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Henri de La Rochejaquelein
Within France, opposition to the revolution of 1789 was fiercest in the west in what is known as the Vendée. This coastal region is roughly defined by the area north and south of the Loire River framed by Nantes, La Rochelle, Poitiers, and Angers. In 1790 the National Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, requiring all French church officials to swear allegiance to the new secular constitution and assembly. While many clergy refused this oath, dissent was strongest in the Vendée where all but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath, as did about half of the parish priests. At the time, Western France was the least industrialized and most isolated region of the country. The local nobility and the Catholic Church were not as resented by the rural populace as in other parts of France. When the General Assembly decreed that clergy who had refused the oath were to be exiled and replaced by priests loyal to the revolutionary regime, throughout France there were local efforts to subvert the law, again particularly in the Vendée. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, which had deep association in France with Marguerite-Marie Alacoque’s apparitions of 1673–1675 and the Marseilles plague of 1720, became the symbol of resistance to the Republic. Sacred Heart patches were sewn to the inside of jackets and small printed sheets with the symbol were surreptitiously passed among royalist sympathizers. The unrest that had been simmering in the Vendée boiled over in March 1793 when the National Assembly set the region’s quota for army conscripts at 300,000. An enraged population organized and led by local nobility took up arms against the Republic. The ensuing civil war was short and brutal, with atrocities against civilians perpetrated by both sides. The rebel’s Royal and Catholic Army was initially victorious over ill-trained Republican troops. A reinforced Republican army waged a scorched earth campaign against the region, defeating the last rebel army in December 1793. This neo-classical painting by Pierre Narcisse Guérin (1774–1833) portrays a twenty-six-year-old noble Henri du Vergier, comte de la Rochejaquelein, (1772–1794), a Sacred Heart of Jesus sewn to his lapel, leading rebel soldiers. He famously declared, "Friends, if I advance, follow me! If I retreat, kill me! If I die, avenge me!" In one of the last skirmishes of the rebellion, he was shot and killed by Republican troops. It is hard to imagine the Sacred Heart of Jesus would take sides in a civil war, but maybe so. |
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