Vaincre ou mourir

After its second week of release, Vaincre ou mourir achieved a further 73,394 admissions, still between Le Chat potté 2 (87,053) and Tár (72,394). The film now tops the 200,000 mark. In week 3, Vaincre ou mourir exited the weekly box-office top 10 in fourteenth place, with an additional 51,790 admissions.

At the time of its release, the hoped-for 100,000 admissions seemed out of reach. The far-right press believed that the controversies and historical analyses relayed by the press had led to a Streisand effect, attracting audiences.

Controversies

Suspicion of fake reviews on Allociné

On February 13, 2023, Allociné, the review aggregator site, received generally favorable reviews from viewers, with an average of 4 out of 5. A survey published in the daily newspaper Libération on February 11 questions the unusual number of reviews, many of which come from accounts created only recently and which have not posted any other reviews. The flood of reviews also arouses suspicion because of their speed: on the day of the film's release, by 7 a.m., the film's page on Allociné was already flooded with several hundred favorable reviews. Two online marketing specialists interviewed concluded that there was a probable attempt to influence the rating of the film's viewer reviews on Allociné by means of fake reviews, as had happened in the past with other films such as Arthur Benzaquen's Les Nouvelles Aventures d'Aladin in 2015.

A year later, audience reviews give the film an average rating of 3.6 out of 5.

Political reactions

MPs Alexis Corbière and Matthias Tavel, both members of the political party La France insoumise, denounced an “anti-republican fiction” and a “falsification of history”, believing that the “extreme rightists want to impose on society their own reading of the problems of our time, their hatred of republican equality, their morbid nostalgia for fundamentalist Catholic pseudo-traditions, their nationalism ‘of the earth and the dead’”.

Analysis

Analysis by Jean-Clément Martin

Vaincre ou mourir is defined as a historical film, and follows on from Dernier Panache, a show at the Puy du Fou theme park presented as “inspired by real events”. Both the theme park and the show have long been the subject of concern and criticism from historians who accuse them of subjugating historical reality to a conservative political vision. This is particularly true of Jean-Clément Martin, a specialist in the French Revolution, the Counter-Revolution and the War in the Vendée. In 2019, however, he indicated that he has proposed “an analysis of the evolution of the memory of the Vendée wars covering the last two centuries up to 2018, to insist on the extraordinary concentration of memories of the war operated by the Puy du Fou and nearby institutions, making the regional memory mutate towards a use that is more touristic than militant”.

Commenting on the film, historian Jean-Clément Martin considers that “there are no notable factual errors that shock, except for one: Charette's signing of the peace treaty of February 17, 1795, which didn't happen! Only the revolutionaries signed“.

In his opinion, the film deals fairly with the participation of women in combat - with the characters of the Amazons Bulkeley and La Rochefoucauld -, the links between the Vendéens and the Chouans and émigrés, and the distance taken by the clergy at the time of the pacification of 1795-1796. On the subject of the massacres committed by the infernal columns, he believes that “overall, the presentation of the devastation corresponds to what is happening. [...] The representation of the repression was inevitable and, it must be said, could have been even more terrible“.

On the other hand, Jean-Clément Martin considers the battle scenes unconvincing, pointing out that Charette did not switch to guerrilla warfare until 1794. He also criticizes the costumes and sets: “The Republicans don't all wear unique uniforms, are better armed and much more numerous. The Vendéens are not just peasants and nobles; there is greater social diversity. [...] The urban décor hardly corresponds to the architecture of Western villages and towns. [...] Life in the area controlled by Charette, or by other forgotten leaders like Stofflet in 1794, is organized: crops are harvested, people are cared for in country hospitals, and even money is minted! The presentation of an almost medieval life is obviously highly romantic and false“. He also regrets that the film does not highlight the divisions between Republicans.

The film takes up “the idea that the Peace of La Jaunaye in February 1795 was accompanied by the delivery of Louis XVII to Charette for installation in the heart of the Vendée”. This version “has been known for two centuries, but no one can say whether it is authentic”.

Jean-Clément Martin believes that the fact that the film “is devoted solely to Charette is technically understandable, but raises questions. Charette arrived late in the war, and only established himself after the summer of 1793. [...] It was only after 1794 that he became a recognized war leader, but his allies and rivals, starting with Stofflet, had to be associated with him. [...] The personalization of war distorts perspectives. [...] The exclusive concentration on Charette is an aesthetic choice, which is understandable, but it does not allow a global view of the war and masks the complexity of the period“.

Jean-Clément Martin subsequently wrote on his Mediapart blog. He criticizes the film for “its useless introduction, its elliptical fiction, its omissions, notably of the complexity of the Vendean armies or, worse still, of the massacres at Machecoul committed by the Vendeans before Charette took the lead”, and points out that Charette never signed the 1795 peace treaty. On the other hand, he criticizes certain aspects of the film, pointing out that the “scenes of fire and devastation” depict historically attested violence. On the whole, he believes that “the word ‘genocide’ is not the subtext of this film”, whose purpose is therefore, in his view, quite distinct from those of Philippe de Villiers, the owner of the Puy du Fou, whose comments Martin deems “highly questionable and deliberately polemical”. He concludes: “Just because important people make highly questionable and deliberately polemical comments, that doesn't mean we should imitate them and enter into stupid debates. We need to get back to the facts, to remember that the War in the Vendée was born of a disastrous rivalry between revolutionaries, and that as long as the Republic does not simply admit this reality - which the Republicans of 1880 knew and denounced - we will always have this festering wound, obviously scratched by those who side with the victims, the fashionable position”. While acknowledging that the film was “produced by groups hostile to the Revolution, even to the Republic, certainly to democracy”, he invites supporters of these three notions to propose other accounts of the period themselves. He cites Turenne and Costelle's TV film La Bataille de Cholet, made in 1974, as an example of successful screen treatment of the period.

