The Vendee Rebellion and Its Place in the History of European Regional Antirevolutionary and Counterrevolutionary Movements

Abstract

The western French department of the Vendee occupies a special place among the regional counterrevolutionary and antirevolutionary movements in the history of European revolutions. The Vendee peasant royalist rebellion, between 1793-1796, under the leadership of the nobility and Catholic clergy, has made the region a synonym for mass lower-class counterrevolutions. This article examines several aspects of the Vendee rebellion in the history of the French Revolution. The accusations of certain scholars about a policy of genocide by the Jacobin government of the region’s population arouses heated debates among contemporary historians. Many historians do recognize the massiveness of the repressions but they object to use of the term genocide. The Vendee rebellion has elements of similarity with many other regional counterrevolutionary and anti-revolutionary movements emerging already in the first months after the taking of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 and with the many revolutionary «federalist» movements of the departments in 1793 against Parisian and local Jacobins. All these movements contained elements of civil war between different groupings of the population, especially between opponents and supporters of the revolution. A deeper study of the Vendee rebellion helps us more objectively understand the questions of regional identities, the consolidation of the French political nation, civil wars within revolutions, the dynamics of antirevolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, and the diversities of mass violence.