In this engagement, French Republican forces successfully defended Nantes from a royalist attack led by Jacques Cathelineau, who was mortally wounded in the fighting.

General Louis Marie Turreau wrote of it: The siege of Nantes is perhaps the most important military event of our revolution.

[1] To replace the army volunteers, who had reached the end of their conscription, the government decreed the raising of 300,000 men, by drawing lots, in early March 1793.

[3] In 1793, peasants from the south of the Nantes area (the Pays nantais) and from the Vendée placed themselves under the command of royalist leaders, some of whom were noblemen.

Patriots from the towns around Nantes were forced to take refuge in the city in the face of this threat: some of them were killed, such as the mayor of La Chapelle-Heulin; 14 constitutional priests, favorable to the Republic, were murdered by the insurgents, with some being mutilated or having their throats cut.

[5] This wealth was not evenly distributed, but the poorest residents of the city tended to support the most radical Republicans, unlike the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside.

Charette and Lyrot, who were absent, made it known through Lescure that they agreed to participate in an attack on Nantes, at the Pirmil bridge, south of the city.

[15] This action thirty kilometers from the city delayed Cathelineau,[16] and when, as expected, Charette had fired his cannons against the defensive system south of Nantes, on 29 June at 2 a.m.,[17] the assault was not launched simultaneously in the north.

The Republicans halted the Vendéen thrust and the insurgents fell back, beginning the retreat of the Catholic and Royal Army.

[23] The quantity of corpses abandoned in the days following the fighting posed a sanitation problem, and on July 8, more than a week after the end of the battle, the department's directory had to take measures to bury the bodies still lying on the ground at the gates of the city.

His incapacitation is sometimes presented as a main cause of the assault's failure, but the means of communication at the time were such that only the fighters closest to him, at Viarme Square, knew very early on that he had been injured.

[27] The search for a port that would allow the Vendéens to receive military aid from the Coalition could not be satisfied after the defeat at Nantes, and Vendée revolt experienced a lull.

The insurgents then began the Virée de Galerne, an operation that would prove fatal to the movement north of the Loire, which came to an end after their rout at the Battle of Savenay.

Jean-Baptiste Carrier was placed at the head of the city; he initiated a policy of Terror targeting political opponents, particularly the Vendéens and priests, suspected of supporting the revolt.