The Unseen Terror: The French Revolution in the Provinces 9780755622689, 9781848853256

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To my friends in the Charente-Maritime

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Illustrations 1.

The serving plate from Bouquet’s festival dinner service (reproduced by permission of the Musée Orbigny-Bernon at La Rochelle). 2. Saintes: Hôtel de Monconseil. 3. Saintes: The Présidial. 4. Two views of Saintes showing the Newly Built Quays: Prints from 1791 5. J.-L. David’s pen and ink portrait of Bernard de Saintes. 6. The Medieval Bridge, Hotel de Monconseil and Cathedral: Prints from 1791. 7. La Rochelle: Tour de la Chaine, 21 March 1793. 8. Portrait of Joseph-Marie Lequinio (reproduced by permission of the Musée Ernest Cognacq at Saint-Martin-de-Ré). 9. Crazannes: The Château. 10. Saintes: Cathédrale de Saint-Pierre. 11. Saint-Savinien-sur-Charente: The Church. 12. Saintes: Abbaye aux Dames. 13. Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud: The Church. 14. Port d’Envaux: Château de Panloy. 15. Portrait of Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély (reproduced from Jean-Noël Luc (ed.),La Charente-Maritime, L’Aunis et La Saintonge des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1981), by permission of the publishers, Éditions Bordessoules). Note: Line Drawings are by the Author

17 21 40 50 55 66 76

106 130 143 146 158 197 204

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Acknowledgements My thanks are due to many people for the help they gave me so willingly. The librarians of the Médiathèque municipale François-Mitterand in Saintes introduced me to François-Guillaume Marillet’s diary and gave me permission to use it in this study, together with the local history journals of which they are the guardians. They and the habitués of the reading room were never stinting on their time and support. The staff at the Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime generously guided me to information about Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély and to documents written by leading local revolutionary lawyers, together with the minutes of the various administrative bodies in the revolutionary era. The staff at the Service Historique de la Défense – Département Marine at Rochefort gave me a fascinating focus on the activities of the French Navy. The late Tom Pocock, historian of British concerns contemporary with the French Revolution and Empire, made time to read several of my chapters and then provided very significant guidance towards my presentation of events. Mr Nicholas Blake advised me on British naval strategy in the revolutionary years. Professor and Mrs Richard Cooter took the time and trouble to read and comment in detail upon my text. The Marquis de Grailly started this project off in his Château at Panloy by telling the story of a member of his family during the revolutionary years and lending me important books. M. Christian Gensbeitel, then Director of the Atelier du Patrimoine Saintonge, generously offered me information about conditions in and personalities of the town of Saintes in the prerevolutionary period. Maître Didier Bréjon de Lavergnée informed me of the misfortunes of his antecedent relation, the Abbé François Levesquot, at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud. M. Claude Morain told me about Le Chevalier de Limouzin at Nieul lès Saintes. M. Henri Texier pointed the way for me as the editor of the bicentenary book on the Revolution in Saintes, M. Dominique Droin’s history of the naval centre of Rochefort, and Maître Claudy Valin’s magisterial work on La Rochelle have all three been inspirational. They are worthy successors to writers like Louis Audiat, Pierre Lemonnier, and Charles Dangibeau in the xi

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nineteenth century and, further back, to authors of journals and memoirs contemporary with the Revolution itself, especially François-Guillaume Marillet and Claude Legrix. Mrs Mary Critchley unstintingly gave all the time and skill needed to compile the index. Mrs Cecilia Cussans most generously made the complete 1868 edition of Jules Michelet and Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outretombe available to me. M. et Mme Claude Teulet found and gave me a nineteenth-century map of the Charente-Inférieure. Dr Lester Crook, Ms Liz Friend-Smith and Mrs Jayne Ansell at I.B. Tauris, together with Ms Hema Latha and her colleagues at Integra, gave vital advice and support. Thanks are also due for their support to Mme Paola Authier, Mme Gilliane Broome, Mrs. Lisa Crane, M. et Mme G. Fontenoy, Mr Julian Ford-Robertson, Mr and Mrs Donald Fry, M. et Mme Gerard Gaillard, Dr Jean Gaud, M. Thomas Humeau, Mme Philippe Humareau, M. et Mme Jacques Japhet, M. François Julien-Labruyère, Mme Nicole Moine, M. Georges Nascas, Mr and Mrs Edward Newland, Mr Mark Norris, M. Jean Peyrondet, Mr and Mrs Terry Piner, Mme Charles Rivière, Mrs Valerie St. Johnston, Mme. Lucette Salomon, M. Luc Smets, Mr and Mrs Kit Thompson, and Mme Béatrice de Vergie. I alone, of course, am responsible for whatever errors may be found. Richard Ballard, Saint-Sorlin de Conac, 2009

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Chronology of Events at National Level 1778 1783 1787 1788 August 1789 February March June July

August October November December

France joins American colonists in their War of Independence against Britain. Peace of Paris. War expenditure has crippled France financially. Assembly of Notables fails to agree on a solution to the financial crisis Faced with the financial crisis, Louis XVI calls the EstatesGeneral to meet on 8 May 1789. Lists of grievances are drawn up by the nobles, the clergy, and the third estate in every administrative unit in France. French provincial assemblies elect deputies for the EstatesGeneral. The Estates-General unite to become the National Constituent Assembly. Grain prices at peak in Paris. The seizure of the Bastille. Louis XVI visits Paris from Versailles and appears to accept the Revolution by wearing the tricolour cockade in his hat. ‘The Great Fear’. Abolition of seigneurial power and the Church tithe. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The king and the National Assembly are compelled to move to Paris. Nationalization of church lands to be sold to pay off the national deficit. The Assignat introduced as a means of facilitating sales of church lands.

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1790 February March July November

1791 February June October November 1792 April June August

September

1793 January February

March

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Vows for monks and nuns abolished. Issue of laws about seigneurial dues misunderstood in rural areas. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Bishops and priests required to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution or be regarded as having resigned their sees and incumbencies. Most bishops refuse. Election of a constitutional bishop for each of the 83 new departments. The king’s flight to Varennes. Constituent Assembly is dissolved. Sitting deputies cannot be re-elected. New Legislative Assembly meets. First of many decrees against emigrés and priests who refuse to take the oath. France declares war on Austria. Sans-culottes enter Tuileries to make Louis XVI wear a bonnet of liberty. Sans-culottes storm the Tuileries. Overthrow of the monarchy. Royal family in prison. Republic declared. Invasion of France by Prussia. Massacre of nobles, bishops, and priests in Paris prisons. French Republican army victorious over Prussians at Valmy. The National Convention replaces the Legislative Assembly. Trial of Louis XVI in the Convention. His execution. France declares war on Britain and Holland. The National Convention orders 300,000 military conscripts. The Vendée rebellion gathers momentum. France declares war on Spain. The National Convention decrees the Revolutionary Tribunal. Committees of Surveillance set up all over France.

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Chronology of Events at National Level

April May June July August

September

October

November December 1794 February April June July 1795 April June July September November 1796 February March

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Committee of Public Safety set up in Paris. ‘Federalist’ rebellion in Marseille. ‘Federalist’ rebellion in Lyon. Girondins expelled from National Convention by Jacobins. Vendéans take Saumur. Robespierre made a member of Committee of Public Safety. Marseille retaken by Republican troops. Toulon taken over by British Admiral Hood in return for recognition of King Louis XVII. Official Terror begins. Convention passes Law of Suspects. Full powers accorded to representatives on mission. Maximum on prices and wages decreed. Revolutionary calendar adopted. Lyon retaken with stern reprisals. Queen Marie-Antoinette executed. Vendéans defeated at Cholet. Vendéans fail to take Granville, no British support arrives. British evacuation of Toulon. Vendéans defeated at Savernay. Execution of Reversaux in Paris. Execution of de La Tour du Pin. Law of 22 prairial: Unrestricted powers to Revolutionary Tribunals. Fall of Robespierre. Thermidorean Convention begins to dismantle the Terror and the economic Maximum. Prussia makes separate peace with France. Death of Louis XVII. Invasion by emigrés, supported by British, defeated at Quiberon. Spain makes separate peace with France. The Directory replaces Thermidorean Convention. Renewed laws against the clergy. Assignat abolished. Bonaparte in command of Army of Italy.

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October

Spain allies with France against Britain.

1797 February

Metal currency restored.

1798 June July

Bonaparte takes Malta. Bonaparte in Egypt.

1799 August November 1801 July

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Bonaparte leaves Egypt. Bonaparte seizes power and replaces Directory with Consulate. Bonaparte signs Concordat with Pope Pius VII.

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Notes on Money and Government Money In the old order, the monarch had the monopoly of issuing money, and the standard unit was the livre tournois, divided up into 20 sous (or sols), and each sou was worth 12 deniers (hence l. s. d. also used in the United Kingdom until 1971). During the revolutionary period, both livres and francs were spoken of. The change was made official when currency became metric on 7 April 1795 and the franc comprised 100 centimes. However, just as French people nowadays think in francs and pay in euros, it is likely that men and women during the Directory still tended to do their sums in livres. Assignats were certificates or bonds devised to simplify the sale of nationalized church property when it was sold off to meet the national deficit. They were introduced in September 1789, and accepted as paper currency in April 1790. Their issue ceased in February 1796 and the printing presses for making them were broken on government orders. France officially returned to metal money in February 1797.

Successive Forms of Government The Estates-General. This was a national elected body not unlike the British parliament, summoned by the kings of France at various times down the centuries to consult with them about policy, especially taxation. Its function was entirely different from that of the 13 non-elected provincial parlements sitting in Paris and other towns like Bordeaux and Grenoble, which registered and promulgated the king’s edicts. The Estates-General last met before 1789 in 1614. It was made up then of 300 deputies from each of the three orders or estates of the nation – the Clergy, the Nobility (only called ‘aristocrats’ pejoratively after the Terror began), and the Third Estate – which included everybody else, from wealthy ship-owners in La Rochelle to tenant farmers everywhere. It was decided before the 1789 meeting that the number of deputies of the third estate should be doubled (‘doubling the third’) so that they would not be outvoted automatically by the clergy and nobility acting xvii

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together, and it was left to be decided when the Estates-General had met whether the three estates should vote as separate bodies or meet together so that every individual should exercise a personal vote. The third estate deputies adopted the title National Assembly in June after their ‘Tennis Court Oath’ not to disperse until they were accepted by the king as such. The Constituent Assembly. After the king had directed the nobility and the remaining clergy to join the third estate and those clergy who had already associated themselves with it, in June 1789, the Estates-General deputies took on this new name. When the deputies followed the king from Versailles to Paris in October they held their meetings in the former riding school (Manège) at the Tuileries Palace. The Constituent was replaced in October 1791 by the Legislative Assembly. New elections were necessary after the decree devised by Maximilien Robespierre which excluded all members of the Constituent from offering themselves for election. A good many second estate deputies left France to become emigrés at that time. The National Convention. After the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, the Legislative Assembly changed its name to this because it was both the legislative and the executive of the new Republic. Its task was to draw up a new constitution, which it did without adopting it, and the Convention remained in power until the creation of the Directory. It delegated responsibilities to 21 committees, of which the Committees of Public Safety (for executive decisions and policy forming) and of General Security (for internal policing) were the most prominent. After the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, commentators speak of the Thermidorean Convention, which lasted until its replacement by the National Directory. The constitutional arrangement adopted six months after the execution of Robespierre and the dismantling of the Terror had five Directors as the corporate head of state, and there were two councils: one of the Elders (anciens), who elected the Directors, and the other called the Council of Five Hundred, elected by means of a complicated franchise. This lasted from October 1795 until it was pushed aside by Bonaparte’s coup d’état of brumaire in November 1799, which established the Consulate. Jacobins and Girondins. With the nationalization of monastic houses in Paris, there were substantial buildings available for the new political clubs that had sprung up around the Estates-General and the National Assembly, first in Versailles and then in Paris. What became the Jacobin Club began

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life in Versailles as the Breton Club. The former convent of the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré became its meeting place. Its members in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention sat together on the higher seats to the left of the tribune, and were also called the Mountain. There were 250–300 Montagnards, the most conspicuous of them being Maximilien Robespierre. Bernard de Saintes was one of them. The group clustering around Brissot, Deputy for the Eure-et-Loir, Vergniaud, and Roland were known as the Gironde (from the department represented by Vergniaud). They were about 180 in number (60 or so loosely joined political associates, plus those who supported them). Finally, there were 250–300 deputies of the Plain or the Marsh who avoided involvement in these factions. Formal party organization was unknown, and patterns of loyalty took time to develop. The Jacobins included some radicals in their number, but in social background and attitudes they were very similar to the Girondins. The quarrel between the two groups, whatever its origins, was political. The leading Girondins were in many ways no less radical than the Mountain, but they bitterly distrusted the Paris Commune, which seemed very close to Jacobin politics, and feared that there were plans for a dictatorship based in Paris. The Girondins favoured the National Convention as the ultimate authority in the nation, based on elections in the French provinces. The Jacobins in the Convention insisted on maintaining the One and Indivisible Republic by means of centralized control and using the Terror to enforce it. During Louis XVI’s trial, the Girondins proposed to counterbalance Parisian influence by deciding on a sentence appropriate for him through a national referendum. This move was discredited when it was rumoured, with some justification, that Vergniaud had written to the king asking to be a minister. The Jacobins, with the help of the politicized artisans in Paris and elsewhere (known as sans-culottes because they wore trousers not breeches and hose), intimidated the uncommitted deputies to bring about the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention between 31 May and 2 June 1793, leaving France governed, in the opinion of many, by an unelected ‘rump’ dominated by Jacobins. This was the inspiration for rebellions in places like Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and Toulon. After that, the Jacobins in the Convention and on the Committees tended to work through trusted representatives on mission like Carrier, Tallien, Collot-d’Herbois, Fouché, Lequinio, and Bernard de Saintes to overcome any tendencies towards what they called federalism.

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Map of the Charente-Inférieure

Reproduced by permission of the Director of the Departmental Archives of the Charente–Maritime at La Rochelle

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Preface We had to remain in Paris, so to speak, during lessons about the French Revolution in an English sixth form because all the big names and the significant places were there: Danton, Marat, or the incorruptible Robespierre, the Bastille, the Tuileries Palace, or the Jacobins. There were a few days out: to Nantes to be horrified at Vendéan suspects being tied together and drowned in the Loire, or to Toulon to see young Captain Bonaparte laying his guns above the harbour to frighten Admiral Lord Hood’s fleet away but, even so, nothing explained why people in small towns accepted the changes, and why the Terror was possible even in country hamlets. Coming to live in south-western France helped me to reply to those questions, and putting yet another book on the shelf marked French Revolution in English is justified by my having been given access to a contemporary diary kept in the town of Saintes by a lawyer made redundant when the changes were made.1 The banks of the Seine were reflected in the Charente, which had its own big names, its own significant places, and its own reasons for embracing the new order of things.

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Introduction

A Revolution Led by Lawyers Je définis la Révolution, l’avènement de la Loi, la resurrection du Droit, la réaction de la Justice. Jules Michelet 1847.1

L

ouis XVI had not personally been a tyrant before 1789, but the system over which he presided had become despotic in the eyes of many Frenchmen long before he inherited the throne from his grandfather in 1774.2 He and Marie-Antoinette saw the candle in Louis XV’s window blown out at the moment of his death. They heard all the courtiers running through the corridors towards their own apartments in the palace of Versailles to kneel before them. Those who told the story gave them awesome words to say: ‘God protect us! We are too young to reign.’3 Public awareness of the financial crisis 15 years later in the spring of 1789 was the immediate cause of the king’s ordering every province in France to hold an assembly to elect deputies to meet him at Versailles to discuss ways and means of revitalizing the nation. On the surface, this could be seen as democratic because the qualification to vote in the election of a deputy to the provincial assembly was to be male, over 21 and having your name on the list of taxpayers. We shall see how the provincial assembly at Saintes rushed to participate in the apparent novelties of government. This development, in the wake of the failure of the king and his council to arrive at any solution for the crisis by themselves, and their being incapable of ensuring the loyalty of the army while food prices peaked in the capital on 14 July, turned into the Revolution. After the citizens had taken the Bastille to seize gunpowder to defend themselves against probable royal reprisals, neither the king nor his surviving ministers, after he had dismissed the popular Jacques Necker as financial controller, could be confident of maintaining control in Paris. All Louis could do was reinstate Necker and go the 12 miles to Paris in person to put a tricolour cockade on his hat and demonstrate the reality that he and his courtiers had lost the political initiative. The fumbled 1

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experiment in constitutional monarchy had begun in June when the king had accepted the reality of the situation and ordered the clergy and nobility to join the deputies of the third estate in a National Assembly.4 The Great Fear5 came at the end of July, when rumours flew all over provincial France saying that nobles at court were hiring brigands to make reprisals against the changes made so far by destroying the grain harvest. Ill-informed panic led tenant farmers to attack their seigneurs to seize and destroy title deeds that showed what dues they had to pay them. Eventually it was discovered that the gangs of men roaming the countryside were unemployed farmhands desperately looking for lodgings and work. As all that came to a close, nobles and senior clergy in the National Assembly at Versailles orchestrated a feverish renunciation of their privileges on the night of 4 August. One of the richest seigneurs in the kingdom, the duc d’Aiguillon, proposed the complete abolition of all feudal dues and, when the bishop of Chartres went to the tribunal to call for seigneurial hunting rights to be taken away and for country people to be allowed to eat pigeons and rabbits caught on noblemen’s estates, the duc du Châtelet made a counter-proposal to remove the tithe that was the only source of income for the parish clergy. Then yet more nobles and churchmen got to their feet to vie with each other to defuse the national crisis without putting increased military or police powers into the king’s hands. ‘This great clearance sale’,6 as Jean-Christian Petitfils7 has called it, ended at three in the morning, and Louis XVI was associated in all this unexpected change by being proclaimed as ‘the restorer of French liberty’. The bizarre night was followed by intense days spent in the National Assembly transforming what had been decided into new laws that deprived the nobility of their local administrative control and judiciary authority throughout France. The Rights of Man and of the Citizen were subsequently declared, seeming to establish freedom of thought, speech, belief, assembly, and the press. In the excitement of this first flush of change, it could have been – and was – argued that the nation was at one with itself. Even so, Artois, the king’s influential younger brother had left the country, followed immediately by a first emigration of nobles who could not accept the crumbling of their alliance with the monarchy. Moreover, a politicized movement emerged among urban artisans who could no longer afford to feed their families and were not satisfied with promises of theoretical change held over for some vague future. The market women of Paris, attended by the Marquis de Lafayette in command of the Parisian National Guard, marched in the rain to Versailles, where, after a night of threatened and real violence, the king acquiesced in their demand that he come to live in Paris. Next day, they brought ‘the baker,

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the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’ back to their city, effectively to be prisoners in the Tuileries Palace, which had been empty for a century after Louis XIV had moved out. All the flour stored in Versailles came too, and the royal house-move was followed in a few days by the arrival of the deputies in the National Assembly who set up shop in the disused riding school close by. Then the essential division in French society was revealed by the secularization of it. The drawing up of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July 1790 by the National Constituent Assembly, and making it into law, along with the requirement that the bishops and clergy take an oath to maintain it, meant that those who welcomed change found themselves cut off from the others who did not.8 Those who looked to the king and the traditional Church for their personal security were, from now on, separated from those whose hopes were in the hands of the governing body elected by the wealthier taxpayers. The new rulers and the ruled alike were dominated by men with a legal training. The king’s temporary veto had to be recognized as incoherent: the king could not support the clergy who were loyal to him, and was not even allowed to receive his Easter communion at the hands of one of them in 1791. It was hoped to re-float the national economy by the nationalization and sale of the lands and property of the Catholic Church, an action which could work effectively only if there were no expenses of major warfare for a long time. Wealthy members of the third estate eagerly used the new bonds called assignats to buy this national property. The design was doomed, however, when the French nation declared war on the kings of Europe in less than 18 months, and its eastern territory was invaded by the forces of Austria and Prussia amid rumours that the queen was secretly communicating French military intentions to her brother, the Austrian Emperor. Louis XVI was temperamentally unable to remodel himself as a constitutional monarch, and attempted to get away from Paris altogether in June 1791, so as to make for the eastern frontier at Montmédy and declare himself free from the National Assembly’s control. The king and queen and their children were brought back to Paris after being captured at Varennes, to be received by the citizens in complete silence as they, and the two Republican lawyers sent to collect them, trundled back in their carriage to the Tuileries Palace. Fourteen months later, the elected members of the National Legislative Assembly abolished the institution of monarchy altogether on the morning of 10 August 1792. Politicized and armed workers9 invaded the Palace on the initiative of the Paris Commune at the Hôtel de Ville, which had ordered the popular assemblies in each section of the city to remain in perpetual session. The king fled with his family to seek safety in the National

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Assembly. The Swiss Guards who had tried to protect him were slaughtered in great numbers. The Republic was declared as the king sat silently by. His trial and execution followed in January 1793. Members of the Jacobin Club, working in association with the Paris Commune, asserted their political supremacy, excluding opponents who were no less revolutionary but who favoured a degree of regional autonomy in France. The means of enforcing the authority of the so-called Montagnards was the Terror, with the setting up of Revolutionary Tribunals all over the country and the systematic threat of execution by means of the guillotine for the gainsayers, regardless of whether they were class opponents or recently seen as sympathizers. During the period of the Official Terror, from the spring of 1793 to the summer of 1794, lawyers created a structure through which the National Convention’s representatives on mission controlled local government. Maximilien Robespierre emerged as leading personality in the National Convention’s Committee of Public Safety,10 and was regarded by many all over France as the head of the ruling faction until he was overthrown and executed himself in July 1794 by the coup d’état known as Thermidor (the name of that month in the recently adopted revolutionary calendar). By that time, any local resistance had been overcome with consistent severity. The extreme situation was the rebellion in the so-called ‘Military Vendée’, extending north from La Rochelle as far as the Loire River, continued into Brittany by the movement known as the Chouannerie. This triggered extreme retributive violence which has given rise in recent years to a debate among historians about whether the action taken by the Republic was the first example of systematic genocide in modern history.11 After the Terror had been gradually but certainly dismantled in Paris and the provinces, the five members of the Directory replaced the National Convention with an Assembly of Elders and a Council of Five Hundred in 1795. Uncertainty and fear for the nation’s security still remained. The lawyers were still in charge, however, and when General Bonaparte seized power in France at the end of 1799, they were among his backers, acquiescing in his authority which took nothing away from theirs.12 We shall be concerned in this study with the evolution of the new political and social order in one clearly defined area of south-western France in 1789 and the subsequent decade. The geographical rationalization of France into 83 departments decreed on 26 February 1790 created the Charente-Inférieure out of part of the former provinces of Aunis and the Angoumois, and of all the province of the Saintonge. There were signifi-

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cant towns in the predominantly rural department. La Rochelle had gained prosperity from Atlantic and Caribbean trade. Rochefort was an artificial implant from Colbert’s time, built as a centre for the king’s navy. Saintes was accepted as the administrative and legal centre (chef-lieu) because it met the criterion of being accessible in one day’s journey from every commune in the department. Four other towns – Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Marennes, Pons, and Monlieu – were to become heads of new districts together with La Rochelle, Rochefort and Saintes. The economic interests of the department depended largely on the products of each area within it. The coast saw salt production. Inland there was grain and the raising of cattle and, further inland, the intense cultivation of vines feeding a major industry centred on Cognac in the next department. All these enterprises were joined together by the system of transport for trade goods provided by the Charente River, navigable upstream beyond the border of the Charente-Inférieure as far as Angoulême, and downstream to the estuary at Rochefort. The shipping on the river included gabares and sloops built at such places as Saint-Savinien and Saintes. The cargoes were barrels of wine, eau de vie, and cognac, building stone quarried at Crazannes and Saint-Savinien, timber for shipbuilding, military materiel for the navy at Rochefort, the ingredients for making ships’ rigging, firewood, and grain and fruit in season. The sloops could, if required, go out to sea and trade with Bordeaux or even English ports before war was declared. The way France was administered had been altered, and the officials in the new départements did what the lawyers become politicians told them to. These officials were lawyers too, and had the necessary experience for leadership as former administrators of noble estates and Church lands. Office-holders were not appointed from Versailles any longer, but elected to administrative bodies in the departments, districts, and municipalities all over the nation by citizens with a recognizable level of wealth. What was decreed in the capital was implemented in the Charente-Inférieure surprisingly quickly, after the three-day time-lag for correspondence to arrive in Saintes, and there were personalities active in the towns and villages who would reflect the preoccupations of their rulers in the capital. Among many others, we shall see Jacques Garnier and André-Antoine Bernard both adding ‘de Saintes’ to their names, Charles-Jean-Marie Alquier active in the early days in La Rochelle, and Michel Regnaud emerging to prominence with Saint-Jean-d’Angély as his original power base. In Jonzac there will be Jacques-Alexis Messin, and in the little village of Saint-Thomas de Conac the

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brief influence of Jacques Roux, the so-called ‘red priest’ who would soon emerge as the leader of the extreme left-wing Enragé faction in Paris. The growth of literacy and the educated discussion of public issues led to increased political strength of French public opinion represented in growing antagonism towards the Bourbon version of monarchy. This meant that wealthy members of the bourgeoisie would eventually challenge the hitherto unquestionable power of noble seigneurs in town and country. All over France, an anti-establishment undertow had already begun in the opinion of those who were neither noble nor active Catholics. This tendency is represented here in the large, prosperous houses along the river near Saintes at Port d’Envaux belonging to the owners of the shipping on the Charente, evidence that there were people ready and able to replace the seigneurs in neighbouring châteaux like the Marquis de Grailly’s Panloy down the river, or the Duc de La Tremoille’s Taillebourg across it, when it came to power representing wealth. Wills drawn up in solicitors’ offices in and around Saintes between 1750 and the Revolution clearly show how social control by the monarchy, by the Catholic Church, and by the nobility had been seriously eroded by the 1780s: only a small mental step remained between the old order and the new. Many of the non-noble wealthy classes and of the artisans had ceased to endow requiem masses or make charitable bequests out of religious motives in their wills, as had been the case beforehand. These documents leave no doubt about the unforced response in the Charente-Inférieure to trends being set in Paris and the national readiness for the surprises the Revolution offered when it came.13 Words spoken in February 1790 by the man elected as the commandant of the National Guard unit in Port d’Envaux represent a responsible individual’s reaction to what was happening. When the members of the new municipality made their Oath to the Constitution at an open-air ceremony, Colonel Gallocheau told his village audience: Frenchmen have broken their chains. Free from now on, and subject to the . . . law alone, we shall not see the scales of justice weighted in favour of the powerful man any more . . . This immortal monument of reason and human wisdom has been the work of enlightened legislators and a just and beneficent monarch who has sworn solemnly to be its most firm support. The constitution ought to give happiness to all, since it offers us, for the first time,14 the inestimable enjoyment of liberty.15

Three years later, this pristine system had been replaced by a climate of fear, with committees of surveillance, the same National Guard unit being ordered to check up on those who did not have candles in their windows

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on the evenings of national festivals, the need for more prison cells than ever before, bonnets of liberty on the church towers, the guillotine permanently set up in La Rochelle and Rochefort (but not in Saintes), and corpses washed up on the beaches at the mouth of the Charente River. Well-documented events in the towns and villages of department of the Charente-Inférieure were characteristic of the national reaction to all these developments, and they help us to understand what the Revolution meant to those who were not active in the capital. It took three days, riding to exhaust a chain of post-horses, before you could reach Saintes or La Rochelle from Paris, but what was happening here was every bit as real as what took place there. Making the connection between national and provincial power, once we have seen the political life of the nation extended into a secular state governed by impartial law and the principles of a new-found civisme, allows our appreciation of the revolutionary decade to take on greater depth. The impartiality of the law and civisme remain in being as the foundations of the French state, despite the different transient models of government that had their respective turns in the two centuries ‘up until our days’ (jusqu’à nos jours) as French people tend to say. The first part of this book opens with an account of a cadet force for the National Guard set up in the village of Rioux by a tailor who found he had a worthwhile position in local society such as had never been possible before. His story allows us to see the extent of the radical change which the Revolution had brought about in the countryside. Then we go back to what historians call the pre-revolution for an account of seigneurial domination to set the scene for what happened in this unforeseen revolution. Accounts from first-hand sources present the drawing up of lists of complaints and election of deputies to the Estates-General during the provincial assembly in Saintes. The body elected turned itself into the National Assembly and divided France into 83 departments, all of equal size, with an administrative centre in each one accessible to all the inhabitants. Early developments in Saintes and Saint-Jean-d’Angély are examined upon the basis of information found readily to hand in primary sources. The second part concerns the development of the system of Terror in the area. The new conditions in Saintes and other towns were dominated by the aspirations of unscrupulous new men like André-Antoine Bernard and Jacques Garnier, who had their revolutionary apprenticeships in Saintes before becoming national figures. A picture of Terror and wartime conditions as they affected the citizens of Saintes is drawn from a diary kept in secret between 1789 and 1795

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by a lawyer called François-Guillaume Marillet, an informed opponent of the new conditions and of the personalities who had taken power. In La Rochelle, the Jacobin Terror was intense after February 1793 to prevent the southward spread of the royalist and Catholic rebellion in the Vendée, just north of there. The British naval occupation of remote Toulon made for a reaction equally severe in the military port of Rochefort. If the lawyers’ revolution were to be successful, the intransigent opposition of nearly all the bishops and a great number of their clergy had to be overcome by making the Church redundant, and this is the subject of the third part. The secular nation was invented by the lawyers during the Revolution as the remedy for what they called fanaticism. The term ‘anti-clericalism’ was not available until late in the nineteenth century in France,16 but the reality it came to convey had existed increasingly for a long time. Although it often appeared that one fanaticism was being replaced by another during the dismantling of the relations between the Church and the State and the increasing de-Christianization of the State, the subconscious echo of the Calas affair17 influenced antagonism towards the Catholic Church in the decade of the Revolution, and showed that there was a wider issue involved: the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and, indeed, to be individuals. The bishop of Saintes was murdered in the September Massacres in Paris after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792. Many priests from the department accepted exile in Spain, as did the bishop of La Rochelle, but those who did not were executed or subjected to systematic brutality on decaying ships off the coast near Rochefort. Marillet again allows an appraisal of local reaction to the treatment of the clergy in the particular context of the town of Saintes after the survivors were brought ashore. It was not until after Bonaparte had taken over the Revolution by making himself First Consul that a new rapport with the Church was established. The minutes of the village council in Saint-Saturnin-de-Séchaud are the basis of the fourth part, which traces individuals and families from initial eager hope through the tensions of the Jacobin Republic to the anxious boredom of the Directory. The way things worked out for the parish priest, for his constitutional replacement, for suspects, for those who were elected to power, for ordinary people in the country are examined in the smallest unit of the new national administration, a typical, rural commune. A concluding chapter traces continuity in the influential career of a lawyer with a moderate outlook from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, which spans the whole revolutionary period and carries on until the Battle of Waterloo.

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What changed and what remained as it had been, who supported the Revolution and who opposed it, can be more fully understood when we move away from the National Assembly and the Convention and see where the deputies who made the decisions had come from while the lawyers’ Revolution span out into Terror and back again before it was taken over by a soldier’s Empire.

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chapter 1

The Old Order Changes

C

itizen Jean Bouquet was a tailor in a village called Rioux. He made liveries for domestic servants in the châteaux roundabout, and his speciality was military uniforms. He made his own officer’s uniform for the National Guard, and wore it every day, claiming always to be ready to resist any attempt to restore the monarchy overthrown on 10 August 1792. He expressed his new sense of liberty in his public speeches, and one he made in 1793 – then called ‘Year II of the Republic’ – included this paragraph: Think how happy we are to be free after so many centuries of slavery under the tyranny of kings, seigneurs, priests, intendants and their lackeys! All those monsters have at last been dispossessed of the rights they took from the people by their craftiness or violence. We were like children before, but now we have come of age, and are masters of our own rights. What Republican would be such a coward as to regret shedding the last drop of his blood to uphold a cause so beautiful?1

The Revolution made a local celebrity of him, which he could never have been in the old society. He took his place in the unit of the National Guard based in Saintes that was set up in the summer of 1789 when it was feared that the king’s courtiers were organizing an army of mercenaries to burn the harvest and starve the recently elected National Assembly and local authorities into submission. The men moving about in the countryside were in reality unemployed farmhands looking for work, and the fear soon passed. The National Guard remained, however, and was manipulated by a lawyer called Bernard de Jeuzines, who seized command of it in Saintes. It gave a taste of village power to people like Bouquet, elected as the third of the officers in the first company of the National Guard unit at Rioux with the rank of sous-lieutenant. That did not fulfil his potential in his own eyes, however, and this strutting innocent exploited an opportunity that arose to extend his influence. When he saw lads who were not old enough to join the National Guard at a loose end outside his workshop, he asked them if they wanted to take 13

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part in impressive parades and be ready to shed their last drop of blood for the Republic. When they said they did and would be, he asked for their parents’ permission to set up a cadet force about a hundred strong, and named it Hope (Espérance). He provided each youth with a tricolour cockade, a pike, a Republican bonnet, a national flag, and a satchel, all at his own expense. He made uniforms for older members of his company after a few months, and the final stage in their training was the handling of weapons. A surviving memoir reproduces the speeches that he made. This extract is typical of his style: Think what depression and misery your fathers and mothers and your grandparents lived in up to now under the most infamous tyrannies of . . . the most insolent despotism. Forget the saints of stone and wood2 that your priests ordered you to adore and kiss. Honour your father and your mother; adore the Supreme Being in your hearts, and show the energy which belongs now to free men to fight and slash until the last of the tyrants is gone. There it is: your most sacred duty!

Jean Bouquet had married Marie Arrive in nearby Montpellier de Medillan 13 years before. So, in February 1793, when the Republic ordered every department in France to raise soldiers to defend the nation in the war against the kings of Europe, Citizen Bouquet, as a married man, was not required to serve. This was a disappointment to him, and he found a substitute in Pierre Bibard, who also lived in Rioux, made him a new uniform, paid for the equipment he needed for the army, and presented him to the authorities of the Department of the Charente-Inférieure at Saintes.3 The officials sent a report of this to the National Convention, making an honourable mention of Bouquet, with a copy to Bouquet himself. In reply, the National Convention sent the ‘generous citizen’ a letter of thanks. The memoir gives the impression that the Espérance Company was Bouquet’s own idea. Certainly the local initiative in Rioux was his but, in La Rochelle at the same time, boys too young to enlist for combat against the rebels in the Vendée joined a body called La Compagnie de l’Espérance de la patrie, a brainchild of the town’s Jacobins, which produced a genuine social mix. Their talk of ‘shedding [our] blood to the last drop for the patrie’ was the same as Bouquet’s, and there were some who lied about their age to join the desperate conflict not very far from their own front doors in the Vendée. It may have been that the Rioux contingent of Espérance was part of a larger Jacobin creation, especially since Bernard de Saintes, Bouquet’s

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patron, was a Jacobin, and Bouquet’s pronouncements were in tune with the Jacobin outlook. He had a full-length portrait of himself in uniform painted and hung it in a gold-coloured frame in his workshop ‘so that his descendants might . . . have him for an example of not attaching themselves to fortunes or riches which are often perishable, especially the ones acquired by fraud and trickery. They should observe’, he added, ‘that a good citizen ought not to keep the surplus that he has over from the rest of his income, but ought to sacrifice it entirely for the upkeep of the nation and the needy in the commune.’ He refused to accept payment for the duties he undertook as a junior officer in the National Guard. He said, with generous naivety, that there were plenty of poor people about and, if he were paid for what he did, that would lessen the support available to them from the national treasury. At parades of the Espérance Company, after the young citizens had marched round the Tree of Liberty and sung hymns in honour of the Republic, they always cried out ‘Long live the Republic. Long live the National Constitution. Long live Citizen Bouquet who gave us our pikes and our bonnets!’ This hurrah punctuates everything in the memoir. As soon as drill was finished, he took the cadets to the auberge and paid for several bottles of wine. Buying drinks for minors seems to have been an acceptable part of revolutionary culture. The most typical symbol of freedom for sans-culotte sympathizers was the Phrygian bonnet, or cap of liberty. It was bright red, and was supposed to have been worn by freed slaves in antiquity. The king had been given one and wore it for a while on the afternoon of 20 June 1792 while he drank to the nation’s health in an attempt, under duress, to show solidarity with the Revolution after a crowd had burst into the Tuileries Palace. So, as was done in most villages, Bouquet put a cap of liberty and two tricolour flags fixed on pikes up on the church tower in place of the weathercock, and ordered someone to paint the sides of the bell tower in the three national colours, with a representation of the sun which had risen in a new age replacing the symbols of the old order. In the new circumstances, when the social and moral control exercised by the clergy had disappeared, secularists like Bouquet at every social level all over France came into their own. There was no one to teach the church catechism after the curé of Rioux, Jean Bertry, and his vicaire, Pierre Guillemeteau, had gone into exile in Spain, and Bouquet took over the task of teaching Republican principles in his cadet force instead, denouncing what had been replaced as fanaticism.4

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Bouquet led the Espérance Company the ten miles to Saintes in April 1793, marching the boys in parade order if they were tall and strong enough, and hiring a horse and cart for the youngest members of the company. He had borrowed four drums from the town in advance, and took the boys along at a pace regulated by old soldiers as far as Citizen Bernard’s front door. By this time Bernard was one of the Deputies for the Department in the National Convention and was eventually to become as great a protagonist of what could be called the new fanaticism on a national scale as Bouquet was on a local one. Deputy Bernard was actually at his house in Saintes. He took Citizen Bouquet and his company to meet the Departmental Directors. These officials admired Bouquet’s spirit because he was ‘virtuous for the public good’. They presented him with his own copy of a report of the occasion which they had drawn up, in which it was said that the young patriots assured the Directors of ‘their regret that they had not risen to their courageous intentions only because of the weakness of their age’, and of ‘how much they looked forward to the time when they could spill their blood usefully for the Republic’. The residents of Rioux were repeatedly witnesses to the activities of Citizen Bouquet. He planted the village Tree of Liberty and concluded, on the morning when he found that ‘certain aristocrats or other wicked partisans had been throwing stones at it and intending to stop it growing, that they seemed to want to bring back despotism in preference to the sacred devotion of a good patriot which horrified them. They will be denounced’, he said. A dinner service for patriotic banquets was made, illustrated with his activities, and a significant icon of the Revolution in the Charente-Inférieure remains from it in the form of a large serving plate bearing a picture of Bouquet arriving at Saintes with his company of cadets, made in the traditional blue and yellow on white faience typical of local production. He marches in front with drawn sword and points to the cathedral tower to say, ‘We will soon be there!’ He is presented as a dapper figure, strutting yet genial. The memoir includes a report of the speech he made at the first anniversary of the king’s execution. When Louis Capet, last king of France, was guillotined, the Republican Bouquet showed great enthusiasm and energy, and he made this speech to his cadets: Ah! My dear children! The perjurer Capet, the most infamous tyrant in the universe, came to undergo the penalty which he so justly merited. This

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1. The serving plate from Bouquet’s festival dinner service (reproduced by permission of the Musée Orbigny-Bernon at La Rochelle). intriguer, who had sworn in the presence of the Convention to be faithful to us, only a little while after looked for a means of the greatest criminality to cut our throats. If the warm patriots and the warm partisans of virtue had not discovered his treason for us, eh! where should we be now? Let us cry out, my children, in the voice of the fatherland; let us swear a sacred oath again to be faithful to the law and to the nation, and to make war until no tyrant remains. I shall not be surprised if intrigues with the ci-devant5 landowners and the priests plunge us into terror. O wise and sacred laws of the republic, who will be the partisan cowardly enough to regret pouring out his blood to the last drop to make you stronger! For me, all that I am able to expend upon it shall be devoted to it.

Afterwards he was promoted to the rank of Captain of the Espérance Company of Rioux by all the voters, so the more solid citizens who qualified for their vote by the tax they paid appeared to have welcomed his influence. If Bouquet did all this, they would not have to do it themselves. He thanked his fellow citizens in these words: My brothers, you come to honour me with your confidence in naming me your captain. I accept it, and promise to carry it out with all my power. I swear to be faithful to the law and to the nation, and to die at my post, rather than abandon you.

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When firearms were requisitioned to arm the defenders of the patrie, Bouquet handed over his own, and did not accept any payment for it. After the Popular Society of Rioux had been reformed and purged, as one of its members he provided ‘a large national flag in the three national colours to be on display in the meeting room, of his own good will and again at his own expense’. Furthermore, he embroidered with his own hands (he was a tailor, after all) the Rights of Man, Equality, Fraternity, and ‘other pictures of our most celebrated martyrs’, to be displayed in the Society. At the time, the main national characteristic was fear: fear of denunciation, fear of arbitrary arrest and execution. The executions at La Rochelle and Rochefort of the opponents of the Revolution did not go unnoticed by villagers who went to those towns on market days to sell their produce or see their relations and friends. No one of the right age was exempt from military service. Parents of military heroes in both the foreign and the civil theatres of war were given rewards, but they were often the parents of a dead hero. Those who had most grounds for fear were the ones who sheltered priests who refused to co-operate with the Revolution and the parents of nobles who had gone into exile in support of Louis XVI’s brothers. In fact, everyone who did not qualify for a certificate of civism – the Republican identity card – knew that to be under a cloud inevitably meant being rained upon if not actually struck by lightning. Confiscation of their property was often carried out. When Maximilien Robespierre and other architects of the Jacobin Terror were themselves executed in July 1794, Citizen Bouquet made a special speech. He invited his fellow citizens to rejoice at the death of their most perfidious enemies who have paid on the scaffold the penalty they so justly deserved for their duplicity in preaching one thing and doing another. It would have been better to follow men who had remained faithful to the civic and fraternal oath that they made, obeyed all the laws of the republic and always encouraged those who were ignorant of them.

The memoir says nothing about Bouquet’s attitude towards the Terror before this event. His general self-projection suggests that he would not have been opposed to it, especially since the local Jacobin, Bernard, was his patron. After the speech, he gave dinner to his Espérance Company, and they shouted their well-rehearsed slogan as usual in return. The account of Bouquet’s achievements in the memoir is breathless, artless, and unsophisticated. It does not have an end. After recording the words painted on the fourth side of the church tower, ‘Thanks to the Supreme

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Being, the republicans ought to be happy to have abolished tyranny and all seditious regimes’, it just stops. Other memories of Bouquet seem to have passed into the sand. The National Guard officer’s uniform had taken the place of the priest’s cassock in representing authority for training the outlook and aspirations of the young. Bouquet was the ideal local instrument for a nation at war with the kings of Europe and the royalist rebels. He had absorbed the principles of the Revolution: loyalty to the unified nation and equality before the law, which went with respect for the law for its own sake and, in 1793–4, there was a lot more law than there had been before, because its source was an elected assembly at national level, even if that assembly, at the height of the Terror, delegated too much of its power to the members of the Committee of Public Safety, for which Robespierre was the front man. Bouquet’s memoir placed great value upon ‘civism’ or ‘civic virtue’, which included honesty and trustworthiness. In his brief time of village power, Bouquet claimed to stand for that ideal, however rough-hewn his expression of it might be. This memoir is the only monument Bouquet has: a dog-eared few pages reproduced in small print in a specialist journal which took over a century to see the light of day and from which, its editor tells us, the front and back pages were missing when he picked it up. It is difficult to accept the suggestion made by its editor over a century later that the memoir is Bouquet’s own work. He obviously had his admirers among the cadets or they would soon have found ways of dodging the parades, and it may be that one of them wrote this as a tribute to him in all its down-to-earth single-mindedness. Even so, if the lads in uniform meant it when they called out for Citizen Bouquet to live long, perhaps he really did represent the liberty which parents talked about at their kitchen tables in the presence of their teenage sons. The darker side of that may be that they were too frightened of the new authority to say anything against it.

*** Three influential men – the Marquis de Monconseil, the Comte de La Tour du Pin, and the Marquis de Reversaux – can be taken to represent the old order in the provinces of Aunis and Saintonge. The first stood for the type of personal authority exercised by the nobility over the country areas of the two provinces as seigneur of Rioux (where Bouquet lived later), Tesson, Thenac, Pradelle, and Courcoury, and he wielded great influence in Saintes. There was a good deal of powerful networking by marriage alliances and

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inheritance. Their self-conscious domination of the area and their links with the court at Versailles meant none of them saw coming what happened in the years following the setting up of the National Assembly in 1789. Even if they had to take the wealthier sections of the third estate into partnership, they did not expect to lose power as utterly as they did when it happened. Born in 1695, Etienne Guinot de Monconseil became a royal page and was soon commissioned into the Royal Household Troop of Musketeers. An obsessive gambler for a time, he bought a regiment of soldiers for himself with his winnings. It was nicknamed the Royal Biribi Regiment, after the name of the card game in which he won the money, and he commanded it in the Wars of the Polish and the Austrian Succession. Then he was appointed Lieutenant-General of Haute-Alsace, but he soon left and came home to the Saintonge, where he became something of a philanthropist, creating the hospital in Saintes and a school of surgery backed up by a botanic garden off the rue Saint-Vivien to provide medicines. He set up a cotton mill where only very poor people would be taken in as workers, and a small hospice for the dying on his estate at Tesson. His control was exercised by benevolence, but patronage from the distant king or the nobles close at hand could never satisfy bourgeois dreams of liberty. The Hôtel de Monconseil in Saintes, built in 1738–9, offers a fine example of private architecture from Louis XV’s reign. It dominates the Charente River and the water meadows on the other side and is his lasting memorial.6 It was built in the taste of the day, not a few years behind Paris as often happened with houses in the provinces, and reflects the elegance of his lifestyle.7 In 1755, the marquis had made a promising marriage alliance for his eldest daughter, Cécile-Charlotte-Marquerite-Séraphine Guinot de Montconseil, with Jean-Frédéric de La Tour du Pin, a 28-year-old widower. De La Tour du Pin was also a professional soldier who had received his commission as a youth and had served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War. His marriage made the Saintonge his personal centre of operations and Louis XVI appointed him military commandant. The nobility of Saintes elected de La Tour du Pin as one of their two deputies in the Estates-General, and he declared himself in favour of necessary change. He was one of the first out of the small number of nobles who allied with the third estate. He kept a good table at Versailles, welcoming fellow deputies of all political colours to twice-weekly dinners. Maximilien Robespierre and Choderlos de Laclos8 were on his guest list. As War Minister he did what he could to re-establish the army after its loss of nerve in 1789, adopting the tricolore as the military banner. He had

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2. Saintes: Hôtel de Monconseil.

worked towards the re-establishment of discipline, but this backfired on him after troops mutinied at Nancy in August 1790 and punishments handed down were as harsh as they had ever been before the Revolution. This led to his resignation after being denounced along with other ministers by sansculottes in the streets of Paris and by Georges Danton in the Assembly. De la Tour du Pin was in England when Louis XVI was put on trial, but came back to Paris to do as much as he could to preserve the idea of constitutional monarchy. When it became plain that there was nothing he could do, he retired to Auteuil, where he was arrested on 31 August 1793. He was brought from prison to be a witness at the queen’s trial and defended her courageously, continuing to give her the respect he saw due to her. He enraged Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, who presided at the trial, by persistently referring to Marie-Antoinette as ‘The Queen’ or ‘Her Majesty’ and by refusing to call her ‘the widow Capet’ as her attackers wanted him to. His renewed imprisonment lasted nearly seven months and then, on 28 April 1794, he was condemned and executed on the same day.9 A third personality among old order figures typical of the Saintonge is the last Royal Intendant, Jacques-Philippe-Isaac Guéau de Gravelle, Marquis de Reversaux. He represented the royal control that lay behind the noble ascendancy in the two provinces, nominated to his office by Louis XVI in 1781. He planned and presided over the draining of a great deal of

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marshland on the coast which involved digging a canal between Rochefort and Brouage. The improvement of streets and drainage in Rochefort was also carried out. Both of these developments raised antagonism towards him, because he used soldiers from several regiments to do the work and billeted them in the town while it was done.10 He saw to the construction of arterial roads, provided the quays on the Charente River at Saintes, and devised other projects that were implemented in the dignified new main streets and buildings developed in the town 50 years later. His development programme in the years preceding the Revolution caused great hostility in Saintes. A royal edict for which he petitioned made it no longer necessary to maintain the medieval ramparts, and Reversaux used the money saved to improve the narrow, muddy town streets flanked by timber-framed buildings. This involved taking over properties and gardens in the town from their bourgeois proprietors, while he installed himself in the vacant Hôtel de Monconseil in 1788.11 His opponents later accused him of having criticized the raising of three hundred thousand soldiers to repel the invasion of France by the kings of Europe – he said that it would be better if the citizens were to stay at home – and he went to the scaffold in February 1794.

*** The inhabitants of the Aunis and the Saintonge welcomed events that occurred in Paris between 14 and 17 July 1789: the fall of the Bastille, the recall of Necker to office, and, above all, the visit of Louis XVI to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where he put the tricolore cockade on his hat to reassure the population of his support for change. The magistrates in Saintes ordered Te Deum to be sung and bonfires of joy to be lit. Before the changes, France was a nation in which the king’s rule was personal and where all major decisions stemmed from ones already made by him on the advice of his ministers in ‘the upstairs council’ (conseil en haut) at Versailles. Those without privilege, however wealthy they were, did not have regular access to the king in the secluded wonderland of Versailles, where court ritual worked to numb the effect of the real world on the processes of government.12 The king did not speak to individuals, only to corporate bodies.13 The clergy and nobles stood a better chance of gaining access within the charmed circle of royal domination than anonymous members of the third estate. From the bird’s eye point of view of the royal audience chamber, shipowners and tenant farmers had virtually the same status. However, over the passage of nearly two centuries since the Estates-General had last met,

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the third estate, in terms of wealth and potential for power, had changed from being nothing to being everything, as a secular-minded canon of Chartres cathedral called Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès had recently observed. At La Rochelle the Revolution developed without too much tension because the town’s maire, Jean-Marie Alquier, became a deputy at the Estates-General and then in the Constituent Assembly but, in spite of his absence, the municipality still firmly held the reins of local power. Alquier was a lawyer on the side of progressive thinking as a Freemason, and the national significance of Freemasonry in the Revolution was that it had a tradition of all its members being equal in their lodges whatever their rank might be in ordinary life. Alquier was popular among the Protestants in the town because he had denounced Bishop Crussol d’Uzès of La Rochelle for his condemnation of Louis XVI’s edict of toleration for Protestants. The amounts Protestants were required to pay as tax eminently qualified some of them as the ones to set the new whirligigs of power in motion. Their wealth came from controlling more than half of the town’s overseas trade. They were readers of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, joined lodges of Freemasons, and lived on a grand scale in the Saint-Barthélémy quarter with noble families as their neighbours. After the Revolution had started, a new edict of 24 December 1789 recognized their civil equality as well as status, so they were eligible to be members of municipal councils for the first time ever. Elections held at La Rochelle in January 1790 still produced a Catholic maire, but 4 Protestants were members of a municipal council of 12 and, of the notables elected, there were 7 Protestants out of 24.14 Election, rather than appointment, of responsible officials was the most characteristic indication of what had changed in the second half of 1789. There were problems involved: in the town of Saint-Jean-d’Angély there were two maires elected at once, the ancien régime progressive Valentin, who had been in office for years, and Normand d’Authon, a conservative landowner who had gained a barony by marriage. This situation persisted until a specific edict of the National Assembly rectified matters.15 In Saintes, as we shall see, there were some manipulations of an untried system by the new powerful, but popular enthusiasm seemed to carry along the transfer of power to the bourgeoisie. Excluded from effective power, some nobles left France immediately to make themselves available to Louis XVI’s brothers who talked of freeing the king from his captors. Others, like Henri de Grailly, left only after they were declared ineligible for election to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, despite having served as deputies for their order in the Estates-General and then in the Constituent.16

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chapter 2

Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues

T

he winter of 1788–9 had been particularly harsh with a temperature below freezing for days on end. Late snowfall delayed sowing, and the vines were frosted. Ice on the Charente disrupted transport, split and sank boats, stopped fishing, and piled up on the banks. Farm animals suffered epidemics, and the price of grain was rising inexorably, to peak at La Rochelle on 28 July. In August, the harvest seemed adequate, but high rainfall made the yield less than expected so, in the autumn, the price of grain rose again and the wine harvest was mediocre too. Hoarding made the problem worse. Workers paid by the day soon became beggars. The wealthy in Pons complained that ‘not a day goes by but we are assailed in the town and in the country by strangers and tramps’. There were bread riots, like the one in Rochefort on 26 April, when a crowd tried to burn the baker Ayraud alive in his own ovens after they had seen him receiving his normal flour delivery. Maire Rondeau restored order and stopped the crowd entering households looking for hoarded grain. Severe punishments were ordered: three rioters were hanged, one sent to the galleys, and a woman imprisoned for life after a public flogging. In early 1789, provincial assemblies were called at Saintes, La Rochelle, and Saint-Jean-d’Angély to draw up the books of grievances (cahiers de doléance) and to hold elections of deputies from all three estates.1 The third estate held meetings in hamlets and villages to draw up a primary document, incorporating what residents had said. Then meetings held in larger villages edited as many as 20 lists of complaints into one. Subsequently these were sent on to La Rochelle or Saintes or Saint-Jean-d’Angély for their final edit, and the clergy and nobility drew up their respective lists. The elected deputies for each order took the final editions with them to the Estates-General. 24

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François-Guillaume Marillet was a lawyer who very soon became antagonistic towards developments in Saintes and the French nation brought about by his fellow lawyers. He was 57 years old, a town councillor, property-owner, and father of a family. Starting from when the elections to the Estates-General were called, he wrote his Secret History of the Revolution, recording his disgruntled reaction to the way things were going. He began with the assemblies of the three orders held in Saintes in March 1789. In the first two orders2 they worked on the reduction of the cayers (sic). There was a lot of noise and diversion, particularly in the clergy’s assembly . . . In the third estate’s assembly . . . each district presented its lists and the assembly nominated eight or twelve commissioners for remodelling them all and reducing them to a single one. M. le Mercier was one. I do not recall who the others were. M. le Mercier, with his sugary and quiet tone set his own views out on all issues to all who would listen, and talked to all the commissioners with the greatest honesty and kindness.3 When they came to the list for the town itself, the greater part of the articles of grievance were complaints and invective against M. Gaudriaud [perpetual maire of Saintes] and M. the intendant. The delegates from the countryside did not want to take up all these personal accusations, saying that they knew nothing of all that, and that in consequence they would never sign, and so if the town had personal grievances against M. Gaudriaue (sic), they could draw up a particular list and address it to M. Necker, the controller-general, or send it to be presented by the deputies. They [the urban delegates] insisted, but they gave in, and all these articles were suppressed from the general list.4

It took three days to produce a final document containing the grievances of the third estate of the Saintes area. The clergy and nobility were in session to draw up their lists from a standing start. Marillet’s full name, which included a nobiliary particle (de la Couboisière), suggests that he had contacts in the impressive former Jesuit boys’ college where the nobles were meeting, and he always speaks respectfully of nobles in his journal. In the meetings of the nobility, ‘all went along peacefully – at least I do not remember that there was any noise’.5 When the lists of grievances were complete, election of the deputies began. For the third estate,6 ‘a landowner from Marennes, M. Garésché, gained the most ballots and was elected first deputy’.7 The second ballot

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was in favour of Lemercier and, after the result was announced, the lawyer Jacques Garnier made a speech. He spoke for a long time in praise of M. le Mercier, and finished by saying that, since his health would perhaps not permit him to live in Versailles for the duration of the Estates, he offered himself as his assistant. The assembly had no regard for this ambitious demand because they saw that he was a loudmouth (bavard) who talked too much, and who would put himself up again8 and wanted his own opinion to prevail.9

The third deputy elected was Auger, a businessman from Tonnay-Charente. For the fourth deputy’s place, there was a disputed result between Ratier – who was either from Barbezieux or from Archiac, and was either a lawyer or a landowner (Marillet could not remember, he says) – and Garnier. At nine o’clock, it was decided to have another vote in the morning. The hours of night were well used by M. Garnier and his supporters. During the time the assembly met, he had often invited the deputies from Pons and other places around to eat with him and he paid visits to others in their respective hotels. That evening, he sent letters to all the hotels to ask for their votes. The greater part of the assembly was staying at M. Bormin’s Fleur de Lys. All the deputies from Barbezieux, Archaic and the places around them were lodged in this hotel – at least fifty of them. They had placed a sign at the hotel door – with the permission of M. the Lieutenant-General of the Police – with the inscription: Hotel of the Provincial Assembly. They say it is still called that.10

Garnier was unsuccessful despite all his efforts because Ratier’s party did not want another deputy from Saintes itself. So the next morning Ratier ‘gained almost all the votes and was named fourth deputy’.11 The thirds had finished their business and they split up with the agreement of M. Nieuil, president of the general assembly, without waiting for the closing ceremony, knowing that the clergy and the nobility had not yet begun to name their deputies, and that their affairs and occupations would not allow them to remain in the town any longer.12

The nobles elected M. de Riché at their first ballot. The second saw the vote divided between de La Tour du Pin and Brémond d’Ars. Another ballot secured the place for de La Tour du Pin. All the voting was complete: two clergy, two noble, and four third estate deputies. The only thing left to do

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was decide the expenses of the deputies, which were set at 24 livres a day. Now Marillet feels free to express his own reaction to these proceedings: It is to be desired that the ambition and cabals of messieurs the deputies of the province in general turn to the advantage of the residents, but the greater number of them were very young, and all were very little instructed in the principles of government and great matters with which they would have to deal. The will of the king, which demanded mature men who were prudent and tranquil, had not been carried out.13

The deputies met at Poitiers, ‘where they were given time and place to meet to go to Versailles together in April. All good Frenchmen, all good patriots, looked on them as their fathers, their true friends, and wished them bon voyage and a happy success in their undertakings’.14 As we shall see, Marillet turned into the most severe critic of nearly all the instigators of the Revolution in his town and in the whole nation. Despite his bias, he adds an important dimension to our understanding of events, and the main value of his comments is that they are immediate.

*** The lists of grievances drawn up in the Aunis and the Saintonge provide a clear guide to the preoccupations of their compilers. The nobility of La Rochelle complained of taxes of all kinds being arbitrarily raised, exclusive privileges stultifying all activity; letters of arrest [lettres de cachet]15 which restrain liberty, set free the guilty, and put the innocent in irons; commissions that suspend laws and interrupt the course of justice. Each ministry reverses the stability enforced by its predecessor. Wastefulness is extensive: considerable pensions are prostituted to all sorts of people, and most modest ones remain refused to zealous servants. The [national] finances are reduced to a frightening state . . .16

They criticized the riches of the regular clergy in their abbeys. The public are astonished, they say, at the seven million livres ‘uniquely employed in charity, in help given to indigent people, and in the building of churches . . . They denounce this crowd of immensely rich monasteries lived in by three or four monks made incapable (hors d’état) of keeping the vows of their orders and their foundations’ by their small number and the luxury in which they live. It comes as a surprise that the abolition of the monasteries and

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convents, which took place two years later, was suggested at this early stage by some of the nobles. They asserted that administration was too complicated, and suggested that uniting the provinces of Aunis, Saintonge, and Angoumois would be preferable since the map of the region was ‘a real harlequin’s coat’. Different types of administrations were shown in different colours: there were enclaves separated from their main territories and attached to others with which contact was difficult because they were so far from each other. Agriculture, industry, and trade were often interrupted by church festivals when no work could be done. They asked for the suppression of 14 of them each year, representing a saving of seventy million livres. They resented courtiers being promoted as military officers more rapidly than country nobles, and said the army and navy estimates varied too much from year to year to allow for consistent planning. Those responsible for coastal defence were taking too many labourers off their estates to be sailors. The peasant who works our land is no more qualified to become a sailor than one from parts of the kingdom inland . . . it is difficult to explain the predisposition which has led to our province being designated as appropriate for taking sailors.

No republic was asked for, and royalist convictions stand out in the lists.17 Nevertheless, the nobles of Saintes and Saint-Jean-d’Angély wanted the Estates-General as a means of parliamentary government on the British model, with regular meetings and ministers responsible to it. The expenses of the king’s household should be permanently fixed. The press should have complete freedom, and there should be provincial assemblies to complement the Estates-General. The state of public education was deplored: an almost total absence of primary schools for the people, teachers thin on the ground. The clergy of Saintes claimed that their college was better maintained than its counterpart in Angoulême. The third estate of La Rochelle’s list complained that the college there was closed to all but the children of the nobility or Catholic pupils: ‘forty two children from La Rochelle are taken far away because their religion means that the college in the town is closed to them’. The complaints expressed by the third estate of Taillebourg, a village on the Charente between Saintes and Saint-Savinien, are very poignant.18

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The poor taxpayers (censitaires), who often sell their belongings so that they can eat, would have preferred to make gifts of what was asked of them, rather than have a serjeant come round to them with a paper in his hand to make the seigneur’s demands of his dues . . . Yet, all the time there are complaints about what the receivers demand from them . . . Two years ago, a marriage contract for a labourer cost a fee of three livres; to-day, someone of the same quality has to pay fifteen livres. When the question is asked of messieurs the receivers, “Why does it cost so much?” They reply “Those are our orders and we have to keep to them. Pay up, unhappy man, and don’t say a word!” Is there anything needed at the church? Recourse is made to M. the Intendant who, whenever the curé asks him to, sends a surveyor down here to draw up a very expensive report at a charge which allows the most hateful fraud to the profit of his protégés . . . The poor parishioners of Juicq and Annepont, Monseigneur [the cahier is meant for the king to see], throw themselves down at your knees to gain a suspension of works at their churches until the Estates-General; they are only embellishments and by no means necessary.19

The complaints of the 62 separate corporations in Rochefort represent the particular concerns of a military port. Soldiers’ and sailors’ wives whose husbands had infected them with venereal disease needed to be cared for, ‘otherwise they will give birth to degenerates, often more a charge on the country than useful to it’. A request is made for a hospice for poor, elderly, and infirm old soldiers and sailors, described in Enlightenment language as ‘our equals in nature’. The draining of the marshes to improve the soil and prevent malaria was strongly urged, so was the need for the streets in the town, little better than foul drains, to be paved, and for fresh water fountains to be cleaned. The Chamber of Commerce wanted freedom from paralysing taxes on goods entering or leaving France, especially those concerning wines and eau de vie. Internal taxes charged on different stretches of the Charente River, and the tax to maintain the bridge at Taillebourg, were hindering trade. The admiralty tax on wrecked or damaged ships was particularly irksome. Additional commercial dry-docks (as opposed to the military ones) and new quays on the river frontage were needed, like the ones provided at Saintes.20 The clergy of Saintes lamented that they were unable to see, ‘without the bitterest pain, the daily attacks brought against religion, the public infraction of its laws, the daily blasphemies which dishonoured it, and the scandalous writings which attack and tear it’. ‘Animated by a truly priestly charity’, they regarded the Protestants ‘as straying sheep after whom we must run with a tender sollicitude’. The term non-catholiques in the 1787

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royal edict of toleration for the Protestants was too vague ‘because it seems to open the doors to all the sects; it is a sort of announcement of this universal toleration which the impetuous (fougueux) denouncers of our century decorate with the good name of philosophy and which, in reality, conceals a profound hatred for our religion’. That last phrase has a prophetic quality in view of what would be happening in a very short time to these same priests from Saintes who refused to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.21 The cahier produced in the town of Jonzac22 shows how fully local opinion had been influenced by what was in the public domain on a national scale. In this case, it is the preamble that counts, since it is full of the ideas of Rousseau’s Contrat social. The local specialist in these ideas was the conspicuous Protestant, marchand philosophe, Joseph-Augustin Bourrilhon. He had devoured works of the Enlightenment, and sat tightly to his Protestant upbringing. Although he was in commerce,23 the greater part of his income came from his investments in the French colonies.24 The preamble is worth quoting in translation at some length: The object which the province of Saintonge ought to adopt for itself is the public good, the end to which all individuals ought to strive if they want to make the best of the advantages they have purchased by the sacrifice of a very small part of their liberty. Woe to the individual who, losing sight of the social agreement without which men on their own would be the most unfortunate beings on the globe, undertakes to substitute himself for the public, referring everything to himself and making himself the centre of everything. If that were so, weighed down by the multitude, he would have tasted all the delicacies society offers only the more keenly to sense their loss to him. He would be prey to misery and remorse, to which he would inevitably succumb. Each individual, nevertheless, guided by his own selfish sense, seeks to break the primordial contract (Bourrilhon says pacte) on which his happiness entirely depends. What can be set against this tendency? Good teachers, worthy pastors and magistrates of integrity.

