In the late 1840s, as revolution swept across Europe, Anthony Trollope wrote a novel portraying the Vendean War, a French civil war fought during the revolutionary decade.Footnote ¹La Vendée: An Historical Romance (1850) depicts the conflict between centralised, revolutionary France led by the National Convention in Paris and the insurgent, royalist population of western France from the perspective of the royalist rebels. La Vendée is one of Trollope's least read novels; yet Trollope's turn to the history of the 1790s in the context of renewed revolutionary movements in the 1840s demonstrates that the political and cultural stakes of the revolutionary period remained present in the minds of Victorians who confronted the possibility of European revolution for the first time in their own lives. Trollope draws on the interrelated democratic and nationalist movements that produced the 1848 revolutions in order to represent the royalist Vendeans as a victimised incipient nation, akin to other minor European nations struggling for sovereignty against their more powerful neighbours. Significantly, throughout the 1840s Trollope lived in Ireland, one such minor nation, and witnessed the Famine years and the consequences of Ireland's governance from London throughout that crisis first-hand. Using the conventions of the generically related national tale – a typically Irish genre – and the historical novel, Trollope works to establish sympathy for a marginalised Vendean community while containing revolution in the past by casting the royalist Vendeans as the true patriots and insurrectionists. However, although Trollope attempted to contain revolution by re-aligning it with the conservative, Vendean position, La Vendée is fragmented by anxieties about the possibility of revolution in the late 1840s that disrupt his efforts to establish an authoritative, distanced historical perspective.

La Vendée defies critical expectations for Trollope's work by diverging substantially from the stylistic patterns critics usually associate with his novels. Trollope novels typically construct an illusion of realism through his analyses of his characters' psychological depths, the complexity of the real-world ethical situations in which they are placed,Footnote ² and detailed depictions of the Victorian society in which he lived. La Vendée, by contrast, presents flat characters engaged in a romantic war on a historical stage. However, as Mary Jean Corbett rightly notes in Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, critics frequently forget that “Trollope, ostensibly the most English of novelists, produced over the course of his long career a substantial canon of. . . Irish fiction” (13), and to Corbett's point I would add that Trollope's neglected, “non-English” canon also includes a number of works featuring continental European subjects, travel, and colonial settings.Footnote ³ Modern critics have been reluctant to examine La Vendée at length: Robert M. Polhemus addresses Trollope's historical romance only briefly in his survey of Trollope's novels, describing it as “the worst book he ever wrote” (20), a novel that “fails” because “the characters are not interesting in themselves. They have no more real substance than balloons with painted faces” (22). Michael Sadleir describes La Vendée as an “unreadable lump of anti-revolutionary propaganda” (viii) and as “history with a faint, fictional disguise plastered along its front” (ix). Owen Dudley Edwards follows Sadleir's cue and calls La Vendée an “ill-chosen foray into historical fiction” (8), and N. John Hall argues that commercial and critical failure were inevitable for the novel, which “deserved its fate” (111).

By contrast, notices of La Vendée published when the novel first appeared suggest that its early readers were more receptive to Trollope's experiment in blurring the lines between fiction and history than later readers familiar with his successful realist novels have been. John Bull's notice of La Vendée concludes that the Vendean War “is a theme as suited to the novelist as it is to the historian” (395), and Trollope's Athenaeum reviewer argues that “[t]his might almost be called ‘a romantic history,’ instead of a historical romance: so well known are the leaders in the war of La Vendée in England” (708). According to these responses, the familiarity of the Vendean narrative allows the distinction between history and fiction to dissolve and permits the reviewers to accept the novel as a realistic portrayal of events and characters; the John Bull reviewer, for example, claims that Trollope represents French rural character with “singular fidelity” (395) and argues that “[t]he story is full of stirring interest, and is well calculated to convey to the mind a picture of the state of French society during the first revolution” (395).

La Vendée was in part familiar to its 1850 audience because of its resemblance to Walter Scott's popular historical romances, and literary critics who approach La Vendée through its relation to Trollope's attitudes toward history across his career find a point of access for the novel. W. J. McCormack argues that La Vendée exhibits a thematic likeness to Scott's historical fiction, “retain[ing] its own importance [in the historical novel genre] by virtue of its cleaving to Scott's central concerns – revolution and the collapse of an allegedly better past” (ix). Furthermore, although much of Trollope's fiction focuses on contemporary English life and not the problem of representing the past, characters dealing with the forces of historical change do feature in major Trollope novels like Barchester Towers and The Way We Live Now. La Vendée does, then, retain some likeness to Trollope's later work for critics like Polhemus, who emphasises the conflict between progress and commitment to the past in Trollope's writing. Polhemus argues that Trollope's first three novels “have nothing directly to do with the anatomy of English life on which he made his reputation. Yet in them emerges the typical Trollopian situation of people unwillingly caught up and menaced by change. He found he could represent broad historical changes by a few carefully drawn characters rooted in a particular environment” (10–11). La Vendée especially “shows clearly the characteristic world view that shapes his fiction. What matters about it is not the story, but Trollope's interest in political power and historical movement” (Polhemus 20). Polhemus's comments point to the extent to which the characters that populate La Vendée are shaped by the historical crisis out of which their national identity emerges. Yet Trollope's attention to “political power and historical movement” in La Vendée also indicates his effort to come to terms, through historical narrative, with the European nationalist and democratic movements that shaped his own time.

