The tales we tell ourselves
Who are you?
South-westward, in remote patriarchal La Vendee, the loyal warmth of a simple people is blown into flame and fury by theological and seigniorial bellows, so that there shall be fighting from behind ditches, death-volleys bursting out of thickets and ravines of rivers, huts burning, feet of the pitiful women hurrying to refuge with their children on their back, seed fields fallow, whitened with human bones.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Thomas Carlyle, writing in the 1830s, and ensuring that events in the Vendee didn’t go unnoticed in Britain at the time.
MUSIC OUT
But nowadays our thoughts about the Revolution do focus on Paris, and to broaden out from that restricted view I felt I must actually visit the towns and villages of the mid West, of the Vendee.
Before I set off Bill Doyle was keen that I should understand Carlyle’s reference to theological bellows, meaning that I should grasp the importance of the split between the revolutionary government and the Catholic Church which had happened as early as 1791.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
So Bill, what was your purpose in bringing me to Notre Dame?
WILLIAM DOYLE
Well the quarrel with the Church went so deep that you have a movement in the summer and autumn of 1793 of dechristianisation, and eventually they close down all churches; they try and strip them of furnishings of one sort or another, and here in Notre Dame, the most famous church in Paris, they hold a Festival of Reason and they have a goddess in, a, a woman embodying reason, who sits in the place where the high altar was. And this, of course, was extremely shocking to all Catholics, desecration of the most important church in Paris, and [so] they say we are for church and King and we want to restore our old priests and we want to restore the altars and get rid of this godless regime.
MUSIC – Festival of Supreme Being
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Although the Vendee rising was already well under way by the time of the Festival of Reason and the subsequent Festival of the Supreme Being, for which this hymn was composed, it’s easy to imagine how reports of them fanned the counter-revolutionary flames.
MUSIC OUT
ALAN FORREST
The status of the priest, of the curé in the West, was much higher than in many other areas, it was a kind of thing that the sons of reasonably well-off families would seek to do, and many of the priests were local people. So there was a bond between them and their congregations which may not have existed in other places, so I think all these things mean that it is to some degree a cultural rising that you have in the West.
MICHAEL PORTILLO
Well to pursue this question of what happened in the provinces I’m now on the TGV train on my way to Poitiers to consult one of the French historians who has done the most to bring to our attention what actually happened in the Vendee, and while I make that journey I’m delving into an extraordinary archive. These are the letters of General Turreau, who was sent by the Revolution to suppress the rebellion in the Vendee, and his letters demanded exact orders so that he would have cover for the very brutal acts that he was about to commit. And he writes here, mon intention et bien de tous…
READING (Translation)
My intention is to burn absolutely everything and to protect only the places where we need to establish safe quarters which will enable us to annihilate the rebels, but these extreme measures must be taken under your command.
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