The Reign of Terror 1793–1794: Leading the Angry Mob and Murdering Political Rivals. Part 12: La Contre-Révolution
What happens to a society when a faction pushes their culture too far? What happens when the faction presents itself as righteous, and all others as enemies of the cause? What happens when the faction uses the journals and newspapers to broadcast and cram their ideologies down everyone’s throats until they give up their “antiquated” lifestyle? What happens when the cultural pendulum swings too far wide? What happens when you villainize people in order to further your cultural agenda? What happens when the government issues a mandate that opposes standards and conscience? What happens when the Revolution takes the Revolution too far?
Not everyone shared the Revolution’s enthusiasm, in fact many simply wanted to live their lives in peace, have a good harvest and raise a family. Some would find glory and excitement from going off to war, and some would never leave the town of their birth. Following the Great Fear in 1789, when the rural population liberated themselves from the nobility, western and southern French farmers found themselves content with the status quo. They removed the lingering feudalistic customs, they gained the opportunity to work on their own land, they were not required to pay taxes to the Catholic Church, and fear from invasion remained surprisingly low for these regions despite France’s war with Austria and Prussia. When the Duke of Brunswick delivered his manifesto in late July 1792, many young men from the western and southern provinces joined the National Guard ranks with enthusiasm to defend their homeland. The greatest flaw in the Revolution, which led to the Reign of Terror, is that Parisians believed the rural population held to the same ideals as the radical urban population. So, when the urban greed and hubris shifted to invading the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch, as well as declaring war on Britain in order to liberate other countries from their monarchs, the National Convention found itself baffled when the rural population rejected the movement. Many rural provinces did not understand why Paris needed young farmhands to invade a foreign country. With Louis XVI’s execution, France becoming a republic, and the victory at the Battle of Valmy, according to many rural provincials the Revolution achieved its goals. Despite the Convention’s enthusiasm and need for victory, the conscription order of 300,000 men, ages 18–25 on 24 February 1793 caused a major problem the Convention did not expect — counterrevolution.
The Vendée, the region in western France just south of the Loire River flourishing with open pastureland and a bocage labyrinth primarily created with hedgerows and trees, populated by simple farmers and artisans such as spinners and weavers. The towns were fairly small compared to others, which included a small bourgeois presence, and despite the anti-Catholic enlightened sentiment in Paris, religion played a significant role in these communities. In the Revolution’s first four years, the bourgeoisie became the loudest and most excited to spread the patriotic message, to the point of being obnoxious, even reprehensible. With the nobility and clergy removed from national and local politics, it was the bourgeoisie who quickly took the positions and unfortunately did nothing to benefit the peasants. By creating equality and inclusivity for themselves, the bourgeoisie created a role reversal of oppression when they took control, all in the spirit of democracy. The counterrevolution came as a surprise to those in Paris, the ones who believed their radical efforts to further the Revolution produced a better life for all, yet the urban Parisians never considered the fact that not all French people supported the rapid cultural change. As in the Vendée, peasants and bourgeoisie rarely cooperated before the Revolution, and with the nobility gone (the protectors of the peasants from the merchant class), matters only got worse.
The primary issue in the Vendée began three years prior to the counterrevolution, when the National Assembly issued the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790. Although the dominant religion in France, many Enlightenment influenced anti-church members in the National Constituent Assembly saw the Catholic Church as a major cause for the economic issues within the Third Estate. The Declaration of the Rights of Man deliberately avoided claiming the Catholic Church as the state church, which ultimately ended mandatory taxation on citizens regardless of religious beliefs; however, the state allowed landowners to raise taxes because the peasants no longer were required to pay taxes to the church. At first, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was widely cheered in the cities because it eliminated the peoples’ taxes, the clergy had to take an oath to the French government, and clergy members were elected by their laity, yet it was not found popular in the western countryside. Although Pope Pius VI objected to the Civil Constitution and wrote to Louis XVI that he should not approve, yet on the advice of avoiding a schism within the church, objection was the only accomplishment for the Pope on the matter. Monasteries, convents, and churches throughout France closed as their lands were sold to the bourgeoisie or the state. By August 1792, the Legislative Assembly passed a deportation law, sending priests who did not take the oath to South America’s French Guiana. Many local governments assisted these refractory priests in fleeing the country, yet many of those arrested in Paris did not receive the chance for deportation because they were hacked to pieces during the September Massacres. While refractory priests kept a presence in western France, those who were arrested and survived the September Massacres were first deported in April of 1793. The Revolution viewed these refractory priests as the primary instigators to the counterrevolution, which made it all the more necessary to rid France of this problem; however, executing them would only create martyrs. The Convention convinced themselves that deportation was the most humane act, which Robespierre received a letter from Citizen Duchesne stating, “the deportation of refractory priests to French Guiana would create an ideal society in the colony, where the deportees’ labor would contribute to its renewal” (Delnore 2007, 405).
