The War in the Vendée

Background: the Revolution and the rifts of the western countryside

The war was fought in the countryside spanning the present department of the Vendée, the south of Loire-Inférieure (Brittany), the south-west of Maine-et-Loire (Anjou) and the north-west of Deux-Sèvres (Poitou), a territory historians call the Vendée militaire. According to Michel Vovelle, at the end of the old regime nobles held more than half the land there, the bourgeoisie 10 to 20 per cent, the peasantry less than 30 and the clergy less than 5, and only 10 to 20 per cent of marrying couples could sign their names. In 1789 the peasants of the west welcomed the Revolution. The grievance lists of Brittany, Maine, Anjou and Bas-Poitou showed hostility to the remnants of feudalism, patriot deputies were elected, and violence against aristocrats and their houses recurred in 1790 and 1791; the Vendée and Maine-et-Loire were among the twelve departments that sent the most Jacobin deputies to the Legislative Assembly. But the nationalisation of church property in November 1789 stripped the Church of the means by which it had assisted a poor population, and the sale of national property passed wealth that communities had accumulated over centuries into the hands of individuals, mostly bourgeois and merchants. The rural communities felt robbed. 1

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy passed by the Constituent Assembly on 12 July 1790 required priests to swear an oath to the constitution, and after the pope condemned it in 1791 most of the western clergy refused. By Vovelle’s estimate juring priests in 1791 made up 0 to 35 per cent in the Vendée and Loire-Inférieure, 35 to 55 in Maine-et-Loire and 75 to 100 in Deux-Sèvres; across the west more than 65 per cent of the clergy refused the oath, against 48 per cent nationally. Peasants anxious for their salvation kept going to the refractory priests, “aristocrats” and “democrats” fought at funerals, and in January 1791 at Saint-Christophe-du-Ligneron near Machecoul the intervention of the National Guard produced the first deaths. The Legislative Assembly banned refractory worship in November 1791 and on 27 May 1792 allowed any refractory priest to be deported on the demand of twenty citizens; the priests went into hiding and said clandestine masses under the protection of women. The English Wikipedia notes that all but seven of the 160 bishops and about half the parish priests refused the oath. Yet there was no riot when the nobles emigrated or when Louis XVI was guillotined in January 1793, a sign that attachment to the monarchy was not what triggered the first risings. 1 2

The causes of the rising are drawn differently by each source and historian. The Convention of the day saw a plot of nobles and priests; the nineteenth-century republican historian Charles-Louis Chassin denied the movement any popular character, while royalist and Catholic authors painted a spontaneous rising of peasants for king and Church. In the twentieth century Albert Mathiez looked for causes in economic and social conditions, and in the 1950s Marcel Faucheux pointed to “Vendéan pauperism”: the sharecroppers who formed the majority gained nothing from the abolition of redeemable feudal dues, and national property went to bourgeois and merchants. Paul Bois, studying the Sarthe, revealed a deep and long-standing antagonism between peasant and bourgeois, countryside and town, and the American sociologist Charles Tilly argued that the growth of eighteenth-century towns and their seizure of local power provoked peasant resistance. Albert Soboul cited poor peasant masses in a sharecropping country ready to rise against bourgeois who were farmers-general, grain merchants and buyers of national property, a lively faith nurtured by missionaries since the late seventeenth century, and the peasants’ identification of the lottery for the levy of 300,000 men with the hated militia of the old regime; while the simultaneity of the rising suggested concertation, he wrote, the peasants “were neither royalists nor partisans of the old regime” and the nobles were at first surprised before exploiting the movement. Jean-Clément Martin lists as common causes the weight of taxes and rents, the worsening lot of sharecroppers, the inability of small rural elites to buy national property monopolised by urban elites, the loss of autonomy of small rural communes to the market towns where the district authorities sat, and the Civil Constitution’s assault on communities defending their priest and their ceremonies, with the levy of March 1793 giving the communities the occasion to unite against the agents of the state. Royalism, in his view, ran shallow; most risings began with “settling of scores, hunts for revolutionaries and pillage”, and counter-revolutionary nobles took little part in the unorganised movement of March. Some, like Charette, had to be dragged in by force. 1 2

March 1793: the levy of 300,000 and the rising

On 24 February 1793, with the volunteers of the previous year going home in droves after enlisting for a single campaign, the Convention ordered a levy of 300,000 men, each commune to fill its quota by lot among unmarried men. The arrival of the recruiters recalled the methods of the monarchy and riots broke out across France, with a particularly violent reaction in the north-west in early March. The first blood was shed at Cholet on Sunday 3 March, when 500 to 600 young men assembled to hear the local quota arrangements refused to go; the next day two grenadiers were wounded and the National Guard fired on the crowd, killing between three and ten. On 10 and 11 March the rising became general. In Anjou the insurgents took as leaders former soldiers such as Stofflet and Perdriau, nobles and former royal officers such as Bonchamps and d’Elbée, and the pedlar Cathelineau; they seized Saint-Florent-le-Vieil on 12 March and Chemillé and Jallais on the 13th, taking muskets and cannon, and on the 14th 15,000 peasants stormed Cholet, held by 500 National Guards. In the Pays de Retz thousands of peasants took Machecoul on 11 March and set up a royalist committee under Souchu; in reprisal for the defeat at Pornic on 23 March and the execution of prisoners there, Souchu’s committee shot 150 to 200 patriot prisoners between 27 March and 22 April. The English Wikipedia records that several hundred Republican citizens were massacred at Machecoul. In the department of the Vendée too Tiffauges fell on 12 March, Challans, Les Herbiers and Montaigu on the 13th, La Roche-sur-Yon on the 14th and Chantonnay and Clisson on the 15th. 1 2

