Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774-1914 (review)

Work on the Revolt of the Vendée has been hindered by the absence of enough rigorous local studies at one level and, at another, a failure to put the revolt and its resonances into a broad enough time frame to allow for perspectival breadth. No doubt sensing these omissions, Edward J. Woell's short monograph attempts to remedy them both, and he has usefully selected the small town of Machecoul (the site of the beginning of the revolt over conscription on March 11,1793) as his template. What happened that day was the catalyst for "unparalleled repression" (p. 16) in western France of a character that plagued official commemoration of the Revolution two centuries later. Yet, as Professor Woell shows, the tendentious reporting of the killings of republicans at Machecoul makes dispassionate reconstruction of the events almost impossible. Making the best of a bad job, he sensibly opts to reconstruct the pre-Revolutionary contexts for the town and its inhabitants and then, to complete his study, to examine the diverse ways in which those traumatic events of spring 1793 were perceived and represented over the following 120 years. Machecoul before 1789 was, according to Woell (and his familiarity with local and regional sources is assured), a town with many resident secular clergy teaching the familiar Tridentine catechetical themes of sin and man's need for obedience but without ever managing to put in place a monolithic Catholic culture or entirely eliminating traces of Jansenist values. The local clergy and their representatives in the National Assembly were alienated from the Revolution before the end of 1789 and only 22 per cent of the former First Estate in the department of the Loire-Inférieure took the oath accepting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Despite the existence of a Masonic Lodge and increased lay involvement in the running of the parish church under the new ecclesiastical regime in place by 1791-92, the nonjuring clergy had many sympathizers in the town and among the wealthy tenant farmers on the peripheries. Woell's researches make him insistent that we cannot talk in terms of the outbreak of violence in 1793 being a matter of town versus country, rich versus poor: the political divisions criss-crossed social and geographical ones. The bitterness felt by republicans against their rebellious neighbors/enemies persisted; Woell notes that many patriots were opposed to Lazare Hoche's "Pacification of the West" in 1795-96 while refractory priests were likewise comparing what had happened to their people as comparable to the persecution of the early Christians by the Roman state. The fault lines proved enduring: Woell uses nineteenth-century sermons to demonstrate that Tridentine rigor persisted alongside a devotion to the Sacred Heart that the devout knew had been an inspiration to their forefathers during the Vendéen Revolt. Other families, no less attached to their faith, were descended from bleus rather than blancs, and before 1914 there was little sign of the secularization that now marks the region as little different from anywhere else in France. Woell notes at the close that the folk memory of the "Massacres," 200 years on, is now at an end. Most locals have forgotten them. Thus concludes a modest, sensible, and well-researched study whose principal weakness is the absence of comparisons with other towns in the region.