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| Flag of Vendée |
In Vendée, the revolt is organized into the so-called Catholic and Royal Army but at the end of 1793 it is put down.
Republic trembled and is now going to avenge with no mercy. Under the Committee of Public Safety rules, slaughters will multiply. Dizains of thousands of prisoners are tortured, rapped, shot or drowned... The army hunt down Vendeans, including women, children and elders, to eliminate them metodically.
In 1986, young historian Reynald Secher publishes a thesis where he describes the slaughters from the Republican Army in Vendée and names them as genocide. This is the end of a 200 years taboo.
In this documentary broadcasted on France 3 on march 7th 2012, Franck Ferrand comes back on this silenced part from French national history.
Bibliography :
La Vendée-Vengé, Le génocide franco-français - Reynald Secher
La désinformation autour des guerres de Vendée et du génocide vendéen - Reynald Secher
Le livre noir de la Révolution Française - Renaud Escande et collectif d'historiens
It is also remembered as the
place where the peasants revolted against the Revolutionary government in 1793,
which opened with a massacre at Machecoul in March. They resented the harsh
conditions imposed on the Roman Catholic Church by the provisions of the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy act (1790) and broke into open revolt after the
Revolutionary government's imposition of military conscription. A guerrilla
war, known as the Revolt in the Vendée, led at the outset by peasants who were
chosen in each locale, cost more than 240,000 lives before it ended in 1796
(190,000 Vendeans who were republicans or royalists and 50,000 non-Vendean
republican soldiers; according to the Jacques Hussenet and Centre Vendéen de
Recherche Historique's book "Détruisez la Vendée"). The Revolt in the
Vendée must not be confused with the revolt of the Chouans, which took place at
the same time in Maine and Brittany. In 1804, Napoleon I chose La Roche-sur-Yon
to be the capital of the departement. At the time, most of La Roche had been
eradicated in the Vendée Revolt (1793–96); the renamed Napoléonville was laid
out and a fresh population of soldiers and civil servants was brought in.
Napoléonville had a square-grid street network and was designed to accommodate
15,000 people.
In 1815, when Napoleon
escaped exile on Elba for his Hundred Days, the Vendée refused to recognise him
and stayed loyal to King Louis XVIII. General Lamarque led 10,000 men into the
Vendée to pacify the region. A failed rebellion in the Vendée in 1832 in
support of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchess de Berry, the former King
Charles X's widowed daughter-in-law, was an unsuccessful attempt to restore the
Legitimist Bourbon dynasty during the reign of the Orléanist monarch, King
Louis Philippe of the French (1830–1848).
Credits: Wikipedia
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