"Unearthed History: The War of The Vendée" Topic

"Something about the French revolution makes it a timeless topic: It encapsulates the totality of our human condition. That condition is our inability to fully measure the unintended consequences of even the best of our intentions. Of course, this opinion only summarizes what political thinkers have said for years, but I can think of no brighter future for history than one where we echo Burke's writings through our own paraphrases. For Burke actually did something with history, and he is just one thinker whose interpretation of history helps us to make the field something applicable from which we can learn. History, after all, is not supposed to be about memorizing and preserving the past for its own sake: It has a practical use. George Santayana said this, Henry Adams said this.

That which we call history is an abstract concept of our own creation, like time. But history is as real as any tangible object because our nature made it so that we perceive the world through memory. For whatever reason it may be, we derive our understanding of who we are through memory of where and who we come from. History doesn't discriminate, moreover. It can speak to our personal experiences without being directly related to us. Such is the case with the French Revolution: One need not have French ancestry to feel compelled by the lessons it demonstrated…"
Main page
link

Amicalement
Armand

From the The Imaginative Conservative website.

Above all from some pseudo historian that doesn't use french sources and historiography or bibliography, not worth reading

Glup!….

Amicalement
Armand

The pb with Vendée et Chouans,in France it is very hard to find unbiased sources and writing. The sides have been hijacked and distorted by politics from the mid XIXth cty on, till nowadays. Any historian who does not want to be ostracized and take a non jacobin look to it will fast find limits. For the ex catholic, marginaly royalist (now defunct) right, the rebels were saints and so on. Unfortunately fot wargaming the details anyway don't get in the way of university approved writing, nor is archeology interested. My belief if many would fing disturbing facts, and we, maps, oobs, etc.😉

marginaly royalist (now defunct) right

Not quit defunct:

YouTube link

I was having a hard enough time getting past that it was just a regurgitation of Davies work without saying so up front. When I got to the part where she used the quote "Last year, I talked to you about the Reformation, which was really a war against the Church. This year, I'm talking about the French Revolution. One can only describe it as a war against God." I lost any respect for the writer. It is at best naive to think of the Roman Catholic Church of the 16th century as the only "Church". It is ludicrous to call the assault on the privileged position of the Roman Catholic Church on France, which the French Revolution most certainly was, with an assault on the concept of a deity, simply because a relatively small number of radical revolutionaries were areligious. Would the author have been as sympathetic if she had been talking about the Camisard rebels under Louis XIV as she was with those in the Vendee.

I quite like the book by Rob Harper – a book for you Jcfrog.

It turned out the justified "assault" on the church, ened up in a will to dechristianize, replacing it by a dubious " culte de l'être suprème" with a veiled personality cult, a new clergy ( a bit like now) inquisition… and for those holding the reins a juicy sharing of the spoils in the form of self serving adjudication of lands and real estates. Nothing was clean and if many had ideals, human nature that deaded negated fact by idioalistics, quickly took over.
As I said then XiXth century politics with the need for the republicans to create a new idealized past and reference, fighting bonapartists and royalists. In 1875 France nearly became a kingdom again with the white flag. Then it became a ritualistic sanctified romance, learned and told by the black hussars of the republic, the new clergy, teachers and state employees, my grand fathers belonged to it, I still have the books. I learned the songs!