September 1990 Print

Marie-France Hilgar  

At a time when the French government is taking every opportunity to "celebrate" the French Revolution, some of my French compatriots are not afraid to claim loudly that the Revolution is nothing to be proud of. Several good books have been published, particularly Dictionnaire des regicides by Jacques-Philippe Giboury (Perrin, 1987), and Lettre ouverte aux coupeurs de têtes et aux menteurs du Bicentenaire (Michel Albin, 1989), [Open letter to the head cutters and the liars of the Bicentennial] by Philippe de Villiers. On August 15, 1989, a Mass was celebrated "in reparation for the crimes of the Revolution" by the priests of Saint Nicholas du Chardonette, Place du Louvre, where so many heads fell, and many biographies of the royal family have been released.

The July 1989 issue of The Angelus presented an excellent article by John P. Philip, "The French Revolution and the Church." The two paragraphs on the rising of the Vendée (p. 7), gave me the idea of providing readers of The Angelus with a few more details on the events which took place some two hundred years ago in that unfortunate province. Situated on the Atlantic coast north of Bordeaux, south of the Loire River, the Vendée's size is about that of the state of Delaware.

At a time when the whole country of France had about twenty-two million inhabitants, the French revolutionary army murdered three hundred thousand people in Vendée. In the village of Lucs-sur-Boulogne on the 28th of February 1794, five hundred and sixty-four persons—mostly women, elderly people and children—were killed savagely. They had locked themselves in their church and they were reciting the rosary at the time of the army's attack. When their remains were dug out in the nineteenth century, their bones and their rosaries were still intertwined. Here are a few names of the martyrs: Marie Renaud, 12 years old; Pierre Geai, two years old; Louis Rousseau, 8 years old; his brother Jean, 6 years old; his sister Jeanne, 4 years old. The youngest victim was two weeks old. A soldier in charge made the following report: "A tiring day, but fruitful. We found no resistance. We were able to kill, at no expense, a whole litter of 'church mice' who held insignias of fanaticism. Our army progressed normally."

Two centuries later it was hoped that the French Revolution would not be a means to political ends. It is time to study the Revolution critically and objectively. We were looking forward to the Bicentennial of truth, but the French government prefers to forget, erase, obliterate. M. Jeanneny, apostolic vicar of the commemoration of the bicentennial stated: "We celebrate the positive." As for the negative it remains buried with the bones of the martyrs.

August 26, 1789: the Declaration of the Rights of Man was ratified. The first true right of man is the right to know the truth, the whole truth, with both its negative and its positive aspects. French children learn in their school books that Condorcet was a brilliant mathematician, that Lavoisier is the father of modern chemistry. They are not told that the two men were thrown in jail, mistreated and died, the first one in his jail,¹ the second one under the blade of the guillotine. Worse yet, they are fed the myth of the child Bara, who supposedly died because, when he was captured by the Vendéens, he refused to say, "Long live the king," and said, "Long live the republic." It has been proven that the whole story is a lie, that young Bara, in fact, was killed by horse thieves, but the revolutionary used his innocent death to political ends, and the lie is perpetuated in our schoolbooks. To prove that Robespierre was kind-hearted, French children read the letter that the mass murderer wrote to his friend Danton upon his wife's death!

The mot d'ordre is to celebrate, to be happy, to spend money on souvenirs of questionable taste, on the innumerable exhibits commemorating the Revolution, and to occult the Reign of Terror and the Vendée. In the many official speeches, the truth is absent and Robespierre is a hero.

The Reign of Terror was not just an accident, it was a system. Robespierre wanted to lead the people through Reason, the enemies of the people through Terror. Terror was inflexible, it was a killing machine, a machine which was going to kill all enemies. Fouquier Tinville, a friend of Robespierre, bragged that heads were falling, like shingles fall from roofs on a stormy night. Marc-Antoine Jullien, extraordinary superintendent of the Committee for Public Safety, was more graphic: "Freedom has for its bed mattresses of corpses... blood is the milk of newborn freedom," and Danton had warned every one that the sacred love for the homeland is so exclusive that "it must immolate everything for the good of public interest, without mercy, without fear, without human respect." And so, within a few months, the Proclamation of Human Rights had become the right to commit collective crime. "Pity is not a revolutionary feeling," said Westermann.²

If the French nation had still been surrounded by foreign armies, we could maybe understand a certain amount of paranoia, but when the Reign of Terror reached its highest point, at the rhythm of one head falling every minute, the danger outside of France as well as inside was over. As threat to the nation decreased, the infernal machine multiplied human sacrifices. Saint-Just³ ordered punished not only the traitors but those who were indifferent. Committees were formed in each town to track down "suspect" characters. At the top of the ladder, two prestigious committees, those of Public Safety and of Criminal Investigation became the all-powerful exterminators.

