Louis Marie Turreau

French First Republic state institutions Jacobins and French revolutionary radicals 1756–1816 ○ Died of natural causes

Commander of the Army of the West who organised the infernal columns that swept the Vendée in 1794

Born in Évreux in 1756, he backed the Revolution from 1789, served as mayor of Aviron and bought confiscated church property. An officer of the Eure volunteers on the northern frontier in 1792, he fought two months in the Vendée in 1793 and then commanded the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees. Taking command of the Army of the West on 30 December 1793, in January 1794 he ordered twelve columns to bayonet the “brigands” who had joined the revolt, women and children included, and to burn the villages. In four months these infernal columns killed 20,000 to 50,000 civilians but revived the rising; he was recalled in May 1794 and arrested in September. A military tribunal acquitted him in December 1795 because he had only obeyed orders, and he prospered as ambassador to the United States from 1803 to 1811 and a baron of the Empire in 1812, dying unprosecuted in 1816.

Also known as: Louis Marie Turreau de Garambouville · Turreau de Lignières