Readers of Disraeli’s novels will remember the advice urged by Rigby on Coningsby to “read Mr. Wordy’s history of the late war, in twenty volumes, proving clearly that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” No one knew better than Rigby’s reputed original, John Wilson Croker, or for that matter Disraeli himself, the compendious utility of Alison’s History of Europe. Elsewhere Trollope may easily have found the historic facts on which he based his third novel. From Alison he learned to deduce a moral in accord with the prevailing English sentiment. Like many of his countrymen who cared nothing for party, Trollope felt something of disgust at the Whig enthusiasm for Napoleon as the reconstructor of the European system, notwithstanding his rise to power by violating all those principles of civil and religious liberty which Whigs, by their historic traditions, were bound to hold sacrosanct. Without pretending to be a specialist in modern French history, Trollope knew enough of the country and the people to look for the real security of a gradual return to law and order, not in the exercise of coercive force by any individual however great, but in the national instincts and tendencies making for conservatism, political or religious, and, as he thought, underrated by recent English writers on the subject. This aspect of national character and life it became his business to bring out in La Vendée. His Irish stories had already maintained and illustrated the view that the Celt as he existed on the other side of St. George’s Channel could be as business-like, as thrifty, as sober in thought as the Saxon or the Lowland Scot himself. So La Vendée was to dispose of similar fallacies about the French rooted in the English mind. Genuine religion could exist in a Roman Catholic land, as well as genuine loyalty and uncalculating patriotism among a people conventionally considered fickle, frivolous, and, naturally incapable of the patient, self-repressive, and sustained effort by which Northern nations are content slowly to await and effect the reforms that Southern races precipitate and mar by revolutions.

Trollope occupies a middle place among the three novelists of the Victorian age who have acknowledged the literary fascination of the French revolutionary period in some one of its aspects, or in the events growing out of it. Carlyle, essentially a humourist before being an historian, first made the subject his own, and in some degree helped by his research and method his successors in their treatment of it. Five years after Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton wrote Zanoni, the earliest English novel descriptive of Paris during the Terror. Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities came out some time later, in 1859. Trollope’s contribution, therefore, to the romance of the revolutionary series, chronologically might have owed something to Alison, who alone among those of an earlier date had touched the phases of the theme specially appealing to our novelist. In fiction the dates just given would exempt him from any suspicion of obligation to Bulwer or Dickens. His originality stamps itself on the opening chapter of La Vendée, and is consistently maintained throughout. Before the action of the novel begins, its royalist heroes can no longer doubt the resolution reached by the municipality of Paris that the king should fall. The Convention, in fact, was already founding the republic. The actual process, indeed, had advanced far enough to array the country gentlemen of La Vendée (1850) and their retainers in arms against the new régime. The entirely fresh descriptive feature of the opening chapters is the account of social Paris when the Jacobins were entrapping Louis XVI.

Here Trollope drew not on Alison, but the first-hand knowledge conveyed to him by his mother. Mrs. Trollope, in her turn, had been taken behind the political scenes of the period by the man whom the royalists in her son’s story agreed could alone save the throne. This was the same General Lafayette that Trollope’s parents had visited in his French country house and that always remained their chief friend abroad. During the early months of 1792, most of the haute noblesse had exchanged the French capital for London or for the English country houses, many of them, as has been already said, familiar to Trollope. They left, however, behind them enough of wit, beauty, and fashionable brilliance to prevent the capital from losing its character of the Western world’s polite metropolis. The city, in a phrase of a contemporary writer, H. S. Edwards, that took Trollope’s fancy, from having been the Lutetia of the ancients had become the lætitia of the moderns. Intellectual interest in the progress of the Revolution, up to the beginning of the king’s imprisonment, had the effect of obliterating class distinctions. It produced a certain solidarity between the professional classes which supplied the revolutionary leaders, and the more enlightened of the aristocracy that, long since admitting the necessity of drastic social ameliorations, had, as Trollope summarises it, approved the early demands of the tiers état, had applauded the tennis-court oath, had entered with enthusiasm into the fête of the Champ de Mars. These had credulously persuaded themselves that sin, avarice, and selfishness were about to be banished from the world by philosophy.

