of their booty; till, at last, the administrators of some departments
were under the necessity of forbidding such incumbrances: but the
officers, with whom restrictions of this sort were unavailing, put all
the horses and waggons of the country in requisition for similar
purposes, while they relaxed themselves from the serious business of the
war, (which indeed was nearly confined to burning, plundering, and
massacring the defenceless inhabitants,) by a numerous retinue of
mistresses and musicians.
It is not surprizing that generals and troops of this description were
constantly defeated; and their reiterated disasters might probably have
first suggested the idea of totally exterminating a people it was found
so difficult to subdue, and so impracticable to conciliate.--On the first
of October 1793, Barrere, after inveighing against the excessive
population of La Vendee, which he termed "frightful," proposed to the
Convention to proclaim by a decree, that the war of La Vendee "should be
terminated" by the twentieth of the same month. The Convention, with
barbarous folly, obeyed; and the enlightened Parisians, accustomed to
think with contempt on the ignorance of the Vendeans, believed that a
war, which had baffled the efforts of government for so many months, was
to end on a precise day--which Barrere had fixed with as much assurance
as though he had only been ordering a fete.
But the Convention and the government understood this decree in a very
different sense from the good people of Paris. The war was, indeed, to
be ended; not by the usual mode of combating armies, but by a total
extinction of all the inhabitants of the country, both innocent and
guilty--and Merlin de Thionville, with other members, so perfectly
comprehended this detestable project, that they already began to devise
schemes for repeopling La Vendee, when its miserable natives should be
destroyed.*
* It is for the credit of humanity to believe, that the decree was
not understood according to its real intention; but the nation has
to choose between the imputation of cruelty, stupidity, or slavery--
for they either approved the sense of the decree, believed what was
not possible, or were obliged to put on an appearance of both, in
spite of their senses and their feelings. A proclamation, in
consequence, to the army, is more explicit--"All the brigands of La
Vendee must be exterminated before the end of October."
From this time, the representatives on mission, commissaries of war,
officers, soldiers, and agents of every kind, vied with each other in the
most abominable outrages. Carrier superintended the fusillades and
noyades at Nantes, while Lequinio dispatched with his own hands a part of
the prisoners taken at La Fontenay, and projected the destruction of the
rest.--After the evacuation of Mans by the insurgents, women were brought
by twenties and thirties, and shot before the house where the deputies
Tureau and Bourbotte had taken up their residence; and it appears to have
been considered as a compliment to these republican Molochs, to surround
their habitation with mountains of the dead. A compliment of the like
nature was paid to the representative Prieur de la Marne,* by a
volunteer, who having learned that his own brother was taken amongst the
enemy, requested, by way of recommending himself to notice, a formal
permission to be his executioner.--The Roman stoicism of Prieur accepted
the implied homage, and granted the request!!
* This representative, who was also a member of the Committee of
Public Welfare, was not only the Brutus, but the Antony of La
Vendee; for we learn from the report of Benaben, that his stern
virtues were accompanied, through the whole of his mission in this
afflicted country, by a cortege of thirty strolling fiddlers!
Fourteen hundred prisoners, who had surrendered at Savenay, among whom
were many women and children, were shot, by order of the deputy
Francastel, who, together with Hentz, Richard, Choudieu, Carpentier, and
others of their colleagues, set an example of rapine and cruelty, but too
zealously imitated by their subordinate agents. In some places, the
inhabitants, without distinction of age or sex, were put indiscriminately
to the sword; in others, they were forced to carry the pillage collected
from their own dwellings, which, after being thus stripped, were
consigned to the flames.*
* "This conflagration accomplished, they had no sooner arrived in
the midst of our army, than the volunteers, in imitation of their
commanders, seized what little they had preserved, and massacred
them.--But this is not all: a whole municipality, in their scarfs of
office, were sacrificed; and at a little village, inhabited by about
fifty good patriots, who had been uniform in their resistance of the
insurgents, news is brought that their brother soldiers are coming
to assist them, and to revenge the wrongs they have suffered. A
friendly repast is provided, the military arrive, embrace their
ill-fated hosts, and devour what they have provided; which is no
sooner done, than they drive all these poor people into the
churchyard, and stab them one after another."
