ABSTRACT
Within the nationalist approach, three very different tendencies can be identified, notwithstanding their common aversion to the revolution, reinforced by manifest xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes. First, there is the traditionalist tendency, which regarded the revolution as satanic. This was essentially made up of ultramontane and legitimist intellectuals,
and formed a counter-revolutionary group which was not content simply to revive the old conspiracy theories (masonic, philosophic, Protestant and Jansenist) that had been developed at the time of the revolution by Abbé Barruel and his followers. In Manichean style, it compared an idealized view of a glorious, Catholic, monarchist France during the ancien régime with a fallen France resulting from the ‘disastrous’ revolution. This idealization of a mythical past took place on anniversaries with symbolic importance for the church in France, notably the fourteenth centenary in 1896 of the baptism of Clovis and France at Reims.2 The anniversary of 496 was also an opportunity to praise the ‘martyrs’ of the Vendée and condemn the ‘executioners’ of the revolution:
Despite the monsters of the Terror, France kept its altars. How magnificent our France was…with the cockade of the Sacred Heart at its side, saying the rosary and biting open cartridges…. How magnificent…with that peasant from Poitou, threatened by 20 bayonets, replying to the cries of his enemies, ‘Give yourself up!’, with the sublime cry from the soul, ‘Give me back my God!’. Yes, France demands that you give back its God. It wants no part of Robespierre’s ‘Supreme being’, nor M.Renan’s ‘category of the Ideal’.3
