Sacred mysteries: No tragic ending for this march to the scaffold
I’ve seen people call the opera Dialogues des Carmélites a tragedy. To me it is a drama of suspense with a happy ending. Like the film Of Gods and Men (about Trappists in Algeria in our own century) the subject is martyrdom – witness to God by faith. The danger is to fail to remain faithful, hence the suspense until the martyrs are safely in heaven.
“There is nothing in opera, absolutely nothing, quite like Francis Poulenc’s extraordinary piece,” Sir Nicholas Kenyon wrote in The Telegraph in reviewing the 2023 Glyndebourne production. The opera adds fictional characters, such as the timid Blanche, to bring out the perils for the 16 Carmelite nuns facing the guillotine in the French Revolution. Now they have been canonised by Pope Francis with no further bureaucracy.
They had been beatified in 1906, and no one doubted their holiness. They kept the reformed rule promoted by the humorous but tough St Teresa of Avila. Carmelites’ core work, though they dig potatoes or deny themselves by fasting, is to pray. They do so individually in silence and together in chanting the Psalms of the half dozen monastic offices each day.
Poulenc has the nuns singing the ancient antiphon Salve Regina as the guillotine thumps away head after head. “After this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” the prayer asks of the Virgin Mary.
In reality I think the nuns sang that prayer as they were taken by cart to the scaffold. They had also written a brave devotional song confronting death to the tune of the Marseillaise: “We all march to the true conquest, under the flag of the dying God.” At the scaffold they sang the Veni Creator, a prayer to the Holy Spirit sung at a nun’s solemn profession. The scaffold was at Place du Trône-Renversé, now the little Place de l’Ile de la Réunion next to the Place de la Nation.
Two women who were externs, not nuns (working at the enclosed convent and being able to go to out), chose to stay with them and shared their martyrdom. They are saints now too. The first nun to die was the youngest, Sister Constance, a novice. She began the short Psalm (116), Laudate Domine: “O praise the Lord, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people. For his merciful kindness is great toward us...” The guillotine cut her off and the next in seniority was put under the blade, singing the same verses.
Sister Charlotte of the Resurrection, 78, the oldest nun, had been in Carmel for 57 years. She used a crutch to walk and, as the nuns’ hands were tied, could not get down from the cart. An executioner threw her down.
Rehearsals had gone on for years for the final curtain on July 17 1794. In 1790, a decree suppressed religious orders, and the Carmelites of Compiègne, 45 miles from Paris, stayed in the convent as wards of the state. In 1792, the furniture was taken and the nuns expelled, their habit now illegal. They continued their life of prayer privately in four houses, watched by police. In June 1794 they were imprisoned, then taken to Paris.
A revolutionary trial accused them of being fanatics and counter-revolutionaries. One piece of evidence was a fleur-de-lis embroidered on an altar cloth. Mother Henriette of Jesus, aged 49, asked the revolutionary prosecutor, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville: “Citizen, tell us just what you mean by the word fanatic.” He replied: “I mean your attachment to your childish beliefs and your silly religious practices.”
The nuns’ end was no prettier than the Crucifixion, but it could not be more relevant in our days of violent persecution.