Guerrilla Warfare Page 5

  From a military point of view, the campaigns are of considerable interest because the Republican army, itself the practitioner of revolutionary new tactics, had to face a new mode of combat which disconcerted it greatly. "Amid fire, skirmish lines, the exploitation of difficult terrain, rapid concentration of force, unhampered by any logistic straitjacket."40 According to Joseph Clemenceau, who was captured by the Vendeans, their generals

  could never form the Vendeans into a permanent army or keep them under arms; it was never possible to make them remain to guard the cities they took; nor could anyone make them encamp or subject them to military discipline. Accustomed to an active life, they could not stand the idleness of the camp. They went to battle eagerly, but they were never soldiers.41

  There had been a wave of unrest in western France, inchoate, without clear direction, even before the Revolution; a first small-scale armed rising took place in August 1792, near Chatillon, but the general attack started on 10 March 1793, when the tocsin was sounded in six hundred villages throughout the Vendée. At first the Vendean generals, such as Cathelineau, Bonchamp, Stoffet and d'Elbee, succeeded in making some headway against the Republican forces, of which there were not many in western France. They were beaten, however, at Lucan and Cholet in late autumn. By the beginning of 1794 they had lost their best officers and soldiers as well as most of their war material. Instead of avoiding direct confrontation and the siege of big cities, the Vendeans committed all the obvious mistakes; instead of retreating after their defeats into the interior of Brittany, where the Republicans could have followed them only with the greatest difficulty, they again went to battle against superior forces equipped with artillery which they themselves lacked. If, despite the capable leadership of Hoche, Ber thier, Kellermann, Marceau and other famous generals, the armies of the Republic did not defeat them more quickly, the main reason was that the troops at their disposal were untrained and of inferior quality. Even more to the point, there was no unified command, political commissars sent out from Paris interfered constantly and gave orders which were, at best, unhelpful.

  Paris had assumed at first that the Vendeans would be defeated in a matter of days, whereas the generals on the spot soon realized that they faced a mass insurrection and that pacification would be at best a long drawn-out undertaking. Kleber bemoaned that the Vendeans were always much better informed about the movements of his forces than he was about theirs, that they were constantly sending out patrols and attacking small Republican detachments. From the very beginning, Hoche stressed that pacification was a political rather than a military problem: "For the twentieth time I repeat," he wrote to the Directoire in Paris, "if one does not grant religious tolerance, one has to give up the idea of peace. This country needs civil administration — military administration does not suit it."42 And, on another occasion: "If you are not tolerant, we shall go on killing Frenchmen who have become our enemies, but the war will not end." The Paris authorities were loath to show clemency to the enemies of the Republic, nor were they as yet fully aware of the extent of the revolt. Instructions were that all rebel leaders and soldiers were to be executed as well as anyone trying to evade conscription or who was found bearing arms. Since there were no game laws in the Vendee, everyone had a rifle, and thus could be shot without trial. Subsequently more lenient orders were issued. Only the leaders of the revolt were to be executed, a ruling more honored in the breach than the observance. When the Vendeans, for instance, killed their prisoners at Cholet, Westerman countered by killing prisoners and civilians and, from 1793, there was a vicious circle of terror and counterterror. In punitive raids women were raped and tortured, children killed, houses and crypts systematically burnt.43 Relatives of Chouans were seized as hostages and executed. All over the west of France "traitors" and "enemy agents," however innocent, were sought out and arrested. Far from breaking the popular movement, such measures made it only more popular. The manifestos issued in Paris, claiming that the insurgents were creatures of the British, never gained credence.

