War in the Vendée

The War in the Vendée (French: Guerre de Vendée) was a counter-revolution from 1793 to 1796 in the Vendée region of France during the French Revolution. The Vendée is a coastal region, located immediately south of the river Loire in western France. Initially, the revolt was similar to the 14th-century Jacquerie peasant uprising, but the Vendée quickly became counter-revolutionary and Royalist. The revolt headed by the newly formed Catholic and Royal Army was comparable to the Chouannerie, which took place in the area north of the Loire.

Quick Facts Date, Location ...

War in the Vendée
Part of the French Revolutionary Wars
Henri de La Rochejaquelein at the Battle of Cholet in 1793, by Paul-Émile Boutigny
Date 3 March 1793 — 16 July 1796 Location West France: Maine-et-Loire, Vendée, Loire-Atlantique, Deux-Sèvres (or former provinces of Anjou, Poitou, Brittany) Result French Republican victory
Belligerents
French Republic	Vendeans Supported by:  Great Britain
Commanders and leaders
Jean Baptiste Camille Canclaux Armand Louis de Gontaut  Jean Antoine Rossignol François Séverin Marceau Jean-Baptiste Kléber François Joseph Westermann Jean Baptiste Carrier René François Lecomte † Jean Léchelle † Louis Marie Turreau Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Lazare Hoche Pierre Augereau	Jacques Cathelineau † Maurice d'Elbée  Charles de Bonchamps † Louis Marie de Lescure † Henri de la Rochejaquelein † François de Charette  Jean-Nicolas Stofflet  Charles de Beaumont d'Autichamp Charles Aimé de Royrand † Georges Cadoudal
Strength
130,000–150,000[1]	80,000
Casualties and losses
c. 30,000 military killed[1][2]	Several tens of thousands killed
Inhabitants of the Vendee: c. 170,000 military and civilians killed[1][3] c. 200,000 dead in total[4][5]

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While elsewhere in France the revolts against the levée en masse were repressed, an insurgent territory, called the Vendée militaire by historians, formed south of the Loire-Inférieure (Brittany), south-west of Maine-et-Loire (Anjou), north of Vendée and north-west of Deux-Sèvres (Poitou). Gradually referred to as the "Vendeans", the insurgents established in April a "Catholic and Royal Army" which won a succession of victories in the spring and summer of 1793. The towns of Fontenay-le-Comte, Thouars, Saumur and Angers were briefly overrun, but the Vendeans failed before Nantes.

During the autumn, the arrival of the Army of Mainz as reinforcements restored the advantage to the Republican camp, which in October seized Cholet, the most important city controlled by the Vendeans. After this defeat, the bulk of the Vendée forces crossed the Loire and marched to Normandy in a desperate attempt to take a port to obtain the help of the British and the Armée des Émigrés. Pushed back to Granville, the Vendée army was finally destroyed in December at Mans and Savenay. From the winter of 1793 to the spring of 1794, during the Reign of Terror, violent repression was put in place by the Republican forces. In the cities, and in particular in Nantes and Angers, around 15,000 people were shot, drowned or guillotined on the orders of the représentants en mission and Revolutionary Military Commissions, while in the countryside about 20,000 to 50,000 civilians were massacred by the infernal columns, who set fire to many towns and villages.

The repression provoked a resurgence of the rebellion and in December 1794 the Republicans began negotiations which led between February and May 1795 to the signing of peace treaties with the various Vendée leaders, thus bringing about the end of the "first Vendée war". A "second Vendée war" broke out shortly afterwards, in June 1795, after the start of the Quiberon expedition. The uprising quickly ran out of steam and the last Vendée leaders submitted or were executed between January and July 1796. The Vendée still experienced last and brief uprisings with a third war in 1799, a fourth in 1815 and a fifth in 1832, but they were on a much smaller scale. The number of victims is estimated at 200,000 dead, including approximately 170,000 for the inhabitants of the military Vendée, i.e. between 20 and 25% of the population of the insurgent territory.

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. Counter-Enlightenment author Francois Mignet accused that militant Republicans wanted to destroy both the independence and influence of the Catholic Church in France, which the people of the Vendée considered unimaginable.^[8]

In 1791, two representatives on mission informed the National Assembly that the Vendée was being mobilized against the First French Republic, and this news was swiftly followed by the exposure of an alleged royalist conspiracy organized by the Marquis de la Rouërie.^[9] Subsequent defenders of the Vendée rebels argue that this plotting against the Republic was an understandable response to The Terror (a period between 1793 and 1794 where thousands of both real and suspected dissidents were beheaded by guillotine), the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and the introduction of conscription upon the whole of France, decreed by the National Convention in February 1793.^[10][11]

In what Max Weber later dubbed Caesaropapism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy required all Roman Catholic priests to transfer their allegiance from the Holy See to the Constitution and, by extension, to the increasingly anti-clerical and anti-Catholic National Constituent Assembly of the Republic. All but seven of the 160 French bishops refused to take the oath, as did about half of the parish priests.^[12] Anti-clericalism and coercive secularization of French culture triggered the Vendée belligerence; another trigger was further mass conscription into the French Revolutionary Army. The March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their district's quota of the national total of 300,000 enraged the local nobility, clergy, and the 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 some support for the Revolution among the rural peasantry. Some Vendean peasants had lived as tenant farmers on Church-owned farmland, and they overwhelmingly embraced the Revolution after all Church lands were seized and redistributed by the Republican government.^[15] Counter-Enlightenment historians have argued that local feudalism had primarily protected the peasantry. They cite the fact that over the 100 years of struggle to impose republicanism upon France, the middle class were the primary beneficiaries. Nearly all the purchasers of former Church land were members of the bourgeoisie and very few peasants benefited from the confiscation and sales.^[16]

