Between Rouen and Le Mans, set deep in the Forêt du Perche – some 400,000 acres of beech and oak – skirted by still lakes, orchards and arable farmland, is the Benedictine Abbaye de La Trappe. It was here, in a period of decadence for 17th-century monasticism in France, that this eponymous branch of the Cistercian order was founded. The Trappists were infamously the strictest order in all Christendom, once described as a “bitter cactus-land of expiation”.
A brief history of La Grande Trappe, inflamed with pious faith since the 12th century, seems to swing between the most extreme fluctuations conceivable; between decadence, unrelenting observance, destruction, peace, influence, service and prayerful silence.
