The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  were only 12 Benedictine monks left in the great unfi nished abbey that was being rebuilt at the time.

  Th

  e expulsion of the Society of Jesus from France in 1764 was a precedent in living memory of what could be done when the nation no longer needed the particular ministry of a body within the Church. Catherine II in Russia and Joseph in Austria had abolished contemplative orders by royal decree but, after the Jesuits had been suppressed, the French bishops themselves set up a Commission of Regulars3 and, in the 25 years before 1789, had abolished 426 abbeys and convents, raised the age of making a religious vow to 21, and made the process of renouncing vows easier. Some small-scale religious orders were suppressed altogether. Even if the orders which off ered public (i.e.

  private) education and ran hospitals remained, the writing was on the wall for the purely contemplative orders in France. Public opinion increasingly regarded religious orders as irrelevant to modern life in the pre-revolutionary years, as all the contemporary pornographic satire at their expense suggests.4

  Th

  e monks and nuns who remained after the bishops had taken action were in the forefront of secular criticism, and the lightning struck their tree with the complete abolition of religious orders by the National Constituent Assembly on 13 February 1790. Th

  is was not necessarily revolutionary, but the continu-

  ation of a process already begun. Th

  e new order had its own plans for secular

  education and health care, and the religious orders were redundant. In Paris, former religious buildings were given new purposes: the Jacobins and the Cordeliers became the homes of two of the most infl uential political bodies outside the National Assembly and then the Convention, and the constitutional monarchists had their meetings at the Feuillants.

  Th

  e Church lands were designated as national property, and government bonds called assignats, offi

  cially printed and carrying the king’s por-

  trait, made it easier for those who had assets to buy them at auction.

  Wealthy townsmen living a long way off and neighbours in the countryside bought the bonds and used the certifi cates to purchase the land or buildings, or both. Later on, assignats were the equivalent of money and the rate at which they lost their value was alarming for everybody.

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  All this was refl ected in what happened in the Charente-Inférieure.

  Abbeys and priories were turned into farm buildings and their lands assumed into the properties of laymen in villages like Saint-Gemme, Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud,5 and Trizay. Th

  e latter had been in impressive ruins since the

  Wars of Religion 200 years before, and it soon became part of a farm.6

  In La Rochelle, the initiative for closing religious houses appears to have been taken by the sans-culottes, who could never have aff orded to participate in their purchase. In November 1792, the church that had belonged to the Augustinians was set aside by the municipality for traditionalist Catholic worship led by refractory priests, until the sans-culottes rioted and forced the municipality to abandon such a scheme, taking the opportunity to settle long standing antagonism against the clergy.7

  Th

  ere were 18 buyers of church property in La Rochelle district and half of them were Protestants. Samuel de Missy bought 600,000 livres worth of land and salt marsh. In 1793–4, the Protestant bourgeoisie of Aunis took over emigré land too. Protestants took advantage of the religious neutrality of the State introduced in 1795. Reformed communities re-established themselves independently at La Rochelle and La Tremblade and, in 1802, Bonaparte’s organic articles which supplemented the Concordat with the Pope, regularized their existence.8

  * * *

  On the opposite side of the Charente from Saintes Cathedral stands the Abbaye aux Dames. At the time of the Revolution it was important in the life of the town as a large-scale employer, if nothing else. It ranked as a powerful institution. Besides whatever spiritual value it may still have had, its abbess wielded real and actual power as the seigneur of a great number of villages in the Charente-Inférieure and elsewhere. Th e closure

  of the Abbaye did not only involve de-Christianization, but the breaking of seigneurial control. To all intents and purposes, the abbess was attacked on the same basis as those noble seigneurs who lost their status in favour of the authorities in the municipalities, the districts and the departments.

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  e abbey was suppressed as a religious house, along with all the others in the town, because it presented a challenge to the maire at the Hôtel de Ville and the district and department along the river at the Hôtel de Monconseil.

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  e Unseen Terror

  12. Saintes: Abbaye aux Dames.

  Marie-Magdeleine de Baudéan de Parabère was the last abbess of Saintes.

  She had presided over the Abbaye aux Dames for 30 years by virtue of the Papal Bull by which she was instituted in 1762, and was not the sort of person you argued with. She fought against the closure of her abbey, but became ill and died while still just about in offi

  ce.

  She had been born fairly close to the throne of France, being the daughter of the Regent Philippe d’Orléans’s mistress. She had battles with the two last bishops of Saintes. Monseigneur Germain de la Chastaigneraye complained about her to the Parlement of Bordeaux in a dispute over the presentation of a curé to the parish of Balanzac in 1770. She was also in dispute with Bishop de La Rochefoucauld, who found the abbey in a state of anarchy, arranged for its suppression by the king and its replacement with a chapter of canonesses, but she managed to obtain a delay: three sisters were

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  expelled by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, but the ordinance for suppressing the abbey was revoked early in 1789.

