The Battle of Savenay took place on 23 December 1793, and marks the end of the Virée de Galerne operational phase of the first war in the Vendée after the French Revolution.

After a crushing defeat at the battle of Le Mans on 12 December 1793, a few thousand Vendéens fled to Laval and then to Ancenis, hoping to cross the Loire back into Vendée.

Hence the Vendéens built small boats and approximately 4,000 people, including Henri de La Rochejaquelein and Jean-Nicolas Stofflet, managed to cross before the arrival of Republican ships.

At nightfall some représentants en mission, Pierre-Louis Prieur, Louis Marie Turreau, and Pierre Bourbotte, arrived at the Republican camp.

[citation needed] At sunrise, the battle started, but it was the Vendéens and Chouans who unexpectedly launched it, in order to take the Touchelais woods and not be surrounded.

Soon after, Kléber launched a counter-attack with his Gendarmes regiment, charging with bayonets and forcing the Vendéens to pull back to the gates of Savenay.

In the center, Marceau, commanding the légion des Francs and Chasseurs de Kastel, encountered difficulties and was for a moment restrained by the Vendéen artillery.

[citation needed] On their respective fronts, Simon Canuel, Jacques Louis François Delaistre Tilly and Westermann also launched attacks, putting pressure on the Royalists on all sides.

Jacques Nicolas Fleuriot de La Fleuriais tried an ultimate counter-attack, he picked 200 to 300 cavalrymen, commanded by Georges Cadoudal, with Pierre-Mathurin Mercier and a few infantrymen.

They fled, pursued by the Republicans, retreating out of Savenay and regrouping to the west of the town (the battle's commemorative cross marks that place).

To the northwest, a group of 600 Vendéens managed to hold at the Butte des Vignes and retreated later to the Blanche-Couronnes woods but they were encircled mid-way by a corps of the Armagnac regiment and were massacred.

[citation needed] Inside Savenay, the town was searched and hundreds of elders, women, and children were taken out of their houses and locked in the church before their trials.

[citation needed] During the search, the brigadier general Alexis Antoine Charlery attacked a position held by 500 Vendéens but failed to defeat them.