Europe: A History (144 page)
Intellectual opposition to revolutionary ideas was not fully formulated until after the Restoration. But nothing could be more hostile than the
Considérations sur la France
(1796) of the Savoyard magistrate Josèphe de Maistre (1753–1821), who took revolutionaries to be servants of Satan. He also opposed the strand of enlightened universalism which had found its way into revolutionary thought. He wrote that he had often met Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Russians—’But as for Man, I’ve never met one in my life.’ His contemporary, Antoine Rivarol (1753–1801), known as ‘le Comte de Rivarol’, who had written a famous discourse in praise of the French language, was forced to flee when he turned to counterrevolutionary pamphleteering. ‘One does not fire guns against ideas,’ he wrote.
Several French provinces remained staunchly royalist at heart, and repeatedly broke into open revolt. Royalist risings had to be suppressed even in Paris, notably on 13 Vendémiaire IV (1795). In some of the remoter departments, such as Le Gard, resistance continued right through to 1815.
29
The most determined resistance, however, was undoubtedly concentrated in the west. Popular fury had been rising there for several years, after an initially favourable reaction to the fall of the Ancien Régime. In 1792 many parishes supported the priests who refused to swear allegiance to the civil establishment. They were often rewarded by gangs of urban republicans who toured the countryside, smashing churches and assaulting the ‘refractories’. In 1793 the same villages were hardest hit by the introduction of universal male conscription. They were specially offended by the exemptions that were frequently granted to the sons of republican administrators and professionals: it seemed that Catholic peasants were being ordered to die for an atheist Republic which they had never wanted in the first place. In May 1792 Danton was informed of a plot supposedly being hatched by the Marquis de la Rouairie in Brittany. The plot was nipped in the bud; but it was the precursor of two interrelated instances of mass rebellion, the rising of the Vendèe and the wars of the Chouans, that were to grip the west for more than a decade.
The rising in the Vendèe engendered civil warfare that lasted for nearly three years. It broke out in March 1793 at St Florent-sur-Loire, but soon spread throughout the villages of the
bocage
. It was started by peasants such as J. Cathelineau, a hawker from Pin-en-Mauges, and J. N. Stofflet, a gamekeeper from Monlévrier, who had refused the draft; but it soon passed under the command of the local gentry—the Marquis de Bonchamps, the Marquis de Lescure, ‘Monsieur Henri’ de La Rochejacquelin, General Gigot d’Elbée, the Prince de Talmont. The ‘Royal and Catholic Army of Saints’ was armed with scythes, pitchforks, and fowling-pieces. It marched under a white standard spangled with lilies and the device of ‘Vive Louis XVII’. Its fighters wore a scapulary round their necks, together with the badge of the Sacred Heart and Cross in flames. They fought twenty-one pitched battles, triumphed on the bloody field of Cholet, captured Angers, laid siege to Nantes, and broke into the provinces of Maine and Anjou. Their desperate courage was caught in the orders of‘Monsieur Henri’:
Si j’avance, suivez-moi! Si je recule, tuez-moi! Si je meurs, vengez-moi!’
(If I advance, follow me! If I retreat, kill me! If I die, avenge me!)
In October 1793 the Vendeans embarked on their most ambitious and (as it proved) their most foolhardy gambit. Some 30,000 armed men, followed by several hundred thousand civilians of all ages, crossed the Loire and wended their way towards the coast of Normandy. Their destination was the little port of Granville, where they had been led to believe that a British fleet and an army of
émigrés
would be waiting to greet them. But they were cruelly deceived: Granville was sealed. Rochejacquelin’s attacks were beaten off; there was no sign of British ships. So the retreat began. As the columns straggled back along 120 miles of winter roads, they fell prey to every form of misfortune and violence. Refused entry to the towns, they had to fight every inch of the way. Fifteen thousand died in the streets of Le Mans. They perished of cold and hunger. They were mercilessly robbed, raped, and hunted down by roving Republican forces. Those who reached the Loire found the bridges blockaded and the boats burned. Their fighters were split up and killed. The defenceless civilians could then be massacred with impunity. The end came at Savenay near Nantes, two days before Christmas. General Westermann, a client of Danton, reported to the Convention:
The Vendeé is no more … I have buried it in the woods and marshes of Savenay … According to your orders, I have trampled their children beneath our horses’ feet; I have massacred their women, so they will no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all. The roads are sown with corpses. At Savenay, brigands are arriving all the time claiming to surrender, and we are shooting them non-stop… Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment.
