La Religieuse (GF) (French Edition)

The Marquis pitied Marguerite and unsuccessfully tried to use his political influence to liberate her. After losing the case in , Marguerite was forced to remain in the convents for the rest of her life. Diderot used Marguerite Delamarre as a prototype for Suzanne, thinking Croismare would be persuaded to return to Paris in order to save Suzanne from her misery in the convent. Eventually, this practical joke turned into a passionate project for Diderot; one where he self-identifies as a woman through his writing to show the corruption and exploitations of Catholic convents.

When Diderot publicly admitted his role in the ruse, the Marquis is said to have laughed at the revelation, unsurprisingly since he had behaved with exemplary compassion and generosity in his willingness to help the imaginary Suzanne. Based in the Eighteenth century, Suzanne Simonin is an intelligent and sensitive sixteen-year-old French girl who is forced against her will into a Catholic convent by her parents.

However, while in the convent, it is revealed to Suzanne that she is actually there because she is an illegitimate child as her mother committed adultery with another man.

By sending Suzanne to the convent, her mother thought she could make amends for her sins by using her daughter as a sacrificial offering for a new salvation. At the convent, Suzanne suffers humiliation, harassment and violence because she refuses to make the vows of the religious community. Suzanne agrees to enter into the sisterhood; however, she is placed in isolation for six months for her reluctance to take her vows.

Sister de Moni was succeeded by Sister Sainte-Christine, who does not share the same empathy for Suzanne that her predecessor had. In fact, the new Mother Superior blames Suzanne for the death of Sister de Moni and for the unrest the convent faces under the new leadership. Suzanne is physically and mentally harassed by Sister Sainte-Christine, almost to the point of death.

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Suzanne contacts her lawyer, Monsieur Manouri, who attempts to legally free her from her vows. She loses the legal battle; however, Monsieur Manouri manages to transfer Suzanne to another convent, Sainte-Eutrope, liberating her from Sister Sainte-Christine's persecution. At the Sainte-Eutrope convent, the Mother Superior is revealed to be a lesbian and she grows affectionate towards Suzanne. The Mother Superior attempts to seduce Suzanne, but her innocence and chaste eventually drives the Mother Superior into insanity, leading to her death.

Suzanne escapes the Sainte-Eutrope convent using the help of a priest. Following her liberating, she lives in fear of being captured and taken back to the convent as she waits for the help of Marquis de Croismare. Diderot was a well-known atheist; however, he did not use the novel as an outlet to condemn Christianity, but to show the corruption of the Catholic Church's institutions. The Church fosters a hierarchical society, prevalent in the power dynamic between the Mother Superior and the girls in the convent.

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Girls are forced against their will to take their vows and endure the intolerable live of the convent. Their subjection to the convent dehumanizes them and represses their sexuality. Improbable as it may now seem, Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse [ The Nun ] -- an all but forgotten work 1 by a director who has neither sought nor attained any great measure of international celebrity 1b -- was once the most notorious film in France.

Le Monde actually ran a special daily feature, l'Affaire de La Religieuse , to which readers would regularly turn for the latest developments. Filmmakers, writers, religious leaders, and politicians clubbed together for protests and counter-protests; there were petitions, declarations, denunciations, public meetings, and angry open letters on all sides, though no broadcasts -- the director of French television and radio had strictly forbidden any mention of the affaire on his airwaves.

The arguments dragged on for months, until finally, on May 30, , the ban was lifted and the adult public was allowed to see Rivette's film, distributed under the title Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot. Naturally, the box office was healthy.

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Lawrence after the triumph of Penguin Books in the Chatterley trial in England a few years earlier, Denis Diderot had suddenly and unexpectedly become a best-selling author. New editions of La Religieuse , some of them so hastily printed that they had barely been proofread, were selling out almost as quickly as the bookshops could display them. The gloomy prediction of the Benedictine Superior Marie-Yvonne had come true: Ken Russell's lurid vision of erotic frenzies within convent walls, The Devils , was still four years away.

La Religieuse proved to be -- as a contemporary British reviewer justly put it -- "a quiet, classically austere work. His next film, L'amour fou [ Mad Love ] was not much shown outside France, and the number of people who have sat through the full twelve and a half hours of its successor Out One: Noli Me Tangere can probably still be measured in the dozens. Nor is it solely among the ranks of the unconverted that Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot has fallen into oblivion: Today, the most obvious trace left by the whole affaire is the cover of the GF-Flammarion paperback edition of Diderot's novel, which continues to feature a black-and-white shot of Anna Karina in the role of Suzanne.

