MARIE-MADELEINE
FONTAINE, MARIE-FRANÇOISE LANEL,
THÉRÈSE-MADELEINE
FANTOU AND JEANNE GÉRARD
Martyred
Daughters of Charity
Thomas
Davitt CM
These four are often referred to as the martyred
Daughters of Charity of Arras, as they were stationed in Arras
at the time of their arrest, though they were tried and executed
in Cambrai. Arras is about one hundred miles almost directly
north of Paris, and Cambrai is about twenty miles south east
of Arras.
The Daughters of Charity came to Arras in 1656,
four years before the death of Vincent. They were asked for because
of the devastation of the town caused by war. Eighty years later,
in 1736, they were still there and because their work had expanded
they needed a larger house. The Vincentians were in charge of
the seminary in the town at that time. Forty-three years later,
in 1779, they needed a still larger house and the bishop purchased
a site in the centre of the town and a completely new house was
constructed and opened in 1782.
At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 they
had a dispensary and a free school for girls, and they made house
visits to the poor. They received plenty of financial help from
the townspeople. There were seven sisters in the house in 1789.
Marie-Madeleine Fontaine was superior. Three of the other sisters
were Marie-Françoise Lanel, Thérèse-Madeleine Fantou and Jeanne
Gérard. There had been three other sisters in the community,
but they had left by the time the revolutionary trouble reached
its climax.
One of the principal men in power in Paris during the period of
the Terror was Maximilien Robespierre. He was a native of Arras,
so the revolutionary figures of that town were zealous for putting
all his ideas into force in the town. As a result, Arras suffered
more than any other country town in France during the revolutionary
period.
This meant that the local leaders tried their
utmost to get the clergy and religious of the town to take the
various oaths, which were prescribed by the laws passed in Paris.
In actual fact only one parish priest and one curate in the town
took the oaths. Some others stayed and conducted an underground
ministry, but many fled abroad. During the Revolution a large
number of French clergy sought refuge in England, including many
Vincentians. The bishop went into exile in Belgium, to the town
of Tournai, which is only about forty miles from Arras. From
there he tried to keep abreast of events in his diocese. The
three vicars general stayed on. One of them was a Vincentian,
and he was probably acting as director of the Daughters. The
Daughters’ policy was to try to continue their work as normally
as they could, and to avoid for as long as possible any direct
confrontation with the revolutionary elements in the town administration.
They had the full support of the ordinary townspeople.
The big change for the Daughters came in November
1793 when a man named Joseph Lebon arrived in Arras to organise
things on the basis of total conformity to the instructions coming
from Paris, in the spirit of Robespierre. In fact his brutality
went far beyond what the laws actually permitted. He was a native
of Arras, born there in 1765, so he was twenty-eight years old
on his arrival. He was a former Oratorian, a member of the National
Convention, and was appointed mayor of Arras and administrator
of the départment of the Pas de Calais.
Lebon took up his new post in Arras on 1 November
1793, and on the 14th he sent two officials to the
Daughters’ house to ascertain whether the sisters had taken the
prescribed oaths and conformed themselves to all other legal
requirements. The sisters said that they had not taken the oaths,
had no intention of taking them and therefore there was no point
in giving them extra time to reconsider. When the two officials
heard this they decided that they would have to inspect all the
rooms of the house and make an inventory of the contents, so
as to report back to the authorities on this. In their report
they said that they were accompanied on this visit of the house
by Citizeness Madeleine Fontaine, the directress. They avoided
terms like sister, or superioress. They found that there were
pictures in the house which were of Catholic religious significance,
as well as others which reflected aspects of the former class
of nobility. They ordered the bursar of the house to remove all
these, but they selected some which they thought were of artistic
value to be retained for the town museum.
On 23 November there was a new decree expelling
from hospitals all religious women who had not taken the oaths.
This applied to the dispensary run by the Daughters, and a new
lay staff was brought in. At the same time they did not go as
far as expelling the sisters. The reason for this was that they
believed that the sisters had secret remedies and prescriptions
for various illnesses, and they hoped that they would discover
these secrets and then expel the sisters. The name was also changed,
from the House of Charity to the House of Humanity.
