In his exhaustive study of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, Murray Rothbard describes the American revolution as the first “successful war of national liberation” and “a people’s war, waged by the majority of Americans having the courage and the zeal to rise up against constituted ‘legitimate’ government, [and throw] off their ‘sovereign.’” How was this liberation to be achieved? Through an act of secession and through establishing new polities that were free of legal and political control from another, larger polity. This was certainly radical—and essentially unheard of—at the time, as historian David Armitage shows:
The notion that “one People” might find it “necessary” to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede from an empire or a composite state—was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution. ... [B]y and large, existing empires and states fiercely resisted movements toward secession and did all they could to suppress them...
Consequently, as Armitage notes, the American Revolution, in the centuries that followed, became the model for other movements for national liberation, from Europe to Latin America and even to Asia.
Among the first to attempt to use the American Revolution to support its own movement were the French Revolutionaries. But there was a problem. The French Revolution was not about liberating one part of France from the metropolis at the center. Rather, as suggested by Ralph Raico and other historians, the French Revolution was largely a battle of one group of elites attempting to seize power from another group of elites. Beyond the very earliest stages of the Revolution, the claims of fighting for freedom were largely window dressing on a fight to continue the power of the central state under new management.
Ironically, it was counterrevolutionaries who, in some cases, came the closest to emulating the experience of the American revolution in the form of a true fight for self-determination, secession, and national liberation.
The most notable of these movements was the Vendée rebellion, also known as “The War in the Vendée,” or simply, “the Vendée.” The Vendée rebels were not fighting to take control of the French state, or even to “reform” France. Rather, they fought for self-determination and the right to govern themselves in accordance with long-standing local laws, customs, and property arrangements. They were fighting a war of national liberation against the revolutionary government that was seeking to further centralize political power and seize control over all non-state institutions.
The Context: Centralization of Power under the Revolutionaries
The Vendée rebellion broke out in early 1793 as the revolution was approaching its most radical phase. France had entered war with Austria in the spring of 1792, prompting a radicalization of French state policy against alleged enemies of the Republic. The anti-clericalist Civil Constitution of the Clergy had passed in 1790 (with the approval of King Louis XVI) and forced clergy to take an oath of obedience to the French state. This had essentially turned clergy into government employees. Moreover, the French state had imposed a new form of direct rule on the French people, in a way that greatly disrupted local institutions, the local economy, and local ways of living. In his lengthy analysis of the Vendée, Charles Tilly describes how the revolutionaries further centralized political power and sought to direct it from the center:
Not only did [the revolutionaries] integrate the structure of the Catholic Church into that of the French government ...but also they made the unprecedented step of extending the purview of the national government to everyday life at the local scale. Although Louis XIV had gained a great reputation as a state-builder and his successors continued the work of centralization, their efforts to penetrate local communities had been partial, tentative, and often unsuccessful. They had succeeded mainly in the realm of taxation—and even there the method of collecting the major taxes was to assign a quota to the whole community and let the local council do the assessing and collecting.1
This was the national political context under which the rebellion began, but key to understanding the causes is to note why the Vendée region was different.
The region was notable for being heavily reliant on cottage industries and agricultural production. The largest segment of the population was the peasantry, but this was not an impoverished peasantry barely scraping by. The peasantry of the Vendée was relatively well off, and more politically active. This distinguished them from the impoverished peasants of other regions who lacked the time and resources to offer resistance. The region contained few sizable cities, and this was important because it meant less of a presence of the bourgeoisie in the region, and fewer bourgeoisie usually meant less support for the Republic. It was especially the upper bourgeoisie of judges, lawyers, and others with state-granted political privileges from which the revolution drew its most reliable support. These classes were strongest where urbanization was most widespread. Thus, in the scarcely urbanized region of the Vendée, the revolutionary bourgeoisie were less present and less influential. And, the lack of urbanization also meant the local peasants were less reliant on economic connections with cities and their bourgeois residents.
In fact, the relationship between the local peasants and the bourgeoisie was often marked by conflict rather than cooperation. The more prosperous peasants, who sought to expand their lands, often found themselves in competition with members of the bourgeoisie over land purchases.
The parish clergy also played a key role in the local political and social institutions. Political and social life was largely characterized by interaction between the landed nobility and the peasants, and the parish curé served as an essential mediator between the peasants and the aristocracy. Yet, when the French state began demanding the “obligatory oath” of clerical obedience to the state, mthe overwhelming majority of the clergy in the Vendée refused. This resulted in many local clergy losing their position to imported “constitutional clergy” who had bent the knee to the state. The Vendean locals often remained loyal to their indigenous clergy, known as the “good priests,” and resented the state for forcing new clergy into key community institutions.
The new revolutionary tax structure also tended to benefit the central state at the expense of local institutions. When the revolutionary government abolished the tithe—i.e., the church “tax”—this did not put more money in the pockets of peasants. Rather, the tithe was swiftly replaced by secular taxes which meant that local resources, rather than being used for the parish church and other community institutions, now flowed more freely to Paris for spending on wars and other regime projects.