After the failure of his first two novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys, Trollope appeared to move away from the Irish novel as a genre and from the Irish political concerns that occupied him across his career. However, in shifting from Irish subjects to historical fiction about the French Revolution, Trollope drew upon the political links between colonised Ireland and revolutionary France that had existed in the British imagination since the 1790s, especially following the 1798 Irish Rebellion.Footnote ⁴ The revival of British radicalism and European revolution just as Trollope began writing his French Revolution novel intensified this imaginative connection; according to historian John Saville, 1848 brought British politics into “the triangle of revolutionary Paris, insurgent Ireland, and a revitalised native Chartist movement in London and the industrial North” (1). For the first time, Saville argues, “the stimulus to revolutionary action by the events in France [occurred] at the same time as Ireland was apparently moving in parallel with the radical movement in Britain” (27). Such a political link clearly continued in Trollope's imagination as late as 1879, when he published An Eye for an Eye, which, in Thomas Tracy's words, recognises Irish nationalism's “Francophilia,” or the “traditional nationalist resort to France for aid and succor as a kindred revolutionary, Anglophobic, Celtic nation” (153), in plotting the heroine Kate O'Hara's escape to France (154).

Yet in addition to being understood as an analogue to revolutionary France, Ireland was also portrayed in British writing from the 1790s on as a victimised, marginalised nation like the royalist Vendée under republican French government. A 1798 article in the Morning Post attributed to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Barrell 645) titled “Ireland and La Vendée” establishes a comparison between the two places based on their shared experiences of “the savage fury and rage of civil war” (n. pag.). While the article concludes that the comparison is “sickening and shocking” because Ireland's victimisation occurs “in a period not of convulsion, not of revolution on the part of the People, but under a Government which boasts that their whole administration has been to Ireland a course of concession; mild, merciful, and benignant,” Coleridge nonetheless uses the atrocities of the Vendean War to draw attention to the parallel sufferings of the Irish under British rule. In his 1797 poem, “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, A War Eclogue,” set in “a desolated Tract in la Vendée” (440),Footnote ⁵ furthermore, Coleridge blames British Prime Minister William Pitt for the deaths of “thrice three hundred thousand men” (23) in the Vendée, as well as for Irish suffering. The allegorical figure Fire describes the destruction she has committed in Ireland before appearing in the Vendée (46–61),Footnote ⁶ consolidating a parallel between Irish and Vendean rebellion that Trollope builds on.

La Vendée, then, is a displacement of Trollope's early literary and political preoccupations, as he turns to a foreign land and a distant past to process the problems of political extremism and marginalisation that he faced in late-1840s Ireland. In the spring of 1848, Trollope wrote to his mother Frances Trollope to reassure her that reports of Irish insurrection were exaggerated:

This account of the parallel situations in Britain, Ireland, France, and Tuscany reveals a number of key points in Trollope's thoughts about revolution at this moment in his career. First, Trollope's discussion of Irish and French affairs in light of each other and nationalist European revolution suggests that he was constantly processing the parallels and differences between the political situations uppermost in European consciousness at the time he wrote La Vendée. Trollope's mother and other family membersFootnote ⁷ lived in Tuscany in the late 1840s, at the height of the Young Italy movement and as revolt spread across Italy and continental Europe.Footnote ⁸ The connection between democratic and nationalist movements in the Italian Risorgimento – which Trollope later fictionalised in his short story “The Last Austrian Who Left Venice” – must have influenced Trollope's understanding of the colonised Ireland where he lived and the republican France of the 1790s that resurfaced again in 1848. As he was writing La Vendée, in other words, Ireland and the European “springtime of the peoples” were uppermost in his mind and the lenses through which he viewed French politics.