Religious persecution and deportation of priests show that religious freedom was not one of the newly-acquired freedoms. Faithfulness to the Church was considered a subversive action, high treason. The law against "suspect" characters made it possible to track down all those who through their words, their actions or their omissions, showed that they were enemies of Freedom. If a rosary, a scapular or a missal was found in an attic, those living in the house were immediately accused of being enemies of the Republic. "All that is not new is pernicious," according to Saint-Just, and Robespierre went much further: "Considering the degree to which the human race is deteriorating, I am convinced of the necessity to operate a whole regeneration and to create a new nation." In order to regenerate it was necessary to re-educate and Rabaud-Saint Etienne wanted children to be taken away from their mothers at birth.⁴ The only way to speed up the making of a new race was to kill off the old one. Saint-Just said it: "The Republic is constituted by the total destruction of what is opposed to it."

The Vendée hecatomb has been occulted for some two hundred years, but the Vendée people have not forgotten. The irony is that, at the beginning, the people of Vendée were rather pro-revolution. They all expected that they would be better off: farmers thought they would become bourgeois, bourgeois believed they would become gentlemen, the small noblemen expected to be treated as high nobility. Even priests welcomed receiving their salary from the state instead of being at the mercy of their collection basket. But as early as 1791, the "national guards," who were actually improvised soldiers, were visiting the villages destroying everywhere any pious object, harassing the men, insulting and undressing the women to snatch away their scapulars and crosses. The Vendéens did not plot to restore monarchy, they fought for their Faith as proven by the Treaty of La Jaunaye in 1795, which professed that from then on religion was free in Vendée, and the non-juried priests⁵ would not be harassed. In 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man had promised that no one would be harassed because of religious opinions. During the five-year interval hundreds of thousands of lives were lost for their Catholic religion.

The nobility of Vendée was not interested in trying to fight a war against the Revolution. They may have wished to, but they had no army, no money and they were realistic people. The peasants of Vendée are the ones who decided to pick up their pitch forks and their axes, and who went to war for their Church. They needed leaders and they coerced the noblemen of their province into leading them because they were trained army officers.

The Vendée war lasted nine months, from March through December 1793. On one side the "blues," soldiers in uniform with warfare weapons; on the other the "whites," with their wooden shoes, their wide-rimmed straw or felt hats, their everyday clothes. After the whites won a few battles, they replaced their pitch forks and their scythes and axes with pistols and sabers. They carried their ammunition in a large handkerchief and their rosary around their neck and their scapular over their heart. Poachers, being the best shots, were given the sharpshooter positions. The white army, to everyone's surprise, was successful during the first three months. Their first defeat was in Nantes on June 29, 1793. From that date on, they lost the territory they had gained, and most of their captains died in battle. By some error of strategy, 60,000 soldiers crossed the Loire River; only 5,000 returned in December. The Catholic army was destroyed, liquidated, and Westermann was able to make his most brilliant report to the Convention: "There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens. It died under our free saber, with its women and its children. I just buried it in its swamps and its forests. Following the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the horses' hooves, I murdered the women who will no longer give birth to scoundrels. I do not have a single prisoner on my conscience. I exterminated all."

The people of Vendée were exhausted, beaten, unable to fight back. The war was over. Instead of allowing their French compatriots to pick up the pieces, the men of the Revolutionary government in Paris gave orders to depopulate the whole province, to "purge the free land of France of its damned race," as General Beaufort put it. What had started as an atrocious civil war became a program of extermination. Not only the rebel soldiers were to be destroyed, but the whole population—farms, villages, crops. The program was legally organized and voted by the members of the Convention, written orders were given, daily reports received. Article 6 of the program reads: The Ministry of War will send all kinds of combustible material to burn down all the woods, thickets and bushes. Article 7: Forests will be cut down, rebels' hiding places destroyed, crops cut, cattle seized. Article 14: The rebels' belongings will become property of the government. A written order, dated February 8, 1794, reassures an unidentified "citizen general": "You complain you have not received, from the Committee, formal approbation for the measures you have taken. We think they are good and just. Exterminate the scoundrels to the last one; it is your duty."

