To Quell the Terror

To Quell the Terror: The True Story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne by William Bush, 233 pages

The story of the Carmelite martyrs of Compiegne is one that has been adapted many times - most famously by Getrude von le Fort in her novel Song at the Scaffold and Francis Poulenc in his opera Dialogue of the Carmelites.  The true story, as told by Bush,  is more profound and dramatic than the fictive adaptations, even if it is somewhat less aesthetically pleasing.

In the midst of the bloody persecutions of the French Revolution, the fifteen nuns and one unprofessed novice of the Carmelite community at Compiegne were expelled from their convent with little more than the habits they were now forbidden by law to wear and a vague promise of future government pensions.  The sixteen women reformed their community in the streets of Paris, and began daily offering themselves to God as living sacrifices for the soul of France.  Arrested, tried, and convicted for the counterrevolutionary act of maintaining their religious vows, the sixteen were executed by guillotine, the novice taking her final vows in the very shadow of the scaffold.  A mere decadi (the decadi was the ten day Revolutionary replacement for the seven day Christian week) later, Robespierre was arrested, and his execution symbolically ended the Terror.

Bush is excellent at contrasting the idolatrous madness of the Revolution with the quiet piety of the Carmelites.  There are some elements that are less than successful - Bush lacks the literary gifts to smoothly handle shifting back and forth in time between the events of the Revolution and the biographies of the martyrs, although a similar technique was thrilling in Hansen's Exiles - but his sensitivity to spiritual realities and his understanding of the Carmelites' theological background make this a remarkable modern hagiography.