Furthermore, by dismissing the possibility of revolution in Britain and Ireland, Trollope appears to respond to working-class protest by trivialising it. In making this rhetorical choice, Trollope aligns himself with the “liberal English discourse dedicated to producing ideological fictions through which Irish disaffection from English rule could be rhetorically minimized, managed, or resolved” that Corbett explores in Allegories of Union (4). Yet Trollope's lengthy and complicated description of Irish politics, including both the condescending claim that the Irish do not have “enough intelligence” to enact change and the seeming recognition that economic inequality, the “marked” “difference between the employer and the employed,” poses a legitimate problem in Ireland, indicates that he holds complex views of Irish politics despite his disavowal of a revolutionary threat. Although it was written much later in his life, his posthumously published 1883 Autobiography further demonstrates this strategy of trivialising Irish nationalism while disclaiming revolt and political violence:

By describing Home Rule as a “nuisance” unlooked for even by its professed supporters, Trollope minimises its importance for the Irish political landscape, and, in doing so, discursively “manage[s]” Irish nationalism. Yet his catalogue of Irish “rebellion,” “monster meetings,” “dangerous. . . battle[s],” and “bloody” political movements suggests that anxiety about political violence underlies his strategy of trivialising and dismissing Irish nationalism. His representational strategies in La Vendée follow a similar contradictory pattern, attempting to minimise the stakes of revolution without fully concealing such anxieties.Footnote ¹¹

In La Vendée, furthermore, Trollope draws on a generic tradition that emerged out of the revolutionary period and was particularly linked to the Irish and Scottish novelists Sydney Owenson and Walter Scott: the allied genres of the national tale and the historical novel.Footnote ¹²La Vendée's subtitle, An Historical Romance, identifies its genre, and the novel's contemporary readers, including its Athenaeum reviewer, immediately recognised its affinity to Scott's historical novels (708). The national tale and historical novel emerged in tandem in early-nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, but the political intentions associated with the two genres shifted over time.Footnote ¹³ For Gary Kelly and Nicola J. Watson, little separates national and historical tales, which both developed out of the political and literary contests of the 1790s as means of dealing with social and cultural crises. Kelly argues that both genres “developed to define the broader scale of national social identity, as it was supposed to have originated in some major crisis of the past” (92). The Vendean War, in Trollope's novel, constitutes the “major crisis” from which a kind of “national social identity” for the Vendeans emerges in opposition to the centralised national identity of the French Republic. For Watson, the genres developed more specifically out of the 1790s Anti-Jacobin “project of disciplining revolutionary energy” (110) that attempted to contain revolutionary plots within authoritative, community-based, third-person narratives. In historical and national tales, Watson argues, “the revolutionary plot is finally immobilized by the authority of a central authorial discourse invested with the full competence of historical hindsight” (111). For these critics, then, both genres work to stabilise social and cultural identities in the wake of a chaotic, revolutionary past.

Critics who have traced the national tale's development, however, recognise that the genre diverges from the strategies and aims of the historical novels Kelly and Watson primarily address. Katie Trumpener and Ina Ferris both examine national tales as narratives of resistance, characterised by the sympathy and anxiety they produce in readers unfamiliar with the victimised populations they portray. The difference between the pre-Waverley early national tale and the Scott-style historical novel, Trumpener argues, is that the national tale defines its world through geographical space while the historical novel emphasises how societies develop through time:

The basic plot of the early national tale in this reading, then, follows a protagonist's movement across borders and between cultures that often results in a marriage between characters representing their respective spaces, or “the contrast, attraction, and union of disparate cultural worlds” (Trumpener 141). In the historical novel, by contrast, “only through the forcible, often violent, entry into history does the feudal folk community become a nation, and only through dislocation and collective suffering is a new national identity forged” (Trumpener 142).

This recognition of cross-cultural reconciliation in the early national tale suggests that, like Kelly and Watson, Trumpener sees consensus and social stability as one of the genre's goals. However, the distinctions between the national tale and Scott's stabilising narratives became more pronounced as the genre developed across the early nineteenth century, as expressing resistance to dominant culture became more important to the national tale's pragmatics than offering resolution. According to Trumpener, the tale's

Ferris emphasises the national tale's cultural resistance more forcefully than Trumpener does, arguing that it is primarily a performative, affective genre: in the national tale, Ferris claims, “representation [is] less a portrayal of something than a presentation to someone” (11). The national tale's affective aim, according to this logic, is to produce sympathy in its readers for a marginalised population, but, for Ferris, this is a sympathy that causes anxiety by destabilising identity and perspective. Sympathy with an Othered people, Ferris argues, produces “a dynamic of dislocation” (59) that becomes “an often disconcerting encounter” (62) for readers of the national tale. Anxiety and instability, in these readings, are therefore central to the national tale's pragmatics. The crucial difference between the historical novel and the later national tale, then, is a political one: while the Scott-style historical novel builds on the early national tale's plot of reconciliation or union by working to resolve the crises of the past, the later national tale's goals focus on resisting and destabilising dominant culture.

