of the Friends of the Constitution on 16 August 1790, with a nucleus of wealthy members, holding their meetings in the former Carmelites’ chapel, open to men and women in the same way as the Jacobin Club in Paris. Th
ey adopted a liberal economic programme, pressing for frequent markets, lower taxes, and increased consumer spending as a remedy for economic stagnation.
69
70 Th
e Unseen Terror
Th
e resources of the hinterland were no longer adequate for supplying the town with foodstuff s, since noble and bourgeois ship owners had found in the recent past that quick profi ts could be made from exporting fortifi ed wines and spirits and had laid out vineyards on land that had been arable. However, British and American protectionism, together with Spanish and Portuguese competition, had recently reduced that resource. An economy based on manning ships, administering diminishing colonies, refi ning sugar, curing leather, and tending vines had replaced natural land and water resources like cereal growing, fi shing, and salt production, and the administrators elected by the town’s 3,000 ‘active’ citizens in 1792 were no better equipped to put things right than their ancien régime predecessors had been.9
Th
e nobles’ position as traditionalist Catholics became untenable when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy became law in July 1790. Many either emigrated to join the Army of the Princes, or moved north to the Vendée when the time came to off er their military experience to the rebels there.
Th
ey often applied for passports for a spa near the frontier for health reasons, and then crossed frontiers as emigrés.10
At fi rst, the newly appointed Bishop Charles de Coucy had associated himself with moderate change by blessing the National Guard banners, but he was found among the 129 out of 136 ancien régime bishops regarded as having resigned after the refusal to take the Oath to the Constitution: their loyalties to the old order were too strong to allow them to compromise.11
Th
e greater part of the clergy in La Rochelle who refused the oath left France within 15 days as the law required, some acting as guardians to the children of the nobility on their journeys, and the majority going to Spain with their bishop.12
Th
is left an alliance of the high and middling bourgeoisie in charge in La Rochelle as economic distress worsened. Claudy Valin describes the town in the last months of international and civil peace as ‘a motley and unstable community’.13 War with Austria was declared in April 1792. When the Republic declared war on Great Britain in February 1793, the coast of the Charente-Inférieure became a naval war-zone. In March 1793, civil war began on the northern border of the department and dispossessed peasants would take up the cause of the nobles and the refractory clergy in the Vendée. Th
e patriots of La Rochelle found themselves living on the frontiers of the Republic.
* * *
La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town
71
Th
e National Convention’s call for a levy of 300,000 soldiers on 24 February 1793 is usually taken as the spark that set off overt Royalist and Catholic rebellion, but a violent stand was taken against the Republic well before the Convention’s decree mobilized the young men against it and allowed the wealthy bourgeoisie to pay for substitutes for their sons if they drew a bad number in the recruiting lottery. As soon as abbey lands and noble estates had been put up for sale and bought by townsmen living in places like Nantes and Niort, the tenant farmers of the so-called ‘Military Vendée’, from the Sèvre River northwards as far as the Loire, compared present conditions unfavourably with rule by resident abbots and nobles in the past.
In the course of the summer in 1792, Gabriel de Baudry d’Asson, seigneur of Brachin in the Commune of La Forêt-sur-Sèvre, led several thousand rioters to Chatillon-sur-Sèvre, driving out the Republican authorities who had implemented the revolutionary measures they so detested. Th ey
tried to do the same at Bressuire, but were repulsed. Th
e Departmental
Directory of Deux-Sèvres appealed to La Rochelle for military assistance and National Guard artillerymen were sent.14
In the villages around Bressuire, Republican offi
cials received threats
that prevented them from ejecting priests who refused the oath. In other places offi
cials were murdered for wearing their tricolour sashes, and their widows and orphans came to be sheltered at La Rochelle.15 Many non-juring priests did leave their parishes and made their way to England or the Channel Islands. Clergy who had taken the Oath to the Civil Constitution were intruded into the livings of those who had not, and ostracized by the peasants who had worked the land tenanted by their families for centuries.
When it was found that many ‘good priests’ had returned from exile and were hiding in remote places and woodland to minister to their congregations as before, the morale of the rebels was sustained against the Republic and the ‘Whites’ took on the ‘Blues’.
Collective rage on the part of country people who lived near Machecoul, a town inland from the Île de Noirmoutier, erupted on 10 March 1793, when, with improvised weapons and duck guns, a crowd of ‘about ten thousand’ converged to challenge fi ve gendarmes and two hundred National Guardsmen. In previous demonstrations, the rebel crowds had dispersed when the Republican troops fi red on them. But not this time. At Machecoul the protesters marching on the town in their clogs and armed with their duck guns were not deterred. Th
ey shouted, ‘Give us back our
good priests!’ and ‘ Vive le Roi!’ Th
eir slogans were punctuated by calls on
72 Th
e Unseen Terror
hunting horns. Th
e Republican defenders withdrew into the narrow streets
and opened fi re on them.
In the heat of the continuing attack something changed. Killing the defenders of Machecoul was no longer a crime for the crowd, but a necessity.