On 15 March General Marcé left La Rochelle with 2,400 National Guards and retook Chantonnay on the 18th, but on the 19th his column was surprised at the Gravereau bridge near Saint-Vincent-Sterlanges by the forces of Royrand and Sapinaud and routed. The defeat, known as the battle of Pont-Charrault, had a psychological impact felt as far as Paris, and from then on all the insurgents of the west were called “Vendéans”. Marcé was guillotined in Paris six months later for treason. North of the Loire the rising in Brittany was crushed by the columns of Canclaux and Beysser by the end of March, but south of the river there were few troops to contain the rebels. The Convention, informed of the risings on 17 March, by chance received a report the next day on the marquis de La Rouërie’s Breton Association, linked the two affairs and wrongly concluded that a plot of nobles and clergy was at work. On 19 March it decreed death for any insurgent taken in arms or wearing the white cockade; on Danton’s initiative the decree was softened on 10 May to target only the leaders, and a proclamation of 6 July promised amnesty to Vendéans who went home, but some representatives on mission ignored these conciliatory measures. Revolt against conscription was not peculiar to the Vendée: there were risings in 1793 at Clermont-Ferrand, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Angoulême and Dunkirk, and in June federalist and royalist insurrections at Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Nîmes and Bordeaux and in Normandy. The representatives who accompanied the levy dramatised the risings, accused the often moderate local authorities of complicity, and the “Vendée militaire” became the symbol of the whole Counter-Revolution. 1 2

By April the outline of the insurgent territory was drawn. The rebel army was decentralised, poorly equipped, with most of its arms and ammunition taken from the Republicans, and impermanent, the peasants returning to their land after each fight. Looking for militarily competent chiefs, the insurgents turned to local nobles who had been royal officers, but most showed little enthusiasm for a rising they thought doomed and were dragged in by force; the peasants imposed command on d’Elbée because of his military experience. An “army of Anjou” and an “army of Poitou and the Centre” were formed on 4 April and united on 30 April as the Catholic and Royal Army, without a unified command. On 30 May a Superior Council of the Vendée was set up at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre to administer the conquered districts and the army was reorganised into the “Grand Army” of Anjou and Haut-Poitou with 40,000 men, the army of the Centre with 10,000 and the “Army of the Marshes” of Bas-Poitou and the Pays de Retz with 15,000 under Charette. Among the leaders Cathelineau was a pedlar and Stofflet a gamekeeper, Charette a naval officer, and Bonchamps, d’Elbée, Lescure and La Rochejaquelein nobles. The bocage of hedgerows and sunken lanes favoured ambushes and hampered the movement of large Republican units. The Republicans relied on the ring of towns around the Vendée militaire, Nantes, Angers, Saumur, Thouars, Parthenay, Les Sables-d’Olonne, Luçon and Fontenay-le-Comte, and their strength grew from 9,000 to 17,000 men in the spring to 20,000 to 30,000 in mid-August, 40,000 to 70,000 at the end of October and 55,000 to 98,000 at the end of January 1794; in all, 130,000 to 150,000 Republican soldiers are thought to have served in the west between 1793 and 1796. 1 3 4

The Catholic and Royal Army’s spring and summer: from Thouars to Cholet

In early April General Berruyer’s three columns tried to push the rebels towards the sea, but La Rochejaquelein beat Quétineau at Les Aubiers on 13 April and the Republican columns were defeated in turn at Vezins on the 19th and Beaupréau on the 22nd; the offensive in Anjou had failed. Bressuire fell on 3 May, and at Thouars on 5 May Quétineau, with 5,000 men against nearly 30,000 Vendéans, capitulated after a bloody fight, for which the Revolutionary Tribunal later condemned him to death. The insurgents took thousands of muskets, twelve cannon and a treasury of 500,000 livres, and released the prisoners on their oath not to fight again in the Vendée. At Fontenay-le-Comte on 16 May the Vendéans, unused to fighting on the plain, were repulsed, but they returned on the 25th with 30,000 men, routed the Republicans and took 3,000 prisoners. The capture of Saumur on 9 June was the high point of the insurgency: the town, held by Berthier, fell in a single day with 11,000 prisoners, 15,000 muskets, 60 cannon and 50,000 pounds of powder, and the prisoners were freed with their heads shaved so they could be recognised if they broke their oath. On 12 June the noble commanders, to secure cohesion, elected the commoner Cathelineau generalissimo. The same day 20,000 of the 30,000 peasants assembled went home, and on 25 June the garrison left at Saumur under La Rochejaquelein numbered eight men, who evacuated the town. 1 2

At Saumur the royalist staff hesitated between Nantes, Paris and Niort and chose Nantes. On 18 June the Grand Army entered Angers, abandoned by its garrison of 5,000, and Charette proposed that they take the port and wealth of Nantes together. The city was divided between a Montagnard populace and a Girondin bourgeoisie of trade and the bar, but its people refused the evacuation ordered by the representatives on mission and organised resistance; the mayor Baco de la Chapelle and Canclaux, commanding the Army of the Coasts of Brest, gathered 12,000 regulars, volunteers, National Guards and workers, and the attack of 28 and 29 June by Charette’s 15,000 on the left bank and Cathelineau’s 18,000 on the right failed for want of coordination. Cathelineau was shot at the head of his men and died on 14 July. At the same time Westermann, on the orders of Biron commanding the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle, led a diversionary raid into the heart of the insurgent territory, taking Parthenay on 25 June and the rebel “capital” Châtillon on 3 July, freeing 2,000 Republican prisoners and seizing the Superior Council’s archives, but on 5 July the Grand Army, 25,000 strong, returned from Cholet and annihilated his force, which escaped with a few hundred men. The raid nonetheless prevented a second assault on Nantes; the insurgents recrossed to the left bank to protect their territory, and Angers, Saumur, Thouars and Fontenay were retaken without a fight. On 19 July a council of war elected d’Elbée generalissimo. The fighting of July and August was indecisive, but at Luçon on 14 August the Vendéan army, 35,000 strong with Charette’s forces, was routed by Tuncq’s 6,000 and left 1,500 to 2,000 dead. 1 2 5

