The Unseen Terror

by Richard Ballard

  More rioters burst in. Th

  e men punched the priests while the women

  banged their heads on the ground. Darbelet cut a priest’s ear off and kept 7. La Rochelle: Tour de la Chaine, 21 March 1793.

  La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town

  77

  holding it up under women’s chins for the rest of the day. A sailor cut open the stomach of another priest with a razor.

  Th

  e murderers then left the guardroom with their clothes and hands covered in blood. One of the women with them shouted, ‘Th

  at was better

  than holy water’, while another said, ‘Look at these bougres: We’ve fi nished them off !’ Th

  e woman with Darbelet went away with some grey hair on a

  knife.

  Th

  e corpses were thrown on the quayside, where the women set about them with clubs. One priest had spasms in his death throes and vomited blood; a man plunged his sabre into his chest three times before he cut off his head and took it away. Another man called Dionnet stood on a corpse while he turned out the dead man’s pockets to fi nd a rosary and a crucifi x which he waved above his head in derision. Some ragged boys took away the shoes from the bodies, together with the breeches and stockings, and the biggest, a boy with one eye, took the shirts. A woman held up a piece of fl esh and said, ‘If I had his heart, I would eat it!’

  Th

  e remaining three heads were cut off and carried high on pitchforks.

  One priest’s private parts were carried on a stick and then on the point of a sabre passed from hand to hand while men and women, shouting obscenities, struggled to get hold of it. Two corpses were attached behind a sledge drawn by two horses and dragged across the cobbles.

  Th

  is ghastly cortège went up through the Saint-Barthélémy section to the cathedral steps and the bodies were laid out there. Th

  e National Guard

  was drawn up on the Place d’Armes (now Place Verdun) in front of the cathedral, and Carra, the representative on mission, was haranguing the crowd, promising to send General Marcé before the revolutionary tribunal in Paris and bring him back to La Rochelle to be guillotined. His charge against Marcé was that he was in conspiracy with General Dumouriez, who had been defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden three days before. Carra was caught up in the popular emotion as much as Darbelet, but had improvised a cynical response to the panic of untrained troops who had fl ed home.

  Afterwards, a district administrator called Griff on arrested the murderers still parading with the priests’ heads held on high. After a long argument, the heads were put into a sack, laid with the bodies on the sledge again and taken to the Saint-Barthélémy cemetery for burial. Th e death

  certifi cate said, ‘ prètres morts, victimes d’une emotion populaire’ . 29 Th e two

  other bodies left on the quay after being mutilated were buried in the Saint-Jean cemetery.

  78 Th

  e Unseen Terror

  Th

  e violence had not yet fi nished. Th

  e next day, 22 March, a batch of

  Vendéan prisoners were sent on a sloop from Saint-Martin-de-Ré to La Rochelle. Th

  ey included three priests, Jacques-Pierre Douche and André

  Verge, from Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, and the Abbé Malerbeau, vicar of Aytré, just south of La Rochelle (and so not a Vendéan). Th ere were also

  some nobles and some women, and they were escorted by six grenadiers.

  When their sloop came alongside, there was a mob waiting for it. Some sailors armed with knives went across moored vessels to reach it. As the barber Darbelet went from boat to boat, he shouted, ‘I’m going on my second expedition!’ A young sailor from the île de Ré whose name was Billiard, seeing a priest still dressed in his cassock (against the law for nearly a year now), shouted, ‘Look, there’s a good meal . . . We are going to do the same to this lot as we did to the others yesterday!’

  One of the grenadiers ran to alert the town council. Th

  e priests went

  below, heard each other’s confessions and gave each other absolution.

  General Th

  ouron, the commander of the National Guard, arrived with

  members of the District Directory wearing their tricolour sashes. Th ouron

  announced that he was going to fi re on the ship once the escort of grenadiers had got ashore. One of the grenadiers dragged the Abbé Malerbeau to safety – he was dressed in layman’s clothes – and told the rioters that he was a passenger.