Lebon travelled all through the area under his
command, and in a report dated 26 November 1793 he wrote: “No
twenty-four hour period passes in which I do not bring before
the revolutionary criminal court in Arras two or three head of
game for the guillotine”. The criminal court did not go along
with Lebon’s thirst for executions and very often imposed prison
sentences instead of the death penalty. Lebon put up with this
until February 1794, when he changed all the court personnel
and replaced them with persons who would do exactly what he wanted.
One of these replacements wrote the following month that the
guillotine “is never idle; dukes, marquises, counts and barons,
men and women, fall like hailstones”. A second court had to be
established to deal with all the new work.
In spite of all this increased revolutionary atmosphere in Arras
the Daughters were left generally in peace. They continued to attend
to the poor and sick in the dispensary and in their own homes,
and the flow of alms to them never slackened. They also engaged
in the dangerous enterprise of helping people to escape into Belgium,
the border being only about forty miles away. They gave financial
help to such people and helped also to provide disguises.
Marie-Madeleine kept detailed financial accounts,
and her accounts for all 1793 and the first six weeks of 1794
are still extant. She had to avoid using terms like “sister”,
and the sisters are now referred to as “the young ladies” who
take up collections in the town. In November 1793 they are called “young
citizenesses”. The mother general had advised this as a safeguard.
Also, in 1794 Marie-Madeleine started writing the new names of
the months and using the dates of the new calendar of the revolutionary
period. In her accounts she lists very many anonymous donations,
probably thinking it prudent not to put down the names of donors.
The accounts show that even at that difficult time the people
of the town continued to support the work of the sisters. Finally,
the accounts also show that Marie-Madeleine did all that she
could to ensure that all sums legally due to the house were paid
up. Some years earlier she had written to the Arras municipality
claiming the continuing right of the house to receive donations
of wine and other gifts, which it used to receive in the pre-revolutionary
period. In that letter, in 1791, she was still able to refer
to the Sisters of Charity, describe herself as superioress and
promise to pray for the municipal officials.
I mentioned earlier that at the start of the
revolutionary period there were seven sisters in the house in
Arras. At some stage one of these returned to her family.
In Paris there was a group called The Jacobin Club, a meeting-place
for people who embraced all the revolutionary ideas of the time.
It took its name from the fact that it met in the former Dominican
priory on the Rue Saint-Jacques. Because of the location of their
priory the Dominicans had been known as the Jacobins. Throughout
France similar clubs were established, including one in Arras.
At the meetings of the club all matters relating to the implementation
of the various laws and decrees were discussed, along with specific
plans for putting them into practice in Arras. Two wealthy Catholic
men of the town, at considerable personal risk, used to attend
all meetings of the club in order to learn what was being planned,
and they passed on what they learned to persons who might be concerned.
They tipped off the Daughters that it would be prudent to get the
two youngest sisters across the border into Belgium as soon as
possible. They brought to the house the sort of clothes two young
local women would wear, and arranged for a trustworthy man, a merchant
who supplied goods to the house, to escort them to the frontier.
This was successfully achieved, and they continued their lives
as Daughters of Charity first in Germany, later in Poland and eventually
in the neighbourhood of Geneva. With their departure only four
sisters remained in Arras, Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, aged 71, Marie-Françoise
Lanel, 49, Thérèse-Madeleine Fantou, 47, and Jeanne Gérard, 42.
On 5 February 1794 a representative of the revolutionary
administration took possession of the Daughters’ house, and assumed
control of all finances. He was one of the people who thought
that the sisters had been given too much freedom to continue
their work, when every other female religious community in the
town had been suppressed. Nine days later, on the 14th,
the four sisters were arrested on the charge of not having taken
the prescribed oaths. They were taken to a mansion in the town
which had been confiscated and turned into a detention prison.