  As abbess, she had the right to present curés to 53 parishes. She was seigneur of some parishes, as was the case in Corme Royal, Bernard’s birthplace, and Pont l’Abbé de l’Arnoult, although the curé there was appointed as a commendatory prior by the crown. Th

  ere is a record of

  her successful dispute about rents with her vassals in the parish of Vix in Poitou.9 Th

  e Supreme Being, however, had no need of monks and nuns.

  A radical suppression of the Abbaye aux Dames, along with the other religious orders for men and women in the town of Saintes was ordered.

  Th

  e Cordeliers convent was closed. Th

  e buildings of the Carmelites, the

  Daughters of Our Lady, and the Sainte-Claires satisfi ed the far greater need for prisons than ever appeared before. Th

  e Grey Sisters’ convent

  became a soap factory and the Jacobins’ property was sold and became a distillery.10 Meagre information about what happened at the Abbaye aux Dames has been pieced together to a certain extent by a study of the register of the debates of the Directory of the District of Saintes.11

  Th

  e Abbaye aux Dames stands back behind the Saint-Pallais quarter and dominates a large, open space. Th

  e church is of cathedral dimen-

  sions, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with remarkable Saintongeais sculptures around its west door, a spacious nave, a sturdy crossing which supports the tower and a conical spire, and an east end that seems to have served as a model for the sanctuaries of many village churches in a wide area around. Added to the church, on the usual Benedictine pattern, are the conventual buildings surviving in their seventeenth-century form, with accommodation for each of the sisters individually in their cells, and all the common rooms and offi ces on the

  ground fl oor. Th

  e buildings are on a palatial scale, ideal for all its original and subsequent uses: an abbey for women, a prison, a barracks, and now a music academy.

  As the legal disputes already mentioned
suggest, by the time of the Revolution the abbey was more about power than prayer, and the rationalists could bring many arguments to bear in support of their decision to close it: not least that the residents of houses in Saint-Pallais hard by complained about the incessant sound of the bells calling the sisters to their offi

  ces at all hours of the day and night.

  Th

  ere is very little left as material for a connected history of the end of the abbey, but the Directory’s records show that on 11 August 1790

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  commissioners were appointed to make an inventory of its deeds and papers, and on 11 November 1791, an archivist was appointed to decipher them. Th

  e fi rst archivist was one of the sisters, but she was soon dismissed.

  On 1 ventôse year 3 (19 February 1795), municipal offi

  cials were put in

  charge of the abbey archives.

  Th

  e Directory of the District of Saintes was in total control of any money spent in its area of jurisdiction, and all the clergy had to come to it at regular intervals to claim their salaries as state offi

  cials. Th

  e abbey’s income and

  expenditure was also recorded in the records, and it is noted that the abbess demanded that her tenant farmers should be ordered to pay their rents on Saint John’s day as usual, in view of the outgoings she had to meet. Th ere

  were 24 sisters to be maintained as well as a number of people who had to be paid wages. Th

  e District Directory decided that, instead of waiting for

  a decision from the National Assembly about a defi nitive course of action, the Departmental Directory ought to decide the issue, at least provisionally, for itself. Th

  e Directory decided that the sums due on Saint John’s day were still required from the farmers. It appears that maintained seigneurial dues were still coming to the abbey without the uproar that took place around Saint-Jean-d’Angély at the same time. Th

  e calling of the Estates-General

  with the drawing up of the cahiers de doléance had not made the abbess any less conscious of her claims as a seigneur.

  Th

  e National Assembly’s law of 13 February 1790 abolished all monastic vows and religious orders unless it could be proved they had value as educational or nursing establishments like the ones in La Rochelle. Monks and nuns were free to leave the monasteries and convents and were able to apply for pensions. Monks who decided to stay in the monastic houses would be re-grouped when most of the houses were shut down, but nuns were allowed to remain in their own convents for the time being.

  Th

  is created a problem for priests such as Bernard Pontet, who was one of four priests at the parish church of Saint-Pallais, just next door to the abbey, and who ministered to communities of nuns. He claimed his quarterly salary from the district in 1790 and then, in February and July 1791, a diff erent amount in his quality as joint-minister in the church since his post as chaplain to the abbey had virtually been abolished. Th

  e District Directory said that

  the former abbey was the concern of a private cult which could not be paid any money out of the public treasury. Pontet could have no more than 500

  livres instead of the 1,425 for which he had asked. On 13 October he took the oath, and asked for his reinstatement in terms of his accommodation,

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  his stipend of 1,000 livres as chaplain of the chantry chapel where he said masses for the souls of dead abbesses, and 800 livres as one of the priests of Saint-Pallais. He was told that his oath had not been taken within the space of time allowed, and he had been replaced in the parish by a constitutional priest, so he could still have no more than 500 livres, the district offi cials said.