Analysis by Paul Chopelin and François Huzar

In an article published in September 2023 in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, historians Paul Chopelin and François Huzar describe the film as “very demonstrative, with an omnipresent voice-over that presents the historical context and very awkwardly relates the characters' feelings”. What's immediately striking, they say, is how little attention is paid to the religious crisis”. The filmmakers put more emphasis on “the political stakes”, in particular the mass uprising as the driving force behind the revolt, but they “didn't want to make a militant Christian film”, which contrasts with the Saje distribution catalogue.

They also point out that “Charette is not hero-ized according to the classic canons of counter-revolutionary literature. Instead, he is portrayed as a procrastinator, even a failure, who enters the war in spite of himself, and whose charisma gradually reveals itself in the course of the fighting. Constantly hesitant, sometimes sinking into violence himself, he allows himself to be led by events rather than influencing them”.

Paul Chopelin and François Huzar note that Reynald Secher speaks last in the introduction, “which gives him an authoritative status”. However, they consider that “the film is far from espousing his theses on the Vendée wars. At no point is the word genocide uttered”. Nevertheless, they regret that “the filmmakers give credence to the idea of a repression entirely organized from outside”, without giving any place to local antagonisms.

In their view, the second part of the film, devoted to pacification and inspired by the work of historian Anne Rolland-Boulestreau, is “the most nuanced and innovative treatment of the Vendée Wars in cinema”. The film distinguishes “in the Republican camp, the criminals from the men of honor”, and in particular highlights Republican general Jean-Pierre Travot, who appears “as the hero's double, bearing the same fighting ethic, respectful of the adversary and the law of nations”. As for the Bourbons, they were not presented to their advantage, and the monarchical cause ultimately proved disappointing in Charette's eyes.

For Paul Chopelin and François Huzar: “We have to recognize that the political message is ultimately neither anti-republican nor counter-revolutionary. The Revolution, accepted at the outset, is not inherently evil. [...] Vincent Mottez takes up the very classic thesis that the “Terror” went off the rails, and ultimately calls for a reconciliation between adversaries”. From this point of view, they consider that “film critics who describe Vaincre ou mourir as a propaganda film, like Samuel Douhaire in Télérama [...] are, to say the least, acting in bad faith”.

In their view, “in the end, it's more the context of the film's release that transforms it into a militant film, on the right as a symbol of a counter-offensive against a supposedly official history imposed by the left, on the left as an emblem of the cultural ambitions of an identitarian Catholic right embodied by Philippe de Villiers and Vincent Bolloré”.

Analysis by Guillaume Lancereau

Historian Guillaume Lancereau believes that, although the film does not explicitly take up the thesis of a “Vendéen genocide”, Vaincre ou mourir does take up the idea “in filigree”, firstly because the film opens with an interview with Reynald Secher, who invented the thesis, and secondly because the film retains the idea that the revolutionary state deliberately sought to eradicate the Vendéens. But this idea is “historically untenable”, says Lancereau, because at the time the film takes place “there was no ethnic dimension to the Vendée, and therefore no Vendéen identity. It was built afterwards, in the memory of the Vendée War. And there was no will on the part of the State, but rather a powerlessness to control the exactions committed by the soldiers. So it wasn't due to an excess of State power!” The film's reactionary intent is also evident in its lack of context, and the abrupt ellipsis in the course of the film: ‘We make a monstrous historical leap between 1789 and 1793, a period that includes some of the richest and densest days in French history, in favor of a shift, as if the Terror was already contained in 1789, which is a particularly reactionary historiographical thesis ’.

Lancereau declares that, like the show, “the film carries an anti-republican, Catholic and royalist vision”, and is alarmed by the producers' “pedagogical” pretensions. He warns: “The problem with showing such a film to an uninformed public is that there are no pedagogical contextual elements, and no way of proposing a critical counter-discourse. At the Puy du Fou, there are booklets aimed at schoolchildren that contain objective errors.”

Analysis by Pierre Vermeren

For Pierre Vermeren, professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and specialist in the Maghreb, the film's poor critical reception can be explained by the taboo of the Vendée War: “the film [...] throws part of the national novel into the fire by recreating, with varying degrees of cinematic success - but that's not the point - one of the most tragic episodes - if not the most tragic - in our Franco-French history: the War in the Vendée and its 200,000 dead. It's in order to unveil this hidden phase of our national history, its cursed page, that [many historians] dedicate this film to the gémonies”. In his view, the public (especially those on the left) would have difficulty with the subject of the Vendée War, because it took place during a delicate period of the “Great Revolution” (execution of Louis XVI, the Terror), even though the French nation and the Republic were partly built on these periods. In fact, he continues, “it fascinates us [the Great Revolution], and we try to conceal its mass crimes”.

Analysis by Thierry Lentz

Historian Thierry Lentz, then associate professor at the Institut Catholique de Vendée, wrote in Le Figaro: “If the film, due to a lack of resources, is not free of aesthetic criticism, and if the choice to open with contemporary interventions makes the whole thing a little unusual, we don't see why its theses - which are, moreover, acceptable for a historian - should have less right to be cited than those of other film productions. We should even be delighted that, at last, French cinema is dealing with a subject like this, if only to continue the discussion on the terrible and not so glamorous wars and exactions of the Vendée. But the ZAD de la Terreur, knowing its historically weak position, will never want to hear about it. That's the only thing that's certain”.

See also

• List of films set during the French Revolution and French Revolutionary Wars

References

Bibliography