France

The France Collection

In November 1869, Cornelia set off for Hyères with a small group of nuns and children ‘for the purpose of bringing some of our pupils to the genial climate of the South of France and with a view also to founding a Convent of our Order here’. While at Paris, Mother Mary Ignatia Bridges and Mother Veronica Fronduti left the group to inspect a possible school at Toul.

The Toul property may have seemed ideal at first, but two weeks after arrangements were made to purchase the building the Franco-Prussian War Broke out. M.M. Ignatia and M. Veronica strongly advised Cornelia to withdraw, but she felt honour bound to go ahead. The two SHCJ sisters resided there for as long as they could until the artillery fire put their lives in grave danger and they managed narrowly escape with their lives in 1870. Four SHCJ returned in June 1871 and put the damaged house in order but in 1876 the SHCJ sold the property to German nuns.

In 1877, the SHCJ found a new a house on Boulevard de la Saussaye in a fashionable district outside Paris, Neuilly sur Seine. Cornelia wrote from there on 27^th January 1877 that, despite the frustration of the SHCJ’s work at Toul, ‘the only thing I had determined on was not to leave France’.

Unfortunately, the French government’s suspicion of convent schools made life increasingly difficult for the Neuilly community at this time. The school was threatened with closure in 1879 and it took the persuasive powers a past pupil of St Leonards, the ‘very young and beautiful’ Blanche the Duchess of Caracciola for the authorities to accept an English sister’s certificate.

On 10^th July 1904, the SHCJ school on Boulevard de la Saussaie was informed, alongside many other convent schools, that it could not open the following October to pupils. The annals of 1904 for the convent noted that ‘many kind friends came that day and those following with offers of help and sympathy’ The sisters departed on 28^th July 1904, feeling it was all ‘far too sad’.

It was not until 1921 the SHCJ returned to Neuilly having found, through the help of their ex-pupil, Madame Meugniot, a new home for the convent school at 47 Rue Perronet. Here a French Holy Child school flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, until war once again disrupted the SHCJ’s French community. In 1939, it became clear that the pupils were not safe at Rue Perronet so they were sent away and the convent became the headquarters of the British Women’s Mechanised Transport Corps. Eventually the situation became too dangerous and on 9^th June 1940 the sisters made a perilous journey to England.

On 10^th July, 1945, Mother Mary Saint Maurice and Mother Marie Odile returned to France and immediately began to clean 47 Rue Perronet and arrange repairs after the building was used by men of the American Airforce. By 11^th October, the Neuilly community was officially formed again and Mass was celebrated at the SHCJ convent for the first time in 5 years on 21^st November.

The Holy Child school on Rue Perronet was reestablished and continued to teach both senior and junior pupils. An école d’edicatrices (teacher training school) and a student hostel was also based there. Members of Neuilly community, encouraged by their superior from 1958 to 1965, Marie Osmonde de Maille, also worked for the wider community, Marie Cecil Bouffandeau running catechism classes to a traveller community in Bezons and engaging in social work with the poor of Paris suburbs.

In 1959 Mother Mary Osmonde answered the need of the parish priest of Créteil for a religious community to manage the local school. In order to provide teaching sisters that to take on the Créteil Parish School, M. Marie Osmonde closed the final two years of the Neuilly Upper school since there were enough other schools in Neuilly to satisfy this need while Créteil’s population was rapidly rising and there was only one Catholic school there.

Eventually, circumstances forced the SHCJ to close the Neuilly school and convent at 47 Rue Perronet. Their next ministry was a collaborative project managing a retirement home with the Sainte Clotilde Congregation nearby. Sister NoëL Laureau was headmistress of Créteil school for 29 years before retiring in 1988, when Monsieur Gerard Crossonneau took over as head of the senior school, Sr Margeurite Bouteloup was already headmistress for the juniors.

Currently, there is one SHCJ who was both born in and still living in this country that has been so important to the Society, but she and the schools that continue to bear the name of her fellow SHCJ, De Maillé, continue to carry the memory of this important connection.