Jean-Hugues Anglade Rod Paradot Constance Gay Francis Renaud Grégory Fitoussi Vaincre ou mourir [lit.
[18] On Claves, the Christian education website of the Fraternité Saint-Pierre, Abbé Paul Roy sees Vaincre ou mourir as “a beautiful film that brings to life all the paradoxical horror of those forgotten times in our history”.
The abbé's presence is constant at his side, even if the character can sometimes seem a little fallible (and unshaven): from the first magnificent images of mass in the woods to the final absolution given to the condemned man on the way to the firing squad”.
He asserts that “the great quality of the production, which reflects the expertise of the Puy du Fou, certainly lies in the fine spirit with which the epic of this Vendéen hero is retold, in the beauty of the images, costumes, scenes in general and the music that accompanies them, and in the richness and historical and literary depth of the text that forms the overall framework ”.
[21] His colleague Elisabeth Franck-Dumas agrees: “What's most fascinating about a militant film that has turned its characters into alibis is the prominence given to concepts, to those headless, abstract, visibly evil entities against which Charette and his friends fight relentlessly.
[22] Albane Guichard of Le HuffPost criticizes the film's use of an interview with “the controversial Reynald Secher, who supports the thesis of a Vendéen ‘genocide’ in his books”, and its ambiguous language: “from the outset, the line between documentary and fiction is blurred”, a “strategy already used in the Park's shows ”.
[24] In L'Obs, Xavier Leherpeur immediately places the film in his “Raté de la semaine” box: “To the question posed by the title, the answer is clear: die rather than ever see this historical nonsense again".
The columnist regrets that the means are “powerless to save the film from its scripted muddle” and finds the direction “inert, relying on an abusive use of drone and low-angle shots to reinforce the Christ-like dimension of the central character”.
The journalist points out that the prologue is signed by “historians including the very oriented Reynald Secher, supporter of the controversial Vendée genocide thesis ”.
[28] On the Écran large website, Antoine Desrues declares that “the production by Puy du Fou Films assumes the role of a royalist and fundamentalist Catholic tract”, “in which the Republic is perceived as the political system that has, little by little, led to the downfall of our Christian values”.
He also compares Vaincre ou mourir to an overtly evangelist strand of Hollywood cinema (Dieu n'est pas mort or Unplanned) that has become “a business in its own right”.
Antoine Desrues castigates the underlying message of the film: the “civilizational battle of Vincent Bolloré, who exploits the seventh art as a propaganda tool similar to Touche pas à mon poste.
His colleague Mathieu Jaborska backs up his comments: “Crude royalist exaltation would almost pass for a tolerable position if the pseudo-documentary approach didn't take us for suggestible morons ”.
[29] Télé 2 semaines wrote: “while it has the merit of shedding light on a little-known hero, this historical fresco suffers from a predictable script and sloppy direction, particularly in the battle scenes ”.
[32] Taking previews into account, the film came second in the box-office for new releases in France on its first day, behind Pattie et la Colère de Poséidon (101,484) and ahead of Mayday (18,013).
[17] MPs Alexis Corbière and Matthias Tavel, both members of the political party La France insoumise, denounced an “anti-republican fiction” and a “falsification of history”, believing that the “extreme rightists want to impose on society their own reading of 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’”.
[41] Vaincre ou mourir is defined as a historical film, and follows on from Dernier Panache, a show at the Puy du Fou theme park presented as “inspired by real events ”.
[42] Both the theme park and the show have long been the subject of concern and criticism from historians who accuse them of subjugating historical reality to a conservative political vision.
[47] Commenting on the film, historian Jean-Clément Martin considers that “there are no notable factual errors that shock, except for one: Charette's signing of the peace treaty of February 17, 1795, which didn't happen!
[47] In his opinion, the film deals fairly with the participation of women in combat - with the characters of the Amazons Bulkeley and La Rochefoucauld -, the links between the Vendéens and the Chouans and émigrés, and the distance taken by the clergy at the time of the pacification of 1795-1796.
[...] Life in the area controlled by Charette, or by other forgotten leaders like Stofflet in 1794, is organized: crops are harvested, people are cared for in country hospitals, and even money is minted!
[47] The film takes up “the idea that the Peace of La Jaunaye in February 1795 was accompanied by the delivery of Louis XVII to Charette for installation in the heart of the Vendée”.
On the whole, he believes that “the word ‘genocide’ is not the subtext of this film”, whose purpose is therefore, in his view, quite distinct from those of Philippe de Villiers, the owner of the Puy du Fou, whose comments Martin deems “highly questionable and deliberately polemical”.
He concludes: “Just because important people make highly questionable and deliberately polemical comments, that doesn't mean we should imitate them and enter into stupid debates.
We need to get back to the facts, to remember that the War in the Vendée was born of a disastrous rivalry between revolutionaries, and that as long as the Republic does not simply admit this reality - which the Republicans of 1880 knew and denounced - we will always have this festering wound, obviously scratched by those who side with the victims, the fashionable position.” While acknowledging that the film was “produced by groups hostile to the Revolution, even to the Republic, certainly to democracy”, he invites supporters of these three notions to propose other accounts of the period themselves.
He cites Turenne and Costelle's TV film La Bataille de Cholet, made in 197448, as an example of successful screen treatment of the period.
[48] In an article published in September 2023 in Annales historiques de la Révolution française, historians Paul Chopelin and François Huzar describe the film as “very demonstrative, with an omnipresent voice-over that presents the historical context and very awkwardly relates the characters' feelings ”.
[49] The filmmakers put more emphasis on “the political stakes”, in particular the mass uprising as the driving force behind the revolt, but they “didn't want to make a militant Christian film”, which contrasts with the Saje distribution catalogue.
[49] In their view, the second part of the film, devoted to pacification and inspired by the work of historian Anne Rolland-Boulestreau, is “the most nuanced and innovative treatment of the Vendée Wars in cinema ”.
At the Puy du Fou, there are booklets aimed at schoolchildren that contain objective errors.” For Pierre Vermeren, professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and specialist in the Maghreb, the film's poor critical reception can be explained by the taboo of the Vendée War: “the film [...] throws part of the national novel into the fire by recreating, with varying degrees of cinematic success - but that's not the point - one of the most tragic episodes - if not the most tragic - in our Franco-French history: the War in the Vendée and its 200,000 dead.