After the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in June 1815, a new White Terror was carried out by the ultra-royalists, who enjoyed the support of rural France and the clergy. This “counter-revolution” set out to remove former revolutionaries and Bonapartists from all organs of power and administration, and to eradicate from the country all the political and ideological legacy of that period. The suppression of individual freedoms, summary justice, and massacres followed one another for a year, until Louis XVIII dissolved the Chamber dominated by the ultras.
White Terror in Southern France
After Waterloo and Napoleon’s second abdication, while in Paris it was enough to wear a bouquet of violets to be assaulted, new massacres were perpetrated in southern France. On June 25, serious incidents opposed royalists and soldiers in Marseille; the latter, who had been ordered not to respond to provocations in order to avoid civil war, lost 145 infantrymen and 18 cavalrymen, killed by royalist volunteers on the road to Toulon.
In the Phocaean city left to itself, it was carnage; retired soldiers, peaceful shopkeepers, former Mamluks brought back from Egypt by Bonaparte fifteen years earlier (13 Mamluk corpses were identified, but there were others), gendarmes, were mercilessly massacred, sometimes with refinement, while the crowd celebrated the French defeat in Belgium. The exact number of victims of this frenzy, which posterity remembered as the “Day of the Farce,” is unknown; estimates range from 45 to 250. The surviving suspects were imprisoned for their safety in the Château d’If; they were almost all released by the king’s prefect, Mr. de Vaublanc.
The Assassination of Marshal Brune
Soon, in many places, rioters bearing the colors of the Count of Artois pursued and killed Protestants and former Jacobins. In Avignon, under the leadership of a man named Pointu and a self-styled Major Lambot, Bonapartist houses were ransacked, dozens of people killed, perhaps even hundreds; among them a disabled man and a baker who was scalded in his kneading trough. Debtors freed themselves from their debts by throwing their creditors into the river. It was in this overheated atmosphere that Marshal Guillaume Marie Anne Brune, who had nevertheless submitted to the king, was assassinated by fanatics. Brune, a genuine republican rather than a Bonapartist, was falsely accused of having carried the head of the Princess of Lamballe on a pike. The constituted authorities, including the newly appointed royal prefect, Mr. de Saint Chamans, tried in vain to save him. Fearing Paris’s disapproval, the murder was disguised as a suicide.
The rioters did not omit to plunder the marshal’s baggage. Brune’s body was thrown into the Rhône, where it floated and was riddled with gunfire; retrieved downstream and buried by pious hands, it was later exhumed and buried again in the ditches of a castle, where it remained for two years before being returned to his widow in a soap box so as to pass unnoticed. For a few months, the Austrian occupation calmed the unrest; an Austrian officer even declared that, all things considered, he preferred Napoleon’s officers to the French nobles brought back in the baggage trains of his army. Like the September massacres, these atrocities were not committed solely by the dregs of the populace, but also by respectable bourgeois and aristocrats, among whom women were not absent. And it all ended in a festive atmosphere reminiscent of a rustic sabbath (carimantran).
The second White Terror was certainly more terrible than the first. In Montpellier, where the announcement of the Emperor’s abdication led to a bloody clash between royalists and the still Bonapartist garrison, more than a hundred people perished in the bloody orgies that followed. In Uzès, about a dozen.
In Nîmes, the change of regime, initially poorly accepted by part of the army, set it against the royalists, before the evacuation of the town by the disarmed troops, who were mercilessly massacred (more than thirty dead). Religious antagonisms reappeared; Protestants, about a third of the population of the Gard, had welcomed the return of the Emperor with joy and were once again targeted by the Catholic majority. It is true that during the Hundred Days they had committed acts of violence against the miquelets of the Duke of Angoulême, notably at Arpaillargues (2 dead). Villages remained divided, and travelers were wise to carry a set of cockades to change quickly before entering, depending on whether they were Bonapartist or royalist.
