Infernal columns

On 1 August 1793, on Barère’s report, the Convention decreed that the forests of the Vendée be cut down, the rebels’ lairs destroyed, the harvest carried off and the cattle seized, while women, children and the old were to be taken inland and protected; on 1 October Barère obtained a second decree with his speech “Destroy the Vendée”. Appointed to the Army of the West on 27 November, Turreau took up his post only on 30 December. On 19 December he sent the Committee of Public Safety an amnesty plan, and when no answer came he drew up a new plan applying the decrees strictly. On 7 January 1794 Kléber proposed that, since the Vendéan forces numbered only 6,200, the territory be ringed with fortified camps, the inhabitants’ trust won and only rebel gatherings attacked; the plan was rejected and Kléber transferred on 9 January. On 16 January Turreau asked the representatives on mission for a decision that would cover his responsibility if women and children were “all to be put to the sword”; the letter went unanswered. On 19 January he instructed his generals to bayonet every “brigand” found in arms or known to have taken them, “and the girls, women and children in that case”, with executions only on the general’s prior order, while those in whom the general recognised “civic sentiments” were to be sent to the rear. On 21 January twelve columns began to advance westward in parallel from Brissac in the north to Saint-Maixent in the south, while eight columns under Haxo came east to meet them. Only thirteen towns, Cholet, Bressuire and Fontenay among them, were to be spared.

The generals read the orders in their own ways. Haxo and Moulin carried out no systematic killing and destruction and respected the evacuation of Republican inhabitants, but the troops of Cordellier, Grignon, Huché and Amey exterminated whole populations, royalist and patriot alike, killing with blades to save powder and murdering women and children; on 28 February the parish of Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne was massacred. The Committee of Public Safety, in Carnot’s letter of 8 February, found Turreau’s “measures good and his intentions pure”, but when Stofflet briefly retook Cholet the same day, Barère on 12 February denounced before the Convention a “barbarous and exaggerated execution of the decrees” and on the 13th Carnot wrote that “the brigands must be killed, not the farms burned”. Yet the representatives Francastel, Hentz and Garrau, sent with unlimited powers on 10 February, approved Turreau’s plan and wrote on 9 March that “when the war of the Vendée is completely over there will be no inhabitants left”. A delegation of Republican Vendéans demanded in Paris that the loyal country be distinguished from the insurgent, and representatives such as Lequinio and Laignelot asked for Turreau’s removal. When part of his troops was withdrawn to the frontiers on 12 April he halted the columns and built entrenched camps, and on 13 May he was suspended. Estimates of the dead range from Gérard Walter’s 2,000 in 1953 to Simone Loidreau’s 180,000 in 1994, but recent research narrows them to Clénet’s 40,000, Dupuy’s 20,000 to 40,000 and Hussenet’s “several tens of thousands to 50,000”. Jean-Clément Martin holds that Turreau may be called a war criminal but rejects the term crime against humanity, which Patrice Gueniffey applies.