingant, Delpal, Laffay, and Gaillardin, the Trappist monk Jérôme du Halgouët wrote a series of articles in the journal Cîteaux in the early 1970s concerning episodes in the nineteenth-century revival of the Trappists that have been collected, translated to English and republished as Jérôme du Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order in the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century, trans. John Hasbrouck (Carlton, OR: Guadelupe Translations, 1999). 13 See e.g., Rebecca Rogers, “Retrograde or modern? Unveiling the teaching nun in nineteenth- century France,” Social History 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 146-164; Rebecca Rogers, “Le Catholicisme au féminine: Thirty Years of Women’s History,” Historical Reflections/Réflections Historiques 39, no. 1, Special Issue: Claude Langlois’s Vision of France: Regional Identity, Royal Imaginary, and Holy Women (Spring 2013): 82-100; Caroline Ford, “Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 1 (March 1993): 152-175; Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Sarah A. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2000); Sarah Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The seminal study of

provided teaching and health care services. This is understandable given the large number of women who joined French congregational orders in the nineteenth century. But some

American historians have contrasted these service orders of nuns with nineteenth-century women’s contemplative orders by describing the contemplatives as “in retreat” and

“languishing.”14 As this thesis will show, however, communities of nineteenth-century contemplative nuns flourished in the face of adverse material and legal circumstances. They neither languished nor retreated.

There are three principal books, two by French historians and one by an English historian, on the general nineteenth-century religious revival in France, but they do not focus on monasticism.15 These histories examine the social context of the French nineteenth- century religious revival, including the romantic reaction to the materialistic spirit of the

Enlightenment and Revolution. Prominent figures in the general religious revival featured in these histories include the leader of the Romantic Movement, François-René de

Chateaubriand; the teacher Félicité Lamennais, who inspired a generation before he became disillusioned with the Church; Dom Prosper Guéranger, who reestablished the Benedictine

Order in France; and Henri Lacordaire, a charismatic preacher who reestablished France’s

Dominican Order. None of these histories, however, examine the Trappist resurgence that led the way for other contemplative monastic communities.

This thesis adds to the body of existing scholarship by examining the potential nineteenth-century French congregational nuns is Claude Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminine. Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1984). 14 Ford, “Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe,” at 170 (“in retreat”); Curtis, Civilizing Habits, at 5 (“languishing”). 15 See e.g., Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, trans. John Dingle, 2 vols. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961); Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789-1914, Christianity and Society in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1989); Gérard Cholvy and Yves- Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine: 1800/1880 (Toulouse: Bibliothèque Historique Privat, 1985).

motivations of the men and women who engaged in the Trappist revival and by focusing on how their efforts led to a successful reestablishment of contemplative monasticism. Unlike

Delpal’s work, this thesis concentrates on the western French monasteries of Notre-Dame des

Gardes and Melleray, which were the most successful of the Trappistine and Trappist monasteries in the period studied. Examining monasteries in western France allows for an exploration of how the particular history of western France, quite distinct from that of southeastern France, affected the monastic revival. Narrative histories of both these monasteries have been published in French, but they do not address the questions raised in this thesis.16

Chapter One provides the context for the monastic revival by describing the fifty years of shattering change that occurred in France prior to 1815, which set the stage that the monastic revival would play out on. It then describes the general contours of the Trappist led revival. Chapter Two examines the revival as it unfolded at the Trappistine monastery of

Notre-Dame des Gardes with a focus on the Restoration (1815-1830), and Chapter Three examines the revival at the Trappist monastery of Melleray, with an emphasis on how that developed under the July Monarchy (1830-1848).

This focus on individual monasteries allows an in depth view of the lives of the nuns

16 See Père Marie-Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire et de la communauté de Notre-Dame-des- Gardes, 2d. ed., (Bourges: Tardy-Pigelet, 1893); Marie de la Trinité Kervingant, La Vie sur la colline Notre-Dame des Gardes: survol d’une longue histoire au pays des Mauges (Saint-George-des- Gardes: Monastère Notre-Dame des Gardes, 1983); Guillotin de Courson, “L’Abbaye de Melleray avant la Révolution,” appended to Bulletin Archéologique de L’Association Bretonne (Saint-Brieuc: Librairie René Prud’homme, 1895); Christian Bouvet and Alain Gallicé, Notre-Dame de Melleray: une abbaye cistercienne de sa foundation à aujourd’hui (Châteaubriant: Histoire et Patrimoine de Châteaubriant, 2008); Marius Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes sous la monarchie censitaire (1813- 1822-1849), 2 vols. (Fontenay-Le-Comte: Lussaud Frères, 1964)(chapter on Melleray); Marius Faugeras, “Les Trappistes de la Melleray, pionniers de l’agriculture moderne dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle,” Enquêtes et documents 3 (Nantes: Centre de recherches sur l’histoire de la France atlantique, 1975); Obrecht, Edmund M., “Melleray,” in Catholic Encyclopedia 10 (New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913).

and monks who made this revival a reality as well as an exploration of their interactions with the society around them. Both monasteries contain rich archival sources of information about the women and men who came to join them in the early nineteenth century—including an unpublished memoir written in the mid-nineteenth century recounting life at Notre-Dame des Gardes during the Restoration and a late nineteenth-century chronicle of life at Melleray that covers the last decade of the July Monarchy, as well as detailed entry registers for both monasteries showing geographic and socio-economic origins of the entrants. These are helpful in trying to tease out an answer to the question of what may have motivated women and men to dedicate themselves to such an austere religious calling. The call to monastic life involves a personal, inner conversion, and one cannot determine exactly what accounts for that at any particular monastery. As a leading historian of French religion noted: “Faith is not a matter of arithmetic.”17 Nevertheless, with the help of these archival sources, it is possible to infer what factors helped to account for the unexpectedly vigorous regrowth of monasticism in early nineteenth-century France at the two leading monasteries discussed below.

17 Gérard Cholvy, Géographie religieuse de l’Hérault contemporain, (Paris: PUF, 1968), 436 (quoted sentence as translated in Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 158).

CHAPTER 1 THE CONTEXT AND CONTOURS OF THE MONASTIC REVIVAL

A. Context.

Trappistines and Trappists are a branch of the Cistercian Order. The Cistercians sought to establish a new monastic order in 1098 that would return to the original purity of monastic life and with “sweat and toil” to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict “more strictly.”18

The Rule, among other things, divides monastic life into three essential parts: the Divine

Offices (seven throughout the day consisting of liturgical praise of God in choir), manual labor, and lectio divina, the meditative, spiritual reading of scripture or other religious texts.19

Like members of other monastic orders, the Cistercians took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to their Abbot or Abbess.20

Cistercian spirituality proved popular for both men and women after its start in

Cîteaux and enjoyed a golden age in the twelfth century. The great Cistercian Abbey of

Clairvaux, founded by Bernard of Clairvaux, served as a center for Christendom in the

Middle Ages, and before his death in 1153, Bernard had established or incorporated 65 additional monasteries while other Cistercians started another 235.21 By 1200, there were over 500 Cistercian monasteries, and on the eve of the Reformation, that number had grown

18 Martha G. Newman, “Foundations and Twelfth Century”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Braun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29; Delpal, Le silence des moines, 18. 19 Thomas Merton, The Waters of Siloe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 27. 20 Merton, Waters of Siloe, x-xi, xiv. 21 Basil Pennington, “Cistercians,” in The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia, eds. M. Glazier and M. K. Hellwig, rev. ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004), 167. Constance Berman has shown, however, that the rapid growth of the Cistercian Order was not simply a matter of monks going out to found new monasteries. Other orders, including those that included both men’s and women’s houses, were sometimes incorporated wholesale into the Cistercian Order. Monastic communities, particularly communities of women, would with some frequency adopt Cistercian customs and thereby become incorporated into the Order. Constance Berman, The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys For Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

to 742.22 This included a “spectacular” increase in Cistercian monasteries for women.23 In the fourteenth century, however the pace of this vast expansion slowed considerably due to a series of calamities including incessant warfare in France and the Black Death.24

According to L.J. Lekai, however, “far more damaging to monasticism in the long run than all other calamities combined was the gradual replacement of freely elected abbots with

‘commendatory’ abbots.”25 Commendatory abbots were persons appointed to be abbots by the king (as was common in France) or by the pope. This was an act of granting or selling a benefice in commendum to reward allies and collect fees. The commendatory abbot rarely had an interest in monastic life and might even be a child. To maximize profits, commendatory abbots often let monastic properties deteriorate, sought to keep the number of monks low, and reduced expenses for food and clothing.26 Michael Casey noted: “The results [of commendatory abbacies] are listed in the records of the General Chapters: disorder, demoralization, violation of monastic enclosure, a widespread reliance by individual monks and nuns on private income, the breakdown of the common life and, in the absence of an effective superior, a general tendency to mitigate observances.”27

A movement of Cistercians of “Strict Observance” began to counter this deterioration of Cistercian spirituality. The movement found its strongest adherents at the Abbey of La

Trappe during the seventeenth century where the abbot, Armand de Rancé, enjoined his monks to engage in a stricter separation from the world, and enforcement of the Rule again

22 Pennington, Cistercians, 167. 23 Peter King, “The Cistercian Order 1200-1600,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order ed. Mette Birkedal Braun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 38. 24 Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality, (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1977), 91- 100. 25 Lekai, Cistercians, 101. 26 Lekai, Cistercians, 101-108. 27 Michael Casey, “The Cistercian Order Since 1600,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, ed. Mette Birkedal Braun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51.

became rigorous, especially with respect to an austere diet and manual labor.28 Those

Cistercians who followed the reforms of Rancé became known as Trappists if men or

Trappistines if women (and are referred to together as Trappists).

Monasticism remained a powerful force in France through the mid-eighteenth century, but disintegrated completely in the latter half of the century. Broadly defined, in

1750 there were still about 3,000 male monasteries and 5,000 female monasteries in France.29

These monasteries faced trouble in the latter half of the 18th century. According to Ralph

Gibson, Enlightenment thinkers in France and those influenced by them exhibited “an increasing hostility to monks and nuns, perceiving them as a standing affront to the

Enlightenment doctrine of utility.”30 Derek Beales has observed that those influenced by the philosophes viewed contemplative orders like the Cistercians as particularly useless.31

Leading intellectuals characterized monks as libertines who were harmful to society.32 In this atmosphere, Louis XV established a general commission in 1766 to investigate the presumed decadence of monasteries, a commission that did not include a single member of

28 Casey, “Cistercian Order Since 1600,” 53-56. The movement of “Strict Observance” centered on the return to a meatless diet required by the Rule. Lekai, The Cistercians, 147-148. The Rancé reforms went much further, including the reincorporation of manual labor into the life of the monks. Casey, “Cistercian Order Since 1600,” 55-56. Rancé was himself a commendatory abbot but underwent a conversion and dedicated himself to monastic reform at La Trappe. Delpal, Le silence des moines, 25. 29 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 86. Beales defines monasticism quite broadly as including all the regular orders including active orders like the Jesuits, Franciscans, and male Dominicans. 30 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 104. 31 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 236-238. This was the view among the Voltarian elite, but it is open to debate as to how widespread that view actually was. Derek Beales concluded from a review of the cahiers, or notes, from town meetings during the Revolution, that “the message from the people and the provinces about the monasteries … was mildly reformist, betraying little sign of the influence of the philosophes or of any rational blueprint for radical change.” Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 242 32 In his popular poem “La Pucelle,” which went through 60 editions, Voltaire described monks as libertines. Gérard Cholvy, “Le renouveau monastique en France au XIXe siècle: Le contexte,” Esprit et Vie, No. 1 (2 Janvier 1997): 10. “Monk,” Cholvy noted, “had become synonymous with inutility.” Ibid., 9. All translations from French are mine except as otherwise noted.

the regular clergy.33 The commission’s findings resulted in royal edicts closing some small, declining monastic communities (including dozens of Cistercian ones), ensuring greater supervision of monastic orders, and increasing the age at which one could enter a monastery.

This resulted in 30% fewer monastics after a couple of decades. But the Commission did not change the practice of appointing commendatory abbots that had led to much of the monastic decline. 34

This challenge to monasticism coincided with what Gérard Cholvy has called a

“reflux” or ebb tide in Christianity in the late eighteenth century that led up to the

Revolution. Urban bishops reported a crisis in Christian observance from the 1760s through the time of the Revolution.35 This reflux was part of, as Thomas Kselman has observed, the start of an “erosion in the cultural authority of Catholicism ....”36 This erosion can be seen in an eighteenth-century decline in bequests to support prayers for the dead, a traditional source of monastic income and, since the medieval period, reflective of how societies valued monasteries as houses of dedicated prayer.37

Monasticism was also on the decline. By the eve of the Revolution, there were only

237 Cistercian monasteries and priories left in France, and commendatory abbots ruled more than 200 them. These monasteries held few religious. Many had been built to hold over 100 monks in their heyday, but by the time of the Revolution, Cistercian monasteries only

33 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 170-171. 34 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 231 35 Gérard Cholvy, “Les peuples de France entre religion et révolution,” Esprit et Vie, no. 10 (22 mai 1997): 219-220. 36 Kselman, “State and Religion,” 66. 37 Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1978). See C.H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism, 4th ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015) 62-63 (on the social value attached to monasteries for the perpetual masses they offered).

averaged 8 monks each.38 But the landholdings that had accreted over centuries remained large, far beyond the capacity of the few remaining resident monks to work or manage on their own. Derek Beales estimated that on average, monasteries owned about 5% of all land in France in 1789, with the vast majority of those holdings in the hands of the ancient orders like the Cistercians.39 Monasteries left themselves open to criticism as bloated landholders without social utility.

This position helped lead to their demise during the Revolution. In November of

1789, the National Assembly declared that all the property of the French church was at the disposal of the nation, and the revolutionary government dissolved monastic orders such as the Cistercians in February 1790. 40 The revolutionary government thereafter sold all monastic properties, with other church properties, as national goods at auctions.41

The elimination of monasticism formed part of an early attempt to rationalize the church by the Revolutionary government. The sense in the Constituent Assembly was, according to Timothy Tackett, that those religious “who served no particularly ‘useful’ role in the state and in society—where utility was defined under specific Enlightenment categories,” should not be allowed among what would initially become the state sponsored clergy.42 Monastics dedicated to lives of prayer and withdrawal from society did not fit within Enlightenment categories of usefulness. Jérôme Pétion, a radical leader in the

38 Lekai, The Cistercians, 166. One of the richest abbeys was Cîteaux where only 15 monks lived amid a huge complex of buildings. Dansette, Religious History, 1:19. Abbeys of Cistercian nuns tended to be more vigorous with a much higher average population. Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 27-28. There were also some vigorous monasteries of Cistercian monks among those that followed the reforms of Rancé. At La Trappe, for instance, there were 91 monks in 1790. Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 69. 39 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 87. 40 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 231. 41 See Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:383. 42 Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 12.

Assembly and mayor of Paris from 1791-1792, declared in the Assembly that monks “are workers lost to society, wealth taken from it. So monks are individually harmful, dangerous as a body. ... You must destroy these orders entirely.”43 His view was not unique. Thomas

Kselman noted that a majority in the Assembly “shared a resentment of monastic wealth and privilege” and viewed monasteries as “useless and irrational.”44

The Assembly initially attempted to rationalize the Church by passing a Civil

Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. Among other things, the Civil Constitution required an oath to the state. Few bishops took the oath, and although half of the lower clergy did, the geographic divisions were stark, foreshadowing the geographic divisions over religious observance in France during the following centuries. Only 5% of the clergy in the area of

Cholet where Notre-Dame des Gardes is located took the oath, and refractory clergy strongly prevailed throughout the west and south of France while those who took the oath prevailed in the center of France, including the Paris Basin.45

Radical revolutionaries soon superseded the Civil Constitution by eliminating the

Church altogether and by attempting to completely dechristianize French society, actions that would reverberate throughout the nineteenth century in animosity between Republicans and

Catholics. Anti-religious violence, fueled by the belief that Church leaders supported the enemies of the new Republic, was directed against refractory clergy and also against religious buildings themselves. Many of the great monasteries built up in the Middle Ages

43 Quoted in Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 255. 44 Kselman, “State and Religion,” 68. Satisfied with the work of dismantling monasteries, a revolutionary deputy from the Vendée wrote in a 1792 report to the Committee of Public Instruction: “The ancient tree of monasticism has been entirely uprooted by the good work of the Constituent Assembly.” He added: “There is almost no one who does not applaud it.” Quoted in Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 262-263. 45 Tackett, Revolution and Regional Culture, 52-55.

like Cluny, Cîteaux, and La Trappe were destroyed.46 Derek Beales summarized the crescendo of dechristianization as follows:

By the end of 1793 the constitutional Church had been virtually abandoned by the government that had established it; clergy were being forced to abjure their vocation, churches were being desecrated and vandalized. Cults of Reason and of the Supreme Being were introduced and celebrated in a ‘purified’ Notre-Dame and many other churches across France, while Catholic Masses were banned. By the summer of 1794 not merely the Roman Catholic Church but Christianity itself seemed to have been outlawed.47

Revolutionary dechristianization met resistance in the west of France. In March of

1793, following a mass conscription order from the revolutionary government, the Vendée in western France rose in a counter-revolutionary revolt. The Vendée revolt encompassed three départements in addition to the Vendée itself: Deux-Sèvres, the Loire Atlantic (where

Melleray was located), and the Maine and Loire (where Notre-Dame des Gardes is located).

Resistance to conscription was not the sole reason for what became a French civil war.48

Religious freedom motivated many of the counter-revolutionaries.49 The people of the region formed a largely peasant army rallying to the call of “long live religion” and initially

46Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 265-266. The destruction continued well after the Revolution. Purchasers of monasteries took years to disassemble them, presumably for building materials. That is what happened to the Cistercian Abbey of Savigny in Normandy, which had been the ultimate motherhouse of La Trappe and the center of monasticism in western France throughout the Middle Ages. A nearby farmer purchased it, and, in the words of Brigitte Galbrun, he submitted the abbey to a “methodical butchering” that continued through the early 1800s. Brigitte Galbrun, “Introduction,” in L’Abbaye de Savigny (1112-2012): Un chef d’ordre anglo-normand, eds. Brigitte Galbrun and Véronique Gazeau (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019), 10. 47Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 264-265. 48French historians often refer to these four départements together as the Vendée militaire. For simplicity, I will refer to them as the Vendée. 49 Historians disagree on the primary reason for the revolt. Some like Adrien Dansette and François Furet have argued that religion was the primary cause. Dansette, Religious History, 1:79; François Furet, La Révolution francaise. De Turgot à Jules Ferry, 1770-1888 (Paris: Hachette,1988), 132. Others have placed primary weight on disillusionment with the Revolution, a dislike of the city bourgeois who had supported the Revolution, or royalism. See Brégeon and Gérard Guicheteau, Nouvelle histoire des guerres de Vendée (Paris: Perrin, 2017), 24-28 (surveying arguments). But no matter what the primary cause, all agree religion played a significant role in the revolt.

calling themselves the “Catholic and Royalist Army” in opposition to the Revolution.50

Many of them adopted the Sacred Heart as their military insignia.51

This became a bitter conflict that traumatized the region in which Melleray and

Notre-Dame des Gardes were to help revive monastic life twenty years later. Atrocities on both sides marked this civil war. But Jean-Joël Brégeon and Gérard Guicheteau have recently argued that the most disturbing part of this conflict involved the development of an ideology of extermination among the ranks of the Jacobins.52 As the war proceeded, they wrote, some Jacobin generals “considered it a patriotic duty to incinerate villages and small landholdings, forests and open lands, ... to massacre all villagers ‘necessarily brigands,’ including women and children.”53

Only the intervention of Napoleon’s troops and the passage of the Concordat of 1801 finally pacified the Vendée. Napoleon declared that it “‘was by becoming a Catholic that I put an end to the war in the Vendée ....’” As Napoleon asserted: “‘the people need religion; this religion must be in the hands of the government.’”54 Napoleon put his philosophy to work with the Concordat of 1801 that allowed the Roman Catholic Church back into France but at a significant cost. In exchange for a state stipend for the secular clergy, the Church agreed to forsake any claim to recover the massive amount of property, including monastic property, confiscated during the Revolution. While the Concordat legalized the practice of

50 Dansette, Religious History, 1:77-79; Patrice Mann, “Les insurrections paysannes de l’Ouest: Vendée et chouannerie,” Revue française de sociologie, XXX (1989): 587-88, 592-93. 51 Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 35-40. 52 Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 251-290. 53 Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 275. 54William Roberts, “Napoleon, the Concordat of 1801, and Its Consequences” in Controversial Concordats: The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler, ed. Frank Coppa (Washington D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2012), 54.

