The Nun (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  Diderot was familiar with these and similar titillating tales. But what makes his nun different from her fictional predecessors is that, whereas earlier convent novels tend to depict a nun who is unhappy because she is separated from the man she loves in the outside world, Suzanne’s unsuitability to her way of life is not caused by love or by any lack of religious devotion. Rather her protest is an ideological and fundamentally humanitarian one. She has been forced to take the veil; her claim is to self-determination. This is a novel about enforced vocations, about making a young woman become a nun against her will.

  While it was unquestionably contrary to the Church’s law to force novices to take vows, it was by no means unheard of: Diderot’s fiction is not entirely fanciful. Diderot had personal experience of the deleterious effects of the cloistered life. In 1743 his own father had his 30-year-old son locked up in a monastery when the wayward Diderot decided, against his father’s wishes, that he did not want to become a priest and that he wanted instead to marry the poor but beautiful Antoinette Champion. (Diderot escaped after a month and married his beloved ‘Nanette’.) Meanwhile his fourth sister Angélique, born in 1720, took the veil at the Ursuline convent in the family’s home town of Langres, was driven mad, and died there in 1748. But perhaps the best-known case of a woman forced against her will to take the veil is the one that actually forms the starting point for Diderot’s novel.

  The origins of The Nun combine fact and fiction, a true story and a daring hoax. Early in 1760 Diderot and his friend Grimm, editor of the Literary Correspondence, together with Grimm’s mistress, Madame d’Épinay, decided that their old friend, the Marquis de Croismare, had been away from Paris—and from them—for long enough (he had left the capital at the beginning of 1759 in order to retire to his country home in Lasson, near Caen). So they devised a plan to persuade him to return. They knew that in 1758 he had become interested in the fate of a nun in her early forties at the convent of Longchamp, a certain Marguerite Delamarre, who was trying to annul her vows on the grounds that her parents had forced her to become a nun. He had gone as far as to intervene in her case, but in vain: Delamarre’s appeal was refused, and she was forced to remain a nun for another three decades, until the dissolution of the convents after the Revolution. Choosing to exploit his philanthropy, the plotters sent the Marquis a series of letters written by Diderot which purported to come from the nun who had supposedly escaped from her convent, and from Madame Madin, the woman she was supposedly staying with in Versailles, who was in fact one of Madame d’Épinay’s friends who had agreed to pass on to Diderot any letters she received from Caen. The exchange of letters in spring 1760 did not, however, go entirely according to plan. The Marquis refused to come to the nun, preferring instead to invite her to come to him in Normandy in order to take up a position in his household. The plotters played for time, but eventually killed off their paper heroine on 10 May 1760.

  But Diderot’s interest in this poor nun did not die with her. He spent much of the rest of 1760 working on a longer account of the nun’s life, now the memoir of one Suzanne Simonin, but he kept the manuscript to himself for the next ten years. In 1770 Grimm published in his Literary Correspondence the exchange of letters (the fictional letters from the nun and her guardian and the Marquis’s authentic replies), together with a preamble outlining the hoax, but not the novel proper. By late 1780 Meister, Grimm’s successor as editor of the Literary Correspondence, was looking for material for the journal; Diderot offered him The Nun. Meister duly published Suzanne’s memoir, followed by the correspondence, now given the title ‘Preface to the Preceding Work’ (‘Préface du précédent ouvrage’). This periodical publication took place in nine instalments between October 1780 and March 1782, with Diderot all the time making last-minute revisions to the text. The ‘Preface’ followed the final instalment in March 1782, by which time it had become an extension of the novel. Details in the letters were changed to bring the text into line with the novel, which is conceived of as Suzanne’s memoirs in the form of a long letter to the Marquis, supposedly written, it seems, after her first (undated) letter to him in the ‘Preface’.

