War in the Vendée

The massacre of 150 to 200 Vendean Republicans by Vendean Royalists in Machecoul was the starting event of the War in the Vendée.

Vendean rebel. Painting by Julien Le Blant

In the rural Vendée, the local nobility seems to have been more permanently in power than in other parts of France.[6] Alexis de Tocqueville, of France, noted that most French nobles lived in cities by 1789. An Intendants' survey showed one of the few areas where the nobility still lived with the peasants was the Vendée.[7] In this particularly-isolated feudal stronghold, the class conflict that drove the revolution in Paris and other parts of France was further suppressed by the institutional strength of the Catholic church in alliance with the nobility. Antienlightenment author Francois Mignet argued that when the revolutionaries wanted to reduce the Church's influence, people of the Vendée region considered this change unimaginable.[8]

In 1791, two representatives on mission informed the National Assembly that the Vendée was being mobilized against the democracy, and this news was swiftly followed by the exposure of a royalist plot organized by the Marquis de la Rouërie.[9] Partisans of the Vendée argue that this plotting against the French government was a response to The Terror (a period between 1793 and 1794 where thousands of elitists, rather than the usual commoners and democrats, were beheaded by guillotine), in opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and the introduction of a levy of 300,000 on the whole of France, decreed by the National Convention in February 1793.[10][11]

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy required all clerics to transfer their allegiance from the monarchy, nobility, and feudalism to the Constitution and, by extension, to the increasingly anti-clerical National Constituent Assembly. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath, as did about half of the parish priests.[12] Reform of the feudal clergy and secularization of citizens triggered the Vendée belligerence; another trigger was conscription to the Republican army. The March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their district's quota of the national total of 300,000 enraged the Lords, clergy, and their populace,[10] who took up arms instead as "The Catholic Army", "Royal" being added later, and fought for "above all the reopening of their parish churches with their former priests."[13]

Although town dwellers were more likely to support the Revolution in the Vendée,[14] there was support for the Revolution among the rural peasantry. Many lived on monastery properties, and they overwhelmingly embraced the Revolution after these lands were seized and redistributed among them by the republican government.[15]

Antienlightenment partisans argue that feudalism primarily protected the peasantry. They cite that fact that over the 100 years of struggle for the French Republic, ultimately the bourgeois were primary beneficiaries. Nearly all the purchasers of church land were bourgeois; very few peasants benefited from the sales.[16] However, if inegalitarians had not waged war against democratization, the working class and smallholders who were fighting for democracy would have been freed to rationally secure rights.

Sacred Heart patch of the Vendean royalist insurgents. The French motto 'Dieu, le Roi' means 'God, the King'.

There were other levy riots across France when regions started to draft men into the army in response to the Levy Decree in February 1793. The reaction in the northwest in early March was particularly pronounced with large-scale rioting verging on insurrection. By early April, in areas north of the Loire, order had been restored by the revolutionary government, but south of the Loire in four departments that became known as the Vendée militaire there were few troops to control rebels and what had started as rioting quickly took on the form of a full insurrection led by priests and the local nobility.[17]

Within a few weeks the Antienlightenment forces had formed a substantial, ill-equipped, army, the Royal and Catholic Army, supported by two thousand irregular cavalry and a few captured artillery pieces. The main force of the Antienlightenment operated on a much smaller scale, using guerrilla tactics, supported by the insurgents' local knowledge and social networks.[18]

Geographic coverage

The administrative Vendée département (green), the "Military Vendée" (pink) where most of the insurrection took place and the Virée de Galerne (black, red and blue arrows)

Geographically, the insurrection occurred within a rough quadrilateral approximately 60 miles (97 km) wide. The territory defied description in the terms of the redistricting of 1790, nor did it align itself to descriptors used in the Ancien Régime; the heart of the movement lay in the forests, with Cholet at its center, in the wild districts of the old county of Anjou, in the Breton marshlands between Montaigu and the sea. It included parts of the old Poitiers and Tours, the departements of Maine-et-Loire, the Vendée, and Deux Sèvres, but never completely fell under Antienlightenment control. The further the land was from Paris (the seat of revolutionary power), the more Counter-revolutionary belligerence occurred.[19]

