The unexpected conversion of an executioner during the Terror

Summary:

The Mouffetard district of Paris was in dire straits in the 1830s. Unemployment was rife, as was revolutionary unrest. The July Revolution in 1830, the riots in the spring of 1832 - immortalised by Hugo in Les Misérables - and the cholera epidemic that swept through the capital from Shrove Tuesday 1832 onwards, before spreading throughout France, claimed thousands of victims. So many misfortunes added to the bitter resentment of the population against everything that represented order. The Church was considered to be part of the 'bourgeois order', and this belief fostered a tenacious hatred of the Catholic faith. However, most of the inhabitants of the district survived thanks to the help provided by these same Catholics whom they insulted. One woman had taken charge of these charitable works, without ever sorting out the needs: "I am a Daughter of Charity and I come to the aid of the unfortunate wherever I meet them. I try to do them good without ever judging them," she said, and it was true.

Born in Confort, in the diocese of Belley, on 9 September 1785, Jeanne Marie Rendu grew up in the midst of the Terror, and took the name Sister Rosalie when she entered the Daughters of Charity of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul at the age of sixteen. She was now in her fifties and had never left the charity office, where she was assigned in 1800, gradually extending her activities to all the misery brought to her attention.

Sister Rosalie is the perfect example of what Saint Vincent de Paul wanted for his Daughters of Charity: "a good country girl", honest and kind, no penchant for mystical reveries, capable of doing exhausting and repulsive work without complaint, serving God by serving "our lords the poor". An efficient organiser, with a courage that never failed her when it came to doing good, fearless, she did what she had to do, with hard work and without hoping for miracles, let alone performing miracles.

In the 1830s, Sister Rosalie Rendu looked after, among others, an old man whose insults and malice had already discouraged many people of good will. This man was a former sans-culotte who, in 1794, had taken part in the crimes committed in Nantes by the deputy Carrier, who was on a mission in the west of France. One of his innovations was to speed up the massacre of prisoners - firing squads and the guillotine went too slowly for his liking to empty the overcrowded prisons - by drowning dozens of unfortunate people every night, crammed into the holds of old barges that were sunk in the middle of the river. To add spice to the affair, the executioners staged "republican marriages" consisting of tying up the tortured, naked, two by two, a man and a woman, preferably a teenager and an old woman, a young girl and an old man, a priest and a nun. These fantasies sent Carrier and his accomplices to the scaffold at the end of 1794, because they damaged the reputation of the Revolution.

As a mere accomplice, the old man was able to return to Paris and be forgotten, but he never repented of the "deeds" of his youth, which explains the isolation in which he lived and from which only the charity of Sister Rosalie could save him.

In fact, in the first half of the 19th century, there were still many people who had experienced the horrors of the French Revolution, and as long as they were alive, no one idealised those terrible years. Quite the contrary! For the majority, who remembered the massacres and crimes committed, this time inspired deep horror. The people who were identified as having committed these crimes - whether they bragged about it or not, now that they had lost power and, with age, all capacity to cause harm - were ostracised by their neighbours, who left them to their solitude, their misery and perhaps their remorse. Only Catholics, in the name of forgiveness of trespasses, agree to help them as they would any other needy person.

As a worthy Daughter of Charity, Sister Rosalie took part in the movement to popularise the miraculous medal revealed to Sister Catherine Labouré by Our Lady in November 1830. Struck at the request of the Archbishop of Paris, Mons. de Quelen, in the context of the cholera epidemic of 1832, but without revealing the identity of the visionary or the circumstances of the apparitions, the medal was widely distributed and met with dazzling success due to the cures, protection and last-minute conversions it brought about. By giving it to her obstinate old man, Rosalie put the case in better hands than her own. And a miracle of conversion happened.

Our Lady's intervention was obvious, because the medal awakened a memory in the old man that he had bottled up for more than forty years and of which he had never spoken to anyone, but in which Marian devotion played a big role. He suddenly recalled a morning in the winter of 1794, in Nantes, where he had come to watch the passage of the cart taking the condemned prisoners to the guillotine. The condemned men were prisoners from the Vendée who, on their way to death, had sung Saint Louis de Montfort's canticle to Our Lady of the Good Death, which is well known in the west of France: "I trust in your help, O Virgin! Serve as my defence, take care of my days, and when my last hour comes to determine my fate, allow me to die the most holy death." Strangely enough, while he had come to insult these dying men and mock them, amidst the shouts of the crowd, the sans-culotte heard this song, so that the melody, as well as each word, imprinted itself on his memory and remained there. For years, without paying attention or fully understanding what it said, he sang it over and over again, allowing the Virgin of Good Death to work on his soul.

For months, he had rebuffed this "good sister", a type he detested. But one morning, because he had nothing else to offer this helpful woman, he said to her: "Here, Sister, I'll sing you a song I've known for a long time" and, instead of the revolutionary refrain or the cabaret song Sister Rosalie was expecting, he sang the hymn he had heard before, which she listened to until the end before exclaiming: "How beautiful it is! Where did you learn it?" And he told her about that sad morning, those people who were about to die and were singing, and that little nagging music that has haunted him ever since...

Suddenly, he understood what he had been singing about, and the miracle that had been performed on his behalf. In tears, he asked to return to Catholicism. He died shortly afterwards, devoutly, in the arms of Sister Rosalie, singing "his song" to the end.

Going further:

Sister Rosalie Rendu: A Daughter of Charity on Fire with Love for the Poor by D.C. Sister Louise Sulllivan, Vincentian Studies Institute, 2006

More information:

• A Heart on Fire... Apostolic Reflection with Sister Rosalie Rendu by Joan Gibson and Kieran Kneaves, National Council of the United States, Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Inc; First Edition (January 1, 2013)