It is estimated that in the middle of the seventeenth century, the number of authors

in France amounted to about 2200 individuals (of which half were men of the church, and
one fourth were nobles), writing for a reading public of probably only a few tens of
thousands of individuals.

DENIS DIDEROT

Anathema to much of the French intellectual and ecclesiastical establishment,

even now, one of the most complex and controversial figures of the Enlightenment, Denis
Diderot, the second child of a widely respected and wealthy master cutler, was born at
Langres in the Champagne, France, Continental Europe, on October 5, 1713. 1 His early
1

Didier Diderot, (September 14, 1685 1759) married Anglique Vigneron, (Ocober 12, 1677 1749), in
1711/12: a boy, born on November 5, 1712, died in infancy; a sister, Denise, who remained an austere
spinster, was born on January 27, 1715; two other sisters were born, one died in infancy and the other died
as a child.

life, unlike those of his equally famous contemporaries, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau
or Voltaire, is shrouded in mystery. Many of the works which he published during his
lifetime were anonymous, or were ascribed to other writers, and some of the works for
which he is now most noted appeared many years after his death. During his lifetime, his
most often reprinted works were two plays, though they were hardly ever performed.
Both his younger sister2 and brother3 entered the Church, and Denis himself
visited the Jesuit College in Langres (1723 1728), whereby he was characterized as a
lively and talented pupil, receiving the tonsure from the bishop of Langres, on August 22,
1726,4 though he did not in fact enter the Church; he went to Paris in 1729 to study
theology, and was first educated by the Jesuits (1728/9 1732), at the College dHarcourt
(or at the Lyce Louis-le-Grand or possibly at both of these institutions). On September 2,
1732, he was awarded the Master of Arts degree from the University of Paris, but he
chose to abandon his religious studies to devote himself to intellectual pursuits: including
higher mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, and modern languages. His father expected
him to study medicine or law, but he chose to pursue his own studies and writing, and
spent his time with books My love belongs to books; with them I am perfectly lucky
and content, more I need not. and women. Besides, he possessed a preference for
music, as also for the theatre. When his financial support was ended he then studied law
as an articled clerk, working in the office of the attorney Clment de Ris (1732 1734).
2

Anglique (1720 1749), who was Denis goddaughter of her own accord, became an Ursuline nun, and
later died in the cloister, mentally confused, at the age of twenty-eight.
3
There is little to suggest the lifelong discord between Denis and his brother, Didier Pierre (1722 1787),
canon and priest in Langres, who was repeatedly shocked by his older brothers bold disrespect for
organized religion. Theirs was an extremely conflict-rich relation because of their diverging world views.
4
When, on his fathers order, Denis was incarcerated in a monastery, and developed a tendency to suffer
from claustrophobia primitive fears of being trapped by some force or power in a situation from which
there is no escape. These dreadful feelings would again be acute during Diderots incarceration at donjon
of Vincennes, and would continue to haunt the man for the rest of his life, although it would have its most
intense literary expression in La Religieuse, conceived in early 1760.

Of his life, from 1734 to 1744, comparatively little is known. He dropped an

early ambition to enter the theatre and, instead, taught for a living, leading a penurious
existence writing sermons for missionaries. At one time he seems to have entertained the
idea of taking up an ecclesiastical career, but it is most unlikely that he entered a
seminary. Yet his work testifies to his having gone through a religious crisis, and he
progressed relatively slowly from Roman Catholicism to deism and then to atheism and
philosophical materialism.5
After ten bohemian years of hand-to-mouth existence as a tutor, translator and
hack journalist, he gradually lost whatever Christian faith he previously had, and began
moving towards a materialist position: Matter is the only entity in the universe, and is
governed by laws which we understand only imperfectly. Diderot first gained notice in
the 1740s translating English works on medicine and philosophy into French, using an
English Latin dictionary and translating the Latin into French. He frequented the
coffeehouses, particularly the Regence and the Procope, where he met the philosopher
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1741, and established a friendship with him that was to last
fifteen years, until it was broken by a quarrel.
In 1741 he also met Anne-Toinette Champion (1710 - 1796), daughter of a linen
draper, and they entered an agreement for marriage: his father locked him up in a
monastery in close proximity to Trovas: after some weeks, he escaped and succeeded in
returning to Paris, and in November 1743 they were married secretly, (because of his
fathers disapproval). The relationship was based on romantic love, but the marriage was
not a happy one owing to incompatible interests: Anne-Toinette emerging every now and

That Diderot led a disordered and bohemian existence at this time is made clear in his posthumously
published novel La Neveu Rameu (Rameaus Nephew).

then as a second Xanthippe. The bond held, however, despite a temporary liaison with
the authoress dArsant de Puisiuex, partly through a common affection for their daughter,
Anglique, born about 1747, sole survivor of three children; she was eventually married
to Albert de Vandeul (1753 - 1824), a man of some standing at Langres. (Diderot
lavished care over her education, and she wrote an account of his life and classified his
manuscripts.)
Diderot, & other reform critics, such as Rousseau, increasingly attacked the realm
of genre painting genre painting was seen as a distraction, appealing to the eyes, rather
than enriching the mind & moving the passions. These critics sought to blame the
aristocracy, & women patrons in particular, for encouraging artists to waste their talents.
Women were not always portrayed as passive objects; they also provided moral
examples, although in ways consistent with the patriarchal ideology of the
Enlightenment. Some of the women are rendered as self-absorbed and complacently
alluring; others embodied warnings against vices such as promiscuity. The paintings of
Boucher and Chardin respectively exemplify the 18 th-century tendency to conceive
women as vain coquettes or simple, pious beings; within Chardins interiors, women are
celebrated at home, whether as tired or distracted kitchen maid, or an attentive mother in
her role as a moral guide to her children. Increasing emphasis was placed on the role of
women in the family, differential to the patriarch, as advocated by Rousseau and other
Enlightenment philosophers. These paintings articulate a vision in which the stable,
productive, happy family is one whose members act according to what is assumed to be
the natural inclination of their sex.6
6

Despite the complaints of reform critics, genre painting was popular even into the decade of the French
Revolution.

One art critic wrote in 1741: There is not a woman of the Third Estate who,
passing by, does not think that she is seeing an image of herself

MATURE CAREER
In order to earn a living, Diderot undertook translation work, publishing a
translation of Temple Stanyans The Grecian History in 1739, and in 1745, the Inquiry
Concerning Virtue (1699, 1711) by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, whose fame and influence
he spread in France.
In 1745, the publisher Andr Le Breton approached Diderot with a view that
bringing out a French translation of Ephraim Chambers Cyclopedia, after two other
translators withdrew from the project.

Diderot became general editor of the

Encyclopdie ou Dictionnaire raisonn des sciences, des arts et des mtiers, par une
Sociti de Gens de lettres and undertook the task with the distinguished mathematician
Jean Le Rond dAlembert as co-editor, but soon profoundly changed the nature of the
publication, broadening its scope and turning it into an important organ of radical and
revolutionary opinion.

He gathered around him a team of dedicated litterateurs,

scientists, and even priests, many of whom, as yet unknown were to make their mark in
later life. All were fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge and, by so doing,
strike a resounding blow against reactionary forces in church and state. The underlying
philosophy was rationalism and a qualified faith in the progress of the human mind.
Its emphasis on the importance of the mechanical arts, and its veiled criticisms of
the inequities of contemporary France, the Encyclopdie was to become the most
important work of the Enlightenment: seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of
plates, containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors. The project

absorbed most of his energies from 1750 to 1752. The impact of the Encyclopdie was
enormous. Through its attempt to classify learning and to open all domains of human
activity to the readers, the Encyclopdie gave expression to many of the most important
intellectual and social developments of its time, a machine de guerre which served to
propagate the Enlightenment.
In Penses philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts) (1746), Diderot asserts that
the universe may have been created by God, but may also be the product of a chance
amalgam of atoms, thrown together in random order which may be only temporary the
Natural Religion.

An original work, directed against Blaise Pascal, with new and

explosive anti-Christian ideas couched in vivid prose, containing many passages directly
translated from or inspired by Shaftesbury. The proceeds of this publication, as of his
allegedly indecent novel Les Bijou indiscrets (1748), were used to meet the demands of
his mistress, Madeleine de Puisieux, with whom he broke a few years later. The book, a
criticism of Christian ideology with its superstitious excrescences and its insulted and
punishing God, restricting humans, was immediately condemned by the authorities.

