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Beleaguered Monasticism and Chateaubriand's vie de Rancé
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In his edition of the Vie de Rancé, M. Fernand Letessier traces the composition of the work but does not touch upon the pressures that were brought to bear upon Chateaubriand as he wrote it. However, several letters that passed between Chateaubriand and Abbé Joseph Hercelin in late summer, 1843, and which were published by M. Letessier in the Revue d'histoire littéraire in 1938 have led me to believe that pressure was exerted. Head of the entire network of Trappist monasteries, Abbé Hercelin presided over his order from the remote, wooded cloisters of the Trappists' mother house, Notre Dame de la Trappe, in the Perche country of northern France, where the Breton marshes become Normandy. Chateaubriand had been scheduled to visit the establishment in June, 1843, but had had to postpone doing so because of ill health. When the visit did take place two months later, he talked with Hercelin about a book on which he was then at work. It was to deal with the Trappist monasteries' patriarch, Armand Jean Le Bouthillier de Rancé. Little more than a week had elapsed since Chateaubriand's departure when Hercelin observed in a letter to his venerable guest that “Cette religion sainte, continuée dans les bois, n'est pas connue des hommes de l'époque, mais elle va leur apparaître belle et amie de l'humanité, quand votre plume, aussi éloquente que catholique, aura écrit l'histoire de l'illustre réformateur dont vous avez vu le tombeau.” He went on to predict that because of the persuasive “unction” of his words, Chateaubriand would realize with his book a marvelous alliance between “the children of the world” and the “peaceable inhabitants of the cloisters.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959
References
1 Fernand Letessier, “Chateaubriand et la Trappe,” RHL, XLV (1938), 65.
2 For a discussion of the Trappists' internal disputes at this time, see Louis J. Lakai, The White Monks (Okauchee, Wis., 1953), p. 127.
3 Auguste Romieu, “Le Couvent des Trappistes de Belle-fontaine,” Revue de Paris, iv (1829), 267–279.
4 Georges d'Alcy, “Le Religieux,” Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris, 1841), i, 165, 166. Henri de Latouche, “Fragments,” Adieux (Paris, 1843), pp. 272–273. Having mentioned the monks' supposed greeting, the poet adds (italics mine) that this is “Un mot qui, chaque jour, dit le monde, est plus triste.'
5 Chauteaubriand, Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1859–61), ii, 430. Louis Du Bois, Histoire civile, religieuse, et littéraire de l'abbaye de la Trappe (Paris, 1824), p. 259. Without calling his critic's name and with no hint as to the nature of the reproach, Chateaubriand complained in the Vie de Rancé that he did not believe he deserved his ill treatment at Du Bois' hands. He alluded to Du Bois' work once in the Vie de Rancé and called it an “excellent recueil où tout se trouve rapporté avec une minutieuse exactitude. Je le recommande d'autant plus que j'y ai remarqué quelques paroles d'humeur contre moi; cependant je croyais ne les avoir pas méritées.” See Vie de Rancé, ed. Fernand Letessier (Paris, 1955), ii, 205.
6 The anticlericalism of the period is skillfully presented in Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, La Restauration (Paris, 1955), pp. 428–430, 437–441, and esp. 510–524.
7 Jean Laflon, Histoire de l'église. La Crise révolutionnaire (Paris, 1949), p. 442.
8 For instance, the activities of Abbé Serre, a Bourbonist courier, were to draw much unwelcome attention to the Bourbons' cause in midsummer, 1844. A rather biased account of these activities, with undue praise heaped upon Serre, can be seen in Elphège Frémy, “Le Comte de Chambord et Chateaubriand,” Revue hebdomadaire, X (1920), 168–188, 338–352.
9 Thiers, Discours parlementaires, ed. Antoine Calmon (Paris, 1879–89), vi, 652. Charles Pomaret, Monsieur Thiers et son siècle (Paris, 1948), p. 115.
10 Gilbert de Grandmaison y Bruno, Histoire de la Trappe (Poitiers, 1839), p. 149.
11 Casimir Gaillardin, Les Trappistes du dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1844), ii, 265–275.
12 Information kindly communicated to the author by M. Claude Sibertin Blanc, curator of the Musée Municipal and Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, both of Carpentras, in a letter dated 31 July 1958.
13 “A la tête d'un manuscrit de 206 pages à 26 lignes la page, venu d'Alençon, où ce manuscrit avait été transporté après la destruction de la Trappe, est écrite, par un moine, la note suivante: ‘Ce livre est écrit de la propre main de notre révérend et très saint père dom Armand Jean, notre réformateur de la Trappe . . .”‘ Rancé, ii, 278–279 (italics mine).
14 The author would like to express here his thanks to Fr. Marie Eric, secretary of the Trappist order, who was kind enough to make him copies of these letters.
15 Chateaubriand's closest approach to a reasoned vindica tion of the Trappists of his own day is one paragraph, which, with the insertion in it of a sentence that in the earlier edition had appeared elsewhere, serves as a conclusion to the second edition of the Vie de Rancé and points to someone's desire that at least a little space be devoted to the theme of modern Trappism. In this second version of his conclusion Chateaubriand wrote, “Les Trappistes ont vu s'écrouler autour d'eux les autres ordres; ils ont vu passer la Révolution et ses crimes, Bonaparte et sa gloire, et ils ont survécu . . . Les nouveaux cénobites de la Trappe sont parfaitement conformes à ceux qui habitaient ce désert en onze cent: ils ont l'air d'une colonie du moyen âge oubliée; on croirait qu'ils jouent une scène d'autrefois, si en s'approchant d'eux on ne s'apercevait que ces acteurs sont des acteurs réels, que l'ordre de Dieu a transportés du Xle siècle au nôtre … Ce phénomène est au milieu de nous, et nous ne le remarquons pas. Les institutions de Rancé ne nous paraissent qu'un objet de curiosité, que nous allons voir en passant,” Rancé, n, 352. Cf. Chau-teaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe (Paris, 1949), iv, 599: “Le temps du désert est revenu; le Christianisme recommence dans la stérilité de la Thébaïde, au milieu d'une idolâtrie redoubtable, l'idolâtrie de l'homme envers soi.”
16 Ironically, as soon as it came out, Chateaubriand's plea for monasteries was seized upon and put to anticlerical use. Less inimical, it would seem, to the Trappists than to the Jesuits and anxious to deal a blow to institutionalized Catholicism as a whole, Edgar Quinet pretended to see a determination to sever all connection between themselves and an immoral church in Rancé and the Trappists' withdrawal into cloistered seclusion. With direct allusions to the Vie de Rancé, he wrote that “Dans ce sépulcre de la Trappe, des hommes ont élevé barrière sur barrière pour se tenir séparés, comme d'un bruit impur et terrestre, même de la voix de leur église. 'Je me suis soumis,' dit Rancé, 'sans avoir de liaison avec personne, parce que j'ai cru qu'il n'y en avait point qui ne fÛt dangereuse.' ” L'Ultramontanisme ou l'église romaine et la société moderne (Paris, 1844), p. 158; Rancé, n, 237–238. See also, in L'Ultramontanisme, pp. 156–157, 160; cf. Rancé, i, 119, 156.