Trollope's Historical Romance, like the historical novel, works to contain revolutionary plots and perspectives within its supposedly authoritative, stabilising narrative. However, the novel is also a displaced and distanced national tale, dislocated from the Celtic fringe and the recent past to narrate a failed struggle for local autonomy against an emerging modern nation in the Vendée, and, ultimately, fracturing under its own destabilising anxieties. La Vendée is fragmented by an underlying consciousness of geographical and historical dislocation that indicates that the post-revolutionary reconciliation and stability that Watson and Kelly describe are impossible for Trollope's novel. The combination of “a history of cultural oppression” and a recognition of geographical and cultural distinctness in La Vendée leads to the kind of “separatist position” Trumpener identifies as the key political feature of the later national tale (146). In other words, although the tactic of creating resolution through historical containment usually associated with the Scott-style historical novel is one of Trollope's strategies for dealing with revolution, La Vendée is perhaps more akin to the later national tale's narrative of resistance because anxiety and instability prevent that resolution from being achieved.

Trollope positions his Vendée as an analogue to the Ireland of the national tale, a peripheral geographical space ruled from a distance by a centralised, modern state. The affinity between such politically marginalised and oppressed regions has long been recognised: in 1936, historian Jean Yole wrote of the Vendée, “For the whole world it had become a sister of Poland and Ireland” (qtd. in Secher 1). Poland, like Ireland and Italy, was another example of the significant link between insurgency and incipient nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ Unlike Ireland, Italy, and Poland, nations that eventually achieved sovereignty, however, the Vendée can be seen as an example of what Ernest Gellner calls a culture “led to the dustheap of history” (46), a region whose independent development was curtailed by its absorption into the emerging nation of France in the revolutionary period. For Trollope, the Vendée is a geographically and culturally unique space, like conventional national tale settings, with its own distinct national vision, but lacking political autonomy or a voice in revolutionary governance. The Vendean War, in this political context, is a conflict between a disenfranchised regional population with a distinct character and an uncompromising centralised government, marking the historical novel's forging of national identity and historical consciousness.

By combining the historical novel's consciousness of time and national identity with the national tale's recognition of cultural marginalisation and victimisation, Trollope positions his Vendeans, instead of the French revolutionaries, as the real insurgents, rising up in resistance to political oppression as Polish and Italian rebels did in the 1840s. For Ferris, by the 1820s, “the national tale was now modulating into the novel of insurgency, folding into itself the Waverley model of historical fiction as it did so” (135). La Vendée is one such “novel of insurgency”; Trollope casts his royalists as revolutionaries, drawing on the national tale's tradition of gaining sympathy for victimised populations. However, Trollope's move to imagine the Vendean royalists as insurgents also attempts to contain actual revolution in the past by shifting sympathy from the radical to the conservative position. In Watson's findings, early national and historical tales feature “a transposition of Jacobinism into Jacobitism” (119) that neutralises the revolutionary threat by turning revolution into nostalgic political action fated to fail. Scott's work especially “succeed[s] at once in containing the French Revolution and in transforming its historical significance, carrying out an essentially counter-revolutionary remaking of the national past” (Watson 127). Trollope's Vendeans push this logic of transposition as historical re-writing even further: like Scott's Jacobites, they are conservative insurgents whose military action locates insurrection firmly within a reactionary ideology, but they also oppose the French Revolution directly. Trollope thus explicitly uses the national tale's production of sympathy for a disenfranchised, Othered people against radical forces. In La Vendée, Jacobinism is transposed into royalism.

Trollope presents the Vendée as geographically and culturally different from the rest of the Republic, represented by the political centre, Paris. The character Henri Larochejaquelin, for example, distinguishes between the “mob of Paris” and “the people of France” with whom he is familiar and whom he identifies as the people of “Anjou and Brittany,” “the people in the Bocage” and the “Marais” (13; ch.1). Trollope thus immediately distinguishes between provincial France – which Henri specifically identifies with and limits to the Vendée region – and republican France, centred on Paris; he therefore locates Vendean cultural and political difference in the region's local allegiances and distinct geography. This consciousness of regional distinctness allows the Vendeans to imagine their insurrection as a defence of local and domestic attachments against an encroaching, central power, rather than as an expression of ideological difference from the revolutionary government: they claim to fight for “their sons and their brethren” (33; ch. 2), their “wives,” “sisters,” and “houses” (43; ch.3).

