During the autumn, the arrival of the Army of Mainz as reinforcements restored the advantage to the Republican camp, which in October seized Cholet, the most important city controlled by the Vendeans.

After this defeat, the bulk of the Vendée forces crossed the Loire and marched to Normandy in a desperate attempt to take a port to obtain the help of the British and the Armée des Émigrés.

In the cities, and in particular in Nantes and Angers, around 15,000 people were shot, drowned or guillotined on the orders of the représentants en mission and Revolutionary Military Commissions, while in the countryside about 20,000 to 50,000 civilians were massacred by the infernal columns, who set fire to many towns and villages.

[7] In this particularly-isolated feudal stronghold, the class conflict that drove the revolution in Paris and other parts of France was further suppressed by the institutional strength of the Catholic Church in alliance with the nobility.

Counter-Enlightenment author Francois Mignet accused that militant Republicans wanted to destroy both the independence and influence of the Catholic Church in France, which the people of the Vendée considered unimaginable.

[8] In 1791, two representatives on mission informed the National Assembly that the Vendée was being mobilized against the First French Republic, and this news was swiftly followed by the exposure of an alleged royalist conspiracy organized by the Marquis de la Rouërie.

[9] Subsequent defenders of the Vendée rebels argue that this plotting against the Republic was an understandable response to The Terror (a period between 1793 and 1794 where thousands of both real and suspected dissidents were beheaded by guillotine), the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and the introduction of conscription upon the whole of France, decreed by the National Convention in February 1793.

The March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their district's quota of the national total of 300,000 enraged the local nobility, clergy, and the populace,[10] who took up arms instead as "The Catholic Army", "Royal" being added later, and fought for "above all the reopening of their parish churches with their former priests.

The territory defied description in the terms of the redistricting of 1790, nor did it align itself to descriptors used in the Ancien régime; the heart of the movement lay in the forests, with Cholet at its center, in the wild districts of the old county of Anjou, in the Breton marshlands between Montaigu and the sea.

A Republican column of 2,000, under general Louis Henri François de Marcé, moving from La Rochelle to Nantes, was intercepted north of Chantonnay near the Gravereau bridge (Saint-Vincent-Sterlanges), over the river le Petit-Lay.

The Vendéens seized a large amount of arms and gunpowder, but allowed the captured Republican forces to leave, after having sworn to no longer fight in the Vendée and had their hair shaved off so they could be recognised lest they went back on their word and were recaptured.

[26] On 24 June 1793, the commanders of the Catholic and royalist army issued an ultimatum to the mayor of Nantes, Baco de la Chapelle to surrender the city or they would massacre the garrison.

Inside the city were Republicans from the surrounding countryside who had fled to Nantes for safety, fortifying the defenders with tales of the horrors that the rebels inflicted on towns they managed to take.

In that action, Marquis de la Rochejaquelein commanding 20,000 Vendean Royalists attacked a French Republican force led by General François Joseph Westermann.

Later in the evening of the same day, François Joseph Westermann led a Republican raiding party and attacked the Vendean encampment inflicting losses upon the rebel fighters and non-combatants.

In October 1793 the main force, commanded by Henri de la Rochejaquelein and numbering some 25,000 (followed by thousands of civilians of all ages), crossed the Loire, headed for the port of Granville where they expected to be greeted by a British fleet and an army of exiled French nobles.

[40] With the decisive Battle of Savenay (December 1793) came formal orders for forced evacuation; also, a 'scorched earth' policy was initiated: farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned and villages razed.

[47] In Anjou, directed by Nicolas Hentz and Marie Pierre Adrien Francastel, Republicans captured 11,000 to 15,000 Vendeans, 6,500 to 7,000 were shot or guillotined and 2,000 to 2,200 prisoners died from disease.

[37] In response, the Committee of Public Safety ordered him to "eliminate the brigands to the last man, there is your duty..."[37] The Convention issued conciliatory proclamations allowing the Vendeans liberty of worship and guaranteeing their property.

[56] This relatively brief episode in French history has left significant traces on French politics, yet it is reasonable to see the episode, Charles Tilly has claimed, in a far more benign light: West's counterrevolution grew directly from the efforts of revolutionary officials to install a particular kind of direct rule in the region: a rule that practically eliminated nobles and priests from their positions as partly autonomous intermediaries, that brought the state's demands for taxes, manpower, and deference to the level of individual communities, neighborhoods, and households that gave the region's bourgeois political power they had never before wielded.

As a result, scholarship on the uprising is generally lacking in objectivity, coming down strongly in defense of either the First French Republic or of the Vendéen rebels and the local Catholic Church.

The Blancs, on the other hand, are so named in a denigrating reference to their continued membership in the Catholic Church in France, also based their findings on Republican archival documents, but also used eyewitness accounts, memoirs by survivors, and "local oral histories".

[61] Les Bleus generally allege that the War in Vendée was not a popular uprising, but was the result of reactionary noble and priestly lies and manipulation of the local peasantry against their self-appointed liberators.

[64] Timothy Tackett of the University of California summarizes the case as such: "In reality ... the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides—initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves.

[54] Concerning the controversy, Michel Vovelle, a specialist on the French Revolution, remarked: "A whole literature is forming on 'Franco-French genocide', starting from risky estimates of the number of fatalities in the Vendean wars ...

"[69] Shortly before his return to the Russian Federation after decades of exile in 1993, former Soviet dissident and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising.

In the published version of his thesis, he incorporated some of Tilly's own arguments: that conflicts within communities generalized into a region-wide confrontation of anti-revolutionary majority based in the countryside with a pro-revolutionary minority that had particular strength in the cities.

The conscription of March 1793, with the questionable exemption for Republican officials and National Guard members, broadened the anti-revolutionary coalition and brought the young men into action.

Most importantly, however, Secher broke with conventional assessments by asserting on the basis of minimal evidence, Tilly claims, that the pre-revolutionary Vendée was more prosperous than the rest of France (to better emphasize the devastation of the war and the repression).

[citation needed] Vaincre ou mourir was a related 2022 film released by Studio Canal in co-operation with the Puy du Fou theme park company.