The cahier goes on to outline the training of these three professions, representing what will emerge as the programme of the Revolution before it turned sharply into the way of the Terror: money set aside for training teachers and priests, adequate supervision of elected officials, and an impartial law, accessible to all and administered by local, properly qualified justices of the peace.

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That such principles were held so far from the intellectual salons of Paris is fascinating evidence of the genuinely national characteristic of the desire for change and readiness to accept it when it came about.

*** The Vicomte de Malartic was a deputy from the nobility of La Rochelle who kept a journal of the Estates-General at Versailles as it changed into the sovereign National Assembly. He eventually withdrew his support, but he remained interested long enough to say how the deputies from Aunis and Saintonge divided, and to draw attention to the prominence of Regnaud, the young lawyer from Saint-Jean-d’Angély, as a constitutional monarchist. The immediate impulse for the famous Tennis Court Oath was given by a man born in Saintes, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.25 When he and his colleagues found themselves locked out of the Salle des Menus-Plaisirs, where they usually met, because it was being altered for a meeting with the king that they did not know about, Guillotin called out that they should meet in a tennis court owned by a friend of his, and not let themselves be dispersed until the king should agree to the deputies of the clergy and nobles joining them to form the National Assembly. The third estate deputies did what Guillotin said, and waited for noblemen and clergy to arrive. Three curés from Poitou – Ballard, Jallet, and Lecesve – joined them immediately and were soon followed by others. De Malartic and most of the other nobles, including the bishop of Saintes, Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, held aloof until the king ordered them and the clergy to become part of the National Assembly on 27 June.26 Deputies from Aunis and Saintonge took office in the new body. Alquier, Garesché, Regnaud, and de Bonnegens found themselves on select committees.27 Lemercier and Augier from Saintes supported the changes. De Riché, a deputy of the nobility from Saintes demanded that justice should be freely available to all; Landreau, one of the clergy from Saint-Jean d’Angély and Pinélière curé of Saint-Martin-de-Ré supported the Revolution, but the rest of the clergy from these provinces held back on the instructions of the bishops of Saintes and La Rochelle. The shortage of grain in Paris, at its most acute form on 14 July, together with the fear that troops surrounding the city might be ordered to attack it by the courtiers at Versailles, led Camille Desmoulins to jump on a table

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in the gardens of the Palais Royal to incite the protesting crowd to take up arms.28 They already had cannon and ammunition, so they stormed the Bastille fortress to obtain gunpowder. It was not only elected deputies from the Saintonge who were in Paris. There was also a young man from Pont l’Abbé d’Arnoult, a few miles north of Saintes, Jean-Martin Bienassis, 23 in 1789 and on his tour of France to complete his apprenticeship as a maker and repairer of heating stoves. He was among the first to cross the Bastille’s drawbridge, and was afterwards honoured as a vainqueur de La Bastille. His local patriotism showed in the new name he gave himself for the occasion: Saintonge, La Liberté.29 When the welcome on his return home had died down, he built up his business and, on 24 June 1791, married Marguerite, daughter of a tailor of uniforms like Citizen Bouquet. Bienassis died in his early seventies on 19 March 1838, and his memorial is in Pont l’Abbé cemetery. As well as recording his achievement in flowery terms, an inscription says, Passer by, if ever hatred of despotism could become weak in your heart, come to this tomb on each anniversary of the day in which he became immortal, to call to mind the conqueror of the Bastille and refresh it in his memory.

The lettering is crowded and homely on a monument in the shape of a stove surmounted with a well-made chimney.

*** A rumour flew round in villages at the southern end of the Saintonge30 that thirty thousand men in the pay of the nobility had come to Barbezieux and set light to everything they could find. Women and children fled into the woods. The men armed themselves and looked in vain for attackers. They heard the rumours in Sousmoulins too, so more than two hundred tenants and labourers armed with firearms, forks, and scythes marched on the château owned by Baron de Bonnevin, their seigneur, to take the national cockade for him to wear in his hat. Warned by the curé, Bonnevin went to meet the villagers and offered to go and drink in a bar with them, accepting the cockade. He had barrels brought out into the château yard, and drank the health of the king and the third estate with the intruders. He agreed to obey a decree of the National Assembly by taking down his weathervanes, since they were regarded as unnecessary symbols of social superiority. His

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tenants also demanded his renunciation of all seigneurial dues, asserting that ‘there are no longer any seigneurs, no messieurs, we are all equal’.31 He agreed to have a deed of renunciation drawn up, but no one was willing to witness it, until de Bonnevin ordered the notary and three others to sign. He put his seal on it. A miller called Neven seized the document and tore it up, shouting that it was worthless if de Bonnevin did not hand over all his original deeds. By this time, some of the crowd were ransacking his house and others were levelling their weapons at him, so he gave his document case to the miller, who jumped on the kitchen table, gave each tenant his own title deeds and threw the case on the fire. Some women had cornered Madame de Bonnevin and her daughters, screaming at them that they ought to dress as ordinary women did, since everyone was equal now. After de Bonnevin and his family barricaded themselves upstairs, his attackers threatened to set the house on fire. His daughter bravely came down to bring them her father’s Cross of Saint Louis that they had asked for, and they left the château, shouting that they would come back later that night to set it on fire. When they did come back after two days, the curé and the notary delayed them long enough to warn the family at the château who got away in time, and the attack fizzled out. His tenants brought M. de Bonnevin to court the following April – the Revolution meant that they could do so now – and it was found that he had been manipulating the law to revise his land register to the disadvantage of the tenants, had tampered with the weighing pans to take more of their harvest produce from them,32 and had been buying up land to which others had a prior claim.33 This explains what they did at his château on 31 July: equality before the law had been affirmed, so they would no longer accept weathervanes as distinctive signs of superiority, nor his rank as a baron, nor ostentatious dresses being worn by the baroness and her daughters. A year later, de Bonnevin left France as an émigré.

*** During a year of change, tension between some seigneurs and their tenants remained. Tenant farmers still did not know whether they had to pay feudal dues or not. The dues in question were the periodic land taxes due to the seigneurs, like terrage34 and the lods and vente, taxes on the sale of tenants’ property on a seigneur’s domain. The intention of the National Assembly to abolish them was stated as early as the night of 4 August 1789, but

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they were not abolished until decrees were passed on 15 March and 3 May 1790. Even then, the burden of proof in disputes about them fell upon the tenants who did not have the necessary legal knowledge or forensic skill to win their cases. Dues on individuals had been annulled, but the National Constituent Assembly upheld payments on the land itself, unless a tenant farmer released himself from the obligation by making a one-off settlement payment to his seigneur. It seemed to the tenant farmers of the Charente-Inférieure that nothing had, in fact, changed in this respect. No one in authority appeared able to give a clear answer about whether seigneurial land taxes were still due or not. Even on 4 August, the nobles who rushed to give up the right to charge them did so in expectation that they would be compensated in some way, and the emigration of nobles on a grand scale did not begin for another year, so a good number were still on their estates, expecting to receive their dues as before, while their tenants were becoming more exasperated at the uncertainty. The abbess of the Abbaye aux Dames in Saintes expected to receive her dues from her farms, and the District Directory upheld the necessity of paying them. The unlikely focus of this acrimonious issue coming to a head was a Sunday sermon preached in April 1790 in the church of Saint-Thomas de Conac, a village in the south of the department between Mirambeau and the Gironde estuary. The preacher was the 26-year-old Jacques Roux, who had been assistant priest (vicaire) there since September 1788. Previously, he had been a teacher at the seminary in Angoulême, where he had been involved in some unspecified way in an incident where one of the students was shot at,35 and moved to be vicaire at Jonzac and then at Cozes. In his address, Roux praised the achievements of the ‘brave Parisians’ in overthrowing the enemies of public well-being when they stormed the Bastille nine months earlier, and claimed that their achievement was an act of God, comparable with the call of Joan of Arc. Nevertheless, he asserted, nothing of significance had yet happened as a result of it to improve the lives of tenant farmers, and they must not let up on the struggle. All men ‘in slavery’ had to take part, and shed their blood for the cause, if that became necessary. So, when a popular rising broke out at the end of the same month, Roux was accused of having incited it. However, he had warned his hearers to act prudently, otherwise ‘the sweet moment would degenerate into

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darkness . . . to prostitute [their] weapons, only to devote them to actions of slaughter and blood’. On the afternoon of 25 April 1790, after a municipal official, Morisset, in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Georges-des-Agoûts had announced to the people at the end of Mass that seigneurial dues had been done away with, an argument arose because it appeared to the farmers that the 1789 changes had had no effect after all and they set the church benches on fire. More violence broke out three days later when about two hundred men went protesting into the seigneur of Bellegarde’s estate at Saint-Bonnet down the road, and then on to the chateau at Saint-Georges-des-Agoûts. According to the curé of Saint-Bonnet, the chateau of Boisroche was burnt down after the crowd had taken all the barrels from the cellar, drunk what they contained, and did a good deal of other damage besides. Then they went on and burned and pillaged at Saint-Georges. It stopped on 1 May when a military contingent arrived and arrested more than a hundred rioters who were locked up in the church at SaintThomas for the night. There were old men and children among them. They were taken on to Saintes and guarded in a large open space because the prisons were full. In the end most of them came home. Forty, however, were put on trial, but what sentence they received, if any, is not known. As for Jacques Roux, perhaps he did no more than raise the idea of the demonstration in the minds of those who perpetrated it, who seemed to have plenty of what Dominique Rousseau calls ‘revolutionary energy’ regardless of what he had asserted.36 In this rural setting, there was no question of there being an organized group of sans-culottes ready to rise against the seigneurial establishment, but what Roux had done was to unleash the spirit of the Jacquerie, which had been deep within the subconsciousness of the rural peasantry since the fourteenth century. Precisely when he left Saint-Thomas is uncertain. His last signature in the parish register is dated 19 April, and the rising erupted on 25 April. He turned up one or two weeks later near Cognac, and we find him in Paris afterwards leading the Enragés faction to the left of Robespierre’s Jacobins, for which he was condemned by them. Roux took the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the church of Saint-Sulpice, and declared himself a radical by giving addresses using the same extremist idiom as Jean-Paul Marat – so much so that people called him ‘petit

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Marat’. He became a prominent member of the Cordeliers Club entrusted with delivering the Enragés’ manifesto at the bar of the Convention. This manifesto demanded that speculation in grain prices should be a crime punishable by death and asserted that the new Constitution would be worthless for the poor if it were not.37 As a member of the general council of the Paris Commune, Roux was sent to take Louis XVI from the Temple Prison to the scaffold, but it was another priest who told the king that he was ascending to his reward. Roux even brusquely refused to look after the king’s will and see that it reached the queen. All that was nearly three years in the future still.

*** Violence was not confined to the south of the Charente-Inférieure. A serious incident occurred at Varaize near Saint-Jean-d’Angély six months later, in October 1790, which led to an uprising in nearly all the district, since the issue of seigneurial dues had still not been effectively resolved. The land around Varaize had belonged to Comte Michel-Noel Amelot, an honorary councillor of the Paris parlement, and seigneur of three other villages besides. He had died in 1768, but his widow stayed on in the village and her estate was valued at 1,800,000 livres in 1769. The countess demanded feudal dues in kind in wheat instead of oats, and increased the quantities she required from the tenants, while having their hunting guns confiscated and forbidding them the use of a stream which crossed her land.38 She moved into the centre of Saint-Jean-d’Angély in 1789, and made her registrar, Pierre Latierce, her agent in Varaize. He was known to be feathering his own nest when he married the grandaughter of the landowner at Richardière and bought himself a house in the village and lands of his own. In 1790, he was a taxpayer substantial enough to be an elector of the district, and became the maire. At the same time, a lawyer called Jacques-Michel Laplanche came to Varaize, after marrying Mademoiselle Lavarenne, who already lived there. He gave free advice to the tenant farmers at Varaize, and a witness at his trial, after the riots that were provoked around him, reported that Laplanche had said to him ‘that it was as clear as water that there had been a decree of 15th March which required them [feudal dues] to be paid no longer’, but he had not mentioned the possibility of tenants buying themselves out of having to go on paying.39

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On Sunday 3 October, outside the south door of Varaize church after Mass, Laplanche read his carefully prepared petition against the payment of seigneurial dues to Countess Amelot, complaining that the redress the peasants had in the law-courts was too expensive for them, even if such action were to be successful. People gathered round Laplanche to listen to him, and then Maire Latierce objected. The crowd set upon Latierce, injured him, and accused him of concealing the Constituent Assembly’s decree suppressing the maintained charges which Laplanche said had been issued seven months before. Several people tried to drag Countess Amelot’s pew out from the church, and proposed to take down the weathervanes from her château. In the evening, the maire denounced Laplanche and the leaders of the riot to the district officials, who were led by Claude-Alexandre Normand, a noble landowner at nearby Authon, instinctively opposed to Laplanche’s arguments. An order to arrest Laplanche was issued. So a company of regular soldiers arrived at Laplanche’s house. Armed tenants confronted them and the soldiers were ordered to fire. Three women and a man fell dead, and four people lay bleeding in the street. The troops took Laplanche away to prison in Saint-Jean-d’Angély. The villagers locked up Maire Latierce. They sent notes to neighbouring parishes to invite them to join an action on the following day. These, preserved in the dossier of the insurgents’ subsequent trial, include disparaging phrases about Latierce. Councillors from Saint-Jean went on a deputation to Varaize, and reported back that the only way of saving Maire Latierce would be to set Laplanche free. During the night, some National Guard artillerymen went to Varaize from Saint-Jean to fraternize with the villagers and at least a dozen other villages sent armed men to support the protesters. Maire Valentin had previously sent the regular soldiers back to their quarters in Saint-Jean. On the morning of 22 October, nearly two thousand protesters advanced on Saint-Jean, bringing Maire Latierce with them. The National Guardsmen in the crowd were in uniform. A judge agreed to free Laplanche, who was greeted with great shouts of pleasure by the crowd as he left the jail. Some of the crowd started knocking Latierce about. Laplanche himself put his arms round Latierce in an attempt to shield him. Someone came up close and, while a scuffle was going on around the two men, killed the maire of Varaize with a shot and several surgical knife–thrusts. Then,

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quickly, some of the rioters left the town, taking Laplanche with them, while the turmoil continued. Next day, two departmental officials brought troops and artillery pieces from Saintes, surrounded the villages that had rebelled, arrested a hundred suspects, searched houses, and confiscated weapons, while maires and curés came to Saint-Jean-d’Angély to hand over the principal rebels in person. The department’s commissioners made tenants pay all the maintained dues they owed. A Requiem Mass was arranged for Latierce. Seventy suspects were released after intervention by their village officials, but Laplanche was kept in prison at Rochefort. A report was made to the Constituent Assembly in Paris about the affair of Varaize, and a decree signed by the king on 10 December ordered an enquiry. The trial of the leaders of the riot was transferred from Rochefort to La Rochelle, and their interrogation went on for over a month, until the court applied the law of 15 September 1790 giving an amnesty for ‘deeds relative to the Revolution’. All the accused, including Laplanche, were freed and Latierce’s wife received a government pension. The Legislative Assembly suppressed all feudal dues as one of its final acts in September 1792, and the National Convention, abolishing any possible remaining feudal claims in July 1793, ordered seigneurial title deeds to be burnt in public all over the nation. The statement about equality before the law had been made irrevocably.40

*** The stabilization of the law and its availability to every citizen was a priority of the early phases of the Revolution. The control of law on a local scale by the seigneurs and the lawyers they appointed to their courts had been overthrown on the night of 4 August 1789 by the National Constituent Assembly at Versailles. Under the old order, the course of justice was slow, arbitrary, and often prolonged because the longer cases lasted the more fees the lawyers could command in civil disputes. When it came to criminal cases, serious crimes were frequently not brought to court because it cost the seigneurs too much to prosecute someone against whom an accusation had been made. Anthony Crubaugh cites a case of the murder of the 12-year-old son of a labourer at Tonnay-Boutonne in which the father of the boy had accepted damages and interest payments from the known perpetrators of it rather than involve himself in the expenses of official judicial channels. He

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draws the conclusion that rural law enforcement in the seigneurial courts was too weak to make criminal justice possible in any reliable sense.41 A revolutionary form of justice was implemented by laws passed in the Constituent Assembly on 16–24 August 1789 and on 19–22 July 1791. These laws set up the post of justice of the peace (juge de paix) in every canton42 so that law could be readily available at the local level of small disputes, and virtually free to plaintiffs.43 The law also provided for the justice of the peace to be supported by two non-specialist assessors. The active citizens were to elect the juge de paix on the basis of his local reputation for probity and integrity, and his task was seen as a mediating one in civil disputes involving sums of money of less than 50 livres. He also had a paternalistic role in protecting the interests of minors. No professional counsel were to be involved in the cantonal court of the juge de paix: their role was confined to district and higher courts and, even in those, defendants could name their own defence counsel, who need not be a qualified lawyer. Small legal actions could now be resolved in a period of weeks, sometimes a few days, as opposed to the years that some cases had taken before the Revolution to the financial ruin of many involved, both innocent and guilty, with fines to be paid and costs to be settled amounting to several years’ income. This was an important radical change in rural areas, and it was expected that the justice of the peace would be an amateur.44 This was certainly the case at Jonzac, where a former serge manufacturer in the town called Jean Chauvreau was appointed to the office in November 1792. His honesty and good will made him considered as the ideal candidate for the post in the exasperating conditions of a dispute between two rival factions in the municipality.45 Nevertheless, professionals were sometimes preferred by local electors, and Pierre Gallocheau was chosen as juge de paix for the canton of Port d’Envaux in February 1794, being required to fill his place ‘without partiality’ and to ‘contribute to the happiness and tranquillity of his fellow citizens’, as his letter of appointment says. Yet he was a career lawyer trained, like Jacques Garnier, in the présidial of Saintes before the Revolution,46 and men like him had no intention of relinquishing control of their revolution. Nevertheless, the assessors elected to assist him in his judgements had no specialist legal training. They were called Couturier and Menet, and the latter was one of the village bakers in Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud.47

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3. Saintes: The Présidial.

In spite of all we shall see happening during the Terror, with the Law of Suspects and revolutionary tribunals producing a new arbitrary justice in political cases, this system continued to work reasonably well as a measure of normality. It established and encouraged a novel civic spirit of mutual co-operation between free individuals all over the country, and is one of the lasting beneficial features of the Revolution of 1789. It meant that the law itself was the basis of justice, administered constructively by justices and assessors, rather than the self-interested arbitrariness offered previously (or not) by lawyers retained in the seigneurial courts.

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A

s soon as the principle was established that power was gained by being elected, the new men who appeared sometimes turned out to be unscrupulous exploiters of it. The most conspicuous example of this sort of political animal to appear in Saintes was André-Antoine Bernard, who emerged into notoriety when he was representative on mission in the Haute-Saône and then the Côte d’Or in 1794, making full use of the revolutionary tribunal and the guillotine against those whom he decided were enemies of the people. He came from a village not far from Saintes called Corme-Royal, one of more than fifty villages that had the abbess of the Abbaye aux Dames in the town as its seigneur. His legal training before the Revolution had been at the Présidial in Saintes and he hoped to make an impression by adopting the name Bernard de Jeuzines before the changes started that would give him power on a national level. Jeuzines was no more than an orchard on some land his family had in another village called Les Essards. Again, not very far from there is a hamlet called La Pommeraye, where his wife came from. Her family, who had aspirations to nobility, did not want Louise Frère de La Pommeraye to marry André-Antoine since he was not a noble at all, but the wedding took place on 3 August 1778.1 Seething about his in-laws might explain his hyperactive antagonism towards the nobility when they were being called aristocrats a dozen years later and regarded by the new powerful as pariahs to be exterminated. By then, Louise had died, leaving him with the care of their two young daughters. François-Guillaume Marillet’s rage against Bernard boiled over whenever he wrote about him. He tells us that André-Antoine Bernard and his rival Jacques Garnier were the two men of Saintes who took over local power as the Revolution gathered momentum, working together against 43

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A.-G. Gaudriaud, who had been maire and deputy of the royal intendant for 32 years. Garnier was elected to replace Gaudriaud by acclamation of his fellow citizens, and Gaudriaud knew when he was beaten.2 Saintes was full of commercial bustle, stolid administration, and a regard for law. Yet tension existed between those notables whose superiority was sustained by the monarchy and those whose acquisitiveness justified their eagerness to grasp what the Revolution would offer them. Most had contact with the land around, as owners of fields, cattle, or vines, and there was only social distance between them and the tenant farmers who came into the town to sell their produce on market days. Saintes was a few sans-culottes short of a riot. The second half of July 1789 had been the time when rumours frightening to the bourgeoisie circulated everywhere. In Paris, the court at Versailles had seemed poised to order the army to take the city centre, so the solid citizens formed their citizens’ militia for their own protection, but were overtaken by the storming of the Bastille. In the Charente valley, the rumour that the nobles had organized 40,000 brigands to attack the towns caused the bourgeoisie in Saintes to organize.3 After Garnier’s being chosen as maire, letters from Paris had been opened which told friends and family that Louis XVI had gone to the Hôtel de Ville in an attempt to calm the citizens who thought his troops would attack them. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, first deputy for Paris in the Estates-General and then president of it, had given him the blue, white and red4 cockade which he had fixed on his hat. The king confirmed Bailly in the new post of maire of Paris. Saintes reflected Paris when Bernard organized visits to the dean of the Cathedral, the president of the nobility, the colonel of the Royal Cavalry Regiment in the town garrison, the chief magistrate, and the chief of police, and gave them all revolutionary cockades to put in their hats. Even the priests and the monks wore them pinned to the front of their cassocks (Marillet says ‘on their hearts’), and the statue of the king was crowned with laurel. The euphoria evaporated on 29 July, when the comte de Jarnac asked for military help in defending Cognac against 2,000 imagined brigands. Then there were riots at Baignes-Saint-Radégond and Sousmoulins in the south of the Saintonge in which the seigneurs were forced to abandon their feudal dues as we saw in the previous chapter. Since an attack on their town was expected very soon, the bourgeois militia in Saintes changed itself into the National Guard as happened everywhere else. Its strength rose to about five

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or six hundred young men from the town and adjacent suburbs like SaintEutrope and Saint-Vivien. Even schoolboys were enrolled in the regiment. The head master of the college, M. de Rupt, was pressured into letting his boarders go out to join up. Marillet saw with sadness that his own son Léon was made a sergeant, but forgave him for being young and impulsive.5 The new unit paraded at a field called La Gaillarde to put on a show for Maire Garnier, who had greater local support than Bernard. Then came a surprise. If Jacques Garnier could be the new maire after 32 years of apparent royalist misrule under Gaudriaud, then Bernard de Jeuzines could appoint himself Colonel of the National Guard unit and be accepted as such.6 The regiment formed up into companies, elected its other officers, and chose its uniform: a red jacket with sky-blue lapels and a white collar. The newspaper proprietor Bourignan was elected lieutenant-colonel. Marillet said exactly what he thought about the headquarters staff: ‘a few drunkards and some headstrong customers’.7 Bernard went on parade and satisfied his autocratic tendencies. Since most of these officers could not afford their uniforms, Bernard was not embarrassed in the least to take over a sum of 2,400 livres recently raised for charity by the cathedral chapter, the sisters at the Abbaye aux Dames, and the congregations in other churches. Bernard took 900 livres, allotted 300 for distribution by the curés of the six parishes, put the remaining 1200 into the hands of the banker Faure, and soon forced him to hand over this sum to pay for the uniforms. ‘There were many objections,’ Marillet says, ‘but protests were no more than timid.’ Bernard kept the National Guard’s regimental colours at his house instead of at the Hôtel de Ville. Then he hurried to La Rochelle to take weapons from the armoury there on the pretext that Saintes was still in danger, and forced the artillery commander at Saint-Jean-d’Angély to provide him with a great deal of gunpowder. He stored all that at his own house too. When he was maire, Gaudriaud used to receive official letters via the post office in Saintes. Bernard ordered the postmaster not to open the council’s box unless he was present. He opened the former maire’s letters and searched the Hôtel de Ville and Gaudriaud’s house for papers that might have incriminated him. However, when Bernard’s interference was known about, Maire Garnier’s council ordered mounted gendarmes, independent of the National Guard, to move all the arms and powder to the Hôtel de Ville and prevent any more tampering with the post. The council resolution was printed and pasted up, but Bernard produced another poster of

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his own in which he swore never to take up arms against his fellow citizens. The same evening, he insulted all the committee in a second poster and then, Marillet adds, went and had a drink in a bar . . . with Garnier. The beginning of the Revolution was a jolly time in Saintes for those who could afford it. Patriotic banquets were arranged which turned into bacchanales. The puritanical Marillet says he disapproved of officers drinking with soldiers, and the men dancing with the women present. ‘Morals, to be precise,’ he complains, ‘ran to risky limits.’ There were ‘close hugs, frightened cries’, and the lunches went on until the August sunset. The most picturesque of these occasions was the one held in the garden of the priests’ seminary, for which Bernard provided two barrels of wine and Bourignon gave two others. The seminary’s principal gave coal for the cooking, and the caterer, whose estimate of 900 livres for providing the meal had been accepted, served ‘bad, cold and unpalatable meat that had partly gone off’. The next day his bill was cut down to 500 livres, but all who were there enjoyed themselves and thanked Bernard. Marillet commented that Messrs. Garnier and Bernard were doing just as they liked and demonstrates, in his journal which continues until 1795, that the background to this new-found enjoyment on the part of a few bourgeois was great misery for most people: the assignat used as paper money lost its value, the cost of white and black bread soared, ‘and the municipality bought up the wheat so no one else could have any . . .’ Bernard extended his rampant power-seeking. A National Guard unit had been formed in Chaniers, upriver from Saintes, and François Augereau was elected its commander. On the day the regimental colours were dedicated, Bernard went over to Chaniers in his colonel’s uniform and demoted Augereau. He offered him command of a company, but Augereau went home. Bernard sent fusiliers to arrest him and humiliated him by making him go on guard like a simple soldier. Bernard tried to deprive Garnier of power in Saintes after setting up an independent military company and parading them at the town bank in rue Saint-Maur during the grape-harvest in early October, when most members of the town council were out of town among their vines. He made his new company vote for the dissolution of the council, and the vote was accepted, which meant that Garnier had to resign as maire. The next day, however, the dismissed council regained its mutual confidence and recalled Garnier, who reached a compromise by re-establishing the council under the control of several military members loyal to Colonel Bernard.

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One of the most characteristic episodes of Bernard’s political apprenticeship in Saintes arose over the National Guard’s intention to hold a memorial service in the cathedral on 27 August 1790 for soldiers who had died as a punishment for the mutiny of the Swiss Châteauvieux Regiment against poor wages at Nancy in August 1790. The mutiny had been suppressed with great severity: 1 mutineer was broken on the wheel, 20 were hanged, and 41 sent to the galleys for life. The mutiny was in all likelihood fermented by Nancy’s Jacobin Club, and Bernard, as a Jacobin sympathizer, put himself at the head of a local committee of commanders of National Guard units in the Charente-Inférieure to organize the ceremony, but the dean and chapter refused to have the cathedral bells rung for it. So Bernard had an altar set up on the flood plain of the Charente called La Pallu, with decorations in the taste of the revolutionary years, poplar and cypress branches, any number of lighted candles, and a great picture representing the Patrie in tears. He had persuaded the prior of the Jacobins8 to celebrate a Mass in the open-air, to which the vicars-general of the absent Bishop de La Rochefoucauld objected. When no departmental officials had arrived by the time the ceremony was due to start, Bernard sent a deputation to the Hôtel de Monconseil, where the Departmental Directory was in session, to persuade them to come. A lively discussion went on beyond the time that Bernard expected them to arrive, so he left the altar and hurried in person to speed up the decision. Bourignon, present as Bernard’s second-in-command, also gave his account of this in his newspaper. He says that the administrators were watching what was happening on the Pallu through the windows of their first-floor meeting room9 and that, although not agreeing to come to the ceremony while Bernard was still with them, once they were on their own, they changed their minds and were present at it. He was becoming an expert in getting his own way. Bernard was elected the principal judge of the municipality on 4 November 1790 and, at the end of a dinner to celebrate his appointment, he proposed the creation of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution,10 with a membership of a hundred and fifty under the presidency of his associate Gout, and controlled by others from among his friends. Its purpose was, he said, ‘to denounce citizens who maintained contacts with the enemies of the Revolution’. Churchmen and nobles were excluded from the outset.

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Anti-clericalism was becoming intense among those who were running Saintes. In December 1790, when the clergy were required by law to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution or be assumed to have resigned their parishes, Marillet wrote a page which could be seen as prophetic unless he altered it in the light of the way things actually turned out later: There is an inconceivable relentlessness against the priests. The king has just vetoed a decree which obliges them to take an oath which will perhaps make martyrs, many renegades, a great number without bread, and will bring about a schism in France . . . It is to be presumed that half of the diocese will take it because self-interest, vile self-interest, is the great mover.

The Club fulfilled Bernard’s expectations. Its first denunciation was of the bishop of Saintes, de La Rochefoucauld, who was declared an enemy of the nation because he had forbidden his clergy to take the oath. The Club was enlarged to 400 members, as many women as men, much to Marillet’s disgust. It took on more importance each day and regulated the town’s business more and more. Marillet raged against Bernard, ‘governor of the town who came to the conclusion of all his enterprises. There was not found a citizen firm enough to punish him by hitting him on the head for all his infamy’.11

*** The news that Louis XVI had been arrested at Varennes, after his attempt to escape the control of the National Assembly and the Parisians, reached Saintes during the night of 23 and 24 June 1791 in a garbled form. The Departmental Directory called the district and municipality officials and notables together to renew their Oath to the Constitution. The National Guard paraded at four in the morning in the place de Belair. The municipality made an inventory of gunpowder and lead shot in the grocers’ shops, forbade their sale without authorization, and sent for some more from SaintJean-d’Angély. No one was allowed to leave the town. The public thought the Departmental Directory had got it wrong. Bernard’s contribution to the reaction was to call for unity.12 Marillet’s idiosyncratic reflection was as follows: It was an unhappy event which could have obtained peace (that is to say if the king had succeeded in getting away), but all went to show that the plan for his departure was known about by the National Assembly and that his

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arrest was manifest treason on the part of the factious. The Assembly knew the king’s intentions, had favoured his escape, and knew that on such a day, in such a place, and at such a time the king had to pass by Varennes and be arrested there. Everyone looks at himself and asks when we shall see the end. The arrest of the king and queen will speed up the entry of troops into France who are 50,000 in number, it is said, as well as French refugees (sic), princes, nobles, and parlementaires, Prussians, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Spaniards, Swiss and Savoyards . . . such is the situation in France between the hands of the factious who want to destroy this empire and make mankind unhappy.13

Bernard was elected as a deputy in the new Legislative Assembly. Lemercier, one of the original deputies, elected in 1789 and not permitted to stand again, came to brief him before he left. Marillet reports that Bernard went from Saintes on 5 October 1791, which would make his arrival in Paris at least a week late for the opening, and makes this private character study of him as the next phase of his career begins: M. Bernard de Jeuzines with much spirit, much recognition of his status as judge, much resource and much competence – in his own imagination – with a great facility for self-publicity without being an orator, and being the brothel of all the vices, without religion, without manners, without delicacy of sentiments, giving free rein to all his passions, is villainous, vile, base. Through all the evil he has done, and much more which he has done through his agents, he has proved that the Constitution is bad because it needs equally bad men to support it . . . He has been a man of all offices. He has kept them . . . even if that were incompatible with the law. It is all the same: the decrees were not made for him. He mocked them and played with them. He is administrator, colonel, president of the Club, and president of the judges of the district. He was a governor of the college and of the hospital. He was everywhere, he dominated everywhere. . . . Vice rises up on the deeds of glory. And was he satisfied? No. Perhaps, he dreams of some eminent position at the end of his time in the legislature . . . He has a honeyed tone, a hypocritical air, the bearing of a factious man. He has a base mind, and has no courage. Many people have provoked him but he has never responded. It is said that, when he is no longer here, it will be noticed because so much evil will have stopped. He is the sort of man who would stir up an insurrection in this town through decrees or letters from Paris to prove that he is a peacemaker. It is true that he leaves behind him some good disciples whom he has imbued with his principles and who would be able to follow his direction, but they will be more difficult to discover because they do not have anything like his energy.14

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4. Two Views of Saintes showing the Newly Built Quays: Prints from 1791.

*** Once he had been elected as a deputy for Saintes in the National Assembly, an orchard called Jeuzines was no longer conspicuous enough to give him a name. So he became Bernard de Saintes instead.15 He went quiet during his early months as a deputy in Paris but, after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, became prominent in the newly elected National Convention. The deputies’ seats on the left of the tribune in Louis XV’s riding school were higher than any others, so those who sat there became known as the Mountain. They were mostly members of the Jacobin Club, who also

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met in the former convent of the Jacobins in the rue Saint-Honoré. Their name distinguished them from the other major revolutionary faction, the Girondins. Bernard and, later, Garnier sat with the Jacobins. On 13 April 1792, Bernard had written to tell the club in Saintes about the suppression of the distinctive dress of the clergy, and Marillet commented, ‘We have reached total destruction of the priestly function. And we can say no more than R.I.P.’16 Bernard’s departure could give no comfort to poor Marillet. When the Terror arose, Marillet saw himself twice on the point of being imprisoned. He was left at liberty but he does not explain why.17

*** The Convention declared that France was a Republic and put Louis XVI on trial,18 and when the Girondins had sponsored the idea of a referendum to confirm the verdict if the Convention found him guilty of conspiracy against the nation, Jacques Garnier cut his political teeth as a deputy by opposing the suggestion. He is recorded as saying that Civil war threatens us. An external war is exhausting us. We are without government and without laws and, disengaging ourselves from the duty we are obliged to perform, we discuss whether we should send back the exercise of it to the people who called us here to accomplish it. Citizens, think hard: security and liberty depend upon the resolution that you are about to take. Do not say any more that you will judge Louis, for you are not judges. Say that in the name of the people you will decide in a revolutionary manner on his fortune. Have you drawn up a procedure for ordering the banishment and death of forty thousand French emigrés, for declaring the deportation of twenty thousand anarchic priests? Have you come to the idea of having those decrees confirmed by the people? Have there been complaints about what you have not done? You are statesmen. You are not judges. All measures about general security are your responsibility. They are delegated to you. To send back to the people what the people have entrusted to you is to send them your responsibility and your resignation. From that moment you would be characterless, the legislative body would have perished, and you would have to leave this arena, because you would lose the right to fulfil the functions which you would have abandoned in it . . .’

Having repeated the text of Garnier’s speech, the early-twentieth-century senator Reveillaud ironically comments on the ‘implacable logic’.19

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Garnier added an unscientific postscript after the king had gone to the scaffold. On 11 February 1793, he said, ‘Like the Divinity in his wrath, the people, when they are betrayed, do not pass judgement on their enemies: they hurl lightning and exterminate them.’20 The deputies decided that the vote about the king’s death should be made by each deputy individually going to the tribune to make his public declaration on 15 January 1793. Garnier voted for execution, and was rebuked for a public dispute with another deputy. Bernard was never one to be upstaged, and he seems to have made the most of his statement. The first question each deputy had to answer was, ‘Is Louis Capet, former king of the French, guilty of conspiracy against public liberty and against the general security of the state?’ Bernard formulated his vote like this: When the law has spoken I know only how to obey. It has ordered me to judge Louis, to declare whether I think him guilty. However I am regarded, since I am certain that the character of a man of good intention will never be taken from me, I reply, Yes.

The Popular Society in Rochefort (the equivalent of ‘The Club’ in Saintes), under the control of Joseph Niou, the Convention’s representative on mission there, echoed all this.21 The deputies had to answer a third question: ‘What sentence should Louis Capet, former king of the French, receive?’ Of the eight representatives from the Charente-Inférieure, seven voted for death. Only Dechézeaux from the île de Ré voted for an appeal to the people.22 Bernard found yet more eloquence in voting for the death sentence: As I do not believe that the preservation of an ex-king is in keeping with making his royal status forgotten, and as I am deeply convinced that the greatest service that can be rendered to the human race is to rid the earth of the monsters that devour it, I vote for the death of the tyrant with the shortest delay.23

After the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention with sans-culotte support at the beginning of June 1793, several large provincial cities declared their opposition to centralized rule because the Paris Commune appeared to have more power than the elected Convention. The Convention itself had excluded elected members and so, in the eyes of its opponents, did not represent the whole nation. The Jacobins called this tendency ‘federalism’ and intensified the use of representatives on mission from the Convention to control the departments. From July onwards, the

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orders of these representatives were given the status of provisional laws, which meant that they had a totally free hand in their direction of local conditions.24 Bernard de Saintes was chosen to be one of them and applied a violent, populist view of the Revolution which the Jacobin faction cultivated. His nineteenth-century French biographer called him a proconsul.25 In the Haute-Saône and in the Cote d’Or, he showed uncompromising vindictiveness towards what remained of the old order. He added Montbéliard, a former territory of the Duke of Wurttemburg, to the French Republic, confiscating all its goods and assets. He even turned the corpses of former rulers out of their coffins in the castle crypt in person, so as to re-use the metal for cannon.26 He falsely accused town council members at Vesoul of federalism, and had them imprisoned on the sole grounds of his own suspicion of them.27 He was responsible for the judicial murder in Dijon of Micault de Courbeton28 after his intimidating behaviour towards the judiciary there.29 Bernard had made so many enemies in eastern France and Burgundy that he sought defiant refuge by returning to Paris while the Jacobin faction was still in charge in April 1794. He spoke unashamedly in the Convention’s debates and was appointed secretary of it on 25 May. He kept out of sight, however, while the Thermidor coup d’état executed Robespierre and his close circle of associates at the end of July. He emerged a few weeks later with his own ideas unchanged, making a point of being in the Pantheon when Marat’s ashes replaced Mirabeau’s at the end of August. He was president of the Convention for three weeks in September 1794.30 Then the citizens of Dijon publicly denounced Bernard, and memoirs by a friend of Micault de Courbeton were published.31 The residents of Vesoul added their denunciation of him. The Convention ordered the printing of a denunciation of seven members of the former Committees of Public Safety and General Security, which contained a recital of the damage done by Bernard at Montbéliard.32 When other representatives on mission, like Carrier, who had put down the last of the Vendéan rebels with such great brutality, were on trial for their lives, Bernard himself was protected as a member of the Committee of General Security. On 10 October 1794, Gaudriaud, the maire whom Bernard and Garnier had overthrown five years earlier, appealed to the Committee of General Security to be released from internment as a suspect at Brouage. His appeal was upheld after Bernard’s intervention, and he went home to Fontcouverte, a village near Saintes. ‘This work of Bernard’, says Marillet, ‘. . . is inconceivable. Nevertheless, what he did gives great honour to Bernard.’

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Charles Dangibeau, a respected scholar in Saintes and a descendant of one of the participants in the Revolution in the town, understood Marillet’s disillusioned conservatism, which worsened after Bernard left Saintes, and he also understood Bernard. He supplied something of a corrective. Here is his comment on Bernard’s part in the freeing of Gaudriaud: The gesture, even towards an old man of 78 years rapidly becoming more and more feeble, coming from a man of the stamp of this one, is assuredly astonishing, but it is not ‘inconceivable’ . . . Bernard always conformed to the movement of the day. Ambition and pride drove him towards the Revolution in 1789, to being violent in 1793 along with other violent men, and in 1794 he became less wild, even clement, because he sensed that the Jacobin fury would calm down. The followers of Robespierre were no longer in charge, the drinkers of blood were satiated, and a certain type of aristocracy began to be reborn. In the end, he remembered that at the outset of his political career he had sworn to the Saintais never to take up arms against them. Gaudriaud’s crimes, which in 1789–90 had motivated his anger, seemed to him later to be very inoffensive.33

The remaining members of the Mountain who had supported terror made a last effort to defend themselves by unleashing the sans-culottes in the Prairial Coup against the Convention, which the National Guard and wealthy sons of the bourgeoisie, known as ‘Gilded Youth’ (Jeunesse dorée), repulsed on 20 May 1795. This reaction against what was left of the Mountain was known as the Prairial Coup.34 As a result, the remaining Jacobins were put in prison. Bernard was put in the former College of the Four Nations, sharing a cell with Jacques-Louis David, who made an Indian ink portrait of him, in profile, with his arms folded in petulant self-assertion.35 He was saved from any further action against himself because, before the National Convention gave way to the Directory under the new constitution, it drew a legal forgetfulness over all actions committed as a result of the Revolution. The amnesty of 24 October 1795 meant that Bernard was given back his incriminating papers and set free.36 He came back to Saintes to take part in municipal administration during 1796 and 1797 and enjoyed the results of his acquisitiveness as the proprietor of a good deal of national property here. He was on the General Council of the Charente-Inférieure from June 1800 to September 1804 and still held office as a judge during the Empire, while fulfilling the promise he had made never to act vindictively against his fellow citizens in Saintes. At the restoration of the monarchy, he was banished from

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5. J.-L. David’s pen and ink portrait of Bernard de Saintes.

France with all surviving members of the Convention who had voted for the king’s death.37 The ship on which he sailed was wrecked on the coast of Madeira, but his life was saved and he remained in exile until he died on the island in 1819.38 Garnier was elected a deputy a year after Bernard, and a representative on mission at Le Mans, La Flèche, and then Bordeaux, where he had to restore confidence after the brutal suppression of the anti-Republican revolt there. Garnier was as much a Republican as Bernard, pressing, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred in the time of the Directory, for the deportation of emigrés’ parents and the exclusion of nobles from public office. However, he was not disposed to carry his convictions as far beyond the law as Bernard had been, despite Marillet’s strictures. Like Bernard, he came back to Saintes with a post on the judiciary during the Empire.

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Garnier was exiled by the 1816 exclusion too. He sailed to America. Once there, he journeyed down the Ohio River, and the boat that he and his son were travelling on overturned, drowning them both. Bernard’s revolutionary career has taken us to the other side of the hexagon and back again. The story has let us see a politician with his roots and formation (as French people say) in the Charente-Inférieure in a national setting as one of the phenomena of darker potential in the new society. His attitude as one of the protagonists in developments reflects the negative as well as the positive tendencies of these years. Armand Lods defended Bernard a century after the Terror for adding Montbéliard to French territory, while fully presenting his fanatical excesses, but his value for us is in the shadows he cast while standing in the sunshine of the new liberty. He was the Robespierre of the Saintonge, being able all the same to protect himself until 1816 from the results of his selfcentred excesses.

*** To conclude this chapter, we ought to notice that Bernard de Saintes was by no means unique as a seeker after power in the Charente-Inférieure during the revolutionary period. Jacques-Alexis Messin, who headed the Terror in the town of Jonzac, has a similar reputation. Messin had been appointed vicaire of Jonzac long before the Revolution, in 1765. Jean-Pierre-François Flornoy, a member of a leading family in the town, had provided the young priest with lodgings under his roof, and Messin had seduced his wife. She was Marie-Marguerite Collet, formerly ward of court to her godfather, Jean-François Landreau, the seigneurial judge who was the representative of the absent comte de Jonzac, whose chateau dominates the town. The marriage arranged between first cousins, after a church indulgence, had put a good deal of money and property into the Landreau–Flornoy families. Scandal ensued. Messin was not unfrocked for his misdemeanour but moved to the little parish of Chaniers near Saintes. Flornoy went to Paris on business and died there, leaving his wife in possession of his extensive property. Local opinion blamed Messin for causing Flornoy to die of a broken heart. Advised by Messin, Marie-Marguerite threatened Landreau with legal action for having misappropriated her funds during her minority. Landreau settled out of court, thereby admitting his guilt, and he

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was finished as a notable in the district. Marie-Marguerite made over the profits from her property at La Cheminaderie to Messin and made him rich. He took up residence there in 1771, spending his time between then and the Revolution in building up an extensive library of political thought and causing financial ruin in court for anyone who crossed him as a landowner.39 Despite his unpopularity, Messin took charge of the process of drawing up the cahier de doléance in his village in February 1789, and associated himself in the compilation of the third estate cahier for Jonzac itself. He tried to gain the post of maire by election but, when he failed, gained control of the National Guard in Jonzac through a political ally who became its colonel. He even visited Paris and sought the support of the Jacobins, whose cause he fostered in Jonzac as keenly as Bernard did in Saintes. Messin became the ‘Marat of Jonzac’, associating himself with every nuance of the Parisian leader’s utterances. When the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was demanded by the National Assembly from all priests, Messin took it and was elected constitutional curé of the village where his property stood. He also cornered influence in the ‘Club’ at Jonzac and set up a local dictatorship during the Terror in association with Antoine Benoit, obtaining the arrest of 25 Jonzacais and the execution of 4 of them. When Robespierre fell, Messin was imprisoned for a while at Brouage and his town house was burnt down by a hostile mob. On his release, he came back to La Cheminarderie, abandoned his priesthood, married Marie-Marguerite, and adopted his godson Jacques-Alexis Leroy, who later inherited all their wealth and added La Cheminarderie to his name. After 1809, Messin was a widower living alone. When he died in 1817, he appears to have been unceremoniously buried under a chestnut tree. The historian of Jonzac during the Revolution remarks, ‘This peaceful burial-place would not have displeased contemporaries like the Parisian romantics but, in this place, it was more likely the means of getting rid of the accursed remains of the man who had made Jonzac tremble’.40

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chapter 4

The Terror in Saintes

F

rançois-Guillaume Marillet de la Couboisière began his diary there in early 1789 and kept it assiduously for 6 years to express his thoughts to himself in private.

My intention is certainly not to make my work public in my lifetime; that would not be prudent because it would expose me to the venom of others and their covert revenge; but it could come about that my descendants who read it would say that I was right. I have done nothing else but amuse myself and show to posterity what effect the meeting of the Estates-General had on opinion in our town. With all my heart, I do not want to be a prophet, but if these gentlemen are not stopped in their tracks, they will do plenty of evil.1

As time went on, he found he was not amusing himself, but often raging, denouncing. Increasingly, he found that the revolutionaries he criticized could not be stopped and, eventually, made a personal compromise. He had seen his inherited, contented way of life disappear. His grandfather had been procurator-fiscal at Taillebourg, and was agent for the property of the duc de La Tremoille, who was also Prince of Talmont and Benon, and whose terrace, with its balustrade designed by Le Notre in front of where his château was, still towers above the houses on the right bank of the Charente. Marillet’s father was a lawyer in the Parlement of Bordeaux, then in Saintes, and he collected fees for religious dispensations. FrançoisGuillaume was himself a lawyer in Saintes, and inherited the post at the dispensations office. He had been on the town council since 1784, and was very much an establishment figure. He and his wife Françoise-Marguerite had six children. So when he found himself out of office and had to live on his capital of 6,000 livres and an annuity of 70 livres, he was obliged to sell a property he had inherited at Annepont, a village up the road from Taillebourg. He offered himself for the post of one of the judges at the Tribunal and received enough votes to be appointed as the fourth deputy, but he was never present at a session, and 58

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he soon resigned because he could not bring himself to sentence priests who were ipso facto criminals in the eyes of the law as it now stood.2 His wife died in December 1793, and two of his children were later separated from him, one in Saint-Domingue and another as a soldier in the Vendée. Marillet saw no need for the new order. He detested André-Antoine Bernard, and was extremely critical of Jacques Garnier, as has been seen. He had respect for nobles, like Brémond d’Ars or Chenier du Chesne, and was completely in accord with the Catholic Church. He was devastated by what would happen to the bishop of Saintes and his clergy.3 Marillet had been a conformist with something to lose, and had lost it. Now he found conforming to the new order difficult. Why should his son have to fight the Vendéans who seemed to have values that he shared? Why should he have to stand in the ranks of the National Guard to hear the king denounced? Marillet is eloquent enough to allow a present-day reader to follow what he says with appreciation, despite the archaic French. Sometimes he gives eyewitness reports as he does when he watches the suspected counterrevolutionaries from Saintes leaving the Abbaye aux Dames to be interned at Brouage in July 1793. At other times he reports what he has heard from others, without compromising his informers by naming them. The war with the Kings of Europe was uppermost in everyone’s minds. In his entry for 8 July 1794, Marillet writes to himself about the battle of Fleurus. To commemorate the reported victory won on the plain of Fleurus by the patriotic armies against the Austrians and the Prussians, the administrative body decided to give the name Fleurus to the Place des Cordeliers which, last time they renamed it, was called Réunion.

He then tells us what the newspapers have said, but adds that he has become very sceptical about what he reads in them: The name Fleurus comes from the field or plain where our Army of the Rhine composed of more than a hundred and fifty thousand men had carried a brilliant victory over the Austrians, Prussians and English whose army of a hundred thousand men had gone to secure Charleroi taken previously by the patriots. The coalition armies lost more than ten thousand men there.

The date had got muddled, he says. The inability to say accurately when it happened cast doubt on the rest of the report. ‘We have celebrated this very questionable victory today, and the name Fleurus has been given to our square.’ In reality, it was the decisive battle that took the Austrians out of Belgium on 25 June 1794.

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Jacques Garnier was in Saintes and made a speech in the Temple of Truth – it used to be the cathedral – ‘in which he greatly boasted of the grandeur and the advantages of the victory over the slaves of tyrants’. Citizen Bouquet’s Espérance Company was on parade, ‘preceded by the administrative body, by women and girls in white with garlands and, at their head, drums and music’. There were young people carrying a pyramid, and a citizen carrying ‘a flag calling itself Austrian’ reversed and trailing in the mud because it had rained before the parade and started again during it. Garnier spoke once more in the newly re-named square, a patriotic song was sung, and then they all trooped off to the military hospital, where Garnier gave the wounded soldiers their medals. They had not finished because they then had to go to the artificial mountain, where there were more songs and a salute of cannon. Bouquet’s cadet company escorted Garnier home, and the ceremony was over.4 Marillet describes the scarcity rations the people in Saintes were enduring. The bread was ‘detestable’. Only the wounded in the military hospital, the administrators, and the people who lived on handouts had white bread now. A consignment of flour did arrive from Rochefort, brought up in boats on the Charente, but no sacks were used to preserve it while it was in store – it had been left on stone floors – so it was all mildewed. He complains, ‘We have sent them superb and good quality grain, but the stores must be emptied to fill them with new, and they make us eat the defective old stuff.’ As for meat, there was only one pound of veal per household every 8 or 15 days. The citizens eked out their diet with artichokes and beans. There were mussels, and there was fish now and again, but they had to queue for it from four in the morning until ten, ‘for half a pound, and often nothing . . . Our very great misfortune is not to know when all this will come to an end and that we foresee ourselves being worse off in the future’. He expresses little hope for a good grain harvest because it had been so wet recently. He says that the people around Bordeaux have been living on boiled weeds and vine prunings for two months. All the wheat, the hay, and the wood have been requisitioned, and it is uncertain if the towns will be able to make provision for the army at the rate of one and a half pounds of grain a day for each soldier. We have to feel and sense all this without saying anything or complaining, for they would soon put us in prison, declare us suspect, or take us to the guillotine . . . There was never among any people, even the most barbaric, a revolution as bloody, an inquisition as terrifying [as this one], inasmuch as it reigns over our thoughts and tongues.

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There is no record of anyone being taken to the guillotine in Saintes for a lack of patriotism, but what Marillet wrote is a genuine indication of the climate of fear created as a result of Jacobin policy that revolutionary conditions should remain until victory. Fear created more fear. Marillet’s writing was an attempt made in private to control his.5 There is a similar story when he comes to the 1794 wine harvest – not a good year: ‘The vines looked good before the fruit started to form, but then storms reduced the yield. As soon as you touch them, they drop off the vine, especially the black and particularly the Quercy.’ It is quite likely that Marillet had a few vines himself somewhere.6 Famine conditions emerge when he talks about livestock7 and the products from it in the summer that saw the fall of Robespierre. There is a lengthy section under the heading ‘Situation of the minds in the town on 10th July 1794’. He tells us that all the citizens want peace, but they see it getting further away. The Republic’s armies seem to totter between victory and loss, and information is very scarce. He registers his wry reaction to the reports that say how few Frenchmen have been lost compared with so many Austrians or Prussians, and says about the prisoners taken: ‘The enormous numbers that we have of them would fill up all the towns of France. The sadness is that, although the reports say that few men have been lost, more and more seem to be called up.’ There is a draft being considered as he writes of all men between the ages of 25 and 40: The Municipality is always in pursuit of our poor children and cannot leave them in peace although they come home because of illness, and they harass them to rejoin. When they endeavour to save themselves from this cruel Vendée for several days, they worry their relatives to make them go back, and they threaten their fathers. The administrative body will sacrifice the whole generation to satisfy their greed and rage. One cannot understand at all what these infernal manœuvres and machinations are for; we don’t know what to think or what to say, so much so that we are assailed in every way, and judging by the way we are governed we can only wait for something better. If these demons from hell who have come to live in France don’t leave soon, the near future is very worrying indeed, since they are only concerned to strip us bare; today it’s one thing, and tomorrow another and, this winter, the demands will be repeated again by all appearances; the armies denude us of everything, and what can be done? We have no more income, very little capital, no resources in the way of savings which are used up every day, and everything costs extremely dear.8

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He had been widowed for just over six months by then, was in denial about his envy of the freedom others had seized for themselves, and could not restrain his descent into self-righteousness. The girls and the women go to everything. They go to the theatre. They dress themselves as men. They conduct themselves in the way men want them to. They do all that decency forbids. They are in all the places where their virtue will be compromised if they have any. The young men, the few who remain in the town, find so many opportunities in the women’s houses and are corrupted before they are grown up.9

He tells us that his ‘good friends the patriots’ had decided that they wanted to turn the building that used to be the chapel of the boys’ college in Saintes into a place for ‘the Club’ to hold its meetings. They had not found a hall good enough anywhere else. They appointed an expert called Avé as chief engineer, and asked him for an estimate. This enterprise needed funds, so the rich had to be soaked. ‘Nothing is so easy. They have proposed their plan to Jacques Garnier, who is here for two or three days,10 and who has adopted it with the greatest pleasure.’ Garnier asked for and was given a list of the well-off, hoping that the names of aristocrats whom he hated would appear on it. Once he had the list, he raised a round total of 60,000 livres as an arbitrary tax ‘from those who annoyed him most’ in the town and the surrounding countryside. The department officials shared the money among themselves, Marillet says. Garnier had his own cut, and no new meeting room was provided. Marillet says that Garnier’s arbitrary tax had the same outcome as the forced loan for the building of ‘the superb [artificial] Mountain’. The suspects were taxed, and nothing was done, but the roll was drawn up and the money collected.11 Marillet was accusing the district officials of embezzling under cover of the direction given by the National Convention, ‘their sole, arbitrary and vexatious authority’.12 When he comes to writing about the 1794 production of The Festival of the Anniversary of the Taking of the Bastille in what had been the cathedral, Marillet is only a few syllables away from modern satire. We can understand the difference between English humour and French irony on the basis of this account. The festival was ‘very simple but pagan like the others’. It was announced the day before by cannon fire and, on the day itself, drum-rolls called the citizens together to the command-posts of their respective National Guard

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captains. Marillet called this ‘a new kind of tyranny’. At four o’clock the companies were drawn up in the Square of the Federation, then marched to the Temple of the Supreme Being, ci-devant of Reason, where Citizens Héard, Gaudet, and Citoyenne Lacheurie, the wife of a priest called Forget, went up into the pulpit and sang the song Aux armes, citoyens (The Marseillaise!), accompanied by the band on its platform, where there was a model of the Bastille and, all around the platform, the names of the departments. When the song had finished, Le Tour, a member of the departmental directory, took the singers’ place in the pulpit and made a speech, after which the same singers went up again and sang another patriotic song. Most of the spectators, patriots and others, agreed that it was a real farce. The companies reassembled and the officers went to their command posts to hand out punishment to those who had not presented themselves in their companies in time, which was for us a great patriotic favour.

Then M. Morineau from Saujon, president of the district, made a speech in the Square. From there they went to the Mountain, where the maire made another one, and the battalion moved on to Fleurus Square, where Davaret, a member of the district, perched on the parapet of the staircase, made yet another one. All these speeches were a reworking of what Robespierre, Barère, Collot d’Herbois, and ‘other rabids and shedders of blood’ had said in the Convention and which had been repeated in the Jacobin Club: a great diatribe against kings, slaves, priests, and their supporters and great talk of liberty and equality on which they played continually. ‘After Davaret’s speech, the companies were at liberty to go and rest, of which the greater part of the men of my age [he was sixty] had a great need . . .’13 Acute wartime conditions had arrived now. Men from the municipality went round all the houses in the town looking for ‘all the iron that one might have: plaques, firebacks, firedogs, iron pots, cast-iron stoves, and they took it all in requisition, only leaving one fireback in each house’. There was also talk of taking away all the balconies and bannisters as they had done in other towns. ‘I am not mistaken in saying that little by little they are taking everything. It is for the casting of cannon, they say, and for the other instruments of war.’14 When the Terror arose, Marillet saw himself twice on the point of being imprisoned. He was left at liberty but he does not explain why. He asked a friend to hide the first volume of his history and he put it under a rock, where it remained exposed to damp until the fall of Robespierre, when he took it up again with his account of ‘the Death of Robespierre, Member of the

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Convention’, as his marginal note heads it. He is almost cheerful at this point in contrast to the acute depression conveyed in what he had written before. We learned . . . yesterday of the death of Robespierre who wanted to grab, it was said, sovereign authority. He was guillotined with Saint-Just, Le Bas, Couthon, and others, twenty-two in all. They had been arrested, judged, condemned and executed in twenty-four hours. Robespierre had had Hébert, Danton and others who were at the head of a faction guillotined . . . and how many others are going to follow as their supporters? All the Municipality of Paris is under arrest: our Garnier could run risks. This death of a man dominant in France, who directed all the constituted authorities, even the Convention, has astonished everyone, and each time you meet anyone, you say to one another: Robespierre has been guillotined. You do not know what to say any more; you do not know what opinion to hold. You have to be everything: for Marat a little while ago, then Hébertist, then Montagnard, then Robespierrist; the most prudent way has always been, and is still, never to have any opinion at all about these factions which form themselves and that we see destroy each other. The patriots are extremely astonished at this death and ask themselves to whom they should give their trust . . . The Convention is going to blame Robespierre for all the cruelties and the massacres which it has had committed, just as it blamed Hébert for all the odiousness of atheism in which they used to glory at the Convention. It seems that there is going to be a plan for justice and humanity to come next, and that the guillotine and the imprisonments will not be so à la mode.15

But now a personal matter: the Revolution has come home to the rue de la Commune. My son Léon of the Compagnie Franche was forced from the town into the garrison at Saint-Jean-d’Angély more than a year ago where I asked my relation, M. de Normand,16 to keep an eye on him, and he has this morning left for Luçon, and from there into the Vendée . . . May God preserve and save him. He is in great danger of losing his life. He is wise, reasonable, and right thinking, but force constrains the law as daily experience proves.17

Writing his criticism of the town council seemed a good cure for depression. The Municipality gives an example that makes us shiver for the people. At the smallest movement of discontent they could come to pillage our houses without us being able to oppose them, since the municipality authorizes it for them in giving them such an example. The motion [about this] had

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already been made at the Club several months ago. It is a very unhappy thing to be witnesses to similar acts at the moment when the Convention shows itself humane and more moderate in letting go several detainees from different prisons, although experience makes us fear that this measure will not last for very long.

There is a sad little entry which contains all his pent-up resentment at the humiliations imposed upon those who a few years before felt confident of their position in society. He says, On 23rd, the Club ordered all citizens and citoyennes to go and cut nettles and other weeds to burn them and make them into ash for the gunpowder factory. Everyone has to bring in ten pounds [weight of ash] to the church of La Charité.18

It was announced in Saintes on 24 February 1795, on the basis of a letter from General Rubel in Nantes to the maire of La Rochelle, that peace had been made in the Vendée. Marillet’s reaction is to say that the peace perhaps is true, but it is found most impossible to believe that Charette [the present Vendéan leader] would have so quickly abandoned the aims for which he has fought for two years, namely the re-establishment of religion, of royalty, and the return of the emigrés with the restoration of their property . . . we will wait until Sunday for confirmation of the news. We have been deceived several times in the last year.

Marillet’s confusion is understandable: Charette had made a truce rather than peace at La Jaunaye. He and other Vendéan leaders had been led to such despair by the actions of the Republicans that they had negotiated, but they sent secret messages to London to say that they intended to carry on their struggle. Marillet had no way of knowing that. This cruel war has cost the lives of four hundred thousand Frenchmen. And now, once more, we cannot believe in this peace which is against all reason, and about which several of the patriots themselves doubt whether it is a true or a political act, after the declarations and plans that the rebels have made with the powers of the coalition. Time will teach us all that.

Marillet reproduced in full Nicolas Stofflet’s19 reply about the truce, which refers to the ‘the third year of Louis XVII’, and offers continued defiance to the Republicans: ‘We will stand up to your actions and your threats’.20 Marillet’s last comment is ‘The Vendée is an impenetrable chaos’.21

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6. The Medieval Bridge, Hotel de Monconseil and Cathedral: Prints from 1791.

On 26 February there was sign of a possible return to pre-terror conditions with the suppression of the Committees of Surveillance by the decree of the National Convention on 20 February. This decree has dismayed the villains of whom our committee is made up, and who only exist by means of their foul conduct for which they sacrifice the sentiments of humanity and to maintain the nine livres a day which enriches them, one could better say gives them the means of satisfying their debauches and their libertinage.

He denounces all those whom he considers villains for having issued hundreds of arrest warrants. ‘They should be arrested themselves to expiate all

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their crimes. Their committee papers will be put under seal and the false arrests they made will soon be known.’22 The post-Thermidorean reaction had a formidable task to be able to bring some reassurance to François-Guillaume Marillet. He writes another of his ‘state of the nation’ entries on 31 March 1795 to say that France, at this moment, is in terrifying chaos. She is governed only by factions who aim to destroy each other and actually do so . . . we are reduced to one half pound of bread a day – something inconceivable – and provisions have not been sufficient even for this amount, so we have been obliged to get by on rice and biscuit in the provinces.23 The Club is governed by several Robespierrists . . . The main leaders are Lemercier and Vanderquand from the district, Gaudet, Brunet, Boquier and Hector Savarit from the department, and others. There are a great number of rabids who are astonished by the new régime and who have the appearance of being moderates, given in the circumstances to hope that the Jacobin party, which appears to have been destroyed since the members of their society are now under arrest, will come back again. If they do return we shall see more villains than ever before. Nevertheless . . . people are talking about the general purge of all the administrative bodies and the destruction of the club. We might soon enjoy peace, and even some of that liberty for which we have often repeated the word without having the thing itself, which could come only with a government that is solid and firm, with a king who is the unique remedy for the evils of all sorts which the revolution has made us suffer for three years. Everything suggests it is coming but we have not yet come to the end and, in order to get there, we have to wait for perhaps a general explosion in the kingdom.24

A rumour said that the King of Prussia was about to make peace with the Republic. Marillet did not believe it, but it was true. Frederick William II’s government signed the Treaty of Basle with France on 5 April 1795 to make a separate peace.25 Hopes began to rise when Charles-Auguste Blutel arrived. His powers were limited as the Convention’s representative on mission to the Navy at Rochefort as yet, but Marillet says they had been ‘waiting three months for him’ to preside over the dismantling of the Terror. ‘He announced a more gentle and humane régime on the part of the Convention; that the reign of terrorism was dead and that it would never appear again; that divisions and particular hatreds had to disappear to give place to a general reunion.’ He invited citizens to make denunciations of

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méchants but, when they did, he soon realized that a great part of that was in order to settle personal scores.26 Marillet provides a list of ‘méchants and of those who served as instruments in the hands of the leaders to bring evil about and work to their personal advantage. To find the names more easily, I have put them in alphabetical order.’ There are 62 names of these local small-fry. All these men are without good manners, without delicacy, without probity, without honour, without religion. They are drunkards, debauchees, and gluttons. They swallow up national property; they are the ones who have stripped the churches bare and who have enriched themselves by robbing them. Their houses and offices are full of furniture, linen and silver which belonged to the nobles, the exiled priests, and those who have been interned, and it would cost a lot in compensation if they were obliged to refund its value. That is why they support the terrorists with all their power. It is the only way they can keep what they have taken. They are two-faced men.27,28

Marillet’s final entry was made in July 1795: Our patriots par excellence do not know what to say of all that has gone on. They put their ears down and find themselves in the same uncertainty as we [all] are under these events. They want to be honest. It is true that they are disapproved of to a great extent, in the same way as the married priests who are in such a degraded state.29

After he had stopped writing his journal, he stood for an official position, and was elected twentieth judge at the Civil Tribunal of the Charente-Inférieure by a hundred and seven votes on 11 October 1795. He was subsequently re-elected on 14 May 1797, then appointed director of the jury of the arrondissement of La Rochelle, and went to live there. This meant he had to administer the new law whether he liked it or not. As we shall see, this office involved him in what must have been a very painful compromise. He died in office aged 68 on 5 March 1800.30 Marillet’s journal finished too soon to tell us whether his son came home safe and sound, or how the next new constitution – the Directory – was received in Saintes. What he has given us, however, is a much needed contemporary’s immediate reaction to what it was like during the Terror for those who had been solid citizens. His journal communicates his agony. It is painful to read, but it reminds us that there were people involved in all these developments, ordinary people who were close to having forgotten what it meant to say, as French people often do of good things, ‘C’est normale’.

