The Ugly Legacy of the French Revolution
Thirty years ago, France marked the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, celebrated officially as a great event, but remembered in the Vendee region of the country quite differently. Roger Jouteau, the manager of Les Herblers, a little town in the Vendee region that was assaulted by revolutionary French armies in 1794, expressed outrage in 1989 that the French government believed the revolution was something to celebrate.
“For us, it was a horrible genocide, a lasting source of national shame,” said Jouteau. It is estimated that Vendee’s 1789 population was 250,000; 150,000 died in the efforts of the radical government to impose its will on the recalcitrant area of rich farmlands south of the Loire River, extending east from the Atlantic Ocean. Much of its population, which resisted the de-Christianization, the destruction of private property, and the attacks upon the existing order of society, all in the name of the people, was either killed in battle, disemboweled, starved, or shoved alive into bread ovens.
While the French Revolution is often depicted as a patriotic uprising against an old regime of aristocratic oppression of the French people, the truth is that most of the victims were not aristocrats, but rather peasants who defended their lands and their Christian faith, and resisted conscription to fight wars intended to spread the revolution throughout Europe.
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