Of Nuns & Censorship

A nun molested by a monk? A lesbian mother superior? A suicidal sister? Shocking material indeed, even if it is only on film. The movie is a new French production called Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot, and last week it was the center of a bitter controversy that has once more put the government of Charles de Gaulle under a withering verbal cannonade. Reason: it is the first film in French history whose showing has been banned by the government both in France and abroad.

Since the banning, the political press, both right and left, from Le Figaro to Combat, have joined in attacks on the government. Said the liberal newspaper Le Monde: "We are stupefied by such a decision, stupefied by the grave blow it strikes against freedom of expression." France's 23-man Board of Censors, which had approved the film, last week threatened to resign. The "Manifesto 1789," signed by French leaders in all walks of life, protested "against the formal attack on liberty of expression" that the ban signaled to them. The French film industry may well, out of spite, make Suzanne the nation's sole entry next month in the Cannes film festival, where no exhibition license is necessary.

The controversial film is an adaptation of Diderot's 18th century novel of an illegitimate girl forced into a convent life. In the Encyclopedist's book, Suzanne threatens suicide after one mother superior tries to seduce her, a monk tries to rape her and various other unconventional happenings deprive her of both vocation and bodily peace. Diderot meant his book less as an anticlerical attack than an attack on the corrupt society of the 18th century, which frequently forced illegitimates into the church. Recognizing it as such, Rome never placed it on the Index of forbidden reading for Catholics. It is, in fact, today regarded as a French classic and studied in French schools.

More Harm. Still, New Wave Director Jacques Rivette knew that getting La Religieuse as a film past the heavy-handed censors of the Gaullist republic would require some fancy cutwork. He took the unusual precaution of submitting his script to the censors in advance--and had to do it three times before getting a version approved for shooting. While the cameras were still rolling, conservative Catholic spokesmen started complaining, eventually mustered over 200,000 letters of protest to the government, many of them from nuns who felt that the film would do irreparable harm to the image of the modern nun and the church. At the time, De Gaulle was running hard for re-election with only grudging support from the church, which quietly disapproves of both his attitude toward a united Europe and his nuclear armament of France. The day before the election, Gaullist Information Minister Alain Peyrefitte announced that if he were in office when La Religieuse was finished, he would "not hesitate" to ban it. As it turned out, Peyrefitte was not in office; the job fell to new Secretary of Information Yvon Bourges, but he imposed the ban with equal dispatch.

In view of the storm that the incident has spawned, many churchmen in France fear that the ban might in the end do more harm to the church than the film itself. As the Catholic weekly Temoignage Chretien observed, La Religieuse "in no way hurts the nuns of today. But [the controversy] has all the same hurt them in the public eye as a pressure group capable of imposing its will on the government."

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