The Unseen Terror
Page 25
Once on board the Deux-Associés, he was given eight days in irons, and died on 13 August.12
For nearly a century, what happened in the sea-roads of the île d’Aix off the coast of the Charente-Inférieure was kept as a local secret and away from the interest of outsiders. Memoirs had been published in Rome from 1796
onwards telling what had happened after the priests had been condemned to deportation in Guyana, but in order to achieve his Concordat with Pope Pius VII, First Consul Bonaparte thought it best ‘to throw a veil of silence over the persecutions of the previous time’.13 What had happened was hardly known at all until the Second Empire,14 and not until the early years of the twentieth century, when Abbé Lemonnier and others worked to have the priests recognized as martyrs, was it really public knowledge. Napoleon III needed the support of Catholic voters, so those who wrote on the subject were able to publish the information that the 245 priests who were buried on the île Madame came from the hulks moored off Rochefort.
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Priests
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Th
e Republican government’s intention in 1793 was to remove the priests from French soil altogether, but it was not decided how they should reach the Namibian desert or Guyana or how they should be treated once they arrived there. Eight hundred and twenty nine priests from more than a third of the new departments of France were brought to Rochefort. Many of them were subjected to premeditated humiliation during the stages of their journey.
Th
e Directory of the Allier sent 101 priests in winter time in two convoys, setting off with an interval of four days between them. One of the priests recalled what had happened when one of these convoys reached Limoges.15
A great number of donkeys and goats covered in vestments worn at mass advanced in a long fi le. A huge pig came at the end which had a mitre fas-tened on its head designating it as ‘Th
e Pope’. Th
e producer of this charivari
halted the carts as they arrived and ordered the priests to stand in two ranks among the animals to go in procession through the town with them. In the principal square they were halted round a scaff old with a guillotine on it. Th
e circle was opened up to let in gendarmes leading a refractory priest whom the town’s revolutionary tribunal had just condemned to death. He was executed there and then. Th
e executioner raised the head which he had
just cut off and said, ‘Th
e criminals whom you see deserve to be treated like
this one whom I have now executed. Which one do you want me to start with?’ Th
e crowd shouted, ‘Whichever one you like!’
Nothing further than this psychological torture happened that night and the priests reached Saintes on Christmas Eve, as we have seen, but they were not taken any further because nothing was ready at Rochefort. Th ey passed
cold nights in the unheated rooms of the Abbaye aux Dames, along with groups from other departments before they went on two days later. One of the priests with them from the Haute-Marne said that they travelled on carts, then on boats and then, at night and in the mud of the marshes, on foot. Th
e older men went into the water up to their knees, and fell into ditches from which the others pulled them out, frozen with fear and cold.
When they reached Rochefort, they were put on the ship Borée adapted for use as a hospital.
Rochefort had its committee of surveillance like everywhere else, and its revolutionary tribunal had been set up in the Saint-Charles Hospital. Th e
military commander of Rochefort was Captain Chevillard, who, with his elder brother, had been a shipwright involved in the construction of the Hermione 16 and in the drawing up of the list of grievances for the naval engineers of the town in 1789.17 He had never held a naval command, and yet was
172 Th
e Unseen Terror
now in charge of the port of Rochefort, taking up his post at the beginning of January 1794, just as the priests began to arrive.
While they waited for their fl oating prisons to be prepared, the priests were put into others made available in the town. One was a former gunpowder magazine called Saint-Maurice, and the refectory of the Capucin order in the town centre was adapted as another. Th
e diet was bread and water. As
more priests arrived, ships were made available. At fi rst there was the Borée, then the inaptly named Nourrice, and later the Bonhomme-Richard, already deprived of her masts.18
When they went on board, the deportees were subjected to the fi rst of many of the regular body searches in which they lost what possessions they still had, and what little money they may have been able to keep sown into their clothes. Whenever sailors found rosaries and crucifi xes, they ridiculed them. Most of their prayer books were taken. Soon there were punishments even for being seen to look as though they were praying.
In February 1794, Chevillard chose the Deux-Associés as suitable for holding 400 men as the navy minister had ordered him. Arrangements were made to take them on board and he set about fi nding a commander for the ship. He chose Citizen Laly, no more than an Enseigne de Vasseau in rank who had command of La Dédaigneuse, an armed sloop. He chose him for his revolutionary convictions and his impressive physique since he would be able to intimidate the priests. Laly was a foul-mouthed brute with a frightening expression on his face. He appointed subordinate offi
-
cers who, like him, were zealous Jacobins above anything else. Th e crew
was backed up by a hundred soldiers from the Army of the West.19
Th
e Deux-Associés was listed as a fl ute, which meant she was a requisitioned and armed merchant ship. She had been built as a slaver with a high and insurmountable barrier between the crew’s quarters astern and the slaves’ quarters forward which passed through all decks.20 Where the priests would be required to sleep was the infamous between decks ( entrepont), and they would be locked in each night.
