Historial de la Vendée

 

This summer we spent three days visiting some of the sites of the war in the Vendée, using an airport hotel on the Nantes periphérique as our base.  Our first stop was the departmental museum, the Historial de la Vendée, which is situated about an hour's drive away, in the commune of Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne.

We stopped in a semi-deserted carpark on the edge of an area of parkland which featured several odd grassy hillocks.  The first two, we later found out, were ancient feudal mottes; the third was the roof of the eco-friendly, state-of-the-art museum complex.  You descend down some steps into a massive hall which resembles a multiplex cinema, with seven separate exhibition spaces corresponding to different periods of history, plus a shop, cafe and children's museum.

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The Historial was opened in 2006 at the substantial cost of 14 million euros for the museum building alone - though apparently this is only half the average cost of a new museum in France (see Dominique Poulot, 2011).  The architects were Plan 01, a collective of four Parisian firms. The museum is modelled, both physically and conceptually, on the ultramodern Canadian Museum of History in Quebec, with an emphasis on audiovisual and interactive technology. 

The term "Historial" is intended to combine "History" and "Memorial", the idea being that the museum should provide not just a historical narrative but a reflection on the development of collective memory.  This is of course particularly fraught for the war in the Vendée:  Les Lucs, where the museum is located, is the scene of a notorious massacre by Republican troops and the site of the Mémorial de la Vendée built in 1993 under the rightist inspiration of Philippe de Villiers.

What follows is a brief description of the section of the museum devoted to the war.  The lighting was very subdued so excuse the poor quality of the photographs!

The exhibition space is arranged chronologically through the Revolutionary years, with national events carefully related to local developments in the Vendée.  Inevitably, the displays are mostly text and maps, but there are some well-chosen contemporary publications and a few illustrative artifacts.

Start of the Revolution

This introductory section brought home to me something I had not really quite appreciated previously:  that "the Vendée" - both the administrative unit and the imaginative space - was itself a creation of the Revolution era.

In 1789 representatives to the Estates General were elected by the province of Poitou; of twenty-eight deputies, ten came from the future department of the Vendée.  The clerical deputies - including Ballard, curé of Poiré-sur-Velluire and Dillon, curé of Vieux-Pouzauges - were the first of the clergy to join the Third Estate at the start of the Revolution

The museum has various patriotic momentoes - a painted fan, a Revolutionary bonnet and a medal commemorating the fall of the Bastille.

In 1790 the Vendée came into being: 

"On 26th February 1790 the department of the Vendée, with 6 districts, 58 cantons and 317 communes, was created.  The Assembly debated the name.  "Occidental du Poitou" and "Deux-Lays" were considered.  Finally, the department was named after a tributary of the Sèvre-Niortaise which flows through Fontenay-le-Comte: the Vendée.

Fontenay, the capital of Bas-Poitou, became the capital of the new department.  The choice excited protests from other towns: Luçon, Sables d'Olonne, Challans, and even La-Roche-sur-Yon, which, though small, enjoyed a favourable position. The prefecture was also sited at Fontenay.  In this predominantly rural area, it was the lawyers of the towns who occupied the new administration and profited from the sale of clerical property.  The inhabitants of the bocage, who suffered economically because of the drought and the crisis in the textile industry, had to swallow their resentment."

The Church in the Vendée

In the kingdom as a whole, one priest in two took the oath to the Civil Constitution, but in the West the refusal was massive - as the map, taken from the Atlas de la Révolution française (ed. Langlois et al.), shows. 

When moves were made in 1791 to replace "les bons prêtres", the situation became insurrectional:  

"For the inhabitants of the Bocage, the curés were the only elite, whilst the King represented the State.  By deporting refractory priests, then on 21st January 1793 executing Louis XVI, the Revolution broke its last bonds with the artisans and peasants of the future insurrection in the Vendée."

A monstrance, made of cardboard belonged to the abbé Duguet in 1793:

The department "Vengé"

The Revolutionary authorities encouraged communes to change their names where they had religious or royal connotations. This demand was formalised by the decree of 25 Vendémiaire II (16th October 1793) - on 8th July 1814 Louis XVIII was to reverse name changes in 3,000 communes.

On 17 Brumaire II (7 November 1793) on the proposal of Merlin de Thionville, the Convention changed the name of the embattled department of the Vendée to the "department Vengé".  This name remained in use for several months during the Terror.