  The generals and the political commissars had reported to Paris as early as October 1793 that the "Vendée no longer exists." Such confident reports were correct to the extent that the rebels were no longer able to raise an army of fifty thousand, as they had done in the beginning. But for all that, they remained in effective control of the country and their guerrilla tactics made it far more difficult to attack them; Hoche needed more than a hundred thousand men, including the whole army of Mayence, to suppress the rebellion. Three years later, in July 1796, he could report with greater justification that the Vendee had been pacified. But even this was not final victory, for though all the major leaders had been taken prisoner and executed, and their troops decimated, unrest on a small scale still continued. Two thousand peasants attacked Nantes in 1799. The Vendean army was royalist in its sympathies, but the last thing the Comte d'Artois (the future Charles X) wanted was to accept the generalship that was offered to him. The leaders of the insurgents were a mixed lot; Chouan was apparently the nickname given to the four Cottereau brothers (Jean being the best known), who were smugglers at the little city of Laval, but they played no leading role in the war. The first generalissimo was Cathelineau, a wagoner and church sexton and son of a mason. He was a native of Anjou; intelligent and fearless, but no great master of strategy. He was killed in the very first months of the uprising and was succeeded by d'Elbée, a former captain of the cavalry, and La Rochejacquelein, a very young lieutenant, who is mainly remembered for having admonished his followers: "Let us find the enemy. If I retreat, kill me; when I advance, follow me. If I am killed, avenge me."

  Bonchamp, also a former army captain, was killed early on in the campaign. One of the two principal leaders of the revolt was Stoffet, who had been a corporal in the army and subsequently a gamekeeper, an Alsatian by birth and son of a miller. A good leader of men and a capable officer, he had nothing but disdain for the nobles and always stressed that he fought for religion and the Church, "which makes all men equal."44 He had the reputation of being a cruel man and many atrocities were ascribed to him. Mercier du Roche, who fought against him, wrote that he would have been a good general of the Republic. The other important military commander was Charette, a former naval lieutenant, who, like Stoffet, was hunted down in early 1796, captured and executed. Napoleon is said to have thought highly of him. To repeat, the notion that the Vendean revolt was a movement inspired and commanded by feudal chiefs is not borne out by the known facts. Caillaud was a locksmith, Forestier, the son of a shoemaker. There were not a few adventurers in their ranks, the outcasts of all classes. By and large, it was a popular movement with anticapitalist undertones; the operations of the Chouans struck terror among the bourgeois of the cities.

  The popular character of the rebellion has to be stressed because it provides the key to an understanding of the roots of the Chouannerie. It was a movement of national liberation of sorts, even though its ideology was diametrically opposed to the ideals of the French Revolution. The enthusiasm of the Chouans surprised and mystified Republican observers. One of them commented: "One goes to battle like to a fête — women, old people, children aged twelve to thirteen, I have seen them killed in the front line."45 Hedonville, who commanded the Republican forces in the later stages of the rising, reported to Bonaparte that the local population invariably gave the army wrong information about the whereabouts of the Chouans. There was no such solidarity among the Republicans. "We never lacked ammunition because your soldiers sold it to us," Coquereau wrote mockingly to the leaders of the Convention in Paris. Contemporary observers noted the prominent role played by women, both in the preparation of the rising and the actual fighting; they urged their sons and husbands to go to war, and many accounts have it that they were the most fanatic proponents of a guerre à l'outrance.

  The tactics of the Chouans have been described by many eyewitnesses. Thus Joseph Clemenceau:

  They fought without order, in squads or crowds, often as indi
vidual snipers, hiding behind hedgerows, spreading out, then rallying, in a way that astonished their enemies, who were entirely unprepared for these manoeuvres; they were seen to run up to cannons and steal them from under the eyes of the gunners, who hardly expected such audacity. They marched to combat, which they called aller au feu, when they were called by their parish commandants, chiefs taken from their ranks and named by them, centurions, so to speak, who had more of their confidence than did the generals chance had given them; in battle as at the doors of their churches on Sunday, they were surrounded by their acquaintances, their kinfolk and their friends; they did not separate except when they had to fly in retreat. After the action, whether victors or vanquished, they went back home, took care of their usual tasks, in fields or shops, always ready to fight.46