The insurrection began in March 1793, as a rejection of the mass conscription edict. In February, the National Convention had voted to approve a levy of three hundred thousand men, to be chosen by lot among the unmarried men in each commune. Thus, the arrival of recruiters reminded locals of the methods of the monarchy, aroused resistance in the countryside, and set in motion the first serious signs of sedition. Much of this opposition was quelled quickly, but in the lower Loire, in the Mauges and in the Vendean bocage, the situation was more serious and more protracted. Youths from communes surrounding Cholet, a large textile town on the boundary between the two regions, invaded the town and killed the commander of the National Guard, a "patriotic" (pro-revolutionary) manufacturer. Within a week, violence had spread to the Breton marshlands; peasants overran the town of Machecoul on 11 March, and several hundred Republican citizens were massacred. A large band of peasants under the leadership of Jacques Cathelineau and Jean-Nicolas Stofflet seized Saint-Florent-le-Vieil on 12 March. By mid-March, a minor revolt against conscription had turned into full-fledged insurrection.[20]

The Republic was quick to respond, dispatching over 45,000 troops to the area. The first pitched battle was on the night of March 19th. A Republican column of 2,000, under general Louis Henri François de Marcé, moving from La Rochelle to Nantes, was intercepted north of Chantonnay near the Gravereau bridge (Saint-Vincent-Sterlanges), over the river le Petit-Lay.[21] After six hours of fighting, rebel reinforcements arrived and routed the Republican forces. In the north, on 22 March, another Republican force was routed near Chalonnes-sur-Loire.[22]

There followed a series of skirmishes and armed contacts:

Battle of Thouars

La Rochejaquelein and the Marquis de Lescure leading troops on the pont de Vrine

On May 5th, 1793, the main clash took place on the Pont de Vrine, the bridge over the stream leading into Thouars. The Vendéens proved unable to take the bridge for six hours, until Louis Marie de Lescure (fighting in his first battle) showed himself alone on the bridge under enemy fire and encouraged his men to follow him, which they did, crossing the bridge. The Republicans there were taken from behind by the cavalry under Charles de Bonchamps, which had crossed the river at a ford. Despite the arrival of reinforcements, the Republicans were routed and withdrew towards the city. The insurgents, headed by Henri de La Rochejacquelein, took the rampart by force and poured into the city, and the Republican troops quickly capitulated. The Vendéens seized a large amount of arms and gunpowder, but allowed the captured Republican forces to leave, after having sworn to no longer fight in the Vendée and had their hair shaved off so they could be recognised lest they went back on their word and were recaptured.

Battle of Saumur

On June 9th 1793, Vendean insurgents commanded by Jacques Cathelineau captured the town of Saumur from Louis-Alexandre Berthier. The victory gave the insurgents a massive supply of arms, including 50 cannons. This was the high point of the insurgency.[25] The Vendeans had never before attempted to take such a large town, and they captured it in a single day, inflicting heavy losses on its Republican defenders. Many prisoners were taken, some of whom went over to the Vendean cause, while many of the citizens fled to Tours.[26]

The burning of Granville, 14 November 1793

First Battle of Châtillon

On 5 July 1793, the First Battle of Châtillon took place at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre near the commune of Mauléon. In that action, Marquis de la Rochejaquelein commanding 20,000 Vendean Royalists attacked a French Republican force led by General François Joseph Westermann. The Vendean Royalists were victorious, killing and wounding 5,000 French Republicans. Among those killed in the battle was French Republican General Chambon.[32]

The capture of François de Charette, 1796

Battle of Montaigu

The Battle of Montaigu was fought on 21 September 1793 when the Vendéens attacked general Jean-Michel Beysser's French Republican division. Taken by surprise, this division fought back but lost 400 men, including many captured. Some of these prisoners were summarily executed by the Vendeens and their bodies later found in the castle wells by troops under Jean-Baptiste Kléber.

Le Bataillon Carré, a painting depicting an ambush in the War of Vendée

Defeat (October–December 1793)

Mass shootings at Nantes, 1793

On 1 August 1793, the Committee of Public Safety ordered Jean-Baptiste Carrier to carry out a "pacification" of the region by complete physical destruction.[37] These orders were not carried out immediately, but a steady stream of demands for total destruction persisted.[37]

Crossing the Loire: General Lescure, wounded, crosses the Loire at Saint-Florent (17 October 1793), by Jules Girardet