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chapter 5

La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town

E

conomic stability in La Rochelle, based on Atlantic trade and support of French colonies, had been eroded by 1789.1 France had lost Canada and the fur trade important to La Rochelle, and Spain had taken over Louisiana, though it was back in French hands in time for it to be bought by the United States from First Consul Bonaparte in 1802. The triangular voyages of slavers were still profitable to individual ship owners like the Catholic Goguet and the Protestant Garesché families, and some of the captains they employed made substantial profit for themselves out of the independent enterprises they were allowed.2 Yet, La Rochelle’s public buildings and infrastructure – despite the Corinthian splendours of the newly completed Palais de Justice – could no longer be maintained from municipal funds, and public cleansing had to be done by criminals serving hard-labour sentences in chain gangs.3 The Revolution found natural support among Protestants4 like Pastor Bétrine and his congregation, whose predecessors had resisted royal absolutism since Cardinal Richelieu’s time.5 Freemasons were also in the forefront of the Revolution.6 Among their number were the lawyers, Charles Jean-Marie Alquier,7 and Pierre Morin, the printer Louis Chauvet and the publisher Vincent Cappon. It was well known that they had much in common with the ideals of progressive Jacobins.8 They founded the Society of the Friends of the Constitution on 16 August 1790, with a nucleus of wealthy members, holding their meetings in the former Carmelites’ chapel, open to men and women in the same way as the Jacobin Club in Paris. They adopted a liberal economic programme, pressing for frequent markets, lower taxes, and increased consumer spending as a remedy for economic stagnation. 69

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The resources of the hinterland were no longer adequate for supplying the town with foodstuffs, since noble and bourgeois ship owners had found in the recent past that quick profits could be made from exporting fortified wines and spirits and had laid out vineyards on land that had been arable. However, British and American protectionism, together with Spanish and Portuguese competition, had recently reduced that resource. An economy based on manning ships, administering diminishing colonies, refining sugar, curing leather, and tending vines had replaced natural land and water resources like cereal growing, fishing, and salt production, and the administrators elected by the town’s 3,000 ‘active’ citizens in 1792 were no better equipped to put things right than their ancien régime predecessors had been.9 The nobles’ position as traditionalist Catholics became untenable when the Civil Constitution of the Clergy became law in July 1790. Many either emigrated to join the Army of the Princes, or moved north to the Vendée when the time came to offer their military experience to the rebels there. They often applied for passports for a spa near the frontier for health reasons, and then crossed frontiers as emigrés.10 At first, the newly appointed Bishop Charles de Coucy had associated himself with moderate change by blessing the National Guard banners, but he was found among the 129 out of 136 ancien régime bishops regarded as having resigned after the refusal to take the Oath to the Constitution: their loyalties to the old order were too strong to allow them to compromise.11 The greater part of the clergy in La Rochelle who refused the oath left France within 15 days as the law required, some acting as guardians to the children of the nobility on their journeys, and the majority going to Spain with their bishop.12 This left an alliance of the high and middling bourgeoisie in charge in La Rochelle as economic distress worsened. Claudy Valin describes the town in the last months of international and civil peace as ‘a motley and unstable community’.13 War with Austria was declared in April 1792. When the Republic declared war on Great Britain in February 1793, the coast of the Charente-Inférieure became a naval war-zone. In March 1793, civil war began on the northern border of the department and dispossessed peasants would take up the cause of the nobles and the refractory clergy in the Vendée. The patriots of La Rochelle found themselves living on the frontiers of the Republic.

***

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The National Convention’s call for a levy of 300,000 soldiers on 24 February 1793 is usually taken as the spark that set off overt Royalist and Catholic rebellion, but a violent stand was taken against the Republic well before the Convention’s decree mobilized the young men against it and allowed the wealthy bourgeoisie to pay for substitutes for their sons if they drew a bad number in the recruiting lottery. As soon as abbey lands and noble estates had been put up for sale and bought by townsmen living in places like Nantes and Niort, the tenant farmers of the so-called ‘Military Vendée’, from the Sèvre River northwards as far as the Loire, compared present conditions unfavourably with rule by resident abbots and nobles in the past. In the course of the summer in 1792, Gabriel de Baudry d’Asson, seigneur of Brachin in the Commune of La Forêt-sur-Sèvre, led several thousand rioters to Chatillon-sur-Sèvre, driving out the Republican authorities who had implemented the revolutionary measures they so detested. They tried to do the same at Bressuire, but were repulsed. The Departmental Directory of Deux-Sèvres appealed to La Rochelle for military assistance and National Guard artillerymen were sent.14 In the villages around Bressuire, Republican officials received threats that prevented them from ejecting priests who refused the oath. In other places officials were murdered for wearing their tricolour sashes, and their widows and orphans came to be sheltered at La Rochelle.15 Many nonjuring priests did leave their parishes and made their way to England or the Channel Islands. Clergy who had taken the Oath to the Civil Constitution were intruded into the livings of those who had not, and ostracized by the peasants who had worked the land tenanted by their families for centuries. When it was found that many ‘good priests’ had returned from exile and were hiding in remote places and woodland to minister to their congregations as before, the morale of the rebels was sustained against the Republic and the ‘Whites’ took on the ‘Blues’. Collective rage on the part of country people who lived near Machecoul, a town inland from the Île de Noirmoutier, erupted on 10 March 1793, when, with improvised weapons and duck guns, a crowd of ‘about ten thousand’ converged to challenge five gendarmes and two hundred National Guardsmen. In previous demonstrations, the rebel crowds had dispersed when the Republican troops fired on them. But not this time. At Machecoul the protesters marching on the town in their clogs and armed with their duck guns were not deterred. They shouted, ‘Give us back our good priests!’ and ‘Vive le Roi!’ Their slogans were punctuated by calls on

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hunting horns. The Republican defenders withdrew into the narrow streets and opened fire on them. In the heat of the continuing attack something changed. Killing the defenders of Machecoul was no longer a crime for the crowd, but a necessity. Fear of reprisals was no longer a consideration. Their assault was not blind and senseless, but a ‘targeted and cruel purification’. The country people were venting self-respecting fury on the prosperous town of 3,000 inhabitants. They targeted the constitutional curé, named (aptly for them) Le Tort, and members of the departmental directory, Jaubert and Maupassant, who were seen not as defenders of the law, but rather symbols of a monstrous usurpation of power called the Republic, responsible for the king’s death, the sale and purchase of stolen lands, and the persecution of lawful priests. The insurgents went into houses, ransacked provisions, and killed 20 citizens. The attackers were at that point leaderless, but there was not such great social difference in the Military Vendée between the hobereaux nobles and their tenants as elsewhere in France. A former naval officer, the chevalier François-Athanase Charette, seigneur of Fonteclose, who had defended Queen Marie-Antoinette with his sword during the attack on the Tuileries Palace on 10 August in the previous year, would soon be persuaded to assume command.16 Reconciliation was impossible after events like this. A horror story was beginning which has been presented for 20 years in France by Reynald Secher as ‘Franco-French genocide’, a claim recently repeated without modification in an American translation.17 The importation of a term invented in the 1940s for the Hitler holocaust might, however, be inappropriate to describe what happened.18 Forcefully expressed determination by the Republic to exterminate the Vendéans was preceded by the arrival of Republican widows and orphans seeking refuge in the Charente-Inférieure after the massacre of their husbands and fathers by the rebels. There was an enormous body count in the Vendéan villages after General Turreau’s ‘columns from Hell’ had made their visitations, but the rebels had an army and the intention to kill had not been confined to one side in the conflict. Civil war might remain a better description of what occurred between the outbreak of violence in the Bressuirais in August 1792 and the negotiations for the Peace of La Jaunaye three and a half years later. Nevertheless, Mark Levene has developed the idea that genocide has often in history been the reaction of nation states to non-conformist minority groups in their midst – such as gypsies, witches, Protestants, Jews, or Muslims – and

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pursued Secher’s assertion convincingly. He argues that, at the time of the Jacobin supremacy in the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, the Vendéan rebels had rallied to the rejected monarchy and the redundant Church against the new nation state and put La Patrie in danger. This was seen as ‘collective treason’ and the Republic responded with ‘a policy agenda of unlimited elimination’. Those who persisted in supporting the son of the executed king and cried for the reinstatement of their refractory priests could expect no mercy from the ‘One and Indivisible Republic’.19 Once it was seen that the rebels had a clear intention to overthrow Republican rule in the Military Vendée, La Rochelle became the centre of operations for confronting them, and hostilities began.

*** General Verteuil was overall military commander in La Rochelle, and ordered General Louis-Henri-François de Marcé, a noble career officer aged 59, and currently in charge of the National Guard in Saintes,20 to prepare an attack on the rebels. The government’s message was that support must be given to the patriots in the Vendée and Deux-Sèvres who were being threatened by enemies of the Republic. Most of the force being assembled in haste to invade the Vendée was made up of civilian volunteers from the National Guard – hardly more than a thousand men. They were going against a Vendéan force reckoned at between seven and ten thousand. Republican officials in the Vendée Department told Marcé that loyal troops were under attack by up to 5,000 rebels, so he had no choice but to set off north with his little force of 1,200 men and 4 cannon on 14 March, with the representatives on mission, Niou21 and Carra, as his political supervisors. The triumphalist Niou wrote from Chantonnay to the National Convention on 17 March: ‘We will be the winners, of that we are sure.’ A Paris newspaper announced that Marcé ‘was going to re-establish communications between Nantes and La Rochelle’. The opposing forces met around La Guérinière, between the Petite Lay and the Vendronneau rivers on 19 March in the evening.22 After six hours of battle, Marcé’s National Guardsmen broke ranks and retreated to Saint-Vincent. Marcé found himself in a narrow defile where a great number of his men were killed. He tried to carry out an orderly retreat but, at Saint-Philibert-du-Pont-Charrault near Chantonnay, the troops broke into headlong flight. The details of what happened became

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confused in the combatants’ memories, and were clarified at Marcé’s subsequent trial under condemnatory pressure from the notorious public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville at the Paris revolutionary tribunal, whose closing speech impugned his competence as a military commander.23 Carra and Niou fled with the others and did not stop until three o’clock in the morning, when they reached Saint-Hermand. Some troops went on to reach La Rochelle by first light, and what had happened became public knowledge there very quickly. The cry of ‘sauve qui peut!’ at Pont-Charrault had fractured confidence in Republican promises, and the representatives on mission had to arrange something quickly to stop themselves from being blamed for the disaster. On 20 March, the General Council of the District of La Rochelle went into permanent session and the army’s retreat was confirmed by Citizen Joseph-Auguste Crassous de Médeuil, its president since September 1792. He had been present himself at Saint-Hermand when the run for home gathered momentum. He claimed that steps were needed to prevent public outcry. Marcé arrived back at nine o’clock and a message was received from the representative on mission charging him with either incompetence or treason, perhaps even colluding with the Vendéans in advance of his encounter with them. Soon after he had presented himself in the council chamber, he surrendered his sword and was put under arrest. General Verteuil provided an escort of 30 men to prevent him from being lynched on his way to prison. The council minutes were signed as midnight was striking.24 When fugitives from the battle trickled into La Rochelle in the early morning, wives and parents asked anxiously about their husbands and sons. Rumours reflected a collective fear that the Vendéans might at any time invade the town. Fear was transformed into finding a focus for hatred.

*** Five months earlier, in October 1792, gendarmes from Oulmes in the Vendée had brought two Catholic priests before the administrators of the Department of Deux-Sèvres: Charles Cornuault, former curé of Noireterre, and Christophe Violleau, former curé of Chapelle Gaudin, who had refused to take the Oath to the Constitution. They had a bundle of certificates with them, explaining why they had not yet gone abroad as the law required, and the officials in their parishes had sent them to the Department Directory for a decision about what to do with them. The departmental officials said there was no escape from the law and they sent them to prison in La

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Rochelle until they could be deported to French Guyana.25 A month before the rout of Marcé’s force, the National Assembly had passed a new law offering 100 livres to anyone denouncing a refractory priest still on French soil: any such must be put to death within 24 hours. On the morning when the defeated troops were arriving back in La Rochelle, Joseph-Auguste Crassous de Médeuil, the hard-line Republican we have already met, ordered Cornuault and Violleau, as well as Hulé from Largeasse and Augeard from Noirlieu, to be brought out of prison at the Palais de Justice and put on board ship for the île de Ré. Their parishes had all been in the area of Bressuire in the north of the Deux-Sèvres Department, where the first eruptions of rebellion took place in August 1792. In the confusion of that morning, many believed that these men were its instigators and responsible for the deaths of their relations two days before.26 Crassous was a man of apparent sophistication who allied himself with the more violent among the revolutionary leaders, a willing fellow-traveller with the succession of representatives on mission who took charge of the Charente-Inférieure before and during the official Terror.27 A company of six National Guardsmen escorted the priests, chained together, from the Palais de Justice to the quayside at midday. Joseph-Honoré Darbelet, a wig-maker and barber known as a prominent sans-culotte, was waiting under the clock tower, which opens from the arcaded streets on to the quayside of the Grand’rive. Darbelet gathered people around him and incited them against the four priests who would soon be coming into sight: ‘What a thing to see! Our brothers all killed, the carts full of wounded coming into La Rochelle! The father cries for his son and the son for the father who has been killed in the Avendée (sic)!’28 A crowd of at least 400 was waiting on the quayside. The tide was out, and the ship that was to collect the priests could not come alongside. The crowd assailed the ship’s boat with stones, the sailors had to row away again and there was no boat ready when the priests came through the arch. The officer in command of the escort said at the belated trial afterwards that he had been called an aristocrat because he did what he could to protect the four priests when sailors from ships in port, National Guardsmen off duty, and many women threw stones at his troop. Darbelet went behind the guard and hit the oldest of the priests as he walked slowly along, weighed down by his fetters and leaning on his stick. Two of the priests had bleeding heads by the time they reached the Tour de la Chaine, and the crowd was trying to push the other two off the quay into the mud.

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The guard intervened. A surgeon dressed the two priests’ wounds, but the riot continued until Maire Dély, along with the municipal officers and the Justices of the Peace, arrived with ten National Guard cavalrymen. The priests had been taken inside the guardroom at the side of the Tour de la Chaine near the harbour entrance. The maire tried to negotiate with the rioters, but members of the crowd shouted that these priests were the cause of their sons having to fight and die in the Vendée. The order was inexplicably given for drums to beat the general retreat, the ten cavalrymen drew back, and the six National Guardsmen lowered their weapons. The maire and the municipal officers tried to form a human barrier in front of the guardroom, but Darbelet, a woman, and a sailor slipped through their outstretched arms and went inside. The officials went away. The guardroom was a stone building with horizontal slits set high in the walls for windows. The four priests inside were pushed back against a camp bed. One of the guards saw Darbelet throw a knife and a hatchet on the bed and heard him say, ‘It’s all up with you now.’ The priests went down on their knees. Another man came in and cut the throat of one of the priests with a knife edge attached to a long stick. The dead man fell forward, dragging the others to the ground with him because they were still chained together. More rioters burst in. The men punched the priests while the women banged their heads on the ground. Darbelet cut a priest’s ear off and kept

7. La Rochelle: Tour de la Chaine, 21 March 1793.

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holding it up under women’s chins for the rest of the day. A sailor cut open the stomach of another priest with a razor. The murderers then left the guardroom with their clothes and hands covered in blood. One of the women with them shouted, ‘That was better than holy water’, while another said, ‘Look at these bougres: We’ve finished them off!’ The woman with Darbelet went away with some grey hair on a knife. The corpses were thrown on the quayside, where the women set about them with clubs. One priest had spasms in his death throes and vomited blood; a man plunged his sabre into his chest three times before he cut off his head and took it away. Another man called Dionnet stood on a corpse while he turned out the dead man’s pockets to find a rosary and a crucifix which he waved above his head in derision. Some ragged boys took away the shoes from the bodies, together with the breeches and stockings, and the biggest, a boy with one eye, took the shirts. A woman held up a piece of flesh and said, ‘If I had his heart, I would eat it!’ The remaining three heads were cut off and carried high on pitchforks. One priest’s private parts were carried on a stick and then on the point of a sabre passed from hand to hand while men and women, shouting obscenities, struggled to get hold of it. Two corpses were attached behind a sledge drawn by two horses and dragged across the cobbles. This ghastly cortège went up through the Saint-Barthélémy section to the cathedral steps and the bodies were laid out there. The National Guard was drawn up on the Place d’Armes (now Place Verdun) in front of the cathedral, and Carra, the representative on mission, was haranguing the crowd, promising to send General Marcé before the revolutionary tribunal in Paris and bring him back to La Rochelle to be guillotined. His charge against Marcé was that he was in conspiracy with General Dumouriez, who had been defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden three days before. Carra was caught up in the popular emotion as much as Darbelet, but had improvised a cynical response to the panic of untrained troops who had fled home. Afterwards, a district administrator called Griffon arrested the murderers still parading with the priests’ heads held on high. After a long argument, the heads were put into a sack, laid with the bodies on the sledge again and taken to the Saint-Barthélémy cemetery for burial. The death certificate said, ‘prètres morts, victimes d’une emotion populaire’.29 The two other bodies left on the quay after being mutilated were buried in the SaintJean cemetery.

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The violence had not yet finished. The next day, 22 March, a batch of Vendéan prisoners were sent on a sloop from Saint-Martin-de-Ré to La Rochelle. They included three priests, Jacques-Pierre Douche and André Verge, from Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, and the Abbé Malerbeau, vicar of Aytré, just south of La Rochelle (and so not a Vendéan). There were also some nobles and some women, and they were escorted by six grenadiers. When their sloop came alongside, there was a mob waiting for it. Some sailors armed with knives went across moored vessels to reach it. As the barber Darbelet went from boat to boat, he shouted, ‘I’m going on my second expedition!’ A young sailor from the île de Ré whose name was Billiard, seeing a priest still dressed in his cassock (against the law for nearly a year now), shouted, ‘Look, there’s a good meal . . . We are going to do the same to this lot as we did to the others yesterday!’ One of the grenadiers ran to alert the town council. The priests went below, heard each other’s confessions and gave each other absolution. General Thouron, the commander of the National Guard, arrived with members of the District Directory wearing their tricolour sashes. Thouron announced that he was going to fire on the ship once the escort of grenadiers had got ashore. One of the grenadiers dragged the Abbé Malerbeau to safety – he was dressed in layman’s clothes – and told the rioters that he was a passenger. The municipal officers watched the killing begin. Both of the priests from Saint-Laurent were hacked to pieces on the quay. The body parts were shared out among the murderers, who even argued about who would have the larger pieces. The mutilated corpses of the priests and the nobles were left lying there for some hours until they were buried in the Saint-Nicolas cemetery.

*** Over two years later, at the request of one of the victims’ family, a man from Saintes who called himself a legal officer, but who was really an actor from the theatre in the town, Marie-Joseph Laporte, went to Pierre-François Heard, the public prosecutor in Saintes, and denounced two of the leaders in the first day’s events. Laporte was a royalist ‘suspect’ who had been interned at Brouage, and Lassoutière, named in the denunciation as the source of information, was his father-in-law. This denunciation is the first document in the relevant dossier in the departmental archives, and a literal translation is as follows:

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I, the undersigned, André-Marie Joseph Laporte, legal usher, denounce the man named Darbelet, wig-maker and barber living on the port at La Rochelle, and the man named Guionnet (or Dionnet), refurbisher of mattresses and wool, to the public prosecutor of the criminal tribunal of the Charente-Inférieure, the first for having mutilated and cut off the organs of generation of a priest who was still alive in the murder that took place at La Rochelle on [the date is not written], and the second for having carried this priest’s testicles around. This fact was related to me at a restaurant at Saintes in the presence of Citizen Lassoutière père, who is a citizen of the rank of commissioner of the Commune of La Rochelle, who told me that the witness had been Citizen de Bragian, living on the harbour at La Rochelle, who told him that he had seen this abominable crime committed by Darbelet. At Saintes, 29 messidor, year 3 of the republic (17th July 1795).30

Judge Charles-André Bessat interrogated 68 witnesses, although only three others, besides Darbelet and Guionnet, were named in the documents as being actually prosecuted: Olivier Juillet, Jean Pinard, and Marie-Anne Marsillat, the widow of a butcher known as Faillofaix. Judge Bessat’s report begins with his examination of the carpenter, Olivier Juillet, who immediately exculpated himself. On 21 March I was at Saint Xandre (a village outside the town), and on 22 March I was under arms because the general alert had been sounded, so I could not have been one of the authors of the murder of the priests.

He also remarked that the tide was out when they wanted to put them on board ship. The next to be interrogated was the blacksmith Jean Pinard, who had been born at Crazannes in the canton of Port d’Envaux. He denied being in the guardroom where the murder took place, and said the guards would bear him out. Then it was Darbelet’s turn: I was in the crowd only after the time the murder took place . . . I was to be found there and I saw the mutilation, and took away an ear which I carried about with me. I saw for myself that most of the people who had perpetrated the murder in question were not from La Rochelle, but foreigners, such as people from Hamburg, or Danes, Swedes, privateers from different places, and the remains of the army back from the Vendée after the rout under Marsais (sic). I also say that the massacre would not have happened if it had not been arranged for the priests to be let out of prison at that time under pretext of putting them on board ship while the tide was out . . . I assure you that I took no part in it.

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Guionnet was questioned next, and played a similar tune. Then Bessat interrogated the widow Faillofax. This is what she said: On the day of the riot, after hearing the general alert sounded, curiosity made me go and see what it was all about. I went down to the port. I stood on a corner and I saw the man Dionnet who had a rosary in his hand and held it up for us to see.

She asserted her innocence. All the accused had the newly established right to choose their own defence counsel, and they chose a man called Forget, whose surname is the same as that of one of the priests in Saintes, a teacher at the former Jesuit college there, who had taken the oath. At the same time as this enquiry was being held, the persecution of priests who had been released after enduring the most appalling 11 months of detention on rotting ships off Rochefort instead of being transported to Guyana was beginning again.31 By January 1796, once more clergy from all over France were being taken to hulks and prisons on islands near La Rochelle. Moreover, also at the same time, an amnesty was given to all who had taken part in ‘revolutionary deeds’. It was in these conditions that the tribunal at Saintes was considering its evidence. On 17 pluviôse year IV (6 February 1796), the jury at the Saintes tribunal declared that Darbelet had taken part in a crime, but without premeditation, and that it was excusable by reason of violent provocation. Guionnet and Juillet had not participated in the crime. The widow Faillofaix had participated in the massacre but unconsciously and without criminal intent.

All the defendants were acquitted and set free, except Darbelet, who was sentenced to ten years in irons, although not executed as a murderer. Two months later, Darbelet sent a meticulously written three-page letter on blue paper from the prison he called his cachote ténébreux at Saintes to claim the benefit of the amnesty of 13 brumaire: Those who pursue me are not Republicans. I am one of the founders of the Republic . . . The revolt that took place at La Rochelle was against the refractory priests and not against property of residents or the safety of the Republic . . . If they had not let the priests out of the prison at the same time as the arrival of the army, they would not have been massacred: but it is proof that they freed them for popular vengeance inasmuch as they knew the tide was out . . . why do they remain unpunished when they were the chief assassins?

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Darbelet eloquently claimed that he had been fitted up: They want to throw the blame on innocent people to whitewash themselves from their penalties, and they have made me pay their debts, and I have been prosecuted by the priests’ relations who certainly have greased palms at the tribunal to have me declared guilty.

His appeal was rejected on 13 May 1796. On 26 May the Court of Cassation also turned it down (which ought to have prevented the appeal going any further) on the grounds that Darbelet had committed murder, and murder could not be regarded as a revolutionary deed under the terms of the amnesty of 13 brumaire. Even so the affair was not finished because Darbelet’s wife again submitted a petition to claim amnesty on 8 January 1797. This time it worked, and on 13 January the criminal tribunal at Saintes ‘without fear of having contradicted itself . . . considering that the murderers of the said priests of which the said Joseph-Honoré Darbelet has been declared an accomplice are, by reason of the circumstances, deeds purely relative to the revolution, orders the setting at liberty of the above-mentioned’. Five judges signed this three-page document. One of them was Lemercier, who, less than three years later, would help Bonaparte to power. The compliance of another who signed is really astonishing: the Catholic royalist FrançoisGuillaume Marillet, who in his secret journal in Saintes from 1789 to 1795 had denounced all the Republicans as villains (scélerats), added his signature, surrounded by decorative flourishes, to Darbelet’s release document.32 The law was the law and, elected as a judge, he had to decide in conformity with it. The secret defender of ‘our poor priests’ could do nothing else but set at liberty the man who had been convicted for the murder of at least one of them. Darbelet seemed to know who they were when he spoke about them, and they were declared innocent by implication along with him. Carra had been guillotined already as a Girondin sympathizer, but others of them continued to benefit from the church property they had bought. Niou and Crassous held office in the Consulate and Empire, though they were exiled for voting for Louis XVI’s execution when the monarchy was restored after Waterloo. What looked like a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling had been the implementation of government policy. That policy became more systematic in the Charente-Inférieure under the control of the next representatives, Joseph-Marie Lequinio and Joseph-François Laignelot, and was the application of Terror as overt policy to prevent the Vendée rebellion spreading south. Crassous threw in his lot with them too.

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Joseph-Auguste Crassous was in a position to know where the four priests murdered on the first day had come from, and would have been acquainted with the characters of prominent sans-culottes like Darbelet who, perhaps, supplied his wigs and held forth on political issues while giving him a shave. Perhaps, also, it was Crassous who sold the idea of making the six priests scapegoats to the people in authority over him.

*** The insurgents in the Vendée gained in confidence and transformed themselves into the Catholic and Royal Army. The Republican government recognized that they were counter-revolutionaries.33 La Rochelle had to be ready to fight on two fronts: across the Sèvre River and on the coastline, where the naval forces of Great Britain, Holland, and Spain might invade at any time.34 The town became a transit camp by the end of March 1793, when troops had come from Libourne, Bourg, Bordeaux, and Blaye, swelling the town’s population by nearly 1,800 men needing food and lodging.35 After the insurgents took Fontenay-le-Comte on 21 May, the border with the Military Vendée coincided with the border of the Charente-Inférieure. Instead of being, as the Bas-Poitou had been in time past, the granary for La Rochelle, it had become enemy country.36 Vendéan infiltrators were soon apprehended and guillotined in the Place d’Armes. Suspicion automatically fell upon noble families who were still resident in the Saint-Barthélémy section and whose sons had gone abroad as emigrés, and there were successful searches for weapons. All emigrés’ fathers, brothers, and male children above the age of 14 were taken to prison in Rochefort as hostages for their own good behaviour. Emigrés’ mothers, wives, and daughters were kept under house arrest. The department’s decree was carried out to the letter by Crassous. Official policy regarded emigrés as subject to ‘civil death’ and their families infected with the cause of it.37 The patriots feared that the atrocities perpetrated upon Republicans across the Sèvre River could be repeated in La Rochelle. So the mobilization of La Rochelle and the communes around was total, and the Jacobin Club was enthusiastically supported by the majority of citizens. Recruitment for regular military units and the navy was substantial. Youths too young to serve with the colours joined the Compagnie de l’Éspérance de la patrie,38,39

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and Republican women played a vital rôle in the idealization of La Patrie. Not only did they act as nurses for the wounded soldiers and those with contagious diseases in the hospitals, but they personally dedicated their own sons to become soldiers. Children were being taught to shout ‘Live free or die!’ The Jacobin club in La Rochelle, as at Saintes, was open to women, and they played their part in keeping the military adrenalin running.40 Rumours multiplied, like the one that said the rebels had poisoned the waters of the Grand Lay River, and that when it flowed into the sea the shellfish were rendered unfit to eat. So people were punished for spreading unfounded reports.41 Sans-culottes policed the streets and the murderers of the priests on 21 and 22 March were left without being prosecuted. The elections for the National Convention in the autumn of 1792 had included the petty bourgeoisie in the franchise, so they could not be denied access to the town’s general council, and they had been politicized as Jacobins. Smaller-scale businessmen – like the shopkeepers Jacques Fillot and Pierre Quinement, the plumber Michel Danglade, the printer and publisher Louis Chauvet, and the Protestant Pastor Bétrine – sat on the council now.42 The former, wealthier administrators were subject to intense criticism. Maire Dély was suspected of federalism for not adding ‘One and Indivisible’ when he called out ‘Long live the Republic!’ On 10 August, Pierre Thouron, the shipowner in charge of the National Guard unit since 1791, was regarded as suspect, despite what he had done when the priests were murdered on 22 March, because he had not had his troops remove the fleur-de-lys emblems from their uniforms. The Jacobins also claimed that the Vendéan prisoners clamped like potatoes in the Tour de la Lanterne at the harbour entrance had been shouting royalist slogans without being stopped by Thouron’s men, and that no one had taken steps to stop posters being put up in favour of Louis XVII on the night after the commemoration of the fall of the monarchy.43 Siege-mentality and totalitarianism went together.

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he need for a concerted, national response to the brigandage in the Vendée, as the Republicans called it, led to the National Convention setting up the Committee of Public Safety in early April 1793. Once they were rid of Girondin opposition in early June,1 the Jacobins maintained an uncompromising position towards the rebels. Republican military defeat at Saumur in early June was followed by successful defence of Nantes. Angers was threatened in July, but the government removed troops from Mainz on the Rhine and sent them against the Vendée, where they were victorious at Luçon. All British subjects found in France were arrested to prevent them dispensing financial help to the rebels. All departmental, district and municipal authorities were purged to replace suspect officials with known patriots. François-Athanase Charette had emerged as the principal Vendéan leader after the charismatic carter, Jacques Cathelineau, died at Nantes. The Republicans defeated Charette at Montaigu, but he beat General Kléber at Tougoin. D’Elbée’s force lost the important battle of Cholet to the Republicans on 17–18 October.2 French emigrés and British supplies were being gathered on the island of Jersey to raise the Vendéans’ hopes. The Marquis de Ximénèz3 revived the phrase ‘perfidious Albion’4 in October 1793, which became a slogan for revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike. The British government had harboured emigré nobles and priests, and considered plans for invasion of France, but eventually did nothing more beyond landing an ineffective émigré force on the Quiberon peninsula in June 1795, after which Charette was reported to have said, as he was taken to his execution, ‘Look where these damned English (gueux Anglais) have brought me!’5 Nevertheless, the Republican government had remained convinced that the British were involved in the Vendée rebellion and would give it maritime support. There were good enough grounds for this, because French nobles from the first emigration in 1789–90, and from the second in 1791, followed by many refractory priests, had gone to England.6 The 84

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clergy had been made particularly welcome there, with subscriptions raised for their support and a royal palace at Winchester made available to them by George III himself. After a while, the nobles’ welcome wore thin since they were reluctant to enlist in a regiment to fight republicans in France, as their counterparts in the Army of the Princes at Coblenz intended. Louis XVI’s two brothers, Provence and Artois, realized that British foreign policy was still antagonistic towards them after they had actively supported the Americans in their War of Independence. Artois, the younger brother, having wasted millions given to him to raise an army by Catherine II of Russia, would have liked British support. Provence, claiming to be regent for Louis XVII, preferred Spanish assistance, and set up his secret agency in Paris, ostensibly in opposition to Artois’ plans. William Pitt, the British Prime minister, was all for avoiding the cost of a new war, having organized financial recovery from the last one. He did not favour the Prussian suggestion that Britain should seize the French colonies. The declaration of Pillnitz issued on 27 August 1791 by Leopold II of Austria and Frederick William II of Prussia raised the hopes of the emigrés in Britain, but when Talleyrand came to London as foreign minister for the constitutional monarchy in January 1792, Pitt gave a verbal promise of what amounted to neutrality. When the French were victorious against Prussia and Austria at Valmy on 20 September, Pitt saw it as regaining lost territory and therefore a defensive action. Things changed after another French victory at Jemappes in Belgium on 6 November 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793. The French Ambassador, the Marquis de Chauvelin, was sent home, and an outraged Republic declared war on Great Britain and Holland on 1 February 1793. Only then did Pitt use hostile language towards revolutionary France. When the Vendée erupted in recognizable rebellion a month later, newspapers in London took up the issue and spies were sent to the Vendée to find out what support might be needed.7 The British Cabinet took too long to make up its collective mind about supporting the Vendéans, having to balance what they were asking for against all the other demands of a maritime world war. By October 1793, when the Vendéans had suffered their serious setback at Cholet, it was too late for intervention to be useful.8 Nevertheless, that was when things started to move. A spy was sent to offer British help to the Vendéan commanders who agreed to make a move to Brittany since Saint-Malo was discussed as a port where support could be landed. They crossed the Loire in force, but they still had not decided

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which port to make for. After two more emigrés arrived with letters signed by Pitt and Dundas, Larochejacquelein, the young nobleman in command now,9 decided upon Granville, with the intention of signalling the British fleet after taking the town and its port. The Committee of Public Safety made a priority of having an army on the Breton coast before the rebels did, but no Republican force prevented the Vendéans from reaching Granville, which, from the British point of view, could have been a bridgehead to the mainland of France. Orders from the Admiralty to prepare a fleet were issued, but without a sailing date or even the destination of help to be given to the Vendéans. A regiment of emigrés had been assembled but, for the present, there was nothing left in the arsenals with which to supply them. Lord Moira, in charge of the force raised to assist the Vendéans, and an associate of the Prince of Wales, used all his powers of persuasion, but the government was more concerned about its large expedition to the West Indies in preparation at the same time. Besides, the British ministers had not made any concrete offer to the Vendéan leaders because intelligence was confused about where they were and what the Republicans might be planning. Larochejacquelein and his Vendéans had already besieged Granville for 26 hours on 13–14 November in the hopes of gaining possession of its port to gain British help. When none came, the Vendéans called off the siege and went south again. A factor in their siege involved the Charente-Inférieure because the garrison in Granville was composed of old soldiers from the Regiment of Aunis and the Vendéans hoped they would defect to their cause. None did. Moira’s fleet arrived off Cherbourg (nowhere near Granville) too late to find Larochejacquelein and, after deciding against raiding the coast without contacting the Vendéans first, returned to Cowes with the crews and their emigré passengers smitten with disease.10 The Vendéans were defeated at Angers and Le Mans. Larochejacquelein was hunted down and executed. The Vendéan army appeared to have been destroyed as a coherent force at Savernay on 23 December by the Republican General Westermann, who boasted, ‘There is no more Vendée.’ But, as Robespierre said, this was an exaggerated claim.11 There followed the sort of small actions by the rebels that later on in Spain would attract the title ‘guerilla’, only to provoke reprisals in the form of mass executions in various centres by the Republic. The British ministers, Pitt and Dundas, spoke of sending the French emigrés to the West Indies for the colonial part of what was, essentially, a world war, but others in the Cabinet, especially Lord Auckland, remarked

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that ‘It is in Europe that we must destroy the Convention.’12 The Republican government, faced with a real, if very vague, threat from the Royal Navy, had two French departments with a western sea-coast that were continuing to escape its authority. There was a new minister of war from April 1793, Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte, responsible for finding marshals’ batons in many knapsacks, even Bonaparte’s. His programme was aligned to sans-culottisme. Six months later, after crops in rebel areas had been destroyed, orders were given to ‘exterminate all the brigands’, and in December 1793 Bouchotte appointed General Louis-Marie Turreau as commander of the Army of the West. He was politically close to the Hébertists, a hard-line de-Christianizer. Turreau presented his plan, a more forceful version of one already devised by General Kléber. Twelve infantry columns would advance in parallel from east to west over territory held by the rebels holding out beyond Cholet in the bocage13 towards General Haxo’s troops on the coast. The Committee of Public Safety accepted his plan. It was well received by the sans-culottes now in charge in La Rochelle, who agreed that the town should provide horses and carts in return for an enormous quantity of grain and livestock made available by this action. Turreau’s ‘columns from hell’ advanced from Parthenay, Bressuire, Doué, and Angers on 22 pluviôse (10 February 1794) with a force of 70,000 gathered from all over France.14 Their orders were to slaughter men, women, and children indiscriminately as deliberate policy in the villages of the Vendée, even to the extent of using bayonets to economize on shot. Many soldiers deserted. Those who were wounded and went to hospital in La Rochelle prolonged their stay there as long as possible, and were registered as suffering from the ‘sickness of the Vendée’.15 The young soldiers were terrified by stories of atrocities perpetrated on Republican troops by the families of the rebels: especially relentless, it was said, were the women and boys of the age of 12, who cut bodies in pieces before they burned them. It was a mutual horror. Valin comments, ‘ . . . the type of warfare Turreau envisaged from then on for the execution of the tasks he had conceived . . . had no need of heroes’.16 Protests immediately resulted from La Rochelle, despite complicity in the plan. Adjutant-General Laurent wrote directly to Maximilien Robespierre on 27 pluviôse (15 February 1794) to protest, and involved Robespierre’s own ‘man of confidence’, Marc-Antoine Jullien, in his complaints, who reported that inhabitants of communes where the houses had been set on fire by the Republicans were themselves arresting other rebels in order to hand them over to the Republicans in self-protection. He added, ‘Can you

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believe that, on the pretext of following your orders, they (republican soldiers) cut the throats of children, women and municipal officers in their sashes . . . or that your generals set the example of pillaging to make the sublime task of a defender of the fatherland degenerate into the vile occupation of a voleur?’17 The Jacobins in Niort denounced Turreau. His subordinate generals made protests. Far from ending the civil war, the ‘infernal columns’ made it worse, they said, because the Vendéans were more determined to resist, and a spirit of revenge brought more recruits into the ranks of the counter-revolutionary army led by Charette and Stofflet.

*** Joseph-Marie Lequinio and Joseph-François Laignelot had arrived in the Charente-Inférieure on 24 September 1793 as representatives on mission, with virtually unlimited powers delegated from the Convention and a fixed-focus patriotic zeal animating both of them.18 Their arrival coincided with the enactment of the Law of Suspects. From now on, people could be arrested simply for not being enthusiastic towards the new order.19 Lequinio was a Breton lawyer, elected as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly and then in the Convention for the Morbihan. He had been on mission in other departments, was a keen supporter of de-Christianization, committees of surveillance, and popular societies. Furthermore, he had voted for the king’s death and against referring the decision to the people. He would be associated later with the notorious Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who brutalized the Vendée into submission after Turreau’s columns had done their barbarity. His colleague Laignelot was a dramatist and one of the deputies for Paris in the Convention. He had voted for the suspension of the king’s death sentence but, in terms of republicanism, was no less enthusiastic than his colleague. Lequinio claimed that he had been sent to La Rochelle because of the maritime threat from England on the basis of intercepted letters about a conspiracy to set fire to French port installations.20 Lequinio’s first preoccupation in La Rochelle was to purge the governing bodies of the district and the commune in favour of committed Jacobins. He dismissed General Verteuil, who had been denounced by the sansculottes after the disaster at Pont Charrault in March, and replaced him with the National Guard commander at Saintes, Jean Léchelle, known to be a sans-culotte sympathizer. The ci-devant noble officers in the 60th and 110th Infantry Regiments were also purged.21

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All the levers of power were in the hands of the popular society by November. The new municipality was established in the former church of Saint-Sauveur, and a very large cast for the new drama appears in the archives. Only Jacobins were acceptable as district directors, and their leader was the lawyer Jean Barbet, a founder member of the popular society. Other Jacobins were representatives of the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie, like André Chrétien, a timber merchant, who never compromised his prejudices.22 Then Lequinio turned to the formation of a surveillance committee, whose task was to find counter-revolutionary suspects. He chose as its leader a clock-maker, Jean Parant, who had lost a limb at the rout of PontCharrault and had organized several riots against the refractory priests in the town: unquestionably a sans-culotte. He was assisted by a bookbinder, Pierre Susbielle.23 All the committee had impeccable pedigrees as sansculotte supporters. More like them were found over the coming months.24 Lequinio appointed a military commission consisting of low-ranking officers and soldiers from the town garrison to speed up the trials of the Vendéan prisoners, but he was alarmed at their reluctance to hand down death sentences. He appointed Jean Barbet as judge of the district and the judgements complied with his intention of a harsh punitive system.25 Even so, a hundred and ninety one people were kept back for further investigation in the SaintNicolas Tower at the south side of the harbour entrance, where many of them soon died in epidemics. Twelve were actually declared innocent and set free. He also harried any remaining nobles, members of the bourgeoisie who might have a tendency to hoard produce, smugglers, black-marketeers, and deserters from the army or navy. The Vendéans, by being rebels, belonged to all these categories. They were the enemy within, and their opposition to the Republic had to be neutralized. The revolutionary surveillance committee, as opposed to the military commission, was responsible for the imprisonment of 87 suspects in the period between October 1793 and the end of March 1794. At first the prisoners were detained in the former convent of the Dames Blanches in the middle of the town, and then in the old and ruinous fortress town of Brouage between Rochefort and Marennes, which was the principal holding place for suspects in the Charente-Inférieure.26, 27 A week before Lequinio took control of La Rochelle, it was estimated that there was enough grain stored in the town for a month and six days for the inhabitants, the garrison, the refugees, and the prisoners. Lequinio ordered the Republicans in the Vendée to make regular requisitions of grain for the town each month. The ‘General Maximum’ fixing prices and wages was

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decreed by the National Convention28 and applied on 22 October. There was a run on the shops and they were soon empty. The inevitable bread queues followed. Lequinio’s eventual solution was radical. He ordered the vines to be dug up to return the land to the growing of cereals. The labour for this was found by demobilizing some soldiers.29 Yet, even if in due course there was grain to be made into bread, the bakeries had no firewood to heat their ovens. He authorized the requisitioning of wood from any authority that had some. Transport would be provided in requisitioned wagons or river boats.30 Shoemakers had run out of leather, and they had no money to buy it, even if there was any.31 The elected officials were less and less able to deal with these scarcities, and the representative on mission was the only one with enough executive authority to obtain necessary goods. When an American ship arrived in port with a cargo of grain, the municipal and district officials vied with each other to commandeer it. Even so, there were fears that it might be contaminated and would infect the citizens with yellow fever.32 There had been a total of nearly 3,000 deaths in the town during the autumn and winter of Year II and the bodies lay unburied for as long as 10 days. Earlier burials had not been made deep enough, so a stench came from the cemetery into the town on the wind.33 The popular society was worried about the health hazard, and accused the gravediggers of stealing clothes from the bodies and leaving parts of them exposed. Besides that, the wells were contaminated, and wounded soldiers brought back from action in the Vendée to the hospitals in La Rochelle faced a desperate situation since none of the food was wholesome. Fruit was mouldy and hair was always being found in the bread. Sheets could not be washed properly, and shirts were ruined by not being deloused soon enough. The officers of the 10th Cavalry Regiment refused to send their wounded men to any hospital in La Rochelle.34 Nearly 500 English and Spanish prisoners of war were kept in two big rooms in the Saint-Nicolas Tower, one above the other, and the floor between them was in a dangerous state. Moreover, the women prisoners from the Vendée had all been crowded into one room there, so infectious diseases were rife.35 All this presented a crisis for the Revolution in La Rochelle, and morale was at rock-bottom. Maintaining the patriotic front against the Vendéan rebels was difficult when the Republic seemed so incapable of delivering the promises it had offered in the autumn of 1792. Nevertheless, the revolutionary impulse remained among the majority of ordinary people, and when the campaign

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against the Vendéans was renewed in March 1794, there were no popular outbursts against it. The principle of equality was re-asserted when a petition in the popular society said that it was not right for a well-off family to provide just a single officer when a family of sans-culottes sent four soldiers to the front.36 On 12 December 1793, a decision was made to clean up the town because of fear of an epidemic. The citizens had to wash their house fronts and carters were sent round to take all the accumulated mud and manure away from the streets and alleys. The filth was taken out of the hospitals and the streets swept, and this was ordered to be done three times in every ten days.37 Conditions in the cemeteries were improved by spreading lime in the existing burial places, and Lequinio established a new cemetery outside the town with graves at a proper depth on the confiscated lands of an emigré in January 1794.38 In contrast to the self-interested bourgeois resentment against the refurbishment of Saintes by the Royal Intendant before the Revolution, this co-operation with the decisions of the elected General Council, even if kick-started by the uncompromising Lequinio, shows grass-roots support for the new institutions. It also represents popular vehemence against the Catholic and Royal Army in the Vendée, and the readiness of the majority of Rochelais families to support the fight to prevent it from spreading further south. There was sufficient unanimity to restrain protest and continue the armed struggle on land and preparedness at sea. Lequinio was even criticized for having set 13 suspects at liberty.39 Even so, among all the letters in the dossier of the General Council of La Rochelle, there is one that suggests at least nostalgia for normality. It is dated 10 brumaire an 2 (31 October 1793), and is addressed to the administrators of the district from the School of Hydrography in the town: There are models of ships in the ci-devant churches of Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas given as votive offerings by sailors. These could be used as demonstration models in the school for teaching [navigational] manœuvres. This would be a good use of them for the service of the republic.40

*** Despite their experience and devotion to duty, the sisters at the White Ladies who had been taken on as nurses in the military hospitals were regarded as ideologically dangerous in the eyes of André Chrétien, Lequinio’s agent on the District Directory, who called the sisters ‘hypocritical vermin’. He

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ordered up to 80 of them to be sent as suspects to Brouage. The municipality protested, however, and pointed out the difficulties of finding nursing staff for the Saint-Étienne hospital, in use as a hospice and for looking after children who were infected by the adults in the general hospital. The district directory took a fortnight to reply, and expressed reservations about some of the sisters known to have opposed the Revolution, but the ones who had kept quiet were allowed to continue their functions as in the past.41 After Lequinio had removed the influence of the remaining clergy, elected officials at all three levels of administration were concerned about the lack of moral guidance. So the popular society took it upon itself to inculcate the new value of civism by making the Temple of Truth (formerly the Saint-Sauveur church), in which they held their meetings, a focus of Republican loyalty, with busts of revolutionary martyrs on display, and festivals to keep the revolutionary pulse-rate beating steadily. For a while, until what was found in the king’s secret strongbox discredited him, Mirabeau’s death provided the nation with a symbolic figure for national loyalty.42 Patriotic songs were written and people sang them together in public.43 ‘Liberty or death!’ was a favourite theme. Another figure found to symbolize the citizens’ belief in the republican cause was a 13 year-old boy called Joseph Bara, who had met his death in the Vendée and became a conspicuous martyr for liberty. At the meeting of the popular society held on 2 April 1794, Bonnin, president of the popular society, made a speech about him: He had charged at the enemy with the cavalry; the brigands had seized him and tried to make him shout, “Vive la Religion. Vive le Roi!” but he would not. He cried out “Vive la République!” instead and they killed him . . .

Bonnin made him into a cult figure who would watch over his listeners’ words and actions as a Republican saint. Bara was to be seen as a model for the young to imitate. Citizen Bouquet, with his cadet force 50 miles to the south in the village of Rioux, would have agreed.44,45 Public celebrations were arranged for significant occasions like the return of Toulon to Republican control, and there were fraternal banquets. These occasions were every bit as didactic in their intention as the liturgy of the Church had been.46 The names of the town’s five sections were changed from the saints’ names of the parish churches to La Montagne, La Liberté, l’Égalité, La Fraternité, and l’Unité. The sections were subdivided and a long list of patriotic names was devised for them. How would residents have felt about living in a street called La Modestie?47

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The rôle of women in moral education continued to be recognized. Young women were required to swear never to marry an aristocrat or a fanatic, but to give their hearts to good sans-culottes. Spinsters dedicated themselves to being models of Republican behaviour.48 The rôle of the revolutionary woman remained primarily to give birth to and bring up the next generation of patriots, but it would not qualify her for a vote until after 1945.

*** Nearly everything in La Rochelle had become conditioned by the civil war, the danger of invasion, and the miserable conditions of scarcity. The insurgents in the Vendée had systematically destroyed the numerous bridges over streams so that the republicans could not move with their cannon or their baggage trains. The journey from La Rochelle to Nantes now took days instead of hours. By the beginning of summer in 1794, Charette and the Vendéans were in control of enough territory to disrupt the harvest from which it was hoped to gain La Rochelle’s provisions for the coming year. The European war continued. The French navy captured several coalition ships and between November 1793 and the following spring, the deaths in hospital of sailors from eight British and eight Spanish ships were registered, together with deaths from one Danish and one Dutch ship. Between September 1793 and October 1794, a third of the total population left the town from all levels of society, and some of the great names of the port’s former prosperity were among them: Garesché, Duvivier, Admyrault, and a few aristocrats.49 Refugees from the Vendée and Deux-Sèvres Departments, mostly widows, orphans, and old people, arrived to replace them.50 This migration of widows and orphans was a direct result of Turreau’s troops’ deliberate brutality in the spring of 1794. Any able-bodied men who came with them were soon encouraged ‘to pour out their blood to the last drop for the patrie’. Women who came carrying an authorization from the rebels to leave their homes were soon interned at Brouage. Jacques Garnier, representative on mission in the Loir-et-Cher and the Sarthe, but keeping his interest in the Charente-Inférieure, forbade the refugees from the Vendée to go home: they had to stay where they were and help with the harvest. Prisoners of war were to do the same. Garnier made a further decree that the work-shy should be interned as suspects.51

***

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War conditions intensified the development of the Revolution in La Rochelle, but the alliance between bourgeois Robespierre supporters, led by the broker Jean-Michel Ganet, and the sans-culottes supporting the clock-maker Jean Parant could not hold together. Jean Parant’s faction comprised craftsmen and those with small businesses like the bookbinder Susbielle, and even the wigmaker Darbelet, who had not yet been arrested. Ganet’s faction controlled the popular society. Parant’s supporters had the surveillance committee as its power base. The two groups sank their differences in sending spokesmen to congratulate the National Convention in Paris when the Hébertists went to the guillotine in March, and then Danton and his faction in April 1794. This co-operation was ended, however, by the fall of Robespierre and his Terrorist faction in July. The artisans and small traders particularly resented the General Maximum, and Parant could not control them. He decided to look for work in Paris because he feared for his family’s safety. Charles Auguste Blutel, very much in sympathy with the Thermidoreans now in the ascendant in Paris, arrived in November as representative on mission. He had sat with the ‘Marsh’ in the National Convention, voted for suspension of the death sentence on Louis XVI, and had come to dismantle the apparatus of the Terror in the Charente-Inférieure. The committee of surveillance was suppressed after another month, but it had already lost its teeth. Bourgeois notables reappeared in association with the general council. People like Darbelet no longer had influence or power to persuade the citizens.52 The popular society formed a welcoming committee for Blutel when he arrived from Rochefort, and ordered the end of the Terror on 15 April 1795. In June a new general council of the commune appeared, led by a very traditional Rochelais figure called Jean Perry, a businessman, the former director of the Chamber of Commerce, and a Protestant. Since he had been detained in the White Ladies’ convent as a suspect, he represented the rehabilitation of the victims of the Terror. Other members were the shipowners Louis Admyrault and Samuel Demissy, who became maire. These men were moderates, who supported the Constituent Assembly’s achievements up to November 1789, before ever war was declared or violence was regarded as a normal feature of Republican life. With the dismantling of the Terror, they could re-appear as the natural party of government. All suspects were set free from Brouage and Pons, and claimed certificates of civism when they came home. This apparent conciliation did not necessarily mean that tribulation was a thing of the past. On 15 October 1794, someone called Siellès was accused of ‘raising the people against the magistrates’. The

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end of the Maximum on prices and wages accentuated the poverty of those who had been sans-culottes. The opening of trials for acts of terrorism raised serious questions, especially the one concerning the murder of the six priests on 21 and 22 March 1793 presented in the last chapter. The imprisonment of the prominent sans-culotte Darbelet seemed like victimization to his sympathizers.

*** The civil war in the Vendée continued, but gestures were made towards the Vendéans. Blutel released the last 103 prisoners from La Rochelle. The National Convention had decreed an amnesty for the prisoners on 2 December 1794 and offers of talks were made to the Vendéan leaders. An ephemeral treaty was signed with Charette at La Jaunaye on 24 February 1795 and, in hopes that it would hold good, a fortnight later the Municipality of La Rochelle called for an end to requisitions for the National Guard.53 Yet the Vendéans had not given up their weapons, and hostilities began again in May. As late as September 1795, there were troops passing through the town to go into the Vendée, and wartime scarcities continued. It was realized that there would not be enough bread to go round and, as reports of their protest show, a practical solution was to suppress the supply to the British prisoners of war. Alternative food in the form of a large supply of beans from Marennes and American imported stockfish, damaged in transit by rats, was improvised. The terrible winter added to the misery. Ornamental trees in the town were cut down for firewood, but a high price was asked for it, and prices of chicken, vegetables, and fish were exorbitant. It was the same story as in Marillet’s Saintes. Blutel had no authority to make requisitions. The municipality introduced rationing because the Maximum had been dismantled. The official claim that peace had been made in the Vendée helped a little, and prices of eggs and fresh butter came down in February. As soon as it was realized that the claim about peace was false, the prices rocketed again. The ideology that lay behind the Terror could not be revived. Communal desperation was represented by the gravediggers in the new cemetery being caught stealing wood from coffins and shirts from corpses.54 In the final action against the terrorists, Joseph-Auguste Crassous, as a prominent member of the Paris Jacobin Club, was arrested by a decree of the Thermidorean Convention on 5 April 1795. He spent a little while in the Four Nations Prison (where David was making his portrait of Bernard along the corridor),

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and then taken to be locked up in the former monastery at Mont-Saint-Michel, in an area dominated by Chouan sympathizers with the Vendéans. The timber merchant André Chrétien, who had been responsible for sending the nursing sisters to Brouage, gave up in La Rochelle and went away to carry on his business in the country. Darbelet stayed in the prison at Saintes for nearly two more years. Jean Parant set up his clock-making business in the rue Mazarine in the University quarter of Paris. He was involved in a riot on 17 March, and sent to La Force prison.55 The original revolutionaries returned as administrators in La Rochelle. Samuel Demissy had cleared his debts and recovered his respectability before becoming the new maire. There is a clear illustration of his business interests in relation to his political life in the register of the debates of the District Directory for 19 ventôse an 3 (9 March 1795). Without information about how he had acquired it, the report says that Demissy sold a 16-gun corvette to the port of Rochefort in 1793 (‘old style’, as the secretary points out). ‘Understanding that La Rochelle had need of such weapons’, he left the cannon out of the sale of the ship. The price of the guns to La Rochelle had been set at 1,000 livres each, but the bill had not been settled by the time the government brought in the Maximum on prices and wages. When the Maximum had become law, the War Ministry ordered the District of La Rochelle to pay for the guns at the price set for them, obviously less than the sum agreed. ‘Since Citizen Demissy had had not believed at the time of the sale that he should have to suffer from the delay’, he asked for satisfaction. The administrators took up the question and established a commission of its members to examine the case.56 People like him had foreseen the economic changes that had to be made, but they had to wait until well into the Napoleonic Empire before La Rochelle’s stability could be restored and its rôle as administrative centre recovered from Saintes by an imperial decree of 1810.57 At the end of December 1795, although there were shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ in the streets, starvation conditions remained, and food prices were impossible, the new municipality retained its authority. Even though officially proscribed now, Protestantism was too strong a tradition to allow the Catholic army to be acceptable. The control exercised by the representatives on mission and the popular society had produced enough energetic resistance against the Vendéans to prevent their encroachment further south and, despite the failure of the Republic to provide anything resembling prosperity, a resolute republicanism remained in place during and after the long communal anxiety in La Rochelle.58

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ochefort was built virtually from scratch not much more than a century before the Revolution by Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, who laid it out as a grid of streets on the right bank of the Charente. Shipyards, dry docks, an arsenal, a facility for rope-making, and a centre for provisioning and arming the ships of the French navy extended between the town and the river bank itself. At the end of Louis XV’s reign, Rochefort was allowed, after a long struggle against vested interests in La Rochelle, to have a chamber of commerce of its own and trade directly with the colonies in its own right.1 Nevertheless, the port’s main raison d’être remained military, and this accounts for the particular troubles experienced there during the revolutionary years. By Louis XVI’s reign, the population there was totally concerned with seaborne commerce and military preparedness. There were sailors and soldiers in plenty, dockyard workers, and a good number of convicts. There were businessmen and ships’ chandlers, all living and working in the dignified setting of classical architecture from the time of the building of Versailles. In the years of the Revolution, there were mutinies of ships’ companies in port by the crews of La Capricieuse in December 1790,2 Dromedaire in August 1791,3 and L’Embuscade in January 1792. The noble naval officers were demoralized, with a good number of them resigning and withdrawing to their estates around and about, later to be arrested as suspects. When the noble officers had gone, they were replaced with former pilots and sailing masters whom the revolutionary government had to accept on the grounds of their professional skills. They could not hope to gain the respect of their crews or overawe them, and the result was indiscipline. The navy was reorganized on revolutionary lines by successive decrees of the National Assembly and Convention. Under the constitutional monarchy, the service was rebuilt without reference to nobility, though some noble officers retained their positions. Promotion was on the basis of meritorious service. Young men were commissioned as ensigns after sitting for a competitive examination. 97

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After the fall of the monarchy, the navy minister was in charge, and then, during the official Terror, there was a decree of purification (épurement) of the same kind as was applied to departmental, district, and municipal councils, to weed out those not regarded as sufficiently enthusiastic for the Revolution. From then on, Republican virtue was as important as nautical skill. If the candidates for the navy were in any way suspect, a decision about them was passed on to the National Convention itself. The names of the aspiring officers were posted up in their home communes, and denunciations were taken seriously, usually leading to rejection, or worse. If officers were dismissed on the grounds of lack of revolutionary zeal, the minister for the navy was responsible for having them replaced.4 The volunteers in the army units in Rochefort were indisciplined. Some young Parisians and other opportunists had recently arrived to avoid recruitment in the capital. The scene was coloured to a certain extent by people deported from Saint-Domingue to France by Admiral de Grimouard, who tended to dominate Rochefortais society.5 Convinced revolutionaries were present, who, when new and relentless leadership appeared, would go into a hyperactive state. Lequinio and Laignelot, whose activity in La Rochelle we have already seen, arrived to provide this leadership. They chose to settle in Rochefort because the sailors and workers at the arsenal there were as devoted Jacobins as they were themselves. After moving into in the Hôtel du Bacha, whose owners were of irreproachable civic virtue,6 the representatives set up the social machinery for the Terror, creating a revolutionary tribunal to judge and imprison all suspects. The most important factor in their motivation, as we have seen, was that the Vendée rebellion in the name of the Louis XVII and the Catholic Church was increasingly dangerous to the Republic. Lequinio’s intransigent actions in La Rochelle and Rochefort were largely responsible for the rebellion not spreading south into the Charente-Inférieure, then or later. Another factor in the containment of the rebellion was the strong presence of Protestants and Freemasons completely unsympathetic to the Catholic enthusiasm of the Vendéans. The Protestants in La Rochelle and Rochefort had purchased as much church and emigré land as the bourgeoisie of Nantes had, but their social control of the rural hinterland of the two towns was very tight. Furthermore, Dalbarade, minister for the navy, dreaded the idea of the Vendéans being helped by a landing by the British or by emigrés, and ordered Rochefort to send a frigate to cruise permanently under sail

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before Les Sables d’Olonne without dropping anchor during her tour of duty. The frigate chosen was the famous Hermione, on which Lafayette had sailed to America 15 years before. Ships cruising from the the île d’Oléron to Belle-île and back cut off all communication with any who might try to land, whether emigrés, refractory priests coming home from Jersey, or any others who might bring help to the rebels.7 Freemasons in Rochefort, as elsewhere, were active in support of the Revolution at the outset. Four of them are found among the fourteen citizens of the town who had formed the popular society there, intending ‘to spread Truth, to defend Liberty, to maintain the Constitution with all our power, to write and talk openly, to profess our principles proudly’. Réne Bestier was the constitutional curé of Rochefort, and was admitted into the Society of the Friends of the Constitution on 11 May 1791 on the basis of his freemasonry. Several of his patriotic speeches given for the Amis de la Constitution as well as in his church sermons were written down in the minutes (procés-verbaux) of the society. He was elected president of it on 2 December 1791. His Republican involvement drew insults and threats upon him from his former parishioners as a turncoat, so the municipality gave him a guard of two fusiliers when he had to go out at night. He continued to participate in assemblies of citizens held in his church up to the beginning of 1793, but he was, despite the civic oath, a rigorous churchman. He refused to bless the marriages of those who refused to go to confession, or of divorced people, and continued to keep the registers of baptisms, marriages, and deaths in his vestry, rather than accepting that such records were to be at the Mairie now, and this led to his exclusion from the society. Local Freemasonry was both a stimulant and a restraint, but with the arrival of Lequinio and Laignelot in September 1793, most of the masons retired from the popular society or were expelled from it by them.8

*** Lequinio wrote to the Convention to say, ‘Everything is going to happen without compromise here.9 The people go by themselves to the torch of reason . . . the revolutionary tribunal that we have just set up will make the aristocrats march and the guillotine will make heads roll.’10 Out of the 190 accused that appeared before this tribunal between November 1793 and April 1794, 52 were condemned to death, 19 to chain gangs, 35 to ordinary imprisonment, 6 to deportation, 17 to fines, and 61 were acquitted. Among

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the condemned were Vendéans, refractory priests, parents of émigrés, naval officers, supporters of the Girondin politicians, and people guilty of economic crimes like hoarding food, forging assignats, and robbing military stores. The guillotine was set up as a fixture in the Place de la République in the heart of the town (Place Colbert as it was before and is now). In its composition and functioning, the revolutionary tribunal was a replica of the one in Paris. Of 23 members that made up its regular personnel, at least 14 were working men and 7 were exiles from Saint-Domingue. These exiles got their own back on Admiral Grimouard, who was condemned to death after being denounced by them for having supported the slave revolt in the colony. They were all enthusiastic Jacobins, and eight more of them also sat on the committee of surveillance at Rochefort, whose task was to search for counter-revolutionaries, among whom from now on were included those who had not actively supported the changes which had been made. All this was enough to prevent any kind of counter-Revolution in the Charente-Inférieure. The public prosecutor was Victor Hugues, born in Marseilles, who had been a labourer, a baker, and then himself a colonist in Saint-Domingue. One member of the surveillance committee was a former merchant marine officer, Viguier, known to be an alcoholic, recently nominated as commandant of one of Rochefort’s coastal outposts at Vergeroux. The executioner Henz was another drunkard from Saint-Domingue, who had volunteered for the task in the popular society. Another member of the committee was Noleau, a former stonemason who was often seen dressed in clothes of good quality which he had taken off the bodies of Henz’s victims. Lequinio and Laignelot set the revolutionary tribunal up in the former chapel of the Saint-Charles Hospital, a place that was large enough to accommodate large crowds at the spectacular public trials they intended to arrange.11

*** The British fleet was constantly patrolling the coast of the CharenteInférieure, and its domination of the deep water demoralized the Republican naval officers further. In fact the turn taken by events in Rochefort in the autumn of 1793 was indirectly provoked by British political and naval intervention a long way off, in Toulon. That came about after the General Committee in the southern naval port had opted – along with Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille, and other Provençal centres – to resist the Republican centralizing government. After

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the Jacobins had expelled the Girondins from the National Convention in Paris at the beginning of June, many in the large provincial towns of France resented control of the country by the Jacobin rump of the Convention, dominated by the Paris Commune, which they had not elected. This caused a determined backlash on the part of the Jacobins, enforced by representatives on mission with full powers to act independently. The Convention’s representatives on mission in the Midi had cut off food supplies to Toulon, and members of the general council there negotiated with the British Admiral, Lord Hood, about provisioning the town from the sea, for which Hood’s price was their acceptance of Louis XVII as King of France.12 After they had accepted his terms, Hood entered Toulon harbour and took possession of Fort La Malgue, landing in force with British and Spanish troops at the end of August 1793. Dalbarade, the navy minister, announced to the National Convention that the inhabitants of Toulon had acted treasonably. A number of secret agents and emigrés had come to Toulon and persuaded the residents to go further in opposition to the Jacobins than they meant to. The port commander, RearAdmiral comte de Trogoff-Kerlessy, made the approach to Lord Hood.13 Two ships from Rochefort had joined the Toulon squadron to boost its effectiveness in the previous year. They were the Apollon (80 guns), under the command of Capitaine de Vaisseau Thomas Imbert, and the Généreux (74 guns), under Cazotte. Imbert had become the president of the general council of the sections in Toulon, and it was he who proclaimed Louis XVII as king. His manifesto was sent to the Republican Captain Saint-Julien, who, as soon as Hood entered the outer harbour, denounced Trogoff and sailed his ship Topaze away, leaving a reluctant officer and eight men behind on shore. In October, Hood ordered cannon to be removed from several French ships, including Apollon and Généreux,14 and 6,000 French Republican sailors whom the British or the moderates in Toulon did not trust were put on board them. Their captains were allowed by the British to return these ships to their home ports – Brest, Lorient and Rochefort – sailing under a flag of truce. Apollon reached Rochefort at the end of the month, followed by Généreux soon after, and the coaster Pluvier soon after that.15 Lyon and Marseilles were brought to their knees by the Republicans, so hopes that Toulon could be used as a base for supporting these other places were disappearing. Hood was reconsidering his position by the end of October and, in November, the National Convention and its Committee of Public Safety found more troops to raise their force before Toulon to 30,000.

