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To: muawiyah
Robespierre managed to cut off the heads of a good number of folks in the Vondee ~ almost all of whom were Protestant.

No, the people of the Vendee were rural Roman Catholics.

There was once a sizable population of Protestants in the Vendee, but they were driven from the area in the persecution that followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes almost a century before the French Revolution.

There were two events that precipitated antirevolutionary violence in the Vendee: the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which forced the clergy to renounce the Pope or be forced underground, and the Conscription decrees.

The Vendee was known for having the highest percentage of Catholic priests who chose prison or death over renouncing the Pope.

Just as the forces of the Revolution wore tricolor cockades to identify themselves, thousands of peasant irregulars in the Vendee wore badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and of the Immaculate heart of Mary.

The small community of French Protestants were actually immune from most of the religious laws enacted by the Constituent Assembly, and they were overrepresented in the CA in proportion to their numbers. However, they also disproportionately suffered from increasing inflation and taxation as they were one of the most urban and enterprising segments of the population.

165 posted on 06/05/2007 12:49:44 PM PDT by wideawake ("Pearl Harbor is all America's fault, right, Mommy?" - Ron Paul, age 6, 12/7/1941)
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To: wideawake

Regarding the Vondee peasantry, you can listen to the French government’s propaganda for the last 217 years or take a look at the facts. Before the peasants lost their heads (actually, guy named Carrier loaded them onto barges, hauled them out into the river, then sank the barges ~ rather like the German gas chamber/oven trick ~ those crazy guys and gals in Europe are always up to something eh) there were still Protestants in the region ~ rather repressed, but present. After they killed everybody there were no more Protestants.


166 posted on 06/05/2007 1:36:19 PM PDT by muawiyah
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