In Paris, under the offensives of the First Coalition, the revolutionaries saw the Vendéan rising as a stab in the back. On 26 July Barère demanded the destruction of the Vendée and the extermination of the insurgents, and on 1 August the Convention decreed that the forests be cut down, the rebels’ lairs destroyed, the harvest carried off and the cattle seized, while “women, children and the old will be taken inland; their subsistence and safety will be provided for with all the regard due to humanity”. The same day, the English Wikipedia notes, the Committee of Public Safety ordered Carrier to carry out a “pacification” of the region by complete physical destruction. On 9 August the Convention sent to the Vendée the garrison that had capitulated with honours at Mainz on 23 July; this disciplined Army of Mainz reached Nantes on 6 to 8 September and, with Kléber in the vanguard, retook Legé and Machecoul. But at Torfou on 18 September it suffered its first defeat at the hands of the Anjou army of d’Elbée, Lescure and Bonchamps, and Rossignol’s defeats at Coron and Saint-Lambert ruined Canclaux’s plan. Paris was stunned. On 1 October the Convention adopted a second decree, merged the Army of the Coasts of La Rochelle, the Army of Mainz and part of the Army of the Coasts of Brest into the Army of the West, dismissed the noble generals, and Barère’s speech “Destroy the Vendée” carried the law of 1 October, known as the “law of extermination”; the Committee of Public Safety sent Carrier to the Army of the West to complete the restoration of order. The war minister Bouchotte replaced noble generals such as Canclaux and Grouchy with sans-culotte generals such as Rossignol, Ronsin and Léchelle, who mostly proved incompetent. In early October two columns from Nantes and Niort converged on Cholet, joining there on 15 October with 26,000 men, and on 17 October 40,000 Vendéans tried to retake the town but were thrown back after hand-to-hand fighting. Both sides left thousands dead and wounded, and d’Elbée and Bonchamps were gravely wounded. 6 1 2

The Virée de Galerne and Savenay (October–December 1793)

Beaten at Cholet, the Vendéans fell back through Beaupréau to Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, leaving 400 wounded who were finished off by Westermann’s men. The insurgents decided to cross the Loire in the hope of raising Brittany and Maine and seizing a Channel port to obtain a British landing. On the night of 18 October the new generalissimo La Rochejaquelein took across the river 20,000 to 30,000 combatants and 15,000 to 60,000 non-combatants, wounded, old people, women and children, between 60,000 and 100,000 people in all: the beginning of the Virée de Galerne, named after the Breton word for the north-west wind. The dying Bonchamps prevented the massacre of 5,000 Republican prisoners his men wanted to shoot and died a few hours later. The Vendéans took Laval on 22 October, and 6,000 to 10,000 Bretons and men of Maine joined them as the “Petite Vendée”. On 25 October Westermann’s vanguard, attacking without waiting for support, was routed at Croix-Bataille, and the next day Léchelle’s incompetence cost the 20,000-strong Republican army 4,000 men at Entrammes and sent it fleeing to Angers; Léchelle was arrested and killed himself at Nantes. The Vendéans took Mayenne on 1 November and Fougères on the 3rd, the day Lescure died of his Cholet wound. At Fougères the staff received two émigré emissaries bearing dispatches from the British government and decided to attack Granville, but when they arrived before the port on 14 November no British ship was waiting and the town held out. Discouraged, the soldiers refused their leaders’ orders and decided of their own accord to return to the Vendée, leaving 800 stragglers in Normandy who were shot by the Republicans. 1 7 2

The Republican army reorganised at Rennes, 25,000 men under Rossignol, barred the way at Antrain and Pontorson, but on 18 November Tribout’s 4,000 were crushed at Pontorson and on 20 to 22 November the Vendéans held at Dol, counter-attacked and carried Antrain. Yet the Vendéan host, half of it wounded, old people, women and children, lost thousands to hunger and disease, while the Republicans received 6,000 men from the Army of the Coasts of Cherbourg and 10,000 from the Army of the North. After failing before Angers on 3 and 4 December, the Vendéans took Le Mans on 10 December to rest, but on the 12th were attacked by 20,000 to 30,000 men under Marceau and Kléber. The battle lasted into the next day and degenerated into a massacre of the wounded, women and children; the Vendéans left 10,000 to 15,000 dead and thousands of prisoners at Le Mans and on the road to Laval. At Ancenis on 16 December La Rochejaquelein and Stofflet crossed the river with a handful of men, but boats were scarce and Republican gunboats from Nantes sank the ferries; at Nort-sur-Erdre Westermann massacred 300 to 400 stragglers. Reduced to 10,000 to 15,000, the Vendéans took Savenay on 22 December, and at dawn on the 23rd some 18,000 Republicans attacked. The representatives Prieur and Bourbotte and the general’s cousin, the representative Turreau, had demanded an immediate assault the night before, but Kléber and Marceau had them wait for daylight. Three to seven thousand Vendéans were killed in action or summarily executed against Republican losses of 30 dead and 200 wounded; the women and children were sent to the prisons of Nantes, and the Bignon Commission shot between 661 and 2,000 prisoners at Savenay. Westermann shot 500 to 700 men, women and children near Prinquiau. His report beginning “There is no more Vendée” is of disputed authenticity: Alain Gérard attributes the passage to a legitimist historian’s invention, and the English Wikipedia notes that his forces held several thousand living prisoners when the letter was supposedly written and that killing civilians would have violated the Convention’s orders. 1 8 5 2

