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The Violence of the War of Vendée

EungJong Kim 1

1충남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The War of Vendéen broke out in March 1793, and finished in December of the same year. For these nine months, the peasants of the Vendée region and the revolutionary armies were at ‘war’ against each other, and the latter won the final victory. What caused the historical controversy was the relentless punishment after the war, during which were killed all the inhabitants including the republicans. After the War of Vendée, the republican historians and the marxist historians who dominated the historiography of the French Revolution, defining it as the counter revolutionary war maintained their negative position on the war of Vendée. They accepted the Terror committed in that period as the inevitable measure for the safety of the nation and the revolution during the simultaneous wars in and out of the country, while they neglected the violent treatment after the war. The new interpretation of the War of Vendé came from the revisionist historians. François Furet criticized Albert Soboul for tolerating the violence carried out for the purpose of obtaining the public safety. It was Reynald Secher who heated up the debate. He argued that the treatment after the war was the ‘genocide’ conducted cautiously by the public safety committee. Jean-Clément Martin who represented the ‘orthodox’ position counter-attacked him by arguing that the public safety committee did not lead the massacre and, for that reason, the massacre was not the genocide. If we define the genocide as the total or partial mass massacre by an integral state policy, the Vendée massacre can be included in this category. But if we expand the scope of the genocide in this way, all the massacres can belong to the genocide, which makes the concept of the genocide meaningless. That is the reason why the genocide should be defined strictly as “the systematic destruction of the other ethnic group”. Viewing the Vendée massacre in this perspective, “the genocide of the French by the French” cannot stand. In the historical conscience of the War of Vendée, the important thing is not to judge whether it is a genocide or not but to confirm the fact that a barbarous violence was committed by the revolutionary armies. In the dimension of the violence, the French Revolution of 1789 made no difference. It is very important to remember that the very revolutionaries who cried out “Liberty-Equality-Fraternity” continued the inhuman violence of the Ancient Regime type.

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