The insurgency of the Vendée

Abstract

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.

Keywords::

• French Revolution
• brigandage
• guerrilla warfare
• civil war
• ideology
• just war
• representations of the enemy
• propaganda
• dehumanisation
• repression

Notes

^1. Muraise, ‘L'insurrection royaliste de l'Ouest’, 72–3.

^2. Quoted in Girard, Pourquoi la Vendée?, 11.

^3. Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire, 34.

^4. Tilly, The Vendée; Bois, Les paysans de l'Ouest; Tilly, ‘Analysis of a Counter-Revolution’; Petitfrère, ‘Origins of the Civil War in the Vendée’; Mitchell, ‘Resistance to the Revolution in Western France’.

^5. Petitfrère, Les Vendéens d'Anjou; Les bleus d'Anjou.

^6. Balzac, Les chouans.

^7. Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire: v.

^8. Martin, ‘Vendée, guerre de’, 502.

^9. Picaud-Monnerat, La petite guerre au XVIIIe siècle, 42.

^10. Turreau, Mémoires, 33.

^11. Ibid., 199.

^12. Peyrard, Les Jacobins de l'Ouest, 285.

^13. Martin, ‘Introduction’, 10.

^14. See Martin, La Vendée de la mémoire.

^15. Tilly, ‘Local conflicts in the Vendée’.

^16. Aulard, Recueil, 5: 98. For a more detailed discussion of republican discourse on the Vendée, see Tyson, ‘The role of Republican and patriote discourse’, 79.

^17. Aulard, Recueil, 4: 445.

^18. Dupuy, ‘Ignorance, fanatisme, et contre-révolution’, 38–9.

^19. Forrest, Déserteurs et insoumis, 138–68.

^20. Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Masculine Citizenship’, 6.

^21. Esdaile, Fighting Napoleon, 18.

^22. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 179–80.

^23. Rowe, ‘Civilians and Warfare during the French Revolutionary Wars’, 113.

^24. Secher, Le génocide franco-français, 206.

^25. Weber, ‘La stratégie de la terre brûlée’, 193.

^26. See especially Pierre Chaunu, who, in the introduction to the book by Reynald Secher, cited above, writes: ‘Cette guerre fut la plus atroce des guerres de religions et le premier génocide idéologique’. Secher, Le Génocide franco-français, 24.

^27. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle, 542.

^28. Lentz, L'effondrement du système napoléonien, 550–2.

^29. Jeney, Le Partisan, 1–2.

^30. ‘Petite guerre’, entry in L'Encyclopédie, 12: 466.

^31. Grandmaison, La petite guerre, 111.

^32. Jeney, Le Partisan, 46.

^33. Viguerie, ‘La Vendée et les Lumières’.

^34. Forrest, Alan. ‘The Ubiquitous Brigand’.

^35. Turreau, Mémoires, 31.

^36. Wahnich, ‘La logique de l'exclusion révolutionnaire’, 74.

^37. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, 202.

^38. Pagès, ‘Lettres de requis’, 155.

^39. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan, 1–26.

^40. Savary, Guerre des Vendéens, 1: 29.

^41. Forrest, Alan. ‘La guerre de l'Ouest’, 98.

^42. Coutansais, F. ‘La guerre des Géants vue par les Bleus’, 4.

^43. Amblard, ‘Les guerres de Vendée’, 66.

^44. Ibid.

^45. Letter from Feugier to his mother in Valence (Drôme); the letter is part of the private collection of M. Guy Bahuault, who was kind enough to allow me read and to use it.