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Young Captain Bonaparte’s artillery dispositions could have blasted the British fleet out of the water. So, on 18 December, Hood decided to leave, embarking some citizens of Toulon who would certainly have been victims of Republican reprisals. He was clear of the harbour on 20 December.16 When Apollon and Généreux arrived off Rochefort, Lequinio and Laignelot gave orders that the ships’ companies were not to be allowed ashore, despite the fact that many were ill and there was little in the way of provisions on board. On Lequinio’s orders Captains Imbert and Cazotte, their officers, and several sailors were arrested, accused of having participated in the surrender of Toulon to the English fleet and of intending to come to Rochefort to bring about the same thing. As we have seen, the first charge would stick. The second was tendentious, but it was the main argument of the speech Lequinio made to open the travesty of a trial. He said that the Convention had learnt that the English (sic) had planned to do what they had done at Toulon in all the ports of France, and for that reason they had allowed the Apollon and the Généreux to proceed unmolested to Rochefort. At the end of his letter to the Convention of 18 October 1793,17 Lequinio wrote in his own hand:18 While we were visiting the coast, the Apollon came from Toulon. We waited for several days . . . we have just formed a commission for the examination of this affair and the interrogations begin today. We do not deny that this vessel came here only to corrupt public spirit and deliver the port to the English, like the ones that came to Lorient and to Brest . . . We presume that before long we will have the fall of several heads to announce to you from here. Adieu. We are republicans. Count on us. Laignelot, Lequinio.

Victor Hugues was in charge of the proceedings after that. On the evidence of one sailor only, the tribunal brought a verdict of guilty for 19 out of 33 accused. Nine of these, all officers, were condemned to death, two to deportation, and eight to six months’ detention. The others were acquitted. After Généreux had arrived, one of Cazotte’s officers on board her, Lieutenant Joseph Crassous de Médeuil, brother of Joseph-Auguste the politician, was interrogated on 8 November 1793.19 His earlier career had been a colourful one.20 He served on the Apollon and then transferred to the Généreux after Hood took Toulon. During his interrogation (presumably by Victor Hugues) Joseph Crassous said he had been on the Généreux since 12 September 1792, but

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denied being involved in the political life of Toulon while the ship was stationed there. He insisted that he wanted to keep the oath to the Republic which he had made at Rochefort before Apollon left her home port and had urged the ship’s company of the Généreux to be faithful to the national flag. It had been the cowardliness of others that had overridden his opinion. He denied that he had ever worn a royalist cockade in his hat, or joined in when others shouted ‘Vive Louis XVII.’ After a great number of the corrupt crew members had deserted during the night, he said, he had had to surrender to greater power and even his death would not have protected the Republic from the infamous treason of de Trogolf (sic) and those in charge at Toulon. When asked why Apollon was ordered to receive four months’ provisions on 11 September when they should have been taken on board Généreux, he replied that he presumed Apollon was sailing to Rochefort, taking all those who had chosen to return to the bosom of their nation and who openly refused to serve the cowardly Toulonnais, and she had to be supplied with extra provisions. He concluded, ‘So, left to ourselves in this awful set of circumstances, we had only our own good faith and the courage to come back among you.’ The interrogator’s questions were tendentious, and he certainly led his witness, but the judge at the revolutionary tribunal before whom he appeared, Gaspard Gorand, decided that he had conspired against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. This was enough to have him condemned to death. His execution took place at Henz’s expert hands three weeks later on 28 November. On the same day as Crassous’s execution, Lequinio and Laignelot wrote a letter to the Convention with their observations on the affair of the Apollon. They said the condemned officers were villains who had brought their ship to Rochefort to prepare for the arrival of the English in the port and to hand it over to them in the same way as they had contributed to the surrender of Toulon. They reported that the revolutionary tribunal had recently condemned nine officers from the Apollon, and the avenger of the people (the executioner) had saved the Republic: All the sailors, and all the dockyard workers and several officers had gone to escort them in two ranks to the place of execution (expiation), where the air retained the cries of ‘Vive la République’ at the fall of each head.

Patriotic songs and cheers for the revolutionary tribunal were a just tribute to its members. They said they seized the opportunity to give praise to the

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public prosecutor of the town, Hugues, whom they describe as an excellent Jacobin, whose civic virtue, ability, and conduct were of the highest degree. They also gave praise to the reliability of Lieutenant Crassous’s brother, Joseph-Auguste, now a deputy in the National Convention, whom they knew, of course, from La Rochelle, where he had been involved to a mysterious extent in the murder of the six priests in March. On this occasion, they report, he had told them that he would have condemned his brother himself if he had been the judge. Lequinio and Laignelot asserted that the last words of Lieutenant Crassous were that the sailors should remember he had warned them at Toulon that their conduct could only lead them to the scaffold: ‘These memorable words are the best proof without doubt that the tribunal has made a good judgement and one must confess that it has fulfilled its mission perfectly.’21 Pluvier had left Toulon and made for the Gironde, but was driven by contrary winds to La Rochelle. Her crew were arrested and brought to Rochefort, where, on 15 February 1794, they appeared with other officers and sailors before the revolutionary tribunal. Out of this whole group, seven were condemned to death and six acquitted, and an engineer who was a part of the headquarters staff in the port had been killed in the scuffle when Pluvier came to tie up there.

*** Another example of the representatives’ Republican anger is their hounding of one of the deputies for the Charente-Inférieure in the National Convention, Gustave Dechézeaux, also an ardent revolutionary. At the king’s trial, he had courageously expressed his opinion that Louis XVI did not have to die for the public good. This led the Jacobins of Rochefort to say that they had lost confidence in him as a deputy, and wanted, in modern terms, to deselect him. They denounced him to the then representatives on mission, Niou and Carra, and to all the popular societies in the department. In their eyes he had become ‘an enemy of the patriots’ despite his Republican record.22 The Convention decreed that his opinion on the judgement of the king should be withdrawn. Dechézeaux persisted in voting for the king’s imprisonment, but wrote to the Rochefort Popular Society saying that he was still a staunch Republican. On 10 February 1793, the society refused to accept his letter and the Municipality of Rochefort decided not to defend him. Dechézeaux allied himself with the Girondins in the Convention, and his position locally was untenable as a result. So on 11 August he resigned, to

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be replaced as a deputy by Réné Eschasseriaux, the procurator-general of the Charente-Inférieure. One of those who denounced him was the hyperactive Joseph-Auguste Crassous de Médeuil.23 Dechézeaux left Paris for his home on the île de Ré on 10 September, and joined the Popular Society in La Flotte. He said he wanted to leave the world of national politics, but he was not able to escape from the Committee of General Security, which he had defied in June. By now Lequinio and Laignelot were in charge in the department and they applied the Law of Suspects to his case, which meant he could be arrested on a far less important pretext than defying the Committees if need be. They sent a leading Jacobin from La Rochelle, Jean Parant, and another from Rochefort, Bobe-Moreau,24 to take him forcibly from his home and shut him up in the Saint-Maurice prison in Rochefort. Lequinio and Laignelot, with the support of the Committee of General Security in Paris, brought an action against the ‘rebel’ Dechézeaux. On 13 January 1794, he was brought before Junius André, the president of the revolutionary tribunal at Rochefort. He was interrogated about ‘Louis Capet’ and about his association with the Girondins who had been condemned and expelled from the Convention on 2 June 1793. He was sent back to the Saint-Maurice prison. Four days later he appeared before the public prosecutor charged with having conspired against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, seeking to discredit the Convention, participating in a federalist plot, and corrupting the republican spirit with his ‘liberticide’ writings. Dechézeaux conducted his own defence, and the judgement against him was handed down the same evening. He was executed straight away, not by the official executioner, Henz, but another found for the purpose. This made the two representatives on mission unpopular, despite all the bombast they were currently uttering. An historian who was also a Republican deputy, writing just over a century later, commented that ‘the base of a republic is not cemented together with the blood of its best citizens’. Dechézeaux was posthumously reinstated and his property restored to his family on 3 May 1795.25

*** One important aspect of Lequinio’s actions has been touched on in relation to La Rochelle: his intransigent motivation by aversion towards the clergy. He had written a pamphlet entitled ‘Prejudices destroyed’ (Les Préjuges détruits), and set himself to root out Christianity. Here is an example of his attitude, translated from his letter to the Convention, already quoted above, written at Rochefort on 18 October 1793:

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8. Portrait of Joseph-Marie Lequinio (reproduced by permission of the Musée Ernest Cognacq at Saint-Martin-de-Ré).

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We have just cut down the poisoned tree of religious prejudice in this area, which for so many centuries has covered men with its mortal shadow, and we have just worked a miracle.26

There is much more like this, all of it filled with the kind of fervour redolent of the triumphalism of some of their opponents. There is a camp meeting quality to it all, and the atheists are claiming miracles in their literal sense of things to wonder at. These de-Christianizers claimed to have carried all before them, to have woken the people to realities that were suppressed or distorted by what was taught by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers alike. ‘Reason makes progress daily, prejudices extinguish themselves and a public spirit is forming’,27 Lequinio goes on. The popular society supported him in all this, and he translated his programme into a detailed regulation in ten articles issued from Saintes which was to be kept more rigorously than any cardinal of the Inquisition could ever have dreamed of doing, forbidding preaching or writing to favour one religion over another, with any clergymen doing so to be summarily executed. Anyone giving a hearing to those who were previously priests or ministers would cause those ministers to be treated as suspects and the listeners to be arrested. Former presbyteries were now to be schoolhouses. Committees of surveillance were to be set up to carry out this regulation and no ci-devant minister was to be allowed to be a member of such a committee. The citizens had to assemble in the Temple of Truth as often as possible to hear and discuss the public news and to listen to civic speeches. There was to be a fraternal banquet every ten days in every commune ‘served without luxury . . . carrying with it the character of simplicity, mixing all the citizens, inspiring joy, making men forget the hardship and the need for misery which they accept, which puts into the spirit of the poorest and the most unfortunate man the sense of social equality and raises him to the full height of his dignity . . .’28 When this was put into practice at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, as the council minutes kept there show, the slogans were painted all over the church walls, but the ten-day festivals were a complete disaster. In the end very few came to them apart from the primary school teacher and her pupils, and she was paid to be there.29

*** The Terror was rigorously applied in the Charente-Inférieure on account of its being near the Vendée, but the period of repression was short because

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Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas Topsent and Mathieu-Claude Guezno, the representatives with special responsibility for the navy who followed Lequinio and Laignelot in February, reduced the intensity of the revolutionary tribunal at Rochefort. This curtailing of the Terror was bound up with the departure of the most fanatical representatives on mission, but due above all to the law of 27 germinal year II (16 April 1794), which brought people arrested as counter-revolutionaries for trial and execution in Paris. In application of this law, Jacques Garnier of Saintes denounced the Rochefort tribunal’s excesses in the Convention. After the fall of Robespierre and his colleagues on 9 thermidor year II (27 July 1794), Republican clubs everywhere saw the leading Jacobins as usurpers of the main local and national offices and began to purge their membership, and not least in Rochefort. From this moment on ‘several of these miserable men who had covered our walls in blood disappeared to go into unknown places to hide their outlawed heads’.30 The Popular Society of Rochefort was reconstituted and took down the slogan ‘War on the tyrants, peace towards virtue, and justice towards all’ from the wall in the Capucins church off the main square where they met. The Terror was started by the National Convention, and that was the body which ended it. Local politicians still acted only on orders from above. Very little could happen until the arrival of Charles-Auguste Blutel, whom the Thermidorean Convention sent as a new representative on mission to the navy at Rochefort in late October1794. His explicit mission was to re-establish order, stop the Terror, and punish the perpetrators of it, as he also did at Saintes and La Rochelle. Lequinio, like Bernard de Saintes, survived the purge of terrorists because of the amnesty of 4 brumaire year 4. He eventually rallied to Bonaparte and was sent to Newport, Rhode Island, to be sub-commissioner of commercial relations in 1802, and then to be vice-consul for the French Empire in Savannah, Georgia, after three years. Then there was an astonishing development. He married Odette de Lévis-Mirepoix, a former canoness of the chapter of Saint-Louis at Metz, who had been born into the nobility. 31 He had met her 25 years earlier, and wrote to her in 1798 to say that ‘the torments of the revolution had passed a long time ago’. Her elder brother had died on the scaffold in 1794, but Lequinio was, incomprehensibly, acceptable as her husband, and appears to have got on well with his surviving brother-in-law.32

*** Once the Terror had been dismantled in Rochefort, ships based there began once more to succeed in their home waters against a number of British, Spanish,

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and other nations’ vessels which were brought into the port as prizes.33 So great was their success that the disposal of these captured ships had to be systematized at Rochefort. There is a large spreadsheet in the archives of the Marine, which lists the sale of 40 captured allied ships in the year beginning August 1795 (13 fructidor year 3). Twenty-one of them were British, seven Spanish, three Portuguese, three Danish, one Swedish, one from Bremen, and one American.34 These prizes were sold off so that they could be used as corsairs or privateers, if needed as such, or as merchant ships. A poster for a sale to take place in fructidor year 5 (August 1798) bears this out. It advertises ten ships, ranging in size from two three-masted vessels of over 300 tonnes, named as La Belle London and Le Progrés, to a brig of 40 tonnes called Le Friendschip (sic), and announces that these ships will be sold as seen on the appointed day, with their masts, sails and rigging, according to the inventories placed under naval control, details of which will be available before and after the sale. Half payments are to be made in metal currency, and the other half is to be paid on the reckoning day within a month, also in current coinage, and there will be no question of letters of exchange.35

With the Directory’s return to metal currency, no use could be made of assignats any more. The notice is signed by Chevillard the Younger, who had been moved from the post of Commandant des armes to that of Ordonnateur de la marine in Rochefort.36 Some redundant ships belonging to the Republic were also assigned for use as privateers and a set of conditions was issued whenever this took place. They were applied to the frigate L’Africaine on 10 October 1797.37 The vessels were licensed to ‘ship-owners whose morality and financial standing [were] well known’ for a period of four months counted from the day they left Rochefort. The shipowners were responsible for fitting out the vessels and for supplying them with the crew’s rations and the military materiel they would need. The licensees could change the armament if they wanted to. The commanders were to be only from those currently on the Republican navy list, and their choice would be a matter for the navy minister, as for all other ships. Other officers could be chosen by agreement between the commanders and the licensees. The licensees could choose the voyages these ships were to make, and what was to be done with the prizes they took. Prize money would be divided: the crew would receive a third between them, the Republic would have a third, and the remaining third

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was for the licensee who was obliged to sign a submission to all 30 regulations to be seen by the navy minister. However, before we are led to wander too far in the direction of Republican triumphalism, we can note that there is a list kept at Rochefort of French officers who had to answer for the loss of their ships to the enemy.38 There were eighteen instances of frigates, corvettes, flutes (merchantmen armed as warships), and coasters (chasses-marée) recorded as captured by the English and two others by the Spanish between 1795 and 1799. One of these was the frigate La Décade. Her captain, Jean-Baptiste Villeneau, faced a courtmartial on 4 March 1799 (14 germinal year 7), and the verdict was against him. He had a lengthy justificatory riposte to this judgement printed, reiterating his own version of events on 23 August 1798 (6 fructidor year 6).39 Villeneau says he left the Bordeaux estuary on 7 floréal year 6 to take 193 prisoners condemned to deportation (perhaps refractory priests40 ) to Cayenne in the French colony of Guyana. He arrived there on 22 prairial, left his deportees and set sail for home on 11 messidor with the mail from the colony, under orders to make the Atlantic crossing in 15 days because the mail included important dispatches. As he approached Cape Finisterre on 5 fructidor, two ships were sighted flying enemy colours, one a frigate and the other a brig. He had to choose between making a run for the coast, which would unavoidably mean being caught, or making for a Spanish port with a possible chance of evasion. He chose the latter course, but did not achieve his purpose. An engagement was inevitable. The document is written in the first person. Officers and sailing masters had given evidence that the Décade, with thirty four guns, twenty six of which were twelve-pounders, and eight sixpounders, was forced to surrender under the crossfire of the English frigate, Naiad . . . and another English ship Magnanimous. They had also said that six of Villeneau’s cannon on the starboard side were not fired during the action, which proved that he had not returned fire, except with seven guns and four in the gaillards, since the position of the other English ship had taken away the chance of moving his armament from port to starboard. With such a disadvantage, what could I hope for from a long engagement? Meanwhile, I need not add anything to what impartial Frenchmen who had found themselves prisoners on board H.M.S. Magnanimous have said in the certificate which I submitted to the sight of the jury, and had no need to conceal or alter the truth of it: ‘Citizen Villeneau . . . having asked us to bear witness about the enemy forces that captured him, we, the officers of the French ship Colombe of

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Bayonne, Captain Joseph Darribeau, prisoners of war . . . certify that the aforementioned frigate Décade was captured on 6 fructidor year 6 of the Republic by the English ship Magnanimous, commanded by Captain de Courcy, armed with twenty eight twenty four pounder guns, twelve of twelve pounds, and six forty two pounder carronades, and also by the English frigate Naiad, Captain Pierrepont, armed with forty four guns, twenty six eighteen pounders, ten of nine pounds and six thirty two pound carronades. We also certify that the frigate La Décade employed all means possible to evade the enemy’s pursuit, but her inferior speed41 could not prevent it. The enemy attacked at six in the evening, and this obliged La Décade to engage in combat until half past six the same day. Not being able to hold off such superior forces as the enemy had, she struck her flag after being boarded several times from both sides. In belief of which we have delivered this document to validate and maintain what is true. On board the said vessel, being at sea, 7 fructidor year 6 of the Republic one and indivisible, signed, J. Darribeau, Captain, Dominique Hondarrague, Second Captain, B Larrond, Lieutenant, Dannedon, Sub-Lieutenant.’ The English themselves, of whose pride and arrogance we are still aware, in writing up this action in their newspapers, bring forward nothing to put the blame on my conduct. By what mischance am I still victim of the declaration of a doubtless badly informed jury, who let the circumstances given above make their judgement hostile and fall unjustly on my head?

The conclusion of his printed defence pleads Villeneau’s good naval record of 20 years at sea, 8 years and 3 months of which in time of war, either under orders or commanding the Republic’s frigates. He claims he has been the victim of a conspiracy, and adds his signature. A manuscript note, obviously friendly towards him, if not actually written by him, has been added at the foot of the printed papers. It says that he has forgotten to mention that before he left to take the deportees to Guyana he was malevolently offered a sum of money to take his ship, once unloaded, to England and surrender it to the enemies of the Republic. He had refused this temptation, but the calumny had persisted and was believed by several members of the jury who condemned him upon suspicion of having made a rendezvous with the English ships. This prejudice on their part had caused the verdict of guilty. It was not possible to find from the Rochefort archives whether Villeneau managed to have this verdict reversed or not, but we can see that, even after the dismantling of the Terror, the question of perfidy was liable to surface every time someone in a responsible position came under suspicion of counter-revolutionary behaviour. The presumed treason of Villeneau turns

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out to be the possibility of collusion with the British, as it was in the cases of the officers from the Apollon and the Généreux five years before.

*** Perhaps the best illustration of Rochefort having rediscovered its proper purpose is the successful combined operation carried out by a Spanish fleet and gunboats from the port against a British naval force which made an attack on the Roads of Aix in July 1799.42 To understand why the Spanish were there, we have to go back to 12 March in that year, when the Directory declared war on Austria and Tuscany, and Naples and Piedmont, pressurized by Austria, also reverted to hostilities against France. Russia and Turkey began to take steps against General Bonaparte during his expedition to Egypt since, after Nelson’s victory in August 1798 at Aboukir Bay,43 he was cut off from contact with his masters in Paris. In response to the new coalition, orders were received by the naval commander at Brest to prepare 25 ships of the line for forthcoming action. Admiral Bruix, who was the Directory’s navy minister, decided to go and take charge of this fleet himself and, when it was ready, to sail with it to the Mediterranean, as he did on 26 April 1799. Talleyrand, the former bishop of Autun, was foreign minister and took over Bruix’s responsibilities in the navy ministry until a successor should be appointed. This meant that, during a time of naval action off Rochefort, the minister responsible was anything other than a naval tactician. The security of the Republic was threatened and the alliance between France and Spain became very important in respect of maritime tactics. As soon as the weather was calm enough for sailings to begin again that spring, the British were cruising in force in the Channel and down the French Atlantic coast. A Spanish squadron under the command of Admiral Don Francisco Melgarejo was dispatched to Rochefort to meet this threat. At the same time, Bruix had arrived in Cadiz, but was ordered to return to Brest, calling in at Rochefort on the way, and to assume Melgarejo’s squadron into his fleet, now also destined for Brest. The Spaniards arrived at Rochefort on 8 May, the troops and crews establishing themselves on the île Citoyenne (Madame), their headquarters being at Port-des Barques at the mouth of the Charente, while senior officers were received at Rochefort as the guests of the military commander, Vice-Admiral Pierre Martin. Martin had had meteoric promotion in the Republican navy as a genuine example of ‘the career open to the talents’. In January 1793, as a lieutenant,

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he was given command of the frigate Hermione, originally built at Rochefort to take the marquis de Lafayette to America 15 years before, but she was lost on the rocks at Four near the mouth of the Loire on 20 September through no fault of his own.44 He was then given command of a frigate captured from the Spanish when they had been allied with Britain. The pilot responsible for the loss of Hermione was found guilty of professional incompetence in a court-martial in November, and Pierre Martin was made a rear-admiral at the same time. After three months he was commander of the French naval forces in the Mediterranean, based at Toulon, retaken after Hood’s departure. December 1796 saw him as a vice-admiral and appointed military commander of the port of Rochefort on account of intuitive skill as a naval tactician as well as his unshakeable revolutionary convictions. He had to cope with the inefficiency of naval supply under the Directory, and the presence of the British 45 fleet inhibiting the departure of political prisoners to Guyana.46 Nevertheless, as we saw in the case of Villeneau’s frigate, a good deal of shipping did make its way in and out of the Roads of Aix. While Spanish officers were enjoying the sights of the Charente-Inférieure and exchanging compliments and presents with Martin, Admiral Bruix was slow in arriving, so consideration was given to sending the Spanish squadron on its own to Brest. Martin had his opposite numbers at Nantes and Brest warned to clear away the British privateers offshore from their stations by means of small ships to enable its passage north. On 13 June 1799, while the Spaniards were preparing to leave, a British flotilla, commanded by Rear-Admiral, Sir Charles Pole, appeared before the île d’Oléron, and intelligence reports said that there was another one further north. Two British frigates and a support ship kept station constantly in the Antioche Narrows while several enemy vessels appeared to have established themselves under the île d’Yeu, off the Vendée coast, ostensibly to prevent Melgarejo’s fleet from leaving Rochefort. Pole sent in boats to assess the armament on the Spanish ships, and then made ready for a confrontation. At five in the morning on 17 June, Vice-Admiral Martin came to the île d’Oléron and found that ‘there were seven ships . . . about four leagues offshore tacking with the NNE wind to hold the entrance of our Roads’, as he wrote to tell Talleyrand. Martin also knew that the British squadron at the île d’Yeu was composed of four ships of the line supplemented by several frigates, two of which were at anchor further south in the Breton strait, not far from La Rochelle. There were also 15 privateers threatening the coast.

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Only one garrison was in arms on the île d’Oléron, whose task was to guard refractory priests imprisoned there, inadequate to prevent a British landing which would be seen as an obvious disaster for the Republic. Martin did not trust the effectiveness of soldiers from the colonial militia on the île d’Aix. The île de Ré was the best defended of the three islands, but part of the garrison from there had been sent to Grenoble. Martin realized that if the British took these islands, it would be almost impossible to dislodge them again and Rochefort could be forced to surrender. He had to convince Talleyrand of the gravity of the situation: The observations that I am submitting to you, Citizen Minister, are of the greatest importance. I have fulfilled my duty as a Frenchman; I pray you let me at least fulfil it as a military man. If the observations which I have the honour to make to you . . . appear consequential enough to be taken into consideration, I pray you to communicate them to the minister of war and let him know the situation on the coast. It is hard to believe that the coast down from Les Sables d’Olonne to the river at Bordeaux should be so badly provided with men.

On 27 June Martin sounded the alarm. The enemy approaches each day and, at the moment that I write, two frigates are anchored in the roads of La Rochelle, that is to say, at two cannon ranges of the île d’Aix. They have told the Spanish admiral that he cannot go out to sea, and that they intend to take the île d’Aix . . .

Melgarejo himself, on the other hand, expressed himself as confident about responding to the British threat and expected to be able to attack the British at anchor. At ten o’clock on 2 July, the coastguards passed the information to Martin that 11 English ships were positioned in the Roads of La Rochelle. Then a violent cannonade resounded as far inland as Rochefort. The English and Spanish were firing upon one another near the île d’Aix, as could be seen from the signal tower in the port. Martin had promised support to Melgarejo, so, at one in the afternoon, he took several armed launches out of the Charente and was alongside the Spanish flagship by five o’clock. He ordered some neutral ships that had moved out into the Roads to re-enter the river mouth: ‘I swear to you that I do not count enough on their loyalty to make them spectators of our operations’, Martin signalled to Melgarejo as he came near him.

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The gunboat Sphinx opened fire on the smaller British ships. Melgarejo sent launches from his squadron, all armed with cannon, in support. The British gunboats withdrew, going about and rejoining their large ships. At the same time, the Aix garrison fired on the British, making them retreat further. Early next morning, Pole’s ships left the narrows. It was incontestably a French victory, for which the crew of the Sphinx received the laurels. At four in the afternoon, the British moved further away to take up station two leagues out to sea, but it was thought they would attack again. Three hundred men from the Spanish squadron landed on the île d’Aix, as well as a hundred French artillerymen and dragoons who were intended for Guadeloupe. That made, with the colonial troops already there, a force of 800 men which waited in good order for the enemy’s return. The British had incurred too many losses, however, for that to happen. Their gunboats had been towed into safety, but debris from them was found floating in the narrows and washed up on the beaches. They left to find refuge behind the île d’Oléron. Their movements were observed from the lighthouse at Chassiron Point as they went to join the rest of their fleet off the île d’Yeu. French coastal traffic began again under escort. A British account of this action belittles it, saying that ‘on both sides’ it was ‘perfectly harmless’. Nevertheless, respect is paid to ‘the superior range of the French mortars’.47 Melgarejo’s squadron had to put up with delays and fever breaking out, and the presence of a fresh British flotilla. Admiral Bruix went straight to Brest without calling in for him, and not until another French fleet arrived from Brest after seven weeks could he leave Rochefort. Even then, he had to wait at La Rochelle for another week because the winds were contrary before making sail for Brest. Pierre Martin did not stay in office long after these events. He fell ill, and was replaced by La Dall-Tromelin, recovered in revolutionary morale after his release from internment as a counter-revolutionary suspect at nearby Brouage. La Dall-Tromelin was in command at Rochefort when news came that Bonaparte had pushed the Directory aside and formed the consulate with Sieyès and Ducos in November.

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chapter 8

Internment in Brouage

T

he deposition of King Louis XVI on 10 August 1792 during the violent day at the Tuileries Palace was the prelude to a period of harsh government and Terror being adopted as official policy. On the day after the overthrow of the monarchy, the Legislative Assembly gave the municipalities powers to arrest those suspected of not supporting what had taken place. The new National Convention met on 20 September 1792, and intensified the policy against opponents of the Republic, regarding as suspects all those who were denounced as not actually in favour of it. Danton, as minister of justice, Marat, Robespierre, and other Jacobins were being accused by Brissot and other Girondins of having at best looked the other way when the sans-culotte sections of Paris used their assemblies in perpetual session to condemn the bishops, priests, noblemen, and noble women who were hacked to death during the September massacres three weeks after the king lost his power.1 The excuse given for that savagery was the suspicion that the nobles and clergy were conspiring to break out of their prisons and kill the families of soldiers who had left for the eastern border of France to repulse the Austrian and Prussian invaders. Suspicion of ‘enemies of the people’ became increasingly focused and, from the spring of 1793 onwards, more and more people were being detained, despite there being as yet no real definition of who was a suspect and who was not. The National Convention passed the Law of Suspects on 17 September 1793 in order to make their selection and imprisonment easier. Then the process was intensified by the infamous law of 22 prairial (10 June 1794), which gave unrestricted authority to revolutionary tribunals all over the country to act more severely against suspects. This, in many cases, led to an automatic death sentence. It stayed in intensive use for six weeks until after the execution of Robespierre and his associates on 10 thermidor (28 July 1794). People like the businessman Mathieu Levesquot at a village called SaintSaturnin de Séchaud attracted attention because one of his brothers was a 116

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priest in exile, and another was an emigré in the army of the princes. The former maire of Saintes, Gaudriaud, was a suspect because he had not supported the changes that Bernard and Garnier had brought about in the town. The Law of Suspects was so imprecise that anybody could be sent to the revolutionary tribunal, but it allowed political arrests, and certain social types immediately qualified for them. Since the nobles were assumed to be willing to co-operate with the Austrians and Prussians to erode the Revolution, they had to be made harmless. Anyone known to have contact with emigrés, would certainly be in danger of arrest. This process had been gathering momentum since the overthrow of the monarchy, and plenty of people were in the prisons not knowing what would befall them. The third estate figured large among the suspects if they were known to be royalist sympathizers or supportive towards priests who had not taken the Oath to the Constitution. The Vendée rebellion against the Republic from February 1793 onwards was too close to the Charente-Inférieure, as we have seen, for its authorities to tolerate such internal opposition. Any bachelor between 18 and 25 who had not presented himself for the army was suspect, no matter if he were a fervid Republican. After 2 June, being a known supporter of the Girondin group, in opposition to what Marillet called ‘the ruling faction’ of Jacobins in the National Convention and which had now been crushed, was sufficient qualification for becoming a suspect. The only way not to be suspect was to apply for, and be granted, a certificate of civism from the municipality where you lived. Even with such a certificate, you had to be in good standing with the local surveillance committee, who ran around like wolverines in a forest to find suspects everywhere. You stood a good chance of being a suspect if you were wealthy because you might be hoarding grain or speculating in the provisions market. It was the committee of surveillance that decided whether you were a suspect or not. A decree of 21 March 1793 ordered the composition of these committees. In every commune there were to be 12 citizens elected to serve on them, who must be neither former nobles nor churchmen, nor any who had been agents of deposed seigneurs. They were ordered to draw up lists of suspects in their communes and impound their private papers at the same time as they ordered their arrest. Under such a system, the members of the committees of surveillance had every incentive to settle old scores and personal grievances. The departmental directory chose the fortress of Brouage in the marshlands south of Rochefort as the principal place to intern the Charente-Inférieure’s suspects.2 Brouage on a summer’s day now is a pleasant tourist attraction

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full of craft shops, small galleries, and restaurants. It was the birthplace of Samuel Champlain, the founder of Quebec. Cardinal Richelieu developed it as a naval base before Rochefort was thought of, and it is a masterpiece of contemporary military engineering, with its walls raised up on piles above the marshes. It had a harbour when it was first built and the sea-ward approaches were free for navigation. One of the complaints of the cahier de doléance from the population of Brouage3 was that the deliberate sinking of ships filled with stones in the channels on Richelieu’s orders at the time of his siege of La Rochelle in 1628, together with the fact that several of the ships were never raised from the bottom of the channels, had taken Brouage’s trade away and caused the salt marshes to be less productive.4 Visit Brouage out of season, and you might sense different imprints from the past, as represented by the sad story of Marie Mancini. She was Cardinal Mazarin’s niece, and the young Louis XIV was in love with her. Her uncle decided that she had to be removed from the king’s presence because his intended marriage alliance with the Infanta of Spain was considered to be of such great importance. The governor of Brouage was another of her relations, and she spent three and a half months in 1659 as his guest there with a few other girls of her own age, regretting her lost love. On the way back from his Spanish wedding, when Marie had left the place, Louis XIV came himself to Brouage to add to the accumulation of sadness. From early summer in 1793 onwards, the suspected opponents of the newly established Republic, denounced by the new committees of surveillance, had a very good chance of spending several months at Brouage. No comfort was available to them in the governor’s palace, though it was still there, since the town was in ruins. The suspects lived in makeshift dormitories, their food was irregular, and the supply of bedding and warm clothes was extremely inadequate. The risk of malaria was constant in the marshes. The French historians of Brouage,5 whose work is the source for most of the material in this chapter, overcome their distaste for the term to call the town at the time of the French Revolution ‘a concentration camp’. Rochefort had been chosen as the principal place to keep the suspects at first, but the prisons there were soon overfull and the eyes of the departmental directory fell on Brouage. The buildings were nearly all empty, including the barracks which provided shelter for no more than a half company of army pensioners. The former governor’s palace was falling down, and the convent in the fortress town was empty.

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The first transport arrived on 12 May 1793.6 The intention was to take away the detainees’ dignity. There was nothing ready in the way of accommodation. They were put into the empty buildings and told to fend for themselves. They turned the rooms into dormitories and were forced to adopt a democratic lifestyle whether they liked it or not, with all classes and professions lumped together. The groups that formed depended upon where they came from and the time they arrived. The arrival time depended upon when the municipalities that sent them found their own accommodation for them was full. François-Guillaume Marillet says he went to watch the suspects from Saintes leaving for internment and wrote his reaction in his journal. They had been detained in the rooms at the Abbaye aux Dames for a month under the Law of Suspects, and now the decision had been made by the Department for the transfer of 46 of them to Brouage. On 23rd July [1793] the ladies and gentlemen detained at the Sainte-Claires7 and at Notre Dame [the Abbaye aux Dames] in the number of forty odd, left to go under arrest to Brouage. They were taken by horse, by carriage, by cart and by boat as far as Soubise, and from Soubise to Brouage by wagon. They found there at least six hundred other people from other towns in the department and they breathed like them the bad air which reigns there in the months of August and September which caused a great number of them to perish according to the desire of those who had sent them there. What was the point of this departure? What did they want to do to them? What was in the mind of the Assembly? It is what the times have brought. The happiest thing for them [the Assembly] will be the sale of their furniture, the sequestration of their lands and perhaps the sale of them: and certainly if they die, for this is the great talent of the men who govern us, to buy, to pillage, and not pay.8

Marillet gave the names of all those whom he and his friends knew in the party, sadly commenting that one couple had their two backward daughters with them. The suspects included Vice-Admiral de Vaudreuil, who had been the commander-in-chief at Rochefort, and his family, a good few others whose names have the nobiliary particle before them, two spinster sisters, a canoness, and several family groups. ‘The chambermaids followed in a party. There is talk of transferring others who are found to be ill, and some nuns, to Brouage in a few days. There are more than two hundred from other towns and communes already there.’ Also included was A.-G. Gaudrieau (sic), the maire toppled by Bernard and Garnier in 1789. He would be joined at Brouage by Marillet’s friend, Baron Normand d’Authon, who had challenged the maire at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and was suspect because his son was an emigré.9

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The suspects at Brouage were not a static population. The total number was never constant. There appears to have been no real list of detainees. The best indication of the numbers and types of suspects kept there exists in the form of list made by one of them, Mademoiselle de Conty,10 of the people who were there with her. Additions from other sources have been made by the historians and, although the list is tentative, it at least gives a sketch of who had to be there. Mlle de Conty mentions 617 names, and her list of people divides up into 79 noblemen and 93 noble women, 18 Catholic priests, 145 monks and nuns, together with 162 men and 120 women from the third estate. So the third estate provided the largest number, and there were more women than men. The presence of a large number of nuns expelled from their convents and the fact that so many noble husbands had left France to join the emigré armies in part explains this imbalance between the sexes. Most of the nobles interned at Brouage came from the Charente-Inférieure, and the rest came from the Vendée or Deux-Sèvres, part of the area in rebellion against the Republic. Many of them were obscure personalities, but some had been prominent among the former establishment of Saintes, like Brémond d’Ars, La Morinière, Martin de Bonsonge, d’Abzac, and Richier de la Rochelongchamp. The last named had been a deputy in the Estates-General. Marillet named, as we saw, Vice-Admiral Louis-Philippe Rigaud de Vaudreuil as one of the internees. His position was particularly poignant because he had a particular relationship with the late king. Louis XVI had accepted the proposed constitution which limited the monarchy on 14 September 1791 so, for a while, when it was thought this constitution would be acted upon and there was no embargo on crossing and recrossing the frontiers of France, it was also thought that nobles who had already emigrated would return home. The king himself hoped this would happen, and a recent historian of Rochefort, M. Dominique Droin, has reproduced the letter which the king wrote to de Vaudreuil at Rochefort on 13 October 1791, consisting of a ‘pathetic appeal’ to him not to leave his post, but to stay and co-operate loyally ‘to assure the carrying out of the laws which the nation thinks ought to bring it happiness . . . It is your king who requires you to stay inviolably attached to the duties which you have always fulfilled so well. You would see it as a crime to disobey his orders. You will not refuse his entreaties.’ The king concluded by ordering de Vaudreuil to send copies of his letter to all the naval officers under his command, and particularly those who had

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taken leave. In other words, de Vaudreuil was called upon to help staunch the blood loss of experienced officers who were taking the option of emigrating, and was ordered himself not to leave.11 Six months afterwards, however, we find de Vaudreuil trying very hard to resign. Because of the changes among his superiors at the navy ministry, his letters of 3 March, 21 April, and 12 May remained unanswered, so he wrote to the king in person with his resignation, ‘sparing the sensibilities of the best of kings from the details of all that he had suffered for three years from this reign of anarchy’.12 The king accepted his resignation, but a replacement was hard to find. Two officers refused the post. Finally, the king accepted the word of the most recently appointed navy minister, Jean de Lacoste, who recommended Le Dall-Tromelin to succeed de Vaudreuil, who had to stay in office until he had trained his successor in his duties. This meant his resignation was not effective until 18 July, and on 25 he made his way to his house at Saintes. As minister for the navy, Lacoste seems to have acquiesced in de Vaudreuil’s retirement. The next minister, du Bouchage, was in office only for three weeks, and he was followed by Gaspard Monge, the mathematician turned politician13 who, after the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 and in the new intensity of the Republican government, did not intend to leave de Vaudreuil, or people like him, in peace. The Convention established that taking the Oath to the Constitution was to be the only acceptable proof of loyalty to the nation. Those who had not taken it were to be regarded as suspect of secretly maintaining their loyalty to the tyranny that had been overthrown. Monge asked for a list of all those who had taken the oath in Rochefort. On 26 October, he asked for proof of loyalty from de Vaudreuil. The new military commander, Le Dall-Tromelin, wrote to his predecessor in Saintes to ask him to give it, but de Vaudreuil did not reply because he was on the point of emigrating. Monge intensified his pressure on 10 November, and once more demanded a certificate to say that de Vaudreuil had taken the oath, and decided that his silence was now to be taken as proof that he had renounced his employment and had lost his considerable pension rights as a vice-admiral. Arrest and imprisonment in the Abbaye aux Dames rapidly followed, and, in July 1793, he was on his way to Brouage.14 Along with him was his very successor in his former post, Le Dall-Tromelin, who had been dismissed in turn by Monge’s successor as navy minister,

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Dalbarade, on 1 April 1793, charged with not having signed his certificate of civism and with having a son who was an emigré. In fact, he and his wife were released from Brouage a month after their arrival there because a letter to them from their son had been found in which he said they begged him to return to his former loyalty to the nation. Tromelin was reinstated, but his post at Rochefort had been given to Vice-Admiral de Rosilly-Mestros.15 He had to wait until November 1796 before he was re-appointed, but he had to give way to the rapidly promoted Pierre Martin in the following month.16 Most of the nobles were accompanied by their wives or by their daughters. Ladies – like Mme de Vaudreuil, Mme Le Dall-Tromelin, and Mme Aubert de Petit-Thouars – were interned there, some of them with their maids. One who had asked for her maid to be allowed to come with her because of her husband’s bad health was given unexpected authorization from the District of Saintes, ‘considering that that the law punishes but does not avenge, and that it is humane to look after enemies’.17 The 18 priests had either taken the oath or had not gone into voluntary exile in time. The constitutional curés who at the beginning of the Revolution had been accepted and even given salaries were suddenly found to be suspect as well as the refractory ones as soon as the process of de-Christianization began. Two of these priests had bought national property, as confiscated church and emigré land was called, two were freemasons, and three had given up their letters of ordination. They had done all that the new administrators had required of them, but none of it stopped them from being interned. The nuns represented all the orders whose convents had been closed down or hospitals taken over in La Rochelle, the île de Ré, or Rochefort. Nearly all their mother superiors were with them. Some came from other areas like Brittany, the Languedoc, and even from other countries like SaintDomingue and Canada. One who stands out is Sister Françoise Percheron, who actually came from Brouage in the first place and was brought home under these bizarre conditions. The third estate suspects were of all types: doctors, lawyers, skilled workers, merchants, farmers, soldiers, domestic servants, and even artists. They were mostly local people from Marennes, Oléron, La Tremblade, Rochefort, and La Rochelle. Some were from neighbouring departments, and some from much further away: Paris, Dijon, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, Corsica, and there was even one from America. He was called Noblet, and we can speculate that his name was the only grounds for his arrest. There was even an Irishman and

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an Englishman, with the obviously misheard names of Scecq and Stak. The third estate women were usually wives or daughters who accompanied their husbands or their fathers. There were even entire families: the Guitots, and the de Luçons, who include the mother and six daughters. Some have what old registers used to call a quality, ‘as merchant, servant, underwear-maker, or working woman . . . there were even two black domestic servants from Guadeloupe.’18 How did they get to be suspects? Brouage was not a prison in the strictest terms. The suspects could walk about the town, but they were not allowed up on the ramparts which surrounded it. Their main problems were finding enough to eat and somewhere more or less comfortable to sleep at night. They were allowed to bring furniture from their homes if they lived near enough. Because they were suspects, the property they left behind had been confiscated and then sold, so those who did not move quickly enough could not take advantage of this permission. They spent a lot of time remembering what their property had been, making lists of it, and hoping to be compensated for its loss one day. When their money ran out, they were allowed 40 sous a day in food and clothing allowance. Yet a lot of them were shut up in Brouage because it was their wealth that made them suspects, and they were able to muddle through. The living quarters were basic. Because they were all crowded close together in dormitories, privacy was hard to find, since the only curtains available took the form of mosquito nets – useful for their proper purpose so close to the marsh, but not thick enough to give the women shelter from bored and lascivious eyes. They had to fend for themselves for food, and what there was in Brouage soon ran out. There was nothing much to buy even if there was money to buy it. The current scarcity was acute enough for the naval administration in Rochefort to have pity and open its stores for the suspects for a while. Day-to-day life was probably very depressing and the deprivations hard to bear. But at least one of the detainees was making the best of it in an account he gave, which the Brouage historians reproduce. There was a garrison of infantrymen set to guard the detainees, for the most part soldiers near retirement age, and officer’s epaulettes had fallen on the shoulders of one of them ‘when they were thrown out of the window above him’, as was remarked. This man was known to be fond of the bottle. So one of the lady’s maids among the detainees, whose name was Gabrielle, started up a little canteen where off-duty officers and men could buy cognac and eau-de-vie. Gabrielle spent her time with her ears open for indiscreet remarks from her customers, and she gathered news from outside

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the fortress – no newspapers were allowed. One of the genteel officers took a liking to Gabrielle. She was not pretty, says this informant, but she was no fool, and took advantage of the attention that was being paid to her. Each tenth-day holiday, she went for a walk outside the walls with another officer’s wife with whom she made friends, followed by her admirer, and the family she worked for went too. That could not have happened unless they were under this officer’s eye. Relations with the residents of Brouage were cordial. One particular woman who lived there risked being prosecuted and possibly guillotined by bringing food to detainees and giving them news from outside. After the Terror was over, she, aged 38, married one of them, a retired captain from the Queen’s Regiment, M. de Montsabre, who was 61. The suspects gave each other mutual support, and those who were well-off lent money to those who were not. There were also rats among the detainees. Two priests, Madé of Saint-Martin-de-Ré and Messin, former vicaire of Chaniers, tried to obtain their own freedom by denouncing other prisoners and causing trouble. It was noticed that agents provocateurs were introduced who shared the life of the suspects, and reported their conversations to the governor, which caused more aggravation for them. One of these was a shoemaker from La Rochelle called Quintard.19 The detainees’ self-imposed main task was to keep clean and tidy and provide food for themselves but, after that, keeping the boredom at bay. They walked out beneath the trees at the bottom of the ramparts and in the garden of the former convent, where they were allowed to grow vegetables. They ignored the rules about the ten-day festivals and discreetly kept Sundays as special days each week, with the women keeping some better piece of clothing to wear to mark the day. There was an auction sale of the property of an officer condemned to death by the revolutionary tribunal at Rochefort on 24 February 1794. It was observed that the detainees bought as much as the residents did.20 There was a significant group of nuns who had refused the oath among the suspects at Brouage, brought there by order of the District Directory of La Rochelle, signed by André Chrétien, a fervently anti-religious timber merchant in the rue des Carmes there.21 The Chronicles of the Congregation of the Daughters of Wisdom gives a detailed account of how the 42 sisters were treated during their detention.22 Their order was well known in La Rochelle for having provided the nursing staff for the military hospital. They arrived in a shaken condition after a sea-crossing which had taken three days and they were lodged in the storage hall where there were a

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number of other nuns already. The sisters were shown the area of the premises which they had to occupy. They were provided with straw to sleep on and only bread to eat. The ‘citizenesses’ were free to worship (pratiquer leur culte) in the building. Like the other detainees, they could go for walks round the interior of the ramparts. They were not supplied with any clothes other than the ones they arrived in, which had to be constantly washed and mended. Besides these almost normal tasks, forced labour (corvée) was imposed upon them. They were ordered to weed the town streets and stop the wild grass growing between the paving stones. No tools were given out for this and they had to do it with their finger nails. It was winter and the cold froze even the handkerchiefs in their pockets. They worked on empty stomachs since black bread was issued only after the weeding was finished. The supplier of the bread gave them less than half the ration that was ordered. There was chronic hunger, ‘the sort that takes you over little by little’. Sometimes a soldier would find a nurse who had looked after him in one of the hospitals, and try to show some kindness in return. When some of the soldiers saw them being set to pull up the grass, they tried to help them do it. Others brought them glowing logs under cover from the guardroom fire to warm their fingers that were reddened and paralysed by the cold. Some slipped them bits of bread taken from their own ration, which was not very plentiful in this time of general misery. Help had to be given secretly when the officers were not looking. ‘If these humane gestures were seen, some martinet was appointed to take the place of any warder or sentry with too kind a heart.’ Also, from time to time, the nuns had to deal with carts full of the town’s filth. After July 1794, when the national régime changed, the nuns were treated a little better, but the ‘sordid butcher’ fed them just as badly. They were allowed to go outside the town gates as long as they were back for their roll-call. Those who did not go out were a guarantee for the parole given by the others. These were not walks for pleasure; rather a case of the nuns going out to forage for necessities. The two youngest sisters usually took on this task: Sister Ménodore was 28 and Sister Cécile 33. They left early in the morning with a bag they borrowed from a Brouage citizen and went round the isolated houses begging, even in conditions of ice and snow. The mistress of one house they went to asked them if they knew about marking items of linen because all her daughter’s trousseau needed it. The two sisters did it during several days, and the sympathetic woman took the risk of providing them with enough to eat and take home for the others all the time they were there.

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The sisters looked after a great number of sick and dying people in the fortress. They were good at making people laugh as well. The chronicle has the air of making the best of a horrific situation, as religious people have sometimes been known to do, but it is a great tribute to them that they were able to do it in winter conditions amid horizontal stair rods of Atlantic rain. Robespierre’s downfall at the end of July 1794 was the prelude to the end of the Terror and, with it, the systematic detention of suspects. From the middle of August on, those sentenced to imprisonment on the grounds of the Law of Suspects were freed immediately, but it took longer to decide upon the release of those detained under other laws, who left a few at a time. The paperwork on their appearance before the revolutionary tribunals was produced, each case reviewed in a lengthy process sometimes taking months, and only then were they regarded as free. When the Charente and the inlet at Brouage froze over in January 1795, no sea- or river-borne foodstuffs could be delivered. The scarcity applied to everyone there, from the guards and the suspects to the few residents who were still there. In the end, the District Directory of Marennes sent enough by road to keep them alive.23 Deprivation, bad food and water, being at close quarters with everybody else during epidemics, and rotting marshland which bred malarial mosquitoes meant that the health of the inmates was threatened if not ruined, as seems to have happened in the case of Mathieu Levesquot from SaintSaturnin de Séchaud, who died soon after his release. The nuns had the highest death rate, probably because their instinct as nurses could not be overcome by the rigours of internment while their constitutions were ruined by deprivation. Thirteen guards and the camp commandant died as well. Then, just as the few residents of Brouage thought that life was getting back to what passed for normal in such a ruined place, the refractory priests from ships blown off course from Bordeaux who had not yet been freed were set down among them, and forgotten about for a long time.24 It is all very well to say that the detainees were set at liberty, but they must have found themselves involved in a great deal of unrecorded misery since their houses and property had been confiscated and their lifestyle had been destabilized. Once they were back where they came from, they had to petition for certificates of civism, now possible since revolutionary extremists were no longer in control. Revolutionaries of a more moderate outlook were in charge by then, chief among them being the new representative on mission, Charles-Auguste Blutel, but it had been a brutal and intentional humiliation all the same.25

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chapter 9

The End of the Bishop of Saintes

P

ierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld-Bayers had been bishop of Saintes since 1781. His annual revenue before the Revolution was 80,000 livres, which included the taxes on everything brought to market in the town each July and August, and he took his cut from the parish tithes. The parish clergy could reasonably expect 800 a year. In the winter, the bishop lived in an impressive house across the road from the cathedral’s magnificent west door. In summer, Baron de Chaudruc rented him the château at Crazannes, set among water-meadows by the Charente River ten miles north of Saintes.1 He had noble neighbours there whom he met on equal terms: Mme de Saint-Dizant at Panloy, the next château upstream, with whom he had lunch on Fridays; the Marquis de Saint-Hermine’s family at Coulanges; and the de La Tremoille family at Taillebourg. There was a story that Pierre-Louis and his brother, François-Joseph, were born into straightened circumstances. The register of his baptism in the little church at Le Peirat, a hamlet near Villebois in the Angoumois, says that his father was the Chevalier Jean de Larochefoucault, the seigneur of at least four villages and the holder of two military orders. The godparents were domestic servants, and the witnesses were vine-growers who could not sign their names. The story was that the chevalier was in financial difficulties and his Bayers branch of the ducal family were poor relations. Someone called M. Duval, or even the duke himself, came by sheer chance while out hunting to the house where Jean and Marguerite lived, which is still a substantial manor with a courtyard, and found the two brothers, whose intelligence impressed him so much that the duke undertook the expenses of their education. The meticulous Louis Audiat – royalist, Catholic, teacher of rhetoric, archivist, 129

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9. Crazannes: The Château.

and antiquarian – writing in 1897, dismisses the story as a ‘ridiculous invention’,2 and he could not accept the idea that the chevalier should be found plying the trade of a joiner. That extension of the story comes from Canon Legrix, who, as a member of the cathedral chapter, knew the bishop, and tells us that M. Daval (sic) was seigneur of another village nearby, and found ‘two little peasants playing with his own children, and so called them to the attention of the aged duke’.3 If the story did have truth in it, it might explain the timidity of a scholarship boy in the presence of people for whom education was not an unexpected gift. There is a major difficulty in this tale, however, since nine years separated the elder brother, who became bishop of Beauvais, from the future bishop of Saintes. This rather discredits the notion of them being little boys together.4 De La Rochefoucauld did have a reputation for being timid in company but, by the time of the elections for the Estates-General, his uncompromising discipline had alienated many of the clergy in his diocese, especially those whose Jansenist5 views led them to distrust the power and rigidity of pre-revolutionary bishops in any case. So, in March 1789, when the clergy met to elect their two deputies for the Estates-General, what stands out in

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the diarist Marillet’s comments about the bishop is that his clergy did not want him to be their deputy at Versailles, although he ‘showered them with politeness’. Every day of the eight the assembly lasted, he invited some of the curés to splendid dinners, and his pressure upon them was successful. On 21 March, the clergy decided that they would vote twice, first for one of the curés and then for the bishop. In the first vote, they chose Canon Beauregard, who was a canon in the Augustinian Order. The second vote was unanimously for Bishop de La Rochefoucauld, ‘to his great satisfaction because he had shown a great desire for it and the possibility of not securing the vote was a great anguish to him’.6 Exiled in Spain, Canon Augustin-Alexis Taillet, the bishop’s friend since they were students together, wrote a necessarily one-sided memoir of what turned out to be the last two and a half years of his life. Abbé Pierre Lemonnier found Taillet’s book in the Vatican Archives and published it in 1902. Taillet says the bishop opposed most resolutions of the National Assembly. Some clergy joined with the Third Estate (‘or rather, the third had caused the clergy to fall into its net, like a prey it was sure to devour’, says Taillet), and de La Rochefoucauld understood that ‘the bishops and the priests would be reduced to the cruel impossibility of doing nothing good, nor even stopping anything evil’.7 In February 1791, de La Rochefoucauld heard that, in Canon Legrix’s words, ‘the clergy were ordered to cease . . . all public prayer whatever in his cathedral, and not to preach at all any more’. Ten days later, some of his clergy took the oath to maintain the Civil Constitution of the Clergy ‘as required by the decrees of the National Assembly of 27th November 1790’.8 Gone were the days when, finding a springtime short of rain in 1785, Maire Gaudriaud had asked for the sacred relic of St. Eutrope’s head9 to be carried round the town in April in a solemn procession, with the bishop in attendance, along with all the clergy and the monks and nuns in the town, ‘pour demander de Dieu de la pluye’. The lawyers had all been in that procession too, and they would have remembered that, all the same, it had not rained until July and food scarcities had been great.10 Ten per cent of all the deputies of the first estate elected nationally to the Estates-General were Jansenists, and they formed a strong pressure group together. Jansenists were found not only in the ranks of the French clergy, but had been an effective force among the lawyers who held office in the Parlement of Paris for a long time before 1789. Jansenist antagonism towards the methods of royal power had previously been circumspect, but

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this group of clergy in the Estates-General energetically represented a large, if deliberately inconspicuous, body of an influential subculture which de La Rochefoucauld and his fellow bishops had tried unsuccessfully to suppress. The Jansenists had been careful in their opposition to Louis XV at the time of the attempt to murder him in 1757 by a servant called Damiens, who had worked in some of their houses and been motivated by their overheard conversations. They had expressed themselves in favour of Damiens’ savage execution. Nevertheless, Jansenist antagonism towards the methods of royal power had been purposeful.11 Henri Grégoire12 was a persuasive and sincere member of the committee that devised the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and fed into the project a good number of Jansenist ideas about the way the Church in France should be organized.13 As a result of this committee’s pressure, the power of the diocesan bishops was broken and a ‘constitutional’ bishop was to be elected for each one of the 83 new departments. To be eligible for the new bishoprics, priests were to have been in office as curés for not less than 15 years. It was asserted that election would mean they were given authority by the church as a whole rather than by the exercise of the royal prerogative as under the old system. The qualification for an elector in each department was the amount of tax each one paid, but the electors need not be Catholics and so, for traditionalists like de La Rochefoucauld and Taillet, the new system was basically flawed. The Jansenist priests, on the other hand, had been eager to take the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy after it had been ratified by the king on the day after Christmas in 1790, and accepted their new rôle as paid functionaries of the state. All the clergy who took the oath supported the changes that soon led to the inauguration of the Republic. Those who did not were known as refractory or non-juring priests, and they opted for loyalty to the king in hopes of a continuing alliance between throne and altar. Taillet remarks that this division was complete by the time the elections for the constitutional bishops took place in the season of Lent in 1791. It was then that their ‘scandalous installations’ were arranged.14 On 27 February 1791 ‘the electoral assembly of the Department, convoked by the procurator-general-syndic of the said Department, proceeded to the replacement of de La Rochefoucauld, whose bishopric was considered vacant within the terms of the decree as if by resignation’.15 Isaac-Etienne Robinet, curé of Saint-Savinien, was elected as constitutional bishop of the

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Department of the Charente-Inférieure to replace both de La Rochefoucauld of Saintes and the newly appointed de Coucy of La Rochelle. De La Rochefoucauld recognized his own opinions about the Civil Constitution in a 36-page pamphlet the Bishop of Boulogne had written. So he took it over himself and had it distributed in his diocese, while adding some blistering thoughts in an uncompromising ordinance. The main effect of this was to make Garnier, Bernard, Héard, and the other lawyers furious: they even went so far as to give it a public burning on a Sunday morning in Pons ‘in the presence of a crowd who applauded the patriotism of their maire’.16 De La Rochefoucauld had already sent a huge letter, in careful writing which looks like his own, to the electors on an enormous sheet of blue paper.17 He said ominously that he was prepared, like the good shepherd, to lay down his life for the sheep. In other words, he offered to be a martyr. Taillet suggests in his memoir that this had not really occurred to him as a possibility at this stage. He went on to tell the electors that if they did institute a successor for him when he had not actually resigned or been dismissed for some fault on his part by proper ecclesiastical authority – rather than by a law which he did not recognize – they would be excommunicated and would eventually find themselves in Hell. The lawyers’ response was that his refusal to take the oath was understood as his resignation, as the law itself made clear. As far as they were concerned, he had no case. But the one they brought against him was for the crime of lèse-nation, which had replaced lèse-majesté in terms of treason against the State. The bishop of La Rochelle faced a similar indictment for the equally huge letter he had also written to the electors.18 De La Rochefoucauld said the election of Robinet was ‘at root nothing, and of no effect. We are still the only true and lawful bishop of the diocese of Saintes. . . and we will continue to govern with all episcopal authority until our death or a canonical judgement, or our dismissal accepted by the church’. Since he was ‘retained in Paris as a member of the National Assembly’, he was not able to supervise the carrying out of this ordinance in person, so he made it a matter of conscience for all the clergy and lay people to obey him. The printed document is dated 1 April 1791. The lawyers read his documents, and signed them at the bottom of each page. Bernard’s name is there. Jacques Garnier, as procurator general, denounced the former bishop. Then on 20 April, Pierre-François Héard, as public prosecutor, produced his indictment and the folded papers were tied into a dossier with the bishop’s letter to the electors, a copy of the

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ordinance, and all other documents relevant to the case for attention of the criminal tribunal of the District of Saintes. The dossier is kept in the Departmental Archives among others about horse thefts and rapes. Héard’s indictment has an eloquence that matches the bishop’s own (and commendable brevity by comparison) on four pages. It opens in an almost world-weary style: It is doubtless at the example of Archbishop Nicodême of Paris that Monsieur De Larochefoucaud (sic) allows himself to turn into a travelling salesman (colporteur) and causes an ordinance and a warning (avertissement) to be spread about in several parishes by rebellious priests on 1st of this month, capable of causing fright in people’s consciences and troubling the sweet harmony of families. Warned by Article 5 of the decree of 27th November last that failure by the bishops to take the oath ordered would result in their replacement as in the case of a dismissal, M. de Larochefoucaud, if he were driven – as he says he is – by motives of true and holy religion, ought to hold back from any commands or ordinances, and principally from writing anything as seditious and as incendiary as those papers that he happens to have distributed by a malign sensitivity of conscience and, as a result, in breach of The Law.

It does not appear to be by oversight that Héard uses capital letters each time he mentions La Loi. De La Rochefoucauld had been churning out texts advocating disobedience for the last four months. Héard says that these were all seditious and incendiary, and capable of throwing the Catholics into the most lively alarm, to arm father against son, brother against sister, citizen against citizen, and to open a scene of blood and horror by his terrifying threats about the loss of eternal well-being. This barbarous writing, as you know, Messieurs . . . has already produced the most alarming effects: the Catholics are already dividing, the feeble and timid souls no longer have the same temple or the same pastors as us, refractory priests are celebrating the sacrifice of the mass in secret, separate chapels. The pale faces, the dumb silence of our fellow citizens forebodes trouble and fear in their uneasy consciences. The tender father, as he sheds tears, rejects a cherished son from his bosom. The troubled wife repulses with horror the husband she used to idolize. Friends no longer have anything to do with each other, and fear to meet, even when such meetings had been very tender before. The bonds of friendship, of blood and conjugal love are being broken by opposing views of belief and religion. Such are the cruel effects which the episcopal

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piety of M. de Larochefoucaud spreads with his warning and his ordinance. Is there, in fact, Messieurs, anything more frightening, anything more seditious than these texts? Cast an eye on points four, five, six and eight of his ordinance, and you will see Monsieur Robinet, the bishop of the Department, expelled from the episcopal throne, without character, whose functions are so many crimes and profanities. You will see in these articles a command to all the curés, vicaires, priests who are either in religious orders or secular, not to recognize M. Robinet as bishop, and that they are not to receive any appointment from him. You will see the same refusal to allow the faithful to recognize as their pastors any curés nominated as their replacements for the ones that have broken The Law. You will see the functions of these new curés in the sacred ministry as of no effect, and like so many sacrileges and profanations. The faithful are forbidden to receive the sacraments from them, or to have anything to do with them, either by being present at Mass or the divine offices or in any other way there might be. There is therefore one law for the Catholics to communicate absolutely under pain of excommunication and of hell, over against [one for] the rebellious priests and the Nation. What is more likely to trouble consciences, the harmony of families and order in society? Hurry, Messieurs, to dissipate the factions which are tearing our town apart: a contagious teaching is making rapid progress, and patriotism is ready to succumb under the perfidious traits of new sectarians.19

Héard gives no impression of being in the vanguard of the de-Christianizers led by Hébert on a national scale or Lequinio, who will later appear on the scene. He seems as fearful of a divided nation and a divided Church as de La Rochefoucauld is. The charge he makes against the ci-devant bishop is incitement against the Revolution. At this early stage of the Revolution’s development, these lawyers had decided to institute a national church under the control of the National Assembly, which now regulated all other aspects of the nation’s activity. The lawyers were in charge now. They were not going to let a clerical counterrevolution stop the momentum of what they saw as necessary change. After the Constituent Assembly wound itself up on 30 September 1791, and the new Legislative was closed to all who had already been deputies, de La Rochefoucauld, now aged 48, stayed in Paris, where he lived in the same ‘modest lodgings’ as his brother,20 near a printing works which brought out his sustained attacks on the new order. He did not realize that he was in very great danger. De La Rochefoucauld, and people who thought like him, knew that their authority depended on the untrammelled power of the king. When the king had no authority at all after the 10 August 1792, he realized that

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his colleague from La Rochelle was in a better position to continue resistance towards the revolutionaries as an exile in Spain than he was.

