The French Revolution has been much romanticised in art and literature – think Les Miserables and The Scarlet Pimpernel – almost from the beginning and leading as it did to the Napoleonic era, it would be easy to forget that the French Revolution wasn’t welcomed by everyone.
Well, yes, aristocrats aside who were arrested and executed in great numbers, there were many other ordinary Frenchmen and women who resisted the imposition of the new republican government.
The centre of the aspiring counter-revolution was in the district of Vendee, a regional area of France.
Popular history teaches that the revolution was fostered by aristocrats and the Catholic church, determined to hang on to their power base against the popular uprising of the newly empowered and emboldened working class.
Well, that would only be part of the truth.
Unlike many areas of France where aristocrats were remote city dwellers, spending most of the time away from their ancestral lands and the were clergy disengaged and dissolute, the region of Vendee was quite different indeed.
The vast majority of Vendeans were relatively successful peasant farmers; their living conditions were better than those of their counterparts in northern France. The Vendée peasants were not as bitterly affected by the harvest failures and bitter winter of 1788-89. They enjoyed a comparatively better relationship with the First Estate; unlike those elsewhere in France the noblemen of the Vendée remained on their estates and did not act as absentee landlords. The citizens of the Vendée were also devoutly religious and were dependent on their local parish and clergy.
Not all Frenchmen were onboard with the overthrow of the “ancien regime”
The conditions which fomented revolution in much of France were largely absent in Vendee. Indeed the locals resented the interference of the new regime:
The regime also brought in what are now familiar revolutionary policies: a stream of arbitrary laws on nationalisation, wage and price-fixing, arbitrary powers to municipal councils, taxes, levies and ultimately requisition and expropriation. The Catholic clergy remained as a force to challenge these injustices. The regime therefore enforced their replacement by schismatic clergy who had taken the civil oath.
All this was massively rejected by the Vendée and elsewhere. Churches served by the “intruder-priests” – curés truttons as they were called – were deserted. The people went to hear Mass in the woods with their old pastors who had refused the oath and gone into hiding to avoid arrest. The government attempted to force the people to hear the Mass of the “truttons”, but the people refused. Barillon, a labourer in Lower Poitou, armed only with a fork, resisted the gendarmes of the new National Guard. “Yield,” cried the officer. “First yield me my God,” was the reply. He was duly bayoneted 22 times by the gendarmes.
The aristocrats, the clergy and the common folk of the Vendee got on well together and resented the imposition from a remote and hostile Parisian government
Therefore it wasn’t surprising that Vendee should be the locus for other Frenchmen who wanted to throw off the brutal new order once Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed.
The skirmishes which afflicted the region turned into a full scale war in 1793 following a forced conscription of 300,000 Vendean men — they took up arms all right, but they did it for “Dieu et le Roi”, for God and King.
The Parisian authorities exercised hitherto unknown brutality of a type only hinted out during the capital’s own Reign of Terror. Not only were fighting men killed, but also children — 400, by some reports — were executed.
It was total war:
“The committee has prepared measures that intend to exterminate this rebellious race of Vendéens, to make their abodes disappear, to torch their forests, to cut their crops”
Of a population of 800,000, it is estimated that up to 500,000 people were killed.
A young Vendeen heads off to a war from which he’ll never return.
The War of Vendee is hardly known in France. It is only taught in the region as local history and is apparently not even recognised by the French Government as part of its own national history.
A memorial to this astonishing part of French Revolutionary history was only erected in 1993 – on the 200th anniversary. The keynote address was given by acclaimed Russian author, philosopher and anti-Communist freedom fighter Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
And so, in dedicating this memorial to your heroic Vendée, I see double in my mind’s eye–for I can also visualize the memorials which will one day rise in Russia, monuments to our Russian resistance against the onslaught of Communism and its atrocities.
We have all lived through the twentieth century, a century of terror, the chilling culmination of that Progress about which so many dreamed in the eighteenth century. And now, I think, more and more citizens of France, with increasing understanding and pride, will remember and value the resistance and the sacrifice of the Vendee.
Here is an excerpt from Moonstone Conspiracy – out June 19
Alone but for the calling of the gulls, he stood staring at the horizon where the shores of France lay visible. Here, more than seven hundred years earlier, the Normans invaded England. Now war threatened her shores once more.
After a time, despite the freshening wind, he could hear the sound of a woman’s footfalls approach. Abigail joined him in silence somehow knowing he would speak when he was ready.
“Percy sent us to Vendee on news of the uprisings,” he said, words ripped from his throat as the wind rose further. Daniel settled an arm around her and urged her back into the shelter of the ruined castle chapel.
“There were spot fires of resistance across the old provinces. We met with those who opposed the revolution and were anxious to see what support England could provide. In the north, Austria had the same intentions—after all, the Queen is one of their own.”
Abigail wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and listened. Daniel picked up a pebble while poking through a tuft of grass and rubbed it with his thumb. His attention remained on it while he spoke.
“Anyway, Jonathan and I had been given names to approach. We were coming close to establishing a resistance network from Normandy to Poitou Charente and across to Paris— residents who would welcome anything up to English troops on their soil. For their safety and ours, Jonathan carried half the list. I carried the other.
“A very clever and ambitious officer by the name of Alexis Roux was appointed by Robespierre as representative of the National Assembly to the District of Vienne. To say Jonathan and I were thorns in his side would be no exaggeration. Perhaps we’d become too cocky, I don’t know. Anyway, one of our meeting houses was raided. Everyone scattered in all directions. I managed to elude the soldiers for three days. I have no idea how many managed to escape or how many were caught.
“I felt certain Jonathan must have escaped. I waited at a pre-arranged rendezvous at La Rochelle for five days. One night I returned to my room at the inn and found it had been broken into and searched. They didn’t bother to be careful. They tore the place apart and probably would have done the same to me if I’d been there.”
Daniel didn’t mention to Abigail why he had been out that night, but he had a young woman by the name of Georgette to thank for that.