It is required of me that I look for the truth, but not find it. (XXXI, XXIX)

The period between 1748 and 1754, in particular, marked a new departure in his
explanation of three major questions: What can we know? How can we know it? How
certain is our knowledge?
In 1749 Diderot published Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on Blindness),
remarkable for its proposal to teach the blind to read through the sense of touch, along

lines that Louis Braille was to follow in the nineteenth-century, and for the presentation
of the first step in his evolutionary theory of survival by superior adaptation. This daring
exposition of the doctrine of materialistic atheism, with its emphasis on human
dependence on sense impression, led to Diderots arrest and incarceration in the dungeon
of Vincennes for three months. Diderots work on the Encyclopdie, however, was not
interrupted for long, and in 1750 he outlined his program for it in a prospectus, which
dAlembert expanded into the momentous Discours preliminaire (1751).
Diderot published few other works in his lifetime, however. His writings were
known only to a few of his friends and the privileged correspondents of the handwritten
Correspondance littrarie, a sort of private newspaper edited by Baron Friedrich Melchoir
Grimm (17231807), circulating at European courts litteraire.

The posthumous

publication of these manuscripts have made Diderot more highly appreciated in the
twentieth-century than he was in France during his lifetime. Four works of prose fiction
by Diderot were published posthumously: the novel La Religieuse (written 1760,
published 1796) describes the distressing and ultimately tragic experiences of a girl who
is forced to become a nun against her will.

LA RELIGIEUSE
A leading figure of the Enlightenment, Diderot fearlessly provoked the wrath of
the French establishment through his writings. Aristocratic privilege, religious authority
and obscurantism, colonialism, militarism, European assumptions of moral authority, the
subordinate role of women, all were examined in a flow of ptolemic and innovative
works in all genres La Religieuse was banned for many years because of its depiction

of the cloistered fate forced upon many women, entombed in an atmosphere of neurosis
and sexual repression.
Early in 1760, full of vitality and intellectually coherent as usual, Diderot began
La Religieuse, his first bona fide novel with a well-defined plot (actually a plot within a
plot) as well as clearly delineated characters. Though an articulate and zealous priest
under the empire charged La Religieuse with being partially responsible for bringing on
the French Revolution, the novel was not published until 1796 at approximately the
same time it appeared before a somewhat scandalized British reading public translated as
The Nun, or The Nuns Story. Still, eighteenth-century Europe had for some years been
regaled or shocked by accounts of fictional and authentic of social and religious practices,
some less edifying than others, in convents and monasteries in various Christian
countries, especially France. Diderots pathetic story of Mlle. Simonin, Sister Suzanne,
stands out far above and beyond the others: through ingenious admixture of truth and
fiction, psychology and aesthetics, portraying social and conventional life in France
under the ancient rgime in the form of a complex narrative, a narrative within a
narrative, in which he attempts transcending the reality of life itself.
A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it
gives a scathing insight into the eighteenth-century, and has attracted and unsettled
readers since a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and tolerance. It is
beautiful literature, elegantly written, charming in its archaism very easy to read, the
vocabulary is accessible, the history is fascinating, not long soporific descriptions, on the
contrary, the author is precise in his satire of the life of convent excesses: the sadism of
Mother Superior Sainte-Christine, and the maliciousness of the other sisters, sowing

crushed glass in the dark corridors, sure that Suzanne will come to tear her delicate feet
there! Or, the private conversations with another Superior, Madame ***, innocent but
vain Suzanne sitting on her knees! Is it ingenuous, or subtly perverse, or perhaps both?

LATER LIFE & WORKS

The completion of the Encyclopdie in 1772 left Diderot without a source of
income. To relieve him of financial worry, Catherine the Great of Russia first bought his
library through an agent in Paris, requesting him to retain the books until she required
them, and then appointed him librarian on an annual salary for the duration of his life.
Diderot went to St.-Petersburg in 1773 to thank her for her support and was received with
great honour and warmth. He wrote for her the Plan dune university pour le government
de Russie (Plan for a University for the Government of Russia). He stayed five months,
long enough to become disillusioned with enlightened despotism as a solution for social
ills.
In 1775, Diderot met Sophie Volland, with whom he formed an attachment that
was to last more than twenty years. The liason was founded on common interests, natural
sympathy, and a deepening fellowship. His correspondence with Sophie, together with
his other letters, forms one of the most fascinating documents on Diderots personality,
enthusiasms, and ideas & on the intellectual-society of Louise dEpinay, F. M. Grimm,
the Baron dHolbach, Ferdinando Galiani, and other deistic writers and thinkers
(philosophes) with whom he felt most at home. Through Rousseau, Diderot met tienne

Bonnet de Condillac, the philosopher, and for a time the three friends dined together at
the Panier Fleuri.
Diderots intimate circle was dwindling. Mme. dEpinay and dAlembert died,
leaving only Grimm and Baron dHolbach. Slowly Diderot retired into the shell of his
own personal and family life. The death of Sophie Volland in February 1784 was a great
grief to him; he survived her by a few months, dying of a coronary thrombosis
emphysema and dropsy in the house that Catherine the Great had put at his disposal, in
the rue de Richelieu, Paris, on July 31, 1784. Apocryphally, his last words were:
Le premier pas vers la philosophie, cest lincr
(The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.)
Through the intervention of his son-in-law, Diderot was buried in consecrated
ground at Saint-Roch. Perhaps the greatest genius of a century of brilliant men he
fulfilled his total promise within his lifetime, but it is only in our time that he has been
understood.7
You ask me why, the more our life is filled up and busy, the less we are attached to it? If
that is true, it is because a busy life is for the most part an innocent life. We think less about
Death, and so we fear it less. Without perceiving it, we resign ourselves to the common lot
of all the beings that we watch around us, dying and being born again in an incessant, everrenewing circle. After having for a season fulfilled the tasks that nature year by year
imposes on us, we grow weary of them, and release ourselves. Energies fade, we become
feebler, we crave the close of life as after working hard we crave the close of day. Living in
harmony with nature, we learn not to rebel against the orders that we see in necessary and
universal execution There is nobody among us who, having worn himself out in toil, has
not seen the hour of rest approach with supreme delight. Life for some of us is only one
long day of weariness, and death a long slumber, and the coffin a bed of rest, and the earth
only a pillow where it is sweet, when all is done, to lay ones head, never to raise it again. I
7

Robert Niklaus (essay date 1970). Source: Diderot, in A Literary History of France: the EighteenthCentury 1715 1789. Ernest Benn Limited, 1970, pp. 211 33. Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800.
Vol. 26, pp. 62 171. James E. Person, Jr., Editor. Gale Research Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-8103-8464-7.
ISSN 0732-1864.

confess to you that, when looked at in this way, and after the long endless crosses that I
have had, death is the most agreeable of prospects. I am bent on teaching myself more and
more to see it so.8

The emancipation of the emotion of love in eighteenth-century France marked the

beginning of the assertion of sexuality in the European consciousness. Its echoes can be
heard in the moral emancipation of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

La Religieuse
Man falls in love not with a real woman,
But with an image he creates for her.
Luc de Clapier de Vauvenargue, 1746

You appeal to God in vain: there is no more God for you.

Die in despair and be damned.
A voice9

Diderots first mature novel, La Religieuse (1796), is an profoundly moving

epistolary narrative that relates the horrific experiences and tribulations endured by a
beautiful, talented, unfortunate young woman without vocation (Marie-)Suzanne

Diderot on death (1762). Denis Diderot in a letter to Sophie Volland, quoted by John Morley, in his
Diderot and the Encyclopedists, Vol. II, 1888. Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Vol. 26, pp. 62
171. James E. Person, Jr., Editor. Gale Research Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-8103-8464-7. ISSN 0732-1864.
9
one day as I was addressing Him in the misery of my heart and calling on Him for help someone said:
You appeal to God in vain: there is no more God for you. Die in despair and be damned. P. 86. Cf. Job
_____, Dinah, the wife of Job (Ayyubhum), telling him tp curse God and die.