Report of Faure, Vice-President of a Military Commission at
Fontenay.
--The heads of the prisoners served occasionally as marks for the
officers to shoot at for trifling wagers, and the soldiers, who imitated
these heinous examples, used to conduct whole hundreds to the place of
execution, singing _"allons enfans de la patrie."_*
* Woe to those who were unable to walk, for, under pretext that
carriages could not be found to convey them, they were shot without
hesitation!--Benaben.
The insurgents had lost Cholet, Chatillon, Mortagne, &c. Yet, far from
being vanquished by the day appointed, they had crossed the Loire in
great force, and, having traversed Brittany, were preparing to make an
attack on Granville. But this did not prevent Barrere from announcing to
the convention, that La Vendee was no more, and the galleries echoed with
applauses, when they were told that the highways were impassable, from
the numbers of the dead, and that a considerable part of France was one
vast cemetery. This intelligence also tranquillized the paternal
solicitude of the legislature, and, for many months, while the system of
depopulation was pursued with the most barbarous fury, it was not
permissible even to suspect that the war was yet unextinguished.
It is only since the trial of the Nantais, that the state of La Vendee
has again become a subject of discussion: truth has now forced its way,
and we learn, that, whatever may be the strength of these unhappy people,
their minds, embittered by suffering, and animated by revenge, are still
less than ever disposed to submit to the republican government. The
design of total extirpation, once so much insisted on, is at present said
to be relinquished, and a plan of instruction and conversion is to be
substituted for bayonets and conflagrations. The revolted countries are
to be enlightened by the doctrines of liberty, fanaticism is to be
exposed, and a love of the republic to succeed the prejudices in favour
of Kings and Nobles.--To promote these objects, is, undoubtedly, the real
interest of the Convention; but a moralist, who observes through another
medium, may compare with regret and indignation the instructors with the
people they are to illumine, and the advantages of philosophy over
ignorance.
Lequinio, one of the most determined reformers of the barbarism of La
Vendee, proposes two methods: the first is, a general massacre of all the
natives--and the only objection it seems susceptible of in his opinion
is, their numbers; but as he thinks on this account it may be attended
with difficulty, he is for establishing a sort of perpetual mission of
Representatives, who, by the influence of good living and a company of
fiddlers and singers, are to restore the whole country to peace.*--
*"The only difficulty that presents itself is, to determine whether
recourse shall be had to the alternative of indulgence, or if it
will not be more advantageous to persist in the plan of total
destruction.
"If the people that still remain were not more than thirty or forty
thousand, the shortest way would doubtless be, to cut all their
throats (egorger), agreeably to my first opinion; but the population
is immense, amounting still to four hundred thousand souls.--If
there were no hope of succeeding by any other methods, certainly it
were better to kill all (egorger), even were there five hundred
thousand.
"But what are we to understand by measures of rigour? Is there no
distinction to be made between rigorous and barbarous measures? The
utmost severity is justified on the plea of the general good, but
nothing can justify barbarity. If the welfare of France
necessitated the sacrifice of the four hundred thousand inhabitants
of La Vendee, and the countries in rebellion adjoining, they ought
to be sacrificed: but, even in this case, there would be no excuse
for those atrocities which revolt nature, which are an outrage to
social order, and repugnant equally to feeling (sentiment) and
reason; and in cutting off so many entire generations for the good
of the country, we ought not to suffer the use of barbarous means in
a single instance.
"Now the most effectual way to arrive at this end (converting the
people), would be by joyous and fraternal missions, frank and
familiar harangues, civic repasts, and, above all, dancing.
