Royalist memorials of the civil war in the Vendée during the early Third Republic

Abstract

Abstract In the 1890s, when statuomanie was at its peak, conservatives in the Vendée erected two statues to commemorate figures from the royalist armies in the civil war in order to contest republican education politics and memory culture. The first, aristocrat Henri de La Rochejaquelein (1772–94), was unveiled in 1895. The second, erected a year later, celebrated the first commander-in-chief of the royalist army, Jacques Cathelineau (1759–93). The contested nature of these commemorations illustrates the distinctive character of the Vendée in the early Third Republic; leading conservative politicians and churchmen did not mediate between grandes and petites patries within a republican frame, but rather rejected the notion of the secular democratic republic in its entirety. The memorials sought to assert a distinctive regional history to local Vendéen audiences, but they did so in the service of a vision of France and its history that contradicted the dominant project of republicanism and thus constituted a unique chapter of the wider debate about memory and history in France during the Third Republic.