The royalist army of Beaucaire, a mob dressed in mismatched uniforms stolen from dead soldiers, looted and murdered indiscriminately, even killing royalists, and punished Calvinist women by lifting their skirts and flogging them with paddles adorned with fleur-de-lis (incidents minimized by royalists).
At this time, Trestaillons distinguished himself, whose real name was Jacques Dupont; it is said he owed his nickname to his claim that he would cut Bonapartists into three pieces, though others say it came from the three plots of vineyard he owned. This porter, at the head of armed bands, had many Protestants assassinated; many others were persecuted and several thousand fled. Paradoxically, the only relatively safe refuges were prisons; however, these too were emptied and their occupants exterminated. Trestaillons was assisted by two accomplices, Truphémy and Servan; these men varied their amusements by setting fires and dancing around the blaze, looting, cutting ears, or killing, sometimes burning their victims alive. After expelling Bonapartist Protestants from their homes, they installed their own families there. They even went so far as to exhume the ancestors of “wrong-thinkers” to auction off their remains. Foreign troops had to be called in to restore order; the Austrians shot about twenty rioters, though not the leaders.
Trestaillons was nevertheless surpassed in cruelty by Quatretaillons of Uzès, a certain Graffand, a former soldier, later a rural guard and a miquelet of the Duke of Angoulême in 1815. Like Trestaillons, he surrounded himself with a band of bloodthirsty fanatics ready to commit any crime. In the name of popular justice, he shot prisoners, both Catholic and Protestant; he spread terror in the villages and indulged in vile mockery of the corpses of those he had just murdered. Granted a pardon once, he was later pursued again by justice for a common-law offense committed in 1819 and was sentenced to death in absentia by the court of Riom in 1821. Fifteen murders were certainly attributed to him, not counting others. The whole of southern France was shaken by the storm, and apart from a few pockets such as Montauban, where the prefect, Mr. de Rambuteau, showed firmness and courage, the authorities were almost everywhere overwhelmed.
The Assassination of General Ramel
In Toulouse, during the return of the Usurper, Vitrolles, a trusted man of the Count of Artois, armed a cohort of “verdets,” so called because their white cockade was trimmed with green. The population was openly royalist. After Napoleon’s second abdication, bloody clashes opposed the army to supporters of the Restoration; the army was forced to leave the city, which was handed over to the verdets. The most fervent among them dreamed of creating a Kingdom of Aquitaine whose monarch would be the Count of Artois, supported by the troops of Ferdinand VII. The presence of the Duke of Angoulême nevertheless kept the monarchists in line until mid-August. After that, secret societies took control, while the verdets, no longer paid, began to grow impatient. The appointments of Mr. de Rémusat as prefect, General Jean-Pierre Ramel as deputy to Marshal Pérignon responsible for maintaining order, and Mr. de Castellane at the head of the National Guard were received as provocations. Secret societies refused to obey Paris, and the verdets demanded pay; to obtain it, they saw only one solution: to instill fear.
The mayor Malaret, threatened, preferred to yield his position to Mr. de Villèle, the future minister. Rémusat did not allow himself to be intimidated, nor did Ramel, who had moreover received the order to disband the verdets.
On August 15, after a well-watered dinner, the conspirators went beneath Ramel’s windows, where they intoxicated the soldiers on guard. The general, who had been absent, warned of the events being prepared, returned home amid insults and threats. The soldier guarding his door was killed with a bayonet thrust, while a pistol shot struck Ramel in the lower abdomen. The wounded man was carried to his apartment by the few people accompanying him. The rioters demanded that he be thrown out of the window to be finished off. As the door was about to be broken down, the two or three individuals present fled and hid. Ramel dragged himself as best he could to a neighbor’s house; the neighbor refused to receive him. Outside, the verdets incited the crowd by claiming that the general had ordered fire on the people, whereas they themselves were the only ones to have used weapons.