"I could wish, too, that during their circuits in these countries,
the Representatives were always attended by musicians. The expence
would be trifling, compared with the good effect; if, as I am
strongly persuaded, we could thus succeed in giving a turn to the
public mind, and close the bleeding arteries of these fertile and
unhappy provinces."
Lequinio, Guerre de La Vendee.
And this people, who were either to have their throats cut, or be
republicanized by means of singing, dancing, and revolutionary Pans
and Silenus's, already beheld their property devastated by pillage
or conflagration, and were in danger of a pestilence from the
unburied bodies of their families.--Let the reader, who has seen
Lequinio's pamphlet, compare his account of the sufferings of the
Vendeans, and his project for conciliating them. They convey a
strong idea of the levity of the national character; but, in this
instance, I must suppose, that nature would be superior to local
influence; and I doubt if Lequinio's jocund philosophy will ever
succeed in attaching the Vendeans to the republic.
--Camille Desmouins, a republican reformer, nearly as sanguinary, though
not more liberal, thought the guillotine disgraced by such ignorant prey,
and that it were better to hunt them down like wild beasts; or, if made
prisoners, to exchange them against the cattle of their country!--The
eminently informed Herault de Sechelles was the patron and confidant of
the exterminating reforms of Carrier; and Carnot, when the mode of
reforming by noyades and fusillades was debated at the Committee, pleaded
the cause of Carrier, whom he describes as a good, nay, an excellent
patriot.--Merlin de Thionville, whose philosophy is of a more martial
cast, was desirous that the natives of La Vendee should be completely
annihilated, in order to furnish in their territory and habitations a
recompence for the armies.--Almost every member of the Convention has
individually avowed principles, or committed acts, from which common
turpitude would recoil, and, as a legislative body, their whole code has
been one unvarying subversion of morals and humanity. Such are the men
who value themselves on possessing all the advantages the Vendeans are
pretended to be in want of.--We will now examine what disciples they have
produced, and the benefits which have been derived from their
instructions.
Every part of France remarkable for an early proselytism to the
revolutionary doctrines has been the theatre of crimes unparalleled in
the annals of human nature. Those who have most boasted their contempt
for religious superstition have been degraded by an idolatry as gross as
any ever practiced on the Nile; and the most enthusiastic republicans
have, without daring to murmur, submitted for two years successively to a
horde of cruel and immoral tyrants.--A pretended enfranchisement from
political and ecclesiastical slavery has been the signal of the lowest
debasement, and the most cruel profligacy: the very Catechumens of
freedom and philosophy have, while yet in their first rudiments,
distinguished themselves as proficients in the arts of oppression and
servility, of intolerance and licentiousness.--Paris, the rendezvous of
all the persecuted patriots and philosophers in Europe, the centre of the
revolutionary system, whose inhabitants were illumined by the first rays
of modern republicanism, and who claim a sort of property in the rights
of man, as being the original inventors, may fairly be quoted as an
example of the benefits that would accrue from a farther dissemination of
the new tenets.
Without reverting to the events of August and September, 1792, presided
by the founders of liberty, and executed by their too apt sectaries, it
is notorious that the legions of Paris, sent to chastise the
unenlightened Vendeans, were the most cruel and rapacious banditti that
ever were let loose to afflict the world. Yet, while they exercised this
savage oppression in the countries near the Loire, their fellow-citizens
on the banks of the Seine crouched at the frown of paltry tyrants, and
were unresistingly dragged to dungeons, or butchered by hundreds on the
scaffold.--At Marseilles, Lyons, Bourdeaux, Arras, wherever these baleful
principles have made converts, they have made criminals and victims; and
those who have been most eager in imbibing or propagating them have, by a
natural and just retribution, been the first sacrificed. The new
discoveries in politics have produced some in ethics not less novel, and
until the adoption of revolutionary doctrines, the extent of human
submission or human depravity was fortunately unknown.