When the Virée de Galerne ended, the Republican victory was assured: of the 60,000 to 100,000 who had crossed the river, only 4,000 recrossed the Loire, 50,000 to 70,000 were dead and 20,000 taken prisoner. The survivors scattered in small bands into the woods of Maine, Upper Brittany and Morbihan, helped by part of the local population. The victory did not reassure the generals and the representatives on mission. The long wandering of this column, when the insurrection had been thought almost crushed, had terrified the country, and they now saw the whole region as dominated by counter-revolution or federalism. The intensity of the repression that followed reflects an escalation of violence that voided the usual rules of war “for a number of political and military leaders as well as for soldiers and militants”, but it ran contrary to the Convention’s decrees, which required women, children, the old and even unarmed men to be spared, and military chiefs and representatives regularly lied to the Convention about it. Meanwhile Charette, who had taken no part in the Virée, had seized the island of Noirmoutier on 12 October, and at Bouin the local chief Pajot massacred several hundred Republican prisoners; d’Elbée, gravely wounded at Cholet, took refuge on the island in early November. On the Committee of Public Safety’s orders, which feared British aid through the island, Haxo set out to retake it, and when 3,000 Republicans landed on 3 January 1794 the Vendéan garrison surrendered on a promise that their lives would be spared. The representatives Prieur de la Marne and Bourbotte and the general’s cousin, the representative Turreau, broke the capitulation and had the 1,200 to 1,500 prisoners shot over the following days; d’Elbée, unable to stand, was executed in an armchair. 1 6 4

Repression under the Terror: the executions at Nantes and Angers and the infernal columns (December 1793 – May 1794)

The end of the Virée de Galerne opened a policy of bloody reprisals. North of the Loire the revolutionary military commissions set up by the representatives on mission tried prisoners and suspected accomplices: in Mayenne 1,325 people were tried and 454 executed, the Brutus Magnier commission in Ille-et-Vilaine tried 744 and passed 267 or 268 death sentences, and the criminal court at Alençon condemned 189 to death, 172 of them Vendéan prisoners. At Nantes the representative Carrier, who arrived on 8 October 1793, inherited the revolutionary committee and the “Marat Company” created by his predecessor and in November and December sent 144 people suspected of complicity with the Vendéans to the guillotine through the revolutionary tribunal. In December 8,000 to 9,000 men, women and children taken in the Virée were crammed into the Coffee Warehouse prison; typhus broke out, killing 3,000 prisoners as well as guards and doctors and threatening the city, and Carrier turned massively to drownings and shootings to empty the prison and the pontoons. From 16 December 1793 to 27 February 1794 the drownings killed 1,800 to 4,860 people and the shootings 2,600 to 3,600; of the 12,000 to 13,000 prisoners in the city, 8,000 to 11,000 died. Most of the victims were Vendéans, with Chouans, Nantes suspects accused as Girondins or federalists, refractory priests, prostitutes, common criminals and British and Dutch prisoners of war among them. On 11 December Carrier wrote to the Committee of Public Safety that “the women, with the priests, fomented and sustained the war of the Vendée” and that he would order the generals to put to death “all individuals of either sex” in every insurgent district and burn everything. The report that the Committee’s agent Jullien sent Robespierre on 4 February accused Carrier of having “put the Terror on the order of the day against the patriots themselves”, and Carrier was recalled on 8 February. 1 9 10

At Angers the representatives Hentz and Francastel faced the same wave of prisoners and had them tried by the Félix-Parein military commission or executed without trial. In the city 290 prisoners were shot or guillotined and 1,020 died of epidemics in prison, and 1,500 to 1,800 were shot at Sainte-Gemmes-sur-Loire, 900 to 3,000 at Avrillé and 1,500 to 1,600 at Les Ponts-de-Cé. According to Hussenet, of 11,000 to 15,000 people imprisoned in Maine-et-Loire 8,500 to 9,000 died; Martin counts at least 5,000 to 6,000 shot. In the south of the Vendée the representative Lequinio had 332 prisoners tried by a military commission at Fontenay-le-Comte and 192 shot. In Paris, on 7 November, on Merlin de Thionville’s proposal, the department of the Vendée was renamed “Vengé” (avenged), and the Vendée deputy Fayau demanded an incendiary army. Carrier ignored the pleas of Kléber and Savary at the front to spare prisoners. The historian Martin observes that Carrier’s political clumsiness and rhetorical excesses made his reputation as much as his brutality, and that other envoys, Fouché and Collot d’Herbois at Lyon, Francastel and Hentz at Angers, Bourbotte, Prieur de la Marne and the representative Turreau in Loire-Inférieure and the Vendée, were responsible for massacres just as great without being judged as severely by posterity. 1 9 6

Turreau, who took over the Army of the West from Marceau at Nantes on 30 December, was close to the Hébertists and disliked by the Army of Mainz. On 19 December, on Moulin’s advice, he had sent the Committee of Public Safety an amnesty plan, and when no reply came he drew up a plan applying the Convention’s decrees to the letter. On 7 January 1794 Kléber proposed that, since the Vendéan forces numbered only 6,200 against 28,000 Republicans, the coasts be guarded, the territory ringed with fortified camps, the inhabitants’ trust won and only rebel gatherings attacked; Turreau refused and Kléber was transferred on 9 January. On 16 January Turreau asked the representatives for a decision that would cover his responsibility if women and children were “all to be put to the sword”; the letter went unanswered, and on 19 January he instructed his generals to bayonet armed rebels “and the girls, women and children in that case”, with executions only on the general’s prior order. On 21 January twelve columns from the east and eight of Haxo’s from the west began to cross a territory of 735 communes and 755,000 inhabitants. The generals read the orders as they chose. Haxo, declaring “we are soldiers, not executioners”, confined himself to hunting Charette and Moulin scrupulously evacuated patriot 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 representative Laignelot denounced the massacres around Challans to the Convention on 23 January without effect. On 8 February Carnot wrote that the Committee had long kept silent on “a matter in which it has already been deceived so many times” but found Turreau’s “measures good and his intentions pure”. The same day Stofflet retook Cholet for two hours and Paris was stunned: on 12 February Barère denounced before the Convention a “barbarous and exaggerated execution of the decrees” and reproached the general with burning peaceful patriot villages, and on the 13th Carnot wrote that “the brigands must be killed, not the farms burned”. 6 1 11

