ABSTRACT
Yet, despite the desire to produce consensus on the meaning of Bicentenary, the celebrations provoked anger within certain quarters of French society. At the beginning of the year several royalist movements combined to form 'Anti-89'. They laid wreaths in the Place de Ia Concorde in Paris where Louis XVI was guillotined and said mass for the repose of the king's soul. One leading member, Abbe Aulagnier, denounced the Revolution as 'the negation of God and the triumph of rationalism'. In the same vein Philippe de Villiers, a right-wing opposition representative from the Vendee, condemned the celebrations in forthright terms. He characterised the brutal repression of the royalist-led peasant uprising, where an estimated 600,000 Bretons lost their lives, as nothing short of genocide. For de Villiers the Revolution was neither generous nor fraternal. Drawing on the historical research of Reynald Secher he condemned the Revolution as inherently brutal, a precursor of Hitler and Stalin, and he wrote to the president calling on him to remove the name of General Turreau, the man responsible for the 1793 punitive campaign in which one-quarter of Vendeens were killed, from the Arc de Triomphe. Significantly too the attacks on the Bicentenary did not just come from the right. The veteran left-wing commentator jacques juillard condemned Mitterrand's celebrations as highly selective. By focusing on the civil rights, freedom of worship for Protestants and jews, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Mitterrand wanted to portray these values as the very essence of the
Revolution. However, in doing so, juillard argued, he downplayed or ignored not only the questions of social equality but also the conflict between church and state, the regions and the centre, as weIl as the role of state power and the Terror.