Simonin10 who, against her will, is immured in a convent 11 as a nun and forced to take
the veil. Imprisoned within the walls of several convents on the outskirts of Paris, she
undergoes a succession of painful vicissitudes that are related in the first person as
memoirs. Finally, managing to escape her cloistered existence, she briefly eeks out a
precarious living in the cesspool that was Paris and, having hardly reached womanhood,
dies.
Diderot did not directly attack the Church,12 but opposed a man-made system
running counter to nature, and vividly demonstrated some of the dangers of celibacy and
sexual repression.13 What makes La Religieuse such a scandalous novel? Essentially it is
the sudden light which it casts on what goes on behind convent walls, the unwilling
vocations, the secrete illegitimate births, the disastrous physiological effects of forced
chastity. It is on the body, deep down in the organism, that convent life finally leaves its
mark. In his nuns confessional tale Diderots penetrating medical insight shows us how
illness, sexual perversion, and madness are the ultimate consequences of a refusal to obey
what he calls nature. The reader not only sees into the cells of the convent, but gains
access to the secret mechanisms of female existence (as it was understood by the medical
science of the eighteenth-century).14
10

Rejected, because she is the fruit of her mothers adultery, Marie-Suzanne Simonins parents cloister her
against her liking so that they are not obliged to divide the heritage - the dowry for marriage - between their
three daughters: cf. Cinderella, Cordelia (King Lear), or Colette (Les Miserables).
11
The convent, a controversial site separating female dwelling, allowed women to remain outside the
traditional patriarchal family structure and removed from traditional conceptions of sexuality and
femininity, fostering female intimacy and permitted women to evade, to some degree, direct subjugation to
patriarchal influences. Cf. Vestal Virgins.
12
Overtones of Diderots reactions to the lives of Anglique and Didier are apparent in his first great novel,
La Religieuse. Dideots daughter, Anglique, was later to confide (to Meister) that It is the fate of the
sister that gave my father the idea for the novel, La Religieuse.
13
Robert Niklaus (essay date 1970). Source: Diderot, in A Literary History of France: the EighteenthCentury 1715 1789. Ernest Benn Limited, 1970, pp. 211 33. Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800.
Vol. 26, pp. 62 171. James E. Person, Jr., Editor. Gale Research Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-8103-8464-7.
ISSN 0732-1864.
14
Jean Starobinski (essay date 1973). Source: The Man Who Told Secrets, in The New York Review of
Books, Vol. XX, No. 4, March 22, 1973, pp. 18 21. Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Vol. 26, pp.

There will be in the true things, the pathetic ones.

La Religieuse is an example of the novel as deception, a work that never
formally severs its ties with real life and that always leaves open the possibility that it
may turn out to be a genuine document. 15 La Religieuse notoriously grew out of a
practical joke played on the witty & volatile marquis de Croismare (1694 1772), prized
for his excellent company, who had retired to his estate in Normandy, near Caen, with his
daughter. After some fifteen months absence, he was greatly missed by his friends, and
the idea was conceived to entice him back to Paris.

He had tried during a much

publicized law-suit from 1755 58 to help a nun who wished to be released from her
vows, but had had no success, and had not met her, and did not even know her name
Marguerite Delamarre.16 Early in 1760 Diderot, in conjunction with Grimm, and Mme.
dEpinay, concocted a letter to Croismare purporting to come from this nun, saying she
had got out of the convent, and asking for help. Croismare replied without hesitation,
inviting her to take the diligence to come to Caen, where his chateau would afford her the
hospitality and care which she was obviously so desperately in need; and the conspirators
had to make her ill to explain her non-appearance. After a considerable correspondence,
there was nothing left to do but bring death to the sickness of the poor, suffering, and
imaginary girl: they killed her off in May 1760. Croismare did not find out about the
62 171. James E. Person, Jr., Editor. Gale Research Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-8103-8464-7. ISSN 07321864.
15
P. N. Furbank (essay date 1992). Source: Diderot: A Critical Biography, A. Knopf, 1992, 524 p.
Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Vol. 26, pp. 62 171. James E. Person, Jr., Editor. Gale
Research Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-8103-8464-7. ISSN 0732-1864.
16
Sister Marguerite Delamarre, member of a wealthy, middle-class family, who was obliged to take the veil
at the age of eighteen. She repeatedly brought before the law courts of Paris the plea to be free from her
religious vows. In May, 1758, however, she lost her suit once and for all. She died as a nun and in a
convent many years later; the Revolutionary authorities offered to release her but by then it was too late for
freedom.

hoax until he returned to Paris in 1768 and discovered it by chance. Diderot, who had
forged the nuns letters, and some in the name of a real Mme. Madin, probably a friend of
Mme. dEspinay, decided to turn the whole affair into a novel. He wrote it in fragments,
then as a complete text in 1760, and then rewrote it again in 1780, when he offered it
Grimms successor, J. H. Meister, for publication in the Correspondence littraire.17
The novel has been immensely popular. The text we now have, the result of at
least three revisions, was published in 1796. There were several French editions between
1796 and 1800, and about seventy up to the beginning of World War II. Nineteen
German translations have been counted, plus ten Italian, six Spanish, and four Russian.

The good nun is that which brings in the cloister some great fault to expire. (p. 82)

The story of Suzanne was especially inspired by the anguished life and tragic
death of (Samuel) Richardsons Clarissa Harlowe.18 In both instances there is the moving
story in epistolary or memorial form in which a gifted, most attractive young woman is
victimized in a world that represents at once realism, illusion, morality, debauchery, and
pathos.
At the age of sixteen, (Marie-)Suzanne Simonin is forced to enter the convent, 19
by her mother and the man she thinks is her father, a rich lawyer with a very hard
17

The letters underlying La Religieuse were sent by Grimm in the 1770 Correspondence littraire to his
correspondents, including the duke of Zweibrcken and Saxo-Gotha, the princes of Hesse-Darmstadt and
Nassau-Sarrebruck, the queen of Sweden, the King of Poland, and the Empress of Russia.
18
Df. De Sades Justine (Misfortunes of Virtue) & Juliette.
19
(Marie-)Suzanne Simonin, being the principle victim of a living entombment, reflects agonizing
experiences from Diderots own past: confinement in a monastery at his fathers behest and incarceration in
the donjon of Vincennes.

character; her mother seems pulled between the love that she must carry for her daughter
and her husband. Suzanne has two jealous and venal sisters who are cherished by their
parents, much more than her;20 a considerable dowry is granted to them, to make a good
match, while Suzanne is sent to the convent of Sainte-Marie by force, with her great
despair and regret she has no vocation for the life of a nun and refuses to take her final
vows, from which she tries to escape throughout the novel. She suspects, rightly, that the
cause of the great discrimination which she undergoes is due to the fact that she is not the
biological and legitimate daughter of Mr. Simonin, and thus fruit of her mothers
adulterous sin and, in the eyes of her mother, the only fault that she has made in her life.

Your birth is the one serious sin I have committed. [ ] may God forgive me for having
brought you into this world.
Suzannes mothers last words to her (p. 54)
You know what you are and what you can expect from me, unless your intention is to
punish me all my life for a sin I have already more than paid for.
Suzannes mother, rejecting her and
condemning her to a cloistered fate (p. 39)
You are still my mother and I am still your child.
Suzanne to her mother, her face wet with
Mingled tears and blood, (p. 34)

Suzannes mother poisons her to her father, and the girl, eager to please her
mother, sacrifices herself and agrees to go to the convent, willingly, where she knows a
sad destiny.

Father Sraphin, both her mothers and Suzannes confessor, and the

deceitful Superior, persuade her to take the veil and begin the novitiate, which lasts two
years.
20

Cf. Cinderella, Cosette (Les Miserables), Cordelia (King Lear).

Alas, I have no father or mother, I am a poor, wretched creature they detest and want to
bury alive in this place.
Suzanne, throwing herself into the deceitful
Superiors arms, (p. 23)

I had no father, religious scruples had deprived me of a mother, precautions had been
taken against my claiming the rights of legitimate birth, there was nothing but harsh
domestic captivity, no hope, no resource.
Suzanne, realizing no worse fate than being
a nun, (p. 38)
I am young and inexperienced, I am afraid of poverty, men, and vice.
Suzanne, the convent at Longchamp, (p.46)

Out of every hundred nuns who die before the age of fifty there are exactly one
hundred damned, and that taking no account of the ones who in the meantime lose their
reason, get feeble-minded or go raving mad. There came a day when a demented nun
escaped from the cell where she was shut up. Suzanne saw her. That was the beginning
of her fortune seeing her own fate in that of this unhappy creature, and there upon a
vow was made in her heart 21 And, on the day for her final vows, renouncing her
religious vocation, Suzanne is confined to her cell and silence imposed upon her.

