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

The town of Machecoul is familiar to historians of the French Revolution as the site of one of the most notorious atrocities committed during the war of the Vendée (1793/94). Woell, who acknowledges that the precise number of those killed will never be known, cites a low-end estimate of at least 160 supporters of the First Republic murdered while Machecoul was in the hands of counterrevolutionaries during March and April of 1793. The town of 4,000 almost immediately became a symbol of Catholic fanaticism for the Jacobins, the murders there being used to justify the campaign of terror conducted by the famous "colonnes infernales" sent by the National Convention, which were responsible for the deaths of thousands during the next two years. Woell, in his study of Machecoul, does not break new ground in his account of the basic events of 1793, but by expanding his focus to cover the Old Regime preconditions and the nineteenth-century recollections of the Revolution, he makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of one of its key events.

In his opening chapter, Woell situates Machecoul in the particular geography of western France, and in the social and political context of the late eighteenth century. The pyramidical social structure at Machecoul was common throughout the region, but Woell wavers on the political profile of the town. He first claims it "saw more political unrest than likely was the case in other such communities (48)," but then notes that "such disagreements were not necessarily remarkable" and were, in fact, "ubiquitous, and thus [that] the town's purely political conflicts seem comparatively mundane" (50). On the whole, however, Woell shows that the social hierarchies and political squabbling over taxes and overlapping jurisdictions were commonplaces for towns like Machecoul, and therefore cannot explain why this particular place exploded with such violence in 1793.

In order to account for the uprising at Machecoul, Woell turns to what he sees as the diverse religious cultures that divided the community. The diocese of Nantes, which included Machecoul, was riven by the same Jansenist-Jesuit quarrels that Van Kley and others have identified as important sources of the Revolution.¹ Many of the elite of Machecoul, such as Etienne Gaschignard, the principal of the secondary school and one of the first to be murdered by the counterrevolutionaries, were apparently shaped by this dispute, looking forward to a reformed Christianity that would reduce the weight of the clergy, both spiritual and material, on their community. But not all of those at the top of Machecoul agreed, and orthodox Catholics were supported by the mass of peasants. Woell weaves together effectively the local story with the larger currents of religious dispute, but because religious tensions similar to those in Machecoul were common throughout the area, the puzzle of why the counterrevolution erupted with such violence in this one place remains.

Woell addresses this issue explicitly in Chapter 4, in which he sets up a contrast between the Republican and Catholic versions of the massacres that began circulating in the 1790s, both of which saw religion as a crucial cause. For Republicans, the clergy were responsible for provoking a crowd of fanatic peasants to defend Catholicism against a regime that was seizing church property and imprisoning priests who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to it. For Catholics, the Republican narrative exaggerates the number killed, ignores the legitimate religious concerns of the peasants about the intrusive and tyrannous regime, and neglects the larger context, a war against the insurgents that some scholars have gone so far as to label a genocide. Woell is fair-minded and careful in sorting out these differences, refusing to take sides in this long-standing battle in the culture wars of modern France. But he also struggles to bring into clear focus the interrelated sources of the massacres, and of the Vendée more generally. At...