Th
e argument about the destination of the deportees was still going on.21 Th
e representatives on mission in Rochefort wrote to the Committee of Public Safety to say that to take them to Madagascar would be too expensive, and recommended the north African coast between Cape Bogador and Cape Blanc22 ‘to make them do penance among the Moors for crimes which they have committed against the human race’. Th
ey added that this
step would also ‘have the merit of concealing from our enemies the route
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Priests
173
which this expedition ought to take’, since the presence of the British fl eet cruising off the Atlantic ports would prevent a passage to Guyana or to West Africa.
Chevillard reported to the navy minister on 10 April 1794 that 400
prisoners were already on board the Deux-Associés as ordered, but the fi rst number given ‘had increased to one more considerable’ so he intended to use the Washington, a vessel of 600 tons registered in La Rochelle as of the same type as the Deux-Associés, ‘to make a second expedition’. She had been lent without charge by Citizen Rémisy, a buyer of national property who would become a sub-prefect during the Empire. Chevillard seemed to think that a journey across the Atlantic was still feasible.
Two days later he was calling the 288 priests imprisoned on the Washington
‘ ces gaillards-là’, and recording all the money and valuables taken from each one of them. Th
e money was handed over to the Rochefort Municipality
after ten days. On 14 April, the Deux-Associés was moored off Fort Lupin and the fi rst deaths on board were recorded. On 16 May, Captain Gibert took command of the Washington and there were more body searches in quest of loot when the clergy disappeared on board her.
Chevillard asked offi
cials of the Ministry of Marine and Colonies where
the ships were going. Th
e answe
r was that the Washington and the Deux-
Associés were to ‘defend the Roads of Aix’. In other words, they were not going anywhere. Th
e two decrepit vessels made their way out of the Char-
ente estuary, hove to off the île d’Aix, dropped anchor, and stayed there.
* * *
Th
ere was a wide cross-section of all French churchmen, constitutional priests as well as refractory ones, confi ned on the two vessels.23 Th ere was
the whole range of cathedral canons, vicars-general, collegiate priests, chaplains of this or that, and vicars, among the secular clergy. Some were still in deacon’s orders, like Michel from Nantes, who provided a valuable source of information in his reminiscences. Th
ere were also monks and
friars representing all the orders to be found in France at the time. Several of these were not priests at all, but lay brothers in a bewildering variety of Franciscan orders: Capucins, Carmelites, Recollects, and many diff erent sorts of Benedictines.
Th
ere were representatives of recognizably noble families, like Labiche de Reignefort or de la Romagière, and they were usually members of cathedral
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e Unseen Terror
chapters or collègiales. Th
ere were sons of royal lawyers and parlementaires,
sons of members of the liberal professions, and a good few who were sons of tradesmen. It would be an oversimplifi cation to suppose that the Jacobins in charge of the Terror singled out their natural class enemies for persecution.
Yet, forgotten about as much as possible off the coast of the Charente-In-férieure, the priests could not get in the way of rationalism or Robespierre’s Supreme Being.
Two of the detainees, Michel and Masson, measured the living space in the Deux-Associés, and said in their reminiscences that the 409 deportees who slept in it had only 11 cubic feet each in which to spend the 14 or 15 hours of each night. Abbé de la Romagère, who survived to become bishop of Saint-Brieuc, had risked talking to members of the crew, and had been told that there had never been more than 300 slaves in this space.24
De la Romagère said that if anyone was seen talking to someone else and it seemed as if a plot was being made, the person was shot straight away.
Moreover, any ship’s offi
cers or sailors who were caught communicating
with the prisoners were punished according to the rigour of the law. Orders were given by the whistle, and the prisoners had to answer with a shout of recognition. Each evening, Captain Laly would order them all between decks for the night. Everyone moved in horror at this, ‘resembling anyone who senses the approach of a tomb in which he is going to be buried while still alive’. Th
ey all went below, and the offi
cers had drawn sabres ready to
infl ict wounds if the movement was not quick enough for them. Th e fi rst
night remained printed on the memory of Abbé Pierre-Joseph Rousseau, later a Canon of Limoges, for ever:
I had not even gone below when I found myself already suff ocated. An accumulation of fetid and burning breath which stopped me in my fi rst steps came out of the hold. A real eff ort was needed to go into that burning furnace . . . we were shut up in so cramped a space that our arms had to be against the bodies of our neighbours out of necessity.
‘We were like herrings in a box’, commented Labiche de Reignefort. To relieve themselves in the night they had to crawl across each other to fi nd a place for what was needed and the deck was soon wet and stinking all over.
Some became delirious, contracted illnesses, or died of asphyxiation. If they asked for help from a guard, he would only shout some insulting epithet, and add Vive la République! De la Romagère remembered that
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Priests
175
one night a fi re broke out and the offi
cers sent a soldier to see if the doors
of the hold were shut properly. Th
e lifeboats were ready for the crew if the
fi re took hold, but they would have left all of us to burn.
