“THE BLOOD OF OUR POOR PEOPLE”: 1848, INCIPIENT NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ANTHONY TROLLOPE'SLA VENDÉE

Abstract

In the late 1840s, as revolutionswept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade.La Vendée: An Historical Romance(1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels.La Vendéeis one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position,La Vendéeis fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.