*** François-Guillaume Marillet in Saintes also opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and was convinced that Crown and Altar stood or fell together. Marillet’s version of events between 10 August and 2 September 1792 begins on 13 August, when an extraordinary courier arrived at the department’s offices in the Hôtel de Monconseil in Saintes at eight in the morning, with a copy of the decree abolishing the monarchy. The department had it printed and copies were sent to all the districts. On 14 all the citizens of Saintes were summoned by a drum to Liberty Square to hear the decree read out. It was received with a great deal of applause, hats were raised on the end of bayonets and there were shouts of ‘Vive la Nation!’ Marillet says he was made to stand in the ranks of his company of the National Guard and listen to the insulting comments that the patriots made about the king ‘who was as unfortunate as he was worthy of respect’ (Marillet will waver in that opinion). The next day there were no newspapers and no mail was delivered. Deputy Bernard’s 17-page letter arrived and told the members of the Club that newspapers had been suppressed so as not to alarm the provinces about what had happened in the Tuileries. Marillet goes on: The day when the assembly made this decree, the factious crowd showed how powerful they had become. They had gone into the Tuileries Palace to seize the king and perhaps to assassinate him. They found a great number of brave royalist people there, together with the Swiss Guards, ready to make a rampart of their bodies for their king . . . The insurgents had fired cannon and thrown bombs at the palace and the king and queen and the royal family were saved as by a miracle. They had to walk over dead bodies and take refuge in the National Assembly itself where they remained for about thirty hours in one of the desks with the ex-ministers.

Bernard had written that ‘the king came to take refuge in the Assembly and they were obliged to take in this vermin that they wanted to see crushed’.21 When it was over, 400 Swiss Guards and more than 600 nobles had been killed. There were 4,000 sans-culottes involved. Marillet observes that 10 August was a fatal day for the kingdom

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because of the weakness and the cowardice of the king. If he had shown himself to be a purposeful and courageous man on that day, all would have been over, the revolution would have been at an end because the foreign troops who were on the plain of Chalons, thirty leagues away from Paris, would have retained the initiative. The king had promised on 9th to put himself at the head of his troops, and on the 8th he had reviewed them as they cried out, ‘Long live the King and Queen!’ and, when he passed along the ranks, he heard only these words: ‘Yes, sire, we are ready to go as far as the last drop of our blood for you’. But instead of replying to the soldiers in some honest and friendly way, he shut himself up in the Tuileries to drink and eat. On 10th, instead of putting himself at the head of his brave and faithful citizens and subjects, he abandoned them at the first sound of the cannon and rifle shots, and went and shut himself in the oeil de boeuf. From there he ran to throw himself with the queen and his son into the National Assembly. The queen did all she could to stop him, she told him he would dishonour himself, but he pushed her back and even turned her round, it was said.22 This day has totally shamed the king and made him to be seen as a coward, an opinion which would not let him continue as king. On 9th all Paris carried him on their hands and on 10th there was not one citizen who had not favoured his dismissal. He is an automaton, a fat and thick machine who will surely not reign if things come back, for he is not made for reigning. Under the pretext of preserving the blood of his subjects, he has made a hundred times more of it spill than if he had decided to show himself just once on all the occasions that presented themselves. I love my country, I love my king: it is an inborn sentiment in the heart of all Frenchmen, but I have turned away on account of Louis 16. I would like another king of the same branch who would know how to govern his kingdom and support his subjects by protecting them. . .

and so on and so on.23 Marillet tells us that the deputies have reported to the Club that all the talk is of the sans-culottes. The Paris hotel they stayed in ‘used to be called Comte d’Artois,24 but the sign now says, The Hotel of the Brave SansCulottes. What do you want that is better, greater or more majestic for a free people?’25 Marillet the royalist has reported in his own way what he had heard from the Jacobin Bernard. He seems to have developed a very effective filter for what Bernard’s letters had said, and remains his own man as he writes all this down in his secret history. Many refractory, and now unemployed, clergy had returned to Paris and were living in lodgings near the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where they had been trained for ordination.26 This was the Luxembourg Section, one of the 48 into which the capital was divided, and its committee was in perpetual

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session in the seminary itself in the rue Vieux-Colombier, with the butcher Louis Legendre, Danton’s ally, as its president. When the monarchy had fallen, the Paris Commune ordered the sections to arrest nobles and refractory priests as enemies of the people and hold them prisoner ‘until the soil of liberty could be purged of their presence’. Wearing bits of uniform from the Swiss Guards and sometimes a royalist’s ear sewn on their hats, sans-culottes went around the streets from the night of 11 August onwards to bring them to Saint-Sulpice. They arrested all who admitted to being priests (distinctive clerical dress had been banned), finding Archbishop du Lau d’Allemans of Arles and 50 others, who went with their captors because they were told they would be protected from further actions like the one in the Palace the day before. In the lecture-room of their youth, the clergy were confronted by a young man called Joachim Ceyrat, who was said also to have been a student in this very theological college himself. He ordered them to the church of the Carmelites in the rue de Vaugirard with no mattresses and only bread and water to eat and drink. They passed their bizarre first night lying on chairs or the marble floor, each with an individual guard and forbidden to speak to each other, in one of the most richly decorated churches in Paris.27 De La Rochefoucauld wrote to Taillet at Saintes again, on 13 August, and told him what had happened. Taillet says that this was the last letter he ever received from him after a thousand and more since their student days, and that it was the source of all his information. A few days later, Taillet himself was turned out of his lodgings near Saintes Cathedral, and had to look for shelter as an outlaw. He embarked for Spain on 2 September, only finding out about what had happened to his bishop after he had reached Bilbao.28 De La Rochefoucauld and his brother were arrested and taken to join the Archbishop of Arles. More clergy were arrested by the end of August, when there were a hundred and fifty of them in the Carmelites. People who lived nearby heard they were there, and sent basic necessities in for them. A restaurateur came in to provide dinner and supper each day which anonymous sympathizers paid for. The guards’ dirty fingers picked through the dishes to see if any letters or small weapons were hidden in them. The prisoners were allowed to walk beneath the lime trees in the large garden, and some took to meeting in the oratory there to say their office. They were even allowed to receive visitors.29 The bishops and priests were locked up because the Paris Commune wanted them to disappear. A popular action had to be found to dress up what was about to happen. The procurator of the commune, the eloquent,

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well-dressed, former private tutor, Pierre-Louis Manuel, arrived on 16 August to tell them that their papers had been looked at, they had nothing to fear, and they would soon be released. He came back several times during the remaining days, and on 27 read them the definitive decree just passed by the Convention that they had to leave France within 15 days. Passports would be issued to them and their journey would be subsidized at three livres a day. If they did not accept this, they would be deported to Guyana.30 The over-sixties and the infirm would go to retirement homes set up in the departments they had come from, where they would live in common under the surveillance of the police. Manuel came back for the last time on 31 August to tell them that their affairs had been regulated for 2 September. Most of the detainees seem to have been reassured by his unctuous comments. By 1 September, the detainees were worried and heard each other’s confessions. Someone slipped into the church with a disguise for the bishop of Saintes to escape in, but he refused it since the man had not brought one for his brother. At dawn on 2 September, they heard drums in the streets, and cannon firing on the Pont-Neuf. They were given a better lunch than usual, and some went to walk in the gardens after it. Others were still indoors when the massacre started.31 Taillet’s account had to rely on rumours in the absence of hard information, and there are differences in what he says,32 based on a few anecdotal reports, from a more objective account given by G. Lenotre in 1933 on the basis of a larger number of survivors’ accounts of what happened.

*** Marillet was not an eyewitness of half the things he talks about in his at times vituperative diary, and he admits to writing only what Bernard’s reporting had informed him of in his letters to ‘the Club’, as he calls the popular society. However, he holds up a mirror to how news reached the provinces from Paris and the effect it had once it had been received. In this instance, of course, the biased Jacobin anti-clerical’s report has passed through the crucible of the mind of a disillusioned royalist Catholic. This is Marillet’s second-hand report of 2 September 1792, filtered out from Bernard’s letter: Bernard wrote yesterday to the Club that in Paris there has been a bloody carnage of bishops, priests and other citizens that were taken to be suspects

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because they did not think in the same way as the dominant party of the insurgents. He announced that M. de Larochfoucauld had had his throat cut, along with sixty others confined in the church of the Carmelites, and that from there they went to a place where there were another hundred and forty whose lives they also took, massacring them as well as in another where there were sixty three, and that brought the number of bishops, priests and nobles killed up to eight hundred. They also massacred Madame the Princess of Lamballe, one of the most beautiful women in Paris and the queen’s intimate friend, and they wanted to make her see her head at the end of a pike, presenting it to her under her windows, but she did not appear. Although Bernard has often given us false, sad news that he has later denied himself, this carnage has been more considerable than he says because one presumes that in the first two or three days of this month more than eight thousand people have had their throats cut in this massacre of all ranks and all ages. The prisons had been opened and a court set up by the insurgents and sans-culottes to judge the criminals. They were making them appear before the judges and asking: ‘Ought this man to be condemned?’ The answer No was given and the man would be made to pass to one side and tapped on the shoulder. This was the sign of death. When he had gone through a doorway, he found men armed with sabres and hatchets who cut him in pieces . . . It was in this manner that all the seigneurs and the bishops, abbés and priests attached to the court or in the king’s party were destroyed. It was only a hundred men who cut the throats of more than six thousand people33 during these three days . . . These hundred men were so tired out from the carnage, from running about in the alleys in their fury to find the designated victims in the prisons where they had been forced to stay, and from the three days the massacre had lasted.34

The September Massacres that raged in the religious houses now used as prisons, the Abbaye, the Salpêtrière, the Carmelites, and in gaols like La Force, with the unresisted killing of so many opponents of the Revolution, have to be set in the context of the war with the kings of Europe. The Prussians had invaded France. The towns of Longwy and Verdun had fallen to them. Danton as minister of justice made his famous 'Daring' speech in the National Assembly,35 and volunteers from all over France arrived in Paris prior to defending the eastern departments of the patrie against the invaders. Before they left the capital, a rumour began to spread, fostered by Marat, that the moment the troops left for the front, the nobles and priests and other suspects in the prisons would break out and attack the soldiers’ families. The instinctive reaction was to prevent this happening. So in some of the Paris sections which were dominated by sans-culottes, like the one around the Luxembourg Palace,

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they decided to arm a death squad and let it loose. No one in authority saw fit to stop them.36

*** On Monday 17 September 1792, ‘the fourth year of Liberty and the first of Equality’, at nine in the morning, Charles Girardin, notary and justice of the peace of the canton of Port d’Envaux came with his bailiff to make an inventory of de La Rochefoucauld’s property in the former château at Crazannes, intending to put everything under seal so that no one could tamper with it and his heirs would find all as it should be.37 Girardin found Pierre Bouchoir, who had been the bishop’s agent, who said on oath that he had not removed anything from the château. Then he began drawing up the inventory, joined by the procurator of the commune of Crazannes whose name was Bron. Girardin noted that his inventory ‘proved only that the furniture of Mgr de La Rochefoucaud was near miserable on account of its simplicity’. He describes the objects he found as ‘more than half used, so much so that for each of the cupboards the formula varied no more than: after opening, nothing was found in it’. Girardin decided that no seals were necessary. The only thing which might be claimed to be of any value in the château was ‘the foot or support of a pendulum plated in brass, as well as the top of the pendulum’. Everything was left in the care of Bouchoir as before, and the necessary report was drawn up and signed by all present. Girardin said that he had come to the château to make an inventory in the bishop’s summer residence just 15 days after his death to safeguard the interests of anyone who might inherit his goods, but it may well be that the department or the district or the municipality of the Canton or all three were looking for evidence of luxury in the bishop’s lifestyle to denounce him with, and were disappointed not to find anything at all valuable beyond two pieces of a clock mechanism. In a bas-relief in the wall of a side-chapel in the south aisle of Saintes Cathedral, sans-culottes and National Guardsmen in uniform precede and follow two bishops standing in a fraternal embrace wearing their soutanes. One of the sans-culottes carries a hand-axe which he is about to use on the two bishops, and a National Guardsman has a drawn sabre. The inscription under the bas-relief says that Bishop de La Rochefoucauld was beatified on 16 October 1926.

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C

laude Legrix kept a journal of events in Saintes from the time he became a canon of the cathedral in 1781. He presented a good deal of information about contemporary events in the town, and has a clerical eloquence as opposed to Marillet’s lawyer’s style. The early entries exude ancien régime confidence, as in the case of the blessing of a great new bell for the cathedral on 4 January 1781. He was there with the dean and the other canons, and the bell’s godparents were the Marquis de Monconseil and his daughter, the Comtesse de la Tour du Pin. He tells us that in September the entire vault of the cathedral roof was finished. But on the last day of 1788, uncertainty creeps in, with the meeting in the Hôtel de Ville, presided over by de La Tour du Pin as military commander of the province, to discuss the great dissatisfaction in the Saintonge with the arbitrary way that Intendant Reversaux had been arranging his projects and raising taxes. The clergy, nobility, and third estate delegates of the Saintonge, meeting together, voted to ask the king for a more equitable means of the province being taxed. Legrix himself welcomed all this, and was a prominent supporter, like de La Tour du Pin, of the early stages of revolutionary change, and accepted the risks. He did not expect his world to cave in on him, and was not as realistic as Marillet when push came to shove. It did cave in, and three years later, Legrix, Taillet and Dean Delaage were in exile in Spain, living on their wits and other people’s charity. The dean died there, whereas Legrix moved to Germany and then to England and came back to the Charente-Inférieure in 1802 to be a canon at La Rochelle. He reports the founding of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution in Saintes on 9 December 1790, under the control of the administrators of the department, the district, and the municipality, who were its principal members, though ‘many other citizens of different classes’ were also members.1 He does not say, as Marillet did, that it was dominated by Bernard and his supporters, but it was quite clear that opinion in the town was being politicized, and the new government was going to assert its 142

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authority on the ground by means of it, and by its intention to make the clergy into functionaries of the nation. For Legrix and the dean and chapter the assertion of control by the State began when, in accordance with the National assembly’s decree of 27 November 1790, all church functionaries were obliged to take the oath to maintain the Civil Constitution of the Clergy if they wanted to remain in office. M. d’Étourneau, teacher of philosophy at the College of Saintes, and M. Marsais, Curé of Barzan, who had lived in Saintes for three or four years, came to take it in the presence of officials of the municipality on 30 January 1791.2 Since Bishop de La Rochefoucauld had refused to take the oath, and was regarded by the municipality as dismissed from office, the electoral assembly of the department, summoned by Jacques Garnier to meet in what had been his cathedral, began the process of replacing him.Only 300 of the 800 qualified to vote came to exercise their new power over the Church. On 28 February, it took all day and three votes to elect Isaac-Etienne Robinet,

10. Saintes: Cathédrale de Saint-Pierre.

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curé of Saint-Savinien, ‘aged about sixty’, as constitutional bishop of the Department of the Charente-Infèrieure.3 Robinet received 212 of the 300 votes, and his competitor in the third round of voting was Le Rol – called Le Roy in the minutes – curé of SaintSauveur in La Rochelle, whose imposing church soon became the meeting place of the popular society there. The election was announced immediately by the sound of a salute of cannon and the bells of the cathedral and the churches of the suburbs being rung on the orders of the municipality. The assembly sent an official down the Charente to tell Isaac-Etienne Robinet the news and ask him to come to Saintes the next day to take office. He accepted his election, but could not arrive until 4 March. After his hurried consecration by Talleyrand, who had just resigned his own bishopric of Autun, Robinet arrived with an escort of regular troops and a contingent of the National Guard from his former parish. The bells were rung, but there were no other ceremonies. Robinet stayed for two or three days with a relation, and not many people called to congratulate him.4 The register of the decisions of the District of Saintes has an entry for 20 March which says that, at the request of the bishop of the department, the council gave the order to empty Bishop de La Rochefoucauld’s furniture from the Palace.5 Very soon after, the principal and senior staff of the college, the former Jesuit boys’ school behind the deanery, where Marillet’s son was a boarder, were dismissed and replaced by clergy who were willing to take the oath. The newly elected teachers were installed in their places in the impressive college chapel,6 including Forget, now vice-principal, who had already sworn the oath. So on Sunday 20 March 1791, the staff took the oath in the presence of the administrators of the department, the district, and the municipality in the cathedral.7 The cathedral was a church like any other now, the bishop was an elected official of the department, the chapter was abolished, and the education of the bourgeoisie was in safe Republican hands. Jacques Garnier, now the attorney-general of the department, made a speech on 15 April 1791 to the Directory in the Hôtel de Monconseil. Garnier told his colleagues that Robinet had agreed to work with them and had chosen the 12 clergymen who were going to be his deputies (known as episcopal vicars) according to the new law. He would be providing services in the cathedral church which would not upset any new order apple carts. Another law, passed in Paris on 21 August, said that there should be only one parish in towns of no more than 6,000 people, and any other churches should be suppressed and joined to the principal church. The population in

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the centre of Saintes was no more than that number, and the four churches of Saint-Michel, Saint-Maur, Saint-Pierre, and Sainte-Colombe were in the process of being closed. The ci-devant curés of these four parishes were dangerous opponents of the new order and they were not going to be left in office. The parishes in the suburbs of Saint-Eutrope and Saint-Vivien had clergy who had taken the oath, so they would be able to carry on and their churches remain open until such time as the council had made a decision about them.8 Tight control was on the way, and it was obvious that the people holding the reins were not going to let Robinet have much choice in his actions. He had a small moment of glory in La Rochelle – which was in his diocese because it included the whole department – when the academy there gave him a speech of welcome. The Protestant Maire Garesché was warm in his greeting also, referring to the clearing away of Gothic bric à brac from the Church. La Rochelle academy, however, was not the Catholic Church in La Rochelle. Robinet could not be reassured for long by being taken up by the church’s natural enemies, in a place where antagonism against it was nearer the surface than in Saintes. Robinet was rejected by the Catholics remaining loyal to Bishop de Coucy, who was in constant touch with them from his exile in Pamplona, and considered himself still in office. Robinet had been curé of Saint-Savinien since 1777 after being vicaire at Barbezieux, so he just qualified for election under the new rules. Robinet appears to have been a popular figure in his parish on the Charente, and even Archdeacon Taillet, who knew him, recognized that he ‘had enjoyed a certain reputation for honesty and goodness’, but added the criticism that he was ‘very relaxed in his principles’.9 In the eyes of traditionalists Robinet had become a usurper and an intruder, who had made the lawful bishop suffer.10 There was a rumour that Robinet had only accepted the offer to help ‘his poor and grasping relations who welcomed the increase in dignity as well as the money they hoped would come their way’.11 Taillet’s history of the church in Saintes is a proper source for an assessment of Robinet, provided we can look through the obvious distaste for him and his appointees with which its pages are filled. Robinet was not endowed richly with leadership qualities, and is a man to feel sorry for. The Bernards and the Garniers made use of this elderly and affable man because they knew he could not stand up to them. There is an entry in the minutes of the District Council of Saintes which says that there was a discussion about how to deal with the incendiary comments made against Bishop Robinet by Pérronneau, soon to be dismissed from his parish at Dompierre, and Delany, curé of Brives, making him out to

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11. Saint-Savinien-sur-Charente: The Church.

be ‘a fool, a heretic and an excommunicate’. The upshot of this was that a gendarme was ordered to hold an enquiry and 50 men were needed to maintain order.12 The Protestant historian M. D. Massiou, writing in the 1830s, says Robinet was ‘as much lacking in knowledge as in elevation of spirit; more feeble than perverse’.13 Robinet’s own reaction to his appointment was to say, ‘You are making me take a false step which will cost me my life.’14 A carefully wrapped-up dead sheep stinking to high heaven was delivered to Robinet one day with an explanatory note attached to it: ‘For such a flock, such a shepherd.’15 A pamphlet war was fed by the local press of P. Toussaints from his office in the rue Saint-Maur. One such production claimed to have found ‘five lies, three calumnies, and three blasphemies . . .’ in a piece only six pages long written by Robinet. ‘Although’, says its author, ‘I have not counted them all.’16 On 21 April 1791, Thursday in Holy Week, the new bishop, attended by his episcopal vicars, visited several chapels at convents for women in the town, intending to take part in the Stations of the Cross with the sisters. As soon as he was seen coming, the grills in the doors were shut against him and the prayers stopped, not to be started again until he had gone. Robinet complained about the nuns’ behaviour to the municipality, but it made no difference. The doors of the convents remained closed against him when

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he paid more visits accompanied by municipal officers. Robinet issued an ordinance against the religious houses on 24 May, and the municipality used it as a cover for ordering strict control of the Abbaye aux Dames, the Poor Claires, and the Carmelites by named municipal officers on the same date.17 Robinet was a rubber stamp for the municipality. That was all Garnier and his colleagues intended him to be. Marillet reports anecdotes about Robinet from the time they happened in May 1791.18 He says that Robinet copied a pastoral letter written by the constitutional bishop of Angoulême whose name was Joubert. This had been written in Paris and was adopted by all the constitutional bishops as a kind of opening salvo to their taking office. Even Marillet admits that the letter Robinet sent out was well written and witty (avec esprit), but he adds that it was ‘full of false principles, false quotations, and evaded the main question and the difficulty which his theft of his office had caused’. He ordered that it was to be read by all the parish priests from their pulpits on the Sunday after they received it. It would cause, Marillet anticipated, a great sensation among the farmers and the municipalities in the countryside because it was very constitutional and full of lively rebellion against the former bishops. Marillet allows himself to presume that, by its very nature, it would provide Bernard and the procurator-general Héard with several more victims like François Glastron, curé of Les Essards near Saintes, who had already been sent to prison for non-compliance with new regulations.19 The test of loyalty to Robinet had been that the curés were expected to go to him on Maundy Thursday to receive a year’s supply of holy oil for the anointing of those about to die, as they had always done in the time of the lawful bishops. Only nine out of all the clergy had done so in 1791. The papal bull upholding the bishops of the old order had produced its desired effect upon some priests’ consciences: 4 of them from the île d’Oléron, all of them with parishes on the île de Ré, and 20 from the department as a whole had withdrawn the oath they had taken.20 A man called Lacheury, on the orders of the treasurer of the National Guard, Commissioner Dière, gave a party for Robinet in the country. Mlle Ver de la Pommeraye, Mlle Lacheury, and other ladies and gentlemen from the Club were there. They sang a lot and, after they had eaten, they stood up to dance the farandole for Monsieur Robinet. The disapproving Marillet comments that Robinet ‘is a man who lowers himself: if he knows he has taken an office worthy of respect, then he must respect his office and have respect also for himself ’.

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The next entry in Marillet’s journal says that Robinet announced his intention to go and see a priest called Abbé Caicy (sic) at Lucerat. His council of episcopal vicars said that he ought not to see this man because he had not taken the oath. Daniel Casey was a theologian who had been curé of Bords, close to Saint-Savinien, but had resigned in 1783 upon being appointed as a diocesan official by de La Rochefoucauld, and received an income as titular abbot of Vauluisant.21, 22 Robinet replied that he wanted to make the visit because Casey had been a good friend. His council would only let him go, however, if he took one of their number with him. So on the afternoon of 13 May, Robinet went to Lucerat accompanied by Gastumeau, one of his episcopal vicars, and another priest called Martin, the curé of Agonnay. When he knocked on the door, no one answered for a while and the servant, who had been told to say that Casey was not at home, did not appear at first. When she did open the door, she said she knew nothing of the abbé’s whereabouts. When Casey heard a noise in his yard, he caught sight of Robinet and his companions through the open window of his upstairs study, and called out that he did not want to have anything to do with him, even quoting scripture at him. Robinet replied, ‘That’s all right: to every one his own way of thinking. But don’t let it break up an old friendship!’ ‘In these circumstances,’ Casey replied, all ties of friendship have already been broken because you bear the weight of all the censures of the church, because you are an intruder and a schismatic, and because you are the cause of all the misfortunes that have torn the church in two, as you have learned from the decree of Mgr de Larochefoucauld and the papal bull.

Marillet says that he could not bear to repeat all the things that were said then, but there is no doubt he feels as Casey felt. Robinet and Gastumeau started laughing at Casey, who shut his window again. Robinet, now realizing that he had been humiliated, went away, leaving Martin, also a friend of Casey’s since his time at Bords, behind to knock on the door again. Casey was surprised that Martin was still there and wanted to talk to him about something other than the constitutional bishop’s visit. Casey let him in and, when they were sitting down together, asked Martin whether he had taken the Oath to the Constitution. He said that he had, ‘but with every reservation he could muster’. They went on to talk about ‘the great principles of religion’, and Martin was convinced that

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Casey had been right to refuse the oath. Casey told Martin to be sure to tell Robinet ‘that the only thing he could do before he came to see him again was to go and throw himself at the feet of M de Larochefoucauld and ask his forgiveness for the injury he had done him and the crime he had committed. Then I will receive him in my embrace as in the past with the greatest pleasure.’23 Marillet comments that ‘this firm and religious conduct brought fame to M. Casey in the minds of right-thinking people, and shame for M. Robinet, because he did have sensitivity and honour’. Later on that day, Martin, a close friend of Robinet, criticized him for wearing the purple cassock. Robinet answered in his usual way: ‘Everyone has his own way of thinking. I was nominated by the electors of the department. You are blathering (Tu badines). Leave all that, I tell you!’ Then he reminded Martin that he had not come to him for the holy oil before Easter. Martin’s reply was cutting: ‘No, ma foi. What do you want me to do? I do not want to give you recognition and if I made use of your holy oil for my sick parishioners, I fear that it would contribute to their deaths!’ Martin reported this conversation to Taillet and told him that his own conduct had been irresponsible.24 Marillet adds that Robinet was disregarded in general, ‘even by members of the Departmental Directory who ridiculed him’.25 Robinet decided next to make a pastoral visit to Madame Baudéan de Parabère, who was still in charge at the Abbaye aux Dames on the other side of the Charente. She had won in verbal fisticuffs with the last two lawful bishops, Germain du Chataignier de la Chataignerie and Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld, and the conversation showed her disdain for this intruder: She received him with honesty in her little parlour. He opened the conversation by saying that he was sorry that his busy time-table had not allowed him to have visited her before. She replied, ‘And I, Monsieur [not Monseigneur], if my conscience had allowed me, I would not have been less in haste to send someone to visit you; but my principles are in every respect opposed to yours.’ ‘Let us not speak of that,’ he said. ‘How are your ladies?’ ‘Well enough, thank God, though one or two of them have colds,’ she replied. ‘It is true,’ he said, ‘that this weather goes against being healthy. It is has made the fruit in my little garden at Saint-Savinien suffer as well.’

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He paid his respects and left the abbess. His visit had lasted ten minutes at the most. There! It was a good reception for our Robinet.26

Marillet now reports on the two papal bulls which arrived in France in May 1791: to the archbishops and bishops – ‘very voluminous’ – and to the priests who had taken the oath and were given 40 days to withdraw it or else be declared schismatics. Both of them made something of a sensation in the kingdom, and they did persuade some priests to withdraw from their oath, as we have seen.27 Marillet welcomed a manifesto from the princes of the German empire, and gave it as his opinion that the papal bulls would not have been sent to France if the Pope had not been assured of tangible support from the princes. All that made us believe and trust in a counter-revolution happening soon. This manifesto was a superb piece of work, full of gentleness and assurance. The princes announced that they would not come into France as enemies but as friends to put the king back on his throne and re-establish things in the state in which they ought to be, that they wanted to break the power of the assembly claiming to be national and make its vile men return to the dust from which they ought never to have emerged. The princes would make the Departments, Districts and Municipalities responsible for the blood which they would have to shed.28

The authorities, Marillet asserts, started to raise money to resist this threat by stripping the religious communities bare: They confiscated furniture, and the day before yesterday, yesterday and today (20th May), sold it to profit from the money that would come from it. To help them in their larceny, they made gifts of bad furniture to poor people and to their supporters: this administration is a horror, atrocious! These people, at the instigation of the national assembly, started to enrich themselves by stripping the clergy, the religious communities and our own people. A great deal of national property was sold, but the national deficit is still five millions. Part of this property and the profit is in the hands of these malcontents; the goods went at a low price and they shared the profits. If there were no divine justice, we would all be dead of grief, but it consoles us and gives us the hope that a better order of things will emerge.29

Marillet’s instantaneous reporting is more valuable than Taillet’s nourished grievance. Marillet was just as disillusioned as the former archdeacon, but he had not had time to reflect on his complaints when he wrote them down.

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Robinet went to Bordeaux to join in the consecration of a constitutional archbishop. He ignored the canonical times of ordination, and the age of the candidates for it. He ordained monks who had not kept their rule, men who were not properly qualified, and all those whom de La Rochefoucauld had refused to ordain. He was accused of not controlling the seminary properly, and allowing too much freedom to the students. There was also an occasion on the île d’Oléron when people saw and heard Robinet, with an old apostate monk who was his inseparable friend, singing the revolutionary song ça ira in plainchant. Robinet had thrown in his lot with the Revolution, so it is not surprising that he attended meetings in the popular societies in the diocese where Republican ideals were discussed.30 Taillet rebukes Robinet for giving public honours to Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, the comte de Mirabeau, who is written off as ‘one of the principal makers of change, one of the blackest subversives’. Robinet had a bust of Mirabeau carried in a religious procession after his death, ‘as the principal object of veneration, a spectacle unheard of in a catholic country’. Furthermore, he either instigated or permitted a memorial service for him in the former cathedral on 18 April 1792. An address in praise of Mirabeau was given by Pierre Deschamps, the constitutional curé of Chaniers, ‘turning his vices into virtues’, as Taillet slightingly comments, and Robinet listened to it ‘with a patience which signified corruption: he applauded the panegyrist’s talent and rewarded him’.31 Behind Marillet’s and Taillet’s disapproval we can recognize that there may have been a genuine intention on the part of the clergy who had taken the civic oath to make the Church available to the nation. Robinet could read the newspapers as well as Marillet, and perhaps he wanted constitutional monarchy as much as Mirabeau. Mirabeau was accused of duplicity and treason in December 1792 after the discovery of the contents of the king’s strongbox in the Tuileries,32 the bust that had been carried in the procession and then displayed in the Club was broken, and the street named after him called something else.33 A different street was given his name in 1932.34 But yet, after so much invective, Taillet saw Robinet’s most courageous action as giving up the post of constitutional bishop after not quite two years. After the execution of the king on 23 January 1793, the Jacobin Club in Paris sent an order to the Clubs in the provinces that all members must sign a document saying that they approved of it or be banned

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from membership. Robinet refused and his membership was revoked. Taillet belittles the refusal: ‘it is praiseworthy, when one is associated with the wicked, to be less wicked than the others’.35 Robinet stayed in his moribund office until December, and then left for the Château de Péné in Torxe owned by his nephew, abdicating his bishopric and even his letters of priesthood. When he died on 8 September 1797,36 no one thought that he ought to be replaced at Saintes. When Bonaparte made his Concordat with Pius VII, the new diocese for the Charente-Inférieure was based on La Rochelle and remains so.

*** Taillet singles out Benjamin-Henri Chasseriaux du Chiron for his first volley of invective against Robinet’s episcopal vicars. Chasseriaux was a former Oratorian of the Diocese of La Rochelle, who often repeated in a lively, cheerful way that he was going to be the bishop’s first vicar and that, instead of twenty five louis a year, he would have more than a hundred. However, before that option arose he had been a stern opponent of the changes, telling his parishioners that those who took the oath would be damned. But those hundred louis had lessened the severity of his theology. He had no longer found that it was such a great evil to take the oath. He had even ended up by finding that it was a great sin to not take the oath, took it, and then persecuted those who did not. Afterwards he not only married, but married a Protestant woman.37

Gounin de La Côte was the curé at Crazannes and took the oath as soon as he was free of the lawful bishop’s influence. Taillet castigates him for his ingratitude to de La Rochefoucauld, who had often had him as a guest at his table in the chateau.38 Then there was Alexander-Eutrope-Charles Huon, who out of the 60 years of his life had spent 30 cursing his lot, ‘furious with de La Rochefoucauld who had not given him a benefice worthy of his self-esteem [Juicq is a very small village], furious with the chapter which had not made him a canon, and furious with all the universe which did not appreciate that he was worthy’. He took the oath, and adopted an especially strong formula for it: he declared that he swore as a citizen, as a priest, and as a curé:

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that is to say he wanted to give evidence that he was a bad citizen, a priest without principles and an unworthy pastor. One finds it difficult to find a man of an imagination more enlightened and of a soul more sadly disturbed.39

There was Jean-Baptiste Forget, a young teacher at the College of Saintes, of suspect convictions before the schism and scandalous manners after it . . .Eventually he gave up his priesthood and his faith, and even all natural shame, because he lived publicly in the infamous ties of a union which he described as a marriage, but which the faithful regarded as a dreadful concubinage.40, 41

His wife’s name was Marie-Charlotte Lacheurie, who upset Marillet by singing the Marseillaise from the pulpit in the cathedral at a Republican festival.42 Forget ended his working life as a teacher in Paris. There are worse things he could have done. His son was well known as a surgeon at Strasbourg in the Second Empire.43 Other episcopal vicars received the same rebuke for breaking their ordination vows, for allying with the Revolution, and, especially, for marrying. Taillet writes with denunciatory eloquence, making his opponents out to be notorious, open, evil livers. There is a Spanish inquisition quality about it all.44 His concluding invective is lanced against Jacques Roux, who was very critical of the Revolution because it was not extreme enough from his point of view, and became chaplain to the sans-culottes in Paris. He was vicaire at Cozes in the Diocese of Saintes in 1787, then moving to the parish of Saint-Thomas-de-Cosnac and preaching a sermon in which he urged tenant farmers to refuse to pay seigneurial dues and denounced the seigneurs.45 Taillet, who is good at imputing base motives to all his opponents, says that the diocese suppressed a parish of which he wanted to be curé, so Roux moved to Paris in 1790, eventually to be elected vicaire of Saint-Nicolasdes-Champs, in the poorest area of the city, the Gravilliers Section, his base for urging extreme economic measures on the government. Soon Roux was a member of the Paris Commune, and it sent him to escort the king to his execution. The newspapers reported that, as Louis XVI was leaving the Temple prison, he had presented his will to Jacques Roux to give to the queen and that, in a reply ‘harder than the executioners themselves’, Taillet says, he pushed the paper away saying, ‘I am here to take you to execution, not to receive your notes.’46

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He became leader of a group called the Enragés and used the Cordeliers Club as a base to attack the new constitution that was being drawn up in June 1793. He brought a petition to the Convention, demanding that the penalty for hoarding food become a capital offence, whereupon Robespierre denounced him and he was arrested. He took his own life with five thrusts of the penknife he had managed to keep while waiting for execution.47

*** In the church of the village where Citizen Bouquet formed his cadet force, there are two memorial tablets on the south wall.48 They commemorate Jean Bertry and Pierre Guillemetau, curé and vicaire of Rioux until the Revolution had been established. ‘He preferred exile to perjury’ is what the memorials say of both of them. Jacques Roux, before being faced with the choice between execution and suicide, had aligned himself with extremists to the left of the Jacobins for the sake of his starving parishioners in the Gravilliers section of Paris. He also saw his position as honest and consistent. The imposed civil oath was the dividing line between Taillet, Bertry, and Guillemetau on the one hand, who saw it as a betrayal, and Robinet, his episcopal vicars, and Roux on the other, who accepted it as necessary. Guillemetau came back to Rioux after the Concordat of 1802 to be the curé, and remained in office until 1823. Taillet moved on to Portugal in 1797, then to England. He maintained a correspondence with Bishop Charles de Coucy, who stayed on in Spain because he did not accept the Concordat that Bonaparte imposed on Pope Pius VII. When at last de Coucy accepted King Louis XVIII’s invitation to become Archbishop of Reims (although he did not move there until some years after), he made Taillet an honorary vicar-general. Taillet died in Paris in 1828. The traditionalists saw themselves set apart from their people, and Roux became a revolutionary to be identified with his. Both sides of the divide were sincere and, soon after, representatives of both opinions found themselves together coughing blood every morning in utter dereliction between decks on rotting hulks anchored off the estuary of the Charente. Their choice had been a matter of principle. Their misery was the direct result of a clash with other people’s principles. The Convention, and then the Directory after it, tried to make them disappear.

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T

he king and his ministers called the Estates-General in the spring of 1789 to make good the national deficit and to regenerate the nation. Successive finance ministers – Calonne, Loménie de Brienne, and even the people’s Necker – had failed to do anything about the crown having to spend so much on servicing national debt incurred largely as the result of the costs of warfare against Great Britain. In old order France, crown deficit was national deficit once it was known about in public. In 1786, Calonne had declared an expected deficit of a 112 million livres, which represented a quarter of the year’s likely income.1 Everybody knew about it now. Indebtedness was no longer the king’s secret, as it always had been. During the war of American Independence, Necker had written an account of the royal finances, for which he was then responsible to the ‘upstairs council’ (conseil en haut), maintaining that all was well, helped along by new loan after new loan. Public opinion was now asking why there was such a large deficit after so short a time. It was easy to blame the expenses of the court, the pensions paid to the queen’s Polignac friends, or the extravagance of Versailles which Calonne fostered in order to spend the way out of a crisis, but they were small compared with the total debt and, as the unforeseen Revolution gathered momentum, a drastic solution was needed. The privileged position of the Catholic Church in relation to national life had been revoked in the National Assembly on the night of 4 August, so an opportunity to refloat the nation’s capital assets emerged. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, still in office as bishop of Autun, devised a way for the nation to take over the lands of the French Church and sell them to restore national solvency.2 The Church’s capital assets were reckoned 155

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at something like 2.1 billion livres, upon which the annual interest was 70 million or so, and there was great hope for the success of the scheme. Monastic buildings would be sold after the monks and nuns had been dispersed from them, and there were reasonable arguments made that the dispossessed religious should be compensated with adequate pensions. In some places this would not be very difficult: at Saint-Jean-d’Angély, there were only 12 Benedictine monks left in the great unfinished abbey that was being rebuilt at the time. The expulsion of the Society of Jesus from France in 1764 was a precedent in living memory of what could be done when the nation no longer needed the particular ministry of a body within the Church. Catherine II in Russia and Joseph in Austria had abolished contemplative orders by royal decree but, after the Jesuits had been suppressed, the French bishops themselves set up a Commission of Regulars3 and, in the 25 years before 1789, had abolished 426 abbeys and convents, raised the age of making a religious vow to 21, and made the process of renouncing vows easier. Some small-scale religious orders were suppressed altogether. Even if the orders which offered public (i.e. private) education and ran hospitals remained, the writing was on the wall for the purely contemplative orders in France. Public opinion increasingly regarded religious orders as irrelevant to modern life in the pre-revolutionary years, as all the contemporary pornographic satire at their expense suggests.4 The monks and nuns who remained after the bishops had taken action were in the forefront of secular criticism, and the lightning struck their tree with the complete abolition of religious orders by the National Constituent Assembly on 13 February 1790. This was not necessarily revolutionary, but the continuation of a process already begun. The new order had its own plans for secular education and health care, and the religious orders were redundant. In Paris, former religious buildings were given new purposes: the Jacobins and the Cordeliers became the homes of two of the most influential political bodies outside the National Assembly and then the Convention, and the constitutional monarchists had their meetings at the Feuillants. The Church lands were designated as national property, and government bonds called assignats, officially printed and carrying the king’s portrait, made it easier for those who had assets to buy them at auction. Wealthy townsmen living a long way off and neighbours in the countryside bought the bonds and used the certificates to purchase the land or buildings, or both. Later on, assignats were the equivalent of money and the rate at which they lost their value was alarming for everybody.

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All this was reflected in what happened in the Charente-Inférieure. Abbeys and priories were turned into farm buildings and their lands assumed into the properties of laymen in villages like Saint-Gemme, Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud,5 and Trizay. The latter had been in impressive ruins since the Wars of Religion 200 years before, and it soon became part of a farm.6 In La Rochelle, the initiative for closing religious houses appears to have been taken by the sans-culottes, who could never have afforded to participate in their purchase. In November 1792, the church that had belonged to the Augustinians was set aside by the municipality for traditionalist Catholic worship led by refractory priests, until the sans-culottes rioted and forced the municipality to abandon such a scheme, taking the opportunity to settle long standing antagonism against the clergy.7 There were 18 buyers of church property in La Rochelle district and half of them were Protestants. Samuel de Missy bought 600,000 livres worth of land and salt marsh. In 1793–4, the Protestant bourgeoisie of Aunis took over emigré land too. Protestants took advantage of the religious neutrality of the State introduced in 1795. Reformed communities re-established themselves independently at La Rochelle and La Tremblade and, in 1802, Bonaparte’s organic articles which supplemented the Concordat with the Pope, regularized their existence.8

*** On the opposite side of the Charente from Saintes Cathedral stands the Abbaye aux Dames. At the time of the Revolution it was important in the life of the town as a large-scale employer, if nothing else. It ranked as a powerful institution. Besides whatever spiritual value it may still have had, its abbess wielded real and actual power as the seigneur of a great number of villages in the Charente-Inférieure and elsewhere. The closure of the Abbaye did not only involve de-Christianization, but the breaking of seigneurial control. To all intents and purposes, the abbess was attacked on the same basis as those noble seigneurs who lost their status in favour of the authorities in the municipalities, the districts and the departments. The abbey was suppressed as a religious house, along with all the others in the town, because it presented a challenge to the maire at the Hôtel de Ville and the district and department along the river at the Hôtel de Monconseil.

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12. Saintes: Abbaye aux Dames.

Marie-Magdeleine de Baudéan de Parabère was the last abbess of Saintes. She had presided over the Abbaye aux Dames for 30 years by virtue of the Papal Bull by which she was instituted in 1762, and was not the sort of person you argued with. She fought against the closure of her abbey, but became ill and died while still just about in office. She had been born fairly close to the throne of France, being the daughter of the Regent Philippe d’Orléans’s mistress. She had battles with the two last bishops of Saintes. Monseigneur Germain de la Chastaigneraye complained about her to the Parlement of Bordeaux in a dispute over the presentation of a curé to the parish of Balanzac in 1770. She was also in dispute with Bishop de La Rochefoucauld, who found the abbey in a state of anarchy, arranged for its suppression by the king and its replacement with a chapter of canonesses, but she managed to obtain a delay: three sisters were

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expelled by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, but the ordinance for suppressing the abbey was revoked early in 1789. As abbess, she had the right to present curés to 53 parishes. She was seigneur of some parishes, as was the case in Corme Royal, Bernard’s birthplace, and Pont l’Abbé de l’Arnoult, although the curé there was appointed as a commendatory prior by the crown. There is a record of her successful dispute about rents with her vassals in the parish of Vix in Poitou.9 The Supreme Being, however, had no need of monks and nuns. A radical suppression of the Abbaye aux Dames, along with the other religious orders for men and women in the town of Saintes was ordered. The Cordeliers convent was closed. The buildings of the Carmelites, the Daughters of Our Lady, and the Sainte-Claires satisfied the far greater need for prisons than ever appeared before. The Grey Sisters’ convent became a soap factory and the Jacobins’ property was sold and became a distillery.10 Meagre information about what happened at the Abbaye aux Dames has been pieced together to a certain extent by a study of the register of the debates of the Directory of the District of Saintes.11 The Abbaye aux Dames stands back behind the Saint-Pallais quarter and dominates a large, open space. The church is of cathedral dimensions, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with remarkable Saintongeais sculptures around its west door, a spacious nave, a sturdy crossing which supports the tower and a conical spire, and an east end that seems to have served as a model for the sanctuaries of many village churches in a wide area around. Added to the church, on the usual Benedictine pattern, are the conventual buildings surviving in their seventeenth-century form, with accommodation for each of the sisters individually in their cells, and all the common rooms and offices on the ground floor. The buildings are on a palatial scale, ideal for all its original and subsequent uses: an abbey for women, a prison, a barracks, and now a music academy. As the legal disputes already mentioned suggest, by the time of the Revolution the abbey was more about power than prayer, and the rationalists could bring many arguments to bear in support of their decision to close it: not least that the residents of houses in Saint-Pallais hard by complained about the incessant sound of the bells calling the sisters to their offices at all hours of the day and night. There is very little left as material for a connected history of the end of the abbey, but the Directory’s records show that on 11 August 1790

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commissioners were appointed to make an inventory of its deeds and papers, and on 11 November 1791, an archivist was appointed to decipher them. The first archivist was one of the sisters, but she was soon dismissed. On 1 ventôse year 3 (19 February 1795), municipal officials were put in charge of the abbey archives. The Directory of the District of Saintes was in total control of any money spent in its area of jurisdiction, and all the clergy had to come to it at regular intervals to claim their salaries as state officials. The abbey’s income and expenditure was also recorded in the records, and it is noted that the abbess demanded that her tenant farmers should be ordered to pay their rents on Saint John’s day as usual, in view of the outgoings she had to meet. There were 24 sisters to be maintained as well as a number of people who had to be paid wages. The District Directory decided that, instead of waiting for a decision from the National Assembly about a definitive course of action, the Departmental Directory ought to decide the issue, at least provisionally, for itself. The Directory decided that the sums due on Saint John’s day were still required from the farmers. It appears that maintained seigneurial dues were still coming to the abbey without the uproar that took place around Saint-Jean-d’Angély at the same time. The calling of the Estates-General with the drawing up of the cahiers de doléance had not made the abbess any less conscious of her claims as a seigneur. The National Assembly’s law of 13 February 1790 abolished all monastic vows and religious orders unless it could be proved they had value as educational or nursing establishments like the ones in La Rochelle. Monks and nuns were free to leave the monasteries and convents and were able to apply for pensions. Monks who decided to stay in the monastic houses would be re-grouped when most of the houses were shut down, but nuns were allowed to remain in their own convents for the time being. This created a problem for priests such as Bernard Pontet, who was one of four priests at the parish church of Saint-Pallais, just next door to the abbey, and who ministered to communities of nuns. He claimed his quarterly salary from the district in 1790 and then, in February and July 1791, a different amount in his quality as joint-minister in the church since his post as chaplain to the abbey had virtually been abolished. The District Directory said that the former abbey was the concern of a private cult which could not be paid any money out of the public treasury. Pontet could have no more than 500 livres instead of the 1,425 for which he had asked. On 13 October he took the oath, and asked for his reinstatement in terms of his accommodation,

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his stipend of 1,000 livres as chaplain of the chantry chapel where he said masses for the souls of dead abbesses, and 800 livres as one of the priests of Saint-Pallais. He was told that his oath had not been taken within the space of time allowed, and he had been replaced in the parish by a constitutional priest, so he could still have no more than 500 livres, the district officials said. However, they added, if he ministered to one parish only ‘with the hope of obtaining the votes of the electoral assembly by sustained zeal and patriotism’, then sought canonical institution by Bishop Robinet, he might possibly improve his financial situation. But, within a year, the church of Saint-Pallais was a saltpetre workshop. After 20 April 1792, gunpowder and cannon for the war against the kings of Europe took priority over everything else.12 The abbess was required to make a ‘patriotic contribution’ in the same way as all the constitutional clergy were. Each sister had made application to the state for a pension of 700 livres. Payments had already been made to the resident sisters, including the abbess’s own stipend of 2,000 livres, and the abbey’s income had been assessed for the two tax periods of 1791 and 1792 on 40,500 livres. The tax expected by the Directory was 2,250 livres. There was a capital of 38,250 livres, on which the patriotic contribution for these two periods would be in two equal sums of 3,187 livres 10 sols; ‘this last sum is made up of the third part of a quarter of the said 38,250 livres’. As for a reduction of 3,800 livres, proposed by the Municipality of Saintes to account for repairs done on the house already submitted, the District Directory agreed that this was right. So, for a while, the Abbaye was being treated with consideration. A law passed in the National Assembly on 22 April, two days after the declaration of war, ordered that the bells of all suppressed religious houses had to be sent to the treasury. Dame de Parabère did her best to resist this law, asking – five weeks after the decree was passed – that she herself should have ‘the oversight of the taking down of the bells of her convent until a reply came from the minister of the interior to whom she had presented a petition on the subject’, but this request was declared unacceptable.13 However, she persisted in asking for permission to keep the clock bell on the grounds that it told the time in the local community and regulated the hours of the working day in the Saint-Pallais quarter. The municipality persuaded the District Directory that the abbess had a point, and on 31 May 1792 a judgement was made that the law of 22 April could not be extended to bells which were integral parts of a clock. The National Assembly had given no pronouncement in this respect: the clock was to be

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considered ‘of a public utility by advantage of its situation’. It was agreed that the bell should remain in place or should be put back if it had been brought down already. But then it was learned that the men who brought down the bells from the former abbey ‘had caused the clock bell to be broken’ and the Directory agreed that it should be replaced by one of the remaining bells.14 François-Guillaume Marillet had his piece to say about the Abbey bells. On 29th March, two famous municipal officers, Boisnard and Canola, went to take away the nine bells of the abbey which made up a charming carillon, the largest serving the clock. Madame the Abbess de Parabère had provided them herself. There was silver in each one, which gave them a silver tone. She had offered to pay the value, but the monsters did not want to listen to her. Boisnard replied to the prioress . . . that the material mattered little, but the sound annoyed the townsfolk and greatly disturbed them: that they attached more to the sound than to what they were made of. There was a sort of movement in the suburb of Saint-Pallais on this subject, and a petition had been presented to the department which had been signed by all the residents who wanted the preservation of the bells . . . but it had been useless. A guard of fifteen men had been put on the gate, no one had got in and the wicked had done whatever they wanted. They wanted to break them up in the church so as to give heartbreak to the community but they decided to smash them in the yard, outside the community living accommodation. Madame Baudéan de Parabère . . . had so much sorrow at this that she fell ill. She added that [her sorrow was increased by] one of her nieces, Mlle de Lantern, whom she had brought up from the age of two to the age of twenty-one, leaving with M. and Mme Lantern who had made the journey from Paris expressly to collect her. This removal of the bells was a manifest theft and I compare the National Assembly, all the clubs, the municipalities and the rabids of the towns to one band of thieves for which the headquarters is in Paris from where the orders are given to many detachments to steal and to pillage everywhere.15

Marillet believed the first thing he heard this time, and perhaps it was not true. On the same day, the district agreed to the request of the Municipality of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud to be allowed to exchange its own church bell for one of those that were taken down from the abbey. The council offered to pay above the bell’s price and provide the difference in weight of metal if it were needed, on condition that the Municipality of Saintes

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paid the transport costs. The electors of Mantels exchanged their broken bell with one from the abbey. So did the residents of the Saint-Vivien quarter in Saintes. The judgement said that ‘the churches preserved for the cult (i.e. religious worship) face the necessity of providing a clock for the purpose of calling the citizens together at the times set for divine service’. On 25 June, it was agreed to reimburse the abbess with 175 livres advanced to her as salary for the second quarter of 1792, addressed to the lady Labonnardelière (sic), ill in her family and having fixed her dwelling in the District of Civray, as it was said on the certificate provided for her by the Municipality of Excideuil to prove where she was at the time. Laws passed on 3 and 4 August 1792 suppressed most female religious communities and ordered the nuns to leave their convents which were to be disposed of as national property.16 In September 1792, when the abbess requested permission to rent out the community’s buildings until such time as those who were likely to purchase them took them over, the District Directory replied that such a course of action was unacceptable. The National Assembly’s ‘intention was not only to procure new resources for the state, but also to dissipate the remaining fanaticism for which the former monasteries offer too easy a retreat’. Another request came to the District Directory ‘from the Lady Baudéan Parabère on 23rd September at mid-day’. She asked that ‘as a result of her great infirmities and her continual fevers, she should be allowed to remain in her apartments until she was recovered, at the charge of paying rent for them to start on 10th October next’.17 In view of the certificate from Doctor Fourestier dated 18 October pointing out the serious state of her health, the attorney-general took note: ‘We think that because of the grave illness with which the superior of the Benedictines finds herself afflicted at this time, she can be allowed not to leave the house until her convalescence permits her to vacate it without danger, or until the sale of it is completed.’ In accepting her request, however, the administrators were anxious to point out that if she made any kind of fuss, they would not comply with her wishes, but they wanted to show themselves as being concerned for a sick old woman. The abbess died on 30 September.18 After she was dead, the question of what to do with her belongings remaining in her rooms arose. There was said to be a sack containing 1000 livres in a cupboard in her bedroom, and another one containing assignats for household expenses for which the remaining nuns made a claim. The

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opinion of the municipality, reached as a result of the attorney-general’s advice, was that the law of 4 October 1790 did not allow the sisters to gain anything from it if they left the abbey to recover their ‘political’ (secular) existence. They could not keep the furniture taken with them when they left, nor could their relations inherit it. They could not even sell the furniture from their cells, as was the case for the sisters who had already left the convent and for the abbess who had died still resident there, according to article 24 of the law of 16 August 1792.19 The Directory officials claimed that the money claimed as salary by the sisters was not in the cash box in the abbey treasurer’s office, where such sums ought to have been kept. If it had been, then that money would have been separate from any other which might have been inherited by relations of the ci-devant abbess. Well before her death, the account of each sister ought to have been finalized at the time the law ordered their dispersal. All others who presented themselves as distant relatives of Dame Parabère, since the law did not recognize them, were declared ineligible to benefit from their claims. As reported in the Directory’s minutes, the situation of her heirs was very confused and the wrangling went on after the death of the abbess for another three months – a particular bone of contention was the inheritance of an expensive harpsichord. What is remarkable is the reluctance to come to an agreement on the part of the District Directory, whose attention was on anything which might produce cash for the war effort. Former abbey servants who had worked there for a long time were considered, and a decision was made that redundancy payments should be paid to them in accordance with the law, now that they were out of work. The money was to come from what was left of the abbey’s capital. There is quite a lengthy list of these former employees drawn up between December 1792 and April 1793, together with a record of what they each were to receive. The redundancy payments that the district decided upon, which would have provided a lot of artillery pieces and a great number of military uniforms, appear to have been 28,037 livres, not counting the open-ended payments offered to some of the employees. It may have appeared a generous settlement to all but the shepherd who got nothing after 13 years’ service, but there is no confirmation that it was ever paid. Unless it was a one-off payment settled immediately, it may have gone the same way as the salaries of constitutional priests which ceased entirely in 1795. On 7 October 1792, the department had examined a proposition dealing with the lodging of priests who had refused the oath but were infirm and more

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than 60 years old in a building opposite the west front of the abbey church. It contained 24 bedrooms with fireplaces which did not need repairs, but they turned it down in favour of the Carmelites up on the ramparts,20 where, instead of being looked after, the old men were systematically pillaged, and at least one died as a result of the treatment he received there.21 On 22 October 1792, the District Directory decreed that the sale ‘of horses which were found at the abbey and were the cause of useless expense’ should be announced by posters. The remaining sisters were being expelled ‘to avoid the cost of guarding them’, and the impending sale of the buildings and orangeries was announced by posters. On 15 October, the citizens of the church of Saint-Eutrope asked for the altar and the iron stair-rails from the abbey church, and the altar alone, not the stair-rails, was given, ‘the National Assembly having dedicated this material to the manufacture of pikes’. The search for metal objects ran on and on.22 The profit from the sale of the abbey furniture was announced as a mere 32 livres 10 sols, and the auction lasted three days.23 A payment of 175 livres for the quarter year just completed was made on 30 January 1793 to Catherine Maron, ci-devant Benedictine, last of the nuns of the Abbaye aux Dames in a long line from the foundation of the house by Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, and his wife Agnès de Bourgogne in 1047.24 In January 1793, the Directory proposed to make the former convent into barracks, and on 7 May a sum of 206 livres was set aside by the municipality to pay the workmen who had knocked down cupboards in the churches and buildings of religious communities at the instigation of the Republican Society. Three workmen gained approval for their invoice of 55 livres for taking down the stalls in the choir of the abbey church in March 1794 and, on 11 July, a man called Bonhomeau was ordered to carry out works for the establishment of a prison at the abbey. Between July and October, Guibaut and Rocheteau, who were market gardeners, complained about the loss of fruit for the sick and convalescents still at the abbey, and there was a complaint from a farmer of the fields next to the gardens against the orchards and fields being taken as a cemetery, but that is what happened on 1 October.25 From then onwards there is a list of depredations: the organ pipes could be taken by anyone who wanted them and gave their equivalent weight in metal in exchange for them. It was commented that ‘this exchange will turn to public instruction and the Republic will lose nothing’. The district

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official Vanderquand, whose signature on many documents is enormous, was allowed to rent part of the garden for 36 livres to start a new orangery. M. Jules, director of the military hospice, was allowed to take the planks of a wooden staircase from the choir for work to be done at his establishment. The municipality was able to take 25 planks for use at the 11th Hussars depot. Rullier, another locksmith, received 25 livres for more work involved in making the abbey into a prison. To make sure that the symbolism for a national property was right, workmen were sent into the buildings to chisel off all the noble coats of arms they could find in the stonework, as Bernard de Saintes was doing at the same time while taking over the Duchy of Montbéliard from the House of Württemburg.26 In the darkness of what was soon to happen, a quiet note in the council records becomes something of ominous proportions when we learn that Manseau, a locksmith, was paid eight livres for work done to enable the imprisonment of priests who had refused the oath. It is probable that people like him became a bit better off in these years with so many people being put under lock and key. An officer called Dubousquet asked if the abbey could be emptied to accommodate his company which was guarding some Spanish deserters and several other detainees. The department conceded the enjoyment of two gardens adjoining the abbess’s flowerbed free to army veterans when the previous letting expired. Old glass panels could be taken away to replace those that were broken at the military hospital. Officials paid a visit in July 1794 to see whether there would be room to bring the detainees dispersed elsewhere at present in four prisons into the abbey. ‘Too many risks would be run’, the attorney-general advised the district, ‘if the prisons stood on one side of this enclosure and the warders found it impossible to stop communication with the other side where there would be shops and your grain stores . . . under the gaze of evil doers who could be enemies of the people. I think that you should not even look at the property.’27 As we shall see, that opinion did not prevail for long.

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uring the autumn of 1792, the priests who had refused to take the Oath to the Constitution made their way to the frontiers facing all sorts of indignities and insults and some were even murdered on the journey. Nobody risked protecting them for fear of being denounced for it. Priests from the coastal diocese of Saintes were perhaps more fortunate than those whose parishes were far inland because they managed to reach Spain in safety. Even so, they could not avoid being searched by customs men at border posts or robbed by officials as they passed checkpoints on roads and rivers. The Departmental Directory of the Charente-Inférieure had ordered that priests leaving the country could take only 50 livres with them. Every jack-in-office took upon himself the right to enforce this edict. An example of this is found in the registers of Annepont, a little parish near Taillebourg, where the municipality minutes record the departure of their curé in the entry for 10 September 1792, a month after the overthrow of the monarchy and a week after the massacres in Paris: M. le Curé Jean-Baptiste David decided to leave for Spain. With him was the Curé of Nantillé, Samuel Saint-Médard.1 They slept at Taillebourg and the same night took a boat on the Charente at about two hours after midnight, and arrived in the afternoon alongside a guard post, where the officials paid them a visit, took all the silver they found on them and gave them paper money instead. On Wednesday at three o’clock in the afternoon, they raised anchor and set sail for their destination in a brig owned by M. Simmonet of Saint-Savinien who took great risks with such priests on board.2

When the time for voluntary exile had expired, department, district, and even municipal officials were writing to their higher echelons of power to ask where to send any refractory priests who were denounced to them for not having left. The government ministries in Paris seemed to be making up

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their replies to the departments as they went along.3 The attorney-general of the Charente-Inférieure, Réné Eschasseriaux, wrote to the minister of the Interior from Saintes to tell him that three priests who had not left the Republic in the time the law allowed had been taken to La Rochelle. He asked him to give the orders for them to be transported to Guyana. After three weeks, the harassed Roland replied that Eschasseriaux’s predecessor had already asked him that question, but he could not answer it until the navy minister had announced his intentions.4 On 14 January 1793, another law was passed which offered a reward of 100 livres for denouncing any refractory priest who still had not left France. More laws, dated 18 March and 23 April, said that all refractory priests found on the territory of the Republic had to be brought before a military tribunal and ‘suffer the death penalty within twenty-four hours’.5 Those who sheltered priests, even if they were their relations, would also suffer the death penalty and a certain number of priests came out of hiding and surrendered to the authorities to save their protectors. In May 1793, the new navy minister, Dalbarade, drew up a plan for the deported priests to settle at Macary, a long way from the main settlement of Cayenne, so that they could have no influence on disaffected colonists in Guyana.6 They would become farmers, with 30 or 40 slaves to assist them, women to set up a laundry, and an armed force to keep them in their enclave. The expenditure involved would soon be recovered by selling their produce, and their fanatical influence would soon be eradicated. Necessary provisions were listed: building materials, livestock, tools, and furniture for three-man huts. The cost was an estimated 2,198 livres for each deportee and no more than 200 of them were expected at a time. The Convention ordered Dalbarade to draw up the decree based upon his plan, and he turned all his suggestions into articles for it.7 Meanwhile, the departments did not wait for orders. From April 1793 onwards they sent many priests condemned to deportation to Bordeaux and Rochefort. On 14 December 1793 at Saintes, it was reported that in a session of the general council [of the Departmental Directory] two gendarmes appeared at the office . . . who said that they had been ordered to bring forty nine priests sentenced to deportation in the Department of the Allier to Saintes to be taken to Rochefort, and the Council has ordered Citizen Macaire, one of its members, to go to the house of the former abbey to choose the place in which to lodge them while they are waiting for vessels to transport them down the river Charente.

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Macaire made his report, and the part of the Abbaye aux Dames called New Lodgings was used to accommodate the priests. Mattresses and other necessities were put there, and a guard was available once they arrived. There were 51 priests on the gendarmes’ list, but one was dead, and another was too ill to go any further and had been left in a hospital on the way. The president of the Departmental Directory, the Protestant shipowner Garesché, was satisfied enough to sign this report because Catholic priests of the old order did not exist any more.8 During a debate in the National Convention on 24 July 1793 Dalbarade’s project was summarized. Then Georges-Jacques Danton suggested leaving them on a beach in Italy instead: That’s the country for fanaticism, and it was in that way that the former government dealt with the Jesuits . . . The empire of the Holy Father [is] where we must concentrate this priestly stink. It will make an explosion there, doubtless, and destroy itself. The furtive return of these fanatics is feared, but if they dare to come back, we must consider them as outlaws under pain of death . . . if they return to French territory, then they die!

Pierre-Joseph Cambon, chairman of the Convention’s finance committee currently presiding over the inflation of the assignat, said Italy was too near: If you throw a large number of these malefactors into Italy, you will see them forming the advance-guard of your enemies, taking Nice and HauteProvence from you . . . What merits more discussion is maintaining the decree which sends them to the New World. In any case, that would be an economy: it is a mistake to fear the expense of chasing this political pestilence far from the Republic.

Maximilien Robespierre intervened with fastidious circumlocution: It is permitted for one to be astonished at the circumstances in which such a delicate question is being brought up. The National Convention has passed a wise decree to remove the contagious pestilence of the fanatical priests far from French soil, and today it is proposed to it that they should be brought back to us . . . but it is forgotten that, if they remain in France, they will always be a rallying point for conspirators, and that a sedition could at any moment deliver and release these ferocious beasts into the midst of us. It is forgotten that from the threshold of their prison they could again poison the people by their sacrilegious writings. The difficulty of transport is used in opposition to this decree which takes them far from us. I do not recognise this difficulty at all . . . I demand that the decree be carried out.

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Antagonism towards the clergy on a national scale was clearly represented in this debate, but the decision was referred to a committee.9 Nevetheless, the captive priests continued to be brought from all over France to Bordeaux or Rochefort.

