Vendée Uprising
The Vendée rose in March 1793 against conscription and the war that followed killed perhaps 170,000 people. The region south of the Loire had accepted the early revolution and turned against it over the church. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 had split the priesthood, and the west had overwhelmingly refused the oath, which meant that the priests the peasants trusted were now outlaws and the ones sent from Paris were intruders. The levy of 300,000 men in February 1793 was the trigger, particularly because officials and national guardsmen were exempt. The rising was rural, Catholic and royalist in that order, and it was led at first by ordinary men — a carter named Cathelineau, a gamekeeper named Stofflet — with nobles recruited afterwards for their military experience. The Catholic and Royal Army took Saumur and Angers and was destroyed attempting Nantes and finally at Savenay in December. What followed was worse than the war. The Convention ordered the region destroyed, and the colonnes infernales marched through it in 1794 burning farms, killing livestock and shooting the population; at Nantes, Carrier drowned prisoners in the Loire by the barge-load. Estimates of the dead run from 117,000 to 200,000 out of a population of about 800,000. Whether it should be called a genocide has been argued in France since the 1980s and is a political question as much as a historical one. The republican general Westermann's despatch claiming to have crushed the Vendée and killed the women and children is quoted in every account and is probably a forgery of the 1820s. The rest of the documentation needs no help.
- Year: 1793 CE
- Category: Military