The Republican army was reinforced, benefiting from the first men of the levée en masse and reinforcements from Mainz. The Vendean army had its first serious defeat at the Battle of Cholet on 17 October; worse for the rebels, their army was split. In October 1793 the main force, commanded by Henri de la Rochejaquelein and numbering some 25,000 (followed by thousands of civilians of all ages), crossed the Loire, headed for the port of Granville where they expected to be greeted by a British fleet and an army of exiled French nobles. Arriving at Granville, they found the city surrounded by Republican forces, with no British ships in sight. Their attempts to take the city were unsuccessful. During the retreat, the extended columns fell prey to Republican forces; suffering from hunger and disease, they died in the thousands. The force was defeated in the last, decisive Battle of Savenay on 23 December.[38][39] Among those executed the following day was lieutenant-general Jacques Alexis de Verteuil, but some historians assert that after the battle of Savenay the rebellion was still going on. [40]

After the Battle of Savenay (December 1793), in a document whose authenticity is disputed,[41] General Westermann reported to his political masters at 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."[39] Such killing of civilians would have been an explicit violation of the convention's orders to Westermann.[42] and several thousand living Vendéan prisoners were being held by Westerman's forces though when the letter was supposedly written.[40]

With the decisive Battle of Savenay (December 1793) came formal orders for forced evacuation; also, a 'scorched earth' policy was initiated: farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned and villages razed. There were many reported atrocities and a campaign of mass killing universally aimed at residents of the Vendée regardless of combatant status, political affiliation, age or sex.[43] One specific target were the women of the region. Since they were seen, in a way, that they were carrying anti-revolutionary babies, they were seen as primary targets.[30]

From January to May 1794, 20,000 to 50,000 Vendean civilians were massacred by the colonnes infernales ("infernal columns") of the general Louis Marie Turreau.[44][45][46]

Among those killed towards the end of the conflict were Blessed Guillaume Repin and 98 other religious figures, many of whom were later beatified by the Catholic Church.[47]

In Anjou, directed by Nicolas Hentz and Marie Pierre Adrien Francastel, Republicans captured 11,000 to 15,000 Vendeans, 6,500 to 7,000 were shot or guillotined and 2,000 to 2,200 prisoners died from disease.[48]

Under orders from the Committee of Public Safety in February 1794, the Republican forces launched their final "pacification" effort (named Vendée-Vengé or "Vendée Avenged"): twelve infernal columns under Louis Marie Turreau, marched through the Vendée.[49] General Turreau inquired about "the fate of the women and children I will encounter in rebel territory", stating that, if it was "necessary to pass them all by sword", he would require a decree.[37] In response, the Committee of Public Safety ordered him to "eliminate the brigands to the last man, there is your duty..."[37]

Execution of General Charette, in Nantes, March 1796, by Julien Le Blant, c. 1883

The Convention issued conciliatory proclamations allowing the Vendeans liberty of worship and guaranteeing their property. General Hoche applied these measures with great success. He restored their cattle to the peasants who submitted, "let the priests have a few crowns", and on 20 July 1795 annihilated an émigré expedition which had been equipped in England and had seized Fort Penthièvre and Quiberon. Treaties were concluded at La Jaunaye (15 February 1795) and at La Mabillaie, and were fairly well observed by the Vendeans; no obstacle remained but the feeble and scattered remnant of the Vendeans still under arms and the Chouans. On 16 July 1796 the Directory proclaimed the official end of the war.[50] On 30 July the state of siege was raised in the western departments.[51]

Estimates of those killed in the Vendean conflict—on both sides—range between 117,000 and 450,000, out of a population of around 800,000.[52][53][54]

This relatively brief episode in French history has left significant traces on French politics, as the current argument on genocide suggests, yet it is reasonable to see the episode, Charles Tilly has claimed, in a far more benign light:

West's counterrevolution grew directly from the efforts of revolutionary officials to install a particular kind of direct rule in the region: a rule that practically eliminated nobles and priests from their positions as partly autonomous intermediaries, that brought the state's demands for taxes, manpower, and deference to the level of individual communities, neighborhoods, and households that gave the region's bourgeois political power they had never before wielded. In seeking to extend the state's rule to every locality, and to dislodge all enemies of that rule, French revolutionaries started a process that did not cease for twenty-five years.[57]