Lebon had drawn up a very severe regime for the prisoners, but
as always seems to happen in such cases, the persons appointed
to administer the regime did not always do so with the severity
intended. Some of the wardens permitted breaches of the rules,
such as allowing prisoners to speak to each other and to communicate
with people outside, and they also helped in the provision of
proper food. One official connected with the prison had been
involved in some way with the administration of the Daughters’ dispensary,
and he did as much as possible to help the four imprisoned sisters.
At the beginning of March Lebon issued further decrees about the
prisoners. They were to be divided into separate categories, and
each category brought to a different place of detention. This meant
that families were broken up, with men, women and children being
put in different places. He also decreed that each detained person
be allowed keep only what was absolutely necessary. This meant,
in fact, that the officials were licensed to steal from the detainees
anything which took their fancy, money, watches, books and articles
of clothing. This was done over the two days of 8 and 9 March,
in the fourth week of the sisters’ detention. They were also brought
to a new prison, the former convent called the convent of the Good
Shepherd, or of Providence.
This building had been designated as a place of detention for
women who were under suspicion. Lebon even invented a category
of “women under suspicion of being under suspicion”. Most of the
detained women were from noble and rich families from all over
that part of northern France. There were about five hundred persons
in the building, resulting in gross overcrowding. Lebon drew
up a set of rules for the house much more severe than any previous
one, especially as regards the question of food. The detainees
were not allowed visitors, and were also forbidden to send or receive
letters. To make sure that the regime would be enforced Lebon stipulated
very severe penalties for any prison officer who allowed any relaxation
of the rules. The governor and vice-governor of the prison were
two very cruel women who were in full agreement with Lebon’s ideas.
The governor used to celebrate on the days when women were taken
out to execution, and get blind drunk. She, in spite of Lebon’s
decree, was ready to take bribes, provided they were large enough.
Several women who had spent time in that prison,
but who were not executed, have left written accounts of what
went on there. These were educated women who needed some form
of intellectual relaxation to break the monotony of prison life.
Some of them used to meet in small groups, around the bed of
one of them, for intelligent and stimulating conversation, each
contributing from her own background and experience. For variety,
each meeting was held around a different bed. The Daughters of
Charity were invited to take part in these meetings, and naturally
their contribution was on religious matters. They were, in fact,
exercising a much needed ministry, in view of the shortage of
priests after so many expulsions.
On 4 April, after about three weeks in their first prison and
almost four in the second, the four Daughters of Charity were brought
before a tribunal. They were charged with having been in possession
of counter-revolutionary printed material, found in the Maison
de la Charité. There seems to be evidence that this material had
been planted, and then conveniently found, hidden under some straw,
by the daughter of the civil administrator of the house who had
been put in charge before the arrest of the sisters. The entire
transcript of the tribunal proceedings is still extant, in the
archives of the départment of the Pas de Calais. Marie-Madeleine
was asked if she knew why she had been arrested, and she said she
did not. Asked if she had any suspicion, she said she supposed
it was because she had not taken the oath, but that as she was
not a religious she was not obliged to take it. Asked if she read
the local newspapers, she said she could not afford to buy them.
She was shown the publications which, it was alleged, had been
found in the house, and she said she had never seen them before.
There were other questions as well, and at the end the transcript
of the proceedings was read to her and she signed it as being accurate.
The other three sisters answered in the same way, except that Marie-Françoise
Lanel admitted, for the sake of absolute truth, that while she
had never read such papers in the house she had, in fact, read
parts of them elsewhere.
On the evidence presented there was really no
case for the sisters to answer, but the administration of law
at that time did not follow normal rules. The decision of the
court was that there was a very strong presumption that the four
accused had hidden the counter-revolutionary publications in
their house, publications which “tended to excite revolt and
ignite civil war in the départment”. They were sentenced to remain
in detention, and the file of the case was to be forwarded to
the civil authorities of the town of Arras. The next day they
were moved into their third house of detention.
The new prison was named the prison of Les Baudets,
because it was on the street of that name; the name means the
street of the donkeys. The actual building in which the detainees
were kept was formerly part of the town mansion of a wealthy
family. Conditions were worse than in the previous prison. One
of the added sources of suffering was the fact that this prison
was regarded as the last stage on the road towards an appearance
before the revolutionary tribunal, and therefore as the ante-chamber
to the guillotine. Every day there were new arrivals, and equally
every day there were departures of others to trial and execution.
