War in the Vendee

4 Key excerpts on "War in the Vendee"

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  Guerrilla Conflict Before the Cold War

  • Anthony J. Joes(Author)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  1, p. 122. Page 49 2 Genocide in La Vendée In the spring of 1793, the Revolutionary government in Paris was about to enter into its most radical and terroristic phase. Among the many consequences of this paroxysm would be protracted and bloody antiRevolutionary insurgencies inside France itself. The most famous of these risings would take place in the province of La Vendée. This Vendéan rebellion would become then and would remain today “the symbol of the counterrevolution.” 1 That is why “to this day the history of the Vendée is capable of polarizing French historians and readers more implacably than almost any other event of the Revolution.” 2 A study of the Vendéan guerrilla conflict illustrates some facets of insurgency that will not show up very clearly in the other three cases examined in this book. It also brings to the surface certain aspects of the French Revolution, especially during its most radical phase, that are not often adverted to in the United States. TO THE REVOLUTION Events of the past appear differently to different peoples and different eras. The debate on the meaning of the French Revolution has gone through several cycles of controversy and fashion, and not only in France. To jump into that debate would in no way advance the purposes of this book. It is nevertheless clearly necessary to place the Vendéan conflict in some coherent context. We will therefore briefly consider only the most visible of the circumstances which preceded that grim struggle. 3 Page 50 It was once the fashion to refer to the kings of 18thcentury France as “absolute monarchs.” To the extent that this phrase suggested that these rulers possessed the fullness of political power in all circumstances, it was fundamentally misleading. At his coronation in 1774 the llfated Louis XVI swore a solemn oath, just as his illustrious predecessors had done, to respect the traditional liberties of his subjects.

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  Small Wars and Insurgencies in Theory and Practice, 1500-1850

  • Beatrice Heuser(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The insurgency of the Vendée Alan Forrest Department of History, University of York, UK

  The insurrection in the Vendée combined open warfare with the methods of petite guerre, ambushing French republican soldiers and cutting their supply lines to Paris. These tactics, when combined with the hatreds generated by a civil war, go far to explain to the cruelty of the conflict in the west and the depth of the hatreds it engendered. In republican eyes the use of guerrilla tactics was unjust and illegitimate, and they denounced their adversaries as common criminals and brigands, portraying them as backward, superstitious, even as subhuman, and in the process justified the savage repression they unleashed against them.

  The civil war in the Vendée has become a critical part of the memory of the West of France and is a powerful element in its identity: a region that has willingly assumed the mantle of a martyred province after one of the most savage campaigns of the Eighteenth Century. The war is remembered in the West as one of principle; a bitter struggle between peasants and Catholics on one side, republicans and atheists on the other. It was a war for God, fought with all the intensity of a religious crusade. In purely military terms, it was a mixture of different types of warfare, ranging from ambushes and isolated attacks on republican columns, to open battles when circumstances allowed, an insurgency that profited from familiarity with the terrain and recruitment based on feudal obligation to local barons, a system that provided the Grande Armée Royale with some 40,000 men, and Charette with a further 5,000 recruits in 1793, numbers far beyond the capacity of the Republic. If it had a disadvantage it lay in the indispensability of individual commanders and the constant likelihood of internal bickering and petty jealousies amongst them.1

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  Genocide in the Age of the Nation State

  The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide

  • Mark Levene(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  49 114 THE RISE OF THE WEST Nor was there anything about either of these four collectively, or the Vendée specifically, or for that matter the Mauges district at the core of the rebellion, which might notably differentiate their populations from other surrounding ones either in ethnic, religious or even political terms. Indeed, in many ways, the Vendée was archetypically what rural France was all about, a close-knit series of micro-societies, made up largely of peasants and weavers, geographi-cally remote from the heartlands of the revolution and culturally and mentally, without doubt, a million miles from its metropolitan and urban power-houses. Certainly, there have been some notable efforts to develop this theme by seek-ing to isolate socio-economic or religious factors which might explain why large elements of the Vendéan population might have been more alienated by the revolution than elsewhere. 50 But what all these arguments really do is rein-force the degree to which this area was very traditional, pietistic, very attached to its local curés – not least in their role as intermediaries with Ancien Régime authority in what was actually a very under-administered region – and thus extraordinarily antagonised when ‘townies’ started to come in, throw their weight around and attempt to move all the time-honoured communal goal-posts. One has here the essence of a classic countryside versus metropolis argument, one that when push came to shove – ‘push’ being the demand on priests to swear allegiance to what appeared to be a brazenly atheistically secu-lar regime; ‘shove’ being the demand that the young men should present themselves as cannon-fodder for it – the Vendée was catapulted over the prec-ipice into open rebellion. Nevertheless, while this may explain the very strong grass-roots underbelly to the insurrection, it does not add up to a Vendéan collectivity.

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  Violence and the state

  • Matt Killingsworth, Matthew Sussex, Jan Pakulski, Matt Killingsworth, Matthew Sussex, Jan Pakulski(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  12 These were not the traditional wars of European kings, it is argued, with limited royal armies and limited objectives, but rather wars fought by rival political and social systems, between popular sovereignty and royal absolutism, between the values of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the feudal Society of Orders. What was at stake for the French was the very existence of the Revolution and the Republic itself. War was a means to both defend the Revolution from internal and external threats, and to export revolutionary principles and reforms throughout Europe. The converse was European powers fighting for the restoration of the Bourbons and the Old Regime to France, and defending themselves against the contagion of revolution.

  Since the 1980s, this interpretation has come under increasing scrutiny. In his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European international relations, Paul Schroeder argues that the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars were not a ‘contest between the French Revolution and the old regime’ but rather a ‘conflict between three hegemonic powers [Britain, France and Russia] as to which or which combination of them would control and exploit the countries in between’.13 In his now classic analysis of the origins of the French Revolutionary Wars, Tim Blanning put the case for realpolitik prevailing over ideological considerations, with the wars driven largely by traditional rivalries and power interests.14 Blanning concedes that ideals certainly weighed more heavily with the French than with the Austrians, Prussians or British, but argues that the Girondin deputies ultimately pushed France to war in 1792 ‘chiefly for the purpose of obtaining political power’.15

  Notwithstanding the continuation of eighteenth-century state rivalries based on power and security, the case for ideological factors as playing a key causal role in the Revolutionary Wars is unquestionably strongest for the case of France, and specifically between the years 1792 and 1794. This was both the most radical and ideologically fervent era of the French Revolution, culminating in the Jacobin dictatorship and Terror (1793–94); and the period when France was most vulnerable to foreign invasion and military defeat. While the French court and other French revolutionary leaders pursued war for their own reasons, it was the Girondin deputies led by Brissot who were ultimately responsible for winning over the French National Assembly between late 1791 and April 1792. Notwithstanding political self-interest, ideology mattered in this debate, and not simply as an emotive rhetorical device to close out the argument for war. As Alan Forrest has remarked of the Jacobin language of war in this era: ‘there is no reason to doubt the reality of their underlying fear or the genuineness of their commitment to what they saw as a better society’.16

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