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The retreat of the Vendeans is known as ‘la Virée de Galerne’. In the sheer scale of loss of life, it was not dissimilar to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
By then the heartland of the Vendèe was being harried by General Kléber and a Republican army transferred from the Rhine. Throughout 1794 the ‘infernal columns’ of the Republic wreaked hateful revenge on the rebel villages. Tens of thousands were shot, guillotined, burned in their barns or their churches. At the harbour of Rochefort, several thousand non-juror priests were slowly starved to death on the decks of prison hulks. At Angers, thousands of prisoners were shot out of hand. At Nantes, thousands more were systematically drowned. Later, to contain resistance, a huge military fortress was planted in the centre of the troubled region with a garrison of 20,000. (First named Napoléon-Vendèe when completed in 1808, it was renamed Bourbon-Vendée in 1815, and is now called Roche-sur-Yon.) Nearby, in the open fields, stands a cross to the memory of the last stand of the last commander of the Vendeans, the Chevalier de la Charette de la Contrie, who, expiring before the firing squad at Nantes, uttered one last cry of ‘Vive le Roi!’,
[NOYADES]
Thanks to the propaganda of the victorious RepubUc, ‘Vendéeism’ has been widely identified with peasant ignorance, religious superstition, and the rule of tyrannical priests. This picture is unfair. It is true that some of the Vendeans were
driven
in extremis
to forms of mystical martyrdom, and also to excesses of their own. But their rebellion was not irrational. They had been subjected to many real assaults and humiliations, including the fashion for public mockery of religion. In any other country of Europe, their devotion to their traditional way of life would have been widely admired. Their moral integrity was well illustrated when the dying Bonchamps pardoned all his 5,000 prisoners. Their tragedy was to have taken up arms during the phase of extreme Jacobin fanaticism. Their enemies did not hesitate to employ genocidal measures, and then to cover the victims with calumny. Napoleon called them ‘giants’. It has taken the best part of 200 years for France to come to terms with this terrible story of
populicide*
of
genocide franco-français.
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NOYADES
I
N
the spring of 1794, French Republican officers in Nantes had so many I rebels from the Vendèe to kill that they didn’t know how to do it. They had unleashed the ‘infernal columns’; they had starved and massacred their captives; and they had been shooting batches of prisoners by the thousand. But it was not enough. They then hit on the idea of drowning. Nantes was an Atlantic slave port; and a fleet of large, shallow hulks was to hand. By sinking a loaded hulk in the river at night, and then refloating it, they devised an efficient and inconspicuous system of reusable death chambers. These were the terrible
noyades
. Necessity proved the mother of invention in the technology of death.
1
A century and a half later, Nazi officers in occupied Poland faced a similar problem. They had so many Jews to kill that they couldn’t cope. They had unleashed the
Einsatzgruppen;
they had starved Jews in crowded ghettos: at Sobibór, they had driven their victims round the countryside in railway wagons packed with quicklime.
2
But it was not enough. Then they hit on gassing. Initial trials using carbon monoxide in mobile vans proved unsatisfactory. But early in 1941, experiments using capsules of Zyklon-B in sealed chambers, together with advice from the leading German designers of crematoria,
3
promised a vast increase in capacity. Within a year, the Nazi SS was able to embark on a programme of industrialized genocide in purpose-built facilities.
4
An eye-witness from the death-camp at Treblinka would later describe the process for interrogators at the Nuremberg Tribunal:
[RAJZMAN]
Transports arrived there every day; sometimes three, four or five trains filled exclusively with Jews. Immediately after their arrival, the people had to line up on the platform—men, women and children separately. They were forced to strip immediately … under the lashes of German whips. Then they were obliged to walk naked through the street to the gas chambers.
What did the Germans call that street?
Himmelfahrtstrasse [the way to heaven].
Please tell us, how long did a person live after arrival?
The whole process of undressing and the walk down to the gas chambers lasted for the men eight to ten minutes, and for the women some fifteen minutes, because the women had to have their hair shaved off….
Please tell us, what was the subsequent aspect of the station of Treblinka?