Catholicism, the Church did not recover its status as the exclusive French religion.55

Rome did not attempt to include any provision for monasteries in the 1801

Concordat.56 As Derrick Beales ironically observed: “The Benedictine pope [Pius VII] had silently acquiesced in the re-establishment of the French Catholic Church without a monastic element.”57 Article XI of the Concordat extended the revolutionary decree abolishing regular religious orders, excepting only seminaries and those branches necessary for the functioning of the Church.58 Napoleon expressed the spirit of the times when he described contemplative religious orders as serving “no useful purpose.”59 His general policy toward monasticism was reflected in an 1804 report from his Minister of Religion, Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, in which Portalis stated: “It was very wise to destroy the monks, and it would be very wise to prevent them from returning.”60

French religion stagnated during the war torn years of Napoleonic rule. The

“anticlericalism of the Enlightenment had survived the Terror,” according to Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, particularly among the wealthier classes and army officers.61 After the Concordat, it was hard to recruit clergy. Payment was meager and seminaries few.

Priests, Protestant clergy, and rabbis all declined in numbers during the Napoleonic period.

The remaining clergy complained about the lack of basic religious knowledge in the

55 Roberts, “Concordat of 1801,” 47. 56 See Mémoires du Cardinal Consalvi avec une introduction et des notes par J. Crétineau-Joly (Paris: Henri Plon, 1866). 57 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 267. 58 Bernard Plongeron, “Comment restaurer un ordre au XIXe siécle? Quand la mythe crée l’histoire,” in Lacordaire: son pays, ses amis et la liberté des ordres religieux, ed. Guy Bedouelle (Paris: Cerf, 1991): 389. 59 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 104. See also Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 10. Napoleon, however, became receptive to certain congregational orders of nuns providing teaching and nursing services. Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 104-105. 60 Quoted in Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 283. Where monasteries could be put to state use, however, Portalis and Napoleon were willing to tolerate them under strict supervision as discussed below. 61 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:17. See also Dansette, Religious History, 1:139.

country.62 D.M.G. Sutherland has argued that the “dechristianization of the 1793-94 was more successful than many historians recognize. ... [T]he declericalization, vandalism, closing of churches, iconoclasm, and forbidding of outdoor processions all deprived the laity of pastoral care for a generation.”63

A massive cultural shift had thus taken place in the half century between 1765 and

1815 that dramatically shaped the potential for, and contours of, a monastic revival.

Catholicism was no longer a given. The Charter of 1814 establishing the constitutional monarchy now guaranteed religious freedom.64 During the approximately 1,000 years that monasticism had flourished in France and during which great monasteries played a primary role in the life of the country, the Church was integral to virtually all aspects of French life.

Social standing throughout society had depended on good standing within the Church. But by 1815, large swaths of French society openly derided Church membership. “Catholicism was withering,” according to Robert Tombs.65 Dedicating one’s children or a lifetime’s accumulation of wealth to a place of continuous prayer seemed to make sense to many people in the Middle Ages. By 1815, as Dansette has observed, “many Catholics had little conception of the function of monastic life and feared the accumulation of property in mortmain,” and most non-Catholics still considered monasticism to be corrupt.66 Tithe rights and rents from vast property holdings that provided most of the material support for monasteries in their golden age were no longer available to monastics. Moreover, as Derek

Beales observed, there had been “a fundamental change of attitudes, away from the belief

62 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:12-18. 63 D.M.G. Sutherland, “Claude Langlois’s French Revolution,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 39, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 43. 64 Thomas Kselman, Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 9. 65 Robert Tombs, France 1814-1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 353. 66 Dansette, Religious History,1:188.

that men [and women] ought to give pre-eminence in their lives to preparation for death and the afterlife to the conviction that they ought first and foremost to try to improve their and others’ lot on earth.”67

If contemplative monasticism were to revive, it would have to revive in a new way.

Hearkening back to the Middle Ages as a golden age helped provide romanticized support for the monastic revival, but that revival could not rely on the mechanisms for growth available to their forebears. A new form of contemplative monasticism was needed in the first half of the nineteenth century. The new form to fit the times in 1815 was the particularly austere form of Trappist monasticism that developed in exile during the Revolution. As we will see, it was with this austere form of monasticism that the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes and the monks of Melleray reinvigorated monastic life in a way that led to a more general monastic revival. This austere form of monasticism emphasized manual labor and that helped to rehabilitate the idea of monasticism by gaining the Trappists’ renown throughout nineteenth- century France as agricultural experts. It also allowed Trappistine nuns and Trappist monks to themselves rebuild their own monastic communities without the tithe rights and rents of former times.

This new form of monasticism would have to establish itself in the face of predominating cultural trends that sharply diverged from contemplative monastic life. It could no longer rely on general cultural support. Economic changes destabilized social relations in nineteenth-century France creating greater competition for resources.68 Steven

Vincent has observed that these changed relations became “intertwined with the growth of

67 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 299. 68 Tombs, France 1814-1914, 368. See also Peter McPhee, A Social History of France: 1789-1914, 2d ed. (Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan, 2004), 138.

self-interest, individualism, and ambition.”69 Ideas of selfhood started to change. Charly

Coleman has argued that a “culture of dispossession that valorized the human person’s loss of ownership over itself and external objects,” a culture very much in keeping with life under the Rule of Saint Benedict, had given way by the end of the eighteenth century to a “culture of self-ownership” in which personal autonomy became “an obligatory point of departure for thinking about the self.”70 This “self-ownership” could devolve into selfishness. As

Thomas Kselman has observed: “Any reader of Balzac is familiar with the [nineteenth- century French] social world in which professional success, conspicuous consumption, and power are the dominant values.”71 Contemplative monasticism as practiced by the Trappists ran directly counter to the culture of self-ownership as well as the dominant values of success and power that often, though not necessarily, flowed from it.72

There was, however, a cultural crosscurrent that developed force in the early nineteenth century—romanticism—that helped to re-valorize monasticism. But romanticism took time to affect popular culture with respect to religion and monasticism. As Chapters 2 will show, monasticism still faced strong cultural headwinds during the Restoration. Those headwinds only shifted after the July Monarchy came to power as the Romantic Movement and the valorization of religion it entailed began to make traction beyond the elite throughout

69 K. Steven Vincent, “Elite Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century France: Salons, Sociability, and the Self,” Modern Intellectual History 4:2 (2007): 351. 70 Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 3-4. See also Jan Goldstein, The Post- Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jerrod Seigel The Idea of Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 71 Thomas Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 107. The church recognized the value of poverty as a corrective. Ibid. 72 There were, of course, many positive things that flowed from the culture of self-ownership, not the least of which involved opening spiritual paths for many thoughtful people as Thomas Kselman has described in Conscience and Conversion.

French culture. Chapter 3 will explore that phenomenon.

B. Contours.

The nineteenth-century monastic revival in France started in exile during the

Revolution. In 1791, a group of 24 Trappists from the Abbey of La Trappe, led by their former novice master, Augustin de Lestrange, escaped the Revolution to reestablish monastic life in La Val Sainte, Switzerland. Other monks escaping France joined them. Women, mostly nuns from a variety of religious orders, who wanted to enter into (or continue) a rigorous monastic life also joined the Trappists and formed an associated Trappistine community at the nearby Sainte Volonté de Dieu.73 In Switzerland, the regrouped Trappists adopted regulations for a new form of monasticism that would largely govern the Trappist led monastic revival for the first two decades after 1815. With a descriptive but oppressively long title in French, this more than one thousand page-long set of rules is typically referred to as the Val Sainte regulations.74 These regulations severely limited food and sleep and increased heavy manual labor. The Val Sainte regulations devalued the health of the religious stating that “the solitaries must profess to make little of [their health], as of life itself ....”75 These were not standards for the faint hearted, but the monks conceived them during an existential crisis as a manner of reviving monasticism by returning to what the monks believed were its roots.

An assembly of the monks of Val Sainte under the guidance of Dom Augustin met during the summer of 1791 to go through the Rule of Saint Benedict and determine how to

73 Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 72-90. 74 The title in French is Règlements de la Maison-Dieu de Notre Dame-de-la-Trappe par Mr l’Abbé de Rancé, son digne Réformateur, mis en ordre et augmentés des usages particuliers de la Maison Dieu de La Valsainte de N.-D.-de-la-Trappe au canton de Fribourg en Suisse chosis et tirés par les premiers religieux de ce monastère, 2 vols. (Fribourg, 1794). 75 Val Sainte regulations, Vol. I, 191 (quoted in Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 75).

implement it. This was the basis for the Val Sainte regulations. Their proceedings were recorded and preserved in a report entitled Short History of the Establishment of the

Religious of La Trappe in Switzerland.76 The theme of returning to the twelfth-century golden age of Cistercian monasticism appears throughout this report. The report explicitly stated that the monks’ goal was “to imitate our first Fathers of Cîteaux, and to strive to revive the first spirit of the Order” in order to recreate “what took place in the first foundation [in the 12th century].”77 However, they only had a vague idea, molded by their own circumstances, of what took place almost 600 years earlier.78 As Jean Leclercq has written with respect to the romantic attraction to medieval monasticism, little was actually known in the nineteenth century concerning the life of twelfth-century monasteries. It took years of painstaking archival research in the twentieth century to clarify that picture.79 The monastic revival reflected in the Val Sainte regulations grew not from a historical understanding of the past, but from an assumption about the distant past informed by what the monks saw as the disastrous monastic decline they had witnessed in the late eighteenth century—a decline they sought to reverse.

They sought to reverse that decline through extreme asceticism and an annihilation of the egoic self. Two of the governing principles of the Val Sainte regulations, according to the Short History, were “blind obedience” in all things to overcome self-importance, and

76 John of Sada, Short History of the Establishment of the Religious of La Trappe in Switzerland, trans. Guadaloupe Translations (Monasterio Legerens: 1793) 77 Sada, Short History,10. 78 See Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 94 (the Trappists sometimes called the Val Sainte reforms that of “primitive” observance since to them it represented a return to the past, but that was a past according to Laffay that was “more or less mythic.”) 79 Jean Leclercq, “Le renouveu Solesmien et le renouveau religieux au XIXe siècle,” in Centenaire de Belloc (Urt, France: Éditions Ezkila, 1977), 76.

“great poverty: in dress, in buildings, in food ....”80 The food restrictions were some of the most extreme, as Dom Augustin himself acknowledged. The regulations state:

It seems that of all our practices, fasting and abstinence are those that strike worldly people as most revolting .... It is with a sort of horror that they generally pronounce these words: to live as a Trappist—to eat neither meat, nor fish, nor eggs, nor butter ... to eat only one time a day during half the year.... It would be tempting God, one seems to say, to undertake this.81

This restriction on eating was difficult for the monastics. For example, the Bishop of Nantes in a report from an 1828 visit to Melleray Abbey, which followed the Val Sainte regulations, found that it was the lack of food that most disturbed monks with whom he talked.82 Indeed,

Laffay stated that the Trappists’ alimentary restrictions served to establish their reputation for austerity in the nineteenth century.83 But sleep deprivation was also an ascetic practice inherent in the Val Sainte regulations that monastics found difficult. In the best of cases there was only six and three quarters hours allotted for sleep (in winter before work days), but less on many other days. Only four hours were allotted for sleep before feast days in the summer.84 Casimir Gaillardin, who spoke with many monks in preparation of his 1844 history of the Trappists, wrote that “the diminution of sleep was perhaps the most painful” of all ascetic practices monastics engaged in under the Val Sainte regulations.85

The nineteenth-century Trappists viewed their austerity as more than a means to discard “all that is selfish and turbulent and make way for the unapprehended Spirit of God,”

80 Sada, Short History, 26. 81 Quoted in Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 122. 82 Annales de l’Abbaye de Melleray, 3 vol., unpublished, 1:273-282 (reproducing the bishop’s report) (manuscript copy in Melleray Archives, stored at Cîteaux Abbey, Saint-Nicolas-lès-Cîteaux, France)(hereinafter Annales). Melleray monk Frère Hermeland (born René Bretonnière) prepared the handwritten Annales between 1884 and 1893. See undated letter from Frère Michel-Dominique, then librarian of Melleray Abbey, to the author. 83 Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 121. 84 Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 18. 85 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:48.

as a mid twentieth-century Trappist, Thomas Merton, eloquently described the goal of monastic asceticism.86 These nineteenth-century Trappists of the La Val Sainte mold saw in their material deprivation a way of atoning for their own sins and the sins of the society around them.87 They also saw personal poverty as necessary to expand their mission. The

Short History stated that “love of penance was not the only motive that made them live such a life; there was another motive .... The motive of charity, the desire to be useful to a greater number of souls thus procuring the means to receive more subjects [for the monastic life.]”88

This was the new monasticism—one calculated to succeed in a world of reduced resources available to support monastic living and one making up both for what the monastics’ perceived as the societal sin of dechristianization during the Revolution and for what they perceived as the decadence of the prevailing style of monasticism that had preceded that

Revolution.

For purposes of the nineteenth century monastic revival, the most significant alteration of the Rancé regulations by the monks of Val Sainte related to labor. The Rule of

Saint Benedict emphasized labor: “When they live by the labor of their hands, as our fathers and the apostles did, then they are really monks.”89 The monks of Val Sainte found justification in this to expand the time dedicated to labor over other activities, like sacred reading. “[T]he Holy Rule obviously seems to prefer work over many other exercises,” the monks’ reasoned, “[f]or the Rule does not say that then they are genuine monks if they read a great deal, but that they are genuine monks if they live by the labor of their hands.”90 While

86 Merton, Waters of Siloe, 3. 87 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 60. 88 Sada, Short History, 55. 89 The Rule of Saint Benedict in English, Timothy Fry ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981), Chapter 48, verse 8. 90 Sada, Short History, 57.

the Rancé reforms had limited choir religious to three hours of manual labor a day in light of the extension of divine offices over the years, the Val Sainte regulations extended this to an average of about five—six in summer, four and a half in winter and four during Lent.91 This expansion of the hours of labor came at the expense of lectio divina. The result, as an early biographer of Augustin de Lestrange noted, was “‘a spirituality simple and practical but intellectually poor.’”92

But simple and practical was what the exigencies of the times called for. It was by practical labor that Trappistine nuns and Trappist monks were able to resuscitate monastic life from the ashes of the Revolution, and it was by practical labor that they were able in many respects to overcome the bad name that a monasticism infected by commendatory abbacies had developed before the Revolution. Labor, particularly agricultural labor as we will see in the Chapter on Melleray, earned the Trappists nationwide respect even among non-Catholics and became a way in which the Trappists would seek to spread Christianity and the moral improvement that they believed monastic life bred.93

The community of Trappists and Trappistines under the guidance of Dom Augustin

91 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:50-53; Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 119-123. Lay monks worked many more hours. The practice of creating two tiers of monks, choir and lay (frère convers), dates back to the late eleventh century, with lay monks serving as the “backbone of the workforce.” Peter King, Western Monasticism: A History of the Monastic Movement in the Latin Church (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1999), 165. The Val Sainte regulations tried to eliminate the distinction by initially having choir and lay monks follow the same schedule. This became impractical since many lay monks could not read Latin well enough to participate in all the divine offices. But the Val Sainte regulations still emphasized that all monks, including choir, would engage in significant manual labor, while both classes of monks would also share a common dormitory and engage together in the time devoted to sacred reading. 92 Lucien Aubry quoted in Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 120. 93 A novel change to monasticism that Dom Lestrange implemented illustrates his desire to prove the modern utility of contemplative monasticism. He instituted a “Third Order” of religious attached to the monastery but living outside the enclosure and caring for young children and orphans without charge. The Third Order, however, was unprecedented within the Cistercian tradition, and it became controversial. In 1836, it would be eliminated, but in the early years of the nineteenth-century French monastic revival, it would provide a way to communicate the continued relevance of contemplative monasticism. Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 138-143.

stayed in La Val Sainte and in Sainte Volonté de Dieu for over six years. But in early 1798 with troops under control of the French Directoire threatening the Swiss border, Dom

Augustin took his communities of religious and began what became known as the “monastic odyssey” over the course of the next four years, first heading to Russia via Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia, and then bouncing around Lithuania and Poland before heading back to

Switzerland in 1801.94 Both before and during this monastic odyssey, Dom Augustin sent monks and nuns out to make new Trappist foundations in England, Bavaria, Belgium, Spain and Italy. He even attempted to set up a monastic community in North America.95

After the return to Switzerland, Dom Lestrange and the Trappists made tentative steps to come back to France.96 By offering to open a hospice for soldiers at a crucial pass in the

Alps between France and Italy, Dom Lestrange temporarily ingratiated himself with

Napoleon and again demonstrated his desire to make the Trappists appear to have the social utility that post-Enlightenment culture expected. This led Napoleon’s government to tolerate a few Trappists monasteries in France and elsewhere for a time. But in 1809, Napoleon decided to annex Rome, and when the Pope threatened to excommunicate him for this,

Napoleon invaded the Vatican and took the Pope prisoner. He then required all religious in

Italy to swear allegiance to the Emperor. At first the Trappists of La Cervara monastery

94 Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 221-249; Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 123-224. 95 Laffay’s biography of Dom Lestrange contains excellent illustrations of this spread of the Trappists abroad. 96 Even before Dom Lestrange’s attempt to re-establish a monastic presence in France, a community of monks and nuns living together in a double monastery re-established an unauthorized Trappist community outside of Paris from 1798-1811. Double monasteries of men and women were not unusual in medieval times, but were almost unknown in the early modern era. Little is known about this monastic community outside of a few police reports, some miscellaneous correspondence about them, and a surviving entry register. But from these sources we know that the community had to move locations a few times, that monks and nuns sang in choir together, and that from 1798-1811, 121 men and women entered this monastic community with 53 taking solemn vows. It appeared to be tolerated until Napoleon banned all Trappists in 1811. Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 303-318.

agreed, but then Dom Augustine intervened and induced them to retract the oath. Napoleon reacted by first issuing an arrest warrant for Dom Augustine, who fled to England, and then issuing an edict in 1811 banning all Trappists throughout his Empire.97

After the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815, however, the Trappists returned to France in force. By 1828, eighteen Trappist monasteries—twelve for men and six for women—had established themselves in France with populations that reached 175 monks at the largest of these monasteries, Melleray.98 Many of the Trappists came from monasteries established outside of France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, with monks of Melleray coming from Lulworth, a monastery in

England, and the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes initially coming (through the monastery of

Saint Raphael the Archangel) from one of the reestablished Swiss monasteries. There had been, however, a split in observances during the exile. The monks of the Belgian Trappist monastery of Darfeld had elected their prior, Eugène de Laprade, abbot over the objection of

Dom Lestrange.99 The new abbot reverted to the Rancé observances. Others followed.