Start of the War in the Vendée

"The war originated in resistance to the Levée-en-masse in March 1793.  Similar unrest took place in other areas, notably in Brittany but - whether because the rising was less decisive or Republican troops more numerous - open resistance ended north of the Loire by the end of the month.  Discontent here was later to manifest itself as Chouannerie.

On 19th March the Convention declared the death penalty against the rebels and their sympathisers.  This ferocious law, which precluded all negotiation, was a political manoeuvre by Robespierre in his power struggle with the Girondins.

The insurgents demanded liberty.  They chose chiefs from their ranks like the colporter Cathelineau or the gamekeeper Stofflet.  They also knocked at the doors of local manors, not to find seigneurs but to furnish themselves with war leaders."

The war between March and October 1793

The main stages of the war are told through videos featuring readings from the contemporary diaries of the marquise de La Rochejaquelein and the Republican Mercier du Rocher.

A few surviving objects illustrate the weaponry and makeshift insignia of the Vendean army; a pike is inscribed with a dedication to Louis XVII; an embroidered sacred-heart once belonged to the Vendean leader Tite de Couhé de Lusigman.

A series of display boards give biographical details of the generals of the Vendée:  Charette, Bonchamps, D'Elbée, La Rochejaquelein.   The traditional emphasis on leaders is offset by the inclusion of a notice concerning an ordinary soldier: 

Jacques Poirier - rank-and-file soldier 1793.

 Jacques Poirier, a peddler from Saint-Laurent-sur Sèvre, was 51 years old.  A mature man among young men, he was also unusual in that he was able to write.  In 1814 he applied for a pension, which is how we know about his military experience.   

A modest and loyal man, he does not seem to have had any ideological motivation.  He joined the insurgents simply to oppose a a situation which he saw as unacceptable.  He was often placed on guard duty and would answer the tocsin to assemble for mass attacks.  He was personally very attached to his chosen leaders.  Thus, he seems typical of those occasional soldiers who returned home after each battle "to change their shirts".  He witnessed both the violence of battle and the surprising leniency with which prisoners were afterwards liberated.  Although he was involved in the fighting from the first, he did not participate in the virée de galerne beyond the Loire, and took up arms only when faced with the horrors of the infernal columns, for a few weeks at the end of 1794.

For further details, see La Maraîchine Normande, post of 05.09.2015 http://shenandoahdavis.canalblog.com/archives/2015/09/05/32582166.html

La Virée de Galerne

Ms memoirs of Mme de Sapinaud

This section of the display features further evocative video sequences and and readings from contemporary sources.  According to the information panel: 

"On 18th October 1793, some 80,000 Vendeans crossed the Loire during a period when the waters were low.  But where should they go?  

The initial plan was to try to obtain help from the English. Rushing north, the Vendeans were victorious over the Republicans at Entrammes on 27th October. 

However, on 15th November the port of Granville could not be taken. The army turned back and the long retreat followed, punctuated by terrible battles, at Dol on 21st November and Antrain the next day. Exhausted by the march, hungry, riddled with dysentery, the Grand Army now wanted only to return home. However, on 3rd-4th December they found themselves confronted by the walls of Angers, with the Loire in full flood.  They fled East, perhaps towards Paris, but at Le Mans, on 13th December at Le Mans suffered a bloody defeat.  They then turned West again, towards Brittany, where they were finally massacred in the Savenay marshes on 23rd December.  The estimated number of survivors was only 5,000.  The Vendée was defeated and no longer posed a threat to the Revolution. "

The dead of Le Mans, excavated in 2010-11 - as yet without permanent resting place

Republican repression 

Republican action in the area in 1794 and 95 is very carefully and creditably presented.  Whilst in no way denying the cruelty and violence, the presentation follows modern historians in limiting the personal responsibility of those involved.  Here are the information panels on Carrier in Nantes and on Turreau and the "Infernal Columns" .

The Drownings in Nantes 

"When the deputy Jean-Baptiste Carrier arrived in Nantes, he had received from Hérault-Séchelle the delegation of the the CPS, which pressed him to "purge Nantes".

"We will be humane", the Committee wrote to him, "when we are assured of victory". And it recommended to him to hide behind those who carried out the executions.

Having greeted the Revolution enthusiastically in 1789, Nantes had committed the double sin of failing to conquer the Vendeans and to have protested against the coup of 2nd June. 

