God Sister Teresa
The other day I was pointing out to visitors a stained-glass window in our chapel; its message is direct and unmistakable, showing as it does the execution of sixteen out of the seventeen sisters at the Compiègne Carmel during the French Revolution. I realised that I was looking at a disconcerting mirror image of myself, stretched out and strapped to a hinged plank, trussed up like an oven-ready chicken and about to be tipped under the blade of the guillotine. I am not the stuff of which martyrs are made.
By September 1792 all women’s religious houses in France were closed and religious habits were forbidden. The Compiègne Carmelites were imprisoned and forced into shabby second-hand civilian clothes though they kept with them their own brown habits and white mantles. They stayed in prison until 12th July 1794 – washday – so for once they were dressed as nuns while their other clothes were put to soak. That morning, the mayor of Compiègne arrived with a party of soldiers to take them to Paris to the Revolutionary Tribunal. There was no question of any delay to allow their clothes to dry, so they had to go to Paris as Carmelites, to the mayor’s fury.
On 17th July the Carmelites were tried and found guilty of treason by the Public Prosecutor. They were then herded to the Conciergerie and loaded onto carts to go to the guillotine. The nuns were spared the indignity of the ‘last toilette’ – having their hair sheared away from their necks by the public executioner – as the prioress had ensured this was done in private beforehand. There is a cruel line drawing by Jacques-louis David of Marie Antoinette on her way to her death, wearing a hideous cap, her hair cropped and messy, her dress drab, with her hands tied behind her back. The nuns must have looked quite different: all sixteen stood out from the crowd, distinguished as they were by their Carmelite clothes, their white mantles in particular.
There has been much speculation about what happened on the slow and painful journey from the Conciergerie to the place du Trône but it would seem that the mob was for once silent. There is contemporary evidence that the nuns sang: possibly the entire Office for the Dead (there would have been time) and that when they got to the actual scaffold they renewed their vows. As they were about to go to the guillotine a sister intoned, some say the ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’, others the ‘Salve Regina’, and the remaining nuns took up the chant and went on singing till the last one was silenced by death.
I have no devotion to relics, but find it very moving that those grubby clothes in the wash-tub in 1794 still exist. A community of English Benedictine nuns in the same prison wore them with gratitude: they hadn’t been able to get hold of civilian clothing and having to wear their illegal habits put them in constant danger. The clothes went with them when they escaped to England, and were preserved out of love and respect for the Carmelites who were executed. These same clothes are now divided between Stanbrook Abbey, where the descendants of the imprisoned Benedictines ended up, and a French Carmel.