The French Revolution included many mass murders, rapes and tortures of Catholics, but the most striking of all of these instances occurred in the peasant Vendee region of the West of France.
One need not look too far to find stories of the birth of the Modern World during the Revolution, with Maximilian Robespierre’s men carrying out drownings, guillotines and lynching of Catholics both lay and clerical. Even bishops were among those brutally killed as the French Revolution sought to destroy everything good and pure about the old world, remaking a new one.
They removed statues of Our Lady from Notre Dame and other cathedrals, replacing her with those dedicated to the Cult of Reason. They renamed the months of the year. They created 10 instead of 7 days in a week.
As the bloodthirsty Masonic Parisian rapist atheists ripped through France, imposing their ‘revolution’ on the people in the Reign of Terror, it was Catholics who bore the brunt of the viciousness.
When the French Republic instituted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, demanding obedience from the church, it began a chain of events that would result in the massacre of thousands of Catholics in the Vendee. Churches closed, altars were desecrated and the traces of Catholicism were erased as far as humanly possible.
For the population of the Vendee, this was something that they could not accept. When they were drafted into the Revolutionary Army, they refused. Soon, priests were among those who were leading a rebellion against the Masonic Reign of Terror.
Although they pioneered new forms of guerrilla warfare in their efforts to keep the savages of the Revolution at bay, the Revolutionaries tried new tactics too, tying clergy and nuns up and drowning them together in ‘marriages’. They locked children in churches and set them on fire. Women were raped and murdered in large numbers, as a weapon against forming future enemies of the Revolution.
Many clergy, such as Guillaume Repin, have since been beatified.
The Vendee was the beginning of the modern world in many ways, a genocide against Catholics that was justified by those who told themselves that they were compassionate and kind. Lenin would later refer to the Russian people as his ‘Vendeans’, knowing that they were peasant obstructions to his plans.
Estimates of the numbers of dead in the Vendee range from 100,000 to 200,000, but the it is the brutality with which they were killed that makes it especially rotten.
Seosamh O’Caoimh
