A French Genocide: The Vendee by Reynald Secher

Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. Behold, the devil will cast some of you into prison that you may be tried: and you shall have tribulation ten days. Be thou faithful until death: and I will give thee the crown of life.

(The Apocalypse of Saint John ii. 10)

The history of Holy Mother Church is filled with the bones of her martyrs. She is a holy society built on the blood and sacrifice of her redeemer and also on those faithful who came later and offered their lives rather than soil their heavenly garments with earthly apostasy. Some are well known to us: great saints, like St. Stephen or St. Polycarp, whom we annually recall on their respective feast days. The vast majority, however, are now anonymous to all save God. There is a poignancy in their anonymity: we may not know them by name or story, but we know thousands upon thousands in history believed what we believe, loved as we love, and, ultimately, were provided the graces necessary to pass through the gauntlet of martyrdom and take their places in the Heavenly Jerusalem. Might I suggest the next time you find yourself transfixed by a clear and dark night sky (which happens to me all too often), imagine that each one of those dots of light so far off represents one such anonymous martyr. I have been told that on a clear night, the naked eye can see perhaps five thousand such stars; well then remember, that these anonymous martyrs number many times over such an amount.

Like so many things forgotten during the modernist revolution shaking the foundations of the Church, the cult of the martyr -- both anonymous and remembered -- has been downplayed to the point of oblivion. Like the sacrificial nature of Holy Mass or the reality of hell, the cult of martyrs does not further the aspirations of the radical ecumenist. After all, the very existence of a martyr presupposes a sacrifice for truth -- for the modernist, why celebrate such reactionary absolutists? If truth is simply a cultural phenomenon -- another way up the mountain as it were -- then why gloat about those past zealots that mistook culture for truth. Even articulating the views of such people makes me want to vomit.

We know better. We should revere the martyrs because, as we love God with all of our hearts, our minds, and our souls, we should loves others who have proved their love for Him by the offering of their blood. Any family will rightly speak proudly of a relative who died in defense of his country. How much more then should we remember and revere those martyrs in our Christian family who died in defense of their faith. Indeed, God remembers his holy martyrs. St. John testified that, “[a]nd when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for their testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying: How long, O Lord (holy and true) dost thou not judge and revenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And white robes were given to every one of them one; and it was said to them, that they should rest for a little while, till their fellow servants, and their brethren, who are to be slain, should be filled up.” (The Apocalypse of Saint John vi. 9-11). Moreover, these Christians should remind us that we too may be called to the difficult road of martyrdom and that we live a holy life that prepares us, in part, for that challenge.

So as we should read the lives of the individual martyrs, so should we read the stories of national martyrs. One such national account is Reynald Secher’s A French Genocide: The Vendee, which exhaustively details the Vendean national martyrdom during the French Revolution. Secher’s account is neither polemic nor hagiographic -- indeed, it is not even a prosecutorial brief against the barbarous French Revolutionary Regime. Rather, Secher is a natural historian -- he weaves together a factual accounting drawing on primary sources and makes reasonable analysis of the causes and consequences. The book is a style of historical writing that focuses intensely on one discrete aspect of a wider phenomenon, and, by doing so, allows us to reach broader conclusions. Given what the horrendous facts are -- many of which are beyond dispute -- there is no need for polemics because the conclusion is that of a monstrous crime that is plain to anyone not hopelessly biased to see it. Secher’s ultimate conclusion is that what transpired in the Vendee during the French Revolution was the first modern genocide.

On the eve of the French Revolution, the Vendee region was a prosperous and fertile land. It was also a religious land. The Vendeans, like many Frenchman, suffered under the burden of taxation and ineffective governing during the last years of the French monarchy. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, the Vendeans were not opposed to the fundamental principles of the Revolution of 1789.

Initial hopes for the betterment of French society by a reforming impulse of the Revolution were quickly dashed as the new leaders of the French central government took upon more radical aspirations. The flash-point culminated in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1792. The practical effect of the requirements contained therein was to force Catholic clergy to choose between the new French state or their priestly vows and loyalty to the Roman pontiff. As many (rightfully) chose the latter, the position of the Republicans hardened. Clergy were subsequently required to swear an oath to the Civil Constitution or be removed from office. Thus, two competing clergy were born: the heretical Constitutional clergy and the nonjuring Refractory clergy. The banishment of the Refractory clergy -- who had been the local priests serving the people -- and their replacement with government-authorized Constitutional clergy was a grievous wound for many communities who named these interlopers Truton (or intruders). The hostility to the attack on traditional Catholicism, coupled with a militia requirement, the failure of the National Assembly to deliver the people from persistent economic crisis and otherwise subject them to arbitrary measures, created a tense and caustic moment that exploded into outright revolt during 1793.

