An Inspirational Book

The German Baroness Gertrud von le Fort (1876-1971) is a name little known in Anglophone circles, and this neglect is unfortunate since, as well as being one of the greatest German writers of the twentieth century, she wrote a little book that proved a huge inspiration to playwrights, cineastes and musicians.  Her novella[1] Die Letzte am Schafott (‘The Last One at the Scaffold’)came out in 1931 and was very soon translated into English with the title The Song at the Scaffold by Olga Marx(1933). Le Fort’s book was based on the story of the Community of Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne who were guillotined together in 1794 under the Reign of Terror in which France was engulfed at that time.  Die Letzte am Schafott was to inspire plays, a film (starring Jeanne Moreau, one of the best-known French actresses of the twentieth century), and an opera (Dialogues of the Carmelites by Francis Poulenc) which has become embedded in the standard operatic repertoire.

Gertrud von le Fort was brought up Protestant but converted to Catholicism in Rome in 1926 after studying at the universities of Heidelberg, Marburg and Berlin.  She wrote over twenty books and is particularly remembered in the German-speaking world as a poet.  Although The Song at the Scaffold is based on a historical event, it is a work of fiction. 

The Historical Background

The crucial historical background to the story is summarised in the Introduction to The Song at the Scaffold, which presents a powerful depiction of the disastrous impact of the French Revolution on the Church in the early 1790s:

These were lawless days when the savage intensity of the revolution gathered momentum and overran every facet of French life.  With fanatical zeal which fed on hatred, the leaders of the revolution determined to destroy, in particular, the religious life of France by annihilating the Catholic Church which safeguarded it.  Wave on wave of religious persecution followed on the fall of the monarchy.  The great abbeys of the Church were confiscated, religious communities were disbanded, churches were pillaged and desecrated, Catholic universities closed, and priests, monks, and nuns hunted down as enemies of the State.  Those religious who refused to sign the oath of loyalty which gave the State jurisdiction over the Church were massacred at the guillotine …  Before the revolution had spent itself in wholesale destruction, the Church in France was almost in ruins …[2]

The Revolutionary regime declared all perpetual vows illegal and the Sisters of Compiègne were ordered to leave their convent.   They then dispersed around the town and managed to continue to meet for a while in small groups, but they were denounced and ordered to be brought to Paris.  A brief trial condemned them for ‘activities subversive of the Revolution’ and they were brought together to the guillotine.  There is an added poignancy to their end because they had agreed together to accept martyrdom for the sake of ending the Terror, and it did indeed end ten days after their demise, on July 17, 1794.

The Battle over Human Nature

A key to an understanding of the book can be found in the very first pages.  The opening chapter is presented as a response to a letter from a close friend of the narrator’s.  The viewpoint of this friend deserves careful attention.  We learn that he is ‘a disciple of Rousseau’ and that, for him, the courageous attitude of many women martyred by the revolutionaries is an illustration of ‘the indestructible nobility of human nature even when mankind is tasting most desolate failure’.

To understand this, to understand why it is important in the story, we need to grasp what this Rousseau was all about, and why he was hugely important in the Revolution.  The Genevan novelist and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) became a giant figure in Europe in the decades preceding the Revolution and was idolised by the Revolutionaries.  His novels and his autobiography and his musings about education sold in shedloads all over the Continent.  The importance of this is that he denied the Christian doctrine of original sin and publicised the idea that people are in reality born good – only to be corrupted by the distorted structures of society.  This simple and breathtakingly false principle has inspired hugely damaging revolutionary movements all over the world.  The whole ideal of political revolution is the idea that a complete change in existing socio-political structures is the pathway to a utopian society.

According to Rousseau, existing social conventions and culture are an artificial straitjacket holding back human development and condemning people to mediocrity, and the second paragraph of The Song at the Scaffold is to be read in the light of this.  Whereas the friend of the narrator has interpreted the courage of many women in the teeth of the revolutionary violence as proving the inherent greatness of human nature, the author points out that the evil that drove the revolutionary leaders to their acts of violence is also natural.  ‘.. the executioner of your women martyrs, the beast in man, fear and terror – all these are nature too!’ 

The revolutionaries had an overweening confidence in natural human goodness, but whereas the narrator’s friend remains under the spell of this anti-Christian viewpoint in the teeth of the revolutionary chaos in France, the narrator has learned a different lesson from that chaos.  The lesson from this German Catholic writer accords with traditional Christian teaching.  Human beings are fallen, so that alongside the goodness with which the Creator has endowed them, they suffer from an innate inherited sinfulness, which means that the evil they may do is as natural as the good.  The father of the central figure in the book, Blanche de la Force, had himself absorbed Rousseau’s message and believed that existing social structures and conventions corrupted humans’ original nobility – but  the thinking of people like him was ‘purely theoretical’, for they ‘never dreamed of concrete results’.  The narrator recalls conversing with him before the Revolution when he and his aristocratic friends were ‘rhapsodising about liberty and fraternity’ – without imagining that these ideas could become an actual weapon in the hands of revolutionaries.         