  Published in this way, of course, The Nun had a very small readership, limited to the small circle of subscribers to the Literary Correspondence. By contrast, when The Nun was first published separately, in book form, in October 1796, the reception was quite different. By 1796 the nun had become less a figure of sexual fun and more a figure to be pitied. In the years leading up to the Revolution the convent was increasingly seen as an emblematic form of social abuse on a par with the infamous lettres de cachet, sealed orders issued at will by the King, ensuring the immediate imprisonment of the unlucky recipient. Both were a form of arbitrary power wielded on behalf of the state by well-to-do families. It was in this context that The Nun was first published.

  The novel was an immediate success, with some fourteen separate editions appearing in France between 1796 and 1800. It came to be seen as a text uncannily close to the Zeitgeist, a text true to the ideals of the Revolution and the First Republic: in October 1789 the taking of perpetual religious vows had been suspended; in February 1790 all the orders that required lifelong vows had been dissolved; by the end of 1792 even the congregations with simple vows had been disbanded; and barely a year later, Catholicism itself was outlawed, to be replaced by the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being. The Nun was an exemplary text. It came to illustrate for some what the Enlightenment stood for and the values it had bequeathed to the Revolutionary era: the pursuit of tolerance, justice, and freedom. Diderot’s novel was not simply the story of a young woman with a bad habit, forced to enter a convent and to take holy orders, but a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and human self-determination, intolerance and the ill effects of systems in general.

  For very similar reasons, of course, the novel also met with opposition. It was condemned as irreligious, obscene, and morally corrupting, with one reviewer in 1796 earnestly advising mothers not to leave a copy in the hands of their daughters. This current of moral disapproval was to resurface two decades later, when, during the reactionary period of the Bourbon Restoration, The Nun was banned twice, first in 1824 and then in 1826, because it was judged to be an obscene work. But this only served to heighten the profile of the work, and by the 1880s it found new favour with the anticlerical movement. This was a novel with a long shelf-life.

  What this sketch of the first hundred years of the novel’s reception suggests is that attitudes to The Nun seem to be a litmus test of public opinion towards the free-thinking ideas that the novel embodies. The novel speaks, it seems, at different times and in different places to ongoing debates between faith and secularism, between conservatives and liberals. In the mid-1960s the French film-maker Jacques Rivette re-ignited these debates with the production of his film version of the novel, Suzanne Simonin, with Anna Karina playing the role of Suzanne. In de Gaulle’s France in 1966, the film was judged untimely and unwelcome, and it was promptly banned on April Fool’s Day, apparently single-handedly, by the Minister of Information, Yvon Bourges, who considered it ‘a blasphemous film which dishonours nuns’. This act of state censorship caused a huge scandal. The new wave of French cinema faced a backlash from the old guard, including the likes of the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, who complained that ‘it would never occur to those who chose to film Diderot’s poisoned book to make a film against the Jews—but against the Catholics, anything goes!’ But liberal opinion refused to be silenced. Jean-Luc Godard, the well-known film-maker and husband of Anna Karina, published in the pages of the magazine The New Observer (Le Nouvel Observateur) a now famous open letter to the then Minister of Culture, André Malraux, in which he defined censorship as the ‘gestapo of the mind’ and accused Malraux, a leading intellectual himself, of blindness and cowardice. A large number of people—intellectuals, film-makers, and even sympathetic priests—added their voices to the chorus of protest. The decision of the right-wing Gaullist governme
nt, driven as much by electoral concerns as moral ones, did not prevent the astute Malraux from allowing the film to be screened at the Cannes film festival, and in May 1967, after the legislative elections, the ban was lifted, and the film was finally shown in Paris in the following November. That Rivette’s film was, until very recently at least, the greatest popular scandal of French cultural life suggests that Diderot’s novel has lost none of its satirical sting.