The sisters were to spend twelve weeks there,
and they realised that there was no real likelihood that they
would escape the guillotine. In that realistic frame of mind
they prepared for death. Thérèse-Madeleine Fantou managed to
get a letter smuggled out to her family in Brittany, in which
she urged them to remain loyal to their religion. Unfortunately
the letter was lost later, and that would seem to be the only
point remembered from it. It was an obvious point to put in the
letter, as she and the three other sisters were doing precisely
that in their own situation. There is a letter still extant,
written from Arras by a friend of the Robespierre family to Robespierre’s
sister on 24 April that year, in which it is stated that in the
previous three weeks five hundred persons had been guillotined
and about three thousand arrested. The writer added that other
atrocious details were not being included in the letter because
one had to be an eye-witness in order to believe they had happened.
The three weeks mentioned were, of course, during the period
of detention of the four Daughters of Charity.
In spite of that description of what was going
on in Arras, Lebon was not certain that he could get a death
sentence for the four sisters. They were too well known in Arras
for their charitable work, and he knew that they still had the
support of the majority of the people of the town. He was presented
with the possibility of achieving his wish in April. His superiors
wrote to him that the ideas of the revolution were still not
being adequately implemented in his area and he was ordered to
go to Cambrai, about forty miles from Arras, to alter that situation.
He left on 5 May, and the following day started repeating in
Cambrai what he had been doing in Arras. As well as arresting
people in Cambrai he also brought prisoners from Arras for trial
and execution in Cambrai, and all through the last month of their
detention in Arras the four sisters saw the carts, known as tumbrils,
loaded with prisoners leave for the neighbouring town.
On 25 June a letter was received by the authorities in Arras that
the four “former Sisters of Charity” were to be sent to Cambrai
immediately. The letter ordered that they were to arrive in Cambrai
very early in the morning, which meant a departure from Arras very
late at night. The four sisters were to be the only
persons in the cart, but at the last moment orders were received
to collect another prisoner, a man, at another prison. There was
a delay of one hour there, midnight to one o’clock in the morning,
and this gave the sisters an unexpected chance to speak to a woman
who used to be involved with them in their work, a Madame Cartier.
It is not exactly clear how this was possible, but it is likely
that the guards who were with the sisters, seeing that there would
be a delay, confided the care of the sisters to some of the warders
of the prison where the cart stopped, and this gave the sisters
the chance to meet Madame Cartier and speak to her.
Madame Cartier and her family, imprisoned with
her, survived the period of the Terror, and later told what had
happened at that midnight meeting. First of all, Marie-Madeleine
tried to give hope to her and strengthen her in her faith. She
realised that she would be executed in a few hours, so she gave
her rosary to Madame Cartier. Oddly enough, the sister had seven
francs of personal money still in her possession, and she gave
this money to Madame Cartier with instructions that when the
two youngest Daughters of Charity, who had escaped from Arras
some time previously, returned from exile and re-occupied the
former house of the Daughters in Arras, they were to be given
this money. Madame Cartier was, in fact, later able to do precisely
that. The final memory she had of that midnight meeting was that
Marie-Madeleine told her she was not to have any fears about
the future, because the four Daughters of Charity would be the
last persons to be executed. This also proved to be true.
When the tumbrils finally left for Cambrai they met, at a stop
somewhere along the route, other tumbrils with prisoners destined
for the tribunal there. Marie-Madeleine recognised one woman who
had been a Lady of Charity in Arras. Once again she told her, and
the others, to have no fear for the future, as the four sisters
would be the last persons to be executed. She also gave another
rosary to this woman. When the tumbrils started off again for the
final leg of the journey to Cambrai, the one in which the sisters
were was second in line. A prisoner in the first tumbril managed
to cause a wheel to break, which stopped further progress for that
tumbril. This meant that the one with the sisters became the first
to arrive at the tribunal, and so the sisters were the first to
be tried and condemned, and their execution was the final guillotining
in Cambrai. The tradition has always been that the accident, which
the prisoner provoked in the other tumbril, saved that group from
being executed.