Bitter experience had already taught them their mistake. Philosophy placed no check upon human nature’s worst passions. The high-flown panegyrics on virtue in the abstract were practically consistent with the letting loose of the tiger and the ape in individuals. The feast of reason that followed the beheading of the king proved the introduction to the long-drawn-out orgy of fiends lasting till Robespierre’s death in 1794. What refuge could there be for the now undeceived dupes of their own fond expectations but in flight? Those who from the first had remained courtiers or royalists, and those whom a spurious philanthropy had caused to dally with wholesale homicide, hastened to put the English Channel between themselves and a capital and country from which had vanished all hope of personal safety or service to their fellow-men. Some gallant spirits had long lingered on near the place of the king’s confinement, refusing even now to despair of some happy chance that might favour his escape from his enemies, and enable his friends to conduct him permanently out of danger.

Such were the historical circumstances and actual conditions of the time without a knowledge of which Trollope’s third novel cannot be rightly understood. Its title came from the new republican name for the vintage districts of Anjou and Poitou, La Vendée (vendange). Those of its gentry who had rallied round the king were known in Paris as the Poitevins. The hope of which this little group supplied the leaders was scarcely so forlorn as it has been described since, during the seven years period covered by Trollope’s novel, the Vendean resistance to the Convention was carried on not only with unfailing courage but occasionally with substantial military success. In Paris, where the story opens, the Poitevins had attracted to their number some among the more moderate members of the Assembly, and particularly certain of those who had been officers of the royal bodyguard. They formed themselves into a club whose meetings were held in the Rue Vivienne. The last of these gatherings took place on August 12, 1792, and lasted just long enough to acquaint all present with the final and complete defeat of the moderates, who so far had clung to the conviction that in some unexplained manner the monarchy would be preserved from final overthrow. Against all gentler counsels, against, in Trollope’s words, the firmness of Roland, the eloquence of Vergniaud, the patriotism of Guadet, the brute force of Paris had prevailed.

Louis XVI, his worst enemies could not deny, had inherited none of his predecessor’s vices, and had shown himself the friend of popular rights. He had indeed actually himself convoked the Assembly that had no sooner come together than it resolved on his destruction. The Poitevins, however, had correctly estimated their resources in their respective neighbourhoods. With a good heart they now welcome and prepare for open war. When told that the sovereign’s defenders are outvoted in the Assembly and that resistance to the people is vain, they one and all protest against dignifying by that name the mob of blood-thirsty ruffians who for the time have the capital at their mercy. The real voice of the French people is for the monarch’s restoration to his rights. Under the Vendean gentry as leaders the masses will rise like one man against the demagogues who so foully misrepresent them. The real enemies of France and of the king are in each case the same men. To save the country from the usurpations of the Assembly falsely called national is also to deliver the lawful ruler from the dungeon to which, in the midst of this heroic oratory, comes the news of Louis having been consigned.

That for the present the mission of the patriots in Paris cannot proceed further is now admitted by all. Before, however, the patriots disperse, each to his own provincial neighbourhood, we have made acquaintance with the clearly and picturesquely characterised individuals of whom they consist. Its most prominent member, Lescure, is a type, historically true, of the educated and enlightened Frenchman, keenly alive to the abuses and evils of the aristocratic system that were at the root of popular degradation and distress. His mind had been nurtured, and his political education derived, from studying classical republicanism, as it existed in Athens and Rome. He was deeply read in Rousseau, Voltaire, and in the whole literature of the encyclopædists. An amiably philanthropic disposition had combined with tendencies of his intellectual culture to take for his watchwords Liberty, Fraternity, though not, it would seem, Equality. On perceiving the new movement to mean universal surrender to an ignorant and brutal mob, he drew back, to find himself gradually pressed into the presidency of the little Poitevin society. This personification of high-minded and cultivated philanthropy numbered amongst its followers the youthful heir to an ancient and wealthy territorial marquisate, Henri de Larochejaquelin.[8] His principles had been formed on those of his elder, Lescure, but his temperament, eager, impetuous, delighting in the rush and whirl of social gaiety, forms a contrast to his staid and judicious senior. In one respect he stands out as a product of the period. The new generation was often noticeable for the precocious manhood developed in the hothouse atmosphere of a convulsive epoch. Since reaching his seventeenth year, the young noble now mentioned, in consequence of his father’s ill-health, had taken upon himself the paternal estates’ management, and his sister Agatha’s guardianship.

