When Marguerite RUTAN was sentenced to death, the judgement that was read out was a list of her crimes, one of the worst being 'the presence in her study of aristocratic pamphlets of a fanatical character'.
The Webster's dictionary definition of a fanatic reads: "a person marked by excessive enthusiasm and often, intense uncritical devotion". Nowadays, the word has a derogatory connotation but at the time of the French Revolution its meaning was straightforward and priests, monks and nuns who refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy were chased and harassed as fanatics. Indeed it was their belief that faithfulness to the Christian Faith and to the Church of Rome was their sacred duty. Sister RUTAN'S keenness was not blind zeal, it was unflinching zeal enlightened by her faith. Interestingly enough, 14 months after her death, the executive directory of the district made the remark that "a woman who by nature had religious beliefs had been sacrificed in a barbarian manner on alleged grounds that still had not been evidenced".
The revolutionaries had that same understanding of the word fanatic : "all those who refuse to recognise the juror priests" ministries are fanatics".
Similarly, when the Catholic cult was officially deemed a superstition and was replaced by a cult to the goddess Reason, and later on when Robespierre introduced the cult to the Supreme Being, those who remained faithful to their faith were labelled «fanatics".
During the diocesan process in 1907-1909, a witness declared :" All the people who took part in the trial, whether directly or indirectly were anti-catholic die-hards as they were Jacobin, my personal belief is that Sister Marguerite RUTAN suffered martyrdom in the legal sense as well as in the common sense of the word, she was condemned and put to death by hatred toward  Religion and she accepted her death by love for God.

So, was Sister RUTAN a real fanatic ?
We could say she was but in the nobler sense of the word as she did not shed other people's blood, as a  modern fanatic would, but she shed her own blood to bear testimony to her faith in Christ, as  martyrs of all time do.

- A Great life in nutshell

- Towards Beatification

- Was Sister Marguerite RUTAN a Fanatic ?

- Marguerite Rutan