Fear of reprisals was no longer a consideration. Th
eir assault was not blind
and senseless, but a ‘targeted and cruel purifi cation’. Th e country people
were venting self-respecting fury on the prosperous town of 3,000 inhabitants. Th
ey targeted the constitutional curé, named (aptly for them) Le Tort, and members of the departmental directory, Jaubert and Maupassant, who were seen not as defenders of the law, but rather symbols of a monstrous usurpation of power called the Republic, responsible for the king’s death, the sale and purchase of stolen lands, and the persecution of lawful priests.
Th
e insurgents went into houses, ransacked provisions, and killed 20
citizens. Th
e attackers were at that point leaderless, but there was not such great social diff erence in the Military Vendée between the hobereaux nobles and their tenants as elsewhere in France. A former naval offi cer, the chevalier François-Athanase Charette, seigneur of Fonteclose, who had defended Queen Marie-Antoinette with his sword during the attack on the Tuileries Palace on 10 August in the previous year, would soon be persuaded to assume command.16
Reconciliation was impossible after events like this. A horror story was beginning which has been presented for 20 years in France by Reynald Secher as ‘Franco-French genocide’, a claim recently repeated without modifi cation in an American translation.17 Th
e importation of a term invented in the 1940s
for the Hitler holocaust might, however, be inappropriate to describe what happened.18 Forcefully expressed determination by the Republic to exterminate the Vendéans was preceded by the arrival of Republican widows and orphans seeking refuge in the Charente-Inférieure after the massacre of their husbands and fathers by the rebels. Th
ere was an enormous body count in the
Vendéan villages after General Turreau’s ‘columns from Hell’ had made their visitations, but the rebels had an
army and the intention to kill had not been confi ned to one side in the confl ict. Civil war might remain a better description of what occurred between the outbreak of violence in the Bressuirais in August 1792 and the negotiations for the Peace of La Jaunaye three and a half years later.
Nevertheless, Mark Levene has developed the idea that genocide has often in history been the reaction of nation states to non-conformist minority groups in their midst – such as gypsies, witches, Protestants, Jews, or Muslims – and
La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town
73
pursued Secher’s assertion convincingly. He argues that, at the time of the Jacobin supremacy in the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, the Vendéan rebels had rallied to the rejected monarchy and the redundant Church against the new nation state and put La Patrie in danger.
Th
is was seen as ‘collective treason’ and the Republic responded with ‘a policy agenda of unlimited elimination’. Th
ose who persisted in supporting the son
of the executed king and cried for the reinstatement of their refractory priests could expect no mercy from the ‘One and Indivisible Republic’.19
Once it was seen that the rebels had a clear intention to overthrow Republican rule in the Military Vendée, La Rochelle became the centre of operations for confronting them, and hostilities began.
* * *
General Verteuil was overall military commander in La Rochelle, and ordered General Louis-Henri-François de Marcé, a noble career offi cer aged
59, and currently in charge of the National Guard in Saintes,20 to prepare an attack on the rebels. Th
e government’s message was that support must
be given to the patriots in the Vendée and Deux-Sèvres who were being threatened by enemies of the Republic.
Most of the force being assembled in haste to invade the Vendée was made up of civilian volunteers from the National Guard – hardly more than a thousand men. Th
ey were going against a Vendéan force reckoned at
between seven and ten thousand. Republican offi
cials in the Vendée Depart-
ment told Marcé that loyal troops were under attack by up to 5,000 rebels, so he had no choice but to set off north with his little force of 1,200 men and 4 cannon on 14 March, with the representatives on mission, Niou21
and Carra, as his political supervisors. Th
e triumphalist Niou wrote from
Chantonnay to the National Convention on 17 March: ‘We will be the winners, of that we are sure.’ A Paris newspaper announced that Marcé ‘was going to re-establish communications between Nantes and La Rochelle’.
Th
e opposing forces met around La Guérinière, between the Petite Lay and the Vendronneau rivers on 19 March in the evening.22
After six hours of battle, Marcé’s National Guardsmen broke ranks and retreated to Saint-Vincent. Marcé found himself in a narrow defi le where a great number of his men were killed. He tried to carry out an orderly retreat but, at Saint-Philibert-du-Pont-Charrault near Chantonnay, the troops broke into headlong fl ight. Th
e details of what happened became
74 Th
e Unseen Terror
confused in the combatants’ memories, and were clarifi ed at Marcé’s subsequent trial under condemnatory pressure from the notorious public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville at the Paris revolutionary tribunal, whose closing speech impugned his competence as a military commander.23
Carra and Niou fl ed with the others and did not stop until three o’clock in the morning, when they reached Saint-Hermand. Some troops went on to reach La Rochelle by fi rst light, and what had happened became public knowledge there very quickly. Th
e cry of ‘ sauve qui peut!’ at Pont-Charrault
had fractured confi dence in Republican promises, and the representatives on mission had to arrange something quickly to stop themselves from being blamed for the disaster.