  Th

  e municipal offi

  cers watched the killing begin. Both of the priests from

  Saint-Laurent were hacked to pieces on the quay. Th

  e body parts were shared

  out among the murderers, who even argued about who would have the larger pieces. Th

  e mutilated corpses of the priests and the nobles were left lying there for some hours until they were buried in the Saint-Nicolas cemetery.

  * * *

  Over two years later, at the request of one of the victims’ family, a man from Saintes who called himself a legal offi

  cer, but who was really an actor from

  the theatre in the town, Marie-Joseph Laporte, went to Pierre-François Heard, the public prosecutor in Saintes, and denounced two of the leaders in the fi rst day’s events. Laporte was a royalist ‘suspect’ who had been interned at Brouage, and Lassoutière, named in the denunciation as the source of information, was his father-in-law. Th

  is denunciation is the fi rst

  document in the relevant dossier in the departmental archives, and a literal translation is as follows:

  La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town

  79

  I, the undersigned, André-Marie Joseph Laporte, legal usher, denounce the man named Darbelet, wig-maker and barber living on the port at La Rochelle, and the man named Guionnet (or Dionnet), refurbisher of mattresses and wool, to the public prosecutor of the criminal tribunal of the Charente-Inférieure, the fi rst for having mutilated and cut off the organs of generation of a priest who was still alive in the murder that took place at La Rochelle on [the date is not written], and the second for having carried this priest’s testicles around. Th

  is fact was related to me at a restaurant at Saintes

  in the presence of Citizen Lassoutière père, who is a citizen of the rank of commissioner of the Commune of La Rochelle, who told me that the witness had been Citizen de Bragian, living on the harbour at La Rochelle, who told him that he had seen this abominable crime committed by Darbelet.

  At Saintes, 29 messidor, year 3 of the republic (17th July 1795).30

  Judge Charles-André Bessat interrogated 68 witnesses, although only three others, besides Darbelet and Guionnet, were named in the documents as being actually prosecuted: Olivier Juillet, Jean Pinard, and Marie-Anne Marsillat, the widow of a butcher known as Faillofaix.

  Judge Bessat’s report begins with his examination of the carpenter, Olivier Juillet, who immediately exculpated himself.

  On 21 March I was at Saint Xandre (a village outside the town), and on 22 March I was under arms because the general alert had been sounded, so I could not have been one of the authors of the murder of the priests.

  He also remarked that the tide was out when they wanted to put them on board ship.

  Th

  e next to be interrogated was the blacksmith Jean Pinard, who had been born at Crazannes in the canton of Port d’Envaux. He denied being in the guardroom where the murder took place, and said the guards would bear him out. Th

  en it was Darbelet’s turn:

  I was in the crowd only after the time the murder took place . . . I was to be found there and I saw the mutilation, and took away an ear which I carried about with me. I saw for myself that most of the people who had perpetrated the murder in question were not from La Rochelle, but foreigners, such as people from Hamburg, or Danes, Swedes, privateer
s from diff erent places, and the remains of the army back from the Vendée after the rout under Marsais ( sic). I also say that the massacre would not have happened if it had not been arranged for the priests to be let out of prison at that time under pretext of putting them on board ship while the tide was out . . . I assure you that I took no part in it.

  80 Th

  e Unseen Terror

  Guionnet was questioned next, and played a similar tune. Th en Bessat

  interrogated the widow Faillofax. Th

  is is what she said:

  On the day of the riot, after hearing the general alert sounded, curiosity made me go and see what it was all about. I went down to the port. I stood on a corner and I saw the man Dionnet who had a rosary in his hand and held it up for us to see.

  She asserted her innocence.

  All the accused had the newly established right to choose their own defence counsel, and they chose a man called Forget, whose surname is the same as that of one of the priests in Saintes, a teacher at the former Jesuit college there, who had taken the oath.

