e minutes have the dry
comment: ‘decree conformed to’.7
Th
ere were other festivals in the period of the Directory as well, understandable in a climate of prevailing totalitarianism. Th
ere was a Festival
of Husbands, one of Victories, the public announcement of the deeds of local heroes, like Richardeau, a volunteer from Geay, wounded in battle at Wörms: ‘Th
e patrie gives you recognition’, said the president of the festival.
‘It comes by my lips to give you a mark of its generosity.’ Th ere were Festivals
of Liberty to keep the memory going of ‘the evils which the French people had suff ered under the reign of kings, and to sense how it is vital to preserve the liberty which they took by conquest’. Th
e oath against anarchy was
renewed from time to time, and a national festival was made of the funeral of General Hoche. When a temporary peace was made with the Austrians, there was a festival for it at the Tree of Liberty, with songs and dances, and candles put in the doors and the windows of the village houses again.8
Robespierre’s festival of the Supreme Being in Paris had been the last fl ing of his kind of Th
eism. So the Catholic Church started to reassert
itself, and the buildings became available to it again after an edict of toleration which amounted to a separation of Church and State. Th e excesses of
the period of de-Christianization disappeared, along with their symbols.
210 Th
e Unseen Terror
Th
e decision was made on 6 thermidor year IV (25 July 1796) to take down the fi ve red bonnets that had been placed on the church tower in April 1794 at a Festival of Liberty, ‘according to a decree from above’, and a speech was made by an unnamed person who was elected president of the assembly for it. Th
is is the record of what he said:
Citizens, We are going to free ourselves . . . Th
e tyranny which the Jacobins
exercised to the horror of all nations was indeed disastrous, and I believe we ought, following the example of all the places around us, to destroy all that could recall their reign to us. I propose, then, that we should make the fi ve red bonnets which are set up on the former church of this commune disappear.
Th
ey took a vote on it, and ‘it was done in an instant’. But the bonnets were national property: they had been substitutes for religious emblems. Th e
‘signs of assassinations and carnage’ as someone at the assembly labelled them were looking sorry for themselves on the grass outside the church.
Th
ey were handed over to the concierge’s daughter in the municipal offi ce
‘with a recommendation to use them for something other than what they had been before’. What had been badges of freedom were going to be used as polishing cloths in the commune’s meeting room. Th
e president of the
festival concluded, ‘Th
e red bonnets have been laid at the foot of the Tree of
Liberty. Th
e groaning of the people at the sight of them has been observed: they demanded that they be taken away with the full agreement of the meeting’, and the proceedings closed with redoubled cries of ‘Vive liberty!
Vive the Republic!’9
Urbain-Jacques-François-Marie Voisin turned up then, ‘a minister of the catholic cult’ and a survivor from all the clerical purges. In June 1798, Voisin declared to the municipal offi
cials of the canton that wanted to ‘exercise his
functions as a minister of the said cult at Saint-Saturnin’. Th ere had been a law
of 30 September 1795 on the policing of cults, and he wanted to act in conformity with it, and there was another one of 4 September 1797 that priests should take an oath to hate royalty and atheism alike. Voisin had already done that, so he said, and he swore that he was ‘attached to the liberty of the Republic’. Th
e council gave him a certifi cate of residence, and let him say Mass in Saint-Saturnin church. Th
ey also gave him a certifi cate of individu-
ality and recorded it in the council minutes so that they had a document to prevent any unacceptable priest from claiming to be him.10 Th is was necessary
because you never knew who was who now – the wearing of clerical dress had been forbidden for a long time and letters of ordination had been torn up.
He was 40 years old, fi ve feet tall, with a round and full face, chestnut hair,
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and eyebrows, brown eyes, a well-formed nose, a long forehead, and a round chin, and he lived in nearby Plassay. Th
e information that Voisin had been a
Recollect is crossed out in the register, but it means that he used to be a member of an order of Franciscans who had a house in the centre of Saintes.11
So the Temple of Reason was used from time to time as a church again four years before Napoleon’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII. A few constitutional priests and the congregations that supported them kept the Catholic cult in being. Voisin had no authority as a state functionary, and was a private individual, so he had to fend for himself for somewhere to live and something to eat.
Harbouring priests was no longer such a dangerous act – mainly by default.
Despite what has been said about the large number of constitutional priests who were found on the hulks of Rochefort, there were some who kept their heads down, did what the law required of them and re-emerged as parish priests at the Concordat. It is remarkable that there were three others besides Voisin found in close proximity in the canton of Port d’Envaux.
