[No Date or Place Given.]
It appears, that the greater part of the inhabitants of Poitou, Anjou, and the Southern divisions of Brittany, now distinguished by the general appellation of the people of La Vendee, (though they include those of several other departments,) never either comprehended or adopted the principles of the French revolution. Many different causes contributed to increase their original aversion from the new system, and to give their resistance that consistency, which has since become so formidable. A partiality for their ancient customs, an attachment to their Noblesse, and a deference for their Priests, are said to characterize the brave and simple natives of La Vendee. Hence republican writers, with self-complacent decision, always treat this war as the effect of ignorance, slavery, and superstition.
The modern reformist, who calls the labourer from the plough, and the artizan from the loom, to make them statesmen or philosophers, and who has invaded the abodes of contented industry with the rights of man, that our fields may be cultivated, and our garments wove, by metaphysicians, will readily assent to this opinion.—Yet a more enlightened and liberal philosophy may be tempted to examine how far the Vendeans have really merited the contempt and persecution of which they have been the objects. By the confession of the republicans themselves, they are religious, hospitable, and frugal, humane and merciful towards their enemies, and easily persuaded to whatever is just and reasonable.
I do not pretend to combat the narrow prejudices of those who suppose the worth or happiness of mankind compatible but with one set of opinions; and who, confounding the adventitious with the essential, appreciate only book learning: but surely, qualities which imply a knowledge of what is due both to God and man, and information sufficient to yield to what is right or rational, are not descriptive of barbarians; or at least, we may say with Phyrrhus, "there is nothing barbarous in their discipline."*
*"The husbandmen of this country are in general men of simple manners, naturally well inclined, or at least not addicted to serious vices." Lequinio, Guerre de La Vendee. Dubois de Crance, speaking of the inhabitants of La Vendee, says, "They are the most hospitable people I ever saw, and always disposed to listen to what is just and reasonable, if proffered with mildness and humanity." "This unpolished people, whom, however, it is much less difficult to persuade than to fight." Lequinio, G. de La V. "They affected towards our prisoners a deceitful humanity, neglecting no means to draw them over to their own party, and often sending them back to us with only a simple prohibition to bear arms against the King or religion." Report of Richard and Choudieu. The ignorant Vendeans then could give lessons of policy and humanity, which the "enlightened" republicans were not capable of profiting by.
—Their adherence to their ancient institutions, and attachment to their Gentry and Clergy, when the former were abolished and the latter proscribed, might warrant a presumption that they were happy under the one, and kindly treated by the other: for though individuals may sometimes persevere in affections or habits from which they derive neither felicity nor advantage, whole bodies of men can scarcely be supposed eager to risk their lives in defence of privileges that have oppressed them, or of a religion from which they draw no consolation.
But whatever the cause, the new doctrines, both civil and religious, were received in La Vendee with a disgust, which was not only expressed by murmurs, but occasionally by little revolts, by disobedience to the constitutional authorities, and a rejection of the constitutional clergy.
Some time previous to the deposition of the King, Commissioners were sent to suppress these disorders; and though I doubt not but all possible means were taken to conciliate, I can easily believe, that neither the King nor his Ministers might be desirous of subduing by force a people who erred only from piety or loyalty. What effect this system of indulgence might have produced cannot now be decided; because the subsequent overthrow of the monarchy, and the massacre or banishment of the priests, must have totally alienated their minds, and precluded all hope of reconcilement.—Disaffection, therefore, continued to increase, and the Brissotines are suspected of having rather fostered than repressed these intestine commotions,* for the same purpose which induced them to provoke the war with England, and to extend that of the Continent.
* Le Brun, one of the Brissotin Ministers, concealed the progress of this war for six months before he thought fit to report it to the Convention.
—It is impossible to assign a good motive to any act of this literary intriguer.
—Perhaps, while they determined to establish their faction by "braving all Europe," they might think it equally politic to perplex and overawe Paris by a near and dangerous enemy, which would render their continuance in power necessary, or whom they might join, if expelled from it.*
* This last reason might afterwards have given way to their apprehensions, and the Brissotins have preferred the creation of new civil wars, to a confidence in the royalists. These men, who condemned the King for a supposed intention of defending an authority transmitted to him through whole ages, and recently sanctioned by the voice of the people, did not scruple to excite a civil war in defence of their six months' sovereignty over a republic, proclaimed by a ferocious comedian, and certainly without the assent of the nation. Had the ill-fated Monarch dared thus to trifle with the lives of his subjects, he might have saved France and himself from ruin.
