Author’s Note
The Reign of Terror
Maximilien de Robespierre was the mastermind of the Reign of Terror, which took place from September 1793 to the end of July 1794. He was the leader of the Committee of Public Safety, the executive committee of the National Convention and, in 1794, the most powerful man in France. In explaining how terror would lead to a “Republic of Virtue” in a speech to the National Convention, he said,
If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.
In his haste to end all opposition to the revolution, he made sure laws were passed providing that anyone suspected of treason could be arrested and executed. He closed all provincial courts so that trials were held at the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. When Parisian jails overflowed with suspects, the process was speeded up, partly by ending the need for witnesses and any defense. The only punishment the tribunal could administer was death.
Thousands of people were executed, including not only Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI and many of Robespierre’s political rivals, but also nobles, clergy, bourgeoisie and peasants. Half a million Frenchmen were imprisoned or placed under house arrest during the Terror. Over forty percent of the death sentences carried out during the Terror took place in the Vendée.
Robespierre fell from power on July 27, 1794, a year to the day after entering the Committee of Public Safety. He and many of his close associates met the guillotine on the next day. With his demise, the Terror ended, though the blot on France’s history remains.
Ironically, while the revolutionaries wanted no king, after having their fill of murder and bloodshed, they accepted Napoleon as emperor and eventually welcomed back the Bourbons to the French throne. If you’d like to read one of my stories set in England and France after the Bourbons return, you might like Racing with the Wind, book 1 in the Agents of the Crown series.
The Émigrés
With the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, French émigrés began flowing into London and other parts of Europe in successive waves that became a tide of emigration. (The number is believed to be one hundred and sixty thousand.) In January 1792, the leaders of the revolution declared all of the émigrés to be traitors to France. Their property and titles were confiscated and the monarchy abolished.
The murders of September 1792, mentioned in my story, left an indelible impression. The victims of the slaughter included anyone the revolutionaries claimed might join an invading force. In reality, that was merely an excuse to get rid of those who disagreed with them. One of the most savagely treated victims was Princesse de Lamballe, the friend of Marie Antoinette who returned to France to be with the queen in her hour of need. Madame de Lamballe was stripped, raped, stabbed, her breasts cut off and the rest of her body mutilated. After she was dead, one of the assassins ripped out her heart and ate it while another stuck her head on a pike and paraded it under Marie Antoinette’s window. Such was the evil of those times.
Before 1792, the émigrés were mostly of the nobility. Those who had ties to England were welcomed into London Society. After the horrors of the September Massacres, the wave of those fleeing France included clergy and refugees of the lower classes. (This is one reason why the family of Lady Mary Campbell in Racing with the Wind has a French pastry cook.)
With Britain’s entry into the war with France in 1793, England opened her arms to the émigrés. London became an important destination for those seeking refuge. The comte de Provence spent twenty-three years in exile, some of them in England. In 1814, he returned to France to reign as Louis XVIII. The comte d’Artois, younger brother of Louis XVI, a character in Echo in the Wind, also spent many years in exile in England. Eventually, he returned to France to become King Charles X in 1824.
Anti-Catholic Persecution
During the Reign of Terror in 1794, the anti-Catholic persecution in France was fierce. Many nuns and priests were sent to the guillotine for refusing to repudiate their faith. In 1792, when the National Assembly called for the suppression of religious communities and the evacuation of pious houses, the Ursulines of Saint-Denis, who you will remember from To Tame the Wind, settled their debts and left the convent. Out of some 10,000 Ursulines living in France at the time, about 1,000 were jailed and thirty-eight guillotined.
The War in the Vendée
The War in the Vendée was, until recently, denied by the French government and not taught in French schools. Yet it was the first “total war” in modern history, in which men, women and children were involved. It was also the first modern war that saw regular troops beaten by mostly unarmed peasants. As I researched this part of the revolution, I kept thinking the Vendéens and their brothers, the Chouans, were like America’s Minutemen who fought the British troops.
The Vendée was a poor rural region inhabited by peasants, impoverished aristocrats, petite bourgeoisie and poor priests. The social inequalities were less marked there than elsewhere in France. The people were loyal to their king and to the Church. Many of the priests came from Vendéen families. When both king and priests were denied them and a conscription of 300,000 demanded by Paris, they rose in rebellion.
The Vendéens fought on after their young general Henri de la Rochejaquelein was killed in January of 1794. But the revenge of the Committee of Public Safety on their defiance would be terrible. A quarter of a million royalists were slaughtered, including women and children in a campaign bordering on genocide.
Napoleon Bonaparte had great respect for the Vendéens. He called their war “le combat des géants”, the fight of the giants. He understood they fought for the preservation of their liberty and freedom of religion. In November 1799, when he seized power in a coup d’état, he immediately began talks with the Vendéen religious leader, the abbé Bernier, and set about repairing relations with the Church. Napoleon was no fool and realized if he was to be accepted as emperor one day, he must have the backing of the Church. By December, full rights of worship were restored, not only in the Vendée, but in the whole of France. Church bells rang once again.
The Isle of Guernsey
After Jean Donet’s marriage to Lady Joanna West in Echo in the Wind, he built a home for them on Guernsey where, with excursions into Lorient and Saintonge, they raised his orphaned niece, Zoé Ariane Donet, and had a child of their own, Jean-Jacques Henri Donet, who insists on being called “Jack”. Guernsey remained their home during the revolution. Donet’s vineyards in Saintonge and his home in Lorient were being kept for him by others, much like his townhouse in Paris. Jack was heir to his father’s title and lands, as you will see in Rogue’s Holiday, book 5 of the Agents of the Crown series, set in England in 1820.
During the revolution, the Channel Islands, sometimes known as “the French Isles”, took on a special role. Lying so close to France, they not only provided sanctuary to the fleeing French, but the islands were used by the British to monitor the movements of ships in and out of the Normandy’s ports. Hence, it was not surprising that our hero Frederick West became a spy for the English while working with his brother-in-law to ferry émigrés to London. His superior in London would have been Evan Nepean, Undersecretary of the Home Office and, after 1794, Undersecretary of War. One of his chief interests during the revolution was intelligence and Philippe d’Auvergne on the Isle of Jersey was one of his contacts.
I hope you have enjoyed my story set in those perilous times. If you did, please post a review! And if you’d like to see my story in pictures, take a look at the Pinterest Storyboard for .