READING (Translation)
Citizen representatives, I repeat that I regard the burning of towns, villages and small holdings as an indispensable measure if we wish finally to bring an end to this terrible war in the Vendee. Without it I will not be able to annihilate this band of brigands who each day seem to increase in number.

ALAN FORREST
I think what you’re getting from Turreau is an honest assessment of how he can reduce the Vendee to submission. They’re being ambushed, very often by men not in uniform. They don’t really know who is a combatant and who is a non-combatant, and I think that always makes an army - well we’ve seen it more recently I suppose in Iraq, it puts that army on a kind of permanent key vivre, they can never relax properly and it makes them angry.

The people who very often were the intermediaries for terror at local level were the deputies on missions sent out from Paris. Now, unfortunately for the West, one of the two deputies in Nantes, Jean Baptiste Carriér, was a particularly violent man. We have descriptions of the executions … including things which, I suppose, one would have to call examples of rather bloodthirsty Jacobean humour, in tying together young men and women, staking them in boats in the middle of the Loire with its dangerous sandbanks, pulling the bottom out of the boat and watching them drown in the river obviously gave the…

MUSIC IN

…the more sadistic Jacobeans, like Carriér, a certain amount of pleasure and satisfaction. But I should stress that this was not the norm.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Norm or no, it’s intensified bitterness on both sides and made for a situation quite as dramatic as anything in Paris conjured up by Dickens or Baroness Orzy, and to my great surprise there was one English writer who set a novel in the initial period of the Vendee uprising, indeed Anthony Trollope’s The Vendeans describes the very chateau I was visiting with Jean Clement Martin.

READING
By degrees the daylight faded away, and for the last time they watched the sun sink down among the cherry trees of Durbelliere, and the Marquis, seated by the window, gazed in to the West ’til not a streak of light was any longer visible. He knew that Durbelliere would be destroyed, and it never could be anything to him how the sun set or rose in any other place.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
What actually happened to the chateau?

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
The chateau was destroyed in the winter of 1793 by a colonne infernal, infernal column sent to destroy the so called Brigands de la Vendee.

ALAN FORREST
If you are a brigand, or worse still if you’re a wild beast, a wild animal, slinking back into the bocage, to your lair, and these words are literal translations of the language that Republicans used at the time, then you’re dehumanised and if you’re dehumanised then, rather like a wolf, you can be eliminated with less compunction than if you are a human being.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Alan Forrest.

Dehumanisation of the victims is something I associate with genocide, and historians have debated whether what happened in La Vendee should be described as genocide.

I put that to Jean Clement Martin.

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
No, because there were never orders to destroy specific populations. What the orders said exactly was to destroy les brigands de la Vendee, and to put in safety women, children and older people.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Have you any idea how many people might have been killed in la Vendee at that time?

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
Two hundred thousand people were killed or disappeared from one or another reason at the time in the Vendee.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Two hundred thousand people…

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
Two, two hundred, yeah.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Killed or disappeared?

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
Yeah.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Over what period of time?

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
From 1791 to1796.

MUSIC IN

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Even allowing for many thousands fleeing to neighbouring provinces, that figure is still shockingly high.

The Revolution was about the rights of the common man, but while we’ve retained a clear image of a few hundred aristocrats guillotined in Paris we’ve largely forgotten the thousands of peasants slaughtered in the Vendee.

To try and make sense of all this, and particularly the way we in Britain have forgotten to remember the Vendee, Bill Doyle had taken me to the Louvre Museum in Paris.

MUSIC OUT

MICHAEL PORTILLO
We’re looking at the painting by Eugene Delacroix of Liberty leading the people, painted shortly after the Revolution of 1830, but clearly meant to represent an image of the French Revolution that’s really founded on the Revolution of 1789.

WILLIAM DOYLE
That’s absolutely right. Here is Liberty, an allegorical figure wearing the cap of Liberty and carrying the tricolour, the standard of Liberty, which was first adopted by the French in 1789.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Now at the time of this picture the British had a very different view of what had happened in the French Revolution, but in the early twenty-first century we would in general approve of Liberty. In some ways then we’ve adopted the principles of the French Revolution - when did that happen?

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Content last updated: 08/06/2005

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