Yet the representatives Francastel, Hentz and Garrau, sent with “unlimited powers” on 10 February, met Turreau at Angers on 19 February and approved his plan; on 18 February they wrote to the Committee that “all the inhabitants now in the Vendée are very stubborn rebels. The women, the girls and the boys over twelve are the cruellest”, and on 9 March that “when the war of the Vendée is completely over there will be no inhabitants left, since everything will have been destroyed”. In early March an order to concentrate on the coasts reduced the twelve columns to four, and on 10 March Turreau suspended the burning of houses and farms; the same day Carrier, who had backed Kléber’s plan in January, defended Turreau’s policy before the Convention. Soon afterwards a delegation of Republican Vendéans was received in Paris for the first time, demanding an end to the burning and a distinction between loyal and insurgent country, and the representatives Guezno and Topsent, who arrived in March, asked for Turreau’s removal. When part of the army was withdrawn to the frontiers on 12 April Turreau ended the columns and built entrenched camps, and on 13 May he was suspended. The Committee of Public Safety, which had disapproved of the killing of Vendéan patriots, let the slaughter of the rebels’ old people, women and children go on, and on 23 July Carnot, writing in its name to the representatives at Niort, refused to intervene. In four months hundreds of villages were burned and 20,000 to 50,000 civilians massacred by the infernal columns, a name which, according to the memoirs of the royalist commander Poirier de Beauvais, the Republicans themselves had coined. Far from ending the rising, the massacres revived it: peasants fleeing the columns rallied to Charette, Stofflet, Sapinaud and Marigny, who had commanded only a few hundred men each at the start of 1794, and on 22 April the four leaders swore at the château of La Boulaye in Châtillon to come to one another’s aid. 6 1

Thermidor and the Treaty of La Jaunaye (July 1794 – June 1795)

Turreau’s removal in May 1794 ended the infernal columns, but the violence subsided only gradually. The Committee of Public Safety had drawn many troops to the frontiers in April, so that by June the Army of the West was down to 50,000 men from 100,000 in January, and Turreau and his successor Vimeux gave up mobile columns for entrenched camps protecting the harvest on its way to the towns. On 2 June Charette, Stofflet and Sapinaud combined nearly 10,000 men to attack Challans, only to be repulsed by a garrison of a few hundred, and in July Huché’s column took Legé while massacring several hundred villagers. In September Charette stormed the Republican camps of La Roullière, Fréligné and Moutiers-les-Mauxfaits in turn. After Robespierre fell on 27 July 1794 the Convention opened to negotiation. General Alexandre Dumas, appointed to the Army of the West on 16 August, denounced the indiscipline and exactions of his troops and resigned on 23 October; Canclaux returned to the Army of the West and Hoche took the Army of the Coasts of Brest, both favouring conciliation. Carrier, arrested on 3 September, was incriminated by his former subordinates at the trial of the Nantes revolutionary committee; after the Convention lifted his immunity on 13 November he cried “Everything here is guilty, down to the president’s bell”, and he was guillotined on 16 December. Several historians hold that the Convention made Carrier a scapegoat to cover the great majority of those involved. Fouché, who carried the weight of the Lyon massacres, had Babeuf mount a press campaign against Carrier, and Babeuf’s pamphlet On the System of Depopulation, or the Life and Crimes of Carrier was taken up again in the twentieth century. 1 9

On 1 December 1794 deputies from Maine-et-Loire, Deux-Sèvres and the Vendée denounced the massacres of civilians and recommended a prior amnesty for the insurgents and their leaders, and on 2 December the Convention decreed an amnesty for Vendéans and Chouans who laid down their arms within a month; the last Vendéan prisoners were freed in the first six weeks of 1795. On 23 December emissaries of the representatives met Charette at Belleville, and Charette and Sapinaud showed themselves open to peace. Formal talks were agreed on 11 January 1795, but on 28 January Stofflet circulated a manifesto against them written by the abbé Bernier. On 12 February Charette, Sapinaud and their officers, Stofflet’s delegate and Cormatin, representing the Breton Chouans, met the representatives at the manor of La Jaunaye at Saint-Sébastien near Nantes, and agreement was reached on 17 February. In return for recognising the Republic and handing over their artillery the insurgents obtained an amnesty, freedom of worship, exemption from taxes and conscription for ten years, the guarantee of their property, a Vendéan guard of 2,000 men, the redemption of the notes issued during the rebellion and eighteen million livres for rebuilding the Vendée; the release of Louis XVII was left in suspense. Only the Republic’s representatives signed, and the Vendéan leaders, instead of ratifying, issued a proclamation calling for an end to the fighting and recognition of the Republic. Stofflet, arriving on 18 February, was offered the same terms, flatly refused to recognise the Republic and returned to Anjou on the 22nd. On 26 February Charette and Sapinaud made a solemn entry into Nantes and paraded in reconciliation beside the Republican generals and representatives, and on 14 March the Convention ratified the La Jaunaye agreements. 12 1 13