When men gratify their ambition by means so sanguinary and atrocious as those resorted to by the Brissotines, we are authorized in concluding they will not be more scrupulous in the use or preservation of power, than they were in attaining it; and we can have no doubt but that the fomenting or suppressing the progress of civil discord, was, with them, a mere question of expediency.
The decree which took place in March, 1793, for raising three hundred thousand men in the departments, changed the partial insurrections of La Vendee to an open and connected rebellion; and every where the young people refused going, and joined in preference the standard of revolt. In the beginning of the summer, the brigands* (as they were called) grew so numerous, that the government, now in the hands of Robespierre and his party, began to take serious measures to combat them.
* Robbers—banditti—The name was first given, probably, to the insurgents of La Vendee, in order to insinuate a belief that the disorders were but of a slight and predatory nature.
—One body of troops were dispatched after another, who were all successively defeated, and every where fled before the royalists.
It is not unusual in political concerns to attribute to deep-laid plans and abstruse combinations, effects which are the natural result of private passions and isolated interests. Robespierre is said to have promoted both the destruction of the republican armies and those of La Vendee, in order to reduce the national population. That he was capable of imagining such a project is probable—yet we need not, in tracing the conduct of the war, look farther than to the character of the agents who were, almost necessarily, employed in it. Nearly every officer qualified for the command of an army, had either emigrated, or was on service at the frontiers; and the task of reducing by violence a people who resisted only because they deemed themselves injured, and who, even in the estimation of the republicans, could only be mistaken, was naturally avoided by all men who were not mere adventurers. It might likewise be the policy of the government to prefer the services of those, who, having neither reputation nor property, would be more dependent, and whom, whether they became dangerous by their successes or defeats, it would be easy to sacrifice.
Either, then, from necessity or choice, the republican armies in La Vendee were conducted by dissolute and rapacious wretches, at all times more eager to pillage than fight, and who were engaged in securing their plunder, when they should have been in pursuit of the enemy. On every occasion they seemed to retreat, that their ill success might afford them a pretext for declaring that the next town or village was confederated with the insurgents, and for delivering it up, in consequence, to murder and rapine. Such of the soldiers as could fill their pocket-books with assignats, left their less successful companions, and retired as invalids to the hospitals: the battalions of Paris (and particularly "the conquerors of the Bastille") had such ardour for pillage, that every person possessed of property was, in their sense, an aristocrat, whom it was lawful to despoil.*
* "Le pillage a ete porte a son comble—les militaires au lieu de songer a ce qu'ils avoient a faire, n'ont pense qu'a remplir leurs sacs, et a voir se perpetuer une guerre aussi avantageuse a leur interet—beaucoup de simples soldats ont acquis cinquante mille francs et plus; on en a vu couverts de bijoux, et faisant dans tous les genres des depenses d'une produgaloite, monstreuse." Lequinio, Guerre de la Vendee. "The most unbridled pillage prevailed—officers, instead of attending to their duty, thought only of filling their portmanteaus, and of the means to perpetuate a war they found so profitable.—Many private soldiers made fifty thousand livres, and they have been seen loaded with trinkets, and exercising the most abominable prodigalities of every kind." Lequinio, War of La Vendee. "The conquerors of the Bastille had unluckily a most unbridled ardour for pillage—one would have supposed they had come for the express purpose of plunder, rather than fighting. The stage coaches for Paris were entirely loaded with their booty." Report of Benaben, Commissioner of the Department of Maine and Loire.
—The carriages of the army were entirely appropriated to the conveyance of their booty; till, at last, the administrators of some departments were under the necessity of forbidding such incumbrances: but the officers, with whom restrictions of this sort were unavailing, put all the horses and waggons of the country in requisition for similar purposes, while they relaxed themselves from the serious business of the war, (which indeed was nearly confined to burning, plundering, and massacring the defenceless inhabitants,) by a numerous retinue of mistresses and musicians.
It is not surprizing that generals and troops of this description were constantly defeated; and their reiterated disasters might probably have first suggested the idea of totally exterminating a people it was found so difficult to subdue, and so impracticable to conciliate.—On the first of October 1793, Barrere, after inveighing against the excessive population of La Vendee, which he termed "frightful," proposed to the Convention to proclaim by a decree, that the war of La Vendee "should be terminated" by the twentieth of the same month. The Convention, with barbarous folly, obeyed; and the enlightened Parisians, accustomed to think with contempt on the ignorance of the Vendeans, believed that a war, which had baffled the efforts of government for so many months, was to end on a precise day—which Barrere had fixed with as much assurance as though he had only been ordering a fete.
