WILLIAM DOYLE
Well there’s a sense in which we have, but when the French Revolution breaks out the first instinct that many British people have before Edmund Burke forced us to think about it was the French were catching up with us. The phrase that was used by British radicals, we were men when they were slave

DR ROSEMARY ASHTON
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven", is almost the most famous thing said about the French Revolution in this country I think.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Rosemary Ashton, Professor of English at University College London, quoting from William Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude.

DR ROSEMARY ASHTON
Interestingly that phrase about it being bliss to have been alive at the time of the French Revolution comes in a part of the poem where Wordsworth has already described having gone to France after the Revolution full of hopes - in 1791 in fact - full of hopes that he would find there all the things that the French Revolution was supposed to be about, and all the things that he felt he missed at home - liberty, equality, improvement for the poor and so on - and of course he found things were not quite as idyllic as that. So even when he writes about it having been bliss to be alive, he’s already writing with a certain weary wisdom that it wasn’t to be, that it was not ultimately successful, that the French Revolution went sour.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Let it be said that at the time of the second centenary of the French Revolution, when Margaret Thatcher was our Prime Minister, she actually resisted the invitation to participate in celebrations of the Revolution, she recalled it still as a bloody mob, so Dickens and others obviously still exerted their influence on her, at least.

WILLIAM DOYLE
That’s true, and she took a bound copy of the Tale of Two Cities to give to Francois Mitterand, but she also said, we, the British, or maybe the Greeks, she said, invented liberty, not the French.

DR ROSEMARY ASHTON
It is odd that the counter revolution in the Vendee hasn’t really entered into the simple story, at any rate, that we like to tell ourselves about the French Revolution. I suppose because revolution’s more exciting than anti- or counter-revolution. It’s a fact, because Paris obviously attracted worldwide attention in a way that the Vendee would not, and the breaking down of the Bastille as a concrete symbol of the metaphorical idea of the breaking down of cruelty and tyrannical laws, was really compelling at the time and still is. There were of course some hot-headed people who wished for revolution in this country, but most people I think, including most of the people who’ve written about the French Revolution, the poets and the writers and the philosophers and politicians of the time, most of them I think cherry picked what they liked about what they knew of the French Revolution while setting aside the less palatable elements, or perhaps just saying 'well, that’s the French way'.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
Professor Rosemary Ashton.

The last stop on our brief trip through the Vendee Militaire was in Cholet, the small town sacked by one of General Turreau’s Colonnes Infernale. It now houses a substantial tribute to the Guerre de la Vendee in its elegant museum, where Jean Clement introduced me to the Deputy Mayor, Roger Massee.

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
Michael Portillo.

INTRODUCTIONS AND SHORT CONVERSATION IN FRENCHMICHAEL PORTILLO
Monsieur Massee conceded that even in France the Vendee War doesn’t feature strongly in revolutionary history.

ROGER MASSEE
SPEAKING IN FRENCH

MALE (Translation)
I think, alas, that the enormous majority of French people have only a very confused recollection of the War of the Vendee, of this Civil War, because that’s what it was a Civil War. Perhaps it’s because it remains something shameful in the collective history of France.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
In this museum at the heart of the Vendee we see many examples of the atrocities that were committed, but what is the first hand evidence for these atrocities, were there eyewitness accounts?

ROGER MASSEE
Yeah it is possible to, to give some testimony coming from a woman, a very young woman, who fight in the white army.

SPEAKING IN FRENCH

FEMALE (Translation)
The uprising by the Royalists in the Vendee in seventeen ninety-three, attracted in to our land a Republican army who ravaged and massacred absolutely without pity. I saw forty-two of my relations perish, but it was the death of my father that was committed right in front of my very eyes that transported me with rage and despair. From that very moment I resolved to sacrifice my body to the King and to offer my soul to God, and I swore that I would continue to fight until death or victory.

MICHAEL PORTILLO
It’s a very moving account isn’t it? It’s a sort of thing that we are almost used to from other civil wars, but the violence, forty-two of her relations being killed, her father murdered in front of her eyes, and of course her reaction, which is that she then will fight to the death.

MUSIC IN – Marseillaise

She then becomes radicalised.

No wonder Margaret Thatcher was reluctant to celebrate seventeen eighty-nine.

For several generations the population figures in the Vendee betrayed the savage losses, and Jean Clement Martin maintains that a strong sense of independence still characterises the region.

Shortly after the execution of Robespierre and the end of the terror, General Turreau was put on trial, his letters making clear that he’d massacred the Vendeans not on his own initiative but as the agent of the Convention saved him. He went on to serve Napoleon, and you can find his name engraved on the Arc de Triomphe.

Henri Larojacquelin died coming to the aid of a Republican soldier.

Nowadays the Marseillaise stirs even British hearts, an international hymn to liberty.

MUSIC OUT

It’s never been easy for the British to be objective about the French Revolution, and we’ve swung from one extreme to another. Burke condemned it in 1790, and set the tone for generations thereafter, but with the passage of time our memory’s been reshaped. As Britain became steadily more democratic we tended to look back on events in France…

MUSIC IN

… as the forerunner of democratic and egalitarian change across Europe and beyond. Maybe that’s why the British generally forget to remember the bloodletting in the Vendee.

Alan Forrest and Jean Clement Martin caution against glamorising any revolution if it means forgetting the many thousands who perish in the name of setting the people free.

ALAN FORREST
I think anyone seeking liberation or seeking freedom and liberty in the twentieth or twenty-first century who looks back to the French Revolution as a model will find inside the French Revolution moments of encouragement, general ideas and principles, which are very, very precious, which are progressive and which are at the root of our freedoms today. The problem is taking the Revolution as a single unmitigated whole and accepting all of it with its implications.

MUSIC OUT

JEAN CLEMENT MARTIN
For many revolutionaries in the world the French Revolution was considered as the model and for many counter revolutionaries in the world French Revolution is also considered as the model of the atrocities committed on the behalf of ideals, but I think that when we are studying a little La Guerre de Vendee it is possible to understand how the French Revolution was not a model but was just the result of internal struggle and civil wars. It is the lesson of the Vendee.

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Content last updated: 08/06/2005

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