Princess Louise Marie of France

Louise-Marie of France was born on 15 July 1737 at the Palace of Versailles, the youngest of the ten children of King Louis XV of France and Queen Marie Leszczyńska. At court she was known as Madame Louise, and sometimes as Madame Dernière or Madame Septième. In accordance with a practice of the French royal house, she and several of her sisters were sent as young children to be raised at the royal Abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, where they received a religious education from the Benedictine community. She returned to Versailles around 1750 and thereafter lived among the unmarried Mesdames de France in the ceremonial world of the late Bourbon court.

She never married. Dynastic marriage projects were considered during her youth, but none was concluded, and she remained at court. Over the following years she formed a firm intention to enter religious life. After the 1770 marriage of her nephew, the Dauphin (the future Louis XVI), to Marie Antoinette of Austria, she obtained her father’s consent to leave the world. In April 1770 she entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery at Saint-Denis, a house with royal associations just north of Paris. She received the habit later that year and made her solemn profession in 1771, taking the name Thérèse of Saint Augustine (Thérèse de Saint-Augustin).

In Carmel she followed the Teresian rule of enclosure, fasting, manual work, and the Divine Office. Despite her rank she sought the ordinary life of the community and was remembered for humility and for undertaking menial tasks. She was elected prioress of the Saint-Denis Carmel more than once, including in the 1770s and again in the mid-1780s. Testimony from the community and her correspondence present her vocation as an offering of reparation for the sins of the court and of France, and in particular as prayer for the conversion of Louis XV, who received the last sacraments before his death in 1774. She remained strictly enclosed while retaining a discreet concern for the spiritual welfare of her family.

Louise died at the Carmel of Saint-Denis on 23 December 1787 after a period of illness, less than two years before the French Revolution, which suppressed the convent and dispersed its nuns. She was buried at the monastery. In the nineteenth century a cause for beatification was introduced; Pope Pius IX declared her virtues heroic in 1873, and she is therefore styled Venerable. She has not been beatified or canonized. Her life is that of a princess of the ancien régime who freely chose the cloister, and of a Carmelite contemplative whose prayer was offered for the Church and for France.