Awareness of this geographical and cultural difference from Paris, moreover, confirms the Vendeans' self-definition as a marginalised community oppressed by the revolutionaries' political dominance and contributes to their success during the war. Trollope opposes the disenfranchised Vendée to republican Paris, locating power geographically and making a moral judgment against the political centre of revolutionary France. Henri's father, for example, exclaims against the republican forces, “my heart shudders, when I am told that the Republic has let loose those wolves of Paris to shed the blood of our poor people” (176; ch. 13). “[O]ur poor people,” here, are the innocent, marginalised victims of a demonised, predatory political power. However, like the mid-century Italian nationalist general Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Vendean leaders gain an advantage from their special knowledge of the region's geographical distinctiveness from the remainder of France, which makes their guerrilla tactics possible: they profit from Westerman's unfamiliarity with the Bocage, firing on the republicans from the ground behind hedges and withdrawing into the woods, finally forcing a retreat (233–36; ch. 17).Footnote ¹⁵ In addition to fostering a sense of distinct identity, then, the Vendée's unique geography determines the royalists' early military success and makes the crisis of civil war, out of which the population's claims for nationhood emerge, possible.

Although the Vendeans begin their revolt with a vision for France that conflicts with republican values, this eventually transforms into a hope of establishing an autonomous Vendée: the war, therefore, intensifies local difference, converting it into a strong sense of politically unacknowledged but distinct national identity. Early in the novel the militant Father Jerome urges his congregation to “give your blood – nay your life for your country, your King, and your Church” (99; ch. 7), indicating that the Vendeans perceive themselves as members of the French nation offering an alternative to the revolutionary slogan of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” in their allegiance to “country,” “King,” and “Church.” However, as the war progresses, the Vendeans' violent break with republican France transforms their vision to include the possibility of creating a politically independent Vendée: a new national identity emerges out of the trauma of civil war. As in revolutionary France and Italy during the Risorgimento, insurrection for the Vendeans functions as a kind of “‘foundation story’ [used] for the purposes of self-legitimation,” a “heroic narrative of events which would make nation-state creation seem the inevitable, and morally correct, outcome of what was, in reality, a political struggle for power” (Riall 39, 40). As the war develops, resistance to the revolutionary government's intrusive authority – especially the conscription measures that trigger the war (23; ch. 2) – evolves into a commitment to political autonomy. The dying Charles de Lescure, for example, hopes that “they might be able to come to such terms with the republicans as would enable them to live after their own fashion, in their own country; to keep their own priests among them, and to maintain their exemption from service in the republican armies” (359; ch. 28). Over the course of the war, the Vendeans learn to claim their distinct national identity and to assert a political agenda of negotiating for some degree of sovereignty. This intensifies their resemblance to the mid-century Irish and Italian nationalists whose goals included independence from British and Austrian authority in Trollope's own time.

Trollope, furthermore, portrays the Vendeans as better democrats than the republicans, thus redefining the political stakes of the revolutionary period. They organise their army meritocratically and foster a sense of cross-class regional solidarity by imagining Vendeans of all ranks as “partners” (84; ch. 6). By framing their resistance as democratic participation, Trollope presents the Vendean efforts as “patriotism” (74; ch. 6), a term usually reserved for revolutionaries in 1790s France, but gaining new resonance in the mid-Victorian context of nationalist insurgency in Europe. French patriotism, then, is redefined in La Vendée: Jacques Chapeau uses “patriot” and “royalist” interchangeably (157; ch. 11), while de Lescure identifies the peasants' “generous loyalty” with “true patriotism” (351; ch. 27), thereby associating patriotism with the regional and political loyalty that inspires the peasants' revolt. The Vendeans, then, embody the values of democratic and nationalist revolution, thus underlining Trollope's transposition of Jacobinism into royalism.

In the civil war context, such cross-class, regional loyalty replaces the early national tale's plot of reconciliation through cross-cultural marriage. The romance between the historical figure and peasant Cathelineau and Trollope's fictional aristocrat Agatha Larochejaquelin stands in for the impossibility of union between the victimised region and the outside oppressor, and suggests the Vendeans' need to close ranks against their external enemies. As McCormack notes, this romance becomes “a symbol of the alliance of all social classes in the royalist cause” (xxvii).Footnote ¹⁶ Their relationship cements Vendean cross-class solidarity by redefining gentility in terms of the values of the resistance, rather than birth; when Henri suggests that Agatha should only marry “a worthy gentleman” (184; ch. 13), Agatha responds that “if valour, honesty, and honour, if trust in God, and forgetfulness of self, if humanity and generosity constitute a gentleman, then is Cathelineau the prince of gentlemen” (185; ch. 13). Although Cathelineau's premature death prevents their marriage, she insists on his position of equality to herself, declaring to Cathelineau's mother, “I am prouder of the dying hero's love, than I could have been had a Prince knelt at my feet” (374; ch. 29). Loyalty to the Vendée thus pre-empts the traditional hierarchy of social rank in favour of commitment to a new national cause held in common by people of all ranks. As a revision of the early national tale's romance plot, which culminates in a symbolic marriage between characters belonging to different cultures, this cross-class relationship indicates that, instead of leaving themselves open to compromise with the Convention, the Vendeans fortify themselves against outsiders by turning inward to affirm Vendean, royalist identity from within their own borders. In this way, they fully inhabit the “separatist position” of the later national tale (Trumpener 146).

