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‪As it focuses on the history of a monastery of Franciscan nuns in Provins which experienced a resounding scandal under Louis XIV, this article develops a three-fold argument. It sets out an approach to analyse this – always delicate – kind of case which marked out the history of convents in the Ancien Régime. It reassesses the Catholic reform as the dominant framework for analysing the history of seventeenth-century convent communities. It goes through the hypothesis that the type of socio-political presence specific to the Cordeliers in the modern period may have made this Order a libertine nest where sexual conduct symbolised the power to break free from the norms ruling society. The usual question of the early-modern-France libertinage – a matter for writers and philosophers – is displaced onto the Cordeliers’ territory and recontextualised in a history, shared by monks and nuns, of the experience of power.‪