The treaty split the royalist camp. On 4 March Stofflet and Bernier published an address against the “former Vendée leaders turned republicans”; the next day Stofflet had Prudhomme, chief of the Loroux division, arrested for signing and put to the sword, and on 6 March the Angevins pillaged Sapinaud’s headquarters. Canclaux drove the 3,000-strong army of Anjou before his 28,000 men; Stofflet signed a ceasefire at Cerizay on 26 March, waited for the outcome of the La Mabilais talks with the Chouans and made peace at Saint-Florent-le-Vieil on 2 May on the same terms as La Jaunaye. On the Chouan side Cormatin signed the treaty of La Mabilais in April, but only 21 of the 121 leaders present signed it. On 20 May Charette, Stofflet and Sapinaud met to mark their reconciliation. Insecurity remained. The return of the Republican “refugees of the Vendée” caused many clashes, the local administrations had no power in the countryside, and many rural communes in royalist hands barred the return of patriots who had fled to the towns, by force if need be. The refugee flow, which had begun before the war into Charente-Inférieure, came in three waves: Republicans in the spring of 1793, a second wave after the decree of 1 August and a third, Blues and Whites alike, fleeing the infernal columns from January 1794; Lenne puts their number at 40,000 to 60,000 and Martin at 20,000 to 40,000. Lenne holds that the Republic’s taking in, feeding and even employing these refugees regardless of their politics flatly contradicts the hypothesis of genocide. Between February and June assassinations and incidents poisoned relations, and distrust prevailed even at a further meeting at La Jaunaye on 8 June. Convinced that the Vendéan generals were only playing for time, the representatives planned an operation to arrest them but had to give it up for want of troops. In May Charette was told by the marquis de Rivière, aide-de-camp to the Count of Artois, that a royalist landing in Brittany with British help was imminent and asked to create a diversion, and on 8 June Louis XVII died in the Temple prison in Paris. 1 12 14

The second war: Quiberon and Hoche’s pacification (June 1795 – July 1796)

On 23 June 1795 a British fleet under Warren and Hood sailed with 3,500 émigré troops and arms, uniforms and food for 40,000 men, and on 27 June landed at Carnac on the Quiberon peninsula to join several thousand Chouans gathered by Cadoudal. The quarrel between Puisaye and d’Hervilly over the command threw away the advantage of surprise; Hoche, setting out from Vannes with 2,000 men, had 13,000 by 4 July and had all but sealed the peninsula by the 7th. In the stormy night attack of 20 July, Republican prisoners enrolled in the émigré force delivered Fort Penthièvre, Puisaye withdrew to the British flagship and on 21 July Sombreuil capitulated. Of the 6,332 prisoners the women and children were freed, but Sombreuil and 748 to 750 companions were shot at Auray on the verdict of a military commission, 430 of them nobles. Meanwhile on 24 June Charette, without consulting his officers or the other Vendéan generals, had announced at Belleville the breaking of the Treaty of La Jaunaye and the resumption of war, which his men received without enthusiasm; he surprised the camp of Les Essarts on 25 June and on the 26th published a manifesto claiming that “secret articles” had promised the release of Louis XVII and the restoration of the monarchy. Stofflet’s army of Anjou and Sapinaud’s army of the Centre did not break the treaty and sent emissaries to the Convention in July, but Charette’s rising wrecked the talks. Louis XVIII named Charette head of the Catholic and Royal Army with the rank of lieutenant-general and made Stofflet a maréchal de camp. In reprisal for the Quiberon executions Charette had 100 to 300 Republican prisoners executed at Belleville on 9 August. The British then turned to the Vendée, landing 1,200 muskets and 3,000 sabres on the beach at Saint-Jean-de-Monts on 10 to 12 August, and on 22 August a fleet of 123 ships left Portsmouth with 5,000 British soldiers and 800 émigrés under the Count of Artois. It took the Île d’Yeu on 30 September and Artois landed there on 2 October, but the attempt on Noirmoutier failed and Charette could not reach the coast; the expedition was abandoned on 8 October and Artois sailed for Britain on 18 November without having joined Charette. The complete failure badly damaged the morale of the Vendéan fighters. 15 1 14

On 29 August 1795 the Committee of Public Safety appointed Hoche to the Army of the West in place of Canclaux, who had stepped down through illness, and on 14 September gave him full powers, forbidding any intervention by the representatives on the spot. On 26 December the Directory merged the Army of the West and the Armies of the Coasts of Brest and Cherbourg into the Army of the Coasts of the Ocean under his command, and on 28 December proclaimed a state of siege in all the large communes of the insurgent departments. Hoche adopted a pragmatic policy. He distinguished the insurgent leaders, to be captured, from ordinary fighters and peasants, who remained free if they handed in their weapons and submitted; the cattle of communities that resisted were confiscated and returned only in exchange for arms. He restored discipline and repressed pillage, sometimes prevented patriot refugees from returning to pacified districts, and conciliated the refractory priests, who were no longer pursued and could celebrate worship freely; the English Wikipedia notes that he restored their cattle to peasants who submitted and “let the priests have a few crowns”. Local patriots accused him of “military dictatorship”, but the inhabitants, exhausted by a devastating war, and most of the insurgent officers now inclined to peace, and from October whole cantons handed in their weapons. A synod of the Vendée’s refractory clergy at Le Poiré on 4 August had also sought accommodation with the Republic. After occupying Saint-Philbert, Clisson, Les Herbiers and Chantonnay in October, Hoche formed six mobile columns of 600 to 2,500 men, relieved every fortnight and operating without artillery, to scour the insurgent territory without pause. In mid-November Charette’s officers urged him to stop fighting; he refused, was beaten on 27 November and 5 December and lost his second-in-command Couëtus and the chief of his cavalry. 1 16

