2020/08/07 by Noah Shusterman · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #European Political History Analysis #French Historical and Cultural Studies
paper · doi:10.4324/9780429432910-7
openalex publication_date 2020/08/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Since March, the long-disgruntled Vendee had been fighting back against the government in Paris. Most of France was now in open opposition to the central government. Caen was becoming the center of a province arming itself to march on Paris. In Brittany, to Normandy’s west, the countryside had long been hostile to the Revolution. The Vendee was one of the departments which the Constituent Assembly had created in 1790, taking its name from the river that formed its southern border. The story of the early fighting in the Vendee was as much about the failures of the armed forces of the republic as it was about the successes of the peasants. The Revolution, however, was becoming a religion in its own right. Or rite—the Revolution had a tradition of borrowing religious practices and putting them to revolutionary uses. Some of the Revolution’s most prominent women were executed at this time: Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, Madame Roland.