They arrived in Cambrai at about ten o’clock
in the morning and were brought to a house of detention where
they were to be kept until their appearance before the tribunal.
However, the governor of that prison refused to accept them as
it was overcrowded. While that point was being argued the sisters
were able to mix with the prisoners already there, and once again
Sister Marie-Madeleine encouraged them by repeating that the
four Daughters of Charity would be the final victims of the Terror
in Cambrai.
The governor got his way and the sisters had
to be moved on, so they were brought straight to the tribunal,
and were immediately put on trial, simply because they were the
first to arrive. The tribunal held its sessions in the former
seminary. The charge against them was that they had kept in their
possession counter-revolutionary publications. They were interrogated
about this, and apparently one of the four judges was of the
opinion that this charge was hardly one meriting the death penalty,
and he offered the sisters the chance of freedom if they would
take the prescribed oath, which they refused to do. This meant
that the death penalty had to be imposed, and it was. The refusal
of the oath was, of course, what underlay all the other matters,
and was the real motive for the arrest and condemnation of the
sisters. Joseph Lebon, as an apostate priest, apparently regarded
priests and members of religious communities who refused to take
the various oaths as offending against one of the main aims of
the revolution, namely the bringing of the Church under state
control. He was right, of course, because it was precisely to
prevent such a happening that so many refused the oath and remained
faithful to the Church.
An eye-witness, who was present at the tribunal
when the death sentence was passed, noticed one important difference
between the attitude of the members of the public who were present
on that occasion and the behaviour of the public on previous
occasions when the death sentence was passed. The normal routine
was that when an aristocrat or someone else from the old regime
was sentenced to death the public clapped and applauded. When
the four sisters were sentenced there was complete silence in
the courtroom. This silence of the crowd was maintained right
up till the last of the sisters was guillotined.
In the courtroom the sisters kept saying the
rosary. An official was ordered to remove these “charms” from
the prisoners, but another one thought it would get a laugh if
he twisted the rosaries around each sister’s head. The sisters
accepted this as a symbol of the crown of martyrdom.
When they were brought out on to the central
square of the town, where the guillotine had been erected, Marie-Madeleine
Fontaine again repeated her assertion that they would be the
final victims of the Terror. A letter written at the time, and
still extant, says that as she mounted the platform of the guillotine
she shouted out loud to the crowd: “Christians, listen to me!
We are the final victims. Tomorrow the persecution will be over,
the scaffold will be dismantled, and the altars of Jesus will
rise glorious once again”. They were guillotined on 26 June 1794.
The following day an army officer was charged
with having counter-revolutionary ideas, but was acquitted because
it was alleged that this was inadvertence on his part. Such an
acquittal would have been unheard of a few days previously. Two
factors were at work here. The first was that the tribunal personnel
had been very much surprised at the changed attitude of the townspeople
towards the work of the tribunal in the case of the four Daughters
of Charity. The second factor was far more significant. Word
had come from Paris that three days previously Joseph Lebon himself
had been denounced for what nowadays would be called crimes against
humanity. Documentary evidence had been collected and submitted
to the authorities in Paris showing how in his work he had gone
far beyond what the law demanded or allowed. These two factors
changed the whole atmosphere in Arras overnight, though arrests
and imprisonments continued.
On one previous occasion Lebon had been in trouble, but had managed
to defend himself successfully. He was quite sure he could do the
same again, but he did have to give time to preparing his defence
and this meant less time for his previous activities. Contrary
to his expectations he was arrested on 2 August, six weeks after
the execution of the sisters, and was imprisoned in Paris, Meaux
and Amiens for the fourteen months during which his trial dragged
on. He was guillotined eventually on 15 October 1795.
Other persons who had been prominent in revolutionary
matters in Arras were also arrested and imprisoned for various
periods. In the case of some, the townspeople looted and burned
their houses. After release from prison some had tried to return
to the town but the people would not have them, and they had
to go and settle in places where they were not known.