Secher recounts that after some initial victories, the Vendean organized resistance was defeated by 1794. For the remainder of the 1790s, the French government continued a policy of brutal pacification following periodic and sporadic Vendean uprisings. While the French government did not have a unitary policy with respect to the Vendee, its generals prosecuting the war and reconstruction, as well as various leaders with the Repubican regime, advocated and pursued a policy of complete annihilation of the Vendeans. In many cases, even those Vendeans loyal to the Republic were murdered indiscriminately. In a blood-curdling mixture of ideological fanaticism, religious bias and otherwise ordinary wartime excess, the French government and its military murdered combatants and non-combatants alike. They murdered men, women, children, the sick, and the elderly. Every facet of Republican military discipline was disregarded in what became a decade long fit of arson, looting, pillage, and rape. This breakdown, however was not an exception to the rule of French Republican military order: it was the rule itself.

The genocidal policy of the French government and military is documented exhaustively by Secher. It is by no means the stray comment of an official here or a military officer there. The conscious policy of total war against every Vendean man, woman, and child was a pervasive aim. Consider the following quotations Sechers cites from contemporary sources:

“There is no more Vendee, Republican citizens. It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and woods of Savenay. Following the orders you gave me, I crushed the children beneath the horse’s hooves, massacred the woman who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I have not a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I exterminated them all ...”

(Republican Brigadier General Francois Westmann (a/k/a the “butcher of , 1793)

Several other similar quotes from government officials, turncoat clergy, and other military officers bear out this genocidal policy forged out of ideological extremism utterly devoid of decency and humanity. This policy was executed by such methods as shootings, “holy mother guillotine,” indiscriminate mass drownings (by which men, women and children were piled into cargo ships and scuttled in rivers (a/k/a “patriotic baptism”)), burning (of villages, churches, and homes), bayonet and sword, and, often, by bare hands. The mass looting, pillaging, and raping that accompanied these murders are difficult to read.

In the end, Secher exhaustively and dispassionately attempts to document the scope of loss of life and property. It is a shocking number: 18% of the Vendean population and 14% of the Vendean housing stock were lost over a ten year period. Nearly one out of five Vendeans were killed during the conflict and subsequent occupation. One point by Secher that drills home the callousness of the Republican war crimes is that the population of Vendeans after the conflict remained relatively constant in terms of men and women. Where we would expect the Vendean men to have been significantly outnumbered by the woman -- because, after all, they did the fighting -- we find them in equal proportions. Needless to say, the Republican government and its military killed a matching contingent of unarmed women.

At the end of the pacification, what was left was a smoldering and raped countryside: a firebombed region one-hundred and fifty-years before Dresden. Welcome to the brave new world of total war. The history of the Republican regime’s actions in the Vendee lead to broader conclusions that the French Revolution was an abominable and regressive step for mankind, which, of course, is never to be offered in secular company. After all, this historical progress gave us the very notions of liberty, fraternity and equality.

To say that this book was panned by professional historians is putting it mildly. All one has to do is “google’ the book to find a vitriol directed at this author who has challenged the orthodox views that the Vendean civil war has nothing to say particularly significant about the French Revolution other than garden variety atrocities were committed “by both sides” during a “civil war.” I submit that there are three primary reasons why this book -- and its thesis -- are detested by “mainstream” thinking. First, Secher’s thesis is a direct assault on the conventional history and meaning of the French Revolution. After all, the French Revolution was a step in the direction of “progress” and “enlightenment” -- whether it be assessed by a Marxist or Whig or any other Hegalian theory of history. If the French Revolutionary Regime’s fruits were genocide, and, if genocide is the unforgivable crime that a government can commit -- than the French Revolution was a retrogression in human development as it introduced on a systematic scale the wholesale destruction of a civilian population to further an ideological goal. Second, the professional historians believe that they alone possess a monopoly to opine on such things. That Reynald Secher -- someone outside of the academy -- offers contrary opinions on the prevailing orthodox view of both the Vendean conflict and the French Revolution is beyond the pale. Third, Secher’s use of “genocide” as applied to the Vendean conflict is simply too much to bear for the professional (and leftist) historian. Secher is hoisting the secularists by their own petard. Stated differently, “genocide” is a modernist concept: invented in 1944 to describe the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Applying this sacrosanct term to vilify historically “good” people (the French Revolutionaries) and rehabilitate historically “bad” people (religious Catholics) is a type of heresy that creates in the modern historian a visceral reaction of disgust.

