The Last White Terror: TheMaquis Blancand Its Impact in Liberated France, 1944–1945

Abstract

If the Revolution is the woof of modern French history, counterrevolution and “white terror” is definitely its warp. Every revolutionary outbreak of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was accompanied by virulent counterrevolutionary responses, especially in western and southern France. Donald Sutherland describes these uprisings as the manifestations of a “massive, extensive, durable and popular” movement,1 noting that the violent counterrevolutionary wars of the 1790s were repeatedly echoed by renewed rebellions and “white terrorism” in 1815 and 1832 and that there were fears of royalist violence in 1848. These encounters bore all the typically savage signs of a civil war. Even the relatively minor “de Berry Revolt” of 1832 generated a fourteen-page report from a local prefect detailing scores of gruesome murders and pillages.2 These bitter conflicts also engendered the development of lasting royalist movements in areas such as Brittany.3 As late as the 1880s, Brittany was the base for a 6,000-man shock force of former Papal Zouaves that was plotting a legitimist march on Paris, and violent counterrevolutionary outbreaks were still being recorded in the early twentieth century, particularly in response to the separation of church and state in 1905. Activities such as draft dodging, always a crucial expression—in poorly integrated regions along the periphery—of opposition to the notion of national duty, still bore the characteristics of such cultural rejectionism as late as the time of World War I.4