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In western France, where counterrevolutionary rebellions in the Vendee, Brittany and Normandy were brutally put down, antipathy toward the revolution is widespread. Historian Chaunu calls the retribution "genocide." In 1793 General Francois Westermann had reported proudly to his government, "I have trampled the children under my horses' hooves. I have massacred the women so they will give birth to no more rebels." The new movie about the Vendee uprising, Vent de Galerne, has understandably garnered intense local support and money. Says Jean-Michel Mousset, a trucking-company owner from Ste.- Florence who put up $5,000: "In 1793 liberty, equality and fraternity was on our side, not on the side of the republicans."
The dissenting voices on both the right and the left have had little effect on the majority of 1789 commemorations. Celebrations large and small, local and national, will attract record numbers of tourists to France. If these do not mark a true festival of reconciliation, the French can still take pride in the passion they have for their history. In Lyons, Jacques Tournier, the descendant of a water carrier who was guillotined in 1793, recalls that his grandmother refused to walk past the place in the market where the execution machine stood. "Now I too avoid that spot out of respect for my ancestors," Tournier says. Jacques Delmas, a lawyer from Reims, has fonder feelings for the revolution. "One of my ancestors stormed the Bastille," he says, "and I feel both thrilled and proud to be French whenever I walk past the place where it once stood."
However it is celebrated, France's birthday party promises to be anything but boring. The main business of such a celebration is, after all, a kind of % national introspection. More than a century ago, historian Alexis de Tocqueville, the first cool head to examine the various sides of the revolution, wrote, "Happy are those who can tie together in their thoughts the past, the present and the future. No Frenchman of our time has had this happiness." In this bicentennial year, the task seems daunting as ever. But the stimulation of ideas and the resulting reflection make the jubilee remembrance well worth all the fuss.
MISCONCEPTIONS
MYTH The storming of the Bastille freed hundreds.
FACT The fortress held only seven prisoners.
MYTH Death by guillotine was quick and painless.
FACT Execution often took several chops.
MYTH Most guillotine victims were aristocrats.
FACT Only 10% of those beheaded were nobles.
MYTH The guillotine was the main form of execution.
FACT Most of the 400,000 put to death during the revolution were shot, burned or drowned.
MYTH When the poor rioted over the price of bread, Marie Antoinette cried, "Let them eat cake!"
FACT Attributed to an unnamed "princess," the remark appears in Rousseau's Confessions at least two years before Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770.