ABSTRACT
In April 1823, an extraordinary scene unfolded in the eastern French city of Besanon, capital of old Franche-Comt. At the centre of the drama was Jeanne-Antide Thouret, at 58 the well-known local founder of the region's most successful community of nuns, the Sisters of Charity of Besanon. Scholars now contest the details, or even the reality, of Jeanne-Antide's 1823 Besanon visit. The events of 1823 were a dramatic end, at least in France, to a distinguished public life. This chapter presents the important activities of highly visible religious women like Jeanne-Antide Thouret contributed to the form and extent of resistance and revival, to that process of feminisation, and to the wider results of those developments. An analysis of her story, and of the early history of the congregation she founded, provides a fascinating route into a set of highly significant changes that took place within the female religious life and the French Catholic church in the period 1790 to 1840.
