Despotic Habits: The Critique of Power and Its Abuses in an Eighteenth-Century Convent

Abstract

In 1764, the Parlement of Paris heard a sensational case in which several nuns from the Abbey of Saint-Pierre-de-Beaumont near Clermont-Ferrand accused their abbess of libertine behavior and abusive conduct. Significantly, this trial coincided with the intensification of attacks on ecclesiastical institutions. This article argues that the lawyers defending the nuns drew from contemporary notions of feminine vice and virtue as means of exposing the larger dangers of clerical despotism. On the one hand, the memoires judiciaires attacking the abbess configured feminine power as self-serving, arbitrary, and corrosive, threatening social order and the masculine world of law. On the other hand, the memoires portrayed the nuns both as passive victims and as active citizens seeking to preserve their community. The nun’s appeals to the lawyers reinforced the latter’s masculine identity. Thus, while revealing the fusion of eighteenth-century anxieties about gender and clerical power, the Beaumont affair also suggests a complex negotiation between female agency and male subjectivity in the public sphere.