Our French trip, continued

[anglomedved]

Unscheduled, on Monday we passed through Fontrevault Abbey, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Loire Valley.  A major abbey until the French revolution, with a series of abbesses from the royal family and nobility, it became a prison until 1963, after which it was restored by the French Ministry of Culture and opened to the public as a cultural centre in 1985. With its superb white stone, Romanesque church, and green field setting, it is picture-book France.

I hated the place. It was empty, with the spiritual emptiness of official French ‘laïcité”. 700 years as a Christian monastery were given very second place indeed to the 150 years as a prison. The one person featured seriously was Jean Genet, the 20th century French writer who spent time there for theft, false papers, vagabondage and indecency, before becoming the chou-chou of the lay establishment (Cocteau, Sartre, Picasso), who managed to get a threatened life sentence set aside by the French president.  I’m not wanting to knock Genet, who is a competent writer. Nor would I want the place plastered with pictures of abbesses and nuns. But the silence on 700 years of rich spiritual history was deafening.