The Nun

Description

WARNING: The encyclopedist (like the child-of-an-ex-nun-who-abanded-him-in-a-wooden-box d'Alembert, whom Ampère also read) Denis Diderot, initially a devout Catholic and seminarian who almost became a priest (at his father's behest) and a Jesuit, ended up a deist and finally an atheist.

Sentimental Savants ref:9.50: "Diderot expressed his disdain for religious life in his novel The Nun." Yet I wouldn't say Diderot "expressed…disdain for religious life"; this story seems more about the consequences of illegitimacy and why it's risky for illegitimate children to be in religious life (e.g., pre-Vatican II Dominican constitution discouraged it). "The Nun was too controversial to risk printing; it was only published posthumously." Yet, it wasn't placed on the Index.

"This novel takes the life of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent as its subject matter and provides an insight into the effects of forced vocations"--Provided by publisher.

The Council of Trent (sess. 25, ch. 17, ref:31.31) condemned forced vocations, so it's not clear whether this work is anti-Catholic or not (probably is, considering Diderot apostatized and this work was on the Index*).

*"If a girl who is more than twelve years of age wishes to take the habit of regulars, she shall be examined by the ordinary, and again before profession […] the bishop […] has carefully examined the wish of the virgin, whether she has been forced or enticed, or knows what she is doing"; cf. "Whether children should be received in religion?" II-II q. 189 a. 5.

ref:6.3:

The Encyclopaedia [which Ampère read] became the Bible of the Enlightenment, the name given to the intellectual tidal wave that washed across Europe, and particularly France, in the eighteenth century, eroding superstition, conventional thinking, and received wisdom, and ushering in new modes of critical thought. The Enlightenment set out above all to challenge and demystify traditional religious authority, in particular the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But this was an age when thought and expression were still rigorously policed. In the late 1750s the authorities stepped up their war against the philosophes , whose possible subversive influence had been highlighted by François Damiens’s attempt to assassinate Louis XV on 5 January 1757, the eve of the Epiphany, la fête des Rois. In 1759 the Parlement of Paris banned further publication of the Encyclopaedia (a ban that proved ineffectual, since, thanks to the collusion of the authorities, the remaining volumes were published unofficially), and the work [the Encyclopaedia] was put on the Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books. The persecution of the philosophes may have contributed to the virulence of the satire in The Nun.

ref:6.25: The Nun "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." {Yet, Boccaccio's satirical, Dantesque Decameron was(or was it? He doesn't appear in the 1938 Index.), despite Boccaccio not being a heretic?}

ref:6.10:

France was home to about 5,000 convents containing some 55,000 nuns, compared to about 3,000 monasteries and about 30,000 monks. France was in fact unique in Europe in possessing so many more nuns than monks.

Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A novel mingling mysticism, madness, sadistic cruelty and nascent sexuality, it gives a scathing insight into the effects of forced vocations and the unnatural life of the convent. This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material. - ;'You can leave a forest, but you can never leave a cloister; you are free in the forest, but you are a slave in the cloister.' Diderot's The Nun (La Religieuse) is the seemingly true story of a young girl forced by her parents to enter a convent and take holy orders. A succès de scandale at the end of the eighteenth century, it has attracted and unsettled readers ever since. For Diderot's novel is not simply a story of a young girl with a bad habit; it is also a powerfully emblematic fable about oppression and intolerance. This new translation includes Diderot's all-important prefatory material, which he placed, disconcertingly, at the end of the novel, and which turns what otherwise seems like an exercise in realism into what is now regarded as a masterpiece of proto-modernist fiction.

film adaptation: La religieuse (quotes Bossuet at its beginning and end; IMDB entry)