Cathedral of Saint-Pierre, Angoulême, France, c. 1860. Wellcome Collection.
Angoulême was a backwater in French Revolutionary politics, as in so much else. It “is never cited in the chronicles of the events of the revolution,” according to the summary of the only substantial history of the French Revolution in the town. It was the capital of “a department that had no exceptional events or personalities who should figure in the revolutionary pantheon,” and it was insignificant, even, in the pantheon of the counterrevolution.
But the revolutionary period was a time of transformation for everyone in Angoulême, as for everyone elsewhere in France.