A Reform Its Own Order Thought Had Gone Too Far

Armand Jean de Rance's reform at La Trappe from 1664 was controversial from the moment it began, and not only among outsiders: fellow Cistercian abbots argued that his added austerities, near total silence, harsh manual labour, and a penitential severity going beyond what the Rule of Saint Benedict itself required, exceeded legitimate reform and amounted to an invented rigor of de Rance's own devising. The reform nonetheless spread to other houses that adopted La Trappe's observance, and it was tested severely within a few generations of its founding, when the French Revolution suppressed French monasteries outright in the 1790s and scattered the Trappist communities into exile.

A monk named Augustin de Lestrange led a group of the displaced community across Switzerland, Germany and eventually into Russia and beyond over the following two decades, keeping the observance alive in exile until conditions allowed a return to France. The various Trappist congregations that had multiplied and drifted apart during this period of exile and dispersal were not reunited into a single order until 1892, when Pope Leo XIII combined them into the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, giving a reform that had begun as one abbot's personal severity its eventual, formal, unified institutional shape.