Abstract EN:

The xviiith century, in traditional vendean historiography can only be studied with regard to post-revolutionary convictions. Nowadays university research, which is above all interested in socioeconomical analyses, does not deal to a great extent with the religious aspects. Two systems evolved in the xviith and xviiith centuries. The plain, an area where cereals were grown and which was also underpopulated, was dominated by farmers who acquired the new ideas by the extinction of illeteracy. The bocage, with its factories and cattle breeders, contained a relatively homogeneous society. There, the parish community appeared to be the breeding ground for rural values with which catholicism was in agreement. The revolution which was, on a local level, the work of the bourgeoisie who had the say on political matters, held the commanding positions, overtaxed the bocage and secured the national possessions, rendered the plain powerless but at the same it revealed itself to be more and more incompatible with the culture of the bocage. Hence the explosion of'93. After the drama, the plain settled into a slow decline. Traumatised, marginalised, the bocage became clerical and clung to the memory. Natalist, it cherished its rural values, its neo-feodal structure. The rupture with legitimism led the church into breeding new elites who, in order to safeguard these values, built an original model of rural industrialisation.