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HIS side-show of the great Revolution was a magnificent spectacle, and unique in the world’s annals. The seat of war,Vendée militaire, may be described roughly as being bounded on the north by the Loire from Saumur to the sea; on the west by the Atlantic; on the south by a line drawn from Sables d’Olonne across to Parthenay; and on the east by another line from Parthenay up again to Saumur. It was then comprised in some square leagues of old Anjou, Poitou, and Nantes; it is now divided into the four modern departments of Loire-Inférieure, Maine-et-Loire, Deux-Sèvres, and Vendée. The name Vendée, at first, indeed, minor andlocal, rose and spread after the affair at Challans on the twelfth of March, until it became representative of the people and their cause. And Vendée, once mentioned, means two things: the Marais, or low sea-coast district, a great meadow honey-combed with canals from the island of Bouin to Saint-Hilairie-de-Rie; and the inland Bocage, or thicket, in its own way quite as inaccessible. The latter, the centre of agitation, was settled by rugged, simple, honorable folk. It was glossy with woods of golden furze and pollard oaks, and broken everywhere with little hollows and little streams. It was a rough and arid place; it had few roads, and these were clayey and difficult; it was full of rocky pastures, hedge-rows, and trenches; dull in color, crabbed in outline, niggardly of distance. It had not a mountain nor any considerable landmark save the Hill of Larks. In the narrow flats it was all but impossiblefor the enemy to form; and utterly impossible for one detachment to communicate with another by signals. The puzzling Bocage was a glorious vantage-ground, however, for its own sons. The race which mastered it had great agility and nerve: Cæsar had called them invincible. They were not of a volatile humor, as were their compatriots in northern France; and yet they moved habitually in the very gravity and temperance of cheerfulness. The patriarchal life survived among them: the noble divided the proceeds of the land with his farmers; and he was his own steward, attending personally to business, and having for his tenants those with whom he had played as a boy. The ladies’ carriages were drawn by bullocks. On fête-days the wives and daughters of the hall danced with the peasants. After the Sunday services, among his devout flockthe goodcuréread aloud the place of meeting for the week’s hunts. There were no feuds; a scandal was unheard of; a lawsuit was a twenty years’ wonder. The keys of the jail had taken to chronic rust. The shut-in Bocage had seen the beginnings of the national upheaval with but faint concern. Its own clergy were poor, its own gentry magnanimous; its liberties were entire; it had no great public abuses calling for reform. And through the outlying districts things were much the same. It was impossible, as Jeffrey wrote soon after in theQuarterly, to “revolutionize” a people so circumstanced. Innocent and happy as they were, it may be said of them that they had no history till the insurrection. It broke out in March of 1793, it was over in July of 1795; and those on its soil cannot speak of it yet without a throb of feeling.
It was in the main, a religious war;one of the few since St. Louis’ in the thirteenth century, which has not disgraced the name; and the latest, indeed, known to general history. But it has been affirmed too often that the nobles and priests, active here as elsewhere for the losing cause, had roused the masses to revolt. M. Berthre de Bourniseaux, of Thouars, a Republican, says earnestly, that defensive war was produced by three causes, with none of which the influence of churchmen and kingsmen, as such, had anything to do. First, by the execrable tyranny of the Jacobins in worrying an intensely conservative section, which, in the proper Jacobinical jargon, was not “ripe” for the Revolution; second, by the foolish persistent persecution of their old faith in behalf of the goddess Reason—a thing borne long in silence and bewilderment, until the smouldering opposition sprang intothe full stature of a blaze; third, by the forced levy of three hundred thousand men. On the twenty-first of January, 1791, Louis, after his usual hesitation, signed the decree authorizing the ejection of those vicars and curates who would not uphold the new civil constitution of the clergy. It may be believed that this stroke of national polity fell heavily in mid-France, where “priestcraft” had never figured as a word in any possible dictionary, and where the Roman obedience had been as perfectly established as the solar system in the popular mind. Says Lamartine: “The Revolution, until then exclusively political, became schism in the eyes of a portion of the clergy and the faithful. Among the bishops and priests, some took the civil oath, which was the guarantee of their lives; others refused to take it, or, having taken it, retracted. This gave rise to trouble in many amind, to agitation of conscience, and to division in the temple. The great majority of parishes had now two ministers, the one a constitutional parson, salaried and protected by the state, the other refractory, refusing the oath, bereft of his income, driven from his sanctuary, and raising his altar in some clandestine chapel or in the open field. These rival upholders of the same worship excommunicated each other, one in the name of the Government, one in the name of the Pope and the Church.... The case was not actually, as it stood, persecution or civil war, but it was the sure prelude to both.... When war burst out, the Revolution had degenerated.” It was not until August that the report of the uprising in the provinces, and the full sense of its significance, were accredited at Paris. Simultaneously the air thickened with fierce rumors from Austria and Spain, and Dumouriez’s lastwatch-lights sputtered out upon the frontiers. While the attention of Europe was fixed for a moment on larger matters, the disbanding of ecclesiastics and the enrolling of conscripts engendered their natural sequence in ignored La Vendée, and the placid farm-country sprang forth prodigious, like a fireside spectre, menacing the fortunes of the house with a bloody hand.