On 20 March, the General Council of the District of La Rochelle went into permanent session and the army’s retreat was confi rmed by Citizen Joseph-Auguste Crassous de Médeuil, its president since September 1792.
He had been present himself at Saint-Hermand when the run for home gathered momentum. He claimed that steps were needed to prevent public outcry. Marcé arrived back at nine o’clock and a message was received from the representative on mission charging him with either incompetence or treason, perhaps even colluding with the Vendéans in advance of his encoun-ter with them. Soon after he had presented himself in the council chamber, he surrendered his sword and was put under arrest. General Verteuil provided an escort of 30 men to prevent him from being lynched on his way to prison. Th
e council minutes were signed as midnight was striking.24 When fugitives from the battle trickled into La Rochelle in the early morning, wives and parents asked anxiously about their husbands and sons. Rumours refl ected a collective fear that the Vendéans might at any time invade the town. Fear was transformed into fi nding a focus for hatred.
* * *
Five months earlier, in October 1792, gendarmes from Oulmes in the Vendée had brought two Catholic priests before the administrators of the Department of Deux-Sèvres: Charles Cornuault, former curé of Noireterre, and Christophe Violleau, former curé of Chapelle Gaudin, who had refused to take the Oath to the Constitution. Th
ey had a bundle of certifi cates with
them, explaining why they had not yet gone abroad as the law required, and the offi
cials in their parishes had sent them to the Department Directory for a decision about what to do with them. Th
e departmental offi
cials
said there was no escape from the law and they sent them to prison in La
La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town
75
Rochelle until they could be deported to French Guyana.25 A month before the rout of Marcé’s force, the National Assembly had passed a new law off ering 100 livres to anyone denouncing a refractory priest still on French soil: any such must be put to death within 24 hours.
On the morning when the defeated troops were arriving back in La Rochelle, Joseph-Auguste Crassous de Médeuil, the hard-line Republican we have already met, ordered Cornuault and Violleau, as well as Hulé from Largeasse and Augeard from Noirlieu, to be brought out of prison at the Palais de Justice and put on board ship for the île de Ré. Th eir parishes had all been in the area of Bressuire in the north of the Deux-Sèvres Department, where the fi rst eruptions of rebellion took place in August 1792. In the confusion of that morning, many believed that these men were its instigators and responsible for the deaths of their relations two days before.26
Crassous was a man of apparent sophistication who allied himself with the more violent among the revolutionary leaders, a willing fellow-traveller with the succession of representatives on mission who took charge of the Charente-Inférieure before and during the offi
cial Terror.27
A company of six National Guardsmen escorted the priests, chained together, from the Palais de Justice to the quayside at midday. Joseph-Honoré Darbelet, a wig-maker and barber known as a prominent sans-culotte, was waiting under the clock tower, which opens from the arcaded streets on to the quayside of the Grand’rive. Darbelet gathered people around him and incited them against the four priests who would soon be coming into sight: ‘What a thing to see! Our brothers all killed, the carts full of wounded coming into La Rochelle! Th
e father cries for his son and the son for the
father who has been killed in the Avendée ( sic)!’28
A crowd of at least 400 was waiting on the quayside. Th
e tide was out,
and the ship that was to collect the priests could not come alongside. Th e
crowd assailed the ship’s boat with stones, the sailors had to row away again and there was no boat ready when the priests came through the arch.
Th
<
br /> e offi
cer in command of the escort said at the belated trial afterwards that he had been called an aristocrat because he did what he could to protect the four priests when sailors from ships in port, National Guardsmen off duty, and many women threw stones at his troop. Darbelet went behind the guard and hit the oldest of the priests as he walked slowly along, weighed down by his fetters and leaning on his stick. Two of the priests had bleeding heads by the time they reached the Tour de la Chaine, and the crowd was trying to push the other two off the quay into the mud.
76 Th
e Unseen Terror
Th
e guard intervened. A surgeon dressed the two priests’ wounds, but the riot continued until Maire Dély, along with the municipal offi cers and
the Justices of the Peace, arrived with ten National Guard cavalrymen. Th e
priests had been taken inside the guardroom at the side of the Tour de la Chaine near the harbour entrance. Th
e maire tried to negotiate with the
rioters, but members of the crowd shouted that these priests were the cause of their sons having to fi ght and die in the Vendée. Th
e order was inexpli-
cably given for drums to beat the general retreat, the ten cavalrymen drew back, and the six National Guardsmen lowered their weapons.
Th
e maire and the municipal offi
cers tried to form a human barrier
in front of the guardroom, but Darbelet, a woman, and a sailor slipped through their outstretched arms and went inside. Th
e offi
cials went away.
Th
e guardroom was a stone building with horizontal slits set high in the walls for windows. Th
e four priests inside were pushed back against
a camp bed. One of the guards saw Darbelet throw a knife and a hatchet on the bed and heard him say, ‘It’s all up with you now.’ Th e priests went
down on their knees. Another man came in and cut the throat of one of the priests with a knife edge attached to a long stick. Th
e dead man fell
forward, dragging the others to the ground with him because they were still chained together.
The Unseen Terror Page 11