In the view of those revolutionaries (and in this they have been followed by innumerable successors down to modern times), if social structures and conventions are to blame for corrupting human beings, then the thing to do is to destroy the said social structures and conventions and create new and better ones – which was what they were trying to do.

The narrator then sees the Terror as the final convulsion of an era based on delusions, delusions stemming from the rejection of the Christian doctrine of original sin.  Although the author does not mention that doctrine specifically, it forms the basic assumption underlying the narrator’s interpretation of events.  (Of course, Catholic doctrine teaches that human beings were made good in the image of God and have potential for nobility, but it is also realistic about the work of the devil since the Fall.)  Thus, in the third paragraph the narrator tells us that Blanche de la Force was not foregrounded in the story ‘to demonstrate the nobility of mankind but rather to prove the infinite frailty of all our vaunted powers’.  Blanche is fearful and runs away from the guillotine – but the grace in her faith (rather than some natural nobility) ultimately brings her back to identify with the other Sisters.

A Fearful Heroine

Who then is this Blanche de la Force?  She is the (entirely fictional) daughter of an aristocratic family who enters the Carmelite community of Compiègne shortly before the Revolution.  A big feature in the way the author describes her is her fearfulness (ironically, in the light of the meaning of the word Force) – and that is traced back to the circumstances of her birth.  Years earlier, as the time of her birth approached, there had been a big fireworks display to celebrate the wedding of the young King Louis XVI.  Unfortunately, the store housing the fireworks caught fire and there were massive explosions that caused panic in the crowds.  The carriage of her pregnant mother became caught up in the mob, and the shock and panic of the experience caused her to give birth to Blanche prematurely.  The whole event was later seen by some to have been a sad omen of the chaos that engulfed France after 1789.  Blanche then was born into fear, and when she chooses to enter Carmel at sixteen, it is as much in quest of a refuge as a genuine religious call.  The Novice Mistress, Marie of the Incarnation, senses this and therefore has serious reservations about her suitability for a life in Carmel, but matters are precipitated by external political developments.  Reacting to hostile measures being taken by the State against Religious Orders and foreseeing the worst, the Carmelite Provincial recommends that the veil be given to all postulants without delay.  In the face of the political situation, Blanche’s fears however grow uncontrollably and she runs away. 

It is this fearfulness of Blanche, then, that is at the centre of The Song at the Scaffold.  The Sisters naturally assume – as who wouldn’t? – that this capitulation to fear is a sign of her inability to follow the religious life, but she herself sees it very differently: for her it represents self-abandonment to the divine will.  She has recognised her own fear on the face of Christ in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane and she feels that her vocation is to live with Christ the mystery of his dereliction.  She is convinced that her fear is supernatural in origin and she strives to base her religious life on union with the suffering Christ in the Garden, the Christ who asked that his cup be taken away.  The Prioress Lidoine understands her and respects what is in her – Was it in your plan, O my Jesus, thinks the Prioress, to choose that at the moment when others prepared for death with joy, she [Blanche] would stay in your anguish of death, at your side?  Was that the devotion you still lacked …? 

Eventually Blanche finds herself in the crowd at the guillotine and at that point she is given the grace to identify publicly with the Sisters, precipitating her own death.  Grace has taken hold of a being who is no longer anything more than a pure capacity to suffer, so that the power and the glory of God may be confirmed in the most absolute and dazzling way.  In other words, there is a way of looking at Blanche’s fear in a positive light.  It is her very fear that makes her a willing tool in the hands of God, who uses the weak to defeat the strong in this world.

A Prideful Heroine

By contrast, Marie of the Incarnation manifests a huge courage, but meanwhile feels a ‘strange oppression’, for fear that she might be prevented from accomplishing her generous sacrifice according to her own will – so there is a concealed pride in Marie’s desire to make the sacrifice she desires.  The narrator tells us that she was afraid not of sacrifice but ‘of hindrance to her own sacrifice’.

Marie of the Incarnation had been miraculously healed in her youth on the grave of Blessed Barbe Acarie, the seventeenth-century apostle of Carmel who played a leading part in the establishment of the Teresian Reform in France.  From that time on, Marie had a burning desire to expiate the sins of the Court in the cloister, for she was of aristocratic birth.  To her (by contrast with Blanche), the convent was a place of combat rather than a refuge.  She had a proud and ardent character and displayed a natural heroism.  She was driven by a sense of pride in her noble birth and a conviction of the mystical mission of her Order but was therefore tempted to presumptuousness. 