Of the nineteen Trappist monasteries reestablished as of 1824 in France, seven followed the Rancé regulations rather than Val Sainte. But those monasteries that would be most instrumental in establishing the Trappist reputation in France for successful hard work followed the Val Sainte regulations. These included La Trappe, Melleray, and Notre-Dame des Gardes in western France as well as Aiguebelle and Maubec (originally Vaise) in

97 Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 325-343; Laffay, Dom Augustin de Lestrange, 343-365. 98 Dom Antoine Saulinier de Beauregard, Compte rendu par ordre de Sa Sainteté de l’état des Maisons de la Réforme de la Trappe établies en France, September 1828 (manuscript copy in the archives of Melleray Abbey where Dom Antoine was abbot). This report has also been published in Revue Mabillon, No. 111, (Juillet-Septembre 1938), 134-181 (hereafter Compte Rendu). 99 Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 329-333.

southeastern France.100 The geography of these monasteries reflected the geography of religious observance first outlined by Timothy Tackett. Taking the oath to the state required of constitutional clergy, Tackett concluded, reflected among other things “influence from the secular society in which [clergy] lived and worked.”101 Religious historians have found that areas of below average oath taking were above average in participation in Catholic religious observances like Easter communion. That inverse relationship continued throughout the nineteenth century.102 Comparing the map below of the 1824 monasteries to the map Tackett prepared of areas where oath taking did not predominate, we see that all the Trappists monasteries were located in areas of below median oath taking—the more religious areas— and grouped themselves especially in the religiously strong areas of western France in and around the Vendée:

100 Compte Rendu, 181. 101 Tackett, Revolution and Regional Culture, 56. 102 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 37-40; Kselman, “State and Religion,” 70.

Figure 1.1: 1824 Trappist Monasteries (Delpal, 63)

Figure 1.2: Map of Oath-taking (Tackett, 54)

The Trappists led the way for other monastic orders to reestablish themselves in

France. They had, according to Bernard Delpal, “saved male and female monasticism from

Revolutionary annihilation.”103 The Trappists’ vigorous revival, Delpal argued, “assured a type of French preeminence in the European monastic restoration.”104 By 1830, the Trappists were the principal monastic presence in France. But that meant, as Peter King has written, that there were at that time “no houses for men who wished to become monks without embracing the rigours of de Rancé or Lestrange.” 105 And there was nowhere to go for those who wanted to renew the tradition of monastic scholarship. That motivated Prosper

Guéranger to restore the Benedictine order in 1832 at Solesmes in the diocese of Le Mans, another area in which religious observance was relatively strong.106 Guéranger hearkened back to the Middle Ages for inspiration about scholarly and liturgical traditions, but he was encouraged by other romantic Catholics like Charles de Montalembert to establish a new strain of monasticism to fit the period.107 Although the two strains were different, the

Benedictines thus followed the Trappists in establishing a new form of monasticism to replace the discredited ancien régime monasticism that had been extinguished by the

Revolution.108

Other contemplative monastic orders also re-established French monasteries in the

103 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 6. 104 Ibid. As Anselm Le Bail wrote, the Trappists “retook possession of France” in the nineteenth century in a “fecund restoration” of monasticism. Anselm Le Bail, L’ordre de Cîteaux: “La Trappe” (Paris: Letouzey, 1924). 105 King, Western Monasticism, 339. 106 Prosper Guéranger, In a Great and Noble Tradition: The Autobiography of Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), Founder of the Solesmes Congregation of Benedictine Monks and Nuns, trans. and ed. David Hayes and Hyacinthe Defos du Rau (Gloucester: Gracewing, 2009) (introduction by Judith Bowen). 107Plongeron, “Comment restaurer un ordre,” 385-386. I adopt from Carol Harrison the description “romantic Catholic” as more meaningful to the modern ear than the more common term “liberal Catholic” used to describe the often ultramontane Catholics who sought to revive religion in France without government interference. Carol Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Post revolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014), 3. 108 Dom Antoine of Melleray had wanted to recruit Guéranger for Melleray in the late 1820s, but Guéranger did not want to give up his intellectual pursuits. Guéranger, Autobiography, 70.

nineteenth century but later than the Trappists.109 By 1861, the Trappist continued to be the dominant monastic order among men. A government census of French religious houses published that year listed over 1,200 Trappists compared to 673 monks in four other contemplative orders.110 But the Trappistines were no longer the predominant women’s contemplative order. The 1861 census listed a little over 700 Trappistines compared to over

1,600 Carmelites and about 1,200 Benedictine nuns with a total of women contemplatives that exceeded 4,900.111 Not all contemplative orders revived after the Revolution. For example, Cluny, which Patrick Sbalchiero described as the “[s]ymbol of the majesty and power of medieval monasticism,” was destroyed.112 The once powerful Cluniac Order, which had dwindled to 300 monks on the eve of the Revolution, never returned.113

Congregational service orders, particularly service orders of nuns, however, dominated the nineteenth-century French religious scene. This development fit with the

109 See Maurice Colinon, Guides des monastères: France, Belgique, Luxembourg (Paris: Guides Horay, 1983). Outside of histories of the Benedictines and Trappists, few published histories specific to the nineteenth century focus on the revival of other contemplative orders in France. In publishing her 2002 history of Dominican nuns, Barbara-Estelle Beaumont expressed surprise that no one had examined the nineteenth-century history of those nuns before. Barbara-Estelle Beaumont, La restauration des monastères de Dominicanes en France au XIXe siècle (Rome: Institutium historicum Fratrum praedicatorum, 2002), 5. 110 Recensement Spécial des congrégations de 1861 reproduced in relevant part in Charles Sauvestre, Les congrégations religieuses dévoilées (Paris: Achille Faure, 1867), 123-133. The other contemplative men’s orders listed were the Benedictines with 137 monks, the Carthusians with 155 monks, the Capuchins with 291 monks, and the Cistercians of ordinary observance with 95 monks. This census apparently includes French monks at the filiations of Aiguebelle in the French colonial territories of Algeria and Syria. Delpal lists the Trappists in France itself at around 900 based on this census. Delpal, Le silence des moines, 92 and note 5. 111 I am counting as women’s contemplative orders the Poor Claires, ordinary observance Cistercians, Carthusians, Dominicans, Carmelites, Bernadines, and Benedictines in addition to the Trappistines. There were a total of 90,000 women religious counted in this census, most of them congregational orders of nuns providing health care and teaching services. Sauvestre, Les congrégations religieuses, 123-133. Sauvestre’s book was framed as a warning to the public that religious were hijacking the education system. 112 Patrick Sbalchiero, Histoire de la vie monastique (Paris: Desclée, 2008), 208. The Cluniac Order and the Cistercians had vied for predominance among the monastic orders in the High Middle Ages. King, Western Monasticism, 159-193. 113 See Beales Prosperity and Plunder, 236 (number of Cluniacs on eve of Revolution).

French turn toward social utility as the measure of value. By 1861, the Trappists, while a prominent presence in France, only constituted about 7% of all French clergy.114 In contrast, by the latter half of the nineteenth-century, congregational orders of nuns constituted three- fifths of the French clergy, with about 135,000 nuns in 1878.115 They provided much of the health care and educational services in nineteenth-century France. There were also many male service orders such as the Dominicans, Jesuits, and Franciscans as well as the diocesan clergy. It is not remarkable that service orders predominated in nineteenth-century France where social utility had become an ingrained cultural value. What is remarkable is that the contemplative orders still made a comeback. We can explore how that happened by looking carefully at two examples—Notre-Dame des Gardes, with an emphasis on its revival during the Restoration, and Melleray, with an emphasis on its revival during last decade of the July

Monarchy.

114 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 92 and note 5. 115 Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminine, 308-10, 321.

CHAPTER 2 NOTRE-DAME DES GARDES116

Nowhere was the outset of the nineteenth-century French monastic revival more vigorous than at the Trappistine monastery of Notre-Dame des Gardes. The reestablishment of monastic life at that monastery provides a tangible demonstration of the depth of religious feeling coursing through France during the Restoration despite the continued decline of religious observance during this period. Notre-Dame des Gardes was in the vanguard of the

Catholic revival in France, a revival that started in the religiously devout area of western

France. The reinvigoration of monastic life there reveals the great sacrifices that women dedicated to bringing austere monasticism back to France were willing to make in the face of material and legal obstacles. By attracting a large number of recruits from throughout

France, particularly during the Restoration, the revival of monastic life at Notre-Dame des

Gardes demonstrates the desire of many French women to devote themselves entirely to the radically committed form of religious life found in nineteenth-century Trappist monasteries.

This reinvigoration of monastic life also highlights the important role a supportive community could play in the early stages of the monastic revival.

We have a window into the lives of the nuns who established Notre-Dame des

Gardes, and into what they valued, in the form of an unpublished, hand written memoir by one of their own, Soeur Victoire, entitled Premières Fleurs de N.-D. des Gardes (First

Flowers of Notre-Dame des Gardes). Together with the monastery’s detailed entry register,

Soeur Victoire’s memoir forms a community memory of the women whose devotion, hard work, and sacrifice (often at the cost of their lives) established Notre-Dame des Gardes as a

116 An earlier version of this chapter has been accepted for publication in Cistercian Studies Quarterly during 2020 under the title, “The First Flowers of Notre-Dame des Gardes and the Revival of Contemplative Nuns in Nineteenth-Century France.”

Trappistine monastery during its poverty stricken foundational years of 1818 to 1833.117

Soeur Victoire’s memoir is a “secondary discourse” to borrow the term used by Ranajit

Guha.118 It involves a discourse about attitudes and beliefs in addition to objectively verifiable external facts. Such discourses are, of course, subject to distortion by the point of view of the author. “There is nothing that historiography can do to eliminate the distortion,”

Guha observed, but it can “acknowledge such distortion as parametric ….”119 In her memoirs, Soeur Victoire not only attempted to preserve the memory of a difficult period in the monastery’s history, but she also recounted the history of that period with pride and with an eye to the virtues of her sisters who had died. What Soeur Victoire and her informants recalled, and Soeur Victoire chose to recount, even if inevitably distorted, gives us more than a factual account. It gives us a valuable picture of what the early nineteenth-century religious of Notre-Dame des Gardes admired and hence what helped draw them to religious life.

Notre-Dame des Gardes had been an Augustinian monastery, and pilgrimage destination, for over 200 years. It occupied a location that had long attracted the faithful.

According to legend, a statue of the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared in the eleventh

117Soeur Victoire Aubry, Premières Fleurs de N.-D. des Gardes, Notre-Dame des Gardes Archives, Saint Georges des Gardes, France (hereafter Premières Fleurs). Soeur Victoire, a lay nun, entered Les Forges in 1816 and then came to Notre-Dame des Gardes in February of 1821 where she died in 1857. Registre des Personnes qui sont entrée dans ce Monastere de Notre dame-des Gardes, Notre- Dame des Gardes Archives (hereinafter Registre d’entrée )(entry 153). From comments she made in her memoirs, it appears Soeur Victoire wrote them late in her life in order to ensure the early years at the monastery were not forgotten. It appears that, in particular, she wanted to ensure a memory of the mostly young women who died in those early years when Soeur Victoire was the infirmarian. She stated that her memoir was based on her personal knowledge as well as her interviews of some of the founding sisters who were there from late 1818 through early 1821. Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 55-56. Unfortunately, Soeur Victoire’s original manuscript is missing from the archives. It was recopied by hand and edited in 1964 by a member of the Notre-Dame des Gardes community, and only that 1964 hand written copy remains. The editor and copyist added some comments based on her review of other archival material and omitted small portions of Soeur Victoire’s account that she found inconsistent with the archival material. 118 Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 6. 119 Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 33.

century on the hill where Notre-Dame des Gardes is located not far from the city of Cholet.

The statue would disappear and reappear on different occasions. The local people interpreted this miracle as a call to build a chapel to the Virgin Mary on that hill, a hill that locals believed had formerly been the site of ancient Druid sacrifices. After various primitive chapels had been constructed, a more solid structure was erected in the early sixteenth century, and shortly thereafter the Augustinians established a monastery on the hill to tend the chapel.120 The monastery served as a pilgrimage destination in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a reputation for producing a variety of healing miracles.121

The Revolution abruptly ended the Augustinian use of Notre-Dame des Gardes.

After the abolition of monastic orders in 1790, the remaining Augustinians had to leave the monastery. In 1791, the district leader of the Revolutionary government and his troops pillaged Notre-Dame des Gardes.122 The area of the Mauges that encompasses Notre-Dame des Gardes became the focal point of the Vendée insurgency.123 And the region suffered the consequences. In 1794, Revolutionary troops (“les colonnes infernales” led by General

Turreau) ravaged this area of the Vendée, burning whole towns and villages and killing 60% of the entire population of Cholet.124 These incendiary tactics engulfed the Notre-Dame des

Gardes church, chapel and monastic buildings in fire.125 A few years later, from 1796-1798, the Revolutionary government auctioned off the properties belonging to Notre-Dame des

120 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 5, 9-12. 121 François Uzureau, “Les Miracles à Notre-Dame-des-Gardes,” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame des Gardes (Septembre 1898), 64-68 (summarizing extracts from a seventeenth-century manuscript recounting the many miracles attributed to Notre-Dame des Gardes). 122 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 59-60. 123 Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 19-20. 124 Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 191. See Anne Rolland-Boulestreau, Les colonnes infernales. Violence et guerre civile en Vendée (1794-1795) (Paris: Fayard, 2015). 125 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 61-62.

Gardes as separate parcels.126

Although the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy brought to power a government more sympathetic to religion than any since the Revolution, anti-clerical forces within the governing parliament refused to legally authorize contemplative monastic communities like the Trappists.127 Religious observance stagnated during the Restoration. Enlightenment writing remained popular, and popular artists often mocked religion. The government and clergy tried to reinstall religiosity with education aimed at inculcating religious beliefs and with revival missions, but this helped to create an anticlerical reaction.128 Henri Lacordaire, who reestablished the Dominican Order, asserted that during the Restoration the number of

Easter communions went down from eighty thousand to twenty thousand. Evaluating this claim, Adrien Dansette concluded: “These figures cannot be checked but, assuming the tendency they reflect to be true, the emptying of the churches and the contempt which threatened Catholicism illustrate the evil effects of the policy of making use of governmental and administrative means to promote religion.”129 Partly as a result of the Bourbon monarchy’s meddling in religious affairs, the July Monarchy came to power in 1830 on a wave of anti-clerical sentiment.130

Countering this general trend during the Restoration, the people of Les Gardes in the

Mauges sought to implement a religious revival without government aid. In October of

126 François Uzureau, “Notre-Dame des Gardes pendant la Révolution: Vente de la chapelle et du monastère,” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame des Gardes (December, 1900): 50-54. 127 Charles Pouthas, L’Église et les questions religieuses sous la monarchie constitutionnelle, 1814- 1848 (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1961), 162-163. Authorization did not occur until 1853 during the Second Empire. Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 11. 128 Dansette, Religious History, 1:189-198. 129 Dansette, Religious History, 1:202. 130 H.A.C. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830—1848, (London: Longman, 1988), 42, 303-304; Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France, (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1991), 103-112.

1815, two of them, Messieurs F. Blanchet and F. Martineau, purchased the charred and dilapidated church and some of the surrounding property. The community in and around Les

Gardes provided M. Blanchet funds to repair the church.131 The community, eager to rebuild

“their church,” also supplied free labor for the reconstruction.132 But with the clergy still decimated in the aftermath of the Revolution, the community had difficulty finding a priest to tend the church. M. Blanchet asked the Trappists, who had recently established

Bellefontaine Abbey not far from Les Gardes, for help in finding a priest, and the

Bellefontaine abbot wrote Dom Lestrange. Soon thereafter Dom Lestrange visited Les

Gardes. He assured the community that he would bring a group of Trappistines to Notre-

Dame des Gardes with a priest as chaplain to celebrate mass if the community in Les Gardes would purchase the rest of the monastery grounds and give them to the Trappistines. By

1817, the people of Les Gardes, a relatively poor area, had gathered additional funds to make the purchase.133

For the community of Les Gardes, reestablishing religious life at Notre-Dame des

Gardes would heal one of the open wounds left by the colonnes infernales. It would sanctify the resting place of the community members who had fought and died on the monastery’s grounds in the Vendée revolt. In digging new gardens, the nuns had discovered the bones of men who had been buried where they fought and died during the Vendée counterrevolution.134 Restoring a monastery would venerate the sacrifice these bones represented. In doing so, it would also restore a place of worship for the community to use, and it would bear homage to the intercessionary presence in Les Gardes of the Mother of

131 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 71-77. 132 Kervingant, La Vie sur la colline, 29. 133 Ibid. 134 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 42-44.

God—Notre-Dame des Gardes.135

The material sacrifices made by the local community to reopen their monastery after it had been destroyed in the Revolution also demonstrated the depth of their religious feeling and their desire to restore a sense of balance to their lives by resuming religious observance.

It may have also reflected a desire to erase the victory the Revolutionary government had achieved at the expense of their forebears, a victory that helped foster the ongoing cultural change in France from a Catholic country to one in which Catholicism competed with secularism and other religions. The brutal suppression of the Vendée revolt in the Mauges hardened the survivors against the Republicans who had sponsored that brutality.136 France remained very divided along religious lines throughout the nineteenth century, with that division being between Catholics who valued traditional religion and Republicans who valued secular reason with an arguably religious zeal. Ralph Gibson observed that in nineteenth-century France: “Republicans and Catholics were both, in their different ways, religious phenomena and the conflict between them could easily take on the bitterness of a religious war.”137 Re-establishing a monastic pilgrimage destination would be a victory in this culture conflict. Jean-Clément Martin has persuasively argued that the people of the

Vendée saw themselves and their expressions of faith as a counterbalance to the “impiety”

135After it reopened as a pilgrimage destination, Notre-Dame des Gardes recaptured its reputation for bringing about miraculous cures for those who made the pilgrimage. Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 194-202. The community must have been aware of the economic benefits that might come if the site were reestablished as a popular pilgrimage destination, but it is difficult to say that hope of economic benefits seriously competed with the spiritual benefits the population seemed to clearly see in the revival of the monastery. 136See Brégeon and Guicheteau, Vendée, 191. 137 Ralph Gibson, “Why Republicans and Catholics Couldn’t Stand Each Other in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion, Society, and Politics in France since 1789, eds. Frank Tallet and Nicolas Atkin (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 108.

that they believed had followed in the wake of the Revolution.138

When the Trappistines, initially ten nuns who transferred from the community of Les

Forges, took control of the monastery on August 7, 1818, they took over ruins next to the rebuilt church. Only a couple of rooms had been fully restored.139 Nevertheless, women flocked to the newly opened Trappistine monastery. Within two days, seven young women had come to join the monastery.140 A few days later a dozen nuns, led by Mère Thaïs, from the community of Begrolles (a short lived daughter house of Les Forges) transferred to

Notre-Dame des Gardes.141 Mère Thaïs was the religious name of Jeanne Magdelaine

Bassignot of Besançon. In 1796, at the age of 24, she jumped out of her bedroom window to flee her home and her abusive father. She then walked over 190 kilometers alone, traversing the Alps in sandals, to join the Trappistine enclave in Switzerland. 142 When Mère Thaïs led the nuns of Begrolles to Notre-Dame des Gardes, she brought with her a statue of the Virgin

Mary that she and the other nuns who had endured the monastic odyssey had carried throughout Europe during their exile from France. They called that statue, Notre-Dame qui a marché—Our Lady who Walked—because, as Mère Thaïs recalled, it had seemed miraculously to follow the sisters when they temporarily left it behind during their monastic odyssey through Europe.143

In the first three years, from August 1818 through October 1821, the entry register lists 181 women who came to immerse themselves in religious life at Notre-Dame des

138 Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire (1800-1980) (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 73. 139 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 117-119. 140Registre d’entrée, (entries 47-53). 141 Marguerite Marie Langumier, Histoire de L’Abbaye Notre-Dame des Gardes, Bicentenaire de l’arrivée des “trappistines” aux Gardes: 200 ans de vigilance—“Stans coram Deo”, unpublished manuscript (Notre-Dame des Gardes, April 30, 2018), 1-25 (hereinafter 200 ans de vigilance). 142 Registre d’entrée, (entry 2); Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 61-63. 143 Théophile, Histoire du sanctuaire, 128-129.

Gardes. Some soon died there and a number left (usually after having been asked to leave as a result of “lack of vocation” or for health reasons), but the population had boomed to 106 nuns by the end of 1821. The overall population in the first half of the nineteenth century fluctuated from a high of 106 to a low of 80, but by 1848, 565 women would have entered monastic life at Notre-Dame des Gardes.