*** In the phase of the Revolution known as the Terror, when the constructive elements of what had been achieved disappeared down a side street while the main road was taken over by the representatives on mission from the National Convention and its Committee of Public Safety, the priests would be made to ‘disappear’. Lequinio actually used the word in a report to the Convention.10 The Popular Society at Rochefort represented this extreme view, and sent a letter to the National Convention to announce that the monster of fanaticism is dead; the Eternal is not known here any more; [the new] cult is the love of humanity, of liberty and equality. There are no more Christians, neither Catholics nor Calvinists. There are only men who reason as true republicans, totally delivered from superstitions.11

Constitutional priests who had changed their minds about the oath were sent to the revolutionary tribunal at Rochefort. One of them was Louis-Marie Léonard, curé of Marennes, whose active support for the Revolution in his parish did not prevent him from being sentenced to deportation for life. Once on board the Deux-Associés, he was given eight days in irons, and died on 13 August.12 For nearly a century, what happened in the sea-roads of the île d’Aix off the coast of the Charente-Inférieure was kept as a local secret and away from the interest of outsiders. Memoirs had been published in Rome from 1796 onwards telling what had happened after the priests had been condemned to deportation in Guyana, but in order to achieve his Concordat with Pope Pius VII, First Consul Bonaparte thought it best ‘to throw a veil of silence over the persecutions of the previous time’.13 What had happened was hardly known at all until the Second Empire,14 and not until the early years of the twentieth century, when Abbé Lemonnier and others worked to have the priests recognized as martyrs, was it really public knowledge. Napoleon III needed the support of Catholic voters, so those who wrote on the subject were able to publish the information that the 245 priests who were buried on the île Madame came from the hulks moored off Rochefort.

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The Republican government’s intention in 1793 was to remove the priests from French soil altogether, but it was not decided how they should reach the Namibian desert or Guyana or how they should be treated once they arrived there. Eight hundred and twenty nine priests from more than a third of the new departments of France were brought to Rochefort. Many of them were subjected to premeditated humiliation during the stages of their journey. The Directory of the Allier sent 101 priests in winter time in two convoys, setting off with an interval of four days between them. One of the priests recalled what had happened when one of these convoys reached Limoges.15 A great number of donkeys and goats covered in vestments worn at mass advanced in a long file. A huge pig came at the end which had a mitre fastened on its head designating it as ‘The Pope’. The producer of this charivari halted the carts as they arrived and ordered the priests to stand in two ranks among the animals to go in procession through the town with them. In the principal square they were halted round a scaffold with a guillotine on it. The circle was opened up to let in gendarmes leading a refractory priest whom the town’s revolutionary tribunal had just condemned to death. He was executed there and then. The executioner raised the head which he had just cut off and said, ‘The criminals whom you see deserve to be treated like this one whom I have now executed. Which one do you want me to start with?’ The crowd shouted, ‘Whichever one you like!’

Nothing further than this psychological torture happened that night and the priests reached Saintes on Christmas Eve, as we have seen, but they were not taken any further because nothing was ready at Rochefort. They passed cold nights in the unheated rooms of the Abbaye aux Dames, along with groups from other departments before they went on two days later. One of the priests with them from the Haute-Marne said that they travelled on carts, then on boats and then, at night and in the mud of the marshes, on foot. The older men went into the water up to their knees, and fell into ditches from which the others pulled them out, frozen with fear and cold. When they reached Rochefort, they were put on the ship Borée adapted for use as a hospital. Rochefort had its committee of surveillance like everywhere else, and its revolutionary tribunal had been set up in the Saint-Charles Hospital. The military commander of Rochefort was Captain Chevillard, who, with his elder brother, had been a shipwright involved in the construction of the Hermione16 and in the drawing up of the list of grievances for the naval engineers of the town in 1789.17 He had never held a naval command, and yet was

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now in charge of the port of Rochefort, taking up his post at the beginning of January 1794, just as the priests began to arrive. While they waited for their floating prisons to be prepared, the priests were put into others made available in the town. One was a former gunpowder magazine called Saint-Maurice, and the refectory of the Capucin order in the town centre was adapted as another. The diet was bread and water. As more priests arrived, ships were made available. At first there was the Borée, then the inaptly named Nourrice, and later the Bonhomme-Richard, already deprived of her masts.18 When they went on board, the deportees were subjected to the first of many of the regular body searches in which they lost what possessions they still had, and what little money they may have been able to keep sown into their clothes. Whenever sailors found rosaries and crucifixes, they ridiculed them. Most of their prayer books were taken. Soon there were punishments even for being seen to look as though they were praying. In February 1794, Chevillard chose the Deux-Associés as suitable for holding 400 men as the navy minister had ordered him. Arrangements were made to take them on board and he set about finding a commander for the ship. He chose Citizen Laly, no more than an Enseigne de Vasseau in rank who had command of La Dédaigneuse, an armed sloop. He chose him for his revolutionary convictions and his impressive physique since he would be able to intimidate the priests. Laly was a foul-mouthed brute with a frightening expression on his face. He appointed subordinate officers who, like him, were zealous Jacobins above anything else. The crew was backed up by a hundred soldiers from the Army of the West.19 The Deux-Associés was listed as a flute, which meant she was a requisitioned and armed merchant ship. She had been built as a slaver with a high and insurmountable barrier between the crew’s quarters astern and the slaves’ quarters forward which passed through all decks.20 Where the priests would be required to sleep was the infamous between decks (entrepont), and they would be locked in each night. The argument about the destination of the deportees was still going on.21 The representatives on mission in Rochefort wrote to the Committee of Public Safety to say that to take them to Madagascar would be too expensive, and recommended the north African coast between Cape Bogador and Cape Blanc22 ‘to make them do penance among the Moors for crimes which they have committed against the human race’. They added that this step would also ‘have the merit of concealing from our enemies the route

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which this expedition ought to take’, since the presence of the British fleet cruising off the Atlantic ports would prevent a passage to Guyana or to West Africa. Chevillard reported to the navy minister on 10 April 1794 that 400 prisoners were already on board the Deux-Associés as ordered, but the first number given ‘had increased to one more considerable’ so he intended to use the Washington, a vessel of 600 tons registered in La Rochelle as of the same type as the Deux-Associés, ‘to make a second expedition’. She had been lent without charge by Citizen Rémisy, a buyer of national property who would become a sub-prefect during the Empire. Chevillard seemed to think that a journey across the Atlantic was still feasible. Two days later he was calling the 288 priests imprisoned on the Washington ‘ces gaillards-là’, and recording all the money and valuables taken from each one of them. The money was handed over to the Rochefort Municipality after ten days. On 14 April, the Deux-Associés was moored off Fort Lupin and the first deaths on board were recorded. On 16 May, Captain Gibert took command of the Washington and there were more body searches in quest of loot when the clergy disappeared on board her. Chevillard asked officials of the Ministry of Marine and Colonies where the ships were going. The answer was that the Washington and the DeuxAssociés were to ‘defend the Roads of Aix’. In other words, they were not going anywhere. The two decrepit vessels made their way out of the Charente estuary, hove to off the île d’Aix, dropped anchor, and stayed there.

*** There was a wide cross-section of all French churchmen, constitutional priests as well as refractory ones, confined on the two vessels.23 There was the whole range of cathedral canons, vicars-general, collegiate priests, chaplains of this or that, and vicars, among the secular clergy. Some were still in deacon’s orders, like Michel from Nantes, who provided a valuable source of information in his reminiscences. There were also monks and friars representing all the orders to be found in France at the time. Several of these were not priests at all, but lay brothers in a bewildering variety of Franciscan orders: Capucins, Carmelites, Recollects, and many different sorts of Benedictines. There were representatives of recognizably noble families, like Labiche de Reignefort or de la Romagière, and they were usually members of cathedral

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chapters or collègiales. There were sons of royal lawyers and parlementaires, sons of members of the liberal professions, and a good few who were sons of tradesmen. It would be an oversimplification to suppose that the Jacobins in charge of the Terror singled out their natural class enemies for persecution. Yet, forgotten about as much as possible off the coast of the Charente-Inférieure, the priests could not get in the way of rationalism or Robespierre’s Supreme Being. Two of the detainees, Michel and Masson, measured the living space in the Deux-Associés, and said in their reminiscences that the 409 deportees who slept in it had only 11 cubic feet each in which to spend the 14 or 15 hours of each night. Abbé de la Romagère, who survived to become bishop of Saint-Brieuc, had risked talking to members of the crew, and had been told that there had never been more than 300 slaves in this space.24 De la Romagère said that if anyone was seen talking to someone else and it seemed as if a plot was being made, the person was shot straight away. Moreover, any ship’s officers or sailors who were caught communicating with the prisoners were punished according to the rigour of the law. Orders were given by the whistle, and the prisoners had to answer with a shout of recognition. Each evening, Captain Laly would order them all between decks for the night. Everyone moved in horror at this, ‘resembling anyone who senses the approach of a tomb in which he is going to be buried while still alive’. They all went below, and the officers had drawn sabres ready to inflict wounds if the movement was not quick enough for them. The first night remained printed on the memory of Abbé Pierre-Joseph Rousseau, later a Canon of Limoges, for ever: I had not even gone below when I found myself already suffocated. An accumulation of fetid and burning breath which stopped me in my first steps came out of the hold. A real effort was needed to go into that burning furnace . . . we were shut up in so cramped a space that our arms had to be against the bodies of our neighbours out of necessity.

‘We were like herrings in a box’, commented Labiche de Reignefort. To relieve themselves in the night they had to crawl across each other to find a place for what was needed and the deck was soon wet and stinking all over. Some became delirious, contracted illnesses, or died of asphyxiation. If they asked for help from a guard, he would only shout some insulting epithet, and add Vive la République! De la Romagère remembered that

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one night a fire broke out and the officers sent a soldier to see if the doors of the hold were shut properly. The lifeboats were ready for the crew if the fire took hold, but they would have left all of us to burn.

Another horror was that although the prisoners had been put below in order to sleep, they were kept awake by the sailors dancing on the deck above them and singing scurrilous songs in which the priests were insulted. This version of a nautical ‘dance and skylark’ was probably ordered by Laly. Food was no comfort to them. Supplies laid in for a long voyage were rancid, and the men who had lost their teeth found weevil-filled ship’s biscuit extremely difficult to eat. The drinking water was often putrid. The main virtue of the handouts of tobacco was that they were wrapped up in old newspapers, the only source of information for the detainees of what was happening in France and the war. Humiliations were normal. Rats’ excrement had to be picked out from the food as the captives ate. Sailors urinated on the priests with foul comments, and on the stores of their food. Reignefort remembers someone being so hungry that he asked for some bits of bread from slops being taken to the two pigs kept by the foremast and, when he was refused, tried to eat whole mouthfuls of the filthy mixture. The clothes they had on were soon in rags and although they did their best to wash them in sea water, they were full of lice. Every now and again more body-searches were arranged: ‘the pretext of this was to inspect the cleanness of our living space, but the real purpose was almost always to rob us of part of what we had managed to keep’. Books were prime targets of the searches since these men of considerable culture were even more deprived without them. They were forbidden to speak to each other in Latin for fear of conspiracy, and de la Romagère noticed a man in a blue coat with no uniform buttons who often went around among the priests listening to what was being said.25

*** Terror was an instrument of government accepted and put to use all over France by now, and Captain Laly used its methods to overawe his prisoners on the Deux-Associés. He chose a victim. After a court-martial presided over by the first lieutenant on 3 May 1794, Canon Antoine Roulhac of Limoges was sentenced to summary

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execution on the basis of an overheard conversation with another prisoner. He was tied to the foremast after all the other priests had been assembled on deck, and sacramental confession was refused. Then they shot him.26 After a few months, some of the prisoners were told by junior officers that his execution was a random choice intended to frighten the others into obedience. Laly duped 17 of his prisoners into signing a petition to the government about their conditions, and then had them put in irons for it. Captain Gibert tried to do the same on the Washington. From mid-April, the dead were being taken ashore to be buried at Vergeroux, and at Forts Lupin and Vaseaux. Attempts were made to isolate the sick by putting them in a ship’s boat let out at a distance with a guard and a few volunteers from among the priests as nurses. Many of those who volunteered as nurses were very soon dead themselves in this typhus epidemic. Frequent burials on shore caused rumours in the villages on the coast about what was really happening on the hulks. Letters written to Chevillard frightened him into sending two naval doctors on board the two ships on 11 July. Their reports were dispassionate and, despite commenting on the filthiness of the ships, asserted that talk of maltreatment was exaggerated.27 Although the report might have allowed him to take no action, Chevillard had l’Indien prepared to take the prisoners off the Deux-Associés to allow her to be disinfected. They were to be taken to a tented hospital on the île Madame, a national property confiscated from an emigré which had not yet been sold, re-named as the île Citoyenne.28 It was near the Charente estuary but easy enough to keep things secret. Meanwhile the coup d’état of Thermidor took place. Robespierre and his associates were dead, but the ship’s officers did their best to keep the priests from knowing about it. There was a slight relaxation of discipline, but little real difference in the way the prisoners were treated.29 They had watched the tents go up on the île Citoyenne from the deck of the Deux-Associés. It was obvious that there were not enough of them. On 20 August, which the politically correct called 3 fructidor, the move to the island began for those who were ill. The sick were carried by their fellow prisoners who had volunteered to nurse them across the banks of mud which surround the island at low tide. The less seriously ill were put on board l’Indien. This ship was not a former slave ship, and Captain Boivin and his first lieutenant were completely different in character from Laly of the Deux-Associés. Both of them were sensitive and intelligent, and they had some concern for their

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prisoners, even to the extent of having conversations with them during the short time the priests stayed on board l’Indien. The authorities in Rochefort realized the inadequacies of this makeshift hospital and on the next day sailors and other workmen arrived to make more tents available and build additional simple bunks. There were 160 places for the sick, the exact number which Doctor Béraud had recommended in his report. The able-bodied among the priests spent their time gathering seafood since that was better nourishment than had been taken by the sick for a long time. Crabs and mussels were gathered at low tide,30 and there were a few half ripe apples and some wild berries. Death was still very frequent, and the typhus epidemic also broke out on the Washington. More than 50 died on board in October. Contemporary medicine could only touch this outbreak slowly. Most of the nursing volunteers succumbed to the disease. More than 150 bodies were buried in the sands in the 72 days of the hospital’s existence. Nourishment was minimal: the guards sold foodstuffs to the priests, but they charged as much as they could get. The deacon Michel paid 50 francs for a pint of milk. The camp blew down in the autumn. Some priests heard that the DeuxAssociés was ready for them again, and drew up a petition to the authorities at Rochefort not to go back on board her. A ship’s officer took the paper, along with 200 francs in assignats and someone’s two last gold louis. He burnt the petition once he had the money. The priests who were not ill on the Deux-Associés had been transferred to l’Indien, and they were now put aboard the Washington. That left l’Indien free for the remaining sick priests from the île Madame. By 5 November all the moves had been made, and the convalescents were back on the Deux-Associés. They were no longer locked in between decks at night now, and Captain Laly’s behaviour reflected political change. Winter closed in. They had no blankets. The sickness had not gone away any more than the lice. Even if between decks was clean on the Deux-Associés now, and eight shared a table to have the same rations as the sailors, there were still a great number who were ill or convalescent and they were very hungry. On l’Indien conditions were more bearable, since mattresses and bedcovers were provided, along with soup twice a day, but this was still a prison sentence.31 A change of government in Paris had little effect at this time upon the misery of the priests. All they could do was stay alive long enough to be released. No one in an official position seemed ready to plead their cause. They had disappeared.

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Persecution and Reinstatement

A

fter the Terror was over in Rochefort, a naval officer serving on the frigate Gloire and a Protestant businessman called Elie Thomas wrote to Henri Grégoire1 to say that, although the priests on the ships had broken the law, their treatment was part of the systematic bloodletting which had oppressed the whole of France. They suggested transferring them to Brouage as suspects instead of leaving them to rot in the Roads of Aix any longer.2 On 20 December, the detainees on the Deux-Associés, the Washington, and l’Indien were not alone. The Gentil (or Jeanty) arrived, followed nine days afterwards by the Dunkerque and the Républicain carrying other priests who had been brought to Bordeaux. They were allowed to exchange visits, and concerts were given by the priests from Bordeaux who had managed to keep their musical instruments, but they had no prospect of freedom as they went from ship to ship.3 The ships had become unseaworthy hulks, usually referred to by French writers as les pontons de Rochefort.

*** On 27 December, the Committee of General Security decided to move the detainees on the three Rochefort ships to Saintes. François-Guillaume Marillet’s journal says that as early as 3 January 1795 news reached Saintes about ‘our poor priests detained on vessels at Rochefort and the Isle of Aix to the number of about eight hundred from all the Departments, waiting for their deportation since they were put on those vessels, and of whom nearly six hundred had died’. It is not clear whether this was the first knowledge Marillet had of all this. That he has more to say in this entry suggests it was not so well kept a secret as the authorities hoped it was. 178

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They are eaten with lice and they have so many of them that people are reluctant to approach them. It is being said at the moment that the representative of the people on mission at Rochefort had them transferred to Brouage, but this is by no means certain. There are some among them who have had the good luck to get away and return to their families, but it is a very small number. We must hope that these confessors of the faith do not have to wait to derive pleasure from the sort of government we now have, and that they will come out of their tomb like a second Lazarus . . . 4

As a prelude to the arrival of the priests from the ships, Marillet’s entry on 9 January (he never used the revolutionary calendar in his journal) says that sixty seven men and women, such as fathers and wives of emigrés, suspects and nuns from all orders detained in the Abbaye aux Dames, were set free and that it was announced that all the others would be let out on 13th on the orders of Leriget.

Leriget was the national agent of the district, castigated elsewhere by Marillet for his cruelty, but he comments now that ‘he appeared as kind, honest and well-meaning, as he had been hard and inhuman. This is the conduct that new circumstances have prescribed for him; it is all they require of him.’ Marillet follows this by a comment which represents the immediate reaction of an ordinary citizen to the government emerging after the fall of Robespierre: This new régime is hard to understand. In fact we do not understand it at all. It is the perfect opposite of what there used to be three months ago. All the unhappy men and women [suspects] have been let go, though they have been stripped of all their property and all their furniture; they have been left no more than freedom to breathe at their ease in the midst of their devastation. It is unbelievable.5

The Municipality of Saintes was ordered to make arrangements for the arrival of 366 priests on 10 January, but the Charente and the estuary froze over, so no movement was possible until February, and no adequate quantities of supplies could be brought to the ships off Port-des-Barques; especially now there were six of them. Marillet did not believe that these arrangements presaged any good purpose. The house [i.e., the Abbey] had to be empty by that evening. In truth, we can conceive nothing of the way all the administrative bodies work and

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their way of thinking which is entirely bloodstained (sanguinière): at present very humane, but since they still maintain the character of the Jacobins it pains them much to act differently. So we can say that we still have the tail of Robespierre (la queue de Robespierre) in all its force.6

When at last the thaw came, the transfer decided upon in Paris took effect. The deportees from Rochefort began making their way to Saintes, and those from Bordeaux to Brouage. The priests had to be put back on the ship where they had been incarcerated in the first place. After that, the Deux-Associés and the Washington moved into the mouth of the Charente and made their way upriver. They took four days to get to Rochefort, and when they reached the town, Deux-Associés broke her last anchor and crashed into a Danish ship. Next day, 6 February, boats came to move the priests to Tonnay-Charente, but they were not set ashore until the next morning. They were taken on carts as far as Saint-Porchaire, where they were put in the church for the night. They found the walls inside covered with Republican slogans, and painted over the west door was this: ‘The French people recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the soul.’ Fires were lit in the nave for warmth, but the smoke could not escape from the church and sleep was hard to come by. They arrived at Saintes in the early afternoon of 8 February, and went across the bridge through the Roman Germanicus Arch to the Abbaye aux Dames. Marillet met some of them and heard that, from the Rochefort ships, only 251 priests survived out of 764. All those who had died had done so from misery, from lice, and as the result of the bad treatment which they had been made to suffer . . . They arrived here full of lice and with their clothes in rags. They could not change these because they had been robbed of everything when they had gone on board the ships: clothes, linen, cases, gold, silver, assignats, and even their breviaries, all had been pilfered. They had been fed on very black bread, beans and water. They were crammed together one on top of each other in the sleeping space, and to make them die quicker, they put a barrel full of mixture there, throwing in a red hot bullet so that the vapour would choke them – they even shut the doors. They were all very weak and infirm. The number of charitable acts that were done towards them in the town is surprising. Some carried them off to change their clothes, to delouse them, to get them warm, and a great number went to stay in private homes where they were taken care of. I have a relation called Lalaurencie Chaduri d’Augumois who came to stay at my house and of whom my daughter took great care. They were brought food

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and clothes of all kinds, it could be said that the town stripped itself to clothe them.7

Marillet was very sorry for them and did his best to help where he could. Yet he was in no mood to compromise his principles, and he observes that they were not all honest men. There were forty of them who had taken the oath. Two were married. There was a constitutional bishop among them who had been elected bishop before being ordained priest . . . All these people had been deported by judgements of the tribunals, and it was the change of system to which they owed their better fortune. We are assured that they will not be staying here for long, and that each one will be sent to his respective District. Out of forty who went from the town, so many from the Carmelites and from the Abbey, only two have come back: M. Mongrand of the Charterhouse, and Father Michael, Guardian of the Capuchins at Rochefort or La Rochelle, and they are two worthy men, above all Father Mongrand whom I know particularly well. Every ten days some who have obtained their liberty leave. The picture they paint of the sufferings they were made to endure makes us groan. They find themselves in paradise here. They are very cheerful, and they find amusement in making up songs.

Marillet carefully wrote out one of the songs which they had started to make up as soon as they were told they were leaving the ships to come here. There are 11 triumphalist verses. The Carmelite priests wrote a riposte to it in five more and, Marillet says, ‘This [second] song seems to me the fruit of great riches.’ However happy they might be at their comparative freedom, the priests like everybody else in Saintes were feeling the cold. The word exceptionnel was on many lips in February 1795. Marillet says that the cold has begun again from an impetuous north wind and ice which did not give up until 18th. My thermometer went down to five degrees below freezing. The sun has appeared every day. On 19th there was snow, and the thaw came on 21st. There is the feeling that the cold has disappeared.8

The central government of France was still officially de-Christianized. Moreover, in September 1794, the budget for the cults, out of which the salaries of the constitutional priests came, had been cancelled. In February 1795 there was a decree for the separation of Church and State

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which meant that churches could be opened, but the State had no obligation towards them.9 The municipality assembled the priests to hear a lecture about all this, mainly to reassure them that they had nothing to fear. The municipality petitioned the National Convention for power to close down the committee of surveillance. This was done very quickly. Marillet says it took four days. It emerges that the Convention had already made the decree suppressing such bodies, and this is why the members of the committee in Saintes were looking round for something to justify their existence – and their pay – by interrogating some women and nuns ‘in a Robespierrist manner’ about a crackpot letter supposed to have been written in gold which descended from heaven 20 years before and conferred easy childbirth and a cure for many illnesses on those who had sight of it.10 The priests were certainly welcome in the homes of traditionalist Catholics. There are many Masses said in the town by the priests who come out of Notre Dame [the Abbey] with passes saying their profession was nursing, and greasing the palms of their guardian, Massiou. The houses where there are chapels are those of Mesdames Mongrand [a relation of the admired Carthusian?], the Widow Labbé, Bouyer, Charnier the younger, Dière, Rabillard, Marviaux, Lolalie, Faure, Pichon, Boutinet, Mareschel, Pureau, Grou and Antoine. These are all women of my acquaintance.11

The priests spread out into the villages, accepting invitations to say mass and to hear confessions, baptize babies, and solemnize marriages. All the same, their liberation was slow to appear. The constitutional priests were freed first, but the refractory priests received family letters saying that the Committee of General Security had ordered their liberation whether they had taken the Oath to the Constitution or not. The decisive factor in their being set free was a correspondence from a man from Rochefort, La Mermilière, with someone called Guyot, who was the father-in-law of Louis Legendre, a friend of the late Georges Danton and his supporter in the Cordeliers Club. Legendre used his position on the Committee of General Security to set the victims of the Terror free. We can only speculate about his own feelings, but he had been president of the assembly of the Luxembourg section assembly when it gave the order to arrest those who were massacred in the Carmelite convent garden in September 1792. Some of the priests who had blown in from Bordeaux

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and were still anchored off Port des Barques had been, from January 1795, the first to benefit from his attitude. He then turned his attention to those at Saintes. The painstaking Marillet compiled a list of the priests from different Departments condemned to deportation and who had been transferred to the vessels Vaginston (sic), and Bonhomme (sic) in the roads of Rochefort near the île d’Aix, divided by Departments . . . I did not write this list merely for my own interest but I have regard for several of my children who, not having any fortune, will perhaps be obliged to travel to earn their living, and my hope is of finding protectors for them among these gentlemen in the towns where they might find themselves. In recognition of the welcome that the people of Saintes gave them on this occasion, they will remember the children of this town and be able to give [the same kind of ] help that their fathers gave, and provide them with protection to find them positions or just to help them. This is the motive which makes me do this and I think, in doing justice to their sentiments, I am not deceiving myself.12

He reproduced what the priests said to express their gratitude to the Saintais: It is a sacred duty for us to express our recognition for all your benificence. You welcomed us and drew us out of our misery. Your care impressed us and gave us back our life. You forgot your own needs abundantly to satisfy ours. For more than two months that we have felt the effects of your charity, far from easing off, it seems to have increased. We suffer from not being able to respond to your bounty except by means of words well beneath what we feel, but we raise our hands to heaven on account of your being inspired to care for us, and may that be your recompense.

‘This letter appeared at the time of their being set entirely at liberty, and M. Pibia was its author’, Marillet adds.13 The priests from the ships at Rochefort were not the only ones freed in the town of Saintes. There were those over 60 who had been shut up in ‘houses of reclusion’ like the convent of the Carmelites, and they were set free on 2 April 1795. There had been 30 of them, and already 6 or 7 had come out as a result of individual applications by their families. Marillet was obviously apprehensive about what would happen to those who were free, as in hindsight he might well have been.

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As long as this is not a trap that they mean to hold out to these good people, the new régime of the Convention makes its announcement out of gentleness and humanity more acceptable in them after such a cruel persecution, and we draw from it a very great advantage from the spiritual help that we receive from it. It is good to think that the Convention will maintain this stance.14

On 22 April, as a result of two letters written by Leriget to the municipality, an order was announced saying that all citizens had to go and make a declaration within 24 hours if they were lodging any priests who were not from Saintes in their houses. Intending to do this on account of a Capucin father whom I have received out of humanity into my house when he came out of prison, I was made to read him Leriget’s letter which ordered that they should leave the town within twenty four hours unless they had legitimate reasons of illness which they must come and declare to the District. This conduct of Leriget’s shows that there is in him a decided taste for Robespierre’s system, as a result of which he cannot extract himself from continuing to do as much evil as he can . . . [Leriget does not realize that] in default of any means, after being stripped of everything when they went on the ships, as well as the fact that they cannot find carriages or horses because they are few and far between, and because the few that there are sell for an exorbitant price (to be driven to Angoulême they have been asked to pay six hundred livres, into Perigord two thousand, and to Paris three thousand). But the despotic and tyrannical Leriget wants them to go and they will go. He is one of the men of probity, as the Convention used to call them – and still does. Although they are the ones who have done so much harm, they want to appear to be doing good. What? There will not be a total change? We will not have a new and more just government?15

Freedom was one thing. Being able to travel to the other side of France, perhaps, was another. On 21st July, the Department enforced the decree which ordered the refractory priests who were not from the town itself to leave within twenty four hours to present themselves in their respective communes. The president and another member [of the Departmental Directory] have done all they could to delay this unjust and unnecessary measure, but it has not been possible. The majority carried it. One member in support of the measure has said that it was so necessary that, if we would give him twenty four hours, he would present to the Department a woman who had made her confession to one of these men who had asked her if her husband was a

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patriot, and counselled her that if he was, then she should cut his throat. Can you take calumny and villainy any farther? The statement caused horror. One cannot conceive how the Department has been able to bring itself to make such a decree at a time when all men enjoy liberty . . . 16

As a result of private and public pressure, priests set free in Saintes fanned out over France on the road network to make their way to their families as unemployed men in the many departments from which they had been deported. Some of them had to pass through Paris and they called on Louis Legendre to thank him for their release – to his great embarrassment. The present administration was still as anti-religious as the one which preceded it, and so would be the Directory which followed it. The priests were at liberty at the moment, but they were redundant. In spite of all he had consistently been saying for six years, François-Guillaume Marillet had to admit that life means compromise from time to time. He had been in need of work, and stood for election to office in the town as a judge and was successful. He had been putting his name forward since August 1791, and had been elected a deputy judge without actually attending sittings but, in October 1795, he was elected again as one, albeit the last to be appointed, receiving only 57 votes as compared to 268 for the most favoured candidate. On 19 March 1796, he was elected to office in the civil tribunal and, on 13 January 1797, as we saw in Chapter 5, he had to sign the release paper for Joseph-Honoré Darbelet, who had been convicted of murdering a priest at La Rochelle nearly four years before. Marillet was the sixth among twelve judges elected to the civil tribunal on 3 May 1797. Six months later, he had risen to be the third judge. Finally, in early 1800, he was made president of the Correctional Tribunal in La Rochelle, and he died in office there on 5 March.17

*** There are two postscripts, as it were, to the story of the priests on the hulks moored off Rochefort. The first concerns the ships themselves. Les DeuxAssociés was a Nantes ship, laid off from her rôle as a slave ship to become a transport for chalk and coal before she became a prison for priests. She was returned to her owners in February 1796. A month later, the Washington was wrecked on the Point des Baleines at the north-western extremity of the île de Ré on her way back to Lorient.18

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The other postscript concerns Laly, the captain of Les Deux-Associés. He was charged in court with undue harshness towards his prisoners. His trial dragged on for some time and Lelarge, Chevillard’s successor at Rochefort, wanted to have done with it, especially since no one wanted to serve under Laly’s command any longer. The Committee of Public Safety passed judgement that ‘the wrongs for which he could be reproached appeared to be more those of a lost man than of an accomplice of a régime of blood’. He was authorized to take service in the merchant navy, but ‘he was not judged worthy to be employed by the State’. After that, he lived a mediocre existence back home on the île de Ré. He had no regular income because he was not a commissioned officer.19 One day in Louis XVIII’s reign, he came home to his house at Saint-Martin-de-Ré and found the Abbé Joseph-Nicolas Adam on his doorstep. He was now the Chaplain of the 52nd Regiment of the Line, stationed on the island, and he asked Laly if he remembered him from the Deux-Associés. He said he did, and the priest gave him 20 gold pieces.20 The curé of Saint-Martin-de-Ré recounted in a book published in 1877 that Jean-Baptiste-René Laly was reconciled with the Catholic faith at the age of 70 in the town hospice, and that he died there on 18 April 1836.21

*** The vessels from Bordeaux stayed at anchor where they had fetched up. No one knew what to do with this remaining embarrassing cargo. The priests became a little less numerous as some died and others who had powerful friends and patrons were singled out for release. At one point it seemed as if they would all get away. Every fortnight, the Committee of General Security changed its president, and Louis Legendre was given the immense powers of the presidency of it at the same time as conditions for travel improved in the spring thaw. He decided that all the priests who requested release should be given it. The good news reached the three ships, and lists of detainees’ names were drawn up, once more in too much of a hurry, and there were a great number whose names were left off them, as had already happened on the Rochefort ships. A corrected copy was sent to Paris, but by the time it reached the Committee it was too late because Legendre’s fortnight was over. The priests whose names were not on the first list stayed where they were. On 14 April 1795, the District of Marennes was informed on the orders of Citizen Blutel, representative of the people in the Charente-Inférieure, that

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250 priests were going to be transferred to Brouage from the ships at anchor off Port-au-Barques. Provisions were already on the way; all that remained was to get lodgings ready. Their stay would not last long and it was even thought that they would be allowed to return to their homes within 15 days. On 26 April 1795, 203 priests were put ashore, and taken to Brouage by road, while the other 42, too ill for the land journey, were taken there by boat with such baggage as there was. The number of detainees would never remain static during the year they stayed there. Some who were being looked after in the hospital at Rochefort came to rejoin the others at Brouage after they had recovered enough. Thirty even came to be freed. It is impossible to say how many there were in the absence of an official list.22 They were given no mattresses or palliasses, not even any straw. Six months later, when it was cold, things were just the same. They counted themselves lucky if they could find a plank to sleep on. A whole administrative correspondence insists on the insalubrity and unsuitability of the lodgings. They stayed there for a year and, like their counterparts from the Rochefort ships, were released after a while spent in the abbey at Saintes. Marillet was not keeping his journal any more by that time.

*** During the National Directory under Barras and his successive colleagues, action against the priests all over France began again, and hulks off the isles of Ré and Oléron, and the citadels there, were used as prisons for them. The deprivation was by no means as severe, but it lasted for upwards of four years until the Concordat, which First Consul Bonaparte made with Pope Pius VII. The traditionalist church was well organized because the Pope had demanded that the exiled bishops continue to direct it from wherever they might be. Monseigneur de Coucy, who still regarded himself as bishop of La Rochelle, sent his directives from Pamplona to be copied and distributed at the risk of the women who did it being denounced.23 So the Church reconstituted itself largely by itself and, in 1801, nominations were made to parishes when around a 150 priests returned from exile and exercised their ministry in the former diocese. Then Bonaparte made his Concordat with the Pope and legitimized the situation. The former vicaire of Rioux, Pierre Guillemeteau, came back as curé in 1802 (his natural adversary Citizen Bouquet had died the year before), and continued in office until his death in 1823.

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Many constitutional priests had accepted the progressive ideas of their parishioners and were working in good faith, but when the Revolution was over, they had to retract publicly – or in private before their bishop alone so as not to be humiliated before those to whom they were ministering. The unhappiest were those who had married, sometimes under pressure from local opinion, and they could not take up their priesthood again unless their wives had died, or they were able to have their civil marriages annulled. This was an issue of strangely inflated importance. It seems that about 12,000 of the constitutional priests on a national scale did marry.24 One of them, Montillé, was the curé of Taillant, a village between Saint-Savinien and Saint-Jean-d’Angély. He had been a Franciscan monk and had married the niece of the constitutional bishop of Saint-Maixent in the Vendée. He changed his mind about the married state and, at the time of Bonaparte’s Concordat, was nominated curé of Coucoury, not far away from Taillant.

*** Bonaparte wanted to re-establish the Church to gain the support of royalists and to give greater social stability. His Concordat and Organic Articles of 1802 specified that the bishops in concert with the prefects in each department should establish a new map of parishes. The Prefect of the CharenteInférieure quickly announced the free exercise of the cult and instituted curés of the first rank at a salary of 1,500 francs, more at the second rank on a salary of 1,000, and others as assistants. At the end of 1802, a decree of the Consuls at the instigation of the minister of finance required that an inventory of the churches and presbyteries should be made, and an account given of how much had been devastated, how many chalices melted down at the Hôtel des Monnaies, how many bells taken away, how many churches disposed of, and how many presbyteries sold or occupied by the village schoolmaster. The state repaired the fabrics, with interior repairs to be paid for out of the offerings of the worshippers, the exterior out of public funds. The municipalities quickly voted the sums needed to top up the salaries of the vicars and other clergy, such as chaplains at hospitals, schools, and prisons. Those who sat on municipal councils were most often those who had bought church lands, presbyteries, or libraries of curés and who wanted to be reconciled to the Church while keeping their acquisitions.25

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The Concordat was the imposition of a peace formula for the Church and, to a great extent, it worked. In the context of the refractory priests and their opponents, Bonaparte’s decision to reconcile the consular Republic with the Catholic Church was one of the reasons for his acceptance as Emperor two years later, because it aligned the Church behind his régime and helped to pacify the rebellious Chouans who continued the same struggle as the Vendéans in the west of France. Bonaparte had gone further than any ancien régime monarch in claiming divine authority to support his throne.26 The law of 18 germinal year X modified what had been agreed with Pius VII by means of the Organic Articles, which regulated how the French Catholic Church worked. Contact between the French clergy and Rome was restricted and, after 1804, the Emperor asserted his own control over the bishops and clergy. A similar arrangement was made for the Calvinists and the Lutherans in France, which changed them into supporters of the new regime. All the Christian traditions shared in a new State establishment which was kept until the legislation of 1905 which separated the Church and the State once more.27 What Napoleon did for the Catholic Church in France was appreciated by at least some of the clergy. When Jean Valade, a former dragoon of the First Regiment, married a girl who received a personal dowry from the Emperor at Jonzac on 29 April 1808, the curé, Réné-Antoine de SaintLegier de Boisnard d’Orignac, preached a sermon at the wedding extolling absolute loyalty to Napoleon. He said that princes were the living images of the master of the universe, and that every Frenchman ought to take pleasure in obeying the Emperor. M. de Saint-Legier (whose name is crammed full of nobiliary particles), had been a canon of Saintes Cathedral from 1780, and joined in the early stages of the Revolution as a municipal officer in the town. However, he refused the civil oath and went into exile, first in Spain and then in England. At the time of the Concordat he was appointed curé of Jonzac and vicar-general of the Diocese of La Rochelle, and remained as such until his death in 1835.28 Everything had gone full circle. God appeared to have transferred his choice from Louis XVI to Napoleon in the eyes of his priest at Jonzac. His vicar on earth, Pope Pius VII, appeared to be in agreement.

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chapter 14

Hope and Disillusion

M

inutes of the meetings of the Municipality of the Commune of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud between January 1790 and June 1800, with some additional material from 1800 to 1819, give us an overview of the way the Revolution unrolled in the ten years after 1789.1 Saint-Saturnin became at the time, and remains still, a component of the Canton of Port d’Envaux, the jurisdiction of which extended along the left bank of the Charente to take in seven communes, with one more on the right bank at Saint-Vaize. The canton was part of the District of Saintes, the Directory of which issued decrees. Reports and minutes were sent back to show they had been acted upon. Other instructions, together with copies of new laws from the National Assembly and the later Convention, emanated from the Departmental Directory, located in the Hôtel de Monconseil at Saintes. The rigid control exercised over the municipality in each commune by the three higher authorities (the canton, the district, and the department) is surprising. Behind them was the overarching power of the national government in its successive manifestations including, during the Terror, the representatives on mission of whom we have seen so much already. After the new arrangements had been set in place by means of elections, the king in the National Assembly was the ultimate authority for the time being, accepted seriously by the men of 1790 in these rural areas. As they saw it at the time, what they had asked for in the lists of grievances (cahiers de doléance) was being implemented. The promulgation of The Rights of Man and of the Citizen a few months before these registers opened seemed to include the right to be confident in a future bright with release from arbitrary rule and seigneurial justice, especially in the minds of those who thought that the past had been dark with bondage to it. The word ‘election’ is deceptive to modern ears. The National Assembly had decreed in October 1789, and the king had no difficulty in accepting, that only men over 25 who paid what amounted to a sum equivalent to 193

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three days’ wages for an unskilled labourer in taxes could be voters. At a national level, this qualified them for no more than being able to vote for a social tier of electors who paid the equivalent of ten days’ wages for such labour, and it was they who were to elect the deputies to the National Assembly as and when required.2 The reformed government had provided itself with an unreformed electorate, however unconsciously, on the English model, though without such discrepancies as rotten boroughs or the occasional one-man, one vote system as in Preston or Westminster. At a local level, those who were primary electors were regarded as ‘active’ citizens, as opposed to those with less ability to be taxed, who were ‘passive’ ones. The ‘active’ citizens in the commune of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud were making the decisions in January and February 1790 in a way that neither they, nor their fathers or grandfathers, had ever done in their lives before. This is what they meant by Liberty, and they seemed to expect a great deal from it. They would have to work hard to define Equality in their system, but they managed it with reference to there being one law for all regardless of wealth or social clout. There was not much talk of Fraternity in the early stages. Not many were qualified under this system to exercise voting power, or to be elected to office, and the same men come and go in successive elections recorded in these minute books, despite a purge of the councils and several of their members becoming official suspects for a while. In Saintes, eight hundred ‘active’ citizens were qualified to vote but, as ever, some were more active than others. The first task for the commune’s ‘active’ citizens was to elect a maire and 5 municipal officials to work with him and, after that, 12 ‘notables’ to form a municipal council with the maire and his officials. So we find the 60 or so electors of the parish of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud holding their meeting on the last day of January 1790 in a large room of the house called La Tour opposite the church. The National Assembly had sent letters-patent via the Districts to the Communes, and the meeting was in obedience to the requirements made in them. A notary named Gaillard was elected president of the meeting and the process of electing other men of means to the various offices was set in motion. Charles Girardin3 was elected secretary ‘by nearly all the voters’. Jacques Bucherit, a timber merchant from the hamlet of Saint-James, was elected Maire ‘by twenty three votes out of forty three voting, and he took his oath.’4 Next day, they were back at eight o’clock in the morning to appoint their municipal officers, who included Etienne Yonnet – still signing council minutes ten years later, Pierre Videau, a farmer who lived in Saint-James, a

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merchant called Saturnin Violleau, Pierre Piocheau, who raised beef cattle, and Jean Vignaud, a wheelwright. The notary Gaillard became procuratorfiscal, the precursor of the justice of the peace to be instituted by subsequent laws. These officials took their oath to be faithful to ‘the nation, the law and the King’. Three years later, perhaps they felt a cold shudder when the third object of their oath went to the scaffold. They had to find men to take office as ‘notables’. Their choice fell first on the recently appointed curé, François Lévesquot; then upon the distinguished lawyer, Jean-Baptiste Héard-Fondclair; then Louis Lévesquot, the curé’s father, a wealthy businessman; Pierre Coumailleau, nicknamed ‘LowTide’, who had a river transport business; Michel Glemein, a shoemaker whose family had been immigrants from across the Rhine; Louis Piocheau, who had the mill and baked the bread; Pierre Menet, another baker; Jean Gelinaud, a merchant; and then on Jean Bertrand, Joseph Mallet, and Nicolas Piochaud, who raised beef cattle. Louis Lévesquot was to be treasurer. A roll of taxation recorded that there were 450 hearths in the parish and, ‘taking five souls per hearth, we could have 2,250 souls’. The clearest indications of what they seemed to hope for were expressed in a speech made on 21 February at the ceremony arranged for public oathtaking. The ceremony was also a parade for the National Guard battalion in their new uniforms, though armed with no more than pikes, in the field where the parish market was held. The proceedings began with a speech from the commandant of the battalion, Colonel Gallocheau. His speech does not sound like an official handout. It is likely the words were his own. In any case, it was a clear pronouncement of hopes and intentions spoken by someone who belonged in these parts. It is worth quoting extensively.5 Messieurs, The municipal officials whom you have chosen present themselves today in all honesty to take the oath to exercise the important functions you have entrusted to them with zeal and fidelity. Honourable men, worthy of the trust placed in them have been selected. By their wise administration, they will offer all the advantages of a well-organized society. Taxes and public works . . . will be shared with equality and directed with intelligence, so will not be a subject of vexation . . . The complaints of the oppressed will not be stifled by an imperious voice of subjugating despotism. The French have broken their chains. Free from now on, and subject to the law alone, we will not see the balance of justice incline in favour of the powerful any more, so much so that its sword is powerful for the weak. Such are, Messieurs,

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the glorious effects of a constitution founded upon the rights of man and political equality. Let us open our hearts in recognition towards the enlightened legislators who are responsible for this immortal monument of reason and human wisdom, and towards a just and beneficent monarch who has sworn solemnly to be its most firm supporter. Who of us, Messieurs, has been able to hear without the liveliest emotion the reading of the sublime and caring speech which he made on that occasion? Let us exert ourselves to imitate so great an example. Let us swear to be faithful to the nation, to the law and to the king. Let us swear to maintain a constitution which ought to give happiness to all, and which offers us the inestimable enjoyment of liberty for the first time (author’s italics).

*** Some of the clergy viewed the publication of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy on 12 July 1790 as enough to clinch their loyalty to the nation, as in the case of Bonneau, the curé of Pont l’Abbé d’Arnoult.6 However, five months later, when the National Assembly decreed that all clergy who wished to remain in office must take an oath to uphold the Civil Constitution or be regarded as having resigned,7 tension mounted at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, as it did in many other places. Secretary Girardin had a hard time writing the minutes concerning what happened on 30 January mil sept cent quatre vingt onze,8 which are full of scratchings-out and re-writing.9 At midday, as the processional Mass was ending in Saint-Saturnin church the councillors of the commune went into the vestry to meet the curé, François Lévesquot, and his vicaire, Jacques Saurin. Lévesquot had earlier, ‘being at the altar and addressing his words to all the people’, refused take the Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Girardin asked the two priests if they would take it now in the presence of the people still in church. Lévesquot’s answer was unequivocal. My brothers, I have made an oath to be faithful to the nation, to the law and to the king, to uphold the constitution of the kingdom with all my power in all that is not contrary to religion. They want [‘to force us’ is scratched out, and replaced between the lines with] us to take another oath that I believe to be contrary to [‘religion’ is scratched out and replaced with] the discipline of the church. I cannot do it.

Saurin also refused this oath and both priests offered to repeat the one they had made previously, which the councillors could not accept.

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13. Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud: The Church.

Nothing more seems to have happened for three months,10 until the maire and municipal officials met François Lévesquot on 16 April 1791 to take the keys of his house and the church from him. Lévesquot said he complied only to be obedient to the law, and they gave him a receipt. Lévesquot was required to sign the minutes so that there could be no subsequent argument about what had been said.11 His reply to the officials is interesting. He had accepted the Revolution in the early days of enthusiasm for change, and had not noticeably taken the side of tradition. The respect for the law as the yardstick of behaviour was something he was not denying even at the moment of his being relieved of his office. Very soon after, however, François Lévesquot started saying Mass illegally upstairs in a house his father owned in Port d’Envaux, the next village along the river, and several women ‘who idolized priests and their sayings’ were present at it. Municipal officers, bringing a guard with them, visited the house intending to surprise him before an altar. The Municipality made a detailed search of the said bedroom, in which the legs of a man who was believed to be climbing the chimney were found.

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But what a surprise! Having dragged him down from this chimney, he was recognized as a devotee, Baudry fils, from the commune of Coteaux, brother-in-law of one of the sons of . . . Lévesquot père.12

Maire Boucherit complained that Lévesquot was seditious and incendiary in the things he said and was trying to persuade the villagers that they ought not to recognize the new curé and denying that he had authority to hear confessions or administer the sacraments. Upon which, the Directory [in Saintes] . . . considered that M. Lévesquot . . . conveys audacity and indecency, one could say infamous criminality, to the point of abusing in his confessions the credulity of timorous and feeble souls in extracting promises from them to have no faith in ecclesiastics who have submitted to the law, and has in this way excited them to fanaticism and revolt.13

On 29 April, Lévesquot was denounced to the public prosecutor and left the commune on a boat owned by his father called La Contesse de Grailly. He reached Spain, where he stayed until 1801. He did not take back his parish at Saint-Saturnin, but was appointed to the cathedral at Saintes. He died aged 58 on 5 January 1816 at his nephew’s house in the rue Saint-Maur. Reading between the lines of the minutes, this was the last thing the municipal officers wanted to do to their curé. André-Louis-François Lévesquot had only been in office since 1789, but he had been elected one of the 12 notables of the commune at the outset of the revolutionary period, had taken an oath to support the Revolution on 2 February 1790, and celebrated the mass on 14 July 1790 in the halles at Port d’Envaux to celebrate the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille.14 Lévesquot had not compromised his faith and had obeyed his bishop. Yet the members of the Municipal Council were committed to a fixed position every bit as much as he was, and conformity with the law was, when push came to shove, more important than Lévesquot’s moral scruples.

*** The council had met at six in the morning on Sunday 17 April15 to carry out what had been ordered by the electoral assembly at Saintes. The men on the ground did what they were told as they always had done in the time of seigneurs and royal intendants: the difference now was that they had elected the new authorities themselves.

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They had received papers from Ouvrard, former curé of the parish of SaintSulpice d’Arnoult who had taken the civil oath. A certificate signed by the constitutional bishop, Robinet, declared that Ouvrard had been instituted to the parish. Nobody from Saintes came to introduce him. He came on his own. ‘In consequence’, the council invited Ouvrard to take the Oath to the Constitution again in the church in the presence of the people. We have received him . . . by these presents, as curé and public functionary of the said parish; to this effect we have put him in possession . . . real and actual of the said church and presbytery . . . at six thirty in the morning, the day, month and year above, and M. Ouvrard has signed with us.16

Ouvrard gives every appearance of being a ready-made village cockerel, involved in the beginning of a revolutionary squeeze on his predecessor’s father and brothers. He was elected president of the assembly which was to choose a new council when the time came in December 1791. There had been some undisclosed arguments, because the District Directory had discussed disorder in Saint-Saturnin and sent an inspector, Jean-Jacques-Fabien Baron, a Chevalier of the Order of Saint-Louis, to lend a hand to restore calm. The details of a complaint made against the commune by Louis Lévesquot do not emerge from the commune’s records, nor from a discussion of the matter by the District Directory on 6 August 1792. Powers were given on 11 August to Ouvrard, the new Maire Gaudin, Dr Chouet, and Michel Glemein to look into the matter. A campaign then built up against Louis Lévesquot, as a businessman living nobly, and his family, and we have not heard the last of it.17 The annual assembly met in the church in December 1792 for the election of a third municipal council. Ouvrard was elected president of the assembly again, and Gaudin was kept as maire.18 Ouvrard was elected as Gaudin’s replacement when he accepted the post of sailors’ spokesman, as you were not supposed to hold more than one office at a time. The constitutional curé was breaking the same rule by accepting election as maire. Ouvrard handed over his church registers to the council as required on 18 January 1793, since the recording of births, marriages, and deaths was now a civil matter, but he told the councillors that his accounts were not ready and there were outstanding payments. The council ‘undertook to meet the costs of the cult’. He had taken the Oath to the Constitution but he was no longer guaranteed a quiet life. The king was executed three days after Ouvrard’s church expenses had been taken over and, as the year went on, the commune reflected national

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opinion. The National Convention and its committees were presenting an increasingly hard line towards the clergy who had taken the oath as much as those who were now under a ban. This gave licence for the nation to take over more of the church’s assets since what had been gained from selling its land had been already spent on war. So, on 24 November 1793, after the council members had finished a debate on ‘the need in which the Republic could find itself, and on the help that the whole commune as well as every citizen ought to offer as being inviolably attached to its interests’, they confiscated ‘six great chandeliers in bronze, a silver-plated cross, two silver-plated flasks and a bowl, which will be sent to the District tomorrow to serve their purpose,’ from the former church. Lequinio, the representative on mission, had been hyper-active in Rochefort for three months now and had power in the whole department. He ordered the constitutional clergy to leave their presbyteries and to undergo re-education in communal houses. On his orders, the council took away all the linen from the house and the Temple. Ouvrard was refused a certificate of civism by eight votes to three at a council meeting without explanation19 and then appears to have dropped out of sight in silence. As with Lévesquot previously, no one seems to have raised a hand in his defence. Fear bred acceptance which looked like conformity. The minutes do not say what became of him. Perhaps he laicized himself to adopt another role in the Revolution. Marillet includes him in his list of 62 ‘villains’ responsible for the implementation of the Terror in the Charente-Inférieure as ‘Ouvrard, curé of Saint-Sorlin,20 married, villain by nature’.21 The only other reference is an indefinite one, where his surname appears among those responsible for terror in Rochefort, from which nothing certain can be concluded.

*** The Lévesquot family as a whole had now become suspect. Early in February 1793, Louis Lévesquot had petitioned the council to register a certificate affirming that another of his sons, André (or d’Anville), had been in Amsterdam on business22 for over a year, provided by a Dutch notary and accepted by the commissioner of the Republic for trade with Holland.23 However, André Lévesquot had left the country as an emigré in 1791, which his father had acknowledged by paying the fixed fine required by law from an emigré’s parent. The procurator of the commune, Michel Glemein, refused to accept this certificate, ‘which had every appearance of being false’,

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and sent it to Saintes. Vanderquand and Guivret, district administrators, replied to say, ‘You have acted prudently. It is not with such documents as these that the law is evaded.’ Louis Lévesquot applied again on 17 March, only to have a second refusal from the municipality. Lévesquot was questioned about his son on 29 April, and first replied that he thought he was in Poitiers now ‘to do his studies’ and, afterwards, that he did not know where he was. He had thought he was an emigré at one point and had paid the sum fixed as a fine to avoid trouble. The council still maintained that both the petition for André Lévesquot-d’Anville to come back to France and the father’s new application for the fine of 883 livres 18 sols to be given back to him ‘should be declared null and void’. The anonymous 1906 editor of these council minutes found a file in the administrative archives of the ministry of war under André Lévesquotd’Anville’s first name, Amédée, which records his claim for pay as an emigré officer to a committee set up after Waterloo. This said that he left France on 1 October 1791, was commissioned, and had six years in his rank, with active service in two campaigns.24 It seems that Louis Lévesquot and his son had agreed that it did not matter what story they told, as long as it was the same one. Yet one more Lévesquot remains: Mathieu. He and his father had gone to Saintes together on 24 March 1793 and heard that rebellion had just broken out in the Vendée.25 All who did not have passports or certificates of civism were being arrested, so the Lévesquots went to the municipality and asked for certificates, making a declaration that, although Louis had a son who was in exile as a refractory priest, they did not hold any uncivic opinions, but they needed certificates ‘to obtain their free passage in the places where they had business to do with their commerce’. The officials in Saintes issued them. Back in Saint-Saturnin it was obvious that Louis and Mathieu Lévesquot had applied for certificates of civism in Saintes because they knew it would be very unlikely that they would receive them in their own commune. ‘The formalities had not been observed’, say the council minutes. There were objections to the commune giving new certificates because Louis Lévesquot had caused trouble before, so they were refused ‘automatically’. Certificates of civism were to all intents and purposes identity cards and anyone who did not have one would be considered suspect. They contained full and detailed descriptions of their holders’ personal appearance

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so that there should be no mistake about who they were whenever they were required to show them to a functionary. That is why the Lévesquots, père et fils, were so eager to have them. Municipal councils had been authorized on 1 April 1793 to keep fathers, brothers, and male children of emigrés under surveillance as suspects. If they stepped out of line, arrest was to be automatic. The women in the Lévesquot family were also suspects, Maire Gaudin claimed, after many marks of a lack of civisme, and their arrest was decided upon. On 2 April at two in the morning, the councillors and 20 national guardsmen searched the Lévesquots’ and other suspects’ houses. The Lévesquots were expected to pay for the guard of ten men placed around their house until they could be apprehended, since the only one at home was Louis Lévesquot’s wife, Magdeleine née Chaudron. When she was asked about the whereabouts of her family, she said she did not know where they were. The councillors set seals on the house, and they trusted Madame Lévesquot with seeing they were not broken.26 The committee of surveillance in Saintes declared Lévesquot père suspect and required the council at Saint-Saturnin to arrest him. They replied that he had left his house at six in the morning on Easter Day, but agreed to arrest him if he came back. The council was also asked its opinion by the district about a petition from Madame Lévesquot, who wanted to move into her house at Saintes. The council ‘gave her a favourable opinion for her tranquillity and ours’ on condition that the officials at Saintes would take over her surveillance, and the maire of Saintes agreed this on 20 April. On 29, it was reported that she had arrived there, taken up the Charente on M. Guillieux’s gabare, and he was told, ‘Your gabare is an excellent means of surveillance; it will be desired that all municipalities do the same.’27 Ladies of a certain age are not given to jumping out of moving boats. In contrast to his father, everybody knew where Mathieu Lévesquot was. He was in the former Convent of the Saint-Claires in Saintes, now used as a prison, and had been there since 6 April. Then he was transferred as a detained suspect to Brouage, and the council had given his wife, Claire Couturier, a unanimous refusal to her request for a certificate of civism for him since it was ‘known that he has an émigré brother (André) and another in exile (the priest, François) . . . The citizen Noureau had observed, furthermore, that he (Mathieu) had told him that he regarded the civic oath that he had taken as null and void since he would never recognize the constitutional priests.’

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Claire petitioned for him to come home on 15 September because ‘he would be useful for the grape-harvest’, but he was retained at Brouage ‘as the relation of an émigré, and not having qualified for a certificate of civism. Not having asked to be set at liberty for the cereal harvest, he is no more useful for the grape harvest.’28 There was a certain amount of hand-washing on the part of the council of Saint-Saturnin in Louis Lévesquot’s case. They argued that a new law allowed them to be relieved of making decisions about the sequestration of his property. They claimed it was for the district authority at Xantes to decide those issues. Although there had been no detailed report of his arrest after his earlier disappearance, Louis Lévesquot was set at liberty on 12 November 1794, on the orders of the Committee of General Security in Paris, and he presented his declaration made at Xantes about coming home to Saint-Saturnin on 29 March 1795. Pressure was still being applied to him as the father of an emigré and a deportee, since it was ordered that he would have to pay for the ashes washed in the saltpetre factory established in his buildings at the Prévoté – ‘ashes belonging to the nation which he had spread on his fields’ – or face prosecution.29 The same order from the Committee of General Security had also freed Mathieu. The deprivations at Brouage were severe and he had died in Xantes two months after his release, on 10 January 1795, presumably at his mother’s house.30 As for his father, he appears to have been reinstated in the public esteem as time went on, since he was soon signing minutes as being present at meetings. It is astonishing that the Committee of General Security is involved in decisions concerning the minutiae of business in individual communes all over the nation. The Republic was indeed One and Indivisible.

*** In contrast to the general fearful acceptance of the situation that set in, there were a few incidents which show that it was just possible successfully to resist the new authorities if their opponents understood the law themselves. At the Château de Panloy, just past Port d’Envaux on a loop of the Charente, a crisis was resolved by Anne-Marie de Saint-Dizant’s good sense and her knowledge of the law.31 Her husband, the Marquis Henri de Grailly, had a typical career as a member of the noblesse d’épée in the old order, becoming

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14. Port d’Envaux: Château de Panloy.

a captain in the Royal Piémont Cavalry in 1789. He had the right to be a member of the noble assemblies both at Saintes and at Angoulême, and was appointed as a deputy to the Estates-General by the latter. When members of the Constituent Assembly were decreed not eligible for office in the new Legislative in May 1791, Henri de Grailly left for Hamburg to join the Army of the Princes. When he and Savinien de Garrigue ordered carriages to take them across Paris, they told the man who owned them they would be back in two or three months, but he was an emigré for nine years. A law of 7 December 1793 ordered the confiscation of all houses and land of the fathers and mothers of emigrés and Anne-Marie expected that a subsequent law would take the property of their wives as well. Panloy had been part of her dowry. Another law, of 20 September 1793, had instituted divorce in France. So she filed for hers on 16 December and, according to the document signed by an official at Bordeaux, ‘she will be from now on Citizeness Saint-Dizant, divorced wife of Citizen Grailly’. This type of divorce in order to keep family property was frequent at the time of the Revolution.32 Baron Normand d’Authon’s wife had to adopt the same tactic when her husband was interned at Brouage as a suspect,33 and Marie-Anne-Rosalie Turpin divorced the Marquis de la Roche-Courbon34 on account of his emigration to St. Petersburg.35 Mme de Grailly had her divorce announced, according to police dossiers, ‘following in that number of wives of émigrés who used this legal subterfuge to assure the future of their children’. Panloy escaped confiscation. From October 1796 onwards, she gave a home at Panloy to Citizen Joseph Merveilleux, a former curé, making him her steward with power of attorney over her property. He had taken the civic oath at different times

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as required by the law,36 and after Bonaparte’s Concordat he was appointed curé of Saint-Savinien, just across the river. In January 1797, the council at Port d’Envaux agreed to her request for a passport for Hamburg ‘so that she could take her two children there to learn foreign languages and commerce’.37 This attempt to go and meet Henri seems to have been unsuccessful at the higher echelons of republican power, because on 19 germinal, year VII, 8 April 1798, she moved from Angoulême, where she had lived for a year, back to Panloy. She was not safe from all interference, however, because on 11 September 1799 a domiciliary visit was made upon Citoyenne de Grailly, femme d’émigré to see that no benefit fraud was involved. The minutes of the commune of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud on 16 nivôse year XI (December 1800) register the certificate of amnesty for Henri de Grailly who had returned to Panloy.38 Subsequent developments took their time, however. On 21 February 1803 there was a change of steward at Panloy: Dame Anne-Marie Michel de Saint-Dizant, living on her domain of Panloy, commune de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, gave a general power of attorney for the administration of her property to Citizen Henry Grailly, landowner, living in the above-mentioned commune of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud.

The divorce had lost its purpose, and on 6 May 1806 at nine in the morning, accompanied by four witnesses, Monsieur Henri de Grailly, aged 45 years, and Dame Marie-Anne Michel de Saint-Dizant, aged 44 years, went to the Mairie in Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud to make a marriage contract. The certificate did not mention their marriage in church under the old order in 1785, nor that they had two sons, Étienne and Théodore. Anne-Marie died in 1833 and Henri survived her until 1847. Henri had lost his property, the marquisate of Touverac, the lands of Lavagnac and Sainte Terre in the Gironde, and a house in the rue Saint-Maur in Saintes. He was awarded compensation of nearly 77,000 francs for the loss of all these properties under the milliard des émigrés organized by Louis XVIII’s minister Villèle in 1825.

*** There is an impressive memorial tablet on the north wall inside the church at Nieul-lès-Saintes to ‘Messire Gabriel-Isaie Lemouzin, Chevalier, Seigneur

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Baron of Nieuil, Varzay and other places, benefactor of this parish, who died on 17th December 1797 at the age of 86 years’. Outside the village is his château, with a moat and drawbridge and domestic buildings now being carefully conserved inside its medieval enclosure. M. de Lemouzin’s daughter, Marie-Henriette, had married Pierre Boscal Réal de Mornac and had a son, François-César, but died in childbirth. Gabriel-Isaie had no son, so his grandson was his heir. De Mornac went as an emigré to Hamburg and took the son of his first marriage, de Lemouzin’s heir, with him. The District Directory at Saintes regarded the land and usufruct as forfeit because of the emigration of the heir, and made a move to confiscate it in accordance with the law. Gabriel-Isaie wrote to the Directory protesting that the land was still his because he was not dead yet. His letter is dated 25 January 1793 – a few days after the king’s execution – a dangerous time for nobles.39 He set out the facts of the situation regarding his daughter’s death, his son-in-law’s subsequent remarriage, and present emigration along with the boy who, ‘on account of the docility and weakness of his age was in no position to resist the wishes of his father’. This double emigration had brought about the sequestration of the property at Nieul, which had always been Limouzin’s own home and still belonged to him, together with the furniture inside it. ‘But this sequestration is the result of an error or a lack of information’, he says. ‘I reserve to myself the right to prove the usufruct and ownership of the lands in question from authentic deeds in my posession: a right all the less incontestable in that I have expressly reserved it until my death.’ As far as the house is concerned, he says, no one can sell it as a national property since it remains his own. A great number of reliable witnesses would testify that de Mornac himself had never brought in furniture of his own. M. de Limouzin’s case is based on local knowledge. He bravely confronts the lawyers of the district, Vanderquand and company, in terms of their own expertise: The law cannot have a retrospective effect and the intention of our legislators is too pure for them to have dictated anything to the prejudice of a third party. I repeat, death alone can deprive me of the enjoyment and the usufruct that I have the right to claim, and it is only after that fatal event that the nation, which replaces the heir on whom the decreed penalty falls, would be able to sell the said lands at Nieul.

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He asks, therefore, to be ‘maintained in the enjoyment of [his] property with the tranquillity of which the law ought to be the sure guarantee’. He also requests that the furniture which belonged to him be released, and adds that he hoped that he would obtain wisdom from the council when they agree with the argument he has put forward. He sends his daughter’s marriage certificate to back up his assertions. He seems to have been left to stew by the district for three weeks, but the reply sent to him on 14 February 1793 accepted his claim, and he kept his lands and their produce. There were further problems when the personnel of the District Directory changed, and Lemouzin was arrested and imprisoned for a few months, but was released. The grim reaper made his contribution to the story. Gabriel-Isaie, as his memorial tablet says, died at the end of 1797, and his grandson soon after, so the house and the lands did become national property and were absorbed into other local terrains. In the end, Pierre Boscal de Réal de Mornac was the one who profited. He returned in 1800, became Marquis de la Chaize de Vicomte, and was compensated in Villèle’s milliard des émigrés to the tune of nearly 90,000 francs paid out of taxes ten years after the restoration of the monarchy.

