Out of the Cloister and into the World: Catholic Nuns in the Aftermath of the Revolution

Abstract

The French Revolution destroyed women’s vowed religious life by closing convents and forcing nuns into civilian life. Curtis shows, however, how it created the conditions for a stunning nineteenth-century revival by empowering women at a grassroots level to establish new active orders dedicated to good works and evangelization. She argues that the expansion of French Catholicism inside and outside of France would not have been possible without the transformations in women’s religious life initiated by the Revolution, but having rather different outcomes than revolutionaries intended. By destroying an old system with limited energy and little potential for expansion and by creating an existential threat to the church itself, the Revolution inspired and empowered Catholic women to recreate religious life on their own terms to new, global, ends.