But the Convention and the government understood this decree in a very different sense from the good people of Paris. The war was, indeed, to be ended; not by the usual mode of combating armies, but by a total extinction of all the inhabitants of the country, both innocent and guilty—and Merlin de Thionville, with other members, so perfectly comprehended this detestable project, that they already began to devise schemes for repeopling La Vendee, when its miserable natives should be destroyed.*
* It is for the credit of humanity to believe, that the decree was not understood according to its real intention; but the nation has to choose between the imputation of cruelty, stupidity, or slavery— for they either approved the sense of the decree, believed what was not possible, or were obliged to put on an appearance of both, in spite of their senses and their feelings. A proclamation, in consequence, to the army, is more explicit—"All the brigands of La Vendee must be exterminated before the end of October."
From this time, the representatives on mission, commissaries of war, officers, soldiers, and agents of every kind, vied with each other in the most abominable outrages. Carrier superintended the fusillades and noyades at Nantes, while Lequinio dispatched with his own hands a part of the prisoners taken at La Fontenay, and projected the destruction of the rest.—After the evacuation of Mans by the insurgents, women were brought by twenties and thirties, and shot before the house where the deputies Tureau and Bourbotte had taken up their residence; and it appears to have been considered as a compliment to these republican Molochs, to surround their habitation with mountains of the dead. A compliment of the like nature was paid to the representative Prieur de la Marne,* by a volunteer, who having learned that his own brother was taken amongst the enemy, requested, by way of recommending himself to notice, a formal permission to be his executioner.—The Roman stoicism of Prieur accepted the implied homage, and granted the request!!
* This representative, who was also a member of the Committee of Public Welfare, was not only the Brutus, but the Antony of La Vendee; for we learn from the report of Benaben, that his stern virtues were accompanied, through the whole of his mission in this afflicted country, by a cortege of thirty strolling fiddlers!
Fourteen hundred prisoners, who had surrendered at Savenay, among whom were many women and children, were shot, by order of the deputy Francastel, who, together with Hentz, Richard, Choudieu, Carpentier, and others of their colleagues, set an example of rapine and cruelty, but too zealously imitated by their subordinate agents. In some places, the inhabitants, without distinction of age or sex, were put indiscriminately to the sword; in others, they were forced to carry the pillage collected from their own dwellings, which, after being thus stripped, were consigned to the flames.*
* "This conflagration accomplished, they had no sooner arrived in the midst of our army, than the volunteers, in imitation of their commanders, seized what little they had preserved, and massacred them.—But this is not all: a whole municipality, in their scarfs of office, were sacrificed; and at a little village, inhabited by about fifty good patriots, who had been uniform in their resistance of the insurgents, news is brought that their brother soldiers are coming to assist them, and to revenge the wrongs they have suffered. A friendly repast is provided, the military arrive, embrace their ill-fated hosts, and devour what they have provided; which is no sooner done, than they drive all these poor people into the churchyard, and stab them one after another." Report of Faure, Vice-President of a Military Commission at Fontenay.
—The heads of the prisoners served occasionally as marks for the officers to shoot at for trifling wagers, and the soldiers, who imitated these heinous examples, used to conduct whole hundreds to the place of execution, singing "allons enfans de la patrie."*
* Woe to those who were unable to walk, for, under pretext that carriages could not be found to convey them, they were shot without hesitation!—Benaben.
The insurgents had lost Cholet, Chatillon, Mortagne, &c. Yet, far from being vanquished by the day appointed, they had crossed the Loire in great force, and, having traversed Brittany, were preparing to make an attack on Granville. But this did not prevent Barrere from announcing to the convention, that La Vendee was no more, and the galleries echoed with applauses, when they were told that the highways were impassable, from the numbers of the dead, and that a considerable part of France was one vast cemetery. This intelligence also tranquillized the paternal solicitude of the legislature, and, for many months, while the system of depopulation was pursued with the most barbarous fury, it was not permissible even to suspect that the war was yet unextinguished.