These women chose lives of almost unimaginable poverty and hard work. Through

1833, Notre-Dame des Gardes followed the strict interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict found in the Val Sainte regulations, which insisted on great poverty among religious.144 But the extreme poverty confronting women who came to Notre-Dame des Gardes in the early years eclipsed even the poverty envisioned by the Val Sainte regulations. This poverty would have been unbearable but for the generosity of neighbors surrounding the monastery.

The first nuns had no beds and few covers. To reach their ramshackle living quarters, they had to climb a ladder. They often slept on tables, but their neighbors, themselves poor villagers, provided them straw for bedding. The walls of the cloister were tumbling in, and the great poverty of the sisters was at first little known in the surrounding community. But word got round, and the children of the town started bringing the sisters some wood they collected nearby, the occasional pail of milk for the sick, and containers of garden vegetables as well as water to cook with.145 “All of this help,” Soeur Victoire wrote, “barely sufficed to keep them from starving to death.”146 On Sundays, the village children brought enough piping hot cooked rice for each sister to have a portion at dinner. The editor of Soeur

Victoire’s memoirs noted that in memory of this fine gesture of support, the community of

144 Sada, Short History, 26. 145 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 33-35, 38. 146 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 35.

Notre-Dame des Gardes had cooked rice for Sunday dinner through at least the 1950s.147

The local community of Les Gardes appreciated the sanctity of the monastic women that had settled among them. We see this in the recollection of one of the children who brought food to the monastery and who later became a nun there. She recounted how the children of Les Gardes loved to bring food and other things to the monastery because they regarded the nuns “as saints.”148 This was not an unusual reaction to the presence of a

Trappistine community in nineteenth-century France. Bernard Delpal in his study found that local communities were often “seized with admiration” for the zeal with which nineteenth- century French Trappistines carried on their vocation.149

In accordance with the Val Sainte regulations, even when food was available, the sisters ate sparingly. On typical days during the part of the year when outdoor work was light (from late September until Easter), they only ate a single meal of soup without butter, vegetables with no seasoning besides salt and pepper, a morsel of bread and some water. In the other months, when manual labor became arduous, they would add to this a portion of soup for a second meal.150

This seems a small palliative given the heavy manual labor the sisters engaged in. As previously noted, the Val Sainte regulations emphasized labor of the hands. The regulations specifically addressed women religious:

[Nuns] will themselves prepare whatever food is necessary, weave their own cloth, make their habits and mend their worn clothing, etc. With their own hands they will cultivate their gardens, do their polishing, sweeping, washing etc. They will do their own laundry, clean out the stables and cart the manure to the garden, and, in a word, they will do all the meanest and most

147 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 35 and footnote. 148 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 35. 149 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 275. 150 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 36.

humiliating tasks.151

The poverty of those early years while the nuns tried to re-establish monastic life at Notre-

Dame des Gardes, however, gave the sisters no choice but to again exceed what even the Val

Sainte regulations envisioned.

When they could gather the means, often by skimping on their own material needs, the sisters hired masons to rebuild the monastery. But this required the choir and lay nuns to work together to unearth stones and sand and cart them to the masons so they could do their job. Soeur Victoire’s memoir often described nuns like Soeur Placide, a choir nun, who

“worked like a man” extracting stones from the garden.152 Soeur Geneviève, a lay nun, was also one of these: “One put in her hand a pickax ... and other tools usually made for men, and she went right to part of the garden to break up the ground and extract the stones found throughout that area.”153 Once, according to Soeur Victoire, Soeur Geneviève worked for twenty-four hours straight to bring cartloads of stones to the masons.154 The sisters brought the same work ethic to agriculture. Choir and lay nuns working together cultivated two large fields by clearing the fields of brush and rocks, plowing them, and then planting them.155

In order for these nuns to make a sustainable living in this nineteenth century rural area, they needed land to cultivate. They again relied on the local community—both women and men—for help procuring land for cultivation and leasing. In 1818, as mentioned above, the community of Les Gardes purchased the monastery grounds for the nuns. In 1824, one

151 Règlements de la Maison-Dieu de Notre-Dame-de-la Trappe par Mr l’Abbé de Rancé, son digne réformateur, mis en nouvel ordre et augmentés des usages particuliers de la Maison-Dieu de La Valsainte de Notre-Dame-de-la Trappe au Canton de Fribourg en Suisse, 2 vols. (Fribourg, 1794), 2:133 (quoted in Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 105). 152 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 144. 153 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 165. 154 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 165. 155 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 42-43.

of their own, Sister Marie–Joseph Levacher, provided funds from her inheritance for the purchase about 25 hectares of land. Other benefactors who provided land included two local widows and the Abbot of Bellefontaine on behalf of his community.156 The community also made land purchases with donations from Mlle. Zénobie-Reine d’Escoubleau de Sourdis.

Mlle. de Sourdis came from an aristocratic family in the Vendée. After she had financially supported the monastery for more than a decade, she joined the sisters as a postulant at the age of 50 in 1838, and there she died in the habit of a novice as Sister Febronie 10 years later.

With the help of Mlle. de Sourdis and Sister Marie-Joseph, between 1824 and 1837, the monastery purchased 133 hectares of farmland, of which the sisters directly cultivated a portion and leased out the rest to local farmers.157

In addition to land, the Notre-Dame des Gardes community needed habitable buildings. The rebuilding of their dormitory space, which was completed in 1821, did not solve their housing needs. The renovated dormitory proved to be a damp and unhealthy place. Nuns would wake up to find their bed covers wet from the damp that seeped in through the dormitory walls. And it was too small for the great numbers who had come to the monastery. So many sisters were crowded into this small living space that the beds touched, and there were no curtains or drapes to keep out the cold.158

With cramped and humid quarters and meager food, many of the nuns soon succumbed to tuberculosis. Soeur Victoire’s memoir of the nuns who died in this period does not typically provide a diagnosis, but it almost always mentions chest pain and often the coughing of blood—a telltale sign. Each year from 1821 through 1825, a dozen nuns died of

156 Etat détaillé de la Communauté de N.D. des Gardes, Mars 1886, 2-8, Notre-Dame des Gardes archives. 157 Langumier, 200 ans de vigilance, 6 and n. 28. 158 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 38.

TB or other ailments. That is a total of 60 sisters in only five years.159 Despite this, women continued to seek entrance to the monastic community at a rapid rate, and by the time Dom

Antoine of Melleray, who assumed a leadership position among the Trappists after Augustine de Lestrange’s death in 1827, took a census of Trappist monasteries at the request of the

Holy See in 1828, the overall population at Notre-Dame des Gardes was only down to about

80 nuns.160

In her memoir, Soeur Victoire noted that “death frequently visited Notre-Dame des

Gardes” in the 1820s. Her memoir traced the life and death of most of the nuns who died at that time. Death was not unwelcome. A great number left “this life for one better,” according to Soeur Victoire, and “this always occurred with a peaceful soul in the ineffable and sweet joy given to one with a good conscience.”161 The Trappists’ insouciant, even welcoming, attitude toward death is the characteristic of these religious that seemed to strike the nineteenth-century French public most forcibly.162 One of the most well known of

Trappist sayings, found in iconography and souvenirs from the eighteenth century through the nineteenth, was: “It is hard to live as a Trappist, it is sweet to die as one.”163 While the

Trappist attitude toward death repelled some people, it must have been part of the attraction that devout women saw in pursuing the Trappistine life. They may well have seen a world gone wrong with the decline of traditional religious observances and with the devastating wars of the Revolution and Empire. Here was a place where one could prepare for a better world, the world after death that offered eternal life with God. As Yvonne Turin concluded

159 Registre d’entrée, (entries 1-276). 160 Compte rendu, 142. 161 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 48. 162 Laffay, 124; Delpal, 390; Henry Redman, Jr., “Beleaguered Monasticism and Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé,” PLMA 74:5 (December 1959): 548. 163 Delpal, 390 n. 2.

with respect to the nineteenth-century French congregational nuns she studied, “they decided that only preparation for eternal life made sense of their life here below.”164

Soeur Victoire’s memoir evidenced this welcoming attitude toward death and the belief that the nuns’ difficult lives prepared them well for it. It served both to validate the community’s spirituality and to celebrate those who died, following in the long tradition of martyrologies. The memoir described the death of Soeur Marie-Bernard, who at 22 entered the monastery in 1819 and died little more than a year later. “God was eager to reward her,” the memoir stated, “for she lived but a little time.”165 Soeur Agnes, who died in 1822 at the age of 25, was remembered as “inflamed with the purest and keenest desire for death—to see soon her Beloved Jesus face to face in heaven.”166 The last words of Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation indicate her Trappistine life had prepared her for death: “I am no longer afraid at the thought of God’s judgment. I have the sure confidence of seeing and belonging to

Him.”167 It was their “hard work,” Soeur Victoire wrote, and the “overwhelming weariness” that such work brought “that procured [for the sisters who had died] salvation, life, and eternal repose.”168

In the late 1820s and 1830s, as the community put more land into cultivation, its situation stabilized. They improved their dwelling space and their source of water. The death rate abated to an average of about five a year, and they were able to maintain a population that averaged 90 nuns throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.169 Their high death rate, however, raised concern within the Trappists, and Dom Antoine in his 1828

164 Yvonne Turin, Femmes et religieuses au XIXe siècle: le féminisime “en religion” (Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1989), 204. 165 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 96. 166 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 132. 167 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 150. 168 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 271. 169 Registre d’entrée, (entries 1-565).

report to the Pope argued that the health problems Notre-Dame des Gardes had experienced showed that the nuns needed to moderate their observance of the La Val Sainte regulations.

He said the La Val Sainte rules were too austere for women. He even reported to the Pope that at the request of the Bishop of Angers and the Bishop of Séez, he had provisionally ordered the nuns to moderate the severity of their observance.170 The nuns at Notre-Dame des Gardes, however, demonstrated their attachment to the rigors of the life they had chosen—and a penchant for independence—by declining to follow this order.171

Surprisingly, at least from a twenty-first century perspective, the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes seemed to experience a sense of joy and contentment in their rigorous life. Soeur

Victoire recalled that her sisters had “a smiling air” during their work and, despite fatigue, were “always joyous, always content.”172 There is reason to believe that this was more than a rose colored recollection of the past. Marie de la Trinité Kervingant found the same expressions of joy in and contentment with monastic life under the Val Sainte regulations in the correspondence of the nuns who were at Saint Volonté de Dieu twenty-five years earlier.173

The idea that self-abnegation would open the way to union with God, both in the next life and in this one, underlay the spirituality that drew women to Notre-Dame des Gardes and formed the subtext of their monastic life. As another nineteenth-century Trappist has written,

“we came here to find this solitude, this poverty, this humble work, this penitence” in

170 Compte Rendu, 143. 171Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 55. Five years later, however, in 1833 it became clear to the sisters that the rigors the Val Sainte rules were leading to too many health difficulties, and so they modified them. Ibid. 172 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 43. 173 Kervingant, Monastic Odyssey, 110-116.

response to “our Lord’s call to follow Him in his hidden life .…”174 Mère Thaïs, in her role as novice mistress, would tell the women who came to the monastery that when they left the world behind they were still full of “amour propre.” But the asceticism of the monastery would help wean them from this excessive self-esteem so they could fully embrace their love of God and God’s love for them.175 To take this journey to union in divine love, they needed

“complete self-renunciation, profound humility, courageous suffering.”176 She would tell novices: “it is by suffering and by accepting humiliations that we prove the force and sincerity of our love.”177

Humility fostered by daily abnegation of the will was the virtue most highly valued by nineteenth-century French nuns, congregational as well as contemplative.178 This spirituality is reflected in Soeur Victoire’s description of sanctity: “[T]he science of the saints consists in love of God, disregard of oneself, desire to experience humiliations, the practice of silence and perpetual prayer through a great mortification of body and spirit, and a profound self-annihilation before God.”179 Many of the “first flowers” of Notre-Dame des

Gardes as described by Soeur Victoire exemplified this standard. Soeur Marie de la Croix’s

“absolute detachment from all things, her total abandonment to the hands of her superiors showed the grandeur of her virtue.”180 Soeur Marie des Anges earned praise for being “dead to herself.”181 Soeur Louise, regarded by the monastic community as a saint during her short

174 Charles de Foucauld, “Cette chère dernier place”: Lettres à mes frères de la Trappe, annotated by A. Robert (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 103. 175 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 58. 176 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 59. 177 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 73. 178 Turin, Femmes et religieuses, 270-271. See also Odile Arnold, Le corps et l’âme: la vie des religieuses au XIXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1984). 179 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 199. 180 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 190. 181 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 172.

life, “edified her companions by her patience, her humility, her sweetness, and her true submission ....”182 Mère Hedwige exemplified humility. She had been the Superior at Les

Forges, but she humbled herself at Notre-Dame des Gardes where she lived “in self forgetfulness and humility, hidden among the other religious, resting in an unalterable peace.”183

The spiritual disciplines of humility, self-abnegation, silence, and prayer together with the physical asceticism inherent in heavy manual labor, regulation of diet, and limitation of sleep created a clear distinction between the monastic community and the dominant culture that the faithful often perceived as corrupt. It was a distinction that the people of the

Mauges had to appreciate. They largely retained their faith during and after the Revolution, but in most of France, the dechristianization activities of the Revolution were followed by a continued decline in religious observance under Napoleon that persisted during the

Restoration.184 In the wake of the Enlightenment and Revolution, much of nineteenth- century French society also inherited the emphasis on individualism described in Chapter

One. The nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes, in contrast, sought self-effacement instead of the individuality and self-autonomy developed in the wake of the Enlightenment. While power, material success, and conspicuous consumption dominated the social world of the elite in

France, these women lived lives of intentional poverty, humility, and obedience. No wonder the people of Les Gardes considered the nuns to be saints. They provided a strong counterbalance to a seemingly dominant culture that distressed many of the faithful of

182 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 143-144. 183 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 109. 184 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:12-19, 23-28; Dansette, Religious History, 1:189-202. The religious revival in France did not come into full fruit until, paradoxically, after the Catholic Bourbons were replaced in 1830 with the largely anti-clerical July Monarchy. Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:90-98; Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 11. This is discussed in more depth in Chapter 3.

western France.

The nuns’ spiritual disciplines were aimed at fostering an intense personal connection with God and through this connection achieving salvation. But the goals of these disciplines were not simply personal. In the wake of the societal traumas and cultural change produced by the Revolution, the idea that suffering could help expiate the sins of an unbelieving society, an idea with obviously deep roots in Christianity, gained particular salience in nineteenth-century France.185 Richard D.E. Burton referred to this as “mystical substitution.”186 This concept of “mystical substitution” is reflected in an admonition given by the Father confessor to the Trappistines of Notre-Dame des Gardes: “My dear sisters, you eat the sins of all mankind, accordingly your primary obligation is to pray for all sinners.”187

Soeur Victoire wrote that this inspired the sisters “to make honorable amends to [Jesus] for all the irreverences, all the crimes committed against this admirable Victim of our altar.”188

Yet we should not overemphasize the role of “mystical substitution” in the spirituality of the

Notre-Dame des Gardes community. Soeur Victoire never again mentions it in her extensive recollection of the spiritual lives of her sisters. Moreover, in those visitation reports from the early nineteenth century still retained in the Notre-Dame des Gardes archives (and still legible), the father-visitor includes a section on penitence that only discusses personal penitence aimed at correcting those personal faults that impede a nun’s spiritual life in

185 See Elizabeth Everton, “Expiatory Victims of Modern Crisis: Christian Feminism, the Bazar de la Charité Fire, and the Politics of Suffering,” French Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2019): 453- 482; Richard D.E. Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Paula M. Kane, “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 80-119. 186 Burton, Holy Tears, Holy Blood, xvi. 187 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 52. 188 Ibid.

community.189

The Trappistines’ spiritual disciplines were also rooted in charity. Charity, one of the virtues taught by Mère Thaïs, has always been an underlying goal of Cistercian poverty. For the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes, this implied both a charitable attitude toward one another in their community, which the annual visitations would check on, and charity toward the greater community outside the monastery. While in the early days of Notre-Dame des

Gardes, the sisters were too poor themselves to provide funds or food to the poor of their community, they did provide—despite their poverty—medication and education in a rural area where both were grossly lacking. In 1824, a response to an inquiry from the departmental subprefect stated that Notre-Dame des Gardes had a pharmacy at which “they furnished without charge remedies for the poor in accordance with doctors’ orders.”190 In

1818, the community of Notre-Dame des Gardes, like other Trappistine houses, established a third order of nuns, who were supported by the monastery but provided services outside of the cloister. They established a school outside of the monastery to provide education without charge. The same 1824 response referred to above stated that the third order nuns of Notre-

Dame des Gardes had 14 students in regular school classes and provided 60 to 80 students instruction outside of the regular school.191 This occurred in a diocese where two thirds of the towns had no schools at all in 1815.192 Several sisters of the third order were also sent

189 See e.g. Carte de visite faite au Monastère de N.D. des Gardes en l’année 1843 pour celle de 1842, p. 3, Notre-Dame des Gardes archives. 190 Untitled response of the Notre-Dame des Gardes community to the Mayor of Saint-George in answer to inquiries by the subprefect of Beaupréau dated September 4, 1824, (hereinafter “1824 response”) côte 30, pièces 1 and 2, La Trappe Abbey archives (Soligny-La-Trappe, France). 191 Ibid. 192 François Lebrun, Histoire de Diocèse d’Angers: L’Anjou chrétien des origines à nos jours (Paris: Beauchesne, 1981), 184

out in pairs in 1824 and 1825 to create schools throughout the region.193

The spirituality of the Trappistines and their radically austere lives drew women from throughout France to monastic life at Notre-Dame des Gardes and its predecessor Les Forges.

Geographic diversity marked the first five years in particular. While many in the years from

1816 through 1821 came to enter monastic life from the Pays de Loire (the general region encompassing Notre-Dame des Gardes) or Lower Normandy (the general region encompassing Les Forges), about as many came from elsewhere in France. There were some from the religiously devout areas of Brittany as one might expect, but many women who came from the far reaches of France to enter monastic life with the Trappistines. Over fifteen women came from the easternmost regions of France bordering Germany and Switzerland, far from the western Pays de Loire. There were also women from the southern Languedoc region near Spain, women from northern France in Picardy as well as women from more central regions like Burgundy and the Center, the region surrounding Blois. Three women, in separate years, came from Paris, a city in which religious observance was in particular decline. There were also women from the next largest city, Lyon and its surrounding area, and many came from the largest city in the Pays de Loire, Nantes. Most, however, came from small villages.194

The wide geographic distance from which the monastery attracted women during these first five years tends to confirm Soeur Victoire’s observation that “the Trappistines of des Gardes enjoyed a great renown at that time,” a renown she attributed to “the austerities and the sanctity of their lives.”195 But it also indicates a hunger among the devout in France

193 Langumier, 200 ans de vigilance, 7. 194 Registre d’entrée, (entries 1-181). See also Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:23-27 (discussing religious observance around 1815 by region, including the Paris basin). 195 Soeur Victoire, Premières Fleurs, 92.

to find a place where they could dedicate their lives completely to God while it may have appeared to many of them that the country was becoming increasingly secular. By the late

1820s, entrants came more and more predominantly from the west, the Pays de Loire and

Brittany. By the 1830s, recruits came predominantly from the Maine and Loire—the region in which Les Gardes is located. Opportunities for female monastic life had by then expanded across France with the re-establishment of Benedictine and Carmelite monasteries for women in addition to the growth of Trappistine houses making a variety of closer monastic options available. Nevertheless, Notre-Dame des Gardes continued to attract a few women from the far corners of France throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, although with much less frequency than in the early years.196

The socio-economic background of these women exemplifies the new monasticism’s link to productive labor. The nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes, even the choir nuns who required some educational background, came predominantly from the working class, mainly farmers and artisans. The lay nuns, as might be expected, had fathers who worked as sharecroppers or small farmers or in one of the host of artisanal occupations that life required before industrialization. But even among the choir nuns there were more daughters of sharecroppers than daughters of proprietaires or rentiers who leased their land. And there were more daughters of small, independent farmers than either sharecroppers or proprietaires. There were also daughters of lawyers, teachers, merchants, and military officers among the choir nuns, but far more choir nuns came from families supported by artisans or tradesmen like innkeepers and bakers.197 In the period studied here, only Mlle. de

196 Registre d’entrée, (entries 182-565). 197 Registre d’entrée, (entries 1-565). The entry register for women’s monasteries, unlike that of men’s, typically identifies socio-economic position by reference to the father’s occupation. Only occasionally, for older entrants, is the woman’s occupation mentioned. On the few occasions that

Sourdis came from a noble family, and as mentioned above, she joined the monastery very late in her life. The monastery did not receive any meaningful amount of income from dowries.198 These socio-economic characteristics distinguish the nineteenth-century monastic revival from the last French revival of ascetic monasteries for women that occurred in the seventeenth century when the Carmelites and Ursulines came to France. Elite women from noble families who found favor at court and whose family wealth subsidized their convents drove that efflorescence of ascetic monasticism.199

For a nineteenth-century French woman, joining a women’s religious community provided an opportunity for initiative and community life largely unconstrained by men.

