War in the Vendée

• 1. Introduction

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  The War in the Vendée killed an estimated 200,000 people between 1793 and 1796. About 170,000 of them lived in the rebel heartland, known as the military Vendée. That is between 20 and 25 percent of everyone who lived there. The Vendée is a coastal region of western France, lying just south of the river Loire. The French call the conflict the Guerre de Vendée, and it unfolded at the height of the French Revolution. It began with young men refusing to be drafted. Within three years, it had become a catastrophe for an entire region. Three questions run through this story. Why did people in one corner of France fight a revolution made in the name of the people? How did a rural revolt turn into a campaign of destruction? And why do historians still argue, more than two centuries later, over what to call it?

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• 2. A Region Apart

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  Alexis de Tocqueville observed that by 1789 most French nobles had moved into the cities. A survey by the Intendants confirmed it, with one notable exception. In the Vendée, nobles still lived among the peasants. This isolated, feudal corner was held together by the Catholic Church in alliance with the nobility. That alliance dulled the class conflict that was driving the Revolution in Paris and elsewhere. The writer François Mignet, a Counter-Enlightenment author, accused militant Republicans of wanting to destroy the Church's independence and influence. To the people of the Vendée, such a thing was unimaginable.

  The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, passed in 1790, turned that fear into law. It required Catholic priests to shift their allegiance from the Holy See to the Constitution. Max Weber later gave this arrangement the name Caesaropapism. All but seven of the 160 French bishops refused the oath, and so did about half of the parish priests.

  Not everyone in the region opposed the Revolution. Town dwellers tended to support it, and so did some peasants. Certain peasants had rented farmland from the Church, and they welcomed the Revolution once the government seized and redistributed Church property. Yet nearly all the buyers of former Church land came from the bourgeoisie, and very few peasants gained anything. Counter-Enlightenment historians point to this when arguing that local feudalism had mostly shielded the peasantry.

  Warnings reached Paris early. In 1791, two representatives on mission told the National Assembly that the Vendée was being mobilized against the Republic. Soon afterward came the exposure of an alleged royalist conspiracy, organized by the Marquis de la Rouërie.

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• 3. The Draft and the Rising

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  In February 1793, the National Convention voted to raise 300,000 men. They were to be chosen by lot from the unmarried men of each commune. The arrival of recruiters reminded country people of how the old monarchy had taken its soldiers. Riots against the levy broke out across France, and the northwest reacted most fiercely in early March. By early April, order had returned north of the Loire. South of the river, in four departments later called the Vendée militaire, there were few troops to keep the peace. Rioting there grew into a full insurrection led by priests and local nobles.

  Youths from the communes around Cholet, a large textile town, invaded it and killed the commander of its National Guard. He was a manufacturer and a pro-revolutionary "patriot." Within a week, violence reached the Breton marshlands. On the 11th of March 1793, peasants overran Machecoul and massacred several hundred Republican citizens. The next day, a band under Jacques Cathelineau and Jean-Nicolas Stofflet seized Saint-Florent-le-Vieil. By mid-March, a protest against the draft had hardened into a war.

  The insurgents called themselves the Catholic Army, and the word Royal was added later. Their aim was, in one account's words, "above all the reopening of their parish churches with their former priests." Within weeks they fielded a large, poorly equipped force, with two thousand irregular cavalry and a few captured guns. Their main strength was smaller-scale guerrilla fighting, backed by local knowledge and village networks.

  The Republic answered by sending more than 45,000 troops. The first pitched battle came on the night of the 19th of March. A Republican column of 2,000, marching from La Rochelle to Nantes, was intercepted north of Chantonnay at the Gravereau bridge over the Petit-Lay. After six hours of fighting, rebel reinforcements arrived and routed it. On the 22nd of March, another Republican force was routed near Chalonnes-sur-Loire.

  Charles Tilly saw the rising as the product of direct rule imposed from Paris. That rule stripped nobles and priests of their roles as partly independent intermediaries. It also carried the state's demands for taxes and manpower down to individual households, and it gave the region's bourgeoisie a political power it had never held. Parisian revolutionaries, for their part, could see only an aristocratic plot. Mona Ozouf and François Furet disagreed. In their view, the region was never morally at odds with the nation. What aroused it was the new regime itself: the new map of districts and departments, the administrative dictatorship, and above all the non-juring priests. Even the regicide did not trigger revolt. Forced conscription did.