  However, they added, if he ministered to one parish only ‘with the hope of obtaining the votes of the electoral assembly by sustained zeal and patriotism’, then sought canonical institution by Bishop Robinet, he might possibly improve his fi nancial situation. But, within a year, the church of Saint-Pallais was a saltpetre workshop. After 20 April 1792, gunpowder and cannon for the war against the kings of Europe took priority over everything else.12

  Th

  e abbess was required to make a ‘patriotic contribution’ in the same way as all the constitutional clergy were. Each sister had made application to the state for a pension of 700 livres. Payments had already been made to the resident sisters, including the abbess’s own stipend of 2,000 livres, and the abbey’s income had been assessed for the two tax periods of 1791 and 1792 on 40,500 livres. Th

  e tax expected by the Directory was 2,250 livres.

  Th

  ere was a capital of 38,250 livres, on which the patriotic contribution for these two periods would be in two equal sums of 3,187 livres 10 sols; ‘this last sum is made up of the third part of a quarter of the said 38,250 livres’.

  As for a reduction of 3,800 livres, proposed by the Municipality of Saintes to account for repairs done on the house already submitted, the District Directory agreed that this was right. So, for a while, the Abbaye was being treated with consideration.

  A law passed in the National Assembly on 22 April, two days after the declaration of war, ordered that the bells of all suppressed religious houses had to be sent to the treasury. Dame de Parabère did her best to resist this law, asking – fi ve weeks after the decree was passed – that she herself should have ‘the oversight of the taking down of the bells of her convent until a reply came from the minister of the interior to whom she had presented a petition on the subject’, but this request was declared unacceptable.13

  However, she persisted in asking for permission to keep the clock bell on the grounds that it told the time in the local community and regulated the hours of the working day in the Saint-Pallais quarter. Th e municipality persuaded the District Directory that the abbess had a point, and on 31 May 1792 a judgement was made that the law of 22 April could not be extended to bells which were integral parts of a clock. Th e National

  Assembly had given no pronouncement in this respect: the clock was to be

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  e Unseen Terror

  considered ‘of a public utility by advantage of its situation’. It was agreed that the bell should remain in place or should be put back if it had been brought down already. But then it was learned that the men who brought down the bells from the former abbey ‘had caused the clock bell to be broken’ and the Directory agreed that it should be replaced by one of the remaining bells.14

  François-Guillaume Marillet had his piece to say about the Abbey bells.

  On 29th March, two famous municipal offi

  cers, Boisnard and Canola,

  went to take away the nine bells of the abbey which made up a charming carillon, the largest serving the clock. Madame the Abbess de Parabère had provided them herself. Th

  ere was silver in each one, which gave them

  a silver tone. She had off ered to pay the value, but the monsters did not want to listen to her. Boisnard replied to the prioress . . . that the material mattered little, but the sound annoyed the townsfolk and greatly disturbed them: that they attached more to the sound than to what they were made of. Th

  ere was a sort of movement in the suburb of Saint-Pallais on this subject, and a petition had been presented to the department which had been signed by all the residents who wanted the preservation of the bells . . . but it had been useless. A guard of fi fteen men had been put on the gate, no one had got in and the wicked had done whatever they wanted.

  Th

  ey wanted to break them up in the church so as to give heartbreak to the community but they decided to smash them in the yard, outside the community living accommodation. Madame Baudéan de Parabère . . . had so much sorrow at this that she fell ill. She added that [her sorrow was increased by] one of her nieces, Mlle de Lantern, whom she had broug
ht up from the age of two to the age of twenty-one, leaving with M. and Mme Lantern who had made the journey from Paris expressly to collect her. Th

  is removal of the bells was a manifest theft and I compare the National Assembly, all the clubs, the municipalities and the rabids of the towns to one band of thieves for which the headquarters is in Paris from where the orders are given to many detachments to steal and to pillage everywhere.15

  Marillet believed the fi rst thing he heard this time, and perhaps it was not true. On the same day, the district agreed to the request of the Municipality of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud to be allowed to exchange its own church bell for one of those that were taken down from the abbey. Th e council

  off ered to pay above the bell’s price and provide the diff erence in weight of metal if it were needed, on condition that the Municipality of Saintes

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  paid the transport costs. Th

  e electors of Mantels exchanged their broken

  bell with one from the abbey. So did the residents of the Saint-Vivien quarter in Saintes. Th

  e judgement said that ‘the churches preserved for the

  cult (i.e. religious worship) face the necessity of providing a clock for the purpose of calling the citizens together at the times set for divine service’.

  On 25 June, it was agreed to reimburse the abbess with 175 livres advanced to her as salary for the second quarter of 1792, addressed to the lady Labonnardelière ( sic), ill in her family and having fi xed her dwelling in the District of Civray, as it was said on the certifi cate provided for her by the Municipality of Excideuil to prove where she was at the time.

  Laws passed on 3 and 4 August 1792 suppressed most female religious communities and ordered the nuns to leave their convents which were to be disposed of as national property.16 In September 1792, when the abbess requested permission to rent out the community’s buildings until such time as those who were likely to purchase them took them over, the District Directory replied that such a course of action was unacceptable. Th

  e National Assembly’s ‘intention was not only to procure new resources for the state, but also to dissipate the remaining fanaticism for which the former monasteries off er too easy a retreat’.