*** More typical was the story of another nobleman nearby, Jean-BretagneCharles-Godefroy, Duke of la Tremoille, Count of Taillebourg, who was not successful in his claim. Early in the Revolution, he left for Nice, which was at that time outside France, on the orders of his wife’s doctor. She died there. He tried to prevent Taillebourg from being confiscated on the grounds that he was not an emigré within the meaning of the law of 12 February 1792 because, in spite of his record in the Seven Years’ War and holding the rank of Maréschal de Camp, he had not undertaken any military involvement to restore the king. His case was heard on 3 May 1792 by the National Assembly’s committee of legislation. He lost the case and died 12 days afterwards. His house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain in Paris and the recently built Château at Taillebourg, divided into 12 lots, were put up for sale as national properties.40

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War and Education

F

rom May 1793 onwards, the council minutes of Saint-Saturnin1 are full of details of prices and wages under the so-called ‘Maximum’ decreed by the National Convention as a doctrinaire attempt to regulate inflation in time of war. No one could pay his employees, and no prices were to be charged, above the detailed, uniform scales of wages and prices published throughout France. Jean David, who lived upriver from Saint-Saturnin at Port-à-Clou, declared before the councillors that he had to pay his servant François Limousin a wage of 120 livres a year because the man ‘did not wish to accommodate himself to the Maximum’, and would not accept as little as was allowed by it, threatening to leave after a day. It seems the council accepted his explanation.2 Even so, not to co-operate with this Jacobin policy was to be counter-revolutionary, since everything was to be revolutionary until victory against the kings of Europe had been achieved.3 Under the decree of the Committee of Public Safety, day-rates of wineharvesters’ wages were regulated, and inspectors had to be appointed to speed up the flailing of grain. Two citizens were given the right to requisition workers, and five others to make a count of forage and cattle. Wood faggots and wood stripped of its bark had to be taken to Saintes. Labourers for the gunpowder factories had to be supplied. Working hours and transport costs were published in detail. Taxes were charged on requisitioned items like cattle-feed. Arguments between suppliers and carters are recorded, and the lawyer Gaillard’s name keeps cropping up as the one who had responsibility for working all this out and applying it. Work needed to be regulated by the time of day, and Pierre Brault was paid an allowance of five livres a day for nine days for going round the lanes beating a drum at the appropriate times. The clock they relied on in the church tower would have been using the bell saved from the Abbaye aux Dames with its silvery note by now, and the workers in the fields or the forest would not always hear it.4 208

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Ordinary concerns and personal tensions continued to assert themselves, however. A municipal official held a divorce hearing in June 1794. Estelle Piocheau, wife of Jacques Piocheau, had petitioned for divorce under the new law that made it possible, but she declared that, ‘having taken thought, this divorce was founded only on the simple incompatibility of humours’, and withdrew her suit, going back to Jacques ‘to live following the custom of the law’. He said he would receive her back and that they ‘should live as a married couple’.5

*** The national government under the new constitution after the fall of Robespierre’s Jacobins needed to maintain the basic tenets of the Revolution without Terror while the war against the kings of Europe was still a threatening reality and morale still had to be maintained. So orders were given for communal festivals to be held all over the country, and the canton of Port d’Envaux, on 15 pluviôse year IV,6 decided to hold a festival of the Just Punishment of the Last King, and another of Hatred for Royalty. With the growing number of royalist sympathizers in the nation at large, such a Republican publicity move seemed necessary. The minutes have the dry comment: ‘decree conformed to’.7 There were other festivals in the period of the Directory as well, understandable in a climate of prevailing totalitarianism. There was a Festival of Husbands, one of Victories, the public announcement of the deeds of local heroes, like Richardeau, a volunteer from Geay, wounded in battle at Wörms: ‘The patrie gives you recognition’, said the president of the festival. ‘It comes by my lips to give you a mark of its generosity.’ There were Festivals of Liberty to keep the memory going of ‘the evils which the French people had suffered under the reign of kings, and to sense how it is vital to preserve the liberty which they took by conquest’. The oath against anarchy was renewed from time to time, and a national festival was made of the funeral of General Hoche. When a temporary peace was made with the Austrians, there was a festival for it at the Tree of Liberty, with songs and dances, and candles put in the doors and the windows of the village houses again.8 Robespierre’s festival of the Supreme Being in Paris had been the last fling of his kind of Theism. So the Catholic Church started to reassert itself, and the buildings became available to it again after an edict of toleration which amounted to a separation of Church and State. The excesses of the period of de-Christianization disappeared, along with their symbols.

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The decision was made on 6 thermidor year IV (25 July 1796) to take down the five red bonnets that had been placed on the church tower in April 1794 at a Festival of Liberty, ‘according to a decree from above’, and a speech was made by an unnamed person who was elected president of the assembly for it. This is the record of what he said: Citizens, We are going to free ourselves . . . The tyranny which the Jacobins exercised to the horror of all nations was indeed disastrous, and I believe we ought, following the example of all the places around us, to destroy all that could recall their reign to us. I propose, then, that we should make the five red bonnets which are set up on the former church of this commune disappear.

They took a vote on it, and ‘it was done in an instant’. But the bonnets were national property: they had been substitutes for religious emblems. The ‘signs of assassinations and carnage’ as someone at the assembly labelled them were looking sorry for themselves on the grass outside the church. They were handed over to the concierge’s daughter in the municipal office ‘with a recommendation to use them for something other than what they had been before’. What had been badges of freedom were going to be used as polishing cloths in the commune’s meeting room. The president of the festival concluded, ‘The red bonnets have been laid at the foot of the Tree of Liberty. The groaning of the people at the sight of them has been observed: they demanded that they be taken away with the full agreement of the meeting’, and the proceedings closed with redoubled cries of ‘Vive liberty! Vive the Republic!’9 Urbain-Jacques-François-Marie Voisin turned up then, ‘a minister of the catholic cult’ and a survivor from all the clerical purges. In June 1798, Voisin declared to the municipal officials of the canton that wanted to ‘exercise his functions as a minister of the said cult at Saint-Saturnin’. There had been a law of 30 September 1795 on the policing of cults, and he wanted to act in conformity with it, and there was another one of 4 September 1797 that priests should take an oath to hate royalty and atheism alike. Voisin had already done that, so he said, and he swore that he was ‘attached to the liberty of the Republic’. The council gave him a certificate of residence, and let him say Mass in Saint-Saturnin church. They also gave him a certificate of individuality and recorded it in the council minutes so that they had a document to prevent any unacceptable priest from claiming to be him.10 This was necessary because you never knew who was who now – the wearing of clerical dress had been forbidden for a long time and letters of ordination had been torn up. He was 40 years old, five feet tall, with a round and full face, chestnut hair,

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and eyebrows, brown eyes, a well-formed nose, a long forehead, and a round chin, and he lived in nearby Plassay. The information that Voisin had been a Recollect is crossed out in the register, but it means that he used to be a member of an order of Franciscans who had a house in the centre of Saintes.11 So the Temple of Reason was used from time to time as a church again four years before Napoleon’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII. A few constitutional priests and the congregations that supported them kept the Catholic cult in being. Voisin had no authority as a state functionary, and was a private individual, so he had to fend for himself for somewhere to live and something to eat. Harbouring priests was no longer such a dangerous act – mainly by default. Despite what has been said about the large number of constitutional priests who were found on the hulks of Rochefort, there were some who kept their heads down, did what the law required of them and re-emerged as parish priests at the Concordat. It is remarkable that there were three others besides Voisin found in close proximity in the canton of Port d’Envaux. Joseph Merveilleux, who was taken on, as we have seen, as the steward of Panloy12 by Citizenness Grailly, had been the curé of Ranville since 1778, resigning on a pension of 800 francs a year on Christmas Day 1792, when he declared to the municipality there that he no longer wanted to exercise his priestly ministry. Two others, Fontenau and Hippeau, were living quietly at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud. Hippeau was appointed as primary school teacher at Port d’Envaux. All four made a declaration before an official in the commune in which they lived in these words: that in my position as priest and ci-devant curé, I have taken as a functionary and as a citizen the oaths required at different times by the law, and that in these documents (titres) I have made use only of literal expressions, without allowing myself any amplification, restriction or modification whatever, declaring in addition that I have never retracted my oath. In trust of which I have signed, 3 frimaire year VI of the Republic One and Indivisible (23 November 1797).

Merveilleux signed his oath on 3 frimaire, the others two days afterwards.13 We can do no more than speculate how these men got on with their neighbours. Revolutionary energy in the country as a whole was flagging during the Directory, despite General Bonaparte’s ‘whiff of grapeshot’ against the royalists themselves outside the church of Saint-Roch in Paris, and the required oath against royalty was against anarchy as well, which meant against Jacobinism.14 Government seemed less revolutionary as victory against the various coalitions of European powers was indefinitely postponed.

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Festivals every ten days were the basic fodder of revolutionary education in the years before Napoleon’s coup d’état of November 1799.15 Starting on 1 October 1798, there were 57 of them.16 The Tenth Day (decadi) had replaced Sunday in the time of the Terror, and neither Sunday nor the seven-day week would be put back until well into the Empire. The official Terror had failed to deliver national solidarity. The ten-day festivals were a more humane approach to coercion, but all they succeeded in doing, however, was raising the level of apathy. They soon appear in the council minutes as very boring occasions. The third one degenerated into merely giving notices like ‘the obligation of young people from 20 to 25 years assigned to naval service to enrol themselves’ or ‘Invitation to pay taxes due for years VII and VI’. It is not surprising that the only people in the temple of truth were the primary school teacher and her pupils, and four or five other citizens. Nevertheless, Dr Chouet expressed his surprise at the lack of attendance, and invited the participants to let their fellow citizens know how interesting it would be for them to be present. One tenth day report says that ‘several girls were knitting’ and that complaints were made about it. The sixth occasion saw only 30 people present, and by the time they reached the twelfth there were only a dozen there. The village officials, with the district officials at their back, continued to express surprise and gave an invitation to the Festival of the Punishment of the Last King. Lengthy lists of functionaries who were not present were drawn up in the minutes, and then signed by those who were. On the fourteenth festival there was no one present, but that was because the Charente was in flood and there were other fish to fry.17 For the Festival of the Sovereignty of the People on 30 ventôse year VII, which was also a ten-day festival, the walls of the Temple were covered in slogans like ‘Sovereignty resides essentially in the universality of the citizens’; ‘The universality of French citizens is sovereign’; ‘No individual, no partial meeting of citizens is able to attribute sovereignty to itself ’; ‘No one can, without a legal delegation, exercise any authority nor fill any public function’; and so on. Obviously, there were several slogans too many. The citizens’ reaction must have been, at least behind their hands, ‘Quelle horreur!’ At the festival, Citizen Mathieu Cochet, former sailor, as the oldest among the old men in the assembly, rose and gave a discourse to some new magistrates, and Citizen Etienne Yonnet, performing his functions as agent of the commune, replied in words of a slogan that was already up on the wall and there was no real need to say it again. We can feel the yawns two centuries later, especially since he went on to read the proclamation of the

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Directory on the elections and then the ten-day bulletin of laws. Did they know the words of the patriotic songs that were sung, and did they really utter enthusiastic cries of ‘Vive la République’? Chouet, Constantin, and Richelot signed the minutes to say that they did.18 Weddings took place on some of the festivals, so perhaps a little happiness broke out now and again as brides and grooms said yes. Ten-day festivals continued to be held until 31 March 1800. The themes of them included the murder by Austrian soldiers of two of the French delegation at the Rastadt peace conference with Austria in April 1799,19 which involved the swearing of an oath of ‘implacable hatred for the atrocious house of Austria’, and vowing ‘the execration of its peoples and posterity’. The desertion of 19 conscripts, of whom two were found in the canton, was also used as a theme. Liberty was celebrated to extinction. Celebrating the seventh anniversary of the overthrow of monarchy on 10 August had possibilities as a crowd puller, and there was a festival to honour elderly people as more than mere survivors. An altar to Concorde was set up in the Temple for another one: oaths were taken, like: ‘I swear fidelity to the Republic and to the Constitution of Year III, and I swear to oppose with all my power the re-establishment of monarchy in France and of any kind of tyranny.’ Letters from Paris were read, like that in September 1799 from the minister of the Interior at the Festival of the Founding of the Republic, after which more oaths were taken to uphold the Constitution of year III. After only two months, that constitution was replaced by Napoleon’s Consulate, and it depends upon your point of view whether that turned into tyranny or not. The national tensions of the months before General Bonaparte’s coup of brumaire are reflected locally in the statement Chouet made at a festival which announced that he had been ‘instructed that royalists had been expanding their influence over a period of time on the roads and at the gates of the canton’. He warned the citizens against these incendiary pamphlets and invited those who found them to send them to him. Several had already been handed to him, like the one entitled ‘Criminal trial, which ought to be held in 1799 at the Court of Cassation, of 25 million Frenchmen against an adventurer called Revolution, known by his crimes in the four parts of the world’. Another was an address from ‘Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, to the French’. All such publications were to be burnt at the door of the Temple at the next festival. At the 53rd ten-day festival, an oath of fidelity to the new constitution of the Consulate was sworn by the members of the municipal administration of the canton,20 repeated individually by those named in the list; some did it

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twice for different functions. The 56th festival was the platform for ‘the proclamation of the Consuls of the Republic to the French people, of 17 nivôse’ and the minutes of the last decadi festival record the ominous entry of the Napoleonic era: ‘the decree of the Departmental prefect of 5 (nivôse) relating to the departure of the conscripts’.21 Even before that, in April 1799, when a national levy of 200,000 men was required by the National Directory, 35 conscripts were taken from the canton. Out of 16 first-class recruits, 1 soon died, and 11 others were mentioned, ‘who presented themselves because the council decided to visit in their homes all who said they had infirmities’. There were inspections at Taillebourg before Dr Ballay, who was the military health officer. ‘No one enrolled voluntarily.’ The second-class recruits were written to with the news that they had only five days to find substitutes; otherwise they would have to leave for service. They might be able to dodge the wrath of those they knew on the council of the municipality, but the district and the department were still suitably scary.22

*** In these circumstances, primary schooling was most imperative after so many false starts and the perceived lack of integrity of the five National Directors. Adults were losing interest in maintaining a shaky system by means of moral uplift every ten days in the Temple of Reason, so committed Republicans had to be found for the formation of the young. The primary school teacher (instituteur) was the answer. In April 1796, acting on a decree from the department, the Canton of Port d’Envaux estimated that four primary schools set up in Saint-Saturnin, Geay, Plassay, and Les Essards would be enough. In September 1796, the register gave Etienne Potirou’s name as the primary teacher at Plassay, ruling that he should be provided with the former curé’s house and garden. Then in March 1798, Hippeau, primary teacher at Port d’Envaux, was provided with 50 francs to pay for his lodging for the second school term of year V and another 50 for the next one. The Directory of the Canton appointed two of their number to act as inspectors for the four schools. Two of the schools were in other places than first planned. Plassay was up and running as they intended, so was that at Geay, but the others were at Port d’Envaux and La Touche in Crazannes.23 Then there was a spectacular village dispute. Citizen Seillès appeared in Port d’Envaux with a plan for a school of his own and his 14-year-old son as the teacher. The Committee of Instruction at Saintes had approved

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the son as capable of teaching children to read, write, and do sums. Seillès asked for the council of the canton to favour the project as well. Dr Chouet and three other worthies decided otherwise. They gave their reasons. The son was only 14 and could ‘not inspire a reasonable fear in his pupils, or have principles fixed enough, or manners well enough approved, for the administration to guarantee them to the fathers of families in the canton’. Seillès had a business as a candle maker and mercer, and had to be away from home from time to time, which the council thought was incompatible with running a school. Moreover, his conduct was not ‘that of a peaceful citizen and a friend of good order. His misdeeds at other times betrayed his real character’, it was said, and a search had been made in the minutes of the Municipality of La Rochelle of 15 October 1794 which revealed that ‘he had merited a severe punishment there’. In fact he had been found guilty of ‘seditious proposals tending to raise the people against the magistrates’.24 Meanwhile, the plans for where the schools were to be had changed again, and Pierre Fricaud was appointed as teacher at Ecurat. Then on 24 February 1799, Seillès started waving about his son’s certificate from Saintes, but Etienne Yonnet’s daughter Marie-Claire was working at Port d’Envaux as Hippeau’s assistant. She was a recognized teacher, so the school was adequately staffed. Seillès continued his campaign into the next month and submitted a petition to the Departmental Directors, but they maintained that ‘his calumnious imputations and his mordant style sufficed to justify the idea that had been conceived of his character’. His turbulence and his constant attempts to vilify the authorities of the canton ‘were opposed to lessons of reserve, of discretion, of civil tolerance and other social virtues which ought to make the basis of republican primary school teaching’. At the session on the tenth day at Port d’Envaux, he tried to gain permission for his son to read out an article from a newspaper known to all, the Feuille rochelais, as proof that he could teach. However, ‘the time taken in the reading of official documents and in the celebration of marriages not having allowed him to be given that satisfaction’, at the end of the session he walked up to Dr Chouet, swore, and then hit him. He demanded that the council’s denial of his son being allowed to read from the newspaper be entered in the minutes. This was refused too,25 and he boiled over into anger, giving out more threats, until Dr Chouet was ‘obliged to remind him of the law authorizing the arrest of disturbers of the peace like him’. The commissioner went on to say that the things he had been shouting were not

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true in the least. He had not been excluded from the communal assembly of Port d’Envaux the year before: he had brought about his own exclusion by losing his temper before the meeting had even started. Seillès claimed that Chouet himself had excluded him, but Chouet told him that he had no authority in a communal assembly. Seillès was not qualified to be on the roll of those paying land tax, or the tax on houses, and he could not make a claim to be heard on the basis of any outstanding tax payments he might have, because he had none. He had asserted during his outburst that, as a veteran of campaigns in the war, he deserved more considerate treatment from the council, but Chouet had taken the trouble to find out that Seillès had never so much as put on uniform or gone on parade. Chouet shouted back at his opponent, perhaps rubbing his bruised chin, ‘Your exclusion was based upon the law!’ The minutes go on to tell us that ‘to his collective insults there was no response beyond the deepest indignation’. Seillès claimed that he was a better Republican than these councillors who had been running the canton for nearly ten years now, but it was remarked that an exaggerated and near-savage civism is not one that bodes well towards the best in a teacher, who ought to have as his task the making of amiable virtues to inspire his pupils hearts, and ought, in the end, to cover the blow of instruction with the honey which he wants them to taste . . . as it were.

All this was drawn up into a procès-verbal, and Dr Chouet signed it, along with the president of the tenth day assembly, Constantin. The council secretary, who was now Richelot, and responsible for the convoluted sentence translated in the last paragraph, signed as well. Seillès was not asked to sign. Seillès seems to have accepted defeat afterwards, and became more conversant with civic virtues. He did sign minutes as being present at meetings a few times after this. There was an oath-taking ceremony soon after, and Mlle Yonnet took part, along with Potiron and Fricaud, the teachers from Plassay and Ecurat. In December 1800, the Seillès affair was settled by Pierre-Philippe Maugé from Saintes being nominated by the prefect of the department as the primary school teacher at Port d’Envaux. ‘He was installed with due civic ceremony and lodged in the presbytery, according to law.’26 A discussion of roads and the post office, since wartime conditions demanded better communications,27 brings us to the end of the decade

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in which these council registers give us a picture of the French Revolution in a part of France that was and is intensely rural. This was not the rarefied atmosphere of the room in Tuileries, where the Committee of Public Safety had met, nor the apartments in the Luxembourg Palace, where the five frequently changing Directors, bizarrely dressed in costumes designed by Jacques-Louis David, read Bonaparte’s dispatches from Italy. This was where ordinary men and women in the abnormal war situation absorbed the requirements of the new laws, and local government saw those requirements put into uncompromising action. After the Terror was dismantled, we can pick up a sense of a good deal of popular indifference towards the new order of things, but the new order was there to stay. Men like Dr Chouet, who usually adds the word commissaire to his signature, had taken over in the countryside and claimed to represent constructive authority. They enforced a compromise between Republican social control and a sense that there was genuine liberty under the law. Compromises depend for their success upon those who gain most from them, so France remained a country in traction.

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T

he French Revolution threw up a great deal of distress. Yet, in spite of all the violent behaviour we have looked at, there were people involved who stood for a moderate approach and were eventually successful in finding one. Louis-Michel-Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély achieved national prominence as a result of the lawyers’ revolution in the CharenteInférieure without being a supporter of Terror. His real prominence was in Napoleon’s Empire, where he was a responsible figure in the drawing up of the Civil Code, which made the law of the French nation accessible to all who were governed by it. Napoleon made Regnaud a Count of the Empire, and he has been spoken of as the Emperor’s éminence grise. Nevertheless, he had a significant role in the revolutionary decade: not least as a counterbalance in history to the excesses of other people who appeared on the national scene from the Department of the Charente-Inférieure at the same time. His statue was put up in the main square of his home town in 1863 during the Second Empire, and a biographical note prepared at the same time says that ‘he always showed himself devoted to [good] order’, and that he had ‘partisan zeal for conciliation and respect for persons’. He ‘wanted to see abuses disappear and a new society raise itself on the ruins of the old one’.1 He deserved this later comment for what he had said and done as a deputy in the Estates-General and in the Constituent Assembly which followed it. He adopted the motto ‘Avoid spreading bitterness when peace is needed.’ He had been brought up on a property called Desrichards, at Mazeray, which his grandfather owned, and went to school from the age of six with the Benedictines in Saint-Jean, seeing the great western towers being built. These towers still dominate the town, though they were abandoned unfinished at the Revolution and the abbey was closed like all the others. After qualifying in Paris Regnaud came back to Saint-Jean in 1781. He wanted a job in the sénéchaussée, but all the posts were taken by people like Normand d’Authon, who later became a friend. The best he could do was to earn 1,300 livres a year in the Lieutenancy of the Navy at Rochefort. This 218

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15. Portrait of Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély (reproduced from Jean-Noël Luc (ed.), La Charente-Maritime, L’Aunis et la Saintonge des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean-d’ Angély, 1981), by permission of the publishers, Éditions Bordessoules).

gave him an impressive uniform to wear and enhanced his natural ability to exercise charm over people but, after two years, he had had enough of naval administration and resigned, intending to go back to Paris. However, he had a relation called Paulian, who pulled old order strings and got him into the legal establishment in Saint-Jean in private practice after a wait of less than a year. He became well known and respected,

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despite being a young man in an elderly profession. He was given the task of editing the lists of grievances for the third estate of Saint-Jean-d’Angély and its surrounding villages into one coherent document, and then was elected as one of the two deputies from Saint-Jean-d’Angély to the EstatesGeneral called to meet at Versailles in May 1789. The other was Jean-Joseph de Bonnegens, who was much more prominent in the establishment of the area than him, since he was seigneur of more than four villages, as well as being a royal advocate, the lieutenant-general of the sénéchaussée of SaintJean d’Angély, and the president of the assembly that drew up the cahier de doléance. Bonnegens was also friendly with Baron Normand d’Authon, leader of the conservative faction in Saint-Jean-d’Angély. Despite association with Normand, Regnaud did have progressive ideas. He spoke in the National Assembly in favour of doing away with the office of intendant and argued that it was against the national interest to keep the system of generalities. It was at his suggestion that the Assembly adopted the new scheme of dividing the country into departments subdivided into districts and municipalities. This was simple and understandable: you literally would know where you were. His moderate approach appeared in the articles he wrote for newspapers such as the Courier de Versailles and the Journal de Paris, which energetically upheld the policies of the king’s popular Finance Minister Necker. Although he was temperamentally against the Church, when the time came for monks and nuns to leave their cloisters and convents, Regnaud argued in the Assembly for pensions to be provided for them. Furthermore, he wanted to prevent the destruction of religious buildings now that they were national property and being sold off to reduce the national deficit. He was politically close to Mirabeau, Barnave, and Lameth, and supported them in their desire to restrict royal power but not abolish it, broadly accepting the programme of the Feuillants and the idea of a constitutional monarchy with two chambers.2 One of the principal contributions of Freemasonry to the Revolution was the idea that there is a basic equality between all men, as they had experienced in the working of their lodges. Regnaud had been a Freemason since 1780 in the Égalité lodge, which had been set up in the town as early as 1764. His colleague as deputy, de Bonnegens, was a member of the same lodge. Regnaud’s antagonism towards the clergy cannot be directly attributed to his Freemasonry because one of his associates in the lodge at Saint-Jean had been the curé of Brizambourg, in spite of official church disapproval towards clerical membership. Of the 16 deputies elected for the three orders in the Aunis and the Saintonge (4 clergy, 4 nobles, and 8 thirds) 5 were Freemasons. Besides the two from Saint-Jean d’Angély, there was Alquier from La Rochelle, who

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soon joined La Concorde lodge in Paris, and de Richier was from L’Aimable concorde lodge in Rochefort. De Malartic who sat for the nobility was in a military lodge, La Parfaite union of the Vermaidois Regiment. Recent pastoral letters from Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV had condemned the craft, so there were no clerical masons elected as deputies.3 Regnaud opted for secularism, and was in firm support of the change made in May 1791 which took the registration of births, marriages, and deaths away from the Church and established the État civil, with the registers at the Mairie.4 Regnaud was a member of the earliest Jacobin Club (as the Breton Club was re-named when the National Assembly moved to Paris in November 1789), but sat with the Feuillants in the Assembly in July 1791 because his opinion was increasingly anchored in constitutional monarchy. His idea of it seemed more monarchist than constitutional, and he did not want to entertain the idea of a Republic, which he described as ‘an open suitcase into which the demagogues of the Cordeliers Club (Danton and company) were ready to slip all sorts of things’.5 Regnaud spoke on a great number of subjects while he was in the EstatesGeneral and the Constituent Assembly which followed it. In September, before the move to Paris, he urged keeping the royal succession from passing to the Spanish Bourbons. He denounced the old order parlements as being ‘like so many citadels of reaction’. He defended Necker’s financial policy, and spoke in favour of Saintes being the capital of the CharenteInférieure in preference to La Rochelle. The Assembly sent Regnaud on mission to the Ain, Haute-Saône, Jura, and Doubs in turn to receive the oath of troops stationed in each of the frontier departments, and to take measures for safeguarding public order and the security of the State: he was an early precursor of those representatives of the Convention whose personal rule was often so extreme. He did all this in a fortnight, coming back to a Paris in turmoil because of the royal family’s flight to Varennes. Regnaud opposed the Republicans in the salons of Sophie de Condorcet and Lucille Desmoulins, whose husband Camille published Le Vieux Cordelier as the first Republican newspaper in France. He excused the king’s attempt to escape from the Assembly’s control by going to the eastern frontier of France in terms of the king having been abducted, and pressed for a decree to ensure the individual liberty of the unfortunate sovereign. From then on Regnaud was personally dedicated to the cause of constitutional monarchy in the person of Louis XVI. On the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille to be held on 17 July 1791, the members of the Cordeliers Club intended to demand the

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setting up of a Republic.6 But on the day before, Regnaud had announced in the Assembly that he had heard of the existence of a faction ready to make trouble at the Champs de Mars, where the petition was going to be drawn up. He pressed for the proclamation of martial law and his suggestion was adopted. In anticipation of that acceptance, he had written a newspaper article for a paper called La Queue de Postillon. The patriots who wanted to use the occasion to end monarchy were enraged, and the owner of that paper was a patriot. Regnaud dramatized the killing of a hairdresser and a man with a wooden leg found sheltering from the rain under the tribunal to justify Maire Bailly’s sending in of the National Guard under La Fayette and their shooting into the crowd. The outcome was disastrous, with 50 people killed when they did not disperse, but the event shows Regnaud himself against the Jacobins, the future protagonists of the Terror. When the Constituent Assembly abolished itself and there had to be new elections for the Legislative which replaced it in October 1791, with the former deputies not allowed to offer themselves as candidates, Regnaud stayed on in Paris and set up his law office. He made a good deal of money to add to what he had inherited from his father, and acquired an apartment at 15, rue Taitbout, in the prosperous Chaussée d’Antin quarter. His office had Mirabeau’s mother as a client. He wrote articles for L’Ami des Patriotes ou le Defenseur de la Constitution and continued to collaborate in the Journal de Paris as a friend of the poet André Chénier and other literary giants. The Journal de Paris supported constitutional monarchy and received funding from civil list money. Papers taken from Regnaud at the Restoration in 1815 confirm that he was with the Feuillants, who were all constitutional monarchists. They took their name from their meeting place in the former convent of the Strict Bernadines which had become the royal chapel after the move from Versailles in October 1789. He had exchanged letters with opponents of revolution like Montmorin, who had been foreign minister and worked hard to win favour for the court, allegedly persuading Mirabeau to support the king. There were also letters between Regnaud and Bertrand de Molleville, Tarbé, and Narbonne, ministers during the time of the Constituent Assembly and now members of the king’s own intimate council which he created in an attempt to avoid his Girondin ministers. Papers seized on 10 August 1792 in the office of the Intendant of the Civil List, Arnault de Laporte, confirm that Regnaud had a permanent entry pass into the Tuileries.7 Serious accusations were made by the Girondin journalist J.-L. Carra8 in March 1792 based on reports by the committee of surveillance of the

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Assembly. ‘Calumny is my trade and I am in the pay of the Jacobins’, Carra said. Deputies immune from prosecution had given him the information for his press articles. He reported that there was an ‘Austrian Committee’ under the presidency of the Princesse de Lamballe. She had come back from emigration to be at the disposal of the queen, who was called l’Autrichienne as soon as war with Austria was declared. Carra accused Regnaud and others of being members of this secret committee. All the accused denied that there was any such body. It was true, however, that Arnault de Laporte had called meetings at the Tuileries. The Princesse de Lamballe is supposed to have presided as the Queen’s representative. Hua, a member of the palace staff admitted that there was politicking even if no committee, but he did not say that Regnaud was involved.9 Yet, whether there was such a committee or not, Regnaud certainly kept company with supposed members of it, and took part in political meetings in a reading room in a vast apartment in the Hôtel de Londres at 14, rue de Richelieu. It had been rented in March 1792 by Richer de Sérizy Parisol de la Valette, Knight of Malta, and was one of the chief counter-revolutionary meeting places. A contemporary commentator, Dubois-Crancy, argued that Regnaud was motivated by money from the civil list to support the King. But the political development of Regnaud is coherent enough without the persuasions of bribery.10 Regnaud had mixed with Montmorin, Bertrand de Molleville, Omer Talon, and Radix de Saint-Foi – all staunch royalists. He kept to a position that could be taken for ambiguous for several months, though his actions were not driven by money since he had enough of his own. It was mistrust of the Republican government, with no more than the appearance of democracy in his eyes, which motivated him. The time for making plans was rapidly passing, and desperate times were approaching for those who supported the monarchy in any form. The king had tried to use his veto to protect refractory priests from being deported and, on 20 June 1792, sans-culottes invaded the Palace to make him drink the health of the nation and wear a bonnet of liberty while the queen and the royal children hid behind stacked tables in another room during the two hours the incident lasted. As a National Guard captain in command of the grenadiers of the Filles de Saint-Thomas Section, Regnaud protected the queen from the rioters threatening to kill her. When the Maire of Paris, Pétion, arrived to call the riot off, the king asked him, ‘What kept you so long?’11

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The order was given that on 15 July 1792 troops of the line were to leave Paris for the eastern border to resist the invasion that was gaining momentum, and the National Guard would take their place. Maire Pétion ordered the mobilization of the capital’s sections, like the one at the Luxembourg, which would soon order the imprisonment of the de La Rochefoucauld brothers. The Jacobins accused the Girondins of using civil list money from the time when some of them were ministers. The sections, dominated by the sans-culottes in many places, had a great deal of power. Pétion was a Republican and drew up a petition of section members calling for the removal of the king who had lost the confidence of the nation. Volunteers from the provinces arrived on 29 July also intending to help overthrow the monarchy. Supporters of constitutional monarchy took up arms on the evening of 9 August. Regnaud was involved in a project, desperately formed at Mme de Staël’s house with Knights of Malta funds, to take Louis XVI away secretly from Paris on 13 August and make him independent of the National Assembly – a second attempt to achieve what had failed 14 months before at Varennes. The duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt would wait for the royal family at Rouen, a place within the distance the King was in theory allowed to travel outside Paris. Money from former Finance Minister Necker, Mme de Staël’s father, and from the duc du Chatelet, was being used to try to persuade Assembly members not to suppress the monarchy before 13 August but, on 10 August, the street made its response to all these manoeuvres, and no opportunity remained for the king to leave Paris.12 On the fateful morning of 10 August Regnaud was with his battalion from the prosperous Filles Saint-Thomas Section in hopes of turning away the mass of assailants from the suburbs coming to invade the Tuileries. He drew his sword along with his friend, the courtier Pierre-Louis Roederer, to protect the queen’s way from the palace to the former riding school where the Legislative Assembly was in session. This was regarded by the Republicans as a criminal act. The rioters with their female leader, Théroigne de Méricourt, clamoured for Regnaud’s death. The bourgeois section of Filles de Saint-Thomas was targeted by the sans-culottes and notably by the patriots from Marseilles. Under Antoine-Joseph Santerre, a wealthy brewer from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine who took the side of the sans-culottes, they set upon Regnaud’s troops. Although in his uniform, Regnaud managed to escape lynching, unlike several good friends who were with him.13 He escaped from the palace in the confusion.

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The Convention ordered Régnaud’s arrest and that of André Chenier. He was followed into the streets of the Mont Saint-Géneviéve quarter, and only just escaped by jumping over a garden wall where a girl found him. He explained his danger to her. She was the 14-year-old Mlle de Lestapie, who would be Marshal Saint-Arnaud’s mother,14 and she hid him for long enough for the immediate danger to pass. Regnaud was put on the wanted list. On 11 August, a murder squad thought they saw him in the Place Vendôme. It was Suleau, a royalist journalist, and they cut his throat. The offices of the Journal de Paris were ransacked and Arnault de Laporte arrested and executed on 28 August. Regnaud hid under the roof tiles above his apartment in the rue Taitbout in section Mirabeau, now re-named Mont-Blanc. A search was made of the apartment and seals put in place. He came down from the attic and had the seals removed. He was assumed to be clean by the officers of the section who were closet royalists. In April 1793, Regnaud was suspected of sympathizing with Orléanists or Girondins or Dumouriez by the Republicans. He was back openly in the rue Taitbout under surveillance. June 2 saw the Girondins expelled from the Convention and those who had not fled to Normandy were arrested. Regnaud was questioned at Douai whether he was involved with a company that supplied the Army of the North. Claude Basire, an unlikely defender as he was from the Jacobins and a member of the Committee of General Security, kept him safe by distorting evidence of his whereabouts.15 In September 1793, he started to use the name Desrichards, taken from his childhood home at Mazeray. He hid in rue Neuve-Saint-Marc at the home of Jacques-Toussaint Chénié, whose daughter, Louise-Augustine, was an aspiring actress at a theatre called l’Ambigu-comique. He had a complete incognito thanks to them at 110, rue du Bac, and he intended to marry Augustine. Three days after the fall of Robespierre she gave birth to their son, Auguste Desrichards, in the Hospice d’enclos du Temple de la Raison (known before and since as the Hôtel-Dieu). The police began a search for the baby’s father. Poor Augustine died. Regnaud acknowledged his son and moved him to 113, rue de la Montagne Saint-Géneviève, with a nurse. He was a businessman now and moved about freely. Then he met Louise de Bonneuil and her daughter, another Augustine but known as Laure. He managed to escape the Vendémiare coup organized by the Director Barras, during which Bonaparte fired his famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’ at royalists at the church of Saint-Roch and, when the Directory voted an amnesty on 4 brumaire an IV, the search for him as

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a defender of the queen was abandoned. Now wealthy, he rented a large town house in the Marais, 8, rue Charlot. He and Laure married, and she adopted Auguste, the future Second Empire Marshal of France, as her own son. The family emerged from the shadows and Regnaud used his real name once more. Regnaud had friends in the upper reaches of the Directory which followed the Convention, and a post was found for him in hospital administration for Bonaparte’s Army of Italy. He moved with his wife to Milan, where he became an associate of the general and his staff. He wrote articles for the Frenchsponsored Journal of Milan, and his rapport with Bonaparte grew. So much so that, when the Egyptian expedition was planned, Regnaud was included in the headquarters staff, and he was left as administrator of the Island of Malta until the British took it back again.16 Once more in France, Regnaud worked with Talleyrand to prepare the way for Napoleon’s coup d’etat of November 1799 and, after its success, the proximity to Napoleon was reestablished so that the fine-tuning of the Civil Code became Regnaud’s task as a lawyer to complete. He became a count of the Empire, and a member of the Council of State. When Tsar Alexander’s forces had taken Paris in 1814 and Napoleon had been beaten, it was Regnaud who advised him to abdicate in favour of Napoleon II rather than wait to be deposed.17 Having supported Napoleon again during the Hundred Days, and despite his personal defence of the queen in 1792, he was not allowed to return to France until he was given specific permission in 1819. Before he could act upon it, he died.

*** Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély’s story has been used to conclude this book because he stands out as a moderate at a time when extremists were in the ascendant, and remained consistent when he was himself a civil administrator in the Empire. It is as a moderate that he helps us towards a view of postrevolutionary society in France. We have looked at a good number of horror stories in the course of this study, and we have seen contentious officials making misery for their opponents. The official Terror, expressed in the attempt to make the Catholic clergy disappear and the frenzied totalitarianism of the representatives on mission, was such a violent episode that outsiders could be pardoned for thinking that the Revolution was essentially violent and that its sole purpose was to create a climate of fear and suspicion. Yet, whatever judgement may be made on the aggressive and dictatorial nature of the

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revolutionary decade and the Napoleonic era, Regnaud takes a part in the whole period, from the election of deputies to sit in the Estates-General in 1789 until Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, as one who stood consistently for stability based upon an effective legal system. Like the Abbé Sieyès, he ‘survived’, but in more than merely not being guillotined. He had to go to earth when the Convention was hunting him for defending Marie-Antoinette and while royalists were still officially proscribed, but his usefulness was clearly apparent to the Emperor whose usual question about men to be appointed as generals was ‘Is he lucky?’ Regnaud was not a general, but he was recognized as having the ability to make things work. The respect felt for him at Saint-Jean-d’Angély and in the CharenteInférieure was genuine. The law-books piled at his feet on his statue in the Square in Saint-Jean-d’Angély are incongruous with his military uniform only if we do not recognize the context of the Empire, which justified its existence by winning victories. Even when the Emperor had lost his final battle and gone to serve his protracted death sentence on Saint Helena, the restored monarchy under Louis XVIII and Charles X maintained the Civil Code. The lawyers had not deprived themselves of an occupation, but had insisted that the law exists in principle as the same for all French men and women. That is the principal legacy of these years of tribulation. A lawyers’ revolution had led to wider respect for the rule of law. It has been observed that two-thirds of the deputies from the third estate in the Estates-General, and half of the members of the National Convention, were from the legal profession.18 Although that profession was changed at the Revolution, with counsels for the defence being reduced to amateur status in lower courts, the appearance in the middle of the revolutionary decade of civic professionalism – and of professional training establishments – was of the greatest importance for the return of public confidence. This was true not only in law, but also in medicine, in the state bureaucracy and in the army. There was, of course, no lasting political settlement for 90 years after the new men took over. France remained a society in tension, but civic responsibility (civisme) had become a valued concept once the Terror was withdrawn, and the parallel concept of taxable wealth giving access to political power appeared as more acceptable than that of privilege stemming from absolute monarchy. Despotism had brought one sort of tribulation, and hatred of it brought another. The conflict between stability and revolution went on in fits and

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starts for the best part of a century. Napoleon I took over the French Revolution, claiming first that the Republic needed a Consul and then that it needed an Emperor. After him there was a modified restoration of the monarchy under Louis XVI’s two brothers, Louis XVIII and then Charles X, followed in turn by Louis-Philippe from the Orleanist line of the royal family, after another revolution in 1830. A further revolution in 1848 set up the Second Republic, to be taken over in its turn by Napoleon III’s Second Empire until the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870–1, followed by the setting up of the Third Republic. During those years, republicanism, Bonapartism, royalism in its legitimist and Orleanist forms, with the addition of socialism, were all present in French society as ideological strands, in contention with each other. Adolphe Thiers, a politician involved in several political U-turns over nearly 50 years, prominent in the reign of Louis Philippe, besides being an historian of the Revolution and Empire himself, observed in 1850 that ‘the Republic is the form of government that divides us least’.19 Nine years after the fall of Napoleon III, President Jules Grévy, along with the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, took the same route from Versailles to Paris as King Louis XVI and the deputies of the previous century, the Marseillaise was finally accepted as the national anthem, and 14 July became the national holiday. So the Third Republic, as has been claimed by François Furet, was the true inheritor of the benefits of the first ten years of antagonistic struggle.20 The tensions that exist within French politics and society in our time are more easily understood if we are aware of their origin in those years. If the function of political life is to give balance to all the elements of a just society, then the tendencies which create imbalance have to be held in check. These tendencies in the revolutionary years were represented by the Jacobin Terror and economic rigidity, along with what could be called the new fanaticism in response to royalist rebellion in the Vendée and federalism in urban centres other than Paris. The rule of law and civic responsibility emerged together from the lawyers’ revolution and justified the learning curve which the negative aspects of the decade brought into being. Even François-Guillaume Marillet, once he had been elected as a judge, was forced to accept the principle that public law must always take precedence over private judgement, despite his vehement denunciation of the revolutionaries in secret until then.

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Notes Preface 1

François-Guillaume Marillet, Histoire Secrete des évènements de la ville de Saintes d’après les influences directes et indirectes de l’Assemblée nationale qui a commencé au moment de l’assurance nous avons eue de la ditte Assemblée. Four manuscript volumes, unpublished, 1789–95, Médiathèque municipale François-Mitterand de Saintes, Fonds Ancien et Régional.

Introduction 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

9

10 11

A Revolution Led by Lawyers

Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution Française, Tome 1 (Paris, 1868), p. 49. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880, ET Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1988), p. 16. Jean-Christian Petitfils, Louis XVI (Paris, 2005), p. 91. The Estates-General at its last meeting in 1614 had been made up of deputies from the three orders (or estates) of the clergy, the nobility, and everyone else, whether wealthy shipowners in La Rochelle or tenant farmers on noble seigneurs’ estates. This last body was known as the third estate. Jacques Necker doubled the number of its deputies in advance of this meeting to prevent it being inevitably outvoted by the other two orders, but all three orders arrived at Versailles expecting not to vote in common as a single assembly. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789, ET Joan White (New York, 1989). ‘Cette grande braderie’. Petitfils, Louis XVI, p. 706. See also Furet: Revolutionary France 1770–1880, pp. 70ff; and Simon Schama, Citizens (London, 1989), pp. 437ff. Since tithe had been abolished and the Church was to be controlled by the nation, the parish clergy would become salaried state functionaries. They would have to take the oath to qualify for their 1200 livres a year – for many of them a huge increase – or be regarded as having resigned their livings. They were always known in Paris and other large centres of population as sans-culottes because they did not wear breeches and hose like the professional classes and nobles, but trousers. They were skilled men and their wives, people with something to lose rather than men and women in hopeless poverty as James Gillray depicted them in his hostile British cartoons. Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity, Robespierre and the French Revolution (London, 2006), p. 254. Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée, ET George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN, 2003), first published in French in 1986 with the title Le Génocide francofrançais.

229

Notes.indd 229

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230 12

13 14 15 16 17

The Unseen Terror The president of the Council of the Elders on the day of the coup was Louis-Nicolas Lemercier, a lawyer from Saintes, whom Napoleon made a count of the Empire in 1808. He had been elected first deputy for the sénéschausée of Saintes in March 1789 and became a member of the Feuillants Club in Paris. He returned to practise law in Saintes in 1791, but was elected to the Elders in 1798. He became a senator in the Empire, before he was a count, and seemed a convinced Bonapartist, but he was not a regicide, nor did he rally to Napoleon in the hundred days, so was acceptable to Louis XVIII as a peer of the realm in 1814. He even voted for sacrilege becoming a crime punishable by death in 1828, and opposed the trial of Charles X’s ministers in the early months of the July Monarchy. Frédéric Morin, in F. Julien-Labruyère (ed.), Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais (Paris, 2005), p. 812. Jacques Buisson, ‘Les mentalités religieuses à Saintes et dans sa proche campagne 1750–1800’, RSA XX (1994), pp. 68–88. Author’s emphasis. Quaeorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud pendant la période révolutionnaire, le 31 janvier 1790–30 prairial an VIII’, RSA XXVI (1906), pp. 323–5. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge, 1975), p. 115. In October 1761, Calas’s son, Marc-Antoine, brought up as a Protestant, embraced the Catholic religion in order to obtain the required certificate to qualify as a lawyer, and committed suicide during a subsequent crisis of conscience. The elderly father was charged before the Toulouse parlement with murdering his son, and was tortured and broken on the wheel by the public executioner. After the case had been given international proportions by Voltaire, Calas was posthumously reinstated by Louis XV, and compensation paid to his widow.

Chapter 1 1 2

3 4

Notes.indd 230

The Old Order Changes

Edgar Clenet, ‘Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la Commune de Rioux, Mémoires de Jean Bouquet’, Recueil XVIII (1908–12), pp. 373–90. There is a sixteenth-century wooden statue group in Rioux church with traces of colour on it dating from the time of François I made for the Château de Rioux. Its subject is the mystical marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria. François de Beaumont, seigneur of Rioux seduced Catherine de Souza-Bragance, a fille d’honneur to Louise de Savoie, Duchess of Angoulême, mother of François I, who obliged Beaumont to marry Catherine. The face of the saint, kneeling before the Virgin and Child and holding the Child’s hand, is said to be the Baronne de Rioux’s likeness. Mme Bibard, the historian of Rioux, denies that this was in the church in Bouquet’s time. Jacqueline Bibard, L’histoire de Rioux à travers les siècles (Gemozac, 2003). Pierre Guillemeteau came back to Rioux as curé after Bonaparte’s Concordat with Pope Pius VII in 1802, by which time Bertry had died. Citizen Bouquet had also died by then, on 10 brumaire, year 9 (1801), and so no opportunity of his challenging the authority of the restored curé presented itself to him. Bouquet was buried in the churchyard, but a new cemetery for the commune was provided in 1860, and the whereabouts of his remains are not known (Jacqueline Bibard, L’histoire de Rioux à travers les siècles (Gemozac, 2003)).

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Notes 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16

This was the usual term on the lips of the revolutionaries for ‘previous’, ‘former’, or, as lawyers might have said, ‘heretofore’. Nowadays it houses the Musée Dupuy-Mestreau. Saintes et L’Histoire de ses rues, Société d’Archéologie d’Histoire de la Charente-Maritime, pp. 195ff. Business manager of the Duke of Orleans and the author of Dangerous Liaisons. Georges Martin, ‘Branche des comtes de Paulin’, Chapter IV, in Histoire et généalogie de la maison de la Tour du Pin (La Ricarderie, 1985). Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), pp. 147f and 182f. I am indebted for this information to M. Christian Gensbeitel, former Directeur de l’Atelier de Patrimoine in Saintes. Philip Mansell, Louis XVIII, revised edition (London, 2005), pp. 19–39. This realization was developed in Patrice Leconte’s 1996 film Ridicule, in which a provincial seigneur tries to gain the king’s necessary acceptance for a land drainage scheme to save his people from total dependence upon a fish diet and the scourge of malaria, and is effectively barred from approaching him by the court nobles. Didier Poton, ‘Un protestantisme reconnu 1787–1799’, in Francine Ducluzeau (ed.), Histoire des protestants charentais (Aunis, Angoumois, Saintonge) (Paris, 2001), pp. 215–34. Jean Cavaignac, ‘Troubles Municipaux à Saint-Jean-d’Angély au debut de la Révolution’, Receuil XXV (1974), pp. 257–66; and T. Debussy and P. Vincent, ‘Claude-Alexandre Normand d’Authon, un maire méconnu de Saint-Jean-d’Angély’, RSA XIV (1988), pp. 63–71. Marquis de Grailly Henri, Histoire de Famille, begun in January 1951, pour finir quand il plaira a Dieu; completed by Jean de Grailly and privately circulated, November 1986, pp. 103–06.

Chapter 2 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Notes.indd 231

231

Elections, Grievances, and Feudal Dues

The king’s minister Necker had agreed that there should be the same number of third estate deputies as from the clergy and the nobility together. This was known as ‘doubling the third’. For an explanation of the three orders, see section ‘Successive Forms of Government’ p. xvii. Ibid. Marillet, Volume 1, p. 20. Ibid., p. 22. The qualification to vote for a third estate deputy in a provincial assembly in the old order was to be male, over the age of 25 and having one’s name on the list of taxpayers. Ibid., p. 23. Garnier had to wait until 1792 to be a deputy, when he was elected to the National Convention. Ibid. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid. Ibid.

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232 13 14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Notes.indd 232

The Unseen Terror Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. These were written by the king to governors of prisons, at the request of privileged nobles, ordering individuals to be taken into custody, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes for criminal reasons, and sometimes merely to remove an embarrassing member of a noble family. It was a cover for arbitrary arrest without trial. Eugène Reveillaud, Histoire politique et parlementaire de La Charente et de La Charente-Inférieure de 1789 à 1830 (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1906) (reprinted Paris, 1987), pp. 73–96. M. D. Massiou, Histoire de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis, Tome VI (Paris, 1836), p. 2. The signature of the president of the assembly which drew up the cahier at Taillebourg is ‘Marillet’, which was probably that of the dean who was also the curé, JacquesThomas, brother of François-Guillaume, the keeper of the Histoire secrète in Saintes. Since 1500 there had been a well-endowed collégiale (a cathedral-sized establishment but without a bishop’s throne) at Taillebourg, which had suffered in its fabric in the Wars of Religion, but still had a dean who was also the curé and at least one canon in 1789. They both had lavish accommodation in the impressive, recently completed outbuildings of the chateau. Dean Marillet had 11 rooms at his disposal. Reveillaud: Histoire politique, pp. 73–96. Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), pp. 203ff. Some of the lists have been lost; for example, that of the clergy at La Rochelle and of the nobles at Saint-Jean-d’Angély. Arch. Dep. Char. Mtme., C 260 bis, quoted in full in Marc Seguin, Jonzac pendant la Révolution (Jonzac, 1986), pp. 167–73. Jonzac’s main occupation was the manufacture and sale of serge cloth. Ibid., pp. 18f. Dr. Guillotin was a third estate deputy for Paris, soon to be responsible for the law adopted at his suggestion ordering that ‘the method of punishment shall be the same for all persons on whom the law shall pronounce a sentence of death. The criminal shall be decapitated . . . by a simple mechanism’. A story persists that his mother, out for a walk by the Charente heard the cries of a convicted man being broken on the wheel, and rushed home to give birth to Joseph-Ignace prematurely, provoking a birth-memory in his adult mind. It gives a thrill to newcomers in the Saintonge nowadays to see signs advertising businesses run by people called Guillotin. He also solved the problem of speakers in the assembly not being able to hear each other by arranging their seats in a semicircle around the tribune, something that became permanent. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 107. Reveillaud: Histoire politique, p. 166. Ibid., p. 123. Jacques Lamarre, La Vie Rurale avant et pendant La Révolution (Niort, 1982), pp. 10ff. Jean-Noel Luc, ‘Les campagnes d’Aunis et de Saintonge en 1789: Une révolution silencieuse?’, RSA III (1977), pp. 79–117. Louis Audiat, ‘Une lettre du curé de Montendre à son évêque’, RSA XXI (1911), pp. 202f. Arch. Dep. Char. Mtme., 1877, quoted by J.-N. Luc.

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Notes 33

34 35 36

37

38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47

Lettre à terrier en faveur du seigneur de Sousmoulins, le 11 avril 1789. Requête au présidial de Saintes et autorisation du tribunal le 4 mai 1789, Arch. Dep. Char. Mtme., B853 23, quoted by J.-N. Luc. This was a detested seigneurial due, paid in kind, of a fraction of a tenant’s grain harvest, varying from a third to a twentieth of the produce. Yvon Pierron, in F. Julien-Labruyère (ed.), Dictionnnaire Biographique des Charentais (Paris, 2005), p. 1156. Dominique Rousseau, Saint-Thomas de Conac, Une histoire en bord d’estuaire (Jonzac, 2008), pp. 114–18. Note 5 refers to Roux’s discours quoted in full in Bibliothèque Nationale document P87, 1172. For the text of Roux’s Parisian speeches and the Enragés’ manifesto, see John Hardman, The French Revolution, the Fall of the Ancien Régime to the Thermidorean Reaction 1785–1795 (London, 1981), pp. 171–6, citing Georgi Markov. Jean-Noel Luc, ‘Les Révoltes paysannes de Varaize et des villages voisins en 1790’, Receuil XXV (1974), pp. 245ff. All that follows is based on minutes and reports of interrogations for the insurgents’ subsequent trial: Arch. Dep. Char. Mtme., B1005, L147, L650, L739, & L748, also quoted by J.-N. Luc. Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800 (Pennsylvania, 2001), pp. 55–6. Ibid., pp. 101–3. The canton was, and is, a group of communes that was the next stage down from the district in each Department. Ibid., pp. 139–41. Ibid., p. 136. Marc Seguin, Jonzac pendant la Révolution (Jonzac, 1986), pp. 80–81. Gallocheau remained in office until 1811. When the monarchy was restored, he was appointed as a judge in Saintes, and remained in office until his death in 1826. He is also recorded as writing a song about the Hirondelle, the first steamboat to appear on the Charente. Frédéric Morin, in F. Julien-Labruyère (ed.), Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais (Paris, 2005), p. 569. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud’, RSA XXVII (1907), pp. 74–6.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6

Notes.indd 233

233

A Representative of the People

Armand Lods, Un Conventionnel en Mission, Bernard de Saintes et la Réunion de la Principauté de Montbéliard à la France (Paris, 1888), p. 9. Marillet, Volume 1, pp. 38–40. Ibid., pp. 27–34. Blue and red were the colours of Paris and white of the royal family. Ibid., p. 35. After the re-election of Garnier as maire in February 1790, the door of his house was decorated with laurel garlands and some young people prepared a triumphal armchair all covered in laurels for him. Bernard never knew anything like that. There was a sting in the tail for Garnier’s acclamation, however. Several days afterwards, he found three horseshoes and a piece of boxwood to make a comb out of left on his doorstep. Marillet, not one to admire social mobility, explains that this was done

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7 8

9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

Notes.indd 234

The Unseen Terror to remind Garnier of his grandfather and father: the former was a blacksmith at Marennes, and the latter a domestic servant. Ibid., p. 36. In this context the Jacobins were the order of Franciscans, which still occupied the buildings around the courtyard where the Mediathèque Municipal François-Mitterand is now found. The term does not refer here to the Jacobin Club in Paris, nor to its counterparts soon to be set up all over the country. The author’s first visit to the Hôtel de Monconseil was made a special occasion when the museum guide opened the first-floor shutters and the whole of the meadow across the river could be seen at once. Marillet always calls it ‘the Club’. Much of Marillet’s opinionated reportage was filtered by Charles Dangibeaud in articles in Le Journal de Saintes, 12, 19, 26 June and 3 and 10 July 1926, thoughtfully pasted into Martineau’s MS transcription of Marillet’s own text kept in the Médiathèque municipale François-Mitterrand at Saintes. These newspaper articles were reproduced as one in RSA XLII (1926–7), pp. 45–58. The king had managed his escape from the Tuileries Palace with the queen, his children, and his sister, intending to make his way to the French border at Montmedy to proclaim himself independent, leaving a letter behind explaining his action. He was recognized by the postmaster at Sainte-Ménéhoude from his picture on the paper money, captured, and brought back to Paris. Ibid. Marillet, Volume 2, pp. 195f. Or, when he remembered, Xantes, which is what the medieval chroniclers like Matthew Paris and William de Nangis had called it. Ibid., Volume 3, p. 27. Dangibeaud, op. cit. Jean-Christian Petitfils, Louis XVI (Paris, 2005), pp. 899–934. Eugène Reveillaud, Histoire politique et parlementaire de La Charente et de La Charente-Inférieure de 1789 à 1830 (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1906) (reprinted Paris, 1987), p. 289. Ibid., p. 289, n. 1. Jean-Théodore Viaud and Élie-Jérôme Fleury, Histoire de la Ville de et du Port de Rochefort, Tome 1 (Rochefort, 1845) (reprinted Marseille, 1977), p. 316. Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), p. 272. Reveillaud: Histoire politique, p. 290. Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London, 2002), p. 486. Lods: Un Conventionnel en Mission, p. 48. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 38–40. He was the former president of the Dijon Parlement under the old order, and very wealthy. Bernard lived in part of his empty but luxurious house and then, having personally supervised his execution, took it over completely. Ibid., pp. 57–69. Colin Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988), p. 100. Lods: Un Conventionnel en Mission, p. 82.

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Notes 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., p. 84. Dangibeaud, op. cit. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880 (ET Alison Nevill, Oxford, 1988), p. 159; Lods: Un Conventionnel en Mission, p. 84. Lods: Un Conventionnel en Mission, p. 84n. Ibid., p. 86. Philip Mansel, Louis XVIII (London, 2005), p. 326. Lods: Un Conventionnel en Mission, p. 86. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L1085, quoted in Marc Seguin, Jonzac pendant la Révolution (Jonzac, 1986), pp. 31–6. Seguin: Jonzac pendant, p. 166.

Chapter 4 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21

Notes.indd 235

235

The Terror in Saintes

Marillet, Volume 1, p. 1. Ibid., Volume 2, p. 98. The curé of Taillebourg, who was also dean of the collégiale there, was his brother and left for exile in Spain to be replaced for a while by a constitutional priest called Bossard. Dean Marillet returned in 1803. Ibid., Volume 3, pp. 55–9. Ibid., pp. 59–61. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 64–5. Ibid., p. 67. He was representative on mission at the time in the Gironde and surrounding Departments. That does not seem to be true. Marillet says that people marched to ‘the Mountain’ during the festival in honour of the battle of Fleurus (discussed earlier) and the revolutionary festival which he reports after this. Righteous indignation knows no boundaries. Ibid., pp. 68–9. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 73. A prominent landowning lawyer and member by marriage of the noblesse de robe in Authon, a village near Saint-Jean-d’Angély, who had been elected maire in the early months of the Revolution. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid. Before 1789, Stofflet was a gamekeeper. In 1793 he led rebels in Anjou to unite with the Vendéans to fight under Cathelineau at Cholet. He eventually became commander of the force alongside Charette, and was ambushed and shot by the Republicans in 1796 (Colin Jones, Longman Companion, p. 393). Nous braverons vos effors et vos menaces. Ibid., Volume 4, pp. 154–7, 170ff & 175.

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236 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

The Unseen Terror Ibid., pp. 160ff. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., pp. 199–200. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 207. Marillet’s most used epithet for those in power is the archaic word scelerat. Ibid., pp. 238–43. Ibid., p. 278. André Zweyaker, Mémoire pour le diplome d’études superieures d’histoire présenté à la faculté des Lettres de l’université de Poitiers, 1958, unpublished MS, Médiathèque municipale François-Mitterand de Saintes, Fonds Ancien et Regional, preface.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

Notes.indd 236

La Rochelle Becomes a Frontier Town

Paul Langford, Modern British Foreign Policy: The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815 (London, 1976), pp. 69 & 147–150. Jean-Pierre Queguiner, ‘Jean Amable Lessene, capitaine de navire négrier’, Écrits d’ouest, No 12 (2004), pp. 107–127. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L395, Brumaire An. 2. Francine Ducluzeau (ed.), Histoire des protestants charentais (Aunis, Saintonge, Angoumois) (Paris, 2001); Didier Poton, Un protestantisme reconnue 1787–1799, pp. 215–34. François Masgnaud, Franc-Maçonnerie et Franc-Maçons en Aunis et Saintonge sous l’Ancien Régime et La Révolution (La Rochelle, 1989), pp. 229ff. Claudy Valin, La Rochelle – La Vendée 1793 (Paris, 1977), pp. 100–06. In 1787, he had denounced Bishop Crussol d’Uzès in 1789 for his opposition to Louis XVI’s Edict of Toleration for Protestants on a national scale and was elected maire soon after. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 112–30. Ibid., p. 148. In 1776 de Coucy had been made a royal chaplain at the age of 30, and was a canon of Reims in October 1789, when he was nominated by Louis XVI to the bishopric of La Rochelle after the reactionary Crussol d’Uzès had died. He obtained a passport to enable him to go to the spa at Barèges in the foothills of the Pyrenees from where he crossed the Spanish border to Pamplona in July 1791 (C. Valin, Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais, p. 356). Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., pp. 189–94. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 184. Ann Bernet, Charette (Paris, 2005), pp. 61ff. Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée (ET George Holoch, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2003), first published in French in 1986 with the title Le Génocide francofrançais. Review of Reynald Secher by Peter McPhee, University of Melbourne, H-France Review 4/26 (March 2004), to be found at www.h-france.net/vol4reviews/mcphee3.html

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Notes 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Notes.indd 237

237

Mark Levene, The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Volume II: Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (London and New York, 2005), pp. 157–61. Bernard had had to relinquish the post of colonel upon his election as one of the Charente-Inférieure deputies in the National Convention. Joseph Niou had been maire of Rochefort, instrumental in expelling Lazarist priests from the church there. Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 192f. Ibid., n. 112. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L388, pp. 66ff. Valin: La Rochelle, p. 202, quoting the Municipal Archives of La Rochelle, li3/1, notes du 20 mars. This narrative depends upon Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L1085/7, the records of the trial and subsequent judgements, used by P. Lemmonier, ‘Les Journées de 21 et 22 mars 1793 à La Rochelle’, RSA XXXII (1912), pp. 201–11, and Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 201ff, and Autopsie d’un Massacre (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1992). Crassous was not a rough-cut figure like Marat, Hébert, or, even, Danton in Paris. He began as an academic lawyer trained at the University of Paris, and was subsequently an advocate in the Paris parlement. He first appeared at La Rochelle in 1779 as a deputy procurator in the finance office. After five years, he went to practise law in Martinique, and then came back in 1791 to stand for election to the District Directory of La Rochelle, by then in his early fifties (C. Valin, Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais, p. 371). Valin: La Rochelle, p. 197. ‘Dead priests, victims of popular emotion’. The similarity between ‘emotion’ and ‘émeute’, which means ‘riot’, is striking. I found the writing in this small and flimsy document hard to read, especially after it has been repeatedly handled over more than 200 years, and I asked the archivist on duty whether there were a specialist in orthography in the room. There was: a dignified elderly lady who was willing to be distracted from columns of accounts. She read it to me, and made the comment, Vos études ne sont pas gaies, monsieur! (‘Your studies are hardly cheerful . . .’) See Chapters 12 and 13. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L1085, the last document in the dossier. Valin: La Rochelle, p. 215. Ibid., pp. 217f. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., pp. 231f. This was the organization of which Citizen Bouquet was forming a contingent in the village of Rioux at the same time as this (Chapter 1). Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., pp. 240f. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., pp. 243f. Ibid., p. 244.

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238

The Unseen Terror

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Notes.indd 238

La Rochelle in Wartime

See p. xvii. Ann Bernet, Charette (Paris, 2005), p. 197. The Oxford dictionary of Quotations, ad.loc. Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, the French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London, 2006), p. 121. La Sentinelle, 9 April 1796, quoted in Émile Gabory, L’Angleterre et La Vendée d’après des documents inédits, Granville, Quiberon, l’île de Yeu (Paris, 1930), pp. 7–13. As we shall see, most of the refractory clergy from the Charente-Inférieure went to Spain. Gabory: L’Angleterre, Tome I, pp. 46–69. Ibid., pp. 70–93. Henri du Vergier, comte de Larochejacquelein, now aged 21, had been an officer in Louis XVI’s Constitutional Guard in 1791, but he escaped from Paris after the overthrow of the monarchy to lead the Vendéans from late 1793. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition, Volume 2 (London, 1983), pp. 322–5. Claudy Valin, La Rochelle – La Vendée 1793 (Paris, 1977), p. 343. Gabory: L’Angleterre, pp. 94–112. Land with sunken lanes and hedgerows, well known to those who lived there, but full of traps for newcomers. Claudy Valin supplies maps showing that the battalions were raised in places as distant as Brest, Lille, Strasbourg, Marseille, and Toulouse, pp. 356f. Valin: La Rochelle, p. 367. Ibid., p. 359. This account of Turreau’s columns depends upon Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 353–64. There is more to that last word than ‘thief ’. Ibid., pp. 279–83. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 258. Valin: La Rochelle, p. 279. Ibid., p. 280. Ibid., p. 283. Susbielle provided the minute book for the district’s meetings and his bookplate is stuck inside the cover of the volume that contains the minutes of meetings held between 1 brumaire year II and 16 brumaire year IV. The bookplate is a pre-war relic, advertising paper from Holland, sealing wax from Spain, pencils from England and Germany. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L389. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., p. 289. See Chapter 8. Ibid., p. 292. Doyle: Oxford History, p. 229. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L395 23 frimaire an 2. Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 310f. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L395 21 frimaire an 2. Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 368f. Ibid., pp. 313f.