The same evil comes either from God who is testing us or from Satan who is tempting. 22

At last the terrible moment came, the bells were nonetheless eventually rung to
inform the world that a woman was about to be condemned to misery. Mass was
celebrated, a long sermon which every single word was the opposite of the truth

21
22

The demented nun: pp. 26 27.

La Religieuse, p. 31

Since it is my fate to be unhappy what does it matter where?

Suzanne, before being sent to the convent
at Longchamp, (p. 44)
I am weary of life and long for death.
Madame de Moni to Suzanne, (p. 49)
I am fulfilling my destiny without finding it carried along by necessity. [ ] I am
numb, I cannot even cry.
Suzanne to Madame de Moni, (p. 50)

The Superior of the convent, Madame de Moni, is a very lenient woman, full of
kindness and direction, who likes all her nuns. However, Suzanne has her preference,
and Madame de Moni likes her passionately,23 and they are very attached to one another.
When Madame de Moni dies,24 her successor, Mother Superior Sister Sainte-Christine
and Suzanne get along very badly.
Sister Sainte-Christine is petty, a muddled narrow spirit of superstitions. She is an
odious and cruel woman who is avenged for the love Sister Sainte-Suzanne carries for the
preceding Superior making her live a life of daily torments. Mother de Moni had
disproved of mortifying the flesh: scourging, the wearing of hair-shirts, or the spoiling of
food with ashes.25 She said such penances did not correct anyone of any failing but only
served to fill people with pride: but, the favorites of the previous reign are never the ones
of the next.

When nothing wrong could be found in her conduct, something was

invented. She was in the wrong every day and every day punished. No courage in the
world can hold out in the face of neglect, solitude and persecution: it became a game to
23

I am fulfilling my destiny without finding it carried along by necessity. [ ] I am numb, I cannot even
cry. Sister Sainte-Suzanne to Reverend Mother de Moni, p. 50.
24
Suzannes father died at the beginning of January, Mother Superior de Moni died at the end of that same
month, and her mother died the following Christmas her last words to Suzanne, (54 p.): your birth is
the one serious sin I have committed. [ ] may God forgive me for bringing you into this world.
25

torment her. Her life was a sequence of real or imagined misdemeanors and their
punishments. She was overcome by exhaustion, grief and melancholy.

If it was not God who stopped me from destroying myself, why did He not prevent
all these other occurrences too?
Sister Sainte-Suzanne, 58 p.

The urge to hurt and torment gradually wanes in the world outside, it never does in
the cloister.
Suzanne manages to acquire paper and composes a memoir, a document of
importance which she could not afford to have found in her possession. When the
Superior demands the memoir, Suzanne denies that any such document exists:

I realize that I am destroying myself, but a moment sooner or a moment later is not
worth bothering about.

Suzannes terrible martyrdom starts. She is locked up and beaten. The other nuns
flee her like a plague and hate her because of Sister Sainte-Christine. They crossed
themselves when they passed her and fled, shrieking:

Satan get thee hence! Lord, come to my aid!26

The only one left allied to her is a young, very soft and pure nun, Sister SainteUrsule, who risks helping secret the document from Mother Superior. Sister SainteUrsule has a melancholic nature, a sad person, who fondly loves Suzanne, and does all
she can to help her when she undergoes violence caused by the Superior.
26

The demon of impurity had possessed me. Let my fate be a warning: Kill your own daughter rather than
imprison her in a cloister. Pp. 85 6.

Suzanne manages to contact a lawyer, Monsieur Manouri, through the intercession

of Sister Sainte-Ursule, and succeeds in instituting proceedings which would deliver her
from the life that she hates but, unfortunately, she loses her lawsuit fails to win her
freedom.27 The Superior of the convent and its community, Sister Sainte-Christine, does
not appreciate the steps taken by Suzanne. Miseries and persecutions follow, and is sent
to the punishment cell.28

an intractable soul [ ] can only be tamed by violent means.

Sisters Sainte-Agnes and Sainte-Julie, to Reverend
Mother Superior Sister Sainte-Christine

Suzanne undergoes tortures: she is deprived of food and clean clothing, wounded by
the others, and rest is denied to her. Suzanne is ordered never to say anything about her
misfortunes, she replies: What you have done must be very wrong, since you demand
my oath to keep silence.

Nobody will ever know anything about it except your

conscience, I swear. How resilient nature is in the young!

People can suffer a long time before dying. Suzanne, driven to desperation,
confides to her only friend, Sister Sainte-Ursule. My soul easily catches fire, becomes
exalted and is deeply moved I had a heart of flesh and the others hearts of stone.

I was, I am, and all my life I shall be dissatisfied with my lot. I am and always will be a
bad nun and by doing what saves others I hate and condemn myself.
Suzanne to Sister Sainte-Christine, (p.76)
My child, you are possessed of the devil.
27

Cf. the tragedy of Marguerite Delamarre.

A horrible cell in which offenders served their solitary confinement: a little dark underground cell
containing some matting half rotten with damp, a piece of black bread and a pitcher of water, with a few
other vessels of the coarsest kind. And, on a stone block was a skull with a wooden crucifix: 65 p.
28

The malicious Superiors reply, (p. 77)

Sometimes more courage is required to live than to die. The past guarantees the
future, and if she was more inclined towards crime perhaps she would be free today,
committing acts sacrilegious in the eyes of God and abhorrent to those of men.29
Suzanne is made to lie in a coffin and humiliated. Her strength sapped by the lack
of food and the poor quality of food that she had, revolting food spoilt by having ashes
and all sorts of filth mixed with it, 30 and even more by the struggle she was having,
having to bear so many repeated acts of inhumanity. Given only enough food to prevent
her dying of starvation, prevented from sleeping, and overwhelmed with mortifications
and terrors, Suzanne was reduced to a corpse.

What favour am I to ask God for? judged, condemned and executed imminent
death made me want to cry out.
Suzanne, in a low faint voice, to Sister
Sainte-Christine, (p. 90)
My God, have mercy on me! My God, have mercy on me! Dear sisters, try not to hurt
me too much.
Suzanne to the three nuns accompanying
Sister Sainte-Christine, (p. 91)

People being led to execution are virtually dead before being executed. What
profound wisdom there is in what blind philosophy calls the folly of the cross; she saw
the pointlessness of life and was only too happy to lose it. She was barely twenty.

Oh God, have pity on me! Oh God, give me strength! My God, do not abandon me!
Forgive me if I have given offence!
29
30

Cf. Justine and Juliette by the marquis de Sade.

La Petite Fleur Blanc, Sainte-Thrse (Martin) of Lisieux of the Holy Face of the Child Jesus *

Suzanne, believing she is to be executed

by the Superior and her myrmidons, (p. 92)

Dragged on her knees before the Vicar-General, Suzanne is brutally presented as

being haunted, possessed, crazy, (in order to discredit her). But the Archdeacon, a just
man, though insensitive, one of those unfortunate enough to be born to practice virtue
without knowing its charm, examines Suzanne and discovers beneath her dirty habit, her
bruised head, bleeding feet, livid and fleshless arms.

I can hear you saying: So many horrors, so varied and so continuous! A series of
calculated atrocities in religious souls! It defies all probability. I agree with you, but it is
true my present situation is deplorable, life is a burden to me.
Suzanne to the reader, (le Marquis de
Croismare), (pp.98 - 99)
Its horrible! Christians! Nuns! Human beings! Horrible!
The Archdeacon, indignant, shaking his
head, to Sister Sainte-Christine, (p. 100)

When you set limits to your defense and have to deal with opponents who set none
to their attack, who trample underfoot just and unjust alike, who make allegations or
denials with the same aplomb and who blush neither at imputations, suspicions, gossip
nor calumny, you can hardly expect to win. In a properly governed state it should be
difficult to enter into religion but easy to come out. Were monks and nuns instituted by
Jesus Christ? Can the Church positively not do without them? What need has the
Bridegroom of so many fresh victims?