  The ground itself helped the rebels. The heart of the rising lay in the forests around Cholet, in the wild districts of old Anjou, and in the Breton marshes between Montaigu and the sea. The territory never fell entirely under royalist control. Resistance grew stronger the farther a district lay from Paris.

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• 4. Victories and Limits

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  On the 3rd of May 1793, Bressuire fell to Vendean forces led by Henri de la Rochejaquelein. Two days later came Thouars. For six hours, the insurgents could not take the Pont de Vrine, the bridge leading into the town. Then Louis Marie de Lescure, fighting in his first battle, stepped out alone under enemy fire and urged his men to follow. They did. Cavalry under Charles de Bonchamps crossed the river at a ford and struck the Republicans from behind. La Rochejaquelein's men stormed the rampart, and the garrison surrendered. The victors seized a large store of arms and gunpowder. They let their prisoners go, but only after an oath never to fight in the Vendée again. They also shaved the prisoners' heads, so that anyone who broke the oath could be recognized.

  On the 25th of May, the Catholic and royalist army took Fontenay-le-Comte. Lescure led a charge shouting "Long live the king!" and came through the cannon fire unharmed. La Rochejaquelein wore three red handkerchiefs, on his head, waist and neck, even though Republican gunners aimed at them. After the victory, his friends all adopted the same handkerchiefs, so that enemies could no longer pick him out. Of the Vendée's towns, only Nantes and Les Sables d'Olonne now remained under Republican control.

  On the 9th of June, Jacques Cathelineau's men captured Saumur from Louis-Alexandre Berthier in a single day. They took a huge supply of arms, including 50 cannons, and inflicted heavy losses on the defenders. Many prisoners were taken, and some switched sides. Many townspeople fled to Tours. The Vendeans had never attempted so large a town, and this was the high point of the insurgency.

  Nantes was where the momentum broke. On the 24th of June, the royalist commanders told the mayor, Baco de la Chapelle, to surrender or see the garrison massacred. On the 29th of June, a force of 40,000 began the assault. Republicans from the surrounding countryside had fled into the city, and their tales of rebel horrors stiffened the defenders. Baco de la Chapelle stood on a dustcart he called the "chariot of victory" to rally the crowd, even after a leg wound. The four Vendean armies, under Charette, Bonchamps, Cathelineau and Lyrot, coordinated poorly. Cathelineau's men were delayed by fighting along the river Erdre against a Republican battalion. Then Cathelineau himself was shot at the head of his forces, and his men lost heart and retreated. The Vendeans never took the city.

  The summer brought a mixed run of fights. At Châtillon-sur-Sèvre on the 5th of July, La Rochejaquelein led 20,000 royalists against General François Joseph Westermann and won. They killed or wounded 5,000 Republicans, and General Chambon was among the dead. On the 18th of July, the Vendeans beat Santerre's revolutionary army at Vihiers. Luçon went the other way. It was really three engagements over four weeks. On the 15th of July, Claude Sandoz and a garrison of 800 repulsed 5,000 insurgents under Maurice d'Elbée. On the 28th of July, Augustin Tuncq drove off a second attempt. Two weeks later, on the 14th of August, Tuncq and 5,000 men routed 30,000 insurgents under François de Charette in person.

  The royalists were not the only side to kill prisoners. At Montaigu on the 21st of September, the Vendeans surprised General Jean-Michel Beysser's division, which lost 400 men, many of them captured. Some of the prisoners were summarily executed. Troops under Jean-Baptiste Kléber later found their bodies in the castle wells.

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• 5. Defeat and Granville

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  On the 1st of August 1793, the Committee of Public Safety ordered Jean-Baptiste Carrier to carry out a "pacification" of the region through complete physical destruction. The order was not carried out at once, but demands for total destruction kept coming. Meanwhile the Republican army grew stronger. It drew on the first men of the levée en masse and on reinforcements from Mainz.

