Convents and slaves

Across from the camp in a line of buildings, strikingly beautiful, pale pink in the sunlight, the style that of eighteen century Paris. In those buildings the slavers kept their African wives, mistresses or sequestered young slave girls from the virgins of some slave catch. Here, now and again, there would be sumptuous riotous weddings that sealed the alliance between some chief and some slave trader. The weddings became famous even in the waste of France’s Ancien R?gime. The only thing that interrupted the luxury was the stench of the slave camp wafted across by changing winds. The buildings somehow emphasised the horror of the trade of flesh.

I had missed my boat back. With a few hours to spare, I walked around to the Gor?e at the back of the buildings. There — no one had mentioned it to me — was a small church. Inside a statue dominated the church. It was that of Anne Marie Javouhey.

The signares

Between April 20 and May 22, 1822, Anne Marie Javouhey wrote in a letter from Gor?e “(we) have opened a school for 62 young ‘signares,’ all nearly white. Many are between 20 and 25 years, none knows how to read or write, all are anxious to learn...” They would have been the children of the slave traders and their African ‘partners,’ as I suppose you would call it today. They were not taken to Europe. They were left on Gor?e. There is no explanation in the Anne Marie Javouhey letters that I have seen of the slave camp at Gor?e. And yet its history could not have failed to evoke some feelings in Mother Anne Marie Javouhey.

As early as May 21, 1818, only eleven years since the Congregation of St Joseph of Cluny had been founded, Mother Anne Marie Javouhey wrote from Brest in France to Sister Marie Joseph Varin, then in the first of the Cluny overseas missions: Bourbon (today’s Reunion):

“I must leave in two months to lead the Sisters to Senegal and Gor?e. It is a little journey of fifteen to twenty days... We will establish a hospital and a boarding school...they say that it is a bad country. That is why I should go and see for myself....”

What was the meaning of bad? She had been asked to go to Senegal by France’s Ministry of the Marines but it was her sister, Mother Rosalie who left for Senegal in February 1819. Finance was in large part provided by the French Government 200 francs for each Sister working in the Colonies, the Congregation paying for passages out and for home leave at the time fixed for every five years. When in early 1822 Mother Anne Marie did leave for Senegal and Gor?e, the journey took seasick 26 days.

Florence

In Senegal, Mother Rosalie had bought a little slave girl, Florence. Mother Anne Marie Javouhey educated her, had her taught music, went nowhere without her. Florence died in 1831 at Limoux in France at the age of 17. The story is not surprising. We know from the British material that there were those who educated and then freed their slaves.

On January 28, 1823, Mother Anne Marie wrote to her sister Rosalie, “There are more than 500 young girls captured at Sierra Leone and twice as many boys. Of this number they permitted us to choose fifty of between eight and ten years of age...for the hospital at Gor?e.” She must have known of the slave trade. There is no mention of it. I look through her letters for a hint of anti-African racism. There is none.

In a letter of September 1822 she wrote from St Louis in Senegal: “Their life is much like that of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. They look after their herds and sleep on simple carpets under their tents. Their encampments, their dress, their manner of praying, excite my curiosity and I can say almost humiliate me...”

Given this we expect some explosion against the Atlantic slave trade. None. What has happened?

Robespierre and NapoleonBy 1822 the grand era of France as a slave-trading nation was over. Gor?e, the main French slave- trading port, was in decline — only a few boatloads left in a year. The trade had been dealt a severe blow by no other than Robespierre. He, the man of the Terror who unleashed the guillotine massacres of the Revolution and who was the last person of the Revolution that the Terror would send to the guillotine, this Robespierre had banned slavery in France and in its colonies. This act integrated the Haitian revolt into Republican history. This emancipation was short lived.

A year or so ago there was one of the periodic mini-explosions in Martinique. It blew or chopped off part of the statue of Josephine. She was Napoleon’s wife and the daughter of a Martinique slave owner. The ‘whiff of grape shot’ by which Napoleon staged his coup d’?tat ending the French Revolution and laying the ground for the end of the Republican conflict between Catholic Church and State, also ended the brief six years of slave emancipation.

The Hand of Providence

Napoleon re-introduced slavery. He dispatched his troops to Haiti to retake the island and to reverse the emancipation of its slaves. It would be his first defeat. None of this is there in what we know of the history of Anne Marie Javouhey. Nothing is there in the published letters. There is nothing of Napoleon’s attempt to have the Pope enter his ‘continental’ political group directed against a competing Britain. Nothing about the imprisonment of the Pope first in Italy and then at Fontainebleu in France. Not a word that the same Pope had agreed to come to France for the coronation of Napoleon, as Napoleon mounted the pressure on him, would excommunicate the French Emperor. Rather Napoleon remains as the hand of Providence. And so it must have seemed to a French country girl.

Napoleon’s coup d’?tat happened on November 10, 1799. It was Anne Marie Javouhey’s twentieth birthday. In 1800 Pius VII was elected Pope. By July 10, 1801 Pius VII had signed a Concordat with Napoleon re-establishing relationships with what has been called “the eldest daughter of the Church,” ie, France, and accepting the broad principles of Repub-licanism. The importance of the Concordat, went beyond France to Republicans in Ireland, in the USA and in the beginnings of democratic movements in Europe.

Anne Marie Javouhey had had an audience with the Pope as he passed through to the coronation ceremony. He had said to her that the future of France depended on her.

The Holy Will of God

She had at first entered a convent at Besancon. It wasn’t long before she realised that it was not for her. Uncertain of her future, one night she prayed: “Oh my God, what do you want me to do? Oh let me know your will.” She reported that she saw herself in a room filled with dark-skinned children. Somehow she knew that these were the children God had given her. Somewhere in the background was Joan of Arc, Saviour of France and of its King. On December 12, 1806, Napoleon at Posen signed a decree officially authorising the Sisters to serve the French people in “whatever way they thought necessary.”

On May 12, 1807, a group which included Anne Marie Javouhey, then 28 years old, and her sisters Pierrette, Marie Francoise and Claudine as well as a niece who would become M?re Clotilde, made their vows before the Archbishop of Chalon in the Church of St Peters. They took as their motto “the holy will of God.”

“I thought,“ Anne Marie Javouhey wrote, “that a Religious should be ready to suffer everything without murmuring and even with joy, in order to prove to God that she really loves him.” It explained the incredible silences in her letters. But it also explained why Pasteur chose the Cluny nuns to be the nurses in his experimental hospital in Paris. It explained Sister Francis Xavier sitting on the floor in the only room with a light once the “Great Science” which marked bedtime had begun. She was marking books and the lavatory was the only room with a light.

And it explained Sister Anna O’Reilly. We sat looking at the rhododendrons and the horizon that James Joyce had known. And I wondered what she was doing away from this Ireland she loved. “The holy will of God,” Anne Marie Javouhey would say, as if history had never existed and the future was the obedience of today.

Next week — the Caribbean beckons