The host reviews the 2023 French film “Victory or Death” (Vaincre ou Mourir), now distributed in the US in 2026 and promoted by conservative traditionalists like Archduke Eduard Habsburg, praising it as a competent, on-location dramatization — unlike much “cheapo” American conservative content — of the 1793 War in the Vendée. He frames the Vendée uprising as a war of self-determination and de facto secession, in which relatively prosperous small-landowning peasants and remnant local nobility rose against the Republic over clerical persecution (priests forced to swear oaths to the state) and mass conscription, before being crushed by General Terau’s “infernal columns,” which killed an estimated 20,000–30,000 locals in mass drownings in the Loire (the “national bathtub”). Drawing on Charles Tilly’s 1964 book The Vendée and his teacher Barrington Moore Jr., the host argues the French Revolution was not a lower-class uprising but the bourgeoisie seizing wealth and offices from the nobility, and that the Vendée conflict was driven by bourgeois local civil servants (exempt from conscription) antagonizing peasants — a centralization-versus-self-rule struggle he explicitly likens to modern US federal power imposing “enlightenment” on regions it deems backward.
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The film’s provenance and quality: Made originally in French for French audiences with mainstream French actors, funded partly by a Vendée living-history park seeking profit and tourism, “Victory or Death” started as a documentary before becoming a ~90-minute dramatization; the host says it avoids the corny screenplays and bad CGI typical of American conservative films, French mainstream press denounced it as “reactionary.”
Causes of the uprising: The movie states conscription was the spark (“the republic needs cannon fodder”), compounded by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy forcing priests into state oaths; peasants fought for “their sons, their faith, their king,” though the host notes debate over how genuinely royalist or abstractly Catholic they were versus simply defending known local priests.
Tilly’s bourgeoisie thesis: Charles Tilly’s 1964 The Vendée argues the small bourgeois minority, having taken oaths and bought up confiscated church lands, gained local power and antagonized both peasants and nobility; the host ties this to Tilly’s later “the state made war and war made states” framework and Ralph Raico’s 2005 endorsement.
The infernal columns and “genocide” framing: Under General Louis Marie Terau, Republican troops raped, burned, and drowned suspected Catholics and royalists, killing 20,000–30,000 in an agrarian region; the host says while not strictly ethnic genocide, the regime would have been “perfectly happy” to see the region depopulated and resettled with loyalists.
Centralization versus self-rule parallel: The host contends the Vendéens wanted regional self-governance, not independence — willing to pay taxes and cede foreign affairs — and draws a direct line to modern America, arguing that even self-described libertarians who back federal power to prevent “backward” behavior are “on the side of Robespierre” and the Jacobins.
