Vendée, Guerre de la. Cruel civil war fought in the west of France between 1793 and 1795, caused by the resentment that the traditional rural communities felt for the town-dwellers, whose encroaching Revolution (with its ever more pronounced antimonarchical, anti-religious policies) was becoming increasingly unacceptable. Disturbances had already occurred (October 1791, August 1792), but one piece of interference in local life finally proved intolerable: faced with the enforced military levy decreed by the Convention, the Vendée rose (10 March 1793). Despite initial successes (March-July), the insurgents were heavily defeated at Luçon (13 August). Thereafter the Republic took the initiative, implementing the scorched-earth policy agreed by the Convention. The ‘war’ ended with rebel defeats at Le Mans and then at Savenay (23 December). The sporadic guerilla resistance of early 1794 was answered with vigorous counter-insurgency methods, especially through Turreau's ‘infernal columns’, and was then slowly contained (December 1794-November 1795).
Deaths through battle, disease, epidemics, starvation, and summary executions were numerous (probably in the region of 150, 000). But current revisionists who speak of ‘genocide’ have merely rediscovered and tailored to their own needs the thesis first advanced by Babeuf who, in Le Système de dépopulation (1794), accused Robespierre of deliberately causing the extermination of 1 million people in the Vendée in the furtherance of his economic policies. [See also Chouannerie.]
[John Renwick]
