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.The French Revolution many women all over France, in a bid to restore the primacy of religion and the place of the church, initiated small communities focused on social work, mostly in education and health. These projects began in towns, villages and cities, and gradually mushroomed throughout France and Europe into the wider world. Sophie Barat was part of that impulse and energy.
Betwee 1800 and 1820 thirty five new communities of women, including the Society of the Sacred Heart, were founded in France; and each year between 1820 and 1880 six new communities were founded. The founders of these communities came from all sections of French society, and included 53 from the lower bourgeoisie, among them Sophie Barat herself.
The huge needs in society generally opened a space for initiatives for women like Sophie Barat. The market for education and health care was immense and between them these women carved out certain areas to work in, and displayed great entrepreneurial skills in maintaining and extending their communities within their chosen area.
Sophie Barat’s chosen area was the education of young women of the aristocracy and upper middle class and the education of the poor. To this purpose she established boarding schools and poor schools, usually on the same property. Yet although the maintaining of schools was central to Sophie Barat’s leadership and the major activity of the members Sophie was convinced that behind such activity was a further dimension.
This
dimension informed and gave depth to the actual work of education. For
Sophie Barat the Society of the Sacred Heart had been born in an
inner world and nourished from an inner place. For her the Society was
a centre of prayer and inner spiritual work, in a sense quite hidden and
veiled, effective in ways not readily perceived. This aspect and dimension
would inform and nourish all the Society would do in the field of education.
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Many
years later Sophie spoke about these early years. She outlined the original
impulse, rooted in her experience of the Revolution:
| 'The
first idea of the Society that we had ….. was to gather as many as possible
of the true adorers of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist …At the
end of the Terror and of the abominations of the Revolution against religion
and the Blessed sacrament….No two pious people meeting together would talk
without trying to find some means of bringing Jesus Christ back into family
life ……….
My original idea of our little Society of the Sacred Heart was to gather young girls together and establish a little community which night and day would adore the Heart of Jesus, whose love had been desecrated in the Eucharist. But I said to myself, when we are twenty four religious, able to replace one another on a prie-Dieu for perpetual adoration, that will be something, and yet little enough for such a noble goal. ….If we had young pupils whom we formed in the spirit of adoration and reparation, now that would be different! and I saw hundreds, thousands of adorers before a perfect, universal monstrance, raised above the Church. "That is it" I said to myself, as I was praying before a lonely tabernacle: `"we must dedicate ourselves to the education of youth, renew in souls the solid foundations of a living faith in the …Blessed Sacrament; [and] there fight the traces of Jansenism which had led to [such] impiety….. we will raise up a multitude of adorers from all the nations, to the very ends of the earth." |
This was a visionary insight directly in response to the Terror when the guillotine was in daily bloody use, when the churches of Paris were being desecrated and the sense of God destroyed. Sophie, with her companions, felt the need to renew a society which had become brutalised and violent. This intuition matured into seeing Paris as the centre of this new spiritual energy, spreading out as the Society expanded.
Sophie Barat hoped to renew and deepen the values of Christianity by carefully forming members who in turn would form students. This was a further development of the impulse of de Tournély, an impulse of Sophie Barat, in response to her experience of the Revolution and to her desire to rebuild and renew the world of her day. It is, of course, expressed in the language and theology of her time yet its essential meaning is timeless.
Sophie saw the task of education not solely to give young women a good basic education which would prepare them to be either good wives and mothers, or to live a good Christian life as single women, or to enter a religious congregation. She hoped that the education given in the schools would be profound enough to inspire the pupils to rebuild, renew and transform society, where ever they lived. This was a social programme, couched in the language of religion and it had the potential to be highly political.
Over the years this intuition matured and developed and expanded into seeing education as the means and the way to renew society in its depths. Sophie always returned to that initial hope and desire to heal and renew society in France after the ravages of the revolution.
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Signature
of Sophie Barat in a letter to her sister
Marie-Louise
Dusaussoy, Paris. October 10th. 1800.
c
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Introduction Who was Sophie Barat? Sophie Barat - Educator |
My Own Vintage - Reflections on Madeleine Sophie Barat |
Sophie Barat - Legacy The New Biography |
"Madeleine
Sophie Barat",
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