  Satire and Sexuality

  Diderot was no stranger to satirizing convents. Early in the Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques, 1746), he compares convents to prisons, and in the Sceptic’s Walk (La Promenade du sceptique), written in 1747 but not published until 1830, he develops this witty defamiliarization by comparing nuns to birds and convents to aviaries:

  All over the place one finds big aviaries in which female birds are locked up. Here there are pious parakeets, bleating out words of affection or singing a jargon that they do not understand; over there are little turtledoves sighing and lamenting the loss of their freedom; elsewhere there are linnets fluttering about and deafening themselves with their chatter, and the guides have fun whistling at them through the bars of their cages. . . . What torments these captives is that they can hear travellers going past but are unable to go after them and mingle with them. Nevertheless, their cages are spacious, clean and well supplied with millet and sweets.

  Madame de Graffigny similarly ‘makes strange’ the commonplace convent in her best-selling novel Letters from a Peruvian Princess (Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 1747), in which the naive Peruvian letter-writer comments abrasively on her experiences in Paris, including temporary incarceration in a convent, which she refers to as ‘a house of virgins’: ‘The virgins who live there are so profoundly ignorant . . . The faith they swear to their country’s god demands that they give up all advantages, intellectual endeavour, feelings and even, I think, reason, at least that is the impression they give by what they say.’

  The apparent echo of Graffigny’s cross-cultural fiction is important. For in The Nun Diderot uses a device familiar from numerous eighteenth-century satirical fictions, from Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lettres persanes, 1721) via Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Princess to Voltaire’s Candide (1759): the device of the naive observer. Suzanne is, literally, a novice, an outsider who brings an apparently honest and disarmingly satirical perspective to bear on the dark recesses of convent life (though the extent of her honesty and innocence is crucially open to question). The satire in The Nun gains its incisive force from the distinctive narrative form of the novel. We see everything through the eyes of Suzanne, the suffering victim of family pressure to become a nun with no vocation. Although some of the satire comes from voices other than Suzanne’s, notably Manouri and Dom Morel, even these voices are filtered through Suzanne’s all-controlling voice. This serves to make The Nun the most sustained, most graphic, and most far-reaching literary satire of enforced seclusion in the eighteenth century.

  In a letter to Meister on 27 September 1780 about The Nun, Diderot writes in self-congratulatory mode: ‘I do not think a more terrifying satire of convents has ever been written.’ His observation is important, though, as it serves to underline a crucial point about this novel: this is not a satire of the Christian religion per se, nor is it a satire of the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, which may be why it was never put on the Index. But the satire is perhaps more specific than Diderot implies. The Nun is an attack on enforced vocations, an attack on the unjust collaboration of Church, state, and family, an attack on the convent as a silencing mechanism and a means of social control. This is an anti-cloistral satire that argues for human rights and self-determination. Diderot denounces the persecution and repression of the individual who enters the religious life against his or her own will. There are examples of true devotion in the novel, and Diderot treats them uncritically. Suzanne’s own faith, crucially, is in a sense unimpeachable: it is precisely at the height of her suffering at Longchamp that she feels that ‘Christianity was superior to all the other religions in the world’ (p. 65). His real target is the practice of enforced vocations; the real issue at stake is individual freedom. What Diderot exposes, at least implicitly, are the deleterious effects of all kinds of systems on the human beings ensnared by them. The ramifications of the novel’s satire are very broad.

  But if Diderot fixes his satirical gaze on enforced seclusion for what might be called political reasons, he does so for physiological reasons too. As a materialist, Diderot is interested in how human beings operate in physical terms. For him, the convent becomes a laboratory, the nuns experimental subjects: just as he uses the hypothesis of blindness in order to think about vision in the Letter on the Blind, so in The Nun he uses the hypothesis of seclusion from society in order to think about society itself. What happens, he asks, when you place people in (to him) abnormal, unnatural conditions? The concepts of nature and sociability are crucial here. Diderot is fascinated by the alienation of the natural being. For him, the natural being is a social animal. The novel describes in graphic, even startling, detail the alienating effects of the anti-social, cloistered life. Enforced seclusion violates what Diderot sees as the essential human need for sociability. The novel dramatizes the problematic relationship between the individual and society.