There are a number of good reasons for regretting this state of collective amnesia. Despite the limited circulation of his films outside France, Rivette has been seriously proposed, by those critics who have addressed his work with sympathy, as one of the cinema's greatest living talents, 5 and though he has expressed his own dissatisfactions with La Religieuse , Rivette evidently does not subscribe to the orthodoxy that the feature has little connection with his other work: La Religieuse may appear to be an uncharacteristic work, but it isn't one for me.

Toutes proportions gardee s ["all things in due proportion"; that is, in a spirit of appropriate humility], it was my idea to make a film in the spirit of Mizoguchi. There was an attempt to make a film with extended takes or even one-shot sequences, with a flexible camera and rather stylized performances. Another sound reason for reconsidering La Religieuse is that it is a work of such manifest seriousness, not to say earnestness, as well as "simply the most telling portrayal of eighteenth-century society ever to appear in French cinema," in the words of a contemporary journalist.

For many of the pious objectors to La Religieuse , Rivette's offense was not so much in launching his personal "noxious" attack on the honor of French nunhood as in restoring currency to a still more noxious text; he was not charged with distorting a classic French author who, by piquant coincidence, was the subject for that year's concours general [general certificate of education] examination in the nation's lycees , but with perpetuating that author's outrage to decent Christian feeling in a peculiarly dangerous manner.

It was a remarkable achievement: Plainly, for all that there have been several thoughtful and searching accounts of the film, 9 La Religieuse deserves more detailed critical attention than it has so far received. Rather than take on that worthwhile task myself, however, I'd like instead to examine here a few of the pertinent facts in the case of La Religieuse , the book and the film, suspecting that there are aspects of its tangled history which are of greater moment than might be immediately apparent.

In the three or four decades following its publication, Diderot's novel became so well known in France that by , when Baudelaire composed his early verses "Epitre a Sainte-Beuve" ["Epistle to Sainte-Beuve"], the poet could take it for granted that "everyone" would be aware of what would now be called its "adult" content: L'oeil plus noir et plus bleu que La Religieuse Dont chacun sait l'histoire obscene et douloureuse. Yet the novel's reputation for salacious detail was in many ways ill deserved.

Rather than being one of those gleeful exercises in pornography with which eminent French men of letters, from Beroalde de Verville to Georges Bataille, have titillated or shocked their readers, La Religieuse was mischief of a more innocent order. The fiction which culminated in a cinematic scandal had began two centuries earlier with an entirely good-natured hoax.

A few years earlier, in , a nun named Marguerite Delamarre had begun proceedings to have her vows anulled, but was eventually turned down by the ecclesiastical court of Paris. She protested, and went to the higher authority of the appeals court of the Parlement de Paris. Despite the Marquis de Croismare's attempts at influencing the outcome, in her second plea was also refused. She was forced to remain a nun for another three decades, until convents were dissolved during the Revolution. Following the failure of his efforts, the marquis retired to his estate near Caen.

He was sadly missed by Diderot and company, who therefore dreamed up a plot to bring him back. Early in , they set about composing a series of pleading letters which purported to come from a young nun who had fled her convent and was now living in hiding in Versailles, at the home of a friend of the pranksters, Madame Moureau-Madin. The compassionate marquis declared himself deeply moved by the plight of "Suzanne Simonin," as the letters were signed, and offered her a position in his household.

This was not precisely the outcome the hoaxers had looked for, and Diderot had to stall by inventing all sorts of reasons why Suzanne was incapable of travelling to Caen. These worked for a while, but the joke was clearly getting out of hand, so Diderot hardened his heart, "killed" Suzanne, and on May 10 sent a letter, ostensibly from Mme Madin, detailing the agonies of the young refugee's passage from this world to the next. It was not until , when Croismare came back to Paris and tried to discuss the whole sad business with a baffled Mme Madin, that the deception came to light.

