Rose-Chrétien de la Neuville

Rose-Chrétien de la Neuville was born in 1741 at Évreux in Normandy, in the Kingdom of France. She belonged to a family established in that region. In adult life she married, but her husband died and she was left a widow. After this bereavement she sought admission to the Discalced Carmelite monastery of Compiègne, a house of the Teresian reform in the historic province of the Île-de-France, not far from Paris. There she received the religious name Sister Julie Louise of Jesus and was professed as a choir nun. The Carmel of Compiègne had been founded in the early seventeenth century and, like other French Teresian houses of the Ancien Régime, combined strict enclosure, the recitation of the Divine Office, and a life of contemplative prayer with dependence on local patronage.

Within the community she lived the ordinary round of Carmelite observance. Later accounts, drawing on the testimony of her sisters and on the memoirs of the choir nun who survived the Revolution, Sister Marie of the Incarnation, describe her as genuinely devout yet long afflicted by a lively fear of death. That fear is presented in the tradition as a spiritual trial rather than a failure of faith, and it forms part of the usual portrait of her character. The Compiègne community in the last decades of the eighteenth century was a small, regular house of some twenty members, including choir nuns, lay sisters, and extern sisters, living under a prioress and following the constitutions of the Discalced Carmelites.

The Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent legislation against religious orders destroyed the legal and material basis of monastic life in France. After the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the decrees suppressing congregations, the Carmelites of Compiègne were driven from their monastery in 1792 and obliged to live in small groups in rented lodgings in the town, where they continued as best they could to keep their rule and their community identity. In that period they made a collective act of consecration, offering their lives to God for the restoration of peace to France and the Church. During the Reign of Terror they were denounced, arrested in June 1794, and taken under guard to Paris, where they were confined in the Conciergerie, the principal prison of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

On 17 July 1794 the sixteen women were brought before the Tribunal, accused of fanaticism and of conspiring against the Revolution. They were condemned to death and, the same afternoon, conveyed in carts to the Place du Trône-Renversé, the present Place de la Nation, in the east of Paris. Contemporary witnesses recorded that the nuns sang the Salve Regina, the Veni Creator Spiritus, and other liturgical pieces as they went, and that each in turn renewed her religious vows at the foot of the scaffold before being guillotined. Sister Julie Louise of Jesus, Rose-Chrétien de la Neuville, was executed with her sisters. The bodies of those put to death at that scaffold in June and July 1794 were thrown into mass graves in the nearby cemetery of Picpus, where the remains of the Compiègne martyrs still lie.

Pope Pius X beatified the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne on 27 May 1906. Their feast is observed on 17 July, the anniversary of their death. They have been venerated especially by the Discalced Carmelite Order and in the French dioceses associated with their lives and martyrdom. In the twentieth century their story entered wider culture through Gertrud von Le Fort’s novella Die Letzte am Schafott and through Francis Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites, works which, despite fictional elements, drew public attention to the historical events. Pope Francis subsequently inscribed them among the saints.