Trollope's inward-looking romance plot shows the impossibility of effecting a reconciliation between the Vendeans and their republican oppressors, and in the resulting conflict the Vendeans must undergo the traumatic experience of entering violently into history which Trumpener associates with the historical novel (142). However, this is an essentially dislocating, rather than stabilising, experience. Trollope uses a voice of dissent from the Vendean political cause, Michael Stein, to emphasise his anxiety about the emergence of national identity and historical consciousness in the Vendée.Footnote ¹⁷ Michael tries to prevent his sons from leaving home to join the Vendean army (86–90; ch. 6), and even after the Vendée's population is displaced across the Loire he continues to oppose the war (382–84; ch. 33). Michael fights in Laval when he can no longer avoid it, defending his decision to help a cause he opposes by stating, “It wasn't possible for a man not to fight on one side or the other – that's the only reason I had for fighting at all” (415; ch. 32). His mobilisation against the republicans at the end of the novel is thus more a result of the violently polarised situation in which he finds himself than any decision to support the Vendean army's politics.

Michael, furthermore, resists the narratives of collective, historical Vendean experience that construct their new sense of national identity. These traumatic stories shape the political imaginary that binds the community together. In War of No Pity, Christopher Herbert traces the cultural impact of another traumatic political event, the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857, beginning with “the premise that a society in its cultural aspect. . . is susceptible to trauma in the same way that an individual person is – or at least may at times of historic shock display symptoms equivalent to those of psychological trauma” (54). The proliferation of stories revisiting traumatic events – Mutiny literature for Herbert, or stories of the Revolution and the Vendean War for Trollope's characters – manifests on the cultural level the “symptomatology of compulsive imaginary reliving of unbearable experience” (54), or repetition compulsion, identifiable with the traumatised individual. Revisiting trauma through narrative, however, is not only a symptom of public, cultural trauma, but also part of the healing process: while Herbert views fictional returns to a site of cultural trauma as an expression of repetition compulsion, I would argue that for most of Trollope's Vendeans, narrative is a means of bringing a traumatised community through a historical crisis. Trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Susan J. Brison posit that transforming a traumatic experience into narrative is essential to recovery: only through “bearing witness” can trauma be integrated into a sufferer's sense of self and the sufferer be re-integrated into a community (Brison xi). In the case of the kind of collective suffering that appears in La Vendée, the “narrative memory” of trauma (Caruth 153) is also national memory, “forged” (Trumpener 142) through violent historical crisis, or the “foundation story” that is crucial to the emerging nation's identity (Riall 39). In Trollope's novel, comic scenes of re-telling construct a narrative of shared history among the Vendeans. Trollope's repetition of battle stories, for example, brings narratives of Vendean political victimisation and military success to new audiences, consolidating their identity and reinforcing the historical narrative already authorised by the narrator. In addition to fostering a sense of belonging to a community and a cause through narrative, the stories of battle that circulate among the Vendeans help construct the local legends that continually animate their success: the stories about the Mad Captain of the Chouans that emerge in Brittany, for example, motivate the Vendeans to military success at Laval (387–90; ch. 31) and continue to fuel the Chouan resistance even under the Directory and Napoleon (396; ch. 31).

Given the importance of narrative to the construction of the Vendeans' new sense of national identity and shared historical trauma, Michael's resistance to such narratives marks him as a voice of dissent within the community, someone whose own sense of belonging does not correspond to the imagined identity of the majority. Michael challenges, for example, Chapeau's version of events at Saumur, and, by extension, his unquestioning loyalty to his leaders and expectations for success (194; ch. 14). This marks him as an outsider to the emergent Vendean nation and tests the authenticity of the stories of collective endeavour that circulate among the Vendeans and lay the foundation of their historical consciousness. Michael's suspicion of narratives of Vendean resistance also suggests a challenge to the authority of Trollope's narrative: if historical actors like Michael express dissent from the narratives that emerge about history in La Vendée, then the authoritative voice of the historical novel loses some of its weight. Furthermore, Michael's refusal to participate in building the national narrative demonstrates Trollope's decision not to resolve the conflicts that traumatise the Vendean community. Transforming trauma into narrative, after all, is not without complications. Caruth argues that although trauma “requires integration,” “the transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one's own, and others', knowledge of the past, may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall” (153). By presenting Michael as a non-integrated, disaffected Vendean, a member of a traumatised culture whom the transformation of trauma into a nationally acceptable narrative cannot heal and for whom the national foundation myth fails to address the realities of the war, Trollope insists on leaving the political and national wounds of the conflict open.