All of this contributed to the multiplication of grievances in the Vendée against the revolutionary regime.
Perhaps the final straw came when, in March 1793, the National Constituent Assembly announced a new quota for military conscripts in the Vendée. Some locals resisted the call, and this was aggravated when it became clear that local officials of the revolutionary government, most of whom were members of the bourgeoisie, would be exempt from conscription. These officials would serve in the National Guard locally, rather than be shipped off to the front in the revolutionary wars.
Peasants had already been forced to give up their local clergy, to submit to countless new regulations from Paris, and to see land prices bid up by state-favored bourgeois officials. Now the peasants were told to sign up for wars in eastern France. Many Vendée peasants elected to take up arms as rebels instead.
By mid-1793, the response from the Republic was increasingly brutal. Moreover, the confirmed presence of counterrevolutionary “enemies of the Republic” further fueled the radicalization of French policy. It is not a coincidence that the Reign of Terror came into full swing in late 1793 during the War in the Vendée. In late 1793, agents of the Republic in Nantes—a town adjacent to the Vendée, and thus consumed by paranoia over rebellion, began drowning thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries in the Loire river. Many were women and children. Thousands throughout the West were executed for similar reasons, and Tilly writes: [T]he law of March 1793, directly instigated by the Vendée ...prescribed military trials and immediate execution for rebels caught bearing arms or counterrevolutionary insignia ... patriotic vengeance meted at Nante ...led all of France in executions...”2
The fact that the Vendée rebellion was a major target of the Terror is also admitted by neo-Marxist Barrington Moore, Jr., although Moore uses this fact to downplay the capriciousness of the terror. He writes: “By and large, the consequences [of the Terror] were rational. Detailed researches show that the Terror was mainly used against counterrevolutionary forces and was most severe where the counterrevolution was storngest [as in the Vendée]. Certainly there were exceptions and injustices. But the Terror was not in its major features a case of shedding blood for the insane please of doing so.”
Whatever one may think of Moore’s blasé attitude here, it’s a good reminder that the Republic meted out some of its most murderous work for those who sought political independence.
But it must be noted that once the Republic identified the Vendée in general as a hotbed of resistance, the regime rarely discriminated between actual rebels and the rest of the local population. The so-called “infernal columns” were dispatched to put down the rebellion, and the French Republican commander admitted his goal was a scorched earth campaign across the region. The number of local residents killed by this campaign commonly rangers from 20,000 to 40,000 people. This, of course, is an enormously large number for a rural community at that time, amounting to as much as a third of the population.
A War of Liberation
This leads to an important question. Is the term “counterrevolutionary” even appropriate here? It would probably be more accurate to refer to the Vendée rebels as secessionists or separatists. After all, the immediate goals of the rebels were clear: the freedom to practice their faith, and exemption from conscription. Certainly, many of the rebels had stated a preference for the return of the monarchy, but this was known by many to not be a realistic goal. No significant army of émigrés ever materialized, and no hope of an actual counterrevolution was on the horizon. Thus, the War in the Vendée remained effectively a war for self-determination and national liberation.
In this, the Vendean rebels were attempting what the Americans had done in North America more than a decade before: throw off the chains of an imperial government that imposes the will of a distant government on locals who wish to rule themselves.
Today, the war remains a contentious issue. On the Left, in France and elsewhere, many still take the old Republican and Marxist view that the war was motivated strictly by religious “fanaticism” or even by cowardice, due to local refusals to serve as conscripts. The Vendée rebels, the overwhelming majority of whom were peasants, are also often described as stooges of the local aristocracy, hoodwinked into taking up arms, against their own interests, against the Republic. Both of these critiques fit well into the Marxist view that no counterrevolution could have originated with “the people” of the region, and thus the rebellion must have been orchestrated by the reactionaries of the Church and the nobility. In reality, however, the rebels had many reasons, religious and economic, to oppose the Republic. In many ways, the peasants simply wanted to be left alone and to free in the sense that the American secessionists wanted.
The War in the Vendée also raises important questions for today in the context of local self-determination and secession. The attitude toward the Vendée rebels on the Left is often similar to what we see in the United States in regards to allowing states, cities, and regions to govern themselves free from the central government. For example, we hear even from self-styled libertarians that all communities must submit to the enlightened rule of the central government lest the “backward” locals prefer their own local ways. These locals, we are told, might have prayers at high school football games or not hire a tax-funded workforce that is sufficiently “diverse.” Fortunately, we have the agents of the central state to force “enlightenment” upon them. The critique of the Vendée rebels has been similar. In that case, it is assumed that the rebels were religious zealots, incapable of self-government and prone to the persecution of local minorities. They required, it was assumed, the more humanitarian rule of the Republic, instead.
What was always really at stake in the War of the Vendée was the principle of whether or not a distant state ought to be free to impose itself on everyone, everywhere within its purported “national territory.” To answer “yes” is to support the imperialist impulse, just as the enemies of the American revolutionaries did. Unfortunately, in the case of the Vendée, the imperialists won.
Image Credit: “MAYEUL,” License CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.