Adolphe Denot is another who has a place in this little company. Born to a position of territorial ownership in Poitou, Denot represents in Trollope’s story the superficial votaries of political change, ready to take up with the newest mode in public affairs, without the trouble of inquiring into its significance or worth. Without Lescure’s historical knowledge and reflective habits, he belonged to the same section of French society as that in which Lescure had been reared. The earliest French protests against the tyranny of ages came from the French nobility themselves. Never in the theatre at Versailles had louder applause been excited than by the lines of Voltaire’s play, produced during the interval separating the first from the last quarter of the eighteenth century: “I am the son of Brutus, and bear graven on the heart the love of liberty and a horror of kings.” In the cheers that greeted these words, Trollope’s Denot might have followed the vogue by joining. J. J. Rousseau no doubt made himself personally responsible for the doctrine of the people’s sovereignty and its consequences. Before, however, its proclamation by him, Voltaire’s wit had secured the notion acceptance with rank, fashion, aristocracy, and even the Court circle. Recently, however, the enthusiasts for freedom in the royal playhouse had discovered everything which savoured of revolution to be insufferably vulgar. He had therefore gone over to Larochejaquelin’s lead, and enrolled himself under Lescure in the little Poitevin clique. Petted and caressed, as Trollope puts it, by the best and fairest in France, the revolution was still in its infancy when men discovered it to be a beast of prey, big with war, anarchy, and misrule.

The royalist organisation now described having been disbanded in the capital, the scene changes to those regions of southern France known as La Vendée. The country gentlemen of Anjou and Poitou were generally landlords of the smaller kind. They lived in comfort, but without any ambition for mere splendour. No pride in the antiquity of their race prevented their treating their tenants and household retainers less as dependents than equals. The instances of this now given exemplify Trollope’s favourite thesis that in a patrician dispensation characterised by thoughtfulness on the part of its controllers for those who live under it, there is more of the true democratic spirit than marks the most levelling variety of popular self-rule. The gentlemen of La Vendée have no sooner reappeared in their country homes than the counter-revolution, without any fostering agitation on their part, almost of its own accord sets in.

The Vendeans had heard from their rural seclusion of the king’s imprisonment, and of the insults offered by his republican jailors to the time-honoured ordinances of Church and State. There is no need for Lescure, Larochejaquelin, and the others to stimulate the local peasantry by fresh appeals against the emissaries of the detested republic. These only show themselves for the purpose of enrolling fresh conscripts, and forcibly apprehending a reluctant recruit. The spontaneous popular resistance ends in a pitched battle, with victory for the royalists. Operations are now on a larger scale. The struggle is no longer between small local garrisons on the one hand, and hastily levied, imperfectly disciplined royalist bodies on the other. Henceforth two armies, each tolerably marshalled and fairly equipped, meet each other in the field. Sieges are laid, attacks are delivered, sometimes repelled and sometimes succumbed to; all the combatants are engaged, towns are captured, private parks transform themselves into entrenched camps. Durbellière particularly, the country seat of the Larochejaquelins, becomes the theatre of a war conducted with sanguinary resolution on both sides, and with constantly varying fortunes. Among each host brave deeds in plenty are done. With the royalists the most picturesque, heroic, and victorious figure is that of Henri de Larochejaquelin, whose red sash and shoulder-band prove the same talisman of triumph as the snow-white plume of Henry of Navarre when he defeated the Duke of Mayenne at Ivry.