As the French Revolution reached the peak of its violence during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, one of its greatest horrors was the desecration of the Carmelite Convent in Compiègne, in northeastern France.
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Sixteen members of the Carmelite community were executed as “counterrevolutionaries.” They were 11 nuns, three lay sisters and two members of the third order. It is said that as the sisters were carted to the guillotine, the surrounding crowd was strangely silent—and that the awful event may indeed have contributed to the end of the Terror.
The story became more widely known when the German writer Gertrude von le Fort, a brilliant student of Ernst Troeltsch and a convert to Catholicism, wrote on a memoir by a survivor of the executions to publish a novel, The Song at the Scaffold. She created the character of Blanche de la Force, a young aristocrat haunted by fear, who seeks peace in the convent. The author’s sympathy with her creation is evident in the similarity of their names. She saw in Blanche “the embodiment of the mortal agony of an era going totally to its ruin.”
As the French Revolution reached the peak of its violence, one of its greatest horrors was the desecration of the Carmelite Convent in Compiègne.
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In the fraught postwar years, the legendary French Dominican Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger and the cinematographer Phillippe Agostini developed a film based on the novella (adding the character of the Chevalier de la Force, Blanche’s brother). In 1947, they persuaded Georges Bernanos to write the dialogue. Though the film was never realized, the Bernanos text was staged as a play that premiered in Zurich in 1951 and ran for 300 consecutive performances in Paris the following year.
Offered a commission to write a ballet for La Scala and the Milanese publisher Ricordi, the French composer Francis Poulenc (1889-1963) chose instead Bernanos’ “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” He had seen the play performed in Paris and now read it straight through one afternoon, transfixed, in the Piazza Navona in Rome. He had found the great theme of his life: uniting historical event and mystical depth. He began “working like a madman” on it. “I do not go out. I do not see anyone. I do not want to think of anything else,” he wrote in August of 1953. “I am crazy about my subject, to the point of believing that I have actually known these women.” For his libretto he had the profound text of Bernanos’s play, yet the project was imperiled by a dispute over rights to the text. Poulenc then suffered a nervous breakdown, triggered also by the death of his lover, Lucien Roubert, as he was writing the final pages of the opera.