Will they never realize the necessity for

narrowing the entrance to these chasms into which future generations are going to plunge
to their doom? Can God, who made man so inconsistent and frail, authorize such rash
vows? Can these vows, which run counter to our natural inclinations, ever be properly

observed except by a few abnormal creatures in whom the seeds of passion are dried up,
and whom we should rightly classify as freaks of nature? Do all theses lugubrious
ceremonies played out at the taking of the habit or the profession, when a man or a
woman is set apart for the monastic life and for woe, suspend the animal functions?
A vow of poverty means binding oneself an oath to be an idler and a thief, a vow of
chastity means promising God continual breaking of the wisest and most important of His
laws, a vow of obedience means giving up mans inalienable prerogative, freedom. If
one observes these vows one is a criminal, if not one is a perjurer. The cloistered life is
that of a fanatic or a hypocrite.31

The past tells me what the future has in store. I have envied the blissful vacuity of mind
of my companions, and implored God for it, but it has not been vouchsafed and He will not
give it.
Suzanne to Mr. Manouri, (p. 109)

Next day the Superior came to her cell accompanied by a nun carrying a hair-shirt
and the coarse garment she had been dressed in when she was put in the dungeon. That
was how she was dressed when, that evening, after she had retired to her cell, she heard a
procession approaching, singing litanies it was the whole convent in double file. A rope
was put around her neck, a lighted torch in one hand and a scourge in the other. She was
led away in silence her feet were covered in blood from cuts made by bits of glass
spitefully thrown in her path. The reason why her feet had not been cut up on the last two
days was that Sister Ursule had been careful to sweep the corridor stealthily, so to move
the bits of glass to either side. On the days that Suzanne was condemned to fast on bread
and water, Ursule went without part of her portion, which wrapped in a clean white cloth
31

Mr. Manouris unsuccessful argument advocating Sister Sainte-Suzannes plight; pp. 100 -104.

and threw into her cell. She seemed almost changed as Suzanne was, she was terrifyingly
thin and her face bore the pallor of death, her lips were bloodless and her eyes almost
unseeing.

I love you.
Sister Sainte-Ursule to Suzanne, (p. 111)

Suzannes health could not hold out against such prolonged and harsh ordeals, and
she fell ill. It was at this juncture that Sister Ursule showed the full extent of her
friendship for her. But all her devotion failed to halt the progress of illness, and Suzanne
was soon at deaths door and received the last sacraments. After receiving the last rites
she fell into a kind of lethargy, and Sister Ursule despaired of her life all that night.

My God, have pity on her and me! My God, receive her soul! Dearest friend, when you
are before God remember Sister Ursule
Sister Sainte-Ursule, (p. 113)

After a very long convalescence, Suzanne began to recover, but her illness was
infectious, and Sister Ursule had barely left her side. When she began to recover her
strength, Sister Ursules was declining

go and ring the bell for her and have her buried.
Sister Sainte-Christine, (p. 116)

Mr. Manouri manages to have her transferred to a different convent, her new prison
in Arpajon, where boarders were mixed up with novices, novices with nuns, and people
ran in and out of each others rooms. Madame *** is Superior of the general assembly,
and of the Freemasons of Arpajon. She is a small, round lady, thoughtless but very sharp,
with large black eyes, always moving and full of energy and a lesbian who, the first
time she sees her, falls passionately in love with Suzanne. Madame *** dedicates a true
worship to her and covers her with kisses and caresses, which attracts the hatred of Sister
Thrse who was formerly the favorite.

I am a lost soul!
Sister Sainte-Thrse to Suzanne, (p. 132)
A lost soul! Why? You must think me the most evil creature in the world.
Sister Sainte-Suzannes reply, (p. 132)

The kindnesses the Superior shows for Suzanne have given Sister Sainte-Thrse
cause for alarm, and she jealously fears Suzanne might gain preference: always a kiss on
her white, smooth, forehead or beautifully shaped neck; sparkling eyes; soft, pink cheeks;
tiny and dimpled hands; firm and admirably formed bosom or arms; but most often on the
mouth, for she thought Suzanne had sweet breath, white teeth, fresh ruby lips the tips
of her fingers touching her breast, sighing and oppressed with heavy breathing; her kisses
spreading over Suzannes neck, bare shoulders and half-naked breast. Trembling began
to come over her, confusion of speech, uncontrollable movements of her eyes and hands,
her knees pressing between Suzannes, the ardour of her embraces and the tightness of
her arms as she held Suzanne, all showed Suzanne that her malady was about to come
over her again.

She is capable of passing from the greatest tenderness to ferocity.

Sister Sainte- Thrse to Suzanne,
concerning the Superior, (p. 140)

Shedding tears is a delicious state for a sensitive soul. [ ] Making the roses of the
cheeks whither!
The Superior to Suzanne, (p. 141 - 142)

Suzanne didnt know what was going on inside of her, but she was seized with
panic, and her own trembling and faintness justified the suspicion she had had that her
trouble was contagious. Suzanne questioned herself, examining her conscience: vague,
crazy, ridiculous notions that she put out of her mind.

It has never occurred to you to run your hands over that lovely bosom, those legs, that
body, that firm, soft, white flesh of yours?
The Superior to Suzanne, (p. 147)
But, dear Mother, that is forbidden. What would they say if it were known?
Suzanne to the Superior, (p. 149)
I am the one who rewards and punishes here. [ ] I forbid it in others, but I allow it in
you, and am asking you to do so. Just let me warm myself a minute and then Ill go. Give
me your hand. Feel me, touch me and see for yourself. I am all shivering and stone cold.
The Superior to Suzanne, (p. 150)

Suzanne would not have wanted to tear a single hair out of the head of her most
cruel enemy. How can you refuse things which give great pleasure to another person on
whom you are totally dependent, things in which you can see no harm yourself?

Sister Sainte-Suzanne, called the Reserved, not quite twenty years of age, is very
innocent and sees nothing evil in the affections of the Superior, however, but when she is
confessed to the director of the convent, P. Lemoine, he compares the strangeness of the
Superiors love for Suzanne with Satan. He spoke of the Superior in terms which made
her shudder, calling her outrageous, a libertine, a wicked nun, a pernicious woman, a
corrupt soul, and enjoined her on pain of mortal sin never to be alone with her and to
submit to none of her advances.

One only goes to confession to acknowledge ones sins, and I see no sin. Cruel Sister,
ask for my life and I will give it to you, but dont avoid me. I couldnt go on living without
you, my dearest
The Superior to Suzanne, (p. 167 - 169)

A delicate flower is only kept fresh and stainless by the special protection of
Providence. Your Superior is sunk in the abyss of crime and seeks to drag you down
into hell by a violent death. You are doomed.
Father Lemoine to Suzanne, (p. 162 - 163)

The Superior, for all her quirks and caprices, was one of the most sensitive women
in the world. Suzanne is terrified by a strange effect of her own imagination:

Perhaps he can discern in the most innocent acts on your part and mine seeds of inner
corruption which he believes are already fully developed in you and fears you will develop
in me.
Suzanne to the Superior, concerning
Father Lemoine, (p. 166)

P. Lemoine is constrained to leave the convent because of the complaints of

Madame ***, and he is replaced in his functions as Director by Dom Morel who, just like
Suzanne, was also forced to enter into religious vocations and wishes to give up his

statute. He brings her moral support by listening to her troubles and misfortunes, and
giving her counsel. It is he which encourages her at the end to escape from the convent at
Arpajon.

Amplius, Domine 32

One day Suzanne emerged from her cell and found the Superior flat on the ground
with her arms extended and face flat to the floor, and she said: Come on, come on and
trample me underfoot. I dont deserve any other treatment.

How can the endearments and caresses of a woman be dangerous to another woman?
Where is the evil in loving each other, saying so and showing it? It is so delightful!
Suzanne to Dom Morel, (p. 176)
There is such a thing as poisonous knowledge
Dom Morel to Suzanne, (p. 176)

This is what happens sooner or later when you go against the universal law of
nature. Healing mists which the heart throws round reason are sometimes blown away.

Eventually, after paroxysms of fervour and guilt this Superior, too, dies, of sorrow
and in madness. Sister Thrse, a whining girl who complains without stop, sickens with
jealousy, also soon dies. The convent has a new Superior, elderly and full of
superstitions. Suzanne is accused of casting spells over Madame ***, and her
tribulations start all over again.
32

Lord, still more

Here the memoires of Sister Sainte-Suzanne become disconnected. Suzanne is then

rather perfunctorily allowed by Diderot to escape to Paris, exposed to the importunities of
the young Benedictine who helps her a vile seducer taking indecent liberties. She is
exposed to all the riotous scenes of a disorderly house, accosted by men (and women),
and condemned to a place of detention for prostitutes and destitute women, the
Saltptrire. Living in a state of continual alarm, almost all of her nights are sleepless,
until she finds, finally, a small employment in a laundry:

Marie, surely you are not soft enough to waste tears on a wicked nun with no morals and
no religion, who falls in love with a horrible monk and runs away with him? You must
have a lot of pity to spare. All she had to do was eat, drink, pray to God and sleep; she was
very well off where she was, so why didnt she stay there?
She is a slut, and God will punish her.
The laundress to Suzanne, concerning the
public knowledge of her escape, (p. 187)

Overwhelmed with fatigue, surrounded by terrors, peace deserting her, Suzanne

finishes composing her memoirs in the form of a letter to the marquis de Croismare, who
agrees to give her employment as a chambermaid, but hurts herself in an accident while
getting away, and dies.