It is only since the trial of the Nantais, that the state of La Vendee has again become a subject of discussion: truth has now forced its way, and we learn, that, whatever may be the strength of these unhappy people, their minds, embittered by suffering, and animated by revenge, are still less than ever disposed to submit to the republican government. The design of total extirpation, once so much insisted on, is at present said to be relinquished, and a plan of instruction and conversion is to be substituted for bayonets and conflagrations. The revolted countries are to be enlightened by the doctrines of liberty, fanaticism is to be exposed, and a love of the republic to succeed the prejudices in favour of Kings and Nobles.—To promote these objects, is, undoubtedly, the real interest of the Convention; but a moralist, who observes through another medium, may compare with regret and indignation the instructors with the people they are to illumine, and the advantages of philosophy over ignorance.
Lequinio, one of the most determined reformers of the barbarism of La Vendee, proposes two methods: the first is, a general massacre of all the natives—and the only objection it seems susceptible of in his opinion is, their numbers; but as he thinks on this account it may be attended with difficulty, he is for establishing a sort of perpetual mission of Representatives, who, by the influence of good living and a company of fiddlers and singers, are to restore the whole country to peace.*—
*"The only difficulty that presents itself is, to determine whether recourse shall be had to the alternative of indulgence, or if it will not be more advantageous to persist in the plan of total destruction. "If the people that still remain were not more than thirty or forty thousand, the shortest way would doubtless be, to cut all their throats (egorger), agreeably to my first opinion; but the population is immense, amounting still to four hundred thousand souls.—If there were no hope of succeeding by any other methods, certainly it were better to kill all (egorger), even were there five hundred thousand. "But what are we to understand by measures of rigour? Is there no distinction to be made between rigorous and barbarous measures? The utmost severity is justified on the plea of the general good, but nothing can justify barbarity. If the welfare of France necessitated the sacrifice of the four hundred thousand inhabitants of La Vendee, and the countries in rebellion adjoining, they ought to be sacrificed: but, even in this case, there would be no excuse for those atrocities which revolt nature, which are an outrage to social order, and repugnant equally to feeling (sentiment) and reason; and in cutting off so many entire generations for the good of the country, we ought not to suffer the use of barbarous means in a single instance. "Now the most effectual way to arrive at this end (converting the people), would be by joyous and fraternal missions, frank and familiar harangues, civic repasts, and, above all, dancing. "I could wish, too, that during their circuits in these countries, the Representatives were always attended by musicians. The expence would be trifling, compared with the good effect; if, as I am strongly persuaded, we could thus succeed in giving a turn to the public mind, and close the bleeding arteries of these fertile and unhappy provinces." Lequinio, Guerre de La Vendee. And this people, who were either to have their throats cut, or be republicanized by means of singing, dancing, and revolutionary Pans and Silenus's, already beheld their property devastated by pillage or conflagration, and were in danger of a pestilence from the unburied bodies of their families.—Let the reader, who has seen Lequinio's pamphlet, compare his account of the sufferings of the Vendeans, and his project for conciliating them. They convey a strong idea of the levity of the national character; but, in this instance, I must suppose, that nature would be superior to local influence; and I doubt if Lequinio's jocund philosophy will ever succeed in attaching the Vendeans to the republic.
—Camille Desmouins, a republican reformer, nearly as sanguinary, though not more liberal, thought the guillotine disgraced by such ignorant prey, and that it were better to hunt them down like wild beasts; or, if made prisoners, to exchange them against the cattle of their country!—The eminently informed Herault de Sechelles was the patron and confidant of the exterminating reforms of Carrier; and Carnot, when the mode of reforming by noyades and fusillades was debated at the Committee, pleaded the cause of Carrier, whom he describes as a good, nay, an excellent patriot.—Merlin de Thionville, whose philosophy is of a more martial cast, was desirous that the natives of La Vendee should be completely annihilated, in order to furnish in their territory and habitations a recompence for the armies.—Almost every member of the Convention has individually avowed principles, or committed acts, from which common turpitude would recoil, and, as a legislative body, their whole code has been one unvarying subversion of morals and humanity. Such are the men who value themselves on possessing all the advantages the Vendeans are pretended to be in want of.—We will now examine what disciples they have produced, and the benefits which have been derived from their instructions.