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 Royalist 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 Royalist operated on a much smaller scale, using guerrilla tactics, supported by the insurgents' local knowledge and social networks.^[18]

Geographic coverage

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 Royalist 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 [fr] 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 19. 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]

Battle of Thouars

This section does not cite any sources. (December 2021)

On 5 May 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 9 June 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]

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]

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.^{[citation needed]}

Defeat (October–December 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]

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.^{[clarification needed][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]

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][page needed][53][54]}

This relatively brief episode in French history has left significant traces on French politics, 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 régime, 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]

The popular historiography of the War in the Vendée is deeply rooted in the pervasive political polarisation within post-1789 French culture and historiography. As a result, scholarship on the uprising is generally lacking in objectivity, coming down strongly in defense of either the First French Republic or of the Vendéen rebels and the local Catholic Church.^[60] This conflict originated in the 19th century between two groups of historians. The Bleus, so-named for their defense of the French Revolutionary Army and who based their interpretations solely on documents from Republican sources. The Blancs, on the other hand, are so named in a denigrating reference to their continued membership in the Catholic Church in France, also based their findings on Republican archival documents, but also used eyewitness accounts, memoirs by survivors, and "local oral histories".^[61] Les Bleus generally allege that the War in Vendée was not a popular uprising, but was the result of reactionary noble and priestly lies and manipulation of the local peasantry against their self-appointed liberators. One of the leaders of this school of history, Charles-Louis Chassin, published eleven volumes of letters, archives, and other materials in an effort to argue for this interpretation. Meanwhile, Les Blancs were at least sometimes Roman Catholic priests, local historians, or survivors of the pre-1789 local French nobility. They allege, on the other hand, that the Vendean peasant rebels were acting out of "genuine love" and loyalty towards individual local families of less wealthy and non-absentee landlords and, far more importantly, a desire to protect the Catholic Church from both religious persecution, the Reign of Terror, and coerced Caesaropapism at the hands of the First French Republic.^[61]

The Counter-Enlightenment interpretation by Les Blancs was widely popularized among the social conservatives throughout the Anglosphere during the Neoliberal era, with French historian Reynald Secher's 1986 A French Genocide: The Vendée. Secher argued that the total war against the local population and the scorched earth tactics unleashed by both the Republican government and the French Revolutionary Army during the War in the Vendée were the first modern genocide.^{[62][page needed]} Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France amongst scholars of French history, as many mainstream authorities on the period—both French and foreign—published articles denouncing Secher's allegations.^[63] Claude Langlois (of the Institute of History of the French Revolution) derides Secher's claims as "quasi-mythological".^[64] 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."^[65] Hugh Gough (Professor of history at University College Dublin) called Secher's book an attempt at historical revisionism unlikely to have any lasting impact.^[66] While some such as Peter McPhee roundly criticized Secher, including the assertion of commonality between the functions of the Republican government and the totalitarianism of Stalinism, historian Pierre Chaunu expressed support for Secher's views,^[67] describing the events as the first "ideological genocide".^[68]

Critics of Secher's thesis have also accused his methodology of being flawed. McPhee asserted that these errors are as follows: (1) The war was not fought against Vendeans generally 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) He fails to inform the reader of atrocities committed by Royalist forces against Republican civilians and POWs in the Vendée. (4) He repeats alleged folkloric myths as facts (5) He 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]

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; as parts of the population at least were allies of 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."^[69]

Shortly before his return to the Russian Federation after decades of exile in 1993, former Soviet dissident and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. Coming down strongly in favor of calling the Republican response genocidal, Solzhenitsyn compared Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks following the October Revolution with the leadership of the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. Solzhenitsyn also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who similarly rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by "revolutionary despotism". He commented sadly that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction, the toppling of the Jacobin single party state by the French Revolutionary Army, and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s.^[70]

Debate over the characterization of the Vendée uprising was renewed in 2007, when nine deputies introduced a measure to the National Assembly to officially recognize the Republican actions as genocidal.^[71] The measure was strongly denounced by a group of Far Left French historians as an attempt to use history to justify political extremism.^[72]

At the start of 2017 Jacques Villemain published Vendée, 1793–1794 : Crime de guerre ? Crime contre l'humanité ? Génocide ? Une étude juridique (English: Vendée, 1793–1794: War crime? Crime against humanity? Genocide? A juridical study), 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 presented a legal study on the War of Vendée based on current international criminal law, according to modern findings in the international courts on genocide cases like the Rwanda Genocide and the Srebrenica massacre, is that the government of the First French Republic was guilty of war crimes beginning in March 1793, crimes against humanity between April to July 1793, and genocide from 1 August 1793 to the middle of 1794.^[73]

The events of the Vendee have been the subject of books, films, and music.

Music

This section does not cite any sources. (December 2021)

• 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.
• La Vandeana, an Italian song about the Vendée.

• 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)
  • Marie Lourdais