In this source of guilt and misery the people of La Vendee are now to be
instructed--that people, who are acknowledged to be hospitable, humane,
and laborious, and whose ideas of freedom may be better estimated by
their resistance to a despotism which the rest of France has sunk under,
than by the jargon of pretended reformers.--I could wish, that not only
the peasants of La Vendee, but those of all other countries, might for
ever remain strangers to such pernicious knowledge. It is sufficient for
this useful class of men to be taught the simple precepts of religion and
morality, and those who would teach them more, are not their benefactors.
Our age is, indeed, a literary age, and such pursuits are both liberal
and laudable in the rich and idle; but why should volumes of politics or
philosophy be mutilated and frittered into pamphlets, to inspire a
disgust for labour, and a taste for study or pleasure, in those to whom
such disgusts or inclinations are fatal. The spirit of one author is
extracted, and the beauties of another are selected, only to bewilder the
understanding, and engross the time, of those who might be more
profitably employed.
I know I may be censured as illiberal; but I have, during my abode in
this country, sufficiently witnessed the disastrous effects of corrupting
a people through their amusements or curiosity, and of making men neglect
their useful callings to become patriots and philosophers.*--
*This right of directing public affairs, and neglecting their own,
we may suppose essential to republicans of the lower orders, since
we find the following sentence of transportation in the registers of
a popular commission:
"Bergeron, a dealer in skins--suspected--having done nothing in
favour of the revolution--extremely selfish (egoiste,) and blaming
the Sans-Culottes for neglecting their callings, that they may
attend only to public concerns."--Signed by the members of the
Commission and the two Committees.
--_"Il est dangereux d'apprendre au peuple a raisonner: il ne faut pas
l'eclairer trop, parce qu'il n'est pas possible de l'eclairer assez."_
["It is dangerous to teach the people to reason--they should not be too
much enlightened, because it is not possible to enlighten them
sufficiently."]--When the enthusiasm of Rousseau's genius was thus
usefully submitted to his good sense and knowledge of mankind, he little
expected every hamlet in France would be inundated with scraps of the
contrat social, and thousands of inoffensive peasants massacred for not
understanding the Profession de Foi.
The arguments of mistaken philanthropists or designing politicians may
divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature--they may
create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it
with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without
labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually
accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and
propensities with which it is incompatible.
The situation of France has amply demonstrated the folly of attempting to
make a whole people reasoners and politicians--there seems to be no
medium; and as it is impossible to make a nation of sages, you let loose
a horde of savages: for the philosophy which teaches a contempt for
accustomed restraints, is not difficult to propagate; but that superior
kind, which enables men to supply them, by subduing the passions that
render restraints necessary, is of slow progress, and never can be
general.
I have made the war of La Vendee more a subject of reflection than
narrative, and have purposely avoided military details, which would be
not only uninteresting, but disgusting. You would learn no more from
these desultory hostilities, than that the defeats of the republican
armies were, if possible, more sanguinary than their victories; that the
royalists, who began the war with humanity, were at length irritated to
reprisals; and that more than two hundred thousand lives have already
been sacrificed in the contest, yet undecided.
Amiens, Oct. 24, 1794.
Revolutions, like every thing else in France, are a mode, and the
Convention already commemorate four since 1789: that of July 1789, which
rendered the monarchical power nugatory; that of August the 10th, 1792,
which subverted it; the expulsion of the Brissotins, in May 1793; and the
death of Robespierre, in July 1794.
The people, accustomed, from their earliest knowledge, to respect the
person and authority of the King, felt that the events of the two first
epochs, which disgraced the one and annihilated the other, were violent
and important revolutions; and, as language which expresses the public
sentiment is readily adopted, it soon became usual to speak of these
events as the revolutions of July and August.