Michael's embodiment of dissent indicates that fissures exist in Trollope's presentation of the Vendée as an emerging historically conscious nation identifiable through its narratives of collective trauma. Anxiety about the representation of a traumatised community continually ruptures La Vendée's narrative coherence, fragmenting the geographically and historically based identities Trollope provides for his characters and preventing the stabilising resolution characteristic of the historical novel's representation of shared suffering. Because the Vendeans' sense of local attachment and cultural difference derives initially from the geographical uniqueness of their region, their geographical displacement in the course of the war indicates the anxiety underlying La Vendée's national tale plot. When the army retreats across the Loire, it is joined by civilians forced from their homes with nowhere else to go; a “disordered multitude” of soldiers and their families, not a disciplined army, crosses into Brittany (334–35; ch. 26). As Trollope's narrative of geographical and cultural distinctness transforms into a narrative of a displaced people fleeing political violence, La Vendée's use of national tale conventions begins to bleed into the historical novel's dominant plot of traumatic dislocation.

The Vendeans' mass migration from Poitou and Anjou is replete with descriptions of poverty and suffering, culminating when the refugees gather to cross the Loire:

Exiled from their home provinces never to return within the limits of the novel, the displaced Vendeans find the source of their distinct identity removed from their geographical and cultural uniqueness and relocated within the emerging historical narrative of their shared suffering.

However, the Vendeans' newfound historical consciousness is also fractured by anxiety; historical narrative becomes increasingly unstable as the novel moves toward its conclusion. The novel's narrative anxiety originates in part in its preoccupation with England's role in the Vendean resistance, which mirrors the complicated relationship between the Italian Risorgimento and the English public in the Victorian period. Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, condemned England's neutrality during the nationalist European revolutions of the mid century in a Westminster Review article titled “Europe: Its Condition and Prospects”:

England's hesitation between the established states and incipient revolutionary nations, Mazzini continues, “ha[s] brought England to the abdication of herself in the affairs of Europe; [it is] bringing her sooner or later to absolute isolation. Self-abdication and isolation: is that a life worthy of England?” (248). As in the case of the Risorgimento, England does not officially intervene in the Vendée. The Vendean characters believe their success depends on military aid from England that never arrives, and thus they can never act out their narratives of victory. In fact, they cross the Loire, completing their geographical dislocation, in hopes of “meet[ing] the succour which had been promised them from England” (321; ch. 25), and as the novel concludes they prepare to migrate to Granville to meet their English allies (427–28; ch. 34). Trollope's preoccupation with English absence in La Vendée, therefore, explores topical mid-Victorian debates over England's place in an international, European community and its responsibilities toward neighbouring peoples, like the Italian nationalists who asked for England's support or the Famine-stricken Irish population that was neglected by its London-based government.

The “disappointment” that the Vendeans never do receive English help in the course of the war haunts the final pages of La Vendée (439; ch. 35); the telling of the war's final outcome is reserved for an English audience, a stranger who appears in the Chapeau home asking the fates of the Vendean heroes after the Battle of Waterloo, significantly the symbolic moment of English moral and political victory over Napoleon and the end of the revolutionary period in France (437–42; ch. 35). Trollope's gesture toward a moment of English military success here highlights, through contrast, the collapse of the Vendean resistance and the emptiness of England's promises to the rebels. The stranger could function as the traveller figure typical of the national tale, who stands in for the audience and through whom the plot aims to produce sympathy for its marginalised people; however, the appearance of this belated English stranger – a symbol of England's belated military involvement in revolutionary France, from the Vendean perspective – can only result in regret and discomfort. By this time, the good will existing between potential allies has disappeared, and the English are viewed as occupiers and enemies, not sympathisers and friends (435–36; ch. 35). Trollope's emphasis on English absence throughout the novel, however, is not simply a means of foreshadowing for a familiar audience that the Vendean efforts are doomed to failure without foreign intervention, but stresses the instability of historical narrative: the story of English intervention, which the Vendean characters circulate as the cornerstone to their resistance narrative, is a fiction rather than historical fact, and the belated English traveller reminds Trollope's reader that Vendean narrative has failed. The Vendeans' national foundation story is thus undermined by their emphasis on a plot point that never occurs, and the event that is intended to mark their final military success exists in Trollope's text only as a gaping historical hole.