  At the same time as this enquiry was being held, the persecution of priests who had been released after enduring the most appalling 11 months of detention on rotting ships off Rochefort instead of being transported to Guyana was beginning again.31 By January 1796, once more clergy from all over France were being taken to hulks and prisons on islands near La Rochelle. Moreover, also at the same time, an amnesty was given to all who had taken part in ‘revolutionary deeds’. It was in these conditions that the tribunal at Saintes was considering its evidence.

  On 17 pluviôse year IV (6 February 1796), the jury at the Saintes tribunal declared

  that Darbelet had taken part in a crime, but without premeditation, and that it was excusable by reason of violent provocation. Guionnet and Juillet had not participated in the crime. Th

  e widow Faillofaix had participated in

  the massacre but unconsciously and without criminal intent.

  All the defendants were acquitted and set free, except Darbelet, who was sentenced to ten years in irons, although not executed as a murderer.

  Two months later, Darbelet sent a meticulously written three-page letter on blue paper from the prison he called his cachote ténébreux at Saintes to claim the benefi t of the amnesty of 13 brumaire:

  Th

  ose who pursue me are not Republicans. I am one of the founders of the Republic . . . Th

  e revolt that took place at La Rochelle was against the refractory priests and not against property of residents or the safety of the Republic . . . If they had not let the priests out of the prison at the same time as the arrival of the army, they would not have been massacred: but it is proof that they freed them for popular vengeance inasmuch as they knew the tide was out . . . why do they remain unpunished when they were the chief assassins?

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  81

  Darbelet eloquently claimed that he had been fi tted up:

  Th

  ey want to throw the blame on innocent people to whitewash themselves from their penalties, and they have made me pay their debts, and I have been prosecuted by the priests’ relations who certainly have greased palms at the tribunal to have me declared guilty.

  His appeal was rejected on 13 May 1796. On 26 May the Court of Cassation also turned it down (which ought to have prevented the appeal going any further) on the grounds that Darbelet had committed murder, and murder could not be regarded as a revolutionary deed under the terms of the amnesty of 13 brumaire.

  Even so the aff air was not fi nished because Darbelet’s wife again submitted a petition to claim amnesty on 8 January 1797. Th

  is time it worked,

  and on 13 January the criminal tribunal at Saintes ‘without fear of having contradicted itself . . . considering that the murderers of the said priests of which the said Joseph-Honoré Darbelet has been declared an accomplice are, by reason of the circumstances, deeds purely relative to the revolution, orders the setting at liberty of the above-mentioned’.

  Five judges signed this three-page document. One of them was Lemercier, who, less than three years later, would help Bonaparte to power. Th e compliance of another who signed is really astonishing: the Catholic royalist François-Guillaume Marillet, who in his secret journal in Saintes from 1789 to 1795

  had denounced all the Republicans as villains ( scélerats), added his signature, surrounded by decorative fl ourishes, to Darbelet’s release document.32 Th e law

  was the law and, elected as a judge, he had to decide in conformity with it. Th e

  secret defender of ‘our poor priests’ could do nothing else but set at liberty the man who had been convicted for the murder of at least one of them.

  Darbelet seemed to know who they were when he spoke about them, and they were declared innocent by implication along with him. Carra had been guillotined already as a Girondin sympathizer, but others of them continued to benefi t from the church property they had bought. Niou and Crassous held offi

  ce in the Consulate and Empire, though they were exiled for voting for Louis XVI’s execution when the monarchy was restored after Waterloo.

  What looked like a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling had been the implementation of government policy. Th

  at policy became more sys-

  tematic in the Charente-Inférieure under the control of the next representatives, Joseph-Marie Lequinio and Joseph-François Laignelot, and was the application of Terror as overt policy to prevent the Vendée rebellion spreading south. Crassous threw in his lot with them too.

