The Nun

In 1760, Denis Diderot begins the Nun , novel in the form of Mémoires that an escaped nun of the convent addresses to the marquis de Croismare to request her assistance.

They were in fact one mystification his friends who wanted to again attract in Paris the marquis who had withdrawn himself in Normandy. In 1780, Diderot takes again the writing of it; the various episodes are published in serial, between 1780 and 1782, in the literary Correspondance . The novel was published in 1796, with the liking of discovered copies that Diderot, scalded by its troubles passed, did not plan to publish of alive sound.

The history is inspired by that of a nun of Longchamp named Marguerite Delamarre, which had made speak about it in the living rooms in 1758, to have written with justice, requiring to be released from the cloister where his/her parents had locked up it. Indeed, it is the illegitimate child between his mother and another man that his father . Of fear of going in hell, his/her mother, by an emotional blackmail, persuades it to go in this convent. Diderot criticizes, here, a precept of the Bible according to which the children will pay for the crimes of their parents.

Diderot makes the lawsuit of the coercive religious institutions, opposites with the true religion insofar as they lead the individuals to the terrestrial sufferings and the eternal damnation. The closed world involves the degradation of the human nature. Idleness, social uselessness, promiscuity plunge little by little the recluses in the morbid or mystical daydreams, sometimes then in the madness and lead them to the Suicide.

Adaptation

Jacques Rivette drew from it a film, censured at its exit, Suzanne Simonin, the Nun of Diderot .

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