  October brought a run of clashes. On the 11th of October, Lescure and Bonchamps routed Alexis Chalbos at the second battle of Châtillon. That evening, a raiding party under Westermann hit the Vendean camp and inflicted losses on fighters and non-combatants alike. On the 15th of October, the Republicans won at Tremblaye near Cholet, where Lescure was seriously injured.

  Two days later, on the 17th of October, the Vendean army suffered its first serious defeat, at Cholet. Worse, the army split. The main force under La Rochejaquelein, some 25,000 strong and followed by thousands of civilians of all ages, crossed the Loire. Its goal was the port of Granville, where the rebels expected a British fleet and an army of exiled French nobles. They found the town ringed by Republican forces and no British ship in sight. Their attempts to take it failed.

  The retreat was a disaster. Republican forces picked off the long, stretched-out columns, and hunger and disease killed people by the thousands. The last decisive fight came at Savenay on the 23rd of December 1793. Lieutenant-general Jacques Alexis de Verteuil was among those executed the next day. Some historians nonetheless hold that the rebellion was still alive after Savenay.

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• 6. The Infernal Columns

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  A report attributed to General Westermann after Savenay told the Convention: "The Vendée is no more... According to your orders, I have trampled their children beneath our horses' feet; I have massacred their women, so they will no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all." Its authenticity is disputed. Such killing would have broken the Convention's own orders. Westermann's forces were also holding several thousand living Vendean prisoners at the time the letter was supposedly written.

  Whatever Westermann wrote, formal orders for forced evacuation followed Savenay, along with a scorched-earth policy. Farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned and villages razed. Reports describe a campaign of mass killing aimed at residents regardless of whether they fought, their politics, their age or their sex. Women were singled out, because they were seen as carrying anti-revolutionary babies.

  In February 1794, the Committee of Public Safety ordered a final pacification, named Vendée-Vengé, or "Vendée Avenged." Twelve infernal columns under General Louis Marie Turreau marched through the region. Turreau asked about "the fate of the women and children I will encounter in rebel territory." If it was "necessary to pass them all by sword," he said, he would require a decree. The Committee answered: "eliminate the brigands to the last man, there is your duty..."

  From January to May 1794, the infernal columns massacred between 20,000 and 50,000 Vendean civilians. Among the dead near the end of the conflict were Blessed Guillaume Repin and 98 other religious figures. Many of them were later beatified by the Catholic Church. In Anjou, under Nicolas Hentz and Marie Pierre Adrien Francastel, Republicans captured between 11,000 and 15,000 Vendeans. Between 6,500 and 7,000 were shot or guillotined, and 2,000 to 2,200 more died of disease.

  The cities had their own killings. In Nantes and Angers in particular, around 15,000 people were shot, drowned or guillotined on the orders of the représentants en mission and the Revolutionary Military Commissions. In October 1793, Carrier ordered Vendean prisoners taken after the failed siege of Nantes to be shot en masse. That proved impractical, so he had the prisoners put on boats with trap-door bottoms on the Loire and left to drown. A rumor added that female prisoners were stripped and tied to men beforehand, the so-called Republican Marriage. Some later historians reject that story as a counter-revolutionary myth.

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• 7. Peace and Relapse

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  In December 1794, the Republicans opened negotiations with the Vendean leaders. The brutality of the repression had provoked the rebellion back to life, and the talks reflected a change of course. The Convention issued conciliatory proclamations that allowed freedom of worship and guaranteed property. General Hoche applied them with great success. He gave cattle back to peasants who submitted, and he "let the priests have a few crowns." A treaty was signed at La Jaunaye on the 15th of February 1795, and another at La Mabillaie. Between February and May 1795, treaties with the various leaders ended what is called the first Vendée war. The Vendeans largely observed them.

  The peace did not last. A second Vendée war broke out in June 1795, after the start of the Quiberon expedition. That expedition was an émigré force equipped in England, and it seized Fort Penthièvre at Quiberon. On the 20th of July 1795, Hoche annihilated it. The renewed uprising quickly ran out of steam. Between January and July 1796, the last Vendean leaders submitted or were executed. On the 16th of July 1796, the Directory proclaimed the official end of the war. On the 30th of July, the state of siege in the western departments was lifted.