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Notes 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

Ibid., p. 314. Ibid. Ibid., p. 317. By this time the ‘decade’ had replaced the seven-day week as the timescale for all activity, public and private alike. Ibid. Ibid., p. 318. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L395, 10 brumaire an 2. Valin: La Rochelle, p. 321. Mirabeau was a profligate nobleman elected to the Estates-General for the third estate, who sold his services to the king and queen as an adviser on constitutional monarchy as the papers found in the king’s secret strongbox made clear when they were discovered. Ibid., p. 324. The Third Republic reinforced this by commissioning a huge canvas of Bara’s death for the salon of 1883 from J.C.Weerts, in which the boy in his uniform is about to be bayoneted among the blown horses of the cavalry charge. Ibid., p. 325. There is a reproduction of this on the cover of Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (New Haven and London, 1994). Bara was a hero on a national scale. Ibid., pp. 325f. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid. Ibid., p. 372. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L395, brumaire an 2. Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 375f. Ibid., pp. 416–26. Ibid., p. 433. Ibid., pp. 436–8. Ibid., p. 440. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L388. It is said that Napoleon I was persuaded to give the status of chef-lieu of the department to La Rochelle after Comtesse Laure de Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély had been cold-shouldered, as it were, by the buttoned-up, respectable bourgeois matrons of Saintes for wearing the décolleté Paris fashion of the day at the reception held for her and her influential husband, the Emperor’s confidant (E.-J. Guérin, ‘La Prefecture de Saintes 1790–1810’, RSA XXXIII (1913), pp. 57–71, and Jean Thaumiaux, Les deux Regnault . . . , Sud-Ouest, 23 March 1962). Valin: La Rochelle, pp. 445–7.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4

Notes.indd 239

239

Lequinio’s Rochefort

Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), pp. 7–29. Ibid., pp. 216–22. Ibid., pp. 239–42. P. Lemonnier, La Déportation Écclésiastique à Rochefort 1794–1795 d’Apres les documents officiels. Publication de la société des archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis (La Rochelle, 1916), p. 29.

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240 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

Notes.indd 240

The Unseen Terror Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, p. 250. Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 284. François Masgnaud, Franc-Maçonnerie et Franc-Maçons en Aunis et Saintonge sous l’Ancien Régime et La Révolution (La Rochelle, 1989), pp. 229ff. Tout va marcher içi rudement. Lemonnier: La Déportation, p. 34. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, pp. 290ff. D.M.G. Sutherland, France, 1789–1815, Revolution and Counterrevolution (London, 1985), p. 189. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, p. 286. Ibid., p. 287. O. Troude, Batailles Navales de la France, Tome 2 (Paris, 1867), pp. 296ff. John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Reluctant Transition, Volume 2 (London, 1983), pp. 303–21. Lemonnier: La Déportation, p. 32, quoting Arch. Nat., C.277. According to the Abbé Lemonnier, who found it in the National Archives for his 1916 book. Masgnaud: Franc-Maçonnerie, pp. 235ff. Born in La Rochelle in 1741, a sailor at 14, a freemason in his mid-twenties, captain of a slave ship, winning sea-fights with English privateers and Barbary pirates, he had suffered several shipwrecks which ruined him financially and took away his independence. After falling out with at least one shipowner who employed him, he joined the navy as a marine officer, though with a reputation as a royalist sympathizer. Moniteur Universel, No 77, 7 December 1793, quoted in Masgnaud: Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 239. Claudy Valin, La Rochelle – La Vendée 1793 (Paris, 1977), p. 229. Masgnaud: Franc-Maçonnerie, p. 241. Claudy Valin in F. Julien-Labruyère (ed.), Dictionnaire Biographique des Charentais (Paris, 2005), p. 398. Eugène Reveillaud, Histoire politique et parlementaire de La Charente et de La Charente-Inférieure de 1789 à 1830 (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1906) (reprinted Paris, 1987),, pp. 362–70. Lemonnier: La Déportation, p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., pp. 42f. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud’, RSA XXVIII (1908), pp. 31–43. J.-T. Viaud et E.-J. Fleury, Histoire de la Ville et du Port de Rochefort, Tome II (Rochefort, 1845) (Lafitte Reprints, Marseille, 1977), pp. 380–95. Mme Lequinio was even related to the de Grailly family at Panloy in the CharenteInférieure, whose reaction to the Revolution will appear in Chapter 14. Marquis de Grailly Henri, Histoire de Famille, completed by Jean de Grailly, 1986, privately printed. Original edition, No 7, pp. 193–5, generously lent to me by the present marquis. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L920.

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Notes 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

S.H. Dpt ‘Marine’, Rochefort, 1 L3/1. Les paymens (sic) seront faits moitié comptant en numéraire effectif, & l’autre moitié dans le delai d’un mois à compter du jour de l’adjudication, aussi en numéraire effectif; il ne sera point question de lettres de change. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, pp. 415f. S.H. Dpt ‘Marine’, Rochefort, 1 L3/1. S.H. Dpt ‘Marine’, Rochefort, 3 O 53. S.H. Dpt ‘Marine’, Rochefort, 3 O 54. See Chapter 12. Villeneau says she achieved nine knots as she tried to get away from Naiad. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, pp. 402–12. Which schoolboys of my generation were taught to call The Battle of the Nile. Ibid., pp. 299–304. Always called ‘English’ by French writers (and the people who work in the naval archives at Rochefort), perhaps out of subconscious awareness of their auld alliance with Scotland. Ibid., p. 374 William James, The Naval History of Great Britain from the Declaration of War by France in 1793 to the Accession of George IV (London, 1837), pp. 269–70.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Notes.indd 241

241

Internment in Brouage

See Chapter 9. The donjon at Pons was another. Elaine and Jimmy Vigé, Brouage, Ville d’histoire et Place fort (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1989), pp. 170f. As they remained until they were replaced by oyster-beds in the next century. Vigé: Brouage, p. 170. Ibid., p. 179. Now the actual prison in Saintes, between the avenue Gambetta and the Abbaye aux Dames. Marillet, Histoire Secrete, Volume 4, pp. 71f. T. Debussy and P. Versat, ‘Claude-Alexandre Normande d’Authon, un maire méconnu de Saint-Jean-d’Angély’, RSA XIV (1988), pp. 63–71. Vigé: Brouage, pp. 180f. Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), pp. 244f. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, pp. 261f. Ibid., p. 264. Ibid., pp. 269f. Ibid., p. 277. Ibid., pp. 362ff. Vigé: Brouage, p. 180. Ibid., pp. 180f. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., p. 183. Claudy Valin, ‘Un document Jacobin rochelais de première importance’, RSA XXVI (2000), p. 141, n. 17.

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242 22 23 24 25

The Unseen Terror Vigé: Brouage, pp. 183f. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 185f. Claudy Valin, La Rochelle – La Vendée 1793 (Paris, 1997) pp. 423f.

Chapter 9 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Notes.indd 242

The End of the Bishop of Saintes

Denys Joly d’Aussy, AHSA II, pp. 305–40, reprinted as Annexe Historique in Nicolas Faucherre and Antoine Pellerin, Crazannes, logis alchemique (Paris, 2003), p. 206. Louis Audiat, Deux Victimes des Septembriseurs (Paris, 1897), pp. 11f. Claude-Furey-André Legrix, Journal de M. l’Abbé Legrix (1781–91), Receuil 2/1 (Saint-Jean-d’Angely, 1867), p. 3, n. 9. G. Lenotre, La Maison des Carmes (Paris, 1933), p. 10. Marillet, Volume 1, pp. 20ff. They were ‘a church within the church’ that followed the teaching on spirituality and church organization of the seventeenth-century Bishop Cornelius Jansen. P. Lemonnier (ed.), Augustin-Alexis Taillet, ‘Église de Saintes depuis 1789 jusqu’à la fin de 1796’, AHSA XXI (1902), p. 253. Legrix: p. 53. Still preserved in the impressive church dedicated to him on the hill above Saintes. Ibid., p. 6. Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London, 2002), pp. 226–35. Grégoire was among the first of the clergy to join the third estate deputies who had made their ‘Tennis Court Oath’ not to disperse until they had been recognized by the king as the National Assembly. He was a leading opponent of slavery and later, as a deputy in the National Convention, he opposed the king’s execution. He was elected constitutional bishop of the Loir et Cher department, and a member of the Council of Five Hundred under the Directory. Even during the Terror, he continued to wear his purple cassock openly in defiance of the law. William Doyle, Jansenism (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 83. Taillet: ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 255. Legrix: p. 53. Taillet: ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 256. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L696ter, 6. The bishop’s printed ordinance is also contained in this dossier, as is the lawyer Héard’s four-page response. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L695, 2. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L696ter, 6. Lenotre: La Maison, p. 10, n. 2. Marillet, Volume 3, pp. 113ff. This is not borne out by the account given of the protection that Regnaud de SaintJean d’Angély offered the queen (see concluding chapter). Ibid., pp. 147–9. After the king’s younger brother, the future King Charles X (1824–30). Ibid., p. 151.

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Notes 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37

These priests were ‘animated’ (a suitable French term) by the principal of the college, the Abbé Jacques-Henri Émery, who, even after his incarceration in the Conciergerie, normally the ante-room to the guillotine, managed to organize young priests clandestinely to administer rites for the dying to Catholics from places within the crowd that watched as the tumbrels passed. Robespierre left him in gaol rather than executing him, so ‘that lamentation and hysteria might cease’. James Wassermann (ed), UnaBirch, Secret Societies (Lake Worth, 2007), pp. 150–1. Lenotre: La Maison, pp. 4–19. Taillet: ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 259. Lenotre: La Maison, pp. 19f. These are the same decrees as applied to the Vendéan priests murdered at La Rochelle six months later (see Chapter 5). Ibid., pp. 41–5. Taillet: ‘Église de Saintes’, pp. 259–61. According to Colin Jones, a more realistic figure is between 1,100 and 1,500. The Great Nation (London, 2002), p. 461. Marillet, Volume 3, pp. 146f. ‘The tocsin that will sound is not the warning of alarm; it is the call to charge against the enemies of the nation. Gentlemen, to overwhelm them we must have Audacity, more Audacity, always Audacity – and France is saved.’ Full and suitably horrific accounts in the last 30 years in English of the September Massacres include those by Christopher Hibbert, The French Revolution (London, 1980), pp. 169–80; and Simon Schama, Citizens (London, 1988), pp. 631–9. See also the important comments by William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), pp. 191–2. Baron Chaudruc de Crazannes, ‘Inventoire des Meubles de Mgr de La Rochefoucauld au Château de Crazannes’, RSA XXVI (1907), pp. 34–6.

Chapter 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Notes.indd 243

243

A Tribulation of Oath Takers

Claude-Furey-André Legrix, ‘Canon of the cathedral church of Saintes’, Journal de M. l’Abbé Legrix (1781–91), Receuil 2/1 (Saint-Jean-d’Angely, 1867), p. 51. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., pp. 53–4. Ibid., p. 54. A. Thibadeau, ‘Extrait des déliberations du district de Saintes’, Receuil XX (1923–31), p. 44. Now in use as a conference hall known as the Salle Saintonge. Legrix, p. 55. Louis Audiat, Deux Victimes des Septembriseurs (Paris, 1897), p. 285. Taillet, ‘Eglise de Saintes’, p. 308. As we have seen, Pierre-Louis de La Rochefoucauld was still alive and living in Paris. Ibid. Thibadeau, ‘Extrait des déliberations’, p. 44. Quoted in Pierre-Damien Rainguet, Biographie Saintongeaise (Saintes, 1851) (reprinted Geneva, 1971), p. 501.

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244 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46 47 48

Notes.indd 244

The Unseen Terror Ibid, p. 502. Ibid, p. 503. Ibid. Ibid, p. 503 n. 1. Marillet, Volume 2, pp. 111–2. Glastron survived to go into exile and died as curé of La Vallée in 1813. Ibid. Taillet, ‘Eglise de Saintes’, p. 283. Marillet, p. 112f. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 118. Tailllet, ‘Eglise de Saintes’, pp. 308–12. Ibid., pp. 313–5. John Hardman, Louis XVI (London, 1993), p.225. Saintes et l’Histoire de ses Rues (Société d’Archéologies et d’Histoire de la CharenteMaritime), p.194f. Mirabeau was licentious, immoral, a menace to his family’ reputation, but was taken into the confidence of the royal family, and his premature death was a factor in the slide into regicide because the king no longer had a spokesman in the National Assembly. Taillet, ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 316. Ibid., n.1. For an imaginative account of Robinet’s motivations, see Michel Theodosevic, Robinet, Évêque de Saintonge (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 2004), with illustrations of the area à l’époque by Ann Bosset. Taillet, ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 318, n.1. Ibid., 318f. Ibid., 319. Ibid. Perhaps it was he who was chosen as defence counsel by those charged with the murder of the priests on the quay at La Rochelle on March 21 and 22, 1793 (Chapter 5). Marillet, Volume 4, p.70. Taillet, ‘Église de Saintes’, p. 319, n. 2, by the more charitable Lemonnier. There may be come confusion for readers in English in this and subsequent chapters. In France the curé is what the English rector or vicar is. The vicaire is an assistant priest, called the curate colloquially in English. See pp. 34–35. Taillet, ‘Église de Saintes’, pp. 333–334. Ibid., p. 334, n.1. See pp. 19–29. The memorial tablets were put up after the Second World War, p. 15.

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Notes

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

2

Notes.indd 245

National Property and Closed Convents

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 69. Robin Harris, Talleyrand, Betrayer and Saviour of France (London, 2007), p. 46. Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London, 2002), p. 201. Robert Darnton, Forbidden Best-sellers of Pre-revolutionary France (London, 1997), pp. 249ff; and Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen (ET Julie Rose, NY, 1999), passim. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud pendant la periode révolutionnaire,’ RSA XXVI (1906), p. 393. The Department of the Charente-Maritime acquired the abbey in 2002 and has conserved what remains of the remarkable romaine buildings. Claudy Valin, Autopsie d’un Massacre (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1992), pp. 131–5. Francine Ducluzeau (ed.), Histoire des protestants charentais (Aunis, Angoumois, Saintonge) (Paris, 2001), pp. 215–34. Extrait de la Gazette des Tribunaux, Médiathèque-municipale-François-Mitterand, Saintes, FetAdew S.21764Mar. It is now the Médiathèque François-Mitterand de Saintes where Marillet’s Histoire secrete is kept. X, ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes’, RSA XLI (1926), pp. 315–9, and ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes, (suite)’, RSA XLII (1927), pp. 21–5. ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes’, pp. 316f. Ibid., pp. 317f. Inability to decide anything without a previous order from the authority in the grade above is very significant: the culture of the revolutionary years was in that respect no different from what had preceded it. Society was still deferential, even if the people who commanded the deference had changed. Marillet, Volume 3, p. 55. ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes’, p. 319. Ibid. Ibid. ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes (suite)’, p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Anatole Laverny, ‘Deux Prêtres de l’Ancien Diocèse de Saintes’, RSA XXVIII (1908), pp. 25ff. Marillet, Volume 4, p. 72. ‘La Mort de l’Abbaye de Saintes (suite)’, p. 24. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid. It is remarkable that the beautifully carved pendant of the Virgin and Child in what is now the auditorium in the abbey survived all the hammering and chiselling. Ibid., p. 25.

Chapter 12 1

245

Disappearing Priests

After his time in Bilbao, Saint-Médard made his way to England. He was back in the Saintonge in 1802, where he died 20 years later. He was made vicar-general of the new diocese of La Rochelle, which included Saintes, after the Concordat. AHSA XII (1892), p. 440.

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246 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

The Unseen Terror P. Lemonnier, La Déportation Ecclésiastique à Rochefort, 1794–1795 D’Après les documents officiels, Publication de la société des archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis (La Rochelle, 1916), pp. 1–45. Arch. Nat. F 19,412,414, quoted by Lemonnier op. cit. The first two of these laws were used to ‘justify’ the murder of six priests on the quay at La Rochelle on 21–22 March 1793 (see Chapter 5). Arch. Nat. D XVI. 3 – 31 – 180, quoted by Lemonnier op. cit. Lemonnier: La Déportation, pp. 20–4. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., pp. 25–7. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 44. Yves Blomme, Les Prêtres Déportés sur les Pontons de Rochefort (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1994), p. 149. 1852–70. Ibid., pp. 60–2. The frigate built at Rochefort to take the marquis de Lafayette to support the Americans against the British in 1778, a replica of which is now being built in a dry dock there. Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), pp. 204 and 206. Ibid., pp. 313f. Ibid., p. 315. Blomme: Les Prêtres Déportés, facing p. 96. P. Lemmonier, ‘Les Journées de 21 et 22 mars 1793 à La Rochelle’, RSA XXXII (1912), pp. 66–74. In modern Tunisia. Blomme: Les Prêtres Déportés, pp. 128f. Ibid., pp. 78–9. Ibid., pp. 80–5. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 94. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, p. 326. Blomme: Les Prêtres Déportés, p. 95. The exploitation of oyster beds had not yet become the major industry of the coast. Droin: L’histoire de Rochefort, p. 326.

Chapter 13 1 2 3 4

Notes.indd 246

Persecution and Reinstatement

The prominent Jansenist, among the first to take the civil oath, by then the constitutional bishop of Loir and Cher and a member of the National Convention. Yves Blomme, Les Prêtres Déportés sur les Pontons de Rochefort (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1994), pp. 113–4. Ibid., p. 114. Marillet, Volume 4, p. 130.

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Notes 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., pp. 139–46. Colin Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988), p. 244. Marillet, Volume 4, pp. 147–53. Ibid., pp. 174f. Ibid., pp. 177ff. Ibid., pp. 200f. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., pp. 211f. Ibid., p. 270. Receuil, Tome VI (1881–3), pp. 224–59. Dominique Droin, L’histoire de Rochefort, Tome 2 (Saint-Laurent-de-Prée, 2002), p. 358. Ibid., p. 340. Blomme: Les Prêtres Déportés, pp. 145f. Ibid. Elaine and Jimmy Vigé, Brouage, Ville d’histoire et Place fort (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1989), pp. 170–98. In spite of his attachment to the Pope, de Coucy refused to acknowledge Bonaparte’s Concordat with Pius VII, and was one of the leaders of the Petite Église, which continued to maintain its independence of successive French regimes well into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, at the request of Louis XVIII he accepted nomination as Archbishop of Reims in 1817 but he did not take up the post until four years afterwards. Declared a Peer of France in October 1822, he died at Reims on 8 March 1824 in his 78th year. Theiner, Histoire des Deux Concordats, Tome II (Paris, 1858), p. 21. Georges Rodriguez, L’Église en Aunis et Saintonge (Royan, 1989), pp. 140ff. Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), p. 224. It was a politician from Pons in the Charente-Inférieure who was largely responsible for the passing of the 1905 legislation, Émile Combes. ‘Registre des Délibérations du Conseil Municipale d Jonzac’, RSA IX (1898), p. 392, quoted in Jean-Noël Luc (ed.), La Charente-Maritime, L’Aunis et la Saintonge des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 1981), p. 320.

Chapter 14 1

2 3 4 5 6

Notes.indd 247

247

Hope and Disillusion

Arch. Dep., Char. Mtme., L458, edited by Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de SaintSaturnin de Séchaud pendant la periode révolutionnaire’, RSA XXVI (1906), pp. 321–39 and 391–403. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), p. 124. He was the notary who carried out the inventory on Bishop de la Rochefoucauld’s property at Crazannes in September 1792. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, pp. 322f. Ibid., p. 323. Jacques Lamare, La Vie rurale avant et pendant La Révolution (Niort, 1982), pp. 139–42.

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248 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

Notes.indd 248

The Unseen Terror Colin Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988), pp. 241f. 1791, written out in full. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, p. 329. Ibid., p. 330. Ibid., pp. 330ff. Ibid., p. 394. A. Thibadeau, ‘Extrait des déliberations du district de Saintes’, Receuil XX (1923–31), p. 44. I am indebted for much of this information about François Lévesquot to Maître Didier Bréjon de Lavergnée, one of Mathieu Lévesquot’s descendants. The day after Lévesquot surrendered his keys. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, pp. 331f. Ibid., p. 332. Ibid., p. 396. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, p. 76. A popular name for Saint-Saturnin. Marillet, Volume 4, pp. 238ff. Perhaps Lévesquot thought this would not be hard to believe because families of negociants had been sending their sons to Amsterdam to learn Dutch marketing techniques for eau de vie, in order to bypass the middle men in La Rochelle, from 1760 onwards. Vide Kyle Jarrard, Cognac, la saga d’un esprit (Paris, 2007), p. 83. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, pp. 398ff. Ibid., n. 1. Ibid., p. 400. Ibid., pp. 401f. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., pp. 261ff. Ibid., p. 262. Marquis de Grailly, Henri, Histoire de Famille, completed by Jean de Grailly and privately printed in 1986, kindly lent to me by the present Marquis de Grailly, pp. 103–6. Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914, The Bourgeois Century (London, 1983), pp. 24–5. T. Debussy and P. Verzat, ‘Claude-AlexandreNormand d’Authon un maire méconnu de Saint-Jean-d’Angély’, RSA XIV (1988), p. 69. Charles Rivière, Les Courbon, Grande famille de Saintonge (Rochefort, 1998), p. 105. Their château is near Saint-Porchaire. He became an equerry to Tsars Paul and Alexander, and died in Russia in April 1801. She married again and moved to Saint-Jean-d’Angély. Quæorens: ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, p. 47. Ibid., p. 46. Certificate of Amnesty, Paris, 18 frimaire year IX of the French Republic: The Grand Judge and Minister of Justice, in execution of article 8 of the senatus consultum on the date of 6 floréal year X, in view of the declaration made on 1 prairial year X, before the secretary-general delegated by the prefect of the Charente-Infèrieure, by Grailly (Henri), living at Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, from which it results that the claimant does not

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Notes

39

40

249

enjoy any title, places, decorations, payments nor pensions of foreign powers; in view equally of the oath which he has made to be faithful to the government established by the Constitution and not to uphold either directly or indirectly any liaison or correspondence with the enemies of the State; and considering that this declaration and this oath were made in the intervals determined and that they are in conformity to the provisions of articles 3, 4, and 5 of the senatus consultum; and considering that the claimant does not find himself in any of the cases of exception set out in article 10, it is decreed as follows: 1. Amnesty is accorded for the fact of the emigration to Grailly, Henri. 2. He returns in consequence into the enjoyment of those of his properties which have been neither sold nor excluded by article 17 of the senatus consultum. Signed, REGNIER. SALADIN, secretary (Quæorens, ‘The Municipality of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud’, RSA XXVIII (1908), p 48). I am grateful to M. Claude Morain, the chateau’s owner, for explaining the Chevalier de Limouzin’s dispute with Republican authority in Saintes and giving me copies of the letters. Charles Fouché, Taillebourg et ses seigneurs (Chef-Boutonne, 1911), pp. 377ff. This rare book was lent to me by M. Jean Peyrondet, my neighbour when I lived in Taillebourg, along with 20 years’ worth of his historical notes.

Chapter 15 War and Education 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Notes.indd 249

Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud pendant la periode révolutionnaire’, RSA XXVII (1907), pp. 74–6, 388–99, and XXVIII (1908), pp. 31–57, all drawn from Arch. Dep., Char. Mtme, L458. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, p. 266. Ibid., pp. 264ff. Ibid., p. 389. Ibid. 4 February 1796, in execution of the law of 21 nivôse year III, 10 January 1795. They took their time. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVIII, p. 31. Ibid., pp. 32–5. Ibid., p. 33. Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., L458. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, p. 399. Panlois during the revolutionary years. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVIII, p. 47. Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London, 2002), p. 517. 18 brumaire year VIII. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVIII, pp. 36–43. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 39. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), pp. 337f. Gallocheaux, judge of the peace, Gaillard, Fruger, Yonnet, Perrault, Sorignet, Boucherit, Garlopeau, Bron, Barrault, the other Yonnet, Michaud, Quéré, Bastard, Voisin, minister of the catholic cult in Plassay, Fricaud, teacher at Ecurat, Marie-Claire Yonnet, teacher at Port d’Envaux, Rouland, field guard of the commune, Bonnet, guard from

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250

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

The Unseen Terror Plassay, Girardin, Commander of the National Guard, Noureau, Machefort, Février, Giraud, Glémein, Richaudeau, Piochaud, Garlopeau, captains, lieutenant and sublieutenant of the National Guard. These also promised fidelity: Constantin, Chouet, Lévesque, Yonnet, Berton, agent of Saint-Vaize, Charrier of Plassay, Desrentes of Ecurat, Menanteau of Crazannes, Angibaud his assistant, Clerteau, agent of les Essards, Parenteau of Le Mung, Chaillot, his assistant, Boisseau, agent of Geay, and, on 15 ventôse, Jean Gaschet, garde of Geay. Most of these names have been with us since the Revolution began, and some of them are still known in the area eight generations afterwards, sometimes also as names for hamlets in the locality. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVIII, p. 43. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, p. 396. Ibid. Claudy Valin, La Rochelle – La Vendée 1793 (Paris, 1997), p. 424. Though in effect it was done. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVII, pp. 396–8. Quæorens, ‘La Municipalité de Saint-Saturnin’, XXVIII, pp. 54–7.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Notes.indd 250

An Eye to the Future

Arch. Dep. Chte. Mtme., Br 1582, Notice Biographique sur Louis-Michel-Etienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély (Rochefort, 1863). Jean Verzat, Le Comte Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, L’Éminence grise de l’Empereur (Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 2000), p. 9. François Masgnaud, Franc-Maçonnerie et Franc-Maçons en Aunis et Saintonge sous l’Ancien Régime et La Révolution (La Rochelle, 1989), p. 229. Olivier Blanc, Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, L’Éminence grise de Napoléon (SaintJean-d’Angély, 2002), p. 36. Blanc: Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, p. 43. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 51. As representative on mission in La Rochelle in 1793, he may have given the orders for the lynching of six priests from the Vendée. See Chapter 5. Ibid., pp. 51f. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., p. 58. Ibid., pp. 56f. The Marshal would be in command of Second Empire French soldiers in the Crimean War of 1854–6. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 91ff. Alan Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York, 1998), p. 761. Colin Jones, The Great Nation (London, 2002), pp. 546–52. Robert Tombs, France 1814–1914 (Harlow and New York, 1996), p. 394. François Furet, Revolutionary France 1770–1880, ET Alison Nevill (Oxford, 1988), p. 537.

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Bibliography Abbreviations AHSA: Bulletin des Archives Historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis. Receuil: Receuil des Actes de la Commission des Arts et Monuments de la Charente-Infèrieure. RSA: Revue de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis. Arch. Dep. Chte-Mtme: Departmental Archives, Charente-Maritime. Arch. Nat.: French National Archives. SHD: Service Historique de la Défense.

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Gildea, Robert, The Past in French History (New Haven and London, 1994). Hardman, John, The French Revolution, The Fall of the Ancien Régime to the Thermidorean Reaction 1785–1795 (London, 1981). Hardman, John, Louis XVI (New Haven and London, 1993). James, William, The Naval History of Great Britain from the Declaration of War by France in 1793 to the Accession of George IV (London, 1837). Jones, Colin, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (London, 1988). Jones, Colin, The Great Nation (London, 2002). Kerguelen, Y.-J., ancien contr’amiral, Guerres Maritimes de 1778 à 1796. Relation des combats et des Evénements de la guerre maritime de 1778 entre la France et l’Angleterre, mélée de reflexions sur les manoeuvres des généraux précédé d’une adresse aux marins sur la disposition des vaisseaux pou la combat, et terminée par un précis de la guerre présente, des causes de la destruction de la marine, et les moyens de la rétablir (Paris, 1796) (SHD – Département ‘Marine’, Rochefort). Lefebvre, Georges, The French Revolution from its Origins to 1793, ET Elizabeth Moss Evanson (New York, 1962). Lefebvre, Georges, The French Revolution, Volume II, From 1793 to 1799, ET John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti (New York, 1964). Lefebvre, Georges, La Grande Peur de 1789, ET Joan White (New York, 1989). Lenotre, G., La Maison des Carmes (Paris, 1933), pp. 1–64, Appendix. Levene, Mark, The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Volume II, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (London and New York, 2005), pp. 103–19, 143–61. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, The Ancien Régime, A History of France 1610–1774, ET Mark Greengrass (Oxford, 1996). Lough, John, An Introduction to Eighteenth Century France (London, 1960). Manceron, Claude, Les Hommes de la Liberté 1774–1797, 10 volumes (Paris, 1987). Mansel, Philip, Louis XVIII, revised edition (London, 2005). Moorehead, Caroline, Dancing to the Precipice, Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution (London, 2009). Palmer, R.R., Twelve Who Ruled, The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution, Bicentenary Edition (Princeton, 1989). Petitfils, Jean-Christian, Louis XVI (Paris, 2005). Popkin, Jeremy D., A Short History of the French Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995). Price, Munro, The Fall of the French Monarchy, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the baron de Breteuil (London, 2002). Rose, J. Holland, Life of Napoleon I, 2 volumes (London, 1910). Rudé, George, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959). Schama, Simon, Citizens, A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989). Schom, Alan, Napoleon Bonaparte (New York, 1997). Schroeder, Paul W., The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994). Scurr, Ruth, Fatal Purity, Robespierre and the French Revolution (London, 2006). Secher, Reynald, A French Genocide: The Vendée, ET George Holoch (Notre Dame, IN, 2003), first published in French with the title Le Génocide franco-français (Paris, 1986). Shennan, J.H., The Parlement of Paris, revised 1998 (London, 1968).

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Index Note: The page numbers in boldphase refer to illustrations. A Abbaye aux Dames, Saintes, 34, 43, 45, 59, 119, 121, 147, 149, 157–159, 165, 169, 171, 179, 180 Aboukir Bay, 112 Active citizens, 39, 70, 194 Adam, Abbé Joseph-Nicolas, 186 Admyrault, Louis, 93, 94 Aiguillon, Armand-Désiré, Duke of, 2 Aix, île de, 114, 115, 170, 173, 178, 183 Aix, Roads of, 112, 113, 173, 178 Alexander I, Tsar, 226 Allier, Department of, 168, 171 Alquier, Charles-Jean-Marie, 5, 23, 31, 69, 220 Amelot, Comtesse Michel-Noël, 36 André, Junius, 105 Angers, 84, 86, 87 Angoulême, 5, 28, 34, 147, 184, 204, 205 Angoumois, 4, 28, 129 Annepont, 29, 58, 167 Apollon, 80 guns, 101, 102, 103, 112 Artois, Charles-Philippe, Comte de, afterwards Charles X, 2, 85, 137, 230 Assignat, 3, 46, 100, 109, 156, 163, 169, 177, 180 Atlantic Trade, 69 Audiat, Louis, 129 Aunis, 4, 19, 22, 27, 28, 31, 86, 157, 219, 220 Austria, Austrian, 3, 20, 59, 60, 61, 70, 77, 85, 112, 116, 117, 156, 209, 213, 223 Authon, Baron Normand of, 23, 37, 119, 204, 218, 220 B Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 44, 222 Bara, Joseph, 92

Barbet, Jean, 89 Barbezieux, 26, 32, 145 Baron, Chevalier Jean-Jacques-Fabian,199 Barras, Jean-Nicolas-Paul-François, Viscount, 187, 225 Bas-Poitou, 82 Basire, Claude, 225 Basle, Treaty of, 67 Bastille, 1, 22, 32, 34, 44, 63, 198, 221 Baudéan, Abbess Marie-Magdaleine de Parabère de, 149, 158, 162, 163 Baudry d’Asson, Gabriel, 71 Beauregard, Canon, 131 Belair, place de, 48 Belgium, 59, 85 Bells, 47, 144, 159, 161, 162, 188 Béraud, Doctor, 177 Bernard, André-Antoine de Saintes (de Jeuzines), 5, 7, 13, 14, 16, 18, 43, 44, 45, 46–54, 55, 56–57, 59, 95, 108, 117, 119, 133, 136–137, 139, 142, 145–146, 159, 166 Bertry, Jean, 15, 154 Bessat, Judge Charles-André, 79, 80 Bestier, Réné, 99 Bétrine, Pastor Jean-Paul, 69, 83 Bibard, soldat, 14 Bienassis, Jean-Martin, 32 Bilbao, 138 Bishops, 3, 8, 31, 70, 116, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146, 149, 150, 156, 158, 187, 188, 189 Blutel, Charles-Auguste, 67, 94, 95, 108, 126, 186 Bobe-Moreau, Jean, 105 Bocage, 87 Boisroche, château de, 35 Boivin, Captain, 176 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 4, 8, 69, 81, 87, 102, 108, 112, 115, 152, 154, 157,

257

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Bonaparte, Napoleon (continued) 170, 187, 188, 189, 205, 211, 213, 217, 225 Bonhomme-Richard, 172 Bonnegens, Jean-Joseph de, 31, 220 Bonnet, Phrygian, 7, 14, 15, 35, 210, 223 Bonneuil, Augustine (Laure) 225 Bonneuil, Louise de, 225 Bonnevin, baron de, 32, 33 Bordeaux, 5, 55, 58, 60, 82, 100, 110, 114, 122, 126, 151, 158, 159, 168, 170, 178, 180, 182, 186, 204 Bords, 148 Borée, 171, 172 Boscal de Réal de Mornac, Pierre, 206, 207 Boucherit, Jacques, 1st maire of SaintSaturnin de Séchaud, 198 Bouchoir, Pierre, 141 Bouchotte, Jean-Baptiste, 87 Bouquet, Citizen Jean, 13–19, 17, 32, 60, 92, 154, 187 Bourbons, 6, 213, 221 Bourgeois, bourgeoisie, 6, 20, 22, 23, 44, 46, 54, 70, 71, 83, 89, 91, 94, 98, 144, 157, 224 Bourgignan, or Bourignan, François-Marie, 45 Bourrilhon, Joseph-Augustin, 30 Brémond d’Ars, Pierre-Réné-Auguste, 26, 59, 120 Bressuire, 71, 75, 87 Brest, 101, 102, 112, 113, 115 Breton Club, 221 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 116 Brittany, 4, 85, 122 Brouage, 22, 53, 57, 59, 78, 89, 92, 93, 94, 96, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 178, 179, 180, 187, 202, 203 Bruix, Admiral Eustache, 112, 113, 115 Brumaire, coup d’état de, 213 C Calendar, revolutionary, 4, 179 Calvinists, 170, 189 Cambon, Pierre-Joseph, 169 Canada, 69, 122 Carmelites, 69, 138, 140, 147, 159, 165, 173, 181, 183 Carra, Jean-Louis, 73, 74, 77, 81, 104, 222

Index.indd 258

Caribbean trade, 5 Carrier, Jean-Baptiste, 53, 88 Casey, Daniel, 148, 149 Cathelineau, Jacques, 84 Catherine II, Tsarina, 85, 156 Catholic and Royal Army of the Vendée, 82, 91 Catholic Church, 3, 6, 8, 59, 98, 145, 155, 189, 209 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 3, 30, 35, 57, 70, 131, 132, 136, 143, 196 Concordat, 152, 154, 157, 170, 187, 188, 189, 205, 211 Constitutional Priests, 164, 170, 181, 188, 202, 211 oath to maintain the Civil Constitution, 30, 35, 48, 57, 71, 131, 132, 143, 196 Organic Articles, 157, 188, 189 refractory priests, 73, 80, 84, 89, 99, 100, 110, 114, 126, 134, 138, 157, 167, 168, 182, 184, 189, 223 sale of church property, 81, 157 Cayenne, 110, 168 Cazotte, Captain, 101–102 Ceyrat, Joachim, 138 Champlain, Samuel, 118 Chaniers, 46, 56, 124, 151 Channel Islands, 71 Charente River, 5, 7, 20, 22, 29, 129, 154, 157, 167, 168, 173, 176, 179, 180, 193, 202, 203, 212 Charente-Inférieure ( since 1939, Charente-Maritime), Department of, 4, 5, 6, 14, 16, 34, 36, 47, 52, 54, 56, 68, 70, 72, 75, 79, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 93, 94, 98, 100, 104, 107, 113, 117, 120, 133, 142, 152, 157, 167, 168, 170, 174, 186, 188, 200, 218, 221, 227 Charleroi, 59 Charette, François-Athenase, 65, 72, 84, 88, 93, 95 Chartres, Bishop of, 2 Chasseriaux du Chiron, Benjamin-Henri, 152 Chastaigneraye, Bishop Germain de, 158 Châtelet, duc de, 2 Chatillon-sur-Sèvre, 71 Chaudruc, baron de, 129 Chauvelin, Bernard-François, marquis de, 85

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Index Chauvreau, Jean, 39 Chénié, Louise-Augustine, 225 Chenier du Chesne, FrançoisXavier-Ambroise, 59 Chénier, André, 222 Cherbourg, 86 Chevillard, Paul, 109, 171, 172, 173, 176,186 Cholet, battle of, 84, 85, 87 Chouans, chouannerie, 4, 189 Chouet, Doctor, 199, 212, 213, 215, 216, 217 Chrétien, André, 89, 91, 96, 124 Citoyenne, île de (île Madame), 112, 176 Civil Code, 218, 226, 227 Civism, certificates of Civisme, 7, 18, 19, 92, 94, 117, 122, 126, 200, 201, 202, 216, 227 Clerical dress, 138, 210 ‘Club’, The Jacobin, 4, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 82, 95, 136, 137, 139, 151, 154, 162, 182, 221 Coblenz, 85 Cochet, Mathieu, 212 Cockade, tricolore, 1, 14, 22, 32, 44, 103 Cognac, 5, 35, 44, 123 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 5, 97, 100 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie, 63 Colonies, 30, 69, 70, 85, 97, 173 Commune, Paris, 4, 36, 52, 64, 101, 138, 228 Conscripts, 213, 214 Constituent Assembly, 3, 23, 34, 37, 38, 94, 135, 156, 204, 218, 221, 222 Consulate, 81, 115, 213 Conty, Mlle de, 120 Convention, National, 4, 9, 14, 16, 17, 36, 38, 50–54, 62, 64, 66, 67, 71, 73, 83, 84, 87–88, 90, 94–95, 97, 98, 99–101, 103, 105, 108, 116, 117, 121, 139, 154, 156, 168–170, 182, 184, 193, 200, 208, 221, 225, 226 Cordeliers Club, 36, 59, 154, 156, 159, 182, 221 Corme-Royal, 43 Cornuault, Charles, 74, 75 Côte d’Or, Department of, 43 Coucoury, 188 Coucy, Bishop Charles de, 70, 133, 145, 154, 187

Index.indd 259

259

Coulanges, 129 Coumailleau, Pierre, 195 Council of State, 226 Cozes, 34, 153 Crassous de Médeuil, Joseph, 102, 104 Crassous de Médeuil, Joseph-Auguste, 74, 75, 82, 95, 105 Crazannes, 5, 79, 129, 130, 141, 152, 214 Crubaugh, Anthony, 38 Crussol d’Uzès, Bishop François-Joseph Emmanuel de, 23 Currency, 109 D Dalbarade, Jean, 98, 101, 122, 168, 169 Dangibeau, Charles, 54 Danton, Georges-Jacques, 21, 64, 94, 116, 138, 140, 182, 221 Darbelet, Joseph-Honoré, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 94, 95, 96, 185 Daughters of Wisdom, Congregation of, 124 David, Jacques-Louis, 54, 55, 95, 217 David, Jean, 208 De-Christianization, 8, 88, 122, 157, 209 Dechézeaux, Gustave, 52, 104, 105 Delaage, Dean of Saintes, 142 Dély, François, 76, 83 Demissy, Samuel, 94, 96 Deschamps, Pierre, 151 Desmoulins, Camille, 31, 221 Deux-Associés, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 185, 186 Deux-Sèvres, Department of, 71, 73, 75, 93, 120 Diderot, Denis, 23 Dijon, 53, 122 Dionnet (Guionnet) 77, 79, 80 Directors, 16, 89, 214, 215, 217 Directory Departmental, 47, 48, 63, 71, 72, 117, 118, 149, 167–169, 193, 215 District, 34, 78, 91, 96, 124, 126, 160, 161, 163, 164, 165, 199, 206, 207 National, 187, 214 Doué, 87 Droin, Dominique, 120 Dubois-Crancy, Edmond-Louis-Alexis, 223 Dues, feudal (seigneurial), 2, 24, 33, 44, 153, 160

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Dumouriez, General Charles-François de Périer, 77, 225 Dundas, Henry, 86 Dunkerque, 178 E Ecurat, 215, 216 Egypt, Bonaparte’s expedition to, 112, 226 Elbée, Maurice-Joseph-Louis Gigost d’, 84 Elders, Council of, 4 Émigrés, 100, 204, 205, 207 Empire, First, 9, 54, 55, 81, 96, 108, 173, 212, 218, 226, 227, 228 Encyclopaedia, 23 England, 21, 71, 84, 88, 111, 142, 154, 189 Enlightenment, 29, 30 Enragés, 35, 154 Eschasseriaux, Réné, 105, 168 Espérance, cadet force, 14–16, 17, 18, 60 Estates-General, 7, 20, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 44, 58, 120, 130, 131, 132, 155, 160, 204, 218, 220, 221, 227, 229 Europe, kings of, 3, 14, 19, 22, 59, 140, 161, 208, 211 Eutrope, Saint, 45, 131, 145, 165 F Factions, 39, 64, 67, 135 Fanaticism, 8, 15, 163, 169, 170, 198, 228 Fear, The Great, 2 Federalism, 52, 83, 228 Festivals, 7, 28, 92, 107, 124, 209, 212, 213 Feuillants Club, 156, 220, 221, 222 Five Hundred, Council of, 4, 55 Fleurus, battle of, 59, 63 Flornoy, Jean-Pierre-François, 56 Flornoy, Marie-Marguerite, 57 Fontcouverte, 53 Fontenay-le-comte, 82 Forget, Jean-Baptiste, 153 Fort Lupin, 173 Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine-Quentin, 21, 74 Freemasonry, 23, 99, 220 Frère de La Pommeraye, Louise, 43 Friends of the Constitution, Society of, 47, 69, 99, 142 Furet, François, 228

Index.indd 260

G Gaillard, notary, 194, 195, 208 Gallocheau, Pierre, 6, 39, 195 Ganet, Jean-Michel, 94 Garesché, Pierre-Isaac, 31, 69, 93, 145, 169 Garnier, Jacques, de Saintes, 5, 7, 26, 39, 44–46, 51–53, 55, 59, 60, 62, 64, 93, 108, 117, 119, 133, 143, 144, 145, 147 Garrigue, Savinien de, 204 Gaudin, 2nd maire of Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, 199, 202 Gaudriaud, A.-G, 44, 45, 54 General Security, Committee of, 53, 105, 178, 182, 186, 203, 225 Genereux, 80 guns, 101 Genocide, 4, 72 Gentil (Jeanty), 178 George III, King of England, 85 Germanicus Arch, Saintes, 180 Gibert, Captain, 173, 176 Gilded youth, 54 Girardin, Henri (or Charles) 141, 196 Girondins, 51, 52, 101, 104, 105, 116, 224, 225 Glastron, François, 147 Glemein, Michel, 195, 200 Goguet, 69 Gorand, Gaspard, 103 Grailly, Henri, Marquis de, 23, 203, 204, 205, 211 Grand Lay River, 83 Granville, 86 Gravilliers Section, Paris, 153 Great Britain, 70, 82, 85, 155 Grégoire, Abbé Henri, 132, 178 Grenoble, 114 Grévy, Jules, 228 Grey Sisters, La Rochelle, 159 Grievances, Lists of (Cahiers de doléance), 24–40, 193, 220 Grimouard, Admiral, 98, 100 Guard, National, 2, 6, 7, 13, 15, 37, 44–48, 54, 57, 59, 62, 71, 73–78, 83, 88, 95, 136, 141, 144, 195, 222, 223 Guards, King’s Swiss, 4, 47, 136, 138 Guezno, Mathieu-Claude, 108 Guillemeteau, Pierre, 15, 187 Guillotin, Doctor Joseph-Ignace, 31

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Index Guillotine, 4, 7, 16, 43, 60, 64, 77, 81, 82, 94, 99, 124, 171, 227 Gunpowder factories, 1, 32, 45, 48, 65, 161, 172, 208 Guyana, 75, 80, 110, 111, 113, 139, 168, 170, 171, 173 H Hamburg, 79, 204, 206 Haute-Marne, Department of, 171 Haute-Saône, Department of, 43, 53, 221 Haxo, General Nicolas, 87 Héard-Fondclair, Jean-Baptiste, 195 Héard, Pierre-Francois, 133, 135, 147 Hébert, Jacques-Réné, 64, 87, 94, 135 Henz, executioner, 100, 103, 105 Hermione, frigate, 99, 113, 171 H.M.S. Magnanimous, 110, 111 H.M.S. Naiad, 110, 111 Hoche, General Lazare, 209 Holland, 82, 85, 200 Hood, Admiral Lord, 101, 102, 113 Hugues, Victor, 100, 102, 104 Hulé, 75 Hundred Days, The, 226 Huon, Abbé Alexandre-Eutrope-Charles, 152 I Imbert, Captain, 101, 102 Indien, L’, 176, 177, 178 Intendant, 13, 21, 25, 29, 44, 91, 142, 198, 222 Internment of suspects, 53, 115, 116–126 Italy, Army of, 226 J Jacobin Club, 4, 47, 50, 63, 69, 82, 95, 151, 221 Jacquerie, 35 Jansenists, 130, 132 Jarnac, The Count of, 44 Jeanty (Gentil) 178 Jemappes, battle of, 85 Jesuits, 156, 169 Jonzac, 5, 30, 34, 39, 56, 57, 189 Joseph II, Emperor, 156 Journal de Paris, 220, 222, 225 Juicq, 29, 152

Index.indd 261

261

Jullien, Marc-Antoine, 87 Justices of the Peace, 30, 76 L La Côte, Abbé Gounin de, 152 La Dall-Tromelin, Vice Admiral Mathieu-Marie, 115, 121, 122 La Décade, 110, 111 La Jaunay, peace of, 65, 72, 95 La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, chevalier Jean de, 129 La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, François-Joseph, Bishop of Beauvais, 129 La Rochefoucauld-Bayers, Pierre-Louis de, Bishop of Saintes, 8, 31, 48, 59, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 138, 141 La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Duke of, 224 La Rochelle, 4–5, 7–8, 14, 17, 18, 23–24, 27, 28, 31, 38, 45, 65, 69–83, 76, 84–96, 97–98, 104–105, 108, 113, 115, 118, 122–124, 133, 136, 142, 144, 145, 152, 157, 160, 168, 173, 181, 185, 187, 189, 215, 221 La Romagère, Abbé de, 174, 175 La Tour du Pin, Jean-Frédéric, Count of, 19, 20, 21, 26, 142 La Tremblade, 122, 157 La Tremoille, Jean-BretagneCharles-Godefroy, Duke of, 6, 58, 129, 207 Labiche de Reignefort, Abbé, 173, 174 Lacheurie, Marie-Charlotte, 63, 153 Laclos, Choderlos de, 20 Lacoste, Jean de, 121 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Roch-YvesGilbert-Monier, Marquis of, 2, 99, 113 Laignelot, Joseph-François, 81, 88, 98, 99, 100, 102–104, 108 Laly, Captain Jean-Baptiste-René, 172, 175, 176, 177, 186 Lamballe, Princesse de, 140, 223 Landreau, Jean-François, 31, 56 Laplanche, Jacques-Michel, 36, 37, 38 Laporte, André-Marie-Joseph, 78, 222, 225 Larochejacquelein, Henri du Vergier, Count of, 86 Latierce, Pierre, 36, 37, 38 Lau d’Allemans, Archbishop of Arles, 138 Laurent, Adjutant-General, 87

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Law of 22 prairial, year II, 116 Law of 27 germinal, year I, 108 Lawyers, 1–9, 25, 38, 40, 69, 122, 131, 133–135, 174, 206, 218, 227, 228 Le Mans, 55, 86 Léchelle, General Jean, 88 Legendre, Louis, 138, 182, 185, 186 Legrix, Canon Claude-Furey-André, 130, 131, 142, 143 Lemercier, Louis-Nicolas, 26, 31, 49, 67, 81 Lemonnier, Abbé Pierre, 131, 170 Lemouzin, Gabriel-Isaie, Baron, 205, 207 Lemouzin, Marie-Henriette, 206 Lenôtre, G, 139 Léonard, Louis-Marie, 170 Leopold II, Emperor, 85 Lequinio, Joseph-Marie, 81, 88–91, 97–115, 135, 170, 200 Leriget, Jean-Baptiste, 179, 184 Les Sables d’Olonne, 99, 114 Lettres de cachet, 27 Levene, Mark, 72 Lévesquot Abbé André-Louis-François, 195, 196, 197, 198 Lévesquot, André (or d’Amville), 200 Lévesquot, Louis, 195, 200, 203 Levesquot, Mathieu, 201, 202 Lévis-Mirepoix, Odette de, 108 Liberty, tree of, 15, 16, 209, 210 Limoges, 171, 174, 175 Loire River, 4, 71, 85, 113 Longwy, 140 Louis XIV, 3, 97, 118 Louis XVI, 2, 3, 18, 20–23, 36, 44, 48, 51, 81, 83, 85, 94, 97, 98, 116, 120, 153, 189, 205, 221, 224, 227, 228 Louis XVII, 65, 83, 85, 98, 101, 103 Louis XVIII, 154, 186, 205, 227 Louisiana, 69 Lucerat, 148 Luçon, 64, 84 Lutherans, 189 Luxembourg Palace, 140, 217 Luxembourg Section, 137, 182 Lyon, 100, 101 M Macaire, Citizen, 168, 169 Macary, 168 Machecoul, 71, 72

Index.indd 262

Madame, île (Citoyenne), 170, 176, 177 Madeira, 55 Mainz, 84 Malerbeau, Abbé, 78 Malta, 223, 224, 226 Mancini, Marie, 118 Manuel, Pierre-Louis, 139 Marat, Jean-Paul, 35, 53, 57, 64, 116, 140 Marcé, General Louis-Henri-François, 73, 75, 77 Marennes, 5, 25, 89, 95, 122, 126, 170, 186 Marie-Antoinette, Queen, 1, 21, 72, 227 Marillet de Courboisière, FrançoisGuillaume, 8, 25–27, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53, 55, 58–68, 81, 95, 119, 120, 131, 136–137, 139, 142, 144, 147–151, 153, 162, 178–183, 185, 187, 200, 228 Marillet, Léon, 45, 65 Marseillaise, La, 63, 153, 228 Marseille, 100, 101, 122, 224 Marsh, 94 Martel, Geoffroy, Count of Anjou, 165 Martin, Admiral Pierre, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120 Martin, Curé of Agonnay, 148, 149 Maximum on prices and wages, 94, 95, 96, 208 Mazarin, Cardinal Luigi, 118 Mazeray, 218, 225 Melgarejo, Admiral Don Francisco, 112, 113, 114, 115 Méricourt, Théroigne de, 224 Merveilleux, Joseph, 204, 211 Messin, Jacques-Alexis, 5, 56, 57 Micault de Courbeton, 53 Michel, Deacon from Nantes, 173, 174, 177 Milan, 226 Mission, Representatives on, 170, 172, 179, 186, 193, 200, 221, 226 Model ships, 91 Moira, Lord, 86 Monarchy Overthrow of, 116, 117, 121, 167, 213, 224 Restoration of, 54, 207, 222, 228 Monconseil, Étienne Gounot, marquis de, 19, 21, 22, 47, 142, 144 Monconseil, Hôtel de, 20, 21, 22, 47, 136, 144

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Index Monge, Gaspard, 121 Monlieu, 5 Montagnards, Mountain, 4, 64 Montbéliard, 53, 56, 166 Monlieu, 5 Montmédy, 3 Montmorin, Armand-Marc, comte de, 222 Morisset, 35 Mutinies, 97 N Nancy, 21, 47 Nantes, 65, 71, 73, 84, 113, 173, 185 Nantillé, 167 Napoleon III, 170, 228 Narbonne, Louis-Marc, comte de, 222 Nation, 1–8, 14, 15, 17–19, 22, 25, 38, 48, 51, 92, 103, 121, 122, 133, 135, 136, 143, 151, 155, 156, 195, 196, 200, 203, 206, 209, 218, 223 National Assembly, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 31, 32, 33, 38, 48, 50, 57, 75, 97, 131, 133, 135, 136, 140, 150, 155, 156, 160, 161, 163, 165, 193, 194, 196, 207, 220, 221, 224 National Deficit, 155, 220 National Guard, 2, 6, 7, 13, 15, 19, 37, 44, 45, 47, 48, 54, 57, 62, 70, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 88, 95, 136, 141, 144, 147, 195, 202, 222, 223 National property, 3, 54, 68, 150, 155–166, 173, 176, 206, 207, 210, 220 Navy, 5, 28, 67, 82, 89, 93, 97, 98, 101, 108, 109, 110, 112, 121, 168, 172, 173, 186, 218 Necker, Jacques, 1, 22, 25, 155, 220, 221, 224 Neven, 33 Nieul-lès-Saintes, 205, 206 Niort, 71, 88 Niou, Joseph, 73, 74, 81, 104 Nobility, 2, 6, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32, 43, 44, 70, 97, 108, 142, 221 Normand d’Authon, Baron ClaudeAlexandre, 23, 37, 64, 119, 204, 218, 220 Notables, 23, 44, 48, 94, 194, 195, 198 Nourrice, 172 Nuns, 119, 122, 124, 126, 131, 146, 156, 159, 160, 163, 165, 179, 182, 220

Index.indd 263

263

O Oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 3, 30, 35, 48, 57, 70, 71, 74, 80, 99, 124, 132, 133, 134, 141, 142–154, 161, 164, 166, 167, 170, 181, 182, 189, 196, 198, 199, 200, 204, 211, 213 Oléron, île d’, 99, 113, 114, 115, 122, 147, 151, 187 Organic Articles, 157, 188, 189 Ouvrard, constitutional priest, 199, 200 Overthrow of monarchy, 116, 117, 121, 167, 213, 224 P Pamplona, 145, 187 Panloy, 6, 129, 204, 205, 211 Parant, Jean, 89, 94, 96, 105 Paris Commune, 52, 101, 138, 153 Commune 1870–1, 228 Hôtel de Ville, 3, 22, 44 Market women of, 2 National Guard, 54, 223 Palais Royal, 32 Parlement de, 36, 131, 221 Prisons, 116, 140 Sans-culottes of, 153, 223, 224 Passive Citizens, 194 Patriots, 82, 84, 92, 104, 136, 222, 224 Pensions, 27, 155, 156, 160, 220 Perry, Jean, 94 Pétion, Jerôme, 223 Pillnitz, Declaration of, 85 Pinélière, 31 Piocheau, Estelle, 209 Piocheau, Jacques, 209 Piocheau, Louis, 195 Piocheau, Nicolas, 195 Piocheau, Pierre, 195 Pitt, William, British Prime Minister, 85, 86 Pius VII, Pope, 152, 154, 170, 187, 189, 211 Plassay, 211, 214, 216 Pluvier, 101, 104 Poitou, 31, 82, 159 Pole, Sir Charles Maurice, Commodore, 113 Pons, 5, 24, 26, 94, 133 Pont l’Abbé d’Arnoult, 32, 159, 196 Pontet, Abbé Bernard, 160

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264

The Unseen Terror

Poor Claires Convent, Saintes, 147 Popular society, 18, 52, 89, 90, 92, 94, 96, 99, 100, 104, 107, 108, 139, 144, 170 Port d’Envaux, 197, 203, 205, 209, 211, 214, 215, 216 Port des Barques, 112, 179, 183 Portugal, 154 Prairial Coup, 54 Présidial de Saintes, 39, 40, 43 Princes, Army of the, 70, 85, 117, 150, 204 Privateers, 79, 109, 113 Prize Ships, 109 Protestants, 23, 29, 69, 72, 98, 157 Provence, Louis-Stanislas, Comte de, afterwards Louis XVIII, 85, 169 Prussia, 85, 116, 117 Public opinion, 6, 155, 156 Public Safety, Committee of, 4, 19, 53, 73, 84, 86, 87, 101, 170, 172, 186, 208, 217 Q Quiberon, 84 R Rastadt, peace conference at 1799, 213 Ré, île de, 52, 75, 78, 114, 122, 147, 185, 186 Refractory priests, 73, 80, 84, 89, 99, 100, 110, 113, 114, 126, 134, 138, 157, 167, 168, 182, 184, 189, 223 Registration of Births etc., (État Civil), 221 Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Laure, comtesse, 239 Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély, Michel, comte, 5, 31, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 Religious orders, 135, 156, 159, 160 Republic, ‘One and Indivisible’, 4, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 28, 51, 53, 55, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109 Republic, Third, 228 Républicain, 178 Requisitions, 89, 95 Reversaux, Jacues-Philippe-Isaac-Guéau de Gravelle, Marquis of, 19, 21 Revolutionary Calendar, 4, 179

Index.indd 264

Revolutionary Tribunal, 4, 40, 43, 74, 77, 98, 99, 103, 105, 108, 116, 117, 124, 126 Richelieu, Cardinal, 69, 118 Richier de Rochelongchamp, JacquesRaymond, Chevalier de, 120, 221 Rights of Man and the Citizen, Declaration of, 2, 18, 193 Rioux, 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 92, 154, 187 Robespierre, Maximilien, 4, 18, 19, 20, 35, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 86, 87, 94, 108, 116, 126, 154, 169, 174, 176, 179, 180, 184, 209, 225 Robinet, Isaac-Étienne, constitutional bishop of Saintes, 132, 135, 144–154, 199 Roche-Courbon, Arnaul d-Gabriel, Marquis of, 204 Rochefort, 5, 7–8, 18, 22, 24, 29, 38, 52, 60, 67, 80, 82, 89, 97–115, 117–124, 168, 170–171, 172, 173, 177, 178, 179–187, 200, 211, 218, 221 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 224 Roland de Platière, Jean-Marie, 168 Rome, 170, 189 Rosilly-Mestros, Vice-Admiral, 122 Roulhac, Chanoine Antoine, 175 Rousseau, Abbé Pierre-Joseph, 174 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 30 Roux, Abbé Jacques, 34, 35, 153–154 Royal Navy, 87 Royalists, 188, 211, 213, 223, 225, 227 Rupt, Abbé Sigisbert de, 45 S Saint-Bonnet-sur-Gironde, 34 Saint-Dizant, Anne-Marie, Mme de, 129, 203–205 Saint-Domingue, 59, 98, 100 Saint-Gemme, 157 Saint-Georges-des-Agouts, 35 Saint-Hermand, 74 Saint-Hermine, Marquis of, 129 Saint-James, 194 Saint-Jean-d’Angély, 5, 7, 8, 23, 24, 28, 31, 36, 37, 45, 48, 64, 77, 91, 119, 156, 160, 188, 218, 219, 220, 226

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Index Saint-Legier de Boisnard d’Orignac, Abbé Réné-Antoine, 189 Saint-Martin de Ré, 31, 78, 124, 186 Saint-Maur, rue, Saintes, 46, 145, 198, 205 Saint-Médard, Abbé Samuel, 167 Saint-Pallais Quarter of Saintes, 159–162 Saint-Philibert-du-Pont-Charrault, 73, 88 Saint-Roch, Church of, Paris, 211, 225 Saint-Saturnin de Séchaud, 8, 39, 107, 116, 126, 157, 162, 193–214, 197 Saint-Savinien-sur-Charente, 5, 28, 132, 144–146, 148, 149, 167, 188, 205 Saint-Sulpice, Paris, 35, 138 Saint-Sulpice d’Arnoult, 199 Saint-Vaize, 193 Saintes, 1, 5–8, 13, 14–16, 19–31, 34–35, 38, 39, 40–54, 55–56, 58–68, 66, 73, 78–83, 88, 91, 95, 96, 107, 108, 117, 119–121, 129, 130, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141–147, 143, 152, 153, 157, 158–160, 161, 162, 166, 171, 178, 179–185, 187, 193, 194, 198, 199, 201–203, 205, 208, 211, 214, 216, 221 Saintonge, 4, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 44, 56, 142, 159, 219, 220 Salons, 31, 221 Sans-culottes, 35, 44, 54, 82, 83, 87, 91, 93–95, 137, 138, 140, 141, 153, 157, 223, 224 Santerre, Antoine-Joseph, 224 Saumur, 84 Savernay, battle of, 86 Scarcity, 60, 93, 123, 126 Second Empire, 153, 170, 218, 226, 228 Seigneurial dues, 33, 35, 36, 153, 160 Seigneurs, 2, 6, 13, 32, 33, 38, 44, 117, 140, 153, 157, 198 Seillès, Citizen, 214–216 Separation of Church and State, 181, 209 Ships, 5, 8, 29, 70, 75, 79, 91, 93, 97, 99, 101, 102, 108–118, 126, 172, 173, 176, 178, 179–181, 183–187 Sieyès, Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph, 23, 115, 227 Sousmoulins, 32, 44 Spain, 8, 15, 69, 70, 82, 86, 112, 118, 131, 136, 138, 142, 154, 167, 189, 198 Staël, Germaine de, 224

Index.indd 265

265

Stofflet, Nicolas, 65 Supreme Being, The, 14, 18–19, 63, 159, 174, 180, 209 Surveillance, committees of, 6, 66, 88–89, 94, 100, 107, 117, 118, 139, 171, 182, 202, 222, 225 Susbielle, Pierre, 89, 94 Suspects, Law of, 40, 116, 117, 119, 126 Suspects, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 140, 178, 179, 194, 200 T Taillant, 188 Taillebourg, 6, 28, 29, 58, 129, 167, 207 Taillet, Abbé Augustin-Marie, 131, 132, 133, 138, 139, 142, 145, 149, 150–154 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles-Maurice de, 85, 112, 113, 114, 144, 155, 226 Taxation, 195 Teachers (Instituteurs), 28, 30, 144, 216 Temple Prison, 36, 153 Temples of Truth (or Reason), 60, 63, 92, 107, 134, 200, 211, 212, 213, 214, 225 Tennis Court Oath, 31 Terror, 4, 7, 9, 17, 18, 30, 40, 51, 54, 56, 57 in La Rochelle, 87–95 in Rochefort, 97–115 in Saintes, 58–68 in rural localities, 193–209 Thermidor coup, 108, 116, 210 Third Estate, 2, 3, 20, 22, 24, 25, 25, 26, 28, 31, 32, 117, 120, 122, 142, 220, 227 Thouron, General Pierre Thouron, 83 Tithe, 2, 129 Tonnay-Boutonne, 38 Tonnay-Charente, 26, 180 Topaze, 101 Topsent, Jean-Baptiste-Nicolas, 108 Torxe, 152 Toulon, 8, 92, 100–104, 113 Trizay, 157 Trogoff-Kerlessy, Admiral Count of, 101 Tuileries Palace, 3, 15, 72, 116, 136 Turreau, General Louis-Marie, 72, 87, 88, 93

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266

The Unseen Terror

V Valentin, Antoine, 23, 37 Valmy, battle of, 85 Vanderquand, Jean-Eutrope, 67, 166, 201, 206 Varaize, 36–38 Varennes, 3, 48, 221, 224 Vaseau, 176 Vatican, 131 Vaudreuil, Vice-Admiral Louis-Philippe Rigaud de, 119–121 Vendée Rebellion, 81, 84, 98, 117 Verdun, 77, 140 Vergeroux, 100, 176 Versailles, 1, 2, 5 Verteuil, General, 73, 74, 88 Vesoul, 53 Videau, Pierre, 194 Vignaud, Jean, 195 Villebois, 129 Villèle, Baron Joseph de, 205, 207 Villeneau, Jean-Baptiste, 110, 111, 113 Violleau, Abbé Christophe, 74 Violleau, Saturnin, 195 Vix, 159

Index.indd 266

Voisin, Abbé Urbain-Joseph-FrançoisMarie, 210–211 Vows, religious, 27, 153, 156, 160 W War of American Independence, 155 War with the Kings of Europe, 19, 59, 140 War, Franco-Prussian, 228 Washington, 173, 176–178, 180, 185 Waterloo, 8, 81, 201 West, Army of the West, 87, 172 Wills, 6 Winchester, 85 Women in the revolution, 2, 32, 37, 46, 48, 60, 76, 83, 87, 90, 93, 116, 120, 123, 140, 146, 159, 168, 179, 182, 187, 202, 217, 227 Wörms, battle of, 209 Württemburg, Duke of, 166 Y Yonnet, Etienne, 212 Yonnet, Marie-Claire, 215

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