Remembering the French Counterrevolution

On May 17, the same day America was formally rededicated as “one Nation under God,” the French film Victory or Death arrived in the U.S. like a torch carried across dark water. Produced by Puy du Fou Films and directed by Vincent Mottez and Paul Mignot, it premiered in France in 2023. Starring Hugo Becker as General François-Athanase Charette de La Contrie, the historical epic tells a story that modernity has spent two centuries trying to bury.  

Set in the late eighteenth century, the film follows General Charette, a former French naval officer and veteran of the American Revolutionary War, who emerges reluctantly from retirement to lead the Catholic, royalist revolt against the newly formed French Republic. In 1793, the peasants of the Vendée rebelled after the revolutionary government suppressed the Church, imposed itself on their clergy, executed King Louis XVI, and ordered mass conscription across the countryside. The film traces the rise and collapse of their resistance. General Charette leads a peasant army constantly threatened by starvation, exhaustion, and internal division against the republicans, who respond with escalating brutality, determined to purge the entire French population of royalist sympathy. Graphic and bloody, the film realistically portrays the cost of loving something enough to die for it. This is precisely what makes it a dramatic success: While the dialogue is occasionally overwrought, the characters are elevated by genuine conviction. The audience feels how much these people cherish their homes, churches, and families, giving weight to their suffering.

American audiences rarely encounter this side of the French Revolution. In both primary and secondary schools, the revolution is typically flattened into a false morality play: enlightened commoners overthrowing an oppressive monarchy and aristocracy in the name of liberty and reason. Victory or Death reveals the hollowness of such slogans in the face of the revolution’s machine of ideological violence, which consumed tens of thousands of innocent Catholics in the Vendée. The death toll in the Vendée—civilians and combatants combined—is an estimated 200,000.

The film’s nuance adds to its gravity. The revolt is not presented as a contest between good guys and bad guys, but between rival theologies and their all-too-human devotees. The revolutionaries are not caricatured as monsters, as it’s their ideology that is the real villain. In their egalitarian zeal, they cannot comprehend the Vendéans’ respect for the past, or their sincere devotion to the Church. During negotiations, General Charette’s republican counterpart speaks of the necessity of abandoning the past to build a new order. General Charette answers simply that his people never forget the past. This is the heart of the clash between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries: The revolutionaries desire to create a world severed from inheritance and faith, insisting on a secular anthropology—“man made in the image of man” rather than in the image of God.

The modern West still lives within that tension. The heretical ideology born in the French Revolution did not disappear in the guillotine’s shadow. It has metastasized in the years since, taking the form of communism in the twentieth century and woke ideology in the twenty-first—in all the movements that insist man may reject his divinely ordained nature and recreate himself according to his whims. In today’s America, nowhere is this more apparent than in the social progressivism that insists our inheritance is ineluctably racist and oppressive, and that human identity is so malleable that anyone can redesign his or her sex.

Despite being a “revisionist” film, Victory or Death never descends into propaganda. The film is told primarily through the life of General Charette, who is portrayed as an imperfect and ruggedly human hero. At first, he resists the call to arms. He then struggles under the weight of command. In a trenchant scene, we see him in the confessional abandoning clemency toward republican prisoners. “We are not like them,” he says, “but war teaches us to become what we are not.” For all his heroism, he is morally exhausted by the civil war. But even as he suffers immensely, he remains conscious of the danger to his own soul. After three years of fighting, General Charette is taken prisoner by the republican army, and held in a cell before his execution. His final request is to receive the sacrament of absolution from a priest on the way to the firing squad. But the republican authorities deny him even the minimal dignities traditionally afforded the condemned. Not only do they deny him a priest, they don’t even let him shave. The revolution that promised fraternité reveals itself incapable of mercy.

The women of the Vendée are likewise given their due. Marie-Anne Charette de La Contrie and the other women remembered as “Charette’s Amazons” sacrifice themselves for the Catholic royalist cause. The film repeatedly returns to children, families, villages, and graves as a testament to the counterrevolutionaries’ fight for continuity, for divine order, for posterity—for the right to hand down a world intact. The opening image of General Charette with an infant wearing a medal of St. Michael aptly sets the stage. As the scenes progress, the rich aesthetics of the Vendéan countryside are brought out: candlelit chapels, muddy fields, forests shrouded in fog, and smoke drifting across stone villages. In one of the most heart-wrenching scenes, a cross is set on fire. 

Only a few years before commanding the counterrevolutionary forces in France, General Charette fought in the French Navy in the American War of Independence. The American Founding, whatever its Enlightenment influences, was deeply rooted in God, unalienable rights, freedom of religion, and natural law. The Vendée’s spirit is not identical, but both causes understood freedom not as liberation from all restraints, but as ordered liberty under God. The 1620 Mayflower Compact begins, “In the name of God, Amen,” and identifies its authors as “the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James,” traveling for “the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country.” The first Americans were deeply faithful Christians who understood authority as originating in God, delegated to kings, and exercised by families and communities within a divinely sanctioned order.

In this sense, the peasants of the Vendée would have recognized something very familiar in the early American soul. The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the narrative taught today in schools, which likens the revolutionaries to the Founding Fathers.

Victory or Death was a box-office success in western France, where memory of the Vendée remains strong. It was attacked by the French left, of course, who accused it of spreading a far-right agenda and romanticizing counterrevolution. The film’s supporters praised it for recovering a chapter of history imbued with heroism but long treated with silence.

Why is the story of the Vendée so subversive? Perhaps because it reveals the costs of revolutionary modernity; it exposes what happens when political movements try to remake society on terms detached from God and memory. Furthermore, it poses a danger to leftist intellectual creeds, because the counterrevolutionaries were much more than spirited peasants from two centuries ago. They were profound writers who created masterful works that still inform politics today: Joseph de Maistre, François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, Donoso Cortés. Their ideas transcend eighteenth-century French politics and speak directly to the civilizational battles of today. Most importantly, they speak to the beauty of a civilization inherited with gratitude over one reconstructed through pride and force.

The French Revolution promised a world made new. The Catholic counterrevolutionaries of the Vendée fought for a world that believed in transcendence, a world worth handing down. Between these competing visions, our civilization still trembles.