While religion acted as the primary reason for the counterrevolution, the catalyst for violence occurred when the National Convention mandated a 300,000-man conscription in late February 1793. With the Convention now at war with Prussia, Austria, Britain, and the Dutch Republic, the conscription was necessary because many soldiers’ one-year commitment was about to end from last spring’s campaign. The Convention used the local authorities to issue the conscription at first, yet the laws for avoiding service left the local bourgeoisie gravely unprepared for the reaction. Not only was there a conscription put in place for the young farmhands to fight in a foreign war when they were needed most at home during harvest, but the bourgeoisie were exempt from conscription due to their position in public office. Author William Doyle (2002, 224) explains how the bourgeoisie exploited the laws when he writes, “The National Guard, who were merely these bourgeois and their friends in uniform, were deemed mobilized ‘on the spot’, which meant that they did not have to go to the front either, yet were the main force needed to compel others to go.”
Issuing a mandate is the easiest of tasks; enforcing a mandate will cause an array of emotions and reactions, especially when the enforcers are exempt from the rules. Many towns within the countryside dragged their feet when it came to volunteers. The larger cities already filled their quotas from previous years, which is why the Convention looked all the more towards the rural population. With rarely any volunteers in early March of 1793, local officials initiated voting or drawing lots to select the volunteers, yet these attempts only reminded the people of the Ancien Régime’s dreaded conscription laws. The initial forays in the Counterrevolution occurred on 11 March 1793 in a small town called Machecoul, where recruitment officers and national guardsmen arrived to enforce the conscription. According to author Jean-Clément Martin (1993, 41), roughly 6,000 townspeople surrounded the soldiers, mutilating as many as twenty-six on 11 March and as many as eighteen the next day. In the following days, peasants gathered en masse throughout western France to storm the patriot bourgeois homes and recruitment headquarters. On 13 March the revolutionary patriots (the Blues) gave no quarter to the counterrevolutionary rebels (the Whites) in the city of Nantes as they began killing any captured rebels. With the city of Cholet rebelling on 15 March and the Convention ordering the death of any captured rebel with a weapon on 19 March, this was not the beginning of a rebellion but a civil war. By no means was religion the initial reason for the counterrevolution, yet it soon became the rallying cry as the Whites started calling themselves the Catholic and Royal Army. Eventually donning the sacred heart patch and proclaiming, “We want our priests back! We are free. We do not want to go to war, but if we must die, let them kill us in our own homes and fields” (Tacket and Strick 2015, 260), the Vendée quickly gathered a force of 45,000 men.
Inside the National Convention, and throughout the streets of Paris, the city buzzed with two major problems in March 1793. News from the Vendée occupied most of the conversation in the Convention, but also the news from the Belgian front caused major concern. The Austrians initiated a new offensive on Aix-la-Chapelle, while the Prussians reasserted their dominance in Germany, forcing the French army to retreat from the German cities they captured in the autumn of 1792. On the cusp of invading the Dutch Republic, General Dumouriez was called back to regroup and face the invading Austrians who defeated him at Neerwinden and forcing the French to retreat from the Belgian front. Despite the military defeats in the first week of March, the Convention still believed they had the upper hand, and in fact declared war against Spain on 7 March in retaliation for Spain expelling the French ambassador. By the end of March 1793, France was at war with Austria, Prussia, Britain, the Dutch, Spain, and Russia (Britain convinced Russia to join on 25 March), as well as a civil war in the Vendée and a rebellion in occupied Belgium. Members within the convention, finally realizing the gravity of the situation, did what any radical politician would do — blame everyone else. With the disastrous news from the front, compounded with the news from the Vendée, both radical right- and left-wing politicians accused each other. And instead of admitting the mistake of biting off more than they could chew, they entrenched themselves far deeper into their stances and chose the more violent path, which Robespierre said in front of the Jacobin Club in the spring of 1793,
“I declare that we must not only exterminate all the rebels in the Vendée but all the rebels against humankind and the French people…There are only two parties, that of corrupt men and that of virtuous men. Do not distinguish men according to their fortune and their state, but according to their character. There are only two classes of men: the friends of liberty and equality, defenders of the oppressed, friends of the indigent and the sinful, rich, unjust men and tyrannical aristocracy. That is the division which exist in France” (McPhee 2012, 148–149).
The radical politician will always few themselves and their cause as the more righteous, completely disregarding secondary or even tertiary consequences, and to the extent of using a Machiavellian methods to achieve their desires. The mandate of 300,000 soldiers and the counterrevolution in the Vendée revealed that the Revolution had taken the Revolution too far, yet admitting their error is not what a radical politician is capable of doing. To ensure that France would commit not only to the mandate, but the necessity to whole heartedly buy into the revolutionary cause, the National Convention established a squad of radical left-wing politicians — The Committee of Public Safety.
References
Delnore, Allyson. 2007. “Robinson Crusoes in Chains: Punishment and Colonial Power Relations in French Deportee Writings, 1791–1848.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 3: 395–419.
Doyle, William. 2002. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. 2nd ed. New York: University of Oxford Press.
Martin, Jean-Clément. 1993. “Histroire et Polémique, les Massacre de Machecoul.” Annales Historiques de La Révolution Française, no. 291: 33–60.
McPhee, Peter, ed. 2012. Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life. Yale University Press.
Tackett, Timothy, and James E. Strick. 2015. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