The Vendée revolt became an immediate symbol of confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution, and a source of unexpurgated violence. The region, and its towns, were eliminated; even the department name of Vendée was renamed Venge. Towns and cities were also renamed, but at heart, in villages and farms, the old names remained the same. Beyond the controversial interpretations of genocide, other historians posit the insurrection as a revolt against conscription that cascaded to include other complaints. For a period of several months, control of the Vendée slipped from the hands of Parisian revolutionaries. They ascribed the revolt to the resurgence of royalist ideas: when faced with insurrection of the people against the Revolution of the People, they were unable to see it as anything but an aristocratic plot. Mona Ozouf and François Furet maintain it was not. The entire territory, none of it unified under a single idea from the ancien regime, had never been a region morally at odds with the rest of the nation. It was not the fall of the old regime that aroused the population against the Revolution, but rather the construction of the new regime into locally unacceptable principles and forms: the new map of districts and departments, the administrative dictatorship, and above all the non-juring priests. Rebellion had first flared in August 1792, but had been immediately quelled. Even the regicide did not trigger insurrection. What did was the forced conscription. Although the Vendeans, to use the term loosely, wrote God and King large on their flags, they invested those symbols of their tradition with something other than regret for the lost regime.[58]

Soldiers, women, and children embroiled in a fight near a church

The popular historiography of the War in the Vendée is deeply rooted in conflicts between different schools of French historiography, and, as a result, writings on the revolt are generally highly partisan, coming down strongly in support of the revolutionary government or the Vendéen royalists.[60] This conflict originated in the 19th century between two groups of historians, the Bleus, named for their support of the republicans, who based their findings on archives from the Blancs, named for their membership in and support of the monarchy and the Catholic Church, who based their findings on "local oral histories".[61] The Bleus generally argue that the Vendée was not a popular uprising, but was the result of noble and clerical manipulation of the peasantry. One of the leaders of this school of history, Charles-Louis Chassin, published eleven volumes of letters, archives, and other materials supporting this position. The Blancs, generally members of the former nobility and clergy themselves, argue (using some of the same documents as Chassin, but also drawing from contemporary oral histories) that the peasants were acting out of a "genuine love" for the nobility and a desire to protect the Catholic Church.[61]

The Counter-Enlightenment interpretation was popularized in the conservatizing English-speaking world of the Neoliberal era, with French historian Reynald Secher's 1986 A French Genocide: The Vendée. Secher argued that the actions of the French republican government during the War in the Vendée was the first modern genocide.[62] Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France amongst scholars of modern French history, as many mainstream authorities on the period—both French and foreign—published articles rejecting Secher's claims.[63][64][65][66][67] Claude Langlois (of the Institute of History of the French Revolution) derides Secher's claims as "quasi-mythological".[68] Timothy Tackett of the University of California summarizes the case as such: "In reality ... the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides—initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate."[69] Hugh Gough (Professor of history at University College Dublin) called Secher's book an attempt at historical revisionism unlikely to have any lasting impact.[70] While some such as Peter McPhee roundly criticized Secher, including the assertion of commonality between the functions of the Republican government and Communist totalitarianism, historian Pierre Chaunu expressed support for Secher's views,[71] describing the events as the first "ideological genocide".[72]

Shootings and massacres by the Colonnes infernales under Turreau

Critics of Secher's thesis find his methodology is flawed. McPhee asserted that these errors are as follows: (1) The war was not fought against Vendeans but Royalist Vendeans, the government relied on the support of Republican Vendeans; (2) the Convention ended the campaign after the Royalist Army was clearly defeated—if the aim was genocide, then they would have continued and easily exterminated the population; (3) Fails to inform the reader of atrocities committed by Royalist against Republicans in the Vendée; (4) Repeats stories now known to be folkloric myths as fact; (5) Does not refer to the wide range of estimates of deaths suffered by both sides, and that casualties were not "one-sided"; and more.[54]

Drownings at Nantes

Peter McPhee says that the pacification of the Vendée does not fit either the United Nations' CPPCG definition of genocide because the events happened during a civil war. He states that the war in the Vendée was not a one-sided mass killing and the Committee of Public Safety did not intend to exterminate the whole population of the Vendée; parts of the population were allied to the revolutionary government.[54]

Concerning the controversy, Michel Vovelle, a specialist on the French Revolution, remarked: "A whole literature is forming on "Franco-French genocide", starting from risky estimates of the number of fatalities in the Vendean wars ... Despite not being specialists in the subject, historians such as Pierre Chaunu have put all the weight of their great moral authority behind the development of an anathematizing discourse, and have dismissed any effort to look at the subject reasonably."[73]