The Commander of the camp, Kurt Franz, built a first-class railroad station with signboards. The barracks where the clothing was stored had signs reading ‘Restaurant’, ‘Ticket Office’, ‘Telegraph’, and so forth …
A kind of make-believe station?… And tell us, how did the Germans behave when killing their victims?
They brought an aged woman with her [pregnant] daughter to this building. Several Germans came to watch the delivery … the grandmother begged to be killed. But of course, the newborn baby was killed first, then the child’s mother, and finally the grandmother.…
Tell us, witness, how many persons were exterminated in the camp on an average
,
daily
.
On an average, from ten to twelve thousand persons daily.
5
A view might conceivably be entertained that the Nazi gas-chambers reflected a ‘humane approach’, akin to that of a well-regulated abattoir. If the sub-humans had to die, it was better that they die quickly rather than in protracted agony. In practice, there is no evidence that Nazi logic knew any such considerations. The operation of the Nazi death-camps was characterised by totally heartless efficiency and gratuitous bestiality.
The ‘death-factory’ at Jasenovac in Croatia was operated by the Fascist Ustaša from 1942 to 1945. It became the object of intense propaganda in post-war Yugoslavia; and the official count of ‘700,000 victims, mainly Serbs’ has since been called into question.
6
But there can be little doubt about the total absence at Jasenovac both of mercy and of modern technology. Sensational stories abound. But shooting or gassing might have been regarded as a blessed reprieve from death by mass clubbings, by immersion in boiling cauldrons, or by decapitation with handsaws.
The ‘Chouanneries’ of 1793–1801 shared many of the basic motives of the Vendée rising; and they overlapped with it geographically. On the other hand, they were much more widespread, embracing the greater part of Brittany, Normandy, and Anjou; and, since they took to guerrilla warfare, they were much more prolonged. The Chouans took their name from the
chat-huant
or ‘catcalling’ which was the favourite means of communication between peasant lads in the woods. Their first recognized leader, Jean Cottereau, a ranger from St Ouen-des-Toits near Le Mans, took the sobriquet of ‘Jean Chouan’. To the Republican authorities they were simply ‘brigands’; but they sustained three lengthy campaigns against all the forces which the Republic could muster.
The first campaign (October 1793 to April 1795) was sparked off by the passage of the Vendeans through western Normandy, where 5,000 Chouans joined their ranks. It was eventually suspended by a truce whereby the Directory ordered an end to the prosecution of non-juror priests. The second campaign (June 1795 to April 1797) began with a daring raid on a republican arsenal at Pont-de-Buis in Brittany. It promised to become a war of regular armies when a royalist force was landed from British ships on the nearby Quiberon peninsula. But General Hoche proved more than equal to his task: after annihilating the landing force, he gradually pacified the countryside by combining religious toleration with ruthless military measures. The third campaign (September 1797 to July 1801) was provoked by the Directory’s decision to annul the electoral results in all the
départements
of the north and west where monarchist candidates had swept the board. It was marked by the renewed persecution of non-juror priests, and by a series of murderous local conflicts between Chouans and ‘Bleus’. In 1799, under Georges Cadoudal (1771–1804) of Kerleano in Morbihan, the insurgents were able to coordinate their activities and briefly to occupy several cities, including Redon, Le Mans, Nantes, and St Brieuc. But their successes came to an end with the Consulship of Napoleon, who followed a similar strategy to that of Hoche. General hostilities ceased after the religious settlement introduced by the Concordat of 1801; but local bands of rebels continued to roam the backwoods until Cadoudal was caught and executed in 1804.
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[CHOUAN]
No accurate account of the ‘Counter-Revolution’ can fail to take note of the rapidly shifting bench-marks. Constitutionalists who led the Revolution in 1789
were already counted among the ‘reactionaries’ by 1792. One of the most determined waves of resistance, which sparked insurrections in Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, and elsewhere in June 1793, was launched in support of the Girondins, who until recently had been the Jacobins’ closest partners. Even the sansculottes, who won the right to a vote and to cheap bread, turned in time against their Jacobin patrons. Bonaparte, who was seen to have betrayed both the Bourbons and the Republic, attracted the hatred of both ‘Whites’ and ‘Reds’. The explosion of an ‘infernal machine’ in Paris on 24 December 1800, which aimed to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the opera, was the work of royalist
émigrés
, but it was used to justify the execution of Jacobin and republican opponents. Any unsuccessful opponent could be condemned as ‘reactionary’,
[ROUGE]
