Victoire de Donnissan de La Rochejaquelein

Victoire de Donnissan de La Rochejaquelein (born October 25, 1772 in Versailles , † February 15, 1857 in Orléans ) is one of the few women who has dealt with the events of the French revolutionary years in writing.

biography

youth

Victoire de Donnisseau was the only daughter of the Maréchal de camp Guy Joseph de Donnissan and grew up in the Ancien Régime near the court of Versailles. She had acquired a high level of education and, with her noble descent, was predestined for a princely marriage and a carefree future. But when she was 16 years old, the French Revolution broke out and reversed the values ​​and ideas that had prevailed until then. As a precaution, she and her parents fled to the Château de Citran in the Médoc , which belonged to the family, at the end of 1789 .

First marriage

Here she married her six-year-old cousin Louis de Salgues de Lescure on October 27, 1791 , whose family was destitute but had a big name. However, the circumstances brought it that her husband decided to leave the country with his family; for this purpose he thought it better to return temporarily to revolutionary Paris in the summer of 1792 with his wife, who was seven months pregnant. Here on June 20, 1792 an anti-royalist demonstration was held in front of the Tuileries Castle and the king was forced to put on a red cap and to drink to the good of the nation; on August 10, 1792 Louis XVI. arrested and imprisoned in the Temple - it was the so-called 'second revolution' that - unlike the first revolutionary wave, which was limited to Paris - swept the whole country. After the king's flight had failed the previous year, Louis Marie de Lescure considered it better not to go into exile, but to retire with his family to the family estate near Bressuire in the Deux-Sèvres department ; They set out on August 25th and thus avoided the September murders , which were primarily directed against the nobility and clergy, the worst enemies of the revolution.

After the execution of the king on the guillotine on January 21, 1793, the revolutionary mood spread in the spring of 1793 in the Poitou and in the Vendée department , but here a Catholic-royalist popular uprising ( uprising of the Vendée ) rose up, which soon led Louis Marie de Lescure and his cousin Henri de La Rochejaquelein posed. In the summer of 1793 Victoire - together with her daughter, who was just under one year old, and her parents - visited her husband, who had broken his arm in a battle near Saumur , and from then on stayed by his side. Shortly after his recovery, he was seriously wounded in the heavy fighting in the Second Battle of Cholet and had to be transported on a stretcher; his wife and little daughter always stayed by his side. The rebels' army fled along with a group of displaced and elderly people - a total of around 25,000 to 30,000 men - across the Loire to the north - this event has become known throughout France as the Virée de Galerne . On November 4, 1793, Louis Marie de Lescure died near a village on the border with Brittany , but homeless as she was, the widow traveled with the remnants of the Vendée army through northwestern France. In December they reached Angers again , where the leaders of the army were captured and executed, whereupon the army disbanded and carried on as a band of hunted robbers.

Mme de Lescure's escape continued and she had to endure even worse hardships than before - hunger and thirst, rain and cold, complete exhaustion and hasty departures with the remnants of the army. For days she only lived on onions that she stole from the fields, until she realized that her little daughter could not go on living like this, whereupon she handed her over to the care of a completely unknown farming family at Ancenis - Mme de Lescure never has anything from her again heard. In the Battle of Savenay , she had to leave her father behind, who was captured and shot a few days later. Disguised as Breton peasant women , she and her mother looked for work and protection on a farm ( ferme ) near Prinquiau , where they spent the rest of the winter with poor farmers who were left alone by the world.

In the spring they moved on and kept hiding in the woods and bushes. The widow gave birth to twins, one of whom died about a month after the birth, in a poor hut that had been uninhabited for years, the windows and doors of which were always closed for fear of discovery. The flight and wandering continued, but after Robespierre's fall and execution on July 27 and 28, 1794 ( 9th Thermidor II ), the reign of terror ( terreur ) subsided and the situation in France relaxed somewhat - a nationwide amnesty was proclaimed and Mme Lescure found accommodation in Nantes , where she met people who had experienced similar things to herself. In February 1795 she reached the Château de Citran in the Médoc, where the second twin daughter died.

exile

After the coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor V (September 4, 1797), which was triggered by fear of a counter-revolution of the nobility and the clergy, the situation of the nobles deteriorated and the persecutions began again. Mme Lescure, who had been put on an emigrant list years ago, went into exile in Spain until the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire VIII (November 9th, 1799). Then she returned to her property at Bressuire, which had been badly damaged during the revolutionary years.

Second marriage

At her mother's insistence, in March 1802 she married Louis de la Rochejaquelein , Henri's brother eleven years her junior. Life in the castles Citran and Clisson was calm; in 1808 the family had five children. Her husband, who was secretly on the side of the king, saw after the fall of Napoleon and his exile on the island of Elba in April 1814 the opportunity had come to publicly proclaim the return of the Bourbons to the throne of France.

In the first restoration period , Louis de la Rochejaquelein was from Louis XVIII. promoted to maréchal de camp and everything seemed to be getting better for the family - then Napoleon returned from his exile on Elba in March 1815. Louis de la Rochejaquelein organized the resistance with a renewed uprising in the Vendée and Poitou; he went into battle himself and was fatally hit by a bullet on July 4, 1815. His wife and the children had already left for exile in San Sebastian and only received news of their death there. In the second restoration period, the family returned to France; the eldest son was appointed peer of France , but was killed by partisans in exile in Portugal after the July Revolution of 1830 .

Mme Rochejaquelein moved to Orléans in 1832 , where two of her married daughters lived. Here she also stood up for former fighters of the Vendée uprising, some of whom were still persecuted and brought to justice. She died completely blind on February 15, 1857 at the old age of 84.

plant

Her memoirs, which she had already begun during her first exile in Spain, were completed shortly after 1805; however, they were not printed until 1814, as it was believed that they were not (yet) of general interest. But the success of the book was surprisingly great: it was translated into several languages ​​and reprinted over and over again. The openness and clarity of the language generated positive reviews almost everywhere. It is often the only neutral (?) Source for both the events and the characterization of the leading figures of the Vendée uprising.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Albert Soboul : The Great French Revolution. EVA, Frankfurt / M. 1973, p. 212ff, ISBN 3-434-00271-5

Web links

• Mémoires de Mme la marquise de La Rochejaquelein as an e-book (French)
• Literature by and about Victoire de Donnissan de La Rochejaquelein in the WorldCat bibliographic database