NANTES JOURNAL; In a Corner of France, Long Live the Old Regime
By JAMES M. MARKHAM, Special to The New York Times
Published: June 17, 1989
NANTES, France, June 14— Baron Armel de Wismes, who puts on a black tie of mourning on the anniversary of Louis XVI's execution, is not enthused about the festivities marking the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.
The sprightly nobleman, who is also a historian, thinks that France would be a happier and more prosperous place had it managed to avoid the fratricidal carnage that sundered the nation two centuries ago. But then, so do a lot of people in the western corner of France known as the Vendee.
While Paris next month will exuberantly mark the fall of the Bastille and the proclamation of the rights of man, in the Vendee many other citizens will be in a somber mood when they remember a peasant uprising against the revolutionary authorities that provoked something resembling mass murder. A Portent of Worse Times
The repression of the Vendee revolt, which is thought to have taken 300,000 to 600,000 lives, is more than a bloody historical footnote. Even more than the better-known Reign of Terror, the time of the guillotine in Paris, it suggests that the French Revolution contained the ideological germs of the kind of limitless brutality more usually associated with totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
This is an unnerving idea for the Socialists who govern Nantes, a handsome city of 420,000 that overlooks the widening Loire River just before it spills into the Atlantic. The bicentenary accent, as a local official put it, is supposed to be ''optimistic,'' not lingering on the Vendee massacres.
But just as American Southerners have not altogether forgotten Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's earth-scorching march, so, too, the people of the Vendee are not about to blot out the memory of Gen. Louis-Marie Turreau and Gen. Francois Westermann, who wildly killed men, women and children, or a sinister Jacobin hanging judge named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who executed 13,000 people in Nantes, drowning many in the Loire in specially made boats.
In Nantes and the surrounding countryside, executions and the settling of accounts were a cover for vast shifts of wealth and the acquisition of land expropriated from the Roman Catholic Church. It is still a sensitive matter here that at the heart of several great fortunes, there lurks a crime.
''In France, someone may pass indifferently by a place where his grandfather was executed,'' observed Baron de Wismes, a 67-year-old bachelor. ''But people do not walk indifferently past a piece of land that was taken from their family.'' Hostility Goes Public
Seeking to spoil the Socialist-orchestrated festival of revolutionary consensus, Philippe de Villiers, the conservative president of the Vendee regional council, has just brought out a tract titled ''Open Letter to the Choppers of Heads and Liars of the Bicentenary.'' It quickly gained national attention.
Mr. de Villiers demands a rehabilitation of the peasants and noblemen who rose against Paris in 1793 and, though nearly destroyed, held out until Napoleon gave them amnesty and reinstated their freedom of religion seven years later. Most historians today concur that the uprising was set off by a purge of Vendee priests, by an attempt to conscript peasants into the revolutionary army and, to a lesser degree, by the beheading of Louis XVI.
''The first right of man is the truth,'' said Mr. de Villiers. ''For two centuries, people have been made to be ashamed to be from the Vendee, but the truth is that all the great terrorists of the 20th century have taken Robespierre as their model.''
Rather than be branded counterrevolutionaries, he said, the Vendee nobles and peasants should be regarded as legitimate defenders of the rights of man. Mr. de Villiers has called on President Francois Mitterrand to make a gesture of reconciliation toward the Vendee.
No historical argument is politically neutral in France, and the defense of the Vendee uprising usually goes hand in hand with conservative politics.
And the effort to rehabilitate the peasants' revolt is an old one. A society founded in 1832 now has about 2,000 members who quietly go about putting up plaques and crosses at the sites of battles and massacres; they have also been active in seeking the Vatican's beatification of 109 children slaughtered in the village of Lucs-sur-Boulogne by one of General Turreau's ''infernal columns'' in 1794. Brutality With Flair
In the village of Savenay on Dec. 23, 1793, General Westermann routed the tenacious Vendee rebel army, boasting that he had ''trampled children under horses' feet and massacred women who will no longer give birth to brigands.''
''I have no prisoner to worry about,'' he reported to Paris. ''I have exterminated everything.''
Alix le Cadre, the Deputy Mayor of Savenay, said that even today residents of the village of 6,000 are divided among ''whites,'' whose ancestors were royalist partisans, and ''blues,'' as the sympathizers of the infant republic were known. She said that the bicentenary celebrations were being kept low key to avoid opening fresh wounds.
''It is a lot easier to dress up schoolchildren in 18th century costumes and have them march around than to look into things in depth,'' she said. ''No one wants to scratch below the surface.''
Engraving shows people of the Vendee crossing the Loire at Varades in defeat on Oct. 18, 1793. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the Vendee uprising against the revolutionary authorities (Collection Viollet); map of France highlighting the Vendee and showing location of Nantes