Everybody knew what was happening in Véndee, and two centuries later those who "celebrate" the Revolution pretend not to know that what took place was a crime against humanity as evidenced by reports kept in archives. The means used to annihilate the whole region of Véndee were no longer means of warfare such as bayonets and bullets because they did not work fast enough. Means of collective extermination were used. First the chemical weapons: on November 1793 Carrier⁶ signed this order: "It is necessary to use extreme means. Poison the water springs, poison bread that you will abandon to the voracity of the miserable army of scoundrels. Kill with arsenic; it is less expensive and easier." Then came the famous drownings and the incendiary columns. Géneral Turreau⁷ ordered to set in flames anything that could burn and to suppress, at the same time, any living soul. According to the police officer, Gannet, who was an eye witness, General Amey ordered large ovens to be fired, and when they were good and hot he had women and children thrown in. Gannet adds that he questioned the procedure, but was told: "This is how the Republic wants to bake its bread." In Nantes, large boats equipped with valves were loaded with people and sunk in the middle of the Loire River. In Angers, human skins were used to make riding pants. The departmental archives of Angers ILI/27/3 states that "Pecquil, surgeon of the 4th Ardennes battalion, skinned 32 corpses, took them to Lomennier, a tanner at the Ponts Libres, to have them tanned, who refused, so they were taken to Prudhomme, a muffmaker.

These events are horrible!

Genocide is a word which was invented by a Polish Jew who went to the United States in 1943.

It is defined as the deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial or religious group. The Convention wanted to destroy the Vendée materially and spiritually, because of its attachment to Catholicism. From this point of view it is possible to use the term "genocide" when relating the horrors which took place in Vendée. Even if it sounds like an anachronism, it does apply.

A book discovered only in recent months in the archives of Nantes uses the word populidde. The War in Vendée and the System of Depopulation was written at the end of 1794 by Gracchus Babeuf,⁸ father of communism, who founded in France the socialist doctrine. Here is the key sentence: "The moment and the occasion have come to reveal an immense secret: Maximilien (Robespierre) and his Council had determined that a true regeneration of France could be obtained only through a new distribution of the territory and of the men occupying it." Babeuf, who denounced and condemned populicide, explains how the Vendée was chosen as a field of experimentation. What this book reveals sounds hardly credible; that is why it was kept hidden during two centuries.

Why should we remember the Vendée? Because thanks to the Vendéens we now have true religious freedom. If the Vendéens had not rebelled, the treaty of La Jaunage first, and then the Concordat signed by Napoleon and the Pope would not have re-established a certain freedom for the Catholic Church. Maybe the "Cult of Reason" or the "Supreme Being" would have pervaded Europe, there would have been no French priests, and missionaries would not have taken the Good Word to all parts of the world. Maybe there would not be an Archbishop Lefebvre fighting to preserve true Catholicism for us.

We must never forget the martyrs of Vendée.

Dr. Hilgar is Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coordinator of Our Lady of Victory Church, Las Vegas. She will begin a new series next month entitled "French Martyrs."

 

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1. He killed himself rather than waiting to be decapitated.

2. Another example of the modern press hiding the truth. The petit Larousse says that Westermann led the war in Vendée with "humanité." God's justice came quickly: Westermann was beheaded in 1794.

3. A family name; he was neither a Saint, nor Just!

4. Jean-Paul Rabaud-Saint-Etienne, born in Nimes in 1743 was a Calvinist minister. He died under the guillotine in 1793.

5. Priests who refused to swear the oath requested by the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy," a schismatic revolutionary act. Many priests died martyrs for refusing to swear it.

6. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, born in 1756, a regicide, was accused of having, among other crimes, shot children. Before being killed by the guillotine on December 16, 1794, he declared, "I am an innocent victim; I only executed the orders of the Committees."

7. Louis Turreau de Linieres, born in 1761, a regicide, survived the Revolution and claimed that it was a distant cousin of his, his homonym, who was the abominable chief of the infernal brigades. He died in 1797 under mysterious circumstances, perhaps assassination. His name is inscribed on the Arc of Triumph in Paris!

8. Francois-Emile, a.k.a. Gracchus Babeuf was born in 1760. Having conspired against the Directoire, he stabbed himself to avoid being killed by the guillotine in 1797.