  The name of the region did not escape the conflict. Under republican and imperial rule, the department of Vendée was renamed Venge, and towns and cities were renamed too. Smaller uprisings followed, with a third war in 1799, a fourth in 1815 and a fifth in 1832. One account holds that the fighting continued with intensity until 1799 and broke out again, spasmodically, in 1813-1814 and 1815.

  During Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815, part of the Vendée stayed loyal to Louis XVIII. Napoleon was short of troops for the Waterloo Campaign, yet he had to send 10,000 men under Jean Maximilien Lamarque against 8,000 Vendeans led by Pierre Constant Suzannet. The fight ended at the Battle of Rocheservière.

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• 8. A Contested Word

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  The argument over the Vendée began in the 19th century, between two camps of historians. The Bleus, named for their defense of the Revolutionary Army, relied solely on Republican documents. Charles-Louis Chassin, one of their leaders, published eleven volumes of letters and archives to argue that the rising was manipulated by reactionary nobles and priests. The Blancs took their name as a slight, aimed at their loyalty to the Catholic Church. They used Republican archives too, but added eyewitness accounts, survivors' memoirs and local oral histories. They held that peasants acted from genuine loyalty to local families and from a wish to protect the Church.

  In 1986, the French historian Reynald Secher published A French Genocide: The Vendée. He argued that the total war and scorched-earth tactics against the local population were the first modern genocide. The book caused a minor uproar among scholars. Claude Langlois called its claims "quasi-mythological." Timothy Tackett described a tragic civil war with horrors on both sides, begun by the rebels, and called the word genocide "wholly inaccurate and inappropriate." Hugh Gough saw an attempt at revisionism unlikely to have lasting impact. Pierre Chaunu took the opposite side and described the events as the first "ideological genocide."

  Peter McPhee listed several flaws in Secher's case. The war was fought against royalist Vendeans, not Vendeans generally, and the government relied on Republican Vendeans. The Convention stopped once the royalist army was defeated, which a campaign of extermination would not have done. Secher also left out royalist atrocities against Republican civilians and prisoners, repeated folkloric myths as fact, and ignored the wide range of death estimates. Those estimates run from 117,000 to 450,000 dead on both sides, out of a population of around 800,000. McPhee added that the events do not fit the United Nations definition of genocide, because they happened during a civil war.

  Charles Tilly analyzed Secher's evidence in 1990. He found that Secher began with a thoughtful thesis about his own village, La Chapelle-Basse-Mer, near Nantes. Secher then broadened it to the whole region. Tilly objected to his claim that the pre-revolutionary Vendée was unusually prosperous, which rested on minimal evidence. He also faulted Secher's population arithmetic. Secher assumed a constant birth rate of about 37 per thousand, when the population was actually declining. He assumed no net migration, though thousands had fled or moved. And he ended the count in 1802 instead of 1794.

  Many scholars still call it genocide. Kurt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk do, as do R. J. Rummel, Jean Tulard and Anthony James Joes. Adam Jones calls the label "apt" in light of the large-scale murder of the Vendean civilian population, though he admits it is not universally shared. Mark Levene sees the Vendée as "an archetype of modern genocide." In 1993, shortly before returning to Russia from exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke at Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne on the 200th anniversary of the uprising. He called the Republican response genocidal and compared the Jacobins to Lenin's Bolsheviks. In 2007, nine deputies introduced a measure to have the National Assembly officially recognize the Republican actions as genocidal. A group of far-left French historians denounced it as history used to justify political extremism.

  In 2017, the French diplomat Jacques Villemain published a legal study of the war, judged against modern international criminal law. He concluded that the Republic committed war crimes from March 1793 and crimes against humanity between April and July 1793. He found genocide from the 1st of August 1793 to the middle of 1794. In 2020, David Bell answered in the Journal of Genocide Research. He called the killings "a terrible war crime" and a frightening new stage in state violence against civilians. But he argued that calling every deliberate mass killing of defenseless wartime civilians genocide would make the word lose its meaning.

  The story still draws storytellers. In 2022, Studio Canal released Vaincre ou mourir, a film made in cooperation with the Puy du Fou theme park company.

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