  Hoche, in a letter to Aubet-Dubayet, noted that the Chouans had friends and agents everywhere and always found food and ammunition whether it was given voluntarily or taken by force. Their principal object was to destroy the civilian authorities, and to that end they intercepted convoys, assassinated government supporters, disarmed Republican soldiers and even tried to foster unrest among the town dwellers. Their tactics were to disperse silently behind hedges, to shoot from all directions, and at the slightest hesitation on the part of the Republican forces to attack them while shouting their war cries. Encountering stiff resistance, they would retreat and renew their attack on another occasion. A Chouan leader addressed the following warning to the Republican authorities:

  The Chouans will demolish all the bridges, intercept all communications, destroy all mills which they do not need, cut the knuckles of all cows and the hocks of the horses employed in transporting supplies, kill every state employee performing his duty, kill everyone obeying requisitions; they will force the population under threat of the death penalty to follow them . . . they will not lower their arms until they have made France a great cemetery.47

  The Chouans were organized on a local basis with assembly points in every village. The peasants kept their own arms and brought food along for three to four days when they went into action. Some of them wore uniforms — green coats and pantaloons with red waistcoats and a white cockade. They frequently attacked at night and they were past masters at ambushing small detachments in a country which favored such operations. They were less inventive when fighting involved larger units on each side. Kleber observed that their plan of battle was always the same:

  It consists in greatly extending their front so as to envelop us and throw disorder in our ranks. . . . When they advance on us they generally take care to dispose their army in three columns whatever the character of the ground . . . their right column is always the strongest and made up of the best men. The center column, strengthened by a few cannons, moves forward, while the other two open up into skirmish lines along the hedges, but the main effort almost always comes from the right.48

  Republican commanders noted that it was the practice of the Chouans not to attack unless their force was greatly superior. When forced to retreat, the Chouans would rally at a distance of a few miles and immediately counterattack the unprepared enemy. On certain occasions they would appear on the battlefield with Republican hostages in front of them; at other times they would wear Republican uniforms so as to surprise the enemy. They were men hardened by long winter nights, men who could jump over hedges and ditches, could see in the dark and hear the slightest noise.49

  In the jaundiced view of their Republican enemies, the Chouans were little better than untamed animals. In actual fact their approach was quite sophisticated, when engaging in psychological warfare, for instance. Early in the war the Catholic army was given orders not to rob and to show leniency toward prisoners. These were released and given special passes on condition that they gave their word of honor not to fight again in the Vendée. Among the Chouans there were detachments of French, Swiss and German deserters; these were not very strong, but their very existence helped to demoralize the Republicans. In a leaflet signed "Les Brigands," the Chouans addressed the Republican soldiers as "nos amis et frères." The city dwellers who had grown rich (it said), were those culpable for the bloodshed. The Republican soldiers were mere dupes, exploited (like the Chouans) by the common enemy.50 On more than one occasion the Chouans attacked, caught, and executed gangs of bandits to dissociate themselves from criminal elements and to help the peasants who had suffered from them. In the end the revolt of the Chouans was put down because the Republic concentrated vastly superior forces against them and used effective counterguerrilla tactics both on the military and the civilian level, A network of entrenched camps was established which the Chouans could not bypass. The Republican soldiers systematically combed the area, seizing the peasants' cattle until they surrendered their arms. All suspects were arrested in the course of these operations, which were carried out in great secrecy with the help of the local police. In the instructions to his officers, Hoche always stressed the importance of establishing a good intelligence service and of deceiving the enemy about their intentions.

  But Hoche also understood that this war could not be won by arms alone. He insisted on strict discipline on the part of his troops; severe punishment threatened those who assaulted civilians and did not respect their property. In an appeal to the civilian population, he announced that, unlike the rebels, the soldiers of the Republic would not answer cruelty with cruelty, terror with counterterror: "You will find in these soldiers zealous protectors just as the brigands will find in them implacable enemies. Peaceful and honest citizen, stop believing that your brothers want your ruin; stop believing that the fatherland wants your blood, it merely wants to make you happy through its beneficial laws." In his correspondence with Paris, Hoche emphasized the importance of treating the clergy well. He saw the priests as the main instrument for regaining the confidence of the population. They could be made to understand that the continuation of the Chouannerie meant war without end, with all the human suffering and the material losses that involved. A victory by the Republic, on the other hand, would restore peace and religious tolerance. Hoche's moderate course of action did not make him any more popular among the Chouans, while in Paris he was suspected of being too soft and thus ineffectual. A tribute was paid to him only in 1796 after the pacification had been completed, when Carnot, the president of the Directoire, expressed the thanks of the Republic to the "Army of the Ocean" and its commander.