Women in early nineteenth-century France were often characterized as the “weaker sex,” and the patriarchal French society, including the patriarchal Church, expected women to be passive and to rely on men outside of the limited domestic sphere of home.200 Nineteenth- century French women certainly worked hard, both at home, on farms, and in factories, but their work tended to be directed by or undertaken for men.201 Trappistine nuns like those at

Notre-Dame des Gardes, on the other hand, took charge of their own affairs and worked for the benefit of their own community of sisters. They asserted independent physical and spiritual strength in manual labor, in long hours of religious observance, and in radical self- discipline. Although their superior was answerable to the male hierarchy within the

Cistercian order (and after 1833 to the local bishop) and although the nuns themselves happened in the Notre-Dame des Gardes register, the woman’s previous job was often as a domestic or washer-women, and occasionally as a teacher. 198 See 1824 response (it only received income from the “mediocre” dowries of four nuns). 199 Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16-17. 200 Arnold, Le corps et l’âme, 8 (preface by Jean-Pierre Peter); Ford, “Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe,” 169. 201 See James F. McMillan, France and Women 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63-78.

depended on a priest to provide sacraments and to celebrate Mass, the women of Notre-Dame des Gardes were largely free to develop their own religious community within the rules (both

Saint Benedict’s and through 1833 the Val Sainte regulations) they chose to live under.202 In her study of nineteenth-century congregational nuns, Yvonne Turin described the choice of religious life as “an occasion for liberty at the same time as a spiritual call.” Congregational nuns, according to Turin, revived a form of life that “they themselves elaborated.”203 The same could be said for Trappistines. In reviving monastic life, they had strict boundaries, but they were free to elaborate the way in which their community would lead that life within those chosen boundaries.

Notre-Dame des Gardes answered a spiritual call that the many women who entered its gates sought to follow. It may also have answered a call to step outside of a male dominated culture into a community of like-minded women. Yet the many women who chose to enter Notre-Dame des Gardes to become Trappistine nuns had less demanding choices available to them if they wanted to enter religious life, or if they simply wanted to avoid a stifling marriage or a restricted home life. Congregational service orders of nuns proliferated in France during the nineteenth century. The rigors of life as a Trappistine nun following the

Val Sainte regulations were far greater than those of the congregational orders, and the

202 Bernard Delpal has emphasized the de jure subordination of women’s houses within the Church hierarchy at this time. He found this subordination weighed heavily on the Trappistines of Maubec. Delpal, Le silence des moines, 132-133. But one does not find a similar sentiment in the histories of Notre-Dame des Gardes written by the monastery’s nuns. While Dom Antoine’s report to the Holy See clearly shows conflict between Dom Antoine and the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes, particularly over their choice to follow the Val Sainte regulations, the fact that the Notre-Dame des Gardes community continued to follow those regulations over Dom Antoine’s objections for five more years demonstrates that, in important ways, they controlled the way they conducted their monastic vocation. 203 Turin, Femmes et religieuses, 51-52. This freedom to develop a religious life largely independently from men has been written about in the context of other nineteenth-century French congregational nuns by Sarah Curtis and Caroline Ford among others. See Curtis, Civilizing Habits, 3; Ford, Divided Houses, 6-9.

contemplative orders did not offer the opportunity for societal engagement the congregational orders provided. In addition, the congregational orders did not face the legal and economic disabilities that contemplative monastic orders had to overcome in early nineteenth-century France.204 But the contemplative Trappistines felt they had advantages.

“If we compare,” one of the Notre-Dame des Gardes chaplains said, Trappistines to the congregational orders who were “living in the world, ... what a preference in our favor! We have neither children to instruct nor the sick to care for nor the old to help; God has asked of us one thing only, the only requirement he gave to Mary and not to Martha: to love him, to contemplate him, and to create heaven here below.”205

In the early years of the monastery reviewed here, women came from across France to take the part of Mary by leading a contemplative life in which they abandoned themselves to God. The fact that so many women chose to enter lives of poverty, silence, manual labor and continuous prayer as Trappistine nuns at Notre-Dame des Gardes when less demanding alternatives were available testifies to the depth of religious fervor in France at the time. The revival of feminine monastic life during the Restoration fulfilled a desire of many women to enter a cloistered community. The austerity of the Trappistines proved particularly attractive.

The softness, to the point of rot, that Enlightenment writers depicted in ancien régime monasteries had no place at Notre-Dame des Gardes. There the vow of poverty and the work of self-emptying to enable spiritual union with God were authentic pursuits. Such authenticity created an attractive aura of sanctity, as Soeur Victoire observed, that drew

204 In contrast to contemplative communities, Claude Langlois has observed that the congregational orders “incontestably benefitted from the aid” of those in power in France during the nineteenth century. Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminine, 632. 205 Anonymous, “Dom Edouard Chaix,” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame des Gardes (Mars- Avril-Mai 1902): 11-12 (quoting Dom Edouard Chaix, the late nineteenth-century chaplain of Notre- Dame des Gardes,).

women from across France.

But the return to authentic monasticism could not have been sustained at Notre-Dame des Gardes without the active support of the local community. Not all revived monasteries enjoyed such support, as we will see with Melleray, but local support at Les Gardes arose from a desire to erase the effects of Revolutionary dechristianization and to reinvigorate a religious tradition that many in the region had fought and died for during the Vendée revolt.

That support was of a kind significantly different than ancien régime monasteries had received. Gone were the large dowries and extensive bequests to support masses for the dead. Gone too were the extensive rents for large swaths of property. But the sacrifices the community of Les Gardes made to help rebuild the monastery and provide what little material support they could to the nuns proved invaluable to the revival of the Trappistines at

Notre-Dame des Gardes. Invaluable, also, were the local women who chose to dedicate their lives as nuns at the monastery. With that help, the revival of a new form of monasticism, a poorer and more laborious form than in pre-Revolutionary monasteries, succeeded at Notre-

Dame des Gardes.

CHAPTER 3 NOTRE-DAME DE MELLERAY206

Melleray Abbey was the most successful of the Trappist monasteries in the first half of the nineteenth century from the point of view of the number of recruits and the reputation it engendered, particularly for agricultural prowess. Melleray went through two distinct phases in this period. During the Restoration, mostly English and Irish monks came to

Melleray, bringing with them advanced agricultural techniques that both earned the Trappists a reputation as agricultural experts and disaffected some of their neighbors who resented the competition. The July Monarchy virtually shut down Melleray Abbey from late 1831 through late 1838. When it fully reopened, after the intervention of the papal nuncio, it experienced remarkable growth through the last ten years of the July Monarchy, fueled this time by Frenchmen. Its growth spilled over into foreign foundations. This chapter will focus on the Trappist revival at Melleray in the last decade of the July Monarchy after a summary of the monastery’s background and its re-establishment under the Bourbons.

A. Background and re-establishment under the Bourbons.

A group of monks from the Abbey of Pontron established Melleray Abbey in

1145.207 They located the monastery between the port city of Nantes, on the Loire River near its Atlantic mouth, and Châteaubriant, the departmental capital. This location is within the canton of Moisdon-le-Rivère, a largely wooded, rocky, and sparsely populated region at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An agronomist dubbed this canton the “Siberia of

206 Portions of this chapter have been previously published. See Jay Butler, “From Melleray to Gethsemani: Spreading Cistercian Spirituality in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2018): 73-95. 207Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:382–383.

Brittany” because of the difficulty of conducting agricultural activities there.208

Melleray remained a Cistercian monastery until the Revolution.209 By that time, like many monasteries, Melleray had large landholdings and extensive buildings but only seven monks governed by an absentee commendatory abbot. After the dissolution of monastic orders, a couple of the monks stayed on into 1792 on condition that they not ring their bells or openly celebrate Mass, but they were gone by mid-September 1792 when the Joué national guard pillaged and ransacked the abbey. The revolutionary government thereafter sold the abbey grounds at auction along with those of all other monasteries.210 Melleray’s former cantor, Jean Lemaître, was caught up in the violent de-Christianization activities of

1793. He was arrested and imprisoned in Guyenne where he died in 1798.211 From the expulsion of the last Melleray monks in 1792 until after the fall of Napoleon I in 1815,

Melleray Abbey lay abandoned as a monastery.

With the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, France became a more welcoming place for monastics. Meanwhile, England had become less welcoming to Trappists. Two monks from Dom Lestrange’s abbey of La Val Sainte in Switzerland had established

Lulworth Abbey in England during the Revolution. But after the conclusion of the

Napoleonic wars, England’s minister of the interior, Lord Sydmouth, required the primarily

British and Irish monks of Lulworth Abbey to leave the country.212 Dom Antoine, the Abbot

208 Marius Faugeras, “Les Trappistes de Melleray, pionniers de l’agriculture moderne dans la premiere moitie du XIXe siècle,” Enquêtes et documents, 3 (Nantes: Centre de recherches sur l’histoire de la France atlantique, 1975): 173. 209 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 382-383. 210 Courson, “L’Abbaye de Melleray avant la Révolution,” 42; Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:383. 211 See Courson, “L’Abbaye de Melleray avant la Révolution,” 43; Bouvet and Gallicé, Notre-Dame de Melleray, 41. 212 A disaffected monk had spread rumors about the harshness of life at Lulworth, and that turned much of the local population against the monastery. See “Julia Woodforde and the Trappist Monk,” The Sphere, November 21, 1934.

of Lulworth, came to Melleray to investigate the availability of the former monastery. He purchased the Abbey buildings, and a local aristocrat, Madame Rousseau de la Meilleraye, gave him two large domains formerly belonging to the Abbey that she had purchased during the Revolution.213

On July 10, 1817, Dom Antoine returned to France with fifty-nine Trappist monks from Lulworth on a frigate provided by Louis XVIII named “Revenge.”214 Within the political context of Restoration France, however, Melleray Abbey’s status was tenuous. As noted above, the Trappists remained unauthorized by French law. Trappist monasteries existed, therefore, at the sufferance of the authorities. Regardless of their tenuous legal status, the monks set to work in earnest to restore the monastery. In the following few years, they completed an enormous amount of work, renovating their church, establishing vast gardens, buying adjacent woods, and building a brewery, a tannery, and a forge.215

By 1828, according to Dom Antoine’s report to the Holy See, Melleray’s population had ballooned to 175 of whom 50 were choir monks and the rest were lay monks together with some frère donnés.216 About half of the monks were Irish and English.217 Delpal emphasizes that lay monks in nineteenth-century Trappist monasteries were members the religious community, not simply “domestics or religious of a subsidiary status.”218 The Val

213 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:73-74, 91-97, 381-382, 384; Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:295 and note 6. Dom Antoine obtained the resources to purchase the monastery buildings from a combination of funds provided by a leading English Catholic family, the Welds, and from funds the monks of Lulworth had accumulated from their agricultural enterprises. Compte-Rendu, 139. 214 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:295; Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:386. 215 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:296. 216 Compte-Rendu, 139. Frère donnés were usually men of advanced age or former postulants who could not adapt to the rigorous schedule of the monastery and, “often inconsolable at this failure,” as Delpal described them, decided to live their lives on the periphery of the community. They could not wear habits, but they would participate in some of the offices and perform some of the labors on a reduced schedule. Delpal, Le silence des moines, 104. 217 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes 1:301; 1:296. 218 Delpal, Le silence des moines,103.

Sainte regulations had attempted to abolish the distinction between lay and choir monks by increasing the manual labor responsibilities of choir monks, by ensuring that both classes of monks shared some common parts of the day (particularly lectio divina), and by housing all monks in a common dormitory.219 But lay monks often did not possess the knowledge of

Latin needed to chant the offices of the day. Accordingly, they primarily engaged in manual labor and in occupations outside the monastery. While they attended some of the canonical offices, they did not go to all of them.220 Indeed, at Melleray during the summer months of heavy labor, the lay monks only attended morning Mass and Compline.221 The choir monks, while also engaging in serious manual labor (five or six hours a day), were dedicated to attending all the canonical offices, and they stayed within the monastic enclosure. Melleray’s ratio of more than two times as many lay monks as choir monks was unusual. The average

Trappist house at this time had only slightly more lay monks than choir monks. But the population of Melleray was unusual as well. It was more than twice as large as any of the other fourteen French Trappist monasteries in 1828.222

And it was a phenomenally busy population. The monks developed a herd of 250 sheep and another of 80 cows. They added a weaving facility to their tannery and forge works and developed milk and cheese facilities in addition to the brewery. Their beer earned the reputation of being the best in the region.223 In addition to grazing meadows, they cultivated close to a hundred acres for the production of fruits, vegetables, spices, and grains, transforming the “Siberia of Brittany” into a fertile plain. They practiced an efficient form of farming brought from England that was previously unknown in the Loire-Atlantic. It

219 Laffay, Dom Augustin, 117. 220 Delpal, Le silence des moines,102. 221 Annales, 1:277. 222Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:300; Delpal, Le silence des moines, 99, 79. 223Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:297–98.

involved creative and intensive fertilizing and irrigation techniques, use of innovative agricultural tools, creation of artificial prairies, as well as novel crop and grazing animal rotations.224 The November 21, 1822, edition of Le Journal de Nantes et de la Loire-

Inférieure praised the monks for bringing this innovative form of agriculture to the region.

The monks freely shared their knowledge with their neighbors, opening up an agricultural school that had twenty-five students to whom they gave room and board.225 This helped

Dom Antoine develop the reputation, according to one 1840 newspaper account, as “one of the most illustrious agronomists and horticulturalists in France.” 226

There were, however, undersides to this hive of activity, both temporal and spiritual.

On the temporal side, the monks sold their wide range of goods at the market in

Châteaubriant and became a major competitor to regional businesses (tanneries, forges, breweries, dairy and other farms). The competition was so fierce that it caused those businesses to make major, and probably painful, changes in the way they operated. Many years later, in 1844, the prefect of Châteaubriant reported to the French interior minister that, despite the loud complaints at the time from those with whom the abbey competed, the efficiencies introduced by Melleray’s agricultural methods had reduced the average cost of a day’s labor in the region by at least thirty centimes.227 But that benefit would not have been clear in the 1820s to those who were pushed out of their comfort zones by what must have been perceived as foreign-monk competition. Hence the June 23, 1825, edition of the journal

L’Ami de la Charte violently attacked the monks as “temple venders.”228

On the spiritual side, the bishop of Nantes expressed concern that the abbey was

224 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:446–47; Faugeras, “Agriculture moderne,” 181–93. 225 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:298; Annales, 1:276. 226 L’Ami de la Religion, no. 3352, Thursday, October 29, 1840, 194. 227 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:336 and n. 213. 228 Quoted in Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:299, n. 24.

becoming too greatly attached to temporal interests and remarked on a tendency toward developing a mercantile spirit. He expressed particular concern that the lay monks’ many exterior functions in marketing and selling the abbey’s large stream of goods would give them the taste and habits of merchants rather than of contemplative monks. But he said their

“religious spirit . . . has nevertheless been still maintained,” and he ended his report on a positive note, stating that the abbey remained “an edifying aspect of my diocese, and it has lost none of its reputation for good conduct.”229

However, Melleray Abbey’s tenuous legal position, coupled with the enmity it garnered as a result of both its commercial success and its ties to Bourbon royalty, cost it dearly after the July Revolution in 1830 overthrew the Bourbon monarchy.

B. Melleray under the July Monarchy.

On September 28, 1831, according to an attorney who came to his aid, Dom Antoine

“glanced at the neighboring forest and perceived weapons glittering among the trees. He called some of his brother monks to him to assure himself it was not an illusion. But almost immediately they distinctly saw troops deploying and covering all exits from the monastery.”230 Earlier in the year, the prefect of Châteaubriant had secretly asked the French

Prime Minister, Casimir Périer, for authority to close down the monastery, which the prefect said may be engaged anti-revolutionary planning. Périer authorized suppression of the

229 Quoted in Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:301. Much of the bishop’s report has also been set forth verbatim in the Annales. 230 M.E. Janvier, Procès de l’abbaye de Melleray: Plaidoirie de M.E. Janvier (Paris: Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse, 1832), 27. Melleray was not alone. The July Monarchy also invaded the Trappist monasteries of Mont des Cats, Bellevaux, and La Trappe in 1830, and Bellefontaine in 1832. The monks of Mont des Cats, mostly of German origin, had to take temporary refuge in the Swiss mountains. Bellevaux closed and the monks there established a new monastery in Switzerland for the next three years. La Trappe and Bellefontaine were only searched, but after the Bellefontaine search, the government arrested the Bellefontaine Abbot and imprisoned him for a month. Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:460-475.

monastery once the harvest was in. General Bonnet, in charge of military affairs for western

France, executed these orders by deploying 600 troops both mounted and on foot to disperse the monks of Melleray on September 28th.

Dom Antoine resisted. He challenged the legal basis for the orders by claiming to run a lawful agricultural operation, and he enlisted the aid of the British counsel to intervene on behalf of the 72 British subjects at Melleray.231 By the end of the year, however, all of the foreign monks had been transported back to the British Isles (where many of them established Mt. Melleray Abbey),232 and the government dispersed the majority of French monks to their homes. Dom Antoine managed to remain with about twenty French religious and a few laborers and domestics. The prefect kept Melleray under constant surveillance, and the abbot could not resume normal operations, or re-expand, for the next several years until, with the assistance of the papal nuncio, he reached an agreement with the government and the monastery was finally allowed to resume normal operations by the end of 1838.233

The invasion of Melleray and dispersal of its monks gained widespread notoriety in

France. The reaction was mixed, but the monastery enjoyed extensive support. The prefect claimed that the “countryside around the abbey is rejoicing at the expulsion of the religious,” and he was probably referring to those in the commercial classes happy to be relieved of a formidable competitor.234 The anticlerical L’Ami de la Charte praised the closure of the monastery. But many in the press criticized the government, as did, for example, the

231 Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order, 81-82; Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:306-307. 232 Stephen Moloney, The History of Mount Melleray Abbey (Cork: Paramount Printing House, 1952), 7-8. Another product of this exodus was the foundation of a Cistercian Abbey in Stapehill, England. Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:332-333. 233 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:308-311, 317-332. 234 Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order, 82; Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:306, 334.

conservative and patriotic journal Breton, the legitimist journal L’Ami de l’Ordre, and the

Parisian journal Le Globe. Melleray became a cause célèbre of the religious revival movement in France, and Dom Antoine received supportive endorsements from such well- known Catholics as Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais and Henri Lacordaire. Dom

Antoine also received editorial support from their influential publication L’Avenir and other religious publications like L’Agence Générale and L’Union catholique Breton. And the countryside around the abbey did not uniformly rejoice. At one point, twelve hundred angry

Chouans (the name given to some of the peasants who engaged in the Vendée rebellion) showed their support for the monks of Melleray by besieging the prefect’s heavy-handed military excursion.235

Although he was closely tied to the Bourbon royalty, and had even given the oration at the funeral of a Bourbon prince, the duc de Berry, Dom Antoine believed it was the animus of local businessmen who did not want to compete with Melleray’s agricultural and artisanal goods that led the July Monarchy to shut down Melleray.236 Jérôme du Halgouët made the same argument in his essay on this subject. He pointed out that the plans to close

Melleray had been made long before the September 1831 invasion and more than a year before any open revolt by Bourbon sympathizers. 237 Melleray in 1831 was in a very different situation than Notre-Dame des Gardes. Although they were only 60 miles apart,

Notre-Dame des Gardes enjoyed strong community support while Melleray’s feverish commercial activity and primarily foreign population had created significant community enmity. This would change.

