They were executed by the guillotine towards the end of the Reign of Terror, at what is now the Place de la Nation in Paris on 17 July 1794, and are venerated as martyr saints of the Catholic Church.

Their story has inspired a novella, a motion picture, a television movie, and an opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites, written by French composer Francis Poulenc.

Thousands of Christians died by the guillotine or as the result of mass deportations, drownings, imprisonment, shootings, mob violence, and "sheer butchery".

[2] The community of Carmelite sisters at Compiègne, a commune 72 km north of Paris, was founded in 1641, a daughter house of the monastery in Amiens.

[3] Shortly after Bastille Day, on 4 August 1790, government officials, with armed guards, interviewed each sister at their convent in Compiègne and forced them to choose between breaking their vows or risking further punishment.

The revolutionary government, at the end of 1791, required all clergy to swear a civic oath supporting the Civil Constitution or risk losing their pensions.

Mother Teresa of St. Augustine, the convent's prioress, suggested to the community that they commit themselves to execution and offer themselves as a sacrifice for France and for the French Church.

[7] They also found two letters written by "the unfortunate"[8] Mulot de la Ménardière to his cousin, Sister Euphrasia of the Immaculate Conception, containing unfavorable criticisms of the Revolution.

She stirred, lifted up her blood-smeared face, and warmly thanked the guard for not killing her, "thereby depriving her of her share in her community's glorious witness for Jesus Christ".

[15]There are no surviving relics of the Martyrs of Compiègne because their heads and bodies were buried, along with 128 other victims executed that day, in a deep, 30-feet square sand-pit in the Picpus Cemetery.

Their names, including the 16 Martyrs of Compiègne as well as Mulot de la Ménardière, are inscribed on marble plaques covering the walls of a nearby church, where prayer is offered continuously.

One of them, Marie de l'Incarnation (Françoise Geneviève Philippe), wrote an account of the execution, History of the Carmelite nuns of Compiègne, which was published in 1836.

[24] In 1931, the German writer Gertrud von Le Fort drew on the History for a novella called Die Letzte am Schafott (The Song at the Scaffold), centered on a fictional character named Blanche de la Force, notable for her timidity, who abandons herself to fear and is rewarded with the grace that allows her to emerge from the crowd of spectators to join the other sisters on the scaffold "without trembling, jubilantly".

[29] Raymond-Leopold Bruckberger, a French Dominican, and cinematographer Philippe Agostini developed a film project based on Le Fort's novella.

[30] James Travers and Willems Henri wrote that "despite its starry cast and needlessly showy production values" the film has "stood the test of time and deserves to be more widely known".

The cast included well-known French actors: Pierre Brasseur, Jeanne Moreau, Madeline Renaud, Alida Valli, Georges Wilson, and Jean-Louis Barrault.