Debate over the characterization of the Vendée uprising was renewed in 2007, when nine deputies introduced a measure to the Assemblée nationale to officially recognize the republican actions as genocidal.[74] The measure was strongly denounced by a group of leftist French historians as an attempt to use history to justify political extremism.[75]

At the start of 2017 Jacques Villemain published Vendée, 1793–1794 : Crime de guerre ? Crime contre l'humanité ? Génocide ? Une étude juridique, which an analysis by him of the Vendée war from the perspective of the international courts of justice in The Hague (such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). Jacques Villemain is a French diplomat, and is currently the vice representative of France at OECD and is representing France at the International Court of Justice. He presents a legal study on the War of Vendée based on current international law, then according modern findings in the international courts on genocide cases like the Rwanda Genocide, and the Srebrenica massacre, is that there were war crimes performed by The French Republic in March 1793, Crime against Humanity from April to July 1793 and Genocide from 1 August 1793 to middle of 1794.[76]

Filmed on location in France, The Hidden Rebellion, a docu-drama produced and directed by Daniel Rabourdin, presents the rebellion as an example of the courage and love for God and country that (it claims) the royalist peasants possessed. Winner of the 2017 Remi Film Award, it has aired on EWTN and is available for purchase on DVD.

The uprising in the Vendée was also the subject of an independent feature film from Navis Pictures. The War of the Vendée (2012), written and directed by Jim Morlino, won awards for "Best Film For Young Audiences" (Mirabile Dictu International Catholic Film Festival, at the Vatican) and "Best Director" (John Paul II International Film Festival, Miami, FL).[89][90]

The Vendée Revolt was the setting for one of the BBC's The Scarlet Pimpernel (TV series) series entitled "Valentine Gautier" (2002).

The Vendée Revolt was also the setting for "The Frogs and the Lobsters", an episode of the television program Hornblower. It is set during the French Revolutionary Wars and very loosely based on the chapter of the same name in C. S. Forester's novel, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and on the actual ill-fated Quiberon expedition of 1795.

• Album Chante la Vendée Militaire (La Chouannerie), by Catherine Garret, 1977.
• Album Vendée 1792–1796, by the Chœur Montjoie Saint-Denis, 2005 (reedition in 2016).
• EP Guerres de Vendée: Chouans, by Jean-Pax Méfret, 2006.
• The French black/folk metal band Paydretz works and plays exclusively about the Wars in the Vendée and the Chouannerie.

• Vendean leaders:
  • Charles Melchior Artus de Bonchamps
  • Jacques Cathelineau
  • François Athanase de Charette
  • Maurice d'Elbée
  • Louis Marie de Salgues de Lescure
  • Henri du Vergier de la Rochejaquelein
  • Charles Aimé de Royrand
  • Jean-Nicolas Stofflet
• Republican leaders:
  • Louis-Alexandre Berthier
  • Jean-Baptiste Carrier
  • Lazare Hoche
  • Jean-Baptiste Kléber
  • Antoine Joseph Santerre
  • François Joseph Westermann
• Other links:
  • Chouannerie (another Royalist uprising)
  • Catholic and Royal Army
  • Armée des Émigrés
  • Drownings at Nantes (mass executions by drowning)
  • Dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution
  • Reign of Terror
  • Cholet
  • Clisson
  • Fontenay-le-Comte
  • La Roche-sur-Yon (capital of Vendée)
  • Ninety-Three (novel by Victor Hugo)

• Anchel, Robert (1911). "Vendée, Wars of the" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 980–981.
• Debord, Guy Panegyric Verso; (1991) ISBN 0-86091-347-3
• Davies, Norman Europe: A History Oxford University Press; (1996)
• Markoff, John. "The social geography of rural revolt at the beginning of the French Revolution." American Sociological Review (1985) 50#6 pp. 761–781 in JSTOR
• Markoff, John. "Peasant Grievances and Peasant Insurrection: France in 1789," Journal of Modern History (1990) 62#3 pp. 445–476 in JSTOR
• Secher, Reynald A French Genocide: The Vendée (Univ. of Notre Dame Press; 2003) ISBN 0-268-02865-6
• Tackett, Timothy. "The West in France in 1789: The Religious Factor in the Origins of the Counterrevolution," Journal of Modern History (1982) 54#4 pp. 715–745 in JSTOR
• Tilly, Charles. The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793 (1964)

• Media related to War in the Vendée and Chouannerie at Wikimedia Commons