Madelonnettes Convent


The Madelonnettes Convent was a Paris convent in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. It was located in what is now a rectangle between 6 rue des Fontaines du Temple, rue Volta and rue du Vertbois, and part of its site is now occupied by the lycée Turgot. As the Madelonnettes Prison during the French Revolution, its prisoners included the writers the Marquis de Sade and Nicolas Chamfort, the politician Jean-Baptiste de Machault d'Arnouville and the actor Dazincourt.

Convent

Origins

Its origins date back to 1618, when the wine merchant Robert de Montry - after being rebuffed by the local prostitutes in his attempts to reform them - finally decided to put them back to the right path whilst being accommodated in his own home. With the aid of M. Du Pont, the Capuchin Father Athanase Molé and M. de Fresne, Montry worked to spread his charitable work to other prostitutes. Quickly overtaken by their success, at first they rented rooms in the faubourg Saint-Honoré, before Robert de Montry lent them a house he owned in the quartier de la Croix-Rouge. A chapel for the house was improvised, served by Benedictines from Saint-Germain des Prés.
The idea of creating an actual convent was down to the patronage of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and the generosity of the Marquise de Maignelay, who, on 16 July 1620, acquired from sister Dubuisson a property in rue des Fontaines, between the Abbaye Saint-Martin des Champs and the Temple fortress enclosure, and left them 101,600 livres in her will. In 1625, Louis XIII granted them 3,000 livres in rents, and they were accorded a constitution by pope Urban VIII in 1630]. Most of the buildings were constructed in 1637, with the first chapel inaugurated by Anne of Austria on 22 March 1648 and a church built from 1680 onwards and consecrated on 2 September 1685.

History

This large gathering of "sinners" freely choosing the way of redemption slowly evolved into a more classical convent establishment in which women or girls suspected of misconduct would be confined on the orders of the king, judges or even just at their family's request, the most famous example being the courtesan Ninon de l'Enclos, imprisoned there in 1657 at the request of Anne of Austria, now queen-mother. A number of them came from rich families who provided the convent with a large pension. It was thus necessary therefore to strengthen the supervision, which was confided in turn to four sisters of the Visitation of Saint-Antoine, the Ursulines and finally to the nuns of Saint-Michel, renowned for their severity.
The convent at its peak housed 165 pensionnaires, organized in three orders, each with a separate building:

French Revolution

After the decree of the National Assembly of 13 February 1790 abolishing convents, a last inventory of the convent's goods and income was carried out on 17 March that same year. Though the convent officially closed in 1790, the nuns were only dispersed by stages, since a new mother-superior and bursar were named on 21 March 1791.
In the face of a new wave of imprisonments, in 1793 the convent buildings were converted into a prison for political prisoners and common criminals, with its first prisoners arriving on 4 April under the direction of the commissaire Marino and the concierge Vaubertrand. The tempo of arrests quickened from May 1793 and this led to overcrowding, with a prison only originally meant for 200 people housing up to 319 by 27 Messidor, crammed into cells only each. Common criminals, nicknamed "les pailleux", were held on the ground floor, with people of varying origins referred to as "suspects". Despite the crowded conditions, the mood was good, with improvised poems, singing, music-making and gymnastics, all under the jailors' eyes, but despite this, the prison regime was hard and insanitary. Commissaire Marino forbade prisoners to go into the courtyard, under the pretext that their detention was only provisional whilst they were awaiting transfer to another location. Promiscuity favoured the spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox, which claimed several victims.
At the end of December 1793, the political prisoners were moved to the Port-Libre, Picpus, and Saint-Lazare prisons, and the common criminals were sent to Bicêtre. Little by little the Madelonnettes was emptied of prisoners after the events of Thermidor, and it reopened in 1795 as a women's prison for female criminals and debtors and young women shut up for correction by their fathers. An image of the prison can be seen in a painting by Louis Léopold Boilly now at the Musée Carnavalet.

19th century

The prison remained a women's prison until April 1831, and also had the population of other prisons transferred to it, such as the public daughters of the Petite Force and the prisoners at the Prison Sainte-Pélagie. Finally all the prisoners from La Roquette Prisons were transferred to the Madelonnettes in 1836 and it became a maison d'arrêt for men on their way to La Force. In the wake of the 1848 Revolution large numbers of politicians were imprisoned here, and in 1865-1866 the Madelonnettes was finally demolished by Haussmann to build the rue de Turbigo and replaced by the still existing Prison de la Santé.

Famous prisoners

Among the "suspects" held here were :
The prison has been used as a setting in several works of fiction, including :