Pit doesn’t matter that the movie Win or die either an artistic success or a turnip, even if the second option is the right one. It doesn’t even matter that the work co-produced by the reactionary performance company Puy du Fou brutalizes historical truth. Art should be free. The directors Vincent Mottez and Paul Mignot can therefore no more be blamed for their hagiography of the counter-revolutionary Charette than one would accuse the Ninety-three by Victor Hugo for his imaginary dialogue between Robespierre, Danton and Marat.
If there were only historical approximations to criticize, anachronisms and a caricatural Manichaeism which burdens the Ire Republic of all the evils of its time, there would not be much to say about this film, if not to advise the reading of the works of real historians. What do they teach us? That the Vendée wars – they concerned, in addition to the department of Vendée, Loire-Atlantique and Maine-et-Loire – were an atrocious civil war, in which neither the opposing camps nor the motivations of the actors were homogeneous.
It is accepted that the absence of well-established powers, among the Whites as among the Blues, prevented the regulation of violence, the fundamental cause of the atrocities in which the two parties indulged. Scientific work also demonstrates that this mass violence never justifies the term genocide that the extremists of the Vendée cause have been trying to impose on public opinion for forty years, without ever having convinced the scientific community.
Reactionary Offensive
It is not, however, for the accumulation of inaccuracies that we must fear Win or die. This docufiction represents an additional degree taken by the ideological enterprise of the ultra-conservative right. Extreme right and extreme right want to impose on society their grid for reading 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” [selon Maurice Barrès]so many pretexts to exclude from the French nation all those whose family origins are elsewhere.
The ninety-five minutes of Win or die were not produced to entertain, but to widely disseminate clichés common to all the extreme right. The neo-fascists of Greece [Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne] theorized it in the 1980s, Le Pen and Zemmour have been dreaming about it out loud for twenty years. Today, the de Villiers and Bolloré, owner of Canal+, who co-financed the film, are directing it. The extreme right seems to have become more “Gramscist” than the legitimate heirs of the Marxist theoretician of cultural hegemony. Four historians once again demonstrate in a salutary book to what extent the Puy du Fou is a “Puy du faux”. But this cultural counter-revolution has free rein and it is taking advantage of it.
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