  Diderot was not the first to dwell on this problematic relationship. Significantly, The Nun can be read as a response to the ideas of the proud and persecuted citizen of Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another of the great philosophes in the eighteenth century. Rousseau had profound disagreements with his fellow philosophes, notably Voltaire and Diderot. What he rejected in particular was their belief in cultural and scientific progress. For him, humanity was free by nature but enslaved by civilization. In 1755 he published his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité), a far-reaching critique of the corrupting influence of modern manners and morals. This was followed first, a year later, by his own solitary retreat to rural Normandy from the corruption of Paris society, where he had been a close friend and ally of Diderot’s, and secondly, in 1757, by the irrevocable breach between the two men, when Rousseau took exception to what he saw as a personal attack on him in an allusion to misanthropy in Diderot’s play The Natural Son. For Diderot, unlike Rousseau, to retreat from society is to distort the individual. And so, in implicit response to Rousseau’s perceived misanthropy, Suzanne stresses the importance of ‘man in society’: ‘Such is the effect of cutting oneself off from society. Man is born to live in society. Separate him, isolate him, and his way of thinking will become incoherent, his character will change’ (p. 104).

  But why should Diderot focus in particular on cloistered women, as opposed to cloistered men? The answer lies, again, in physiology. Diderot is particularly interested in female physiology: what happens to women, he asks, when you bar them from normal contact with other women and, perhaps more importantly, men? The answer to this question, the novel suggests, is that women become hysterical and alienated. Here the novel chimes in with Diderot’s later essay On Women (Sur les femmes, 1772), in which Diderot argues that women are ruled by their womb, ‘an organ susceptible to terrible spasms, controlling her and creating in her mind all kinds of apparition’, and that they are unusually prone to what he calls ‘hystericism’ as a result of religious fervour.

  So we find madness running like a leitmotif through the novel. It is, for example, the terrifying spectacle at her first convent of a deranged nun who has escaped from her cell that makes Suzanne resolve not to take her final vows, and that nun’s madness foreshadows the fate of the lesbian Mother Superior at her last convent. Nor is the last Mother Superior alone in her suffering. All the Mothers Superior are examples of the pathologically alienated, hysterical being: the mystical Madame de Moni, the sadistic Sister Sainte Christine, and the lesbian Superior at Sainte-Eutrope. Just as Jacques the Fatalist is about metaphysical alienation and Rameau’s Nephew about social ali
enation, so The Nun depicts and dissects different forms of physical alienation. Diderot paints a vivid picture of how the mind and body can be twisted and deformed by hysteria in cloistered conditions.

  It is perhaps the ‘hysteria’ of the lesbian Mother Superior at Sainte-Eutrope that has received most critical attention in recent years. Of course, the idea that convents, by shutting nuns away together, could incite women to engage in sexual behaviour with one another was well established by the eighteenth century. Locking women away, so the argument went, was ‘unnatural’, and so it led to ‘unnatural’ sexual practices. Popular medieval literature had portrayed monks and nuns as stock types of sexual licentiousness. But concern over the possibility of homosexual relationships was even expressed within the very rules governing the orders. As early as the thirteenth century in Paris and Rouen, for example, nuns were warned against excessive intimacy and encouraged to stay out of each other’s cells and to leave their doors unlocked so that the Mother Superior could check on them. And since the Council of Trent (1545–63), certain practices hitherto tolerated in convents had been forbidden, in particular two (or more) nuns sleeping in the same room. In eighteenth-century France, homosexual practices became another stick with which the philosophes could beat monasteries and convents. Amidst contemporary (but ultimately unfounded) fears about depopulation, celibacy was seen, not least in Diderot’s article on the subject in the Encyclopaedia, as against nature and useless, and monasteries and convents were regarded as running counter to the common good. Typical of this attitude is letter 117 of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, in which monasteries are described as being home to ‘an eternal family which gives birth to nobody’ and are compared to ‘gaping chasms in which future races bury themselves’.