On 3 and 4 January 1796 Charette, marching into Anjou to draw Stofflet into the war, was surprised at La Bruffière and Tiffauges and his troops completely dispersed; thereafter he could gather only a few hundred men. Sapinaud made peace with General Willot in January, but Hoche disowned the agreement as too lenient. Stofflet, now a lieutenant-general and knight of Saint-Louis, hesitated long before rising again without illusion on 26 January on the orders of the Count of Artois; only 400 men joined him, his attack on Chemillé failed and from 29 January he hid in the forest of Maulévrier. Surprised on the night of 23 to 24 February at the farm of La Saugrenière near La Poitevinière by a detachment of the Bassigny regiment, he was condemned by a military commission at Angers and shot on 25 February. In mid-February, with Hoche’s consent, Charette was offered the chance to leave France; he refused on 20 February. Travot’s column routed him at La Bégaudière on the 21st and at Froidfond on the 27th, and his principal officers submitted to the Republic. On 23 March, with some fifty men, Charette was surprised near Les Lucs by Valentin’s column, driven onto Travot’s and captured in the woods of La Chabotterie near Saint-Sulpice-le-Verdon. Taken to Angers and then Nantes, he was condemned to death and shot on 29 March. His death marked the end of the War in the Vendée. In the army of the Centre Sapinaud’s successor Vasselot was shot on 4 May, and in Anjou Stofflet’s successor d’Autichamp and Forestier laid down their arms in May. Hoche then obtained the submission of the Chouans of Brittany, Maine and Normandy, signing a peace at Fontenai-les-Louvets in the Orne on 6 July, and announced on 13 July that “the troubles of the West are over”. On 16 July the Directory proclaimed that “it is at last true to say today that this frightful war of the Vendée and the Chouans is extinguished”, and on 30 July the state of siege in the western departments was lifted. The Vendée would see a third war in 1799, a fourth in 1815 and a fifth in 1832, but on a far smaller scale. 1 2 16

Assessment

The history of the war has been written between two documentary traditions, the “Blues” and the “Whites”. The first works were participants’ memoirs: on the royalist side those of Lescure’s widow, the marquise de La Rochejaquelein, which painted a spontaneous rising of peasants for king and Church, and on the Republican side the writings of Kléber, Turreau, Savary and Westermann. In the nineteenth century Chassin, a pupil of Aulard, published eleven volumes of documents and saw the rising as a manipulation by nobles and priests, while Catholic and royalist scholars used oral tradition and memoirs to concentrate on the violence of the repression of 1793 and 1794. The treatment by republican historians shows how sources were selected: Michelet denounced the Terror and Carrier but gave Turreau a single line, Louis Blanc defended the Terror and Robespierre and wrote that the massacres committed by the Vendéans had made more victims than those of the Republicans, and in 1865 Edgar Quinet, who wrote that Turreau and Carrier had acted on the Convention’s instructions, was disowned by his own camp. Under the Third Republic Jaurès’s Socialist History of the French Revolution held that the Vendéans should be thrown into “the dustbins of history” and dwelt on the Machecoul massacres of 1793 while passing over the infernal columns and the drownings and shootings of Nantes and Angers. In 1909 Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution condemned the Vendéans and Machecoul but held the Committee of Public Safety responsible for Turreau’s policy of extermination. In Mathiez and Soboul the infernal columns almost vanish. In the 1960s and 1970s Petitfrère, Bois, Faucheux and Tilly set out to end the Manichaean histories of Blues and Whites, and since the “genocide” controversy of the 1980s the devastation of the Vendée is no longer passed over: it appears in the Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution edited by Soboul and in the works of 1989. 1 6

Figures for the dead diverge widely by source. Contemporary estimates were inflated: on 1 December 1794 nine deputies from three departments told the Committee of Public Safety that a population of 400,000 had been annihilated, Kléber in his memoirs wrote of “nearly three hundred thousand French”, Hoche in a letter of 1796 of “six hundred thousand”, and Prudhomme in 1797 of 900,000 to more than a million, while the figure of 600,000 repeated by Chateaubriand passed into posterity. Between 1801 and 1804, at the Interior Ministry’s request, the prefects of the four departments produced the first statistics by comparing the populations of 1790–1791 and 1800, and in 1818 Cavoleau calculated 159,412 dead or missing for the four departments of the Vendée militaire. In the 1980s Reynald Secher went through the parish and civil registers of 700 communes and, applying a common multiplier of 27 to birth rates, estimated a “deficit” of 117,257 out of 815,029 (14.38 per cent); critics objected that the reconstructed populations were those of 1784 and 1807, outside the war years, that the method ignored the fall in births during the war, did not separate battle deaths, massacre victims and indirect deaths, left out refugees and migration to the towns, did not distinguish victims by political allegiance and omitted the many dead from outside the Vendée. Charles Tilly showed that Secher inflated the population, the number of houses and the losses through “three unjustifiable assumptions”: a constant birth rate of about 37 per thousand at a time when the population was falling, zero net migration, and an end of the conflict in 1802 rather than 1794. Jean-Clément Martin in 1987 corrected the censuses of 1790 and 1801 with a natural increase of 1 per cent a year and found 200,000 to 250,000 people “missing” in 1801, a deficit due mainly to the killing in the fighting, which struck Republicans and royalists alike. The collective study directed by Jacques Hussenet in 2007 put the dead among the inhabitants of the Vendée militaire between 1793 and 1796 at about 170,000, 22 to 23 per cent of the 755,000 inhabitants before the conflict, a quarter to a fifth of them Republicans. Republican military dead are estimated at 26,000 to 37,000 by Coullomb and Laborieux and at 30,000 by Dupâquier, and Hussenet holds that, given 130,000 to 150,000 soldiers engaged, they cannot exceed 50,000. Martin judged in 2014 that Hussenet’s estimate “seems reasonable and well founded”, and Alain Gérard wrote that it put an end to “nearly two centuries of delirious figures”. The English Wikipedia gives a range of 117,000 to 450,000 for both sides and summarises a total of about 200,000 dead, of whom about 170,000 were inhabitants of the Vendée militaire, 20 to 25 per cent of the insurgent territory’s population. 1 2 17