  82 Th

  e Unseen Terror

  Joseph-Auguste Crassous was in a position to know where the four priests murdered on the fi rst day had come from, and would have been acquainted with the characters of prominent sans-culottes like Darbelet who, perhaps, supplied his wigs and held forth on political issues while giving him a shave. Perhaps, also, it was Crassous who sold the idea of making the six priests scapegoats to the people in authority over him.

  * * *

  Th

  e insurgents in the Vendée gained in confi dence and transformed themselves into the Catholic and Royal Army. Th

  e Republican government

  recognized that they were counter-revolutionaries.33 La Rochelle had to be ready to fi ght on two fronts: across the Sèvre River and on the coast-line, where the naval forces of Great Britain, Holland, and Spain might invade at any time.34 Th

  e town became a transit camp by the end of March

  1793, when troops had come from Libourne, Bourg, Bordeaux, and Blaye, swelling the town’s population by nearly 1,800 men needing food and lodging.35

  After the insurgents took Fontenay-le-Comte on 21 May, the border with the Military Vendée coincided with the border of the Charente-In-férieure. Instead of being, as the Bas-Poitou had been in time past, the granary for La Rochelle, it had become enemy country.36

  Vendéan infi ltrators were soon apprehended and guillotined in the Place d’Armes. Suspicion automatically fell upon noble families who were still resident in the Saint-Barthélémy section and whose sons had gone abroad as emigrés, and there were successful searches for weapons. All emigrés’ fathers, brothers, and male children above the age of 14 were taken to prison in Rochefort as hostages for their own good behaviour. Emigrés’

  mothers, wives, and daughters were kept under house arrest. Th e department’s decree was carried out to the letter by Crassous. Offi cial policy

  regarded emigrés as subject to ‘civil death’ and their families infected with the cause of it.37

  Th

  e patriots feared that the atrocities perpetrated upon Republicans across the Sèvre River could be repeated in La Rochelle. So the mobilization of La Rochelle and the communes around was total, and the Jacobin Club was enthusiastically supported by the majority of citizens. Recruitment for regular military units and the navy was substantial. Youths too young to serve with the colours joined th
e Compagnie de l’Éspérance de la patrie,38,39

  La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town

  83

  and Republican women played a vital rôle in the idealization of La Patrie.

  Not only did they act as nurses for the wounded soldiers and those with contagious diseases in the hospitals, but they personally dedicated their own sons to become soldiers. Children were being taught to shout ‘Live free or die!’ Th

  e Jacobin club in La Rochelle, as at Saintes, was open to women, and they played their part in keeping the military adrenalin running.40

  Rumours multiplied, like the one that said the rebels had poisoned the waters of the Grand Lay River, and that when it fl owed into the sea the shellfi sh were rendered unfi t to eat. So people were punished for spreading unfounded reports.41

  Sans-culottes policed the streets and the murderers of the priests on 21

  and 22 March were left without being prosecuted. Th

  e elections for the

  National Convention in the autumn of 1792 had included the petty bourgeoisie in the franchise, so they could not be denied access to the town’s general council, and they had been politicized as Jacobins. Smaller-scale businessmen – like the shopkeepers Jacques Fillot and Pierre Quinement, the plumber Michel Danglade, the printer and publisher Louis Chauvet, and the Protestant Pastor Bétrine – sat on the council now.42

  Th

  e former, wealthier administrators were subject to intense criticism.

  Maire Dély was suspected of federalism for not adding ‘One and Indivisible’ when he called out ‘Long live the Republic!’ On 10 August, Pierre Th

  ouron, the shipowner in charge of the National Guard unit since 1791, was regarded as suspect, despite what he had done when the priests were murdered on 22 March, because he had not had his troops remove the fl eur-de-lys emblems from their uniforms. Th

  e Jacobins also claimed that

  the Vendéan prisoners clamped like potatoes in the Tour de la Lanterne at the harbour entrance had been shouting royalist slogans without being stopped by Th

  ouron’s men, and that no one had taken steps to stop posters being put up in favour of Louis XVII on the night after the commemora-tion of the fall of the monarchy.43