Oakland Thesis 11 17 20
Resisting the Republic: The Politics of Commemoration in the Vendée, 1870-1918 Gareth Oakland Royal Holloway, University of London Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2020 2 Declaration of authorship I, Gareth Simeon Oakland, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. ...............................................................................14 January 2020. 3 Acknowledgements Fifteen years ago, I was sitting in a farmhouse in the small village of Venensault, Vendée, having dinner with Monique and Dominique Favroult. They were smallholders (nous sommes les paysans) who had farmed the land there for as long as anyone knew and had sold part of it to my mother-in-law, so that she could have a place to live in France. We were discussing my plans for life after I retired from my career in the accountancy firm PwC and I said I would like to go back to history one day. “Ah, if you want to understand our history,” said Dominique, “you have to know about the war.” Of course, I thought he meant the story of the Flying Fortress crew who, in 1943, had crashed in the woods nearby, been spirited away from the occupying Germans and off to Spain. Or perhaps the sacrifice of so many young men in 1914-1918 commemorated on the memorial at the crossroads in the village. But no, this was a war that I had not heard of, a civil war fought by Mon and Dom’s ancestors against fellow Frenchmen over two hundred years before.
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