235 Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order, 82–83; Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:312–13. 236 Guéranger, Autobiography, 70. While the July Monarchy targeted other Trappist monasteries in the period from 1830-1832, only Melleray remained suppressed through 1838. 237 Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order, 79-80.

In 1838, the nuncio from Rome engaged in negotiations with the government to reopen Melleray. While the government had sought Dom Antoine’s resignation first, he was obviously growing old, and the nuncio arranged a rapprochement between the prefect and

Dom Antoine in late 1838 with the understanding that Melleray would soon need to choose a new abbot.238 Soon after, the prefect allowed Melleray to function normally again as a

Trappist monastery. Then in January 1839, Dom Antoine died. The monks of Melleray elected Dom Maxime to replace him.239 This marked the beginning of a new era for Melleray in which the postulants would now be primarily French (instead of Irish), as would its increasing population of professed monks.

At the beginning of his abbacy, Dom Maxime found that the Dom Antoine had sacrificed the upkeep of the monastic buildings to establish a viable economic basis for the monastery in agricultural and cottage industries. Accordingly, Dom Maxime set to work renovating the monastery. The buildings had not provided for the separation of the religious from secular visitors that Dom Maxime believed necessary to the spiritual well being of the monastics. He viewed the “world” as a contaminant to be avoided.240 Accordingly, he had hallways constructed to keep the monks separate from the secular pensioners, workers, and guests who frequented the monastery. He also enlarged the dormitory so the lay monks and choir monks could all sleep in a common room. The old dormitory had been too small leaving many of the lay monks to find a place to sleep wherever they could, including in areas where seculars were housed.241

To reflect the monastic spirituality he sought to infuse in the Melleray community,

238 Halgouët, Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order, 94. 239 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:334. 240Annales, 2:38-41. 241Annales, 2:42.

Dom Maxime had a series of sayings painted on the refurbished walls of the monastery.

Reflecting the goal of monastic humility, one stated: “Jacob’s ladder teaches us that we descend when we try to rise and that we go up when we are humble,” while another stated:

“Teach me to be sweet and humble of heart.”242 A saying aimed at guarding against worldly egotism stated: “Those who love life in this world lose their life in the next.” In the refectory, the sayings reinforced Trappist asceticism: “When you drink, think of the gall and vinegar presented to Jesus Christ on the cross,” one saying proclaimed while another advised:

“Let us stop excess and intemperance by the thought of eternal fire.”243 In other places, Dom

Maxime emphasized monastic harmony with sayings such as: “Let us live as brothers and we will live in peace.”244

The refurbished buildings saw an influx of new monks. In the decade between

October 1838 (the start of “the period when the Abbey of Melleray received novices after the restoration of 1838” according to the choir monk register) and the end of 1848, about 360 men entered the monastery as postulant choir or lay monks.245 Many others would have come and been turned away, either because of an obvious lack of vocation or because of a lack of room. By 1848, Dom Maxime had to turn away applicants at a rate of almost one per week due to space constraints.246 The monastery, which Dom Maxime described in a letter to the secretary of Bishop of Nantes as “formerly so poor in French subjects,” had attracted

242Annales, 2:47. 243Annales, 2:47-48. 244Annales, 2:48. 245 Religieux de Choeur: Régistre Matricule du 5 Octobre 1838 au 3 Juin 1877, pp. 1-32, Melleray archives (hereinafter Régistre Matricule de Choeur); Frères Convers: Régistre Matricule du 15 8bre Octobre 1830 [sic] au 3 Juin 1865, pp. 1-38, Melleray archives (hereinafter Régistre Matricule de Convers) (the inside cover page states, despite the cover date, that this register was started in October 1838 to track novices entering the monastery “after the restoration of 1838.” No entries predate 1838). 246 Annales, 2:260.

men from across France though primarily from the west, with the vast majority coming from

Brittany, the Pays de Loire, and Normandy.247 There were some foreign entrants from

Belgium, England, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, but—in contrast to Dom Antoine’s tenure—over 95% of the men came from France.248

Only two years after the 1838 restoration, Melleray held seventy-six French monks.

Dom Maxime wrote to the bishop of Nantes and his secretary in 1840 saying that diversity marked the previous occupations of this new crop of religious. There were “sailors, soldiers, notaries, lawyers, actors, and diocesan priests” among others.249 Diocesan priests and men coming from other religious orders, however, constituted the predominant source of new choir monks, and the lay monks came almost exclusively from the working class of laborers, farmers, tradesmen, and craftsmen.250 By 1848, the continued growth of the monastery resulted in a full house of 150 monks, of whom sixty were choir monks and ninety were lay monks.251

This regrowth during 1838–1848 almost exclusively from French entrants is all the more remarkable given the rate of attrition at Melleray. Departures from the monastery arose from monks going to Staouëli Abbey in Algeria, from those (mostly novices) choosing or being told to leave monastic life, and from those dying at Melleray. Twenty-five monks were sent to Staouëli in the mid-1840s to help the monks of Aiguebelle Abbey establish a

247Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes 1:335; Régistre Matricule de Choeur; Régistre Matricule de Convers. 248 Régistre Matricule de Choeur; Régistre Matricule de Convers. 249 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:335. 250 Régistre Matricule de Choeur; Régistre Matricule de Convers. The registers do not reveal the socio-economic class of the priests for most of this period. But for 1838-1839, they do state the occupation of the fathers of those priests who entered. Most had fathers who were shopkeepers or tradesmen though some came from farming families. There were only a few whose fathers had been proprietaires. 251 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:335; Annales, 2:260.

Trappist model farm and monastic community there and almost thirty monks died at

Melleray during 1839–1848. Most of these men were surprisingly young, with ten in their twenties and six in their thirties, a testament to a hard life in an age without effective medical treatment.252 Yet more than enough new French postulants came to Melleray to replace this attrition and to fill the monastery with 150 active monks only a decade after the suppression was lifted.

In the 1820s, Melleray had primarily grown through immigration. Many Irish postulants came to Melleray to escape persecution at home. A number of Irish and English men also came because of the reputation that Lulworth and Dom Antoine had developed in

Britain.253 The French postulants started to come in large numbers only after the suppression.

According to the subprefect of Châteaubriant in a February 1843 report to the prefect, the monastery was “favored by the well-known return toward religious ideas.”254 This return to religious ideas manifested itself visibly in the change between the character of the July

1830 Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. The church had been a close friend of the

Bourbon monarchy, and opponents of that monarchy in 1830 were, partially as a result of the church’s position, largely anticlerical. But with the church free from government entanglements after the July 1830 Revolution, rates of religious observance and ordinations all grew faster than they had during the Restoration.255 Cholvy and Hilaire argue that 1835–

1836 marked a turning point in French religious history. It seemed to contemporaries that

252 Melleray archives: Necrology from 1839 through 1848; Annales, 2:213-217. 253 Annales 1:245–47. 254 Sous-prèfet to prèfet, February 16, 1843, Loire-Atlantic Departmental archives, 71-72 V/1 (hereinafter Sous-prèfet lettre). 255 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:139–40; 1:40; Dansette, Religious History, 1:219–24; Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 232.

they “‘were present at the religious resurrection of their society.’”256 The great leaders of

France’s religious revival—Lacordaire, Lamennais, Guéranger—were most active in this period, and the effects of this revival became distinct toward 1840.257

By that time, the generation that had grown up during the Revolution and Napoleonic

Empire with little religious education and amid a predominantly anticlerical culture gave way to a new generation. After the Restoration, catechism and other forms of religious education became more regularly available to children. A domestic mission movement brought religious instruction and revival to adult populations.258 Religious education and missions thus set the stage for the religious revival that was manifest by 1840s.

Henri Lacordaire commented on the incredible contrast between the February 1848 revolution and the anti-religious nature of the 1830 Revolution. In 1830, he had to hide his clerical clothes beneath a riding coat as he circulated through Paris because of the violent anticlericalism of the revolutionaries. In 1848, in contrast, when protestors sacked the

Tuilleries on February 24, they spared the Chapel and paid homage to Christian symbols.

Three days later, Lacordaire preached a sermon to a full house at Notre Dame Cathedral in which he publicly expressed admiration for “the religious revolution that changed the heart of the people in less than a generation.” 259

The religious revival in France coincided with the birth of an alternative world-view.

Many French people became attracted to a new way of thinking about life—Romanticism— that found value in religion. Chateaubriand’s publication of the Genius of Christianity

256 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:89 (quoting Frédéric Ozanam). 257 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:90–98; Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 11. 258 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 54–55, 228, 250–51; Gérard Cholvy, La religion en France de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1998), 28–29; Dansette, Religious History, 1:202–12. 259Anne Philibert, Henri Lacordaire (Paris: Cerf, 2016), 322–23.

provided the earliest, and perhaps the most important, example. It created, according to

Cholvy, a “genuine cultural alternative to the Enlightenment.”260 Chateaubriand valued sentiment over materialism, which he argued could not truly satisfy human needs. Dansette called the Genius of Christianity “the great literary event at the beginning” of the nineteenth century, and it sparked conversions and a return to religiosity.261 A copy was kept in the monks’ library at Melleray.262 While the effects of this romantic Christian literary revival initially took place at the elite level, such cultural shifts often sifted down to the general population over time.263 This shift resulted in an increased taste for Catholic devotional writing, and many religious writings became bestsellers.264 “By the familiarity that they created with religious tradition,” Cholvy and Hilaire argue, “these readings, sometimes simply heard, served as the vehicle of a culture that had at its heart a vocabulary charged with

Christian references.”265

Although prejudice against religious orders remained strong in some areas through the 1840s, the Romantic Movement helped to rehabilitate monasticism after years of bashing by the followers of Voltaire.266 Romanticism validated self-sacrificing religious commitment and the importance of community—key aspects of monastic life. Dom Prosper Guéranger employed the Catholic liturgy followed by monasteries as “an instrument in the destruction

260 Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 10. See also McPhee, Social History of France, 154. 261 Dansette, Religious History, 1:156. 262 Melleray archives: 1899 catalogue of books available to the monks. 263 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:21, 79. 264 Carol Harrison, Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014), 8. Carol Harrison coined the phrase “romantic Catholics” to describe Catholics influenced by the Romantic Movement that have often been called liberal Catholics. Her more descriptive nomenclature is adopted here. 265 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:146. 266 Dansette, Religious History, 1:243; Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:93.

of individualism.”267 He suggested that monastic communities, with their emphasis on communal life, were “the ideal that a Christian society should follow” to move beyond atomistic individualism.268 Romantic writers also turned to the medieval period as an

“imaginative touchstone,” in the words of Carol Harrison, that they fashioned into a model for regenerating modern life including religious life.269 This led to romanticizing monasticism, which the Comte de Montalembert did in his multi volume history, Les Moines d’Occident. In it, he portrayed medieval monks as idealized men of prayer who cultivated the land and built beautiful structures, as opposed to the societal leeches portrayed by

Enlightenment writers.270 Chateaubriand added to this rehabilitation of monasticism by directly addressing Cistercian life with the publication of his book, La Vie de Rancé (The

Life of Rancé) in 1844. It presented a romanticized picture of the seventeenth-century founder of the Trappist Cistercians, Dom Armand de Rancé, abbot of La Trappe Abbey.

The Romantic movement strengthened France’s general religious revival, but that revival occurred unevenly in France, coming in a late and limited way to the region around

Paris.271 It exhibited particular strength in western France. That area had never lost its core constituency of faithful, as was demonstrated by the resistance to the anti-religious aspects of the Revolution in western France and the march of Chouans to Melleray’s aid in 1831.

Ordinations increased in the west throughout the 1840s. Cholvy and Hilaire observed that

“[a] true [religious] renaissance occurred there and continued throughout the first two thirds

267 R.W. Franklin, Nineteenth-Century Churches: The History of a New Catholicism in Württemberg, England, and France (New York and London: Garland, 1987), 16. 268 Harrison 5. Guéranger’s monastery Solesmes reintroduced Gregorian chant into the liturgical life of the church. Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:94. 269 Harrison, Romantic Catholics, 10. Bernard Plongeron described the restoration of religious orders led by romantics like Dom Guéranger as a “neo-medieval resurrection.” Plongeron, “Comment restaurer un ordre,” 385. 270 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:93. 271 Cholvy, “Renouveau monastique,” 11.

of the [nineteenth] century.”272 Religious practices were particularly fervent in the diocese of

Nantes where Melleray was located. Easter communion has been frequently used by religious historians of nineteenth-century France to measure religiosity. In many areas of France, men in particular might go to Mass for social reasons but did not take Easter communion. In

Vendée, 90 percent of the population took Easter communion between 1839 and 1845.273

Moreover, the character of religious sentiment in the west—with what Gibson described as a

“taste for the mystical” and “capable of great sacrifices”—lent itself to a monastic commitment.274

Because western France was a largely rural region full of poor farmers and artisans, it is tempting to attribute the decision to enter a monastery to economic reasons as well. Indeed, that was an argument some contemporaries made to explain the monastic revival of their day, often in literary or artistic formats. Honoré Daumier made this point in his 1851 drawing,

“Capucinade.”275 He depicted two Capucin monks greedily carving up a fat capon on a table heavily laden with other food. He sarcastically subtitled this drawing “La Pauvreté Contente”

[Contented Poverty]. Although grossly exaggerated, Daumier’s caricature may have reflected the life of some rich monasteries run by commendatory abbots in the early eighteenth century, and poverty may still have drawn some to religious vocations in the early nineteenth century, when the French countryside was overcrowded and economic conditions poor.276

The industrial revolution that had brought consistent economic growth to England arrived

272 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:40, 265. 273 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 170–77; Claude Langlois, “Permanence, Renouveau et Affrontements,” in Histoire des Catholiques en France du XVe siècle à nos jours, ed. François Lebrun (Paris: Privat, 1980). 274 Gibson, Social History of French Catholicism, 176–77. 275 Honoré Daumier, “Capucinade: La Pauverté Contente. (Planche dédiée à Mr. de Montalembert),” accessed March 24, 2020, http://bir.brandeis.edu/handle/10192/2447. 276 Cholvy and Hilaire, Histoire Religieuse, 1:66–67.

tardily in France. Instead of industrial development in the early nineteenth century, periodic economic crises hit French rural areas in 1818, 1826–1828, ad 1837–1839 and leading up to the revolutions of 1848.277 Roger Magraw states that the “1846–47 harvest failures [in

France] were a reminder [that] demographic growth threatened to push the limits of agricultural output. . . . Celibacy and late marriage became commonplace.”278 In some areas of France, this situation did push people into the church.279 But it seems unlikely that economic conditions played a significant role in encouraging men to join a Trappist monastery like Melleray, which assiduously cultivated personal poverty and material deprivation.

Melleray had been among the Trappist monasteries to adopt the Val Sainte regulations after Napoleon’s fall.280 These had been modified in 1834 when Pope Gregory

XVI approved a reunification of the Trappists under one set of rules. But that modification did little to soften the life of the monks. They still rose at 2 a.m. (1 a.m. in Lent) to start what would amount to seven hours of prayer throughout a day punctuated by an additional six hours of manual labor.281 The alimentary restrictions remained unchanged, including the single meal a day during half the year and the strict vegan diet at a time when abstinence from meat, eggs and dairy products was deemed harmful. The only changes 1834 brought were the allowance of straw mattresses (rather than hard planks) for bed and the allowance, in addition to water, of a moderate amount of local drink (beer, wine, or cider in Brittany where Melleray was located). Within the enclosure, the monks still lived totally silent lives

277 Claude Frohlen, “The Industrial Revolution in France,” in Essays in French Economic History, ed. Rhondo Cameron (Homewood, IL.: American Economic Association 1970), 220–21. 278 Roger Magraw, France 1800–1924: A Social History (London: Longman, 2002), 126. 279 Magraw, France 1800–1924, 126. 280 Compte Rendu, 180. 281 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:492-497; Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 1:300. The lay monks, as noted above, would attend divine offices less often and work more.

except for prayer during the liturgical offices, confession, or the occasional need to speak to a superior. But even that speech was allowed only if the superior nodded agreement to talk.282

Because this type of austerity would not look attractive to economic refugees looking for a materially improved life, economic conditions do not appear to be an important factor in the growth of Melleray. In contrast, the Romantic religious revival, particularly as it manifested itself in western France, clearly contributed to Melleray’s growth. But the religious revival of an already religious people fueled by a cultural shift toward Romanticism provides only part of the answer. Melleray’s growth far outstripped that of the two closest monasteries in western France—Bellefontane in the diocese of Angers and Port Salut in the diocese of Le Mans.283 What was it about Melleray that attracted a much larger following than the other Trappist monasteries in its region?

The monastery’s relationship with its neighbors significantly improved after it reopened in 1838 following the years of suppression. The subprefect of Châteaubriant reported in February 1843 that Melleray “enjoys today a higher regard among the public than it did some years ago.”284 He noted that the monastery had discontinued the cottage industries that before the suppression had aroused jealousies and created enemies. The monks now concentrated on agricultural goods that they sold in Châteaubriant and further abroad.

The subprefect mentioned that the market in Châteaubriant would not be adequately supplied without the monastery’s goods.285 Indeed the seeds produced by the monastery became so popular that depots had to be established in Nantes, Rennes, and Châteaubriant to meet the

282 Gaillardin, Les Trappistes, 2:47–49; 500. 283 Faugeras, Le diocèse de Nantes, 2:137–39. Only Aiguebelle, far away from Melleray in southeastern France, had a stronger call to vocations among French Trappist monasteries by the 1840s. Delpal 113–14, 125. 284 Sous-prèfet lettre. 285 Ibid.

demand.286 Responding to a few merchants’ false representation of seeds as coming from

Melleray, the monastery stamped its seed bags with the monastery’s emblem and placed notices in regional newspapers explaining to the public how to distinguish Melleray seeds from counterfeits.287

In addition, according to the subprefect, “their numerous works of charity attract[ed] the goodwill of the people in the countryside who,” he felt compelled to add, “can be very difficult.”288 He found that the poor and other visitors were always well received at the monastery and that the monks’ “welcome is simple, dignified, and marked by a noteworthy tolerance for all opinions.”289 The increasing number of visitors provided a welcome source of revenue for surrounding villages. The population of adjacent La Meilleraye-de-Bretagne, which had increased during the years of Melleray’s initial growth period and decreased during the years the abbey was suppressed, rebounded as Melleray reestablished itself from

1838 to 1848 and grew even larger than in the pre-suppression days.290

With this improved image in the community, the agricultural and commercial success of Melleray may also have contributed to its attraction. As is shown by the monastery registers, Melleray’s high proportion of lay monks overwhelmingly came from the artisanal and agricultural classes as did a material portion of the choir monks. By the early 1840s, as the subprefect’s 1843 report evidences, a regional appreciation had developed for the innovative agricultural techniques the monks had introduced to the area. Indeed, under Dom

286 Annales, 2:82. 287 Annales, 2:82–83. 288 Sous-prèfet lettre. 289 Ibid. 290 “Notice Communale,” La Meilleraye-de-Bretagne, accessed March 14, 2020, http://cassini.ehess.fr/cassini/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=21854.

Maxime, Melleray became regarded as a model farm.291 Men who are going to dedicate their lives to labor as well as prayer would probably be attracted to a place where that labor is going to be particularly successful—a place where you not only worked, but worked well and innovatively.

In addition to establishing a good reputation in its region for its work, for its charity, and for its hospitality, Melleray gained extensive publicity as a result of the July Monarchy suppression that Dom Antoine so vigorously resisted. That publicity must have earned the monastery a reputation as a defender of the faith among a population that had done the same with great loss during the Revolution. Such a reputation would have been an attraction to many serious Catholics. Indeed, Melleray’s fame drew people from throughout France.