Meanwhile, Colonel Ricard, a surgeon, and a police commissioner arrived and, following the trail of blood, found the general in an attic. The surgeon dressed his wounds while National Guards and gendarmes arrived on the square; this force did nothing to prevent the rioters from breaking through the barriers set up to separate them from their prey. The fanatics threw themselves upon the wounded general, tore out one of his eyes, struck him with several blows of bladed weapons, taking care not to kill him in order to prolong the pleasure. Nothing was spared: his uniform, lying on a chair, was slashed with sabers. Ramel died only the next day, horribly mutilated, in dreadful suffering. He had nevertheless been deported to Guyana during the coup of Fructidor because of his royalist opinions and did not hide his support for Louis XVIII; his only fault was having obeyed the king’s orders by refusing to pay the verdets.
Louis XVIII, whose authority had been flouted in this affair, demanded in vain the punishment of an attack that threatened the unity of the kingdom. In 1816, the apartment of the magistrate in charge of the investigation, Mr. de Caumont, was searched, six hundred francs were stolen, and many documents useful to the inquiry were taken; the investigation came to nothing. In 1817, three of Ramel’s murderers were indeed brought before the provost court, an exceptional tribunal used against Bonapartists, but despite a severe indictment by the king’s prosecutor, who was for the occasion called a Jacobin by the audience, the accused were sentenced, almost reluctantly, only to minimal penalties. Pérignon, Ramel’s superior, not only failed to appear on the day of the drama, but the following day wrote to Paris that he was obliged to replace his sick deputy; the timidity of the old marshal was rewarded as it deserved, with exile to his estates. And, to add hypocrisy to horror, solemn funeral honors were given to the martyred general, at which some of his executioners dared to attend. This affair remained emblematic of the prevailing mindset.
It should nevertheless be noted that in the Vendée, where a royal army had opposed imperial troops during the Hundred Days, from the moment of Napoleon’s abdication, the royalists offered to unite with their former enemies to defend France against invaders. A fine display of civic spirit at a time when, further south, people were thinking of carving up the kingdom. In the west, it was mainly in Nantes that the Viscount of Cardaillac earned the nickname of “White Carrier,” rather unfairly, since although he persecuted, he did not kill. In Normandy, the prefect was briefly threatened by a band of fanatics who tore up orders from Paris, but Caen was close to the capital, news spread quickly, and order was rapidly restored. In central France, the “brigands of the Loire,” as survivors of the imperial army were called, were often threatened, especially when returning home alone; but when they traveled in groups, it was enough for them to adopt a firm attitude for their opponents to scatter like a flock of sparrows.
The Institutional Second White Terror: The Provost Courts
If, as we have seen, a perverted and disorderly justice characterized the White Terror, its second phase was different from the first. This second phase also took on an institutional and regular character, with prison sentences or death sentences imposed on several senior officers (19 generals), some of whom managed to escape while others suffered the penalty. Exceptional tribunals, the provost courts, were established, in a way mirroring revolutionary tribunals. The press demanded, without nuance, the punishment of the guilty, condemning some to death and others to deportation to Siberia. Some even attacked the king, deemed too lenient for having promised pardon upon his return to Cambrai, a promise he could not keep. Legal terror was encouraged by foreign powers, who wished both to teach the French a lesson and to strip them of part of the artworks they possessed, which had not always been acquired honestly.
It was in this atmosphere of vengeance that Joseph Fouché, former regicide and at that time minister, prepared the lists of proscription, in which he forgot none of his former friends, perhaps not suspecting that he would join them later. Faithful to the policy of Jacobin terror, Fouché tried to appease public opinion by bringing the most guilty to justice in order to put an end to the disturbances that bloodied southern France and to calm the fury of the reaction. The arbitrariness in selecting those who would pay for all undoubtedly contributed to discrediting the monarchy and preparing the events of 1830. Many excused the revolutionaries for their cruelty because of their lack of education; such an excuse no longer held when well-born individuals behaved in the same way. Hypocrisy was added to cruelty; as a dark joke of the time put it, an amnesty was proclaimed from which everyone was excluded. The legal sophistry of notables had simply replaced the revolutionary fury of the people. And the “unfindable chamber,” composed largely of fanatics, prolonged a situation that only the initial moment might have excused.