The phrase “Vendéan genocide” first appeared in 1969 in an article by the army doctor Adrien Carré in the bulletin of the Souvenir vendéen, with an avowed comparison to Nazi crimes, and Pierre Chaunu brought it into public debate in 1983–1985. In 1986 Secher published as A Franco-French Genocide: the Vendée-Vengé the state doctorate he had defended at the Sorbonne in 1985 before a jury including Chaunu, Meyer and Tulard, and the controversy of 1986–1989, on the eve of the bicentenary, drew in journalists, parliamentarians, generals, jurists and novelists; he demanded the repeal of the decrees of 1 August, 1 October and 7 November 1793. Chaunu, declaring that “we have never had Hitler’s written order for the Jewish genocide, we have those of Barère and Carnot for the Vendée”, called it the first “ideological genocide”, and scholars such as Tulard, Le Roy Ladurie, Stéphane Courtois, Jonassohn and Chalk, Adam Jones and Mark Levene have supported the designation. In 1993 Solzhenitsyn, speaking at Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne for the bicentenary of the rising, compared the Jacobins with Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the Vendéans with the Russian, Ukrainian and Cossack peasants who rose against them, both destroyed mercilessly by “revolutionary despotism”. In 2017 the diplomat and jurist Jacques Villemain argued from international criminal law that the Republic was guilty of war crimes from March 1793, crimes against humanity from April to July and genocide from 1 August 1793 to mid-1794. The debate became political: Jean-Marie Le Pen tabled an amendment in 1987 to recognise a crime against humanity, nine right-wing deputies tabled bills to recognise the “Vendéan genocide” in 2007 and 2012, a 2013 bill was co-signed by UMP and National Front deputies, and two far-right deputies tabled another in 2018. Alexis Corbière of the Parti de gauche called the 2013 bill “a gross act of historical manipulation” and “an old ideological ruse of the far right to slander the French Revolution and trivialise the very real genocides of the twentieth century”. 1 2 18

Most of the academic world rejected the genocide thesis. François Lebrun refuted Chaunu in 1985; Peter McPhee pointed out that the war was waged not against Vendéans in general but against royalist Vendéans, the government relying on the support of Republican Vendéans, that the Convention ended the campaign once the royalist army was clearly beaten, and that Secher fails to tell his readers of the atrocities committed by royalists against Republican civilians and prisoners, repeats folklore as fact and ignores the range of estimates of the dead. He holds that the events do not meet the United Nations definition of genocide because they occurred during a civil war and the Committee of Public Safety did not intend to exterminate the whole population of the Vendée. Timothy Tackett wrote that “the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides, initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate”; Claude Langlois called Secher’s claims “quasi-mythological”. Michel Vovelle, the specialist on the Revolution closely associated with the Communist Party, wrote in 1987 that “a whole literature is forming on ‘Franco-French genocide’, starting from risky estimates of the number of fatalities in the Vendean wars”, with non-specialists such as Chaunu putting “all the weight of their great moral authority behind the development of an anathematizing discourse”. Jean-Clément Martin sums up: “there were war crimes and abominable battles, that is clear, but in no way a genocide”. The notion of genocide, he argues, presupposes an ideological intention applied to a clearly delimited group, yet no “Vendéan” identity existed before the war and the Revolution did not target a religious, social or racial entity; the decree of 1 August and Barère’s report excluded women, children and the old from destruction, the decree of 1 October added unarmed men, and the word “brigands” had already been used under the monarchy. The revolutionaries’ view of the Vendée as “the symbol of all opposition to the Revolution” legitimised a “just violence”, but the Convention did not endorse the actions of soldiers and representatives who broke its decrees, local revolutionaries succeeded in stopping the unjustified violence at Angers and in the southern Vendée, and some officers refused to follow their colleagues’ policy of devastation and brought some of them before courts. In his analysis this is not the violence of a strong state crashing down on its population but of a state too weak to control the spiral of violence between insurgents and patriots, the insurgents having resumed the old habits of rural revolt, hunting and killing the agents of the state and pillaging the towns. Patrice Gueniffey calls the suffering inflicted on the Vendéan population after the end of the fighting, unrelated to military necessity, “a crime without equivalent in the history of the French Revolution, a crime that can today be called a crime against humanity”, yet does not absolve the Convention: “the Committee of Public Safety seems to have given a wider extension to the decree of 1 August in October, and at the beginning of 1794 it would approve extermination”. Hussenet himself writes that “massacres” and “war crimes” are the right words and that he “will never put on the same level the coldly organised elimination of the Jews and the bloody raids of the infernal columns”. In 2020 David Bell granted that the massacres of early 1794 “marked a frightening new stage in the history of state violence against civilian populations” but argued that defining every deliberate large-scale killing of civilians in wartime as genocide would empty the word of meaning. 1 2 19 17

For the socialist movement the Vendée left two legacies. One is vocabulary. “Vendée” became a common noun for peasant counter-revolution, and in the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks called the Don Cossack country “the Russian Vendée”; Stéphane Courtois writes that Lenin compared “the Cossacks to the Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a programme that Gracchus Babeuf, the ‘inventor’ of modern communism, had called ‘populicide’ in 1795”. The other is the question of revolutionary violence and its limits. After Thermidor Babeuf denounced Carrier’s crimes in On the System of Depopulation and coined the neologism “populicide”. In that book the system of depopulation concerned all of France, not only the Vendée; Babeuf, taking up the criticisms of the Enragés, held the Terror responsible for the massacres of 1793–1794 and attacked the Montagnards and Jacobins, claiming that the eighteenth-century philosophers’ idea that equality required a smaller population than France’s underlay the Committee of Public Safety’s plans. Little read in 1794, the pamphlet was revived in the twentieth century and republished by Secher in 1987. Hoche himself told Wolfe Tone during the Irish expedition of 1796 that “if you guillotine a man, you get rid of an individual, it is true, but then you make all his friends and connections enemies for ever of the government”, and that the blood spilled had done great harm to the principles of liberty. The lessons of the Vendée are clear. The rising of 1793 was a peasant revolt in which grievances over conscription, religion and local society converged, not a movement for the restoration of the monarchy from the outset; the repression answered the insurgents’ own massacres and followed the logic of civil war, but it spread into a slaughter of civilians beyond the government’s own decrees and revived the rebellion. As Hoche’s pacification showed, what ended the war was not extermination but amnesty, freedom of worship and army discipline. Since the number of victims and the legal characterisation are still disputed, the right way to treat the event is not to close it with a single figure or a single name. 1 18 16 2