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War in the Vendée
Part of the French Revolutionary Wars
GuerreVendée 1.jpg
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
France French Republic Drapeau Armée Catholique et Royale de Vendée3.svg Vendeans
Supported by:
 Great Britain
Commanders and leaders
Strength
130,000–150,000 80,000
Casualties and losses
c. 30,000 military killed Several tens of thousands killed
  • Inhabitants of the Vendee: c. 170,000 military and civilians killed
  • c. 200,000 dead in total



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.

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.

Background

Le Vendéen
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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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, 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."

Although town dwellers were more likely to support the Revolution in the Vendée, 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. 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.

Outbreak of revolt

Coeur-chouan
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.

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.

Geographic coverage

Vendee-militaire 2
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 Royalist control. The further the land was from Paris (the seat of revolutionary power), the more Counter-revolutionary belligerence occurred.

Aftermath of the first war and later revolts

For more details, see Chouannerie

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. In response, the Committee of Public Safety ordered him to "eliminate the brigands to the last man, there is your duty..."

Exécution Charette
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. On 30 July the state of siege was raised in the western departments.

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.

The Hundred Days

According to Theodore A. Dodge, the war in the Vendée lasted with intensity from 1793 to 1799, when it was suppressed, but later broke out spasmodically especially in 1813, 1814 and 1815. During Napoleon's Hundred Days in 1815, some of the population of the Vendée remained loyal to Louis XVIII, forcing Napoleon—who was short of troops to fight the Waterloo Campaign—to send a force of 10,000 under the command of Jean Maximilien Lamarque to pacify the 8,000 Vendeans led by Pierre Constant Suzannet, which ended with the Battle of Rocheservière.

Historiography

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.

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.

Cultural depictions

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

Film & Television

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 the royalists 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).

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. Vaincre ou mourir was a related 2022 film released by Studio Canal in co-operation with the Puy du Fou theme park company.

Music

  • 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.

See also

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