Death Sentences of Military Figures
Let us turn to the executions. The brothers Constantin and César de Faucher, natives of La Réole, twin brothers, more moderate republicans than Bonapartists, were judicially murdered in Bordeaux, where the population, inspired by the courage shown by the Duchess of Angoulême during the return of the Usurper, was royalist without descending into excesses beyond words. The dramatic and absurd arrest of the two brothers, for trivial offenses, took place in a climate of civil war reminiscent of Toulouse; the brothers, accused only of their opinions, found no lawyer willing to defend them, not even among their friends, and even a defense witness was imprisoned. At the appeal stage, their court-appointed lawyer, instead of defending them, apologized to the court for having been assigned to the case. On the day of the execution, the condemned were forced to walk for an hour to the place of execution, instead of being transported, to satisfy the ultras; but while their execution briefly excited their frenzy, their composure and dignity moved many spectators and soon inspired contempt among honest people.
Colonel Charles de La Bédoyère, an impetuous Bonapartist who had brought his regiment to Napoleon in the Alps, was executed in Paris despite the pleas of his royalist family. Warned of his fate, he could have fled but ultimately refused to abandon his wife and child. Decazes used his arrest to plot against Fouché, whose position he coveted; he failed at that time, but it was only a matter of time before the regicide minister was forced into exile. La Bédoyère’s widow was ordered to pay the bonus granted to the soldiers who executed her husband. The ultras rejoiced, and even François-René de Chateaubriand urged the king to firmness.
Marshal Michel Ney was arrested in the Cantal, where he had taken refuge after unsuccessfully attempting to be killed at Waterloo. His arrest troubled Louis XVIII, who foresaw that Ney’s inevitable execution would deal a severe blow to the monarchy. The Chamber of Peers condemned him to death. He was officially shot discreetly near the Observatory, though some believe he later lived in the United States.
Marshal Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey refused to preside over Ney’s trial and was punished for it.
Mouton-Duvernet was executed in Lyon; the city’s elite celebrated by dancing at the execution site. Chartran was executed in Lille. General Travot was sentenced to death for having shown moderation; his sentence was commuted to prison, where he lost his sanity. Several other generals were condemned or imprisoned.
Drouot surrendered himself and was acquitted. Cambronne was also acquitted after a passionate defense. Marshal Davout was stripped of income and exiled internally. Masséna was publicly insulted. Soult fled in disguise.
Persecution of Civilians and Soldiers
Alongside the military, civilians were also persecuted and executed. Lavalette, a former minister, escaped thanks to his wife, who took his place in prison and later went mad. In various regions, people were executed for minor or fabricated offenses.
By the end of 1815, nearly 3,000 political prisoners were held in French jails. Around 9,000 political sentences were handed down. Thousands were purged across all social levels. Many fled abroad, to Europe and America, where some joined independence movements. Figures such as Joseph Bonaparte and Marshal Grouchy went into exile in the United States, along with many others.
Aftermath of the Second White Terror
Louis XVIII, who did not approve of the excesses, quickly dismissed the ultra-dominated chamber. In 1816, the royal power dissolved associations formed in its name but engaged in extortion. Foreign occupying armies, responsible for maintaining order, intervened only sporadically.
Rather than consolidating peace, the White Terror deepened divisions between royalist and revolutionary France. In 1816, the Didier conspiracy in Grenoble further destabilized the situation, leading to executions and repression.
In Lyon in 1817, General Canuel manipulated unrest to provoke a Bonapartist uprising and demonstrate his loyalty. Arrests and executions followed, though the plot was later exposed.
Many other conspiracies followed. Ultimately, the events contributed to the downfall of the Bourbon Restoration. The July Revolution finally drove Charles X into exile.
One observation remains: it is far easier to enter a period of bloody turmoil than to emerge from it. The events of 1830 once again proved that one does not create martyrs without consequence.