I suffered, I suffered much; but the fate of my persecutors appears to me and always
appeared to me more to feel sorry for them. I would like better, I would have better liked to
die than to leave my role, in the condition of taking theirs. My sorrows will finish, I hope
for it your kindness; the memory, the shame, and the remorse of the crime will remain to

them until their last hour. They are shown already, do not doubt it; they will show all their
life; and terror will go down under the tomb with them.
Sur Suzanne Simonin

CONCLUSION

Among other allusions to madness, is the growing dementia of Reverend Mother

Superior Madam ***, who begins lying long hours in bed, indulging in erotic reverie, and
fondling herself. She then feels sexually drawn to the younger members of her convent.
Particularly attracted to Sister Suzanne (the Reserved) but unable to seduce her, she
becomes tormented finally overwhelmed by inexplicable guilt, sinks into a profound
nervous depression, and dies. The theme of the madness could have derived specifically
from Diderots own sister, insane in her mid-twenties; and that of lesbianism from his
insistent suspicion of abnormal relations between his beloved Sophie and her enticing
sister.
The litany of madness hysteria or delirium closely linked to the phenomenon
of genius like Julien Le Mettrie, the miscreant of the philosophic school, the most
notorious materialist of that day and the author of LHomme machine, Diderot held that
the mind could affect the body, and the body the mind. Moreover, Diderot, like Le
Mettrie, who was a medical doctor, believed that man, the machine, or the animal, is so
complicated that we can never hope to discover his essence nor even all the springs that
control human behaviour.

The novel is often praised for its balanced depiction of female homosexuality
within the cloister and of the results of sexual frustration on those subjected to enforced
celibacy. It is true that some of the religious, male and female, are depicted as intelligent,
devout, and humane, but that the author felt physical impulses should at any rate not
automatically be frustrated as being in some way incompatible with moral fulfillment.
Man is, in Diderots view, a social being, and the dangers of solitude, of sequestration, are
everywhere apparent in La Relgieuse.33 Monastic celibacy seemed to Diderot to be
socially wasteful, and he understood the ritual cruelty to which ecclesiastical discipline
can lead. If the possibility of genuine vocations, saintly nuns, and discerning directors is
respected in the book, there are also the clear and familiar warnings:34

LHomme est ne pour la socit, separez-le, isolez-le, ses ides se dsuiniront, son
caractre se tournera, mille affections ridicules slvront dans son couer
(Man is born for society. Segregate him, and his ideas will become disintegrated, his
character will be spoiled, (and) a thousand ridiculous affections will rise in his heart.)

From a literary point of view the most interesting thing about the novel is the way
in which the dialogue obtrudes, to the extent that parts of the text read as if they were
written for the stage.

The psychology is delicate, sometimes subtle, though the

composition is hasty, but Diderot uses what is essentially a dramatic technique. He

allows the reader psychological insight only into Suzanne, the supposed author of the first

33

For Diderot the two most important sources for madness are seclusion and deprivation of sexual love.
Ned Willard, Le Gnie et la folie au dix-huitime sicle (Paris, 1963), 33 p.
34
Man is born for society; separate him, isolate him, his ideas will disintegrate, his character will become
deformed, a thousand absurd notions will well up in him; extravagant thoughts will take root in his mind
like brambles in uncultivated soil. (AT, V, 119) Twaynes World Author Series: A Survey of the Worlds
Literature. TWAS 425: Diderot, 84 p. Otis Fellows. Twayne Publishers. A Division of G. K. Hall & Co.,
Boston. G. K. Hall & Co., 1977. ISBN 0-8057-6265-5

person narrative, leaving us to make judgments about the other characters on the grounds
alone of their externally observed behaviour, as recounted in the novel.

However well calculated the original deception of Croismare, the novel as

published could scarcely have been written by the Diderot of 1760. The writing is too
practiced, the psychology too subtle, and the dialogue too skillful. The propaganda is
vigorous, the innocence of Suzanne cleverly exploited to avoid obscuring the message
with an overlay of prurience, and a strong sense of the dramatic does not interfere with
verisimilitude; but the novels imaginative vision and the exceptional qualities of its
principal characters may be thought scarcely adequate to make the novel a literary
achievement of the highest level.

Libertine works are not, as is commonly thought, characterized by the preaching

of sexual pleasure but are instead linked by an ethics of pleasure, which teaches readers
that vanity and sensual enjoyment are part of their moral being. The novel is a powerful
vehicle for moral lessons, more so than philosophical treatises, because it conveys such
lessons through pleasure. The proliferation of libertine novels as a reaction against denial
of pleasure in the literature and culture of the time, in the midst of the centurys
metaphysical impulse to simplify human psychology, affords a more complex picture of
moral being and ultimately contributed a lesson of tolerance to the Enlightenment.

I forgive all to men, except injustice, ingratitude and inhumanity.

Denis Diderot

APPENDIX: A SUMMARY

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: A Concise Summary35

French literature in the eighteenth-century spans the period from the death of
Louis XIV of France, through Rgence, and the reigns of Louis XV of France and of
Louis XVI of France to the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 a period of prose
and reason, and also of general ideas, many of which were to prove destructive to the
existing institutions of church and state. The death of Louis XIV in 1715 set into motion
a social revolution marked by licentiousness & then by intellectual liberation and
philosophical inquiry.
The era of the French Rgence (1715 1723), when France was governed by the
five year old child-kings uncle, Philippe dOrlans, was a period ruled by licentious
freedom. The Rgence marks the temporary eclipse of Versailles as a center for policymaking, since the Regents court was at the Palais Royal in Paris. It marks the rise of
Parisian salons as cultural centers, as literary meeting places and nuclei of discreet liberal
resistance to some official policies. In the Paris salons aristocrats mingled more easily
with the haute-bourgeoise in a new atmosphere of relaxed decorum, comfort, and
intimacy. The spirit of the Rgence was critical, skeptical, and innovating. Ideas of
liberty, toleration, humanitarianism, equality, and progress were advocated increasingly.
Louis XIV had died, leaving a great public debt. The Regent had recourse to
taxation and other arbitrary and violent expedients for raising money when in the midst
35

Abridged selections

of the general confusion of affairs the Scotchman John Law began to rise to notice.
Laws Bank, declared the Royal Bank at the end of the year 1718, had acquired
monopoly privileges, and exchanging bank notes for gold, reimbursed creditors of the
State. Everything was easy for the government when it had the gold of the people. At the
commencement of 1720, Law found himself at the height of his fortune, and having
abjured the Protestant faith, was made Comptroller-General; but from this time dates his
fall.

His principle error had been that he looked upon paper-money as a perfect

equivalent for coin, and the fatal consequences of this error had been aggravated by the
ignorance and cupidity of the Government. Law was arrested, and summoned to give in
his accounts, which he did with an admirable clearness which confounded his enemies.
But this illustrious man possessed neither genius nor power sufficient to quell the storm,
and misfortunes followed each other in rapid succession. Law then quitted France and
retired to Venice, abandoning to the Regent all his fortune.
Pestilence had broken out in France, closing almost all ports to French vessels,
and was causing frightful ravages in Provence. The number of its victims is unknown;
but the four cities of Marseilles, Arles, Aix and Toulon, alone, lost seventy-nine thousand
five hundred of their inhabitants.
Louis XV was declared of age by the Parliament in January, 1723. The Regent
died of apoplexy in December, 1723; but before his death he had projected a marriage
between the King and the Infanta of Spain, a child of four years of age. Three persons
only constituted the Kings Council; the Duke of Bourbon, Fleury, Bishop of Frejus, and
Marshal Villars. The first laws made under this Ministry were both foolish and wicked.
Heavy taxes were levied throughout the kingdom, and barbarous laws enacted against the

Protestants. The Duke of Bourbon broke off the marriage which had been projected
between the King and the Infanta of Spain, substituting for her Maria Leczinski, the
daughter of Stanislaus, formerly crowned King of Poland, and, who, stripped of his royal
state, lived in obscurity at Weissemberg. In the following year, the misery of the people
was so great, and the outcries against the Government so fierce and frequent, that it was
found necessary to dismiss the Duke of Bourbon from his office. The King declared that
henceforth he would have no First minister: the functions of this office were virtually
discharged by the Kings old tutor Fleury, who had acquired a great ascendancy over the
King.36

Louis XV, in spite of his shameful debaucheries, was extremely scrupulous in

respect to his outward observances of religion, and took an active part in the religious
quarrels by which France was agitated. Such was the state of excitement in the capital
when, on 5th January, 1757, an unhappy wretch, named Damiens, slightly wounded the
King at the gates of the palace of Versailles. After the trial and execution of Damiens,
Louis XV endeavoured to conciliate the popular feeling.