Guéranger made retreats at Melleray, and it had many other famous visitors from leaders in the Romantic Movement, including Chateaubriand, Vigny, Hugo, Montalembert, Delacroix, and Georges Sand—who disguised her sex in order to gain admittance to the enclosure.292

Adding to Melleray’s fame, Victor Hugo even published a poem concerning Melleray in his

1831 poetry collection, Autumn Leaves.293

Several publications appeared recounting visits to Melleray, some justifying multiple editions.294 Its popularity as a destination for spiritual retreats is also recounted in the

Annales. The guest master during this period was Father Eusèbe, who was sought after for spiritual direction and as a confessor. The Annales report that one night in the 1840s, he had

291 Annales, 2:81. 292 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 397, n. 23. 293 Victor Hugo, Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, a Bilingual Edition, eds. E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 294 See Édouard Richer, Voyage à la Trappe de Melleray, 5th ed. (Nantes: Mellinet-Malassis,1823); M. L’Abbé de Villefort, Trois Jours au Monastère des Trappistes de la Meilleray, 2nd ed. (Paris: C. J. Trouvé,1826); Léon Gatayes, “Une Communauté de Trappistes Musiciens,” Le Menestrell (Aug. 24, 1853); M. Auguste-Amaury, Le Monastère de Meilleraie ou Visite à Notre-Dame de la Trappe (Nantes: Montagne, 1857).

sixty visitors at dinner.295 Visitors sometimes heard the call to monastic life during their stay, as did Father Jacques Proud (later Dom Eutropius) when he came to Melleray on retreat as a diocesan priest in 1844.296

Melleray’s reputation for austerity probably served as an additional attraction. The monks’ lives of austerity and hard work involved a rejection of worldly materialism for the benefit of others in two distinct ways. First, their self-sacrifice created a means of generating food and shelter for the poor in their region. At any one time, there were close to a dozen pensioners housed at the monastery, the monks were caring for orphan children, and they were distributing food to the poor in the surrounding areas. The monks expressed pride at saving the best parts of their harvest for others.297 Second, the nineteenth-century Trappists viewed themselves as a penitential order. As did the nuns of Notre-Dame des Gardes, they saw in their material deprivation a way of atoning for the sins of the society around them.298

While this may not have been a major part of their experience, it fit within the stream of nineteenth-century French Catholic theology noted above in connection with Notre-Dame des Gardes. Charity and atonement were callings to self-sacrifice for the greater good that may have attracted many men in the romantic nineteenth century.

The monks of Melleray, however, like the self sufficiently empowered nuns of Notre-

Dame des Gardes, cut across the grain of nineteenth-century French cultural norms. For

French men, the Napoleonic ideal of masculinity still held sway, and that placed a high value on men of action who fought for honor and glory whether it be on the battlefield, in politics

295 Annales, 2:470. 296 Annales, 2:250–51. 297 Annales, 2:82, 227–28, 464. 298 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 60.

or in the marketplace.299 This ethos was reflected in an increase in dueling and the popularity of warfare which France engaged in throughout the early and mid nineteenth century.300 As

Robert Tombs observed: “the themes of victory and defeat, patriotism and martial virtue ... were emphasized in the arts and philosophy, and pressed on a wider audience by the press, the popular arts and the schools ....”301 Monks who cultivated humility, self-denial, and poverty were the antithesis of such a model.

But it was Trappist valorization of labor that served as the defining aspect of their community life. That would have resonated with many workingmen and others in nineteenth-century France. It reflected the new monasticism’s accommodation to the times it faced. Trappists valued manual labor as a moral imperative. They saw it first as the penance humanity must pay for its fall from the original state of grace. This was penance in the form of prayer: “He who works prays,” according to the author of the Annales.302 But in addition to prayerful penance, it also served as a means of grounding monks in their present reality with its goal of union with God while helping them escape from morally hazardous flights of imagination.303 The Trappists expressed the primacy of manual labor by declaring: “Work is the law of our existence.”304 The value Trappists invested in manual labor dovetailed with a stream of early nineteenth-century French thought in which writers from a variety of political

299 See e.g. Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 123-141, 153. 300 Tombs, France 1814-1914, 34 and 221. 301 Tombs, France 1814-1914, 35. 302 Annales, 2:77. 303 Annales, 2:78-79 304 Directoire spirituel à l’usage des Cistercien Réformés, vulgairement dits Trappistes, publié par l’ordre des supériers (Paris, 1869), 428 (quoted in Bernard Delpal, “Travail, loisir et observance chez les trappistes au XIXe siècle,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 86 (1994): 216).

persuasions extolled manual labor’s creative possibilities and moral power.305

Valorizing manual labor also fit the litmus test of post-Revolutionary France: it was useful. In 1834, when the Vatican moved to revert to the regulations of Rancé for all French

Trappists, Trappist monasteries uniformly petitioned the Holy See to keep the Val Sainte regulations with respect to increasing the labor requirement from three to at least five hours a day. Three hours, they wrote, “is no longer sufficient for monks to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, [and] religious who no longer work can no longer be tolerated in France.

They are regarded as useless men dependent on the state.”306 This was a key consideration for a congregation not legally authorized and living at the sufferance of whoever governed.

Melleray’s valorization of labor helped it develop a reputation for agricultural expertise that earned the Trappists a new found respect from the July Monarchy. The July

Monarchy sought out the aid of the Trappists to develop model farms that would further colonial ventures in Algeria and Martinique. Melleray was heavily involved in both ventures.

Those ventures help to illustrate first, how the new monasticism’s emphasis on utility gained the Trappists national recognition despite their continued lack of legal authorization; second, how firmly the Trappists believed their form of monastic living could be a moral benefit to others; and finally, how the Trappists were willing to extend that benefit at great risk of their

305 The moral power of labor was recognized by writers as varied as Karl Marx and the bourgeois moralist Louis Villermé. William H. Sewell, Jr., Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 222-223. Sewell provided examples of nineteenth-century French socialist poets who “praised [labor] as the height of human creativity and the source of all social order." Ibid. 236. But this attitude was not ubiquitous. While socialists like Benoît Malon, according to Steven Vincent, “extended the Enlightenment ideal of the dignity of laborers” by “amplify[ing] it with a heightened appreciation of the nobility of work,” Paul Lafargue, the son in law of Karl Marx, painted the valorization of labor as a ploy to disempower the working classes. K. Steven Vincent, “Authority, Revolution, and Work: Views from the Socialist Left in the Fin de Siècle,” in K. Steven Vincent and Alison Klairmont- Lingo, The Human Tradition in Modern France (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000), 108-112. 306 Quoted in Delpal, Le silence des moines, 84.

own mortal lives.

C. Foreign Expansion.307

The July Monarchy sought Trappist assistance to rehabilitate lackluster economic development in Algeria and to instill a work ethic in Martinican slaves so they would continue to support the colonial economy after emancipation. The Trappists’ primary motivation lay elsewhere. In Algeria, they hoped the example of their monastic life would regenerate Christianity in a part of the world that had been an ancient and vibrant Christian domain. In Martinique, they sought to regenerate enslaved Martinicans spiritually and materially by teaching them, through the example of manual labor under the Rule of Saint

Benedict, to succeed as free farmers after a lifetime of slavery. Both cooperative ventures with the government also lent the Trappists needed legitimacy. They remained legally unauthorized, and powerful state actors continued to argue that their existence in France should no longer be tolerated. In the mid 1840s, for example, a former Prime Minister under the July Monarchy, Adolphe Thiers, called for the Chamber of Deputies to abolish the

Trappists along with the Jesuits and other religious orders.308 In addition to accomplishing missionary goals, increasing ties with the state might be seen as a form of self-preservation in the face of such threats.

A Catholic member of the Chamber of Deputies, François de Corcelle, concluded based on the Trappists’ agricultural reputation that the Trappists would provide a perfect

307 This subchapter contains portions of my article entitled “Agricultural Missionaries: The Trappists and French Colonialism under the July Monarchy,” to be published later this year in The Catholic Historical Review. 308 Adolphe Thiers, Discours parlementaires, 15 vols., ed. Calmann Lévy (Paris: M. Calmon, 1880), 6:651-652. The Jesuit Order was, again, banned in 1845 though that ban did not go as far as Thiers had advocated. As Peter King observed: “The revival of monasticism in the nineteenth century took place against a background of implacable hostility from Liberal government ...” King, Western Monasticism, 378.

remedy to the lackluster agricultural development he observed in early 1840s Algeria.309 He convinced the July Monarchy to subsidize a Trappist model farm in Staouëli not far from

Algiers. Trappist correspondence demonstrates a desire to use the example of their life dedicated to prayer and work to bring Algeria back into the domain of universal Christianity.

The governing body of the Trappists, the General Chapter, wrote a letter expressing this hope in 1843, the year Staouëli was established. “If you are true children of Saint Benedict,” wrote the General Chapter to the leader of the Trappist expedition, Père François Régis of

Aiguebelle Abbey, “your example will be for these infidels the most eloquent and the most salutary of all that can be predicted for you. If you make them admire your virtue, grace will perhaps soon lead them to imitate you.”310

Père Régis, soon to be Abbot of Staouëli with the title “Dom” Régis, confirmed the

Trappist goal of achieving Christian conversion when he appeared before the monks of

Melleray Abbey in September of 1844 to seek their help. In the first year of Staouëli

Abbey’s existence, the death rate from dysentery, fever and other ailments had decimated the monks from Aiguebelle Abbey that Dom Régis had brought with him. The abbot needed

Melleray’s help to replenish the reduced ranks. Even as he described the difficulties encountered in establishing this monastic venture, he told the monks of his “most ardent zeal for the conversion of the Arabs.”311 That was a zeal apparently shared by the Trappists of

Melleray. About two dozen responded to Dom Régis’s call over the course of a few years despite the known risks. Half of them also succumbed to death in the climate of Algeria

309 J. Bersange, Dom François Régis: Fondateur et premier Abbé de N.-D. de Staouëli (Algérie) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1911), 70 (originally published in 1885). 310 Actes et décisions des chapitres généraux de la Congrégation de N.D. de la Trappe en France, 1835-1843, documents supplémentaires du chapitre général de 1843 (reproduced in V. Hermans, “Actes et décisions des chapitres généraux des Congrégations Trappistes du XIXe siècle (1835- 1891)(I),” Analecta Cisterciensia XXVII (Jan.-Jun. 1971): 141-142). 311 Annales, 2:215.

within the first few years of their arrival.312 The Trappists efforts in Algeria came at great personal cost to all the monks who went there. From the 1843 foundation of Staouëli Abbey through 1857, 107 monks died at Staouëli. Seventy percent of those who died were under

60.313 Yet the goal of Christian conversions was never achieved, and this monastic venture shut down at the turn of the twentieth century.314

In July 1846, the July Monarchy again approached the Trappists for help with colonial agriculture—this time in Martinique. Pressure had been mounting in favor of

French emancipation since the English abolition of slavery in 1834. Almost all French abolitionists believed that enslaved people needed to be educated and instilled with an independent work ethic.315 This view included Catholic Church leaders in France and

Martinique who in the 1840s increasingly called for abolition with a preparatory phase.316 In

1846, the government anticipated emancipation by planning to fund a Trappist model farm in

Martinique as a means to preserve the economic productivity of its colony following the inevitable end of slavery.

The government initially contacted the Trappists by letter dated July 1, 1846 from

Henri-Léon Causat de Riancey.317 Addressed to Dom Hercelin, then superior general of all the Trappists, it included a memorandum written by G. de Lagrange for the Ministry of the

312 Annales, 2:215-217. In just the three-year period from 1847-1849, 11 Melleray monks died at Staouëli. Necrology of monks departed for Staouëli in Melleray archives. 313 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 164. 314 Delpal, Le silence des moines, 193-194. 315 Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), 71-73. 316 See Philippe Delisle, Renouveau missionaire et société esclavagiste, La Martinique: 1815-1848 (Paris: Publisud, 1997); Troy Feay, Mission to Moralize: Slaves, Africans, and Missionaries in the French Colonies, 1815-1852 (PhD Diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003), 71-75, 100-102. 317 Riancey to Hercelin, July 1, 1846, côte 181, pièce 1, La Trappe Abbey archives.

Navy and Colonies.318 It also attached an extract of what it described as a “completely confidential” report from the Director of the Colonies.319 The Director endorsed the

Lagrange memorandum and stated that “nothing would be ... more favorable to the success of the government’s current views than to see a religious Order ... specially devoted to agricultural operations establish itself in the colonies and provide all classes an example of useful, fruitful and intelligent work.”320 The Lagrange memorandum revealed the government’s motivations for calling on the Trappists. “Everything makes us fear,” Lagrange wrote, “that the moment slavery is abolished, blacks employed in agriculture will desert in mass.” Those who remain, he posited, would not be sufficient to keep the plantations running. This is “a menacing question of life or death for our colonies” where the population primarily consisted of enslaved people.321

In response to the government’s request to establish a model farm in Martinique,

Dom Hercelin chose three Trappists from Melleray Abbey to explore, at government expense, the possibility of establishing a Trappist monastery at a one of the government’s

Martinican farms. The three Melleray monks commissioned to go to Martinique issued a report in which they recommended that the Trappists accept the government’s proposal despite the grave risks posed by the “fatal” climate.322 This report to Dom Hercelin revealed the Trappist desire to effect a regeneration of enslaved Martinicans. The Melleray monks

318 Note sur le moyen de réhabiliter le travail agricole dans les Colonies, côte 181, pièce 24, La Trappe Abbey archives (hereinafter “Note”). 319 Extrait d’un Rapport presenté au Ministre de la Marine par le Directeur des Colonies le 30 juin 1846, côte 181, pièce 2, La Trappe Abbey archives. 320 Ibid. 321 Note, pp.1-2. 322 Fr. Eusèbe, Fr. Hilarion, Fr. Emmanuel, Extrait du rapport fait au Général des Trappistes par les trois religieux envoyés à Martinique à l’effet d’examiner s’il y avait possibilité de réaliser un projet d’établissement proposé par le Département de la Marine, March 15 1847, côte 181, pièce 11, La Trappe Abbey archives (hereinafter “Rapport”).

had toured a state farm in Saint Jacques, about 28 kilometers from Saint Pierre and a little further from Port Royal. The three Melleray monks wrote that Saint Jacques could be turned into a “model farm” if one succeeded at moralizing its “fine workers and establishing them in free labor.... [T]he black is neither as profoundly corrupted nor as intractable as has been depicted to us.”323 They concluded that the enslaved Saint Jacques workers would follow the guidance of a group who treated them well instead of imposing more of the “cruel, corrupt and brutal” treatment they had received from their colonial masters.324

The Trappists also believed that enslaved workers needed their leadership. They observed that the enslaved worker of Saint Jacques “raised his head all the more proudly now that he saw himself on the point of obtaining that liberty he had sought so long.”325 But given how enslaved Martinicans had been treated, the Trappists, like the July Monarchy, foresaw a mass exodus to the city as soon as emancipation took place. They expressed concern not for the economic well being of the colony, but for what they saw as the disastrous effects such an exodus would have on the moral well being of the formerly enslaved. Trappists valued manual labor, particularly agricultural labor, for its power to strengthen the soul. They viewed city life as morally degrading. The Melleray monks argued that the Saint Jacques workers “must be entrusted without the least delay into the care of a religious group, above all to a congregation of workers who ... by the example of their work” would lead slaves to value farm labor and become productive free farmers themselves.326

In July of 1847, Dom Maxime, with Dom Hercelin’s approval, appointed one of his monks, Père Eutrope Proud, to lead the expedition to Martinique. Père Eutrope had

323 Rapport, 6. 324 Rapport, 8-9. 325 Rapport, 7. 326 Rapport, 7.

described the Trappist mission in a December 27, 1846 letter to his brothers and sisters as follows: “The purpose of our foundation then is to bring labor back into honor, to inspire a taste for it in all classes and thus to obtain liberty for these wretched slaves whose condition resembles that of domestic animals.”327 In another letter dated August 1, 1847 to his brother,

Père Eutrope wrote that he was in Paris working out final arrangements with the government and informed his brother that “[t]he deal is practically concluded for the trifling sum of

350,000 francs.”328

Père Eutrope described the conclusion of negotiations in a memoir retained by the

Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. “All we were waiting for before setting out for Martinique in the number of 40 [Melleray monks] was the cancellation of the lease of the plantation we were to cultivate.” Père Eutrope went to Paris on October 2, 1847, and there he found the lease cancellation had been received, but the government “was greatly preoccupied at the time with the agitation of those seeking a new government [and] postponed the complete conclusion of the affair for some weeks.” Père Eutrope returned to

Melleray to wait, and then the February 1848 Revolution brought down the July Monarchy.

Having heard nothing from the new government, Père Eutrope again travelled to Paris at the end of March. His memoir recounts that the new government told him it “would take no account” of the arrangements the Trappists had made with the July Monarchy. The new government, at least initially, viewed the Trappist presence as unnecessary since the slaves had already achieved freedom.329

With the collapse of the Martinique venture, Dom Maxime faced the necessity of

327 Eutrope Proud to his brothers and sisters, December 27, 1846, translator unknown, Gethsemani Abbey archives, Trappist, Kentucky. 328 Eutrope Proud to Pierre Proud, Aug. 1, 1847, translator unknown, Gethsemani Abbey archives. 329 From Melleray to Gethsemani 1848, short undated memoir of Eutrope Proud, translator unknown, Gethsemani Abbey archives.

founding a new monastery to make room for postulants flocking to Melleray.330 He had a variety of choices available to him. In a testament to the monastery’s reputation, several

French bishops had contacted him about setting up a new Trappist monastery in their dioceses. But the recent French history of revolutions made his country seem unstable to

Dom Maxime and to those he consulted. He decided to look outside the country in order, according to the Annales, “to assure the Trappists of France a refuge in the case of a revolution or religious persecution.”331 For some time, several American bishops had been expressing a desire to host a Trappist monastery in order “to inspire love of work in whites” and thus help to pull “the negro race …from slavery.”332 Dom Maxime set his sights on

America. On March 26, 1848, Dom Maxime sent two monks from Melleray to look for a suitable place without preselecting any region in particular in the search for the new monastery. It was only due to an unplanned meeting on the ship to America, an encounter of the kind “that statisticians call chance … and Christians grace,”333 that the Melleray exploratory party learned that the Sisters of Loretto had a well-situated establishment in

Kentucky called Gethsemani for sale.334

Dom Maxime again appointed Père Eutrope to lead Melleray’s overseas foundation.

Seven months later, without government support, Père Eutrope was on his way to Kentucky leading 44 Melleray monks to establish the first Trappist Abbey in the new world,

Gethsemani Abbey. Melleray Abbey ceased functioning as a Cistercian monastery in 2016 and handed the abbey grounds on to the Catholic Community of the New Path. But its earlier

330 Annales, 2:260. 331 Annales, 2:261. 332 Ibid. 333 Marius Faugeras, Vocations sacredotales et religieuse d’homme dans le diocèse de Nantes de 1851 à 1914 (Thèse Complémentaire pour le Doctorat présentée à la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Rennes, 1964), 50. 334 Annales, 2:262-264.

period of tremendous growth spread Cistercian spirituality to the New World and beyond.

Gethsemani Abbey remains one of the strongest Cistercian monasteries in America and has in turn founded more American Trappist communities. Mt. Melleray in Ireland continues the

Cistercian life, as does its daughter house of New Melleray in Iowa. So it is that Melleray

Abbey’s phenomenal early-nineteenth-century growth continues to reverberate in the world today.

CONCLUSION

By the mid-nineteenth century, the contemplative monastic revival in France was complete. Despite the cultural changes that undercut traditional monastic functions, despite the loss of monastic property and sources of income, and despite the continued refusal of the state to authorize it, contemplative monasticism led by the Trappists had reestablished itself in France. The government, this time under the Second Empire, recognized that when it finally authorized monastic life in 1853.

