by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
We think of France as being more liberated culturally and sexually than the US. And perhaps it is, today. But in the 1960s, post-war/pre-Mai ’68 France was still in the grip of the Catholic Church and right-wing Gaullist politicians.
In 1965, France banned the showing of Jacques Rivette’s film of Denis Diderot’s 1792 novel, La Religieuse (The Nun). Not only did they ban the film, they also banned the radio and television press from reporting that they had banned the film.
Although Voltaire and Rousseau grabbed the headlines as philosophers of the Revolution, it was Diderot the Encyclopedist whose “seditious” words put him under constant surveillance, led to the confiscation of his manuscripts and eventually landed him in the dungeons of the king’s prison at Vincennes, where the Marquis de Sade was later locked in a dark cell for seven years. (The last straw for the enforcers of imperial obedience was his heretical “Letter on the Blind,” which not only advocated reason over religious superstition but advanced a theory of natural selection 100 years before Darwin.)
Diderot’s novel, which wasn’t published until a decade after his death, was a scathing assault on the corrupt and incestuous ties between the Church and the Ancient Regime. Rivette’s film, which is remarkably faithful to the novel, targeted the modern reincarnation of that repressive alliance.
Simone is the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic family in financial ruin. Her severe mother tells her she is a daily reminder of her sin, a child who will never have the status to be married. Against her will, she is placed in a convent. The convent is a prison, a sanctified Bastille, where the nuns are kept in cells, the windows are barred and all interactions with the secular world take place behind curtains or grill-like barriers.
Every act of rebellion is punished with increasing severity: she was placed in isolation, deprived of food and books, whipped and forced to kneel or prostrate herself (stress positions) on stone floors for hours. The basic techniques of torture haven’t changed all that much across the centuries.
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