Joseph Merveilleux, who was taken on, as we have seen, as the steward of Panloy12 by Citizenness Grailly, had been the curé of Ranville since 1778, resigning on a pension of 800 francs a year on Christmas Day 1792, when he declared to the municipality there that he no longer wanted to exercise his priestly ministry. Two others, Fontenau and Hippeau, were living quietly at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud. Hippeau was appointed as primary school teacher at Port d’Envaux. All four made a declaration before an offi
-
cial in the commune in which they lived in these words:
that in my position as priest and ci-devant curé, I have taken as a functionary and as a citizen the oaths required at diff erent times by the law, and that in these documents ( titres) I have made use only of literal expressions, without allowing myself any amplifi cation, restriction or modifi cation whatever, declaring in addition that I have never retracted my oath. In trust of which I have signed, 3 frimaire year VI of the Republic One and Indivisible (23
November 1797).
Merveilleux signed his oath on 3 frimaire, the others two days afterwards.13 We can do no more than speculate how these men got on with their neighbours.
Revolutionary energy in the country as a whole was fl agging during the Directory, despite General Bonaparte’s ‘whiff of grapeshot’ against the royalists themselves outside the church of Saint-Roch in Paris, and the required oath against royalty was against anarchy as well, which meant against Jacobinism.14 Government seemed less revolutionary as victory against the various coalitions of European powers was indefi nitely postponed.
212 Th
e Unseen Terror
Festivals every ten days were the basic fodder of revolutionary education in the years before Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799.15 Starting on 1 October 1798, there were 57 of them.16 Th
e Tenth Day ( decadi) had
replaced Sunday in the time of the Terror, and neither Sunday nor the seven-day week would be put back until well into the Empire. Th e offi
cial
Terror had failed to deliver national solidarity. Th
e ten-day festivals were
a more humane approach to coercion, but all they succeeded in doing, however, was raising the level of apathy. Th
ey soon appear in the council
minutes as very boring occasions. Th
e third one degenerated into merely
giving notices like ‘the obligation of young people from 20 to 25 years assigned to naval service to enrol themselves’ or ‘Invitation to pay taxes due for years VII and VI’. It is not surprising that the only people in the temple of truth were the primary school teacher and her pupils, and four or fi ve other citizens. Nevertheless, Dr Chouet expressed his surprise at the lack of attendance, and invited the participants to let their fellow citizens know how interesting it would be for them to be present.
One tenth day report says that ‘several girls were knitting’ and that complaints were made about it. Th
e sixth occasion saw only 30 people present,
and by the time they reached the twelfth there were only a dozen there. Th e
village offi
cials, with the district offi
cials at their back, continued to express
surprise and gave an invitation to the Festival of the Punishment of the Last King. Lengthy lists of functionaries who were not present were drawn up in the minutes, and then signed by those who were. On the fourteenth festival there was no one present, but that was because the Charente was in fl ood and there were other fi sh to fry.17
For the Festival of the Sovereignty of the People on 30 ventôse year VII, which was also a ten-day festival, the walls of the Temple were covered in slogans like ‘Sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of the citizens’;
‘Th
e universality of French citizens is sovereign’; ‘No individual, no partial meeting of citizens is able to attribute sovereignty to itself ’; ‘No one can, without a legal delegation, exercise any authority nor fi ll any public function’; and so on. Obviously, there were several slogans too many. Th e citizens’ reaction must have been, at least behind their hands, ‘ Quelle horreur!’
At the festival, Citizen Mathieu Cochet, former sailor, as the oldest among the old men in the assembly, rose and gave a discourse to some new magistrates, and Citizen Etienne Yonnet, performing his functions as agent of the commune, replied in words of a slogan that was already up on the wall and there was no real need to say it again. We can feel the yawns two centuries later, especially since he went on to read the proclamation of the
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Directory on the elections and then the ten-day bulletin of laws. Did they know the words of the patriotic songs that were sung, and did they really utter enthusiastic cries of ‘ Vive la République’? Chouet, Constantin, and Richelot signed the minutes to say that they did.18
Weddings took place on some of the festivals, so perhaps a little happiness broke out now and again as brides and grooms said yes. Ten-day festivals continued to be held until 31 March 1800. Th
e themes of them
included the murder by Austrian soldiers of two of the French delegation at the Rastadt peace conference with Austria in April 1799,19 which involved the swearing of an oath of ‘implacable hatred for the atrocious house of Austria’, and vowing ‘the execration of its peoples and posterity’.
Th
e desertion of 19 conscripts, of whom two were found in the canton, was also used as a theme. Liberty was celebrated to extinction. Celebrating the seventh anniversary of the overthrow of monarchy on 10 August had possibilities as a crowd puller, and there was a festival to honour elderly people as more than mere survivors. An altar to Concorde was set up in the Temple for another one: oaths were taken, like: ‘I swear fi delity to the Republic and to the Constitution of Year III, and I swear to oppose with all my power the re-establishment of monarchy in France and of any kind of tyranny.’ Letters from Paris were read, like that in September 1799 from the minister of the Interior at the Festival of the Founding of the Republic, after which more oaths were taken to uphold the Constitution of year III. After only two months, that constitution was replaced by Napoleon’s Consulate, and it depends upon your point of view whether that turned into tyranny or not.