The austere form of monasticism adopted by the exiled Trappists in La Val Sainte helped account for this success. Those regulations required monks and nuns to truly live by the work of their hands, an authentic return to one of the fundamental tenets of monasticism under the Rule of Saint Benedict. This allowed monks and nuns to rebuild monastic communities without rents or tithe rights. It also attracted the faithful, many of whom as the entry registers of Notre-Dame des Gardes and Melleray attest, came from the working class.

By valorizing labor, the Trappists became attractive to people whose station in life required labor. Other Trappist austerities, like the radically reduced diet, would attract those who were looking for a radical commitment to divine union, a commitment that left behind that material desires that became more and more prominent in nineteenth-century France.

The Trappist led revival of monasticism was in one sense countercultural and in another in line with nineteenth-century French societal trends. Trappist monks and

Trappistine nuns eschewed the individualism and materialism that became prominent in

France after the Revolution. They also transcended the gendered expectations of French society—with the nuns forming independent and self-sufficient communities rather than relying on men and the monks cultivating humility, self-denial, and poverty in an age when

the ideal of masculinity valued bravado and martial virtue. At the same time, Trappist monastic communities fit within the current of nineteenth-century French utopian ideas displayed by groups ranging from Christian missionaries to socialists who also resisted the individualism and materialism of the predominant society. Many socialists and even some liberal Republicans also valorized the type of manual labor that helped define the new monastic communities of women and men. Moreover, the intensity of the Trappists’ approach to reinvigorating monastic life put them in the vanguard of a romantic religious revival that swept France, a religious movement that ultimately helped to sustain the monastic revival. Thus, the Trappists were very much in tune with their times even while they offered an alternative approach to living in them.

The numbers demonstrate the attraction of their life. Over three hundred women flocked to Notre-Dame des Gardes during the Restoration, despite its great poverty, and over three hundred men entered Melleray during the last ten years of the July Monarchy, despite the tenuous nature of its legal status. These women and men were drawn to Trappist austerity. Though they came from throughout France, the recruits came predominantly from the religious west. At Notre-Dame des Gardes during the Restoration, this in part reflected a desire of the local community to atone for the losses suffered during the Vendée revolt. At

Melleray during the last ten years of the July Monarchy, it reflected the romantic religious revival that was taking off in western France. At both places during these growth periods, community support proved important.

The return of contemplative monastic orders could not have been anticipated in 1815 after the cultural changes that had swept France during the preceding fifty years. The

Trappists demonstrated tenacity in the face of inherent vulnerability to a government that

would not recognize their right to exist. That tenacity led the way for other contemplative orders to return to France, and that tenacity helped save contemplative monasticism from extinction.

REFERENCES

Primary Sources: Manuscript

Melleray Abbey Archives (stored at Cîteaux Abbey, Saint-Nicolas-lès-Cîteaux, France):

Annales de l’Abbaye de Melleray, 3 vols.

Dom Antoine Saulinier de Beauregard, Compte rendu par ordre de Sa Sainteté de l’état des Maisons de la Réforme de la Trappe établies en France, September 1828.

Religieux de Choeur: Régistre Matricule du 5 Octobre 1838 au 3 Juin 1877.

Frères Convers: Régistre Matricule du 15 8bre Octobre 1830 [sic] au 3 Juin 1865.

Necrology from 1839 through 1848.

Necrology of monks who went to Staouëli Abbey.

Notre-Dame des Gardes Archives (Saint Georges des Gardes, France):

Soeur Victoire Aubry, Premières Fleurs de N.-D. des Gardes.

Registre des Personnes qui sont entrée dans ce Monastere de Notre dame-des Gardes.

Etat détaillé de la Communauté de N.D. des Gardes, Mars 1886.

Cartes des visites.

La Trappe Abbey Archives (Soligny-La-Trappe, France)

Response of the Notre-Dame des Gardes community to the Mayor of Saint-George in answer to inquiries by the subprefect of Beaupréau dated September 4, 1824, côte 30, pièces 1-2.

Martinique correspondence, côte 181, pièces 1-30.

Gethsemani Abbey Archives (Trappist, KY)

Eutrope Proud to his brothers and sisters, December 27, 1846, translator unknown.

Eutrope Proud to Pierre Proud, Aug. 1, 1847, translator unknown.

From Melleray to Gethsemani 1848, short undated memoir of Eutrope Proud, translator unknown.

Loire-Atlantic Departmental Archives:

Sous-prèfet to prèfet, February 16, 1843, 71-72 V/1

Primary Sources: Printed

Auguste-Amaury, M. Le Monastère de Meilleraie ou Visite a Notre-Dame de la Trappe. Nantes: Montagne, 1857.

Beauregard, Antoine Saulinier de, “Compte rendu par ordre de Sa Sainteté de l’état des Maisons de la Réforme de la Trappe établies en France,” Revue Mabillon, No. 111, (Juillet-Septembre 1938).

Conslavi, Ercole. Mémoires du Cardinal Consalvi avec une introduction et des notes par J. Crétineau-Joly. Paris: Henri Plon, 1866.

Foucauld, Charles de. “Cette chère dernier place”: Lettres à Mes Frères de la Trappe, annotated by A. Robert. Paris: Cerf, 1991.

Fry, Timothy, ed. The Rule of Saint Benedict in English. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981.

Gatayes, Léon, “Une Communauté de Trappistes Musiciens,” Le Menestrell, August 24, 1853.

Guéranger, Prosper. In a Great and Noble Tradition: The Autobiography of Dom Prosper Guéranger (1805-1875), Founder of the Solesmes Congregation of Benedictine Monks and Nuns, trans. and eds. David Hayes and Hyacinthe Defos du Rau. Gloucester: Gracewing 2009.

Hermans, V., “Actes et décisions des chapitres généraux des Congrégations Trappistes du XIXe siècle (1835-1891)(I),” Analecta Cisterciensia XXVII, Jan.-Jun. 1971.

Hugo, Victor. Selected Poems of Victor Hugo, a Bilingual Edition, eds. E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Janvier, M.E. Procès de l’abbaye de Melleray: Plaidoirie de M.E. Janvier. Paris: Agence générale pour la défense de la liberté religieuse, 1832.

John of Sada. Short History of the Establishment of the Religious of La Trappe in Switzerland, trans. Guadaloupe Translations. Monasterio Legerens: 1793.

“Notice Communale,” La Meilleraye-de-Bretagne, accessed March 14, 2020, http://cassini.ehess.fr/cassini/fr/html/fiche.php?select_resultat=21854.

Richer, Édouard. Voyage à la trappe de Melleray, 5th ed. Nantes: Mellinet-Malassis, 1823.

Thiers, Adolphe. Discours parlementaires, 15 vols., Calmann Lévy ed. Paris: M. Calmon, 1880.

Villefort, M. L’Abbé de. Trois jours au monastère des trappistes de la Meilleray, 2nd ed. Paris: C. J. Trouvé, 1826.

Secondary Sources

Abbaye de La Trappe. Odyssée monastique. Dom A. de Lestrange et les trappistes pendant la révolution. Imp. de la Grande-Trappe, 1898.

Amaury, Auguste. Le monastère de Meilleraie, ou Visite à Note-Dame de la Trappe. Nantes: Montagne, 1857.

Anonymous, “Vie du R.P.D. Antoine, abbé de la Trappe de Melleray”, L’Ami de la Religion, Jeudi 29 Octobre 1840.

Anonymous, “Julia Woodforde and the Trappist Monk,” The Sphere, November 21, 1934.

Anonymous, “Dom Edouard Chaix,” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame des Gardes, Mars- Avril-Mai, 1902.

Arnold, Odile. Le corps et l’âme: la vie des religieuses au XIXe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1984.

Beales, Derek Edward Dawson. Prosperity and Plunder : European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650-1815. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bersange, J. Dom François Régis: Fondateur et premier Abbe de N.-D. de Staouëli (Algérie). Paris: Beauchesne, 1911.

Bouvet, Christian and Alain Gallicé. Notre-Dame de Melleray: une abbaye cistercienne de sa foundation à aujourd’hui. Châteaubriant: Histoire et Patrimoine de Châteaubriant, 2008.

Berman, Constance. The White Nuns: Cistercian Abbeys For Women in Medieval France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Brégeon, Jean-Joël and Guicheteau. Gérard, Nouvelle histoire des guerres de Vendée. Paris: Perrin, 2017.

Byrnes, Joseph. “Chateaubriand and Destutt de Tracy: Defining Religious and Secular Polarities in France at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century.” Church History 60, no. 3 (September 1991): 316-330.

Casey, Michael. “The Cistercian Order since 1600,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, edited by Mette Birkedal Braun, 50-64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Coleman, Charly. The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-individualist History of the French Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.

Cholvy, Gérard and Yves-Marie Hilaire. Histoire Religieuse de la France Contemporaine. Toulouse: Bibliothèque historique Privat, 1985.

Cholvy, Gérard. “Le Renouveau Monastique en France au XIXe Siècle: Le Contexte,” Esprit et Vie, 22, no. 1 (2 Janvier 1997): 9-13.

Cholvy, Gérard. “Les Peuples de France entre Religion et Révolution (1760-1830).” Esprit et Vie, 22, no. 10 (Mai 1997): 217-223.

Cholvy, Gérard. La religion en France de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours. Paris: Hachette, 1998.

Cholvy, Gérard. Géographie religieuse de l’Hérault contemporain. Paris: PUF, 1968.

Clenet, Louis-Marie. Grignion de Montfort, Le Saint de la Vendée. Paris: Perrin 1988.

Colinon, Maurice. Guides des monastères: France, Belgique, Luxembourg. Paris: Guides Horay, 1983.

Collingham, H.A.C. The July Monarchy: A Political History of France 1830—1848. Longman, London: 1988.

Courson, Guillotin De. “L’Abbaye de Melleray Avant La Révolution,” appended to Bulletin Archéologique de L’Association Bretonne. Saint-Brieuc: Librairie René Prud’homme, 1895.

Curtis, Sarah A. Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Curtis, Sarah A. Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth- Century France. Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 2000.

Dansette, Adrien. Religious History of Modern France. Translated by John Dingle, 2 vols. Herder and Herder, 1961.

Delisle, Philippe. Renouveau missionaire et société esclavagiste, La Martinique: 1815-1848. Paris: Publisud, 1997.

Delpal, Bernard. Le silence des moines: les trappistes au XIXe siècle, France—Algèrie— Syrie. Paris: Beauchesne, 1998.

Delpal, Bernard. “Travail, loisir et observance chez les trappistes au XIXe siècle.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions, no. 86 (1994): 213-233.

Diefendorf, Barbara B. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Engle-Janosi, Frederich. “Chateaubriand as an Historical Writer,” The Catholic Historical Review 33 no. 4 (January 1948): 385-422.

Everton, Elizabeth. “Expiatory Victims of Modern Crisis: Christian Feminism, the Bazar de la Charité Fire, and the Politics of Suffering.” French Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (August 2019): 453-482.

Faugeras, Marius. Vocations sacerdotales et religieuses d’homme dans le diocèse de Nantes de 1851 a 1914. Thèse Complémentaire pour le Doctorat présentée à la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Rennes, 1964.

Faugeras, Marius. Le diocèse de Nantes sous la monarchie censitaire (1813-1822-1849), 2 vols. Fontenay-Le-Comte: Lussaud Frères, 1964.

Faugeras, Marius. “Les trappistes de la Melleray, pionniers de l’agriculture moderne dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle.” Enquêtes et documents, 3 (Nantes: Centre de recherches sur l’histoire de la France atlantique, 1975): 171-210.

Feay, Troy. Mission to Moralize: Slaves, Africans, and Missionaries in the French Colonies, 1815-1852. PhD Diss., University of Notre Dame, 2003.

Ford, Carolyn, “Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe,” The Journal of Modern History, 65 no. 1 (March 1993): 152-175.

Ford, Carolyn. Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Franklin, R.W. Nineteenth-Century Churches: The History of a New Catholicism in Württemberg, England, and France. New York and London: Garland, 1987.

Frohlen, Claude “The Industrial Revolution in France,” in Essays in French Economic History, edited by Rondo Cameron, 201-225. Homewood, Ill.: American Economic Association, 1970.

Furet, François. La Révolution francaise. De Turgot à Jules Ferry, 1770-1888. Paris: Hachette, 1988.

Gaillardin, Casimir. Les Trappistes, ou, l’ordre de Citeaux au XIXe siècle : histoire de la Trappe depuis sa fondation jusqu’a nos jours, 1140-1844. Paris: Comptior des imprimeurs-unis, 1844.

Galbrun, Bridgette. “Introduction,” in L’Abbaye de Savigny (1112-2012): Un chef d’ordre anglo-normand, edited by Brigitte Galbrun and Véronique Gazeau. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019.

Gibson, Ralph. A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789-1914, Christianity and Society in the Modern World. London: Routledge, 1989.

Gibson, Ralph, “Why Republicans and Catholics Couldn’t Stand Each Other in the Nineteenth Century,” in Religion, society, and politics in France since 1789, edited by Frank Tallet and Nicolas Atkin, 107-120. London: Hambledon Press 1991.

Goldstein, Jan. The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Halgouët, Jérôme du. Sketches for a History of the Trappist Order in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by John Hasbrouck. Carlton, OR: Guadelupe Translations, 1999.

Harrison, Carol. Romantic Catholics: France’s Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Jennings, Lawrence C. French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802-1848. Cambridge UK: University of Cambridge Press 2000.

Kane, Paula M., “‘She Offered Herself Up’: The Victim Soul and Victim Spirituality in Catholicism,” Church History 71, no. 1 (2002): 80-119.

Kervingant, Marie de la Trinité. La vie sur la colline Notre-Dame des Gardes: survol d’une longue histoire au pays des Mauges. Saint-George-des-Gardes: Monastère Notre- Dame des Gardes, 1983.

Kervingant, Marie de la Trinité. A Monastic Odyssey. Translated by Jean Holman. Kalamazoo/Spencer: Cistercian Publications, 1999.

King, Peter. Western Monasticism : A History of the Monastic Movement in the Latin Church. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1999.

King, Peter. “The Cistercian Order 1200-1600.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order, edited by Mette Birkedal Braun, 38-49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Kselman, Thomas. Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

Kselman, Thomas, “State and Religion,” in Revolutionary France 1788-1880 edited by Malcolm Cook, 63-92. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Kselman, Thomas. Conscience and Conversion: Religious Liberty in Post-Revolutionary France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.

Laffay, Hervé. Dom Augustin de Lestrange et l’avenir du monachisme. Paris: Cerf, 1998.

Langlois, Claude. Le catholicisme au féminine. Les congrégations françaises à supérieure générale au XIXe siècle. Paris: Cerf, 1984.

Langlois, Claude. “Permanence, Renouveau et Affrontements.” In Histoire des Catholiques en France du XVe siècle à nos jours. Edited by François Lebrun, 291-368. Toulouse: Privat, 1980.

Langumier, Marguerite Marie. Histoire de L’Abbaye Notre-Dame des Gardes, bicentenaire de l’arrivée des “trappistines” aux Gardes: 200 ans de vigilance—“Stans coram Deo”, unpublished manuscript. Notre-Dame des Gardes, April 30, 2018.

Lawrence, C.H. Medieval Monasticism, 4th ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Le Bail, Anselm. L’ordre de Cîteaux:“La Trappe.” Paris: Letouzey, 1924.

Lebrun, François. Histoire de Diocèse d’Angers: L’Anjou chrétien des origines à nos jours. Paris: Beauchesne, 1981.

Leclercq, Jean, “Le renouveu Solesmien et le renouveau religieux au XIXe siècle,” in Centenaire de Belloc, 47-84. Éditions Ezkila, 1977.

Le Coadic, Ronan, Brittany’s borders, (2004 Glamorgan, UK: https://hal.archives- ouvertes.fr/file/index/docid/872449/filename/Brittanya_s_borders.pdf).

Lekai, Louis. The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977.

Magraw, Roger. France 1800-1924: A Social History. London: Longman, 2002.

Mann, Patrice, “Les insurrections paysannes de l’Ouest: Vendée et chouannerie,” Revue française de sociologie XXX (1989): 587-600.

McManners, J. “Voltaire and the Monks.” Studies in Church History 22 (1985): 319–342.

McMillan, James F. France and Women 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Obrecht, Edmund M. “Melleray,” in Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 10. New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1913.

McPhee, Peter. A Social History of France: 1789-1914, 2d ed. Hampshire: Palgrave McMillan, 2004.

Merton, Thomas. The Waters of Siloe. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949.

Moloney, Stephen. The History of Mount Melleray Abbey. Cork: Paramount Printing House, 1952.

Newman, Martha, “Foundations and Twelfth Century”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Cistercian Order edited by Mette Birkedal Braun, , 25-37. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Pennington, Basil, “Cistercians” in The Modern Catholic Encyclopedia edited by M. Glazier and M. K. Hellwig, 167. Revised edition. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2004.

Philibert, Anne. Henri Lacordaire. Paris: Cerf, 2016.

Phillips, Charles Stanley. The Church in France, 1789-1848; a Study in Revival. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966.

Pilbeam, Pamela. The 1830 Revolution in France. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1991.

Pongeron, B., “Comment restaurer un ordre au XIXe siécle? Quand la mythe crée l’histoire.” In Lacordaire: son pays, ses amis et la liberté des ordres religieux edited by Guy Bedouelle, 383-406. Paris: Cerf, 1991.

Pouthas, Charles Hippolyte. L’Église et Les Questions Religieuses Sous La Monarchie Constitutionnelle, 1814-1848. Paris : Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1961.

Price, Roger. Religious Renewal in France, 1789-1870: The Roman Catholic Church between Catastrophe and Triumph. Aberystwyth, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Redman, Jr., Henry. “Beleaguered Monasticism and Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé.” PLMA 74, no. 5 (December 1959): 548-552

Sbalchiero, Patrick. Histoire de la vie monastique. Paris: Desclée, 2008.

Roberts, William, “Napoleon, the Concordat of 1801, and Its Consequences.” In Controversial Concordats: The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and

Hitler edited by Frank Coppa, 34-80. Washington D.C. Catholic University Press, 2012.

Rogers, Rebecca. “Retrograde or modern? Unveiling the teaching nun in nineteenth-century France.” Social History 23, no. 2 (May 2008): 146-164.

Rogers, Rebecca. “Le Catholicisme au féminine: Thirty Years of Women’s History.” Historical Reflections/Réflections Historiques 39, no. 1, Special Issue: Claude Langlois’s Vision of France: Regional Identity, Royal Imaginary, and Holy Women (Spring 2013): 82-100.

Rolland-Boulestreau, Anne. Les colonnes infernales. Violence et guerre civile en Vendée (1794-1795). Paris: Fayard, 2015.

Sauvestre, Charles. Les Congrégations religieuses dévoilées. Paris: Achille Faure, 1867.

Seigel, Jerrod. The Idea of Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Sessions, Jennifer. By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Sewell, Jr., William H. Work & Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Sutherland, D.M.G. “Claude Langlois’s French Revolution.” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 39, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 40-50.

Tackett, Timothy. Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Théophile, Marie. Histoire du sanctuaire et de la communaute de Notre-Dame-des-Gardes, 2d. ed. (quelque peu augmenté). Bourges: Tardy-Pigelet, 1893.

Tombs, Robert. France 1814-1914. London and New York: Longman, 1996.

Turin, Yvonne. Femmes et religieuses au XIXe siècle: le féminisime “en religion.” Paris: Nouvelle Cité, 1989.

Vincent, K. Steven. “Elite Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century France: Salons, Sociability, and the Self.” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 2 (2007): 327-351.

Vincent, K. Steven. “Authority, Revolution, and Work: Views from the Socialist Left in the Fin de Siècle.” In The Human Tradition in Modern France edited by K. Steven Vincent and Alison Klairmont-Lingo, 99-113. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000.

Vovelle, Michel. Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

Uzureau, François. “Les Miracles à Notre-Dame-des-Gardes.” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre- Dame des Gardes, September, 1898.

Uzureau, François. “Notre-Dame des Gardes pendant la Révolution: Vente de la chapelle et du monastère.” Bulletin de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame des Gardes, December 1900.

100