Through a Providential accident, however, Marie was not present in the convent at the crucial time, with the result that she escaped the guillotine.[3] Marie de l’Incarnation, who had been the very soul of sacrifice, was the only one who had escaped, who had been excluded from the sacrifice.  However, she had fought against escaping, for she was not willing to ‘sacrifice the sacrifice’, to submit entirely to God’s will.  When she learned of the imprisonment of her sisters, Marie of the Incarnation planned to join them and present herself too before the Revolutionary Tribunal, but the priest did not allow her to do so.  She was responsible for her sisters’ deaths because it was her impetuousness which brought it about, so now she had to give it up for herself.  The reference to impetuousness here is a reminder that it was actually Marie of the Incarnation who had proposed to the Sisters that they make an offering of their lives for the sake of stemming the Terror, a proposal approved by the Sisters. 

As soon as the vow was pronounced, Blanche took off.  The Prioress Lidoine interpreted this charitably as a wish to identify with Our Lord in his anguish. Was it thy will, O Jesus, to choose the timid temperament of this poor child, so that while others are preparing to exult in the dying of Thy death, Thou hast communicated to her Thy mortal fear?

Fear Can be Positive

There are two ways of describing Blanche’s flight then.  First, a failure of nerve.  But second, she wanted to share the mortal fear of the Saviour and when her strength broke, she ran into the very heart of fear itself.

It is difficult for us to associate with the author’s ‘cult of fear’ but the narrator observes that there should be a healthy fear in society because such events as the Terror do happen.  The prevalent optimism of pre-Revolutionary times about ‘the natural nobility’ of human nature, as Rousseau had portrayed it, had bred complacency about the human capacity for evil. Chaos is nature too… the executioners of your woman martyrs, the beast in man, fear and terror – all these are nature too! … fear is a great emotion.  Not one of us was sufficiently afraid!  Society should be afraid.  A State should know fear.  Governments should tremble.  To tremble is to be strong.  These things I am writing of have taken place and may reoccur at any moment![4]

The fearful one who has seemingly rejected martyrdom chooses in the end to join with the martyrs at the scaffold.  As the last of the sixteen mounts the steps to the scaffold, Blanche takes up the singing of the martyrs as they mount the steps to the guillotine from her position in the crowd, who then turn on her and kill her.  The strong one [Marie of the Incarnation] is denied heroism while the weak one achieves it.

In commending a healthy kind of fearfulness in society, the narrator’s message is that a naïve and exaggerated belief in the essential nobility of humans leads to complacency, the kind of complacency that made the French elite oblivious to the effect of their beliefs.  An overweening optimism about human nature, convinced that humans can surely create a utopia – provided that the goodness of humans currently corralled by vicious social structures is channelled into new virtuous structures – has led only to chaos.  The chaos was made possible by the blind complacency of the French elite.  A more realistic acceptance of the Christian doctrine of original sin would have made them much more fearful in a good way.

As a comment on this, I recall a legendary quotation which reminds us that ‘the price of liberty is eternal vigilance’.  When the narrator speaks of the value of a healthy fear, we might perhaps interpret that in terms of idea of the need for vigilance.  Complacency about human nature sees no need for vigilance, but realism about human nature knows that need only too well.

Conclusion

Writing her novella in Germany in 1931, Gertrud von le Fort was well aware of the rising danger of Hitler and his Party, and one can sense her concern at the complacency of those around her.  They lacked a perfectly healthy fear of what might happen to Germany under his leadership.

On the other hand, the book reminds us that God uses for his purposes not just the heroic souls like Marie of the Incarnation but flawed and fragile ones like Blanche.  We have only to think of St Peter, the Prince of the Apostles who failed so miserably at the hour of testing and denied Jesus; or St Paul, in his persona of Saul persecutor of the Christians.  The glory of God is shown, above all, when he works through our weakness and fragility to attain his ends.  Think Bernadette, Thérèse, the children of Fatima, think Jonah.  God chose the foolish and weak things of the world to shame the wise and strong (1 Cor 1:27).

The last two paragraphs of le Fort’s novella give an admirable summary of the theme.  She tells us that any reader anticipating a story about a heroic victory has been presented instead in her book with ‘a miracle in one so weak’.  For the human element is not enough … the purely human is not enough.  It is not even enough to offer as a sacrifice.  The inference is that divine grace is essential. In a lecture she gave in 1934, le Fort said that she found consolation, when she pondered the story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, in the thought that Christian martyrdom comes not from personal strength, not from heroism, but from the grace of God at work.

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[1] A novella is a work of fiction that falls between a short story and a novel in length.

[2] Gertrud von le Fort, The Song at the Scaffold, tr. Olga Marx, New York: Image Books, 1961 [1933], i.

[3] Marie of the Incarnation was actually a real historical character, one of the Community who survived the Revolution and later wrote an account of the Sisters’ martyrdom.

[4] Gertrud von le Fort. The Song at the Scaffold. Translated from the German by Olga Marx (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), pp. 14 and 79.