This collaborative spoof had unforeseen consequences for the history of literature, for the "dead" Suzanne refused to lie down quietly. Diderot, intrigued by the implications of the tragic yarn he had spun and then cut short, spent the months after May working on a longer account of Suzanne's life. He kept the manuscript more or less private until , when his co-conspirator Friedrich Grimm published a memoir of what they had done in the pages of the Correspondance litteraire , together with the texts of the letters and a hint that further "revelations" about Suzanne might be forthcoming.

It took another ten years before those details were made public: This was the only version of La Religieuse circulated in Diderot's lifetime -- a discreet publication, since the Correspondance was read by only a small circle of subscribers. Sixteen further years passed before the first proper edition was available to a wider public.

The same revolutionary Directory which finally released the unfortunate Marguerite Delamarre from her pious incarceration also granted liberty of the press to Suzanne Simonin. But by that time, Diderot had been dead for a dozen years. The novel bore many marks of its improvised origins. Its very first sentence -- "The Marquis de Croismare's reply, if he does reply, will serve as the opening lines of this tale" 11 -- must always be mildly puzzling to readers unaware of the Encyclopaedist's game with the soft-hearted aristocrat.

And though Diderot played freely with his historical sources, the bones of the real-life case of Marguerite Delamarre are frequently to be discerned beneath the fictional flesh he put upon them. Since Baudelaire's assumption that "everyone" knows the Nun's story now seems somewhat old-fashioned, a brief summary is in order here.

Written almost entirely in the first person singular, La Religieuse tells the story of Suzanne Simonin, one of three daughters of an advocate who married late in life.

The Nun by Denis Diderot

Though, by her own modest admission, both more beautiful and more gifted than her conceited siblings, she was always treated coolly by her parents. As the three girls reach nubile age, the parents grow alarmed that potential suitors always gravitate towards the charms of Suzanne, so they pack her off to a convent until her sisters are safely wed.

Suzanne is reasonably contented with her lot, expecting an early release, but is shocked to find that her parents, having spent a fortune in dowries, now expect her to take orders and remain a nun for life. She resists, but is eventually browbeaten into joining the novitiate. From this point on, La Religieuse is essentially the tale of Suzanne's rebellions, persecutions, and despairs. Suzanne completes her novitiate, but as a result of her rebelliousness is transferred to the convent at Longchamp. At first, life here is not so bad: But her protector soon dies, and is succeeded by the fanatical Sister Sainte-Christine, who, seeking to crush Suzanne's spirit, enforces a brutal regime of abuse.

Though strongly tempted by suicide, Suzanne continues to fight for her freedom and eventually wins a transfer to the liberal convent of Saint -Eutrope. For alert readers, those coy asterisks tell their own tale. The hand she had rested on my knee wandered all over my clothing from my feet to my girdle, pressing here and there, and she gasped as she urged me in a strange, low voice to redouble my caresses, which I did. Eventually a moment came, whether of pleasure or of pain I cannot say, when she went as pale as death, closed her eyes, and her whole body tautened violently, her lips were first pressed together and moistened with a sort of foam, then they parted and she seemed to expire with a deep sigh.

I jumped up, thinking she had fainted, and was about to go and call for help. Sexual exploitation is no joke, but a sexually naive narrator can be. Rivette's film, recounting this event in the conventional third-person form of film narrative, shreds it of nearly all of its comic tone. Suzanne is compliant when her confessor, Father Lemoine, urges her to shun Madame The Mother Superior grows sad, then morbid, then frenzied.

The other nuns, blaming Suzanne for the demise of their beloved leader, organize a fresh campaign of persecution. A new confessor, Dom Morel, comes to investigate the case, and thanks to his investigations, our less than perspicacious heroine finally realizes her Superior's true motives. The ten or so remaining pages of Suzanne's confessions grow increasingly fragmentary: Suzanne flees the convent one night with the help of a young Benedictine, who promptly tries to rape her.

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She is taken to a brothel and held there for two weeks before making a second escape, suffers various additional humiliations and then manages to secure a menial job in a laundry. The novel ends with a final appeal to the marquis, hinting at the possibility of suicide if she is forced back into the convent.

Such is the principal content of Diderot's novel, and, since the director remained uncommonly faithful to his source, such is the plot of Rivette's film. Rivette makes just one substantial change. His film concludes with Suzanne in a brothel, powdered and primped and clearly more desperate than ever.