Every part of France remarkable for an early proselytism to the revolutionary doctrines has been the theatre of crimes unparalleled in the annals of human nature. Those who have most boasted their contempt for religious superstition have been degraded by an idolatry as gross as any ever practiced on the Nile; and the most enthusiastic republicans have, without daring to murmur, submitted for two years successively to a horde of cruel and immoral tyrants.—A pretended enfranchisement from political and ecclesiastical slavery has been the signal of the lowest debasement, and the most cruel profligacy: the very Catechumens of freedom and philosophy have, while yet in their first rudiments, distinguished themselves as proficients in the arts of oppression and servility, of intolerance and licentiousness.—Paris, the rendezvous of all the persecuted patriots and philosophers in Europe, the centre of the revolutionary system, whose inhabitants were illumined by the first rays of modern republicanism, and who claim a sort of property in the rights of man, as being the original inventors, may fairly be quoted as an example of the benefits that would accrue from a farther dissemination of the new tenets.
Without reverting to the events of August and September, 1792, presided by the founders of liberty, and executed by their too apt sectaries, it is notorious that the legions of Paris, sent to chastise the unenlightened Vendeans, were the most cruel and rapacious banditti that ever were let loose to afflict the world. Yet, while they exercised this savage oppression in the countries near the Loire, their fellow-citizens on the banks of the Seine crouched at the frown of paltry tyrants, and were unresistingly dragged to dungeons, or butchered by hundreds on the scaffold.—At Marseilles, Lyons, Bourdeaux, Arras, wherever these baleful principles have made converts, they have made criminals and victims; and those who have been most eager in imbibing or propagating them have, by a natural and just retribution, been the first sacrificed. The new discoveries in politics have produced some in ethics not less novel, and until the adoption of revolutionary doctrines, the extent of human submission or human depravity was fortunately unknown.
In this source of guilt and misery the people of La Vendee are now to be instructed—that people, who are acknowledged to be hospitable, humane, and laborious, and whose ideas of freedom may be better estimated by their resistance to a despotism which the rest of France has sunk under, than by the jargon of pretended reformers.—I could wish, that not only the peasants of La Vendee, but those of all other countries, might for ever remain strangers to such pernicious knowledge. It is sufficient for this useful class of men to be taught the simple precepts of religion and morality, and those who would teach them more, are not their benefactors. Our age is, indeed, a literary age, and such pursuits are both liberal and laudable in the rich and idle; but why should volumes of politics or philosophy be mutilated and frittered into pamphlets, to inspire a disgust for labour, and a taste for study or pleasure, in those to whom such disgusts or inclinations are fatal. The spirit of one author is extracted, and the beauties of another are selected, only to bewilder the understanding, and engross the time, of those who might be more profitably employed.
I know I may be censured as illiberal; but I have, during my abode in this country, sufficiently witnessed the disastrous effects of corrupting a people through their amusements or curiosity, and of making men neglect their useful callings to become patriots and philosophers.*—
*This right of directing public affairs, and neglecting their own, we may suppose essential to republicans of the lower orders, since we find the following sentence of transportation in the registers of a popular commission: "Bergeron, a dealer in skins—suspected—having done nothing in favour of the revolution—extremely selfish (egoiste,) and blaming the Sans-Culottes for neglecting their callings, that they may attend only to public concerns."—Signed by the members of the Commission and the two Committees.
—"Il est dangereux d'apprendre au peuple a raisonner: il ne faut pas l'eclairer trop, parce qu'il n'est pas possible de l'eclairer assez." ["It is dangerous to teach the people to reason—they should not be too much enlightened, because it is not possible to enlighten them sufficiently.">[—When the enthusiasm of Rousseau's genius was thus usefully submitted to his good sense and knowledge of mankind, he little expected every hamlet in France would be inundated with scraps of the contrat social, and thousands of inoffensive peasants massacred for not understanding the Profession de Foi.
The arguments of mistaken philanthropists or designing politicians may divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature—they may create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and propensities with which it is incompatible.
The situation of France has amply demonstrated the folly of attempting to make a whole people reasoners and politicians—there seems to be no medium; and as it is impossible to make a nation of sages, you let loose a horde of savages: for the philosophy which teaches a contempt for accustomed restraints, is not difficult to propagate; but that superior kind, which enables men to supply them, by subduing the passions that render restraints necessary, is of slow progress, and never can be general.
I have made the war of La Vendee more a subject of reflection than narrative, and have purposely avoided military details, which would be not only uninteresting, but disgusting. You would learn no more from these desultory hostilities, than that the defeats of the republican armies were, if possible, more sanguinary than their victories; that the royalists, who began the war with humanity, were at length irritated to reprisals; and that more than two hundred thousand lives have already been sacrificed in the contest, yet undecided.