Vendée-Vengée
"Citizens, the Republic has shamed itself in the Vendée!"

One Republican, Léquinio, wrote: "Pillage was taken to its ultimate degree. Instead of attending to their duties, the soldiers thought only of filling their pockets and reaping as much reward as possible from this war. Many simple soldiers acquired 50,000 francs and more. Some were seen covered with jewels and spending obscenely large amounts of money. The thirst for riches caused thousands of instances of fatal carelessness, resulting in the massacre of look-outs, the surprise and the vanquishing of defending troops.Pillaging became such a habit that the troops meted out the same treatment to Republican sympathisers; their wealth fell, in thousands of cases, into the hands of the men sent to defend them.

  speared on the same blade. The rebels were not the only victims of the soldiers' brutality. The wives and daughters of patriots, too, were "requisitioned". All these horrors soured the mind and swelled the numbers of discontented people. Many even came, thereby, to see less virtue in our own troops than in those of the brigands -

several of the latter, it is true, committed massacres but their chiefs always had a policy of preaching virtue and often affected a kind of indulgence and generosity towards our prisoners." Léquinio doesn't go into detail: the women and children thrown into lighted ovens, the children hanged from branches and split into two like the carcasses of pigs. It was no cold, Nazi-style extermination. The troops took time to exercise refined torture. Morel and Carpenty, two municipal officers, were horrified: "Citizens, the Republic is shaming itself in the Vendée!", they wrote in a courageous report to the Convention. They themselves were threatened with death while trying to intercede to save civilians.

During this sombre extermination drive, two sinister shadows stand out: those of General Turreau and of Carrier - known as "the drowner of Nantes".Two thousand Vendeans - half of them women - were shot at Angers; 1,500 on the island of Noirmoutier; 1,800 in the quarries of Gigant, near Nantes. Carrier had 4,000 prisoners drowned in the river Loire. Still it was not enough. On 19 January, Turreau presented his extermination plan to the Convention: 24 columns of men would be sent to the Vendée with orders to penetrate every corner of the rebellious département and to burn and destroy everything they found. The Vendée was put to fire and sword. On just one day, 28 February 1794, at Les Lucs sur Boulogne, a column under the command of Cordellier killed 563 people.But it was not over yet. The exhausted survivors regrouped behind two battle-hardened leaders: Charette and Stofflet. The death-squads were massacred in their turn at Chauché, at Les Clouzeaux and elsewhere. A Republican column led by Crouzat - who, in the absence of Stofflet, killed 1,500 people in the forest of Vezins on 25 March - was cut down three days later at Les Ouleries.Turreau's plan had failed. The Vendée was wounded, but with its endless programme of guerrilla warfare was still a threat. The wooded bocage provided a maze of sunken lanes where a single strategically-placed Vendean could easily pick off his opponents and into which Republican troops ventured at their peril. Reprisals, though, were often enacted on civilians. "The incredible Vendée still survives," wrote back the angry Republican commanders to the Convention.On 13 May 1794 Turreau was relieved of his duties. Needing troops to fight on its frontiers, the Convention pulled out of the Vendée.