With respect to this latter point, it is outrageous (but not surpising) how obtuse the academy is to the crimes against the Vendeans. The charge of mutual culpability is egregious when one considers that the war crimes at issues were committed by the French government against a people seeking to exercise the very rights (e.g., religious freedom) that the very same Regime declared as both natural and inalienable. The French government had both the authority and responsibility to prevent the genocide of some of its civilian population. How dare these historians pooh-pooh the wholesale slaughter of a religious group on account of its resistance to gross religious persecution. Whoever said that the last acceptable bias was that of Catholicism was dead-on.

The Vendeans produced countless lay and clerical martyrs. While the value of any martyrdom is divine in nature, the Vendeans are uniquely suited as models for Traditional Catholics: the patron saints, if you will, of the Traditionalist movement. There are parallels between the Vendean crisis and the Catholic collapse of the last fifty years. But in latter times, the persecutor has been certain pastors of the Church herself. Traditionalists priests have been largely outlawed (the ecclesial equivalent of refractory priests). These priests have been punished -- as were there Vendean counterparts -- for stubbornly holding onto the timeless Catholic faith.

We must admit that the tide appears to be turning at least among some of the hierarchy against the modernist forces within the Church. Nonetheless, we are rapidly approaching that point in time (at least in first world countries) at which organized persecutions and martyrdom are not just possible -- rather they are probable. But that should not surprise us: Holy Mother Church has endured dreadful persecutions at the hands of state authority for the last five-hundred years. During this time, modernist and Christ-hating regimes have regularly come to power and inflicted reigns of terror and horror that rival any prior point in history. While we live in a moment of relative peace in first world countries, the question remains whether our current modernist regimes (albeit more benign than other historical ones) will tolerate the existence of traditional Catholics. I can imagine the time in which our priests are effectively outlawed by speech codes and government mandates. For example, I recently read where the last English Catholic adoption agency closed its doors because it refused to place children with homosexuals.
Traditional Catholics suffer in anticipation of this coming persecution. Like Cassandra, they see it coming and their warnings seem to fall on the deaf ears of their Catholic friends and family who have been cut off from Catholic tradition. Moreover, they further see that the Church hierarchy is generally doing a very poor job in preparing the faithful for the hard things to come; and, in many instances, is helping to create the conditions by which radical modernism is running amok. By example, the waning of such devotions as the Rosary -- a conscious decision by mainstream Churchman -- has deprived a generation of Catholics of a source of grace and sanctification. When the proverbial “blank” hits the fan, those graces and that sanctification would have come in handy. Our pastors also injure society as a whole when they allow religious and lay Catholics alike to openly preach heretical teachings or social aims with impunity. Had the Church Fathers in the 1960s excommunicated the first Catholic politician who supported permissive abortion laws -- if they continued plainly to preach that cooperating with abortion in any way paves the way to hell -- query whether we would have Roe for very long. Similarly, by embracing modernist political theory as a “good” and by extolling Americanism as the best and only way for people to organize themselves, our pastors have silenced those who know that Americanism, even if it is (now) kinder than its French Republican cousin, is nonetheless a creature of the so-called Enlightenment and, eventually, will persecute the Church as an intolerable force in the way of progress.

In this coming abyss, the Vendeans should be our guide. We should not compromise with the intellectual descendants of their murderers. We must be dogged, as the Vendeans were, in clinging to the Faith of our Fathers. In today’s world, which is beset by confusion and error, two central and exceedingly unpopular Traditional truths must be maintained. First, the Roman Catholic Church is God’s one true Church. There is no other way: to pretend that the question does not matter or has evolved over time is heresy. Second, salvation is ordinarily obtained only through initiation into this one true Church. While I do not deny that there exists extraordinary means of salvation, they are means that are nonetheless extraordinary. Holy Mother Church is the ark of salvation. Our friends and family that either choose to depart from her or refuse to join her risk the same fate as those whose scoffed at Noah only to drown in the righteous flood. Our love of neighbor should drive us to pray and work towards their conversion. Obscuring matters so grave is never charitable, and I pray for the day that I hear my local diocesan pastors preach those two truths with unflinching clarity.

The Vendeans suffered for their right to worship the True God, and Reynald Secher deserves our gratitude for telling their story no matter how much the world would like it to remain unheard. They suffered for the legitimate resistance to the deprivation of authentic rights. They fought valiantly and were overcome by a foe possessed with the anger and venom of Hell itself. But in the end, as is the case in Christianity generally, the winners are losers and the losers are winners. God loves those brave souls willing to sacrifice property and life -- i.e., the world -- in defense of the truth. Therefore, the Vendeans must be very dear to God indeed.