ABSTRACT
It was also, of course, an insurrection by a single region of France against the authority of the government, of the Revolution, and of the French nation. This is how it was seen by republicans and by the National Guards sent to repress it. It is how Michelet recorded it for future generations: ‘a people so strangely blinded and so bizarrely misled that they took up arms against the Revolution, their mother, against the security of the people, against themselves’.2 It was, moreover, of astonishing tenacity, a civil war that blazed in 1793-1794 and then
temporarily died down before rekindling under the Consulate in 1800, and again after the declaration of the Empire in 1804.3 For the inhabitants of the region it remained what it had been for their ancestors: a principled struggle against an authoritarian and centralist regime, a struggle for their liberties and traditions, a combat fanned by their priests and inspired by a simple and profound Christian faith. But we can legitimately challenge this rather sanitised version of the region’s history. The rebellion was fomented at the moment when the first great levy of troops was announced, the leve´e des 300,000, the first attempt by the Revolution to force the young into uniform and to compel local communities to part with their sons. This is not a matter of idealism or the principled response of a united population. And for a generation of historians like Paul Bois and Charles Tilly, the origins of the revolt are to be found in social and economic interests, in village conflicts over land and property.4 There was not a single Vendean response to the Revolution, but several, often deeply factious, responses. There were republicans as well as counter-revolutionaries in the west, communities riven by internal squabbles, villages and families torn apart by the war.5 Neighbour denounced neighbour, brother fought against brother as the Vende´e slid into the throes of a hateful civil war.