Another horror was that although the prisoners had been put below in order to sleep, they were kept awake by the sailors dancing on the deck above them and singing scurrilous songs in which the priests were insulted. Th is
version of a nautical ‘dance and skylark’ was probably ordered by Laly.
Food was no comfort to them. Supplies laid in for a long voyage were rancid, and the men who had lost their teeth found weevil-fi lled ship’s biscuit extremely diffi
cult to eat. Th
e drinking water was often putrid. Th
e
main virtue of the handouts of tobacco was that they were wrapped up in old newspapers, the only source of information for the detainees of what was happening in France and the war.
Humiliations were normal. Rats’ excrement had to be picked out from the food as the captives ate. Sailors urinated on the priests with foul comments, and on the stores of their food. Reignefort remembers someone being so hungry that he asked for some bits of bread from slops being taken to the two pigs kept by the foremast and, when he was refused, tried to eat whole mouthfuls of the fi lthy mixture.
Th
e clothes they had on were soon in rags and although they did their best to wash them in sea water, they were full of lice. Every now and again more body-searches were arranged: ‘the pretext of this was to inspect the cleanness of our living space, but the real purpose was almost always to rob us of part of what we had managed to keep’. Books were prime targets of the searches since these men of considerable culture were even more deprived without them. Th
ey were forbidden to speak to each other in
Latin for fear of conspiracy, and de la Romagère noticed a man in a blue coat with no uniform buttons who often went around among the priests listening to what was being said.25
* * *
Terror was an instrument of government accepted and put to use all over France by now, and Captain Laly used its methods to overawe his prisoners on the Deux-Associés. He chose a victim.
After a court-martial presided over by the fi rst lieutenant on 3 May 1794, Canon Antoine Roulhac of Limoges was sentenced to summary
176 Th
e Unseen Terror
execution on the basis of an overheard conversation with another prisoner.
He was tied to the foremast after all the other priests had been assembled on deck, and sacramental confession was refused. Th
en they shot him.26
After a few months, some of the prisoners were told by junior offi cers
that his execution was a random choice intended to frighten the others into obedience. Laly duped 17 of his prisoners into signing a petition to the government about their conditions, and then had them put in irons for it.
Captain Gibert tried to do the same on the Washington.
From mid-April, the dead were being taken ashore to be buried at Vergeroux, and at Forts Lupin and Vaseaux. Attempts were made to isolate the sick by putting them in a ship’s boat let out at a distance with a guard and a few volunteers from among the priests as nurses. Many of those who volunteered as nurses were very soon dead themselves in this typhus epidemic.
Frequent burials on shore caused rumours in the villages on the coast about what was really happening on the hulks. Letters written to Chevillard frightened him into sending two naval doctors on board the two ships on 11 July. Th
eir reports were dispassionate and, despite commenting on the fi lthiness of the ships, asserted that talk of maltreatment was exaggerated.27
Although the report might have allowed him to take no action, Chevillard had l’Indien prepared to take the prisoners off the Deux-Associés to allow her to be disinfected. Th
ey were to be taken to a tented hospital on the île
Madame, a national property confi scated from an emigré which had not yet been sold, re-nam
ed as the île Citoyenne.28 It was near the Charente estuary but easy enough to keep things secret.
Meanwhile the coup d’état of Th
ermidor took place. Robespierre and his
associates were dead, but the ship’s offi
cers did their best to keep the priests
from knowing about it. Th
ere was a slight relaxation of discipline, but little
real diff erence in the way the prisoners were treated.29
Th
ey had watched the tents go up on the île Citoyenne from the deck of the Deux-Associés. It was obvious that there were not enough of them. On 20 August, which the politically correct called 3 fructidor, the move to the island began for those who were ill. Th
e sick were carried by their fellow
prisoners who had volunteered to nurse them across the banks of mud which surround the island at low tide.
Th
e less seriously ill were put on board l’Indien. Th is ship was not
a former slave ship, and Captain Boivin and his fi rst lieutenant were completely diff erent in character from Laly of the Deux-Associés. Both of them were sensitive and intelligent, and they had some concern for their
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Priests
177
prisoners, even to the extent of having conversations with them during the short time the priests stayed on board l’Indien.
Th
e authorities in Rochefort realized the inadequacies of this makeshift hospital and on the next day sailors and other workmen arrived to make more tents available and build additional simple bunks. Th
ere were 160
places for the sick, the exact number which Doctor Béraud had recommended in his report. Th
e able-bodied among the priests spent their time
gathering seafood since that was better nourishment than had been taken by the sick for a long time. Crabs and mussels were gathered at low tide,30 and there were a few half ripe apples and some wild berries.
Death was still very frequent, and the typhus epidemic also broke out on the Washington. More than 50 died on board in October. Contemporary medicine could only touch this outbreak slowly. Most of the nursing volunteers succumbed to the disease. More than 150 bodies were buried in the sands in the 72 days of the hospital’s existence. Nourishment was minimal: the guards sold foodstuff s to the priests, but they charged as much as they could get. Th