Fighter of the Vendée
The following is a critical article that I wrote some time ago for the news.it portal on the massacre of the Vendée, one of the bloodiest pages of the French Revolution , considered by many historians to be the first genocide of the modern era.
Happy reading.
Symbol of the Vendée fighters
When I first studied the French Revolution at school, in elementary school, I immediately felt a certain screeching between the enthusiastic and joyful tone of the teacher in telling the facts, and the facts themselves; I wondered how it was possible to talk about summary judgments, severed heads, piled up corpses and abuse of all kinds, as if it were a great national holiday in which everyone loved each other.
"And violence , the massacres, the horrors ” ? I asked.
It was explained to me that they were "bad guys", people who deserved it, traitors, treacherous bread eaters at best, people to be eliminated, in short.
Disconcerting.
And it is even more disconcerting, in my opinion, that this is, after all, the thought that to this day many continue to have towards a historical event of fundamental importance for what would become modern Europe, but at the at the same time totally antithetical in facts and in practice to those same principles of freedom, equality and fraternity which he advocated, but which he first betrayed, and in the worst way.
Yet this is almost never said, or at most it is whispered with a certain fear, as if it were something marginal or not very relevant or even necessary to impose new ideas.
Here's the thing, impose.
Almost all the men, women and even children guillotined during the Terror, they were innocent on whose head no crime was pending, except that of having ideas and wanting to observe and prosecute them even if they were contrary to those that were wanted to be imposed on them from above.
None of the revolutionary leaders ever sought dialogue or a semblance of discussion with those who, and there were many, did not share those principles that would end up changing the face of France and beyond, preferred to torture, massacre, eliminate without distinction and without mercy every "Obstacle", using sacrosanct and fully shared values as a pretext for the atrocities perpetrated against defenseless citizens and political opponents.
The revolutionary leaders were by no means philanthropists, but astute, ambitious and bloodthirsty despots, very skilled in exploiting the legitimate popular discontent for purposes that were not only clean and not just universal; the opponents, the enemies, the "bad guys" to be removed were, after all, all those who were on the other side, those who dared to disagree, men and women of different ideas, perhaps antithetical, but not for this without reason to exist.
I have always thought that horror, arbitrariness and abuse have no political color, and unfortunately there is no alignment, flag, ideology or institution that, in the course of history, has not been guilty of serious crimes.
Including the French revolutionaries.
The Vendée it was a western region in which a purely peasant, Christian and realist society prevailed; the fuse that led to the outbreak of the civil war it was the rebellion of the Vendeans against a state that continually needed to recruit young people from the countryside to send to the front, who were thus taken away from their families and from working in the fields, already put to the test by unfair taxes and continuous famines.
Fighting under the banner of the Sacred Heart , the Vendeans, courageous and idealistic but inferior in number and equipment, were literally massacred by the "brotherly" Parisian troops, until more than 117,000 were stranded to the ground.
It was the first genocide in modern history.
What is striking is not only the impressive number of victims, but also the methods of sophisticated and unprecedented cruelty used to kill:groups of people were tied up and embarked on rafts that were later sunk, others were thrown from the top of the city walls, by body fats of some corpses, it is said, soap was made.
Stuff to be envied by the worst Nazis.