Loris Chavanette is the author, among others, of
Quatre-vingt-quinze.
The Terror on Trial
(CNRS editions, 2017, preface by historian Patrice Gueniffey), thesis prize from the National Assembly 2013 and history prize from the Fondation Stéphane Bern-Institut de France 2018, and from
Danton and Robespierre.
The shock of the Revolution
(Pasts compounds, 2021).
He also established the edition of a selection of Napoleon's letters,
Napoleon.
Between eternity, the ocean and the night.
Correspondence
(Books, 2020).
Far from being a circumstantial quarrel, the recent controversy sparked by the release of the film
Vanquish or die
, about the Vendée war and the French Revolution, questions our social pact.
The supporters of the recognition by the French State of a genocide in the Vendée are opposed by the self-proclaimed advocates of republican ideals.
Each side went there from its accusing platform, where indignation rivals the art of taunting the enemy, until the very recent position taken up in the columns of
Le Monde
by Alexis Corbière, deputy for France Insoumise and apologist for Robespierre.
Read alsoVaincre or die: Puy du Fou recounts General Charette and the Vendée war for his first film
A little more and we would have thought we had returned to the time of the violent diatribes of the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
Nevertheless, a major difference appears between the bicentenary, almost forty years ago, and today, it is that at the time, François Furet had inaugurated a middle voice, neither reactionary nor communist, thus making it possible to share the fire of the revolutionary decade.
Conversely, our time sees the interpretation of this sadly binary and always ideological history split into two blocks.
However, it cannot be reduced to the eternal war between royalists and republicans, between whites and blues, between those who see themselves qualified as supporters of the Jacobin Terror and those who find themselves labeled as counter-revolutionaries.
The French Revolution has never been a cold object and never will be, but it is regrettable today that its interpreters reduce it to a purely political confrontation.
Loris Chavanette
The theme of the French Revolution has always been conducive to these excesses and historical recoveries, when they are not political.
Already at the end of the 19th century, Clemenceau had endeavored to attenuate this memory war by affirming that the Revolution was a “block”, so true that the Terror remained a bone of contention.
This continues to be divisive, with the great crimes of the 20th century, committed both by the fascist and communist revolutions, having awakened the fashion for historical analogies.
The French Revolution has never been a cold object and never will be, but it is regrettable today that its interpreters reduce it to a purely political confrontation.
Nothing proves it better than this bitter observation: the left is united behind the figure of Robespierre,
Moreover, it is easy to note this intellectual secession: revolutionary studies are the prerogative of the left, whereas Napoleonic studies are the monopoly of the right, each striving to perpetuate the radicalism of a secular tradition.
The historical analysis is necessarily narrowed down.
A tendency of the last ten years, tending to deny the Terror its exceptionality, demonstrates this quite well.
This is gradually normalized, the violence of Year II being put into perspective.
After all, wasn't this a government in crisis like there have been others?
Weren't religious wars already the occasion for massacres?
So why not write "terror" with lowercase and quotes?
That's what happens,
some scholars even going so far as to argue that the Terror was an "invention" of the Thermidorians.
As such, there is reason to be afraid of the pedagogy being cooked up for us for the next Robespierre museum.
In the opposite camp, we can deplore a story that is just as oriented, as the publication in 2008 of the
Black Book of the French Revolution
, the collective work piloted by a Dominican, Renaud Escande, and including in particular the signature of Pierre Chaunu of the Institute.
Between these two poles, painting this story in black and white, they want to summon us to choose.
The history of France threatens to become an à la carte history where everyone picks what they like, what flatters their social origin, their religious beliefs or their political orientation.
Loris Chavanette
The story of the Vendée war is a textbook case.
It should not only be told in the light of the atrocities that were committed by the Republican armies in 1793, but also studied from the angle of the attempts at pacification of 1795. We then discover that the revolutionary government, after carrying out a methodical extermination of all resistance, practiced a policy of outstretched hands.
Thus, after the Terror and the fall of Robespierre, men like Carnot supported and had an amnesty adopted in the West by signing the Treaty of La Jaunaye, near Nantes, by which the royalists agreed to bury the hatchet, in exchange for legal and economic advantages intended to pacify the region.
The charismatic leader Charrette (who is mentioned in the film quoted) met in person, under a tent, the representatives of the Republic, except that a few weeks only after this symbolic act, he took up arms again by supporting a landing of an army emigrated, with the help of the English navy, to Quiberon.
This is why Charette was shot in 1796. A new bloodbath weakened the agreement, which was only a facade.
Instead of dwelling on the massacres, perpetrated on both coasts, another story was told: that showing the republican general Canclaux taking Charrette in his arms, or generals Hoche and Dumas father fraternizing with the Vendeans, or even the royalist Bonchamps ordering to free the prisoners of war of the revolutionary army before dying.
Everything must be put in the balance of history;
yet it is regrettable that the current controversy does not report on each of these troubled episodes.
In reality, less than a debate, we are in the presence of blinkered monologues.
So much so that, today, for lack of bridges between the clans, we lack history smugglers.
The latter is the victim of a thought that is crumbling.
I'
Schisms are legion in our past and periods of unity all relative.
Fighting is the rule, concord the exception.
Loris Chavanette
Democracy, which guarantees the free expression of everyone's opinions, if it is by nature the breeding ground for incessant internal struggles, must also ensure the homogeneity of the social body, otherwise it risks sinking into the selfishness of representations of our past.
Happy to recognize the diversity of ideas and people, it cannot forget the effort to build a peaceful historical fabric, where everyone finds their place without contempt for the otherness which is consubstantial with it.
Because not everything is worth it.
But today, we are witnessing a regrettable fistfight where each school is exhausted in portraying the sensitivity of the other with opprobrium.
Certainly, how could it be otherwise in a nation as disparate as ours, offering such geographic, political, religious, and therefore cultural diversity?
Schisms are legion in our past and periods of unity all relative.
Fighting is the rule, concord the exception.
However, the current spectacle of a balkanization of our history, what we call the drama of an à la carte history, has been dangerously renewed lately, at the cost of an extremization of the positions taken on the substance, and 'a hysterization on the form.
The spirit of nuance is the victim of this bipolarity, and many political personalities blow on the embers of our history to give themselves the impression of being able to control its course, forgetting that there are flashbacks that come back in the face.
This is undoubtedly the reason why the historian and resistant Marc Bloch pronounced well when he said that
"There are two categories of French people who will never understand the history of France, those who refuse to resonate with the memory of the coronation of Reims;
those who read without emotion the account of the feast of the Federation.”
This warning applies both to the balance of thought and to the quality of the approach to history.
Along with a taste for order, Bloch claimed a taste for freedom.
And we, fragile as well as proud democracies, we have the duty to maintain this hope of a people which does not dissociate itself from its past, of which we are, each one on our scale, the heirs and the transmitters.