Making use of a revolution committee put in place by his predecessors, and a company of active revolutionaries, Carrier began to rid himself of the partisans of the Revolution of 1789, the rich, 

sending them to the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris.  Then it was the turn of two consignments of 90 and 53 former priests who were loaded into boats and drowned in the Loire.  In the same way, 129 common criminals were drowned. As to the Vendean prisoners piled into the colonial Entrepot, there was no register kept; the total number drowned remains unknown.

Once his task was completed Carrier turned against the revolutionaries themselves.  Recalled to Paris, he took his place in the Convention, which he had kept informed of the drownings.  After the fall of Robespierre, a particular chain of circumstances led him before the tribunal.  He, and two of his accomplices, henceforth villified as monsters, were the only ones to pay with their lives, for having to establish at Nantes, a utopian city purged of all those who opposed the Revolution."

The Infernal Columns 

On 28th November 1793 Turreau became commander-in-chief of the Army of the West.  On his way from the Pyrenees he passed through Paris.  It seems he met with someone influential, since the minister of War, who was hitherto hostile, was suddenly very sollicitious towards him.

On 25th December he presented his plan to have the Vendée crossed from east to west by twelve "colonnes incendiaires".

On 16th January 1794, he asked the Committee of Public Safety whether he should kill women and children.  He received no response, and none when he asked again on two further occasions.  The infernal columns undertook the gratuitous and systematic extermination of the population of the Vendée; even patriot were killed who had returned to an area that they thought was pacified.

Did Turreau weaken?  The Convention sent out three deputies, and even a member of the Committee of Public Safety, who reported back on the massacre in progress of this "race mauvaise".

Implicated after Thermidor, then amnestied, Turreau appealed to the decree of 1st August and demanded to be judged.  Vindicated by a military tribunal, he was to die in his bed, showered with honours, in 1816.

Massacre at Les Lucs

"Massacres are seldom boasted about".  However, a MS "martyrology"  compiled by the priest Barbedette  at Les Lucs records the names of 564 victims of actions conducted by the divisions of General Cordelier on 28th February and 1st March 1793. They included few men of military age, but were mainly women, and 110 children under the age of eight.  The manuscript was rediscovered in about 1860, excavations were carried out, and a commemorative chapel built on the site of the former parish church of Le Petit-Luc.   In 1993 the Mémoral, which is located near the Historial, was inaugurated by Alexander Solzhenitzyn to commemorate all the victims of totalitarian regimes.

The end of the War

Relief by Simon-Louis Boizot showing the "Pacification of the Vendée" by General Hoche in 1796

Negotiations between Hoche and Charette led to the signing of the Treaty of La Jaunaie on 13th February 1795.  Charette took up arms again shortly afterwards but, according to the notice, his battle had now become political and he no longer enjoyed popular support. The capture of the "King of the Vendée" in the woods of La Chabotterie and his execution on 29th March 1796, signalled the final end of the War in the Vendée.

The museum has various exhibits relating to Charette including a copy of his death mask:

Peace refound

David 'd'Anger, Bust of Louis Marie de La Révellière-Lépeaux ,
 deputy to the Convention for the Vendée and  President of the Directory 1796-99.

"There remained the task of pacifying and reconstructing the region.

The death toll in the Vendée militaire was some 165,000, both combattants and victims of the  extermination policy. The countryside was no more than fields of ruins, where wolves prowled. All the same the former Revolutionaries did not relax their vigilance.  La Révellere-Lépeaux, member of the Directory, or Goupilleau, both natives of Montaignu, feared that the pacification would force them to render account.

On the part of the Vendeans, the temptation was to reject and turn in on onselves.  Some did not accept the Concordat and founded the Petite Eglise.  However, particularly under the impulsion of Louis-Marie Baudouin and Pierre Monnereau,  the Vendée began to reconstruct  its identity around Catholicism.  Napoleon would have the intelligence to recognise this."

References

Historial de Vendée official site

https://www.sitesculturels.vendee.fr/Historial-de-Vendee

There is a "Collections search" for the various departmental museums in the Vendée but I found it difficult to use. 

Trad'Histoire [Educational site]: Page on the Historial
http://www.tradhistoire.com/pages/pages-sorties-pedagogiques/pays-de-la-loire/historial-de-la-vendee.html

On the concepts behind the museum:

Dominique Poulot,  "Museums and history in contemporary France" Paper of 2011. [Available on Academia]

Presentation of the architectural design on Archello.com
https://archello.com/es/project/historial-de-la-vendee-museum