The Kings mistress, the

Marquise de Pompadour, who was dismissed from the palace whilest the King considered
himself in danger from his wound, returned in triumph.

The governments of France and England were disputing in Asia and America for
the possession of immense territories.
36

The war which broke out in 1756 between

The Emperor Charles VI died in 1740, in the confident hope that his daughter Maria Theresa, Queen of
Hungary, would inherit his States. Frederick II, King of Prussia, was the first to launch his battalions,
invading Silesia in 1741, beginning the European War for Austrian Succession (1740 1748). Terms of
peace were signed for at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, but this war had added twelve hundred millions to the
French debt.

England and France speedily embraced the whole of Europe, and its ravages extended
over the entire world. Louis XV was gained over to support the cause of Maria Theresa
by the influence of Madame de Pompadour, and soon all the forces of France were placed
at the disposal of Austria, as the terrible and deplorable Seven Years War (1756 1773)
commenced. Qubec was taken by the English in 1759, and in the following year the
French suffered losses in Africa and Asia, as well. England, France, Spain and Portugal
then signed on 10th February, 1763, the Treaty of Paris, which was disgraceful to France.
This power ceded to England a portion of Louisiana, the remainder was ceded by France
to Spain, to recompense the cession of Florida to England.
The last years of this war were signalized by the abolition of the Order of the
Jesuits in France. Their Order was suppressed throughout the kingdom by an edict of
1764, which gave them permission to reside in France only as simple private persons. All
the Bourbon Courts declared themselves at the same time against the Jesuits who were
successively driven from Portugal, Spain, Naples and Parma; and the total suppression of
the Order was ultimately procured at Rome from Clement XIV, who thus destroyed the
firmest supports of the rights of the Papal Court of Rome. Prussia and Russia were the
only states who gave the Jesuits an asylum and protection.

Madame de Pompadour died in 1764, and was soon afterwards succeeded as

mistress to Louis XV by a woman of low origin, afterwards known as the Countess du
Barri.

The Seven Years War added thirty-four millions of annual interest to the national
debt, and the taxes, which had enormously increased during the war, were not lessened at
the peace. Two edicts were issued which abolished the old Parliament and established a
new. The public wrath burst forth against despotic power letters de cachet sent
murmurers either into exile or to the Bastile. At the close of 1771, in the space of less
than a year, the new judicial arrangements were in force over the whole kingdom. The
taxes were at the same time raised to an exorbitant amount. Louis XV, utterly apathetic
in the midst of these serious events,37 continued to present to the world an example of
shameful debauchery, and complete indifference to scandal. He had Madame du Barri
publicly presented at Court, and gave her a distinguished place at the table at which were
present for the first time after their marriage, his grandson, the Dauphin, and his young
spouse, Marie Antoinette of Austria. At length, worn out by ennui, weary of pleasure,
and disgusted with all things, he died of small-pox in the sixty-fourth year of his life, and
after a reign of fifty-nine years, which is one of the most deplorable in history.

Louis XVI ascended the throne on the 11th May, 1774, at the age of twenty. His
morals were pure, his intentions upright and generous; but, to complete inexperience, he
added a great want of decision of character. He chose as his first minister, Maurepas,
who recalled the old Parliaments, but knew not how to make them submit to useful and
efficient reforms. They were reinstalled on 12 th November; and the privileged classes
burst forth into complaints.

37

Strong in her amity with Frederick II and Maria Theresa, and the supine indolence of Louis XV,
Catharine II, the Emperess of Russia, signed in 1772, with the Courts of Prussia and Vienna, a treaty for the
dismemberment of Poland. This preliminary division deprived the country of a third of its territory, and led
to other treaties which effaced Poland from the number of independent nations.

The general management of the national finances fell into the hands of a
Genevese banker, Nekker, who placed France in a position to support a war occasioned
by the rebellion of the English colonies of North America in 1773 (against England,
overburdened by debt after the peace of 1763). The Congress of the revolted colonies
published, in 1776, the Act of Independence, by which it constituted itself a free power,
and independent of English rule. France concluded a treaty of alliance and commerce
with the Americans, and in the following year with Spain. Maurepas, offended by lavish
praises bestowed upon Nekker, maligned him to the king; and the eminent financier,
perceiving that he no longer possessed his sovereigns confidence, sent in his resignation,
which was accepted on 23rd May.
Peace was at length signed at Versailles on 3rd September, 1783, between England
on the one part, and France, Spain and the United States, whose independence was
recognized, on the other. Maurepas died soon after the disgrace of Nekker; Joly de
Fleury and dOrmesson succeeded Nekker in turn without being able to discover a
remedy for the deficit of the Treasury which had increased during the war; and Calonne
succeeded them in the management of the finances, adopting a system directly opposed to
that of Nekker, endeavouring to strengthen the Government credit by prodigality.
Calonne, to enforce Parliaments submission, convoked an Assembly of Notables (1787),
hoping it would be more docile than the Parliaments and the Estates-General. He could
not, however, conceal from the Notables the fact that within a few years there was a
deficit of a hundred and fifteen millions in the revenue, and resigned. He was succeeded
by Lommie de Brienne, Archbishop of Sens.

Brienne perceived that it was only possible to overcome the resistance of the
Parliament by suppressing it; and in conjunction with M. de Lagoignon, the new Keeper
of the Seals, he persuaded the King to agree to a plan which destroyed the political
authority of the magistracy. By this scheme an assembly of the principal persons of the
kingdom was to be constituted, endowed with all the authority of the plenary courts of the
time of Charlesmagne. This court was to regulate the general police laws, and the edicts,
which were no longer to be submitted to the Parliaments. All the provinces were in a
state of agitation, by 1788, and almost everywhere the privileged classes, for the sake of
preserving their own privileges, gave to the masses of the people a dangerous example of
resistance and insurrection. Brienne was resolved, at any price, to remain in power; but a
Court intrigue overthrew him and he resigned, at the same time advising Louis XVI to
recall Nekker, as the only man capable of restoring the finances to a satisfactory state.
But, skilful as he was as a financier, this minister was not equal, as politician, to the task
of grappling with the perilous circumstances by which France was now surrounded.
The moment of crisis drew near when the King convoked the Second Assembly of
the Notables, to which was submitted the question as to how the Estates-General should
be convoked. It commenced its sittings on 9th November, 1788, and divided itself into six
committees, one of which alone declared in favour of the double representation of the
Third Estate. The Third Estate now perceived its strength; it reckoned with good reason
the support of a portion of the Noblesse and the Clergy, and foresaw that it would be able
to control the method of deliberation. From this moment the Revolution was inevitable.

