Holy Martyrs of Compiègne

The Holy Martyrs of Compiègne are sixteen Discalced Carmelites of the monastery of Compiègne in France who, during the French Revolution, died by the guillotine in Paris on July 17, 1794. The community was led by its prioress, Teresa of Saint Augustine (Marie-Madeleine-Claudine Lidoine), born in Paris in 1752. The Church commemorates them on July 17, the day of their martyrdom.

The monastery of Compiègne was one of the foundations that arose in France after the arrival there of Blessed Anne of Jesus, a disciple of Saint Teresa of Ávila. Among the martyrs were ten choir nuns, a novice, three lay sisters, and two extern sisters, Catherine and Thérèse Soiron, sisters by birth, who had served the community for many years. The oldest of them were nearly eighty.

After the outbreak of the Revolution, officials came to the monastery to question the nuns and to persuade them to abandon religious life, but the sisters refused. In 1792, as violence grew, the prioress proposed that the community offer their lives to God for peace in the Church and in the State. The sisters renewed this act every day until their death. In September 1792 they were expelled from the monastery. Wearing secular clothes and divided into four groups living in different parts of the town, they continued their life of prayer and penance under the guidance of the prioress.

In June 1794 they were discovered, denounced, and arrested, then taken to Paris and held in the Conciergerie prison. There too they kept their calm and their trust in God. On July 16, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, they sang hymns of joy in prison. The next day the Revolutionary Tribunal condemned them to death. They were charged with fidelity to religious life and with “fanaticism,” as their devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was called.

That same day they were taken in two carts to the place of execution, today’s Place de la Nation. On the way they sang psalms. At the foot of the scaffold they intoned the “Veni Creator” and renewed their baptismal promises and their religious vows, while the prioress blessed each of them. The first to die was the youngest, the novice Constance, singing the psalm “Laudate Dominum.” The bodies of the martyrs were thrown into a common pit in the garden of the former Picpus convent, together with the bodies of many other victims of the Terror. Ten days later Robespierre fell, and the Terror came to an end.

Many details of their life and death were handed down by Sister Marie of the Incarnation, a Carmelite of the same community, who was away from Compiègne at the time of the arrest and survived, and who later wrote the history of her sisters. Pope Pius X beatified the martyrs on May 27, 1906. On December 18, 2024, Pope Francis extended their veneration to the whole Church and enrolled them in the catalog of saints by way of an equipollent canonization, which does not require the approval of a miracle.