Where the action of Diderot's novel is left hanging, Rivette has Suzanne fall -- she jumps from an upper-storey window and is last seen lying dead, spread out on paving stones in an attitude which echoes that of a penitent before the altar. It was as early as that Rivette first took Jean Gruault's scenario to the board responsible for issuing production visas. Despite being rewritten and trimmed of its offending material, the script was turned down three times in all, and eventually passed in a bowdlerized version on the understanding that it would also be retitled as Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot and furnished, by the producer Georges de Beauregard, with a disclaimer pointing out that it was a work of fiction and not a comment on modern-day convent life.

These laborious negotiations took the better part of three years, and it was not until September that Rivette was at last able to begin shooting. In the meantime, religious groups had been alerted. Peyrefitte, demanding his intervention "in the name of the , nuns of France. Before long, Bourges's office was being flooded with angry petitions -- so many that he phoned the local archbishop to request that a team of nuns be despatched to help him sort the mail. What had happened was that children in Catholic schools were being required to write down dictated letters of complaint, take them home to be signed by their parents, and post them to the Ministry.

One of these petitions, drawn up by the APEL Association des parents des ecoles libres ["Parents' association of free schools"] , declared: This film, which defames and travesties the life of religious orders, injures -the dignity of woman; -the honour of nuns; -wounds the moral sense; -draws a distorted picture of nuns, former educators of our mothers and our wives; most often at present still the educators of our children. Surprisingly, perhaps, the twenty-three members of the Censorship Board, having viewed Rivette's completed film, declared on March 22, that it was quite suitable for public exhibition.

Bourges was not happy. A week later, on March 29, he "invited" the members of the board to view the film again, and reconsider their verdict. This time, one of the Censors brought along a Mother Superior, who -- it is pleasant to record -- thought that the film was perfectly realistic and nothing to be upset about: Unfortunately, Bourges had also sent along his own expert -- Maurice Grimaud, the director of the Surete Nationale, who warned the board of the riots which would surely break out if La Religieuse were to be distributed. Votes were cast and, once again, the Censors passed La Religieuse by a large majority.

They did, however, restrict the film to viewers over the age of eighteen, and recommended that it should not be exported to any part of Africa or to Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Lebanon, Syria or Madagascar -- that is, to countries in which there were French missions, where the locals might not fully appreciate that the film was set in the bad old pre-Revolutionary days, and where they might form a false impression of modern nuns, "whose cultural activities participate in the world-wide radiance of France. Le Monde reported the wording of the Minister's objections: This decision is motivated by the fact that this film, because of the behavior of some characters, as of certain situations, and similarly because of the audience and the range of a commercially distributed film, is of a nature to affront gravely the feelings and the consciences of a large part of the population.

Intellectuals, filmmakers, writers and even sympathetic priests hastened to the defense. The , members of the federation of cine-clubs volunteered for any form of protest Rivette's group saw fit; Rivette and his fellow film director Claude Chabrol went on a "Free the Nun" tour of French campuses "Censors belong in convents," Chabrol told their supporters ; Beauregard began a legal action against Bourges, accusing him of "misappropriation of power," and began a petition of his own, aiming for the symbolic total of 1, signatures; Paris Presse leaked a rumor that the members of the Censorship Board were planning to resign as a body, believing that Bourges had made them look like "clowns"; and the editorial columns fired salvo after salvo.

The Abbe Lenfantin wrote to Cahiers du Cinema with "tears in my eyes," and rose to a pitch of truly splendid disgust: Oh, how I should like to have M. Bourges in the secrecy of the confessional! I will tell him, that ignoble servant of a totalitarian State, some home truths. That such men, such fools that one is flabbergasted, exist still and govern us!

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I say out loud to M. Bourges and to his masters that they will remain in the memory of history on the same grounds as the judges of Flaubert and of Baudelaire -- as those powerless curs who cling with all their teeth to the skirts of Beauty! Jean-Luc Godard composed and published two blazing open letters: But God in heaven, I did not really think I should have to do so for your brother, Diderot, a journalist and a writer like you, and his Religieuse , my sister, that is to say, a French citizen who prays simply to our Father to protect his independence.

For their part, the opponents of La Religieuse were equally intemperate. In Le Figaro Litteraire , Francois Mauriac complained that "It would never occur to those who chose to film Diderot's poisoned book to make a film against the Jews -- whereas against the Catholics, anything goes! Eventually, Bourges was himself succeeded as Minister of Information by a M.