  The Chouans received some supplies from England but this assistance was at no stage decisive. Of the nobles who had left France, only few were inclined to return and fight. Those who did despised the peasants and their conduct of war. They wanted to fight according to time-honored tradition — and were quickly wiped out by the armies of the Republic. Since the Chouans did not hold any major port, supplies were neither substantial nor regular and in the last resort they could rely only on their own resources. The Chouans had no guerrilla doctrine; they were simply adapting their war to local conditions and, after their initial setbacks, fought the only way they possibly could.51 The Russian partisans under Denis Davydov were regular soldiers, engaged in raids to the enemies' rear. The Spanish guerrilla fighters received substantial help from Wellington and the various local juntas, which also provided political leadership. The Chouans, in contrast, had no government, no political advisers. Of all the early guerrilla movements, it was the most spontaneous, the most isolated, and thus, in many ways, the "purest" specimen of the lot.

  Spain

  The Spanish war against the French (1808-1813) not only produced the term guerrilla but remained for many years the guerrilla war par excellence. Napoleon had badly misjudged the situation, assuming that with the defeat of the Spanish regular armies the war in the peninsula would come to a speedy end. But popular resistance continued and tied down substantial French forces. Taken in isolation these activities were mere pinpricks, but they had a cumulative effect. Furthermore, they provided inspiration to the anti French forces all over Europe.

 
Spain at the turn of the century was a backward country ruled by the largest and most useless aristocracy in Europe.52 The small-town bosses, the poderosos, were an important factor, often employing armed gangs or cooperating with them. Spain had a long tradition of banditry and guerrilla fighting of sorts. In a proclamation, the Empecinado, one of the leading guerrilla chieftains, invoked the memory of Sertorius and Viriathus.53 The Spanish establishment and the liberals were on the whole pro-French; the former because they had realized since the lost war of 1783-1785 that resistance against their powerful neighbor in the north was hopeless, the latter because France was the country of the revolution. The attitude of the liberals gradually changed, largely because in Spain Napoleon supported the most reactionary forces — Ferdinand and Godoy. Sections of the Church were more popular in character than they were usually credited with being; the lower clergy was quite poor, their contact with the peasantry was close — most of them were, in fact, of peasant origin. The peasantry, or at any rate a militant minority among them, turned against the French with the same slogans that had been used previously in the Vendée, and later in Russia: in defense of Church and monarchy — though not necessarily the king. There was a genuine patriotic upsurge provoked by invasion and conquest — the Spanish regular forces were beaten, but, in marked contrast to the political and military tradition of the age, the people would not accept the fact. There was also a great deal of xenophobia — foreigners had no business to be in Spain. Thus it was essentially a war carried on by le petit peuple with an admixture of students, monks, local notables, a few officers, doctors and lawyers. But the backbone of the movement was rural, very much in contradistinction to Garibaldi's "Thousand," among whom there were no peasants at all. As in the Vendée, there was a strong populist bias, and the French mistakenly assumed that this would drive the men of property into their camp. It was the "mob," not the establishment, which in Saragossa demanded arms and patriotic resistance and the same happened in many other places. The performance of the Spanish army had been disastrous; true, there had been the victory at Bailén, and Saragossa resisted for ten weeks — to the admiration of all enemies of Napoleon. But these were followed by the calamitous Battle of Ocaña and the Spanish flight at Talavera. "I have never known the Spaniards do anything, much less do anything well," wrote Wellington.