A peasant and royalist rising against conscription and the civil constitution of the clergy broke out in the Vendee and neighbouring departments in March 1793 and was suppressed by Republican forces over the following three years. After the insurgent defeat at Savenay in December 1793 the Convention ordered the region devastated; General Turreau's colonnes infernales burned farms, crops and villages, and mass executions were carried out at Nantes under Jean-Baptiste Carrier, including the drownings in the Loire. Estimates of the dead range from about 117,000 to 200,000 out of a pre-war population of around 800,000, with the Hussenet team's figure of roughly 170,000 the most widely cited. Since Reynald Secher's 1986 book the question of whether the repression constituted a genocide has been fiercely argued in France; most academic historians of the Revolution, including Jean-Clement Martin, reject the term while accepting that the Convention ordered exterminatory measures. The event is the largest instance of state mass killing in western Europe between the Wars of Religion and the twentieth century.
French Republican armies suppressed a royalist and Catholic peasant insurrection in western France, burning villages and conducting mass executions and punitive sweeps
The insurgent territory covered the Vendée and adjoining parts of Loire-Inférieure, Maine-et-Loire and Deux-Sèvres, with a population usually put at about 800,000 on the basis of the revolutionary-era departmental returns. Estimates of the dead on both sides range from 117,000 to 450,000, and the historians' dispute over whether the repression constituted genocide turns partly on which end of that range is accepted.
The lower figure is the reconstruction by Jacques Hussenet and colleagues from parish registers and claims records, covering insurgents, civilians and Republican soldiers; the upper end reflects older estimates and those of authors such as Secher who count a wider area and longer period. The disagreement turns on which departments and years are included and on whether Republican military deaths are counted alongside civilian ones.
The Convention's own orders to Turreau, the trial records of Jean-Baptiste Carrier in 1794 and the reports of Republican officers themselves document the burnings, the Nantes drownings and rapes by the columns.
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