Th
e national tensions of the months before General Bonaparte’s coup of brumaire are refl ected locally in the statement Chouet made at a festival which announced that he had been ‘instructed that royalists had been expanding their infl uence over a period of time on the roads and at the gates of the canton’. He warned the citizens against these incendiary pamphlets and invited those who found them to send them to him. Several had already been handed to him, like the one entitled ‘Criminal trial, which ought to be held in 1799 at the Court of Cassation, of 25 million Frenchmen against an adventurer called Revolution, known by his crimes in the four parts of the world’. Another was an address from ‘Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, to the French’.
All such publications were to be burnt at the door of the Temple at the next festival. At the 53rd ten-day festival, an oath of fi delity to the new constitution of the Consulate was sworn by the members of the municipal administration of the canton,20 repeated individually by those named in the list; some did it
214 Th
e Unseen Terror
twice for diff erent functions. Th
e 56th festival was the platform for ‘the proc-
lamation of the Consuls of the Republic to the French people, of 17 nivôse’
and the minutes of the last decadi festival record the ominous entry of the Napoleonic era: ‘the decree of the Departmental prefect of 5 (nivôse) relating to the departure of the conscripts’.21
Even before that, in April 1799, when a national levy of 200,000 men was required by the National Directory, 35 conscripts were taken from the canton. Out of 16 fi rst-class recruits, 1 soon died, and 11 others were mentioned,
‘who presented themselves because the council decided to visit in their homes all who said they had infi rmities’. Th
ere were inspections at Taillebourg before
Dr Ballay, who was the military health offi
cer. ‘No one enrolled voluntarily.’
Th
e second-class recruits were written to with the news that they had only fi ve days to fi nd substitutes; otherwise they would have to leave for service. Th ey
might be able to dodge the wrath of those they knew on the council of the municipality, but the district and the department were still suitably scary.22
* * *
In these circumstances, primary schooling was most imperative after so many false starts and the perceived lack of integrity of the fi ve National Directors. Adults were losing interest in maintaining a shaky system by means of moral uplift every ten days in the Temple of Reason, so committed Republicans had to be found for the formation of the young.
Th
e primary school teacher ( instituteur) was the answer.
In April 1796, acting on a decree from the department, the Canton of Port d’Envaux estimated that four primary schools set up in Saint-Saturnin, Geay, Plassay, and Les Essards would be enough. In September 1796, the register gave Etienne Potirou’s name as the primary teacher at Plassay, ruling that he should be provided with the former curé’s house and garden. Th en in March
1798, Hippeau, primary teacher at Port d’Envaux, was provided with 50 francs to pay for his lodging for the second school term of year V and another 50 for the next one. Th
e Directory of the Canton appointed two of their number to
act as inspectors for the four schools. Two of the schools were in other places than fi rst planned. Plassay was up and running as they intended, so was that at Geay, but the others were at Port d’Envaux and La Touche in Crazannes.23
Th
en there was a spectacular village dispute. Citizen Seillès appeared in Port d’Envaux with a plan for a school of his own and his 14-year-old son as the teacher. Th
e Committee of Instruction at Saintes had approved
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the son as capable of teaching children
to read, write, and do sums. Seillès asked for the council of the canton to favour the project as well. Dr Chouet and three other worthies decided otherwise. Th
ey gave their reasons. Th
e
son was only 14 and could ‘not inspire a reasonable fear in his pupils, or have principles fi xed enough, or manners well enough approved, for the administration to guarantee them to the fathers of families in the canton’.
Seillès had a business as a candle maker and mercer, and had to be away from home from time to time, which the council thought was incompatible with running a school. Moreover, his conduct was not ‘that of a peaceful citizen and a friend of good order. His misdeeds at other times betrayed his real character’, it was said, and a search had been made in the minutes of the Municipality of La Rochelle of 15 October 1794 which revealed that ‘he had merited a severe punishment there’. In fact he had been found guilty of
‘seditious proposals tending to raise the people against the magistrates’.24
Meanwhile, the plans for where the schools were to be had changed again, and Pierre Fricaud was appointed as teacher at Ecurat. Th en on
24 February 1799, Seillès started waving about his son’s certifi cate from Saintes, but Etienne Yonnet’s daughter Marie-Claire was working at Port d’Envaux as Hippeau’s assistant. She was a recognized teacher, so the school was adequately staff ed.
Seillès continued his campaign into the next month and submitted a petition to the Departmental Directors, but they maintained that ‘his calumnious imputations and his mordant style suffi
ced to justify the idea
that had been conceived of his character’. His turbulence and his constant attempts to vilify the authorities of the canton ‘were opposed to lessons of reserve, of discretion, of civil tolerance and other social virtues which ought to make the basis of republican primary school teaching’.
At the session on the tenth day at Port d’Envaux, he tried to gain permission for his son to read out an article from a newspaper known to all, the Feuille rochelais, as proof that he could teach. However, ‘the time taken in the reading of offi
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