The Estates-General commenced their sittings on 5 th May, 1789, at Versailles. On

17th June, a National Assembly consisting of the deputies of the Third Estate and the
dissenting portion of the nobility and clergy, sanctioning the temporary levying of
existing taxes, consolidating the public debt. Violent measures proposed by the Court
were now evident, and the deputies resolved their being carried into execution they
unanimously swore, with one exception, that they would bestow a constitution on France:
the Oath of the Tennis Court, June 20, 1789. A Royal sitting took place on June 23 rd, the
King recognizing the Assembly as the Order of the Third Estate, commanding its
dissolution. The members of the nobility and clergy immediately obeyed, but those of
the Commons persisted in maintaining the inviolability of its members. From thenceforth
the Royal authority was at an end. Despite the resistance of the nobility, forty-seven
members of the noblesse, with the Duke of Orleans at their head, joined the Third Estate,
and the majority of the clergy, and were received with enthusiasm. The fusion of the
several orders in a single assembly, however, was not yet complete; and as this
circumstance produced an extreme state of agitation, Nekker again advised the union of
the three orders; and as the Queen and many influential persons supported his views,
Louis XVI yielded, and after 27th June the clergy, the noblesse and the Third Estate
formed only one National and Constituent Assembly the distinction between the orders
became extinct.
All moral authority having passed from the Monarch to the Assembly, the
advisors of Louis XVI imprudently persuaded him to have recourse, too late, to force.
Troops were assembled in large bodies around Versailles, and Nekker was exiled,
producing a feeling of great excitement in Paris. Camille Desmoulins, a young and

ardent demagogue, harangued the populace in the garden of the Palais Royal, and
exhorted them to rush to arms. The crowd replied with acclamations; and he then
proposed that a patriotic colour should be adopted green, the symbol of hope. The
orator then tore a leaf from a tree and attached it to his hat: everyone followed his
example, and the trees of the garden were almost entirely denuded of their foliage. A
tumult took place, troops refused to act, barriers were set on fire, and many houses were
pillaged.
The National Assembly placed the public debt under the protection of French
honour, and constituted itself a permanent Assembly.

The populace of Paris was eager to follow up its first successes, and demanded
arms. A Committee of Electors sitting at the Htel de Ville organized the National Guard,
which it raised to the number of forty-eight thousand men, and to which, on the proposal
of Lafayette, it gave the tricoloured cockade: this cockade united white, the ancient
colour of the flag of France, with red and blue, the colours of the city of Paris.

To the Bastile! to the Bastile!

became the cry of the excited populace; and the siege of the Bastile was immediately
commenced. The French Guards revolted, aided the mob with cannon, and secured the
capture of the citadel, the feeble garrison of which surrendered. The people, bearing on
their pikes the bleeding trophies of their triumph, returned with immense uproar to the

Htel de Ville, and speedily signalized their victory with many assassinations. Blood
flowed in all directions and a civil war was imminent.
The Court only regarded the insurrection as a riot. The King proceeded in person
to dissolve the Assembly Louis XVI entered the Htel de Ville, unaccompanied by
guards, received the tricoloured cockade amidst the acclamations of the multitude, and
did not return to Versailles until he had sanctioned the acts of the people. The return of
Nekker to Paris was a triumph for him, but it was also the last of his prosperity. From
thenceforth he endeavoured, but in vain, to struggle against Revolution. The insurrection
movements in Paris extended to the provinces.

Everywhere the people formed

themselves into municipalities and national guards. Armed mobs pillaged and burned the
castles of the nobility in all parts of France.

The flight of the Royal family, June 20, 1791: the King was arrested at Varennes,
and brought to Paris, where he was received with terrible silence. The Assembly declared
that it was not competent to try Louis XVI, or to pronounce his dethronement; but for the
sake of calming the popular excitement, it decreed that the King would have to abdicate
de facto, and have ceased to be inviolable if he should wage war against the nation, or
suffer it to be done in his name.
Danton aroused insurgency. The King proceeded with his family to the hall of the
Assembly amidst the vociferations of the populace.

This was the last day of the

Monarchy: August 10, 1792. Louis XVI was taken to the Temple with his family, 38 and
September 20 was appointed as the day for opening the Assembly which was to decide
the destinies of the nation.

An Austrian-Prussian alliance threatened the northern frontier, in August 1792.

Terror reigned throughout Paris; numerous arrests were made by order of the Commune.
During three days, commencing September 2, 1792, nobles and priests were murdered by
ruffians in the midst of a hideous parody of judicial forms. The brutal mob made horrible
saturnalia in the Temple,39 and displayed under the window, in the sight of the Queen, the
head of her friend, the unfortunate Princess Lamballe.
The Assembly was unable to check the massacres. The Commune reigned alone
in Paris.

Proclamation of the Republic, September 20: the Legislative Assembly dissolved

itself, and took the name of the National Convention. Its first act was to abolish Royalty,
and to proclaim a Republic.
The Girdonists desired a legal and constitutional form of government in the
Republic; Danton, Robespierre, and Marat, were more audacious and less scrupulous as
to the means by which they achieved their ends. Marat, a furious fanatic, had rendered
himself the apostle of murder by his discourses; and in his journal, The Friend of the
People, he advocated recourse to dictatorship for the purpose of subduing the enemies of
the people, and exterminating them in a body: every day organizing fresh massacres. The
38

Cf. the tragic end of the Romanov Dynasty and the emergence of Communism in Marxist Russia. The
outstanding figures: Peyots Grigori Efimemovich Rasputin, the Starets, and the Czarina, Anastasia.
39

Girdonists, although stronger in the Assembly than their rivals, accused Robespierre of
seeking to establish a tyranny, but yielded to their enemies, the Commune of Paris and
the Club of the Jacobins who were proclaiming the unity and indivisibility of the
Republic.
The debate on the Kings trial began on the 23rd of November. It was decided to
bring him before the Convention on a variety of charges, the chief of which was
conspiracy with European powers to overthrow the sovereignty and liberties of the
common people.

The Girdonists openly expressed their desire to save him.

His

execution was fixed for January 21: at half-past ten, Louis XVI arrived at the Place de la
Rvolution, to suffer the outrage of his fate, with God as his only recompense. I die
innocent: I pardon my enemies, and you, unhappy people
The rolling of the drums silenced his voice.

When the Girdonists resisted the establishment of an arbitrary and formidable

revolutionary tribunal, created on March 20, 1793, they were branded as intriguers and
enemies of the people.

Their insurrection had provoked the Convention to cruel

measures against priests and nobles, and their destruction was resolved. On May 31,
Lanjuinais denounced that all Revolutionary authorities in the capital should be deposed.
Henriot was appointed to command the ragged partisans of the Commune and the
Jacobins.
The Girdonists were especially denounced by Robespierre and Marat, with the
object of freeing the Assembly from the tyranny of the Jacobins and the Commune. (The
whole Convention arose, and set forth with the president at its head; it met Henriot on

horseback, sword in hand. What does the people want? asked the president. It
demands that twenty-four criminals be handed up to it. replied Henriot. The Convention
no longer opposed the arrest of the proscribed deputies, and Marat constituted himself
dictator as to their fates. From that moment the Girdonist party was crushed, and the
Convention was no longer free.)
The heroic Charlotte Corday, a young girl endowed with an ardent soul, stabbed
the atrocious Marat40 in his bath, and she died on the scaffold with exemplary courage.
On the second of June, Lyons declared itself against the Convention.

The Convention appointed a Committee of Public Safety, with Robespierre as a

principle member.

The Republic ordered frightful executions and horrible massacres.

The

extermination of the unfortunate City of Lyons was ordered. The scaffold was too slow
an instrument, for the decrees of the committee, and the vanquished insurgents were
mowed down by muskuetry. In Paris, the Queen, the noble Marie Antoinette, perished.
The Girdonists who were proscribed on June 2 soon followed. The public credit was
abolished, and the expenses of the Government were supplied by the sale of the property
of proscribed persons. Despotic measures were enforced by threats. The new era was
consecrated, and the Christian calendar was replaced, dating from the period at which the
Republic was founded.
The leaders of the Commune and their accomplices, were all seized and
condemned; and most of them died as cowards, on March 24, 1794. Danton and his
40

Death of Marat, July 13, 1793.

friends were arrested, in turn, on 30 March, and Robespierre prevented their being heard
in the Assembly. Robespierre had now obtained the height of his power, and was to be
speedily followed by his fall.

Conspiracy against Robespierre: Robespierre, relying on the support of the

Jacobins and the mob, denounced Danton et al, as enemies to the Republic in the
Convention. A cry arose from every side: Down with the Tyrant.
Terror reigned in the Assembly. The Convention assumed the offensive, attacking
the Commune and put its members beyond the pale of the law.

Robespierre sat

motionless, as though paralyzed, petrified by irresolution; the Htel de Ville was

surrounded by cries of Long live the Convention! He was seized, together with his
colleagues and the principal members of the Commune; and on the following day they
were tried by the same Revolutionary tribunal which they had so long ago fed victims,
and which now sent them in their turn to the scaffold, trembling with fear. The Reign of
Terror was at an end.

Anarchy prevailed.

Rira bien qui rira le dernier.

(He who laughs last, laughs best.)
Last sentence of Diderots Le Neveu