The thirty-first of May has always been viewed in a very different light,
for it was not easy to make the people at large comprehend how the
succession of Robespierre and Danton to Brissot and Roland could be
considered as a revolution, more especially as it appeared evident that
the principles of one party actuated the government of the other. Every
town had its many-headed monster to represent the defeat of the
Foederalists, and its mountain to proclaim the triumph of their enemies
the Mountaineers; but these political hieroglyphics were little
understood, and the merits of the factions they alluded to little
distinguished--so that the revolution of the thirty-first of May was
rather a party aera, than a popular one.
The fall of Robespierre would have made as little impression as that of
the Girondists, if some melioration of the revolutionary system had not
succeeded it; and it is in fact only since the public voice, and the
interest of the Convention, have occasioned a change approaching to
reform, that the death of Robespierre is really considered as a benefit.
But what was in itself no more than a warfare of factions, may now, if
estimated by its consequences, be pronounced a revolution of infinite
importance. The Jacobins, whom their declining power only rendered more
insolent and daring, have at length obliged the Convention to take
decided measures against them, and they are now subject to such
regulations as must effectually diminish their influence, and, in the
end, dissolve their whole combination. They can no longer correspond as
societies, and the mischievous union which constituted their chief force,
can scarcely be supported for any time under the present restrictions.*
* "All affiliations, aggregations, and foederations, as well as
correspondences carried on collectively between societies, under
whatever denomination they may exist, are henceforth prohibited, as
being subversive of government, and contrary to the unity of the
republic.
"Those persons who sign as presidents or secretaries, petitions or
addresses in a collective form, shall be arrested and confined as
suspicious, &c. &c.--Whoever offends in any shape against the
present law, will incur the same penalty."
The whole of the decree is in the same spirit. The immediate and
avowed pretext for this measure was, that the popular societies, who
have of late only sent petitions disagreeable to the Convention, did
not express the sense of the people. Yet the deposition of the
King, and the establishment of the republic, had no other sanction
than the adherence of these clubs, who are now allowed not to be the
nation, and whose very existence as then constituted is declared to
be subversive of government.
It is not improbable, that the Convention, by suffering the clubs still
to exist, after reducing them to nullity, may hope to preserve the
institution as a future resource against the people, while it represses
their immediate efforts against itself. The Brissotins would have
attempted a similar policy, but they had nothing to oppose to the
Jacobins, except their personal influence. Brissot and Roland took part
with the clubs, as they approved the massacres of August and September,
just as far as it answered their purpose; and when they were abandoned by
the one, and the other were found to incur an unprofitable odium, they
acted the part which Tallien and Freron act now under the same
circumstances, and would willingly have promoted the destruction of a
power which had become inimical to them.*--
* Brissot and Roland were more pernicious as Jacobins than the most
furious of their successors. If they did not in person excite the
people to the commission of crimes, they corrupted them, and made
them fit instruments for the crimes of others. Brissot might affect
to condemn the massacres of September in the gross, but he is known
to have enquired with eager impatience, and in a tone which implied
he had reasons for expecting it, whether De Morande, an enemy he
wished to be released from, was among the murdered.
--Their imitators, without possessing more honesty, either political or
moral, are more fortunate; and not only Tallien and Freron, who since
their expulsion from the Jacobins have become their most active enemies,
are now in a manner popular, but even the whole Convention is much less
detested than it was before.
It is the singular felicity of the Assembly to derive a sort of
popularity from the very excesses it has occasioned or sanctioned, and
which, it was natural to suppose, would have consigned it for ever to
vengeance or obloquy; but the past sufferings of the people have taught
them to be moderate in their expectations; and the name of their
representation has been so connected with tyranny of every sort, that it
appears an extraordinary forbearance when the usual operations of
guillotines and mandates of arrest are suspended.
Thus, though the Convention have not in effect repaired a thousandth part
of their own acts of injustice, or done any good except from necessity,
they are overwhelmed with applauding addresses, and affectionate
injunctions not to quit their post. What is still more wonderful, many
of these are sincere; and Tallien, Freron, Legendre, &c. with all their
revolutionary enormities on their heads, are now the heroes of the
reviving aristocrats.