Let it be remembered, despite Carlyle’s random arrow at “simple people blown into flame and fury by theological and seignorial bellows,” that the nobles and the clergy, whatever may have been their desire, were too well informed to pit a forlorn corner of France against the united realm. Here, as in Paris, and for rival arguments exactly as apposite, the Revolution was a matter belonging to “the man on the street.” Against what they knew to be the spirit of rapine and injustice, the people, of themselves, arose.Their campaign had no intrigue, no pushing; it had absolute purity of intention. More perfectly than even the American civil war, this of La Vendée was fought on a moral principle, and on that solely, from the start. Every advantage possible was on the side of submission; the peasants would have been let alone and forgotten, presently had they been weaker, and wiser. Unable to foresee the majestic trend of events, not having in their own sore memories the germ of a verdict which was to reverse the world, they hit out, in the dark, against the local and the immediate wrong. Ignorant as they were, they were not ignorant of their jeopardized liberties. They opposed iniquitous laws for the sake of their own commune; their argument had premises impregnably sound. If they were mad, it must be added that they were right, too, in the fullest relative senses of earth and heaven. The titled gentry werecompelled to join, in nearly every case, by their vehemence. D’Elbée, Bonchamp, Lescure, La Rochejaquelein, Charette, and many of the minor officers, were drawn from their very firesides, and urged into service. “You are no braver than we, but you know better how to manage,” so the frank fellows explained it to the lords. The priests, also, banished from their sad parishes for refusing the irregular oaths proposed by the Assembly, and cast adrift like the hill-side friars of Ireland, long held aloof from sanctioning the redress of arms. Nowhere, at any time, did they march nor combat with their flocks. When their bodies were found upon the field, it was manifest that they had been shot while ministering to the dying. Such, on this point, was the Vendean sensitiveness, and austere regard for the proprieties, that a young subdeacon discovered in the ranks was angrily and summarily dismissed.Not until the army was at Dol did the pastors ever attempt to “fanaticize” the soldiery by working upon their religious feeling as a means of reviving courage. Nor did the laymen ever waive towards them that which, in Turreau’s phrase, was their “blind and incurable attachment.” At a sign from some active Levite they actually disbanded during Holy Week of 1793. The Republican squadron, sent to quell the revolt, found the villages in dead quiet, and so returned north; but on Easter Monday the roads were alive again.
Well was the Bocage called, by the earliest of its very few English critics, “the last land of romance in Europe.” The quarrel espoused for conscience’ sake had a child-like disinterestedness. What the men endured we know; the rewards they meant to ask for their success were these: that religion should be established, free of state interference;that the Bocage itself should be known as La Vendée, with a distinct administration; that the King should make it a visit, and retain a corps of Vendeans in his guard; and that the white flag should float forever from every steeple, in memory of the war! It is clear that they had little to wish for, and that they had no greed. Nor did they fight for glory, the dearest motive of their race. “There is no glory in civil war,” said Bonchamp, in what was, for once, too ascetic a generality. But they were dedicated souls; they bore themselves gently, gayly, without boast or spite; and they long continued to honor the obligations laid on them by the purest cause that ever drew sword. Their blows were struck for the independence of their religion, and only incidentally for the monarchy then identified with it. From the chivalrous conversation between the Marquis of Lescureand General Quétineau, then his prisoner, we learn that even Lescure would have rushed to the common defence had the Austrian made good his threat to pollute the soil of France. They failed, we say; yet what they fought for they secured: the liberty of the Church, and the restoration (temporary, as things are in France) of the government of their allegiance. Louis XVIII. was unworthy of their devotion. He was mean enough afterwards to reduce the pension granted by Napoleon himself to Madame de Bonchamp; to suspect the immeasurable loyalty of Madame de Lescure; to refuse admission to the portraits of Stofflet and Cathelineau when opening his gallery of generals at Saint Cloud, because, forsooth, they were but plebeians. In a hundred ways, by delayed recognitions, by temporizing, by denials, and by cringing to alien opinion (things deprecated with energyby the Abbé Deniau in his valuable work), he broke the faith of a too faithful party. Yet the praise the western subjects hoped for from the little Dauphin of 1793 they won from this man. “I owe my crown to the Vendeans,” he said, with the family characteristic of gracious speech.
The peasants, therefore, driven to the wall, rebelled without forethought or plan; a desperate handful against the strength of new France. At remote points, with no concert whatever, hostilities began: on Sunday, March tenth, in Anjou, two days later in Lower Poitou; and months passed ere one knot of insurrectionists heard tidings of the other. With the populace at Maulevrier rose Stofflet, the swarthy game-keeper of the resident lord; Stofflet of the German accent, harsh and hard, big-nosed, unlettered, trusty, a keenly intelligent and masterful disciplinarian. But the noteworthiestleader was Jacques Cathelineau, “a painstaking, neighborly man,” wagoner, and vender of woollens. There had been a disturbance at Saint Florent over the drafting; the Government troops fired; the young recruits charged on their assailants and routed them, pillaging the municipality and burning the papers. Cathelineau of Pin-en-Mauges was kneading bread when he heard of it. “We must begin the war,” he murmured. His startled wife echoed his words, wailing: “Begin what war? Who will help you begin the war?” “God,” he answered quietly. Putting her aside, he wiped his arms, drew on his coat, and went out instantly to the market-place. That afternoon he attacked two Republican detachments and seized their ammunition, his small force augmenting on the march; in a few days it was one thousand strong, and carried Chollet. Cathelineau’sthree brothers enlisted under his banner; in one short year all four were to be gathered into their stainless graves. He was called “the saint of Anjou,” and he deserved it; a man of truth, discretion, dignity, and sweetness, about whom the wounded crept to die.