Martyrs of Compiègne

The Martyrs of Compiègne were sixteen Discalced Carmelite nuns of the monastery of Compiègne, in northern France, who were executed by guillotine in Paris on 17 July 1794 during the Reign of Terror. The Carmel of Compiègne had been founded in 1641 under the patronage of Queen Anne of Austria and followed the Teresian reform. By the late eighteenth century it was a regular contemplative house of choir nuns and lay sisters. Revolutionary legislation against religious orders, including the suppression of remaining congregations in August 1792, forced the community from its monastery that September. The nuns then lived in small groups in hired lodgings in the town, laying aside the habit in public while continuing the Divine Office, community prayer, and their vows in secret. In this period they made an act of consecration offering their lives so that peace might be restored to France and to the Church.

In June 1794, as the Terror reached its height, they were arrested on charges of living as an illegal religious association and of fanaticism and counter-revolutionary attachment. They were held first in a prison at Compiègne, in the former Visitation convent, where English Benedictine nuns from Cambrai were also detained and later gave testimony about them. Transferred to Paris, they were imprisoned in the Conciergerie. On 17 July 1794 they were brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned after a summary trial, and sentenced to death. The group included the prioress Mother Teresa of St. Augustine (Madeleine-Claudine Lidoine); Mother Henriette of Jesus (Marie-Françoise Gabrielle de Croissy), a former prioress; elderly choir nuns such as Sister Charlotte of the Resurrection (Anne-Marie-Madeleine Thouret) and Sister Mary of Jesus Crucified (Marie-Anne Piedcourt); the novice Sister Constance of St. Denis (Marie-Geneviève Meunier); and the two extern sisters Catherine and Thérèse Soiron.

That afternoon they were taken in open carts to the Place du Trône Renversé, now Place de la Nation. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts report that they went to the scaffold singing the Salve Regina and other liturgical chants, including the Veni Creator Spiritus, and that each sister knelt to the prioress, renewed her vows, and asked permission to die. Sister Constance was the first executed; Mother Teresa of St. Augustine was the last. Their bodies were thrown into a mass grave in the garden of the former convent of the Canonesses of St. Augustine at Picpus, today the Picpus Cemetery in Paris, where more than a thousand other victims of the Terror were buried. That cemetery remains their burial place. Ten days later, on 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor Year II), Robespierre fell and the most intense phase of the Terror ended. Catholic tradition has long linked the nuns’ offering of their lives with prayer for the end of the bloodshed and for the Church in France.

A cultus developed in the nineteenth century. The sixteen were beatified by Pope Pius X on 27 May 1906. Their liturgical memorial is kept on 17 July, the day of their death. Gertrud von Le Fort’s 1931 novella Die Letzte am Schafott drew on their story and in turn shaped Georges Bernanos’s Dialogues des Carmélites and Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera of that name, which spread knowledge of the Compiègne Carmelites far beyond specialist Catholic circles. Pope Francis canonized them by equipollent canonization on 18 December 2024.