In addition to drawing attention to the narrative's missing pieces, the conclusion to La Vendée expresses Trollope's anxiety about historical narrative and about the revival of revolution in his own time by skewing the narrator's sense of historical distance. The novel's opening reference to the “first French Republic” (7; ch. 1) showed the narrator's consciousness of the historical distance between the novel's action in 1793 and the time of its writing in the late 1840s, when revolution brought the Second French Republic, as well as temporary republics across Italy, into being. However, this recognition of the re-emergence of republicanism in the 1840s also means that the novel does not conclude with this historical distance between action and narration intact. The primary narrative cuts off mid-war, concluding the main characters' plots with a double marriage in order to provide the closest thing to a fictional happy ending that the historical record could allow (434; ch. 35). Yet, the novel does not end where Trollope leaves his Vendeans, optimistically planning their march to Granville to meet with English aid. The narrator instead attempts to adopt a retrospective view on the events of La Vendée while leaping forward in time to describe first the post-Waterloo restoration (434–35; ch. 35) and then the period following the 1848 revolution, collapsing time and rendering history a fragmented but repetitive collection of violent events with no real linear movement. This emphasis on historical repetition and fragmented plotlines undermines the novel's ability to use historical narrative to produce continuity, stability, and identity out of events characterised by violent rupture and disorder.

In fact, La Vendée's final pages provide competing perspectives on how to understand history by validating and granting finality to the Vendean narrative of resistance in the post-Waterloo restoration and then undermining that conclusiveness by describing 1848's return to republican government. After Waterloo, the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods of French history appear to be over, and with them, the source of the Vendée's political grievances. Jacques Chapeau can state with confidence from 1815,

Chapeau's assurance that the Vendée “will receive its reward” under the restoration corresponds with the narrative the Vendeans promote throughout the war, ending in royalist triumph. Yet, to the historically conscious, Chapeau's list of governmental frameworks – the Convention, Directory, Consul, and Empire – which precede France's return to monarchy indicates that French history between 1793 and 1815, far from working progressively along one trajectory toward one political end, actually consists of a series of ruptures with the political past, leading the reader to question why the restoration should be any more permanent than the earlier revolutionary phases. For Trollope's 1850 reader, aware of the 1830 July Revolution and the 1848 “springtime of the peoples,” Chapeau's confidence is undermined by France's discontinuous political history.

From the post-1848 perspective, to which the novel lurches forward in its final paragraph, “Five-and-thirty years” since the Battle of Waterloo, Trollope's capacity to produce a historical narrative of some distance and stability is even more questionable. The narrator asks, in light of France's return to republican government, “How long will it be before some second La Vendée shall successfully, but bloodlessly, struggle for another re-establishment of the monarchy?” (442; ch. 35), revealing that the stakes of the Vendean War are once more immediate and unresolved. The narrator answers this question assertively, stating, “Surely before the expiration of half a century since the return of Louis, France will congratulate herself on another restoration” (442; ch. 35), but the confidence of this conservative prophecy is destabilised by the narrator's inability to bring the Vendean plot to some final conclusion and by the first restoration's overturn by the events of 1830 and 1848. Instead, the history of La Vendée is fragmented, repetitive, and disordered, and Trollope's effort to bring coherence to violent and chaotic historical events fails in these final pages. If the stakes of the war remain unresolved from the historically distanced position the narrator takes up to the extent that the narrator must still continue to take sides as though the conflict is immediately relevant, then history collapses in on itself, refusing the novel's narrative demand for order and stability. Revolution, finally, cannot be contained within the past: as these concluding anxieties about the post-1848 world suggest, the revolutionary era still poses challenges to mid-nineteenth-century political stability.

In La Vendée, Trollope is preoccupied with the representational strategies and contests that emerged out of the revolutionary context and were brought to the forefront of the British imagination once more as a result of the nationalist, revolutionary struggles of the 1840s. By framing the Vendeans as nationalist insurgents, Trollope displaces his interest in Irish nationalism and the “springtime of the peoples” onto the history of the 1790s. His efforts to contain revolution within a stabilising historical narrative, however, are fractured by his suggestions of revolution's continued urgency in his own historical moment. Trollope's turn to revolutionary history and to the generic experiments of Romantic-era literary predecessors such as Scott and Owenson demonstrates just how immediate and unresolved the stakes of the French revolutionary past remained for Trollope's mid-Victorian present. Although Trollope's non-fiction writing on Ireland, France, and Italy indicates a lack of sympathy for revolutionary nationalist movements, La Vendée complicates his position. La Vendée should not be critically dismissed as “anti-revolutionary propaganda” (Sadleir viii); the representational struggles evident in the anxious ruptures that prevent closure in La Vendée reveal a complexity to the novel's politics that has not been recognised. Trollope does transform revolution into royalism in La Vendée, but writing the Vendean War as a narrative of insurgency with no possibility of resolution also allows Trollope to express sympathy for and acknowledge the legitimacy of the separatist resistance that characterised the nationalist, democratic movements of the mid-Victorian period and the politics of the national tale.